If a stock market rally was a colour, what would it be? Strangely, enough there is a group of people on the planet with a condition who might have an idea. Synesthesia occurs in one in 10,000 people and is, at its most basic level - a blending and co-ordinating of the senses. Those with the capacity can literally ‘see’ sounds and ‘taste’ colours. The roll call of famous synesthetes includes Russian painter Kandinksy, physicist Richard Feynman, inventor Nikola Tesla, and founder of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett.

I was reminded of this phenomenon when I started playing with an interesting new iPad application this week called StockTouch. It takes a radically new approach to presenting stock movements and sectors - using colours and spiral patterns to visually demonstrate market movements. Thinking back to the revolutionary impact of ‘quants’ to stock trading in the late 70s, this app made me wonder whether in the future we would see new types of trading rooms with massive visual displays and synesthetic interfaces. It might take a math genius to write an equation that predicts market movements, but what about a savant that could look at a sea of colour and predict an impending credit crisis? Perhaps one day the world’s greatest funds manager will be an artist.

A key trend to track this year is social mining - the intelligent collation and cross-referencing of machine accessible data on your social graph and personal content. It is a controversial area and you can be sure the trouble will only escalate once the general public really understands how powerful these new data matching tools have become. Leaving aside the privacy issues for now - I’d advise you to spend some time thinking about how these technologies can be integrated into your business - and in particular your sales cycle.
Here are three tools to start with:

1. Connected
Connected is a Cloud based address book that connects and syncs with all of your potential sources contacts and leads. Once the system identifies duplicates and merges records you are left with a new contact database gleaned from your email address book, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even your mobile phone directory. Where Connected is smart - is that it begins monitoring these connections and sends you a daily email with useful communication triggers like job changes or impending birthdays.

2. Tout
If you currently use Mailchimp or a similar advanced newsletter distribution platform - you would be familiar with concepts like open rates, click throughs ratios and bounce reports. Tout takes these reporting concepts and combines it with web based templates. Connecting your web based CRM tool to it (e.g HighRise, Batchbook, CapsuleCRM) imports all of your sales leads as contacts. You can then begin firing off business development or follow up emails from your template list and then track which versions are the most successful. The team edition is particularly useful, as you can monitor how many of the emails your team are sending out are generating positive responses.

3. Rapportive
Rapportive is a magical addition to the Gmail experience. It uses social data from Rapleaf to automatically identify the people you are communicating with. If you are already connected with them on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn it will load up their picture and recent status updates in a right hand column - or alternatively will prompt you to connect with them. In a sense - it creates the kind of information rich, business focused social network from your email inbox that Google+ should be doing for you.

One of my favourite airports in the world is Charles De Gaulle in Paris. Its sweeping concrete lines and internal transport tubes seem to promise an optimistic super sleek future that even decades later, never seemed to quite materialise. Certainly, I’m sure the original designers of the airport would have sooner conceived of space faring jets docking by 2011, rather than having to herd flocks of discount airlines and their attendant rabble of dollar diving tourists. I’m not saying that the future is more likely to be easyJet than than Jetset - but what is interesting is how our perceptions of the ‘futuristic’ are really an embodiment of our hopes and fears about the present. You could almost argue that there is an archaelogy of the future just waiting to be explored.

Some time ago I came across a wonderful clip of Orson Welles narrating a documentary based on Alvin Toffler. From its psychedelic opening titles, to its melodramatic opening featuring Welles walking down an airport terminal smoking a cigar - it seeks to astonish with an array of now mundane statistics of rapid change. Of course, it is easy to laugh at yesterday’s future visions, but I wonder how well turgid web virals like ‘Did You Know?’ will hold up to scrutiny in ten years time?

Predicting the future is hard enough. But even more tricky is finding ways to talk about it. Futurists have to walk the precarious line between highlighting the forces that will genuinely change the word, and the ones that sound like they will. Imagine being a futurist fifty years ago and identifying penicillin, refrigeration and shipping containers as the three forces that would underpin modern civilisation. Neither very sexy nor a great theme for selling books - and even if you turned out to be right, no one would remember it. I’d argue that we still revere theorists like Marshall Mcluhan today, not because he accurately predicted the future - but because, like Andy Warhol - he managed to combine stylish self promotion with enough ambiguity, that even years later - we can adapt his slogans to whatever point we are trying to make. Future Schlock indeed.

One of the best exhibitions I have seen in a while was ‘L’Art De L’Automobile’ - a selection of stunning vehicles from the Ralph Lauren car collection in Paris. You will see the cars of your dreams - and I mean that literally. These are not the original cars as they rolled off their production lines. You may see a historic sports car, but from its unique colour, upgraded upholstery, and bespoke ornamentation - means that it was much built by Bugatti as finished by Ralph Lauren. The purists are enraged at the motoring sacrilege, but I was rather delighted. It reminded me of the wonderful ways that we imbue technology with design and materials that are emblematic of its underlying attributes. A car should look fast even when its standing still, it should look expensive even when we don’t know the price tag, and a sports car should look like a race car even when its built for fat, rich old men. And what is true for cars, is especially true for gadgets. 

Technological objects are by nature fetishistic. iPad, Blackberries, Android tablets - our devices in the modern age are our drowsing sticks, totems, and ritual wands. They make us feel more powerful, because they look powerful. I asked someone once in Turkey why people who couldn’t afford expensive smart phones spent months of salary on the latest branded device. In Ottoman times, my friend replied, when men met each other they would show each other the size of their knife or gun. And, he said with a wry smile - what else is a phone today but your weapon?

If I have learnt one thing from studying innovation in emerging markets it is that constraint is the mother of invention. When you are short of energy, money or resources - you are often forced to find solutions that are smarter, cheaper and more flexible. But there is another, darker example of constraint led innovation - tobacco marketing. As you can see from this photo I shot at the airport duty free the other day, Davidoff were more than a little inspired by Moleskine in their latest packaging design. Time for more regulation - the non-smokers and air puritans among you cry! But is there any point? The real issue in controlling Big Tobacco in the future will be not stamping out innovation but dealing with what consumers are already doing on their behalf. Social media is a minefield for tobacco regulators.

So far, the big brands have exercised caution about lighting up on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But in a sense, they haven’t needed to do anything. Search YouTube for references to Marlboro and you will find thousands of videos - none of them created by the brand themselves. Clips from movies, old Marlboro Man TV ads, and bizarrely enough - smoker fan videos. Equally disconcerting - growing membership numbers on consumer generated fan pages and forums. All of this demonstrates one simple fact - in a network connected world - marketing is less about what brands say to consumers, and more about what consumers say about brands to each other. In the future, banning cigarette marketing will prove increasingly futile. Already in many countries, packet warnings seem tepid, and at times, even counterproductive. In Istanbul I saw one packet with a picture of a beautiful woman and an empty baby stroller. The label helpfully proclaimed that smoking makes it harder to get your girlfriend pregnant. The ambiguity of that statement is fairly self evident!

So here’s the issue - you can try and stop Big Tobacco advertising, regulate their packaging and even force them to display their brands as generic texts - but the damage is done. The iconic metaphors of smoking - The Marlboro Man, Joe Camel and the millions of scenes in movies old and new - have taken on a life of their own. Like the artist Richard Prince’s re-photographs of smoking cowboy advertisements - our commercial unconscious is already full of the ghosts of prohibited brand icons roaming free in the landscapes of our mind. And can you really hope to ban consumers talking about the brands they love?