Privacy is on its way out - I wonder if anyone will miss it

Much has been written about "the death of privacy" - and I think a lot of it has been over-stated. But I do think it's true that the world is a much less private place than it used to be. Whether you're looking at the information that people choose to share on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Myspace- or previously-hidden (or, at least, hard to reach) information that's now in the public domain (such as estimated home values on Zillow), there are a lot of things that were previously private that are no longer so.

And that's largely OK with me. On the whole, I'm not really too fussed what people know about me or my life. I've always felt there's a fine line between privacy and secrecy - with the former being generally a good thing that helps people have and maintain appropriate inter-personal boundaries and the latter being an unhelpful, controlling and ultimately destructive impulse that is as unhealthy in personal relationships as it is in governments.

The real question that I think technology has brought to us is this: who gets to decide what's private and what's not? Hopefully, each of us gets to make our own decisions on that, but it doesn't always seem to work out that way.

There are some things that clearly fall within the existing legal framework - such as the big "cellphone hacking" scandal in the UK where a major tabloid newspaper is accused of sanctioning the hacking of cellphone messages and texts between the rich, royal and famous. And then there are a lot of gray areas.

Suppose, for example, that I didn't want Zillow to publish an estimated value for my house? Or that I didn't want Google to offer a "street view" of that house? Or maybe that I didn't want every search engine on the planet to pull up links to my older, published work (the good, the bad and the ugly).

For the most part, I'd be out of luck. I have a reasonable expectation of privacy around what I say in-person to someone else (and I can judge for myself whether that person is likely to pass on information that I have told them is private). I should also have a similar expectation for cellphone messages and texts - although it's clear that they can be hacked. But published work on the Web - whether it's newspaper, magazine articles or video - that's all fair game.

The long and short of all this, I think, is that we're all just going to have to get used to a lot less privacy and be OK with that. I don't see any way to turn back the tide - nor a huge amount of value in doing so. Sure, there are a lot of things that ideally should go with that (like a greater sense of tolerance and acceptance throughout society for people's backgrounds, political views and other things they might have otherwise wanted to keep private), but changes to expected levels of privacy will happen regardless of those broader societal changes. And there do have to be some hard lines drawn.

While I don't mind - on the whole - much of my life being open, I think kids, for example, should be protected from having their young lives impacted by this lack of privacy before they're learned how to manage it. And some of that will come from education (so that they know how to use privacy settings on Facebook and Myspace) and some of it may have to come from legislation.

In general, my hope is that reduced levels of privacy will cause more of us - with our human frailties and foibles - to be regarded by our fellow citizens as "just regular folks" who deserve our consideration and acceptance. I honestly believe that the more we look at others as people - first and foremost - the less we'll suffer from the impact of less privacy.

What do you think? Don't feel that you need to keep your thoughts private!

My Memory is Online

I feel fortunate that the digitization of my life seems to be happening at a point when my own brain is straining to retain (and retrieve) all the information I think it is supposed to hold. Having lived my professional life as a writer - and much of my work having appeared online for the last 15 years - I'm finding that the Web is actually doing a pretty good job of remembering things for me that I had almost forgotten.

I like to think of memories as being kind of like that big warehouse at the end of the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" movie, where there's a seemingly endless array of boxes containing historical artifacts - most of them gathering dust and all difficult to identify and unpack in any rational way.

What is surprising to me now is just how many pieces of my "pre-Web" life are appearing on the Web (and spark retrieval of those things I haven't thought about in a long time). I would not have expected, for example, that the writing that I did in my university student newspaper days would ever make it to the Web. And yet, through the magic of archived PDFs, my writing (and that of many of my friends) appears on the University of British Columbia's library archive site. In this example, on Page 5, I see a piece that my old friend Tom Hawthorn wrote about exploitation of students working at a certain large burger chain, On Page 6, there's a piece by Bill Tieleman on the efforts by the New Democratic Party to rebuild itself (shades of today) and, on Page 9, I am reminded that I actually did write an extensive feature about the perils of being a parent and living in student housing. And all of this took place in this week 31 years ago!  

Meanwhile, the Web also holds the text of long-forgotten technology articles. This piece unearths work that I did in writing about how the early Apple Macintosh was used to help Fleetwood Mac's road manager handle the band's 1988 European tour. If you had asked me to remember anything about writing that article, I would have been hard-pressed to do so. In fact, I had completely forgotten having written it until I saw that piece while doing a search for this post.

Come the 1990s and things get a little easier. But many old Web sites have been taken down or radically altered. So as an aid to my memory, I sometimes use the "Wayback Machine", which provides archives of some pages of old Web sites - even if the sites themselves are long gone. You just stick in the URL of the old site and it will bring back a list of pages it has archived from now defunct sites - organized by day.

Of course, none of this is really a substitute for actually remembering things. And I'll try to remember that.

Why I Don't Want To Be My Own Editer

It's an odd feeling to know that you're becoming irrelevant. But that was indeed how I felt after giving a talk at a local university about my life as a writer - and trying to give tips to young, aspiring writers.

The core of this irrelevance was simply that the kinds of challenges and aspirations facing young writers has changed. For centuries - virtually since the invention of the printing press - one of the biggest obstacles for any writer was to get published. Sure, there were a few hardy souls who wrote for the love of writing. But the most prolific (think Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle or, more latterly, Stephen King) were all about getting their work published and in front of large numbers of readers. And, of course, they wanted to get paid so they could make a living doing what they loved.

Now, anyone with Internet access and a free account on Blogger, can be a published online writer. And if you want to write a book, Amazon makes it pretty easy and economic to self-publish - and sell - Kindle versions of your work (at a minimal cost and, of course, agreeing to share revenue with Amazon). The part about getting paid, however, is a little more tricky in this new world. You need to handle that yourself - by getting advertising on your blog, selling eBooks directly - or be one of those rare bloggers whose work makes it from the blog to the big screen (hello, Julie and Julia).

But the real point is that writers no longer have to live and die professionally by the whims of editors and publishers - even if they are willing to be 'starving artists'. And I'm not totally convinced that's a good thing. Editors and publishers (good ones, anyway) can add a great deal to the quality and value of any written work - from magazine article to grand historical novel. Left to handle everything on their own, today's new writers have to be their own editors and publishers.

The smart ones will, I think, seek out others to fulfill that role for them. It's very hard to edit your own work - and even harder to be a judge of its appeal to readers. Being your own publisher means having to set your own quality bar. I, for example, have to tell myself (not always successfully) that readers may not enjoy having sentences constantly broken up by dashes, parentheses and odd asides within the narrative. But I'm my own publisher and editor, so who's going to stop me?

The answer seems to be that I'm going to have to stop myself. And that's hard. But maybe it's a better challenge than having to pester editors and publishers with my ideas until I find one that appeals to them. I personally don't think so.

What do you think?

Job-hunting 2.0

Job-hunting used to be a pretty personal endeavor. And it was all about you - the job applicant. The application process was designed to help you market yourself. Your cover letter and resume were your chance (if you didn't already know someone at the company) to start building a relationship between yourself and your hoped-for new workplace.

The advice from friends, career counselors and loved ones was also pretty consistent - keep your resume short, consistent and to the point. Ensure that your cover letter shows you to be engaging, confident and strong in your desire for the new job. And all of those things made sense.

But something pretty dramatic has happened over the last 10 years. Not only has the economic downturn changed the landscape of job-hunting (so that there are a whole lot more people looking for jobs and far fewer actually finding them), but the technology that powers many recruiting departments has transformed both how you submit your job application and what happens to it after it's been submitted.

The sad fact is that the first person to see your resume or cover letter these days won't commonly be a person at all. It will likely be a resume filtering application. It works like this:

• You submit your resume online (either by attaching a document or cutting and pasting the resume into an online form)
• The resume filter application scans your resume for the existence of certain "keywords" (like those used in Web search) and, if the right keywords - or enough of them - are found, then your resume may actually make it into the hands of a human being
• Presuming that your resume contains the keywords that the company is looking for, then the recruiter may actually start to read the fine words you've carefully composed in order to get their attention and explain how you are different and why the company NEEDS you

And all of that is very, very different advice than the traditional "keep it short, simple and to the point". I won't go into a lot of detail on job-hunting tips, as other blogs have already done a good job of that - such as last year's Underblog post that asked "Would You Pass The Resume-Filter Test?" and the excellent set of tips to which it linked at Iagora - which explains, in considerable detail - how best to create CVs for the New Reality.

This is an area I've been long interested in. A few years back, I interviewed a hiring industry luminary - Dr. David P. Jones - and he provided a great perspective on what were then looming trends in hiring. You can read that article here: http://www.verificationsinc.com/newsletter/01152007/million.html and, I think it's a great illustration of how things that were - not long ago - just 10 minutes into the future can have an impact on your present day life.

I'd welcome any tales and feedback from anyone who's currently job-hunting and how this new Resume Reality is impacting them.

Now turning to the future - Part 1 of many

This blog is called "Ten Minutes into the Future" for a reason. I created it to not only chronicle a life of living with - and using - new technology a little ahead of the pack (and talking about the many interesting people I've had a chance to meet along the way), but also to take a look into the future.

So for the next while (the immediate future), I'm going to focus on where I think various aspects of technology may take us - and how that will impact our lives. I'm going to start my focus by looking at an odd trend that simultaneously increases and decreases the importance of the devices that you use to enjoy or use the information you work with.

Take the basic word-processed document, for example. With online products such as Microsoft's Office Live - which you can access at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/web-apps/ you can work with your spreadsheets, word-processed documents and PowerPoint presentations from any popular browser. You don't need to be using your specific computer pulling information from its hard drive in order to be able to work with your information. It's all stored out in "the cloud" so that you can get it from wherever you happen to be - using whatever computer you have to hand at the time.

I admit there is really nothing radical in this idea. In many fundamental ways, it harkens back to the old days of the 'dumb terminal' when users would log into mainframes and minicomputers to work with their information - and it's certainly in line with the experience than is common to anyone who uses Facebook, Twitter or just about any one Web site that does anything more than provide textual information.

Former Sun Microsystems' former vice-president John Burdette Gage is largely credited with coining the phrase 'the network is the computer' and it really seems to have become true. Any reasonably-powered device (from a phone to a Web-enabled TV or gaming console to a high-powered desktop computer) can do most things on the Web that you would have typically expected that only a 'personal computer' could do 10 years ago.

And that trend is only likely to accelerate over the next 10 years - with huge implications for the entire technology industry and some important impacts for us as consumers. Over the next few posts, we'll look at those implications and impacts - starting with the impact of the cloud and online applications in the delivery of many of the services we use in our day-to-day lives - from how we apply for jobs, how we shop, how we use government services, where we live and how we get there.

Stay tuned!

Videophone: The Bathrobe Effect

For as long as I can remember, the videophone - in one form or another - has been a component of the science fiction of the near future. Whether it was Star Trek, Dick Tracey or The Jetsons, the idea of the videophone has been hugely popular. The desire to be able to look at the person you're talking to is very natural and human.

And the technology to do it is here - and has been for quite a while. And there are a lot of ways now to approximate making a video phone call - including Skype and a myriad of other video calling solutions. In addition, lots of big companies provide video conferencing facilities in their conference rooms - so that people can both see and here what's happening in a meeting that they are 'virtually' attending.

Despite all of this, the videophone as an artifact has really not yet arrived. And I have a theory as to why that is: there's a lot of value in not being seen. Having a telephone conversation without video ensures that the person on the other end - if they're engaged in the dialog at all - has to listen to the words you're saying (and how you're saying them) and doesn't get any of the visual cues about your body language.

You don't have to dress up to make a phone call. Anyone who's ever worked from home knows the value of being able to be professional and businesslike on a conference call, yet still be wearing that ratty old bathrobe that you got for Christmas 10 years ago and haven't been able to part with.

There are, of course, circumstances where you do want to be seen on a call - and there are now lots of options to do that. Those options are growing. When I purchased my latest cellphone last month, I noticed that it had front and back camera lenses for the express purpose of allowing video calls. Apple, of course, has made much of this feature in its latest iPhone.

But no matter how many lenses you put into a phone, I can't think of any circumstance under which I'd want to inflict the sight of me in a bathrobe - first thing in the morning - on the rest of the world. Only those who've built up the tolerance for such a sight should bear the responsibility for witnessing it.

And that, I predict, is why the videophone has been slow to become popular - despite the ability of technology to deliver it.

Ode to the Busy Signal

My favorite blogger recently pointed me to a New York Times Magazine piece on the disappearance of the analog phone (and the land line to which it was attached). It lamented the loss of reliability in telephone communication - and how we collectively seem to be willing to live with dropped calls, conversations in which words cut out and endless beeps and buzzes when texts and "incoming email" beeps cut into a phone conversation.

I must confess that the piece got me to thinking about some of things I miss about land lines. I miss the busy signal. It's something that is so rare now, that when I hear it, I don't hang up right away. I hang on the line for a while, savoring the fast-paced beep that sings the song of my teenage years.

It went like this: there's a girl want to call, but I haven't had the nerve. I finally get the courage to call her. I dial the number with apprehension. I sweat a little. And then..... I get a busy signal.

But it was OK. The busy signal didn't connote rejection. It didn't tell me that I personally was not the one she wanted to talk to. A busy signal might also be the very thing that helped me get the courage to ask her in person if she would go to the dance with me.

If I were a teenager today, I wouldn't get that second chance. She'd either see my number come up on Caller ID and ignore it. Or she might come on the line and say - "I'm on the other line - can I call you back?" Either way, I'd be crushed and rejected. Right then and there, without a moment for cool reflection, a chance for a great comeback - or a thought that perhaps fate was intervening.

The busy signal was also my friend in business. As a reporter, one of my jobs was often to get hold of people who didn't really want to talk to me - or, at the very least, were hard to get hold of. A busy signal told me that they could be gotten. They were not only near the phone. They were on it. So all I had to do was make their phone ring while they were still near the phone. And few people could resist a ringing phone. You never knew who it was going to be - and what message of joy or sadness might be delivered. The call might be Important.

And without Caller ID, the person I wanted to talk to would have no idea I was a reporter. If I heard a busy signal, I knew that there was a pretty good chance that if I keep dialing their number they would eventually finish their call and answer mine.

It strikes me that the beep-beep-beep of the busy signal was very democratic and egalitarian. Making a call was a "first come, first served" kind of thing. So if I called someone first, anyone and everyone else who called that person - no matter who they were - would get a busy signal until my conversation with that person was over.

So I guess I just wanted to say it: I miss the busy signal.

Hanging up now......

Old Tech: When does it stop being useful?

I have a curious technological dinosaur in my living room (and no, I'm not talking about myself). I'm talking about an old reel-to-reel tape deck that my Dad used for many years to record music - as well as the various musings of family members. I have it because I want to move the various bits of old audio he created into a digital form (probably WAV or MP3 files) so that they can be shared with the rest of the family.

But it's also kind of a cool thing to look at - with it's glowing VU meters, slowing rotating tape spindles and giant buttons. It has a real, tactile quality to it that I just don't feel from the digital recording software on my PC or smartphone.

For the purposes of this blog, however, the real question is when it - and other devices like it - stop being useful and make their way from being living room curiosities to items that need to get dropped off at Goodwill? Aside from the aesthetic quality of the device (and the same could be true of an old record player, VCR, cassette deck, 8-track tape player, slide projector or 8 mm movie projector), the real answer may be the use of the media with it is associated.

If I have old tapes, slides and movies, there's an obvious usefulness in keeping the old machines around. It also saves me the trouble of actually doing that "rainy day project" of moving all the pictures, audio tapes and video tapes from their current form to a digital one.

But I'm beginning to think there's more to it than that. There is actually something to the experience of watching slides on a classic projector, hearing the 'thunk' of a VHS tape as it stops in exactly the right place to begin playing an old movie or dropping the record player needle in exactly the right place on an old LP.

So I guess old technology really stops becoming useful when you stop having any feeling for it. Don Draper said it all in the classic Mad Men episode "The Wheel" - when he extols the virtues of Kodak's then new slide carousel with the following words:

"This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved."

As long as we want to keep going back to those places where we know we are loved, old technology will always be with us.

Voicemail now on the endandered technologies list

Voicemail has lived a long and useful life. But from everything I can see, it's on the verge of extinction- along with old friends such as telephone land lines and those big cordless phones with long silver aerials (like the one favored by Jerry Seinfeld in his apartment).

The interesting thing about this phase of technological evolution is that it appears to be as much a social shift as a technological one. From where I sit, voicemail isn't dying out because it stopped doing its job well - or some other technology came along that did it better. In fact, voicemail has changed a whole lot in terms of how it's delivered - from the classic "answering machine" to today's digital voice recording. But the way in which you interact with voicemail - and it's core purpose - has remained the same.

Voicemail is dying because no-one wants to leave voicemails anymore - and even fewer people want to listen to them.

Based on a completely non-scientific study of friends and family, the only people who seem to leave voicemails are above a certain age threshold - and that threshold seems to be rising. A few years ago, I started to notice that my own teenage kids would never leave me a voicemail. First of all, they would never call a landline. And if they called my cellphone and I didn't answer right away, they would either keep trying - or send me a text. The other thing I noticed was that if I left a voicemail, it often was either disdained (why did you leave me a voicemail? That is SO lame) or completely ignored.

Now don't get me wrong. I love my kids - and they're really great people. But they have been conditioned to expect that almost all technologically-delivered conversation is instant - or completely irrelevant. I then started to notice this same trend at work - where younger people in the office (I'll call them twentysomethings) started to operate the same way. Either they would send me an email or engage me in a conversation on IM (Instant Messenger) - but almost never would anyone of that age leave me a voicemail.

Over the past two years, the age bar has continued to rise to the people where the only people who really ever leave me voicemail now are my parents (who are 78 and 85). Everyone else has bought into the "instant engagement" mode of communication.

I predict that email will be the next on the endangered technology list - at least for social interactions. Already I'm seeing a huge trend towards friends leaving me Facebook messages - or texting me - if they want to get in touch. And, a few years ago, those same friends would have sent me an email (or left me a voicemail).

This evolution is ripe for many things - including comedy. So I'll leave you with one of a recent sketch about Facebook (and generational mismatches) from Saturday Night Live!

Leave your message after the beep........

PC pioneers: Sir Clive Sinclair

Over the 30 years or so that I've written about technology (and God, does that make me sound old), I've met, heard from and talked with a lot of visionaries and pioneers - including Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Alan Sugar, Michael Dell , Andy Grove and Carly Fiorina.

But none have had the technological insight, quirky charisma or entrepreneurial flourish as British computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair. I first became aware of Clive Sinclair when I was a boy in Canada - and was intrigued by his radio kits (such as the Sinclair Micromatic) in the late 1960s. I did eventually buy a crystal radio kit (and I can't honestly say that it was one of his, but I can say that his name stuck with me) - and it fueled an interest in technology and gadgets that have stayed with me throughout my entire life.

Even then, it was clear that Sir Clive was pretty unique:

• He had a flair for marketing
• He liked to release new products quickly
• He liked to sell products by mail order (and, as I found out later, would sometimes use the proceeds from the mail order money to pay for manufacturing of the products that customers had ordered)

Another theme that continued throughout what I've seen of Sir Clive's career - and it was as much in evidence in his early career as his later endeavors - was the willingness to take chances. As a result, his career enjoyed a 'boom and bust' quality - throughout which he has never stopped being inventive. That's why his inventions included:

• One of the first portable CRT televisions (which sadly came at a time when LCD technology was able to make it irrelevant)
• One of the earliest mass-produced electric vehicles (a 'trike' called the Sinclair C5, the launch of which I attended at London's Alexandra Palace in 1985)
• The hugely popular Sinclair Spectrum colour computer (a must-have for any self-respecting British computer user throughout much of the mid-1980s)
• The pioneering, but much-troubled Sinclair QL (which included subscription to a 'user's club' newsletter I edited for Sir Clive in the 1980s)
• A lightweight folding bicycle (which remains a passion of Sir Clive's even today)
• A pioneering, lightweight laptop computer called the Z88

So even though his most commercially successful enterprise - his computer business - was sold off in the late 1980s amidst financial troubles to British electronics entrepreneur Alan Sugar (whom is also a marketing genius of a different sort), Sir Clive's passion for inventing has never waned. And I have to admire that.

In my interviews with him, he was always quiet, thoughtful and yet full of enthusiasm. He was also largely without the brashness and self-promotion that I've sometimes seen from his American counterparts. It could be argued, for example, that Michael Dell probably learned a lot from Sir Clive's experience in building and selling computers via mail-order (which was the original business model for Dell - although admittedly it probably owed as much to the Sears Catalog model as to Sir Clive).

Anyway, in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Sinclair C5 electric vehicle (which was launched on January 10, 1985 - so I've only got a couple of months before we're out of the 25th anniversary year), I'm going to make this the first of several posts about one of the more intriguing people I've ever interviewed - and I'll dig out some of my old interviews and notes to make the next post a little more lively. Consider this the scene-setter. And I'll be inviting friends with their own experiences of Sir Clive to post their thoughts about him.

Inventors and Entrepreneurs - Part 1

The technology world has long been filled inventors - and, every once in a while, one of those inventors happens to live in the same body as an entrepreneur. Most inventors I have met, however, are wonderful, creative people who love to solve hard problems and want to create things that will make a difference in people's lives - yet often are less concerned with how such a thing will make money (or, if they are, don't have a strong idea of how to bring that about).

The other great thing I've seen with inventors is that they keep on inventing. Even if they invent One Big Thing that actually does take the world by storm, they keep going. Take Dan Bricklin, for example, the co-creator of VisiCalc - the world's first spreadsheet. He wrote VisiCalc for the Apple II - and has an excellent series of articles on how he created Visicalc, why he didn't patent it - and on all the fascinating people he met over the years - on his Web site.

But when I met him in the mid-1990s, he was busy touting the products produced by his then-latest company Trellix Corporation. And he was as eager to talk to me (then a freelance journalist for the Financial Times, the Times of London and Canada's Financial Post) as any other young entrepreneur. I found him modest, down-to-earth and engaging. He also seemed to be free of any of the regrets that you might expect from being the co-inventor of something that other people made a LOT of money from, but from which he didn't particularly profit greatly.

Dan told me that when he turned 40, he didn't have to worry about whether he had made a difference in the world. He knew that he already had. And I thought about what a simple and clear view of the world he enjoyed - knowing that he had made a difference in people's lives and that the thing he helped create was changing the lives of millions was enough. He didn't need billions - nor did he need accolades. He was comfortable in his own skin.

A few years later, I met another man whose invention changed the world - Martin Cooper, inventor of the cellphone. At 44 years old, when working at Motorola in 1973, Cooper led a small team that invented the first cellphone - and made the first "public" cellphone call in New York City - a story he has recounted in many places and which he gives a great summary for on his company's Web site. And, like Dan Bricklin, Cooper was not a shameless promoter or marketer. He was, at heart, an inventor who believed in the power of what he was doing.

I have a great sympathy for inventors. My own grandfather - John Sylvester (or Jack) Wheelwright - was an inventor and airship pioneer, whose life was captured in the book "A Man of Invention". I think his life inspired me to spend much of mine following the inventors and innovators of the last 30 years.

Sir George Martin, The Beatles and Innovation

Throughout a long career, I've been lucky enough to see and hear all kinds of fascinating people in-person - and many of them have been ahead of their time.



CC BY-SA 3.0 by Adamsharp (Own work)
[CC BY-SA 3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

One of the most engaging and enthralling people I ever had the chance to hear was the now-late Sir George Martin, the famous music producer of The Beatles. I encountered him at a conference organized by Cisco - the computer network equipment maker - in Vancouver in April of 2005.
To start with, he was a real contrast to Cisco CEO John Chambers - who had kicked the conference off with a keynote speech during which he roved through the crowd with a wireless microphone and aimed to whip his techie audience into an evangelism fervor about Cisco, its vision and its products. And, make no mistake, he was good. I'd had the opportunity to interview him a couple of times - and Chambers has the charm and charisma of a southern Baptist preacher at his most eloquent.

So when Chambers was followed by a quiet, understated, 79-year-old Englishman, it was like walking into a chamber music concert after attending a classic rock music festival. And the irony, of course, is that I can of no-one who has produced more classic rock than Sir George Martin - the producer behind albums such as Rubber Soul, Help!, Abbey Road and, of course, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The first thing that became clear to me is what a wonderful raconteur Sir George was. Every story was delivered with wit, a sense of insight - and usually a good punch line. The theme was the talk was all about how he and The Beatles worked to innovate music forms in creating the Sgt. Pepper album - with a description of how every song was made to meet the unique vision that Lennon and McCartney envisioned for it.

He talked about how, for example, the classical musicians assembled to record parts of "A Day in the Life" were initially supposed to be instructed by John Lennon to "play anything they liked" as long as they ended up at a particular note in the crescendo that precedes the final - now classic - piano chord ending the song.

Sir George said he explained to John that classical musicals are trained to play anything except "what they liked" and would need clearer direction. So, instead, he instructed them each to run up a scale starting at one specific note and ending on another - but, if they were playing the same note as the person sitting next to them, it was the wrong note.

Dozens of other great stories abounded, but the main thing I took away from it was that innovation often comes best from keeping one foot in the real world, while being willing to let the other take a step into creative, uncharted waters that can carry you to a new and wonderful place.

Thanks for the Long and Winding Road, Sir George! May you rest in peace.

Updated on March 9, 2016.

The Jetsons

When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was Hanna Barbara's cartoon sitcom about family life in the future - complete with flying cars, a robot maid, a conveyor belt that helps you get dressed in the morning - and 'picture phones' that let you see people that you're talking to on the 'phone.

As a teenager, my fascination with gadgets drew me to the James Bond movies, Star Trek and then Star Wars.

I wanted to live in that future and I wanted to use those gadgets. So a decade or so later, when I was a young journalist looking for a job, I naturally gravitated to one where I could test and play with the latest Jetson-like technologies. And play with them I did. I tested and wrote about early laptop computers, mobile phones, email, online news, online banking - as well as really basic robots and electric cars - and did all of that back in the 1980s.

At the time, I felt that I was getting a peek into the future - a glimpse of what everyone's lives might be like only a few years hence. I felt that I was living "ten minutes into the future". The biggest surprise to me in all of this, however, was not the gadgets. It was the people who dreamed them up.

And that's - as much as anything else - what this blog is about. It's about the many fascinating characters I've met over the years who came up with the ideas, technologies, gadgets and innovations that have changed our lives. Some of those people are well-known. Many are not.

I wonder how many people have heard of Martin Cooper, inventor of the cellphone? Or Seymour Rubenstein - the man behind the first popular word-processor (WordStar) - or Dan Bricklin, who pioneered the spreadsheet with VisiCalc?

Over the years, I've had the opportunity to meet and talk to many of these fascinating people. In this blog, I'll give you my take on some of the insights they've given me - about the future, about technology - and about what makes a great entrepreneur or inventor (they're rarely the same thing).

And I'd like to invite you to comment with any stories and insights you have about great inventors, innovators or entrepreneurs that you've had the chance to meet or work with.

My first story - which you'll have to wait until the next post to read - is about Sir George Martin, producer of The Beatles staggering volume of work (and still very much a keeper of the flame). Some years ago, I had the chance to hear him speak about invention and innovation in the context of the classic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. It was - and still is - an inspiring tale..