The buzz: “In its hundred-year history, the drumset has been adorned by temple blocks, timpani, and bass drumheads with nature scenes…introduction of the hi-hat, Rototoms, Octobans… bass drums with no front heads at all…entire drumsets would spin in the air, be aided by powerful electronics, and explode in size with additional bass drums, toms, and snare drums and enough cymbals to equip a large marching band.” “So what of drumming’s future?…How will such buzz phrases as “Internet of Things” and...
Nov 11, 2020•54 min
The buzz: “In the unknowable future, all leaders will need to be entrepreneurs: visionaries that can imagine, adapt, and act nimbly to address whatever challenges come their way.” (Bhatia and Levina, hbr.org) With global businesses impacted by Covid-19 and other disruptions, companies that survived are looking at their future workforce through a new lens. No more obey-the-status-quo hires. They need creative, entrepreneurial, collaborative problem-solvers to help them turn obstacles into positiv...
Nov 04, 2020•55 min
The Buzz 1: “The future holds unparalleled visions of progress and intrigue for the curious…where we manifest our hopes, dreams and even worst fears…While we've had our fair share of inventive breakthroughs in the past that have changed the world, the dazzling and world-shaking inventions of the future will change the world in even stranger and greater ways.” bigthink.com The Buzz 2: In the 19th century, inventors were heroes…Stephenson, Morse and Goodyear were the shock troops of the Industrial...
Oct 28, 2020•55 min
The buzz: Futurists are people who attempt to predict the future – authors, consultants, thinkers, organizational leaders and others who engage in interdisciplinary and systems thinking to advise private and public organizations on diverse global trends, possible scenarios, emerging market opportunities and risk management. Futurists are motivated by change. Not content merely to describe or forecast, they desire an active role in world transformation. Futurology is concerned with ‘three P's and...
Oct 21, 2020•56 min
The buzz: “We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.” (President Jimmy Carter) But Canadian social psychologist John Berry observes that multiculturalism is dependent on both the “cultural maintenance” by immigrant groups and “cultural acceptance” by host societies. Strong cultural maintenance by immigrants and weak cultural acceptance by a host society lead to separation and marginalization. C...
Oct 14, 2020•55 min
The buzz: “Over the centuries human beings have always loved to laugh. We can imagine jokes being shared by our cave dwelling ancestors about the two woolly mammoths. Today comedy is shared with vast audience by world-famous arena-filling comedians. Comedy is part of human culture. “There seems to be more comedy than ever. There are local comedy clubs, the Edinburgh Fringe, YouTube, comedy series and Hollywood movies – however you like your comedy served up, there is probably a source catering t...
Oct 07, 2020•54 min
The buzz: Although they comprise more 50% of the population, women hold far fewer positions in the wine industry, fewer leadership roles, and fewer ownership roles. Wine expert and The Wine Bible author Karen MacNeil’s Second Annual Report on Women in the Wine Industry reveals an estimated 10% of winemakers in California are female, 7% in Washington, and 5% in New York. She closed her keynote at the 2019 Wonder Women of Wine (WWOW) inaugural conference with this advice: “My friends, men are not ...
Sep 30, 2020•54 min
The buzz: “We’ve all been there — woken up from a night’s sleep thinking about a dream from the night before. Why did the dream happen? What does it mean? (Jean-Marc Emden, DreamsCloud. www.wired.com/insights/2014/10/dreaming-innovation) Finally, answers! The Aurora headband from iWinks gives us the opportunity to control our dreams and access lucid dreams – awareness that one is dreaming – by prompting them in our sleep. The headband measures brain wave and eye movement activity, while tracking...
Sep 23, 2020•55 min
The buzz: Vrooomm. Today, women account for only 27% of the US auto manufacturing workforce as compared to about 47% of the overall labor force. This talent gap is counterproductive for companies looking to tap into the rising opportunities for innovation, transformation, and disruption by digital technologies such as AI, AR, and the IoT. (www2.deloitte.com) Bogi Lateiner, owner of 180 Degrees Automotive in Phoenix, wanted to be a mechanic. “I had to go to 20 shops before I got the first job to ...
Sep 16, 2020•55 min
The buzz X 3: Make me laugh! Though seemingly innocuous, cartoons, caricatures, comic strips and comic books are representative of important issues in society. Years ago, cartoons were handmade, frame by frame. Now many use flash, aftereffects or other software with interpolation features to produce movement illusion. (engadget.com) Caricature artists once heavily relied on pens and paper. Now, many use digital artistic tools for molding their imagination. (bmmagazine.co.uk) Storytelling using p...
Sep 02, 2020•54 min
The buzz: “Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the right moment that a buyer needs it.” (David Meerman Scott, The New Rules of Marketing and PR) For companies trying to sell you something right now, while you’re listening to us and in the midst of a pandemic, is this the right moment? How do you want them to find you, pitch you, engage you, earn your trust and get you to buy their products or services? Are you annoyed by their intrusion or do you welcome it? Today’s dynamic ...
Aug 26, 2020•55 min
The buzz: According to Engineering the Future of Creativity: How Technology is Revolutionizing Art (techspective.net 2019, technology has created more accessible tools for the production of art, changed the arena of self-expression, and accelerated the process of art funding and distribution. The artist’s palette now includes 3D printers. Eyal Gever is working with NASA scientists to create visualizations of human laughter that will be 3D printed on the International Space Station. Technology is...
Aug 19, 2020•55 min
The buzz: Hard to imagine, but not so long ago, products and services were sold in the physical world and salespeople were the go-to experts before a sale. Remember being invited to coffee or lunch by a salesperson? But consumer habits change, often due to technology. Over the past few years, social selling has gained the attention of sales professionals. With nearly 3.6B people now using social media worldwide, and consumers now 5 times more reliant on digital content than in the early 2,000’s,...
Aug 12, 2020•56 min
The buzz: Cyberpsychology is the study of the human mind and behavior and how the culture of technology, specifically, virtual reality, and social media affect them. Hot topics: online identity, online relationships, personality types in cyberspace, transference to computers, addiction to computers and Internet, regressive behavior in cyberspace, and online gender-switching. An example: comparison, low self-esteem, depression, loneliness, and negative relationships are possible detrimental conse...
Aug 05, 2020•55 min
The buzz! “As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, restaurants are still doing what they always do: taking care of their communities.…free food to medical workers on the frontlines, laid-off restaurant staff and their families, and basically anyone else in need.” (blog.opentable.com) “Giving back to others has had another much-needed consequence: It’s helping keep those restaurants in business and their staff working.” (cnbc.com) “Through the generosity of patrons, the fundraised meals are provided ...
Jul 29, 2020•56 min
A social good is something that benefits the largest number of people in the largest possible way, such as clean air, clean water, healthcare, and literacy. Aka common good, social good can trace its history to Ancient Greece philosophers and implies a positive impact on individuals or society in general… Today, social good is used to refer to corporate initiatives that aim to enhance the social contract of corporations by promoting practices that are better for the environment and overall socie...
Jul 22, 2020•55 min
The buzz! Europe-based Just Eat Takeaway, a merger between U.K.’s Just Eat and Netherlands-based Takeaway, is set to acquire its US competitor Grubhub in a $7.3B deal, beating out Uber. The new company will have an active customer base of 70M. When the pandemic forced restaurants to close on-site dining and find other ways to stay in business, Glasserie, a Brooklyn, N.Y. Mediterranean restaurant, experimented with delivery and takeout apps including Seamless, Grubhub and DoorDash. But they were ...
Jul 15, 2020•55 min
The buzz! Yogurt is a food produced by bacterial fermentation of milk. Yogurt is related to the verb yogurmak, to be curdled or coagulated; to thicken”. Ancient Greek cuisine included a similar dairy product, oxygala. Yogurt was introduced to the US in the early 20th century. In 2017, the average American ate 13.7 pounds of yogurt. Because it may contain live cultures, yogurt is often associated with probiotics, postulated as having positive effects on immune, cardiovascular or metabolic health....
Jul 08, 2020•56 min
The buzz! themuse.com “Social media can also be a powerful tool for your professional life…build your personal brand, grow your network, establish yourself as an expert in your field, or give prospective employers a glimpse into your personality. It can also be full of pitfalls. More employers…check candidates’ social media profiles before hiring…screenshots of status updates and tweets mean your electronic words can live forever, even if you delete them later…not just your own posts—your activi...
Jun 24, 2020•56 min
Ripped from the headlines: transwood.com: “Technology is becoming an increasingly important part of everyday trucking life…improving trucker safety, efficiency and saving transportation companies…a new mobile app [Jan. 2019] helps truckers find safe and close-by parking spaces via smart phone, in-cab information systems and the DOT 511 platform.” trucks.com: “Zero-emission (ZE) truck and bus models are on the verge of a major surge in the United States and Canada. Among the fastest-growing vehic...
Jun 17, 2020•55 min
The buzz: Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member Michael Anissimov says, “Transhumanists advocate the improvement of human capacities through advanced technology. Not just…in gadgets you get from Best Buy, but technology in the grander sense of strategies for eliminating disease, providing cheap but high-quality products to the world’s poorest, improving quality of life and social interconnectedness…Technology we don’t notice because it’s blended in with the fabric of the world, bu...
Jun 10, 2020•56 min
The buzz: Ripped from the headlines. WebMD.com: “Contact tracing is essentially detective work.“… “One of the oldest public health tactics, dating back centuries.” CNN.com: …public health staff work with a patient to help them recall everyone with whom they have had close contact during the timeframe while they may have been infectious. To protect patient privacy, contacts are only informed that they may have been exposed to a patient with the infection…not the identity of the patient… [CDC) . Z...
Jun 03, 2020•55 min
The Buzz: “The Factory of the Future…Perhaps manufacturing will at last be able to leave behind the public impressions of labor-intensive, dirty and dangerous worksites…There is only one characteristic of the Factory of the Future that is essential: A creative mindset for problem-solving and out-of-the-box thinking is key to embracing new technologies.” (industryweek.com) So many questions! What will future factory jobs look like – only programmers, AI experts and supervisors in Silicon Valley a...
May 27, 2020•54 min
The Buzz: “For better and for worse, robots will alter humans’ capacity for altruism, love, and friendship…‘hybrid systems’—where people and robots interact socially—the right kind of AI can improve the way humans relate to one another” (theatlantic.com). “The internet acts like a kind of digital-fuelled alcohol, freeing us to say things to strangers that we would never dare to say if we met them” (bbc.com). “Being a good online citizen is more than being a safe Internet user—it’s about being re...
May 20, 2020•54 min
The buzz: “Pet adoptions are way up amid coronavirus crisis, even with shelters closed to public” (USA TODAY). “Like everyone else forced to improvise in the face of an unprecedented crisis, America's animal shelters are coming up with creative ways to stay open, so they can continue pairing people and pets. Americans are rushing, well, not to their local shelters but to their phones and laptops to check out available pets, to donate money and supplies, to share the word on social media about re...
May 13, 2020•52 min
The buzz: “Even incubators/accelerators [in India] that have been around for years, and have “processed” 50+ startups, usually don't have even one startup that has achieved impressive revenues/valuations” (Source). 90% of startups fail. Doomed from the start? Likely if they work with accelerators, which invest low seed capital in multiple startups for 12-week mentoring, expecting most to flop when Demo Day investors say No. If you’re a wannabe entrepreneur or a serial entrepreneur with your eye ...
May 06, 2020•54 min
The buzz X2: “Humans have been co-evolving with their technologies since the dawn of prehistory…. Coping with this new means liberating ourselves from such categories as ‘human,’ ‘technological,’ and ‘natural’ to embrace a new techno-human relationship” (Allenby & Sarewitz). “Growing up I always considered the interaction of humanity and technology presented in the original Star Trek series as a fairly accurate representation of the way things would someday go. Then came the Next Generation’s Bo...
Apr 29, 2020•53 min
The buzz: “The Factory of the Future has an evolving definition…even different names…Smart Manufacturing, Industry 4.0 or the Digital Enterprise…Perhaps manufacturing will at last be able to leave behind the public impressions of labor-intensive, dirty and dangerous worksites…Only one characteristic of the Factory of the Future that is essential: A creative mindset for problem-solving and out-of-the-box thinking is key to embracing new technologies…Stubborn adherence to traditional processes…wil...
Apr 22, 2020•53 min
The buzz: Ripped from the headlines. “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret” (NY Times 12/18): “Dozens of companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds. They say it’s anonymous, but the data shows how personal it is…One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour…” And April 3, 2020: “Google is publicly releasing the data it's already collecting about peopl...
Apr 15, 2020•53 min
The Buzz: “Entertainment is ultimately an attention business, and the competition for attention has never been fiercer with new entrants from tech firms and non-media brands jumping into content production … With the explosion in content, consumers today are often overwhelmed when choosing content to watch.” Apple unveiled star-studded content slate for its TV+ streaming service. Walmart is reportedly developing Vudu-branded streaming original content. Quibi, mobile-first short-form video conten...
Apr 08, 2020•53 min
