TECHNOLOGY THAT IS BEATING THE ODDS IN 2017
-
Posted by Kenn Kimutai - Filed in Technology - 1,002 views
TECHNOLOGY THAT IS BEATING THE ODDS IN 2017
With an endless number of trade shows and technology journals brimming with innovations and future application enabling technologies, 2017 has been an amazing year, and we’re only halfway through. Fast-paced commercial developments, exciting space advances, quirky quantum-computing developments, smart transportation, wireless charging, and more are in store for our society, and this list is what we think are the most thrilling innovations of the first half of 2017
Cota wireless power transfer technologies
At CES 2017, Ossia Inc. unveiled the capabilities of its Cota wireless power transfer technologies capable of charging compatible devices up to 30 feet away. Included in this unveiling was the Cota Tile, which is designed to seamlessly integrate into the office or public building infrastructure by replacing a ceiling tile. The goal of this technology is to bring wireless power to users and devices as conveniently as we currently have wireless internet.
Smart transportation for Smart Cities
City transportation is an important pillar for quality of life for citizens in a city. Currently, in most of the cities, public and private road transportation are the key modes of commuting and logistics. Some large and mega cities have metro and local train network as the backbone transportation mode.
Lack of quality and safe public transportation, inadequate capacity of public transportation, road safety concerns, overcrowded road network, poor traffic management, parking issues, theft. These are some of the reasons that have brought about ‘smart transportation’Virtual Reality & Artificial Reality
The VR and AR trend is gearing up for productivity and growth in 2017. Industries dealing with technology in Virtual and Augmented Reality will thrive.
Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that layers computer-generated enhancements atop an existing reality in order to make it more meaningful to interact with. AR is developed into apps and used on mobile devices to blend digital components into the real world in such a way that they enhance one another but can also be differentiated easily. See examples of these at http://www.creativeguerrillamarketing.com/augmented-reality/10-examples-augmented-reality-retail/
Virtual Reality (VR) is an artificial, computer-generated simulation or recreation of a real-life environment or situation. It immerses the user by making them feel like they are experiencing the simulated reality firsthand, primarily by stimulating their vision and hearing.
Two leading companies in this industry are Oculus and Contus. Oculus has created the Rift, an advanced VR system that integrates head and hand-motion sensors with two 1080p lenses to give the user an incredible experience. As we continue to innovate in these two fields, systems will increasingly become more advanced. Examples of Companies pursuing this, is Samsung Electronics East Africa.
Google's smart speaker looks more striking than Amazon's Echo and does many of the same things as soon as you've caught its attention by saying "Okay, Google." If you've used Google's voice recognition on its phone app, you'll know it's pretty accurate. It'll play music from services like Spotify, as the Echo does.
It can also set alarms, timers, add items to a shopping list, tell you the time your commute will take today and so on. And of course it can set the temperature on your Nest thermostat, Belkin, Honeywell, Samsung SmartThings and so on. It works with your smartphone, Apple and Android, which is where you set up new accessories to work with it.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin block chain was first introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in his white paper back in the year 2008. While Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has caught the attention of the mainstream media, as a developer, far more interesting is the underlying technology — Block chain! This is where it all started. Bitcoin was a great innovation, because it solved two fundamental problems in a decentralized manner — preventing double spend and decentralized trust!
Over the years, as the Bitcoin network has proliferated, and the number of people using Bitcoin has increased, we have seen a significant increase in the number of transactions on the network. But the network has been unable to scale efficiently along with the increasing number of transactions, which has led to a significant block time, around 10–15 minutes on an average. There have been several attempts to solve this issue —
- Increasing the block size
- Payment channels
- Decreasing the transaction data size
While there were a lot of discussions and debates going on about increasing the block size of the Bitcoin block chain itself, in a Scaling Bitcoin conference in Hong Kong in December 2015, one of the Bitcoin lead developers, Pieter Wuille, presented the idea of Segwit at that conference. It was an interesting innovation which proposed to remove the signature data from transactions and send it separately, thus increasing the capacity of the blocks to carry more transactions.
Although this is a really innovative solution, some people have opined their reservations about it.
Source references: