This January many of us will undertake new year’s resolutions such as learning a new language, losing a few pounds, or developing healthy habits such as meditation. The same can be said for the technology sector wherein the beginning of the year marks a time of looking forward and setting goals. Here at Lavasoft we plan to continue helping our users maintain their online privacy and security with an increasing range of free, effective and lightweight products, building software that stays up-to-date with recent threats and evolves based on industry-best standards. 

Here are a number of additional technology-focused new year’s resolutions from around the web that caught our attention, perhaps you’ll find them inspiring: 

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has given himself the tall order of creating “a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.” Zuckberger’s “simple” AI will feature voice-controlled automation, and one of his first tasks will be “teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home - music, lights, temperature and so on. I'll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell. I'll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max's room [Editor’s note: his baby] that I need to check on when I'm not with her. On the work side, it'll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively.” It will be interesting to see how the social media guru will harness existing technology as well as Facebook’s engineering crew to create a smarter smart home. Hopefully the project will end better than many of the artificial intelligence experiments featured in movies. 

Adrianne Jeffries, the Managing Editor of Motherboard, predicts that 2016 will be a year wherein the way we view website traffic and analytics information will shift significantly, from short term boosts in traffic and virality towards cultivating brand loyalty through a long-term strategy of focused content and quality writing: “If you think about it in terms of metrics, it would be a shift from looking at raw pageviews and unique users, to looking at time on site and homepage traffic. You can have a 100 million unique visitors a month, but your average time on site is 4 seconds and homepage traffic is non-existent.” Jeffries is essentially pointing to a strategy of long term versus short term gain, applicable to other areas of technology and life in general. 

Marc Solomon from Security Week lists his “Three New Year's Resolutions Every Security Vendor Should Make,” including the necessity of working “within existing infrastructure - Many security technologies require organizations to overhaul their security architecture just to adapt to the latest risks. This is not a sustainable model. Most organizations can’t afford to rip and replace existing solutions to keep pace with the changing threat landscape and increase security effectiveness. Resource-constrained organizations need technologies that can integrate smoothly with existing solutions and leverage the valuable data these solutions provide to strengthen protection.” Unfortunately, his advice does not apply if you’re still using Windows XP.