Understanding the new realities of economic development
The USPTO is hiring. In fact they are doing a lot of hiring, over 1,200 new examiners every year, and they still can’t keep up with the deluge of new patent filings.
But while the number of patent filings has grown from 90,544 in 1967 to 484,955 in 2007, a 535% workload increase in 40 years plus an equally growing backlog of patent applications waiting for examiner attention, and no more room to expand in their current offices, the agency is now looking at a different approach to solving their growing pains.
First, some personal background in this matter. In 2004 I began researching the workload problems at the USPTO and wrote a paper about what I saw as an impending crisis, predicting that they would quickly run out of office space in DC, ending the article by asking the simple question, “Why not come to Colorado?” The article ended up being printed in a local magazine, but I largely viewed this as the end of the matter.
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.
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.
Next Generation Gaming is Not for the Faint of Heart
Life is a game. Every day we find ourselves in the middle of the game, involving the work we do, the people we hang out with, and the social structures that surround us.
But who exactly created this game? Each day we live our lives as animated playing pieces, playing by rules that others created. Conformity is a constant force, imposing a lifestyle that most of us were born into, saddled with goals that often go cross-grain with our personal strengths. All of this, however, is about to change.
In the future, the very near future, nothing we hold dear today will remain sacred. Not even the rules for our own game of life.
Every industry has its own “favorite son”, but for many areas of new technology there are no real household names associated with them.There are no people like Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, or Chuck Norris rising to the forefront of these technologies.Put another way, these technologies represent industries without their own rock stars.
“The fundamental unit of the new economy
is not the corporation, but the individual.”
- Thomas Malone & Robert Laubacher
Running a solo business in the past meant that you had a one-person practice, most often offering a professional service, well suited for lawyers, accountants, and doctors. However, a new breed of solo business has emerged that allows people to leverage the power of the Internet and control a vast empire from their home office or wherever they happen to be. Across the world thousands of people are giving birth to what is being called an “Empire of One”.
Invisible to the human eye, nano diameter needles will be shot like clusters of bullets
from great distances to “pin” people to a wall or freeze their physical movement.
Nano needles, because of their incredibly tiny diameter, will be the ultimate
non-lethal weapon, leaving no visible wounds and causing no permanent damage.
I would like to begin by saying that I am not a fan of using nanotechnology for weapons or in any way, shape or form as tools of war. However, since the military is one of the key drivers of nanotechnology, and its use in warfare will be an inevitable outcome, our awareness of the possibilities will be a first line of defense against their proliferation.
On the optimistic side, I have high hopes for nano-weapons to offer precise solutions for the bigger conflicts, eliminating some of the causes for war, and generally contributing to a safer and more stable global environment. With precision comes less loss of life, not more.
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 »
This is a blog produced by Thomas Frey, Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute, and Google's top rated futurist speaker. Unlike most speakers, Tom works closely with his Board of Visionaries to develop original research studies, which enables him to speak on unusual topics, translating trends into unique opportunities.
