David Gentle, Fujitsu, speaks on Entering the New Tech Era
David Gentle, Director of Foresight at Fujitsu spoke at a breakfast event this week organised by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce. His talk, which was part of Dublin Chamber’s SMART series, was entitled Entering the New Tech Era and looked at how technology is enabling businesses to operate in new ways.
David spoke about the ripples new technology creates in society, how it can begin with a period of disruption which levels out into a period of maturity and ultimately brings about societal value. Previously we have experienced a computer-centric era that improved productivity, then we moved to a network-centric era that transformed business processes and we are now entering a human-centric era that has the current mega trends in the ICT sector at its core: cloud computing, mobile technologies, social and big data.
He explained how the time for innovation is now: access to technology has never been easier and the amount of ways to share and consume information is growing rapidly. This has reduced the cost for innovation. He mentioned the app, Halo, as an example of how technology can boost creativity and help invent products and services that were inconceivable a few years ago.
Following David’s talk, there was a panel discussion with Johnny Ryan from the Irish Times (celebrating 20 years online!) and Noel Rush from ESB Networks. The panel discussion looked at the question du jour; should we be concerned about privacy online both for ourselves and for the next generation? Well, maybe when we reach this era’s period of maturity we'll have answered this question.
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