Thomas Frey's blog

In 2008, I was asked to speak at the Leaders in Dubai Conference along with several world famous speakers like former NYC Mayor Rudy Giulliani, Tom Peters, and former World Bank President James Wolfensohn. Attending the conference were 1,200 world leaders and influencers from 40 different counties. At the time, Dubai was a shining new star on the global stage, attracting the world’s best architects, building remarkable structures, tackling ingenious new projects, and raising the bar for creativity around the world.

In July 2011, as a cost cutting measure, the U.S. Postal Service put together a list of 3,700 post offices that it wanted to close. Like most organizations that have faced a full frontal assault by online automation and technology, the USPS has been working its way through a very uncomfortable transition. They have no clear picture of what the service will look like 10 years from now.

The DaVinci Inventor Showcase is an annual event produced by our amazing team at the DaVinci Institute. Now in its 8th year, we attract inventors from all across the U.S. to be part of what has become one of the nation’s most prestigious inventor events. As a futurist, it is the brilliance of these visionaries that breathes inspiration into the work that I do. But this is only scratching the surface. Here’s what you really missed.

Professor Lee Cronin heads up a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University in England. His team has figured out how to turn a 3D printer into a sort of universal chemistry set capable of “printing” prescription drugs via downloadable chemistry.

In much the same way that we now expect every child’s toy to talk, in the future, we will expect virtually everything we own to be connected to the Internet. Our mushrooming “Internet of Things” is growing exponentially, and estimates of its progression vary tremendously. GSMA estimates connecting 24 billion devices by 2020, while Cisco and Ericsson think we will hit 50 billion. Depending on a few key breakthroughs, these estimates may all be on low end, and here’s why.

Our technology is consuming virtually all of our attention. Even our dogs have resigned themselves to the fact they are no long man’s best friend. But while those who are desperately concerned with the wellbeing of our society are raising red flags, the business world is being incentivized to create technologies that elevate our addictions even further.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could turn on your television and it instantly knew what show you wanted to watch? We all dream of an easier life, so what if we got into our car and it knew where we wanted to go, or turned on a radio and it played the perfect music, or pressed “call” on our phone and we would instantly be connected to the person we most wanted to talk to. Our days are filled with countless decisions and the stress level of all these choices is growing steadily. Yes, we want to be in control, but control can be very taxing. That’s why I was so intrigued when I came across a new iPad app called MindMeld that is based on the emerging science of “anticipatory computing.”

As the world’s leading producer of synthetic rubber for the automotive industry, Lanxess is very interested in positioning itself at the forefront of our mobile future. One of the biggest trends for this industry is the push to make vehicles driverless. While most people have been focusing on the driverless technology inside the vehicle itself, where noteworthy accomplishments seen to be happening on a daily basis, the shift will also cause huge changes to occur in area’s like insurance, public policy, parking, delivery services, and especially highway engineering.

As something of a grand finale to their 11-week, full-immersion Ruby on Rails class, our first graduating class of DaVinci Coders took the stage on Demo Day to talk about the projects they worked on.

During the late 1990s business and industry began to panic over the issues surrounding Y2K, which later turned out to be mostly manufactured fear. In the chaotic world around us, it has become increasingly difficult to separate genuine problems from manufactured fear. And it is especially difficult to make plans for the future when we can’t properly gauge the severity of a legitimate issue we know we’ll have to deal with.