Deepening of Information Age: Record Pace of Smart Phone Adaption

Technology adaption has been speeding up, with smart phones saturating the US markets in record time

From Technologyreview.com (hat tip Professor Mark Perry)

Today's technology scene seems overheated to some. Apple is the most valuable company on earth. Software apps are reaching tens of millions of users within weeks. Major technology names like Research in Motion and Nokia are being undone by rapid changes to their markets. Underlying these developments: the unprecedented speed at which mobile computers are spreading.

Presented below is the U.S. market penetration achieved by nine technologies since 1876, the year Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Penetration rates have been organized to show three phases of a technology's spread: traction, maturity, and saturation.

Those technologies with "last mile" problems—bringing electricity cables or telephone wire to individual homes—appear to spread more slowly. It took almost a century for landline phones to reach saturation, or the point at which new demand falls off. Mobile phones, by contrast, achieved saturation in just 20 years. Smart phones are on track to halve that rate yet again, and tablets could move still faster, setting consecutive records for speed to market saturation in the United States.

It is difficult to conclude categorically from the available data that smart phones are spreading faster than any previous technology. Statistics are not always available globally, and not every technology is easily tracked. Also, because smart phones have not yet reached market saturation, as electricity and television have, the results are still coming in.

This for me represents additional manifestations of the deepening of the information age.

This also means that the diffusion of technology usage will increasingly change the way live or do things or how we conduct commerce.

The influence of technology will not be limited to economy, but will also affect politics and political institutions.

The intensifying friction between on the one side, globalization and technology innovation, and on the other, centralized political institutions should be a noteworthy example.

Nonetheless the transition will not be smooth as entrenched parties, who benefited from the industrial political economy, will resist and fight change.

Information Age will be Driven by Three Major Forces

Writing at the Wall Street Journal physicist-entrepreneur Mark P. Mills and Dean of McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Northwestern University Julio M. Ottino sees a dramatic reconfiguration of the US economy that would likely be driven by 3 major forces: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

They write, (bold emphasis mine)

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

Information technology has entered a big-data era. Processing power and data storage are virtually free. A hand-held device, the iPhone, has computing power that shames the 1970s-era IBM mainframe. The Internet is evolving into the "cloud"—a network of thousands of data centers any one of which makes a 1990 supercomputer look antediluvian. From social media to medical revolutions anchored in metadata analyses, wherein astronomical feats of data crunching enable heretofore unimaginable services and businesses, we are on the cusp of unimaginable new markets.

The second transformation? Smart manufacturing. This is the first structural shift since Henry Ford launched the economic power of "mass production." While we see evidence already in automation and information systems applied to supply-chain management, we are just entering an era where the very fabrication of physical things is revolutionized by emerging materials science. Engineers will soon design and build from the molecular level, optimizing features and even creating new materials, radically improving quality and reducing waste.

Devices and products are already appearing based on computationally engineered materials that literally did not exist a few years ago: novel metal alloys, graphene instead of silicon transistors (graphene and carbon enable a radically new class of electronic and structural materials), and meta-materials that possess properties not possible in nature; e.g., rendering an object invisible—speculation about which received understandable recent publicity.

This era of new materials will be economically explosive when combined with 3-D printing, also known as direct-digital manufacturing—literally "printing" parts and devices using computational power, lasers and basic powdered metals and plastics. Already emerging are printed parts for high-value applications like patient-specific implants for hip joints or teeth, or lighter and stronger aircraft parts. Then one day, the Holy Grail: "desktop" printing of entire final products from wheels to even washing machines.

The era of near-perfect computational design and production will unleash as big a change in how we make things as the agricultural revolution did in how we grew things. And it will be defined by high talent not cheap labor.

Finally, there is the unfolding communications revolution where soon most humans on the planet will be connected wirelessly. Never before have a billion people—soon billions more—been able to communicate, socialize and trade in real time.

The implications of the radical collapse in the cost of wireless connectivity are as big as those following the dawn of telegraphy/telephony. Coupled with the cloud, the wireless world provides cheap connectivity, information and processing power to nearly everyone, everywhere. This introduces both rapid change—e.g., the Arab Spring—and great opportunity. Again, both the launch and epicenter of this technology reside in America.

I think that this will not just be a feature that would influence the US economy, but also of the world, as the significance of political borders trends towards irrelevance.

Said differently, the above forces will likely underpin the accelerating influence of decentralization to the political economic sphere throughout the world.

Video: Amazing YouTube Statistics

This is a terse video on some amazing YouTube statistics. This only shows how social media networks, like YouTube, has been reconfiguring our lives.

More from onehourpersecond.com (hat tip Professor Mark Perry)

Mobile Internet: Welcoming Dr. Smartphone?

I think the major springboard in the next wave of advances in the technology sector will be in the applications aspects of the mobile internet platform.

Aside from games, mobile health services along with Mobile banking and mobile commerce are likely the high growth areas to watch.

In terms of healthcare here is a clue where application development trends are headed for, from Reuters

Tired of long waits at the hospital for medical tests? If Korean researchers have their way, your smartphone could one day eliminate that -- and perhaps even tell you that you have cancer.

A team of scientists at Korea Advanced Institute of Science of Technology (KAIST) said in a paper published in Angewandte Chemie, a German science journal, that touch screen technology can be used to detect biomolecular matter, much as is done in medical tests.

"It began from the idea that touch screens work by recognizing the electronic signs from the touch of the finger, and so the presence of specific proteins and DNA should be recognizable as well," said Hyun-gyu Park, who with Byong-yeon Won led the study.

The touch screens on smartphones, PDAs or other electronic devices work by sensing the electronic charges from the user's body on the screen. Biochemicals such as proteins and DNA molecules also carry specific electronic charges.

According to KAIST, the team's experiments showed that touch screens can recognize the existence and the concentration of DNA molecules placed on them, a first step toward one day being able to use the screens to carry out medical tests.

As I have been saying, the information or digital age will change or reconfigure the way we do things.

Technology Curve: Is Mobile Commerce The Future?

Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker thinks so. She has convincing evidence to prove her case, as shown in the presentation below. (hat tip: Research Recap)

According to Cecilia Kang of the Washington Post,

``Among the factors that are driving the mobile Web, Meeker said, 3G wireless data networks rank most highly. All major carriers introduced 3G access for Android phones, the iPhone, Blackberry and Palm Pre this year, making mobile Internet use mainstream at 20 percent of all wireless users, Meeker said. There has also been an explosion of Wi-Fi connection hot spots.

``Advertising may finally be set to take off on the Internet, she said. People are spending more time on the Web – more than they do reading print publications or listening to the radio. (But not as much as TV, which still dominates.) But even as users spend 28 percent of total entertainment time on the Internet, advertisers only spend 13 percent of their budgets on the Internet. That represents a $50 billion opportunity, she said, that advertisers are starting to seize." (emphasis added)

In my view this is one of the positive forces, along with globalization, that counterbalances the risks of bubbles from government policies.

Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research

View more presentations from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time.

Technology Curve: Terrific Advances In Supercomputers

The technology curve has indeed been accelerating as the capacity of supercomputers continually soar.

This update from the Economist,

``AMERICA's dominance in the field of supercomputing has slipped over the past decade, according to the latest TOP500 chart, a biannual list of the world's fastest number-crunching machines. Having accounted for 56% of the top 50 machines a decade ago, America now accounts for 40%. Japan has lost ground too, while Britain and Germany have held steady. The greatest gains have been made by France, due in part to the use of supercomputers in the energy industry, and China, which had no supercomputers in the top 50 a decade ago, but now has four, including the world's second-fastest machine, at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen. Other countries have also moved up the rankings, which indicates that supercomputers are more widely distributed around the world than they used to be: the top 50 machines include computers in South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and India."

The loss of the dominance of the US in this field does not exhibit a zero sum based competition, where one's gains translates to the loss of the others, which appear to be the undertone of the article.

What's truly happening is that the progress in technological innovation in supercomputers have been more diffused globally where more nations have been participating in the growing pie.

The general advances in the capability of supercomputing from Top500.org illustrates of the dynamics of the growing pie. The progress has been breath-taking.

In my view it's merely the motions of Moore's law at work, and possibly Ray Kurzweil's technological singularity.

And this has been fuelled by competition, globalization and collaboration.

And it would be a mistake to gloss over the implications of such remarkable progress in technology innovation to the real economy.

Read more interactive graph of supercomputers from BBC here

How The Information Age Is Changing Our Lives

The New economy or the information age is largely dismissed in the arguments of the mainstream. That's because while the gist of their discussions predominantly centers on what needs to be presumptively "fixed", they appear to be preoccupied with sustaining the status quo.

Needless to say, even if they communicate by email or by mobile phones or use the web as a key source to secure information, they seem to discount on the role these instruments play in shaping our lives or our economy, despite the fact that these gadgets have mostly been ABSENT about two decades ago.

Marketing guru Seth Godin, whose words of wisdom comes in remarkably terse but poignant messages, seem right anew: People resist change because ``These represent safety, because if you don't challenge the status quo, you can't be made fun of, can't fail, can't be laughed at." He calls this the Lizard brain.

Well, safety in the status quo is in reality utter nonsense. That's because life always changes and people through the markets respond to the incentives that the environment provides.

Hence, safety in the status quo represents as sheer absurdity or rabid denial or plain simplemindedness or the lack of observation skills or at worst delusional attachments to ideologically based economic creeds.

And yet the stage of technology adaption determines the chances of winning or losing in terms of career or investments.

This also shows that an enabled technology based revolution translates to a new way of living.

It's not just in terms of business structures (operational platforms, distribution process, organizational capital, new markets etc.), but also in many other human aspects (values, attitudes, fashion etc.).

In terms of economics, we may call this the lengthening of the capital or production structure or the enhancement of capital tools or "inventing machines to make more- and-better machines" as Alvin and Heidi Toffler describes in Revolutionary Wealth. To quote Mr. & Mrs. Toffler anew, ``This same process on a vastly larger scale is now happening to what may be termed "K-tools- the instruments we use to generate knowledge, the most important form of capital in advanced economies."

How substantial is the information age to our global economy?


Some important notes from the International Telecommunications Union (bold highlights mine)

-Between 2008 and 2009, mobile cellular penetration in developing countries surpassed the 50% mark to reach an estimated 56% end 2009

-There are now more than twice as many mobile subscriptions in the developing world than in the developed world (3.2 billion vs. 1.4 billion)

-China 750 million, India 480 million

-26% of world population (1.7 billion people) are using the Internet (64% in developed, 17.5% in developing countries)

- 1 billion Internet users in developing countries, one third of which in China

-Almost 500 million fixed broadband subscribers globally, China overtook US in
2008 as largest market

-Half of the 200 million broadband subscribers in the developing countries are in China

-23.3% broadband penetration in developed countries; 3.5 % penetration in developing countries


Let's add that in the US, according to the Business Insider,

``More kids are getting mobile phones: Last year, more than 35% of U.S. children ages 10-11 had cellphones, almost double the amount in 2005, according to Mediamark data, via eMarketer. And even more than 5% of 6-7-year-olds had cellphones last year."

So the spread of the information technology is clearly diffusing across all the demographic categories.

Well, the above exhibited the infrastructure aspect of the information technology.

Here is the applications or how people have been using the infrastructure...


We'd like to focus on the web, where presently 26% of world population or 1.7 billion are participants or users.

From Marketingcharts.com ``Global consumers increased the amount of time they spent on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter by 82% in December 2009 compared to December 2008, according to The Nielsen Company.

``In December 2008, global consumers spent an average of three hours, three minutes and 54 seconds on social networking sites. That amount of time increased to five hours, 35 minutes and five seconds one year later. In addition, unique audience increased 27%, from 242 million in December 2008 to 307.4 million in December 2009." (emphasis added)

The Economist has a national breakdown on time spent on these applications....

According to the Economist, ``SOCIAL networks are now a ubiquitous part of daily life in western countries. Facebook, for example, which was launched in 2004, now boasts over 350m users, more than two-thirds of them outside of America. The keenest social-network users, Australians, spent over seven hours a month on such sites, “poking” friends and “twittering” in late 2009, twice as much as users in Japan. Yet making big revenues and profits from such habits remain Facebook’s greatest challenges."

Think of it, for developed nations some 3-6 hours are spent on social networking sites or people are spending some 20-40% of their active time on the web via social networks (assuming 8 hours of sleep). That's how important the web has been transforming our lives.

Well this seems to be the core trend of technological advances....

It's practically Moore's Law at work

Steve Jurvetson neatly explains, ``Moore’s Law is commonly reported as a doubling of transistor density every 18 months. But this is not something the co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, has ever said. It is a nice blending of his two predictions; in 1965, he predicted an annual doubling of transistor counts in the most cost effective chip and revised it in 1975 to every 24 months. With a little hand waving, most reports attribute 18 months to Moore’s Law, but there is quite a bit of variability. The popular perception of Moore’s Law is that computer chips are compounding in their complexity at near constant per unit cost. This is one of the many abstractions of Moore’s Law, and it relates to the compounding of transistor density in two dimensions. Others relate to speed (the signals have less distance to travel) and computational power (speed x density).

``Unless you work for a chip company and focus on fab-yield optimization, you do not care about transistor counts. Integrated circuit customers do not buy transistors. Consumers of technology purchase computational speed and data storage density. When recast in these terms, Moore’s Law is no longer a transistor-centric metric, and this abstraction allows for longer-term analysis.

``What Moore observed in the belly of the early IC industry was a derivative metric, a refracted signal, from the bigger trend, the trend that begs various philosophical questions and predicts mind-bending futures"

``Moore’s Law is a primary driver of disruptive innovation, such as the iPod usurping the Sony Walkman franchise , and it drives not only IT and Communications and has become the primary driver in drug discovery and bioinformatics, medical imaging and diagnostics. As Moore’s Law crosses critical thresholds, a formerly lab science of trial and error experimentation becomes a simulation science and the pace of progress accelerates dramatically, creating opportunities for new entrants in new industries."

So yes, free market based technology innovations has indeed been meaningfully transforming our lives.

Ignore this at your own peril.

Will Vertical Farming Prevent A Food Crisis?

I chanced upon an article about growing food in buildings which piqued my interest. It's called vertical farming.

The following are the illustrated conceptual framework of vertical farming....

Now this article from CBC Canada,

``Is it an elegant solution to pressing problems related to the food supply, or another example of putting too much faith in technology?

``That's a tough question to answer. But what is clear right now is that vertical farming is in its infancy.

``The idea is to grow food inside buildings — not conventional greenhouses, but multi-storey buildings, quite likely in cities — in closed ecosystems using hydroponics rather than soil, and without the use of pesticides.

``So far it has only been tried on a very small scale. Paignton Zoo in South Devon, U.K., for example, is growing produce to feed some of its animals.

``But advocates of vertical farming — notably Dickson Despommier, a Columbia University professor of public health — envision towering gardens in the heart of a city. Despommier, who is working on a book on the idea, sees vertical farming as part of the answer to global warming, water shortages and inner-city health problems.

The key arguments for vertical farming are these:

• Conventional farms waste water. Despommier says irrigation accounts for 70 per cent of worldwide water use, and much of that is wasted as runoff, but because it's contaminated with silt, pesticides and fertilizers, it can't be captured and reused. Vertical farms would grow crops hydroponically, in a water-and-nutrient solution, or perhaps aeroponically, using a mist of nutrient-laden water. The approach could grow the same crops with as little as 10 per cent of the water used in traditional agriculture, Despommier argues.
• Vertical farms would make it easy to grow food without chemicals. There is growing concern about the environmental effects of pesticides and fertilizers used in traditional agriculture. Some see organic farming as the answer, others argue organic farming can't deliver the yields necessary to feed the world. But vertical farming would virtually eliminate the need for pesticides because air coming in could be filtered to keep pests out, and whatever fertilizers were used could be kept within the system and out of lakes and rivers.
• Growing fresh produce in cities would make it more accessible to poor city-dwellers. As a public-health professor, this one particularly interests Despommier. "It's very difficult to find fresh produce in inner cities," he said, so people who live there tend to eat less nutritious foods. "The data is overwhelming," he added: If healthier food is available, people will eat it.
• Growing food close to where it's eaten would reduce transportation needs, which would cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Reduced use of fossil-fuelled farm machinery would also help cut emissions.
• Vertical farms would improve air quality in cities by consuming carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.

``All this sounds too good to be true — and some people argue that it is.

``The arguments against vertical farming aren't as numerous as those for it, but one of them in particular stands out: Urban land is just too expensive for vertical farming to be commercially viable in cities."

This last statement appears to be reading present conditions into the future. Should a food crisis erupt, this equation will be radically altered-farm lands will likely be more expensive than urban lands.

Vertical farming seems designed for nations that lack agricultural lands than addressing a food crisis. That's why it is technology dependent.

As how will vertical farming impact the world today, Grant Buckler of CBC writes, ``We have never suggested that it will replace conventional agricultural systems," Bradford says.

``And whatever potential vertical farming has, it won't be realized overnight. Even Despommier, probably its most enthusiastic proponent, says the idea could take 50 years to take hold — but he does expect some significant experiments in the next couple of years."

Bottom line, we can't seek salvation from vertical farming should a food crisis emerge.

Closing The Technology Divide Via Mobile Phones

The Technology Divide is narrowing.

This from the Economist, (all bold highlights mine)

``MOBILE phones have proved to be a boon for the poor world. An extra ten mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts growth in GDP per person by 0.8 percentage points, according to a recent study. Mobile-phone subscriptions in poorer countries accounted for just a quarter of the global stock in 2000, but had risen to three-quarters of the 4 billion total by the start of this year. The next challenge is to expand the use of mobile technology to access the internet. Despite huge strides in producing cheap netbooks that connect via mobile networks, the mobile phone may still provide the cheapest way to access the internet in the developing world."


Communications functions as vital instrument in the dissemination of information from which establishes money prices via choice, action and coordination.

Hence, the trend of wider adoption of technology in emerging markets signifies of the prospects of enhanced productivity and much improved market efficiencies to a broader segment of world population. This should translate to more capital accumulation and upliftment of economic status for many.

If we should “follow the money” to ascertain rewarding investment themes then mobile and internet use could serve as great indicators for economic growth.

Did You Know? Media Landscape Is Changing Rapidly

The Economist on the fantastic rate of changes in media convergence...

``The surge of new technologies and social media innovations in today's environment is significantly altering the future media landscape for marketers. Consumer behaviour is changing and the way marketers reach their audience must also change. Marketers are searching for new ways to not only reach their customers, but to understand them, to peer inside their minds. As the level of consumer understanding increases, so can the knowledge of how best to reach them. However the plethora of tools at a marketers disposal is not easy to navigate and real learning comes from a real understanding of the future of media convergence.

``Media Convergence forum gathers a unique speaking faculty of thought leaders, marketing psychologists, technology experts, futurists, media and marketing professionals to look into the future to consider the ideas, technologies and tactics that tomorrow's best organisations will adopt.'

Since the embed video doesn't want to appear on the blog, pls. watch the video by clicking on the link

The Petabyte Illustrated

Great Stuff from Mozy.com... (HT: Paul Kedrosky) How Much is a Petabyte.

Here is an illustrated series of statistics that should help explain what a petabyte is...

To get a larger view click on this link to direct you to mozy.com

To me, all this appears evidence of accelerating change, which wikipedia.org defines as `` an increase in the rate of technological (and sometimes social and cultural) progress throughout history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future."

Wikinomics: The Exploding Growth In Social Networking Media

We are witnessing a growth juggernaut in social networking.

In the US social networking among broadband users have soared by 93% according to a new report from Netpop Research, LLC that delves into social networking trends and habits (Marketing Charts).

And talking, sharing, and providing opinions and perspectives have been taking up the "new" form of entertainment displacing the traditional forms as shown below. (All charts from Marketingcharts.com)

Of the 105 million US users, a big majority or 76% are counted as active participants to social media.

This implies of the sundry roles of contribution: upload audio/video, post to wiki, publish a blog, upload photos or podcasts, publish websites, tag articles or vidoes, post to microblog, send/forward email, live in a virtual world, post to blog or forum, rate or review products, P2P file sharing, publish personal pages...see below

Meanwhile, WEB 2.0 is being shaped at the margins.

Web 2.0 is defined by wikipedia.org as the ``perceived second generation of web development and design, that facilitates communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.”

This means less than 10% of US broadband users are “heavy” social media contributors, concentrating their activities to at least 6 applications- such as blogging, microblogging, social networking and photo/video sharing - and connect with 248 people on a one-to-many basis in a typical week (marketing charts.com).

And which is the most used social networking media?

According to Marketingcharts.com which quotes Hitwise it is still MySpace, ``MySpace accounted for 52.21% of those visits, the highest in the category, despite a decrease in visits of 28% compared with February 2008.” Albeit MySpace appears to be losing out to competitors.

Nonetheless, while MySpace is where Americans spent more time among the most visited media: “with 29 minutes and 38 seconds - though this represents a decrease of 2% compared with February 2008”, the fastest growth was seen in Facebook and Tagged.

Again from Marketing Charts, `` In contrast to MySpace’s negative growth, US visits to Facebook increased 149% in February 2009 compared with February 2008. The site received the second-highest market share of US. visits for the month, with 36.03%. Tagged received 2.47% of visits in February 2009, the third-largest number, and had the largest percentage gain in market share of visits among the top five visited websites increasing 280% compared with February 2008.”

Yet based on demographics, Facebook appeals more to older users…

``Looking at the demographic breakdown of visitors to MySpace and Facebook, users between the ages 18-34 still dominate, as 58.81% and 53.91% of US visits, respectively, came from those combined age groups in February 2009. This represents a 2% growth for MySpace and a 14% decline for Facebook in terms of year-over-year percentages. Visitors to the sites who are age 35+ have increased 23% to Facebook in February 2009 compared with February 2008, while visitors from that age group to MySpace have declined 2%.” reports the Marketingcharts.com

All of these underscores of the exploding social networking business model of Wikinomics (openness, peering, sharing and acting globally). This means that from an investment point of view companies actively exploiting these opportunities could be tomorrow’s bonanza.

Importantly we can take note of additional social networking data from Marketingcharts.com:

Additional findings about Chinese users:

-China has a sizable proportion of social media contributors who participate in many Web 2.0 activities, including blogs, micro-blogs, social media, video and photo sharing

-43% of Chinese broadband users (105 million) contribute to forums and discussion boards.

-Young professionals ages 25-29 are the most active users of social media in China. They use more online modes of communication more often than any other age group.

-37 percent of bloggers, or 29 million bloggers, post to blogs on a daily basis.

-41 million Chinese are heavy social media contributors (6+ activities) who connect with 84 people on a ‘one-to-many’ basis in a typical week.

For Chinese Netizens, Netpop said, social media add exponentially to the sources and perspectives available online and represent a new experience for a country accustomed to a single source for media and information.

A global growth juggernaut indeed.

Global Internet and Economic Trends in Charts by Mary Meeker

Check out the great stuff from Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley, whose slide deck of charts deals with global technology and economic trends (hat tip Paul Kedrosky)

Just two examples...
Philippines leads in the technology usage of Microtransactions via SMS or text messaging...

as the industry is backed by a 57% Penetration level in mobile subscription

check out the rest of her interesting charts here...


Meeker Tech '09 - Get more Business Plans