A-Z 2020: Around The Globe
What a year was 2020; a year to remember or a year to forget?
Twenty-twenty, fun to say, and easy on the eyes. We were all excited to flow through the year for the special events we anticipated and the holidays that were to fall on or near the weekend. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.Our ancestors might disagree that 2020 is the worst year on record. Sure, frightening things are happening, but many of those things happened in the past, too, including the 1918 flu pandemic, during which 50 million people died. Plus, the belief that civilization is on the decline is a tradition as old as civilization itself.
26 Things that have happened so far:
A For App Bans: The COVID Crisis led to a Certain Amount of disillusionment with china and the border dispute with India followed. The Indian Government started with a succession of Chinese app bans.
B For Bitcoin: When Bitcoin was introduced in 2008, many embraced by a player called it a fraud, but it is was embraced by a handful of enthusiasts and geeks and it survives well into the 2020s.
C For Contact Tracing: The good and the bad of tech together. It’s pretty great that during COVID governments can monitor live its citizens and in the process manage the global epidemic that has bought countries to a halt.
D For Driverless everything: California Permitted Google-owned Waymo to Conduct driverless car rides, and thousand have already used it in the trial runs.
E For Educational Transformation: Students of all ages and geographies across schools and colleges got a taste of online education. Some of it is temporary and some of it will become permanent. The ease of introducing new courses and updating syllabi is a boon.
F For Foxconn: Foxconn is shifting manufacturing of certain units of iPhone11 to India which boost to Make in India Scheme for 2020. Foxconn is planning to shift out certain MacBook and iPad operations to Vietnam.
G For Generations to Technology: Millions of people still use 2G In India and the rest of the users are distributed between 3G and 4 G.
H For Hacks all Kinds: Everyone right from the WHO was attacked and ransomware cases increased. The most high-profile was the Twitter hack where 130 top global verified accounts were taken over. The Twitter account of the website of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was also hacked.
I For IPO of Ant Group: Global investors put in bids worth a whooping for $3 trillion for Alibaba’s Fintech Ant Group, which proved to be the largest IPO in history, and the great global debut was pulled at the last minute by Chinese regulator leaving Chinese billionaire Jack Ma high and dry.
J For Jio: Jio’s dream run continues in 2020, considered its market share positioned itself as a future 5G player, but more importantly got a host of investment crossing 1 lakh crore Rupees. Jio established itself as a global tech player.
K For Ka And Ku Bands: Elon Musk’s SpaceX is launching revolutionary satellite internet service for the world. The beta trials have started in 2020, as the number of total satellites up there was in the region of one thousand this year. It will use both Ka and Ku Bands.
L For Lockdown: Most of the country witnesses a lockdown to curb the COVID-19 Virus, which slow down the financial growth. India has witnessed the longest lockdown in the year which revealed the basic areas where the Indian government needs to put attention.
M For mRNA: Many viruses have been around for thousands of years and some vaccines took hundreds of years to develop. That way COVID ushered in the tech era for vaccines. The messenger RNA vaccines were created on the computer and replicated easily on the machine.
N For Net Neutrality: When the US President Barak Obama took over in 2009 he announced his own set of internet rules. When his predecessor Donald Trump is on his way out Silicon Valley was looking for what new rules will come with the new regime in 2021.
O For OTT: With movies, halls shut down for most of the year, people turned to OTT in large numbers and choked the bandwidths. While Netflix and Amazon Prime continued to charm, Disney + came to India with Hotstar. India also has many regional players.
P For PUBG: It becomes a sensation among the youth of India, so much so that many elders demanded its ban due to its violence and bad influence. However, the ban finally came after the China border dispute.
Q For Quantum computing: If the last year 2019, Google claimed to have achieved Quantum supremacy. But 2020 claims towards China, they built a photonic quantum computer that could perform certain computations 100 trillion times faster than the best supercomputer, which is 10 billion times faster than the Google prototype of 2019.
R For Retail: Well 2020, traditional retail survived and boosted its e-commerce footprint, traditional eCommerce players flourished. In the US it doubled and India gained a lot of new users too. The delivery boy network expanded and enhanced the blue color employee.
S For Services: While there wasn’t much focus on this but Indian IT Services also chugged along and TCS become the largest IT service Company in the world going past Accenture.
T For TikTok: Across the world, it becomes a teen sensation crossing to the one billion user club and in all likelihood would have gone past WhatsApp and Instagram and been no 2-after Facebook. It is popular in India, was a hit in both urban and rural India.
U For US Congress: The US Congress summoned Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sunder Pichai over the antitrust issues.
V For Virtual Reality: This is one of the emerging technologies that showed its worth in the No-Touch Era And has application in the medical field, education, entertainment, tourism, gaming, etc.
W For WFH: 2020 is the year the WORK FROM HOME era began. Before this, it was an exception in most cases but now it becomes the rule. Almost the whole world did the WFH and many have this status sanctioned for good. More importantly, the bandwidth has gone up and now we have enough collaboration tools to deliver the goods.
X For Xiaomi: Despite the call for the boycott of Chinese products, Xiaomi continued to do well in India in mobiles, wearables, and smart TVs.
Y For Yelp: Came under great controversy this year when it said it would flag businesses that were considered racist, but it showed how Silicon Valley and tech companies continue to grapple with things like diversity and inclusion.
Z For Zoom: It symbolized the Zeitgeist of the year. Video conferencing and collaboration took off and it registered a lot of first-time users. After that WFH and online education also got a boost.
