Celebrating National Effective Communication Month
June brings many things like sunshine, longer days, summer breaks, shave ice and vacations. June also brings us National Effective Communication month, which is worth celebrating for those of us who don’t get summer breaks. As professionals, one of our biggest obstacles is communicating with our team effectively. This year, the month of June will be dedicated to bringing awareness about effective communication and how it is the biggest, but most important hurdle in business today.
Communication can come in all different forms. Thanks to pioneers in the field such as Alexander Graham Bell, Martin Cooper, Vic Hayes and Mark Zuckerburg, we are able to communicate in newer, more innovative ways than ever. Various types of communication have been developed since the humble telegraph, helping people be more effective along the way.
Below is a chronological list of communication as we know it today.
1836 — Morse Code — Samuel F.B. Morse, Joseph Henry and Alfred Vail
1861 — Pony Express — America starts using transportation for mail delivery
1876 — Electronic Telephone — Alexander Graham Bell
1946 — ENIAC — First electronic general-purpose computer
1971 — Personal Computer (PC) -
1973 — First call on a cell phone — Martin Cooper
Who really invented email?
Roy Tomlinson vs. Shiva Ayyadurai — which one invented email? The struggle to find the ‘truth’ is real. The fact that Ayyadurai had written the code that produced the first BCC, CC, to and from fields in 1978 is strong, but Tomlinson’s ARPANET sent the first message between two computers (email as we know it today) in 1971. If it were up to us, we’d choose to be Sweden in this controversy.
1976 — Personal computer market is born
Early 1980’s — First flip form laptop was born — Australia
1982 — Emoticon : — ) — Scott E. Fahlman, to express jokes in written form
1989 — First prototype of the world wide web — Tim Berners, Lee and Robert Cailliau
1991 — WiFi invented — Vic Hayes
1992 — First SMS was sent — Neil Papworth
1997 — AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) — America Online released this software after buying ICQ
2000 — First marketed ‘smartphone’ — Ericsson
2003 — Commercial video chat — Skype
2003 — Blackberry — The first mass adoption of smartphones in the United States
2003 — MySpace — First social networking service founded by Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson
2004 — Facebook — Mark Zuckerburg disrupts the world with social networking
2007 — iPhone — Apple releases first iPhone
2014 — Cloud computing — the idea being able to store information without actually taking up space sees increased growth
2015 — Emojis — Emojis as we use them today have become an extension of the English language as a better way to express emotion. If you haven’t adopted them yet, The Next Web thinks you should
2015 — Businessfriend — an all-in-one effective business communication platform is launched
Throughout history, effective communication has naturally evolved, making it easier to communicate with people across the world. With apps and different platforms, exactly how effective is communication in today’s world?
