“Looking back it was a prophetic moment though I did not know it at the time. Almost 14 years ago I covered a Scottish Enterprise conference on  the future of Scotland. At that time I did not possess a mobile phone let alone imagine what it might be capable of doing.” In this guest blog, Walking Heads research director Fay Young takes us back to the future…

US futurist Joe Coates, grey and spindly as a heron, stalked the stage and talked about the potential of mobile technology using language most of us hardly understood. What future tourists would want, he said, was a digital companion they could carry in their pockets providing all the information they needed to know about any given place.

In 1997 I didn’t even possess a mobile phone. Now here I am, one of the directors of a brand new media company creating one of those digital companions – or rather, the information that can be loaded on to it, with the help of talented young app developers Spot Specific and designer Ryan Addams.

A roll of good old fashioned drums please. Walking Heads Ltd launched our first downloadable audio walking tour during Edinburgh’s Fringe. At one level Edinburgh Comedy Tour can be taken as a Fringe show (and of course there were others using digital technology this year) but our 90 minute walking guide includes many layers of information. Just like Joe Coates predicted, it is full of facts people like to know when they visit a new place: where to go, what to see, how to get there. But there’s a difference. With a nice poetic twist, Walking Heads has won a Scottish Enterprise Tourism Innovation Fund award because we promise to take people off the beaten track to reveal the true grit of the place.

So Edinburgh Comedy Tour is a streetwise mix of history and folklore, comedy and spicy gossip and I feel it captures the odd Jekyll and Hyde (perhaps I mean fur-coat-and-no-knickers) nature of Edinburgh much better than conventional guidebook or guided tour.

Harry Gooch (left)and Jamie MacDonald. Above David Hume’s toe [pictures Andrea McCarthy]

Back to the future. We’ve only just begun. We’re learning a huge amount as we go and we have a lot more to learn yet. But already we demonstrate something else that Joe Coates predicted.  In the future, he said, companies will be like the film industry: collaborative and infinitely flexible co-operatives, constantly forming and re-forming to share expertise according to the needs of each product.

Unlike a film company, we have neither best boy nor  grip,  hairdresser nor continuity girl (though we could do with the hairdresser at times!).  But, straddling Glasgow and Edinburgh, Walking Heads is a mosaic of technical and artistic creative talent – you will meet them all soon –  buzzing with an enthusiasm that would put big corporations to shame. Of course I am biased.  And very proud indeed to be part of it.

This is an edited extract from a post which first appeared on www.fayyoung.org