Technology as a Social Commodity

In an interesting experience I had several weeks ago I noticed something about technology. No matter what, there is always a market for something. My girlfriend and I chose to sell our iPhones. In my opinion the iPhone is over hyped, is too restricted with it’s sdk’s, and the AT&T network is just horrible, (we’re getting Droids *plug).

We both posted our iPhones on eBay. They both sold incredibly under 2 minutes of being on auction via the buy now feature. Now here’s the interesting part. I noticed both buyers were Chinese. So I did some investigating and found out a tremendous amount of “gray-market” iPhone demand in China. Turns out that China does not allow wifi enabled iPhones to be sold due to some local regulation.

Suffice to say the phones sold for more than we paid for them with a nice profit. Seems that no matter where you are in the world, the demand for technology whether it’s legal or illegal and whether those determinations are just or not, people want to be connected at any cost. This gives great hope and promise within the social networking arena which much of the world isn’t even participating fully yet.

I believe that technology will actually become a sought after commodity as more and more restrictions come into play. Especially with all this talk about Google filtering China’s search results. I expect that there could also be a large Black Market Internet which will push the limits of technology even further.