The best things in life are for free—and need to be kept that way.Tim Berners-Lee,physicist and Oxford University graduate,believed in it.The man who invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989-90 could easily have become a trillionaire,had he decided to monetise his invention.Today,thanks to him,millions of users worldwide post andaccess multimedia data on the internet,adding to thesteadily growing mountain of casual,business,informative,academic and entertainment-related contentonline.Despite its popularity,the WWW (or the Web) is notan easy concept to understand.Indeed,many consider itsynonymous with the Internet.But as experts say,“ WWW isa subset of the internet.However,the internet owes itsmassive popularity to the Web!”In 1989,Berners-Lee,then working with CERN (the Geneva-based European ParticlePhysics Laboratory),proposed a global hypertext projectbased on his research.The project proposed to makehypertext documents freely available to users everywhere.Today,if we are able to raid the internet’s bounties foreverything from the history of Machu Picchu to Nehru’sfamous ‘Tryst with Destiny’,it is because of the point andclick system Berners-Lee and his associates pioneered.Onecan view WWW pages that may contain text,images, videos,multimedia and navigate between them usinghyperlinks.No one currently enjoys proprietary status of the WWW. Voluntary groups like W3C (WWW consortium led by TimBerners-Lee himself),ICANN and Internet GovernanceForum under the UN ensure that the WWW remains likethe commons in medieval England—to be shared andmaintained by all.The Web now has over 1.4 billion users worldwide and this number is growing fast.
WORLD WIDE
WEB
Nothing has come to represent cash the way credit cards have. The ideaof using a card to make purchases was first drawn up by EdwardBellamy in 1887 in his novel
Looking Backward
and its sequel
Equality
.The US was the first country to launch it in the early 1900s, althoughthe usage was at the time restricted to being ‘unorganised’.It was Diners Club International, the first independent credit cardcompany in the world and American Express, which changed the way cards were used. They developed it into a tangible businessphenomenon. In India, the concept of plastic money caught on in thelate 1980s, only after private sector banking came into practice. Today,all private sector banks and many nationalised banks offer credit cards,the market leader being ICICI Bank.
PLASTIC
MONEY
It’s said that the ultimate success of a product lies in its brand namebecoming a verb. Google is one such brand. Imagine carrying the world’s knowledge in the brain and giving out near-results wheneversomeone pops a question. The web search engine has managed to do just that, and in the process, made hard-copy monoliths like theEncyclopaedia Britannica run out of business. Google began as adissertation project in January 1996 by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student atStanford. It later evolved as one of the most popular inventions on theinternet. Page was soon joined by his mate, Sergey Brin, on the thesis.Now Googling is officially listed as a verb in the Oxford and Merriam Websters Collegiate dictionaries.If there is one disease Indians are most wary about, it is Diabetes, amedical condition where the human body cannot produce or useinsulin properly. Over centuries, the disease had resulted in deaths of millions worldwide.So when Dr Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best firstmade insulin from an animal pancreatic extract in 1922, it came as ablessing to mankind. Later, Eli Lilly joined hands with the scientistsand in 1982, along with Genentech, launched the world’s first insulin-Humulin. The global sales of insulin is expected to double to around$15 billion by 2010. Danish company Novo Nordisk is the globalleader with 45% market share followed by American rival Eli Lilly, with about 30%.
HUMAN
INSULIN
Despite a century, photography remained an elitist andexpensive hobby for humanity, which resorted to thetedious and expensive analog photography process.The commercial introduction of digital cameras in 1997changed the notion completely, beginning a process of ‘democratisation’ of photography, making it withinreach of the have-nots. With a peak saleof 30 million analogue camera units in a single year inthe early 1990s, digital camera sales surged and crossedthe 100 million-mark in 2004. Till date, around 500million digital camera units have beensold worldwide.The technology, which involves recording of still imagesand video as a computerised file on memory cards, took over two decades to go commercial and involved work by many individuals and companies. Besides theeconomics, it offered other advantages like displayingimages on a LCD screen, storing thousands of imagesand deleting them, making it an instant hit.
DIGITAL
CAMERAS
It took a 007 for the world to fully come toterms with Global Positioning System, or GPS. As Korean Airlines Flight 007 strayed intoformer USSR prohibited airspace in 1983, it was duly shot down. The world was shaken,and the then US President Ronald Reaganstirred into action by issuing a directivemaking GPS freely available for civilian use forthe greater good. The GPS, simply put, uses aconstellation of 24 to 32 Medium Earth Orbitsatellites that transmit microwave signals, which enable GPS receivers to determine theircurrent location, time and velocity.Though it is managed by the US Air Force’s50th Wing, GPS is now commonly used by civilians for navigation. The GPS hasrevolutionised the way people find each other.GPS devices now come fitted in mobilephones, PDAs, laptops, cars, bikes, airplanes,cycles, ships, parachutes and even trekkingshoes. Such devices are now used for findingstray dogs and cats to accurately droppingmissiles and bombs in battle zones.
GPS
TRACKING
Outsourcing is a plain-vanilla sub-contracting process,traditionalists contend. Actually, it goes back to 19thcentury manufacturing when the sweating systemprevailed in American cities. Suppliers used to‘outsource’ the work of making garments and boots forthe American Forces to sub-contractors. The processcontinued to remain in manufacturing with large-scalesub-contracting of production work to suppliers in Asiaby companies like Nike in the 1970s. Many companiesalso decided to set up subsidiaries in Asia to handlesome of the production work.In the 1980s, outsourcing moved beyond the realm of manufacturing with services, such as travel bookingand payroll processing, being forked out to players like American Express and EDS. But outsourcing’s heydaysreally took wing in the 1990s with IT as American firmshanded over their applications development andmaintenance work to foreign vendors, such as IndianIT and BPO companies.
OUTSOURCING
IS KING
Videoconferencing (VC) took its baby steps as far back as the 1920s when engineers at Bell TelephoneLaboratories started thinking of ways to transmit voiceand video over phone lines. On April 7, 1927, Bell Labs’office played host to an initial demonstration of what would later come to be known as video-conferencing.This two-way television as a system of communication was refined further only in 1956, when AT&T made thefirst PicturePhone test system, a kind of visualtelephone. In the 1990s, VC systems resorted to openstandards and were no more expensive proprietary equipment and software. Soon, Internet Protocol-basedvideoconferencing became possible and later advancesshifted it to personal computers as well. VC has revolutionised not only the way business isdone, but has also facilitated telemedicine, tele-education and helps the environment. It has broughtdown time and expenses on travel as business meetingscan be done with participants in distant places.
VIDEO
CONFERENCING
Perhaps no other idea has had the kind of impact thatthe small, embedded inside devices, silently workingchip has had on people’s lives. It’s ubiquitous-ineverything from computers, cars, cellphones, coffee-makers, space shuttles, smart toasters, washingmachines, and so on. Not surprisingly, the globalchip market is over $200 billion a year and the marketfor all the products that use a chip is well over atrillion dollars!Chips perform various tasks by design. Meaning thatsome are more complex than others. The mostsophisticated chip is a microprocessor, whosetransistors can execute hundreds of millions of instructions per second.These chips or integrated circuits as they were called when first developed, were invented by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce who laterfounded Intel, the world’s largest chip-maker. Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integratedcircuit in July 1958 and successfully demonstrated thefirst working integrated circuit on September 12,1958. He won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for hispart of the invention of the chip. Noyce came up withhis own idea of the chip, six months after Kilby.Noyce’s chip solved many practical problems that themicrochip developed by Kilby had not. Today, a world without chips is inconceivable and in the not-so-distant future, microchips will process informationfaster than the human brain. Brace up for super-human robots.
MICRO
CHIPS
Although the human race had developedcooling systems in ancient times, withRomans cooling buildings by flowing waterthrough aqueducts in the walls, it took WillisCarrier to challenge nature by inventing thefirst modern electrical air-conditioningdevice in 1902 in the US. He developed theproduct while solving a task to stemfluctuating heat and humidity conditions ata printing plant. Surrounded by fog while waiting for a train in Pittsburgh, Carrierrefined the idea of a machine which wouldcontrol heat, humidity, air circulation andventilation, besides cleaning the air. Then,the father of modern air-conditioningformed his own company, CarrierEngineering Corp., with the idea of sellingcooling gadgets in 1915. The company bearing his name marketed itsair-conditioners to consumers in the 1950sand was later acquired by UTC. It continuesto be the world’s largest air-conditioningfirm today.
AIR
CONDITIONING
Nobody can dispute the revolution that e-mailing has brought about. A small kilobytesent on the information superhighway hasmade a giga-leap for all mankind. TheMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) isbelieved to be the first computer todemonstrate e-mailing. Users of CTSS couldstore files online from a remote location, justlike emails today are stored on Yahoo orGoogle servers. Like some of the othertechnology inventions, the roots of e-mailingcan also be traced to the US Department of Defense (DoD). E-mailing became a regularfeature for users of the DoD’s ARPANET (theearly form of internet). It was here that use of the @ sign became popular in 1970s. As the internet evolved, web-based mailbecame a regular but paid feature offered by many ISPs. Lycos.com used to offer paid emailas early as 1995. But it took an Indian, SabeerBhatia, in 1997 to popularise the use of free e-mail via his free webmail service—Hotmail.
FREE
MAIL
The world, which boasts of having dedicated TV channels on every possible subject, traces the origin of Cable TV to the states of Arkansas, Oregon andPennsylvania in US. In a bid to provide televisionentertainment in rural areas (where television signals were not accessible), a TV (sets) salesman came up withthe idea of using cable in 1948. But the pilot transmission was done almost simultaneously by James Y. Davidson,Leroy "Ed" Parsons, John Walson and Martin Malarkey inthe US. This was followed by English movie channel HBObecoming the first to use satellite mode of transmittingcontent in 1976. From the basic analog terrestrialbroadcast in the 1920s to Cable & Satellite TV, the modeof transmission for providing content has now transformed into direct-to-home (DTH), InternetProtocol Television (IPTV) and even mobile TV.Cable & Satellite television, which started in India duringthe Gulf War, is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment for consumers.
CABLE
TV
METHODOLOGY
OF THE CEO POLL
GOOGLE
SEARCH
of the
BEST
25
The CEOs were asked to allocatepoints (from 1 to 10,with 10being the highest) to each of thethree parameters for every idea.Points given to the threeparameters were then summedup to find how many points outof a total of 30 points a CEO hadgiven to an idea.Finally,the totalmarks,given by the 50 CEOs,foreach idea was collated todetermine the total overallpoints.The idea which got themaximum points was rankedone.One with the least pointscame 25th on the list.
Leave a Comment
thanks:)good material for a lesson