Monthly Archives: September 2012

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He threw out four of them, aiming at engineers who attended his keynote at DESIGN East here. The grenades took the form of questions, the equivalent of Zen master koans for the embedded community. Here are a few to ponder:

For instance, all but 11 percent of people aged 15-24 will be in developing markets in Asia and Africa in the next decade. This will have impact on where people buy your products, he told several hundred engineers here.

Google is harnessing the smartphone generation, hiring known video game experts. They figured out someone who is a guild leader in World of Warcraft has similar characteristics of a good software group leader managing a global team, Walsh said.

Chinas white goods maker Haier is an example of the new, smart OEM, said Walsh. Responding to support calls from remote villages who used its washing machines to clean potatoes, it created new modes for its productslike butter churning.

Walsh also held up shanzai, Chinas cottage industry of no-name cellphone cloners for their growing innovation and competence. Some now make $100 smartphones that include TV tuners and can take two SIM cards.

Their aggressive approach will be a juggernaut that any traditional R&D company will find it difficult to keep up with, he said.

Walsh challenged the conventional notion products are made in developing countries and sold in developed ones. For example, he noted Turkey is the fifth largest market for Facebook and tends to be a consumer of the most expensive smartphones.

At the same time, 3-D printing holds the potential to disrupt supply chains, calling it an industrial re-revolution or additive manufacturing. 3-D printing will change the way we think about manufacturing--the means of production are now in the hands of everyday people, he said.

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DESIGN East: Futurist tells engineers to embrace change

Henry Ford once said: If I asked consumers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Sheryl Connelly drew a connection to Ford and how the car company that bears his name approaches doing business in the future, using the quote to reflect on the creativity and imagination to create automobiles, yet defying what the public thinks it wants.

It's incumbent to try and imagine a future that is unimaginable, Connelly said.

Connelly reflected on the worldwide trends she sees as a futurist for Ford Motor Co. at a luncheon Monday with the Livonia Public Schools Foundation at St. Mary's Cultural and Banquet Center.

The event was a benefit for the LPS Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides financial support to Livonia Public Schools for innovative programs and services.

Connelly said officials at businesses can study market sales time and time again, yet the difficulty in predicting world events presents unimaginable challenges to firms. For innovations, people need to look for wild cards, expect the unexpected, and learn to build products that are practical and follow trends. Prepare for all scenarios, she said. You have to write a story with great optimism, but if you do that, you also have to write one of great collapse, Connelly said.

Global trends are crucial, including environmental, economic and political ones, Connelly said. Population and demographic shifts are trends that need to be examined and studied, Connelly said.

Connelly showed a map reflecting population growth. The borders of countries and continents experiencing larger growth were expanded, while others with small growth shrunk.

U.S., Canada populations shrinking

The map showed a smaller United States and an even smaller Canada, while Asia and the Middle East appeared much larger. The growth appears in nations that are least able to handle it, Connelly said.

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Ford futurist:

Henry Ford once said: If I asked consumers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Sheryl Connelly drew a connection to Ford and how the car company that bears his name approaches doing business in the future, using the quote to reflect on the creativity and imagination to create automobiles, yet defying what the public thinks it wants.

It's incumbent to try and imagine a future that is unimaginable, Connelly said.

Connelly reflected on the worldwide trends she sees as a futurist for Ford Motor Co. at a luncheon Monday with the Livonia Public Schools Foundation at St. Mary's Cultural and Banquet Center.

The event was a benefit for the LPS Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides financial support to Livonia Public Schools for innovative programs and services.

Connelly said officials at businesses can study market sales time and time again, yet the difficulty in predicting world events presents unimaginable challenges to firms. For innovations, people need to look for wild cards, expect the unexpected, and learn to build products that are practical and follow trends. Prepare for all scenarios, she said. You have to write a story with great optimism, but if you do that, you also have to write one of great collapse, Connelly said.

Global trends are crucial, including environmental, economic and political ones, Connelly said. Population and demographic shifts are trends that need to be examined and studied, Connelly said.

Connelly showed a map reflecting population growth. The borders of countries and continents experiencing larger growth were expanded, while others with small growth shrunk.

U.S., Canada populations shrinking

The map showed a smaller United States and an even smaller Canada, while Asia and the Middle East appeared much larger. The growth appears in nations that are least able to handle it, Connelly said.

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Ford futurist: ‘Imagine a future that is unimaginable'

This summer it was announced that the WELL, a revolutionary online community founded nearly 30 years ago, had been put up for sale by its current owner, web magazine Salon. If no buyer emerges, this historic online watering hole will likely have to close up shop. It would mark the end of an erabut no matter what happens, the WELLs legacy will continue to live on all around us, in the rollicking conversations we enjoy every day on social networks and comment threads.

In that regard, the WELL is just one of many world-bending triumphs in the long, strange career of its cofounder, Stewart Brand. A Merry Prankster in the early 1960s, Brand went on to found the Whole Earth Catalog, a bible for both the back-to-the-land movement and the first computer hackers. Indeed, the community that sprang up around the catalog was what formed the seed of the WELL (an acronym of Whole Earth Lectronic Link), an early BBS that became an Internet service provider at the dawn of the web.

In addition to his many entrepreneurial ventures, Brand has also been a vocal visionary on technology and its future, famously coining the phrase Information wants to be free (though it also wants to be expensive, he immediately added in a far less-quoted caveat). Hes written extensively and perceptively about alternative energy, the environment, and bioengineering. Today Brand heads the Long Now Foundation, a group devoted to thinking about what humanity and Earth will look like in 10,000 years.

As part of our 20th-anniversary Icons series, we sent Kevin Kellya longtime writer and editor for Wired as well as an early member of the WELL and a former contributor to the Whole Earth Catalogto chat with Brand about the legacy of his online community and the challenges of trying to peer into the future.

Kevin Kelly: There was an event in San Francisco in 1968 that has come to be called the mother of all demoswhen Stanfords Doug Engelbart showed off a computer with a mouse and graphical interface. You were there. What significance did that event have for you?

Stewart Brand: It made me perpetually impatient. I saw a bunch of things demonstrated that clearly worked, and I wanted some right now, please! That demo gave a really accurate look at what was coming and made it seem so easy. But decades would go by, and it just kept not coming.

Kelly: Does that give you pause that maybe all kinds of things that look to be around the corner todaydrones, magic glasses, self-driving carsare just premature promises?

Brand: The lesson was that this is exponential technology. I dont mean that just in terms of power or capacitydriven by Moores lawbut also in that it starts out slow as consumers find ways to put it to use.

Kelly: Another harbinger of the digital age is on the ropes right now. In June, Salon announced it was selling the WELL, which you cofounded. How would you describe the WELL?

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Futurist Stewart Brand Wants to Revive Extinct Species

Illustration by David Plunkert

The Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, has proven a formidable weapon for the U.S. military, quietly lurking in the sky and then zipping in to loose a missile on enemy targets. Its effectiveness raises an important question: When will I have a robotic plane of my own buzzing about that I might summon down to teach a lesson to some of the many deeply annoying people who cross my path? A mild Taser zap or even just a spitball would be fine.

Im very likely out of luck on this score, due to the bizarre fact that neither Taser zaps nor spitballs share the constitutional protection afforded bullets. So Ill just have to find other ways to make use of the tiny airborne drone that will almost certainly be at my beck and call in the not-too-distant future.

In fact, Im tempted to head over to a Brookstone right now and pick up a Parrot AR.Drone Quadricoptera $300, four-rotored, self-stabilizing microaircraft with two video cameras that I can send 150 feet up and down my street to hover outside homes and put my neighbors on notice that their transgressions will no longer go unrecorded. That could keep me occupied until I can afford the more sophisticated $10,000 swinglet cam by senseFly, which can fly 10 miles, or the $20,000 Draganflyer X4-P, which can carry a 1.5-pound payloadusually a high-end camerafor about 15 minutes.

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With a winged camera to beam images to me, Id also be able to effortlessly inspect my gutters, track my occasionally escaped dog, gauge the lines at the drive-through window, or scope out a dark parking lot before making my way to my car.

But Ill probably hold out on buying a microdrone, because even the Draganflyer is a mere toy compared with what dozens of engineering teams at universities and companies around the world are hard at work on: miniature, autonomous, inexpensive aircraft that you or I could send flying miles to perform any of a wide range of tasks.

Here Come the Flying Tacos

I, for one, cant see what could possibly be wrong with providing personal air-force capabilities to the masses. But if were going to get truly interesting things done with our drones, well need them to fly farther, higher, and longer, as well as to carry more, and do it with much more sophisticated control. All thats in the works, according to Mary Missy Cummings, a former F/A-18 fighter pilot who is an MIT aeronautics professor focusing on human interfaces for UAVs. This is the best thing to happen to aviation since the space race, she says. Were talking about a technology with a low cost of entry that anyone with a cell phone can use.

The new field is engaging students around the world, Cummings adds, and is engendering some creative ideas. At the top of her wish list: a personal drone to shadow her 3-year-old daughter when shes old enough to walk to school. A hobbyist has reportedly used a drone to track cattle (apparently taking up the slack left by the EPA, which contrary to widespread reports, is not sending drones to spy on farms throughout the Midwest). And one group of students, Cummings says, is drawing up plans for a drone-based taco delivery service.

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Impatient Futurist: Rise of the (Friendly) Drones | DISCOVER Magazine