There’s another kerfuffle about getting rid of plastic bags, since one of the government’s waste advisers has suggested that government plans to ban plastic bags, or charge for them, are a diversion from more pressing environmental issues. While it is true that plastic bags represent only a small amount of waste, or of oil use, [...]
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 [...]
Suddenly my reader is full of lists of trends - this one spotted by Dave Birch at Digital Money Forum, about the trends shaping the European payments market. The headline seems to be that it is going digital - as you would expect, but only slowly.
The news that the UK Competition Competition has broadly - I’m paraprasing - found, at least provisionally, that everything is pretty much OK in the world of Britain’s supermarkets reminds me of the trouble with competition economists: they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
What happens if the pervasive chemicals in the everyday products we buy and use are the reason that we generally feel below par so much of the time? It could cause a backlash by consumers who increasingly regard their well-being as important to them. The thought comes both because of the wave of stories about [...]
I spent Friday at an event in Reading organised by the Sustainable Development Commission to explore the sustainable future of the retail sector. Easy to imagine that in the coming world of more expensive energy, increased transparency, tighter borders and tighter money, maybe there isn’t one, at least not in a form similar to that [...]
There’s so much ‘noise’ coming out of the music industry sector, pun not intended, that it is still hard to discern what the trends are, but one seems to be becoming clearer by the day: the half-century long boom in long-format music, which has made the industry so profitable, is coming to an end. We’re [...]
Weak signals are trends which are tiny, hiding in small subcultures or social groups, at which on the face of it seem downright odd when first explained. (But then again, there’s a famous futures quote from James Dator which says that “”Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous.” 
Is there a [...]
Tesco’s business decisions tend to be informed by a monitoring of consumer trends, and their latest acquisition (of the gardening centre chain Dobbies) is in line with this.
A couple of recent posts from the Core 77 design blog tell complementary stories about the future of street vending machines. They will be more responsive to the ambient environment around them, and also less resource hungry.
