San Diego Union-Tribune It’s a presidential election year. The economy is limping along. Real estate and the job market are terrible. Graduates are despondent. The big innovations that changed the world over the past several decades are behind us. Sound familiar? Welcome to America in 1980. Not a soul imagined then that technology would ignite…
A recent AP story opens with a sobering line: “The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.” Opportunities are weak, the article notes, and those with ‘soft’ degrees are having the most trouble. Hardly news to the Millennial generation. And it’s no comfort that their parents (count me amongst…
You can imagine an episode of The Office in which Michael Scott has to tell warehouse supervisor Darrell that he’s being replaced by a squat, turtle-like orange robot. In that world, odds are it would end with the robot carrying Michael out the door holding his pink slip, and Darrell promoted. In the real world, people will…
So I find myself in a refurbished Cold War bunker just north of Philadelphia where the future of the long-haul electric business is on full display. Literally. Massive data flows are collected, analyzed, modeled, forecast and presented on displays the size of several Imax screens.
Yelp’s [NYSE:YELP] successful IPO this past Friday was a modern validation of an age-old economic precept. People migrate to better and cheaper ways to do things they like to do. People like shopping and going to restaurants. And technology drives those trends. Social media is the new Mega Mall, the most effective way for retail…
Can we talk about oil? Tom Friedman now evinces excitement about his discovery of the emergence of America as “a major oil and gas producer.” (See his Sunday New York Times column.) No kidding. He was, he says, tantalized by a tongue-in-cheek idea; the U.S. could join OPEC. Some folks are late to the party. …
