For slightly less than 27 years I have worked at a Fortune 100 company's research and development center. A goal of one's work is always to see the future, and then make that future happen in a profitable way. However, understanding what technologies will drive the world of tomorrow through new products is always difficult. Seeing a trend before it smacks you in the face is tough. Thus, the question remains … how do you see the future? 

One company has taken a unique and delightful approach, the Tomorrow Project from Intel. Imagine if you took four leading science fiction writers and asked them to wright short stories about present technologies in your lab, but how that body of work might evolve in the future? This is an intriguing concept, and is exactly what Intel's Tomorrow Project has done. The four short stories may be downloaded without charge via NorthstarNerd.Org.

I've already read the Last Day of Work by Douglas Rushkoff. I won't give the story away, but imagine a technology which knows what you want … before you consciously understand your own desires? Intel has a process in their R&D Lab which can anticipate whether you want to go left, or right. Now read the story!

Learn more about this fascinating idea via the Tomorrow Project, including Science Fiction Prototyping (free pdf download). Intel is thinking outside the box. In fact, the box does not even exist!

What is to become of the library in the internet age? As a youth in the 1960's one of my proudest moments was when I was given my first library card, and could check out books on my own. An entire world was opened to me!

Fast forward many, many years and I am now a senior technologist working for a large Fortune 100 company. A major share of my job involves leveraging web resources for collaboration. Two weeks ago while on vacation I had an "a-ha" moment. You see, I learned how a small town in England chose to use their dying symbol of a prior age … an English phone box (a phone booth for we colonials) . Understand that like many people, my wife and I no longer have a "land line". Our connection to the world is via our smartphones. Phone booths, and hopefully not libraries, are the dinosaurs of the information age. 

In Timsbury … near Bath, England … I met a true "smartphone", or should I say smart "phone box"! Take a look at their new public library. You can visit the world via their phone booth; just don't try and make a phone call!

Click to expand and view either image at full resolution.

Thank you to everyone who navigated here in response to my research requests. 

Many of you may have arrived via this shortened BudURL

• http://Ez.com/GAnerd

Now that you're here, please click and read some of the latest posts / research. You'll find blog entries ranging from a neat wedding video / musical recording I took last week at Oxford University to Google Search research.

Here's what I'm testing. Thanks very much in advance. Your visting via the link given triggered the following:

• A link to my blog
• Capturing of statistics via the BudURL (prior post) url shortening service
• Capturing of statistics via Google Analytics and Campaign URL Builder

Most of us know that url shorteners are valuable. Some of the leading services are bit.ly, Google and BudURL. While the temptation is to use a free service, consider an inexpensive premium service. Linking your url's to your web analytics service can really enhance your knowledge of what is truly generating your traffic.

For instance, for this post I could use this url, or the direct link given at the bottom of the post. The premium service from Bud also allows me to use my own sub-domain, and even QR Qodes (think smartphones).

Here is one day's worth of reports for the url which I have linked in the previous paragraph. Please note than much of the information is "clickable" and allows me to drill down for greater understanding of my results!

And a service can be easily invoked!

I wanted to post some quick results. I appreciated everyone who sent screenshots. I'll post more results when I have some additional free time to compile them. You can download the linked Powerpoint file and run the animations. The background results are from my browser. In successive order click through the results (the file will pause after each additional result giving you time to compare). You'll see a number of results from the United States, and also the Czech Republic and Australia. I found it interesting that some folks had "news" items presented, while some of us did not.

Why did I only focus on the top three results? Studies have shown that 85% of us never go beyond these top 3 (see the study from Cornell University … scroll to bottom of blog post)

I've also given two screenshots below for those of you who want a quick fix! These are the top three results for two different individuals (click to maximize).

• Post Update on July 20th: Here are the Eric Whitacre results (ppt file). Interestingly enough, the results were almost 100% identical for everyone for the Whitacre example, but not for the corporate hacking. I invite you to make your own conclusions. Finally, if you have not watched (and listened) to the TED lecture and Whitacre's virtual choir … take the time. It's well worth it!
• See original post: Is My Google Your Google?