Happy Friday! For today’s Fun Friday post I’m going to focus on what I feel are the three of the best tech trends to to keep an eye on that I believe will have significant impact within the next five years.
3D Printing
3D printing is a nascent technology whereby a printer is used to create 3 dimensional objects. The 3D printing industry has largely developed in the industrial and medical fields. In industry, manufacturing components and parts are being printed from templates. In medicine, cell lines and tissue are being printed with the hope of one day printing organs for on-demand transplant.
NASA has commissioned the construction of a 3d printer that prints food in order to feed astronauts on long space missions. 3d food printers have the potential to drastically reduce world hunger by creating food stuffs from sustainable protein, fat, and carbohydrate sources at a significantly reduced cost.
3D printing has recently started to hit the consumer market. At home 3D printers, such as the ones for sale on Cubify.com, are producing toys, belts, plates, and other plastic or resin based items from templates. Currently a hobbyist activity, 3D at home printing will could become a mainstay home appliance. Imagine having a dinner party where the chairs, table, plates, and meal where all printed for the event. Umbrellas could be printed on demand for rainy weather, the latest fashion downloaded from your favorite designer and worn the next day.
Boutique Travel
In traditional advertising media, the travel industry spend was largely dominated by high budget hotel chains with enough market penetrance to recoup on advertising spend. Boutique hotels or vacation rental property owners were limited to small, targeted marketing opportunities or word-of-mouth campaigns.
While some travelers prefer chain hotels when traveling, due to quality standards and reward programs, boutique hotels and rental properties have been consistently popular alternatives due to possible cheaper price, better or custom amenities, and locations where a chain hotel property would be unfeasible. A growing set of platforms using geo-search, such as EasyToBook and HomeAway.com, have sprung up which allow boutique hotels and rentals the ability to list their property and rates for a national and international audience. This trend will likely continue, causing a marketing share shift toward boutique venues in travel. This form of advertising also opens up the possibility vacation destinations that would otherwise not have attracted tourists going viral and becoming the new ‘it’ travel places.
Smart Clothing/Wearable Computing
Imagine a world where your glasses or contact lens give you news feed updates and search results on whatever you are looking at. Spikes of adrenaline, pain, or physical stress will be detected by fibers in your clothing. If you have a medical crisis, an ambulance will be automatically dispatched to your location. This future becomes more real every day.
The medical field has long eyed the prize of wearable monitoring devices that can measure health and fitness levels as a form of preventative care. In the consumer market, Under Armour has designed a smart shirt to monitor heart rate and G-force in order to help athletes train and protect them from strain and concussion. Google glasses is the latest buzz in smart clothing. With Microsoft and Apple now announcing plans to make their own version of glasses, one can speculate that the era of wearable computing on the common market may be just around the corner.
Fun Friday Predictions
Being a fun Friday, I had a few other predictive trends that may not be as world changing as the trends presented earlier in this article, but which will most certainly come to pass.
- The Cubs will win another world series. Eventually… statistically… it has to happen at some point.
- Later this year, the Chicago weather will go from hot-to-cold within 48 hours, signaling Chicago’s ever so abrupt end of summer and beginning of winter
- Brian Littleton will be photographed in a mascot costume at some point in this year.
- Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2013 will be even bigger 2012!
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