Posted by Dr. James Canton on June 8, 2011 under Uncategorized | 
The most interesting thing about the U2 concert last night in Oakland was not Bono’s call to action for human rights in Burma or his crazy robust voice banging out all the songs we love. It was the real time (maybe) feed from space the last Endeavor space station of our Astronaut beaming in reminding us that it takes only one of us to with imagination to change the world for the better.
Very cool reminder, from space that tech innovations transform the our world and will transform the future.
So much of the world has been made better with technology innovation and we are only in the middle ages where computers, nano, neuro, biotech have just been invented minutes ago in the long history of civilization.
We must meet the grand challenges of a Sustainable Planet–economic, social, security and environmental sustainability. Especially as were are looking at 9 billion by 2050.
This futurist calls for Planetary Management of food, water, security and energy. We need more Fast Innovation, Innovation Velocity for inventing the next future we will all be living in.
Bono reminded us, and he’s right. The Bay Area helped change the world with innovations like the computer, networks and biotech. Now we need to build on this culture everywhere.
Innovation Velocity means faster tech inventions by individuals, more investments by government and private sector, faster products to empower the next billion people to learn, grow, contribute, collaborate and do business.
How are you creating Innovation Velocity?
One world. One Challenge.
Tags: Apple, business, climate, creativity, education, energy, global, HR, innovation, Internet, iPad, keynotes, leadership, speakers, stategy, success, team building, training, U2, U2 band, vision, web 2.0
Posted by Dr. James Canton on under Uncategorized |
I have been analyzing the future of transaction processing platforms, the history and the future. OK so that is my obsession, what’s next for everything.
So the history of transaction processing was almost eclipsed by the banking sector which did not really understand how tech was disrupting financial services. They still don’t which is OK.
Paypal emerged because the banks missed the e-commerce trend. Credit cards are and were the Trojan horse that was “good enough” for the banks to play and still today control enough of the space though this is changing fast.
Some of the players I have been looking at such as Apollo, Oracle, Amazon, Google, HP, Compass are interesting. But new players using smart method patents that use automatic online analytics and estimators for complex shipping and transactions like Compass and Paid seem more like the nextgen winners like Amazon.
Posted by Dr. James Canton on under Uncategorized |
Apple’s strategy with the cloud is to learn from their customers. No less important is to lay the foundation of interoperability with Apple TV, the Mac, iPad and Mobile Me. Mobile Me is a work in progress but is moving in the right direction.
As a former Apple executive I know that Apple envisions the future by learning from its customers. This is a powerful lesson that more of my clients could benefit from–learning from customers about how they see the future applications of their products.
Apple learns more from putting out products to customers and then mining their experiences. Apple TV is the latest. But the cloud is an attempt to integrate all of the other devices into one platform–an intuitive interoperable platform.
Already users of Apple’s iPad can stream wireless to the TV programs. What’s next the iCar? Yes. So the cloud for Apple is already in play for the next generation, its laying the foundation for the integration of not just devices like the iPhone but the integration of knowledge assets like video, music and data.
Who are you learning about the future from?
Tags: Apple, business, creativity, education, global, HR, innovation, Internet, iPad, keynotes, leadership, speakers, stategy, success, team building, training, vision, web 2.0
Posted by Dr. James Canton on May 25, 2011 under Uncategorized |
Your going to hear more about cloud computing and big data impacting every organization and industry, especially government. This is the next evolution of network applications, mobile transactions and agile software services. The entire idea of information architecture, in a cloud computing future is coming very fast.
I have just given a series of keynotes to Cisco, EMC, IBM, Disney and Digital River. Everyone is embracing a cloud based strategy, why? cost-effectiveness of their IT spend and agility.
Business agility cannot evolve without IT agility. Write once, use everywhere. App’s that can be easily developed, deployed and delivered are the future and the future is now.
Now onto Big Data. I wrote a forecast on my website www.Futureguru.com about the coming Digital Tsunami, the convergence of tech and applications, from media to logistics to health care to personal genomics–an explosion of data–100 exobytes is coming FAST. Are you ready? No one is.
The storage, use, distribution and capture of 100 exobytes is insanely huge. Pardon the Apple pun. Being a former Apple executive is part of my DNA. but Big Data is the use of huge peta and exabytes of data to better serve customers, find value, develop products, feed the planet, protect the environment–you name it.
So our future is the Cloud.
For more see www.Futureguru.com
Tags: business strategy, Cisco, cloud computing, competition, experts, Facebook, Google, Groupon, IBM, information architecture, keynote speaking, keynotes, management, media, Microsoft, networks, presentations, social media, social selling, strategy, web 2.0
Posted by Dr. James Canton on April 23, 2011 under Uncategorized |
The 4 P’s of medicine: Prediction, Personalization, Prevention and Promotion will redefine medicine in the near future over the next 3-10 years–maybe sooner.
Prediction will be possible due to a new era of bioinformatics and personal DNA sequencing and ultimately a new mass epidemiology and genomic public health that’s coming. We will map diseases, geomaps that will tell us who and where people get sick.
We will know more about who gets sick and why, the patterns and maps of predicting disease will reveal this in our lifetimes. Today we have a predictive model to determine 70-80% of illness. Tomorrow 95%.
Personalized medicine, targeted at individuals, using massive supercomputing resources to identify genomic precursors and biotags that signal disease is next. From fMRI’s to Health Profiling is coming. Jobs, insurance, dating, marriage, crime and sports will be influenced in nefarious ways not all ethically hard to imagine–think You are your DNA.
Prevention will be possible when we have mastered the medical knowledge engineering of prediction–genomic, behavioral, neural, biological etc. We will know before we can predict, as we do now with certain Cancers and other diseases. Amazing how little people can know but choose not to.
I was giving a keynote on the future of medicine to an affluent group of business leaders in Washington DC and less then 20% of the audience were talking statins to prevent heart disease. Disturbing given the knowledge that statins reduce the risk of heart disease and can even retard and prevent heart disease by 30-50%.
Promoting healthy behaviors as well as prevention and personalized medical treatments is the fourth force. A society that wants to live long and prosper must promote healthy policies and practices. Promotion will become a national security issue if your society is depopulating like Italy or Japan.
Business can do much to tie jobs, incentives, bonuses and advancement to health. Enhance your health and advance your career. A new work ethic may be born.
The whole idea of health enhancement, the by product of these four forces that will shape the future of medicine is that individuals may choose to go beyond their limitations of age, health and even what it is to be human in normal society. Vast new choices to enhance ones intelligence or stamina will be offered in the near future. Think legal drugs that refresh your memory–Viagra for the Mind and enable your to access entirely new parts of your brain or your networked brain–in the Cloud.
Oh the places we could go…
Stay Tuned
Tags: cost effective health care, enhancement, ethics, future, Google, healing, health care, Internet, keynotes, management, medicine, medicine and the future. future of health, personalized medicine, prediction, presentations, prevention, promotion, singularity, trends
Posted by Dr. James Canton on under Uncategorized |
Recently I gave back to back keynote presentations to Disney, Cisco and soon IBM. Cloud computing was on the agenda. A few things to help you think strategy about the Cloud. For more on this see my website and on the home page I have a Future of Cloud Computing thought leadership article for you at www.Globalfuturist.com
1. Consider a rationale and low impact transition strategy from your legacy infrastructure to the Cloud.
2. You have to be clear about the ROI on Cloud, why are you embracing this now/ What is the ROI?
3. I support Cloud Strategies but they must support and be driven by sound business strategy–not the other way around.
4. Keep in mind that a Cloud strategy should also support or better enable where you are going–how will the Cloud drive future value for customers, employees etc. You got to have a clear mission that validates the time, cost and resources.
5. The Cloud must support a mobile strategy which is essential to your future.
6. The Cloud must support a rich social media platform.
7. The Cloud must support security in the Cloud.
Get these right and you will be on your way to having a viable and rational Cloud strategy.
Stay Tuned
Tags: business strategy, Cisco, cloud computing, competition, experts, Facebook, Google, IBM, keynote speaking, management, media, Microsoft, networks, presentations, social media, strategy, web 2.0
Posted by Dr. James Canton on under Uncategorized |
Neuroscience is in its infancy. We are just trying to figure out where in the brain key functions, behaviors, emotions and needs are located.
Great progress has been made but much more R&D will be required to gain a objective map of the brain.
One thing to beware of is the intersection of neuroscience and privacy. Wireless fMRI, brain scanners if you will could potentially used to determine truth, honesty or even authenticity about belief or loyalty. Could this be a frightful 1984 scenario finally to come true? No doubt unless we are watching.
Neuroscience more neuromarketing will be used to not just understand and target the brain but to manufacture desire–the ultimate end game of business. This is beyond what science can do today unless you think you live in the Matrix now or advertising has already got you barking out loud.
I say that neuroscience will heal, fix and transform the aging brain, restore memories and manufacture desire to help sell more stuff to consumers. All things are possible in the Extreme Future..
In my last book I penned a scenario of the use and misuse of neurotechnology. Funny thing is like atomic energy, you cannot just have the good without the bad.
So the future of NeuroSci is also about learning about our minds, not just the biology of the brain. We will learn not just from scans but from simulations and learning how to improve and enhance learning in the 2st century.
Stay tuned
Tags: advertising, brands, business strategy, Facebook, Google, Groupon, Internet, management, marketing, neurmarketing, neuroscience, online, science, strategy, web, web 2.0
Posted by Dr. James Canton on under Uncategorized |
As the Arab Spring continues the real interesting back story is social media. If technology is the artifact of globalization and modernity then governments who are attempting to repress freedom should beware. Technology is a enabler of revolutions. Always has and always will.
This time the power to connect people, with real time communications is transformational as we have seen in the Middle East and North Africa. This is the beginning.
Social media like Twitter and Facebook are powerful social networking tools that combined with the 5 Billion cell phones on the planet are creating a new world wide broadcast channel for person to person communications. The organizers of the Arab Spring in now five nations in this region are using social media to connect, communicate and enable their revolutions.
Actual dates were published by organizers in Egypt and Libya calling for protests and organization. A mobile map with timelines was published via Twitter. This is a fundamental shift in the use of technology to influence even change the power structures of society.
The larger and perhaps amazing story is I think about the self-organizing systems that are playing out in the Arab Spring phenomena. As more nations go into turmoil and driven by the large majority of under 25 year old’s screaming for social change, the more we may see the workings of emergent systems that are connected, aligned and moving together. Some with their own mind.
Emergent self-organizing smart systems are new forms of technology enabled global networks that will transform the planet–some dark some light. Is this the Hive Mind at work? Or a quantum type of new organization mind at work evolving to meet the social needs of its inventors?
Stay tuned
Self organizing smart systems, social and political just like emerging computer networks have a collective unconscious Hive Mind at work. Smart Systems, intelligent evolving organizations of people, aligned around a similar ideology, across in this case nations in the Arab Spring Revolution are demonstrating via social networks like Twitter a new form of order and community. 
Tags: Apple, Arab Spring, blog, cell phone, computer, emergence, emergent systems, Facebook, forecasts, freedom, Google, hive minds, Internet, management, Microsoft, Middle East, military, mobile, networking, North Africa, organization, social media, strategy, sustainable, Terrorism, trends, Twitter, War
Posted by Dr. James Canton on February 14, 2011 under Uncategorized |
No one predicted before Egypt the revolution that has changed the government but of more interest, the emergence of what I call the NeuroMind. This is the collective fusion of minds, the people that changed the government and created an alternative to the Mubarak government
The NeuroMind, is the collective unconscious hive mind that united, organized and communicated beyond the borders of normal cognition. There is something very different going on here–a Network Effect influenced by the mass neuroscience of minds that we need to understand. This is not business as usual.
Every government in the Middle East and Africa should take notice about this NeuroMind changing the political dynamic in their country. Every leader is questioning what this phenomena is about and how to understand if this NeuroMind is coming to visit them–Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine…governments beware.
The Network Effect, the accelerating even evolutionary shift in power maybe neurological in nature, not just political. In a future world that is coming where over 8 billion are connected by wireless the NeuroMind will emerge as a social force of change.
Beware the NeuroMind
Tags: change, democracy, Egypt, freedom, globalization, Internet, Islam, Middle East, political change, social change, Twitter
Posted by Dr. James Canton on January 27, 2011 under Uncategorized |
So much talk about innovation. Innovations, from tech innovation to systems, culture and process all can make a a huge difference in a company or organization. But why is innovating so hard?
This is because we don’t know where it begins–where innovation is born is in the mind.
The innovation is about Inventing Something New, a fresh product, service, solution or some new way to bring value to a customer.
Innovation starts within the mind of the person. The Innovators Mindset is about the ways of thinking that cause innovation to be born.
These Innovative Mindsets are:
No Rules
Fiercely Experiment
Be Future Smart
Start Big
Take No No’s
Simulate
Create a Compelling Aha Vision
Innovation is about the mindset of open possibility. Real innovators, had an idea, a vision before they had a thing. Ted Turner, CNN. Apple’s Steve Jobs. Craig Venter mapping the Human Genome. Crick and Watson on DNA and Ratan Tata’s Nano car. They all had a vision of what what was possible and few supporters at first.
Think Big
Tags: business, creativity, education, global, HR, innovation, Internet, keynotes, leadership, speakers, stategy, success, team building, training, vision, web 2.0
