One of the most interesting trends I’ve seen in our sort of post-industrial world is a move to a more self-driven world where manufacturing and services and just about everything that used to be driven by governments, corporations, and large economic factors are increasingly done just through networking between each other.  The internet and all the technological innovations the Internet has made possible we are seeing slowly changing the fabric of society.  Such technology can be used for good or evil but given that, as humans, things sort of land in the middle; to me that just means it will slowly become a good thing as the social fabric and the power of the internet drive it in that direction.

Meaning mediocre IoT and mediocre internet breeds better of both and its sort of a cycle of improvement no matter what and those just two of many driving factors that will continue to drive things towards this mesh social fabric.

Let’s look at a few wider details enabled by these changes…  blockchain on the Internet can allow absolute democracy removing the need for large-scale bureaucratic organizations.  Blockchain enables money that is not government controlled and things like eBay and Etsy and many sites enable you to go directly to customers.  You can automate your own manufacturing or just outsource bits as needed or any number of other combinations w/o little overhead enabling anyone to do anything.  Some of these trends are so widespread that in some industry sectors like manufacturing we see jobs coming back to the US for example that were exported due to lower wages but brought back to support automated manufacturing.  That goes back to the individual trends including the maker movement, 3D printers and the like.

Now what is interesting is one particular case regarding what is essentially a VC firm that underneath the covers is focused on creating small sustainable companies that can contribute to the wider business community not just in making money but making society better.  The company is Hall Labs, which underwritten by large amounts of capital but the projects at Hall Labs tend to be small companies with a new technology and about their ‘New Vistas’ small business model.  One company at Hall Labs run by a young CEO named Gerome who started off as a tec at what became Hall Labs is now running his own company called Garage Smart and releasing a 2.0 version of their product called MyLifter 2.0.  What is great, is that Gerome and a few engineers and developers have been able to design, build and test this ‘product’ based on an idea from the New Vistas communities and take it to market doing virtually everything themselves.  It is this sort of working together with various other experts in the Hall Labs ‘network’ that has allowed Gerome to build a company from virtually nothing but willpower and an idea and with Hall Labs now helping move it forward.  While long-term Gerome is looking at IoT and blue tooth mesh networking and the like they are able to launch the current product on Kickstarter w/o the huge overhead associated with a typical product launch.

While you might not be interested in ‘MyLifter’ it is important to note antidotally the impact all of these various trends together and what that may imply for all of us.

If you interested in ‘MyLifter’ feel free to check out their Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mylifter/mylifter-20-by-garage-smart?ref=csngb2

If you interested in the New Vistas Community projects or have other questions leave a note below or ping us.  Please especially feel free to let us know your antidotal evidence for the changes to come.