2019 is officially underway and while we’re still trying to adjust to waking up to an alarm clock and remembering what our New Year resolution was again, it’s time to have a look at what will be happening in the tech world this year.
While it’s pretty difficult to accurately predict the future (we are still waiting for our crystal ball to be delivered) we have a few ideas of what we will be seeing tech wise in 2019.
In 2018 we saw huge scandals around the way a lot of organisations handle our data and what they do once they have it. Who could forget the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal and the subsequent Congress meetings involving Mark Zuckerberg.
In the wake of these high profile cases the general public has become more aware of how their data is collected and are beginning make their voices heard. In 2019 it is reasonable to expect that this scrutiny of organisations who collect and use our data will continue, and with laws coming into effect last year (Mandatory Data Notification) organisations who don’t properly protect sensitive data will be fined.
AI continues to grow and become more useful, the rise of chatbots, self-driving cars, smart assistants and creepy robots are testament to the increasing abilities of Artificial Intelligence.
Think Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri. These assistants are here to make our lives easier and are becoming smarter by pre-empting our needs and understanding context more and more.
These assistants aren’t just great at telling jokes, they can also be used to schedule your day, manage travel plans (Virgin Australian are now using Alexa to check-in to flights), dictate notes, perform calculations and track packages.
Different cities around the world have been working on IoT innovations to make their cities run more efficiently and conveniently for their citizens. Residents of cities where investment has been made in different smart city schemes will start to see real benefits in their daily lives and more cities will follow suit.
From innovations like smart lighting that are powered by solar panels to bins that know when they are reaching capacity and send out an alert to be collected.
So with all these new IoT devices powering our smart cities and generating vast amounts of data, it’s good timing that 5G will be arriving on our shores in 2019.
5G promises to provide greater speed, great capacity and lower latency than its predecessor 4G. Both Telstra and Optus have committed to selling commercial 5G services this year and the race is on for phone makers to provide the first 5G enabled phones.