disruption

A Series on the Major Future Disruptors of the next decade – Section 1

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I have had a bit of a holiday from blogging over the last couple of months due to a variety of reasons but now I am back.

Last week I did a presentation for the Cambooya Family Education Day on what the future looks like. This was both for them to look at how they should think about future investments but also to think about the future of their children and grandchildren.

We had an interesting discussion on a variety of issues and it prompted me to think a bit more deeply about the major disruptors in our global society. This was because part of my premise was that we are facing increased levels of change and disruption and therefore we need to rethink our views and measures on investments and their returns.

First of all this needs a definition. By disruption I mean a sudden change that alters a sector or industry rapidly and extensively. The definition of rapid here can be quite misleading. It took the iPhone years to really disrupt the sector and Airbnb took several years to ramp up to the size that it currently sits at but these are rapid changes when looked at form a historical perspective. Other changes such as turn by turn navigation being available on Google maps were a single individual change which revamped the GPS industry overnight.

By major I mean the capacity to completely transform large slabs of our entire society and economy.

So what do I believe are the major disruptors in the next decade.

The first of these is the driverless car. My last post:

Implementation of Driverless Cars – A case for public subsidy of private transport systems

was on how I believe there is a business case for government subsidies to implement a widespread adoption of driverless car technology given the savings that accrue to government in the process.

Given the promise that driverless cars could eliminate 90% of all accidents lets look at the industries and sectors that could be changed by such an implementation, some obvious, some not that obvious:

Car Insurance

The obvious one here is that car insurance as an industry would shrink enormously due to the reduction in accidents but there are a number of other interesting angles:

  • What happens to insurance of a vehicle where you are not driving – where do the risks lie and how do you insure those risks? If an accident is due to the failure of an algorithm then who is to blame if that algorithm has reduced the risk by 90% but still causes the accident? There is a case here for a comprehensive insurance of the system as a whole.
  • If there is wide scale implementation of driverless cars what does it cost to insure your car if you still want to drive? If you are 10 times more likely to have an accident or kill someone will anybody share those risks? If the government has implemented wide-scale adoption and is relying on the business case of reduced medical costs to fund that change are you liable for any costs incurred, including all medical costs? If so would only the super rich be allowed to drive and would we actually allow it?

Taxis

Taxis are an obvious one – put a fork in them they are done. There are some large legacy issues here. In Melbourne we are seeing protests from taxi licence holders because the government is going to issue extra annual licences which the current owners believe will devalue existing licences. Now I have little sympathy on anyone that builds a business and borrows money based on government policy on issued licences and then complains when government policy changes but there are political considerations here when taxis licences become worthless. I would not be buying one as a long term investment.

Road Building

The estimates are that we will need 30-40% of the vehicles on our roads if a complete system of driverless cars were implemented (Toward a Systematic Approach to the Design and Evaluation of Automated Mobility-on-Demand Systems: A Case Study in Singapore)

We have already started to talk to councils about what this might mean for road building and maintenance. It is clear that if we drastically reduce the amount of cars on our roads then we will need both less new roads built and less road maintenance. Of course there are all sorts of variables here about what might happen. It is likely that there would be a significant shift from public transport to private transport and that would be significantly different in different cities.

We also do not really know what happens to demand when we move from a cost that is largely embedded to one where costs are directly related to an individual decision. For instance I no longer have a car and use a car sharing service called Flexicar here in Melbourne. I estimate that it has reduced my car costs by about 60% but every time I use a car the cost is right in my face rather than being involved in my annual registration and insurance costs, or the costs of capital involved in owning a car, so I am much more likely to walk, cycle, or use public transport. The reactions of people around me are similarly different. People offer me a lift or ask me “will you have a car” or say “don’t go to that expense” when I talk about coming over when they would never do so if I owned a car. A full scale implementation of driverless cars will be an interesting experiment in people’s reaction to those costs.

What is clear is that road building companies and their supply chains will have far less demand in the long term future.

 

Please join me in the next installment where I will discuss some of the less obvious changes including effects on real estate prices.

 

Paul Higgins

 

Section 2 of this series can be found at

Major Disruptors Section 2

 

An App Store and Service to Completely Change the World

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We are standing in the middle of one of the major turning points in technology history.

We will only know whether that statement is true in retrospect in a few years time but I believe that the developments around the Watson computing model are creating a new wave of innovation possibilities.

ZDNET has reported on IBM setting up a Watson division with $1 billion dollars in funding and 2,000 employees to leverage the investment that has gone into developing the Watson cognitive computing model:

IBM forms Watson Business Group: Will commercialization follow?

Including:

The Watson Business Group will break down into four groups:

  • One focused on research and development on cognitive computing.
  • Another aimed at applying Watson to new industries to “disrupt and transform how business is done.”
  • An implementation group to ensure Watson has services support to keep customers satisfied. 
  • An engagement team to sell and market Watson.

and

Specifically, IBM is launching the following Watson cloud services:

  • IBM Watson Discovery Advisor is aimed at pharmaceutical, publishing and education research. The promise here is that Watson will wade through search results to deliver data and context faster for researchers.
  • IBM Watson Analytics Advisor is designed to be used by enterprises to send questions and raw data sets to Watson and allow the system to deliver insight.

and:

Big Blue said it will invest $1 billion into the Watson division including $100 million to fund startups developing cognitive apps

This follows a story in The Verge in the middle of November announcing that Watson was being opened up to developers through an API that would allow people to build applications on top of its platform:

IBM’s more powerful Watson supercomputer is opening up for public use

The combination of natural language/cognitive computing capability, with the system operating as a platform that others can build new applications on is analogous to the levels of innovation that we have seen in smartphone and tablet application markets in the last few years. The major difference is that the focus will be almost purely on applications that can disrupt whole systems and industries deliberately.

The value in the app development market has been twofold:

  1. The possibilities envisaged by tens of thousands of developers all around the world adds hugely to the perspectives and possible ideas that can be generated compared to keeping things in house.
  2. The fact that all those people are prepared to risk their money and time to try stuff has bypassed the normal “MBA spreadsheet” assessment of ideas and funding so that lots more stuff has been tried. Trying more stuff means more stuff gets to prove it can work.

This has led to a huge flowering of applications, many of them trivial but some of them have been fantastic and world changing.

This can lead to big bang disruption as described by Steve Denning in his review of the book of the same name : Big Business’s Worst Nightmare

If IBM and Watson and the developers involved can get this right then I expect much higher levels of big bang disruption over the next few years. This means that the levels of change experienced by people and business over the next decade might pale into insignificance over the next decade.

As my friend Stowe Boyd would say: “welcome to the post normal!”

Paul Higgins

My job advice to my nephews and nieces for 2025

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I spent a few days over the Christmas break down at my parents house near the beach on the Mornington Peninsula and hung out with my brothers, sisters in law, and my nephews and nieces.

During one of our later night discussions which are always willing but friendly one of my sisters in law posed the question of what my view was on what they should be advising their children on their future work prospects and directions. We had a bit of a discussion on that but then I sat down and collated a few thoughts for them and some things I think they should read. This is the gist of that advice:

Bottom line is that I believe that we are at the edge of a technological revolution in robotics and artificial intelligence.

Advances in robotics that include cheaper and better sensors and intelligence capacity will move them beyond manufacturing and into cooperative manufacturing, and assisting and replacing humans in all sorts of physical tasks.

Advances in artificial intelligence due to massive increases in computing power and moves towards much better natural language computers/semantic knowledge/deep machine learning will move computer intelligence out of just replacement of easily routinised jobs due to data crunching capacity, and into many more areas of human work – e.g. computer assisted journalism

There are really two scenarios here – that we will see more changes than we can imagine as in the industrial revolution, and more and more jobs will be created, or large slabs of jobs will disappear for ever and not be replaced, and that will cause significant disruption and competition for work unless we move to a new way of having an economy. Now you can take the Luddite view or you can take an optimistic view but the key to thinking about the future is to create a strategy that deals with multiple possible futures as well as you can, whilst understanding that most of the futures you can think up will probably not go close to mapping what the world will look like.

Just to put this in context my youngest niece will probably not enter the workforce until at least 2025, and more probably 2030 and will then have a working life which is likely to extend to 2080 so we are talking about long time frames here.

So what advice would I give to a parent of a 5-15 year old at the moment.

The key is involvement in :

  • Jobs that are not easily routinised – my brother mentioned plumbing and other trades and he was right– the capacity to carry out a complicated task that is different every time and interact with people will still be highly human centered.
  • Jobs with high levels of manual dexterity – robotics still find that hard to master although some systems of surgery are better than people already.
  • Jobs that require high levels of empathy and capacity to interact with people – e.g. aged care, teaching, although stuff like retail is likely to become more data and network facilitated than through an individual shopping experience.
  • Jobs that require the capacity to coach and facilitate networks to perform rather than the current emphasis on managers and hierarchies – requires empathy as well.
  • Jobs centred around the ability to find insight in data – assisted by AI but value added by people.
  • Jobs that are highly creative and require visions and connection.
  • Jobs that cross the boundaries of the jobs types I have listed above.
  • Jobs centered around the ability to code

In terms of thinking about this more I would recommend looking at the following

Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs – by the fantastic Kevin Kelly

Algorithms, Robots and the Future of Management – a previous post by me with a great addition from my friend and colleague Stowe Boyd

I also recommend you read Stowe’s :Beneath the chatter about the Future Of Work lies a discontinuity which I think is more about the near future than the long future.

The IFTF report on future work skills – details drivers and skills

In the end we can give all the clinical and logical advice we like but the most important thing for them to do is to pursue what they are passionate about with a weather eye out to the fact that you need passion, skills and a market to make a living and:

  • If you have passion and skills but not market you have a hobby
  • If you have skills and a market but no passion you will be mediocre or burnout
  • If you have a market and passion but no skills you will fail in an increasingly competitive world

The great thing about the modern world is that skills are easier and easier to gain, and markets can span the globe for an individual or a small organisation. So passion is the cornerstone.

Paul Higgins

Some readers have requested some further links and reading on these issues. Here are  a a few from our scanning database:
Robots Can’t End Amazon’s Labor Woes Because They Don’t Have Hands

This was written by RACTER, a computer program that can generate original English language prose and poetry at random

SWARM Quadrotors (Aerial Robots): Coordinated Flight of Small Quadcoptors Interacting with Humans

A Mind-Controlled Exoskeleton Will Kick Off the 2014 World Cup

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience

Which of the Dinosaurs will Survive?

/ futuristpaul (Paul Higgins) / 2 Comments

The Guardian newspaper has launched an online Australia version of its newspaper:

Guardian Australia launches with promise of ‘fresh and independent view’

In my view this is part of the future of newspapers and marks the continuation of what I see as a major extinction event where there will be a further massive loss of newspapers around the world. This is due to continuing evidence that digital pay models and digital advertising are not replacing the old business models in terms of revenue per reader. Therefore I think that the media landscape in general and newspapers in particular will divide into a few distinct business models:

1/ The Global Giants.

There will be some very large newspapers that will survive and prosper and they will do so by reaching a much larger global audience and therefore garnering enough revenue to maintain good levels of quality, stories and investigative journalism. The Guardian is an example of one of these that may survive and the story they have done on the bushfires in Tasmania, Australia is a case in point:

Firestorm

A compelling story, told in a superb and mesmerising way that has local content and interest but also has a wider global audience and interest.  That global audience includes those that have bushfires issues in their own communities but also those people interested in great human interest stories. It also not a “normal” newspaper story.

The key initial ingredient that the newspapers have that might survive with this business model is a great and trusted brand. So newspapers like the New York Times, The Times, and The Guardian are good candidates.

However that great and trusted brand is only a ticket to play in the game and does not guarantee survival. A lot of well known newspapers are going to try this strategy and only a few will survive. Two other key components are going to be required. The first is continual investment in the assets required to tell great stories – journalists. The second is patient capital because this is going to be a long and bloody fight and the organisations involved will need deep pockets:

NOTE: The Guardian bushfire story was notified to me by Michael Cote who is a climate adaptation consultant and runs a blog on Tumblr (Climate Adaptation) where I follow him. This is a mark of how these stories will be accessed and promoted in the future. A story about my country was relayed to me by someone I have never met who lives in Massachusetts.

2/ National Champions

These are the newspapers/media outlets that will survive by focusing on key national issues that are not of interest to a wider global audience. Their stories will include stories at a national politics levels and investigative journalism focused on national politics and local corporate issues as well as sport which appear to drive a huge amount of “eyeball” to use the jargon.

I think that the model of ow this will work will be far more varied. Possibilities include the creation of crowd funded journalism models where people agree to fund specific investigative journalism. They also include the loyal readership of such a newspaper/media outlet being an asset that can drive revenues into the larger global entities that survive and generate income by doing so.

3/Local/Specialised

This is going to be much more fragmented and localised and also far more prone to non profit business models. The development of web based technologies has made both the creation of content, and the connection to an audience much more effective and has vastly reduced the costs. That will allow a continual flowering of new models and possibilities.

A journalist friend of mine is always talking to me about how important a strong and independent media is to the strength of our countries and our communities. I totally agree with him but a “you will miss us when we are gone” has never been a great value proposition.

There is going to be lots of churn and extinction in this space and I think we all have a responsibility to think about how this will all work. I for one am keen to support crowd funded investigative journalism models as part of my contribution.

Paul Higgins

Music Industry Whinges or Music Industry Whinges?

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An interesting article at the New York Times entitled As Music Streaming Grows, Royalties Slow to a Trickle talks about streaming services and their income payments to artists including:

“Late last year, Zoe Keating (pictured) , an independent musician from Northern California, provided an unusually detailed case in point. In voluminous spreadsheets posted to her Tumblr blog, she revealed the royalties she gets from various services, down to the ten-thousandth of a cent.

Even for an under-the-radar artist like Ms. Keating, who describes her style as “avant cello,” the numbers painted a stark picture of what it is like to be a working musician these days. After her songs had been played more than 1.5 million times on Pandora over six months, she earned $1,652.74. On Spotify, 131,000 plays last year netted just $547.71, or an average of 0.42 cent a play.”

The article raises a number of important issues but also seems to speak from a sense of the music companies protecting their turf and musicians being entitled to a living.

One of the constant themes in my conference presentations and my talk to University students on the disruptive effects of web technologies has been the removal of the gatekeeper. I commonly describe this gatekeeper as a bunch of middle aged white men making decisions about what the consumer will get to listen to or get to see.

I see this removal of the gatekeeper as one of the great things of the 21st century and the ability of the any creator of “stuff” being able to connect to anyone in the planet as a fantastic development. There is a lot of hand wringing in the music industry about these issues but I see them as mainly a self protection mechanism rather than any real concern about the musicians.

I think that we are likely to see the following:

  • More and more musicians connecting to their fans in a number of ways including streaming services.
  • Streaming services beating the ownership model in most cases.
  • An increase in the total spend on music as more and more people are connected.
  • The average income per musician/band falling because people will be exposed to far more music than the gatekeepers let people listen to. Total number of bands and musicians available will grow faster than total income.
  • Breakout bands and hits still commanding good money.
  • Innovative approaches and musicians finding ways to make all this work – a la Amanda Palmer on Kickstarter.

I am confident that market mechanisms will sort out the issues and that if streaming services try to pay little in the long term then other services will spring up to take the space.

I would like to end with the Hunter S Thompson quote on the music industry:

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

The new way has to be better than that

Paul Higgins

On Demand Printing – Too Little too Late – The Broadcast TV Conundrum

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Publishers Weekly has published a post describing a new on demand printing initiative:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/53932-on-demand-to-roll-out-more-than-100-000-book-machines-through-kodak-and-readerlink.html

“Kodak is working with On Demand to integrate the Espresso Book Machine, currently available in only a handful of bookstores and libraries, with the KODAK Picture Kiosk at 105,000 locations worldwide. The integrated kiosks, which will begin to go live late this year in the U.S., will have more than 7 million books available through On Demand. The kiosks will also have the capability to handle self-published books…..”

The problem with this announcement is that it is solving yesterday’s problems which were:

  1. Buyers only being able to purchase what was on the bookshelves at their local store or waiting weeks for an order.
  2. The high capital costs for booksellers from holding inventory and high return rates for books.

The advent of eBooks and the ability to read them on readers and in applications in other tablets has solved most of these problems. Years ago I would have said this could have been a short term runaway success but now it faces the broadcast TV conundrum. In order to support the costs of creating high quality TV (or paying for sporting content) under the current models you need a massive audience. Once the attention of that audience is fractured and the audience starts to disintegrate then your income falls and cost cutting on the production side alienates more viewers.

I have only purchased couple of non fiction books in the last 18 months. Please note this is a slight change on my post:

Why Would You Publish a Book About the Future Without a Kindle Version? (or another e-book version)

because on a recent US trip I saw two books I really wanted to read on multiple plane trips and I hate not being able to do that on taking off and landing.

Lots of people I talk to say they still like the feel of books and bookstores and are aghast when I predict the future is eBooks. All of these people are over 30 and most of them are over 50. So if you couple a dying demographic with the advantages of purchasing anywhere and being able to share and access extra content through a tablet or e-reader the likely volumes of print on demand books are much smaller than they might have been 5 years ago. That means the business model for return on the capital investment is under great threat.

For instance I met author Dave Gray in Providence Rhode Island last week and he was able to email me a copy of his new book Connected Company to read on my iPad and I immediately purchased his previous book Gamestorming via Amazon. That model totally kills going to an on demand book store for me – and I would have been a big user 5 years ago.

Addendum: The ABC Gruen Planet did a pitch contest last night for ad agencies to create an ad pushing us back to printed books and away from e-books – a must watch:

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/gruenplanet/pages/s3598460.htm

Paul Higgins

Ruminations on Web Technologies from New York

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I’m sitting here after a day and a half in New York ruminating on a presentation I have to give on the future of web technologies when I return. In between long bouts of walking around the city tracing the notes of my favourite venture capitalist bloggers from New York I have been inhaling William Gibson’s “Distrust That Particular Flavour”. A particularly apt writer to be digesting when afflicted by jet lag from a 24 hr trip and a 14 hour time difference.

The challenge of the presentation is that I need to give it to a bunch of first year university students all of which will have not lived without the web. Two things have resonated with me from Gibson’s writing. The first is the concept of the book as a technology and the requisite learning requirements needed to enable the technology. One cannot imagine a new technology being adopted that requires years of learning in order to operate. Our modern web technologies are characterised by intuitive ease-of-use which both facilitate adoption and dispersion through the culture but also contribute to a shallowness in design and innovation. The second is the concept that changes in culture are technologically driven but that we cannot know the culture we live in by its very nature. The students to whom I’ll be talking are immersed in a web technology culture that they cannot truly know or comprehend because they live it. So the value that I can provide is one of providing a long-term contextual discussion of web technologies inside a concept of change and disruption. From that I intend to facilitate a discussion from the students to create something new rather than just lecture to them.

The core of what I currently intend is to stretch back over a longer period of time to look at the nature of disruption and change via technological change through the ages. Then I will challenge the group as to what this might mean for the future of web technologies. I am a long term believer in the concept that in order to understand something you should have to teach it to someone else. Along with that belief is another strong view that the group is way smarter than the individual. Having said that I am both excited and terrified (and those emotions are closely aligned) to be giving the talk.  The excitement is linked to what sort of possibilities might emerge, the terror is linked to that falling flat in a performance sense.

The subject matter is inextricably linked to a presentation that that I also have to prepare for the Department of Premier and Cabinet on future public policy challenges. From the concept of cultural change driven by technological change then the disruptive effects of web technologies have to be a large part of that vision of suggested possibilities. At their core web technologies are changing the nature of the power relationships between people and the organisations they deal with. That is a challenge for public policy.

If anyone has any suggestions on what I should present in either case then please feel free to comment here or email me at paul@emergentfutures.com

Paul Higgins

Car Sharing about to Explode?

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I wrote a post back in May on

The Mental Shift in the Collaboration Economy and Why it Matters to Everyone

The post is about how collaboration and sharing is taking off and specifically mentioned car sharing as a key example.

On Tuesday GigaOm had a notice up that GM was partnering with Relay Rides to allow users of OnStar to rent their cars out via a mobile app:

GM opens up OnStar with peer-to-peer car sharing service

This is the implementation of an announcement from back in October.

This is a big deal because it is about building services on top of existing installed technologies rather than people having to pay for new technologies.

It is also a big deal because OnStar has an installed user base of 6 million people which immediately gives the idea scale.

Our cars are one of our most expensive capital and operating budget items. In a time of financial uncertainty and risk a method which safely allows us to offset that cost by lending our car to a trusted social network may take off in a big way.

If that is the case then car makers better look out because they can throw out all their projections on future car sales.

STEEPeD in Environmental Scanning

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I am back posting again after a brief 2 month hiatus where we have been the busiest we have ever been in the life of our company. During that time it has been my privilege to work with people like the CEO and 180 senior managers of YMCA Victoria, the senior staff and associated bodies of the NE Catchment Management Authority, and the Expert Advisory Group for the National Farmers Federation Blueprint for the Future of Agriculture among many others.

One thing that has consistently come up has been discussions on change versus disruption. We all experience change in our working lives and it seems for many people that this change has become more rapid and more exhausting. On top of that we are also experiencing more disruption which I would define as sudden and abrupt change that fundamentally changes the way that we operate. Commonly people have regarded that as the province of large companies that are suddenly blind sided by a fundamentally changed technology or way of doing business as we have seen in the last few years with the iPhone and Android phones blind siding Blackberry and Nokia. More and more these changes are affecting organisations of all sizes and people are constantly asking us how do we spot disruption before it destroys us?

There are three basic principles that we use to answer that question.

1/ The first is that the disruptions while they might seem abrupt at the time quite often have a long lead time before they create the disruption. The figure below from Business Insider shows the RIM (manufacturer of the Blackberry) share price from the date the iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs. This is clearly a technology that has completely disrupted RIM’s business model but it took several years to do so.

Image

2/ The second is that you can look around a search for possible disruptions to your business model. You do this by looking outside of your industry area but also by looking more deeply into trends and developments than just the surface stories. More on this below.

3/ The third is that you must accept that you are not going to see all disruptions before they arrive. This is particularly true in the developments of technology changes. As Kevin Kelly says in his book What Technology Wants social use of a modern technology changes the technology and the use. If you put Microsoft Kinect in the hands of 10 million people then some of them are going to use it for different things. So we now have Kinects being used to manipulate micro-satellites, being the sensory head of robotic guide dogs, and being used as 3d scanners in archaeological digs. If you think you can predict or know where 10 million hackers and innovators might take 50 different technologies and business models then good luck to you. If you accept that you cannot do that then you must build a resilient and adaptive business model that can cope with disruption. One that is not reliant on a single future taking place one that you are constantly challenging.

If you want to start looking around more at what might affect you and your organisation then one of the ways that we recommend people do that is a structured environmental scanning system.

The most common way of doing that is to use a framework such as STEEP which stands for Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political. If you collect information and possibilities and test them against these categories you can see where you are looking and bolster your scanning in areas that you are normally weak in.

On top of that we recommend looking for possible disruptions and so use the STEEPeD acronym to describe that. At the end of this post I have put in several examples of disruption that we have seen in the last few months. A disruptive change can be in any of the categories of STEEP but must have the ability to significantly challenge your business model.

As well as looking around you to see what might happen you need to have a structured approach to try and make sense of what you are seeing. We use a simple system of questions to structure that approach which are:

  • Did you See it? (are you looking in the right directions?)
  • Did you Heed it? (when you saw it did you really notice it?)
  • Did you Understand it? (have you looked beyond the surface for implications)
  • Did you Execute? (did you actually do something or are you just daydreaming? – Making a decision to do nothing is different than doing nothing)

So if you follow these principles you can improve you ability to spot disruptions before they occur and to change your business models to take advantage of disruptions but you must always remember that you will miss lots of them and your strategies must be able to cope with that.

Here are some interesting disruptions from our scanning in the last few months:

Automate or Perish

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428402/automate-or-perish/?nlid=nlbus&nld=2012-07-06

Successful businesses will be those that optimize the mix of humans, robots, and algorithms.

Jeff Jarvis

We are seeing a widespread disruption of institutions: not just economically and technologically but also in their status in society. Note: Gallup finds that more than half the institutions it tracks have hit historic lows in confidence in the last five years.

E-Commerce Is Head Over Heels for Pinterest

http://allthingsd.com/20120615/e-commerce-is-head-over-heels-for-pinterest-and-theres-a-good-reason-why/

 evidence that Pinterest is skyrocketing: 

  • In Q2, referral traffic from Pinterest is up 2,535 percent year over year.
  • In Q2, referral traffic from Facebook is up 2.7 percent year over year.
  • Conversion rates from Pinterest are 0.43 percent in Q2, up from 0.29 percent in Q1 2012.
  • Conversion rates for Facebook are 0.61 percent in Q2, up from 0.49 percent in Q1 2012.

Disruption in Film Making

http://wiredinsider.tumblr.com/post/25307743475/diy-cgi

Every aspiring filmmaker should get really excited right about now. A group of programming enthusiasts have successfully hacked a Kinect to produce a stunning new hybrid of video and computer generated imagery. CGI is hard. And expensive. This technique puts it within reach of anyone with a Kinect and a digital camera.

Scoot Airlines Cuts 7% of Aircraft Weight and Slashes Fuel Bills by Switching to iPad 2 Rental

http://worldnewsresource.com/scoot-airlines-cuts-7-of-aircraft-weight-and-slashes-fuel-bills-by-switching-to-ipad-2-rental/1948/frank-little

No more airline entertainment systems or servicing!

If you are interested in increasing your scanning capacity then we offer a free month’s trial for our scanning database which contains all the future orientated stuff we see. You can access the trial by going to http://www.emergentfutures.com and entering your details at the bottom of the page.

Paul Higgins