2019 Predictions from Our Portfolio
At the end of 2018, we asked our portfolio companies to reflect on their respective tech sectors and pinpoint the trends they expect to see emerge in 2019. What products and experiences will gain momentum? What technology will reach the next level of its true potential? Here are a few of our portfolio companies’ predictions for the year ahead:
Continued Advancements of AR / VR
“2018 brought immense technological advancements to video, particularly with regards to AR/VR, and the trend will only continue into the new year. In 2019, we’ll see that video will continue to dominate the world on a variety of platforms — the internet, phone cameras, CCTVs, body cameras, drones, and planes.”
- Adam Kaplan, CEO and Co-Founder, Edgybees
“We will see leaps forward in headset capability, including a much greater field of view, faster and higher resolution displays, and resolving the vergence accommodation conflict. You will know we are close when putting on a VR headset feels less like looking through video goggles and more like opening your eyes to see another world.”
- Curtis Hickman, Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder, The VOID
“We will see advancements in social VR and the rise of “Hyper-Reality Experiences” (deeply immersive social VR). When something is funny or impactful, one of the first things people often do is look at someone else to see how they are reacting. So, when you look at yourself or someone else in VR, what are you looking at? A stone-faced generic avatar? In 2019, we’ll see a visage that accurately represents who you are looking at and how they feel as well as a migration to use this technology to reconnect with one another.”
- Curtis Hickman, Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder, The VOID
5G Goes Worldwide
“5G connectivity will pick up speed worldwide. For smartphone or tablet users, this means higher-quality video and voice calls, smoother streaming, and faster upload and download speeds. Additionally, the spurred adoption of 5G will enable machine-to-machine communications and be a boon to the IoT, connected wearables, augmented reality and immersive gaming.”
- Adam Kaplan, CEO and Co-Founder, Edgybees
Tech Aids Emergency Situations
“2018 taught us that technology can aid in the effort to combat and mitigate the impact of natural disasters — helping emergency teams in search and rescue missions after hurricanes and fire departments to navigate wildfires. These use cases have laid the necessary groundwork to justify the role of technology in emergency situations, and we can expect the burgeoning sector to see significant growth in the coming year.”
- Adam Kaplan, CEO and Co-Founder, Edgybees
AI Transforms the Enterprise
“We’re starting to see end-to-end automation of business processes. Script based RPA (Robotic Process Automation) which focuses on screen automation has been the first generation of products in process automation. In 2019 we will see AI- and cloud-based Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) products that not only address the screen automation, but also knowledge extraction from unstructured and semi-structured documents, as well as the automation of the thousands of decisions being made every day by people who are part of the business process.”
- T. M. Ravi, Managing Director, The Hive
True Potential of Cloud-Delivered Infrastructure
“With the widespread enterprise adoption of containers, micro-services, hybrid/multi-cloud deployments, and the presently emerging mobile/edge cloud, new challenges have risen in the infrastructure for these modern applications and their data. In 2019, we will see the broad availability of purpose-built, cloud-delivered infrastructure services that orchestrate, secure, and optimize such highly distributed application and data deployments.”
- Prabakar Sundarrajan, Chief Strategist and Co-Founder, The Fabric
Read more from Verizon Ventures:
