"The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow" - Bill Gates
We take the internet for granted.Honestly, we take a lot for granted.
Do you remember a time before cell phones, before the internet, before all these science fiction realities. Even when the internet started … do you remember dial-up ... or when you needed dial-up for each individual site?
Think of the impact of that one paper has on so many aspects of our life.
Information Gathering
I remember being in law school, going to the library and scanning through microfiche (or actual books) to study or do research.
I remember reading encyclopedias (and photocopying relevant articles).
I remember paying for newsletters that were mailed to me (or paying extra for fax delivery).
Having access to more data or faster delivery was a huge advantage.
Today, you have all the information you could ever ask for at the tip of your fingers ... Google and Wikipedia are just the tip of the iceberg.
There is almost too much information now. It is hard to separate the signal from the noise. It seems like anyone can find justification for almost anything. The result is lots of data, but too little knowledge.
Part of what is needed is a way to help people make better decisions about what to trust, what it means, and what to use.
Social Interaction
People record every moment, every intimate detail of their lives online, contrasted by a fear of strangers and letting children roam.
While riding around the neighborhood on your bike to see if your friends could come out to play is by no means outlawed - it does seem passé.
Chat rooms, Facebook, Online multi-player ... many people's key friendships are born and kept online.
I remember my son, 13 years old at the time, sending 10,000+ texts a month and thinking it was a phase. I was wrong.
The internet has radically changed the structure of relationships - for better, or often worse.
Privacy ( ... or the lack of it)
One of the biggest changes is that we as individuals have become productized. We take advantage of all these free resources at the cost of being pixeled and cookied into oblivion. We've chosen convenience over safety.
Remember, if you’re not paying for a product - you are the product.
Little bits of our private information, demographics, and psychographics are sold to advertisers to create smarter ads, new offers, and realistically we have very little control over that.
It’s been proven time and time again that these giants like Google and Facebook will find ways to sneak your data to advertisers even when it’s “illegal” with a slap on the wrist.
Data protection is a massive issue not only for corporations but for individuals. While many companies are trying to manage your privacy while still monetizing your data, there are just as many companies who couldn’t care less.
The GPDR - while frustrating for many - is a step towards protecting individuals.
Every action has a reaction, and every benefit has a cost. The internet is an amazing tool - but it can also be a weapon.
What will the next 30 years of the internet hold?
"The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won't even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room." — Eric Schmidt
It has been 30 years since inception, and there's radical growth.
We’ve gone from bit speeds to megabyte speeds. We’ve gone from crappy-quality video taking hours to download to streaming HD quality video live.
The US grounded the Boeing 737 Max after similarities between two crashes. It's good they did, safety first, but it definitely caused some headaches coming back from Saskatchewan. There's an interesting thought experiment here to understand the complexities that the airlines had to solve.
Imagine a 737 holds 200 people and does 4 or 5 flights a day. American has 24 737s in its fleet. That means each day ~24,000 people are displaced on American Airlines alone. They're replacing those planes with smaller regional jets – meaning more flights, more small airports, and more delays. The logistical/supply chain dynamics are a nightmare.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.
Rapidly maturing sectors are payment processing, personal finance, and blockchain/crypto.
Payment Processing - Stripe received $685 million in funding last year and is valued at over $20B
Personal Finance - This is a broad market, but we're seeing the "average joe" empowered to make smarter personal finance decisions with companies like Robinhood, Acorns, and Credit Karma. Credit Karma raised $869M and is valued at approximately $4B
Blockchain - While crypto is currently out of favor for many, blockchain is still an exciting prospect. Opendoor is bypassing real estate agents and brokers to disrupt the housing market. Receiving over $1B in funding last year, it is currently valued at $3.7B.
These are the sectors getting the most Fintech funding now (with payment processing the clear leader).
In my opinion, real disruption is brewing in the personal finance & Wall Street sectors ... and funding is ramping up there as we speak.
This Fintech sector reminds me of biotech. Solutions have to be more mature and fully-tested before unleashing them on the public. But winners will Win!
Wall Street is one of the smaller sections in this infographic. Nonetheless, I think you'll be reading a lot more about this space soon. Here are some of the companies worth noting.
Symphony does secure communications for companies like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. It helps with internal communication, and client-centric communication, and has various bots and apps to decrease decision time.
Addepar claims to "power the global financial system". It's a performance reporting platform meant to provide better insights, and connect assets to goals.
Carta does equity management; helping private & public companies manage their cap tables, investments, and equity plans.
Not seen on these lists are all the smaller companies at the beginning of their innovation cycle, and the companies doing their best to stay under the radar. More competitors and more opportunities mean more reason to keep your cards close to your chest.
The funding cycle is always two steps behind the innovation cycle, which means ideas we've been hearing about from the likes of Gartner will be seeing increased publicity soon.
I think 2019 will be a great year for innovation. What about you?
NASA's Mars Opportunity Rover has officially lost contact with earth after a fierce dust storm. Its last message was "My battery is getting low and it's getting dark." The rover's original mission was scheduled for 90 days ... it lasted 14 years.
This week, I spoke on stage at IBM's Think! 2019 conference in San Francisco. Our topic was "Gaining a Financial Edge through Fast Data and Analytics." I think it went well (both the presentation and our exposure to lots of useful technology, talent, and opportunities).
Moscone Center was filled with people clamoring for information about artificial intelligence, big data, and flexible computing (think of it as being able to do what you want locally, in the cloud, or with a hybrid cloud ... or through hardware or software). That means solutions are becoming independent of how they are produced, delivered, or consumed.
Pretty Cool! But, remember, the hype cycle precedes the adoption and benefits cycle. This will be an interesting decade.
The conference was in San Francisco. That is where my oldest son lives. Lucky for him, the most romantic Valentine's Day dinner is one spent with your dad right?
I thought it was fun. For them, at least there was Absinthe involved to dull the pain.
In 1977, the Voyager 1 launched into space. Just over a dozen years later, the Voyager 1 spacecraft had traveled farther than any spacecraft/probe/human-made anything had gone before. It was approximately 6 billion kilometers away from earth. At that point, the Voyager 1 was "told" by Carl Sagan to turn around and take one last photo of the Earth ... a pale blue dot.
The resulting photo is impressive precisely because it shows so little in so much.
"Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." – Carl Sagan
Earth is in the far right sunbeam – a little below halfway down the image. This image (and the ability to send it back to earth) was the culmination of years of effort, the advancement of technology, and the dreams of mankind.
The resulting speech from Carl Sagan is still profound, moving, and worth a listen.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Today, we have people living in space, posting videos from the ISS, and high-resolution images of space and galaxies near and far.
We take for granted the immense phase shift in technology. You have more computing power in your pocket than we first used to go to the moon.
As humans, we're wired to think locally and linearly. We evolved to live our lives in small groups, to fear outsiders, and to stay in a general region until we die. We're not wired to think about the billions and billions of individuals on our planet, or the rate of technological growth - or the minuteness of that all in regard to the expanse of space.
However, today's reality necessitates we think about the world, our impact, and what's now possible for us.
We created better and faster ways to travel, we've created instantaneous communication networks across vast distances, and we've created megacities. Our tribes have gotten much bigger - and with that, our ability to enact massive change has grown as well.
Space was the first bastion of today's innovation, but today we can look toward A.I., medicine, epigenetics, and more.
It's hard to comprehend the scale of the universe and the scale of our potential ... but that's what makes it worth exploring!
Celebrating 30 Years of the Internet [Infographic]
We take the internet for granted. Honestly, we take a lot for granted.
Do you remember a time before cell phones, before the internet, before all these science fiction realities. Even when the internet started … do you remember dial-up ... or when you needed dial-up for each individual site?
In March of 1989, Tim Berners-Lee published “Information Management: A Proposal” which outlined his vision for what would soon become the World Wide Web. March 12th is the official anniversary.
In celebration of 30 years of the internet, here’s an infographic on the timeline. Click to see the full thing.
via AppInstitute
Think of the impact of that one paper has on so many aspects of our life.
Information Gathering
I remember being in law school, going to the library and scanning through microfiche (or actual books) to study or do research.
I remember reading encyclopedias (and photocopying relevant articles).
I remember paying for newsletters that were mailed to me (or paying extra for fax delivery).
Having access to more data or faster delivery was a huge advantage.
Today, you have all the information you could ever ask for at the tip of your fingers ... Google and Wikipedia are just the tip of the iceberg.
There is almost too much information now. It is hard to separate the signal from the noise. It seems like anyone can find justification for almost anything. The result is lots of data, but too little knowledge.
Part of what is needed is a way to help people make better decisions about what to trust, what it means, and what to use.
Social Interaction
People record every moment, every intimate detail of their lives online, contrasted by a fear of strangers and letting children roam.
While riding around the neighborhood on your bike to see if your friends could come out to play is by no means outlawed - it does seem passé.
Chat rooms, Facebook, Online multi-player ... many people's key friendships are born and kept online.
I remember my son, 13 years old at the time, sending 10,000+ texts a month and thinking it was a phase. I was wrong.
The internet has radically changed the structure of relationships - for better, or often worse.
Privacy ( ... or the lack of it)
One of the biggest changes is that we as individuals have become productized. We take advantage of all these free resources at the cost of being pixeled and cookied into oblivion. We've chosen convenience over safety.
Remember, if you’re not paying for a product - you are the product.
Little bits of our private information, demographics, and psychographics are sold to advertisers to create smarter ads, new offers, and realistically we have very little control over that.
It’s been proven time and time again that these giants like Google and Facebook will find ways to sneak your data to advertisers even when it’s “illegal” with a slap on the wrist.
Data protection is a massive issue not only for corporations but for individuals. While many companies are trying to manage your privacy while still monetizing your data, there are just as many companies who couldn’t care less.
The GPDR - while frustrating for many - is a step towards protecting individuals.
Every action has a reaction, and every benefit has a cost. The internet is an amazing tool - but it can also be a weapon.
What will the next 30 years of the internet hold?
It has been 30 years since inception, and there's radical growth.
We’ve gone from bit speeds to megabyte speeds. We’ve gone from crappy-quality video taking hours to download to streaming HD quality video live.
How do imagine that the internet will evolve?
What influence do you think the Internet of Things will have?
It’s hard to foresee how innovation and regulation will change the internet, but it’s clear there will be change.
We live in exciting times!
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