When you stroll through Belgian cities Gent or Brugge, you feel like you're in a fairy tale. Everything seems to fit. Only after some time has passed, you realize why everything seems to fit so well. The original thought of the developers and architects are untouched. The view of the city is very carefully protected. Billboards, signs, striking shop windows or even posters are forbidden. And the result is beautiful.

In this era, in which information is always available for everybody, in which we ourselves determine what brands are allowed to interrupt our lives, in which everything is taken care of for us, advertising is unnecessary. Businesses won't need advertising to flourish any longer. They will find other ways to bring together producing and consuming roles. This means the end of advertising. Street view wise, this will mean that cities can become as beautiful as Gent again. First we will need a generation that is used to function without advertising though, which moreover will forbid outdoor advertising. This generation hasn't been born yet, so it will at least be 2050 before we will get here. After all, even the youngest generation is still regularly tipped through advertising (like flyers), and thus is still valuing advertising. After that we will really start thinking about city views again. At the end of this century a lot will have changed.

Developing home entertainment coaching brand Joost starts with live streams. Starting next week, watchers anywhere in the world can watch the NCAA basketball championships live (em, Dutch). Thus home entertainment coaching brands slowly evolve. Live or not live, this type of brands takes care of entertainment on the couch after a day of hard work. Be it passive, a little active, or very active: we don't have to leave the house any longer. Once Joost gets mass-accessibility on TV, broadcasters will have a lot to worry about.

In January 2008, Chatbots.org had its soft launch. This site presents all chat bots in the world. This is not just handy for the consumer, but also for developers as a benchmark, and as a promotion for their own bots. Brands owning chat bots as well as platform developers support this initiative. Chatbots.org seeks to support the development of dialogues between brands and their customers. The site is paid for by advertisements (especially around the word 'chat'). Since the introduction the site has grown continuously, although this is definitely not enough yet considering the worldwide market. I am now looking for someone to help me with the content and promotion of this site, on a commercial basis.

The WII Balance Board is a sort scale that can accurately determine where you put pressure on it. Apart from all kinds of fitness exercises, the Board also makes it possible to train your balance (fc).

Promoting balance in mind and body is not a short contemporary hype, not a trend like 'we are going to play games again', but a very long term trend. This trend however is only beginning, and will only further develop after the world economy has come to balance, we can hardly speak of low wage countries, and the automizing and robotizing trends have allowed us to work less. We then will finally have the time to structurally work on ourselves. We will then be able to do things we now consider 'inexplicable', as 'magic', or supra natural. It will take some time, I am talking about 2050, but the first products to help us in this are now introduced. And these are just brands again.

It is now possible to consult business social network LinkedIn with your mobile phone (lb). All brands can soon be consulted on every screen (like a watch, navigation system, or mega 3D television). The challenge is to adapt the content to every kind of screen, in a personal context. Social networks are ahead in mobile communication. This is logical: we have a lot of social interaction when we are outside the house, in the street. Soon we won't just be able to exchange business cards through our mobile phones, but we will also be able to directly link, and record a message as a note of the conversation. And we will only have to aim our mobile at somebody for the person to be recognized and the profile to be shown directly. These are the steps we may expect pretty soon.

Through the special miCoach phone (a product of Adidas and Samsung) the runner gets a personal assistant while running. A coach who knows what you want, and who helps you to get there. The coach can determine your fitness in the first run, help you define your goals, and make a plan to get there. Top trainers are supporting the coach. Besides music during your run, you get spoken instructions, and your heart rate and running pace are monitored (mb, Dutch).

We more and more surround ourselves with technique, offered by brands. Soon miCoach will also measure what music leads to what changes in achievements for us. And miCoach will tell us how to run, so that we don't have to think about it, and will have us take a different route if something is going on on our usual route (and we don't want to run there). And miCoach will have us compete with others. Real time, or as a benchmark. But even here it doesn't stop. Thanks to all kinds of mental techniques we will be capable of even better achievements. Practice for that starts at home. And thanks to all kinds of sensors, miCoach will exactly know how we move, and how this influences our performance. There miCoach will give tips as well. And on and on. This will not stop.

Soon European gambling sites will be allowed, and national gambling monopolies disappear. That is what the EU wants (em, Dutch). Thus the European market slowly evolves. Then, as a result of other developments, a world market follows, with a world government, world legislation, world police and one world currency. This will take at least another fifty years though.

Consumers control the data at financial advise brand Wesabe. Although the consumer can upload all financial data from transactions, which thus are stored on the Wesabe servers, the help desk can't just get to those data. The consumer can authorize a help desk agent to get to his data by entering a code on the website. The help desk agent needs this code to get access to the data (em, Dutch). Thus brands slowly build their brand memory, a memory that remembers all communication between consumer and brand. Other people can't access this information, although the artificial brand agent will undoubtedly be authorized to do so. This way new brands slowly develop the dialogue model, while existing brands still have a long way to go.

Dutch newspaper NRC is now also available on e-paper. This electronic, very thin paper is available in a so-called reader (em, Dutch). Brands will soon communicate through hundreds of different devices. Not programming the consumer will be important, but the flexible adaptation to the type of medium: portable, size, speed, connectivity, and interactivity. This is just another example.

Thuisbezorgd.nl, the Dutch market leader in home delivered meals, forwards every order on its website by e-mail or fax to the restaurant it is ordered from. 'At peak times on Sundays we process an average of 1 order per second. Things can go wrong then. A fax can be out of paper, or an e-mail doesn't arrive. I think that 5 to 10 percent of the orders doesn't directly get through. That's why our call center makes follow-up calls for every order.' (em, Dutch).

Thus Thuisbezorgd.nl changes the food chain. First she creates the market, and makes sure a substantial part of the orders is made through her site. Then software suppliers will come with reservation and order systems connected to the databases of Thuisbezorgd.nl. So that in the end no e-mail or fax will be necessary any more, and information is (almost) always correct. The consumer then can directly see if for example a certain dish is temporarily not available. And of course through Thuisbezorgd.nl, but also through other websites, they will be able to submit their order electronically. With that, we will also get connections with review systems and social networks. And then food coaching brands can really come to life.

Dutch food order site Thuisbezorgd.nl in 2007 processed about 1 million orders for pizza, shoarma and other deliverable meals. This amount has grown with a factor 10 in five years. In the Netherlands 1,200 restaurants are connected to the site. This year's goal for Thuisbezorgd is to increase this amount to 2,000. Thuisbezorgd.nl was responsible for a turnover of about 20 million euros for connected restaurants in 2007. That is an average of 17,000 euros per restaurant per year (em, Dutch).

Wuzzon, the online place where everybody can trade their self made mobile content - ring tones, wallpapers and animated wallpapers, launches a shop widget for social network Hyves. Through this widget the 10,000 Wuzzon shop owners can also showcase their mobile shop on their Hyves profile, and thus show it directly to their friends and other people who visit their page. Interested buyers can directly listen to the ring tones as well as order them through the widget (am, Dutch).

Brands get better at tribal thinking. Instead of aiming their communication at the consumer, they find people who are important to spread the word. Malcolm Gladwell has researched and described this before in his book The Tipping Point. He found that three types of people, at the most 5% of the population, have special characteristics fundamentally important for buzz. One of these types are the so-called 'sales men'. Wuzzon gives this type of people lots of opportunities. Well done.

Related trends

• Tribal

Isvou is a Chinese visual search engine. If you are looking for a purse that looks like one you have seen before, you can upload a picture, after which automatically a selection of similar purses is shown, which can all be ordered directly (cw). Although this seems very advanced, it really only is the beginning. Soon we will walk in the street, point to something we like, and directly ask our fashion coaching brand if we can get something like that. We will then get the possibilities presented to us through our ear plug, as well as projected in our glasses, and are directly advised about the combination with other clothes we own. Uploading and clicking then will seem so old-fashioned. Visual searching is a small step in that direction.

Internet users can ask questions at Chinese website QiHoo. These are first automatically interpreted and if possible answered. If there is no satisfying answer, the user can ask the community (cw).

In the supply driven economy collecting answers and information was important. In the new economy, answering questions is important. Whoever manages to interpret questions the right way, and answer them, in the end will win the consumer's sympathy. Google owes its success to this, although it still has problems interpreting questions. Even Google is still at the start. Maybe it's time for Google Community?

Fitna, Dutch politician Geert Wilders's film about the Koran, is announced in English, while the language spoken in the film is Dutch (fi). The Dutch politician apparently realizes that the whole world is looking at him, and this is how he anticipates that.

As the virtual world matures, and we connect to a worldwide network of 6.6 billion people, it shouldn't surprise us that this will lead to conflicts. All cultures with their own convictions built up in thousands of years, and passed on from generation to generation, all of a sudden are confronted with each other. We will (have to) fight the confrontation over the years to come. The Danish cartoons were only the beginning. With more than 3 billion people connected through mobile phones at the moment (growing rapidly), this video from about the most leveled-out culture in the world, where everything seems ok, where you can say everything you like, might cause a huge shock wave. Finally (after a couple of decades) there will be peace like never before. We will then live in the era of Pamper Planet.

For the development of the current version of Erwinvanlun.com 1.5 I have enjoyed working with Lodewijk Schutte. Unfortunately he has too many projects at the moment, forcing him to end our collaboration. For this reason, I am looking for a talented, freelance ExpressionEngine programmer. Maybe you?