Trend #7 in my 2020 technology trends, “Apple accepts payments” has come true, enabling small businesses take contactless payments without the need to buy additional hardware or dongles.
The new Samsung XCover-Pro, which comes with MPOS functionality as standard
The product comes from Samsung rather than Apple. Apple is rarely a first mover, so in hindsight I should have called the trend “Samsung accepts payments“.
Among several new features, Galaxy XCover Pro will also have Samsung POS, a mobile-based point of sale (MPOS) solution that has been approved by Visa’s Tap to Phone pilot program.
Here are my technology predictions for 2020. I try to predict technology trends that are outside the mainstream, and with high expectations. It seems to get harder every year.
Every year I score my own previous year’s predictions– see how I fared for digital predictions for 2019 and work backwards. Hopefully my technology predictions for 2020 will fare a little better!
1. Alerts from voice assistants
Alexa practical jokes were invented in 2015
If 2018 was the year of mass adoption of Alexa and Google Home devices, 2019 was the year of releasing a lot more skills. At the end of 2019, the Google Home device in our kitchen started answers requests with more suggestions of other skills. Cross-selling perhaps.
But this is nothing compared to where these devices are heading. I predict that by the end of 2020 these devices will be making proactive recommendations to us.
“Rain is due today, take an umbrella.”
“You still have 30 unread emails, why not deal with some of them?”
“You ordered XYZ from Amazon recently, and it’s due to arrive today”.
2. Wearables beyond your wrist
In 2020 we’ll see many more wearable devices.
In 2019, several devices for pets became available, from activity trackers to GPS trackers to smart collars.
Next year we’ll start seeing many more devices, such as spectacles from Vue or ByNorth (my favourites). With the announcement of the iPhone 12, we’ll probably hear Apple launch a new type of wearable beyond the Apple Watch.
Time to look back on the 2019 predictions from 12 months ago…. how many of the predictions came true?
1. Foldable/ rollable and other-able screens
The Samsung Galaxy Fold. The only commercial folding screen currently available.
The Samsung Galaxy Fold was released in the first half of 2019 and is currently (at the end of December) available for sale. For the SIM-free (unlocked) version, it’s only £2,110 including VAT.
For context, the iPhone 11 (64Gb) is currently available for £729 on the same website.
Despite its name, the Motorola Razr 2019 is due for release in Q1 2020.
As for rollable, LG have shown prototypes, but there’s nothing for consumer sale quite yet.
Verdict – 5/10. We only have one folding screen available for sale at the end of 2019, and it costs much more than my Microsoft Surface Pro.
2. Citizen Data Science
I predicted that we’ll find data applications that won’t require a degree in data science to make sense of all their data. Nothing obvious is available yet, although I find Google Maps is becoming ever more personalised with its routing and recommendations. Continue reading Review of my 2019 predictions→
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Last week I went to the CSFI breakfast event and it was great. I’ve been to a CSFI event before (I was one of the panellists), but it was a different format back then.
Last week we went through a document of web links and discussed each one. It was much more interesting than it sounds. Jemima Kelly, the FT journalist who wrote many of those articles was one of the panellists.
Facebook Libra
What’s in it for anyone except for Facebook? (Left unanswered but with some good points made:
It could be extremely disruptive and put massive pressure on the big currencies, making them look volatile.
Governments will try to squash it – and if they do, Facebook might use this as an opportunity to show that it’s not evil.
Facebook needs to find another revenue stream other than marketing, this might be the first.
I was working on a piece of work recently with a colleague about the retail industry. Our thinking was moving into fast fashion, or more like “fast retail” – a made up term describing the sales of low-cost goods increasingly quickly, probably through subscription channels.
We started to consider the counter this trend, but the following piece was dropped. I recently picked it up again when I saw an article about UK retail sales.
Countering fast retail
The Guardian article “Charity shop and antique purchases drive up UK retail sales” is interesting because it’s such a counter balance to the constant product advertising and marketing culture we live in: “Buy more”, “buy it cheaper”, “buy the latest version”, etc. etc.
There’s usually a counterculture that either stops, or prolongs, a trend. With retail sales it might be a combination of Minimalism, the book and Netflix documentary; and Marie Kondo or KonMari – her process of tidying up to create joy. (If that sentence looks peculiar, then watch one of the programmes to get the picture).
Minimalism and Marie Kondo both recommend buying fewer high-quality goods rather than lots of poor-quality goods.
Maybe this explains the increase in charity shop purchases. In the Guardian article, Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics, said “…households still have the ability to spend and remain the strongest part of the economy.” In other words, people are choosing to go into charity shops over buying brand new goods. Continue reading Countering fast retail→
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It’s been an interesting week at Netflix, with US subscribers falling by 120,000.
Another interesting piece of Netflix news has been about password sharing. According to analysts MoffettNathanson, 14% of Netflix subscribers share their password, and only 6% share their Amazon password to access Prime video.
The reason why password sharing on Amazon Prime is much lower than Netflix is probably because it’s easy for a friend to purchase an Amazon product once you give them your password. Possibly just as undesirable – it’s straightforward for people to review purchases on your account once you have given them your password!
I’ve been asked a few times this week, why Netflix and Amazon don’t clamp down on password sharing. I think the answer lies with a comment from Spotify.
Think of those Netflix users who are using someone else’s password as ‘freemium’ subscribers. Spotify encourages freemium (non-paying, or trial) accounts to learn “that music is an important part of their life worth paying for”. And consider the data from those listeners, how Spotify can “learn from the biggest possible group of music fans in the world.”
Freemium places a user on the path to a sales conversion. It’s a far better path than traditional or digital marketing channels. When people share a password, it shares the value of the product, that might want to make them ultimately go and buy the product.
Mary Meeker’s latest annual Internet trends report has been released, and it’s as insightful as always.
New sections for this year include:
A new section on the ethics of data usage and regulation
Interesting sections on healthcare (expenditure by country, and their focus on preventable deaths); and China (the move from manufacturing, and the totally different user experiences, such as live streaming for ecommerce)
New section on education – US university enrolments falling, with online increasing
Here are my highlights (aka abbreviated research notes):
Slide 25: [USA-based] advertising purchasing is moving to Amazon/ Twitter/ Pinterest (basically, moving from Facebook or Google at a quicker amount than they are growing)
Slide 28 & 29: Balancing Customer acquisition cost with Life Time Value!!
Slide 32: Drive conversion from freemium (Spotify & Zoom), rather than seeking new customers
#51: Echo devices doubled last year to 47M. There are now 90,000+ skills for Alexa. Why? How are they promoted?
Facebook investors are going to like this announcement
Facebook has announced the most exciting new product of all the recent FAANG press releases. From “Sign In With Apple” to Uber’s IPO, this one beats them all.
Until now, Facebook has been reliant on advertising spend. In Q4 2018, Facebook’s advertising revenue was $16.6bn, of a total revenue $16.9bn.
Facebook has always received poor press coverage over its collection, harvesting and commercialisation of our data. What’s the best way to avoid this type of brand coverage?
Rebrand.
Enter Calibra. Or at least, Calibra will enter next year.
The latest Ofcom media report has been released, and here are some of the highlights:
On the BBC revenue: 20% of people don’t know how BBC TV is funded, over a third of people don’t know how the BBC website is funded, and almost half don’t know how BBC iPlayer is funded.
Almost a half of people don’t know how search engines make money, and 56% of people don’t know how YouTube is funded. (Answer: it’s owned by Google and has lots of video ads).
Incredibly, 31% of people don’t know how commercial TV is funded. (Answer: Adverts and sometimes subscriptions)
The social network unknowns: In socio-economic terms, why do 74% of the AB group have a social media profile, and for DE it’s only 56%? Yet C1 has the highest percentage of social media profiles. Also, “One in seven adults of working age in DE households do not use the internet, and when they do, one in five only go online via a smartphone.“
In the UK, 5.5 million homes (around 20% of all homes) now possess a voice activated assistant.
20 per cent of 3-5-year-olds now own their own iPad.
Google and Facebook have more than a fifth of the world’s advertising spending (they have 50-60 per cent of digital advertising spend).
The terms and conditions for Amazon’s Kindle are 73,198 words long and would take around 9 hours to read. I checked this out (link) and the terms are made up from 20 documents, plus the privacy notice.
Compared to the 400 deaths per year from terrorism, more Europeans drown in their own bathtubs, and ten times more die from falling down the stairs.
