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Last year, Mercedes launched a feature in their electric cars that would allow drivers to pay $60 per month for an “Acceleration Increase” that would boost their car’s acceleration speed by 1 second when going from zero to sixty. BMW announced (and quickly abandoned) their wildly unpopular idea of charging car owners $18 per month to … Read more
Dennis Austin just died and I feel like he deserves a bit of a tribute. Maybe even a parade. He’s the co-inventor, along with Michael Gaskins, of the greatest software product ever imagined: PowerPoint. Yes, I said it. PowerPoint is the best software for communicators. I use it for everything. Giving talks. Designing images. Laying out … Read more
Radar speed scanners slow down drivers by showing them how fast they are going. The awareness creates the behavior change. Could the same idea shift how we eat? In Japan, 7-Eleven is testing a Vege-Check palm scanner that “uses reflection spectroscopy to measure carotenoid levels in a person’s skin.” These are the biomarkers that can estimate the amount of … Read more
Technology was supposed to make the entire world more accessible. It still can, but sometimes it seems that progress has stalled. This past month, the MIT Technology Review magazine devoted an entire issue to exploring the future of tech-enabled accessibility and how it may soon be more “normal” than you think. They spotlight everything from the sonification … Read more
Maybe you’ve already heard of Photoshop’s new “Generative Expand” feature that allows users to “expand images in any direction and generate an additional scene for the space with a combination of traditional app tools and AI.” Most of the examples of use cases for this feature involve filling in background details or fixing a photo that was … Read more
What if AI could serve as a linguistics coach for a talented musician? That’s essentially what K-pop music label HYBE created using technology from AI startup Supertone to help singer MIDNATT release his latest single simultaneously in six languages —Korean, English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese. Most significantly, each language version isn’t AI-generated. Instead AI tools helped … Read more
Yes, I am part of the generation that grew up with the original Nintendo gaming system … and sometimes I even feature it in my keynote talks. This year is the 40th anniversary of the console and my fellow geeks over at Engadget have put together an illuminating history of exactly why this system was so … Read more
Whether you consider it dangerous or useful, the most likely use case for generative AI right now is as an automated tool to write faster (and perhaps better).
Reporting from the trade show floor at CES 2023, here are some of my picks for the most non-obvious inventions to watch and why they are so interesting.
Based on this combination of quantitative and qualitative data, here is a partial list of some of the most popular stories of the year, based on what my readers shared.
Non-Obvious Thinking is my latest book about the 4 secrets of becoming a non-obvious thinker - relesaed 10/01/2024.
Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator, founder of the Non-Obvious Company and the 3-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author of ten books.
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In addition to Non-Obvious Thinking, Rohit is the author of 10 books on trends, the future of business, building a more human brand with storytelling and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world.
