Exploding Smartphone Industry With a global population exceeding 7 billion people, we have seen the mobile phone industry mushroom to include over 5 billion members.
Smartphones remain a small subset, owned by around 10%of all those with mobile phones. But not for much longer.
We are about to see virtually all communication devices replaced with smartphones over the coming decade.
Leading the charge is Google with over 700,000 Android devices being activated daily. Over the past year, Google activated more than 255 million devices compared to 105 million Apple activations.
Admittedly this isn t a true apples-to-apples comparison (no pun intended) because Google doesn t make their own phones
and Apple does. As smartphones and other devices evolve in this exploding market, look for a near-term push into near-field communications, 4g,
and flexible bendable devices. Critical to the growth of this mobile device market is the global supply of rare earth metals,
which China currently controls 95%of known reserves. Looking out for its own self-interests, Chinas has been ratcheting down exports of these metals by 12%per year for the past 5 years.
Their reluctance to export enough to meet global demand has touched off a worldwide hunt for new sources with promising finds being uncovered in Canada, Argentina, South korea, and California.
Look for several new mines to come online in coming years and China s stranglehold on the industry to plummet. 16.)
Hyper-Local Urban Farming Going Underground A few years ago, a study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable agriculture at Iowa State university reported that between 1980 and 2001,
Many limit their thinking about gamification to mobile apps but it has far broader implications.
People who visit the site, enter details of their running times and the routes they were on,
it will be the year that major players like Google and Mastercard roll out their cashless initiatives around the world.
In October 2011, the Google Wallet, a free, NFC-enabled mobile payment system became operational at select retailers across the US.
shoppers simply tap their mobile device on special terminals at points-of-sale to pay instantly.
In June 2011, Paypal demonstrated its own mobile payment app for Android devices. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey s latest venture, Square, is an electronic payments service
which enables users to accept credit card payments by using a portable card-reader device that plugs in to iphone, ipad or Android devices.
Both the Square card-reader and app are free although there is a 2. 75%charge for each payment made.
The izettle app works with iphones and ipads. Bills can also be paid or money transferred using this service.
Google CEO Larry page sees himself as the next great visionary, following in the footsteps of Steve jobs, Nikola Tesla,
Google s self-driving car project has racked already up over 150 000 driverless miles on highways.
and for Google to make a play to design an Android-like operating system for all driverless cars. 22.)
With basic drone hardware being matched up with smartphones, and the bottom-up design capabilities of app developers around the world, drones will quickly move from the realm of personal toys to functional necessities that we interact with on a daily basis. For those of you looking to switch careers,
the drone marketplace will create one of the hot new industries of the future. More details here. 23.
For this reason, Los angeles-based QLESS Inc. has devised a text messaging service to help eliminate the wait.
using keyboards and computer screens, the time-to-answer process can easily be reduced to as little as 10 minutes.
Emergence of Food Printers-3d printing is a form of object creation technology where the shape of the objects are formed through a process of building up layers of material until all of the details are in place a relatively slow process often requiring hours to complete.
Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands of items
Look for continuing progress in the area of 3d food printers, even though the Jetson s style food synthesizers may still be a few years off.
Apple s App store currently offers 9, 000 mobile health apps, along with 1, 500 cardio fitness apps, over 1, 300 diet apps, more than 1, 000 stress and relaxation apps,
and over 650 women s health apps. But apps are only part of the equation. Peripheral devices are setting the stage for the true self-revolution:
All Apples stores now carry the Withings Blood pressure monitor, a peripheral device that plugs into the ipad,
iphone or ipod Touch and takes the user s blood pressure. Data can be sent directly to a doctor or saved (confidentially) to the cloud.
Lifelens has created a smartphone app to diagnose malaria. The app can magnify a drop of blood (captured via a simple finger prick)
and identify whether malarial parasites are present. In October 2011, Ford demonstrated three SYNC apps offering in-car health monitoring for drivers to track chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma and hay fever.
Also in October 2011 AT&T announced it will begin selling clothes embedded with health monitors,
able to track the wearer s vital signs heart rate and body temperature and upload them to a dedicated website.
The X Prize Foundation is cosponsoring a $10 million prize for the best mobile device allowing consumers to diagnose their own diseases.
Every new peripheral device will create a market for hundreds of new apps, and we haven t even scratched the surface of
what will seem like a massive influx of brilliant new peripherals over the coming months.
Healthcare industry execs should be nervous. Final Thoughts I will end with a few comments about the new systems that will be needed to tie all of these trends together.
We are currently out of balance between backward-looking problem-solving and forward-looking accomplishments. Forward accomplishments help erase past problems.
They solve problems in a different way. We need more forward-looking accomplishments, and our greatest undertakings in the future will come in this area.
This need for future accomplishments will also dictate a need for new and better systems to regulate,
and computer system analysts, they are all jobs that currently exist today. Yes, many of these jobs will still exist in the future,
and change as technology and communication systems make their impact. As an example, technology research firm IDC predicts the amount of data businesses will have access to will grow 50-fold over the next decade.
Avatar Designers Next generation avatars will become indistinguishable from humans on a two-dimensional screen. However, avatars will only live in the computer world for a short time longer.
It is only a matter of time before they emerge from the computer and appear as visual beings,
walking around among us. Once an avatar goes through the radical metamorphosis from an image that we see on a screen to a three dimensional being that joins us for dinner,
carries on conversations with our friends, and serves as a stand-in for us at meetings,
and the demand for printer-produced products will skyrocket. The trend will be for these worker-less workshops to enter virtually every field of manufacturing,
and maintain the next wave of this technology. 13. 3d Food-Printer Engineers Pushing the envelope for 3d printer technology even further,
will be the coming age of food printers. Converting 3d printers to work with cartridges containing food-stocks will prove difficult and demanding on a number of levels.
Book-to-App Converters Over the coming months we will begin to see a form of competition brewing between books and apps.
we will begin to see a large scale effort to convert existing books and literature into an interactive app, similar to the current effort to convert popular literature from print to audiobooks.
Smart Dust Programmers In it s simplest form, smart dust consists of a sensor combined with a wireless transmitter and some kind of power source.
Personality Services Talking back and forth to a computer that has a machinelike voice is boring. But being able to download specific personality packages#will add an entirely new level of engagement for basement-dwellers everywhere.
The hottest personalities to download will be offshoots of existing characters or celebrities such as being able to download a David Letterman personality, a Homer Simpson personality,
Smart Contact Developers The idea of smart#contact lenses the kind that can superimpose information on the wearer s field of view has been around for a while.
and cargo transport system designed around a network of vacuum tubes with maglev tracks. Operating at less than 2%of the cost of today s car, truck, jet, ship,
Mass Energy Storage Developers As a society, we have become very good at generating electricity,
By Futurist Thomas Frey Author of Communicating with the Future the book that changes everything Via Futuristspeaker. com Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati k
#The Coming Food Printer Revolution Futurist Thomas Frey: Would you buy a product that was advertised as Naturally grown, completely organic, printed food?#
This is the promise of food printer technology as we move from simply printing ink on paper
to 3d printing of parts and objects, to next generation food printers. These aren t the artificial food devices that science fiction movies have been promising.
Stereolithographic printers remain one of the most accurate types of hardware for fabricating 3d objects.
Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands of items
which is used also in the manufacturing of satellites. The world s first fully 3d printed car called, The Urbee The Urbee is a hybrid vehicle that has its entire body
It s difficult to build those vascular networks, but now a team from Germany s Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB has developed a way to print capillaries with a 3-D printer.
Printed artificial bones The Open3dp team at the University of Washington has managed to accomplish something extraordinary.
The Digital Fabricator Next Generation Food Printers Food is a basic building block of life. We have a hard time going longer than a day without it.
have created a very visual way for us to imagine next generation food that will come from printers.
Cornucopia printer Cornucopias printing process begins with an array of food canisters filled with the cook s#foods of choice.
After a meal selection has been made using the device s multi-touch translucent screen, users are able to see their meal being assembled
Philips food printer Philips Food Creation#device has been inspired by the so-called molecular gastronomists. These are chefs who deconstruct food
The food printer works with various edible ingredients and then combine and print them in the desired shape and consistency.
Yanko Design s prototype for the Electrolux Molã culaire food printer The brilliant thinkers at Yanko Design have developed a new device called the Electrolux Molã culaire,
a 3d molecular food printer that relies on the experimental molecular cooking technology. New designs for printed food The Molã culaire is based on the same layer-by-layer printing technique that arranges small particles from a set of ingredients.
Within minutes, it prints out three-dimensional desserts, complex structures, shapes for molecular dishes, and patterns for decorating a meal.
Users can also create their own recipes with special software and their own ingredients. Ambitious users can download recipes and share them with other users in an online community.#
Food printer technology is clearly a quantum leap forward. In the future, we will only be consuming food that our body has a positive reaction to.
By Futurist Thomas Frey Author of Communicating with the Future#-the book that changes everything Via Futuristspeaker. com Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati c
Our mobile communication systems are just beginning to make these connections, and on a certain level, this back and forth information flow becomes a rudimentary form of language between us and our plants.
I ve written extensively on the topic of smartphone peripherals and how the use of smartphones will expand by over 1, 000%in the coming decade.
We now have over 1 million mobile apps available for download. Putting this into perspective,
the whole mobile apps revolution began in March of 2008 when Steve jobs announced the software developer s kit for the Apple iphone.
When Apple s App store officially opened on July 11, 2008 there were a whopping 552 apps to choose from.
To say the apps were an instant success is a gross understatement. Over 60 million apps were downloaded within the first 3 days
and tech companies around the world began to sense a market shift. Little did they know how much,
and how many industries would be affected. As of today, over 20 billion apps have been downloaded and there s no end in sight.
But the piece getting very little attention is the exploding field of smartphone peripherals that extend our current communication systems far beyond simple person-to-person communications.
While there are literally thousands of peripheral devices either in existence or being contemplated for the marketplace, I ll focus on just a two pieces of technology smart dust
and smart contacts to illustrate the transformations about to take place. Early visions of smart dust technology Smart Dust In the 1990s, Kris Pister, a researcher at UC Berkley dreamed up the idea of sprinkling the Earth with countless tiny sensors, no larger than grains
of rice. These smart dust#particles, as he called them, could be used to monitor everything.
Acting like electronic nerve endings for the planet and fitted with computer processors, sensing equipment, wireless radios,
and extended life batteries, smart dust would have the capabilities of providing huge volumes of real-time data about people,
HP will take its first step toward this goal in about two years, according to Pete Hartwell,
a senior researcher at HP Labs in Palo alto. The company is under contract with Royal dutch shell to install 1 million matchbook-size monitors to aid in oil exploration by measuring rock vibrations and movement.
Data streams coming from these plants with give them a voice#that will help us better understand the idiosyncrasies of plant life.
or augmented-reality overlay that requires no glasses, screen or headset. The first iteration of smart contact lenses are already on the market.
Technology imbedded in smart contacts Photo credits Fast Company Our demand for information is growing on a daily basis. Using devices such as smartphones
and tablet computers to display what we are looking for is slow and clunky at best. With a constantly surging trend line towards creating a seamless and invisible interface between the information world and our brains,
and send/receive capabilities of a nearby smartphone, the very real possibilities for smart contacts being used as a replacement for current handheld displays suddenly comes within reach.
By Futurist Thomas Frey Author of Communicating with the Future#the book that changes everything Via Futuristspeaker. com Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati i
#Marc Andreessen explains why software is â eating the worldâ##Groupon, Facebook, and Linkedin investor Marc Andreessen.
Hewlett-packard announced this week that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software,
Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Hewlett-packard and Googles moves surprised the tech world.
Marc Andreessen (board member at Hewlett-Parckard) explains why software is eating the world. Both moves are also in line with a trend Ive observed,
one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies,
In short, software is eating the world. More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon valley,
due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets. com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, Isnt this just a dangerous new bubble?#
which has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare, among others. I am also personally an investor in Linkedin.
We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.
which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software
and delivered as online services#rom movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading
and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software,
with new world-beating Silicon valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not. Why is this happening now?
Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works
and can be delivered widely at global scale. Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago,
when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones,
giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.
On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries#ithout the need to invest in new infrastructure and train
new employees. In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud,
the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150, 000 a month.
Running that same application today in Amazons cloud costs about $1, 500 a month. With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services
the result is a global economy that for the first time will be wired fully digitally#he dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s,
finally delivered, a full generation later. Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon.
In 2001, Borders agreed to hand over its online business to Amazon under the theory that online book sales were nonstrategic and unimportant.
Oops. Today, the worlds largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company#ts core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online
no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy,
Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.
Todays largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix. How Netflix eviscerated Blockbuster is an old story,
but now other traditional entertainment providers are facing the same threat. Comcast, Time warner and others are responding by transforming themselves into software companies with efforts such as TV Everywhere,
which liberates content from the physical cable and connects it to smartphones and tablets. Todays dominant music companies are software companies, too:
Apples itunes, Spotify and Pandora. Traditional record labels increasingly exist only to provide those software companies with content.
Industry revenue from digital channels totaled $4. 6 billion in 2010, growing to 29%of total revenue from 2%in 2004.
Todays fastest growing entertainment companies are videogame makers#gain, software#ith the industry growing to $60 billion from $30 billion five years ago.
And the fastest growing major videogame company is Zynga (maker of games including Farmville), which delivers its games entirely online.
Zyngas first-quarter revenues grew to $235 million this year, more than double revenues from a year earlier.
when it debuted the popular game on the iphone in late 2009). Meanwhile, traditional videogame powerhouses like Electronic arts and Nintendo have seen revenues stagnate and fall.
The best new movie production company in many decades, Pixar, was a software company. Disney#isney!#
#ad to buy Pixar, a software company, to remain relevant in animated movies. Photography, of course, was eaten by software long ago.
Its virtually impossible to buy a mobile phone that doesnt include a software-powered camera, and photos are uploaded automatically to the Internet for permanent archiving and global sharing.
Companies like Shutterfly, Snapfish and Flickr have stepped into Kodaks place. Todays largest direct marketing platform is a software company#oogle.
Now its been joined by Groupon, Living Social, Foursquare and others, which are using software to eat the retail marketing industry.
Groupon generated over $700 million in revenue in 2010 after being in business for only two years.
Todays fastest growing telecom company is Skype, a software company that was bought just by Microsoft for $8. 5 billion.
Centurylink, the third largest telecom company in the U s.,with a $20 billion market cap, had 15 million access lines at the end of June 30#eclining at an annual rate of about 7%.Excluding the revenue from its Qwest acquisition,
Centurylinks revenue from these legacy services declined by more than 11%.%Meanwhile, the two biggest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have survived by transforming themselves into software companies,
partnering with Apple and other smartphone makers. Linkedin is todays fastest growing recruiting company. For the first time ever, on Linkedin, employees can maintain their own resumes for recruiters to search in real time#iving Linkedin the opportunity to eat the lucrative $400 billion recruiting industry.
Software is also eating much of the value chain of industries that are viewed widely as primarily existing in the physical world.
In todays cars, software runs the engines, controls safety features, entertains passengers, guides drivers to destinations and connects each car to mobile, satellite and GPS networks.
The days when a car aficionado could repair his or her own car are long past, due primarily to the high software content.
The trend toward hybrid and electric vehicles will only accelerate the software shift#lectric cars are controlled completely computer.
And the creation of software-powered driverless cars is already under way at Google and the major car companies.
Todays leading real-world retailer, Wal-mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition.
Likewise for Fedex which is thought best of as a software network that happens to have trucks, planes and distribution hubs attached.
And the success or failure of airlines today and in the future hinges on their ability to price tickets
and optimize routes and yields correctly#ith software. Oil and gas companies were early innovators in supercomputing and data visualization and analysis,
which are crucial to todays oil and gas exploration efforts. Agriculture is powered increasingly by software as well,
including satellite analysis of soils linked to per-acre seed selection software algorithms. The financial services industry has been transformed visibly by software over the last 30 years.
Practically every financial transaction from someone buying a cup of coffee to someone trading a trillion dollars of credit default derivatives, is done in software.
And many of the leading innovators in financial services are software companies, such as Square, which allows anyone to accept credit card payments with a mobile phone,
and Paypal, which generated more than $1 billion in revenue in the second quarter of this year, up 31%over the previous year.
Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation. My venture capital firm is backing aggressive start-ups in both of these gigantic and critical industries.
We believe both of these industries which historically have been highly resistant to entrepreneurial change, are primed for tipping by great new software-centric entrepreneurs.
Even national defense is based increasingly software. The modern combat soldier is embedded in a web of software that provides intelligence, communications, logistics and weapons guidance.
Software-powered drones launch airstrikes without putting human pilots at risk. Intelligence agencies do large-scale data mining with software to uncover
and track potential terrorist plots. Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming.
This includes even industries that are based software today. Great incumbent software companies like Oracle and Microsoft are threatened increasingly with irrelevance by new software offerings like Salesforce. com
and Android (especially in a world where Google owns a major handset maker). In some industries, particularly those with a heavy real-world component such as oil and gas, the software revolution is primarily an opportunity for incumbents.
But in many industries, new software ideas will result in the rise of new Silicon valley-style start-ups that invade existing industries with impunity.
Over the next 10 years, the battles between incumbents and software-powered insurgents will be epic. Joseph Schumpeter, the economist who coined the term creative destruction,
#would be proud. And while people watching the values of their 401 (k) s bounce up and down the last few weeks might doubt it
this is a profoundly positive story for the American economy, in particular. Its not an accident that many of the biggest recent technology companies#ncluding Google, Amazon, ebay and more#re American companies.
Our combination of great research universities, a pro-risk business culture, deep pools of innovation-seeking equity capital and reliable business and contract law is unprecedented
and unparalleled in the world. Still, we face several challenges. First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds,
making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign 90s. The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient
And when the economy finally stabilizes, look out#he best of the new companies will grow even faster.
Secondly, many people in the U s. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution.
This is a tragedy since every company I work with is starved absolutely for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon valley can rack up dozens of high-paying,
high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high.
This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption
and may never be able to work in their fields again. Theres no way through this problem other than education,
and we have a long way to go. Finally, the new companies need to prove their worth.
They need to build strong cultures, delight their customers, establish their own competitive advantages and,
yes, justify their rising valuations. No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy.
Its brutally difficult. Im privileged to work with some of the best of the new breed of software companies,
and I can tell you theyre really good at what they do. If they perform to my and others expectations
what we can collectively do to expand the number of innovative new software companies created in the U s. and around the world.
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