Group items tagged

When we look at the future of global cash, we need that extra pair of eyes my parents longed to possess to give them greater power to keep track of their highly active children. The story of cash is a very old and rich one, going back to the invention of coins in the earliest civilizations several centuries B.C. The story continues into our own time, which has seen a remarkable global bounce-back effect since the credit crisis of 2008 turned our economies, and the global economy, upside down. This bounce-back has given rise to positive figures for the growth of cash, and the ATM industry which distributes that cash, on a truly monumental scale.

Conducttr has been around for a while as a tool for automating the telling of a narrative over several platforms - online, text messages and so on. This seems like the very logical next step, to take it out from the laptop or tablet and into the world of mobile. A three-part ecosystem, where the audience takes part of a mobile app which lets them take part of different "Worlds", each belonging to a separate story or story world, the designers of the narrative get a "cloud-based network intelligence" and the developers get an API to play around with.

Summary of a WikiLeaks story that the Saudis have been over-stating their oil reserves and some thoughts on why it go neglected by mainstream media.

"...the message from Star Simpson, who stopped by the Institute yesterday to talk about TacoCopter, her in-joke turned viral juggernaut. The idea behind TacoCopter is relatively simple, but irresistibly futuristic: order tacos from your smartphone, and your friendly neighborhood unmanned drone will deliver them to your exact GPS coordinates within minutes. Star created tacocopter.com in 2011 as a joke to a friend, then promptly moved on to other projects. It wasn't until March of 2012 that the popular blog Hacker News discovered her site, at which point every 21st century media outlet jumped onto the story of the business that would change restaurants forever. It didn't seem to matter whether TacoCopter was real or not - it was an idea whose time had come."

"The sewing machine was the smartphone of the nineteenth century. Just skim through the promotional materials of the leading sewing-machine manufacturers of that distant era and you will notice the many similarities with our own lofty, dizzy discourse. The catalog from Willcox & Gibbs, the Apple of its day, in 1864, includes glowing testimonials from a number of reverends thrilled by the civilizing powers of the new machine. One calls it a "Christian institution"; another celebrates its usefulness in his missionary efforts in Syria; a third, after praising it as an "honest machine," expresses his hope that "every man and woman who owns one will take pattern from it, in principle and duty." The brochure from Singer in 1880-modestly titled "Genius Rewarded: or, the Story of the Sewing Machine"-takes such rhetoric even further, presenting the sewing machine as the ultimate platform for spreading American culture. The machine's appeal is universal and its impact is revolutionary. Even its marketing is pure poetry:"

"This year's Slush conference in Helsinki has been a terrific event, with a very high standard of startup and a disproportionate number of great ideas floating around. One of the most intriguing has been that of Futureful, a sort-of-browser app that's going to be made available to iPad users in the U.S. in January. Futureful has been under rather stealthy development for two years, and the team is backed and mentored by Skype co-founder Janus Friis. It's a bit like StumbleUpon, in that it's an app that contains a browser (as opposed to being a browser - you can't enter a URL) and is designed to help the user find new content. However, Futureful is all about semantic tagging and artificial intelligence. As you browse, the app presents subject tags in a row at the top - click on a tag, and you get taken to another related page with its own set of tags. So, clicking on a 'Silicon Valley' tag may take you to a tech story, with the fresh tags above it including something like 'Moore's Law'. It basically provides an intelligent chain of content discovery."

"Futurescaper creates bespoke solutions for futures research and scenario planning studies, using the power of the internet to gather stories from an unlimited number of individuals. This approach combines the qualitative richness of a traditional scenario planning workshop with the breadth and diversity of online collective-intelligence systems, producing faster, cheaper, and more effective outcomes."

"The IPS Prism Project uses the scenario planning method to help participants look beneath events to identify the deep driving forces that will shape the future and how these driving forces will interact with each other to create of alternative, plausible stories about the future, or "scenarios". "

Another story highlighting the emergence and movement of BRIC nations

Places of living revisited...ideology vs utopia and other stories (articles) from Portugal

"When Texas Gov. Rick Perry decided to stage a Texas-size prayer event - dubbed "The Response" - on Aug. 6, it no doubt seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It received little critical scrutiny when he announced it back in early June, except on websites that track these sorts of things. But after Rachel Maddow, drawing on these sites, did a segment highlighting some of the more bizarre statements made by Perry's high-profile religious endorsers, things cooled considerably - even though the real story is still not remotely well-understood."

I've heard thin threads of this before, but this does seem like one of these massive, subterranean movements that no-one's going to notice until it pops up "out of nowhere".

" Zapaday is an open news agenda and a global public calendar. Zapaday lets you see the future with day-by-day events, news stories, facts and trivia. "

Title: Scenarios 2040Location: The Bell Tower on 34thLink out: Click hereDescription: More vivid and dynamic than forecasting or visioning, scenarios are stories based on rigorous research, analysis and community interviews that help us understand how the powerful driving forces that affect our world - and the choices we make right now - could affect our region's future decades from now. In 2009, the Center for Houston's Future embarked upon Scenarios 2040, the largest public-interest, business-led, regional scenario project in the country. The resulting scenarios will describe different future worlds we might face in the year 2040, and will be used to generate wide public discussion that will help individuals, organizations, business, and government identify their own options and responses to different future worlds. These scenarios will help us learn how to protect and nurture what we value, and achieve what we want to achieve - a healthy balance between competitiveness and sustainability. Start Time: 18:00Date: 2011-10-04

Great summary article which covers the basics with lots of video examples.

ONE of humanity's ultimate dreams, to peer into the future, may be moving a step closer with a controversial €1 billion ($1.3bn) EU plan to recreate the entire world in a computer system. The Living Earth Simulator project would take the vast streams of data pouring into the internet, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to dry-as-dust government statistics, and try to spot the economic and social trends that will shape the future.

FORGET using passwords to log on to your computer, needing touch screens to navigate on your smartphone or paying expensive energy bills; in the future your daily activities will create all the energy you need to power your house, biometrics will unlock your devices, and your mind will be capable of controlling them.

The professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama is a space archaeologist who uses satellite imagery to map and locate previously unknown archaeological sites in the Middle East, Europe, and across the Mediterranean.  

"THOUSANDS of wannabe Martians from Australia have put their hand up for the biggest relocation of a lifetime - from Earth to the Red Planet. More than 2500 Australians have applied for the one-way trip to Mars, which will double as a reality TV show. The Mars One project, which aims to create the first human settlement on the Solar System's second-smallest planet, has received 165,000 applications from astronaut hopefuls from 140 different countries. "We now have a large group of applicants from where we can start our search," Mars One chief medical officer Dr Norbert Kraft said. "Finding the best crews of qualified and compatible individuals is crucial to the success of our mission." Successful applicants will have to say goodbye to Earth forever, with the first crew of four people expected to launch into space for their seven months journey to Mars in 2022."

Found this whilst trying to set-up pipes for crowd sourcing / morphology blog......

are you trying to make me feel at home?