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There has been a future conference (Übermorgenkongress) on October 19/20 in Oldenburg. The issue was living in 2020: food, body, luxury, identity in 2020.
I have had the opportunity to go a bit beyond my focus there as a technology analyst and care for my more speculative side as futurist. Normally I resist the temptation to talk about time horizons like this one, when there is no really deep research before, but in this case it was more like a nice “thought experiment”. See for yourself – sorry, preso is only available in German up to now.
This presentation is “post hoc”, the slides have not been shown at the event, since the event format was delibertely “no powerpoint please”. This is to avoid some disadvantages of powerpoint presentations, but I created this one to share my thoughts with a broader audience.
Human Enhancement Technology – Logical Evolution or Pandora’s Box?
The realm of technologizing the human being is a persistant issue in foresight, let alone science fiction. I guess that I am in a minority position in the Read the rest of this entry »
One year ago I blogged that post: iPhone 2010: Bet on mixed reality apps as a standard - and I felt the risk to fail with my prediction. Today I have found some news concerning that speculations:
Augmented reality startups want iPhone to open up
More than a dozen augmented reality companies have asked Apple to open up the iPhone 3GS’ live video feature for their apps. (mobile-ent.biz)
So wait and see. And iPhone will not stay alone – “Mobile Augmented Reality” could be one of the most exciting trends and disruptive innovations in the next years. Google that phrase and see Nokia on top of the listing … And there is that Layar video from June 2009 (“Browse the world!”).
The World-as-a-Store – uPOS, the “Ubiquitous Point of Sale”
New buzzwords for 2010 might be: MARcommerce. ARcommerce, the long tail of “reality shopping” … Scenario as shown in the clip: See something, get info, get price, (call the owner with the next click if you want), buy it. Hmm, actually a wellknown usage scenario to the futurist – but now it is knocking on your door, no longer a “vision”.
Augmented reality startups want iPhone to open up | Mobile Content | News by Mobile Entertainmenthttp://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/33644/Augmented-reality-startups-want-iPhone-to-open-up
Claudia Langer, Utopia conference (source: konsumguerilla.net)
To be green or not to be
First part of my coverage of the Utopia conference was about necessity and possibility of the coming transformation. This global transformation is politically, economically and technologically. How we shape things, connect material flows, structure systems, control communication, this is all about technology and design. Prof. Braungart reminded us about the “next industrial revolution”, he and William McDonough really did this for quite a while (The Atlantic 1998) and successfully.
Efficiency potentials and radical new mobility concepts
As I said before there is no consensus about goals and means. One good example is the seemingly polarity of Braungart’s paradigmatic radicality on he one hand and the optimization strategy of Dr. Lovins (Rocky Mountain Institute) on the other. Both approaches will coexist even when a holistic approach and some disruptive innovation is always more impressive than the “optimization of the old” (see also my post “Dont’ worry …“). But sometimes the sum of many tiny steps could mean revolutionary consequences, too. Take mobility based on fossil fuels. The cars of today are completely stupid in their basic design, Dr. Lovins calculated that only 0.3% of the total energy invested in driving actually moves the physical mass of the driver. Obviously there is huge potential to eco-optimize mobility systems. So maybe car driving will not be illegal in 2018, because cars have very different features then, e.g. are made of very light materials.
An other way to “save the car” was demonstrated by Rolf Schumann of Better Place, a company which could mean a new way to realize personal mobility. Think about sustainable mobility and using a smart infrastructure to cope with the problem of batteries. Better place is acting like an operator selling kilometers not cars, like a mobile carrier is selling minutes to you (Better Place how-it-works).
These are the times for visionary leadership
I want to end with another lesson. As a researcher and speaker I am frequently stressing the potential of the social web, participation, collaboration and “collective intelligence”. This “social thing” always has to be balanced with the respect of individual genius and leadership. I suppose Claudia Langer as the initiating founder of Utopia shows the decisive role of personality.
Mobile social semantic web evolving - it is so 3.0!
Today I want to start a series around the emerging issue “web 3.0″, the controversial buzzword with its dazzling meaning. Like with the forerunner “web 2.0″ sober clarifications will help us discerning hype from reality. Today we start with three seemingly unjoined signals from the domains of consumer electronics fairs, web debate and killer startups .-)
Things are networked and start to speak - Nabaztag rabbit
SIGNAL 1: IFA fair opens up to household appliances – maybe they are preparing for the internet of things
Today the IFA fair is starting in Berlin. The first time the worlds largest consumer electronics fair will be sharing the spotlight with household appliances like washers and dryers. Two facts from the market trends department:
- Trend: From “passive cocooning” to “active cocooning”, e.g. having guests and cooking at home. Funny symptom: A lot of shows around flat, garden, house and … the kitchen. You will hardly find a minute in German tv these days, when there is no cooking show running on one channel or the other.) As a consequence of this “active cocooning / social cocooning” trend there is a growth market for household appliances.
- Growth market household appliances: Market research firm Freedonia Group forecasts an increase by 3.1 percent each year through 2011 (redOrbit)
But there should be an other good reason for IFA fair to open up to the wider spectrum of devices. In the next years we will see a jump in the ict evolution. Maybe it will be more radical than the innovations brought by web 2.0 with the blogosophere, youtube, social networking, Google maps etc. that changed lives and business. Read the rest of this entry »
Shopping with your twitter swarm at your side – the mobile social shopping in the simplest form
http://twitter.com/Gernot/statuses/894599324
WEAK SIGNAL: Early adopters go shopping supported with micro blogging. The wisdom of the crowd works as the shopping adviser.
There is a lot of tweets out there, so I only sporadically look at my twitter stream. Today I accidentally read a short tweet, that made me curios. Just one word, a question “Buy?” (German: Kaufen?) and a short link to twitpic, a convenient picture uploading service in the twitter eco-system. Of course I followed the link and now have a look at the screenshot above. The buyer sent his question into the twitterverse and a micro conversation resulted in the encouragement of the transaction.
RELEVANCE: Social shopping could happen as a very simple form of mixed reality in the future. Just the smart phone plus the mobile social network of twitter.
Rather questions than a statement: Is that the real social shopping experience? What can you do as a retailer to support this behavioral pattern to your advantage? Should you? What is significiant for me is, that voice would not work, but the textual micro conversations of twitter do work – but only together with twitpic.
One could call this para synchronity, because it is not typical synchronous, neither asynchronous communication. The sender even does not know who will actually answer out of the crowd of his >600 twitter followers (a reason to apply the swarm concept). My gut feeling says: Social ubiquity changes the game.
SIGNAL: Carrotmob is an initiative, which could become a globally spreading use pattern. Like in the collective activity of flash mobs people organize in the real world. But not for fun but for a strategic cause – to reward the local shop with the most environment friendly politics.
CONTEXT/PRECURSOR: Consumers know that their shopping behavior is a weapon. Aware consumers use “shop mobs” to lower the price.
We have heard about shop mobs in 2006:
Tuangou, or team buying, aims to drive unprecedented bargains by combining the reach of the internet with the power of the mob. It is spreading through China like wildfire. Economist
On the socio-technical side there is the behavior pattern of flash mobs since 2003 (Wikipedia), enabled by networked people. Flash mobs have started as a kind of rather dadaistic fun thing. Read the rest of this entry »
