Things the Internet killed

I still remember when I accessed the internet

for the first time, it was in 1998 (the internet arrived in Brazil in 1995). To get an internet connection we had to have a service provider to dial up thought the telephone (landline) using a modem (which is very different of what we see today, despite the fact the concept is still similar).

After a few year the ADSL connection started becoming popular in Brazil, so it was affordable to have this kind of connection and pay not a cheap monthly fee, but 24 hours of connection for the same payment - and with that, the old modem was retired which had to pay for a minute connected.

Year by year, we see the internet speed is increasingly faster in a way that we are able to watch a movie online now, or even download a movie in Blu-ray quality in minutes; make phone calls for free (not speak and listen, but actually see other people while speaking); make use of many public services such as the light invoice, income tax return, check the public expenses (know as transparency portal); and also talk to the politicians.

So if we stop to think how contrasting and interesting is to compare the two periods, our life before the internet and today with dedicated connection.

Lets see some interesting topics:

- Correct writing: many acronyms raised in order to make shorter the time to type, such as u, ur, 2moro, ily, omg, ttyl, wtf, and many others. In Portuguese we see others similar but mostly the way its pronounced, the phoneme such as vc (means voce), mto (muito), etc.

- Listen the complete album: buy a CD of your favorite band to listen at home or in the car it out of question. You buy or listen the sound track that you most like, online or downloading it. By the way, internet radios are about to change again the music market.

- Truth famous people: mostly because of the social networks and blogs we see people becoming famous due to specific activities - perhaps the most common is with music, DJs, etc.

- Sex mystery: Before this change, people would discover the sex only at that time together with the partner, and as a consequence it created a much bigger expectation. Today with sex trivialized, anyone can learn everything about it before “practicing".

- Encyclopedias: perhaps kids have another concept of what encyclopedia meant twenty years ago, many books with lots of books and pretty expensive. For them, the information might be on Google, Wikipedia, etc, but definitely not on a book.

- Knowledge: everyone today can have a minimum knowledge about any subject, just need some spare time to search a bit.

- Know places at home: how many times you were first on the web to search about a place you have to go, to get more info, or to see how to get there using maps. And more, look for more info about a city you are interested in visiting, the main sightseeings, hotels to stay, etc.

Absolutely sure there are many other things the Internet changed the way we do things, and of course, we haven't even quoted what smartphones and tablets have changed.

But for the next time you use any service of the internet, you will think how that thing was in the past (if you are older than 30 years old, of course)!!

How the 3G internet has changed the telecom companies' life

With the booming of smartphones and tablets in the last four/five years, the business model of telephony companies has been put against the wall. With the competition of applications that replace phone calls and text messages, the carriers are betting and investing more than ever on sales of data packet to the internet.

Today there are 273 million of active mobile phones in Brazil and 38% of this amount has access to the internet 3G - in 2009 this percentage didn’t exceed 2%. Access to mobile broadband also made popular applications to exchange messages and files such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber and a few others. Each time, users are more connected not only by 3G but also by Wifi hotspots, and then, users need less to fall back on SMS with more alternatives for phone calls and messages.

The change is not only in Brazil, but globally. A research by the British consulting Ovum says that the preference for applications makes telecom operators around the world stop profiting USD 33 billion per year with SMS. The prediction is that the next two years, the value of the annual loss will reach USD 54 billion. In 2012, the consulting company Informa affirms that the number of messages exchanged by apps for the first time surpassed the number of text messages sent via SMS - it was 19 billion messages per day compared to 17.9 billion.

With this scenario, it made the telecom companies had changed the strategic and charge less for the SMS, now selling by a pack of 100 or 500 SMSs, before that, charged by unit. Despite of being the voice service as the main service, the revenues coming from this vertical are dropping in some countries and in Brazil stopping growing. The telephone companies are now increasingly investing in landline and mobile broadband, which is where it is coming revenue growth.

Virtualization: the shadow of the Cloud

In recent years, we have heard a new term called Cloud, which means in general lines to have the service or application available on the internet reachable from anywhere, quite different from the traditional model where the application runs in a specific server and reachable only from a closed network. The Cloud comes with a different concept of work, instead of you buy the hardware, take care of the maintenance and provide all infrastructure, you just buy a piece of service where you will put your application to run – the simplest and practical example we see it is the email, instead of having the server mail to host you domain and provide the service, there are many companies providing this service where you pay a monthly or yearly subscription and access from anywhere and just forget the maintenance worries.

Although, do you know how the Cloud service usually works behind the scenes? It’s a complex environment and varies a lot from service to service, but the main though is to have a hardware that can work to run as many “clients” as possible in order to use the full capacity of the hardware, and make this model profitable. The service can vary widely because in our giving example about Email service, possibly the server would run only one email service and then shared with many customers. The complex service would have from each customer some specific features which would be pretty hard to match with another customer and share the same resource. In order to solve this gap, it would have another layer which splits the server in many other small servers, known as Virtualization.

To give a better idea how virtualization works, imagine the company has a very powerful server with lots of processors, memory and disk space, each time a customer comes with a specific requirement, the administrator will slice the server and create a “virtual server” or “virtual machine” with the resources to meet the requirement. This is the mentioned added layer that will be used for the customer with specific purposes and totally isolated from the rest of the resources of the powerful server.

You might be wondering that only companies with specific requirement can afford this kind of hardware!! Actually at home you can also have a virtualization environment with no money involved (or a little), of course not powerful as a server, but the same hardware using different purposes.

Let’s describe some possible scenarios:

- You might have special needs for specific software that you use only works in a specific operating system, but you don’t want to downgrade the whole environment, thus with virtualization you would keep your current operating system and create a virtual machine (VM) and install the operating system required for that. Eg: your laptop running MS Windows 7, but you use a program that works only on MS Windows XP, so this XP version would be a VM.

- A very interesting requirement - You just bought a Mac and of course some programs are incompatible with OSX and only run on Windows. Not problem, you will install this program into a VM by creating a VM to install your MS Windows 7 and later your program, so that it will be easy to switch platforms in clicks and taking advantage of both platforms.

- You would like to install a trial program and test if it fits on what you are looking for, but don’t want to do this on your fresh and clean operating system recently installed, so you would create a new VM, install the operating system, install the trial software, test and decide if it’s worth to have on your “real” computer. This is much easier to do because if you don’t like, you can reverse back a copy of this VM or just leave this VM for testing purposes.

Did you enjoy this idea? So take a look at those vendors’s website and look for the products, some are free, others paid – just be aware of the minimum requirement to run the software virtualization on your PC or laptop:




- VMWare Player from VMWare (Windows and Linux) - www.vmware.com
- VMWare Fusion from VMWare (Mac only) - www.vmware.com
- Virtual Box from Oracle (Windows, Linux and Mac) - www.virtualbox.org
- Parallels Desktop from Parallels (Mac only) - www.parallels.com

Big Data - All our information there

We have never been so connected like today, whether through tablets, smartphones or computers. The result of this is a huge amount of information available on the internet, which can be collected by companies or governments - even if we don’t know it. This is precisely the purpose of Big Data: monitor and organize this almost endless number of information floating on the network.

Looking at a real scenario, with a smartphone in the pocket we carry lots of things: photos, video, music, make access to the internet and social networks, check e-mail, etc., and all this all generates more information mixed with habits and geolocation, but all in unstructured way, a fusion of information.

The Big Date comes to compile all this information based on programming and algorithms and aggregate all structured and unstructured databases - video, images and text. By the time you mix it all, it turns a huge volume of information.

The big challenge is how to manage and analyze all this data volume grows infinitely everyday. More than that, to understand this data and create tools to generate more experience, productivity, consumption and new services. To give an idea, these unstructured data represents 85% of the information with which companies deal nowadays.

Giants like Google and Facebook have extensive experience in using algorithms to interpret profiles and behaviors and transform it into profit - that's why we see ads posted in searches or on the timeline that matches on what you were seeing.

Today we see many people talking about Big Data, and it’s expected to see much more because we will see many other applications using this concept.