MINITRENDS Wins Pinnacle Best Business Book Award

December 22, 2011

Technology Futures, Inc. is pleased to announce that MINITRENDS: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit From Business & Technology Trends by Dr. John H. Vanston with Carrie Vanston has won the Pinnacle Book Acheivement Best Business Book Award. This award is in addition to several earlier book awards received this year.

According to Dr. Vanston, “Many people will be starting the New Year with resolutions to achieve new goals. I am gratified with the attention MINITRENDS is receiving because I believe the book provides a path to make those goals a reality. The best way for individuals and businesses seeking to start new ventures or keep existing business innovative and competitive is to be constantly on the lookout for emerging trends that are not yet widely recognized. MINITRENDS helps people do just that by providing a mindset and process for initial idea generation and techniques to analyze and exploit these ideas.”

Based on Dr. Vanston’s more than 30 years of experience in identifying and applying technical, social, and business trends, MINITRENDS provides practical guidance to individuals and organizations of all sizes for extracting business opportunities from emerging trends that have a realistic chance of becoming profitable in the next 2-5 years. The book assists the reader in launching their own exciting, profitable “Minitrend Adventure” using their creativity, foresight, innovative nature, and basic good sense.

Additional accolades for MINITRENDS include an Eric Hoffer Business Book of the Year Award and finalist nods from ForeWord Reviews’ Business Book of the Year, USA Book News’ Entrepreneurship & Small Business Book of the Year, and Dan Poytner’s Global eBook Awards Business Book of the Year. Excellent endorsements and testimonials have also been received from top futurists Joseph Coates and David Pearce Snyder and many other opinion leaders and publications.

For more information on Minitrends, please visit the Minitrends Website or contact us by e-mail or (512) 258-8898.  (Click here to purchase book.)

For 33 years, TFI has helped organizations plan for the future by offering outstanding technology and telecommunications forecasting services and custom forecasts for key trends to high-technology and telecom organizations.

PRESS, MEDIA, BLOGGERS: Please contact Carrie Vanston at info@tfi.com or (512) 258-8898 if you are interested in doing a Minitrends article, to request an interview with Dr. Vanston, or to request a review copy of MINITRENDS.

InnoTech Conference Teeming With Emerging Trends

October 25, 2011

I’ve attended the InnoTech Conference and Expo and its associated eMarketing Summit for several years now and always learn a lot. This year I wanted to pass on some comments from experts that I heard yesterday relating to emerging trends that are becoming more and more important:

Sean Lowry, of the very successful InnoTech series, always does a great job of making sure everything runs smoothly. I was even able to steal him for a minute to ask what emerging trends he saw coming. He told me, “I see continued convergence of all the different technologies we are seeing here today. Development of mobile applications and host applications in the cloud are particularly important. There is so much video activity and a lot of it is being hosted in the cloud now.”

I asked Giovanni Galluci, social media expert and Dallas photographer what he thinks the next trend in social media is going to be. He said, “Getting over it. Everyone is burnt out with all the hype and now people are looking for more meaning in social media. Twitter is ridiculous. Those who do marketing are beginning to realize it. Online social media is becoming part of the umbrella of marketing, which is where it belongs. Social media is becoming more commodatized—as in more of a commodity.”

He gave several great hints about Facebook including that Facebook ads are the best way to grow a fan base; Facebook is the 2nd largest search engine, so take advantage of it (including using pictures with metatags, main key words in description, etc.); and put Facebook info on all your printed matter including cards and bills.

I chatted with William Leake, CEO of Apogee Search Marketing, and his take was that “More and more advertising presence is going to be driven by physical location. If you don’t have a physical location strategy, you are going to lose.”

Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo and a video expert, had a lot to say about the future of video marketing. According to Craig, “In the future, no one is going to stand in line anymore. Offline and online is no longer relevant. This is already starting to happen and it is going to become ubiquous.” He added that “QR readers are going to be incorporated into devices and the present obstacles to their use will be chipped away.” (On a side note, Craig was most recently the Senior Vice President and General Manager at Match.com. That had to be an interesting job!)

According to Pat Scherer, Web and Mobile Deployment Manager at The Detail Person,  ”Mobile space is going to be huge. With the explosion of devices, I think it’s going to make a huge impact on the retail industry. Not only for payments, but for creating local-based experiences utilizing mobile social media. I anticipate this leveling the playing field with e-commerce.”

Finally, I got to chat briefly with siblings Kevin Olsen and Kerri Olsen, Co-Founders of the Austin Grand Prix. Having Formula 1 in Austin exciting!

Cheers,

Carrie Vanston
Media/Marketing Director, Technology Futures, Inc.
Co-Author, MINITRENDS: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit From Business & Technology Trends

Is Google a Monopoly? EC Launches Investigation

December 2, 2010

We monitor technology trends on this blog. One of the biggest tech trends of late is accusing Google of having a monopoly, or monopolies (plural), which begs the question of what, exactly, Google has a monopoly over? Most of the accusations center around search.

“Google ‘owns’ search,” says Columbia Law Professor, Tim Wu, in a November 13 piece for The Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ “Review” section. Wu’s new book, The Master Switch, is sounding the “Google as monopoly” bell which rang loudly before the U.S. Presidential elections in 2008 but has quieted down since.

Wu’s definition of “ownership” is quite a bit looser than a pure monopoly. Google “owns” less than two-thirds of the search market, according to ComScore. In June of this year, Google held 62.6% of search queries; Yahoo held 18.9%; and Microsoft’s Bing has grown to an impressive 12.7%. Having a dominant position in a field with few barriers to entry is not a monopoly. Just ask MySpace.

Two days ago, however, the accusations that Google has a monopoly moved from the rhetoric to real threat as the European Commission opened an investigation into whether Google has abused its position as the dominant search engine by intentionally skewing search results to benefit entities it owns. From the EC’s press release announcing inquiry launch:

The Commission will investigate whether Google has abused a dominant market position in online search by allegedly lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competing services which are specialised in providing users with specific online content such as price comparisons (so-called vertical search services) and by according preferential placement to the results of its own vertical search services in order to shut out competing services. The Commission will also look into allegations that Google lowered the ‘Quality Score’ for sponsored links of competing vertical search services. The Quality Score is one of the factors that determine the price paid to Google by advertisers.

The argument here is not that Google is a monopoly because of its size. Rather, that Google has used illegal means to penalize competitors, which is what eventually gets so-called monopolies in trouble. I have long suspected that Google Blog Search favors blogs on the Google-owned Blogger/BlogSpot platform over rival WordPress. The EC review is based on favoring Google’s price comparison results over rival Foundem.

Two Google vice presidents have posted a response to the EC’s announcement on the Google Public Policy Blog, but they do not dispute the EC’s claim of favoritism. It was Microsoft’s exclusionary sales contracts that required PC makers to install its operating system and not competing software that got the software maker into antitrust trouble, not its market share.

As long as consumers have access to alternatives, does Google really have a monopoly on search? Does Facebook have a monopoly on social networking? The same could have been said of MySpace three years ago. MySpace has suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for owner News Corp. Facebook could fade just as fast and, believe it or not, so could Google. In a previous post on this blog, we cited Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker as noting that seven of the top 15 Internet companies by market capitalization in 2004 are not in the top 15 today.

The primary reason for the demise of [Fortune 100] companies has been a failure to recognize and react to changing trends.

Those words come from the new book, MINITRENDS, by futurist John Vanston with Carrie Vanston. One of the main reasons the Vanstons wrote this book was to give large companies a formula for staying innovative. It’s easy for entrepreneurs to pioneer new ideas, and often much harder for those ideas to come from within giant organizations. But it can be done, and MINITRENDS provides a process these giants can use to identify and develop new methods and markets.

It has been Microsoft’s argument against the antitrust regulators that, absent criminal barriers to entry, its businesses are open to competition and subject to decline unless Microsoft continually innovates. Bill Gates, who is no stranger to the issues now facing Google, lashed out at Matt Ridley, author of the new book, The Rational Optimist, in last weekend’s WSJ Review:

Like many other authors who write about innovation, Mr. Ridley suggests that all innovation comes from new companies, with no contribution from established companies. As you might expect, I disagree with this view.

Gates knows that Facebook’s advertising network could upend Google’s fragile hold over the online advertising market, and that Facebook itself could fade as fast as MySpace did in a matter of a few years. For those companies who hope to stay ahead of the game, as Apple and Microsoft have consistently done, MINITRENDS provides a way of nurturing innovation — a process that itself is a significant innovation — in the quest to remain competitive.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “In the Grip of the New Monopolists,” The Wall Street Journal, 11/13/10
Source: “Search engine Bing gains market share,” BBC Technology News, 07/14/10
Source: “Antitrust: Commission probes allegations of antitrust violations by Google,” EUROPA Press Releases, 11/30/10
Source: “MySpace losses lead way down for News Corp.,” Los Angeles Times, 08/05/09
Source: MINITRENDS: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit From Business & Technology Trends, Technology Futures, Inc., p. 13.
Source: “Africa Needs Aid, Not Flawed Theories,” The Wall Street Journal, 11/27/10
Image by cambodia4kidsorg, used under its Creative Commons license.

New Employment Trend: No Employment

November 19, 2010

A pair of stories in The Wall Street Journal on Friday, November 19, illustrate a growing trend for startup companies: avoiding hiring any employees.

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Mark Whitehouse, who recently joined the Journal‘s New York office as a senior economics correspondent after years working in Russia, profiled financial analysis startup, MCAP Research, in Montclair, New Jersey, which epitomizes the lean, new startup environment by eschewing any significant capital investments or hiring employees.

The firm was started two years ago by Efrem Meretab, a native of Eritrea, who gave up his job as a stock analyst to open the ultra-lean company. Whitehouse says,

His experience demonstrates how advances in technology and communications are allowing some small companies to sell products world-wide without creating many jobs in the U.S. or spending much money on things made in the U.S.

Whitehouse cites two main factors driving the company’s lean profile: outsourcing programming to the Ukraine and Pakistan while taking advantage of Amazon’s cloud instead of purchasing servers. We have discussed the trend toward cloud computing in many posts on this blog, but never for the solopreneur.

A related story also written by Mark Whitehouse with Justin Lahart, a former CNN/Money correspondent who covers economics for the Journal, reports that startups are not contributing to the growth in employment usually associated with periods of economic recovery.

The number of companies with at least one employee fell by 100,000, or 2%, in the year that ended March 31, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That was the second worst performance in 18 years, the worst being the 3.4% drop in the previous year.

Startups were first hammered by the recession, with more closing that opening since 2008, then strangled by tight capital markets. Angel investing still has not recovered, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, which reports that less has been invested in the first half of 2010 than during the recession years of 2008 and 2009.

In their new book, MINITRENDS, John and Carrie Vanston devote a significant portion of the book to new business opportunities serving a growing work-at-home workforce. In a previous post on this blog, we discussed how cloud computing has enabled temp agencies to apply the same just-in-time inventory to the workforce that auto companies have brought to manufacturing.

Without capital to grow their businesses, and with access to a global marketplace of contract workers, companies have learned to prosper by renting rather than buying assets and outsourcing services. If the Vanstons are correct — and their track record (PDF) on such predictions is excellent — the solopreneur will no longer be a trend coming out of this recession but the new standard operating procedure.

We welcome your thoughts about this ultra-lean method of bootstrapping high-tech businesses.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Starting a Global Business, With No U.S. Employees,” The Wall Street Journal, 11/19/10
Source: “Few Businesses Sprout, With Even Fewer Jobs,” The Wall Street Journal, 11/19/10
Photo courtesy of psd (Paul Downey), used under its Creative Commons license.

Engineering Smart Foods to Combat Disease

October 25, 2010

Swiss food giant Nestlé has announced a series of major investments in developing medicinal foods that target chronic diseases. This comes as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission cracks down on Nestlé and other food companies for dubious health claims made about their products.

Nestlé CEO Paul Bulcke announced the creation of Nestlé Health Science and the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences at a press conference on September 27, stating that the focus of the new companies will be to “prevent or correct acute chronic diseases with medicinal nutrition.”

A news release issued by Nestlé calls it a combination of “food and pharma,” and provides a list of some of the diseases being targeted:

These two separate organisations will allow Nestlé to develop the innovative area of personalised health science nutrition to prevent and treat health conditions such as diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease, which are placing an unsustainable burden on the world’s healthcare systems.

The subject of longevity is the source of several trends mentioned in the new book, MINITRENDS, by John and Carrie Vanston. One trend resulting from increasing lifespans is the surge in the number of seniors who work. The authors state that “29% of those in their late 60s were still employed in 2006, up from 18% in 1985.” And that was before the Great Recession eroded retirement funds and home equity.

One has to wonder about Nestle’s motives in development of these medicinal foods. Nestlé is the maker of many foods that have been linked to chronic diseases, such as childhood obesity. Nestlé was one of 17 food companies that have received letters from the Federal Trade Commission in February, warning that their ads “violated federal law by making misleading statements about disease prevention and health benefits.” Looks like Nestlé is out to bolster the science behind those claims.

SwissInfo.ch, who broke the story on the international wires, seems to be making commentary on the irony of the maker of candy bars now making health bars. It pairs the Nestlé announcement  with a video about a government-sponsored study that shows that the “obesity among schoolchildren is increasing.”

What do you think of Nestle’s foray into the billion-dollar market of medicinal foods? Is it Trick or Treat?

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Nestlé Health Science S.A. and Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences established to target new opportunity between food and pharma,” Nestlé Press Release, 09/27/10
Source: “Paul Bulcke, Nestlé CEO, talks about the creation of Nestlé Health Science and the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences,” Nestlé Video, 09/27/10
Source: “Nestlé creates new bond between food and pharma,” SwissInfo.ch, 09/27/10
Source: “POM Wonderful: Not So Wonderful After All, Says the FTC,” FastCompany, 9/28/10

Intelligence Economy Has Arrived, Says Gartner Guru Sondergaard

October 21, 2010

Peter Sondergaard, head of research for consulting giant, Gartner, Inc., in his opening remarks at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Florida, on October 18, forecast that “we are on our way to an IT-driven intelligence society,” according to Michael J. Miller on PC Magazine‘s Forward Thinking blog.

Miller is the former Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media and the editor of Forward Thinking. His coverage of Sondergaard’s remarks is extensive and compelling. He quotes Gartner guru Sondergaard as saying:

By 2012, the Internet will be 75 times larger than it was in 2002.

Gartner’s Symposium doubles as an Information Technology (IT) expo. Ten days ago, Gartner released its much-hyped Hype Cycle, boosting visibility in advance of the big event. We criticized the “emerging technology” Hype Cycle here for excluding social networking.

According to Miller, Sondergaard included “social computing” in his list of the top four trends driving IT in his opening remarks. The other three are context-aware computing, pattern-based strategy, and cloud computing, which Gartner’s own HypeCycle says is “past its peak.”

Miller quotes Sondergaard:

Information will be the oil of the 21st century.

In their book, MINITRENDS, John H. Vanston and Carrie Vanston cover the Minitrend of  Increasing Use of Electricity in Industrial Processes, where they discuss the concept that the value of goods increases with the amount of information contained in them:

Manufacturing can be defined as the transformation of materials from one form to another more valuable form using energy and information. In general, the greater the information content of the process, the greater the efficiency, the smaller the waste of material and energy, and the smaller the pollution-producing side streams will be. For example, sand can be used as filler for asphalt, as a component of fine china, or as a ingredient in an electronic computer chip. The basic difference between these uses is the amount of information embedded in the silicon (sand) during the production process. Electrical processes can be used to materially increase information content to material.

That mindbending little excerpt comes courtesy of the Edison Electric Institute. It’s one of the interesting trends John and Carrie have uncovered in this book.

If you are looking for a Minitrend Adventure, think about how you can increase the information content in the things around you — before someone else does.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Four Big Trends Changing Computing, Gartner Says,” PCMagazine, Forward Thinking Blog, 10/18/10
Source: Gartner Symposium Live Blog (SymLive), 10/17/10 – 10/21/10.
Image of the Gartner Symposium 2010 logo is used under Fair Use: Reporting.

“The Futurist” Sees a Booming Market in MINITRENDS

October 6, 2010

One of the great things about being a futurist is that you learn how to see into the future. For example, even though it’s October, I know that the November-December issue of The Futurist, the journal of the World Future Society — “the world’s largest organization devoted to the future’s exploration” — will contain a review of MINITRENDS: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit From Business & Technology Trends, the new book by John and Carrie Vanston.

The World Future Society was founded in 1960 and is celebrating 41 years of uniting people who have an interest in predicting the future. Among the earliest supporters of the Society was Buckminster Fuller. Today, the Society boasts dozens of chapters throughout the U.S. and hosts an international conference, held in July this year in Vancouver, British Columbia. Among the notable resources available at the Society’s website are the interviews with leading technologists and a new collection of forecasts, “2020 Visionaries,” where 20 futurists are asked their predictions for this decade.

The review of MINITRENDS in next month’s issue of The Futurist will be written by contributing editor David Pearce Snyder. Snyder is partner with Dr. Gregg Edwards, Director of the Academy for Advanced and Strategic Studies, overseeing a virtual network of 30 trendspotters. In his review, Snyder will say:

While this book is specifically about a futures research methodology, it is also an unabashed business book. The authors’ expressed purpose in writing Minitrends was to enable entrepreneurs at every level of the workplace to take advantage of the foresight that they, themselves, can gather from the ‘infosphere.’

Snyder will write about the Minitrends “mindset” that results from reading the book. It’s like a spooky kind of vision that enables you to see Minitrends wherever you look. One of the things David Pearce Snyder sees in the future is a healthy, growing interest in Minitrends:

Because the early identification of emergent long-term trends poses such enormous marketplace value, it seems not improbable that traffic in minitrends will become a significant online phenomenon during the next two to five years. I am also prepared to believe that much of that traffic will be generated by freelance futurists who learned their trade by reading this book.

Thank you in advance, David Pearce Snyder and The Futurist, for the thoughtful book review you will be publishing in next month’s issue!

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “In Forecasting, Mini Is Big,” The Futurist, 11-12/10
Image of the The Futirist November-December 2010 issue cover is used under Fair Use: Reporting.

Welcome to Minitrends by John H. Vanston, PhD

September 24, 2010

Dear Fellow Innovators, Educators and Entrepreneurs:

Greetings! On behalf of myself and my fellow members of the TFI Minitrend Team, we welcome you to the Minitrend Blog and invite you to launch your own Minitrend Adventure. Although we have only recently begun to use the term “Minitrends,” in reality we have been using the Minitrend concept since I founded Technology Futures, Inc. in 1978.

For my part, over the last thirty-two years, I have conducted hundreds of forecasting seminars and workshops and have provided consulting services for a wide range of commercial, government, and academic organizations.

As my son, Dr. Lawrence Vanston, our staff, and I built TFI into a very well-respected company specializing in technology forecasting, depreciation and valuation studies, and telecommunications forecasting and analyses, I kept wishing to share the many useful ideas and techniques that I used to help organizations find and profit from business opportunities that are not yet generally recognized or appreciated.

I felt that many of the insights I had applied not only to the medium and large companies that hired me, but also to investors and individuals looking for ideas to start their own enterprises. I was particularly interested in the 2-5 year window of opportunity for business and technology trends.

With the help of my daughter and co-author, Carrie Vanston, and the encouragement of friends and family, MINITRENDS: How Innovators &Entrepreneurs Discover& Profit From Business & Technology Trends, our new book, was born.

The mission of the book and the supporting Minitrends Website and Minitrends Blog is quite simple — to provide you with information, insights, and suggestions that will materially improve your business situation, your financial standing, and your personal satisfaction.

I hope you will join me in a “Minitrends Adventure” through MINITRENDS, the book, our blog, and our website. We welcome your interest and participation.

Sincerely,
John H. Vanston, PhD
Chairman, Technology Futures, Inc.
Author, MINITRENDS: How Entrepreneurs & Innovators Discover & Profit From Business & Technology Trends