The Next Big Thing(s)

Judging this year’s Tech of the Future category in the Global Mobile awards, I was struck by the range of entries. They addressed many different market spaces, with different combinations of technology, and came from companies and collaborations of different sizes and shapes. While tech as an industry may still have its issues with diversity in hiring, its outputs are incredibly diverse.This should perhaps not surprise us. The connected computing revolution has stripped much of the friction from innovation, equipping more people than ever with the tools and the knowledge to create. It has brought global organisations closer together, reducing the friction of communication and increasingly demolishing the remaining barriers, like language. A shared platform of connected computers has allowed more people to innovate, and to find an audience for those innovations in an enormous network of niches.Given this breadth of innovation and the increasingly fractured nature of the audience, I have to wonder if we should be looking for a single ‘next big thing’.

What’s next?

This is a question that is asked frequently in the mobile industry, in one form or another. It takes the form of questions like: “What is 5G for?”, and “What will replace the smartphone?” Perhaps we should stop looking for a single answer to these questions and think much more in terms of answers, plural.The whole point of 5G for me is that it can support a diverse range of applications with a level of ubiquitous connectivity we have only been able to dream of until now. If I still have to think about whether or not I am connected in five years’ time, then it will have been a spectacular failure. I should only have to think about the applications, and more specifically, my chosen blend of applications, unique to me. Some will be more popular than others, and hungrier for bandwidth or low latency. But with the rapidly growing array of connected devices, perhaps the biggest category in any analysis of traffic in the future will be ‘other’, an enormous group of individually small but collectively very large bandwidth consumers.

Beyond the smartphone

Perhaps the devices running those applications will be equally diverse? I am compelled by the vision for the future of mixed reality, and the replacement of handsets with headsets. But it is unlikely this will suit everyone. Processors, baseband units, cameras and batteries can be assembled into a huge variety of form factors. As design and manufacturing capabilities continue to advance, the size of a profitable market for individual devices is likely to shrink further. There will likely be a device for every niche, well beyond the current diversity of handset designs. And that’s before we get into the incredible range of M2M (machine to machine) or IoT (internet of things) devices that we already see appearing.In summary, perhaps we should be less concerned about what is ‘the next big thing’. Instead we should focus on the things, plural. On continuing to enhance the environment for innovation and experimentation. On putting the tools of creativity into the hands of those that understand their niches and can build great things that they will love.

What Apple’s announcements mean for the future of TV

Apple is making a move to dominate the future of TV. But it's not the one you think...It's a few months since I stepped back from reviewing gadgets and commenting on general tech stories on the Beeb. Since then, I’ve paid less attention to the occasional slew of press releases that drop into my inbox from Apple. But this morning, as well as talking about the future of work, Julia Hartley-Brewer’s team on TalkRadio have asked me to comment on yesterday’s announcements. So, I took a look.What I saw fascinated me.For me, Apple’s announcements are not so much about new products or services. They are about the way we navigate the explosion of choice in front of us when it comes to entertainment. In the announcements of Apple TV+, the new Apple TV App, and Apple Arcade, the new ad-free games service, the same words keep coming up: “curated”, “personalised”, “discover”. Apple is catching a lot of headlines for its big-name content signings. But I think its desire, and mission, to insert itself into our decision-making is much more interesting.Fair warning, there may be some confirmation bias here. I’ve been obsessed with how we navigate the surfeit of choice we now face for some time, writing about the phenomenon of ‘reintermediation’ here, and here. This, to me, is just another example. But it’s important because of Apple’s scale and reach.

Apple swagger

Apple offering new content is undoubtedly important. It doesn’t matter how late you are to the party if you roll up with Apple-scale swagger. But Apple inserting itself into the process for how 1bn people choose content? That’s enormous. If Apple becomes the tastemaker, the front end to all TV services, then it will have incredible power over what we watch. It can diminish the value of the brands behind that discovery engine – brands that right now act as a heuristic for choice. Don’t know what to watch? There’s probably something good on the BBC.I believe that in the future a lot of our decision-making processes will be augmented by smart machines. Many of us already let our digital music accounts do the choosing with automatically curated playlists. This potentially creates a more open market for content creators: no longer is your success at the whim of a big distributor if you can get it found by the right discover engine. But it also places enormous power with those discovery engines – just as we have already handed Google so much power by making it the primary means by which we navigate the web.

Does Apple own the future of TV?

This move by Apple is a smart one as it transitions to a higher proportion of service-based revenue. It makes Apple ownership more sticky, because your preferences are bound to your Apple account. But it also allows Apple to exert that stickiness beyond its own ecosystem, if it can use its new channels as a trojan horse to get the Apple TV app on to third party devices and smart TVs.Don’t get me wrong: I’m as dazzled by Oprah and Spielberg as the next person. But reintermediation is the bigger play here.

When recycled material is better than new

Can we really make recycled material that is better than its virgin equivalent?When you describe someone – perhaps a government minister right now – as a ‘chocolate teapot’, everyone knows what you mean. We know that chocolate melts at roughly the temperature of the human body. It would be a ridiculous material from which to make a teapot carrying boiling liquids. Fortunately, we have many other choices of material and we can select one that is appropriate to the task at hand.The material we choose for a particular task depends on its physical properties, as well as its cost, both financial and environmental. We can never select for just one property: it’s always about a compromise between a variety of characteristics, and our budget.

Recycled material for specific tasks

Imagine if we could design a material for each task. One that had the minimum amount of compromise because it was engineered for the task at hand. More, imagine we could reform recycled materials with new properties that make them greater than their virgin equivalents.I’ve shared my excitement about the new wave of materials science a few times on this blog. What thrills me is that new single layer and composite materials will change the way our world looks, just as the digital revolution changed the way it works. In fact, based on a conversation I had at the national Graphene institute recently, it might just do both.We all know plastics are bad, right? Bags, straws, packaging, all have to go because they consume fossil fuels in their production and take decades or more to biodegrade, choking the seas as they do. Some plastics are recyclable but the resulting product is typically inferior. This doesn’t have to be the case.

Pipeline plastics

Speaking to Dr Oana Istrate, a Graphene Applications Specialist at the new Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre, I learned that they are working on adding single layer materials to recycled plastics to create a variety of properties suited to different applications. For example, stopping the leakage of Hydrogen Sulphide gas from oil pipelines.H2S is a colourless gas with a distinctive smell of rotten eggs. It is highly poisonous, flammable, and corrosive, presenting a real challenge for the oil and gas industry. H2S corrodes pipelines shortens their lifespan and increases the risk from leaks, creating a serious safety issue, as well as one of maintenance costs.Combining graphene with plastic can create a material that is impenetrable to H2S. Line a pipeline with this and you can extend its lifespan and improve safety.Other applications abound: imagine a contact lens that better retains moisture, or a wetsuit that better retains heat. This is before we get into improved mechanical properties. Researchers have already used Graphene to increase the wear properties of trainer soles, and make racing bikes and cars stiffer, improving the transfer of power to the track.If we combine single layer materials with recycled plastics, we see the promise of a new range of materials. Materials with which we can construct tomorrow’s world. Materials that are greener but also more particularly suited to the applications at hand.

Who answers the questions that futurism raises?

There’s a small product design company in Manchester that has designed a $5 solar light. Developed for Yingli Namene, affiliated with one of the world’s largest solar panel manufacturers, it is now being sold in Malawi, Uganda and Zambia by SunnyMoney, the social enterprise created by the charity Solar Aid.

Why is this light important?

Because it offers an extremely low-cost alternative to kerosene lamps. Kerosene lamps are widely used by the nearly 600 million people across the continent of Africa who don’t have access to electricity. Kerosene lamps are dangerous, dirty and expensive to run. Solar lights are free to run, totally clean, and give much better light.Why mention this light? Three reasons.First, this story highlights just how much of a role geography still plays in determining the macro factors that influence your future. This is Gibson’s quote about an unevenly distributed future made very real: while I’m writing about having a robot control my lights, for others the challenge is getting any electric light at all.Second, because it neatly captures some of the ‘supermacro’ issues that affect the big picture of everyone’s future: poverty, inequality, climate change, and of course, technology. While geography remains a huge determinant of the pressures affecting your future, these supermacro trends are playing out in different ways across every continent.And third, because of what it represents: a solution to a well-defined problem — something that I know I can’t deliver.

Answering the questions you raise

Applied futurism provides great tools for questioning the future. And for laying out possible routes to answer those questions. It can even offer a framework for the type of organisation most likely to recognise the right questions early and answer them quickly.But there is a limit. Nothing in the toolkit addresses solution design or implementation at anything beyond the surface layer.If futurists — I and other users of the toolkit — are going to help people answer the questions they raise, then they need partners. People who can follow questions through to a practical answer. Like the $5 solar light.inventid & Future Product are the first partners in what I’m loosely calling my 'Labs' — a collection of formalised partnerships with organisations and individuals who can help clients pursue practical answers to the questions raised by futurism.inventid is an award-winning industrial design studio working in product, packaging and customer experience. Based in Manchester, UK and working with international partners, inventid believes thoughtful design transforms businesses and improves quality of life for people and our planet.Future Product is a spin-out project by the two founding members of inventid and additional board member Kevin Smith. Future Product uses design to activate technology, helping partners understand both the market gaps and operational threats technology presents. Without design, technologies that start in the lab stay in the lab. Future Product was started to help emergent ideas crossover into everyday life more quickly, helping them make better sense to customers, investors and mainstream media.I’m really excited to be working with these teams and we’re already speaking to clients about potential joint projects.I’ll be adding more partners this year and looking for other projects with my clients where they can really make a difference.

The manipulation of nature

One of the primary objectives of the proto-science of alchemy was to turn lead into gold. It seems a rather base goal (forgive the pun), and more in the realm of magic than technology. Nonetheless, alchemists around the world laid down some of the foundations of modern science.The alchemists never succeeded, but as it turns out, you can turn lead into gold. Since every element is merely a collection of protons, neutrons and electrons, if you can manipulate the content of a nucleus you can change lead into gold. People have done so. Unfortunately, the process isn’t exactly practical, requiring huge amounts of energy from a particle accelerator, or depositing the lead in nuclear reactor.Selling that might be even harder than selling Ratner’s jewellery.

Coding DNA

Early in 2017 a team of scientists took the next step in creating truly programmable organisms. We may look back on this as synthetic biology’s 'Turing moment’, the point at which an expensive specialist machine starts to become an affordable generalist platform.Imagine being able to program a bacterium to produce materials, biofuel, cotton or spider silk. Imagine being able to program it to make medicines. Program one, feed it and watch it divide, exponentially increasing your production capacity.The potential is endless, as are the pitfalls. Such power needs careful constraint. And yet, it is following the same path of all technologies: it is becoming cheaper and more accessible all the time.Basic genetic engineering is already at the point of being a toy, in terms of its cost and ease. How long before I can buy a genetic programming platform as readily as a 3D printer?

Technology is the tools by which we manipulate nature

I have rather pigeonholed myself as a ‘tech expert’ over the years. Occasionally I struggle against this self-applied categorisation, worried that it limits my scope and people’s faith in my advice.But then I follow little rabbit holes of research into alchemy (inspired by a throwaway comment on a recent episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage) and synthetic biology, and realise that technology — properly defined — is barely a pigeonhole. It represents the grand scope of our ability to affect our environment, an endeavour that I believe defines us as a species.This is why I start with technology — in the broadest sense — when looking to the future. Technology is the means by which we make change, whether intended, or unintended.

Ten ways to disrupt tomorrow

Last week I gave the closing keynote at the enormous RESI 2017 residential property conference, sharing a stage with the housing minister Alok Sharma, the BBC’s Mark Easton, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, and Blur’s Alex James.I wrote a talk for the event, but the night before I decided it was all wrong. Closing keynotes need to be full of energy — especially when people are still jaded from the previous night’s gala dinner. They need to give people some simple points to take away. And while they can summarise, the last thing people want to hear is a repeat of what has come before.Looking at the agenda for the previous days I decided I needed to come up with something fresh. This is what I wrote. Though it was written for a property audience, I think it has wider relevance. Have a read and see what you think.####I’ve been asked to talk to you today about disruption. In the next twenty five minutes I want to talk about ten things that are going to completely disrupt the physical world. Your business, your home, and everyone’s lives.But first I want to talk about what’s driving that disruption. Right here, right now there is one change driver that is bigger than Trump, bigger than Brexit, bigger than climate change. And it’s technology.Technology is driving change both more consistently and more persistently than any of these factors today. You may be able to roll back whatever decisions a politician makes, given enough time. But you can’t un-invent the smartphone, or the atom bomb — unfortunately, given the sabre rattling from a certain chubby dictator.

The appliance of science

When I talk about technology, I’m not talking about the phone in your pocket, though that’s part of it. I’m talking about technology in the broadest sense. The appliance of science. We are a race of tool makers who have been applying science since the first caveman or woman picked up a rock and realised it was a more efficient way to stove in the head of whatever animal they were trying to catch. Technology is maths, wheels and language. Which I guess makes Shakespeare a coder.Throughout our history technology has done one thing. It has lowered friction. Technology allows us to do things we couldn’t otherwise do more efficiently, quickly, and painlessly.But that gives whoever has that technology a competitive edge. Because if someone else has that edge, then we want it. It doesn’t matter if it’s countries competing in an arms race, companies competing in a market, or you trying to keep up with the family at number 42 with the nice new Merc.It is this competitive tension that keeps driving technology forward. The last ten years have seen technology transform our world. The next ten will see transformations of even greater magnitude.

1. The end of possessions

Technology has eliminated so much of the matter in our lives. Newspapers and magazines, books, paper in general. CDs, DVDs, Blurays and all the various paraphernalia needed to play them on.This has coincided with a shift to a much more experience-led culture. Expenditure on food and drink and holidays is up. People are focused on what they can do, not what they can own.There’s still huge — perhaps increasing — value in tactile experiences like vinyl, in the face of mass digitisation. But the larger trend is clear: we can achieve the same or greater experiences through fewer physical objects.

2. Personal AI

We outsource memory to other people in our lives. How many times have you relied on a partner or family member to remember someone’s birthday, the MOT, or home insurance renewal? Why shouldn’t we outsource to machines as well?The reality is that we already do. GPS has become our sense of direction, calendars and photos our memories.The next step is letting them filter the world, and even take buying decisions, on our behalf. Right now we put this power in the hands of third parties like Facebook, and subscription shopping services. When it should be our own personal AI, intimately familiar with our preferences and insulated from the influence of external parties.

3. Frictionless administration

With a personal AI hosting aspects of our identity, finance and vital documentation, we can look forward to truly frictionless administration. No more endless reams of paper or multi-page forms for every insurance policy, remortgage or investment. Our assistants interact with the APIs of any intermediary, in turn interacting with providers and third parties. Blockchain may play a role in providing a more secure and transparent record.

4. Everything is smart

Our personal AIs will be driven by data captured from the world around us, and able to shape that world to our needs. Because everything will be connected. It costs less than a couple of pounds to add WiFi to anything these days — a few cents to do it at scale. Eventually the cost of doing so falls below the return — however slight it might be. And so everything gets some level of smarts, for sensing or control.

5. Distributed energy

We can power this smarter world because three things are happening. First, the consumption of each unit is declining: desktop PCs consume around 400 watts, laptops 75w, tablets and phones just 10. Appliances get more efficient all the time.Second, our ability to generate electricity cheaply and cleanly is improving — particularly at small scale with solar. Wind is already markedly cheaper than nuclear, as the last round of bidding for UK energy supply shows.Third, we can now store energy better. The next generation of batteries approach the energy density of petrol and are made from cheap and readily-available minerals.

6. Everything is electric

Because of this, gas starts to look as unattractive as a home fuel as coal does to us now. Dangerous and dirty, people will bother less and less with installing gas supply in new developments, as electricity becomes the preferred technology for heating and cooking, transport and travel, as well as all of our digital appliances.

7. Autonomous construction

Machines can already lay bricks and pour concrete faster than people, with large-scale 3D printers now producing whole buildings near-autonomously from a recycled slurry. As this technology advances it will change the nature of construction and maintenance. Autonomous machines will follow digital instructions to create and complete whole structures, utilising new materials and modular techniques.Then machines will respond to sensor data to adapt those buildings to current need, within the parameters laid down by the original architects.

8. Dynamic addressing

Your phone is increasingly your address, enabling you to share your location with a high degree of accuracy with third parties. The incredible WhatThreeWords gives a unique address to every few square metres of the earth. Given these capabilities, why do we have everything delivered to a fixed physical address? New fraud controls mean we should be less reliant on address as a validation of someone’s trustworthiness. Why not send goods to wherever they want them — whether that’s where they are or where they will be?

9. Life through a lens

Yesterday’s Deloitte figures showed we spend an incredible amount of time staring at a screen. Tomorrow we will stare through it. Augmented reality enables more natural, human interactions with the digital world, and equips us with a general purpose sensor — the head-mounted camera — that enables a whole range of applications. I genuinely believe that in just ten years we will spend 10–12 hours per day in augmented reality, witnessing the world through a digital overlay. One that expands our senses, enhances our memory and cognition, and personalises our world. This isn’t a vision without risk, but I think it’s realistic.

10. Joy is paramount

One of the insights about the ‘millennial’ generation that I actually accept is the rising priority placed on experiences over possessions. While widely pilloried I think this can only be seen as a good thing in retrospect. We should enjoy life if we can, and our spaces and places, services and service, need to be shaped around that priority.

How smart does a vacuum cleaner need to be?

With my gadget-man hat on, I had a demo this week of the most spectacular vacuum cleaner. It arrived in an array of cases with multiple components and a trained demonstrator to walk me through it.

This is not the Rolls Royce of vacuum cleaners. That would imply conspicuous expenditure. This is more a boy scout in a BMW: beautifully engineered and prepared for anything.I’ll be writing up a full review of the Vorwerk VK200 over on The Loadout, but what struck me most about this system was its smarts. This is a highly intelligent vacuum cleaner.

Smarts in action

This was made clear at two points in the demonstration, one deliberate, one less so.The first occasion was in showing the transitions from carpet to hard floor. The cleaner head has ultrasonic sensors to not just detect this transition but to understand how deep the carpet might be and adjust the suction and profile accordingly.Impressive.The second occasion was when the unit started misbehaving. I felt for the demonstrator, having been in that situation. It’s uncomfortable. But I didn’t read too much into it: these are products with a 17–25 year lifespan. The worst is bound to happen in a demonstration.What surprised me was his response. Not “I’ll have to fix that,” but “I’ll have to reprogram that.” This is a vacuum cleaner smart enough to be fixable by plugging in a USB cable.

Ubiquity

The processing power required to support such capabilities is hardly spectacular by modern standards. But nonetheless it struck me that yet another formerly dumb item is now smart. Not just because it has a small digital brain but because it can sense its environment and respond.When you’re looking to the future, one of the critical things to understand is just how far and how fast the price or technology falls, and its accessibility increases. The more widely used and deployed a technology becomes (often a factor of price), the more shared knowledge there is about how to deploy it. This drives further application and the price falls again, continuing the cycle.The result is that we see technology in all sorts of applications where previously it may have seemed unrealistically expensive or complex to implement. Sometimes that’s frivolous — the WiFi Kettle being a good example — and sometimes that smarts is put to good use, as in the VK200.This ubiquitous application of technology — in all its forms — drives competition, often from unforeseen sources. People with a problem recognise a technology-driven solution and see that it can be constructed with relative ease. They then launch themselves into a market that may have seen little new competition in decades.Unless your peripheral vision is alert to incoming technologies and the challenges they might carry, your business is at serious risk.

In the future (carrying) less is more

There are four things I hate carrying around: wallet, house keys, cash, laptop. They just add friction to your day, discomfort to your pockets, and weight to your backpack. I'm working to do away with all of them.

Wap your wad

The wallet and the cash are increasingly easy, as long as you don’t care about loyalty card points. I'm willing to ditch those in favour of a nice empty pocket, even without the privacy concerns. For most of this week I have been relying on my phone for payments and have found few occasions when it has not been accepted.

I have tried tucking a credit card and a single cash note into my jeans for those occasions but found the credit card gets easily bent. A little engineering along the lines of the Ridge wallet may be required.

Unlock your pockets

The keys are more complicated. Yes, there are digital locks, like the Yale lock I tested recently, which I will be fitting to the door of my workshop (when I get around to fitting a door to my workshop). But this would annoy the crap out of the rest of my family as a front door control.

Instead I need a system where I can use my phone (or RFID) while they continue to use a key. I haven’t yet found one fits my front door, and I don’t really fancy replacing the door just yet.

Leave the laptop

The laptop is perhaps the biggest challenge. I'm lucky to have a pretty dinky laptop but it’s still the biggest and heaviest item I have to carry each day.

Until now I've always believed that mobile devices lack the horsepower for a lot of my work, but I now think it is only the interface that stops me getting everything done with a pocket sized device. And I mean that in every sense: even if I can type fast enough on screen — as I'm doing now — I don’t have the screen size or mouse-driven precision for video or audio editing, or presentation prep.

Lots of attempts have been made to overcome these challenges with hybrid devices and accessories. But, of course, the more additional hardware it involves, the more you may as well carry a laptop. This will require experimentation…

In the future…

So far this has just been a post about my pet peeves. But there is a point to it: this stuff all goes away, and soon.

The first step will be further consolidation into the smartphone as it increasingly integrates all of the major wallet functions — not just payments but smart cards, loyalty schemes, and ID.

Then it will start to absorb the key chain. Right now, digital locks are a pain: power is a problem, people are concerned about security, and there’s no straight electronic replacement for barrel locks and security doors — without changing the door. But all of these problems will be solved in time.

Where it gets really interesting is when these functions start to explode out of the phone and either become device-less, or integrated elsewhere.

The first place people think of for this integration is the body, but given the fast pace of technology change, I remain sceptical about anything embedded under the skin. Rather, I think we’ll see schemes that replace the device altogether: biometric sensors for identification could go a long way to replacing keys and cards. Maybe a single, small, ID device could provide a second authentication factor.

Likewise with computing power: why take it with us when the power can be hosted in the cloud and projected to us when we need it? Future devices might only need a minuscule physical presence if they can capture voice input, or project three dimensional interfaces through augmented reality. Even the AR device may only be the size of a contact lens.

A minimalist future

We may be on the path towards a minimalist future already: most media items are disappearing — discs, newspapers, magazines. We may be buying more books for now but how many people do you see out listening to, watching or reading from their digital devices rather than a dedicated physical medium?

The convergence of devices into the smartphone is already cliché, but it hasn't finished until it has swallowed the wallet and the key chain. I still believe we will see an explosion of functions out of the smartphone as more ergonomic options become economically viable. But long term, those devices may be so small, that we don’t even remember we’re carrying them. Or, there may be no device at all.