We can communicate with people around the world in seconds using the links of the Internet. A couple of days ago I was talking to a client that informed me that he engaged in a voice conversation with someone in Brazil using the iphone software over the Internet. We can talk around the world free to those who have a sound card. How many of the 80 million surfers do you suppose have a sound card?....more and more every day.
I was recently at a seminar in Toronto at the Toronto Convention Centre with Intel and Creative Labs. With Creative labs we were briefed on the Pentium's attributes with respect to communications over the Internet. They have developed a camera & microphone set with appropriate software to make video conferencing over the Internet, now, a reality. How exciting. Since this is already here, then why don't we hear more about it?. Simply, because it costs over $1400. per computer. Even though, we as Canadians/Americans can afford these luxuries it takes two to tango. That surfer in England, Brazil, Mexico and in fact a large percentage of users presently cannot justify or afford the extra expense.
However, our economy appears to be being driven downward by short sighted governments. When they should be deriving income by putting or encouraging us all to go back to work they instead are cutting off our feet with massive cutbacks in spending. If they stimulated tourism , more American dollars would flow north. If they lowered gas taxes people would travel more. More travel requires more car maintenance. More deteriation means more automotive jobs. More R&D more spent, more spin offs and more jobs created means a broader tax base. A similar problem exists within our own town. The city decided to levy large taxes on the building lots and alot of construction jobs are on the line. Why?
Reverse effect, instead of increasing the cities tax base now and creating jobs thru construction and its spinoff effect, we have a town with increasing welfare rolls and unprecedented hard ship. We have aggravated our own recession through short sightlessness and greed. Pity, the ones who authorized it aren't the ones suffering. It's the people being walked on who bear the brunt.
As we see the degeneration of blue collar jobs, out of the ashes arises a new generation of thriving businessmen. The electronic mass appeal of web advertising to 80,000,000 potential buyers who roam the Internet every night, many bargain hunters and still others looking for new idea's and excitement. In Barrie, we have over 1,000 people on the Barrie Internet's dial up service. This means a large segment of our population is involved in this activity already. When Barrie Internet opened in Barrie in April, they had a gala grand opening featuring Janice Laking, Mayor and good old Arch Brown. Mc Light's gave an incredible light and smoke show and a good time was had by all. Chris went on line with a laptop connected to a cell phone supplied by Cantel and even I was amazed as I watched him pull up WEB pages for the first time from North Bay promoting tourism there. This was the first time alot of people actually viewed the Internet. Recently, I contacted City of Barrie and offered them free space on our server in order to promote our city to the rest of the world. Destination Barrie!!! Check out the Beautiful Web pages for Orillia also located on the web server of Barrie Internet.
Since I placed 15 WEB pages on the Internet I can safely say my business has increased by $200,000. due directly to Barrie Internet. The other day, I was looking at the pages of the Barrie Advance (they have a counter that tells you the number of people that have viewed the pages) and was amazed at the number of people that had gone there to see the news pages and other areas of interest. I went into the church section and could see there was a new link. Yes Barrie has it's very own Cyber church - Calvary Community, first church on the local net!
Web advertising isn't as expensive as it could be. Where it costs 1000's of dollars to reach 1000's of people using paper and postage, WEB pages cost pennies a day to reach out to millions. So MY 15 pages cost about $50.00 a month! The artwork was surprisingly inexpensive and look how beautiful my pages are. I have " linked them" into the "Yahoo" index which has some 50,000 indexed locations (categories). Considering there are 5,000,000 Web sites now, I am one of the more visible to the 80 millions surfers worldwide. I can do support by E-mail to anywhere in the world the only cost being my time. So here I sit doing support, inventing new batch files and giving advice for $40.00 an hour and I don't have to leave my chair. Talk about low overhead.
I have some wonderful "thank you" E-mails from many people off the Internet that I have helped, which in itself this is proper renumeration. Internet people communicate constantly amongst the internet community and so it goes your business grows. Just over a year ago, before Internet I was working on my own. Today I have created employment for close to 20 people and its well on it's way to being 900. You see I market my Dr. Computer Logick Franchise solely on the Internet and have inquiries from Coast to Coast and right down to Texas. Two years ago the Advance published a full page which indicated we were the success story of the year, that pales by comparison to what is happening today. Thanks, in part to the Super Stores doing huge promotions with off the shelf systems, more people are realizing there is really only one good way to buy a computer.
For Now, Doc