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Published
12/17/2015
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Cloud

Tech Predictions for 2016

It’s that time of year – the time for reflecting on the recent past and looking towards the future.  The time of year for making predictions.

We’re always looking ahead for the good of our clients to find ways to use technology to help them grow – and set them apart from their competition.

The following list of predictions for 2016 is based on actual technology that currently exists and where we would like to see it go.

Smart Shopping Carts

Grocery store shopping carts will have a dock for your phone and beacons will inform it of your exact location and the nearby products. Coupons will show up as notifications and out-of-stock items will allow you to still add them to your virtual cart. The dock can also incorporate NFC allowing you to pay without having to remove your phone. When RFIDs become cheap enough the cart itself can be a RFID reader.

Smartphone-Integrated POS

Your phone will be able to pay using an open protocol directly with the POS terminal using WiFi instead of NFC. You won’t have to give the waitress your credit card and your smart phone will request authorization for payment when your check is ready without using a third party service to route between the two.

Buy Groceries Online, Pick Up in Store

Instead of paying for same-day delivery you can pick them up yourself. To reduce staffing costs it only has enough employees for stocking and pickups. Shopping and payment is handled online and you give a window of time to pick it up. Unfortunately for Californians, they still have to sit behind the wheel while their car drives itself to the grocery warehouse.

Voice Detection Algorithms

Programmatic marketing is being increasingly used to make more automated marketing decisions. Part of that tracking already incorporates unique phone numbers to accurately track a user but will also include voice detection to guess the user’s age, mood if they’re frustrated or neutral, and even intelligence depending on word and grammar choice.

Wearables Get Even More… Wearable

Currently only fixed beacons broadcast. Smart clothing will have integrated beacons that can announce themselves, opening a range of possibilities such as informing your coworkers what outfit you’re wearing so they can avoid dressing similarly, or even provide input for that important meeting.

New Depth Sensors for Augmented Reality

Depth sensor allows mapping the physical environment and will be incorporated with more apps for augmented reality.

Netflix announces Lottery Monkey

Netflix invented a series of “Simian Army” tools such as Chaos Monkey, that would randomly introduce failures into their cloud infrastructure to test resiliency. Next they’ll announce Lottery Monkey that will randomly give an employee the day off, as if they won the lottery and quit, to test business resiliency.

Frameworks Take Online Security Into Their Own Hands

Content Management Systems and Frameworks will form a web application firewall security initiative.  All vulnerabilities and patches are also released with a web application firewall ruleset allowing websites and hosting providers to quickly patch exploits without relying on software patches to be applied.

There you have it, our tech wish list for 2016!