icFutures
Summary
Buying in expertise to help with the horizon scanning aspects of technology development is increasingly seen as a cost effective solution to in-house time and expertise shortages. It also brings in a fresh set of eyes and ears. This will be of particular interest to people who work in education, government and the public sector, and creative industries.
Technology futures
Whether you're preparing a strategic positioning paper or you just want to map a technical environment, keeping up with technology developments is time consuming, and, if you're not a technologist yourself, can be daunting. Technology changes so quickly, and trying to anticipate the impact of new and potentially disruptive technologies often seems to be more about social and market forces than pure technical capability.
But the trajectory of technology application and uptake is not arbitrary. Behind the scenes there are 'hard science' issues that constitute some of the non-negotiable factors of technology development. Understanding these sorts of science questions helps to cool some of the hot air that often circulates around the discussion of technology.
Intelligent Content provides future-watching services for clients from a wide range of industries. We often combine this with our research and publishing expertise to provide extremely high quality documentation that can be used for policy setting and strategic decision-making. So far, we have produced a range of different documentation on subjects as diverse as the impact of Internet technologies on the TV and film industries, RFID, Web 2.0, VoIP, Location-based services, Semantic Web technologies, the sustainability of open source software, the future of advanced display technologies, and hand-held computing.