Top Technology| Top 3 Trends For 2018,

1. Live Video Broadcasting & VOD(Video On Demand): Mobile Is Your New TV:

Video On Demand & Live Streaming Will Be Very Much a Game Changer.

Traditional broadcaster who owns most of the rights for sports or any show for that matter are getting some serious threat from this Over-The-Top players . like Amazon, Netflix, Apple & Fb are all eyeing it as huge potential and are committing themselves to grab this with full hands. Amazon & Fb will be the largest player to fight for sports broadcasting rights. Various premier leagues pertaining to cricket, Football etc grabs millions of user attention, who love to watch the matches live on their mobile powerhouse. So this social media & eCommerce giants have started to invest heavily on getting all the popular shows & live sports events. Amazon with Amazon prime has already taken the huge leap forward and i believe it will rule the OTT game in coming year. Facebook with its FB live has started to experiment with videos and they will use its huge user base to buy some of those big events rights and use its platform to engage their user making huge profits for themselves.

Juniper Research agency has predicted in their recent report on technology trends of 2018-

We believe that while both Amazon and Facebook are likely to bid, Amazon is likely to be the biggest winner. We expect it to bid for, and win, equivalent package to those currently held by BT. That company successfully bid for 2 of the 7 packages on offer, amounting to 42 games per season, for which it paid £960 million ($1.3 billion) over 3 seasons, or £7.6 million ($10.3 million) per game.

2. Artificial Intelligence & Blockchain :

As a technology enthusiast and specially being fascinated by Cryptos &Machine Learning stuff, I strongly feel that this virtual currency & virtual machine training stuff will continue to fire imagination of many technology giants like Alphabet, IBM, Amazon, Facebook & they will invest hugely to make human more efficient by doing less. It has already been started with all the intelligent chatbots being deployed in the market, Voice Recognition and Intelligent robots being employed within an organization & restaurant doing the work more efficiently than humans. NLP being employed to make machine speak human language

Juniper Research Predicts :

That 2018 is the year when deployment of blockchain will move beyond straightforward banking applications and into other areas, such as money transfer and remittances, insurance and digital identity verification. These applications include providing the infrastructure for P2P payments, as well as insurance smart contracts (for example including usage based car insurance) and storing digital identity.

source

I believe that many banking major will adopt blockchain technology in their banking practices and next 12 -13 Months to leverage it to increase their global footprint and largely impacting the masses.

Machine learning techniques will be much more evolved and will be employed to recognise human more precisely.

Juniper puts in his research that :

Technology vendors will use a combination of machine learning and smartphone-connectivity to create and verify digital identity. ID verification at present is a largely manual process. Account opening in most areas for banks usually involves checking several identity documents in person. This process, known as KYC (Know Your Customer) is largely inefficient and time-consuming.

3. IOT will leverage Edge Computing To Make this World Look More Smarter & Connected Over The Cloud-

Having said that let me make you understand a bit about “Edge Computing”-

As per Wiki-

Edge computing is a method of optimizing cloud computing systems by performing data processing at the edge of the network, near the source of the data. This reduces the communications bandwidth needed between sensors and the central data centre by performing analytics and knowledge generation at or near the source of the data.

Edge computing pushes applications, data and computing power (services) away from centralized points to the logical extremes of a network.

I feel that many Tech leaders will employ this edge computing which in no way is the direct competitor to any cloud based model, to fast track their #IOT services, saving a lot of infrastructure cost for this companies and making them more smarter over the coming future in serving their consumer.

Refer: All About Edge Computing- How It’s Collaborating With IoT To Rock 2018 & Beyond. for in depth understanding.

Juniper Research Predicts-

In 2018, we believe that a number of IoT service providers will find the edge computing model a way of maximizing their services. Therefore, mobile operators must consider offering this option through investment in their networking architecture, as the forecasted rise of both IoT devices and data generated by these devices is likely to create a demand for this service.

Well there are many more things which will a kind of lead the next wave of technological revolution like

• Robo Advisers will assist human through virtual apps to help them AI based investment decisions.
• Facial Recognition Will Lead As An User Authentication Tool
• Many smart devices will change the education industry like smart toys for kids
• There will be the evolutions of smart wireless charger
• Payment wallets will become a common way of storing your digital currency

& many more such innovation will happen….

What Gartner Has To Say :

source

You May Also Like : Top 3 Mobile Technology Trend, You Can’t Miss In 2018.

Summary :

I can see this coming year to be the game changer for many big player and also as a Pot Of Gold for many innovative startup who will take the risk and will adopt AI, Blockchain & Other Cloud based technology to influence the masses. Entertainment will remain the king as it has been in the form apps & games but now it will have a more smarter face to engage user for hours, smartphone has already been sweeping the world imagination and many tech innovators will keep harnessing its power to entice their user to play more & payback more. Video will rule for sure and it is has been doing and will be the largest source of entertainment & fun for online user. Thanks to smartphone & OTT players they have brought TV into every user pocket and providing them content on the go and on demand.

THREE FACTS HOW CAN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BE DANGEROUS?

WHAT IS AI?

From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons.

Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow AI (or weak AI), in that it is designed to perform a narrow task (e.g. only facial recognition or only internet searches or only driving a car). However, the long-term goal of many researchers is to create general AI (AGI or strong AI). While narrow AI may outperform humans at whatever its specific task is, like playing chess or solving equations, AGI would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task.

Most researchers agree that a superintelligent AI is unlikely to exhibit human emotions like love or hate, and that there is no reason to expect AI to become intentionally benevolent or malevolent. Instead, when considering how AI might become a risk, experts think two scenarios most likely:

    1 . The AI is programmed to do something devastating: Autonomous weapons are artificial intelligence systems that are programmed to kill. In the hands of the wrong person, these weapons could easily cause mass casualties. Moreover, an AI arms race could inadvertently lead to an AI war that also results in mass casualties. To avoid being thwarted by the enemy, these weapons would be designed to be extremely difficult to simply “turn off,” so humans could plausibly lose control of such a situation. This risk is one that’s present even with narrow AI, but grows as levels of AI intelligence and autonomy increase.

   2 . The AI is programmed to do something beneficial, but it develops a destructive method for achieving its goal: This can happen whenever we fail to fully align the AI’s goals with ours, which is strikingly difficult. If you ask an obedient intelligent car to take you to the airport as fast as possible, it might get you there chased by helicopters and covered in vomit, doing not what you wanted but literally what you asked for. If a super intelligent system is tasked with a ambitious geoengineering project, it might wreak havoc with our ecosystem as a side effect, and view human attempts to stop it as a threat to be met.

3 . Hackers start using AI like financial firms:If banks and credit card firms adopt machine learning to improve their services, so too will hackers. For instance, the report said that criminals could use AI techniques to automate tasks like payment processing, presumably helping them collect ransoms more quickly.

Criminals could also create chatbots that would communicate with the victims of ransomware attacks, in which criminals hold people’s computers hostage until they receive payment. By using software that can talk or chat with people, hackers could conceivably target more people at once without having to actually personally communicate with them and demand payments.

As these examples illustrate, the concern about advanced AI isn’t malevolence but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we have a problem. You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. A key goal of AI safety research is to never place humanity in the position of those ants.