Traffic can be a huge burden on economic development, and just overall quality of life. Sometimes when entrepreneurs are just fed up with something that is when they come up with the most innovative ideas. Their ability to make people’s lives just a little easier, whether through a solution to a dangerous social problem or [...]

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it” – Albert Einstein Futurist Thomas Frey: As a futurist, I’ve always been interested in our relationship with the future. But lately I’ve become obsessed with understanding more about the dividing line between the present and the future.    

Futurist Thomas Frey: A couple years ago I was on a weekend outing in Vail, Colorado and ended up attending a kayaking tournament taking place on the Gore Creek in the heart of town.    

Futurist Thomas Frey: A few years ago I was taking a tour of a dome shaped house, and the architect explained to me that domes are an optical illusion. Whenever someone enters a room, their eyes inadvertently glance up at the corners of the room to give them the contextual dimensions of the space they’re [...]

Like YouTube, Facebook, or blogging platforms, it’s almost hard to believe there was an Internet without Kickstarter, which may be the greatest testament to its success. In 2009, the site generated about $23 million for its projects–an impressive figure by all accounts–but in 2012, Kickstarter pulled in roughly 10 times that, leapfrogging the grant budget [...]

Recently, someone in the office came across the home that inspired Tony Stark’s house in the Iron Man movies (it’s real, but not quite as extravagantly located). Instead of talking about that actual home, we launched into a debate about Stark’s fictional palace and the many, many expensive things he’d keep inside. Debating his home [...]

Bitcoins are completely digital, so you can’t spend actual ones like these (non-digital ones) at a digital casino. As various tech companies report their fourth-quarter 2012 earnings numbers this week, so are two gray-market, Bitcoin-based casinos—and one is turning profits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars after only six months of being in business [...]

Nicknamed “Blade Runner,” South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius competed in the Olympic Games in 2012. Just how futuristic did things become in 2012?  at the Olympic Games we watched a cyborg compete.  We marveled at the news that NASA was actually working on a faster-than-light warp drive. 2012 also featured the planet’s first superstorm, the [...]

Futurist Thomas Frey: How many extra shavers, bars of soap, or cans of soup do you currently have on your shelves at home? How much money do you currently have tied up in “inventory” of typical household items? What if you could get by without any?    

Futurist Thomas Frey: When you buy a stock, you place a bet on how that stock will perform in the future. In a perfect world, where market insiders and manipulators are removed from the equation, the market is a terrific tool for determining the true value of companies being invested in.