To infinity…

January is a busy time for the team at HWM and as you’re reading this issue, we’ll be having a ball in Las Vegas slogging away through the halls and crowds of the annual Consumer Electronics Show to bring you this year’s top tech trends.

Looking back at my last note, I felt that we ended 2016 with a little too much doom and gloom. So, for January 2017, I’ve decided to switch gears back to looking ahead and hopefully, keep this month’s rant a wee bit shorter, so bear with me.

One of the biggest tech trends happening now isn’t related to the launch of any one product, but the relentless assault of the software industry (actually, if this keeps up, we might have to rename the magazine). Digitization of goods and services has become the catalyst of change, speeding up mass adoption of new technologies. For instance, e-payments have become second nature to me, and I’m not just talking about swiping a credit card. I’m talking about the brave new world of connected commerce platforms that I have access to from my smartphone. From groceries to transport and even splitting the lunch bill with friends, you’d probably have a better chance of getting me to pay for something through an app than with real cash. Just like how e-mail replaced snail mail, this is the future I readily embrace.

This issue, we look into the technologies that make this cashless world go round. And to start off 2017 in a more positive note, we visited Dyson’s headquarters in the UK to soak up some inspiration and wisdom from inventor Sir James Dyson himself on the fine art of failing.