The new frontiers of recruiting talent in Silicon Valley are becoming more demanding and precocious, the inventors of the most sought after by Apple and Google are very young and they are still attending high school.
A growing army of teenagers flocking technology conferences to present their patents, they win international competitions, spread their App on smartphones.
The best brains of this new tender age ends up in the Wall Street Journal, Millionaires even before he passed puberty.
The economic newspaper interviewed in the first page that Grant Goodman at age 14 has already submitted its third successful patent. Last year, Apple decided that the new iPhone YouTube there would have been supplied, the boy took the opportunity and invented prodigus, an app that allows you to watch video on the iPhone, without the advertising imposed by YouTube. He has already formed a company, the Macster Software, to manage its business by inventor. Knows how to put them in competition between Apple and Google, experimenting with new apps for all their products, including a patented has used to see the charge level of the battery eyewear Google Glass, a tiny light. He also created a new videogame. This was the summer of his farewell to middle school, from this September will cross the threshold of high school.
There have been cases even earlier. When in June, Google held its conference in San Francisco the annual I / O, dedicated to all inventors who develop new software and app, had to provide a special “youth program” with 200 participants, the smallest of them had 11 years . Not to be less competitive rivals, in the recruitment of young brains, Apple as early as 2012 began to lower the minimum age for admission to its developer conference: from 18 to 13 years old and half scholarships to attend the free Apple technical conferences, reserved for true professionals, were won by minors.
The creativity of these “child prodigy” is well remunerated. Google in a year has paid $5 billion to the inventors of the best apps, even twice while Apple: 10 billion. The young age involves some legal limitation, easily avoidable. To set up a company must be of legal age, so some of these kids abut your company to parents or grandparents. By definition, their crafts know no borders: it confirms the story of Douglas Bumby (16 years), whose JustGo app! (chronometer for runners) is already on sale in all the AppStore; Douglas who lives in Canada has recently found a partner to the antipodes, Australia, the 17 year old Jason Pan with which they created the company Apollo Research. And there is the case of Ahmed Fathi, a 15 year old flew from Egypt to Silicon Valley to participate in the conference organized by the inventors Apple. Fathi has learned how to program and create software app as a self-taught, taking a course online at YouTube. He has already invented, patented and sold to Apple its Tweader, Twitter app that reads aloud for people who are driving or riding a bicycle.
The French philosopher Michel Serres, who teaches at Stanford University in California, use the fairy-tale character Petit Poucet, that is Pollicino, to describe the mutant generation of “digital natives” whose prehensile-inch travel at the speed of light on the phone’s display. “No country for old men”, is not a world for old people, so they have even translated the theories of Serres on the revolutionary potential of this generation. Now also in their twenties should look back, compelled by obsolescence already lurking.
Source: La Repubblica