An interesting comment was made on last week’s Question Time. When an audience member stated that the UK needs to return to a solid manufacturing base to aid recovery, the panel agreed, and indeed one member went further and said that when it comes, in order to compete with the far east low cost of labour, it won’t be humans doing all the work.
Now in various forms this is something that’s been gently pushing to the surface for a while, and as it does, gaining implied acceptance from society. Look how easily people accepted GPS in their phones – the ultimate “big brother” tool. Just give cool, funky apps to the early adopters and before you know it they are the latest must-have quicker than you can say “loss of privacy.”
Well with automation, of course car manufacturing plants have used robots on assembly lines for many years. Apart from the job losses, there seems little to be concerned about – they are hardly likely to go all “iRobot” on us are they? Now strangely enough I saw a BBC news interview just the other day discussing how robots were being developed with the artificial intelligence to interpret human commands, make decisions and learn from them – true AI. When the interviewer asked what would stop the iRobot scenario happening, the man on the spot could only offer “well they can’t, they’ve been built by humans”.
Back down to earth, whilst the heavily indebted western world continues its struggle back to economic normality, there is little doubt that most companies are on a constant search to restore margins. There has been much R&D $ allocated in the last decade or two without much of a demand for productive output – that’s all changed now, and the pressure is being applied to turn out commercial applications for these robots.
When it comes down to automating tasks there is now little thought for the human cost. Walk in to Tesco, B&Q or even some KFCs now and you may well end up serving yourself. How long until they invite us to nip out the back to fill up the shelf with the beans that have run out?
Hospitals are also heading down the robot route, with a fleet of the metal mickeys at the Forth Valley Royal Hospital zipping around to do tasks traditionally carried out by porters.
Bit by bit we are accepting robots into our daily life, and I forsee the next 5 years will bring some major developments in this area.
In the last couple of months I have been lucky enough to get 100mb broadband to my home from Bournemouth based C4L.
Just think about that speed for a moment – 100mb. At home or work you may be getting 5mb, 10mb, if you’re really lucky 20mb. Whilst this speed makes little difference to browsing an average well optimised simple web page, it makes a massive difference to looking at rich media experiences, or downloading large files…such as movies.
With 100mb you can download a high definition film in as little as 10 minutes. From thinking “I fancy watching that movie” to having it ready to roll takes a little longer than microwaving up the popcorn and opening up a bucket size bottle of Coke.
Once speeds this fast become common place in the average UK home there will be a significant shift in consumption habits and how people want to consume their media. Goodbye high street Blockbuster, hello more legal battles to prevent illegal downloading and new business models to cope.
The music industry is finally adapting, and is now starting to release tracks for download as soon as they are heard on radio – an excellent and overdue move that actually acknowledges how consumer habits have changed. People want it now, and they are prepared to pay for it, so make sure they are able to buy it!
Don’t know about you, but I get bored very quickly of typing on my iPhone. Hell, at home I’ve even bought a bluetooth keyboard for my iPhone (if you really want to know, it’s so when controlling my TV from my iPhone I can type easier! Tech overload…)
Well whilst we are at last in the age of mobile (how many years did industry people say THIS was the year?!), and smartphone penetration is growing rapidly, how motivated are people to interact with offline advertising when it means typing in a long URL?
This is why QR codes are so important and I predict 2011 will see their widespread adoption in everything from magazine ads to travel brochures to urinal advertising.
Consider you’re a prospective student and you’re browsing the fashion pages of a prospectus. It might have glorious colourful images, but it’s all static. Now insert a QR code on the page, and with a quick and simple click from a free QR code reading app it immediately loads a video review from a past student or shows the end of year fashion show, and encourages a call to action to enquire.
Laziness is in all of us humans to some extent, and no matter how compelling the proposition, you can’t beat making it easy for people to take action to increase campaign effectiveness.
