Kiesbeter.nl (Dutch) compares health care per complains. Instead of searching through the available offers, the user can choose from: respiration; allergies; bones; joints; muscles; genetics and chromosomes; mental health; genitalia; heart; arteries; blood and lymph; brains and nervous center; hormones; skin; mucous membrane and connective tissue; infections; cancer; throat, nose and ear; mouth and teeth, kidneys and urinary system; eyes and line of sight; accidents and poisonings; digestion]; metabolism; reproduction and pregnancy. Then those who treat these can be compared. Furthermore there's a medical encyclopedia that filters by age and gender. Men will get specific explanations and pictures of the male body and women of the female body.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Health coaching brands are getting a more solid shape. Currently with a simple generalization on age and gender, soon such a brand will keep a very detailed profile. That profile is connected to your medical file. Furthermore not just health care in your own country will be involved, but in the whole world. And a next step is guiding us in our health. A lot to do for now, but KiesBeter (ChooseBetter) is nicely on its way.

Related trends

• Coaching brands

On bungalowtrips.nl vacation goers can now, just like with hotels, rent a bungalow on any desired day. Until now bungalow parks have only offered vacations in predetermined periods, the so-called mid-weeks and mid-weekends. They hope to address primarily pensioners through this as pensioners aren't restricted to free weekends or vacations.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

We’re slowly switching to a network economy in which supply and demand are connected flexibly and in real-time. The offers per week or mid-week were typical thoughts of the old times: product and price had to be recorded in a leaflet after all. We’re slowly but surely saying goodbye to this kind of concept and this is a nice example.

Related trends

• Network economy

This robot can jump 27 times higher than itself and breaks the old record of 17 times.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Microrobots will soon be a normal part of life. The creators are thinking of applications for disasters where this kind of robot could take bumps easily, but I think that there’ll be many civil applications following. Think of cleaning the façade of a house: a swamp of microcleaners gets the job done in no-time. You grab from a bucket with a few hundred of them in it and throw them against the wall. Tracking and destroying dangerous spiders could also be an application. Or flying robots could chase dangerous insects and kill them. Or spreading out several microcameras allowing you to build up a 3D image of the area if you’ve never been there before.

If you can think of any other applications, let me know what they are!

A team led by Takao Someya of the University of Tokyo in Japan is working on the development of a flexible skin for a robot. With this a robot can function far more normally in daily life. The "e-skin" measures pressure and temperature. The challenge is in the wires of the sensors that usually break when stretched. This "skin" can be stretched out a factor two and still function.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

While most people still need to get used to virtual characters, avatars or virtual colleagues, laboratories make maximum effort to produce physical, but artificial colleagues. However, it’ll take at least a generation before we’ll accept these humanoids in our midst.

Qash (Dutch) offers you insight in your spending patterns by reading and analyzing the data of your various bank accounts, credit cards and/or savings accounts. Each transaction will automatically be given a label and through this categorization you'll know exactly where your money is going. On top of that Qash can give you ideas on where to save money. Cheaper subscriptions, for example.

ditismijndroombaan.nl, a new Dutch career site, lets people who are looking for a job describe in their own words what their ideal job would look like, enhanced by experience and education. The recruiter can then read the introductions for free, but the complete resume costs 19 euros.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

This is how career coaching brands are slowly shaped in the network economy. In this economy an employee is considered as someone offering a service. And in the development of the demand-driven economy it’s important to first gather the available offers so that others can choose from it. Just like a hotel room: first you map all available rooms, look at their availability and within that the consumer can look. That also goes for people who can help you in the long run, call it ‘staff’. These too need to be mapped so that you can make a choice. That too is a part of the network economy and this is a nice example.

Related trends

• Coaching brands
• Network economy

HuizenZoeker.nl, a new Dutch housing site, collects the offers from the various other housing sites (Funda, Huislijn, Dimo, Vbo, Era, Remax, Makelaarsland, LMV, Garantiemakelaars) and combines them into a complete overview. For more information on a house one is referred to the site where the house was found. If a house is available on multiple sites, the consumer can choose which site they want to look at then.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

At this time, the creation of coaching brands is still all about completeness in the category: give me a site which lists everything. Only those sites will survive, only those brands will survive. Then it’ll become an art to offer added value. That’s the basis on which home coaching brands can be created.

Related trends

• Coaching brands

The American store chain Kohls, with 975 physical locations, launched a new line that's only for sale on Stardoll.com, a virtual meeting place for teenagers. Using Stardollars they can buy virtual clothes. In the first sixteen days the virtual shop attracted 2.2 million visitors and sold 1.8 million items. Goal is to familiarize kids with the clothes Kohl sells and seduce them to come into the physical store to buy clothes there.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Where the virtual world seems more and more really, eventually it’s all about clothing in the real world with it’s rich sensory experiences. By wearing our clothing virtually first people can give their uncertainty about their looks a place. If the environment approves the next step can be taking. Kolhs gets precisely how this works.

Facebook now has over 100 million users.

Business social network LinkedIn has started to allow registered users to hold group discussions.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

This is how a serious form of online conferences is formed: people already know each other and can also bring in people from their social network. In a next step this kind of discussion will integrate with live discussions/chats to give the feeling of being in a real workshop through speech and images. Still not all physical sessions will be replaced.

The ultimate will be real workshops of course, because this is the only way to be stimulated by all your senses. Furthermore, the social obligation to remain seated allows you to create a bond between people that will never be feasible in the virtual world. But such a session would have to be incredibly special and not a lecture in the traditional sense. It’s like with a vacation: the more you get the impression through impressive images that you’re in a specific location, the more you get the feeling ‘I want that too!’

LinkedIn, as

• in Dutch

Japan uses QR codes to deduce the origin of food products. This allows you to determine where food comes from and whether it comes from somewhere safe and healthy. By checking the QR codes with a suitable reader you're led to a website which tells you the product's story. From origin to the way of growing the food to the shelf it's on at the moment.

A robot that can think using rat's brains has been developed at the University of Reading. The robot can avoid objects without the use of additional support from humans or technology. The brains aren't physically located in the robot, but are kept in a food-rich environment. They communicate with the robot using Bluetooth.

With Photosynth users can now create their own 3D images. The principle is simple: you take a lot of pictures of, for example, a building. You walk around it and takes pictures from several angles. And you also make a lot of photos with a smaller detail. You can upload the photos, Photosynth analyses them and in a few minutes has made a 3D image that you can fly through.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

People think in 3D. The virtual world will be completely 3D. And the conversion we’re making now is converting the temporarily captured 2D image of the reality we perceive (call it a photo) into a 3D image. Soon we won’t take pictures anymore, but will be registering things continuously, the ‘devices’ around us will do this. By combining them with the pictures of others we can go back in time in great detail.

What would happen when at a pop concert everyone’s running a camera and a microphone? You could relive the entire concert, relisten to every conversation from every possible angle (ignoring for a moment the possible consequences regarding privacy). That’s the nostalgic human to a tee.

What’s more you can manipulate this world and add people who weren’t there or replace people with others. This turns the past into a playground in which we can’t even recall what that past really looked like. And it won’t matter. As long as we’re happy.

Related trends

• More 3D

Business social network LinkedIn now has a special application for the iPhone. With this users can write a status update immediately, look up contacts or send them a message.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

This is how coaching brands continue to be shaped. Now we’re getting pC functions on the cell phone. Soon we’ll be able to call those people (no need for a phone number, just click). We can automatically record conversations and let speech interpretation report it. And later, much later, our conversations will be analyzed (automatically!) For example, if we hold a sales conversation we’ll receive tips on how to do better. Which emotions we failed to register and kept talking. This allows this type of brand to grow into a coach. But first they should be always with us. That feels right.

Related trends

• Coaching brands

With TinEye, a new search engine, people can use a picture to look for similar ones. Useful if you're looking for a pretty version of something. After uploading a photo, TinEye gets to work. It can also help photographers track their work on the internet. It's still a beta-version, but on the site you can find a few cool examples.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

The virtual world is connecting more and more effectively with the visual human, the human that thinks in images. Soon we’ll be able to point at something on the street and shout ‘I like that!’. A brand that’s supporting you will immediately start to think along with you, recognize the object you’re pointing at and retrieve information from the past and present about it. Perhaps it’ll even be able to buy it for you. Not just in western countries, but especially in countries where people have never learned to read this’ll be a big thing. This future keeps getting closer.

Emily is an artificial character that moves exactly like a human being. She is, after all, based on the video recording of a real person. And copied so precisely that you can't tell the difference. As such Emily displays all the emotions that a regular human being would also display.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

The virtual world is becoming more and more real. With this technology we’ll be able to pretend to be someone else in a year or ten: we’ll be recorded, placed in a model and shown as someone else. Including the changing of our voice! This way granddad can come to life again. Scary!

Brand agents, artificial employees that represent brands, won’t start to look like this until around 2030. Only when we can present the dialogue on an adult, human level will we be able to accept that brand agents also look like humans (that’s why I’ve picked the name ‘mensmerk’ or, translated, ‘humanbrand’!) And the technology to listen is developing very slowly, but steadily. And that’s what I’m tracking nicely on this website. For now there’s plenty to look forward to!