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Crystal Balls Lack One Thing: Clarity; But Analysts Say Cell Phone Spam, Smart Cards Lie Ahead

Posted on: Sunday, 1 January 2006, 15:00 CST

By RICK ROMELL

Right about now you're probably sitting there in your disposable paper clothing, thinking that if you really have to drag yourself back to your paperless office on Tuesday, at least you can dodge traffic by riding the maglev train.

No? So you're probably still waiting for that 30-hour work week, too, along with the undersea colonies, the $50 computer and the pills that control your weight without dieting, right?

Well, as Milwaukee-based futurist David Zach notes, we all might want to keep in mind the wisdom of Yogi Berra: "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future."

But that's never stopped us. The Greeks consulted the oracle at Delphi. The Chinese had the I Ching. And today, so much money rides on successfully anticipating consumer behavior that businesses from ad agencies to electronics companies to television networks employ an army of people scanning society's horizons for developments ranging from fads to fundamental shifts in the way we live.

Ask some of the trend-spotters about 2006, and you get plenty of answers:

The nationwide downtown housing boom will begin unraveling. Design will continue to rise in importance. You might get a new form of spam, called "spit," on your telephone.

The oldest baby boomers will turn 60, sparking a wave of introspection and an itch to do "something that actually matters." The film "Brokeback Mountain" will help speed the eventual acceptance of gay marriage.

Salespeople will tote pocket-sized projectors to use in presentations. More people will make real money selling imaginary goods.

Or not. Remember the paperless office.

"The way that things happen in the world, these big things that really matter, they don't really care about (the) calendar," said Daniel Pink, a contributing editor at Wired magazine and author of "A Whole New Mind."

But one demographic milestone will, by definition, be reached in 2006: The baby boomers will begin the long journey into their 60s the age, not the decade that shaped many of their values.

And to Pink, that will signal a shift in what the leading edge of the 77 million-strong generation views as important.

"They're reckoning with their own mortality," he said, "and I think it's only going to accelerate this robust search for meaning."

He views the growing numbers of Americans practicing yoga (15 million) and meditation (10 million) as examples of the more- general trend and believes the aging of the boomers will fuel its growth.

"They're thinking about, How do I spend the remainder of my life?' " Pink said.

Down on downtown living

If Joel Kotkin is right, they won't, for the most part, be spending it in loft apartments in newly trendy downtowns.

Some, including the developers who keep spending money on downtown housing, think Kotkin is wrong, but he believes the much- publicized boom is about to fizzle. Economic and demographic growth, he said, will continue to move toward suburbs, smaller cities and college towns.

"I think this is going to be a period (of) a bit of reckoning for a lot of cities that are counting on this sort of empty-nester revitalization," said Kotkin, a Los Angeles author and trend analyst.

That would surprise many people, but here's a prediction that won't: There will be newer, faster, easier ways to spend money.

Chief among them are the "smart cards" that Denver's Kim Long, author of "The American Forecaster Almanac," thinks will soon begin to move toward critical mass in the United States. Embedded with a microprocessor that connects via radio signal with a store's checkout terminal, the cards are akin to the devices that let you pay for gasoline or tolls by holding them near a reader.

Now, Long looks for them to invade retail checkouts and be used for small purchases, shaving as much as 15 to 20 seconds off each transaction.

"Which is a huge chunk of time for any line," he said.

Indeed. One-third of Americans get frustrated after waiting 10 seconds in line, Chase Bank found in a survey last year.

Chase has begun introducing smart cards it describes them as equipped with "blink" that allow a sale to be recorded without swiping the card or handing it to a clerk.

But beyond soothing the easily frustrated and potentially allowing more sales per hour, there's this: Smart-card-toting customers spend more money. One study, according to Chase, found that they spent 20% to 30% more than consumers using cash.

Mobile phones incorporating similar technology also will break out in the coming year, said David Pearce Snyder, lifestyles editor of The Futurist magazine.

"You will be able to charge things with your cell phone, which will be marketed as the electronic wallet," he said.

Maybe that will give us extra time to wrestle with what Snyder says will be a growing annoyance voice spam sent to telephones that use increasingly popular Internet connections.

"It's called spit' spam over Internet telephony," he said. "And it will emerge, it will become an issue for next year."

On the gizmo front, Snyder sees possibilities for pocket-sized video projectors.

"That's another piece of zippy technology that they're going to dump on us next year," he said.

Virtual economy, real money

While the affluent among us many trend-watchers seem to focus on the high end buy ever-newer technology, a growing number of people will profit from the merging of the real and virtual economies.

Online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft and EverQuest II have spawned markets in which some participants buy rather than earn treasure, weapons and lofty status.

As of late last week, players of Ultima Online were offering 2,600 imaginary items on eBay. Most were various amounts of virtual gold, but the merchandise also included a "Dryad Bow," a "Lands of Malsa Runebook" and experienced characters it takes time and skill to build up your character's powers skilled in alchemy, archery and animal lore.

"This virtual economy," said Institute for the Future director Paul Saffo, speaking generally, "will keep getting bigger."

Participants in Second Life, an online world filled with attractive characters few people choose to be homely in their imaginary skins are buying $3.5 million worth of virtual stuff from each other every month, said David Fleck of Linden Lab, creator of Second Life.

Nearly 500 people clear more than $1,000 a month, he said, doing such things as designing virtual clothing, selling virtual pets and, most importantly, dealing in un-real real estate.

One woman, Fleck said, made $150,000 in a year off Second Life land and housing.

Linden Lab, of course, has an interest in promoting Second Life not just as entertainment but as a business opportunity.

But an academic observer, Indiana University economist Edward Castronova, estimates on his Web site that the overall trade in virtual goods such as gold, magic wands and characters totals "at least $200 million annually, and probably many times more." Whole companies, in fact, have sprung up devoted strictly to brokering real-money trading in virtual items.

Back in the world of tangible goods, meanwhile, design will play a greater role in dictating value, Zach said.

"It is increasingly the age of the designer and less the age of the MBA," he said.

Pink agreed. With goods so abundant, he said, the way to stand out in the marketplace is to improve aesthetics more than a product itself.

General Motors is hiring sculptors from the Rhode Island School of Design, he said, and Apple's sleek iPod music player, while certainly well-engineered, is "largely a triumph of design."

From his office in Palo Alto, Calif., Saffo sees an end to the furor over gay marriage. It won't happen in the year ahead, but in a decade or so it will be accepted, he said.

"In 2020, people will look back and shake their heads the same way we look back and shake our heads at segregation in the South," he said.

One might wonder whether the view would look the same were the forecaster based in say, Oklahoma City or Omaha, but Saffo, for his part, is convinced. And he thinks "Brokeback Mountain," the critically lauded new movie about two gay cowboys in Wyoming, will push the development.

"It puts a real human face on an issue . . . 2006 is the year everybody realizes they have a close friend who is gay," he said.

It's all about us

Finally, trend analyst Michael Tchong believes social and technological currents are flowing together to encourage Americans to expect that they can have exactly what they want exactly when they want it.

Continuing to grow, this tendency has been fed for more than two decades by marketers and devices such as the VCR, the iPod and now the TiVo digital video recorder all tech gear that caters to individual taste and whim.

At the same time, Tchong notes, the number of people living alone keeps rising. Singles now make up 27% of all U.S. households; married couples with children make up 22%. By 2010, the respective shares will be 30% and 20%, Tchong said.

He believes the trends toward living alone and toward personal pickiness in consumption Tchong calls it "the growing control- freak nature of Americans" are linked. And he acknowledges that some might question the benefits.

Copyright 2006, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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