Small business expert Irvine Green encourages budding entrepreneurs to have what he calls ‘ideas veld fires’. This entails letting your imagination run wild as you think about money-making opportunities and only discarding options when you have thought them all through carefully. Sometimes ideas that seem silly on the surface turn out to be highly lucrative.
Irvine’s latest blog for Biznewz is a prime example of how this serial entrepreneur gets his creative juices flowing. This week he explores ways you can make money through the internet – today as well as in the future. Who knows? Irvine may just be right when he says that one day we could be magically transported into a cyberworld games arcade through glasses that look just like a pair of ordinary specs. – JC
By Irvine Green
Apart from being a business TOOL, the internet/world wide web can ITSELF be a business. By that I mean utilising the fast, 24/, always on, worldwide connections as a standalone business – or as the MAIN core of a service business you might want to provide.
Examples of this already exist – services like search engine Google and its associated add-ons (Google maps, Google earth, their filing/document system, the books’ access system, etc). Another example is Skype (though free, it has some money making aspects…why not a Skype ‘communications kiosk’ similar to the way in which one can make calls from a cell or landline phone kiosk? I’ve never seen or heard of a Skype kiosk – has anyone else thought of this? If not, here’s my free contribution to a business idea).
Other internet related businesses include: web site design, network and WiFi installations, 3G and LTE wireless connections, eft (and similar) payment services, on-demand movies and video related info, remote storage/back-up of information (aka the ‘cloud’), real-time news coverage from remote sites, or unmanned
monitoring systems (ranging from security surveillance to video coverage of events), etc etc.
Then there’s blogging (articles by and news from people who have a ‘need to tell’ a story or share a viewpoint). Pre-internet days you either published your own newspaper and tried to sell it, ditto a booklet if you were a student at university with a radical or important view that needed wider dispersion, or stood on a ‘soapbox’ in a park and vented forth for as long as your voice lasted. NOW, you can set up your own space on a ‘blog-site’ or get your own website, write what you want to write/say and wait for reaction. And discuss or exchange views that arise and fine-tune your idea/s (whether political, social, business, economic, esoteric, erotic and more)…at a cost lower than you’d ever get with a paper version and coverage to/in places you might never have thought of distributing your hard copy. The most important thing being that someone in a place you never thought of could discover your views etc via a search engine. And even be your most influential and helpful assistant – without the internet THAT could never have come to pass.
Imagine being somewhere and a major event occurs, such as an earthquake, tsunami, tornado, aircraft crash, explosion (such as a gas well, don’t just think suicide bombers) or avalanche. In the old days, you’d click the camera shutter, have to find somewhere to get a film developed, find a facility to transmit your photo to a newspaper you think might be willing to buy it, and such. NOW, with the internet, you can use your smartphone to take, send and discuss payment for the photo/video clip (with a TV station/newspaper or image library) and even remain on site as a ‘citizen reporter’ (whether for CNN/BSkyB/BBC et al). This happens on a regular basis nowadays with 24/7 news access and news ‘hunger’ – ie. ‘people in the street’ benefiting from being in the right place at the right time. All thanks to the internet. And YouTube too.
The most recent application of the internet’s use for ‘citizen journalism’ was the Al Shabaab attack on the Westgate Mall in Kenya. But there have been hundreds of occasions where just a smartphone or high end cellphone with a built-in camera has been put to ‘on the spot’ news use (like the original Arab Spring ‘event’ based in Cairo, Egypt).
With the internet you also have access to every radio station on the planet via streaming audio, plus ‘ web only ‘ radio stations…just about every newspaper in the world has a presence on the ‘net, and there’s also web only news sources.. there’s music (licence fee free and paid for), private news agencies and voice versions of Twitter.
There are photo ‘places ‘ like Instagram, Flickr and similar, just about every telephone number anywhere, business info databases, ‘How to’ pages, just about every magazine has a web presence (and again, some are ‘ web only ‘), info on hobbies and related societies, current weather, where an aircraft is in its flight – and more. Whatever it is one wants, it’s ‘out there’.
You can buy and sell anything, locally or internationally, find clients for your business or find a supplier of something you need, ask questions on how to repair something, get up to date country info (such as a school child might need for a project) and even access the on-line ‘citizen-written’ encyclopaedia ‘Wikipedia’, as well as (now only in digital format anyway) ‘REAL encyclopaedias’ like Brittanica.
It’s a hell of a thing this amorphous, invisible, ‘somewhere out there’ internet… Does IT exist ? Or is just the information you can access via it ‘the REAL part of it’? Most of everything we send and receive travels as photons of light via underground and undersea optical fibre (occasionally via satellite on a radio signal) and is stored as one’s and zero’s on very high speed mechanical and solid state storage devices.
Perhaps one day you WILL be able to say ‘Beam me up Scotty’ on your way to play a 3D version of ‘Tron’ or ‘Tetris’, at a ‘virtual location’, seen only through high definition goggles that look like nothing more than a pair of everyday reading glasses.
All of the above – and more – is why it’s such a pity that South Africa’s citizen internet access is still under fifty (possibly even forty) percent and that those who DO have access are not benefiting from the high speeds available via the MANY undersea cables that terminate in Cape Town or Durban due to lack of ‘matching speed’ upgrades on inland digital network infrastructure.
Hopefully, with a variation on my closing remark from last week: “If I don’t see you through the week, I’ll see you on-line doing profitable business with a somewhat exotic, far flung, location”.
For more by Irvine Green, read: Smart ideas for small businesses and From business idea to action: how to go about finding the money
