Bitcoin
What should we be thinking about a currency like Bitcoin? The first thing we should remember is that money is a sort of collective fiction. What money we choose to trust says much about how we see the world.
Continue reading… “Bitcoin and other money fictions”
One way to improve life for the new student majority is to raise the quality of the education without raising the price.
Interest in using the internet to slash the price of higher education is being driven in part by hope for new methods of teaching, but also by frustration with the existing system. The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.
Continue reading… “Is this the end of the golden age for higher education?”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Many of us suffer from a sinister and often contagious disorder, something I call just-in-case disease.
We own toolboxes full of tools, just in case we need to fix something. We have kitchens full of appliances just in case we want to prepare a meal. We have cars in our garages just in case we need to go somewhere. We even have closets full of clothes we know we’ll never wear just in case we get desperate.
In the cryptocurrency world, Bitcoin (and Litecoin) garner the most attention, but there are now 83 (and counting) virtual currencies to store your wealth in. Bitcoin’s market cap is over $10 billionis and is by far the highest but we wonder whether the miasma of mimiccers – from Unobtainium to the ironically-named StableCoin and from ‘Philospher Stones’ to HoboNickels – serves to reduce the confidence in Bitcoin as a new method payments, or bolsters it as the clear market winner.
Continue reading… “There are now 83 (and counting) cryptocurrencies in the world”
There are several critical technology trends that are likely to affect your business in the year to come, from connected devices to new security concerns to a more demanding and discriminating user base.
Continue reading… “Top 5 business tech trends to watch in 2014”
In the United States a solar system is installed every four minutes. The solar industry is adding a lot of new jobs in the process. There are 142,698 jobs throughout the industry, according to the Solar Foundation. That’s a 20 percent increase since 2012 — a jump driven both by growth in installations and new categories for academic and research jobs.
Continue reading… “Top 5 facts about the solar jobs market”
To see the future, we have to be willing to take a good long look at what is happening in the talent acquisition world within the context of bigger picture trends. The mega trends that are shaping the future of how people do things on a global basis (i.e., empowerment via access to information, exponential growth in connectivity, ability to crunch and interpret staggering amounts of data, using collective intelligence to find truth) are all quietly at work setting the stage for major change in our industry.
Continue reading… “Talent assessment trends for 2014”
Nielsen put out its latest figures on the state of the advertising market across old and new media platforms this morning. One big takeaway is that Internet advertising continues to be the fastest-growing medium, but it remains a small player. Global display advertising across the web, mobile internet and apps collectively grew by 32.4% in 2013 — by far the biggest leap of any media — but that still worked out to a 4.5% share of the overall spend in ads. In contrast, television grew only 4.3% but remains the behemoth when it comes to ad spend, taking nearly 58% of the market.
Continue reading… “Internet display ad spending up 32% in 2013, but still just 4.5% of market share”
The U.S. Army has recently declared that it is cutting troop levels. Over the next sixteen years, each and every brigade in the Army will see its soldier count drop from 4,000 to 3,000, with robots making up the loss in firepower. That’s according to General Robert Cone, who said robot soldier levels would reach their new peak between 2030 and 2040 during an Army Aviation symposium last week.
Continue reading… “By 2030 U.S. Army will replace 25% of soldiers with robots”
Amelia Earhart – 1st Woman to Cross the Atlantic.
Futurist Thomas Frey, wrote a very interesting article about a year and a half ago titled 56 Future Accomplishments: Waiting for Someone to go First. It was a fascinating piece on some of the “firsts” that have occurred, such as:
Continue reading… “What will be the ‘firsts’ in HR?”
Baxter, the flagship robot by Rethink Robotics in Boston.
Computerization. Automation. Artificial intelligence. Technology. Innovation. Robots. These are the many names of an invisible force that has been stoking progress and killing jobs for centuries. But it’s different now because nearly half of jobs in America today could be automated in the next 10 to 20 years, according to a new paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, discussed recently in The Economist. The question is: Which half?
Continue reading… “Almost half of American jobs today will be automated ‘in a decade or two’”
A new dawn of smarter power grid tools is emerging.
Some of the technologies that have been mainstays of the internet are slowly being adopted by the electricity grid, like decentralized computing and smarter distributed systems. A step in that direction emerged on Tuesday from startup Gridco, which after four years has announced its first commercial product: new power electronics and a smart management system for the part of the grid that brings electricity to homes and buildings.
Continue reading… “The power grid is starting to look more like the internet”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.