Technology Trends to Consider in the Coming Year

Savvy investors understand the tremendous value that emerging technology can provide. Positioning your business to take advantage of emerging technologies places you in a sector with immense growth opportunities available. Below, I will outline five key areas of emergent technology that can be both a financial boon, as well as produce increased efficiency and agility.

Intelligent Systems Technology—although you may not be familiar with the phrase, there is another which I’m sure will ring a bell—Artificial Intelligence or AI. Artificial intelligence systems have grown in leaps and bounds within the past decade. Perhaps the most famous face on the current cutting edge of the field is IBM’s Watson, the super-computer originally built to play Jeopardy. IBM initially conceived of Watson as a so-called “Proof of Concept.” Essentially, they built it to show that they could.

As time went on however, Watson transitioned its inductive and deductive reasoning capabilities into something beneficial to all mankind—interpreting MRI scans and looking for patterns from the data that indicate malignancies. This task could previously only be accomplished by trained professionals, professionals that become fatigued, or make mistakes. Watson is able to use machine learning to interpret fMRI data and recognize disease patterns previously missed by highly trained human professionals. This is but one of the many exciting new potential applications of AI technology.

Interaction Technology is something that you may probably use every day. You can think of interaction technology in terms of Siri or Alexa, software applications that you’re able to interact with by speaking commands or asking questions. Interaction technology has revolutionized the ways in which users interact with their devices. With their increasing prevalence, corporations are able to leverage increased efficiency through the variety of tasks that these capable algorithms can perform. When couple with Intelligent Systems Technology, interactive systems become even more powerful. Could you have imagined being able to simply ask your phone to create a calendar reminder for you ten years ago? It’s easy to imagine the undiscovered possibilities of this emerging technology.

Small Software Technology is another emerging technology that can be used to increase the efficiency of your business in the here and now. You can think of Small Software Technology as the “app-ification” of larger software applications. Gone are the days of enormous, unwieldy, multi-module enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions—with the increased availability and minimal cost of the cloud, these applications are able to be broken into bite sized chunks.

These “Lego bricks” of software are able to be purchased or licensed a la carte, enabling the savvy SMB to leverage only those applications they have need for, rather than purchasing the entire solution and utilizing only a tiny fraction. This industry trend will only increase the ability of the SMB to scale as its needs grow and change, while maintaining low overhead cost.

Sensor Analytics Technology is often paired with another technology buzzword—the Internet of Things (IoT). With the increased prevalence of wireless Internet connections and the ability to pack more and more compute power into even smaller spaces, the appliances around us are getting smarter and more capable. Refrigerators, toaster ovens, thermostats and smart watches, the applications of the IoT are almost limitless. Sensor Analytics Technology is paired with the IoT to be able to track and analyze real-time data, enabling devices to react to the demands of their users automatically. One real-world application of sensor technology are NFC tags available for smart phones. Users are able to automatically launch specific applications based on their location. Your phone would, for example, know that you were at work and automatically begin checking for new emails and instant messages, while simultaneously ceasing distraction causing processes.

All of these areas of emerging technology underscore the importance of the final area, Cyber-Security Technology. All security architectures are forced to constantly adapt. Recently a huge number of devices falling under the umbrella of the Internet of Things were compromised by malware and used in a large scale DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service—flooding a specific location with a huge amount of internet traffic effectively shutting it down, often targeted at specific corporations or websites).

Cyber-Security appliances have been forced to evolve along with development in all other areas of emerging technologies.

Firewalls and antivirus now utilize sophisticated algorithms and heuristics technologies to determine the difference between malicious and allowed traffic.

It is vitally important that SMB owners and corporate officers understand evolving technology. With each iteraction comes the potential for greater and greater efficiency. The downside is that these greater efficiencies can induce liability without up-to-date security methodology. As always, please contact Mythos Technology for assistance in navigating new and emerging technologies.

Mythos Technology is an IT consulting and management firm. For more information, please visit www.mythostech.com or call (951) 813-2672.

Posted in Articles