The tech community is nothing if not obsessed with predicting the future. I wouldn’t say these are predictions, exactly - more like problems we’ll be trying to solve in 2016.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things consumer market really hit its peak in 2015. Recent examples include ‘smart’ belts and basketballs - check the hilarious Internet of Shit Twitter parody account for more - gimmicky products that have had unnecessary technological capabilities thrown at them. Unsurprisingly, sales have been slow for these types of products.

But 2015 was also the year that people started to actually pay attention, making plans and laying the foundation for a future where all our devices will be connected. Gartner predicts 6.4 billion ‘things’ will be connected in 2016.

The biggest question on everyone’s lips is: how is all this stuff going to work together? Every major tech company has some kind of smart offering - Apple’s Homekit, Google has Brillo and Samsung has taken on SmartThings. None of them actually support the other, and there’s no guarantee that when you buy something it will actually work.

The technology is there. We have built the infrastructure. But we haven’t yet set the interoperable standards, and that should be our task next year.

People

We’re constantly being told that our jobs are going to be extinct due to artificial intelligence, and yet one thing that became clear this year was the fact that there is a massive shortage of people going into the engineering field - we need data scientists, security experts and Devops professionals.

We are getting better at addressing the need for gender diversity - for example, doing the Bechdel test for panels at tech conferences: 1) two women speaking, 2) on the same panel and 3) not about women in tech. But there’s always room for more improvement.

Security

I’ve been writing about this issue more than any other topic this year; security is currently at the top of every CIO’s priority list for 2016, and for good reason too - Talk Talk, Ashley Madison and Sony are just a few high profile names who have been hacked this year.

The true costs of a security breach tend to mount up. Sometimes hackers don’t even go public with their attack and the system fails to detect it, leaving the company oblivious to any damage and even more vulnerable than before.

What is needed is a solution that hides in the open. An attacker may know it is there, but they would need to launch a full-scale assault to get by without detection.