The Next Billion

I attended Quartz’s Next Billion Conference and came away from it with the following summary of trends that we could take advantage of within the next year:

Disintermediation and job losses will leave gaps in the fulfillment cycles that will create opportunities for software as a service providers to layer on actual services to their products.

Digital signage provides the opportunity to deploy sensors wherever displays are installed and these displays can serve as collection, collation and presentation vehicles for the data collected.

Very shortly every person on this planet will have a smartphone and bandwidth will not be a barrier. 5G and ubiquitous satellite connectivity will solve it.

Warehousing of data and the interpretation of it with machine learning is entering the commodity phase. Small companies like us, don’t need to build, we simply “use” for pennies per month. We can stand on the backs of the giants to create value adds on to the products that we already have using big data and the interpretation of that data with machine learning (AI).

Computing is commoditized. Cost of digital signage deployment is not now a barrier, and it will continue to become even less so. There is opportunity to create media players and displays that are first sensors, and second media players, for no noticeable incremental computing cost.

Learning design is not usually included within user experience design and it typically targets the layers between the creators and consumers of the creation. With disintermediation there is an opportunity to embed learning design into applications to replace the disintermediated layer in between in such a way that the training is predictive, validated and gamified, all the while being continuously deployed and A/B tested while calculating the ROI on the services in almost real time. Something the learning design industry has never really done before. Digital signage is complicated and it has many moving parts, by embedding learning design we can greatly increase the success rates of our users.

Emerging markets are huge. There is no need to go up vertically in markets when software as a service can easily go horizontally geographically to attain growth for higher return on investment.