Looking Back At 2017
With the final curtain closed on 2017 we can look back and reflect that the big themes of tech in the year just passed have been the smart home, voice recognition and cyber security.
Home controllers took off last year. Latest figures indicate that there are over 20 million Amazon Echoes and seven million Google Homes installed worldwide, with these two dominating a market which is projected to really hot up in 2018. Families have started to deploy them to better control security, lighting, entertainment and, more rarely, domestic appliances.
Those Echoes and Homes are just some of the devices that have brought a surge of voice recognition activity in the past twelve months.
In homes, cars and holiday haunts, people are asking their fixed and mobile devices to “play me some Ed Sheeran,” and much, much more,
However, all of this has added more burden to the complexity of the Net.
There are now over 20 billion devices connected worldwide.
That provides an open invitation to fraudsters to try more devious ways to break into our systems to steal out identities and/or our cash. Recent estimates suggest that globally the number of security attacks per day has now risen above 120,000 and the cost of cybercrime has exceeded 50 million dollars per annum. Another big trend of 2017, of course has been the resurgent sales of old fashion metal steering wheel locks, which have bounced back to combat laptop wielding car thieves. We can expect to see many more precautions against hi-tech crime as 2018 progresses.
