Tag: time

The not so quiet revolution

How many times did i hear… the “ahh…good old times” rant. Sure, sometimes the world as we know it now is complicated, sometimes unfair and even cruel and bad. But if you stop and zoom out a bit, like 20 years (don’t need to go all the way to the dark ages), one realizes the leap forward. And in technology the leap is nothing short of massive – thank you Mr. Moore. I’m really glad and lucky to be apart of this.

You can get a Raspberry PI a fully functional (and power efficient) computer running Linux for about 30€. You can get a TV stick running Android OS for about 50€ (there are Linux distributions for this kind of device). Linux is free, BSD OS family is free. Most of the SDKs are free. MySQL is free (as other fully capable Relational Database Systems). Many compilers are free. Open Office is free. Heck, even Adobe CS2 can be freely downloaded from Adobe…

Transit Price Drops

Also the price of bandwidth and networking has gone South over the years as the speed and quality has gone North. I remember to dial-up with a 28.8 kbps modem, downloading a single mp3 file was task for one hour, loading a simple webpage was eternity, etc… and in the end of the month the phone bill was obscene… Nowadays, i can download pristine high resolution full movie (in Itunes or other payed service of course) in less than an hour for a fraction of the cost that the mp3.

Documentation, tutorials, examples, e-books, howto’s all over the place. Information (for all levels) is freely available to anyone, you just need time and the right mindset, to read, test and educate yourself about any technology that you want to learn.

So in the web business capital is not the main factor, it’s knowledge and labor. The funny thing is that capitalism did this, an industry that moves billions of dollars and for start capital is not the most important factor (by far). Some kid can (and probably is) somewhere in some room build the next big website or mobile app costing him (or her) nothing more than time.

There is a bright future in this model. You don’t need some guys in suits that are sitting on top of the money to believe in your idea. You are the only one that needs to believe (can you picture the scared faces?) and learn, learn, learn:

Personally i wish i had much more time and piece of mind to learn and thinker with new technologies and projects because now is the time.

The marketing advantage of young people

I was listening Deolinda’s song “Parva que Sou”,  very buzzed nowadays due to the strong lyrics about the lack of opportunities given to the young people, and found myself thinking what a piece of crap….  Why? To start the melody is non-existent, and the so called “strong” lyrics are pathetic.

Is plain pathetic to say young people can’t get good jobs, because they are all already taken, and they can’t start their own business because they have no capital, and the lack of capital trows them to poorly paid jobs, which just creates a perpetual loop. So, this is an unfair world and the poor young guy is always with the lower hand. Right? Wrong.

There are so many advantages to the young people… but in this post i would like to highlight the marketing advantages. One can legitimately ask, if a young entrepreneur has little to no money stock, what is the advantage to the established players with much more cash flow to invest in marketing and advertising? Is pretty simple, they can do it better with much less money. How? Exploring the potential of guerrilla marketing to their own profit. The new technologies, the new communication medias, the new languages. They rule the Internet inside out, the websites, the social networks, the blogs, the forums, the chats, the new mobile medias. They know what is cool, what is uncool. What a great marketing advantage that is.

So, i really don’t know about you, but i sure have my own plans to keep “young” as long as i can, keep up with the upcoming medias and technologies so i can take on the “old” guys who do business the same as they did twenty years ago.

PS – and of course, the song who made me think about this, well… i can’t identify me less with it