Happy New Year, in numbers!

Time flies, and it has never been so true than in the last fifty years of technology evolution. And the change is now accelerating: as new technology becomes available and yesterday’s technology becomes even more affordable, more and more products applications and services, which is what actually we perceive, are entering our life.
Technology is pervasive, as well as science. And its pervasiveness is now true also in a recursive way: technology evolution pushes further technology evolution. Most of what we see in our everyday life is actually the result of what is going on in the background. Evolution in production and distribution processes bring to our homes and into our life affordable innovation.
This is something that researchers often miss: the result of their ingenuity is expensive and because of that it will not find a way to the market. Engineering and logistic gurus on the other hand have the capacity to make affordable something that on the researcher’s bench was expensive.
The pace of innovation can also be perceived in numbers. Here there are a few I picked up on a variety of reports around the web:
– 4.4 ZettaByte is the amount of information available at the beginning of 2014 according to IDC. And now it should have exceeded 6.5 ZettaByte…
– Netflix is streaming over a billion hours of video per month
– Google and Amazon are getting ready to host your genome. For 25$ a year you can have your genome (once you sequence it) stored by Google and made available on demand to whom you care to share. You don’t have your genome sequenced yet? Most likely you will in the next 10 years, and your grandchildren will have their genome sequenced by default at birth.
– The market has never been so fleeting: Samsung held 32% of the smart phone market share in the third quarter of 2013, A year later its market share has plummeted to 24%. Ever heard of company names like Xiaomi (China) and Micromax (India). They are the rising start that are chewing on Samsung market!
– Smart phone sales only 3 years ago were less than 10% of the market share. Now they are over 60% and according to Gartner in 3 years they will be 90% of the market.
– Whatsapp is adding one million customer every day, it went from 0 to 96% of text messages marketshare in Spain in just 4 years. It manages 60 billion messages per day and it does that worldwide with a workforce of 55 people!
Take a look at the Gartner info chart on the top 10 technology trends for 2015.  You’ll notice that blended life, as we call it at the EIT ICT Labs, is right at the top!
Happy New Year!

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.