Nine tech trends shaping our lives and work
We are today at the beginning of a fourth industrial revolution, according to theThe Future of Jobs, a January report from the World Economic Forum (WEF).
The report rightly points out that developments in previously disjointed fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing and genetics and biotechnology are all building on and amplifying one another.
We have tried to detail, to some extent, nine trends that we believe are changing our lives and disrupting business models.
In no particular order, the trends include the increasing use of algorithms, the rise of robots in the workplace, changes in factories with 3D printers, the Internet of Things phenomenon and the huge disruption in business models on the back of digital technologies.
Most of these trends are expected to mature in the next two to five years. Besides, the interconnectedness of these trends is clearly evident. Smart systems—whether they are homes, factories, farms, grids or entire cities—all stem from the Internet of Things concept.
Algorithms, on their part, are clearly entrenching themselves in the economy and when written in software code that is understood by machines, can be turned into a tool to control and manipulate machines.
These nine tech trends are in no way exhaustive but they do indicate, as the WEF research points out, that on average, by 2020, more than a third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations will consist of skills that are not yet considered crucial to the job today.
Internet of Things
Spending on Internet of Things (IoT) hardware will exceed $2.5 million every minute in 2016, and in five years, one million new devices will come online every hour, according to IT research firm Gartner Inc. If this forecast is to be believed, then billions of devices will be able to communicate with each other, unleashing the potential to dramatically change the way we do business and consume goods and services.
The goal of IoT is to enable things to be connected any time, any place, and with anything or anyone. It is not a single technology but a concept that has existed in factories for many years, but is becoming more effective with machines talking to each other over networks.
However, while most of the popular discussions around IoT is about wearables and connected homes, the total value lies in enterprise applications, according to a report by McKinsey and Co., which was presented at a Mint IoT conference on 16 March 2015. In the context of a factory, the use of thousands of sensors coupled with analytics has given rise to the term Industrial IoT (IIoT).
India understands the importance of IoT. The Indian government envisions creating a market of $15 billion by 2020 in the country, increasing connected devices from the current 200 million to 2.7 billion by 2020.
However, according to a December 2014 report by Bengaluru-based telecom research and advisory firm Convergence Catalyst, challenges to meeting this target include India’s own cultural, market and structural hurdles such as a disconnected and fragmented IoT value chain and a lack of component players that prove a key hindrance for design, testing and development of IoT products in India.
Sourcing components, mainly from China, can be time-consuming, which could extend the product development cycle, and also introduce potential quality issues. Another key issue in India is the fewer number of large-scale electronics and semiconductor products manufacturing facilities. Also, wireless data connectivity is not ubiquitous in India.
Rise of the algorithmic economy
By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in 5% of all economic transactions, according to a 7 October note by Gartner.
An algorithm, in the simplest form, is a step-by-step procedure to execute certain action. When written in software code that is understood by machines, it can be turned into a tool to control and manipulate machines.
Algorithmically driven agents are already participating in our economy. However, while these agents are automated, they are not fully autonomous. New autonomous software agents will hold value themselves, and function as the fundamental underpinning of a new economic paradigm that Gartner calls the programmable economy or algorithmic economy.
The programmable economy has potential for great disruption to the existing financial services industry. So are the interconnections of new devices that are increasingly going online, creating billions of new relationships. These relationships are not driven solely by data, but algorithms that define action and are the core of new customer interactions.
For instance, Amazon’s recommendation algorithm keeps customers engaged and buying, while Netflix’s dynamic algorithm that is built through crowdsourcing, keeps people busy with binge watching, and the Waze algorithm directs thousands of independent cars on the road.
E-commerce companies, banks, financial institutions, retailers and oil and gas companies in India are already heavy users of algorithm-based business decisions. Stock markets the world over have made trading very fast-paced with algorithms, thus giving rise to robo-advisory services to keep pace with the trend.
Robo-advisory services are defined as those that offer automated, low-cost, investment advisory services through web-based and, or, mobile platforms. According to an 18 June report by consulting firm A.T. Kearney, robo-advisory is the next step in the evolution of asset management and financial advice.
Age of wearables
Wearables figure among the seven categories to watch out for in 2016, according to e-commerce firm Flipkart, which collected data from 50 million shoppers between 1 January 2015 and 14 December 2015.
The demand for basic wearables, those that do not run third-party apps, has been “absolutely astounding”, corroborated a 22 June note by market researcher IDC. Companies such as Fitbit and Xiaomi have helped propel the market with their sub-$100 bands, and IDC expects this momentum to continue.
IDC expects smart wearables, or those capable of running third-party apps, to take the lead this year. According to latest shipment data from Juniper Research, the total shipments of smartwatches the world over touched 17.1 million in 2015, but Apple Watch with 8.8 million shipments accounted for a 51.5% share.
According to Forrester Data, 21% of consumers already have wearable devices and are using them to track health and wellness. Gartner analysts have a similar view. They believe that by 2018, two million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employment.
But before the healthcare industry can incorporate Internet of Things (IoT) and wearables into care methods, privacy and quality concerns will need to be addressed, say analysts. The concern is in order, given that you can even do banking transactions on your smartwatch—be it an Apple Watch, Android Wear or Samsung Gear.
According to a study by Hewlett-Packard Co. released on 23 July, 100% of the tested smartwatches contain significant vulnerabilities. A 27 March note by Kaspersky Lab corroborated that while fitness trackers of all kinds have become extremely popular, helping people to manage their physical activity and calorie intake and stay in shape, “such devices also process important personal data about their owners and it is important to keep it secure”.
More than money in your digital wallets
Banks have come to terms with the fact that young customers, especially those living in urban areas, prefer Net banking and mobile banking and would seldom, or never, want to visit a bank branch if given that choice. Therefore, given that almost 50% of India’s nearly 400 million Internet users are mobile-only surfers, banks are happily embracing the concept of mobile, or digital, wallets so that they do not alienate their existing customer base while reaching out to new ones.
According to a 19 January note by US-based Zion Research, global demand for the mobile wallet market was valued at $500 billion in 2014 and is expected to grow fivefold by 2020. North America dominated the mobile wallet market and accounted for over 25% share of the total revenue generated in 2014.
The mobile wallet market in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the report, is expected to exhibit strong growth in the years to come. The rapid adoption of e-commerce coupled with the falling prices of mobile phones has only helped.
A decent smartphone can now be bought for less than Rs.5,000. Banking applications are also being developed in regional languages to help the customers in rural and semi-urban areas in a bid to improve financial inclusion. The mobile phone subscriber base of a little over 1 billion is also creating millions of access points for banking, and so will the granting of licences to 11 payments banks last August, which include a few telecom services providers.
Despite its promising future, the mobile wallet market segment is facing challenges such as different cash transfer channels, lack of awareness, stringent policies, low margins and poor web connectivity in several areas. Moreover, there are security concerns among some mobile users, who are refusing to embrace the change fully.
Technologies such as voice biometrics and imaging for cheque clearances have become cheap and banks should be able to afford to offer them to their customers in the next few years.
3D printing: The ‘Make in India’ push
Three-dimensional or 3D printing technology, which has been around for almost three decades, is finally coming of age. The so-called Fabbers, or personal manufacturing machines—3D printers come under this category—now not only make jewellery and toothbrushes, but also football boots, racing-car parts, custom-designed cakes, guns, human organs, houses and plane parts, promising to change the way people manufacture goods and do business.
3D printing belongs to a class of techniques known as additive manufacturing, or building objects layer by layer. The most common household 3D-printing process involves a “print head”, which allows for any material to be extruded or squirted through a nozzle. There are several additive processes, including selective laser sintering, direct metal-laser sintering, fused deposition modelling, stereolithography and laminated-object manufacturing. All of them differ in the way layers are deposited to create the 3D objects.
According to the 3D Printing Spending Guide from research firm International Data Corporation released on 21 January, global spending on 3D printing will grow from nearly $11 billion in 2015 to $26.7 billion in 2019.
India offers major potential growth for domestic manufacturers, local assemblers and distributors due to the increasing use of rapid prototyping and 3D modelling across various industry sectors. Further, the ‘Make in India’ campaign, which started in 2014, is expected to drive the future growth of the market, according to market intelligence firm, 6Wresearch. Last April, the firm forecast the country’s 3D printer market to cross $79 million by 2021.
Global firms such as Stratasys, 3D Systems and Optomec are gradually establishing their presence in India, through partnerships and alliances with Indian technology firms. Indian companies, both manufacturers and distributors, include Altem Technologies, Brahma3, DesignTech Systems Ltd, Imaginarium and Divide by Zero.
Meanwhile, even as businesses grapple with 3D printing, the concept of 4D printing is evolving. This allows materials to “self-assemble” into 3D structures and was initially proposed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Skylar Tibbits in April 2013.
We’re still thinking 4G. But here’s 5G
Telecom services providers in India are touting their fourth-generation (4G) networks and, in many cases, encouraging users to replace their 3G SIMs with 4G SIMs in a bid to be 4G-ready on their 4G-enabled handsets.
The big three—Bharti Airtel Ltd, Vodafone India Pvt. Ltd and Idea Cellular Ltd—have already launched the high-speed 4G services, ahead of the Jio-branded 4G services from Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the telecom unit of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd, which is primarily banking on VoLTE (voice over LTE).
However, some 4G services are currently running on the 2300MHz spectrum band, which is inefficient and can’t penetrate thick walls. Even the 1800MHz band has to be harmonized, which implies consolidating airwaves in that band to create contiguous or continuous blocks of spectrum to provide faster 4G LTE, or long-term evolution, services. This results in poor connectivity, lower data speeds and call drops. Besides, 4G being a data technology, the services have to rely on 3G and 2G for voice.
All telcos are now awaiting the spectrum auctions in seven bands, including the very efficient 700MHz, which are expected later this year.
Meanwhile, the buzz on fifth-generation, or 5G, technology is getting stronger. The speed of 5G is much faster than 4G—20 gigabits per second, fast enough to download HD movies in a span of seconds—and is expected to be the driver for trends such as the Internet of Things and initiatives such as Smart Cities and Digital India.
5G networks are not expected to roll out until 2020, but Verizon Communications Inc. has already announced that it will be the first US carrier to support the standard. One can expect progress reports on the upcoming 5G wireless standards at the Mobile World Congress 2016, which begins in Barcelona on 22 February.
Firms warm up to Blockchain
The cryptocurrency Bitcoin may not have caught the fancy of companies, but the underlying technology that powers it and helps to authenticate transactions is surely finding favour with firms. Blockchain has been recognized as a “game-changing digital technology for enterprise transformation”, according to a January report by IT services provider Persistent Sytems Ltd.
Many companies are trying to build applications on top of Blockchain to offer solutions across industries. For instance, making an intelligent application over Blockchain to store and handle patient data can find use in the healthcare space and would do away with the need for a central authority to manage all the details of a patient.
Banks are another case in point. Blockchain works on a model of code-breaking and crowdsourcing, and the technology decentralizes the way a traditional bank works—Blockchain itself verifies a person’s identity or credit risk.
For instance, Royal Bank of Scotland Plc. (RBS) is aiming to pilot a service based on Blockchain technology in 2016. International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) has outlined a decentralized and distributed IoT platform incorporating the Blockchain database technology.
Closer home, information technology services firms Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), Infosys Ltd and Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. have boosted investment in Blockchain technology and are exploring ways to build applications around it.
Visa Inc., according to an 18 August report in Mint, is planning to use Blockchain to improve its digital payments processes.
Drones will take off in India
When Ehang Inc., a Guangzhou, China-based firm, unveiled its Ehang 184 Autonomous Aerial Vehicle (AAV) at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) 2016 in Las Vegas, it simply heralded what was becoming obvious: Drones are here to stay. Ehang 184 is a 142-horsepower “personal flying vehicle” that can transport a single human at an altitude of more than 11,000ft and be controlled by an app.
In India, Bollywood films use drones to film stunts and action sequences. Drones are still being used by wedding photographers and advertisers, but mostly on the sly because the law does not allow civilians to fly drones. At least, not till the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and police departments permit it. The concerns are valid. Drones can crash due to strong gusts of wind and land on populated areas. If used by the wrong sort of people, drones could invade security and privacy.
Yet, when DGCA does introduce guidelines for commercial use of drones in the country—soon if one goes by media reports—it will be a step in the right direction because it will not only allow e-commerce companies in the country to work on delivering packages with the help of drones that can circumvent traffic snarls, but allow start-ups that are making hardware and software for drones to flourish and also get funds from venture capitalists as a legal business.
And, of course, it will give the Make in India and Digital India movements a push.
Companies such as Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. have already tested drones for different purposes. In India, Bengaluru-based Edall Systems has been designing and building drones since 2008 in collaboration with National Aerospace Laboratories. Garuda Robotics, a Singapore-based company, builds software to drive and manage vast drone fleets. Idea Forge Technology Pvt. Ltd’s Netra UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) are a collaborative effort with the Defence Research and Development Organisation.
Rise of the robo boss, cobots
Will robots run our companies? Research firm Gartner believes that by 2018, more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a “robo boss” who will increasingly make decisions that previously could only have been made by a human manager. In the same period, Gartner believes that 45% of the fastest-growing firms will have fewer employees than smart machines.
The 7 October report cites possible examples of a fully automated supermarket or a security firm offering drone-only surveillance services. The report also predicts that by 2018-end, customer digital assistants will recognize individuals by face and voice across channels and partners, and by 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40% of mobile interactions, and the post-app era will begin to dominate.
Gartner also predicts that by 2018, 20% of business content will be authored by machines. Technologies with the ability to proactively assemble and deliver information through automated composition engines are fostering a movement from human- to machine-generated business content. Data-based and analytical information can be turned into natural language writing using these emerging tools. Business content, such as shareholder reports, legal documents, market reports, press releases and white papers, are all candidates for automated writing, it notes.
This ‘robo’ trend, as underscored by Gartner, is an algorithmic and smart machine-driven one where people and machines must define harmonious relationships. Accenture’s 2015 Tech Vision has a similar view. It notes that while advances in natural interfaces, wearable devices and smart machines are presenting new opportunities for firms to empower their workers through technology, it will also raise new challenges in managing a collaborative workforce of people and machines.
Based on a survey, the report predicts that within three years, firms will need to focus on training their machines as much as on training employees (e.g., using intelligent software, algorithms and machine learning). This is already happening at the Yale Social Robotics Lab, run by computer science professor Brian Scassellati, where robots are already learning the skills needed to be good teammates, allowing people to work more safely, more efficiently, and more effectively, according to a 21 September release. These collaborative robots, also known as cobots, are complementary to industrial robots. Examples include the Baxter robot by Rethink Robotics; the UR5 arm by Universal Robots and Robonaut2 (by General Motors Co.). And, of course, the YuMi robot, short for ‘you and me’, unveiled by ABB Robotics at the Hannover Messe in April.
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