Trends Identified
Trump administration
23% of the respondents view this as a negative trend.
2019
4Q 2018 KPMG Global Insights Pulse Survey Report
KPMG
Trust declines, while peer influence rises
2017 was a tumultuous ride—we saw the explosion of fake news in public discourse, U.S. President Donald Trump’s unexpected triumph over traditional media, and an erosion of public trust in mainstream institutions. Politics aside, these cultural and technological shifts impacted both businesses and consumers. As Edelman found in their global study of consumer confidence, for the first time in history consumers trust peers just as much as technical experts and more than CEOs, governments, and academics. Marketing leaders are also more skeptical of inflated influencer metrics and wary of paying to reach social media bots instead of humans. We’re moving away from trusting institutions, vanity metrics, and mega-influencer celebrities—and moving towards smaller and actual spheres of influence where customers advocates, genuine customer communities, and engaged employees matter more than ever.
2018
Social media trends 2018
Hootsuit
Two-Dimensional Materials
New materials can change the world. There is a reason we talk about the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Concrete, stainless steel, and silicon made the modern era possible. Now a new class of materials, each consisting of a single layer of atoms, are emerging, with far-reaching potential. Known as two-dimensional materials, this class has grown within the past few years to include lattice-like layers of carbon (graphene), boron (borophene) and hexagonal boron nitride (aka white graphene), germanium (germanene), silicon (silicene), phosphorous (phosphorene) and tin (stanene). More 2-D materials have been shown theoretically possible but not yet synthesized, such as graphyne from carbon. Each has exciting properties, and the various 2-D substances can be combined like Lego bricks to build still more new materials. This revolution in monolayers started in 2004 when two scientists famously created 2-D graphene using Scotch tape—probably the first time that Nobel-prize-winning science has been done using a tool found in kindergarten classrooms. Graphene is stronger than steel, harder than diamond, lighter than almost anything, transparent, flexible, and an ultrafast electrical conductor. It is also impervious to most substances except water vapor, which flows freely through its molecular mesh. Initially more costly than gold, graphene has tumbled in price thanks to improved production technologies. Hexagonal boron nitride is now also commercially available and set to follow a similar trajectory. Graphene has become cheap enough to incorporate it in water filters, which could make desalination and waste-water treatment far more affordable. As the cost continues to fall, graphene could be added to road paving mixtures or concrete to clean up urban air—on top of its other strengths, the stuff absorbs carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides from the atmosphere. Other 2-D materials will probably follow the trajectory that graphene has, simultaneously finding use in high-volume applications as the cost falls, and in high-value products like electronics as technologists work out ways to exploit their unique properties. Graphene, for example, has been used to make flexible sensors that can been sewn into garments—or now actually 3-D printed directly into fabrics using new additive manufacturing techniques. When added to polymers, graphene can yield stronger yet lighter airplane wings and bicycle tires. Hexagonal boron nitride has been combined with graphene and boron nitride to improve lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors. By packing more energy into smaller volumes, the materials can reduce charging times, extend battery life, and lower weight and waste for everything from smart phones to electric vehicles. Whenever new materials enter the environment, toxicity is always a concern. It’s smart to be cautious and to keep an eye out for problems. Ten years of research into the toxicology of graphene has, so far, yielded nothing that raises any concerns over its effects on health or the environment. But studies continue. The invention of 2-D materials has created a new box of powerful tools for technologists. Scientists and engineers are excitedly mixing and matching these ultrathin compounds—each with unique optical, mechanical and electrical properties—to produce tailored materials optimised for a wide range of functions. Steel and silicon, the foundations of 20th-century industrialization, look clumsy and crude by comparison.
2016
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016
World Economic Forum (WEF)
U.S. Image Suffers as Publics Around World Question Trump’s Leadership
International views of the U.S. have fluctuated over time, often accompanying changes in political leadership in Washington. In Western Europe, opinions about the U.S. grew much more positive after Barack Obama became president in 2009 but fell sharply following Trump’s inauguration in January.
2017
6 trends in international public opinion from our Global Indicators Database
Pew Research Center
Uber and Lyft will lead a wave of IPOs.
Ride-hailing companies Lyft and Uber just filed papers on the same day to go public in early 2019. This could be a banner year for tech IPOs, with total proceeds forecast north of $100 billion. “According to the Chinese calendar, 2019 rings in the Year of the Pig...and boy is that apt for the IPO market!” says CBS News’s Jill Schlesinger. “Uber, Lyft, Palantir, Slack, Airbnb all could take the plunge in 2019. With the tech sector taking a bit of a hit recently, the C-suite execs and their bankers are trying to carefully weigh the old Wall Street mantra: ‘Bulls and bears make money; pigs get slaughtered!’” Despite a shaky market, they may still pull the trigger this year to avoid running into a downturn and an election cycle in 2020.
2018
50 Big Ideas for 2019: What to watch in the year ahead
LinkedIn
Ubiquitous infrastructure
In general, infrastructure is no longer the key to strategic business goals. The appearance and growing popularity of cloud computing and the always-on, always-available, limitless infrastructure environment have changed the infrastructure landscape. These technologies will enable a new future of business. For example, quantum computing, with its complicated systems of qubits and algorithms, can operate exponentially faster than conventional computers. In the future, this technology will have a huge impact on optimization, machine learning, encryption, analytics and image analysis. Though general-purpose quantum computers will probably never be realized, the technology holds great potential in narrow, defined areas. A second new technology in this trend is neuromorphic hardware. These are semiconductor devices inspired by neurobiological architecture, which can deliver extreme performance for things like deep neural networks, using less power and offering faster performance than conventional options.
2018
5 Trends Emerge in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2018
Gartner
Ubiquitous radio-frequency identification tagging of products and people
2006
Global Technology Revolution 2020
RAND Corporation
UI/UX and VR/AR are improving productivity and the customer experience
Financial firms, as well as companies in other industries, are allocating significant resources to improve the online presentation of, and interaction with, their products. To this end, they are investing in User Interface (UI) Design technology to improve the look of their site and User Experience (UX) Design technology to improve how the site works. There have been major advancements in UI and UX over the last 10 to 15 years. Several frontend frameworks compete with each other nowadays, although JavaScript is among the most popular ones. Many products that were initially developed for commercial use are now open source, and this has accelerated adoption. React, Vue.Js and AngularJs are examples of this trend. They make applications faster, more attractive and userfriendly, and designers have to write less code. The UI/UX design process has been taken to the middle tier instead of full-stack development where the front end would be connected to the back end, and debugging was a challenge. Designers are using Single Page Applications (SPAs), which load a single HTML page and dynamically update that page as the user interacts with the web app. There is no need for constant page reloads, it is mobile responsive, and multiple teams can work on it simultaneously. With componentization in the JavaScript framework, multiple teams can work on different components of an application at the same time, and a common component can be reused by different applications. The JavaScript frameworks were initially created for the web development, but now they are extended to support building native mobile applications. Many companies have built their entire mobile applications using a JavaScript framework to further reduce the cost and accelerate the development. Further, these component-based frameworks support serverless application development running in the edge. These advancements in UI/UX have improved performance and enabled more consistency, resulting in higher employee productivity and a better customer experience. Yet this comes with some challenges. Transforming legacy products into the new way of doing development involves a multi-disciplinary team and a different mindset. Moreover, the toolsets change constantly, so firms need to be very adaptable and create a flexible, evolutionary architecture – thus the shift toward microservices. The emergence of Web Component standards is making it possible to simplify composing applications from microservices and enabling User Interface as a Service architectural models, which can help further facilitate reuse. Companies are also experimenting with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) solutions to develop marketing applications that bring experiences to life. Inexpensive solutions such as Google Cardboard can be used to create 360-degree videos, which bring a whole company into the emotional IPO Listing experience, for example. Microsoft HoloLens and Unity could enable users to more deeply and efficiently explore datasets. In 3D, users can experience another dimension of complex datasets and explore them in new ways to drive new insight. UI/UX and VR/AR offer huge opportunities for innovation, and it will be an exciting space to watch over the next few years.
2019
NASDAQ DECODES: TECH TRENDS 2019 -The technology trends that are driving the world of markets forward
Nasdaq
Ultra lightweight transport devices
(Definition) A next-gen technology that allows transport devices and vehicles encompassing a large area of public/private infrastructure to save energy which is required for various sectors, while satisfying strict environmental regulations and requirements. (Use) Continuous-fiber composite materials are used for frames and load carrying members of autonomous driving vehicles, hybrid vehicles, EVs, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and other future transport devices.
2019
KISTEP 10 Emerging Technologies 2019
South Korea, Korea Institute of S&T Evaluation and Planning (KISTEP)
Uncertain economic growth
26% of responding CEOs answered that they were 'extremely concerned'
2018
Global CEO survey
PWC