Academy of Digital Doctors Journal Edition 1 | Page 7

ACADEMY OF DIGITAL DOCTORS JOURNAL

ACADEMY OF DIGITAL DOCTORS

Sound too exciting? Well, the
real excitement is yet to come.
Until this point, the web could
be accessed only from computers or laptops alone. Additionally, this was largely
restricted to developed countries. There were around 500
million people in the world
using the internet in 2001.
The stage was set for the
pigeon of our times — smartphones!
People started realizing how
powerful smartphones could
be and technology companies
started realising the immense
market, waiting to be tapped.
Moore’s law kicked in and the
prices of smartphones started
going down and hence, more
people could now afford these
devices. Smartphone sales
increased from 122 million in
2007 to 1.4 billion in 2015.
What did that mean? The
number of internet users

started growing at a rate never
before imagined. People started going online and shopping
for groceries, ordering furniture, booking movie tickets
etc. The e-commerce industry
itself is now worth more than
$1.67 trillion worldwide. Our
social lives were going digital
too. The social networking
website Facebook, invented in
2004, is now 1.23 billion users
huge - that’s 1/6th of the
world’s population!
India has not been far behind
either. Companies like Flipkart, Myntra etc., are spearheading online retail. BookMyShow is a popular website
for booking movie tickets.
People no longer stand in
queues for booking their flight
and train tickets. WhatsApp is
now the popular channel of
communication. In fact,
people are now searching for
doctors online too. Practo, a

Statista - http://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone-sales-to-end-users-since-2007/
Statista-http://www.statista.com/statistics/379046/worlwide-retail-e-commerce-sales/

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healthcare technology firm
from Bangalore, has more
than 2 million people searching for doctors online, every
month.
Our lifestyle and behavior is
now so tightly coupled with
technology, that most of our
interactions involve some
form of it. It has become an
integral part of our species.
The beautiful part of this
story is that we are still just
scratching the surface. There
is so much potential that the
internet and technology holds
— artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, 3D printing,
autonomous vehicles etc.,
there are enough innovations
waiting to wow us and
improve our lives even further.
We are truly witnessing an
evolution of the human race
at an unprecedented pace.