Anthropic Unveils Claude 3: Redefining AI Chatbots with Enhanced Capabilities

Now organizations in sectors well beyond the pioneers in finance are investing in blockchain to protect data, decentralize processes and facilitate asset and data transfer.

“It’s an appealing model for many sectors, promising transparency and trust as it helps make value exchange possible,” says a SmartBrief article. Although focusing mostly on the financial sector, which is where blockchain found its earliest uses, the article mentions the steady creep of the technology into other industries and even slowly becoming commoditized as “blockchain as a service.”

“Amazon and Microsoft both currently offer BaaS, and enterprises as well as startups are taking advantage of it,” says SmartBrief. Citing a Gartner survey of CIOs, the article notes that “60% expected their firms to start or continue adopting blockchain-based technology between now and 2023.”

Earlier this year, Deloitte issued a blockchain trends report. Besides describing the evolving technology and the features each different approach offers, Deloitte found that some of the fastest growth in blockchain investments was coming in such unexpected industries as professional services – a sector that includes the staffing and employment industry – and energy and resources. In each of those 38% and 43% respectively of the firms surveyed were spending at least $5 million each on blockchain initiatives.

Not unexpectedly, the largest percentage of businesses investing in blockchain were in technology, media and telecom.

“More organizations in more sectors — such as technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, health care, and government — are expanding and diversifying their blockchain initiatives,” Deloitte observes.

Like the financial sector, life sciences and health care deal with highly sensitive medical data they must protect or face legal consequences. Those two sectors are where blockchain “can have a more immediate and meaningful impact,” says Deloitte. They are in an industry, the report explains, “In which data transparency, speed of access, immutability, traceability, and trustworthiness can provide the information necessary for life-altering decisions.”

Interestingly, Gartner assigns a similar importance – not life or death, but still vital – to blockchain’s value to media.

“Organizations and governments are now turning to technology to help counter fake news, for example, by using blockchain technology to authenticate news photographs and video, as the technology creates an immutable and shared record of content that ideally is viewable to consumers,” Gartner said.

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Tech jobs, which took a hit during the first months of the pandemic, are on the rebound and likely to surge this year.

“We’re very bullish on hiring in 2021, particularly in tech,” labor economist Julia Pollak told Crunchbase.

Likewise, Art Zeile, CEO of the company that owns the tech job site Dice.com, said, “We believe that there will be a post-pandemic explosion of interest in technologists, and that includes within startups, with so many focusing on technological innovation.”

The availability of COVID vaccines is one of the key reasons behind the optimism, Pollak said. “There’s sort of an end to the pandemic in sight now.”

In the early days of the pandemic, businesses focused on building out their remote work capability. In so many cases, less critical projects were put on hold or never started leading to layoffs of tech workers.

According to ZipRecruiter data, tech job postings fell from about 1 million in February 2020 to just under half a million in June. Job listings began to rise only slowly, reaching almost 800,000 in November. However, unemployment in the tech sector never came close to the national rate. In July, when unemployment nationally was at 10.2%, the rate among tech professionals was 4.4%, CompTIA reported. In November, the tech rate was 2.4%.

Perhaps spooked by the layoffs in an industry that historically provides lavish benefits and pay premiums, a malaise has settled over tech workers. A poll of 1,348 readers of the tech site Blind found a third admitting they are constantly anxious about losing their job; 54% said the feeling comes and goes.

That may account for the number of applicants per job posting to ZipRecruiter, which Pollak told Crunchbase was “very high.”

Now, with vaccines becoming available and as the pace of business increases and delayed IT projects get back on track, IT hiring will accelerate. Research consultancy IDC estimates global tech industry revenue will hit $5 trillion in 2021, up from $4.8 trillion in 2020.

Microsoft estimates the number of technology-oriented jobs – will increase nearly five-fold by 2025, rising from 41 million in 2020 to 190 million in 2025. If Microsoft is right, to reach that number 2021 will be a banner year for tech job growth.

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