The Impending Boom

The Impending Boom I thought I would share the gist of an article that I read yesterday in the Opinion Section of the Wall Street Journal. “The Coming Tech-led Boom” was an incredibly stimulating prognostication that the United States is on the cusp of three technological breakthroughs that will transform our economy and fuel hyper economic growth: Big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution. The first out-of-the-wonder-box idea is that data is virtually free, and that the “cloud” will enable a network of thousands of data centers, producing data-crunching at a level that will spawn previously unimaginable services and businesses. The second emerging paradigm is “smart manufacturing,” the revolution of design and build from the molecular level to create new materials with properties not possible in nature and enabling start-to-finish manufacturing from a desktop. The third is the connectivity of billions of people through cloud-based wireless technology. The United States is at the epicenter of all three technologies, and these will engender sweeping changes in business and society. I am attending the Real Estate Roundtable meeting today in D.C., and it provides a backdrop for thinking about how the real estate industry will capitalize on the impending boom. Unfortunately, our industry is rarely an early adapter of change; in fact, we are in many ways still in the Jurassic era on the technology front. Sad but true.