turntable / as the table turns

During the 2000 U.S. presidential election I joked that if George Bush were elected I’d leave the country. In 2001, we emigrated to New Zealand. When people ask me why I moved to New Zealand I only half jokingly explain that I’m a political refugee.

My engagement with U.S. politics is tending to diminish the longer I’m an expat. Especially after the last fiasco of an election, I’m observing things as an outsider.

Nevertheless, watching this election it’s occurred to me that in some ways 2008 is looking a bit like 1968. America is in the middle of an unconscionable war, meanwhile there are echoes of Bobby Kennedy in the air. Let’s hope that the parallels end there.

Apart from Obama, the leading candidates are the same old charlatans. Puppets. Pandering megalomaniacs, power whores whose only interest is getting their head on the pedestal. Hillary is perhaps the worst of them all.

That’s why I’m really glad that Lessig made this video, it is required viewing…

If George can anoint himself “The Decider” then I can confidently take the title of “The Predictor”. I was just crowned (literally, I have the tiara to prove it) 2008 Visionary Of The Year by Unlimited Potential. Which is pretty impressive, considering it happened in the first month of 2008.

It was another fun event and my fellow predictors had plenty of prescient and witty insights. Hopefully UP will post all the predictions somewhere.

The following is my outlook on the year to come. It contains a fair dose of wishful thinking, but sometimes technology and events do sneak up on you quicker than you expect.

2007 Greatest hits and misses

DRM finally goes away
Hit. Woot!

Wellington weather will be shit
Miss. Woot!

2007 Report card

User generated video advertising
Good progress: LiveRail, BrightRoll, YuMe, Adap.tv, VideoEgg, Adotube, Google/YouTube

Enterprise SaaS
Good progress: Netsuite IPO, Force.com

Web OS
Good progress: Macbook Air, gOS, CloudBook

Mobile Media Centers
Not so much: iPhone + Apple TV

2008 Better mobile experiences

3G iPhone with GPS, still won’t be available in NZ

Mesh networks start catching on thanks to Wireless USB (WUSB)

Somebody will provide a standard wifi billing platform (think OpenID + Paypal)

Presence detection gets real, gets fun:
get pinged when social network in proximity,
“scan” a party, cafe, club, biz conference to see profiles,
mixing and mingling privately while standing in a crowded room

2008 Hyperlocal on the homefront

Oil nears $200 a barrel, travel increasingly becomes a luxury,
people start thinking and acting a lot more local

Biofuels start becoming more efficient, demand surges
Aqua Flow becomes a leading provider

Working and learning from home becomes more and more of a necessity, collaborative web applications thrive in response

Lending networks thrive, microloans help ease economic turbulence

Home bio scanners start to hit the market - letting people scan food, detect viruses and germs, capture and analyse medical data, send data to a remote expert for further analysis

2008 Geeks Robots rule the earth

Portions of Google Earth and Streetside become available as realtime video

Mashed on top of this “open surveilance” framework will be
massively multiplayer game experiences

Hardware widgets and software widgets will converge producing very hackable, very personalised, interoperable device components (Buglabs, ThingM, Chumby)

New software driven materials interactively, physically reshape on command

2008 will go down in history as the year the robot uprising started taking shape

2008 Politics

Obama wins by a landslide

Helen wins (barely)

Kerry resigns in disgrace over conflicts-of-interest scandal

Tom Beard becomes the new mayor!

Finally, in my acceptance speech I predicted that next year the panel will include a woman!

Putin and the west start a new game of chicken. Make sure you study up on Cold War 1.0.