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Origo is here to support you during this new normal. Get the latest updates in our blog

Origo specialists are assisting the World Health Organization (WHO) in developing a digital vaccination certificate. Iceland is the first country to issue a digital vaccination certificate and the solution, developed by Origo, has attracted worldwide attention.

The vaccination project is twofold and involves vaccinations followed by the issuance of vaccination certificates. "We have been working hard over the past few weeks on the solution that manages vaccinations. Development went smoothly and we are confident that we can respond swiftly to any changes that might come," says Björk Grétarsdóttir, Project Manager at Origo.

Iceland was the first country to issue vaccination certificates and several hundred Icelanders have already received them.

"The vaccination certificates are part of a European cooperative effort. People can apply for a certificate as soon as they have completed the second vaccination. Certificates can be applied for through the Icelandic Citizen Health Portal (Heilsuvera) using electronic ID. Heilsuvera has proven to be very useful in the effort to contain COVID-19," says Arnaldur Skúli Baldursson, Project Manager for Heilsuvera at Origo.

Iceland's success in the fight against COVID-19 has attracted a great deal of attention from other countries. Representatives from the Icelandic health authorities have described the solutions used by Iceland in combating the virus at international conferences and events. Iceland is considered to be at the forefront of the development of software solutions and, as proof of this, Origo specialists are now assisting WHO with the further development of vaccination certificates.

Origo assisting WHO in developing a vaccination certificate

Origo is assisting WHO in developing a digital vaccination certificate

Ransomware attacks – why they’re on the rise and how Origo can protect you

 The first six months of 2020 saw a 151% increase in DDoS attacks – distributed denial of service cyber attacks that cripple an organisation’s IT systems. The reason for this startling rise is quite simple: COVID-19. As organisations and their staff adapted to working from home, internet traffic soared by more than 50%. And where internet traffic grows, cybercrime grows too.

DDoS attacks involve huge volumes of traffic being directed to the victim’s website, bringing it down and causing costly business interruption. The perpetrators then demand a ransom to stop the attack. Hackers generate these massive volumes of traffic by networking servers that they have infiltrated; for example, through spam emails. The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has also given hackers a broad new choice of entry points, often poorly secured.

The question businesses are asking is this: with internet traffic and the IoT set to continue growing for the foreseeable future, and hackers becoming increasingly sophisticated and determined, what can they do to protect themselves against this burgeoning threat?

DDoS attacks range from small attacks of 5 gigabytes per second (that’s 5Gbps of data flooding the victim’s systems) up to massive attacks in the terabyte scale. Earlier this year, an Amazon Web Service client sustained an attack of 2.3Tbps. Compare this to the first headline DDoS attack which brought six US banks to a halt in 2012. The scale of that attack was 60Gbps – the threat has escalated.

But it’s at both ends of the scale that the rise in DDoS has been most pronounced. In other words, it’s not just big businesses that are at risk. In fact, more attacks are initiated at the 5Gbps level than anywhere else.

The impact is fourfold. First you have to find the resources to recover and secure compromised data. Then you have to communicate with regulators and customers to inform them that you have been breached. You may have to pay regulatory penalties. And you will want to invest in more robust security around your newly restored systems. The cost for some organisations can run to millions. The reputational damage can be even more severe.

How to protect your business against DDoS attacks

When your business is targeted by a DDoS attack, it is hit by a tidal wave of data. In order to protect your website from becoming swamped, you need to break up that wave and deflect it away.

The solution is, in effect, a reversal of the tactic the hackers use to build up the wave in the first place: the creation of a network through which all traffic to your website is routed. When an abnormal build-up of data comes your way, the network dissipates and absorbs the impact.

The leading specialist in counteracting DDoS attacks is Cloudflare, a San Francisco based company with a 42Tb network of over 13 million internet properties in 150 countries. Every website under Cloudflare’s protection is routed through this global network, giving optimal page load times and robust resilience against DDoS attacks. To give an idea of the scale of that protection, Cloudflare’s global network is 15 times bigger than the largest DDoS attack recorded to date.

This year Origo and Cloudflare became partners, enabling us to increase the level of protection we can offer to Origo customers. For most businesses, the cost of building an infrastructure that can handle a large-scale DDoS attack is prohibitive, but with the Cloudflare model, businesses of any size can enjoy the best protection there is, by being part of the global network. Should your business come under attack, you can block it without any discernible impact on your ability to trade and serve your customers. That’s particularly important, given the increase in attacks at the smaller end of the scale. 

As well as mitigating DDoS and other attacks, Cloudflare provides protection against spam, saving medium-sized businesses thousands of hours a year in time taken up by employees having to sift through unwanted emails. With this saving of ongoing costs coupled with the protection against the potential cost of a ransomware attack, businesses of all sizes can afford to operate with the confidence that they are protected from the biggest cyber threat of all.

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The first six months of 2020 saw a 151% increase in DDoS attacks – distributed denial of service cyber attacks that cripple an organisation’s IT systems. The reason for this startling rise is quite simple: COVID-19. As organisations and their staff adapted to working from home, internet traffic soared by more than 50%. And where internet traffic grows, cybercrime grows too.

Ransomware attacks – how Origo can protect you

DDoS Ransomware Attacks – how can Origo protect you?

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Origo has worked closely with the Directorate of Health in Iceland to conduct testing both at the Icelandic border and other health care facilities. The border screening system showed its strength when it was implemented at the Health Clinics in the Greater Reykjavik area for general testing. Before the system was implemented, the Health Clinics conducted around 200-400 COVID-19 tests per day, but with the introduction of the border system, up to 4000 tests could be conducted daily, a big increase.

The next big project for the Icelandic health care system

The next big project the Icelandic health care system faces is fast approaching: the COVID-19 vaccinations. In recent weeks, Origo has been working on developing a computer system which will handle the management of all COVID-19 vaccinations in Iceland. The system is being developed in close collaboration with the Directorate of Health, the Health Clinics in Greater Reykjavik and other health institutions in Iceland. The system is based on a previous software developed for the COVID-19 testing at the Icelandic border which is currently used for almost all COVID-19 testing in Iceland.

A powerful system that manages priority groups and automatically calls people in for vaccination via SMS messages

In developing the new system many factors had to be considered which keeps track of priority groups, among other features. The system also had to be developed in such a way that it will able to send automatic messages to call people in for vaccination as soon as vaccines arrive in Iceland. 
This will be accomplished by sending a bar code to an individual's personal health care page (Heilsuvera) and an SMS message inviting them to come in for vaccination. It will also be possible to call people in to different vaccination centers based on which health clinic they are registered with. The system will also call people in for their second vaccination in a similar way through Heilsuvera. Thus, Heilsuvera will continue to serve as the central communication platform for individuals' health services.

The system will enter all vaccinations in the vaccination database of the Chief Epidemiologist so that it will be possible to keep a central record of all those who receive vaccinations.

Work has already begun, since 15 December, on registering the priority groups defined by the Chief Epidemiologist and the Minister of Health into the system. 

Origo's Healthcare Solutions division is also working with the Directorate of Health on compiling a list of all individuals who are at increased risk of COVID-19 based on diagnoses registered in the Saga medical records system.

Iceland is in a unique position due to the electronic infrastructure that has been developed for the health care system in recent years, including the Saga medical records system, Heilsuvera and the Hekla health network, which is managed and developed by Origo. 
This infrastructure will now enable us to vaccinate against COVID-19 in a targeted and organised manner.

COVID-19 pandemic IT system

Our next big project: Vaccinations against COVID-19

We’ve been familiar with the concept of drones fro some years now. Their use in the military, for everything from bomb disposal to surgical strikes, is no longer the stuff of sci-fi, their recreational use (and misuse) by consumers and criminals makes the news headlines with increasing frequency and we’re all still waiting for our first drone delivery from Amazon.

But while we wait, other businesses have already begun to integrate drones into their workforce. Here we’ve collected some of the applications already in use to show how drones can improve the way we work and trigger new ideas for you, our readers, as to how you might be able to employ them in your business.

A few years ago Easyjet started using drones to carry out aircraft inspections and now they are used for similar purposes in a range of industries. Inspecting an aircraft is not easy for a human. You have to get up to the height of the fuselage, then work your way around methodically, checking for minute signs of damage. A drone, by contrast, can access every part of the plane quickly and safely, gather high-definition imagery and be programmed to methodically cover every inch of the plane, so nothing is overlooked.

This highlights three key benefits of drones: their speed and agility, their ability to carry sensors and their tireless thoroughness.

These benefits are also being realised in industries such as construction, petrochemicals and shipping, where inspections need to be carried out at height, or underwater or using sensors to detect gas leaks or heat loss.

The ability of drones to take great aerial photographs has opened up a huge advertising opportunity for businesses of all sizes. Once upon a time, if you wanted to run an ad featuring swooping aerial footage, you had to hire a helicopter, or perhaps some CGI, all at very high cost. Consequently it was the preserve of very big brands and their spectacular cinema ads.

But a drone mounted with a high quality camera makes the capture of exciting aerial shots affordable across the board, and more and more businesses are being able to utilise this in their creative marketing output on digital channels. The only question is ‘how creative are you?’

Farming involves a lot of repetitive, methodical tasks. Ploughing fields, spraying crops, harvesting, inspecting fences, surveying buildings and livestock. Farm machinery has become increasingly programmable, to the point where humans are being taken out of the equation altogether and replaced with autonomous drone tractors that can manage the ploughing and harvesting all by themselves. 

Meanwhile, the cowboy or shepherd, who used to spend all day riding the ranch or roaming the hills, can now carry out much of the animal husbandry with a drone. The benefits are that it can cover the ground in a fraction of the time and send back images from an aerial or low level perspective, thus spotting things that might go undetected at ground level.

Delivery drones are ready to go; the only constraints are the air traffic regulations that require drones to remain in the line of sight of the pilot at all times. In countries where this stipulation doesn’t apply, delivery drones are already at work, ferrying medical supplies between hospitals and delivering goods across rivers.

But the logistical capability of drones doesn’t stop at deliveries. Drones are being used in warehouse management, fitted with scanners for automatic inventory control and helping to speed up the pick and pack process. They are used for transporting items within site too, freeing up human labour and adding a level of agility to the already established robot production line workforce.

In many respects, drones are answering the question of what humans could achieve if they had wings. But it’s not just the airborne capability of drones that provides opportunities for businesses. They can operate underwater, on the water and overland too. In some cases they have even negotiated tunnels.

Here we have covered just a handful of examples, chosen to illustrate the essential attributes of drones: speed and agility, safety, affordability, sensor carrying, weight carrying, tirelessness and thoroughness. If any of these are attributes you look for in new recruits, perhaps you should consider a drone. It could take to to whole new heights.

Drones: time to add them to your workforce?

Imagine being in charge of a commercial airline when the jet engine was invented. Would you concern yourself with how this new, superpowered contraption works? Or would you focus on all the possibilities that it offers for your airline?

Business leaders struggling with the mind-blowing concept of quantum computing would be well advised to take the same approach. Never mind how this complicated stuff works, just think what it could do for your business!

OK, it helps to have some understanding of what quantum computing is. Let’s begin with the word ‘quantum’: a word given to the world by the Romans but adopted by physicists to refer to the smallest quantity of any physical entity. So we’re dealing with very small particles here and their behaviour in the Universe, but that’s as much science as you need to know.

Traditional computing, as you know, uses binary units called bits; 1s and 0s that work in an either/or format of rapid trial and error. Quantum computing uses qubits, which can be both 1s and 0s, so they can do two calculations at once. Double the speed, right? Wrong. Qubits give an exponential gain, so 10 qubits can do 1,000 calculations, 30 qubits can do a billion and… 

You get the point. Quantum computers are phenomenally fast. However, they are also prone to getting things wrong. I know – seems strange for a computer to get things wrong but they do. Sometimes. So the application of quantum computing works best as a hybrid with traditional computing, where the speed of one is underpinned by the accuracy of the other.

So how can this ultrafast computer power improve the way your business works? In essence, any calculation that requires vast amounts of trial and error is a candidate for quantum computing. It might help to look at some of the applications that are already in development. We can illustrate this by looking at some examples of where quantum computing solutions are being developed right now.

The future development of many chemistry-based technologies relies on the ability to simulate the makeup and behaviour of molecules. This would replace the traditional trial and error experiments with much greater speed and precision, but it requires vast computing power. Quantum computers could provide the solution. Applications being developed include the engineering of proteins for medical purposes, a more energy-efficient method of making fertilisers and the development of battery cells for electric cars.

The speed and efficiency with which traffic moves is increasingly important as we move to cut emissions, save fuel and prepare the way for autonomous vehicles. Traffic management requires a powerful combination of pattern recognition and predictive analysis in order to plot optimum routes that can be altered in real-time as unpredictable traffic conditions evolve. Specific applications include plotting delivery routes for logistics and managing large crowds at events.

Traffic management is one example of AI and machine learning in action. AI is basically the ability of a computer to learn from experience. Again, it’s trial and error at a fast pace. Experience will be programmed in by a human initially and then it will start to grow autonomously from the feedback. Traditional computers have already shown remarkable capabilities to learn and ‘think’ for themselves, but quantum computers could carry out the trial and error sequences required to gain knowledge so much faster.

If you think traffic is unpredictable, the weather is even more so. And that’s because the computers currently being used to analyse patterns and build models aren’t yet powerful enough to handle all the variables involved. Quantum computing could change all that, enabling us to not only make more accurate weather forecasts but also to gain a better understanding of climate change and its influencing factors.

This is an interesting one because the constant battle between good and evil in cyberspace will tip dramatically towards the bad guys thanks to quantum computing, unless a new approach to security is found. Why? Because hackers employ trial and error methodologies to crack security codes and anything that speeds up the process gives them a better chance of getting in before their attempt is discovered. So the race is on to find a way to use quantum computing to build new security structures that present a whole new challenge to hackers and keep the good guys on top.

Quantum computing is still in its infancy. The first developed applications are not expected for another 10 years and there are still many questions to be answered as to how or if it will replace the role of traditional computing today.

It pays to be ready, though. Like the airline owner who thought the propellor plane was all he needed, you don’t want to be left on the ground when all around you are taking off.

Quantum computing: never mind the mechanics, what can it do?

Quantum computing is still in its infancy. The first developed applications are not expected for another 10 years and there are still many questions to be answered as to how or if it will replace the role of traditional computing today. This articles discusses some of the ways in which quantum computing can benefit businesses and in what industries especially.

Even before Covid, remote working had become a regular part of life for the majority of the world’s workforce. Now, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t have frequent online meetings as part of their working week.

2020 has been the year of the video meeting and, as with so many cultural innovations, the practice has been somewhat anarchic. Meetings go on for hours, children appear in the background demanding lunch, dogs and cats wander across the screen, participants take their device to the toilet with the camera still on, or stand up to fetch a drink, forgetting that they haven’t yet put on their trousers!

This was funny for a while but the novelty has worn off. Workers complain of ‘Zoom fatigue’ and spending their days in back-to-back meetings. If companies are to rely on remote meetings as a long-term strategy, it’s important to apply some controls. Here are five essential principles to ensure your remote meetings don’t become a joke.

Does your meeting actually warrant a video call? The working world managed perfectly well without video calls for decades – we just made calls.

The telephone is actually a much less distracting, more immediate medium than video conferencing, so if you need to speak to a client or colleague about a matter that really doesn’t require visual support, put the laptop to one side and pick up the phone.

If you do need to hold video meetings, research all the different video conferencing platforms to find one that best suits your needs. And make sure your equipment is up to the job. That applies to your employees too. If you expect them to communicate in this way, give them the equipment and connectivity to do so as effortlessly as possible. Poor bandwidth and slow processors could drive your talent away. 

The pandemic has thrown the spotlight on mental health and the need for managers to check in with their individual team members on a personal level. This is good, but it shouldn’t be mixed with a meeting about sales strategy.

Work meetings are necessary for various purposes: brainstorming, training, appraisals, wellbeing… keeping them separate will help to keep them focused and succinct.

Apply an appropriate code of conduct for each type of meeting. For example, you could dress informally and have a cat in the background if you want to chat to an employee about their mental health, whereas more formal work wear and a plain background would be better for their annual appraisal. The same applies to training, team meetings and sales calls. Apply an appropriate level of professionalism and ask all your employees to follow the same code.

A good meeting is a fast meeting. Maintain momentum by structuring your meeting with an agenda and, ideally, a time limit.

Decide in advance who should speak about what and for how long and share the programme ahead of the meeting. There have been some really impressive ‘events’ held on video conferencing platforms in 2020, where there has been a well planned schedule, a variety of interesting speakers and a strict time limit. When structured efficiently, this is a medium that can deliver a lot of valuable content all around the world in a succinct and impactful way.

This relates to point 2 and the code of conduct. As a general rule for all types of remote meeting, all attendees should be expected to arrive on time, as they would in the physical world, dressed appropriately, well prepared and without distractions or disruptions in the background.

Different companies will have different approaches to these standards, but whatever your standards were when everybody worked under one roof, apply them to video meetings too and communicate your expectations and the reasons behind them.

Your people will be much more energised and inspired by a meeting that runs efficiently and ends on time than they will by one that drifts on without direction.

When the meeting is over, cement the value of the time you’ve spent together by writing up a summary with action points and circulating it to all attendees. Concluding your meetings with a summary shows that you’ve been listening, gives recognition for everybody’s attendance and reinforces the sense of purpose and progress that every meeting should have, whatever its purpose may be.

These principles have been standard business meeting practice for years, but they have become widely neglected, especially amid the anarchy of the remote working boom. It’s time to get organised again. We have the technology – don’t let it run away with you.

5 ways to enhance the remote meeting experience

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, is nothing if not realistic. In his endeavour to keep the Facebook family forever striving to break new ground and avoid resting on their laurels, he is quoted as having said, “If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.”

Every business should take heed, especially the big ones. Nothing lasts forever, no matter how huge and successful. Just ask Nokia.

It’s very tempting to leave a successful business alone, not to try and fix what isn’t broken. But ever since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, that approach has left behind big casualties that failed to recognise or respond to the harbingers of disruption.

The game changer today is the Internet of Things (IoT) and its powerful alliance with artificial intelligence (AI). Data collection and data analysis, all taking place without the need for human intervention. Is your business ready for this?

Here are three questions business leaders should be asking in order to preserve the longevity of their brands.

Digital technology has changed customer expectations in many industries, notably retail, healthcare and banking. In each case this has brought about something of an existential crisis. Why do people need shops any more?

It’s important to examine the services you provide and ask yourself, “Do people still need this? And if they don’t, what is it they do need?”

Look beyond what you provide to the end benefit that it enables. A bank, for example, will provide mortgages and car loans but are these what their customers really want? No. What they really want is homes and cars. In fact, you could go further. While some customers want cars for the aesthetics and status that they bring, others just want to get from A to B.

So how can your company satisfy that need.

Q2: How could digital tech improve what we do now?

Retail has pioneered the use of the IoT and AI to enhance the customer experience and meet the increasing expectations of consumers. With Amazon blazing the trail, retailers have been quick to recognise the value of customer behavioural data and use it to target customers with surgical precision.

Before you think about using the IoT to collect new data, take a look at the data you already hold. Most businesses are sitting on a goldmine of customer data that they’re not exploiting. How can you apply AI to the data you hold – within the boundaries of data privacy, of course – to improve your targeting and enhance your customer experience?

What the IoT adds to this is fresh data in real-time, enabling you to respond in a very agile manner by adjusting your offering to quickly meeting changes in demand. This technology is proving very beneficial in logistics, where companies can stay very competitive by monitoring a range of factors such as traffic, import/export tariffs and driver data to find the best routes and prices for their customers at any given time.

Q3: How could we embrace digital to move into new markets?

Historically, businesses have tended to stick to their niche because the cost of moving into new, uncharted sectors was prohibitive. But the first wave of digital disruption showed us a different way, when small startups tore up the market by bringing ideas quickly and cost-effectively to market.

This has changed the way brands should define themselves. Look at what you’re good at, rather than what you do. A healthcare provider, for example, might see itself as an institution that tends to the sick. But another way of looking at it would be as a brand that’s really good at customer service, has the trust of its users, employs proven experts, is recognised as caring etc etc. Now, how can these strengths be applied to expand your offering? And how can digital technology enable that?

You could start providing health insurance, for example. With a trusted brand and established expertise, it wouldn’t be hard to sell. And by using IoT and AI to streamline the healthcare service you provide, and thus the cost, one part of the business will benefit the other.

While your business is thriving is the time to start thinking about its destruction. Why? Because that’s when you have the resources, the confidence and the brand equity to explore new ideas. Define what customers need most, identify how your core strengths as a business can meet those needs and make data your ally in delivering a service that is truly revolutionary.

Intelligent disruption: using IT to break and improve

Whether or not you subscribe to the dystopian vision of machines replacing the entire human workforce, and however far away you think that might be, employers can befriend artificial intelligence right now to enhance their human workforce.

The traditional CV, showing educational qualifications and work experience, is becoming an anachronism. “The big gap,” says Nick Boothroyd, co-founder of UK-based employability startup Naturally Talented Me, “is the personality, behaviour and attitude behind the written word. And that is precisely what many employers are seeking: that spark of individuality that will light up their brand and deliver amazing results time after time.”

“We can train many of the ‘skills’ that we need in our non-executive roles but we can’t significantly change natural talent and we certainly can’t change personality in any reliable way. So employers need a new way of assessing candidates that identifies those personality, behaviour and attitude skills, such as empathy, attention to detail, teamwork, reliability and independence.”

“These are the talents that will wow customers, engage work colleagues and boost brands through positive interactions.”

Hobbies and interests are often omitted from CVs, or at best represent an afterthought, not considered particularly relevant to employability. But this is the section Boothroyd, who has held senior recruitment roles at Rank Group, Merlin Entertainments, Prezzo and The Body Shop, looks at first. Why? “Because it is, in part, what people choose to do voluntarily that gives an insight into their true motivations and passions, and hence their natural talents.”

Naturally Talented Me uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help job seekers identify their own natural talents from their hobbies and interests, and then helps employers to find people with the talents they need. The AI is learning all the time from the inputs of new candidates and the requests of new employers, and thus the process of matching candidates with job roles is becoming more and more accurate.

Saving the time and cost of pre-screening

Recruitment is a major cost for employers. Paying an agency to pre-screen candidates can cost thousands of dollars per placement, or if you do it in-house, the cost in hours can be even more.

Some jobs attract hundreds of applicants, many of who will be wildly unsuitable. For companies that fill hundreds of roles every year, this can amount to millions being spent with very little to show for it.

AI can save that cost. Recruiters can train the algorithm not only to recognise the required qualifications, but also to check for natural talents and even conduct interviews. Robot Vera is a Russian AI recruitment solution, which can be programmed to call candidates and interview them. She has proven effective at recruiting some highly qualified personnel, including software engineers and even doctors.

Concerns over how job seekers would respond to being interviewed by a robot have proven unfounded. Nobody has put the phone down on Robot Vera; in fact, for many candidates the use of AI gives a positive impression of the employer, as forward-looking and innovative.

By the time you get down to your shortlist of most suitable applicants, you might want to test them with some hypothetical scenarios, to see how they respond. You can do this by talking them through the scenario and asking them to describe what they would do – not very realistic or informative; you can take them on for a trial to see them in action – time consuming and inefficient; or you can create virtual scenarios using virtual reality (VR), instantly placing them in a very realistic predicament where you can observe their reaction there and then.

Lloyds Banking Group was one of the pioneers of VR in its recruitment process back in 2017. VR allows employers to present candidates with computer-generated environments and challenges that could never have been recreated in a traditional interview. The benefit works both ways: the employer gets a clear idea of the talent they’re taking on and the candidate gets a better idea of job their walking into.

Recruitment is an area of business that can benefit enormously from AI. It can take care of the high-volume, low return, mundane processes like pre-screening, operating at many times the speed of a human and working 24/7, 365 days a year at no extra cost. It can also help in the highly specialised processes of talent identification and candidate interviews.

As the world of work adapts to the need for new talents to work alongside AI, AI holds the key to finding the human talent employers need.

How AI can help you recruit your future workforce ?

Blockchain has been around long enough now for most businesses to have started considering whether they should be using it and how.

As with all new technology, when something is spoken about as much as blockchain is, it creates a feeling of paranoia among those who aren’t yet at the party. It’s important, however, to remember that this technology is a tool for getting a certain type of job done – and if you don’t need that type of job done, you don’t need the tool.

In this article, we give an overview of the types of jobs that blockchain is being used for. The idea is that you draw your own conclusions about whether or not it could be useful for you. First, though, let’s try to clarify what blockchain is and how it works.

Blockchain explained – the short version

Blockchain is a virtually tamper-proof method of storing and sharing information. It is, as the name suggests, a chain of digital blocks, each one containing a piece of data, a unique code and a copy of the unique code belonging to the block before it in the chain. If somebody tampers with the data in one block, it changes its unique code, which creates a disagreement with the code stored in the next block and raises a red flag.

With the traditional method for keeping records in a central location, such as a Government office, it might be the responsibility of one or two people to pick up any red flags and investigate. With blockchain, validation is decentralised, spread around an online peer-to-peer network of devices (known as nodes), which all get notified of any changes in the chain and must verify it before it can pass.

New blocks are created by ‘miners’, who are paid for each new block they create. To create a new block (mining), a miner is presented with a mathematical problem (hash) that is hugely complex to solve, yet very simple to validate. Solving the problem requires vast computing power, which makes it effectively unprofitable to try to hack the system. The solution to the hash becomes the unique code (has output) for the new block. Nodes quickly validate the hash output and give consensus, enabling the new block to join the chain.

Because of blockchain’s decentralised structure, there can be no single point of failure, nor can a blockchain be censored. It is a neutral, borderless, secure technology that mitigates against human error and cuts through a lot of red tape, thus speeding up processes and reducing costs.

Some of the more obvious applications of blockchain include the transfer of cryptocurrency across borders, streamlining record-keeping, protecting intellectual property and securing personal information. It’s easy to see how applications like this benefit from the added security, efficiency and accessibility of being decentralised and automated. They are proving particularly useful in sectors like Financial Services, Logistics, Media, Medical and Government, which have all seen innovative adoption of the technology.

Governments, for example, can combat vote rigging and empower higher turn-outs at elections by storing voter details on a blockchain and using it to enable secure voting from personal devices. Logistics companies can streamline their supply chain by placing all transit records on a blockchain to identify patterns and avoid duplications and anomalies in the system.

Protecting businesses with Smart contracts

Putting contracts on a blockchain turns them from a piece of paper into a set of rules that are enforced in real-time. Rather than having to dig out the piece of paper and hire a lawyer when agreements break down, smart contracts keep all parties accountable and compliant all the time, avoiding contractual disputes and saving time and money.

Smart contracts are proving useful across multiple sectors, from the sharing of patient medical information to real estate title registrations to the tracing and collecting of artist royalties. The smart contract is one application of blockchain that looks likely to be adopted across the board as a business norm in the not-too-distant future.

The billions of connected devices in our homes and work places, known as the Internet of Things (IoT), are all data points, feeding vast volumes of data into centralised artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which then analyse the data and trigger actions. A simple example is your Amazon Alexa device, which collects a record of the songs you’ve asked it to play and uses this to suggest other songs that you may want to listen to.

This is what we love about AI: its ability to take the initiative and enhance our lives with new information that would have taken us a lot of time and effort to research. But there is an innate suspicion of AI too. Who told the algorithm that because I like the Clash I’ll probably like Iggy Pop too? What if it was Iggy’s record company?

Now apply this thinking to healthcare. As Telehealth becomes more and more prevalent and doctors use algorithms to source remedies for our ailments, how do we know that the algorithm hasn’t been ‘trained’ by a certain pharmaceutical company with a vested interested in peddling a certain drug? As long as AI remains centralised, with the data owned by individual companies, there will be a problem establishing trust.

Blockchain can deliver the trust that AI and the IoT currently lack in two ways: firstly, by giving individuals the ability to control which of their data can be shared and which cannot; secondly, by tracking the provenance of every decision served up by AI.

There is already a legal requirement written into the European Union’s GDPR for any decision made by a machine to be explainable, with massive fines for non-compliance. Given the complexity of the decisions that AI is making and will increasingly make in future, blockchain could be the only way to keep up with such explanations.

In the context of the data gold rush that is happening now, the idea of giving power back to individuals may seem counterintuitive. But every business knows the importance of trust in building the customer relationship and there is already a growing suspicion among consumers that Big Data is out of control.

Some companies have made billions of dollars from the exploitation of customer data and others will do so in the coming years, but as with every gold rush, the pioneers are soon followed by the regulators and the protection of the individual becomes paramount. Blockchain will enable individuals to reclaim their privacy – and facilitating that freedom could well be big business.

Some of the more obvious applications of blockchain include the transfer of cryptocurrency across borders, streamlining record-keeping, protecting intellectual property and securing personal information. It’s easy to see how applications like this benefit from the added security, efficiency and accessibility of being decentralised and automated.

What could blockchain do for your business?

Facing reality – how can AR and VR take your business to new realms?Any business with an eye on the future will be contemplating this question: how can we embrace augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)?

Before you can really explore the possibilities, however, it’s important to be clear about what AR and VR do. After all, clarity is what this technology is all about.

AR is a real-time view of the world around you, overlaid with computer-generated add-ons that look, sound, feel, smell and possibly even taste as if they are really there. The computer literally augments reality by adding to, subtracting from or simply altering what we perceive around us.

For example, you want to decorate your living room in a new colour. You look through the colour charts, buy a few match pots, paint some sample patches on the walls and try to imagine what it will look like with the whole room done.

With AR you can take out the guesswork. Simply hold up your device to video the room and ask your AR paint sampler app to overlay colours on the walls. The tech will take into account light and shadows in the room, giving a realistic impression of what the finished effect will look like in any given colour and saving you the time, expense and annoyance of getting it wrong first time.

Another application of AR that is growing in popularity is indoor navigation. We’ve been used to satnavs showing us where to go in our cars for years, but what about finding your way around an unfamiliar building? An airport, for example. You’ve got 10 minutes to catch your plane but you need to buy sunglasses.

AR apps enable you to use your device as an indoor navigation tool, showing the building that you see around you with overlaid directions, route maps, estimated journey times and information about the facilities, such as shops selling sunglasses. Rather than rushing around like a headless chicken and missing your flight, you can relax, buy your sunglasses and step on board as cool as a cucumber.

VR takes the computer-generated factor a step further, creating a perceived environment that isn’t there at all, through the manipulation of the senses. Video headsets, sensory gloves, soundtracks, odour sprays and artificial flavourings can all combine to create a wholly make-believe world that feels very real indeed.

With VR, you can make a person believe they are going over Niagara Falls in a barrel when in reality they’re lying in a hotel bed. Or, as in the film Total Recall, believe that they’ve been cast out onto the surface of Mars when in reality they’re strapped to a gurney in a reform institution. Or are they?

A natural application for VR is gaming. If you want a complete escape from reality into a world of shoot-em-ups and car chases, or even mythical monsters, don the headset and dive into the full immersive experience. Just make sure there’s no-one within arm’s reach when you’re wielding that axe!

Gaming, decorating and finding your way around may not be the most essential use cases for new technology, but they help to grasp the essence of what AR and VR can do. With a little imagination, you can start thinking of ways to use this capability in a more valuable business setting.

Much has been written about the use of AR in retail, for example, to enhance the customer experience by giving real-time information about the items they’re browsing in-store. The use of AR and VR in the military is also well documented, helping to identify friend from foe, to navigate and to strike with greater precision. But in order to imagine practical uses of this technology in your business, you need to think beyond shopping and warfare. To get you started, here are some more examples of how AR and VR are being applied today.

VR is being used as an educational tool, enabling trainee doctors and surgeons, for example, to simulate operations and practise treatments in a very real way. But it has also proven effective in the treatment of patients, particularly as a distraction from pain. Burns victims, cancer patients and birthing mothers, for example, have shown positive responses to the distractions provided by VR, and this has extended into mental health, where the technology has proven beneficial in the treatment of PTSD and phobias.

Could you use VR to train your employees or alleviate an anxiety for your customers?

The business world has embraced remote working, yet a common complaint is that online meetings are a poor substitute for everyone being in one room together. Networking software developers including Microsoft and Cisco Systems are working on remote conferencing tools that use AR to augment the home setting to resemble a meeting room, common to all participants, in which every member of the team is recreated as a digital twin and represented as a hologram.

Could you use AR to enhance the way your teams collaborate, or deliver their services to customers?

You’ve probably experienced a job interview, either as candidate or hirer, in which the interviewee is presented with a hypothetical scenario and asked how they would respond. With VR, you can create that scenario and see how the candidate responds. Lloyds Banking Group started using VR in its recruitment process in 2017, and now present candidates with computer-generated environments and puzzles that could never have been recreated in a traditional interview. This not only gives Lloyds a clearer idea of the talent they’re taking on, it also gives the candidate a better idea of the working environment they’re applying for.

Could you use VR to give an advanced taste of a service or product you’re trying to sell?

From sketches to wireframes to clay models to CAD drawings, the quest for designers to convincingly visualise  their creative ideas is centuries old. But now a software company in the UK called Sketch is developing a VR design tool that can place automotive designers inside their own computer renderings so they can feel what it’s like to drive! This will take out several stages of the design process, saving huge amounts of time and money and paving the way for some groundbreaking designs.

Could you streamline your processes by using VR to experience your concepts in action?

World famous chefs like Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal have been toying with diners’ senses for years, using a science dubbed ‘molecular gastronomy’ to conjure visual and aromatic illusions that make diners think they’re eating something completely different to what they see. Now an organisation called Project Nourished, which describes itself as “a public benefit platform”, is using VR to take the illusion a step further.

Diners wear a VR headset through which they see, for example, some sushi, and as they bring it to their mouth, an aromatic diffuser sprays the scent of sushi. The result is the diner tastes sushi. But it isn’t sushi, it’s reconstituted seaweed.

The idea is that if a diner can be convinced they’re eating something rare and delicious when, in fact, it’s widely available and nutritious, Project Nourished can tackle the world’s food crisis without spoiling our dining pleasure.

Could you bring about change by turning your products into something they’re not?

AR and VR technology is still in its infancy but, as with all technology, the more it is adopted, the faster the evolution will be. The immersive experience of VR gaming and the informative experience of AR indoor navigation are already impressive enough to light up the synapses with new ideas for ways in which this technology could be applied over the next five, ten, twenty years. When you look to the future, what exactly do you see?

How can AR and VR take your business to new realms?

Facing reality – how can AR and VR take your business to new realms?

Do you know what future IT trends you have to get at work or in personal life? This article will reveal 4 of the biggest IT trends for 2021. 

Today’s technology industry is constantly evolving and very fast in a chain reaction of hurried technological. Technology has become an intrinsic part of life, deeply embedded in how business and people work and live. No matter where you live in the world, you will feel the way new technologies are reshaping your everyday life. So, how do you want your personal and work life to be changed in the year 2021?

Here are 4 top IT trends that your should consider:

As the technology possibilities increase and both companies and people use the technology solutions to a higher extent, the more important is the Cybersecurity getting. Based on the present world pandemic Covid-19, Cypersecurity has become even more important in the priorities of every company. The new world situation has resulted in a huge increase in remote workers, which places new demands for securing the remote workers identities and devices, together with the companies sensible information. The Cybersecurity technology is also constantly evolving in line with hackers, who are becoming smarter and more advanced. According to reports the global Cybersecurity market is currently worth $173 billion in 2020, and are expected to increase to $270 billion in 2026. Jobs in the Cybersecurity are growing 3 times faster than any other jobs in the tech industry; this is indicating the demand is increasing.

A lot of people have tried or heard of Virtual Reality, without having that much knowledge of what augmented reality means. Augmented Reality is becoming more mainstream, while more businesses are started to use it in their operations. Augmented Reality is already extensively used in the gaming industry, while more and more companies are starting to use it. Augmented Reality have a lot of opportunities for companies, example on solutions that allow consumers to visualize products and imagine what it might feel like to own the product or experience the service before actually purchasing it. And as the world adjusts the new limitations coursed of the pandemic, Augmented Reality may have a bigger role in the everyday interactions.

Artificial Intelligence is already a well-used and known phenomenon, which is going to become omnipresent in a lot of technology areas in our everyday lives. Experts expect that 2021 is going to be the year where use of Artificial Intelligence is going to grow exponentially, and feature within nearly all tech services and products. A big advantage of using the Artificial Intelligence is also the availability to predict assess risks and maintenance, which the technology already is used widely for. Artificial Intelligence is set to transform working patterns, lifestyles, create enormous wealth and global productivity. The research firm Gartner expects the global Artificial Intelligence will create $2.9 trillion of business value and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity globally, which gives an indication of the demand for this IT trend.

Cloud computing and the cloud are no longer an emerging technology, but instead and omnipotent part of everyday life, where Edge Computing is the next big leap forward. Edge computing is a concept that is from the telecom and mobile sector and has now quickly spread to almost all industries. Edge computing is a networking philosophy concentrated on bringing computing as close to the source of data as possible. Compared to the cloud, the Edge computing is significantly more advanced while using it, it bypassing the latency that is present when using cloud computing.

Do you know what future IT trends you have to get at work or in personal life? This article will reveal 4 of the biggest IT trends for 2021.

Trends in IT 2021

Back in 1949, an American mathematician named Claude Shannon published a paper entitled ‘Programming a Computer for Playing Chess’. It was a landmark paper and, if you’re really interested in algorithms, you can find it on the internet, but you don’t need to read it to understand its significance. The point about Shannon’s paper is that it shows that there is nothing new in the concept of teaching computers to learn for themselves – not only to execute complex calculations but to learn and improve as they do so.

Machine learning has been around for decades. In 1997 an IBM computer named Deep Blue vindicated Shannon’s proposition by beating World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov at his own game. Because of the cost of data storage and slow processing speeds, however, machine learning was slow to make much impression beyond the fields of sci-fi and chess.

Times have changed. Large quantities of data are readily available to businesses of all sizes and you don’t need a computer the size of a house to process it. So how could machine learning benefit your business?

Today we are surrounded by applications of machine learning. Here are some examples:

Ever feel like your computer knows you better than you know yourself? Those uncanny shopping suggestions that pop up from Amazon are the fruits of a machine learning about your tastes and buying habits. Every time you browse or buy, the computer takes note of what you’re looking at, where you go next, what actions you take etc and formulates an increasingly accurate understanding of your behaviour. A human could shadow you for a while and come to similar conclusions, but the Amazon algorithms are doing this in seconds for millions of transactions every day and the learning curve is exponential.

The future of transport is unwritten but it’s fair to say that the way we get around today is stupidly inefficient compared to what the future holds. Machine learning is helping to manage traffic, making rapid calculations and applying fresh learnings from constantly updating data sources to apply controls that keep the lines flowing. Logistics companies are using machine learning to calculate the optimum transit routes for their customers’ goods at any given time. And self-drive technology, which uses machine learning to enable a vehicle to plan its own movement according to its position and what’s around it, is being applied in aviation, shipping and autonomous cars like the Google Waymo.

Machine learning is being applied across the healthcare spectrum, from the management of patient flows in hospitals to the assessment of patients’ conditions and more accurate diagnoses. Doctors make their diagnoses by assessing the symptoms, gathering historical information and observing patient responses to certain tests. But they are still reliant on their scope of knowledge, which can never be comprehensive. A computer trained with the same information can scan a far greater range of possible causes and provide doctors with suggestions that they might never have considered.

The banking industry is using machine learning to identify patterns in customer behaviour which can be used to provide an early warning against fraudulent transactions. These patterns become increasingly sophisticated each time a transaction is challenged and the machine learns from the outcome. As a result, the machine can identify when an anomaly fits with a particular customer’s behaviour and thus reduce the number of false positives. At the investment end of banking, machine learning is used to calculate risk and identify opportunities.

Similar to the way Amazon presents you with shopping suggestions, Netflix, Pandora and other entertainment platforms have been using machine learning for several years to gauge customers’ viewing and listening tastes and offer suggestions accordingly. The devices we use to access these platforms, such as Amazon Echo, are also examples of machine learning. Every time you ask a question and follow it up with a decision, the machine learns something new about your tastes and behaviour and becomes better at catering for your needs.

How to make machine learning work for you

Ever feel like your computer knows you better than you know yourself? Those uncanny shopping suggestions that pop up from Amazon are the fruits of a machine learning about your tastes and buying habits.

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