A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience
Many companies are starting to integrate blockchain technology into ledgers, using it to track diamonds and ensure fair land distribution. The projects are first steps toward making governments and industries more transparent and eliminating fraud and corruption.
The labor movement in the U.S. is finally starting to go online. It was born from the shifting economic environment created by the Industrial Revolution—and we are, once again, at a technological turning point: this time, change is driven across transistors rather than by steam engines. Labor issues are as much in flux as any part of the economy, with Uber and other “on-demand economy” companies creating both new opportunities and new perils for workers. Workers’ rights are struggling to keep pace with technological progress.
Continue reading… “Has digital technology created a new labor movement?”
Along with a growing number of leaders around the world, many people believe that 3D printing will change the way things are produced more in this century than the industrial revolution did over the last 300 years. Continue reading… “How 3D printing could change the world forever”
The most dominant industries in the United States look a lot different than they did less than 25 years ago. From 1990 to 2013, the top industries by employment have changed from mostly manufacturing to mostly health-care and social-assistance jobs in the majority of states, according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data analysis of its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
Continue reading… “How America’s top industries have changed since 1990”
The Internet of Things will impact the daily lives of most people who live in developed areas by 2025.
Experts predict that the “Internet of Things” will bring improvements in convenience and efficiency by 2025, but at the expense of privacy, social divisions and complex problems.
Continue reading… “Internet of Things will bring promise and problems by 2025”
The motor industry’s fortunes are increasingly divided, but in the right markets and with the right technologies, they look surprisingly bright.
Henry Ford and his engineers perfected the moving assembly line a hundred years ago. They cut the time taken to assemble a Ford Model T from 12 hours and 30 minutes in 1913 to just one hour and 33 minutes the following year. That made the car a lot cheaper to build and opened up a mass market for it. By 1918 its list price was down to $450, or just over 5 months’ pay for the average American worker, against the equivalent of about a year and a half’s pay when the car was launched a decade earlier. Cars became a personal badge of status, and in time carmaking became a badge of national virility.
Continue reading… “Future of the car industry looks surprisingly bright”
Only 44% of the top 25 online retailers responded to customer service requests from social media within 24 hours.
Social media and the internet have made it much easier for people to vent about bad service to a potentially large audience. If you make a customer unhappy these days you can count on their other 5,000-some friends hearing about it, too. Twenty-five percent of people who have a negative customer experience share their thoughts on social networks. (Infographic)
Continue reading… “Which industries get the most customer service complaints?”
What is one of the first questions to ask yourself before starting a business? “Can I make money in this industry?”
Continue reading… “What are the most profitable businesses to start?”
Small business is an American cultural icon. Companies with fewer than 500 employees account for almost two-thirds of net new jobs and generate 13 times more new patents per employee than large ones do. But optimism among these enterprises is at its lowest levels in almost 20 years. If the US economy had generated as many start-ups in the Great Recession’s aftermath as it did in 2007, the country would have almost 2.5 million more jobs.
Continue reading… “Small business is big”
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!”
Are you working for the fastest shrinking industry in the United States? You are, if you’re working for a newspaper according to this study by LinkedIn and the Council of Economic Advisors.
The fastest-growing industries include renewables (+49.2%), internet (+24.6%), online publishing (+24.3%), and e-learning (+15.9%). Fastest-shrinking industries were newspapers (-28.4%), retail (-15.5%), building materials (-14.2%), and automotive (-12.8%)…
Continue reading… “Newspaper: America’s Fastest Shrinking Industry”
Futurist Thomas Frey: In 1936 Edwin Howard Armstrong unveiled an improvement in radio that would later become known as FM radio. Working out of an office on the 82nd floor of the Empire State Building, an office provided by RCA, Armstrong was on the verge of revolutionizing the radio industry. But it was a revolution that would not happen for several decades.
Continue reading… “Reinventing Monopolies”
