October 2001 > The Wayback Machine, launched by the Internet Archive
In October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages, the Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for users to be able to surf the archive of the web by date. In 2004, there were 300 terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month. There were 65 billion webpages (from 50 million websites) in 2006, 85 billion webpages in 2008, and 150 billion webpages in March 2010. Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that has built an "internet library" to offer permanent access to historical collections in digital format for researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. Since then, an archive of the web has been stored every two months or so.
2001 > Creative Commons, to adapt copyright to the web
Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence "Larry" Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, California. As explained on its website in 2009: "Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof." There were one million Creative Commons licensed works in 2003, 4.7 million in 2004, 20 million in 2005, 50 million in 2006, 90 million in 2007, 130 million in 2008, and 350 million in April 2010.
2001 > Nokia 9210 was the first smartphone
The first smartphone was Nokia 9210, launched as early as 2001. It was followed by Nokia Series 60, Sony Ericsson P800, and the smartphones of Motorola and Siemens. Smartphones quickly became popular while sales dropped for PDAs. In February 2005, Sony stopped selling PDAs. Smartphones represented 3,7% of all cellphones sold in 2004, and 9% in 2006, with 90 million smartphones sold for one billion cellphones.
January 2003 > The Public Library of Science, a publisher of free high- quality online journals
In early 2003, the Public Library of Science (PloS) — founded in October 2000 - created a non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture to provide scientists and physicians with free high-quality, high-profile online journals in which to publish their work. The journals were PloS Biology (launched in 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational Biology (2005), PLoS Pathogens (2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006), and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (2007), the first scientific journal on this topic. All PloS articles are freely available online, on the websites of PLoS and of PubMed Central, the public archive run by the National Library of Medicine (United States). The articles can be freely redistributed and reused under a Creative Commons license, including for translations, as long as the author(s) and source are cited.
February 2003 > A quote by Nicolas Pewny, consultant in electronic publishing
A bookseller, publisher — he founded the small publishing house Le Choucas in 1992 -, and consultant in electronic publishing, Nicolas Pewny wrote in February 2003: "I see the future digital book as a 'total work' putting together text, sound, images, video, and interactivity: a new way to design, and write, and read, perhaps on a single book, constantly renewed, which would contain everything we have read, a single and multiple companion. Utopian? Improbable? Maybe not that much!" (NEF Interview)