Technology Horizons
feedThe Technology Horizons Program combines a deep understanding of technology and societal forces to identify and evaluate discontinuities and innovations in the next 3 to 10 years. We help organizations develop insights and strategic tools to better position themselves for the future. Our approach to technology forecasting is unique—we put people at the center of our forecasts. Understanding humans as consumers, workers, householders, and community members allows IFTF to help companies look beyond technical feasibility to identify the value in new technologies, forecast adoption and diffusion patterns, and discover new market opportunities and threats.
Lyn Jeffery | Director, Technology Horizon Program
For more information on membership in the Technology Horizons Program, please contact Sean Ness at sness@iftf.org or 650-233-9517.
2012 Technology Horizons Research Agenda
As Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Our identities, organizations, industries, and societies have slowly but surely been reshaped over the past thirty years of the mass experiment that we call the...
The Human Internet: Where will the web take us in 2022?
In 2012, we will begin mapping the core technologies that will shape the next ten years of web experience and finish with a guide to the new values and capacities of an Internet human in 2022. This will provide insight into the emerging concepts and social phenomena shaping new services, interactions, and living patters across a wide range of daily-life domains. Along the way we...
Your World Redefined - the Serious Business of Augmented Reality
IFTF's Mike Liebhold is featured in the Ericsson's Business Review cover story on the transformative world of augmented reality. The dreams of sci-fi writers and movie makers are explored here--playing out on...
Human Plus Machine: A Winning Partnership
As we forecast in 2010’s Technology Horizons research, the next ten years will see smart machines entering virtually every domain of our lives: assisting doctors during surgery, fighting on battlefields, building things in factories, and assisting in classrooms, nursing homes, and offices. As machines augment and replace humans...
Science Hack Day Goes Global
Today IFTF research affiliate, founder of spacehack.org, and open science strategist, Ariel Waldman, will make the official announcement that Science Hack Day is going global at her morning keynote at OSCON...
Innovation spaces of the future: research notes on China's shanzhai meeting the Makers
Over a few months in early 2011, in the course of doing research for an IFTF Tech Horizons Program’s study on the future of “open fabrication,” I convened what turned out to be a remarkable, free-wheeling conversation among a set of pioneering thinker/makers in China, Singapore, and the U.S. What started out as a set of distinct one-on-one research emails turned into a group discussion...
IFTF Explores Innovation in Brazil
I had the amazing opportunity to speak at the 4th Brazilian Congress on Innovation this week. There’s not much information about the event on the web in English, but it was a large gathering of government officials and industry leaders taking another step towards a comprehensive innovation strategy for Brazil.
It’s a fascinating time for Brazil. The country’s economy is booming, largely...
Slow Rollout for Future of Whitespace Wifi
IFTF colleague, Sean Ness, asked me for comments on glowing blog predictions for near term availability of wide area "Super WiFi" using the recently...
Blue Mind: A look at the ocean through the field of neuroscience
"We are more than logical. We are human." Jacques Cousteau.
Why do books and symposia about the human brain, the most complex object in the universe, contain no mention of the ocean, the single greatest feature of our planet? Why do books and conferences on protecting and restoring the world’s oceans entirely overlook the field of cognitive neuroscience? The...
Reinventing Our Energy Futures
For the last several months, IFTF's Technology Horizons program has been conducting research on the notoriously difficult to forecast topic of energy. Because the future energy landscape is in a near-constant state of innovation and change, we projected four alternative futures for energy, using the Alternative Futures Methodology developed by Jim Dator at the Manoa School of Future Studies....
Is our future all sunny?
Last week, I mentioned that we're hosting a workshop: Reinventing Our Energy Futures. Yesterday, we kicked things off with a keynote speech by Tony Seba, author of Solar Trillions. Tony has an entrepreneurial/tech background and has...
SIGNALS: Avatars, Solar, Tar Sands, Shock Wave Engine, SketchChair, Robotics, Biopunk, Algae, Virtual Currency
- 3-D Avatars Could Put You in Two Places at Once (source) #TechTYF #FutureOfVideo
- Google...
SIGNALS: Obesity, Wind Farms, Eye-Tracking, Printable Buildings, Robotics Badge, Batteries, Fracking, Contagious Solar, iPads
- Tackling Obesity with Neuroscience and Clever Design (source) #Neuroscience #FoodFutures ...
SIGNALS: Saudia Arabia, Conservation, Rights After Death, Clean Energy, UAVs
- Saudi Arabia to Spend $100 Billion on Renewable Energy (source) #AltEnergy
- Saving the Planet: Just Like Cleaning Our Room (source) ...
SIGNALS: Medical Data, Wind, Solar, Milk, Displays, Water, Energy, Leaf, Robots, Climate Change, Cyborgs
- Thomas Goetz TED Talk: It is Time to Redesign Medical Data (source) #MedicalData #Visualization...
SIGNALS: space junk, 3d printing, biosensors, neuroscience, personhood, nuclear, darpa, resiliency, printable insects
- NASA Working On Laser System To Zap and ‘Displace’ Space Junk (Source) #FreeSpace #TechTYF...
SIGNALS: battery, robots, 3D printing, kidney, biofuel, LED, Wave Disk, Phase Change Memory
- New Sumitomo Electric Battery 90% Cheaper Than Lithium Ion (Source) #AltEnergy
- Our depressing robot overlords (Source) ...
Makerbot Day 5 (Part 1/2): It's Alive! (sort of)
I have no doubt that February 26 will go down in history as a momentous day. On Saturday morning, after an evening spent fine tuning the current of my Thing-O-Matic's motors, calibrating the PID (don't ask) of the extruder to stabilize the temperature so that the plastic would be dispensed in a controlled, even stream instead of like toothpaste out of an almost-cashed out tube, and generally...
SIGNALS: Adaptive Power, AltEnergy, TechTYF, Persuasion, IFTFRobots, KidsTech
- Beijing to pinpoint and trail citizens via cellphone (Source) #AdaptivePower
- ARPA-E: How the Government Agency With a Name Out of Lost Could "Win the Future" and Save Humanity (Source...
