2017 – The Year Of UX

UX Design has totally revolutionized the arena of businesses worldwide. It has enabled business owners to shift the focus away from selling goods or services, and rather focus on selling experiences to the customer. With its growing influence, the field of UX design too is expanding rapidly.

For those who want to know what is in store for 2017 and 2018, here is a quick compilation of the UX design trends that will continue to be popular in 2017 and 2018:

1 – Platform independent UX

As we increasingly move to cross-platform solutions, we are looking to deliver a richer cross-platform experience to users. Be it responsive design to cater to different screen sizes, or fading online-offline channels for generating e-commerce sales, the entire world is now looking to have a contextual yet platform-agnostic user experience to be delivered to customers.

2 – Better personalization

Gone are the days of batch mailing and hoping for great conversions. Today it is all about personalization of the marketing messages after considering the views and opinions of users. For this, marketers will need to reach far and wide and sift through multiple sources of unstructured and structured data like diverse social media feeds.

3 – Move away from general UX

The scope of specialization within the UX domain is fast gaining momentum. As a result, we will see domain-specific UX design expertise emerging for sectors like Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and within industry verticals like healthcare.

4 – Performance tracking beyond the interface

Traditional metrics like bounce rate, page visit, etc. will hold lesser prominence as performance indicators. Instead, there will be more emphasis on how well an experience was delivered to a customer.  Take the case of Snapchat Spectacles. The accessory is great for Snapchat users to interact with the platform without the use of a phone. This merging of an intuitive experience around the way a customer uses a product denotes the overall experience delivered to the Snapchat user.

5 – Merging UX into the employee workflow

A visionary management will seek to integrate UX as a management practice rather than an alienated concept in 2017 and 2018. In this, the management will employ UX and put themselves into the shoes of the employee. This will allow them to know what triggers, incentives, or limitations an employee faces at each stage of a user journey – right from suggesting an idea, to implementing it, and then seeing what happens when they fail. This UX integration will be a great motivation boost for employees to bring out their innovative steak into routine work. This trend of enabling UX design for employees is expected to gain traction in 2017 and 2018.

As evident, the forward- looking trends will play a greater role in helping businesses stay ahead competitively in a crowded digital landscape. Make sure to employ these trends into your next UX design project and enable the much needed competitive edge to your clients.

Machine Learning In Marketing

AI and its associated concepts of Machine Learning and NLP are fast affecting all major functions of a business. Digital marketing too can be counted as one of the sectors that have seen the massive influence of ML seep in.

The involvement of Machine Learning into sales and marketing activities was a natural progression considering the ease with which we can store humongous amount of data and process it in much faster time with lower cost tools and resources.

Here are some reasons why machine learning is transforming digital marketing:

1 – Better campaign customization

Traditional marketers from the era of print and TV ads were stuck on broadcasting their marketing message to one and all. However, since the digital customer is different, there is a need for one-to-one engagement for better outcomes. This calls for knowing on a deeper level the presences, needs, and behaviors of the potential customers to send targeted marketing message. Machine learning can help marketers to dig deeper and sense a pattern not readily visible. This way you can customize your marketing campaign for better efficacy.

2 – Dynamic ad display

The recent case of Jivox IQ machine learning algorithm (called as Neuron) providing a much more personalized brand messaging than a brand CPG manager is a case in point where the advantages of Machine Learning can be put to practical use. This way marketers can add a touch of ‘smart’ to their digital marketing programmes and ensure better quality conversions.

3 – Better segmentation

As evident, the ‘one size fits all’ phrase has never been more wrong as with the digital marketing ecosystem. Hence marketers have employed segmentation to show the relevant ads to the right set of people at the right time.  While you may create broad segments, in order to create micro segments for better targeting you would need the incredible data processing and insight generation prowess of machine learning.

What does this evolution means for marketers?

Does this mean that marketing automation combined with machine learning will throw the careers of marketers off-balance? Of course not. It will simply mean that marketers will be spared the labor of manually processing data, going through tons of reports, sensing patterns, uncovering insights, and aiding in management decision making.

All this will now be handled by the Machine Learning algorithm in a much more effective and swifter way. They can enhance their job responsibilities to creating media strategies, identifying effective marketing channels, and trying to understand customer behavior, and create more appealing marketing campaigns.

Machine Learning is clearly revolutionizing the world of programmatic marketing. It is affecting every function of marketing – right from what flavor of marketing campaign to be directed at which customer segment, to a new way of telling brand stories.

These reasons clearly outline why marketers can no longer shy away from embracing Machine Learning to give their digital marketing campaigns the much needed competitive edge. Adopt ML into your marketing mix and see how your outcomes will be radically different from those driven by traditional marketing approaches.

IBM Bluemix – A Mix Of Amazing Things

IBM Bluemix is a cloud platform as a Service based on open standards such as Cloudfoundry, Docker & Openstack. Bluemix comes in 3 deployment models – Public , Dedicated & Local. Bluemix Public is a multi-tenant where as Dedicated & Local are single tenant environments. Dedicated resides on IBMs Softlayer datacenter and Local resides behind your firewall. You have choice of deployment models which may not be available with Amazon or google.

Many enterprises have hybrid cloud requirements so Bluemix and other IBM Cloud offerings would be able to offer end to end solutions.

Watson based cognitive services, integrated DevOps , range of mobile backend services , database & analytics services makes IBM Bluemix a very rich platform. There are over 150+ services on the Bluemix platform.

Its very difficult to compare pricing as most of the public PaaS offerings are never easy to compare. For example, the cost of Bluemix Services are based on API calls (& storage) and there are no charges for data traffic. Many vendors may charge you for the data going out of their datacenter.

Recently IoT became has become a big tech to invest in. It is far easy to use BlueMix with Arduino or Raspberry Pi than anything else. Number of projects on Github, documentation, community help on Stackoverflow are enormous.

Advantages Of IBM Bluemix

1. Simplicity and speed: By focusing on the DevOps model, Bluemix can reduce the downtime of redeploying applications. Continuous delivery is one way this can be provided. The integrated environment provided by Bluemix allows developers to automatically deliver code without the hassle of building and debugging installation scripts. This reduces the time needed to manage code delivery and puts it in the hands of the testers and user community faster. The application can be deployed to multiple spaces which allow segregation of environments for development, testing and production. Automatically delivering code keeps developers focused on coding, not installation.

2. Agility: Bluemix allows developers to focus on delivering business value, rather than on maintaining the development environment, by scaling environments elastically based on business demand. Instead of manually deploying workloads, Bluemix will automatically redeploy workloads to other virtual machines (VMs) if there is an outage. To provide continuous availability, Bluemix abstracts the underlying architecture and keeps the manageability of services and applications at an easily understood level. Users are able to stop or start applications and define how much memory is associated with each application while Bluemix manages the rest.

3. Tools: With Bluemix, developers have the freedom to choose the development tools that work best for them. Developers don’t always want to work with the same tool sets and Bluemix provides several options, including the following:

• Command line: The Cloud Foundry (CF) command line provides integration for developers that prefer coding without an integrated development environment (IDE). This is also helpful for developing automation scripts with Bluemix. The CF application programming interfaces (APIs) can be integrated with multiple languages, frameworks and services.
• Eclipse: Since Eclipse is widely used by developers, they can continue to use the tools with which they are comfortable. The Cloud Foundry integration can be installed from the Eclipse Marketplace. This provides integration with Bluemix from the Eclipse client.
• Web IDE: Developers can work with the Web IDE directly in Bluemix. This allows modification of the application without any development environment installed on the developers’ laptops.

4. Source control: Bluemix also comes with integration to several source control management (SCM) systems. These include Git, GitHub and Jazz SCM. These environments can be configured to deliver application changes continuously. Open source Cloud Foundry applications can be forked and loaded to Bluemix. This provides a great place to start development of a new project.

5. Services marketplace: Services leverage APIs and software development kits (SDKs) that can quickly and easily be incorporated with Bluemix applications. Although IBM provides many services, Bluemix offers an open and flexible ecosystem which allows other companies to provide services that can be integrated into applications. Companies can be both providers and users of services. Two types of services are available:

The “Managed Service Offering” is not available in the beta, but will be available soon. Services in the marketplace can be at no charge or have a pay as you go (PAYG) pricing model. These services are available to all Bluemix customers.

“User Provided Services” can be added so that organizations can share services within their organization. This promotes more reuse and standardization of services within the company.

The Revolution Called AWS

Let’s switch back to the old ages.

Imagine you are heading overseas for your travel endeavors.

You have options to go anywhere but wherever you go, you need a place to stay.

Traditionally, you would have to build your own shelter upon arrival. You would cut wood for the walls, collect leaves to build shade, and segregate compartment for rooms as required. You would then build a kitchen, toilets, and bed as additional features in the house. At the finest day, your activities will be cooking, sleeping, drinking and showering.

Before you realize it, your holiday has finished and it’s time to come back to reality.

Soon, many great builders arise because of the huge demand for shelters. When you go for a holiday, you could pay to have someone build a house for you. However this is very expensive unless you decide to live at that new place for a long time. And keep in mind disasters do happen. Your floor sinks and your builder runs away with your money, the house is not what you ordered for and now you are in a complete dilemma in an unknown land.

Soon, a service known as ‘hotel’ is created. It provides shelter at locations of your liking, different pricing models based on number of guests, nights, and your preferred exclusivity. In addition, housekeeping service are there to ensure your tenacity in the hotel is at its best. So you always get clean bed sheets, bathroom with toiletries, and alcohol in the fridge for your disposal. Now here comes the hardest choice, pick one.

The great thing about this is, you do not need to know how to build a wall, start a fire, do cooking and so on. The amount you pay is proportional to your chosen preferences and exclusivity. Best of all, you focus on enjoying your holiday.

With this model, it is very obvious that your risks are mitigated, you spend only what is required, and are able to focus on your holiday. Honestly, hotel services are a great innovation!

AWS stack is the hotel service provider in the virtual world, only more powerful. They have expertise in developing and managing a large scale “physical” infrastructures, eg: EC2 (walls, shade, pipes), skillful in providing “features” platform services like VPC, Lambda, RDS, Auto-Scaling and Load Balancing (kitchen, toilet, bedroom, garden). You focus on your main business, they focus on theirs; there is no huge upfront cost; people can build fast, fail fast with minimal cost, and to top it all, it is an extremely powerful component for innovation to happen.

“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.”

Services Offered By AWS

Let us have a look at the various services offered by AWS and their brief descriptions.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Allows renting a server per hour (from small to huge.)

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Allows renting a couple of servers per hour as an hadoop cluster (to crunch a lot of data.)

Auto Scaling

Allows renting just enough servers as necessary (using more with a lot of work, using less with less work.)

Amazon CloudFront

Facilitates something like Akamai services (CDN, content distribution network) but at much cheaper rates.

Amazon SimpleDB

Allows noSQL for key-value store, store huge lists of items consisting of attributes that are quickly searchable.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

MySQL as a Service is one of the best services of AWS at this moment which kills redundant data and provides complete data superiority. 

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Allows infrastructure automation for java applications. works with tomcat, uses services like autoscaling. (turn-key solution, perfect for getting familiar with several AWS services.)

AWS CloudFormation

Allows infrastructure orchestration. write recipes for different services you want to use, and how, and CloudFormation will do the rest.

Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (FWS)

Have a shop? You can have Amazon manage your fulfillment. your suppliers ship to Amazon, and they ship to your customers.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

The one of a kind ‘first in, first out’ (in nature) messaging, perfect for jobs that should be processed asynchronously, more or less in order of arrival. think of video rendering or thumbnail generation.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Publish/subscribe mechanism, you create topics interested parties can subscribe to, sending a message to a topic, sends the message to all subscribers (like a mailing list, but for software systems.)

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

A service for sending mail. You have to earn your quota with a good behaviour. An interesting way of minimizing spam.

Amazon CloudWatch

Alows monitoring of many AWS assets, like instances (servers) and load balancers.

Amazon Route 53

DNS  facilities with amazing flexibility.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Allows extension of your private network with ‘some cloud’.

Elastic Load Balancing

Allows distributing traffic over one or more instances (servers).

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

The most revolutionary service in AWS. unlimited storage.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

The network disks for AWS, attaches a volume to an instance of your choice. You can’t share the disk between multiple instances.

AWS Import/Export

Allows moving large data in and out of S3.

Alexa Top Sites

Display top sites from Alexa.com in your application.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Lets you provision users within your AWS account and grant them access to different services and resources.

At GoodWorkLabs, we understand Amazon Web Services in & out. We understand the intricacies involved and the minute details that make the implementation process hassle free.

Contact us today for world class AWS services.

Apache Kafka – A Scalable Messaging System

Kafka is a distributed messaging system that allows to publish-subscribe messages in a data pipeline. It is a fast and highly scalable messaging system and is most commonly used as a central messaging system and cnetralizes communication between different and large data systems.

Image reference: http://kafka.apache.org/documentation.html

Advantages of using Apache Kafka

1.) Highly Scalable:

As mentioned earlier, one of the major advantages of using Kafka is that it is highly scalable. In times of any node failure, Kafka allows for quick and automatic recovery. In a world that now deals with high volumes of real-time data, this feature makes Kafka a hands down choice for data communication and integration.

2.) Reliable and Fault – Tolerant:

Kafka helps to replicate data and also supports multiple subscribers. Thus, in case of any failure there is no fear of data crash. Kafka is a fault-tolerant messaging system,  thus making it a highly reliable pub-sub messaging system among the many others

3.) High Performance:

Kafka is super efficient at handling real-time and complex data feeds with high throughput and lesser delays. The data and stored messages can run into terabytes, yet Kafka delivers high performance and the best companion for any enterprise Hadoop infrastructure.

Popular use case scenarios for Apcahe Kafka

1.) Messaging

A message broker is used for many reasons such as separating data lines from data producers, buffer and load unprocessed images etc and Kafka works as the best messaging broker to support all these activities. Also, with the credibility of being fault-tolerant and highly scalable, Kafka is a good solution for processing large scale messages.

2.) Website Activity Tracking

The main use of Kafka was to help to track and analyze real-time feeds of complete website activity such as page views, search, publish and subscribe and any activity that user performs on the site. All these activities are stored as separate topics in the data pipeline.

Kafka is also used to track high volumes of data activities as each page view can generate multiple messages.

3.) Log Aggregation

Kafka helps to collect distributed data files and puts them all together in a central place for processing. It de-clutters the extra details and only gives log and event data that has been recorded. Kafka is better suited from other log-centric systems because of greater performance and durability due to data replication.

4.) Stream Processing

Kafka helps to process data in multiple stages where the raw input data procured from Kafka topics is aggregated, enriched and transformed into new topics for further data mining.

Right from crawling content, to publishing it and further categorizing it under relevant topic and then attempting to recommend the content to users, Kafka does it all! The processing pipeline is quick and has low latency. It also provides real-time data graphs and hence is considered to be the most reliable stream processing tool.

Thus, Kafka is an amazing big data processing tool that most MNCs such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and many more use as their publish-subscribe messaging system and also to track data. Its durability and scalability give Kafka an edge over other big data solutions.

Building An AR App

The world of mobile technology has seen tremendous upgrades since the last few months and it would not be odd to say it’s changing week by week. As most of the businesses today are linked with technology, it’s prudent to stay up to date with it. Augmented reality is one such technology that is gaining tremendous traction and experts believe the technology is here to stay.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology which allows overlaying of digital data on top of real world items or objects. As AR integrates digital information with real-time live feeds, it has plenty of opportunities for businesses to engage with customers and improve their revenues. Fashion, Retail, and Travel were the three original trendsetters who initially started to use AR in their businesses. Now they are taking it a notch up and implementing it on a large scale.

Various types of Augmented Reality Apps

Marker based AR Apps

You must have identified, searched or installed something using QR code. If so, then that technology is enabled using Marker-based Augmented Reality. A device like Smartphone or any other device having a camera can be used to see virtual superimposed on real life objects. Animated and 3D images can also be seen with the help of AR technology.

Location-based AR Apps

The GPS of each mobile device helps to provide the accurate location of the user. Location based AR apps use this feature of a mobile app to send personalized deals and offers to a consumer.

Some things to know before developing an AR-based app

1) Imagery

A user-friendly Imagery should be the primary consideration while developing an AR-based consumer app. It should not be over the top but be realistic and easy on the eye.

2) Programming Languages

The programming languages of choice to create AR based apps for businesses are C# and C++. Also, some other skills which are essential for the successful creation of the app are practical knowledge of 3D modeling and Imaging.

3) Factors to consider

• Finalizing the use case and appropriately selecting the SDK’s suitable for the business requirements.
• Create the target objects and take use of the cloud recognition technology if required.
• SDK selection is of critical importance for the success of the project. The important and commonly used SDK features are Reliable Target Recognition, Multiple Targets Recognition, and Dynamic Target Recognition.

Prospects of Augmented Reality

There is tremendous scope for AR in the future in not just fashion and retail but across multiple industries of the business spectrum. Education is one such field where it can be a Game changer. Also it can be very useful while learning a new language as can be seen from some popular apps which have been downloaded million of times.

For a developer building a new app for AR can be highly rewarding but for a business’s it can bring multiple benefits in terms of revenue gains and enhanced user engagement.

The Favorite Search Engine

If you haven’t heard the name Google then you are definitely from another planet. Today Google is synonymous with the word “search”. Nowadays, plenty of people say “Google it” instead of “search it”. For a majority of the people, no other product or service is as important as Google. Founded in the year 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it has rapidly evolved from a simple search engine at Stanford to a modern technological giant.

Today it is working on multiple products and services including driverless cars and providing internet by floating balloons in the sky. On the cusp of its 19^th anniversary, we provide you some interesting milestones of Google.

1) July 2000

Google establishes its monopoly by becoming the world’s largest search engine with an indexes capacity of around a billion. It dethrones the current reigning champion of search engines “Yahoo” from the top spot.

2) March 2004

Most people think that Gmail was launched with Google, but the truth is it was launched six years later in March 2004. Initially the service was invitation only as the release was a beta one. The general public had to wait another 3 years to experience its advanced features. Currently Gmail is the leader in email space while the followers are lagging way far behind.

3) June 2005

The year 2005 was a major milestone for Google as it released multiple products and services that proved to be a blockbuster in the coming years. The Landmark year had seen the release of Google Maps. With the help of Google Maps you can visit any part of the planet and be sure that you won’t get lost. It has made travelling fun and an exhilarating experience. Other products also launched in the same year were Google Earth, Talk and Video. It also purchased technology company Urchin which helped to create Google Analytics.

4) July 2005

“Android” the word synonymous with Smartphones today, was purchased by Google. Based on the Linux operating system it was basically designed for the touch screen devices. Today the majority of Smartphones and tablets have android as their operating system.

5) October 2008

Today most of us think YouTube as a product created by Google. But the truth is, it was purchased by Google in the year 2008. From then to now the video sharing site has seen enormous growth. Today it’s the biggest platform for video sharing leaving its competitors way far behind.

6) March 2012

Although there were many innovations and launches of products between 2008 and 2012, the launch of the Google Play store was the biggest significant event by Google in 2012. The play store has millions of apps in various categories such as games, education, entertainment, healthcare etc. It is single handedly responsible for more than a billion download of apps and installs.

7) September 2016

The year 2016 saw the launch of the smart messaging app “Allo” by Google. People were waiting for a messaging app from Google and it delivered on it. The app provides customizable emojis, stickers and doodles to make the chat interesting.

If we would put the whole list of products and services launched and offered by Google it would take plenty of pages to fill, as the innovation factory at Google continues to create exciting products year after year.

Got any other interesting Google milestone worth knowing about? Then share your views and let us know.

Big Data in Business Today

With 2.5 quintillion of data produced every day, Big Data is gaining tremendous traction in analyzing this humongous volume of data from disparate structured and unstructured sources. It has proven to drive enhanced business performance with the help of real time analytics and enable smart decision making backed by strong data analysis.

Here are some examples of how our daily lives are changed for the better with the help of Big Data applications:

1 – Big Data in healthcare

As healthcare costs keeps rising, Big Data and related technologies are stepping in for more efficient patient care. It can reduce clinic visits with the help of vitals monitoring devices fitted on the patient. These monitors relay information such as heart rate or BP level, so that the physician can take real time action to prevent escalation of deteriorating health condition. This remote physician care can be administered even if the physician is located miles away from the patient.

2 – Big Data in e-commerce

An online shopper’s entire journey from visit to sale is tracked by Big Data to provide insightful information about buying behavior, preferences, and socio-economic demographic profiling. This helps in segmenting the shoppers into appropriate groups so that deeply customized and targeted marketing messages can be relayed to the appropriate group at the right time.

Big Data also tracks purchases made 3 to 4 months prior to a big ticket event like Black Friday or Big Billion Day Sale. This helps in a better understanding of what products need to be stocked and thus ensure proper inventory management.

3 – Big Data in Navigation Assistance

Our Maps services are enabled by GPS. This in turn is made more precise with the help of tons of reports fed into the systems so that the coordinates are made as accurate as possible. Big Data relies on diverse sources of information such as individual data from apps, incident reports, or road traffic reports for value added services like depicting the shortest route or the fastest route from the source to destination.

4 – Big Data in Entertainment

See recommendations in music based on your music playing preferences? This is nothing but Big Data at play. Apps like Pandora and Spotify have mastered the use of Big Data to generate personalized recommendations to music lovers based on their listening preferences. Spotify’s work in this sector is particularly interesting. It has acquired The Echo Nest to power up their music recommendation engine algorithm. The algorithm isn’t limited to simply analyzing and classifying music. It also uses web crawling to obtain information about the artist, the song, or the music label and includes this insight into the analytics engine.

To conclude

These real life use cases aptly denote the extent to which Big Data has entered our lives. From healthcare to education, there is no sector is left untouched by Big Data. As a smart business owner, it will be unwise to ignore these trends.

Understanding Smart Cities

Imagine a city that has a nearly zero carbon footprint. It uses analytics to determine the best routes for electric mass transit systems, reducing traffic and carbon dioxide emissions.

Crime is low due to gunshot detection systems and facial recognition systems.

Large data sets and advanced analytics are used to deter criminals and help law enforcement patrol areas statistically most likely to have problems particular times of day or after certain events.

Utilities such as water, waste removal and electricity are administered efficiently, maximizing the cities resources and reducing costs to end users. Wireless network access blankets the city and works seamlessly as you move about your day.

If you need a permit, request records or interact with the government, it happens electronically and instantly. No more waiting in line, no more dealing with flash, flash, hundred yard dash.

It sounds lovely I’m sure. The vision for “Smart Cities” is something like the above depending on who you talk to. But what is a smart city and is the future it promises achievable?

A smart city, in short, uses networked devices and data analytics to harness the power of the “IoT” and “Big Data” in order to improve the lives of people who live in heavily populated cities.

Smart cities are important to the growth of the human race. As the population of those who live in urban environments explodes, the need for good planning and infrastructure is going to become critical. The world’s urban population has grown from 746 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion by 2014.

The term ‘smart cities’ has been increasingly used over the last few years and recently more-so than ever before. With a multitude of next generation wireless technologies such as Li-Fi, 5G, LoRa and network slicing being developed alongside the emergence of IoT (Internet of Things) our experience of large towns and cities is set to be enhanced considerably.

It’s very important that these wireless technologies are developed quickly to provide the infrastructure for so many of the proposed aspects of smart cities, such as connected cars, water-systems and transport systems.

The issue that developers currently face is the existing mobile and wireless infrastructure. 3G and 4G came before the real inception of IoT and smart devices so they lag behind considerably with the technologies required to support such a complex network.

In order to cater for the devices that make up for the anticipated $1.7 trillion spend that consumers will have made by 2020, network operators are going to need to improve their infrastructure.

This poses the question, what technologies are being proposed to cater for requirements of smart cities?

Network slicing

Network slicing is the process whereby network operators will be able to divide or ‘slice’ their networks depending on the requirements of its users.

To meet the needs of smart cities, smart services will rely on low latency to offer essential real-time and ultra-reliable connectivity and interactivity. For example, autonomous drones are going to need incredibly fast response times, but won’t necessarily require fast data rates.

On the other hand, things like cloud based services will be reliant on fast data rates, but not necessarily need low latency. This is where network slicing comes in. It will allow providers to “slice up” their 5G networks to meet the different requirements of different services.

Li-Fi

Li-Fi gets its name from its similarity to Wi-Fi, only it uses visible light rather than radio waves to connect to devices. Due to its nature, it can reach staggering speeds of up to 224 gigbits per second. Something that will be very useful within a high-speed, high-demand network.

One of the most obvious benefits of Li-Fi will be its ability to connect places where Wi-Fi can’t. It uses LED (Light-emitting diode) bulbs to bring very fast and reliable connectivity to users within its proximity.

LoRa

As we move towards smart cities, millions of low power sensors will replace wide area networks and connect to provide connectivity and interconnectivity for users moving within that space.

This is where LoRa comes in.

LoRa is a low power, low range wireless network platform which is secure, highly available and highly reliable. It has been developed specifically with IoT and smart cities in mind. Importantly, it is configured to work on multiple frequencies within the free radio spectrum, which allows for applications across very wide geographical areas and connecting both indoors and outdoors.

LoRa’s most compelling opportunity lies in its ability to connect and manage cities own sub-systems such as waste-management, agriculture, parking, lighting etc. By connecting simultaneously, it will provide the platform for easy, comprehensive management.

There is no denying smart cities will be a reality very soon and the 5G technologies behind them are sure to include an array of sophisticated technologies that will enhance and add to our existing infrastructure. When this will be fully operational across the world’s major towns and cities is unclear, but Li-Fi, LoRa and network slicing are sure to provide the foundations of the fast-approaching 5G future.