Thomas Frey's Blog, page 48

Moving from Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time Living

How many extra shavers, bars of soap, or cans of soup do you currently have on your shelves at home? How much money do you currently have tied up in “inventory” of typical household items? What if you could get by without any?

Every time you buy a loaf of bread, pack of gum, or stapler for your desk, you take ownership of those items. All of these become part of your personal assets. The ownership cycle generally ends whenever the item is consumed, abandoned, or thrown in the trash.

Most of us have houses full of personal belongings and we even rent storage units for overload items.

Our possessions continue to grow until we start approaching retirement age. That’s when we start taking a hard look at everything we’ve accumulated and begin the shedding process.

Two recent trends are beginning to change this cycle. One is the transition from physical products to digital ones. The other is our every evolving systems that enable us to access items at the time of need rather than maintaining a standing inventory.

This is all part of our transition from just-in-case to just-in-time living.

Shifting Our Thinking about Ownership

In her “2012 KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update,” famed Kleiner Perkins VC Mary Meeker zeros in on this shift by first explaining the move to mobile technology.

During the last quarter of 2010 we saw our first inflection point with the sale of mobile devices exceeding the sale of desktop PCs.

She goes on to predict the next inflection point will be when the total install base of mobile devices will exceed the number of desktop PCs sometime in 2013.

During the past few years our thinking about everything being physical and stationary has transitioned to the mobile and digital mindset.

Smart device cameras overtook stand-alone camera sales in 2008.
Smart phone GPS apps overtook portable GPS devices in early 2012.
Job fairs in physical locations have been replaced with LinkedIn and other online job finder services.
In-bank paper-based loan forms have been replaced with online credit applications.
Physical in-store cash registers are being replaced by iPads with Square.
College lectures in the classroom are being replaced with Coursera, Kahn Academy, EDx, Udemy, and more.

In Meeker’s view, we are moving from an asset heavy generation, dependent upon physical money, physical time constraints, and physical space issues, to an asset-light era where we can walk out the door with our clothes, smartphone, and nothing else, and can still be functional all day.

Freeing ourselves from the physical limitations of time and place proximity dramatically reduces our cost of living and the overhead cost of a business employing us.

Moving from Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time

Rather than having closets full of CDs, record albums, and VHS videos, we can have our entire entertainment library hosted in the cloud and retrieve it whenever we want.

Rather than owning a car and paying for parking, insurance, and maintenance, services like Zipcar, Uber, and Hailo are offering some very appealing on-demand transportation options.

Rather than having pockets full of cash and credit cards, our smartphones are quickly becoming the do-everything wallet of choice.

Over the coming years, entrepreneurs will force us to rethink our need for almost anything physical.

As delivery services improve, with future automated drones reducing the time it takes to receive an order from days to minutes, our thinking about our ties to the physical world will begin to morph.

3D printers are beginning to show us how we can create what we need rather than spending countless hours searching the planet to find the item and have it shipped to us.

The time and precision with which our needs can be met will cause us to rethink virtually everything that feels like ownership.

Final Thoughts

On a recent trip to Australia I was shown a house that was owned by Elton John. He owned it for 12 years but only showed up there once. 

In the past, rich people were always defined by how much they owned. Real estate, expensive cars, vacation homes, and fancy jewelry have long been the symbols of greatness.

But at the same time, all of our physical trappings weigh us down. They occupy our mind, cloud our judgment, and consume our time. Our possessions become our obsessions.

No, the world of physical ownership will not abruptly end over night. But the speed with which we begin to migrate in that direction is about to pick up.

Today 144 million Americans spend an average of 52 minutes a day in their car, most of it spent commuting to and from work. In the future, we will not show up for work just-in-case we need to be there. Rather, we will figure out schemes for being there just-in-time, either virtually or physically, as business needs dictate.

If the average non-productive time spent in cars were cut in half, how else could people spend their extra 26 minutes a day?

What will a world of on-demand education, on-demand healthcare, and on-demand employment look like? If you’re struggling to imagine this kind of future, you’re not alone. But we are about to find out very soon.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Will Big Data Destroy the Stock Market?

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When you buy a stock, you place a bet on how that stock will perform in the future. In a perfect world, where market insiders and manipulators are removed from the equation, the market is a terrific tool for determining the true value of companies being invested in.

But what happens when the volume of data used to make decisions increases 100 million times, and trading volumes increase 100 million times, and trades can be transacted over 100 million times a second?

The proliferation of mobile phones, social media, machine data, and web logs has led to massive amounts of data being generated, stored, and processed, and this volume is increasing exponentially with the digital shift from offline to online. Inside these rapidly expanding data pools are millions of tiny little “tells” that can be extracted and combined with the emerging science of anticipatory computing into very predictable movement indicators.

At the same time, these “tells” can be fabricated, manipulated, and auto-generated. In less time than it takes for a human to blink an eye, the entire value of the markets can fluctuate over $100 trillion and back again without leaving any humanly understandable trace of what just happened.

How long will it be before a series of trading algorithms go terribly wrong, causing the markets to simply implode? Here are a couple thoughts.

Moving into the Big Data Era

First a few jaw dropping stats on the growth of structured and unstructured data. Here are a few examples:

RFID (radio frequency ID) systems generate up to 1,000 times the data of conventional bar code systems.
Smart dust products and similar “Internet of Things” devices connected to the Internet will reach 50 billion by 2020, each with its own 24/7 data generating capability.
10,000 payment card transactions are made every second around the world.
Wal-Mart averages more than 1 million customer transactions every hour.
340 million tweets are sent per day. That’s nearly 4,000 tweets per second.
More than 5 billion people are calling, texting, tweeting and browsing websites on mobile phones.
247 billion emails are sent every day (80% is spam!)
It now only costs $600 to buy a disk drive large enough to store all of the world’s music.
30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every month.
Projected growth in global data generated annually is 40%. By 2020, the production of data will be 44 times greater than what we produced in 2009

Big Data is indeed …big! And getting bigger.

The Future Stock Market

When it comes to the stock market, humans are already the outsiders. The number of actual trades transacted by real humans is only a small fraction of a day’s total trading volume.

Yes there are still people who buy stocks because they “like” the company, and yes, companies who are attempting to recruit key employees will still give stock options as part of their compensation package.

But for those who are serious traders, buying and selling stock on a daily basis, the game is constantly amping up to new levels where automated systems do most of the grunt work.

In a trash-talking society with quants boasting “my algorithm can beat your algorithm,” the entire stock exchange has deteriorate into a kind of bot vs. bot warfare that has lost all semblance of being a marketplace of human values.

One Possible Scenario

As a way to help you understand how this may unfold, here is a short scenario.

With the stock market, every trade creates a butterfly effect, a tiny ripple of influence, with the size of the ripple being directly proportional to the size of the trade. When trades happen at lightening speed, the size of the ripples can be manipulated through a series of external distortion signals designed to mislead all of the other bots, leading to ever-greater buy-sell patterns until they reach a point of maximum distortion for profit taking.

If, as example, a quant were to set up a specific trading pattern starting with 2 shares, followed over a set period of time by a series of doublings, 4 shares, then 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, and so on, the exponentially growing signal produces a “resonancing effect.”

Whenever a pattern like this is repeated multiple times, other bots will pick up on it, and start formulating strategies around it. For the puppet masters this becomes a relatively easy way to manipulate the market by first establishing a pattern, and then skipping or altering the final trade.

Much like the cracking of a whip, where all of the attention is focused on the final snap, the market positions itself for the grand finale. Predictability creates manipulability and its games like these that polymaths live for.

So what can be done to keep the destructive forces of our hacker culture at bay? Can the controllers and regulators ever outsmart the unleashers?

Reaching the Breaking Point – One Additional Scenario

People who are earning a living off the stock market have a vested interest in preserving it.

Even though the markets are being heavily abused by “the takers,” virtually all of the current players will go out of their way to keep the current system operational. No one wants to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

However, there are three key variables where complexity issues are spiraling out of control – volume, speed, and scale. With the size and scale of the problem growing exponentially faster than the regulatory ability of those trying to keep the genie in the box, given enough time, I would place the odds of total collapse at 100%.

So what does failure mean, and exactly what will it look like?

Consider this scenario.

The first of those to master the big data stock market era will become the wealthiest people on the planet in a very short period of time, literally over night. Their rise to prominence will be silent and without fanfare.

This new class of the super elite will quickly move to shore up their power by demanding prominent board positions in some of the world’s top corporations, and in short order, start converting public companies to private ones as a way to insure ongoing control.

Once a few major companies have been privatized, others will begin to panic and begin similar steps to isolate themselves from the public markets.

In just a few months we will see a massive migration towards privatization, with thousands of companies around the world seeking refuge from similar hijackings.

With huge numbers of businesses leaving the marketplace, this black swan event will cause an implosion of global stock exchanges.

So at what point do the existing stock exchanges begin to fail? To put it another way, at what point do the too-big-to-fail banks with all their hands in the cookie jars find it necessary to step in to try to regain control of a system that has gotten away from them?

The answer: When someone new comes along, a new breed of “big data super-quants,” that learns to play the game on a whole new level, leaving today’s existing power elite one step behind on the investing chessboard.

The initial battles will be over rule changes designed to keep “intruder techniques” at bay.

The system will be officially broken when people lose faith in its integrity. When the trust is gone, businesses will begin to abandon it.

So then what?

Given enough time, all industries will eventually end. When the stock market ends, how will it affect society?

The businesses that the market has been investing in will undoubtedly figure out other ways to compensate. The traders that made their living in the market will find themselves looking for new skills to do other work. And the news media that has dedicated unusual levels of attention to this high-end chess game will be forced to find real news to report on.

Final Thoughts

Admittedly, I’m not an expert on the stock market or the nuanced theories that govern the system. And I’m quite certain the scenarios above are overly simplistic and simply wrong.

But big data itself is a game changer, and once combined with the scaling of speed and volume, people heavily invested in today’s game will undoubtedly be blindsided by something new.

Much like adding steroids and performance enhancers to professional sports, the human vs. human marketplace for stocks is about to be overtaken by a wave of cyborg quants driving next generation supercomputers to play an entirely new game of Moneyball.

So how long before everything begins to unravel? I’m not sure of the year, but it will happen on the 2nd Wednesday after a full moon. In fact, I’m so certain of it, that I’m willing to bet all my Wachovia, Blockbuster Video, Enron, and Circuit City stock on it.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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The Future of the Visual Arts

Click here to view the embedded video.

ABC’s Weekend Breakfast with Andrew Geoghegan

On Nov 26-28th, I will be speaking at the Creative Innovations 2012 event in Melbourne, Australia. The theme of the conference will be “Wicked Problems, Great Opportunities! Leadership and courage for volatile times.”

With over 50 key influencers from around the world on hand to inspire people’s thinking, this will indeed be a world-changing event. In fact, it will be the largest innovations conference ever held in the southern hemisphere.

Leading up to this event I’ve done a series of talks and interviews as a way to help expand people’s thinking about the world ahead.

One rather unusual interview was with The Age Magazine on the future of visual arts. Writer Michael Lallo encouraged me to go a little crazy in our discussions so here is what we talked about.

Home is where the hologram is

Within a year, someone will make the world’s first ”printable house”. ”It might not be a very good house but it will go down in history,” says American futurist Thomas Frey, author of the prediction and a speaker at the Creative Innovation conference in Melbourne next week. ”Eventually, we’ll be ‘printing’ 30-storey buildings – and huge replicas of, say, the Statue of Liberty to put on top.”

3D printing is the ”additive” process of layering different materials to build a product – vastly different from the ”subtractive” cutting and drilling of modern manufacturing. Such printers already exist and are improving rapidly. Soon, we will be able to design a house on a computer, hit the print button and watch it take form. ”And when you get tired of your house,” Frey laughs, ”you can crush it up and print a new one.”

The focus of our interview is the future of visual arts but, as Frey points out, everything will become a canvas eventually. Our clothes will double as video screens. We can change the pattern of our dinner plates every night. Even the doors of our cars and the walls of our houses can be altered at will: a new color, perhaps, or fresh moving images.

To discuss the future of ”painting” or ”sculpting”, therefore, is to put art in a box from which it will soon escape. Within the next decade, anyone could conceivably print replicas of the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David that are indistinguishable from the original. (”Forgery in the art world will become a massive problem,” Frey concedes.) They could also ”paint” their own masterpiece on an iPad and 3D-print it with real watercolors on real canvas, all in a matter of hours.

Beautiful paintings, therefore, will no longer depend on an ability to paint. Likewise, a tech-savvy teenager could create a statue of breathtaking glory without ever lifting chisel to rock. But how will this impact on traditional art forms and those who create them?

”To look at the Mona Lisa now, you have to stand behind layers of glass and hundreds of people at the Louvre,” Frey says.

”Soon, you can create replicas that are better than the original in some respects, like the fact they’re more durable. You’ll be able to touch them and see them up close; much better than you would while wrestling for position in a crowded museum. People could pay a lot of money for these advantages.

”Yet there remains something magical about the original and I don’t think people will stop going to the Louvre. Once you get further down the line, though, original artworks could lose their value very quickly. It will be fascinating to see how the supply and demand pans out.”

Artists, therefore, could be commissioned to create an original work – which they email to the client to 3D-print at home. Indeed, when everything is a canvas, aesthetics will become even more important. Some will relish the opportunities for self-expression; others will be overwhelmed by the endless choices this requires.

The economic impact on the design, fashion and art industries remains to be seen. One thing is certain, though: arguments about taste are bound to intensify. It’s one thing to paint your house a color the neighbors don’t like; it’s quite another to display new videos on your roof each day.

Frey believes that ”save our suburbs” committees are doomed to extinction.

”The idea of ‘this is my area and I don’t want a purple house on my street’ goes out the door with these new technologies because the rules have changed so radically,” he says.

In 2000, former footballer Sam Newman caused a stir by building a home with an image of Pamela Anderson as its facade. What he would create if let loose with a printable house is anyone’s guess. ”People’s imagination will run wild,” Frey says. ”If everyone can put a dome on their roof or print a statue for their front lawn, then anything goes.”

Not all artistic advancements will spark heated debates, however.

Frey envisions a new style of cinema in which the audience sits ”in the round” to watch 3D holograms.

Going to the movies, therefore, will be akin to seeing a play – except the explosions, murders and sex scenes will appear disconcertingly lifelike.

This technology could also be used to bring Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain and other departed musicians back from the dead. To the naked eye, it will appear as if they are actually on stage. And that’s just the beginning of a revolution in live music.

”Flying drones are catching on crazy-fast,” Frey says. ”The advancements are being created by the military, who use them for surveillance and to kill people.”

In concerts, however, drones will project images and create extraordinary sound effects.

But could these non-lethal drones be used for more nefarious purposes – to assault us with advertisements as we’re walking down the street, for instance? Yes, Frey says, but this won’t be as bad as being harassed in our homes.

”In 10 or 15 years, you’ll be watching television. An intense pizza commercial – so good it makes your mouth water – will come on. All you have to do is give in and say ‘yes’ to purchase that pizza. Within 30 seconds, a drone will deliver it to your door with a six-pack of beer because it knows that’s what you like.”

Such scenarios can sound so far-fetched as to invite doubt. But Frey, described by one Seattle newspaper as ”the dean of futurists”, has seen suspicions about his predictions diminish as his prophecies come to pass. He foretold lab-grown meat and spherical computer displays years ago, for example, as well as crowd funding, store-branded credit cards and medically induced amnesia. And as the pace of change quickens, with most of us kept abreast of each advancement via the internet, his latest eyebrow-raising outlooks seem increasingly realistic.

In his 15 years as an engineer at IBM, Frey collected 270 awards for his designs and products. He is also a former member of the Triple Nine Society, which requires members to have an IQ above the 99.9th percentile. (Mensa accepts those who score at the 98th percentile or higher.)

Needless to say, Frey’s predictions are not the result of idle speculation. Rather, he uses several ”anticipatory thinking protocols” to analyze cycles and trends and build scenarios. These include extensive number-crunching and ”mastermind groups” with other experts and geniuses.

”You have these intensely bright people sitting around a table, one comment leads to another and it creates a synergy,” he says. ”I find these moments to be the most inspiring.”

 

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Creating a Global Language Archive

For most of us, the language we speak is like the air we breathe. But what happens when we wake up and find that our air is going extinct?

According to Oregon’s Living Tongues Institute, one of the world’s languages dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will disappear, as young people abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish.

Researchers estimate that over the last 500 years, half of the world’s languages, from Etruscan to Tasmanian, have vanished. So what do we lose when a language goes silent?

When you mess with a person’s language, you mess with their heritage, their culture, and their affinity with their ancestors. Changing language somehow invalidates all of the work of the past, disgracing the culture of their forefathers.

For this reason I would like to propose the creation of a Global Language Archive, similar, in some respects, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway which has archived 1.5 million distinct seed samples of agricultural crops from around the world.

Different than some of the online efforts to archive languages that tend to lose much of the dimensionality of culture, I’d like you to think of the Global Language Archive as the “Louvre of Languages” where culture and language collide in a way that all can experience. Let me explain.

Language as a Source of Conflict

When the United States was founded, only 40 percent of the people living within its boundaries spoke English as their first language. Today that number is 87%.

Over the years, language has become a hotly debated issue, not only in the U.S., but also in countries around the world.

Most observers tend to explain today’s global political conflicts as stemming from racial, ethnic, religious, or territorial disputes. We rarely see language attributed as a direct and fundamental cause. But that’s not always true.

As an example, in 1989, Slobodan Milosevic ordered Albanians to speak Serbian. They refused. This became one of the primary causes of the war that followed.

When looking at past conflicts, it’s important to look at language as the source of tension: it is often more tangible than race or religion. For example, when you look at a person it can be very difficult to tell what race or ethnicity group they belong to. However, once they speak, much of the confusion disappears.

Over the coming years, the number of languages spoken around the world will decline sharply. At the same time, the more vulnerable a group feels about their language, the greater their devotion to keeping it. As one of the most important elements of a culture’s identity, language can also become incendiary. A group’s language can feel essential to its very existence.

Living Tongue’s map of endangered languages

Disappearing Languages

From Bolivia to Malaysia, hundreds of languages around the world are teetering on the brink of extinction—some being spoken only by a single person, according to a new study.

Of the 50 native languages remaining in California, none are being actively taught to schoolchildren today.

With only 5% of the world still speaking 6,500 of today’s “long tail” languages, we are on the verge of losing a significant piece of humanity.

Currently, more than 500 languages are spoken by fewer than ten people.

The pace of life is quickening. As people’s lives become busier, they have less time to pay attention to things that were important to their ancestors. The new language wars will be an inter-generational battle between the younger generations and their parents and grandparents.

Existing Archives

A few notable efforts are already underway.

Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages has a mission to promote the documentation, maintenance, preservation, and revitalization of endangered languages worldwide through linguist-aided, community-driven multimedia language documentation projects. Through proactive efforts, the Institute arranges expeditions to find “last speakers” of endangered languages worldwide and archive pieces of their culture through books, stories, and videos for use by future generations.
Talking Dictionary – Living Tongues Institute is also producing a series of Online Talking Dictionaries for a range of languages. Here are some examples.
The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone for the next 10,000 years. This project is run by the Long Now Foundation. Their goal is create a broad online survey and near-permanent physical archive of 1,500 of the approximately 7,000 human languages.
Multilingual Manchester – A University of Manchester archive set up in 2010 to document, protect and support the languages spoken in one of Europe’s most diverse cities, is now the world’s largest. The web-based Multilingual Manchester documents the city’s diverse linguistic tradition of over 100 languages.

The Global Language Archive – The “Louvre of Languages”

Creating a physical place that represents a focal point for language preservation brings with it tremendous opportunity. Unlike today’s cultural museums that capture physical fragments of history, the Global Language Archive will have a mission to preserve the communications, stories, and dreams of our ancestors.

Online efforts only go so far. By adding physical dimensions, human contact, audio stories, and peripheral experiences, we breathe life into these otherwise single-dimensional languages.

As “last speakers” begin to dwindle, the final-person-responsibility brings with it tremendous stress and anxiety. The loss of a language means the loss of birthright, heritage, and customs. It somehow breaks the connection with their ancestors and invalidates all of the accomplishments of the past, dishonoring the culture of their families.

But much of this stress can be diffused by taking these speakers through a formal preservation process that transforms them from “crazy person clinging to the past” to “cultural expert with a deep understanding of their ancestors.”

Curators of languages are different than curators of artifacts. Languages are tools of expression with deep emotional ties. Done correctly, the Global Language Archive will attract massive crowds from around the world. It will be a one-of-a-kind facility serving as a Mecca for linguistic scientists and cultural researchers around the globe.

In this context, language itself becomes a cultural taxonomy, and with upwards of 7,000 languages left to preserve, it has the potential for becoming the largest museum in the world with associated universities, hotels, culture-inspired retail centers, and much more.

Final Thoughts

Ironically, the creation of a Global Language Archive will speed the reduction of spoken languages. Once the onus of responsibility has been removed from last speakers to keep their culture alive, they will be more likely to let their children decide their own career path.

Having fewer languages creates societal efficiencies on many levels – less confusion, reduced standards, and fewer decision points within most business structures.

From a nation-to-nation relationship standpoint, it will be a great diffuser of cultural tensions.

With English becoming the de facto international language standard of science, technology, and the Internet, it will be in the best interest of English-speaking countries to fund the Global Language Archive in a big way. For them it will create an unprecedented competitive advantage for business and industry.

My goal in writing this was to help readers understand how this looming language crisis could be transitioned into a significant opportunity. But I tend to look at the world through an overly optimistic lens, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Entering the Legal Marijuana Era – Finding the Pitfalls and Profits in the Years Ahead

It may sound silly to walk into a bar and order up a beer with a weed chaser or to open a late night box of cereal called “Weedies” to help you sleep, but that is exactly the era we’re entering.

On Election Day, the citizens of both Colorado and Washington made the bold decision to legalize marijuana and manage it with controls similar to alcohol, prompting speculation about Amsterdam-style “drug tourism” and a new round of jokes about Colorado’s official song, Rocky Mountain High.

Certainly, for Colorado, there will be big concerns about stoners on the ski slopes, and in Washington, even bigger concerns about stoned lumberjacks wielding chainsaws. But those tend to be edge cases in a much larger opportunity movement.

Using the two ballot issues as templates, the remaining 48 states will see similar versions of this legalization on their ballots in the coming years.

But for now, Colorado and Washington will be the ones making all of the critical decisions about the massive new industries that are about to unfold.

While the role of being first brings with it some painful policy-making work, it will also attract tremendous attention, and the entrepreneurs in these states are already racking their brains to figure out how to capitalize on it. Here are a few things to expect.

First a Little Background

In 2009 I predicted: “Within ten years marijuana will emerge as a staple at most night clubs and parties.”

After looking closely at the similarities between now and 1933 when prohibition ended, it was an easy prediction to make.

Attitudes about pot laws had been shifting and a 2009 Gallup poll showed 44% of the population supported legalizing marijuana, up from 25% in 1995. A more recent poll in 2011 showed it had risen to 50%.

Since the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act that prohibited the production of both cannabis (marijuana) and hemp, a rigorous effort has been made to vilify the two substances. The reasons behind hemp’s inclusion seem to have centered around a conspiracy orchestrated by the combined efforts of Andrew Mellon, Randolph Hearst, and the Du Pont family.

With the invention of the celluloid-extracting decorticator, hemp was thought to be a very cheap substitute for the paper pulp used in the newspaper industry. Hearst felt that this was a threat to his extensive timber holdings. Mellon, who was then Secretary of the Treasury and the wealthiest man in America, had invested heavily in the DuPont’s new synthetic fiber, nylon, and was worried that new hemp fiber derivatives could derail nylon’s popularity.

Scare tactics about pot’s addictive nature and its “gateway drug” potential have long been debunked, but those who oppose legalization still cite these issues as major concerns.

In the Netherlands, where pot is widely available in coffee shops and smoke shops throughout its cities, the Dutch are far less likely than Americans or other Europeans to use marijuana. Roughly 14% of Americans already use marijuana, versus about 5% of the Dutch, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

The Great Legalization Showdown

The Colorado and Washington initiatives have put the Justice Department in an awkward position. The two states have asserted their rights to make it legal, but this legality is in direct conflict with federal law.

These votes have set the stage for a massive showdown between State’s rights and Federal authority. So far the Federal Government hasn’t been willing to budge.

From October 2011 to October 2012, federal law enforcement has shut down 600 medical marijuana dispensaries in California. It was the biggest crackdown since the state legalized medical marijuana in 1996. Prosecutors also tried to seize the assets of sellers and their landlords and threatened them with criminal charges.

This is not a case where we can assume the federal government will follow the lead of the states. Rather, it’s a case where the Justice Department is asserting its authority against the state’s voters and state sovereignty.

Colorado already has 536 medical marijuana dispensaries operating throughout the state and Washington has a similar number. The new legalization vote could trigger 100 times as many outlets.

This will indeed be a thorny issue for the Obama administration, and it may very well end up in the Supreme Court to get a final ruling. And if the Supreme Court doesn’t agree with Colorado and Washington, expect a much larger movement involving protests and civil unrest to ensue.

Uncovering the Opportunities

Entrepreneurs tend to be very optimistic and many are already working the angles to uncover new business opportunities with the presumption that the Fed’s will okay it. Once the showdown dust settles, the new legalization era will officially begin.

We already know about the number of businesses launched and jobs created through the 17 states that have legalized medical marijuana. If we assume an exponentially larger industry to emerge from outright legalization, the number of jobs created could easily be over a million.

Ironically, a huge percentage of the new jobs won’t involve the consumption of pot, but will instead involve peripheral industries.

Here is a sampling of some of the new industries this will spawn:

New Products – With a growing aversion to “smoking,” the style and form of marijuana will need to be shifted into edible and drinkable products. This will include everything from sodas, to candies, to cookies, to inhalers, to lotions, and much more.
Conventions & Events – Seattle’s Hempfest is already the world’s largest pot gathering with over 250,000 people getting together, smoking dope, and discussing the stoners view of the world ahead. Look for the number of conventions, Meetups, and other kinds of events to expand greatly.
Associations – Many new associations will come out of the woodwork including retailers associations, growers association, standards associations, etc.
Testing Laboratories – The alcohol industry is already tightly controlled, but marijuana brings with it a thousand times as many variables as booze. Testing will be the centerpiece of control for this industry.


Ratings Organizations – We hear a lot of hype about which kind of pot is the best, but this will open the doors for new companies to do a thorough ranking of the industry options.
Newspapers & Magazines – There is already an underground newspaper and magazine industry for the weed world, but this will grow dramatically.
News Specials – The first wave of opportunity will develop around news organizations, as this will become a rich vein of news programming.
Education, Training & How To Guides – Everyone looking to enter the field will be searching for quick ways to bring themselves up to speed. This type of training will become more formalized over the coming years, and some of the coming legislation will likely require it.
Movies, Documentaries & TV Shows – Look for industry-related new sitcoms, comedies, documentaries, and other ingenious “potlines” to involve an entirely new set of good guys and bad guys.
Patents – Expect a rush to patent new marijuana devices, gadgets, formulas, processes, and much more.
Support Groups – There will be many negative issues resulting from legalization and each one will likely create the need for support groups to help people work through them.
Pharmaceuticals & Alternative Medicines – Suddenly THC will be finding its way into a variety of stress relieving, pain controlling, and sleep enhancing pills. Big Pharma is already licking their lips on this one.
Farmers Markets – Get it right from the source. Farmers markets will welcome the new weed dealers with open arms.
Marijuana Tourism – While this seems to be the primary focus of the news media, marijuana tourism will only be a tiny piece of a much larger industry.
Many More – Look for additional opportunities in agriculture, processing plants, transportation, distribution, marketing, advertising, training, certification, regulators, and much more.

Final Thoughts

As Napa valley is to the wine industry, Colorado and Washington will be to the emerging Marijuana industries.

The biggest early-stage opportunities will be to invent the industry itself. Elected officials and policymakers are usually pretty inept at visualizing all the possibilities ahead, so those who can help them think through the possibilities will be in huge demand. The early stage people who shape this industry will also help define the kinds of opportunities that it creates.

We are entering chartered territory and the Obama administration will be heavily scrutinized for virtually every decision they make. In the end, marijuana will become legalized, and this movement will them transform into a movement to reinvent the justice system.

America now imprisons more of its own citizens than any other nation on Earth. The first step will be to release all of the prisoners convicted of marijuana possession. The next step will be far more dramatic, to reform the heart and soul of American-style justice and rein in the system that has grown wildly out of control.

Most people thought the election was about selecting our next President. While that selection will affect people for the next four year, the legalization of marijuana will affect the future of world from here on out.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Replacing Our Physical Infrastructure with Digital Infrastructure

In the 1980s, as a young human factors engineer at IBM, I spent much of my time working with anthropometric tables, a compilation of statistical data about the human body used for designing a product’s ergonomic interface.

At the time, much of the data for these tables was compiled by the U.S. Military through a series of 40 separate anthropometric surveys of military personnel between 1945 and 1988. The research involved 240 distinct measurements of the body such as weight, height, arm length, distance between eyes, circumference of fingers and toes, and much more.

Once compiled, these tables became a key reference tool for engineers and designers involved in creating customer-facing products ranging from workstations, to cars, to chairs, to beds, to shoes, and virtually every other product that people physically interact with.

Coming from the government, the data was freely available for anyone to use.

In the future, body scanners will become commonplace in retail stores around the world, as customers gravitate to custom tailored and custom printed clothing, and the volume of data involving the size and shape of human bodies will grow exponentially. Research studies that once involved 240 distinct measurements will transition into real-time data involving millions of possible dimensions.

However, even after the customer’s name is separated from the data, a lingering question remains, “Will this data be freely available for the world to use?”

Open Data Vs. Private Data

What I have described above is one tiny example of the challenges ahead for the Open Data Movement.

Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other “Open” movements such as open source, open content, and open access.

The philosophy behind open data has been long established but the term “open data” itself is relatively new, gaining popularity with the rise of the Internet and especially, with the launch of open-data government initiatives such as Data.gov.

It could easily be argued that a retail clothing chain with 10,000 stores could charge millions of dollars for the raw data they accumulate from doing countless customer body scans. After all, this is a private business struggling to make a profit selling clothing, so why should they be coerced into giving this information away for free?

At the same time, the data about individual people actually belongs to those people, so it doesn’t seem fair that a private company should profit from their data.

Another possible source of this data may be the scanners used by TSA at the airport. These scanners could be programmed to perform a similar task. In this case, as a government agency, the data would likely be free.

Open Data as Digital Infrastructure

Countries are in a constant one-upsmanship battle to create the world’s greatest infrastructure. But global leaders are quickly beginning to understand that infrastructure in the future will not just mean physical infrastructure, but also digital infrastructure. And positioning itself directly at the heart of our future digital infrastructure will be the Open Data Movement.

In the past, research studies were conducted to get a “snapshot in time” of data. This research data may have involved traffic patterns, weather statistics, buying habits, customer preferences, energy usage, time of day issues, or literally millions of other topics.

Over the coming years, nearly all of this kind of data will become collectable through some real-time mechanism.

Driverless cars will leave countless digital trails in their wake monitoring everything from road conditions, to vehicle occupancy, to traffic patterns, to load time details, and more.

Digital lighting systems that allow customers to automatically change color, brightness, and intensity will automatically be collecting a range of data on personal preferences based on time of day, time of year, geographic location, weather conditions and a host of other ancillary issues.

Pillcams, those tiny digestible cameras used to scam a person’s digestive tract, can be programmed to measure human dimensions from the inside out.

So where does open data end and private data begin? We currently don’t have the answer for this question.

The “Internet of Things” as Infrastructure

When we think of being connected to the Internet, our minds instantly go to images of computers, phones, and tablets. But that’s only scratching the surface. The number of devices connected to the Internet today now exceeds the number of people on earth.

In what’s called the Internet of Things, sensors and actuators are being embedded in physical objects ranging from roadways to pacemakers. Our rapidly growing universe of “Things” is being linked through wired and wireless networks to the Internet. Altogether, these networks are churning out huge volumes of data that flow to computers for analysis. When objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding complexity and responding to it swiftly.

As an example, precision farming equipment with wireless links to data collected from remote satellites and ground sensors can take into account crop conditions and adjust the way each individual part of a field is being farmed. In some cases this means planting seeds at different depths, spreading extra fertilizer on areas that need more nutrients, or adding more water as soil conditions change.

Billboards in Japan look back at cars as they pass, determining whether passengers fit certain customer profiles, instantly changing displayed messages based on those assessments.

Yesterday’s predictable pathways of information are changing and the physical world itself is becoming a new type of intelligent system. The resulting information networks are emerging as a new form of infrastructure capable of spawning new business models, improved business processes, and even entire new industries.

Final Thoughts

No I don’t think we’ll see physical infrastructure going away anytime soon. But what we will see is a combining and expanding of the physical with the digital. By creating tiers of usable information, companies can add layers of efficiency and enhance productivity, giving them a far-reaching competitive edge.

Countries that provide the best digital infrastructures will have a huge advantage over those showing lesser efforts.

As an example, if a country installed digital sensors throughout every square mile of its land, adding things like geological indicators, air monitors, radiation detectors, environmental gauges, temperature and barometric pressure meters, the resulting trove of usable information would be incredible.

However, ramping up the density from one per square mile to one per square meter will yield 2.6 million times as much data from the land. The sheer quality and precision of the resulting information will dramatically improve both the caliber and scope of startup ventures.

But the question remains. How much of this will be open data, free and readily available for anyone who wishes to use it, versus data that is private, protected, and expensive?

From my perspective, every paywall inserted in the middle will create a “negative Metcalf’s Law effect” causing the cumulative value of the resulting open data universe to drop exponentially.

So do the pros outweigh the cons in our future data wars? It’s not likely going to be an either-or question, but one of dividing lines. I’ve already mentioned some of my thoughts on this topic, but carving out those territorial delimiters as to where private data stops and open data begins will be a policy decision that is not going to be easy to make.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Will Future Mobility Lead to Future Instability?

In 2008, I was asked to speak at the Leaders in Dubai Conference along with several world famous speakers like former NYC Mayor Rudy Giulliani, Tom Peters, and former World Bank President James Wolfensohn. Attending the conference were 1,200 world leaders and influencers from 40 different counties.

At the time, Dubai was a shining new star on the global stage, attracting the world’s best architects, building remarkable structures, tackling ingenious new projects, and raising the bar for creativity around the world.

However, everything happening in Dubai was because of foreign workers and foreign talent. At the time, foreigners made up about 85% of the population and 99% of the private work force.

Laborers working on high-rise buildings were easy to spot, all dressed in blue coveralls and wearing hardhats, riding commuter buses between the work sites and the labor camps they called home. Dubai had attracted over 1.2 million construction laborers from countries like India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, all because of the attractive pay, approx. $225 per month which was roughly twice what they would have made back home.

Two years later, nearly all of these workers had returned home as the economic situation deteriorated and all new construction ground to a halt. In the future, mobile workforces like this will become even easier to attract. But at the same time, virtually every new situations will have the potential of causing a mass influx or mass exodus as populations instantly react to the changing winds of opportunities.

Increasing Our Mobility

If we live to be 70 years old, we get roughly 613,200 hours to live. That’s 365 days, times 70 years, times 24 hours. This is the time we have to enjoy, to love, to cry, to learn and to travel. And when it comes to travel, it’s getting easier and we’re doing more of it.

Here are some of the clues we’re seeing about how global speed and mobility has improved around the world:

Cross-border migration has increased 42% in the last decade, from 150 million to 214 million, with most of the traffic directed toward OECD countries. (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development)
The number of students traveling to other countries to attend college has risen from 2.1 million in 2002 to 3.4 million in 2009. Researchers project this number to grow to 8 million by 2020.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. now has the largest percentage of its population foreign-born since the 1920s. 13%, or 40 million people, were born in other countries with the largest numbers coming from Mexico and Latin America.

Circumnavigating the Globe

It was less than 500 years ago when Magellan’s crew became the first to circumnavigate the globe, and it took them a little over 3 years to complete the journey. Magellan himself was killed in the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines, but his crew managed to complete the journey.

Since then, the time it’s taken to circumnavigate the world has shrunk dramatically. Here are a few of the records set along the way:

1522 – Ferdinand Magellan – 3 Years
1764 – John Byron – 2 Years
1924 – US Air Service – 175 Days
1929 – Hugo Eckener – 21 Days
1931 – Wiley Post – 8 Days, 16 Hours
1933 – Wiley Post – 7 Days, 19 Hours
1949 – USAF B-50 Lucky Lady II – 94 Hours
1961 – Yuri Gagarin – 1 Hour, 48 Minutes (First Russian Cosmonaut)
1969 – Apollo 10 – 1 Hour – Astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young and Gene Cernan traveled at 24,790 mph (All-time human speed record)

Compressing the time it takes to travel around the earth from 3 years to 1 hour is indeed a huge accomplishment. But sadly, the all-time human speed record was set in 1969 and hasn’t improved since.

Distance Traveled Over a Lifetime

If we assume the average person in 1850 walked 4 miles a day, same as the average travel speed of the day, over a 50-year lifespan, they would have covered 73,000 miles over the course of their life.

Using the same assumption, that people travel an hour a day at the average transportation speed of that era, we can begin to get a picture of how mobility is changing how we live:

1850 – Average speed 4 mph* – Traveling 4 miles per day X 50 year life expectancy = 73,000 miles.
1900 – Average speed 8 mph* – Traveling 8 miles per day X 60 year life expectancy = 175,200 miles.
1950 – Average speed 24 mph* – Traveling 24 miles per day X 70 year life expectancy = 613,200 miles.
2000 – Average speed 75 mph* – Traveling 75 miles per day X 80 year life expectancy = 2,190,000 miles.
2050 – Average speed 225 mph** – Traveling 225 miles per day X 90 year life expectancy = 7,391,250 miles.

* – Average speed based on Richard Florida’s calculations for the U.S. in his book titled “The Great Reset.”

** – Projection based on current trends.

Even though these numbers are rough estimates based on travel for people in the U.S., every country in the world has seen their mobility progressing along a similar growth curve.

To be sure, people who travel 7.4 million miles in their lifetime will have radically different ways of thinking about their life, their work, and future opportunities than people who lived 50 years earlier.

Implication of Increased Mobility

As we increase our mobility, we increase the fluidity of our workforce, our lifestyles, and our cultures. Opportunities will serve as attractors and negative influences will drive people away.

While our current thinking about mobility is centered around driving in cars, flying in planes, and the future vehicles that will be used to transport us, our ideas for improving mobility will begin to permeate virtually every system, procedure, regulation, and public policy we come into contact with.

The flow of humanity will tie directly to a region’s economy, its livelihood, and its sense of well-being. This is where true freedom is born. Yet wherever flow is optimized for its constituency, it creates large scale variability that can be detrimental to a region, its government, and radical shifts in supply and demand.

Here are some possible scenarios:

In countries with excessively high debt, and tax rates skyrocket to compensate for it, both people and businesses will vote with their feet and move away. Entire countries may experience a massive talent and brain drain as a result.
Countries that go to war will see increasingly high numbers of people deserting their countries to avoid the conflict.
Communities with the greatest job opportunities will see their populations mushroom over night. Similarly, areas with large numbers of layoffs and dying industries will turn into ghost towns equally as fast.
With society becoming increasingly mobile, people will be reluctant to make long-term commitments. As a result, all new mortgages will need to include a dropout clause, or dropout insurance, that kicks in if they suddenly need to leave.
Communities will increasingly be judged by their “freedom index” (drug laws, crime rates, police presence, etc.), their “happiness index” (cultural activities, overall friendliness, social tolerance, etc.), and their “opportunity index” (statistical odds of finding new opportunities when old ones go away.)
A single news story about better living conditions, healthier lifestyles, lower taxes, or ultra-engaging cultural events will cause hundreds, and perhaps thousands to move to new communities almost instantly.
Demographics shifts will be abrupt, hard to plan for, and will leave tremendous economic turmoil in their wake.
Countries will begin to compete for citizens, touting their strengths and benefits, at the same time trash-talking the countries they hope to draw from. For countries with rapidly declining populations, citizenship laws will be quickly revamped to make it easy and painless for people to claim new residency.
With increased transparency, virtually every governmental system will have to be reworked to include extra sensitivity to the fact that their actions could drive citizens away.

How many times over the past decade have you become frustrated with your community, city, state, or country? How many times have you wished you could move somewhere else?

As we have seen in the job market, the easier it is to switch jobs, the more people will switch. Similarly, when moving becomes easy, more people will move.

Final Thoughts

In February 2009, just 3 months after my visit to Dubai, news reports showed a record number of cars being abandoned at Dubai International Airport. The dust-covered Mercedes and BMW’s at the Dubai Airport were a telltale sign of the economic shifts that had just occurred there.

Public news services put the number of cars left at the airport at slightly over 3,000. But informal reports from Dubai bloggers described it as tens of thousands of vehicles abandoned around the city.

People who lost their jobs and were over-extended on their credit began a mass exodus, largely because of Sharia law, the Islamic code that deals severely with people who can’t pay their bills. Bouncing a check is punishable with jail time and debtor prisons are indeed alive and well in that part of the world.

Those who abandoned their cars suddenly had an arrest warrant waiting for them should they ever try to reenter the country.

In 2008, 3.62 million foreign nationals lived among Dubai’s 864,000 residents. In 2009, reports showed the country was cancelling visas at a rate of 1,500 per day, and the city that was once on the verge of becoming the Las Vegas of the Middle East, was now quickly turning into a ghost town.

Unlike most communities, Dubai has a PR engine working overtime to compensate for all the negative reports. Today, three years later, they have managed to turn things around, and the outlook is much brighter.

Ratcheting forward 20 years, if this same type of incident were to happen in 2030, Dubai would very likely lose over 3 million foreign nationals in less than a month, and the economic fallout that followed would be catastrophic.

Mobility is a double-edged sword. The same systems and tools that make it easy for people and business to move, make it hard for cities and countries to govern. When countries attempt to limit mobility, they will also limit commerce. Over time, governments will need to think and operate differently before they can properly adapt to this new age of super mobility.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Making the Post Office Invisible

In July 2011, as a cost cutting measure, the U.S. Postal Service put together a list of 3,700 post offices that it wanted to close.

Like most organizations that have faced a full frontal assault by online automation and technology, the USPS has been working its way through a very uncomfortable transition.  They have no clear picture of what the service will look like 10 years from now.

Over the past five years alone, mail volume has fallen more than 20%, and revenue has declined 12%. According to the Cato Institute, a decade ago sorting 35,000 letters an hour required 70 employees. Today, only it takes two.

For this reason, the USPS has cut about 240,000 positions nationwide since 2000.

Between 2007 and 2011 it lost $25 billion, but its cash flow is getting worse. This year alone, the USPS has posted a net loss of $5.2 billion in the third quarter, and $11.6 billion loss so far for 2012.

So rather than doing a piece meal approach to cutting hours and closing post offices, a better approach may be to simply close all 32,000 of them. With this approach they would still perform the service, but eliminate their physical presence. This is what I refer to as “going invisible.” Let me explain.

First a Bit of History

In 1775 the Second Continental Congress made the decision to form a nation-wide postal delivery service and appointed Ben Franklin as the first Postmaster General. In 1792 it was elevated to a cabinet-level position.

The organization transitioned into its current form in 1971 under the Nixon-era Postal Reorganization Act.

Even with its declining base of employment, the USPS still employs over 574,000 workers and delivers 177 billion pieces of mail annually. It also operates the largest civilian vehicle fleet in the world with just over 218,000 vehicles.

The Current Business Model 

The USPS is in the business of selling postage. Even though it provides a number of other services, the vast majority of its revenue streams come from the sale of postage.

In a normal free enterprise business, postal rates would rise and fall according to market demand to stay competitive and remain profitable.

The Postal Reorganization Act signed by President Richard Nixon on August 12, 1970, replaced the cabinet-level Post Office Department with the independent United States Postal Service. The Act took effect on July 1, 1971.

In its current status of being a quasi-governmental agency, the organization has been given monopoly access to all residential mailboxes, but virtually none of the authority it needs to make it function as a business.

As New York Times columnist Joe Nocera recently argued, “the problem is that neither the management nor the workers really control the Postal Service. Even though the post office has been self-financed since the 1980s, it remains shackled by Congress, which simply can’t bring itself to allow the service to make its own decisions.”

Regardless of whether the USPS moves more towards a private or public entity, and good arguments can be made for both, its days of functioning as a headless, decisionless money pit are numbered.

Enter the Internet 

Delivery of First Class mail, which USPS has a legal monopoly on, peaked in 2001 and has declined 29% from 1998 to 2008, due primarily to the increasing use of email and other forms of online correspondence and business transactions.

FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS) directly compete with USPS in the areas of express mail and package delivery services. However, both companies have transit agreements with USPS in which an item can be dropped off with either FedEx or UPS who will then provide shipment up to the destination post office, serving the intended recipient, where it will be transferred for delivery to the U.S. Mail destination, including PO Boxes.

While email may have lowered the volume of First Class mail, online retail has increased delivery volumes in areas where customers would have previously purchased items from local retailers. Approximately 40% of postal revenue today comes from online purchases or private retail partners like Wal-Mart, Staples, Office Depot, Walgreens, Sam’s, Costco, and grocery stores.

Australia’s new automated postal stations

Going Invisible

Just as mail volume has dropped, foot traffic into local post offices has also plummeted. Once a focal point of community activity, people’s need to actually walk into a post office has been replaced with automated postal machines, online stamp sellers, contract postal units, and more.

Virtually everything that required a person to walk into a post office in the past either has or will be replaced by an automated machine, drop-off box, or remote service option in the near future.

By eliminating its customer facing-retail storefronts, where transaction costs are high and customer service is painful, the USPS can focus on what it does best, pickup and delivery.

As they makes this transition, they can also offload virtually all of its high dollar real estate where maintenance, upkeep, and parking are at a premium, and replace it with less onerous industrial space in cheaper, less-trafficked areas of the community.

Automated Delivery 

In much the same way homeowners cover the costs for specialty trash containers that match the semi-automated trash trucks on the road today, homeowners could easily be required to install next-generation mailboxes designed to work with automated postal pickup and delivery machines.

As we enter the era of driverless cars, a similar effort will focus on developing driverless delivery vehicles with automated mail delivery being the holy grails in this emerging industry.

In the late 1990s, I spent time working with David Porter, an ingenious inventor based in Kansas City who had developed and patented an automated delivery box he called SmartBox. As you can see from the photos, a delivery box like this can come in a variety of shapes and sizes, including something as subtle as a park bench with secured containers below the seat.

After spending several years trying to get industry leaders to take notice, David finally moved on to other ventures, resigning himself to the fact that he was a couple decades ahead of his time. However, given the chance, entrepreneurs are ready and eager to help delivery services adapt to the ever changing marketplace that our future holds.

Final Thoughts

The reason communities are fighting so hard to keep their post offices open is because they, as a community, are being singled out as “less important.” This never bodes well for political candidates who generally bear the brunt of this kind of regional complaint.

However, if all post offices were closed, it would be far more acceptable because everyone would be treated equally.

We will always need a system for delivering items. But is it better to deliver these items to a physical address or to us personally?

The average person in the US will move 16 times over the course of their lifetime, roughly once every five years. In any given year, approximately 20% of the population will change the place they call home.

While it is true that in some cases we want things delivered to a business at a specific location, such as parts for a manufacturing plant or books for a school, our current systems don’t allow for the separation of individuals and locations.

So, is it possible to create a technology for the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS that will enable them to switch from static location-based addresses to dynamic, ever-changing personal addresses?

The starting and ending nodes of our connected world are often major disconnects. The efficiencies we have come to expect in the online world simply doesn’t translate well into our current systems in the off-line world.

So where do we go from here? What are the systems we need to create to solve these problems? Rest assured, the answer to these questions may very well be a critical new system that redefines our future.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Inventing the Future

When Charles Corry walked onto the stage of the Shark Tank-like Piranha Pit at Saturday’s DaVinci Inventor Showcase, his iExpander product was still $6,000 away from making the goal of $125,000 on Kickstarter. As of this morning, he has not only passed his goal, now exceeding $140,000, but still has 6 more days to go.

The iExpander is a brilliantly designed case for the iPhone that dramatically improves photo quality and battery life, and adds an expandable SD memory slot for virtually unlimited storage capability.

As the Piranha Pit investors listened to the pitch they started scratching their heads, asking the simple question, “Why do you need us?”

Charles was quick to respond, saying that his product fits into a very competitive marketplace and having a great product and money is simply not enough. He was looking for a smart-money partner.

The story of the iExpander was only one of hundreds of stories unfolding at this event. With influential people, mixed with powerful innovation, and extra large doses of passion, drive, creativity, and determination, it is one of those rare occurrences where people can literally see the future taking shape right in front of them.

As a futurist, it is the brilliance of these visionaries that breathes inspiration into the work that I do. But this is only scratching the surface. Here’s what you really missed.

Setting the Stage, Announcing the Winners

The DaVinci Inventor Showcase is an annual event produced by our amazing team at the DaVinci Institute. Even though I serve as the Executive Director of the Institute, the vast majority of the work is handled by Deb, Jan, Andrew, and Kyler.

Now in its 8th year, we attract inventors from all across the U.S. to be part of what has become one of the nation’s most prestigious inventor events.

Winner of the 2012 “Inventor of the Year Award” - Power Practical

Winning top prize at this year’s event was Power Practical for their ingenious device called the Power Pot. Using the magic of thermoelectric power generation, the PowerPot is a cooking pot generator that uses the heat from cooking to run a 5W generator that can power up to 2-3 USB devices at a time. With 5 watts of output and a USB interface, the product is designed to supply the power necessary to charge devices anywhere, including people living in poverty in far away countries.

There was no shortage of creativity at this event. The complete list of inventors receiving awards and honorable mentions included:

Inventor of the Year Award – Power Practical - Providing practical personal power solutions. The PowerPot is the first product, which takes fire & water and makes electricity.
Commercial Product of the Year Award – SafeAwake – A smoke alarm aid, designed specifically for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, that integrates tactile stimulation and low frequency sound to awaken a sleeping person in a fire emergency.
Consumer Product of the Year Award – Cloud Dome - A revolutionary line of photography products, each one specifically designed to make you a better and faster product photographer.
Software Product of the Year Award – Megathread – Provides greater social affinity and integration through building authentic credentials across any online community platform.
Food & Drink Product of the Year Award – Bee Nut Free - Sensibly portioned gluten free, nut free, dairy free nutritious snack items.
Special Award – Education Innovation of the Year Award – Regis University – Unusual entrepreneurial education program.
Honorable Mention – Gate Glide - Gate support system that stops a wooden gate from sagging due to weather and gravity and makes it easy to open and close.
Honorable Mention – iExpander - An expansion device for the iPhone that has microSD card memory, provides unbelievable low light images, and doubles the battery life.
Honorable Mention – Grace Skiis – Designs and builds solid, environmentally respectful and innovative, big mountain free ride and powder skis.
Honorable Mention – Maggies’s Magnificent Cakes - Wisecakes are a patented “gourmet cake in a box” that the consumer just has to add water, stir and bake for a delicious, gourmet cake every time.

With nearly 100 “celebrity judges” weighing in, the selection process involves considerable effort, both on the part of the judges and the team who tallied all the scores.

As we designed this event, we put a tremendous emphasis on the judging process. We ask some very credible people to take valuable time out of their lives to participate in judging these inventions. And it is the combined weight of these individual decisions that gives such far-reaching credibility to these awards.

But that’s still only part of the story.

Positive Human Collisions 

We live in a human based world, and even though we now have a far easier time connecting with people all over the world, nothing replaces the one-on-one relationship-building that happens when you can shake someone’s hand and look them directly in the eye.

As a futurist, I don’t see this changing anytime soon. In fact, emotion-based relationships and the energy of human presence may be one of the few unchangeable tenants of human nature.

In the future, communities will be judged by their vibrancy, their interconnectedness, and their fluid structures for causing “positive human collisions.”

The success of this even has been predicated on our ability to create positive human collisions where people who otherwise never have a reason to meet, are sent on a collision course and amazing things begin to happen.

In this particular setting, we go out of our way to find judges who can offer great benefit to the inventors. And since the inventors need many different kinds of help, we find several categories of inventors. Here are a few examples:

Successful Entrepreneurs – Scott Tibbets, Pat Engstrom, and Steve Meyers are all serial entrepreneurs who have built multi-million dollar companies and are always looking for what’s next.
Past Winner of the DaVinci Inventor Showcase – People like Jim Turner, Dave McCloskey, and Michael Sitarsewski are all past winners at the Showcase who have all been in their shoes and gone through the struggles of building a successful company from scratch.
Product Scouts – Brian Abe works as a product scout for the dozens of brands associated with Clorox and Avery Business Products. Scott Cooley is the product scout for McGuckin Hardware.
Money People – As part of the Piranha Pit, Louis Foreman, Joel Comm, Scott Jordan, and Frank Hoffmeister have all been active as angel investors and deal brokers for people needing money.
Media People – Ken Clark, news anchor for Fox31, Lisa Hildago, part of the 7News Team, and Alexia Parks, writer for Huffington Post, all know how to draw attention to products, people, and stories.
Technical Experts – Tom Franklin is a patent attorney with Kilpatrick Townsend. Gene Branch is a patent attorney with Perkins Coie. Jeff Samson is a product design expert with Samson Design.
Corporate Executives – Andrew Aldrin (son of Buzz Aldrin) is the Development Director for the United Launch Alliance, Sam Rediess is a Director for Oracle, and Stirling Olsen is the CEO of Foraker Labs.
Other Exhibitors – As an example, Rennie Davis is in the process of launching iPowered Living, a 4,700 acre alternative energy ranch in New Mexico as a solution to one of humanity’s biggest problems.
Many more…

Special Thanks

We especially want to thank the brilliant and dedicated staff and volunteers at the DaVinci Institute for pulling this event together. Special thanks go out to Deb Frey, Jan Wagner, Kyler Frey, Andrew Frey, Nancy Slattery, Cheri Hoffer, and our many volunteers. Also, thanks go out to our photographer Steve Sokolik, and our videographers Steve Maltz and Paula Zimmerman.

We also want to thank our Sponsors who become very closely involved in the planning, execution, judging, and operation of the event itself. Sponsors included Tom Franklin at Kilpatrick Townsend, Gene Branch at Perkins Coie, Peter Vandevanter at CGX Printing, and Karl Dakin at Regis University..

Without these amazingly talented individual, none of this could have ever happened.

Keynote Speakers

The event not only showcased the brilliance of inventors, but also three of the nation’s top speakers working in the field of cutting edge innovation.

Teresa Stanek Rea is Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Ms. Rea oversees an office that encourages innovation and technological advancement, and helps businesses protect their investments, promote their goods and safeguard against deception in the marketplace. Before joining USPTO in 2011, Ms. Rea was a leading attorney in the field of intellectual property with more than 25 years of legal experience and a past president of the American Intellectual Property Law Association.

Oliver Kuttner is Founder & Chief Executive Officer for the Edison2 Team. One hundred and eleven teams from around the world entered the 100 Mile per Gallon Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize in 2008, and in September 2010 Edison2 was awarded the top prize, winning the Mainstream class and with it $5 million. Oliver is also a commercial real estate developer who was pivotal in revitalizing Charlottesville, Virginia’s downtown. Today, his enlightened and environmentally responsible methods are helping revitalize Lynchburg, Virginia. Practicing what he preaches, Oliver placed Edison2’s offices and assembly facility in a formerly abandoned 360,000 square foot textile factory that now houses over 24 businesses and numerous residences. This important work demonstrates Oliver’s ability to lead complex projects, build business relationships, and deliver results. His broad experience also includes award-winning building design, sports car racing prototype construction.

Louis Foreman currently manages a $25 Million Dollar Innovation Fund dedicated to bringing individuals’ innovations to the marketplace. Louis is a prolific inventor, product developer, innovation enthusiast created nine successful startups and has been directly responsible for the creation of more than 20 others. He is the CEO of EdisonNation, publisher of Inventor’s Digest, and producer of the Emmy Award winning PBS series “Everyday Edison”.

Final Thoughts

If you missed Saturday’s event, you missed an opportunity to watch the universe reshape itself as the future itself is being formed.

Well, maybe not. As you might imagine, I’m a little biased.

Each year I leave this event totally energized, cheering on the sidelines as each of our inventors continues their struggle to build a viable enterprise. It’s never easy.

For those of you who are disenchanted with the way the world is headed, it’s not too late. You personally can invent a better future. I see people doing it every single day, so don’t think it can’t be done.

But always remember, “We shape our future, and then our future shapes us.”

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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Inventing the 3D Pill Printer

The next big innovation in healthcare may very well be a printer. But this is no ordinary printer.

Professor Lee Cronin heads up a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University in England. His team has figured out how to turn a 3D printer into a sort of universal chemistry set capable of “printing” prescription drugs via downloadable chemistry.

According to Cronin, since nearly all drugs are made from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, along with readily available agents such as vegetable oils and paraffin, a printer can be developed with a relatively small number of “inks” to make virtually any organic molecule.

However, as you might imagine, not everyone is welcoming this type of innovation with open arms. Here are some of the likely implications this radical new technology may have on the health of humanity.

Controllers of the Supply Lines

Solving world problems is never simple. Researchers currently estimate 13% of the world’s population goes to bed hungry every night. Yes, we have gone from 26% of the world population being undernourished in the 1960 to 13% today, but it remains an excruciatingly high number.

The problem doesn’t stem from a lack of food. World agriculture produces 17% more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70% population increase.

The principal problem stems from governments that repress economic activities and archaic distribution systems bottlenecked by local powerbrokers that would rather see people die than lose an opportunity to make money.

At the same time that people are dying of starvation, roughly 50% of all the food in the world goes to waste. Small percentages of food are lost in the farmer’s fields, on trucks and through delivery systems, in food processing plants, on store shelves, and in our own homes. Altogether, these tiny slivers of inefficiencies add up to a huge number.

For many people, pharmaceuticals are as important as food, and the supply lines are equally complex. Anything that can be done to circumvent our current power brokers and barriers to entry should be welcomed with open arms. But life is never that simple.

Professor Lee Cronin and his pill printer

Can We “App” Chemistry?

Professor Cronin’s latest TED talk dealt with the simple question: “Can we make a really cool universal chemistry set?” and “Can we ‘app’ chemistry?”

He thinks in terms of “what Apple did for music,” he’d like to do for the discovery and distribution of prescription drugs.

As a first step, Cronin’s team is looking at ways in which a relatively simple drug – ibuprofen – can be produced with his 3D printer or “chemputer”. If they can accomplish that, the possibilities suddenly seem endless.

“Imagine your printer like a refrigerator that is full of all the ingredients you might require to make any recipe in a giant new cook book,” Cronin says. “If you apply that idea to making drugs, you have all your ingredients and you follow a recipe that a drug company gives you. The value is in the recipe, not in the manufacturing of it. It is essentially an app.”

The Coming Pharma Wars

In the same way music downloads have disrupted the music industry, downloadable pharmaceutical recipes piped directly into pill replicators will have huge implications for an industry that spends billions every year on research and development.

On one hand, drug companies are constantly looking for new ways to shut down the underground counterfeit drug trade that is pervasive in many third world countries. Phony knockoffs are neither produced to exacting specification, nor are they even made with the same chemicals.

Having cheap delivery mechanisms that could print pills to an exact specification would enable legitimate pharmaceutical companies to regain at least some control over this subversive market.

But much the way Napster cut the legs out from under major record labels, floating digital drug formulas may cause them to lose more control than they gain. Very likely, big pharma will do everything it can to block the proliferation of pill printers, until they can find ways to make the pipeline safe and secure.

Huge New Opportunity for the Illegal Drug Trade

With a tool like this, the scriptwriters for “Breaking Bad” will have to rethink their plot lines, and Mafia kingpins will be paying very close attention as details emerge.

Even though it’s being developed with the best of intentions, the “Chemputer” will have the ability to produce illegal narcotics with no discernable chemical trail.

Marijuana and cocaine drug trades both have elaborate growing networks tied to equally sophisticated supply lines and production facilities. The world of “meth” was created to circumvent the problems associated with the labor-intensive drug operations of the past.

In addition to eliminating most of the supply chain, the “Chemputer” will have the ability to alter recreational drug formulations on an ongoing basis to keep the products legal as lawmakers play their whack-a-mole game of banning the newly created substances on a monthly basis.

Future Possibilities

Working with a “Chemputer” will give us the ability to create industries that work with far more precision than anything available today. Think of the idea of “per­fect water.“

We all know pol­luted water is bad for us. If we take every­thing out of it and create distilled water, it’s less than opti­mal. Some­where in this whole spectrum of water is what I think of as “perfect water.” But it’s only perfect for one person at that exact moment in time.

Every person on earth will have his or her own formulation of “perfect water.” So we will have 7 billion formulations (one for every person on earth), and each of these formulations will change every second of every day as our metabolisms change.

Somewhere in this line of thinking is the ultimate interface. So far we haven’t had the ability to work with that level of precision.

As example, doctors today prescribe medications for a patient in doses of either 200 or 400 milligrams, when the ideal dosage might be 147 milligrams or 369 milligrams.

By using the “Chemputer,” we may eventually be able to create consumer products with this level of granularity.

In addition to increased precision, we will also develop new ways to deliver medicines.

Nutraceuticals, also known as bioceuticals, encompass a large spectrum of food and food-based products that are tied to the practice of holistic and alternative medicine. Using food printers instead of pill printers, medicines could be delivered in cupcakes instead of tablets.

Final Thoughts

Lee Cronin’s ideas are sure to be a disruptive force in future healthcare. His concepts will also quickly permeate the entire chemistry profession, and my discussions about developing a pharmaceutical-grade pill printer are just scratching the surface of its true potential.

Yes, it will very likely follow down the path of Gartner’s famed hype cycle, and we won’t know its true potential for several years. But it is giving us a new perspective on a very old profession.

On open source drug movement may very well be as dramatic a shift to societal norms as the Internet itself.

Professor Cronin is a naturally impatient person and wants to quickly expand the possibilities. “As well as transforming the industry and making money,” he says, “we could be saving lives. So why should we wait?”

By Futurist Thomas Frey

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

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