Sorry, it’s been getting a bit busy with the book launch coming up. Here’s another sneaky peek.

The average US movie now costs close to US $100 million to make and the window of opportunity for marketing and distribution is concentrated on two or three critical holiday periods each year. I was talking to a Vice President of a major film studio last year and he said that even the old idea of an opening weekend as an indication of how successful a film is going to be has now shifted to ten minutes. If an audience doesn’t like the opening they are immediately on their phones sending text messages to their friends saying, “don’t bother”. Add to this the increasingly unrealistic wage demands of movie stars and it’s clear that Hollywood is looking more like a disaster movie every year. However, while things are going to get worse for a while there is ultimately a light at the end of the (digital) movie projector.

Typical. You wait ages for your book to come out and then a few weeks beforehand someone in the same country brings out a seemingly identical book with a similar title. So my bedtime reading is now Future Perfect: What Next? And other impossible questions by Robyn Williams. I’ll let you all know how I get on with it.

Meanwhile…some more of my book!!!

In the UK there were 6.5 million workdays lost to stress back in 1995. By 2001 that figure had jumped to 13.4 million and there is no reason to suppose that this trend won’t accelerate into the future. However, taking a very long term view average hours worked have actually been declining for a century. So again, what’s causing the stress? One possible explanation is the increased pace of modern life caused by technology but this doesn’t really stack up either. In the 1870s the term ‘neurasthesia’ was created to describe the nerve-racking effects of modern inventions like the railway and the telegraph. What has changed though is the willingness of people to say that they are suffering from stress — a badge of honour in many work environments. There is also the argument that as societies become richer there is more time for introspection and people begin to feel a sense of entitlement, which fuels anxiety when expectations are not met. Whatever the reason the problem is going to get worse in the future. In the US 40% of workers say they have experienced verbal abuse at work and murder recently emerged as one of the most common causes of death at work.

My book isn’t out until 3 Sept but I got my first review today. Not bad at all.Here’s another small extract – this time one of the many ‘Postcards from the Future’.

14 November 2030
Dear Ollie,
This will knock you out. I’m sending you something I’ve just found called ‘Leaves.â„¢ It’s a new product from Past Toyz in Shanghai featuring a giant biodegradable plastic bag containing real farm grown leaves that have been hygienically dried and treated with an anti-bacterial agent for ‘safe outdoor fun’ â„¢ Can you believe it? Why didn’t we think of that?  I think the idea is that you empty the bag in your backyard and play with the leaves. Either that or you can drive that hygiene and order fixated neighbor or yours crazy by placing a single leaf on his plastic lawn every night for the next two years.  I suppose the company did some research with Maverns and Connectors that said that people in urban areas aren’t getting as close to nature as they like.  Back in my day leaves grew on trees but the colours weren’t manipulated and the bugs were kept in check by other bugs not chemicals.  Anyway, it certainly made me laugh.  You can always send it back if the joke is lost on you.
All the best,
Leon.
PS- What’s Next? — aerosol dirt?

Does this mean that the Internet fridge will finally take off? Probably not because there is no real customer need and the computer usually gets old and out-of-date before the fridge, but some way of alerting people to what food you’ve got in your house, what you can make with it and ordering what you need but don’t have could be a winner.In Japan the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation sells a kitchen appliance with the snappy name of the Umasa Vitamin Zoryo Hikari Power Yasai Shitsu fridge. It’s the first fridge in the world that increases the vitamin C content of the food contained within through a process of photosynthesis. It’s a good example of how technology will be used to increase the healthiness of what we eat.

The date is the 14 April 2047. It’s 2am at a garage in downtown Los Angeles and I’m with a small group of eight men ranging in age from seventeen to seventy-five and we are all looking in awe at a 1949 Mercury Sedan. The vehicle is a museum piece but that’s not why everyone is here. The owner (we’ll call him Steve) is planning to do an illegal run up the highway running the car on petrol. These days petrol is pretty rare but you can still buy it from various illegal sources. The petrol for tonight’s run has come from a guy in outside San Francisco that has discovered how to extract gasoline from vintage plastic shopping bags dug up from a Mexican landfill. It’s pretty rough stuff but it will do the job, not least because the car’s engine is unrestricted (now illegal). If we’re caught using petrol we could face six-months on a prison island. Steve starts the car up with a key. The engine sounds unlike anything most of the assembled crowd have ever heard. You can buy software to make otherwise silent electric cars sound like old petrol engined sports cars from the last century but it immediately appears that these are pale imitations of the real thing. The exterior of the car is made of metal and is painted. Inside it smells of oil and leather.

There’s another problem with older people too. As I’ve said already, developed nations have ageing populations and older people tend to be conservative and less productive. In contrast, developing nations, particularly those in Asia, have a vast surplus of younger people who by most historical measures are the most likely future innovators. One reason that it’s now fashionable to outsource R&D to countries like Thailand, Brazil and Eastern Europe is because it’s cheaper. But it’s also to do with the lack of skilled workers in developed nations. In 2005 for instance the US graduated 220,000 engineers. China, in contrast, graduated 660,000 and according to a Booz Allen/NASSCOM survey there are now as many as 6 million engineers available for hire in emerging markets like Asia. But low-cost is only half the story. Young brains drive innovation. They are hungry and in certain circumstances adversity drives invention too so these regions will become the new powerhouses of innovation and change.

Something from the media chapter…

We are all becoming digital nomads. We read, listen and watch what we want when we want. We no longer have the time (during the working week at least) to read newspapers and readers are shifting their eyes and ears to online sources of information delivered via everything from mobile phones to iPods. Online news is especially useful because the content can be controlled and personalised. If you’re of the active (or exhibitionist) persuasion you can comment on the news too through your own blog or send your own homemade documentary to YouTube, which is currently the 11th largest country on earth population-wise. People don’t even trust newspapers these days. Only 59% of Americans believe what they read in the newspapers compared to 80% in 1985. (Amazingly, 36% of US high school students also believe that newspapers should get government approval of news stories prior to publication but that’s another story). In short, what used to be a passive one-way conversation is thus turning into an active relationship. Content flows both ways and consumption has time shifted and place shifted.