I came across the latest vision of future productivity from Microsoft today and thought I would share it with you, along with a whole series of previous videos from Microsoft taking a look at the same subject area, ranging from 2009-2015. It is interesting to see what has changed and what has stayed the same over those six years in their view of the future.

Education has long played an important role in the success of the United States.  From some of the world’s first public schools to the land grant universities which spurred innovation in agriculture, our development as long been tied to how we educate future generations. So we should be concerned that US students performance on the international PISA tests, which evaluate not just knowledge but cognitive ability, have not been great.

There are three converging forces seriously disrupting ‘business as usual.’ This accelerates the importance and role of lean principles as the key emerging innovative business model for 21st century businesses - Resulting in business as unusual!

From weak signals to strong ideas, we gathered a list of ten trends we expect to unfold in 2015.

You may remember neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis — he built the brain-controlled exoskeleton that allowed a paralyzed man to kick the first ball of the 2014 World Cup. What’s he working on now? Building ways for two minds (rats and monkeys, for now) to send messages brain to brain. Watch to the end for an experiment that, as he says, will go to "the limit of your imagination."

What amazing discovery did economists make in the 20th century about the true source of growth? Why was Joseph Schumpeter’s revolutionary “innovation theory” initially dismissed? And what exactly is the key to future progress for our world?

Brian Solis explores some of the biggest technology trends and possible twists on the horizon for 2015 and 2016.

Wow! I have to start that word, because I'm not sure how else to describe what has just emerged from Microsoft Research in the new Microsoft HoloLens. And as I say in the title, if you watch the video below you'll clearly see that Microsoft has just broke Google Glass - both lenses. It's probably no coincidence that Google closed down Glass as a public project just days before Microsoft's announcement.

Although we’ve been hearing about the cloud for a while now, it’s mostly been for tech geeks and big corporations. Over the next year, however, the cloud will burst into an avalanche of products and services that will be incredibly cheap and easy to use. That will make 2015 the year that some incredibly advanced technologies start making a real impact on the rest of us.

I wrote a couple of months ago about the Amazon Echo, the latest piece of hardware to emerge from the South Lake Union headquarters of one my city's largest employers. A piece of hardware that follows in the wake of the successful Amazon Kindle and the failed Amazon Fire Phone. The Amazon Echo aims to get you to put a computer in the center of your living room and...