Just when I thought I had it all

Some years ago my wife and kids bought me, for Father's Day, a teabag squeezer.

I drink more tea than is good for me and I just love my teabag squeezer. But what I particularly liked about getting the squeezer was the realisation that I was the man who had everything.

Once I had acquired a teabag squeezer I couldn't, for the life of me, think of a single material possession I seriously wanted or needed. This was no small achievement for an historically disadvantaged white person (remember, I grew up in Plumstead), even one who likes to think of himself as not being terribly acquisitive.

Then Steve Jobs invented the iPad, and suddenly I was no longer the man who had every worldly possession hitherto invented. So I bought myself an iPad and, once again, I was the man who had everything. But the iPad and, especially, the infernal App Store have opened up a whole new world of things I absolutely have to have.

This Father's Day I acquired something else I didn't know I needed or wanted. It's called a "Cordies" and is essentially a weighted little piece of baby-blue rubber that sits on your desk with four slots that keep in place computer, printer, cellphone and other cords. It works very well and can be bought online for $4.99 (R53) - although Wife assures me she paid well over these odds for it at a Joburg shop. Now that I have a Cordies I realise how miserable my life must have been without one.

The Cordies was made and is marketed by an online business based in New York called quirky.com. The actual inventor, though, is based in Belfast, a place that, as far as anyone is aware, hasn't made anything particularly useful since its shipbuilders cobbled together the Titanic. The Quirky website offers all manner of clever gadgets but what is interesting about the business is that it gets people all over the world to send in ideas for products; then it gets others at computers, also all over the world, to refine the ones it likes and Quirky manufactures and sells the things. As the website says: "We believe the best ideas in the world aren't actually in the world . they're locked inside people's heads."

So, when a product is eventually made and sold, the inventor gets a share of the profits, as do the various people who helped improve it. Brilliant idea but too bad that Quirky wasn't around a couple of decades before. It is a little known fact but I actually invented Google long before those upstarts Page and Brin stole my idea - in much the same way that Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter but didn't get around to putting the thing into production. (Back in the day, I scoped out in my mind a program that would tell me how to spell "King William's Town" at the click of a search button - and other very useful things, like where to find pictures of actress Halle Berry in various stages of undress.)

Two weeks ago Naspers reported full-year results that slightly knocked its share price because profit growth was muted but that also revealed the billions it was spending on its satellite TV and internet businesses, especially its hugely lucrative Tencent operation in China. Tencent, it turns out, has a mobile communications app called WeChat that is used daily by hundreds of millions of Chinese people to, well, chat, and that is now going into savings and even banking.

Until just the other day Chinese people had no idea they needed to do their banking while sitting on the bus. Now they know that not only do they need to bank on the bus, they were born to do their banking on the bus. Similarly, there was a time when the rest of us had no idea that what we really wanted to do was to tell 3billion people what we had had for breakfast. In 140 characters.

All the things we thought we wanted and needed are today being turned on their heads by technology. If Abraham Maslow were alive today he would amend the base of his hierarchy of human needs to include air, food, shelter and the odd bit of rumpy pumpy - plus a Samsung Galaxy S5. And, I would be so bold as to suggest, teabag squeezers.