George C. Dimitriou

Is it possible to determine which 30 innovations have changed life most dramatically during the past 30 years? That is the question that Nightly Business Report, the Emmy Award-winning PBS business program, and Knowledge@Wharton set out to answer to celebrate NBR’s 30^thanniversary this year. NBR partnered with Knowledge@Wharton to create a list of the “Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years.” The show’s audiences from more than 250 markets across the country and Knowledge@Wharton’s readers from around the world were asked to suggest innovations they think have shaped the world in the last three decades.

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A new Harris Poll finds that adult Internet users in the USA are now spending an average of 13 hours a week online.  Of course, people’s usage varies greatly; one in five (20%) of adult Internet users are online for only two hours or less a week while one in seven (14%) are spending 24 or more hours a week online.

Over the years the average hours spent online have increased from 7 hours in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002, to between 8 and 9 hours in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006.  In 2007, it increased to 11 hours.  Last year (in October after the financial crisis broke and before the presidential election) Internet users were online for 14 hours a week, double what it was from 1999 to 2002.

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French President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced that the government will invest EUR 4.5 billion to support the rollout of very high-speed broadband and the development of innovative services as part of a EUR 35 billion bond issue known as the “grand emprunt”. Les Echos reports that Sarkozy announced five major priorities, higher education, research, digital, sustainable development and industry. Although details of how the funds will be allocated have yet to be unveiled, the public sector investment in the digital economy will be EUR 500 million more than the EUR 4 billion of funding recently sought by a commission on the digital economy.

The government will provide EUR 2 billion to enable 70 percent of the population to have access to at least 100 Mpbs services within the next 10 years. Private operators are expected to invest twice as much as the State, according to the President. While operators are ready to go it alone in densely populated areas, a national fund for the digital society will be formed to make loans to operators for shared infrastructure deployment. A public-private partnership is expected to be formed to launch a satellite offering very high-speed access within five years to 750,000 rural homes. The government will also invest EUR 2.5 billion in promoting the development of innovative content and new uses through public-private partnerships in intelligent networks, tele-working, telemedicine, health, government, justice and education. Part of the funds will go towards the construction of large data processing and storage facilities.

The January issue of Technology Review features an important article discussing whether cloud computing is secure enough for broad public use. “Security in the Ether,” by David Talbot, brings to light some of the serious technology concerns from cloud based applications including Gmail, Twitter and Facebook.

From a rocket of the future to a $10 million light bulb, here are TIME’s picks for the best new gadgets and breakthrough ideas of the year.

U.S. households consumed approximately 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008, according to the How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers (PDF) released yesterday by the University of California, San Diego.

In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.

Information consumed

Created by Online Education

A  Harvard Medical School study that looked at some of the U.S “most wired” hospital facilities found that computerization of those facilities hasn’t saved them any money or improved administrative efficiency.

The recently released study evaluated data on 4,000 hospitals in the U.S over a four-year period and found that the immense cost of installing and running hospital IT systems is greater than any expected cost savings. And much of the software being written for use in clinics is aimed at administrators, not doctors, nurses and lab workers.

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