Around this time of year, we love reading all the “best of” and “worst of” lists recounting the past 12 months, along with the predictions of what’s to come. This week we stumbled on a good piece at Smartplanet.com highlighting “10 game-changing business innovations for 2012.”
The First 3D Printer Manufactured Car
While all 10 of the technologies listed bear watching, we think the following four are particularly interesting and, for the most part, especially relevant to our IT audience.
Cloud Computing Accelerates
As the Smartplanet post points out:
Thanks to the availability of powerful and low-cost on-demand technologies, innovators now have access to computing and information resources unheard of even a few years ago. There was a time when launching a serious startup required serious capital for hiring talent, marketing and promotion, office space, and for technology to make it all happen. Thanks to cloud computing and social networking resources, it now costs virtually pennies to secure and get the infrastructure needed up and running to get a new venture off the ground.
At the same time, cloud technologies provide a means for IT to become far more agile, with the ability to quickly spin up new compute resources to meet business demands – without breaking the bank. As you know, we are all over the cloud trend (read more of our thinking on Cloud on this blog), and we feel it is just going to accelerate and become more meaningful in 2012.
The New Delivery Channel: Smartphones
“Smartphones will continue disrupting just about everything that moves,” Smartplanet says, calling the phones a new delivery channel for data and services to consumers and partners. We love this paragraph, as it puts the smartphone phenomena (as it relates to the broader economy) in sharp focus.
The rise of the smartphone is also disrupting an unheard-of number of product markets. Things now disrupted by smartphones include cameras, portable music players, video games, GPS devices, PCs, watches, remote controls, alarm clocks, levels and other measurement tools, thermometers, radios, microscopes, calendars, advertising, and, oh, yeah — cellphones and landline telephones.
Good point on landline phones. More than a quarter of American homes have deserted their landlines, according to a study from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a year ago – you have to figure the number is higher now. And it’s becoming easier to do it, with home phones such as one from Panasonic that connect via Bluetooth to your cell. Once you arrive home and the Bluetooth connection is made, you can use the home handset to make or receive calls from your cell phone; no more worrying about keeping it within reach and charged. If you’re arriving home while talking on the cell, you can even pick up the home handset and continue talking. Pretty cool. With technology like that, you have to ask, do you really need a landline?
3D Printers May Bring Back Manufacturing
3D printers are even cooler than cell phones that talk to home phones. As the name suggests, the “printers” produce tangible, 3 dimensional objects of various sorts – everything from chess pieces to prosthetic limbs, according to this piece in Smartplanet. The technology promises to make possible “desktop manufacturing.” As Smartplanet says:
If 3D printing takes hold, mass production within the US could be far cheaper than producing and shipping products from overseas.
The 3D Printing space is poised to make a dramatic impact on multiple industries and not just in the rapid prototyping space where it has been playing for years. 2011 saw the first fully functional car produced entirely with 3D printers, and the toy industry is going to see a dramatic shakeup with this low cost, dynamic technology
Just Can’t Get Good Help These Days
The problem many organizations face is finding enough talented people to help them make the most out of all these technologies and drive growth. According to Smartplanet:
A survey of 1,201 CEOs by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), finds business leaders are confident about their growth prospects in 2012, but are not confident they will be able to find enough talented employees to carry that growth forward. As economic worries recede to the back burner, new priorities now occupy the business leaders’ agendas: driving innovation, and finding the right talent to drive that innovation.
If your company is having trouble finding enough IT expertise, let Carousel help. We’re excited about the prospects for 2012 and want to help you make the best of it.
