CALIOPOLIS

I listen to a lot of podcasts – 10 to 20 per week while I am walking my dog or driving to/from work. Mostly these are presentations given at conferences or talks/brown bag seminars at schools by scholars and the amount of knowledge available in these fora is fantastic.

In the past week, I listened to three mind-expanding talks about the future that really made my head spin with ideas and information.

The first is Peter Cochrane giving the keynote at the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference given on January of 2006. Peter really brings it all together about RFID, telephones, telepresence and the use of sensor networks and telecommunications. I felt myself getting smarter listening to this.

The second is Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley speaking at the Web 2.0 conference in 2005 and she provides a succinct and rapid overview of the adoption of all kinds of technologies around the world including WiFi, broadband and mobile phones. This podcast is extremely dense and you will benefit from multiple listens.

The third podcast is a talk by John Smart called How to be Tech Futurist and is ostensibly about a new area of education on future planning. He starts out a little slow, but about 10 minutes in, he starts dropping amazing asides and insights about the future of computing, oil, complexity theory, physics and nanotechnology that I had never heard so well expressed. It’s a fast, breath-taking and ultimately optimistic podcast.

If you are trying to make sense out of the chaos in the tech marketplace, these three podcasts will expand your thinking and give you perspectives that are difficult to find without extensive research.