The Dutch county Helmond followed a fierce discussion on the closing times for pubs, cafés, etc on a private blog: Hellemond (Dutch). The county included this discussion in a note, as can be read in the (Dutch) Burgerjaarverslag 2007(pdf) (Civilian year report 2007) which makes it an official approach. The report reads 'Spontaneously a discussion about the note started on a private blog in Helmond which we took into account here.'

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Counties are also experiencing a brand coming out. Now they’re following personal (but public) blogs, but soon they’ll create their own forums where they’ll ask civilians for their opinions. People will also be able to come up with alternative plans. The county will organize online polls. Solely for the registered inhabitant of course. And eventually the opinion of the civilians will start to carry far more weight than the opinion of the political party they voted for for a while. This is a cautious step in that direction.

Related trends

• Brand coming out

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

For 2-6 weeks, Jai of the Dutch eJai is your digital guide in a journey with experiences in Personal Growth, Health, Leadership, Beauty, Relations, Money or Pleasure. For 65 euros you'll be pulled out of your comfort-zone and you'll experience things that you'd never do otherwise. This is how you can get the most out of every moment of the day. Offered to you by your friends.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

The virtual world is forming a layer around the physical world more and more. Digital guides like Jai will became common property. Sometimes for only a short interacting, sometimes for a few weeks, and sometimes they’ll be with us our entire life. Then we’re talking about coaching brands, brands that immerse themselves in who you are. These offered services from the experience economy fit completely in this development.

Related trends

• Experiences
• Coaching brands

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.

Rabobank has now placed at least a hundred talking ATMs (Dutch) in its establishments and this year the amount of machines with speech and a receiver will come to a total of 750 (demo (Dutch)). The talking ATM is extremely useful for the blind, the poor-sighted and for people in wheelchairs. A voice guides the user via a telephone receiver through the process of getting money.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

And this is how the dialogue is given more shape. For now just in the establishments, but soon we’ll be able to ‘call’ an ATM with our cell phone (potentially with headset) and we’ll no longer need a receiver. We’ll be recognized immediately (from voice, fingerprint or both), say what we want, confirm and receive our money immediately. If we then, calling longer, still have financial questions (‘since I’m talking to you anyway…’), we can ask those immediately too. For now only at establishments by the Rabobank in the Netherlands, but soon they’ll be found all over the world, wherever we’re going.

Movie theater City Theater in Steenwijk sends people who reserve online a text message with a so-called MobiTicket. That makes them the first movie theater in the Netherlands. MobiTickets are tickets that are sent to your cell phone as a simple text message. The text message contains a unique barcode and information on the movie, the time, room, row and chair number. The movie-goer simply lets an employee scan the text message to gain entrance to the movie. It means never standing in line to buy a ticket.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Brands that enter a dialogue with the consumer have to make the consumers’ lives easier. Recognition is an important part. First the visitor was anonymous, now they’re recognized through a barcode, soon from cell phone number and afterwards through biometric characteristics. Then all you have to say is ‘save two seats for me, I’ll definitely be there’ and then you can walk straight through when you arrive. That’s the trend this development fits with.

It's now possible to look at the virtual world of Second Life from your cell phone. After installing a small program you can simply log in with your own user name and password and the fun can begin.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Cell phones will soon be so powerful that they can do this. It’ll be combined with a compass so that, if we spin around, we’ll truly get to see a different image. The images can, if we want to, be projected around us or into our video-glasses. It’ll become realer, realer and realer. In this world we’ll be able to learn, play, dance, sing and laugh. In this world we’ll get experiences that we’d never be able to get in the regular world. It’s all a step in this direction. It’s an evolutional step of the experience economy.

Related trends

• Experiences

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’.

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

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.

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.

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.