The financial crisis hits the super-rich as well, says Forbes 400, the ranking list of the 400 wealthiest Americans which was updated this autumn. Within one year they lost a combined $300 billion, about 205 billion Euros. Number 1 on the list is Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, with an estimated net worth of $50 billion. He had to swallow a loss of about $7 billion. Hit even harder was the investor Warren Buffet who ranks second. According to the American business publication Forbes he lost $10 billion.
But in these difficult times when announcing deficits are on the daily agenda, it is much more interesting to take a look at the winner: Marc Zuckerberg. Within one year the founder of Facebook climbed up from place 321 to place 158 of the Forbes 400. Originally the 25-year-old entrepreneur launched Facebook only for students of Harvard University. After some expansion steps, however, the social network today has more than 300 million members. Zuckerberg explained to Stern, a German news magazine, that it is his goal to gain one billion Facebook users. In Germany, also according to Stern, three-fourths of the 40 million internet users are already members of an online network, and this number is rising. But not only private networks are booming, also in business online networking is growing in popularity such as the business internet portal XING. But futurologists forecast much more: The personal presence on location will not be necessary any more. Research clusters can join their forces in networks. They can study in the same fields of research without being in the same laboratory. Nike picked up this trend: At the Nike+ 10km Human Race the runners don’t have to be present at any of the 30 race venues. Entrants only need a sensor and the corresponding software and with this, they can do their races by themselves at home. Afterwards they synchronize their data via the network. The Nike+ Community has grown to 1.2 million members from 142 countries at the Human Race in 2008.
But the topic of networks does also play an important role for the industry, e.g., to profit from results of the latest research or to educate employees. To push such networks between industry and academia, first and foremost platform- independent solutions and standardized interfaces are essential. The importance of standards is something the machine vision industry recognized early on, and consequently introduced the GigE Vision Standard. At the last Vision show, the three big associations, Automated Imaging Association (AIA), European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) and Japan Industrial Imaging Association (JIIA), entered into an agreement of cooperation for the common development and promotion of new standards in machine vision.
If you also know about the importance of networking: Become a member of our INSPECT network to share existing knowledge over thousands of kilometers. Our goal is one billion users as well – help us in attaining this!
Stephanie Nickl
Editor INSPECT
