West Midlands: Digital Revolution

In recent years, the West Midlands has emerged from the decline of its traditional industries to become a thriving tech hub. We interviewed several key figures within the region to understand why and how this has happened and what the future holds.

There are four main types of e-commerce: Business to Consumer (B2C) Business to Business (B2B) Consumer to Consumer (C2C) Consumer to Business (C2B). E-commerce includes retail, wholesale, services, drop shipping, crowdfunding, subscription, physical products and digital products.

Computing infrastructure close to sources of data aggregating data from equipment or sensors. “where you can reduce the distance, the speed of electrons being essentially constant, you minimise latency”.

Arvind Krishna, The Chief Executive of IBM, said “History will look back on this… as the moment when the digital transformation of business and society suddenly accelerated”. We asked whether IT Directors, Managers/Heads and Engineers of UK businesses agreed.

Internet of Things “refers to the billions of physical devices around the world that are now connected to the internet, all collecting and sharing data”. Connecting different objects adds an intelligence to the devices and communicate real-time data independent of human interference.

President Trump is currently threatening to ban TikTok in the United States. The app was expected to establish its headquarters in California or New York. This is unless Microsoft, or another American firm, acquires the platform.

5G has a large task of “replacing one wireless architecture created this century with another one that aims to lower energy consumption and maintenance costs”. One of the key benefits is the faster download and upload speeds.

The CEOs of the biggest tech companies – Jeff Bezos for Amazon, Tim Cook for Apple, Sundar Pichai for Google and Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook – testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday 29th July 2020.

In January, Microsoft gave themselves the task to be carbon negative by 2030. Microsoft also plan to remove their historical carbon emissions by 2050.

Our digital activity could increase the number of cyber threats we receive. For example, logging onto Netflix, shopping online or using internet banking. If one of these accounts is hacked, log in information, messages or financial data could be accessed from different accounts across the internet.