Chennai: Trends get a bad rap, mostly because they are often equated with fashions. Talk about trends and people immediately start imagining wafer thin models strutting down catwalks in outrageous outfits, or maybe a new shade of purple that will be long forgotten by next season.
Yet trends can be important, especially those long in the making. If lots of smart people are willing to spend years of their lives and millions (if not billions) of dollars on an idea, there’s probably something to it.
Today, we’re on the brink of a new digital paradigm, where the capabilities of our technology are beginning to outstrip our own. Computers are deciding which products to stock on shelves, performing legal discovery and even winning game shows. They will soon be driving our cars and making medical diagnoses. Here are five trends that are driving it all.
1. No touch interface
We are moving to an era where technology is adapting more and more to us rather than the other way around. The pattern recognition technology is a passé now and the nNo touch interface, is expected to be more human-like. Microsoft’s Kinect, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Project Glass are all making futuristic devices. Thanks to Google Glass you can just wear glasses and take a picture of what you see and do lots more stuff like uploading and sharing.
2. Native Content
While over the past several years technology has become more local, social and mobile, the new digital battlefield will be fought in the living room, with Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple and the cable companies all vying to produce a dominant model for delivering consumer entertainment.
One emerging strategy is to develop original programming in order to attract and maintain a subscriber base. Netflix recently found success with their “House of Cards” series starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Amazon and Microsoft quickly announced their own forays into original content soon after.
3. Massively Online
Instead of playing with a computer, it is always interesting to play with our fellow species. Massively online facilitates gaming with a large number of people simultaneously. “World of Warcraft” is one such example. In the education sector, Khan Academy and Code Academy are taking e-learning to a mega scale. Political leaders and spiritual gurus are using this to connect with their audience. It can be remembered that President Obama used Google Hangout to reach his voters.
4. The Web of Things
Probably the most pervasive trend is the Web of Things, where just about everything we interact with becomes a computable entity. Our homes, our cars and even objects on the street will interact with our smartphones and with each other, seamlessly.
What will drive the trend in the years to come are two complementary technologies: Near Field Communication (NFC), which allows for two-way data communication with nearby devices and ultra-low power chips that canharvest energy in the environment, which will put computable entities just about everywhere you can think of.
While the Web of Things is already underway, it’s difficult to see where it will lead us. Some applications, such as mobile payments and IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, will become widespread in just a few years. Marketing will also be transformed, as consumers will be able to seamless access digital products from advertisements in the physical world.
Still, as computing ceases to be something we do seated at a desk and becomes a natural, normal way of interacting with our environment, there’s really no telling what the impact will be.
5. Consumer Driven Supercomputing
Supercomputers always does huge processing in seconds. Applying that to the service industry is the new trend. IBM, Google and Microsoft are racing to combine natural language processing with huge Big Data systems in the cloud. That makes large amount of data available at all corners of the world and that too if you literally ask your system in your spoken language. First such foray into this field is IBM's Watson which is supposedly helping doctors fight cancer by natural language capabilities, hypothesis generation, and evidence-based learning to support medical professionals as they make decisions.
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