How long will Japan continue to drive technological innovation? For years I have made my pilgrimage here to see the next generation of the cool, the shiny and the super-advanced. Lately, I'm no longer sure. Hanging out in Tokyo is always a strangely mesmerising experience. Like some alien artifact, the city itself is both impossibly futuristic and yet beguiling in its retro contradictions. Beneath tomorrow's gleaming skyscrapers glide yesterday's Toyota Crown taxis, with their 'SuperDeluxe' badging and white lace seat covers. It is a striking contrast. Amid the neon billboards and blinking red lights of rooftops, the freakish and the familiar blend with equal aplomb.

In a small outdoor cafe in Shibuya, I caught up with Dr Serkan Toto - who is Techcrunch's Tokyo based correspondent on all things Japanese, mobile and gadget wonderful. We had a terrific discussion about the local market, and a few things resonated with me. Firstly, mobile. With its tiny advanced phones, QR codes, e-wallets and content ecosystem - Japan has led the mobile world for the last decade. That's starting to change. The iPhone, which borrows so much from Japan in its design and execution has, after a slow start, managed to now take nearly 5% of the local market with an estimated 3 million phones.

Now that they have it, I'm certain the Japanese will do interesting things with the Apple platform. They have a tendency to see things in a different way. Take for example, the Tokyo N building, covered in QR codes that lets you see people tweeting floor by floor as an augmented reality application. Another interesting augmented reality application is Sekai Camera, fast growing popular with local Japanese users. The application now features a cool gaming hook which allow people to remotely virtual assault devices that attack unsuspecting users in geo-tagged locations.

That said, I'm not sure how much disruptive innovation will continue to come from Japan in the mobile space. Following Samsung's decision to create the Bada platform, NTT Docomo have also announced their own attempt to compete with Apple and Android. If this was 1989 and we were talking about PC operating systems, they might stand a chance. But there is a new innovation dynamic at play in the mobile space, and my gut instinct is that it will be at the bottom of the pyramid.

I'm writing the sequel to Futuretainment, and my new focus is technological innovation in the BRIC countries. I've come to believe that constraint is the mother of invention - especially when applied to the magic of large numbers (big domestic population, fast growing middle classes, rising literacy levels, growing export markets, falling technology prices). Immediately prior to my trip to Tokyo, I spent a month in Brazil and Latin America. There is a real contrast between the kind of grassroots technological innovation you are seeing in the BRIC countries and the brilliant, but closed loop ingenuity that has traditionally come out of Japan.

That's not to say that Japan will not play a key role in technology in the next decade. One area in which they will continue to excel is robotics. It's hard to articulate just how much the Japanese love robots. Yesterday I was walking around Akihabara, Tokyo's electronics district. I marveled at small robot shops that sell highly advanced toy robots that cost thousands but will let you compete in martial arts and soccer games. At the new Gundam robot cafe, the line snaked around the block. And not surprisingly, they are also morally ambiguous on cybernetic pop culture characters like Darth Vader, who currently features in a bizarre viral campaign from NTT Docomo. Japan is the one country in the world where they plan to solve their aging population crisis through robot helpers and companions.

Serkan had an interesting observation on this point. The Japanese religion Shinto is based on a principle of Animism - all things have a spirit. Like a Kabbalistic Golem, to create a robot is to literally breathe life into a piece of technology. Not so in the West. For like Tony Stark in Iron Man, we have a different vision. We dream of turning ourselves into machines.

I was hesitant to write this post. After all, the last thing the world needs right now is yet another burnt offering to the Jesus Tablet by an Apple fanboy. But in all the praise, whining, worship and ennui that characterised last week's coverage of the iPad's launch - something was missing. In my view, the difference between whether the iPad becomes a genre changing device, or just a tech geek curio like the Apple TV or the Mac Book Air has little to do with hardware or design, and everything to do with how users end up doing with it. And that, quite frankly, is still very much a mystery. So selfishly, I'd like to propose five ways that Steve's new toy might change my life - or at the very least, improve my day.

1. Reducing the Infovore Chore

If you are reading this, you may well be an information addict. Information addicts, or 'infovores' as I like to call them - are curious creatures. Similar, actually to the largest members of the class Oligochaeta - or specifically, earthworms. Unlike most people I know, earthworms actually improve their environment through consumption. Dead leaves in one end, rich fertile soil out the other. Consuming content is like that too. Infovores spend most of their day reading, tagging, classifying, twittering, posting, blogging and sharing. They take isolated bits of content and through their act of processing it create metadata, structure and discoverability. Spending your days doing that kind of task is not only thankless, but hunched over a laptop - somewhat uncomfortable. And so the first thing I thought when I watched Jobs ease back in his armchair during his keynote, was the significance of posture. The ideal position for actively consuming content is not a lean forward to screen (PC) or a lean back at a screen (TV) but a lean back with a screen (Tablet). And preferably in an original Eames recliner.

2. The Third Screen

Anyone who has experienced the joy of using two screens simultaneously can never go back to a solitary display existence. With multiple displays you can have your work on one screen and Facebook distractions on the other, you can open lots of windows at once and scatter them carelessly around your workplace like clothes in a teenager's bedroom. And for some creative tasks, like editing photos and videos - it is almost impossible to do them without visual duality. In my view, the iPad represents the opportunity to add a third screen to the mix. The extra real estate, while nice, is not the point. Suddenly a contract arrives that needs your signature. Imagine being able to drag a document off your monitor and straight onto your pad, you sign it and then drag it onto a contact in your address book. It is emailed directly. A screen connected iPad would allow you to interact with content in a more visceral way - just like a graphics tablet for designers.

3. A Social Remote

I was at a party recently when I realised that the most useful thing on my iPhone was an application i barely used. Conversation at dinner had flagged, and the evening was fast accelerating into polite banality. Fortunately my iPhone was already paired to the host's wireless network, and with a few clicks I was able to access his iTunes music collection - select a new song, use Apple Genius to automatically complete the playlist and then turn up the volume to a boredom banishing decibel level. Party fixed. The iPad should be able to take this one step further. You should be able to use it like a social remote. Leave an iPad on your coffee table and people can pick it up and select upcoming songs like in a Karoke bar, or access their cloud based music collections from home, or simply program some videos and images to appear on the panel display in the living room. If nothing else, it will bring new meaning to the concept of fighting over the remote.

4. The Prestige

In one of my favourite films about magic, Michael Caine's character explains that it's not enough just to trick people, you need to disorient their very sense of reality. And that's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part he calls "The Prestige". When you give speeches for a living, 'The Prestige' is something you also think about. How do you wow people using technology in a way that's not a gimmick but upends their sensory awareness? Using your iPhone to change Keynote slides is not cool. Using your iPad to interact in real time with data, shapes, images and simulations could be. Presentation slides are static things. I'd love to be able to use a tablet to bring life to my visual back drops.

5. Show and Tell 

In a similar but more intimate vein, a tablet computer is the perfect tool for impromptu pitch sessions. If you are photographer with a portfolio, a scientist with a 3D simulation of a DNA strand, an architect with a blueprint, a producer with a film idea or even a entrepreneur with a business model - being able to walk into a room with a flat screen that allows for dynamic interaction and play - is far more involving than a standard presentation on a laptop. As the Hollywood scriptwriters say - show don't tell. Elevators rides will never be the same again.

Well, that's my wishlist. Let's see by the end of the year whether those little application developer elves bring me a little Tablet inspired happiness or I just end up on Santa's naughty list again. Anyway, enough about me. What do you want the iPad to do?
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The first question my publisher asked me was why a book and not a blog? Three years ago when I started working on Futuretainment, that was already a tough question to answer. With eBooks now on the crest of critical mass, it hasn't got any easier. Last week, my book hit the shelves. Although you can buy it on Amazon, you can't read it on a Kindle. In fact, with 300 pages of illustrations, original photographs and custom designed typography - it is about as Kindle friendly as a bathtub. That was a deliberate decision on my part, but it comes at a time when the very concept of a book is changing.

This Christmas, a very large number of people will recieve their first eReader. I have no doubts it will kickstart a transformation of the publishing industry. It happened with DVD players, digital cameras and MP3 players. Now, it is going to happen to books. Amazon have finally released a global edition of their Kindle which allows wireless book delivery in over 100 countries. Sony has been busy too - introducing a sexy eReader integrated with Google's book platform, while Apple's long awaited messiah tablet is mere months away. If nothing else, there will soon be a generation of school children who get to grow up without being disabled by weightlifting a satchel of text books to class every day.

None of this spells the end of books and book writing. Quite the contrary. There are two aspects to any book. First, there is the book as an informational construct. Put simply - an arrangement of words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters. However in our attention drained world of 140 characters, this construct increasingly boils down to a simple image - the long tail, the tipping point or the black swan. Despite fervent claims to the contrary, the vast majority of people don't actually read books. They consume metaphors and debate in status updates.

Fortunately, there is also a second aspect of books - 'thingness'. Whether a Sumerian stone tablet, an Egyptian papyrus, an illuminated Medieval manuscript or just a pulp paperback - there is a physical side of books which has its own life. Here is where eReaders will attack. Dead trees are an inefficient form of information transmission. From now on, to survive as an object, books will need to serve a greater function than communication. In times past, the wealthy lined their houses with leather bound rare editions. Expedient booksellers would literally sell knowledge by the metre. After all, a library of physical books was part of the symbology of money and power. We may soon come full circle.

For all of these reasons, I embarked on the journey of trying to create my own book. While writing a blog can give you influence and notoriety, a book has a sense of completeness which a series of online posts can never achieve. Moreover to write about the digital revolution required some distance from the immediacy of online chatter in order to make sense. I knew from both my days at Jupiter Research, and also working for the Murdochs at Newscorp that the Internet was changing every aspect of how lived. But as much as I liked gadgets, the revolution was not being led by computer innovation. In fact, the most profound changes were taking place because consumers were changing the way they behaved. That meant thinking less like a technologist, and more like an anthropologist.

I had encounted the first glimpses of these disruptive forces while advising media companies in Asia - savvy and socially networked teenagers in China, Japan and Korea armed with advanced mobile phones, fast wireless broadband, multiple virtual avatars and a cavalier approach to copyright - they were the forerunners of entirely new type of consumer. As tough as it was for traditional businesses to understand - anyone born after the introduction of the first web browser in 1994 was quite simply unlike any generation before it. They had never known a world without the Web, and so never knew a world where they couldn't get any piece of content, on any device, at any time. And importantly, with a hat tip to the Mayan's for predicting a civilisation changing event taking place in the next few years - in 2012 that generation would all turn 18.

Of course, if I had known just how hard it would be to create a visual book - I might have indeed stuck to blogging. But as they say, there is a certain boldness in naiveté. With a first draft of my manuscript, I approached the iconic designer Vince Frost. Vince had recently opened a studio in Australia, after a successful career in the UK where he had been one of the youngest ever directors at the legendary design powerhouse Pentagram. One of the first aesthetic challenges we hit when planning the book was creating a future forward look that wouldn't date.

The solution lay in the past. The design of the fifties and sixties had a clean, directional look that was at once futuristic and yet, being nearly a half century old, dislocated from contemporary views of tomorrow. Some of our sources of inspiration included the little known Swiss designer Hans Hartmann, Giovanni Pintori's designs for Olivetti, the Latvian literary magazine Jauna Gaita, and the iconography of the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Vince and his team did an incredible job on the visual look of the project, right down to the imposing f cut out of book's front cover and a website which integrated social media in mesmerising melange of animation and video. As the project went forward, we used the Web to colloborate. I scanned and uploaded photos taken with my old school Leica M6 on 35mm film, and on the other side of the world, Vince's designers accessed the high resolution photos from Flickr.

I ran into an old friend of mine recently who told me that as an author the best possible moment is when you see your first book in your favourite book store. I smiled, and asked him whether that was really better than, as he has, seeing a royalty check for your ten millionth book sold. He just winked.

In ten years we will still have books, but they will serve a different purpose to what they do today. The Japanese may well invent an eReader which emits the faint smell of paper to soothe those who yearn for the tactile romance of print. Because, as much as I love my Kindle, it is a marriage of convenience. My true mistress will always be books. The smell of print, and the sensual touch of high quality paper will never fail to seduce me. And I can only hope that my book might elicit the same response in you.

There has always been something alluring about the myth of the creative advertising genius. A Mad Man style maven sitting in a palatial corner office, twirling a pencil and then devising a diabolical way to sell more cigarettes, cars or potato chips. But the new media landscape has made a mockery of that. It used to be enough to make ads that people remembered when they watched them. Now, being a great creative means being smart enough to ensure people watch them at all.

Early this year, I spoke at PromaxBDA Europe - a TV marketing conference in the Czech Republic. Prague is a beautiful city. Look outside your window and you will be rewarded with an exquisite gothic skyline marred only by a single building — the Žižkov TV tower. When I asked about it, I was told that the Soviets thought that if they beamed out a strong enough TV signal, they could blanket out any competing programming from Western countries. It was a cunning plan and quite possible in a world where television had a monopoly on moving pictures and sound in households. For the last 50 years or so, you could literally buy people’s attention. Now, it’s not so easy.

On the Internet, there is no concept of prime time. You can program television, but when online people discover and consume content, it is often because it has been sent to them by other people they know. Whether a tweet on Twitter, a blog post on Wordpress or a shared link on Facebook, the most influential distribution assets now are not broadcast networks but rather audience networks.

Consider the recent transformation of the social media space. Social networks have evolved from an orgy of self-expression to brand communication channels and tools of political influence. The new prize is realtime search. Traditional search is great for finding non-time-sensitive material, but if you want to know what people are saying and thinking right now about your brand, TV show or anything else, you need to be able to dip into the live stream of social chatter and link sharing.

From a creative perspective, real-time search creates a unique challenge. Stunning art direction is useless if no one actually watches your ad. In a world of audience networks, people will only forward your content to their friends and followers if it makes them look smarter or cooler by doing so. Their brand, not yours is at stake. You would be surprised how few marketers take that into account and are left wondering when their viral campaigns are socially vaccinated before they get off the ground.

Funnily enough, one of the best examples of smart social creativity this year came from far North Australia. Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World” campaign took three Grand Prix awards at the Cannes advertising awards this year. The campaign, which was ostensibly just promoting a caretaker job on Hamilton Island, generated more than AU$332 million in media coverage, 34,684 video entries from 197 countries and eight million site visits with an average of eight minutes and 15 seconds spent on the site per visitor. What made the campaign so effectively viral was not how it looked or where the ads were placed, but rather the power of its core idea. After all, who wouldn’t want to get paid to hang out on a desert island? Great ideas are like social candy to consumer networks.

Social media doesn’t mean the death of TV advertising, but it does place it into context. Broadcast is a powerful medium for rapidly raising awareness, but the reality of media fragmentation means that to get real engagement requires your customers to do the distribution for you. And that, quite frankly, is not easy. The trick of turning audiences into advocates requires more than just savvy media planning or bribing people with free iPods.

It takes true creative genius.

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It's not hard to run late. Time is a more fluid concept that you might think. And I'm not talking about relativity. Before time became enslaved to an ensemble of atomic clocks around the world, it was tied to an official chronometer in Greenwich kept in synch to assist maritime navigation. This accounts for those references to GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time that turn up in those odd little meeting request messages dispatched by Outlook. Not that I paid much attention. Even when I owned a watch, I had little concept of a universal constant. Periodically when I turned up to get my hair cut, the clock in the salon was always five minutes fast. So naturally that meant I was always late and my hairdresser always yelled at me. I seriously considered synching my clocks to his one. His mean time was considerably meaner than that of Greenwich.

But my hairdresser had a point. Whatever the universal time might say, it is irrelevant unless the people meeting up have the same basis of measurement. Consider what happened during the French Revolution. On November 24, 1793, a decree of the Convention Nationale introduced a decimal division of time. After that point, if you were to ask a fellow revolutionary in Paris what the time was, they might have answered seventy five minutes past six. Naturally confusion abounded. Many watches created during that period had a double display of both classical and revolutionary time. Unfortunately like the Revolution itself, the temporal schizophrenia was also shortlived. After 18 months, clocks went back to normal. And the French found other things to be uniquely French about.

Francophiles were not the last to meddle with clockwork. Despite what you might think - the word Swatch was not originally intended as a contraction of Swiss (Made) Watch, but rather Second Watch - a fun, casual accessory to your main time keeping device. In the late nineties, right after the first Internet boom - the Swatch company decided to re-invigorate some of the spirit of the decimal revolution and introduce Swatch Internet Time or Beat Time. Beat Time divided the day into 1000 .beats with @000 being midnight and @500 being noon. Controversy abounded, not least because being very European about the whole thing - the Swiss chose Central European Time rather than Coordinated Universal Time as the basis of the system. But the bigger problem was, just like in the French Revolution, no one could be bothered to learn a new system just to hang out with each other more effectively.

In a way I wished they had. As someone who lives nomadically in the cracks between timezones - my calendars and conference calls are always in a state of constant confusion. It finally made me think - if time is the primary tool we rely on for organising our interactions with other members of society - how can we make clocks more social? Should a clock not be a social network, or a social network not be a clock? I pondered the thought as I watched the Japanese fashion brand Uniqlo's human clock and quirky calendar. With it's crazy Pachinko sound track, here was a clock that gave you a sense of the life behind the minutes and seconds that ruled us.

So what if your watch instead of just telling you it was 3pm, also informed you what your work colleagues had planned for the next few hours, or what your friends were planning on doing at 8pm when you all finished work. We all have a forward light cone of things that we might do. Sharing this information makes more sense from the perspective of social co-ordination, than simply adhering to a systema of standardised timekeeping. At the The Long Now Foundation, they are making plans to build a clock that will last 10,000 years. Like the monks in Neal Stephenson's Anathem - it is a clock designed to give us a deeper perspective of historical time extending far beyond our impressions of the immediate moment. I like the romance of the idea, but for me - a clock is only useful if it can give me a sense of possible futures not extended pasts.

Whoever said there was no time like the present was quite mistaken. There is no time in the present. Like a garden of forking paths, it would be nice to know what I could do with the next minute rather than simply be aware of it's passing. Rather than historical time, it would be social time. Time enough, you would hope, for me also to think about buying a new watch.