T3 bionics article

Want to know where humans are headed in the 21st century? Click on each of the images in turn to find out…

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Social is easy

 

The social bandwagon (image from http://www.kyanmedia.net)

Social networking, social tagging, social newsgathering. The social concept, that is, where we share everything, is spreading like wildfire. Even the BBC has a social media editor now. These people seem to agree with me.

It’s similar to the way the pared-down easyJet approach to business spread into other verticals, such as hotels and cars. Actually it’s so sucessful it’s even threatening on making into the most wasteful place of all: government. The UK’s Conservative party have even called for easy-style local government. 

What I’m wondering now is: how far will ‘social’ go? What other verticals can take advantage of it, and how? How can businesses harness the power of ‘social’?

(And what’s the next useful business/media/tech concept du jour?)

Drowning in TMI

 

Drowning in TMI

Hundreds of millions of blogs, thousands of Twits, online video in the UK up 47% (source: comScore), US Facebook use up 699% and Twitter 3,712% in the last year (sources: comScore and Nielsen) – and all those Youtube videos… it’s got people worrying there’s just TMI (toooo much information) in the world. If we were still printing it and putting it in outboxes, inboxes, pending trays and big grey metal filing cabinets, there would be.

But there’s been a shift. The first, of course, is to digital. But then some bright spark worked out that in today and tomorrow’s oceans of information, filing won’t cut it anymore. 

That’s because there’s an essential problem with filing. Each thing can only go in one file. So that restaurant receipt from Budapest’s Cafe Kor can either go in (1) expenses, or (2) Budapest, or (3) great restaurants. It can’t go in all three. 

That’s a shame because filing things gives them meaning. It means instead of having a pile of stuff on the floor (even if that’s a digital floor) you have organised piles. You know where to go to get something and filing gives something context and meaning. It means we can make sense of stuff. Just think of genus, species etc that biologists and botanists use.

But in a world where there’s zillions of new pieces of information being created every day, filing doesn’t work anymore. It’s too restrictive, too clunky, takes too much time to think about. 

But then along came tagging and the problem of TMI was solved.

Tagging means that your pile of information on the floor can magically rearrange itself as soon as you call out the tag. Call ‘restaurants’ and everything you’ve marked restaurants gathers in a group to say hello. Call ‘Budapest’ and ditto. Which means TMI data becomes JIT (just-in-time) information. Which makes for knowledge when put into our lovely human hands.

With the exponential increase in data being produced and our need to manage it even more keen than ever, this is not only essential – but becoming increasingly sophisticated. There’s now geotagging, social tagging and now even, with the advent of augmented reality ‘air tagging’.

Which means that instead of drowning in oceans of TMI – as some commentators worried – we can find what we want, when we want it, JIT. We’re swimming on top of the seas of information thanks to tagging.

Find the best Wi-fi… with augmented reality

AR may be the emperor’s new clothes at the moment – that is, it’s the old information dressed up in a fancy new way – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t very useful.
For one thing, there are now two applications that’ll help you find the best wi-fi, and that’s gotta be a good thing, right?
First up is Worksnug – see Youtube video above – from futurist Richard Leyland. Hold up your 3G iPhone in London (& coming soon San Francisco & then… the world) and it’ll tell you the nearest place that offers good wi-fi, and a good working environment.
Another company’s trying it too. From Tel Aviv-based Loft Developers comes Lookator, which just tells you where the good wi-fi is. The difference? This one works on Android-powered phones, such as the HTC Hero, Samsung Galaxy i7500 and T-Mobiles G1, G2, G3. (For a full range of Android phones see Android Phone).
It’s getting harder and harder to say you can’t get in touch with the office, isn’t it?

Stop or I shoot

 

Nablus, Palestine: entrance to a tunnel created by Saladdin in the 12th century, used in the Second Intifada

On a twelve-day holiday in Israel and Palestine (the West Bank only; Gaza seems totally off-limits), I visited Hebron, Haifa, Ramallah, Tel Aviv and Nablus. Being there made me proud, ashamed and amazed at what humans are capable of – of what they can achieve and what they can do to other humans. It was an horrific, eye-opening, brilliant experience.

I went expecting to be appalled only at the Isrealis, at their apartheid-style treatment of the people whose land I thought they’d taken. But I was also incredulous at what they’ve achieved in 60 years of nationhood, turning desert waste and ruinous marsh into productive land. And I felt for them, and came away with a far more nuanced impression and understanding.

Seeing the Security Fence/Apartheid Wall that makes the Palestinians caged animals made me cry like a child. But I was glad of it when I took a bus from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, and when I cycled in the city’s answer to Notting Hill, Newe Tzedek – no chance of any suicide bombers since the wall went up.

In Nablus, I met a ex-PLO man who’d been in Lebanon with Yassir Arafat. Now he sold everything that would help the terrorist/freedom fighter – gun cleaning kit, holsters – except the weapons themselves. Nablus is the first place I’ve visited where politician posters whose heroes are draped in ammo belts and carry heavy weapons.

In Haifa, I hung out with a 25-year-old Israeli girl who knew one Arabic phrase, learned during her three years’ national service in the phrase the Israeli Defence Force (IDF): “stop or I shoot”. Which seems horrible, but it’s easy to judge, isn’t it? As a Brit, no one’s invaded my country for almost 1,000 years. The Israelis have been at war with their neighbours and the Palestinians themselves.

In Hebron, a bustling Arab city of shawarma stands, coffee shops and traffic jams, a young boy brought me to the third-floor roof of his home, to get a bird’s eye view of the Jewish settlement next door and the IDF gun’s placements overlooking the market below. From there, I could see into the squeaky clean Jewish barbed-wire ghetto on one side, and, on the other, metal grids above the marketplace, protecting the Arabs below from the the rocks, rubbish and dirty nappies the Jewish settlers throw out the window.

And then there was the taxi driver who took me from Tel Aviv to Ben Gurion airport on the way home. He’d been a sniper for eight years in the IDF. “When they asked me what I did for a living on my license form, I told them: I make people stop breathing,’ he laughed.

Yet they need peace, not chuckled posturing by Israelis and bitter – understandbly bitter – recriminations from Palestinians. They all need it. The Israelis, so they can relax at home. The Palestinians, because more than 90% of them can’t leave their West Bank or Gaza Strip homes. They’re not allowed to – in case they bring terror to Israel’s Jews. As well as restricting access, the wall/fence is a form of economic warfare against them – and since per capita in the West Bank is US$2,900 and US$28,300 (source: CIA World Factbook), it would clearly make sense if they could trade more freely with the Israelis.

What could bring peace? An end to the Jewish settlements? An end to violence? Tony Blair – he’s out there, camped out in West Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel? He managed peace in Northern Ireland. But the Arabs don’t like him.

I think the Palestinians need a Gandhi figure, a figure head who doesn’t fight back with weapons, but with dignity, with right on his side. Just as Gandhi shamed the British government into submission, so a Palestinian Great Soul could do the same to the Israelis. The Americans, remember, weren’t always so Israel-biased. They stopped them (and the Brits and French) in Suez in 1956, after all. Couldn’t a Palestinian Mahatma shift opinion so that peace and justice in the Mid East became a real priority?

If global opinion swung irrevocably towards pity for the Palestinians, the Israelis might stop building more settlements in the West Bank, might actually want peace. Those in the know wonder if the status quo actually benefits the Israelis.

How would a peace plan work? Just as the British engaged with the palatable side of the IRA, AKA Sinn Fein, and the palatable side of terrorism in India, so the Palestinians need someone who turns the other cheek, who fights hate with compassion and understanding. Someone the Israeli public opinion might even embrace.

It’s a tall order, but it’s a plan that’s worked before.

And wouldn’t it be better if the only Arabic phrase normal Israelis knew wasn’t “stop or I shoot”?

The end of liberal democracy

At the Intelligence Squared event last night at the Royal Geographic Society (RGS), presenters from Oxford University’s James Martin 21st Century School had lots of interesting eutopic and dystopic views of The World in 2050.

Particularly interesting was Porfessor Julian Savulescu’s comment that comes from a book he’s writing now. 

Civilisations that last, says Savulescu, are either small states or totalitarian ones. So where does that leave the liberal democracy we know and love today, where we’re tolerant to different ways and values?

To deal with the challenges of the 21st century, he says, ‘we may have to give up our commitment to liberal democracy’ – and some of its essential traits.

Three key ones include:

(1) increased surveillance; 

(2) give up our privacy;

(3) we may have to look at influencing people’s moral dispositions, their behaviour through education; government will shift from holding a liberal, neutral position towards values, to giving people certain, specific values.

Given that we already have 4.2m CCTV cameras in the UK and our behaviour, from the amount of rubbish we throw out to how much electricity we use is increasingly being monitored, I’d agree and say we’re heading that way.

After the talk, I asked Savulescu if this all sounded like a shift towards using the sort of influence Sunstein and Thaler propose in their book Nudge, and a shift from a liberal democracy to a paternalistic libertarian one. He agreed that it was.

The end of liberal democracy then? The beginning of the end, certainly. And don’t worry, it is a good thing.

A mad, ostentatious future

Remember what people thought the world would look like now, in 1959? If they’d been right, we’d be flying cars and living on the moon. Predicting the gadgets we’ll be drooling over 50 years from now is just as tricky.

But it’s what my editor at T3 asked me to do, so…

The big hairy problem is that while progress usually shuffles along predictably – a bigger screen here, better battery life there – really big steps forward come from disruptive innovations. They’re the ones that creep up and catch clever people out.

Talking about computers in 1943, IBM’s chairman said: “There is a world market for maybe five.”

That was before some bright spark made them smaller than a house and able to run games.

Bill Gates’s response to the internet in 1993? “Not interested.”

It isn’t just clever people who get caught out though. Who in the 1980s thought mobile phones were anything but a tool for braying Yuppies?

A 1980s Yuppie with mobile phone

That email wasn’t just a geek’s way of getting in touch in the early 90s?

“If you’re looking for tomorrow’s big ‘un,” says Jonathan Margolis, the FT How to Spend It techspert. “It’s probably the stuff that sounds unremarkable, ostentatious or mad right now.” 

Here’s one mad idea: no more gadgets.

“If by gadget you mean discrete, single-purpose high-technological devices, they’ll be gone,” says Adam Greenfield, Nokia’s head of design direction.

In his book Everyware, Greenfield describes a future, not far from now, when computing power will be so powerful and cheap it’ll be installed everywhere. There are two important results of this. One, your fridge will outsmart you and, two, there’ll be a ubiquitous network.

Then, gadgets will be commoditised tools that tap into that network. We won’t care about the best gadget anymore – it’ll all be about the latest killer app.

By 2059, there’ll be other things missing too, like wires. They’ll only exist in the Museum of the Computer (which will also keep keyboards, PCs and joysticks – remember those?).

Wireless will mean electricity then too. Using Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL), scientists at Intel can already power a 60-watt light bulb– that’s more power than most laptops use today.

Instead of touch screens, we’ll communicate with the network through 3D motion sensors –

similar to the way Scientology Tom does in Minority Report.

By 2059, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) might have taken over. They’re already in the formative stage. Take Emotiv Systems’ EPOC headset. Currently in Beta, it can identify 30 different brainwave patterns to tell a game what the player wants to do.

Tapping this idea, Margolis thinks we’ll be using Life Recorders in the 2050s. They’ll record everything we see, hear and do. Pay for the 2059 upgrade and they’ll record your dreams and auto-upload them to 3Dreamtube.

That’ll be competing with 2059’s other piece of must-have tech: Intel’s ShapeShifter, which the company is already working on. Still in its early stages, it’ll be made up of microscopic robots called “catoms” which collectively change their arrangement to become something else.

By 2059, your catomised mobile device will instantly morph into a coffee cup, a paper-thin OLED screen, a birthday card, a Darth Vader mask… whatever you want it to be. If that doesn’t sound mad and ostentatious, I don’t know what does.

The future of TV: like Martini

 

1950s General Electric TV Set

What’s Martini got to do with telly? Patience… The role of TV in Britain was defined by the BBC’s first director general, Lord Reith: to educate, inform, entertain. More than 80 years later and in an increasingly fractured media world, the telly is still doing that and still number one.

 

“TV viewing has actually increased in recent years,’ Ofcom’s director of research James Thickett told me. “It’s about 27 hours per week – up by about 30 minutes in the last 5 years.”

In the future though, won’t the digital generations, brought up with Facebook, Flickr, Bebo, Blogger, Twitter, Wiis and PSPs, be too active and creative to sit goggle-eyed in front of the TV, whether it’s HD, 3D, holographic or an immersive entertainment cave? In the future, will they switch off the TV set and go and do something less boring instead?

Well, no, because stories are as old than the hills, an essential part of what it is to be human, so passive, sit-back-and-watch TV-style story entertainment is resolutely here to stay.

And, well, yes too, because what’s going to change is how and where we watch TV. In the future, watching TV will become less the family-sit-round-the-telly experience, it’ll be more personalised and time-shifted, that is, instead of watching at scheduled primetime, we’ll watch anytime that suits us. It’ll be like ordering a Martini in the 1970s.

The digital/Twitter/Bebo generation is already doing that. Instead of rushing home to watch Grange Hill like we did, they’re watching Beyond the Rave webisodes or Lost: Missing Pieces style mobisodes on their laptops and mobiles. And as we increasingly watch TV on devices originally conceived as interactive, shows will incorporate ever more interactive enhancements into the original. Strategic advisor to Channel Four, Steve Moore is already working on “bringing social networking to the TV experience”. BAFTA-nominted director Basi Akpabio suggests TV shows will have more external enhancements in the future, “like The Apprentice predictor”. The next step major step will be the convergence of the PC and TV.

“With Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), TV will go from a linear to a non-linear medium, like how news went from linear in newspapers to non-linear on the web,” the BBC’s chief advisor to the deputy director general, Richard Addy, told me. “Imagine how it’ll be when you can access any piece of video ever made from any device you like. The questions then become: what do you want to watch, where do you want to watch it – and how do you find the stuff you like?”

GoogleTV anyone? It may be a hoax till now but don’t bet against the concept. After all, aren’t today’s Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs) a bit limiting? Wouldn’t it be great to have Google-style search when you want to find something to watch? There’s a design challenge here: computer search works with a keyboard, a TV with a remote. One solution launching in the US next year is from a company called Rovi: a unified media guide that will allow users to search and even offer and see social recommendations of broadcast TV and channels like YouTube XL, a version of the website but with videos optimized for watching on a big screen.

The internet, mobile and whatever’s coming next will not kill the TV star, they’ll enable and enhance it. Wherever people watch – on the beach, skating or even at home , TV will continue to do what it’s supposed to do: educate, inform, entertain. Lord Reith would be happy.

I-ntimacy today

 

10 levels of intimacy from Ji-Lee in NYC

I came across this through Dan Chapman’s blog. Created by NY-based Ji-Lee I think it’s brilliant in its simplicity, and shows how relationships and intimacy have changed in our connected world. I don’t think it goes far enough though. What about when someone posts something on Google Maps or Mapr? Or geo-tags a picture in Flickr? Or shares a photo album on Flickr? Or sends a text message to many people? And blogging/micro-blogging? When I write for magazines & newspapers, even if though I know who the audience are, it feels much less personal than writing here, or Tweeting.

I know what you’re thinking: why make something simple so much more complex when the idea was just to make a point? Because in our connected world, there’s an increasingly complex set and subset and subsubset of communications and levels of intimacy. I’d love to see and use a diagram that showed how those fit together.

The world is bumpy

What shape the world? First, it was flat, then round, then flat. And now, in a book being lauded by Bill Clinton it’s curved.

As the 20th century came to a close and a young arrogant country decided that it was the American century, Milton Friedman told us the world was flat. Friedman’s book extolled the virtues of the internet and how it made the business world a level playing field.

Now, it turns out it isn’t flat, but curved, so says financial expert David Smick. That is, sort of flat but with unexpected downsides that might make you slip off the edge.

Is this really where the world’s best minds can take us? Doesn’t it sound a bit like Francis Fukuyama’s idea about the end of history? That everything is headed towards the mid-American dream because it’s version of libertarian capitalism has won in the big cold war against communism. Didn’t it occur to him that something else might come along, or that things might change? Which civilization hasn’t thought it’s own to the world’s best/strongest/biggest/most likely to last forever? Is this not a least a little bit naive?

It’s amazing that supposedly very clever people can’t see that their pronouncements are intimately linked with their own experiences, with the Zeitgeist. Why are they not able to take themselves out of their current, blinkered situation and have a proper perspective on things? Isn’t that what being smart is all about?

Or perhaps it’s me who’s ridiculously naive, and they’re just saying all this stuff to sell books, get famous and make money.

In which case, I think the World Is Bumpy. Now, on to selling the idea, getting famous and making money.