Welcome to 2016!

by SherlockTalent

With CES 2016 starting on Wednesday, Jan 6 – I thought I’d update my list of Tech Trends from last week to include a few more consumer specific trends.

Rise of the Drones.

Drones have been with us a while now but expect to see a huge increase in consumer drones this year.  With the FAA’s speedy announcement that all recreational drone users will be required to register whether they’re used for commercial, media, research, aid or recreational purposes, wxpect to see the rise of the Drone Police.

Augmented Reality.

Expect a lot of chatter about VR – but the more sophisticated working platforms and products won’t be rolling out until later in 2016. Keep your eyes peeled for VR cameras. Early examples of VR cameras include the Jump Camera Rig which patches together 16 camera modules in a circular array. Or Nokia’s Ozo, which captures 360 degree video and surround sound.

Cars.

Expect to see announcements regarding 2nd generation electric cars, driverless car evolution and energy-efficient vehicles. Chevrolet will roll out its Bolt all-electric vehicle at CES. The Bolt – not to be confused with Chevy’s plug-in hybrid Volt – is General Motors first all-electric long-range vehicle, with an expected battery-only range of 200 miles. Ford and Google are expected to announce a collaboration on self-driving, aka autonomous, vehicles. Toyota is also slated to show off autonomous car tech. The autonomous electric vehicle is a red-hot area of R&D for vehicle makers globally. U.S. carmaker Tesla is leading the way by already offering limited self-driving on its Model S and Model X electric vehicles that are on the road today.

Cybersecurity will go mainstream / end-to-end encryption will take-off.

Expect to see simplified rhetoric and more accessible technology driving companies and end-users to buy into the security paradigm. Investment should start to pour in as tech companies embrace the challenge of cybersecurity for all. Despite the tug-of-war between government and tech Cos., expect end-to-end encryption to take a strong foot hold among a wider range of end users.

PHP 7 will start rolling-out to web servers near you.

This is the most important change for PHP since the release of PHP 5 in 2004. Thanks to the new Zend Engine 3.0, apps should see up to 2x faster performance and 50% better memory consumption than PHP 5.6, allowing sites to serve more concurrent users without adding any hardware. However, expect many ISPs to be slow to support PHP 7 on their web-servers.

Cord-cutting will continue.

This is really good news as it is clearly incentivizing many traditional media groups to add streaming services to their bouquets. On the down-side is the ongoing debate between the FCC and service providers regarding how they charge for data usage. Many providers are excluding ‘streaming’ from the clients data caps.

Screens will get bigger and smaller.

As we see the maturity of wearables and the evolution of 4K Ultra-HD TV, we see 2 sides of the same coin; one focused on the small personal world and the other focused on the larger-than-life personal world of home entertainment. Expect to see wearables becoming more functional as they integrate to IoT devices.

IoT will invade your home.

Expect the Internet of Things to make an appearance in your home in 2016. Perhaps it will be a thermostat or smart lighting or in-home surveillance. There is no doubt that the IoT will invade homes as tech manufactures find new and interesting products to separate consumers from their cash.