We have completed the first decade in the second millennium of the Gregorian calendar. So it is time to look back at technologies which shaped the first decade. IEEE has listed out the following as the 10 best technologies in the first decade-
- Smartphones :
Though at the begining of the decade the idea of a poketable PC was new everyone knew this was going to get big. Initially Blackberry and Nokia made up the almost the entire market of smartphones. These were the phones which had physical buttons and Microsoft was the only one which had gone completely touch. This was all going change come 2007. The think was that no one really expected Apple to make the first move. In 2007 Apple Inc. released the iPhone which introduced a phone without many buttons and most of it was the touch screen. This marked the rise of iOS. Then came the Android,Symbian^3 and now the Windows 7 for phones. Surely, there is every chance that at the end of the second decade(or even earlier than that) Desktops might get scarce.
- Social Networking :
At the beginning of the millennium internet itself was a growing business. in 2000 if anyone were to ask who is the "boss" of the internet , many would would answer it as AOL and the rest would ask what is internet. Now you see the trend is different , many cant live without the internet. One kind which is drawing a lot of people to the web is Social Networking Sites. It is not a Surprise that Facebook is the most visited site this year. Twitter is another popular website which has being adopted rapidly these days. No wonder Social Networking is second on the list. - Voice over IP :
By 2000, a mobile phone was placed in the hands of many, in the next 2 years efforts were made to put internet on the phone. Now everyone wondered why the hell were they paying so much for a call being made. So some brainy guy showed the world VOIP. Now everyone has one or the other VOIP apps on their phone to save that extra penny. Example of VOIP apps-Skype,fring etc. and VOIP enabled phones are like Vonage etc... - LED Lighting :
As technological advances were made , mankind understood that it is high time to become more greener. LED lighting are said to be more easy to dispose and last 25 times better than the Edison/Incandescent bulbs. The LEDs have become 20% brighter and 90% cheaper through the last decade. They are going to replace those incandescent lights, you light in your house, in the coming years. - Multicore CPUs:
Every CPU has a core(processor core). How did computer shrink from the size of a room to a small box? because we were able to pack the numerous transistors onto a small core. As new technologies were developed we started to increase the number of transistors on the core. But eventually we reached a stage when we could no more add transistors onto a core. So what we did was put more number of cores in the area of one. Thus improving the performance at same time conserving area. Now a days we don't get single core processors. Even if we manage to , we end up paying more for it than a processor with 2 or 4 cores. - Cloud Computing:
As the dependence on the internet grew we realised that we needed to do everything a little faster on the web. When we actually visit a website what happens is that the browser fetches data from the server of the website and display the data in a neat manner. As the inter grew larger we started using hundreds of servers to support the ever increasing websites. So at the strat of the decade Salesforce started a new concept of "Cloud computing" i.e storing the files on a common server thus reducing the effort to fetch it when required. The popular example of cloud computing is Google's Gmail email service. Also, the idea which is now becoming every popular is Cloud Storage. You can store data onto the cloud server and access it anywhere through the internet. Everyone is running out of space these days and there are many adopters of this new concept. - Drone Aircraft:
What are these ? they are unmanned aerial vehicles. Controlled by experts ,who are positioned far from the action , they unleash hell on the enemy land. Though unmanned vehicular operation is not a new technology but in the last decade it has been used extensively in war by USA and its allies (like anyone else is at war in the last decade ...duh! ). The first idea of 'drone' technology was made in 1898 by Nikola Tesla by showing remotely controlled boat through radio-telautomaton. Also in the same year Tesla wrote a paper showing how an aircraft can be used as an aerial torpedo - Of course the paper was rejected since it was too fanciful ! - Planetary Rovers:
The human is nevertheless very curious about our existence on this beautiful planet. This has made mankind to make every effort to cross the earth's atmosphere to find whether we are escapists from another planet. So far we have been successful in putting a man on our own moon only, we have achieved the feat of sending "Planet Rovers" to scour the planet's terrain to obtain invaluable data. Many believe that to sustain population there must be water. So we are basically looking for water in any form. And these rovers capture data in the form of soil samples which are researched to find any water to confirm presence of life forms. - AC Transmission:
The main system backing this technology is the FACT- Flexible AC Transmission systems. These systems enables us to send current (or rather power) to places where the conventional devices cannot be sent. These systems act like switches between the AC lines thus can redirect current to the place where it is required the most. The technology was invented in 1970s but started widespread implementation in the 2000s. Emerging economies such as India and China are using FACT based lines rather than the conventional ones because use of FACT systems reduces 1 transmission line for every 3 lines required. Thus being more economical. The FACT systems use the switching nature of solid state devices. Due to the technological advancement,FACT systems have an effciency of 94%. The efficiency can be further increased by using silicon carbide for switching which is supposed to happen in the coming years. Basically what this FACT system does is to create a smarter grid which manages power more efficiently. - Digital Photography:
If we imagine ourselves thinking about photographs in the year 2000,it would remind us of Camera Rolls,cleaning the photos,printing them and storing (occasionally framing) them. Come back to the present , when was the last time you framed a photo? or at-least worried about getting the photos printed? Camera rolls? now? still in stone age ,eh? The past decade has just shown how our lifestyle can be changed in just 10years. Cameras no more use rolls everything is digital.As you take a snap you can see the shot. Think it is not so good? take it again, delete the previous one ,no problemo. We don't settle for that small resolution pictures anymore we need those big bright high resolution media. We need everything HD. Now we can videos at a clarity(resolutions) which we could not achieve through still cameras a decade ago. The technology is so good now that they are mounting these pieces of media on our mobile phones(yup, #2 tech). And it is true that we love to share our pictures. It is to be noted that a whopping 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over the new year day!!
From the year 2000, we have come a long way in terms of technological advancement and we do hope this brings remarkable achievements in the coming to solve the problems faced by mankind.
source:IEEE
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