The 6 Essential Ways to Market Your Updated Brand

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A brand redevelopment can be an exciting time for the business, as it could generate a superb return on investment. If you want to showcase your new image to a target audience successfully, here are the six essentials ways to market your updated brand.

Communicate with Your Customers

 

 

Before you launch a new look to the world, you must communicate with your current customers that you are planning to positively transform the brand, and that the change will not come at the expense of your existing services. Officially announce an upcoming brand redevelopment on your website’s blog, email newsletter, social media profiles, and press releases. Doing so will prevent frustration or confusion, and it could even build excitement ahead of the re-brand launch.

Redevelop Your Company Website

 

 

You need to do much more than change your logo when re-branding your business. The company will also need to change its website to complement the new design and tone of voice. However, you must ensure it continues to be aesthetically pleasing and offers easy navigation, and it should even be better to use than the old site. This will ensure you continue to provide ease of use and readability, which can increase your site’s conversion rate.

Apply the New Logo to Company Vehicles

 

 

Ensure every business vehicle adorns professional vinyl wraps on the re-brand launch day. This will allow your business to catch pedestrian and drivers’ attention immediately, so you can start generating an instant return on your investment. The more eye-catching and professional the design on your fleet of vehicles, the more likely people will want to learn more about your business and buy your goods and services.

Change Your Company Uniforms

 

 

If you run a customer-facing business, it is an intelligent decision to change the company uniforms to avoid brand confusion. The garments must, therefore, feature the new logo and the clothing colors should reflect the new image. You must also ensure your employees’ appearance and attitude reflects the brand. For example, you may want them to appear professional, friendly, and helpful.

Update Social Media

 

 

Social media will provide the perfect forum to inform the world about your recent re-brand. You must, therefore, ensure every aspect of each profile represents your new image. So, you may want to delete unprofessional photos from your feed and update each page with your new logo, business photographs, and tone of voice. Also, you will want to publish the re-brand post at the right time and date to maximize your reach and increase your brand awareness.

Change Your Printed Materials

 

 

It is the little things you might easily overlook when re-branding your business, such as your printed materials. Maintain your professionalism and avoid mixed messages by ensuring you change important printed materials, which you might pass on to customers, clients, business associates, or suppliers. For example, you may need to update your company business cards, stationery, brochures, plus more.

The Only Social Media Checklist for B2B Marketers

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Social media marketing is a tough game. It seems very simple on the surface, but as one dives into the technical nuances of the practice, it gets harder and harder. Most people do not realize that social media marketing involves a lot of number crunching and technical feasibility analysis for success. The toughness goes up by a major factor in the world of B2B marketing.

Some people think that social media is not the ideal place for marketing in the B2B segment. However, the people who’ve actually tried social media for B2B claim otherwise. 54% of the total B2B marketers claim that they have generated leads from their social media marketing efforts. (Source)

If you too want to start generating leads from your social media marketing efforts, you can follow this B2B Social Media Strategy Tips.

Interact with Your Audience Regularly

The winners on the social media platform know how to interact with other people exceptionally well in the virtual world. They know that the more they interact, the more connections they will make. In fact, the LinkedIn platform, which is considered as one of the best B2B social media platforms, adds new people to your network as connections.

Posting regular content on the platform is not enough. You need to like, share as well as comment on posts by other people to gain popularity on social media.

Post Regularly on Your Profile

The only way you can stay in touch with your audience is by posting regular content on your profile. Original content is truly valued on most social media platforms, especially in the B2B segment. You can create new articles and blog posts and share them actively on all your social media platforms. There are several tools on the internet like Slack that allow you to post on multiple social media profiles with a single click. Use these B2B social media marketing ideas wisely to save time and post regularly.

Collect and Share Content from Various Sites

For new organizations hiring, a new full-time content developer might not be a viable option. In fact, these organizations should rather invest their money in growing the business. To post regular content these organizations can hire a freelance content developer at dirt-cheap prices or share content from other blogs. Just make sure that when you do share content from other blogs, you give them the deserved amount of credit for it.

By sharing collating and sharing content from other bloggers, you can easily build great contacts in the industry. Most people will appreciate you sharing their content, especially if you have developed a good readership on your profile.

Schedule Bulk Content for Regular Posting

Developing a fresh article/blog is time-consuming. Also, getting a professional content writer to do that for you is extremely costly. Instead of this, you can easily generate bulk content from a decent team of content writers on various relevant topics. Now you can use online tools like Jetpack and Schedulio to post the content automatically and regularly. These tools have a simple and intuitive calendar layout that will help you keep a track of these posts.

Keep Tabs on Activities of Competitors

The B2B segment is extremely competitive due to lucrative deal sizes. Most people do not leverage this competition the right way. By keeping tabs on your most successful competitors, you can easily get on the fast track to success. Follow the footsteps of these successful competitors to get an edge on the market space quickly.

You can create blogs/articles for your social media profile along the similar lines and get a number of views. Just make sure that you do not copy the content or it will be flagged by the search engine as plagiarized content.

Keep a Track of Latest Trends and Updates

The best digital marketers do not create a wave in the world of digital marketing. Instead, they know how to ride the high waves created by someone else. They can leverage exciting news/trends in the most effective manner to create customer-friendly content around it.

You can easily keep tabs on the latest trends and updates effectively with your social media profiles. Facebook, LinkedIn as well as Twitter show you the most trending topics in the world in a dedicated section. Leverage this knowledge to create content that will attract more and more prospects to your business.

Have a Regular Conversation with Industry Leaders

The best part about social media platforms like LinkedIn is that you can interact with some of the top minds of the industry for free. You will be surprised by the number of people who would actually want to help you succeed. Some of the best leaders know that the only way to growth is helping others. They would willingly give you their time and knowledge if you approach them correctly.

On a free LinkedIn account, you can send up to 15 inmails every month. Utilize these inmails very carefully and send it to 15 new people every month to grow your network.

Create and Launch Interactive Campaigns

Textual and graphical campaigns are boring. Plain ads do not attract people anymore. You need to think creatively to stay one step ahead of the crowd. With the help of a professional digital marketer, you can create and launch powerful interactive campaigns that people would love to see.

A professional digital marketer will help you leverage the most intriguing features of a social media platform so that you can easily captivate the attention of the top decision-makers in the business.

Remarket/Repost Old Content

You do not realize the power of old content till you repost it. This article on medium shows the power of reposting old content. It shows how an author of a post on Medium got only 400-500 views on the original post. However, the repost of the same article got him over 1200 views. Sometimes, the relevancy of your old content changes with time. You can leverage this change in relevancy and repost the content so that more people read it.

If you are reposting the same content, make sure that you spice it up with some more images, links and statistics. This way, the regular readers of your post will feel that you are truly investing your time in creating fresh posts for them.

Set Micro and Macro Goals Regularly

It is easy for a novice digital marketer to just go with the flow. Both, latching onto a failed strategy and giving up on a good strategy are bad in the B2B segment. To make sure that this does not happen on a regular basis, the professional digital marketers create several micro and macro goals with their campaign. These b2b social media goals help these marketers streamline their overall efforts in a coherent manner and stick to a strict timeline.

Analyse Performance Through Online Tools

Once you have set up your goals, you can analyse the performance of your marketing campaigns with online tools. Tools like Google Analytics can help you track the performance of a social media campaign very effectively. Other tools like Facebook Pixel can help you measure the metrics of a campaign and redefine it in a more comprehensible manner.
Regular evaluation of your campaigns along with the best optimization practices will help you make the best use of the limited online resources.

Diversify Your Marketing Attempts

It is important that you do not lay an exclusive focus on a singular marketing campaign. In fact, you must diversify your attempts to include posting on multiple social media platforms. This is the fastest manner to grow your reach in the realm of social media marketing. With such posting queues, you can easily make sure that your content reaches a good amount of audience in the stipulated amount of time.

Balance Between Informational and Promotional Content

You need to balance the informational and promotional aspects of the content very neatly to generate a good amount of interest and profit out of the venture. An exclusive focus on the informational content will not bring true value to your business. Similarly, an exclusive focus on the promotional content will render the overall post useless for a majority of the audience.

Follow the best social media post writing practices to ensure that your content stays relevant to the audience’s needs while still focusing on your business.

Keep a Specific Budget for Social Media Aside Every Quarter

Most organizations do not generate the right amount of results out of their B2B social media marketing best practice efforts because they either over-invest or under-invest in their ventures. You need to set a specific budget aside for social media marketing at the beginning of every quarter. When you do this, you will easily derive the necessary amount of value in a short period.

Follow this checklist diligently to make sure that your B2B social media marketing strategy reap the necessary results. Understand that social media marketing is a game for the long run. You cannot expect to see results within a single day. In fact, sometimes you have to wait several weeks/months for it to reap results.

Your Global Businesses’ Best Partner

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It’s always exciting to have your business grow to a global business, enjoying more success and broadening your clients. However, there’s a few challenges you’ll need to face when taking your business to global levels. Beyond just language barriers, you have to figure out the best way to market and appeal to global clients with which you’ve not dealt before. In order to achieve success in making your business global, you’re going to need some assistance. Translation services can help you boost your web presence, better communicate with global clients, and even translate your important documents for you. Through this article, we hope to explain to you how translation services can prove to be your best partner in the endeavor to take your business global.

Translating Important Documents

If you’re thinking about growing your business and making it globally available and operable, you’re going to need to translate your important documents so they can read them. Your contracts, invoices, service descriptions, and more will need to be translated accurately by a fluent speaker of your target language. Contracts are important and legally binding documents that shouldn’t be taken lightly. You already go to great pains to ensure your contracts are written adequately and accurately, why would you throw all that away to save a little bit of money and rely on a computer translating program? If you’re going to succeed at taking your business to global heights, you’ll need to handle the translation of your important documents properly.

Translating Web Content and Marketing Materials

If you want your new potential pool of clients to be aware of your business and what you can offer them, you’ll need to not only retool your marketing strategy (which we’ll talk in greater detail about later), but also translate your ads, web content, press releases, and the like. These translations need to be done accurate and well. By far, the best option for this is to utilize translation services from a company with reliable and fluent translators. This ensures that your content looks professional and authentic and that you won’t run the risk of losing out on customers or clients. When you rely on a computer translating program, you run the risk of your content coming across as being unprofessional which could even cause you to lose clients.

Helping with Your Marketing Strategy

A lot of businesses providing these translation services also offer SEO services for your website and web content. While translating the content alone is important, it’s crucial to remember that the same keywords that work in your country, won’t necessarily work globally, even when their translated directly. With the assistance of translation services, you can revamp your marketing strategy and keywords with the guidance of a fluent speaker who understands the culture of your target area as well.

Growing your business to offer services globally can be exciting, scary, and complicated. By utilizing the assistance of translation services, you can have all of your important content translated accurately by a fluent speaker and boost your website’s SEO effectively.

A Brave New Blockchain World

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Blockchain is a technology working its way into the ether since 2009, but has taken on a life of its on in 2017.  It entered most people’s consciousness in the form of bitcoin which emerged from a paper published anonymously under the pen name of Satoshi Nakamoto.  The paper’s concept resonated quickly and deeply, forging a community of developers determined to make it real.

The product, bitcoin, is the first cryptocurrency applying block chain technology.  It is the potential of the database (or some call it the ledger) that makes this technology so interesting. Bitcoin and its siblings who followed are just one application of the blockchain concept.

Read and learn more about cryptocurrency.

Blockchain is a solution to add uniqueness to digital assets and allowing trusted buying and selling of digital goods between unknown partners.

Is bitcoin money?

The simple answer is no, although this is an ongoing argument.  The issue of what constitutes money is an abstract conundrum that still has economists arguing over the criteria for inclusion. Just as gold is marketable, so is Bitcoin, and as neither are any use for buying a cup of coffee they compare well.

The gold miner sells gold at the prevailing market price, so will a bitcoin miner. Just as people buy gold because they hope to exchange it for something else in the future, people buy bitcoin. The analogy extends, just as extracting gold by mining becomes harder and harder as supplies in the Earth’s crust run low, bitcoin becomes harder and harder to extract as miners reach the theoretical 21 million bitcoin limit.

A relative measure of how difficult it is to find a new block. The difficulty is adjusted periodically as a function of how much hashing power has been deployed by the network of miners.

Bitcoin kind of outsmarts gold because we know 3 of every 4 bitcoins that will ever exist have already been mined, whereas new gold seam discovery devalues the world’s gold. There are stockpiles of inactive bitcoin, just as there are stockpiles of gold, and so the recent tripling of bitcoin valuation is open to the same market influences of mass sell-off, just as gold valuation is influenced by massive sell-off of gold supplies.

Bitcoin’s launch paper: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, clearly shared its intention to be spent and there are some 100,00 merchants worldwide [1] who will accept bitcoin payments, such as: Shopify, Microsoft, PayPal, and Virgin Galactic [2], but still no coffee, at least not yet.

What is blockchain technology?

Blockchain is simply an asset registry. A digital ledger. The asset can be a car, house, currency, contract, equity or anything of value. Bitcoin and its siblings are simply one application of the blockchain concept.

“The blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.”
Don & Alex Tapscott, authors Blockchain Revolution (2016)

A blockchain is a public digital register or ledger shared by numerous parties over a distributed network. The blockchain records and stores every transaction that occurs within the network, creating an un-editable and auditable transaction history.

Every party of the network has a copy of the register and therefore if anyone presents data that does not match, it will be rejected. The transactions are linked with a public key, but that cannot be traced back to the originator who holds the private key. Therefore, there is a public record of transactions and transfer of ownership, whilst retaining the privacy of the owner.

The blockchain process infographic

What is so special about that?

Blockchain technology allows databases to be both secure and distributed. Blockchain’s beauty is in its resilience, because a wide peer group shares a blockchain there is no single point of failure, allowing it to survive the loss of parties, temporarily or permanently.

It is secure due to its resilience, transparency and immutability. It is transparent because the blockchain database is visible to the participants, allowing a simple auditing trail. It is immutable because it is impossible to make changes to the blockchain without detection by the other peers, reducing the opportunities of fraud. It is permanent because the final data block is write-only, there is no amending the data [2].

It is revolutionary because of the nature of the peer to peer exchange. Two parties are able to make an exchange without the intervention or oversight of a third party.

“With blockchain technology, we can create a version of Wall Street where no one can cheat and where all kinds of mischief cannot even occur. Crypto currency gives us a way to communicate value that’s outside the control of any government mandarin, and I think that’s good.”
Patrick Byrne – CEO, Overstock.com

How is it useful?

Peer-to-peer exchange can benefit from blockchain, allowing secure access to cloud, to encrypted file transfers and communication logs. Imagine a country such as Indonesia, where every cell phone is connected, transferring smart contracts on behalf of their users. Everyone else’s phone can be a node holding and updating the registry, if you are off to the countryside for a while, don’t worry, as long as a few visitors travel through, someone’s phone will pick up your changes and requests and pass it onto the rest of the cloud once they get back to town. This peer-to-peer exchange offers a real opportunity for innovation. You can vote using blockchain, register assets and write contracts. You could do a combination of the above.

Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are the programs that encode certain conditions and outcomes. The software has already been adapted to allow creation of invoices that pay themselves when a shipment arrives. Share certificates can be created which send their owners dividends once profits reach a threshold level. Such contracts allow escrow services to be enabled with near-instant submission times at marginal costs.

What would the child of smart contracts and voting look like? Imagine votes that are activated when certain conditions are met. A power company wants to build a power plant. You set up a smart contract that says: “I’ll vote yes for the power plant, if they put six solar panels on every house in my street and allow us all to sell that electricity back to the grid”.

“Study how to write smart contracts, which is the basic unit of programming a blockchain for business purposes. It is the equivalent of being taught HTML and Java during the early Internet days. And master how to create assets or tokenize existing ones on a blockchain.”
William Mougayar – author: The Business Blockchain

Whilst your Kenyan friend chuckles as you describe the American banking system to them, then chuckles some more and sends their mum some money, that arrives before you finish explaining that the quickest way to transfer money in America is by applying the que-withdraw-que-deposit system. Smart contracts offer an enormous potential for countries, such as Kenya to leapfrog, just as they have with their banking systems, (thank you very much).

Smart contracts have already entered into the legal system. The future may see a smart contract system for every song streamed, with royalties allocated and paid immediately upon file activation. An asset registry of ownership for works of art may protect stolen art from resale. Ascribe, for example, has entered the intellectual property arena offering services to register digital art [3].

They can also be applied in a more mundane arena: you want to make a sports bet with your brother, but you don’t trust him as far as you could throw a kettlebell? Etherparty plans to handle the technical heavy lifting, to make setting up a smart contract as simple as posting a blog on a WordPress site.

Business practices

There are areas of industry ripe for blockchain disruption. Businesses with huge auditing-trails, such as the freight industry, can reinvent their business processes. All the goods moving in and out of countries can be tagged, for example, properly harvested wood can be identified and verified [5].

“In the modern insurance industry, the cost of auditing accounts for 30 percent or even 40 percent of the total. Even so, the ratio of insurance fraud in China is still not small. Therefore, the insurance industry is looking closely at Blockchain technology. If data is stored on the Blockchain, immutability will save us from contractual conflict. In the case of insurance claims, a smart contract will be triggered to execute provisions, this solving the problem of compensation settlement and lower auditing costs. Blockchain can reshape the integral foundations of insurance.”
Wei Yingning – Former vice chairman of China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC)

Fatcom offers a permanent, time-stamped record to data anchored in the block chain. This can be applied to proof of process, existence or audit. Their first project was an official land title registry.  The potential range of applications is immense. The energy sector is examining the potential of blockchain. With a modern, distributed energy grid where customers are also producers, even the movement of electrons is an asset that can be logged and trigger payment. Blockchain technology is set to revolutionize bureaucratic administration. Dubai’s blockchain strategy is to move all government documents (more than 100 million per year) onto a blockchain by 2020 [5].

Blockchain in Healthcare – it doesn’t make sense.  But it does.  People are working very hard to bring together blockchain and healthcare as you read this.

The Power of Blockchain for Healthcare by Peter B. Nichol shows how blockchain will transform the patient experience.  From patients, to doctors to insurance companies – the entire system.  The book shows blockchain’s potential to transform healthcare at the patient level.

It answers the questions: What can blockchain do? How will it impact our health? Why should you care?

Healthcare is a bureaucratic service industry that suffers from disparate stakeholders requiring access to patient records. Gem has set up an Ethereum blockchain infrastructure to allow healthcare stakeholders to access patient information. Operational efficiency will climb exponentially, hand in hand with actually giving practitioners access to up to date patient information [4]. Quality control is a serious consideration for application of blockchain. Medication, for example, can be guaranteed to be what it claims to be. Hyperledger has created the Counterfeit Medicines Project. Each drug produced is marked with a place-timestamp, as well as changes in ownership, which are transparent to all interested parties [4].

“A blockchain-based medical records system could safeguard patient data and allow for improved interoperability between doctors and hospitals, while also giving patients more ownership over their own records.”
Valery Vavilov – CEO of BitFury.

Financial Technologies

With over 2.5 billion adults worldwide lacking a bank account, blockchain offers opportunities to overcome barriers to accessing financial services [7]. The key issue preventing access to financial services is proof of identify, and yet 20% of the world’s population lack any such documentation [7]. Humaniq applies Ethereum’s blockchain-based app to create user profiles based on bio-metric data and then gives them access to services otherwise denied, such as small business loans, insurance and pensions. Pundi Pundi, a small start-up in Indonesia, allows anyone without a bank account to hold, buy and sell cryptocurrencies in physical stores with a smartphone, and it also offers retail points of sale in shops, cafes and convenience stores. An early player, 21 aims to embed their mining chip into IoT devices such as smart phones, allowing the phones to become a player in the bitcoin market place. Companies such as these are set to radically alter the payment playing field.

“You could imagine something like a completely automated system for renting bikes that’s just done completely over blockchain crypto-payments. And theoretically just sort of start it up, and it works completely autonomously.”
Vitalik Buterin – co-founder of Ethereum

The financial technologies (fintech) sector has clearly embraced this new technology. The World Economic forum predicts that by 2027, 10% of the global GDP will be managed by distributed ledger technology (ref in [6]). All the major stock exchanges are investigating the technologies [6]. The significant difference between fintech’s approach and bitcoin’s is that the bitcoin network is public, anyone can join. Fintech will, more typically, apply private networks, where only selected members such as traders and banks will have access to update the registry [6]. There are plenty of bitcoin sibling crypotcurrencies spreading across market niches: namecoin, litecoin, mastercoin, peercoin, darkcoin and ripple [2][6].

The Internet of Things (IoT)

The sheer size of the IoT propels it towards blockchain technology. One early player, Filament provides the wireless sensor network for industrial applications of IoT. In response to the challenge that comes from attempting to connect an ever-growing number of devices to one centralised network, they have developed and deployed a fully decentralised IoT infrastructure [3] using blockchain technology.

Frictionless micropayments

So, we travel full circle and return to the issue of money and payment. There has long been a need for internet-based service provision to be able to accept meaningful micro-payments. Similarly, there has been a barrier to provision of micro-services on the internet because of the sheer effort of will required by users to make a payment. The tedious requirement to create a username, password, enter credit-card details and buy a service can be circumvented by the application of bitcoin-like technology. News sites and other providers who could create revenue with a buy by article business model, would be empowered to move away from their corroding advertising model, [3].

What about the hackers?

So, there are those of you wondering whether this system is truly safe: surely it can be hacked? Interestingly this happened early on enough in the game to provide insights now. It was not the blockchain that was hacked, but the application using a blockchain system. This is what happened to a project based on the blockchain platform Ethereum where around $50 million was stolen. The project based on the platform was hacked and the Ether “coinage”, mined in the same way as bitcoins are mined, stolen.

Imagine you picked up a large sum of fresh bills from the bank, and on the way home you were robbed. It would be great if you can tell the bank about this and they can inform the world that they will cancel the notes they gave you (based on their serial numbers no one anywhere would accept those notes) and they reissue you with your cash. Ethereum decided to dump the “serial numbers” associated with those “coins” and return Ether of the same value to the investors who had lost their money.

They faced an interesting dilemma. Ethereum applies blockchain technology, whose transactions are intended to be irreversible. By executing a hard fork (they can’t delete, remember!) and rewriting the rules by which their blockchain is executed, Ethereum negated one of the core tenants of their system- that it is unchangeable. Yet they also did something profound – their community rejected the violence committed against it. Of course, the hackers are still at it, and wallets that hold such coins have also suffered attacks.

So you still don’t like a virtual currency?

Maybe you like the concept of blockchain, you agree that is sounds like a great plan with applications limited only by the imagination and the developers to throw at it, but there is that but. A currency not backed by any bank, government or collateral, you just don’t like the feel? Then fear not -there are platforms out there designed for the asset investor. Do you like high-end sports cars, but you are not likely to ever own one? Bitcar will allow you to invest in their blockchain platform where your CAR coin F50one actually represents investment in a Ferrari 50. After a 5–15 year term they sell the vehicles and pass the profits back to the holders of the coins.

A new social order

Blockchain is here, and outshining other start-ups in terms of investment, and has the potential to solve bureaucratic issues at a fraction of the normal costs. Sweeping all of this utility aside for the moment, it also represents a revolution in human interaction. The bitcoin community, like other disparate, self-appointed networks such as Wikipedia are creating useful, reliable, liberating products with no leader.

“The blockchain does one thing: It replaces third-party trust with mathematical proof that something happened.”
Adam Draper – founder and managing director of Boost VC  (Adam Draper Bot)


Bibliography:
[1]  G. Vora, “Cryptocurrencies: Are Disruptive Financial Innovations Here?,” Mod. Econ., vol. 6, pp. 816–832, 2009.
[2]  K. Rabah, “Overview of Blockchain as the Engine of the 4th Industrial Revolution,” Africa Prem. Res. Publ. Hub www.mrjournals.org Mara Res. Journals MR J. Bus. Manag. Mara Res. J. Bus. Manag., vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 125–135, 2016.
[3]  R. Wörner and V. Bomhard, “The Bitcoin Ecosystem: Disruption Beyond Financial Services?,” 2016.
[4]  M. Mettler, “Blockchain technology in healthcare: The revolution starts here,” in 2016 IEEE 18th International Conference on e-Health Networking, Applications and Services, Healthcom 2016, 2016.
[5]  V. Gupta and R. Knight, “How Blockchain Could Help Emerging Markets Leap Ahead,” 2017.
[6]  M. Geranio, “Fintech in the exchange industry: Potential for disruption?,” Masaryk Univ. J. Law Technol., 2017.[7]  N. Kshetri, “Journal of Global Information Technology Management Potential roles of blockchain in fighting poverty and reducing financial exclusion in the global south. Potential roles of blockchain in fighting poverty and reducing financial exclusion in the global south,” 2017.

 

How Will We Communicate In The Future?

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Since mankind uttered its first words, we have been developing ways to communicate. Fire beacons and smoke signals have evolved to string and soup cans.  Now we use VOIP and smart phones to talk to anyone at any time..

As technologies developed we used the telegraph and telephones – now communication is happening over the internet.  Look at the quantum leap since 1861 when the first transcontinental communication line was completed.

Telephones/Land Lines have died.

From 10% in 2006 to over 50% in 2016, land lines have all but died.  In the chart below – 2016 shows over 50% of adults using no land line and the number jumps to 60% for children.

We now send and receive data, voice and video instantly over the internet.  VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) systems are replace standard lines and mobile phones use VOIP.  At the end of 2016 95% of Americans had a cellphone and smart phones account for 77% of that.  (Pew Research study)

But how will we communicate in the future

Look at the past and present and we can see where communication is evolving.  From telephones connected to our homes to cell phones and then smart phone apps.  The evolution of apps is just as quick – with phone calls moved to SMS and phones calls are replaced with Facebook messenger, Twitter, Snapchap and Apple’s Facetime.Each generation looks for new – more picture/video entangled options.

Each generation of technology gets closer to real-time communication.

How does Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Play in?

Virtual and augmented reality (more explanation of what VR and AR is at the end of this post) is something that technologists have been working on.  Used for military planes to help pilots get more data in a fluid way.  The technology now creeps into manufacturing companies – helping humans be more efficient.

Business push for VR – it reduces the necessity of travel.  Members gather in a virtual conference room instead of wait in lines at the airport.  The brain’s perception is the same.

AR lets us have additional information connected in real time to add value to the current situation.  Imagine scanning the room for an old friend and augmented reality pointing a virtual green arrow at them over their head via your AR enables contact lenses or glasses.

Having AR & VR tools embedded into our lives is a huge shift in how we perceive who we are and where we go.  The brain acts very similarly if it “sees” VR or if it is having a “real” experience.  VR is used to help paraplegics walk again – and the results are amazing.  With VR the brain can see the body working and using a robotic exoskeleton to move the body.  Good things are happening and “some patients started to regain some sensation and some muscle movement on their own”, this is so amazing…read more at ABC.

What’s next?

You have to wonder what will be next – how will we communicate in the future?  A fantastic book called Autonomous, where Analee Newitz paints an incredible future where people, hybrids and robots communicate in fascinating ways – verbally, via private instant massages as well as skin like feedback clothing.  What we use to communicate in the future is literally up to our imagination. I want to experience these new ways – how about you?