Andrew Medal chats with Aubrey Marcus about the inception of lifestyle brand Onnit, where he derives his creativity and building a multimillion-dollar business.
2 min read
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Aubrey Marcus is the founder and CEO of Onnit, a lifestyle brand based on a holistic health philosophy he calls Total Human Optimization. Since its founding, Onnit has become an industry leader with over 250 products ranging from peak performance supplements to foods, fitness equipment and apparel.
Inspired by his lifelong experience as a multisport athlete — as well as his background in ancient philosophy — Marcus’s goal was to create a company that empowered customers to achieve their fullest human potential. With the launch of the firm’s flagship supplement Alpha BRAIN in 2011, Onnit was born.
Marcus currently hosts The Aubrey Marcus Podcast, a destination for conversations with the brightest minds in athletics, business, science and philosophy, with over 10 million downloads on iTunes. He is also the instructor of a 16-week goal-acceleration program called “Go For Your Win.”
Last year, Marcus led his first three-day seminar about relationships, called “LOVE: Practice Makes The Master,” and offered his insight to over 6,000 entrepreneurs during his roundtable discussion at the Synergy Global Forum, a two-day conference in New York City that brought together the world’s most admired business leaders, media moguls, literary icons, tech wizards and entertainers.
A sought-after public speaker and multi-platform media expert, Marcus has been featured in major media outlets such as Entrepreneur, Men’s Health and Men’s Journal, among others. His book, Own The Day, Own Your Life, was published by HarperCollins in April of 2018. In this episode of Action & Ambition, Entrepreneur Network partner Andrew Medal discusses Marcus’s vision for his life, business and spiritual quest.
This Entrepreneur Was Down to His Last Cent When He Got an Order for His First Product. Now, His Company Is Worth More Than $28 Million. May 11th, 2018andrew
Blockchain is bringing about Internet 3.0. Are you going to be involved?
5 min read
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The internet revolutionized the way the world operates, stays connected and communicates — that was Internet 1.0. Internet 2.0 then arrived, to overhaul static web pages, making them more dynamic, as well as strengthen mobile applications and the responsive web.
At this point, today, we are entering the next phase — or Internet 3.0, which many experts are calling it (check out this CoinDesk article). Internet 3.0’s central factor? Blockchain technology, which seeks to decentralize everything from banking to healthcare to real estate.
Video-streaming is poised to play a major role in the coming Blockchain world: As online content has exploded, video-streaming has become the de facto way to watch movies and videos online. It’s also led to the “cut the cable cord” movement. Blockchain will enable this trend.
The Big Three
Today, the majority of efforts in the video storage, computing, encoding, networking and streaming categories are led by three dominant brands: Amazon Web Services, or AWS (34 percent), Microsoft (11 percent) and Google Cloud (8 percent). AWS is so big that it generates the major portion of Amazon’s profits — some $10 billion-plus in annual revenue, TechCrunch says. AWS hosts data for megacorporations like Comcast, PG&E, and Netflix, which all rent space on its servers.
Streaming and encoding are areas ripe for disruption, as Blockchain technology expands storage options by spreading data across the blockchain computer network. Streaming video will be able to tap into underutilized computers through the Blockchain, which will dramatically reduce streaming’s cost, in ways detailed below.
Startups such as VideoCoin see this trend as an opportunity and are entering the arena by providing the means for video content to be distributed at a fraction of the price. Haley Minor, an investor in VideoCoin as well as CEO of Live Planet, recently shared some thoughts with me about the ways in which Blockchain technology is poised to take over online video-streaming.
The explosion of online video
Video changed everything. Where there used to be text blogs, we now have vlogs, YouTube channels, Facebook Live, Snapchat and podcast interviews.
Where images or text used to appear in digital ads, we now see animated GIFs. Live video-streaming, meanwhile, has become insanely popular across mobile apps and social media. Companies like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon have put old-fashioned video rental out of business, and DVDs are quickly becoming a thing of the past. “Video is exploding — growing by 25 percent per year,” Minor told me. “All companies now use video for marketing.” (The explosion of video-streaming and thoughts about its future use are further reinforced in this ReCode article.)
Since video usage is significantly increasing every year, improvements in the way it is stored and streamed are becoming all the more essential.
Enter the Blockchain.
Blockchain technology is an unanticipated breakthrough and its capabilities are far-reaching. Its popularity has skyrocketed with the creation of cryptocurrency, and it’s toppling established market leaders and creating opportunities for a new generation of startup entrepreneurs. “The reason anything sticks around is that it makes business more efficient,” Minor pointed out.
Specifically, Blockchain tech brings together computers all over the world in a peer-to-peer network with no central server required. The technology supports the authentication and transfer of digital data, where each “block” has pointers encoded to the preceding and following blocks. This process is private secure, and permanent, eliminating the need for middlemen, and in the case of video, cloud-storage providers.
Minor told me he intends to run the VideoCoin Network largely on unused or underutilized servers in data centers, where, he estimates, there are about 20 million servers, 30 percent of which are idle at any given time, and another 20 percent aren’t being used at all.
“You’ve got $10 billion to $20 billion of data center assets that are doing nothing,” Minor said. “This presents an opportunity to efficiently harness unused computing power to process and encode video.”
Benefits of blockchain technology in the video-streaming Industry
Current video-streaming offers have incrementally increased costs in order to store all that content out there and all those massive video files on servers. This has meant large margins for the controlling companies, and these expenses have trickled down to the content creators.
Blockchain technology, however, promises to cut down these costs and give content creators direct access to their revenue. The Blockchain also promises to offer “smart contract” technology, providing a multitude of avenues for video content to be stored and shared under a heavily encrypted and secure system.
While today’s blockchains cannot handle video-streaming due to long transaction times and limited computing capacity, there are new blockchain-backed companies being built specifically to enable those faster transactions. “Miners” (those adding transaction records to the public ledger of past transactions) will be able to load software onto their computers or servers and effectively rent their excess computer space; they’ll be incentivized by rewards in the form of cryptocurrency or tokens.
Utilizing the same philosophy as the sharing economy, miners will simply store video on their excess disc space and stream it with their excess bandwidth. This process will have the ability to lower the cost of distributing video.
A revolution is coming.
The evolution of technology will continue to change the entertainment and streaming industries. Just as the internet rendered brick and mortar video-rental stores obsolete, Blockchain technology will soon completely overthrow the current realities of video streaming –and become ubiquitous.
Current leaders in online video-streaming simply will not be able to compete — or be willing to give up market share — to a decentralized network. So, those leaders will have to adjust accordingly. That’s how the revolution will begin — and in fact already has begun.
Andrew Medal sits down with Timmy Sneaks, world-renowned creative visionary and graffiti artist, to discuss creativity in the digital age and the business behind making art.
1 min read
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Timmy Sneaks is a modern creative and graffiti artist from Boston. His unique style and brand has garnered interest from the highest level brands and influencers like Kevin Hart, Scott Disick and Robinson Cano. In this episode of Action & Ambition with Andrew Medal, Sneaks discusses his beginnings and how he turned his passion for art into a thriving business, the keys to luxury branding and the vision for his empire.
Kym Gold discusses how she disrupted an entire industry, scaled and sold her company for hundreds of millions and more.
1 min read
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Kym Gold is the co-creator of True Religion Brand Jeans; author of the business book, Gold Standard: How to Rock the World and Run an Empire, and producer for projects with a social conscience, including the documentary, SLAG: Served Like a Girl. Kym’s unwavering drive has helped her achieve success as a designer and entrepreneur. She shares tips about life, business and selling her company for more than $800 million.
Humanity has come a long way in teaching technology how to appear more human. Now, technology is teaching itself.
4 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
With the rise of the artificial neural network, which mirrors the interconnected nodes of the human brain, artificial intelligence is ready to graduate to a new level.
Artificial neural networks (ANN) are programmed to be cognizant of patterns. ANN can read human speech and synthesize the use of specific words to identify subtle meanings in human communication. The implications are particularly impressive once processing speed is taken into account.
The (until now) uniquely human ability to understand the complexities of language, multiplied by the speed of computational efficiency, results in a very effective response program.
I know, I know: Your mind is blown; (yes, AI can now write puns like that). But, on a practical note, did you know that AI can also improve customer service?
AI’s benefits for customer service
“When we give our machine-learning algorithm access to historical customer service data, it begins to identify patterns and learn in a human-like way,” Mikhail Naumov told me. He’s co-founder and president of DigitalGenius (a frontrunner in the AI and customer service industry), and we were speaking about the future of AI. “What is created by this process,” Naumov said, “is an AI model that is trained on a company’s specific customer-service data-set.
“This intelligence generates automated-response suggestions to customer queries and gives human customer-service professionals a partner to help handle a growing volume of requests.”
The implications for the customer service industry are profound. Data can be fed to a machine-learning program, which creates the neural network, or the “intelligence” behind AI. That intelligence helps humans to better understand customers and take care of their needs with greater speed and precision.
Industry experts agree that intelligence-backed digital assistants represent the change that’s needed for the customer-service sector. As Dan Miller, the founder of Opus Research, commented in Medium: “The future of personalized customer experience is inevitably tied to ‘Intelligent assistance.'”
The benefit for entrepreneurs
Communication is one of the top factors in quality customer service, a fact reflected by this SurveyMonkey study. Companies want to take advantage of software that will give them a platform to address the needs of their clients more efficiently. This is especially true now that customer service has migrated to texting, where mass communications can become bottlenecked. Support agents cannot process the workload.
But, alternately, instead of a handful of people working to respond to an entire client base, there are AI programs that can filter communications and suggest appropriate responses, cutting down the time it takes for those agents to address inquiries.
The evolution of AI
All of this is magnified by the fact that these systems are continuously improving, learning in real time from collected data. Like the ideal employee, because of deep learning algorithms, they just keep getting better at their job. AI would be nowhere without ANN.
“The deep learning methodology allows companies to unlock value from their historical customer service data,” Naumov explained. “By scouring through mountains of historical data and watching how human customer-service representatives responded to thousands of different queries, deep learning can create the intelligence necessary for the AI to be useful.
“In customer service,” Naumov continued, “that means it can detect sentiment, urgency, type of request, details about the case and so on. It can also recommend answers to agents, saving them valuable time. [These things] help companies scale their contact center while responding to a growing volume of requests.”
Current customer-service departments are bogged down by requests that result in an hour or longer queue times for customers. According to Alexandre Lebrun of Facebook’s artificial intelligence division, quoted by Business Insider, “The better we get [at artificial intelligence], the less time you spend talking to customer service. It’s a gain for companies, but it’s also a gain for personal life.”
Many customer service requests are repetitive and easily could be handled by an AI-based response system. Indeed, data and the neural network will make AI the best coworker the support desk has seen yet.
“Do-it-for-me” is the next evolution of the on-demand economy.
5 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Today’s consumers value their time more than ever. With the proliferation of on-demand apps, there is virtually no need to wait in lines or even to leave your house if you’re that much of a homebody.
You know the drill: Amazon for your groceries, Netflix for date night, Handy for that light bulb you just can’t reach and even on-demand car services to care for the car you hardly ever drive because you ride-share everywhere. Yeah, welcome to the future.
Yet, as with everything, change is constant. So, if you think today’s adults require instant gratification, think about the high demands the next generation will have. For this reason, those building a business they hope will last should consider shifting from providing goods to providing … services.
Spend money to buy time
A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested that people who spend money on time-saving services feel happier. “What we found is that people who spent money to buy time reported being almost one full point higher on our 10-point [happiness] ladder, compared to people who did not use money to buy time,” wrote Elizabeth Dunn, an author of the study and a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. “People from across the income spectrum benefited from ‘buying time.’”
One consumer expert has labeled this phenomenon the “do-it-for-me” movement. That expert is Scot Wingo, cofounder of ChannelAdvisor and CEO of Spiffy, an on-demand car care service. Wingo says that the future of consumerism is no longer do-it-yourself (DIY), but do-it-for-me, or DIFM.
DIFM
“The do-it-for-me consumer mindset disavows DIY,” Wingo told me in an interview. “The DIFM consumer discovered the power of convenience through the on-demand economy and never looked back,” he continued. “[These consumers] prioritize spending time with their kids or their hobbies over mowing the yard, cleaning the house or washing their cars. Importantly, the DIFM consumer is willing to spend money to save time.”
Others are starting to agree. To research the future of the on-demand economy, I listened to an interview with Vikrum Aiyer aired on the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative podcast. Aiyer is the strategic communications and public policy lead for Postmates, Inc., the on-demand logistics and delivery platform.
During the podcast, Aiyer explained that Postmates had actually seen its retail partners increase their sales three to four times over their previous level once it — the company — started using on-demand delivery.
“This goes well beyond food, because we’re actually servicing hardware stores and beyond,” Aiyer told his interviewers. “And that’s actually because of a new reach of their customer potential, in which geographically if they were located on one side of town, they’re now reaching customers at another side of town.
“This validates,” he continued, “the thesis that the on-demand economy and automation are going to really change, and are changing, the way commerce is connecting communities.”
The lesson for entrepreneurs
So how should entrepreneurs and business leaders respond? They should target consumers who are willing to spend money to save time. As entrepreneurs, we can use that information to shape marketing messages, ad copy, new products. Whatever product we’re creating or selling, we should incorporate into it the fact that consumers are willing to spend money to save time.
“When you look at GDP in the U.S., products or goods represents 20 percent of GDP, and services represent the other 80 percent,” Wingo told me. “Using those broad strokes, I think [the trend for] ‘services go digital’ could be four times as large an opportunity as ecommerce.
“In the next five years, I think it will feel as archaic as using the Yellow Pages to have to ‘call’ a service provider. Your phone will be the remote control for your life, and you will have a myriad of products and services available to you at your whim in a completely transparent and digital way.”
While some detractors will argue that DIFM is a luxury exclusive to the wealthy, that’s not actually the case. DIFM is beneficial for anyone who can benefit from time saved. “We thought the effects might only hold up for people with quite a bit of disposable income, but to our surprise, we found the same effects across the income spectrum,” Dunn shared.
Giving consumers the ability to ‘buy back’ an increasingly scarce resource — their time — is the future of consumerism. Sounds a bit like the sci-fi thriller In Time (lLOL), but in order for on-demand companies to move past the ‘Uber of…’ era, a huge market opportunity will consist of consumers looking for DIFM options.
“Moving people up on the ladder of life satisfaction is not an easy thing to do,” Dunn said. “So, if altering slightly how people are spending their money could move them up a full rung, it’s something we really want to understand, and perhaps encourage people to do.”
Andrew Medal sits down with rapper Nipsey Hussle to discuss how gang life catapulted his success, his latest album ‘Victory Lap’ and his various businesses, including a blockchain-specific startup.
1 min read
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Nipsey Hussle is arguably hip-hop’s hottest star right now, with his much-anticipated album release of Victory Lap. Hussle has been making his name from a steady stream of mixtapes including 2013’s Crenshaw, which he sold at $100 a pop, netting $100,000 in the process. He’s collaborated with artists like YG, Diddy and Jeezy. His record label All In Records recently partnered with Atlantic Records to increase his distribution, and he’s turning the industry on its head by owning the rights to his music. He’s an entrepreneur in every sense with multiple businesses including his record label and his clothing brand The Marathon Company, and he’s even an early investor in some blockchain-based startups. Hussle kicks off Season 2 of Action & Ambition with Entrepreneur Network partner Andrew Medal.
Just because the number of women in technology-related fields has always been dramatically lower than that of men doesn’t mean that things will stay that way.
4 min read
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about nine influential women in blockchain who received a lot of praise and positive feedback. So I decided to write a follow-up post with a new list.
The latest tech boom has revolved around blockchain and cryptocurrencies. And while this brand-new field is still heavily dominated by men, women are quickly closing in and making big names for themselves. The blockchain space, in fact, is the perfect place for women who want to make a big impact to get involved.
Here are eight women currently crushing it in the blockchain and crypto space and serving as inspiration for budding female techs and entrepreneurs.
1. Piper Moretti is the CEO of The Crypto Realty Group. Her company specializes in real estate transactions using cryptocurrency. Moretti is a licensed international luxury realtor at Christie’s International Luxury Real Estate, one of the world’s largest luxury real estate brokerages, and she has a passion for the crypto space. She helps clients find or sell property, using cryptocurrency, anywhere throughout Los Angeles (and beyond).
2. Manju Mohan is the co-CEO and co-founder of Ionixx Technologies, a company that helps businesses turn their ideas into reality using technology. Ionixx focuses on mobile and web technologies that help digitize businesses. One of its services is working with companies on developing strategic approaches to implement blockchain technologies. One of its most recent projects revolved around applying blockchain technology to the process of educational certificate verification for businesses and recruitment managers.
3. Mihriban Ersin Tekmen is co-founder/ COO at Colendi. Colendi is a cross-border decentralized credit-scoring platform using Blockchain technology to provide a secure and democratic service for the fintech world, and transforming the definition of banking. She is also the co-founder of Fintechtime, an independent publication that offers the latest news, insights and analysis of the global fintech market.
4. Shadan Azali is vice president of investor relations for Dispatch Labs, a business-ready blockchain protocol that empowers industries to create scalable, secure and decentralized peer-to-peer applications. Prior to joining Dispatch Labs, Azali led corporate philanthropy initiatives at Ally Bank and the Bank of America. Azali’s role straddles two fields that traditionally lack female representation: finance and technology. However, she publicly expresses hope that the combination of more women stepping into leadership roles and the continual support and mentorship for young girls entering math and computer science programs will bring more opportunities for women in technology.
5. Elizabeth McCauley, a member of the board of directors at the Bitcoin Foundation and advisor at the BitGive Foundation and Coin Congress, got her introduction to blockchain and crypto while working as an assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives. During that time, McCauley was involved in the adoption of bitcoin in the United States.
6. Maxine Ryan is the COO and co-founder at Bitspark, the world’s first cash-in, cash-out blockchain remittance platform. She developed her passion for bitcoin while pursuing a degree in international relations in Australia. Ryan’s interest in blockchain and cryptocurrency was so intense that she dropped out of school just six months before graduation to pursue her dream. Shortly thereafter, she returned to Hong Kong and launched her business.
7. Rachel Wolfson is a blockchain guru and journalist who writes for Bitcoin magazine and has contributed to Forbes, Dataconomy Media, Elite Daily and more. Wolfson also serves as board advisor for a blockchain-based supply-chain management company and as board observer for a number of other blockchain companies. She was recently named by Next Web as one of the top five women working to change the world of crypto.
8. Emily Arth is the VP of operations at Constellation. Having worked as the right-hand aide to the CEO of a $300 million company — North American Power — Arth is a powerhouse of corporate leadership and management. Driving operational excellence and organization at Rakugo, Arth brings years of experience that will drive growth and success.
These women (among many others) are making a big impact in the blockchain and crypto space as well as forging a path to help other women get involved. Just because the number of women in technology-related fields has always been dramatically lower than that of men doesn’t mean that things will stay that way. Blockchain technology is poised to disrupt many industries in the coming years, and women will play a big role in the revolution.
Create new value offerings using blockchain and augmented reality.
5 min read
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There’s no denying that digital marketing has become an integral part of business success — everyone’s business success. Companies investing in building an online presence have a much better chance of expanding their brands than do those clinging to a “brick-and-mortar” mentality.
In fact, the latter companies are falling by the wayside, a point underlined by the the facts outlined in this Trellis article:
Last year, 2017, saw an increase of 13 percent in ecommerce sales over the previous year. The prediction is that this growth will increase even further, to 17 percent, by 2022.
Some 80 percent of Americans surveyed have made an online purchase over the past 30 days; over half said they preferred online transactions to visiting retail outlets.
While ecommerce grew during 2017, traditional retail stores saw hundreds of closures. Some nine major companies declared bankruptcy. Pressure from online competition is reaching industries that only a short time ago felt immune.
Convinced that online sales are the way to go? Here are three strategies for pushing sales using new technologies.
Use blockchain to redesign supply-chain economics.
Technology and unique value offerings should be inherent to your overall strategy.SHOP is a business I know that provides a unique example of how to leverage a new offering using technology.
The company is a blockchain-based retail platform created by John Wantz (formerly of the Target store chain) and Jamie O’Shea (influential in marketing brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, Levi Strauss and Johnson & Johnson).
The SHOP system is designed to act as an information marketplace where users acquire brand tokens in exchange for sharing preferences, purchase histories, profiles on their preferred styles and other data.
The data is then stored on the SHOP platform and used to improve interactions and experiences between shoppers and company brands. This radical redesign of supply-chain economics provides a new type of alignment that the system has never before seen. Making data available empowers SHOP members to create new kinds of value exchanges and fair approaches to margin and price; and it represents an opportunity to drive innovation in unforeseeable ways.
Ounie Phakousonh, CTO of Henry.tax, and a marketplace developer, for one, is excited to see how blockchain is going to enhance and improve the marketplace model. As Phakousonh told me, “Blockchain opens up countless new ways to enhance development and even users’ experiences. As a long-time blockchain activist, it’s great to finally see the power of blockchain improving marketplaces and e-ommerce experiences.”
In short, technology can provide a competitive advantage for any business, especially one scaling an ecommerce company.
Harness augmented reality for use by influencers and brands.
With the release of augmented reality (AR) developer kits by both Apple and Google in 2017, and the advance of hardware devices, AR is poised to hit the mainstream in the coming years. Already, Fluffr is using blockchain technology to disrupt the AR space. Its platform rewards users with tokens for the purpose of interacting with and promoting AR experiences by influencers and brands.
Dave Lee, partner at Brilliant Investment Group, explained to me that he’s excited to bring the technology to the Asian markets, because they’ve had disruptive AR tech experiences, but none that have fused cryptocurrency with AR. Lee said he believes that blockchain technology harnessed with augmented reality is going to create mass adoption across various Asian markets, and he’s excited to pave the way with Fluffr.
In regards to the Fluffr platform, two types of tokens are collected (Fluffs and Carats) in a way that’s similar to the characters in Pokemon Gó. The difference is that these tokens can then be exchanged for real currency or exclusive prizes through the Fluffr marketplace. The idea is to encourage people to use AR apps and engage in AR experiences, and get paid for it.
The result is an entirely new and immersive ecommerce experience for brands and consumers using the tech. Plus, with the release of Fluffr and other AR-focused platforms, the barrier to entry for companies to create these experiences for their consumers has become extremely low.
That’s why brands have to ensure that their databases contain real people who have given their permission to receive promotions. One such company is YouGov Direct, a product of YouGov, which works to help brands gain more value from their advertising campaigns through its blockchain-based platform and ad network. Essentially, if brands “know” rather than “assume” that consumers are interested in their products, they can provide those people with actual solutions — rather than waste ad dollars on the wrong people.
Want to get ahead in ecommerce? The bottom line for achieving success in today’s increasingly technological age is to utilize the various advantages and tools available, orchestrating them into a symphony of performance success.
For some companies, blockchain-based security applications are enticing; others are simply excited about blockchain’s potential for helping them create transparent marketplaces for their customers.
Whatever the motive, the immutable and transparent nature of the blockchain is what has so many people racing to incorporate it into their IT strategies. Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum, interviewed by Newsweek explained why more and more companies are taking note: “There won’t ever be a single powerful entity that controls the system or controls gatekeeping into the system the way blockchain does,” Lubin said.
As a decentralized platform for innovation, blockchain technology, over time, will revolutionize virtually every industry. First movers will have the distinct advantage of figuring out how blockchain can get their business to the next level. They’ll also figure out earlier than their competition does the challenges that come with any new IT integration.
Following are examples of industries that are already adopting blockchain solutions with a great degree of success.
Fund administration
The challenges associated with fund administration are extensive. Currently, most companies rely on outdated software or ungainly paper processes. Gary Markham, CEO of aXpire a blockchain-based solution for expenditure management, described the traditional challenges in this company white paper. “Normally,” he wrote, “businesses have to spend a lot of time sorting through paper, PDFs and spreadsheets to process documents by hand.
“Smart contracts use software code to automate tasks, thereby shaving hours off a range of business processes.”
One of the biggest challenges in fund administration is tracking and managing expenditures. Blockchain solutions could solve that issue completely by reducing data inaccuracies, improving interoperability of various enterprise applications and creating more transparent expenditure tracking.
Continued Markham: “For fund managers, financial industry leaders or any regulated group, the ability to show a regulator a report of [expenditures] in real time, having spent far less time and money gathering that data relative to legacy solutions, is immensely powerful.”
Information services
As the internet has become inseparable from everyday life and been transferred to our mobile phones whose access is at our fingertips, users have sought instant access to their favorite websites. According to this report by Shopify, page-load speed is one of the most important factors for consumers buying something online.
Even Google decided to incorporate website speed into its algorithm ranking factors as explained by TechCrunch.The world’s most popular search engine considers a page to be “slow” if it takes longer than 1.5 seconds to load!
Miao Zhicheng, a blockchain developer for NOIA Network, believes that blockchain will transform the global internet infrastructure as explained in that company’s white paper.
“The problems of latency, low internet availability and sluggish pace of digital-content progress due to high content delivery costs will soon be over,” Zhicheng wrote. “NOIA Network is solving them by creating a widely dispersed and decentralized content delivery network. This network is formed by household computers and data centers around the globe.”
Participants can share their idle bandwidth and storage resources in exchange for NOIA tokens,” Zhicheng wrote, claiming that, “Every single transaction is automated and seamless only because of smart contracts enabled by blockchain technology.”
Other technology experts, too, believe that blockchain will power us into Web 3.0, by offering the fast speed and decentralization they say should have been developed at the beginning of the internet age.
Real estate
Real estate is an incredibly complex industry with a lot of moving parts. The participation of buyers, sellers, agents and brokers, and the processes of title and escrow make real estate transactions slow and potentially risky.
Blockchain can reduce that risk and increase trust in a number of ways. With home purchases, most people rely on title companies to verify real estate transactions and ownership. There has been much debate about how blockchain could solve this problem, but a recentNewsweek report detailing the example of a home title being issued on the Ethereum blockchain showed a solution: It’s only a matter of time, the article said, before government agencies start embracing blockchain as a valid alternative to existing title processes.
The technology can also be used to conduct transactions using various cryptocurrencies. Recent reports, including this Los Angeles Times article, have detailed how all types of homes being placed on the market for cryptocurrency rather than fiat currencies. This demonstrates a demand for the option to buy homes with digital assets over traditional ones.
Banking
At this point, banks that remain somewhat skeptical about the new technology are only slowly changing their tune regarding cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Barclays, J.P. MorganChase, Goldman Sachs and other big players are investigating potential applications.
In Europe, the banking industry is shifting from closed unilateral systems to a more decentralized “bank as a platform” approach. The process, Open Banking, is explained in this Medium article. Recent legislation has forced banks to allow third-parties access to client data via APIs.
Different banks, deposit and insurance accounts, crypto holdings and exchanges can now be reached using a single interface. From the consumer’s perspective, this degree of access decentralizes banking services, in a secure and user-friendly manner.
While other platforms suggest direct blockchain usage, ORCA, a customizable open-banking platform connecting crypto and fiat services, reverses things, aggregating only third-party services, but storing no data. “It’s the first time in history when open banking allows [us] to combine traditional banking and cryptocurrency services, “ Natan Avidan, CEO of the ORCA Alliance, told Medium.
Escrow
Blockchain can also make escrow a thing of the past, not just for real estate, but for all industries that work with any kind of escrow middle man.
New York City Department of Education attorney Tsui S. Ng recently explained the benefits to the American Bar Association. “In securities trading,” he said, “it currently takes several days to transfer assets, thereby increasing counterparty risk. Smart contracts that use blockchain technology could shorten settlement times and mitigate such risk.”
By creating an automated, incorruptible and instantaneous contract, blockchain solutions will be able to eliminate costly intermediaries and the risks associated with drawn-out transactions.
Legal
Businesses are getting more comfortable with the idea of digitally secure contracts, to facilitate deals in real time. This means law firms will need to become intimately acquainted with the technology to advise clients on the best ways to structure various transactions on the blockchain.
That’s precisely why the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance has worked so hard to get law firms invested in the technology. To date, the alliance has addedover 14 firms as members, according to this Coin Telegraph article, to help drive development and adoption of blockchain solutions for the legal industry.
As Aaron Wright, chair of the alliance’s Legal Industry Working Group, told Coin Telegraph, “Lawyers are poised to serve as the catalysts for blockchain technology, and the Legal Working Group will serve as a neutral space to explore blockchain-based legal technology, develop standards for ‘smart’ legal agreements, support emerging enterprise use cases, and tackle important policy issues raised by this new, impactful technology.”
What business owners should know
Business owners in any of these industries need to start incorporating blockchain into their strategies so as not to fall behind. One of the best ways is to hire a firm that has blockchain built into every aspect of its service offering. Just make sure the company knows the technology through and through. Larger companies might consider hiring a chief blockchain officer or placing a blockchain director under the CTO.
They should ensure that blockchain development is an integral advantage for their businesses — not just a cool-sounding tech phrase.
