Articles about Predictions

Six hundred and seventy-five thousand Americans died of the Spanish Flu in 1918, back when the total population of the United States was 103 million. In the current pandemic, American deaths are already above 540,000 (remember when a projection of 160,000 deaths seemed crazy?) but our population is now 331 million. While COVID-19 will undoubtedly kill more Americans than did the Spanish flu, the percentage of the population dying will be much lower than the 0.65 percent death rate in 1918. But the numbers are close enough that one might guess the long-term impact of this pandemic could be very similar to that one.

I don’t think it will be. I think this pandemic will have greater long-term effects than that of 1918 and the reason comes down mainly to technology.

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To this point in my tech predictions for 2021 I have ignored COVID-19, which we all do at our peril. Now that we know the pandemic is real, that it won’t just disappear, and that half a million people in the US (so far) are dead from it, what are predictable longer-term impacts? I see plenty changing in how we work, how we use social media, and how education has generally failed. Coming out the other side of this mess several aspects of life will be different, but school probably won’t be one of those.

I have an unusual perspective on these times since I am a parent of three sons (19, 16, and 14), I have a background in IT, yet my first job out of college 48 years ago was teaching high school biology, chemistry, physics, and vocational agriculture. Oh, and I home-schooled two of my kids for two years ending about 18 months before the pandemic began.

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Back on January 23, the New York Times published an Op-Ed piece by Kate Murphy titled America Has a GPS Problem, citing fear at the highest levels of government and industry that international bad actors might bring down the Global Positioning System satellite network, running your Tesla into a guardrail in the process. It’s just the sort of story you’d expect to read here, rather than in the Times, but what the heck. And the story is absolutely correct: we are all in danger. But Ms. Murphy, beyond wringing her hands, doesn’t say how the crisis will be averted or who will do the averting. I predict that Apple will fix the problem and save the day and they’ll probably do it this year.

The military and intelligence communities have long been worried that China or Russia could shoot down some or all of the 24 GPS satellites, blinding our strategic weapons in the process. It’s literal shooting-down, too, since the anti-satellite weapons demonstrated so far have been kinetic -- dumb rocks smashed into our satellites at incredible speed, knocking them from the sky and requiring incredible precision. So far only China and Russia have this offensive capability. But Ms. Murphy and the Times expand the population of bad guys beyond China and Russia to include enemies jamming, spoofing, or otherwise hacking GPS, which could be anyone -- Iran, North Korea, even groups of private individuals.

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Remember Bufferbloat? It’s a subject I was among the first to write about a decade ago, starting with a prediction column just like this one in 2011. The problem at the time was that every video or audio application -- the big bandwidth consumers -- was trying to solve performance issues through pre-buffering. You’d launch Netflix (just one example -- they all did it) and it would pause for a few seconds filling a huge buffer intended to smooth-out any playing glitches. Except performance didn’t improve and in fact got worse because of buffers buffering buffers. These extra buffers were defeating TCP/IP’s own flow control mechanisms, often leading to total failure of the connection. Jim Gettys from Bell Labs called it Bufferbloat, then Jim and Dave Taht spent the next three years or so fixing the problem, or so they thought.

Well Bufferbloat is back.

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Contain your excitement; 5G is coming (again). However, wasn’t it actually launched over two years ago? 

For those not familiar with the nuances of 5G technology, 5GC (core or standalone) takes 5G deployment to the next level and replaces the 4G packet core with a new, cloud-native core using containers and following 3GPP specifications (release 15). This is somewhat separate from the market-by-market launch that most operators publicize, and the activity is less visible to the casual subscriber. Below, I have predicted some of the key 5GC deployment and adoption trends for 2021. 

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Today is my birthday. Thirty-five years ago today I was drinking coffee in my Palo Alto kitchen when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on TV. Thirty years ago today my father fell over, instantly dead of a heart attack while walking between gates in the American Airlines terminal at DFW. I was expecting a call, just not that one. Life is full of surprises and some of them aren’t good, as hedge funds are learning this week while their fortunes are determined by millennial traders in shares of GameStop, the venerable video game retailer. This is all part of the new normal.

Day Trading of stocks and options was a big deal during the dot-com era 25 years ago. "Traders" intent on closing-out their positions at the end of each day would hype this stock or that on Internet discussion boards, counting on artificial volatility and good timing to both buy and sell (or sell and buy) before the other guy -- one trader against the world. That’s NOT what is happening here with GameStop, AMC, Bed Bath & Beyond, Blackberry, etc. This is coordinated action of thousands of traders toward a specific and guaranteed profitable end.

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If 2020 was a Trump- and Covid-inspired year of social media excess, 2021 can’t help but see some reversion. But it’s more than that, with big Internet companies coming under greater regulatory scrutiny worldwide, especially Facebook and Google. This year is going to be a tough one for Mark Zuckerberg, especially. And while I don’t expect Zuckerberg to abandon his CEO job this year, he eventually will, simply because it isn’t as much fun as it used to be and there will come a point (maybe in 2022) when leaving the top job will help Facebook’s stock.

At this moment there’s reportedly a bot operating on Telegram selling for $20 or less the personal info including phone numbers of 500 million individual Facebook users. What’s the logical corporate response to a gambit like that? Nobody knows because nobody has been in Facebook’s particular position before.

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Despite an inarguably terrible year and many concerning events happening around the world -- pandemic notwithstanding -- technology is still advancing at breakneck speeds. That looks to continue well into the coming year, with many fascinating and emergent solutions bubbling to the surface.

Here are 10 emerging technologies everyone should be on the lookout for in 2021:

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This is when I typically generate a list of technology predictions for the coming year. The challenge this year isn’t coming up with predictions, it’s finding a moment of calm to share them when people are most likely to read. With a pandemic rolling along and the nation in political and economic crises to boot, such a moment of clarity isn’t likely to ever arrive, so I’ve decided just to write the damned columns and see what happens.

This is the column in which I’ll review my predictions from 2020 to see how I did and whether it is even worth your while to read further. Having done this for over 20 years, historically I’m correct abut 70 percent of the time, but this year could be a disappointment given that I’m pretty sure I didn’t predict 390,000 deaths and an economy in free-fall. We’ll just have to see whether I was vague enough to get a couple right.

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After an extraordinary year, businesses around the world are anxious to embrace 2021 as a year of renewed focus and a return to normalcy. But businesses must continue to focus on best practices and investments that will enable them to navigate the path ahead.

Much uncertainty remains in the coming year as the impacts of the global pandemic linger. Many of the workplace changes we adopted in 2020 will, by necessity, continue this year.

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Nothing could have prepared us for 2020 -- a year that demanded a swift and dramatic restructure of corporate operations in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Remote workforces were created overnight, even within industries who never had the experience of managing effective, remote working teams. With limited time and resources to prepare and support home working employees, a makeshift remote setup was thrust upon us. This, consequently, created an opportunity for massive cyber security breaches and a stream of cyber attacks, which can have a devastating impact on businesses when the cost of a data breach averaged between $184k and $715k for a medium-sized business in 2019. 2020 was an opportunistic year for cyber criminals, who took advantage of a time of uncertainty. In the UK, businesses experienced a 31 percent increase in cyber crime during the height of the pandemic, with phishing emails up by nearly 700 percent, preying on what should be a company’s greatest cyber defense asset; their employees. 

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The year 2020 was challenging to say the least. Between the pandemic, shutdowns, wildfires and other natural disasters, most of us will look forward to a new beginning in 2021. However, the pandemic response in 2020 will have a lasting impact on how and where consumers and businesses will use networks services, how service providers will build out their networks, and where they will invest in additional capacity.   

On that basis, here are a few predictions for 2021 for service providers: 

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We've already looked at the possible cybercrime landscape for 2021, but what about the other side of the coin? How are businesses going to set about ensuring they are properly protected next year?

Josh Bregman, COO of CyGlass thinks security needs to put people first, "2020 has been incredibly stressful. Organizations should therefore look to put people first in 2021. Cybersecurity teams are especially stressed. They've been tasked with securing a changing environment where more people than ever before are working remotely. They've also faced new threats as cyber criminals have looked to take advantage of the pandemic: whether through phishing attacks or exploiting weaknesses in corporate infrastructure. Being proactive, encouraging good cyber hygiene and executing a well thought out cyber program will go a long way towards promoting a peaceful and productive 2021, not least because it will build resiliency."

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The switch to remote working and the surge in online shopping during 2020 has seen a greater focus on the experience that software provides.

There have of course been other pressures on developers too, but what can we expect to happen in the next year?

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2020 has seen cybercriminals step up their efforts to exploit the surge of people working from home, as well as seeking to exploit news and information about the pandemic.

This is a notoriously difficult area to predict, but what do experts think we’ll see happening in 2021?

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