10 Best Inventions |
The ten most significant inventions in the past ten years |
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10 |
mp3 | |
| While as a medium the mp3 may be on its way out the door, for the brief time it was here it completely rocked the industry and sent the record labels into a spiral they have still yet to recover from. Driven at first by a black market with an insatiable appetite, the mp3 has since grown up and become a legitimate music source. | ||
9 |
SIM Cards | |
| These tiny little cards behind the battery of your cell phone have changed the entire wireless communication industry. Not because they store all your numbers, but because they allow you to switch between phones with ease. (see #3 as to why the numbers aren't all that important anymore) With the birth of SIM cards, suddenly you were no longer locked into the 6 choices some regional wireless manager thought he could sell. You could buy phones from anywhere, new and used, on the internet and base your purchase decision off of a much larger pool of devices. And speaking of pools, these SIM cards are waterproof! So if you were ever to drop your phone into a body of water, the phone may be fried but not your cell number. Not that i've ever done that... more than 3 times... in a year. | ||
8 |
Wireless | |
| As big of a deal as wireless is now, I really think it is the one item in this top 10 with the most room for growth. At first it was all about the convenience of being free from a cord, but now wireless has spread into enough other areas where it has completely changed our expectations for staying in touch. Text messaging, email and being online and connected in general is now just a part of being a functional person in society. I don't know if we all just used to be more organized or what, but try and get a group of four people to meet for dinner and a movie without mixing in 3 emails and a half dozen text messages. | ||
7 |
Satellite TV | |
| Back in 1997 I bolted my first sat dish to the side of my house. At that time, my neighbors were not nearly as enthused as I was about breaking away from cable. In fact, seeing how these were the very same neighbors that sent me an association letter complaining about my colored Christmas lights, I'm sure there was a meeting about it and steps taken to prevent any further installs. Anyway, I still remember how staff member Hank and I played marco-polo via cell phone in order to get the best signal as we aimed it "over Texas". Since that time, sat dishes have become like gutters. Sure they are ugly, but nobody really even notices them anymore. | ||
6 |
LED | |
| Brighter, cheaper and more efficient than traditional filament bulbs, LED's are slowly being adopted into the marketplace as people find more and more creative ways to implement them. Yes, there have been some misapplications, like on my across the street neighbor's front porch, but for the most part these things are just all around better. I was hooked when a car salesman once told me that at 60 miles per-hour, the amount of time it takes a pulse of electricity to light up a traditional filament bulb versus a LED translates into 12 feet. Wow! That is pretty important when you are talking about BREAK LIGHTS! And while I never actually ran the math on that statement, I was blown away by the premise. (and bought the car) | ||
5 |
HD | |
| I knew HD was "the deal" when I found myself watching hour long shows on the migratory habits of penguins on the Discovery HD channel rather than ESPN. The quality was just so much better that it actually altered my viewing habits. Over time, that has changed now that more and more of the traditional stations have made the leap to HD, but I still occasionally find myself flipping over to Disco from time to time to learn about the mating rituals of the molluscs octopus. | ||
4 |
Digital Cameras | |
| I remember a day back when I thought twice about taking a photo due to the cost of film and development. Seriously, you could spend 10 bucks just to get 24 photos done. Furthermore, of those 24, only about 6 of them were any good. Now, I take pictures left and right every day with little or no thought... and it shows. Freed from the cost and hassle of film, a new generation of spontaneous photographs have come to light. And another thing, can anybody even imagine having to go back to a day where you couldn't immediately look at a photo right after you took it? | ||
3 |
HotSync | |
| First everyone got cell phone. Then everyone got Outlook. Later, everyone got some form of a PDA. And suddenly, staying organized was a bigger task than being organized in the first place. Enter HotSync. For the first time people could reliably keep, and upkeep, of all their appointments, tasks, phone numbers and addresses without having to worry about which information, and on what device, was current. Huge - especially with the way people move around these days. Buzz books and phone directories can't keep up, while wall calendars have been relegated to artwork that changes monthly. | ||
2 |
Web/Email | |
| I know, the web has been around longer than 10 years, but its reach has been expanded in the past 10 to places really useful. No longer just a place for jokes and funny photos, now you can make phone calls via skype, IM people, blog, get a head coach fired or humiliate a friend on YouTube. "The sum of all human knowledge right there at your fingertips, and you used it to download what?" is still one of my favorite lines to use at work right after somebody points out a particularly enlightening find. Try giving this one up for Lent or something and let me now how far you get. | ||
#1 |
Tivo | |
Best... Invention... EVAR! Seriously, how did we ever live without this thing. If you don't have it, you can't even possibly understand how incredible of an invention Tivo really is. The ability to pause, SloMo, FF and RW are cool, but they are not what makes this invention number one. It's the devices ability to sort, filter and record your favorite shows that push it to the top. "Appointment TV" is perhaps the best way to describe it as you can pick the shows you want to watch and then pound them all into your head at record speed. Over time I have found that my brain is actually able to absorb the majority of a show's content on 2x. Pretty impressive, or frightening, depending on how you look at it. I've tried 3x, but it ends up looking like the mind-eraser machine Ming used in Flash Gordon. But we better enjoy this device, in its current form anyway, while it lasts as advertisers are already working on ways to prevent us from FF'ing their commercials. Even so, I consider Tivo to be this generation's "Moon Shot". |
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HM |
Lithium Batteries | |
| Wireless really doesn't have the presence it has today if we were all still operating with 30 minute laptops now does it? Digital photography also owes a large portion of its popularity to batteries that have the ability to light up a flash more than 8 times. So lithium batteries - thank you. | ||
| USB Ports | ||
| Slightly more than 10 years old, but still an impactful invention. This is especially true now that laptops and docking stations are replacing desktops machines in more and more places. | ||
| Memory Sticks | ||
| Digital photography simply would not be where it is today without the recent advances in memory sticks. USB pin drives with 4 plus gig on them have also changed the way we all thing about storing and backing up our information | ||
| To Close | ||
| Well, did I miss anything? Feel free to let me know in the comment area below. | ||
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