Square
With so many people being self-employed and taking on multiple side hustles, we needed a better way to pay for goods and services. Enter Square – a small device you can plug into a smartphone or tablet to turn it into a credit card reader. Launched in 2010 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Square gives vendors of all sizes the ability to accept credit card payments – even without an actual cash register. This technology made it much more accessible to start your own business and actually earn money from it.
Kickstarter
Crowdfunding itself isn’t new – people have long turned to their communities for financial assistance when they’ve needed it. But before Kickstarter, crowdfunding was a lot more difficult. Though technically launched in 2009, by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler, Kickstarter really started taking off in the 2010s and has since funded 172,890 projects through $4.6 billion. Now, there was a much easier way of fundraising – whether it was for a musician looking to put out a new album, emergency funds for disaster relief, or a family who needed financial assistance to pay for medical care. There have been other crowdfunding sites since, but Kickstarter well, kickstarted it all.
Smart speakers
Though different forms of voice recognition software and devices have been around since the 1970s, it wasn’t until the 2010s that the technology truly entered our homes. Well, first it came to our phones, when Apple introduced Siri, an electronic assistant, as a regular feature on iPhones in 2010. At that point, people got used to pressing a button on their phone and asking a faceless woman all sorts of questions. Though Siri felt (and was) futuristic, the trend really took off with the invention of smart speakers, which had the ability to answer the same kinds of questions as Siri but also control certain elements of your home, like lighting and heating. The most common smart speaker – Amazon’s Alexa – launched in 2014, and was soon followed by Google Assistant. Today, 66.4 million people — or 26.2 percent of the U.S. adult population—have a smart speaker in their home. Of course, with this technology came a new set of ethical issues regarding companies being able to listen in to your home and what happens to all the data this device collects. Find out more items that could be spying on you in your home.
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