Upside Downturn » the future

beta testing facebooks hyperlocal augmented reality

Paolo — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:29:33 +0000

beta testing facebooks hyperlocal augmented reality:

Met up with some interesting intruiging and exciting peeps last night in Cardiff #cdfblogs meetup with @getgood @hrwaldram @carlmorris @stuherbert @GlynTansley Am excited again about the concept of local online. Might even do something like a “secret swansea” facebook group.

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I love technology

andy — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:36:42 +0000

Photo by M Guy

…but not really. I met one of the people who taught me photography the other evening (and, by the way, another person who taught me photography is really quite well known now – see his work here). We were talking about digital photography and how it killed the high street camera shop and development labs. That got us talking about the other career killers out there in terms of technology: affordable computing, desktop publishing, WYSIWYG editors, digital printers, blogs. All things I’ve made use of and made money out of, but all of which (apart from the first, maybe) have devalued my expertise in the fields I trained in – print design, web design, photography.

All of which makes technology a bitter-sweet thing for me.

I don’t want to make this post an ‘adapt-or-die’ message but at the same time we all have to think about what technologies are on the horizon now that will people will learn and then say ‘Why should I pay you to do that? I can do it myself.’ Is there still an argument for being an expert in things or is it best to flit from one next-big-thing to the other in the hope of hitting a goldmine (however temporary)?

It’s been useful to think in terms of what new technology I can look at that will help me stay ahead of the game and how I can sell myself in a world where everyone’s suddenly an expert.

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Futurology

andy — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:59:27 +0000

This week I was fortunate enough to see the futurologist Ray Hammond speak. He used to live next door to Steve Jobs dontchaknow. He managed to cover pretty much the whole of life within 45 minutes from the past to the future, the local to the global and the real to the virtual.

He touched on the recession, which is why I’m mentioning him here, and he said a few interesting things:

The first thing he said was about the virtual quality of money – the fact that it’s not real. It’s been said before but is always worth repeating. If you think about that for a while your mind takes you to some interesting places and provide some interesting thoughts about your work and how you do it.

Secondly, he said that we were on our way out of trouble, or would be very soon, and that after that we would see an extended period of unprecedented growth. This I thought was overly optimistic and didn’t take into account the constant wrong turns the government is making.

The third thing was that he gets very annoyed with pundits on the news comparing it with recessions of the past (‘82, 70’s, 30’s) as globalisation has made this recession completely unique and therefore incomparable He was frustrated that nobody on the political stage had picked this point up. This is a really good point, and if like me you listen to the news too much it might be worth keeping in mind; there are no historical precedents for this and although we know what caused it, we don’t know how it will pan out. This time there are millions and millions more people in the world who a) have more and b) want more than any other time in the past.

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