A geeky blog about digital thinking, digital doing and technology

The turkey is gone along with the attempts at dry January. We’re swinging back into action and it’s time to make good on all those big ambitions you presented to clients at the end of last year.

‘Digital’, ‘Tech’ and ‘Innovations’ continue to top every client priority list followed by the ‘What do we do?’ question. It’s a good question. We’re still facing a cluttered landscape with so much happening, so here’s my wiki guide of high-level things to keep up your sleeve when asked, or even look into if you feel so inclined…

I’ll ease you in, let’s start with a few obvious ones that were talked about a lot but mainly ignored in 2017 – they’re not going away so best to start thinking about how they could be relevant:

• AR will continue to pave the way for realties adoption. The fad is over and the race to develop a scalable solution is on.
• AI (yes, yes I know) IS only getting better and faster. Brands that don’t adopt or at the very least develop a roadmap towards adopting, will see others eat their breakfast by the time the 2020 swings round.
• 5G is coming and we’ll see phone connectivity increase by a thousandfold. More video streaming with less buffering? Yes, but we’ll also see consumers demanding more, more quickly than ever before… if you’re not set up for instant gratification, time to button that down now.

A few less obvious ones but that I expect to see explode this year are:

• Voice and visual search will increase and not just with the younger generations. Brands that include this in their sales strategies will see an increase in revenue – early predictions from Gartner state this could be up to 30%.
• The race to creatively use the blockchain is ON! Someone will get there (in an interesting way) and they will be hailed for it.
• Processing power will continue to increase by 4-6x with rapid adoption by both consumers and business. Couple this with my point around 5G, this means the window for instant gratification increases the pace of life further. Brands that manage to keep up with this will see deeper loyalty, simply for making the things consumers seek easier to do/get.
• Wearables will slowly start to replace smartphones. If you just rolled your eyes click here.
• 3D printing has grown up and adoption will increase for car parts and begin for human body parts.

And to draw this post to a close a few slightly more ‘eep’ ones to know about (and ignore if you’re not ready yet):

• Sales in EV’s and smart cars will spike and so the connection to smart cities will begin to join up and take its place in the IoT.
• Edge computing will start to replace cloud computing, connecting the IoT more closely than ever before.
• Privacy will start to become obsolete and the pressure on brands to be transparent will rocket, turbocharged by the GDPR directive.
• The four horsemen will each try to develop one code base to dominate the IoT. The battle to own the data will continue and consumers will be nudged into a decision of adopting or releasing the ease of the connected intuitive world from their lives.

Tech is transforming our world really bloody quickly. In fact, experts predict it will change more in the next 25 years than it has in the last 200.

Time to pull your head out of the sand, look up and buckle up, it’s going to be a breakneck year.

Wooooooo

One code to rule them all, one code to bind them…