Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

I’ve just had an article published in STOrai Magazine. This is the monthly magazine for the Retail Association of India, one of the largest such groups in the world.

The article takes a look at the trends which will define the world of retail through the next 1, 2, 5 to 10 years.

You can grab a PDF version of the file — it’s 2 pages long.   

Grab the PDF of the article above! “…most retail experts believe that retail stores will evolve, so that they simply become showrooms for a massive backend logistics system that is their e-commerce system.”

I’ve been doing quite a few keynotes in the world of retail for quite some time, with clients that including for The GAP, the Walt Disney Company, Loblaw and global conferences for both Yum! Brands and Burger King. There’s a lot more information in the Retail Trends section of my blog.

These have ranged from speaking for small groups around a boardroom table (with the CEO and senior management team of several major retailers) to 7,000 person events in Las Vegas.

While dong my research for a recent event, I came across a great quote from Cyriac Roeding, CEO of Shopkick (which develops location- based shopping apps available for Macy’s, Target and other top retailers) ….. “The next five years will bring more change to retail than the last 100 years.”

I certainly believe that to be true.

I also believe that there are quite a few retailers who aren’t quite ready for the scope, speed and breadth of the change that is underway.

The article does a good job of putting into perspective just a few of the trends that are sweeping the world of retail. Much of it is being driven by mobile technology — which is coming to influence not just purchasing behavior, but the entire checkout process.

And think about how quickly dramatic change is occurring in the world of retail – by simply visiting an Apple Store – which is redefining the layout and purpose of a retail store, as well as causing significant upheaval in the entire retail process.

Consider this fact: Apple Stores devote at least 50% of their retail process to what they call “ownership experiences”. The Genius Bar, training, and exploring. That in itself is a fascinating statistic.

And then there’s process: the Apple checkout process, for example. All of a sudden, cash registers seem obsolete! They’ve had such an impact that countless other retailers are now scrambling to put the same type of process flow in place, trying to link themselves to the coolness of the Apple cachet.

That’s the new reality in the world of retail today — pacesetters can swiftly and suddenly change the pace and structure of an industry, and other competitors have to scramble to keep up.

Here’s the article in it’s entirety – and remember, you can grab the PDF from the image above!

Logistics, E-commerce and Attention Spans!

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the future of retail is that e-commerce, or virtual commerce – which was so hyped in the late 90′s and then came into it’s stride in the last decade -will probably come to define the future of the physical retail experience. Jim Carroll, a futurist trends and innovation experts with clients such as The Gap, the Walt Disney Company, the Professional Retail Store Maintenance Association, Loblaw and other, has an interesting take to share on the future of retail.

 Isn’t that the obvious conclusion in a world in which, in the US at least, Amazon.com is now promising same day delivery?

Buy online, get it delivered, all in an instant. So imagine that you go into a store, see something you like, buy it and the same e-commerce system kicks in to deliver it to you later in the day!

Why? Well, why carry inventory if you don’t have to if you’ve built a big e-commerce infrastructure for your brand, you might as well use it!

This is the obvious conclusion  in a world in which the customer in the typical retail store probably spends more time looking at the screen on their smartphone than looking at store shelves. So why not adapt to that reality?

Certainly it is becoming more difficult for retailers to keep the attention of their customers. It is said that the average consumer scans some 12 feet of shelf space per second – because they are spending a lot of other time looking at their phones.

In a recent keynote with a world-leading retailer, I made the observation that most retail experts believe that over time, retail stores will evolve, so that they simply become showrooms for a massive backend logistics system that is their e-commerce system. Stores won’t carry much inventory anymore, and instead will become integrated into the sophisticated e-commerce systems which they have built for the online shopping experience.

Anne Zybowski, an analyst at Kantar Retail, stated this possibility perfectly: “A few years ago retailers spent a ton of time trying to make their online stores look and act like their physical stores. Now they’ve sort of reversed course, and the challenge is how to take that online shopping experience that’s so personalized, socially connected and heavily layered with data, and essentially bring it into a physical environment.”

And it is for reasons like that, that we have Ron Boire, the chief marketing officer at Sears (and former chief executive of Brookstone Inc.), commenting that his focus is about “creating more and better theater in the stores.”

In other words, pump up the in store experience to grab the attention of the customer. Send promo codes to their smartphones, interact with them heavily through technology, give them the excitement of shopping and deliver the product to them the same day through the logistics system that you have already put in place.

Continual re-invention

Of course, if the consumer is losing their attention, then retail needs to ensure it can do the right thing to stay relevant.

We are seeing this as many retailers invest heavily in the in-store experience. In the UK, Marks & Spencer is spending $600 million revamp of its High Street Kensington store! And Macy’s in New York is spending $400 million on flagship store.

But it’s not just big global mega-stores, mega brands that are reinventing. Trends involving everything from safety to energy to health are causing retail chains to reformulate their stores at a fast pace.

Consider Fresh-Stop, a chain in South Africa that is own owned by Chevron. With the push to healthier diets in the country, the gas-bar chain is now moving away from a mix of unhealthy snack foods, to shelves that offer  fresh produce, meat, fish, a delicatessen and even up-market meals!  And they are converting stores at a furious pace with results. Converted stores have recorded a 12 per cent footfall increase and a 40 per cent sales increase in 2010 against the background of a convenience store sector where sales fell 6 per cent.

What’s most fascinating about this is the fact that they are learning how to change an entire store extremely fast. They can convert an entire store in just two weeks so the future belongs to those who are fast!

And then the credit card disappears

The biggest change to the world of retail comes about as credit cards disappear – because our cell phones become the credit card!

This is a huge trend in North America, it is estimated that payments using digital wallets will grow from $4 billion in 2012 to $191 billion in 2017, breaking $100 billion in 2016.

We’re already seeing the signs of this change consider the Silicon valley upstart Square. Plug the little (square device) into your iPhone, and all of a sudden, you can accept credit card payments.

The service is growing at a furious pace with over 2 million users in just 2 years. They’re doing $8 billion in payments, and just had equity investment by VISA. Even more momentum Starbucks planning a massive rollout to 8,000 stores throughout the US. Square has an unmitigated cool factor!

Yet, despite the excitement of such initiatives, it will take some time for the ‘digital wallet’, or mobile commerce, to become real. Even Google admits this their VP of Wallet and Payment Systems, Osama Bedier, commented that “there’s a lot of ideas and not a lot of problems being solved.”

That’s because there are a lot of BIG problems that need to be solved concerning credit card infrastructure. The New York Times noted this, commenting that “one of the bigger problems that has to be overcome is that mobile payments involve deals between companies that aren’t used to working together like wireless carriers and banks.” (Mobile Payments Slow to Catch On, New York Times, March 2012).

Certainly smartphones are everywhere but retail stores and credit card companies are going to have to invest a HUGE amount of money to put in place the technology that will support near-field-communications.

How much work? “Yankee Group analyst Nick Holland estimates it will cost $15 billion to deploy the technology that will make mobile payments ubiquitous.” Wall Street Journal, November 2011.

So I’ve been running around for years, preaching my mantra to many global organizations that a key chance for innovation success will come from the ability to align yourself to fast paced future trends…

We’re in the era of the end of incumbency, in which small dominates big, fast trumps ponderous, and indecision spawns failure.

I’ve even written books on the theme: both The Future Belongs To Those Who Are Fast and Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast carry this key message.

So I was thrilled when I was discovered by, and eventually booked, by the Toronto Agile community, for the 2012 Agile Tour Toronto conference, being held next Monday morning in Toronto.

As with all clients, I’ve spent some time to understand who these folks are, what they do, and what they think. One evening, over some refreshments, I had a wonderful discussion with their team that helped me to realize that my theme, and the spirit of Agile (yes, it’s capitalized) are perfectly aligned.

So here’s the thing: if you want to understand how your organization will survive and thrive in a world in the future belongs to those who are fast, you should understand and learn about Agile. It’s pretty darned important. Here’s a good starting point – the session description for my keynote on Monday below. But more important, you want to take a look at the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, and the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto.

And then dig deeper from there. Talk to some of these folks. Discover if you’ve got them on your software team, internally or externally. If you don’t, find out why not — because it’s probably a key indicator that you aren’t positioned to keep up with the change that is occurring with your company and the industry that you compete in.

Oh — and if you want to come on Monday, you can’t. The event sold out months ago. Agile is that important!

Aligning Acceleration and Agility: The Business Case for Fast!

The NEST Learning Thermostat is a great example of the type of typical business model disruption that we are going to witness through the next decade!

Give it a few years.

You won’t even recognize the industry you are operating in.

That’s because the rate of business model change is accelerating in every single industry. Here’s why:

1. Right now, there are probably a bunch of really smart people figuring out to disrupt your business model
2. If you aren’t busy thinking about to disrupt your business model, they most certainly will.
3. They’ll probably do this sooner than you think they will.
4. The result is that 10 years out (or less), your business model will look nothing like it does today.
5. Those that do mess up your business model are quite likely to be younger than you; for many folks, age provides complacency.
6. The fundamental change to your business model driven by this younger generation will be the result of digital, smart, intelligent, location-oriented technology.
7. They’ll use this technology in such a way they’ll come out of left field with a business model idea that you’ve never even thought of before.
8. Their business model will carry an undeniable ‘coolness factor’ that you can’t simply match.
9. Most likely, you’ll discount the importance of their innovation, until it is much too late.
10. The result will be dramatic change : such that perhaps 1/2 of what you sell right now won’t exist in 5 years, and 1/2 of what you’ll sell in 5 years doesn’t exist now.

Examples of this type of disruption are occurring all around us right now.

Simply take a look at the Square credit card reader for the iPhone, or the NEST Learning Thermostat. The future belongs to those who are fast!

Every industry in the world today finds itself in the midst of dramatic change, as mobile smartphone technology comes to change business models, consumer behaviour, and entire professions.

No where is this more evident today than what is happening in the world of healthcare, wellness and fitness, as a flood of new apps and technologies emerge that will forever change this world.

Back in late September, I was the opening keynote speaker for the 2012 Chronic Disease Fund annual conference in Dallas, Texas. Here’s a video clip in which I’m talking about the significance of the change that is occurring … compelling to watch!

As for me? I just bought a FitBit this morning — it would be fascinating to see how much territory I cover during one single keynote!

I keep advising my personal trainer that she needs to get an iPhone. She shrugs, noting that there is a queue in the family for the next mobile upgrade, and her 14 year old daughter might have more of a claim in the line than she does.

Hogwash! There is an absolute revolution going on involving the “consumerization of fitness and wellness” — and this super long blog post will put into perspective why. And maybe this will help to sort out some of her family politics over the ‘next phone.’ The fact is, the very nature of the future fitness opportunity is changing ….

Update: After I wrote this blog post, Adweek ran the article, “Nike+ Officially Turns Your Workout Into a Video Game” – you want to read it.

Here’s the main gist of this post — In May and June, I spoke at a tremendous number of corporate, association and private events; it was a busy couple of months, and hence the lack of regular postings to the blog.

Three of these were events related to the issue of corporate wellness programs.

It was the perfect timing for such a keynote; through the last year and I half, I’ve been following what I believe to be a fairly aggressive personal fitness regime, with the help of my personal trainer, as well as personally exploring the wealth of new fitness and wellness mobile applications that are flooding the market.

The entire premise of my keynote? At this moment in time, we are witnessing the perfect confluence of several major trends:

• the first signs of the reality of the massive scope of the health care crisis (both disease, lifestyle and funding related) as baby boomers begin to flood the health care system with requirements for extra care
• a renewed and significant focus on “preventative” health care concepts” ;
• structural change aimed at wellness programs so that people work harder to avoid or reduce the impact of lifestyle disease;
• and the rapid emergence of new technologies — many involving the smartphones that have become a ubiquitous part of our lifestyle – that can motivate consumers to do so much more with their personal fitness and wellness.

Why a keynote on wellness? Because companies are recognizing there is a big opportunity to be innovative with managing healthcare costs through a proactive approach that involves wellness. It’s a good example of the deep, transformative thinking that is occurring with many organizations in the healthcare system worldwide . Organizations are moving beyond the endless political debate, and are instead, putting in place practical, innovative programs that can help organizations manage healthcare costs, and employees can actively work at improving their overall health and fitness.

Let’s consider the trends which are all coming together.

1. It’s crisis time!

Throughout the western worldwide, the obesity, diabetes and lifestyle health care crisis is really making itself felt with massive demands being placed on the system. The future is stark ; if something is not done, we will continue to see:

• a continued rapid increase in lifestyle disease, resulting in even more massive future demands on the system
• a bigger demographic challenge – more boomers placing demand on the system, with fewer workers to support the massive uptick in spending that results
• a resultant massive supply / demand imbalance
• and an expectation gap likely to increase scope of challenge : a trend I wrote about in my “Trending in 2011: 10 Major Trends to Start Thinking About Now.” It’s worth a read — check the first big trend in the list.

Clearly, something needs to be done. Hence, a lot of innovative thinking!

2. A massive shift to preventative medical concepts

Given that the Western world has such a big problem, it’s also fascinating to note that there is a huge amount of innovation occurring in the health care system now – and it has absolutely nothing to do with the raging (and now seemingly pointless) political debate occurring in the US.

What is happening is this: we are in the midst of a long term trend in which “preventative medical care” will come to exceed what we spend on “reactive medical care.” Preventative care takes many forms, from genetic testing (to determine what conditions people are likely to develop in their lifetime) to wellness and other preventative programs. Simply put, let’s fix people before they are sick, rather than treating them after they’ve developed a condition.

We’ve got a heck of a long way to go with this trend: according to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report, “a mere 3% of spending goes towards prevention of chronic disease among industrialized countries.”

But what is happening is an acceleration of the trends that take us to a world of preventative healthcare. Consider the trend line with genomic medicine:

• it took $3 billion to sequence the first human genome
• by 2009, that was down to $100,000
• it’s now under $10,000
• and it is estimated by the end of 2012, $1,000

Give it a few years, and you’ll be able to go out and buy a $5 genomic sequencing machine at Radio Shack! That might seem like a joke, and it is. But the significance of a cost curve such as this is that it accelerates a significant shift in spending.

It isn’t occurring with genomic medicine — its happening everywhere throughout the world of healthcare. Last year, when I keynoted one of the largest seniors care conferences in the US, I noted the same type of focus on preventative thinking was becoming routine:

• “Identifying dementia early can cut the cost of care by nearly 30 percent … routine screening that identified patients with early signs of dementia helped cut average healthcare costs by nearly $2,000 per patient in the first year, often by eliminating money spent on unnecessary tests and treatments. Early diagnosis can cut Alzheimer’s costs, Reuters Health E-Line, July 2010

The health and wellness theme fits into this agenda as well, which have undergone very much a sea-change in the last, in terms of perception, importance and approach:

• “In businesses across the nation, workplace wellness has morphed from a “nice-to-have” fringe benefit to a “must-have” cost-containment strategy.” 23 April 2012, GlobeNewswire
• Employers determined to contain medical costs must focus on creating a culture that supports healthy behaviors. If they can do that, they can enhance not only their bottom lines but also transform the lives of their workers. 28 April 2012, Obesity, Fitness & Wellness Week
• “In businesses across the nation, workplace wellness has morphed from a “nice-to-have” fringe benefit to a “must-have” cost-containment strategy.” 23 April 2012, GlobeNewswire
• “64 percent of employers surveyed indicated that wellness initiatives are among the top three most effective tactics for controlling health care costs” 2012 Annual Plan Design Survey, National Business Group on Health

Studies show that for every $1 spent on a wellness program, medical expenses fall by at least $3.

Part 3: Time for some more aggressive action!

What is interesting is that in corporate organizations throughout the Western world, wellness programs are rapidly shifting : they’re going from a “nice-to-have” type of program, to a “we really need to see some results!” approach. Consider the trends; certainly many more organizations are putting such programs in place:

• A recent study by Willis North America’s Human Capital Practice found about 60 percent of the companies surveyed have wellness programs, an increase of 13 percent from 2010. Companies encourage wellness, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 22 April 2012

But not only are more organizations adopting wellness programs: they are working to put in place structures, methodologies and measurement technologies that can help to ensure that employees are benefitting from such programs:

• One of the fastest-growing categories of new insurance includes significant penalties for those who don’t participate or backslide on targets – penalties that may include deductible spikes or loss of health-savings accounts. Workers’ wellness can turn a profit Insurers offer incentives for health and penalize workers who can’t meet goals, The Denver Post , 25 December 2011
• A national survey of large employers by the National Business Group on Health found that 80 percent plan to offer financial rewards for health in 2012, up from 54 percent this year. Workers’ wellness can turn a profit Insurers offer incentives for health and penalize workers who can’t meet goals, The Denver Post , 25 December 2011

And this is where tech comes along at the perfect time!

4. In comes technology – and the new consumerization of health care!

Technology is going to provide for more creative disruption in the world of healthcare than we’ve ever seen. Simply put, it changes everything.

• “Imagine a far more extreme transformation, in which advances in IT, biology and engineering allow us to move much of health care out of hospitals, clinics and doctors offices, and into our everyday lives.” Our high-tech health care future, New York Times, 10 Nov 2011

The Withings Wi-FI Body Scale measures weight, BMI and fat mass, and transmits the info to a password protected site. I’ve got one and love it. They sell them at the Apple Store!

Cast your mind out 5 years or more, and we will see significant change in everything we do in the world of health care:

• “…. you’ll be sitting in front of a big multitouch screen actually watching what’s going on in your body in a very intuitive, fun kind of animation. When you leave, the doctor will download prescriptions and treatments onto your cellphone – which not only remind you, but encourage you to follow the medicine’s or other lifestyle procedures. [You'll see] a periodic video message from the doctor to encourage you if you’re doing well or maybe to encourage you if you’re not. It’ll be continuous care rather than the episodic, periodic care that occurs today.” Better living with technology, The Boston Globe, 21 November 2011

Extend that type of thinking, and we are headed to a future in which we literally have a dashboard for the human body…..

And it is starting to happen now — with a flood of new mobile and other healthcare technologies that help consumers to take more of an active role in their level of wellness and fitness. Consider the current trends:

• 78% of consumers are interested in mobile health wellness fitness solutions
• medical fitness health care apps are 3rd fast growing category for iPhone and Android phones
• the Apple App store now has 17,000 health care related apps, 60% of which are aimed at the consumer
• sports, fitness and wellness apps will grow from 154 million downloads in 2010 to 908 million by 2016
• the number of wearable wireless “gadgets” will grow from 8 million to 72 million over the same period

I’m using a number of mobile wellness and fitness apps — for example, MapMyWalk, which I use to track the pace and timing of the five mile — or more — walk that I do while at home or travelling. I’ve also got a Withings Wi-Fi Body Scale — which tracks weight, BMI and body-fat mass, transmitting those details to a personally-password protected Web site. Utilize such technology, and all of a sudden you’ve got the opportunity to be more involved in your own well being.

Or, as I commented in New York at the keynote the impact of consumer fitness, wellness and healthcare technologies is that  “...they increase how often individuals think about their health…”

And clearly, it’s a pretty big trend:

•  “500 million mobile users, or about 30% of an estimated 1.4 billion smartphone subscribers worldwide, will be using health/fitness apps by 2015. Healthcare in your hands
International Herald Tribune, March 2011

The Withings Blood Pressure Monitor works with your iPhone. It’s an example of the start of the trend I call “bio-connectivity.”

It isn’t just consumers who are rapidly adopting such technology — so are doctors and other professionals throughout the healthcare system.

• By the end of the year 90 percent of physicians will have smart phones. Health apps soon will get an incubator, The San Francisco Chronicle, 11 April 2011

We are only beginning to scratch the surface of the innovations that will occur here. I’ve been suggesting that one of the biggest trends to sweep the world of healthcare and medicine will be that of ‘bio-connectivity,’ a phrase I coined well over a decade ago. Consider this post which I wrote before keynoting the World Healthcare Innovation & Technology Congress in Washington.

Bio-connectivity provides huge opportunity for innovation in the space of healthcare. The same company – Withings — has brought out the Withings iPhone Blood Pressure Monitor — seen on the right. All of a sudden, someone working to manage their blood pressure doesn’t need to rely on pencils and paper to track their progress — it’s automatically captured through the smartphone which is becoming an integral, everyday part of their life.

Not only that, but they can transmit their blood pressure readings and charts to their doctor or other health care provider via email. This provides for the virtualization of healthcare ; no longer are hospital or doctor visits restricted to actual physical locations known as hospitals or doctors offices — instead, it becomes a part of the global Internet. If you think about what is happening here: there is a change in the centuries old relationship between doctor and patient!

Did you know that researchers have already figured out how to make an ultra-thin heart monitor that goes on like a tattoo? Talk about a trend that is going to drive a lot of change!

Link all of these trends together, and the simple fact is this: we are going to witness more change in the world of healthcare, wellness and fitness in the next five years, than we have seen in the previous one hundred years.

And if you follow that path down the road of wellness and fitness — the very nature of fitness is changing. Ten years out, most folks going to the gym will have a smartphone attached to their hip, and will be working with their trainer on a regimen that includes this type of personal fitness tracking.

Sure, it sounds odd, but ten years ago, we didn’t have Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or many other of today’s life changing technologies.

My personal trainer really needs to get an iPhone!

I recently found myself at 37,000 feet on a flight from San Francisco to Toronto, Skyping with my son who is at university. After a brief “can you hear me now” exchange, the call signal adjusted itself and the quality of the video call became crystal clear. Say goodbye to one of the last bastions of refuge from the interconnected world.

A typical day in the typical life of a typical cell phone customer!

Internet access on flights isn’t new; several carriers have featured the service for a number of years and I’ve been using the Internet “up in the air” for some time. What became evident to me on that recent flight, however, is the continuing improvement in the quality and speed of the connection. And that’s a trend for bandwidth overall, whether by satellite (as is the case on planes), cable/phone lines or wireless devices.

According to research firm IDC, Internet traffic will grow 32% per year from 2010 to 2015. We currently send about 46 terabits per second, and that should grow to more than 200 terabits per second by 2015. Cisco suggests total annual Internet traffic will grow to 966 exabytes by 2015.

Of course, such numbers can become meaningless without interpretation, so let’s just say we will be able to send the equivalent of a million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with 20 million pages — every second. Each year, we’ll send information equivalent to twice the number of words spoken by all humankind since the beginning of time. Whoa.

As our demands on the system grow, technologies behind the scenes will emerge to support huge transmissions of capacity. A recent IBM press release, for example, noted the company has developed “the first parallel optical transceiver to transfer one trillion bits — one terabit — of information per second, the equivalent of downloading 500 high-definition movies.”

Someday, we’ll have this type of bandwidth in our homes and on our mobile devices. Which brings me to accountants and wireless companies. Given the reality of these trends, why do wireless companies use a business model that deploys thousands of accountants at a cost of millions of dollars to track individual bits of information and charge customers every time they go over a usage cap? I seem to be in a perpetual state of war with my wireless/Internet service provider. Our family has four iPhones — and we spend a substantial sum of money to support our data-driven lifestyle as well as a high-speed Internet connection. Every time we make some small change that involves an incremental adjustment in bandwidth, the fee goes up.

The approach of these companies seems to be that in a world of continuous bandwidth growth, they should track each and every byte. Couldn’t they save a ton of money if they just offered a simple flat-fee service that recognizes the reality of our times? They’d eliminate a bunch of sophisticated IT systems, the staff who supports them, the marketing staff who dreams up complex campaigns that revolve around bit-tracking, and the support staff who has to clean up the mess after the inevitable showdown with the customer when things (usually) go wrong.

Here’s the conundrum in a nutshell: Internet usage and capacity will continue to grow at an exponential pace. But the industry that handles the flow of data sees tracking individual bits as a critical part of the business plan. I’d say this is one of those industries where you really question the value of the accounting mind-set, don’t you think?

This article ran last week after I did a talk for one of the world’s leading heart research / hospital institutions, the University of Ottawa Heart Institute.

Health care is the most complex issue that our society faces in our time. We really need some big and bold and very innovative thinking to deal with the scope of the challenges.

Health care’s best bet: technology
Ottawa Citizen, May 16, 2012 

Here’s the text for a keynote I’m doing in Calgary tomorrow at noon for a group of IT executives.

Lots to think about here – the future belongs to those who are fast!

———–

“The new business model for everyone will increasingly use speed as a metric, and fast-innovation is a core capability”

Certainly the last forty years have seen technology play a huge impact on business.

Name any industry – auto, health care, manufacturing, energy, banking — and it’s clear that we are witnessing a fundamental and distinct shift of the innovation agenda to one which is driven by the speed of Silicon Valley, and by a generation of people in the computing world who think fundamentally differently about the source of innovation in an industry.

As this occurs, we will see massive business model disruption as new, faster, more nimble competitors who understand technology based disruption, cast aside their slower, ingrained counterparts who are stuck with old, ingrained ideas.

The future belongs, in other words, to those who are fast. Tech companies and tech based innovators certainly understand that logic. Their entire DNA is bound up in the ability to move fast.

That’s why financial organizations are finding themselves plunged into a whirlwind of change as our mobile devices become our credit cards. As slow-to-change insurance companies find that driver-performance oriented insurance policies, linked to in-dash GPS monitoring technologies, wreak havoc on old-line insurance assumptions. As the world of health care adjusts to the reality of a less than $1,000 genomic sequence machine — something that would have cost over $1 million just ten years ago, leading us much quicker to a world of personalized medicine. And an oil and gas industry which is witnessing hyper-innovation in terms of extraction techniques, driven by deep data analysis and other capabilities, which are leading to year over year yield increases which were unmanageable years ago.

The new business model for everyone will increasingly use speed as a metric, and fast-innovation is a core capability.

That’s why you should join iON Secured Networks and Check Point Security Technologies, as we bring you the unique insight of Jim Carroll, who has emerged as one of the world’s leading international futurists, trends and innovation experts, with a client list that ranges from Northrop Grumman to Rockwell Collins; the SouthWest Gas Association to RGA Reinsurance; the Walt Disney Organization to NASA. Jim has had the opportunity to study what world-class innovators have been doing to keep up with a world in which the future belongs to the fast. He will share with us the new role of leading edge technologies involving cloud networks, agile computing, just-in-time development and other key strategies that will help organizations to deploy the right technologies at the right time for the right purpose — a strategy that will be increasingly important as all industries come to innovate at the speed of Silicon Valley.

(Warning: This is a geek post!)

Last weekend, I successfully moved my main Web site, www.jimcarroll.com, over to Linode.com, running on an Ubuntu virtual server. For years, I had been running it on a Mediatemple DV server based on CentOS.

My Web site now runs on a blazingly fast infrastructure over at Linode.com!

Why did I do this? Speed improvements. And then some!

Mediatemple was a great company with awesome support, but I found over time that my Web site just didn’t operate fast enough — some pages would render slowly — and it would often slow down under the weigh of a stream of a lot of oncurrent users. I’ve been using the handy tool at GtMetrix.com to test my page load times. Things were pretty slow with overall page load times and first byte times — which were always in the range of 3 or more seconds for the former, and 1 second at least for the latter.

As I understood it, the Plesk system used at this version of CentOS simply added a lot of processing overhead ; even if I had no visitors, my memory use was always at 80% plus.

So I started to look around for alternatives about six months ago. Two months ago, I discovered Linode. Great cloud service — pick your operating system, build, log into root, and away you go! Since I had a bunch of Ubuntu servers in my home at one point, I chose to go with that, since I knew how to configure most of what I needed.

And then I discovered Linode’s ‘Stackscripts” — where the user community has put together a variety of custom ‘scripts’ which will pre-intsall your operating system of choice along with your applications/configuration of choice. My blog is based on WordPress — so I needed that. But I also needed whatever I could get that would speed up the rendering of WordPress pages — some good memory cacheing, and cacheing of PHP code so that things would execute faster. And from everything I was reading, I knew I needed to have a Varnish cache.

That’s when I found Paulo Fagiani — an avid Linode fan — and his Optimized WP script. He’s put together a script that installs a Ubuntu server, and then, as he puts it, “installs a pretty, sweet and secure box with nginx + varnish + memcached + php5 fpm + mysql optimized for heavy load wordpress sites.” (I’ll note that I could have chosen a product from Mediatemple similar to Linode – but it was the Stackscripts which sold me!)

One button, and you’ve got a rip-roaring infrastructure that just flies!

It took me a few months, though, to get things right — this is a part time hobby after all. If I’ve got time to kill in an airport, and no pressing client demands, I’ll fire up Terminal and ssh into my Linode. If it’s later in the day and I’m at home in front of the TV on the couch and need to relax — I’ll fire up Terminal and ssh …. (I was just joking with a friend as to how we both suffer from this weird way of relaxing by working away as root on some box somewhere…)

And it took some help – Paolo was magical in how he walked me through various issues. My good friend Akshat Choudhary over at BlogVault.Net — a fabulous WordPress backup service — also patiently provided me some guidance.

And so I went live last Saturday AM, just before going out to do some yard work.

IT”S A BIG CHANGE. I’m getting page load times of <2s for most of my main pages, and first byte load times of .2ms or less. I’m getting hit rates of 99% on my APC cache (for WordPress page cacheing) and 50% for Memcache (which caches everything else – I’ve got to figure out how to improve that.)

Under load testing with the Ubuntu ab command, the site stands up extremely well. So I’m thrilled.

Next project? I’m going to play around with a WordPress PHPFog site over at www.phpfog.com — which promises to do what I’ve got now, but a hugely optimized infrastructure that strips away the last bit of overhead from use of PHP.

So now you know what one of the world’s leading futurists does to relax. But it’s not just that — I’m out speaking to organizations on leading edge trends. In many cases, this involves observations on the impact and evolution of technology. I’ve been a geek for 30 years – I started out with a Radio Shack Model III 30 years ago. I’ve always been deep into the core of systems and technology.

You can’t talk about the cloud, if you don’t play in the cloud!

The Canadian Society of Association Executives “Association Magazine” has just released their latest edition, which included my article with the title above.

"We will see massive business model disruption as new, faster, more nimble competitors who understand technology based disruption cast aside their slower, ingrained counterparts who are stuck with old, ingrained ideas."

You can grab the PDF of the article at the right on the image. Note that it is English and French.

The article is based on the blog post I wrote back in November last year, shortly after my keynote for the 2011 T. Rowe Price Investment Symposium, where I played into the theme in a big way.

You can read that post here, although the PDF of the article expands on the concepts in a bit more detail.

I’m finding a huge degree of interest in this theme as a speaking topic; actually, quite a few recent keynotes are being entirely built around the theme, since it is such a significant transformative trend.

Essentially, industries used to control their destiny. They could drive the pace of innovation.

That’s not true anymore, and as I have described on stage in the last few weeks to companies in the insurance, banking, credit union, agricultural and other industries — “What happens to you when the pace of innovation begins to occur at the same speed that Apple innovates. Because that is pretty well what is beginning to happen now.”

Read the article. Think about what is happening here.

The future belongs to those who are fast!

I’ve recently been the opening keynote speaker for two major energy events, with talks that focused on the future trends that will impact the energy industry, primarily from the perspective of energy utilities.

The first was for Accenture’s International Utilities and Energy Conference 2012 held in San Francisco, with a global audience from over 35 countries.

The second was for Enercom 2012, Canada’s leading energy conference held in Toronto, which featured a similar senior level audience from across Canada.

Both keynotes took a look at some of the key trends which will provide accelerating opportunity to provide for a more efficient energy grid, more rapid adoption of alternative energy sources, and respond to changing energy consumer profiles, among other trends.

One of my key messages? Opportunities for innovation are increasing because of a rapid acceleration in the velocity of knowledge.

1. World class innovators keep the goal in sight despite pushback

To a degree, it’s a bit tough to keep an innovative spirit in the utility industry today, as a number of trends seem to work against the need for continuous new thinking:

• in many areas of the world, there is a massive pushback on solar / wind / alternative energy sources by the public, for a variety of reasons (which some might conclude is driven by an overstimulated by “Internet-fact” driven NIMBYism)
• political turmoil over the incentive structure around alternative energy projects
• well publicized major failures around the same (call it The Solyndra Effect)
• growing public and government skepticism over the pace of change

Consider the latter point. In some areas of the US, there is significant pushback against the implementation of smart meter technology — 47 cities and counties have adopted resolutions opposing smart meters for various reasons. At the other extreme, there are some areas where people are impatient with the pace of adoption of alternative technologies. In Boulder Colorado,  there is a citizen inspired initiative to take over local power generation because of a belief that Xcel Energy is not moving fast enough with green and smart energy tech!

How can you win in an environment in which there are such dramatically different views? Keep focused on the goal! The International Energy Authority suggests that energy demand will grow worldwide by 35% between 2010 and 2035; in the US, by 22% alone. Globally, Shell suggests energy demand will grow 60% in developed countries by 2040.

Clearly there has to be a continued effort to focus on the need to continue to develop and implement alternative energy sources. There is a need for continual, relentless innovation!

 2. World class innovators aren’t afraid of thinking boldly

We live in a period of time that involves massive, sweeping transformations, and thinking longer term is always critical. I pointed out that Exxon Mobil believes that one out of every two cars will be either hybrids or some other alternative-fuel vehicle by 2040 – up from just 1% today. Clearly there is going to be a lot of innovation with the energy grid and everything that helps to generate power around in order to keep up with such a massive shift.

Big ideas lead to big opportunities – I spoke about the Gemasolar plant outside Villanueva del Ray in southern Spain – the world’s first  24 hour solar power plant. It involves a unique molton-salt heat storage system that solves one of the key problems with alternative energy : how to storage generated power so that it can be used at off peak periods. The slide from my deck tells it all: this was a big, bold project.

3. World class innovators ride rapidly accelerating science

That’s what the video clip above was from. In Canada, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Waterlook recently brought together a group of experts touching on every aspect of the energy industry. They issued the The Equinox Blueprint, with one of the key points being that we are going to see “.….extremely rapid advances in battery storage, enhanced geothermal, advanced nuclear, off-grid power and smart urbanization….”

The MIT project I refer to in the video clip above? It involves “…organic photovoltaics … solar cells which are sprayed or painted onto surfaces.”

Cool stuff!

4. World class innovators ride generational acceleration

There are huge opportunities to drive efficiency in the global energy grid by shifting demand — the oft-cited example being if consumers use their dishwashers during off-peak hours when demand is lower and generation costs are reduced, we have a smarter system.

The challenge is that efforts to encourage this type of activity through smart meters has not met with great acceptance. But I pointed out that is simply a transitional issue, as the current generation of iPhone-weaned Gen-Connect individuals comes to buy their own homes — and bring their different technology-based lifestyle to the energy grid.

I pointed out that we are quickly going to witness four key trends come together:

• energy costs continue to increase, continuing to drive the need for consumers to change their energy usage behaviour
• system connectivity accelerates in the global energy grid, particularly with the consumerization of energy technology, as witnessed by the Nest LearningThermostat
• the current “App generation” buys houses and installs such devices
• and the incentive structure around power consumption matures with this generation

Think about it: this is the XBOX generation! They’ve grown up in a world of instant rewards for activity. In Call of Duty, you get a series of continual rewards based on actions. The same type of thing will happen with power consumption — if you use the technology that surrounds your personal energy infrastructure, you’ll get a cost reduction.

This generation will take advantage of Nest thermostats to a huge degree. They’re daily activities with simple activties such as dishwashers and dryers is changing :

• “Imagine your washing machine sending you a text when it’s time to move your clothes to the dryer…” Connect Home Appliances, PC Magazine,April 2011

Smart appliances are emerging faster than ever before as Moore’s law comes to the industry:

• “Whirlpool recently announced it will be producing 1 million smart-grid compatible clothes dryers by the of 2011” Total home control. Residential Design & Build,September 2010

These are appliances which are linked to the intelligence in the smart-grid, and which will automatically schedule themselves to run when rates are lowest, according to a defined set of consumer preferences.

In other words, consumer behaviour and interaction with the rapid emergence of smart grid technology is going to accelerate faster opportunities for efficiency in the grid.

The key message for global energy utilities? The future belongs to those who are fast!

Mashable just ran a post, “9 Bold Predictions for the Digital World of 2020“.

I’m quoted in point 5 – Virtual Hospitals”.

9 Bold Predictions for the Digital World of 2020

Here’s what I said: “By 2020, if not before, most industries – health care, agriculture, financial – will have found that they have been transformed by the velocity of Moore’s law. Mobility, wireless, pervasive connectivity – everywhere we look, we see that the big trend for the next eight years is that technology will drive the pace of innovation in every single industry.

Credit cards will be replaced by smartphone transactions systems; auto insurance will be forever changed through GPS-based monitoring devices that reward good driving performance; hospitals will become virtual through the extension of bio-connectivity, involving remote medical monitoring and management.

The big trend is that as tech comes to change industries, change in those industries will occur faster than ever before. The winners will have been those who understand this reality, and adjust their innovation engine to keep up with this new speed of change.”

There are a few ways to put this into more detail, through various posts and videos on my site where I talk about this trend:

• Major 10 year trend: The Future of Every Industry to be Controlled by Silicon Valley Innovation  
• A report on my keynote for the 2011 T. Rowe Price Investment Symposium  
• Video – When Silicon Valley Takes Over Your Innovation Agenda  
• Silicon Valley Innovation Velocity Set to Dominate Every Industry 
• Video: Healthcare 2020: Moore’s Law, Genomics and Velocity 

I was recently the keynote speaker at two major corporate events, both of which really have to seem a key theme at the heart of the “big issues” that organizations are faced with — and that is, we are in a period of time in which the very concept of ‘cash’ is being fundamentally changed, due to the impact of mobile technology.

The first event was for Visa’s 2012 Prepaid Forum in Phoenix — at which, in my keynote, I made the observation that “if you think about it, we’ve only redefined cash once in our history — when credit cards were introduced. We’re about to do it a second time as smartphones become the new credit card!”

The second event was in Las Vegas, at GlobalExchange 2012, an event held by Pollard Banknote, one of the largest printers of lottery tickets, with attendance by a large number of senior executives from throughout the global lottery industry. I made the same observation, but in this case challenging the audience to think about how the world of retail, and hence the world of lottery ticket sales, would come to be challenged through this transformation of cash.

Both event featured similar session descriptions in that the issues that both are confronting through strategic thinking are very much the same.

In the case of the VISA event (click to view)….

…and for Pollard Banknote (click to view)

This is a huge trend that is unfolding at lightening speed as a wide variety of Internet companies (Google, Facebook, PayPal and more) all position themselves in terms of the “virtual wallet”, at the same that smartphone makers (Apple, etc) , banks and credit card companies all explore the space.

Yet it is a pretty massive undertaking : as noted in the Wall Street Journal, 
November 2011, “Yankee Group analyst Nick Holland estimates it will cost $15 billion to deploy the technology that will make mobile payments ubiquitous.”

As we get the second biggest disruption with cash to occur in our entire history, we can be certain there will be a huge number of business model disruptions, new competitors, existing market turmoil, new customer challenges and opportunities — and just a tremendous amount of change.

One of my observations in both keynotes is that every organization needs to get involved and get their feet wet — fast. There is so much going on so quickly that in this case — the future will truly belong to those who are fast. That means trying out a whole bunch of new ideas and innovating at top speed.

But does that mean that we are going to see someone win in this space in 2012? I doubt it — the scope of the undertaking and the infrastructure is involved is simply too big. That doesn’t mean anyone can avoid it though – because those who are making bold plays now will become big players tomorrow. Noted Thomas Kunz, Senior Vice President,  PNC Financial, when it comes to mobile payments: “2012 will be about a beta and expanding that beta test. It will take some time for this to become mainstream.”

As a result, my key innovation mantra — THINK BIG, START SMALL, SCALE FAST — fit perfectly into the themes and stories I weaved on stage in Phoenix and Las Vegas!

The Globe & Mail had a nice summary of my 2012 future trends prediction blog.

You can grab a copy of the PDF by clicking on the image to the right. Harvey Schacter, who summarized my original blog post, is a great guy!

You might find it a good document to fire up into your email and share around, retweet or Facebook!

I’ve had a number of media interviews and followup as a result of the article. If you are interested in contacting me for these purposes, please do so.

I enjoy seeing coverage of the trends and insight that I regularly provide in my blog. I think my job continues to be to challenge people to think about their status quo; how quickly their world is changing around them in ways that they might not know; and what they need to be thinking from an innovation perspective to deal with those realities.

This synopses makes for a quick read and summary, and so it’s always a thrill to see the blog post get shared in a unique and innovative way.

Sidebar: I actually wrote a weekly column for the Globe & Mail for four years from 1998 till 2002, in which I covered leading edge technology and Internet issues. It was well liked and always generated a tremendous amount of e-mail feedback.

That is, until the-then editor of the business section decided in the light of the dot.com crash that there would be no more future technology stories to unfold, and that tech coverage was just as good as dead!

Of course, after that, we saw the emergence of Facebook, the dominance of Google, the rise of the Apple infrastructure, iTunes and Apps and iPods, the explosion of social networking, the huge impact of Twitter, pervasive connectivity, digital lifestyles, the overthrow of government through national online networking …. and so much more.

Yup, tech was dead!

I still think that editor was one of the biggest bozos I ever met in my life! Just saying!

At the T. Rowe Price 2011 Investment Symposium in Baltimore on Friday, I listened to the technology panel that preceded my luncheon keynote.

It was a fascinating discussion as a number of their leading analysts spoke of the trends that they saw unfolding with consumer and other digital technology companies, such as Apple, Amazon and Samsung.

Name any industry - auto, health care, manufacturing, energy, banking -- and the big trend over the next five years is that Silicon Valley is coming to control the pace of innovation in the industry. And it's speeding it up!

But I thought that the crowd was hungering for a bit more — where are the next big trends, and the next big transformation opportunities that are going to unfold which are going to provide for the birth of new industries, fast growing companies, and billion-dollar market opportunities?

And so I outlined that reality: the next big areas of growth will come from the transformative change that occurs as Silicon Valley comes to drive the pace of innovation in almost every other industry. As it does so,  it will speed up the rate of innovation.

The impact of this trend is that it will also shift control from any particular industry – insurance, healthcare, banking, auto — to the technology companies. The result will be massive business model disruption as new, faster, more nimble competitors who understand technology based disruption, cast aside their slower, ingrained counterparts.

The future belongs, in other words, to those who are fast. Tech companies and tech based innovators certainly understand this! And the key issue is speed : Apple, for example, could innovate much faster with new credit card financial systems than any bank could. Google and it’s tests of automatic car navigation technology will certainly evolve faster than any auto company in Detroit, Japan or Germany could. Unless leaders in those organizations increasingly learn to focus on speed as a metric, and fast-innovation as a core capability.

Consider just a few of the trends:

• Banks and credit companies risk losing control of their future as our mobile devices, cell phones and iPhones become credit cards
• the energy industry and home construction is impacted as a new personal energy infrastructure management, in the form of such devices as the NEST Thermostat, provide for a significant change in the way people use energy
• health care will be transformed by medical device connectivity and bioconnetivity — allowing hospitals and nursing homes to extend the reach of their medical professionals to an increasing number of remote locations
• the auto industry will face trendmeondous change as an intelligent highway infrastructure emerges as the same time as intelligent, self-guiding cars and trucks become a regular part of our daily world
• the world of insurance is upended as we head to a world of predictive insurance modelling through the use of sophisticated technologies such as on-board GPS devices which monitor driver behaviour

These are but just a few examples. I can go into any industry today and point out how Silicon Valley and technology is going to cause significant change and upheaval within the industry. I can spot the smart executives who understand the message and realize that right now is the time for aggressive innovation and big thinking.

And then in other clients, I can see this observation pass right over the heads of some of those in the audience, and realize we’ve got folks who are like deer in the headlights — the trends are blinding in their reality, but they are frozen by their inability to do anything.

I spoke about this trend in a recent keynote.

There are a whole series of related posts in which I’ve commented on the significance of this trend and the speed with which it is occurring. These are just a few.

• Silicon Valley innovation velocity set to dominate every industry 
• When Silicon Valley Takes Over Health Care Innovation 
• This ghost town in New Mexico could turn into one of the most important innovation engines 
• Reinventing the future with transformative technology
• Silicon Valley: Is Innovation Dead? 

730AM, New Orleans, an audience of 4,500 executives. My keynote theme is “Today’s Trends – Tomorrow’s Opportunities.” I’m taking a look at the trends of Healthcare 2020 — the key trends that will provide for transformative opportunities in health care in the years to come. Trends that are unfolding today — one of them being the huge velocity behind wireless and mobile health applications, and the rapidity of changing patient / consumer behavior.

It’s a low-res video clip — I should have a higher quality version next week. But its worth a watch. (You need to turn the volume up!)

• It took two years for Apple to sell 2 million iPhones.
•  It took 2 months for them to sell 2 million iPads!
• It took 1 month to sell 1 million iPhone 4’s!
• It took 1 day to sell 1 million iPhone 4s
• it’s estimated that Apple sold 5 million iPhone 4s’s in the first 4 days of release

But it’s what consumers are doing with these technologies that provide so much potential for innovation. With respect to health care, the numbers are quite staggering:

• 78% of consumers are interested in mobile health solutions
• medical and health care apps are 3rd fast growing category for iPhone and Android phones
• the Apple App store now has 17,000 health care related apps
• 60% of which are aimed at the consumer

What we have happening here is a massive trend in which people are changing their behaviours, actions, wellness, and day to day routines in which they actively manage their health circumstances through the personal digital assistants which are becoming an ingrained part of their lives.

Innovation is all about finding opportunity when business models change. The centuries old relationship between doctor and patient is changing in a massive way — driven with increased velocity by mobile and wireless technologies. This is HUGE.

This is a huge trend, and will probably provide one of the biggest areas for innovation in the world of health care out to the year 2020. I just wrote about this in a recent blog post – read “When Silicon Valley takes over health care innovation” for more.

I’ve recently done a number of very high profile talks in the health care, pharmaceutical and related industries, including opening the recent World Pharma Innovation Congress in London, England.

Just last week, I was the opening speaker for a very early start at 730AM in New Orleans for over 4,500 people at the International Foundation 57th U.S. Annual Employee Benefits Conference – always a fascinating experience to have that many people out in N.O. for an early keynote!

The organizations selected me specifically because I could give them an overview of future health care trends, without taking at look at the political issue of health care reform. After all, the real trends that will provide the real solutions to some pretty massive challenges in the world of health care will come from the world of science, hi-tech and pure research — not from an ongoing, relentless, annoying and ultimately useless amount of hot-air from politicians, regardless of their political stripe.

For New Orleans, the keynote description emphasized this : which is perhaps why so many showed up!

“Jim Carroll, one of the world’s leading futurists, will share his thoughts on transformative trends that will define the road ahead in the critical area of health care. The fact is we will witness more change in health care in the next ten years than we have seen in the last 200. Hear Mr. Carroll forecast what paradigms will change as health care is transformed through the next decade, far beyond the impact of health care reform.

At events such as this one and the keynote in London, I take a look at the future of health care from the perspective of medical science, social and demographic trends, the impact of increasing velocity of knowledge and other major trends that have absolutely nothing to do with the political debate around health care reform. You can’t wish a problem into a solution — you need pure research and innovation to make things real.

And certainly one of the trends that is going to provide tremendous opportunities for innovation in the sector will come about as Silicon Valley sets its sights on health care. Years ago, a senior executive at Intel noted that “we have the potential to aim our innovation engine at the age wave challenge and change the way we do health care from a crisis- driven, assembly-line, hospital approach to a personal-driven approach, with people taking care of themselves with help from family, friends and technologies.” At the time they were speaking of health care being one of their top five sources of revenue in the years to come.

That’s why one of the biggest growth markets we are beginning to witness now is emerging as Silicon Valley and the hi-tech industry begins to get involved in the world of health care in a whole variety of different ways.

First and foremost, it’s happening in a very big way with consumer-oriented health care apps, particularly on the iPhone and Android. A recent survey indicated that:

• 78% of consumers are interested in mobile health solutions
• medical and health care apps are 3rd fast growing category for iPhone and Android phones
• the Apple App store now has 17,000 health care related apps, 60% of which are aimed at the consumer

We will certainly see a huge amount of product innovation, such as the new iPhone based blood pressure monitor from Withings:

What is really significant is that with such personal medical monitoring and wellness technology, we are going to see very significant involvement by health care providers and professionals, insurers and others within the system to adapt to a new world in which a large number of patients become immersed in the world of interactive healthcare and wellness monitoring.

Then there is the world of bio-connectivity — a trend that will see the emergence of more sophisticated medical device technology that will let medical professional monitor their patients from afar. This is a topic that I’ve explored at length in a variety of posts on this site. Quite simply, in the years to come, the concept of a physical hospital is going to change as it goes virtual through the extension of bio-connectivity technologies and methodologies:

• Imagine the hospital of 2020? I can 
• The future of seniors care / assisted living: Big trends or crazy ideas? 

Silicon Valley will also play a huge role as it comes to develop real time health care predictive dashboards and other new forms of medical insight that will help the system to be better predictors of emerging health care risks and crisis situations. Big math, big computers, big analytics and health care – a match made in heaven!

• Remember those kids who were really good at math? They own the future 

It doesn’t stop there. In the world of pharmaceuticals, the impact of Silicon Valley is going to have one of the most dramatic impacts on an industry that we have ever witnessed. For years, the sector has been busy exploring the opportunity for ‘pharmacogenetics’ — that is, how can we determine if a particular drug treatment is going to have its greatest impact on a group of people who share a common characteristic in their DNA.

This type of very specific genomic medicine has been around for years — but it is about to take off like a rocket as Moore’s law comes to have an impact. Quite simply, the cost to do what were once very expensive genetic tests are simply going to plummet.

• Costs of DNA sequencing falling fast – look at these graphs 

I could go on ; there are dozens of examples where the impact of technology upon the health care system is going to be dramatic.

Suffice it to say, if you want to watch one of the trends that will have the most impact in the next decade, this is one of them.

From my August CAMagazine column….

You might have been to a conference recently that involved polling technology. You’re handed a little clicker that has four buttons, and on the screen at the front of the room you see a multiple-choice question. Everyone sends in a response and the results appear instantly on screen.

This instant polling technology is quite fun. Too bad this particular technology, which has been around just a few years, is already obsolete. That’s because of the impact of mobile technology, which is set to cause many other day-to-day activities to become out of date.

I often do live polling of my audience while onstage, but there’s no complicated set-up for me. I simply design a multiple-choice poll using the Poll Everywhere website. Then I ask those in attendance to take out their smartphones, iPhones andBlackBerrys and respond by sending a text message. (They can also vote by visiting a website on their smartphone, or even tweet their response.)

Of course, the number of votes that come in varies. I was onstage in front of 800 bankers in Texas and the average age must have been 60-plus. Out of that group, three managed to figure out how to send a text. Maybe they didn’t know how to send a text to someone outside their contact list. This was fascinating, because there are already new types of banks, such as South Africa-based Wizzit, in which all transactions occur via text message.

Contrast the ability of the bankers to participate in a live text-message poll to my experience when I was invited to talk to 250 students for my son’s Grade 12 class. When I ran the first text-message poll, I had about 247 responses within 60 seconds. For members of this generation, texting is like oxygen; their mobile smartphone is their view into the world. They’ll look at something like text-message-based banking and think it is a great idea.

This speaks to a huge trend: significant business model change as a result of the impact of mobile or smartphone technology. The pace of innovation in the banking sector will shift from what was once a nice, leisurely state of affairs to the hyperspeed, frenetic pace of innovation that emanates from Silicon Valley and smartphone makers. Even the credit cards in our pockets are likely to disappear because near-field communications technology will allow us to instantly pay for a purchase by simply authorizing the transaction on our smartphones. Some magic will happen that will cause the authorization to be sent to the store, gas station or other payment acceptance system.

And the trend isn’t limited to financial services — it’s happening in virtually every industry. For example, British insurance company Insure The Box will set your car up with a special type of GPS device. It will measure your acceleration, the G-force of your turns, whether you are stopping fully at traffic lights and whether you are keeping to the speed limit. If you do, you’ll get a rebate on the insurance you paid. Call it performance-based insurance. Several major North American insurance carriers plan to roll out similar technology within the year.

What happens in the world of banking, insurance and other industries when Apple and other smartphone developers determine their destiny?

Read more about that experience here: “What happens when high school students are told to text!” 

While I spend a huge amount of time travelling to speak at various events, I also spend a good chunk of time in the home office undertaking research for my next keynote; and I am continually working on marketing and support of the business. A big part of the latter comes from the Web site that you are just now visiting…

When you are viewing JimCarrollcom, you're dealing with a pretty sophisticated cloud computing infrastructure.... artwork courtesy of Fotolia!

When I’m not working, I break the office day wit with regular 5 mile walks, 50 kilometer / 30 mile bike rides, visits to the gym or other activities — there are a lot of extra hours in the day when you’ve been working at home for 20 years.

But sometimes you have to take a break in the office from working and exercising — and that’s where geek-time comes in. I’ve been online since 1982, dialling into bulletin boards with a 300 baud modem; I was using email from that year on. In 1985 I was running around telling people that “the Internet was coming” — some 10 years before it really went mainstream….

And so in addition to my role as an innovation expert and futurist, I’ve also got a hard core technology habit. Heck, I even know how to compile source code….. and at one point, had 7 Linux servers in my basement. (Long story; I’m over that now; it’s all a big Mac / OS/X infrastructure now…)

I get a lot of questions from some of the technology folks that I deal with about my Web site and blog, and so in response to that, for those of you who are technically inclined, here’s the skinny:

• JimCarroll.com is served up from a DV server at MediaTemple. I was on a GS (shared service) for about a year, but just decided to take the plunge and for a “dedicated virtual” service just for the extra perfomrance boost
• Does the domain name jimcarroll.com resolve quickly, and can it flip over to a backup site if my main server crashes? All of my domain hosting for this (and other domains) is handled by easyDNS. I’ve been with them for 15+ years, and they are likely one of the most dependable tech companies on the planet!
• the site is based on WordPress, likely the most popular blogging platform on the planet
• the Web site design was done by Echo Factory, who are somewhere out in California. I think they did a briliant job with the design …
• cloud computing? Yup! All of the video throughout the site comes to you either via YouTube, or via Vimeo. That too cuts down on the load on my own Web server, which just helps to speed things up
• then there is real cloud computing! Most of the images, javascript and other design files aren’t served up by my own host, but are actually pulled down “from the cloud” using Amazons’ Cloudfront service. That’s why you’ll see some images as coming from media.jimcarroll.com or media3.jimcarroll.com. That means they are actually coming at you from the cloud….which results in some pretty dramatic speed improvements in terms of Web page loading.
• the cloud magic happens utilizing the W3TC cache-ing plugin from W3Edge. It’s a pretty remarkable piece of software that does a lot of cool stuff to make your Web pages and blogs load faster. (Right now, they’ve had a new release that hasn’t gone so well for 48 hours or so, but they’ll fix it…)
• I’m a nut about backup, and utilize both the BlogVault and VaultPress plugins that provide automated regular backup of my entire site, blog database files and other stuff. I’ve had to use one or both on occasion, and both are highly recommended. When I moved my site from one server to another, it was a paineless, 1-click process using the most recent BlogVault backup
• I’m constantly working to try to improve page loading performance. As of this week, I’m using Memcache so that rendering of some pages is happening from memory instead of disk at my Web host. I think I’m seeing some performance improvements!
• the site is constantly tested for performance using the great service from GTMetrix — which does a series of daily tests for page loading times, architecture and design. There’s lots of work to continue to tweak the site, but the insight they provide is fabulous – test your own page! Some my pages now load in less than 2 seconds; they used to take 8 or 10 or more seconds…..
• part of tweaking a Web site is knowing if it running with an adequate load? Monitoring done by Monit!


What people are searching for right now @ JimCarroll.com

• my business is increasingly global. Is my site up and accessible from London, Sydney, and Hong Kong? Lately, I’ve been playing around with WebSitePulse.Com, which does regular testing of site uptime and performance from locations worldwide. Every day I get a report as to how well the site was performing in various cities. Not only that, if the site crashes – I know about it just about 1/2 second later!
• I’ve got instant, up to the second insight into how people are finding my Web site — the search phrases they use, the search engines they are on, and the pages they look at. I use two such services — Mint, which is just an absolute ton of fun to use, and Reinvigorate, which is actually part of MediaTemple. The screen shot shows some of the search phrases people have used to find my site in the last hour – that’s from Mint, which can work on a wide variety of different platforms.
• Content? The photo at the top comes courtesy of Fotolia. I’ve long been a fan of professional online photo / artwork services, and this is a new one that I just added to my stable.

2 years ago, my site ran as a slow blog based on MovableType on a single server that was shared by countless other people and companies.

Today, my site is out on the cloud, utilizing some fascinating cutting edge technology, and scalable and flexible enough to meet the demands placed upon it.

So while its important to always be thinking about the future and innovation, it’s also critical to get in regularly and get your feet wet and your hands dirty. I certainly do!

(If your company is also being used by my site in some way, and I forgot to mention you, let me know and I’ll make sure to add you to this post…)

“Most people overestimate the amount of change that will occur in two years and underestimate the change that will occur over ten years” – Bill Gates

In 2001, the future was over already! Slow growth was sure to follow!

That’s a phrase that I often use when opening a keynote. When I’m on stage, about to blast into a high velocity 45 minute presentation that links fast-paced trends to the need for various types of innovation, whether with business models, customer support, skills access or new forms of revenue where revenue hasn’t existed before — I need an effective hook to grab the attention of the audience.

With the phrase from Bill Gates put out to the audience, I sometimes reach into the past in order to put the future into perspective. After all, it is very true that most people really don’t think about how quickly their world is changing around them.

With that in mind, let’s go back to this week in the year 2001. It was an innocent time — pre 9-11. The dot.com world had just collapsed, and the world was in the midst of another economic downturn.

The Internet? It was over, folks! We’d just witnessed the flameout of a huge number of dot.com startups — and people had convinced themselves that technology had run its course. And yet others knew that something big was still yet to come. It’s fascinating to compare the different perspectives of the time with the reality that resulted today.

(By the way, Apple’s market cap in March 2001 was about $10 billion US. Microsoft? $319 billion US.Today, Apple is over $300 billion, while Apple is about $228 billion.)

Just ten years ago this week, this is what you would have seen:

Internet access in cars? If you want to go online, get the (beep) off the road!
The San Diego Union-Tribune, 31 March 2001

• the implication being, of course, that we would never see anything so silly as having Internet access in automobiles. Today, of course, virtually every car company in the world is working feverishly to provide an enhanced dashboard experience involving a vast array of sophisticated technologies including, of course, all kinds of links to Internet-oriented data.

MLB to Start Charging For Audio on Internet
The San Francisco Chronicle, 28 March 2001

• early on, it was apparent that major brands that had loyal followers could invent and build new business models which would reach out directly to their fan base. MLB has always been spot on in this regard. Ten years after charging for audio, they’ve launched an extremely sophisticated, flat-fee iPad application that allows streaming access to a full range of live and archived video. Innovators don’t fight the future — they adapt to it and discover opportunity.

Michael Jackson TV goes on the Internet
The Globe and Mail, 27 March 2001

• back in the day, you had to be a global entertainment superstar to dump some video up on the Internet. It took megabucks to do it, and megageeks to figure it out. Ten years later, everybody has their own personal TV channel on YouTube, and the entire concept of TV has been forever reshaped.

Nortel Networks Teams to Create High-Performance Internet Village in California
Reuters Significant Developments, 30 March 2001

• Nortel — and a few other tech companies — blew up in spectacular fashion just a few years later, a victim of bad business decisions, an accounting fraud or two, and a basic inability to keep up with furious rates of technologiical and market change. Key message: today’s heroes can often become tomorrow’s zeros, faster than you might think. Do any of today’s fast social media startups know that they could soon too be in the dustbin? Complacency is a dangerous thing, especially in the context of history.

Many teachers find Internet of little use
Milwaukee Sentinel Journal, 30 March 2001

• well, this might still be true today in some cases, but certainly not in many other cases. Demographically, we’re just a few years away from a time when almost every teacher will have grown up with the Internet from their teens. And certainly students find the Internet to be of use – most studies show that it is the most important source for homework research!

Microsoft warns of problems with Internet Explorer
Associated Press Newswires, 30 March 2001

• well, maybe some things just don’t change over a decade!

Sign of the times: Companies call for Internet appreciation day
Associated Press Newswires, 31 March 2001

• put this headline in context. We’d just witnessed the great dot.com collapse. All kinds of dubious Internet startups were shutting down; there was gloom throughout Silicon Valley and other tech-hotspots. I remember one reporter calling me: “Since the Internet is now over, what’s next?” The mainstream and business media convinced themselves in this state of gloom that the Internet would have little to no impact on politics, business and society in the future. And so some folks thought it was important that we just sit back and consider how important the Internet might still be. Quaint.

Railroads, Like the Internet, Once Steamed the Economy
International Herald Tribune, 31 March 2001

• the implication being, of course, that in this state of doom-and-gloom, the Internet would no longer have an impact on the global economy. Oops! Then the world went flat — the Internet proved to be the backbone which steamrollered business models, provided the genesis for the birth of entire new industries, had a major influence on marketing and branding, caused global revolutions, and led to a few new multi-gazzillionaires (Facebook, Twitter, MyTube didn’t come along till many years after this headline.)

Napster, CD Burning, Internet Retail Are Hot NARM Confab Topics
Billboard, 31 March 2001

• back then, people stole music and burned it onto CD’s. Today, the music industry business model is all about the cloud, with systems like RDIO, Spotify and, maybe, Apple’s forthcoming cloud initiative set to continue to reshape the future. Ten years ago, the music industry was busy battling the future. Ten years later, many in the old music industry are still battling the future, while the new business models that will sustain music over the long term are being built today by faster, fleeted footed youngsters.

Any Patient Can Now Send Internet Messages Directly To Their Doctor’s Fax Machine
Internet Wire, 30 March 2001

• some braniac dreamed up a new business model, except they forgot to realize that within a decade, 75% of American doctors would carry some type of mobile or PDA device with them while working. History has shown us that many folks often miss the signs of massive technological shift — the result being that a great idea is often out of date before it gets to go mainstream

Struggling eMachines cuts 16% of jobs Computers The new CEO also eliminates most Internet advertising ventures.
The Orange County Register, 30 March 2001

• the beginning of the end of the “personal computer.” eMachines still exists, busy manufacturing low-end computers. 10 years later, technology growth is all about mobile devices, tablets / iPads, embedded technology, and who knows what else is yet to come?

Internet Is Dominated By the Rich World, Says Mando.
All Africa, 29 March 2001

• to be fair, it was difficult to get onto the Internet 10 years ago in many third-world countries. It still is today. And yet, we’ve witnessed throughout the Middle East and northern Africa the impact that the network can have upon autocractic regimes. In terms of numbers, the Internet is no longer dominated by the ‘rich world,’ and in terms of democracy, it’s having its biggest political impact far beyond that world.

The great Internet firewall of China
The Nation (Thailand), 26 March 2001

• ten years on, it is kind of chilling to realize that the nation has now spent a decade learning how to make the firewall work better. Here’s your challenge of the day: what will the headline of 26 March 2021 have to say about the ‘great Internet firewall of China?” Will they have succeeded, or will have it become the most massive FAIL of the century?

So that’s a look back at headlines involving the Internet but a mere ten years ago. What if we go back 20 years? In my news service, I could only find one for this particular week in which the word “Internet” was mentioned in the headline:

General Atomics, Performance Systems International, UUNET Technologies establish first Commercial Internet Exchange
BusinessWire, 27 March 1991

• in other words, but 20 years ago, today’s Internet was but a glimmer in the eye of but a few thousand geeks worldwide. A few networks were beginning to realize they could do something awesome if they plugged together. I was one of them. By 1991, I had already been online for some 9 years, starting out with early BBS systems, services like the Source and BIX (Byte Information Network). Yet all of a sudden, in 1991, visions were crystallizing of an opportunity to use a fast-paced emerging standard known as TCP/IP to link together all the computers in the world. Many of us thought the results would be astonishing. That’s an understatment.

So let me ask this: what are the headlines that you think you’ll see this week in 2021?

How small is your world? How big is your thinking?

So what do you do with the information you learned from this post? Go and read, “How small is your world? How thinking big could save you in the 21st century economy“