The Future Place Blog

Time Lapse Video of Shunjuku's Tower Blocks

I saw a link to this video on Boing Boing. It shows a time lapse video, spanning 35 years, of the skyline of Shinjuku, a central area of Tokyo. This is the sort of change that is happening across many cities in China at the moment, but in China it is happening faster - more accelerating change.

Are mobile phones 20 years old?

The BBC has an article celebrating 20 years of mobile phones. The event they are referring to is the signing of the GSM agreement, which went on to produce GSM (2nd generation mobile phones). The article also quotes the figures that it took 12 years for the number of GSM phones to reach 1 billion, and 30 months for it to reach 2 billion.

More typically, people tend to date the first mobile phone network to 1981, with the Nordic Mobile Telephone network. With the first GSM network being in Finland in 1991.

But the key takeaway, for me, from the article is to remind us of the accelerating change we are going through. When I started working in the Market Research industry in 1978, there were no mobile phones, no laptops, no faxes, and the only personal computers were Apple IIs, with a memory of 64K. Until about 10 years ago most of the world had never seen a telephone, within a few years we will find that most of the world's population own a mobile phone.

Audio cassettes, another sign of shift

The BBC have an article talking about how UK retailer Currys has announced that it will stop stocking blank audio cassettes. Last year Currys sold just 100,000 tapes, in 1989 they sold 83 million.

Recordable tapes were first introduced in 1963 and have had a pretty good run. It is unlikely that DVDs and MP3 players will last anything like as long.