The Cloud Comes of Age

Three years before he passed away, Apple’s Steve Jobs made a prescient forecast, predicting that over the next few years, people would shift away from using their personal computers as the “digital hub” of their lives, and embrace the cloud.

Nowadays, we read newspapers on the go with our smartphones, turn to apps for restaurant recommendations, use Evernote to take the minutes of our meetings, upload work-in-progress to Dropbox to revisit later in a café, and constantly check in on Facebook to “like” posts and socialize.

According to a Google survey, one in three Taiwanese owned a smartphone as of the first quarter of 2012, a penetration rate higher than that of Japan. Google also found that Tai­wan­ese smartphone users have an average of 30 apps installed on their phones, more than their counterparts in the US (29) and the UK (25).

Smartphone in hand, we’re like Adam in Michelangelo’s iconic Genesis, almost touching God with our extended index fingers. This joining of person and machine is redefining humanity, making us not just Homo sapiens, but also Homo mobilis. Having rejected the notion that our data needs to be linked to a fixed location, we’ve become connected wherever we go.

But the “cloud life” isn’t limited to individuals. There’s a technological revolution underway in the form of cloud computing, which offers a means of processing huge volumes of data very rapidly to provide the general public with intelligent services.

The government’s clouds are coalescing at an opportune moment. The medical cloud offers a mechanism for sharing electronic medical records, while the food cloud enables the tracking of food products through the production chain. Cloud technology also offers new business opportunities.

What are you waiting for? Launch yourself into the cloud!