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Posted by admin on August 23rd, 2008
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The coming demise of the retail storefront
Last week my wife Deb and I were relaxing at a new shopping center in the Denver area. Along the sidewalks a series of speakers cast a rather pleasant musical backdrop to the shopping experience.
At one point an interesting song began playing. I reached for my iPhone, and used a program called Shazam to “listen” to the music, revealing the name of the song and the artist. I was then able to purchase the song on my iPhone and download it directly to the phone for later use.
The nature of this transaction is quite revealing in that it gives us clues as to what our shopping experiences will be like in the future.
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Posted by admin on July 11th, 2008
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When the going gets tough, the tough go bootstrapping
Walk a Mile in These Bootstrapped Shoes.
Much the way nature has evolved, the world of business operates in fluid balance with money serving as its breathable oxygen. And in much the same manner as nature, businesses feed off the less fortunate, using their superior strength to suffocate and feed off of the revenue streams of their daily prey, walking casually away to find their next meal.
Welcome to the startup business playground, where some of the best and brightest talent in this country has been burned at the stake.
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Posted by admin on July 8th, 2008
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Cryonics and our ongoing effort to build the ultimate life-extension toolbox
No person should ever die…. EVER!
Is that the direction we’re headed?
There are many reasons why people die, yet these reasons may all disappear as we develop fixes and cures for everything that ails us.
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Posted by admin on June 27th, 2008
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The Library of the Future Series:
Part 2 - The Search Command Center
As a child, it was embarrassing to ask for help. I didn’t want people to think I was the “dumb student”, and I especially didn’t want to be the one asking dumb questions in a library around people I didn’t know. My assumption was that if I had to ask, I was obviously missing something. Perhaps I should wait until I was older and come back at a time when I was smart enough to understand the library.
My impression was that librarians were incredibly smart, and in an entirely different intellectual league than I was. I felt as if I hadn’t yet earned the right to be there.
While it may sound like I was slightly paranoid, and especially today, knowing that librarians are the world’s most uniquely helpful breed of people, I’m pretty sure this perception still exists among some of us today.
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Posted by admin on May 15th, 2008
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Terrafugia - Redefining the flying car
What exactly is a flying car?
My life is a bit unusual in that I often have conversations with people about the topic of flying cars. Since I was a child I dreamed about the day that we would have flying cars. But, other than the vague notion of the flying car that George Jetson drove each day to Spacely Sprockets, we have no real definition of the flying car, until now.
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Posted by admin on April 8th, 2008
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Roman Numerals were a Numbering System that
Prevented an Entire Civilization from Doing Any Higher Math
By Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute
During the time of the ancient Greek civilization several mathematicians became famous for their work. People like Archimedes, Pythagoras, Euclid, Hipparchus, Posidonius and Ptolemy all brought new elements of thinking to society, furthering the field of math, building on the earlier work of Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians
A few generations later the Romans became the dominant society on earth, and the one aspect of Roman society that was remarkably absent was the lack of Roman mathematicians. Rest assured, the scholarly members of Roman society came from a good gene pool and they were every bit as gifted and talented as the Greeks. But Roman society was being held hostage by its own systems. One of the primary culprit for the lack of Roman mathematicians was their numbering system – Roman Numerals and its lack of numeric positioning Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by admin on April 3rd, 2008
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Will people in the future sell real estate “information rights” as a separate property right?
October 2007
By Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute
“Science never solves a problem without
creating ten more.” - George Bernard Shaw
The concept of smart dust has been around for several years now. Smartdust is a hypothetical network of tiny wireless microelectromechanical systems including sensors, robots, or other devices, installed with wireless communications, that can detect anything from light, to temperature, to vibrations, to chemical composition, etc.
The smartdust concept was introduced by Kristofer S. J. Pister at the University of California in 2001, although similar ideas existed in science fiction before then.
As an extension of this idea, I’ve become very intrigued with the concept of floating particles that emit signals, and some of the legal implications of who actually owns the particles and the information that
flows out of them Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by admin on April 3rd, 2008
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The pace of change is mandating that we produce a faster, smarter, better grade of human being. Current systems are preventing that from happening. Future education system will be unleashed with the advent of a standardized rapid courseware-builder and a single point global distribution system.
By Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute
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Posted by admin on April 3rd, 2008
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A new generation of freedom-loving entrepreneurs
have made it their mission to circumvent gatekeepers
By Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute
Recently a decision was made to allow people in 12 South American nations to travel from country to country without visas. Much like the efficiencies gained from a similar decision in the European Union, these countries are beginning to realize that life can exist without all the gatekeepers.
In the not-too-distant past, every creative work, whether it was a song, a movie, artwork, poetry, or an article for publication, had to be approved by at least one other person before the public could see it. Often times the work had to be screened by layer upon layer of reviewers so only the very best accomplishments would rise to the top.
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