Celebrating International Internet Day

Today marks 46 years since the first ever data transmission across the internet.
Happy International Internet Day! For us, this celebration is up there with Christmas; we’ll be celebrating all things world wide web rather than All Hallow’s Eve this weekend. The internet is truly the greatest invention of modern day, and the ways it has shaped our lives are innumerable. The way we live now as compared to life a mere half century ago is drastically different, and we have the internet to thank for this.
The power of the internet and the computers which house and transmit our data have seen such accelerated growth that many businesses have struggled to keep up. Those which have been slow to adjust to the internet have been swept aside by Digital Darwinism, and replaced by younger fledgling startups with innovative ideas and an ability to adapt to the constantly changing and fluid digital environment.
It is the hardware which houses our data and transmits it around the world in milliseconds that has seen consistent advancement; Moore’s Law turned 50 this year. On 19th April 1959, before even the first data transmission we are celebrating today, Gordon Moore predicted that each year we’d see a doubling in the number of transistors on a silicon chip, equating to a doubling in computing power year on year without a huge cost increase. Moore later modified this prediction to be every two years, but with this amendment we’ve seen this hold true until now.
The shrinking computing chips have corresponded with our shrinking hardware; nowadays wearable devices which are fully internet-enabled can be as small as a fingernail, and we’ve not reached full potential yet. We recently reported about FlexTech, the next generation of wearable tech which will be small and fluid enough to become a part of clothing or other materials. Soon we could be wearing the most powerful computers ever engineered…as part of our jeans!
The internet has truly revolutionized international business and personal communications. Just as Back to the Future II predicted, we can chat in real time across the globe with our business associates, meaning we don’t have to be anchored to a physical location to communicate with our colleagues and associates. From this leap in communications came the birth of the digital nomad, who travels the world whilst working remotely. Of course, with these emerging professions come a hoard of new online applications to help manage the lifestyle, and we recently listed our very own five essential apps for digital nomads.
With businesses becoming less rigid in their working schedules we’re seeing many employers give their team room to grow and develop in their own ways in this digital landscape. Google famously gives their employees ‘20% time’ to work on innovative side  projects, which has brought us Gmail, Google News and AdSense. Of the project, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had this to say:
“We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. This empowers them to be more creative and innovative. Many of our significant advances have happened in this manner.”.
Looking forward towards what the future holds for our internet-enabled society, there are several buzzwords which are promising to become staples in our society. Although wearable technology has been slow to be fully adopted by society, it promises to explode onto the market as products are refined and bettered. In addition, the internet of things promises to connect us to every aspect of our lives, and by 2020 Cisco predicts 50 billion of the world’s devices will be connected on the internet. That’s certainly one giant leap away from the online landscape in 1969 which was just getting started.
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