Technology has always been a strong influence in our lives. The TV defined generations of the fifties and sixties. Cellphones shortened distances like never before. The computer revolutionized the way we do business, and the internet changed the world.
Today, digital technology provides the framework for all human action. It is the bedrock of modern societal development.
With that in mind, let us look at five digital trends currently at the forefront of the industry.
Interactive Customer Experiences
For businesses to succeed, it is no longer enough to invest in advertising and promotion. Even though these strategies have worked through the years and continue to do so at present, conventional advertising has transformed completely. It has changed from a one-sided approach where businesses show products and services to their customers to a two-way, interactive experience.
Consumers don’t want companies to sell them things. They want to participate in all phases of the product development process, including conception and design. Companies are doing this by setting up fully branded community websites, personalized environments in which users can engage in back and forth communication with the company and themselves. By becoming members, they can also attend events, subscribe to feeds, and gain access to content libraries.
Streaming Music and Video Services
The concept of streaming music and video on your desktop, laptop, or mobile device is nothing new. It has been going on for almost a decade. Still, the advent of 5G technology has led to a proliferation of apps and websites providing a wide variety of services to consumers. Along with conventional ones like watching a movie or listening to a song, people can also share content through social media, write reviews, and sometimes even interact with the artists themselves.
As a result, consumers don’t need to buy movies, music, or TV shows anymore. This is both cost-effective and time-saving. As with anything online, service providers should place the utmost importance on data protection mechanisms, namely user information.
Distance Learning
One of the many aspects of the covid-19 global pandemic is the need for isolation, maintaining ourselves distant from one another as much as we can. For public and private educational institutions worldwide, this means providing the same quality services without classrooms and physical teachers.
Enter presentation and video-conferencing platforms like Zoom, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meetings. These programs offer a long list of features, including screen-sharing capabilities for both audio and video, break rooms, annotation tools for hosts and participants, session recordings, and many others.
This has also led to an increase in specific courses provided by regular people and the growth of online course providers like Udemy, CBT Nuggets, LinkedIn Learning, and Coursera.
Health and Fitness Apps
There are many advantages to living in modern society. We now have access to all kinds of information, and most things are much more convenient than in years past. But, strong economic and social development has made competition fiercer and people more stressed. One consequence of this is the increasing number of people with lifestyle diseases such as diabetes type II, hypertension, and metabolic syndrome.
To deal with this, tech companies have made partnerships with health and nutrition experts to create fun, efficient, and customizable apps. These apps provide fitness tips and calorie information on dishes and a vast library of workouts, meditation exercises, recipes, support communities, and social media sharing.
Best of all, most of them offer free access to limited services and trials. If you don’t like what you can see, you can still use it for one or two months and then discard it without having to spend a single penny.
Online Gaming
If you are a child of the eighties or nineties, you might remember video games like Mario Bros. 3, Contra, GoldenEye 007, and Double Dragon on devices such as the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Game Boy, and Nintendo 64. In Bob Dylan’s great words, “things, they are a-changing.”
In the last 10 years, online gaming has taken the world by storm. Games like PUBG, Fortnite, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike are played by tens of millions of people worldwide. A boy in Shanghai can create a team with a girl in Buenos Aires and compete with another team from Johannesburg and Tokyo. This makes the experience much more exciting for everyone involved and provides the perfect environment for building friendships and global networking.
Five digital trends are interactive customer experiences, streaming services, distance learning, health and fitness app, and online gaming. They continue to define how we study, work, interact with others, and live our daily lives.
