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For the technology industry it was that time of year again!

CES 2021 was here, but this time around the well-known conference

organized by the CTA (The Consumer Electronics Association) went digital!

For the first time in 54 years we experienced a virtual trade show, where exhibitors showcased their products by coming up with innovating ways to do so. In addition, the technology business community interacted with each other through multiple communication channels such as real-time chats, messaging and other networking tools.

As we all know CES 2021 is all about the future, as every year it exhibits the newest innovations in the technology space. It brings to the table a great variety of smart products, from robots to smart home appliances, as well as many other innovative technologies. For sure, attending a digital venue was a new experience for all!

 

Here are the top three tech industry trends we saw, which are here to stay for the long haul.

 

1. Digital transformation accelerated due to fast changes in consumer behavior

In both the B2C and B2B markets, digital technology usage rapidly started accelerating as a result of the sudden changes in our everyday lives caused by the pandemic. People were forced to adapt to new technologies at a very fast rate due to the needs they began to face. Some of these trends were already here, but the pandemic triggered a more rapid pace of adoption, from remote meetings to e-commerce and smart home.

In retail and e-commerce in particular, we saw how brick-and-mortar businesses suddenly started closing at a faster clip. As a result, or perhaps as one of its main causes, online shopping and home deliveries began to flourish during these challenging times, opening a whole new world of possibilities to the industry. Reflecting on these changes, Luke Motschenbacher, VP of Merchandising at Best Buy stated:

“Mostly the changes you have seen in retail are permanent because customers have found new ways to shop, new ways to explore, and they become accustomed to the most flexible product fulfillment mechanisms that have ever existed in the industry.”

In short, we have seen how the impact of changes in consumption patterns has encouraged innovation and has opened emerging markets across all areas of the tech industry, such as Smart Home, Digital Health, Robotics, and the like. As the world needed to act quickly, and adapt to new ways of living, technology became an asset in preserving the well-being of people during these difficult times. This paved the road to launching new products and to the acceleration of research on smart solutions aiming to improve everyday life.

 

2. The home becomes a multi-functional hub to live, play, work and learn.

For most of us, because of the pandemic, our home became a place to work, entertain, play, and learn. For this reason alone, we saw how new needs arose in terms of comfort and functionality. The “home as a hub” spurred the acceleration of the smart home market last year, as Steven Hummel, the manager of market research at CTA explained: “2020 was a spectacular year for the smart home industry. We had revenue grow by 8% over 2019 (even in the middle of pandemic)…a lot of product movement, we saw a 17% increase in shipment volumes of DYI smart home products.”

All kinds of smart home solutions experienced growth, including the biggest categories of smart lighting, smart displays, smart doorbells, smart thermostats, and smart speakers, which saw a huge surge in sales. For smart home vendors the scenario in the upcoming years is promising.

Once our behavior changed, our relationship with technology changed as well. While people continue changing their habits, investing in more smart home solutions and expanding the capabilities of the network at their homes, we will continue looking at the rise of an emerging and exciting market.

The CTA forecasted that the estimated revenue of smart home related products would surpass 28 billion by 2022. If families remain at home and continue to implement new technologies in their daily lives, we might see a new growth pattern emerge during 2021. Some of these new technologies include, but are not limited to, no-touch technology, which can be found in both home appliances and vehicles among other innovations. We also have smart security, voice-control and command technologies, in addition to gaming and streaming services.

 

3. Adoption of digital health products is here to stay

Covid-19 has certainly changed our lives, but most importantly, we have seen a global impact because of it. As a result, the digital health industry has experienced rapid growth and has thrived during the pandemic. Furthermore, as the world needed to act quickly, the digital health sector became an asset in preserving the well-being of people around the world as COVID cases started to skyrocket during these difficult times.

On the other hand, smart solutions such as remote patient monitoring, fitness wearables, biometrics monitoring devices, stress trackers, and telemedicine solutions have become essentials in our everyday lives. Trends show that consumers are rapidly adapting and are more proactive to understand their health with the use of wearables, leading to an age of personalization within the health space.

This change in lifestyle, health awareness and medical needs is opening a new array of possibilities to the industry. In this context, everything is an open game for innovation, consumers are central, and service providers are key, but it is the smart technologies vendors who will play an enabling and critical role in leading societies to a healthier and more active lifestyle.

 

Summary

With crisis comes opportunity, and what we can learn from these trends is that it will neither be the strongest or the biggest, but the most adaptable who will survive unfavorable scenarios. Hence, when businesses react early and fast to present conditions, they have found a new path to innovation and to emerging markets. As Luke Motschenbacher inferred in the session called Macro Trends Affecting the Tech Industry Session at CES 2021 “Now, you have people from different generations and demographics that many times the technology industry does not target because they are slow adapters, and this year (2020) that adoption occurred and accelerated to an extent we haven’t seen before. Now you have a whole new market that feels comfortable adopting new technology.”

NEW YORK (PRWEB) AUGUST 14, 2020

Inc. magazine revealed that INFOLINK TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS is No. 490 on its annual Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. The list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the American economy’s most dynamic segment—its independent small businesses. Intuit, Zappos, Under Armour, Microsoft, Patagonia, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees on the Inc. 5000.

READ THE FULL LIST HERE: INC.5000

“Our purpose at Infolink-Exp is to be a platform for growth to our customers in the smart technology space, as well as to our team, partners and investors, so we are truly honored to have made the Inc. 500 list this year. It validates the hard work everyone’s been doing to make that happen and the solutions we bring to the market” said Infolink’s CEO José A. González.

Not only have the companies on the 2020 Inc. 5000 been very competitive within their markets, but the list as a whole shows staggering growth compared with prior lists as well. The 2020 Inc. 5000 achieved an incredible three-year average growth of over 500 percent, and a median rate of 165 percent. The Inc. 5000’s aggregate revenue was $209 billion in 2019, accounting for over 1 million jobs over the past three years.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000. The top 500 companies are also being featured in the September issue of Inc., available on newsstands August 12.

“The companies on this year’s Inc. 5000 come from nearly every realm of business,” says Inc. editor-in-chief Scott Omelianuk. “From health and software to media and hospitality, the 2020 list proves that no matter the sector, incredible growth is based on the foundations of tenacity and opportunism.”

The annual Inc. 5000 event honoring the companies on the list will be held virtually from October 23 to 27, 2020. As always, speakers will include some of the greatest innovators and business leaders of our generation.

More about Infolink-exp

Infolink-Exp partners with rapidly scaling IoT technology companies to help their users adopt, learn, and leverage smart technologies to transform their lives. We augment our clients support operations along the customer journey with services to their end-users and with data-driven insights on the customer experience using our Zahoree™ CX analytics platform, to increase adoption, customer retention and expand revenue. Infolink-exp serves the technology industry worldwide with operations in North America and Europe.

More about Inc. and Inc 5000

Methodology
The 2020 Inc. 5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2016 and 2019. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2016. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2019. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2016 is $100,000; the minimum for 2019 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.’s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at http://www.inc.com/inc5000.

About Inc. Media
The world’s most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit http://www.inc.com.

 

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Infolink-exp was feature on ‘INVEST IN SPAIN’ by ICEX, the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade.

Read the full article here:

www.investinspain.org

 

Infolink-EXP partners with rapidly scaling IoT technology companies, to deliver an unsurpassed customer experience to end users. That is why we have developed the Customer Journey Support methodology, to help vendors support their customers throughout their lifetime, from pre-sales to activation and on-boarding, first-use, ongoing support, and upgrading.

We augment our clients support operations along the customer journey with services and data-driven insights, to increase adoption, customer retention and expand revenue.

 

Infolink-exp, a leader in global technology support services, announced the opening of its European office today.

 

SAN JOSE, CA, November 4, 2019. – Infolink-exp’s new office will be based in Málaga, Spain and will serve European and Asian companies, as well as North American clients moving into the European IoT market. “Some of our U.S.-based clients, companies out of San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, and New York City among others, are growing rapidly and expanding into overseas markets with their products. Often the first step in their expansion is the EMEA market, and we at Infolink-exp want to be in a position to serve them there and become a global partner to them in supporting their users“, says José Antonio González, Founder and CEO of Infolink-EXP. “In addition, Europe has a large and growing number of their own technology companies providing innovations in the smart home, automotive, healthcare and environmental spaces, among others. We also want to be in a position to deliver our customer support and customer experience solutions to them, as we help them scale”.

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been gaining ground with consumers, who are starting to see the benefits of using IoT devices to simplify tasks in the home and to manage things around them using apps. According to CSG, just in the smart home, adoption of devices is already in the mid twenties (23%), but expected to rise rapidly, and a strong majority of consumers feel that the most valuable attribute of IoT devices is to make life easier.

The Andalucía Technology Park (PTA) in Málaga provides the perfect environment for Infolink-exp’s landing in Europe, where the company will be able to tap into multi-national and multi-lingual customer support and engineering talent. Infolink-exp, with current operations in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and San Jose, CA, will be serving clients –B2C and B2B IoT brands– out of their Spanish operations center starting in November of 2019.

ABOUT

Infolink-EXP partners with rapidly scaling IoT technology companies, to deliver an unsurpassed customer experience to end users. That is why we have developed the Customer Journey Support methodology, to help vendors support their customers throughout their lifetime, from pre-sales to activation and on-boarding, first-use, ongoing support, and upgrading.

We augment our clients support operations along the customer journey with services and data-driven insights, to increase adoption, customer retention and expand revenue.

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