Disruptive Technologies

A disruptive innovation is something that disrupts an existing market. An example of a disruptive technology is digital photography. Prior to digital photography, chemical photography ruled the market. It was necessary for people to buy the rolls of film and put them in their camera. Each roll of film had a certain limit on the number of pictures that could be taken. After the roll had been exhausted, the person had to take it to a special shop to get the pictures developed. This process usually took several days and was quite a hassle. With the advent of digital photography, limits on the number of pictures taken still exist (based on the size of the memory card), but images can be deleted from the memory card if it gets full. Also, there's no longer a need to take the photos to a specialty shop for development; people simply plug their camera in to their computer and upload the photos directly to their hard-drive. The market shifted from chemical to digital in what seemed like no time at all, and now, chemical photography is much a thing of the past.

Social Media

Social Media is something that has caught on within the last couple of years, really with the advent of Facebook. Prior to Facebook, Myspace was the main form of Social Media, but its popularity never grew as much as Facebook's has. After Facebook's inception, LinkedIn came into play. All of these websites appeal to different audiences. Myspace's goal was to allow users to create their own customized website where users could put music, pictures, and video. This generally appealed to a young crowd (teenagers). When Facebook came out, it was exclusive to college students (an .edu email was required for registration). This actually worked in Facebook's advantage because it made people feel as if they were part of an exclusive club. After a while though, Facebook opened registration to everyone. In contrast to Facebook and Myspace, LinkedIn provides a more professional platform for social networking. It allows business colleagues to connect to each other and is strictly used for business-networking.

Nerd Culture

There's generally a lot of negative stereotypes when it comes to talking about nerds. People tend to think of nerds as socially awkward, unattractive, and all-around weird people. This of course, isn't true for all "nerds." The problem with generalizing is that it throws everyone into the same boat, and with nerds, that's just not the case. I believe that nerds don't have to conform to the stereotypes that people describe -- they can be everyday, normal people. Of course, a lot of the times you can figure out if someone is a nerd by just looking at them, or by talking to them for a few moments. Perhaps the most well-known nerd is Bill Gates. He seems to conform to most of the characteristics that define a nerd; though, he's established himself as a very good public speaker, which isn't something a nerd would typically be able to do because of the social awkwardness.

Privacy

Nowadays, privacy has become a something of utmost importance for most people. People are worried about their personal information being stolen -- and for good reason. With more and more companies storing customer data on servers that can be accessed via the Web, the possibility of someone stealing the data becomes greater. Most recently, Sony has had files containing personal information for its PS3 customers hacked. Not only did this include customer's personal information such as name and address, it also included customer's credit card numbers! The files that Sony was storing their customer's personal data in were simple XML files, and all of the data was stored as plain-text. It's quite surprising that, with all of the talk about privacy nowadays, Sony would be storing its customer's credit card information as plain-text XML files.

Blogging

Blogging, as of late, has been a very popular method of communication. Perhaps ironically, I'm writing about blogging while I'm blogging, in a blog that hasn't been updated in quite some time. Nonetheless, blogs can be useful and offer a way for people to share their ideas with the world. Blogs can be very beneficial to business, but only if they're done right. There are many cases where a business can ruin its reputation by having a blog and mentioning something that someone might find offensive. Simple spelling and grammatical errors can also have negative impacts on how people view the company. The debate on whether a company should be blogging is something that should probably be examines on a case-by-case basis, though I think it's something that should be very cautiously approached.

Collective Intelligence - Google

According to Wikipedia, Collective Intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks. Google harnesses Collective Intelligence through its PageRank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) algorithm. As the name implies, it utilizes a special system that ranks sets of hyperlinked documents based on their relevance. Basically, the greater number of links to a specific website, the higher that website gets ranked by Google. Using this algorithm, Google is able to gather information from all over the Web, thereby harnessing Collective Intelligence.

E-Commerce

Bestbuy.com is well known as being a Business-2-Consumer (B2C) company. It purchases goods from other companies (HP, Dell, Sony, etc.) and sells them to consumers through its many retail channels. However, BestBuy also has a form of Business-to-Business (B2B) called Best Buy For Business (http://www.bestbuybusiness.com) whereby they market products to small businesses. The viability of this business model is pretty evident through BestBuy's success. Leveraging both the B2C and B2B models allows Best Buy to capture more of the market.

Green IT

The idea of Green IT, or Green Computing, seems to be a bit of a misnomer due to the obvious fact that computers need electricity to run. However, when looking at the goals of Green IT, it becomes a bit more clear: reduction in the use of harmful materials, maximize energy efficiency during the product's lifetime, and promote recyclability. Regarding the first item, Apple has taken steps to elimination many of the harmful materials they once used in the production of their laptops (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/agreenerapple/) in trying to go Green. As far as reducing the amount of harmful materials that go into making these products, we as consumers don't have too much control over; but the second two items we do. Maximizing energy efficiency during a product's lifetime means not leaving your computer on when you're not using it, and might imply that you continue using your computer until it dies (though, that's not feasible in many cases). Also, promoting recylability is something that we as consumers can do. Get in the habit of recycling any items that can be recycled (aluminum cans, glass bottles, cardboard, paper, etc). Even if your community doesn't offer a recycling service, take your items to the nearest recycling facility.

Online Dating Services

There are many online dating services, each with their own pros and cons (comparison here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_dating_websites). www.plentyoffish.com is a free online dating service with 11,000,000 registered users. According to Wikipedia, it's the #1 dating site in the UK and Canada. The difference between Plenty of Fish and other sites like Match.com or eHarmony.com is that the site is completely free. This, of course, has its downsides in that a lot of people on the site may not be very serious/genuine in posting. The advantage, of course, is that the database of people to choose from is huge. The site leverages collective intelligence by allowing anyone to register as a user, and then offers the ability to search for people based on very distinct characteristics.

Web 2.0

Today, more and more businesses are leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies. CNN.com's "Newspulse" and "Popular on Facebook" features are good examples of this. These features search the web, and Facebook for things that people are posting about. The advent of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have been a very beneficial tool for companies. Now they can search these networking sites for keywords and see what people are saying about the company or its products. Google's instant search feature is also a great example of this type of thing. As you start searching, Google provides suggested queries based on previous search habits of other users. With all of the different APIs available to programmers (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.), implementing these new features has become easier and easier for businesses.

Pervasive Networking

Evidence of pervasive networking is seen everywhere. Most of these things we take for granted and don't really recognize because we're so accustomed to them.

A popular example of this would be internet-based companies eliminating brick-and-mortar stores. Netflix is a perfect example of this. They've provided a service that allows people to order movies from anywhere with an internet connection and have them delivered in just a few days. What's more, they've now provided instant streaming of many popular movies so there's no wait. Blockbuster couldn't compete and was forced into Chapter 11 Bankruptcy because of this.

Many of these types of examples exist, where traditional physical media is no longer necessary because it's all digital and available online. Perhaps in the past it made sense to go out and rent a movie, or purchase a CD, or buy a book, because the internet wasn't fast enough or you didn't have enough space on your hard drive to store it. With the internet becoming much faster and disk storage becoming very cheap, those times have changed.

Nowadays, you can do just about everything online, even ordering groceries (http://www.schwans.com/, http://personalcheftogo.com/). Is this pervasion convenience making us lazy?

Networking

Networking, in particular the advent of the internet, has greatly changed the way we live. Before networking, if you wanted to send a letter to someone, you'd have to get out your pen and paper and write it out, stuff it in an envelope, drop it by the Post Office, and wait several days before your recipient received it. Now, it's as simple as typing text on the screen and clicking a button. This simple example can be applied to all data, even the use of these blogs. With millions of people sharing their thoughts on blogs like these, we're exposed to such a diverse group of opinions; whereas before, we would only be exposed to what we read in newspapers, magazines, or through talking with others.

A recent example of the power of networking would be the events that have transpired in Egypt in the last couple of days. The Egyptian government forced its ISPs to drop internet access of their subscribers. The Government's hope was that it would silence protesters of President Mubarak. Of course, it has had the exact opposite effect and now the world has turned its attention toward Egypt, and the protests only intensified.