Turmoil Ahead for Housing

Posted by admin on September 1st, 2010

The Coming a Ban on
Real Estate Construction
Consider the following scenario. Over the next few years, several major cities in the U.S. will begin to impose a ban on all new residential and commercial construction. With populations declining in several metro areas, they will worry openly about becoming the next Detroit with abandoned neighborhoods signaling a rapid decline in property values.
In the past, many cities and counties invested in buying open space to insure there would be room for parks and open trails in the future. Now, with property values declining and funding in short supply, a new set of concerns has taken center stage.
Abandoned properties can quickly turn into a rapidly escalating blight that moves like an infestation from one community to the next. Poorly constructed houses and office buildings will see the economics of their existence shift from a net positive to a net negative with little forewarning. When property values decline and maintenance costs increase, more and more owners will decide to cut their losses, and let their property go into default.
As a way to counteract this trend, cities will place a ban on all new open-ground construction, forcing existing buildings to be torn down before new ones can be built. So the only way someone can build a brand new home will be to tear down an existing home.
In the 60s, 70s, and 80s there was a massive effort to create affordable housing, to insure that the vast majority of people could own their own home. Financial tools were tweaked to allow the greatest possible acceptance, and construction standards were lowered to increase affordability. This combination provided a great short-term fix, but disastrous long term consequences.
Until recently, the ever growing population base provided a steady demand for houses. Even poorly built older homes in various states of decay were worth repairing and reselling because the demand kept valuations relatively high.
Real estate, like most other commodities, retains its value as long as there is sufficient demand to match the supply.
Every time there is a change in a local population, the price of real estate becomes an early warning indicator.
Shifting Population Trends
Unbeknownst to most, the 8,000 pound gorilla hovering in the background of our economy is the shifting population base. Any fluctuation in the number of consumers changes the demand-side of the supply and demand equation.
The 1900s were a very fertile century where the earth’s population grew from 1.6 billion people to 6.4 billion within 100 years. Never before in history had the human population exploded like this, and we all became conditioned to think there would be a never-ending supply of young people, and a never-ending supply of demand for real estate.
But a strange thing happened along the way. As doom and gloom predictions started painting scary scenarios of an overpopulated earth where food shortages threatened the very existence of humanity, the full impact of birth control technology, invented in the 1960s, began to take effect.
Today, the population in the U.S. has begun to level off, while at the same time nearly all of Europe and major parts of Asia are in serious decline. Since people create the economy, the lack of people creates just the opposite. This drop in demand will manifest itself in many areas, including a drop in the demand for real estate.
As a rule of thumb, it’s best not to view this through the value-lens of being “good or bad”; it just signals a change in the way the world works.
Population Statistics – A Closer Look
Simply looking at U.S. population statistics can give us a false impression of what’s actually going on.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
The primary reason why the population is still growing is because people are living longer. As baby boomers work their way into the retirement years, they will be shifting into more efficient lifestyles, shedding belongings, and downsizing their homes.
Another key factor in these statistics is the number of immigrants moving into the U.S. Even though the numbers are declining and there are some signs of a weakening demand, the U.S. continually attracts some of the best and the brightest from around the world.
Over the past three decades, the number of live births has remained relatively steady
Source: U.S. National Center for Health Statistics
Yes, it’s true that in 2007, more babies were born in the United States than any other year in the nation’s history. But as a percentage of the overall population it was far less than in the 50s and 60s.
To be sure, the U.S. birth rate is still higher than the birth rate in many countries in Europe and Asia where population declines are forcing the closure of schools, shuttering of factories, and a rethinking of economic strategies.
Falling below replacement levels of 2.1 has raised a number of red flags
Source: U.S. National Center for Health Statistics
For any population to maintain its current numbers, couples need to average 2.1 children. Any number below that will yield a population decline over the long run.
According to numbers released recently by the National Center for Health Statistics, births fell 2.7 percent last year even as the population grew.
As a percentage of the population, the U.S. sunk to 13.5 birth per 1,000 population
Source: U.S. National Center for Health Statistics
The most telling statistic is the decline in live births, now at the lowest point in recorded history.
This downward trend invites some troubling comparisons to Japan and its lost decade of stagnant growth in the 1990s and very low birth rates. Births in Japan fell 2 percent in 2009 after a slight rise in 2008.
Housing Markets and Opportunities
Number of new building permits (Shaded areas indicate U.S. recessions)
2010 research by the St Louis office of the U.S. Federal Reserve
Over the past four years, the housing market has experienced a devastating meltdown.
Whether you’re looking at new or existing homes, both prices and unit volumes have declined sharply since the peak in 2006. Foreclosed homes and empty subdivisions litter the landscape. In short, the housing market is in shambles.
Perhaps one of the big trends today is a shifting mindset about owning and investing in real estate. As the number of young people declines, and loan money becomes more difficult to come by, demand for property will continue to weaken.
In addition, as the baby boomers move into retirement, there is a big shift away from the uncertainties of real estate, towards a simpler, more affordable lifestyle.
One opportunity today is for someone to devise a new approach to home ownership. With credit ratings now at an all-time low, one option may be a lease-with-an-option-to-buy arrangement where someone who leases a house for two years and makes all of their payments on time can qualify for a loan in spite of a bad credit rating.
Since young people today like the idea of being mobile with fewer ties to a particular location, the idea of loan portability may make sense, where existing loans can be applied to the purchase of a new home.
In the area of construction, we have lots of existing houses, but it tends to be the wrong kind of inventory. Our vast supply of bi-level, tri-level, and quad-level homes are a poor fit for the baby boomers who no longer like to do steps. Growing numbers of telecommuters are finding most homes don’t work well as office space. And homeschoolers are having to turn their homes into a learning environment.
Homes today are being used in vastly different ways than homes 50 years ago when they were built. And these changing lifestyles create a wide array of new opportunities for repair, retrofit, and new construction along the way.
Some final thoughts…
Declining birth rates have a delayed effect. It will be many years before the full impact of these demographic changes is felt across society.
Some regional hotspots will find ways to avoid any effect altogether, while others will suffer significantly from stagnation and deflation as the population declines.
Big challenges create big opportunities. The people who can best assess the impact will be well poised to find the opportunities.
B Futurist Thomas Frey

Construction Site 442t

Consider the following scenario. Over the next few years, several major cities in the U.S. will begin to impose a ban on all new residential and commercial construction. With populations declining in numerous metro areas, they will worry openly about becoming the next Detroit with abandoned neighborhoods signaling a rapid decline in property values.

In the past, many cities and counties invested in open space to insure there would be room for parks and open trails in the future. Now, with property values declining and funding in short supply, a new set of concerns has taken center stage.

Abandoned properties can quickly turn into a rapidly escalating blight that moves like an infestation from one community to the next. Poorly constructed houses and office buildings will see the economics of their existence shift from a net positive to a net negative with little forewarning. When property values decline and maintenance costs increase, more and more owners will decide to cut their losses, and let their property go into default.

As a way to counteract this trend, cities will place a ban on all new open-ground construction, forcing existing buildings to be torn down before new ones can be built. So the only way someone can build a brand new home will be to tear down an existing home.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, historical perspective, new strategy, powerful idea, prediction 8 Comments »

Where is My Flying Car?

Posted by admin on August 3rd, 2010
Where in My Flying Car?
Flying cars will have to wait until we go
through the era of flying delivery drones
Imagine yourself in 2030, 20 years in the future, sitting in your living room watching your favorite show on a 3D holographic display, and you witness a product placement scene where someone is eating one of the best pizzas you’ve ever seen. The depiction is so lifelike and intense that you instantly start craving pizza, and simply utter the word “yes.”
Thirty seconds later, a flying delivery drone docks with your house and delivers the exact pizza you were craving along with a six-pack of your favorite beer. It automatically knew what you wanted, and it knew about the beer as well as the pizza.
As this plays out, you will have eaten half of the pizza before you realize what you paid for it.
Marketing people have worked for decades to shrink the time-gap between the marketing moment and the buying moment. In this scenario, I’ve also added a nearly instantaneous fulfillment moment.
With this simple illustration we can begin to see the immense potential of flying delivery drones and the radical changes they will impose on everyday living. At the same time, they become the critical next step for us to advance towards one of our most sacred unfulfilled dreams, the age of the flying car.
Flying Cars Defined
So what exactly is a flying car?
Most of us are still stuck on visions of George Jetson’s car, remnants of Hanna-Barbera’s hugely influential cartoon series launched in 1962. Our first generation of mass-produced flying cars, however, will look far different than what George was driving.
Over the years we have seen many versions of flying cars starting with the Curtiss Autoplane in 1917. Decade after decade, designs have evolved along with the conceptual underpinnings of what constitutes a flying car.
In 2009 when Terrafugia launched the maiden voyage of its own flying car known as The Transition, the universal reaction people voiced was, “Interesting, but it’s not really a flying car.”
NASA has begun referring to them as PAVS (Personal Air Vehicles) and has attempted to differentiate flying cars from other flying vehicles and has concluded that for any of these vehicles to become commercially successful, they need to meet the following criteria.
• Seats 2 to 6 passengers.
• 150-200 mph (322 km/h) cruising speed.
• Quiet.
• Safe.
• Comfortable.
• Reliable.
• Able to be flown by anyone with a driver’s license.
• As affordable as travel by car or airliner.
• Near all-weather capability enabled by Synthetic Vision Systems (NASA’s term for a technology with better-than-human visualization of the terrain and airspace).
• Highly fuel efficient (able to use alternative fuels).
• 800 mile (1300 km) range.
• Provide “door-to-door” travel capabilities, via vehicle roadability, or small residential airfields or vertiports with only a short walk from the aircraft to the final destination.
Essentially, flying cars need to be as comfortable as cars today, extremely safe, and fly from Point A to Point B on its own, with no human interference.
Expanding on NASA’s list, five key technological breakthroughs will be needed for the first generation of flying cars to become viable:
1. Fully automated navigation systems – The average person has a difficult time navigating on a two dimensional surface. The flying car industry will not be able to “get off the ground” without an onboard navigator that “handles the driving”. Yes, people will want the freedom of being able to do some creative maneuvering in certain situations, but that will only be allowed in rare instances.
2. Low-impact vertical take-off – When used by average person, flying cars cannot have a runway requirement. They need to take off and land vertically without blowing the leaves off of trees or shutters off windows.
3. Convenient fly-drive capability – As humanity makes the transition from ground-based autos to flying cars there will be a need for both driving on the ground and flying in the air.
4. Silent engines – Because there are no significant acoustical barriers in the air, the engines on flying cars will need to be virtually silent. Very few cities will want to put up with the noise of thousands of flying vehicles if they all sound like airplanes today.
5. Specialized safety systems – To date both aircraft and airspace have been closely controlled by organizations like the FAA and the NTSB to insure the safety of the flying public. Because of the sheer volume of vehicles being navigated by average drivers (read untrained pilots), additional safety measures will need to be in place. Required safety featured will include such things as collision avoidance systems and drop-out-of-the-sky emergency airbags on the outside of the vehicles.
Additionally, with the potential for thousands of vehicles clutter the airspace, one additional requirement will be that they become virtually invisible from the ground.
The Norman Matrix – Directional layering of airspace
In addition to the technology built into the vehicles, we will also need to develop a workable air traffic control system for exponentially larger traffic volumes.
With several hundred thousand vehicles flying over a city, there will need to be an organized system for managing the traffic, and having all vehicles at a particular altitude traveling the same direction would eliminate many problems. This is an automated navigation system I’ve labeled the Norman Matrix.
In the Norman Matrix, all vehicles traveling at 1,000 ft altitude will be traveling due north, at 1,010 ft altitude 1 degree east of due north, 1,020 ft altitude 2 degrees east of due north, etc. Vehicles will spiral up to make a right turn, or spiral down to make a left turn.
With a fully automated navigation system, this type of maneuvering should be invisible to the operator.
While not a perfect solution (the North Pole becomes a crash point for those flying due north), it does represent a good starting point for engineering a more comprehensive air traffic solution.
Flying Delivery Drones
As we look over the list of technologies needed, it becomes clear that virtually every aspect of the flying car era will also be needed for us to usher in a workable system for flying delivery drones. But it can be done without the dangers of flying people.
For us to reach a point where large numbers of average people can conveniently fly across town for work, school, and shopping, we will need to spend a few years practicing with non-passenger drones. Once the drones have been perfected, we can easily transition to the flying car era.
Logically, any full-scale drone delivery service should be pioneered by companies like FedEx or UPS. But as with most large companies they tend to be less risk-taking than some of the private and small business innovators. Small companies will develop the prototypes which the large companies will later use.
The U.S. Military has been proving the viability of unmanned drones, with over 5,500 already being used in combat. However, most military drones, such as the Predator and Reaper, are designed to operate more like a plane with runways for takeoff and landing.
Deliver drones, like flying cars, need precise vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. For this reason, some of the innovative companies in the rapidly growing quadricopter field may be better positioned to move into this category. Quadricopters today are primarily used for surveillance and aerial monitoring.
Changing the World in the Process
When the Internet began to scale in the early 1990’s, it did far more than transform communications. The viral nature of the World Wide Web began creating borderless economies, causing individual countries to lose control of commerce.
In addition, to borderless commerce, it created confusion about issues related to power and control, even the sovereignty of nations.
Once the volume of flying cars reaches a significant number, somewhere in the range of 500,000 to 1 million, countries will begin to lose control of their citizens.
Borders will become meaningless to people with flying cars. Yes, it will be possible for countries to develop electronic borders, but that will only create a black market for cloaking devices and invisibility shields.
Flying cars will do far more than transform transportation; they will transform government, taxation, conflict, commerce, culture, patriotism, and much more. As with any new technologies, not all of the changes will be good.
In the early days of the Internet, we could only begin to imagine the opportunities that would eventually accompany this kind of innovation. It will be the same with flying cars.
For me, the best way to phase it is: “Flying cars will unleash our bodies in much the same way the Internet has unleashed our minds.”
By Thomas Frey

Before flying cars... 124

First things first. Before we can have flying cars,
we will need to go through the era of flying delivery drones

Imagine yourself in 2030, 20 years in the future, sitting in your living room watching your favorite show on a 3D holographic display, and you witness a product placement scene where someone is eating one of the best pizzas you’ve ever seen. The depiction is so lifelike and intense that you instantly start craving pizza, and simply utter the word “yes.”

Thirty seconds later, a flying delivery drone docks with your house and delivers the exact pizza you were craving along with a six-pack of your favorite beer. It automatically knew what you wanted, and it knew about the beer as well as the pizza.

As this plays out, you will have eaten half of the pizza before you realize what you paid for it.

Marketing people have worked for decades to shrink the time-gap between the marketing moment and the buying moment. In this scenario, I’ve also added a nearly instantaneous fulfillment moment.

With this simple illustration we can begin to see the immense potential of flying delivery drones and the radical changes they will impose on everyday living. At the same time, they become the critical next step for us to advance towards one of our most sacred unfulfilled dreams, the age of the flying car.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, new strategy, powerful idea, prediction, technology trends 7 Comments »

The Future of Libraries: Interview with Thomas Frey

Posted by admin on July 20th, 2010

Future Library 984

Libraries in the future will come in many different forms

NOTE: The following is a reprint of an interview that recently appeared in American Libraries Magazine

Without consulting a crystal ball, Thomas Frey, executive director and senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute, writes and speaks about a promising future for those libraries strongly connected to their communities and quickly adaptable to the changing world around them. Tom Sloan, executive director of the DuPage Library System in Geneva, Illinois, asked Frey to discuss the future of libraries.

Read the rest of this entry »

future scenario, new strategy, powerful idea, prediction, social trends, technology trends 4 Comments »

The Coming of the Terabyters

Posted by admin on July 5th, 2010
The Coming of the Terabyters
A new breed of worker, equipped with uber-geek
data-capturing tools, are about to usher in a whole new information era
Recently I was preparing for a talk on the future of money, a talk I have given many times in the past, and I became absorbed with one singular thought – the relationship between information and money.
The value of a person, as an example, has traditionally been calculated based on hard number such as money in their bank account, personal assets, 401Ks, earning power, etc. As our ability to capture and process information improves, we are able to assign many more numbers to the intrinsic value of an individual.
Today we find ourselves in an awkward in-between state of trying to transition from a world based on hard currencies to one where things like talent, relationships, knowledge, reputation, personal networks, influence, and accomplishments all have growing significance. These attributes have always held value, but only recently have they been considered valuable enough to serve as a tradable commodity.
In the coming years we will see an explosion of systems designed around the quantification of human attributes and personal influence serving as the basis of new currencies. And these currency movements will be driven farther and faster with introduction of The Terabyters.
What is a Terabyter?
In 2008, Americans consumed 1.3 trillion hours worth of information, which translates into 12 hours of information per person per day. If 12 hours a day seems a bit much, consider the sources of TV, radio, games, social networking, surfing the Internet that continue to play an ever greater role in our lives. From a literary standpoint, Americans consume 100,500 words per day from these same sources. That amounts to 34 gigabytes each day or a total of 3.6 zettabytes total for 2008.
As impressive as these numbers sound, they are tiny compared to the walking information nodes we will see in the near future. These are people I have begun to call the Terabyters.
A terabyter is a person who produces more than a terabyte of new information every day. Today, only a handful of these people in existence, but the numbers will soon swell along with the development of new data capture equipment.
Consider the following scenario…
Each morning Winston rolls out of bed, takes a quick shower, and begins to strap on the trademark Gargoyle gear. Named after the characters described in Neil Stevenson’s Snow Crash, a Gargoyle is a person who equips themselves with a wearable computer of sorts, and is constantly collecting visual and sensory data about his/her surroundings, while continually being jacked into the Metaverse (Internet).
For Winston, his role in life is to serve as a human information node in the rapidly growing world of extreme data immersion, and his income is both directly and indirectly dependent upon the amount of information he is able to amass on a daily basis.
The information Winston collects is being continually streamed to the server farms for search engines designed for the physical world. Each video stream coming from Winston is layered with object recognition software, geospatial coordinates, and other sensory response data to the physical world around him into digital information that is searchable.
He represents a human version of the spidering bots that tech companies currently use to scan the digital web. But spidering the physical world requires a more human approach, and that’s where Winston comes in.
Search technology companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have agreed to buy the incoming data streams from Winston, and thousands more people like him, based on a percentage of ad sales associated with the display of his information.
Two years earlier, Cisco began a campaign to promote the lifestyle of the Terabyter as a way to force the other industry players like AT&T and Verizon to step up their game. Within a few short weeks, seemingly everyone on the planet knew what the hottest new ultra-cool profession would be.
As a full-fledged Terabyter, people can do whatever they want to, anytime, anyplace, and still make money.
For a mere $5,000 worth of equipment, and a commitment to wear the gear relentlessly, virtually anyone can become a Terabyter, and the money will start rolling in.
Admittedly it isn’t a lifestyle that will appealed to everyone. The equipment is a hassle and the income is rather sparse to begin with. But those who stick with it will see their income grow and, over time, the equipment will become far less intrusive.
However, for the people who start early and stick with it, this is the ultimate lifestyle. Every day is an adventure, finding new places to explore, new people to meet, and never bound to a desk or a computer. Their livelihood is directly related to how active their lifestyle is.
Creating the Terabyter Network
To be sure, there will be many players involved in developing a system to ramp up data collection to this level. All of the Internet service providers will have to gear up, new bandwidth needs to be allocated, routers and switching systems have to be changed out, browsers and operating systems will need to be updated, and search engine thinking will have to be revised.
Invariably, this whole shift will begin with a ragtag operation of sub-terabyters seeding the data universe. The initial capabilities will be quite limited with regional test-beds set up to demonstrate the potential inside a single city. But once a major player like Cisco begins to smell an opportunity, everything changes quickly.
Terabyer gear is already available, but still in crude, marginally-usable formats. Video capture goggles, helmets, and other devices will quickly morph into sleek, barely-visible equipment that can be mounted in, on, and around the wearers.
Once the world gets a glimpse of the potential, along with the right incentives, Terabyter gear will begin to fly off the shelves, system registrations will skyrocket, and a whole new income-producing lifestyle will spring to life.
In addition to the ongoing video stream of a Terabyter’s surroundings, the video images will be overlaid with biosensor response data, assigning emotional values to individual objects, places, and people.
Each month new sensors and data-collection gear will show up in the marketplace and Terabyters will have to decide which elements to replace on their apparatus. .
Some of the initial dissention will stem from whether or not it’s necessary to use humans. Terabyter equipment can easily be strapped onto cars and bicycles, but the most valuable data will come from the places that only humans could go.
To be sure, privacy and security issues will rise to the surface, but these will not be insurmountable matters.
Bridging the Relationship
After viewing the world through the lens of a Terabyter, I’d like to focus your attention again on the emerging relationship brewing between information and money.
Money based on rare commodities will hold its value until the commodity is no longer rare. Similarly, money based on confidence and trust will hold its value until faith in the system begins to dissipate.
For this reason, all money is fiat money, based on trust.
Money today is nothing more than information – digital nuggets that have been assigned value buried deep inside our information reserves. Mining for information is similar to mining for gold or any other precious metals. You have to know what you’re looking for.
Currency has been the traditional system for transferring value in the past. In the future, our ability to manage and control information will enable many new systems for transferring value.
If you’re still struggling with the concepts here, Dan Robles, founder of the Ingenesist Project offers this set of predictions for 2020 based on “an entirely new form of capitalism whose velocity and voracity will take the world completely by surprise.”
Hold on to your hats, the transition is right around the corner. And the change agents who will help usher in this new system will be none other than the Terabyters.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Terabyter 2

A new breed of worker, equipped with uber-geek data-capturing tools,
are about to usher in a whole new information era

Recently I was preparing for a talk on the future of money, a talk I have given many times in the past, and I became absorbed with one singular thought – the relationship between information and money.

The value of a person, as an example, has traditionally been calculated based on hard number such as money in their bank account, personal assets, 401Ks, earning power, etc. As our ability to capture and process information improves, we are able to assign many more numbers to the intrinsic value of an individual.

Today we find ourselves in an awkward in-between state of trying to transition from a world based on hard currencies to one where things like talent, relationships, knowledge, reputation, personal networks, influence, and accomplishments all have growing significance. These attributes have always held value, but only recently have they been considered valuable enough to serve as a tradable commodity.

In the coming years we will see an explosion of systems designed around the quantification of human attributes and personal influence serving as the basis of new currencies. And these currency movements will be driven farther and faster with introduction of The Terabyters.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, new strategy, powerful idea, prediction, technology trends 6 Comments »

Next Generation Literacy

Posted by admin on June 28th, 2010

Next Generation Literacy 761

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can’t read & write,
but those who can’t learn, unlearn & relearn.” – Alvin Toffler

So what is literacy?
The first time I listened to an audio book I thought I was cheating. As a child, reading for me seemed like a lot of work, and my teachers kept piling on more reading assignments, continually feeding into the notion that reading is hard work.
Later, I rationalized that the process of reading is the process of taking characters on a page and turning them into mental concepts and images. Listening to an audio book is a little different process where we convert sounds into mental concepts and images.
Today, when someone talks about literacy there is an instant assumption that they are talking about the ability to read and write – basic ink-on-paper communications 1.0. However, communications is evolving and our ability to craft words and preserve them on paper is being replaced with digital forms of communications, and the options people now have to communicate with each other have exploded into thousands and thousands of nuanced variations of what was formerly called language.
Tomorrow there will be even more.
Understanding Literacy through the Words We Consume
In 2008, Americans consumed 1.3 trillion hours worth of information. This information consumption translated into an average of 12 hours per person, 100,500 words, and 34 gigabytes each day.
If we base the notion of literacy on the number of words that flow into our mind on a daily basis, we suddenly realize that the incoming words are coming from a variety of different sources. Today the vast majority of our “word intake” comes from television and computers with only 9% coming from print media. In 1960, print media accounted for 26% of our word consumption but has shrunk to 9% today, with the prospects of getting even smaller in the future.
For many people working within the book-centric world of today, it’s difficult for them to wrap their mind around the changing attitudes of today’s information consumers. And even for those who can, it’s not clear what the next steps should be, and how fast the changes should be made.
Programming as a Language
In 1972, I was a young engineering student at South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD and for my first computer programming class I was trained to “speak” the language of Fortran. We were taught a basic form of machine communications to “talk” to the giant computer through punch cards that were fed in and out of the beast through a card reading input-output device.
In this class our training involved such sophisticated tasks as sorting numbers, basic addition, and putting lists in alphabetical order. The whole process was very time-consuming with very little to show for the effort.
At the end of the class, being the true visionary that I am, I concluded, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there would be no future for the profession of computer programming.
Computers spoke a different language. In many ways it was similar to the language differences of people in Europe or Asia. While learning French, German, Mandarin, or Japanese required learning foreign words, definitions, and vocal inflections, the mastery of a computer language required the writing and interpretation of computer code, Boolean algebra, and many long and frustrating hours of dealing with non-human, no personality machines.
Next Generation Literacy
So going back to my original question, what really is literacy?
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) describes literacy as the “ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts.
Going beyond the textbook definition, literacy is evolving, and deep inside this evolution we can begin to understand some of the underlying complexities associated with the options currently at our disposal.
1. Reading and writing
2. Computer literacy
3. Web surfing literacy
4. Cell phone & telephone literacy
5. Smart phone literacy
6. Body language literacy
7. Financial literacy
8. Cartooning
9. Online commerce literacy
10. Online security literacy
11. Graphical literacy
12. Animation literacy
13. Audio literacy
14. Video literacy
15. Social networking literacy
16. Gaming literacy
17. Virtual world literacy
18. Cultural literacy
It is a common trap to associate our talent for communicating with our ability to read and write. However, texting is different than cartooning. Audio podcasts are different than video podcasts. Each new form of communications comes with its own unique style and attributes for conveying thoughts and ideas.
Literacy will continue to evolve along with every new system and each form of technology that gets created along the way.
Basic reading and writing forms of communications will no longer be sufficient for the workforce of the future. People will still need to read and write, but they will also need and a whole lot more.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

So what is literacy?

The first time I listened to an audio book I thought I was cheating. As a child, reading for me seemed like a lot of work, and my teachers kept piling on more reading assignments, continually feeding into the notion that reading is hard work.

Later, I rationalized that the process of reading is the process of taking characters on a page and turning them into mental concepts and images. Listening to an audio book is a little different process where we convert sounds into mental concepts and images.

Today, when someone talks about literacy there is an instant assumption that they are talking about the ability to read and write – basic ink-on-paper communications 1.0. However, communications is evolving and our ability to craft words and preserve them on paper is being replaced with digital forms of communications, and the options people now have to communicate with each other have exploded into thousands and thousands of nuanced variations of what was formerly called language.

Tomorrow there will be even more.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, historical perspective, prediction, social trends 10 Comments »

A Country of 90,000 Governments

Posted by admin on June 17th, 2010
A Country of 90,000 Governments
The total number of governmental bodies in the U.S. is approaching a staggering number – 90,000. During normal economic times there is plenty of money to go around, but now every city, state, county, parish, township, and special taxing district is competing for the same tax dollars that the federal government is.
Governmental entities are living, breathing organisms, each fighting for survival. With tax shortfalls cropping up in nearly every corner of the U.S. economy, most are struggling to preserve their own piece of the pie. With money declining, many are compensating with unusual policy decisions that they hope will shore up their balance sheet.
But it’s not just about money issues. Along with taxing authority, each one of these governments has its own ability to create and enforce new laws, rules, and regulations. Working with a limited set of tools in their toolbox, governments have resorted to using new laws and regulations to solve virtually every conceivable problem. The volume of new laws being created are truly stunning.
Abraham Lincoln once said, ““The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.” Similarly, the quickest way to bring America to its knees is to strictly enforce all of its laws.
Sales Tax Battles
Most of the governmental entities are funded through some form of sales tax, a system designed during an entirely different era, a system that is now on the verge of collapse.
At the heart of many of the current debates is a 1992 landmark ruling by the Supreme Court that determined retailers are not required to collect sales tax from shoppers unless they have a physical presence in the state where customers live. Initially, this ruling applied mainly to catalog companies and home-shopping channels on TV. But it also applied to the emerging online retail industry, giving them a distinct competitive advantage, and consumers a reason to change their buying habits.
Local retailers who have invested in their community, who send their kids to local schools and volunteer for local charities, find themselves competing with faceless online companies, most of whom have never set foot in the town. The problem with current sales tax laws are that they create a disadvantage to those who are local. But here is where it gets complicated.
If an online business has a physical presence in a state, such as a store, office or warehouse, they must collect sales tax from the customers who purchase items in that state. Without a physical presence, no sales tax needs to be collected. That sounds simple enough, until you get into the definition of what constitutes a physical presence.
Some states now claim that anyone doing affiliate sales, placing referral ads on their blog sites and receiving a commission, can be construed as being a local sales agent, and therefore the entire transaction is subject to sales tax. As a result, companies like Amazon and Overstock who count heavily upon the no-sales-tax advantage have cancelled affiliate relationships with anyone doing affiliate sales on their behalf in those states.
Maximizing the Failure Points
Rest assured sales tax issues are but a small piece of a much larger problem.
Complexity creates failure points. Every decision point along the way increases the odds that something will go wrong, and we have moved into an era of non-stop decision points.
A country with 90,000 governments, whose primary tools for solving problems involve creating new laws, is a country that has maximized the number of failure points.
As I’ve often said, “The health of a nation is inversely proportional to the number of laws needed to govern it.” From this perspective, we live in a very sick nation.
Over time, these complexity-laden systems that will invariably descend into the lower levels of disfunctionality, with anger and finger-pointing setting the stage for more graphic battles to follow.
In a tough global economy, the good people of the U.S. have chosen to tie ankle weights of complexity around their legs as they attempt to swim towards a better economy.
The Futurist Perspective
Backcasting is a tool used by futurists to look at the present from some point in the future.
In much the same way we stand in amazement as we read about the Salem witch trials, or 18th century doctors who used bleeding to cure diseases, or Polynesian tribes who sacrificed virgins to appease the volcano-gods, a country comprised of 90,000 governments is destined to appear equally ludicrous in the future.
One hundred years in the future, people in 2110 will look back at this era of history and marvel at the insanity of our times. They will be amazed at how people managed to live in a country with more laws than anyone can count, a tax code that, according to NPR, is over 67,000 pages long with 1,638 different tax forms, and a justice system that controls one out of every 31 people in the country, and has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in history.
All of our defensive posturing for maintaining the status quo will quickly deteriorate into the equivalent of modern caveman thinking as future generations make us the punchline of their jokes and the universal symbol of “what not to do.”
Reining in the Unreinable
So how do we reverse the avalanche of complexity that is cascading around us? In philosophical terms, how do we create the immovable object to deal with the unstoppable force?
The short answer is that abrupt change is simply not possible. Systems that have evolved over decades cannot instantly be traded in for something newer.
With a society that is already heavily invested in our current systems, and people already pre-programmed to think and act accordingly, the operating system can only be changed by rewriting the source code. In short, we need to create systems for changing the system.
We currently have no check-and-balance system for impeding the excessive law-writing now taking place. Simply by adding friction to the rule-making process will slow it down. Adding a lifespan to the laws will help force decision-makers to focus on the highest priorities.
Here are a few examples:
1. All laws must be posted in one central location online. As a first step towards getting a handle on the runaway law-creators, we need to create a law that requires all laws be posted on one central website online. Any laws not posted will be deemed unenforceable.
2. Any laws that have not been enforced in that past 20 years become unenforceable and must be removed from the list. Time spent getting rid of the clutter means less time for creating new laws.
3. All laws must be written on an 8th grade comprehension level. No laws can become law until they are certified as having been written on this level.
Aspiring to Synergy
History has taught us that governments can only exist if there is an adversarial relationship between a government and its people. For this reason, few have bothered to question the abrasive relationships that have developed.
However, business and government need to maintain a synergistic relationship. Governments provide the operating system and businesses shares the wealth, proving the revenue streams upon which governments operate.
Companies in the U.S. are continually facing new forms of global competition, and anything that makes it more difficult to conduct business, makes them less competitive.
For a country to prosper, it’s not necessary to be perfect. When we find ourselves being chased by a bear, we only need to be faster than the other guy.

Maximizing our own failure points

The total number of governmental bodies in the U.S. is approaching a staggering number – 90,000. During normal economic times there is plenty of money to go around, but now every city, state, county, parish, township, and special taxing district is competing for the same tax dollars that the federal government is.

Governmental entities are living, breathing organisms, each fighting for survival. With tax shortfalls cropping up in nearly every corner of the U.S. economy, most are struggling to preserve their own piece of the pie. With money declining, many are compensating with unusual policy decisions that they hope will shore up their balance sheets.

But it’s not just about money issues. Along with taxing authority, each one of these governments has its own ability to create and enforce new laws, rules, and regulations. Working with a limited set of tools in their toolbox, governments have resorted to using laws and regulations to solve virtually every conceivable problem. The sheer volume of laws emerging from these 90,000 rule-making bodies is truly stunning.

Abraham Lincoln once said, ““The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.” Similarly, the quickest way to bring America to its knees is to strictly enforce all of its laws.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, powerful idea, prediction, scary future 7 Comments »

Maximum Freud

Posted by admin on May 19th, 2010

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A few thoughts on “Maximum Freud”

In 1972, I was young engineering student at South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD. One of the first courses I was required to take was a short-course on slide rules. For those of you who don’t know what a slide rule is – first came the abacus, then came the slide rule, and then came the calculator.

This was a time when the real “cool geeks” on campus walked around proudly displaying their black carrying case for their slide rule that was attached to their belt. Brainiacs on parade, a way of telling the world how smart they were.

Early calculators were first showing their face around 1970, but in 1972 they were still pretty expensive. I remember arguing with my teacher about whether or not the slide rule course was necessary and his response was that “all engineers need to know how to run the slide rule.” Tough to argue with that logic.

But of course his thinking was wrong. Even though I took the course and passed it with flying colors, I’ve never used a slide rule in doing engineering work. Engineers at Hewlett Packard and Texas Instruments who were working on next generation calculators at the time would have laughed at my teacher’s assertion that slide rules were always going to be the centerpiece of the engineer’s tool chest.

Clearly this period of time was the end of an era. It was the end of the slide rule era and the beginning of the calculator era.

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Systems Thinking and the Future of Education

Posted by admin on April 27th, 2010

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Short video clip on “Systems Thinking”
recorded at the Plan Fort Collins event on March 3, 2010

A recent article in iLibrarian explained it this way.

Online education seems set on its course to overtake traditional colleges within the next few decades, especially as our society becomes ever more dependent on the internet to get our work done.  Thomas Frey, an expert on online education, compares our growing reliance on the education system to the reliance of ancient Romans on their numeric system.  He indicates that much like the Romans, we have become increasingly reliant on our education system which is meant to pass on information from one generation to the next, hesitant to any change that may occur (explaining the rough transition to online education).

historical perspective, powerful idea, prediction, technology trends No Comments »

Ghost Towns of the Internet

Posted by admin on March 27th, 2010
Ghost Towns of the Internet
When today’s data goldmines becomes tomorrow’s data carcasses
In 1859 the tiny community of Tin Cup, Colorado got its first taste of gold fever. A tiny amount of gold was all it took for prospectors to start poking around with hopes of striking it rich. Twenty years later they landed their first major strike and rumors of the find spread across the country.
By 1900, the once insignificant mountain settlement had mushroomed into a bustling gold town with over 2,000 people. But in a short time the mines were exhausted, the people left, and the post office closed its doors in 1918. Today, the only remnants of this once thriving community are a few abandon buildings and a couple signs along the road.
Ghost towns are a rich part of world history. There are literally thousands of examples of these now-irrelevant pin pricks on a map. Overnight sensations quickly became a distant memory in the years that followed.
Is the Internet today really that much different than the gold rush stories of the late 1800s?
For ghost towns, the reasons behind their demise vary tremendously. Pripyat, a small town in northern Ukraine, reached a population of 50,000 before the Chernobyl Nuclear Power disaster. Today, it is glowing with abandonment.
Jonestown, Guyana was founded as both a “socialist paradise” and a “sanctuary” from media scrutiny by cult leader Rev Jim Jones. After reaching a population of nearly 1,000 people, the entire population participated in a mass suicide, causing it to become little more than an entry in the why-in-the-hell-did-they-listen-to-him history books.
These, of course, are unusual examples. But the world is filled with unusual examples. A disaster is still a disaster no matter how unusual the circumstances may be.
Will the digital ruins of today’s Internet ever compare to the physical ruins of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome? Will anyone even know they existed?
Ghost Brands
In 1962, Woolco began a 20 year rollercoaster ride through retail history. At its peak the Woolco name was a powerful force in the marketplace, with hundreds of big box stores in the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain employing tens of thousands of people. Today the name hardly merits a mention in history books.
In the 1970s, IBM’s Selectric Typewriter had established itself as a critical cornerstone of office activity. But when computers arrived in the 1980, typewriters began to disappear and now the Selectric brand is little more than a museum piece.
In 1999 some of the top Internet properties were Lycos, Xoom, Excite, AltaVista, and GeoCities. Each of them were attracting millions of web visitors each month, competing head to head with companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon. Today each exists in name only, resting quietly in the shadow of its former existence.
Organic Content Creation
As we entered the 2000s, many companies began to focus on organic content creation with customer doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the time and labor used to build a primo web property.
As a result of this trend, data has been accumulating so fast that companies are investing heavily in server capacity to accommodate customer demand. While the exact numbers are being closely guarded, here are some notable data points to consider:
• Google is rumored to manage over one million servers in its various data centers around the globe. Google’s data capacity for its search, YouTube, G-Mail, and other data-heavy services is said to be over twice the size of its competitors – Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, and IBM.
• Microsoft’s newest data center in Chicago has been architected around installing entire containers filled with servers. Each container holds over 2,000 servers and can be installed in less than eight hours.
• Amazon currently runs the world’s largest online store and one of the world’s largest cloud computing operations.
• IBM currently operates eight million square feet of data center space on six continents.
• EDS is now managing over 380,000 servers in 180 data centers.
• Facebook’s data centers store more than 40 billion photos, and users upload 40 million new photos each day – about 2,000 photos every second.
• The Tokyo Data Center serves as Japan’s Internet backbone. Japan claims it to be the largest data center in the world
• IDC is predicting that the cost of powering data centers around the world will reach $40 billion annually by 2012. How long before that number doubles, triples, or quadruples?
The difference today between the ghost towns of the Wild West and the brand names of the 70s is the speed with which changes are happening.
Organic growth often leads to organic abandonment. Is the speed with which they arrive a predictor of the speed with which they will leave?
Future Ruins Viewed as a Digital Past
As we look at the next generation of the Internet, watching carefully as it unfolds, we cannot help but be struck by how quickly it has infiltrated our lives and how much of our attention it currently commands.
Much like the physical structures in our cities that form along the horizons of our urban landscapes, the data structures inside today’s data giants represent some of mankind’s most remarkable feats. True, they exist only as a digital compliment to the bricks and steel of physical buildings, but they hold within them vital clues about who we are, what we find valuable, and our drives and passions for forging ahead.
So what will happen to the likes of these ground-losing giants?
• Second Life – Less than 3 years ago this one time buzz-dominator of the virtual world’s industry was the darling of media discussions, but has now been relegated to competing for mindshare with lesser contenders like video games and social media.
• MySpace – People have rapidly shifted from the chaotic page-building systems on MySpace to the cleaner look and interface on Facebook. How long before some new contender arrives and begin to steal market share from both?
• Plaxo – Starting off as a constantly updating business card service, Plaxo has lost ground to other mindshare grabbers like LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Monster.COM – Monster suffered a 33% decline in revenues in 2009 compared to 2008 as the bad economy and lack of jobs drove many would be customers to CraigsList and other contenders.
• Friendster – An early pioneer in social media, Friendster has lost its footing and remains a distant memory among the historians for social media.
• PhotoBucket – Riding on the coattails of MySpace, this one-time darling of the photo hosting world has lost ground to companies like Flickr and Picassa.
Certainly each of the companies has the potential to breathe new life into their business and add buoyancy to their sinking ship. But even the best business managers can only hold things together for a while.
Life expectancy for modern day businesses, even the remarkable ones, is measured in decades, not centuries.
Are today’s success stories nothing more than a prelude to tomorrow’s disaster stories?
The digital world as it exists today contains the keys to humanity, the raw essence of personhood, and in the long run, the future of our children’s children.
More important than the decaying wood and weed infested streets of physical ghost towns, what will happen to the data reserves and important scraps of our civilization that can be instantly erased with the flip of a switch rather than the erosion of time?
These are all hard questions without good answers. But rest assured, the ghost town era of the Internet is coming, and for some, it has already arrived.

Ghost Towns 676

When today’s data goldmines becomes tomorrow’s data carcasses

In 1859 the tiny community of Tin Cup, Colorado got its first taste of gold fever. A tiny amount of gold was all it took for prospectors to start poking around with hopes of striking it rich. Twenty years later they landed their first major strike and rumors of the find spread across the country.

By 1900, the once insignificant mountain settlement had mushroomed into a bustling gold town with over 2,000 people. But in a short time the mines were exhausted, the people left, and the post office closed its doors in 1918. Today, the only remnants of this once thriving community are a few abandon buildings and a couple signs along the road.

Ghost towns are a rich part of world history. There are literally thousands of examples of these now-irrelevant pin pricks on a map. Overnight sensations quickly became a distant memory in the years that followed.

Is the Internet today really that much different than the gold rush stories of the late 1800s?

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, historical perspective, prediction, scary future, technology trends 6 Comments »

The Great Bank & Credit Card Backlash

Posted by admin on February 8th, 2010
The Great Bank & Credit Card Backlash
The pungent odor of corruption is offending more than few nostrils
Recent attempts by Congress and the Federal Reserve Board to curb the excessive fees being charged by credit cards, banks, and finance companies have resulted in a punitive industry response with interest rates and fees climbing in almost every category. This action has resulted in nothing short of a full-scale revolt by a victimized-feeling public.
Consumers are slamming on the brakes. Revolving credit — largely made up of credit card debt — fell by nearly 20% in November, the largest drop on record, according to the Federal Reserve. Through October, the number of new credit card accounts dropped 46% from October 2008, according to Equifax.
“Washington doesn’t get it,” says a DaVinci Institute researcher who asked to remain anonymous. “People now view banking and credit cards as some of the most corrupt industries on the planet. The length to which they are willing to abuse their own customer base to improve profits is astonishing, and congress has been condoning this practice for years.”
The smoldering flames of animosity behind the credit card backlash are being fueled in part by an equally malicious banking industry. Controversial banking fees have fattened banks’ bottom lines at the expense of our most vulnerable consumers.
At first glance, the arrangement posed by banks seems reasonable enough: Overdraw your account, and the bank will cover the transaction — for a fee. Problem is, consumers don’t get a choice in what transactions get covered and how the fees get assessed. In recent years, as bankers have begun to drool over how lucrative these fees can be, they’ve devised even sneakier ways for consumers to overdraw their accounts, to the tune of $36.7 billion in revenue last year.
Banks have done this by covering debit card transactions as small as $1 and charging a fee as high as $39. Some also charge fees before consumers are overdraw by deducting a purchase when it’s made, instead of when it clears. The timing trick alone has been worth billions. And they’ve nefariously learned to order transactions from highest to lowest dollar amount, emptying consumers’ accounts quicker and trigging more overdrafts.
On average, consumers will pay a fee of $26.68 every time they overdraw their account, according to data from Moebs Services, an economic research firm. That means that if consumers overdraw their account by $100, they’d pay an annual percentage rate (APR) of 696%, if the credit is paid back in two weeks.
Another casualty of this war is declining credit scores. From the 3rd quarter of 2006 to the 2nd quarter of 2009, the number of consumers considered “deep subprime,” with such low credit scores they qualify for credit only at steep interest rates, if at all, rose from 34.4 million to 39.8 million, according to Experian.
While lending companies are quick to say they have no incentive to lower credit scores, they indeed do. Lower credit scores mean higher interest rates and potentially higher fees.
As the burden of repayment climbs, higher risk individuals paying a higher interest rate will have a higher default rate. Higher payments increase the likelihood of failure. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, where an industry can point and say, “I told you so.”
Yes, the interest rates, overdrafts, and declining credit scores are fueling calls to reform the entire industry. But banks and credit card companies form a powerful lobby, and as distrust over any action taken by Washington grows, and campaign contributions are being dangled by the industry to blunt the outcries for reform, consumers are left with few options and have resorted to taking matters into their own hands.
The backlash is in full swing. Credit cards are being cut up, houses are being walked away from, and the industry is now left holding the bag. In the process, few tears are being shed over industry losses.
So where do we go from here?
Major industry players have set themselves up as easy targets. In the midst of this chaotic backlash lies some tremendous opportunities, and smart entrepreneurs will figure out ways to capitalize on them.
The cornerstones of the next generation financial service industry will be based on attributes like trust, openness, ethics, and credibility. Players that base their company on these founding principles will quickly gain favor among fee-weary consumers.
Long-term winners will forego near-term profits in favor of establishing themselves as a major contender.
Credit cards will be replaced with a variety of easy to use, bank-on-a-chip devices, complete with biometric security and the ability to monitor account activity real-time. Other devices will give consumers real-time access and monitoring of their own credit report.
Look for foreign banks and foreign credit card companies to make a serious play. Some will even come with easy forms for establishing a foreign corporations through which your money can be channeled.
In the end, consumers are okay with paying small fees and service charges. But when customers feel victimized by the companies who have been placed in a position of trust to guard and protect their money, change is inevitable, and it’s happening now.

Credit Card Backlash 782

The smell of corruption is offending more than few nostrils

Recent attempts by Congress and the Federal Reserve Board to curb the excessive fees being charged by credit cards, banks, and finance companies have resulted in a punitive industry response with interest rates and fees climbing in almost every category. This action has resulted in nothing short of a full-scale revolt by a victimized-feeling public.

Consumers are slamming on the brakes. Revolving credit — largely made up of credit card debt — fell by nearly 20% in November, the largest drop on record, according to the Federal Reserve. Through October, the number of new credit card accounts dropped 46% from October 2008, according to Equifax.

Read the rest of this entry »

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