How to get a divorce, win your first million or to die in style

Artículo publicado en Revista Debate traducido al inglés.

How to get a divorce, win your first million or to die in style

In Germany if both parties agree on a separation the divorce settlement can be done over the Internet.

In China hundreds of people who have been recruited via the Web gather together in front of an electronics store to obtain a better price on the purchase of a flat screen TV. “Hello, there are twenty of us out here in all and we each wish to purchase an LCD monitor. What’s your best price offer? And if the price isn’t right we’ll check out another store just around the corner”.

The Internet is offering outrageous and innovative options for being entertained, boring oneself and even for falling into or out of love, and its growth has motivated cultural changes both small and large and the appearance of some very surprising new services.

Just ten years ago the idea of having one’s own web page appeared impossible. It was common to hear excuses like “I don’t know how”, or “who do I ask?” and “I don’t know anything about Internet”. At that time the Internet was just a small planet with a few million pages and its visitors a select global minority.

Finding the website of a newspaper that was updated on an hourly basis; or an e-mail service that allowed one to avoid the trip to the post office with letter in hand and the eternal queue; or enjoying the possibility of downloading music (with apologies to copyrights) were sufficient to make us all marvel at its wonders.

It didn’t seem that we lacked much else. At that time the scope of the Internet appeared to be infinite. Today in MyHeritage.com, a website with over thirty million users one can create a family tree and find long lost relatives scattered around the globe.

In Needaproblem.com we can discover a very peculiar philosophy. According to this site a quiet happy life without problems can be boring.

As a result they invite you to buy problems so that everyone has something to keep themselves occupied.
From one dollar to five thousand dollars, simple problems to more complex ones are offered for sale to the public. There is also the option of giving a problem on birthdays and anniversaries. “Hi, Happy Birthday.

Here goes a complicated problem as a gift so that you have something to do”.
A webpage for every eight people that surf is a sufficient number for everyone to find what they might want.

With over 1,500 million users across the globe and the possibility of just about anyone being able to create their own space on the net and publish their own content in just seconds, the Internet has multiplied its offering in almost incalculable form. Everyday, new projects are launched backed with multimillion dollar investments that surprise us and that even the most fanatical surfers are able to keep up with.

One of the great landmarks in the history of the Internet is The Million Dollar Home Page. In 2005 a 21 year old English student launched a website to help finance his university career. He created a web page and divided it into a million pixels (a minimum unit of color) which he then sold for one dollar each. He made his first million in less than a year and his funny and generous creature still lives on in www.milliondollarhomepage.com

The calculations are not precise but studies by Netcast estimate that the number of websites has doubled over the last two years and that there are now more than 182 million web pages competing for our attention

In the movie “The Holiday” Iris (Kate Winslett) and Amanda (Cameron Díaz) decide to exchange homes for their vacations.
In HomeExchange.com for an annual subscription of a hundred dollars one can consult more than 26,000 houses and apartments for exchange with one’s own. An active community formed by thousands of people that vacation this way every year and allows one to swap one’s house for another.

“Participate in creating a better World, one couch at a time” is the slogan of a very special service. If sleeping on a couch for a few days does not seem too much when its time to cut costs in Couchsurfing.com one can find more than a million people in more than 50,000 towns and cities around the World who are prepared to lend their couch with the sole interest of helping out.

A French website soon to be launched will do the homework for those students prepared to pay.

For many Internet has now become a digital filing cabinet containing their photos, documents, videos and e-mail accounts. When a person dies the mechanisms for transferring that information become obsolete and generally the terms of service of the many sites where the information is stored do not permit the transfer by any unauthorized third party. A newly launched service aptly named LegacyLocker.com takes charge of resolving this problem and very simply organizes a person’s digital inheritance.