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July 2010
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Silicon Valley may become Graphene Gulch

Some day you may see a workman replacing a location sign designating Silicon Valley. In its place the new sign could read Nanotube Valley, or maybe Graphene Gulch. That is improbable at best, but could be more accurate. Researchers are anticipating the day when it will be impossible to further miniaturize [...]

Innovate or miss the recovery

Innovation is garnering attention in the business media, but like crop storage in a grainery it has no value until somebody buys it. The companies are numerous that have come up with great ideas only to see somebody else turn them into business breakthroughs. Equally numerous are companies that are best described as arid innovation deserts. [...]

Clues to future corporate success

The first imperative is to deliberately, consciously wean the organization from excessive control, the methods most executives learned and practice in their profession. The late Peter Drucker explained, “Because the modern organization consists of knowledge specialists, it has to be an organization of equals, of colleagues and associates. No knowledge ranks higher than another; each [...]

Accurate forecast for 2010

Forler Massnick

It is time for the annual rite of attempts to forecast what will happen in the new year. In his book Rethinking the Corporation, Forler Massnick quotes Winston Churchill’s complaint, “The future is one damn thing after another.” Peter Drucker put an academic spin on it, “”Forecasting is not a respectable human activity and [...]

Checklist for science and technology advances

Ray Kurzweil

Executives anxious about bridging the gap between business as usual and exponential advances in science and technology have been given a checklist for their attention. These are the technologies recommended by the experts: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Nanotechnology, Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Medicine and Human-Machine Interfaces, Networks & Computing Systems, and Energy & Environmental Systems.

These [...]

Exciting glimpse of the future

Futurist and scientist/inventor Ray Kurzweil welcomes the new year with predictions of how technology will change humanity by 2020. Solar power on steroids, longer lives, the chance to get rid of obesity once and for all, and portable computing devices that start becoming part of your body rather than being held in your hand are among [...]

The Internet is a surrogate sales person

It is not surprising that corporations are struggling with how to budget for and use the Internet as a marketing tool and interface with customers. After all the Internet is a surrogate for sales people, and sales people are a surrogate for the image and reputation of the legal entity called a corporation.

Until accountants figure out [...]

Marketers face a new conundrum

Google Goggles

While marketing executives continue to struggle with what to do about Web 2.0, they face a possible new conundrum just announced by Google. An industry observer made this comment, “This is certainly a rebuke to anyone who believes that Google is through innovating.”

The comment was prompted by Google’s announcement of these developments: 1) the [...]

Today’s certainties become tomorrow’s absurdities

In an age in which the average tenure of CEOs has shrunk to about five years, and theories about how to manage successfully through economic turmoil have the lifespan of a tsetse fly, it is interesting to reflect on the amazingly prophetic writings of Peter Drucker who died nearly four years ago at the age of [...]

Artificial intelligence breakthrough

Professor Leon Chua

There is a new word lurking in the arcane language of electronics that may describe a breakthrough in the science of artificial intelligence. It is “memristor”.The more familiar elements of electronic circuits are resistors, capacitors and inductors. An electronics engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, Leon Chua, was convinced there was a [...]