Books crystalize thought. They kick off different conversations.So as we traveled, pitched, consulted, worked, blogged, over the last few months we started writing the first draft of a book targeted for  publication 2006.

The book is about the revolution.

Today, we publish one of the first chapters; A Snapshot of the Future. We allowed an Australian Venture Capital Group, The Venture Group, to distribute a copy with their monthly dispatch to encourage feedback. We want lots of discussion. We publish it here today. Thats the new model. Distribute widely. Field comment. Encorporate ideas. Keep the conversation moving forward. 

Snapshot Tomorrow.

What is the future?

Long term it's amazing, perhaps even scary, if you believe Ray Kurzweil’s predictions from his new book, “The Singularity is Near.” George Gilder, the noted American technology futurist, often intentionally misquotes the title as; “The Singularity is Here” for the obvious reasons.

It’s dramatic change. It’s silicon and it’s nano and beyond the pod.

And this long term is decades, not centuries.

We always tend to overestimate the impact of new technology in the short term and underestimate the impact of the same new technology over the long term.

Reference that, and think this: The short term future is happening to us as we speak. The now we are living is already our future. We all fall into the trap of being announcement driven. We tend to want to hear about the newest new thing. Everything that we think we have heard about before, we tune out because it is old news. That is the nature of humanity. Ultimately, what this is all about is humanity.

It is not about technology at all. Just people. People make things. People sell things. People buy things. People use things. And more than anything else, people tell things to each other.

Wind it back to just before the tech wreck. Engineers and entrepreneurs weren’t only thinking up ways to sell pet food via the internet. During the tech wreck suitcases of money may have gone up in smoke, but inventors and engineers kept on dreaming and scheming and building.

Those dreams and schemes, many of them open source applications, have been slipping into the market over the last couple of years, sometimes with fanfare, sometimes very quietly, fueled only by end user enthusiasm.

They are now creating sweeping change. These changes affect us all. Yet they are happening right in the open. They are happening with very little capital. They are massive in implication. They are all about content, media, interactivity and most important of all, they represent the shift to creation by the consumer.

These technologies and tools are going to be the big value drivers of the next 10 years. They will shape both business and social environment profoundly.

Broadly, this future falls under the general heading of social networking. Some people call it Web 2.0. As a description, Web 2.0 is probably unfortunate. It implies that there is maybe a nice ‘new and improved’ iteration of software being released – like a new version of MS Office or Eudora.

Well that’s not  Web 2.0. That’s not the big change. Web 2.0 is an organically growing plethora of communications, technologies, content and social vectors all working together. These are being shaped by, and are shaping the world.

This is the world of blogs, podcasts, wikis and of vlogs. These are the fundamental tools that are providing the accelerators for the irrepressible growth of consumer created content. In turn they are massively fueling the rampant expansion of global social networks. Recently attention may have been centered on skype and voip.

But important as skype and voip, in general are, they are simply two components of a social engine where communications are exploding in multiple directions, interactivity, and value.

The explosion is going to bring a change of really enormous and paradoxical significance – the emergence of the hyper-individual.

Some of the world’s biggest companies get it. Take IBM. They have appointed staff at the corporate level to identify people within the company that have attractive voices to do podcasts. They are directing the podcasts both inside and outside the company. IBM’s senior management understand that it is the context of content bound together with a good presenter and strong production values that are going to cause people to entertained and involved. And that’s what they want. Involvement in the company.

And here’s something else. Some companies’ HR departments are now looking at people’s personal blogs as part of their general hiring process. They understand that knowing what your future employees really feel passionate about is a useful piece of information and can be very helpful in evaluating a future employee.

Newspapers too, such as the Guardian in the UK, are encouraging their journalists to write blogs. You have to understand what the early adopters are doing and feeling if you are going to connect with them.

Early adopters drive the mass. Early adopters are blogging. And podcasting. And vLogging. Massively.

And their blogs are creating waves because analysts and investors, and journalists and ordinary people are reading them too.

The positive feedback loop of proven reaction to blogs is ensuring an acceleration of the importance of social networks. This is growing at a faster pace than any other communication technology ever.

It’s all part of an emerging global conversation. You have to join, or frankly, you’ll be left behind at the starting gate. That’s why IBM wants in. McDonalds too. The world’s most successful Scottish restaurant just put in place its own corporate blog strategy. It makes sense. They now get to the root cause of customer problems faster, get to take action quicker, and get to communicate their actions to the activists – and incidentally reduce the likelihood of lawsuits.

Companies that unreservedly embrace social networking and merge it into their business models will be the winners over the next decade. Companies that don’t, who ignore it, or think of it as a fad, will find that they lose out on critical intelligence they are going to need in order to survive and thrive in the 21Century. Social networking today may be where the internet was in 1995.

And remember: the rise of the Internet was not deliberate when it started either. It grew from brilliant, lateral minds. This is the same. Hugely unplanned, scary, anarchic… many things.

You also need to include The Long Tail in this. Consumers are being rushed headlong into a huge global market where they not only have limitless choice, but also the ability to deeply personalize and customize the content they consume, the way they consume it, and the time at which they consume it.

The Google and Yahoo! business model are totally suited to where we are going. So is the much derided, Amazon. They offer unlimited choice at low capital cost to either the consumer or company. They personalize. They suggest. They connect… people: to knowledge, information, music, and each other.

It’s this interconnectedness of everyone that makes it such an extremely and increasingly viral world.

Generation HI – the hyper-individual, is the next group to take charge. Generation HI is the group that were born after the creation of the Internet. These about to be teenagers have never experienced life without interactivity. They’ve always had email. Instant messaging. Massive multiplayer games. Unlimited online experience. Cell phones. Now with cameras. That download. Or play streaming media.

And now they want to mash

Mash ups started with music. Now we are starting to see mash up technologies. Example; combining car dealership locations with Google Earth so you can easily find the Toyota location nearest you that has the Prius you want, and with the shortest delivery time.

Mashing content is the front end of Generation HI’s activities. They can already do this on line in the game space with Second Life

And tools for sharing content are maturing fast. RSS

Soon the interface will improve and the difference between TV’s and PC’s, blurred right now, will  magically disappear. Think quickly. Was the new Apple announced by Steve Jobs a month ago a computer? Really? It has a big flat screen, enables you to enjoy traditional media; it has a remote control…. plays channels”… and it’s cheaper than a TV! It’s a taste of the future of consumer electronics.

Now think content for these merged, and blurred, devices. Content has got to appeal to the mass of micro-niche markets. All those hyper-individuals. There are so many markets that soon it will become an impossibility to produce high budget Hollywood drama and make it economically viable when it is built on a model of interruptive marketing.

Particularly, when there are so many tools and so many great ideas that can be recycled and rehashed. And let’s face it, Hollywood’s been doing this for years. Now you get people creating their own vignettes of their favorite shows – and here is the kicker – they use the original footage digitally sampled – as the underlying content. Then they star in the key roles themselves. It’s a mashed up kind of world.

Think of the tribute remake of Indiana Jones made by filmmaker, Chris Strompolis over years as his school friends seven grew up. Spielberg loved it. Now think future mash up version he could have done using the original footage and merging himself and his friends into the movie instead of the lovingly created, shot by shot, full remake.

It doesn’t matter what Digital Rights Management solutions are created. It doesn’t matter what laws are enacted. The sheer volume of material that is already ‘out there’, the tools that already enable digital material on CD’s and DVD’s to be ripped, the software that enables editing…. It’s all there.

It’s only been the will that’s been missing. And that’s coming like an avalanche. There’s no going back. The genie is out the bottle. People are about to start entertaining each other and traditional media will need to embrace this change, or shrivel and die.

Welcome to the near term.

Copyright 2005. Chris Gilbey and Richard McKinnon

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