Garry Golden

A personal/professional update since this blog has not been an accurate mirror of my freelance work world.
The spring and early summer have been quite fantastic (and busy) with several collaborative projects on the:

future of transportation infrastructure (TxDOT/University of Houston Futures Studies program)
future of financial services (Citigroup/FutureThink)
association leadership in 21st century (ASAE/ UK-based FastFuture)
future of […]

It is easy to set up a blog, but not easy to maintain an accurate web presence that reflects, or better yet - balances, one’s personal interests and professional services.
I have struggled to post on a regular basis, and to make those posts accessible to wider audiences. One of the downsides of working […]

Of course I laughed at the quick exchanges and ‘ego’ jokes while Stephen Colbert interviewed Craig Venter (of human genome sequencing fame) on the Colbert Report. But my mouth dropped when Venter spoke very confidently about ‘microorganisms that produce hydrogen or biofuels’, and Colbert played right into this big, powerful idea that could […]

An Association of Professional Futurists colleague Kaipo Lum (CEO Vision Foresight Strategy) has turned me back onto presentations by Thomas Barnett - author of the Pentagon’s New Map and Blueprint for Action.
I remembered Barnett’s 2005 TED Conference presentation quite well - but it always struck me as a specific look at the Iraq war […]

Last week Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone maker, spent $8 billion to acquire Navteq, the world’s second largest maker of maps used in car-navigation devices and handhelds.
Is it time for us to reconsider the economic value of maps? Or, better yet, the value created in map-making?!
Read more below…

“The seemingly impossible is possible” - and then watch me shock the audience in the end… Hans Rosling is back!
TED 2007 has released its latest video of Hans Rosling’s (of Gapminder.org) visual journey / talk on global health and economic development. Nearly one year after his web-famous TED 2006 talk which highlighted […]

Watch this clip from the TED Conference of Blaise Aguera y Arcas - Architect of PhotoSynth
Or go directly to: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

I’ve been following Photosynth for a while now… and that demonstration just launched the product into the geek/design world blogosphere. It is buzzing on the web! Blaise and crew are doing […]

Interface is a hot topic in conversations related to the future of technology. The vision is often a world of technologies with more intuitive interfaces that create a more ‘human’ experience for the user.
Go deeper and the vision is to break down the barrier between the physical and digital (virtual) world- setting […]

Professional futurists often say that one of the most common mistakes made in forecasting change is to overestimate change in the short term, or underestimate change in the long term. Too often change is hyped in the beginning; and ignored as a real long term disruptive force.
We use a […]

Looking down at the Earth – 2015
While delivering a keynote at the University of Wisconsin River Fall’s new University Center I asked a group of 200 students (and 20 staff) if they had ever seen a picture of the planet taken from space. All hands went up. Then I asked […]