5 Emerging Technologies you must understand
Technology is going to continue to change our way of doing business. Whoever takes advantage before others does will be the winner. Here are the 5 emerging technologies that I believe will have the most impact to the gaming world in the future (a very near future, to be exact).
Distributed Ledger (a.k.a. Blockchain)
When someone mentions “blockchain”, the first association that comes to mind is usually “bitcoin”, but the thing is, the concept of the technology is far more than just bitcoin. More importantly, “blockchain” is only a method of realizing the concept behind the technology which is more accurately descripted as Distributed Ledger.
The primary purpose of Distributed Ledger is to offer a trustful method to record ownership of “things” and to exchange “things”. Each ledger contains just a fraction of the data so even if someone gains unauthorized access, they will not be able to make sense of that.
Utilizing the technology to create crypto currency is one of the many ways it can benefit the gaming industry, however, it bears a lot of legal challenges and trust to build with regulators worldwide. The most foreseeable legal use case of the technology is to build a trustful network to bring gaming operators and game developers together, creating something new to customers, as well as to increase the transparency of data to gaming regulators.
Artificial Intelligence (a.k.a. AI)
AI is about automation and machine learning. It allows machines to observe and to learn from human behavior. AI can detect patterns in hacker attacks and provide predictive analysis for breaches before they occur. AI can also improve customer retention, engagement and support by predicting customer behavior. AI also can play a crucial role in scheduling, predictive maintenance, thru maximizing efficiency and reducing jobs(?!). At the same time, it will create new job opportunities for what human can do better including customer engagement and services which sounds like a job well-suited for humans more, plus many new jobs in developers and programmers for development and optimization of the system.
You can easily name many more potential use cases in the gaming industry after understanding what AI is about. The challenge of the AI technology is the interoperability between systems and making the technology more publicly affordable.
Big Data
The definition of Big Data is … an extremely large sets of data. Yes, big data means a lot of data but of course it doesn’t stop there. The most important part of Big Data is about the ability to analyze the data computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to behavior and interactions. Big Data can be analyzed for insights that lead to better decisions and strategic business moves … and also for better Artificial Intelligence (AI) building. Combining with AI technology, companies can detect fraudulent behavior before it affects your organization and determining root cause of failures in near-real time.
Internet of Things (a.k.a. IoT)
This technology will help connecting your rice cooker to your car (why?) and your phone. If you are experiencing a heavy traffic jam on your way home, your rice cooker will delay the cooking time of your dinner and your phone will notify your children’s teachers about the delay of picking them up at school.
IoT devices are things that normally would not have internet connectivity and once connected, IoT-enabled objects can communicate with each other. This ability allows for new, more effective ways for operations.
5G Mobile Network
Last but not least, the latest innovations in mobile are all eyes on this year in 2019. The new generation of mobile communications promises increased speed and low latency. Currently the average speed of internet is 10MB/s, and so 5G can potentially offer a connection that is 100 times faster… yes, one hundred times faster with lower latency.
What exactly would that mean… the new 5G shall bring more connecting IoT, thus more Big Data to have better AI, and offering a competitive edge to who can make the best use of all these technologies combined. Are you ready?
