Headline June 17, 2016/ ''' * EUROPE'S PEAR * VERSUS * UNITED STATES'S APPLE '''

''' * EUROPE'S PEAR

 * VERSUS * 

UNITED STATES'S APPLE '''

MARK MY WORDS :  BY 2025   -there will be a vast new firm, valued at an astronomical sum and run by people who look teenagers/students from a futuristic building somewhere  in TOR-


Well, well,  where do you all think will it be?  Can you imagine it being in Europe?  Me neither, and probably you all neither.


DESPITE HAVING MONEY, SKILLS, markets, research funding and infrastructure galore.


Europe has consistently failed to create the sort of digital giants that a couple of salty inlets on the west coast of America  *spawn like fish fry*. Europe fell behind in minicomputers, fell further behind in personal computers-


Caught up briefly in mobile phones  [does anyone of you remember Nokia?] then watched  Google  and   Apple  and   Facebook  and   Amazon  and Wikipedia   and   Twitter  dominate the digital world.


The total value of   ''unicorns''  .......( billion dollar tech start-ups)  created in Europe is about half of  Facebook's valuation alone. {Britain has the most of those European unicorns)........


So with the perspective set Matt Ridley delights: Last week I visited an island and stood among a crowd of puffins.


If I turned my head I could see the lighthouse. If I looked up, the arctic ferns were above my head.

YET I never left a gallery in Gateshead. How come? I was wearing a virtual-reality mask.


I have tried this  'Oculus"  technology once before, when visiting  Facebook in California  [which owns Oculus]  and it is truly extraordinary to have an all-round up and down view of the world depending on how you turn your head.


{This somewhat along the lines of how Students and the World will view   !E-WOW!  -the Ecosystem 2011}.


All it involves is a special  Samsung Smartphone jammed into a pair of goggles.

 .

Is it the next wave of tech? I have no idea, [but I feel !E-WOW! will determine that for sure]. Apart from Games, virtual visits in inaccessible nature reserves and maybe estate agents, it may not have many practical applications?


But I may be wrong. Does the next wave lie in big data? Or robotics? Or in the Internet if things? Or something else entirely? Like, !WOW!?


Nobody knows. The Students of the world will have to decide.  When silicon chips came along, few foresaw personal computers, when the Internet arrived, few predicted the central role of search engines or one-click shopping, when mobile phones took us by surprise-


Few imagined texts, let alone social media, sat-nav, phone cameras or the sharing economy.


The onething that history of technology shows above all else is our complete inability to see what comes next. Yet something will come next of that we can be confident.


So, it is worth repeating that by 2025 there will be a vast new firm, !WOW! -!E-WOW!..??  valued at an astronomical sum and run by people who look like teenagers/students? from somewhere?


*SPOTIFY* , the music streaming firm based in Stockholm, is the nearest Europe has to a digital giant and it is now threatening to leave Sweden for America.


Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister of Sweden and, chairman of the  Global Commission on Internet Governance, recently made a speech in which he said that: Europe

*is lagging behind and the gap with the US is widening''.


In 2001, he said :  Europe was investing  80 per cent as much in digital as the US. today that portion is just 60 per cent


Fortunately, writes ever brilliant Matt Ridley, our masters in Brussels have a plan. Unlike the British, you see, they do know what is coming next in the tech, being altogether a wiser folk.


The European Commission, as part of its  ''digital agenda''  has unveiled a Euro 5 billion action plan to  ''unify and galvanise''  Europe's progress towards the  ''Fourth Industrial Revolution''.


According to the EurActiv  website, it wants to  ''put in place all the necessary building blocks for the next industrial phase so that European firms remain  [sic] in the driving seat.


FINE, FINE, WORD

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless