The 2010’s has undoubtedly been a decade of genuine tech innovation.
It has seen the rise of Artificial Intelligence and virtual reality, IoT, crowdfunding, and the gig economy. It has delivered everything from new mobile devices right through to driverless cars.
The decade has seen our world progress further down the path of futuristic technologies many of which even a decade earlier seemed firmly in the realms of science fiction movies.
We didn’t get hoverboards (well, not really) but we have witnessed some truly incredible innovations.
Here is a rundown of the most important inventions and innovations for each year of the last decade: 

2010

• The iPad – the decade kicked off with Apple’s wildly successful take on the truly portable computer
• Google’s driverless car – Google introduced us to the still slightly unnerving reality that in the near future road transport will be almost entirely automated
• Kickstarter – the company that launched not only thousands of great product ideas but also the modern crowdfunding model itself
• Instagram – it turned photo sharing into essentially a full time career 

2011

• Siri – the voice assistant that made it socially acceptable to talk to yourself
• Kinect 2 – the ability of the second iteration of the Kinect game controller to recognise facial expressions was literally a game changer
• Snapchat – while it became popular due to its “this message will self destruct in 10 seconds” philosophy, it’s real innovation came later by introducing the masses to augmented reality filters 

2012

• Tesla Model S – while the Tesla roadster came before it, it was the Model S that put Tesla on the map as the electric car that everybody wanted to own
• DJI Phantom Drone – thanks to its user friendly appearance and controls, the Phantom brought previously professional level drone capabilities to millions of hobbyists around the world

2013

• Slack – the Slack messaging and team collaboration platform really popularised organisational communication
• Google Glass – although ultimately being put on the back burner, Google Glass was the first real attempt at wearable, real time computing and it’s return at some point soon now seems inevitable 

2014

• Uber – it’s hard to believe that Uber is only five years old but in that time it has completely revolutionised the taxi industry
• Amazon Alexa – Alexa saw the first major integration of a virtual assistant into smart home devices like the Echo

2015

• Apple Watch – other smart watches came before it but the Apple Watch captured so much market share in its first year that it became THE smart watch
• Falcon 9 Rocket Landing – despite nearly going broke to achieve it, Elon Musk’s private rocket company, Space X, really nailed it when they managed to land and re-use their rockets, forever changing the economics of launching rockets
• Tesla Energy’s Powerwall – home battery storage will slowly revolutionise the residential power market

2016

• Oculus Rift – the VR headset that signaled the second wave of virtual reality
• AlphaGO – machine learning took another giant leap forward when the AlphaGO system beat a human GO champion for the first time
• IBM Q Experience – the world’s first publicly accessible quantum computer delivered via the Cloud

2017

• Tesla Model 3 – Tesla finally delivered its much hyped affordable electric car that became an instant sales hit
• Space X Falcon Heavy – the world’s first partially reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle

2018

• Metal 3D printing – 3D metal printing allows almost limitless design options that were previously impossible or prohibitively expensive to make
• Dueling Neural Networks – the new kind of machine learning where two neural network AIs square off against each other to help transform science, art, advertising, and gaming

2019

• 5G – rollout of the first 5G networks commenced, ushering in the era of high speed, low latency communications
• Quantum supremacy – the long discussed moment of quantum supremacy occured when Google announced it had developed a quantum computer that could solve in 200 seconds a problem that would take a classical supercomputer more than 10,000 years to complete

Where to next?

Reflecting on the past ten years, major innovations in tech have occurred that will shape the coming decade and indeed the next century. Driverless cars, quantum computing, and 5G will become entrenched in our systems and day to day lives and will lay the platform for the next round of major innovations. And the speed of advances in tech won’t be slowing down any time soon. In fact, they’re speeding up.
For more information on the technologies that will shape our lives in the next decade and how you should best position yourself to take advantage of them, talk to the tech experts at Finite.

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