Technology and Careers

This week I read an article about a freelance musician. He writes soundtracks for everything from political campaigns to History Channel documentaries. He earns more than $500,000 in a good year. He has no employees. He works at home. And this is all possible by use of $50,000 worth of technology. Of course, he is very talented, but technology made it possible for him to reproduce the sound of a symphony orchestra and pocket all the money that would have gone to the orchestra. An author of the article calls it “a miracle of productivity”. It is incredible how talented driven people who adopt and learn new technology can be ahead of the game, capitalizing on it and enjoying what they do at the same time. Can it even become more effective than that? Technology turns things that were impossible years ago into simple reality. It creates a lot of opportunities for home-based businesses as well as work-from-home jobs. A study of the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that there were 19.8 million Americans in the 2001 that could be classified as working from home. This number is growing steady from year to year. Some of other home-based jobs include: call center worker, mystery shopper and survey taker, online auction seller/buyer, other web business. Technology creates opportunities and I have another great example to prove it. Markus Frind is a Canadian entrepreneur who owns PlentyofFish.com, the world’s largest online dating website. According to reports in 2006, he earned around $10,000 a day through Adsense’s contextual advertising program. According to a recent article Plenty of Fish now receives 45 million visitors along with 1.1 billion page views every month. His annual income from PlentyofFish.com alone is currently $5 to $10 million a year. What is fascinating is that Markus Frind is a one-man show. He virtually ran Plenty of Fish by himself, along with help from his girlfriend and other voluntary moderators. Carr said that technology becomes a commodity item and does not bring a strategic advantage. I see it otherwise. A person/business has to be creative and unique, timely, persistent and hard-working. And when you add technology to the mix great things can happen!