As access to powerful and low-cost new media, electronics and digital technologies becomes easier and easier thanks to innovation and lower and lower prices, creating value, products and good content is not anymore the exclusive property of large corporations, or financially equipped teams of investors. Amateurs professionals are figuring out in more than one way, that they too can be effective and even sustainable products creators without needing to tap into large budgets, expensive machinery and highly paid professionals.

Are you one?

Thanks to the Internet and to the ongoing growth of former underground movements like Open Source, Blogging and P2P, a growing number of individuals are figuring out that even creating their own newspaper, magazine, radio or TV channel it is not anymore out of their reach.

Yes, their creation may not have the slick interface and the 9-months testing period that a Sony product can guarantee, but the level of innovation and the speed at which new ideas can be embedded in such amateur-created new products and services can outpace established players.

Good examples of this come from all directions: Skype, the first free Internet-based voice communication tool that works better and much more economically that a standard telephone it is not the fruit of research and engineering of a large multinational telecom. New P2P technologies like BitTorrent or the lesser known Byte Tornado utilized by the Cybersky-TV project, allow the distribution of audio, music and television programming (at broadcast quality levels) without the use of satellites, cable or antennas of any kind, is unsettling big media executives in their chairs.

What does it make these amateur professionals increasingly more powerful, but critical to the development of user-driven new products and services?

"A number of factors are coming together to empower amateurs in a way never before possible, blurring the lines between those who make and those who take.

Instead, they're simply finding a way—in this mass-produced, Wal-Mart world—to take power back, prove that they can make the products that they want to consume, have fun doing so, and, just maybe, make a few dollars."

Passionate amateurs have in fact attracted the attention of both large corporations as well as the one of mainstream news sources, who have recently started to devote quite a bit of attention to this new spreading phenomenon.

Call them "prosumers" or "Pro-Am", professional amateurs are here to stay while gradually transforming many of the professional realities we now give for granted.

Want to find who they are and why they are so important?

read on...