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A flood of innovations iPod to Twitter: Digital Decade delivers
While it got off to a rocky start with the overhyped Y2K bug and the dotcom bubble, the "Digital Decade" as predicted by Microsoft’s Bill Gates has turned out to be a dizzying period of innovation.
While it got off to a rocky start with the overhyped Y2K bug and the dotcom bubble, the "Digital Decade" as predicted by Microsoft’s Bill Gates has turned out to be a dizzying period of innovation.
"It's been an amazingly vibrant decade for the Internet and for digital things in general," said John Abell, New York bureau chief of Wired magazine, which has chronicled the technological leaps and bounds of the past 10 years.
"People simply don't exist in a non-digital world," Abell said. "Even grandmothers and Luddites have tools and devices which connect them to a digital world."
David Pogue, personal technology columnist for The New York Times, points to Apple's iPod, introduced in 2001, as among the most influential devices of the decade.
"It really revolutionised the way music is distributed and marketed," said Pogue, who also casts a vote for the Flip pocket camcorder from Pure Digital Technologies.
"In two years it... has taken over one-third of the camcorder market and killed tape camcorders," Pogue said of the Flip.
Touchscreen smartphones such as the iPhone are also high on Pogue's list.
Other pathbreakers listed by technology analysts are Amazon's Kindle electronic reader, the GPS navigation system, the technology of making webpages (which has morphed from a specialist job to anyone can).
Web search giant Google has become "central to our lives," said Wired's Abell, branching out into "everything you can think of."
The Internet has become accessible to all in the years since, giving birth to sites such as Wikipedia in 2001, MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006.
Much of what has come to pass over the past 10 years was presaged by Gates in an October 2001 essay, Moving Into the Digital Decade. Wonder he makes of the coming decade.
