Robert Dow

Steve Jobs didn’t get everything right. When he stood in front of an admiring audience and gave them the finger during the launch of the iPad, he declared no pens or styluses are needed ever again. The vaunted Palm PDA with its little solid plastic stylus was dead. Since then almost every major PC maker has introduced a product with … Read more

Companies position themselves for growth in 2015 and beyond At the end of 2014, the future is looking brighter if you can ignore all the war, disease, and despair that’s going on around our little play land of technology. The technology companies have weighed in with their product strategies, and they’re confidently plotting courses of growth for new markets and … Read more

Now what do we do? We thought we had really stumbled onto something when we recognized a correlation between the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and the attendance at CES: when CES attendance fell, so did the DJIA. That gauge worked up until 2013 and then failed in 2014 and again in 2015. Damn.  All things considered, I’d much rather … Read more

This is the time of year when soothsayers, financial forecasters, conspiracy theorists, and brilliant industry analysts polish their crystal balls and let the rest of you uninformed and ill-advised know what to expect for and during the next 12 months.  None of these predictions will be realized. I could stop here but just want to make the point that predicting … Read more

It’ll never happen in your lifetime? It’s simple: A: By the time we develop any new functionality we incorrectly call AI, it will no longer be the benchmark for what we think AI is, and so we’ll never realize AI. B: Since we don’t yet understand the workings of the brain, or biology, how can we possibly build something to … Read more