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Stick­ing with pre­dic­tions for the future from Edison’s insights last week, here are some more near-future articles.

From aug­mented music videos, to wear­able trans­porta­tion, in the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate (sic), it’s great to know there are peo­ple out there who still get paid to think out­side the box (also sic). Here are some of the results.

Acti­vate the Future

Thought Lead­er­ship. This is a phrase that gets thrown around more than the ubiq­ui­tous “cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate”, but what does it actu­ally mean?

Some com­pa­nies feel that thought lead­er­ship is throw­ing out a white paper, or a case study and watch­ing the col­lec­tive audi­ence nod their heads in approval and mar­vel at their insights.

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So here’s me think­ing that pub­lish­ers have really missed an oppor­tu­nity when it comes to pro­vid­ing guar­an­teed leads from their web properties.

Admit­tedly, whitepa­per pro­grammes work well when you’re try­ing to gen­er­ate a list of names. But, some­times that’s all they are – a list of names who are often unre­cep­tive when followed-up by tele­mar­ket­ing. Surely all of these “names” are active on the publisher’s web­site – they’ve been vis­it­ing, review­ing con­tent, con­tribut­ing in forums, etc. But all of this infor­ma­tion isn’t cap­tured when they fill-in a form and the data is passed on to the client.

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It seems that the world is hold­ing its breath. I’m not sure why, but I have a def­i­nite sense of big things to come in 2011.

I’m not just talk­ing about the next big film, either. This year will bring us the next Apple toys — includ­ing the iPad II & the iPhone 5 — which have fan­boys (and girls) already froth­ing at the mouth, we’ll see the emer­gence of (prac­ti­cal) 3D prod­ucts, Andriod’s next Hon­ey­comb — hur­rah! — (real) high-speed broad­band and elec­tric cars.

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Music in adver­tis­ing has been around for a long, long time. Long before the days of Dell singing about lol­lipops and Gwen Ste­fani sell­ing HP print­ers.

From a time when prod­ucts were pro­moted by street singers, right through to a drum-playing gorilla, music has held the impor­tant role of enter­tain­ing con­sumers in the hope that a catchy, mem­o­rable tune might lead to a sale, or at least an increase in brand awareness.

Of course there are many ways to encour­age some­one to buy a prod­uct, but his­tory has shown that incor­po­rat­ing the right song can be the dif­fer­ence between an ad’s suc­cess or fail­ure.

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Wel­come to The Future! Yes. It is now 2011.

The orig­i­nal Back to the Future film is 26 years old, The Ter­mi­na­tor is 27 (and no longer in charge of Cal­i­for­nia) and the Smurfs are push­ing 30.*

Ana­lysts are also pre­dict­ing some pretty major changes in the way we play and work online, with social media in all its forms and guises lead­ing the pack.

And now, as a spe­cial New Year present from the UK Gov, the 2.5% VAT increase should be just the thing to get you over the Christmas-overindulgence-blues and ensure a post-holiday diet con­sist­ing only of dis­counted tinned food­stuffs.

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