1. Content Network Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is great–search marketing reaches more people than Yellow Pages, and allows you to generate targeted leads, but what about optimizing for content? One company, Scienceops, uses their patent-pending algorithms to optimize for content. Contextual marketing is designed to produce data concerned with what the consumer is doing online when they change from a person shopping to a consumer buying. By optimizing for content the marketer gains deeper, extremely relevant, and highly marketable insights into the how, when, and what is needed to make a sale.

2. Approach the new world of technology and marketing with a lot of flexibility and agility in terms of project creation and project management. New applications are coming with lightening speed and today’s hot thing is tomorrow’s big bore, so a rapid pace of change is the norm. It’s frustrating but real to have to keep on such a learning curve.

3. Mobile Advertising. Search Engine Watch notes that “6.8 percent of all U.S. Web traffic occurred from mobile devices.”

4. Plan for the democratization of your brand. That is, the company has less and less control, while those formerly known as consumers (and now known as individual publishers of text and video to the web) have more and more control. So, you have to engage people in a more comprehensive way.

5. Interaction comes before transaction. Each day, the ability of people to interact with each other, with other customers, and with you increases. And each day this interaction takes on greater importance as the precursor to any transaction decision.

For more thoughts on marketing and the future see The future of marketing 2012 and beyond.

According to Wikipedia, “Memristor theory was formulated and named by Leon Chua in a 1971 paper.[4] In 2008, a team at HP Labs announced the development of a switching memristor based on a thin film of titanium dioxide.[5] These devices are being developed for application in nanoelectronic memories, computer logic, and neuromorphic computer architectures. In October 2011, the same team announced the commercial availability of memristor technology within 18 months, as a replacement for Flash, SSD, DRAM and SRAM. [7]”

Apparently memristors have the capacity to start up and shut down computers as if you were flicking a light switch on and off. And one unique characteristic of this technology is that, “Memristance of a material become more and more strong as its size reduces,” which means it may be most valuable in nanotechnology.

Once HP finishes its work on the commercial availability of memristor technology, it will be exciting to learn more about the useful applications that memristors can provide all of us.

The most recent edition of The Futurist magazine included The Best Predictions of 2011. Here are some that seem stranger to us than the others.

1. Thought Helmets. According to Gerwin Schalk, an Albany Medical College scientist, by the year 2020 we will have thought helmets. Though these helmets will probably not be for commercial use right away, Schalk is sure that at least “Soldiers will communicate with telepathic helmets.” It will be very interesting to see how these actually work. Once the technology is even more advanced will it be embedded into our brains so everyone can communicate without speaking?

2. Sleep learning. Great news! By 2030 you will apparently be able to study in your sleep! But, only at select locations. “Hotels will offer customers a selection of dreams as well as the opportunity to study and learn while they sleep.” It would be interesting to ask the Futurist who predicted this a few questions, such as: Will you be able to study any topic? Who will decide which topics (committing the perfect crime, kidnapping for dummies) are off limits to study?

3. No more days off. Bad news for students who love snow days. In the future “Schools won’t have days off for inclement weather anymore”. The idea is that all students will have access to internet and be able to attend class online. Is it plausible that all students will have web access and own a web-enabled device? Perhaps. But then again every young student who wants to take a day off to play in the snow will find a way to get around the rules by using any number of excuses that the school can’t necessarily check up on. How are you supposed to track every student who says it snowed so hard that their electricity went out?

4. Empty Oceans. By 2050 “Ocean-dwelling plant and animal species will disappear on a scale equal to the five great global extinctions of the past 600 million years,” according to the International Programme on the State of the Ocean. This pessimistic prediction assumes that people will stop taking action to mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions and continue to destroy the ocean. There is no doubt that the world needs to pay attention to creating a more sustainable planet, but predicting such a widespread extinction happening in the next 39 years is pushing the boundaries of plausibility. Needless to say, it wouldn’t hurt to start preserving what we have before it’s too late.

5. Holograms for everyone! By 2022 “Home entertainment centers could be playing movies and television shows as 3-D holographs, no television screen involved.” The components of 3-D Holographic technology have been around for a long time and have recently made some great improvements, but to get holographic products that are commercially usable in the next 11 years is going to be quite the challenge. Why? The issue is with finding more sensitive film. Film has been around since before 1890. Less than 35 years later, in 1922, we had the earliest confirmed 3-D film shown to an audience. Holography was invented 25 years later in 1947. Our technology is vastly more advanced now than in the early 1900s, yet it only took a span of 60 years to invent film, make it 3D and turn objects into holographic images. Now, more than 60 years later we have even better technology and 3-D holographic shows and movies are still just beyond our grasp (commercially). Judging by the numbers, we are long overdue for this prediction to come true.

Engineering:
Versabar VB10000
This rig remover can unearth an entire oil rig from under water in a few short hours and for a quarter of the price. The Versabar VB10000 is extremely necessary, as the U.S. has identified 1,800 rigs that have to be excavated within 10 years.

Green Tech:
Bio Soil Enhancers Forage Boost
These bio soil enhancers raise productivity and lower watering needs. Grass yields increase by 20% over standard fertilizer. Learn more about the inventors at AuroraAgra, LLC.

Wysips
The world’s first transparent photovoltaic film. Wysips turn almost anything into a power source. This film has thin strips filled with solar cells alternating with transparent areas, so it appears transparent has thousands of potential applications.

Health:
Diagnostics for All
All it takes is a drop of blood on a stamp-size paper chip and in 15 minutes a color will appear that indicates liver health. Diagnostics for All’s “chip lab” costs less than a penny to make and allows patients to pay about a nickel for treatment.

Avita/ReCell Spray-on-Skin
ReCell Spray-On-Skin grows cells quickly and applies new skin to a bad burn, helping it heal more quickly.

Aviation and Space:
Messenger
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab’s Messenger probe was the first spacecraft to enter Mercury’s orbit. The probe sent back the first close-up photos taken of Mercury since 1975.

Security:
Recon Scout XT
This bot is tough enough to be thrown into any environment, even through a window, beaming back to its handler live video footage.

Gadgets:
Eye-Fi Direct Mode
Eye-Fi SD cards do not need Wi-Fi to share photos and video from a camera on the Web. All you need is a location with cell service and you can download, upload and share through e-mail any photos you want.

Home Entertainment:
Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface
This 40-inch thin tabletop computer sees and responds to whatever gets placed on it.

Flying construction robots at the FRAC Centre, France

Now comes news via GizMag that the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France will host an exhibition entitled “flight assembled architecture. set to run from December 2, 2011 through February 19, 2012. The exhibit will feature a 6-meter tall structure, made of 1500 prefabricated modules, to be constructed by a fleet of small quadrocopters. The flying robots are “programmed to interact, lift, transport and assemble the final tower, all the time receiving commands wirelessly from a local control room.”

Assuming that the actual build process is successful, here is what the tower is to look like.

6-meter tall tower to be built by flying robots

The video of the robots in action, as designed by Raffaello D’Andrea, is pretty impressive to watch.

Even more powerful visualizations become possible when you add video effects, such as in the video below on world population, from NPR. (Side note: it is also interesting to click through to YouTube on this video and scan the comments – a rather amazing discussion on whether population is a problem or a solution (its a problem if you assume every person is entitled to a reasonable standard of living), and whether fast population growth somehow disproves evolution (I would say, probably not).

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist author, speaker, consultant, and Founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultationcontact Futurist.com.

We recently came across a quite wonderful video that explains the cloud in a way both clever and informative. Enjoy.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist author, speaker, consultant, and Founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultationcontact Futurist.com.

I was touched this week when I discovered his heartfelt and optimistic speculations, and his “3 wishes” that he recorded in this video on the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2007. He speaks very much to today.