The Next Big Thing in Megaprojects

 01

The Next Big Thing For 5G Is Happening Now

Besides offering faster speeds, increased reliability, and greater capacity to move more data across more devices than any cellular network before it, what makes 5G so powerful is it allows businesses to reimagine and optimize how they do business. Here are just a few examples of 5G use cases—with many more cutting across industry verticals.

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Better experiences and outcomes in healthcare

Healthcare is one of many industries where bringing information to people instead of having people go to the information can have dramatic impacts on productivity and efficiency.

Today, digital health platforms from companies like Zyter can offer secure and highly-reliable telehealth, home health, and remote patient monitoring to more people in more areas using T-Mobile’s 5G network—which can free up both patients and providers to get more done in their day. 5G also acts as a force multiplier when deployed within healthcare facilities such as T-Mobile’s installation at Miami Veterans Affairs (VA) Healthcare System—untethering doctors and nurses from workstations so they can spend more time treating patients and less time hunting down information. They can view data-intensive files such as imaging results, lab work, and medical charts on portable devices from anywhere in the facility—including their patient’s bedside.

Ultra-capacity 5G enables terabytes of health data to move around healthcare facilities with unheard of speed and reliability, opening up a world of collaboration and machine-to-machine communication that will help save lives and dramatically increase the efficient use of caregivers’ time. And combining 5G with other technologies, like XR headsets, opens up a whole new world of possibilities for medical professionals and their patients. Instead of looking at individual data points in isolation on a series of disconnected charts and images, doctors can use computer-enhanced visualizations, fed by data sources from around a hospital. This will allow doctors to achieve a holistic view of their patients to diagnose conditions and devise treatments more efficiently.

On the other end of the spectrum, 5G-enabled solutions will eventually improve paramedics and first responders’ ability to interact with ER doctors in real-time to deliver critical patient care, whether in the field or in route to the hospital. With 5G-connected ambulances, it becomes easy to imagine an ER physician guiding a paramedic wearing augmented reality goggles to perform a life-saving procedure.

Enabling a paradigm shift in education

Like healthcare, higher education also responded to the massive disruption of the COVID pandemic by enabling students to learn remotely. As colleges and universities transitioned to virtual classrooms, the experience highlighted pervasive challenges—but also universal opportunities.

Fisk University in Nashville worked with HTC VIVE, T-Mobile, and VictoryXR to create an interactive 5G-powered VR human cadaver lab for students in pre-med and biology-related majors. Unable to purchase and store human cadavers before the pandemic due to cost and facilities limitations, Fisk can now not only provide students with immersive lessons but also attract prospective students with an entirely new way of learning.

In the future, the ability to slice the 5G spectrum into dedicated channels aimed at specific data types, geographies, or activities will prove very beneficial to making 5G available across sprawling campuses. Use cases beyond campus walls—for instance, athletic events—could also benefit from network slicing. Different functions such as drones for stadium security and broadcasting the event, point of sale network for vendors, and coaches on the sidelines could all benefit from dedicated network resources provided by 5G networks.

Pre-COVID-19, providing cutting-edge digital experiences like these to students and faculty was not a priority for many institutions—but it is now. According to Aberdeen Strategy & Research, the No. 1 technology to promote student success is 5G, with 83% of respondents to a recent survey of higher ed institutions saying 5G is very or extremely important to their IT modernization plans.

These institutions need to retire aging and redundant wireline infrastructure, develop exciting new digital services for students and faculty, and attract Industry 4.0 research dollars. They also need to entice new students with interactive campus environments that facilitate continuous learning using XR technologies. Immersive, 5G-powered XR solutions make it possible to re-envision the classroom from a place you go to an experience you can embrace anywhere. By combining 5G with other high-speed networking technologies such as Wi-Fi 6, colleges and universities will be able to disrupt thousands of years of linear knowledge transfer from teacher to student—instead, creating immersive, experientially-driven learning that engages students as active participants.

How Manufacturers, field services, and construction benefit from 5G

5G-enabled XR technologies are being used today by field technicians to troubleshoot equipment problems, perform routine maintenance, and quickly train new hires. A real-time, live-feed option allows a supervisor to see what the technician sees so they can guide them through unfamiliar processes and help solve problems without having to be anywhere near the job site.

For instance, 5G is poised to make construction robots more versatile and useful. Currently, Sarcos’ Guardian XT lines of humanoid robots are controlled by operators connected via wires. Initially, 5G will be used by human operators for remote viewing. But in time, 5G will remove the need for operators to be anywhere near the robots they control. These robots will then be able to handle higher-risk activities, allowing companies to both protect workers and deploy them more strategically.

Older generations of cellular and Wi-Fi were too limited for such data- and device-intensive operations. With 5G, manufacturers can link thousands of devices together and move terabytes of data around on a single network without having to settle for bulky wired connections throughout the factory.

The ability to run massive numbers of devices on the same network without data throttling is one of the reasons the construction industry is so interested in 5G. Today, the use of 5G in construction sites is still in its infancy but that will change. It is easy to imagine a connected job site that uses real-time tracking technologies to keep workers safe and to know where equipment is at all times.

Drones flying overhead can monitor the job site for dangerous situations, perform inspections, and provide site security—all while feeding data to AI models running on-site (via the network edge) that can alert operators and project managers to potential problems in real time. As in other industries, XR goggles can be worn to help workers learn new skills and execute unfamiliar tasks with precision.

No longer just the art of the possible, the future of 5G is now

Once firmly in the realm of science fiction, use cases like these and many others are either happening today or just over the horizon. Businesses’ imagination and ingenuity is already creating a world where 5G-enabled devices—be they sensors, robots, or connected machines of all sorts—exist side-by-side with humans to make the world a safer, more reliable, and far more efficient place.

See how else 5G is changing the game for business at 5G HQ by T-Mobile for Business.

02

Blockchain Data Is The Next Big Thing In Web3, According To This Expert

Blockchain data could be the next big thing in Web3

Parsiq

Permissionless access to data is one of blockchain’s most prominent promises; the idea that anyone anywhere can access and make use of data whichever way they want without requiring the say-so of a centralized entity. That could be access to real-time transaction information to make investment decisions based on the moves of whales (the crypto industry’s term for large investors). In theory, all that’s needed is to plug into the blockchain protocol of interest by setting up a node—essentially a computer that runs the blockchain’s software.

To appreciate how disruptive permissionless access to data is, consider how gaining access to the real-time transaction flow of the largest stock investors would work. In the United States, for example, an exchange such as Nasdaq will need to give you (or a third-party data provider) access to such data. The exchange has the right to decide who receives access and who doesn’t—and at what cost.

With blockchain, no one gets to make that call. The barrier to entry here is limited to the (monetary and non-monetary) cost of setting up a node.

However, running nodes isn’t the most efficient way for most businesses to access and use blockchain data—especially for legacy companies looking to enter the Web3 space, said Tom Tirman, the cofounder and CEO of Parsiq.

Parsiq is a blockchain data infrastructure startup.

“Consider a traditional investment data provider who wants to start offering crypto data,” Tirman said. “Their preference would be to have access to structured data that can be processed and presented to users without adding the extra operational and technical layer of running their own nodes.”

The added operational and technical layer that Tirman referenced multiplies if the service provider intends to provide data from more than one blockchain network. That’s where blockchain data service providers come in.

“I think, with where we are right now in the adoption curve, blockchain data is the next big thing,” he added. “As applications are being built, as Web2 companies slowly start adopting blockchain, everyone needs a place to build their backend—a way to source their data.”

Parsiq, which launched in 2018 by offering real-time blockchain monitoring, recently launched its flagship product dubbed the “Tsunami API.” The product provides historical access to data across a few blockchain protocols, including Ether ETH eum, Avalanche AVAX , BNB BNB Smart Chain and Polygon MATIC . It plans to add support for Bitcoin BTC and other fast-growing networks in the future.

“In addition to real-time monitoring, the Tsunami API provides an indexed history of all these blockchains from the very first block, the genesis block,” said Tirman. “And now, in milliseconds and with a simple query, any team building on blockchain can go back in time and collect any data they want, whether they want statistics, account balances, history of an NFT ownership—really anything they want.”

Parsiq isn’t the only company provider of on-chain data.

The Graph GRT is a better-known protocol for querying and indexing blockchain data. The Graph is decentralized, and anyone can employ the protocol to build their own subgraphs, essentially APIs for querying specific data types.

Parsiq, on the other hand, operates similarly to a legacy software-as-a-service company. The company performs the querying, indexing and storage itself.

A few of Parsiq’s other direct competitors include Alchemy, Covalent and Moralis.

Unlike many competitors, though, Tirman says that Parsiq offers the possibility of implementing real-time triggers that follows the “if this, then that” conditional programming statement.

“We've been compared to Zapier regarding how we automate processes between Web2 and Web3 environments,” he said. “You can tell Zapier to upload attachments to Dropbox and notify you in Slack whenever an email comes in.

“So think of it as a similar situation; if something happens on the blockchain—whether funds come in, funds go out, the smart contract gets called, etc.—take this action. So you can set up triggers such as, ‘aggregate this data sent to my accounting system.’ ‘Notify my KYC department that a transaction of over $10,000 has come in.’”

Legacy businesses aren’t the only group that can benefit from the lower operational and technical barriers that easy and scalable access to blockchain data offers. Regulators can now perform real-time monitoring without needing to set up nodes across several blockchain networks.

Tirman mentioned that the police department of an Asian country has tested its service for investigation purposes.

For all their benefits, Parsiq and other blockchain data-as-a-service providers aren’t the complete package just yet. In theory, the complete provider should be able to offer data access across all blockchain protocols—at least the most widely used ones. For instance, Parsiq currently indexes only four blockchains. That could be a limitation for businesses that want access to additional networks.

By comparison, The Graph protocol indexes over 20 blockchain networks.

While Tirman recognizes the need to support more blockchain networks, he says it’s a tough business decision.

“It's so difficult to place our bets; there are like three dozen [blockchain protocols], and it will probably be seven dozen by year-end,” he said. “Which ones should we focus our energy on or not? Which one will go down and die? Which one will actually have adoption? [Answering these questions] is a pretty big challenge.”

03

Newmann: The next big thing

Now that the dust has settled and the election results are at hand, we can move on to the next big thing … whatever that happens to be.

The news — and the concomitant flurry of opinion as to how and why it happened — comes and goes. The irony is that most folks probably would not be able to remember the seemingly important news of a couple of days ago. Or maybe even yesterday. But they’d have recall of events in their personal lives, whether yesterday — or 10 years ago.

Most big things have less to do with the headlines — and more to do with the everyday stuff in our lives. We’ve all got stuff. And much of it, when it’s occurring, is the next big thing.

But seems like we often don’t realize that our daily lives and the occurrences within them — and not outside events — really are the big deals.

The external big stuff — much of which is presented to us in a constant stream of information (or misinformation) — can be pretty overwhelming. Climate change, COVID-19, social and political unrest … add whatever you want to this fun list. It just keeps coming.

We also get hammered with ads, which generally promise all sorts of major stuff. Your life may not be complete — or even worth living — without using this product. Bigger, better. Until it becomes bigger and better in the next iteration.

It’s all about the next big thing. The old stuff is passé. The constant barrage could lead you to believe that the big-story events are dwarfing your own world and the ads might leave you feeling you’re behind the curve without the most advanced products.

But the ultimate next-big-things are usually right there in front of us — and our own lives are filled with them on a daily basis.

For many folks, it’s just getting through the day. For others, it might be getting the kids to school on time. Or, for some, getting the right haircut. Guess it’s all a matter of perspective. But each of these activities, and many countless others, are pretty major when they’re being performed. And then it’s on to the next event.

The problem is … sometimes we don’t realize that we’re onto the next one. Or even that we’ve just finished the last one.

The major aspects in our lives are not usually exciting or sensational or glamorous. They’re our everyday activities. And our ability to perform them on a continual basis with a modicum of efficiency.

In essence, we are — each one of us — the real bearers of the next big thing.

Tom Newmann splits his time between Edwards and Queenstown, New Zealand. He has been going winter-to-winter since 1986. He was also a journalist in Missoula, Montana, at the Missoulian for quite a few years. Email him at tsnmmf@xtra.co.nz .