IFTF's Future Now

Ian Pearson on... thinks about... talks about... oh, just follow the link

BT futurologist Ian Pearson has an admirable instinct for the spectacular, easy-to-understand claim about the future-- the sort of image or trend that captures an entire age. My instinct is to be the E. P. Thompson of the future, to look for moral economies and the track how perceptions of time and work change with new technologies; Pearson, in contrast, goes right for the... um, jugular. From Ananova:

Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman's breast implants.

One boob could hold an MP3 player and the other the person's whole music collection.

BT futurology, who have developed the idea, say it could be available within 15 years.

BT Laboratories' analyst Ian Pearson said flexible plastic electronics would sit inside the breast. A signal would be relayed to headphones, while the device would be controlled by Bluetooth using a panel on the wrist.

According to The Sun he said: "It is now very hard for me to think of breast implants as just decorative. If a woman has something implanted permanently, it might as well do something useful."

I suppose there's a witty observation to be made about women being better at multitasking, or the Mozart Effect. But I'll just go reread The Making of the English Working Class....

[via Yme Bosma]

Technorati Tags: biology, cyborg, future, music

Society for New Communications Research Launches

A new international non-profit think tank called the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) was launched today.  From the press release:

The group was formed to provide a forum for research and education and a source of expertise focused on the broad theoretical and practical implications surrounding new communications methodologies, tools and technologies.

Jennifer McClure, who runs the New Communications Blogzine, is SNCR's Executive Director and she has brought together a mix of academics and business professionals to study and research online social media and their impact on society.  I've joined as an "honorary senior fellow".

Much of my work is focused on the impact of new media on corporations.  One of the things that is clearly missing from this field is a solid body of research and best practices information.  I'm very excited about the formation of SNCR and believe their research will help us all in better undertanding and working with new media.

Here is The Society for New Communications Research's blog.

Jason Tester at Next2005

The things you learn when you surf the Web: my colleague Jason Tester will be doing one of the keynotes at Next2005, along with Aubrey De Grey and Norbert Streitz. Exalted company....

Technorati Tags: copenhagen, IFTF, itu

links for 2005-10-27

• Educated Workers Leaving Poor Nations, Survey Finds - New York Times
  "Poor countries across Africa, Central America and the Caribbean are losing sometimes staggering numbers of their college-educated workers to wealthy, industrialized democracies,"
  (tags: education poverty employment)

Greetings from Denmark

While my colleagues are occupied with putting on a brilliant conference for the Technology Horizons program, I'm in Aarhus, Denmark, doing a talk at the DesignDay conference. I'm talking about the future of technology and the role of design in creating products (and by extension, company value).

There are two big points I'm working on in this talk.

First, while it used to look like the future of technology was about making things smart, it now seems clear that it's going to be about making people smart. Smart things are a means, not an end: the end is sociability-- linking to other people, and creating cooperative/collective systems for doing cool things. Design strategies that take full advantage of pervasive computing technologies, but also pay a lot of attention to interface issues, and also operate in ways that don't crowd out person-to-person interaction, will be especially compelling.

I realized on the flight over that lots of different things I've studied over the last year-- ranging from the open source movement to aging in place-- share underlying technologies and aims that enable and/or encourage sociability and cooperative behavior. I want to try to flesh this argument out.

The second point is that Denmark has both world-class computer science researchers who are interested in pervasive computing, and an incredibly deep design community that extends from architecture and furniture through to toys and stereo equipment. (Okay, Silicon Valley is the other place where you've got this mix, and arguably good Japanese electronics has drawn on Japanese aesthetics. And the Koreans are trying like mad to get world-class in design.) There are already some contacts between parts of these communities (obviously Bang and Olusfen has more than its share of acoustics and electronics experts), but in the future, as wearables become a real thing, as smart furniture moves into the marketplace, as aging in place takes off, there will be opportunities for Danish companies and design firms working all across the industrial/product spectrum to create value by collaborating with pervasive computing people.

We'll see how it goes.

(Incidentally, I'm keeping meticulous records of the trip at my personal blog, and have a Flickr photo set devoted to my views of Denmark.)

Technorati Tags: aarhus, denmark, design, travel

Nanodot Blogs Foresight Conference

I note that the Foresight nanotech Institute is blogging their ongoing Beneficial Nanotechnology conference.  A good introduction to current interests and directions of the technology.  I have now followed a number of conferences using blogs.  Enjoy the voice behind each of the correspondents.  They have also taken the time to create relevant links for each post.    It seems to work best for small conferences, where commitment for coverage can be generated.  Less so for more impersonal larger conferences.   I have been able to avoid travel several times in this way. 

Browser with Social Networking

I note that Palo Alto startup Flock has introduced a new browser, described in some detail in ZDnet, that includes a number of Web 2.0 and social networking capabilities.  Integrates some advanced web features, such as RSS, tagging and file sharing.  One of the developers, Geoffrey Arone has a blog that includes some interesting details about the effort and its development culture.  Still a developers release, with bugs, but its worth a look.  Its nice to see some of these new ideas being integrated into browsers, but its going to be tough to compete with the big G. 

Riya - Face Recognition Software

Tech Crunch has an update post on Riya, a company that has a facial and text recognition technology that automatically tags photos with who’s in them.   The technology sounds very cool.  Also interesting is their target market - consumers. 

The company blog - Recognizing Devan - has an interesting post on the consumer need for auto tagging of photos. 

links for 2005-10-21

• The Asia Nanotechnology Initiatives Snap Shots (pdf)
  2003 report on nanotechnology spending and commercialization in Korea.
  (tags: Asia c2st nanotech R&D)
• Nanotechnology Strategy in Korea (pdf)
  2003 report on nanotechnology initiatives in Korea.
  (tags: Korea c2st nanotech R&D)
• School of Informatics Building (The Forum)
  Proposed new informatics building at Edinburgh University.
  (tags: collaboration IT UK R&D university c2st)

Finally, one place to get my Google Maps fix:

...the new Google Maps Mania blog.

Technorati Tags: blogging