A delightful report out from International Telecommunication Union (ITU) today, Measuring the Information Society 2014, examines in depth the state of global telecommunications.
Below are a handful of the particularly interesting insights from the report.
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Yesterday US retail chain Lowe’s announced that it will be launching a robot assistant named OSHbot in one of its Orchard Supply Hardware outlets.
Last week I was delighted to speak alongside Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro at the SAP APJ Leadership Summit in Singapore, and spend time with him as we did video interviews to support the event.
I have followed Prof. Ishiguro’s work for many years, first writing about him on this blog in 2006 in a post Being in two places at the same time when he launched his first Geminoid robot. Below is a video of more recent versions of his Geminoid robots that duplicate real humans.
This evening I was at SAP’s Asia-Pacific Japan 25th Anniversary Leadership Summit in Singapore, which brought together a small group of leaders of SAP’s major customers in the region for an exclusive dinner at the Shangri-La hotel.
The guest speakers were myself, speaking on How Hyperconnectivity Will Fuel Asia’s Growth, and Stacey Allaster, President of the Women’s Tennis Association.
Stacey, together with WTA founder Billie-Jean King and last year’s Wimbledon winner Marion Bortoli, fielded questions about this week’s announcement that the WTA is allowing in-game coaching using real-time data from the match.
Billie-Jean King, Women’s Tennis Association President Stacey Allaster, and Marion Bartoli at the SAP APJ Leadership summit in Singapore
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A little while ago we released our “Crunch Time” framework, looking at the 14 domains where we are hitting dramatic disruption, including work, money, privacy, government, education, media, climate and more. You can see the full Crunch Time framework on the Future Exploration Network website.
We have created a short video to introduce the concept of Crunch Time, and the four major implications that apply across the board.
The rise of wearables is one of the biggest emerging trends in consumer technology. Over the last decade our primary interfaces with connected technology have shifted from fixed computers to devices that we can carry in our pockets or bags. The next phase is for our interfaces to be worn on our body.
While it is always hard to predict consumer response to new technologies, it is safe to say that any early adopters will take to the next generation of devices with alacrity. While traditionalists will remain, certainly over time many who now choose to wear a wristwatch will replace it with a device that does far more than tell the time.
As the wearables landscape emerges there are 5 major uncertainties to consider:
The rise of smartphones as an interface to information has been dramatic. It has been largely foreseeable in terms of the power of the technology available at an accessible cost, however what was less certain was people’s willingness to use a small screen to access information.
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On my RossDawson.com site I list some of the more popular topics for my keynote speeches.
Particularly for internal corporate events, one of the most popular themes is ‘Embracing the Future‘, in which I not only point to the dramatic shifts underway and the potential of the future, but show that the attitude of embracing those changes will bring the greatest personal opportunities.
I recently created a short video to help describe the main themes of the keynote, shown below.
Big Data is one of the hottest trends at the moment, as shown in this Google Trends chart below.
However much of the big data discussion is about how to market better to customers, gathering data ABOUT them so companies can sell more to them.
This seems to me to be the wrong way to think about it. Big data should be used to CREATE VALUE FOR CUSTOMERS. From that good things will flow to everyone, including of course attracting the most customers.
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I am at Innovation Partnership Program, a three-day executive education program in Silicon Valley for senior executives from Fortune 100 companies, done as a joint venture between Singularity University and XPrize.
It is an exceptional program providing a deep dive into the exponential technologies driving change, including AI, robotics, crowds, 3D manufacturing, medicine, genetics, computing, digital finance and the strategic implications for enterprise.
I presented the session on crowds on the first day, providing a big picture overview of crowds, crowdsourcing and the sharing economy.
My slides are below. As always, they are not intended to be meaningful for those who did not attend the presentation, but may still be useful to others.
Last week I gave a keynote on The Future of Banking to a group of the most senior risk leaders in a major bank, sharing some provocative ideas on how the banking landscape may change in the years to come.
One of the ideas I shared briefly was on how micro-payments between connected devices could enable an entirely new layer of the economy.
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