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4 long standing Technologies that are coming to the end of their cycle

If you are 50 years young or above, you are probably starting to enjoy telling our teenagers or grand kids what technology was to us as kids In the dark era, the standing outside telephone boxes, astronomical costs to contact anyone overseas, telegrams, black and white televisions, and how calculators to us were boffins in white coats who operated computers the size of a house!

Old technology – the way we were

We have seen such a shift in technology since the 1960’s and the crux of technology is the next new thing as it is such an evolving business.

Here are the 4 shifts that will change dramatically over the next decade that some of us will see massive Investment opportunities in.

The Silicone Chip

Microchips getting smaller and smaller

For the past half century technology has not really surprised us. It must be difficult when you are a certain age working for Apple or Samsung design teams and you know there has to come; a big change soon, as we can only fit so many more transistors onto silicon wafers, which makes chips more powerful and devices smaller and smaller.

Gordon Moore’s mid 1960’s treatise ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’ observed how chips were doubling every year making it accessible to more and more homes, well he got that right!

Fast forward 50 years, we all know the demands placed on the microchip and how small we can go with present technology, so things have to change and soon.

It’s demanding on the brain learning a whole new process and that change for the silicon chip is starting to loom ever so darker.

You thought the answer was something revolutionary to answer to the smaller and smaller chip problem; naaah sorry, too easy; let’s stack them and get more from them.

This method means placing them on top of one another to get more computing power. The most basic technique (Bump + RDL) involves stacking two chips together, and then connecting them both to a flip chip at the bottom of the stack; the chips are physically close, which is a good step forward. This will probably give us one more decade before we need something completely new.

A new computer brain

A new brain is needed to cope..

Up to now; Computing is based on a Central Processing Unit with relational databases driving the information. This was all based on Van Nuemann’s work in the 1970’s with a CPU at the core and the information stored in databases,

Ask any geek what ‘Van Nuemann’s bottleneck’ means, and in one word he’ll say frustration! Simply put, it doesn’t matter how fast chips can process if they need to wait too long to communicate with each other.

We are now beginning to understand a little more of how the Human Brain works, and are developing ways to use the brain’s architecture to power computing, like; Neuromorphic chips, based on the brain itself, which hopefully will be thousands of times more efficient than conventional chips. Quantum computers, which IBM has recently made available in the cloud, work far better for security applications. New FPGA chips can be optimized for other applications.

Open Community

New launches of revolutionary innovation used to be the realm of the company launching the product or service, but it seems the shift has gone to the community, much like how Van Andel and De Voss pioneered Multi-Level marketing concept in the 50’s, it appears the ‘community marketing’ concept has come full circle and has even started to be part of technology launches.

Community Marketing

Apple owe a lot of success to freelancers who create fantastic apps and now IBM owe so much to the open source community giving them access to engineering way outside their own labs.

Managers have to learn to embrace the wider community to develop platforms and gain access to ecosystems that used to take decades to break into, and Social media is also a pivotal factor in this new marketing.

Online entertainment

The Television really took a grip globally in the 1950’s unless of course you grew up like me in South Africa where it was 1979 when South Africans stood outside Television shops gawping at this latest technology, I’ve never really found out why such a major economy was so slow to integrate the television.

On screen entertainment is still in demand more so than it ever was, however we as a society in the mid noughties are all about on demand. The future here is personal TV streaming into our tablets and smart phones. Watching what we want, when we want, playing the games we want, when we want, and advertisers are already desperately trying to think of ways to break into this new paradigm shift.

Online gaming on demand

By 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic, according to Cisco. Video-on-demand traffic alone will have almost trebled. Leafing through a swathe of statistics on the subject, I’m hard pressed to find any indicator that doesn’t suggest rapid growth.

Video is the future of content marketing. That is, if it’s not the here and now. Various studies show more than half of companies are already making use of the medium – a figure that’s predicted to rise as more and more realise the possibilities. Another research company claims; 64% of marketers expect video to dominate their strategies in the near future. It’s not difficult to see why.

Seven out of ten view brands in a more positive light after watching an interesting video from them.

FOTV is a network of entertainment companies who have collaborated to bring one company to look forward into what are the driving factors behind the future of online entertainment, and Virtual reality gaming and cinema.

Online entertainment for the masses

FOTV are introducing an IPO that is actually being kept away from the big corporations as much as possible, and utilising more of the community, the very people that power the entertainment industry