It is hard to imagine life without the internet. Imagine having no email, no browsers, no search engines such as Google, no web companies like Amazon, eBay and Yahoo!, no online shopping, communications or information. We tend to take it all for granted.
It may come as a surprise therefore that the internet as a mass phenomenon is still in its infancy.
In fact this week marks its 10th birthday - which is also the anniversary of the sensational debut on the New York stock exchange of Netscape, which triggered the dotcom boom.
The web browser firm opened up access to the web for the masses and changed the world forever. Now there are estimated to be more than a billion web users, with Hong Kong having one of the world's highest rates of internet usage.
It is hard to grasp the change the internet has wrought in our lives in such a short time, and the pace of innovation shows no signs of slowing. We are seeing the explosive expansion of personal journals (blogs), free newspapers, web cameras, downloaded films and music, internet telephony and convergence of the internet and mobile phones.
Thanks to faster broadband technology, we now live in a world radically different even from that predicted by early internet visionaries.
