What’s coming — and what does it take to be ready for the future?
There is a big convergence going on among social media platforms. . . . (read more)
The decline in traffic on cellular phone networks is only the latest indication of the decline in phone usage. Messaging in all its forms is slowly replacing phone calls for moment-to-moment person-to-person communication. . . . (read more)
The NFT bubble has burst. . . . (read more)
The new signs of stress in the manufacturing world are indications of the scale of the consumer trend toward higher quality in manufactured goods. . . . (read more)
Self-awareness is the big new weight loss trend . . . (read more)
The results of experiments conducted by online platforms in recent weeks suggest that it is still human nature to resist being controlled. . . . (read more)
Apple’s new “system on a chip” Mac architecture shows how computer manufacturing can get simpler. . . . (read more)
The question of whether former retail juggernaut Bed Bath & Beyond can survive . . . (read more)
On the surface, the recent large bank failures are the same excessive risk-taking that has been sinking banks for as long as banks existed. Look deeper, though, and you see something darker . . . (read more)
The declining fortunes of social media might be the direct result of the pandemic and lockdown. . . . (read more)
Technology companies are scaling back and laying off workers in what almost looks like a repeat of 1998–1999. . . . (read more)
The trade in used electric cars is obvious now that it’s here, but it does not seem that anyone in the auto business saw it coming. . . . (read more)
A sharp drop in manufactured goods shipped from China to the United States could be a sign that consumers are becoming more conscious about their purchases. . . . (read more)
The current state of the world has reduced the reach of news. . . . (read more)
If people who have a strong tendency to take things literally are alarmingly easy to exploit in the current world, the same flaw is also affecting machines. . . . (read more)
People who are quick to conclude that things are what they say they are are being exploited . . . (read more)
The rush to buy “experiences” did not last long. . . . (read more)
People are becoming more aware of the presence of propaganda online, and there are indications that, collectively, we are getting sick of seeing it. . . . (read more)
Economists and demographers know what the consequences of the new abortion bans will be on marriage and birth rates. Based on that, it is easy enough to guess what the effect on fashion will be. . . . (read more)
“I can no longer be found here” has become one of the common messages found in online bios. . . . (read more)
Economic disruptions have made people more aware of the sources of products and materials. . . . (read more)
Recent news items may be making people more open to the idea of change . . . (read more)
For me, the commercial software era ended this month. . . . (read more)
More workers have been out sick this month than ever before in U.S. history. . . . (read more)
Complex challenges in the world are seeing people wishing they could go back to the past. It is a familiar kind of nostalgic pattern, except that an emotion that previously was reserved for a time two or three decades back is now being applied to more recent times . . . (read more)
Black Friday has become a retail holiday without a purpose, so this year there are several efforts to connect a new purpose or meaning to Black Friday. . . . (read more)
Spam calls have become so frequent that the future of the telephone network is in doubt. . . . (read more)
More people are noticing that the world is changing. . . . (read more)
As disasters become more frequent, people are more likely to take them in stride. . . . (read more)
The large corporations taking a wait-and-see approach about the privacy of consumer data may now be rethinking that approach . . . (read more)
Along with its many other challenges, the Olympics may be running out of host cities. . . . (read more)
Scotland is again on its way to seceding from the United Kingdom and becoming a separate country . . . (read more)
The COVID-19 vaccines are proving more effective in general use than they were in early tests. The next challenge is to make them available to the public . . . (read more)
The pandemic lockdown has given shoppers a newfound patience. This threatens to undo two centuries of selling strategies that are based on urgency. . . . (read more)
For a lifetime, there was not much to connect the worlds of live sound and the recording studio. In recent years, that gap has started to disappear. . . . (read more)
Most of us never would have imagined anyone using a crowdfunding site to hire fighters for an insurrection — until it happened. . . . (read more)
I am still throwing food away. . . . (read more)
It has been a record-setting hurricane season . . . (read more)
The drop-off in retail spending is far greater than the decline in consumer income during the current crisis. Consumers are spending less because they have been forced to spend more thoughtfully. . . . (read more)
It is hard enough to operate a retail store in the best of times. This year and next, when most potential customers want to stay home as much as possible, we may see the largest wave of store closings ever. . . . (read more)
The trend in corporate office design since World War II, in which workers are packed closer and closer together regardless of the cost in productivity, looks like a disaster in an era when a viral contagion has forced many such offices to close. . . . (read more)
Economic aggregates, the measures of combined economic activity, make arbitrary distinctions that can provide a misleading picture of the health of an economy. We are seeing an unusually large example of this as the places where food is thrown away are changing . . . (read more)
Statistics had long shown that the U.S. commuter category was burning the largest share of the global oil market. . . . (read more)
Not everyone who is unexpectedly spending a few months at home is happy about it. There are plenty of people who look around and realize that, in one sense or another, they are in the wrong place. . . . (read more)
In a world of people spending most days at home, clothing is losing most of its meaning. Partly as a result, clothing sales have fallen off by half. . . . (read more)
One of the surest ways to change a habit is to forget you ever had that habit. That’s something happening to millions of people this month . . . (read more)
The new coronavirus pandemic has highlighted one of the most baffling incongruities in U.S. health policy: the central government plays only an advisory role in matters of public health. . . . (read more)
On many, if not most, recent pop records, the instrumental sounds are produced by digital programs with no acoustic instruments in sight. Now we can start getting used to the idea of vocals that are synthesized in the same way. . . . (read more)
If online suppliers can deliver what you want exactly when you are ready for it, then why order anything in advance? . . . (read more)
Many writers now find that they type on touch screens nearly as fast as they type on a traditional computer keyboard. . . . (read more)
There are still millions of avid video gamers, but the numbers have now dropped enough that video games have disappeared from popular culture. . . . (read more)
Corporations have decided that being corporate is no longer a core competency. . . . (read more)
Plant-based meat alternatives, or fake meat as I like to call them, have been around for forty years, but now they are poised to take over. . . . (read more)
When recycling capacity is limited, part of the answer is a greater emphasis on reuse. . . . (read more)
Modern, more modular design approaches make it easier for the design of a car to change even after the car has left the factory. . . . (read more)
Recycling would be easier if municipal recycling programs collected more materials that can be recycled and fewer that cannot be. . . . (read more)
In 2018, recycling got a lot harder. . . . (read more)
For two years PledgeMusic looked like the one reliable corner of crowdfunding for music artists, but it was all an illusion. . . . (read more)
The bots are already an important part of our political discussion. . . . (read more)
There was a time when skinny people found the best clothing selection in thrift shops. That has changed . . . (read more)
We look at the peak shopping periods, especially November and December, to see where capacity problems might be happening in retail. This season, it is clear that most of the retail sector has far more capacity than it needs. . . . (read more)
Video lectures are more productive than live lectures . . . (read more)
As long as there have been public forums for discussing music, it has been clear that a small fraction of “fans” were not fans at all. . . . (read more)
As team sports lose their place in American popular culture, companies aligned with team sports have a decision to make. . . . (read more)
Music CDs can be hard to find, even for important new albums. . . . (read more)
Technology products are lasting longer than ever. Consumers save money by replacing phones, cars, computers, and other products less often, but when the upgrades finally come, the changes can be jarring. . . . (read more)
Ford startled the world when it said it would get out of cars . . . (read more)
If you happen to see a chain saw with the chain, bar, and battery removed . . . (read more)
When businesses create consumer brands, they sometimes forget the primary purpose of a brand. The idea is that consumers should remember the brand and what it stands for. . . . (read more)
Users fear Facebook because it knows them so well — too well . . . (read more)
HTTPS adoption is approaching a tipping point. . . . (read more)
They know where you live. . . . (read more)
Last year, there was some hope of a technological solution to robocalls. . . . (read more)
“Oh, no! Not another video!” . . . (read more)
With cars lasting longer, auto dealers are putting a greater emphasis on auto service. . . . (read more)
As electric cars take over the commuter-car niche, we are likely to see lots of households that have both a small electric car and a fuel-burning SUV. . . . (read more)
We are starting to see indications that e-commerce may not scale much farther. . . . (read more)
If what I am seeing in advertising is any indication, hot dogs have completed the transition to a one-day-a-year food for most of the people who eat them. . . . (read more)
Labeling fruit and root vegetables has for many years been a problem with no perfect solution. . . . (read more)
The trend away from paper documents has gone farther than we really want, so that we are due for a countertrend — going back to paper in the same way that the record industry is going back to vinyl. . . . (read more)
Ten years ago it seemed that computer software would always be unreliable. . . . (read more)
The story of travel over the last three centuries was a series of improvements. With canals, railroads, paved highways, and airports, travel was easier, faster, and more frequent. Suddenly in this century, that trend has reversed. . . . (read more)
The new IKEA power strip has two USB charging ports. . . . (read more)
It is an instinct to know when you are being watched and especially when you are being tracked. . . . (read more)
Since Cyber Monday was invented, it has been a day when you could watch the Internet break. . . . (read more)
It is a good time to be a wizard. What would Harry Potter do, faced with the problems of the world today? . . . (read more)
In a worldwide cultural shift, crimes that used to slip by unnoticed are suddenly being seen . . . (read more)
Starting this month, the Thursday night NFL football game is on Twitter. . . . (read more)
The book business doesn’t run on fax machines anymore. . . . (read more)
With the Internet, the world is “flat.” Huge international corporations compete with high schoolers who don’t even necessarily care about turning a profit. But how flat is the world? . . . (read more)
When you think of solar power, you probably think of the conventional solar cells that use photons of visible light to move electrons across a gap, generating an electric current. But only half of the energy in sunlight is visible light. . . . (read more)
The use of paper is declining for the first time in history as paper documents become fewer and smaller. The common understanding of this trend is that paper documents are being replaced by electronic documents. In many cases, that’s accurate, but in some ways, electronic documents are also part of the trend away from documents. Electronic documents too are getting smaller and less numerous . . . (read more)
One of the last major bookstores in Chester County, Pennsylvania is preparing to close. If the fortunes of the other bookstores in the county do not improve, Chester County could shortly find itself without a bookstore. . . . (read more)
It’s a trend: more people are approaching their dealings with the larger world and especially the Internet with a strategy I would describe as a calculated minimalism. . . . (read more)
Twitter has been experimenting on me . . . (read more)
The solar business is booming. In the United States solar is now larger than natural gas by some measures. The solar boom defies conventional thinking that predicted that low prices for fossil fuels would hurt demand for sustainable energy. . . . (read more)
Just eight years ago, it was starting to look like oil production had reached its peak. . . . (read more)
Streaming is the talk of the music industry this year, with the number of song streams nearly double last year’s pace. It is not necessarily good news for the music industry . . . (read more)
TV weather is becoming more scientific in style. Ten years ago, the banter that accompanied by small talk and banter so light it might make you forget that weather is a subject of scientific inquiry. This year you are more likely to hear a nuanced discussion of the relative likelihood of competing forecast scenarios than a mention of folk wisdom or superstition about weather events. . . . (read more)
“Happy Birthday” has long held a unique place in U.S. culture, a ritual song sung on birthdays that you couldn’t legally perform without a license. . . . (read more)
What should an electric car sound like? . . . (read more)
The world’s record companies got together and agreed that Friday would be a nice day to release new records. . . . (read more)
A small fraction of all the world’s plastics end up in the ocean, where they break into small pieces that take centuries to decay. This abandoned plastic poses a substantial ecological threat, but it could also be a source of a valuable raw material if an efficient way to collect it could be found. . . . (read more)
If you are looking for the new energy efficiency and electrical generation strategies, you might have to look carefully. They are more popular than it appears . . . (read more)
Over the 20th century people became less aware of the food they were eating as there was a mass migration from farms to urban centers. A countertrend started around 1960, though, and accelerated with the Internet. Now people are becoming aware of food in a way that they never were before. . . . (read more)
The rise of the mini-tablet computer should be a boost for urban mass transit. . . . (read more)
Printed paper documents are not only fewer in number. They are getting smaller too. . . . (read more)
For a few years, record companies and digital music retailers routinely ran promotions in which hundreds of albums would be offered at a low price, often $5, for a limited time. That angle seems to have lost its pull. . . . (read more)
It’s a trend: corporate offices are dropping voice mail in favor of newer messaging media that are more user-friendly. . . . (read more)
Progress in making batteries smaller and lighter has been slow to come, so now some engineers are focusing on ways to make batteries recharge faster . . . (read more)
A few years ago, plasma looked like the ultimate TV display . . . (read more)
The latest Atlantic City casino closing, a few hours ago, went quietly. . . . (read more)
We avoid war at all costs in part because the best way to minimize the chances of war in the future is for everyone to avoid the experience of war now. . . . (read more)
Politics and television form one of the current great ironies of U.S. culture. . . . (read more)
Corporate decision-making is hard to explain. It is not rational, not even approximately rational. Many people make the mistake of thinking that corporations are rational in financial matters, but fail to balance financial priorities with other priorities. But it is easy to find examples to show that even when only financial consequences are considered, decisions are still not rational. . . . (read more)
Here is a new trend: commercial building sites being used for solar arrays. . . . (read more)
The office is a fantastically complex institution, so it is surprising to discover the extent to which it is ultimately just a place for papers to sit. The “paperless office” we started to imagine a quarter century ago . . . (read more)
E-waste laws in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other states make it illegal to place various electronic devices in the trash. . . . (read more)
Cast iron cookware fell out of favor in the 1970s. . . . Now cast iron seems to be making a comeback. . . . (read more)
Digital currency was originally meant to resemble cash in the way it could be exchanged. In one respect, though, digital currency is not so much like cash, but more like a bank account. . . . (read more)
As I write this, almost the entire North American continent is freezing . . . (read more)
Cooking takes time and skill, but it costs less than most people realize. When you cook food at home, you essentially pay just for the ingredients, and these cost a fraction of what you pay for prepared food. . . . (read more)
Somehow, sincerity has become a style rather than a state of mind. . . . (read more)
For half a century, professional team sports were part of the routine office chatter that anyone in the office might participate in . . . Over the past decade, the conversation has changed. . . . (read more)
Better-sounding music downloads are on the way in the near future. . . . (read more)
Computer printers are becoming less important as people print less. . . . (read more)
You may never have to buy a new cell phone again . . . (read more)
Polypropylene has quietly become the new favorite plastic . . . (read more)
As banking transactions become more expensive, will people respond by buying fewer things? . . . (read more)
Authoring tools are no longer a meaningful part of the authoring process. . . . (read more)
The improvements promised by new lighting technology are leading to improvements in incandescent and fluorescent lights, as those older technologies try to keep up . . . (read more)
We are adapting to a more rapid pace of change, and one way we are adapting is by not discussing every change that we observe. . . . (read more)
Voice designers have to choose a dialect for each voice they synthesize, though they likely wish they didn’t have to. (read more)
A frightfully high proportion of buildings are likely to be in the water at some point, the result of storms, climate trends, tsunamis, and broken pipes. It is something of a mistake, then, that buildings are designed on the assumption that they will remain above water. (read more)
One of the early effects of warming climates, first identified in the 1960s, is the loss of precipitation in the middle of continents, particularly at mid-latitudes and around midsummer. We may be seeing that this year . . . (read more)
Pitch correction is widely used to make singers sound like they are more in tune than they really are. . . . (read more)
Chrome has quietly become the most popular web browser . . . (read more)
Def Leppard is recording “forgeries” of some of its biggest hits. The note-for-note reconstruction of a song such as “Pour Some Sugar On Me” is an example of rework: redoing work that has already been done. . . . (read more)
A new model of the Apple MacBook Pro has drawn criticism for the difficulty of repairing it. Most components are permanently fastened in place . . . (read more)
Change often sneaks up on us, and attitudes and expectations may change before there is an obvious change in behavior. . . . (read more)
Hard disk drives still have the edge over flash memory — but for how long? . . . (read more)
If you have been waiting for the right time to convert paper files to digital data, now is the time. . . . (read more)
At a Presidents’ Day sale I saw an office laser printer selling, quietly, for $50. It is the best indication yet that laser printers are beating out ink-jet printers . . . (read more)
Well, here it is. A year in which we can expect sweeping change, according to a panoply of prophets and experts. . . . (read more)
It is getting harder and harder to tell models and avatars apart. . . . (read more)
It costs less than ever to own a piano. . . . (read more)
HTML 5 might be two years away from official approval, but it is already simplifying Internet video. . . . (read more)
The trend toward minimalism in paper documents has now reached business cards. . . . (read more)
I am old enough to remember when cardboard was the core of almost all shoes. . . . (read more)
Two vignettes from my work this month point to a current trend in product design: designers and engineers are looking hard for ways to reduce the weight of the products they design. . . . (read more)
Lately, I have been watching hours of weather videos, with the recent floods, tornados, and volcanic eruptions. The videos come from every kind of camera. There are broadcast news cameras, security cameras, and webcams. Most of the videos, though, come from cell phones. . . . (read more)
As I write this, people are talking about a prediction of the end of the world . . . (read more)
I wrote a month ago about web sites that have been streamlined after developers gained insight into simpler design approaches while working on mobile versions of the sites. I hadn’t imagined the same process would also happen with a web browser, but that is exactly what has happened with Firefox 4 . . . (read more)
Designers are learning from the challenge of rebuilding web sites to work on mobile devices. The redesigned sites are, quite simply, faster and better . . . (read more)