For the past ten years I have gone through an annual ritual of publishing a book about trends that describe our shifting culture and business environment. Over the past decade, my team and I have identified and written about well over 100 trends covering everything from the rise of the #metoo movement (a trend we
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Every year my team and I read and review hundreds of books in the process of curating ideas to incorporate in our annual list of trends. Beyond using those books to inspire how we see the world, we also select our favorites each year to feature as part of the Non-Obvious Book Awards program. For
Continue reading »The idea that neighbors might want the food you won’t eat might seem far fetched depending on where you live. Yet the hyperlocal food sharing app called Olio just picked up another $6 million in funding and has already expanded to over 40 countries with rapid growth. More than 400,000 food items have been shared since the app started
Continue reading »If your smart robot vacuum cleaner created a map of your home in the process of cleaning it, that data could provide new insights to help tailor smart home products to your specific living conditions. That’s the bold assertion of Colin Angle, chief executive of Roomba maker iRobot Corp. It does raise some clear privacy
Continue reading »Are you a member of the media? Visit our media kit to download a trend summary and more information about requesting an interview with Rohit >> This week I launched the seventh edition of my annual trend report featuring all of my research from throughout the year on trends. Many of you have already picked
Continue reading »In case you hadn’t noticed, your bank wants to upsell you more services – and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Unless your bank happens to be HSBC. There is a well known model in the financial industry for customer evolution that is based on lifetime customer value. If you deliver a great service and
Continue reading »There’s a few things they don’t tell you about being on The Shark Tank. One of them is that every pitch on the popular reality business TV show starts with a silent 10 second staring contest. I spent an afternoon talking to a former (winning) contestant from the show, and one of the the insights
Continue reading »In just a few weeks, it will be time once again for one of my favourite marketing events of the year. No, it’s not the party-filled serendipity fest of SXSW, or the Las Vegas geek-pride gathering at CES. The event I’m talking about is all business … and that’s why it’s one of my top
Continue reading »Looking back, it’s fair to say the launch strategy Google used back in 2004 has become legendary. When the new platform first came out offering an unheard of 1 GB of free storage space, it was only available to an extremely limited group of people. As a result, having a Gmail account became an early
Continue reading »There is a very good reason that milk has an expiration date. No one wants to have crusty lumpy milk in their fridge. A lot of food in general is required by law to have these expiration dates. It is the most familiar of all deadlines that all of us experience in some way almost
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