In the beginning there were commodities as the basis of the agrarian economy, the industrial revolution changed this as commodities became a raw material to manufacture goods. Goods have now become commoditised, with no care of who the goods were manufactured by. This has been reflected to the service sector with the sole care being price.

The shift that is now occurring away from this is towards an ‘Experience Economy’. The buying criteria for consumers are now being rendered by ‘Authenticity’.

As we begin to work smarter to create free time for ourselves to fill with experiences, the cost of this ‘free’ time will thus grow in value as we are driven to work longer and harder.

In 1972 Geoffrey Hoyle's book predicted what life would be like in 2010, it has now been reprinted with the title amended to 2011.

Among predictions of “vision phones” and “doing grocery shopping online”, one of the drastic wrong predictions in the 19^th century from the industrial revolution was that as we became more mechanised it would go a bit further to earning us a life of leisure.

Hoyle's three day week for 2010 has failed to materialise. "People are going to have to work very hard. It's gone the other way. People are working seven days a week. I'm very pessimistic now," he says.

We have been unable to use mechanisation and technology to truly make our lives easier. If anything they have made our lives more complex creating more demands upon ourselves acting as the catalyst to escape this and create authentic life experiences.

When attempting to create more free time in this experience economy remember the value of free and how you can best appreciate it.

Often people find it’s better to avoid predicting the future in case  you  end up looking foolish: “Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput” – Sir Alan Sugar, 2005

“We’ll kill spam in two years” – Bill Gates, 2004

“We stand on the threshold of rocket mail” – U.S. postmaster general, Arthur Summerfield, 1959

“Britain doesn’t need telephones” – Chief engineer at the Post Office, Sir William Preece, 1878

With the speed that technology is evolving it’s becoming even harder to know what is going to happen next week, let alone in the next 10 years. But we need not accept defeat.

When predicting the future, the singularity can assist us.  By practicing predictions from accelerated feedback loops, we can begin to grasp a tighter understanding of future events. Accelerated feedback loops were especially helpful for the development of the mobile web following the fixed line, with smart devices leading to a digitally responsive generation producing comprehensive records of their lives’ activities.

With this in mind, I predict that within the next ten years we’ll be tracking our lives end-to-end with a multitude of personal sensors – think Nike+ – and openly sharing the information. The opportunity for data gathering from this would be huge, making the loyalty schemes of today appear insignificant.

Here are a few feedback loops for you to explore:

WiFi body scales – WiFi blood pressure – Mass market sensors – Life achievement apps – Life achievement visualisations – Rewards for being active

If you’re thinking this all seems rather Orwellian, let me try to convince you otherwise.  I believe with an enhanced understanding of our lives, we will be better equipped to seek out the things that make us happy, and avoid those which cause us pain.  

As stated in Good to Great, the best businesses find concrete numbers to judge and manage themselves by, why then, not apply this to our lives?

However, I’m also inclined to agree with Alan Kay that “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”.

Since joining Fuel and speaking to friends, family and colleagues about my new role, I‘ve noticed a certain amount of “data distancing”. Even for so-called “diagonal thinkers”, data can be seen as scary stuff, and it’s not surprising considering the outdated image data has in this digital and visual age. This is changing though, with new terms such as “Infomagination”, research carried out by UCL shown here and the World Wide Web Consortiums’ Linked Data project shown here.

I’m by no means a mathematician as a new edition to this award winning team, with my past comfortably lying in strategic marketing. It’s just the opportunity Fuel has within the marketing space, supporting clients and enhancing creativity, is too big to miss. My data epiphany was sparked by the awesome series back in January that was The Virtual Revolution, demonstrating the impact of the web and its might as an empowerment tool. Particularly poignant for me was the idea that whilst this empowerment is deemed to be free, it does bide by the laws of economics, and there is certainly a cost attached. Whilst the exchange isn’t monetary, we are paying with our privacy and that is arguably more valuable.

The Fuel of my excitement:

The web based processing power of “the cloud”, mass adoption of smart devices and the growing development of augmented reality is bringing business intelligence to a new level. It’s leading to a deeper relationship between company and consumer and the ability for companies not just to understand consumers better but react to their behaviour in real time to optimize performance  and with mobile accessible data solutions.

Google’s Eric Schmidt talks frequently of “Consumer Nowness” and  “Mobile First” and that is no surprise considering  that in many European countries there are more mobile phones than humans, with the Mobile web (last estimates I saw) growing 8 times faster than the equivalent fixed line web. When developing this it’s the data that drives the change becoming intertwined with your day-to-day like threads in a fabric.

Undoubtedly it’s an exciting time in digital. I however, am more excited by what lays beneath the surface of this and that is the much misunderstood world of data. Via this exchange of privacy and soaring adoption the “infomagination” can be developed to enhance market understanding. The untrackable is becoming trackable. The technology allows for it and is putting an end to the above the line stranglehold.

There’s a lot of information out there on the web. It’s not organised very well though. Data is certainly something that fuels the drive to present information more clearly e.g. Microsoft Pivot. We have surpassed the desktop, laptop and notebook to get more powerful portable information access through phones and tablets, with the filtering of information being made possible through the social web. Having said this there is still a lot more that can be done to increase the relevance of information and that is what we will now explore.

This is a strategic frame of mind. Simple really. If you think of most situations – A business idea you have, a girl you see at a bar, an athletic feat you wish to achieve, the concept is to gun for 10*. If you think medioca you’re going to meet a hell of a lot of competition, there are 6.7billion people in the world and most people aim or keep on track for mediocracy. There are a lot of reason for this; all I know is I do everything I can to gun for 10. Hopefully I can share my story one day, in the mean time here are a couple of stories I’ve used for motivation over the years and great examples of gunning for 10.

The business world is changing. This change excites me as the balance between corporatocracy and the world in which it resides begins to strive for equilibrium; something I want to believe is possible in my lifetime. New design concepts such as Cradle to Cradle demonstrate the power of changing years of bad practice (the book itself is a polymer ‘not a tree’ and aptly is the name of the first chapter).

I love business strategy. It started at A-level, from then I began to set myself strategic challenges. This post will demonstrate a strategic challenge I set myself at University. I wondered how easy it would be to fundamentally change a product (segments and motivation for purchase) without changing the core product at all.