![\"Nintendo](\"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Nintendo-Wii.png\")
<\/a>Nintendo Wii<\/p><\/div>\n
Nintendo Wii – taking gaming to the everyman<\/h3>\n
The Wii is a 7th generation gaming console released by Nintendo. When the console launched in 2006, it gained a significant head start on competitors – Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s Playstation 3.<\/p>\n
While Nintendo’s console could not match the processing power of its competition – and had to face the sniggers and “wee” jokes made at its expense – Nintendo’s console had one very appealing draw: its price.<\/p>\n
Retailing for US$50 – US$150 cheaper than the next cheapest console (Xbox 360 at US$300 – US$400) and mass-appeal family-friendly games, the Wii went after a different market to Microsoft and Sony – casual gamers.<\/p>\n
The Wii’s positioning worked perfectly for the company, with people of all ages – from children to the elderly – playing games on the system.<\/p>\n
By March 2013, Nintedo had shipped just under 100 million Wii consoles across the world – surpassing both the Xbox 360 (77.2 million units) and the PlayStation 3 (75 million units) despite its lack of technical horsepower.<\/p>\n
While Nintendo’s Wii may not have been the best or most powerful console available – it certainly became the most accessible, and moved gaming away from the field of the “hardcore” and into the living rooms of the everyman.<\/p>\n
<\/a>iPad Mini<\/p><\/div>\n
iPad – birthing a new market<\/h3>\n
In 2010, CNN reported that “as Apple’s iPad is released in nine overseas markets…industry watchers wonder if they are seeing the birth of a new market or a geek niche product”.<\/p>\n
While the launch of the iPad created the question – a retrospective look at the sales which followed certainly answered it.<\/p>\n
Since the launch of the iPad in 2010, Apple has shifted over 120 million iPads world wide – 19.5 million sold in the last quarter, alone.<\/p>\n
Beyond Apple’s sales, the tablet market has exploded, opening the way for manufacturers like Acer, Samsung, HP, Lenovo – pretty much anyone in the industry – to launch and sell their own tablets.<\/p>\n
According to research firm IDC, tablet sales globally are expected to grow 58.7% in 2013 to 229.3 million units.<\/p>\n
Further, the IDC expects tablet shipments to outpace the entire PC market by 2015.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t the first tablet ever launched, but the iPad is definitely the tablet that made having a tablet a thing – and everyone took notice.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Twitter<\/p><\/div>\n
Twitter – it caught on<\/h3>\n
It’s difficult to imagine a day going by when someone isn’t sub-tweeting or hash-tagging or saying something idiotically racist on Twitter – but there was a time when the world just didn’t quite get it.<\/p>\n
Back in more innocent times (2006), a company called Odea released a service called Twttr, an online short message service (SMS) that delivered quick messages of networked people straight to your phone.<\/p>\n
While functionally different at launch, Twttr would eventually evolve into the Twitter as we know it today – an online service that allows you to follow short messages posted by other people you choose to include in your network.<\/p>\n
What did people think of the service when it launched?<\/p>\n
“This is never going to catch on.”<\/p>\n
Seven years later, however, over 270 million users across the globe would beg to differ.<\/p>\n
While there’s no official number at which to peg Twitter’s true value, in 2011 the company was priced at over US$8.4 billion – a number which would be far greater now.<\/p>\n
Available on pretty much every platform out there, catering to the stalkers, narcissists, news-hounds, trolls and the all-sorts of the world, Twitter has very much “caught on” – and with hundreds of thousands of sign-ups happening every month, it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down any time soon.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Tesla Model S<\/p><\/div>\n
Tesla Motors – making electric cars sexy<\/h3>\n
Whether you’re aesthetically inclined or not, it’s undeniable that Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors has definitely made electric cars sexy – but it’s faced a tough time making them financially viable. Until now, that is.<\/p>\n
For the first time the company’s 10 year history, in Q1 2013 Tesla recorded a profit of $11 million – with a 83% increase in sales and growing demand for its vehicles.<\/p>\n
It has been a tough road to profitability for Tesla, as the company builds its own cars and has to expand its costly “Supercharger network” of “filling stations” across its markets (at US$500,000 a pop) to make sure they can actually run.<\/p>\n
The company’s flagship car, the Tesla Roadster (which has since stopped production), was sold at US$109,000 as a base price, and sold 2,400 units of the vehicle by September 2012.<\/p>\n
In contrast to the relatively meagre sales numbers of the Roadster, the company’s follow-up – the Tesla Model S sedan, which sells for a minimum of US$95,400 – has become the star child to push the brand.<\/p>\n
It may be too soon to call Tesla’s Model S a roaring success that will change the motor industry, but with 15,000 “pre-orders” currently in, and 30,000 expected in 2014, Tesla is certainly changing the face of electric cars in the USA – and showing that it can be done profitably.<\/p>\n
Tesla has a new version of the Roadster as well as the Model X in line for 2014, and other vehicles also planned.<\/p>\n
<\/a>MP3 audio<\/p><\/div>\n
MP3 encoding – down-sizing your tunes<\/h3>\n
It would be easy to add Apple’s iPod to this list of technologies, as the music player changed the way we consume music – and eventually other media – every day.<\/p>\n
However, giving credit where credit is due, it’s arguably MP3 encoding which fundamentally changed the way music is shared and stored, even though it took a long time to get there.<\/p>\n
MP3s use data compression based on perceptual limitations of human hearing – that is, our ears can’t hear the full spectrum of audio waves present in recorded music, so there is a lot of extra, inaudible baggage being dragged along with digital sound.<\/p>\n
The concept of cancelling out those sounds – called auditory masking – was reported as early as 1894, but it took decades of understanding and evolution in compression technology before the MP3 format got standardized in 1995.<\/p>\n
While storage today isn’t much of an issue, when disk space was more limited, MP3s were a god-send, shrinking audio files to a fraction of the size.<\/p>\n
This means that consumers finally had the means to access thousands of songs on platforms like iTunes, and could store them on their portable media players like iPods.<\/p>\n
Smaller file sizes also opened up the way for easier music sharing online – which paved the way for Napster and other file-sharing sites to blossom.<\/p>\n
More list articles<\/h3>\n
Technology\u2019s dead and dying<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Biggest disruptors in tech<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n The most unnecessarily expensive gadgets<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n