________________________
________________________
The technology we use is changing almost constantly these days. For online businesses, there is both the challenge of staying up to date but also the opportunity to harness something new. With that in mind, here are some of the most interesting upcoming tech releases that could change digital industries in a big way.
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, has been the backbone of the web since the early 90s and is linked to the ‘inventor’ of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It is the basic code behind every website in the world from Wikipedia to online shops to online casinos. In the last case, it has been capable of handling everything on these sites including graphics, design, and payment platforms. It has also been capable of running all the slot and roulette games as of HTML5, the current version at the moment.
Put simply, it is a fundamental building block of online businesses and we’re now on the verge of a new version in HTML6. Anticipated new features to this version include automatically adaptive images, which would massively save time compared to optimising manually, plus higher native security levels and a lot more offline functionality. Expect to see this rolling out in the next few years.
While it is most commonly linked to things like NFTs and cryptocurrency in the public consciousness, the core parts of blockchain technology will serve digital businesses in a completely different way. It is fundamentally a log of transactions made online that is all but bulletproof against tampering or attacks. The result is a perfect record that can be used to track every single step in any kind of business.
For instance, if there’s a business dealing in coffee that sources raw materials from multiple different farms in different regions, traditional records may lump sources together or fail to log certain steps before delivery. It means that any issue with the materials can take weeks to track down, but with a blockchain in place, any issues can be identified almost immediately.
As hard as it may be to believe, there are currently thousands of active languages spoken in the world right now. In some countries alone you can easily find dozens of languages spoken without even crossing the border, and that has meant that translation services have come at a premium. It has created dilemmas for online businesses; do you save money and translate only to the dominant language and risk missing customers, or do you spend extra to cover everyone?
In this case, AI translation systems are set to make a big difference. While they are currently still rough around the edges and overall inferior to human translators, they are rapidly learning. According to some predictions, we may reach the point where translation software can be baked directly into a site, automatically generating translations based on the user’s settings.
The full list of new tech on the horizon feels endless but we’re confident that each item above is set to have a bigger impact than many people expect!
