“Technological evolution can not be stopped” said Nicklas Bergman in a lecture when he presented his future theory. He also explained that before you can call a single independent invention a technological evolution you need to wait and see whether it gets established on the market to a certain point where it starts to affect peoples’ lives. His example was private cars. Before they existed, people were less movable and therefore had a stationary lifestyle. Once the private cars become affordable, it led to an increase of the sales of country houses, since people now could easily transport between the cities and the suburbs.
In other words Nicklas meant that every innovation can be a single independent invention, but doesn’t necessary have to become a technological evolution.
A few weeks later I was watching “Beyond Tomorrow” on Discovery Science Channel, where they as usually presented the latest inventions from all around the world, and I started to think of what these new cool gadgets could lead to if they gradually turned into technological evolutions. All inventions presented were from different areas and therefore had various features & benefits. Although after seeing all five of them I started to see a pattern. No matter what field of application they would have, all of them had one purpose – to achieve the result quicker.
Here comes the list of them:
1. Chemical spray from US that helps you to remove the scratches on your car. You don’t have to polish you vehicle or do anything else with it, just spray on the scratches and wait, the result will show in 15-20 minutes. --> Less time-consuming
2. New video camera that helps the scientist to do their research on dingos in South Australia. The heat- and movement sensor build in the camera only reacts and starts filming when it catches a warm-blooded animal that moves and has the size that has been preselected (to film only animals of dingo-size) cuts down the time of the night film from 12 hours to just a few. --> Less time-consuming
3. Mystical berries from Japan that can make it easier for you to drop a couple of kilos if you need it. The berries are served only in one restaurant in Tokyo together with very healthy food, which does not contain a milligram of sugar. You are supposed to chew on the berries before you start eating the food, which without any sugar tastes bitter and sour. The secret is that the berries can affect your taste buds for the next hour and therefore turn any bitter or sour taste into a sweet flavor and make it taste like the best pastry you’ve ever eaten. This can actually make you want to eat healthy food and spend less time at the gym trying to lose your weight. --> Less time-consuming
4. New invention called Quin Spin developed at Loughborough University in England that can make you kick it like Beckham. By measuring the speed, spin and position of the ball that you kick, it can tell you what parts to improve and therefore help you to get the perfect kick faster. --> Less time-consuming
5. Mechanical translator from Kahrlsruhe University in Germany that can help you to communicate on the thirty most common languages spoken all over the world. The translator itself is a communication revolution. It doesn’t only immediately translates and pronouns the exact phrases you say and receive the answers, but also “reads” signs by taking pictures. The creators are also working on the translator so that it can be used on the phone by using the muscle detector, but such a progress will take some more time. As for now, the plan is to release it on the market within a couple of years, which means that you can forget all that time it takes you to learn a new language if you can afford one of these new translators. --> Less time-consuming
According to these inventions the technology development today goes in a clear direction to reach the results quicker and therefore ease the existence of humans in the future by give them more free time. The question now is though whether this kind of inventions will only remain the inventions or whether they actually will become a common part of our lives and gradually turn into the technological evolution? And if they will, will we humans have more spear time in future? And in that case, what will we spend it on? Will we find new interest and hobbies, spend more time with our friends and families or will we just choose to work more? Well, I can’t answer this question for everyone, but at least i know what my choice would be... Do you?
söndag 28 september 2008
måndag 22 september 2008
Wedding thoughts
Going to a wedding is usually fun, going to a wedding as a trendspotter is even more fun! This is a true wisdom that I learned during this weekend.
By the end of the evening I ended up talking to a guy in his thirties who seemed to have done everything from hiking in Peru to starting up a Swedish Student Association at a University in Australia. He has travelled the world and gave the impression of being driven and ambitious. He told me that at the moment he was running a coffeehouse in Odenplan together with his girlfriend, but that soon he would be getting the license and dilute the current menu with some alcoholic beverages.
But for a young Stockholm-guy this didn’t seem to be enough and soon we started to talk about his collateral project that he was working on together with one of his friends. Sandshoe, which is the name of the company, started its existence in May 2008 and less than one month later the pilot group got the privilege to try it out.
The idea of Sandshoe is simple – surf trips to South America, combined with voluntary work in that area. The company offers a cheap price for your surf holiday, while you in return spend a few hours a day contributing with your knowledge and skills to the local development projects. At the moment the company has specified on surf holidays (everything between 2 and 8 weeks) combined with teaching English, bringing a great value to the ongoing local projects in Las Tunas, Ecuador.
But how did these two guys manage to come up with such an idea? The answer is simple: they spotted two trends and put them together in one business idea. Growing tourism that takes people further away from their homes in order to experience more adventurous challenges and better awareness of the world situation that increases the voluntary work around the globe. These two trends combined together generated a new business idea, which gradually led to Sandshoe, a company that truly brings together business and pleasure by creating a great value within the areas of education and sustainable community development and giving their customers a good deal on the price for surf holidays!
Key take away from this story: A good trendspotting eye can generate a profitable idea and at the same time contribute to the progress in developing countries.
This Saturday one of my close friends said the most important “Yes” in his life so far, hence a big crowd of friends and family gathered for a lively celebration in a ballroom in central Stockholm. The wedding was lovely; luxury residence, delicious dinner, great entertainment, you name it… And on top of all this I got lucky with my table company. (Worth mentioning is that my friend married a girl from India, thus the audience was very mixed in terms of both age and culture, something that I, as a young trendspotter, consider being a perfect environment for trendspotting).
By the end of the evening I ended up talking to a guy in his thirties who seemed to have done everything from hiking in Peru to starting up a Swedish Student Association at a University in Australia. He has travelled the world and gave the impression of being driven and ambitious. He told me that at the moment he was running a coffeehouse in Odenplan together with his girlfriend, but that soon he would be getting the license and dilute the current menu with some alcoholic beverages.
But for a young Stockholm-guy this didn’t seem to be enough and soon we started to talk about his collateral project that he was working on together with one of his friends. Sandshoe, which is the name of the company, started its existence in May 2008 and less than one month later the pilot group got the privilege to try it out.
The idea of Sandshoe is simple – surf trips to South America, combined with voluntary work in that area. The company offers a cheap price for your surf holiday, while you in return spend a few hours a day contributing with your knowledge and skills to the local development projects. At the moment the company has specified on surf holidays (everything between 2 and 8 weeks) combined with teaching English, bringing a great value to the ongoing local projects in Las Tunas, Ecuador.
But how did these two guys manage to come up with such an idea? The answer is simple: they spotted two trends and put them together in one business idea. Growing tourism that takes people further away from their homes in order to experience more adventurous challenges and better awareness of the world situation that increases the voluntary work around the globe. These two trends combined together generated a new business idea, which gradually led to Sandshoe, a company that truly brings together business and pleasure by creating a great value within the areas of education and sustainable community development and giving their customers a good deal on the price for surf holidays!
Key take away from this story: A good trendspotting eye can generate a profitable idea and at the same time contribute to the progress in developing countries.
torsdag 18 september 2008
True Butterfly Effect?
In my last entry I mentioned a phenomenon called the butterfly effect, a theory that says that even very small things can lead to e chain of actions that in the end cause much larger impact that anyone could expect. Today I would like to complement with an example which proves how easily it can happen.
This morning I was about to throw out a bunch of old papers, when I saw the headline about SCB (Statistic Central Bureau) on the front page of DN from 2008-09-10. Of course I’ve seen it before and I’ve read the article itself, but at that time I just didn’t think of it in terms of the butterfly effect.
The article is about a code error in SCB’s system that led to an incorrectly calculated rate of inflation in Sweden and therefore misled the Riksbank to increase the repo rate as part of their monetary policy. SCB has calculated the yearly rate of inflation to 4.4%, when in fact it was only 4.1%. The increased repo rate will now cause troubles for a considerable part of the Swedish population in need for loans to finance their houses. People forced to take new loans after the Riksbank’s decision about the increase will end up paying more than they actually should, which of course will lead to a reduction in their private savings. And all of this just due to a small error in SCB’s system, isn’t this a true butterfly effect?
This morning I was about to throw out a bunch of old papers, when I saw the headline about SCB (Statistic Central Bureau) on the front page of DN from 2008-09-10. Of course I’ve seen it before and I’ve read the article itself, but at that time I just didn’t think of it in terms of the butterfly effect.
The article is about a code error in SCB’s system that led to an incorrectly calculated rate of inflation in Sweden and therefore misled the Riksbank to increase the repo rate as part of their monetary policy. SCB has calculated the yearly rate of inflation to 4.4%, when in fact it was only 4.1%. The increased repo rate will now cause troubles for a considerable part of the Swedish population in need for loans to finance their houses. People forced to take new loans after the Riksbank’s decision about the increase will end up paying more than they actually should, which of course will lead to a reduction in their private savings. And all of this just due to a small error in SCB’s system, isn’t this a true butterfly effect?
tisdag 16 september 2008
Unreliable Frontal Lobe?
This weekend I started to read Daniel Gilbert’s ”Stumbling on Happiness” that is about our brains and how much the activity of our brain can distort our perception of the world. Therefore it can make us believe that the things want write now, will not be the same by the time we manage to get them. In other words Gilbert talks about future thinking from the perspective of a human brain, which I found very interesting.
As Gilbert states in his book human beings are the only kind of being on earth who can think of the future. Magnus has mentioned this in one of the lectures as well; animals can predict the very immediate future, they put together previous and present events and figure out that a sound of a rifle that almost killed them last time is a good sign to start running away. This kind of activity doesn’t even require complete thoughts and by sending the signals in the system can cause an immediate reaction.
This immediate forecast of the future can be done by any simple brain (read even computers and simple animals with no “real” brain) through consideration and recollection. But what differs us most from the animals is our ability to imagine things. Not only that we can imagine our future, we find it hard not to think about it since our brain has been “programmed” to do so! According to a study presented in Gilbert’s book, people spend 1/8 of their time thinking of the future. This activity is located in our frontal lobe, a part of our brains that started to develop fairly late comparing to the other parts of our brain (3 million years ago vs 500 million years ago). This part of our brain has many different functions such as critical thinking, long-term memories, to choose between good or bad, to see the differences and the similarities between things or events and of course future thinking.
Humans spend a ridiculous amount of time on planning and thinking forward, no doubt about that. Just think about how many books, films and songs there have been created about the future. But even though we spend so much time on future thinking, we somehow find the future intangible and unpredictable. And how qualitative is this forecasting that our frontal lobe allows us to imagine? For every film or song about the future, there is a painting or a book showing the opposite. It seems that there are as many different visualizations of the future as there are people in the world. Or is there even more? Do we think of the future differently, depending on what has happened in the past, a little like the “Sliding Doors” or “The Butterfly Effect”? For those of you who haven’t seen these two films, they both are about how very small things can cause major changes in the future. “Sliding Doors” is two different versions of a woman’s life created by a simple insignificant action in the beginning of the film; by catching or missing a train. “The Butterfly Effect” is about the butterfly effect itself, the theory where the flapping wing of a butterfly represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events in a long term. The producer uses this theory in terms of past and future thinking, showing how a small change in the past can generate different versions of your future.
So even though the prime function of the frontal lobe is to think about the future and plan for it, how much can it really predict, taking into consideration the fact that even small insignificant things can have such a major impact on the real future. Can the frontal lobe manage to imagine this? And can we rely on its forecasts?
As Gilbert states in his book human beings are the only kind of being on earth who can think of the future. Magnus has mentioned this in one of the lectures as well; animals can predict the very immediate future, they put together previous and present events and figure out that a sound of a rifle that almost killed them last time is a good sign to start running away. This kind of activity doesn’t even require complete thoughts and by sending the signals in the system can cause an immediate reaction.
This immediate forecast of the future can be done by any simple brain (read even computers and simple animals with no “real” brain) through consideration and recollection. But what differs us most from the animals is our ability to imagine things. Not only that we can imagine our future, we find it hard not to think about it since our brain has been “programmed” to do so! According to a study presented in Gilbert’s book, people spend 1/8 of their time thinking of the future. This activity is located in our frontal lobe, a part of our brains that started to develop fairly late comparing to the other parts of our brain (3 million years ago vs 500 million years ago). This part of our brain has many different functions such as critical thinking, long-term memories, to choose between good or bad, to see the differences and the similarities between things or events and of course future thinking.
Humans spend a ridiculous amount of time on planning and thinking forward, no doubt about that. Just think about how many books, films and songs there have been created about the future. But even though we spend so much time on future thinking, we somehow find the future intangible and unpredictable. And how qualitative is this forecasting that our frontal lobe allows us to imagine? For every film or song about the future, there is a painting or a book showing the opposite. It seems that there are as many different visualizations of the future as there are people in the world. Or is there even more? Do we think of the future differently, depending on what has happened in the past, a little like the “Sliding Doors” or “The Butterfly Effect”? For those of you who haven’t seen these two films, they both are about how very small things can cause major changes in the future. “Sliding Doors” is two different versions of a woman’s life created by a simple insignificant action in the beginning of the film; by catching or missing a train. “The Butterfly Effect” is about the butterfly effect itself, the theory where the flapping wing of a butterfly represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events in a long term. The producer uses this theory in terms of past and future thinking, showing how a small change in the past can generate different versions of your future.
So even though the prime function of the frontal lobe is to think about the future and plan for it, how much can it really predict, taking into consideration the fact that even small insignificant things can have such a major impact on the real future. Can the frontal lobe manage to imagine this? And can we rely on its forecasts?
fredag 5 september 2008
“One blog a day keeps the doctor away”
Well, my knowledge in blogging and why it has become so popular these days seems to be expanding for every day. Yesterday’s Trendspotting lesson started with Magnus telling the audience that a new study has shown that bogging has a positive effect on your health and memory. Unfortunately (inexperienced blogger as I am, with therefore quite bad memory) I forgot to write down the name of that research! But as we leave in an informative world where a simple google search can give you answers to everything, it took me less than a few minutes to find a similar article. Scientific American (a popular science magazine in US that usually brings articles about new and innovative research) published “Blogging--It's Good for You” in May this year and claimed that blogging (aka writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings) not only “serves as a stress-coping machine […] but also improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery.” And if you choose to believe this theory then self-medication may be the reason to why the blogosphere has taken off with such a rapid growth!
But let’s start from the beginning. What is a blog? How do you define it? And how did it all started? According to our own beloved Wikipedia a blog is “a Web site, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.”
Early blogs were simply manually-updated personal web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of the web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Gradually more and more people got a sweet tooth for this new innovative way of communicating their ideas to the society, and voilá.. A blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs as of December 2007.
There seem to be all kind of different blogs: personal, corporate, educational, medial, political, you name it! Everyone seems to be doing it, and I doubt that all of those 112 million blogs have only been created as self-medication or just because it’s trendy. There seems to be a higher reason to why all these people use their own time to update and maintain the blogs. What is it these people have in common? Well, the answer is simple: They are all trying to make their voice heard! Whether they blog about world’s environmental issues, macro trends, their own babies or toasters, they want someone to hear their thoughts and ideas to receive feedback, start a discussion or just to make other people to reflect over what they’ve just read.
This is not an unusual behavior and I can even give you a term for this activity - Citizen journalism (also known as public, participatory or democratic journalism) People without any professional journalism background use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others, which is exactly what we do by writing down our ideas, posting pictures and sharing links on our blogs. "The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires" say Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis according to the seminal report “We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information”
So it seems that a blog a day keeps not only the doctor away, but also makes people around you think! So start blogging! After all: “An apple a day, keeps the doctor away!”
But let’s start from the beginning. What is a blog? How do you define it? And how did it all started? According to our own beloved Wikipedia a blog is “a Web site, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.”
Early blogs were simply manually-updated personal web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of the web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Gradually more and more people got a sweet tooth for this new innovative way of communicating their ideas to the society, and voilá.. A blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs as of December 2007.
There seem to be all kind of different blogs: personal, corporate, educational, medial, political, you name it! Everyone seems to be doing it, and I doubt that all of those 112 million blogs have only been created as self-medication or just because it’s trendy. There seems to be a higher reason to why all these people use their own time to update and maintain the blogs. What is it these people have in common? Well, the answer is simple: They are all trying to make their voice heard! Whether they blog about world’s environmental issues, macro trends, their own babies or toasters, they want someone to hear their thoughts and ideas to receive feedback, start a discussion or just to make other people to reflect over what they’ve just read.
This is not an unusual behavior and I can even give you a term for this activity - Citizen journalism (also known as public, participatory or democratic journalism) People without any professional journalism background use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others, which is exactly what we do by writing down our ideas, posting pictures and sharing links on our blogs. "The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires" say Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis according to the seminal report “We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information”
So it seems that a blog a day keeps not only the doctor away, but also makes people around you think! So start blogging! After all: “An apple a day, keeps the doctor away!”
torsdag 4 september 2008
Loosing my (blogging) virginity
Saying that blogging is something I do on a weekly or even monthly basis would be a total lie since such a thing has never happened. I could even go further and reveal that I belong to the (boring?) crowd that even avoid “wall-posting” on Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, I do communicate with my people, I just prefer doing it through messages so that no one else except me and the receiver is aware of the content. Why would I want anyone else to read my thoughts? And for the same reason I don’t understand people who expose their whole life on different communities and blogs by adding photos and videos of themselves, writing wall-posts, comments, ideas and thoughts available to everyone, even to the people they don’t know! What happens to the integrity in our world? Is exposing some kind of new trend that more and more people start following? Or is it just a side effect of the new inventions like web-communities and blogs? Maybe people are just trying to keep up with this new inventions and the loss of their integrities is something that comes with it, or something they are not even aware of?
Furthermore this extremely exposing way of communication (aka blogging) seems all of a sudden to become a part of my reality! And not just because of Trendspotting & Future Thinking, but also because of Ideation (one of my other courses)! Two professors have two days in a row enlightened me with a simple message: “Blogging is da sh*t!” It’s cool, it’s modern, it’s innovative, it’s public, it’s trendy, everyone does it and you should as well! (Note, this is not really the language that the professors have used, just my own simplification.)
Well, knowing nothing about blogs (or trendspotting for that matter) even I can see that blogging seem to be something really trendy these days. Therefore I decided to do my own (very small-scaled) research at least to find out what it is, deep inside hoping to understand why it has become so popular and maybe even be able to describe the whole development process of a blog-trend in our society. But as we all know, even a small-scaled research takes time, which means that this will have to be the subject for my next post.
But as for now I’ll just see this post as my first step into (for me) a very unknown World of Blogging. This is my first entry, my first contribution, my first official statement on the Internet, public for other people to read and comment! Scary? Well, not idea, never done this before.. So I guess this is for me to find out…
Furthermore this extremely exposing way of communication (aka blogging) seems all of a sudden to become a part of my reality! And not just because of Trendspotting & Future Thinking, but also because of Ideation (one of my other courses)! Two professors have two days in a row enlightened me with a simple message: “Blogging is da sh*t!” It’s cool, it’s modern, it’s innovative, it’s public, it’s trendy, everyone does it and you should as well! (Note, this is not really the language that the professors have used, just my own simplification.)
Well, knowing nothing about blogs (or trendspotting for that matter) even I can see that blogging seem to be something really trendy these days. Therefore I decided to do my own (very small-scaled) research at least to find out what it is, deep inside hoping to understand why it has become so popular and maybe even be able to describe the whole development process of a blog-trend in our society. But as we all know, even a small-scaled research takes time, which means that this will have to be the subject for my next post.
But as for now I’ll just see this post as my first step into (for me) a very unknown World of Blogging. This is my first entry, my first contribution, my first official statement on the Internet, public for other people to read and comment! Scary? Well, not idea, never done this before.. So I guess this is for me to find out…
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