It has been a strange year all told. Ignoring the medical and political stuff that has trundled us through this year.
Work From Home and Zoom
By far the biggest shocker was the ability to work from home and how important decent Internet is to be able to communicate with work colleagues as well as friends and family over Zoom.
Skype used to be the video call tool for businesses, but that is now the has-been when you can can have a 1 to 1 over your computer, mobile or tablet in Zoom from a single app without having to know their number or Skype name, you just set up a meeting and give out the link.
Raspberry Pi
Perhaps the most shocking in the Raspberry Pi world was the desktop ready version 4; the HQ camera and the Pi 400 computer in a keyboard.
Both the Pi 4 and Pi 400 feature the 40 pin GPIO connector, a gateway to another world. HATs (Hardware Attached on Top) are boards that give you whatever you can possibly imagine from audio amplifiers and MIDI interfaces for music fanatics to relay and stepper motor boards. There are even 4G boards that give you an alternative to wifi and bluetooth with GPS.
Apple Silicon
Apple brought out their new iPhone SE 2020, the next generation lower cost phone and released the A14 processor for it’s iPads and iPhone 12 family.
Apple went one better and released the M1 processor with 8 CPU, 8GPU and 8 Neural processors in one chip to replace their desktop and laptop Intel machines.
Intel 10th Generation processor
Intel released their 10th generation processor with built in h265 codec support which means it’s easier to encode video into a higher quality but smaller file size than the previous h264 compression.
Fraunhofer unveiled h266
VVC or h266 codec was unveiled this year to give a 50% improvement in efficiency over h265. This means that a video encoded in h266 will take up less bandwidth when streamed, which means better quality video over lower speed connections.
Circulose
Circulose is a revolutionary process introduced in 2020 to divert cotton from landfill back into clothes. The technology is being used by Levi to create a partly recycled pair of jeans they call Wellthread™
Innovation in fuel cell technology using urine
Researchers from the University of the West of England in Bristol have developed the Urine-tricity project Pee Power, a special fuel cell that runs on urine and produces electricity to provide safer toilet facilities at an all girl’s school in Uganda. Not only does illuminating the toilets help pupils feel safer after dark; make it easier for girls to see dangerous creatures in and around the cubicles as well as deter male intruders.
Funny conclusion
Telenor‘s (Norway’s Telecom company) Tech Trends for 2020 never happened. Absolutely every one was so wide of the mark, it makes me wonder what their trends for 2021 will be like. Nobody would have predicted the US election to be such a record breaker in many ways.
