Next year in technology

Next year in technology

Telenor looks in its crystal ball and foresees many more real-world applications for advanced IT.

Self-driving vehicles, such as this Google car, will be among the technologies that are expected to hit the market in a significant way next year.
Self-driving vehicles, such as this Google car, will be among the technologies that are expected to hit the market in a significant way next year.

Self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI), big data and cryptocurrencies appeared on everyone's radar in 2017, but 2018 will be the year when many of these technologies hit the market in a meaningful way, says Telenor Research.

"When big changes happen it is often because regulations, user preferences and technology converge -- mobile telephony is one example, the car another. Next year, we will see key developments in all three dimensions," said Bjørn Taale Sandberg, head of Telenor Research.

Telenor Research is a unit of the global telecommunications conglomerate Telenor Group, the major shareholder of Total Access Communication (DTAC) in Thailand. There are seven trends to watch for, the company says:

Less social, more media: The nature of social media is changing, as Facebook users post less and the amount of relevant information on Facebook newsfeeds is dropping. This has given way to an increasing amount of professional and paid content -- of varying relevance and quality.

Users are also becoming more critical as awareness rises around "fake news" seeping into their feeds. "Perhaps discouraged by a lack of relevance, users could start turning to other platforms for news, to curate their 'digital presence' and get updates on friends and family," said Mr Sandberg. All the while, Facebook will develop further into a communication platform -- both through its Messenger app and through Facebook Groups.

Data ownership: There will also be important changes to the terms and conditions of many websites on which people share data, at least in some markets. In mid-2018, the European Union will update the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in several significant ways. Customers of any digital service -- all of us -- are becoming the owners of the data that we produce when using these services. The regulation aims to give control back to private users. It also changes how companies ask for your permission to use your data.

Terms and conditions must be reinvented so that consumers know what data they give away and for what purpose. "We will see a lot of variations around terms and conditions in the beginning. We expect that the best solutions will be copied. New terms and conditions are coming to your favourite app -- and you'll want to read them," said Mr Sandberg.

The jury is still out on how this could affect consumers in Asia, but Telenor anticipates ripple effects in the months and years ahead. "Global companies like Google and Facebook might make their improved terms and conditions apply globally," he said.

AI and Deep Learning go mass-market: "We believe 2018 will be the year when deep learning moves beyond the hype, and will find new markets outside of the Internet giants."

The technology will take on a wide range of industries, including health, energy, transport and telecoms. Those that succeed will do so through well understood use cases, ample training data and skills and knowledge to train models, according to Telenor.

Business failures will come from misunderstood use, mismanaged expectations of deep learning capabilities, immature data handling, and from thinking that deep learning is a magical tool that can be bought off the shelf and not grown from within, according to Telenor.

Deep learning is a sub-field of machine learning concerned with understanding the world through large models and huge amounts of data, and thus bringing us closer to artificial intelligence. Deep learning is behind revolutionary breakthroughs in automation of a wide range of tasks, including understanding images, text, and speech. It uses large artificial neural networks, computing systems inspired by our brains neural networks.

Blockchain moves beyond cryptocurrency: Blockchain is best known as the technology behind bitcoin, a digital currency that doesn't need a central governing body to guarantee transactions. One of the benefits of blockchain is that it is, by design, resistant to modification. However, this also brings about the challenge of diversifying its practical applications: to create more varied and usable blockchain-based solutions, developers need to be able to modify it -- to sort out bugs, upgrade technology and make widespread engineering decisions.

"Industry agreement must be reached about all of this. But the point of blockchain is that it avoids the need for a central governing body to oversee its transactions. This is known as the 'blockchain governance paradox'. The blockchain industry will need to resolve these challenges to fully deliver on its promise," Mr Sandberg predicts.

A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography. Each block typically contains a hash pointer as a link to a previous block, a time stamp and transaction data. While it has enabled bitcoin by serving as the public ledger for all transactions, the technology has many other valuable applications.

Augmented reality advances: "Though no mass-market relaunch of Google's AR glasses are on the immediate horizon, we should see a surge in the number of apps with AR in 2018," said Mr Sandberg.

With its latest version of the iPhone operating system, Apple has built-in support for augmenting whatever the phone's camera captures with additional information. This means that much of the complexity is removed for programmers and AR suddenly gets to be within reach for hundreds of thousands of iOS app developers. Expect to see navigation apps use the camera and superimpose your route on the image and games beyond Pokémon Go appear in app stores.

5G is almost here: The next generation of mobile network technology will be an enabler for many of the technologies listed above. In addition to seeing the development and testing of advanced technical features, Telenor expects to see real-life use cases demonstrated. For example, we might see 5G-linked drone equipment follow ski jumpers through the air, which will allow us to view the slopes from different 5G-connected vantage points.

"Sneak peeks of 5G technologies like these will provide new knowledge on how 5G can be used to empower vertical industries and give us more answers on 5G performance. 2018 will be the year when history said 5G was launched," said Mr Sandberg.

Digital payments go mainstream: Next year, a growing number of devices will become payment devices -- car keys, vending machines, smartphones, connected cars, sports watches and more. Artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) will generate intelligent and personalised context-aware customer services, enabling more tailored solutions to help customers and companies alike make sound financial decisions, manage risk and reduce costs.

In 2018 several new device-based payment systems will be introduced globally. In Asia Pacific, IoT banking-based services are poised to grow. In Europe, next year will bring the introduction of the new Payment Service (PSD2) directive, which enables access to banks' customer data for external actors such as fintech startups.

"This paves the way for 'open banking' and innovation as well as challenges within current business models and the telco payment ecosystem. Security will be the key in preventing cyber criminals from hacking payment-enabled devices," said Mr Sandberg.

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