A New Year is around the corner, and with it the potential for a vast array of new technologies. 2014 was a year of rapid changes, and there is no sign of a slowdown ahead. Techwire recently talked to several technology leaders to ask them what they expect to see next and what they think is important for the industry and government in the upcoming year and beyond.
Gary Arstein-Kerslake, CIO, CalRecycle:
Gary Arstein-Kerslake, CIO of CalRecycle
Newer mobile devices such as bands and smartwatches offer high-resolution screen sizes down to an inch or so. These products increase productivity, but the benefit arises from the mobility they offer. On the other hand, many studies over the years have shown increased productivity from larger display sizes, which just make sense. The larger-format holographic displays depicted in the 2002 film Minority Report are not quite here yet, but the technology has arrived that allows you to get many of the benefits of very large format displays for very low cost. If a 24-inch monitor allows you to be more productive than you were with your 14- or 17-inch monitor, how much more beneficial would a 48-inch monitor be? With the new generation of 4K displays rapidly dropping in price and all major graphics manufacturers and integrated graphics processors now supporting 4K, this is a technology that holds a lot of promise for increased productivity in the workplace.
Implementations of low-cost VoIP will accelerate. Over the past decade, some early adopters of VoIP became enamored with the technology rather than the potential benefits of the technology. They literally paid the price of very expensive implementations that had little chance of ever yielding a return on investment. Meanwhile, low-cost, consumer-based VoIP products experienced dramatic growth. Products such as Skype, VoIPBuster,
Google Voice, Magic Jack, etc., collectively have hundreds of millions of subscribers. Now, there are many moderate- cost VoIP products and many hosted solutions that offer excellent quality at a reasonable price point. The moderate cost coupled with the host of additional benefits and increased productivity from unified communications when fully implemented will make VoIP a very important technology during the next few years.
