Or how the Internet fosters innovation

by Waqar Shah

Our world has converged into an increasingly interconnected, heterogeneous community of people belonging to different cultures and ethnicities, speaking different languages, and getting ever greater opportunities to interact and communicate with each other.

The greater possibilities for interaction between cultures that were spurred in the twentieth century by advances in transport such as air travel were not available to people of ages bygone; the advances ininformation and communication technology achieved at the turn of this century were not available only a few decades earlier. The communications revolution of recent times is every bit as groundbreaking as the development of the modern transport systems preceding it, or even the Industrial Revolution.

Cultures that evolved over hundreds of years were suddenly exposed to new stimuli that were to affect them in unprecedented ways. Peoples that had led traditional lives in isolated communities were now confronted with new choices and new opportunities.

The transformations brought about were multilateral and symbiotic. While those living in developing countries suddenly had greater access to the latest information about the lifestyles and dynamics of theFirst World, getting in effect greater opportunities to improve their own lives, the inhabitants of the post-industrialized world had a chance to appreciate and benefit from the unique perspectives ofcultures that were often radically different from their own.

Even as cultural interactions have taken place with increased frequency since the dawn of the twentieth century, both their scaleand scope have changed dramatically with the advent of therevolutionary communication technologies of the post-modern age. While the transfer of technology across the world occurred at different paces throughout history, often with innovative outcomes like that of gunpowder introduced to Europe, or personal computers to India, in recent years the transfer of ideas has assumed a marked pace of its own. And although business at the speed of thought (asadvocated by Bill Gates) may yet be some way off, ideas todayliterally travel at the speed of light thanks to technologies such asthe Internet.

The diverse worldviews available to the average citizen of the UnitedStates in the first decade of the twenty first century, for example, would not have been possible only a few decades earlier. While thefascination with Eastern spirituality and Indian fads in the West maybe some of the most conspicuous, superficial aspects of this cross cultural exchange – more profound developments may be taking place in the collective consciousness of humanity. The human mind may be entering a new phase in its evolution, as mass-consciousness attempts to gather bits and pieces of the civilizational experience that nature has distributed to man across his world through the thousands of years of his development.

Ancient cultures around the world apparently tend to possess certain unique features, or core competences, so to speak, that give them an edge over other cultures in specific domains. Obvious examples ofsuch inimitable cultural features may be found in Indian spiritual and meditation techniques, Chinese martial arts, and Western technologyand organizational capabilities – all unique, civilizational skillsthat developed in isolation, but eventually led to the enrichment of mankind’s experience in totality. Sanskrit, a prosaic language especially suited to the expression of discrete ideas may havecontributed to India becoming a major software powerhouse, while lyrical Arabic may have made for some of the most beautiful Urdu poetry imaginable.

Today, when a Belgian man recommends Kimchi to his fellow Web-surfers in order to improve brain power, or when a Polynesian teenager advocates the use of the Noni fruit growing on his island to improve muscular endurance, human intellect may have finally come into itsown. Unique outlooks, perspectives, and specific cognitions that formed across the world as a result of centuries of human experience in isolation, may now have unprecedented opportunities to converge, restructure and even lead to the development of new forms ofknowledge.

Creativity may be a particular beneficiary of such extensive,transcending forms of communication. Such new sources of information may prove to be a boon to human ingenuity, as diverse ideas give rise to richer thought, opening up new horizons for the human mind as it learns to think with greater freedom.

New paradigms may now be created by the average mind that has access to information about whole new contexts, overriding old notions. For example, an inquisitive villager in Africa may use the Internet to discover that the hardy aloe vera plant that thrives in the deserts of Australia also provides a veritable storehouse of nutrients, a reliable potential food source for the starving people of drought-ridden Sudan. The perceptive human mind now has access to new solutions, creating whole new paradigms by simply linking existing bits of information – connecting existing contexts to create new ones.

So what does all this bode for the future of our world? Leadership,for one, is bound to see major developments. Those who have the foresight to forge links between hitherto unrelated contexts willcreate paradigms that will be dutifully followed by the rest of their communities. In our time, one way to define leadership would be to see it as the power to actually create new patterns of thought andbehavior – new ways of going about life.

This, then, may be the ultimate achievement of mankind – the end of evolution, as it were – to discover, extract, conserve, and utilize human genius as it occurs in its natural distribution across ourplanet. Diversity, in all its totality, is the equivalent of human genius – an aggregation of the individual pieces of thought as it developed over millennia, a collection of the countless cognitions that have occurred across the expanse of time. Genius, we may thus surmise, may not be the domain of any one individual, but the collective destiny of mankind.

“I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow,” said Woodrow Wilson. Suddenly, that may appear to be very true for an increasing number of individuals around the world.

Firefox 4 was extraordinarily well received by the Internet community, with people downloading Mozilla’s latest browser over 60 million times when this post was written. The browser brought a range of improvements, from faster software processing speed to an improved tabbed layout.

However, some aspects of the famed web browser have suffered rather needlessly. Chief amongst these (rather regressive) drawbacks is the lack of a status bar. This came as quite a surprise to many users (especially those in the developer community) who relied upon the excellent variety of Firefox toolbars available, and were used to seeing specific toolbar activity in the Firefox status bar. These people saw their toolbars virtually disappear overnight.

A toolbar can be artifically added to Firefox 4 through a plugin. The best plugin for adding a status bar to Firefox 4 is the Status 4 Evar plugin.

What started as an April Fool’s Day prank by search engine giant and Gmail provider Google has actually been realized by the University of Southern California Los Angeles. “Gmail Motion” was the name given to a fictional motion sensor activated Gmail interface “introduced” by Google on the first of April 2011.

An actual Gmail motion controller was put together by UCL’s ICT MxR labs using Microsoft Kinect. The resultant contraption, called Software Library Optimizing Obligatory Waving (SLOOW) could input and send emails just by body movements. The system is based upon a toolkit framework called FAAST (no we’re not making this up), which can be downloaded and used by anybody.

The Federal Communications Commission has announced that it is handing out free wireless routers to anyone who chooses to participate in an ISP Test. Called Test my ISP, the project is created in collaboration with Sam Knows, and is intended to help shape the future of the American broadband industry.

Behind the hype, whether the system will fare any better than the well known Speedtest.net is anyone’s guess. But what’s the harm in trying? You just might get a free wireless router.

While using Google’s Chrome browser to access Mozilla’s website and download Firefox 4, we encountered a smug little message on the lower left hand corner of our screen:

This type of file can harm your computer. Are you sure that you want to download Firefox Setup 4.0.exe?

Well, what a way to dissuade people from downloading your competitor’s web browser! There’s a lot of talk of net neutrality and how ISPs could possibly restrict access to competiting service providers, but what about web browsers? Should there be increased “browser neutrality” too?

Surely Google Chrome should know better than to insinuate that a respected and widely used browser could possibly be malware? Or is it just the latest shot in the unrelenting browser wars!

Firefox 4 is set to be released tommorrow. The latest version of Mozilla’s highly acclaimed open source web browser, Firefox 4 will be eagerly anticipated by developers and consumers alike.

JavaScript will now run up to three times as fast, along with faster core processing bringing Firefox up to par with the likes of Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome.

Have you ever seen a multicolored bundle of LAN cables on your floor and wished they’d just disappear? We’ve all had those moments of wire-aversion; atrocious tangles of wires (often found near a home router) can make you go mad. In recent years wireless devices have helped us get rid of the many wires in our homes, without sacrificing connectivity. We’re still as connected as we were five years ago – even better, in fact. With WiFi enabled laptops and tablets we now have the freedom to roam all over our homes(and beyond), improving portability, organization and ultimately, our tech lives.

However, it’s not always smooth sailing when it comes to tech. When one Redditor advises another to simply “go outside” in half-jest, he’s also being half-serious. Sometimes, too much technology can lead to a loss of meaning in life. From some people getting envious of others having more fun on Twitter, to others becoming depressed by reading acquaintances’ activities on Facebook, the Internet harbours all sorts of negativity-arousing stimulants just lurking around a cyber-corner. While a funny lol-cat can make your day, in the very next second news about human rights violations on the other side of the world can take it away.

We often talk about information overload. At what point does information become detrimental to the purpose at hand? Would your information overloaded iPad be somewhat analogous to the wire-tangled room? We’ve all experienced that unwanted barrage of tweets in our timelines, making us wonder why we’re even looking at Twitter at all. We’ve all been subjected to information overload at one time or another. Can too much tech be a bad thing?

Then there is the “blur factor” – information overload leading to a loss of focus both in our professional and leisurely activities. The recent SWSX conference saw a barrage of 110 tweets per minute, enough to cause many Twitter users to want to tune out of the microblogging site. At what point does it get too much to bear?

Imagine for a moment that your iPad disappeared. And so did your laptop, your Android phone, and your desktop PC. You didn’t have an Internet connection. What would you do? Would you go outside and say hi to your neighbour instead? To the passing old lady on the street? Would you really lose from not knowing what someone was saying at a conference thousands of miles away? Would your life change for the better or for the worse?

A good proportion of worldwide searches comprise questions about mundane everyday facts, something not lost on the world’s search engines. Surfers using search engine Google have recently noticed knowledge snippts or fact suggestions cropping up at the top of the search engine results page (SERPs). Generated in response to queries for facts, the snippets offer a “best guess” for the relevant answer.

The functionality actually emulates a knowledge engine. First to market in the knowledge engine arena was Wolfram Alpha, which is currently nowhere near as popular as Google or even Bing. Entire content-intensive websitse have been built to cater to the inquisitive market, including such sites as Ask.com, Yahoo Answers, Quora and the rather innovative ChaCha. Google actually had a specialist Q & A website subdomain called Google Answers, but the service has now been retired.

Google may be planning a new foray to capitalize on this subsection of the search market, trying to retain eyeballs for itself rather than have people click on other answer providers. Try queries for yourselves, such as searching for CEOs of large companies (Facebook or Nike would be a good choice as small companies aren’t featured), Gandhi’s Birthday, or Obama’s birthplace.

The latest version of Microsoft’s famed Web browser, Internet Explorer 9, was released to much fanfare on Monday. The browser was downloaded over 2 million times in the first twenty four hours after its release, boasted Redmond. Microsoft has high hopes behind its client software, and with good reason. The past half decade has seen competitors such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome slowly strip away at its Web browser share.

Some of the new features of Internet Explorer include HTML 5 support, graphics hardware acceleration and a minimalist user interface that sacifices eye candy for performance improvement. The browser takes advantage of new machines’ graphics processing unit (GPU), which means that graphic rendering and display is significantly faster. The result is a remarkably fast Web browser that some users are claiming is even faster than Chrome.

Microsoft has dedicated an entire website to the browser. The Beauty of the Web is an attempt by Microsoft to showcase IE9 to the emerging social web designer community – people who live and breathe design. “Real people get blown away” by the new browser, claims Microsoft (as though the alternative would be fake people, or even androids). The socially-inclined site is reminiscent of Microsoft’s other attempt to use social outreach to convince users to give up IE6.

Newspapers are in decline the world over. Today, more people are turning to the Internet for news than are reading newspapers. That’s the message we get from research undertaken by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism that concluded at the end of 2010. The State of the Media report assesses mobile readership for local news, community news websites, and US news sources compared to the world. The report concludes with a strong verdict for the unmistakable dominance of the digital media, relegating print media to an unsure end.

According to the report, nearly half of all Americans use their mobile phones for news reading. A majority of under-30s state that the Internet is their main news source. Live weather and local business reports drive the bulk of mobile news readership. Among other findings, the report states that newspaper newsrooms have shrunk by over 30 percent over a ten year period leading up to 2010. The declining trend continues, with niche interest and live news websites continuing to eat away at erstwhile prominent newspaper topics.

Economics may have something to do with it. Why pay for news rags when you can get news faster, for free? Internet news sources are live, personal and have an tinge of informality. While newspapers may be portable, websites are truly ubiquitous, available wherever there is a wireless signal. With mobile phones in our pockets, we carry the news around with us wherever we go. Little surprise there is, then that newspapers are being slowly phased out in the developed world.