Looking back: the tech winners of 2021

Author: unno, posted January 1, 2022 to 15:12 – Reply

The year 2021 has come to an end and we can now list the tech winners of the past year.

It was another tiring year. Our country is still in the grip of the coronavirus and the measures taken by the government to curb it. Yet it was also a year in which there were many technological highlights.

Tech winners 2021

Technology, and its progress, never stands still. Not even a global pandemic can stop this. Investments in the past year have also been high, which is why many new technologies and applications have been developed and entered the market.

Like it or not, Mark Zuckerberg has done it smart with his Facebook. The platform is, of course, huge in terms of members. But at some point this will diminish. The company therefore focuses on the future and does not bet everything on Facebook. For example, it buys up other companies (WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.), but it also develops new technologies itself. In addition, it is smart to change the company’s name to ‘Meta’. Zuckerberg didn’t invent the term, but the name refers to the metaverse. You can see it as the logical step forward of the (mobile) internet, a world in which our online experiences can easily be transferred between multiple devices. And eventually it could be something we interact with through AR and VR glasses.

NFT

2021 will go into the year as the year of the NFTs. Non-Fungible Tokens are an attempt to create an immutable digital asset in an environment where such a thing was troublesome in the past. For example, you can call yourself the owner of an online picture of a monkey that has a lot of value. The question is what that value is based on.

The most notable sale this year concerns art. On March 11, digital artist Beeple Everydays: The First 5,000 Days sold at Christie’s auction house for $69,346,250. Those hefty sums are, in some people’s minds, justified because they believe that NFTs will become the new cryptocurrency, with everyone trying to get on board before it gets big. It is likely that this will only increase in the new year.

Windows 11

It’s been a long wait, but Windows 11 came out this year. It’s turned out to be a pretty solid step forward. Windows 11 rose from the ashes of Windows 10X. This was an OS variant originally intended to focus on dual-screen devices, but was eventually canceled in May. Despite that inauspicious start, it’s still a good update: the security is better, and the facelift brings some Mac-esque pleasantries to the drab world of Windows.