This book combines the three dimensions of technology, society and economy to explore the advent of today’s cloud ecosystems as successors to older service ecosystems based on networks. Further, it describes the shifting of services to the cloud as a long-term trend that is still progressing rapidly.The book adopts a comprehensive perspective on the key success factors for the technology – compelling business models and ecosystems including private, public and national organizations. The authors explore the evolution of service ecosystems, describe the similarities and differences, and analyze the way they have created and changed industries. Lastly, based on the current status of cloud computing and related technologies like virtualization, the internet of things, fog computing, big data and analytics, cognitive computing and blockchain, the authors provide a revealing outlook on the possibilities of future technologies, the future of the internet, and the potential impacts on business and society.

Presents the story of Luke Howard, an ameteur meterologist, and his groundbreaking work that began with naming and classifying clouds.

The history of inventions was born more than 10 centuries ago. 10,000 years of inventions and creations of the human being, of the so-called Homus Sapiens. This book traces the history of the most important inventions and discoveries that have happened throughout the centuries, this work defines in an extended and very complete way the definition of all those creations that some geniuses created in their day. From the most remote antiquity, those stone tools created in the era of the Cromagnon man, to the most advanced cybernetic and digital technologies of our time. As an author, I realized when writing this book, that although we think we know almost everything, we do not really know almost anything...

The conventional wisdom on how technology will change the future is wrong. Mark Mills lays out a radically different and optimistic vision for what’s really coming. The mainstream forecasts fall into three camps. One considers today as the “new normal,” where ordering a ride or food on a smartphone or trading in bitcoins is as good as it’s going to get. Another foresees a dystopian era of widespread, digitally driven job- and business-destruction. A third believes that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. But according to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive an economic boom over the coming decade, one that historians will characterize as the “Roaring 2020s.” It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in three primary technology domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. Microprocessors are increasingly embedded in everything. Materials, from which everything is built, are emerging with novel, almost magical capabilities. And machines, which make and move all manner of stuff, are undergoing a complementary transformation. Accelerating and enabling all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. We’ve seen this pattern before. The technological revolution that drove the great economic expansion of the twentieth century can be traced to a similar confluence, one that was first visible in the 1920s: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). Single inventions don’t drive great, long-cycle booms. It always takes convergent revolutions in technology’s three core spheres—information, materials, and machines. Over history, that’s only happened a few times. We have wrung much magic from the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. And this time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.

Reproduction of the original: Inventions in the Century by William H. Doolittle

This collection of essays concentrates on the structures and connections which have made it possible, over the last two centuries, for an integrated regime of historical representation to emerge. It also touches upon the debate about the contemporary uses of history - whether it is a matter of new versus traditional approaches to the school curriculum, or of the need to historicize museums, houses and gardens and so avoid the blandness of an uninformed display.

An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition or process. It may be an improvement upon a machine or product or a new process for creating an object or a result. An invention that achieves a completely unique function or result may be a radical breakthrough. Some inventions can be patented. A Patent legally protects the intellectual property rights of the inventor and legally recognizes that a claimed invention is actually an invention. The rules and requirements for patenting an invention vary from country to country, and the process of obtaining a patent is often expensive.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.