By Teeka Tiwari
It took two years before people realized just how powerful Tomlinson’s invention was. By then, e-mail had gone from virtually nothing to 75% of all ARPANET traffic. Today, 2.5 million e-mails per second are sent on ARPANET’s successor – the Internet. More than four decades after Tomlinson’s invention, e-mail is still the single most-used application on the Internet. It was crucial to the growth of the web. In the early days of the Internet, e-mail was the primary draw for users. There was no YouTube, Google, or iTunes Store. E-mail birthed some of the earliest Internet success stories... Pioneering online-service providers like Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online were all built on providing convenient e-mail access. E-mail has been called a “disruptive technology.” Its use is so widespread that it’s putting the U.S. Postal Service out of business... E-mail has contributed to a 35% drop in first-class mail over the past decade. Early investors in e-mail support technology got rich, turning tiny investments into millions and millions of dollars today. It’s easy for us to dream what it would have been like to make that sort of fortune from an investment. If we had the right information back in the 1980s and 1990s, would we have invested? Would we have committed those dollars? Today, we are on the brink of a budding new technology trend that is on the same scale as e-mail and the Internet – possibly bigger.
We are on the brink of a budding new technology trend that is on the same scale as e-mail and the Internet – possibly bigger.
But this one will revolutionize the way we transact and do business... in the way e-mail revolutionized communication. It’s happening right now with only a few people watching...
A NEW REVOLUTION IN TRADE
On September 7, Barclays facilitated a $100,000 trade of cheese and butter between Irish food company Ornua and the Seychelles Trading Company. This small trade will be just as revolutionary as the first e-mail sent. Here’s why... When two companies in different countries want to buy and sell from each other, they use a bank to guarantee the transaction... It’s called “trade finance.” According to consulting giant McKinsey, about $2 trillion is conducted in trade finance each year. For more than 400 years, trade finance hasn’t
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