This morning I attended a technology seminar, with three leading figures from the world of technology journalism sharing their views of the future.  In my view, it’s vital that you always look ahead for the next big thing, or you end up like Nokia or Kodak, thinking that what exists today might last forever.

One of today’s panel members – Olivia Solon, Associate Editor of Wired Magazine – talked about the trend Collaborative Consumption.  In short terms, what this means is how spare capacity is mopped up by the crowd using the web.  Lots of examples of this are popping up all over, including car shares (one commuter one car who trades their free space), bike renting (let’s say someone rides to work and the bikes sits in a shed all day when it could be rented out), house sitting to name a few.  Capacity is made visible to the crowd either on a short term (one day), mid or long term basis.

She made an excellent supporting point around trust. I’ve been talking about TATT (Time, Attention, Trust and Transparency) for about two years now, believing them to the key social currencies.  If collaborative consumption is to be truly a success, then you are going to need to be pretty sure about the credentials of a stranger before you let them into your home, your car or have them riding away on your best bike!

Sites like e-bay and its payment platform – Paypal – build transparent trust by members giving feedback to build a reputation aswell as a pretty robust process to validate who you are are, before you can get a Paypal account.  This highly visible feedback reduces fears with other potential buyers and sellers.  It works well for e-Bay, so if collaborative consumption is to take off, how can demonstrate your trustworthiness in the future across multiple consumption plaftorms?  Such a thing doesn’t exist today.

If you think about all the on-line transactions you make (Amazon, i-Tunes, e-Bay, Tesco, Council Tax, Utilities) aswell as your social graph (social media) and then imagine all those transactions being aggregated in one place to build a trust rating which is effectively validated through multiple sources validating your public trust persona, then that could be a vision of what the future might look like. It would be like a visible credit report, buyer/seller report and assessment of you as an all round good egg, which is available to others.  That would be a big job, but not beyond the realm of impossibility given the amount of data that now exists.

If we’re truly going to switch from hyper-consumption to collaborative consumption, then the evidence of trustworthiness to strangers will become a big issue.  Let’s see who gets to market first.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to a private dinner with Dr. Andrew Sentance - who sits on the Bank of Englands monetary policy committee (MPC) – on a visit he made to Manchester earlier this week.

Meeting business leaders as part of his visit to the North West, he was interested to understand feedback about life on the street and hear directly how we felt the economy was doing, our outlook and perspective for the future. 

Articulate and brainy (why wouldn’t he be with a name like Sentance), he opened with a macro view on the global and UK economies. I’ve captured some of his key commentary in no particular order: -

• Commodity pricing remains a key issue (oil+gas).
• Interest rates do have to go up soon and “how to deploy the exit strategy” remains the key consideration without damage to the economy.  Perhaps in steps of 0.25%, travelling to 1% sometime over the next 12 months.
• The world is truly globalised now and it is difficult to act independently with so many chain reactions now built into the system.
• UK is in a recovery phase (as detailed by yesterday’s 0.5% rise in GDP) however the recovery is at different speeds, in different sectors.
• The 2.5% VAT rise is equal to a 1% reduction in wallet spend for the average consumer.
• Inflation remains a key long term concern for the economy.
• Exports continue to be in good shape with the weak £.  However, he did ask the views of the group about if the pound went up to the 1.25-1.30 range, would we see that as “damaging” – conclusion was no.
• Wage settlements continue to be inconsistent across sectors.  Some businesses opting to not offer increases, others awarding at RPI/CPI rate (up to 5%).

I asked whether the MPC took into account “natural disasters” in their forecasting.  It’s become clear now that a great deal of worldwide production is going to be impacted due to a lack of things following the disaster in Japan, such as micro-chips.  This inevitably may lead to a shortage of some goods in developed economies and therefore a potential to impact growth.  Sentace said the short supply may push prices up, therefore lifting selling prices, so my advice is ”buy it now” – for anything electronic!!

It also became apparent as there were a few businesses there which sold multi-nationally, that production by some major brands for developed economies is being capped in favour of developing economies like Russia, India and China (where there is a huge appetite for western goods and brands).  This is impacting on some of these goods entering the European supply chain.  For example, I didn’t realise that there was a shortage of pigment which car manufacturers use for painting cars, seems that one luxury car brand could only supply their cars in white for the forseeable future.  Interesting thought (guess what colour my new car is – that explains a lot).

It’s good to get these “think tank types” out.  Hearing real feedback from real businesses.  Having debate.  Listening to opinion and it’s a real value to meet other businesses from non-competing sectors to hear their view of the economy.  In a “sentance” – well worth the time investment.

I love to play with words.  One of my most recent creations which I used at the How-Do Brand on Demand event on Wednesday was “ME-conomics”. 

I used the word as a descriptor for the changing nature of mobile business, personalisation of goods, growth of personal branding and how marketeers need to pay attention to these trends in their marketing mix in order to monetise them (economics bit).

There was widespread agreement that the world is moving pretty quickly at the minute.  Mobile applications are motoring along at a terrific pace.  Innovation is rife.  Here’s a great factoid – 60% of Apple’s 2010 sales came from products that did not exist three years ago.  Scary!

Mobile-ME

Retailers in the states are now providing free wi-fi in store as a way of being able to geo-locate their customers, find out more about them and send hyper-local advertising to them, fire real-time coupons at their customers and track their physical paths through the store.  Interesting stuff, totally driven by the technology.  Mobile search gives local retailers a real chance for cut-through, as long as they get their proposition right.

Pay-Off

It’s evident that those businesses that get their plans shifted to accomodate the mobile revolution will be big winners in the game.  Mobile enabled websites, mobile enabled e-commerce, mobile enabled search.  I talked about the world shaking down to the big convenience platforms, Amazon, i-Tunes, Facebook, eBay – as they offer the ultimate in convenience to the attention poor individual on the move.

What’s clear, is that ME-conomics is a big trend.  There are other elements to it, I’m saving those for a keynote I’m doing in a couple of months in Berlin.  More to come.

“That was Easy.” This red button was the physical manifestation of an advertising slogan that office superstore giant Staples ran.  They ended up giving away millions of these little red buttons, which said the words when pressed.  Great, simple campaign.

Later this week, I’ll be delivering a keynote to a marketing conference in Manchester.  I’m focussing on convenience as one of the features of something I call the “expectation economy”.  That is, the changing face of why people buy from key platforms.  At home, Amazon, eBay, i-Tunes, Google and Facebook consume the bulk of our face time and are becoming our de-facto on-line shopping malls/social/search platforms.

They are shaking the on-line world down as they continue to consolidate, throw their net wider, provide new and additional services which makes life easier for people.  As an example, in September last year, Facebook started to sell credits in stores in the USA, in the same way you could buy mobile phone credit.  A potential game changing moment. Right now, they can only be used to buy apps or other in-game stuff, however it’s only a matter of time before Facebook becomes a fully blown trading platform in its own right, then what’s going to happen?

Inevitably, they’ll scoop up a process that is currently being transacted somewhere else. They’ll find a way to integrate into their social sphere.  They’ll make it easier for buyers with one-click.  They’ll make it mobile.  They’ll make it easy.  They realise that people are busy, moments are being maximised, the more folk can do on the move or with a mobile in their hand, the better.  Upgrades, last minute stuff, gift certificates, movement of money, you name it, I bet you’re going to see it at some point in the near future.  Perhaps Facebook credits may become a new global currency?

Mobile marketing.  Mobile search.  Mobile me.

The next decade will be the decade we remember for it’s advance in mobile technology.  Signalling the shift to location based shopping, services and convenience.  Apps are coming out by their droves and one that caught my eye recently was this one from Red Laser which I think gives an indication of where it’s all heading.  Using an i-Phone, you simply scan a products barcode, the app then identifies it and presents the current web pricing for that product from it’s database.  Instant price checking and hugely convenient.  Just one thing to do, scan the app.

From the user feedback so far, it seems the pricing isn’t perfect in their back end database, that can soon be corrected.  It’s the process that interests me more. Another shift in the way people shop, instant comparison pricing and perhaps a decision to not “buy it now” but buy it when you get home, if the price is significantly different.  Retailers watch out.

Mobile search is where it’s going to be at, presenting your website in a mobile friendly way.  Manchester Search specialists theEword have already cottoned onto this and have a tool in development which will effectively convert your site into a mobile friendly version, which I consider to be an essential step for all businesses moving forward.  Pay per click and search engine marketing also takes on a new persona, with specific activity needing to be done in parallel to your conventional SEM.

What’s evident is that the future is about mobile, the customer journey, convenience, location based marketing and immediacy.  If you’re not working on “mobilising” your digital resources, you should be, it’s where it’s all heading.

I’ve got the Mr. Sheen out on my crystal ball, given it a good clean, stared deeply into it and seen the future.  Saturdays lottery numbers are 7, 9, 22, 28, 35, 42 – buy a ticket now!

Seriously, thought I’d have a go at laying down some thoughts about where I think the world is moving for 2011.  In no particular order (and they may change as this is my first bash after thinking about this on the way home from work last night).

1. Crowd-forcing. Inspired by Crowd-sourcing.  The crowd pulling together to pressurise/threaten brands through negative on-line chatter and peer pressure.
2. Digi-paranoia. Fuelled by the Wikileaks scandal, people will become more paranoid about their on-line breadcrumb trail.  They’ll protect more of their digital assets, through pre-approving and using trusted platforms.
3. Talent thaw. 2010 has been a tough year for finding good people, the hatches were well and truly buttoned down and movements frozen.  As confidence returns, we’ll start to see the talent market thaw.
4. Life caching. As micro-moments continue to be recorded in the cloud by mobile devices, we’ll record/upload more data electronically than at any other time in mankind (despite paranoia trend, sheer qty of GB/TB on the web will make 2011 a record year).
5. Friend Filtering. 2011 will be the year of quality over quantity.  New social media start-up Path hits this trend, limiting your network to just 50 key people.  Competitiveness for this new inner-circle will drive new behaviour and take us back to “Face Friends” who matter, rather than Facebook Friends by the thousand.”
6. Centre-fall. De-volving from the middle, whether that be government or big business.  Applications in the cloud will allow businesses to challenge their conventions and methodologies of working.  The drive to competitiveness and the desire to see people take responsibility, will mean the hub will become less important than the spokes and rim.
7. De-cluttering. Removing things that crowd out our thoughts/consume our time (see next point).  Prioritising those things that truly add value.  Marketeers need to take note as traditional methods of interruptive marketing are becoming less and less effective, particularly in B2B.
8. Time poor war. Time continues to be the worlds most scarce commodity for the masses.  Time improvement tools just mean we are working more, not reducing work-time spent pursuing happiness or joy.  Generation X are kicking back against this as the last generation which may rescue the lost generation of “Y”‘s, before the values of deep friendship, downtime, family time are confined to words in wikipedia.  Hyper-tasking will be the new multi-tasking.
9. Relevancy. Staying relevant in peoples lives.  Having just the right amount of interaction.  Choosing moments.  Keeping an acceptable proximity.
10. Social Media Revolution. Wider business will take more notice of social media channels for conversations and relationship generation now all the glittery buzz is dying down.  It was never designed to be a transactional channel but a way of generating proximity, feedback and conversations with individuals.  As new business becomes harder (less public sector expenditure to cushion your overhead), new conversations and contacts will be key and more businesses will get moving with new conversation channels.
11. Trust and Transparency. A continuing theme for me.  People are more willing to trust a strangers view than a big brand ad when it comes to products and services.  User generated content will continue to grow exponentially, more people will blog, leave content on sites like Tripadvisor and Reevoo, use electronic platforms to distribute buzz (+ or -).  2010 was the year we’ll all remember for Wikileaks.  Wikileak yourself or your business, compare that with the messages you send on your marketing materials and ask yourself are the two things consistent.

What are your thoughts? What would you add?

Earlier today on Twitter, I posted this infographic about how social media has emerged over the last ten years or so (I love infographics by the way). 

It’s a game changer and has led to a re-configuration of the world and we are all living through it, some actively, some as bystanders.  What I think is most interesting is the emergence of all these businesses which have entered the market in the last ten years- Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube.

Pre- 2000, many of these didn’t exist as businesses.  If you have a look back at the infographic, you can  how transient social media has been as a technology.  A continuum of ideas, start-ups and failures waiting for their moment for social media traction to grip.  And it has.

I began to think what the next ten years of that infographic might look like and how the worlds wiring is going to change again?  Augmented reality linked to geo-location may take us on a whole new journey of interaction and uncover more possibilities to stay in contact, in real time.  Mobile phone tariffs may offer gigabytes of data in their tariffs, not megabytes.  Mobile phones may need terabytes of disk space and ultra-high performance batteries to keep up with us and our need to update. 

Life-caching is at an unprecedented level.  A detailed breadcrumb trail on you and your movements on a moment by moment basis is being recorded in the cloud.  Life is being recorded in incredible detail for future historians to marvel over, they will be able to replay your life in microscopic detail.  What you did, who you knew, where you went.   Want to see what I mean?  Create a book using Twournal of your Twitter feed.

All I know is, you haven’t seen anything yet in terms of where the cloud or social media platforms may take us.  It’s a hell of a time to be alive to witness it.  Here’s an article on Harvard Business Review which outlines some of the upcoming social media trends for 2011, have a quick look and see whether you’re geared up to be involved.

Chatting with a colleague about “businesses or things that exist today, that didn’t exist when we were growing up” yesterday, got me thinking about eBay. Founded in 1995, it’s now part of our everyday language and has a next to near perfect business model, connecting millions of people together into a trading community, like no other.

Imagine a business, that doesn’t make anything, doesn’t have a warehouse or a product, doesn’t ship anything, yet turns over $6bn a year.  Yes, please, I’d like some of that. Particularly when you consider how much they make per transaction.  Let me give you an example.  Mrs Jones recently sold a pair of designer shoes on e-Bay.  She’d bought them from new, worn them twice (typical) and then decided they were a big too big for her.  So, time to get rid.

Working out the fees that eBay collected on the overall transaction – 13.5% – it made me think what a money making machine the platform is.  What value did they add?  They connected two buyers together and provided an electronic trading platform.  We all know, that this represents pennies in transactional costs, yet the cash margin they made was around £33 on sale item of £249, they take a percentage from everything, including the financial payment through their payment platform – Paypal.  Not bad considering we packaged and shipped the goods!

I’m sure the average UK IT distributor, who has to carry stock, fund a warehouse, provide logistics, credit and the like, yet still do this with a cost structure of around 6-8 per cent and an overall trading gross margin which sometimes doesn’t even make double digits, would give their right arm for it.

And they continue to go from strength to strength.  The trusted and familiar nature of the trading platform means that it, along with Amazon, has almost become the default website for price checking anything.  eBay sells as much brand new stuff nowadays as it does used, it genuinely is a storefront for merchants selling goods of all shape and size.  And, its scale is such a size that it would be difficult for any market entrant to challenge them.

They are a great example of a business that took advantage of the here and now, back in 1995.  They had an idea, saw the gap, went away, developed it, stuck with it through the hard times and saw it grow into a global busineness.  There’s lessons there for any business, some of which are: - Always think ahead.  Watch for social trends. Preserve time to think.  Challenge market conventions and disrupt where necessary.  What could be your next big thing?

Please put your phone, your Blackberry, your i-Pad, your laptop into this bag.  We’ll give it you back in 24 hours, now off you go…..

Is your heart racing at the prospect of not being able to be connected to the matrix or are you relishing a break from tech?  It kind of happened to me over the last couple of days, when my Blackberry decided to give up unexpectedly.  This meant no work e-mail on the move and no phone calls or texts, out or in.  To top it off couldn’t get my laptop to connect to the hotel network either.  I was in a digital ghetto.

It felt strange.  Walking along the street with nothing to read, no one to call and no buzzing or red lights flashing at me.  It also made me realise just how many people walk down the street with their eyes fixed on a screen as they go about their day.  Random walking I call it as you invariably have to sidestep them.

First thing I did this morning?  Out of the hotel, straight to Starbucks, log on, sync up and plug back in.   And breathe……  It’s amazing that in the last five years or so how life has changed.  It’s a far cry from my calling back to the office for my messages from a phone box (that was only in 1995),  just as carphones started taking off.  Look how far (or not) we’ve all come.

Good or bad, It’s where we are.  I guess the lesson here is about whether you are a slave to the network or a master of it. Most would probably say we’re slaves to it now, it certainly feels like that.  I think doing without the e-mail was doable, being without a mobile phone was by far the more uncomfortable of the sensations.

Think forward twenty years.  What’s the world going to look like then?   Superfast networks, augmented reality, real time everthing.  Hyperspeed awaits.  Access will be like Oxygen to Generation Y and Z, being plugged in will be the default state to keep up.   Information will be even more bite size, Twitter 2 will probably come out with a 70 character limit and every second of downtime will be squeezed, optimised and maximised. 

So, whose for chucking all those things in the bag for a couple of days and going cold turkey with your tech?  Go on, I dare you….

“Now everybody, before you enjoy your desert, let me show you a short film which shows you the surgical procedure I used to insert the implant into the eye”. Not many people can stomach the sight of surgery at the best of times, but between your dinner courses, that’s a new one on me.  However, that’s what happened to me on Monday night at a dinner hosted by leading Consultant Opthalmologist Paulo Stanga, to showcase the pioneering surgery being carried out at Manchester Eye Hospital (you can read a bit more about the procedure by clicking on the link).

Giving someone back their sight is a pretty special thing.  This new technology – developed by California based medical company – Second Sight – aims to do that.  Imagine a pair of dark glasses with a small sixty pixel camera hidden within the frame, attached to a transmitter. The transmitter sends the images to a small receiver implanted within the eye and attached to the retina.  As the camera transmits the images, the electrical signals are then passed up the fibre optic nerve to the brain, where they are decoded.  Clever stuff.  In reality, this low resolution image would allow someone one stage away from total blindness, with only recognition of light, to see shape outlines or follow  a white line on the floor.  Mr Stanga showed us the full video of the procedure and results on some of his pilot cases at the eye hospital.

What fascinated me was the technology behind it. Why only 60 pixels for example?  Answer – This is the limit of the actual transmitter size and the actual number of electrodes you can safely fit onto it without incurring additional heat within the eye.  Could the retina or fibre optic nerve carry higher resolutions if the technology were improved? – of course.  Tonnes of questions were coming to my mind.

One thing that I did think of was this. If this camera device is transmitting electrical signals to the brain to decode, why couldn’t this technology be used to input other information into the brain?  Let me explain.  In a world where geotagging is now the norm, where google are mapping the world in photo form or 3d flyrounds is considered part of everyday life, why not use augmented reality to input both sets of data to the brain to process?  This would potentially give a blind person a blended image, of real time and virtual time.  With the virtual information being taken from a small geotagged wireless processor attached to the subject somewhere.  It sounds  a bit crazy,  however seeing this effective “input device” to the brain just made me think that all the location based technology that exists, might have uses in the medical sector, such as this.  In my mind, it was almost like the human equivalent of a USB port.

Bearing in mind that this is first generation technology, you have to say that it is a breakthrough.  If it can be commercialised after trials, it will impact many thousands of blind people across the globe.  As the processors are improved and more electrodes added, image resolution can improve and vision along with it.  What made me really excited is that this is being pioneered in Manchester, by Mr Stanga.  For the region to truly be considered a technology hotbed, we need more innovation like this.  Whilst the core technology is from the states, the surgical procedure is being further developed and refined in the eye hospital under his watchful eye.   It was well worth sitting through dinner (including the gorey bit) to hear this story,  I’m always in awe of people like Mr Stanga who devote their lives to medical science, putting patients first and driving for new answers.  A very genuine and clever man.