…continued from Top Technology Trends for 2014 (trends 1-4)
#5: The end of Windows XP
With support for windows XP expiring after 8 April, it could be interesting to see how many companies, who still revere and use the product, will be left unprepared for its demise, and may therefore be taken by surprise and left high and dry. A recent sojourn into XP following an unexpected drive failure for a friend of mine left her very frustrated when it came to using the back-up machine that was XP based and so in effect, the support had already gone.
#6: 4K TV Technology
Moving into consumer products, one of the biggest trends that we’re likely to see according to most pundits, is a large increase in the rollout of 4K or Ultra HD TVs
. 4K TVs come with a resolution of 4196 x 2160 pixels. It’s the 4196 pixels (which is the horizontal measurement) that 4K refers to.
The new Ultra HD is the latest release since the 1080p, a number which relates to the fact that it has 1080 pixels on the vertical measurement. To the untrained, this might not sound like a huge difference, but when you multiply out the total number of pixels that both variants will display, the 4K images nearly 8.3 million pixels, which is 4 times more than a 1080p TV with the same screen size. More pixels mean a clearer resolution.
Despite that fact that there is not much being done in terms of producing new films with 4K technology right now, falling prices are expected to ramp up demand as buyers invest in Ultra HD in anticipation of what is to come film and program-wise in the near future.
#7: Cloud based DVR services
Although cloud based DVR services are already in existence via USA’s Cablevision, it is being predicted that other service providers will launch competitive services in 2014, including some 3rd party hosting too. Despite that fact that digital recordings are very memory consumptive, the explosion of cloud technology and service providers are set to make this a more competitive marketplace.
The architecture of a standardized policy, once agreed, will revolutionize the ability of cloud based services to stream products from different service providers. Once this happens it will open the floodgates to more and more people being able to record anything they want and store it on a cloud based DVR, for streaming whenever and wherever they wish.
Cloud itself is expected to take off in the consumer sector in 2014, following a slow start. This is expected to manifest itself as consumer storage solutions for the most part, as the corporate sector moves more towards IaaS, now that SaaS has firmly entrenched in the enterprise.
#8: Mobile & Tablets
Given that the majority of the major research houses such as Gartner and Forrester put mobile at the top of their own trends list, we thought it worth a mention. Mobile and tablets will continue to make an impact, but more with regard to MDM (mobile device management) solutions and apps, rather than devices themselves.
Image Credits
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By Original work: Microsoft This work: FleetCommand (Original work: Windows XP This work: Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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By ??? [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
William Thompson
William Thompson is the Marketing Manager at Power Admin, a server monitoring software business in the Kansas City area. You can find him on Google+ and Twitter. William has been a professional in website design, digital marketing and 3D/graphic design for over 20 years.