Global Nerdy

In October 2007, as a way to offset the high cost of rent in San Francisco, roommates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia came up with the idea of putting an air mattress in their living room and turning it into a bed and breakfast. They called their venture AirBedandBreakfast.com, which later got shortened to its current name.

This marks the start of the modern web- and app-driven gig economy.

The first version of Android as we know it was announced on September 23, 2008 on the HTC Dream (also sold as the T-Mobile G1).

Originally started in 2003 and bought by Google in 2005, Android was at first a mobile operating system in the same spirit as Symbian or more importantly, Windows Mobile — Google was worried about competition from Microsoft. The original spec was for a more BlackBerry-like device with a keyboard, and did not account for a touchscreen. This all changed after the iPhone keynote.

Apple’s App Store launched on July 10, 2008 with an initial 500 apps. At the time of writing (March 2020), there should be close to 2 million.

In case you don’t remember, Steve Jobs’ original plan was to not allow third-party developers to create native apps for the iPhone. Developers were directed to create web apps. The backlash prompted Apple to allow developers to create apps, and in March 2008, the first iPhone SDK was released.

The person (or persons) going by the name “Satoshi Nakamoto” started working on the Bitcoin project in 2007.

It would eventually lead to cryptocurrency mania, crypto bros, HODL and other additions to the lexicon, one of the best Last Week Tonight news pieces, and give the Winklevoss twins their second shot at technology stardom after their failed first attempt with a guy named Mark Zuckerberg.

By 2008, the browser wars were long done, and Internet Explorer owned the market. Then, on September 2, Google released Chrome, announcing it with a comic illustrated by Scott “Understanding Comics” McCloud, and starting the Second Browser War.

When Chrome was launched, Internet Explorer had about 70% of the browser market. In less than 5 years, Chrome would overtake IE.

In 2006, developer Doug Cutting of Apache’s Nutch project, took used GFS (Google File System, written up by Google in 2003) and the MapReduce algorithm (written up by Google in 2004) and combined it with the dataset tech from Nutch to create the Hadoop project. He gave his project the name that his son gave to his yellow toy elephant, hence the logo.

By enabling applications and data to be run and stored on clusters of commodity hardware, Hadoop played a key role in creating today’s cloud computing world.

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs said the following at this keynote: “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary new products…an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator…Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device!”

The iPhone has changed everyone’s lives, including mine. Thanks to this device, I landed my (current until recently) job, and right now, I’m working on revising this book.

Before tablets or large smartphone came Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, which came out on November 19, 2007. It was dubbed “the iPod of reading” at the time.

You might not remember this, but the first version didn’t have a touch-sensitive screen. Instead, it had a full-size keyboard below its screen, in a manner similar to phones of that era.

The first Intel-based Macs were announced on January 10, 2006: The 15″ MacBook Pro and iMac Core Duo. Both were based on the Intel Core Duo.

Motorola’s consistent failure to produce chips with the kind of performance that Apple needed on schedule caused Apple to enact their secret “Plan B”: switch to Intel-based chips. At the 2005 WWDC, Steve Jobs revealed that every version of Mac OS X had been secretly developed and compiled for both Motorola and Intel processors — just in case.

We may soon see another such transition: from Intel to Apple’s own A-series chips.

The release of Python 3 — a.k.a. Python 3000 — in December 2008 was the beginning of the Second Beginning! While Python had been eclipsed by Ruby in the 2000s thanks to Rails and the rise of MVC web frameworks and the supermodel developer, it made its comeback in the 2010s as the language of choice for data science and machine learning thanks to a plethora of libraries (NumPy, SciPy, Pandas) and support applications (including Jupyter Notebooks).

I will always have an affection for Python. I cut my web development teeth in 1999 helping build Givex.com’s site in Python and PostgreSQL. I learned Python by reading O’Reilly’s Learning Python while at Burning Man 1999.

Announced on May 29, 2007, the original Surface was a large coffee table-sized multitouch-sensitive computer aimed at commercial customers who wanted to provide next generation kiosk computer entertainment, information, or services to the public.

Do you remember SarcasticGamer’s parody video of the Surface?

In 2006, Twittr (it had no e then, which was the style at the time, thanks to Flickr) was formed. From then, it had a wild ride, including South by Southwest 2007, when its attendees — influential techies — used it as a means of catching up and finding each other at the conference. @replies appeared in May 2007, followers were added that July, hashtag support in September, and trending topics came a year later.

Twitter also got featured on an episode of CSI in November 2007, when it was used to solve a case.

While the best real-life competitors buzzed in half the time and responded correctly to as many as 95% of clues, Watson’s first pass could get only about 15% correct. During 2007, the IBM team was given three to five years and a staff of 15 people to solve the problems. By 2008, the developers had advanced Watson such that it could compete with Jeopardy! champions.

YouTube was purchased by Google in October 2006. In 2007, it exploded in popularity, consuming as much bandwidth as the entire internet did 7 years before. In the summer and fall of 2007, CNN and YouTube produced televised presidential debates, where Democratic and Republican US presidential hopefuls answered YouTube viewer questions.

You probably winced at this infamous YouTube video, which was posted on August 24, 2007: Miss Teen USA 2007 – South Carolina answers a question, which has amassed almost 70 million views to date.