3 Things in Technology to look out for in 2016

The last decade has been the most revolutionary in terms of technological advances. We have seen mobile gaming evolve from Snake to App releases of popular console games such as GTA San Andreas and Broken Sword – The Shadow of the Templars. Manufacturers show no signs of slowing down in terms of innovation, making technology evolve faster than ever before. Let’s have a look at some exciting new projects that all tech enthusiasts need to watch out for.

HTML 6?

HTML 5 was implemented at the end of 2014. This is the 5th revision of the markup language since it’s introduction in 1993. While there is no official confirmation of a HTML 6 release, there are several different suggestions and theories on how it could be improved; for example, HTML 5 gave programmers additional tags to work with but developers still feel that there is a void within HTML 5 in this area, and that it could be adapted to give much more freedom to programmers who wants to use it when coding.

It was announced after the release of HTML 5 that the revisions would no longer be numbered and all versions would simply be referred to as HTML. So technically we won’t see anything named HTML 6, but we may see a lot of neat improvements made to HTML, that could take website coding to the next level.

Contactless payments

With the release of Apple Pay, contactless payments have suddenly become more widely used. The maximum transaction amount has been upped to £30 from £20, in the UK, after a soaring number of customers started using the contactless mobile devices instead of cards to pay for their items. This method looks to eliminate some fraudulent activity and even heart beat monitors have been mentioned as a possible method for identification and security, making it considerably more difficult to steal your hard earned cash.

The new iPhone models, from Iphone 6 and up, allows users to use their Apple Pay account by verifying their identity using the fingerprint scanner on the home button. Developers for e-commerce business are working on ways to build on this progress by looking at other ways users can be identified. There are many small flaws with the Apple Pay system however, such as the lack of compliance across all debit and credit card providers. Apple pay has for the time being reignited the excitement around contactless mobile based payment technology. Apple has a real opportunity to capitalize on this, optimize it and create more ground-breaking technology for their future mobile devices.

Other companies have realized the potential of contactless and digital payment systems as well. For example, Coral has introduced their Connect service. This allows users to collect their winnings from their website or App directly from the store, rather than transferring the funds to the user’s bank account. Any winnings in store can be kept in your account and used for online games or betting.

New AMD Processors

AMD’s Chief Executive Officer, Rory Read announced that the company would be targeting product launches in the first quarter of 2016. AMD is working on the K12 and sister X68 CPU processors and are confident of their early release next year. The now scrapped, Project Skybridge, was the first processor from AMD to support Android OS. Maybe this suggests that the company is looking to expand to the mobile market. Rival Company Intel already has a foot in the door having released their own range of smartphones, so AMD shouldn’t overlook this market, as it is a market on a never-ending quest for expansion. The percentage of online mobile traffic was reported to be all the way up to 60%, during 2014 and shows no sign of coming to a halt. This would be an excellent time for AMD to be opportunistic and tap into the huge labyrinth, that is the mobile market.

What new tech are you most excited for in 2016? Did we miss any big items? Let us know what you think in the comment section.