Essay, Paragraph or Speech on “Use of Information Technology in Our Daily Life” Complete Essay, Speech for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Use of Information Technology in Our Daily Life

Information Technology has come a long way in a short period of time. Along the way it has pushed Asia into the limelight time and again. Information Technology or IT used to be synonymous with computers. Now-a-days with devices big and small incorporating some sort of computer in them, IT has come to mean a lot more. In South East Asian Region, the impact of IT Development is more pronounced in countries like Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. IT has helped to shape these countries economically, socially and culturally. As for IT itself, one major change in the perception it has undergone, from being an infrastructure in itself to being a tool to aid infrastructure development.

Smart Homes—Imagine a house that wakes you up in time, gives you a list of appointments for the day and gives you the directions to get there.

Houses automated to control the environment and tough tasks are called SMART Homes. Their use is becoming popular.

The Smart Homes store the user’s profile and act depending on that in any given situation. For example if the user prefers to drive and take the public transport, the directions given to both of them would be totally different and would be in sync with their preferences stored in their individual profiles. Their profile would be automatically updated depending on their decision in various circumstances.

Currently smart homes do detect movement in a house where the owners are known to be out. The house then alerts the owner via cell phone. The owner could over the internet, check the images from the security cameras installed in the room where the movement was detected and take appropriate action.

Cool Town—Recently Hewelett Packard launched its first cool town outside the Americans and Europe in Singapore. Cooltown is an experimental centre depicting HPs vision of what the future should look like. The concept is the so-called pervasive computing, where users can link all manner of computing devices with people and places via internet. People are mobile, appliances are fixed and every thing has a web page. All appliances would be capable of retrieving information for use of the person. Cooltown showcases Hps vision of the future using simulation.

Cab Portals—In Singapore cabs are owned by a number of cab companies. Drivers rent these cabs, city cab. One such company has now introduced a portal for drivers. This provides drivers with information like corporate policies and what to do after an incident. Drivers routinely use the portal view statements on their monthly rental bills. For them it is less time and money spent going to the Cab company for these administrative tasks and those cab drivers who are not able to drive on a particular day can look up for approved relief drivers on the portal.

Hotels—Restaurants in some large hotels carry tablets, which enable patron’s order to retransmit directly to the kitchen. The table display multilingual descriptions and photos of menu items. In the hotel itself, staffs carry PDAs round to access information. They add information, like the preference of a particular patron, into a database instantly.

Security personnel and PDAs capable of displaying images from particular cameras. This enables them to move around freely, patrolling instead of having to sit behind a desk monitoring cameras.

E-sourcing—Companies reluctant or unable to buy computer infrastructure, applications and printers. Although this concept has been there for sometime in the form of leased lines and data storage facilitating the extension of the concept to include all forms of IT infrastructure is spawning a large industry. The consumers are charged on a usage basis. This suits a lot of SMES (Small and medium sized enterprises) since they do not have to bear the cost of purchase and are not penalised for wasted infrastructure. IT set up thus is spread over a long period of time.

CRM AND SCM—Customer Relation Management and Supply Chain Management are two buzzwords that have emerged as solution to save a turn around the slide in the economic growth. It is about the return of the so called good old business values ?

Operating System—Microsoft window based operating systems are currently the most popular in the market but the competition is stiff.

In the PC market, UNIX based operating systems are garnering a lot of support or large servers. Sun Solstice is popular choice.

To top it all Linux, a free operating system resembling UNIX has caught the imagination of lot of people despite the fact that it misses the interface of the windows of Mac. One reason is that Linux is reputed to be very stable operating system, with almost no crashes and can in most cases be maintained remotely. One other reason is that there are fewer viruses that run on Linux than on windows based system.

Software—The software development scene is no longer seen as anone stop solution and a quickly way to large profits. It is now considered to be an expenditure that should be watched carefully the scales have lifted, people have started realising the true role of IT in business Without information technology solution, business would be left behind. But IT solutions will not work a miracle and make profit jumps without the acumen from the businessmen.

In this part of the globe, the keen competition between the software giants Microsoft and Sun, influence the whole environment. Now software development have also shifted to biotechnology in a large way. The large number crunching capabilities required to bring about success in such projects have paved the way for development of a new areas in cooperation with computing called grid computing.

Digital Camera—Before digital cameras, cameras used to be divided into two types Video cameras capable of taking motion picture and still photo camera producing printed images.

Digital cameras have still same distinction. Digital Video Cameras can produce stills and digital still cameras can record motion. Digital still cameras range from point and shoot to SLRs. Digital cameras are so small they can be found on many devices like watches or PDAs. The photos snapped using Digital cameras could then be unloaded directly to a personal computer or the Internet.

Mobile Phones—Hand phones have become smaller but with a lot more features. Currently hand phones can be used to make purchase at automatic vending machines. In places like Korea where 60% people own a hand phone, they are used in a variety of ways from being used as trains pass to pay restaurant bills.

SMS (Short Messaging System) is one of the offshoot of the mobile phone technology that is very widely used. The currant offshoot Multimedia Messaging System (MMS) will probably be used just as much if not more MMS though already quite established in Japan and Korea has not yet really made an impact here. This is mainly due to network incompatibilities and high costs (around 3 times what we would cost to send on SMS). But using this they can send pictures, audio clips or even small video clips to their friends relative or business associates.

Currently with less than 5% of revenue for service providers coming from WAP (almost dead) and GPRS (going the WAP way) ? Service providers in Singapore are wandering whether they should try and meet Singapore government deadline of 2004 to provide Third Generation (3G) services.

To the end user, 3G services would mean faster data transfers rates and shorter connectivity time. This is a packet based service, which means all data to and from the hand phone would be divided into packets and sent over share hands width (so many users packets would use the same band width) minimizing wastage. At present, a dedicated connection is used when two people talk, so a lot of bandwidth is wasted. The phone would always remain connected (As long as it is turned on) that is, a person would know which of his contracts is in range and which of them is out of range at any given time. It would also mean that a person could be located as long as his 3G hand phone is turned on and he is in range. This translates to a low level of privacy but high level of accessibility.

The 3G services should mean cheaper rates since the charge is only for the data transferred to a network without wires. They afford some portability and are fast becoming popular. The greater portability and wider area roaming capabilities make the next generation hand phones likely to emerge as the more popular choice.

IP Telephony (Internet Protocol Telephony)—Initially telephone calls over the internet (known as IP Telephony because of the use of the Internet Protocol of the TCP/IP suit of protocols used for communication over the Internet) was restricted by technology and legislation. Now with lesser restrictions in legislation and improved technology cheap long distance telephonic conversations over the Internet are becoming popular. Telephone service provide special dial-in numbers to make these calls. There is currently still a bit of quality degradation. Since this technology is more efficient way of existing bandwidth and with the demand in bandwidth bound to rise, IP telephony will be more, and more in the future. Video Conferencing through video-conferencing began with the promise of bringing together people in different continents, they are seldom seen being more used than normal telephone conversation. For example, people in the software industry would rather do not have meetings and see each other computers than each other face. This does net mean that video-conferencing is a thing of the past. If the trend in other Asian Countries is any indicator with the advent of 3G technologies and mobile phones that can capture pictures Video-conferencing can turn out to be a huge new market with large number of people using it to communicate with their family and friends.

Technology keeps opening up new markets and mostly it is just the limit of their imagination that stops people from finding a new touch. This is still the truth in IT industry.