UPDATE MARCH 2018
This is now largely a diary. It’s about what I’m thinking and where I’m going…

Old about..
This blog is now largely about trends and innovations relating to digital culture, social media, the internet, artificial intelligence, robotics and automation along with observations, images and thoughts about my books and my writing generally. It is also a collection of random thoughts about the past, the present and especially the future. Most of all, perhaps, it’s about new ideas and how they come about.

If you want to contact me my email address is richard@(deletethisbit)nowandnext.com

If you’d like to know about the history of the blog carry on reading below….

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Top Trends started off in 2006 as a blog about current and future trends. The trends were originally sifted into a number of sections largely based on industry sectors. If you go back far enough by date they still are. So if you want to know about trends in retail just click on the retail category for example. The big trends don’t change that often so much of the content is fairly static and is only changed when something changes. However, sightings, observations and ideas are added all the time.

There is then a category of trends named megatrends, which is a listing of trends that affect many industries or have wider future socio-economic impacts. This is also getting old now and needs an update, but there’s still some good stuff here.

There’s also a section called columns, which is some of my writings for various newspapers and magazines and a section called predictions. Odd insights and innovations appear all over the place. I’m also adding to the categories all the time, which all relate in some way to trends, the future, strategy, scenarios, ideas and thinking.

There is also quite a bit of content about the things I’m especially interested in such as society and technology (how people and technology interact), newspapers, banking, supermarkets, public libraries, oil, water and food.

Most recently I’ve been adding quotes (usually about the future), statistics, book reviews and the odd long essay.

Last but not least there’s also a section about my book, Future Files, and about my newest book (Future Minds). If you like this kind of stuff check out my main site at nowandnext.com or look at futuretrendsbook.com  Lastly, there’s my main quarterly What’s Next trend report (free) and a free monthly newsletter (usually!) called brainmail that contains collections of the sort of observations found on the blog.

Who am I? I’m a writer, speaker and scenario planning consultant with a deep interest in trends and a love of the future generally. My biggest passion of all is scenarios. I’m based in London but I’m quite often somewhere else.

Apart from all of the above I like old cars, old wine, new ideas, maps and making things with my hands.

My email is richard@(deletethisbit)nowandnext.com