David Zach, futurist

Pop Up Businesses have Popped Up before

I was looking at my website traffic and someone in Italy was searching on the term pop up business and thereby found my site. 

So, I clicked on that person's search and found 771 hits (most not connected to our idea, of course) but found this one from Lubicom Marketing in 2006 that had me smiling. The author is comparing today's trends with some rather old notions of PUBs. Pushcarts indeed. 

My father once told me that there are very few new ideas out there, just recombinations of existing ideas along with rediscovery of old ones that we might have forgotten. 

Here's a blog called Boomer Matters exploring some of the questions the PUB idea presents: 

Here's one also from 2006 from Springwise (a trend spotting website) with the clever term: Vanchising.

These sorts of things convince me that good ideas are seldom unique to one individual or another. They "pop-up" everywhere. The curious challenge is to try to discern what does it take for those great ideas to actually get manifested? What sorts of technology breakthroughs cause someone to finally recognize that the roadblock that might have held them back is now gone or can now be bypassed? 

Drew Carey on ReasonTV: Mexicans vs. Machines

Yeah, this is good. Politicians cheaply rail against the drift of jobs to India and China, but not so much to the machines no matter where they are. The question is not so much how do we save our old jobs, but how do we push innovation towards helping to create jobs that draw out of people some sense of intelligence and dignity?

Reason TV has host Drew Carey explain here where the jobs are really going.

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For some reason that is beyond my limited sense of coding, the above link does show up as a video box. Here's the direct link to that page on Reason TV.

A question to ask is not what can be automated, but rather what should never be automated? When it is said that work is good for the soul, I would suspect that's only true if that notion is applied to work by people who actually believe in the existence of the soul. I've seen a lot of work that seems to crush the soul — and I'm not talking about tough, manual labor, but rather the softer, cubicle farm-type jobs where people are measured in every way possible, from how many seconds did the task take to how many seconds were you gone to the restroom? Jobs were they are just a cog, not asked to think, but only required to do what they are told.

A few weeks ago I spoke at the AEO Annual Summit in Anaheim. This is put on by the Association for Enterprise Opportunity. (Locally, we've got the Wisconsin Women's Business Initiative Corporation.) Basically, they're an umbrella organization for efforts to help poor and disadvantaged start and sustain their own businesses. Let me repeat that: START AND SUSTAIN THEIR OWN BUSINESSES. A fairly liberal group with very conservative goals. Helping people take their ideas, run them through the mill of objection so that they can build those dreams and can live out their own dreams, not have them either crushed or minimally replaced by television. 

The best source of jobs in the future is not the government nor is it large corporations. The best source of jobs is the imagination. If we can prevent education and modern culture from stomping on imagination, there's unlimited jobs right here at home or anywhere you find yourself.

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. Eden Phillpotts