It’s not too late

I was listening to a podcast recently where one of the hosts was lamenting the fact that they didn’t invent any of the great new apps that seem somewhat obvious to us now, like Uber and Slack. They wished they could go back in time about 10 years and fix that, but “it’s too late now”.

For those apps, he’s absolutely right, but most people will be able to say the same thing 10 years from now. The next 10 years will bring amazing new technologies and ideas, and that’s all still in front of us.

Tech giants rule

Even with that in mind, it can be tough when you look at the current landscape being mostly dominated by a few large companies (Google, Apple, Amazon, etc).

Can you build a phone next year to compete with the iPhone? Probably not.

Can you create a new search engine to topple Google? Unlikely.

Despite that, opportunities abound.

Two examples

Two fun examples of small, unique projects come to mind.

TogetherLetters is a way to connect a small group of people with weekly email updates. As social media fragments into different platforms, everyone (at least for now) has email. This is a creative way to use that to bring people together.