By about 2025 70% of European rubbish landfills will be full. So expect to see more earth friendly design, increased use of biodegradable materials, healthy buildings (less use of chemical additives and synthetic materials) and increased use of recycled water and locally produced energy.
In case you haven’t noticed, your garden is supposed to be merging with the design of the inside of your house whilst the inside look is moving outside. Houses are also starting to look like resort hotels if you’ve got the money and other people are buying apartments in hotels. Meanwhile, ‘villages’ are being built in tower blocks while underground cities are expected to be built in places like Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok (giving new meaning to the phrase ‘suburban living’)
Every electronic household gadget you own is about to become obsolete. But don’t throw away those vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, turntables, black & white TVs or Apple clam shell computers away just yet. They’ll be considered retro quite soon as history becomes much sought after in the future.
What can we expect to see in the average home in ten or twenty years time? Here’s a list: 3-D printers , dream machines (basic versions already available in Japan), electronic pets, air quality monitoring devices (will people pay more for clean air?), ubiquitous imbedded intelligence in everyday products and appliances, intelligent paint and wallpaper, wearable computers (smart clothing) and 3D TV.
By 2010 the global population should have increased to 6.8 billion (it reached 6 billion in 1999 and currently stands at 6.49 billion), but 95% of global population growth between now and 2010 will come from developing countries, most of them in the East. India will become an economic superpower, especially in services, but most attention will continue to be focused on the potential of its manufacturing based rival China. China is important for a number of reasons including its sheer size (geographically and population wise), its economic growth and its territorial claims. These in turn make China a significant foreign policy player. Thus there will be (is) a significant powershift eastwards. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t forget that China is a totalitarian state with, some would argue, the seeds of its own destruction already sown. Urban-rural conflict, rampant corruption and environmental calamities are all there under the surface.
You can bank online, bet on line, date on line and watch TV on line — so why can’t we all vote on line? And come to think of it, if I can vote for American Pop Idol, why can’t I vote for the US President? (after all he/she arguably affects me more than my own Prime Minister).
Once upon a time, a signature and a photograph were all you needed to prove that you were who you said you were. But in anxious digital times, we need to be able to prove it beyond reasonable doubt in a variety of physical and virtual situations. Cue biometric mobile phones (in Japan already), verbal signatures, body scanning and even ‘signatures’ based on body smell.
Once upon a time you could screen a TV commercial or two in the knowledge that most of the country would see it. Not anymore. The plethora of choices from cable to satellite TV, together with time shifting technologies like video, DVD and TiVo, has fragmented audiences like never before. Is this the end of mass media or simply a shift from TV to Internet based information and entertainment? Most commentators firmly believe that the age of mass media, especially television, is dying or dead but I’m not so sure. The theory is that broadcasters will become irrelevant as programme makers connect directly with their audiences. However, people are busy. They are also not experts and no matter how clever search becomes I predict that there will always be a need for editors and other human filters to tell us what’s available and what’s worth watching. Equally, whilst mobile content will continue to grow, the home (together with movie theatres) will remain the primary location for mass entertainment.
By the end of last year (2005) there were in excess of 2 billion mobile phones switched on world-wide. Voice is still the primary source of revenue for telecomm firms but this is changing. We are also slowly changing from a world where communication is verbal to a world where information is delivered visually. What are the consequences of this shift?
One upon a time (sometime last century) the music industry had a business model. Record companies signed up bands, paid them an advance (against which they offset all expenses – like recording albums) and sold records to adoring fans. Sometimes this didn’t work, but the profitability of a handful of albums offset the many failures. Problem was, as a band, you were either a rich rock star or an invisible failure. The gap between artist and audience was also immense. Not any more. MySpace.com (bought by NewsCorp for US $580 million) is yet another example of how the Internet is changing the rules of markets and connecting people (and, crucially, groups of people) who would like to know about each other. MySpace, in case you’ve been away in space, is a social networking or community site that converts electronic word of mouth into, among other things, album sales and concert tickets. The site has around 30 million pages of which about 400,000 belong to bands. It also has more ads than any other site on the entire web (12% if you’re counting) and is signing up 3.5 million new users a month. Sometimes the site even ranks ahead of Google in terms of monthly page views. So what’s going on here? Well for one thing, Generation Y isn’t watching much TV anymore. In fact programmed media, TV schedules, record companies, albums and mass-marketing are becoming irrelevant, replaced instead with TiVo, P2P, AOL, iTunes and sites like Myspace. For example, a band called Hawthorne Heights recently sold 500,000 copies of their debut album without being signed to a major label and with almost zero TV or radio airplay. What they did use was MySpace, which connected the band to potential fans who could download free tracks, buy albums, T-shirts and concert tickets. Watch this space …