The future of offices: facilitating interaction and making work fun
Last week I was interviewed on the Daily Edition TV program about the future of offices.
Click on the image below to see a video of the interview.
How will TV and digital video converge and who will take the bulk of the value?
While news-on-paper is on the way out, it appears to be quite a different story for TV. The TV industry globally is challenged in a variety of ways, however revenues in the US remain resilient, as shown in this chart.
Source: LUMA’s The Future of (Digital) TV
Digital video has exploded over the last 8 years however that has, in the main, being a complement to TV, with TV viewing eroding surprisingly slowly compared to earlier forecasts.
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The death of news-on-paper is the rebirth of news organizations
My Newspaper Extinction Timeline is now well over 3 years old, in which time it has been viewed many millions of times and appeared in publications in over 30 countries. There has been a revival of interest recently from the extensive coverage of a keynote I gave at Arab Media Forum in Dubai last month and comments I made afterwards.
Many commentators on my framework seem to equate newspapers with newspaper companies. That is completely incorrect.
Such a thing as a “newspaper” company has ceased to exist except in regional areas of developing countries. What were newspaper companies are now news organizations.
The death of news-on-paper absolutely does not imply the death of news organizations. In fact it is an enabler of their rebirth.
Dominique Delport, the very switched-on Global MD of Havas Media Group, has created an excellent slide deck titled Newspapers: The End… Seriously? (embedded below). He opens with my Newspaper Extinction Timeline and goes on to paint a bright future for the industry.
How the next generation of display technologies will transform mobile computing
This morning I was interviewed on the Morning Show about next generation technologies including holograms on smartphones, machine to machine (M2M) communication, neuro-hacking and brain implants.
Click on the image to see a video of the segment.
The possibility of holograms on smartphones is absolutely compelling.
Back from when the first smartphones came out I pointed to the interfaces as the critical enabler of rich computing on-the-go, as shown for example in my Future of the Media Lifecycle framework.
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The future of credit unions is community
Two weeks ago I gave the closing keynote at the Boards of Directors and Supervisory Committees Conference of the U.S. National Association of Federal Credit Unions in the beautiful Hawaiian island of Maui, on the topic of Profiting From Technology Trends.
The credit union sector in the U.S outperformed commercial banks after the financial crisis according to the very interesting ILO study Resilience in a downturn: The power of financial cooperatives, moving from 42.8% to 45.0% market penetration to a total over $1 trillion in assets, while in the same post-GFC period credit unions increased their market share in most other regions in the world.
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“Shoezam” app mimics Shazam to image, identify, and replicate shoes on the street
This morning I attended the Innovation Bay breakfast on Where to for retail now?.
It was a fascinating discussion, which was definitely useful as I develop my forthcoming Future of Retail framework. (Still working on it, I don’t know when it will be ready for the public, more later.)
Michael Fox, founder of the highly innovative and successful Shoes of Prey, spoke about some of what they envisage for the future of retail.
One of their internal initiatives is an app they dub “Shoezam”, which acts like Shazam in that people can take an image of a shoe they like in the street, which the app analyzes so that users can immediately order that shoe for themselves.
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Future of Media, Print, Publishing: Conversation with Gerd Leonhard
The latest in the Meeting of the Minds series of conversations between fellow-futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself is on the Future of Media, Print, Publishing, produced by Jonathan Marks. The video and some summary notes from the conversation are below.
Some of the things we discuss:
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Study: Global comparisons of news consumption and shifting channels
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford has just published the very interesting 110 page Digital News Report 2013, which draws on an extensive survey of news consumption across nine major countries.
Below are a selection of some of the most interesting data points in the report, focusing on how people are paying for news, along with brief commentary. Source for all data is Digital News Report 2013
There is very strong variation in the degree to which newspapers are bought by subscription or at the newsstand. This is one of the factors we looked at in our Newspaper Extinction Timeline, as it shapes how quickly people are likely to change their news consumption habits.
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A new world of (lack of) privacy: Here’s looking at you with Google Glass
The discussion is heating up around the forthcoming Google Glass augmented reality glasses and what will almost surely be a wave of similar devices from other companies.
Much of the conversation focuses on the ability of Google Glass to continuously capture video of wherever its user is looking. Following an insalubrious bar in Seattle announcing Google Glass-wearers would be banned from its premises, we are seeing the launch of handy Google Glass Ban Signs for whoever else wants to ban Google Glass, along with its potential for pervasive video capture.
A nice piece in Sydney Morning Herald titled Through the looking glass into the future does a nice job of reviewing the state of the nation on the topic.
The article quotes me:
Australian futurist Ross Dawson said that people largely accepted widespread video surveillance, but ”the idea of individuals recording video wherever they go is more pointed and uncomfortable”.
He said the technology may be the final straw in the erosion of privacy that sparked a social uprising and new legislation, but it was more likely that people would become used to ”a world in which almost everything they do is visible”.
Launch of Future of the CIO framework
Over the next few weeks I will be giving the keynote at the Tomorrow-Ready CIO Series organized by CIO magazine and sponsored by IBM. The events will be held over breakfast in Canberra, Perth, Sydney, Auckland and Melbourne, with an audience of CIOs and other senior IT executives. Full details on the events here.
My keynote will be on the Future of the CIO. I have recently pulled together my thinking on the topic, drawing in particular on a series of CIO workshops I ran across Europe last year.
Below is the Future of the CIO Framework that I will be sharing at the events. It is now up on my complete list of visual frameworks on RossDawson.com.
