Ally, the new brand agent of Dutch county Almere, is now also available 3D on Hyves. Ally answers people's questions on Almere and events in the county online. Ally is the first chatbot belonging to a Dutch county that can be found on Hyves.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

And this is how this chatbot fits in exactly with the long term developments of the dialogue I’ve written about more often here. The waiting is, where I’m concerned, for the first speech-driven chatbots. Around that time, brand builders will also be meddling with brand agents because it’s in the dialogue that affection can be created, that emotion can be created, that a connection can be formed. Exactly what brand builders have been waiting for, but that’s currently only optimized for the ‘sending’.

Research shows that consumers are looking increasingly often at testimonials of others before they buy something. The consumer is even willing to pay a quarter more for a product that has a positive rating. Of course that means the product needs to have been judged by a large group of visitors and have a substantially higher grade.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Consumers are allowing themselves to be more and more influenced by companies that tell stories through advertisement. Instead of this they start to listen to other people, just like in the era before the mass-communication. For now they’re just general testimonials, but soon they’ll be chiefly from what trusted relations (friends (of friends), family, or colleagues) thought of the products. That’s not so far away now.

Price comparison site Kelkoo.nl is now also available on your cell phone.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

All brands are going to create mobile website, but price comparison sites that go mobile will change the behavior of the shopping public rapidly and drastically. After all, the consumer will have the lowest price immediately at hand all the time. In time it’ll ensure that you only enter a store where you’ll find exactly the right circumstances for you: the right product, at the right price and for the right conditions. It’s the time in which you’re taken along by the coaching brands.

Related trends

• Coaching brands

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

In this video Derren Brown, known for playing with our brains, demonstrates how a random passerby can stop other people from dozens of metres away. Impressive. But the question here is: what are we seeing? Are we making contact with the quantum field in which all life on earth is connected or is it just a trick and everything is acted? Whoever has had telepathic experiences will lean towards the former, which is extremely interesting – what would we be able to do with it in the future? – and revealing the trick would be a shame then. Let me know what you think!

Dutch webshop company Eperium has divided its branches neatly across different timezones to be available 24 hours a day. With the opening of the establishment on Curaçao the e-Commerce specialist offers service around the clock. On top of that the exotic location works as a magnet on the rare ITers.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

The network economy doesn’t limit itself to one country, but stretches across the entire globe. The experience economy, in which this vast network is formed, furthermore needs people that can design and produce experiences in a virtual world. A job that can be done anywhere in the world. This working method of companies is one that we’ll see more and more often as a result.

Related trends

• Experiences
• Network economy

Nespresso brought the costs for its contact center down with 16% with the help of Nortel's automatic speech recognition. Without intermediation of an agent customers can place their order for the small coffee cups. Mother company Nestle processes over 300,000 orders per year. The 180 agents in the contact center in Lausanne receive requests in German, French and Italian. The implemented speech recognition also understands and uses the English language. The system reduces the average waiting period and is active during peak hours.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Cost reduction is often a reason to implement speech recognition. However, they form the basis for the automated dialogue. The dialogue in which the consumer’s emotions will soon be stimulated. Costs is nowadays a good start to begin with.

Dutch job-vacancy site werkbank.nl now has a version for the iPhone, which makes it the first website in the Netherlands to have this.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Brands will communicate with their customers through every possible screen. Through watches, the navigational system or life-size televisions. Media-specialists won’t be busy with programming your evening, or where to interrupt when with their message, but with shaping the dialogue through an almost endless variety of different screens which will sometimes move and have all sorts of different abilities on top of that.

At some of the stores of the supermarket chain Albert Heijn it's now possible to pay by fingerprint. After showing some ID and a means of payment a scan is made of the unique points of the fingertip and name, address, bank account and, if wanted, the number of the customer bonus card will be registered. After this consumers can pay by placing their finger on the reader at the cash desk.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

This is how an important part of the dialogue, the direct recognition of the customer, is taking shape. For now with the tip of one’s finger, but later a camera will have seen who’s coming long ago and payment is just a formality. Brands will recognize people better and faster than people can do this themselves now, and then they’ll be able to create an anticipating dialogue even better than any human ever could. This’ll take a while, but it’s a development that fits in this long term trend.

YouTube is making all its videos interactive. Uploaders can add another 'layer' to which the creator of the video can add interactivity. You can also add, for example, text balloons. This allows people to select a gaming-form, for example with cards. Depending on your choice, a different movie will start up (demo video). In this sense, the interactivity is limited and it exists, in fact, of a script.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

People have always responded to video. Just look at their faces when they’re watching. They feel, think and do all sorts of things. Except that the screen doesn’t respond to that. That’s changing slowly. Now the creator is able to add a layer. Soon this will be a 3D world in which something happens by default (call it a movie), but if we want to participate we can do this too. Because YouTube is picking up on this, this development is clearly a step closer.

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.

At Totspot (Dutch) parents of babies can make a profile with the timeline of their child. The time lines distinguish themselves by heights and lows and supplemented by photos, videos and music.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Look at it as part photo-album, part diary and part social network that is brought together online. We keep seeing more and more niche social sites that aim for a specific group of users. Where you used to need hundreds of videotapes and scrapbooks for maintaining a child’s time line, now you have an online archive. The digitalizing of all information will be public property and families from faraway places can see exactly how children develop. At a next visit a child won’t even have to tell people what happened to it. They’ll already know.

In this video of the American Marishi University of Management scientists are explaining the evidence for the effect of prayers. David Lynch, Maharishi University Trustee, and quantum physicist Dr. John Hagelin, professor of Physics, explain from the Vedic science that, if people come into sync with one another and are literally on the same wavelength, it has an exponential effect on the behavior of other people. It's so strong it can even prevent terrorism.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

It’s the scientific approach for the ancient prayer. What would happen if we called people to focus on peace at the same moment through the virtual world? What would happen to individual ambition? What would happen if we built a world in which everything is automated and a new generation for whom such thoughts are the most normal thing in the world has risen? Then everything could suddenly look completely different. It’s the time of the pamper planet. (Dutch)

The British Open University offers its lectures through iTunes. The Open University has already added over 300 audio and video fragments. Examples include courses on art history or a lecture on how Sierra Leone is recovering from a horrible civil war. Other subjects that are treated in the podcasts are: cows that can choose when they're to be milked, researches who look up the very limits of humanoid computer interactions, the world of mathematical modeling or an ecological school trip in the English highlands.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Brands are experiencing a brand coming out, are becoming more and more open and share their information. In the experience economy that’s created they’ll start teaching, stimulating or entertaining people from a distance, using audio, video, actively, through interaction or in games. Government brands will be obligated to deliver this service. After all the goal of universities is to gather and distribute knowledge. This step fits completely with these developments.

Related trends

• Experiences
• Brand coming out

At Rijschool Network (Driving School Network) people who are looking for driving lessons through Hyves (rijscholen.hyves.nl), a Dutch social networking site, can see where their friends learned to drive and what they thought of it.

Driving schools can make accounts for their instructors. With this account they can use email to invite students to share the driving school through their Hyves (or Messenger) network. Because of the link back to Hyves this can happen through a simple confirmation by the student. In the meantime over 100 driving schools have already registered for the new service.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Soon Rijschool Network will list all the driving schools in the Netherlands. Or further: all the driving schools in Europe. Because maybe you’ll pay far less for lessons in Spain and your driving license will still be valid in the Netherlands. Nice to combine with an internship or a vacation. From this perspective Rijschool Network will get a relationship with the mobile consumer. A next step could be advice on cats, on insurance or repairs. Or how to best use your car. How to drive best. And when it’s better to take the train. And how your friends are traveling, because Rijschool Network will have known who your friends are for years, after all. This is how Rijschool Network can grow into a mobility coaching brand from an existing relationship.

Dutch restaurant site Iens no longer simply compares restaurants or diners, but also gives the consumer the ability to book a table immediately. On a restaurant page the visitor can enter the day, the amount of people and the desired time and see whether there's a table available. The first 150 restaurants have since connected their booking system to Iens.

Both Iens and Livebookings, real-time booking partner in this course, make money of these bookings. When a visitor books a table the owner of the establishment pays 2 Euros. If a reservation is cancelled, no costs are charged.

Iens used to earn as much from the site as it did from its guides, but it wants to earn much more from the website. The yearly revenue of about 1 million Euros has to be increased. That's why the organization is professionalized. The stock holders decided with founder Iens Boswijk that she'll step down as director. Since the beginning of this year Sander Klos has been in charge as the CEO.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

In the demand-driven economy new models, based per definition on the wishes of the consumer, will be created. This can be seen perfectly in this example. Iens first mapped the consumer’s wishes and then starts offering added value. Furthermore, by being transparent about the contribution of the restaurant owner and by asking the same price for each restaurant, Iens can guarantee her independence.

For now just in the Netherlands, but soon this type of brand will be present world-wide. Now solely for dining out, but soon also advice about deliveries, eating at home, even cooking for friends. Because in future even their taste will be known to food coaching brands.