Articles about 2018

Cybercriminals are getting better at monetizing their activities, with more than two million cyber incidents in 2018 resulting in over $45 billion in losses, with actual numbers expected to be much higher as many cyber incidents are never reported.

The Internet Society's Online Trust Alliance (OTA) has released a report which finds the financial impact of ransomware rose by 60 percent last year, and losses from business email compromise doubled, despite the fact that overall breaches and exposed records were down.

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I can’t put this off any longer, so here are the tech predictions I made a year ago for 2018. We have to see how well or poorly I did before we can move on to my predictions for 2019 and beyond. These old predictions have been edited for length, but not to avoid embarrassment. I try to never avoid embarrassment.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that my predictions get longer and longer (this column, alone, is 4329 words -- my second longest, ever) as they have drifted from new products to explaining new strategies. This sometimes works against the prediction since it is often easier to claim success if your goal is vague, but I see it more as a tribute to my readers. Many of you have been with me for decades and the very fact that we are both still here has as much to do with the work as with its results. How the future fits together is just as important as where it is heading.

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2018 is has come to a close. Many experts are making predictions for 2019, but I think it’s important to learn from the past.  Let’s take a look back at all of the major email industry events of 2018.

There were plenty of changes amongst mailbox providers that kept marketers and deliverability professionals busy. Providers like Gmail and Oath (AOL, Yahoo and Verizon mail) went through significant changes this year, including:

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The internet is a serious and valuable tool for research and commerce, but we all know it's mostly about cute kittens and celebrities.

Photo service Shutterstock has been analyzing the search data from its site to reveal most searched for names around the world and has produced an infographic of the result.

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Despite newer technologies, most of us still rely on passwords to secure our accounts. We are not, however, very good at choosing them or looking after them.

Password management company Dashlane has produced a list of the 10 worst password fails of 2018.

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As 2018 comes to a close, many people start reflecting on the year. While there were many bad things occurring, such as the California wildfires and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, it is important to remember many good things happen too -- they just don't often make the news. Hell, I am sure no person had a perfect 2018 -- everyone encounters peaks and valleys -- so hopefully you had more of the former than the latter.

Media is a great way to distract us from the daily pitfalls of life. Things such as apps, games, music, and movies can help us to forget our troubles. The Google Play Store offers all these things and more, and today, Google reveals the best of 2018.

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Every year, Shutterstock customers across the world make billions of searches for images, footage, and music. Our data and creative teams analyze this search and download information to discover the biggest year-over-year increases. The information gathered, plus expert knowledge from our content, design, video, and music teams, forms the creative trends series which identifies and predicts the trends for the upcoming year.

This year, we selected a "trend to watch," a style we predicted would explode onto the design scene in more ways than one: Holographic Foil. The holographic trend has notes of the ‘80s, a dash of sci-fi, and a hint of nostalgia. Up 435 percent in searches, holographic’s chameleon palette of shimmering colors has been a trend to watch, even finding its way to the catwalk at Paris Fashion Week; Iridescent designs were showcased by Maison Margiela models walking down the runway in prismatic looks accompanied with iridescent lips.

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It’s time to wrap up all these 2018 predictions, so here are my final three in which Apple finds a new groove, IBM prepares for a leadership change, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gives up a dream.

Apple has long needed a new franchise. It’s been almost eight years since the iPad (Apple’s last new business) was introduced. Thanks to Donald Trump’s tax plan, Cupertino can probably stretch its stock market winning streak for another 2-3 years with cash repatriation, share buy-backs, dividend increases and cost reductions, but the company really needs another new $20+ billion business and it will take every one of those years to get a new one up to scale.

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There’s a new Marvel superhero series on Fox called The Gifted that this week inspired my son Fallon, age 11, to predict the first Alexa virus, coming soon to an Amazon Echo, Echo Dot or Echo Show cloud device near you. Or maybe it will be a Google Home virus. Fallon’s point is that such a contagion is coming and there probably isn’t much any of us -- including both Amazon and Google -- can do to stop it.

The Gifted has characters from Marvel’s X-Men universe. They are the usual mutants but the novel twist in this series is that some of these particular mutants are able to combine their powers with terrible effect. They just hold hands, get angry, and it is mayhem squared.

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Paul Saffo says that communication technologies historically take 30 years or more to find their true purpose. Just look at how the Internet today is different than it was back in 1988. I am beginning to think this idea applies also to new computing technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). We’re reading a lot lately about AI and I think 2018 is the year when AI becomes recognized for its much deeper purpose of asking questions, not just finding answers.

Some older readers may remember the AI bubble of the mid-1980s. Sand Hill Road venture capitalists invested (and lost) about $1 billion in AI startups that were generally touted as expert systems. An expert system attempted to computerize professional skills like reading mammograms or interpreting oil field seismic logs. Computers were cheaper than medical specialists or petroleum geologists, the startup founders reckoned, so replacing these professionals would not only save money, it would allow much broader application of their knowledge. Alas, it didn’t work for two reasons: 1) figuring-out how experts make decisions was way harder than the AI researchers expected, and; 2) even if you could fully explain the decision-making process it required a LOT more computing power than originally expected. Circa 1985 it probably was cheaper to hire a doctor than to run a program to replace one.

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I’m sorry this year’s predictions seem to this point to mainly have to do with policies rather than products, but I don’t get to make the future, just predict it, and in this case I’m predicting that immigration reform will have little actual effect on H-1B visa abuse.

For those of you who aren’t already asleep I’ll start with the Cliff Notes version of the H-1B issue, which I have written about ad nauseam as you can read here (notice there are three pages of columns, so dig deep). H-1B is a U.S. immigration program to allow 65,000 foreign workers into the USA each year for up to six years, which means that at any moment there are almost 400,000 of these folks working at the desk next to yours. Some people claim that H-1Bs take jobs better filled by U.S. citizens and some feel that H-1Bs are essential for the functioning of technology industries that would otherwise be devoid of needed talent. I am clearly on the side of the former folks who see H-1Bs as a scam intended to take jobs away from, well, me.

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2017 was a wild ride for cryptocurrencies and for Bitcoin in particular, rising in price at one point above $19,000 only to drop back to a bit over half of that number now. But which number is correct? If only the market can tell for sure -- and these numbers are coming straight from the market, remember -- what the heck does it all mean? It means Bitcoin isn’t a currency at all but traders are pretending that it is. 2018 will see investors finally figure this out.

Confusion abounds, so let’s cut through the crap with an analogy. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and a ton of others operate almost exactly like a market that uses only U.S. one dollar bills and doesn’t allow exchanging those bills… ever. If you need five dollars, that will be five one dollar bill, please. If you need less than a dollar then you and your counter-party have to agree how much of a one dollar bill you each own. And they aren’t just any one dollar bills: they are specific bills, each with its own unique serial number that can be checked against a U.S. Treasury database to make sure the money is real -- that it is actually worth a dollar.

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With 1.9 billion records stolen in the first six months, more than in the whole of 2016, 2017 proved a bumper year for cyber crime.

According to cyber security company Venafi, this trend is set to continue into 2018, with state-sponsored attacks to the fore.

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When I started this series of 2018 predictions I said the recently passed U.S. tax law was going to have a profound impact on upcoming events. Having had a chance to look closer at the issue I am even more convinced that this seismic financial event is, as I wrote above, a $591.8 billion taxpayer ripoff. This is not to say there aren’t some possible public benefits from the repatriation, but it’s fairly clear that the public loses more than it will ever gain.

In case you don’t follow these things, multinational U.S. companies have, since 2005, squirreled away about $2.5 TRILLION in profits overseas because U.S. tax law allowed those profits to go untaxed until they are returned to the USA. Understand that this $2.5 trillion is more than just the profit made on overseas business: many companies changed their ways of doing business to divert what would have been U.S. domestic profits, sending them overseas for parking to await a business-friendly U.S. Administration that would cut them a sweetheart deal to bring back all that moolah. The amount of U.S. corporate income tax that went unpaid during this 12 year period was 35 percent of $2.5 trillion or about $875 BILLION. That’s taxes of $73 billion annually for 12 years that went unpaid -- about five percent of the federal budget for those 12 years.

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About 20 years ago, when I started publishing a list of annual technology predictions, it just made sense to look back to see how I had done the year before. Alas, I made that decision without looking to see that nobody else in my line of work actually does that. But I was stuck and have found since that by being deliberately vague and putting a fair amount of thought into this stuff I’ve been able to keep my long-term stats at about 70 percent correct. We’ll shortly see if that trend continues, but first I want to discuss how this year is so different from all those others.

Nothing seems the same, does it? Maybe it’s President Trump. Maybe it’s just time for a revolution in tech and the economy, but this year feels unlike any of those others. I don’t know if it will make my predictions more accurate or less, but I have to tell you that I believe the context matters this year more than any other. I’ll get to that in a moment but first let’s see how badly I did the last time. You can read both of last year’s prediction columns here and here.

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