5 things to disappear in 5 years

Five years ago, the world was completely different. In 2010, the iPad just came out, Kickstarter demonstrated a new kind of investment, which was destined to change the fundraising principle, and Square allowed merchants of any caliber to accept card payments from a mobile phone. And we did not look around.

In the next five years, there will undoubtedly be products and services that we cannot yet imagine. But what will we leave behind as we progress? Here are a few things of our daily use, which either disappear altogether, or practically disappear from our everyday life due to innovative technologies and methods.
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Cash, check books, bank cards and ATMs: what do you have in your digital wallet?

Nowadays, Square allows all entrepreneurs to accept bank cards. Venmo allows you with a buddy to share a check for dinner by transferring money via SMS. Soon you will be able to manage your funds through any mobile device, including even a car. According to the Fed, in the US, the use of checks decreased by 57% from 2000 to 2012.

94% of consumers under the age of 35 use an online bank, and more than one-fifth of them have never written a check for payment, according to First Data, reported in The Unbanked Generation report. In Europe, they will look at you with your check as if they were crazy. Rent is the last bastion of using checks, but even these services are declining as property owners are switching to electronic payments, and mobile payments are becoming easier.

And yet - in the more distant future, cash will disappear. And there is no cash - no ATM. Bye-bye, ATMs.

USB flash drives: how much is still left to the physical drives?

By 2020, 70% of the world's population will use smartphones, as the Ericsson report predicts. Mobile networks will cover 90% of the population. Cloud services from Apple, Box, Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft offer almost unlimited storage for very little money, so there’s simply no need for storage devices that take up space in your pocket. Needless to say about the increase in the memory capacity of the mobile devices themselves.

The conference organizers will have to come up with another zavlekalochku instead of a free distribution of flash drives, when they begin to become a sign of the analog past.

Access is secure and easy: passwords and keys will disappear

This is a controversial point, as now passwords are used very widely. It is said that on average, each person has 19 passwords — and about half of people admit to using weak and insecure passwords. But even if you use only strong passwords, they still can, theoretically, be cracked.

Biometric authentication systems are already gaining popularity, especially on mobile devices - namely, mobile devices have become the main portals on the Internet. Fingerprints, voice and face recognition will replace your dog's name and the date of your wedding, now used to access your accounts. They will have their own security problems, but passwords will be a thing of the past.

Also, soon you will not have any physical keys - their role will go to smart devices that you carry with you. They will be connected to you through biometric recognition so that only you can dispose of them.

No one will miss the control panel

No more rummaging under the sofa cushions in search of a control panel (or ten remotes - depending on the trickyness of your media system).

Researchers at Strategy Analytics predict that the Internet of Things, smart home and wearable electronics will receive 17.6 billion additional devices by 2020. Already today, devices like Amazon Echo take voice search and command recognition to a new level. And by 2020, when all these devices are connected to the Internet, there will be no point in creating a separate hardware for the control panel.

Static documents and paper contracts

Paper signatures and paperwork - the need to print, fax, scan documents for reviews, approvals, decision making and transaction confirmation - very quickly become archaic in the digital world. In the future, we will rely on cloud agreements to manage transactions.

Such agreements will be linked to the personalities of the parties involved, able to initiate payments upon reaching the terms of the contract and contact the parties to the contract at the appropriate time.

Companies involved in real estate, finance, insurance, high technology and medicine - even government - are implementing cloud models of work to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve the lives of users. Soon contract management will be completely different.

When preparing a list of things to be done next year, add a paragraph about getting rid of old technologies there so that next year is more digital. Yes, you still have time. But why wait if such remarkable technological breakthroughs occur around?