What the technology decade has taught us

A mobile subscriber withdraws money from an M-Pesa shop in Nyeri on May 2, 2016. Across Africa more and more people are now spending, saving and planning for the future through banking services offered by mobile phone companies. FILE PHOTO | JOSEPH KANYI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Here at home, the world famous phone-based money transfer service, M-Pesa, was launched in 2007 by Safaricom. The service has tens of millions of users in Kenya and Tanzania, where most of its clients are, and is growing experientially.
  • Every so often, we learn of new countries that are adopting M-Pesa, including Afghanistan, South Africa, India and Romania.
  • From the days of mainframe computers, information and communication technologies have become easy and natural for people to use. Ten years ago, to use a computer, one needed college level training. That is no longer the case.

In just a week, the world will welcome 2017 — a significant year in many ways on the technology front.

It will mark a decade since most of the technology we enjoy today came to light. From Facebook, Airbnb, Kindle by Amazon, to M-Pesa, many tech toys and services were conceived a decade ago.

Many of the leading tech companies emerged around 2007. These firms have changed our lives in many ways.

A decade ago, Facebook, a social networking site initially confined to college students, was opened to anyone 13 years and above.

It expanded rapidly to virtually all corners of the world. Ten years later, Facebook has one billion active users, almost the population of Africa.

In 2007, micro-blogging site Twitter, which had been part of a broader start-up, took a different and independent turn, spreading its tentacles worldwide.

Before then, twitter was simply a sound made by some birds. Now Twitter has about 317 million monthly active users.

In the same year, Amazon released Kindle, a device that enables users to download and read e-books; the same year Airbnb was conceived.

Here at home, the world famous phone-based money transfer service, M-Pesa, was launched in 2007 by Safaricom. The service has tens of millions of users in Kenya and Tanzania, where most of its clients are, and is growing experientially.

Every so often, we learn of new countries that are adopting M-Pesa, including Afghanistan, South Africa, India and Romania.

From the days of mainframe computers, information and communication technologies have become easy and natural for people to use. Ten years ago, to use a computer, one needed college level training. That is no longer the case.

A 10-year-old child with only a few hours of tinkering with a phone can teach the parents some fine features of the phone. It’s like children are these days born fully-loaded with tech skills.

Computers have shrunk in size from mainframes to desktops, to laptops and now to smartphones and tablets. Their power improves every so often.

Just days after you acquire a new piece of technology and think you have the latest version in town, you realise you are wrong.

What can we expect in the next decade, starting in 2017? Can experiences from the past 10 years help us predict the direction technology will take?

To answer this question, we need to refer to Moore’s Law. In 1965, Gordon Moore postulated that the speed and power of microchips — computational processing power — would double every year without increasing its cost.

Moore’s Law is not a law in the sense of, say, Newton’s laws of motion. But Intel, which has for decades been the leading maker of microprocessors, and the rest of the industry, turned the prediction into a self-fulfilling prophecy. This law has held true for the past 50 years.

Going by Moore’s Law, we can expect technology to expand even to the remotest parts of the country, providing farmers, fishermen, pastoralists and blue chip companies alike with technology to make lives better, cheaper and efficient.

Broadband technology will expand and become cheaper, enabling more people, especially the youth, to go online and do business across counties and countries.

Continuous education will be the norm as more and more skills become replaced by technology. The workforce will have to adapt quickly to changing technology, or shape out. Thankfully, there are many online resources to keep all of us up to speed.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Wambugu is an informatics specialist. [email protected] @samwambugu2