While we go about our day to day business, our world continues to change. Every now and then you can look around and find that the sands have shifted and left you somewhere foreign. I'll leave the abstract world I'm describing and give you an incredible example...
When I was about four or five, my mum owned a market stall selling shoes. I had just finished five or so hand crafted finger paintings and the entrepreneurial spirit was flowing well. The smell of money was in the air so I decided to sprawl my paintings over the prime real estate in my mum's shop, covering the shoes on the front racks. It was a long day, and mum kept taking my artwork down. I persisted and eventually made $0.50 thanks to the merciful shop keeper next door. By the end of the day I came to the realisation that maybe art wasn't my thing.
Fast forward twenty years and I
come across this story about an eight year old, with the help of his VC dad, setting up a skate brand. His father helped him buy a domain and point it to
his son's blog, and then his son went off and created a cafepress store. His son supplied the artwork, and cafepress whacked the art on t-shirts, mugs, and gave him a shop front!
The world is changing. For some reason, very few people seem to acknowledge it. From an entrepreneur's point of view, the better you understand the change, the better prepared you will be to take advantage of opportunities.
I'm 24 years old and was growing up as the personal computing revolution was occurring. I'm 100% fluent with computers, as are many people of a similar age. We taunt the oldies that flail through E-Mail, and "downloading the Internet". The pre-teen kids growing up now are in a different world. They are living and breathing primitive Internet services, and primitive ubiquitous computing. They are going to push technology to the next level. The level where the computer hardware is abstracted to real world computing services and technology is accepted in ways us 24 year old "old school" geeks can only dream of.
Opportunity awaits!