Rating: 
Summary: Useful, Fun, Futures!
Review: Richard Laermer's Trendspotting is exactly what the author claims it to be -- Cliff Notes for future business trends "without the guilt." In an easy to read, light style (I read it in a few hours on the plane) Laermer conveys what makes the time we live in so filled with possibility. From SMS messaging and integrative medicine to spirituality and wireless infrastructure, he lets the people who are doing it talk about it; and then throws in some of his own spice for good measure.
Rating:
Summary: Book looks ahead with a brain
Review: This is a truly useful book. For starters, Laermer doesn't idly speculate in the way of so many futurists. Instead, Laermer's brand of futurism is based on interviewing acknowleged experts, and reporting to readers about what they see on the horizon in their particular field. In Trendspotting, when you get a prognostication about the future of technology, it's courtesy of people such as Jared Headley a tech guru with Cisco. The section on spiritual trends draws on the research of people such as Robert Thurmond, a distinguished professor of religion at Columbia.It gives Laermer's book so much more credibility than if he'd just pulled all this stuff out of his head. And some of the predictions are fascinating: smells and tastes transferred over the internet, so that you can sample brownies before ordering a batch. Or entire homes powered by small, disherwasher-size hydrogen generators. The book becomes all the more credible when you notice that some of the predictions are already coming true. He quotes an expert as saying that movie studios will hype their products all the more if the economy stays soft. "Hype is more intense in a slowdown," the expert is quoted as saying. "People are more and more intense and, um, vicious." That put me in mind of the fierce whispering campaign rival studios are mounting against the movie A Beautiful Mind to try to keep it from winning Oscars. I would highly recommend this book. It is fun to read, superbly researched, and you can actually believe that some of the predictions will come true.
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