Institutional Investor (March 21)
“The Internet and all its mixed blessings are currently in full flower with the Internet of Things (IoT).” Connected things are forecast to grow by 30% this year and by 2020, there will probably be over 20 billion things connected to the Internet. “The pressing question: Is the IoT floor too far along for security to be, as technologists like to say, baked in?” To hackers, the IoT represents the ultimate honeypot” and already a significant share of botnet attacks are taking place not on PCs, but from connected things. “Welcome to the insecurity of things.”
The Economist (February 28)
As the “defining technology” of the beginning of the 21st century, smartphones “matter partly because of their ubiquity. They have become the fastest-selling gadgets in history, outstripping the growth of the simple mobile phones that preceded them. They outsell personal computers four to one. Today about half the adult population owns a smartphone; by 2020, 80% will.” Smartphones also matter because of the tremendous empowerment they bring users. Today, even the most basic smartphone “has access to more number-crunching capacity than NASA had when it put men on the Moon in 1969.” In their day, the clock and the car brought revolutionary change. “Today the smartphone is poised to enrich lives, reshape entire industries and transform societies.”
Tags: 21st century, Car, Change, Clock, Gadgets, Moon, NASA, PCs, Smartphones, Technology, Ubiquity
Wall Street Journal (October 7)
“The fourth major era of computing” is leaving mainframes, PCs and the Web further behind. “The mobile era began this summer, as there are now more mobile users than desktop users, with 1.8 billion surfing the Web on their smartphones. Having a personal computer in your pocket is changing the tech world because, unlike a computer, a smartphone is always there when you need it.”
Tags: Computing, Desktops, Era, Mainframes, Mobile era, PCs, Smartphones, Surfing, Users, Web
Boston Globe (October 7)
“Personal computers, smartphones, and digital music players might well exist if Steve Jobs had never begun tinkering in his parents’ California garage in the 1970s, but they wouldn’t have developed so rapidly, so beautifully, and with so much thought to their users. Without Jobs, who died of cancer at 56 Wednesday, the technologies we love would lack almost everything we love about them.”
Tags: Apple, Death, PCs, Smartphones, Steve Jobs
