Top 10 Lists for the Decade

As the 2010-2019 decade draws to a close, I will post (over the next 10 days - with a break on Christmas Day) a "Top 10" list on each of the following topics:

1. Technology Disruptions (Later in this post)
2. Business
3. US News
4. World News
5. Medicine / HealthCare
6. People (Influencers)
7. Sports
8. Movies
9. Music
10. Tragedies / Disasters

Here are my Top Technology Disruptions in the last decade:

1. SmartPhones - While the Smartphone existed in 2010, we continued to rely on multiple gadgets. Today, we have all these gadgets rolled into one.

2. Cloud, Data and AI - Computing has grown to become a utility over the last decade. Along with Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, these behind-the-scenes technologies power so many tasks that we do today.

3. Streaming - Netflix (app launched in 2010), Hulu and Amazon Prime have changed the face of entertainment. The $64m question is did bigger phone screens help Netflix become popular or was Netflix the reason why our phone screens got bigger?

4. Virtual Assistants - today it is common for 3-year old kids using their voice to command devices to play music. Between Siri, Alexa and Google, we can get the news, sports and weather using our voice.

5. Sharing Economy - Today, Airbnb has more room listings that all of the available rooms of the world's top five hotel chains combined. Uber (launched in 2010) was the first app to truly take advantage of faster cellular networks and improved location services on a SmartPhone

6. Autonomous Vehicles - Tesla led the way by turning the Model S into a self-driving vehicle by downloading an "upgrade". Talk about the mother of all in-app purchases! 

7. Wearables - Fitbit, Garmin and Apple made fitness tracking devices.  They helped us boost our daily activity by meeting goals for steps taken, tracking the amount and quality of sleep. They are moving towards mainstream MedicalCare as well.

8. Edge Computing - With the advent of 4G Networks (especially 4G LTE), SmartPhones no longer needed to be tethered to WiFi networks to be useful. With 5G offering a 10x to 100x improvement over 4G, the next decade promises to be exciting!

Best practices when you lose your digital device to liquids ...

An article in today's Mercury News by Patrick May prompted me to pen this blog about being deprived of your digital device - cell phone, laptop, camera, etc.

This has happened to most of us - when our phone has fallen into a "bowl" or coffee spilled on our laptop or the camera got drenched in rain.

I wanted to ask people out there what they have done in such situations. There is, of course, the dreaded, "Liquid spills are not covered by the warranty." Is there anything that works? What have people done in the past - post them as comments to this blog and I will collect these and post a follow up blog towards the end of this month.