A Year in 12 Posts

Drones have been in the news since the gulf wars. They became a hot topic on 2013. Military, police, entertainment, delivery (well, not quite yet, Amazon, but PrimeAir certainly was a communication hit), they are everywhere. In April, the Scientific American review started to warn against the impact of drones on our privacy. To be read in the perspective of PRISM and other scary initiatives. Democracy, beware.

And insect drones are coming! (from Miguel Prazeres's beautiful Biomimicry topic).

Moving further to a connected world, 2013 was also the year of the Internet of Things (IoT). Its impact will be felt in the economy, health care, media, energy, transport... in all our life, hopefully for the better. Major stake. Special praise to rising stars Arduino (a topic on the Italy-born open source popular platform) and Sigfox, the first IoT dedicated network.

Prism, Drones, IoT, Big Data, Robots... seems like 2013 heralds a new era where the Internet as we know it was just a humble start to immense control and power given to machines and computers. I think it's time to watch Terminator again! And to be careful.

When we started Goojet (our Mobile Social Media adventure before Scoop.it) in 2007, neither iPhone nor Android existed and Nokia ruled the world. Their N95 was the best device then for mobile internet. And now they're gone. Talk about a market disruption initiated by Apple! Check today's phone market shares. Impressive performance by Samsung.

Speaking disruption, 2013 was a turning point for three major evolutions:

• Bitcoin. Its price increased 100x ! What does it mean for the finance world and the world in general? Read more on Investors Europe Stock Brokers' topic.
• The MOOCs, which address the most important asset: knowledge. Lots of good reading on MOOCs on Scoop.it
• 3D Printing which changes the rule of the production game, some going as far as calling it the third industrial revolution.

These, plus IoT and Big Data: some fundamental changes, not mere buzz, emerged or exploded in 2013. Thinking of something else? 

Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Youtube, AOL, Facebook, Skype, Verizon, ...: the NSA is spying on US (and perhaps not only US) citizen with a data mining program called PRISM, revealed in June.

Edward Snowden gave this interview. Getting closer and closer to 1984, the dystopian novel by George Orwell. Blurred boundaries between democracy, freedom and security... How afraid are you? I'm impressed by the power of the program... I'm also very impressed by Snowden's position. Must watch.

Meanwhile, China reclaimed top spot in the TOP500 list (most powerful supercomputers). [geek alert] Tianhe-2: 33.86 petaflop/s, more than 3 million cores. 30 times more powerful than the most powerul supercompters from 5 years ago. That's lots of power for data mining...