Tech news outside the mainstream
Uncommon news and information with a technical twist and some topics that are a bit out there. Enjoy...
In as much as the cartoon the Jetsons made a spoof of a future world with flying vehicles and radio controlled appliances, this article from Wired.com creates the visual that I've been thinking we are headed for in less than 20 years down the road. With overcrowded highways and better use of unmanned vehicle technology, it doesn't seem far fetched that hundreds of personal drones could be taking to the skies delivering people quietly and flawlessly to their destinations. Having a personal airport on the balcony of your high rise looks like a great idea.
The other side of that vision is the class separation that will come between have and the have nots. Those unable to afford such upgrades will be left in the masses on the ground where the deliver of goods, health care and the overall quality of life is not as good, like a scene out of Elysium. The future lies somewhere between these two visions.
A few years ago I wanted to have a separate phone number for a startup company, but since we are only a few members, and in different locations, it needed to on a system we could all make calls from it and redirect for availability. After trying a couple I've found RingCentral.com to be the best and most affordable.
Here are some of the key features for a small company that can make you look like a big well run operation. First you choose a number for your business, then with their phone app, you to make and receive calls from your cell phone with the other number. When some calls your business you can route them by extensions you set up to other employees cell phones and everyone can make make and receive calls from that number. It's one of many great features, plus you have logging to see what calls have been made. This feature is really helpful to make sure you don't miss or followed up on a call. There's even a feature for direct digital recording your calls.
Take a test drive on RingCentral.com.
Blockchain technology can be boiled down to an accounting ledger built on a network of servers. There's a detailed article and infographic included on Recode.net that will give you an overview of how any why this financial technology will shape more than just crypto currency transactions in the future.
Blockchain technology is developing very quickly into an established transaction method and disrupting the financial services industry.
Read more about blockchain technology Recode.
I found TheNextWeb while looking for information about wearables (great seo by the way) Wearables are technology devices that you wear. I discovered a passage called Wearables Reach Employees in an article by JT Ripton titled 6 Technology Trends for 2016.
My interest in wearable is in how they can be useful and monetized in the private sector. Clearly, the applications for police, fire rescue and military are needed and in the future may be looked upon as how could we have ever done without them. But, other than convenience what applications do they really hold? Now after reading the article, from a psychology viewpoint the the possibilities are endless. Here's an exert:
Some companies are giving wearables to their employees on the ground for second-by-second inventory updates. Others are using them internally to see how their corporate employees interact.
Read the full article here at TheNextWeb.
I am surprised I had not come across TheNextWeb.com sooner. Their site has the best layout and quality of articles that I've had the pleasure of reading in a long time. I strongly recommend bookmarking it and check out the Insights and Offers sections. It's at the top of my reading list now.
Although this article is on the subject of content marketing it overlaps into all areas of digital marketing. I found this great article by Richard Darell while doing research for a strategic marketing plan for a new project. There's a detailed infographic included by ZenContent that helped me form the basis of my plan.
I was having a touch of writers block getting started on this marketing plan and can see when a business becomes too close to itself to be able to write effectively for their own products. Whether it is the lack of time or just the need for a fresh perspective, consider hiring professional content writers from ZenContent.
Promoting your website is essentially content marketing. Quality content gets a new customer to the door and engages the the ones that have already made purchases. Add a great domain name and building more engaging content provides the search engines with a bigger target to hit and will dynamically improve your SEO efforts.
Read more about content marketing at BitRebels.
Top business-strategist Michael Wolf gave a presentation on the future of tech and media from 2016 to 2020 in the Wall Street Journal last October. I've been covering technology predictions in several articles and although there are some corrections in the stock market at the moment, there is nothing really holding the tech sector back. But, don't take my word for it, read Wolf's presentation on how consumer tech and media staged to grow by 535 Billion over the next 4 years.
You can view the presentation from the Business Insider here.
While searching for domain technology news, I had the pleasure of stumbling upon another great technology site for tech startups that is a start up. Edward Domain is the founder and CEO of Techli.com He is a writer, U.S. Army veteran, serial entrepreneur and chronic early adopter. Having worked for startups in Silicon Valley and Chicago, Edward founded, grew and successfully exited his own previous startup and loves telling the tales of innovators everywhere. Based out of St. Louis, Techli.com also has a show on PBS that covers innovators in a candid business casual format that yields a closer personal experience of the entrepreneurs behind the scenes while delivering the synergy.
Techli.com has a nice layout and I found several several article worth reading, it's bookmark worthy and on my reading list. I'd like to see this level of ground floor reporting for innovative technology roll out to all major cities around the world.
Looking for predictions into the 2016 technology sector?
Check out ComputerWorld.com has several predictions of tech trends that will have a greater impact in 2016. Nothing really disruptive, but check the article for their top 5.
Forrester.com has predictions by various market segments providing a more in depth look at the shape of things to come.
Going beyond 2016...ELON University has a few new concepts to embrace about the future. Be sure to check their 2045 and beyond predictions, it starts getting creepy and it's not that far away.
I graduated high school a year early on the condition set by my parents that I attend a junior college. So I enrolled for a couple of night classes at what was locally referred to as UCLA or University Closest to Lambert Avenue, better known as College of DuPage in Lombard Illinois. I signed up for a couple of classes. One class was Intro to Business and after a couple of days into the class I was really enjoying it. Our instructor was like no teacher I had in high school he had an unorthodox method of getting his points across and when he began the course he started by telling us that he wasn't going to teach us the way business was done by the book, he was going explain business in the real world and how to be successful in it. This got my attention and when he told us that he caught Mitsubishi's initial listing on the American stock exchange making millions and was only teaching there for 1 dollar a year, he had my full attention. At the age of 17 I didn't know what I wanted to do, I only knew what I didn't want to do, and that was working in a 9 to 5 grind for the rest of my life.
Without getting on a rant here, one of the main points he kept emphasizing was to spot trends in business and consumer behavior. I look for trends daily and one source I keep going back to is BusinessInsider.com. If there's any indication of what the future holds it will be a change in currency. Follow the money trail here, there are several start ups in the financial sector where investment is in internet financial vehicles, financial tools, cryto-coins, lending platforms and investment can be viewed more of a diversification of the current financial institutions. The finance industry knows which way the wind is blowing, they're closer to the ground floor of business in general, they know what the numbers are. Here's a link to some of the top Nordic startups.
The obvious investment is clicks and bricks, solid online business models. And, whatever you're doing, it will be online.
As we approach the 4th quarter of fiscal year 2015, and soon to be at the midway point of this decade, I started to look at the predictions and indicators for internet growth by year 2020. Sounds futurist the year 2020 and I think we are starting to enter into the steeper slope of the curve now. In 2010 the internet had 1.7 billion users, today it has a little over 3.1 billion and by 2020 it should be at 5 billion. Check out the stats by country here on InternetWorldStats.com.
Forecasting the future of the internet is that hard to predict just look at what we do and ask yourself are we going to be doing any less of it. Twenty-five great points are listed in this article on Marketing in 2020 by Jeff Beer of FastCompany.com. By looking at marketing we can see the direction society is taking by observing the force trying to get in-front of the mass. Some key points I took away were virtual reality is reality, brand transparency and through technology it's about to get really personal.
Don't forget to consider the growth of the machine usage with the Internet of Things IoT. Both machine and human usage almost double in the next 5 years!