Five Interesting Things: Today’s Scan Hits
Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today.
- Smartphones now have a majority of marketshare in the US. A new survey from Pew Center for Internet and American Life found that 56% of adult mobile users in the US own mobile devices running iOS, Android or Windows 8 operating systems, up from 46% in 2012, and 35% in 2011.
- Some US electric utility companies are seeking rate changes for solar homes that sell electricity back to the grid on sunny days, arguing that these customers aren’t paying their fair share of the cost for building and maintaining power stations and transmission lines. The request may be symptomatic of the long-term threat that distributed solar power generation poses to the business model of electric utilities.
- The Chief IT architect at Google strenuously denies that there is any direct or indirect cooperation with the purported PRISM internet surveillance system of the USGOV. If both the PRISM leak information and the Google denials are factually correct, it would imply that widespread internet surveillance is occurring at key nodes of the US internet backbone.
- A report suggests that the natural gas boom underway in the US might be replicable in many parts of the world.
- A report from the International Energy Agency, a global energy think tank, recommends four steps to curb global warming that governments should put in place by 2015, five years before a UN climate deal now under negotiation would take effect. The IEA recommends aggressive energy conservation, reducing the use of coal-fired power plants, curbing methane emissions, and lowering subsidies for consumption of fossil fuels.