the Infotech revolution

Remember when a small group of Internet entrepreneurs with a big idea, passion, and modest resources and would undercut a big corporation by innovating faster, cheaper, and better? Craig's List did it in 1995, Google in 1998, YouTube in 2005. They started out as small and quickly grew to be household names and businesses worth billions of dollars. Meanwhile, their disruptive innovations have threatened the existence of larger, entrenched corporations.  Now, imagine you had invested early in those companies that made it all happen... companies that will undoubtedly continue to deliver innovative products to the consumer while creating immense shareholder value for their investors.

“Indie Ranch Media Inc. continues to create new opportunities in a booming market for new innovative Internet Technologies that utilize today’s technological advances. We focus on business’ who commercialize technology, particularly in the areas of clean energy, advance manufacturing, biosciences and information technologies.”

While the 1970s and 1980s will be remembered as the "Information Age," and the 1990s will undoubtedly be singled out as the beginning of the "Internet Age," the first decades of the 21st Century may become the "Convergence Age." In the '90s, the Internet was revolutionary in terms of communications and furthering the progress of data sharing, from the personal level to the global enterprise level.

Today, broadband sources such as Fiber-to-the-premises, Wi-Fi and cable modems provide high-speed access to information and media, creating an "always-on" environment for many users. The result is a widespread convergence of entertainment, telephony and computerized information: data, voice and video, delivered to a rapidly evolving array of Internet appliances, PDAs, wireless devices and desktop computers. Broadband access has been installed in enough U.S. households and businesses (about 90 million as 2007 ended) to create a true mass market, fueling demand for new Internet-delivered services, information and entertainment.

The Convergence Age is leading to a steady evolution in the way we access and utilize software applications. Widespread access to high-speed Internet has created a boom in user-generated content (such as Flikr, YouTube and Wikipedia); social networking (such as Facebook and MySpace); as well as TV and movies delivered via the Internet.
The Convergence Age is leading to rapid adoption of Software as a Service. That is, the delivery of sophisticated software applications by remote servers that are accessed via the Internet, as opposed to software that is installed locally by its users.

The promise of the Convergence Age-the delivery of an entire universe of information and entertainment to PCs and mobile devices, on-demand with the click of a mouse-is much closer than it was a mere 24 months ago. Consumers are swarming to new and enhanced products and services, such as the iPod, which has sold more than 100 million units as of April 2007, and the iTunes download store, which had sold more than 3 billion songs, 100 million TV shows and 2 million feature-length movies by late 2007.

The U.S. workforce totals more than 150 million people. Microsoft recently estimated that there are 40 million "knowledge workers" in the U.S. A large majority of the workforce uses a computer of some type on the job daily, in every conceivable application-from receptionists answering computerized telephone systems to cashiers ringing up sales at Wal-Mart on registers that are tied into vast computerized databases.

This is the InfoTech revolution at work, moving voice, video and data through the air and over phone lines, driving productivity ahead at rates that we do not yet know how to calculate. Our ability to utilize technology effectively is finally catching up to our ability to create the technologies themselves. We're finding more and more uses for computers with increased processing speed, increased memory capacity, interfaces that are friendly and easy-to-use and software created to speed up virtually every task known to man.