I contributed last week to an event in London which was designed to imagine how the notion of the museum might change. The current model, which is about 150 years old, basically consists of a building with some stuff in it, arranged according to some organising principle. It is changing already in the face of [...]
Kenya’s mobile phone-enabled payment system M-Pesa has grown explosively over the last nine months, according to Russell Southwood’s Balancing Act newsletter, which has been tracking the African mobile and internet markets for something like four years now. According to the newsletter the operator, Safaricom, gained 150,000 users in the three months to June last year, [...]
I blogged last week about the potential impact of expensive energy on the future shape of the internet. Now it turns out that Sun has already started changing the design of its computer systems to favour efficiency rather than performance because of energy costs. It seems to have moved them to a different market space [...]
One of the most consistently interesting thinkers online about the long-term future of industrial society is John Michael Greer, who takes an impressively long-term and wide ranging (if also pessimistic) view of civilizational change. In his recent post Back Up The Rabbit Hole, he speculated on the way in which the ‘ultra cheap energy’ [...]
New word of the month is ‘iWar’, conjured up by Johnny Ryan of Dublin’s Institute of European Affairs in an article in Open Democracy. It describes “attacks carried out over the internet that target the consumer internet infrastructure”.
The first post I wrote on this blog, in April this year, was on the arts and technology consultancy Proboscis and their Snout collaboration, designed to help communities develop “environmental authoring” tools to monitor their local environments. Now Nokia has trialed a phone which would do some of the same things, including some environment monitoring, [...]
Trends and futures are related, of course, but they are used in different ways. Trends-watchers tend to be looking for short-run innovation opportunities in products and services. Futures is longer-term, or ought to be, and more about structural shifts, and should be more connected with strategy. The same underlying divers of change can lead to [...]
According to new figures from Ofcom, 4 out of 10 of British internet users now use social networking sites - and those that do spend more than 5 hours a month on social networking sites, and return 23 times a month. Usage is heavier than elsewhere in Europe, and above the USA, but behind [...]
A quick post to note the launch of Future Scanner, a site which scours the net for articles which include predictions with dates attached to them, and then organises them by year (up to 2020, and then ‘beyond’ 
and by category. It is still in beta-test.
Mobile payments have at last reached the stage in the UK where trials and pilots are starting. Barclays Bank, O2, and Transport for London has announced a trial of a combined transport/payments card in London (news report here), while RBS and MasterCard have announced a trial of a mobile debit card in London and Edinburgh [...]
