"Ten years ago we didn’t have flat-panel televisions. We really didn’t have mobile Web devices or smartphones. We didn’t have e-book readers. Very, very few consumers had notebook computers. There was no Wi-Fi. Just not even a similar experience to what the world was like ten years ago.”

Bruce Bachenheimer is with the MIT Enterprise Forum in New York. He is also the director of entrepreneurship at Pace University. We spoke with him about what he believes are the most important developments of the twenty-first century.

BRUCE BACHENHEIMER: “If I were looking at technology that has really impacted us over the last ten years, I would go in order: mobile computing, the proliferation of digital media content, broadband -- mobile and at-home access -- social media platforms and user-generated content, cloud computing, digital photography and GPS. And what I mean by GPS is GPS for the masses, although global positioning systems have been around for quite a while.”

Mr. Bachenheimer says all of these things have worked together to revolutionize technology. And, he says the technology is constantly changing, faster than at any other time in history.

BRUCE BACHENHEIMER: “The life cycle of these products are so much shorter. If you look at having a telephone, a home phone back in the nineteen fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties, it was exactly the same phone. Nothing changed for three or four decades.