2019: The year face recognition goes big and voice ads stall

Unlike the holiday fruitcake we've all been avoiding the past couple of weeks, 2018 was far from stale. The year was riddled with controversies, excitement, and disappointments -- from Facebook selling it's soul … err, our souls, to the battle over net neutrality to Apple hitting over a trillion dollars to cryptocurrencies' nosedive. While already used on a wider basis in China, we will see facial recognition systems launched in the U.S. on a test-basis in large public venues in 2019. There are various technical and public policy issues to overcome, but this could be the start of a Minority Report-like world with advertising thrown into our view based on this technology. While listening to a talk by Timothy Chou, cloud computing pioneer and former President of Oracle On Demand, a few months ago combined with my SparkLabs Group co-founder's, HanJoo Lee, constant yapping about the future of the cloud, I have to agree that future of enterprise analytics can be as big as the trillion dollar workflow platform space (Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and others).