For Blockchain and B2B, real transaction volumes will start to flo

Block chain in the B2B world has been all hype with no significant transaction volume, but there are signs that this will change in 2019. To deal with cash flow, financing, settlements, and other ways of sharing value at scale, you need to get past the current hour-by-hour volatility and ensure a stable medium of exchange. The emergence of mature stable coin players such as True USD (backed by IBM and others), USD coin (backed by Goldman Sachs and IDG) and DAI stable coin (an algorithmic stable coin) signals the start of a transition from a floating bubble crypto-economy to an internet of value tethered to the established economy. 

Many industry leaders have already achieved significant business benefits, including greater transparency, enhanced security, improved traceability, increased efficiency and speed of transactions, and reduced costs. Competitive advantages like transaction processing speed, convenience, and access will no longer be enough to retain customers, and B2B payments players will have to start evaluating more service driven benchmarks such as a frictionless user experience and interface that is both convenient and accessible.

Intuitive and responsive platforms that can be highly customized will become the frontrunners in this crowded space in the coming years. In addition, after years of talk and discussions, it seems that Ethereum and Bitcoin are implementing architectural changes to address the scalability challenges that have been considered a barrier to widespread adoption. For B2B blockchain use, 2019 could be a significant year.

Good User Interface in Anyways

A user interface is the vehicle that takes you places. Those places are the different functions of the software application or website. A good interface should allow you to perform those functions faster and with less effort. Simply put, a good User Interface is important because it can turn potential visitors to buyers as it facilitates interactions between the user and your website or web application.  A good User Interface Design presents a seamless blend of visual design, interaction design, and information architecture: Visual Design.

Most hardware devices also include a user interface, though it is typically not as complex as a software interface. A common example of a hardware device with a user interface is a remote control. Other devices, such as digital cameras, audio mixing consoles, and stereo systems also have a user interface. Touchscreen smartphones entered the market shortly after that, introducing a range of other tactile command prompts like the poke (to simulate pressing a button), the pinch (to zoom in and out), the press, hold and drag.

These tactile commands gained traction quickly among the public for a number of reasons: They were new. All the cool (famous) kids were doing it. Touchscreen technology became cheap and mainstream. But most of all, the movements felt intuitive, natural. Simply put, User Interface Design is important because it can make or break your customer base. It creates fewer problems, increases user involvement, perfects functionality and creates a strong link between your customers and your website.

The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider

The High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) is a major upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that is completed by 2026. This new design boosts the machine's luminosity by a factor of between five and seven, allowing 10 times more data to be accumulated, providing a better chance to see rare processes and improving statistically marginal measurements.

Luminosity is a way of measuring the performance of an accelerator: it is proportional to the number of collisions that occur in a given amount of time. The HL-LHC can perform detailed studies of the new particles observed at the LHC, such as the Higgs boson. It enables the observation of rare processes that were inaccessible at the previous sensitivity levels. More than 15 million Higgs bosons can be produced each year, for example, compared to the 1.2 million produced in 2011-2012.

The development of the HL-LHC depends on several technological innovations that are exceptionally challenging to researchers – such as cutting-edge Tesla superconducting magnets, very compact and ultra-precise superconducting cavities for beam rotation, and 300-metre-long high-power superconducting links with zero energy dissipation. Together, these upgrades help to advance and further refine the knowledge already gained from the Higgs boson and provide fresh insights into so-called "New Physics", a more fundamental and general theory than that of the Standard Model.

Self-learning software (SLS)

Building on the industry shift toward SaaS, a new trend in the software space is emerging that combines both SaaS and AI. Leading companies from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM have begun offering their AI infrastructure as a service to their clients. In other words, no longer is AI and machine learning accessible to only to software giants, now any company and developer can access online AI resources to build self-learning software (SLS).

At home, this could mean having an SLS system manage your future smart home, including tasks like pre-heating your home before you arrive or keeping track of groceries you need to buy. By the 2020s and into the 2030s, these SLS systems will play a vital role in the corporate, government, military, and consumer markets, gradually helping each improve their productivity and reduce waste of all kinds.

The only way the SaaS and SLS models work is if the Internet (or the infrastructure behind it) continues to grow and improve, alongside the computing and storage hardware that runs the ‘cloud' these SaaS/SLS systems operate on. The coming decade will see the next evolution, the next quantum leap in communication and interconnectivity, entirely intermediated by a range of future computer interfaces and it may just reshape what it means to be human.

Poking, pinching, and swiping at the air

As of 2018, smartphones have replaced standard mobile phones in much of the developed world. This means a large portion of the world is now familiar with the various tactile commands mentioned above. Through apps and games, smartphone users have learned a large variety of abstract skills to control the relative supercomputers sitting in their pockets.  It's these skills that will prepare consumers for the next wave of devices—devices that will allow us to more easily merge the digital world with our real-world environments. So let's take a look at some of the tools we'll use to navigate our future world.

Open-air gesture control as of 2018, we’re still in the micro-age of touch control. We still poke, pinch, and swipe our way through our mobile lives. But that touch control is slowly giving way to a form of open-air gesture control. For the gamers out there, your first interaction with this may have been playing overactive Nintendo Wii games or the Xbox Kinect games—both consoles use advanced motion-capture technology to match player movements with game avatars. 

Well, this tech isn't staying confined to video games and green screen filmmaking; it will soon enter the broader consumer electronics market. One striking example of what this might look like is a Google venture named Project Soli. Developers of this project use miniature radar to track the fine movements of your hand and fingers to simulate the poke, pinch, and swipe in open-air instead of against a screen. This is the kind of tech that will help make wearable easier to use, and thus more attractive to a wider audience.

Speaking to your virtual assistant

While we're slowly reimagining touch UI, a new and complementary form of UI is emerging that may feel even more intuitive to the average person: speech. Amazon made a cultural splash with the release of its artificially intelligent (AI) personal assistant system, Alexa, and the various voice-activated home assistant products it released alongside it. Google, the supposed leader in AI, rushed to follow suit with its own suite of home assistant products.

Whether you prefer Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, iPhone's Siri, or Windows Cortana, these services are designed to let you interface with your phone or smart device and access the knowledge bank of the web with simple verbal commands, telling these ‘virtual assistants' what you want. It’s an amazing feat of engineering. And even while it’s not quite perfect, the technology is improving quickly. When you combine this falling error rate with the massive innovations happening with microchips and cloud computing (outlined in the upcoming series chapters), we can expect virtual assistants to become pleasantly accurate by 2020.

Even better, the virtual assistants currently being engineered will not only understand your speech perfectly, but they will also understand the context behind the questions you ask; they will recognize the indirect signals given off by your tone of voice; they will even engage in long-form conversations with you, Her-style. Overall, voice recognition based virtual assistants will become the primary way we access the web for our day-to-day informational needs.

Haptic holograms

The holograms we’ve all seen in person or in the movies tend to be 2D or 3D projections of light that show objects or people hovering in the air. What these projections all have in common is that if you reached out to grab them, you would only get a handful of air. That won’t be the case by the mid-2020s. New technologies (see examples: one and two) are being developed to create holograms you can touch (or at least mimic the sensation of touch, i.e. haptics). Depending on the technique used, be it ultrasonic waves or plasma projection, haptic holograms will open up an entirely new industry of digital products that we can use in the real world.

Think about it, instead of a physical keyboard, you can have a holographic one that can give you the physical sensation of typing, wherever you’re standing in a room. This technology is what will mainstream the Minority Report open-air interface and possibly end the age of the traditional desktop.

Imagine this: Instead of carrying around a bulky laptop, you could one day carry a small square wafer (maybe the size of a thin external hard drive) that would project a touchable display screen and keyboard hologram. Taken one step further, imagine an office with only a desk and a chair, then with a simple voice command, an entire office projects itself around you—a holographic workstation, wall decorations, plants, etc. Shopping for furniture or decoration in the future may involve a visit to the app store along with a visit to Ikea.