Monday, December 05, 2005

Technopreneurs on the Town

I’ve gotta blog about my meeting with two people at a downtown café last week. As we were talking about putting on an initiative together, the other two (only one of whom I had known before) both told me it’s too bad a fourth guy wasn’t there. Mark’s an actor as well as a business consultant, and they were dying for me to see this commercial he’s done.

So Ron, on my right, says to Richard on my left, “Did you bring your laptop?” Richard says yes. Ron releases a chain around his neck that holds a USB storage device no bigger than your fingernail. He pops it into Richard’s USB drive and Richard copies the file onto his laptop. Then he goes to play it.

Oops. The commercial is formatted in Quicktime, and Richard doesn’t have it.

No problem. This café is wired for wireless Internet (if that makes sense to you), so Richard downloads it while we talk. Within three minutes, we are watching Mark’s commercial.

It didn’t really advance our conversation much, but I was struck by how cool this whole process was.

My first PC had a 20-mb hard drive and weighed 80 pounds (including monitor). Now we carry gigabytes of storage around our neck, haul many megahertz of processing power around in a briefcase, and download the programs we need out of the ether. As we've said around here before, it’s an amazing time to be in business.

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