The FINANCIAL — Information technology leaders stand to drive new revenue streams for their businesses by leveraging “context-based services,” an emerging technology trend where real world and digital data are aggregated to understand “who you are, where you are, and what you are doing” to give consumers an “extremely rich experience,” according to a new report from Accenture.
Accenture identifies context-based services as one of six key trends in its Technology Vision 2012, an annual outlook of the most important emerging technology trends that are predicted to have a critical impact on businesses. Accenture has been researching and predicting the future of technology trends for more than a decade.
Accenture predicts that a surge in context-based services is imminent, enabled by the convergence of and easy access to many sources of contextual information, including soaring smartphone usage, the expansion of cloud computing, an explosion of social media participation, and the development of powerful tools for aggregating and analyzing multiple forms of data. A s an example, consider one travel company that scans Twitter accounts in search of mentions about upcoming trips.
It then alerts hotels located in the communities where the traveler is headed. The traveler benefits because the hotel – via Twitter – might offer discounted rates as an enticement. And the hotel benefits by potentially gaining a new customer.
In another example, several mobile phone service providers are experimenting with technology that automatically deactivates phones for motorists, thereby preventing them from violating laws against driving while texting or speaking on the phone.
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