One of the key elements of writing scenarios is accepting that you are describing people of the future who will most likely not share your assumptions about the world. Their society will look and act differently. Technology will solve new problems and cause new complications. They won’t be, in many ways, like you and me. This is scary, because it makes us feel obsolete and more likely to avoid the real implications of where the world is heading. Nobody likes a bracing shot of mortality with their futures work – but that’s what we get.

Don’t believe that your world will one day look foreign? Watch this group of Quebec schoolkids try to somehow fathom the bizarre world that you and I must have inhabited.

What, after all, could this strange, backward group of people been thinking to be playing with this absurdly inferior technology?

I really wish that the title of the above post wasn’t merely a snarky way to call attention to the fact that with hedge fund investment deals like the ones Twitter and Facebook are touting, we’re back to the good old days of irrational tech exurberance. I suppose if it were true, I wouldn’t be typing but would instead be happily playing my absurdly large collection of vintage Stratocasters and D’angelico New Yorker archtops through my vintage Fender Twin amps in our chateau in the Loire valley.

Guitaristic dreams aside, we seem to be back into an interesting of period that recalls the halcyon days of the Dot Com Bubble 1.0. Back then, the glorious days of new-car-smelling Porsche Boxsters, spiffy leather jackets and brand-new bulky cell phones, you didn’t have to prove any piffling details like how much profit you made in order for your company to be worth bazillions of dollars. You even got to say things like, “We’re the company of the future, although we are still searching for a business model.”

Ah, the good ol’ days of making $75,000 just for knowing how to spell “HTML.”

Facebook’s interesting new “valuation” at $50 billion is raising the eyebrows of a few people who understand the basics of how a company’s value is typically computed. So says William Cohen in the New York Times:

Last August, Facebook was valued at $27 billion and now it’s $50 billion — for a company with a reported $2 billion in revenue and negligible profits. If General Electric, with 2010 revenue of around $150 billion, traded at a similar multiple of revenue, it would be worth $3.75 trillion instead of $200 billion. Facebook is now considered to be worth more than Time Warner, DuPont and Goldman’s rival Morgan Stanley.

Something is definitely up. This is why we were intrigued to discover that there is actually more IPO deal activity now than during the late 90s!

Can I have a Porsche Boxster please?

First, a headline from the Motley Fool: Cisco Taps Google for an Office Assault. Sounds serious. We think it is, too, and for a variety of reasons.

You may notice that the tech sector has been experiencing a wave of mergers and acquisitions, all angling to find a future of profitability in a world where our information needs all converge into multi-use devices and mobile infrastructure. Whether it’s smart phones, search, or telepresence, it seems that when one megacompany is involved, they are ALL involved.

Just consider the short- and long-term implications of the Cisco Cius – a Google Android-run tablet computer that will allow entreprise-grade video, video and data collaboration.

Business-wise, does your company just specialize in one form of telecommunication? You had better have a serious commitment to a special niche – finance, healthcare, defense, or other – because the mass market will be eaten by some very, very large players.

In terms of business communications, email, phone, and video will finally come together into one smooth package. Meetings will be infused with all kinds of rich content. Quick email messages (so easy to misconstrue!) will likely be replace by short video bursts in which your facial expression will be transmitted along with your words! Collaboration between colleagues around the globe will finally become easy enough to make telecommuting more of a reality than ever.

In this is just one device – think of what lies ahead in the next ten years, both for the companies involved and for those who will use these products and services.

Tell me that when every kid has one of these that education won’t change forever.

Also, let me know how colleges will keep charging $1000 per semester for books when no printing is required.

This is the stuff that makes you say, “Awesome, I think the future just arrived.”

Kno Movie from Kno, Inc. on Vimeo.

Often, I think the 21st century may look increasingly like the 19th. Sure, there’s the dominance of coal in the developing world. There’s unprecedented globalization. European disintegration. Resurgence of local agriculture. All this, plus world health is considerably better. Not a bad future, necessarily.

In the musical world, there is a recent event that hearkens back to the 19th century days of the player piano, but will 21st century elegance and complexity. Pat Metheny, one of the top guitarists and composers in the world, has experimented for years with MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), the technology that allows musicians to connect directly to synthesizers, samplers, and recording devices. This year, his vision has gone steampunk – the Orchestrion project, a centrally-coordinated digital orchestra that triggers actual instruments instead of their synthesized counterparts.

Watch the video – this is an incredibly beautiful sounding vision by a mad professor bent on calling back a more elegant age.

Beats talking about housing and finance for a moment.

I answered that question in the negative out of pure instinct, but when you hear that Lulu is already signed on for a publishing distribution deal for iPad, you think – oh yeah, once again Apple doesn’t make devices, they make new business models. And exceedingly few companies are comfortable in that game.

Andy Ihnatko at the Chicago Sun-Times is just flat -out ebullient, in way that transcends fanboy excitement:

In fact, after a week with the iPad, I’m suddenly wondering if any other company is as committed to invention as Apple. Has any other company ever demonstrated a restlessness to stray from the safe and proven, and actually invent things?

Good question: Is your company restlessly invented new things?

With a hat tip to August Jackson, Lloyd’s of London schools us further in the outlandish corporate risk due to the telephone.

Had I not seen this, we might have started using such dangerous technology recklessly.

Yes, it sounds dorky, but these are the weak signals that portend the coming revolution in telepresence.

Will h.264 prevail? What about Ogg Theora? This may seem like a strange debate for anyone not deeply involved in technology analysis for enterprise-quality video, but consider Cisco’s recent purchase of Tandberg, Logitech’s purchase of strange bedfellow LifeSize – there is a clear megatrend for video becoming a mission-critical technology for running businesses and keeping in touch with friends.

But many chess pieces are about to be moved. Check it out.

Courtesy of Forrester Research, a great graphic describing the innovation of the music industry, from 25 billion euros in 2000 down to 10 billion euros today.

Competitive Futures has been using the music industry as the poster child for strategic disruption since the beginning of the decade. I remember discussions with music executives around the turn of the millennium. Mostly, they were caught in the “moral” indignation of “kids” “stealing” music when they should be paying $18 (closer to $30 in Europe!) for static music media.

My favorite discussion was with an industry exec who attempted to sell me on the notion that “Compared with going to the movies, which is $8, a CD is a great investment because you can play it again and again. It probably should be $100 or something.” Nice. Try.

The conclusion: just because you don’t want to face reality doesn’t make it have less impact.

It’s Thanksgiving week here in the United States, and I am very grateful to have found a video clip that features three of my favorite things:

1. Music technology
2. Weird Al Yankovic
3. Analytical tools to understand trends

You’ll admit, the Venn Diagram of such varying interests have a tiny intersection, so personally I’m going to enjoy it.

Here’s why the story of Auto-Tune is of interest to intelligence and decision making types. There’s nothing particularly universal about the software itself – it’s a “plugin” used for digital music production for the correction of vocals. If you sing out of tune, Auto-Tune drags you back into A440 pitch, using effects that range from imperceptible to robotic. As of 2009, the term “Auto-Tune” is a verb, and adjective and an Internet meme, for the reasons given in the video below. Unbeknown to the masses who know the effect through artists like T-Pain and The Gregory Brothers, the effect has been in use since 1997. Only now has it come to the cultural forefront. Why?

• Evolution of Auto-Tune from hardware to a software plugin usable with digital audio workstations
• Drop in price of Auto-Tune
• Increase in processing power and bandwidth of computing and the Internet in general
• Proliferation of free social media sites such as YouTube and MySpace

In short, the technology got cheaper, easier to use, and easier to distribute. This has led to the proliferation of an “Internet meme,” an idea that virally spawns a burst of creativity around the world on the same theme. What I love about this video from Rocketboom is their description of the four stages of an Internet meme, offering us a certain level of predictability for future memes. The stages are:

1. Introduction
2. Overexposure
3. Parody and remix
4. Equilibrium

You may not connect Lolcatz or dramatic chipmunk with economic forecasting or product management, but at Competitive Futures, we see significant similarities. Short-term fads and memes regularly invade the public consciousness, and as a decision maker you must understand their dynamics. Is green business a meme created by the media, or is it driven by structural factors? What about “ethical business,” is that just a popular reaction to the scandal in the financial world, or a development in the world of management? Is “collaboration” a marketing meme to describe the same old information technologies, or is it truly a driver of business value in the next decade?  We recommend that you collect a variety of data-driven trends to help your analysis – preferably trends that are under-reported and thus immune to the dynamics of Internet- or media-driven memes.

While you consider such heady stuff on the way into a long weekend, think it over with the Gregory Brothers, the world’s most awesome political-remix-Auto-Tuners:

The future of video conferencing: having a physical representation of you in a room, a mannequin with your face digitally projected onto it.

Creepy? Uh, yes, that’s a word that comes to mind. But people in a few years may look for all kinds of ways to enhance long-distance communications, and this may not be as disturbing.

In the meantime, it’s an interesting technology in a phase of rapid growth.

Nokia is the poster child for futures thinking at the corporate level. They pulled off the amazing feat of transitioning their company from logging supplies, rubber boots and toilet paper over to cell phones, spurred by the transformative event of the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union. (How did they pull this off? I detail it in my book “Future Inc.”)

Finland in general, due to their somewhat obscure position in Europe and the humility of being regularly invaded by Swedes and Russians alike for centuries, has become REALLY good at foresight. Thus, it’s no surprise to see Nokia’s vision for our digital lives in 2015 laid out in beautiful graphical scenarios as in the video below.

Further to our series of “Forecasting Works” blog posts, dig these ads for AT&T from 16 years ago, 1993. They forecast, based on their own knowledge of technology and some educated guesses:

• E-books
• Telepresence
• EZ-Pass digital toll collection
• Online concert ticket sales
• In-car GPS navigation

Were they completely accurate in these visions? Not entirely, but you’ll have to admit that it is all frighteningly close.

They engaged in a rational process of thinking about the impact of current trends, and it helped light the way.

You can do likewise.

We forecast the progression of these technologies some years ago for some clients. Nice to see wireless power promising us a future without batteries (and likely with some other unintended consequences.)

So Google is coming out with its own operating system, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone. It will likely be lightweight, simple, cool and functional like pretty much everything they do. And also evident is the fact that Microsoft should now be hyperventilating, as this development takes direct aim at its aging business model while also pointing at the future of computing.

Google is now threatening to bust the trust owned by the world’s richest man. You may remember a fantatastic, precient essay by Neal Stephenson entitled “In the Beginning Was the Command Line,” in which the author of Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash pointed out the near absurdity that the world’s wealthiest businessman made his money selling operating systems, as opposed to chemicals or railroads or minerals or something real and industrial. The untold riches in the production of user interfaces really did seem surreal at the time.

If you think about it, though, their business model was strikingly industrial in the Henry Ford, mass market vein. In the Golden Age of Microsoft, computers all hungered for standardization and interoperability if they were to function as something other than an electric paper weight. Whoever could forge that infrastructure could make stupid amounts of money – not unlike the railroad or the telephone. Not only did the infrastructure model pay off for Microsoft, they also harnessed Henry Ford’s mass production model, shipping out millions of individual boxes of “software” to individual users about the globe. It “scaled up” but at massive profit to the manufacturer.

And now you can officially say the 20th century is over. Even Microsoft, a digital age company, has succumbed to the new business models of the future. Google’s new operating system is harnessing all the aspects of the next generation business model. Google OS will be free, perfect for a variety of small, light devices intended to access the internet and cloud-based services. It’s not that you won’t be able to run Microsoft’s operating system and software tools – it’s just that they will no longer be the only game in town. Their competition will need to come from innovation, customization, and service rather than size, exclusivity, and scarcity that stems from limited technologies.

Record companies have learned this the hard way.

Newspapers are learning this the hard way.

Telecom is learning this the hard way.

No doubt, large and unwieldy, Microsoft will learn it the hard way as well.

Now…what about your industry? What will it need to learn? And will you be proactive, or will you be happier learning it the hard way?

The national pastime is now watching financial indicators reach the lows of the decade. It’s getting boring.

FAR BETTER is to see what IS going to create the next economy – entrepreneurialism. The next economy won’t be stimulated into existence, it will be built by entrepreneurs. Yes, that intrepid spirit of putting your money and time into businesses that do little but eat money and time, in the hopes that one day you will change the world – or at least turn a profit.

My colleague, the intelligence thoughtleader and Enterprise 2.0 guru August Jackson dragged me out to a mixer for group I didn’t know – Tech Cocktail. You might think that an event dedicated to technology startups would be morose in this supposedly capital-scarce, depressed economy. Surprisingly, the mood was gleeful, far more reminiscent of Monica-Lewinsky-era Washington, when cell phones were novel, Napster brought you the world’s music guilt-and-compensation free, and people were just SURE that www.e-spatulas.com was going to set the world on fire.

Wait, haven’t we learned ANYTHING since 1998? Shouldn’t we have figured out to not trust the flowing drinks, the meeting of new people, the launching of strange sounding, internet-based services, since this irrational exuberance brought us Enron and Global Crossing? Isn’t getting excited about tech companies better suited to an era of high profits, financial trickery, cheap illusions?

No, this is still where the future’s at. Sure, nobody was trying to deal with clean water, climate change or healthcare, the likely shapers of our destiny, but it’s the attitude here that is so important. Check out a few of the players:

• The Social Collective, a group the builds online communities to improve the value of conferences
• Localist, a one-stop shop to advertise local cultural events
• DeGeeked, a website dedicated to answering the simplest, most inane questions for tech n00bs
• GeniusRocket, a service to link brand builders and artists

What struck me was that this time around, all of the entrepreneurs were prepared to discuss viable business models. They knew where the money would come from, and were even realistic about their projections. Today, it’s OK to base a business off traffic and revenue from ads, even if it means you won’t be ultimately buying a Gulfstream 5 from your income. The rest generally knew who their target markets would be. These details seem to be all the difference between this round of innovation and 1999, when sites like www.goatclick.com went for $127.50 a share, and the CEO said “We’re still looking for a business model.”

I don’t care whether any of these specific businesses rescues the economy. What strikes me as important is that America is still hosting these types of events, where people come together excited to talk about building new services, manufacturing new goods, solving real problems and hopefully creating jobs. This is the only spirit that EVER builds economies.

We’re spending so much time examining the collapse, it’s time we get excited about the recovery. I know I am.

Many people on the Interwebs are becoming exercised about the new terms of service of Facebook:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

On one hand, this does sound a bit like King Henry VIII on The Tudors, granting himself powers over all matters royal, legal, theological and temporal and starting a new church all at once. This blog, for example, gets posted to my personal Facebook account: can Facebook now make derivative products of ALL futurists on Facebook, print a compendium of foresight blogs? (Who knows, maybe it would be cool?) But it sounds like a lot of power.

On the other hand, I saw one young person comment, “You probably should expect anything you put on the Internet to be available for free, forever.” This is probably the more rational approach.

As Gerd Leonhard is fond of saying, “Compensation, not control.”

Gerd Leonhard is one of the hardest working guys in the world right now, criss-crossing the globe and trying to figure out the future of making money off music, books, movies, and other content. (Guys like me really appreciate that!)

He has noticed that the “sue the customer” trick didn’t work (ahem) and that a new business model for content is badly needed.

Here, his mantra is “compensation, not control.” Watch the whole thing:

The Department of Defense has put out a request for proposal for a technology company to create a chatbot application to simulate parental response so children of deployed service members in the United States could have the “experience” of talking with their parents:

We are looking for innovative applications that explore and harness the power of advanced interactive multimedia computer technologies to produce compelling interactive dialogue between a Service member and their families via a pc- or web-based application using video footage or high-resolution 3-D rendering. The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics. For instance, a child may get a response from saying “I love you”, or “I miss you”, or “Good night mommy/daddy.”

I leave the commentary to you.

Ah, I finally understand why Apple left my new MacBook disturbingly free of FireWire ports. USB 3.0 will be considerably faster.

Sounds awesome.

These are the kinds of cool things you can do when your country is:

a) small

b) starting an infrastructure from scratch after Soviet occupation

According to Raul Kaidro, spokesman of the SK Certification Center, which issues personal ID cards in Estonia, security will not be an issue as the cell phone, “is the most secure way to authenticate digital signatures.”

What does this mean for large countries for whom this would be punishingly expensive and/or difficult? As American, I feel like we won’t win the science fair this year…

Since they began to find profitable applications ten years ago, it has been fascinating to the see the degree to which RFID tags are being used in a variety of convenience-enhancing applications. Don’t stop for toll roads! No need to swipe your card! Just get near enough for us to scan you, and you’re on your way

.Naturally, this has an unintended consequence: human being are generating massive amounts of data about their behavior, from travel patterns to shopping preferences. These data are being collected by central databases, both by governments and private entities. Free democracies have certain implicit and explicit expectations of privacy, but we are at the point of unprecedented technological power in tracking human beings and most everything they do.

Dialogue is in order – we need to decide what we feel about this, what we expect; our values of right and wrong.

Some have already started: France’s Le Figaro newspaper has an article this morning about how the rail company is sounding the alarm that it cannot necessarily guarantee “anonymous” travel when using the regular RFID-chipped NaviGo pass.

This has led to a higher paid, but anonymous version of the card called “Navigo Decouverte.” But also it leads to a polemic. Is our privacy ours, or must we purchase it just as we purchase other goods and services? Are our laws made with enough foresight to handle the challenges these technologies may pose to liberty and open society?

It’s nice to see that France is paying attention. Let’s dialogue!

More insightful stuff from Gerd Leonhard on the future of media, which is useful the day after the Tribune Company melts down.

Great point: water is technically “free” in the developed world, but the global water industry is worth $100 billion, four times the size of the music industry.

Just because a business model blows up doesn’t mean the service no longer has billions of dollars in value

Click To Play

Steve Clemons runs The Washington Note, one of the truly essential blogs for anyone who has an interest in America’s foreign policy.

Clemons thinks like a natural futurist, always considering strategic trends in a holistic, intellectually honest manner. But he’s also is interested in new technologies like Facebook and Twitter that will connect people around the world in a way that impacts America’s diplomacy. Cutting edge stuff. Check out this speech on social media from the New America Foundation:

Look, I am not a techno-utopian. I don’t look to gadgets to save humanity – not biotech, not nanotech, not

IT.

But I’m just a man. I can’t help the technolust that besets you when you witness the curved iMac prototype.

KidTechBlog from Singapore details 70 sexy gadgets you haven’t heard of (yet).

Hard times sure can spur innovative action. The current economic chaos could be complemented by some tight, disciplined, creative thinking.

France is in the same hot water as America when it comes to stagnant economic growth and teetering banks. Housing sits vacant or unsold, cars are stuck in the show rooms. While they haven’t had the spectacular fireworks of watching their governments purchase twelve failed banks, the average Frenchmen knows that the status quo won’t endure.

Today, president Nicolas Sarkozy unveiled a major step in the spirit of innovation, France’s digital economy 2012 plan. This program will offer the French people 150 ways to transition to a digital lifestyle and workstyle in the hopes of creating new markets, launching new companies, and ultimately spurring economic growth in a country of crippling social obligations and sub-2% GDP progress. In the next three years, we’ll see a major push toward converting to digital television signal, 100% penetration of broadband internet, the sale of analog TV frequencies to new users, and more.

I believe that Korea was at this level about three years ago, but never mind that. It’s an important move, one that will have dividends.

France has a funny approach to technology leapfrogging. Those who lived in France prior to the Internet remember a revolutionary device known as Minitel, run entirely by France Telecom’s Soviet-style business/politburo, that provided many of our favorite Internet services (stock trades, plane tickets, sports info, etc) as far back as the 1980s. It was way, way ahead of its time. Then, in true French style, the whole country celebrated this world beating progress by tucking in for a nine course meal, talking about how they got there before the Germans, going on strike, and doing nothing for around a decade while the Internet rendered it obsolete.

If you find this a grotesque caricature of French technology policy, have a look at their defense technology after 1918. Having finally beaten back the Prussians, they innovated all sorts of munitions, communications, and aerospace technology. In the 1920s and 1930s, France was a scientific and cultural hotbed, and everybody was pretty impressed with themselves, right up until the moment they discovered that the Panzer tank was even better technology. Historically, the French love to prove they are world class – look at their high-speed trains – but don’t necessarily want to trade their nine weeks of vacation for jittery paranoia in order to stay on top.

This is hard to argue with.

Socio-technological stereotypes aside, I take this as a pretty good sign that France will step up to the plate to compete on the world stage again. It’s right on schedule.

The guys over at Busted Tees have got an amusing shirt depicting the sad fate of our favorite technologies. I may have to own this one.

According to the Chinese government, the total number of internet users will pass 210 million this year, finally catching up to the United States.

Impressive enough, with lots of strategic implications for businesses and governments just on its face.

Cross reference this with the next-generation capabilities of IPv6 architecture, which will allow central governments unprecedented control of who gets what information and how they get it.

Now, this needs some heavier discussion.

-Garland

Some people are way handier than I am. Some efficiency geeks in California have hacked their Toyota Prius, enabling it to get 100 miles per gallon.

The upgrade invoved adding inexpensive lead-acid batteries and
"some innovative software" to fool the car’s computerized controls into using
more of the energy stored in the batteries.

I was NOT good enough in chemistry or physics class to just tinker with the software that regulates the freaking electricity in my car, but these guys claim it’s only a $5,000 investment to get a lifetime of 100 miles per gallon.

Since 95% of the remaining petroleum is stored under Middle East countries that keep exploding, perhaps this is  a small price to pay and a smart strategy for the future.