3 Technologies to Watch in 2017

I think it would be good to start with a quick review of my three predictions from last year. The first one was Virtual Reality (VR). I think I got this one mostly right as the Playstation VR and Oculus Rift both reached consumers within the year and received extremely good reviews as did some of the Playstation VR games. I say mostly right though as the reach has been pretty limited to those who are well ahead of the curve and to some gimmicky examples mainly for marketing purposes. Although judging by the App Store charts this Christmas VR certainly seemed top of the list with many of the top 20 apps being VR apps.

Secondly was Personal Fitness and Health Tracking. I think this was pretty spot on. We saw a major shift in the wearables market over the last 12 months away from them being a smartphone accessory to being specialised fitness and health tracking devices. There was a clear focus on fitness in Apple’s marketing of the Watch and new Watch 2 in the latter half of the year along with the Watch 2’s new features mostly being around fitness. We also saw the French wearables company, Withings, being purchased by Nokia for 170 Million Euros in a bid to ‘accelerate entry into Digital Health’. Again this Christmas Fitbit was in the Top 5 apps in the App Store.

Finally, I discussed Electric Vehicles although focussed on Plug-in Hybrids (PHEVs). This, I think, was mostly right. The Tesla Model X did start shipping but in quite limited numbers. Details of Faraday Future’s offering were not really released in any detail but will be in the upcoming CES 2017. Most vehicle manufacturers released PHEV versions of some of the vehicles and sales of Low Emission Vehicles in the UK increased by 48% compared to last year. There’s still some way to go on this one though. Perhaps I was a year or two early on this one.

So now let’s get in to 2017. We’re starting to get in to a strange stagnant period, almost a ‘no mans land’ between old tech and new tech. Between the Smartphone and the next generation, between human powered tech and AI powered tech. I think 2017 is going to see some hyped up technologies tank - Autonomous Vehicles top my list as the hype fails to materialise in to anything close to the publics and medias (wrong) expectations.

We’re going to see some interesting things happen though as seeds sewn over the last few years begin to grow.

  1. Start-up Banks

In Europe, and particularly the UK, there has been a flurry of FinTech (Financial Technology) start-ups raising Venture Capital over the last two or three years. This combined with the relaxation of banking legislation meaning a number of start-ups have been granted banking licenses in the last year means that these start-ups are about to flourish and begin massive growth. Let’s take a look at one of my favourites - Monzo. In the last year they were granted a restricted banking license and according to their roadmap (yes they've released their product roadmap for all to see) they’ll be launching their ‘full bank’ offering within 2017. Earlier this year Monzo reached £20 Million spent through them which although is a drop in the ocean compared to the 100s of billions spent by consumers each year it does show rapid growth. Here’s two infographics showing April 2016 spending and August 2016 spending - the increase is huge and can only continue upwards through 2017.

We’ve also got Atom Bank and Curve growing in the UK while Germany is a hot bed of start-up banks with N26 and solarisBank to name a few services that are growing in popularity.

2. Chat Bots & Virtual Personal Assistants

I put these two together as they use similar technologies, mainly natural language processing and to some extent machine learning (the combination often termed Artificial Intelligence (AI)). Messaging apps have, over the last few years, become a focal point with over 1 billion monthly users each on both WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (both owned by Facebook). Since Facebook launched bots on it’s Messenger platform earlier this year the number of bots has grown to beyond 30,000. In China the use of messaging apps as a platform is nothing new, they’ve been using them for shopping, banking, taxis and more for a number of years. With it now becoming immensely easy to develop chat bots companies are beginning to realise their value, particularly in customer relationship management.

Marketing powerhouse Ogilvy & Mathers have recently gone in hard on Chat Bots with them saying “messaging platforms are the new internet, chatbots are it’s websites”. There’s a good presentation here by their Innovation Partner - James Whatley.

Personal Assistants are certainly nothing new. We’ve had Siri and OK Google for years but let’s be honest, they’ve been a bit shit. With recent developments in Natural Language Processing though they’re getting a lot better. Over the last year we’ve also seen the unexpected popularity of the Amazon Echo (Alexa) virtual personal assistant. This was one of the most popular gifts this Christmas and has mostly been sold out since it’s launch.

So now with Chat Bots and Virtual Personal Assistants we’re pretty much there with the voice recognition bar some corner cases so I think this year we’re going to see them becoming a bit more intelligent in their answering of questions and performing tasks - something they’ve been lacking so far.

3. Cellular IoT

An interesting area with huge potential is the infrastructure and services to support the Internet of Things (IoT). I believe that one of the most interesting of these infrastructure items is Cellular IoT, specifically NB-IoT (Narrowband IoT). Through 2016 we saw the 3GPP standard develop and become part of Release 13 (LTE-A Pro).

As I wrote earlier this year there are many IoT specific network technologies such as LoRa and Sigfox that do the job quite well but something they’re potentially lacking is open standardisation, Quality of Service (QoS), and coverage. So SigFox for example is proprietary, it uses unlicensed spectrum so cannot give QoS guarantees, and only has relatively limited coverage (although this is growing significantly).

NB-IoT overcomes these potential issues which for many use cases may prove to be show stoppers.

Vodafone, who are very big in the M2M (Machine-to-Machine) arena are investing heavily in NB-IoT and have spent the last year or two conducting trials and will be opening up the first networks in the latter half of 2017. They also have their eyes set on a number of critical use-cases including autonomous vehicles and drones - both of which need QoS and coverage at least.

Now I have to admit that writing this post was a bit of a struggle. As I said at the top, 2017 is going to be a strange year for a lot of tech as we sit in this odd period between major developments. Let’s see how it pans out.

The IoT Iceberg

The Internet of Things. A bit of a buzzword since it’s inception in the late 1990’s by a guy called Kevin Ashton (a Brit by the way). Almost every day we hear some companies hot take, hear about some start-up developing new hardware, hear about an incumbent building 'yet another IoT innovation lab’, and almost every time we dismiss it as nonsence that no-one would ever need. There’s good reason we’ve thought this. IoT products have largely been a bit pointless, security has almost completely been ignored, and lots of the backend systems haven’t been developed properly, if at all. There’s even a dedicated, and quite successful, Twitter account (@internetofshit) posting about the (mostly funny) failings of IoT. However, I think we’ve now reached an inflection point where the ‘usefulness’ of IoT is on the up.

You see, most of the IoT is actually behind the scenes, it’s under the water, it’s the bits that the average consumer doesn’t see, and it is recently started being developed at an astonishing rate.

Specific Internet of Things networks are going up all over the world. Countries such as South Korea and the Netherlands have country wide IoT networks based on LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) technology such as LoRa and LoRaWAN. Additionally, nearly all of France, Spain and the Czech Republic have Sigfox coverage thanks to their private investment in those countries. Sigfox is another LPWAN based technology. In the UK we have a bit of piecemeal approach to IoT networks. For example, Sigfox is present in some of the larger cities such as London and Liverpool while rival LPMESH based technology such as ZigBee is present across Hampshire.

The Hampshire network is quite a good example of what I’m talking about actually. I’ve lived in Southampton, a city in Hampshire, for about 3 years and had no idea that the whole county was covered by a ZigBee network. It was not until I went to a conference in Berlin that I learnt about this network. It happens that since 2010 every one of the 150,000 or so street lights in Hampshire have been replaced by a ‘Smart Lighting’ system where each lamppost has a ZigBee sub-node on it allowing each street light to be centrally controlled and for new IoT sensors to be added. The main aim of this was originally to save money and its provided around a 40% reduction in lighting energy consumption so far which equates to about £2 million/year - in part due to more efficient lighting and in part due to smart control. Now though this network is being used to test and trial a whole host of other ideas such as monitoring available parking spaces and environmental monitoring. The point I’m making here is that this huge enabling network now exists and most people don’t know about it - it’s the part of the iceberg that’s under the water.

In the news recently was the huge £24 Billion acquisition of ARM by SoftBank. ARM are well known for being ahead of the field in terms of processors for mobile. Their processors are the most power efficient on the market which is a huge advantage for IoT devices where potentially years of battery life are required. It think it’s no coincidence that ARM have been purchased at this point in time.

So, all of this stuff that the consumer doesn’t see is starting to enable consumer facing products that actually offer some benefit. We’re starting to see a number of the big players get seriously in to IoT and actually develop useful products. I don’t normally have good things to say about Samsung but in IoT they’re probably leading the way with their SmartThings product line. One of the major advantages of this is that the SmartThings Hub works with a wide range of products other than those developed by Samsung. This means that your Philips Hue Lights, Bose SoundTouch, or your Yale Smartlock all work off of one hub and one smartphone app. One of the key pillars of IoT will be interoperability.

We have an interesting few years ahead of us as the IoT networks get rolled out behind the scenes and useful consumer products start to slowly enter the market. This is all even before the behemoth that is 5G comes our way by 2020.

I’ll leave you with this great tweet from @BenHammersley: