10 Biggest tech breakthroughs of the past 200 issues (Part 2)
Mobile email
I remember sending my fist email. I was a
student and my alma mater had gifted me use of an email account. The address
was an impossible-to-remember string of digits, and to access it I had to book
a timeslot at the university’s computer centre. On balance, I decided that even
a task so suited to email as keeping up with friends at other universities was
much simpler when scrawling on a scrap of paper and heading down to the post
office. And the post office sold sweets.
Of course, even then email was more
portable than I’d realised. But it remained only a slightly easier way of
sending letters, using a static PC or laptop, until push email for mobile
devices became prevalent. Although push email was standard on Japanese
smartphones from around the turn of the last century, it wasn’t until RIM
started flogging its BlackBerry phones that it became a big deal in the UK.
The first full-featured BlackBerry phone
launched as recently as 2003. its impact in that short time has been nothing
short of staggering. Now almost all white-collar workers carry at least one
push-email-enabled portable device and, in plenty of cases, more than one. The
age of being out of contact when out of the office is well-and-truly over, as
executives email from the beach, and weekend warriors check their email in
nanosecond moments of down time.
Being able to email from a mobile
ha-along with SMS-in turn spawned other, more immediate forms of mobile
communication, from instant messaging, through Twitter and Facebook to
video-calling. But mobile email remains the daddy of them all, meaning that
working9 to 5 is a distant memory, while enabling flexible working practices.
Whether this makes us more efficient and
flexible, or simply more stressed, is a moot point. The way we communicate has
changed to a staggering extent, and this in no small part down to mobile email.
Multi-touch
You’d have been within your rights to
offer only a casual shrug at the idea of multi-touch technology representing a
major breakthrough. The use of touch screens to control devices has been around
since the dawn of computing, but for a long time it remained unpopular. Indeed,
like many of our technology breakthroughs, touch input was something that
Microsoft correctly recognised as important, without immediately cashing in.
Microsoft’s table-top touch platform- Microsoft
Surface-was dreamed up in 2001, but a final spec was announced with both
typically poor timing barely a month before the iPhone. Surface interacts with
both the users’ touch and objects placed on the display, and the technology
forms as huge part of Microsoft’s plans for a future wherein every surface is
an input device, and every device can interact.
But it was Apple that made multi-touch
popular with iPhone, launched in 2007. the iPhone’s creen tech was ultimately
the product of a company called Fingerworks. Fingerworks spent the early years
of this century developing various multi-touch technologies. It produced
several products, including a touch screen keyboard that Apple likes so much it
bought the company.
Of course, no-one is claiming that Apple
invented multi-touch-except Apple itself-but the iPhone was the first mobile
device with a multi-touch screen.
From the being a niche feature, touch is
now intrinsic to all manner of devices. Not all touch screens are made equal,
and by no means are al multi-touch, but the success of the iPhone and the
products that allowed it have firmly entrenched a ‘touch first, ask questions
later’ policy into the minds of most computer users. It may not be the ideal
input mode for every type of product, but it’s not ginf away: place a child in
front any tech device, and they will instinctively attempt to control it by
touch. That, my friends, is intuitive.
Social networking
There’s been a We forum-our own
social network, and the largest of its kind in Europe. But it took the rest of
the world a while to catch up.
According to Wikipedia, the first
social-networking websites went live around the same time as we thrust
itself on to an unsuspecting world. But the key dates in social networking happen
much later.
Consider this, as you browse the web: the
term ‘weblog’ didn’t exist before 1997 and, although people published online
diaries, the first dedicated blogging sites appeared even later than that.
Friendster, MySpace, FriendsReunited…they’ve all risen and fallen since 2002.
and even then, success and failure are relative terms, given the thousands of
people who still use networks considered moribund by the watching world.
Facebook debuted in 2004, Twitter in July 2006, and yet the amount of web
traffic that now goes to such sites is staggering.
Facebook, the biggest of all, tells us it
has more than 800 million active users more than half of whom visit the site at
least once a day and a staggering 350 million of whom access the site through
mobile phones. More than 70 languages, and there are more than 900 million
pages, group events and community pages.
Facebook, Twitter and the rest have
changed the way we communicate, while other sites and services have altered the
way we access and consume media. There’s more content on YouTube today than has
ever been broadcast on all the TV stations in the world. Want to share an event
with a loved one far away? If photos on Flickr and live Twitter updates aren’t
enough, just Skype it.
Love it or loathe it, social media has
changed the lives of millions of people to the extent that it’s not the ‘social
web’; for lots of people, it’s just ‘the web’.
