Now more than ever, digital technology has become a staple in our professional and private life.

The revolution can’t be ignored as it is changing the way people travel, work, interact & organize their daily activities. And it does it at high speed.

With some of the enthusiasm brought by this digital age, this podcast is about celebrating impactful innovations on their day of birth.

We’ll find out how some brillant minds set the path with new ways to solve old business problems, create new opportunities, and changed the society entirely.

I’m your host, Vincent Giraud. Welcome to the digital innovation days!

Google marked the release of its web browser on the 11th of December, 2008, when it launched the first stable public version of Chrome. Although the tech giant had previously released 3 versions for testing, they were beta versions. With the release of version 1, Chrome entered a market where users were growing frustrated with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox was gaining momentum. By 2013, Chrome was dominating the web browser industry, clearly surpassing Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The software used certain features from Apple’s WebKit open-source rendering engine as well as Firefox, and its source code was made available by Google as part of its Chromium project. Google Chrome stood out due to a multitude of features. For starters, it strictly focused on web standards. This came at a time when Microsoft was struggling with proprietary web standards for its own web navigator, Internet Explorer. Chrome also introduced the idea of sandboxing in a web browser. By sandboxing individual tabs, if one of them crashed, the others would not be affected. This led to improved speed and stability although it required each tab to use as much dedicated memory as the first one. However, when any tab was closed, it released its allocated memory, effectively solving a problem many older browsers were facing and which could only be fixed by restarting them.

Today, Google Chrome is the undisputed leader in web browsers. With a market share of nearly 65%, it is the most popular web browser in 2021. It is more than just a web navigator now. In fact, it can be viewed as a complete platform that can run on different operating systems including Windows, Android, Linux, macOS, and iOS. From its release till now, Google Chrome has added value for the users and helped drive innovation in the field.

Larry Wall released the general-purpose programming language Perl on the 18th of December, 1987. It was meant to offer text manipulation, web development, network programming, system administration, and Graphics User Interface (GUI) development, among other tasks. With its tagline, “easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible”, Perl was designed to make computer programming easier and faster.

With the advent of the web, Perl also gained momentum. In fact, it became the dominant language for Common Interface Gateway (CGI) programming. The regular expression and string parsing abilities that this language offered brought it immense popularity as well. System administration tasks that were too complex for a shell script but not worth the effort when coding in C, were easily done with Perl. This also became the perfect language to interact with databases, leading to its widespread use to implement dynamic websites. True to its motto of TIMTOWTDI (“there is more than one way to do it”), Perl cemented its position as a very versatile and flexible language since it allowed the user to adopt any kind of programming style, be it procedural or object-oriented.

Although Perl may not be sitting atop the list of the most commonly-used programming languages today, its uniqueness largely stems from its compatibility with other programming languages. Perl is being used throughout the web and it is also termed as the “duct tape of the Internet” because it tied together systems and interfaces that could not work together prior to Perl. While many think that Perl has “died” as a language now, it is still being heavily used not just for maintaining existing projects but also for creating new ones. In fact, it is still considered among the best coding languages to increase one’s employability as well as remuneration.

When the world’s first ever web server (http://info.cern.ch/) went live at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) on the 24th of December, 1990, it marked the creation of one of the four essentials of the World Wide Web: HTML, web protocol, web browser, and web server. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, set up a NeXT computer at CERN as the first ever server. However, this web server was more of a small intranet for information sharing among CERN physicists rather than being “world wide”.

By 1991, several other web servers had been created, all located at CERN. By this time, it had been successfully tested that document retrieval could be performed from web servers on incompatible computer systems. However, since all the web servers were at CERN, the possibility of retrieving data from halfway across the world was questionable. To do so, a computer was set up with the help of Paul Kunz, a physicist at Stanford University. This server was located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and by the end of 1991, it went live, becoming the first web server outside Europe.

What started from a single NeXT computer at a nuclear research lab in Europe has now grown into an indispensable part of the internet globally. A world without web servers means a world where information cannot be retrieved from any part of the world within an instant - essentially unimaginable. The millions of servers online are responsible for displaying website content by storing, preprocessing, and delivering the requested web pages to users. The sheer significance of this invention can be gauged by the fact that all data that are shared over the internet today are hosted on web servers. And while the first web server could only retrieve data from other servers located in CERN, today this retrieval can quickly be done across oceans and continents.

The creation of the Domain Name System (DNS) on the 1st of January, 1985 transformed the way the internet was browsed. Essentially the phonebook of the internet, the DNS allowed users to access information using domain names instead of IP addresses.

Each machine or device connected to the internet has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address that is used to find and interact with a particular device. These IP addresses can be in the IPv4 format (such as 192.168.1.1) or the newer, alphanumeric IPv6 format (like 2400:cb00:2048:1::c629:d7a2). Web browsers interact and load internet resources using IP addresses. While this is completely understandable for machines, it is exceptionally difficult for humans to memorise more than a few IP addresses. To make accessing websites easier, the DNS was created which translates domain names (such as google.com) to IP addresses. While the way the DNS works involves several servers and can be a long-winded process, it takes a few milliseconds only to fetch an IP address given a domain name.

If it weren’t for the DNS, we would still be using difficult-to-remember strings of numbers like 192.58.9.34 instead of the easy and memorable domain names that we use today. DNS enabled users to have a more user-friendly, collaborative, and diverse internet. With over 363.5 million registered domain names, the DNS is not only a fundamental part of the internet today but also its backbone. In fact, if a DNS is not responding, a connection to other websites over the internet cannot be established. Interestingly, before personal computing became popular, the few users over the internet could memorise and recognise some familiar IP addresses but this is beyond practical in today’s time and age with millions of domain names and even more IP addresses, which further underscores how significant the DNS is.

When Bitcoin was created by its mysterious pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto on the 3rd of January, 2009, the world was introduced to a completely new form of currency - cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a form of binary data which acts as a payment medium. Since then, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been launched taking the current total to over 7,812. However, Bitcoin remains the most popular and traded cryptocurrency in the industry. In fact, the price movement of Bitcoin strongly impacts the entire cryptocurrency market.

Bitcoin was initially created to be an electronic, peer-to-peer cash system but now it is also viewed as a store-of-value currency, such as gold. The concept of this cryptocurrency was introduced in a white paper in 2008 under a pseudonym. To this day, the identity of the author is unknown; in fact, it is not even known whether this paper was by a single person or a group of people. What makes Bitcoin so valuable is its scarcity. With the maximum supply set at 21 million, there will not be any more Bitcoins - no one can create or duplicate them, not even the original inventor(s). As with all cryptocurrencies, the parameters (for example, the rules of buying and selling, the total amount, how new Bitcoins can be added to the market, etc.) for Bitcoin have been set.

Today, Bitcoin is not only significant because it is merely at the top of all cryptocurrencies. It is crucial because it established an altogether new financial ecosystem. Cryptocurrencies offer multiple benefits, some of which are as follows. They provide anonymity which is paramount for many when it comes to financing. With the world economy shifting to digital currency in the future, the worth of cryptocurrencies will only increase. With cryptocurrencies, settlements are instant, transactions extremely simple, and availability is high due to easy internet access for many.

The launch of Bitcoin created a digital currency ecosystem that has just truly begun and will inevitably transform the world economy in the future.

There are very few technological events in recent history that can rival the introduction of the iPhone by Apple on the 9th of January, 2007. Dubbing it the “reinvention of the phone”, the company claimed that it was a revolutionary product that was five years ahead of any other mobile phone. Starting at $499, this first-generation iPhone offered a 3.5-inch diagonal screen, had a 2-megapixel camera, and featured the then-new multitouch features. This device was marketed as a combination of three products - a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod, and a breakthrough internet communications device. The first iPhone sold 1.39 million units. Today, this device holds a major share in the global smartphone market revenue.

With every new line of iPhone introduced, this smartphone has gained loyal fans and become a highly popular brand. A few of the aspects that make the iPhone so uniquely desirable are as follows. This device was not the first to feature a multi-touch screen but it was the first to make using one highly intuitive and easy. Using an iPhone is a luxury experience since it is made from high-quality products. The design is extremely simple and minimalistic yet elegant, adding to the ease of use. The seamless integration with the Apple ecosystem offers greater security and better software optimisation. And of course, the extremely positive perception and image attached to this phone are almost unparalleled.

At the time of its release, critics did not foresee the iPhone performing well in the market due to its price range. Interestingly, since 2009, this product has been ranked among the top 5 smartphone vendors in the world. In the year 2020 alone, iPhone revenue was over $137.7 billion. In fact, this product is so revolutionary that it has separated the smartphone market into two categories - the iPhone and everything else.

On the 15th of January, 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia, a free and collaborative online encyclopedia. Written and edited by the internet community, it is the largest of its type of websites and is available in over 300 languages besides English. With more than 6.3 million articles and 42 million users, it is ranked among the most visited sites on the internet today.

In 2000, Bomis, a web advertising firm owned by Jimmy Wales, among others, launched Nupedia. This was a free online encyclopedia whose editor in chief was Larry Sanger. By January 2001, fewer than two dozen articles were completed and there were rarely any contributions. Concerned about the growth of Nupedia, Sanger and Wales decided to lend it support with an open-source encyclopedia based on wiki software. Initially, Wikipedia was launched as a feature of Nupedia but following certain objections from the advisory board and reluctance among the editors and reviewers to associate Nupedia with a wiki-based site, Wikipedia was relaunched as an independent website a few days later. It grew at a staggering pace and by the end of the year, Wikipedia was available in around 19 languages.

Throughout the years, the most serious challenges that Wikipedia has faced are plagiarism, inaccuracies, and vandalism. Despite this, impressively, Wikipedia has maintained its role as the go-to site for millions of users to access information online. It continues to be a reliable database of information without a large number of paid moderators and editors. Additionally, the site owners and policymakers have implemented various strategies to counter its problems and ensure that their original vision is truly fulfilled - allowing people to collaborate and build an online portal of easily accessible knowledge. Thus, what keeps Wikipedia relevant and reliable today despite its collaborative nature is the review of all information by broad groups of people, stringent requirements regarding the data, its transparent discussions, and the willingness to swiftly delete inaccurate content.