By Alan Coleman on 3 Apr 2018
In the latest edition of Wolfgang Bites, Al dives into the new world of 5G. Expected to fully launch by 2020, 5G will allow us to transfer more data faster than ever before from even more and more devices; which leads to one massive question. From all the tech giants in the world, who is ready to harness the awesome power of 5G and lead the tech world into a new age? This is the Battle of the Internet Giants.
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Which of the internet giants is going to conquer the 5G iteration of the internet? This is a really interesting subject. 5G rolls out in 2020. The promise is that broadband speeds with be 100 times faster. 100 times faster. Dramatically faster. Just before we start jumping into the future and predicting what's going to happen there, let's have a look at the past. Let's have a look at the last two iterations of the Gs. The 3G internet was the birth of the smartphone. All the information in the world is essentially accessible to us all in our pocket. The two internet giants that really prevailed in that iteration of the internet were Apple, who invented the most popular device and Google and who is our window to the world wide web we can access any time, anywhere. 4G internet came along and internet speeds were ramped up, mobile internet speeds were ramped up and there are dramatic implications for e-commerce and online video.
And as a consequence, the two internet giants that really leaped to the forefront or experienced the most growth during the 4G internet were Amazon and Facebook. And this is where we are now, we have these four companies and are four of the biggest companies on planet earth. And as a result of 3G and 4G iterations of the internet. What's going to happen next in this 100 times faster 5G internet? Really, really interesting. First of all, let's define what the predictions are around 5G. Most of the people are talking the internet of kings. What's going to happen when we've got a 100 times more internet speed available to us is we won't just have one device on our body, but we'll actually be interacting with a solar system of connected devices everywhere we go. We'll live in a smart home. We'll travel in a smart car. We'll go to a smart workplace, which is probably in a smart city.
What exactly does smart mean? There are two components to smart for me. One is it's always connected to the internet or to the other devices. And number two is artificial intelligence. It's artificial intelligence enabled. I'll come back to that point shortly. Right now, for me, there are two of the internet giants doing so much better than any of the other when it comes to smart devices when it comes to the internet of things. And therefore, these are the two I'd picked to really dominate the 5G iteration of the internet. And those two are Google and Amazon. If you look at the hardware and the Google Home and the Amazon Alexa have both shipped more than tens of millions of devices each. And perhaps the bigger opportunity is software. Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are really far superior to Siri or any of the other alternatives. And the amazing thing about ... And for example, with Alexa, any device that has a mike, that has a speaker and is connected to the internet can actually run Alexa.
And you can see Amazon wants all your connected devices to be running Alexa. Therefore, they control your IoT solar system. Of the two, I think just one that has for me an unassailable unfair advantage when it comes domination, our future smart world. I mentioned that there are two components to smart, connected and artificial intelligence. And for me, the person who does the best offering of artificial intelligence, the battle is won. They're the ones who are most likely to guide us through our optimized lives, our 5G lives. While on the way to artificial intelligence the most important part of artificial intelligence these days is machine learning. Machine learning is fairly simple. It's like the intelligence is watching. It's lots of data if this, then that and it's learning. Oftentimes it's watching humans interact with data and learning from how they interact.
Who's got the best data? Who's got the biggest data to make the best AI? Amazon has fantastic data on our shopping behaviour. But Google's data goes so much further than that. Google has data on everything we do. And there's a theory out there that Google never even intended on being search engine business. The big play was always to be a machine learning business. Let me just explain that to you. Google's stage of the mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible to everybody. I believe Google's secret mission is to organize the world's information, make it universally accessible to everybody but then measure all of humanity's interactions with that information. That's how machine learning learns. I think Google is positioned to have the unassailable lead when it comes to the intelligence, artificial intelligence through machine learning. And I think they're going to dominate and conquer at the 5G internet. That's today's video. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. I'll be on the #WolfgangBites the next few days looking forward to interacting with you. I hope to see you there. Bye-bye.
