Will driverless cars become common on the roads one day? If not, where is automated navigation having the biggest impact currently?
How about Big Data? When the world is producing nearly unlimited amounts of information, what companies are being used to process and make sense of it all?
These are some of the questions that senior editor and analyst Alex Daley for Casey Research’s Extraordinary Technology answers in his latest interview with Financial Sense.
As an industry insider, either as a senior IT executive or helping to design one of the first autonomous vehicles for DARPA’s Grand Challenge, Alex uses his strategic expertise in finding ways to profit from the next breakthroughs and game changers in technology.
For example, with all the interest in driverless cars, is there a way for investors to participate? Not really, says Alex. Given the risk of a car running into a person or a building on the road, not to mention the flood of litigation that would follow, investors need to look for greener pastures elsewhere.
Where then can autonomous vehicles using vision systems, smart navigation, and artificial intelligence roam free? On the farm!
All across the US, a major transition is taking place in farming equipment. Self-guiding tractors running 24-hours a day, 7 days a week, have completely tipped the balance in favor of technologically-advanced farming. Autonomous navigation isn't years away—it's right now. Investors may just be looking in the wrong place.
Moving into another fast-growing field, Big Data, Alex points out how several multi-billion dollar companies built around storing vast quantities of information have reached a breaking point. Since the cost of storing information continues to decline, along with their revenues, the major growth over the past five years has been in new companies that can actually process and make sense of all that data.
Although there are a number of larger companies that often get mentioned, like Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft, Big Data analytics comprises only a small percentage of their income. Thus, Alex advises focusing instead on mid-tier companies that have direct exposure with well-established revenues.
When asked about another game changer, Alex cites micro-electronic mechanical systems (MEMs) that are used for touch-screen displays, phones, surgery, and all sorts of applications that allow our clumsy fingers, for example, to interact with very small objects.
Lastly, Alex cites biotechnology as the absolute greatest development, which he believes will change human life to an extent that we haven’t even begun to understand. He cites a number of companies, Genomics Health as one, that he particularly likes in this space.
This interview will be available for subscribers next week on Financial Sense. If you’d like to listen to it along with the companies Alex recommends in the autonomous farming, Big Data, and biotech sectors mentioned above, you can do so by CLICKING HERE to subscribe.
