New Application For Old Technologies

Technology everywhere nowadays follow an exponential growth and it progresses at a rate so fast that today’s technology might even become tomorrow’s antique. New gadgets, new ideas, and new inventions are everywhere; however, what’s fun to see is that a few older ideas are making a come back as well, of course, the comebacks arrive with a newer vibe and a much-improved tech, but in functionality, they can be very much the same as the earlier version. Meanwhile, there are products which are simply mergers of different old technologies. Take the smartphone, for example, an essential and breakthrough technology of the 21st century, the smartphones can be pictured as a combination of our old style cellular phones, handycams, walkmans and much more. Well, in this article, we are going to be seeing a few old technologies which were replaced with much cooler, sleeker, and more tech-y versions of products.

Walkmans:

You might still have one lying around the house or you may have heard of it in one of the nostalgic stories shared by one of your parents. At a time, walkman’s were very big in the market and most people had a piece. The earlier versions came with no memories, but you could pop in a cassette and listened to the tunes in primitive headphones; the latter versions however, came with built-in memories often capacitating around 256/512 Megabytes of good music! It had a few alike products as well which were developed during the Walkman hype such as the MiniDisc or the portable CD player.

By the early 2000s; however, walkman’s were out of the market and then, it was the time of the iPods which can be debated to be basically a high end Walkman!

Information Rights Management:

Back in 2008, it was still early days for cloud computing and people were only finding out about it, but file sharing was something which was still very common. A few companies tried to protect mobile documents on the move beyond multiple servers. The companies were using IRM, which is basically something like Google Docs. They were trying to make sure that a piece of document can only be opened by a trusted group who have been given permission regardless of the number of servers it jumps across. The idea was simple, yet useful and now, many years later, we are seeing the same happening via Google drive in our everyday lives.

Fax:

Gone are those days where you would keep a fax machine in your office and use that as a premium medium of communication. While faxing in general has become a bit unpopular but even if you use faxing in your company, online faxing is the way you should go. Online faxing service is almost like 10-15 times cheaper than what a good Fax machine will cost you. Apart from that, it gives you great convenience as an employee or as a boss. You can use your email to attach and exchange fax. With the entire system in place, it can help you be more organized with all your faxes. Also don’t forget you get to save some precious time because now you don’t have to get up and use the fax machine every time you need to fax someone.

Food Delivery:

Remember WebVan? It was held as an example of the dot com burst and a symbol of excesses of the 90’s tech bloom. It is the poster child of the dot com burst which led to the tech market crash in the millennium. It was basically a startup which brought you groceries on demand, sounds familiar? Webvan crashed while rushing to attain the biggest IPO at the Silicon valley back then, but they were much too early for their time as the founders later found out as the company basically imploded being unable to scale up.

Messaging Platforms:

Back in the early 2000s, instant messaging platforms were very big in the market. Back in those days, every big company was trying an Instant Messaging platform and most people would have ad you believe that IMs were going to be as big as E-Mails were, if not bigger. Most companies; however, gave up the pursuit and before 2010, there were only a handful of big messaging platforms which seemed as if they were swallowing the entire market; the rise of social media later took over these platforms and now again, we are seeing a comeback of messenger apps with platforms such as Whatsapp, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Imo, etc.

There are plenty of other examples like the ones above and for now, it seems that the list of recycled ideas is not going to stop anytime soon. It’s not too bad for the startup market as well because not every startup can come up with an unique idea which has never been implemented before, besides doing something new has its more significant elements of risk as well. On the other hand, doing something new regarding an old idea can be a smart way to go as it has lesser risks, it is something which has been tried before so you would know the pros and cons regarding it. As long as there’s a demand for it in the market, you should be cool!