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David B. Anthony
David B. Anthony
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Walmart’s virtual stores at Canadian bus stops

walmart-busstop
Wal-Mart Canada have launched digital signs at bus stops where customers can use their mobile devices to scan products on posters and have the goods delivered to their homes for free. The campaign will last four weeks. Since consumers are typically pressed for time, this is one way of adding value, Simon Rodrigue, vice president of e-commerce for Wal-Mart Canada, said in a statement. “This campaign allows us to help Torontonians shop for essentials on the go, anywhere, at any time.”

“What we used to have before is, here is something we have on sale; please come to our store and buy it. Now what we’re saying is we have this product on sale; buy it right this instant,” says David Elsner, manager, retail consulting services at PwC. “That cash register is in their hand. They can make that purchase.”

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Subway Virtual Grocery Store

Virtual supermarkets are popping up in subway stations in South Korea, where commuters can virtually shop for items while waiting for the train to come. Customers simply scan an item’s QR code using the free "Homeplus" app and can have it delivered to their doorstep before they even get home. Ranked as the 2nd most hard-working country in the world to Japan, South Korea is rewarding its workers with this timesaving gem.

(Source: travel.spotcoolstuff.com)

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Levitating Wireless Computer Mouse

The Levitating Wireless Computer Mouse “The Bat” by Kibardin Design.
A set that consists of a base - mouse pad and floating mouse with magnet ring .

One of the goals of this product is to prevent and treat Carpal tunnel syndrome. Source

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Tools of the trade: managing a digital business

Successfully managing a digital business requires a complex mix of skills, experience, systems and processes. Digital agencies need to have a robust infrastructure that streamlines project delivery and the day-to-day, operational requirements of a business. These processes need to be flexible and adaptable enough to evolve as a business changes.

Every company has a slightly different way of doing things - so process aside, I’ve written this article to introduce you to a few tools of the trade that have helped Onespacemedia to streamline operations, collaboration and output.

Project management

Collaboration is a critical part of our project delivery. Centrally managing teams, to-do lists, milestones and deadlines, as well as assets, codebases and time tracking ensures that delivery is streamlined and the team benefits from both individual accountability and shared ownership.

Basecamp

I’ve used Basecamp by 37signals for more than eight years and have come to completely rely on it as a critical tool for our business. I personally rate everything that 37signals have put out so far - butBasecamp really is their crowning glory. Basecamp comes in two flavours: ‘classic’ mode and the current version which was released a couple of years ago. We still use the classic version as it has a time tracking feature that was removed in the current version.

Basecamp is essentially a collaborative project management tool that allows the user to set up internal or client projects and then invite people to collaborate on those projects. Framed in an intuitive user experience, each project is split into messages (discussion between team members), to-dos (categorised list items with completion check boxes, dates and responsibility allocation), calendar (project meetings, deadlines and milestones), writeboards (collaborative, version-controlled writing canvasses), time (granular time-tracking for the whole team) and files (docs, images, videos and any other type of digital asset).

The quality of the intuitive user experience aside, there are a tons of little features that elevate Basecamp above its competitors. These include project RSS feeds, email integration, connectivity with other applications through an API and the clever interaction between modular functionality.

Basecamp is woven tightly into the fabric of our organisation. I can’t advocate for it highly enough. With a free trial and pricing plans from $20 a month, it really is a no-brainer.

Trello

Basecamp is a feature-rich project management tool - but more useful for project communication and detail than an overview of all projects ongoing within an organisation. Trello fits in as a very simple and visual way to show the status of various projects from initial interactions, to writing proposals and finally launching a project.

Although you can use Trello in a number of ways, we use it as a project progression status board to provide a high-level overview of project status. Trello’s interface is based around a cascading card system where cards are added or assigned to lists. Our lists are set up as ‘RFP/initial contact’, ‘Introductory meeting’, ‘Proposal being written’, ‘Proposal sent’, ‘Proposal accepted’, ‘Research & Discovery’, ‘Design’, ‘Design sign off’, ‘Development’, ‘Bug fixes/ Amendments’, ‘Training, testing and QA’ and ‘Site/Campaign live’.

When we are approached by a client we create a new card with the client’s name. The card is placed into the appropriate list depending on what stage the project is at. The card itself has extra controls such as assigning members, due date, checklists, files, voting, alerts and communications preferences.

There is some crossover between Basecamp and Trello but I love Trello for it’s simplicity and horizontally scrolling UI. We are planning to put Trello up on a monitor in the office so that everyone can check the progress of projects at a glance. With free, gold and business class pricing models there is a package to suit everyone.

Collaboration

In many ways, for small businesses, Google has sounded the death knell for Microsoft Exchange and Office deployments - and the days of installed software in small commercial environments are well and truly numbered. Pushing modern browser capability to the absolute limit, cloud-based tools to aid collaboration are becoming the norm - and they’re getting better all of the time.

Google Apps for Business

Gmail led the way with a simple, web-based e-mail client to rival Hotmail and other popular services - but now the application has been integrated into a suite of services that companies can adopt for free. Combining domain management (i.e. appending services under your company web address), user management, e-mail, calendar, instant messaging, and shared documents including presentations, word documents and spreadsheets, Google Hosted Apps is heads and shoulders above the competition.

Google Apps is free for up to 10 users, and once we rolled it out, we never looked back. It works straight out of the box - and setting up new users or adding new services is a cinch. Google have clearly worked very hard to ensure that their suite works with a whole range of technologies such as being able to manage your e-mail through your preferred client, being able to open and save as Word, Excel and Powerpoint formats, as well as solid PDF support.

My favourite product in the suite has to be the combination of Google Docs and Google Drive. The first gives you a stripped down but feature-rich word processor with clever collaboration tools - such as comments and notifications. Drive gives you one place for all of your documents with 15GB of storage for starters and a whole range of intuitive and powerful sharing and privacy controls. A great standout feature is the split between documents you own and documents that are shared with you. I’m writing this post on Google Docs right now.

Once your organisation steps above 10 users, you’ll need to upgrade to the $5 per user per month plan - but the extra, dare I say, ‘enterprise’ level controls that come with the upgrade are easily worth it. For any SME looking to move into the cloud, this is by far the best place to start.

CRM

Customer/constituent/client relationship management is the term used to define the management of information relating to people and organisations. CRM is not a new concept and subsequently there are hundreds of different solutions available, most of which are defined by the type of sectors they serve. If we focus on more generic platforms rather than applications with sector-specific nuances you can count the best cloud CRM apps on your fingers.

Highrise

Highrise is another product in the 37signals suite and as a customer/client/constituent relationship management tool there are few equals - especially considering pricing starts at $20 a month for the basic account.

What I love about 37signals is that they used to be a creative agency - so their products seem to be well suited to agencies of the same nature. Highrise is an online application that manages contacts and allows the user to group them into companies. In a multi-user environment you can then add and assign tasks with dates and completion checks.

The application comes with basically everything you need to manage contacts - but my favourite feature is ‘deals’. This awesome module allows you to track deals, proposals and leads and attach them to an entity in the CRM. The deal can have a cash value as a fixed cost or as a cost per hour/day/month, and you can assign follow up tasks and give a deal one of three statuses: pending, won and lost.

In typical 37signals style Highrise works really well with email. You can send, BCC, or forward e-mails to Highrise and they’ll automatically be attached to the right person’s page. There is also a clever Basecamp integration where you can turn a won deal into a Basecamp project. Nice!

Accounting

Let’s face it - to most creatives, apart from getting paid anything to with accounting is pretty dull. I remember using Sage back in the day and that piece of installable frankenware was enough to induce physical pain. Luckily, the Internet gave us an answer and a whole host of accounting applications were launched. Here’s a quick round-up of my favourites.

Freshbooks

With a super simple user interface and a policy to avoid unnecessary financial jargon Freshbooks is a perfect cloud accounting option for freelancers and small businesses. The application is lightweight and it does the simple things very well. A lot of thought has gone into the process design and by virtue you can be productive very quickly. Features include easy invoice management with an option to receive payments via popular gateways, client and supplier management, import/export, receipts, reports, document management, time tracking and user controls.

I should point out that we don’t use Freshbooks anymore - however, when our agency was a lot smaller it was perfect for invoicing and payments. The customer service was excellent and I especially liked the report feature where I could generate a score against similar types of companies on metrics such as quarterly income, time to get paid, number of invoices sent, and more. It didn’t really provide me with any useful information but it was a nice vanity play.

The reason we chose Freshbooks was because we could import our time tracking data directly from Basecamp projects. This was a massive time saver for us when creating invoices and they’ve added all sorts of integration with other applications now. From what I can see on their website they’ve got a decent API for third party devs too.

With free accounts with limited functions and customers, to the ‘seedling’ account at $19.95/month, right up to the mighty oak at $39.95, Freshbooks is one of the best investments a freelancer or small business can make.

Xero

Xero is basically a Quickbooks or Sage replacement but in the cloud. It’s an intuitive but feature rich accounting package that provides all of the controls necessary to manage the day-to-day financial operations of a business. Even though the company was founded in 2006 they don’t have a massive profile and the Xero home page still only boasts 200,000 customers.

If you’ve ever used accounting software, it’s pretty mind numbing by nature - and with no offence to Xero, I doubt they are going to win any major UX awards. A lot of this I think boils down to the fact that the company is trying to attract accounting and financial customers as opposed to Freshbook’s mass-market approach.

Xero does everything that Freshbooks can do and a whole lot more. I particularly like the Dashboard view where I can look at bank accounts, money due in, money due out and expense claims. By connecting the application to our online bank accounts we can get a real-time picture of the state of the business as well as easily reconcile incomings and outgoings.

The primary navigation from left to right includes Dashboard, Accounts (including sales, purchases, payroll, expense claims and fixed assets), Reports (budget manager, aged payables, aged receivables, balance sheet, p&l, VAT return), Contacts and Settings. The UI is fixed width and uses neutral colours with a blue accent. Everything is neatly split up into individual widgets and the design is functional and accessible.

What I like about Xero is that different team members get what they need from it without being distracted by irrelevant content or functionality. As a business owner, I log in everyday to see the current state of play or run periodic reports. My bookkeeper issues invoices, adds contacts and reconciles payments. My accountant runs reports for planning and submitting statutory accounts.

Accounting software is never going to light up my world but of the SaaS offerings that I’ve used, Freshbooks and Xero are by far the best.

Human resources

KinHR

Aside from the fact that I hate the term ‘Human Resources’, managing people and information relating to people is a crucial part of any business. Our headcount has grown substantially in the last 12 months and the old systems of shared calendars, folders and bits of papers to manage holidays and contracts just weren’t cutting the mustard. I turned to the Internet and found all kinds of expensive, enterprise level HR systems with far too many features and the most boring looking UIs I have ever seen. My colleague came across a website submission on Awwwards for the marketing site for KinHR.

KinHR is basically an ultra simple way to manage employee data and files, salaries and pay rises, time-off and other features such as onboarding new employees. All types of staff, whether part-time, full-time or contract can be managed through the system and it works best if everyone in the organisation has an account. From the account screen logged-in users can upload their own information including contact details and files such as photo ID or tax documents, request holidays, complete tasks, see their team or line management and more. The system allows you to specify when employees work and what their holiday allocation is which is a real time-saver.

The user interface was the first thing that drew me to KinHR - it is well thought out, looks great and is enjoyable to use. With an affordable and ultra simple pricing scheme ($5 per user per month) and a free trial KinHR is worth a lot more than they charge.

Support

Zendesk

Zendesk sells itself as ‘beautifully simple customer service software’ and to be fair it does exactly what is says on the tin. Zendesk works to serve three distinct types of users: the customer, the agent and the manager.

Zendesk serves the customer by providing a knowledge base, community, and customer portal all in one place. Users can log in and submit requests, send e-mails to a specific support e-mail and interact socially. For a customer support agent it delivers one of the best, if not the best, ticketing systems I have ever used. It has a great mobile experience to boot.

For managers, Zendesk delivers detailed analytics on everything from agent performance to customer satisfaction. It provides support managers or business owners with everything they need to measure and evolve company support infrastructure.

We don’t use all of Zendesk’s features but what I love about it is the rapid set-up process. It literally took five minutes before our clients could interact with the online support portal and send support requests to a specific support email address.

Round-up

Well there you have it - a suite of eight applications that we use to store and manage information, collaborate, manage tasks, finances, people and provide a better experience for our team and customers. As a business owner the most important factors are that our application suite is flexible, scalable, cost-effective and connectable. As bandwidth and browser technology improve I’m sure that cloud applications will eventually replace desktop software and if the innovation on show today is anything to go by, the future is looking good.

I’m interested to see what other businesses are using so let us know in the comments below.

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Why the future doesn't need us.

Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

Full Article click here

From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.

Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder’s Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this day.

I had missed Ray’s talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they’d left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn’t happen, because the robots couldn’t be conscious.

While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility. I was taken aback, especially given Ray’s proven ability to imagine and create the future. I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.

It’s easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. We hear in the news almost every day of some kind of technological or scientific advance. Yet this was no ordinary prediction. In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming bookThe Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw - one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. On reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I felt sure he had to be understating the dangers, understating the probability of a bad outcome along this path.

I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing adystopian scenario:

THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.1

In the book, you don’t discover until you turn the page that the author of this passage is Theodore Kaczynski - the Unabomber. I am no apologist for Kaczynski. His bombs killed three people during a 17-year terror campaign and wounded many others. One of his bombs gravely injured my friend David Gelernter, one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time. Like many of my colleagues, I felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber’s next target.

Kaczynski’s actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it.

Kaczynski’s dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a well-known problem with the design and use of technology, and one that is clearly related to Murphy’s law - “Anything that can go wrong, will.” (Actually, this is Finagle’s law, which in itself shows that Finagle was right.) Our overuse of antibiotics has led to what may be the biggest such problem so far: the emergence of antibiotic-resistant and much more dangerous bacteria. Similar things happened when attempts to eliminate malarial mosquitoes using DDT caused them to acquire DDT resistance; malarial parasites likewise acquired multi-drug-resistant genes.2

The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved.

I started showing friends the Kaczynski quote fromThe Age of Spiritual Machines; I would hand them Kurzweil’s book, let them read the quote, and then watch their reaction as they discovered who had written it. At around the same time, I found Hans Moravec’s bookRobot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. Moravec is one of the leaders in robotics research, and was a founder of the world’s largest robotics research program, at Carnegie Mellon University.Robot gave me more material to try out on my friends - material surprisingly supportive of Kaczynski’s argument. For example:

The Short Run (Early 2000s)

Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.

In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence.

There is probably some breathing room, because we do not live in a completely free marketplace. Government coerces nonmarket behavior, especially by collecting taxes. Judiciously applied, governmental coercion could support human populations in high style on the fruits of robot labor, perhaps for a long while.

A textbook dystopia - and Moravec is just getting wound up. He goes on to discuss how our main job in the 21st century will be “ensuring continued cooperation from the robot industries” by passing laws decreeing that they be “nice,”3 and to describe how seriously dangerous a human can be “once transformed into an unbounded superintelligent robot.” Moravec’s view is that the robots will eventually succeed us - that humans clearly face extinction.

I decided it was time to talk to my friend Danny Hillis. Danny became famous as the cofounder of Thinking Machines Corporation, which built a very powerful parallel supercomputer. Despite my current job title of Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, I am more a computer architect than a scientist, and I respect Danny’s knowledge of the information and physical sciences more than that of any other single person I know. Danny is also a highly regarded futurist who thinks long-term - four years ago he started the Long Now Foundation, which is building a clock designed to last 10,000 years, in an attempt to draw attention to the pitifully short attention span of our society. (See “Test of Time,”Wired 8.03, page 78.)

So I flew to Los Angeles for the express purpose of having dinner with Danny and his wife, Pati. I went through my now-familiar routine, trotting out the ideas and passages that I found so disturbing. Danny’s answer - directed specifically at Kurzweil’s scenario of humans merging with robots - came swiftly, and quite surprised me. He said, simply, that the changes would come gradually, and that we would get used to them.

But I guess I wasn’t totally surprised. I had seen a quote from Danny in Kurzweil’s book in which he said, “I’m as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I’ll take it.” It seemed that he was at peace with this process and its attendant risks, while I was not.

While talking and thinking about Kurzweil, Kaczynski, and Moravec, I suddenly remembered a novel I had read almost 20 years ago -The White Plague, by Frank Herbert - in which a molecular biologist is driven insane by the senseless murder of his family. To seek revenge he constructs and disseminates a new and highly contagious plague that kills widely but selectively. (We’re lucky Kaczynski was a mathematician, not a molecular biologist.) I was also reminded of the Borg ofStar Trek, a hive of partly biological, partly robotic creatures with a strong destructive streak. Borg-like disasters are a staple of science fiction, so why hadn’t I been more concerned about such robotic dystopias earlier? Why weren’t other people more concerned about these nightmarish scenarios?

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IBM reveals its top five innovation predictions for the next five years

IBM reveals its top five innovation predictions for the next five years

IBM revealed its predictions for five big innovations that will change our lives within five years.

Bernie Meyerson, the vice president of innovation at IBM.

The IBM “5 in 5″ is the eighth year in a row that IBM has made predictions about technology, and this year’s prognostications are sure to get people talking. We discussed them with Bernie Meyerson, the vice president of innovation at IBM, and he told us that the goal of the predictions is to better marshal the company’s resources in order to make them come true.

“We try to get a sense of where the world is going because that focuses where we put our efforts,” Meyerson said. “The harder part is nailing down what you want to focus on. Unless you stick your neck out and say this is where the world is going, it’s hard to you can turn around and say you will get there first. These are seminal shifts. We want to be there, enabling them.”

(See our complete interview with Meyerson here).

In a nutshell, IBM says:

  • The classroom will learn you.
  • Buying local will beat online.
  • Doctors will use your DNA to keep you well.
  • A digital guardian will protect you online.
  • The city will help you live in it.

Meyerson said that this year’s ideas are based on the fact that everything will learn. Machines will learn about us, reason, and engage in a much more natural and personalized way. IBM can already figure out your personality by deciphering 200 of your tweets, and its capability to read your wishes will only get better. The innovations are being enabled by cloud computing, big data analytics (the company recently formed its own customer-focused big data analytics lab), and adaptive learning technologies. IBM believes the technologies will be developed with the appropriate safeguards for privacy and security, but each of these predictions raises additional privacy and security issues.

As computers get smarter and more compact, they will be built into more devices that help us do things when we need them done. IBM believes that these breakthroughs in computing will amplify our human abilities. The company came up with the predictions by querying its 220,000 technical people in a bottoms-up fashion and tapping the leadership of its vast research labs in a top-down effort.

Here’s some more detailed description and analysis on the predictions.

In five years, the classroom will learn you.
IBM

In five years, the classroom will learn you to help tailor instruction to your individual needs.

The classroom will learn you

Globally, two out of three adults haven’t gotten the equivalent of a high school education. But IBM believes the classrooms of the future will give educators the tools to learn about every student, providing them with a tailored curriculum from kindergarten to high school.

“Your teacher spends time getting to know you every year,” Meyerson said. “What if they already knew everything about how you learn?”

In the next five years, IBM believes teachers will use “longitudinal data” such as test scores, attendance, and student behavior on electronic learning platforms — and not just the results of aptitude tests. Sophisticated analytics delivered over the cloud will help teachers make decisions about which students are at risk, their roadblocks, and the way to help them. IBM is working on a research project with the Gwinnett County Public Schools in Georgia, the 14th largest school district in the U.S. with 170,000 students. The goal is to increase the district’s graduation rate. And after a $10 billion investment in analytics, IBM believes it can harness big data to help students out.

“You’ll be able to pick up problems like dyslexia instantly,” Meyerson said. “If a child has extraordinary abilities, they can be recognized. With 30 kids in a class, a teacher cannot do it themselves. This doesn’t replace them. It allows them to be far more effective. Right now, the experience in a big box store doesn’t resemble this, but it will get there.”

In five years, buying local will beat online as you get online data at your fingertips in the store.
IBM

In five years, buying local will beat online as you get online data at your fingertips in the store.

Buying local will beat online

Online sales topped $1 trillion worldwide last year, and many physical retailers have gone out of business as they fail to compete on price with the likes of Amazon. But innovations for physical stores will make buying local turn out better. Retailers will use the immediacy of the store and proximity to customers to create experiences that online-only retail can’t replicate. The innovations will bring the power of the Web right to where the shopper can touch it. Retailers could rely on artificial intelligence akin to IBM’s Watson, which played Jeopardy better than many human competitors. The Web can make sales associates smarter, and augmented reality can deliver more information to the store shelves. With these technologies, stores will be able to anticipate what a shopper most wants and needs.

And they won’t have to wait two days for shipping.

“The store will ask if you would like to see a certain camera and have a salesperson meet you in a certain aisle where it is located,” Meyerson said. “The ability to do this painlessly, without the normal hassle of trying to find help, is very powerful.”

This technology will get so good that online retailers are likely to set up retail showrooms to help their own sales.

“It has been physical against online,” Meyerson said. “But in this case, it is combining them. What that enables you to do is that mom-and-pop stores can offer the same services as the big online retailers. The tech they have to serve you is as good as anything in online shopping. It is an interesting evolution but it is coming.”

In five years, doctors will routinely use your DNA to keep you well.
IBM

In five years, doctors will routinely use your DNA to keep you well.

Doctors will use your DNA to keep you well

Global cancer rates are expected to jump by 75 percent by 2030. IBM wants computers to help doctors understand how a tumor affects a patient down to their DNA. They could then figure out what medications will best work against the cancer, and fulfill it with a personalized cancer treatment plan. The hope is that genomic insights will reduce the time it takes to find a treatment down from weeks to minutes.

“The ability to correlate a person’s DNA against the results of treatment with a certain protocol could be a huge breakthrough,” Meyerson said. It’ll be able to scan your DNA and find out if any magic bullet treatments exist that will address your particular ailment.

IBM recently made a breakthrough with a nanomedicine that it can engineer to latch on to fungal cells in the body and attack them by piercing their cell membranes. The fungi won’t be able to adapt to these kinds of physical attacks easily. That sort of advance, where the attack is tailored against particular kinds of cells, will be more common in the future.

In five years, a digital guardian will protect you online.
IBM

In five years, a digital guardian will protect you online.

A digital guardian will protect you online

We have multiple passwords, identifications, and devices than ever before. But security across them is highly fragmented. In 2012, 12 million people were victims of identity fraud in the U.S. In five years, IBM envisions a digital guardian that will become trained to focus on the people and items it’s entrusted with. This smart guardian will sort through contextual, situational, and historical data to verify a person’s identity on different devices. The guardian can learn about a user and make an inference about behavior that is out of the norm and may be the result of someone stealing that person’s identity. With 360 degrees of data about someone, it will be much harder to steal an identity.

“In this case, you don’t look for the signature of an attack,” Meyerson said. “It looks at your behavior with a device and spots something anomalous. It screams when there is something out of the norm.”

In five years, the city will help you live in it.
IBM

In five years, the city will help you live in it.

The city will help you live in it

IBM says that, by 2030, the towns and cities of the developing world will make up 80 percent of urban humanity and by 2050, seven out of every 10 people will be a city dweller. To deal with that growth, the only way cities can manage is to have automation, where smarter cities can understand in real-time how billions of events occur as computers learn to understand what people need, what they like, what they do, and how they move from place to place.

IBM predicts that cities will digest information freely provided by citizens to place resources where they are needed. Mobile devices and social engagement will help citizens strike up a conversation with their city leaders. Such a concept is already in motion in Brazil, where IBM researchers are working with a crowdsourcing tool that people can use to report accessibility problems, via their mobile phones, to help those with disabilities better navigate urban streets.

Of course, as in the upcoming video game Watch Dogs from Ubisoft, a bad guy could hack into the city and use its monitoring systems in nefarious ways. But Meyerson said, “I’d rather have the city linked. Then I can protect it. You have an agent that looks over the city. If some wise guy wants to make the sewage pumps run backwards, the system will shut that down.”

The advantage of the ultraconnected city is that feedback is instantaneous and the city government can be much more responsive.

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