Tim O’Reilly talks about growth opportunities

Tim O’Reilly talks about growth opportunities

At the HardwareCon 2016 Tim O’Reilly, publisher entrepreneur, and the founder of O’Reilly Media, presented a map showing where technology is going and the role of enthusiasts who are passionate about new products and ideas.

Tim brought back the famous quote from Thomas Watson, the longtime CEO of IBM, who said in 1943 “I’ve seen no need for more than five computers in the whole world”. Watson’s misjudgment allowed other companies to enter the market for computers. Over time, this trend led to the entry of  many smaller companies to the market and gave them an opportunity that IBM neglected. Today, startups continue to play the same role, especially in the IoT landscape.

Tim presented that the trend started in2000.  At that time, the smartphones and tablets were entering the market and PCs were on a small stable increase. As the mobile devices proliferated, they rapidly took away growth and market share from the PC space. That was the marketplace until about 2014 when the smartphone and tablet growth became flat as the market approached saturation. .  This market change has given an opportunity for huge numbers of devices in the “Internet of everything”. IoT is the new thing in the market with projected 35percent growth and will stay with that pace until 2019.

What’s next in computing?

O’Reilly stated three key trends on the horizon: small, cheap and ubiquitous hardware, the golden age of AI software, and software and hardware combining into new computer platforms.

Many entrepreneurs are taking their chances and hope to participate in these opportunities and define a new and large market segment with their products.

Wikipedia and Wikia

Wikipedia and Wikia

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, dreamt about a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. In 2001, he founded Wikipedia, making that dream a reality. Today, Wikipedia is the seventh most visited website in the world. There are 500 million unique visitors every month visiting the site from every country in the world. Wikipedia contains nearly 5 million articles, that is being added to at the rate of 750 articles every day.

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that is written by thousands of volunteers, and has content in 288 languages. Key statistics for the site are: 8 languages that have over 1,000,000 entries; 46 languages have at least 100,000 entries; 120 languages have at least 10,000 entries and 223 languages have at least 1,000 entries. For Wikipedia, “free” means not just only no cost for the readers or contributors, but also freedom of speech. Everyone can copy, modify, and redistribute the content, both commercially and for private use.

In 2004 Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley Starling announced the creation of their next project named Wikia. Wikia follows the same success model of Wikipedia. Wikia is a free web hosting service for wikis. The site is free of charge and derives its income from advertising. It publishes all user-provided text under copyleft licenses (https://copyleft.org/) . Today Wikia has more than 136 million readers every month and is written in 200 language.

Jimmy Wales dream about “the sum” of all human knowledge came true twice, due to his perseverance and his decision on sharing the vision of his dream with others.