Thursday, October 12, 2006 Ng: Useful gadgets By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
One of the great things that gadgets can do, at least for me, is to allow me to concentrate on more productive matters, instead of remembering day-to-day things.
Before, I had to remember birthdays, telephone numbers and various appointments, as well as bits and pieces of data here and there. Remember the time when you used to wake up several times at night because you are afraid that you would oversleep?
Now, I just make sure that I always have a gadget around. I use gadgets to wake me up or remind me of appointments. I just make sure that appointments are listed, after which I can forget about them and give my full concentration on the task at hand.
In the last few days, I meet several people who could not even remember their own cell phone numbers, but why should they? It is not a matter of the brain being unable to do it, but the gadgets probably can do it better. So why stuff your brain? The brain should be for processing and thinking, not for remembering.
Gadgets enabled me to note and record bits and pieces of observations here and there to share with readers. For instance, here is a note on how much overcharging cell phones is costing us in terms of electricity.
If you are like me, you would probably charge your phone overnight, even though it only needs one or two hours to do so. A study by Nokia shows that if only 10 percent of the world’s cell phone owners unplug their chargers once a phone is fully charged, instead of keeping it plugged until we remember to unplug it the next day, we would be able to save enough energy that is equivalent to the power consumed by 60,000 European homes per year.
Here’s another piece of information: In a forum by Microsoft, it was noted that the business applications market worldwide continues to be very fragmented. Thus, people looking for business applications should note which they need because the industry is in consolidation.
If you look at history, industry will always start with many players but as it matures, the number will decline as some companies are edged out of the market.
Take the case of search engine providers. There used to be hundreds of contenders in this sector but right now, only three dominate the market.
There used to be hundreds of computer manufacturers but now, the PC market is practically dominated by Dell, HP, Lenovo and a few others. At the start of the 20th century, there used to be hundreds of airplane and car manufacturers but now, there are just a dozen or so, with the top five practically dominating the market.
Not so in accounting software. A study noted that the top 12 companies only have about 20 percent of the total market, while the next 571 companies share 44 percent. There are over 130,000 players in the accounting software industry, and the 600th to the 130,000th players hold 36 percent of the market.
Through time, there might be consolidation for even though they say accounting or business applications are highly individualistic, how many ways can there be to manage inventory or receivables effectively?
Another interesting statistic I saw in a newsmagazine was the fact that in Shanghai alone, there were over 3,937 people who have the same name — Chen Jie. Another 3,751 are named Zhang Min. It is estimated that Shanghai, with a population of over 20 million have over 900,000 people with the family name of Zhang, and a few hundred thousand Wangs and Chens.
After all, there are over 1.3 billion Chinese, and with most names having only two or three syllables, the chances of having the same name is high indeed. This can cause a lot of confusion. No wonder the present generation, at least in the Philippines, resort to giving their children two names.
Another statistic worth noting is that notwithstanding the growth of computers and the Internet, TV continues to be the main preoccupation of the people.
In fact, the most popular site, YouTube — which zooms to over a hundred million people logging in every day and was bought by Google for over $1.6 billion (and it had only 25 employees, and was founded only in February 2005!)— is all about TV and video.
It has been reported that over half of households in the United States have more than three TV sets, and that a set is turned on at an average of seven hours and 40 minutes a day. In fact, children spend more time in front of the TV, than they do in school!
Internet is highly interactive, while you can watch TV passively. Maybe at the end of a tiring day, people just don’t want to think.
