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  • Futurist Friday: Stories for a Brighter Future

    Yesterday I ran over and picked up my copy of the new science fiction anthology Hieroglyph from the independent bookstore Politics & Prose. (Short run–it’s only about a mile from my house.)Hieroglyph was inspired by a …
  • Museum Hack: We Love People Who Don’t Like Museums

    The peer-to-peer economy is great at uncovering unmet consumer demand and unused aspects of institutional resources. For this reason, I recently tracked down a young entrepreneur who has found, and filled, an empty niche in the ecology of …
  • You Go First

    “We’re right on the edge but we need a little push  Dancing on the tightrope wearing it thin  Instead of closing our eyes and jumping in”  –Jessica Andrews  Sometime change is painful. Very painful. Giving up …
  • Navigating the Social Media Morass

    What do Jelly, Nextt, Spayce, Pheed, Sulia, Sharebloc, Bubblews and Learni.sthave in common? They’re all new social media sites, most having launched within the last year. It seems like every week a new service (or two, or three) bursts …
  • Won’t you be my neighbor?

    By the time this post goes up, session submission for AAM 2015 will have closed. I’ve had a hard time keeping up with all the great proposals streaming into the site and look forward to seeing how many match topics on my wish list. You …
  • Update on Philanthropy

    One of the topics we examined in TrendsWatch 2013 was the “Changing Face of Giving.” Though the economy, and giving overall, continues to rebound, there’s wide agreement that we aren’t going to return to the world that existed pre-2008. We …
  • Update on the 2014 Trends: Robots!!!!

    Previous mid-year updates on social entrepreneurship, big data and the sharing economy were pretty text heavy. As a bit of relief from all that reading, I’m going to go with very short text this week, and give the bulk of the update via …
  • Thursday Update: When does the Crowd become a Mob?

    I’ve been posting  midyear updates on the 2014 trends, which got me thinking about the previous issues of our forecast. The trends CFM wrote about in TrendsWatch 2012 and 2013 are still important forces of change–If any had …
  • Keeping Up with the 2014 Trends: What’s Mine is Yours

    This is the third summer update on TrendsWatch 2014: you can catch up recent developments in Social Entrepreneurship and Big Data in previous posts. Overall Arc of the Trend Up, rapidly, with notable speed bumps. Image from Center for …
  • Monday Musing: Data Epiphanies

    Today’s musing is sparked by an article in Forbes about a taxi company in Stockholm that devised a brilliant way to link the data generated by all its rides with other geospatial data to create “Taxi Trails”: an app that …

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