Global telecom operator Telenor has revealed the top expected trends to watch out in 2018.
2017 was the year when self-driving cars, AI, Big Data and cryptocurrencies on our radar. 2018 will be the year when many of them appear in our markets, says Bjorn Taale Sandberg, head of Telenor Research.
Social media newsfeeds: Less social, more media
Facebook users are posting less and the amount of relevant information on the Facebook newsfeed is dropping, giving way to an increasing amount of professional and paid content – of varying relevance. Users are likely becoming more critical as awareness rises around “fake news” seeping into their feeds.
People will actually read online Terms & Conditions
In mid-2018, the EU will update the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in several significant ways. The regulation strengthens how that data is protected for all of us in the EU, aiming to give control back to us private users. It also changes how companies ask for your permission to use your data. Terms & Conditions must be reinvented so that consumers know what data they give away and for what purpose.
Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning hit the mass market
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and especially Deep Learning is bringing driverless cars and facial recognition. The technology will take on a wide range of industries, including health, energy, transport and telco.
Blockchain – can it break out of its own cryptocurrency cradle?
Blockchain is best known as the technology behind Bitcoin, a digital currency that doesn’t need a central governing body to guarantee transactions. One of the perks of blockchain is that it is, by design, resistant to modification. This also brings about the challenge of diversifying its practical applications: to create more varied and usable blockchain-based solutions, developers need to be able to modify it.
2018 will augment your reality
With its latest version of the iPhone operating system, Apple have built-in support for augmenting whatever the phone’s camera captures with additional information. This means that much of the complexity is removed for programmers and AR suddenly gets to be within reach for hundreds of thousands of iOS app developers. Expect to see navigation apps use the camera and superimpose your route on the image and games beyond Pokemon Go appear in an app store close to you.
Winter Olympics and virtualization kick off 5G
Sneak peeks at 5G in action come courtesy of the Winter Olympics in South Korea with increased use of network virtualization, availability of first 5G specifications and spectrum. In addition to seeing the development and testing of advanced technical features, we also expect to see real-life use cases demonstrated. We might see 5G-linked drone equipment follow ski jumpers through the air, views of the slopes from different 5G-connected vantage points for instance.
You’ll wear your wallet?
In 2018 a growing number of our devices become payment devices – car keys, vending machines, smart phones, connected cars, sports watches etc. Artificial Intelligence and IoT will generate intelligent and personalized context-aware customer services, enabling more tailored solutions to help customers and companies alike make sound financial decisions, manage risk and reduce costs.
In 2018 several new device payment systems will be introduced globally. For the Asian Pacific region, we will see growth of IoT banking based services. In Europe, next year sees the introduction of the new Payment Service (PSD2) directive, which enables access to banks’ customer data for external actors such as fintech-startups.
