Most of us who work as professional futurists never really stop gathering information - you never know when a provocative, potentially disruptive new development might appear.

Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.

Neodymium is one of 17 'rare-earth metals,' and these elements have turned out to be critical to the rapidly-growing green technology industries.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

Great graphics requires more than just high-performance hardware. Gamers know software is just as important.

It's not as if I've never been awkward myself. I'm a big gamer, so I've had access to that type of personality. I used to go to these LAN parties; that was before high-speed Internet. The only way you could get lag-free gaming was to haul these huge computers to people's houses.

So evidently music was a killer app and is a killer app for computer and the Internet; it just took the tech industry a long time to hear that message.

I love those stretches where I've just been a writer - when I haven't been doing Internet start-ups - where I pretty much eliminate meetings from my life.