Trends Identified
Connectivity of tomorrow
Advanced networking is the unsung hero of our digital future, offering a continuum of connectivity that can drive the development of new products and services or transform inefficient operating models. Increasingly, digital transformation through data and networking-dependent technologies such as cognitive, IoT, blockchain, and advanced analytics are fueling adoption of connectivity advances. Next-generation technologies and techniques such as 5G, low Earth orbit satellites, mesh networks, edge computing, and ultra-broadband solutions promise order-of-magnitude improvements that will support reliable, high-performance communication capabilities; software-defined networking and network function virtualization help companies manage evolving connectivity options. In the coming months, expect to see companies across sectors and geographies take advantage of advanced connectivity to configure and operate tomorrow’s enterprise networks.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
Intelligent interfaces
Today, people interact with technology through ever more intelligent interfaces, moving from traditional keyboards to touchscreens, voice commands, and beyond. And even these engagement patterns are giving way to new and more seamless and natural methods of interaction. For example, images and video feeds can be used to track assets, authenticate individual identities, and understand context from surrounding environments. Advanced voice capabilities allow interaction with complex systems in natural, nuanced conversations. Moreover, by intuiting human gestures, head movements, and gazes, AI-based systems can respond to nonverbal user commands. Intelligent interfaces combine the latest in humancentered design techniques with leading-edge technologies such as computer vision, conversational voice, auditory analytics, and advanced augmented reality and virtual reality. Working in concert, these techniques and capabilities are transforming the way we engage with machines, data, and each other.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
Beyond marketing: Experience reimagined
The new world of marketing is personalized, contextualized, and dynamic. Increasingly, this world is orchestrated not by outside parties but by chief marketing officers partnering with their technology organizations to bring control of the human experience back in-house. Together, CMOs and CIOs are building an arsenal of experience-focused marketing tools that are powered by emerging technology. Their goal is to transform marketing from a customer acquisition-focused activity to one that enables a superb human experience, grounded in data. In experiential marketing, companies treat each customer as an individual by understanding their preferences and behaviors. Analytics and cognitive capabilities illuminate the context of customers’ needs and desires, and determine the optimal way to engage with them. Experience management tools tailor content and identify the best method of delivery across physical and digital touchpoints, bringing us closer to truly unique engagement with each and every human.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
DevSecOps and the cyber imperative
To enhance their approaches to cyber and other risks, forward-thinking organizations are embedding security, privacy, policy, and controls into their DevOps culture, processes, and tools. As the DevSecOps trend gains momentum, more companies will likely make threat modeling, risk assessment, and security-task automation foundational components of product development initiatives, from ideation to iteration to launch to operations. DevSecOps fundamentally transforms cyber and risk management from being compliance-based activities—typically undertaken late in the development life cycle—into essential framing mindsets across the product journey. Moreover, DevSecOps codifies policies and best practices into tools and underlying platforms, enabling security to become a shared responsibility of the entire IT organization.
2019
Tech trends 2019 - Beyond the digital frontier
Deloitte
Big data, the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence
Big data and IoT are new digital developments that make it possible to optimize business operations and facilitate the creation of new products, services and industries. The possibility of collecting unlimited amounts of data through Internet-connected sensors and monitoring of the web and social media allows prediction of demand, estimation of rural incomes (based on mobile phone activity) and anticipation of civil unrest. While such technologies add to the existing toolkit for development, the availability of fine-grained and increasingly personal data also introduces new risks (see section D.2). Such technologies therefore merit attention from policymakers. In the last few years, artificial intelligence has become a major focus of attention for technologists, investors, governments and futurists. Since it was first proposed more than 60 years ago, artificial intelligence has experienced periods of progress but also of stagnation, when it has been virtually sidetracked while other technologies advanced exponentially. However, recent breakthroughs have led to major advances, driven by machine learning and deep learning, facilitated by access to huge amounts of big data, cheap and massive cloud computing, and advanced microprocessors (Kelly, 2016:38–40).Artificial intelligence now includes image recognition that exceeds human capabilities and greatly improves language translation, including voice translation through natural language processing, and has proved more accurate than doctors at diagnosing some cancers.
2018
Technology and Innovation Report 2018
UNCTAD
3D printing
Another recent digital development, 3D printing, also offers potential economic, social and environmental benefits for developing countries. Invented three decades ago, 3D printing has become a viable technology for global manufacturers to produce critical parts for airplanes, wind turbines, automobiles and other machines as a result of huge reductions in its costs and complementary developments in computer-aided design, the Internet, new materials for manufacturing and cloud computing (Campbell et al., 2011).
2018
Technology and Innovation Report 2018
UNCTAD
Biotechnology and health tech
Advances in ICT have allowed an increasing integration of synthetic biology, systems biology and functional genomics into biotechnology. Through convergence of an ever-expanding range of “omics” technologies – genomics, proteomics (proteins), metabolomics (biochemical activity), etc. – computational biology explores the roles, relationships and actions of the various types of molecules that make up the cells of an organism (Emerging Technologies, 2014), allowing the functions of organisms to be better understood, from the molecular level to the system level, and advancing biotechnology applications. The cost of sequencing a complete human genome has fallen faster even than implied by Moore’s Law (section C.2) to around $1,000, and is expected to cost no more than a regular blood test by the early 2020s (Wadhwa with Salkever, 2017:123–124).
2018
Technology and Innovation Report 2018
UNCTAD
Advanced materials and nanotechnology
Nanomaterials are materials manufactured and used at an infinitesimal scale, on the order of one billionth of a metre, which behave differently from their larger counterparts, for example in terms of resistance, conductivity or chemical reactivity. They encompass a wide range of organic and inorganic materials, including nanocrystals and nanocomposites. Nanotechnology is a general-purpose technology with multiple applications, which has the potential to revolutionize many industrial sectors. Its applications include: (a) Water remedation and purification, for example through nanofiltration membranes used to treat wastewater in water-scarce countries; (b) Increasing the heat resistance of materials and the Flexibility and performance of electrodes in lithium-ion batteries; (c) Precise control of the release of agrochemicals, improving seed germination and reducing toxicity in the agriculture process, increasing agricultural yields and reducing environmental impacts; (d) Nanoelectronics include devices and materials that reduce weight and power consumption of electronic devices, for example the production of small electronic circuits, enhanced memory storage and faster computer processors; and (e) Medical applications such as the use of gold nanoparticles in the detection of targeted sequences of nucleic acids, and of nanoparticles as a delivery mechanism for medications.
2018
Technology and Innovation Report 2018
UNCTAD
Renewable energy technologies
Using smart grids, big data and IoT technologies can help to reduce energy consumption, balance energy demand and supply, and ensure and improve the management of energy distribution, while increasing the role of renewable sources by allowing households to feed surplus energy from solar panels or wind turbines into the grid. The real-time information provided by smart grids helps utility companies to respond better to changes in demand, power supply, costs and emissions, and to avert major power outages (UNCTAD, 2015d:23). Zenatix, a Delhibased start-up, for example, uses smart meters and temperature sensors to help households and offices reduce energy consumption through message-based alerts, saving Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology nearly $30,000 annually.23 Renewable energy technologies can provide electricity in remote and isolated rural areas inaccessible to centralized grid systems (UNCTAD, 2017c); and costs have declined dramatically, especially for solar power, which is now cost-competitive with coal and natural gas. The cost of solar cells has dropped by a factor of more than 100 in the last 40 years, from $76.67/watt in 1977 to $0.029/kilowatt-hour (kWh) in 2017 (Clark, 2017). Solar energy is now the cheapest generation technology in many parts of the world.24
2018
Technology and Innovation Report 2018
UNCTAD
Satellites and drones
Communication satellites have been used for Internet access in rural areas and developing countries since the early days of the Internet, and the industry has remained viable as a result of technical progress in launch technology (public and private), antennas, solar power, radios and other electronics, as well as tuning of TCP/IP protocols to account for the quartersecond latency due to the orbital altitude. It has been suggested that these technologies have progressed to the point where high-altitude platform stations (HAPSs) and lower orbit satellites are now viable as well. HAPSs are non-rigid airships, drones or balloons that hover or circulate around 15–30 km in the stratosphere (UNCTAD, 2014a). HAPSs have lower transmission delay (latency), but their signal cover (footprint) tends to be lower compared to other technologies (ibid.:38). An example of a project that offers broadband Internet using satellite communications is the Google Project Loon (ibid.), which uses HAPSs to create an aerial wireless network with up to 3G-like speeds.
2018
Technology and Innovation Report 2018
UNCTAD