Bob Ankosko

When I stumbled upon Poet Audio’s Pandoretta, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at. I knew it was a speaker and not some sort of fancy air-filtration system, but what kind of speaker? Was it a new take on Yamaha’s Digital Sound Projector with an array of tiny drivers behind all those holes? It didn’t occur to me that the stainless steel “grille” might be an elaborate design element. Yet that’s exactly what it is.

Stop for a moment and think back to home entertainment 10 years ago. You were starting to build a library of Blu-ray titles, thankful that HD had finally made its way to disc, but 4K at home was a technology of the future and streaming was still a curiosity. Netflix was a hugely successful DVD mail-order company with a billion discs delivered but could see the writing on the wall when it started offering movies on demand over the internet in February 2007. Today, streaming is commonplace and home audio and video have reached unprecedented levels of quality, raising the question of what comes next? Looking ahead to the future, we reached out to Dr. Shawn DuBravac, founder of the Washington, DC-based consultancy Astra Insights, former chief economist for the Consumer Technology Association, and author of the New York Times Best Seller (Regnery, 2015). A well-regarded futurist and trendcaster, DuBravac writes frequently about technology with a focus on deciphering disruptive shifts.