Futurist Thomas Frey: Last week I was speaking at the MD&M West Expo in Anaheim, California on the “future of manufacturing.” With over 2,000 manufacturing exhibitors filling the convention center, there was no small amount of interest in this topic.
Continue reading… “Fastest Way to Create New Jobs? Automate Them Out of Existence!”
Kaplan and Pearson have unveiled their new startup programs.
When it comes to picking an accelerator or incubator programs, ed-tech entrepreneurs will be spoiled by the choices.
Continue reading… “A deluge of new ed-tech accelerators”
An increasing number of companies are requiring college degrees.
It used to take just a high school diploma to get a low level job like a file clerk. Today, it takes a college degree: the new minimum requirement for getting even the lowest-level job.
Continue reading… “A college degree is the new high school diploma”
Apple’s suppliers in Asia.
Apple released a list of its 748 suppliers last month. According to a new data visualization by ChinaFile, more than 600 of them are in Asia, and more than half of those are in China.
Continue reading… “88% of Apple’s suppliers are in Asia, 11% in U.S.”
There is no evidence that prior founding experience is translating into superior performance for social entrepreneurs.
All of the conventional wisdom and research says entrepreneurs with prior entrepreneurial experience outperform entrepreneurs who have never launched a new enterprise. Investors know that it’s often wiser to bet on someone who has started something before.
Continue reading… “Startup experience doesn’t help social entrepreneurs”
Futurist Thomas Frey: How many pills do you take on a daily basis?
According to a 2010 study by Colorado State University, about 68% of American adults take multivitamin supplements. At the same time the average American fills 12 prescriptions a year.
Continue reading… “Our Alarming Culture of Pill People and Future Trends in Healthcare”
Recently, Marc Andreessen made some bold statements about the future of the retail business:
“Retail chains are a fundamentally implausible economic structure if there’s a viable alternative,” he says. “You combine the fixed cost of real estate with inventory, and it puts every retailer in a highly leveraged position. Few can survive a decline of 20 to 30 percent in revenues. It just doesn’t make any sense for all this stuff to sit on shelves. There is fundamentally a better model.”
Continue reading… “The future of 3D printing and the retail business”
There are nowhere near enough “data scientists.”
It is currently accepted that the people who understand Big Data – the enormous datasets of information being collected with nearly every click of every computing device on the planet – will rule the roost in the future. If you can predict behavior by measuring and monitoring people’s machines down to an almost atomic level, you can make both your customers and your shareholders much happier.
Continue reading… “The search for data scientists grows frantic as startups produce more data”
End-ups are old companies and institutions that want to be become more like start-up, and startups want to become more like end-ups.
At the DLD Conference in Munich, John Maeda, President of RISD, sat onstage with the co-founder and CPO of Airbnb, Joe Gebbia. They discussed the unique creative culture at Rhode Island School of Design, where Joe went to college, and where John currently serves as president. Joe shared some of his secrets of being a successful designer-founder. He asked John what it’s like to run a 136-year-old institution like RISD.
Continue reading… “Startups can learn a lot from ‘end-ups’”
Mars One
Mars One is a fascinating tale of a private-sector mission to put humans on Mars. They will be left there, no round-trip ticket, to build a new civilization.
Continue reading… “Bas Lansdorp got angel money to build a permanent colony on Mars”
The death of traditional retailers.
Sarah Lacy, founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily spoke with Marc Andreessen yesterday about ShoeDazzle’s rapid decline and subsequent rapid turn-around, She asked Andreessen if he has seen anything quite so dramatic in the startup world.
Continue reading… “The death of traditional retailers predicted by Marc Andreessen”
Watsi.org co-founders.
Is there a difference between building a successful for-profit and nonprofit startup? Not much, according to Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, there isn’t much of a difference. Y Combinator is an elite accelerator program in Mountain View, Calif., that accepted a nonprofit for the first time this month, Watsi.org. “You could never tell there was a nonprofit mixed in,” he said in a phone interview recently.
Continue reading… “Y Combinator – Nonprofit startups are just like their counterparts”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
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