2000's Telecommunication

Telecommunications 2000's.mp4

Telecommunication in the 2000's

The 2000's is when the internet took it's seat as the most influential form of media.  The world had it's first taste of the internet in the 1990's and it wanted more.  Americans were excited for what new technology would emerge next and you could not go more than a few months before a new revolutionary development was announced from online gaming with systems like the XBox Live, social media platforms like Myspace and Facebook, the introduction of the first real "smartphone" with the iPhone in 2007 and the growth of online shopping.

Americans were oversaturated with new technology and they were loving every second of it, the tech industry was booming through the end of the 1990's and the first half of the 2000's.  By the end of the 2000's the internet boom had bust and only the most innovative and progressive platforms survived - Amazon was dominating eCommerce and Facebook was taking over the world.

Tasks

Task 1: Watch the Introductory Video to this Unit (5 minutes)

Task 2: Explore the provided images,video and attached links for Telecommunications during the 2000's (35 minutes)

Technology was making some big changes to the way Americans lived and interacted in the 2000's.  It changed the way people communicated, what people learned and the way information was shared.  Many of the innovations from this decade carried over to later decades and impacted not just the way technology was used, but how people value technology in the future.

Gaming

Home gaming systems in the 2000's once again upped the standard of visual graphics, connected play and content that keeps drawing you back for more; however, the biggest draw of the 2000's was the birth of online gaming where you could connect and talk to other players all round the country and the world.  Xbox ushered in this new phenomenon with the Xbox Live platform and changed the way we game at home forever.  

In the adult world of gaming - Las Vegas, you see another transformation as the once thought to be recession proof Las Vegas Strip saw an drastic slowdown after the 9/11 attacks that made Americans fearful of visiting large events, big cities  or traveling on an airplane.  This coupled with an economic collapse in 2008 required this resilient town to draw in visitors - Vegas become "Sin City" once again and the slogan "What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas" is born.

XBox

The Xbox was launched it the US on November 15th 2001. Originally titled the 'DirectX Box', it was the first American-made console since the Atari Jaguar in the mid-90s. It was also the first console to have a built-in hard drive. It was primarily designed to compete with the Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, and GameCube.

The console came about after collaborating with Sega to try and port Windows CE to the Dreamcast. As a start, four DirectX engineers took apart a few laptops to construct a prototype using a Windows operating system. The system was vaguely announced as early as 1999, but was delayed several times. It turned out the Microsoft marketing department hated the name 'Xbox', but it had proven popular during focus groups. (Putting an 'X' in a product name always seemed very 90s to me, though.)

The controllers were also an issue for some people as they were big, bulky, and difficult to use. A smaller controller (originally designed for Japan) was later released, but not before it was dubbed the second worst controller in history (the worst being the Atari Jaguar controller, of course).

Xbox Live went online in November 2002; it was different from the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 services in that it required a subscription fee and broadband connection (this was before broadband had fully taken off). The service ended up being quite successful because Microsoft had better servers, easy to work online menus, and great multiplayer games such as the Halo series. (https://www.smh.com.au/technology/your-turn-a-brief-history-of-microsoft-and-the-xbox-20131113-2xeyx.html )

Las Vegas

Las Vegas' popular "Only Vegas" campaign, which used the now famous "What happens here, stays here™" tagline, found a new market of young travelers seeking a complete resort experience. Ultra lounges, mega-nightclubs and world-class restaurants began opening at a fevered pace, and Las Vegas continued to be the city where the rich and famous came to play. (https://www.nevadaresorts.org/about/history/ )

As pop artists filled arenas, electronic dance music rose in popularity in Las Vegas’ underground scene. Small, more mainstream events would pop up throughout the 2000s, but everything would change when Paul Oakenfold took up residency at the Perfecto at Rain in 2008. With light shows, aerialists and stilt walkers, Oakenfold’s show came with a uniquely Vegas flashiness.

Electronic dance music-focused clubs popped up one after another, as these mega residencies became the norm. They packed nightclubs and swimming pools throughout the Strip. Today, Las Vegas rivals Ibiza with its ability to draw in big names like Tiësto, Zedd, Diplo and Steve Aoki. (https://www.visitlasvegas.com/experience/post/evolution-of-entertainment/ )

Social Media

The first social media site to reach a million monthly active users was MySpace – it achieved this milestone around 2004.  This is arguably the beginning of social media as we know it.  Social media has changed the world. The rapid and vast adoption of these technologies is changing how we find partners, how we access information from the news, and how we organize to demand political change.  Young people tend to use social media more frequently. In fact, in rich countries, where access to the internet is nearly universal, the vast majority of young adults use it.  Fast changes like those brought about by social media always spark fears about possible negative effects. Specifically in the context of social media, a key question is whether these new communication technologies are having a negative impact on our mental health. (https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media )

MySpace

Catalyzing an unprecedented digital word-of-mouth phenomenon, Myspace leveraged a unique set of action-oriented features to organize people. Features like “Groups” allowed users to communicate with each other by shared interest and geographic location, while other platform features further gave agency to communities––taking stock of opinions and current moods via “Polls” and adopting newsletter-esque modes of mass communication through “Bulletins.”

In 2005, Myspace was purchased by News Corp for $580 million just two years after it was founded and six years later sold to Specific Media for a fraction of its original sale price at $35 million. The platform was amongst the first in digital community building, making it possible for users to discover and support other users in new ways.

The ability to target new audiences quickly gave rise to the social network’s popularity in music, launching the careers of bands like Arctic Monkeys and Grammy-nominated Little Dragon––a Swedish electronic soul group crossing traditional mainstream genre boundaries that suddenly found new ways of cultivating an audience. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelineschneider/2019/03/20/how-myspace-opened-the-door-to-niche-music-genres/#1b9a538e2d8e )

Facebook

There was a time when Facebook was small. After all, it only existed in one place on Earth: Harvard University, where Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore. He lived in Kirkland House, a square of brick buildings arranged around a courtyard, one side hemmed in by JFK Street. For all the tendrils that Facebook now has snaked across the globe, it feels strange that one can pinpoint the moment it all began: 6 p.m. on February 4, 2004, as the temperature dipped below freezing on another day in Cambridge.

Within weeks, the social network would spread across the school; within months, the Ivy League followed by popular American colleges.  High schoolers arrived the next year, then college students across the globe, and finally anyone who wanted to in September 2006. Four years after it was founded, Facebook hit 100 million users. Four years after that, 1 billion. Now 2 billion people use Facebook every month. That’s 500 million more users than the total number of personal computers in use around the globe. (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/and-then-there-was-thefacebookcom/582004/ )

YouTube

The video sharing service posted its first video on April 23, 2005. (That video, Me at the Zoo, has subsequently been viewed 19 million times in 10 years.) YouTube changed everything about television, from public access to major networks. In one decade, YouTube has developed a culture of its own and is a threat to the conventional business model of television—but not in the way world expected.

YouTube was originally created to make it easy to upload videos and post them on blogs, a medium that was then pushing past the fringes of the Internet and into the mainstream. Quickly, YouTube became a destination of its own, one that traditional television producers thought they could harness to tap into the growing power of the Internet. The first clip I ever remember going to YouTube specifically to watch was Lazy Sunday, the first “Digital Short” produced by Saturday Night Live. It went on YouTube, iTunes and a few other websites on Dec. 17, 2005 and was perhaps the first viral video — particularly on YouTube, where it was free. (https://time.com/3828217/youtube-decade/ )

Learn more about the most successful Youtuber in History - Mr. Beast  (whose fame grows in the mid to late 2010's and by 2022 has amasses more than 200 million subscribers across all his channels) - by watching the documentary below by Curiosity Stream.

Smartphones

The emergence of communication and computing for mobile consumer devices is on the evolutionary course to bring interoperability and leverage the services and functions of every industry. As a marketing strategy, Smartphone term was introduced, referring to a new class of mobile phones with integrated services like communication, mobile sectors including voice communication, messaging, personal information management and wireless communication capability. Initially, Smartphone’s were only perceived for business use due to higher cost, but not today, today we are in a frenetic impact of Smartphone on the society. The latest surveys show that the popularity of Smartphone is increasing in general public with a much higher pace than it is increasing in any corporate sector. Earlier Smartphones were used as enterprise devices and were predominantly meant for corporate users. Smartphones have been around since 1993, but in reality, it reached the general public when Apple introduced this in the mass consumer market.  (https://www.keyideasinfotech.com/blog/impact-of-smartphone-on-society/ )

The Blackberry Leads the Way

The first device with the BlackBerry name was a pager released in 1999 called the BlackBerry 850. The pager, like the better-known smartphones that came after it, was particularly notable for its keypad that users could operate via thumbs. The name BlackBerry derived from this keypad, since the globe-shaped buttons resembled blackberry fruits.

The company’s first smartphone, the BlackBerry 5810, was launched in 2002. Initially targeted toward businesspeople rather than general users, its technological capabilities and stylish look made it a hit among investment bankers and other professionals. BlackBerry quickly became a household name, gaining the nickname “CrackBerry” due to its addictive nature.

The true death knell for BlackBerry, however, was the launch of iPhones and Android phones in 2007 and 2008. BlackBerry was left behind as those new products revolutionized the smartphone industry with touchscreen displays and third-party apps. (https://www.biography.com/movies-tv/a43840015/true-story-of-blackberry-ceos-mike-lazairidis-and-jim-balsillie

The iPhone is a Game Changer

When the iPhone shipped to customers on June 29, 2007, the first generation of the device that would change the world was missing a lot of what we now expect in an iPhone, but it set up the road map for Apple that continues to this day.

The first generation iPhone was, in many days, quite different than the ones we see in use today. For one thing, it was small, just 4.5 inches by 2.4 inches. By comparison, the iPhone XS Max launched in 2018 is 6.2 inches by 3.05 inches.

It also had no third-party apps whatsoever, and it topped out at 16GB of flash memory. The first iPhone was exclusive to AT&T, and ran only on AT&T's notoriously slow and unreliable EDGE GSM network.  But despite all of its shortcomings, relative to today, that first iPhone was hugely important. It was Apple's entry into a new category, at a time when the company's singular handheld device was the iPod.

The iPhone was the debut of the touchscreen, which would soon become standard in the category. Sure, there had been smartphones available from established manufacturers before, but they had physical keyboards and a much smaller screen. (https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/29/the-story-of-the-original-iphone-that-nobody-thought-was-possible )

eCommerce

The history of eCommerce started 40 years ago and, to this day, continues to grow with new technologies, innovations, and thousands of businesses entering the online market each year. Electronic Data Interchanges and teleshopping in the 1970s paved the way for the modern day eCommerce store. The history of eCommerce is closely intertwined with the history of the internet. Online shopping only became possible when the internet was opened to the public in 1991.  Amazon.com was one of the first eCommerce sites in the US to start selling products online and thousands of businesses have followed since. The convenience, safety, and user experience of eCommerce have improved exponentially since its inception.  This article will address some of the key players and milestones of eCommerce.  (https://www.miva.com/blog/the-history-of-ecommerce-how-did-it-all-begin/ )

Amazon

Amazon continually took shopping convenience to newer levels.  Before 1994, shoppers had to travel to stores to discover and buy things. Shopping used to be hard work – wandering down multiple aisles in search of a desired item, dealing with crying and nagging kids, and waiting in long checkout lines. Today, stores try to reach out to shoppers anywhere, anytime and through multiple channels and devices.

After first experiencing two-day free shipping from Amazon’s Prime membership program, shoppers started expecting no less from every online retailer. About 100 million shoppers worldwide have Amazon Prime.  

The company made shopping more convenient through features like one-click ordering; personalized recommendations; package pickup at Amazon hubs and lockers; ordering products with the single touch of a Dash button; and in-home delivery with Amazon Key.  Shoppers can also search for and order items through a simple voice command to an Echo or by clicking an Instagram or a Pinterest image. Amazon now even has a cashierless “Go” store in Seattle.

Amazon has been a factor in the rising closures of brick-and-mortar stores that can’t keep pace with the changes in retail. In the first 15 weeks of 2019 alone, there were about 6,000 store closures in the U.S. overall, higher than the number of closures in all of 2018. Analysts fear a coming “retail apocalypse.” (https://theconversation.com/amazon-is-turning-25-heres-a-look-back-at-how-it-changed-the-world-118307 )