This week at the Consumer Electronics Show there are hundreds of companies touting new gadgets that are “revolutionary” “innovative” “at the cutting edge” and “totally cool”.  I will leave the descriptions of all these to the mainstream media as they already excessively cover this convention.  Instead I will give you some view on the larger trends that are clear.

Connectivity

We are rapidly moving to total connectedness. Whether you are in the office, in the home, on the road, or anywhere in the world you can be connected to information, data and billions of people.    Bill Gates spoke of the fact that …

In the post below, we looked at reasons why coffee and caffeine might have become the ‘drug’ of the current decade.  In our ‘always on’ culture, the need for a stimulating pick me up is clear.  I would now like to explore the other aspects of this new coffee culture, as it is the manifestation of a number of social trends and cultural dynamics that are fundamentally changing our society.

Starbucks [for this post I will use them, the biggest brand, as the representation of all the new wave of coffee houses] is often thought to be brilliant because they …

This week in New York I attended the OMMA Conference, produced by Media Post.  The acronym stands for On-line Media, Marketing & Advertising.  Basically this was a gathering of those who work in the Internet space and focus on delivering marketing messages to people.  The title of the conference was “The Internet:  Back on Speed”, which of course references the fact that we are now in the Internet 2.0 stage of development when broadband and video have started to deliver the promise of the Internet that was first glimpsed in the late 1990s before the bubble burst on …

The first post I made here was about the significance of the MIT Media Lab and the fact that its founder, Nicholas Negroponte was taking a leave of absence to launch the noble effort of supplying $100 laptops to children in the Third World.  In the six months since that post, the $100 laptop has moved toward becoming a reality.  It has also started to affect the computer marketplace in beneficial ways.

Last month the prototype of the $100 laptop had its public unveiling at a computing conference. It is about the size of a hardback book, has an …