Sunday, June 16, 2013

Eric Schmidt: The Next 5 Billion - Life in Our New Connected Age

Five billion are still unconnected to the Net?! Shock and aw.



This talk is full of astounding details. For example is mentioned a museum exhibit in Saudi Arabia which was closed down, partly because a female was in an area alone without proper male guardian. This was a female... dinosaur... skeleton...! How far does insanity go in groups?
By the way, I may be underrating Twitter badly, because Twitter is very often one of the forces where such crazy (or worse) situations get known about to the broader world.

Schmidt makes the amazing claim that the last 5 Billion people, roughly, will be connected in 5-7 years. That sounds... very optimistic. But even if it's 15 years, that will still be a grand change. A bit scary.
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Here is a good article about one of the ways we can connect the vast masses: High-flying balloons. Verra kool. Should be much more cost-effective than satellites or drones, I guess. (I'm still waiting for two cheap planet-covering satellite broadband services which they promised us in 2000 would come around 2004.)

1 comment:

John Krumm said...

Its' not the quantity of connections, it's the quality. This won't come from Google or Facebook.