As a kid, did you ever think that this is how the future would look like? In terms of technology evolution, I - as a kid - never dreamt that technological evolution would take us to the point where we stand today. Robert A. Heinlein - an American science fiction author - said:
A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future.
The advancement of technology first began with huge devices, humble capabilities and slow processing that could take days or even months to process a single equation. These primitive devices improved over the past seven decades until they evolved to what we are using these days: small, handy devices used to make thousands if not millions of complicated processing of data quickly and efficiently. They became an integral part of our daily life and in our commercial dealings.
In this article, we’ll take you on a journey through the past, present and look at the evolution of technology from a futuristic point of view. So, buckle up for a journey through time.
Evolution of technology: The past and present
In the last five years, many tech companies have started acquisition and building on their platforms in order to prepare to announce the new technology age transformation. This race is centered on visual wearable technology, specifically Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).
Here’s a performance analysis of the tech giants
Google have released many versions of wearable technology during the past few years, and even made a monumental step by releasing a prototype for visual-wearable technology (Google Glasses). The company produced it with the goal of performing a market analysis en masse, aiming to launch it in the beginning at limited quantities in 2013, and then to make that prototype available for customers in 2014. After one year, Google stopped producing that line of business before coming back in 2017 with their new edition Google Glass Enterprise Edition, followed by Google Glass Enterprise Edition II in 2019. Interestingly, these came without any huge announcements like the kind we usually get from Google.
Related: 8 Free Google Products that your business should be using
Apple
Apple, largely considered to be the most influential company on the market for quite a while, lost a lot of their loyal customers after releasing a couple of smartphone editions. After focusing on promoting the technology in these editions, they switched their marketing strategy to focus on their brand itself. Apple already owns their position in the market due to the benefits offered by the possibility of synchronization and compatibility between their various devices. Therefore, transformation towards the new technology for them appears to be safer and more guaranteed than any other competitor, especially since they had guaranteed both compatibility and customer loyalty. Strangely, there has not been an official statement about any potential visual wearable technology, which is unheard of for a tech company like Apple. Currently, Apple is focusing on replacing intel processors by designing their own. The release date has not been announced, but any such potential news will have a tremendous impact that is sure to affect the market.
Microsoft
Microsoft paused their investments in smartphone technology and changed their focus to investing in compatibility and desktop applications as they are building their wearable device Microsoft HoloLens. They produced the 1st edition in 2010 as an add-on to Xbox before targeting developers with the next edition in 2016. In order to gain extra access to users' data on the web, they made an important acquisition on LinkedIn to cover the business level and to gain leverage in the digital world.
Facebook, for its part, is not missing the chance to enter the race and become a technology provider in its own right instead of being a program that runs using another’s technology. Facebook has been trying to enter this industry since 2013 when they announced their first smartphone device, co-operating with HTC to produce their first batch. While it was considered an unsuccessful device for various reasons, Facebook continued to make a significant acquisition with 2.3 Billion USD in cash and stocks to own the Oculus VR company and another one in 2020 for MIX platform for gaming. I believe that Facebook will make their way to cover more than just games using this technology.
A lot of companies are trying to get into this field of introducing new technology to the world, but between these players and rival Chinese companies, it is quite hard to compete. It is possible that the next stage will be more efficient when it comes to finding a niche to fill, as the market gets carved between the winners of this round and SpaceX's Neuralink Chip.
Which leads us to our main topic: how will the next era of technology affect our lives and our daily habits with e-business? And what we should do to be prepared to this era?
Seize the evolution of technology
During the next few years, we will likely witness a massive competition between those well-reputed companies with the goal of acquiring the largest share of the market. The focus will be on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies in business and gaming and other daily applications. So, how should we prepare for the upcoming Technology age?
As business owners, we must take care of our online presence to make sure it goes beyond social media accounts. It must cover creating a professional website, web apps and mobile applications to gather larger amounts of data and information. Below are some tips to help you keep up with the upcoming technologies:
- Invest in CMS: Like WordPress which gives you the ability to create a business website and an e-commerce website with minimum effort, making it easy to integrate with new technology instead of building it from scratch. Business websites are incredibly important, and this point is proven by what Apple did. By focusing on building customer's loyalty instead of focusing on selling items, they achieved major success.
- Enhance your search engine optimization (SEO) with voice search: Optimizing your website and content for voice search makes Google treat you more favorably, and boosts your website’s rank since you are helping the assistant voice feature to further understand your business vocabulary tone. This move will help Siri and Cortona do the same thing too.
Related: Local SEO Checklist easy 20 steps to check for CXOs
- Enhance your search engine optimization with video content: Videos play a huge role in SEO, since most of the content in future will be visualized. Google will reward you for this, and they will give your website a higher rank in search results.
Related: Here’s why your small business needs to embrace video content now
- Invest in 3D modelling for your products and tools: You can embrace 3D technology by designing virtual tours for your services, and coming up with more than one scenario to give your visitor/ customer an unforgettable online customer journey that fits their needs based on your previous data and analysis. To achieve all of this, it is recommended for your company to be using one of the most successful game engines, such as Unreal or Unity.
Are you ready for the future?
Whether you’re prepared or not, the evolution of technology is progressing. The global tech players have already begun their moves towards technology. The question is: will you be able to keep up or fall behind?
