Arigato Prof. Roboto

Online courses are nothing new. Many institutions now offer hundreds of online degrees. But a new trend from educational systems is called: Massive Open Online Courses or MOOC.  An example of these courses is that Stanford University has done with Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Introduction to Databases, which are offered for free online. This is an example of the class:

Results are impressive, as 160,000 students were registered (Waters, 2013). This videos are short length, with practical exercises and on-screen questions that reinforce the learning methods. But in the future this will be obsolete.

As the potential for the software evolves, the educational programs will adapt to different stages of the learning curve, offering a customized attention for each student. Imagine a system where class material or evaluations will be presented to the student according to his interests.

Imagine not also what information can be presented, but how the methodology of the class is customised. For some students, the best way to learn is reading, for others is chatting, and for others maybe making a presentation or playing. The future system will be able of recognise when a student is loosing interest on a subject and offer the best methodology possible to engage him again.

In the future, computes will create a customised learning environment.

 

References

Watters, Aurdery.  (2013). MOOC Mania: Debunking the hype around massive open online courses. Retrieved from: http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/04/featured/got-mooc-massive-open-online-courses-are-poised-to-change-the-face-of-education/

Socinema

Content producers will be closest with its consumers, co-creating according to their preferences and generating new strategies to attract them.

There has been a lost of interesting changes in content consumption in the past five years. Thanks to the democratization of distribution and the reduced costs of production, many artists and creators have all the tools to generate content, reach an audience and monetize its productions without distributors.

This trend will continue as distributors, filmmakers and exhibitors will have to adjust its business mode. You will no longer see releases exclusively for cinema theaters. Instead there will be multiplatform releases, with a high priority on digital subscription services, movies created for mobile devices and with online marketing strategies.

Those strategies will be not only for watching the movies, but also to create an experience around them. People will be able to watch them, share them, analyze them and create them.

Mash-up generation will be able to co-create the script and invent a customized editing and finales. For the first time in history, people will be an active participant on how content is created.

Access to extra features, direct communication with directors, producers and actors will be a common practice. Content will be more social.

Minority Report

Security of personal data is becoming a sensitive issue. Any device connected to the Internec can become a threat towards confidenciality.

It is not difficult to remember films that tells the stories of stolen identities to disapear a person or creating the illusion that never existed. Or highly sofisticated delinquents that steal a bank with only a click from their computers. All of this stories are not being scince fiction anymore.

As people tend to share too much information through social networks, the security landscape for the next years seems threatened by numerous informational attacks. Here is a visualization from Facebook that shows in blue how much information from the social network was published for the entire internet in 2010 (Inside Facebook, 2010):

The steal of information from sectors like education or health will be more common.  Data from students of patients can also represent a goldmine for hackers, to be exploited freely and unethically.

There is also a lack of security monitoring towards cars, refrigerators, printers,  IP phones, and other tools that are also connected to the Internet and should be protected. Think about someone can acces the documents you send to your printer. Even worse, in the future, someone could hack a pacemaker to really hurt someone.

Education and ethical behaviours are key when security issues increase in the world.

NOTE: An interesting video sent to me by @TinkTugeder on Twitter that puts some drama to the security issues.

Digital Entrepreneurship

¿How will be the entrepreneur of the future? A friendly environment will prevail, with options to try new projects, supported by private institutions and the government.

The world will be transformed from a consumer-centric to a creation-centric society. World’s development will allow turning ideas into companies that will be supported by mentorship and venture capital from across the globe, allowing the identification of global needs.

Globalized education systems will equip new entrepreneurs with modern ideation tools, systematic intellectual property protection laws and easier patent processes.

Entrepreneurial prototypes of the future will validate with marketing tools that will promote automatically new products through the network, sending news to the upcoming devices that will replace tablets and smart phones.

The future entrepreneur will develop activities focusing in creatively achieving results. Production will be centralized in knowledge, combining known products to create new solutions.

Being an entrepreneur will be very dynamic, as most people will be focused on creativity. The environment will facilitate the personal development through devices that encourage the freethinking and strengthen the community sense.

YouTube killed the video star

The amount of content available just one click away will keeps us in front of a screen most of the time, but not exactly a TV screen.

In Mexico, new and exciting times for television is coming, as the government has approved a historically law to allow new players and networks on open TV. But discussions are now centered not only on the networks, but also on the content, as the main competitor just bought the rights for Olympics in 2106.

We can think on television in three different stages: the live broadcasts, the cable era, and now, the digital era.  This last one has two main trends: on-demand contents and live streaming.

As well as telephony moved to mobile phones, the majority of the television contents will be viewed by the majority of the people. It is just a matter of time for this to happen.

An example on how this is happening is the live streamings of Coca-Cola.TV in Mexico. For the first time in years, a popular cable network declined in broadcasting the most important rock festival in Latin America: Vive Latino.  The online broadcast from the Coke brand in Mexico left the network without a reason to pay the rights for it.

 

In the future, mainly smart equipments will drive the content consumption, so every content provider must be ready to broadcast it to multiple platforms. Even exclusive content will be made for digital broadcasters, with different experience models and legal distributions. A great example is the 360 videos from Coachella, offered exclusively in YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/coachella

The success for these strategies will be the customization and consumer focus, where the best experience of seeing what I want, when I want and how I want will win.

The answer to any question

Curiosity in humans is infinite; in the future you will be able to get, in seconds, the answer to any question that comes to your mind.

Simple questions such as: Where is the next Lady Gaga concert with a nice weather? Which is the colder city in December in Mexico? Seems difficult to find on a search engine. In the future, semantic web will do it in a second.

It has to do with how you organize and correlate all the world’s information in order to help you solve problems.

In the future, you will no longer think in Google as a search engine for words, it will serve you much more like a personal assistant, like Siri, that will help you to answer your questions in a more simple way. For example, if you ask Google about places where to skydive, but with water and wind characteristics, it can give you a full list of places and reasons to go.

Google will calculate final results with actual data and the digital footprint from all of us. This rises ethical questions such as privacy and personal information protection, that companies like Google and Facebook handle.

Le PC est mort, vive le PC!

PC will evolve to hybrid devices, with the predominance of touch screens and technology you can wear.

I don’t think there is a PC definition anymore. This device has evolved to many different mechanisms that will never die. Smart phones, tablets, and hybrid devices will remain very popular in the future. Also, the mouse will be replaced with touch devices, exploring the creative nature of the human being. Stylus, however, will remain as an art expression form; just as the pen survived the typewriter and hand painting.

I believe in the endless possibilities and current trends of the evolution from “personal computers” to “wearable computers”. Embedded in our clothes and integrated to our every day lifestyle. Not only sports performance will be benefit (as the Nike Fuel Band showed) but also imagine the medical implication of having 24/7 diagnoses near your skin.

The most expected “wearable computer” device of this year will be the Google Glasses.  There’s been talk of a Google augmented reality project for years, but now Google has officially unveiled that its Project Glass Augmented Reality glasses are beginning to be tested in public. Apparently this device will be for sale by the end of 2013.

Will you wear a personal computer on your head most of the day?

By giving peopl…

“By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.”
Mark Zuckerberg

Technology will make us more humans

The every day use of technology not only must facilitate our lives; it should also aggregate a deeper and profound meaning to our vision as humanity and inclusion of every gender, race or social condition.

¿How our lives will change? Lets unleash our imagination to think about some concepts already happening and others still to come. For me, cloud computing will represent the most radical of the changes. I will pay a lot of subscription services and goods. For example, razors will come to my home each month through DollarShaveClub.com.

Through subscription services, today, I can get TV, disk space for my family pictures and office documents, access to my favorite videogames, virtual classes like this IMC Master, and access to all my office information systems so I can be more productive wherever I am.

But, can we think even further? Maybe, I will be able to access all “my life in the cloud” services from any place and device on the planet Earth (and out of it). Depending on the device I will use, my fingerprints, eye recognition or the electromagnetic pattern of my body will make that “all the World” (even electronic devices) know my profile and preferences. In the future, humanity will trust more the strangers.

There will be also advanced analytical technology that will correlate, predict and detect all my data in order to respond any question based on the knowledge of the mankind to that time.  Just as 23andme, who can predict your future health issues, managing risk and helping your to make informed prevention decisions.

https://www.23andme.com

So, what will be my added value at work? An algorithm will easily replace me? My contribution will come from my ideas. As long as I still have them and be smart enough to invest my time on the best ones. Innovation will be key. Humanity will get more creative and smarter.

Finally, what will be the mankind challenges since everything our brain does will be replicated by a supercomputer? This will test our own humanity and our capacity to use technology to plan a better future. A better communion between different points of view will be demanded and needed. ¿Are humans ready for this challenge? Humans will be, hopefully, more humans.

From Mad Men to Math Men

Long long time ago, the media strategy used to get only the last ten minutes of the Brand Communications meeting. The big TV idea, the provocative headline or the right choice of talent was the key to unlocking brand fame in a world where advertising was first and foremost about interrupting an audience. But for many marketers that playbook is being tossed aside. The conventional order putting distribution strategy at the end of the process is being flipped. Advertising has become a numbers game. The pressing questions from the senior leadership teams today are: How much should we ideally spend? Which brands should be supported? What is the return on investment? And which channels will best pay out? Before developing the right messaging, the right business case needs to be established. One of the biggest factors for marketing failure is not matching the right budget to the goals or getting the right plan.

The Big TV idea has lost ground to small, smartly placed, relevant ideas
.  The agency world live to sell clients the big idea, such as Nike’s “Just Do It” or the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.

The Big Idea just isn’t a scalable proposition in advertising. Relevance is one of the most important currencies in communications. Smart, tactical use of custom messages in different media at relevant times, locations and environments is what creates engagement. There is a key role in emerging media to do so. Axe has done this brilliantly over the years, deploying an array of channels to talk to young men. This includes branded video series of men trying to win over women, night club sponsorships or mating-game toolkits, like the Eliminator: