2013 and all that......

Earlier this week Chinwag did a Crystal Balls event, looking at the world out 5 years +. Quite an interesting panel too (Chinwag has the links to their webpages):

Jonathan Mitchener - Futurologist & Principal Research Scientist, Devices, BT

Simon Collister - Head of Digital – Consumer Practice, Weber Shandwick Simon Collister

Jamie Coomber – Head of Digital Strategy, Profero

Neville Hobson - Communicator; Blogger; Podcaster,

Richard Titus - Head of User Experience, BBC Future Media and Technology

Ewan MacLeod - Founder of Mobile Industry Review

Made some notes, can't by and large recall who said what, but here is the gist of it:

Mobile Devices

Don't think handset, think mobile device - could be any number of things, and we will want to access the 'Net with all of them. The customer wants a seamless, no hassle service - problem today is the infrastructure is not integrated, the commercial deals are non-existent outside of Japan / South Korea and there is little evidence of exiting players collaborating.

My thought - an outside end to end player will take this market from the operators within 5 years - Apple is playing Apple, who will play Microsoft?

Mobile Commerce

mCommerce is here, just unevenly distributed - will mainly be driven by developing world needs where it is being used instead of previous models that don't exist there yet. In the west the Mobile is for entertainment, in Africa it is for existence. Jonathan made a prediction on near field system m-commerce

My thought - mCommerce will take off in India and Africa, and in the very advanced nations - Japan etc - OECD will be pincered.

The Role of Google in 5 years

Google will start the change to standardisation in many areas - ID, mobile devices etc - question is whether it will live to enjoy it - increasingly algorithms less useful, company seen as more Evil / less trusted.

My thoughts - Google is beginning to occupy the Microsoft seat - in 5 years they risk being an unloved, unpleasant behemoth that will have the SEC and EU gunning for them. But, they will have done what Microsoft did - bring a horde of industry niches to use standard approaches, kicking and screaming as they go.

Privacy

There was some disagreement on the panel between the "people don't care" and the "people don't understand yet" schools of thought. View is that over time (i) more regulation will come in and (ii) people will want something back for what they give - uncompensated scraping not an option going
forward.

My thoughts - I'd agree with that - see last sentence in this post below

Does Technology change happen because of Social Drivers, or vice versa?

Technology drives the change, we then decide how to use it socially - lost of discussion about coming to terms with being connected 24/7, continuous partial attention, issues with online ID.

My thought - there is an interim step here - the economics - Tech won't even get off the ground apart from very early adopters if the economics doesn't work

Given we all use different comms systems, how will we contact each other?

You don't use email, I don't use Facebook, she won't use a mobile et etc. Jonathan noted that a BT "Future of Work" project predicts we will have to make far more of these low level decisions for a while as new conventions take time to emerge (see point above). The Web is still a baby, very immature in its evolution.

Also, there are countertrends - ubiquitous email and MP3 has seen the rise of the Letter and the LP.

There was talk about shopping - how in RL women forage and men hunt in shopping behaviour, its the opposite on the web as women find the experience unpleasant.

My thought - this need to Unify Communications will be one of the big needs in the next 3 - 5 years - whoevever does it well will clean up. That's why I am fascinated by embryonic UC services like Twitter (I also don't think we will give this service our data).

With respect to shopping, we've noticed this anti-female effect, odd as women control more spend - see this post here

Jemima Gibbons (from the floor) then raised the elephant in the room - the Economy. Thoughts were:

Firstly, a lot of teh bad news is companies using recession as an excuse to do unpleasant stuff that they have been holding off on. But the push is now for ROI, not relationships - as digital has a great cost saving potential impact (Is the Cluetrain wrecked now?). there was discussion around Open Innovation. The really interesting thing though is that this represents a major restructuring of the World Order, the key thing is to think about what is left after the dust settles

My thought - well done Jemima for pointing out the obvious discontinuity. My prediction is it will be more in the mindspace next year

Agree totally re the restructuring - if past such things are any indication, a major restructuring of communications impacts economic, social, political and belief structures (think printing press, automobile, telephone)

I was having a chat later at the bar, re prediction - we do a lot of it in the 3-5 year range. My experience is that predicting the "what" is not that hard - in developing tech anyways (though it requires a lot of analysis and research of course), as there re big trends that are fairly easy to see and fairly good rules of thumb (Chasm, Moore's Law etc). The harder thing by far is predicting the when, and the devilish details about the who, how, where etc.

And lastly - about 10 years ago, I was present at a 10 year future view conference with BT's futurologists and some others, and the prognosis 10 years in the future - ie about now was that:

- There will be an almighty scramble to own the data that shows the net present value of people's future spend

- this scramble, plus the massive expansion of people on the 'Net will drive unpleasant "Wild West" behaviours for a while

- regulation will have to come, to protect the masses and make the system safe to use again.

Points 2 and 3 are still to play out, but I see nothing that tells me they are not on track.