Which technology products have influenced you in 2016?

2016 was a turbulent year for the technology industry, with Samsung Note 7 exploding and Apple phone battery problems. 2016 was a cold winter for the technology industry, with fresh food e-commerce and P2P companies frequently running away and the VR industry being cold. But at the same time, some technology products are quietly affecting our lives and are even gradually becoming a part of our lives.

The rapid growth of shared bicycles has given rise to new options for the last mile of travel

Open the mobile app, enter the vehicle license plate number or scan the QR code, and you can ride a bicycle for 1 yuan or even less, and park it on the roadside when you are done. This was unimaginable before 2016.

After Mobike landed in Shanghai in April and entered Beijing in August, ofo also officially stepped out of the campus in October, setting off an "orange and yellow" showdown on the road. Although both companies are shared bicycles, their development paths are very different.

Mobike manufactures its own bicycles, integrating high-tech means such as GPS, explosion-proof tires, and shaft transmission. At the same time, Mobike is also very low-key, with almost no advertisements. Ofo is much more high-profile, with its billboards in many subway stations in Beijing. The bicycles are manufactured by old bicycle factories and are secured by password locks.

Illegal parking and private storage of cars seem to have become a common problem in this industry. Apart from Mobike, which can monitor through GPS, the industry can only rely on user feedback. In the future, efforts from all parties will be needed to maintain the healthy development of the industry.

The financing of shared bikes is even crazier. In less than half a year (from August 2016 to now), Mobike has completed 5 rounds of financing, receiving investments from Tencent , Sinovation Ventures, etc., and ofo has also completed 4 rounds of financing, receiving investments from Didi Chuxing, etc. In the second half of 2016, the total financing amount of shared bikes exceeded RMB 3 billion, with as many as 30 investors entering the market.

Someone once said that shared bicycles would not survive this winter, but now they seem to be doing well, and the number of players is gradually increasing. The colors of vehicles from Xiaoming, Youbai, Qibei, Xiaolan, etc. have formed a rainbow.

Is the demand for bicycles really that great? Is this an oversupplied industry? Will small players be eliminated? I believe that as time goes by, we will gradually get the answer. At least, shared bicycles have proven their ability to influence people's lives in 2016. Their emergence has provided new options for the last kilometer of travel.

In the first year of online live streaming, nearly half of netizens use it

2016 is known as the first year of online live streaming, and it also ignited the phenomenon of the internet celebrity economy. People can not only get "close" to celebrities during live broadcasts and watch experts play games, but also experience the news scene firsthand.

According to the 39th report of CNNIC, as of December 2016, the number of online live broadcast users reached 344 million, accounting for 47.1% of the total number of netizens. In other words, nearly half of the netizens use online live broadcast.

As the attention continues to increase, the dark side of the live broadcast industry has also been repeatedly exposed by the media. Sina Technology once found that after 10 o'clock in the evening, the female anchors of the Miss live broadcast platform wore seductive clothes, exposed their sensitive parts, and chatted with the audience in front of the camera, asking for gifts from netizens, etc. Not only that, when you open the mobile app market and search for the word "live broadcast", you will find very explicit names of software such as "Papa Show" and "Chuang Chat", and some software are directly marked with the words "Adult Live Dating".

QuestMobile data shows that online live streaming apps experience four small usage peaks at 17:00, 19:00, 22:00 and 0:00, among which the peak at 22:00 accounts for more than 10% and the peak at 0:00 accounts for more than 8%, making them the two time periods with the most concentrated user usage.

On November 14, 2016, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued the "Internet Live Broadcasting Service Management Regulations", which stipulates that live broadcasts should be authenticated by real names, and news broadcasts must have "double qualifications", requiring users of Internet live broadcast services not to use Internet live broadcast services to spread pornography and other activities prohibited by laws and regulations. This is undoubtedly a "boost" to rectify the chaos of online live broadcasts.

According to incomplete statistics, there are more than 300 companies providing Internet live broadcast platform services in China, and the number is still growing. However, as industry supervision becomes stricter and user habits gradually form, the reshuffle of the live broadcast industry will accelerate.

Voice recognition is so popular, will shorthands lose their jobs?

On the evening of October 18, Smartisan released its new M1 smartphone series, and Luo Yonghao popularized the iFlytek input method. Luo Yonghao gave a few speeches for live demonstration, and iFlytek performed high-accuracy text conversion at an extremely fast speed, which made it a hot topic on WeChat Moments.

Of course, this is not the first time that iFlytek has appeared in people's vision. As early as 2008, iFlytek was listed and is committed to using neural networks in various aspects of speech and language, such as speech synthesis, language recognition, language identification, natural language processing, etc. At the 2016 C+ Summit, every word of iFlytek's rotating president Hu Yu was displayed on the screen in real time, which amazed everyone.

Voice recognition sounds far away, but in fact, there is such a function in WeChat. I believe everyone has used voice-to-text. When you can't hear the voice, you can convert it into text through machine voice recognition, but the accuracy of this conversion is really not high.

In addition to being able to convert spoken words into text, iFLYTEK has also launched a feature called Quick Listening. By inputting text and selecting a reader, you can turn what you want to say into the voice of Luo Yonghao, Obama and others and send it out.

At the Artificial Intelligence Frontier Summit held recently, Jeff Dean, a senior researcher at Google , said that Google has reduced the error rate of speech recognition by more than 30% since 2012. With the development of AI, speech recognition technology has become more mature.

On the stage of the fourth season of The Brain, Baidu 's artificial intelligence tied with the hearing prodigy Sun Yiting. Although the accuracy of both was not high, it also showed us the possibility of artificial intelligence, especially under extremely harsh conditions. In the future, will the accuracy and speed of artificial intelligence be significantly higher than shorthand in normal speaking?

AR industry explodes, AR becomes the protagonist in Spring Festival red envelope war

"Pokemon Go" undoubtedly made people discover another possibility of AR. It turns out that it is not just limited to early education cards. Anyone who picks up a mobile phone can feel the distance between virtual and reality.

Although this game is not yet available in most parts of the country, Alibaba and Tencent, which claimed that they did not plan to continue the red envelope war, have launched AR red envelopes, allowing the red envelope war to continue through AR.

Of course, red envelopes are just the most intuitive display. In addition, the recently launched scanning of Tmall supermarket express boxes and the "sweeping summons" in Onmyoji both use this technology.

At the end of 2016, Google and Lenovo jointly launched the first Tango phone, Lenovo PHAB2 PRO. Although it is not yet the killer device expected by mobile AR, it has explored a new path for the upgrade and iteration of mobile phones.

In 2016, when the VR market was cold and MR had not yet blossomed, AR emerged as a new force, but it is still in its infancy and seems to be open to everyone. Where will the AR industry go when the new trend fades and subsidies are reduced?

Facial recognition AI wins out, train stations also use it for entry

In the fourth season of The Brain, two facial recognition competitions have been held between man and machine, and both times AI won. Even Wang Yuheng, the water brother who could distinguish the subtle features of a bowl of water, was defeated.

Artificial intelligence is not that scary. Instead, it has brought some welcome changes to our lives. During this year's Spring Festival travel rush, some train stations in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen have already adopted "face recognition" to enter the station. The machine will capture the passenger's facial information and compare it with the photo in the ID card chip. If the ticket information matches and the face and ID photo are matched, the gate will automatically release the passenger.

In addition, according to foreign media reports, Apple's new phone has a built-in new laser sensor that can recognize gestures and faces. In the future, you can open your phone by scanning your face.

At present, this technology is now being applied in the fields of government, banking, social welfare, e-commerce, security and defense. Even the college entrance examination work uses the biometric technology of "face recognition + fingerprint recognition" to confirm the identity of candidates and prevent substitution. In the future, traveling around the world with just one face may become a reality.

1. Internet of Things (IoT)

The revenue of IoT platform is growing rapidly, but it is still mainly used in industry. In 2017, IoT may create a new business model. The business model that IoT will create will meet all forms of e-commerce market, vertical market, horizontal market and consumer market. The new business model represented by the shared use of consumer devices will greatly reduce the cost of device owners. But security risks will also expand. (Translated by Zhang Dongyang, International Economic and Technical Cooperation Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology)

2. Blockchain

3. Autonomous driving

At the 2016 World Robot Conference and this year's CES, driverless cars stole the limelight, and will make further breakthroughs in 2017. Foreign media reported that Google's driverless car may be launched before the end of 2017, but the steering wheel and brake accelerator will still be retained.

4. Big Data

Big data has been a big topic for the past five years or so. By collecting large amounts of data, we can help everything from planning better medical treatments to executing better marketing campaigns. But the biggest strength of big data is its numerical basis, which is also a weakness. In 2017, I hope to see more big data that is closer to life.

5. Machine Learning

Machine learning has made some great strides over the past few years, even powering Google’s core search engine algorithm. However, we’ve only seen it in limited applications. In 2017, expect to see machine learning making its way into more consumer applications, gradually improving the user experience. Soon, machine learning will become the “new normal,” an integral part of all kinds of technology.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.