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But there are pitfalls. "The biggest caveat is the issue of curation. It's great you opening the gates up to everybody - but all of a sudden you're going to get a lot more stuff."

"We later learned that it was this revolutionary business model. I think the reason it's so pure like that is the reason it's worked so well as a crowdsourcing company."

"I think that the way companies are seeing crowdsourcing is a lot different from the way we see it. They are looking at it as this new business model, as a way to outsource your work to an anonymous crowd of people. We're more about giving people something productive to do with their passions."

it's not so much the software that makes the company, it's the community

"It's an affordable way to be ahead. You're able to see what your customers are thinking and what they're dreaming of, and you're able to measure that against what you're doing."

His concern is that by "mining" the crowd in this way, the wealth that results from the work done remains concentrated in the hands of the people who put out the call - ultimately endangering jobs and the economy. Mr Lanier also believes that crowdsourcing threatens creativity.

One European clothing company, popular with inner city youth in the United States, admits privately that its social media team is baffled by its customers' ever changing slang, and even the online Urban Dictionary provides little help.

Social media is quickly becoming a customer relationship management system, as companies have "for the first time access to people's minds in real-time," says Jorn Lyseggen. The tools on offer provide companies with dashboards that show trends, hot topics, the reach of brands, customer mood and how competitors are doing.

Social media may be all the buzz, but in reality "only a few firms get it [and use it], it's of peripheral interest for most", says Tom Austin at technology consultancy Gartner. Few realise that using social media has become much more than customer service and reputation management.

many social media tools are poorly integrated into the corporate workflow

But there are dangers. Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway warns that the obsession with social networking can make management lose focus.

To survive the world of social media, companies have to throw away their old marketing playbook.

"don't push... and don't pretend you are hip"

"Once companies have worked out that they should do something with social media, they usually don't know how to do it,"

"If you want to influence the people who influence your customers, that's a very powerful game, but it's also very dangerous if you get it wrong."

it's not about how many friends or followers somebody has, but whether they make an impact.

When Virgin America recently launched new routes from California to Toronto, it used Klout to identify a small group of social media "influencers" and gave them free flights. This generated thousands of tweets, triggered press coverage and delivered more immediate impact than traditional advertising.

"Consumers are spending their attention on social media," he says, but firms don't know how to repay them properly. "There's no manual for that yet."

Social media are dynamic, and today's Twitter may be tomorrow's forgotten website. "Don't assume that what works today will work tomorrow," says Tom Austin at Gartner. "Your model has to be continually adapted."

FREE CHANGES EVERYTHING

Government spending is not a major force in a classical economic theory.

Too much government spending takes away valuable economic resources needed by individuals and businesses. To classical economists, government spending and involvement can retard a nation’s economic growth by increasing the public sector and decreasing the private sector. Keynesian economics relies on government spending to jumpstart a nation’s economic growth during sluggish economic downturns.

Classical economics focuses on creating long-term solutions for economic problems.

Keynesian economics often focuses on immediate results in economic theories. Policies focus on the short-term needs and how economic policies can make instant corrections to a nation’s economy. This is why government spending is such a key cog of Keynesian economics.

was the preparation of firing and bombing tables for the Army which at that time, of course, included the Army Air Corps.

The analyzer installed at Aberdeen had ten integrating units and provisions for two input and two output tables as well. But, despite its value as an important mechanical aid to computation, it had several severe limitations.

It was, of course, known that the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania had a Bush differential analyzer of somewhat larger capacity than the one installed at Aberdeen. As a matter of fact, the one at the Moore School had fourteen integrating units. Therefore one of the first steps taken was the award to the University of Pennsylvania of a contract by the Ordnance Department for the utilization of this device.

he original agreement between the United States of America and the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, dated June 5, 1943, called for six months of "research and development of an electronic numerical integrator and computer and delivery of a report thereon." This initial contract committed $61,700 in U.S. Army Ordnance funds

The ENIAC was placed in operation at the Moore School, component by component, beginning with the cycling unit and an accumulator in June 1944. This was followed in rapid succession by the initiating unit and function tables in September 1945 and the divider and square-root unit in October 1945. Final assembly took place during the fall of 1945. By today's standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power. But ENIAC was the prototype from which most other modern computers evolved. It embodied almost all the components and concepts of today's high- speed, electronic digital computers. Its designers conceived what has now become standard circuitry such as the gate (logical "and" element), buffer (logical "or" element) and used a modified Eccles-Jordan flip-flop as a logical, high-speed storage-and-control device.

The ENIAC was not originally designed as an internally programmed computer. The program was set up manually by varying switches and cable connections. However, means for altering the program and repeating its iterative steps were built into the master programmer

The ENIAC led the computer field during the period 1949 through 1952 when it served as the main computation workhorse for the solution of the scientific problems of the Nation. It surpassed all other existing computers put together whenever it came to problems involving a large number of arithmetic operations. It was the major instrument for the computation of all ballistic tables for the U.S. Army and Air Force.