Top technology 2015 part1

ATLANTA (March 10, 2015) - The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) today announced the Top 40 Innovative Technology Companies in Georgia.  One of the motifs that will really begin to take hold in 2015 is a distinct crossover between consumer and enterprise technology. By comparison, and perhaps more understandably, last year's top searches were Robin Williams, the World Cup and Ebola. Last year's technology searches featured the iPhone 6 in the top spot, Samsung Galaxy S5 in number two and the Nexus 6 in third. Google's site for exploring trends this time around is actually pretty amazing, allowing you to delve deeper into trends as well as the stories behind them. With a 2020 commercialization horizon, 2015 be the year when we move from these concepts to technology trials and standards development. The challenge that IoT faces is that everything sits in isolation thus an IoT standard is a must, and many see this happening in 2015. Besides this mobile network focus, there is a 2015 and beyond trend to manage total energy usage, compute-to-consumption ratios and performance KPIs for best in class green operations. The average selling price of a smartphone went down in 2014, and we expect this to continue in 2015 with low-cost OEMs such as Xiaomi and Lenovo leading the trend. Governments and institutions around the world will continue working on it during 2015. Inspecting Gartner's picks for the past three years and its choices for 2015 (links to each year's report are at the bottom of this article), one notices that every year cloud services play an increased role in which trends are selected. In fact, a fair assumption might be that all 10 of the 2015 trends rely on some type of interaction with cloud services. See if you agree; here are Gartner's top 10 strategic technology trends for 2015. The statistic depicts a ranking of the top-20 technology companies in 2015 according to their brand value as calculated by Millward Brown. Google is ranked as the second most valuable technology company worldwide with a brand value over 170 billion U.S. dollars. With technology becoming essential to every part of people's lives, it is no surprise to find technology companies among the most valuable brands worldwide Of the top five most valuable global brands, four are technology brands: Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft. In 2015, the technology sector's brand value amounted to 732 billion U.S. dollars. Apple leads the top 20 most valuable technology brands, followed by Google and Microsoft respectively. The second most valuable technology company, Google, reported a more modest growth. Google's global brand value was 158.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2014 and reached 173.65 billion U.S. dollars in 2015. But nothing newly minted in 2015 has captivated and remade the lives of the masses yet, though some technologies that I believe will eventually do so got better and more real this year. But, in 2015, we got little big news out of the top phones offered by Apple, Samsung, or Google's Nexus line. Research firm Gartner reported a 7.7 percent year-over-year decline in PC sales in the third quarter of 2015. After completely blowing the 2007 smartphone revolution, and bringing out a confusing and flawed version of Windows, Microsoft seemed to come out of a coma in 2015. And 2015 will also be remembered as the year that Elon Musk formed a nonprofit designed to make sure AI advances remain open source, to protect against some potentially dangerous version down the road. There are four technologies that, while not yet mainstream, made major strides in 2015. In 2015, even an aging institution, the New York Times, distributed cardboard VR viewers with its newspapers to try storytelling with the technology. They're still not a daily sight on your average street, but they've become so common in 2015 that the government is requiring that they be registered. The Accenture Technology Vision 2015 maps out five key trends: The Internet of Me, Outcome Economy, Platform (R)evolution, Intelligent Enterprise and Workforce Reimagined. Collectively, the five trends from our Technology Vision 2015 represent the newest expression of Accenture's stance that every business is a digital business,” which we first introduced in our 2013 report. The 2015 trends provide additional components to Accenture's multiyear perspective on technology's tectonic shifts and their impacts on the strategies and operational priorities for organizations worldwide. Each year, our Technology Vision pinpoints the emerging technology trends that will impact large enterprises in the next 3-5 years based on our insights and research. Our 2015 Technology Vision research process began by gathering inputs from the Technology Vision External Advisory Board, which is a group comprising executives and entrepreneurs from the public and private sectors, academia, venture capital, and startups. We then interviewed 100+ technology luminaries, industry experts, and Accenture business leaders. Accenture is a leading global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company with approximately 319,000 employees and $30 billion in net revenue in 2014. Four growth platforms — Strategy, Digital, Technology and Operations — are the innovation engines through which we build world class skills and capabilities, develop knowledge capital and create and manage key assets that are central to the development of integrated services and solutions for our clients. Both established players and small startups in 2015 will be actively involved in developing new devices, applications, and protocols for the wearable electronics market, which Juniper Research expects to account for $53 billion in sales by 2019. As the volume of data explodes, along with the means to collect and analyze that information, building security into software design and balancing security and privacy are becoming top priorities. The celebrity photo hacking scandal and iCloud breach in China in 2014 has brought cloud security to the forefront for 2015. According to Gartner, sales of 3D printers will double each year between 2015 and 2018, and exceed sales of more than 2 million. Business intelligence in 2015 will be less about examining the past and more about predicting the future. Predictive analytics, an emerging area of data mining, involves extracting information from data and using it to predict trends and behavior patterns. The way we deal with our health is undergoing a major transformation, not only because mobile Internet technology has made it possible to have continuous access to personal health information, but also because breaking the trend of ever-growing healthcare costs is increasingly necessary. Internet technology not only lets us continuously monitor an individual's physiological and psychological state, but also allows for building up a lifelong record of physical, mental, and social health. Follow the links to find out more about each of the tools A categorised list of the tools appears in the Best of Breed 2015 The slideset of the Top 100 Tools is embedded below. Here's our take on what 2015 brought in the areas of fundraising, software, hardware, mobile, cloud adoption, and security. The previously hot tablet market dramatically cooled off in 2015 If your organization needs tablets, good ones are available at very low cost these days. They all use NFC (near-field communication) technology that allows two devices placed close to each other to securely transfer payment information. In our 2015 Tech Predictions , TechSoup's Chris Delatorre was prescient that there would be increased interest in online document storage and collaboration. As online data storage costs steadily decline, it made more sense in 2015 for nonprofits to store their data and programs on the Internet. Box is now available through the TechSoup donation programs in 27 countries and has quickly become one of our top 10 donation programs. Therefore, this technology year in review covers the leaders, the trends and the deals that not only most impacted tech, but also that permeated the global business, political and social landscape in 2015. Mark Parker, CEO Nike, #1 rank : Parker has doubled revenues and profits since 2006 and raised Nike's stock price six-fold, while openly increasing the company's commitment to technology , whether in design, manufacturing, marketing, or retailing. Zuckerberg has finally also made it highly profitable with 25% operating margins and roughly $4 billion in earnings expected in 2015. Profits in 2015 soared to $53 billion while innovation continues in brand new products like the Apple Watch. Ajay Banga, CEO Mastercard, #5 rank : Banga has doubled profits and revenue in five years and has turned Mastercard from a credit card systems vendor to a full technology company to maintain competitive edge in order to expand into mobile, virtual and digital payments, advanced biometrics and facial-recognition. The rapidly accelerating ways technology can be used to store, manage, analyze and act on data was the underlying catalyst for disruption in every single field, not just Cybersecurity. Advanced and Pervasive Analytics: The focus of big data” in 2015 really moved from managing and storing the data to understanding how to use the increasing amount, volume and variety of data to learn something we did not know before. The pace of advancement in AI actually sped up in 2015 and machine helpers” started to simplify and automate many processes and to really open their eyes.”. Thanks to embedded intelligence and analytics, these systems will become more alert and responsive to their surroundings and will become more anticipatory vs merely reactive. The Seattle online retailer and cloud computing powerhouse — whose CEO Jeff Bezos speaks of the company's long-term thinking and willingness to be misunderstood” for long periods of time — was a Wall Street darling in 2015. In 2014, Amazon's stock lost 22 percent of its value, but the company soared like no other in 2015 as Jeff Bezos and crew established themselves as perhaps the most dominant (and feared) tech company on the planet. The Bellevue company, formerly known as InfoSpace, cut its InfoSpace workforce by 10 percent in August 2015 and then two months later announced a major strategy shift in which he indicated plans to divest InfoSpace and its e-commerce business Monoprice. The stock is still doing better than that IPO price, though shares fell a bit in 2015. The high-flying Seattle biotech upstart, which went public in 2014, saw its shine fall off a bit in 2015. And here's a look back at the top tech stocks of 2014 , with Alder BioPharmaceuticals on top. Lytro is also building a camera to capture live action VR using its light field technology. Microsoft surprises..with hardware: Microsoft gave the world Windows 10 in 2015. Electric cars and oil prices: one thing that has defined macro economics in 2015 has been the plummeting oil (and other commodities) price. AI - improving slowly: 2015 saw sequential improvements in Microsoft's Cortana, Google Now and the broader availability of Amazon's Echo device (in the USA only) after its limited launch in late 2014. Intel acquiring Altera for US$16.7 Billion to make strides in FPGA technology to build broader portfolio of solutions for IoT, data centers (cloud is hot!) and so forth. US wireless giants such as AT&T continued to see traction in 2015 for its end to end Digital Life (Smart Home) platform as well as AT&T Drive (connected car platform) with almost 5.8 million cars on its network powered by AT&T Drive. It offers consulting and technology services, such as IT strategy, program management, operations improvement, strategy and business consulting services. Investors still have the opportunity to add a top software security stock at a very reasonable entry point, as the stock is Merrill Lynch's top security play for 2015. Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) is trading at a very low 9.3 times 2015 estimated earnings, and it is the top Merrill Lynch pick for 2015 in IT hardware. NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI) is the top Merrill Lynch pick in semiconductors, and it is also on the firm's U.S.1 list. The Merrill Lynch analysts and others are focused on the huge possibilities in technology in what is called the connected car.” They see automotive generating 20% of total revenues, and say that growth could outgrow the broader chip market over the next couple of years. In conjunction with the building momentum in online corporate learning, expect to see intensified focus in 2015 on identifying better ways to assess skills and measure individual progress, competency-based learning, and ultimately ROI. We've got this as a top priority at Pluralsight via our recent acquisition of Smarterer , which allows us to measure any skill set with as few as 10 questions in under two minutes based on an adaptive algorithm. Information Week identifies technology for flipped learning as another key ed-tech trend in 2015. Look for next-generation cloud-based, mobile, and app solutions-with powerful analytics to measure student responses-to replace outdated learning management systems in 2015. As Michael B. Horn and Heather Staker point out in their book Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools , the most successful designers of education technology will keep the end in mind, rather than pushing tech innovations for technology's own sake. The size and magnitude of this change is impossible to imagine, but the implications for service providers will hit like a tsunami in 2015. Data center traffic will exceed five zetabytes in 2015 and 76 percent of that data will stay inside the data center. This trend, already visible, will continue — and accelerate — in 2014 and 2015. This number, which blows people's minds, has profound implications for cloud and other technology. If they are not careful, quantum computing will create real headaches for service providers by 2015. In 2015, consumers will begin to see SVPA technology baked into their mobile phones. Block chain technology: The block chain is the transaction database that's shared by everyone participating in bitcoin's digital system. Even if Bitcoin itself never really gains traction, block chain technology has enormous promise. In some way, each of these tech trends will affect your business in the coming year. The best way to prepare for coming disruption is to learn as much as you can, discuss implications with others in your company, and then commit to launching small experiments internally to help you see the trends in motion. Amy Webb is the founder and CEO of Webbmedia Group , a digital strategy firm that advises an international client base on near-future emerging technologies and digital media trends. Oh, and don't forget about smart scarves and hats too Basically, if you can wear it on your body, there was a smart version of it in 2015.