Life-changing advances in technology

As I reading through Teresa Morgan's blog, I came upon "How Much Changes in Ten Years?" Really interesting and it sort of prompted me to think about the technologies that I DEFINITELY CAN'T live without!!

Wi-Fi 

Gone are those nasty dial-up days of plugging 56k modems into shaky phone lines and hoping for the best; or precariously balancing laptops while avoiding pulling the plug on the internet connection.
Wi-Fi's 802.11 standard was first mooted in the late 90s, but has now come of age, with many homes now running wireless networks to cope with multiple devices requiring internet connections.
Free hotspots are dotted around major cities, meaning you no longer need to go far to check email.

iPod

 Sure, it's not the only MP3 player out there, but when Apple's iPod first made its debut in 2001, no one could have predicted the mammoth success that it has become - racking up 173 million unit sales by September 2008. It's come a long way from the humble, mono-screened beginnings, evolving from a hard drive spinner to flash-memory packing devices that range from the near-pointless Shuffle to the video-capable Nano and the flagship Touch, which connects to Wi-Fi networks to let users surf the net as well as play games and play with GoogleMaps. Then there's the so-called 'Jesus phone' - the iPhone 3G, which adds a cellphone and next-gen internet capability to the Touch.

Google

 Need to know anything? Google it. A late arrival to the lucrative world of internet search, Google was the result of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's research project at Stamford in 1996. The company launched two years later and is currently the king of all things search, with a market share of 62.9 per cent and handling up to five billion searches each month. The company has managed to expand into many different tech spaces with projects like its open source Android mobile phone operating system and the Chrome internet browser and voyeur's delight Street View, all released in 2008.
Digital cameras

 Digital cameras have come a long, long way in the past decade. In 1999, a 2.7 megapixel digital SLR would set you back in the region of $25,000 - and that was just for the body. The staggering pricing of these early digitals made them strictly pro-only. Times have certainly changed, and while high-end DSLRs like Nikon's D3X and Canon's D1 Mk3 will set you back close to $10,000; point-and-click, zoom-capable eight megapixel compact digital cameras cost less than $400. Most cellphones feature a built-in camera these days, but there really is no substitute for a stand-alone camera for ease of use and quality of results. Bundled software has improved alongside price, and now anyone with half a brain can tackle simple photo-editing.

Facebook

 By far the biggest success story of the Web 2.0 world, Facebook took on New Corp's MySpace in 2004 and started to change the way we run our lives online. It was started by baby-faced Mark Zuckerberg. Microsoft bought a small stake in Facebook, which is now estimated to be worth US$15 billion (NZ$27bn). Part of the Facebook appeal is the ability to add applications to your profile - the most high-profile being Scrabulous, a Scrabble knock off that had half a million users playing every day. It also allows people from past lives to suddenly pop up, wanting to be your friend.


Reference: Greenop, M., (2009). Ten years of life-changing advances in technology. New Zealand Herald. Retrieved from http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10552897