Innovation and emerging technology in the news

Did you spot Marc Andreessens’ essay on a16z’s website titled ‘It’s time to build’? TechCrunch report on this call to arms here, and call on Marc and Silicon Valley to lead the charge.

businesswire released an extract from ResearchAndMarkets.com’s report on Covid-19 and the telecoms sector. I’ve not seen the full report, but the reported extract includes a note that 5g developments will be disrupted or delayed in 2020. Supply-chain disruption aside, I assume the Telecoms industry is pretty busy maintaining existing networks and ensuring it can cope with the increased demands.

What is happening with AR/VR? I wondered if Covid (sorry, but it is quite topical) might drive some more demand and therefore maturity in this space? VentureBeat reports a mixed bag for the fortunes of AR/VR here .

Articles & Reading

Rob Geraghty, presentation guru provides another great tip about presenting remotely and hosting webinars.  This article in LinkedIn suggests pre-recording your introduction so you can set the scene and expectations with attendees in advance. Rob is well worth a follow!

IBM’s CIO Fletcher Previn posted an article about the CIO’s role in the Covid-19 pandemic and focusing on security, tech and culture. Most of the CIO’s I’ve spoken with recently who have rapidly moved to a fully remote working environment have been examining the long-term outlook for IT. Many have assumed there will only be a partial return to the office and are content to continue their operation with the new-normal. The handbrake has truly been let off Digital transformation as a bi-product too!

Tech spotlight – interesting disruptive technology vendors on my radar

Lilt – not the totally tropical drink, but the localisation technology SaaS platform. Lilt combines AI powered computer aided translation technology and Human translators to reduce the time and cost of translating content. The translation workforce is largley made up of freenlance workers and government employees. Lilt claim to reduce cost and yet pay better rates to their community of freelance workers. Think Uber for translation.

Iotics‘ cloud-hosted operating environment is a secure, scalable platform where Digital Twins of any endpoint selectively share Information, through brokered interactions, across corporate boundaries, in real-time.

The Iotic platform can be used to build interoperable, event-driven applications and analytics. I think this technology provides an excellent platform to rapidly build new Digital apps around our legacy ecosystem, and for sharing information across partner ecosystems, something that’s going to be very attractive in the current climate.

If you are interested in any of these vendors or disruptive technology please contact us to discuss our personalised horizon scanning and tech radar service