A Year in Review 2011

Posted by Karen on Dec 28, 2011 12:00:00 AM

2011’s been an exciting year for Fluidata with the launch of new services such as 3G backup, the new dawn of IPv6 and the announcement of our initiative to help solve the UK’s rural broadband problems. In the wider technical community it’s also been eventful time. Social networking continued to rise in popularity and significance. It’s power to help mobilise the revolutionary fervour during the ‘Arab Spring’, perhaps the most striking illustration of its social, and indeed political magnitude. It also played a role closer to home, in inflaming , reporting on, and helping to extinguish the London riots. Wikileaks opened up fresh debates over the dichotomy between freedom of speech and national security, while twitter circumvented super injunctions that attempted to suffocate free press under the banner of right to privacy. The News of the Worlds demise and subsequent Leveson inquiry, where all such matters would come to a head, may be viewed, in part, as the print newspapers struggle to stay popular in the digital age. You can’t speak of WikiLeaks without mentioning hacking and 2011 witnessed a worrying rise in the hacking of public, private and government networks, culminating with the theft of 24,000 sensitive defence files from the Pentagon. Another thing we saw rise in popularity was ‘cloud’ services. From Microsoft 360 to Amazon ebooks, the cloud is transforming the way we work, rest and play. Although it’s not immune from failure – as the Blackberry smartphone crash of October highlighted. Apple suffered no such technological setbacks, with iPhones becoming ubiquitous, iPads the new ‘must have’ and iCloud launched. Sadly, November would see the passing of their charismatic CEO Steve Jobs (1955 -2011) who left a rich legacy which is yet to be fully realised. Looking forward to what 2012 has in store.

Topics: News