What’s Next: Top Trends

I’m not kidding. You will be able to buy this very soon. Probably this year. A company has invented a toy called the Force Trainer that allows you to lift a ball by just thinking about it. It really is mind over matter. Electrical thoughts in your brain are transferred to the machine and this starts a small fan that blows the ball up a tube. It’s not quite levitation but it’s close. Two firms already in the mind control toy business are Mattel and Uncle Milton Industries.

A contact at the Times newspaper just sent me an email saying that at ASDA (a UK supermarket chain owned by Wal-Mart) has announced that local food sales are up 41% on this time last year in England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland has also shown a marked increase in sales, with 29% increase in sales.

I’ve been bagging on about localisation being a powerful counter-trend to globalisation for some time and also, obviously, the importance of provenance, not only within food but also in other areas too. This is something that’s worth tracking in my opinion. I’d expect globalisation to slow in coming years with economic protectionism rising significantly.

BTW, just book a copy of a History of the Future by Jacques Attali. Report soon.

If you’ve not seen it already check out a TED talk by Pattie Maes from MIT. The device is essentially a wearable projector and computer that allows people to interact with their external environment by projecting related information about things they are looking at onto the thing they’re looking at. For example, if you pick up a book in a store it could project reader comments or the book website onto the actual book. Equally it could display information about product provenance onto the product in a supermarket. It could even be used to project a watch onto your hand or turn your hand into a fully functioning calculator.

A clickable link appears in the comments below.

In the National Library of Wales there is a self-portrait by the writer Dylan Thomas aged, I’d guess, about eight. The self-portrait is nothing special but above it the young Thomas has written the following:

“I am young but I can learn.”

How do you compete with that?

This is priceless – and a reminder of how even the best predictions can go slightly off the rails. The prediction that newspapers will be read mostly on computers is obviously on the money, but it’s things like likely cost and functionality that go out of the window.

This is from YouTube via the New York Times/Opinionator and TechCrunch. Full link in comments.