What are your customers and prospects doing, saying, and thinking? More importantly, how is this influencing their buying decisions? Increasingly, the answer to that question is hidden in the sea of data that is the World Wide Web. It is buried in Web pages, blogs, forum posts, and plenty of other accessible content. In theory, it’s an enormous opportunity for those who can leverage it. It’s also an enormous potential threat to those who can’t. Fortunately, a new generation of tools, tactics, and strategies is emerging that is making exploitation of this resource meaningful, if not necessarily easy. We’ll examine the threats, opportunities, methods, and implications that managers, consumers, and investors need to understand.

Despite the assertions of some commentators, the pace of innovation has remained strong and even accelerated in recent years. Admittedly, the full commercial revolution many expected to see has been delayed while necessary supporting technologies and business models were assembled. But finally, all the parts of the system are falling into place. As we'll highlight, a broad range of amazing, game-changing innovations is approaching large-scale commercialization. As you'll see, many of the fundamental breakthroughs reported in past issues of Trends are finally reaching the point where they could soon transform our lives.

Throughout human history, translators have been kept busy decoding messages from one language into another. And a hallmark of sophistication has been the ability to speak more than one language. However, emerging technology is about to change all that. A wave of technologies is soon expected to embed reliable and accurate translation into the Internet and the mobile telephone. What will this mean for managers, educators, investors, and students? Find out here.