It’s easy to become jaded about announcements in the tech world.  Slick, media savvy CEO’s announce “revolutionary” new products with metronomic regularity.  Version 1.0 becomes 1.1 and eventually 2.0 and on and on.  It all seems like a blur.

Meanwhile, the truly groundbreaking stuff often goes unnoticed (neither the transistor nor the microchip were instant hits).  Paradigm shifts come in strange guises, with little or no tangible effect on immediate life and often take decades to make an impact.

Nevertheless, we should take notice at the recent news of the Google-NASA quantum computing partnership which marks the beginning of a new digital paradigm.  Although we must account for that which is beyond our present understanding, even the projects currently underway promise a future that seems almost more like science fiction than science fact.

In a commencement address to business students at Columbia University, New York Times CEO Mark Thompson hailed the company’s digital subscription strategy and dismissed skeptics who say media outlets can’t reinvent themselves.

“[T]he launch of the pay model is the most important and  most successful business decision made by The New York Times in many years. We have around 700,000 paid digital subscribers across the company’s products so far and a new nine-figure revenue-stream which is still growing.”

Intel has been taking steps in recent months to promote the democratization of consumer data — the idea that consumers should be able to check out the information that companies are collecting on them — even though it might not be immediately obvious how the chip maker could generate revenue through the initiatives, according to an article from the MIT Technology Review.

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost,” wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, “not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.” Which is another way of saying that physics is weird. And particle physics – or quantum mechanics, to give it its posh title – is weird to the power of n, where n is a very large integer.

By 2015, six billion objects in the world will be connected to the internet. While it may seem tricky to grasp as a concept, the internet of things is nothing simpler, and more stunning, than objects being connected to the internet. At its most mind-blowing, these objects are learning and adapting to the behaviour of the user.