The death of news-on-paper is the rebirth of news organizations

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My Newspaper Extinction Timeline is now well over 3 years old, in which time it has been viewed many millions of times and appeared in publications in over 30 countries. There has been a revival of interest recently from the extensive coverage of a keynote I gave at Arab Media Forum in Dubai last month and comments I made afterwards.

Many commentators on my framework seem to equate newspapers with newspaper companies. That is completely incorrect.

Such a thing as a “newspaper” company has ceased to exist except in regional areas of developing countries. What were newspaper companies are now news organizations.

The death of news-on-paper absolutely does not imply the death of news organizations. In fact it is an enabler of their rebirth.

Dominique Delport, the very switched-on Global MD of Havas Media Group, has created an excellent slide deck titled Newspapers: The End… Seriously? (embedded below). He opens with my Newspaper Extinction Timeline and goes on to paint a bright future for the industry.

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How the next generation of display technologies will transform mobile computing

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This morning I was interviewed on the Morning Show about next generation technologies including holograms on smartphones, machine to machine (M2M) communication, neuro-hacking and brain implants.

Click on the image to see a video of the segment.

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The possibility of holograms on smartphones is absolutely compelling.

Back from when the first smartphones came out I pointed to the interfaces as the critical enabler of rich computing on-the-go, as shown for example in my Future of the Media Lifecycle framework.
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Report: The Future of Digital Australia in 2025 and what Australians think

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I have been recently working with McAfee, now part of Intel Security, to write a report on Safeguarding the Future of Digital Australia in 2025, being launched this morning in Parliament House in Canberra as part of the Federal Government’s Stay Smart Online Week.

SafeguardingFuture2025_cover_250_shadowThe report consists of my insights into the Future of Home, Social, Work, and GenNext in 2025, together with commentary from McAfee and other experts on how to keep safe in these worlds.
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Click on the report cover image left to download the report.

Accompanying the report, we did a survey of what Australians think about their digital future in 2025. The results of the survey are in the video below. There are some fascinating insights.

For now, please feel free to share the resources. I would love to hear your thoughts on the report.

Updating the newspaper extinction timeline for the Arab world

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Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at the Arab Media Forum in Dubai, on Creating the Future of Arab Media.

My speech and a series of interviews I did afterwards have received broad coverage, including articles in Al Arabiya, Gulf Today, Huffington Post, Emirates 24/7, Zawya, and Gulf News, as well as interviews on Dubai Eye and Dubai One. I thought it was worth reviewing a few of the major points made.
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Keynote slides: Creating the Future of Arab Media

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Tomorrow I am doing the opening presentation at Arab Media Forum in Dubai, the largest and most prestigious conference on media in the Arab world.

The slides to my presentation are below. As always, slides are designed to support my presentation, not to stand alone, but may still be of value even if you didn’t attend my keynote.

In my presentation I cover:
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The future of travel: vertical train stations to help the growth of high-speed trains

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Today I was interviewed on the Channel 7 Daily Edition about the future of travel. Click on the image below to see a video of the segment.

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One of the topics we discussed was a proposed concept of a Hyper-Speed Vertical Train Hub, an interesting idea which allows high speed trains to shift to a vertical configuration as they arrive at a station.

Instead of long carriages the train consists of smaller pods that can stay in upright position as the train shifts to be aligned with the walls of a building, where the passengers can alight.

The primary advantage is that the train station can have a very small footprint, which will be increasingly important when space is at a premium in densely populated urban centers.

High-speed trains are proving to be a vital foundation to China’s infrastructure, providing an example that other countries are increasingly interested in following.

The vertical train hubs concept is not that likely to be implemented, but it is a novel and intriguing approach that just might facilitate the adoption of high-speed trains in major centers.

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Image source: Evolo

Scratch: The enormous value of children’s programming languages

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I have been aware for some years of the various programming languages available for children. This evening I decided to have a go with Scratch with my daughters, as Leda is now almost eight, the bottom of the suggested age range for the language.

I was blown away. Scratch has an extremely wide range of capabilities, ranging from very simple animations through to complex conditional loops, all done through extremely easy rearrangement of colored blocks.

Any child would be immediately drawn into what they can do, and simply by playing, learn the principles of programming. Scratch’s originator MIT’s Mitch Resnick tells the story in this TED talk below.


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Keynote slides: The New World of Business

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Yesterday I gave two keynotes at the Congreso Internacional de Retail in Lima Peru.

The first keynote provided a big picture view of the changing world of business, while the second keynote focused on the future of retail.

Here are the slides to my first keynote. The slides to the second keynote are here. As always, my slides are designed to support my presentations, not to stand alone, but may be useful to others.

The opportunities and risks of virtual reality

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Today I was interviewed on the Daily Edition about virtual reality, in the wake of Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus Rift.

You can click on the image below to watch a video of the segment.

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It is staggering that the very old idea of ‘virtual reality’ is finally about to reach its fruition with new technologies such as Oculus Rift, which have low enough latency to fool the brain into believing it is in a new world.
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15 theses about the future of the Internet and how we can shape it positively

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PewResearch Internet Project has just released a report on Digital Life in 2025 based on expert interviews.

One of the interesting aspects of the report is the ‘theses‘ that they have distilled from the interviews, which they have divided into ‘more-hopeful and ‘less-hopeful’, concluding with one very important piece advice. These are:
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