Five Tech Predictions for 2017
We’ve all seen through steady changes in our everyday lives over the past few years, with innovations and inventions setting us free from the shackles that once held our imaginations back. 2016 was no different, this time pushing for change in things we’d already gotten comfortable with; case in point, Apple’s push towards wireless earphones.
Let’s take a look at what 2017 may have in store for us.
Augmented/Virtual Reality
Admittedly a trend that started a while back, utilising high resolution mobile phones, the idea of augmented or virtual reality still looms over the wait for that one perfect app, one that will further change and enhance how we experience entertainment, or even get ourselves educated.
Ideas and innovations have been expressed through the year’s TV and film, and Pokémon Go did tremendously well to set some exciting precedence. So whilst the ideas are in place, we are hopeful that 2017 will go one further to materialise them.
Autonomous Cars
We enter 2017 with a better understanding of artificial intelligence than ever before, and that has allowed the likes of Google and Tesla to develop autonomous, or self-driving, cars. Coupling that with improvements in radar, GPS, and cameras, self-driving car have inched closer to revolutionising the automotive industry.
This clip of a Tesla Autopilot predicting a crash a second before it happened is both exciting and somewhat disconcerting, but autonomous cars looks set to take the next step in 2017.
The Internet of Things (IoT)
Smart technology has proved to be the staple of high-end houses, but now looks to be heading towards the egalitarian, and opening up the Internet of Things to all other consumers. 2017 promises to be exciting, in which you find ways to control your household appliances and gadgets with the swipe your phone, instead of having to walk or talk.
With that, there will be the competition amongst brands to be your smart home hub solution, with Google, Amazon, and Apple amongst the front-runners.
The Cloud
One more for the enterprises, something that will probably have elevated from a luxury, to a must-have. Dan Jones, contributing author at IT Pro Portal, predicts companies around the world to struggle with their digital transformation efforts, anticipating companies to take their cloud strategies to the next level in an effort to bridge the divide between the two modes of IT in 2017. This will include migrating workloads from existing public clouds to private clouds on-premises
To the everyday user of technology and Internet, the cloud essentially represents your private locker room. And whilst you can buy a 5TB hard-disk for $99, the cloud provides a whole ecosystem with the necessary security needed by enterprises.
Conversational Systems
The chatbot craze that ended 2016 looks set to follow through on to 2017, letting you interact with all sorts of apps by texting. “To what end?” you question, but research firm Gartner believes that this is all just the beginning. Texting to apps or speaking to devices (much like Amazon’s Alexa) to perform tasks for us has become more common than imagined, but one day all of our intelligent objects should have some form of conversational interface.
Business app giant Oracle is already building chat bots for its app, and TMA Associates believe that conversational user interfaces should lead to a $600 billion market by 2020. Healthy too, seeing as 2017 isn’t all too far away from the projected timeline.