Smart Dust

What are the forthcoming strategic technology trends that will shape and affect businesses, governments, education, and media this year, and for years to come?

Each year quantitative futurist Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute releases a Tech Trends Report. In this episode, The Works' Douglas Nicol and Norton Rose Fulbright's Nick Abrahams discuss the most interesting trends from the report and give their take on how it will be applied to society.

They'll cover everything from the how your DNA could change the way we shop to a new version of the Turing Test.

And as a bonus, this episode also includes last year's Smart Dust interview with Amy Webb, recorded after the release of her 2019 Tech Trends report. It provides an interesting insight into how the world has changed since the last report.

You can download the key takeaways from the 2020 Tech Trends report here: https://bit.ly/2vpKwPJ 

Smart Dust is produced and edited by Daresay, the content specialists: https://daresay.com.au/ 

Hosted by Douglas Nicol, Strategy Partner, The Works: https://theworksagency.com.au/ 

And Nick Abrahams, Global Head of Strategy and Innovation, Norton Rose Fulbright: https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en-au/people/120114 

Novelist and UTS's Creative Intelligence & Innovation course director Bem Le Hunte joins The Works' Douglas Nicol and Norton Rose Fulbright's Nick Abrahams to discuss what the concept of creative intelligence actually means on a day-to-day basis.

As well as heading up the degree program, Bem's first novel, The Seduction of Silence, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2001. Her second novel – There, Where The Pepper Grows - was published in 2005.

Bem takes Douglas and Nick through how creativity and innovation can make a better world and use creativity to solve problems across a range of disciplines and how we can use our own creativity to find and solve business problems.

Smart Dust is produced and edited by Daresay, the content specialists: https://daresay.com.au/

Hosted by Douglas Nicol, Strategy Partner, The Works (https://theworksagency.com.au/) and Nick Abrahams, Global Head of Strategy and Innovation, Norton Rose Fulbright (https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en-au/people/120114).

Bem Le Hunte's website: http://www.bemlehunte.com/

UTS Creative Intelligence & Innovation degree: https://www.uts.edu.au/future-students/transdisciplinary-innovation/undergraduate-courses/creative-intelligence-and

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Three trends which will help define 2020: Instagram shopping deep fakes and space tourism. The Works' Douglas Nicol and Norton Rose Fulbright's Nick Abrahams discuss how these will shape the world around us in this year's first edition of Smart Dust.

With Instagram continuing to shift towards an ecommerce platform, Douglas and Nick show off their knowledge of the fashion and cosmetic industries to demonstrate how influencer partnerships with brands will continue to evolve, but also how brands are using Instagram as a global shop front, including one particularly interesting example from India.

With the 2020 US presidential election set to be characterised by more misinformation, deep fakes are set to be one of the biggest battleground in fake news. What are deep fakes? Quite simply, they're videos edited so individuals are on camera saying words they never uttered in real life. And with researchers at Israel's Open University producing a tool that offers deep fakes as a service, how will we know what is real and what is fake? Nick and Douglas discuss the implications.

Finally, Virgin Galactic's recent IPO shows that space tourism is set to arrive in this decade. With tickets starting at a quarter of a million dollars, will travelling off this planet become tourism's hottest new ticket? Or with the no plane movement becoming a trend across Europe, will Richard Branson's pet project fail to get off the ground?

Smart Dust is produced and edited by Daresay, the content specialists: https://daresay.com.au/

Hosted by Douglas Nicol, Strategy Partner, The Works (https://theworksagency.com.au/) and Nick Abrahams, Global Head of Strategy and Innovation, Norton Rose Fulbright (https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en-au/people/120114).

Subscribe via: Spotify Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Stitcher

This episode covers food tech, gaming, and data, although not necessarily all combined. With the human population projected to hit 10 billion by 2050, it's clear we'll have problems feeding everyone. So how can food tech help, and when even fast food restaurants are offering plant based alternatives, how is this shifting how we consume food.

The podcast also looks at Fortnite - the gaming phenomenon that's also a smart marketing play, and discusses the implications of privacy and data collection by social media in light of The Great Hack and the political pressure on companies who collect and target us with our own data.

Hosted by Douglas Nicol and Nick Abrahams.

Produced by Daresay

http://daresay.com.au

Fred Schebesta is an iconic Australian entrepreneur, award-winning marketer, and media commentator. His company, Finder.com, is the world's foremost comparison website. Active in over 80 countries, Fred explains that it operates as a global – rather than Australian – company. 

On this episode of Smart Dust, Fred reflects on his company's incredible but challenging path to success. He explains how Finder.com overcame five Google penalties, and how he is no longer the business' 'ghost'.   

Fred also delves into the world of cryptocurrencies. He explains his latest business venture, HiveEx. The cryptocurrency brokerage firm predominantly communicates with customers via WhatsApp.

Paul X McCarthy is a technology consultant, speaker and author. His company, Online Gravity Consulting, is a global digital consulting firm. He is also the co-founder of League of Scholars, an enterprise looking at analytics in the research and innovation space. 

On this episode, we discuss one of Paul's greatest passions: the Australian startup sphere. He explains his particular interest in the next generation of computational linguistics, and the emergence of conversational artificial intelligence. 

Paul also provides insight into why he believes technology has rewritten the laws of economics, as he has concluded in his book, Online Gravity.

Amy Webb is a quantitative futurist, author and professor at the Stern School of Business at the New York University. She is also the founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute. The Institute is globally respected and recognised for their annual Tech Trends Report, which is now in its twelfth year of publication.

During this episode, Amy explains the importance of strategic forecasting and she provides insight into the four characteristics generally shared by technology trends. We also discuss Amy's claim that privacy is dead, and she explains the emergence of biometric camouflage. 

Amy then provides us with an in-depth explanation of how China utilises artificial intelligence. Her book, The Big Nine, is an investigation into artificial intelligence in nine major companies located across China and the United States.

This month on Smart Dust, we're talking to two robotics leaders from opposite ends of the globe, who are both pioneering the race to create 'human-like' robotics. First up is Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro, the director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University, Japan. Dr. Ishiguro has dedicated his life's work to create a robot that will be indistinguishablefrom that of a human and will eventually past the 'Turing Test'. Dr. Ishiguro also created a 'Geminoid', a robot that looks exactly like himself – where the Dr. claims to even feel phantom touches when people touch the 'Geminoid'. We also unpack the future of sociable robotics with Gabriel Skantze, chief scientist and co-founder of Furhat Robotics.  The Stockholm-based technology start-up has led the world is pioneering our interactions with AI by putting a face to the voice. Gabriel was the lead scientist and engineer on Furhat, the world's most 'sociable' robot, who communicates just like us humans by listening, speaking and sharing emotions. This podcast is produced by Daresay, for The Works and Norton-Rose Fulbright.

In this episode we talk to Wally Brill from Google who is a global expert in conversation design. Australia per capita is one of the fastest growing smart speaker markets in the world and this means our relationship with computing is changing. Talking is the new typing and this has profound implications for business and marketing. Wally is a leader in his field and shares insights and best practice for designing conversations with AI.   

This episode, we're talking to one of China's most influential executives, Bessie Lee. Bessie Lee is Founder of Withinlink, a China-based startup incubator and early-stage venture fund focused on MarTech. Prior to founding Withinlink, Lee was CEO of WPP China and at SXSW was one of the few speakers who got an 'encore' performance. This episode we discuss how the Chinese Government has created a national 'AI movement' to nurture technology investments, the rise of TikTok globally, how western companies can target the Chinese market and the normality of their 'big brother' government and its effect on data privacy.