Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this list of technology questions for 2022 feels like an answer to the question "what is digital disruption?".
We have reached a moment in time where old technologies - eCommerce or videoconferencing for example - are finally breaking into established industries. And the impact, at scale, cannot be found in technology but rather in every single industry it disrupts.
I have been talking with hundreds of people across the industry and have discovered that the changes coming to Apple are deeper than just a VR/AR headset. Way deeper. The changes already being worked into products represent tens of billions of dollars of investment.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: a long read about tens of new developments in the works at Apple from a long time AR-VR industry watcher (he was very bullish about Google glasses back in the day). Nevertheless, the article is a good rundown of what the future of 3D in AR and VR may be.
What I find great is that it goes beyond the classic AR-VR use cases and into a more fundamental trend of embedding digital into the real world in 3D. The examples of what is being developed in the labs is eye opening. But remember, this is R&D and will take years to become ubiquitous.
There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this post is a bit theoretical for someone not bathing in digital transformation all day as I do (mostly). It explores what could come next but more importantly stresses an important fact: we now have a new platform - the mobile phone - in our pockets that has the potential to transform our world. We have started to see this with eCommerce - physical retail stores become irrelevant and we can price compare from anywhere - but we have yet to see the real impact of eCommerce+mobile+cloud+5G. THIS is what I think about most days...
- 5G-enabled IoT Services will drive supply-chain optimization
- 5G enables many other technologies in the retail sector
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: 5G telecom network promises to revolutionize many industries including retail. This report from Forrester presents use cases for 5G may bring but also puts those in context of what exists today and how fast the transformation will be.
Girish Balakrishnan, Netflix's director of virtual production, says the workflow using Unreal offers "the ability to connect a DP in New York with VFX artists in London, a director in Los Angeles with an art department in Japan, and performance-capture talent with in-house animation supervisors." The goal is to streamline production across continents "while talent safely works from home."
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: movie production is going digital real fast enabling distributed teams to work collaboratively. Will this mean that the production of hyper realistic fake videos will become easier to produce. One may think so :-(
The future travel experience will be personalised, delivering seamless and safe services that are high value, low touch and consumer-centric, thanks to an accelerated digital transformation post-pandemic. These new advances in technology will usher in a new era of automation, requiring upskilling for employees to provide greater levels of high-quality service. Tracking climate impact across consumers, brands and destinations will be critical for building resilience, agility and speed to combat future risks and accelerate the green transition. This white paper outlines a vision for how consumers will book and experience travel in 2040, exploring how technology and the need for sustainability could change the travel experience over the next 20 years. In particular, this analysis will focus on the future of travel — exploring what online travel agents, urban mobility, air travel and hotels will look like.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: short white paper on what travel *may* look like in 20 years. I think it is idealistic and far fetched but there are elements in there that feel very probable (ie. renting clothes instead of packing your own, robots that carry your luggage, AR-VR to help with travel planning). Not saying if this future is good or bad, but will certainly be very digital. Thoughts?
Which technology trends are most likely to impact your business in the coming years? Trends are waypoints to help anticipate future states in a world where uncertainty looms. The Future Today Institute's annual Tech Trends Report asks you to examine your assumptions, cherished beliefs and expectations for the future using a bolder, more holistic perspective. In the 13th edition of our Tech Trends Report, we forecast the key technology trends that will redefine businesses in the coming years. More importantly, we offer strategic analysis and guidance on those trends and further explore them in future scenarios to help you understand their implications on your organization and industry.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: 360 pages of reference material for any strategic planning exercice.
Samsung “Neon” project leader Pranav Mistry has confirmed that the project aims to create lifelike avatars using artificial intelligence. These virtual humans are based on captured data, but can generate their own expressions, movements and dialog in multiple languages. Mistry belives that one day soon a digital human could extend its role to become a part of our everyday lives, whether it be a virtual news anchor, virtual receptionist, or even an AI-generated film star. Read more for the leaked video and additional information.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: realistic looking avatars is essential to convey realism in many retailTech use cases from customer support to online video promotions. If this is realistic, cheap, easy to do, then this opens up the possibility of truly personalized video advertisement for example. And one step closer to digital disruption acceptance by blurring real with digital...
Technology is the future of customer experience. These statistics show the grow of new technology and how it impacts everything about the future of customer experience.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: the trends is clear, technology drives a number of business innovations in Retail. Questions is: is there a business model behind those innovations? Not always unfortunately... Nevertheless, useful insights about what's trending.
Watch this webinar featuring Unity and special guests from Taqtile — Co-Founder & CTO John Tomizuka and VP Kelly Malone — to learn more about innovative AR and VR use cases across the industrial sector.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: state of the art in the use of AR and VR in real life scenarios appear to remain focussed on training and repair operations. The videos in this webcast, starting at 12:30 are indicative of what's possible. First thing that strikes you is that solutions appear useful but one wonders how much work goes into making each one and also maintaining each solution. AR & VR in commercial environment remain niche solutions at this time.
Specialized repair services for LED, LCD, and LG plasma TVs at the LG TV repair agency, Tehran Electronics Center, with more than 27 years of professional experience in troubleshooting and repairing electronic devices. Audio and video are provided in Tehran. Troubleshooting and repairs of LED, LCD and plasma LG TVs, broken panel, burnt panel, damaged panel, damaged panel, motherboard damaged by power fluctuations, mine board failure, mine failure board, broken and burnt backlight, Tikan board failure (T-CON), defects related to TV power board, power board failure, no image display, sound interruption, image skipping, tuner failure and other defects are done at Tehran Electronics Center. https://tehranelektronik.com/tv-repair/lg-tv-repair
The technologies on the list, which is curated by members of the Forum’s Expert Network, are selected against a number of criteria. In addition to promising major benefits to societies and economies, they must also be disruptive, attractive to investors and researchers, and expected to have achieved considerable scale within five years.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: always good to look beyond digital transformation into practical applications of the digital technologies. In particular, #2,6,7 in the list. Here an extract from the #7 highlights an application of blockchain which we've been tracking for a while as a disruptive digital technology that has received a lot of bad press with the bitcoin debacle but that has real future...
"Together, a pair of technologies could reduce both food poisoning and food waste. The first, an innovative application of blockchain technology (better known for managing virtual currency) is beginning to solve the traceability problem. Enhanced food packaging, meanwhile, is providing new ways to determine whether foods have been stored at proper temperatures and whether they might have begun to spoil."
Have you ever wished you could be in the room when founders present to the a16z investing team? Even better, do you wish you could stay to hear the discussion after the pitch? We hear you and are thrilled to launch our latest series of videos called "The a16z Pitch Room". This inaugural episode features the Sandbox VR team Steve Zhao and Siqi Chen pitching to General Partner Andrew Chen. Steve and Siqi present a lightly edited version of their pitch deck. Then Andrew will join them on screen and provide the “director’s commentary”: a slide-by-slide walkthrough of the presentation, describing what resonated, what didn’t, and how he thought about the investment opportunity.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this article and accompanying video explains the process that successful venture capital firms go through when deciding to invest - or not - in stratups. It breaks down the pitch deck to explain what works and what doesn't. This is great for startups but any business transformation - especially digital transformation - should have a pitch deck like this!
The Magicverse is an Emergent System of Systems bridging the physical with the digital, in a large scale, persistent manner within a community of people.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: want to know what augmented reality will look like in 10 or 20 years. Read this. But don't expect it to come together in the short-term, this is a *long* play
Amazon quietly rolled out Amazon Showroom, a tool that lets you place furniture in a virtual living room, making online furniture shopping more visual.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: sales of furniture online is difficult because it is difficult to visualize the product in your environment. At least in the store you can view the product in a fake setting (think IKEA rooms you have to travel through during your shopping trip). Augmented Reality has been tried to enhance paper catalogues in the past but now Amazon is trying to leverage 3D directly within their online store to help you decide if that table and sofa go well together. This is obviously a test and the links below should provide you with additional food for thought on the matter.
WHY IT MATTERS: sales of furniture online is difficult because it is difficult to visualize the product in your environment. At least in the store you can view the product in a fake setting (think IKEA rooms you have to travel through during your shopping trip). Augmented Reality has been tried to enhance paper catalogues in the past but now Amazon is trying to leverage 3D directly within their online store to help you decide if that table and sofa go well together. This is obviously a test and the links below should provide you with additional food for thought on the matter.
This paper examines the essential eight technologies that matter and what business leaders now need to do about them, and emerging technologies in general.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: A good summary of potential use cases and applications for key digital technologies that revolutionize business.
Augmented reality technologies promise to transform how we learn, make decisions, and interact with the physical world. In this package we explain what AR is, how its applications are evolving, and why it’s so important.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: AR is one of those technologies that have been discussed for so many years and that will explode into the scene with a plethora of consumer and business applications in the coming years. An overnight success story that has been 10 years in the making (if not more). This paper helps managers see business applications for this technology.
What makes it so compelling in the fact that mobile devices (2B+ and counting) all have support for this technology builtin. Just checkout the video I made using my Google Pixel 2 phone camera this morning. It just works!
Why are companies so intent on using technology to track our behavior? Our actions reveal what we desire, how we shop, and why we buy. Retailers can now learn so much more about shopper behavior than ever before, and while these “big data” applications create concerns about privacy, the detailed data can be used to design stores, product offerings and promotions that connect with our interests, speed up the shopping process, and help us find items we will buy.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: we all go to stores and seldom notice the technology that surrounds us and tracks our moves.
Every year, Wolf puts together a slide presentation highlighting his forecasts. Wolf's consulting firm, Activate, released his latest presentation at the Wall Street Journal's D.Live conference in Laguna Beach, California, on Tuesday.
At an event in San Francisco we unveiled our vision for Windows Mixed Reality, announced SteamVR and AltSpaceVR are coming to Windows Mixed Reality, introduced the new Samsung Odyssey HMD, and kicked off the holiday shopping season by announcing the availability of pre-orders for Windows Mixed Reality headsets at the Microsoft Store.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this 20min video is a great demonstration of what is now possible with mixed reality headsets along with possible real-life applications for home and the office. More on the Windows blog: msft.social/b9ULwk
The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies provides insights gained from evaluating more than 2,000 technologies. The eight added in 2017 include 5G, Artificial General Intelligence, Deep Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Digital Twin, Edge Computing, Serverless PaaS and Cognitive Computing.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS MATTERS
I find most of my clients struggling to find time and money to implement technologies that have been around for more than 10 years: Internet, Big Data, mobility, cloud computing, etc. When they do make it to implement them in their organizations, it is often too little too late to make a difference with their competition. As Wayne Gretsky famously said, you should "skate to where the puck will be, not where it is". Thus, every company's strategy should have a clear view on AI, blockchain, robots, 3D printing, Internet of Things, etc. Does your strat plan include them?
Forrester says that CIOs must act as VCs and recommends they support early-stage tech companies and have their own technology scouts. As CIO Angela Yochem told me in 2015, she has set up a process to find “capabilities that are not yet commercially available” and “quickly absorb, test, and utilize emerging technologies, and discard them if they are not appropriate and don’t give us a leg up on our competition.”
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS
Forrester has recently produced a matrix of disruptive technologies that is worth sharing. More important is the article conclusion where Forrester recommends that cIO act as Venture Capitalists to actively scout new technologies and companies to leverage this innovation for improved competitiveness. This is a radical departure form traditional IT roles and responsibilities which I believe has important benefits in large organizations where All eyes are on the CIO to lead the digital transformation. Unfortunately we are a long way away from this in most organizations.
Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat plays ping pong on the HTC Vive.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS
Doesn't matter, just fun to watch and wonder where we'll be a few years from now playing ping pong (and beer pong ;-) with people half way across the world... ;-)
“Model3AR” by @JelmerVerhoog. Subscribe for updates on Jelmer’s app → http://bit.ly/2vEXtUI “The accuracy of #ARKit is just incredible. https://t.co/npq6aEkVGk — Robert Davey (@RobJDavey)
AR/VR hype keeps reaching new heights. Funding to AR/VR startups reached an all-time high in deals and dollars last year. Both Facebook and Apple are reputed to have 1000+ engineers working on their respective headset efforts. And PlayStation said its PSVR, a $400 headset released in October, has sold 915k units in just 4 months. Unsurprisingly, startups of all kinds are flocking toward what could be the next major computing platform.
In this webinar we'll delve into:
Major startup players in the AR and VR market
Investigate new enterprise and industrial use cases for AR/VR
Patents being sought by large corporates like Microsoft, Apple, along with startups like Magic Leap
Highlight how media companies and movie studios are reacting and driving M&A
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
So much money is being invested by so many large companies that it is difficult not to expect great things from AR and VR in the coming years. If you go beyond the hype on gaming gears and being able to watch a virtual TV on the wall, every corporate strategy should include at least evaluations of the technologies to help improve manufacturing, repairs, or other professional activities.
The most anticipated slide deck of the year is here. Key takeaways:
Global smartphone growth is slowing: Smartphone shipments grew 3 percent year over year last year, versus 10 percent the year before. This is in addition to continued slowing internet growth, which Meeker discussed last year.
Voice is beginning to replace typing in online queries. Twenty percent of mobile queries were made via voice in 2016, while accuracy is now about 95 percent.
In 10 years, Netflix went from 0 to more than 30 percent of home entertainment revenue in the U.S. This is happening while TV viewership continues to decline.
Entrepreneurs are often fans of gaming, Meeker said, quoting Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg. Global interactive gaming is becoming mainstream, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017 versus 100 million in 1995. Global gaming revenue is estimated to be around $100 billion in 2016, and China is now the top market for interactive gaming.
China remains a fascinating market, with huge growth in mobile services and payments and services like on-demand bike sharing. (More here: The highlights of Meeker's China slides.)
While internet growth is slowing globally, that’s not the case in India, the fastest growing large economy. The number of internet users in India grew more than 28 percent in 2016. That’s only 27 percent online penetration, which means there’s lots of room for internet usership to grow. Mobile internet usage is growing as the cost of bandwidth declines. (More here: The highlights of Meeker's India slides.)
In the U.S. in 2016, 60 percent of the most highly valued tech companies were founded by first- or second-generation Americans and are responsible for 1.5 million employees. Those companies include tech titans Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook.
Healthcare: Wearables are gaining adoption with about 25 percent of Americans owning one, up 12 percent from 2016. Leading tech brands are well-positioned in the digital health market, with 60 percent of consumers willing to share their health data with the likes of Google in 2016.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
This is an annual bag of goodies.
Highlight #1: retail stores are closing at record pace while Amazon opens stores. This is such a huge trend because it transforms stores from a mini-warehouse into something else: a destination for experience, service, and training. Think Apple store with the highest sales per square foot, genius bar, classes and a showroom. Amazon has pushed its Amazon GO, no lines, no registers concept and it is rolling it out slowly. This is just the beginning...
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
Scoop.it!
WHY IT MATTERS: this list of technology questions for 2022 feels like an answer to the question "what is digital disruption?".
We have reached a moment in time where old technologies - eCommerce or videoconferencing for example - are finally breaking into established industries. And the impact, at scale, cannot be found in technology but rather in every single industry it disrupts.
Very thoughtful piece, very good questions.