Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Jorge Schnura, Co-founder and COO, source{d}

Ready, Player One in 2019?

While we might not see flying cars in 2019, we can expect to start seeing more of self-driving cars. And let's not forget augmented reality. Are we heading for a Ready Player One-esq existence?

But first, with the year coming to a close let's first take a look at the past. In 2018 tech, as always, changed daily, but of course there were a few standouts:

1. Apple and Amazon hitting the 1 trillion dollar market cap

2. The EU's digital tax showing two things

a. How fiscal laws are adapting to a new type of economy

b. How the EU is completely disarmed in the tech war

3. The Cambridge Analytica Facebook Lawsuit proved the potential dangers of one company accessing our private data

And the biggest surprise? The speed at which Bird, the scooter company, achieved a $2bn valuation is something no one would've expected from any startup. But the biggest winner, both in technology and growth, was Artificial Intelligence. AI went from being a buzzword in 2017, to becoming omnipresent in many digital projects and a top priority for some of the world's leading tech companies.

And so we don't repeat history, we need to learn from failure, including the fall of cryptocurrencies. But tech too can rise from the dead -- take voice assistants for instance. They want to eat your brains! Just kidding.

Great, now that we have the past in the past, it's time to move forward. So, what are the three technologies to watch in 2019? That, without a doubt, would have to be autonomous farming, autonomous drones and blockchain. But I think the biggest surprise we can expect is going to come from Magic Leap, makers of a head-mounted virtual retinal display.

AR has been kind of a let down for a long time. Even with the arrival of the simple AR of Pokemon Go, most people turned it off. VR is another technology that has not managed to match expectations, but it got people excited because it was close to delivering an experience that was good enough for the mainstream. I believe this made people ready for AR/VR/MR, but also gave them the perception that we need many more years to get to an inevitable success of it. Based on the reviews from people who got access to Magic Leap, it seems that it is already delivering an incredible AR experience that people are not ready for. For this reason I believe it will be a big surprise.

Will we end up living in a Ready Player One-esq existence? I can't wait to see where AR is going to take us!

To really build these technologies will take a Herculean effort for traditional developers. In order to build these worlds we will need a data layer to both analyze and automate the software development life cycle, to streamline and ultimately reduce the cost of development. Efforts are already under way by open source software companies to better understand -- and perhaps even monetize -- their code. And I expect these efforts will branch out to proprietary software vendors and -- ultimately -- to traditional businesses that are transforming INTO software companies.

With greater understanding of their code, businesses can more more informed -- and replicable -- decisions on the future.

So here's to the new year. Let's see what technologies we can't even fathom comes into existence in 2019.

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About the Author

Jorge Schnura is the co-founder of source{d}, a startup enabling Machine Learning for Large Scale code analysis. He currently is COO and member of the board.