Tuesday 28 May 2013

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters

This was the remark of Peter Theil , a founder of Pay Pal. 

It's true that our current innovations aren't having a big bang appeal which 18th and 19th century innovations had, like a Steam Engine or Iron Clad Ship or Radio. 

But this also explains a bit about inability of human kind to direct innovations in a specific direction and bit more about our inability to predict the impact of seemingly humble tools like Twitter, which asks people to react within a limit of 140 words.

Who would have imagined that those 140 words would have fueled a great socio-political churn in form of 'Arab Spring '. 

In 1990's our childhood dream would have been to travel in a flying car and not typing 140 characters on a glass screen. Jump to 2013. Flying Car is still a distant dream but those 140 characters are moving the world, changing the rules and made the ideator Jack Dorsey, A Billionaire for god sake.

And now he is going to kill another childhood dream of having our own credit cards with unending limits of withdrawal .  

Yes. His product Square is here , to disrupt the existing credit card framework and bring the wallet into our smart phones. Hence now the Credit cards are facing a slow death. How cool is that ?

Though sounding cool, we have no idea about it's supposed impacts on our spending habits and its reflection on actual economy. 

Below are the links which speak on how the present day Innovations is being viewed by majority and its implication ,which are far from unknown.

1. Founders Fund , whose motto goes like /// We invest in smart people solving difficult problems, often difficult scientific or engineering problems///.
Their Innovation document is interesting and it can be found @ What Happened to the Future?

2. An Economist article on whether the present day Idea and Innovation have stopped benefiting the real economy : Has the ideas machine broken down?

3. A case of an unintended effect on real economy by 140 characters :http://www.rocketmill.co.uk/we-w...

Happy reading !!!!

1 comment:

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