The Internet and Equipment Financing

By | April 13, 2008

Today’s post is about the internet and equipment financing, and comes from three different thoughts, all jumbled together into a tidy little package.

· The first thought is related to last weeks post about odd equipment financing.

· The second was born from a particular movie I was watching (you all know I like movies.)

· The third was when I did a favor for a friend. After I did that, I pieced it all together and had a viola moment.

Follow me here:

Last week, I wrote a post about financing equipment that was a little odd. Just let that thought hang for a moment.

Then, later that same week, I was flipping through the channels and saw the movie The Matrix playing. To understand my point here, you need not know the movie (just know that it’s loosely about people plugged into a computer world).

Anyway, in this one scene, Neo and Trinity have to escape a building. The only way off is a helicopter, which neither of them can fly. No problem, Trinity calls into HQ, they upload the program to her brain, and viola!  In ten seconds, she can now fly it.

That got me thinking further.

Ok, then later that week, a friend of mine was looking into buying a house. But the house had a possibly contested lien (but the owner said everything would be fine). He asked me what he should do (apparently being involved in equipment finance makes you some sort of guru on everything, I guess.) So, knowing zilch about houses and liens, I consulted the internet. I put phrases like ‘contested lien’ and ‘buying a house’ into Google, and went to work.

You know what happened? Within fifteen minutes, I knew all I ever needed to know about contested liens in regards to buying a house. Which I passed along to my friend (he didn’t buy the house.)

My point here is, while what I did is not quite learning how to fly a helicopter in ten seconds, it is pretty amazing that I could find this obscure information relatively quickly. For a minute there, it was like I was in the Matrix, and could get information on anything (although trust me, a decidedly non-movie-star-guy finding out information on contested liens is a terrible movie plot point.)

That’s pretty neat, isn’t it?

Then, I thought of my odd equipment financing post and certainly some of these people probably found my company on the internet when they searched for ‘dredging equipment financing’ or something like that. That’s pretty remarkable, because when you really think about it,  fifteen years ago this simply was not possible.

And that neatly ties it all together: the internet is an amazing, borderline science fiction type tool – a tool that can be used for finding out information on just about anything (even odd equipment financing.)