Tag : future

Bruce Sterling's closing keynote at SXSW was typically fiery and inspirational. But whereas last year's felt like a war cry, this year there was a strain of hope in his words.

And he summed it up this way:  

Be passionate about what you do, because now is a pretty awesome time.

A great blog post by Lukas Mathis has been floating around Twitter for a few days now. In it he talks about the removal of features in software development. Specifically:

If you don’t pay attention, what started out as an elegant, simple application that perfectly solves a single problem, can quickly turn into a huge behemoth of an application that solves a ton of problems, but solves all of them poorly.

This, and some other tweet comments, got me thinking about the iPad (who isn’t?) and how I believe it’s a glimpse of the future for how we interact with personal computers.

In the 35 years since the arrival of the personal computer we’ve been on a continuous upward trajectory of feature enhancement and specification bloat. It’s not just the software, it’s infecting the very machines that we run the bloated software on.

Last week, the BBC Trust gingerly announced provisional approval of the BBC’s Project Canvas. 

The aim of Project Canvas is to define a set of standards for set-top boxes that will allow integration of web and TV. Although, it isn’t clear exactly what the standards will consist of and what Project Canvas’ vision of IPTV really is.

Back in the summer William and I were invited to take part in a Creative Review round table discussion to debate the ‘Future of Advertising’. Chaired by Patrick Burgoyne, Editor of Creative Review, we were joined by the great and the good from agencies across London.

Over the hour and a half chat the topics we talked about varied from measurement mechanisms for digital campaigns, payment models, client-agency relationships and a load of other stuff.

Has the future turned out the way it was supposed to?

That’s something we’re very interested in here at Made by Many, so we’ve invited world-renowned author and futurist Howard Rheingold to present an evaluation of the outcomes and predictions he made in the 2002 best-seller “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution”.

Howard’s talk will be followed by an open discussion – I’m sure it will be a lively one! The event will appeal to anyone interested in new models of mass collaboration, crowd-sourcing and emergent intelligence that are made possible with the advent of ubiquitous social computing. We’ve only got a few free seats left, so if you’re interested, get in touch with me asap at elin@madebymany.co.uk and I will try to get you on the guest list.