Our first blog from Heather Corker, VP of the newly opened Future Foundation New York office, taking a look at the latest trends, news and views from the USA.

The national dish here is not curry, but take-away – in any form.

New York City has long been famous for its 24-hour mentality. But technology today has added another dimension to this 24 hour society; more, social media has made instant access – all hours access – available to everyone, not just in the city that never sleeps. The End of Adventure is playing out quite nicely on the streets of America today.

One of the biggest differences I’ve noticed jumping the pond from the UK to the US is just how much more social Americans are – but not in the traditional sense. While mobile platforms and their functionality were adopted far more quickly in the UK and Europe initially, Americans are more actively involved in the everyday, on-the-ground use of social media via their phones as they go throughout their day.  Using every form of social media not just to show the world what they are doing and who they are doing it with, but to find the information they need.

Yelp, in particular, is not a new concept. It has been around for ages, but pray for the business that receives a bad review -  their end may be night.  Be it because no one wants to waste their hard earned cash on a venue or experience that is only, well OK; or because our time is too precious to be spent at any place other than the best of venues, with an excellent happy hour, the best flat white in the city or food which worthy of an instagram mug shot  -  in New York, cafes, salons, Laundromats live and die by their Yelp review.

If there were ever any doubt that transparency is now integral to every business-consumer relationship, this is it.  There is simply too much choice and too many new venues to wade through – very little is now left to chance. If walking down the street and in need of a quick coffee, bite to eat or a spur of the moment mani-pedi where do I turn? Even in a hurry, mediocre will just not do. So I don’t leave it to chance, I leave it to Yelp.

In fact today, not only did I look up the nearest  mani-pedi salon to my home; I ensured it had received no bad reviews in the last 6 months, on any site  -  because you are only ever as good as your latest review. In the last week I have used online review services (why ask a friend when I can ask my phone?) to book my hair appointment, find a venue for happy hour, book dinner, “discover” a quiet, cool cafe to spend my Sunday morning reading the paper, and found a gym to join (who have very kindly provided me with a free one-week trial while I determine whether or not to jump on board). The list, as you can tell, could go on.

But these habits speak to a bigger social trend -  the need to share. It is my fellow citizens – the collective of New Yorkers and tourists alike – who are banding together to make sure that not one of us need have a bad experience. Or that we are at least warned of the possibility ahead of time.

What consequences does this have for businesses? How must they now interact?  Now that consumers are talking to each other, brands need to join the conversation -  and they must offer complete transparency.  You’ve heard this, we know.  But getting the response right is critical.  Brands must acknowledge where they have gone wrong, answer questions and reply to bad reviews. Talk to your consumers like friends, not as a potential sale.

People are social. Brands need to get involved.

For more on nVision US or our NY office, please contact Heather Corker – heatherc@futurefoundation.net

After much speculation surrounding the Facebook phone, the social networking giant unveiled Home a few weeks ago.  The app installs a new home screen onto your Android phone and more fully integrates Facebook into its functionality; indeed according to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Home is a step towards designing a phone around people rather than apps. Home’s official site reads, “From the moment you turn it on, you see a steady stream of friends’ posts and photos on your home screen. Upfront notifications and quick access to your essentials mean you’ll never miss a moment. And when you download Facebook Messenger, you can keep chatting with friends when you’re using other apps.”

To date however reviews have been fairly poor. At the time of writing, Facebook Home has an average rating of just 2.3 on Google Play, with 9,261 of  17,742 reviews giving it just 1 star – and given that Facebook has had five weeks since the product launched, improvements have yet to be made to the service to boost its appeal. In fairness to Facebook, if the short lived outrage caused by switching users to Timeline is anything to go by we can probably get a good indication of how opinion could shift on Home once a few tweaks are made.

Thinking in the context of mobile advertising which I wrote about last month, could this be the type of game changer the industry needs? Though nothing was mentioned at the Home launch in relation to advertising, certainly this will add a new dimension to mobile ads. The information Facebook has the potential of accessing through Home is certainly appealing (or worrying depending on which side of the fence you’re sitting) and could provide opportunities for mobile advertising to be more genuinely native than Facebook currently claims it is. Additionally, it provides an opportunity for location-based targeting to appear in a less interfering manner. Thinking of how the chat heads and notifications features on Home work it’s not hard to imagine targeted ads popping up on screens without users having to navigate away from what they are currently doing, and more importantly allowing them to swipe it away if it isn’t of interest.

Obviously this opens up a raft of privacy issues. While a majority of consumers agree that their “definition of privacy is changing due to the internet and social media”, an even higher number say they would like greater control over their personal information and have the power to choose when they exchange it. Presumably Facebook plans to stick to its tried and tested approach, wait until it has achieved the scale needed to ensure users won’t leave before monetising Home. Still, when they do let’s hope they get it right.

What do you think?  Is Facebook Home going to make mobile advertising more relevant and targeted?  Will the move to a dedicated phone prove to be seamless?  Will anyone actually use it?

We’re becoming more and more obsessed with professional happiness and motivation. A snapshot to illustrate my point:

- I have just finished reading yet another excellent article in Fast Company about how the greatest business leaders achieve their legendary greatness (generally by ignoring the detritus that tends to drag lesser mortals like me down a slippery slope of Lol Cats and women putting cats in bins)

- I went to a conference last week which focused solely on understanding motivation, happiness and sustainable innovation (although we had to pretend we were doing yoga on a beach and stare into strangers’ eyes, which made me realise how deeply rooted I am to Powerpoint and not looking into strangers’ eyes)

- I have a range of new books on my desk – one of which is entitled “Happy Hour 9 To 5: How to Love Your Job, Love Your Life and Kick Butt At Work”, and all of which are part of a growing trend towards helping people break out of the unhappy cycle of Work Life Tension.  I will read this book one day – if I find the time…

So what’s behind this trend?  FF trends like Brainstorms at Bedtime and The Power of Quiet speak to our increasingly digital, connected lives – we’ve pretty much all got smartphones, tablets and laptops and – other than small (but valuable) innovations in things like apps to help manage the clutter – the general move is very much towards a world in which we’re permanently switched-on, able (and encouraged) to work 24/7 and checking emails while lying in bed/ on a beach in the Seychelles.

But there are other, less tangible facets to the trend trajectory.  For example, the trend we call Personal Net Growth, in which we see workers harnessing online channels like LinkedIn for personal and professional development, accruing new skills, broadcasting expertise and building a picture of themselves as thoroughly employable people.  It’s a variation on Performative Leisure – we want to show ourselves in the best light at any given time; we want to be the most motivated and innovative employee imaginable; we want to be admired.  Social platforms give us the exposure we crave – and for the 50% of 16-24 British year olds who say they enjoy talking about their career to their friends, this is clearly a trend on an upwards curve.

Another trend we could draw on is the Myth of Decline – there’s a general sense among every generation that they are the most deprived, the unhappiest, the least wealthy consumer tribe; that things were better before.  This applies tangibly to our work lives – we think we work longer hours than ever (in fact, the working week is almost exactly the same as 20 years ago ); we’re spending less time at home/ with our families (probably but for a variety of reasons); we’re being pushed harder than ever before in an increasingly competitive environment.

The last point is, I think, the crux of this.  Workers are operating in a global labour market where competition is fierce, the skilled workforce is growing, education is more expensive, digital platforms give anyone the chance to work from anywhere and social media gives them the chance to tell everyone about it.  This isn’t an environment where anyone can afford to relax.  No wonder we’re obsessed with being the most motivated and innovative – we have to be to survive.

This is life, professionalised.

We’d love to hear your thoughts.  Are employees feeling the pressure of a global labour market? What about the employer’s role in all of this?  Where does trust sit within this?  Remuneration?

For this month’s guest blog post, we’re delighted to be featuring a post from Jess Butcher, CMO of blisteringly hot image recognition platform Blippar.  I first stumbled across this amazing technology as part of an interactive gaming supplement for Shortlist magazine – the front of the magazine magically transformed from a static cover to a game of Chuckie Egg. I was hooked.  For this blog post, we asked Jess about where Blippar came from, its place in the rapidly evolving world of creative content and advertising, and its future.

‘Nomophobia’ is apparently the word to describe the fear of being out of mobile phone contact – OCD-related behaviours such as angst as to how little battery is left, the pocket pat followed by a panicked increase in heart rate when realizing it’s not there, a phone within arms reach of the bed pillow – and many more recent behavioural phenomena that I’m sure most will associate with.  What’s going on!?

Well, we have every single family member, friend, colleague and vague acquaintance we have ever met within our pocket; we have the internet and more information than a President had access to less than a decade ago in the palm of our hand.  We have our life PA and 24-7 entertainment at the touch of a button; a curious constant companion for our down-time and our up-time.

Plus new advances are fundamentally changing not only how we engage with each other but with the physical world around us. How much more indispensable might the phone become as it continues along its evolutionary path of becoming an extension of our physical senses…? Audio discovery started this trend, enabling the phone to ‘listen’ and act like our ears – interpreting sound into a response. High resolution cameras, powerful processors and trends like QR codes have extended it into the realm of sight and with Near Field Communication (NFC) coming soon – we’ll soon be touching things with our devices, to pay, to register interest and to find out more…

Blippar grew out of this trend, and in particular the sight extension, with the evolution of a exciting ‘markerless image recognition’ technology – which has removed the need for codes, watermarking or any digital manipulation of day-to-day images and objects.  Now, simply ‘looking’ at something can bring it to life with interactive content experiences and the future implications of this are pretty mind-blowing.   This revolutionary trend effectively ‘digitizes’ the 99.9% of the static world around us that could previously only feed us old (inherent to print), static, one-way information.  Whether a product, a poster, a newspaper, a t-shirt, pub coaster, shop signage, piece of art, school text book – we can now interact with them all in ways we have only just started to scratch the surface of.

Blippar’s technology was the brainchild of Ambarish Mitra and Omar Tayeb – CEO and CTO respectively – who met whilst working on innovation projects at AXA insurance and stared dabbling with the tech in their spare time.  The ‘eureka’ moment came in late 2010 whilst playing with a £5 note and managing to augment Rish’s head over the Queen’s …  and so the verb to ‘blipp’ was born.  In the spring of 2011, I joined them and our other co-founder, Steve Spencer (Chief Creative Officer) to start marketing this powerful new tool to marketers and media owners, and through them, this exciting new behaviour to consumers.

Since our first campaigns that summer with Tesco, Cadbury and Heinz, the business has grown dramatically – with nearly 2 million users, a staff of 35, offices in London and NY, a seed funding round from Qualcomm Ventures and client relationships with many of the leading global brands in the worlds (including Coke, Unilever, Nestle, L’Oreal, Warner Bros, Sony and many more).   Most fundamentally, we have been the first to successfully ‘de-tech’ this most technical of fields – evolving it into a consumer friendly verb – to ‘blipp’ –  and focusing tirelessly on the content value of what this as a content medium, can deliver the smart-phone owning consumer.

So onwards and upwards in our task to get the world ‘blipping’ and turning everything physical into an interactive trigger for content experiences – and our apologies to all those nomophobes whose plight we may inadvertently exacerbate in the months and years ahead…  (My name is Jessica and I’m a nomophobe).

Huge thanks to Jess for contributing – you can read more about Blippar on their website http://blippar.com/.  Blippar is the world’s first image recognition platform for mobile and tablet devices targeted specifically at customer-brand interaction.