The Personal Information Economy

February: Nike caters for the Self-Quants

Sportswear brand Nike launches Nike+ Basketball, a digital experience that tracks, records and analyses every aspect of a player’s basketball game through a sensor in a shoe.

Key Development: Nike shows how data can evaluate and affect the performance of amateur and professional sportsmen.

May: Audi designs bike with self-quantifying technology

German car manufacturer Audi unveils its e-bike prototype featuring self-quantifying technology.

Riders can monitor performance statistics such as speed and energy consumption on the e-bike’s touchscreen computer and their iPhone.

Key Development: The impulse to track performance is being recognised by the world's biggest brands.

August: Movenbank launches financial health rating scheme

New York-based online banking system Movenbank (now Moven) launches a service that assesses its customers’ financial health via their social media presence.

The service, CRED, integrates ‘mobile, online engagement, social media and gamification’, Brett King, founder of Movenbank, said at the launch of the service.

Key Development: We learn that consumers' digital and physical lives are intrinsically linked and that brands can develop a more holistic understanding of consumers thorough social data.

November: Coca-cola embraces the Self-Quants movement

Coca-Cola UK launches the online tool Work It Out Calculator. The calculator helps consumers to understand how much physical activity is required to burn the calories contained in various Coca-Cola products.

Key Development: In a transparent move, Coca-Cola arms people with the tools to be healthier through data.

June: Apple moves into digital health-tracking market

Apple enters the mobile fitness-tracking market. New software products HealthKit and Health help users to monitor health and fitness data.

It also announces the launch of HomeKit, a service that will enable people to control functions such as locks in their homes with their iPhone.

Key Development: Consumers are understanding the importance of taking a pre-emptive, data-led approach to health.

July: British Airways introduces data-measuring blanket on long-haul flights

British Airways trials blankets that visually display passengers’ stress levels during a flight, as measured by a brainwave-detecting headband.

The initiative is designed to draw attention to the airline’s commitment to customer comfort and sleep.

Key Development: This invention shows that data tracking can be used to monitor our emotions and more primal impulses.

July: Meal-delivery service teams up with Jawbone to help consumers count calories

Meal-delivery service Munchery announces that its nutritional information can be automatically downloaded onto wristband Jawbone’s self-quantification app.

Key Development: The partnership signals a new emphasis on making self-quantification more intuitive.

August: Nike accepts points for payment

Nike installs a pop-up vending machine in New York that enables people to buy clothing in exchange for NikeFuel points accumulated on Nike+ fitness devices.

Key Development: This is a signifier of LS:N Global's The New Value Economy trend and how aspects of the PIE feed into this. Consumers trade new forms of data-enabled value with each other and with brands.

January: LS:N Global examines how the distinction between social and commercial is blurring online

Platforms including Net-A-Porter’s The Net Set and tastemaking network Semaine point to a new form of e-commerce focused on generating sales through social interactions online. These exclusive social eco-systems are often invitation-only or opt-in, adding to their allure.

Key Development: S-commerce gives brands access to personal as well as group data, helping segment customers into tribes.

February: Kassem Younis, founder of anonymous messaging app Thoughts Around Me, explains why data hoarding is bad for business

Younis believes we are seeing the fightback against first-wave internet companies that have over-reached into people’s personal lives. His anonymous messaging and sharing app Thoughts Around Me is built on trust, monetising data points that don’t need to be attached to personal information.

Key Development: Privacy is increasingly seen as the greatest luxury of the digital age and is becoming a big selling point for brands.

March: Toy-maker Fisher-Price produces a video speculating on the relationship between parenting and play in 2025

The Future of Parenting imagines play time a decade from now with phygital, connected devices that use augmented and virtual reality. The video focuses on the potential for sensors to be built in to fixtures and furnishings to act as a powerful parenting tool, tracking elements of a child’s development and feeding back that data across interactive displays.

Key Development: Older generations could be increasingly complicit in the datafication of their children, if it affords them a way to be better parents.

April: LS:N Global examines the rise of ad-blockers as people demand more privacy and less obtrusive advertising online

Ad-blockers represent a big problem for online publishers and advertisers that failed to respect people’s personal space online. ‘The question,’ says Joseph Evans, media research analyst at Enders Analysis,’ is whether all of the players in the digital advertising chain – advertisers, agencies and publishers – can create an experience that users find much less objectionable before simple and effective technological solutions to mobile advertising are given traction.’

Key Development: Brands are realising that they have to take a less myopic approach to online advertising and think about the bigger picture.

May: Topman’s senior digital creative manager Tom Lancaster explains how to make millions of different customers feel like you are talking directly to them

Lancaster explains why Topman is placing its faith in programmatic advertising, which he believes is a 21st-century replacement to great media placement. ‘Don’t get too bogged down in trying to create something viral,’ he says. ‘It’s better to consistently drop new content, see what people engage with and learn from that.’

Key Development: Programmatic advertising enables retailers to pitch the perfect advert depending on location, demographic and style.

June: Artist Margot Bowman examines the relationship between identity and algorithms for car-maker Mini

Data Portraits is a series of four GIFs depicting two sets of identical twins. To an algorithm the twins are indistinguishable, but to a human their unique personalities are easily apparent. The project is designed to raise questions about the way that humans are perceived by algorithms that are created to determine who we are and what our interests might be.

Key Development: The fallibility of algorithms is becoming a source of frustration for artists and creatives seeking a more emotional connection between man and machine.

September: Brave is an ad-blocking web browser that will now pay publishers with Bitcoins.

In the US, 43m people will use ad-blockers in 2016, according to analytics firm Optimal. Brave is an ad-blocking platform with a difference, acknowledging the fact that this relatively recent technology is undermining existing business models, and may make it impossible for publishers who use ads to fund content. Brave automatically blocks ads, but creates a system of donations to get the funds back to publishers.

Key Development: Consumers are now aware that the online world is powered by their attention and are becoming increasingly savvy with how they distribute it. When they are committed to a product, however, they are still willing to pay.

October: An interactive documentary series examines the phenomenon of mass surveillance

I Spy focuses on Five Eyes, an intelligence-gathering alliance between the NSA, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). It brings together experts from both sides of the privacy-versus-security debate to give a variety of perspectives on the matter, and viewers can contribute their own opinions by posting comments on the documentary website.

Key Development: The balance between national security and online privacy continues to be a major talking point among consumers.