Tag Archives: cloud

2022 Technology & Business Predictions

Business, Technology, Trends, , , , , , , ,

Every year I try to predict what lies  for the year ahead, and then I mark them a year later! It’s a particularly difficult  timeframe because a year is reasonably short term in technology, but we’re lucky to work in such a fast paced industry.

You can see how I faired last year, 2021, and keep working back, all the way back to 2010.

1. 3D, rather than the metaverse

Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45501032@N00/3726589535/in/photostream/
Try finding a supermarket website that can present a 2D version of this. Credit on Flickr

There are times when the current user experience for the web is adequate. For example, filling in a form. There’s little wrong with the fields appearing in our web browser and us typing in the answers.

There are other situations where it would be preferable to have a 3D environment. For example, when buying physical products online. Imagine if we were in a 3D experience where we could see adjacent items, or interact with them, or compare different types of the item together. The current page-based, 2D experience for shopping is a little too flat compared to our real world.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, believes that the future of these 3D environments will be using a headset to see an AR (Augmented Reality) or VR (Virtual Reality) world, a bit like SecondLife. Personally, I think that’s several years ahead of us for most people. There are good enough 3D environments that can be ported from video games into day-to-day internet activities though. Continue reading 2022 Technology & Business Predictions →

Review of 2018 predictions

Business, Technology, Trends, , , , , , ,

Time to look back on the 2018 predictions from 12 months ago…. how many of the predictions came true?

1. Tesla share price to drop significantly

Tesla stock was $312 on New Years Day 2018 and finished the year at $333, so on the face of it, the prediction was incorrect.

However, on 7 August, Elon Musk made the headlines by tweeting that “funding secured” at $420. The share price jumped 10% to $379. He was personally fined $20 million, and the company was fined the same amount.

Two months later, the stock was $250. The stock has been relatively volatile since then, climbing back to $376 and back down to $333.

Amazingly, the offending tweet is still live.

I also mentioned how “2017 was generally a good financial year, and if consumer confidence drops in 2018, people will buy fewer cars.” Ford stock started 2018 at $12 and is now under $8. General motors started at $41 and is now $33. Jaguar Land Rover (which is a private company) made a pre-tax loss of £90m for the three months to end of September, compared to a profit for the same quarter in 2017. The firm’s Solihull plant, where it makes Range Rover and Jaguar models, was closed for a two-week shutdown due to “fluctuating demand”. That followed a move to a three-day week at JLR’s Castle Bromwich plant.

Prediction rating: 5/10 – Tesla stock has been a volatile stock in 2018 but has actually finished higher Continue reading Review of 2018 predictions →

2018 Digital Predictions

Business, Technology, Trends, , , , , , , , ,

Here are my predictions for the ‘digital’ industry for the coming year. I’ve been making digital predictions since 2010 and at the end of each year I review how the predictions fared – see the digital predictions for 2017 and work backwards.

1. Tesla share price to drop significantly

The Tesla Roadster 1 – yes it’s lovely. What will 2018 have in store for the car company? Photo credit: randychiu.

Each quarter, Tesla’s costs keep increasing by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Its profit margin keeps slipping further into the red.

Other companies, both traditional and new entrants, will catch up to Tesla in 2018.

Finally, 2017 was generally a good financial year, and if consumer confidence drops in 2018, people will buy fewer cars. There’s also the debt pile-up in the US car loans industry. Total auto loans in the US have increased 70% in the last 7 years to $1.17 trillion – and much of it is subprime, with some buyers opting for 7(!!) year loans (think about the value of the car at the end of 7 years).

We’ll see Tesla’s share price drop by at least 30% this coming year. Continue reading 2018 Digital Predictions →

Digital best practice: Release regularly

Business, Technology, , , ,

One of the best practice digital principles we talk about at Endava is regular rollouts to users. The more regular and automated you can make them, the quicker you can provide additional functionality to your users.

Amazon

Amazon’s release to live every 11.6 seconds. This was the mean average for weekdays during May 2011. During that month, they had up to 1,079 production deployments per hour. Continue reading Digital best practice: Release regularly →

Cloud thinking for IoT

Business, Technology, Trends, ,
Who would have thought that the legal side of IoT could be so interesting?
Who would have thought that the legal side of IoT could be so interesting?

TechUK held an event called “Can the IoT (Internet of Things) become a reality without the Cloud?” and whilst the event didn’t really answer the headline question, it was interesting in other unexpected ways.

The last couple of events I’ve attended at TechUK have been a little dry, lacking anything interesting to report here. As I left the office for the IoT event I remarked to a colleague that if this event was also dry, I might reduce the number of TechUK events I attend.

There were four speakers supported by the chair Stephen Pattison, VP, ARM Holdings:

  • Paul D’Cruz, Chief Technical Officer, Cisco UK Public Sector
  • Barry Jennings, Associate, Bird & Bird
  • Nick Hyner, Director Cloud Services EMEA, Dell
  • Gabriel Vizzard, Internet of Things Lab Services Foundry, IoT Solution Architect, IBM

Stephen, Paul, Nick and Gabriel naturally promoted their employer’s latest product offerings, with varying degrees of humour.

Surprise surprise Cisco said the current network (Internet) doesn’t have the bandwidth for billions of devices (I wonder who sells network equipment….) and Dell talked about more Cloud computing which ultimately translates into more [Dell] servers. Every time thw word “security” was mentioned, we were served a reminder of how much ARM are investing in IoT security protocols.

The surprise session was from Barry Jennings who spoke about the liability and funding models for IoT. Continue reading Cloud thinking for IoT →

How Insurance will use Internet of Things technologies

Business, Technology, Trends, , , , , , , ,

In October I’m giving a keynote speech at an insurance event and I’ve been asked to speak about new technologies and trends. Separately, one of the readers of this site, Doug, recently emailed me asking whether I had “any insight into the insurance sector, and company’s use of Internet of Things technologies?”

Here are some thoughts which I’ve been thinking about for a while.

In its truest form, Internet of Things, or IoT for short, applies to an electronic device which has Internet connectivity capability – i.e. it can send data to, or receive data from services on the Internet. Continue reading How Insurance will use Internet of Things technologies →

Windows 10 one week on

Application Review, Technology, , ,

Last week I handed over my perfectly working Surface Pro 3 to our IT department who upgraded it from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. Here’s my report after spending a week with Microsoft’s latest operating system on Microsoft’s latest tablet/laptop.

Firstly, it’s stable. I have used beta versions of Windows before, from XP to Vista to Windows 8. They all have their own niggles, but Windows 10 is fine. I haven’t had a single crash, despite plugging in all sorts of displays, docking stations, printers and USB devices. Continue reading Windows 10 one week on →

How the NBA and McLaren are leading technology innovation

Business, Technology, Trends, , , , , , ,
Darren Roos gave the keynote speech
Darren Roos gave the keynote speech

Customers often ask my team how we stay up to date with the latest innovations across industries. One way is to attend industry events outside of your own.

Today we went to Leaders Meet Innovation – an event for sports organisations hosted by SAP and the NBA at the BAFTA in London. We were invited to the event because we produce several sports websites.

The event itself was extremely well organised. Most of the top brands you can think of in sport were there, and SAP – the main sponsor, gave a really good presentation on why sports is important to them, especially as a case study to other industries. They were showcasing their nba.com/stats products at the event and during some their presentations. Continue reading How the NBA and McLaren are leading technology innovation →

What is Digital?

Business, Trends, , , , , , ,
Self-service - a key trend in digital projects
Self-service – a key trend in digital projects

Many organisations are finding themselves asking “What is Digital?” It’s a difficult question which sounds easy at first. After all, isn’t everything that we do today that involves electronics, digital in some shape or form?

If an organisation has a CTO (Chief Technology Officer), why does it also need a CDO (Chief Digital Officer)? If an organisation already has an IT department, why does it need a digital one too?

So what is digital?

To me, digital is a mindset. In the 1990’s we’d have called it a paradigm. It’s all about thinking slightly differently to classic IT. Continue reading What is Digital? →

What Fotopedia’s closure means to everybody

Business, Technology, Trends, , , , , , ,
You better hope users stored their photos elsewhere once Fotopedia closed down
You better hope users stored their photos elsewhere once Fotopedia closed down

This week, the website Fotopedia closed down, and this heralded a key stage in the Internet’s maturity.

We’ve seen various Google products shutdown in the past, sometimes with more publicity than they attracted while the product was ‘live’, such as Google Video and Wave. However Fotopedia signals the dangers that lurk behind relying upon consumer-focussed cloud services.

Continue reading What Fotopedia’s closure means to everybody →