Tech Transformation

If you're having trouble keeping up with your email inbox or the technology shifts and nano-speeds of changes in your business, the way Peter Leyden tells it, this is just the beginning.

America and the world, Leyden says, are on the front lip of an “Age of Transformation” — a period of profound, rapid innovation and reinvention that will create new worldwide systems and structures.

History says so, says Leyden, founder and CEO of Berkeley, Calif.-based Next Agenda. And he has the data to show it.

“We're now going through the biggest historic shift in technology, and the power of this is world historic,” he says.

Nano-, technology shifts? Try this:

• In a speech in Atlanta less than a year ago, Leyden shared this statistic: More than 24 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube worldwide every minute.
• Today: That number is 48 hours per minute. And growing.
• Ten years ago, Leyden says, an HD camera cost about $10,000.
• Today: new iPhones have HD cameras. An iPhone sells for about $175.

Leyden has made a 25-year career of looking for and finding the Next Big Thing, ever since his days in the late 1980s as a Newsweek correspondent in Asia, as one of the first technology beat journalists in America and as managing editor of Wired magazine in the early 1990s. And for most of that quarter century, he has found the Big What's Next.

Leyden was in Sarasota and Tampa last week addressing members of the Gulf Coast CEO Forum and CEO Council of Tampa Bay. He gave them data-driven proof of what's next: The Age of Transformation.

Leyden sees the world in terms of 50- and 100-year increments. In that vein, he noted how the United States already has experienced four eras of reinvention: 1800-1860, 1860s-1900, 1900-1945 and 1945-today.

This means we have reached the end of the useful life of such social institutions as Medicare and Social Security and that we're on the verge of reinventing them. But in the overall scheme, addressing those systems is only part of bigger transformations, driven largely by tsunamis in technology, the globalization of everything and changing demographics.

A few highlights:
• Technology — Leyden urged CEOs to take note of video and how to employ it. More than half of all traffic on the Internet today is video, a change that has occurred in the past five years.
“As a percentage of what's on the Web,” he said, “video is exploding ... This is a huge shift, and a really important shift.”
Open-channel, multiple videos, with people collaborating at once in multiple locations are going to explode, he says. “We have perfected how to communicate via video.”
• Globalization — Part of the globalization might be categorized as Facebook Nation. With 900 million users, Facebook is now the world's third most-populous nation — “and there's not a peasant in it. They're all educated,” Leyden said. And networked. “Everything is connected,” Leyden says.
• Demographics — The Millennial Generation (ages 13 to 32) is the largest generation in American history — 83 million versus 74 million Baby Boomers. In the Middle East, more than 50% of the population is younger than 35.

This generation brings huge economic and consumer trends. Says Leyden: “They're the most empowered, the most highly educated, the most global, very civic-minded, very collaborative, very green and environmental, very optimistic.” He called them the Next Greatest Generation.

But they'll be facing, as we are today, what Leyden calls “our 21st Century Challenges — a period of intensely polarized and paralyzed politics and the breakdown of systems.

Leyden is optimistic. As he put it: What if you told FDR in 1945 he would be able to hold an iPhone and answer any question in the world in two seconds? He wouldn't have believed it.

Says Leyden: “That says we can do it” — reinvent America.

Leyden's Factoids

• 75% of the people on the planet have cell phones.
• An iPhone processes data faster than a $30 million supercomputer of 30 years ago.
• 2000: 30% of Americans were online; 2010: 80% are online.
• Videos comprise 50% of all traffic on the Internet.
• Millennial generation in the U.S.: 84 million. Baby Boomers: 73 million.
• 30% of U.S. population will be Hispanic by 2050; whites will be a minority in 2040.
• The Next Big Industries: biotech, genetics, nanotechnology.