9 Unrecognised Technology Innovations

In the midst of tech wonders like Facebook and Flickr, we forget to appreciate the tech innovations without which we can’t even think of using information technology. These innovations have changed email, Web development, database management and more but have gone unnoticed every time. Here are 9 of them listed by CIO.

1. Server-Side Scripting

In 1994, Fred DuFresne was working on an interactive website for the local TV station. There he created a technique called server-side scripting, which was very different from the common programming techniques of the day as it programmed a server to carry out commands.

Before that, programmers had to write complex HTML commands. Today, it is used on everything from Facebook pages to travel blogs. "With Server Side Scripting, the level of training required to create dynamic pages was drastically reduced. No formal training in computer science was required to create a simple PHP page. There is no linking to object libraries, no compiling source code to object code", DuFresne says.Bangalore: In the midst of tech wonders like Facebook and Flickr, we forget to appreciate the tech innovations without which we can’t even think of using information technology. These innovations have changed email, Web development, database management and more but have gone unnoticed every time. Here are 9 of them listed by CIO.

2. IP Cameras

Cameras that use the Internet to stream video have gone largely unnoticed. Axis Communications, the company that invented IP cameras back in 1997, says only 40 percent of the security cameras in use today are connected to the Web.

IP cameras can scale much faster and the quality is superior. Adding 32 cameras is like plugging more computers into a hub. They are also very affordable and provide features such as motion tracking.

3. Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions

The MIME email standard brought a revolution in a new age of rich messaging, turning raw text email into something much more useable—email with attachments, images and HTML encoding. Computer scientist Nathaniel Borenstein, one of the co-founders of MIME worked on this in the mid-1980s and sent the first email attachment in March 1992. Some experts estimate that the MIME standard now processes email about 1 trillion times per day.

4. OAuth

OAuth, the open standard for authorization, bridges the gap between two known entities. The technology uses a token as a credential. If you want to use some website’s data in Facebook, then OAuth might be the authentication method used to connect one data set to another. OAuth is highly specific. For example, you can use an OAuth token to create a secure connection between a Twitter feed and Klout, a service that ranks social media influence.

5. Keystroke Encryption

This technology is heard only at security analyst conferences. In the enterprise, malware infections can cause havoc. One of the worst offenders is a keylogger, which is a piece of software that can record each keystroke. Criminals use them to capture business intelligence data, credit card numbers and bank records.

Keystroke encryption prevents these attacks. Companies such as Strikeforce Technologies invented encryption technology at the hardware layer for companies to increase security detection techniques. Now it's used on more than 4 million computers.

6. Virtual Market Research

Virtual market research which was offered by companies such as Affinnova, takes the traditional technique of market research of people sitting in a focus group and giving their opinions, and makes it virtual. You can test a new product packaging design, a logo and even specific wording in a marketing campaign, present the new ideas in a Web interface and then track preferences. Companies such as Nutrisystem and Ricola have tested new marketing concepts this way.

7. Open Database Connectivity

Many IT experts can't imagine how in-house applications could run without ODBC. Developed in the early 1990s, ODBC can connect to any other Database Management System (DBMS). The drivers can run on any platform and even connect from one platform to another. In that way, they pre-date the open standards used on the Web. The only issue is that many Web apps skip ODBC and connect to databases using PHP.

8. Reputation Management

The reputation of a large company is hard to control, but it's not impossible. Reputation management systems, including Reputation.com for Business, can track customer sentiment for major brands.

For example, in one demo for an American automaker, the system showed reputation level at the dealer level, tracked by monitoring comments on message boards and Twitter. This can help a company track whether customers are happy with a brand, down to a regional and even a local level.

9. Local News Aggregation

Local News Aggregation operates like in the sense that there are hundreds of local hubs where people can post news stories and human interest content. Lately, this aggregation concept has lost some momentum—but the idea might make its way into the enterprise in the form of more localized content for Intranets, including employee status updates. Some of the tools which do the aggregation are Craigslist and Patch.