Info Tech Inc

As we race into 2020, the experts are making a host of technology predictions for the new year. Here are a few of the most newsworthy:

Facebook will reverse itself on its disinformation and fake news policy. Politicians and hate mongers love how much they can lie on FB and get away with it. Not so, the general public. The backlash is growing stronger and in 2020 the pundits say the company will be compelled to reverse its hands-off policy and hire real, live, fact checkers to comb through the billions of posts put up each day. They’ll have algorithms to help them, of course.

Metrics will keep disappearing. Instagram ditched ‘likes’ earlier this year, to keep a lid on outrageous stunts that have led to actual physical injury. Other social media platforms are keeping a close eye on how that pans out for Instagram. If it looks good, you can expect Twitter and Facebook, among others, to do the same thing.

And last, but not least, news aggregators will become more human. Literally. The algorithms that pulled up the daily news this past year have not performed as well as expected, and social media platforms are frantically scrambling to bring back the human touch to selecting and editing news stories for their sites. Could be a big boost in Silicon Valley hiring . . . 

Texting while walking or driving is a relatively new item on America’s health horizon. A few years ago such concern would have seemed pettifogging and strictly the provenance of worry warts. But today, it’s a major concern throughout the country — especially in larger metropolitan areas. Should distracted walking (i.e. walking while texting) be considered dangerous and thus be made illegal? Some cities have already decided it is serious enough to ban, with stiff fines for even the first infraction — such as Rexburg, Idaho, and sunny Honolulu. And there statistics backing up the concern. Last year, reports several prominent newspapers, pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. reached a high point not seen in nearly thirty years. The main of pedestrian casualties was the bigger utility vehicles now being driven . . . and distracted drivers who were too busy texting, or, in some cases, even playing games on their phones, to pay attention to what was in front of them. 

Modern communication technology has spawned the smartphone, which in turn has spawned smartphone addiction in some people. Those who have demanding, deadline-driven careers may need to be on the phone all the time — but those who find they just can’t live without knowing the current temperature, how their favorite team is doing, and checking for likes on Facebook, are now considered to be clinically addicted; they are the ones most likely to become victims of distracted texting or driving.

It’s reported that Uber, the ride hailing company, is in deep discussions with an Indian company to auction off its food delivery arm in the Indian subcontinent. Inside sources say the sale is becoming urgent as the Indian food-slinging arm of the company continues to hemorrhage cash. If all goes as planned, Uber will sell its Uber Eats India to a native food delivery service named Zomato. While everything about the pending sale is very hush-hush, anonymous sources inside the company say that the sale could be completed by as early as the end of this week.

Uber Eats India is valued at around $400 million.

The chief executive of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, is attempting to cut back on money-draining parts of the company to show investors that it is still a very profitable proposition. Many investors have been complaining, both in public meetings and behind closed doors, that Uber needs to reconfigure its balance sheet since going public six months ago.

Their initial public offering this past spring was not a howling success, as investors began queuing up to ask about why the company was not on a solid footing yet when it came to profit margins. The whisper on Wall Street today is that Uber is underfunded and overextended, and needs severe pruning to get back on top of the game. 

The debate is far from over, but more and more education professionals and college professors are changing their minds about the distractions of mobile devices in the classrooms. In other words, many educators are beginning to think that smartphones, tablets, and laptops may not be the irritating bugaboo that they once thought they were. That’s because it’s becoming clearer that when used strategically and under some kind of structured control, these devices help students with autism, dyslexia, and those whose first language is not English, to engage at a higher level and retain more information for longer periods of time. Test score results in classrooms where disciplined screen time is a regular feature show a steady climb above classrooms where there is little or no permissible screen time. This, in turn, is encouraging educators to explore further uses of online media to keep students on the fast track as they get ready to face the real world of jobs, relationships, and emotional and physical fitness.  

Professional educators, for the most part, now realize that while students rarely, if ever, would look something up in the dictionary or encyclopedia back in the analog era, today they are quick to go online to look up words, formulas, and even brief histories.

Consumers in China are beginning to lose interest in iPhones as the year draws to an end, according to analysts at the Swiss banking and finance giant Credit Suisse.

Shipments of iPhones in China have dropped by over 35 percent in November, compared to last year at the same time, is what the Credit Suisse analysts said in a report yesterday, in spite of a very slight increase within the smartphone market in China concurrently. The report from Credit Suisse says that sales of iPhones in China declined a little over ten percent during the past 2, starting in October. This kind of percentage drop is having a chilling effect on product placement, not only in China but throughout all of Southeast Asia.

Since the Chinese launch of the current iPhone 11 family, shipments in the country are down a total of 7.4 percent compared to a year ago, is what the Credit Suisse experts are saying; they’re analysis states that during the fall of this year the revenue from iPhone sales fell by over 17 percent as compared to last year’s sales. 

Another worrying trend that Credit Suisse mentioned in their recent report is that the continuing tariff wars with the United States is causing moderate to large operating losses to the communications industry in China.