Gaming is a huge business. In 2021, gaming generated $214 billion in revenues worldwide. That represents over 6% of all spending on entertainment. Gaming market experts are predicting that this will grow to over 10% during this decade. The pandemic triggered a growth spurt in gaming, with revenues almost tripling since 2019. During that time, there was also a big change in the dynamics of the industry, where many games are offered for free. more
Last Saturday marked the 53rd anniversary of the Internet. While the vast majority of its five billion users have been online for less than a decade, the Internet was taken into use on October 29th, 1969, when two computers connected to the ARPANET exchanged a message. Although the Internet has been around for a while, it remained below most people's radar until the late 1990s when the dot com boom started. more
I'm not sure that most people understand the extent to which our online experience has moved to the cloud -- and this movement to the cloud means we're using a lot more bandwidth than in the recent past. A huge number of online functions now reside in the cloud, when only a few years ago, a lot of processing was done on our computers. Take the example of Twitter, where I keep an account to upload a copy of my blog every day. more
When it comes to the economy, the global supply chain was one of the biggest casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic. Port closures and soaring infection rates hampered logistics providers' ability to schedule deliveries and predict risks. In turn, manufacturers' demand projections were challenged, leading to empty shelves worldwide. A lack of shipping containers has affected supply chains, with shippers scrambling to find usable containers before they disappear into service. more
One of the consequences of our increased use of broadband is a big increase in the amount the data that we store outside our homes and businesses. The numbers are becoming staggering. There are currently about 3.7 billion people using the Internet, and together we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of online data every day. The trends are that by 2025 we'll be storing 160 zettabytes of data per year - a zettabyte is one trillion gigabytes. I store a lot more data online than I used to. I now store things in the cloud all day long. more
With so much "cloud-talk" across every industry -- many presume that every company with serious telecom operations has already moved there -- but they haven't. In fact, 20 to 25% of global companies are still using legacy PBX systems and MPLS networks and waiting to replace them and move over to SD-Wan/mesh solutions. These advancements can be done successfully after an infrastructure audit has been conducted to identify operational weaknesses and threat vulnerabilities and measuring efficiencies of each feature for usage optimization and increased productivity. more
Last month, I announced our Open Data Hub to the CircleID community, inviting anyone interested in making the digital sector more transparent to join our efforts. Today, I am excited to share summaries of our three-part series describing our vision for a sustainable European cloud. It’s a key part of our Roadmap to Sustainable Digital Infrastructure by 2030, and one that is meant to not merely challenge the dominance of the big, non-European cloud providers, but offer an entirely different paradigm that is open-source, fair, sustainable, and creates economic opportunities for all. more
Huawei's Cloud is growing faster than Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, Iain Morris writes. He cites U.S. Senator Tom Cotton on growth in "Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates." Cotton further says: "In addition, Huawei's cloud services revenues reportedly rose by almost 170 percent in 2020. This accelerating revenue stream threatens to undermine U.S. efforts to curtail Huawei's power, influence, and financial strength." I think Cotton is a little high on Huawei Cloud growth... more
Innovation is one of those words that is a bit hard to internalize. Merriam-Webster says innovation is the introduction of something new or a new idea, method, or device. That would be a narrow definition, perhaps even obsolete. Innovation is much more than invention or introducing new technology. Some would say that innovation is more of a state of mind, an attitude. One thing is for sure: innovation is happening more quickly; it is more open and more collaborative. more
The global internet, from the perspective of its billions of users, has often been envisioned as a cloud -- a shapeless structure that connects users to applications and to one another, with the internal details left up to the infrastructure operators inside. From the perspective of the infrastructure operators, however, the global internet is a network of networks. It's a complex set of connections among network operators, application platforms, content providers and other parties. more
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