TheFuturesAgency

it’s more important to know when to detect chaos than predict things....

stoweboyd — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:03:09 +0100

it’s more important to know when to detect chaos than predict things. ‘Chaospotting’ is a valuable skill. It’s the next Trendspotting.
— Ale Lariu (@alelariu) February 22, 2012

Broadband Futures and the Future of ICT: Futurist and Keynote...

gabrieleruttloff — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:01:00 +0100

Broadband Futures and the Future of ICT: Futurist and Keynote Speaker Gerd Leonhard (by gleonhard)

Khoi Vinh on The Future Of News

stoweboyd — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:53:54 +0100

5 Minutes on The Verge: Khoi Vinh

Q: How should media publishers deal with the fact that readers are increasingly getting news, links, and more from a range of sources filtered through social networks? Is anyone doing it particularly well?

Vinh: I think news organizations have to get really, really serious about creating a social software product that leverages their product in a value-add way. This is basically what a few dozen startups are doing, and somebody is going to figure this out; if I were the owner of a news organization, I would put $10 million towards funding a few of my own startups to get a better shot at owning the winning solution. Because none of the existing ‘old media’ news brands are going to do it. Anyway, within a decade, we’ll have a social news powerhouse brand that can sit comfortably next to the New York Times, Economist, CNN, etc. That seems inevitable to me.

The Future Of News via Time for Chicago Ideas Week Ayman...

stoweboyd — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:36:17 +0100

The Future Of News via Time for Chicago Ideas Week

Ayman Mohyeldin, Joe McGinniss, James Warren, Evan Ratliff, Kara Swisher, Richard Stengel

Most impressed with Swisher’s recounting of being the first (only, at the time) at the Wall Street Journal, first up in the video. ‘People wanted the news, but they didn’t like the newspaper.’

A London billboard has a camera that can determine the sex of...

stoweboyd — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:00:36 +0100

A London billboard has a camera that can determine the sex of those looking at it, and, in this case, only shows a 40-second video to females. Males are shown a link to the advertiser’s website.

(via Face-Recognizing Billboard Only Displays Ad To Women | TechCrunch)

So, pretty soon we’ll be targeted more exactly, like a Kangol hat ad for me: because I walk by wearing a Kangol, or because their algorithm targets bald guys, or because they know it’s me, and that I own 5 Kangols.

Augmented reality is not just for people: machines — like this billboard — will share augmented reality with us.

Anthonia Akitunde via Fast Company Nike Unveils Its Big New...

stoweboyd — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:54:00 +0100

Anthonia Akitunde via Fast Company

Nike Unveils Its Big New Paradigm: Shoes Knit Like Socks

The new Flyknit shoe was the product of four years of R&D, which yielded new machines for a fabrication technique that never existed before.

Although it seems like just another sneaker, Flyknit is a paradigm shift, and ‘knit’ instead of ‘sewn-together’ shoes will become the new normal. Including knit leather.

greenfuturist: Great resource by JWT: 2012 trends and beyond...

greenfuturist — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:00:51 +0100

greenfuturist:

Great resource by JWT: 2012 trends and beyond (slideshow) - many of these are actually ‘green’ issues. Worth looking at.

Related articles

Check out this really nice slideshow by JWT Intelligence, on… (greenfuturist.com)

JWT 10 Trends for 2012 Executive Summary (thefuturesagency.com)

100 things to watch in 2012 (via JWT Intelligence) (mediafuturist.com)

greenfuturist: motherjones: We’re still liking this meme for… (thefuturesagency.com)

Stowe Boyd: how about 'Slow Capitalism'

mediafuturist — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:32:20 +0100

Stowe Boyd: how about 'Slow Capitalism':

Nice piece by TFA Curator Stowe Boyd yesterday. I (Gerd) love the term ‘slow capitalism’ and Stowe hits the nail on the head with his comments on not looking to further enrich the 1% with a new form of the same thing. I still think that Al Gore’s sustainable capitalism manifesto makes some very good points, as well; they just may be slightly more realistic:)

underpaidgenius:

Yesterday, I read Al Gore’s Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism (pdf), and made a few comments. After reflecting a day, I have a more sweeping response: Gore’s focus — and that of his co-author, David Blood — is far too focused on the corporate boardroom, the compensation of CEOs, and the way… ‘Sustainable Capitalism’ is a term dreamed up by enlightened and benign members of the 1%: an admonition by the members of the elite to the elite, saying in effect that they should to play more fairly. But it’s not broadly based enough for the 99%, who demand a system rooted in justice, not just a suggestion that the overloads agree to crush us a bit less. What we need is ‘slow capitalism’. A system that rewards all for their work and investments, but which is founded on the full accounting of costs in the world. Businesses cannot be allowed to make a huge profit by moving operations to an unregulated corner of the world where there are no environmental regulations, and spewing poisons into the air and ocean. Investors cannot be allowed to make money on pointless financial transactions that add no value, but simply bleed money from a broken system. And the time horizon of our considerations must be reckoned in decades, not in quarters or microseconds.

Yale Alumni Magazine: A Fungus That Eats Polyurethane (Nov/Dec 2011)

stoweboyd — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:15:10 +0100

Yale Alumni Magazine: A Fungus That Eats Polyurethane (Nov/Dec 2011):

A group of Yale students discovered a fungus in the jungles of Equador — Pestalotiopsis microspora — that can eat polyurethane: plastic. And apparently it can eat plastic even in the oxygen-free setting at the bottom of a landfill. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn the plastic into CO2, though.

“Occupy” Named 2011 Word of the Year ow.ly/9akoH via @VocabularyCom #OWS —...

stoweboyd — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:24:00 +0100

“Occupy” Named 2011 Word of the Year ow.ly/9akoH via @VocabularyCom #OWS
— #OCCUPYWALLSTREET (@OccupyWallStNYC) February 20, 2012

The Human-Environment Dialog in Award-winning Children’s Picture Books - Williams et al via Wiley Online Library

stoweboyd — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:58:00 +0100

The Human-Environment Dialog in Award-winning Children’s Picture Books - Williams et al via Wiley Online Library:

A recent study by J. Allen Williams and colleagues found that the depiction of the ‘built environment’ — cities, homes, buildings — has increased in Caldecott award winning books since the ’60s, when ‘natural’ settings were about half of all images. Today, the depictions of the built environment occur twice as frequently as the natural:

via Wiley

If we ask what today’s children are learning about the environment from contemporary picture books, perhaps the most important answer is that for the most part they are reading stories set in built environments. They are exposed to relatively few images of the natural environment and even fewer images of humans interacting with nature. They also are seeing less human interaction with animals than in the past. Scenes of interaction with wild animals have never been common, but have become even less so in recent years. Perhaps because interaction with domestic animals is relatively rare in the more recent books, when it is shown, it is more likely to play an important role in a story.

We cannot say that increasing isolation from the natural world influenced the content changes we have found in children’s picture books, but the increase in built environments and the decline in natural environments and wild animals are certainly consistent with it.

As we become increasingly urbanized, this will increase. Children’s dreams lie atop the arc of the future.

'Living' Buildings

stoweboyd — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:25:02 +0100

Rachel Armstrong is a TED Senior Fellow, and she imagines a world where buildings — and other built objects — might be based on materials that act something like living things. For example, buildings could be coated with materials that are modeled on living things, like oil and alkali mixed together forming ‘protocells’:

Jessica Griggs via NewScientist

Q: How could you put these protocells to use?

Armstrong: If buildings were covered in a layer of them, they would act as a sort of smart paint, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When the building got wet the mineral salt would dissolve, react with the carbon dioxide in the rain and produce a deposit of mineral carbonate which would strengthen the bricks. So, carbon dioxide would be removed from the atmosphere and over time and the building would become more robust.

Growing like a coral reef, and pulling CO2 from the air.

The Opportunities and Friction of Ultra-Fast Broadband

gabrieleruttloff — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:49:19 +0100

Interview with Gerd Leonhard on Radio New Zealand’s morning show Nine to Noon, Feb 21st, 2012 (link).

Data is the new oil - and 'publicy' is the new default

gabrieleruttloff — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:58:44 +0100

Guest article on The Orange Rag by Gerd Leonhard, one of the keynote speakers at next month’s LawTech Futures event in London:
“When observing the explosive growth of the mobile Internet, the ubiquitous availability of ever more powerful digital devices as well as the global boom in social networking, it becomes patently clear that there is a common economic force behind these trends, and that force is data.
In this hyper-networked society, everyone seems to want to know what we think, all the time, what we like, where we are and who we are connected to. Data (and metadata, i.e. data about data) is quickly becoming a primary force in our digital society, and since successful advertising is forever based on having good data on who is on the other end, the consumer is becoming more powerful than ever before – if he/she opts out of providing data it’s game-over. Never before did consumers wield this much power over marketers; never before could we trade our data for free goods and services in this way (eg Gmail, Skype, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook). The quest for data has made us powerful but it has made us dependent on its benefits as well. The Faustian bargain is in full swing.
Some pundits even argue that the only reason advertising in its…read on.”

The Ethics of Crowdsourcing (by rossdaht2)

gabrieleruttloff — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:07:56 +0100

The Ethics of Crowdsourcing (by rossdaht2)

Peak Telecom?

stoweboyd — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:11:47 +0100

Martin Geddes says we’re at ‘Peak Telecom’ — the maximum point of expansion of telecom companies, just before the Internet gobbles them up and changes the economics drastically, commoditizing them into pipe:

Peak Telecoms by Martin Geddes

We’re at “Peak Telecoms”

The telco voice and messaging business is on the verge of going into meltdown. As this is where the margins come from, the problem is hard to exaggerate. The drip-drip of links about declining voice and messaging volume and revenue is becoming a small stream. Even mobile telephony is losing ground in competition to asynchronous messaging. Twitter and Facebook message volumes are exploding, and SMS is beginning to sink. Termination and roaming are endangered species, hunted by packs of voracious regulators. There is no way back.

[…]

In their place, a raft of “internet-time” start-ups are taking their place, filling in the missing features that decades of neglect of the voice and messaging business have left behind. (You mean I still can’t record and search my calls in 2012? Wow!) There’s a few years of catch-up that will let smart operators wring extra services revenue our of feature-starved users.

[…]

Whether it is voice, messaging or video, the chain of money from application to transmission to infrastructure is breaking down.

Martin paints a grim picture for the telcos, which if you hold up to the mirror, looks pretty good for the users. His advice for telcos is dead on, go read it.

The Future of Broadband: Telemedia, Futurist Gerd Leonhard

gabrieleruttloff — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:11:18 +0100

View more presentations from Gerd Leonhard. Keynote at the “The Future with High Speed Broadband” conference in Auckland, New Zealand, February 20th, 2012

Test tube hamburgers to be served this year - Nick Collins via Telegraph

stoweboyd — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:24:05 +0100

Test tube hamburgers to be served this year - Nick Collins via Telegraph:

The world’s first test tube hamburger will be served up this October after scientists perfected the art of growing beef in the lab.

My response to this news is halfway between ‘Ewww’ and ‘Cool’.

Stowe Boyd: The Decade Of Publicy (must read)

futuresagencyblog — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:02:01 +0100

Stowe Boyd: The Decade Of Publicy (must read):

I am aware that my recent inquiries into privacy and ‘publicy’ are a bit anthropological at their core, rather than technological or software-design based. Claude Lévi-Strauss sets the stage for this inquiry, perhaps, when he wrote “The anthropology of the future is the study of ourselves.”

The…

Al Gore Pushes 'Sustainable Capitalism'

stoweboyd — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:17:00 +0100

Al Gore has taken on the root cause of most of our modern societal ills: unsustainable business practices. He and David Blood, a partner with Gore in Generation Investment Management, have written a Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism:

Before the crisis and since, we and others have called for a more responsible form of capitalism, what we call sustainable capitalism: a framework that seeks to maximize long- term economic value by reforming markets to address real needs while integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics throughout the decision-making process.

Such sustainable capitalism applies to the entire investment value chain—from entrepreneurial ventures to large public companies, seed-capital providers to institutional investors, employees to CEOs, activists to policy makers. It transcends borders, industries, asset classes and stakeholders.

And how would this work? And will capitalists willingly change their ways? Generation has also written a more in depth white paper on Sustainable Capitalism that makes a clear argument: the rejection of short-term thinking is necessary to increase long-term value creation. To allow capitalists to make a transition to a long-term timeframe in their thinking, we have to change the way the game is played. Specifically they recommend five key actions:

Identify and incorporate risks from stranded assets — Assets that would change dramatically in value under new approaches to long-term scenarios of change might be ‘stranded’, and as a result give businesses an incentive to maintain the status quo, and avoid transition to more sustainable models of operation.
Mandate integrated reporting — Integrated reporting of financial data along with environmental, social and governance factors will allow investors to make more informed judgments about investment options.
End the default practice of issuing quarterly earnings guidance — Quarterly earnings guidance can incent executives to manage for the short term.
Align compensation structures with long-term sustainable performance — Financial rewards should be tied to long-term value creation, using multiyear milestones for performance evaluation.
Encourage long-term investing with loyalty-driven securities — Short-termism makes for a more volatile and unstable market, driving away long-term investment; loyalty-driven securities provide additional financial rewards for holding securities for a longer time, which leads to more stable markets.

There is no doubt that these ideas are sweeping and revolutionary. We will have to see what the response is from the international financial community… if they can take their eyes off the newest flare-up in the Euro debt crisis, China’s slowing growth, or the spike in US gas prices. It might take a generation for this change to happen.