2019 ... a look into the future years

Not sure where to put this post in but I think it's important to discuss what holds in for the future and to understand a view point in terms of technology.

Currently one visionary holds most of the stake in terms of transportation of the future - whether it is on the ground for city to city or for long distance or even from one planet to another. There is a thought to re-use renewable energy and lessen the effect of pollution on the planet.
Transportation is going to be a major breakthrough going in future and so are things needed to make it happen.

It might be the opportunity to keep the best car right now which is run on gas as soon electric vehicles will replace the market, and it should be happening rather quick.

Primarily all the visionary firms currently are leaping in towards understanding how to make travel beyond earth possible and in that process is the process of understanding - how to build the foundations when you need to travel to a different place.

Most important is to understand the role of autonomous systems, there is a big focus on both connected systems and systems which function independently. With technologies like 5G coming into the market, there will be a big push to virtual reality and augmented reality with equal push on systems which can function or get trained in augmented reality.

If we need to build a new station even as a starting point a lot of foundation specific development needs to take place, that is where internet of things will come into picture, this concept will not just stay within the realms of the connected world but will go forward into the autonomous world as well.

Trends associate that there might be a  major firm coming into picture which might hold a stake into the autonomous equipments using modern day tools like artificial intelligence and learning to substitute good decision making.

Governance platforms will begin to come into picture which provide governance along the line of usage of artificial intelligence equipments, internet of artificial intelligent machines might be a buss world for future years.

With the Global reach becoming minimised, the rise of crypto and blockchain might help to standardise the processes across different segments of the world.

Although these are just speculations but there is a lot more in terms of what kind of technologies would develop to make sure above areas help shape the world into a better place for future.

Let's talk about customer service... & some simple math...

Well, I might have originally not put this down but one experience prompted me to do a bit of justification on this topic by discussing about it.

Here is how it begins... as a code evangenlist every coder/developer wants to use the latest technologies available in best possible way & what more to ask for if they are available for 'free'.

Or 'are they'? Every-time we trespass on a piece of technological marvel we ask what's the cost and when we know it's free we pretty much 'forget' about it and start using it. Well, it's called a virtual free zone ... let's see how. Selling a product has various lure tactics to it, almost any product today would have some lure tactics involved - but ones which are fair and visible are the most beneficial as they give out the risks & advantages fairly.

As of today we use a lot of products off the cloud and start using them with the concept or notion of they being 'free' and available, so where do we lack they hit back at us at a later stage - may be in terms of capability limitation, data exposure, cost (yeah you heard it right - it was free wasn't it?) or performance(again you heard it - right - it was on the cloud wasn't it?). The first point where we presumably lack is asking the right questions the moment we start using the free product.

Suppose a well known service provider is giving a platform which allows using their software as a service but then it's free (well, it's not - it's just the matter of time when you found that out) - so day 1 you start using it, day 30 - you are quite satisfied with it, day 90 - you have already started putting that product out to a bigger base - started telling people about it, suddenly your product is peaking with everyone loving it and 'one fine day' - it stops functioning or doesn't function how it should (now what's the probability of that - well maybe 2%, but that probability was 2% when you started using it - it is now gone to be 60%). The only way to fix this is to buy a package which will get your product running again - but aah you were never told about - well, think on it - did you ask the right question?

Let's talk about another scenario - everything still running fine but you got bill on the product - and that is a figure which is 400% of what you capped your product budget on, you get amazed how that happened - when you get through to customer support - they tell you need to buy a support plan to give you information on why your bill shot up - so you think to yourself - seriously? - you got a free product based on face value of company selling it to you - well guess what - nothing comes on face value - you might have just learnt that - but then you have a more bitter experience since you are only trying to understand why your something which was capped at 20% max budget was charged at 400% (these days every big firm needs your credit card before you can start using their services), so now you have a headache of dealing with the customer support who will at best will assist you with information you already know - except that they will take away more time from that process making it lengithier which will probably negate your  future plans to pursue with that product, and they are getting paid for it, so unless you want to buy additional support to get more information, which again you shouldn't be getting so fast until you agree to a term plan, so apparently now you lost more than what you could think of when starting with a 'free' product. And think for some time on the company which put those people in customer support, the manager you escalated the call to, the vp-product justifying the cause, they are all getting paid - to do what? justify 'nothing', no new information, same old stuff and who is paying for them - some poor company trying to get their product working, now that's not funny is it?

And this doesn't end here - if you start to quote your experience on a channel - there will be qualified people starting to negate your story and the company working at a probability to improve it would be 0.02%, that's the sorry part - as they earned their degree to do something constructive but now are just trying to re-sell a costly product back which was originally put on sale as free. So long story short - nothing comes free, ask the right questions, any company (whether it's the top 3 or bottom 3 worldwide) has a right to explain their package and product details - if they fail to do that, in sufficient detail, the idea to proceed is always an unknown risk as face value can be lost in a jiffy. The next thing you know - the company is sitting with your data which you already lost, which you need to pay to get back, and you cannot be sure that that firm might not be hacked tomorrow. It's very simple math but still it becomes very difficult most of the times.

Well, I would not quote the name but the experience quoted above is from one of the worlds best technology product firms and a startup trying to use their services - but that part doesn't surprise me at all but the part on the buying habits of the consumers really does and will not stop surprising me!

One of my resolutions on the new year is being a more informed consumer because I love technology and would always want to use the right & best suited for the job but would need to be fairly informed as well.

'Flutter Live' .... much needed single platform application development framework..high hopes on this one!

So it seems Google launched their stable release of flutter few days back.. let's deep dive into the details...

Before we begin - we must understand we are living in the mature age of mobile app development, gone are the days when mobile app development was a small child growing up and surprising all, it suddenly grew up too fast and now most have seemed to realise that a more mature approach is needed to build for mobile apps before it starts the downward trend.. so let's go into details.

Built by google developers, using native c, c++, along with dart & skin graphics engine, this engine gives the developer - embedded, mobile, web, mobile app, desktop along with forthcoming support for watchOS.

The whole experience is seamless across iOS or Android using the native platform's

Below are the major components of flutter -

1. Dart platform - the flutter experience is built using the dart language.
2. Flutter engine  - written in C++ & provides low level rendering support, engine is composed of a cross platform code
3. Foundation Library - again in Dart gives the api's to use & there is a huge library of widgets which can be plugged into the code base.
4. Design-Specific Widgets - an immutable description of a part of an interface, these can be hot loaded and viewed to suit the kind of design they are etched or used on.

4 characteristics which define flutter are -

1. Beautiful - controlled by widgets delivering pixel perfect experience.

2. Fast - 3d Skia graphics - compiled to native machine code.

3. Productive - stateful hot reload without restart to have the glimpse of the experience in a shot.

4. Open - can be extended and has no license.

Benefits - single application platform which can drive the focus more on the UI or UX aspect of the app design rather than dwelwing on the challenges of what will work on a platform and what won't and then getting through the complexities of code differentials on each platform.

Appears to a be a step further into culmination of monopoly of OS based development.

Some advantages of flutter

- Ahead of time compilation
- Recompute the animation before hand
- Skia GE is hardware accelerated and runs directly on graphics card
- Backward OS capability for both iOS and Android (at least 5 years)
- Develop in single location and publish to Android or iOS store in one go.
- Easily embed high speed widgets like video on the graphics design with ease.
- A widget inside a widget behaves like an actual widget seamlessly.

It's quick and easy to install - flavours exist for

iOS - directly integrates with XCode simple to install.
Linux - installs and runs on android emulator and studio
Android  (needless to say works embedded in android studio & emulator).

Refer to below resources from google for more information..

Resources -- https://flutter.io

I will try to put in a blog with an actual app development done using flutter in my next blog on this topic.

Not property but algorithms might be the asset of future...so which algorithm do you own?

As awkward as it sounds, many will still find it hard to believe that future might not hold so much of a return on any other commodity which currently is topping the list of highly wanted assets as of today.

Artificial intelligence has gained so much momentum and popularity that probably the only significant observation and result of this has been fear of what it can do and how it can overtake humanity.

The above abstract form of envisioning a technological or sociatal change is the basic human psychology of approach when little is known about the result of the adaptation. Whenever we go from a quantified result set to an unquantified one chaos & chaos impending thoughts start ruling the brain.

Well, my point is we really need to open our eyes and start thinking about quantifying the use of artificial intelligence enabled assets which again means to enable proactive measures to control the capability and govern the result-set to be in the quantified so called ‘happy realm’ of the result horizon and to root out any negatives or negative result sets & establishing methods to study them making sure that they do not propagate further.

In short using AI to understand AI result set and make sure the capability grows as per needed outcome.

How is that achievable? - 1st step towards any artificial intelligent approach is choosing the right algorithm.

This is the 2nd stage in the development of artificial intelligent ecosystem.

The 0th stage can be training - in which nothing intelligent or artificial about it.  With the training in place - a machine is able to know relationships and implication or intent as a result of those relationships.

The 1st stage comes when those relationships are applied to newer inputs which haven’t been learned before - this is where the machine tries to bring an unknown result-set within a realm of known outcome and then tries to establish a relation which maps to that outcome, it can do so in many ways, one way might be asking the right questions. Once the realm is establish machine is able to learn the outcome and process of achieving that outcome and is able to apply it to new result-set & inputs.

At this stage there can be a monitor which would enable the mapping and learning to be accurate, you can easily learn wrongly if you get an affirmation on a process or resultset which doesn’t hold in real life, a malicious program can trick you into believing that is the right resultset so monitoring while training is highly essential, probably this is not being done as of today in accurate way.

The 2nd stage starts when you have mastered the capability to learn the resultset of application with 99% accuracy relative to the real world. This is the area where the machine upgrade from being just a learning & application engine to choosing some definite algorithms to stream line the process and patterns. This is particularly interesting as the right algorithm which works 95% of the time can get a sequence of optimised decisions laid out which would profit or provide a return which can be much higher in comparison to other competitive algorithm, so the key here is 1st to get the 1st stage accurate and quickly advance to 2nd stage before prediction models start changing. Bear in mind there would be negative algorithms which would be working just to establish uncertainty in the evaluation process so the key is how to identify and watch out for those algorithms.

The company or person which posses the best ranked algorithm might earn a better return and might profit much more than any other individual. In the future when everything would be done using efficient algo’s the question comes back who owns the best algo.

Seems confusing? Let’s take a very simple example - we all get emails, I get hundreds of emails a day, maybe I don’t want to look at them, I will use my algo to give me the emails which really matter to me.

Let’s say I have 3 kinds of email assistants operating on 3 different algo’s - to read me out the emails which ‘matter to me’ - I would probably go with an algo which gives me the most optimised output which matters to me - 5 emails is good, 4 is better or maybe 10 might be best - well, this is where true AI will decide what really works for me.

This is just a very small example & a short glimpse - the capacity and capability here is humongous… I will cover more examples in my other posts so stay tuned.

Why voice technology needs to start thinking about blockchain..

Voice technology is somewhat becoming the new realm in the world of emerging patterns to interact with computational systems to obtain results quickly.

Major advantages of voice include - the free interaction without an aid or interaction mechanism primitive to technology, which means - unless you want to talk and do something else at the time via talk, you have nothing to loose.

But the key question as of today is resting on 2 major observations -

1. Voice doesn't have a common framework - unfortunately it's true - we are living in a world of competitor governed architecture and that has a disadvantage in terms of establishing a common framework just suited to voice.

This in turn introduces delay to make change and also restricts changes to happen seamlessly across all the voice supported systems.

2. Currently we are living in a world of insecurity caused by the ease of having someone present themselves as the owner whereas they might not be. Security has become the prime concern and with voice systems the challenge becomes bigger.

Current voice artefacts have the capability to be replicated and processed with variations, consider a program using that to trigger a hack and cause complete disruption of systems. Voice biometrics have a far way to go but more important here is the ledger of trigger of transactions via voice which gives a trust on the transaction invoked.

This is where blockchain comes into picture, making sure each iteration or change in the voice pattern received is ultimately managed via blocks recorded over a period of time.

As this technology is new - it is easy to fundamentally implement this and have a method to enforce this into the architecture but it also means that the major firms have to understand the implications so that adoption is quicker.. it's high time voice starts thinking blockchain..