Smell of change

In memory of my Loving Grandfather (10 July 1936 - 27 October 2015)

We are living in post industrial era where everything is continuously changing and evolving drastically and an exponential rise in every field can be felt across the globe. Center of gravity of businesses and governments is changing as per technological evolvement. The resource intensive patterns which were prevailed since the end of World War II can be seen replaced by a new trend of economic growth, data patterns and knowledge intensive growth. This can be seen as the latest phase of capitalism which is revolving around data, information, knowledge, technological evolvement, skills, ideas, services, intangibles, human assets, brainpower, education and intellectual property etc.  Where we are heading?

Revolution can be felt across new generation businesses which are showing how combination of ideas and technology are changing the gravity. We can take examples of Alibaba (Retail without inventory), Airbnb (Accommodation without hotels), Uber (Transportation without cars) and may more. We can have few examples of entirely new businesses which started from an idea and has valued more than a billion dollar businesses within some years like Xiomi, Snapchat, Dropbox, DociSign, Palantir, Pinterest and Jawbone etc. There is a clear cut competition in which the new winners are winning the bigger pie and rest are struggling hard for the left part. The intellectual property is creating the value of corporations rather than the operational part.

Data, Analytics and technology are uniting and are responsible for current developments and upcoming future trends. Data when combined with technology becomes key driver of global development and lifestyle enhancement. A new game changer “Real Time data” is coming in lime light which has the ability to influence buying behaviour and helping businesses in growing by customising their campaigns. According to a survey done by Talend, Almost 85% of online shoppers have abandoned a shopping cart prior to checkout and if retailers employ real-time big data technologies, they can recover 30 percent or more of that potential revenue.

Internet is playing a key role in today’s lifestyle and has become an essential part of everything. It is the fastest link of data sharing around the globe and also it is becoming the playground of cyber terrorism and data hacking attacks. If we talk about data concerns, then we can take example of US whistleblower Edward Snowden who leaked documents in 2013 revealing global surveillance programmes carried out by Washington which created chaos in global communities. Due to this, companies like Microsoft are opening data centers in Germany, Canada and India.  Not only businesses but governments are also concerned with security of their top secret data from cyber attacks and also concerned with the usage of freely available data for solving their other issues as well. Recently Facebook (which has bigger population from China) recorded that the number of requests for Facebook data made by governments around the word roses for 18 percent in last half year in which US made most requests, asking 17577 times for 26579 accounts.

Social media is spreading information faster than every possible means. Facebook and Twitter etc have changed the way of interaction and communication among the masses. In previous years we have seen many government change and removal of dictators who were ruling countries since many decades and this became possible when people united on a common platform with a common intention and this shows the potential power of social media. This platform is rigorously used by teenagers for sharing and marketers for promotion and also eventually it is being used by terrorists groups for recruitment of terrorists and creating chaos among people. People are divided in two major parts, one is creating a reign of terrorism and others are fighting and protesting terrorism on this platform. After recent attack of ISIS on Paris, many countries started tracing tweets send by people of ISIS or tweets in favor of ISIS. 

The importance of internet can be felt by a report which says that Russian submarines and spy ships are operating aggressively near vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some United States military and intelligence officials that Russia might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.

Internet and data is proving to be the backbone of businesses and governments and this is the one of key driving factor of economies is becoming vulnerable towards attacks and data losses. At one side we are getting benefited and are expecting good and positive changes in world economies and lifestyle but on other side it is getting highly misused in spreading terror and if internet cables gets damaged or destroyed in future by what so ever means and data traffic stopped, then it will be not easy to estimate how much loss it will made in global economy and lifestyle. We are now becoming dependent on internet and we cannot live without this. Are we really moving in right direction? Or we have to find out alternative solution of internet?