Since beginning my journey as a Futurist 8 months ago, I’ve become incredibly optimistic about the power of innovation to solve so many of our challenges. In part 1, we looked at the challenges facing food production today. Here, we’ll explore some of the new developments which present solutions to those challenges. Let’s begin with […]
The UN predicts global population is set to rise by 2.5 billion by 2050. Effectively, that’s adding a population the size of China and India combined. It will require us to double our food production output. Throw in the fact that 1 in 9 current inhabitants of our planet are ‘chronically hungry’ right now, and we’ve […]
As the well-worn phrase has it, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. And as an equally well-worn phrase tells us, “history is written by the victors”: those with power mould the ongoing narrative of countries and governments; and decide which groups are characterised in any particular way. For the purposes of this article, […]
There’s a lot of talk in marketing circles about the potential for ‘Augmented Reality’ (AR). Unlike its more totally immersive cousin, Virtual Reality, AR creates new layers of experience over what we already see in the real world. Wikipedia defines AR as ‘a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements […]
For as long as laws have existed, so has crime. Depending on your religious outlook, you could say it began with Cain and Abel. The comprehensive recording of UK crime (and learning its lessons) goes back to 1898 – and as with Robert Peel’s Police force, was a British innovation. For many years, crime and […]
I’ve looked at customisation and personalisation in a marketing context before, and I mentioned Coke’s customised named bottles and Starbucks’ habit of writing your name on the cup. Brands appreciate that with identity comes a sense of belonging, of ownership; and that’s why customisation is such an appealing marketing tool. We are, however, becoming ever […]
Personalisation isn’t new. I can remember the day my mum gifted me a “Me and Mayor Stubbs” book. It was something about a rabbit collecting Easter eggs. The detail escapes me, but I still remember after 32 years that ‘Matt’ was a central character. I was the story. But product personalisation is being taken to […]
You might think that above is just another sensationalist website. It’s certainly sensationalist. But MediaMass is not just another website! First off, all the news reported on MediaMass is completely fake – indeed, it’s an exercise in proving that you shouldn’t believe everything you read. But more importantly for our purposes, none of it has been […]
The concept of user-generated content (UGC) is not new. It first came to the attention of business analysts in the early 2000s, when it became apparent that companies like Facebook were becoming corporate behemoths not by churning out their own content, but by leveraging the value of content created by users. In a sense, Google […]
If this video encourages anything, it is a difference of opinion. What about the steam train? Transistors? “On the Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin? Or, in terms of changing history, Sir Hiram Maxim’s devastating invention: the machine gun. Innovation is everywhere, and we don’t all agree on it. Taking a more birds-eye view, though, throughout history, we can see that population size […]
