Again, I want to deviate slightly to share my world-view of technology. When I say technology, I primarily refer to information technology in this post. I’ve always been a believer in the enabling capacity of technology. This role has increased recently and is getting highly emphasized everywhere. at one point I thought technology can be used primarily for solving the sales/marketing problem via e-commerce, which is where most of the focus of activity is recently (at least in India). Most of the analytics application, and big data applications and cloud based services are also catering to this area. There is a hype around the connectivity technology can provide(look at the valuations of any social media company) and its entertainment value. But I have realized technology has a much bigger role to play than just being a support system for sales or entertainment.
Some of the areas, I think, that have immense potential for scale through use of technology are:
- Supply chain optimization enabling small scale setups also to reach out the global market
- Agriculture management starting from what and how much to produce to complete farm automation
- Manufacturing automation especially for a country like India.
- Medicine and health care. In fact, at some point, the role of a doctor can be completely replaced by a massive decision tree
- Genetics, after all genes are nature’s way of storing information
- Industrial design. Use of software for design is not new but there are other less explored areas like community design through software etc.
- Automated fraud and crime detection
It is good that big companies like Google and FB are connecting people and helping companies sell their products but it would have been better if they focused on areas that can have bigger and deeper impact.
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