Hello, welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I might pass since the CEO of Qualitas and today we start a brand new series and this is going to be big. Emerging trends, both in technology and collaboration, we have so much to get into. So I'm super excited. We're going to start a new series. It's all going to be about what's emerging.

And the first place we need to start is if we want to see what's going to happen in the future, we need to check in and see what's happened in the past. Let's have a look at our back catalog. Now the good news for you is I've been, I've been trying to pick emerging trends for many, many years now. So in front of me, I've got four consecutive years of some good picks since I'm not so [00:01:00] good pigs.

And, uh, today I really want to share with you just some thoughts that I had about trying. Uh, to pick emerging trends and weighing up all the factors and looking at addressable market, what problem does it solve? Is there kind of ecosystem support all those kinds of things that I look for? Well, today we're going to, we're going to look back at the ones I got, right.

And try and decode them a little bit and see why those picks worked. But don't worry. This is, this is not all about self praise here because in the next show, I'm going to go to my flops, my bad pigs, but for now, let's, uh, let's start with the goodies. So for years I've chosen one thing from each year that I got.

Right. And let's talk about why we think it's, it's worked so, so damn well, 2017, uh, I had a big peak for blockchain and [00:02:00] obviously. With retrospect that wasn't such a bad peak. I would have been even smarter if I had bought a few, uh, crypto coins. Um, I could probably retire now if I had, but the point here is what blockchain represents is this.

A fantastic system that is decentralized, um, it's super efficient and the integrity of the system. I mean, if you just look at 2019 and you look at, uh, the fraud, uh, around transactions in the blockchain in 2019, there was zero. So the system is so competent. That it has the incredibly, this incredibly efficient level of performance of integrity.

Whereas you could compare that to the global financial market. It is commonly estimated that more than 5% of transactions were fraudulent, [00:03:00] meaning that they were fake, uh, meaning that they were not real transactions. There wasn't a buyer and a seller. There was not a proper ledger. There was some. Fraud happening in that transaction.

So isn't that interesting how efficient blockchain really is now, obviously born of blockchain. We've got a lot of these cryptocurrencies, which are taking up a huge, huge amount, huge amount of the news at the moment. And I just want to put that into a. Perspective that we're looking at, you know, take Bitcoin, for example, the value of Bitcoin raised over 300% in 2020.

Now I don't want to get into the hype and the cycles of Bitcoin itself, but what we're seeing is whether it is as an asset class or a store value. Um, these coins, which are built on blockchain are proving a safe Haven against [00:04:00] traditional systems. So I think there is huge momentum that is being driven by investment, which has been driven by transaction store value or people finding safe Haven or alternatives to federal reserve government systems.

So blockchain has come along and it has whipped people up into a frenzy. And this idea of a distributed ledger with high integrity is not only great for consumer investors, but what we are starting to see is that more and more. Businesses are adopting blockchain to perform ledger based tasks in the enterprise.

So we've got that one pretty right. And I'm pretty happy with that and excited to see what happens with blockchain in 2018, we picked face recognition. Now, many of you might know this from face ID with your iPhones, [00:05:00] and I want to start there, but that's not the only angle that I took with face recognition.

Without a doubt. Um, you know, if you look at the core of consumer device interaction, it's all about inputs and outputs. And in this case, Entering your whore pink code. It's a thing, password drama. So being able, just to look at your face and open your iPhone is actually a huge reduction in friction for the user and enables them to get their tasks done quicker with less hassle.

So face recognition, we picked that in 2018. Boom, we're off to the races, but what we also saw is the technology from big firms, Microsoft, Amazon, et cetera. Was so good at face recognition, even IBM as well that they actually took a step back and said, we're not going to sell this to police forces around the world because of where it would naturally take [00:06:00] you.

Um, with. Crime law and order. So the tech was so good that they said, well, we're not even going to supply this to the police force. So I'm not here to really, to cast any judgments about that, but it shows you the power of the technology. So 2017, we picked blockchain. I think Bitcoin would, would serve as evidence that we're in a great place there face recognition.

I mean, I certainly use it on a regular basis and we see just the desire for, uh, police and crime prevention, the huge role they can play now in 2019 sort of building our face recognition, we, we really picked something that we didn't expect, uh, to be this big. Privacy and ethics. That was our, one of our big trends that we picked for 2019.

And what was interesting about that is we were kind of looking at it from the perspective of that. There were so many big systems, whether it was, um, Cambridge Analytica that were, um, kind of stealing, misusing a user [00:07:00] data, or whether there were all those big breaches that we saw. Um, so many different, uh, folks, uh, were, um, seeing their data.

Um, misuse that we saw this huge need to increase privacy and the ethics around it. So the thought here is that users realize that they had become the product and they wanted to get back in to control. So what we saw with both tick-tock and Facebook is we saw these big. Blowups in 2020, where the use of the data, whether it be by the firm or by state actors became a huge issue for users.

And I think we can expect that it's going to stay around for a long time as well. Another big pick from, uh, last year, you know, obviously we had some cloud and automation, pigs. They did really well, but I wanted to kind of continue this theme [00:08:00] of face recognition, privacy and ethics, one that we picked. And I just want to caveat this.

W COVID had not happened at this time. We picked mass surveillance and what we have seen Holy smoke, whether you look at it from a defense perspective, Whether you look at it from health and safety, we have seen three of the biggest state actors, China, Russia, USA, all getting into various forms of mass surveillance of trying to defend the nation state.

Look after the health of people. I'm not here to judge whether they be right or wrong, they're just doing their thing. And surveillance is at the heart of it. It's a combination of face recognition, privacy ethics data. IOT, all of these things really do come together and mass surveillance. And I think all of these things, what's really interesting when you zoom out and you look at each of these big four themes is that they really demonstrate the power [00:09:00] of emerging technology because they're not only alive and well each and every one of these trends is.

Taking off in a big way. And I think what we're seeing is the opportunity to build new products in 2021 that enjoy the efficiencies. Enjoy the exponential natur...