The balance of power is shifting away from the exclusive domain of huge monolithic organizations and creating enormous market opportunities.  We are witnessing an exponential growth in creative destruction.  Old ideas are overtaken by new ones.  Despite our nostalgia for how it used to be, our existence depends upon this continual drive for innovation.

What formerly required mass sums of capital, large nation-states, and proprietary global networks, can be accomplished with a handful of people armed with laptops, internet access, and small handheld devices.  Why?  What is driving this Broadband Revolution?

 Three elements have converged to create the current possibilities:

1. Engaging content can be created with ever decreasing costs - Twenty years ago, the cost of video production equipment required to create high quality video pieces was outrageous.  Because it was all driven by physical media (i.e. celluloid film), editing and post-production was unwieldy.  Today, a modest laptop computer and off-the-shelf software can far outpace what was cutting-edge ten years ago.

2. Universal internet access - Thanks to wireless technologies and millions of miles of fiber optic cables, we can tap into the collective consciousness of the internet from pretty much anywhere we want now.  Our ability to access the internet with unlimited bandwidth and mind-numbing transmission speeds is only becoming more and more of a reality (read more here).  Thanks to the current generation of smart phones, e.g. iPhones, we can carry the internet in our pocket.  Just imagine what will be possible three years from now.

3. Advanced Web Applications - Gone are the days of buying your software in a box and loading it directly on your computer.  Websites are our software now.  From any computer in the world, you can check your email, update your financials, track your contacts with prospective clients, and a myriad of other essential and non-essential tasks.   

Where these three elements converge is where the Broadband Revolution is happening right now.  Citizen journalists can upload their news stories (see Real News Network and iReport), amateur politicians are disseminating political videos across the globe (see YouTube’s YouChoose Channel), and everyday people are creating a 3-D map of the world (see Google Earth).

Every industry, company, organization, and individual is being affected by the Broadband Revolution.  How you come out of this revolution depends on how you decide to harness it.  Those who seek ”transformation” are those who want the revolution to go their way.

What do you seek to transform?  How can you ensure the revolution goes your way?  

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under change, transformational, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.