How to Spot the Future

Photo: Brock Davis Thirty years ago, when John Naisbitt was writing Megatrends, his prescient vision of America’s future, he used a simple yet powerful tool to spot new ideas that were bubbling in the zeitgeist: the newspaper. He didn’t just read it, though. He took out a ruler and measured it. As clever as Naisbitt’s method was, it would never work today. This may sound like a paradox. So how do we spot the future—and how might you? It’s no secret that the best ideas—the ones with the most impact and longevity—are transferable; an innovation in one industry can be exported to transform another. This notion goes way back. Sometimes the cross-pollination is potent enough to create entirely new disciplines. More recently, the commonalities between biology and digital technology—code is code, after all—have inspired a new generation to reach across specialties and create a range of new cross-bred disciplines: bioinformatics, computational genomics, synthetic biology, systems biology.

Cloudy with a chance of data loss Cloudy with a chance of data loss image copyright by Harald Edens This is a followup to my recent column about Steve Wozniak’s warning on the perils of cloud computing, especially cloud storage. It might surprise many users to know there are firms that sell cloud storage and do not back it up. They rely on the disk RAID and some redundancy in the cloud to “protect” your data. If something happens to their data center, they could probably not recover your data. Remember MailandNews.com? RAID is not a data backup technology. What happens if your cloud storage firm goes out of business? Firms like IBM provide a professional backup service. Thanks to Enron, the financial crisis, and other wrong doing, there are boatloads of regulations on how to secure business data. And that brings us back to the many cloud vendors we deal with regularly. No. That means your data is probably not backed-up.

World Economic Forum lists top 10 emerging technologies for 2012 The World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies has drawn up a list of the top 10 emerging technologies for 2012 (Image: Shutterstock) Our goal here at Gizmag is to cover innovation and emerging technologies in all fields of human endeavor, and while almost all of the ideas that grace our pages have the potential to enhance some of our lives in one way or another, at the core are those technologies that will have profound implications for everyone on the planet. For those looking to shape political, business, and academic agendas, predicting how and when these types of technologies will effect us all is critical. Recognizing this, the World Economic Forum's (WEF's) Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies has compiled a list of the top 10 emerging technologies it believes will have the greatest impact on the state of the world in 2012. 1. Source: World Economic Forum Blog About the Author Post a CommentRelated Articles

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