Sunday, February 21, 2010

Trends We Suggest for the Nobel Prize

With Internet being nominated for the much deserved Nobel Peace Prize, it gets me thinking about other great technologies that probably need to be awarded for their key role in revolutionizing our lives. Let’s take a quick look at some of these great innovations.

Apple iPhone
Even though India has been generally starved of the iPhone with only one out of three generations releasing here, the iPhone without a doubt revolutionized the way we use mobile phones. Steve Jobs’ simple keynote about how every application should have the interface it needs and not settle for a phone’s restrictive interface, was definitely one of the top ideas of the decade. Of course Apple has been adequately rewarded with ground-breaking sales figures and a ginormous fan following, but considering how the iPhone revolutionized the interface for us, it could do with the mother of all prizes.

Social Networking

Sure it may be a part of the whole Internet bandwagon, but Social Networking applicability has gone beyond being simple websites. It’s the technology that helps long-lost friends get in touch, helps daughters find their fathers after 48 years, get people logging in their daily lives, gaming socially and even help push businesses. As much as you may hate the “Going to the loo now” tweets, you probably can’t live without social networks.

USB Flash Drives
The 90’s had floppies, the early 2000s had CDs and DVDs and after a lot of eco-damaging plastic wastage the USB flash drives are now truly a man’s best friend. With flash memory storage getting higher in capacity, smaller in size and faster, we seriously doubt that these little babies are going the way of the dinosaur anytime soon.

BlackBerry

Sure emails revolutionized the way we communicated, but that didn’t make it fun or even easy enough to access. Enter the Blackberry and you have even the laziest guy at work responding to mails almost immediately. Their OS perfectly suited for handling communication in all its forms. Now only if the data plans were more affordable!

Nintendo Wii
How do you get the biggest technophobe in your family to become an active gamer? Just get him (or her) the Nintendo Wii! After a series of slackers like the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, Nintendo once again has the best selling home console in the world thanks to the brilliantly innovative control scheme of the Wii. It has singlehandedly gotten grandparents into gaming and with the Wii Fit, gaming is even considered healthy. Though hardcore gamers admittedly wouldn’t be caught dead with the console, there’s nothing that can dampen Wii’s parade.
So these were a few award winning innovations I could think of off the top of my head.

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