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By Glen Hiemstra, Futurist.com

On January 9, 2013 Discovery Channel Canada broadcast a short interview with me on the show Daily Planet. The questions had to do with developments that I see in 50 years, 100 years, 200 years. I did a lot of thinking prior to the interview about these time frames, and I’ll be summarizing these ideas in blogs to come, perhaps one grand article.

One question was, “what will be a breakthrough similar to the Internet in 50 and 100 and 200 years?” My thoughts began with the idea of the disappearance in 50 years of the boundary between what we now think of as the online and offline (or real) worlds. In 50 years, devices we carry or imbed will have so completely integrated these two worlds that there will only be “the world” and that world will combine the real and the virtual in a seemless and constant way.

For now, link to the 3 minute video interview here. Discovery uses some nice graphics to illustrate our conversation.

By Glen Hiemstra

I recently came across a series of articles by Future Cape Town, a media movement and urban consultancy founded by Rashiq Fataar in 2010.

The beginning of the About page on the Future Cape Town website starts “With our roots firmly in the present, and eyes on the full potential of the city we live, play and work in, Future Cape Town is a diverse collection of minds that are driven by sustainable and innovative ways to address modern urban design challenges.” Awesome. This is a group that is actually creating the future they want.

Future Cape Town invests a lot in its social media. They realize the importance of ideas being easily communicated and the value of viral information. An example of this is the article 7 Big Ideas for Cape Town: Who Will Champion Them?. Inviting participants with its title, this article gives detailed information about 7 great ideas for creating a better city.

Last week I had the privilege of presenting a keynote speech to the annual conference on the future of Telemedicine, put on the Northwest Regional Telehealth Resource Center, in Billings, Montana.

As I thought about a theme for my talk what occurred to me was that there are certain developments that always seem to be “in the future” and never quite seem to reach full application here in the present. Think nuclear power from fusion, and flying cars. Telemedicine has in many ways always been something that is going to be big, in the future. This is despite widespread experiments with and adoption of telemedicine for some basic care in many rural parts of the world, including the northwest United States.

Read More of This Article

You can view the slides that used here via Slide Share.

Moving Telehealth from the future to the present

View more presentations from Glen Hiemstra

By Glen Hiemstra | October 28th, 2011 

Ahh, to live in the clouds. We’ve been there for a decade, and each day more of what we do – make a call, watch a video, navigate a car, order a product, read a book, play a game, takes place in the cloud. Yes, cloud computing is just a clever name for big server farms and client services on your local device, which can sound a lot like the old days of computing if you have been around long enough. But, it just grows and grows.

We recently came across a quite wonderful video that explains the cloud in a way both clever and informative. Enjoy

The State of Cloud Computing from JESS3 on Vimeo.

The cloud does allow for many efficiencies which is a good thing, given that federal spending on IT is expected to be restrained through 2017, according to Bloomberg.

By Glen Hiemstra | September 26th, 2011

It has been possible for years now to do 3D design, 3D prototyping, and more recently 3D manufacture or 3D printing of more and more complex objects. Increasingly this kind of work can be done using small machines, even desktop machines.

This past summer I heard about a project to extend the concept of 3D manufacture to space. It seems like a great idea, if we are eventually going to become space faring. The concept is simple. Rather than manufacturing everything needed on earth and launching it at great expense into space, instead put 3D manufacturing machines into space, and provide a stock of raw materials, either from earth or acquired in space from asteroids, Mars, wherever. Then, when a need for a new or replacement device arises, manufacture it on the spot.

MADE IN SPACE team members Adam Ellsworth, Brinson White and Jason Dunn wave to the camera while testing multiple 3D printers in zero-gravity.

One company with this dream is Made in Space. They are pioneering “additive manufacturing,” which means simply the process of building a product layer by layer. Materials can include plastics, titanium, aluminum. When Made in Space conducted their tests over the summer, they manufactured items like a scaled-down wrench, that became the first ever tool manufactured in limited gravity (they were flying on the NASA parabolic flights that simulate zero-gravity.

By Glen Hiemstra | September 15th, 2011

This is really interesting, did not know this. In 1976 and in 1980, when Jimmy Carter ran against Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, respectively, for President, the presidential campaigns raised… 0 dollars. That is, both Carter, and Ford and Reagan, took no campaign contributions. Instead, all the campaigns were paid for only by public financing through the $1 or $2 check-off box on annual tax returns. Amazing. The next elections will raise money in the billions. Not hard to figure out which system is better for the future.

by Glen Hiemstra on 06/09/11 at 4:20 pm |