Posts tagged “Future”

10pm in Shenzhen

Posted on June 8th, 2009

10pm in the Futian district of Shenzhen taken from the roof of a 33 story apartment block which a guard kindly let me climb out onto (in China there are no “health and safety” laws… that people follow anyway). They came out surprisingly well considering they were taken by a shaky hand without a tripod. There is something magical about the night in such densely packed cities where man has built upwards towards the heavens. Thousands of lights twinkle against the skyline as if indicating their inhabitants very existence within the controlled chaos of urban dwelling in China. As if arteries in some enormous autonomous monster even the roads and highways take on a life of their own at night ferrying the lifeblood of…

Collective Conciousness

Posted on January 15th, 2009

There can be no doubt that we are now at a point of being inexplicitly dependant on the Internet. The more I think about the evolution of the internet the more I am convinced about the emergence of a new collective conciousness which has formed an almost symbiotic relationship between man and machine through which we are now globally connected. There is almost no part of our lives which it does not touch and if it were to collapse tomorrow the results would be devastating. For a quick recap of how it all started check out the short film below – Looking at what’s going on in the world right now; we have the outsourcing of jobs, the open-sourcing of software, and the crowdsourcing of…

Every Coin Has Two Sides

Posted on November 15th, 2008

People love to bash China over it’s human rights and environmental record which I don’t thing anyone can dispute is pretty abysmal. I’m sure what gets reported is only the tip of the iceberg but when you consider the enormous size of China, it’s long history and all the cultural baggage which comes with it I don’t find it particularly surprising. Social and political change is no doubt under way but it’s a long process which will take decades and probably wont be fully fulfilled until the current vanguard are long gone. Photo by kmeron This came to mind last week when I interviewed around 50 fresh graduates from Shenzhen & Guanzhou universities who were looking for their first job. I asked each group…

10 Future Trends

Posted on September 13th, 2008

On the 10th anniversary of its founding Google has recently been asking 10 of its “experts” to give their predictions of what’s going to happen in the next 10 years as the internet evolves. I’m no expert but as a curious partaker in this brave new world I thought I’d give a shot at coming up with my own list of future predictions – Computation moves into the cloud – obvious but important. This is the key to the future which will provoke massive social change. No longer will we be tied to our desks or fortified corporate networks. Work anywhere on any device with the same access to all the same resources. Technology is humanised – forget “plug and pray”, it just works.…

Conceptualising The Future

Posted on August 15th, 2008

While the digitally-empowered of today may find the concept of searching for information in a library full of dead trees rather quaint how will future generations see the way in we navigate the sea of hypertextually linked information today and what will they be doing differently? Envisioning or conceptualising the future has always fascinated me. Some lucky people get to do this as a job and futurologists at Adaptive Path have recently produced some interesting videos (as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series) showcasing a possible future user experience on the web – Aurora (Part 1), Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 There are some extremely cool ideas going on here with four major themes; contextual awareness (understanding and finding patterns in…

Data Portability

Posted on January 10th, 2008

“Philosophy As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together. Mission To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.” Finally a credible move towards being able to move personal data between services. Whilst the reality of this is still a way off it’s good to see the likes of Google, Facebook & Flickr on board. Small steps towards a more…

Did You Know?

Posted on December 21st, 2007

I love this. Although it’s rather US centric there’s some great info-viz with some fairly thought provoking questions in there. The way in which the world has changed over my short lifetime is staggering already, it’s even more amazing to imagine where it will go and be the ones to take it there… What does it all mean? [via]

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Exploring asian culture, travel and technology