Changes in Tech Startups Caused by COVID-19
The coronavirus pandemic has triggered significant changes in how all businesses operate, particularly, tech startups. The lockdown and the looming threat of the disease have forced enterprises to go remote and reduce the amount of physical contact required, all the while keeping profits afloat.
Although changes that companies now must adopt are abrupt, they are not necessarily devastating. Many of the new trends such as virtual communication and the rise of freelancing websites are likely to spike the development of handy technological solutions in the future.
In this article, we’ll take a look at six changes brought on by the COVID-19 virus that software startup companies can use in their new solutions even after the pandemic.
1. Augmented Reality in Education Gets to Shine
AR in education has taken off quickly since the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to close their doors. Normally, augmented reality learning is used for employee training, but these days, the whole education sector can benefit from incorporating AR and VR solutions into their curriculums.
AR is a fast-growing and multi-purposeful tool that can enrich communication, ease certain processes for remote workers, and grant a more engaging customer experience. The share of augmented reality in education is expected to reach $5.3 billion by 2023.
If you are a tech startup focusing on education, AR is a gateway to users who already own headsets, and it’s also a possibility to improve the experience for those on mobile platforms.
Custom solutions that incorporate AR may include software for conducting specific remote training programs and online classroom sessions. Since this technology relies on overlaying digital information on top of real-world settings, AR can also be used in services to assist new employees in manufacturing and logistics positions on-site by providing real-time guidance from professionals.
2. Digitization for Events
The pandemic has forced both the business and entertainment industries to adapt to the new conditions and move their events online. This demand has generated a rise in popularity of such social planning apps as Bizzabo, Eventbrite, Whova, and many others.
Consequently, the growth of the event app development has market spiked, and planning a company event has become an easier feat. As a course of action, focusing your efforts on creating software for digital events is a good strategy for 2021. An event management application can help users conduct anything from a mobile development conference to e-commerce calls, online classes, and daily company meetings. This stable demand covers a vast variety of industries, securing a large pool of potential customers for your business.
3. Collaboration Tools for Remote Work
Virtual team collaboration is one of the highlights of the 2020 work trends. Tools for remote collaboration can help organize work processes for remote teams, enable companies to function as a whole despite the fragmentation, keep track of objectives, monitor the results, and encourage employees to socialize online as they would in person, maintaining any established corporate culture.
Creating collaboration tools for remote teams is an incredibly promising venture, both in 2020 and the upcoming year, 2021. The possibilities are broad. You can create anything from video conferencing software to business-oriented messengers, efficient file-sharing platforms, project management apps, and time-tracking systems. Comprehensive platforms that include all these tools as features are also likely to attract users’ attention.
4. Healthcare Innovations: EHR Systems
Telehealth is gaining more and more momentum as various regulations are slightly loosened due to the outbreak. Currently, healthcare going online allows for less physical contact between patients and doctors while supplying equally effective medical advice. Since the trend is sustainable and overall beneficial, it’s reasonable to concentrate your development efforts on the medical field.
One particularly promising innovation is Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. These applications should help patients and hospital staff store, share, and modify data in a person’s health record.
If you want to develop for IoT, wireless thermometers connected to Wi-Fi as well as other wearables to monitor a patient’s heart rate and breathing, can be helpful.
5. Marketplace Development
The question of what a freelance model is couldn’t be more pressing than how it has been in 2020. Sites like Upwork are prospering as more and more employers try scouting for new talent among freelancers, and the so-called gig economy is gaining exposure during the shift towards remote work.
Currently, many job seekers look for a more convenient Upwork alternative, so getting into this niche is a good choice for tech startups. Developing a freelance marketplace will grant you access to more than 57.3 million freelancers in the U.S. alone, and the flexible nature of the platform will make the global expansion smoother and faster.
6. Biometrics Will Go Touchless
The most widely used biometric access control solutions include the need to touch the device to verify your identity, for instance, fingerprint readers. In the current conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the existing biometrics technology is rapidly becoming outdated.
Although coronavirus is the most recent danger, infectious diseases will always remain an obstacle to biometrics security hardware that requires contact. For tech startups looking into the most promising endeavors in 2021, designing safer contactless biometrics solutions is a reliable start. Since the most popular contactless options—face recognition and iris detection—are already in use, the market is likely to get competitive soon, so it’s better to start developing early.
7. Frameworks for fast development
The pandemic forced office workers to start working remotely. As a result, on-the-job training has become mission impossible for junior developers. Nowadays, we have no extra time for practicing. Quick adaptability is a valuable skill that can guarantee your bosses will be happy with your performance.
In the sphere of UI development, there is a nice solution to the above-listed issues. There is a wide choice of JavaScript UI frameworks that can significantly speed up the application development process. Frameworks include ready-made templates to create a website or a web application. They provide developers with “a skeleton” of the future app and offer a complete set of tools to form and arrange a website or web application. Using such tools, you can cope with the project faster and at the same time improve your qualification as the learning process goes in line with the practice.
A handy solution is the JS Webix UI library. It contains 100+ widgets, ready-made SPA applications, and a templates library. All widgets easily fit together, which saves a lot of working hours for the developers. The tool may appear useful for both juniors and seniors, as it provides a quick learning process of material design and sophisticated implementation of modern UI development practices. UI frameworks offer an easy way of creating a project, and they will stay with the developers for quite some time.
Business Changes Due to COVID-19: Recap
The coronavirus pandemic has given rise to the development of the whole sector of remote work and freelancing. Sites like Upwork will continue gaining subscribers as more and more people realize the potential of working from home and managing their own workload. Consequently, developing solutions for remote job seeking, video conferencing, and virtual collaboration will yield a high degree of consumer interest and potentially large profits in 2021.
The same holds true for mobile apps, contactless biometric solutions, and telehealth applications. Although the COVID-19 pandemic will decline over time, some of the recently discovered hazards, as well as possibilities, will stick. Now is a good time to think about how you can leverage the new trends to help your startup grow.
