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 …

In a recent television interview I touched on some points that regular readers will realize have been forecasts I have made in this column over the past couple of years. Over a short but wide ranging interview with Chicago Fox News Anchor Bob Sirott  I touched on forecasts previously made about thrift being the new cool,  the scarring of the consumer, a lack of inflation, high unemployment and the future of e-books.

It is my job as a futurist to provoke you to think about the future and to be as accurate as possible with …

The recent announcement from Amazon that in the past three months they had sold more e-books for their Kindle reader than hardcover books is significant.  It confirms that 2010 will be the year of lift off for e-books.  Amazon said that it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there are no Kindle editions.

This made me want to go back to past forecasts I have made about e-books to see how accurate they were.  As long time readers know, I have been forecasting the dramatic increase in e-books for four years.  In June of …

As a futurist I often feel as though I live in a déjà- vu world. I write about something and then months or years later it occurs or becomes something that is on the minds of a lot of people.

This is the first of what may be occasional columns from years past written here that, for one reason or another, are relevant to what is currently going on in the world.  As a futurist I try to write “ahead of the curve” or to take a “future look at today”. Sometimes old columns resonate today.  This is one of …