I don't necessarily agree with all these predictions, but they are certainly make you stop and think about what real world objects will be replaced in the near future.
For the record, I think there it's not a case of making these object extinct, it's a case of killing off the majority of them.
A very funny video about social media and naming consultants...
A huge congratulations to Mark Cavendish on winning the Tour de France's green jersey. That's the colour worn by the leader in the Tour's points competition, which is the race's most consistent high-finisher.
I watched more coverage of the Tour de France this year than ever before. It might be because I've been cycling more (myself) this year, but it's probably got more to do with ITV's superb coverage on TV and online.
The online coverage had a quick user registration process - literally just the email address. The benefit of the registration was twofold:
The second advantage was very refreshing - literally receiving an email when "the Tour" started each day, and then I received notification when the entire Tour highlights was on TV and the Internet.
Websites that require registration for no apparent reason other than untargeted 'spam' email could learn a lot from ITV. The only piece of feedback to ITV for their online coverage is to increase the quality by increasing the video bitrate. I don't mind the adverts because I understand they are paying for the content in the first place.
There were a few twists in the online session (around 54,000 people were simultaneously watching) delivered by Mark Zuckerberg and Tony Bates (CEO of Skype):
When the camera panned to the audience - all the audience were on their laptops, presumably tweeting. And nothing annoys me more than people who constantly tweet at conferences. How do they listen to (and understand) what is going on?
Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most influential people over the course of the Internet, and his live audience in the room weren't even looking at him - see the photo above. Six months ago when Mark Zuckerberg spoke, the room paid him 100% attention and thought he was the greatest thing since the Google search engine.
Photo courtesy of Marco Bernardini on Flickr
The public (and press) are too quick to criticise the BBC for the licence fee. I've said before that I think we get fantastic return on investment for our £150 a year - with top quality radio, TV and Internet content.
This week though, I got another pleasant surprise from the BBC. Despite having a two year old flat screen TV without the latest Internet-apps capability, I pressed the red button whilst watching one of the BBC channels because I saw 'iPlayer' on the red button prompt.
And there it was - iPlayer. On my TV.
So I browsed around and started watching something from iPlayer on the TV. Completely on demand, with pass and play functionality - everything you get from the website equivalent.
The impressive-ness of the experience was that iPlayer was streaming content over the Internet on to my TV without me realising that the TV could do it!
Quality is OK - although Mrs H didn't find it a problem, I could see that the bandwidth needs to be increased to give a TV-quality experience.
So a round of applause to the BBC for once again delivering something beyond expectation. A special commendation should go to Panasonic of course for also delivering beyond expectation! And both for doing it without increasing the cost.
Back in January I made 10 predictions for Digital Media for 2010. Being open and transparent, how did these predictions fair over the year?
Pretty good going overall. Any more accurate and I'd be an octopus.
I'll post an article on 2011 predictions next week.
Photo courtesy of Shine 2010 - 2010 World Cup good news.
We recently held an event with Facebook, where they showed a video of what would (could?) happen if you put RFID bracelets (a bracelet version of an Oyster card) on 650 teenagers and tracked them for a few days in a fixed environment.
OK, I admit that as a parent it's quite a scary concept, however the teenagers took to the concept en-masse - statistics like 35,000 uploaded photos for those 650 teens would be classed at successful by virtually any brand.
So is this the future? Will our children have an RFID tag in their mobile phone which automatically tags where they are, what they're doing, all their phone's photos and uploads them to a central place on the Internet (for the time being, Facebook)?
Yesterday I promised to post a second video clip of someone supremely talented, following yesterday's Star Wars clip.
Danny MacAskill's stunts are quite breathtaking. It's worth watching this video with speaker on - loud.
One of the amazing things the Internet enables, is for talented gifted people to reach an audience that in previous ages, required the luck of a TV appearance.
The first is "The Solo Adventures", the winner of "Best Animation" from the Star Wars Fan Film Movie Challenge, sponsored by Lucasfilm.
As the title suggests, it was actually created in 3D, and this version on Vimeo (a far superior quality video hosting platform than YouTube) is the 2D version.
I'll post a video of another talented individual tomorrow.
Thanks to Julian at Endava for sending this video through. It's an amusing TED discussion from Rory Sutherland discussing the advertiser's view of the World, and how his perspective is so (unashamedly) different to most other people's view.
The video is just over 10 minutes long, so I recommend you watch it when you have time to concentrate on it. As usual with the very friendly Rory Sutherland, it's full of anecdotes and humour.
Next time you're on the Eurostar, you'll tell someone about this video.
Head of Digital Media at Endava, although all the views in this blog are purely mine and not necessarily those of Endava.
