7 Technologies That Will Change Your Business

4. Predictive Analytics

The brainier sibling to Business Intelligence, Predictive Analytics (PA) involves collaboration in collecting and merging continuous daily-activity data. Industry guru Eric Siegel, whose 2013 book Predictive Analytics is smart data mining’s Freakonomics, defines the field as “driving operational decisions via many individual per-individual predictions.” In other words: encoding experience.

PA sifts through reams of data to anticipate how individuals will behave in similar circumstances. Doctors, for example, will use data to predict the onset of depression for asymptomatic individuals and prescribe prophylactically. You’ll use PA to better gauge how customers will react when they pick up your product and a competitor’s off the same shelf. You’ll use PA to configure the benefits package you’ll offer your top recruits versus your lesser candidates. PA consultants tap growing quantities of data to help marketers, for example, identify which prospects are open to persuasion versus those who’ve made up their minds. They also help customer-service managers fine-tune solutions, such as when to send an irate customer a part replacement rather than offer a refund.

Using analytics with the help of a BI analytics software, online retailers can deploy “more sophisticated solutions” than discount come-ons to reduce the abandoned-cart syndrome, says consultant Dean Abbott. For example, they can woo walkouts by substituting offers for products recently purchased by “people like themselves.”

Talent Analytics predicts not just who will pass their tests but how many tries a candidate will require, says co-founder Greta Roberts. Expect to see growing industry focus on persuasion rather than prediction. Consultants will earn fees by guiding you in applying the Uplift Model to undecided purchase-decision modalities with variable weighted criteria. (That’s PA-speak for: Convince shoppers to buy your brand, not Brand X.)

5. Smart Dust

Sensors have been around for decades, but recent R&D has advanced the field by emphasizing integration with wireless data-transfer protocols, digitization and other technologies. Packets of microscopically scaled nano-sensors are clustered in mobile pods and used to track environmental data—temperature change, air quality and ambient movement; identify patterns instantaneously; and send data upstream. Smart dust has become a tool of environmental-cleanup specialists, emergency-relief teams, military strategists and oceanographers, as well as energy-efficiency experts and industrial-automation engineers. While currently restricted by limited power capacity, evolving 3G technologies will greatly accelerate data-transmission speeds—making smart dust smarter—and more essential—than ever.

6. Brain-Computer Interfaces

Products that allow the human brain to control a computer without physical movement continue to evolve. John Donoghue’s work at the Brown Institute’s BrainGate project has produced remarkable breakthroughs, such as enabling a completely paralyzed woman with sensor brain implants to use a robotic arm to pour herself a cup of coffee by visualizing the process. Last fall, a research team at Chalmers University of Technology announced the first mind-controlled prosthetic arms that “work in daily life” through computer interface bone implants.

At Colorado State, researchers at the Brain-Computer Interfaces Laboratory have produced a prototype where a user can don a headset and control a small, mobile robot hands-free; real-time instructions are on a pie-menu screen interface. In Brooklyn, New York, two computer scientists used Kickstarter last year to fund Phase I of a populist, open-source brain-computer interface that promises to “give anybody with a computer access to their brainwaves.” They’re back on Kickstarter for Phase II. Look for further entrepreneurial commercialization of recent academic research funded through crowdsourcing platforms.

7. Private Social Networks

The appeal of private social network is not hard to figure out. Compare an exclusive country club with a crowded catering hall. You might be served similar food at both, but not just anyone can walk into the country club. These elite networks offer such lures as greater privacy, ad restrictions and—let us hope—a ban on user-posted videos of cats sliding off tables. Niche social networks like ASmallWorld beckon with exclusive event invitations and the lure of meeting “like-minded people and building long-lasting relationships.”

Elixio is a gated online community (membership to senior business executives by invitation only) that claims over 80,000 members worldwide. Affluence positions itself as the LinkedIn for the corner-office crowd, a self-described “network built around introducing…like-minded individuals all around the world.” Netropolitan Club joined the ranks of private networks in September. Pay its $9,000 induction fee plus annual $3,000 renewal fees and you’re free to socialize virtually in its private, secure and courteous environment, where online decorum is maintained by staff moderators.

Ad-free? Not exactly, but commercial messages are restricted to individual postings; no corporate brands are allowed. Expect more choices of elite networks in the future, including some developed by traditional, high-end hospitality brands.