Make Life Easier

4:35 | Play Now | Brookstone Technologies sells to the companies that want to make it easy for employees to work anytime and from anywhere in the world.  Here co-owner John Stockbridge does business from the golf course.

The World: For several months, every time we tried reaching these people, they were in another city -- Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Jakarta, Tapiei, the Phillippines ..., and we quickly discovered that they never left their own time zone! They could live and work in what is known around the world as GMT+8 (Greenwich Mean Time plus 8 hours) and have access to half of the world's population.

It is hard to believe. It has also been a bit emabrrassing.

We took a long look at that list of cities above. We placed a blank map infront of each of us and tried to locate these major population centers. We will not report the scores, but just simply say that the results were not pretty.

It was time to take our blinders off and really study this little world in which we live. Perhaps it's time for all of us to go back and review that old geography course again ... you know, the one we had in fifth grade.

Now talk about strange contradictions, here this small business and their people live in the same time zone with China, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, yet the city of Perth, Australia is the most remote "big" city (population over 1M) on earth. You have to get on an airplane and fly at least three hours to get to an equally large city!

It is no wonder that the people of Brookstone Technologies developed award winning software that allowed them to work in their own virtual office such that they could be anywhere and still have access to all the same information that was coming through their offices back home.

That is a powerful software tool. It caused us to stop and think, "What is software and where is it taking us?" Occasionally the Wall Street Journal runs an article asking the question, "Where is technology taking us?" 

Now that question is not easy  to answer, but in the study guide for this episode of the show, we may come close to one.