The Golden Opportunities trend will continue to rapidly grow, particularly as merger/acquisition and consolidation rates increase as a result of cheap money. In addition, as the global economy slows, financially strapped enterprises will be gobbled up by stronger competition. Again, in an increasingly stressful business climate, survival strategies will trump innovation by focusing on the present while sacrificing emerging trend opportunities....
Ready To Explode
Look at any meaningful metric to determine America’s and much of the Western World’s economic, physical, cultural and moral health. In fact, all those indicators are in sharp decline. Tensions are high and the trajectory is not positive. As we wrote two years ago in “Empire America is fading fast” (Trends Journal, Fall 2013), “When a critical mass of human...
Trend Forecast
As 2016 dawns, the factors are clear: The rise of the Black Lives Matter protest movement, spontaneous campus protests over race issues, the sharp increase in far-right movements in Europe in the wake of the refugee crisis, the growing likelihood that more and more voters worldwide vote against a candidate rather for other candidates, and many other indicators suggest a...
Breeding Robots
In 2016, robots become mainstream. Moreover, they begin breeding, transforming many aspects of daily life. Robots now are doing hundreds of human chores, from monitoring an elderly shut-in’s mood swings to searching for lost hikers. In the months ahead, we’ll become even more aware of their presence — and abilities — as more tasks, both simple and complex, become automated. The new...
Trend Forecast
The synergy of robotics and artificial intelligence is leading to a near-term future in which robots assume an accelerating number of humans’ rote tasks. But we already are confronting the reality that robots can learn and communicate faster and more efficiently than humans can. This is leading us to a future in which robots not only are self-aware, but also are able to...
The Personalized City
A recent visitor to Venice Beach, California, was parking his car when he was approached by a young man who handed him a business card. The card was for a service that would park someone’s car to spare them the trouble and time of prowling the streets for a space, then deliver the car to the driver when the driver...
Trend Forecast
In 2016, the trend of cities to accommodate the young, old, needy and time-pressed will create even more new businesses and new markets as part of an urban renaissance throughout the developed world, particularly in the US. But new stresses and conflicts will be created as new waves of migrants — including Americans — are shuffled to places outside of...
Crusades 2000 could destroy us
It’s official. The West has launched Crusades 2000. If the first nine were not enough to satisfy the bloodthirsty and fanatical, the 10th Crusade will deliver death, mayhem and massacre on a global scale that only ruling presidents, prime ministers, chancellors, fellow politicians, the presstitute media and a sick-minded public could get off on. Go back to 2001. Just days...
Trend Forecast
Following terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and Brussels closing down for several days during a high-terror alert, anti-Islam/anti-Muslim sentiments not only have gained strength across Europe, but more European nations will join the US in its Crusade to “degrade,” “destroy” and “eradicate” the Islamic State “cancer” in the Middle East and Africa. On the US home front, in...