My last post talked about what was going in the world when we were born. This article will revolve around the fortunes of our generation and how lucky we are to have the things without which life can't be imagined. Let's begin this article from the place where we left, 'the internet'.
The last article mentioned how the internet came into existence and its early days, but let's start this with how internet transformed the world.
Internet was founded as a better alternative for the pre-existing ARPANET and internet used TCP/IP for establishing the connection between two points. It also connects the whole world together through efficient implementation of TCP/IP and World Wide Web.
Before our generation (1990-91 born), the greatest thing which modified the world was mobile telephone communication. This one thing turned the whole world upside down as it provided immense freedom and accessibility of communicating with other people in different cities, states, countries and continents.
But with the internet, things were much more advanced and has the potential of impacting the world with greater extent than by any other invention.
It is just like the electricity of 20th century, which has remolded the life of mankind to the same extent electricity recast in late 19th century.
Invention of internet was just the birth of a miracle baby who will now change the way whole world operates..!! With this event, mankind was entering into a new era, digital era and certainly it is the greatest fortune of our generation as today everything is dependent on this one thing, the internet.
But how we can say that the internet is the greatest fortune..!!??
The internet is the foundation of our 21st-century world, everything is standing on the internet. Even the crimes are dependent on internet, extent of the internet is that much in today's world. The internet gave birth to new areas, new industries, new companies, new businesses, new products & services and redefined human needs. The internet today is considered as the basic requirement and no more is considered to be the extra want. Rather, it has become a need which gave rise to different wants.
Internet formed backbone of the whole new family of devices, which is the lifeline of modern mankind..'Smart Phones'..!!
The first smartphone was developed in 1993 by IBM which was named as IBM 'Simon'.
This was the phone which provided touch screen, qwerty keyboard format, emails, predictive typing, Stylus, send and receive faxes and cellular pages. It was the first phone to provide memory card option of extending memory to 1.8MB. It paved a path for the future phones by allowing people to send and receive emails faxes and pages on their phones.
The phones of today which have memory of 128GB (Apple i phone 6 and 6+) , flexible expandable memories, stylus (Galaxy Note series) and provides assortment of features including internet, social networking, camera, video conferencing, all were started by Simon, having internet as its backbone.
The world at that time used to go to libraries and referred to tens to hundreds of books, newspapers and magazines to find out anything they wanted to search. This was very time-consuming and boring. But a soon change in the boring world came with the foundation of yahoo.com, a search engine company which revolutionized the way of information search. Yahoo was founded in 1994, just 3 years later since the world wide web was founded.
Yahoo proved to be legendary in teaching the world how to use the internet and make the knowledge management task easy and fast. Information was no more to be considered as the area of differentiation as it was available at yahoo.com that too without any charges. It also organized and provide easy access to emails to people.
This company revamped completely the structure of working of every organization. E-mails were used by people and companies but in a very limited way but with yahoo, companies started using emails for their official communications, within an organization and with other organizations as well. It also restructured the advertisement pattern of most companies, as they started advertising through personal emails to the target market using emails as it was more effective way to advertise than the earlier ways of advertisements, which included canopies, banners, and other print media.
The internet completely recasts the way of selling and buying goods. Earlier, if anyone had to purchase anything, he/she had to go to retail stores or mega marts or superstores, pick up the things required, pay the money and come back home, then enjoy the benefits of the product purchased. One man redesigns the whole pattern, Jeff Bezos, by founding the first company to sell goods online, amazon.com in 1994. It was completely based on the internet and used the online marketplace to showcase its products.
It started from selling books but added all sorts of goods later on.
Another company which followed amazon pattern of creating online marketplace was ebay.com in 1995 which was primarily an auction site, where customers can sell their products directly to customers and also business sell their products to customers.
These two companies started the dot-com bubble and today that bubble is expanding like anything where more and more companies are adding up each day. For companies like them, the internet was their lifeline, their heart which were surviving on the internet.
There are countless examples of companies which followed the pattern of amazon and eBay, whether its alibaba.com of China or flipkart.com of India, all were leveraging the backbone created by the internet. People across the world started using e-tail more than retail and customer purchasing pattern and behavior changed.
The internet not only changed the way people spend money but also the way people access and carry money with them. It helped people to access their accounts from anywhere in the world with the introduction of net banking in 1995 by a US bank named Wells Fargo.
This event was the beginning of the transformation of the financial industry. Net banking which was started as an add-on service became the norm and the expected service from any bank.
It made people spending more as they were having easy and anytime access of their bank accounts. Later on with the development of mobile phones, mobile banking again restructured the financial industry. Mobile banking helped banks to reach untapped rural areas of countries and contributed in countries' GDP.
After net banking, new range of banking or payment method came into market known as digital wallet or e-wallet, which allowed people to keep their money in a digital wallet in digital form and pay for their purchase of goods and services online.
The first company to foray in this area was PayPal in 1998, founded by Elon Musk. It showed the path to various digital wallets across the world and, as a result, changed the payment structure and spending structure of people around the world.
The world was enjoying some last years of 20th century and was getting prepared for the 21st century. But like before, mankind was very fortunate. Before stepping into the 21st century, a company turned the world and divided the world timeline as 'before the Google era' and 'after the Google era'.
Google founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 was started as a search engine which works on different principles than what yahoo did. The google's way was much more efficient and fast. It quickly replaced yahoo and became the leader of the search engine. But Google was not just a search engine company, it was a whole assortment of world-changing innovations.
It gave all the products which were required at personal and professional level to make work and life simple and easy such as google online books, news, docs, sheet, forms, presentation, drive and most importantly Gmail, which is the most widely used mailing platform across world.
These were just a few of the feathers from google's crown. google has always provided out of the box products to mankind. Google Glass which is the new project of the company will transform lives.
It started Adwords, ad sense which revolutionized whole advertising industry and a new marketing medium developed for marketeers. It started search engine optimization which ranked the website of companies according to the organic search by people and keywords included. This made companies realized that they have to take google seriously to gain an edge over their competitors and as more companies started taking google seriously, companies had to invest more and more at 'google management' to stay in competition in industry.
Google redefined the way people lived. It disrupted the smartphone industry with the launch of first android phone HTC Dream in 2008. The story behind the launch of android is long. Android was developed as a company in 2003 but struggled to survive. Google adopted the baby and nourished it to make it software according to the integration with google products and this is how android was revitalized in 2005 and today it has developed to be the most successful software for smartphones.
Google apps provide virtually an infinite number of ways to make your life interesting, easy and more productive, are just one click away from us.
Google has restructured the world completely. It's all products are so integrated with our lives that now we can not imagine a minute without google. Even the place I am writing this article is a product of google. Thank you, google for blog spot. It is the god of the digital world, omnipresent and solving all the problems altogether. Whether it is traveling, information about anything in the world, language problem, the image recognizing, storing & access of data and what not.
Writing about google will take me a whole article dedicated to google only, but for the time being, let's move to our next fortune. It is something which has transformed music listening and purchasing..!!
It is none other than the Apple Inc. It launched iPod and iTunes, which redesigned the whole music industry and a rest is a history. iPod and iTunes became the best combination for music and every copyrighted piece of music was specially made available at iTunes, as it was the major market.
Later on apple forte into smartphones and today developed to be the second largest selling smartphones across the world. It made a completely new range of products which people never realized they require, iPad.
Ipad was a product which was neither a laptop nor a phone, but combined features of both. It provided large screen area, suitable for working on documents and presentations and also watching movies and playing games and was free from any bulky keyboard and thus was easier to handle and light in weight. It started tablet series of products which are now selling like hot cakes.
In starting years of 21st century, one company kicked out the traditional way of mobile telephony. Through mobiles, we were only able to hear the voice of the person on the other side, but this company will provide us with the video of the person with whom we are talking. It enabled us to see the expressions & emotions also of the people as if they are sitting with us and chatting. It added a life to the whole communication process.
It is none other than Skype, founded in 2003. With skype, both personal and professional parts of our lives changed. We could sit at a distant place and still be with our near and dear ones through skype and we can make presentations to a head office in New York while sitting in Mumbai.
This concept of video chatting and video conferencing was a fortune for our generation. Video conferencing reduced the expenditure on transportation of all the companies to a great extent and also the time wasted in traveling can now be much more productively utilized. This also helped companies to reduce their carbon footprints and thus contributing their share towards a dream of the better world.
Till now the internet has transfigured the world completely with e-tail, search engines, video conferencing, but this was just starters. The main course is still to be served, with the first dish as Facebook. It is a social networking giant founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook changed the behavior of people. People started updating their facebook status as the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. It created obsession of social networking and provided people a platform to be what they desired to be in actual life as most of the people
faked themselves on this platform to get
more likes or comments.
Count of friends on facebook was a count of the popularity of a person and thus facebook created a whole world around people in which they were ready to forget the real life.
Facebook also provided an advertisement platform to companies because of the presence of a wide variety of people at a single place, that too totally engrossed in facebook. It started the revolution in social networking and today even one-year-old is on facebook (although against facebook policies).
Facebook paved the way for other social networking sites and there comes the next giant of social media, Twitter in 2006.
Twitter although considered under the same category of social networking but worked on the slightly different pattern. It allowed people to follow their political leaders, actors/actresses, sports icons and what not. It was not as mad as facebook, but slightly on the professional side.
It was not social networking site, it was more of celebrity networking. It was an easier way to get updates from the people or companies you want to follow and thus is very popular today.
Above three companies, google, facebook, and twitter revolutionized the digital world, forced companies to started a whole new department, the digital marketing department, responsible for handling online marketing of companies.
Till now there were only thee modes of payment, by cash or plastic money through debit and credit cards or bank accounts through net banking, but with the introduction of a digital currency named Bitcoin in 2009, there was a disruption in whole financial industry. This was the new kind of currency which was never used before and was
gaining acceptance very fast across the world.
With the all of this in our hands, our generation has been fortunate..!!??
We are fortunate to be obsessed with our digital life, our digital image at facebook, following famous personalities at twitter, thinking every time which song to purchase and which channel to be used to make payment, Paypal or any other digital wallet. Visiting an e-commerce website and spending hours and hours to chose an apparel to be purchased, which later on realized was not required and was purchased because of weekend bonanza offer. Handling accounts of different e-commerce sites, digital wallets, social networking sites and handling the countless offers given by each of these commerce websites and digital wallets is obviously not less than any fortune.
We can do everything on our smartphone which is our fortune and smartphones have become a part of the human body itself. We can not live without our phone for a minute, but can live without people for years. We go crazy if, by chance, we kept our phone somewhere in a room are not able to find our phone for a while. We turn the whole room upside down to search it and what a relief we get on finding it. But we are least bothered if our mother has dropped her ring in the room and asked our help as we are more concerned about what swapping or friends and sending them those stupid jokes and images. Definition of happiness for our generation has changed. It is redefined by increasing likes on facebook profile pic and retweets at twitter, although in reality you are not even asked for by any of your followers. We are getting enslaved by these so called fortunes and we are still happy.
You still think all of the above are fortunes of our generation..!! I doubt that..!!
