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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In the future we will have relationships with our homes

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Today I was interviewed on The Daily Edition about the homes of the future.

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

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The future of homes is a very rich topic that goes far beyond the usual chatter about internet-enabled refrigerators and integrated entertainment, and we weren’t able to cover much in a TV panel format.

However the main point that I made is that in the future we will have a very real relationship with our homes. Now homes are somewhere that we reside, and while we can shape them to our personalities, it is not currently a two-way relationship.

As we move forward, our relationship with our homes will comprise many elements.
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The age of self-creation: why ethics must be central to how we create the future

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One of my flurry of media appearances over New Year was on the Sunrise show, talking about what to expect in 2014.

Click on the image to see a video of my interview.

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We discussed emerging consumer technology trends, shifts in retail, and the idea of “self-creation”, which was one of my 14 themes in our 2014: Crunch Time report.

As I wrote in the report about the theme:
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