The World's Crystal Ball - A look into the future

 A GLIMPSE INTO WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR US. 
 

In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide.

Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they went bankrupt.

What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 year - and most people don't see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you would never take pictures on paper film again? Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore's law. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, before it became way superior and got mainstream in only a few short years. It will now happen with Artificial Intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs. Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution. Welcome to the Exponential Age.

Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.

Uber is just a software tool, they don't own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don't own any properties.

Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected. In the US, young lawyers already don't get jobs. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for more or less basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90% less lawyers in the future, only specialists will remain.

Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, 4 time more accurate than human nurses. Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.

Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self driving cars will appear for the public. Around 2020, the complete industry will start to be disrupted. You don't want to own a car anymore. You will call a car with your phone, it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination. You will not need to park it, you only pay for the driven distance and can be productive while driving. Our kids will never get a driver's licence and will never own a car. It will change the cities, because we will need 90-95% less cars for that. We can transform former parking space into parks. 1,2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide. We now have one accident every 100,000km, with autonomous driving that will drop to one accident in 10 million km. That will save a million lives each year.

Most car companies might become bankrupt. Traditional car companies try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels. I spoke to a lot of engineers from Volkswagen and Audi; they are completely terrified of Tesla.

Insurance companies will have massive trouble because without accidents, the insurance will become 100x cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.

Real estate will change. Because if you can work while you commute, people will move further away to live in a more beautiful neighborhood.

Electric cars will become mainstream until 2020. Cities will be less noisy because all cars will run on electric. Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean: Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you can only now see the impact. Last year, more solar energy was installed worldwide than fossil. The price for solar will drop so much that all coal companies will be out of business by 2025.

With cheap electricity comes cheap and abundant water. Desalination now only needs 2kWh per cubic meter. We don't have scarce water in most places, we only have scarce drinking water. Imagine what will be possible if anyone can have as much clean water as he wants, for nearly no cost.

Health: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year. There will be companies who will build a medical device (called the "Tricorder" from Star Trek) that works with you phone, which takes your retina scan, you blood sample and you breath into it. It then analyses 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease. It will be cheap, so in a few years everyone on this planet will have access to world class medicine, nearly for free.

3D printing: The price of the cheapest 3D printer came down from 18,000$ to 400$ within 10 years. In the same time, it became 100 times faster. All major shoe companies started 3D printing shoes. Spare airplane parts are already 3D printed in remote airports. The space station now has a printer that eliminates the need for the large amount of spare parts they used to have in the past.

At the end of this year, new smart phones will have 3D scanning possibilities. You can then 3D scan your feet and print your perfect shoe at home. In China, they already 3D printed a complete 6-storey office building. By 2027, 10% of everything that's being produced will be 3D printed.

Business opportunities: If you think of a niche you want to go in, ask yourself: "in the future, do you think we will have that?" and if the answer is yes, how can you make that happen sooner? If it doesn't work with your phone, forget the idea. And any idea designed for success in the 20th century is doomed in to failure in the 21st century.

Work: 70-80% of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years. There will be a lot of new jobs, but it is not clear if there will be enough new jobs in such a small time.

Agriculture: There will be a 100$ agricultural robot in the future. Farmers in 3rd world countries can then become managers of their field instead of working all days on heir fields. Aeroponics will need much less water. The first petri dish produced veal is now available and will be cheaper than cow produced veal in 2018. Right now, 30% of all agricultural surfaces is used for cows. Imagine if we don't need that space anymore. There are several startups who will bring insect protein to the market shortly. It contains more protein than meat. It will be labeled as "alternative protein source" (because most people still reject the idea of eating insects).

There is an app called "moodies" which can already tell in which mood you are. Until 2020 there will be apps that can tell by your facial expressions if you are lying. Imagine a political debate where it's being displayed when they are telling the truth and when not.

Bitcoin will become mainstream this year and might even become the default reserve currency.

Longevity: Right now, the average life span increases by 3 months per year. Four years ago, the life span used to be 79 years, now it's 80 years. The increase itself is increasing and by 2036, there will be more that one year increase per year. So we all might live for a long long time, probably way more than 100.

Education: The cheapest smart phones are already at 10$ in Africa and Asia. Until 2020, 70% of all humans will own a smart phone. That means, everyone has the same access to world class education. Every child can use Khan academy for everything a child learns at school in First World countries. We have already released our software in Indonesia and will release it in Arabic, Suaheli and Chinese this Summer, because I see an enormous potential. We will give the English app for free, so that children in Africa can become fluent in English within half a year.

Why Email Marketing Is Vital To A Brand's Health

Steve Olenski, 

Just a few weeks ago I wrote an article entitled As If They Need It, Another Reason Brands Need To Be Mobile which essentially spelled out the fact that the most powerful brand ambassadors in the world, moms – are a very mobile demographic and if marketing & advertising folks want to succeed, they better be mobile as well. Literally.

In fact one of the things I used to make my point was this chart, courtesy of eMarketer which spells out what the activities moms most like to do via their smartphone. Pay attention to the first two. Then hold that thought.

  

Not long ago I received the results of a survey entitled Shopping with Social Media which was conducted by Ryan Partnership, a behavioral marketing agency. In the online survey of primary household shoppers, which yielded over 10,000 results, consumers were asked which digital tools they were aware of and which they used in the past year.

It is the third year they’ve conducted this study and according to Kim Finnerty, SVP Research & Insights at Ryan Partnership, this year they saw continued increasing penetration for newer, more mobile tools like Load to Card coupons, product reviews, and mobile payments.

No real surprise there as far as I am concerned given the mobile world we live in, of course.

In speaking with Kim, I asked her if should could break down the results to show just one particular demographic. A demographic which accounts for anywhere from 80-90% of all household decisions. A very powerful and influential demographic. Of course I am referring to moms.

The reason I asked for this breakdown is I wanted to see how moms fared compared to the national averages and lo and behold, it seems good old email, the medium many predicted years ago would go the way of fax machines, is not only popular among moms, it outranks other mediums in the eyes of this most sought after demographic.

Go back and look at the eMarketer chart above, then look at this:

Do you see it?
The question posed was “When have you used X to help you shop or plan to shop?”

Retail emails

• U.S. average – 13%
• Moms – 16%

Brand emails

• U.S. average – 17%
• Moms – 19%

Retailer texts

• U.S. average – 29%
• Moms – 31%

So, moms are mobile, we know that. They check email and texts on their smartphones but they are also checking email via other sources as the chart above is channel agnostic.

In other words email marketing is extremely vital in engaging with moms and potentially impacting their buying decision. The words “help you shop”  and ”plan to shop” are the key phrases here kids. Anytime you use and hear the words “help” and “plan” that tells you that whatever topic you’re discussing carries with it an inherent value either in the positive or negative.

Go back again and look at the chart above from Ryan Partnership see how email scores compared to social media and shopping apps. In each instance, moms come in under the national average.

Yet for email, the opposite is true.

Finnerty, in speaking about the results of the survey from an overall perspective says that the biggest surprise that came out of the findings was how high email ranked. “Email is still a very strong tool for changing shopper behavior and satisfying shopper needs,” she said. “While it seems like an old-school tool compared to things like shopping apps and mobile payments, marketers have had years to perfect it so it achieves objectives.”

She very well could have been speaking about the mom demographic only.

5 Incredible Entrepreneurs and What We Can Learn From Them

Ilya Pozin, 

Entrepreneurship is growing at a breakneck pace. And with our technological revolution, businesses are scaling and impacting the world more than ever before. For the United States to remain competitive, innovation and entrepreneurship must remain center stage. After all, entrepreneurship has been the primary engine of job creation in our economy over the last several decades – from 1980 to 2005, new companies (less than 5 years old) were responsible for nearly all net job growth in America.

 

But it is not only jobs and wealth which entrepreneurs create. Oftentimes, business creators bring forth solutions that solve society’s most difficult problems, provide inspiration and brighten our future. To celebrate entrepreneurship and its contributions, here is a list of five truly incredible entrepreneurs and lessons we can learn from them:

1. Bill Drayton, Ashoka

Lesson Learned: Incorporate empathy into your business

Widely considered the “father of social enterprise,” Bill Drayton has extended the idea of entrepreneurship into the spheres of education, health, environment and human rights. He regards empathy as the most powerful factor in forming an organization. The ability to see, understand and feel from the perspective of others, he says, is absolutely key in the process of creating a business that will be helpful and desirable.

Empathy played a role in Drayton’s founding of Ashoka, a global enterprise that identifies and invests in social entrepreneurs across the globe. Ashoka currently operates in over 70 countries and supports the work of over 2,000 social entrepreneurs making important contributions.

2. Oleg Firer, Unified Payments

Lesson Learned: Start young

As the founder of the number one fastest growing business on the Inc. 500 list in 2012, Oleg Firer’s career is a testament to the power of starting young as an entrepreneur. Firer started his first business at 17 and worked hard through successes and failures for the next twelve years, when he founded credit card processing company Unified Payments in 2007.

By 2012, Unified Payments was processing $10 billion worth of transactions for 100,000 merchants a year – with a mind-boggling three-year growth rate of 23,646.3 percent.

Firer undoubtedly achieved his success in large part due to the hard lessons learned from being in business at such a young age.

3. Halle Tecco, Rock Health

Lesson Learned: Pick a specific niche

It seems that accelerators, incubators and other startup-boosting programs are popping up everywhere. So when Halle Tecco graduated from Harvard Business School in 2011 and set out to create an accelerator program, she picked a specific niche to tackle: healthcare technology.

Today, Tecco’s accelerator — known as Rock Health – has provided dozens of health tech startups with millions in collective funding.

Rock Health tripled its revenue last year and has solidified itself as the first accelerator exclusively focused on health startups.

Tecco’s success proves the importance of picking a specific niche and sticking to it. In the words of marketing genius Seth Godin: don’t be a generalist that is pretty good at lots of things, rather be a specialist that is great at one thing.

4. Aaron and Karine Hirschhorn, DogVacay

Lesson Learned: Use personal pain points to inspire your business idea

When husband and wife Aaron and Karine Hirschhorn couldn’t find the right overnight kennel for their dogs, they decided to take matters into their own hands and created a marketplace that pairs traveling pet owners with local pet-sitters. Since being founded last year, LA-based DogVacay has raised over $6 million in venture capital and is increasing revenue 60 percent monthly.

The online service, dubbed “the Airbnb for pets,” has already booked 50,000 nights for pets and has paid over $1 million to pet-sitters signed up with the site.

The Hirschhorns identified a simple pain point in their own lives and created a business that solved the problem. Entrepreneurs should remember that great businesses are often born from observations of and attempts to solve personal pain points.

5. Jake Nickell, Threadless

Lesson Learned: Build a community around your business

Jake Nickell founded Threadless over a decade ago on the premise that a community of individuals would contribute and determine the T-shirt designs his company would print and sell.

More than two million artists have submitted their designs to Threadless and collectively vote on which designs will go to print. The company, which is rumored to be at $30 million or more in annual revenue, sells millions of shirts each year and gives previously unknown artists a spotlight.

Nickell says his goal is to “give the creative minds of the world more opportunities to make and sell great art.” His constant focus on community building and collaboration has been at the heart of Threadless’ success.