Revisiting the Newspaper Extinction Timeline on its first anniversary

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The Newspaper Extinction Timeline below was launched one year ago today. It received plenty of attention, getting published in newspapers and other mainstream media in over 30 countries, and being seen well over a million times.

Newspaper_Timeline_front.gif

Click on image to download full framework

Today a commenter on the original post asked me if anything had happened over the last year to make me change my forecasts. The answer, in short, is no.

If you look at the broader factors that we used in assessing the underlying trends, as below, things have played out much as expected.
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How tablets are changing how we consume news

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Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released some great research on how people use tablets (still mainly iPads) to consume news. The infographic below summarizes the findings – click on the image to go through to the original full-size version.

The very short summary is that those who own tablets usually access news on their devices, they access more news than before, and that substitutes for other news sources. However not many are paying for new on their tablets yet.

The survey results, combined with the announcement lower cost tablets such as the Kindle Fire, are entirely consistent with the arguments I made when I released the Newspaper Extinction Timeline, which is now a few days away from its first anniversary.

There are still major uncertainties on issues such as news pricing structures, screen technologies, and device formats, however the trends are clear. News will be accessed where we are, and delivered on screens larger than those on mobile phones.
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The future of cars: Why car exhaust will be as anti-social as cigarette smoke is today

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Earlier this week I was interviewed on ABC TV about the future of cars, in a program to coincide with the start of World Solar Challenge, the annual solar car race covering the 3,021 km from Darwin to Adelaide.

I talked about several facets of the future of cars, including changing energy sources and their implications, new car materials and structures, and the rise of self-driving automobiles.

It is important to understand that while zero emission vehicles, usually electric, are a key objective in moving beyond petrol-driven cars, that electric cars usually still pollute. In most countries electricity is generated primarily by a variety of dirty fossil fuels. Refueling your car by plugging it into the mains doesn’t mean it isn’t polluting, simply that the pollution happens elsewhere.
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[VIDEO] In 1987 Apple predicted it would launch Siri in 2011

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This is very, very good.

This video created by Apple in 1987 shows how a ‘Knowledge Navigator’ would work, depicting a university professor interacting with a tablet computer through voice. The system’s animated avatar summarizes emails, responds to voice commands, extracts and displays data, provides intelligent information retrieval, and provides message filtering.

This video was posted on Waxy, where they calculate the date of the video as September 16, 2011, based on the calendar on the desk, and the request for a five-year old research paper from 2006.


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Watch a robot surgeon peel a grape: the extension of human powers

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This awesome video from New Scientist TV shows a surgical robot with a human operator peeling a grape. This technology greatly augments what human surgeons can do, and also provides a platform for telesurgery.

The New Scientist article Watch a surgical robot peel a grape, says:
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Animated excursions into the future: the extraordinary implications of utility fog

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I caught up with fellow futurist Kristin Alford last week, yet another first time face-to-face meeting after a long time interacting online. It seems most of the people I meet these days are people I know from Twitter.

Kristin pointed me to some of what her company Bridge8 is doing in creating animated videos about the future. I believe the primary intended audience is secondary school students, but they are excellent videos, well-paced, well-thought-out, educational, all in all very nicely done.

Here is their video on the implications of Utility Fog, starting with a segment on how to think about the future, introducing the idea of utility fog, and running through some of the possible implications. It’s a great study in futures thinking, and well worth watching.


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Creating the future of local government

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I recently gave the opening keynote at Local Government Association of Tasmania‘s annual conference. On the occasion of their 100th anniversary, they wanted to look forward to the future as well as to their past.

Incidentally, the event was just two days after I gave the opening keynote at the Institute of Public Administration NSW’s annual conference on the Transformation of Government. My presentations at the two events were reasonably similar, but many issues differ across state and local government. One of the key issues is that in a world driven by community, local government is (or at least should be) closer to the community than any other level of government.

For the local government conference my topic was Creating the Future of Local Government. The current issue of the association’s magazine, LGAT News, contains a write-up of my keynote:

In a defining era for government globally, councils are in the front-line of changes and challenges and are best placed to take the lead in turning these challenges into opportunities. This was the message to Tasmanian councils from leading business futurist, Ross Dawson, in his keynote address to conference delegates.

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Looking for talented editors/ writers / project managers / social media on cool tech, media, and future topics

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We have just posted an ad on Elance, looking for editors/ writers/ project managers for some of our existing and forthcoming online publications.

Please apply on Elance if this seems like a match, or pass it on to others if you think it might be of interest. If you have questions before applying you can use our contact form. We hope to find some awesome people!

Talented editors/ writers / project managers / social media for cool tech and future topics

We run a series of content websites on topics related to technology, media, and the future, among many other activities.

We are looking for highly talented editors/ project managers who can drive quality content and traffic on these sites.
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Capturing all your browsing data: the difference between Amazon’s Silk and Opera Mobile

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Chris Espinosa has written a very interesting piece about the Silk browser that comes on Amazon’s freshly announced Fire tablet.

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web.

In a discussion on Twitter, Mark Pesce and Alexander Sadleir pointed out that this is basically the same as what Opera Mobile does. The Registry wrote last year:
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Angry Birds and productivity at work: why distractions can help

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On Friday a journalist from the Herald Sun called me to ask for my response to an ‘analysis’ suggesting that $1.4 billion of worker productivity is lost to playing Angry Birds. It seems that my answers turned the story around from what could have been yet another populist headline to Is Angry Birds the new Solitaire or are we flying off the handle a bit too early?

I was quoted:
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