It’s interesting to see an emerging trend we’ve known about for some time finally making mainstream news. Articles, editorials and blogs are buzzing about the population trends that show it is births, not immigration, accounting for most of the growth in the United States Hispanic population.

The arrival of Hispanics in remote and rural areas far from traditional gateways has been going on for years. What’s new is a pronounced demographic shift unfolding because these young immigrants are having children. Births outnumber deaths, and the population increases. That’s due largely in part because Hispanic moms are younger than the U.S. population as a whole. Their median age is 27.4, compared with 37.9 overall.

What will this mean in the future?

For one thing, the economic impact will be a positive. The U.S. is gearing up to support 79 million Baby Boomers in their old age, the growing and younger population of Hispanics ensures that the next generation as it grows will contribute greatly to the workforce, the tax revenue and the housing market. Other countries simply are not replacing themselves demographically, according to some researchers.

I think of all the opportunities this is already opening up for innovative companies. The only way these corporations are able to stay ahead of the innovation curve is by recognizing the global impact of megatrends and by knowing their consumers on a deeper level. Hispanic women lead the AlphaMom market in many ways and they are an important segment for marketers to understand.

Those who have tapped into the Hispanic mom’s feelings about motherhood, the challenges she faces, how to reach her, the impact of acculturation on her decisions and what motivates her as a consumer will ultimately deliver the innovative products and services that will shape our culture in the U.S. for decades to come.

Nintendo is releasing what might be the first big-budget console game that can pull in that ever elusive segment: mothers. I blogged about the Wii craze last year, pointing to the ALPHA MOM as the key audience Nintendo looked to in creating video games that would spur their children to get off the couch. For an industry that’s often been blamed for helping cause obesity and inactivity, Wii Fit is a chance to turn back the criticism by offering a game that targets health issues in a way that’s fun.

Wii Fit is a health and exercise program that I believe will boost the momentum of the Nintendo Wii, which has sold more than 9 million consoles since it was released in November 2006. The Wii has created a huge shift in the gaming world, inviting millions of casual and nongamers, many of them women, to pick up the motion-sensing Wii remote controller and play games using gestures and waves.

Officially, Nintendo said Wii Fit is designed for an “expanded audience.” But the game has the potential to attract what some marketers have called the chief household officer, ALPHA MOMS, a large but mostly unreached population of potential gamers. Some think that the new Wii game will skew female, much like the “Richard Simmons Sweatin’ to the Oldies. ” videos of the Eighties.

For about $90 players can chart their weight and body mass index over time and work to improve them by engaging in about 40 activities including yoga, aerobic step routines, strength and training exercises, and balance games. The balance board can track the progress of up to eight players, so users can encourage each other toward their respective goals. (Nintendo’s Wii Fit mini-site has video demonstrations of each training mode. For those who are well aware of the Wii Fit and have been patiently awaiting its release, you may have a tough time finding it in stores!)

The increase in new female gamers on the Wii has been noticeable, but Wii Fit can take it a step further by enticing moms to spring for the Wii for themselves, not just for their kids.

“Disruption” has become a popular business term, especially in the innovation realm. My company is working with a lot of corporate clients to help them identify disruptive opportunities and disruptive threats. I also enjoy passing that disruptive potential on to our clients who are startups and lone inventors.

So what is Disruptive Innovation?

Disruptive innovation requires looking beyond technology and new products to understand the barriers that are leaving the often unrecognized or unexpressed needs of nonusers and low-end users unfulfilled. It typically provides new levels of convenience, access, and cost effectiveness to people – often at the expense of some high-end feature. Companies often overlook the needs of many people who would welcome a “worse” product that made some aspect of life better for them.

You’re probably asking, “how can this be? No one would want a product that is worse, would they?” In fact they do! And that’s disruptive.

Kleenex® facial tissue and the Swiffer® mop are great examples of what Clayton Christensen of the Harvard School of Business has called “disruptive innovation:” an innovation that may be initially worse in terms of standard metrics of established products and customers, but which appeals to non-users or low-end users by offering improved convenience, lower cost, or other benefits not previously viewed as the basis for competition.

When the facial tissues were first available in the 1920s, many women used them to remove makeup and cold cream. Marketers at Kimberly-Clark responded, repositioning the product in the early 1930s as “the handkerchiefs you can throw away.” Women used them as a convenient replacement for the handkerchief, even though they weren’t as strong or washable, and that forever changed the handkerchief industry.

The disposable Swiffer mop also offers a “worse” performance relative to the durability and cleaning power of conventional dry and wet mops, but would convert many non-moppers and infrequent moppers into frequent floor cleaners!

The key here is that it’s all about the business model –not the technology itself—that determines whether the opportunity is disruptive or not. A given technology can be launched as a sustaining innovation aimed at mainstream users in a head-to-head battle with the previous incumbents in the market, or it can be launched in a way that draws in non-users and low-end users while motivating the incumbents to largely ignore your efforts since they aren’t feeling pain - until it’s too late.

That’s the kind of disruptive advantage that motivates the long-established giants to flee rather than fight, giving the market entrant a precious foothold from which to grow with further “sustaining” innovation.

The Greenpeace study, titled “Playing Dirty,” reveals that the next-generation game consoles like Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3 Elite and Microsoft Xbox 360 have all tested positive for hazardous chemicals. For example, high levels of bromine were found in the components of all three, with the highest by weight levels in the PS3 and the Wii. But the tests also showed that each of the manufacturers avoided or reduced the use of individual hazardous substances in certain materials within their consoles.

The good news is that greener consoles are possible, according to the report. My feeling is that a typical video game consumer is not likely to care that much about the toxins in landfills, but the companies making them will definitely want to make strides to rid their products of them, for the greater good.

The days of loose coupon clippings may be coming to an end, as the coupons we used to clip and carry are just about to go mobile. McDonald, Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Kimberly-Clark, Clorox and Del Monte and others are all posed to send their customers mobile coupons, either via text messages (with their permission), directing the user to the company’s mobile coupon site or promoting the product through barcode technology where retailers scan the barcodes right from your cell phone as you stand in the checkout line!

This one-to-one marketing opportunity is huge–where messages are customized and localized towards individual’s tastes and behaviors. Today there are more than 230 million mobile phone users in the US; and an estimated three billion coupons will be issued to mobile phone users by 2011, amounting to sales of almost $87 billion.

How do consumers feel about coupons via cell phone? Three-quarters of consumers felt that a coupon would be the most effective incentive to get them to respond to a mobile marketing message and that half would use mobile coupons for a discount at a local store, according to a survey by ABI Research. Similar studies by Jupiter Research show that 30 percent of consumers would like to receive mobile coupons.

A start-up called Cellfire provides advertisers/marketers with the ability to promote special discounts or savings of their goods/services via mobile coupons (opted-in SMS). Some of the advertisers include Domino’s Pizza, Supercuts, EMI Music, LA Times and Hardees’ among others. McDonald recently conducted a regional test of mobile coupons where consumers could receive one of the chain’s new iced coffees for free. Subway is using mobile coupon to drive retail traffic with last-minute special offers. To date, more than 10,000 retail stores nationwide are said to redeem Cellfire mobile coupons.

The Kroger grocery store has entered into a partnership with consumer-packaged food companies like P&G, General Mills and Kimberly-Clark to offer mobile coupons at the end of the second quarter using Cellfire services. The coupons offered will be mobile-exclusive and will be valid for specific store locations.

Other mobile coupon providers include GoMobo, SnapTell and Ugotitfirst. With mobile phones being such personal devices, receiving opt-in savings messages from relevant businesses would be highly appealing.

Best of all in my opinion is that there’s definitely a “Green” advantage to mobile coupons in the potential to save billions of dollars in paper and printing costs!

The current food crisis is inspiring forward-thinking scientists to develop solutions for farmers in developing nations. Here is just one example I read about this morning: an 82-year-old scientist who was once dubbed the father of India’s Green Revolution is inspiring a perpetual revolution.

Forty years ago, Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan helped rescue the world from growing famine and a deepening gloom over the future of food supplies by developing a hybrid wheat seed that allowed Indian farmers to dramatically increase yields. Now he is researching new ways to put farmers on the right road to unending growth.

In the twenty-first century’s “Evergreen Revolution”, as he calls it, he predicts conservation farming and green technology will bring about sustainable change that could allow India to become an even bigger supplier of food to the world.

That would be welcome news for the millions of impoverished people and food-importing nations who are struggling to cope with the surge in basic crop prices over the last year, caused in part by protectionist trade bans by some exporters, including India.

I completely agree with his statement that, “in every crisis is an opportunity and this time it will lead to an evergreen revolution,” and I look forward to reporting more about innovative ideas that will feed millions in this time of need.

“Green is he new black!” That’s a slogan on a T-shirt that stores like Wal-Mart are selling, and I’ve seen quite a few of them around today. Green has indeed become quite a fashion statement that transcends Earth Day.

Earth Day has come a long way since it first launched 39 years ago, and today across the United States, schools, businesses and government agencies are finding new ways to draw attention to caring for our planet. From where I stand, environmental issues are bigger news today than ever before. Environmental sustainability is a mega-trend that is inspiring innovative new products.

What is sustainability? Simply put, it’s how we meet our resource needs (water, food and energy), without compromising our ability to supply for future generations. Sustainability is how we impact the environment, our economy and our society. Innovative companies embrace sustainable “Green” policies with business strategies that are three-fold: Environmental, Economic and Social impact.

If you are truly innovative in your corporate sustainability efforts, you should be embracing new ways to decrease your environmental footprint, improve your financial bottom line and improve your interaction with your employees, your community and your world.

Disposable diapers have become a roughly $5.7 billion business, but cloth diapering is making a comeback. Here is an interesting diaper product that is not only fashionable, but environmentally friendly. They’re called gDiapers, and consist of a washable, cotton outer pant and a plastic free flushable refill. They are made of breathable material just like sports clothing, and that is what keeps the skin from getting diaper rash.

The makers encourage parents to toss flushable refills because they’re plastic-free, or garden compost the wet ones. They’ll break down in 50-150 days. Check out gDiapers here!.

Today’s new cloth diapers are different from the ones that I struggled with years ago. While approximately half of cloth users still rely on fold-and-pin diapers provided by laundry services, new designs with cutesy names like Fuzzi Bunz, bumGenius, Kissaluvs and Happy Heinys have become enormously popular with parents who want to do the right thing for the environment.

Velcro, buttons and snaps have replaced pins, and the diapers are fitted with elastic around the openings to hold tight around flailing legs. In place of old-fashioned rubber panties, the new cloths use water-resistant covers made of merino wool, nylon or polyurethane laminate.

It will be interesting to see how the disposable diaper industry responds to these next generation diapers!

Ever put your car keys or mobile phone somewhere and then forget where you put them? Japanese scientists at the University of Tokyo have invented a pair of intelligent glasses that remembers where people last saw their keys, handbag, iPod or mobile phone.

The glasses come with a built in camera that can even identify unfamiliar plants or faces. It is an invention that could help not only those of us who experience common forgetfulness, but also those suffering from serious memory problems caused by dementia.

The Smart Goggles contain a compact video camera which films everything the wearer looks at - and a viewfinder which fits snugly in front of the right lens. The glasses are connected to a small, but smart computer processor worn on the back which can learn to recognize shapes extremely quickly.

To use the glasses, you simply walk around your house or workplace for an hour or so, looking at the objects that you may later want to find in a hurry.

Each time the camera focuses on a object - such as a set of keys, a mobile phone or a purse - you say the name aloud. The name is then recorded and stored into the memory.

Once the names have been programmed in, the glasses will try to find the right name for what you need. All you have to do is shout out what it is you are looking for.

Get this: The high speed, image recognition technology could also help develop robots - like the Terminator androids from the science fiction series - that have human-like abilities. Not only that, but the glasses could also be used as an educational tool by allowing wearers to walk through gardens, stare and unfamiliar plants and find out their names instantly.

In looking at this photo you can see that the prototype version is still too bulky and obtrusive to use in public, but I’m sure that given time, technologists could eventually shrink the camera and viewfinder down to a more sensible, and fashionable, size within a few years!