Four Futures: One Humanity
This post looks at a few of my favorite futurists and a book I recently found intriguing that presented four visions of the future.
The World is Bubbly: Capital, Cities, and Creative People
I’m concerned that as cities develop policies to become more attractive to the creative class, that they sow the seeds of their own demise by attracting excess real estate capital.
Digital Disruption in the Film Industry – Gains and Losses – Part 2: Non-Linear Editing
In 1999, The Matrix (1999) won 4 Oscars with the Avid, a non-linear video editing computer system, that launched a revolution in the production of audio-visual materials. A new years before, James Cameron edited much of Titanic (1997) himself with an Avid application on a computer at his house. This post returns to the theme […]
GLOBAL INNOVATION INDEX
The Global Innovation Index (GII) signifies the key role of innovation in economic growth, competitiveness, and sustainability. Co-published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the GII attempts to identify and measure key innovation drivers that assist countries in developing policies to increase employment, improve productivity, and support long-term output growth. […]
Not Like 1984: GUI and the Apple Mac
In January of 1984, during the Super Bowl, America’s most popular sporting event, Apple announced the release of the Macintosh computer. It was with a commercial that was shown only once, causing a stir, and gaining millions of dollars in free publicity afterward. The TV ad was produced by Ridley Scott whose credits at the […]
Xanadu to World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee, a British citizen and a software consultant at CERN, or Centre European pour la Recherche Nucleaire developed what came to be known as the World Wide Web (WWW). Located in Switzerland, CERN was Europe’s largest nuclear research institute, although the name was changed to European Laboratory for Particle Physics to avoid the stigma […]
The NSFNET is the Internet
An important intermediary in the transition of the military’s ARPANET into the commercial Internet was the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET. The NSFNET adopted TCP/IP and required all connecting nodes to use them as well compliant network technology, mainly built by a small California startup company called Cisco. With government funding for advanced scientific and military […]
The MAD Origins of the Computer Age
It was the “missile gap” that would impregnate Silicon Valley with the purpose and capital to grow to its famed stature as the center of computer innovation in the world. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, when Robert S. McNamara was Secretary of Defense, the US undertook an enormous military buildup, with the intercontinental missile […]
keep looking »