W1 Insight

Ten years ago it was baffling news to us that we would go through a digital revolution. Can you remember a time when the radio, your music recordings on cassette tape, your vinyl records, the analogue television, your telephone and the cinema you went to were all disconnected with no way of transferring their content easily between them. Today, we are dissatisfied if we can’t copy-and-paste between any of these media in the time it takes to make two clicks of your mouse. Where will it all end?

We tend to think in terms of ‘projects’ – a start and an end to things. This is comforting and containing for the many tasks we have to achieve and the changes we have to cope with. Unfortunately we live in continuity and discontinuity and increasingly in an exponential world of change. ‘Everything’ is changing around us, all the time, and we are just experiencing our life’s worth of change.

The digital explosion is continuing to provide us with information, communication and connectivity. Our business and social models are being changed – year-on-year – as we learn to factor in new ways to work, buy, govern, market, sell and connect with one another. This is set to accelerate – not end!

Global Internet (IP) traffic is set to grow 500% in the next 3 years (CISCO 2009). What else in your world has a percentage associated with it that is of this magnitude? By 2013 IP traffic will hit two-thirds of a zettabyte, or 667 exabytes – a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. The major driver of all this growth is video – you knew that already? You probably already video connect with your suppliers, clients, friends and family as standard already.

By 2013, 90% of all internet traffic will be from video in all its forms. TV, video-on-demand, Internet video, and p2p video – and video messaging will increase 10 fold in the five years to 2013. Our use of mobile broadband will transform how we engage with ‘the world’ and is set to double every year to 2013, a 66 fold increase in the five years to 2013. Why all the numbers? In order to grasp the importance, scale and speed of the transformation around us, it’s important to examine these extraordinary numbers.

The result will be huge shifts in how we communicate, socialise and entertain ourselves, how we educate our school age children, university students and employees, how and where we work, how we operate government services, how we buy, barter and trade the goods and services we want and need, to live our lives, and how we undertake business-at home and on a global basis. Nothing that can be impacted by digital technology will remain the same in the coming decade. In 2020 we will look back  and laugh at the technology that we were ‘forced’ to use, pretty much as we laugh at the technology we had at our disposal in 2000. Do you remember internet version 1. What could you buy on the internet just ten years ago? Think about it. Not that much. What did your ‘mobile’ phone look like and what could you do with it?

One consequence of these exploding broadband capabilities will be our ability to multitask. It’s foreseen that new technologies will add a virtual 6 hours of extra productivity to our day by 2013. Passive networking – eg: recording one tv program whilst watching another, adds to our productivity. Today, there are 36 hours in our networked day and in three years that will have increased to 48 hours a day. (Cisco)

Convergence is one of the driving forces of the digital revolution of the next decade. Devices, applications, the internet itself, content and service providers will ‘mash-up’ new offers by combining these components to make us more productive and better served than we are today. Some of the new devices will bring us brand-new experiences. Consider the interactive, touchable, holograms developed at the University of Tokyo that add tactile feedback to 3D images that hover in space. (ZDNet Blog) We’ll have new ‘haptic’ interfaces that will allow us to ‘feel’ holograms and provide us with new ways to interface with the digital world around us. (Softpedia)

QR codes on buildings, containing offers and information about the store, restaurant or office will be ‘zapped’ by our smart phones giving us offers and insights into what’s happening inside.

For twenty years the promise of interactive, PC based, video conferencing has failed to materialise. With the boom in Skype-like capabilities we are set to see video conferencing becoming the norm in personal communication in the next decade. For example: Marriott and Starwood Hotels have announced that they are installing telepresence technology in many of their hotels. Others will follow (Cordinball). The telepresence market will be worth $4.7 billion in 2014. (TMCnet)

In the same vein, virtual worlds will explode into our daily lives in the next ten years. In Q2 last year virtual worlds grew by 39% to an estimated 579 million users. Which virtual worlds are you in? (Guardian.co). The Virtual world conference and trade show market is expected to be worth $18.6 billion over the next 5 years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 56% (Virtualedge). Maybe it’s time to start having someone look into this for your firm?

We’ve all seen the artist’s impression of a telephone keypad tattooed on a person’s hand. Well even skin has now become an interactive digital surface. Skinput triggered by a finger passing across the surface of our skin can now be detected and used and enables us to become an interactive digital surface – for better or worse. (ZDNET) This won’t seem that ‘strange’ given that we are about to see the computer ‘disappear’ and we’ll be having ‘conversations’ with all sorts of seemingly inanimate objects around us – so a conversation with a table could become quite possible, even normal, very soon (hmestrum).

Consider our desire for more information about our customers and the consumer. From just next year ‘reality mining’ will allow us to monitor the use, location and movement of our mobile phones and our interaction with every digital source around us. Sophisticated data-mining algorithms will infer human relationships and behavior and we will want to use this information to predict market opportunities for our products and services and those of our clients and customers. (Technologyreview)

The intelligent web will understand spoken enquiries, gather and sift relevant information and form meaningful answers to help us live our lives and achieve our business goals. DARPA, the US government agency is developing these capabilities, which could be with us by 2015. (Techcast) Spoken language itself should be capable of being translated into foreign languages through our mobile handsets – whatever they may be like – real-time, in the next 5 to 10 years, opening up even more of our diverse world to us. (hothardware)

The big transformation in our interaction with the digital world and all its information, will be the emergence and use of ‘intelligent software assistants’, which we can expect by 2013. We’ll move from the world of the ‘Search Engine’ to the ‘do engine’, as Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Silicon Valley’s Siri startup calls it. The ‘do engine’ will help us complete tasks rather than just collect the information so that we can complete the task. (Technologyreview)

Of course ‘all of this’ is likely to be provided ‘in the cloud’ by 2015, a market worth $45 billion a year by 2015 (dummies.com). At the same time Grid computing will allow us to utilize the processing power of all the machines connected to the internet to calculate complex issues.

We started out talking about the connected world. Wireless broadband will give us the much sought ubiquity in connectedness that will distribute the various break-through digital capabilities I’ve been discussing with you in this short article. In the next 5 to 8 years we expect that 3-4 out of 5 people on planet Earth will be connected via wireless broadband. That’s about 5 billion people. Think of the commercial possibilities of connecting with this many people. In just a decade we could be communicating with all this capability through intelligent brain-computer interfaces – imagine how old fashioned the keyboard, and even the spoken world will appear then. (techcast)

Optical computers, the Semantic Web, Collective ‘Blanket Licenses’, 3D printing and the 3D internet along with the development of ‘Augmented Reality’ will all emerge in this next decade to add to our rapidly changing digital landscape. Whatever we think we know about how we will work, learn, be entertained, socialise, communicate, advertise, promote, sell, build, distribute – the digital world is set to explode in this digital decade.

What new technologies are you building into your business strategy?

How will you help your clients engage with the new digital world in the 2010’s?

What don’t you know that could blow your business off course or be the best opportunity you didn’t see coming?

Telco future scenarios

Socialtechnologies 1750 to 2100

Intelligent web

Real-time language translation

3D Internet

3D Printing

Virtual worlds

Skinput – the body as an input device

Haptic interfaces – to feel as well as see online objects

Reality mining