I’m pleased to report that an article I co-authored for The Futurist in 2012 has landed on the magazine’s list of its most popular stories of the year. Co-written with my longtime friend and colleague Chris Carbone, who serves as director of insights and research at Innovaro, “From Smart House to Networked Home” describes how…
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Last August, the travel site Orbitz found itself in a kerfuffle when the Wall Street Journal reported that the site was showing Mac users higher-priced hotel rooms than the ones it displayed to PC users. Orbitz retorted that its tracking data revealed that Mac users do, in fact, spend an average of $20-30 more per…
DetailsI’ve just finished reading The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family, by Liza Mundy, a Washington Post reporter. Mundy closely examines what she calls the Big Flip: the rapid trend toward millions of women in the US, Western Europe, and East Asia becoming the primary breadwinner…
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As analysts of social change, one trend we monitor is the dramatic, ongoing evolution of the American family. The Leave It to Beaver model of married-couple-with-kids, plus the odd dog or gerbil, now fits less than one-fifth of US households. Instead, many more people are living in “voluntary” families composed of (or at least including)…
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Tiny houses are an American tradition, dating back to the 150sf cabin where Thoreau wrote his masterpiece on simple living. Now they’re back in vogue, driven by foreclosure woes, boomers downsizing, and eco-consciousness. According to an interesting update in the New Haven Advocate, at least two consulting firms—Rightsize by Design and Tumbleweed Tiny House Company—now…
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