As I have stated here several times, a fundamental aspect of being a futurist is to look for patterns to discern the dynamics that will shape our collective future.  Events, inventions, social, cultural and economic developments, trailblazing efforts by individuals and small groups, when looked at collectively can reveal underlying patterns and trends, both macro and micro.  Here are some notable developments that point into our future, some of which will be looked at in greater detail in future columns.

Writers’ Strike

The writers’ strike in the entertainment business is now two months old. Its’ length, the animosity it has engendered and the immediate consequences of it are significant.  It has within it the seeds of structural and permanent change in the entertainment business. The annual ...]]> Happy New Year to all of you that are regular readers of this blog and to those of you who might be coming to it the first time.  May 2008 be a happy year for everyone.  I can promise that it will be another year of upheaval and change, probably exceeding 2007 in that regard.  I will submit to you my annual predictions, both general and specific, for the year within the next two weeks.  Right now I would like to take a quick look at several late in the year developments of 2007 that provide indication as to where we are going and what will lay ahead for us in 2008. 

As I have stated here several times, a fundamental aspect of being a futurist is to look for patterns to discern the dynamics that will shape our collective future.  Events, inventions, social, cultural and economic developments, trailblazing efforts by individuals and small groups, when looked at collectively can reveal underlying patterns and trends, both macro and micro.  Here are some notable developments that point into our future, some of which will be looked at in greater detail in future columns.

Writers’ Strike

The writers’ strike in the entertainment business is now two months old. Its’ length, the animosity it has engendered and the immediate consequences of it are significant.  It has within it the seeds of structural and permanent change in the entertainment business. The annual television writers’ January press junket has been cancelled.  Those in the advertising business ponder whether the decades old — and therefore outdated — process of late springtime frenzy called ‘the Upfront’ will be cancelled, with a certainty that it will be changed.  Those in the interactive space wonder why, if the writers who are demanding a bigger share of on-line revenues for their work are really serious, they just don’t go out on their own with quality writing and create properties they can wholly own.  By not doing so they acknowledge the power and need for media conglomerates, studios and large production companies.  The Golden Globes and the Oscars are at serious risk of being both writer and actor free. We are about to find out how funny late night hosts are without writers. While the detailed outcome of the strike is not clear, what is clear is that it will have a permanent structural impact on the entertainment business.  It is a “change  event” of some magnitude.

Virtual Worlds

There was much brouhaha over such virtual worlds on the Internet such as Second Life in 2007.  It is the first foray into what will become a highly significant world of alternative reality for humans during the next 20 years.  The recent development is that while such virtual worlds for those 16 and over has slowed recently, there has been explosive growth in the virtual worlds targeted for children, now the fastest growing segment of this new space.  What does this mean?  While adults are coming to virtual worlds to create alter egos or let their inner selves take flight, the young children are developing selves that fully incorporate virtual worlds into their developing identity.  A new form of digital natives is being created that has great in-depth significance for the cyberspace electronic village in our future.

Video Gaming

Nintendo has redefined video gaming over the past 18 months with the Wii and the portable DS.  The Wii is the best selling console, and the DS is the best selling portable device.  In addition to being lower in price, the strategy behind both devices, particularly the Wii was to greatly broaden the video game marketplace beyond hard core gamers, bringing non-gamers of all ages into the fold.  Equally important, and tied to the development of virtual worlds stated above, the Wii will be looked back upon as the beginning of the creation of alternative electronic reality.  While the Second Life type virtual worlds allowed the creation of an alternative world on the computer with fingertips, the Wii allowed the entire body to participate in and experience an alternative reality.  Be a competitive tennis player in your living room.  In 10 years, the Wii will be looked back upon as a precursor to alternative electronic reality, as the Pong game is looked back upon as the precursor to the phenomenon of video gaming.

Mobile Wireless

The now three year old hype about the third screen of the cell phone continues but with some reality now injected into it.  Texting is rampant, but viewing rich media is yet to explode.  Ring tones, a huge business as recently as 2006 is now down trending.  In the U.K. two mobile phone companies, T-Mobile UK and 3 UK are combining their third generation networks so that they can save billions of dollars in the coming years.  This points to a developing long term trend in the mobile phone business, the migration from the walled garden business model to the open business model.  All of this means that this truly global communication technology continues to morph forward into a universal connectedness of great transformation

Google and Search

A month ago Google accounted for 65.1% of all searches in the U.S.  That compares to 58.3% 18 months ago.  This means that the company has three times the market share of its’ nearest competitor Yahoo, and nine times the share of the distant third place finisher, Microsoft.  Will Google continue to be a/the central player in the current zeitgeist?  At least for the next year it will be as it is making all the right moves facing the future.

Economics

The traditional either/or discussion continues at years’ end.  Recession or not?  Inflation or not?  Housing to decline further or not?  While all these structural conversations are valid they are sounding a bit antiquated, as though the terms and definitions that have been used for the past 75 years are in need of alteration.  The constantly expanding global economy is creating new dynamics that will continue to confound traditional terminology and nationally oriented measurements.  The key economic word for 2007 and even more so for 2008 will be “debt”.  It is debt that is the true economic issue for the individual, the company, the state, the country, the world.  How all of these economic entities deal with debt will be one of the two key economic issues we will face in the coming years.  Energy of course is the other.

Presidential Politics

The 2008 election is the most important election in at least a generation.  So far, while it is exciting as a participation or spectator sport, it is depressing in that the key issues that America must face in the next 10 years are not really being addressed by the leading candidates.  However what is exciting is the rise of populism and a great dissatisfaction with the status quo of non-leadership in Washington.  The most used word is “Change”.  For America to successfully navigate the coming crises ahead, there will need to be a new visions and new ways of political leadership and consensus. I try to stay out of predicting politics in this column, as the variables can be micro and personal, not macro and trend oriented.  That being said, it looks to this observer that 2008 will be a Democratic landslide year on the order of 1936 and 1964.  Who will be the President in 2009?  The junior senator from Illinois.

Happy New Year!  Welcome to the Shift Age!

As someone who thinks about the future, converting global society to alternative and renewable types of energy and away from fossil fuels is perhaps the top challenge humanity faces.  The way this will get done is through creativity, innovation, technological breakthroughs and non-attachment to existing status quos. Sounds like something that Google is well prepared to do.  (Regular readers know that I have admired Google in the past; click on ‘Google’ in the archives at right).

Of course the traditional reaction to this announcement, mostly from those supposedly insightful “Wall Street Analysts” was to suggest the company was risking corporate focus on its’ core businesses.  Nonsense!  It was these types of conventional pundits that, a century ago suggested that the railroad companies were in the railroad and not transportation businesses.  Flying people in airplanes, nah, you guys are in the train business.  Using all your right of way real estate for development?  Nah, stick to the train business.

As readers of this column know, I have often ...]]>  Last week Google announced that the company, and its philanthropic subsidiary, Google.org, would explore research and develop renewable energy.  The goal is to ultimately produce one gigawatt of renewable energy and do so more cheaply that coal-generated electricity, which of course creates vast amounts of CO2.  I was thrilled to read the news reports of this announcement.

As someone who thinks about the future, converting global society to alternative and renewable types of energy and away from fossil fuels is perhaps the top challenge humanity faces.  The way this will get done is through creativity, innovation, technological breakthroughs and non-attachment to existing status quos. Sounds like something that Google is well prepared to do.  (Regular readers know that I have admired Google in the past; click on ‘Google’ in the archives at right).

Of course the traditional reaction to this announcement, mostly from those supposedly insightful “Wall Street Analysts” was to suggest the company was risking corporate focus on its’ core businesses.  Nonsense!  It was these types of conventional pundits that, a century ago suggested that the railroad companies were in the railroad and not transportation businesses.  Flying people in airplanes, nah, you guys are in the train business.  Using all your right of way real estate for development?  Nah, stick to the train business.

As readers of this column know, I have often suggested that the renewable energy marketplace presents the greatest wealth creation opportunity in humanity’s history.  Great fortunes are about to be made.  Think of the wealth that John D. Rockefeller created that has existed for generations.  When he started out the user base for oil was in the hundreds of thousands.  The user base for alternative energy right now is in the billions of people. The wealth created around alternative energy in the next 20-30 years will equal and probably dwarf the wealth created around computers.  It is the hugest financial opportunity in the world today.

Google is a company populated by thousands of very smart people, many of them engineers, all of whom work in a culture that values innovation and new ideas.  What better place to work on the urgent problem of renewable energy.  We cannot leave this issue with the traditional power and drilling companies because they are stuck in their own paradigms.  It is outside the box thinkers that will come up with the radical, transformative ideas.  Who would have thought that the bicycle repair shop owned by the Wright brothers would be the place where manned flight would be birthed?

The companies and individuals that develop the breakthroughs that save us from our deathly addiction to fossil fuels will be heroes.  In addition, they will be wealthy.  Why would any company that has the resources and also the brainpower not want to give it a try?

In speeches I give, I suggest that, in the last two decades, Western science has proven the validity of Eastern religion which is that everything is energy.  If everything is energy, why linger in this small, non-renewable part of energy called fossil fuels?  It is clear the energy sources we will be using in the decades ahead: terrestrial solar, space solar power, wind, wave, biomass, nuclear, and ultimately perhaps cold fusion.  What needs to be developed are the power conversion, storage and transmission technologies that will harness all these sources of power.  That will ultimately drive down the costs relative to fossil fuels.

The equation that Google is using is to create renewable energy that costs less than coal.  That will be easier to achieve than most pundits suggest.  In the 1860s, when oil was first discovered it was, in 2006 dollars, as expensive as it is today.  It was much more expensive as an energy source than wood or coal.  The price rapidly dropped in the following decades because of scale of production and delivery which then created market scale, which then drove down the costs even further. So when people talk about the relative expensive costs of wind and solar energy, they need to be told that oil was much more expensive than the energy sources that were used at that time.  Innovation, new technologies and market scale is the path.  Google seems to have shown they can do these very well.

Wouldn’t it be funny, if in 2015, the comment about Google was “Remember when search was their largest business?”               

On this blog, and at conferences I point to the fact that it is the cell phone that is the true global technology. I have written about the explosive growth and sheer numbers of devices, of the technological innovation and how the cell phone has found a seat at the table of major media.  OHA takes the logical next step which is to break up the walled gardens of carriers and software suppliers.  Incompatibility is at odds with a world of  ever increasing connectedness.  Universality is one of the touch stones of our wireless future.  Another is the ongoing commoditization of the entire business pushing costs ever lower for the consumer.  OHA will facilitate both of these inevitable trends.

Google of course is doing this for business reasons.  They hope to dominate the mobile advertising marketplace the way they currently dominate the on-line one.  In addition, they seem to have a strong desire to attack the business constructs of Microsoft and other companies that sell ...]]> Google has now made the long awaited announcement that it would be entering the wireless arena.  It was not a product, or “Google Phone” roll-out, but rather the announcement of OHA, or the Open Handset Alliance.  OHA(my choice to come up with an acronym as the full name sounds a bit too bureaucratic and almost Orwellian for me to type it a lot) is the next step in the globalization of connectivity and something I have anticipated and expected for a couple of years.

On this blog, and at conferences I point to the fact that it is the cell phone that is the true global technology. I have written about the explosive growth and sheer numbers of devices, of the technological innovation and how the cell phone has found a seat at the table of major media.  OHA takes the logical next step which is to break up the walled gardens of carriers and software suppliers.  Incompatibility is at odds with a world of  ever increasing connectedness.  Universality is one of the touch stones of our wireless future.  Another is the ongoing commoditization of the entire business pushing costs ever lower for the consumer.  OHA will facilitate both of these inevitable trends.

Google of course is doing this for business reasons.  They hope to dominate the mobile advertising marketplace the way they currently dominate the on-line one.  In addition, they seem to have a strong desire to attack the business constructs of Microsoft and other companies that sell proprietary software to individual users.

Taking a look at the growth of the Internet provides some direction as to the growth of the wireless world.  Subscription models have largely failed.  People expect content to be free and easily accessible.  As a result, advertising supported content and services has won the day.  So, think about mobile devices.  If people don’t want to pay for video, news, entertainment and information on the web, why do the wireless companies and their content suppliers think that people will pay for content on their phones?  Purchased downloads is one thing, but all else will ultimately be expected to be free.  

Currently handset makers and carriers are trying to control what gets on the phone.  That walled garden approach will fail in the future.  Think again about the Internet.  What happened to that walled garden called AOL where people paid to be included?  When was the last time you bought a computer and were limited to the software that the computer manufacturer said you could have on your computer?  Open access for all will ultimately win out.  Once the handset manufacturers run through all the cool got to have features like a music player, high resolution camera, large touch screens and such bells and whistles the marketplace will move on to more computer oriented values.  These include storage capacity, speed of use, download speeds, ability to have multiple functions open at once and ability to connect real time with a friends’ network regardless of hardware.

Where this is going to get extremely interesting and transformative is when the market forces now launched by Google intersect with a couple of other extremely interesting developments.  The first is the 10 to 100 fold increase in chip speed that is now being developed by chip manufacturers.  This of course will affect all content and multi-task functionality on wireless devices.  The second is the coming increase in data storage technology.  It is expected that a breakthrough in storage architecture could increase storage capacity by at first 10 and then 100 times.  This means that instead of 200 hours of video that is the current capacity of an iPod today, there could soon be 2,000 hours, and then 20,000 hours.  Of course when this happens there will be ever decreasing reasons to lug around a laptop, or even use a computer at all.  Just have a wireless device and an external back up hard drive.  This of course will trigger the development of devices that are larger than current smart phones, but smaller than a notebook computer.

The development of this new form of large ‘smart phone’ or small notebook computer seems certain. When wireless devices have hundreds of gigabytes of storage and can be much faster than the current generation of notebooks, there will be no need for a sizeable percent of the population to have a computer.  Those that create content, be it documents or graphics will still need the interface with laptops and desktops, and of course businesses will continue their usage of computers as we know them today, but many millions more may not.  I predict that within years most people will carry two devices.  One will be this new mini-notebook or maxi-phone and the other will be a small phone.  The third hardware component will be a back up hard drive that will also serve to integrate all the screens and electronics at the home or office.

Another way to look at this development is that there are approximately four times as many cell phones at use in the world as computers.  The OHA open source wireless platform, exponential progress in storage miniaturization and capacity, and exponential increase in processing speed will all merge together resulting in a global wireless connectivity of billions of portable computers.  We are rapidly moving toward the day when 50% of the world’s population will be carrying around portable computers that can communicate with each other.  The effects, consequences and possibilities of that truly boggle the mind.