What to expect from digital tech, and how it will affect your agency

As 2014 unfolds, all eyes are on digital tech; with people across the globe eagerly awaiting the newest innovations from one of the world’s most progressive and exciting industries.

Fierce competition, consumer demand and company pride all drive the world’s leading companies to keep pushing for newer, better technologies – from Amazon’s flying drones to Apple’s iWatch, 2014 certainly shows promise.

This year, we’ve gathered the highly experienced Cohaesus team to offer their tips on what to expect from 2014, and how innovations might affect agencies.

 

Richard Bundock (Technical Director – Enterprise)

We all dislike corporate IT. When you’re trying to get a project delivered, their slow speed and silod culture tends to drive us and our agency clients mad. Deployments of updates and new projects can be extremely difficult. For 2014, I hope (and predict) to see corporate IT embracing development environments in the cloud, which will reduce a lot of complexity, and some cost, for our agency clients.

With cloud-based development environments, agencies can quickly get their code deployed into production/staging sites allowing faster feedback and a better service. All we need is corporate IT to embrace and enable this.

 

Matt Meckes (Technical Director – Creative Coding)

2014 will be the year that virtual reality finally breaks through into the mainstream. Although this technology has been touted as “just around the corner” since the ’90s, the latest offerings are finally starting to give a compelling experience.

We’ve already started to see the potential of combining hardware like Oculus Rift, and gesture-based controllers. A great example in 2013 was PaperDude. We now just need a really smart team to come up with a killer implementation, and the tech will fast find its way into everyone’s living room.

 

Mark Pynen (Technical Director – Support & Maintenance)

Digital currencies and wallets will gain more traction and mainstream acceptance in 2014.  Bitcoin is easily the digital currency with the most awareness as it currently stands; and more and more practical uses for it will continue to increase over the next twelve months as products and services begin to accept digital currencies as payment.

Digital currency will be making lots of headlines in the coming year, on topics ranging from regulations and legality to security and volatility.  Bitcoin in its current form may not manage to remain the dominant digital currency as alternatives continue to emerge, and digital currencies may never become the currency of the future; but one thing is absolutely certain – digital currency in one form or another is here to stay, and it will be big news in 2014.

 

Marfat Abdullahi (Developer)

The much-anticipated Amazon drones (or Prime Air as they’re marketing them) will influence the market tremendously. Products at your doorstep in 30 minutes will surely change the world of online shopping, as long as Amazon delivers.

It’s been claimed that a drone can cover areas within a 10-mile radius of their distribution centres; what better way to grab the attention and the curiosity of consumers than a flying drone? This is certainly an opportunity to take advantage of exposure to a large amount of population in a short time, and in targeted areas. I am convinced that the idea of drones will spark the creative ones to take this chance and bring in new and exciting ways of entertaining an audience too.

 

Ana Cuesta Biel (Developer)

Hybrid cloud will change the way business are run, and in 2014 it will be widely used.

We’re used to the concepts of public cloud (open to anyone) and private cloud (open to an organization); but, according to Rackspace, the future which has already started is the Hybrid Cloud, which consists of public cloud, private cloud and dedicated hosting, all together.

They defined DevOps as the culture and work methodology that uses a set of tools and deployment strategies to automate all the processes. Some of them are already widely used (GitHub for coding, Jenkins and Gerrit to automate testing, etc.). The hybrid cloud will be key to this change, which will embrace all the DevOps.

 

Jose Terrones (Developer)

3D printing has been a much-touted trend for the last few years. Mostly it’s been used for hobbyists, or very high-end uses, as the cost has been astronomical.

But I really think that 2014 will be the year where 3D prints have an impact on the wider market.

We can already see in CES that 3D printers are covering more markets, such as the food, jewellery and gaming. There are already  a few companies where you can orders high-quality products online to be printed for competitive prices.

This is a great opportunity for brands and agencies to create bespoke, customised products, at reasonable prices. There are many ways this tech could be used in really interesting and creative campaigns. Watch this space!

 

James Hunt (Creative Technical Lead)

This is the year for wearable tech. We saw Google Glass come and go, with very mixed reviews, with the majority being bad. There were also a few other pieces released, such as fitness trackers. But I think this year companies will start to release things that really do change the way we interact with everything and each other.

These new bits of tech will bring benefits to both our business and social lives. With the ability to make us more involved with our online worlds, while at the same time freeing up our hands to get more involved with what it is we’re doing.

Author: Deepak Ark.