Five Interesting Things: Today’s Scan Hits
Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today.
- India has water scarcity issues that are likely to grow worse, driven in part by agriculture and rising prosperity, this Washington Post article says.
- Google has identified Austin, Texas as the next city (the third) to get high speed fiber connectivity, which Google says is 100 times faster than the average American Internet user’s service. It will be interesting to see if this “highway of the future” significantly increases business creation and entrepreneurial practices.
- According to Marc Schoen of the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, author of Your Survival Instinct Is Killing You, modern societies offer so much comfort that even minor problems trigger self-preservation responses; the resulting stress produces a wide variety of psychological and physical maladies.
- The Oculus Rift VR headset is poised to rekindle interest in virtual reality. The headsets have been endorsed by several major game designers, and the shipment of over 10,000 development kits should insure that a wide variety of games will be available when Oculus Rift is made available to consumers.
- A new report from Shullman Research Center’s Luxury and Affluence on how the wealthy (income of more than $250,000 a year) plan to spend money this year finds that older rich people plan to spend less than younger rich people. The report also found that rich consumers are not very brand loyal.