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Richard Watson of NowandNext.com and I have collaborated extensively over the years, including on numerous client projects. Richard is very well-known for his Trend Blend annual series of maps (here are the 2007-2010 trend maps). I collaborated with Richard on several of them but not on the more recent ones, partly as he is now
For any student of potential disruptive technological advances, life extension inevitably looms as one that could completely change the condition of humanity. While there is heated debate about whether the current proposed approaches to life extension being proposed have any merit, there is no question that major advances are possible in the field.
On Tuesday I was interviewed as part of a 30 minute panel discussion on ABC Queensland on the future of radio. The podcast of the program is here. It was a wide ranging discussion, and we covered a lot of territory. At the conclusion of the program, when we were each asked to give our
Continue reading The future of radio will be a personal mosaic of global and local audio
I was interviewed last night on ABC’s The Business in a broad-ranging discussion about Facebook’s IPO, Apple’s cash pile, and Research In Motion’s future. Click on the image to watch the interview on the ABC website I’ll add some more comments on these very interesting topics shortly.
In December I created a list of 12 themes to frame the year ahead, and then explored the ideas in a number of media interviews. The slides for the 12 themes have been seen almost 50,000 times now, suggesting they struck a chord somewhere. It’s now interesting to reflect on these, especially the response from
Continue reading Dominant themes for 2012: transformation and beyond
[This post first appeared on the Getting Results From Crowds book website] Research firm IDC has forecast that there will be 1.3 billion ‘mobile workers’ in the world by 2015, representing 37.2% of the global workforce. This points to the massive explosion of what I call the ‘global talent economy’, in which talent can be
Continue reading In the global talent economy over 50% will be mobile workers
Yesterday I appeared on the Australia national breakfast program Today, talking about what we can expect in social media and technology in 2012. I was on holidays in Melbourne so spoke from the studio there. You can see the clip below, or on the Today Show Video page, under the title Social Trends for 2012.
Continue reading Today show: Social media and technology trends for 2012
I’m officially on holidays, but back at home between a family Christmas and beach sojourn and doing quite a few interviews as I go, so I’ll slip in a quick blog post or two. Yesterday I was interviewed by Toronto radio station Newstalk 1010 about the future (or lack thereof) of newspapers, coming off the
Continue reading From news-on-paper to news-on-many-channels
I believe strongly in visual frameworks as a way of communicating and engaging with complex ideas. I share these on the web, sometimes use them as central frames for my keynotes, apply them in strategy workshops, use them to shape my own thinking on the topics they cover, and sometimes create private custom visual frameworks
It’s almost the end of the year, so I’ll try to do a few compilations of my most popular posts of the year. Today, on the general theme of the future, here are 12 (+1 for next year) that have attracted the most interest… 1. Zeitgeist 2011: anxiety, mobility, blending, indulgence, immersion, wrath, nudity and
Continue reading 12 most popular posts of the year on the future
For those who love rich data on the world of media and telecoms, the release of a report by UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom is always a cause for celebration. Last year I covered some of Ofcom’s report on key trends on communication and media usage. Here I will excerpt a few of the highlights from
Continue reading Fantastic international comparative data on media, social media, and mobile
This morning I appeared on the Australian national breakfast TV program Sunrise in their ‘Ask an Expert’ segment, talking about the year ahead. Here is the 4 minute clip. In the brief segment I draw on a number of the 12 Themes for 2012 I recently released. The key topics we discussed were:
We recently launched our 12 Themes for 2012, shown below, in which the third of the 12 themes is ‘Privacy vanishes’. 2012: 12 Themes View more presentations from rossdawson One of the drivers of privacy vanishing is the rise of facial recognition. As the 2012 themes document notes, while Facebook has prominently launched its facial
Continue reading Will your privacy completely vanish? It depends how we use facial recognition
Today we are launching my new book Getting Results From Crowds: The definitive guide to using crowdsourcing to grow your business! This has been, in all, many years in the planning and making, and I’m extremely happy with how it has come out. It is definitely my most useful book, and while it’s hard to
Continue reading Launching my new book today! Getting Results From Crowds
Last week I gave a keynote at the National Broadband Network – what’s in it for me? conference in Bunbury, Western Australia, a town 2 hours south of Perth, the most geographically isolated city in the world. Not surprisingly the hunger for broadband in the region is enormous – you could feel it in the
Continue reading Many sensors + Imagination = The Internet of Things
Towards the end of each year I share some thoughts on what awaits in the year ahead. It is actually a lot easier to look years into the future than just a single year, as while we can readily discern broad trends, the major events in a year are usually unforeseeable, though they may express
Continue reading 12 Themes for 2012: what we can expect in the year ahead
One of my speaking bureau just asked me to provide them with a few quick ideas on how technology is changing events, as one of their key clients is having an internal meeting to discuss their future use of technology in events. I only had 10 minutes free to write something, so it’s far from
I have long said that table tops will embed video and that we will use every possible means to interact usefully with computers. Software and device vendor ExoPC has announced EXOdesk, a computer interface that will be laid on your desk, offering digital keyboards, a variety of colorful keypads, sortable RSS feeds, and even a
Continue reading Next year your entire desk will be a computer control device
Yesterday I gave the keynote on The Future of Information Technology at the Local Government IT2011 conference in Coffs Harbour, which this year had the theme of mobility. Given the ambitious scope of my keynote title, I covered a lot of territory including fundamental technology shifts and the evolving shape of organizational technology. In looking
Continue reading Tear the walls down: Jericho and the future of enterprise tech
Earlier this week I spoke at an excellent event organized by Canon for the CIOs of major organizations. During an extended lunch, a diverse range of ‘celebrities’ including TV personalities, authors, and musicians gave short presentations. I spoke about how the evolving intersection of technology and society is shaping employees’ expectations, particularly in the technology
Continue reading 5 facets of employees’ increasing technology expectations
Honda, better known for its cars, has just released a new version of its Asimo humanoid robot, as shown below. It can run at a good pace, hop on one foot, and unscrew bottle caps and pour drinks.
A nice video titled On the Brink of a Networked Society, shown below, has just been launched by Ericsson. It includes a series of excellent interviews exploring some of the many implications and directions of a connected world, including health, industry structure, how we socialize, and far more. It’s well worth watching. The single quote
I have recently done a number of interviews on the implications of Apple’s voice assistant Siri. To me, it’s looking very much like Apple has once again brought a technology to market precisely when it is sufficiently mature to impress. Voice control and ‘intelligent assistants’ are far from new, but haven’t been widely used to
Continue reading Siri and the dawn of the era of intelligent agents
In the Kochie’s Business Builders program that I hosted on Sunday, I interviewed Matt Barrie of Freelancer.com, and Eddie Machaalani and Mitch Harper of BigCommerce, both fantastic Australian online business success stories. Following the excellent Freelancer.com interview, below is the interview with BigCommerce’s founders. They recently raised US$15 million from US VC firm General Catalyst
I first wrote about Techmeme over 5 years ago. Today Techmeme remains the reference point for what’s hot in technology news. Bloggers and publishers strive to appear on its pages, not just because of the traffic it drives, but also because the people who visit Techmeme are among the most influential in the business. Founder
The most recent Kochie’s Business Builders program focused on online business. It started with an interview with me about the big picture, after which I went out to interview two of Australia’s most successful online businesses: Freelancer.com and BigCommerce. Below are the videos of the interview I did with Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com, together
Continue reading Freelancer.com: There has never been a better time to start an online business
The Newspaper Extinction Timeline below was launched one year ago today. It received plenty of attention, getting published in newspapers and other mainstream media in over 30 countries, and being seen well over a million times. Click on image to download full framework Today a commenter on the original post asked me if anything had
Continue reading Revisiting the Newspaper Extinction Timeline on its first anniversary
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released some great research on how people use tablets (still mainly iPads) to consume news. The infographic below summarizes the findings – click on the image to go through to the original full-size version. The very short summary is that those who own tablets usually
Continue reading How tablets are changing how we consume news
Earlier this week I was interviewed on ABC TV about the future of cars, in a program to coincide with the start of World Solar Challenge, the annual solar car race covering the 3,021 km from Darwin to Adelaide. I talked about several facets of the future of cars, including changing energy sources and their
This is very, very good. This video created by Apple in 1987 shows how a ‘Knowledge Navigator’ would work, depicting a university professor interacting with a tablet computer through voice. The system’s animated avatar summarizes emails, responds to voice commands, extracts and displays data, provides intelligent information retrieval, and provides message filtering. This video was
Continue reading [VIDEO] In 1987 Apple predicted it would launch Siri in 2011
This awesome video from New Scientist TV shows a surgical robot with a human operator peeling a grape. This technology greatly augments what human surgeons can do, and also provides a platform for telesurgery. The New Scientist article Watch a surgical robot peel a grape, says:
I caught up with fellow futurist Kristin Alford last week, yet another first time face-to-face meeting after a long time interacting online. It seems most of the people I meet these days are people I know from Twitter. Kristin pointed me to some of what her company Bridge8 is doing in creating animated videos about
Continue reading Animated excursions into the future: the extraordinary implications of utility fog
I recently gave the opening keynote at Local Government Association of Tasmania‘s annual conference. On the occasion of their 100th anniversary, they wanted to look forward to the future as well as to their past. Incidentally, the event was just two days after I gave the opening keynote at the Institute of Public Administration NSW’s
We have just posted an ad on Elance, looking for editors/ writers/ project managers for some of our existing and forthcoming online publications. Please apply on Elance if this seems like a match, or pass it on to others if you think it might be of interest. If you have questions before applying you can
Chris Espinosa has written a very interesting piece about the Silk browser that comes on Amazon’s freshly announced Fire tablet. The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based


























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