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Big changes often come in many small almost unnoticeable steps. When looking back two or three decades none of us would ever have predicted the break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa.

 We could never have imagined using technology like skype or facebook to communicate with family and friends living in distant corners of the world with a pocket-sized smart-phone from virtually any location.

 On the political side we have seen the bankruptcy of ideologies such as communism and apartheid that tried to impose fixed systems that simply could not work in a fast-changing world. I would even dare to say that what we are now seeing in the Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East, North Korea and China are the last kicks of the dying horse of political and religious dogma. And we know from the past that when major changes are coming it is initially accompanied by a lot of turmoil.

 Russian President Putin’s power-posturing in the Crimea comes out of a position of weakness and the loss of the eastern Ukraine to a people’s revolution seeking freedom. There is more to come, even in Russia itself.

 The telecommunication/communication revolution on the economic side has given hundreds of millions of people the opportunity to access information they would otherwise never have had, cutting a swathe through the censorship attempts of dictatorial governments. The Internet is far more efficient at spreading information from the grassroots than the print media ever was, much to the chagrin of many a journalist from the old school.

 After the Internet revolution of the 1990s we are now moving into an era of networking, cooperative partnerships and sustainable economies. The signs are all out there. A lot of start-ups and many very creative individuals out there are getting together to form business partnerships, sharing their talents and knowledge. Many of them are so fed-up with the banking system that they are going into Bitcoin and other alternative forms of financing such as crowd-funding, getting a lot of new technology out there that would otherwise never be available.

 The Internet makes it all possible. Many of us are already working from home and offering our talents and skills to many different employers at the same time or joining groups of other people (living in many different parts of the world) for specific projects. I am seeing a lot of the younger folk simply refusing to join the system in big companies that have a reputation of treating their employees like machines. The most innovative, creative companies are those with small, highly motivated and talented teams. These are people with a similar mind-set getting together to start something really new and enjoying what they are doing.

 We are after all social animals that love to interact with our fellow human beings. So sooner then we might think we will be beaming 3D images of ourselves across the world with the famous catch phrase from the science fiction series Star Trek “Beam me up, Scotty.”