Democratic Futurist

Welcome to the Democratic Futurist web site, a repository of thought-provoking predictions that are created, tracked, timed and assessed, by you, the reader. More about the concept behind the site here.

New on Democratic Futurist

23 Sep 2009 – Following some encouragement, I’m putting more effort into the site. See my latest ‘vision’, describing a new media service (‘the iJourno app) just waiting to be created by some enterprising individual! See it here.

13 June 2009 - There is now a new class of post, a ‘vision’. The purpose of this type of post is to allow the author a more artistic or creative expression of a prediction, utilising what is, in essence, a mini-story. This helps to embed some ideas in a wider context, to make them more real and to explore some of the associated ideas that relate to the core prediction. The first of these, entitled “Digital Immortality” is here and another describing a bad day after convergence here.

Selected Posts

Opinion : The Trouble with Prediction Markets – A short piece on why this site is not a prediction market, together some thoughts on why prediction markets are, at best, gambling sites and, at worst, irrelevant. See the post here.

Vision : Digital Immortality – A prediction in the form of a mini-story, a new format for this site. See the post here.

Prediction : Mobile Drives Adoption of Cloud – A suggestion that the use of mobile technologies and appliances will overcome the concerns over security, while driving everyday user behaviour in such a way as to make the tradition desktop PC an irrelevance. See the post here.

Successful Prediction : The First Apple iPhone App Store Millionare – A short prediction made in 2008 that it wouldn’t take long for some to make their first million by writing an application for Apple’s iPhone “App Store”. This seems to be the first demonstrably successful prediction. See the post here.

For more posts, use the categories on the side bar, or the search facilities.

Contributors and Authors are Welcome

I now feel that the concept behind the site is mature enough to experiment with allowing contributions from other authors. If you would like to contribute a prediction, vision or opinion, please contact me. To be clear, at this stage I reserve the right of editorial privilege, so may choose to use, edit or ignore any posts submitted for consideration. If you become a regular contributor, these constraints may change. Within these guidelines, I’d encourage you to have a go. There are billions of people with millions of ideas out there. You just might be one of them.

Seldon14