Your Portable Empire: How to Make Money Anywhere While Doing What You Love

Chapter 36. What's Next?

One of the loops that runs through my mind regularly is "what's coming next?" What new, outlandish, outrageous experience, thing, or concept is going to come out of nowhere and change our lives?

Can you imagine a world without the Internet? Can you, really? It seems like it's always been there. I remember when Bill Hibbler first told me about Compuserve, which was a sorta precurser to the Internet. It seemed like magic. You could actually download a picture in less than an hour and see it right on your monitor. It even had some primitive forums and e-mail.

That was about a decade ago. Now, it seems like I've always had broadband high-speed Internet access.

And yet, for most of my life, if I wanted information I had to go to hard copy—newspapers (with a 24-hour lag) or magazines (months), or TV (spin, spin, spin). Now, we take for granted that we're entitled to immediate access to information.

As the migration of software from hard drive to online continues, our Empires can get even more Portable.

I've got shelves and shelves of books. They're kinda nice. Like vinyl records. Retro. Old-fashioned and inefficient.

I carry e-books around on my hard drive. It would be easy to upload them all to my server where I could access them from anywhere and share them.

Cell phones? Mine checks my e-mail, has room on it for lots of e-books, keeps my calendar up-to-date, and lets me actually make phone calls from pretty much anywhere. I've written chapters (short ones) for books ...