A Decade of Technology – 2014

Continuing our 10 year anniversary celebrations, this month we take a look at 2014.

The biggest story for 2014, was the stepping down of Bill Gates as CEO of Microsoft.  His successor, Sadya Nadella took over on the 4^th of February.  On April 25, the Nokia/Microsoft deal was completed, making Nokia now Microsoft Mobile in a deal totalling $7.17 billion.  On September 15, Microsoft announced that it purchased Mojang, the makers of Minecraft, for $2.5 billion.

Some other noteworthy events, products and services:

• Information on the Shellshock vulnerability was first released to developers in September.
• The largest bug bounty was awarded, when Unix specialist Stéphane Chazelas discovered the Shell Shock vulnerability in the widely used Bash shell.
• The FIDO Alliance released their first official specification on December 9.
• Apple introduced the Swift programming language on June 2.
• Android TV was released on June 25.
• Google announced on January 13, that it had reached an agreement to acquire Nest for $3.2 billion in cash. Nest was the manufacturer of the Nest thermostats and smoke alarms.
• On January 26, Google announced it had agreed to acquire DeepMind Technologies for $650 million.
• Google announced on June 20, that it would acquire Dropcam, the video home monitoring company for $555 million.
• On September 30, Google announced it would stop the Orkut social networking site.

Fun Facts:

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge went viral in July.

On October 1, a Japanese man was sentenced to two years in prison for manufacturing 3D printed guns. He becomes the first person to serve time for a 3D printed gun.