Most sci-fi movies depict the future as technology-driven utopia, with everything connected and controlled by artificial-intelligence, and while we’re still far from that perfect world, we are definitely heading in the right direction. Most of our devices are already smart and connected, and by looking at the trends, they are only about to get smarter and better connected. Here are the latest technology trends that support in advancement of a digitally connected world, and guess what — sooner or later your business will be transformed, if not disrupted, by one or more of them.
Internet of Things
The Internet of Things is probably the most ambitious technological project ever conceived. While the Internet itself had the goal of connecting everyone together, the Internet of Things aims to connect everything together, and that is significantly bigger, since the number of devices that can and will become connected greatly exceeds the number of actual people. This is essentially the backbone of a digitally connected world, and it’s already here, operational, and growing. In business environments, the Internet of Things will allow for large-scale automations, moving more work from people to machines.
Information of Everything and Machine Learning
One of the side effects of the continually-growing Internet of Things is the generation of massive amounts of data. Each and every device that needs to connect to the Internet needs to be able to communicate with the rest, and each session generates a certain amount of data, and while this data can be useful in providing more information about everything around us, it can also get overwhelming.
Concepts such as Big Data are of great value to businesses, but at some point the amounts are simply too big to go through and be useful. Here’s where machine learning comes into play – with the help of some solid programming, computers are finally able to interpret the data and determine by themselves which of this data is useful and which isn’t, thus removing the need for a human to go through those huge data piles. Businesses had access to an ocean of information already, known under the fancy name of Big Data, but now they finally have the means to actually put that data to good use. This can be tremendously benefic, as it basically means a great leap forward in the field of artificial intelligence, but it can also be very dangerous if we are to take Hollywood movie plots into account: we’re giving technology the ability to make decisions on its own – what’s stopping it from turning against us?
Ambient User Experience
Ambient User Experience is another trend that brings us one step closer to a completely connected digital world. Put in layman’s terms, ambient user experience is the element that ensures a user a seamless experience across multiple devices. If you’re a Google user, you don’t need to look further than your web browser to understand how this works: you login with one account on all your devices and everything gets synchronized – you get instant access to your bookmarks or browsing history when you switch from one device to another, without the needs of making individual settings on every device every time you use it. Ambient User Experience is a very powerful tool for business owners – all the data they have on a customer will be available in one place, linked together in contextual ways, making it easier than ever to offer the ultimate customized solutions.
This is bound to expand to all areas of our technological world, thus creating the ultimate digitally connected world.
Ambient User Experience is not the only element that will bring the digital world together – wearables have a massive contribution as well. While the former has a great role in providing a seamless experience on the software side, wearables makes connecting devices together more facile from a hardware standpoint. The numerous arrays of sensors present in wearable devices and the Bluetooth connectivity most of them use to communicate with each other make them the perfect tool to integrate mobile elements – us – into the digital universe. In the business field, wearables already have a great impact in domains that require close monitoring, such as the health segment, allowing doctors to see basic information about their patients without having them come in to the cabinet every time.
The cloud is one of the key elements in a digitally connected world. It’s the ever-present entity that allows everything to connect with, well, everything.
What’s really impressive about the cloud is that it doesn’t only act as an always-on communication hub for devices to connect to, but can also host services such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or SaaS (Software as a Service), which provide unlimited growth options for businesses. For those that want to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer, but are not familiar with how to get started, companies that provide managed IT support services can step in and help – it’s all one well-oiled mechanism that works to everyone’s advantage.
As you can see, everything is pushing towards a connected universe, and significant progress has been made recently. It’s just a matter of time until we get there.