The latest robots are virtually indistinguishable from people

By

Almost five years ago now I wrote a post titled Being in two places at the same time which described how Professor Ishiguro, a Japanese roboticist, had created a robot replica of himself so he could give lectures at his university without enduring the commute from his home.

The robot, named Geminoid HI-1 to emphasize that it was his twin, mimicked his expressions and movements. Having this doppelganger meant that he could send it (or indeed multiple versions) out to represent him in the world.

After a sequence of other Geminoids, the state of the art has become startlingly good. The following videos show Geminoid DK, which is the twin of Associate Professor Henrik Scharfe of Denmark’s Aalborg University, designed in collaboration with Professor Ishiguro. Check out the videos.


Read more →

Developmental robotics: the cute baby robot who will grow up to be just like you

By

We are at the cusp of a new phase of robotics, where some of what has been promised to us for decades will come to fruition. An example of this is the iCub, a humanoid baby robot that can learn, emulating human cognition and development. This is the field of ‘developmental robotics’: creating robots that can learn and develop their capabilities over time.

Read more →

Six trends for 2011 and beyond on how businesses can tap the power of the web

By

The very dynamic Adam Franklin and Toby Jenkins of Bluewire Media recently did a video interview of me, asking me about the trends driving how the web will shape business.

Here is the video, with a summary of my headline points below. (Also see Bluewire Media’soriginal post of the video , which has my comments written up in greater detail.)

What do you see the future of the web being for businesses?

The fundamental trends include:

Read more →

We will need better filters as spurious news explodes: the curious case of the king of Saudi Arabia buying Facebook

By

Earlier today ‘satirical’ website DawnWires published a story titled Saudi King to buy Facebook for $150 billion to end the revolt: Goldman Sachs to advise. The article was published in the LoLNews category, and the bottom of it says “Sunday Humor… (Sunday Humor article at Dawnwires.com are meant to humor our readers. They may or may not be the truth.)”

The article was taken up by a number of mainstream news sites in the Middle East, including Tehran Times (quoting “inside sources”) and Egyptian media, as noted by Google exec Wael Ghonim. The original story on DawnWires shows almost 30,000 Facebook shares and over 30,000 shares on other channels, suggesting a lot of people have seen this now.

Read more →

When will tablets be given away for free? Perhaps before the end of this year

By

When we launched our Newspaper Extinction Timeline I noted that tablets similar to the iPad of today will cost less than $10 and given away for free by the end of the decade, a prediction that interviewers have frequently questioned me on since. 

I have since realized that tablets are likely to be given away far earlier than this, probably first bundled with content subscriptions. However it is not just publishers who would consider subsidizing the cost of a free tablet. Marketers may find it less expensive than traditional advertising to reach the right audience by giving them tablets which embed carefully presented messages. Consumer services companies such as banks could provide handy interfaces within tablets to embed and broaden relationships with select customers.

The following chart comes from John Walkenbach’s blog via Kevin Kelly, suggesting that Kindles will be given away for free by November 2011.


Source: John Walkenbach
Read more →

The Future of Customer Relationships: notes on where they are going

By

I’ve just finished a teleconference on The Future of Customer Relationships (follow the link for an overview), hosted by Focus.com and Brian Vellmure.

The panellists were:
Ross Dawson
Dr. Graham Hill
Dr. Michael Wu
Denis Pombriant

Our discussion will be available shortly as an mp3. For now, here are a few quick notes I took from the discussion. We certainly didn’t have the time to cover the full scope of the future of customer relationships in our 45 minute discussion, but we did get across some very interesting issues.

We started by talking about the big picture, where I covered a few of the themes from my map of the ExaTrends of the Decade.

MapoftheDecade_500w.jpg

Read more →

The future of business: choosing the industries that will prosper in the decade ahead

By

The cover story on the current issue of MyBusiness magazine is on The Future of Business: Businesses to seek – or flee – in the next decade.

It features ideas from three futurists: myself, Bernard Salt of KPMG, and Christine Christian of Dun & Bradstreet.

Here are a few of the quotes from me they used in the article. I will do a separate post tomorrow that runs through some of my ideas on the specific industries that will grow and shrink in the coming decade.

Ross Dawson, a futurist and Chairman of Future Exploration Network, advises that it is not important to pick which industries will rise or fall. Canny business people, he believes, will try to preduct what those changes will mean for the way business is conducted. “It does not make much sense to think about rising or shrinking industries,” he says. “It makes sense to think about where value is going.”

Read more →

Blogging is fragmenting into multi-platform content creation – long live blogging!

By

Drawing on a new Pew Internet report on Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults, The New York Times headline is: Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter.

It’s a misleading headline, so let’s unpack it.

First, blogs are not waning. All the major blogging platforms are growing. As noted in the article, Blogger’s visitors were up 9% last year, while WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg on his blog notes that WordPress is up 80 million views in the same period.

Second, while it is true that younger adults are moving away from blogging in its traditional sense, older adults are blogging more than they used to.

Read more →

Insights into effective social media policies

By

Last week I was part of a panel on the SkyBusiness Technology Behind Business program discussing corporate social media policies, comprised of Peter Williams of Deloitte, Adrienne Unkovitch of Workplace Guardian, and myself.

Here are some of the key points made during our discussion.

* Example of Commonwealth Bank which introduced social media policies that impinged on staff’s personal rights, and quickly reversed them based on the response.
Read more →

Apple subscriptions vs Google One Pass subscriptions – comparison and analysis for publishers

By

The lovely pace of change in the media world isn’t slowing down any…

One day after Apple launched its long-expected subscription service, Google announced its One Pass content payment system. Here is a quick comparison.

– What they are
They are both payment and delivery platforms for content sales and subscriptions.

– Delivery platforms
Apple’s platform is for content delivered to apps that are sold in the Apple iTunes store, so only to iPad, iPhone and iTouch products.
Google OnePass works on any web or mobile platform (not just Android) as long as it is permitted in the terms (i.e. it cannot be used on Apple devices)

Read more →