 The value of mobile commerce transactions expanded by 85.5 per cent to Ksh 3.2 trillion in 2017. The growth was spurred by customer’s preference for mobile commerce and the availability of these services across the country. 5.4.3 Technology Trends Gigabit and Petabit Wireless: Networks at the edge are going wireless. We observe the development of NBase-T, Terahertz wireless and other high-speed communications developments, and anticipate their wholesale adoption across all sectors of Kenya. Kenya will standardise on Gigabit/Ethernet speed wireless networks. Ubiquitous Communications: Internet access is available everywhere, all the time to everybody and everything via mobile phone, Wi-Fi, cable and other means. The internet protocol has become the de-facto means of communication. This trend will intensify and increase as available speeds improve. Pervasive Instrumentation: As more and more devices and elements of our environment become network enabled, from electric power meters, industrial equipment to household appliances we are entering an era where everything is producing data continuously and everything can talk to everything else. This is the Internet of Things (IoT) or to use more recent nomenclature the Internet of Everything (IoE). The ability to remotely effect physical change inherently poses significant challenges and provides enormous advantages. You can now remotely monitor, manage and change processes and states without having to physically be present, but it also means you can do damage, destroy facilities and injure people remotely. Big Data: Every person, device and instrument has become a data emitter. The aggregation and storage of these enormous data volumes has led to a technical phenomenon called big data. The storage, analysis and interpretation of big data requires specialised techniques and equipment for which we must be prepared. Kenya is currently a net emitter of data and the facilities, capability and interest in being a sink need to be developed. We need to develop the capacity to store and use our own data. Deep Learning: Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence focusing on data classification, trend identification and predictive analytics. Using big data for machine learning is called deep learning. Deep learning Ministry of ICT, Kenya has led to fundamentally useful outcomes such as accurate speech recognition, automated expert level medical diagnosis, better-thanhuman computer vision, holistic systems like self-driving cars and self guiding drones, and more mundanely improved purchase recommendation systems, customer credit rating and epidemic outbreak prediction. Blockchain and Digital Currency: A peerto-peer distributed digital ledger that provides an immutable time-sequenced record of all transactions (blockchain) is a peer-to-peer distributed digital ledger that provides an immutable time sequenced record of all transactions, does not require trust between parties and facilitates electronic “smart contracts”. Blockchain can be used to track digital assets, assets whose ownership can be verified digitally such as land, equities, shares and derivatives, votes and currency. It’s most famous implementation is in Bitcoin, but it not limited to those domains. A blockchain’s integrity hinges on strong cryptography that validates and chains together blocks of transactions, making it nearly impossible to tamper with any individual transaction record without being detected. The Sharing Economy: The Sharing Economy is a socio-economic ecosystem built around the sharing of human, physical and intellectual resources. A sharing economy is an economic model in which individuals are able to borrow or rent assets owned by someone else. The sharing economy model is most likely to be used when the price of a particular asset is high, and the asset is not fully utilised all the time. Sitting in any large parking lot are dozens of cars, which represent hundreds of millions of shillings of non-performing depreciating capital assets. Putting those assets to use, when the owner is not using them, is the basic operating model of ride-sharing and online taxi companies. Communities of people have shared the use of assets for thousands of years, but the advent of the Internet has made it easier for asset owners and those seeking to use those assets to find each other. This sort of lending is sometimes referred to as a peer-to-peer (P2P) rental market. Sharing economies allow individuals and groups to make money from underused assets. In this way, physical assets are shared as services. For example, a car owner may allow someone to rent out their vehicle while they are not using it, or a homeowner may rent out their home while they are on vacation. 11/37 November-2019