The past few weeks have been marked by my nearly constant efforts to bring technology back into my life in a meaningful way. This may seem like a strange process, but technology used to be a very large part of my life. I was consistently upgrading, downloading and beta testing every piece to tech I could get my hands on. Somewhere along the line I allowed the time I spent doing that to be taken over by minutiae.
I believe it was all thanks to the time I spent in Breckenridge and Boulder, Colorado with a group of techie friends. They own and operate all kinds of sweet businesses (list at the end of the entry). And their involvement with personal electronics, and abuse of the automation of daily tasks got me back into that mindset. Life doesn't have to sneak up on you--or, if it does, you should at the very least be able to get a SMS notification before it does.
So I found myself signing up for Twitter,Google's Latitude, Mint.com and other online tools. The interesting part of all of these services is that they solve simple problems with elegant solutions.
Take Mint.com for example. They developed a way to aggregate all of your financial information through relationships with nearly every depository and lending institution in the country. Unbelievable that I can go to one website (without entering ANY sizable amount of data) and see my net worth. MY NET WORTH! No accountants needed. Not 30 calls to brokers. No time spent on hold.
There are considerable hurdles to trusting a site like that with such sensitive information. But once you make the jump, it's such a wonderful tool!
These fundamental questions we ask hundreds of times a day "what are you doing?" "where are you?" "am I richer than my parents yet?" are continually being answered by innovation. What a great time we live in. It all has to do with the generativity of the 'net! Just ask Johnathan Zittrain!
The list of companies represented:
ShipCompliant - a POP software development company ensuring compliance of distillers, wineries and distributors with state laws
OneButton - a home theater installation company focusing on end user ease-of-use
VCWear - t-shirts for venture capitalists
DynamIT - web development and design firm based in Columbus, Ohio.
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