The Next Big Thing in Technologies
Read the updated article on Top Technology Trends in 2021 here.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on the whole world. The transformations that we are experiencing today are changing not only our habits, routines, and works but even the demand for technology. The main question that concerns everyone today: what’s next? German Stogniev, CTO at IdeaSoft, carefully studied the current situation and made his forecast of what is the next big thing in technologies. Let’s figure it out!
We should start with the social changes that have occurred recently. It’s obvious, we’re all at home now. Our freedom is limited. In this situation, many are experiencing fear of totalitarian regimes. We should take into account that humanity is divided by social, and other indicators. The way we consume information has changed. If we transfer this to processes in IT, we can talk about new growing areas, such as collaboration software, games, online training, streaming, telemedicine, food delivery, and others. However, some niches didn’t lie on the surface. Let’s take a closer look at each change block.
- The Authoritarian Creep
Payment apps like Alipay and WeChat installed software to track user’s movements. Apple and Google are negotiating to run a nearby location tracking app. Both state and private companies are starting to create services that help track the movement of people and collect their personal data. In conditions when everyone is sitting at home, doing this is not so hard. Therefore, we would expect the popularization of services related to video/location/audio/behavior recognition, data transfer, and personal data security.
On the other hand, there will be a demand for decentralization-related services among those who want to stay away from government models and seek privacy and anonymity. Here’s P2P communication, blockchain, smart contracts, alternative banking. However, no matter what position a business occupies, the issue of data security is always important. The more we go online, the more our data goes to the Internet, and more attention should be paid to the security of information storage and transmission. That’s a great niche for development.
2. A Greater Depression
This crisis is completely different from the previous ones. In a normal crisis the prescription for solving this is simple: the government spends until people start consuming and working again. But today, as we said, the structure of consumption has changed. Now the most important are the products of basic necessity: food, medicine, social services. However, the growth potential of these markets is limited and dependent on people, not technology. So, even their growth can’t help grow the economy.
In such conditions, the first thing that enterprises will need to do is learn to grow inward and minimize the importance of humans in the production processes. On this basis, the issue of automation will escalate. Businesses will need private LTE, unmanned vehicles, remote controls, decentralized production chain management services (ERP).
Most likely, some productions will switch to home models, so there will be special services for individual niches, tailored to decentralized processes: data transfer security, communications standards, logistic networks.
3. A Divided Mankind
In a totally rational world, you might assume that an international pandemic would lead to greater internationalism. But in fact, we are moving away from each other, separated by boundaries, social positions, interests, and lifestyles. If we focus on the positive aspects of the situation, we should expect the development of a customized society — professional and hobbies social networks, new ads platform, niche marketplace. Now almost everything is sold online, so professional networks should contain internal marketplaces.
Part of the production will become distributed, part of the services will switch to self-service. So, the direction of Do it yourself (DIY) will become more popular. DIY educational platforms, DIY AR, DIY manufacturing, DIY marketplaces will receive new development forces. For example, today, people are looking even for open source options for creating respiratory systems. Maybe this is the beginning of a new DIY era?
4. Streaming Everything
New films, which were supposed to be released in the near future, were transferred to streaming platforms. However, now we have a problem with creating content. For example, it’s hard to bring a film crew together to create a movie. Therefore, in the future, shared content creation tools, distributed motion capture, professional streaming, anti-pirates tools, and next-level interaction (VR) will develop.
5. We Live Online Now
Yeah, once again, we live online now. This lifestyle has influenced and continues to influence our habits. For example, we can’t meet friends just like before. Therefore, we should expect the development of VR, the virtual marketplace, where it will be possible to make virtual purchases, virtual fintech — virtual banks to support a virtual marketplace.
The total transition to online will change the demand for IT professions too. DevOps will be one of the most important roles. It’s quite justified. Going online we load the current server capacity, and we need new architectures.
What conclusion can be drawn by looking at all these changes? Huge parts of our lives will continue to evolve online. Such a reality needs new technologies, habits, and mindset. Only one thing is definitely clear: we’re only on the threshold of new changes, and the question of what is the next big thing remains open. Now everyone must decide this for himself.
