archive for the ‘guest contributors’ category

The second economy

24 October 2011 | W. Brian Arthur, guest contributor

Digitization is creating a second economy that’s vast, automatic, and invisible – thereby bringing the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution. Deep changes like this are not unusual. Every so often – every 60 years or so – a body of technology comes along and over several decades, quietly, almost unnoticeably, transforms the economy: it brings new social classes to the fore and creates a different world for business. Can such a transformation – deep and slow and silent – be happening today?

Innovating when what you already have is “good enough”

6 April 2011 | Ted Selker, guest contributor

Why bother innovating when what we are already used to, we tend to use better? Innovation/ UI expert and former MIT Media Lab professor Ted Selker shares his thoughts on this topic (and the example of QWERTY keyboards) in this guest post...

The best way to invent the future is to predict it

5 October 2010 | Editor

[40th anniversary special] "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." PARC researcher Alan Kay is widely attributed as having said this here. However, we don’t know this for sure; as Bob Metcalfe aptly shared with us recently (and he was quoting Alan Kay who in turn was quoting Robert Heinlein) – good stories are rarely true. But we're not trying to share a story with you here... what we want to share is a glimpse into what PARC alumni, employees, and invited friends of PARC predicted that we as a company would (or should) be working on in the future… the next 40 years. There’s also a separate 4-minute video with luminaries sharing their predictions with us in person. Because why can’t the best way to invent the future be to predict it??

Connecting information using context: Meshin

22 June 2010 | Meshin - Chris Holmes

Let’s face it: email is ripe for innovation. We rely on folders and keyword searches to sift through thousands of emails to locate buried messages and documents… but the problem goes beyond the inbox. Today’s business processes are more dynamic, more human-centric, ad hoc, unscripted, and loosely orchestrated – they represent the framework for our interactions with team members, business partners, and customers. The information that fuels these interactions is digital: emails, documents, web site links, database records, IMs, tweets, and so on. Keeping track of all this information in the context of a person, a partner or customer, or a particular activity is a TIME CONSUMING, MANUAL, CUMBERSOME process. And it’s only getting tougher.

Printed electronics: The opportunity (and the challenge)

30 November 2009 | Raghu Das, guest contributor

A $300 billion industry is in the making. Raghu Das, CEO of analyst firm IDTechEx (and the first guest contributor to PARC’s blog), argues that the “printed electronics” industry will eventually become far larger than the semiconductor industry today. By offering such advantages as new form factors, lower cost, and large area electronics, printed electronics have already made available devices such as batteries, photovoltaics, transistors, new display technologies, sensors, printed conductors, and more. But these are enabling technologies -- not products. How can we create new markets and novel designs for products that users need?