Curiosity-Driven Education

Posted by admin on January 27th, 2011
Curiosity-Driven Education
“If a teacher can be replaced by a machine, they should be.” – Arthur C. Clark
In 1999, Professor Sugata Mitra embedded a computer in a wall in a slum in New Dehli, connected it to high speed internet and left it there. Kids in the area, mesmerized by this technology, learn to use computers by themselves.
Over time his work has become famously referred to as the “Hole in the Wall Experiment.” He repeated this experiment in other parts of India and discovered how kids learn what they want to do.
His online videos of kids interacting with these computers have become the source of considerable discussion with one showing children recording music and playing it back for others only four hours after seeing the computer for the first time.
One experiment he did in Hyderabad, India involved asking kids who spoke English with a strong Telugu accent to use a voice recognition system on a computer. Since it didn’t recognize many of their words initially, he told them to speak so the computer could understand them. And then he left. When he returned two months later, their accents had changed and were closer to the neutral British accent required by the speech synthesizer.
In a conversation that Mitra had with the late Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke commented that, “If a teacher can be replaced with a machine, they should be.” And Clarke told him that a student’s interest is the most important thing in education.
Clarke instinctively knew that a student driven by their own curiosity will learn more, learn faster, and retain far more than when they are confronted with subjects of low interest.
Understanding the Word Stream
In 2008, Roger Bohn and James Short, two researchers at the University of California in San Diego decided to do a study to determine the amount of information people have entering their brains on a daily basis.
They added a rather interesting twist to the study. Because of the varying forms of information, and the difficulty in comparing video to magazines and newspapers, they decided to convert all information into one standard form of measurement – words.
Based on their final 2009 report, the average person in the U.S. has 100,500 words flowing into their heads on a daily basis. And this number is increasing by 2.6% per year.
So where are all these words coming from?  In rough terms, 41% come from watching television, 27% – computers, 18% – radio, 9% – print media, 6% – telephone conversations, 4% – recorded music, and smaller amounts from movies, games, and other information sources.
As it turns out, the average American spends 11.8 hours every day consuming information. Many other countries are posting similar numbers. People today are being exposed to far more information than ever in the past.
Buried deep within the “other category,” constituting far less than 1% is formalized education. Even for students attending college, their classroom studies constitute a relatively small percentage of the information they are exposed to on a daily basis.
In the midst of this vast river of information we have flowing into our minds is a certain pedigree of information coming from scholarly people, constituting our formal education.
So why is this information considered far more valuable than all of the other information we are exposed to on a daily basis?
The Cost of Words
For colleges and universities that operate on a regular semester system, one credit requires 16 hours of class contact time. Thus, a three credit course would be 48 hours of class contact time for the semester. This is typically broken down into three hours of class contact time per week.
However, each one-hour class is actually only 50 minutes, so that 16 hours of contact time is really only 13.33 hours of real time. Most Bachelor’s degrees require 124-128 credits to graduate. That’s typically 31-32 per academic year.
128 credits times 13.33 hours equals 1,706 hours of actual classroom time.
On the extreme high end of society, if someone spends $10 per day ($300/month) to be connected to media – cable TV, radio, newspaper and more – they are spending, a total of $99.50 per million words.
Most people speak at a rate of 125 words per minute. So 125 words per minute, times 60 minutes per hour, times 1,706 hours of classroom time equals 12,795,000. For people who spend $200,000 attending an Ivy League University, this works out to $15,600 per million words.
At this rate, the word-cost for a person attending an Ivy League School is 157 times as expensive as the words being consumed by an extremely well-connected person.
While this may be considered by many to be pretty fuzzy math, the value of a university education is now totally out of sync with the rest of the information world.
Are Colleges Pricing Themselves Out of Existence?
Students and their families are finding it increasingly difficult to afford college, forcing them to be more pragmatic in their decisions:
• Nationally, tuition and fees have risen 439% since 1982 in inflation-adjusted dollars, while median family income has risen only 147%. (National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education)
• 69.2% of private colleges reported that loan availability for their students and parents has been negatively affected by the economic downturn. (National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities)
• In October 2008, nearly 60% of surveyed high school seniors were considering a less prestigious college for affordability reasons; 14% changed their focus to a two-year college; 16% put their college searches on hold. (MeritAid.com)
Yes, early school training is oriented around necessary skills such as literacy and math. But as students progress it becomes less about learning necessary skills and more about learning desirable skills, some of which hold questionable value in today’s rapidly evolving world.
Yes, it comes from a trusted source, a college or school, with some very bright people staking their reputation on its accuracy. But there are many other trusted sources of information backed by the people who produce it such as newspapers, books, magazines, statistical journals, and video documentaries.
Yes, college classes are packaged in a comprehensible form making them easier to digest. Even though many college students would argue with the easily-digestible part, we will give them points for better course design. However, many non-school organizations are presenting information in similarly comprehensible formats for far less money. Think webinars, workshops, and non-accredited training centers.
More importantly, other organizations are doing a far better job of matching the curiosity of the learner with the subjects and experts they are interested in.
When Inertia Ends
Over the years colleges have become a magnet for intensely bright people. Faculty and staff are bestowed with enviable status and given high rankings in nearly all social circles.
Elitism has its privileges, and smart people have influence.
Colleges around the world have done a masterful job of fortifying their position in society by creating countless forms of governmental subsidies and devising elaborate schemes for student loans to buttress the financial underpinnings of this enlightened house of cards.
However, even well-fortified positions can collapse quickly. The newspaper world was filled with some of the brightest people in the world, fully-integrated into all aspects of society. Yet even with their low-cost word stream, the industry has shown itself to be unsustainable in this ultra-competitive new world.
Newspapers did a poor job of meeting the demands of the emerging hyper-individualized curiosity-driven consumer. Our education systems are doing an equally poor job.
Curiosity-Driven Education
In 2009, a study done by SRI International for the U.S. Department of Education concluded that students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.
The study found that students working online performed at the 59th percentile level, while traditional classroom students performed at the 50th percentile. This 9% differential is statistically very significant.
In much the same way that iTunes and YouTube have created curiosity-driven systems for consuming music and video content, a new system will arise on the Internet that will enable curiosity-driven students to consume courses.
iTunesU is already making major inroads into this space.
Communication technology today is designed around the two-way flow of information. People are no longer satisfied, or trusting, of one-way information systems like that employed by colleges and traditional education systems. They want to participate, contribute, and take ownership of content.
They are most interested in letting their curiosity be their guide.
More on the “Hole in the Wall” Experiment
Prof. Sugata Mitra, currently a Professor at Newcastle University in the UK continues to probe the capabilities of the self-learners.
At one point Mitra started asking the question, “How difficult a task can students take on?” So he decided to find out.
In the small village of Kalikuppam, Mitra decided to see if Tamil-speaking children could learn about biotech in English on their own. After two months, the students sheepishly told him they’d learned nothing. He asked whether they’d learned nothing at all, and a twelve year old girl told him, “Apart from the fact that improper copying of genetic molecules could cause disease, we’ve learned nothing.”
Students took biotechnology exams and scored a 30, where they’d scored a 0 before… “an educational impossibility.”
He asked one of the best students to teach the others and improve their schools. She asked how she could possibly teach them, and Mitra suggested “the grandmother method” – stand behind, admire, act fascinated and praise. After two months, the class score was up to 50.
Mitra is now conducting experiments in the UK, with students at Gateshead school. Students work in groups of four, using one computer, and can switch between groups.
One group started solving GSCE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) questions within 20 minutes. The least successful group took 45 minutes. They were using online tools like Google, Ask Jeeves and others.
Traditional teachers, however, are still skeptical. “Is this truly deep learning?”
But Mitra has seen evidence that test scores will rise over time with groups like these, and believes that students have near-photographic recall because they are learning together at a time when their curiosity has been peaked.
Final Thoughts
Wilhelm Konrad von Roentgen became famous for “accidentally” discovering x-rays. Roentgen found something in nature that seemed useless, but fascinated him. He devoted countless hours to studying how electrons move from one point to another within a gas. He did this because he had an amazing sense of curiosity that was driven by a need to understand nature.
X-rays weren’t discovered by chance. Chance is when something comes from nothing. Yes, his discovery was serendipitous, but it was followed by a lot of hard work. Today, a scientist in a similar situation would be confronted with the challenges of finding the funding to proceed with this type of research.
Roentgen’s story is a classic example of a scientist who didn’t begin with a well-defined question. So, how do we remove the constraints and incentivize people build on a hunch, with the remote possibility that their hunch may lead to enormous breakthroughs in society?
We do it by creating systems that empower our curiosity.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Curiosity-Driven Education

“If a teacher can be replaced by a machine, they should be.” – Arthur C. Clark

In 1999, Professor Sugata Mitra embedded a computer in a wall in a slum in New Dehli, connected it to high speed internet and left it there. Kids in the area, mesmerized by this technology, learn to use computers by themselves.

Over time his work has become famously referred to as the “Hole in the Wall Experiment.” He repeated this experiment in other parts of India and discovered how kids learn what they want to do.

His online videos of kids interacting with these computers have become the source of considerable discussion with one showing children recording music and playing it back for others only four hours after seeing the computer for the first time.

One experiment he did in Hyderabad, India involved asking kids who spoke English with a strong Telugu accent to use a voice recognition system on a computer. Since it didn’t recognize many of their words initially, he told them to speak so the computer could understand them. And then he left. When he returned two months later, their accents had changed and were closer to the neutral British accent required by the speech synthesizer.

In a conversation that Mitra had with the late Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke commented that, “If a teacher can be replaced with a machine, they should be.” And Clarke told him that a student’s interest is the most important thing in education.

Clarke instinctively knew that a student driven by their own curiosity will learn more, learn faster, and retain far more than when they are confronted with subjects of low interest.

Read the rest of this entry »

historical perspective, new strategy, people making a difference, powerful idea, technology trends 9 Comments »

My Weekend with the new All-Electric Nissan Leaf

Posted by admin on January 24th, 2011
My Weekend with the new All-Electric Nissan Leaf
I looked over at my clock and saw that it was 3:19 am, a time when most people would normally just roll over and fall back to sleep, but I was wide awake. And from past experience, I wouldn’t get tired again for 2-3 hours, so this was one of those crazy middle-of-the-night periods of free time where I could get something done, and my body didn’t really know I was awake.
As I rolled out of bed, I was making plans to drive across a stretch of southern California in the new Nissan Leaf my friend was letting me borrow to retrieve the charging cord that the valet person at the Sheraton Hotel in Carlsbad mistakenly thought was theirs. Rarely have I seen a new 5 star hotel shoot themselves in the foot as badly as this one. More on this later.
The car had been charging several hours, so once I disconnected the cord and pushed the start button on the Leaf I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had 91 miles on the all-important range gauge in front of me. But, the enthusiasm was short-lived as two miles down the road I glanced down and saw that I was already down to 72 mile.
Google maps told me that the Sheraton Hotel was 24.8 miles away, so knowing the squishiness of the range gauge, I knew I didn’t have a whole lot of miles to spare.
The all-important range gauge
Unlike gas-powered cars, where a low gas light means you have to start looking for a nearby gas station, running out of electrons on the Leaf means searching for an outlet that you can plug into and waiting for hours for it to recharge.
Two nights before, after spending a grueling hour in California commuter traffic driving from La Jolla to Carlsbad, I arrived at the Sheraton Hotel with a total of 32 miles left on the car. The car had driven splendidly and the onboard navigation system was nothing short of a lifesaver as I worked my way seamlessly through this unfamiliar territory.
As I began the check-in process at the Sheraton registration desk, I was blown away by the number of roadblocks the front desk clerk was throwing in front of me. At issue was his insistence that I give him a credit card to charge the room on, even though the company I was working with has reserved and paid for the room on their card.
The problem I have with allowing hotels to swipe my credit card, even though they say they won’t charge anything to it, is that they put a hold on large amounts of money, often as much as $500. They always say that they will remove the hold right away, but in most cases the hotel doesn’t release the hold for several days, often times a week.
For a frugal business person traveling with only one credit card, as I was, with limited room on the card, this meant that I would lose access to all available funds for the duration of my trip. Since I was traveling to Tucson, AZ two days later, it would complicate that trip as well. I have run into this problem before, and I was about to again.
After going several rounds with the front desk guy, even putting Deb on the phone with him and threatening to drive back to the house we were staying at in La Jolla, something I really didn’t want to do because of all the traffic, I finally relented and gave him the credit card. This was a full hour-long process.
At one point he called two of the people from the company that had hired me to get authorization on the credit card they had on file. I actually think he was going to require them to drive over and personally authorize the card because later he said they couldn’t accept a card unless someone was there to sign on it. We waited but no one called back.
Being short on money complicates things immensely, and in this case I could not afford to eat at the hotel. So after parking in the underground parking lot and getting unpacked in my room, a nice room with great views of the dirt piles on the back side rather than an ocean view on the front, I had to decide what to do for dinner.
The car showed I had 32 miles left, so I used the navigation system on the car to locate a nearby fast food restaurant and found a Carl’s Jr only a mile away. I thought I might be able to burn a couple more miles and still make it back on the original charge.
Instead, as I drove out of the parking lot I watched the miles instantly drop to 29, and by the time I had returned, it was down to 24 miles, far too little to chance the 24.8 miles I would need to drive the following day.
So what actually happens when the Nissan Leaf clicks down to zero miles? I didn’t have a clue. Was it like a gas gauge on other car where you can still squeak out a few more miles or do you simply die a silent electron-free death along some lonely stretch of highway?
My only option was to find a way to plug the car in. I noticed a feature on the navigation system where it lists the nearest charging stations, so I hit the button and found the closest one was 19 miles away. Hmmm, no help there.
So when I got back to the hotel I called the front desk and asked if they had any accommodations for plugging in an electric car. “No, not really. Sorry,” Was my reply.
For me it was a sleepless night as I worried about plugging the car in and making it back. I had wandered through the underground parking lot looking for a 110 volt outlet, but didn’t see any. I wondered if nearby gas stations would let me plug in and how much they would charge.
I found it hard to believe that the hotel hadn’t run into this problem before.
The next morning, after packing up all my belongings, I noticed the car had lost even more miles just sitting in the garage. It only showing 21 miles left on the gauge. So I drove to the valet station in front of the hotel and simply told them that I needed to plug the car in. I told them that I couldn’t leave until it was charged.
The valet attendant, eager to help, had me show him how to plug it in, and assured me he’d find a way to plug it in.
Plugging in to a 110 volt outlet is a far slower charging process than plugging into a 220 volt charging station. But since my talk would take place over the next 3-4 hours, with even a short low voltage charge, I should easily have enough miles to make it back to the house in La Jolla.
The talk went very well. Some very good questions and an exceptionally bright audience. I love working with groups like this.
Four hours later I returned to pick up the car, only this time I was working with a different valet attendant. He saw the notes on the car, said that it was plugged in somewhere in the underground parking area, and he’d bring it up right away.
I was relieved. It had been charging for close to four hours, so now I could make it back with no problems.
I was so grateful that I handed him a $10 tip. He mentioned something about the cord, but the same front desk clerk from the night before had come out and was asking how my stay was, apparently feeling guilty, so I never caught what he said about the cord.
As I drove off, I realized that I only had 37 miles on the gauge. I just gave a guy a $10 tip for 16 extra miles. On this car that would be the equivalent of a quart of gasoline. But it was enough to get me back, so I shrugged it off.
Once again I fought my way through the relentless California traffic and drove into the garage with a total of 16 miles remaining. Turns out I could have made it after all….. maybe.
The comment about the electrical cord was bugging me, so as soon as I returned I looked in the trunk only to find… nothing. The cord was missing. Who could possibly think the cord didn’t go with the car?
I wanted my $10 tip back!
I immediately called the hotel and got the exact same front desk clerk I had been working with all along. He apologized for the valet and said he’d look for the cord and call me back.
Thirty minutes later he called back to say he had found the cord, but all the overnight delivery services had left for the day and the only way for me to retrieve the cord would be for me to come and get it myself. I told him it would have to be tomorrow because the car would once again have to fully recharge before I would attempt this trip.
This brings back to where I started, with me making the early morning trip back to the Sheraton.
The whole trip back and forth took a little over an hour because most drivers were still sleeping. I retrieved the cord without a hitch, but as expected, the Sheraton was quick to ignore the screw-up.
Front charging port on the Leaf
This whole situation resulted from the interplay between a short-range electric car and a less-than-accommodating hotel on the edge of the car’s round-trip range.
NOTE:  It is now 8 days after this incident and the Sheraton still has a $259 hold on my credit card.
Back of the car
More about the Leaf
The Leaf is being billed as a zero emissions car, but in reality it is an “emissions elsewhere” car. Electricity comes from generators, and generating electricity at most power plants is not a zero emissions operation. It does, however, eliminate pollution along the roads.
The Leaf is a five-door, five-passenger city-car, but as with all back seats, that third passenger needs to be unusually thin.
A look under the hood
At the center of its power is a front-mounted motor producing 107 horsepower and 208 pound-feet of torque. Top speed comes in at just under 90 mph and Nissan claims a 0-60 mph time under ten seconds. It always seemed to have the power, speed, and acceleration I needed, making it feel like a solid commuter vehicle.
What matters most is range. Nissan claims the car will go for 100 miles per charge. However, if you limit each charge to 80% of capacity, the batteries will last considerably longer. That is the option my friend chose, and this was the reason I was dealing with a shorter range.
If you don’t drive more than 70 or 80 miles per day, and research by Nissan indicates that more than 80 percent of us don’t, then the Leaf might just be the perfect planet-friendly transport for you.
Mouse-shaped shifting knob
One thing I didn’t know about was the “Eco” mode on the shifting knob where the on-board computer automatically switches its programming to dial down the air conditioning and throttle response while boosting regenerative braking, which reportedly improves driving range by as much as 10 percent.
The shifting knob did seem like it was designed backwards – push forward to reverse, and pull back to go forward.
Intelligent Transport System on the center console
Upon further reading I found out that the Leaf is a very well-connected car. When your smart-phone is linked to its Intelligent Transport System, whose main purpose is to assist with what Nissan calls “range management,” owners can call the Leaf and instruct it to charge the batteries or turn on the air conditioner on hot days, and the car itself will call you back to let you know when it’s finished charging. But it has to be connected to the grid to take advantage of these features.
The Intelligent Transport System also shows you how much energy you are using and how many miles to empty.
Battery cells under the passenger compartment
The Leaf comes equipped with a 24kW lithium-ion battery pack complete with 48 separate modules housing four cells a piece. The number of cells is important because if one fails, Nissan can replace the individual modules without having to replace the entire battery pack. The Japanese automaker is keenly aware of the issues that could plague a mass-market EV.
When recharging, there are three different cables for three different charging options – 110-, 220- or 440-volt.
The missing 110 volt charging cord
The 110 volt charge is the most convenient, but it provides barely enough juice to top up the batteries after 20 hours of charge time.
The two other options are better. An electrician can rewire an existing 220-volt clothes dryer outlet, thus reducing charge time to around seven hours total. The cost of the in-house charger runs around $2,200, but the Feds will take care of half that amount and Nissan will not only arrange for the installation, it’ll allow you to roll the cost of the setup into your monthly payments.
440-volt “Quick Charge” station
If you’re lucky enough to live around one of the 440-volt “Quick Charge” stations, you can get up to 80 percent of the battery’s capacity in around 30 minutes. Expect to see these popping up across the U.S. in the coming months and years, assuming all goes according to plan.
The list price is $32,780 for the base price (not including any government rebates), but if you want the backup camera and spoiler-mounted solar panel, you can get those options with the SL model for a $940 upgrade.
My friends said his car, after all of the rebates, came in at around $22,000.
Rear view camera
The rearview camera is a nice addition, giving you a wide view of what’s behind you. However, the solar panel, which adds a 12-volt trickle charge to the battery to supply electrons to the headlights, clock and a few low-power accessories, does not provide you much of a return on your investment. Even Nissan officials admit the solar panel is more of a marketing ploy than a functional addition. Even so, 85 percent of pre-order customers are opting to include the solar trim. Obviously it is more of a status play.
According to Motor Trend Magazine, “As the first kid on the electric block, Nissan has really made an effort to make the Leaf as appealing to as many buyers as possible. The car looks futuristic yet very approachable from the outside, and its interior is finished in a bright, stylish trim with wave-like contours and blue-hued illumination, emphasizing the car’s planet-conscious slant. Its seats are comfortable and head and legroom is sufficient.”
The car is initially being manufacture in Japan, but the entire operation is slated to be moved to Smyrna, Tennessee in 2012.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Nissan Leaf 764s

Me standing next to the all-electric Nissan Leaf in La Jolla, CA

I looked over at my clock and saw that it was 3:19 am, a time when most people would normally just roll over and fall back to sleep, but I was wide awake. And from past experience, I wouldn’t get tired again for 2-3 hours, so this was one of those crazy middle-of-the-night periods of free time where I could get something done, and my body didn’t really know I was awake.

As I rolled out of bed, I was making plans to drive across a stretch of southern California in the new Nissan Leaf my friend was letting me borrow to retrieve the charging cord that the valet person at the Sheraton Hotel in Carlsbad mistakenly thought was theirs. Rarely have I seen a new 5 star hotel shoot themselves in the foot as badly as this one. More on this later.

The car had been charging several hours, so once I disconnected the cord and pushed the start button on the Leaf I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had 91 miles on the all-important range gauge in front of me. But, the enthusiasm was short-lived as two miles down the road I glanced down and saw that I was already down to 72 mile.

Google maps told me that the Sheraton Hotel was 24.8 miles away, so knowing the squishiness of the range gauge, I knew I didn’t have a whole lot of miles to spare. (Pics)

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, technology trends 2 Comments »

Connecting the Physical World with the Digital World through Apps

Posted by admin on January 20th, 2011
Connecting the Physical World with the Digital World through Apps
We are witnessing an explosion of apps for our handheld devices.
When Apple introduced their iPhone SDK (software development kit) on March 6, 2008, no one had a clue about the tectonic plate-shifting nature of this announcement. In just a few short years the number of apps has mushroomed into a force of nature, radically shifting how products are created, and more importantly, how people in the physical world interface with information in the digital world.
Currently there are over 330,000 apps listed on the iPhone app store, and over 220,000 apps for androids. Facebook boasts over 57,000 apps with over 200,000 active developers exploring ideas for what comes next. And once Google TV hits the marketplace, the number of TV apps will create a uniquely different kind of flashpoint.
We are creative a massive amount of new information every day. But for us as humans to access this information, we need some sort of device, or interface, to make that connection.
As a former human factors engineer at IBM, I tend to view the world through an interface lens. The interface is, without a doubt, the biggest failure point between the products, structures, and systems we create in the physical world and the way we, as humans, interact with them.
Apps, however, create an entirely new approach for adding a dose of human-centric usability to virtually everything we come in contact with. Let me explain…
Over 70% of the world’s population now has a mobile phone. That’s over 5 billion mobile subscribers, and in places like the U.S. and Europe, it’s 9 out of every 10 people. Around the world, children are now more likely to own a mobile phone than own a book. 85% own phones and only 73% own books.
The reason iPhone apps exploded is because the iPhone itself was a wildly popular device that gave people a glimpse of what all might be possible with handheld devices in the future.
Closely following every new Apple product announcement is an intensely loyal user community, filled with talented geeks who are light-years ahead of the rest of the world. So the stage was set. An explosive hit product (sales currently exceeding 90 million phones) coupled with a poised and dedicated developer community and an open invitation to add your own personal touch.
The rest is history. But it is a damn short history. So where do we go from here?
Apps for the Rest of the World
Why do we need to limit our thinking to handheld devices?
Products have traditionally been designed using a top down approach. Smart executives, working with smart engineers, develop a new product and spend millions on marketing and advertising campaigns to tell the world how much they are going to love this new product.
Most of the business community still thinks that way, but the app world is opening up an entirely new toolbox for companies to work with.
Companies and engineers no longer need to have all of the answers. In the future, virtually all mass-market physical products will have an open API (Application Programming Interface) that allows the information world to merge with it.
To explain this further, let’s consider the possibilities for five commonly-used products – cars, TVs, guitars, houses, and shoes.
Future Car Apps
Future cars will be designed around apps much like smart phones today. This is that critical interface between the physical (mechanical) and the digital (software) where the auto manufacturers will eventually start to understand the difference between a top-down design and. a bottom-up design.
My thinking is that every major automotive manufacturer will create their own interface system, and it will be installed across their entire line of cars.
There is no way that Apple could have possibly invented all of the creative apps that users wanted for the iPhone. Similarly, there is no way that Ford can possibly imagine all of the ways people will want to interact with their cars.
Creating an open API for a car naturally comes with its own interesting set of complications, but I for one would like an app that never lets me drive over the speed limit. Well, except in Wyoming, Kansas, and major part of Texas. Those states don’t count.
I would also like an app that will let people know when I’m going to be late for a meeting. (Reads my calendar, calculates arrival times, and knows who to contact.)
In a crowded area, I would love to know where the available parking spaces are, where the cheapest parking is, and how long I can park in any given spot.
I would like a car that finds me rather than me having to search for the car. The car needs to learn from me, know my likes and dislikes, recommend restaurants, theaters, and cultural events. It needs to understand my problems and do everything within its power to alleviate my anxiety.
This is the kind of car I would love to own, but it doesn’t come from a few smart guys in Detroit trying to make educated guesses. It comes from letting the world’s best and brightest add mosaic tiles of brilliance to every newly born vehicle.
Future TV Apps
The television world is being backed into a corner with their stogy, heavy-handed approach to set-top boxes and TV design.
TV apps will finally allow us to use keyboards and a variety of other interface devices to find the shows we want. We will no longer be restricted to the existing channel list. Rather, we will have access to any type of programming on the net.
We will be able to dial-in exactly how many ads we can tolerate, and during election season, we can turn them off entirely. Having no ads will cost us money, but for most of us it will be well worth it.
Rather than watching a movie with subtitles, we will be able to have it translated to whatever language we want.
Every program will be pause-able.
Since watching television is as much about context as it is about content, apps will be created that allow us to change the mood of the room, reorient the surround sound, noise-cancel the neighbor’s barking dog, and even order pizza without having to talk on the phone.
Perhaps the most popular app will also be the most hated one, an app that turns every TV into a working karaoke machine. *Sigh*
Future Guitar Apps
The guitar is currently the world’s most popular musical instrument and also the one most likely to embrace a rapid transformation.
A guitar interface will be similar to an iPhone or Android, only the device will somehow be integrated into the instrument. Similar to cars, major manufacturers like Gibson and Fender will create a common interface for all of their guitars.
Tied to the right controls, guitar apps will provide self-tuning capabilities and, with the touch of a button, instantly switch to a different pitch during the middle of a song. They will monitor the number of notes played and the accuracy of the performance. With a flip-out display, they will serve as a teleprompter with an instant display of music, words, play lists, and other visual cues.
In a live performance, this type of interface will give guitarist tools to “read the room” with meters showing sound distribution, comparative volumes, and tonal qualities. Working as a master control unit, musicians will be able to change pedals, switch devices, and adjust reverb and distortions.
In a practice environment, aspiring musicians will be able to jam remotely with people half-way around the world, add in other instruments, and even create the feel of a live stage performance.
Future House Apps
Houses are our biggest investments, yet we have no standard interface for them. Designers that appreciate the public’s diverse individuality will drive the engines of home innovation. People want to decide for themselves what is important and what is not.
Smart homes of the future will begin to resemble living organisms, and countless apps will serve as the building blocks for them.
A living house will be aware of its surroundings, its content, and everything flowing in and out of its structure. Awareness will be achieved by adding sensory and monitoring capabilities that extend capabilities both internally and externally.
Appliances will imitate body organs, serving distinct purposes, but carefully crafted to coordinate and serve the function of the larger organism, the home. The outer walls of a house already can be thought of as human skin that shields us from the elements. Walls will be sensitive to temperature shifts and react to external changes, and will become alternately porous and protective.
A living home will form a symbiotic relationship with its occupants. This kind of home offers a superior environment that will enhance human performance and efficiencies, managing the inflows and outflows from both a resource-conscious and human-centric perspective.
For those who want automated environmental controls, security systems and lighting. The components of the smart home interface will include:
• Monitoring and control of all inputs – water, electricity, air, people, purchased items, etc
• Monitoring and control of all outputs – sewage, trash, etc
• Monitoring and control of all storage – water, electricity, food, information, and more.
The smart home interface will be a challenge of engineering, a challenge of design, and a challenge of inspiration. But the opportunity is far too great for this to go untouched much longer.
Future Shoe Apps
The three areas where our physical bodies come into contact with our physical surroundings the most are the beds that we sleep in, the chars that we sit in, and the shoes that we walk in. Each of these product areas are prime candidates for involving app developers.
Our shoes are a very personal extension of who we are. As such, the smart shoes of the future will monitor your gate, record every step, map your daily journeys by giving you a sort of fitness diary, and in an emergency, will let others know where you are.
With the right kind of shoe, the shoe will have the ability to self-adjust to your feet and the surrounding conditions. When your feet get too hot, additional pores or air vents will open. Over the course of a long run, the shoes will adjust to reduce fatigue, slippage, and internal stress points. When walking in water, the shoes will seal themselves up to keep your feet dry.
Other Prime Candidates for Apps
The intent of this paper is to expand your thinking about app possibilities. So let’s step a bit further outside the envelope of conventional thinking.
• Dental Implants – A dental implant with a series of imbedded sensors and wireless access will open the doors to accurately monitoring such things as calorie intake, food composition, your body’s reaction to certain types of food, breathing problems, and sleep issues. It may also record your voice, analyze speech patterns, help control addictions, and with an imbedded transmitter, allow you to talk on a cellphone without any visible external device.
• Rapid Courseware Builder – Education is a system primed for a revolution, and a well-devised courseware builder, built around a templated process that allows any topical expert to build their own courses, has the potential to mushroom into the world’s largest web property. Working with a vibrant app-builder community, a tiny software company has the potential to “fire the proverbial shot heard ‘round the world,” and our system for education will be forever changed.
• Whole Body Interface – Our bodies are radiating information, yet we have no convenient way of capturing and making sense of these data streams. A well-crafted interface device used in connection with the right combination of monitoring, stimulation, intake, and adjustments will have a dramatic effect on everything from daily performance, to health improvements, to human aging. We may be a long ways from the super beings that science fiction writers like to talk about, but we may be closer than anyone thinks.
Our next door neighbors rarely connect with us on the same wavelength, and the way I see our app-inspired future may be time-shift ahead of what we are prepared to deal with, but consider this. The next time you walk into a store to purchase a BBQ grill, physical fitness equipment, a new office chair, a bicycle, boat, pair of skis, or an eReader, consider what it would be like to also have over 100,000 downloadable apps that could be downloaded into the product.
One person’s musings may very well be another’s inspiration for building the next killer app.
Final Thoughts
Even with the number of apps approaching the all-important one-million milestone, it is still a fledgling industry with a very short track record.
In July 2010, Google announced a beta product called App Inventor to help streamline the development process. This will be one of many innovations along this line that allow non-programmers to become the app designers of the future.
For over 100 years we have had visions of how robots will dramatically alter our lives, yet they have only made tiny inroads. One of the primary reasons for this is because robot designers have a very difficult time imagining how people will use them.
A well-designed robot with an open API has the potential to change all that. People could invent their own uses, and a vast robot marketplace might instantly spring to life.
Color me optimistic, but opening the Pandora’s Box to the app world is giving us the keys to an unimaginable future, and the best part is that we all get to participate in building it.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

app explosion 677

We are witnessing an explosion of apps for our handheld devices.

When Apple introduced their iPhone SDK (software development kit) on March 6, 2008, no one had a clue about the tectonic plate-shifting nature of this announcement. In just a few short years the number of apps has mushroomed into a force of nature, radically shifting how products are created, and more importantly, how people in the physical world interface with information in the digital world.

Currently there are over 330,000 apps listed on the iPhone app store, and over 220,000 apps for androids. Facebook boasts over 57,000 apps with over 200,000 active developers exploring ideas for what comes next. And once Google TV hits the marketplace, the number of TV apps will create a uniquely different kind of flashpoint.

We are creative a massive amount of new information every day. But for us as humans to access this information, we need some sort of device, or interface, to make that connection.

As a former human factors engineer at IBM, I tend to view the world through an interface lens. The interface is, without a doubt, the biggest failure point between the products, structures, and systems we create in the physical world and the way we, as humans, interact with them.

Apps, however, create an entirely new approach for adding a dose of human-centric usability to virtually everything we come in contact with. Let me explain…

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business trends, future scenario, new strategy, powerful idea, prediction, technology trends 6 Comments »

Eight Great Explosions in Video

Posted by admin on January 12th, 2011
Eight Great Explosions in Video
What will it be like to watch television in 2030
Having just returned from four days at the famous Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I am spending the next couple weeks sorting through the vast array of products I came across, looking for overarching trends and patterns that may signal lifestyle shifts in the future.
Wandering through the exhibits, it is hard not to be impressed with the elaborate video displays and the tens of thousands of video screens appearing on virtually every surface.
However, if we ask the very simple question of what the television-watching experience will be like 20 years from now, we can begin to sense how our lives are on the verge of shifting into a whole new gear.
Will watching TV still be a communal experience? Will we be looking at a device, or will the image be projected? Or will it appear on some sort of digital wallpaper? Will it be portable? Will it be 2D, 3D, or perhaps 4D or 5D? Will it be interactive, reactive, immersive, or participative?
The answer to these and many more questions lie in what I call the “Eight Great Explosions in Video” that will happen in the coming years.
Television, the Early Years
The early work on televisions, spearheaded by visionaries like Philo Farnsworth, John Logie Baird, and Vladimir Zworykin began in the euphoric 1920s. But in just a few years the economy tanked and they were forced to develop their technologies during the Great Depression.
The fact that television technology was born out of one of the worst economic times of the past should not be lost on those startups who have been building new video technologies over the past few years.
However, television was originally thought of as a home version of the movie industry which had begun a couple decades earlier. In 1889, William Friese-Greene was issued a patent for his ‘chronophotographic’ camera capable of taking up to ten photographs per second using perforated celluloid film. The first public motion-picture was shown in Europe in 1895.
1928 Baird Model C
By the time the earliest televisions were being tinkered with, the movie industry had already gone through the silent screen era and the first “talky” came with the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927.
Philo Farnsworth with his television in 1935
As the earliest televisions were beginning to roll off the manufacturing lines in the mid 1930s, the film industry was already making quantum leaps forward with Walt Disney’s release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 and the release of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind in 1939.
Since the movie industry was already perfecting the development of content, the stage was being set for the broadcast television era even as the demand for new programming skyrocketed. Over the next couple decades, virtually every family would place high value on the invention of the TV and find a way to purchase one for themselves.
Today a full 99% of all households in the U.S. have televisions in them, with 66% equipped with 3 or more. The number of hours per day that TV is on, in an average U.S. home, is 6 hours, 47 minutes.
While these may seem like staggering statistics, they will seem tiny when compared to the “video everywhere” age we are about to enter into.
Purpose of Video
In the past, video was a one-way form of communication generally focused on providing one of two things – entertainment or education. News and documentaries were common forms of educational television, but most of the airwaves were dedicated to various forms of entertainment which attracted the largest audiences.
As a result of this focus, we currently have a more advanced developer-community for educational and entertainment-related content. More recently gaming has emerged as a dominant industry player. Over time, though, many other creative uses for video will begin to emerge including the following:
• Entertainment – Video entertainment will continue to fragment into thousands of different categories.
• Instructional and Educational – Look for rapid growth in the areas of college and K-12 educational programming.
• News – Micro-niche news services are already carving out video-blogging and super-focused business models. Many companies will experiment with progress-report news services to keep customers informed about any new developments.
• Aesthetics and Art – Video has the ability to add flow and movement to otherwise static pieces of artwork. It gives artists an entirely new pallet of expressive options for breathing life into their ideas.
• Lifelogging – To many of us, our personal relevance is based on the legacy we leave. Capturing the essence of who we are is an important function in fulfilling this basic human need.
• Ambiance – Setting the Mood, creating emotional context to any given environment.
• Archival Purposes – Personal, family, and business video archiving will become big business in the future.
• Self Expression – We will soon define ourselves based on the videos we surround ourselves with.
• Conversation – Conversational video services like Chatroulette, Masturbette, and WooMe are tapping into people’s needs and desires for forming conversational relationships with people in other cultures.
• Two-Way Communications – The Dick Tracy watch never caught on and even FaceTime on the new iPhones is considered more of a novelty than a must-have feature. But over time, two-way video communications will become far more pervasive.
• Social Networking – As social networking expands, many more video elements will come into play, adding new dimensions to those we wish to have as our “friends.”
• Gaming – Video gaming is already one of the largest growth industries in the world. Look for video gaming to fragment as it expands, into 10,000 new niche market areas.
• Discovery – Everything from macro-projects to nano-projects will enrich the world of scientific discovery as video capture devices explode around us.
• Marketing and Advertising – As the number of video display surfaces expands, the creative juices inside Madison Avenue will flow to meet the growing demands. Marketing messages will begin to appear on surfaces we never dreamed possible in the past.
• Relationship Building – The people we meet become far more real once we capture their manners and expressions on video. Future forms of video will allow us to find and form meaningful relationships like never before.
• Data Gathering – In the future, the world around us will be recorded on a real-time basis, with a cast of young people, known as the Terabyters, making it their mission to spider their surroundings. This will give rise to search engines designed for the physical world.
Crowd Accelerated Innovation
Chris Anderson, curator of the TED conferences, believes the video content available online is already educating the masses, causing young people today to think and perform at levels that were inconceivable even ten years ago. He calls this phenomenon “crowd accelerated innovation.”
Videos have a way of reducing the distance between experts and viewers to just one degree of separation.
As Anderson goes on to explain, “Innovation has always been a group activity. The myth of the lone genius having a eureka moment that changes the world is indeed a myth. Most innovation is the result of long hours, building on the input of others. Ideas spawn from earlier ideas, bouncing from person to person and being reshaped as they go. If you’re comfortable with the language of memes, you could say a healthy meme needs an ecosystem not of a single brain but of a network of brains. That’s how ideas bump into other ideas, replicate, mutate, and evolve.”
Crowd Accelerated Innovation isn’t new. In one sense, it’s the only kind of innovation we’ve ever had. What is new is that the Internet—and more specifically online video on the Internet— has made it universally available, turning it into a spectacular source of influence.
Because of this, we are standing on the precipice of the great video explosion. But it won’t be just one explosion. Rather, it will explode on eight separate fronts in stunning fashion.
The Eight Great Explosions of Video
As we work through the original question of “what will it be like to watch television in 2030,” we must first think through the breakthrough innovations that will happen over the next 20 years and determine how and why certain areas will grow faster than others.
Video is set to go through an explosive growth phase. The coming years of video development will be defined by what I call the eight great explosions.
1. Explosion of Television Apps – Today we have over 300,000 apps that have been built for the iPhone and many more for Android and Window 7 phones. Tens of thousands of people have entered into this emerging new market of adding mosaic tile pieces of software capability to our communication systems. However, comparatively few have built apps for television. If, as an example, Apple were to develop their own television with an open API, then invariable developers would rapidly shift their business to building TV apps. We are already seeing widgets and apps for television on a small scale, but this market is set to explode in a big way once the right players enter the market.
2. Explosion of Video Capture Devices – According to Ericsson, mobile broadband subscriptions are on track to surpass 1 billion in 2011 only months after reaching half a billion. Certainly not all of these handheld devices are equipped with video cameras, but they soon will be. Look for tiny cameras to become inexpensive and ubiquitous, with instant upload-to-the-web capabilities.
3. Explosion of Video Display Surfaces – Electronic inks and papers will soon evolve into inexpensive full-motion flexible video fabrics and we will begin to see video surfaces springing to life all around us. Video surfaces will begin to appear on product packaging, in-store displays, on our cars, and even on our clothing. People will produce videos for tiny niche markets like “videos that look good on bicycles,” “videos for your garage door,” and “videos that make your dog stop barking.” Video clothing will become all the rage with video hats, video shirts, and video dresses setting new standards for how people get noticed. Women will even ask such crazy questions as, “Does this video on my pants make my butt look fat?”
4. Explosion of Video Projection Systems – With low-cost LEDs replacing the expensive bulbs in video projectors, a new breed of tiny, super-bright projection system will emerge, giving us the ability to turn virtually any flat surface into an active video surface. Since the biggest barrier to video projection systems has been the cost of the replacement bulbs, next-generation projectors will begin to morph in size and shape, as an add-on to many of our existing gadgets. They will even giving us the tools to make things appear invisible. As an example, the ceiling in our home can quickly become a projection of the sky above it. The sides of our cars can become a projection of what’s on the back side, so they will appear to be part of the landscape. Thinking through some more unusual applications, flying projection systems may even be developed to do such things as “paint” momentary messages on a wall, project disguises on our faces, build ambiance for a party, or change the mood for events and large gatherings.
5. Explosion of Video Content – Over 80 million hours of YouTube videos are consumed globally on a daily basis. In the U.S. over 6 million videos are rented every day. Cisco predicts that 90% of the content on the web will be video content in just 4 years. To meet this growing need, video recording, editing, and messaging will soon become core skills taught to virtually every young child. As this happens, exponential growth of video content will force the need for massive expansion in both bandwidth and storage capabilities.
6. Explosion of Holography – Since 1947 when Nobel Physicist Dennis Gabor first conceptualized holography, the concept has been riddled with far more hype and vaporware than actual marketable technology. But we are making progress. Every advancement in 3D technology and every new blockbuster film requiring 3D glasses is helping to push the envelope further. Look for no-glasses holographic movies to begin appearing within a decade, and further expansion to full-action holo-movies taking place in-the-round with each spectator getting a different perspective depending on their vantage point to happen soon after that.
7. Explosion of Video Gaming – So far, nearly 400 million video game consoles have been sold worldwide. 392.9 million according to my calculations. With the advent of the gesture interface, coupled with advances in augmented reality, video games will soon turn the world around us into our own personalized playing field. The game of life will truly become the game of life. Along with the explosion of video display surfaces and handheld devices will come games designed for every personality, every age group, and every interest group. The creativity and resourcefulness of this industry will continually expand to meet the explosive opportunities and demands.
8. Explosion of Video Bandwidth and Storage – Along with the rapid expansion of video creation will come the growing demand for video bandwidth and storage. Admittedly, bandwidth is one of the biggest choke points in the emerging video world. Video content requires high bandwidth capabilities and the big players like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon who are developing the Internet backbone routinely drag their feet. This situation, however, will be forced to change as countries become more competitive and new bandwidth technologies such as drone-based broadband systems come into play.
Final Thoughts
Not everything in the video world will be positive. Today the average child who turns 18 has witnessed over 200,000 violent acts on television. Every year the average child is bombarded with over 20,000 thirty second commercials. And the 1,680 minutes each day that the average child spends in front of their TV is making them increasingly fat, lazy, and prone to disease.
On one hand, television is the great educator, the center of modern culture, and a pipeline into everything happening around us. But at the same time, it is sucking up our time, infringing on our relationships, and keeping us from doing meaningful work.
Television is at once both a massive problem and a massive solution. However, as a medium, television has the capability of solving the problems it creates.
So to go back to the original questions I posed at the beginning of this article, television in 2030 will still be both a private and communal experience. We will be watching it on a flexible video fabric that can be either portable or permanent. We will have the option of switching from 2D to 3D to center-of-the-room blow-your-mind holographic TV. And we will have the choice of making it interactive, reactive, immersive, or participative. It will be all this and so much more.
Ironically, the word “television” will no longer be used in 2030. Instead, we will refer to it as…..
…wait for it…
…. “the experience formerly known as television.”
By Futurist Thomas Frey

TV Futures 354

What will it be like to watch television in 2030?

Having just returned from four days at the famous Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I am spending the next couple weeks sorting through the vast array of products I came across, looking for overarching trends and patterns that may signal lifestyle shifts in the future.

Wandering through the exhibits, it is hard not to be impressed with the elaborate video displays and the tens of thousands of video screens appearing on virtually every surface.

However, if we ask the very simple question of what the television-watching experience will be like 20 years from now, we can begin to sense how our lives are on the verge of shifting into a whole new gear.

Will watching TV still be a communal experience? Will we be looking at a device, or will the image be projected? Or will it appear on some sort of digital wallpaper? Will it be portable? Will it be 2D, 3D, or perhaps 4D or 5D? Will it be interactive, reactive, immersive, or participative?

The answer to these and many more questions lie in what I call the “Eight Great Explosions in Video” that will happen in the coming years.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, historical perspective, new strategy, powerful idea, technology trends 4 Comments »

The Future of the Cruise Industry

Posted by admin on January 6th, 2011
The Future of the Cruise Industry
Designing cruise ships today to meet the
wants, needs, and desires of future generations
Having just returned from a holiday cruise on the Mexican Riviera, I became intrigued with the prospects for this behemoth industry, and the long-term implications of designing ships today that mesh well with the changing attitudes and fickle interests of traveling consumers many years in the future.
So for the past week I have immersed in researching the cruise industry and thinking through the current trends that will guide it into the future.
At the heart of this discussion is the 30-50 year economic life of a ship. With design and construction time for megaships taking five to ten years, it is already possible for them to be unveiled to the public noticeably out of date. And 5-10 years into their operational life, cruise lines run the risk of having to schedule a major rework to re-sync the functionality to match consumer expectations.
Some interesting parallels can be seen with shopping malls, where mall owners have seen stiff competition from Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco and are now filing a record number of bankruptcies, and jumbo jets with a similar usable life span but a rapidly increasing cost of operation during the later years.
Unlike shopping malls, cruise ships can easily be moved to better markets. And unlike jumbo jets, many repairs and upgrades can happen “on the fly.”
For the moment, the industry is sitting on top of the world with a growing consumer base and stellar earnings reports. It is precisely this time when the industry needs to spend considerable time reinventing itself. With this in mind, we begin this examination of future trends in the cruise industry.
Industry Overview
The cruise industry is the fastest growing segment of the travel industry – achieving more than 2,100 percent growth since 1970, when an estimated 500,000 people took a cruise.
• Roughly 14.3 million passengers traveled in 2010, a 6.3% increase over 2009.
• The cruise industry is the fastest-growing category in the leisure travel market. Since 1980, the industry has experienced an average annual passenger growth rate of 7.4% per annum.
• Since 1990, over 154 million passengers have taken a 2+ day cruise. Of this number, over 68% of the total passengers have been generated in the past 10 years and nearly 40% in the past 5 years.
• The average length of cruises is 7.2 days.
• The cruise product is diversified. Throughout its history the industry has responded to the vacation desires of its guests and embraced innovation to develop new destinations, new ship designs, new and diverse onboard amenities, facilities and services, plus wide-ranging shore side activities. Cruise lines have also offered their guests new cruise themes and voyage lengths to meet the changing vacation patterns of today’s travelers.
• The cruise industry now has over 30 North American embarkation ports placing cruise ships within driving distance of 75% of North American vacationers. With the added convenience of avoiding air travel, cruise lines have attracted a wider customer base.
• From a capacity standpoint, utilization is consistently over 100% (104% in 2009).
• The Caribbean is the number one destination, with an estimated 37% of the total in 2010.
• 26 new state-of-the-art new ships are contracted or planned to be added to the North American fleet through 2012, at a cost of nearly $15 billion US.
• Because only approximately 20 percent of U.S. adults, and far less of the world market, have ever taken a cruise vacation, there remains an enormous untapped market.
• Ninety percent of all cruise vacations are booked through travel agents.
• There are over 2,000 ports of call around our planet that cruise ships can visit.
• There are more than 300 cruise ships in the world today with a collective capacity to handle over 250,000 passengers.
• Three major cruise line groups (Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Star/NCL) control roughly two-thirds of world’s cruise passenger capacity.
Profitability
Ever wonder where the money goes? Based on market calculations provided by Cruise Market Watch, here is a breakdown of the estimated 2010 average cruise revenue and expense per passenger for all cruise lines worldwide.
INCOME (Per Passenger)
Ticket $1,155
On board spending
Casino & Bar 206
Shore excursions (cruise line portion) 75
Spa 37
All other on board spending 56
Total on board spending 375
Total Revenue $1,530
EXPENSES (Per Passenger)
Corporate operating costs $    525 34.3%
Shipboard payroll 169 11.0%
Agent commission 162 10.6%
Depreciation & amortization 153 10.0%
Ship fuel costs 107   7.0%
Victualing (subsistence supplies) 96 6.3%
Interest expense 76 5.0%
Other ship expenses (port fees etc.,) 69 4.5%
Other on board operating costs 67 4.4%
Total Expenses $1,424
Profit before taxes $    157 10.3%
For 2011, the average profit per passenger per day is projected to increase to $218.57, with $165.00 ticket price and $53.57 on board spending.
Signs of Trouble
To be sure, the industry is doing many things right, so to some of you, the problems I’m mentioning here may seem like minor blips on the radar screen of success. Indeed, the total worldwide cruise market is estimated at $29.4 billion, a full 9.5% increase between 2009 and 2010.
Yet for companies that pride themselves on offering luxury class service and amenities, there are some glaring omissions:
• Internet Connections – In virtually every other aspect of the travel industry, vacations have transitioned into working vacations, at least on some level. But with excessive connection fees and slow download speeds, doing work onboard a ship is painful at best. The average person in the U.S. spends 2 hrs and 35 minutes per day online, and as cruise lines attempt to recruit a larger share of the traveling public, they will be butting up against some natural barriers here until they are able to solve this issue.
• Cellphone Connections – While the rest of the world has shifted from place-to-place communications to person-to-person communications, the cruise industry remains woefully behind. Cell phones and other handheld devices are not usable without paying exorbitant connection fees. This also means that friends and family members onboard become increasingly difficult to coordinate plans with. Especially on the megaships of the future.
• Ship Time – With the proliferation of self-correcting watches, clocks, and timepieces, the notion of running a ship’s operation on “ship time” becomes more confusing. Most ships have very few clocks and passengers are left in a constant state of confusion as to whether their watch or handheld device has self-corrected to a different time zone. This becomes a critical issue when a passenger is off on an excursion and arrives too late for the departure.
• Smoking – Onboard smoking issues will continue to plague the cruise industry for years to come as the anti-smoking zealots in the U.S. square off against the chain-smoking Asians who are beginning to wield far more clout as their market share increases. Smoking bars and smoking casinos become difficult environments to contain and since casinos are a high-revenue asset, and smoking gamblers spend far more than non-smoking gamblers, many cruise lines have positioned their casinos along critical must-walk-thru traffic lanes to maximize impulse gambling, but at the same time, force non-smokers to breathe the air.
• Business Environment Vs Vacation Environment – Cruise ships are a natural environment for networking, collaboration, and launching new ideas. Yet the current technological constraints provide a massive impediment for attracting the serious tech-related businesses crowds of the future. As an example, full-immersion events like Seedcamp, Startup Weekend, or BarCamp would work well with a ship’s self-contained live-together, work-together environment, but not without access to high bandwidth Internet connections.
Future Trends, Future Opportunities
For cruise lines it was important to first establish a durable industry, and they have done a remarkable job so far. But here is where it gets interesting. Each of the industry leaders are now well-positioned to leave their mark on the future, and they will be doing it by pushing the envelope, taking risks, and breaking rules.
Cruise lines, while still lagging on the digital frontier, will be entering an experimentation phase with each trying to establish themselves as a leading innovator.
Here are eight key trends that will begin driving this industry into the future:
1.) Global Load Shifting
Over the years the cruise industry has grown up with a majority of its passengers coming from North America. However, with the fluidity of global markets causing a constant shifting in the wealth of nations, the North American dominance of the industry is beginning to erode.
Cruise Lines International Association’s (CLIA) latest report shows that North American passenger numbers rose 1.0% to 10.1 million, while the global passenger count grew 3.3% to reach 13.4 million.
Leading travel expert, Arthur Frommer recently cited the shifting of capacity to European waters “the biggest development in cruising” noting “you’ll see far fewer cabins and berths in the Caribbean.”
At the same time, countries around the world who are interested in building their image are realizing that cruising is an important vehicle for sampling destination areas to which they may later return.
Over the coming years, the rapidly growing Asian market will cause a constant realignment of ships and cruise strategies with companies moving more of their ships into European and Asian ports. Already positioned as some of the most preferred destinations for travelers, look for strong growth in the Australian, New Zealand, and Singapore cruise industry.
2.) Branded Differentiation
When scanning through the current listings of cruise options, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the uniformity. They all start looking the same. Yes, they originate from different ports and make a variety of stops at diverse ports along the way, but there is little to set them apart.
People today are more inclined to identify with a branded experience as opposed to a branded ship. With this trend we will begin to see cruise companies align themselves with corporate sponsors in an effort to make every 5, 7, or 14 day cruise a branded experience.
Here are a few examples:
• ELLE Fashion Week Cruise – Where top fashion designers and top fashion models from around the world meet to unveil their latest creations at this once a year event sponsored by ELLE Magazine
• The Petron Tequila Cruise – Tequila lovers, here’s the perfect getaway. Not only are all tequila dinks onboard half-price, and all passenger gifted with a one-of-a-kind free gift package from Petron, but people will have the opportunity to take an extended behind-the-scenes tour of the Petron factory in Jalisco, Mexico,  and meet some of the workers.
• The Letterman Cruise – Join David Letterman and his guests as the entire Letterman teams is assembled onboard to produce his nightly show. For this week, the ship has been temporarily renamed, the U.S.S. Letterman.
• X-Box Tournament Cruise – If you are into gaming you will love this cruise with six X-Box Tournaments happening simultaneously on virtually every level of the ship.
• Facebook Social Networking Cruise – Invite your friends to join you on this cruise and for every friend that signs up, you win prizes and credits good for future cruises. The top ten networkers will have their trips totaled paid for. Passengers will be joined by key executives at Facebook as they step you through what’s next for this social networking giant.
• The Amazon Shopping Cruise – No, this isn’t a trip into the Amazon. Rather, passengers will be treated to an ongoing series of product demonstrations of everything lining the online shelves on Amazon.com. As a major incentive, all passengers will receive a free Kindle Book Reader.
• The Zappos Shoe Cruise – People who take extended cruises know the value of having great shoes. Daily shoe fashion shows, lectures by shoe designers and fashion trend experts, and meet the Zappos team as they demonstrate how their company is being positioned to meet the footwear needs of future generations.
• NYSE Cruise – On this cruise, 25 traders from the New York Stock Exchange will be working live from a mini-trading floor onboard the ship with live data feeds providing real-time updates on stock prices.
3.) Growing Need for Office Staterooms
As the pace of business continues to climb, and the nature of employment continues to morph, few will be able to completely escape the demands of work for the duration of a cruise. For this reason, companies will begin to redesign their staterooms to include a functional work environment.
As an example, ceiling mounted flat screen televisions will enable one person to watch TV with headphones and not distract someone else who is working on a computer at a desk. Rolling office chairs, pull-out desk space, affordable in-room Internet & cellphone connections, projection screens, and large-screen computer monitors are just a few of the elements needed to give travelers the convenience of on-demand workspace whenever the need arises.
4.) Rapidly Evolving Shipboard Innovations
Smaller ships will tend to focus more on their own branded experience while larger ships will continue to push the limit of what’s possible at sea.
Below water viewing chambers, onboard observatories, electronic gaming tournament centers, pet spas, cook-your-own dinner-dining rooms, slash-casters, movies-under-the-stars outdoor theaters, graffiti walls, and cruise-for-a-cause walls of fame are just a few of the possibilities here.
In addition, onboard wireless networks will give rise to interactive game playing through personal cellphones. Ship-based photo competitions, audience voting, “complete this phrase” (text in an answer), unusual scavenger hunts, remote ship webcam monitoring, and invite-a-friend games can add entirely new dimensions to what is currently being offered.
Some ships may even begin to use flying drones for such things as extended view whale-watching, storm monitoring, cloud formation, and weather analysis. While near land, drones can be used to view the surrounding countryside and even witness city lights at night.
5.) Increases in Multigenerational Travel
The CLIA fleet carries over 1.6 million kids traveling each year and that number is increasing, in part due to the growth of multi-generational bookings.
One recent survey found that 46 percent of families have taken two to four cruises with children under the age of 18, and 15.2 percent have taken five to seven cruises, and 4.8 percent have taken more than ten.
As life expectancy grows, and 80-90 year olds become increasingly more active, cruise lines will find themselves needing an even broader selection of programming, with a range of offerings that appeal to even more age groups. Adding to the complexity of age-related programming will be the diverse, rapidly-changing interests of multi-cultural age groups.
6.) Shorter Lead Times
Businesses around the world are beginning to grapple with the fact that shorter lead times are getting shorter every year. Our rapidly accelerating communications networks are constantly raising the bar. The once radical notion that packages and letters could be delivered anywhere in the world overnight, is now stogy thinking, far too slow for today’s on-demand generation.
For cruise lines, representing an industry built around the leisurely pace of leisure, this creates a number of friction points, as well as several advantages.
Customers, who would have booked 6-12 months in advance in the past, now see little need to book more than 1-2 months in advance today. This last-minute thinking that causes heartburn from an operational standpoint also opens the door to last-minute promotional schemes that can insure a near-capacity turnout virtually every time.
While switching embarkation and destination points still needs advance planning, it requires far less than it did even a couple years ago. Customer notifications can happen quickly and last minute requests and changes are becoming much more manageable. Onboard staff and talent can be booked with little notice and
7.) Floating Cities and Floating Nation-States
The cruise industry has been quietly testing the limits of international law by asking the fundamental question, “What things can happen in international waters that are not permitted inside most countries?”
They are already claiming exemption from sales tax, gambling laws, HR requirements, minimum wage laws, and a multitude of other restrictions that land-based businesses have to deal with. But how far are they willing to push it? And how far is too far?
• Could a medical tourism ship be stationed in international waters to perform medical procedures that are still pending approval in other countries?
• Is it possible for a ship to serve as a shopping center for illicit merchandize such as counterfeit software, illegal arms, human organs, designer drugs, and more?
• Can they create and enforce their own laws, begin to incorporate businesses, develop their own currency, manage their own banking operations, and serve as a tax haven?
• In short, is it possible for a ship to become its own sovereign nation?
If this line of thinking sounds too extreme, consider the following:
1.) Floating cities on the ocean have been receiving added attention due, in part, to concerns over climate changes.
2.) A number of groups are already in the early development phases of floating and undersea cities of the future.
3.) One floating city is already in operation. This super cruise ship off the coast of Florida is operated by Residensea. It has been designed for wealthy families who wish to live and work from a sea-based permanent home floating in international waters.
4.) Seasteading Institute in California is based on the belief that “…current political systems are outdated and work poorly, for two reasons. One is the lack of a frontier – a place to go try out new forms of government (like the crazy new “democracy” which sprung up in far-off America). The other is the lack of mobility on land that happens because people are tied to buildings and buildings are fixed in place.”
5.) SeaLand is a manmade structure 60 miles off the coast of England that has established itself as an autonomous country.
Below are photos of these early efforts:
ResidenSea is a $264 million, 43,000 ton, 12-deck, 644 foot long, 650-person capacity, one-of-a-kind resort floating community at sea that circles the globe. The vessel took six years to build and contains luxury studios, one, two and three-bedroom residences.
Belgian Architect Vincent Callebaut has conceived of a lillypad-designed city that features water collection and purification powered primarily by solar and wind energies.
The Lillypad plan is moving from design to implementation stage, an indication that the development of floating cities may not be so distant.
In Tokyo, to deal with a lack of developable land, a “city in a pyramid” has been proposed to float on Tokyo Bay.
András Gyõrfi’s “The Swimming City” was the winner of the Seasteading Institute’s first 3D design competition in 2009
8.) Extreme Ship Designs
Cruise lines have proven that they are sitting on top of a very profitable industry and the more outrageous the ship, the more profitable it becomes. This line of thinking is paving the way for a new era of extreme ship designs and extreme operational strategies.
I should note that something only sounds extreme before it’s built and operating. After it becomes a successful, the label “extreme” gets traded in for “genius.”
Here are a few ideas that have been proposed:
Designed by Fredrik Johansson, a mother ship would carry smaller vessels
Waterstudios, Royal Haskoning, and Dutch Docklands have formed a consortium to have this Floating Cruise Terminal built at sea by 2014.
Freedom Ship is a “floating city” concept proposed by Norman Nixon of Freedom Ship International. With a design length of 1400 meters (4500 feet), width of 230 meters (750 feet) and high of 110 meters (350 feet), Freedom Ship is four times the length of the largest cruise ship in the world today
Addressing the issue of rising sea levels, Russia-based architectural firm Remistudio proposes The Ark, an arch-shaped floating hotel as a refuge from even extreme floods.
Conceptualized by Gianluca Santosuosso, the MORPHotel is a unique project that intends to develop a new luxury hotel concept where the user can live inside a floating system that keeps moving around the world. The MORPHotel is able to adapt its shape to the weather conditions and the site morphology, thanks to the linear structure developed around the vertebral spine.
Final Thoughts….
The cruise industry is in the enviable position of having demand build faster than capacity can be created. They can shift assets to match the markets and morph their offerings to match customer demands. And, being outside of most jurisdictional boundaries, they can literally write their own rules.
For this reason they have the ability to manage risks more efficiently than most other industries.
But cruise ships still have enormous challenges ahead. For one, the average person gains seven pounds onboard a seven day cruise. If they could figure out a way for the average person to lose seven pound while consuming the same food, then we’re talking.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Vincent_Callebaut_Lilypads_5_Ss

Designing cruise ships today to meet the
wants, needs, and desires of future generations

Having just returned from a holiday cruise on the Mexican Riviera, I became intrigued with the prospects for this behemoth industry, and the long-term implications of designing ships today that mesh well with the changing attitudes and fickle interests of traveling consumers many years in the future.

So for the past week I have immersed in researching the cruise industry and thinking through the current trends that will guide it into the future.

At the heart of this discussion is the 30-50 year economic life of a ship. With design and construction time for mega-ships taking five to ten years, it is already possible for them to be unveiled to the public noticeably out of date. And 5-10 years into their operational life, cruise lines run the risk of having to schedule a major rework to re-sync the functionality to match consumer expectations.

Some interesting parallels can be seen with shopping malls, where mall owners have seen stiff competition from Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco and are now filing a record number of bankruptcies, and jumbo jets with a similar usable life span but a rapidly increasing cost of operation during the later years.

Unlike shopping malls, cruise ships can easily be moved to better markets. And unlike jumbo jets, many repairs and upgrades can happen “on the fly.”

For the moment, the industry is sitting on top of the world with a growing consumer base and stellar earnings reports. It is precisely this time when the industry needs to spend considerable time reinventing itself. With this in mind, we begin this examination of future trends in the cruise industry.

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business trends, future scenario, historical perspective, new strategy, technology trends 11 Comments »