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A Decade of Technology – 2013

Continuing our 10 year anniversary celebrations, this month we take a look at 2013.

The year when Hotmail was not so hot anymore.  In February, Microsoft announced that it would be moving away from Hotmail brand and begin moving over 300 million users to the new Outlook.com e-mail service. It was also the year in which Edward Snowden began leaking classified NSA information.

Some other highlights include:

  • Yahoo! announced it would purchase Tumblr for $1.1billion on May 20th.
  • Facebook introduced Graph Search in January as it offered some users early beta access to the service. Graph Search was later released to everyone and allowed people to use natural language in the Facebook search.
  • The popularity of drones grew rapidly.
  • In May, Facebook released the first version of the React JavaScript library and React Native framework, giving developers new options when developing web applications.
  • At 23:30:26 UTC on January 25, the largest known prime number containing 17,425,170 digits was discovered by GIMPS.
  • One of the biggest cyberattacks in Internet history happened on March 29, as a massive DDoS attack targeted The Spamhaus Project.
  • On June 24, Apple announced it had no intentions of continuing to develop Safari for the PC or Microsoft Windows.
  • Google announced it would purchase Waze, a popular mobile social map application for $1.1 billion on June 11.
  • Google introduced the Chromecast on July 24.
  • IDG announced on July 10, that the August edition of PC World magazine would be the last print edition of the magazine.
  • The Furusawa group at the University of Tokyo succeeded in demonstrating complete quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits on September 11. This achievement helped bring quantum computers even closer to reality.
  • The trojan virus Cryptolocker was discovered in September.
  • Android version 4.4 (KitKat) was released on October 31.
  • The FBI shut down the Silk Road on June 23. The Silk Road 2.0 came online on November 6.
  • Apple introduced the iPhone 5c and 5s with Touch ID and Secure Enclave on September 10.
  • Apple introduced iOS7 on September 18.
  • Microsoft discontinued Messenger in favour of Skype.

Cryptocurrencies launched in this year:

  • Ripple
  • Primecoin
  • Gridcoin
  • NXT