New Biz Insights - Technology Finally Makes It Work

We last wrote our columns "Employ Yourself", "HomeFree" and "Entrepreneur's Corner" in the 20th century when the Internet was just a promise and no one knew where it would lead us.

Now here we are half-past the first decade of Century 21 and the big companies are quaking in their boots as the inmates - Youtube, Ourmedia, MySpace, Podomatic, Paltalk, Skype, Gizmoproject, the revised Napster, and hundreds of others - take over the asylum and rip the keys out of the hands of the content and media gatekeepers.

For a while on the Net it looked like the big branded companies - the guys who came late to the Internet revolution - had beaten the first dot-com wave. Then along came Google - a company less than a decade old - that flipped the script on targeted advertising and revolutionized something called Web 2.0 - services on the web. Now it's all up for grabs - Windows, packaged software, the telephone companies, movie companies, record companies and traditional software companies might all be disrupted out of business.

I'm a small guy. When I first started writing the columns in 1993, my main weapon was a 16Mhz PC with 32 mb of RAM and 100Mb of drive space. Cell phones were unaffordable, notebook PCs disconnected from anything but themselves, e-mail just a dream. Back in 1994, I had two or three PCs on my desk, two notebook computers that cost me $2,000.00 (and I thought that was a deal at the time) which together had less drive space and power than a keychain drive and $100 PDA has today, and a cell phone that felt more like a small radio than a voice transceiver. I wanted to be totally mobile but to get to that mobility then I had to settle for a large black bag to carry the notebook PC, HP DJ 310 printer, and Ameritech cell phone. The rig's bulk and inconvenience (the batteries didn't last and everything had an attached brick battery-AC cord that was useless unless you were sitting down near an electric jack) made its utility hard to realize.

Now you can hold the phone, fax, e-mail, software, and TV in the Palm (or HP or Compaq or Nextel). A Blackberry 8700 can be an office link for everything you do at your desk. And if you are a small guy today, you can compete with the big guys without it costing you an arm and leg if you have:

A bluetooth enabled, wi-fi connected notebook computer
A bluetooth-enabled cell phone with videocam
A universal battery charger and AC connector
Subscriptions to Skype, Vonage, GizmoProject, Paltalk, MyFax, Podomatic, YouTube, Paypal, ccbill and ibill

You can:
create and send any kind of digital media
write, host and broadcast your own portable radio and TV shows
develop and promote your own websites
accept payments instantly via credit card or debit card from anywhere in the world

It's on and the bandwagon already left; if you ain't on already you better run and catch up!