Red Herring reports that VeriChip, a firm which specialises in RFID tags for human implantation, intends to file for an IPO. In 1993 when I was involved in the Reed Elsevier Innovation Programme with Strategos one of the more outlandish discontinuities we came up with was the move to chip everything, including humans. This seemed to be hard to take at the time, but it’s interesting how, bit by bit, the story is unfolding. The Red Herring article goes on to say that the RFID industry is slated to become a multi-billion dollar industry over the next five years.

Co-incidentally, CIO Insight reports at the same time that Kimberly-Clark, the paper products giant, is investing millions in a factory to prove the uses of RFID – even though it is not expected to bear fruit for a couple of years.

This is one of the more pointless ways to spend the past 28 and a half years.

An interesting and inspiring online “leader article” by John Robinson, editor of the News and Record sets out to explain how the traditional newspaper is going to use its websites to expand citizen journalism. It sets out very clearly what it believes local newspapers will need to do to continue to be relevant in a Web 2.0 world. There are clearly lessons here for all publishers…

A few things I would like to see in 2006:

1. Longer life batteries for laptops – 10 hours would be useful
2. Large -size flash memory – say 40GB
3. Gadget makers standardise on one data connection and one power supply – it drives me crazy that my house is so full of adapters and cables

Kurzweil predicts, on current trajectories, that $1,000 will buy you a PC with as much processing power as a human brain by 2020. Given that kind of time frame, anything goes!

Two of my recent posts have talked about the prospects for online advertising revenue in 2006. The first suggested that 2006 could prove to be the ““tipping point” for online advertising. The second suggested that there could be a substantial rise in absolute terms in the coming year.

I have a strong feeling that traditional publishers are not factoring this possibility into their thinking; I saw an internal projection the other day from a senior advertising working party in which they were predicting that the total amount of online advertising would overtake conventional print advertising by, I think, 2014!

The basis of this assumption is a linear interpretation of current (internal) trends. This could prove to be badly wrong.

I’ve just finished reading Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near and he makes a strong point about the dangers of applying a linear view if, in fact, we are looking at something with exponential characteristics.

Given the notorious difficulty of forecasting this market (Veronis Suhler forecast a market of $9.9bn in the US by 2005; Forrester have just put the figure at $14.7bn) an open mind is probably required.

If we are, indeed, at the tipping point or the “knee of the curve” as he calls it, our future planning assumptions could be dangerously out of kilter with reality.

At the very least, we should have a couple of alternative views of the future…

According to a report by Bloomberg.com online advertising is set to rise by 32% next year.

Jeff Jarvis again, but this time on whether news desks for print and online should be separate or combined. He favours combined, perhaps surprisingly.

BuzzMachine has an interesting take on “the Digg society”, an ecosystem which has formed around www.digg.com, a collaborative news site.