I attended a talk by Thomas Friedman last night. He showed a slide that relates very much to what we do here at RunSignup:
His point was more global – that technology is changing faster than human’s ability to keep up with the change. For example at one point in the US, 98% of the population was agrarian, and it is now 2%. That change took many, many years, allowing humans to make the adjustments. Now, there is not the luxury of time – to be successful you must harness technology and leverage its power.
He pointed out 2007 as a key year that was the initial start of this next wave. That was the year the iPhone came out and Amazon became really serious about the AWS Cloud (who could have imagined a website like RunSignup that had a half a million page views from cell phones on Thanksgiving day 10 years ago?). This democratization of technology brought a huge shift that allows many, many downstream technology enhancements that simply were not possible before. Many people are having trouble with this pace of change.
As we pointed out a few weeks ago, RunSignup is on the right side of technology. We are bringing out new technology that races can use for free or very inexpensively. Race Directors who are stuck in the past will get passed by with advances like GPS tracking with phones, Photos, marketing and promotional tools. And much like Amazon’s success with AWS, the key to our strategy is the democratization of technology for races – even little 5K’s can have the types of tools that used to be available only to races like New York or Boston.
As we continue to pour out technology, we want to make sure you can take advantage of it. This is the reason for our extensive How To’s, our Case Studies, Customer Videos, the RunSignup Symposium, our Webinar Series, and of course our customer support and account management teams. But as Thomas pointed out, the new world driven by technology only works well for the humans who adapt to it and spend the time to learn about how to make the technology part of their lives, businesses – and races.