2020 tech predictions - Business - Akron Beacon Journal

2020 tech predictions - Business - Akron Beacon Journal

By BRIAN BOYERColumnist

Sunday

Jan 12, 2020 at 12:01 AM

2020 is now underway and it is time for me to make my annual tech predictions for the coming year.

Augmented reality will become more mainstream. Augmented reality (AR) takes real life (photos or videos) and overlays additional information or objects. Note that AR is different from virtual reality because virtual reality is 100% computer generated. This makes AR much harder as the computer needs to understand things such as what objects are, where the horizon is, etc. However, this is what makes AR much more valuable. AR has struggled as it requires so much data and image recognition. With machine learning making so much progress, in 2020 we should see AR getting better ... and to the point of having practical and usable mainstream applications.

Elon Musk will announce a new business. He has been quiet for a while on new ideas. This is understandable after all the turmoil he caused at Tesla recently from the apparently fake announcement Tesla was going private to making wild accusations about a person involved in a cave rescue (remember "pedo guy"?). But that all seems behind him now as his current businesses are hitting their stride including Tesla whose stock value is soaring and SpaceX which is beating Boeing handily for the next generation of manned space flight. Elon Musk must be itching to start something new again.

Amazon will continue to be the dominant e-retailer but Alibaba will make up much ground. If you have never heard of Alibaba, that is most likely because it isn’t an American company. Alibaba is often referred to as the Amazon of China, but its business model is noticeably different. While Amazon sells mostly its own products with some merchants on board, Alibaba is focused on independent merchants. With Alibaba in many of the biggest growing markets in Asia, the company has had rapid growth. Here are a few comparison stats: Over the past year, Amazon stock has risen about 14%. Alibaba’s has grown nearly 50%. Amazon’s 2019 "Prime Day" sales (which lasted two days) were estimated at over $7 billion while Alibaba’s "Singles Day" (which was only one day long) amounted to well over $38 billion.

The internet of things (IoT) community will have a serious and public discussion about security. It isn’t that the internet of things hasn’t talked about security or even taken security seriously. It is that there hasn’t yet been the scale and concentration of IoT devices in U.S. households to make it a public target. For example, for a long time Mac computers were known to have less viruses ... that was because less people had them so there was less reason to target them. We are now at that point where serious and public discussions will have to take place, perhaps even new laws. Not only is it an invasion of privacy to have devices in our own homes hijacked, but those hijacked devices can be used against national security interests, such as launching a denial of service attack (DoS) against our government’s systems.

More tech hubs outside of Silicon Valley will pop up and grow. Silicon Valley still will be a powerhouse for technology but the price of doing business there (and the culture) is starting to take its toll on many start-ups and established businesses. We are seeing cities both nationally and internationally trying to set up technology business hubs to attract residences, growth and tax dollars. Of course some are succeeding better than others but 2020 will see the trend continue with upward momentum.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

2020-01-12 06:42:13Z
https://www.beaconjournal.com/business/20200112/2020-tech-predictions
CBMiRWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmJlYWNvbmpvdXJuYWwuY29tL2J1c2luZXNzLzIwMjAwMTEyLzIwMjAtdGVjaC1wcmVkaWN0aW9uc9IBAA

Bagikan Berita Ini