Readers of the American newspaper the New York Times will get a special frame on the technology and business pages. In this frame they'll be offered a special selection based on their LinkedIn profile. (LinkedIn is a social network for business professionals.) Members that are active in the energy sector will for instance receive relevant news from the energy market. Besides that it is also possible to share the news from the New York Times with LinkedIn contacts or to start a discussion with people from the user's personal network.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

People are more involved with the world in which they live, extremely involved in the lives of their family and friends, involves with their neighborhood, involved with their town, slightly less involved with their state and even less with country’s and world politics. Of the first they want to know everything, of the last just the headlines and between those a bridge. By personalizing the news the NY Times is a step closer to this. After this all sources will get their turn, different opinions will get their turn, or we can even create our own news. Then a newspaper (call it an example of ‘the media’) will no longer determine what the news is, but the people. The NY Times facilitates that and this is a good step in that direction.

Related trends

• More involved

When one looks up a route, Dutch Routesite Routenet automatically calculates the actual fuel costs based on the type of car and fuel used. By entering the car's license plate number the model of the car, the fuel consumption and the actual fuel prices are looked up. Based on that Routenet calculates the cost.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Mobility coaching brands help you get from A to B using conditions you’ve set yourself. All possible information will be used for this. At first it was just about the roads, but now we’re seeing the use of estimated traveling times or even actual traveling times more and more often, now the costs are also added to the list. Soon costs will be weighted against other forms of transport, desired comfort and, on top of that, globally. This is how mobility coaching brands ensure that you can reach any destination on earth using your personal preferences. Routenet takes another step in that direction.

The Dutch living concept Stay or Go calls the members of its community on Grohe Rainshowers to test a special kind of shower head. This was sent to the members through email. By clicking the link in the email a personal page is created where the users only need to add their zip code. The rest is already filled out and users can then click 'send'. That's all you need to do to sign up. Then Grohe selects people based on their profile, including their zip code.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Brands that have access to the consumer (coaching brands, Stay or Go a home coaching brand in the making) catalogue the demand in name of the consumer. The testing of products is a part of this. This time Stay or Go is making a general call (or was it because I once said I wasn’t happy with my bathroom?), soon it’ll be able to select the consumers open to this kind of thing accurately.

Related trends

• Coaching brands

PC Zapper groups together all watched videostreams of broadcasting companies, of Dutch video sharing sites or other video sources using Dutchcharts (Dutch). This way a Top 30 can be created. Videos can be clicked on and watched immediately.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Home entertainment coaching brands collect and group all available media from which a viewer, the consumer, can choose. Now all the Dutch video-offerings are being grouped, soon the whole international videos and then live-video will follow suit. How to choose from this overwhelming offer. This new type of brand will help us choose by building a profile of us and also by knowing what our friends are doing. First gathering up all the video-material. That’s difficult enough in 2008.

Through CitySense inhabitants and visitors of San Francisco can see where the masses are in a city with one press on their BlackBerry. Through GPS and WiFi-locations of other (anonymous) CitySense-users the BlackBerry displays real time where in the city the most people are gathered. You can see whether it concerns a busy restaurant, overcrowded bar, or a steamy club. Also ideal for when you're looking for an empty bar stool or don't want to go out where all of San Francisco is at that moment.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Brands will aid people with real time information in real time increasingly often. In this case you see what’s happening NOW for other people in the city. The same also goes for a TomTom with detailed route information based on other users that are stuck in a traffic jam at that moment. Soon we’ll be able to view the inventory of any store in the neighborhood and reserve immediately. We’ll know that it’s now a twelve minute walk because of road-work, but it’s usually a ten minute walk. As such we’ll get a pair of ‘antennae’ on our head that guide us across the world and that look further and deeper than we can ourselves. Brands will get a very meaningful role in this. This is a nice, innovative example.

Through Dutch housing site Zuka buyers and sellers can chat with one another directly. Typical questions that aren't (as) easily caught in a database - for example 'from what time will the sun be shining in the garden?' or 'when was the exterior painted for the last time?' - can easily be answered in this way. In an extreme case one might even be able to make an offer from the chatroom.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

You can sell or buy a house just like any other object. We used to need all sorts of complicated things for this, but in the network economy that’s being created it’s all about allowing two parties to meet. In a next step, Zuka could arrange for a notary, sort mortgages and arrange the move. Sometimes you’ll need a physical, real person, but that’s going to be the case less and less. This is a development in that direction.

Related trends

• Network economy

At GreenNote American students can get financing for their college/university studies through acquaintances. The student creates a profile and adds, alongside the desired monetary amount, a photo, information on finished courses and in 'my story' the reason the money is needed. And of course why they think that lending them money to go to college is a good investment. From there the student can start to approach people.

If people are interested in offering a loan, GreenNote formalizes this through a legally binding contract for both the student and the person offering the loan.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

This is how new financial brands are created in the network economy. The new model will be borrowing from the acquaintance of an acquaintance. We trust the people we know, our trusted relations, and the trust that they have in the outside world. This is how micro credit becomes useable around the globe, this is how new brands such as GreenNote grab a chance that traditional banks aren’t yet embracing well enough.

Related trends

• Network economy

The line between banners and widgets (an intelligent coding behind a space on a website that can be shared by different websites) is slowly disappearing. This example shows a banner of an event that users can mark. This way users can put the date directly in their diaries, invite friends, set a reminder (maybe the user wants to decide later), put it on their personal page on Facebook (without showing it to friends or other people) or just book tickets straight away.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

A smart publisher, read a smart brand, makes sure that someone who’s set something as a reminder has a different ‘show’ the next time. To someone who’s already booked you don’t need to show ‘book now’ again. And that smart publisher will at some point know so much about a customer that they’ll know exactly what to offer next time. And that ‘publisher’ won’t earn money from the ad revenue, but from actually selling products. This is how publishers can develop into coaching brands. This is a step in that direction.

Related trends

• Coaching brands

With Air, Bed & Breakfast you can spend the night in people's homes. You only pay a small fee.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

This is how the added value pillar of every existing concept will be knocked down. A hotel has, for example, a bed to offer, but also takes care of the cleaning, the security and breakfast. That’s what makes a hotel a hotel, and that made the offers comparable in the old days. In those days you could make a guide book, organizing by destination, class or price. In the demand-driven era you can see ‘I want a bed, take care of my own cleaning, my own security and my own breakfast’. That’s in actual fact the model that’s being offered here. Personal travel brands will sort everything and just ask what it is that you’d like.

Inside Trip has refined searching for flights to such an extent that not just the price counts as a criteria, but also the amount of transfers, the risk of delays and the average amount of times luggage gets lost.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

We’re guided better and better. All generic aspects will start to count. All personal aspects will start to count too. That’s the added value of the mobility coaching brands.

Through SMSParking inhabitants of Amsterdam can pay for their parking with a text message. A simple text message at the beginning and end of parking will do. The driver parks his/her car and sends a text message with the zone-number of the parking lot and the license plate number of the car to 4030. The system confirms that parking has started with a text message. Placing a separate parking ticket in your car will no longer be necessary. As soon as the driver is done parking, (s)he sends a message with just the letter 'q' to state that they quit parking there. The system again confirms this with a text message which will contain the zone, the license plate number, the time, the date and the price.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

In the dialogue between human and brand payment is a normal part. Soon if we say to our brand ‘Yes, that’s what I want’ it’ll be given to you immediately and the payment will be dealt with immediately as well. For parking this means that our mobility coaching brand will soon see that we’re standing in a specific spot, organize the payment for us and give us an overview at the end of the month. If we want, we’ll also be given tips on how to reduce the costs of parking, but some people won’t need that. The mobility coaching brand will understand precisely.

Private loans (Dutch) are a new service of the Dutch ABN Amro branch. It's a service for people who want to lend money privately. It often involves a loan between friends, acquaintances or family members.

It's pretty simple. You agree with someone from your area how much you'll borrow and make arrangements about the height of the interest rate and the repayment plan. Lenders and borrowers can orient themselves on the website of ABN AMRO. When they've reached an agreement on the payment conditions, ABN AMRO offers them sample contracts for making the agreement. The site also offers fiscal and judicial tips and a calculator.

The bank doesn't charge a commission for this service, but aims at binding customers to itself and offers additional paid services. The Judicial Service Plan offers direct connection with professionals, specialized in judicial aid.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

This way the bank transforms itself into a financial coaching brand: a brand that facilitates financial transactions between private people. In a closed model this was only possible by accepting and then lending large amounts of money. In an open model, small transactions can take place. Soon we’ll find these transactions between our savings accounts (or our loans). Even if we lend money to people elsewhere in the world (call it microcredit). This is how the network economy is formed and existing brands transform into open network brands.

Related trends

• Network economy

Dutch news site Nu.nl puts the news on the map (Dutch). You can also look at police notices (crime map) and traffic jams. With an extra timeline you can move through time too.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

This is how we map the physical world in real time more and more often. If we later add our own behavior (how we move across this earth, where we’ve been) we can see what news happened where. A question such as “where are all those fire engines headed?” will in future never be left unanswered. That’s the next step. That’s how the news coaching brand will keep you up to date.

Researchers have discovered that monkeys can control an extra robot arm along with their own arms. Brains are apparently so flexible that they can connect additional 'devices'. That offers plenty of opportunities for the future to let the world around us be controlled by robots that do as we think. Below is a summary of the complete text:

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

With this we won’t be able to control just prosthetics, but also robots or cars. But what happens when we can invent an interface that links people and copies concepts? Now we’ve developed speech, but there’s a lot of interference there. Or we can start to observe things we couldn’t before, like infrared, magnetic pull, warmth, vibrations, high and low tones, etc… That could turn us into a very special species. Those are the insights that are coming to life here.

Business social network LinkedIn places network updates in a personal RSS feed . This means that changes to business contacts can be accessed immediately from webpages, RSS readers or email clients. Changes include such things as: 'a new job', 'a new contact' or 'a new question'. This allows people to be presented such things in the same way as 'news', but with the difference that this is much nearer to them.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

People who are involved in the groups in which they live and then specifically with the people they know. That’s why the who’s-who section in professional magazines are so widely read (do I know someone? Do I see a familiar photo?) This service takes this a step further and automatically selects the changes of people you know on a professional level. Furthermore it selects them in all branches because they’re your contacts. By joining the groups an individual works in a career coaching brand (which LinkedIn is becoming) will be able to guide the personal development of an individual much better.

Familii.nl offers people the ability to hunt for ancestors and family members all over the globe. The looking, finding and keeping in contact with family are the most important features of the site. You can develop your family tree, keep the birthdays and addresses of your family members up to date and share photos and movies.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Social coaching brands help you to maintain your network. For now loose niches will be created because traditional social network (such as MySpace, Facebook or Livejournal) don’t pay any attention to them, but they’ll be reintegrated. On these networks you can see mothers who have no abilities to do something with their baby other than share some pictures, you’ll see profiles with hundreds of friends without differentiating between family, acquaintances and read friends, you’ll see people who are getting married, but they can’t do anything other than a few extra messages, list items or calls.

The limited abilities of today’s social networks is creating new competition. It’s only a matter of time, though, before social networks return to their core business: facilitating contact between people.