Global spending on information technology (IT) is expected to reach US$3.8 trillion next year, driven by growth in connected devices ranging from jewelry to refrigerators, researchers said on Monday.
A report by the research firm Gartner said next year’s IT spending is expected to increase 3.6 percent from this year.
The vast expansion of digital devices will affect just about every industry in what is described as the digital industrial economy, according to Gartner researcher Peter Sondergaard. Sondergaard said this means every company will become a technology company in an era of the “Internet of things.”
“Digitalization exposes every part of your business and its operations to these forces,” he said. “It is how you reach customers and constituents, how you run your physical plant and how you generate revenue or deliver services. Enterprises doing this today are setting themselves apart and will collectively lead the new digital industrial economy.”
Gartner said that in 2009, there were 2.5 billion devices with unique IP addresses connected to the Internet; most of them cellphones and computers. In 2020, there will be up to 30 billion devices, most of which will be other products.
Gartner predicts that the total economic value for the Internet of things will be US$1.9 trillion dollars in 2020, benefiting a wide range of industries such as healthcare, retail and transportation.
“Computing power will be cheap and covert. We won’t know it is there. It will be in our jewelry and in our clothing,” Sondergaard said. “We will throw more computers into our laundry in a week than we’ve used in our lifetimes so far.”
Gartner said that by 2017, new device categories such as mobile phones, tablets, and ultra-mobile PCs will represent more than 80 percent of device spending.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day