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Press Release - 19th June 2014

Announcing the Way of the Future1

Shaping Tomorrow launches the World’s First, Near-instant, Web-based, Future Oracle

London -- June 19th 2014 -- Shaping Tomorrow released revolutionary futures research software to its clients this morning.

By automatically extracting metadata, future related statements and implications from web articles and  PDFs, they are now able to create instant ‘foresight’ about expected future, world conditions and to turn these into research reports, tag clouds, tree and mind-maps at will. This new functionality was made possible through a new release of the “Extractor” text mining software which Shaping Tomorrow has been using successfully since September 2013. In this new version the Extractor does a deep and detailed analysis of the source text in order to find detailed information about the future which is found anywhere inside the text.

This initial version uses a collection of ~8,500 ‘foresights’, gleaned from the company’s extensive database of articles and reports since September 2013. They are continuing to add to this database at the rate of 200 new foresights per week through their global scanning network of contributors.

All the client has to do is to query the ‘foresight’ database with their search term and the system will give them back all it knows about the future of that subject in an easily read listing. The search process also allows the client to choose to see only statistical foresights or to separate likely futures from uncertainties as the basis for creating future scenarios. The listings can be immediately exported to an Excel spreadsheet for parsing to a text analyzer, mind map or document editor.

“We believe this is the way of the future in foresight”, said Dr Mike Jackson, Chairman of Shaping Tomorrow. “Our clients can now discover possible and probable futures in seconds saving huge amounts of time and cost in conducting or paying for traditional trends research and ensuring a far wider view of all the relevant emerging issues. Soon be gone will be the tedious literature reviews of the past that researchers depend upon.”

Jackson says clients are using cheap but powerful software from websummarizer.com to then write immediate executive summary, draft reports on the future of any topic or to discover all the weak and emerging signals that they face in real-time.

 “I’m still finding it hard to believe this is possible at all”, says Jackson, “but it means huge savings in time and cost and more robust and immediate outputs for clients to get a solid answers on their research questions about the future in a few minutes. And, this is only the beginning of our plan to make trends research a simple thing to do for our members.

Shaping Tomorrow is currently only providing the service to its private clients.

Shaping Tomorrow is a one-stop, global research shop helping busy people and organizations mitigate risk and uncertainty, and to exploit opportunities and innovations for future growth and profits more effectively than rivals. Member organizations come from diverse backgrounds such as: strategy, R&D, product management, foresight, change management, consulting, I.T., education, risk management, policymaking and intelligence and from equally diverse industries from agriculture to business support and logistics, to government, food & drink, to name a few. The company helps 12,000 members and 7,000 organizations make better decisions today through mastery of horizon scanning, real-time strategic thinking, collaborative research, systematic innovation, risk and change management, competitive intelligence, scenario planning and continuous action. 


1 A term used to say something is forward thinking, interesting, Way Of The Future was started and made popular by Cameron Walker of WeatherStar. 

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