In time for the Future Foundation conference on 14 May, we spoke to a couple of emerging tech companies to explore where technology is coming from, where it is heading, and why our modern world is just so ripe for the raft of innovation we’re currently experiencing.  Resident tech-head Will explains.

As part of our nVitro research, we are constantly keeping our finger on the pulse of emerging technology and the trends driving it. It’s important to imagine how current trends will evolve in future technological environments, as well as to envisage some of the totally new trends forced upon us by these new technologies.

We began our journey with a trip to London’s Google Campus, where we met a few of their startups-in-residence. We also travelled outside London, meeting international entrepreneurs at the Gadget Show Live in Birmingham and visiting Silicon Fen in Cambridge. From this, we have identified 4 ways that the technology of tomorrow will change everything.

1)      Connectivity: we spoke to London-based EVRYTHNG about the future of the internet. If the last ten years have told the story of getting every person online, the next ten years will be about getting every thing online. Their product is an engine designed to allow all manner of objects – from your wristwatch to your steak – to gain a digital identity.

2)      Information: why do we want a connected world? Because, with the information generated by every one of our possessions, we will start to gain genuinely useful insights into our lives. This isn’t just about eating enough omega-3, or getting your 30 minutes of exercise – Narrato, at the Google Campus, are building a tool with which to analyse ALL our data in one place. This is about moving from the Quantified Self to totally informed decision making, driven by real-time knowledge of your financial status, your health status and even what influences your mood. There is so much room for brands to enter this real-time data-mood-experience exchange.

3)      Wearable Tech: doesn’t all this data-mood-experience sound a bit Brave New World? Maybe, if we were constantly reading our smartphones, trying to interpret our metadata. But we won’t be – in fact, we won’t even notice that we’re being monitored until some fantastically useful insight is revealed to us, such as “alcohol level still too high to drive”, or “before you go through the ticket barrier, have you forgotten that the Piccadilly Line is closed?”. Wearable tech bears our digital identity around smart environments, but also opens up context-sensitive interfaces that are far quicker and easier to use than a touchscreen smartphone: this is one of the reasons behind Hoverkey (also at Campus), an NFC security card developed to physically “log in” to smartphone apps. No to usernames and passwords. Yes to seamless digital environments.

4)      New interfaces: every surface has the potential to be interactive. And this doesn’t mean wall-to-wall touchscreens. It means hidden technology that only becomes visible when needed, when actually useful. The Xbox Kinect showed how any space can be made into a control mechanism. Novalia, based in Cambridge, has designed processes that make paper interactive. The best part is that, unlike say, a tablet, when you’re not interacting with these surfaces, they don’t become dead weight – they just go back to being good old useful paper.

The bottom line? A lot of people see Google Glass as another step on the path to Murder by Modernity, bemoaning new tech, constant updates and the demands for instant information. But there is another way out: make the tech better.  Pretty soon, kids won’t be checking texts at dinner time or taking phone calls in the cinema: tech will certainly be everywhere, but it won’t be interrupting our lives. In our conversations, we’ve realised that the future will have fewer screens, fewer distractions. Computers are learning human – tomorrow won’t have wires, buttons or charging docks. In fact, we think the future will look more like the past. That’s why we’ve started calling it Yesterday’s World.

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?

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.

The Future Foundation’s first event of 2013 will take place on 14th May – get in touch to book your place!

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES : Interpreting your global consumer’s inner life for profit

Led by Future Foundation CEO Christophe Jouan and MD Meabh Quoirin, we will -

• Trail Future Foundation’s forthcoming book The Big Lie and present implications of the story for brand management and insight development
• Address current business challenges – specifically identified by our client community in advance of the event – via our top nVision trends
• Introduce guest contributors to help put our stories and our forecasts under extreme scrutiny – and let you, our clients, do the same in both formal and informal forums
• Supply ever more nutritious takeaways, slicing out the consequences of individual trends for sales and marketing, for new product formulation, for corporate communications, for strategic planning
• Offer a choice of fringe events and networking opportunities – and demonstrate all of the very latest service innovations from inside nVision.
• Make this the most colourfully multi-media event yet – video, live streaming, tweets, noise and fun

Book your place
Clients receive complimentary tickets and can purchase extra tickets at the discounted rate of £400 + VAT per delegate. For non-clients, the standard ticket charge is £800 + VAT per delegate.  To book your place, email events@futurefoundation.net.  Book early, our events always sell out!

Details

14th May 2013 | 08.30 – 16.00
Congress Centre, 28 Great Russell Street, London WC1B3LS