3 Trends to Watch in 2018

It’s my favourite time of the year again. A good time to look back and learn and to look forward at what might come our way.

So, the first bit, looking back and learning. This time last year I wrote ‘3 technologies to Watch in 2017’ which included Start-up Banks, Virtual Personal Assistants, and Cellular IoT. I think at least the first two of these were quite spot-on. 

Looking at the start-up bank community we saw Monzo who are probably the most popular launch their full current account and raise almost £100 million including £2 million in crowdfunding. This time last year they were at around £20 million spent through their system and 200,000 customers, now they’re in to £100s millions spent and around half a million customers. Other big players such as Starling Bank also went from strength to strength and the very popular N26 (a German start-up bank) announced they’re launching in the UK too.

On to Virtual Personal Assistants. This was definitely the year for VPAs. The Amazon Alexa continued to dominate the market with the ever popular Echo range of devices and a number of companies announced Alexa integrations in to their products such as cars and TVs. We also saw the launch of the Google Home range of smart speakers and Apple announced their yet to be released smart speaker with Siri integration (interestingly they delayed the launch missing the critical Christmas market).

With Cellular IoT there were a number of grand plans from service providers that were continually delayed throughout 2017. Vodafone had promised commercial launches (although not in the UK) in the first half of 2017 which were subsequently delayed until the second half. We did though see plans and trials continue to develop with  both O2 and Vodafone UK announcing initial trials on their UK networks. I don’t think Cellular IoT quite had the year I was expecting.

Now for the interesting bit. What to look forward to and focus on in 2018. I’ve changed it slightly to look at general trends rather than just technology.

1. 5G Hype

With the first release (Phase 1) of 5G standards by the 3GPP in December 2017 we can expect the 5G hype train to continue rolling on throughout 2018. I don’t think we’ll actually see much in the way of real 5G deployments but there’s no doubt the service provider marketing departments will be doing everything they can to use the ‘5G’ term. We will see more and more trials taking place and hopefully some real plans for proper deployments at least on a small scale. Do be very weary of the hype though, take all press releases mentioning 5G with a pinch of salt and ask if it’s actually just 4G. Oh and follow Dean Bubley and William Webb who both give great views on the subject and see straight through the marketing hype.

2. Declining Social Media Usage

This is something I’ve picked up a number of weak signals on. It could just be my filter bubble but I think it’s something worth watching. There seems to be a trend developing in people feeling that social media usage is not good for their mental health. This has come about following a number of studies on the subject and sites such as Twitter becoming rather toxic throughout 2017 (although some of Twitter’s policies towards the end of the year may subdue this). Personally, I’ve noticed a huge decline in the amount that friends and family post to Facebook. Even going on the chronological timeline (Menu —> Most Recent) it’s still full of company posts rather than friends posting.

Another thing I’m increasingly seeing is people taking breaks from their devices, from simply keeping it on ‘do not disturb’/silent to going on digital detoxes. This is something to look out for in 2018.

Additionally, there seems to have been a shift towards more private use of social media, mainly through the use of messaging apps like WhatsApp. Where previously friends would communicate on Facebook they’re now doing it more privately in WhatsApp group messages. Personally, my communication is now almost entirely through this method.

3. Enhanced Privacy

Now I wasn’t quite sure what to have has my third trend, I debated between Enhanced Privacy and Multi-Cloud Architectures but thought multi-cloud was a bit too techy (perhaps I’ll do a separate post on that topic). While privacy has been a big topic for a number of years, mainly since the Snowden revelations, I think it’s picking up another tail wind. The general pubic are becoming much more aware of the subject following a number of high profile data breaches throughout 2017 and the previous couple of years. In 2018 we also see the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) across the EU including the UK. Although GDPR doesn’t contain anything much more than we already have across various legislation the size of the potential fines has caused companies to finally sit up and listen. 

We’re seeing companies of all shapes and sizes really start to think about the personal data they hold and take action to anonymise it or remove it entirely, and provide mechanisms for all the aspects of GDPR such as the right to access, erasure and portability. This has already led to companies for example getting rid of their marketing newsletters (presumably they don’t get the return to be able to take the risk of non-compliance).

I think we’re going to see companies thinking much more carefully about the data they collect, hold and process, leading to much more privacy for the general public.

So there’s a few things that are worth watching through 2018. 

What else should be on the list?

Weather Tech is Thriving

Most don’t know that I’m a weather nerd (now you do), in fact I used to run a mildly successful severe weather site and still run the Twitter account @cardiffstorm. Anyway, when I saw an article on a company using cellular comms to provide high resolution weather forecasts I decided to take a deeper dive in to ‘Weather Tech’ (yes, that’s how I use some of my spare time).

The company I refer to is ClimaCell and it recently raised $15 million in Series A funding. They’re a perfect example of the old ‘Software’s eating the world’. ClimaCell provide ‘hyper-local weather prediction’ primarily by looking at the interfered RF of cellular networks and comparing it to the known signal of different weather types. So, essentially they know what the RF signature is like on a clear day and they know what it’s like when it’s raining at certain rates. Then by using the real-time data they get from the cellular networks they can infer the current conditions on a street-by-street basis. They also combine this data with secondary and tertiary sources such as the more traditional weather radars and weather stations. This allows them to provide these hyper local nowcasts and forecasts just by using existing data and some clever analysis. They claim an accuracy of 90% vs 50% just using radar. These very local nowcast and forecasts can be very valuable to industries such as sports, agriculture, construction and aviation.

Another company that sparked my interest is Spire. Spire has a constellation of 100s of small satellites that it uses to provide weather data among other things such as maritime tracking. It does this in a not too dissimilar way to ClimaCell in that it uses GPS Radio Occulation to gain an understanding of the temperature, pressure, moisture levels etc in the atmosphere by seeing how the RF signals change as they pass through. Spire recently raised $70 million in Series C funding. Back in late 2016 Spire were one of two companies awarded the first ever commercial satellite contract from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who are probably the worlds biggest meteorological organisation.

The final one that I noticed is a young company called Understory. They have developed a network of weather stations across metropolitan areas in the US such as Kansas and Dallas where severe weather is particularly prevalent. Their weather stations measure a range of factors such as hail intensity, size and angle, wind speed and direction, rainfall, dew point, pressure, among others. They do this every second and upload all the data to Understory via a cellular connection. Their network produces over 50,000 data points every second. According to the company they have one station for every 1 km square. Understory make their money primarily selling this hyperlocal on-the-ground data to insurance companies who can ensure claims are true and accurate and provide proactive communications to customers. However, this data is also very valuable to other industries such as retail and agriculture. Understory last raised $7.5 million in Series A funding in 2016 plus an undisclosed investment in late 2017.

It’s great to see the thing that us Brits talk about the most being given great attention by the startup community and the investors that power them.

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.

My Cashless Experiment

£72,000,000,000 - the estimated value of all notes and coins in circulation in the UK. This equates to around 31 billion pieces of metal, paper, and now plastic. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get rid of all of this? Cashless societies or economies have been talked about for many years and some countries are a bit further along the path than others. Just a few weeks ago the Indian Prime Minister urged businesses and citizens to embrace digital payments saying "We can gradually move from a less-cash society to a cashless society.”

One of the leaders in this is Sweden (of course) where only 2% of all payments use cash and over half of bank branches neither accept cash deposits nor give out cash to customers.

To see how far along this path the UK is I thought I’d try a little experiment, I wanted to see how far I could get without using cash for a week. Armed with my Mondo (now Monzo) card I set off. Here’s how it went:

My experiment started on a Sunday with a trip back up to London from Southampton. I needed to get to the train station. I check Uber and there’s no cars available but I know the local taxi company accepts cards, this should be easy. We get to the train station and I asked to pay by card, the driver huffed and groaned. We sat there for a good few minutes while the card machine booted up and I got charged an extra £1 for the pleasure. Not a good start I thought.

I was hoping the rest of the week would go a bit better, particularly as I was now in London, the FinTech capital of the world.

The first test on Monday was a lunchtime trip to a cafe now known between my colleague and I as the ‘crazy Italian’ simply as it’s utter chaos in there (but the food tastes great). Anyway, I order my sandwich and go to pay but of course they don’t accept cards. Luckily my colleague lent me a tenner (which I probably still owe, sorry). Again, not a great start to the week.

Tuesday was a rainy day so it was lunch in the office canteen, unfortunately. Here they do accept cards although there’s a £3.50 minimum spend. Not great I’ll take it.

After just a few days in I wasn’t feeling hopeful. Lunch for Wednesday was at a local bakery which amazingly accepted card payments - YAY!!! The day ended with an evening in Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland. Getting their on the tube was super easy just using contactless at the station barriers but of course nowhere in Winter Wonderland accepted cards - it was a trip to find one of only a few cashpoints on the site.

By Thursday I was really not feeling great (and not because of a hangover) about the experiment. Only twice so far (baguette shop and tube) had I had a nice and easy cashless experience. The day consisted of various meetings around London, travelling via tubes and buses - again super easy with contactless. One of the meetings was in a nice little coffee shop, we order our drinks and then realise they don’t accept cards. Neither of us had cash so we had to go to Pret next door. I was getting really bored of this experiment by now.

Finally, the last day. It was straight to the pub after work where thankfully they welcome card payments. I don’t remember what happened the rest of the evening :)

So what I thought was going to be a nice, interesting experiment turned out to be pretty rubbish. I had high hopes for London’s small businesses. I mean it is 2016 in the financial capital of the world.

I learnt that week that we’ve got a long way to go before the UK becomes a cashless society. Oh well.

The Problem with Trolley Problems

There’s a runaway train barrelling down the tracks. It will kill 5 people, but, there’s a lever you could pull to divert the train and it will then kill only 1 person. What do you do?

This is the trolley problem. Everyone has heard something similar and there are an infinite number of variants. I remember them featuring heavily in high school R.E. and Philosophy lessons as a way to engage the class in debate and to help us easily understand the different philosophical approaches.

Now though they've recently been used by many as a way to ask what an autonomous vehicle would do in a situation where it could, let’s say, either kill a group of pedestrians or kill the vehicle’s passengers. I have a problem with this.

The first issue is that the situations often described are entirely unrealistic. I’ve seen everything from a cyclist pulling out to a group of children suddenly being in the road. When was the last time a group of pedestrians suddenly entered the road right in front of you? I’ve been driving for something like 8 years and it’s certainly never happened to me. Yes, people can step out in to the road but the chances are you’ve seen them on the pavement, perhaps even looking as though they’re about to cross. They certainly don’t appear in the front of your vehicle to the point that an emergency stop isn’t sufficient.

Secondly, we’re saying that a vehicle will have the ‘intelligence’ to make reasoned and complex decisions within a matter of milliseconds but will not have the capability to either a) identify the situation unfolding and take proactive action (e.g. slowing down, pre-engaging brakes, changing lane) or b) take emergency action and very quickly bring the vehicle to a stop or avoid a collision altogether by some other means. In a situation where proactive action could not be taken why would the vehicle do anything but perform an emergency stop just as we do today? Surely if the vehicle has the technology to make complex decisions it will also have the technology to simply avoid a collision altogether (by a combination of reacting quickly and with advanced mechanics and materials i.e. braking systems).

Additionally, there is the issue that there is a huge degree of uncertainty in these situations, even those that are mildly realistic. How can the vehicle ever know how external actors are going to behave? For example, if there is going to be a collision between a vehicle and a cyclist how can the vehicle ever know how the cyclist is going to be behave in such a situation. Let’s say the vehicle makes the decision to put itself in to a wall to avoid hitting the cyclist but the cyclist manages to move out of the way anyway. The vehicle has now potentially injured the passengers for no reason. My point here is that there are far too many variables and unknowns for a vehicle to ever do more than perform an emergency stop or take proactive action if it recognises a potential incident might happen. It is not unreasonable to say that the vehicle will always perform the action with the greatest certainty in the outcome and that will always be protecting itself (and therefore the passengers) as that’s the only thing it has control over and the only thing it knows the behaviour of.

Now I’m not saying I don’t like trolley problems in their entirety, they certainly have their place, as I mentioned at the start but I don’t think that the application of autonomous vehicles is one of them. I will say this though, it has been great that these sorts of debates have and are being had but I don’t see there ever being a decision like this being made by a vehicle.