The 7 Tech Trends from SXSW 2016

Every March, Austin Texas holds the South By Southwest - SXSW event, with an estimate of up to 30,000 attendees this year. A festival that comprises of not only tech, but also film and music enthusiasts. Over the course of 10 days you can witness entrepreneurs, marketers, programmers, scientists and others fly in from all over the world to soak up and exchange new ideas at this festival. 

I would like to share with you the 7 trends that resonated with me and I believe are the next tech trends:

1. Artificial Intelligence- Call it rather artificial smartness - the more the people use AI, the smarter it will get. AI surrounds us every day through a vast spectrum, from our Google searches and calculators to our navigations.However this shouldn’t be a troubling thought, as robots will be able to create new opportunities for humans. It is within our nature to fear that robots will one day take over our jobs. The ones however with a valid and substantial concern would be the assemblers or general laborers, where machines can offer more productivity at a cheaper rate. Consequently new industries, new technologies and jobs will be created where robots are unable to accomplish such skills. In the near future you will be hiring people depending on how well they work with AI and technology.

The main industries to have AI implemented in the near future are medicine, autonomous transport, marketing, machine-learnt personalization and search intent strategies.

2. Virtual Reality- The technology that supports and acts as an enabler for VR has dramatically improved and has become significantly cheaper. Kevin Kelly believes that VR will be as big as smartphones. A new term was then discussed: ‘MR’, Mixed Reality of VR and AR where the presence feels very real and it will have several user cases. We will be shifting from the Internet of information to the Internet of experiences. VR will be the most social in all social media.

3. Beneficence- The main disruption will come from the focus on transparency of companies towards their customers, rather than the focus on profit. The company’s business practices should be as open as possible with what its processes are and how a customer’s information is being used. 

4. Tracking- “If it does not happen in real time, it doesn’t happen at all.” Anything that can be tracked will be tracked. We have Uber tracking us, checking into locations is a form of tracking, getting tagged in pictures at places is yet another form of tracking. Think of it as “If I want to have personalized care, I need to be transparent with my information, and if I want generic care and information I can stay private.”

5. Software eating software-There is an abundance of software in established businesses but this software is based on old technology. New platforms can radically change delivery of products and service, run new software and enable new services to be developed and deployed far quicker than what we have previously seen.

6. Gifs-the new medium – If you’re having a hard time pronouncing gif…you’re not alone!  Short looping videos, aka “gifs” were established in 1987 by Steve Wilhite. Giphy CEO - Alex Chung showcased over 200 GIFs in his presentation at the SXSW conference. He expressed that although the format has been around since late 80’s, the ability to paste them into conversations has only become recent. The average GIF is 5 seconds and apparently as per Chung’s statement, is the average length between film cuts as well as the human attention span. Chung also announced the formation of Giphy Studios in LA, which will employ over 500 GIF artists.

7. IBM Watson-Watson is the real deal.  Watson is a technology platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data. It’s a new era of computing- cognitive computing.

Now if we were to look at it from the MENA perspective, from the hundreds of pitch decks that I had the opportunity to see, very few if any address VR, AI or distinctive software. This then places a question whether MENA does not express a necessity to develop these technologies for the market, or is the market not ready? Is it safe to say that the majority of innovation of the latest technologies’ is primarily adopted in the US and then duplicated into emerging markets? As we all know innovation does not necessarily mean to be the first one to come up with something new, but it could be a new way of customising tech to the market and then scaling the business as fast as possible, which in the end is what the MENA startups are doing. 

Overall the MENA startup ecosystem is developing at a very rapid pace with e-commerce, logistics, transportation, on-demand delivery and marketplaces leading the way and securing the majority of VC money. All of the above mentioned industries were in need of disruption and that’s why I believe all the startups operating in that space are solving real issues and needs for their customers on the market. 

In a nutshell, I end it with a quote from Max Levchin during his presentation: “Too many entrepreneurs aren’t thinking big enough – they’re often just refining or doing a new twist on an old model.”