Bypassing Wall Street

Bankers, rating agencies, and venture capitalists exist to provide funding to businesses and individuals. In the process, they earn a return for the owners of capital and themselves. As professionals, they are trusted by...

Off-Shoring Comes Full Circle

Outsourcing and off-shoring were major growth trends of the past two decades. Technology and globalization made the economics irresistible, especially in manufacturing. However, that picture began to change around 2008....

China Struggles to Control Its...

As the Trends editors have long argued, China's apparent success has been propped up by unsustainable command-and-control mechanisms, made possible because of its unique mix of communist and capitalist institutions. Like the...

50 Billion Internet Devices by...

The World Wide Web has transformed our lives in amazing ways. For consumers, however, most of that impact involves accessing and delivering content. We use a wide range of devices to do this, ranging from smart phones and...

Fast, Low-Cost Human Genomes W...

Nowhere has the impact of digitization been more profound than in the field of genomics. In roughly a dozen years, price performance has improved 3 million-fold and speed has improved 60,000-fold. No other field even comes...

Digitization Enables the Deep ...

As explained in prior issues, the United States now stands at the beginning of the Deployment phase of the fifth techno-economic revolution. That means information technology is becoming deeply embedded in every aspect of...