- In 2008, Google became the World's most Powerful Brand for the first time, beating out GE, Microsoft and Coca-Cola.
- YouTube consumes as much bandwidth this year as the ENTIRE internet in 2000
- The traditional media are hurting: US Newspaper circulation in 2008 is the same as in 1978, when there were 100 million fewer people in America.
- There are 1.4 million new broadband users in China every month.
- In the second quarter of 2008, 74% of all email received worldwide was spam.
- Today 1.5 billion devices on this planet have Internet access. By 2012, this number will d ouble
- Online advertising in the US alone is a $21 billion dollar business.
- Facebook has more than 80 million users... It was launched only in 2004.
- The total volume of digital information is more than 400 exabytes. That is 400 billion gigabytes or more than 60 Gigabytes for each person on earth.
- Last year, more transistors were produced on this planet than grains of rice at a lower cost.
- Roughly 40% of all Internet users worldwide have mobile internet access today. This figure will triple by 2012.
We are at the dawn of another revolution.. the quantum information revolution. Quantum information is the result of fusing quantum mechanics and information science. It adds a new dimension in the way data will be stored: quantum information is not stored in bits but in qubits.
The classical information science sees storage, transmission, and manipulation of information in a bitbased context. Information is encoded as bits—the ones and zeros of the binary number system.
The classical information science sees storage, transmission, and manipulation of information in a bitbased context. Information is encoded as bits—the ones and zeros of the binary number system.
In your and my computer information is stored as bits on physical systems (Hardware). Billions upon billions of bits are stored on the device's hard disk.
Computers, cellphones and the Internet are all products of bit-based information science, and one reason these bits work so well is that they normally work without errors or ambiguities. Bit-based information has to be error-free or else the exponential growth in complexity and speed of computing devices would eventually lead to chaos.
Quantum mechanics in turn describes the world of the very small—the submicroscopic world of elementary particles. A revolutionary aspect of quantum theory is its prediction of fundamental ambiguities.
Physical properties of objects such as their positions or velocities may coexist in multiple states - a condition that is inconceivable in our macroscopic world...and in the world of conventional information science so it seems.
Quantum information is stored in “qubits” These quantum bits have a value that can be one or zero but can also be both zero and one at the same time. In a way, the bits are managed in a chaotic way... Chaos theory meets Moore's and Parkinson's laws...
Quantum information leads to a complete new way of looking at information. The processing of quantum information requires hardware that can deal with the laws of quantum mechanics as it is happening in very small, isolated systems such as individual atoms and photons. Seems like we will all be having some kind of nuclear device in our backyard to store our 60 gigs of information in the near future. Not really my idea of Green IT to be honest.
Yours sincerely inspired by Controlling the Quantum World: The Science of Atoms, Molecules, and Photons (2007) Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA)