Happy New Year,
Welcome back. You’ll be happy to hear I have a New Year’s resolution. 2016 is my year to avoid temptation. More specifically, there’s no room for tempting but banal “10 Things You MUST Do To Get Your Business Digital-Ready” type efforts in my 2016 writing. Nothing as dull as “10 Predictions For How Your Business Will Change In 2016”. No way. 2016 WILL BE the year of avoiding temptation…
For those keen readers, you would have realised that this was the intro to the first blog of 2016, and like many New Year’s resolutions I broke the temptation after a couple of months.
Before I had a chance to make any similar resolutions this year Spark asked me to share my thoughts on 2016’s technology highlights and predictions for 2017’s ‘next big thing’. Which I will share with you now.
Kursten Shalfoon, Director at The Exponential Agency
Kursten’s on a mission to help organisations survive and thrive in the exponential world. He’s got deep media and telco experience as well as expertise across digital, ecommerce, ISP services, retail, and domestic and international FMCG.
Highlights of 2016
“Cloud computing and SaaS have come of age. The interfaces between large enterprise systems have also matured with new API frameworks, which seamlessly link systems. From a personal business point of view, this year Generator Consulting and three other consulting businesses merged to create a larger and more diverse business. We set up an integrated website, shared storage, project management, workflow, CRM and financials all for less than $250 per month, and it’s connected, scalable and just works.”
Moving ahead, Kursten sees four major trends:
- Mobile mobile mobile – the prediction is that 75% of all traffic will be mobile this year.
- He loves the fact that you can now start up a new business or business line in the time it takes traditional businesses to write a business case.
- Voice command products such as Siri, Google Home and Amazon Echo are going to become mainstream.
- AR, wearables, IoT and distributed blockchain services are the next wave of devices and capabilities that will create an entirely new platform for value and place demands on computing that finally warrant huge bandwidth everywhere.
I wasn’t the only one asked to contribute to the article and there are other great insights from
- Paul Quickenden, CEO of Putti
- Patrick Verryt, Head of Smart Cities/IoT at Spark Ventures
- Shona Grundy, Managing Director at Ora 10 Ltd and
- Richard Adams, General Manager of Solutions, Spark Digital
KS
