Technology Corner
It’s possible, even for the enthusiast, to get blasé and cynical about the tech world. As a general rule, the media coverage of technology and its developments is focussed on two areas: health and consumerism. And while the advancements in healthcare in the last decade are nothing short of magical, the rampant and irrepressible slew of smartphones, tablets and TVs, each only incrementally updated from its previous iteration, can make a jaded onlooker out of any of us.
“but when you do scratch beneath the surface of mass media coverage, even 2015 starts to look shiny and new.”
So what have we got coming this year? Let’s get the basics out of the way. Apple are going to release a new phone, so will Samsung, so will HTC. We’ll also see a range of new tablets, new TVs, better laptops and a wide release of Google Glass. And all of those things do have their place – indeed we’ll cover some of those in future editions of this very magazine – but what else is there? First, let’s start with something that’s not strictly new. Let’s look back at 2008 when the Large Hadron Collider was first switched on. Remember the Doomsday predictions, the worries over black holes, or even the next “Big Bang”? For four years those scientists in Switzerland have been smashing particles together without killing us all, and 2015 will be the year that the LHC hits top speed. That’s right, until now it’s only been running at half c capacity. Does this mean 2015 will see Doomsday? Almost certainly not, and bigger particle accelerators are being planned for 2028 and then 2035, when it’s hoped that we will learn even more about the birth of the universe.
If the opening to this month’s piece was a little downcast, please forgive me. See, in the course of research for this article, SBM was treated to predictions from industry experts which varied from “Apple will release a new iPad” (really?!) to “this year will be big in TV”. Maybe we’d been spoilt, but after the unrelenting optimism and deep research of Jim Mellon and Al Chalabi’s new book, Fast Forward, it was with a heavy heart that we read the “exclusive” news that HTC would be updating their flagship phone. However, in the spirit of that fantastic book, the research didn’t stop there. Of course, it’s beyond the remit of this feature to look as far into the future as Mellon and Chalabi do, but when you do scratch beneath the surface of mass media coverage, even 2015 starts to look shiny and new.
80 | www.financial-spread-betting.com | January 2015