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By Michael Nagle for The New York Times

EYE OPENERS Mika Brzezinski, left, with her teammate and sparring partner, Joe Scarborough, on the set of “Morning Joe,” their news program on MSNBC.

LAST week on the north lawn of the White House, the morning after the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski held court on the grass, presiding over a special Sunday edition of their MSNBC daily news program “Morning Joe.” As they sat beside one another in directors’ chairs — Mika in a black evening gown with a plunging neckline; Joe in a dinner jacket (sans tie), both of them wearing dark sunglasses — they exuded the reckless, easy glamour of old-style Hollywood stars: Rock Hudson and Doris Day (but Doris Day with a tan and killer abs).

For more information about Joe & Mika or to invite them to your next meeting check out Mika’s Bio at Speakers.com. For more of this article follow this link

Jack Uldrich

#1: By the end of 2010, one-third of all automotive ads will focus exclusively on software-driven features that emphasize future car’s ability to interpret, react and connect to the external environment. Far less emphasis will be placed on car’s physical appearance and performance.

#2: One 4-year college will decrease its tuition by more than 5% in 2010 citing growing pressure from online universities; 10 universities will follow Princeton’s lead and begin distributing e-Books (such as the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader) to incoming students; and at least 100 other colleges and universities will follow Boston University’s lead in eliminating email addresses for incoming freshmen.

#3: The sale of solar cells will grow faster than expected due to innovations in new financing models that minimize or eliminate altogether the large up-front costs currently associated with installing solar modules.

#4: The first fully robotic vehicle will become operational in Iraq and Afghanistan and will successfully deliver military supplies more than 25 miles without the aid of any humans.

#5: A socially-networked song in which none of the band members knew one another prior to the song’s release will become a Billboard Top Ten hit. The band will attempt to conduct a conventional tour but will soon breakup citing “artistic differences.” The real cause: they find they just don’t like one another.

#6:The first cyborg soldier—with above average human capabilities in terms of strength, speed and/or vision—will return to active duty. Nicknamed “Steve Austin” by his fellow soldiers; the technology inside “the bionic man” (or bionic woman) will cost far less than 6 million dollars.

#7: An amateur scientist using cheap supercomputers accessed through “the cloud” will make a major scientific discovery. Her discovery will have initially been dismissed by peer-reviewed journals but hailed by the growing number of “open-science” advocates.

#8: A full two years before its first-ever “Space Tourism” launch, Galactic Suite Ltd will lower the price of its three-day trip to space from $4.4 million to $2 million.

#9: A physician in India will perform a prostectonomy on a patient in a different country using only a high-speed Internet connection and da Vinci robotic surgical device. The “medical tourist” in Sri Lanka will return to the United States the following day.

#10: A new iPhone app will be created which overlays a “Nascar-like” suit over the images of Congressmen and other prominent politicians to reveal from whom they are receiving campaign contributions. The size of the “patch” will vary according to the amount of campaign contributions they have received from the organization. The new app will bring heightened attention to the burgeoning field of augmented reality.

#11: An RFID chip embedded in the arm of an elderly Alzheimer patient will be credited with saving the man from freezing to death after he strolled away from his residence in the middle of the night and became disoriented.

#12: A leading concrete company will call for a ban on carbon dioxide emissions from concrete because its nanotechnology-enable concrete will be certified as a “CO2 neutral.”

#13: Hype surround algae’s promise as the “bio-fuel of the future” will grow hot after a breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology. Environmental advocates, however, will draw parallels between the advent of the “designer bacteria” (which is used to convert algae into fuel) and the creation of genetically modified organisms. The issue of “Frankenbugs” will gain traction in the media.

#14: Mind-control toys will grow from a small niche product in 2009 to the latest “must-have” toy by the 2010 holiday season. The technology will sell very well among kids under the age of 10 and seniors over the age of 65. Interest in brain-neural technology will also be driven by plummeting prices and increased product performance.

#15: Synthetically grown diamonds will make their way into the commercial marketplace but the diamond industry will have no ability to discern the products from “natural” diamonds. The diamond industry will attempt to downplay the significance of the event but will quietly ramp up efforts to regulate and control the creation of synthetic diamonds.

#16: A robotic pet that also serves as a companion, watch dog, vacuum cleaner and a personal healthcare monitor will be unveiled in Japan and marketed to the seniors. Voice recognition technology inside the robot will also be able to detect if a person”s speech is slurring and will connect to a healthcare professional immediately.

#17: The cost of sequencing an individual’s genome will drop to less than $1000. The breakthrough will lead to the creation of a rash of new social networking sites around different genetic dispositions in order to deal with the avalanche of genetic information. Genetic counseling will become one of the fastest growing professions in the coming decade.

#18: The growing sophistication of language translational software (available on such platforms as Google Wave) will cause leading corporations to revisit some job descriptions which currently require candidates to speak two languages. Citing the technology’s ability to facilitate conversations with native speakers, the city of Paris will become an even more popular tourist destination.

#19: A conservative state legislator will introduce legislation prohibiting healthy individuals (i.e. non-injured combat veterans) from using implanted brain-neural technology to control objects outside their body. The bill will die in committee but the author and other supporters vow to make it a campaign issue in 2010.

#20: Technology artisans will begin using inexpensive rapid prototype manufacturing equipment to develop new pieces of art and jewelry of previously unseen sophistication, complexity and beauty. More traditional artisans will ask that “non hand-made” products be banned from local art fairs.

The “Back to the Future” Prediction of 2010: A barefoot runner will win a major marathon and fuel a growing trend among recreational runners to run without shoes.

Dom Sagolla

Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.

“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.

Later, each group presented their ideas, and a few of them were selected for prototyping. Demos ensued. @Jack’s idea rose to the top as a combination of status-type ideas. @Jack, @Biz, and @Florian were assigned to build version 0.1, managed by @Noah. The rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped we’d have something to fall back upon.

The first version of @Jack’s idea was entirely web-based. It was created on March 21st, 2006. My first substantive message is #38: “oh this going to be addictive.”

We struggled with a codename and a product name. “It’s FriendStalker!” joked @Crystal, our most prolific user. The userbase was limited entirely to the company and our immediate family. No one from a major company of any kind was allowed in. For months, we were in Top Secret Alpha because of competing products like the now-defunkt Dodgeball.  The original product name / codename “twttr” was inspired by Flickr and the fact that American SMS shortcodes are five characters. We prototyped with “10958″ as our shortcode. (We later changed to “40404″ for ease of use and memorability.) @Florian was commuting from Germany, so in order to operate with him we secured a “long code”, or a full 10-digit phone number linked to a small-potatoes gateway.  Twttr probably had about 50 users in the 10958 days.

I was following everyone on the system. We had an admin page where you could see every user. As Head of Quality for the company, it seemed like my duty to watch for opinions or issues from our users. This caused confusion, though, when family members of our team were suddenly being followed by a seemingly random person. Thus, Private Accounts were born. @Jack and @Florian created a means for users to mark themselves private, and we admins had the ability to tell who wanted to be private so we’d know not to follow them. Actual, real privacy with secure protection came a bit later. I’d say there were about 100 users when Private was invented.

The interaction model and the visual metaphor for the service were constantly in flux. The meaning of being someone’s “Friend” versus “Following” someone changed regularly. At that point, you could either get all SMS messages or get none. There was no Twictionary back then; data in the system were referred to as “posts” or just “messages”. The lack of clear terminology led to some pretty spirited debates leading up to the Spring of 2006.

We launched Twttr Beta on @Ev’s birthday. We could now invite a slightly larger circle of friends, but still excluding any large companies (with a few trusted exceptions within places like Google). I’ll never forget the family-friendly feeling of that day. We all knew that we were going to change the world with this thing that no one else understood. That day stands out in memory as the deep breath before a baby’s first cry.

Meanwhile, Odeo and the corporate board were at a tension point. Not only was the value of Twttr difficult to describe, the relevance of Odeo was declining monthly. Drastic cuts were recommended. One day in early May 2006, @Ev let four of us go: @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, me, and @Rabble. @Noah and @TimRoberts would later be asked to leave as well. It was a tough decision and huge shock to each of us. We all handled it differently. Looking back on it, I think Twitter allowed us to stay connected when we might not have otherwise been. After all, we weren’t even public with the site yet, so each of us continued to add value just by using it with each other.

During this transition, Twttr.com launched to the public. Still, very few people understood its value. At the time most people were paying per SMS message, and so wouldn’t Twttr run up our bills? Also, how were we supposed to use this thing and who cares what I’m doing? Each one of us original users became a kind of personal evangelist for Twttr, trying to get our coworkers and friends to use it. At this point, Obvious Corp was born as an incubator with Twttr as its sole project.

@Jack was still just an engineer, and the service was only a few months old when the group acquired Twitter.com and re-branded. Back then, we had no character limit on our system. Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message. In February of 2007 @Jack wrote something which inspired me to get started on this project: “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.”

Just in time for SxSW, @RayReadyRay rigged a very sweet Flash-based visualizer that ended up on display on the halls of the conference. I wasn’t working there, but I used to visit regularly to see how our baby was doing. I happened to be at the office in SF when the visualizer went live on site in Austin. I remember finding a bug just before showtime, as @Biz and @Jeremy talked over the phone. Everything miraculously fell into place by the time people filtered out of the sessions to see their comments floating along the hallway screens.

Boom #1: Twitter won an award in the Blog category, and @Jack thanked everyone in 140 characters.  MTV Music Awards: Boom #2.  Apple WWDC 2007, and then TV, and then print and pretty soon Cable news: Boom #3.

@Jack became the CEO of a newly spun-off Twitter, Inc. during the Boom Times. People still didn’t quite “get it” but at least some people had heard about it. The team created permalinks and RSS feeds. @Blaine pushed for IM integration. Each major feature added tremendous gains in users, and in usage per user. Still small by social networking standards, Twitter delivered something immediate and vital that no other service could attain.

For a lot of people, the entire API launch was really the time when Twitter first left the nest. But that is another story, for another time.

Scott Anthony

A story last week about the Obama administration committing more than $3 billion to smart grid initiatives caught my eye. It wasn’t really an unusual story. It seems like every day features a slew of stories where leaders commit billions to new geographies, technologies, or acquisitions to demonstrate how serious they are about innovation and growth.

Here’s the thing — these kinds of commitments paradoxically can make it harder for organizations to achieve their aim. In other words, the very act of making a serious financial commitment to solve a problem can make it harder to solve the problem.

Why can large commitments hamstring innovation?

First, they lead people to chase the known rather than the unknown. After all, if you are going to spend a large chunk of change, you better be sure it is going to be going after a large market. Otherwise it is next to impossible to justify the investment. But most growth comes from creating what doesn’t exist, not getting a piece of what already does. It’s no better to rely on projections for tomorrow’s growth markets, because they are notoriously flawed.

Big commitments also lead people to frame problems in technological terms. Innovators spend resources on path-breaking technologies that hold the tantalizing promise of transformation. But as my colleagues Mark Johnson and Josh Suskewicz have shown, the true path to transformation almost always comes from developing a distinct business model.

Finally, large investments lead innovators to shut off “emergent signals.” When you spend a lot, you lock in fixed assets that make it hard to dramatically shift strategy. What, for example, could Motorola do after it invested billions to launch dozens of satellites to support its Iridium service only to learn there just wasn’t a market for it? Painfully little. Early commitments predetermined the venture’s path, and when it turned out the first strategy was wrong — as it almost always is — the big commitment acted as an anchor that inhibited iteration.

These ingredients are a recipe for sustaining thinking — trying to leap-frog over existing incumbents with cutting-edge technologies. Research shows that market leaders tend to beat back these kinds of attacks, resulting in a lot of squandered resources.

So what should leaders do?

Be frugal with financial resources but generous with human resources. What holds disruptive innovation back in most organizations isn’t a lack of money. It is a lack of committed people, a surplus of inappropriate mindsets, and a whole series of standard operating procedures that run counter to the fast-cycle decision making, in-market learning, and iterative approach to strategy required for disruption.

Freeing people to fully engage in this problem, and having leadership focus their energy on helping to ward off what I call the “sucking sound of the core” can be critical to success.

In an interview with Innosight, Intuit Chairman Scott Cook said that in his experience, the most successful disruptive teams have “an executive that is rooting for them, cheering them, mentoring them, actively spending time with them every week and protecting them from the antibodies of the rest of the companies that are trying to love them to death, or, exterminate them.”

Signing checks is easier than spending time. If you are truly committed to innovation, though, spend less money and more time. You’ll end up making substantially more progress.

Ken Dychtwald

Learning from my mom and dad’s experience.
I grew up in the 1950s and 60s in a close-knit, hard-working family. My parents both worked full-time to pay the bills, send my brother and me to college while saving frugally for their own retirement nest egg. Still very much alive at 86 and 89, my mom and dad live in a retirement community in South Florida. I live 3,000 miles away with my wife and kids in California, while my older brother lives in New Jersey – near where we grew up.

Today, my dad has diabetes and heart disease and has been blind for a decade due to macular degeneration. While still sharp as a tack, and ready for a political argument 24/7, he can’t drive, read or handle many of the normal activities of daily living without a full-time aide. My mom – who remains the “heart” of our family – also requires ongoing assistance. She has COPD – which means she must spend three hours a day on a nebulizer. In the past several years, she has had a heart bypass surgery, a hip replacement and is grappling with memory loss.

Around a decade ago, when it became obvious that living independently in their home was becoming difficult, my brother and I grew concerned because we saw that age and chronic disease were starting to take a deep toll. We knew that Medicare didn’t pay for long term care and Medicaid was for the poor, so our anxiety was high. However, I was very relieved when my dad told me that they were going to activate the benefits of the long term care insurance policies they had bought five years before, to get the extra help they needed so they could continue to live independently.

The good news is they are currently living surprisingly normal lives in their own home, thanks to the services of their care coordinator as well as the terrific aide who comes to their house six days a week, helps manage their household, does the grocery shopping, prepares meals, takes them to their various doctors appointments, cares for them – and generally has allowed them to stay together in their home, just like they always wanted.

If not for their LTC policy, my folks (who have recently celebrated their 67th anniversary!) would most likely be living in some sort of institution – probably a nursing home. And because of their different conditions, they might have been forced into separate facilities. My brother would probably have given up his life in NJ to look after them, and my wife and I would probably be paying for their care which by now would have cost nearly $500,000 – a small fortune.

As a gerontologist, I know that paying out-of-pocket for eldercare can be very costly. The median cost for home care is $42,000/year and a private room in a nursing home costs on average $74,000/year (for information on the cost of care where you live, here’s a helpful resource: www.genworth.com/costofcare). Some people have to sell all their assets to cover the cost of LTC – and many others become impoverished while paying for LTC expenses. I recently read how some social workers are advising elder men and women to divorce their spouse should their partner’s health start to fail. By doing so, they can detach from the financial responsibilities of caring for their loved one – and have Medicaid pick up the tab. This is a shameful state of affairs.

My folks say that they purchased their policies so that they wouldn’t be a burden on us – and while we would do almost anything for them, we are thankful for their proactive decision to purchase their LTC insurance years ago.

The Coming Caregiver Crunch
Over the past century, life expectancy has vaulted from 47 to 77….and it continues to rise. But, the longer you live – the longer you’ll live. So a 65 year old today has an average life expectancy of nearly 85 years! For many, this is a terrific circumstance – more years to learn, work, play and enjoy time with those we love. However, with longer lives, there’s also the increased possibility of health problems along the way. Nearly 70% of all people over 65 will need some long term care in the years ahead. And we’re talking about our parents and soon us!

Today, three quarters of all care is provided informally by loving and supportive family members outside of hospitals, nursing homes and other institutions. This caregiving might involve grocery shopping, house cleaning or helping a loved one who is recuperating from surgery to bathe, dress or visit their doctor. Or, it might even require 24/7 care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

But there will soon be a shortage of family caregivers for four reasons:

1. Fewer children to provide care. Today’s elders had around four children per couple, while boomers have had only two.
2. Family members may not live nearby due to increased mobility and relocations.
3. Escalating numbers of singles without a spouse to care for them, due to rising divorce rates and widowhood (women outlive men by more than five years).
4. Highest rates – ever – of both middle-aged men and women working. And so, the adult daughter or son might need (or wish) to work.

Long Term Care is not necessarily a comfortable topic…even for a gerontologist!
So, when my wife Maddy and I stopped to think about it five years ago, we considered what might happen to our lives if sometime down the road we needed extended care. While we realized that there were costs associated with purchasing LTC insurance, the potential financial and emotional costs to ourselves and to our children of not purchasing them were far higher. Although my folks bought their policies in their 70s, we decided to buy ours in our early 50s, when the rates are lower and the likelihood of qualifying is far higher. And, we also took advantage of the special discounts for couples. In addition, because we are small business owners, around ¾ of our premiums turned out to be tax-deducible.

After 35 years on the aging front lines, my personal rationale for why purchasing long term care insurance makes sense:

1. To maintain independence and to avoid burdening your children – financially or emotionally.
2. To assure your ability to get quality care in the setting you choose.
3. To protect your retirement assets and stay in control of your money and your life.
4. To protect your spouse’s lifestyle and financial security, while you’re alive and afterwards.
5. To protect inheritance for your children and grandchildren.

While I don’t think everyone needs LTC insurance, I do believe that everyone should have a plan for how they’re going to be looked after should they needed extended care, and how they’re going to pay for it without burdening their family.