What's Changing? - Technology

Please see below selected recent technology-related change.

See also:

July 2024

David Mattin from New World Same Humans is convinced that it’s going to become a high-status, elite play to renounce phones, social media, and many other aspects of digital culture, as a reaction against a world of information abundance and always-on connection. Mattin sad: "If I’m right, we’ll see a growing divide between those who can afford to disconnect and those who must remain connected. Replete with material and cultural capital? Ditch your phone, delete X and Instagram, and luxuriate in the privilege that is Undistracted Human Consciousness. Need to pay the rent? Keep (doom)scrolling, and don’t worry too much about all those flame wars and ads: most of them are AI generated!"

April 2024

2.6 billion is the approximate number of people who still lack internet access; a disparity that satellite internet start-ups are working to remedy.

March 2024

The gap between the number of men and women employed in tech narrowed since the pandemic, based on a Financial Times analysis, which pointed to strong demand and increased acceptance of flexible work schedules as contributing factors. Though women are making gains, men still hold the greater share of tech jobs - which could be a problem as much of the field turns its focus to artificial intelligence. One expert told the FT, "You need a diverse workforce to make sure that you find some way around any bias that is present" in AI technologies.

January 2024

Technology companies started slashing jobs to invest in AI. For example, the German software firm SAP announced plans to cut or restructure 8,000 jobs - training some of the employees to work alongside AI.

January 2023

BCG believes that the technology function of the future will look and act nothing like the function of today. Changes in the technology landscape, from quantum computing and the explosion of data to the democratisation of coding, will force a transformation in the fundamental purpose, function, and scope of the tech function.

December 2022

Further reading:

October 2022

For GZERO, one of the most important changes happening in the global economy today is invisible. It’s the accelerating move from hard currencies and brick-and-mortar banks to digital and mobile-based platforms for commerce, payments, and banking. This shift, which got a boost from the COVID pandemic, will transform the global economy from the ground up: broadening households’ and entrepreneurs’ access to the financial tools they need to thrive and grow, which strengthens national and regional economies, ultimately spurring more global economic growth. The annual value of the digital economy is already $14.5 trillion and through the next decade, it will account for nearly three-quarters of global GDP expansion.

June 2022

For most organisations, the question of whether advanced technologies will disrupt their business is a matter of when, not if. There are plenty of reasons why such "deep tech" is starting to make deep inroads. One of the biggest and most immediate is the global push for more-sustainable business practices. In many industries, true sustainability (net-zero emissions, for example) cannot be achieved without the help of new technologies, while moving early as a new technology trend emerges can create enormous value (BCG notes as examples Tesla taking on electric vehicles or Pfizer, BioNTech, and others investing in RNA vaccines).
Further reading:

April 2022

Corporate spending on digital technology was due to rise for a third consecutive year in 2022, increasing by 65% compared with 2020. However, with this rise in spending came new challenges for corporate leaders, who must integrate digital technologies and measure their impact. To determine how companies can overcome these digital transformation challenges, EY-Parthenon and Oxford Economics surveyed 1,500 global C-level executives to understand digital strategies, technology decision-making, and the results from investments.

February 2022

Maturing technologies in the realms of information, machines, and materials are paving the way toward an explosion in human progress and productivity, argued the author of The Cloud Revolution, Mark Mills. Mills describes how "overnight success" stories like the iPhone are actually built upon previous technologies, which themselves often took decades to develop and he argues that ultimately, technological revolutions of the kind we are now experiencing bring greater per capita wealth, improved health and well-being, and more conveniences and leisure.

January 2022

Big technology always wants to find the next big opportunity, and an Economist analysis of deals, patents, recruitment and other yardsticks showed that cash flows into everything from driverless cars to quantum computing. The shift reflected a fear that the lucrative investment areas of the 2010s were losing relevance, and the fact that technology titans are increasingly moving onto each other’s patches (the share of sales that overlap has doubled since 2015 to 40%).
In early 2022, US manufacturers had on average fewer than five days' worth of semiconductor supplies, down from 40 days before the pandemic. There was growing pressure for America to produce more chips as a global shortage dragged on.

December 2021

By the end of 2021, an estimated 2.9 billion people had never used the internet, according to a study by the UN. That’s nearly 40 percent of the world’s population. Closing that “digital divide” will be critical for addressing global poverty and income inequality.
For New World, Same Humans, the pandemic is our great collective shock; the closest thing most of us have experienced to the cataclysm that was WWII. In the wake of it, we need to relinquish our faith in old images of our shared future, and build new radical visions. However, perhaps we’ve lost the ability to do this and we can no longer even imagine radically better futures, let alone enact them. So many of the futures imagined for us – whether inside virtual worlds or on distant planets – appear radical, but take a closer look, and one finds they’re only new ways to sustain the same old systems of technological capitalism.

November 2021

For CB Insights, technology is in a very different place today than it was during the dotcom bubble. The proliferation of smartphones and computers across the globe - over three-quarters of adults now have one - has supercharged industries from fintech to digital health, as tech and the internet have become an integral part of most adults’ lives around the world.
The potential economic value that the market for the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) could unlock is large and growing. By 2030, McKinsey estimates that it could enable $5.5 trillion to $12.6 trillion in value globally, including the value captured by consumers and customers of IoT products and services. The IoT’s economic-value potential is concentrated in certain settings (types of physical environments where IoT is deployed), with the factory setting (which includes standardised production environments in manufacturing, hospitals, and other areas) accounting for the largest amount of potential economic value

September 2021

CB Insights notes that the metaverse is the tech world’s latest obsession - despite originating from a dystopic sci-fi novel. The metaverse refers to the idea of a shared, persistent virtual space, akin to a digital mirror of the real world — but without any of the constraints. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently articulated his vision to transform Facebook into a metaverse company, describes it as “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content - you are in it.”

August 2021

China gave technology companies more bad news when it announced a five-year plan for tighter regulation of the digital economy, monopolies, and national security.

July 2021

Technology was at the heart of many changes during the pandemic: online shopping surged, Zoom became a household name and QR codes finally entered regular use when checking in and ordering at bars and pubs. Analysts believe video calls are here to stay as remote work gains traction, and as a more common form of staying in touch on the go. Experts also believe computer and console gaming is likely to retain much of the new audience who discovered it as a new hobby during the pandemic. However, our familiarity with certain aspects of technology may lead us into risky habits, security experts warned. Scam messages related to parcel delivery charges or bogus QR codes are growing cybersecurity threats to “desensitised” tech consumers.
The extended reality (XR) industry, which includes virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), which involves both virtual and physical spaces, is projected to grow from $43 billion in 2020 to $333 billion by 2025, according to a recent market forecast. Much of that growth will be driven by consumer technologies, such as VR video games, which are projected to be worth more than $90 billion by 2027, and AR glasses, which Apple and Facebook are currently developing. But other sectors are adopting immersive technologies, too. A 2020 survey found that 91 percent of businesses are currently using some form of XR or plan to use it in the future. The range of XR applications seems endless, according to Big Think.
Despite recent advances, quantum computing is still a nascent technology. It will likely follow the same trajectory as any other technology. It is currently transitioning from the government sector to the private sector which could soon mean social implications. Quantum technologies have the potential to significantly boost the capabilities of all of our current IT. Communications could become more secure, and simulations could become more realistic. Artificial intelligence may finally achieve or even surpass the promises of human-like intelligence. However, while quantum computers can solve complex problems in a fraction of the time compared to classical computers, that also means that our current cybersecurity is in danger during the transition to quantum technologies, warned Shaping Tomorrow.

May 2021

2021 witnessed a global chip shortage. One obvious question is why don’t we just make more chips? The answer is that making chips is extremely difficult and requires ample investment in semiconductor fabrication facilities.

April 2021

Technological solutionism is a phrase coined by the technology thinker Evgeny Morozov, who used it to describe a worldview - common, he said, in Silicon Valley - in which the conditions of human life, including our greatest individual and collective challenges, are seen as only a set of technical problems to be engineered away. The world, said Morozov, doesn’t work like that. We need to unlearn the lesson that technology can always solve our problems.

March 2021

Northwestern University published Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies, asking what ordinary people can do to win back some of the power being amassed by the big digital platforms. One answer, noted New World, Same Humans, is what the researchers call data poisoning: intentionally sending false or meaningless data to Google, Facebook, and others in order to confuse the algorithms they use to make sense of our online behaviour.
According to EY and Imperial College London’s Institute for Global Health Innovation Embracing Digital survey, India has witnessed one of the highest adoptions of digital technologies by health and human services organisations as the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated adoption of digital solutions. The survey revealed that 51% of respondents in India increased their use of digital technologies and data solutions since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, 74% reported that digital technologies and data solutions have increased staff productivity and 75% reported that digital solutions have been effective in delivering better outcomes for patients and service users.
Diminished Reality (DR) digitally removes or reduces unwanted features of the real-world environment. It's like augmented reality in reverse. DR has wide-ranging applications in health and medicine (taking away stimuli), city planning (reducing noise), retail/dining/ travel (customising consumer experiences), manufacturing (worker focus), and sports (reduce the sensation of impact) to name a few. DR is a feature of what Future Today Institute calls the You of Things, the set of connected wearable devices that use our data to optimise our daily activities. For companies that have chased (and given up on) personalisation, DR and AR will give consumers more direct control over their experiences.

February 2021

EY asked whether we remember learning how to navigate the internet? Icons. Drop-down menus. Touching. Swiping. Scrolling. Tapping. Now, thanks to novel smart sensors and advances in artificial intelligence (AI), devices are adapting to us through what’s collectively known as “Zero UI” – the effective disappearance of a visual user interface (UI) enabling us to communicate through voice, gestures, and biometric authentication. Sensory interfaces such as voice assistants and gesture recognition point to a future where the interface is embedded in our environment, enabling frictionless, anticipatory, responsive and predictive interactions.
China’s internet user population reached 1bn, which is one-fifth of the global total.

January 2021

While today's "classical" computers continue to become more and more powerful, there is a ceiling to their advancement due to the physical limits of the materials used to make them. Quantum computing allows physicists and researchers to exponentially increase computation power, harnessing potential parallel realities to do so, noted Big Think.
A range of alternative, or so-called alt-tech, social platforms emerged by early 2021, partly in the wake of the sweeping Donald Trump bans enacted by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Previously little-known Facebook alternative MeWe gained 2.5 million users in a week and was the second most downloaded app in the Google Play Store, after TikTok.

December 2020

Many startups are building their own globe-spanning networks of nanosatellites, enabling a new kind of everywhere, all-the-time connectivity for people, animals and assets on Earth. Scientists who track the health of penguins in Antarctica are managing their cameras from thousands of miles away - via tiny satellites orbiting above our heads. Energy companies are exploring using the same technology for monitoring hard-to-reach wind farms; logistics companies for tracking shipping containers; and agribusiness companies for minding cattle. It even helped National Geographic track a discarded plastic bottle from Bangladesh to the Indian Ocean, noted the Wall Street Journal.

November 2020

Pandemic lockdowns created 40 million plus new internet users across Southeast Asia in 2020, according to a new report by Google which looked at web users in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia.. Eight out of 10 people across these countries said that access to technology helped them get through the difficult lockdown period, reported GZERO Media.
Xin Xiaomeng, is a virtual newsreader developed by Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency. Unlike a human newsreader, Xin can read the news millions of times per day, and deliver a different bulletin to each viewer depending on their interests.

October 2020

When some people think of the “splinternet,” they think of China’s Great Firewall: a central authority blocking citizens from easy access to information, but Quartz reporters from five different countries showed how the experience of being online is diverging in more ways than one. We’re a long way from the early ambition and optimism of a truly open internet, but don’t lose hope, concluded Quartz.
Sixty-four percent of American adults say social media is having a negative impact on the way things are going in the country, according to a Pew study. Most people who said so cited misinformation, hate, and harassment as the main reasons for their pessimism.

September 2020

An EY report analysed what major technology accounts talk about on their earnings calls with investors. These technology companies discussed quarterly results, and how digital transformation projects are driving revenues. They also shared how tight cash flow management allowed companies to keep investing in long-term strategies, and how management is planning to adapt the business to a post-pandemic environment of volatility and business disruption.

July 2020

Competitive digital gaming experienced a boom when physical distancing remained in effect. Game spending totalled a record-breaking $10.5 billion in April 2020, not only because games entertain and distract, but also because online gaming fosters connection and community, noted Future Today Institute.

June 2020

Today, 11 of the world's 13 largest internet companies are US-based, and the US produces more of the tech startups that will drive innovation in the AI and other cutting-edge technologies that will soon dominate global economic development. COVID enhances those US advantages, because contact tracing, immunity passports, and remote work, enabled by new technologies that US companies have a jump on, are now more important. However, Chinese companies, with priority backing from their government, are working in all these same areas and will continue to make progress, and China's government is going all in to make China a technology superpower over the next decade, noted GZEROMedia.

May 2020

The FAAAM (for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft), the five biggest US tech companies. between them have nearly $500bn in cash and are spending it. Indeed, the rate of acquisitions is the fastest since 2015. In China, too, Tencent wants to invest 500 billion yuan (US$70 billion) into digital infrastructure over the next five years.

April 2020

Despite lots of anecdotal evidence of interruptions to Zoom calls etc. in the round the internet seemed to do just fine during the coronvirus crisis. Web traffic in many major cities was up by as much as a quarter, as people increasingly depend on it for work, school, socialising etc. Though there were some slowdowns, researchers said they were mostly minor and that’s due to years of massive investments by Big Telecom in capacity, speed, and performance.

March 2020

DNV GL’s Technology Outlook 2030 argued that “precision” will define many of the technology developments in the next decade: precision materials, precision healthcare, precision food design etc.

January 2020

A third of the world plays video games. About 60% of Americans say they play them daily. And as the global gaming industry grows, it’s influencing much more than how we spend our free time. From entertainment to government to health care, industries are trying to distil and deploy gaming’s immersive power, noted Quartz.

December 2019

The Economist contemplated the phenomenon of technological pessimism. Many people look to technology for a vision of a brighter future. However, as the 2020s dawn, social media are spreading propaganda and undermining democracy; e-commerce, ride-hailing and the gig economy are charged with underpaying workers and exacerbating inequality; and parents worry that smartphones have turned their children into screen-addicted zombies.

November 2019

In order to crack the encryption on everything from bank accounts to nuclear war plans, today's most powerful supercomputers would have to crunch numbers longer than the lifespan of the known universe. But a powerful enough quantum computer might be able to crack the same code in just a few hours, giving whoever owns it access to other countries and their citizens' most sensitive secrets.
To manage - and possibly avoid - a damaging split that could stop globalisation in its tracks, Ian Bremmer, the founder of Eurasia Group, has called for a new approach to managing global tech competition. His idea is to create two new global organisations. First, a kind of global referee to assess the world's current progress in managing data and emerging technologies like AI. This would be modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body that serves a similar function on the science of climate change. Second, a World Data Organisation (WDO) modelled on the World Trade Organisation - a club of like-minded countries that believe in "online openness and transparency" that could set and enforce norms around data privacy and digital trade.
67% of consumers believe that modern technology is ‘weakening human bonds’. Yet at the same time, Apple is hiring software engineers with a psychology background to ‘help Siri have serious conversations’, because it sees people’s behavior towards virtual assistants moving beyond the purely functional. (source: Trendwatching).

October 2019

As of 2018, half of the world's population was online with some form of internet connection. Despite progress, this still puts billions of people on the wrong side of the digital divide. Leaving half the world without access to the "electricity of today's age" - internet access, and increasingly at broadband speeds - means that existing inequalities, poverty and insecurity will persist, worsen and become increasingly difficult to address.
India's 630 million internet users surpass the populations of the US, the UK, Russia, and South Africa combined. But for every Indian who does have internet access, there's at least one who doesn't. With 66% of India's population living in rural areas, overcoming the digital divide remains a huge challenge.

September 2019

New technology such as 5G, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and robotics have become, now more than ever, intertwined with geopolitical, economic and trade interests. Leading powers are using new technology to exert power and influence and to shape geopolitics more generally. The ongoing race between the US and China around 5G technology is a case in point.

July 2019

Quantum computing is expected to add productivity gains of over $450 billion annually in the coming decades, says BCG, with early applications in portfolio management, drug discovery and fluid dynamics.

June 2019

The average daily time consumers spend on mobile in minutes surpassed TV in 2019: 226 minutes for mobile versus 216 minutes for TV.
Over 50% of the planet’s population is now online. The second half of the internet revolution has begun. According to an Economist briefing describes, it is changing how society works—and also creating a new business puzzle. Most new users are in the emerging world. China is still growing fast. But much of the rise is coming from poorer places, notably India and Africa. Having seen what fake news and trolling has done to public discourse in rich countries, many observers worry about politics being debased, from the polarisation of India’s electorate to the persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority. On the positive side, charities and aid workers talk endlessly and earnestly about how smartphones will allow farmers to check crop prices, let villagers sign up for online education and help doctors boost vaccination rates.

May 2019

Humans don't seem to be great at predicting the consequences of technology. After all, social media platforms, which began as a way for friends to connect online, are today being used to radicalise terrorists and potentially swinging democratic elections.
Panellists at a Chatham House event discussed the extent to which advances in technology can be said to be re-engineering humanity and whether the goal of designing programmable worlds go hand-in-hand with engineering predictable people. Or, on the contrary, they considered whether human qualities and interactions become increasingly important and powerful in today’s digital world, and evaluated how should cultural, legal and political institutions might evolve and adapt in response to these developments.
For Raconteur, when it comes to empowering citizens through public sector technology, Estonia is leading the way by a distance. The tiny former Soviet republic, with a population of 1.3 million, is arguably the most advanced digital society in the world. Some 94% applicants gain e-residency, a photograph and their fingerprints. They are issued with an identity card, a cryptographic key and a PIN code to access Estonia’s national systems. E-residency aims to create a digital nation for all, built on inclusion, transparency and legitimacy to empower citizens globally, and achieve worldwide digital and financial inclusion, as outlined on e-estonia.com.
Kickstarter's co-founder thinks the internet is becoming a space of dark forests. As the internet becomes an ever more hostile space, real conversation is retreating into the perceived safety of private channels, invitation-only message boards, text groups, even newsletters and podcasts. These "dark forests" grow because they provide psychological and reputational cover. They allow us to be ourselves because we know who else is there.

April 2019

OneWeb, a UK start-up, confirmed funding to create a constellation of 650 satellites to provide high-speed broadband access to the 4 billion unconnected people around the world, beginning with schools.

March 2019

The downsides of mobile-device dependency on mental health, especially for children, are increasingly well documented.

February 2019

For a growing proportion of the world, our lives are increasingly lived online. According to Forum for the Future, our ‘onlives’ make us gloriously connected, grant us myriad opportunities to reinvent ourselves, to learn, to innovate, to access life-saving advice and assistance, and to teleport an endless cornucopia of goods to our front doors. But there are signs that living perpetually plugged-in is bringing unintended consequences. The dark side is expressing itself in our politics, our mental health, our screen addictions and our social cohesion.
Futurists have pointed to the coming of “mirrorworld”, the digital, augmented reality twin of the real world. Advances in augmented reality are building a 1:1 scale map of the world which could become the next computing platform, Such simulacra could even be more high-fidelity than the real world because “digital twins” often have attributes that don't exist in their physical manifestations, noted Exponential View.

January 2019

Virtual reality will be much bigger than augmented reality, argued Quartz. AR is better for places that are already very interesting, but most people don’t live in places like that.

December 2018

By the end of 2018, some 3.9 billion had internet access, according to the UN. That means that for the first time ever, more than half of earth’s population will be online. Over the past decade, Africa has experienced the fastest growth in internet access globally. Since 2005, the percentage of Africans with an internet connection has risen from 2 to 24.
Every business is now a technology business. Even companies founded before the internet age should be putting tech talent in the C-suites, argued Quartz.
Further reading:
- The Most Surprising Tech Breakthroughs of 2018 - SingularityHub

November 2018

Quartz analysed an experiment that could bring internet to millions of people. In a rural part of northern USA, too sparsely populated for big providers to bother with, is a project beaming internet over otherwise unused TV waves. For millions in the US and beyond, it could be the key to joining the modern era.

October 2018

The world could soon have three separate internets, according to Quartz.. The EU, US, and China are balkanising what was once a universal human resource.
In the very poorest countries - including Eritrea, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, the Central African Republic, Niger, and Madagascar - fewer than 5% are online. And at the very bottom is North Korea, where the country’s oppressive regime restricts the access to the walled-off North Korean intranet Kwangmyong and access to the global internet is only granted to a very small elite.
However, noted Our World in Data the overarching trend globally – and, as the chart shows, in all world regions – is clear: more and more people are online every year. The speed with which the world is changing is incredibly fast. On any day in the last 5 years there were on average 640,000 people online for the first time. This was 27,000 every hour.
As IT’s boardroom presence and influence on corporate strategy increases, chief information officers (CIOs) need to be surrounded by talent that evolves at the same rate as technology. An infographic explored the most important technologies for businesses in the future to identify where the skills gaps are.
In Essential education: future jobs must be taught with tech, Raconteur argued that the applications of technology in classrooms can add great value, but leave room for the human interactions of skilled teachers.
Computers are getting smaller and smaller. But what if we had sensors the size of dust, that could float through the air undetected, talk to one another, gather information, and transmit that information back down to a central place? This is the concept behind smart dust, and it’s more plausible than you might think - listen here.
Digital detoxing isn’t new, but the past year has certainly seen a profound shift in perception: for TrendWatching, our near-total digital lifestyles are seen less as simply a personal choice; instead people have been manipulated to become digital addicts, with all the negative social outcomes that entails - e.g. the World Health Organisation officially classified ‘gaming addiction’ as a mental disorder and France banned smartphones in school.
Further reading:
- The Truth About Algorithms - The RSA

September 2018

Humanity’s future is being shaped by the technologies emerging today, argued New Scientist. But these technologies also raise important questions: do we clearly understand the potential of AI, how will robots change the nature of work and society more broadly, can we exploit personal information and keep it private at the same time, and are we doing enough to make energy renewable? New Scientist’s “Exploring the Future” webinar challenged engineers and scientists to discuss these questions and the technologies behind them to better understand how they will change our lives by 2030.
The internet is splitting in two, noted GZEROMedia. At least that’s the assessment of Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google and recently departed chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Asked recently whether the global internet would fragment into “three to four separate internets” over the next 10-15 years, the tech billionaire replied: “I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America.”
EY research found that the number of users, network devices and data is increasing exponentially – and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Digital data is doubling every two years. By 2020, there will be 50 billion internet-connected “things”. Cisco estimates that global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic will increase nearly threefold over the next five years and will have increased 127-fold from 2005 to 2021.
The Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development says that the world will not even achieve 50% internet use until the end of 2018. If the world maintains current internet user growth rates - a big if 0 we won’t approach 100% global internet adoption for well over two decades. This could exacerbate the current fault lines of global inequality, warned the World Economic Forum. Internet use is overwhelmingly concentrated in advanced economies, and the biggest gaps are in the world’s poorest areas.
Carnegie Mellon University is establishing a new Centre for Technology and Society that examines how emerging technologies impact the ability of workers of all skill levels to make a living in the 21st Century,
Identifying where the real potential for digital transformation lies (in terms of risk, process and the bottom-line) will be a key challenge tor all organisations, argued Shaping Tomorrow.
Singularity Hub warned that the breakneck speed of digital transformation leaves the public and governments behind so quickly that they often never catch up before the next iteration takes hold. The result is unbridled advances in technology that have dazzled the world, bringing benefits but simultaneously trampling some business models, neglecting to always consider what’s best for consumers, and even affecting the outcomes of elections. And it isn’t just the speed of digital technologies that makes them difficult to regulate. A further complication is that the technologies and platforms are global and at the same time governed by many jurisdictions and polities.
Further reading:

August 2018

Software should encourage us to stop and think, claimed Quartz, pointing to a WIRED warning that, from impulse buys to knee-jerk reactions, we’re using technology to make the world more haphazard, and that we should be using it to slow us down, not speed us up.
Further reading:

July 2018

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter joined to announce a new standards initiative called the Data Transfer Project, designed as a new way to move data between platforms. In a blog post, Google described the project as letting users “transfer data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it”.
Robotics for manufacturing, warehouses, maintenance, etc. is estimated to be a $105bn market by 2025, according to CB Insights’ market sizings data. Much of the growth is being driven by ”cobots,” or collaborative robots that can work alongside humans. These are smaller and cheaper, too - think a small robot arm vs. huge robotic machinery, which is what we often imagine when we think of robots "on the job."
Further reading:

June 2018

The recent spread of Virtual Reality (VR) technology into diverse sectors is testament to its incredible business potential, claimed DistruptionHub. VR makes it possible for us to visualise data, simulate training experiences, and explore new buildings without laying a single brick. These possibilities – and more – are expressed in a global VR sector which is expected to grow at a rate of 54 per cent over the next few years, reaching a market value of nearly $27bn by 2022.
A speaker at the Latitude 59 startup 2018 event in Tallinn, Estonia argued that society is now basically a cyber system that can be hacked and disrupted with the dependency we have on mobile phones, digital systems and other aspect of tech integrated throughout our life. The speaker reconceptualised Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to illustrate how every part of the pyramid relies on cyber today.
The internet of thinking, a trend identified by Accenture, differs from the internet of things (IoT) in that it accelerates the insights gathered from data inputs without referring to a core cloud-based IT structure. This is important, because as the vast number of data-gathering devices increases, along with the tremendous volumes of data, these centralised systems will simply be unable to keep up.
Further reading:

May 2018

There is a moral panic over “addiction” to tech that’s based on weak data, argued Quartz.
Technology advances “exponentially,” yet most people still think “linearly” about technological progress. Exponential technologies include nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D printing, biotech, brain science, big data and financial technology. These technologies upend traditional models of education, career, retirement and lifespan. Traditional commerce doesn’t grow exponentially; knowledge-based assets do.
Although trust in specific technology and social media companies is falling, 72 percent of Americans polled still say technology has a net positive effect on society, according to a new survey by Axios.
An accelerating AI arms race can be slowed - FT

April 2018

March 2018

February 2018

January 2018

Pre-2018

December 2017

November 2017

October 2017

Why China dominates bitcoin and how it may control the blockchain technology behind it — Quartz

September 2017

August 2017

July 2017

2016

A new report prepared by Strategy& for Facebook Inc. in support of its Internet.org initiative, examined the barriers to Internet adoption and how they could be removed. The report analysed both the social and economic impact of internet access, and the implications and opportunities for telecoms, media content, and infrastructure sectors. 'Connecting the World: Ten Mechanisms for Global Inclusion' is a 10 year study, encompassing 120 countries. Growth in access to the Internet has slowed down in the past four years. Currently, only one out of three people in the world is connected to the Internet.

Deloitte said it had partnered with five blockchain startups and built a wide range of prototypes to service industries including insurance, employee management and cross-border payments. The firm has built 20 working blockchain prototypes in partnership with startups BlockCypher, Bloq, ConsenSys Enterprise, Loyyal and Stellar. Four of the prototypes will be demoed live on stage at the Consensus 2016 conference in New York City. Deloitte partner Eric Piscini told CoinDesk that, while the companies represent a wide range of businesses, his company’s decision to partner with them was part of a global strategy to help push blockchain from theory into real-world applications.

The internet is at a crossroads. Since its birth over 30 years ago, the internet has generally adhered to its original vision: a decentralized and universally connected network. That is to say, any connected device is generally free to exchange information with any other device that is willing to receive it. However, the internet of tomorrow faces a series of new challenges which, if allowed to accumulate unchecked, threaten to splinter it across national, commercial, and technological boundaries.

Those able to harness the power of information and communication technology are reaping ever more benefits. But in poor countries, digital poverty is holding back growth and development, leaving them further behind. Singapore is this year’s leader of the global ICT revolution. Its government has a clear digital strategy and is an exemplar of online services and e-participation tools, which filters down to its industries and population. The country has the highest penetration of mobile broadband subscriptions per capita in the world and more than half of the population is employed in knowledge-intensive jobs. The country topped the 2016 Global Information Technology Report, published by INSEAD in partnership with the World Economic Forum and Johnson Cornell University, due to its leadership in business, innovation environment and government usage of ICT. The report benchmarks 143 economies in terms of their capacity to prepare for, use and leverage ICT.

See also: Accenture: Fintech and the evolving landscape: landing points for the industry.

April 2016

Adaptive Insights released its CFO Indicator Q1 2016 report that revealed the ways in which Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) harness the power of big data and scenario planning to help navigate their companies through the current financial uncertainty. To compile the report, the company surveyed 377 CFOs worldwide. The report found that while some CFOs are worried about the financial uncertainty that hung over Q1 2016, the vast majority of those it surveyed were confident in their forecasts and believe that big data, analytics and scenario planning will help them guide the way for their organisations. 48% cent of the CFOs viewed scenario planning provides the most strategic value to their companies when a downturn arises.

Major banks are poised to escalate their participation in financial technology (fintech) projects across Asia Pacific as mainland China continues to drive these investments in the region, according to industry experts. Accenture has estimated that fintech investments in Asia-Pacific grew 517 per cent in the first quarter to US$2.7 billion, up from US$445 million in the same period last year, on the back of initiatives in the world’s second-largest economy. Total Asia-Pacific investments in fintech last year more than quadrupled to reach a record US$4.3 billion, the firm said. The region is now the world’s second-biggest geographic market for fintech investments after North America.

The Telegraph looked at reasons why big banks may find it difficult to gain a foothold in the fintech market, despite their investment in new technology and the acquisition of forward-thinking start-ups. Traditional banks are weighed down by huge costs while start-up websites are cheaper to run, and so can offer far better value. Banks are so heavily regulated that competition has been smothered, meaning they may find a super-competitive market alien. With dozens and dozens of fintech start-ups, banks may find selecting the right ones to invest in difficult... history is against banks as “all the evidence of industrial innovation suggests that legacy companies can virtually never transform themselves.

Digital technologies continue to rapidly reshape the business landscape, noted Boston Consulting Group. A striking feature of this ongoing transformation is that, despite these technologies’ underlying technical complexity, a significant share of many companies’ digital campaigns is being driven largely by the business function, with only limited conceptual involvement by the corporate IT department. In fact, sometimes the business even launches digital initiatives without the knowledge of corporate IT. The empowerment of the business function in this manner can provide clear advantages for a company: it can, for example, speed the launch of innovative new products and services to customers. But over time, it can also lead to an assortment of independently driven digital initiatives that have no unifying standards. This can translate into high complexity, additional costs, a lack of compatibility among initiatives, and security issues.

March 2016

Spooked by technological change, CEOs of global banks fear they are staring extinction in the eye if they fail to keep on top of trends, according to a new PwC report, which found that 81% of the world’s top bankers said the speed of technological change concerns them. The latest PwC survey of 176 banking and capital markets CEOs across 62 countries cites cybersecurity and fast-moving entrepreneurs nimbly grasping the new opportunities emerging from technology as key risks.

Fewer than 30% of businesses using analytics to drive operational efficiency have actually managed to improve business operations, according a study from Capgemini. In its survey of 608 companies, only 29% said they had successfully achieved their objectives in operational analytics initiatives; 40% said they had achieved only moderate success. The survey found that 41% of the businesses that Capgemini looked at struggled to introduce analytics initiatives in their operations. “They have mostly implemented proof of concepts and are struggling to realise benefits from their analytics initiative,” the company’s Going Big: Why Organisations Need to Focus on Operations Analytics report stated.

The predictive analytics market size is expected to grow from US$2.4bn in 2015 to $9.20bn by 2020, at an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 27.4% during the forecast period, according to Research and Markets. Increase in the amount of structured and unstructured data is the foremost factor that is driving the need of this market. Also, increased focus on market and competitive intelligence, transformation from traditional BI techniques to advanced analytics techniques are other drivers behind the increasing market. Among business functions, finance is expected to have the highest market share in 2015 while human resources is expected to grow at the highest CAGR from 2015 to 2020. Financial firms are delving deeper into predictive analytics to realize faster time to value and improve operational performance and decision outcomes.

PwC published 'Making sense of bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain' to help understand terms like bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency. (Contact: John Plansky, Andrew Luca, Haskell Garfinkel, Jeremy Drane.) See also Do you know what blockchains are?

February 2016

The European Commission published the results of the 2016 edition of the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI). The findings show that Member States have made progress in areas such as connectivity and digital skills, as well as on-line public services, since the publication of the Commission's Digital Single Market Strategy last year but that the pace of progress is slowing down. More needs to be done, both at the EU and national levels, to remove the obstacles which prevent EU Member States from fully benefitting from digital opportunities.

Bitcoin became the world’s first decentralised cryptocurrency back in 2009, and with it came its main innovation – the blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain is used to keep a record of all transactions that occur in the Bitcoin network and acts as the global ledger for the currency. However the blockchain has now outgrown Bitcoin, and has the potential to be one the biggest disruptors of the computing world.

According to PwC's 19th Annual Global CEO Survey, technology CEOs are more optimistic about growth prospects than CEOs from other industries as technology is increasingly impacting every business. Companies across the globe from all industries are looking to technology and innovation to help meet stakeholder expectations, which are changing dramatically. Tech CEOs are also making significant changes to their talent strategies and their purpose.

Blockchain startup Digital Asset Holdings announced alliances with Accenture, PwC and Broadridge. Accenture will work with the company to provide consulting and systems integration services for blockchain-related projects at global financial institutions. Broadridge will help identify, develop and drive adoption of business use cases of the blockchain and PwC will help educate Digital Asset's clients on its technology. Goldman Sachs and IBM recently participated in Digital Asset's latest funding round, which raised approx $60 million.