Signals of Change

My Private Web SoC327

New products and services are allowing World Wide Web users to customize Web interfaces, access channels, and functionality to an unprecedented degree. Will the Web lose its universality?

Carbon Labeling Needs Standards SoC328

Governments, manufacturers, and retailers have launched carbon-labeling efforts across the globe to document the carbon dioxide emissions associated with particular products. Efforts to display carbon-footprint information on products have the potential to raise awareness among consumers of corporate efforts to address climate change. But a lack of consistency and uniformity in the measures in use to calculate carbon emissions is a problem.

The New Science SoC329

The traditional scientific method, based on logic-driven models and theories, is experiencing competition from investigative processes that depend on statistical analysis of massive amounts of data. Google, for instance, doesn't know languages or language theory but can translate languages quite nicely.

Gaming Skills SoC330

An increasing number of companies are interested in the skills that people develop while participating in online games. Online gaming skills inform corporations about potential customers, future employees, and success at newly emerging online business processes.

The Fine Art of Choosing SoC331

Neuroscientists, sociologists, and philosophers are questioning long-held fundamental assumptions about how people make choices. Some researchers claim that conscious reasoning is simply an attempt to justify a decision that a person has already made on the basis of other criteria.

The Ubiquitous (and Talented) Digital Display SoC332

Solutions Research Group predicts that U.S. consumers will, on average, spend eight hours a day using some kind of display screens by 2013. Companies that aren't up on the technology, psychology, and sociology of accessing, informing, interacting with, and serving consumers via screen displays of various sorts run the risk of losing out to the competition.

Insights

More than a Car D08-2580

The highly competitive nature of the auto industry in combination with rapid advances in sensor, computing, and networking technologies has led to a situation in which a multitude of applications offer the car buyer endless options in luxury, safety, comfort, and increasingly, real-time access to all types of information. Just in the year 2007, consumers saw a dramatic expansion of connectivity capabilities for their cars in terms of navigation systems and the ability to link external electronic devices to dashboard electronics systems. Cars have always been more than simply the means to move from one place to another. But as technology and economic pressures accelerate the evolution of cars, people and society begin to interact with vehicles in new and different ways. These new ways of interacting will transform how consumers think of their cars and how they identify with them. This study identifies some of the new technologies that are transforming how consumers think of their cars as new applications of those technologies emerge in the areas of safety, health, the environment, fuel efficiency, and autonomous vehicle capabilities. Author: Kimberly H. Wiesbrock. 9 pages.

Scan™ Meeting Digest: 20 August 2008 Meeting D08-2581

This document is a digest of the Scan™ abstract clusters that participants in the 20 August 2008 Scan meeting identified. The digest includes a description of the Scan process for people who have never attended a Scan meeting, a list of the clusters that meeting participants identified, and a one-page description of each cluster's premise and supporting abstracts. The document has active links that allow the reader to access the supporting abstracts for each cluster in Scan's online abstract database. The document also has links to previously published Scan documents relating to the particular cluster. Clusters of abstracts for this August meeting included death to boredom; water, food, and energy trade-offs; biology versus biotech; the cost of living; individualism and the greater good; hidden costs of technology; swarm stuff; humans and robots relating; getting older, wiser, and fired; gaming our way to HAL; and performance versus profitability. Compiler: Aster Peng. 35 pages.

Calendar

Scan™ Abstract Meetings

Scan abstract meetings (in which SRIC-BI [now SBI] staff participate in a free-form discussion of current Scan abstracts) are open for client observation/participation on:

• 22 October 2008 at 9:00 am
• 21 January 2009 at 9:00 am.
• 18 March 2009 at 9:00 am
• 20 May 2009 at 9:00 am
• 22 July 2009 at 9:00 am
• 23 September 2009 at 9:00 am.

Please contact your SRIC-BI (now SBI) marketing representative to schedule participation in any of the Scan Abstract Meetings.