Today in 1973, Martin Cooper made a phone call from a prototype Dyna-Tac handheld cellular phone. The phone, which weighed about 2.5 lb, connected Cooper to Dr. Joel S. Engel, head of research at Bell Labs.
Thirty-five years ago today, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne signed a partnership agreement that established the company that will become Apple Computer, Inc. on January 3, 1977. (Wayne left the company eleven days later, relinquishing his ten percent share for US$2300). Steve Jobs told Stephen Segaller in Nerds 2.0.1: Continue reading
A few days ago I got an email from Netflix telling me that “recently you may have had trouble instantly watching TV episodes or movies due to technical issues.” Continue reading
The State of the Media Democracy Survey, Fifth Edition, from Deloitte, reports surprising finding regarding print magazines: Continue reading
Phonautograph 1859
Today in 1857, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville received a patent for the Phonautograph, the first device to record sound. He made sound recordings in order to analyze sound visually, not to play them back. But in 2008, audio historians and recording engineers succeeded in playing sound recordings made by de Martinville in 1860 and posted them online.
Today, the U.S. Census Bureau delivered “New York’s 2010 Census population totals, including first look at race and hispanic origin data for legislative redistricting.” Continue reading
Research firm Radicati announced today that they expect the number of social networking users to rise from 798 million users in 2011, to over 1.2 billion in 2015. Since users typically have more than 1 account, they expect social networking accounts, including
both consumer and enterprise accounts, to grow from about 2.4 billion in 2011, to about 3.9 billion in 2015.
Given that the world’s population in 2015 is projected to be 7.2 billion, about one in six men, women, and children on earth will be socially networked. Another way to look at these numbers: Assuming the number of people connected to the Internet in 2015 will be about 4 billion (it’s about 2 billion today), we get a social networking penetration of only 30%.
Update: It’s Twitter’s 5th anniversary today.
Professor Michael Pupin on the value and application of the wireless telephone: Continue reading
Moshe Vardi, the Editor-in-Chief of Communications of the ACM (CACM), has done a great public service by asking IBM to declassify and publish online an IBM report originally published in 1989. It summarized the work of 20 IBM Research Division staff members, “who met regularly over a period of 18 months to discuss visions about the future of computing.” Continue reading
The Story of Information 