Trends Identified
A radical new recycling process will breathe new life into old plastic.
In five years, the disposal of trash and the creation of new plastics will be completely transformed. Everything from milk cartons and cookie containers to grocery bags and clothing will be recyclable, and polyester manufacturing companies will be able to take in refuse and turn it into something useful again.
2019
5 in 5 - Research predicts five innovations that will change our lives within five years.
IBM Research
Can Esports Actually Make it into the Mainstream?
Esports is well on its way to becoming a household name. Almost 70% of internet users in the UK and U.S. alone have now heard of the term “esports”, with as many as half of those aged 55-64 also being aware of these competitive video game tournaments. Sell-out stadiums and prize pools of $100 million dollars have increased esports’ exposure and shored up any reservations over its longevity, providing a powerful reminder of how much the genre has grown since the first official tournaments took place in the 1990s. A significant chunk of this growth has been in the last year. Among those who say they watch esports content in the UK and U.S., more than 60% watch it at least once a week, with 3 in 10 saying they hadn’t even heard of esports more than a year ago. 2018 has witnessed major structural developments in esports, with franchised leagues bringing it closer to the model of traditional sports. This is making esports a more cohesive and accessible genre of entertainment among new audiences, and helping to win over potential investors and sponsors anxious for signs of strong revenue generating potential. With these structural tweaks all working in harmony, 2019 is the year esports is approaching its tipping point.
2019
Trends 19
GlobalWebIndex
Rethinking “Trust” in a New Era of Data Privacy
In 2018, we witnessed a groundbreaking shift in the way we think about data, privacy and brand trust. The culmination of high-profile corporate privacy scandals and new wide-sweeping data legislation has forced consumers to get to grips with their digital footprints. It’s compelled companies to confront and reevaluate what’s at stake concerning commercial data collection and processing. It’s also coincided with a sense of fatigue and disillusionment with contemporary online marketing techniques that has begun to boil over. While ad-blocking tools may have mitigated some of this disillusionment, they have increasingly and indiscriminately hacked away at vital revenue streams in companies that rely on online advertising. Together with pressure from declining print advertising revenues, the spread of ad-blocking tools has led many organizations to look towards pursuing new subscriptionbased business models to mitigate against the threat.
2019
Trends 19
GlobalWebIndex
The Rise of Green Consumerism: What Do Brands Need to Know?
Environmental degradation is hitting the headlines lately. News articles and documentaries around rising seas, declining air quality and shrinking animal populations are now more common than ever - and they’re beginning to cut through. A couple of moments stand out in particular. In Australia, it was the War on Waste TV program, while in the UK, David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series sparked a cultural shift around plastic consumption. Sales of reusable coffee cups and water bottles took off, plastic straws were banned in many bars and restaurants, and brands like Evian and Coca-Cola promised packaging made from recycled materials. The impulse to “be greener” is clearly gaining momentum. According to a recent bespoke study we carried out in the UK and U.S., half of digital consumers say environmental concerns impact their purchasing decisions. There’s a difference between intention and action, but brands could miss out on a big group of consumers if their green credentials aren’t up to scratch.
2019
Trends 19
GlobalWebIndex
Decrypting Crypto-Consumers
On October 31th, 2008, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the paper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, which would lay the groundwork for the world’s most talked about and prominent novel currency project since the creation of the euro some twenty years ago. Growing from a little-known cryptography mailing list, a discreetly registered domain, and a dedicated forum set up by its founder, Bitcoin soon inspired a huge growth in traders, platform and brokers, trade media, fans churning out memes, as well as commercial endeavors from cash brokers to exchanges, pubs to candy stores. This rapid expansion also meant that the user and consumer base has been difficult to track and segment. The crypto landscape is awash with data, but consumer data has been more difficult to come by for a variety of reasons. At first the audience was very small, and few cryptocurrency holders would be caught in the dragnet of national surveys – some of which were still based on calling landlines when Bitcoin was launched – and others relied on data volunteered by community members based on straw polls and student surveys. Self-selection also favored outspoken crypto activists, rather than silent investors. It’s the latter group our research has been able to capture. By including cryptocurrency into our global internet user survey, we’ve been able to expand the dragnet to almost 90,000 respondents – and picked up cryptocurrency holders in the course of general fieldwork, without targeting them. This means we have a sample of cryptocurrency holders with more than 25,000 data points against them, which has also served as a benchmark for our subsequent targeted poll.
2019
Trends 19
GlobalWebIndex
The gender gap in labour force participation remains large
The much lower labour force participation rate of women, which stood at 48 per cent in 2018, com-pared with 75 per cent for men, means that around three in five of the 3.5 billion people in the global labour force in 2018 were men. After a period of rapid improvement that lasted until 2003, subsequent progress on closing the gender gap in participation rates has stalled. The sizeable gap of 27 percentage points registered in 2018 should motivate policy action aimed at both improving gender equality in global labour markets and maximizing human capabilities. Overall, labour force participation rates among adults have been declining for the past 25 years; the decline is even more pronounced among young people aged 15–24. This downward trend is projected to continue in the future. Some of the factors behind it – such as increased educational enrolment, greater retirement opportunities and higher life expectancy – are of course positive. Yet, the rise in the dependency ratio (i.e. the proportion of economically inactive people relative to the active) poses new challenges in terms of the organization of work and the distribution of resources in society.
2019
World Employment and Social Outlook
International Labour Organization (ILO)
Decent work deficits are widespread
A majority of the 3.3 billion people employed globally in 2018 experienced a lack of material well-being, economic security, equal opportunities or scope for human development. Being in employment does not always guarantee a decent living. Many workers find themselves having to take up unattractive jobs that tend to be informal and are characterized by low pay and little or no access to social protection and rights at work. Significantly, 360 million people in 2018 were contributing family workers and 1.1 billion worked on their own account, often in subsistence activities that are pursued because of an absence of job opportunities in the formal sector and/or the lack of a social protection system. Overall, 2 billion workers were in informal employment in 2016, accounting for 61 per cent of the world’s workforce. The poor quality of many jobs also manifests itself in the fact that, in 2018, more than one quarter of workers in low- and middle-income countries were living in extreme or moderate poverty. On a positive note, the incidence of working poverty has decreased greatly over the past three decades, especially in middle-income countries. In low-income countries, however, the pace of poverty reduction is not expected to keep up with employment growth, so that the actual number of working poor in these countries is projected to rise.
2019
World Employment and Social Outlook
International Labour Organization (ILO)
More than 170 million people are unemployed despitethe continued decrease in the global unemployment rate
An estimated 172 million people worldwide were unemployed in 2018, which corresponds to an un-employment rate of 5.0 per cent. It is remarkable that, whereas it took only one year for the global un-employment rate to jump from 5.0 per cent in 2008 to 5.6 per cent in 2009, the recovery to the levels that prevailed before the global financial crisis has taken a full nine years. The current outlook is un-certain. Assuming stable economic conditions, the unemployment rate in many countries is projected to decline further. However, macroeconomic risks have increased and are already having a negative impact on the labour market in a number of countries. On balance, the global unemployment rate should remain at roughly the same level during 2019 and 2020. The number of people unemployed is projected to increase by 1 million per year to reach 174 million by 2020 as a result of the expanding labour force.
2019
World Employment and Social Outlook
International Labour Organization (ILO)
Labour underutilization is more prevalent among women
Apart from the unemployed, a further 140 million people were in the “potential labour force” in 2018, which means that they have to be classified as underutilized labour. This group of people who are looking for a job but are not available to take up employment, or who are available but are not looking for a job, includes far more women (85 million) than men (55 million). The corresponding rate of labour underutilization is consequently much higher for women, at 11.0 per cent, than for men, at 7.1 per cent. In addition, women are much more likely to work part time and a significant proportion say they would prefer more hours of employment.
2019
World Employment and Social Outlook
International Labour Organization (ILO)
Adversarial Machine Learning Becomes Key for Security & Fraud Prevention
Machine learning has had its advantage in effectively delivering rapid prediction of trends and establishing robust risk management and inference. Much investment, time and focus by organisations has been dedicated to programming and training machine learning algorithms to fulfil these functions. However, if these algorithms become compromised, they will be prone to attacks from threats and viruses. The chaotic damage that permeating cyberattacks have inflicted in algorithms can dangerously result in the misclassification/alteration of information within them; in effect an organisation’s entire system’s security can be at stake. Cybercriminals constantly seek to successfully exploit weaknesses of learning algorithms of highly valued organisations. Fraudsters are responding to the enhanced detection capabilities for transaction fraud and account fraud offered by fraud detection and prevention service providers. In some instances, they are also using machine learning algorithms to uncover weaknesses in fraud detection systems, in a type of machine learning chess match. It is here that the choice of FDP vendor becomes important, in terms of how its machine learning solution is implemented. Is a static model used, or does the vendor employ an adversarial model that adapts to changing conditions? Fraudsters will have very little knowledge of the precise algorithms being used to detect fraud. As a result, time, effort and funding must be sourced to identify weaknesses, which may then be applied or replicated across other merchants assumed to be using similar algorithms. Sectors (healthcare, industrial, advertising) where protection of huge amounts and types of sensitive data (e.g. consumer/public data) is a high priority – will be the drivers here. Spend on Fraud Detection & Prevention software in the financial sector, ie for eCommerce transactions including ticketing, money transfer and payments, will reach $10 billion by 2022. These sectors recognise the value of determining and containing susceptibilities (e.g. to detect unauthorised access points, weak security infrastructures, etc.) in machine learning approaches within adversarial circumstances. They will prioritise increasing their understanding of these vulnerabilities in machine learning algorithms. They’ll also engage with machine learning specialists to design and implement effective action steps to address these vulnerabilities. Juniper Research believes, moving forward into 2019 and beyond, that adversarial machine learning will be required by numerous industries to: · Identify weaknesses of machine learning algorithms during the learning and identification process · Enforce the protection and integrity and validity of data in these systems · Action steps in response to specific threats · Assess the potential damage of these threats · Programme algorithms to enhance their resistance to viruses · Eliminate the presence of opaque ‘black boxes’ · Grant adequate time to algorithm developers to invest into ‘breaking’ the efforts of cybercriminals to infect data Related Research: Online Payment Fraud: Emerging Threats, Segment Analysis & Market Forecasts 2018-2023.
2019
Top Tech trends 2019
Juniper Research