Future Manufacturing 4.0: innovations from Toyota - robotics, AI, Big Da...

The truth about cyberattacks - and how to protect your business as well as personal life

What happens when you combine Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, theInternet of Things, Big Data and Cloud Computing, to the world of banking, telcos, mobile devices and personal computers? 

The answer is the you get the biggest target for criminals that the world has ever seen - all waiting online to be attached and exploited in a billion different ways using little more than a couple of computers, owned by very smart geeks.  

Never in human history has it been possible for one person, sitting in a bedroom at home in a distant land, to create such havoc and chaos, to seize such power. 

Cyber-crime will therefore be one of the greatest threats to our world over the next 50 years, and far beyond, into centuries to come.  

There is no way back from such a future, except by dismantling all the global e-systems that link us increasingly together.

As I predicted many years ago, and have spoken about since in many keynotes on cybersecurity and related issues, every large company in the world is now experiencing frequent cyber-attacks, on their own systems or in the cloud, whether they realize or not.

(This article is an extract from Patrick Dixon's Futurist book "The Future of Almost Everything"

Cyberattacks already cost business over $300 billion a year

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies has estimated total cost to business to be around $300bn a year. 

 Losses are likely to be more than $1 trillion a year by 2025, especially if we see wide-scale attacks, sponsored by hostile governments.  

We are not just talking about attacks on traditional targets like bank websites, but also commercial aggression like the blackmail of Sony, after the company released a controversial film about North Korea.

There is nothing new about web abuse. At least 80% of the 247 billion emails sent every day are spam, many of them so-called phishing attacks, pretending to be from a bank, encouraging people to enter passwords.

Expect 10 billion separate attacks a year

Macafee is already detecting over 600 million new and different computer viruses, malware or Trojan horses every year – several a second. 

Pharma, chemicals, mining, electronics and agricultural companies are seeing increases of 600% a year in malware attacks. 

Energy, oil and gas attacks are growing by 400%.  Attempts to steal data from retailers are doubling every 12 months.  

In many cases, tens of millions of credit card details have been stolen.  Target lost data on 70 million people in a single attack.  

A single contractor in South Korea managed to steal personal information on 20 million credit card users, more than half the country’s working population. 

Two years previously, personal data on 35 million South Koreans was stolen from Cyworld, a popular social network. 

3 billion people’s personal details have been stolen

Similar attacks have happened across the world.  Hackers recently stole personal details of 213 million eBay users.  Sony lost 100 million client’s details to a hacker.  The Heartbleed bug caused huge damage in 2014 as it swept globally, invading websites of many multinationals, retailers, banks and email companies.

Another example was a major attack on JP Morgan Chase – following a sustained assault with tens of thousands of separate attacks each day over many months, mostly traced to Russia.   76 million names, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses were stolen – affecting two thirds of all households in America. 

Most attacks are reported very late, some not at all, and many are never noticed of course.

Yahoo admitted in 2017 that 3 billion accounts were hacked back in 2013, triple the previous estimate they had given.

Why hackers will often escape prosecution if caught

I have met bankers who don’t prosecute or even sack staff who hack into their own bank systems. 

“Just thought you should know…. Of course I should probably leak the news or publish the account names.”  

Terrified of bad publicity, they pay them off, give them a wonderful reference, and let them go and work for a competitor – where exactly the same thing is likely to happen again.  

There is no legal requirement in most countries for any bank to report when they have been hacked and data lost, which means that most attacks will never be known, and the true scale is far larger than most people think.

Even the most basic bank security can be pitifully weak.  

I remember shortly before spending a day advising the board of a Swiss bank, I decided to carry out a test of my own. Without being challenged, I managed to walk right into a high-security area using the oldest tricks in the book: distracting reception staff, and gently pulling apart sliding security doors with my fingers.

Large corporations will be forced to encrypt stored data

All IT and smartphone companies will step up personal security with end to end encryption during data transmission, and encryption of all data “at rest” stored on servers.  

It is really shocking that most banks in some nations still do not encrypt data on their servers, so once a hacker gains entry, which they do in every large bank several times a year, they usually have no trouble at all reading files.

It was very careless of Sony to allow hackers to so easily read all their archived emails, contracts and other documents.  Best practice will mean universal encryption.

Customers will be urged to set up two step authentication, with confirmation of passwords using codes sent to mobile devices.  As a result, expect dramatic growth in attacks on telco companies and all mobile devices, to try to hack into SMS and intercept these codes.  In 2014, such attacks grew more than a hundred times over the previous year.

Cyberwar  - a new kind of Cold War

Expect many more significant large-scale cyber attacks against nations and groups of enterprises over the next two decades, often directed by criminal gangs rather than government staff, paid for by secret agents of other countries. 

The largest of these attacks are likely to form part of next-generation conflicts / disputes between nations, paralysing entire government agencies for days, causing major disruption to banking and telecommunications, damaging utilities such as power stations or parts of the national grid. 

It is already happening:  for example, a blast furnace in a steel mill was hit by hackers in Germany recently, causing parts of the plant to fail.  But for understandable reasons, most successful attacks on major installations will be kept strictly secret, in the national interest.

Cyberattacks on international data cables, people, companies and nations

Cyber-attacks are easy to carry out on physical web infrastructure too.  

For example, most bandwidth in the world is carried on a few, very vulnerable, fibre-optic cables.  Cutting them is very easy – all you have to do is drag a ship’s anchor along a sea bed to snag them.  And it is very hard to detect what ship did it, especially in relatively busy shipping areas.  

Recent cable damage reduced web access in India by 70%, Egypt by 60%, with many other nations affected in the Middle East.  In another episode, divers were arrested off the coast of Egypt in the act of sabotage.

For all these reasons, Nato includes cyberattacks as one of the events which could trigger a joint response by the Alliance.

Nations like the UK are very vulnerable since the exact points are well known on maps, where huge data cables run from shallow sea water into the shoreline.

Using mini-submersibles like those the BBC hired to film Blue Oceans II, it is easy to track all data cables into deep ocean, and a work of minutes to cut such them.

However, it will be almost impossible to prove who is really behind such attacks, and therefore impossible to retaliate effectively. 

The US Navy is being hit on a routine basis by over 100,000 separate online attacks every hour, according to Hewlett Packard. But from where and by whom and for what purpose?

Sometimes digital debris is left by accident which gives clues about origin – for example naming a piece of code, deeply encrypted inside a complex virus, after a popular TV comedian in a particular country.  But subtle clue-dropping can also be a deliberate decoy, used by secret services or gangs to cast blame on an innocent nation.

Viruses designed to control entire countries

Energetic Bear is a cyber-espionage weapon which infected vital parts of Europe’s energy infrastructure during the Ukraine – Russia – EU crisis.  

It targeted a wide range of industrial control systems, national grids, power stations, wind turbines, biomass fuel plants. 

It was designed to monitor energy use in real time and to disable systems on command – but on whose command? 

Future energy viruses will target smart grids and smart homes – imagine the impact for example, if a hacker from a hostile state or group could turn on 15 million air conditioners simultaneously, causing instant power cuts.

A few weeks after discover of Energetic Bear, Russian telecom and health companies, utilities and government agencies discovered that they too had been hit by one of the most deadly and sophisticated clusters of viruses ever created, called Regin.  

The cluster was designed with multiple Apps, to steal passwords, extract information on a huge range of systems, and take total control of many different types of industrial equipment.

“Digital bombs” inside large organisations

Targets were also hit in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Ireland, India, Iran, Belgium, Australia and Pakistan.  

In many cases, it turned out that the viruses had been working away for up to 6 years without detection, despite every check. The viruses were constantly listening online for a single command to detonate tens of thousands of digital “bombs” across every part of the nation.  

It has been reported that Russia is now so anxious about American penetration, that security agencies are using printed paper for ultra-sensitive communications.  The Chinese meanwhile are building a quantum computing link between Beijing and Shanghai, which they hope will lock out foreign surveillance.

In 2007, Estonia banks, Government agencies, Parliament, broadcasters and newspapers were also hit by three weeks of cyber-attacks which completely paralysed their web capabiliites.  These followed a disagreement with Russia, though responsibility was never proven.

So we will see huge investment in cyber-resilience, by governments, banks, stock exchanges and utility companies in particular, in the wealthiest nations, but smaller nations will remain very vulnerable.  

At least a quarter of all attacks will be espionage – directed at stealing state secrets or corporate research which has yet to be patent protected. 

Hackers will be recruited by spies and gangs

Expect growing numbers of full-time professional hackers, operating as independent consultants to criminal gangs and secret services, offering services in combination with others to plan major attacks. 

In many cases, these hacking geniuses will never realize who the end client really is.  They may think they are working for MI6 in the UK for example, but are actually working for a Bulgarian gang, which is assisting Russian Federal Security Services, or for the CIA or Mossad.

Many attacks will be multidimensional in future. So a large scale identity theft takes place a couple of hours before a vital payment channel is hacked, to create new PIN numbers. Minutes later, two hundred people with cloned cash cards start withdrawing cash from ATMs in over 50 cities.

Hackers will be turned against other hackers

Expect a radical rethink about what on earth to do with convicted hackers:  people with proven genius in cracking open systems, who may well be the best people in the world to test your own security, and help improve it.  

Do we really want to waste their lives locked up in prison?

Some hackers will be offered rewards by governments to attack and destroy the dark web. 

The aim will be to identify many millions of users of Tor web browsers (these are like normal web browsers, but prevent ANYONE monitoring your web activity), and users of other “secret” tools: people who want to keep their activities and payments 100% secret. 

Over 400 dark websites were closed in 2014 alone, including sites which sell illegal drugs, illegal arms deals, assassinations of spouses or politicians, and every kind of depravity. 

However, many dark web users in future will simply be trying to evade “oppressive” state snooping – particularly in countries like Russia or China where web controls have become severe.  Use of Tor in Russia leapt from 60,000 to over 200,000 people in just a couple of months following the seizure of Crimea.

Looking for a cybersecurity keynote speaker?  Patrick Dixon has given keynotes for over 400 of the world's largest corporations and to governments on a wide range of digital issues including cybersecurity, how to prevent cyberattacks, how to detect cyberattacks and related matters.

Truth about BlockChain, BitCoins - impact on banking, insurance - BlockC...

I have advised hundreds of the world’s largest corporations on digital trends, and one of the biggest that CEOs and boards are now talking about is Blockchain.  What is Blockchain and what does it mean for us?  Could Blockchain wipe out our business, or will Blockchain help us grow? 

Here is a comment after my recent keynote for the global team of Generali Insurance, on Blockchain.

So what is Blockchain?

Blockchain is a very clever method for making permanent global records, with copies held in many different places, totally safe from corruption, deletion, alteration or cyberattack. 

Blockchain uses the same technology as BitCoin and other so-called cyptocurrencies. 

BitCoin technology was developed to allow a new “virtual” currency to be created, coin by coin, in a way that is permanent, protected, cannot be duplicated or destroyed.  It costs a lot of money, mainly electric power to run computers, to create each BitCoin, so they are rare and have real value.  BitCoins are traded against many other currencies. 

Blockchain developed from BitCoins

BitCoins are also completely anonymous, and impossible to track when used for online payments, as well as completely secure.  

BitCoins are controversial because the system is so strong, that they are now the payment of choice used by many criminal gangs, for drugs, ransom payments, arms deals and so on.

The system works because each payment is registered in an ultra-secure database which cannot ever be altered.  This means that each BitCoin can only be transferred once.  

If you spend a BitCoin, you cannot spend your same BitCoin again.  Once spent, it’s value is registered at the speed of light to another person permanently, using a system that we call BlockChain.  Each “block” is an individual cluster of records, and each “Chain” is a time-stamped sequence of blocks.

But we can use the same registration system for another purpose: to register documents rather than ownership of BitCoins.

Why Blockchain really matters to most industries

Blockchain means that anyone in the world with online access can prove a particular document exists, when it was sent, who it was sent to and so on.  We can also prove that an event has taken place, in a way which is fully transparent to everyone who needs to know this around the world.

The implications of this are going to be huge.  And it will be many years before we work it all out.  We are at a similar stage with Blockchain that we were with the web in 1997. 

A lot of excitement and speculation, and also a lot of uncertainty about how it will affect us all in practice.

Blockchain Boom

There is no doubt that Blockchain has the power to completely transform every financial transaction or legal process, every trade agreement, every insurance claim and every supply chain ordering system.

That is why we are seeing huge investment in Blockchain innovation, inside large companies, and a huge number of new Blockchain startups, especially in FinTech.

Blockchain impact on real estate sales

Consider the complex processes to buy a house.  Legal agreements are exchanged and signed.  Deposits are made, and then final payments.  After this, land ownership records are altered in government archives. 

Each of these processes has to be checked and verified to prevent fraud and protect both buyer and seller.  Each of these steps can be revolutionized using Blockchain.  

And as that happens, we will find we have new ways to validate these steps – no longer the exclusive roles of banks and law firms.

A real estate agent could safely handle the whole thing, backed by Blockchain technology.  Indeed, buyers and sellers could do far more themselves, cutting costs and speeding up transactions by many days or weeks.

Blockchain impact on insurance industry

Fraud is a major challenge in the insurance industry, and means that in many nations people are paying at least 5% more than they should be, just to pay for these losses. 

Blockchain could change all that, as well as cut many other costs.  Take the auto industry and car insurance.  Imagine that every vehicle in the world has its own Blockchain record. 

A global register of your car that contains date of sale, past and current owners, details of every repair, accident or insurance claim. 

We could also create a global register of individuals and their current or past insurance policies, or a global register of all insured businesses and claims.

Automated travel insurance claims driven by Blockchain

Blockchain could mean completely automated insurance: from payment to policy issuing, to triggering a claim, to payout, to confirmation of receipt of payment and closure of the case. 

A traveller could take out insurance against flight cancellation.  The flight record is made automatically, and shows that a cancellation did indeed happen.  

Within seconds, a payment is triggered into the policy holder’s bank account, before the traveller is even aware that the insurance company has been notified.

Blockchain impact on banking and international payments

Blockchain will protect international money transfers.  

I spoke at a global payments conference recently and was shocked to discover how many global payments are still relying on last century tech for tracking – which is why cross-border payments are still so slow and so prone to errors.

Blockchain impact on supply chains and manufacturing

Blockchain could revolutionise supply chains and manufacturing, allowing buyers and sellers to be 100% confident about receipt of legally binding orders and payments, issuing of shipping documents, registration for customs and excise, proof of payment of import taxes.

Blockchain in legal firms and accounting

Legal processes depend fundamentally on proving that certain events have taken place, and in certifying the legal consequencies of those events.

Blockchain means that legal firms can prove that documents have been issued and in what form.  Signed and dated documents can be authenticated in a global secure register. 

Blockchain in digital forensics, compliance and regulatory processes

How do you prove that your digital records are correct?  That the date of an email authorizing action on a health and safety matter is the real date and has not been deliberately altered to avoid a prosecution?  

Blockchain can be used to permanently authenticate the fact of every email sent and received.

Blockchain can be used to validate all investor information, reports, and other important information.

So what happens next with Blockchain?

Expect to see a huge number of experiments with multiple failures along the way. As with all areas of FinTech, we will see common platforms and systems develop, for different industries, using common standards. 

And there will be quite a fight amongst different companies to get scale and dominance of their own industry.

The most successful Blockchain companies will become the industrial or legal or financial “Google’s” of tomorrow, with immense influence and power, and systems which are used in many different parts of society.

The financial rewards will be spectacular for the largest winners in the new Blockchain economy.  At the same time, we will see some spectacular failures and scandals. 

Expect Blockchain and cryptocurrency frauds and scandals

Blockchain is highly complex, depends on sophisticated mathematics and is poorly understood by most small investors or non-technical board members of multinationals. 

BlockChain and cyptocurrencies are both areas open to fraud, misrepresentation and deception on a gigantic scale, and expert advice is needed at every stage before engagement. 

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Future of Telcos - why business models broken. Telecom mobile customer t...

Future of telecom companies and smartphones, mobile devices and why the telecom business model is broken.  Patrick Dixon conference keynote speaker on telco issues and customer experience. Where will future telecom revenues come from and risks to future strategy.  Future customers will be even more impatient about waiting for -- web pages to load, calls to be answered, software to update, mobile devices to reset.  Future of customer services and customer relationship management. Technology convergence or divergence and why all innovation is divergent.  Ethical issues when companies sell hardware or software that they know contains significant bugs eg failure to reliably synchronise PC and phone data.  Why risky to believe results of market research as guide to future trends -- because customers change rapidly.  Converging on features, quality and price results in spiral to bottom on profits and return on equity.  Cloud-based computing and impact of cloud software on enterprise system design.  New revenue models for telecom companies -- enterprise solutions, cloud-based data management, mobile payments and financial services.  90% of all Microsoft R&D is cloud-related in some way. Radical opportunities to provide free mobile devices, handsets, ipads etc, bandwidth, calls, SMS and online content, free storage of photos and movies in the cloud, in return for agreement to use mobile device almost exclusively for card transactions.  Paid for by commissions on mobile transactions charged to retailers, and also by charges for credit, loans, insurance and related financial products. Biometric mobile payments -- using screen detection of fingerprints.  Most debates about future are about timing of predictable events -- eg date by which costs of mobile devices falls so low that they can be provided for free by a financial institution.  Impact of regulation and compliance.  Why bandwidth use will be dominated by video -- which already consumes more than 70% of all bandwidth in some European nations. Impact of YouTube and BBC iplayer in the UK.  Why telcos are being overtaken by video streaming as primary use of mobile and landline data. Dwarfing all voice calls, SMS, emails etc.  Geopositioning and multichannel marketing, impact of Big Data on smart direct marketing campaigns.  RFID tags in the internet of things.  Concerns about privacy from data harvesting of consumer information to produce accurate insights about future purchasing decisions.  Impact on mass market, fast moving consumer goods (FMCG).  Future of Google and other search engines and impact of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter on future search listings, and what appears on Google Pay per Click adverts.  How social network recommendations are winning trust over corporate websites, and why sites like TripAdvisor are dominating consumer decisions.  Winning trust, or restoring trust, is the most important challenge facing many corporations.  The only product or service a bank sells is trust and without trust you have no bank.  Without trust, it may be that you have no government either.  Why opinions of complete strangers are more influential over most consumers in some industries than official marketing information.  Why traditional marketing is dead in the third millennial, multi-dimensional online world.  Video recorded in 2012 for global leaders of enterprise technology and innovation for one of the world's largest telecom companies.

Innovation! How to innovate, win competitive advantage. Retail Industry ...

Innovation means doing things differently to serve customers better. How to innovate and why all innovation is about divergence not convergence. Innovation that simply imitates competitors, product features, design or brand elements, just means that all products and services look identical in every way, which means you can only differentiate yourself from competition based on price. Long term sustainable competitive advantage will always come from finding new ways to excell, exceed customer expectations. Technigues for innovation including open innovation and crowdsourcing using wikipedia type models to solve complex innovation challenges. How to encourage innovative teams and processes. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Patrick Dixon - lecture at Hermes client event for UK retailers on retail industry trends.

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Nokia - will they manage turnaround with Windows Mobile?

Key issue for Nokia is agility: being able to change at high speed.  Nokia is one of the world's most advanced engineering companies - but has been less strong in the past (their CEO has also made statements about this) when it comes to customer insight.  You can have the best innovation teams but if the end products fail to connect with consumer passions and imaginations, your new products will fail to sell.

Clouds and Crowds: Seize your Digital Future

Clouds and Crowds: Seize your Digital Future: "CONVERGENCE

We think about convergence of technologies, and of businesses such as information and entertainment companies. But convergence also demands multi-skilled, multidisciplinary teams. People with unusual combinations of experiences and training. Globalisation of every large business, mergers, acquisitions – all these create new leadership pressures when it comes to sharing information. New blends of products and services. Blurring of differences between different kinds of corporations.

CONNECTIONS

Beyond increasingly mobile connections between people, to connections between apparently unrelated ideas and facts. Semantic web. Example: fraud detection in banking using complex data analysis to identify patterns of unusual activity, including unusual interactions between people. Example: detection of viral mutations and new patterns of disease. Example: predicting behaviour of customers through multivariate analysis. All these things require a much more sophisticated approach to data. A recent UK survey showed that in the largest corporations:

•85% allow wireless access
•90% allow remote access
•75% use software as a service / cloud
•44% entrust critical services to 3rd party"

Clouds, Crowds, Convergency, Connections and Controls:IT GROWTH STRATEGIES

Key themes: rapidly changing nature of business, external operating environments, velocity of change in consumer and competitor behaviour, shifts in patterns of work, collaboration and partnership - relevant to key industries such as financial services and health. 

CONVERGENCE

We think about convergence of technologies, and of businesses such as information and entertainment companies. But convergence also demands multi-skilled, multidisciplinary teams. People with unusual combinations of experiences and training. CIO and COO industry strategy. Globalisation of every large business, mergers, acquisitions -- all these create new leadership pressures when it comes to sharing information. New blends of products and services. Blurring of differences between different kinds of corporations.

CONNECTIONS

Beyond increasingly mobile connections between people, to connections between apparently unrelated ideas and facts. Semantic web. Example: fraud detection in banking using complex data analysis to identify patterns of unusual activity, including unusual interactions between people. Example: detection of viral mutations and new patterns of disease. Example: predicting behaviour of customers through multivariate analysis. All these things require a much more sophisticated approach to data. A recent UK survey showed that in the largest corporations:

•85% allow wireless access
•90% allow remote access
•75% use software as a service / cloud
•44% entrust critical services to 3rd party

CLOUDS

A digital world which is independent of any particular technology, device, platform, operating system. Everything everywhere, all the time. Corporations need to catch up with how their own teams are behaving in their private lives - storing all their e-mail, photos, videos, documents on remote servers owned by organisations like Facebook or Google. 25% of large corporations plan partial migration into the cloud in the next 2 years, 11% in 12 months. This is already a $56bn / year, and will be $150bn by 2013, according to Gartner. As part of the same trends we can expect to see rapid growth in software as a service -- hosted on other company's servers.

CROWDS

Beyond virtual teams, virtual working and virtual organisations. Innovation in the past has tended to be limited to the capacity of teams inside organisations - even if they are spread across many time zones and sites. Expect rapid growth of crowd-sourcing or open innovation, with the same mindset as Wikipedia or Twitter: harnessing the intellectual power of communities to solve complex problems fast in profitable ways. Cost of innovation is shifting from cost of creating the ideas to the legal costs of protecting them, in a relatively open environment. We have seen widespread use of open innovation in computing, innovation in green technology, and also in health -- for example matching disease to genetic code.

CONTROLS

Convergence, connections, clouds and crowds - each of these is creating new risks which are increasing dramatically. Corporations can only embrace these four Cs above by also building much more sophisticated controls. Such security needs to be dynamic: responding in the right way according to actual risk, without slowing down and frustrating our management and innovation teams. But we can also use Convergence, Connections, Clouds and Crowds to help find and develop the innovations we need in Controls.Summary of Keynote conference presentation for Ricoh by Patrick Dixon, Futurist speaker and author of Futurewise. Other topics: virtual teams, virtual working, hacking, data loss, fraud detection, enterprise growth, IT strategy and system stability, IT risk management, server reliability, denial of service attacks, viral attacks, industrial espionage, detection of criminal activity in banks. Risk management -- reducing down-time and increasing system recovery speed.

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How I became a hologram

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Tubemogul: free online video distribution. Tubemogul review

Tubemogul is a brilliant free online video publishing site which I discovered a few weeks ago and has made my life a lot easier when uploading to different video hosting destinations. Tubemogul allows you to publish instantly the same video to 12 or more different video hosting sites. Tubemogul will publish videos to Myspace, Youtube, Yahoo, Metacafe, Google, Revver, Dailymotion, Blip,Veoh, Crackle, Stupidvideos, Sclipo, Viddler and Howcast. Tubemogul also allows free centralised video reporting,video viewing statistics, video daily reports, video viewing weekly e-mail summaries, video viewing figures for individual uploaded videos by day, week, month, group video viewing figures, demographic and national online video viewing patterns. Tubemogul also allows you to manage all comments on online videos from one central point. Review of Tubemogul by Dr Patrick Dixon, Futurist conference keynote speaker and author of 12 books including Futuewise. See http://www.globalchange.com . Tubemogul enables videos to be recalled from some sites and descriptions to be updated. Tubemogul team members need to approve your account for sending to sites with specific requirements like Howcast. Keywords and video type are both mapped onto different video hosting site classifications -- not always an easy process. Tubemogul video distribution is free to low-volume users but is increasingly being used on a commercial basis by online marketing companies as a rapid way to launch viral videos, new advertising videos, music videos and so on. Tubemogul is developing fast with new features being added regularly and is filling an important niche market for regular video producers who are keen to see instant wide online distribution of their new video productions. Tubemogul does not do everything and video makers who publish online should still take care to visit the individual video hosting sites regularly to ensure everything is working correctly, video producer information is up to date, and so on. So: Tubemogul works well, and is really useful. Optimisation / optimization is easy to help improve online video search engine rankings and increase viewing figures. Video sites are developing fast and powerful search engine optimisation of videos has only just begun. Tubemogul also makes it easy to promote videos to online communities and online forums.
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Better and different -- convergence and divergence
http://www.globalchange.com Divergence or convergence? Consumer focus, IT systems, software and mobile phones. Multiple devices and systems. Multiple capabilities and features. Innovation, divergence, new products and services. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Mobile phones and banks, banking transactions future trends

Banks will become phone companies and telecom companies will become banks. Mobile payment systems, micropayments, mobile phone credit card transactions and loans. Economic impact of remittances from foreign workers using SMS credit to avoid foreign exchange transaction costs. How biometrics fingerprint technology will allow large mobile phone payments. Commissions and interest charges on loans. Impact of revenues from American Express, Visa, Delta, Access, Mastercard moving to mobile phone transactions. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Intellectual copyright: many businesses will give ideas away

Future of futurists bright because future trends soon become the past. Giving away intellectual capital. Wikipedia and YouTube world. Intellectual property only has power when released and used by others. Future is about giving away knowledge and ideas. Future of universities and research institutions, future of music and music industry. How to understand future trends. Conference keynote speaker and Futurist Dr Patrick Dixon.

Future of Music - the secret of great music

What exactly is music? The secret of great music. Physics of sound and how it communicates. How all great music connects with passion and all great performers provoke a response from those who listen. The elusive magic of a world class musician and why live performance will become increasingly important in a virtual, online world. Comment by Dr Patrick Dixon, futurist, leading authority on global trends, conference speaker – (bad) player of many different instruments and amateur composer.

Search engines and personal privacy - invading our space? - Video

Big controversy over personal privacy using code on your computer to track search requests, and enable a personal profile to be built up. This means that search results and advertising can be targeted to the individual person using a web browser. Search engine cookies from engines like Google had been set in the past to remain active for more than a decade. Under pressure from the EU, Google recently announced that the two years of user history they keep would be reduced to 18 months. Expect pressure to continue for personal opt out boxes enabling search engine users to block personal data from being stored. Expect search engines to push back perhaps by only allowing the fullest search results for those who give personal data to be stored. As it is they will claim (correctly) that personal history is vital to make the results as relevant as possible. Expect big civil rights debates and worries about invasion of personal life by security agencies. Video comment by Dr Patrick Dixon, futurist, leading authority on global trends and conference speaker.

Future of Music Industry

Future of music, EMI, Sony, music publishing, music industry, video industry, downloads, live performance, concerts, home made bands, band management, YouTube music bands, MySpace bands, performing artists and why live music is best. Tribute bands and buskers, Rolling Stones band example of premium for being tribute band to themselves. Why audience experience is everything and entertainment is king. Comment by Dr Patrick Dixon, futurist, leading authority on global trends and conference speaker.

YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, MSN – security worries - privacy, MI5, CIA, KGB?

Web 2.0 groups such as Facebook offer huge new opportunities for people to network with others... and could represent a powerful recruiting mechanism for all kinds of antisocial groups, activist networks and extremists of various kinds. Being able to identify friends of friends could make it easier for group leaders to target others who may share similar values (as well as friends) and who might be open to (for example) meeting to discuss things that they would prefer not to talk about online.

Online community sites also offer security services an extraordinarily powerful new tool for inspecting the history of an individual’s social life. In a few year’s time it will be possible for security services to check out for example many of the people an office worker was friendly with while at University a long time before. Experience shows that old friends are often important in an individual’s subsequent development.

Dr Patrick Dixon talks to Chad Hurley, founder YouTube on the meteoric rise of YouTube and implications for online community building. Google Zeitgeist CEO Summit.