Top 14 Technology Trends of 2012 that Changed Face of Technology
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As we leap forward to 2013, we cannot ignore the fact that 2012 was a year of many revolutions in the field of technology. Technology has changed for better and if we look back not more than 10 years ago we can feel that the world has been tremendously influenced by innumerable innovations made in technology. Today we will be touching some of the most outstanding technology trends that took place in 2012 an will change the face of technology forever. Hope you will enjoy the list!
Touch Screen Technology
One of the most dominant, visible and inevitable trends of 2012 is quite clearly the touch screen. The touch interface and input method is becoming increasingly popular and is being adopted rapidly by a variety of devices. There are stoves with touch input options, just imagine its impact… With tablets on the rise, and there functionality increasing, these may soon become replacements rather than accompaniments to regular computers and laptops.
Social Gestures
The world’s biggest social network Facebook introduced the concept of social gestures, through its services and apps. The idea behind social gestures is that users now no longer have to even click a button in order to share content; rather the app or service automatically publishes any content directly to the persons profile on a social network. Examples of this include Spotify and Social Reader.
Near Field Communication (NFC)
Next up is the NFC breakthrough which makes mobile payments far easier than before. A helping hand was that of Google, which helped through its service Google Wallet, many other firms are also taking steps in this direction now. Near Field Communication (NFC) allows users to replace their credit cards with their smart devices. Rather than having to swipe your card at a store or any other place you can now simply wave your NFC capable device across a receiving chip and your payment is debited from your account.
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Kindle Fire
The Kindle Fire has set a revolutionary trend. It has also posed some serious competition to the iPad, which was the device that really got things started for tablet computers. Not only is the Kindle Fire far cheaper than the iPad as well as many other Android tablets, it is unlike any of them, even though it is running Android itself. For users and developers alike, this comes as a new platform and many will be eager to make use of it, and make money from it.
Cable Subscription
With the onset of the many media capable devices one might have thought that cable companies would be facing their demise, though things are quite on the contrary. Many of the largest cable network providers in the world such as Dish Network and Time Warner are now offering their services to various devices such as tablets. These include services like on-demand movies and TV shows as well as live TV Now users who are maintaining their subscriptions can view the content on more than just their television screens.
Siri
Heard of Siri? Voice control is on the mind of many firms. Apple started Siri on their line of smart phones; it’s a great app which allows you to do quite a number of things on your smart phone just by talking to the device. The idea of voice control can be widely seen being implemented in the automobile industry. Several new cars now let you talk to the onboard computer which will in turn do as you tell it to, for instance switch on the air conditioning or change radio stations.
Spatial Gesture Technology
Other than voice what about gestures with your hands? The spatial gesture technology can be seen in products such as the Kinect for the Xbox, in which hand movements are used as a form of input to a computer. This is another of the mediums which is likely to surpass the need to have pointing device to in order to control a computer or software.
Second Screen Experiences
‘Second screen experiences’ is another growing trend in a number of industries. It is mostly focused on the tablet market, and in essence an app running on your iPad or any other tablet will listen in on the sounds coming from your TV or any other medium and will display content on your tablet related to what you are watching or listening to.
Flexible Screens
Flexible screens are also something to keep your eye open for. Soon you may not be pinching your screen to zoom in and out, but rather bending your device to do the same. These flexible screens are not widely available right now though some firms have rumored that they will be introducing the technology soon.
HTML5, your very own Responsive Language
For those who are familiar with HTML, it will be no surprise to you that HTML 5 is in fact one of the most ground breaking trends of this year. For those who are less familiar it’s like this; in the past with earlier versions of HTML, a single app had to have several versions, each version associated with a specific operating system such as Android or Windows Phone. HTML 5 makes it possible for developers to create a single app and have it function on any kind of platform. Furthermore, HTML 5 also allows for much richer applications to be created, which means the apps and services you and I will be using soon, will be much better.
Apps Stores and the Marketplaces
These have become increasingly common with the onset of the smart phones as well as the radical increase in the amount of devices which use operating systems such as iOS and Android. As they are rather complex systems, the apps they host can be quite complex too, and to trade them App stores are the new main market.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is something which was pretty much nonexistent just a couple of years ago and today it has grown in popularity extensively. Cloud computing allows users to have data stored in one location, which is a remote server, and they can access this data from anywhere, much like a hard disk that you can access from any computer in the world, through the internet.
Zero Footprint Technology
Zero footprint technology is also something which is becoming popular with people and industries in which security is a major concern. Zero footprint apps save no data of any kind and run entirely on web based servers.
BYOD Trend
Major corporations all around the world are promoting the Bring Your Own Device Culture; this is largely due to the fact that so many people have smart devices that nearly every employee is bound to have one. For this reason it is a lot cheaper to have the employees use their own smart devices rather than the firm providing one to them.
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Kiran,
It seems that every e-mail I’ve sent lately has ended up in the “noreply” zone. I have some questions about the article we discussed. Do you have an e-mail account for general useage? Please advise; thanks.
Richard