Five Innovative Business Tech Solutions for AW 2013

Temporary social media sites

Lots of technology that’s good for business starts elsewhere – just look at the internet. That was originally designed to make light work of academic file transfer, before it got militarized and took over the universe.

The latest incarnation of online tech is almost a backwards step – but for businesses everywhere, it’s a very welcome one. Next year could very well see the advent of short term social media – sites where messages and status updates have a shelf life, and blow themselves up after a few days. Now that would save a few customer service departments from embarrassment…

Baxter the everyday robot

Baxter was invented by Rethink Robotics – a “blue collar” robot designed to make us understand more about how real people work. He’s cute, he’s bright, and he’s eerily hard to read: just like a person applying for a job with your firm, perhaps?

In all seriousness, behavioral experts reckon Baxter could show us a thing or two about the ways in which real people differ from the often oversimplified versions of them we read about in management manuals. He’s an industrial robot that actually assembles things on a production line: but he “thinks” and “feels” too. Creepy.

3D printing

We’ve been harping on about 3D printing for a while, and guess what? All that predicting just paid off. General Electric (which was incidentally the corporation Kurt Vonnegut used to write advertising copy for, before he launched his literary career) has just announced trials of aviation parts printed using a laser, rather than put together by machines.

Image Credits: www.stevelarkins.freeuk.com

If the parts work, we could be witnessing the end of manufacturing as we know it. Rather important for businesses involved in supply and demand as well as the actual manufacturing process, we think.

Super grids

Everyone knows it’s highly impractical to make DC power supplies work. DC is just too darn difficult to tame – it goes in a straight line (hence the name Direct Current) and that’s it. A new electronic innovation, the super grid, is set to make all that change – and if it works, we could see power prices plunging as businesses took the juice they needed from all over the world.

That’s right – in theory, a DC power grid could plumb a whole country into the solar generating capabilities of an African desert, with barely a loss of current. A light bulb moment, if ever there was one.

Integrated consumer management software

Consumer management software is becoming more important for businesses looking to bridge the gap between the number-crunching back end of a brand and the customer experience (which after all is the deciding factor on just how well those numbers crunch). Utilizing social media technologies, companies like IQ Retail are bringing the consumer experience to life for all departments in a retail environment.

Guest Author

About the Author:

The Author is a technology commentator, whose work has been published in some of the biggest print magazines on the planet. His articles are also used by the home pages of some of Britain’s best loved popular science and technology shows, while his blog posts are followed by hundreds of thousands of fans, and linked in millions of other blogs around the world.