The just completed World Cup was an amazing event.  Along with the Olympics it is the truly global sporting event.  I would venture to say that in the 32 countries that had teams in the Cup the ratings and awareness of the games was much greater than for the Olympics.  In those countries, hundreds and thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of people came together in public places to watch their teams, cheering or moaning as one.

I realized that eight years ago, in the early months of this blog, I had written a column about the 2006 World …

Thousands of crumbling bridges, millions of gaping potholes, billions of dropped calls, limited bandwidth, a fragile electric grid, antiquated nuclear power plants, water and sewer systems that are decrepit and dangerous.  This is not the foundation for another “American Century”.  It is the disaster of the infrastructure in the United States half way through the second decade of the century.

In the last column here, I referenced numerous dialogues I had from 2008-2011 as I gave speeches all across this country.  In the dark months and years of the Great Recession I was consistently asked the question “How can …

What might the future of the Internet be?  What can it be?  How empowering can it be for Capitalism and Democracy in the 21^st century? What must we do to maximize the positive possibilities the Internet provides humanity as we stand at the fork in the road Buckminster Fuller foresaw decades ago: – Utopia or Oblivion?

As a futurist this is the perspective from which  I think about the current issues of “net neutrality” or the “open net”.  The current debate on Net Neutrality is now center stage due to a court ruling forcing the FCC to suggest a new doctrine.  …

Last November, I wrote a column here about the future of cable television.  In that column from last November I forecast:

“Cable television subscriptions will experience noticeable percentage declines in the next three to five years.”

Last week it was announced that for the first time in history paid television subscriptions dropped 216,000 with cable taking the greatest hit.

The conventional wisdom of course is that this is due to the bad economic conditions of today.  Of course that is a factor, but the times have been bad for the past two years.  The new dynamic is what I touched upon …