2014 - galloping into year of the horse

We're two thirds of the way through January already. How did that happen?

Sure, it's good news for those in the west who are trying to have a "dry" January after an excess of Christmas partying and good news for those of us in the east who having skipped the pre-Christmas slowdown we might be used to, are looking forward to the pre Chinese New Year equivalent.

Chinese New Year decorations go up for Year of the Horse.

Year of the Horse is galloping towards us, the decorations are going up around town, the people are emptying out of town noticeably day by day. And we still have nearly 2 weeks to go! 200m people are likely to be on the move around China over the next 2 weeks. Sure, of the 1.3b people here, that's a drop in the ocean but that's not how it feels if you are anywhere on the public transport system.

Christmas holidays for those that had them are already a distant memory, CES has come and gone bringing with it more focus on wearable technology as the personal data monitoring theme gathers momentum, and "computers" as once we called them get ever smaller, more flexible and more powerful.

CES is just the big shiny toy show for the gadget geek, but as its' name suggests -Consumer Electronics Show,...it's all about marketing really. Who wins in buzz makes share prices rise and fall.

Ray Kurzweil, Google's Chief Engineer, has a more long term view with a remarkable track record / ability for seeing (& in some ways defining) the future.  Shiny toys round-ups from CES abound, but 5 minutes reading Ray's latest prediction piece will be 5 minutes food for thought well worth indulging in.

Albeit, I'd then follow up with this piece from an ex-Googler who moved to China, which gives a good helicopter view of why China is an exciting place to work at the minute. I love it! I can't wait to see what the "mountain thieves" (Chinese copy-cats) make of the e-ink opportunities.

Evolving user interfaces & the internet of things

Of the many things in the digital sphere I am fascinated by, the evolving nature of the interfaces by which we interact with technology has to be up there in the top 3.

The internet of things / connected home is becoming less conceptual and more and more of a tangible reality even if it's just beginner baby steps for most people as they start to use energy monitors as fuel cost increases as much as eco-conscience drive mainstream adoption and behavioural change.

Moving beyond the baby steps, the connected home, cloud based data access, and device neutral data interfaces are becoming less of a mental stretch as today's tablet fans start embracing the notion of companion devices and will become increasingly demanding about hardware neutrality.   With the launch of Siri and Iris (Apple & Android personal digital assistants respectively), the spoken interface has joined touch on the critical mass of credibility table, if only for the innovators and early adopters at present.  With the mainstream undoubtedly following close behind bringing true scale now is the time to start thinking about what interface change means for the way that consumers can and/or could interact with your brand in the future.  This could also have a significant impact on your business architecture for staff : organisational relationships as much as business : consumer ones, as this recent Gartner trends piece highlighted.  I wouldn't be so bold as to consider myself an expert in new UIs (user interfaces) yet but I do believe that there needs to be a happy marriage between insight, extrapolation of existing behaviours, imagination and experimentation with new technologies and interface alternatives so that learnings can be developed. Context as much as attitude will no doubt influence our interface preferences, much as they already do today but with greater inter-changeability between them than is currently present. I wouldn't choose to write anything of  significant length using my iPad, because even with my small hands the keyboard is cramped and the angle on my neck to see over the keyboard is awkward and pain inducing, but the touch / swipe / pinch we've all become used to is intuitive for browsing in all manner of scenarios. I've used voice dialling on my phone for years as it's handy in the car, and voice search is handy on occasions, and yet I'm still an enormous fan of the notebook, post-it and pencil for quick scribbles, or doodles to evolve my thinking. At the minute our range of interface options are often device capability limited but this is a barrier that I expect to erode over the medium term future.

With hints of the Corning Glass futures piece I posted previously, the Microsoft Envision Lab have produced this piece. Whether you believe it'll ever happen or not is up to you but I remind you that Minority Report was released in 2002, and much of the technology that seemed far distant and sci-fi then is already a reality.

Charting the rise of the Internet of Things

I've been following the Internet of Things for a few years now, the wireless home/city with more and more connected devices talking to each other is almost a tangible reality rather than some sci-fi future.

The number of devices connected to the web, sharing data, enabling new behaviours and capabilities is growing at a rapid rate.  So if you haven't watched the video from the IBM Internet of Things project, do so here, and then click to make this nice infographic from Cisco,(who also have a rather nifty data projection graphing tool),  big enough to read properly!

Click to enlarge