Global IT Trends Impacting South Africa
The evolution of technology in SA has been accelerating greatly over the last decade; the impact of these trends is not only remarkable but also makes life easier for SA people.
The global trends have a positive impact not only to individuals but also to business environment and society. Business members are able to predict what the future will be by studding or understanding the global IT trends. Understanding the trends can help individual determine innovative ideas.
More global IT trends impact in SA
Cloud Gaming is the future
Cloud gaming has been a tech buzzword for years. The idea is that we’ll no longer need gaming PCs or consoles with powerful graphics hardware. All the heavy lifting will be done in the cloud.
Cloud gaming has much in common with streaming videos. Essentially, the cloud-gaming server runs a game and streams a video of the gameplay to you. Your keyboard, mouse, and controller input actions are sent over the network to the cloud gaming server.
The remote server does all the heavy work, while your computer just receives streaming video (and audio) and sends input commands. Essentially, cloud gaming is like a streaming video service, but interactive.
Wireless Power
Society is deeply reliant on electrically powered devices. Yet, a significant limitation in their continued development and utility is the need to be attached to the electricity grid by wire – either permanently or through frequent battery recharging. Emerging approaches to wireless power transmission will free electrical devices from having to be physically plugged in, and are poised to have as significant an impact on personal electronics as Wi-Fi had on Internet use.
The world’s first wireless brain-computer interface
A BCI, or brain-computer interface, is a device that feeds your brain activity into a computer, where it’s usually processed (to work out what you’re thinking) and acted upon. BCIs usually consist of a large mesh of electrodes — an electroencephalogram, EEG — which is then wired into a PC. This is great for lab-based testing, but not so useful if you want to use your BCI at home, out shopping, etc. The Brown University BCI, however, is implanted under the skin, and communicates with a nearby computer wirelessly.
The world’s first flying car makes a public test drive/flight
The Transition is technically classified as a road able aircraft, and in practice that’s exactly what it is: We’re definitely not talking about a sexy, Aston Martin-like car that sprouts wings in the middle of a high-speed chase and evades the bad guys by flying away. The Transition is basically a plane with wings that fold up, so that it’s narrow enough to use on conventional roads. It also uses conventional unleaded fuel, so you can fill up at the gas station. Its 23-gallon tank is good for around four hours of flight, at a cruising speed of 93 knots (105 mph). It only needs around 30 meters (100 feet) of runway to take off, which is rather cool.
The first road-powered electric vehicle network
In the large city of Gumi, there are now electric buses that are powered by power lines under the road, which wirelessly transmit power to the buses via magnetic resonance. (This is the
same tech that you use to wirelessly charge your smartphone, just on a much larger, hundreds-of-kilowatts scale.
3-D printing and remote manufacturing
Three-dimensional printing allows the creation of solid structures from a digital computer file, potentially revolutionizing the economics of manufacturing if objects can be printed remotely in the home or office rather than requiring time and energy for transportation
THE DEATH OF PERSONAL COMPUTERS
For as long as the Internet has existed, the vast majority of its traffic has come from people connecting with their laptops and desktops.
That's about to change.
In future, global Internet traffic will be almost evenly split: People using desktops and laptops will account for about half of all traffic, while a combination of smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and Internet-connected "things" cars, dog collars, cameras and thermostats, for example -- will account for the other half.
Data interfaces
The amount of information available through the internet has exploded over the past decade. Advances in data storage, transmission and processing have transformed the internet from a geek’s paradise to a supporting pillar of 21st century society. But while the last ten years have been about access to information, I suspect that the next ten will be dominated by how to make sense of it all. Without the means to find what we want in this vast sea of information, we are quite literally drowning in data. And useful as search engines like Google are, they still struggle to separate the meaningful from the meaningless. As a result, my sense is that over the next decade we will see some significant changes in how we interact with the internet. We’re already seeing the beginnings of this in websites like Wolfram Alpha that “computes” answers to queries rather than simply returning search hits, or Microsoft’s Bing, which helps take some of the guesswork out of searches. Then we have ideas like The Sixth Sense project at the MIT Media Lab, which uses an interactive interface to tap into context-relevant web information. As devices like phones, cameras, projectors, TV’s, computers, cars, shopping trolleys, you name it, become increasingly integrated and connected, be prepared to see rapid and radical changes in how we interface with and make sense of the web.