In its branch office in Herten, Rabobank Roermond offers a video connection to the main office in Roermond (video, Dutch). It's a national scoop. Under the name of Rabovision the system is supposed to ensure that the office branches in smaller villages can stay open longer.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

This is how new working methods of brands, of companies, are shaped increasingly. On the one hand the most simple questions are handled through brand agents, on the other the questions that are left are getting more and more complex and need more and more specialist knowledge. The chance that someone is stationed in the neighborhood grows ever smaller and so video conferencing fits seamlessly into this picture. Core of the success is eye contact, something which is a huge difference with, for example, contact though a webcam where you get a top view of the person you’re speaking to. In the next step we’ll be doing this from home (when a camera is truly inside the screen, instead of on top of it), with multiple screens (like e-paper that you hold in your hand and is connected to the conversation), 24 hours a day, with national contacts and for some clients even abroad.

Related trends

• Brand-dialogue

Picasa, Google's photo site, now recognizes faces. If you add names to faces, Picasa will start to recognize patterns. If you add more photos, Picasa will start to suggest tags.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Picasa is a brand that lets you relive the past. Just like all the other brands that mean something to us, they also know our friends. Currently we have to tell them, but soon they’ll know so many people that they can recognize people purely based on our contact list. Maybe it’ll turn out that we’re in a picture with someone we haven’t seen for fifteen years and wouldn’t even recognize anymore. And then the live-interpretation will follow: we’ll be walking on the street, then brands will help us recognize people immediately. We’ll just hear it in our (invisible) ear piece. Never again ‘who was that again?’ And so we’re taking a step closer to the future every day.

Related trends

• Brand-dialogue

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