It's a truism that we live in a knowledge economy. For the last decade, being competitive in the knowledge economy has required developing systems to manage information-- information like consumer data, logistics, organizational practices. But the tools of the next decade will be very different. The growing accessibility of knowledge management systems have greatly reduced the competitive advantage that companies can draw from adopting them: KM is business as usual.

After discovering a free application that let her Mac laptop display movement like a seismograph, seismologist Elizabeth Cochran of UC Riverside was struck by a pretty good idea: let's turn our laptops into real earthquake sensors.