This article is contributed by Jason Dirkham
If there is something that you need to be paying attention to at all times in your business, it is how well it is keeping up with what is going on around it in the modern world. There are so many constant advances that you need to be aware of if you want to stay on top that it is hard to make sure you are doing so at all times – but that is necessary for a truly well run and managed business, and it’s something to always consider. There might well be a number of elements of the modern world which you don’t want to have anything to do with, or which are not going to be useful for your business, but nonetheless, you need to at least be aware of them – even if it’s only a means of knowing what your rivals are up to. In this post, we will look at a number of current technologies which you need to be aware of or have in your radar to some degree, so that you can remain competitive at all times.
Although not a new technology, smartphone apps are hugely important and very popular in many kinds of business now – and they are growing in popularity all the time as well. There are so many ways that you can use and utilize them in your business, and it might be surprising to discover some of thee. You can build an app which enables your customers to use the service you provide for them easier and on the go, such as in the case of banking apps or shopping apps. Or it might be a portal for communicating with you which is free for them to use, in essence a distilled kind of email. Whatever it is, it’s worth considering, and if nothing else it’s useful to just have your business name on their phone as a form of marketing which they are going to see every day. If you do decide to develop an app for your business, make sure that you consult resources such as globalapptesting.com to really ensure that you are doing everything right and that you produce the best app to use.
2017 was really the year of boosting blockchains, but they are now starting to be used in wider and wider ways as well. It could b e very good idea to get on to this bandwagon in your business, but before we discuss why, you might well need us to discuss the what. Understanding blockchains is hard, but essential to ensuring that you can utilize them in future. Essentially a blockchain is just a distributed public ledger made of blocks of data, each of which contains a cryptographic hash of the one before it and the public key of the successive one. Because of this chain effect, changing one block of data would change all, which would require a great deal of time to do (as each hash is the result of complex mathematics), and would also mean the consent of the majority of the nodes. You therefore have a way for data to be shared without ever being held in one place and therefore being much less vulnerable to attacks, theft and hacking than traditional forms of data. Clearly, there are many potential uses for this in many kinds of business, and you can see why it might be a powerful technology to get behind while it is still fairly young. See https://www.techradar.com/news/understanding-the-power-of-blockchain-infused-with-ai for more.
Although it might still be a long way off that we will have actual robots walking amongst us in everyday life, these things are already possible, and are already being produced in the world, and it might be a good idea to understand it and get behind it at your earliest convenience. The more that you understand AI and can think of ways to make use of it in your business, the more likely it is that you will be able to keep your business up to date with the modern world, so this is something that you should absolutely think about. Carry out your own research into AI, and try to see if there is anything that you could do to make proper use of it. You might surprise yourself with some of the things that you can think of as a means of using this fascinating technology.
This article is contributed by Jason Dirkham
