By Rommel Feria At the start of the 2017, I wrote about technologies that I was expecting to be hits for the year. Let’s look back and see which ones were hits, and which were misses. • TV Set-Top Box and Streaming TV My wish came true, Amazon Prime Video is now on the Apple TV! This made Apple TV one of the best platforms available in the market today, with support for Amazon’s collection, Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, SlingTV, DirecTV Now, and more. You can’t get this on other streaming TV devices, e.g., Roku, FireTV/Fire Stick, or Chromecast! Google’s YouTube TV and Hulu with Live TV are gaining more ground this past year. Unfortunately, it is still not available outside of North America. 2018 will see this scene just explode with Disney’s acquisition of Fox, Apple investing in original content for iTunes and Apple Music and supporting Live Sports, Netflix continuing producing original content, and more consumers cutting the cord! • IP-based Messaging 2017 brought us additional emojis, and this will continue in the years to come, as more emojis are added to the standard. This year also brought us AI integration on the messaging platform, specifically interfacing with the personal assistants. Apple brought us Animojis, too — albeit exclusive on the iOS platform’s iMessage. In addition, Apple made Apple Pay Cash on iMessage, their peer-to-peer mobile payment. Mobile payment via messaging is not new, though, we had other platforms capitalize on messaging as the delivery mechanism for financial transactions. • Personal Assistants and Artificial Intelligence As mobile processors continue to become more powerful, the computational complexity of AI is becoming more accessible on mobile devices. 2017 finally, at least for some platforms, brought more processing on device, as opposed to having it on the cloud. This year, Siri became part of Mac OS X High Sierra, too. Sadly, though, I have yet to find a good use case for this. 2018 will see more progress along device-based AI processing, but will all data remain local? That needs to be seen. Personally, though, I highly doubt it. • Voice User Interfaces The Black Friday sale in the US made voice-based devices and speakers affordable! A lot of consumers bought heavily discounted Amazon Echos and Google Homes. Amazon has the first mover advantage, having a wide array of third-party skills. Google just started this 2017, so expect 2018 to get third-party skills pick-up on the Google Home. Apple missed 2017 by failing to launch the HomePod. We will see how this market changes in 2018, with the HomePod becoming a player. • Mixed-Reality Platforms This year, Apple became the largest Augmented Reality (AR) platform in the market, when it released iOS 11, with support starting with the iPhone SE and newer models. The much hyped Magic Leap is still vaporware — maybe 2018 is the year they will finally release a product. Google just recently announced the end of Project Tango, another failed project. It is a good thing that they were able to wrap up the Project Tango software that isn’t dependent on the specialized Tango cameras and sensors, and whipped up the AR Core, a software AR toolkit akin to Apple’s ARKit. 2018 will see more AR applications to be more useful, as compared to just being novelty applications. If the Disney Research demo is any indication, AR artifacts will soon be able to react to your surroundings! Exciting times. • Wearables This year, when you talk wearables, you cannot deny the fact that Apple’s Apple Watch cornered this market. Apple’s move to improve and expand the health features on the Apple Watch will bring more users to its fold. Unfortunately, no other wearable can compete against it at the moment. 2018 will be no different, specially now that Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE sales seem to be doing very well (which means that those who held off previously are considering buying). I wish, though, that there is a worthy competitor to the Apple Watch — competition drives Apple to make the platform better! • Blockchain Towards the end of 2017, Bitcoin exploded, and now more people have an idea what blockchain technology is all about — well, not the really technology, just bitcoin! :) This coming year, this tech will grow considerably, hopefully with applications on other domains becoming more mainstream, e.g., health records. • 2018 This year’s technologies will be no different than this year’s, in my humble opinion. I wish that more emphasis on security and privacy will be the trend in 2018.