A quick post to note the launch of Future Scanner, a site which scours the net for articles which include predictions with dates attached to them, and then organises them by year (up to 2020, and then ‘beyond’) and by category. It is still in beta-test.


The site will win no prizes for design, but the material gathered so far is reasonably interesting, even if tends towards the sci-tech end of the spectrum where road maps enourage (over) confidence about future ooutcomes. By 2015, for example, photovoltaics will be cost-competitive, 75% of Americans will be overweight, and there will be robot wars. Quite a lot of the sdources are news outlets (BBC, CNN, msnbc).

Future Scanner is designed as a community site – which it hopes wioll improve quality and push the best material to the front:

[T]he Future Scanner … essentially scans the web for the best future-focused content (predictions by experts, discoveries that will impact future events, product prototypes, industry forecasts, useful resources, etc.) and then sorts it by future Year and Category. When Community members locate these types of cool links, they tag them accordingly and submit them to site via their personal accounts. Other users then vote on the material they find most interesting or beneficial and the best content ends up being featured on the front page.

[Thanks to AdLab]

Update: Maree Conway has a good post on Future Scanner at her Futures Think blog.