The iPhone 3G has officially been released into the wild, and it's time for the most avid Apple fan here at S)T to pick apart what makes it so darned interesting and why it makes people wait in line for hours just to get one (guilty as charged).

Last year's iPhone hype was all about the hardware. The iPhone combined everything great about the iPod with a quality mobile phone complete with the best touchscreen the world has ever known.

This time around, hardware is less important (though the 3G and GPS have raised the bar). A lot of the hype is focused on software, namely the App Store, a new service that makes it simple for iPhone owners to find software that takes advantage of the hi-speed Internet access of 3G and the location-based information from the GPS. For example, Loopt has an application that combines online social networking with GPS info, so it's easier to find where one's friends are hanging out or where the cool events are happening.

With the launch of the App Store, Apple has taken a very difficult process--finding quality software for mobile phones--and made it much simpler. The App Store has already sold $55,000 worth of software within its first day.

The App Store's success seems to be driven by the innovative software developers who are contributing to the project. Apple recognized they needed to make it possible for developers to create their own applications for the iPhone, and instead of leaving that innovation to hackers, they've managed to create a successful platform that will likely continue to fuel consumer interest in mobile Internet services and, even more importantly, the mobile phone as a computing platform.

Apple has really hit another home run by giving up control over iPhone software development. And I, as a new iPhone owner, am quite thankful.

Image: velorowdy (Flickr.com)

On his blog yesterday, marketing guru Seth Godin raised the generalists-vs.-specialists debate and asked what benefit generalists bring. Before I had time to dash off a response, Godin himself defended the need for generalists, writing,

“It's okay to specialize in being a generalist, of course. By that, I mean that there are many problems … where someone who can see wide and doesn't have an allegiance to a particular solution is exactly the right person to call. I rely on generalists all the time, and so do you.”

To be fair to Godin’s argument, he adds, “My point is that you never call on these people when there's a better specialist available.”

We at S)T pride ourselves on being generalists—our staff of futurists is composed of Ph.D. chemists, historians, English majors, MBAs, and—yes—the occasional trained futurist. Collectively we thrive because we bring a divergent set of training, backgrounds and worldviews to our clients. We are generalists because, as foresight professionals, our job is to look at the big picture and to make the connections that experts often miss. Experts, while knowledgeable, often see trees, rather than the forest, mountain, river etc. We don’t lack for expertise, for in many cases our clients have all the expert knowledge we need and our job is to tease it out of them in order to help them see the larger picture of the future or futures.

My answer to Godin would be that all of my non-futures-trained colleagues combine to create a specialized knowledge base, and that it does our clients no good for us to know everything they do. That is a pointless duplication of resources. The benefit to hiring a firm of dedicated generalists is that collectively we create/own a specialized knowledge. This is reinforced as we bounce from project to project, so that one of our futurists may be writing on mobile telecommunications on Monday and infant formula on Friday. The generalist mindset allows our team to see the connections that exist between disparate businesses, consumers, and technologies. As a result, the sum of the whole is greater than its attendant parts.

That is why we are generalists.

Image: Angelrays (Flickr)

SILICON VALLEY -- Arriving in the heart of Silicon Valley to deliver a presentation that says infotech’s most dynamic years are behind it is a little daunting.

The drive from San Francisco Airport to NASA’s Ames Research Center – site of this year’s CONTACT 2008 Conference – takes you straight down Highway 101, where some icons of the computer and Internet world are still scattered among the BMW and Lexus dealerships, strip malls, and industrial parks lining the freeway.

Gone, however, are the gung ho days of the past, when even the cab drivers had an Internet concept they were ready to pitch at the slightest sign of interest. A dozen years ago, the very air seemed to be charged with excitement over how the world was being changed by what was happening here. Five years ago, in the wake of the dot-com crash, there seemed to be a lingering hope that the glory days would return.

Not any more…at least not among those I spoke with.

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The final day of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference included two presentations that really stood out to me.

Joel Selanikio discussed the potential for Africa to be a major source of mobile phone software innovation, in sectors ranging from health to financial services. He argued that many of these innovations could make their way back to the United States and other developed countries: because mobile banking initiatives are a low priority in the US, but are a necessity in Africa, these systems can be beta tested and refined in African markets before becoming major product offerings in World 1.

Though interesting, his talk focused too much on applications that could "reverse leapfrog" back into World 1. Instead, I would have liked him to explore the implications of Africa's developing a core competency in software development aimed at bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers worldwide. African programmers could profit greatly by developing products for Worlds 2 and 3 instead of focusing on retrofitting these solutions for PC-dominated World 1 nations.

W. James Au, author of the blog "New World Notes," gave a presentation entitled "Why Won't Second Life Just Go Away Already? Understanding Web 2.0's Most Misunderstood Phenomenon." He reviewed Second Life's growth amidst its on-again/off-again relationship with the media, which tends to oscillate between finding the virtual world exciting and declaring it useless. My favorite takeaway from the session was Au's assertion that Second Life's steep learning curve for users is actually a boon, in that it guarantees a high level of user knowledge and sophistication.

Image: We Make Money Not Art (Flickr)

I'm in San Diego this week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I'll be providing daily updates for ChangeWaves covering the various sessions I'm attending. Here's a recap of some of the stand out sessions and ideas from today:

• Megaphone, a startup specializing in interactive digital signage, started off the morning with an interactive game that people played while waiting for the first series of talks to begin. About 20 people called in to a phone number, then moved a character around on the interactive sign using the 2, 4, 6, and 8 buttons as up, down, left and right arrows. Players could then shoot other players by pressing 5 while moving in the direction of their opponent.
• Saul Griffith was the first presenter of the morning, and his talk was entitled "Energy Literacy." He covered the statistical background of climate change and explored various steps governments and individuals need to take to address the issue. He offered a meticulous analysis of his personal energy consumption relative to global energy consumption through the lens of the "best case scenario" presented by the IPCC and Stern reports.
• Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design gave an intriguing presentation on data visualization as a medium. He showed various data visualization projects like the Oakland Crimespotting maps and MySociety travel time maps. Rodenbeck focused on showing how we can use data visualization to interact with information--in ways previously too difficult for widespread adoption--for both analysis and entertainment.

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One of the hazards of being a futurist is being peppered regularly with the “flying car” question. Variations on this question are “where’s my ray gun?” and “when are we going to have Star Trek-style matter transporters?”

The simple answer is “when someone invents it,” but of course the answer is more complicated than that. There are thousands of things that need to happen before the toys of the future become the tools of today. Undoubtedly, the most important is vision -- the set of ideas that will guide the development of a new technology.

Recently, as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition on design entitled "Design and the Elastic Mind," the concept team at Nokia submitted their vision for how mobile communications, computing, and advances in nanotechnology would merge to create the infotech device of the future, which they dubbed "Morph." The wizards of Espoo, Finland have imagined an elegant and creative device that explores the intersection of form and function and how both of these requirements play on each other. It can be stretched, collapsed or reformed to whatever shape is needed, is self-cleaning, and runs on solar energy. Sound cool? It is. If you have five minutes, you can see a video of the Morph in action here.

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Steve Jobs’ keynote at the MacWorld convention on January 15^th sparked some online conversation between two of our futurists -- myself (Christopher) and Simeon Spearman. Here is the text of our discussion:

Christopher: I just finished reading the live blog (via Engadget) of Jobs' presentation from this a.m. I thought there were three really interesting ideas: The software upgrade for the iPhone that pinpoints the user’s location; the incorporation of the Touch interface into the MacBook Air; and the remote optical drive.

[The new MacBook Air does not have a CD/DVD ROM drive, rather, via software and wireless, MacBook Air can connect to a computer with a CD-drive and read the disc remotely.]

Simeon: I had live updates of the keynote running in the background as Jobs spoke. The announcements were pretty cool, but I felt like there should have been more to it.

Christopher: The first really pushes forward the concept of location-based services; the second puts us closer to non-physical interfaces for all computers; and the third could be the death knell for optical drives.

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What will likely be the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value and impacts on the lives of consumers out to 2025?

To begin to answer that question, S)T's Technology Foresight program conducted a virtual, global focus group of experts in technology, innovation, and business strategy. The group included experts from the Association of Professional Futurists, Tekes, Duke University, Hasbro, Worldwatch, General Motors, Shell, Johnson Controls, and Oxford University, among others.

After consolidating input from the expert panel and analysis by Social Technologies' futurists, what emerged was our list of top 12 areas for tech innovation through 2025:

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Just finished the third offering of Clay "Innovator's Dilemma" Christensen's innovation trilogy, Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change. I'm not a fan of the biz book press, but I have found Christensen’s work to be truly worthwhile and relevant, particularly to those poor souls toiling at innovation in large organizations and wondering why it's so hard. The first book laid out the dilemma of how listening to your biggest customers made you vulnerable to upstarts with disruptive innovations attacking from the bottom of the market. The second--five long years later--offered solutions, primarily the need for organizations to set up an entirely separate unit to deal with disruptive threats.

The latest, Seeing What's Next, strengthens our understanding of both the dilemma and the solution. As Christensen has learned more, he has become bolder. Of particular interest to us futurists is his claim of using theories of innovation to "predict" industry change. "Predict" is a loaded term in futures. Many futurists will flat-out say that we do not predict the future; rather, we forecast alternative future possibilities. I define "prediction" as a yes-or-no statement about the future. Either something will happen or it won't. I distinguish it from a forecast, which involves a statement of probability about the future. My interpretation of Christensen's book is that he really means "forecast" rather than "predict" He acknowledges that "many people who make their livings providing advice about the future express deep skepticism about theory-based prognostication". He, alas, makes no reference to futures research, but rather is referring to market analysts and management consultants.

He offers a simple three-step process to "predict" and respond to industry change: (1) identify signals of change (2) prepare for competitive battles, and (3) make strategic choices, and devotes a chapter to explaining each. Futurists will likely find this framework a bit simplistic and narrow in scope. It is tightly focused on business issues, and there is only a brief, unsatisfactory section on the non-market context. This narrow view will inevitably come back to bite innovators down the road. In short, the magic bullet for predicting change has not yet been found--that non-market context has been the undoing of many a prediction, um, forecast.

The Seventh Annual Axelson Center Symposium for Nonprofit Professionals was held May 17, 2006 in Chicago. This year’s theme was “Nonprofits and Innovation:  Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Change.” The Symposium drew hundreds of nonprofit leaders from across the Midwest.

Nonprofits face significant change. The distribution of wealth is shifting nationally and globally, America is aging, stakeholders’ time and attention are fragmenting, and new communication technologies bring both benefits and risks. S)T founder Tom Conger highlighted these and other trends and their implications for the nonprofit sector as he introduced the closing plenary session of the Symposium. A recurring concern is the future of nonprofit leadership. Many executive directors are Baby Boomers who are nearing retirement. Will the sector be able to attract young leaders? Emerging leaders will need an even broader range of skills than their predecessors, as the nonprofit sector explores new business and governance models and new relationships with the private sector.

Social Technologies also provided a full day “innovation boot camp,” in cooperation with The Innovation Group using their Seeds of Innovation® workshop, a basic introduction to innovation management at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

Social Technologies presented the workshop for interested Axelson Symposium participants at a pre-symposium event on May 16, and also offered two hour-long breakout sessions on scenarios and scenario thinking for nonprofits. Scenarios help people and organizations understand at a gut level how existing and emerging forces can cause the future to unfold in multiple directions – for which they can then prepare. Scenarios can enable nonprofit leaders to identify priorities for their organizations, think creatively about new opportunities, and make effective strategic decisions.