Category: Twists

Humans think in images and concepts but not in written language. Very rarely does someone see something literally written in their thoughts. We dream in 'happenings'. Now that the virtual world has come into existence it is possible that in the long term (think 2050) a world will come into existence where 'reading' and 'writing' has evolved into a hobby. Something that people needed to do in the past but that's now just fun to learn, just like making clogs, crocheting or milking cows.

When you stroll through Belgian cities Gent or Brugge, you feel like you’re in a fairy tale. Everything seems to fit. Only after some time has passed, you realize why everything seems to fit so well. The original thought of the developers and architects are untouched. The view of the city is very carefully protected. Billboards, signs, striking shop windows or even posters are forbidden. And the result is beautiful.

In this era, in which information is always available for everybody, in which we ourselves determine what brands are allowed to interrupt our lives, in which everything is taken care of for us, advertising is unnecessary. Businesses won’t need advertising to flourish any longer.  They will find other ways to bring together producing and consuming roles. This means the end of advertising. Street view wise, this will mean that cities can become as beautiful as Gent again. First we will need a generation that is used to function without advertising though, which moreover will forbid outdoor advertising. This generation hasn’t been born yet, so it will at least be 2050 before we will get here. After all, even the youngest generation is still regularly tipped through advertising (like flyers), and thus is still valuing advertising. After that we will really start thinking about city views again. At the end of this century a lot will have changed.

At a forum in Sydney about the future of Search Engine Marketing somebody from the audience asked Google Australia’s General Manager: ‘When will Google start to not only show search results, but also the protocol that is used to generate the search results?’ The Google manager a little giggly answered that of course that isn’t possible, although they are working on other forms of openness. I however do think this is possible, and to take it even further: Google will have to do this.

Japanese company Ns-elex has developed a new device that will allow people to “speak” through their ear so they can use their mobile telephones in noisy places. The device doubles as an earphone and a microphone by detecting air vibrations inside the ear. (al). In the future the audio part of our virtual world experience will be built in our heads. We will carry invisible audio-devices in our ears, serving as speakers as well as microphones. Outside sounds they will of course allow in, if we choose to permit that. This way we can zoom in to every conversation, even from a far distance. It will be no problem to have a conversation with somebody sitting on the other side of a bar. And even when no vibrations are reaching our ears any more, we transfer to a virtual world, to still be able to talk. Soon we will be helpless without our ‘audio boosters’, or whatever we will decide to call these devices.

The internet is about to burst:

• The amount of spam e-mails rapidly increases (now already 94 percent of the total e-mail traffic, evl), and correct e-mails get more and bigger attachments. Almost half of all office employees send between five and ten e-mail attachments a day, and 31 percent send ten to twenty attachments a day in e-mails. This accounts for huge pressure on the network.
• The amount of available IP-addresses is ending. As only real solution the new version of IP, IPv6, was developed ten years ago. In the Netherlands, Europe and the US this version hasn’t been used very much yet, although China started using it in 2006.
• Energy consumption is earth-rocking. 50 percent of the money spent on computers goes to electricity companies. If we don’t take action, this will rise to 71 percent over the coming 4 years, research shows us. These costs will be passed on to consumers.

I recently had a meeting with Dutch magician Ramana, or Wouter Bijdendijk. Ramana acquired international fame by his levitation act in front of the White House, and before that in the Netherlands through appearances on TV with Jensen and Paul de Leeuw. Hij also did a levitation act for insurance company RVS. In a very surprising conversation, lasting for many hours, I was able to sharpen my thoughts about the future. Below are my notes.

I had no idea what to expect from this meeting. Did Ramana possess powers that most people have too, but just are not able to use (any more)? Is it all just one big illusion? How does Ramana handle critique? How does he see the future? What kind of person will he be? And maybe there would be a way we could cooperate. We met at Pacific Parc, close to the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. 

Winston Churchill has said (among others at bq):

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.

And slowly the end of democracy comes closer, to make place for new forms of government in which civilians are the boss…

Protection device supplier Taser International (which also supplies to consumers) considers equipping robots with weapons. The American army already has been using PackBot, made by iRobot, equipped with deadly weapons. A couple of hundreds of these robots are currently active in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Taser plan takes this a step further however. In their plan, the police can use robots against civilians. Thus robots could give electronic shocks to criminals until the police arrives (via ns). The question now is, what happens if the robots make mistakes through which people are accidentally wounded or even killed.

As I announced earlier, I am working on a new website and a new book. The site will go live shortly, and I am writing the last content for the section called ‘trends’. In this I describe a couple of typical human motives, like the free man, the involved man, and the visual man. I wrote about these before in my book. For the new article ‘the nostalgic man’ I made a first draft. I like it myself. Maybe you have more examples of products helping the nostalgic man now, earlier, or in the future. Let’s see!

Having lived life digitally (ultra-sounds, birth, youth, life as a grown-up, family reunions, and funeral: everything is recorded), our digital lives from now on continue even after death. At Dutch cemetery Larikshof in Rhenen there is a tombstone with a small TV-screen on which images of the deceased can be seen: the digizerk (digital tombstone). Relatives and friends can show pictures and videos on this screen. According to supplier steenhouwerij Rijtink, this is the first digital tombstone in the world. The screen now operates on a battery, but the company is working on tombstones operated through solar cells (sr, Dutch). Pictures and videos are virtual representatives of people’s real lives. In a next step, these screens are connected to the internet. Relatives then can consult our social-network pages through the tombstones, watch the video of the funeral and the condolence register, listen to their favorite music, and see where friends will be buried later. And we can still interact with the avatar, the virtual representative of the deceased. Like our voice mail today, these virtual representatives keep reacting. The contact after all stays. And it will show behavior that will be an awful lot like the behavior of the deceived. A different world, that’s for sure.

BrandBase, a company that develops brand activation programs for big brands, developed a concept for theater company Alaska, in which the new performance ’Sic transit gloria mundi’ through private sponsoring will be free for the public. Individuals and companies can buy a piece of scenery and place their logo on it. The logos will be visible for two months, the price varies between 100-500 euro. (mb). Although the presence of brands at the set generally will not be appreciated, I see great possibilities for brands in the future. Especially the theater world continuously finds new and creative solutions, especially the theater world is constantly looking for financial support and especially in the theater world there are many high-educated people with an extended social network. A perfect place for brands to be active.

In the video under this picture you can see a (very far, think of 2050) futuristic view on claytronics , being developed by the Carnegie Mellon University: a technology that imitates form at a distance. Like sound and vision are recorded by microphone and camera, are transported through electronic media and are played somewhere else, this technology does the same with form. It does that by having millions of microscopic balls changing shape and color dynamically. In this video we see a car which arises out of a bowl of balls, which then can be manually changed at the spot. More information below. Claytronics will have an enormous impact on the way brands will develop products. If a designer forms a product, it can arise at thousands of consumer tables at the same time, with all its possibilities and impossibilities. It will still take a very long time, but earlier or later this will throw marketing off its feet (again).

If companies become more and more international, and their interests in strategy, creation, production, and distribution are globalized, how can a labor union still be a valuable discussion partner? How can a company that increasingly has to compete with India and China, listen to ONE labor union that has only one goal: to keep its members in the Netherlands (or another western country) satisfied. In this situation it is merely impossible for a company to keep a lot of people employed in only one country. It is all about adding value to the lives of people world wide, as an employer as well as a supplier. National labor unions will lose their power as discussion partners, and it looks like there is only one solution: an international labor union. A point of focus for personal career brands? 

In almost half of the countries in the world (194 in total) physical abuse of children in schools is allowed. In 31 countries (about 16%) the situation is so bad that children can get whipped or even amputated as a disciplinary measure. This is the outcome of research from Unicef, the children’s fund of the United Nation, which was presented in Berlin yesterday. According to Unicef it is a paradox that abuse of grownups is prohibited in most countries, while they make exceptions for children. Only in fourteen countries (less than 10%) there is a complete ban on abuse of children. The UN-research furthermore shows that 150 million girls and 73 million boys are abused sexually (ld, Dutch). Every country still has extremely different norms, and totally different opinions about what is normal. The UN-research proves that again. What will happen if we connect these worlds in a way through which it looks like we are really there? The world will probably not become more stable. At least not in the short run. The future will show us.