Technological advances still often amaze me as much as they interest me, and how rapidly the technological landscape changes has, as I have discussed before, a big impact on the real estate market.
Although it's not exactly new, one technology I've been pondering lately is Kindle. Amazon have grand plans for Kindle, and their vision is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds on Kindle. Already the Kindle Store has more than 275,000 books available, plus top newspapers, magazines, and blogs. In addition, anything in the Kindle Store can use the text-to-speech feature, which means Kindle can read every newspaper, magazine, blog, and book out loud to you, unless the book is disabled by the rights holder.
With this technology, Kindle has the potential to become a publisher of open source textbooks, and for this reason it's been termed "disruptive". That means it displaces a current method of doing something, and in much the same way that Wikipedia was disruptive to printed encyclopedias, Kindle has the potential to threaten the published book market, and in particular textbooks. And that got me thinking about real estate training and how the technology could apply there.
Imagine how much easier it would be to train and update real estate agents if you could add to an existing text rather than starting from scratch. We've all seen the recent impact the global financial crisis has had on real estate, and that's made much of what has been written previously in regards to trends and projections useless. The technology to include this into training texts that already exist would make the spread of this information much more accessible, and much faster, and that would result in a more educated industry and a more educated market.