Tomorrow’s 2015 Shifts

TOMORROW GROUPFaster fads.

3) FSTR

Introduction.!Identifying trends has always been difficult, but the rampant and accelerating pace of change in the the current age makes it harder than ever. !Any snapshot of this moment in time is likely to be a blur of movement & immediately out of date. !Trends are hard to separate from fads, they are impossible to act upon, they don’t allow for building sustainable growth, they offer a flicker of illumination, not the need for continuous enlightenment. !So the Tomorrow Group develops and leverages Shifts. !Shifts are multi year changes in how people behave, how technology is changing this behavior , they offer a more firm platforms to base decisions on. !I hope you enjoy them, shifts are living, evolving, they blend and separate, I’d love to hear any feedback on any part of these. !Tom Goodwin - September 8th 2014. Founder Tomorrow Group tom@tomorrow-innovation.com

Introducing FSTR.Society is accelerating, our relationship with time is changing. !We’re in a non-stop world, we have FOMO, (fear of missing out) because YOLO (we only live once) , heck we don’t even have time to use words anymore. !Now businesses look set to drive the pace of change up to new heights and embrace the frenetic pace, to find ways to make money from every shorter fads, ever more dramatic user take-up and the more rapid changes in direction. In this age agility eats size for breakfast. !Technology is being adopted faster than ever before, It took 30 years for electricity to reach 10% of the population, 25 years for the telephone, 11 years for the television, 9 years for the internet, and 8 years for the smartphone, yet the with the arrival of the tablet it took less than 3 years. !The technology itself is now able to propagate success faster, the price of installation now free, the time to download minimal, the sign up or switching costs are nothing and the mobile phone book has become the new social graph, allowing viral like success to become commonplace. While it took Twitter 24 months in 2006), Foursquare 13 months ( 2009), Instagram 3 months ( 2010) but by 2013 Flappy bird and now Yo in 4 days. !Welcome to the accelerated age. FSTR.

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Chapters of the pervasive web.

1) The most demanding and disappointed age. 2) Ultra-short form media. 3) Spontaneous business. 4) Faster fads. 5) Faster fads (cntd) 6) Real-time marketing. 7) Last mover advantage. 8) Implications. 9) Warning. 10) Find out more.

The most demanding and disappointed age.We live in incredibly turbulent times, technology is unleashing itself on every aspect of our lives, progressing relentlessly to more bring about more profound changes, more quickly than ever before, but ironically, as is does so, the only thing changing faster are our expectations. !Moore's law continues to hold true, we see computing power grow exponentially, our ability to process data has never improved more rapidly and sensors become cheap and abundant. Simultaneously costs for sharing and storing data plummet, while speeds and capacity increases accelerates. We're on the edge of an interconnected world, a world of the internet of things, with big data and powerful computing that aids our lives in ways we've never imagined. !When these empowering elements meet the changing business world, a culture of entrepreneurialism, readily available cash, lower barriers to entry and start up costs, it's easy to see why so many people think the singularity is nearing, it feels like the equivalent of the moments before the big bang and this time we have a ring side seat. !But look around: we've already embraced the new and expect more. We're looking not at what's leading the edge of progress but what's lagging behind. We're frustrated when we don't get 4G, amazed when we can't track our home delivery with GPS, shocked that we still get medical appointments via mail, and we act bewildered when after two hours browsing, three hours of video watching, four phone calls, and 25 photos taken, our phone's battery is looking low. If you think that's bad, look at children: have you ever seen the disgust on a four- year old's face when they notice a TV isn't a touchscreen? !We see a curious world where what's possible is marching at a faster pace, but what's common—and expected--lags behind. We see a world of consumer disappointment, filled with "This is not a touchscreen" signs on airport TVs or in retail displays. In the words of Louis CK, commenting on Wi-Fi on planes: "How quickly is it that the world owes us something we didn't know existed only five seconds ago?". !!

Over the course of the last ten years the average attention span has dropped from 12 minutes to a staggeringly short 5 minutes. Our continuous partial attention span and on demand cultures has destroyed concentration. We now see the death of longer form journalism, articles with subtle headlines and meaty reporting. !We’ve moved to a time of click baits for headlines to attract attention, a move away from words and to video and a growth in articles that require little focus, a plethora of listicles and quizzicles. ! We see the rise 1 minute newsroundups, the BBC trailing 15 second instagram video roudups, shorter form serious journalism like the independents (i) and most drastic of all the Vine ( 6 second videos) or the tweet as reporting. The rise of the GIF could see video take on ever shorter form. !!!!

Ultra short form media

The ‘i” ,designed for people who do not have much time to read a newspaper

TV Shows looks to embrace 6 second clips

Spontaneous BusinessesAs the world becomes lubricated by technology the ability of companies to reach people, sell to people and fulfill deals faster opens up a new tranche of apps and business models designed either to facilitate spontaneity or sell perishable inventory before time passes. !Beautified or Voodou allow the spontaneous booking of hair and beauty services that would otherwise go used and Hotel Tonight allows Hotels to shift hotel rooms for that location and night only. Spring now offers a Tinder like UI to make buying stuff take seconds, impulse purchases through mCommerce for the first time. Home delivery is getting faster, Amazon now offering same day delivery in 8 cities, apps like InstaCart offering grocery delivery in hours, our expectations of everything increase. !Services now propagate to aid those who do the spur of the moment, yPlan offers curated shortlist of the best events in town every that night and allows two tap booking and no printing, Swarm from foursquare is designed around seeing your friends locations to start impromptu gatherings, apps like Wingit or Urban Daddy then allow quick discovery of places around you based on simplified needs and curated listings. !

Hotel tonight - the app for last second booking.

Amazon same day delivery growing

Faster fads.

One of the problems in the current business model is that the same forces that allowed quick user adoption are all those that allow people to leave equally quickly. We used to talk about network effects and how important the social graph was in building a sustainable user base. It was once impossible for startups to compete with legacy businesses ( like Facebook or eBay) because scale was self sustaining. But the mobile phone has changed all that. Now a download of an app can spread to millions of people through the mobile address book. !Other friction is removed, most apps today are free, don’t require credit card entry to sign up or a contract of any sort. Now the same forces that build companies quickly, hasten their demise. And we are at PEAK APP. We only have time for so many games or apps, so the next big thing is likely to replace the current situation not build on it. In this age success seems more fleeting than ever. This is the time of easy come, easy go. We’re also marketing to a new crowd, a group of people who’ve only ever known free. Loyalty is no longer existent in a generation of people. All mere flashes that make securing a profit harder than ever. !

Faster fads ( C’ntd)It is any wonder companies are failing faster, Faster failures of companies- The average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of leading US companies has decreased by more than 50 years in the last century, from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today, according to Professor Richard Foster from Yale University.

Ever faster, ever higher peaks of interest, the current internet landscape. !If profit is linked to peak of interest and time, note that the area of these graphs are tiny.

Real Time MarketingWe consume new stories that spread around the world and die in a flash, what’s below the fold on the twitter newsfeed passes in a way that no longer happened with the website as a portal, sparking stories burn out, refreshed by ever more and every more quickly produced new content. !Marketing has followed the trends, we now see real time marketing look to jump on sparking stories, the 24 hour turn around of tactical media in the print age, turned into expectations of tweets in the seconds after. We now have brands with Newsrooms, looking to hijack buzz worthy moments

Based in Nestle HQ , the ’Digital Acceleration Team’ tasked with

‘listening, engaging, transforming and inspiring’ in real time.

Last mover advantage.First mover advantage was perfect for centuries. The first to get the gold, build the railways, make a TV. !But then as technology and behaviors advanced, it was possible to be too early. Ask Jeaves was ahead of Google but people we not ready for it. WebVan started before anyone would trust the internet. Nokia’s Vine was like a mobile Facebook but before people wanted to do this on mobiles. The second phase was “right mover advantage” Those that rode the wave of innovation but launched just as people and technology caught up. !But now technology moves so fast that ANY new company launching later than you will be able to tap into a larger smartphone user base, use better programmers, leverage more recent behaviors and better technology, for a lower cost than ever before. What if the world was changing so fast, it was always the last to launch that succeeded? How can companies keep themselves the latest and best when their succees makes them slower and less thirsty than the newer arrivals? What about last mover advantage.

Implications What can be done about this? How do you benefit form this? How do you…… !Embrace the spontaneity, how can you use apps and advertising to provide a way to ensure that people can buy your product on the go. !Embrace the time poor,what can you do to help people with no time. !Be wary of easy come easy go, where will people go to after they grow tiered of your business? !Embrace the power of the network effect and growth hacking to create fast advantages. !Manage expectations, are you setting up expectations for immediacy that you can’t deliver on? Always on is a one way street. !Consider faster more efficient ways to communicate and offer customer service, OTT messaging or IM suits people more than phone calls to call centers. !Make hay while the sunshines, in a world where success can be random or fleeting,be able to tap into flashes of success before they pass. !!!

Warning!

While a lot of effort has gone into this document, no predictions are ever perfect and few are intended to be. !The value of this document isn’t in certainty, it’s about exploration. !This document is about asking questions, entertaining scenarios, stress testing ideas. !But, above all else it’s about triggering creativity, what new opportunities does this way of thinking create? how does this frame of reference inspire?

What’s next?

So you’ve got this much for free, it’s pretty profound and asks many more questions. !It’s the tip of the iceberg, you will note that examples and demonstrations are lacking in particular. !If you want a presentation and explanation. !If you want to discuss these in detail. !If you want to ideate around what new opportunities this provides, what threats will materialize,. !Please contact me. !The Tomorrow Group is based New York and London, but we have planes and phones in 2014. !Tom@tommorrow-innovation.com !!

Thank youTom Goodwin Tomorrow tom@tomorrow-innovation.com