IFTF's Future Now

Enabling Curated Consumption

Trendwatching provides a nice post on what they are calling Curated Consumption:

...make way for the emerging trend of CURATED CONSUMPTION: millions of consumers following and obeying the new curators of style, of taste, of eruditeness, in an ever growing number of B2C industries (Martha and home decorating was really just the beginning ;-). And it's not just one way: in this uber-connected world, the new curators enjoy unprecedented access to broadcasting and publishing channels to reach their audience, from their own blogs to niche TV channels...

Contains lots of interesting examples and photos ... Technologies are starting to emerge which will help connect to the shopper in the aisle of the store. These not only help to provide a 'curated' feel to retail, they also allow the interaction to be tailored in a number of ways. I will follow this article with others that deal with these emergent technologies, where they are being tested, and how they are doing.

Disruptive technologies-- the latest naked emperor?

In the latest PC Magazine, John Dvorak attacks "The Myth of Disruptive Technology." Since I think everyone's familiar with the basic notion of disruptive technologies, let's jump directly to the criticism:

The concept of disruptive technology goes to the top of my list as the biggest crock of the new millennium....

There is no such thing as a disruptive technology. There are inventions and new ideas, many of which fail while others succeed. That's it....

One problem in our society is the increasing popularity of false-premise concepts that are blindly used for decision making. The amount of money squandered during the dot-com era because of "paradigm shifts" and "new economies" is staggering. People actually believed that all retailing would be online and that all groceries would be delivered to the home as they were in the 1920s, despite changes that make delivery impractical. Who cares about reality? We have a disruptive technology at work!

The concept of disruptive technology is not the only daft idea floating around to be lapped up obediently by the business community. There are others. But the way these dingbat bromides go unchallenged makes you wonder whether anyone can think independently anymore.

As it's a Friday afternoon, I'll have an actual comment on the piece next week. Though as one sarcasting colleague put it, "I await with baited breath John's take on the Creative Class."

[thanks Bill!]

Wikis in the Workplace

Our colleague Ross Mayfield of Socialtext does a nice job excerpting yesterday's WSJ article (subscription required) on Wikis in the workplace. The WSJ article explains and positions Wikis for workplace use.

I have actively blogged for about a year and a half, and was recently involved in a test of Wikis ... and I have started to appreciate the difference between the two formats. The blog is like an online newspaper, its serial and you may expect to be able to only scan the headlines each day. Of course you can use a blog like an archive, since all blog software has a search. I do that, but the readers of the blog sometimes don't grasp the wealth of information a blog contains.

In contrast, a Wiki does not look serial. If organized reasonably it looks like a reference work. So it looks like an archive and users figure this out right away. It does suffer from a critical mass problem, if there is not enough there, users just wont think of it when they need it. To create a critical mass, you need lots of contributors. If your Wiki is public you can get enough enthusiasts to provide content. Within a corporation its harder to get enough people to invest the time to get the Wiki to a state where its a viable resource.

I am optimistic about the use of Wikis in the workplace, and look forward to working with them in and outside of the corporation.

RFID and store security

A German technology consultant warns that item-level use of RFID tags could create some significant security problems:

Privacy advocates may not be the only people taking issue with the current crop of radio-frequency identification tags--merchants will likely have problems with a lack of security as well....

Low-cost RFID tags--many which are smaller than a nickel and cost less too--are already being added to packaging by retailers to keep track of inventory but could be abused by hackers and tech-savvy shoplifters, said Lukas Grunwald, a senior consultant with DN-Systems Enterprise Solutions GmbH. While the technology mostly threatens consumer privacy, the new technology could allow thieves to fool merchants by changing the identity of goods, he said.

I recently spent a morning with Peter Neumann, a computer scientist and security expert at SRI. One of the things I carried away from that interview was a much deeper sense of how little attention we tend to pay to security (even though we know how to do it right), and just how much trouble that inattention causes. This piece suggests that it might be wise to pay more attention to those issues before enter the penny-tag world, and start thinking seriously about putting RFID on everything.

Update 30 July 2004: Forbes has an article on Grunwald's work.

Symbol Buys Matrics

I follow tagging technologies .... Symbol is a strong player in emergent retail technologies. They own a very big part of the handheld barcode scanning market, and have developed hybrid RFID / optical readers. Matrics is one of the premier RFID tag suppliers. This kind of acquisition could accelerate mainstream tagging technology development. Press Release.

Symbol Technologies Buys Matrics, Accelerating Its Move Into Radio Tags, BARNABY J. FEDER, NYT 07/28/04 Symbol Technologies, which has been burdened by the fallout from a long-running accounting fraud under previous management, tested the patience of its investors yesterday by announcing an acquisition that is likely to cut into earnings for the next two years at least. Symbol, the nation's leading producer of bar-code systems, said it would pay $230 million to acquire Matrics, a developer of electronic identification tags and wireless devices that read them. Analysts said that the deal should sharply accelerate Symbol's push into the promising field of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, but that Matrics and many other RFID pioneers still faced significant hurdles to becoming profitable ....

Del.icio.us feed now visible

Those of you who read Future Now through a Web browser on a PC (sorry Bill!) will notice a third column: a list of articles that IFTF staff have recently read, and thought were interesting enough to flag. These articles fall into that category of things you don't want to lost track of, but aren't necessarily important or stable enough to bookmark in your browser.

So Future Now is now laid out in a left-to-right, permanent to impermanent layout. The bookmarks on the far left are things that don't change. The entries in the center represent attempts to make sense of things we're seeing in the world, or articles that confirm or challenge ideas we have about what the future will be life. The "Recent Reading" column on the far left is the most ephemeral of the three: it's things we've seen in the last 48 hours or so, and may not talk about again, but wanted to just take note of.

I could make some declaration about wanting to open up the black box of forecasting, or using blogging to create a greater degree of transparency and openness in our work; but frankly, I've been driven to do this by 1) the fact that I've always been a little bothered by that generous right-hand margin, and 2) my desire to experiment with del.icio.us.

I'll try to contain the impulse to do some radical redesign featuring yellow type and deep purple-and-black striped backgrounds. Though our creative director is on vacation, and the temptation is strong.

Markoff on mobile devices

The always-interesting John Markoff (finish that book already, John!) has an article in the New York Times on "The New Miniature Computers." One part that caught my eye was this statistic about users of the Danger Hiptop:

[E]ach day, its average user sends 182 instant messages, receives 25 e-mail messages, makes or receives 17 phone calls, sends 8 or 9 short text messages and browses 24 Web pages.

This strikes me as an astonishingly high IM and text messaging use rate-- for American users of mobile devices, anyway.

Who was Samuel Pepys?

A mere 344 years ago, in Restoration London, a public servant named Samuel Pepys was busy writing a daily entry in his diary. He continued this for about ten years. If you have taken any history classes that include this period, or read novels based on this time, you know the value of Pepys's scribbling. He provided us with a day to day view of what life was like back then.

So what could this have to do with Emergent Technology? It turns out that Phil Gyford has been replaying Pepys diary on the web, one entry per day, and will continue for about a decade. This trail of information is like an early blog, though it should be noted that Pepys never intended his writings to be public.

So what, a diary replayed? The Pepys diary site takes it a bit further, allowing for commentary, cross linking to related information and related web sites. It has attracted thousands of people with an interest in the history of the time, and linked them to others with this apparently arcane interest. It is a beautiful example of the power of the web and blogs. Each entry is short, usually much less than a page of text, each incrementally teaching you about the history of the time, both from Pepys viewpoint, and from modern global experts on the topic.

I have followed the diary for about a year, and I am impressed, there are lessons here for understanding how a blog can be used to teach, interact and attract interest in an otherwise obscure world. You could imagine constructing a number of such channels that provide tailored instruction and interaction, based on a blog, then linked to a wiki.

Future of Chinese energy use

The Glasgow Sunday Herald has a sobering article on the future of energy consumption in China:

Switch on a light in your home. Any light. Then list the other uses of domestic electricity. Fridge, freezer, washing machine, tumble drier, vacuum cleaner, computer, DVD player, TV and video, mobile phone chargers, toaster … And that’s just for starters.

Now think of China. At present, this vast nation of 1.3 billion inhabitants – and rising – is using the equivalent of one 100-watt lightbulb per head, per year. But its population is developing an insatiable appetite for consumer goods.

Forget global terrorism. One of the scariest stories today is how the Chinese are going to meet their energy demands over the next 20 years. While Scotland fumbles with issues of wind farms blighting the landscape, we should wake up to the potential energy horror story that will impact on everyone.

Invisible thoughts

Also on the subject of (unwanted) invisibility: I'm trying to get a third column up that shows recent del.icio.us bookmarks, but so far it's not cooperating. It shows up about 3/4 of the way down the screen, rather than at the top.

I haven't figured out why it refuses to behave, even though I'm using a position:absolute attribute. But I'm working on it.