What music comes to mind when you try on your new pair of jeans? Does that “music in your head” somehow change when you try on a different brand?

The next time you try on a piece of jewelry, pay very close attention to the emotional experiences that run through your mind as you touch and feel the jewelry.

Even though clothing and jewelry are inanimate objects, they are closely tied to an emotional response, and brand managers today are working overtime to figure out ways to both cultivate and amplify that emotional connection.

One fascinating example of this is Gomus, a Brazil-based music branding company that embeds RFID tags in clothing. When a customer tries on a piece of clothing in the changing room, music will automatically come on that matches the feel or mood of the clothing.

This is just one example of how retail stores of the future are attempting to differentiate themselves from the online world. Here are 18 more examples of how future retail is on the verge of becoming an exciting new frontier for both product designers and consumers alike.

Setting the Stage

A famous 1998 article in Wired Magazine written by Nicholas Negroponte predicted with great accuracy the demise of traditional retail. What he was not able to predict is all of the nuances of how the online world and technology would be integrated and blend together to form unusual experiences that will become part and parcel to virtually every new retail store in the future.

When looking at how retail is evolving, there are several factors that must be considered. Here are a few data points to consider as we dive deeper into this topic.

• According to Google, 8 out of 10 consumers research purchases online. But not all make their purchases online. Interestingly enough, only 42% research online and then buy online, while 51% research online and then buy in-store.
• According to USA Today, over the past two decades over 75% of all independent bookstores have closed.
• Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney, Gamestop, and Nordstrom have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook. The stores’ quick failure shows that Facebook doesn’t drive commerce and casts doubt on its value for retailers, according to Forrester Research.
• A study by Deloitte showed that multi-channel consumers who receive information from more than one source prior to purchase, such as in-store, online, mobile, and/or catalog, will spend 82% more per transaction than a customer who only shops in stores.
• E-commerce conversion rates have been hovering around 2-3.5% while brick-and-mortar conversion rates for fashion retailers have been around 20-25% according to Verdict Research.
• The concept of “augmented humanity” began to crystallize with the introduction of Siri as part of the iPhone 4S rollout. Tapping into the power of voice response changes the way people interact with their smartphones — and looking ahead, it could reshape the way consumers shop.
• Research done by IPSOS OTX shows that out of the 40% of US consumers who own smartphones, 70% use their smartphones while shopping in-store.

18 Driving Forces in Retail

Understanding the current trends is only part of the equation. As we dive into some of the possibilities we begin to see a radically different picture emerge.

Here are 18 examples of companies that are pushing the boundaries of imagination when it comes to future retail.

SingTel – Turning store windows into a touchscreen experience

1.) SingTel, a Singapore-based mobile phone service launched their flagship store in Singapore’s Comcentre in July 2011. The store’s exterior glass walls have embedded interactive digital touchscreens in them, meaning that the store will effectively be open 24 hours a day.

Homeplus – Turning empty walls in a subway into a new shopping experience

2.) Homeplus, Korea’s largest discount chain has announced the opening of the world’s first virtual store for smartphone users. They launched a series of virtual stores on subway platforms, enabling customers to make purchases using their smartphones while they wait for a train. During the trial period, Homeplus’ online sales increased by 130%, with over 10,000 new customers trying the stores.

Wal-Mart’s “order now, pickup later service”

3.) In March 2011, Walmart launched “Pick Up Today,” a service that allows customers to order online and collect their shopping from a local store the same day. This new service offers same-day pick up of online purchases, for free. Walmart began testing the program at 750 stores in 20 markets late last year and will roll it out nationally to all locations by the end of March.

Groupon is rethinking the bargain-hunter’s dream experience

4.) Both Groupon and Living Social are testing in-store deals that are delivered directly to a person’s smartphone as soon as they enter a store. Eventually this service will become aisle-specific, delivering deals that are only within a few feet of the customer.

In.gredient’s zero-waste, package-free grocery store

5.) Soon to be the newest grocery store in Austin, Texas, the town where Whole Foods was born, will be the country’s first zero-waste, package-free grocery store, cleverly named In.gredients. Shoppers at the store will bring their own reusable containers to fill with local and organic groceries ranging from dry bulk and dairy, to wine and household cleaners.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Envisioning a new world for urban agriculture

6.) Taking fresh produce one step further, the visionary thinkers at PlantLab, a Dutch leader in the urban agricultural movement is exploring new ways to grow produce in sunless, rain-less rooms in underground vaults beneath grocery stores.

ThinFilm Smart Tags

7.) ThinFilm Electronics is working with Xerox PARC to develop smart tags in the form of printable plastic labels that will actively monitor food freshness. The multilayer tags will combine a year’s worth of battery power, sensors and a small display, and will initially be used to show a temperature record of perishable food and medications. In the future smart tags will be used to trace the lifecycle of a product including point of origin, distance traveled, age, environmental changes, and any degradation of the product’s integrity that may have occurred along the way.

Paperless receipts are all the rage

8.) In August 2011, the New York Times reported on an increase in the popularity of digital, paperless receipts, touting it as a convenient, environmentally friendly alternative to paper receipts. Gone are the days of digging through your purse looking for that crumpled slip of paper. Retailers in the US include Apple, Whole Foods Market, Gap, Sears, and Kmart offer shoppers the option of choosing to receive proof of purchase by email or via password-protected websites.

What could be more appealing than Books and Cookies?

9.) In May 2011, a Santa Monica-based bookstore called Books and Cookies was launched as an educational experience to provide children with literature and tasty treats. The store stocks children’s books – available to purchase or read in the child-friendly reading room area – toys, and freshly baked cookies and snacks. The brainchild of Chudney Ross, youngest daughter of singer Diana Ross, the store offers great books and toys for toddlers and tweens, daily events, healthy snacks and drop-dead delicious cookies just a few blocks from the area’s famous California shoreline.

Cook and Coffee – Combining classes, product demos, and a great in-store experience

10.) Cook and Coffee is a retail space in Paris that combines classes and demonstrations with their in-store experience. Run by Italian electronic appliance manufacturer De’Longhi, customers can learn the history of coffee from a specialist barista, sample various blends and try out kitchen appliances including espresso makers and food processors. The space is equipped with interactive screens and from September 2010 onwards, consumers have been able to attend no cost cooking workshops, such as how to make custard or pasta.

2theloo – A clean restroom and a new kind of shopping experience

11.) 2theloo (to the loo) is a chain of Dutch restrooms. Each visit to the restroom costs 0.50 euros ($0.68). It seems, that in Europe, restrooms are not considered a public service and you have to pay for them pretty much everywhere.

However, the chain of ‘always clean’ restroom shops, located in city centers, shopping centers, and train and gas stations, not only offer eco-friendly toilets, including disabled access restrooms and family restrooms, but also shops with toiletry products and sometimes even a coffee shop.

The secret underground shopping experience of Bodega

12.) Everyone knows that the hottest businesses are the ones that are impossible to find. Bodega is a Boston shoe store which people truly wouldn’t be able to find despite their best efforts because it’s hidden under the guise of a convenience store. Shoppers need to enter, and find the Snapple vending machine on one of the walls, and then they have the ability to enter via a trap door and go underground and shop at the exclusive shoe boutique decked in polished hardwood.

MyBestFit’s whole-body scanner

13.) MyBestFit is a free service available in a number of U.S. malls. Customers enter a circular whole-body scanner that uses low-power radio waves to record over 200,000 body measurements. It then matches the customer’s body type to clothes in its database, such as products from mall staples American Eagle, Old Navy, Eddie Bauer and Talbots. A printout advises customers what and where to buy the clothes that will best match their body.

Intel Labs’ Magic Mirror

14.) Intel Labs’ Magic Mirror aims to transform the shopping experience using a realistic avatar of the consumer dressed in the latest fashions, showing Intel’s research in body tracking and parametric human body model. This technology uses a 3D avatar that tracks a person’s movements in real time.

ng Connect’s Virtual Personal Stylist

15.) At CES, ng Connect demonstrated its Virtual Personal Stylist, a shopping experience that will bring the personalization and customization of offline and online shopping together. Using a tablet or mobile phone, shoppers in stores will be able to access their avatar via a full-size networked “mirror” where they can “try-on” clothing, make-up and more without time-consuming trips to the changing room.

Pánská Pasáž – Redefining the male shopping experience

16.) Pánská Pasáž is an upscale mall in Prague focusing exclusively on male shoppers. The 800-square-meter venue features 19 luxury shops including Ralph Lauren, famed Austrian tailor Knize, a gourmet food market, a shoe shop, a perfume store for men, a traditional barbershop and a tobacco store.

Some of the fabric pattern possibilities with 3D printed clothing

3D Printing and the Clothing in Our Future

It is important to note that the garment/fashion industry is one of the few remaining industries where mass produced items are still assembled almost entirely by hand. This means that although design may happen in the first world, production is often outsourced to the third world where labor is cheap.

While some of you may not be thrilled with the possibility of wearing plastic garments, 3D printers in the future will have the ability to print cotton, polyester, wool, or any number of other traditional and non-traditional materials. Here are a few examples.

The N12 Bra created with a 3D Printer

17.) The result of a collaboration between Continuum Fashion and the 3D printing experts at Shapeways, the N12 Bra is billed as the “the first completely 3D-printed, ready-to-wear, item of clothing.” The high-tech bikini’s name is derived from “nylon 12″, the material that’s used in the 3D printing process.

One of Hoon Chung’s 3D printed shoe designs

18.) Hoon Chung, a student at the London College of Fashion, has designed a collection of 3D-printed shoes that he hopes will rock the fashion world.

Cubify’s 3D printer designed for consumers

Another 3D printer that was all the rage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that I attended last month, was Cubify’s consumer-targeted desktop printer called Cube that is cheap enough for home use (retails for around $1200).

Once a person’s feet are scanned in, the printer can be used to create a custom-fit shoe that is styled and colored to your exact preferences.

Final Thoughts

People are social creatures by nature and while the online world has dealt a temporary setback to traditional retailers, a new breed of unusual stores filled with hyper-individualized experiences is starting to enter the marketplace.

Where many commodity items such as books and music are better delivered in digital form online, other products will find ways to differentiate themselves through instant status-fixes, group learning experiences, relationship building opportunities, and much more.

When it comes to retail, consumers are in control. They vote with their dollar when they decide what to buy, where to buy, when to buy, and how much they’re willing or can afford to pay.

In our connected world, where information is fluid and transparent, retailers must become actively engaged in the global conversation. If not, their customers will simply begin the conversations without them.

Physical stores currently still provide the best way to create a high-value relationship with customers and build a branded experience, but this could easily change over time. Although brick and mortar stores are not going away any time soon, the actual value they add to their communities as well as their appearance and interactivity levels plus the variety of products they offer will remain in transition for the foreseeable future.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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ADDITIONAL UPDATES

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19.) Starbucks Opens First-Ever Ski-Thru Coffee Shop - A Starbucks located at the Squaw Valley Ski Resort was built into the slopes at an elevation of 8,000 feet, allowing resort-goers to purchase a cup of Joe without ever having to remove their skis or snowboards.

Jewelry designed by Nervous System printed on a 3D printer

20.) Nervous System is a design studio that works at the intersection of science, art, and technology. Their jewelry that was printed on a 3d printer exemplifies the current craze in 3D printer design and is testament to the fact that technology and craft are going a long way in partnership to make beautiful d’objects that wouldn’t otherwise exist in nature.

Photo of me demonstrating an unuual thermoelectric generator
with NY Times Correspondent Matthew Wald

On Wednesday I was invited to speak on a panel at the 2012 National Electricity Forum, an event sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, in Washington DC.

In the audience were a thousand power industry executives, regulators, and key industry service providers.

The event was kicked off by U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Our panel took the stage immediately afterward.

Other panelists included Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of the Institute for the Future, John Petersen, President of the Arlington Institute, and our Moderator Matthew Wald, Senior Washington Bureau Correspondent for the NY Times.

As the kickoff speaker on the panel, my message to them noted that the power industry is an industry that is under attack. An attack not being carried out by terrorists or invading armies, rather it is being attacked by emerging new technologies that have been advancing quickly and are currently beginning to boil around the edges.

My advice was that they begin to make transition plans for dismantling the industry, plans that will include dismantling our national grid and replace it with a series of micro grids. But it included much more than that.

Understanding the National Power Grid

During the early years of distributing electricity, Edison’s direct current (DC) was the standard for the United States and Edison focused heavily on retaining his patent royalties. DC worked well with incandescent bulbs and motors, which the principal load of that era. DC systems could be directly tied to storage batteries, providing the all-important load-leveling and backup power during interruptions of the generator.

At the time, there were no practical AC motors available. Edison invented the first electric meter to bill customers for the power they used, but this meter only worked with DC. All of these technical issues gave DC a huge advantage. However, progress stalled out because they were not able to transmit DC beyond the 1-2 miles range of the generator.

George Westinghouse

Counter to what most have been led to believe, alternating current (AC) had its origins in Europe before the time of Tesla, but didn’t progress very far until it caught the attention of George Westinghouse. Westinghouse put together a team run by William Stanley to explore ways to use AC current. In 1888 Tesla partnered with Westinghouse Electric to commercialize his own particular version of AC, which caught on in a big way.

Creating the 110-Volt Standard

Edison’s DC distribution network consisted of lots of generators and lots of wires. There were no transformers to vary the voltage. Instead, the system operated at the same voltage level throughout the network. As an example, a 100-volt light in a home or office was connected to a generator producing 110 volts, with the line lost accounting for the drop in voltage.

The 110-volt standard was adopted because it was convenient for light bulb manufacturers to work with. They could produce a high-resistance carbon filament bulb that could withstand 100 volts, and still yield enough illumination to be economically competitive with gas lighting. At the time it was felt that 100 volts was not likely to present a severe hazard of fatal electric shock.

Edison, the Elephant Slayer

The world’s first AC hydroelectric plant began operations in 1889 at the Williamette Falls Station in Oregon City, Oregon, and the same company began work on an even bigger plant at Niagara Falls.

When Edison got wind of this, he set out on a national campaign to warn the world of the dangers of AC power. Through a series of town hall meetings he demonstrated how terrible AC current was by rounding up stray cats and dogs and electrocuting them on stage.

He also tried to popularize the term for being electrocuted as being “Westinghoused”.

Years after DC had lost the “war of the currents,” in 1903, Edison’s film crew made a movie of the electrocution of Topsy, a Coney Island circus elephant which had recently killed three men. A 23 second video of the “Electrocution of Topsy” can be seen here on YouTube.

The Birth of a National Power Grid

With Edison’s failure to find a long-range transmission system for DC power, a national AC grid was born.

Even though the “current wars” official ending can be traced to the 1891 International Electro-Technical Exhibition in Frankfurt Germany, some cities continued to use DC well into the 20th century. For example, central Helsinki had a DC network operating until the late 1940s, and Stockholm lost its last remaining DC system in the 1970s.

Since power generation through hydroelectric plants such as the one at Niagara Falls were far away from the population it served, and later coal-fired and oil-fired plants were dirty and noisy, power generation was out-of-sight and out-of-mind for the average consumer. They didn’t care where the power came from as long as long as they had power.

For the past century, nations all over the world have invested heavily in building national and international grids, based upon the assumption that local power generation was not possible. This, however, is about to change.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu

Introducing the Game-Changers

At Wednesday’s 2012 National Electricity Forum, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu commented, “If someone invents a cheap, efficient form of storage, it will be a game changer.”

Secretary Chu also suggested another game-changer would be, “Breaking down the barriers between utilities so that the variability of generation can be leveled out over a larger area.”

Both of these game-changers already exist.

One technology I demonstrated at the Forum, (shown at top) was a demo version of a thermoelectric generator being developed by Phil Watts in Longmont, Colorado. This local power generator works on the temperature differential of water, with a very clever system for routing geothermally cooled water on one side of the chip and solar heated water on the other. His secret ingredient is an unusual nano-fluid that causes the system to operate with great efficiencies when there is only a minor temperature differential, even at night.

Phil’s technology is just one of many I’ve seen that solves the game-changing issue of local generation. You can see his patent application here.

The second company that I talked about at the Forum is the first I’ve seen that efficiently solves both game-changer problems – local generation and storage.

Since I am under an NDA and not able to discuss this technology in great detail, I will refer all specific questions to the company’s attorney, Karl Dakin – (Feel free to arrange a demonstration for yourself).

What I can tell you is this. The company is a startup in south Denver founded by a physicist with a strong entrepreneurial background. He’s assembling a formidable team to move the technology forward.

The technology will reside in a box that sits adjacent to every home. A series of boxes can also replace a local substation. Power can be generated for less than 2 cents per kwh. Each unit can produce three times the power needed for the average home, and whatever power is unused can be efficiently stored from one day to the next.

I’ve looked at hundreds of energy related inventions over the years and none I’ve seen have the potential of this one. The technology operates silently inside a container without the need for any external power, water, or other inputs. There is no pollution. And the best part is that it serves as a mass energy storage system, efficiently storing power from one day to the next.

I can also point out what this technology is NOT. It is not a Tesla device. It is not a solar, nuclear, geothermal, or fuel cell device. Also, it does not involve zero point energy or any other mystery science.

What’s Next?

If we work under the assumption that both game-changing issues have been solved with this technology, the next discussion will center around commercialization, adoption rates, and rethinking the industry.

Even with a near-perfect solution for local power generation and storage, any new entrant will be faced with huge amounts of resistance. Resistance to change is a built-in byproduct of human nature. But couple that with legacy infrastructure, a century worth of reinforcing public policy, and the seemingly infinite resources of public utilities.  Calling them a formidable opponent is indeed an understatement.

But the game quickly shifts once a large player forms some sort of alliance with the startup and takes them under their wing. Watch carefully to see who decides to cut this kind of deal.

The Adoption Curve

Assuming that a large player aligns with the startup in the near future, how will the adoption of this technology unfold?

Over time, the national electric grid will be converted to a series of micro grids. Grids could be eliminated completely, but there are advantages to being on some sort of a grid as I will explain later.

Since the power industry in unlikely to be an early adopter, look for local utilities and cities to step up to the plate. Industry standards and long-term visioning will lag several years behind the early adopters.

Transition planning will be difficult with the first few installations. Considering all parts of the equation, at what point will one power source be turned off and the new one be turned on?

Businesses, states, and even countries will vie for manufacturing, distribution, and installation rights. There may even be a series of auctions used to decide the winners. Product manufacturing, even with multiple players working with highly automated plants will take years to make a large dent in the current market.

As a best-case scenario, with optimal adoption rates, it is unlikely that more than 10% of the market can be converted over in less than a decade. However, the 2nd decade will see almost universal adoption.

Working from a Mindset of Scarcity

As a society, we have been conditioned to think that electric power is a scarce commodity. Twenty years ago we also thought information storage was a scarce commodity. Now we don’t even bat an eye when we store large photos or videos on our computers.

Over time, the price of power will begin to drop. As we’ve shown with progressively cheaper storage, usage will dramatically increase.

Rather than setting the thermostat to 62 degrees and freezing during the winter, what if we could set the temperature at a truly comfortable degree and not stress about going broke from it or overconsuming?

Being cost conscious of every kwh we use, we have gone through a period of sealing our houses to the point where they can no longer breath. A tightly sealed house creates a very polluted environment with the natural outgassing and chemical emissions of carpet, furniture, paint, and cooking products getting embedded in every wall. With this in mind, a draftier house can actually be a healthier house, and lower cost energy will radically realign our thinking in this area.

Power Laws of Networks

Information networks are a different breed of animal than power networks …or are they?

Over the years we have developed a number of “laws” to describe the value of having networks of people connected people. Here are three prominent laws used to describe the change in value as networks went from one-way broadcasts to two-way communication networks.

• Sarnoff’s Law – The value of a broadcast network is directly proportional to the number of viewers.

• Metcalfe’s Law – The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users connected to the system

(images – credit UbberNoggin)

• Reed’s Law - The value of large networks, particularly social networks, will scale exponentially with the size of the network.

When it comes to a networked power grid, we currently have a poor understanding of the value that can be derived from it. It is fairly clear that the value increases dramatically if users are both sending and receiving power. It’s also clear that if power is somehow coupled with information it becomes exponentially more valuable.

Final Thoughts

Reinventing the power grid is long overdue. Over the past decade the number inventions has escalated, and caliber of the technology has greatly improved. If the two technologies I’ve mentioned fail, there are thousands of others quickly lining up to take their place.

Over the next couple decades we will witness the dismantling of the national power grid, both in the U.S. and every other nation on earth. If the U.S. fails to act quickly, several other countries will take the lead and the competitive pressure of other nations cannot be silenced by reinforcing policy decisions or failure to act.

This will be a very difficult transition because most wealthy investors have at least some of their portfolio invested in energy-related securities. This will result in many losers along the way.

Current public policy-driven efforts to deal with climate change issues will disappear, as technology will provide a much better solution.

Transformation of national grids will lead to transformation of the global economy, but it won’t solve all the problems. In fact it will create a whole set of new problems, but hopefully a better grade of problems.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” - the book that changes everything

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A picture of me speaking at yesterday’s TEDxReset in Istanbul.

Yesterday I was honored to be one of the featured speakers at the TEDxReset Conference in Istanbul, Turkey where I predicted that over 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030. Since my 18-minute talk was about the rapidly shifting nature of colleges and higher education, I didn’t have time to explain how and why so many jobs would be going away. Because of all of the questions I received afterwards, I will do that here.

If you haven’t been to a TEDx event, it is hard to confer the life-changing nature of something like this. Ali Ustundag and his team pulled off a wonderful event.

The day was filled with an energizing mix of musicians, inspiration, and big thinkers. During the breaks, audience members were eager to hear more and peppered the speakers with countless questions. They were also extremely eager to hear more about the future.

When I brought up the idea of 2 billion jobs disappearing (roughly 50% of all the jobs on the planet) it wasn’t intended as a doom and gloom outlook. Rather, it was intended as a wakeup call, letting the world know how quickly things are about to change, and letting academia know that much of the battle ahead will be taking place at their doorstep.

Here is a brief overview of five industries – where the jobs will be going away and the jobs that will likely replace at least some of them – over the coming decades.

No one will miss the clutter and chaos of power lines.

1.) Power Industry

Until now, the utility companies existed as a safe career path where little more than storm-related outages and an occasional rate increase would cause industry officials to raise their eyebrows.

Yet the public has become increasingly vocal about their concerns over long-term health and environmental issues relating to the current structure and disseminating methods of of the power industry, causing a number of ingenious minds to look for a better way of doing things.

Recently I was introduced to two solutions that seem predestined to start the proverbial row of dominoes to start falling. There are likely many more waiting in the wings, but these two capitalize on existing variances found in nature and are unusually elegant in the way they solve the problem of generating clean power at a low cost.

Both companies have asked me to keep quiet about their technology until they are a bit farther along, but I will at least explain the overarching ramifications.

I should emphasize that both technologies are intended to work inside the current utility company structure, so the changes will happen within the industry itself.

To begin with, these technologies will shift utilities around the world from national grids to micro grids that can be scaled from a single home to entire cities. The dirty power era will finally be over and the power lines that dangle menacingly over our neighborhoods, will begin to come down. All of them.

While the industry will go through a long-term shrinking trend, the immediate shift will cause many new jobs to be created.

Jobs Going Away

• Power generation plants will begin to close down.
• Coal plants will begin to close down.
• Many railroad and transportation workers will no longer be needed.
• Even wind farms, natural gas, and bio-fuel generators will begin to close down.
• Ethanol plants will be phased out or repurposed.
• Utility company engineers, gone.
• Line repairmen, gone.

New Jobs Created

• Manufacturing power generation units the size of ac units will go into full production.
• Installation crews will begin to work around the clock.
• The entire national grid will need to be taken down (a 20 year project). Much of it will be recycled and the recycling process alone will employ many thousands of people.
• Micro-grid operations will open in every community requiring a new breed of engineers, managers, and regulators.
• Many more.

San Francisco–based design team Mike and Maaike’s concept car, the ATNMBL (the “autonomobile”).

2.) Automobile Transportation – Going Driverless

Over the next 10 years we will see the first wave of autonomous vehicles hit the roads, with some of the first inroads made by vehicles that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes.

The first wave of driverless vehicles will be luxury vehicles that allow you to kick back, listen to music, have a cup of coffee, stop wherever you need to along the way, stay productive in transit with connections to the Internet, make phone calls, and even watch a movie or two, for substantially less than the cost of today’s limos.

Driverless technology will initially require a driver, but it will quickly creep into everyday use much as airbags did. First as an expensive option for luxury cars, but eventually it will become a safety feature stipulated by the government.

The greatest benefits of this kind of automation won’t be realized until the driver’s hands are off the wheel. With over 2 million people involved in car accidents every year in the U.S., it won’t take long for legislators to be convinced that driverless cars are a substantially safer and more effective option.

The privilege of driving is about to be redefined.

Jobs Going Away

• Taxi and limo drivers, gone.
• Bus drivers, gone.
• Truck drivers, gone.
• Gas stations, parking lots, traffic cops, traffic courts, gone.
• Fewer doctors and nurses will be needed to treat injuries.
• Pizza (and other food) delivery drivers, gone.
• Mail delivery drivers, gone.
• FedEx and UPS delivery jobs, gone.
• As people shift from owning their own vehicles to a transportation-on-demand system, the total number of vehicles manufactured will also begin to decline.

New Jobs Created

• Delivery dispatchers
• Traffic monitoring systems, although automated, will require a management team.
• Automated traffic designers, architects, and engineers
• Driverless “ride experience” people.
• Driverless operating system engineers.
• Emergency crews for when things go wrong.

Apple is involved in another life changing innovation with iTunes U.

3.) Education

The OpenCourseware Movement took hold in 2001 when MIT started recording all their courses and making them available for free online. They currently have over 2080 courses available that have been downloaded 131 million times.

In 2004 the Khan Academy was started with a clear and concise way of teaching science and math. Today they offer over 2,400 courses that have been downloaded 116 million times.

Now, the 8,000 pound gorilla in the OpenCourseware space is Apple’s iTunes U. This platform offers over 500,000 courses from 1,000 universities that have been downloaded over 700 million times. Recently they also started moving into the K-12 space.

All of these courses are free for anyone to take. So how do colleges, that charge steep tuitions, compete with “free”?

As the OpenCourseware Movement has shown us, courses are becoming a commodity. Teachers only need to teach once, record it, and then move on to another topic or something else.

In the middle of all this we are transitioning from a teaching model to a learning model. Why do we need to wait for a teacher to take the stage in the front of the room when we can learn whatever is of interest to us at any moment?

Teaching requires experts. Learning only requires coaches.

With all of the assets in place, we are moving quickly into the new frontier of a teacherless education system.

Jobs Going Away

• Teachers.
• Trainers.
• Professors.

New Jobs Created

• Coaches.
• Course designers.
• Learning camps.

Prototype of a 40′ X 40′ 3D Printer capable of printing a small building

4.) 3D Printers

Unlike a machine shop that starts with a large piece of metal and carves away everything but the final piece, 3D printing is an object creation technology where the shape of the objects are formed through a process of building up layers of material until all of the details are in place.

Chuck Hull in front of stereolithography machine.

The first commercial 3D printer was invented by Charles Hull in 1984, based on a technique called stereolithography.

Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands of items and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did during the Henry Ford era.

3D Printed Dress

3D Printed Shoes

Jobs Going Away

• If we can print our own clothes and they fit perfectly, clothing manufacturers and clothing retailers will quickly go away.
• Similarly, if we can print our own shoes, shoe manufacturers and shoe retailers will cease to be relevant.
• If we can print construction material, the lumber, rock, drywall, shingle, concrete, and various other construction industries will go away.

New Jobs Created

• 3D printer design, engineering, and manufacturing.
• 3D printer repairmen will be in big demand.
• Product designers, stylists, and engineers for 3D printers.
• 3D printer ‘Ink’ sellers.

Boston Dynamics’ BigDog

5.) Bots

We are moving quickly past the robotic vacuum cleaner stage to far more complex machines.

The BigDog robot, shown above, is among the most impressive and potentially useful for troops in the immediate future–it’s being developed to act as an autonomous drone assistant that’ll carry gear for soldiers across rough battlefield terrain.

Nearly every physical task can conceivably be done by a robot at some point in the future.

Jobs Going Away

• Fishing bots will replace fishermen.
• Mining bots will replace miners.
• Ag bots will replace farmers.
• Inspection bots will replace human inspectors.
• Warrior drones will replace soldiers.
• Robots can pick up building material coming out of the 3D printer and begin building a house with it.

New Jobs Created

• Robot designers, engineers, repairmen.
• Robot dispatchers.
• Robot therapists.
• Robot trainers.
• Robot fashion designers.

Final Thoughts

In these five industries alone there will be hundreds of millions of jobs disappearing. But many other sectors will also be affected.

Certainly there’s a downside to all this. The more technology we rely on, the more breaking points we’ll have in our lives.

Driverless drones can deliver people. These people can deliver bombs or illicit drugs as easily as pizza.

Robots that can build building can also destroy buildings.

All of this technology could make us fat, dumb, and lazy, and the problems we thought we were solving become far more complicated.

We are not well-equipped culturally and emotionally to have this much technology entering into our lives. There will be backlashes, “destroy the robots” or “damn the driverless car” campaigns with proposed legislation attempting to limit its influence.

At the same time, most of the jobs getting displaced are the low-level, low-skilled labor positions. Our challenge will be to upgrade our workforce to match the labor demand of the coming era. Although it won’t be an easy road ahead it will be one filled with amazing technology and huge potentials as the industries shift.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” - the book that changes everything

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November 2009 was when Michael Migliozzi and Brian Flatow started a website called BuyaBeerCompany.com who’s lofty goal was to buy the ailing century old Pabst Blue Ribbon beer company. In less than two years, working to match the $300 million sale price, the pair attracted over 5 million investors pledging upwards of $280 million, with an average pledge of $40.

The SEC found out about the money raise and put a stop to it in Sept 2011. The problem? They hadn’t registered the offering with the SEC and they targeted unaccredited investors. These are two major no-nos in investment circles.

Because no money changed hands, only pledges, the two escaped charges, but the entire incident fueled the interest of some very prominent people who saw the potential for invigorating the cash-strapped startup and small business world where most new jobs get created. The concept of crowdfunding was born.

On November 3, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed H.R. 2930, a crowdfunding bill that will allow startups to offer and sell securities online. The Senate will likely vote on the bill in early 2012.

After eight decades of arguably the most restrictive rules for raising capital in the world, we are standing on the precipice of a new era for funding: crowdfunding. Here are 23 unusual ways in which the crowdfunding revolution could redefine the business to investor relationship.

First a Little Background

On the evening of Monday Jan 23, 2012 DaVinci Institute hosted a packed Night With A Futurist event as three experts took the stage to speak on the topic of crowdfunding. Brian Tsuchiya, Karl Dakin, and Steve Reaser all covered different aspects of the topic, but combined, painted an inspiring picture of how crowdfunding could unfold over the coming months.

Here are some of the highlights:

At the same time the Crowdfunding bill was being voted on in the House of Representatives, Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts introduced a similar bill in the Senate which was referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

There are four significant differences between the House and the Senate Bills so far and more changes may be coming:

• The Senate bill only permits the issuance of securities “through a crowdfunding intermediary”. Accordingly, startups would not be permitted to raise funds via social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn (as permitted under the House bill).
• Under the Senate bill, each investor is limited to investing up to $1,000 per year per company; the House bill permits an amount equal to the lesser of $10,000 or 10 percent of the investor’s annual income.
• Similar to the House bill, the Senate bill caps the total amount of capital that may be raised during any twelve-month period at $1 million; the House bill, however, raises the cap to $2 million if the issuer provides potential investors with audited financial statements.
• Finally, the Senate bill permits some form of registration by the State in which the company is organized and/or “any State in which purchasers of 50 percent or greater of the aggregate amount of the issue are…residents.” The House bill preempts State law and, accordingly, there is no State registration requirement.

Opposition groups are forming with the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), a trade group for state regulators lobbying very hard against the House Bill to prevent the preemption of State law and to reduce the maximum investment amount per investor.

The topic of fraud has also been touted by the opposition, and while fraud is a legitimate concern and there probably will be cases of it, that concern is disproportionately small compared to the benefits crowdfunding will ultimately create.

Remember, people had similar concerns about e-commerce when it first debuted, but those fears have since been allayed. Crowd-funding won’t replace venture capital, angel investing or bank lending, nor should it. They encompass a substantially different model and mindset for raising funds.

Popular websites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have already shown the power, possibilities and vitality of crowdfunding. In these models, people request funds online from strangers to back specific projects such as a new invention, filming for a movie, or a cupcake delivery truck. What makes these allowable and legal under the current regulations is that those who pledge money can only receive perks and products like T-shirts, DVDs, or posters in exchange, not actual equity shares.

Lending websites like Prosper.com are another facet in understanding the funding puzzle. They facilitate person-to-person loans. People ask to borrow money for anything from plastic surgery to starting a company and offer a fixed interest rate in return. But again, equity stakes are not allowed.

Reid Hoffman

Speaking recently at an event titled “Silicon Valley comes to Oxford,” Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder and serial investor, said many startups seeking investment money still don’t properly think through where they fit in to the markets they aim to penetrate. Incorrect sizing of the commercial opportunity and the company’s competitive circumstances are still widespread barriers that fund raising amplifies.

But in asking the right questions, any funding process arguably forces entrepreneurs to think further ahead and arrive at more water-tight justifications for the paths they are planning to take. If more people thought about raising money, more people would be thinking more seriously about the plans that underpin this activity – and that has to be a good thing.

Crowdfunding in Other Countries

Other nations – such as Great Britain, France, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands – already offer equity-based crowdfunding opportunities to investors and startups to help companies get started. Here are four quick examples:

1. One of the pioneers of crowdfunding in the music industry was the British rock group Marillion. In 1997 American fans underwrote their entire U.S. tour with $60,000 following a highly successful Internet campaign.
2. The British site A Swarm Of Angels raised the first $50,000 of a $2 million feature film that was distributed free online.
3. British documentary filmmaker Franny Armstrong raised more than $815,000 to underwrite the film – The Age of Stupid. People who gave 20 quid ($35) got a credit on the film’s website; those who gave £5,000 ($9,000) and up got a percentage of the profits.
4. Another Britain project, My Football Club, tapped into global soccer fervor to raise more than $2.6 million from 53,000 fans in less than four months to purchase a British soccer team.

The Future of Crowdfunding – 23 Unusual Examples

The popularity of the House bill with over 90% voting in favor, and the speed with which it cruised through the process has led many to believe crowdfunding is a done deal.

The blocked Pabst purchase brought to light the massive potential for crowdfunding and changing the rules of business funding options from here on out.

Granted, what the two beer-minded gentlemen were doing may have been a bit over the top, it undeniably proves a point. There is a strong interest for the average American to support ideas they believe in. While raising $300 million on the Internet may be excessive, allowing entrepreneurs to raise a limited about of seed or growth capital through crowdfunding can easily be seen as being very beneficial.

Regardless of the details that are put into the final legislation, entrepreneurs will find a way to work with it. Assuming it passes, crowdfunding will either make a huge difference or relatively little, with the devil-in-the-details being the deciding variable.

While there will be an initial rush to “throw things at the wall to see what sticks,” only those who are able to cultivate a loyalist investor following will find the gold at the end of the rainbow.

Investor pitches will likely be much more grassroots and emotional, pulling on the heartstrings of people through cause marketing campaigns, save the city pitches, or “we’re all in this together” movements.

The most effective campaigns will spend time developing a target market of likely investors and custom tailor their strategy around reaching that community.

Virtually every trick in the marketing handbook can quickly come into play with these new parameters for business to consumer investor pitches.

Redefining the Company-Investor Relationship

More than anything else, crowdfunding will re-invent the company-investor relationship. Gone are the days of suits meeting suits to hammer out contracts in the boardroom on the 37th floor.

Companies will no longer be judged solely on their office furnishings, polished appearance, or the address of the company. Instead, we are moving into an era of common people doing business with common people.

Those who are most successful at funding their business will have a unique way of rising above the noise, standing out in the crowded din of “pick me, pick me” language surging through the blogosphere.

For this reason I’ve decided to feature 23 unusual concepts that entrepreneurs might utilize to stand out. Not all of these may fit in the legal category once the final legislation is approved and most will involve a second stage of relationship-building, but marketing the products simultaneously with the investment opportunities will likely create a loyal customer base in the process.

1.) Stage a Positive Protest – Stage a protest in front of the business seeking funding with fake protesters holding signs that read “This company is brilliant” or “These people are too nice.” With a little creativity and the right audience, this strategy could be an overnight sensation.

2.) Guest Blogging – This is for the bloggers and freelance writers out there. Thousands of blogs are starving for good content and getting your article posted will be relatively easy. This will be most effective on high traffic blogs that are closely aligned with the target audience of prospective investors.

3.) Product Demonstrations – For some products or services a demonstration done on a street corner or in a building entrance may be an effective way to get people’s attention. Offering free food, drinks or snacks can be leveraged to attract a crowd of people who can then be introduced to the investment opportunity.

4.) Online Investor Gambling – This one may be pushing the limits, but is “gambling your way to an investment” still gambling? If it were allowable, a business could create an online gambling site to entertain people as they play for the opportunity to invest in your company combined with some other form of return.

5.) Competitions – Offer a series of prizes to people who can figure out new uses for your product or services. The investment offers will follow once you’ve collected all the contact information from the top competitors and participants.

6.) Movie Theater Ads – If the business being funded is a movie production company or music recording studio, movie theater ads could be an effective way to reach a very targeted investor group. Combined with an effective phone app, newly converted investors could invest from their theater seat before the feature even begins.

7.) Borrow a Wall - Get a projector and find someone who will allow you to use the side of their building at night. The wall could host projections of your company logo and website information as well as promo videos of how your product works and other teasers.

8.) Invest $10,000 and Date a Supermodel – Sex still sells, and while posting photos of beautiful women on a website may seem sleazy or lazy to some, for the right company, this could be an effective strategy.

9.) High End Hair Salons and Barber Shops – Hair stylists love to talk. With a little motivation in the form of finders fees or commissions, these people could become a good investment funnel.

10.) Grouponing Your Investment – Deal of the day sites like Groupon and Social Living reach huge audiences. With their current business model, these sites take half of the revenue that comes in through the offer. However, thinking more creatively, an offer could be created that would have prospects “buy” a dinner, tour, or show that was combined with and includes a short no cost investor pitch.

11.) Free Chauffeur – Offer free limo rides to people at airports or hotels and pitch them on the investment while they are being driven to their destination. This approach could reach several dozen good prospects a day in a “captive audience” setting.

12.) Legacy Building – Buy a brick with your name on it or Have your name engraved on the wall are common donor strategies for nonprofits. They could also work as investment incentives in the crowdfunding model.

13.) Framed-Art Stock Certificates – Having artistically crafted stock certificates framed and prominently posted on a wall gives investors bragging rights and also generates conversations within their circle of friends.

14.) Affiliate Marketing Investments – Paying a finders fee has been a long standing tradition within the investment community. Working through affiliate networks should be considered an extension of this in the online world and a natural part of its evolution.

15.) Live Animal Marketing – Walking through town with a cow, water buffalo or cloned triceratops on a leash can be a highly effective attention-getter.

16.) Building Lists – Building lists is all about building a community of online followers. Using fishbowls to have people drop in a business card for a free prize or signing up for a free newsletter are just couple of the many effective ways to build lists, but innovative crowdfunders will create many more and ultimately find techniques of quickly generating large lists.

17.) Riding the Ski Lift – Instead of actually going to a ski resort to ski, people sitting next to you in a ski lift become a captive audience until you reach the top.

18.) Free Seminar – A well-orchestrated free seminar can attract large numbers of people who will listen to an inventive investor pitch on a hot topic.

19.) Limited Edition Artwork – One investment model could be structured around 100 people making a $10,000 investment. If each were offered a limited edition piece of artwork, signed by the artist, some of the money would go to the artist with the rest used to fund the business.

20.) Partner Promotion – Invest $10 and get a $10 gift certificate to Nordstroms, Macys, Dillards, or some other high-end department store. You get the investment, they get the customers.

21.) Personalized App Promotion – Create a smartphone app that is custom designed around the business seeking funds and the person buying it. Since people will pay more for something that is “all about them,” the app could be priced at $10 or more.

22.) Host a Blood Drive – A blood drive for a cause creates a good will atmosphere for the event sponsor.

23.) Underground Music – If there is a genre of music that your target market listens to, host a concert or benefit with live music to set the stage for brief investor pitches between sets.

Final Thoughts

Yes, you may find some of these ideas too far out to consider reasonable investment tools for crowdfunding, but most will not.

Crowdfunding will usher in a new era of thinking, with the advantage going to those who are the most creative, innovative and passionate.

It certainly won’t solve all the problems with funding early stage companies, and it will likely create many more at least initially. But the investment world is overdue for something that will shake it up, and this is exactly that.

Look for many new resistance groups to form as this gains momentum. Even after the legislation is passed, the battle will be far from over.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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If you were traveling between Boston and Washington, DC, and had the choice of either flying or riding in a driverless car, which would you choose?

Under good conditions this is an 8.5-hour drive vs. 4-5 hours flying – driving to the airport, wading through security, boarding the flight, landing, and commuting to your destination when you arrive.

Keep in mind that the first wave of driverless vehicles will be luxury vehicles that allow you to kick back, listen to music, have a cup of coffee, stop wherever you need to along the way, stay productive with connections to the Internet, make phone calls, and even watch a movie or two, for roughly the same price.

If you think this vision is far off, think again. Over the next 10 years we will see the first wave of autonomous vehicles hit the roads, with some of the first inroads made with vehicles that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes.

Here are a few thoughts on how this industry will develop.

Driverless concept vehicle

The Complexities of Going Driverless

Over the past few nights we hosted a couple mastermind groups at the DaVinci Institute to discus how the rollout of driverless cars will begin to disrupt life, as we know it, both in the U.S. and around the world. I truly appreciate everyone’s input, as this is a complicated subject with multiple driving forces, each with a number of “human” variables that will either speed or slow the introduction of this technology.

But we all agreed, nothing will stop it

While the current technology is good enough to navigate roadways and recognize obstacles, it will need some refinement before it’s human-safe, and to push economic viability, the component costs will need to come down.

Driverless technology will initially require a driver, and it will creep into everyday use much as airbags did. First as an expensive option for luxury cars, but eventually it will become a safety feature required by the government.

The greatest benefits of this kind of automation won’t be realized until the driver’s hands are off the wheel. With over 2 million people are involved in car accidents every year in the U.S., it won’t take long for legislators to be convinced that driverless cars are a safer option.

The privilege of driving is about to be redefined.

Many aspects of going driverless are overwhelmingly positive, such as saving lives and giving additional years of mobility to an aging senior population. However, it will also be a very disruptive technology.

At the same time, it will be destroying countless jobs – truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, limo drivers, traffic cops, parking lot attendants, ambulance drivers, first responders, doctors, and nurses will all see their careers impacted.

But before we get into the “good vs. evil” technology debate, let’s look at why this will happen so quickly.

Inside the driverless Personal Rapid Transport vehicle at Heathrow Airport

The Roots of the Driverless Movement

The idea of self-driving cars is almost as old as the car itself. GM had visions of going driverless in its exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

• In 1959, Walt Disney unveiled his driverless monorail at Disneyland, originally envisioned as a practical form of public transport for the future. However, the monorail came about during a time when America’s love affair with the automobile was growing, and even though he offered to pay for a monorail to ease the growing traffic congestion in Los Angeles, his technology never made it past the walls of the Disney’s theme parks.
• In 2004 and 2005 DARPA sponsored the “Grand Challenge,” a competition to produce a driverless vehicle that could pilot itself 132 miles through the Nevada desert with no human intervention. The Stanford team won that competition in 2005 with their modified Volkswagen Touareg named “Stanley.”
• Building on their success, in 2007 DARPA sponsored the next iteration, the “Urban Challenge,” which was won by the Carnegie Mellon team.
• In 2008, John Deere introduced a steering assist option for their tractors, capable of turning, shifting gears and seeing through darkness and dust. The tractors were able to follow a row with sub-inch precision in the moonlight, raising and lowering the equipment to match the terrain, at the same time, saving thousands of hours and countless dollars in the process.
• In 2008, Google launched their driverless car team. The group was headed up by Sebastian Thrun, the entrepreneurial Stanford professor who won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and also co-creator of the Google’s Street View project. So far, their self-driving car fleet has already racked up over 200,000 driverless miles on highways. Google reports these cars have required intervention by a human co-pilot only about once every 1,000 miles and the goal is to reduce this rate to once in 1,000,000 miles.
• In 2009, Heathrow Airport introduced their Personal Rapid Transport system consisting of 21 electric shuttles on a two-and-a-half mile pathway
• In 2010 VisLab ran VIAC (VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge), a 13,000 km test run of autonomous vehicles. In this competition, 4 driverless electric vans successfully drove from Italy to China, arriving at the Shanghai Expo on October 28, 2010. This was the first intercontinental trip ever completed by an autonomous vehicle.
• In 2010, Volkswagen sent a driverless Audi TTS to the top of Pike’s Peak at close to race speeds.
• In 2011 the U.S. Military spent $4.8 billion on flying drones. This has been a rapidly growing budget item in the military’s arsenal. With this kind of focused spending, drone technology has improved dramatically over the past decade, but as a technology, the future for drones will go far beyond military uses.
• In 2011, with Google lobbying in the background, the Nevada Legislature passed a law to authorize the use of autonomous vehicles, making it the first state where driverless vehicles can be legally operated on public roads.

These represent just a few of the advances, to date, that are driving this technology forward.

Mercedes concept vehicle

Stepping into Our Driverless Future

Recent advances in computing power and networking technologies are improving the viability of both the technology and economics on a daily basis. Today’s technology uses GPS to recognize where the cars are on the road. Cameras, lasers, and radar help them keep their distance from other cars and recognize objects like pedestrians. Superfast processors weave all the inputs together, allowing cars to react quickly.

Over time, data spidering systems, like those used by search engines, will be used to log details of every road in the country in real time, report potholes, cracks, or other dangerous conditions immediately when they occur, and build an information highway to serve as the backbone for our real highways.

Here are a few of the companies pushing this technology forward:

• Mercedes is equipping its 2013 model S-Class cars with a system that can drive autonomously through city traffic at speeds up to 25 m.p.h.
• Buyers of European luxury cars are already choosing from a menu of advanced options. For example, for $1,350, people who purchase BMW’s 535i xDrive sedan in the United States can opt for a “driver assistance package” that includes radar to detect vehicles in the car’s blind spot. For another $2,600, BMW will install “night vision with pedestrian detection,” which uses a forward-facing infrared camera to spot people in the road.
• Many car companies including General Motors, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, and Volvo have begun early testing of driverless car systems.
• General Motors has stated that they will have a driverless model ready for final testing by 2015, going on sale officially in 2018.

Several automakers already sell cars with adaptive cruise controls that automatically applies the brakes if traffic slows. BMW plans to extend that idea in its upcoming i3 series of electric cars, whose traffic-jam feature will let the car accelerate, decelerate, and steer by itself at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour—as long as the driver leaves a hand on the wheel.

According to New York’s ABI Research, the market for “advanced driver assistance” technologies was $10 billion in 2011, but will grow to a staggering $130 billion by 2016.

Driverless car network

Cars that Talk to Each Other

A major challenge for driverless roadways is for vehicles to safely and reliably communicate with one another. That’s where the Google operating system comes into play.

Hidden behind the hype of this technology is Google’s plan to come up with an Android-like operating system for all future driverless cars.

Regardless of whether its Google or someone else, creating communication standards and protocols will be the key to making this all work.

That requires getting all the automakers and regulatory agencies to agree on a standard. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has begun studying various technologies for vehicle-to-vehicle communication and plans to make a decision by 2013. They project intervehicle communications alone could reduce up to 80 percent of vehicle crashes involving non-impaired drivers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

LIT Motor’s new one-person commuter vehicle

Future Power Systems

People tend not to care about the power systems driving vehicles that they don’t own. As an example, few people pay attention to fuel efficiency of the airplane they’re flying in. They only care that they arrive on time.

This, combined with cost, range, and efficiency factors will mean that the first wave of driverless vehicles will likely be powered with old-fashioned gas engines.

However, electric vehicles using drive-by-wire technology will have many advantages over time. Rapid charging stations, silent engines, and the simple act of a vehicle recharging itself as opposed to the dangers of one that has to “refuel” itself will win over vehicle buyers in the future.

Many other power systems will be experimented with including everything from wireless power, to fuel cells, to natural gas, to biofuels. But in the end, fuel efficiency will prevail.

Google’s driverless car

The Promise of Going Driverless

According to the Center for Disease Control, motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among the 5-34 age group in the U.S. More than 2.3 million adult drivers and passengers were treated in emergency departments as the result of being injured in motor vehicle crashes last year.

The lifetime costs of crash-related deaths and injuries among drivers and passengers are over $70 billion annually.

Consider the following problems that would go away:

• There were more than 5.5 million car accidents last year in the United States. Nearly 31,000 were fatal, and more than 2 million people were injured.
• Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children and teenagers.
• At any given moment, 812,000 vehicles are being driven by someone using a handheld cell phone in the U.S.
• An average of four children ages 14 and under are killed every day in auto accidents. Nearly 500 are injured daily.
• While statistics continue to improve, 32 percent of fatal accidents involved alcohol-impaired drivers.

In addition to the known health and accident related issues, there is a tremendous amount of stress involved in driving.

People are not productive when they are driving and the frenetic atmosphere of high traffic situations leaves most commuters drained at the end of a day.

All of these problems will eventually go away.

Driverless taxi

The Downside of this Technology

At the same time, driverless cars will dramatically affect employment around the world.

• Over time over 232,000 taxi and limo drivers in the U.S. will lose their jobs.
• Over 647,000 bus drivers will be out of work.
• Over 125,000 truck drivers will be looking for new careers.
• Other jobs affected will include jobs at gas stations, parking lots, car washes, traffic cops, traffic courts, doctors, nurses, pizza delivery, mail delivery, FedEx and UPS jobs, as well as vehicle manufacturing positions.

In the future, the number of vehicles sold will begin to decline.

Inside a future car

Final Thoughts

The reason driverless cars will prove to be so disruptive for the automobile industry is that it will enable on-demand transportation services to replace the need for individual car ownership. Rather than having to conform to the route and timing of today’s mass transit systems, people will simply be able to request a vehicle through their smartphones whenever they need it, and a driverless vehicle will show up, on-demand, and take them to wherever they desire to go.

An on-demand transportation system will not significantly reduce the overall number of vehicles on the road at peak times, but will be better at matching the size of the vehicle with the number of people traveling. Since the vehicles will be in continuous operation, there will be significantly less need for parking spaces.

To be sure, this is a very complicated topic. Many other countries will be competing with the U.S. to become global leaders in this multi-pronged emerging industry.

With Google pushing the lobbying effort in Las Vegas, look for them to become the initial showcase for the world.

The military will likely find unusual uses in for these vehicles that have few civilian applications.

The coming years will see the public first embracing the technology and at the same time disdaining the tumultuous effects its having.

In the end, we will be driving towards a far safer and more resilient society, but we’ll be traveling down some very bumpy roads along the way.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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After spending the past three days scouring the showroom floors at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, watching people become overwhelmed by what they saw, I tended to be more underwhelmed by what I didn’t see.

Smartphones, tablets, 3D televisions, and supporting peripherals were everywhere. But as the industry was getting sucked towards the gravitational allure of these technologies, many others, with harder problems to solve, haven’t been getting enough attention.

It’s very easy for the digital world to spot an opportunity, write a few lines of code, and have a new product ready to launch. But going beyond the current capabilities of existing hardware, blazing entirely new trails of thinking, is where the real opportunities lie.

For this reason I thought it would be interesting to talk about “what’s missing.” For those of you are up to the challenge, here are 25 technologies I’d love to see at future CES events.

AIQ Smart Clothing with soft padding that stiffens upon impact,
monitors heart rate and blood pressure

Smart Clothing

The CES show has a few examples of smart clothing companies like AIQ, but for most exhibitors their so-called smart clothing has little more than pockets for smartphones or space for video nametags.

Here are a few ideas for future smart clothing that would be total game changers:

1.) Mood-Driven Chameleon Wear – Yes, most people will go out of their way to avoid having their clothing overtly display their emotional state. However, using technology to compensate, and make you look good, even though you’re fatigued, angry, or depressed would be a welcome addition to most clothing lines.

2.) Organ-View Clothing – As part of our on-going effort to monitor our own biological functions, it may be possible to design a fabric that serves as an optical lens into our inner selves. Think of this as a wearable CAT scan system with variable-adjust focal point settings, zoom powers down to a near-nano scale, and flexible data-capture sensors built-in. The fashion options here will be incredible.

3.) Self-Moving Fabrics – It will no longer be good enough for smart fabrics to merely collect and transmit information, the next generation will have the ability to take action. Dirty clothes will pick up after themselves, snuggly fitting shirts and pants will readjust themselves for maximum comfort, and torn clothing will send themselves out for repair. Beds will make themselves, sheets will change themselves according to a set rotation, and pillows will have the ability to sense pressure points and reform themselves accordingly.

4.) Nano-Netting – Using super strong fibers so small that they are invisible to the human eye, nano-netting will provide a fibrous support structure that is visually non-intrusive but capable of keeping out insects, birds, and other unwanted animals. The density of the netting can be adjusted to match specific requirements. Objects can be suspended in air with seemingly invisible support. Invisible fences, invisible screens, along with invisible cars and windmills will all be possible.

Ford had its Evos concept car on display at CES 2012 turning heads
with style and design, but little true innovation

Transportation

At CES, Ford Motor Company unveiled its first-ever zero emissions, electric passenger vehicle, following in the footsteps of Tesla and Nissan. Plus they jumped on the cloud computing bandwagon with the new Evos Concept Car.

But behind the flashy surfaces, chrome wheels, and tech trimming lies some far bigger opportunities.

5.) Driverless Cars – The next revolution in transportation will be self-driving cars, and the adoption of this technology will change virtually everything in the field of transportation and urban planning. The idea of jumping into a vehicle and having it shuttle you to your destination without anyone “driving” it may sound like pure fantasy to some, but it’s far closer than most of us think. Google’s self-driving car project has already racked up over 200,000 driverless miles on highways.

6.) Ground-Based Delivery Drones – Before we have driverless passenger cars sold in any sizable quantities, we will see ground-based delivery drones hauling point-to-point cargo. Better to practice without passengers onboard to perfect the technology. Railroads and trucking companies should be worried as this will displace much of their industry.

Parrot officially unveiled the follow-up to its popular quadrocopter at CES – AR Drone 2.0

Flying Drones

I happen to be a big fan of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and already own an AR Drone.

Unveiled at CES, the new Drone 2.0 features a 720p front-facing camera so that you can capture your flights in HD. There’s also a whole raft of new sensors, including an on-board magnetometer so that it can always tell where the pilot is in relation to its flight path, and a new air pressure sensor that allows it to be more stable when hovering.

That said, these drones have very short battery life (10 min max), and so far have little application outside of the hobbyist community.

The world of flying drones will become infinitely more useful when some of the following begin to appear:

7.) Flying-Hovering Monitor Drones – Whenever an accident or disaster happens, the initial first-step should be to “get eyes on the scene.” Dispatching a flying drone with video cameras that transmits a live feed back to a central command center will give first responders critical information to formulate an action plan before they arrive.

8.) Video Projector Drones – Once a video projector is added to a flying drone, you suddenly have a marketer’s dream tool with the ability to project images on the sides of buildings, on sidewalks, or even on the side of a moving vehicle.

9.) Lighting Drones – We’ve been trapped into thinking that lighting can only be managed from stationary positions, but that could soon change. Concerts and stage shows with flying spotlights or pyro-burst effects, TV sets, political speeches, and opening night galas can all be enhanced when our lights start flying.

10.) Audio Drones – Drones outfitted with speakers are already being experimented with. Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) are being used as loud hailers to emit warning signals. Audio drones, however, have far more potential in the marketing and entertainment fields. Floating and flying sounds create a far different sensation than stationary speakers. Floating messages over nearby crowds may be the solution to draw attention to a mobile business, a time sensitive special such as hot bread just pulled from the over, or situational conditions such as announcing the sale of umbrellas during the start of a rainstorm.

11.) Delivery Drones - Can you imagine a flying drone with UPS or FedEx on its side? Thinking beyond traditional delivery systems, flying drones could be used to deliver food, packages, water, change out the batteries in your home, remove trash and sewage, and even vacuum the leaves from your front lawn.

Miscellaneous Technologies

As with many new technologies, not all of them fit into easily definable categories. Here are a few more thoughts on what was missing at CES:

12.) Password Eliminator Technology – Even with all our sophisticated security technology being built-in to computer platforms, our best defense against hackers and identity theft remains the lowly password and our ability to remember it… or remember 20 of them.

13.) Smart Dust - In its simplest form, smart dust consists of a sensor combined with a wireless transmitter and some kind of power source. Many are envisioning the power to come from wireless RF signals. Future designs for smart dust will have them detecting everything from moisture content, to soil temperature, to chemical composition.

14.) Smart Contacts - The idea of “smart” contact lenses, the kind that can superimpose information on the wearer’s field of view has been around for a while. But contact lenses are also being developed that use embedded sensors and electronics to monitor disease and dispense drugs. Such devices may eventually be able to measure the level of cholesterol or alcohol in your blood and flash up an appropriate warning. The first iteration of smart contact lenses are already on the market, but were not seen at CES.

15.) Automatic Pothole Detector/Reporter – The connected city of the future will see cars automatically reporting and mapping out potholes as soon as they happen. No need to wait until serious damage occurs to your vehicle.

16.) Body Scanner Complete with Instant Clothing Fabricator – Scanners that can create a virtual framework for custom tailored clothing is already in use. But so far no one has developed the equipment to cut and stitch new shirts, jeans, and dresses on the spot.

17.) 3D Food Printers - As we shop for apples in the grocery store, we find ourselves looking for the “perfect apple.” Only a small percentage of apples grown on the farm are worthy of making it into the major leagues of food – the fresh produce section of our grocery stores.

But what if we could take all of those bruised and damaged apples and turn them all into “perfect apples” – perfect size, perfect color, perfect crunch when we bite into them, and the perfect sweet juicy flavor and aroma that makes our mouth water every time we think about them.

This is the promise of food printer technology as we move from simply printing ink on paper, to 3D printing of parts and objects, to next generation food printers.

These aren’t the artificial food devices that science fiction movies have been promising. Instead, they are devices with the very real potential for turning real apples into perfect apples. More details here.

18.) Wireless Power – The transmission of electrical energy without unsightly power lines has long been the dream of Tesla fans and science fiction writers. However some recent developments at MIT are putting this within reach. Powering electric cars, boats, and farm equipment may not be that far off.

19.) Plant Monitors - Urban agriculture is catching on like wildfire, yet the tech world has glossed over most of the opportunities here. Future plant monitors will give us the ability to “communicate” with our plants and produce far more sophisticated forms of food.

20.) Auquaponics Tech – For those of you not familiar with the term, aquaponics is a sustainable food production system that combines traditional aquaculture (raising aquatic animals such as fish, crayfish, or prawns in tanks) with hydroponics (cultivating plants in water) in a symbiotic environment.

Panasonic at CES

21.) 3D Television Without the Glasses – One thing CES does not have a shortage of is exhibits with televisions in them. And 3D television was there in a big way. But if you’re like me and long for the day when holographic scenes jump from the page and appears real and touchable without the glasses, well, you’ll just have to wait longer.

Shown here is Life Science’s Benchtop Genome Center

21.) Gene Therapy - Gene therapy is the use of DNA as a pharmaceutical agent to treat disease, with the most common form involving DNA that has been encoded with a functional fix to replace a mutated one. Shown above is the Ion Proton™ Sequencer, the first benchtop sequencer to offer fast (under 8 hours), affordable (under $1,000) human genome and human exome sequencing.

On the first day of CES, the X-Prize Foundation announced the Qualcomm Tricorder challenge to build a tool capable of capturing “key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 different diseases. The $10 million prize will go to the first person that can create a Star Trek-like medical “tricorder”. Sequencing is the first step. Once we have this information, can the StarTrek tricorder be far off?

22.) Disposable Batteries for Smartphones – At CES there was no shortage of battery companies. Virtually any object that needs power has a battery vendor exhibiting several different options. But as of yet, there are no cheap disposable batteries for Smartphones. Yes, it is indeed a bad idea to fill landfills with more batteries, but when the only option is either a $50 rechargeable battery or nothing at all, there is a huge need not currently being filled.

23.) Accomplishment-Based Educational Apps - Much of what happens in today’s colleges and universities is based on “symbols of achievement,” not actual accomplishments. Students that enter a classroom will typically find themselves immersed in an academic competition, a competition that pits students against each other to produce results that best match the teacher’s expectations. Only rarely will the work product of a student in a classroom rise to any notable level of significance. Completing a class is nothing more than a symbol of achievement.

A new generation of apps will soon be developed that allow students to autonomously work their way through an actual accomplishment, and receive credit upon completion. More details here.

24.) Swarm-Bots - Swarm robotics involves the design and operation of multiple robots, or swarms, inspired by the behavior observed in social insects, called swarm intelligence. So far no swarmbots have made their way to CES.

25.) Electron-Based Information Storage – Yes, Moore’s Law is still in effect, but we are still a long ways from using electrons as the basis for our storage medium. This one will undoubtedly be an exhibitor’s nightmare because nano-sized technology is tough to display.

Final Thoughts

To be sure, there were many impressive technologies on display at CES and one that really caught my eye was a 3D modeling system developed by a Hungarian company – Leonar3Do.

Check out the following video for a glimpse of how this intuitive system is about revolutionize the future of product development.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Leonar3Do is the easiest way I’ve seen to create and visualize 3D objects in space while sitting at your desktop. Leonar3Do is an integrated software and hardware platform that offers a unique, truly immersive VR experience in the sense that you are able to see and interact with your virtual objects as you create them.

As I bid farewell to CES in 2012, I will ask organizers of the 2012 event to keep up the good work, but also the hope that they will continue to push the envelope and the request that product developers continue to work on disruptive technologies.

We are still in the awkward in-between stages of technology. I’ll feel much more comfortable when we get to the other side.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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On December 29th, Verizon announced it would begin charging a $2 “convenience fee” for any customers paying monthly bills with a credit or debit card via the Internet or telephone.

Within 24 hours, online petitions began to circulate and commenters voiced their condemnation of Verizon’s corporate greed. Instantly, their messages started showing up on websites and message boards across the Internet, and even the FCC responded quickly, announcing plans to investigate the charge. A day after the so-called convenience fee was announced, Verizon caved to public and governmental pressure and scrapped the charge.

This type of public outcry is beginning to happen with ever-greater frequency.

• Netflix subscribers derailed the company’s July 2011 plans to raise prices and spin off its DVD-rental business by overwhelming it with more than 27,000 comments. CEO Reed Hastings instantly moved from media darling to media demon over night.
• In October 2011, Bank of America announced a new $5/month charge to use debit cards. In less than a month, more than 300,000 people signed an online petition to stop the planned fee, and over 21,000 customers pledged to close their Bank of America checking accounts. One news anchor even cut up her card on the air. By the end of Oct, the $5 fee was dropped.

These are just a couple recent examples of how consumers are flexing their newfound muscles. But rest assured, the war against consumer injustice is just beginning. We are witnessing the start of a new era – micro-movements. Here’s what may be happening in the months ahead.

When David Meets Goliath

In 1983, when Apple was on the verge of launching the Macintosh, Steve Jobs sought out film producer Ridley Scott, who was just coming off the critically acclaimed production of Blade Runner, to produce a SuperBowl commercial that would play up the David and Goliath battle being waged between IBM and Apple.

Using an unprecedented $900,000 budget to produce the commercial, Job’s was determined to make a big slash. Even though the Apple Board tried to kill the ad for the Superbowl, through some behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the commercial still ran, and the impact was huge.

The commercial opened with an ominous dark feel of some future time, showing a line of bald genderless people marching in unison through a long tunnel with every movement being monitored by electronic screens. This scene sets the stage for the contrasting image a well-muscled female runner carrying a large hammer while wearing a colorful athletic outfit.

As she is chased by four police-like officers representing the “thought police,” she races towards a large screen with an image of Big Brother giving a speech:

“Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology — where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”

As the runner closes in on the screen, she hurls the hammer towards it, at the exact same moment that Big Brother announces, “we shall prevail!” In a flurry of light and smoke, the screen is destroyed, shocking the people watching it.

The commercial concludes with an ominous narrative rising from the hazy, whitish-blue aftermath of the cataclysmic event:

“On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”

The commercial ends by fading to black and as the Apple logo appears.

After receiving numerous other awards, in 2007 the ad was chosen as the “Best Super Bowl Spot” in the game’s 40-year history.

Steve Jobs was a master at leveraging his role as the underdog, always wanting to champion the “little guys” in their battles against the forces of big business.

Big Brother Vs. Big Citizenry

Ever since George Orwell published his 1949 head-turning classic “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” people have had a lingering fear of government usurping too much power, and especially in the electronic age, of them monitoring our every movement.

The “1984” paranoia surrounding Big Brother is still alive today, but with one big difference. The little guys now have the tools to fight back.

People power has gone mainstream:

• In May 2011, a Chicago jewelry artist accused Urban Outfitters on her blog of copying her designs, her post went viral and the company pulled the items within a day.
• When Facebook pushes their transparency plans too far, users scream and Facebook changes their approach.
• Coca-Cola released a special 2011 white and silver holiday design for its cans to raise awareness about the plight of polar bears. But the cans closely resembled the silver ones used for Diet Coke and many diehard Coke drinkers felt misled. As a result, they took to the Internet to complain and the company pulled the can design.
• On Dec 19th a video showed up on YouTube of a FedEx courier tossing a computer monitor over a backyard fence. In days, the video had millions of views, and began showing up on everything from Good Morning America, to CNN News, to the Late Show with David Letterman. FedEx responded quickly with a YouTube video of its own and a blog post saying that the courier’s behavior was “absolutely, positively unacceptable.”

Micro-Movements and the Tools of the People

In the past, most governments could use heavy-handed top-down tactics to foil any protest or uprising. But the toolsets used by the people are changing.

The most powerful tools in today’s arsenals are transparency and instant communication. Spotting injustice and rubbing the public’s nose in it can cause micro-movements to surface and explode in less than a day.

This new trend is all about micro-movements and their ability to self-organize in minutes, not days, and cause the world to change. Micro-movements are an instant checks and balance where other systems fail.

The watchers are watching, so the listeners have to be listening.

Anyone who doesn’t respond quickly runs the risk of being burned at the stake of public ridicule.

When it comes to other tools these architects of micro-movement can leverage, in addition to generating instant awareness, they can influence people’s political vote, their monetary vote (where they spend their money), and their attention vote (where they spend their time). Going even further, leveraging perhaps the most disruptive tool of all, they can cause people to register a defiance vote, ignore the rules, and simply walk away. This can have severe consequences, but if played right, can quickly garner political backing.

As an example, when housing prices began to plummet and the outstanding mortgages were more than the underlying value of the houses, homeowners simply walked away. Even though it wasn’t the result of any well-planned movement, the next one might be.

Given the right circumstances, someone may architect a similar mass exit for the following situations:

• As the price of college education begins to drop, the outstanding student loans will begin to seem unreasonable. At this point it wouldn’t take a lot of effort to convince large numbers of people to stop paying their student loans.
• As frustration over big banks increase, many could be influenced to move to credit unions or “no bank” alternatives.
• As credit card companies continue to press for high transaction fees, companies and consumers could be directed toward Dwolla and other low-fee options.
• As health insurance companies try to raise prices, virtually every increase could become a new micro-movement with people lining up to change it.

Big Citizenry Going Global

The past 18 months have seen extraordinary outpourings of discontent. BBC writer Paul Mason captured the reasons behind this movement well in his column “Twenty Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere”

Listen closely as the voice of the people begins to gain momentum. Look for both the technology that supports it to improve, startups to form around the micro-movement industry and spring to life, and political pressure to be felt like never before.

The Arab Spring has set most governments of the world on notice.

On January 1st, probably more as a preemptive strike, the Chinese government ordered the cancellation of what it considered “low brow” programming, dropping many of its most popular TV programs from 126 a week to just 38, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.

Each of China’s 34 satellite television channels is now limited to an hour and a half of light entertainment programming between 7.30pm and 10pm. In addition, the regulations now require at least two half-hour news bulletins a night.

Protests are now a daily occurrence in China and officials are responding to each incident differently. But this kind of “people power” will not go away anytime soon, and China will have entirely new kinds of outbreaks to deal with this year.

Economic turmoil is causing uprising throughout Europe, but this time around they will be far more exacting in how the protests are staged.

Even Russia’s Vladimir Putin is now receiving unprecedented push-back from his heavy-handed governing authority. No governments will be exempt.

The age of protest has only begun. With new tools coming online daily, and the overarching reach of the awareness extending even further, those who are caught in the crossfire will no longer have the luxury of planning a response. They will need to react quickly, and correctly. If not, they will end up little more than footnoted casualties of the power of the people and the great consumer backlash.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

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The sixth law of the future states, “The “unknowability” of the future is what gives us our drive and motivation.”

The fact that the future is unknowable is a good thing. Our involvement in the game of life is based on our notion that we as individuals can make a difference. If we somehow remove the mystery of what results our actions will have, we also dismantle our individual drives and motivations for moving forward.

There is a whole lot that we don’t know about the year ahead. Yes, it will be messy. Important people will die. We will not cure cancer, just yet. And we won’t find a solution for war. But there is great value in the struggle. Our greatest achievements will come from these struggles.

We can learn much about where we’ve come from, and for this reason I’d like to give you a quick overview of the top articles in 2011 on FuturistSpeaker.com, based on popularity. They touch on jobs, education, crime, food supplies, and most importantly, the future. Join me as we take a look at the future through the eyes of the past.

10.) Four Fundamental Myths Derailing Academic Change

When we think about Benjamin Franklin, we instantly think of the author, scientist, inventor, diplomat who signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence and has his face on the one-hundred dollar bill. Ben Franklin was a truly remarkable person, yet he had less than two years of formal education.

I recently came across a study that examined the lives of 755 famous people who either dropped out of grade school or high school. The list included 25 billionaires, 8 U.S. Presidents, 10 Nobel Prize winners, 8 Olympic medal winners, 63 Oscar winners, 55 best-selling authors, and 31 who had been Knighted.

With names like Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Richard Branson, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Will Rogers, and Joseph Pulitzer, being an academic failure still left you in the company of some incredible luminaries.

Going one step further, adding the names of well-known college dropouts to the list, names like Steve Jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bill Gates, Buckminster Fuller, Larry Ellison, Howard Hughes, Michael Dell, Ted Turner, Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, and virtually every famous actor, actress, and director in Hollywood, and the dropout list becomes a venerable Who’s Who of American culture.

So what are we missing here? On one hand we are being told that the path to success is through academia. Yet, we have literally thousands of examples of wealthy, successful, business leaders, industry icons, and some of our greatest heroes that took a different route. Continue reading here.

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9.) Why Industries Collapse

It was roughly two years ago, October 15, 2009, when I got a call from a desperate lady, panicking, as she asked for my help.

Being a futurist, I don’t get many calls from people who urgently need my help. Futurists are rarely first responders.

As she described the situation, telling how a young boy’s life was at stake, and the situation was far too complicated for normal emergency rescue crews, she somehow thought of the DaVinci Institute.

“You work with some of the brightest minds in the world and this situation is going to require a very ingenious solution.” Her voice was dripping with trepidation and fear.

Moments after receiving her call, I turned on the television because the problem she described was quickly unfolding across the nation, gaining national attention, as a six-year old boy named Falcon had somehow gotten trapped inside a small weather balloon that was flying over the Midwest. Yes, this was the legendary balloon-boy incident, gripping the nation in panic and fear until the entire hoax started unraveling.

At the DaVinci Institute, we often tackle complex problems to find solutions. But in today’s world, one of the biggest problems threatening society today is complexity itself. Here’s why. Continue reading here.

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8.) Hoping the Crime Rate Goes Up

How many laws are governing you at this very moment?

Driving across America we find ourselves constantly driving through invisible barriers where new laws come into play and old ones fade away. We have no clue as to what laws they are, or even how many, but these laws have the potential to ruin our lives.

In a country that claims to be the land of the free, the number of people under the control of the U.S. corrections system has exploded over the last 25 years to more than 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31 U.S. adults, according to a report by the Pew Center on the States. The actual number of people behind bars rose to 2.3 million, nearly five times more than the world’s average.

But true criminals are not the problem.

Headlines in the New York Times have repeatedly showed us the irony of our current dilemma – “Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling,” “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops,” “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction,” and “More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime.”

Logically then, if crime keeps falling, we simply won’t be able to build prisons fast enough.

We can only hope that real crime goes up so our criminal justice system will have real criminals to go after. Continue reading here.

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7.) Introducing the Eight Grand Challenges for Humanity

As I took the stage, my goal was to introduce the crowd to a series of Eight Grand Challenges, incentivized competitions designed to push humanity to another level.

But as with many crowds, there was a formidable issue in the minds of attendees, a hurdle of acceptance before these challenges would be deemed cause-worthy.

At issue was our obsession with solving all of today’s problems before we dare think about advancing humanity. How can we possibly justify advancing humanity when the money would be far better spent solving today’s massive problems?

Answering this objection first, was critically important, so here is the way I presented it.

If we only focus on solving today’s problems, we become trapped in the past. Every solution leads to another set of problems. Much like the whack-a-mole game at video arcades, as one problem gets pounded down, another pokes its ugly head out.

The only real way out is to advance civilization. By advancing civilization we change the nature of the problems we’re dealing with, and that is exactly what the Eight Grand Challenges have been designed to do. Continue reading here.

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6.) The Coming Collapse of Bitcoin?

In 2008 the entire world was beginning to panic as our global financial systems teetered ever so close to total meltdown. Major banks were either failing or near failure, and the entire house of cards seemed to be one 10-of-Clubs away from becoming a meaningless flat stack in the middle of the table.

There was a growing distrust of banks, Wall Street, and our entire monetary system. We had allowed the wrong powerbrokers to gain control and business and industry were collapsing all around us. Visions of the Great Depression and its soup lines were haunting us, like a reoccurring nightmare, causing us to rethink our every move.

Many ideas were percolating in the background, but for one, the timing was perfect. Indeed, it is during the worst of times that we, as humans, often do our best work.

So it was in this collapsing chaos where people were grasping desperately for even the slightest ray of hope when on November 1st in 2008 a mysterious paper appeared on an obscure cryptography listserv describing details for a new digital currency called bitcoin.

It was from this seemingly innocent birthing chamber that this piece of monetary-replacement technology would begin its three-year rollercoaster journey, a journey with great lessons for our future. Continue reading here.

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5.) Eight Critical Skills for the Future

On Monday evening I presented my thoughts on the “Future of Mobile Apps & Peripherals” at our monthly Night with a Futurist event. My talk was followed by a fascinating panel discussion with three of the industry’s brightest minds – Michael Sitarzewski, Lisa Calkins, and Gary Moskoff with Karl Dakin moderating the discussion.

Several people left this event saying their heads were ready to explode with all the fascinating new ground we covered, and I credit these four with helping us push the envelope on this topic.

At one point the conversation turned to social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, and Buzz that encourage users to log in and share their location. This feature is packaged as a fun way to find friends and stay social. But there is a downside.

Michael Sitarzewski was quick to point out a new site called ‘Please Rob Me‘ that aims to make online tell-alls aware of the potential downside to public location-sharing.

‘Please Rob Me’ aggregates and streams location check-ins into a list of “all those empty homes out there,” and describes the recently-shared locations as “new opportunities.”

While this seems comical on one level, the dangers are quite obvious, and even more apparent is our poor understanding of the demands being placed on us individually, and the skills we will need to function in this unchartered new territory.

With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of the eight critical skills that we will need in the future that are not being taught in school today. Continue reading here.

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4.) 12 Laws of the Future

For several decades now I have been contemplating our relationship with the future.

Many of my colleagues think of me as that crazy guy who assigns human attributes to this thing we call the future.

On occasion you can hear me uttering phrases like, “I know it’s going to be a great day because the future is clearly happy with me today.” Or, “no, that’s not a good idea because the future is probably going to push it off a cliff.”

At one point I even tried to convince my wife that the future wanted me to buy a new car, but she wasn’t buying it.

So why is it so important to study the future? For starters, we all have a vested interest in it. We will all be living in the future. Continue reading here.

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3.) The Coming Food Printer Revolution

Would you buy a product that was advertised as “Naturally grown, completely organic, printed food?”

Anyone who has an apple tree growing in their yard knows how difficult it is to grow one that is worthy of eating straight off the tree. Most have bruises, wormholes, or bird damage that leaves most apples somewhat marginalized. They may be perfectly good on the inside, yet they don’t look very good.

As we shop for apples in the grocery store, we find ourselves looking for the “perfect apple.” Only a small percentage of apples grown on the farm are worthy of making it into the major leagues of food – the fresh produce section of our grocery stores.

But what if we could take all of those bruised and damaged apples and turn them all into “perfect apples” – perfect size, perfect color, perfect crunch when we bite into them, and the perfect sweet juicy flavor and aroma that makes our mouth water every time we think about them.

This is the promise of food printer technology as we move from simply printing ink on paper, to 3D printing of parts and objects, to next generation food printers.

These aren’t the artificial food devices that science fiction movies have been promising. Instead, they are devices with the very real potential for turning real apples into perfect apples. But this is only scratching the surface. Continue reading here.

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Great lies continue to be propagated

2.) Eight False Promises of the Internet

In early 2003 I had a conversation with Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of VISA. At the time we were interested in hiring him to be the keynote speaker at our upcoming Future of Money Summit, an event that would take place in November of that year.

Ten years earlier, in March of 1993, Hock gave a dinner speech at the Santa Fe Institute where he described his unusual organizational theories in managing VISA, describing them as “chaordic” a term that roughly translates into “ordered chaos.”

In 1996 he formed the Chaordic Alliance, later renamed the Chaordic Commons, for the purpose of furthering his notions that businesses can run more effectively when they are based on a “vital set of living beliefs” distributed through an organization, essentially replacing top-down command and control.

As we talked, his powers of persuasion were quite evident as he artfully described his “chaordic” theories, and by the end of the conversation I was a true believer, wanting to become a disciple of this new business gospel.

But as with many things that sound too good to be true the first time you hear them, Hock’s “chaodic” theories that somehow worked within VISA, proved non-reproducible in other settings, and have now largely been abandoned after numerous attempts to implement them in other companies.

As we enter the 2nd decade of the new millennium we find ourselves in a similar quandary trying to separate the fallacies from the promises of what works and what doesn’t on the Internet. With that in mind I’ve put together a list of eight of the founding theories of the Internet that have proved similarly deceptive. Continue reading here.

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1.) 55 Jobs of the Future

One of my primary complaints with higher education is that they tend to prepare students for jobs of the past. The way a Midwesterner would phrase it, “they are constantly shooting behind the duck.”

Similarly, whenever a column is written about the best paying jobs of the future, jobs like civil engineers, registered nurses, and computer system analysts, they are all jobs that currently exist today.

Yes, many of these jobs will still exist in the future, but every one of them will morph and change as technology and communication systems make their impact.

As an example, technology research firm IDC predicts the amount of data businesses will have access to will grow 50-fold over the next decade. As data becomes cheaper, faster, and more pervasive, the nature of our work begins to change as well.

The first wave of baby boomers has now turned 65. As this generation grays, their needs will change. Their growing numbers and increasing medical needs will require a different kind of health care professionals to take care of them.

As a rule of thumb, 60% of the jobs 10 years from now haven’t been invented yet. With that in mind, I’ve decided to pull together a list of 55 jobs that will be in high demand in the future. Continue reading here.

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Final Thoughts

We are in for a very exciting year ahead. It’s a year where many competing trends will collide, and through those collisions we will see new pathways emerge.

At the same time, many new trends are forming, some with enough steam to form entirely new movements, others that will run their course and splinter into other emerging ways of doing business.

The “new normal” is quickly becoming the “nothing normal,” and our daily routines, the things we use to maintain our own sanity, will need to morph and change if we hope to stay competitive in the emerging job market and even stay current in our own social circles.

The year ahead will be a wild ride. Let’s take that ride together.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future“ – the book that changes everything

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“High expectations are the key to everything” – - Sam Walton

On a recent shopping trip, I went to three separate stores and had difficulty finding what I was looking for. On each of these occasions I talked with a staff person and they told me about an option that either wasn’t apparent to most customers, or that I hadn’t considered.

Yes, the online retail business is stealing a growing percentage of market share, but people-to-people interaction still matters. The problem is that it’s mattering less, and pricing competition is making the people-to-people option a luxury.

Our mobile devices are freeing the retail experience from the confines of the physical storefronts and traditional online locations, allowing shopping to take place virtually anywhere.

In the emerging customer-centric approach to retail, retailers will need to come up with new ways to engage their customers and find ways to lower barriers to purchase. Most importantly, retailers must be prepared to make a sale whenever and wherever a customer is ready. Here are a few thoughts on how they can make that happen.

Retails Downhill Slide

Recently Sears announced the closure of 120 of its Sears and Kmart stores. This was one of a number of similar announcements during the past year as online retailers become much more skilled at stealing market share.

The 2011 list of store closings is a very long list that includes the following:

• 405 – Blockbuster
• 633 – Borders
• 200 – GameStop
• 189 – Gap
• 160 – f.y.e.
• 117 – Anchor Blue
• 117 – Foot Locker
• 100 – Talbot’s
• 71 – A.J. Wright
• 69 – Metropark
• 63 – Friendly’s
• 60 – Rite Aid
• 52 – Destination Maternity
• 50 – Abercrombie & Fitch
• 50 – Hot Topic
• 45 – Big Lots
• 45 – Family Dollar
• 43 – Select Comfort
• 43 – Sonic Drive-In
• 35 – Denny’s
• 32 – Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, Inc. (SuperFresh, Pathmark Super Market)
• 30 – Ultimate Electronics
• 28 – Dominos
• 25 – Superfresh (Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company)
• 20 – Lowe’s
• Many, many more

Store closings hurt local communities in a number of ways, primarily with the blighted look of empty storefronts and plummeting sales tax receipts. But a dead Main Street adds to it a sense of declining options, fewer ways to meet the neighbors, and a growing detachment from that all-important sense of community.

Many of the empty storefronts still have large retailers paying the rent in the background, so property owners have little incentive to find a new tenant until the lease finally runs out. It also leaves owners with a delusional view of the property’s true value.

When it comes to sales tax, the system is severely broke, giving preferential treatment to online sales. It can be reinvented, and the issues surrounding sales tax are solvable, but they need to be dealt with on a national level and this is not likely to make it onto any of the dockets in a presidential election year. One approach for solving this issue can be found here.

With declining sales tax receipts, local communities have very few options for engineering their own solutions.

For these reasons, combined with increased competition from the online sector, tradition retail is not likely to recover – ever.

However, every problem creates an opportunity, and the stage has now been set for a new era of retail, what I call Retail 2.0.

Flooring the Customer

People love to shop at places that are new and different. They love to be surprised by their experience, and they are willing to pay for those surprises.

Gone are the days where stores could simply warehouse products for consumer to buy. Retailers need to provide customers with a feeling of excitement and exclusivity; in short, they need to be floored by their experience.

Traditional shopping centers have become stagnant. Sure, some of the displays change along with the merchandise, and occasionally a store is replaced by another store, but the pace of life today is much faster than the glacial speed that transforms the fashion racks at Macy’s.

We don’t remember an evolution. We only remember a revolution.

Inside this ocean of lackluster thinking lies a few shining examples of what the next generation of retail will look like. Retail 2.0 will form around phrases like “experiential entertainment,” “active engagement,” and “interaction with experts.”

Here are 9 different examples of how this grand experiment is beginning to unfold:

Apple Stores, where people go for answers

1.) Experts Shops – People love to talk to the experts and find answers for those nagging questions that create a cloud of uncertainty around most consumer products. The Apple Stores are a perfect example of an “experts shop” because each of their employees is a true expert on the products they sell. While Apple uses several other elements to attract and engage buyers, the expert-to-consumer relationship is a key feature.

Other companies like Amazon and Google are looking to replicate the Apple experience, but they will have an uphill battle. Unless something major changes, Google will ultimately fail with their retail experiment because they have no respect for two-way communications. If you’ve ever tried to contact Google to get an answer to a problem you’ll know what I mean. In the end, retail is all about two-way communications.

Intel’s “3D Magic Mirror” – a gesture-controlled parametric body model display

2.) 3D Mirror Tech Shops – Imagine walking up to a mirror and visually “trying on” 120 different outfits in 15 minutes to find the perfect wardrobe combination to match your personality and the image you’re hoping to portray. Intel is currently experimenting with 3D Mirror technology where an avatar that closely resembles a customer, and move with their movements, can be clothed and re-clothed numerous times as customers search for their perfect outfit. While this technology is still in its infancy, look for some version to make its way into most clothing stores within a decade.

Example of Cornell University’s Body Scan Technology

3. Body Scanner Tech Shops – The key to a perfect fit is clothing that has been custom tailored to your exact specifications, and what better way to achieve that than to have your body scanned and your dimensions fed into some sort of clothing printer.

Leading the charge is Brooks Brothers, a company that already uses body scanners seamlessly. They offer mass-customized suits at their New York City retail store using a 3D body scanner to collect customer measurements. Style, fabrics, and design features are selected from a computer screen in consultation with a trained sales professional, who facilitates the discussion of fit preferences, such as loose or form-fitted clothing. Brooks Brothers uses a proprietary custom pattern-making system to create an individual pattern based on the body measurements. The garment is manufactured remotely and shipped to the store where a single fitting ensures customer satisfaction. Scan data and patterns for each customer are stored for future orders.

Further research is being conducted at Cornell University. Clothing printers are still a ways off.

MERM – Mobile Electric Retail Minivan

4.) Mobile Shops – Rather than having customers come to you, move your store to the customers.

One example, MERM (Modular Electronic Retail Minivan), shown above, creates a mobile retail market wherever people are gathered – at sporting events, theater, concerts, parades, or even busy street corners.

When MERM is in driving mode, all the inner space is used for storing inventory. When it’s switched to retail booth mode, the shelves can be easily unfolded for display outside the car, making adequate space for the vendor to stand inside. This feature minimizes the size of the car and thus reduces its energy consumption. Also, the compact size enables the user to drive in narrow urban streets.

Instead of opening a retail store and trying to get customers to walk in the front door, mobile retail has the flexibility to find the markets, anytime day or night.

Pop-Up Shop by illy

5.) Pop-Up Shops – If new products come and go, why can’t the stores that display them do the same?

Pop-Up Shops, in their current iteration, have a tendency to pop up unannounced, quickly draw in the crowds, and then disappear or morph into something else, adding to retail the fresh feel, exclusivity and surprise that galleries, theaters and Cirque du Soleil-adepts have been using for years.

Look for many new variations on this concept. Much like mobile retail, Pop-Up Shops can easily move to where the customers are.

Conceptual layout for Docking Shops

6.) Docking Shops – The idea of Docking Shops were first envisioned for rural communities where the customer base is too low to warrant a permanent location. But a one-day-a-week storefront in five or six communities might be a perfect arrangement.

For this reason, I’m predicting a new form of shopping center will spring to life – Docking Shops. With a stationary common area at its core, the Docking Shops will be the central gathering place where multiple businesses can “plug-in” and set up shop.

RVs, trucks, vans, and other large vehicles will be converted into traveling dental offices, tax preparation centers, chiropractic clinics, and mobile retail storefronts. As they “dock” with the Docking Shops, merchandise and service areas will expand into the common area creating an “open bizarre” feel for the shopping experience.

Most of the traveling storefronts will be one or two person businesses, nomadically traveling from city to city on their business adventure. Others will work a regular circuit, showing up on the same day each week, building a loyal customer base.

What was the brand and style of shoes you bought last time?
Who has that information?

7.) Complementary Digital Curation – Information about your brand preferences, past purchases, sizes, shapes, colors, and overall shopping habits is a double-edged sword. For privacy advocates, any storehouse of personal data is a recipe for future disasters. But for those looking to improve speed, convenience, and their overall shopping experience, digital curation has the potential to offer an unparalleled shopping experience.

Customers can volunteer for this experience, and retailers would love to have them, but the current privacy-transparency battleground has created too many unknowns for this to be used to its fullest. That will change in the future as the rules get defined.

Cooking Demonstration

8.) No-Inventory Demo Shops – One of the major expenses in traditional retail have been maintaining inventories and shelf space. Look for a new breed of retails shops that carry no inventory, only product demonstration stations with the ability to order on the spot (and receive a discount).

While most people think in terms of cooking demos with chef’s talking about the food and cookware that they’re using, the Demo Shops will extend to everything from athletic equipment, to toys, to hardware, to appliances, and much more.

Most will be pay-to-play product placement stations with experts on hand to answer questions. Look for tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft to pave the way for these kinds of storefronts.

Using smartphone cameras to turn the world around us into our marketplace

9.) Google Goggles Retail – Still in early testing, Google Goggles is an experimental technology that will enable our smartphones to 1.) identify a product, 2.) find the entity selling it, 3.) make the purchase, and 4.) have it delivered – any product, any where, any time.

This technology has the potential to turn the world around us into our marketplace. If we can see it, we may be able to buy it and have it delivered to our home.

So rather than traditional storefronts, some retailers may hire models to walk up and down the street, trying to get people to “click” on them and buy their clothing or whatever they’re selling.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to retail, consumers are in control. They decide what to buy, where to buy, when to buy, and how much they’re willing to pay.

In a connected world, where information is fluid and transparent, retailers must become actively engaged in the global conversation. If not, their customers will begin the conversations without them.

Physical stores still provide the best way to create a high-value relationship with customers and build a branded experience.

Bricks and mortar stores are not going away any time soon, but the value they add to their communities and the variety of products they offer will remain in transition for the foreseeable future.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything

Understanding trends is more of an art form than an exact science. But for those who can read the tealeaves, and make bold moves, leveraging trends can give them a serious competitive advantage.

As an example, LinkedIn just posted its annual list of top buzzwords, the ones most commonly used on their members’ professional profiles. The top word people in the U.S. use to describe themselves on LinkedIn is “Creative.” Last year “Creative” didn’t even make it into the top ten, where “Extensive Experience” topped the list.

And it’s not just the U.S. This was the most used word in Britain, Canada, Netherlands, and Germany. So what business decisions will you make that tie into people’s recast dreams of being “creative?”

Obviously, trends don’t happen in one-year cycles. They are constantly evolving, and all of the content below is, in one way or another, already happening. Last week we began our journey with trends 1-14 of the “28 Major Trends,” and this week we will finish it. Here are trends 15 – 28.

15.) Exploding Smartphone Industry – With a global population exceeding 7 billion people, we have seen the mobile phone industry mushroom to include over 5 billion members. Smartphones remain a small subset, owned by around 10% of all those with mobile phones. But not for much longer. We are about to see virtually all communication devices replaced with smartphones over the coming decade.

Leading the charge is Google with over 700,000 Android devices being activated daily. Over the past year, Google activated more than 255 million devices compared to 105 million Apple activations. Admittedly this isn’t a true apples-to-apples comparison (no pun intended) because Google doesn’t make their own phones and Apple does.

As smartphones and other devices evolve in this exploding market, look for a near-term push into near-field communications, 4G, and flexible bendable devices.

Critical to the growth of this mobile device market is the global supply of rare earth metals, which China currently controls 95% of known reserves. Looking out for its own self-interests, Chinas has been ratcheting down exports of these metals by 12% per year for the past 5 years. Their reluctance to export enough to meet global demand has touched off a world-wide hunt for new sources with promising finds being uncovered in Canada, Argentina, South Korea, and California. Look for several new mines to come online in coming years and China’s stranglehold on the industry to plummet.

16.) Hyper-Local Urban Farming Going Underground – A few years ago, a study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University reported that between 1980 and 2001, the distance food traveled from farm-to-table increased 25%, ranging from 1,500 to 3,000 miles. Since then we have seen a strong push to localize and even hyper-localize the growing of food supplies.

The drive to make all food supplies local has touched off a number of battles to rewrite municipal codes to accommodate everything from rooftop gardens, to backyard cows and chickens, to aquaponic and aquaculture projects, to experimental vertical farms. The next shift with see crops grown underground.

Dutch-based PlantLab recently announced it has figured out how to triple plant yield in a sunless, rainless environment housed in their underground research facilities. PlantLab uses artificial light and only 10% of the water typically needed. Using the correct spectrum from their LED lighting system has increased photosynthesis efficiency to 12-15% percent from sunlight’s 9% range.

By keeping the plants in a contained environment, PlantLab can also recycle evaporated water, which helps them grow crops using just one-tenth the water needed in traditional greenhouses. As an addition bonus, pesticides are no longer necessary. Production facilities can be built almost anywhere – from the deserts of Sahara to the icy plains of the Artic.

17.) The Gamification of Business – Currently a huge buzzword in techy circles, gamification is moving mainstream. Simply defined, gamification involves applying game techniques such as leveling, rewards and competition, to any human experience.

Many limit their thinking about gamification to mobile apps but it has far broader implications. Imbedded game features such as leaderboards, achievements, and skill-based learning are becoming common in day-to-day business processes, driving adoption, performance and engagement.

One recent example is the Nike campaign to gamify the process of personal training. People who visit the site, enter details of their running times and the routes they were on, and compete for prizes with others around the world.

Another example is the geo-location service Foursquare provides which encourages people to use its check-in technology by giving them an incentive, when they checked in to a certain venue. Many restaurants have picked up on this and offer free cupcakes or desserts to customers who talk about their experience on Foursquare and other social networks.

It’s all about adding fun to the daily tedium of living. Look for gamification to start making major inroads into college offerings as well as non-traditional K-12 educational programs.

18.) Going Cashless – Signs of our emerging cashless society has been popping-up in small doses since 2005. And while 2012 may not be the year that consumers instantly go cashless, it will be the year that major players like Google and MasterCard roll out their cashless initiatives around the world.

For consumers, the initial attraction will be convenience, but eventually mobile payments will create an entirely new data-driven eco-system of rewards, purchase history, daily-deals and more. Key to this movement will be Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that allows for encrypted data to be exchanged between two devices in close proximity (”near field”) to each other.

Here are a few of the changes happening in this market over the past few months:

• In October 2011, the Google Wallet, a free, NFC-enabled mobile payment system became operational at select retailers across the US. Licensing MasterCard’s PayPass technology, shoppers simply tap their mobile device on special terminals at points-of-sale to pay instantly.
• In June 2011, PayPal demonstrated its own mobile payment app for Android devices.
• Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s latest venture, Square, is an electronic payments service which enables users to accept credit card payments by using a portable card-reader device that plugs in to iPhone, iPad or Android devices. Both the Square card-reader and app are free, although there is a 2.75% charge for each payment made. In November 2011, Richard Branson and Visa became investors in Square.
• In June 2011, Sweedish-based iZettle was launched to enable consumers to accept anywhere-anytime credit card payments. The iZettle app works with iPhones and iPads. Bills can also be paid or money transferred using this service.

Google CEO Larry Page sees himself as the next great visionary, following in the footsteps of Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison, as he attempts to rewrite the rules for major industries by pushing initiatives like driverless vehicles, wireless power, and a cashless society. With our hero-based culture, look for Larry Page to emerge as the heart and soul of the movement to turn virtually every electronic device into a payment device.

19.) Ending the Dream of Home Ownership – If you had to choose between starting your own company, traveling around the world, or owning your own home, which would you choose?

Attitudes among Gen X and Gen Y are increasingly shifting towards creating a full life experience rather than settling down and building a nest egg.

Home ownership in the U.S. dropped to 66.9% last year from a high of 70% in 2005, and some are forecasting it will drop as low as 62%, a level not seen since the Census began tracking this data in 1963, as the hurdles to owning a home increase.

Naturally, this begs the question: Is a 62% home ownership rate so bad? It’s still far higher than in most European countries. And, more importantly, why is it assumed we need to own our own homes?

Trillions of dollars have been spent propping up the American Dream of owning our own home. But the dream is shifting, so look for Congress to quit spending money on it. Instead, look for new experimental approached for redefining the relationship between people and the places they’re living in. The stage has been set, it only a matter of time before a new paradigm unfolds.

20.) Accomplishment-Based Education - Writing a book, receiving a patent, or starting a business are all symbols of achievement in today’s world. But being the author of a book that sells 10,000 copies, or inventing a product that 100,000 people buy, or building a business that grosses over $1 million in annual sales are all significant accomplishments that are far more meaningful than their symbolic starting points.

Much of what happens in today’s colleges and universities is based on “symbols of achievement,” not actual accomplishments.

Students that enter a classroom will typically find themselves immersed in an academic competition, a competition that pits students against each other to produce results that best match the teacher’s expectations. Only rarely will the work product of a student in a classroom rise to any notable level of significance. Completing a class is nothing more than a symbol of achievement.

Look for this to change quickly as the tools for creating and managing “accomplishments” remotely become more pervasive. More details here.

21.) Driverless Cars and Autonomous Vehicles – The next revolution in transportation will be here soon, and it won’t be streetcars, monorails, Segway’s, or electric vehicles. It will be self-driving cars, and the adoption of this technology will change virtually everything in the field of transportation planning.

The idea of jumping into a vehicle and having it shuttle you to your destination without anyone “driving” it may sound like pure fantasy to some, but it’s far closer than most of us think.

• Google’s self-driving car project has already racked up over 200,000 driverless miles on highways. Google reports these cars have required intervention by a human co-pilot only about once every 1,000 miles and the goal is to reduce this rate to once in 1,000,000 miles.
• In 2010 VisLab ran VIAC (VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge), a 13,000 km test run of autonomous vehicles. In this competition, 4 driverless electric vans successfully drove from Italy to China, arriving at the Shanghai Expo on October 28, 2010. This was the first intercontinental trip ever completed by an autonomous vehicle.
• Many car companies including General Motors, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, and Volvo have begun early testing of driverless car systems.
• General Motors has stated that they will have a driverless model ready for final testing by 2015, going on sale officially in 2018.

Even though car companies are making plans for the transition, planning departments are not. Most local and regional transportation departments are working with models that assume 20 years from now transportation systems will be basically the same, with only slight variations around the edges.

Driverless cars will be far safer. Human-based foibles like speeding, inattention, inexperience, impairment and fatigue all contribute to road accidents. Driverless cars will remove the human variable from the system. Along with fewer accidents will come the eventual elimination of traffic cops, traffic courts, stoplights, and parking lots.

Look for rapid advancement in this area and for Google to make a play to design an Android-like operating system for all driverless cars.

22.) The Drone Side of Life - Sometime over the coming months you can expect to see a version of the following help wanted ad:

“Help Wanted: Full-time aerial drone pilots needed to help manager our growing fleet of surveillance, delivery, and communication drones. We are also looking for drone repair techs, drone dispatchers, and drone salesmen.”

In 2010 the U.S. Military spent $4.5 billion on drones, increasing to $4.8 billion in 2011.

With this kind of focused spending, military drone technology has improved dramatically over the past decade. But as a technology, future drones will go well beyond military uses. The stage is being set for thousands of everyday uses in business and industry all over the world.

With basic drone hardware being matched up with smartphones, and the bottom-up design capabilities of app developers around the world, drones will quickly move from the realm of personal toys to functional necessities that we interact with on a daily basis.

For those of you looking to switch careers, the drone marketplace will create one of the hot new industries of the future. More details here.

23.) The Coming Transparency Wars – Can you feel the layers being lifted? Transparency is entering our lives in unusual ways and much like having individual veils lifted from a multi-veiled garment; we are now able to see the world around us with far greater clarity.

Recently, several misguided thinkers have proposed the notion that the more transparent our society becomes, the better off we’ll be. Using the logic that a self-watching society will be a safer one, they advocate for radical transparency. This is simply not true. And the privacy advocates will not let it happen.

The greatest danger of too much transparency is that we will become consumed by watching each other, and somewhere along the way, we will lose sight of the big picture. Each day will be filled with constant drama as we exhaust ourselves trying to right every wrong, and solve every problem.

We are all terminally human and have very limited ability to improve who we are simply because someone else may be watching. However, drawing the correct dividing line between privacy and transparency will not come easy. This will continue to be a volatile battleground for many years to come. More details here and here.

24.) Dismantling the Justice System - In a country that claims to be the land of the free, the number of people under the control of the U.S. corrections system has exploded over the last 25 years to more than 7.3 million, or 1 in every 31 U.S. adults, according to a report by the Pew Center on the States. The actual number of people behind bars rose to 2.3 million, nearly five times more than the world’s average.

A new study by the University of North Carolina now shows a shocking 30% of all young people get arrested at least once by age 23.

People who enter prison cannot lead productive lives. Removing too many from wage-earning positions, turning them into wards of the state, is a recipe for economic disaster.

We are seeing some experimentation and improvements around the edges but so far nothing major. Even with its massive inertia to maintain the status quo, public tolerance has reached its limit for this kind of needless expenditure and constant friction between the government and its citizens.

Look for this to become one of the long-term movements splintering away from the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Ironically, the biggest changes in this area will happen when driverless cars start eliminating the need for street cops. More details here.

25.) Going Waitless – In our highly competitive business and social environments, we have a need to be active and engaged at all times. And waiting in line, for virtually anything, becomes irritating.

For this reason, Los Angeles-based QLess Inc. has devised a text-messaging service to help eliminate the wait.

The department of motor vehicles seems to be the epitome of mind-numbingly long wait times and Johnson County, Kansas was one of the first to implement QLess to alerts customers when it was their turn.

With this type of service, people don’t have to be present as the grueling minutes click away. Many customers now go grocery shopping, while waiting in a virtual line, or come in closer to their estimated appointment time.

Since implementing the system three years ago, customers no longer camp out on the floor and spend far less time complaining.

Look for wait-less systems to spring to life in doctor offices, auto service shops, pharmacies, Disneyland, and virtually every place in society where the wait needs to dissipate.

26.) Power of 10 Interface - The distance between information and our brain is getting shorter.

Twenty years ago if you had access to a large information base, such as the Library of Congress, and someone asked you a series of questions, your task would have been to pour through the racks of books to come up with the answers. The time involved could have easily have been 10 hours per question.

Today, if we are faced with uncovering answers from a digital Library of Congress, using keyboards and computer screens, the time-to-answer process can easily be reduced to as little as 10 minutes.

The next iteration of our information-to-brain interface will give us the power to find answers in as little as 10 seconds. Look for major advancements in “smart contacts” in the coming months to help close the gap towards the 10-second goal. More details here.

27.) Emergence of Food Printers - 3D printing is a form of object creation technology where the shape of the objects are formed through a process of building up layers of material until all of the details are in place – a relatively slow process often requiring hours to complete.

Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands of items and thus undermines traditional economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did during the Henry Ford era.

Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran, a couple ingenious minds at MIT working on the Cornucopias Project, have created a very visual way for us to imagine next generation food that will come from similar 3D printers. Each of their designs proposes an advanced way of mixing ingredients, forming new compounds, and building a layer-by-layer aesthetically pleasing menu item with perfect texture and shape.

Look for continuing progress in the area of 3D food printers, even though the Jetson’s style food synthesizers may still be a few years off. More details here.

28.) The Self-Health Movement – No one cares more about your health than you do. So it was only a matter of time until someone invented the self-diagnostic tools, self-monitoring devices, and self-analysis systems to put “self” into the center of the healthcare equation.

Apple’s App Store currently offers 9,000 mobile health apps, along with 1,500 cardio fitness apps, over 1,300 diet apps, more than 1,000 stress and relaxation apps, and over 650 women’s health apps.

But apps are only part of the equation. Peripheral devices are setting the stage for the true self-revolution:

• All Apples stores now carry the Withings’ Blood Pressure Monitor, a peripheral device that plugs into the iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch and takes the user’s blood pressure. Data can be sent directly to a doctor or saved (confidentially) to the cloud.
• Lifelens has created a smartphone app to diagnose malaria. The app can magnify a drop of blood (captured via a simple finger prick) and identify whether malarial parasites are present.
• In October 2011, Ford demonstrated three SYNC apps offering in-car health monitoring for drivers to track chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma and hay fever.
• Also in October 2011, AT&T announced it will begin selling clothes embedded with health monitors, able to track the wearer’s vital signs – heart rate and body temperature – and upload them to a dedicated website.
• The X Prize Foundation is co-sponsoring a $10 million prize for the best mobile device allowing consumers to diagnose their own diseases.

Every new peripheral device will create a market for hundreds of new apps, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what will seem like a massive influx of brilliant new peripherals over the coming months. Healthcare industry execs should be nervous.

Final Thoughts

I will end with a few comments about the new systems that will be needed to tie all of these trends together.

We are currently out of balance between backward-looking problem-solving and forward-looking accomplishments. Forward accomplishments help erase past problems. They solve problems in a different way. We need more forward-looking accomplishments, and our greatest undertakings in the future will come in this area.

This need for future accomplishments will also dictate a need for new and better systems to regulate, manage, and leverage the activities surrounding them. These systems will need to be global in nature, and over time, a few will emerge to challenge the power of nations. National systems are already putting the brakes on emerging global systems, but it will only serve as a short-term delay of the inevitable.

The era of global systems is coming very soon.

See “28 Major Trends for 2012 and Beyond – Part 1“

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Author of “Communicating with the Future” – the book that changes everything