Blockchain has come a long way from Bitcoin. The technology is already in widespread use in finance, secure voting, authenticating academic credentials, and more. In the coming year, healthcare, manufacturing, supply chain logistics, and government services are among the sectors most likely to embrace blockchain technology.
Blockchain distributes digital information. The information resides on millions of nodes, in shared and reconciled databases. The fact that it's not controlled by any single authority and has no single point of failure makes it very robust, transparent, and incorruptible. It also solves the threat of a middleman manipulating the data. Such inherent strengths account for blockchain's soaring popularity and explain why it is likely to emerge as a mainstream technology in the immediate future.
OpenStack is essentially a cloud operating system that offers admins the ability to provision and control huge compute, storage, and networking resources through an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA), an aggregation of technologies, design concepts, and web APIs, offer an app-like experience in the mobile browser.
Traditional websites suffer from many inherent shortcomings. Apps, although offering a more personal and focused engagement than websites, place a huge demand on resources, including needing to be downloaded upfront. PWA delivers the best of both worlds. It delivers an app-like experience to users while being accessible on browsers, indexable on search engines, and responsive to fit any form factor. Like an app, a PWA updates itself to always display the latest real-time information, and, like a website, it is delivered in an ultra-safe HTTPS model. It runs in a standard container and is accessible to anyone who types in the URL, without having to install anything.
Most programming languages come with safety vs. control tradeoffs. Rust is an exception. The language co-opts extensive compile-time checking to offer 100% control without compromising safety. The last Pwn2Own competition threw up many serious vulnerabilities in Firefox on account of its underlying C++ language. If Firefox had been written in Rust, many of those errors would have manifested as compile-time bugs and resolved before the product rollout stage.
Cognitive technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, are increasingly used to reduce complexity and personalize experiences across multiple sectors. One case in point is gamification apps in the financial sector, which offer investors critical investment insights and reduce the complexities of investment models. Digital trust platforms reduce the identity-verification process for financial institutions by about 80%, improving compliance and reducing chances of fraud.
