My best friend Rosemarie and I had a very involved secret life when we were in elementary school. After we saw 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' on TV, we invented a whole secret life in which we were twins from the planet Venus, and we were in charge of the entire solar system as well as Earth.

Perhaps this is because I'm from the generation that grew up watching 'The Jetsons' on TV, but I really thought we would be much more advanced in the areas of transportation and medicine.

I used to think that, by the 21st century, cars would run on electricity rather than gasoline and would have guidance systems so that they actually drove themselves. Specially equipped roadways would transmit instructions to the cars, telling them where to go and how fast. I figured this would be in the lines painted on the roads.

Most people who are on the inside of a technology have no idea what it's like to look at from an end user's point of view. This is why they have focus groups. I'm really familiar with this because I worked 10 years for Hallmark Cards in the U.S.

Technology is amoral, but it requires humanistic values to steer it in a way that's empowering, and not detrimental to social progress. It's up to us to maximize the good and minimize the bad.

Children can take lessons in that school via the Internet and can score extra points like e.g. in Geography or History. That sounds very promising and is a fantastic basis for future steps.

Being able to compete for consumers' attention and dollars over the preciousness of access is a thing of the past. Everyone is using the Internet to globally market a product.

Make sure you have a clear understanding of your values and intent, then use technology to enable that. What the tech won't do is compensate for a lack of strategy.