Here’s a demo of a cool semantic app from Adaptive Blue… it’s called Glue. The app lives on top of the browser as an add-on and intelligently recognizes whatever item you’re browsing on, whether it be a book, movie, song, restaurant, recipe, or wine, and lets you see what your friends thought of it to help you make a decision.

The most interesting part of the demo is at 0:58 where he asks who is involved in vertical/niche social networks for different things such as movies (Flixster) and virtually no one raises their hand. Facebook and Myspace have pretty much grabbed the whole social networking world as far as actual webpages that people visit to interact. Now where the innovation comes in is on top of the browser and on the phone. The only real websites that have a chance these days are dynamic marketplaces (Foodzie, Etsy).

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With all the smoothie bars opening up and the natural supplements and herbs flooding the market, I’m starting to wonder if we’ll even need solid food in the future. They say that modern day man evolved at the point of creating fire, because it allowed us to cook our food, thereby using less energy on digestion and more energy on mental development and awareness. Could this trend continue to the point where we don’t even need food anymore and get all of our nutrition from liquid energy?

I personally love smoothies and protein shakes. They give me almost everything my body needs. I get vitamins, anti-oxidants, and amino acids (whey protein concentrate and/or whey isolate protein), all of which are the key building blocks to growth, energy and vibrant health. Lol, add in a little metamucil and carbs, and I’m good to go.

However, this new way of eating would obviously take away one of life’s greatest pleasures, that of the taste experience. There’s really nothing better than eating a fresh piece of salmon or some creamy italian gelatto… it’s the texture variety mixed with the blend of tastes. Regardless, I have my juicer and I love my smoothies and  whey shakes. I could definitely see my diet moving more and more to liquid energy as the days go buy. Better for evolution? That’s for you to decide.

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LOHAS - Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability

A holistic philosophy on products, services, businesses, organizations, and humanity as a whole that advocates growth and change through systems thinking. I recently found an amazing write up at the LOHAS website about how this philosophy will help the business culture of the future.

Here’s my favorite excerpt:

“For the last 250 years, we have been living in what Peter Senge calls the ‘industrial age bubble’, based on a ‘take, make, waste’ worldview. Behind this way of life has been a set of attitudes and beliefs about economics, wealth, and business. We tend to think of these beliefs as “common sense”, or even as objective natural law. But in fact, they are received knowledge, the inheritance of centuries of cultural, political, and philosophical tradition. Our way of business is based on learned behavior, not natural law.

With this worldview, we’ve created unprecedented wealth, knowledge and communication. And, we’ve created environmental toxicity, cheap throw away products, denatured industrially-produced food, and a culture of low self-esteem and spiritual poverty.”

So how do we change? How do we grow?
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A good buddy of mine recently brought my attention to a cool new company he’s been working with called iKan. He’s helping them develop a scalable business model for their flagship product, a counter top pod that allows you to scan your food items and create grocery lists. It scans your items with a UPC barcode scanner and wirelessly logs them into an online account, from which you can place orders with online grocers or print out a shopping list to take to your local store. Furthermore, it has great voice recognition software that allows you to simply say the name of the item in the event that there’s no barcode. iKan surely has the ability to revolutionize home grocery shopping, and yet, with a well executed user interface, it could offer so much more.

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Here’s a company that’s doing something very special. I watched Ron’s presentation at VLAB (MIT/Stanford Venture Lab) Green Tech for the Consumer Market this past January and got very excited. Then after hearing Trae Vasallo’s glowing presentation at the Silicon Valley West Coast Green conference, I knew they were out to change the world.

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