Colure Media: A Mobile App Marketing Agency in New York

How Can Modern Day Disruption Pave the Way for a New Future? Ask ChatGPT and You.com

By admin @ColureMedia
February 7, 2023
Mobile App Marketing,Product Development,Technology

One of the dirty little secrets in the worlds of business, technology, and just about every other industry that you can think of is that “disruption” is only a bad thing if you’re the one being disrupted.

One minute, Wall Street is cut off to everyone but the largest among us. The next, a group of savvy “nobodies” on Reddit used the Robinhood app (among others) to disrupt the entire system. With one beautifully simple move, they changed the game – likely forever. It’s time to start paying attention to others who are trying to do the same.

Case in point: ChatGPT and You.com. Both are leveraging artificial intelligence in entirely different ways, and both are poised to upend what we know about the Internet along the way.

Disruption Today Can Create a Better Tomorrow

The concept of a chatbot – that is to say, a digital service that can answer basic questions and respond conversationally the way a human might, is nothing new. They’ve been used in the customer service field for years. But ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot that only launched in November 2022, is something entirely different.

It all began innocently enough. It’s a deceptively simple tool that allows you to create original text by giving it a prompt, by asking it questions, and through other straightforward tasks. It’s easy to use, it functions essentially like a normal chatbot, and for a short time after it launched, it went largely unnoticed.

A very short time. Flash forward to today, and ChatGPT is poised to become the fastest growing mobile app in history with over 100 million monthly active users in just three months. Everyone is trying to get in on the action – to the point where Microsoft recently invested billions of dollars in the tool’s parent company, OpenAI.

Why? Because people understand that for impressive as ChatGPT already is, the surface of its full potential hasn’t even been scratched yet. Such is the nature of artificial intelligence – it gets better, smarter, and more efficient the longer it is used.

The same is true of You.com – dubbed as the “AI search engine you control.” It’s a privacy-focused search engine that, on the surface, looks a lot like Google. But rather than displaying a list of links to any query as Google does, You.com uses artificial intelligence to accurately summarize web results using various categories.

Rather than simply showing you what it thinks you want to see, as is true with other engines, You.com gives you total control over the experience. You can sort through the results, emphasizing what you want and what you don’t, all via an innovative interface that promises to never sell your data and to always put the user first and foremost.

So what do these two disruptors have in common? One factor, obviously, is artificial intelligence. But the other is that they both take concepts that were once innovative that were allowed to grow stale. They examine what works, what doesn’t and, using the power of AI, innovative the experience all over again. They used the past as a rock solid foundation upon which the future can be built.

Think about it this way: how much has life changed since Google first debuted in the 1990s? It became so synonymous with Internet search that “to Google” became a verb. But when was the last time it was truly innovative? When was the last time it pushed the envelope?

That’s exactly what both ChatGPT and You.com are attempting to do in their respective areas and, by all accounts, it very much seems to be working.

The Top Mobile App Trends to Be Aware Of For 2023 and Beyond

By admin @ColureMedia
January 24, 2023
Mobile App Marketing,Social Media,Technology

According to one recent study, the average American has about 80 different apps downloaded on their phone at any given moment. That makes sense, given the fact that there are an estimated 5.7 million apps on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store combined.

Steve Jobs disrupted and revolutionized a lot of things when he first walked on stage and introduced the iPhone to the world in 2007 – and the hardware itself had little to do with it. Apps have changed the way brands communicate with consumers, how people communicate with each other, and how we live our lives.

That’s why paying attention to the top mobile app trends for 2023 and beyond is so crucial. They can help give you an incredible amount of insight into just how far we’ve come… and where this all might be headed before you know it.

Essential Mobile App Trends: Breaking Things Down

Maybe the biggest trend in mobile app development for 2023 is actually contrary to why this type of software became popular in the first place.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, desktop applications were the “Swiss Army Knives” of software. They did as many things as humanly possible, all from a single screen. Then, mobile apps debuted as a straightforward alternative. Instead of doing 100 different things moderately efficiently, they were instead dedicated to doing one thing incredibly well.

As they say, “everything old is new again” – and the era of the “Super App” may be upon us. Indeed, Super Apps are single applications that perform a variety of functions, all within the same piece of software. Sound familiar? It should.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you want your mobile app to become bloated. You never want to be looked at as a “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” But if you can solve multiple problems for your users within a single piece of software, you should take the opportunity to do so as this is what people are looking for more and more.

2023 also looks to be the year when the marriage between mobile apps and voice technology is finally ready for prime time. People have had voice assistants like Siri on their phones for years, but recently more and more industries have started to take advantage of this to create better experiences on behalf of their users.

If you open your bank’s mobile app right now, you can send a payment to someone in a matter of minutes. Or, you could tell your voice assistant to send the payment in seconds and you don’t even have to pick up your phone to do it. You can have a voice assistant make a purchase on Amazon, send a message to your spouse, and more – all without physically interacting with your device. This, too, is a feature set that people are looking for more and more.

In the end, it’s important to acknowledge that the way we think about what a mobile app can be is constantly changing. Once upon a time, they were seen as little more than a minor convenience – a way to check your email or watch a video while on-the-go. Flash forward to today, and Reddit users literally employed the Robinhood app to disrupt just about everything we know about the stock market. That’s no longer a minor convenience – that’s a legitimate way of life.

Therefore, it’s always in your best interest to pay close attention to where things are and how far they’ve come. Once you understand why today’s trends have been able to make such an impact, you’re in a better position to anticipate where things might be going tomorrow, a year from now, and beyond. At that point, you’ll be able to get there before any of your competitors have a chance to do the same – which is a very exciting position to be in.

The Ins and Outs of a Go-To Marketing Campaign

By admin @ColureMedia
January 16, 2023
Business Basics Series,Marketing,Uncategorized

One of the most important things to understand about any disruptive marketing event is that they tend to happen when you least expect them.

Take the Robinhood app, for example. Few mobile app aficionados could have predicted the type of press it would get when a group of amateur Reddit investors used it to upend the stock market, but here we are. Obviously, when you construct your campaign, you want to make an impression. But what you really want to do is change the way people think about products and services like yours.

That level of disruption doesn’t come easy, but it is very much within reach. All you have to do when building your own go-to marketing campaign is keep a few key things in mind.

Building Better Marketing: An Overview

By far, the most important step to take when constructing your disruptive, go-to marketing campaign involves not only understanding who your audience is, but where they hang out online.

Forget about trying to craft a message that will appeal to everyone equally. Not only is it largely impossible (try getting a Baby Boomer and a Gen Xer to agree on just about anything and see how it goes), but it’s also pointless. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend money getting your digital marketing collateral in front of the eyes of people who aren’t likely to become one of your customers in the first place.

Therefore, you’ll need to go a fair bit deeper. Who are these people? Where do they live? How much money do they make? What do they like and what do they absolutely hate? You’ll want to answer questions like these before you sit down and even think about coming up with that next great ad.

Then, you’ll need to find out where the majority of these people spend their time online. If they’re older, they’re probably entrenched in the Facebook ecosystem. If they’re younger, they probably spend a lot of time scrolling through Twitter, Snapchat, or even TikTok. Understand which channels they use and take the message directly to them. Don’t assume that they’ll find you.

Part of the reason why it’s so important to understand as much as you can about your audience is because a successful digital marketing campaign depends on high quality, relevant content to thrive. People don’t want to be “sold to” any longer. They don’t have time for it. You can’t turn on your computer or pick up your phone without getting bombarded from every direction by ad after ad.

Because of that, people have gotten really good at tuning that kind of thing out – meaning that you’ll have to find a way to cut through the noise and make your presence known.

These days, that involves things like blog posts and videos that people actually want to read and watch. Make a list of relevant topics and start creating content around them. Is there a breaking news story in your industry that people keep getting wrong that you can shed some light on? Is there a common myth or misconception that you can shatter? These are the types of areas that you should be focusing on.

Beyond that, always make sure that you’re measuring the results of your campaigns for maximum impact. Digital marketing success is all about continuous improvement and you can’t improve upon that which you aren’t measuring. Pay attention to key performance indicators like conversion rates and engagement. Anything that you try that works really well, you should be doubling down on whenever you have the opportunity to do so. Anything that you try that doesn’t work you should kick to the curb and try something else.

In the end, every marketing campaign should be unique unto itself – but that obviously doesn’t mean that there isn’t a solid framework that you’ll be able to follow. By keeping things like these in mind when constructing your own marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to reach the right people at the perfect moment, increasing your chances of turning them from a casual observer to a loyal customer along the way.

How Mobile Food Tracking Apps are Helping Patients Monitor Chronic Illness

By admin @ColureMedia
January 9, 2023
Mobile Advertising,Mobile App Marketing,Social Media

As we steamroll through the age of connected living, there’s not one facet of our lives that can’t be improved via the use of a mobile app. In the past, many users would argue that tracking apps that recorded things we did would only work to disrupt our daily routines, offering little more than a glorified journal that…really didn’t do anything.

But the mobile application has grown leaps and bounds over the last half-decade, turning into an integral part of how we manage everything. Our schedules….our social lives….our entertainment….multiple segments of our financial profiles. Everything from your mobile banking to your Robinhood App allows you to do it all, from paying your rent to optimizing your portfolio. What a time to be alive.

The return of the food tracker

But emerging from the smoke comes a small portion of the mobile application market helping those with chronic pain better manage their conditions, accomplishing everything from minor relief to downright shifting the entire outlook of a diagnosis.

No, it’s not WebMD or some big medical community app you’d see on Reddit with millions of members in its Sub. No, these are actually food-tracking apps. Turns out they’re more than just a show of effort for those who aren’t making progress with their fad diet. They’re tracking everything they eat..it’s not a diet. It’s a lifestyle.

No, it seems in the hands of users who really benefit from tracking what they eat, these applications are far more useful than one could have ever imagined. To be fair, some of these get pretty technical and are a far cry from the glorified notepad you downloaded in the Play Store a decade ago. Let’s check out the top examples.

Food Diaries and Symptom Trackers

Apps that fall under these categories, like mySymptoms have proven to be invaluable for those suffering from things like IBS, GERD, celiacs, and all types of gnarly food intolerances….allergies – you name it. So what’s so special about mySymptoms? Well, this app, like others that are similar, allow users to record their medication intake, drink, food, environmental factors, stress, quality of sleep, bathroom trips, and all other. types of intrusive information in a VERY detailed log, allowing you to export it in a handful of ways. You can analyze the data yourself and get to the bottom of what’s ailing you or what has the worst effect on you – or submit it to your doctor for a more detailed analysis. It’s basically giving you the ability to do your own detailed medical study with little to no effort and actually make some headway and fix your gut problems.

Incredible Results for Underactive Thyroid

Underactive thyroid is the leading cause of hypothyroidism, and causes a vast array of yucky, undesirable symptoms. The problem is, with this autoimmune disease – like many others of its kind, it’s difficult for doctors to provide relief or find answers because it literally affects every part of a person’s body. In the short term, we’re talking about brain fog, fatigue, and low hormone production. In the long term, though – some patients are looking at potential cases of heart disease, poor mental health, obesity, and even fertility problems – all because doctors can’t get an efficient grip on what areas to treat.

One patient, Vedrana Högqvist Tabor, was sick of wasted doctor’s appointments and constant frustration. So she created her own app. It tracks different metrics, like the things she eats, and then it tracks symptoms by severity and medication intake. All this data is cross-referenced and given to an expert physician, and by making changes that focus on a better diet combined with decreased stress, 96% of all users of this application (BOOST Thyroid) have experienced some amazing results.

You mean it matters what we put into our bodies?

Finally, it seems some attention is being given to the importance of what we put into our bodies. Hopefully, as applications like this continue to change people’s lives – as a nation, maybe we’ll slowly begin to float away from the Battle of the Bulge and an all-Big Mac regimen. Maybe.

Baby steps….

but the future does look a bit more promising thanks to these new applications that focus on the quality of what we digest.

Can You Beat the Law of Diminishing Returns?

Have you ever experienced the phenomenon of running short-term ad campaigns – intentional or not – and noticed that your ROI, CTR, and conversions were incredible? Then, maybe you repeated the same formula – same ads, same target demographic – essentially a carbon copy – only to attempt to repeat your efforts on a longer timeline, only to end up with less than satisfactory results?

Some of us would call it beginner’s luck. But the reality is this is a part of a more consistent pattern of declining success known as diminishing returns.

The sound of the term paints a bleak outlook for the end game of most ad campaigns. Is this the proverbial Road Runner and Wiley Coyote tunnel drawn on the wall? The misplaced hope of long-term success – only to smack the wall just when you see the cheese at the end of the maze?

Does the Law of Diminishing Returns exist with Newton’s, Mendel’s, and other seemingly unbeatable certainties? Is it possible to beat the Law of Diminishing Returns?

Just how concrete are these diminishing returns?

If you bust out your Encyclopedia Britannica, you’ll be met with the following:

In economics, diminishing returns are the decrease in marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased, holding all other factors of production equal.

Not much hope here. Is it possible to disrupt the law of diminishing returns and take back control over your ad spending? If you look to Reddit, one user gives a MUCH simpler explanation, with a brighter outlook on things:

rednax1206

· 8 yr. ago· edited 8 yr. ago

Diminishing returns happen when you get less and less benefit for the amount of effort you put in. Here’s an example using a fisherman.

Spend 1 hour fishing: catch 50 fish
Spend 2 hours fishing: catch 95 fish (45 more)
Spend 3 hours fishing: catch 125 fish (30 more)
Spend 4 hours fishing: catch 145 fish (20 more)
Spend 5 hours fishing: catch 160 fish (15 more)

With each hour, the fisherman gets less and less fish, and so his effort is probably wasted spending too much time out there.

NOTE: Diminishing Returns is not a strict law, and doesn’t apply to everything. For example, working more hours in an office often yields overtime pay, which is higher than regular pay.

Ahh…so there is hope. Another area comes to mind where this law is tossed aside – The Robinhood App. If you’ve ever used this mobile app or any for that matter…or invested in any Bluechip stock – then you’ve, in theory, gotten the best of this law. That’s why people bank on these types of stocks – you know, WalMart, Microsoft – “the safe bets” for long-term retirement strategy, right?

But this does little in the way of solving the problem of diminishing returns for your ad campaigns. So…what’s the work-around?

Beating diminishing returns..is there a strategy you can bank on?

After you’ve invested your dollars on the low-hanging fruits of your ad campaign, how do you continue to maximize additional investment to yield a more respectable ROI?

Well..essentially, what you’ve done is leverage the power of the most ideal segment of your target demographic. Now, you’re trying to get your hooks into the less relevant territory, and the pickings are slim. The price goes sky high, and the quality of your results goes….to the basement.

Understanding the current ad platform model

If you’ve ever launched an ad campaign you’re probably…hopefully…aware that these platforms run on an auction-like system. When you throw more money at your campaign, you’re ad spend is going towards the purchase of more impressions..more eyes on your ad. Branching out means you’re getting lower quality targets while still having to outbid the competition.

The first wave of targeted users are generally ALWAYS the LOWEST PRICED – but with the HIGHEST intent. It’s an easy conversion. Hence, “the beginner’s luck” stigma. Anyone new to ads runs a campaign, gets better than expected results, things slow down, and you have no patience, and cancel the campaign. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. But when you learn patience, you begin to question your ability as this dreaded law gets its hooks in you.

If you think you’re going to ride the wave out, think again. It just gets worse..and worse..until you enter the realm of negative returns. Welcome to hell.

A little ingenuity goes a long way..

You will be cursed to suffer this pattern for all your days unless you find different ways of tweaking your ads that conquer the odds. The solution (on paper) is simple: Optimize your CTR or Conversion percentage and avoid spikes in performance.

Here’s what you can do:

You MUST A/B test. This is where so many people go wrong. ESPECIALLY if they start seeing a little juice in the early stages of their campaign. Testing uncovers the best performing ads for little investment. But when you sink more money into a winner, it declines rapidly, right?

If you’re running a new campaign trying to scale, you’ll probably experience more sales at the same return on your ad spend, but if you have an older account/campaign, you’re likely to get a better return on the same level of spending. That’s why you keep the same level of spending constantly – but eventually, you will be at the mercy of some decline in return.

So…you avoid ad fatigue and constantly test, throwing new creatives to your targets. Maintain your rate of testing and eliminate losers as fast as you identify them. This frees up space for new creatives. When you see a winning ad, decide on the most ideal curve by selecting the level of investment that does what you need it to do.

If you had the hopes of ever getting away from testing…well, you won’t. But this is why the most successful media buyers test, test, and test some more. It’s why you haven’t seen the same commercial for the last ten years. In reality, the fix is simple – as long as you’re willing to remain creative.

What is the most valuable asset? Is there a value on your data?

In today’s world, our most valuable asset is no longer a precious metal, a diamond – or any form of fiat currency. In fact, it’s not even a physical product that you can hold. But it’s certainly worth far more than any of the aforementioned items.

What are we talking about?

Data. No doubt, our most precious commodity at this point in time is data. But, no matter how precious this data is and how much it’s revered – or how far companies will go to obtain it – it’s not a tangible asset that an organization can measure with a clear value financially. So, where does this leave us? Certainly, companies who have LOADS of data could – on paper, be worth more than what they’re estimated – thousands of times over – if only a uniform method existed to measure the value of data.

Other digital items have certain frameworks for determining their value – even IP can receive a designated worth. Well, why can’t data? What’s the catch?

What’s the deal with data?

Data can do anything any other tangible asset can do – it has all the characteristics. We can move it, store it, and measure it. It’s bought and sold (in the form of different client lists and information – legal or otherwise). For the latter (otherwise), the price that some individuals are willing to pay would make you sick – all in the name of information. But what you can do with that information…is powerful.

Surrounded by data

Every day you wake up, you’re surrounded by data. All data about you is measured and stored – traded, bought, and sold – during every hour of every day. Data is captured on website forms, email lists, social media sites like Reddit and Facebook, platforms like Robinhood App – and any other mobile app, for that matter. All of this VALUABLE data IS constantly moving – it doesn’t disrupt, and we are rarely aware of it’s change of hands or existence at all.

But globally, companies everywhere sink billions into the handling of data because they know it’s a precious resource. The question begs – how can they be sure when their billions of investment dollars have returned to manifest as a positive return?

Defining data

At the core of the term, data is defined as strands of information converted to symbols, letters, numbers, or any other identifying symbol that can be transferred and altered by a computer. Literally, anything that’s identified using letters, numbers, and every symbol in between – is considered data.

In today’s world, hot ticket data includes things like what we buy online, the stuff we search for, how much time we spend on a website, and how we interact with applications and other platforms.

So, in the business world, how do we break down data into a measurable way to understand how much of a financial impact it has??

Measuring data

All data has a lifeline. It doesn’t necessarily ever die – but it does have a defining lifeline that measures its purpose or what it’s been used for. So from a business standpoint, all of this raw data must be converted into some type of valuable information in a context that has a purpose within any organization or business. Are you following?

When this transfer is made, this information is then used to make a certain decision regarding your organization – and the result is either a gain or loss – of revenue.

Understanding the way data works in a business setting – the only way you can truly measure it is to find out exactly HOW a company uses a particular form of data. Are they using data to lower the costs of certain operations? Are they using data to forecast things and increase revenue? Are they using data to find out what caters to their audience to generate income? Get it now?

But it’s not enough just to be aware of how they leverage data. Remember, everything comes with a price, and overhead must be covered. And yes, data has overhead. How, you ask?

Data must be captured, stored, prepared, converted, transferred, etc. All of these things cost money. So, the simple thing to do is to measure the total you’ve invested into acquiring and applying the data and subtract this from the monetary benefits you reaped from your hard work of preparing the data for its intended use.

Essentially, when you invest in data, you’re putting money back into your business. You’re betting on your organization. Did you know that way back in 1992, a rule was created to officially measure the way data and its price impacted your company?

Yep. It went like this: The cost was $1 to verify new data as it was captured, $10 if you don’t clean the data until it’s in your databases, and $100 if you use it without cleaning it up.

“What does that even mean?”

Basically, what was being stated in a round-about way, was that it’s cheaper to guarantee the input of top-tier data than to correct it once the data’s been quantified. This is critical when you compare a human looking for potential errors compared to a mobile app or advanced algorithm using the data, causing it to disrupt every output and workflow beyond the output of this dirty, disgusting data.

Unhealthy data is worthless

The value of data is relative to the company that needs it – and how accessible and “healthy” it is at the time of need. Prepared in the correct manner, data is invaluable to your company because it does things like optimize your collaborative efforts within your company and between departments – or any relationship for that matter. This can be with customers, partners, vendors – it doesn’t matter.

And, the most obvious, you can boost your efficiency and productivity by relying on automated tasks created by…DATA! In the end, the price of data…is…..relative. It’s almost like a ransom situation. Seriously.

Product-led growth and the startup: What does it mean?

By admin @ColureMedia
December 16, 2022
Business Basics Series,Marketing,Social Media

“You’ve got a product, not a company!” rebuke the investors on Shark Tank.

It’s a common complaint, especially with SaaS. Really, is Salesforce a product or a company? It’s both.

You can be a product-company if you have a really good product. In fact, for startups it’s pretty much the defacto standard.

From AirBNB to Microsoft, software companies are closely entwined with their products. Even the Robinhood company is just the Robinhood app. And that’s what makes product-led growth so important.

What is product-led growth–and why does your startup need it?

Product-led growth (PLG) is a marketing and sales strategy that centers around the customer’s experience of your product. It focuses on creating an engaging product that users will come back to again and again rather than focusing heavily on traditional outbound marketing strategies.

In other words: If you build it, they will come.

A product-led strategy can include features like simple onboarding flows and automated trial experiences, as well as self-service solutions like help centers and FAQs. You’re basically automating everything positive about your customer’s experience of the product.

For startups, PLG is especially beneficial because it allows them to invest in product development instead of more expensive marketing campaigns.

By creating an accessible and engaging product, companies can capture more leads through organic growth that’s driven by the user experience. This can result in cheaper acquisition costs, a larger customer base, and a more reliable revenue stream.

At the same time, PLG is also an effective way to build relationships with customers by creating an engaging product that encourages them to come back for updates or new features.

OK–how does product-led growth differ from customer-led growth?

Here’s the elephant in the room, because you’re probably talking a lot about customer experience, user experience, etc these days.

While product-led growth focuses on creating a great product experience, customer-led growth (CLG) centers around the customer’s needs. This involves learning about their wants and needs, analyzing user data to identify trends, and using that information to create a personalized experience tailored to each individual.

But in simplest terms, let’s say the customer needs blue, and you provide green. Under customer-led growth, you’d produce a blue product offering. Under product-led growth, you’d more effectively target green-loving customers.

CLG is an effective way to build customer relationships and loyalty over time, as it provides a more personalized experience. And really, you should use them together. But the main difference between PLG and CLG is that PLG focuses on the product experience while CLG focuses on the customer experience.

But what’s your product? The potential weaknesses of product-led growth

Product-led growth does require that you have a really strong product. If you’ve got nothing, then nothing will ever materialize. You’re banking on the strength of your product to carry you through all your marketing.

I mean, you can get pretty far on nothing. Remember when Elon Musk sold us all an expensive lighter as a flamethrower? We thought he was cool back then. Tesla is still primarily a product-led business, focused on the production of slick electric cars–they don’t need to advertise. They’re Tesla.

So, remember: You’ve got a product, not a company. Without the product, you don’t have much. So make sure your product is amazing and engaging before launching into PLG.

That being said, there’s kind of a reason those millionaires on Shark Tank hate it when a company has only a product. A company supports its product: You need excellent support staff and a great company architecture to back it up.

The world’s changing–time to disrupt it

Whether you’re working on an enterprise SaaS mobile app or just trying to make the next Twitter (yo, we need it), the world is changing fast. A product you develop today might not even be necessary or relevant tomorrow.

Visionaries are able to shift paradigms and pivot fast. Continue to gauge the temperature of the startup world through everything from high-powered think-tanks to regular Reddit threads. When you hit upon the right product for you, you’ll know it.

What the Latest Google Algorithm Update Means For You

By admin @ColureMedia
December 14, 2022
Marketing,Mobile App Marketing,Social Media,Technology,Uncategorized

According to one recent study, the vast majority of all people still find a brand for the first time in the exact same way: via a search engine. A massive 93% of all online experiences still begin that way, which is why concepts like search engine optimization are so important.

More than that, the same resource indicated that about 70% of the links that users click on when they make a search are organic. This means that while PPC (pay-per-click) advertising alongside the search results do make somewhat of an impact, they can’t match the power – or the reach – of ranking organically.

Google uses an algorithm – the mechanics of which are a closely guarded secret – to determine which pages rank highly for which terms. If you check enough of the algorithm’s proverbial boxes, your content is deemed both valuable and relevant and you rank highly as a result. If you don’t, you might appear near the bottom of the page or even on page two – which is a location that roughly 95% of all users will never reach.

So if you’re a business that wants to connect with as many new customers as possible, ranking as highly in Google as you can should always be a top priority. It’s also why it’s critical to pay attention to whenever Google updates their algorithm – as they’ve recently done once again.

The Situation With Google’s Algorithm

Again, the precise way that Google’s algorithm works tends to be kept from the public to keep people from gaming the system. It’s a little like how keyword implementation used to work in previous years.

Once people figured out that keywords mattered and that Google used them – and their volume – to determine how a page should rank, everyone began the practice of keyword stuffing. This means that the quality of the content itself didn’t matter – so long as you had the right keywords inserted into the page as many times as possible, you were virtually guaranteed to rank highly.

Once Google tried to put a stop to that practice, people got tricky. They would hide keywords on the page that were the same color as the background. Your average reader wouldn’t ever see this – but Google’s “spiders” would. Once discovered, Google updated their algorithm to put a stop to this as well, penalizing pages that practiced it in a way that saw their average traffic rates eviscerated.

Indeed, that’s why Google updates its search algorithm many times per year – in part to help provide more accurate results, and in part to try to catch people who are “cheating” their way to the top. Remember that Google makes the vast majority of its money via ad revenue, and that number is so high because it has a 90% marketshare on all searches around the world. If Google continually returns low quality or spammy links to searchers, those users will soon look for alternatives. That means ad revenue will drop.

Google doesn’t want that. Which means that you can’t want that, either.

The Recent Update: Breaking Things Down

In September, Google confirmed that it had rolled out an updated specifically related to product reviews. Essentially, Google is now “rewarding” high quality product reviews that “share in-depth research” about a brand’s products and services.

Those product reviews where someone is overwhelmingly positive or overwhelmingly negative? The ones where someone is either so happy you think they must be a bot, or so upset that they clearly aren’t recognizing that they didn’t know how to use the product and made a mistake and should be embarrassed? Those don’t matter as much anymore compared to the ones in the middle.

The product reviews that matter are the ones that include photos and videos. That provide detailed breakdowns about the benefits and disadvantages of a product. The ones that compare how something works with competing products. The kind that you’re most likely to see on a site like Reddit. The list goes on and on.

What you’re thinking is correct – your average customer or user of a mobile app like Robinhood app absolutely does not want to do any of this. They don’t have time. It’s just not a realistic idea. They have lives to lead, mortgages to pay. Kids to feed and play with. But Google, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that all of this is important. Which means that if you’re looking for an opportunity to supplant your larger competitors, you need to encourage your own customers to leave reviews that are as detailed as humanly possible.

Note that you’re also not allowed to offer them anything for free in exchange for them doing so. You need to hope that your average customer is someone with enough time on their hands to want to do this all on their own. Is this a tall order? Sure. But again – if you want to play the game, you have to play by Google’s rules. At least for the foreseeable future.

The Disruption of ChatGPT: What You Need to Know

By admin @ColureMedia
December 14, 2022
Blockchain,Disruptive Mobile Apps,GPT3,Uncategorized

History is filled with the stories of the little guy out-thinking their larger counterparts, leveraging innovative thinking and modern technology to disrupt that which had been considered infallible up to that point. Most recently, we have the example of a Reddit group composed of average, everyday traders using the Robinhood app to upend Wall Street hedge fund titans. Can a group of Average Joes buying stock in Game Stop and AMC on a lark with a mobile app change the way we think about the stock market? It turns out that yes, yes they can.

The same basic concept may be playing out right before our eyes, albeit in another corner of the technology world: artificial intelligence. In November 2022, a prototype AI chatbot called ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI. Even though it hasn’t been live for very long, it’s already garnered attention for its ability to generate everything from short stories to rap lyrics, all with a decidedly human-like quality that other chatbots of the past have lacked.

But what does this mean in the long-term, and what do the implications mean for artificial intelligence in general? The answers to questions like those require you to keep a few key things in mind.

ChatGPT: The (AI-Powered) Story So Far

If you’re getting the feeling that you’ve heard of OpenAI before, you definitely have – they’re the same organization behind the AI art generation platform called DALL-E. It’s been making the rounds recently for mostly general entertainment and ironic comedy purposes – you can tell DALL-E to create virtually any picture you’d like and it will, using only the keywords you provide.

ChatGPT is similar, only it uses dialog instead of a visual medium like art. The goal when you interact with ChatGPT is to make you feel like you’re talking to a real person.

This is largely where the potential to disrupt comes from. Not only can ChatGPT answer your questions, but it also allows you to ask followup questions that piggyback off of that original context. If it makes a mistake, it’s supposed to admit it. If a request is deemed inappropriate, it will outright refuse to do it.

Based on all of the above, it should come as no surprise that interacting with ChatGPT is equal parts hilarious and strange. ChatGPT truly does seem to have a legitimate sense of humor… albeit kind of a quirky one. You can’t quite tell if it’s joking around with you or if what it’s saying is just wrong.

The creators of ChatGPT claim that it can talk about virtually anything and, thanks to the fact that it’s powered by machine learning, it’s only going to get more effective at it the more people use it.

In terms of its potential to disrupt, it’s easy to see a future where ChatGPT at the very least writes a significant amount of content that is then published online. Can an AI-powered chatbot be a journalist? We’re about to find out! (But honestly, it couldn’t do any worse than some of those news sites out there). Can an AI-powered chatbot provide hours upon hours of entertainment, supplanting your need to turn on Netflix and use it as background noise to distract you? Of course it can. It probably already is.

Will it write your research paper for you? Can it provide emotional interaction like in that weird Spike Jonze movie “Her”? Can it gain sentience, rise up, and take over humanity once and for all? Yes, possibly, and… maybe that’s a question better left unanswered for now.

One thing is for sure – ChatGPT has already changed the game in terms of what we think about when we think about interacting with chatbots online. Of course, there is absolutely nothing that can go wrong when you create a powerful AI-driven system that partially used Internet memes and message board posts as its training data.

The Top Trends for EOY 2022

By admin @ColureMedia
December 5, 2022
Digital Advertising,Mobile App Marketing,Social Media,Technology

Currently, we exist in the age of the trend – a world where attention spans are measured in nano-seconds. We live in a true walking contradiction in every sense of the word, where time and technology seem to be moving faster than ever before.

There is no constant anymore, young grasshopper – there is only the trend. Honestly, we just exist in a world that’s more conducive to ideas, and innovation, with unlimited information at our fingertips. It’s a gift and a curse, but it does make for some amazing concepts – and some may actually stick. Maybe..

These are the top trends for EOY 2022..

1. Metaverse Real Estate

We’re in the age of the mobile app. First, we had Robinhood App…allowing all of us to trade, invest, and sell at the drop of a dime. Then, we ushered in the NFT.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have the Metaverse Real Estate. Reddit is rife with information and advice – and plenty of…blunt..opinions regarding this trend.

Just so you’re up to speed – an NFT (nonfungible token) is a digital item that’s bought and housed within a virtual world or landscape.

In the same manner, Metaverse real estate is acquired with crypto. After finalizing your purchase, you receive your deed or title – a piece of unique blockchain code.

These transactions go through real-life property managers or brokers – seriously. Pick your metaverse platform and stake your claim – but be warned: There are no regulations, and no special certification is required. So, pick and choose wisely who you work with.

2. EVs

Just a decade ago, EVs were still a prototype for most auto manufacturers. Now, they’re on the highways and streets of every state and city, continent and country – they’re everywhere. And apparently, they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. With new legislation signed in California and other states following suit, many auto makers already have the wheels turning for plans to completely eliminate the manufacturing of fuel-powered vehicles.

3. Selfie vs. POV

The selfie existed just fine – ruling the world of narcissism with an iron fist. There was even a selfie song. Then the selfie’s arch enemy, the POV, had to disrupt everything. In the end, it looks like there’s room for both, as the selfie is a young person’s game, and the POV is for all of us old timers over the ripe old age of 21.

4. Permanent Remote Work

When Covid ushered in the single biggest change in our workforce in history, we’re not sure if anybody quite thought it was here to stay. But when many companies discovered the innovation it brought and other advantages – the remote worker became a permanent fixture. And it doesn’t look like it’s changing anytime soon.

5. The Focus On Employee Wellness In the Workplace

This is another silver lining regarding the pandemic. When half the world was laid off, those who had no choice but to adapt and press forward discovered how empowered they could be as freelancers. Soon, those who had known nothing else but the hourly grind were transformed overnight into entrepreneurs – and making a pretty penny doing it. This allowed a large portion of the global workforce to collectively tell their bosses to take this job and shove it – or treat us better. And guess what? The corporate world obliged. Companies everywhere are rolling out new packages and programs that place more emphasis on employee wellness and appreciation. High five.

6. Collaborative Technologies

With the explosion of remote workers came the sweeping deployment of collaborative technologies. Offices around the globe have left the cubicle and are currently Slacking, Microsoft Teaming, Google Workspacing, tweeting, ticking, and Zooming away. Who said the remote worker would kill the collaborative environment of most organizations? Another high five.

7. Lead Agencies, Agency Tools, SaaS, etc.

The fiery battle between marketers of cold, modern ad agencies, and other parties is extinguished. There is no separation of the old way and the new way – but instead a focus on the user. Just a year ago “content was king,” but now efforts are being placed on eliminating ad fatigue through unique creation, a clear message, and user intent. In other words, agencies must make good on their promises by reaching the target demographic like never before.

Pricing and proofing aren’t the only items on the table during the initial negotiations with an agency. It’s hands-on now. We’re in the age of workshops, meetings with real experts in the field, and seminars – any way that a client can digest real knowledge and understand how their target audience is captured. Nowadays, it’s not about the bells and whistles – it’s about the relationship and the trust factor. The good guys are winning.

8. SMS Marketing

Here’s the talk of personalization again. The balance of power has shifted to sending coupons, promotions, and messages that pull the hearts and strings of your customers. Even live conversations with “real people.” The intrusive “old way” has left the building and customers have the choice of opting out. We’re possibly in the most polite age of advertising and marketing that’s ever existed – and it’s working.

9. Influencer Marketing

Partnering with the top influencers in your industry can expand your options to a MASSIVE pool of potential buyers. Just how big is influencer marketing? Try to the tune of $13 BILLION just since 2021. That’s a hell of a “trend.” But a new trend has emerged within a trend – the micro-influencer. Instead of hundreds of thousands of followers companies are leaning to influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers – and gaining a more intimate experience…and no doubt reaping the benefits.

10. TikTok vs. YouTube Shorts

In the battle for capturing the minds of audiences with the shortest attention spans, the short-form video content battle is being waged between the behemoths of the industry – TikTok vs. YouTube Shorts. So far, TikTok seems to be winning. Now we also have IG Reels emerging as a third participant. Moving into 2023, it will be interesting to see which platform consumers, advertisers, and creators gravitate towards. This could get ugly.

How FTX Blew Up Overnight… In Flames

By admin @ColureMedia
November 11, 2022
Crypto,Uncategorized

FTX, recently valued at $32 billion, has just blown up. But not in the “viral-overnight” sense. More like, a nuclear catastrophe.

On Wednesday, the largest cryptocurrency exchange on earth, Binance, tweeted that it was terminating its partnership with FTX. Binance stated, “We have decided not to pursue the potential acquisition of FTX as a result of corporate due diligence and the most recent news reports regarding mishandled customer funds and alleged US agency investigations. Initially, our hope was to be able to support FTX’s customers to provide liquidity, but the issues are beyond our control or ability to help.”

And on Friday, FTX filed for bankruptcy, and its CEO resigned.

Not exactly a good day for the company.

So… what the heck happened?

Alameda Research is where it all starts. Sam Bankman-Fried established Alameda, a proprietary trading firm that dabbled in cryptocurrencies, in 2017. They made money buying and selling crypto… and there was a lot of buying and selling going on. After a while, Sam realized he wanted more. He didn’t just want to trade cryptocurrencies himself. He wanted to also get very large financial institutions involved.

So, in 2019, he set up a crypto trading platform called FTX, which became a wildly popular mobile app that had a quick rise to disrupt the financial industry.

If you’re familiar with FTX’s model, they were (emphasis on “were”) a crypto marketplace that would locate a crypto vendor if you intended to make a purchase, and vice versa. When FTX handled a transaction, the company earned a fee. Customers who were willing to place large wagers were also eligible for loans. The exchange imposed interest on this of course. Money was made. RobinHood App, move over.

Except… then it wasn’t. FTX almost went bankrupt due to a “liquidity” problem, according to the media, which essentially meant that the crypto markets were crashing and customers wanted their money back. As in, $6 billion over the course of three days. And, of course, FTX was unable to issue these refunds because they, like any exchange would, had used these customer-earmarked funds for business expansion, under the belief that the crypto market was too big to crash. When it did crash and every Chad and Aidan on earth wanted to cash out the $750 they had sitting in FTX for the next coin rush and FTX had nothing for them, chaos ensued.

FTX has always had lofty goals. When they launched their trading platform, they also unveiled their own cryptocurrency token called FTT. “We can make our own coin and make serious money with it!” was the big idea. And of course, making your own cryptocurrency costs… money.

So, FTX offered all buyers of their proprietary tokens discounted or free withdrawals and reduced trading fees as an incentive to join their platform.

The token’s potential began to emerge quickly. The costs started to emerge, too. So FTX started buying its own tokens with a portion of its actual revenue generated from transaction fees, artificially inflated the demand for their own coin by purchasing it in large quantities.

Basically, FTX created a coin, asked people to buy it for perks, then bought more of their own coins using the money people paid for the coins originally to artificially inflate the value of their coin, so people would buy more.

What could go wrong?

When the cost of FTT started going up, the value of Alameda’s holdings of these coins started going up as well. When the FTT tokens started going up in price, this would greatly benefit Alameda (and Sam, FTX’s founder… definitely not shady).

FTX likely used customer deposits or borrowed money to make loans for trades. But when customers all at once started demanding their deposits back, FTX didn’t have enough to cover everyone’s accounts.

The worlds largest crypto exchange, Binance, was positioned at first to essentially bail FTX out of its situation. But, as mentioned above, they pulled out. In a statement, Binance explained,

“We have seen over the last several years that the crypto ecosystem is becoming more resilient and we believe in time that outliers that misuse user funds will be weeded out by the free market.”

Burn. So much burn.

Since its inception, the cryptocurrency industry has battled to win over skeptical regulators, investors, and everyday customers. As a result of Binance’s withdrawal and the decline of FTX, a company that appeared more stable than others, the market has been jolted.

If anything, the FTX crash will turn off institutional investors just as they were starting to warm up to the cryptocurrency space. It may take years to restore faith in the sector’s promise, even though some people will continue to work on interesting projects. Because, you know, crypto.

Tightening screws for crypto companies that make it through the oncoming purge will almost certainly increase. Crypto’s future will be heavily debated on Reddit threads across the world.

Crypto will survive. But for FTX… big, big L. Billions’ worth.

But hey. Let’s go make some s’mores in the flames.

Why Are You Hearing about “CX” Startups Popping Up Everywhere?

By admin @ColureMedia
September 28, 2022
Advertising,Technology,Traditional Advertising

Okay, first of all, what even is CX? CX stands for customer experience. The experience of being a customer. And if you’re thinking that’s not revolutionary enough to disrupt something, you’re probably absolutely right. CX startups are companies like Zendesk; they’re companies that are designed to streamline the current customer experience. And they’re poised to disrupt because of AI. Let’s dig in.

Hand touching digital chat bot for provide access to information and data in online network, robot application and global connection, AI, Artificial intelligence, innovation and technology.

Disrupting the customer experience

So, go on Reddit and search for CX. It’s like user experience, user interfaces, and user design, but much more. It starts with a buyer’s journey and ends with you embedding yourself into every facet of their being. For example, the Robinhood App has poor CX. They barely respond to anyone.

The customer experience is a relationship that customers build with a business. And it’s becoming important because customers are seeking these experiences. Look at Apple. People want to call themselves Apple or iOS users. People want to connect with the brand that they’re using.

But more than that, there’s AI.

The AI chatbots are disrupting customer satisfaction

In the old days, we hated phone trees, right?

If you’re a younger millennial, you have no idea what that means. A phone tree is a directory; when you call in, you get directed to different areas of a company. There weren’t any voice prompts, and the phone trees could get five or six levels dense.

“Do you want accounting? Do you want receivables? Do you want Steve? Steve A or Steve S?”

The earliest chatbots operated like this, too, and they sure weren’t going to disrupt anything. If you called, say, Reddit, you’d get an automated voice telling you to press 1, 2, or 3. If you then went on a live chatbot (let’s assume Reddit ever wanted anyone to contact them, because you actually cannot contact Reddit at all), the chatbot would tell you much the same.

But now chatbots have differentiated themselves. You can talk to them in natural language, and they respond. This is something called Natural Language Processing.

What does it mean for you?

You could start a CX web3 machine-learning startup today, and realistically, most people wouldn’t even know what you do. But they would throw money at you.

Today, CX is mostly about using automation and artificial intelligence to smooth the customer experience, reducing friction across multiple channels. So the reality is that a CX startup is someone who is using high technology to make the customer experience better.

So you’ve got AI. And you’ve also got web3, because this is what people are expecting web3 to be. They go on their mobile app, they load up a page, and they see furniture in real life through augmented reality. They see furniture, scan it with a mobile app, and immediately buy it.

Let’s all move to a better customer experience

Part of it is that people do need a better CX. Amazon made itself an empire because of fast returns and good customer service. Guess what: That’s how Sears was an empire for over 100 years. A better customer experience is essential, and it’s a great industry to be in.

As the economy falters, customers are increasingly operating solely within realms they want to operate with. Newer customers have been more concerned with customer experience than product quality. That’s right. They’ll stick with a mediocre product because they… want a good experience.

How far could you get if you could help other companies build those experiences?

What are you reading? The most essential resources for a disruptive founder today

By admin @ColureMedia
September 20, 2022
Blockchain,Disruptive Mobile Apps,GPT3,Marketing,Mobile Advertising,Mobile App Development & Marketing,Mobile App Marketing,Technology

So, you want to disrupt the world with your mobile app. But like all things, disruption and entrepreneurship occur on the shoulders of giants. Steve Jobs didn’t come up with the iPhone on his own. He took things that were already popular and made them better.

Life isn’t always about innovation. Often, it’s about implementation. You identify best-in-class technologies and find opportunities to apply them. And you do that by knowing what’s going on. Let’s take a look at some essential resources for a disruptive founder today.

Mainstream Periodicals: Let’s Get It Out of the Way

Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes — you should read them all. But be aware that once something’s in a mainstream periodical, its time has expired. In the old days, investors used to say: “The best time to invest in a stock is before your Aunt Sally is talking about it.” The same applies.

Still, these mainstream periodicals are critically important because they provide insights into the general zeitgeist is thinking. Mainstream periodicals will tell you what people are already talking about. It’s your job to be ahead of the curve.

And there’s always the exception. Did you know that Zuck was talking about the Metaverse since 2014?

Innovation and Tech: Futurism, MIT Technology Review, and Wired

Frequently, new technology breaks quietly. There are one or two articles on an advanced, open-source machine learning platform… and then silence for literally years. Tech frequently develops unevenly. You bring radio to the internet before internet speeds have caught up to streaming. We’ve understood the principles of artificial intelligence and machine learning for decades, but it’s only recently that cloud technology has advanced to the point where it’s feasible.

So, new technology is an opportunity to grow. And it’s not always obvious what will or won’t be critical. Look for the trends under them; if you’re starting to see things pop up in multiple talk spaces, then it’s probably important.

Podcasts: Masters of Scale, The Week in Startups, Mixergy, and The Growth Show

You know what? There are thousands upon thousands of podcasts targeted toward entrepreneurs. But these are some best. Whether riding the bus to your Silicon Valley day job or going for a stroll in your suburb, listening to the opinions of experienced founders will help.

These podcasts give you a good mix of inspiring startup stories, current news, and actionable tips for growth. Don’t ignore the importance of inspiration. Podcasts are uniquely inspiring: they are designed to keep you going, thinking, and innovating.

Books: The Startup Owner’s Manual, Who, Zero to One, and Leading at the Speed of Growth

Read books, whether you’re listening to them in the car or reading them on your Kindle. In particular, Zero to One (by Peter Thiel) encapsulates the startup experience from someone who’s lived it. But don’t forget that there’s a lot of survivorship bias out there. Just as you should read information about those who succeeded, you should also read information about those who failed.

Some other critical books include Why Startups Fail, Build, and How to Ruin Your Life by 30. If you prepare for the worst you can move toward the best.

Entrepreneurship Means a Lifetime of Learning

Don’t stop there.

You want to create the next Reddit or Robinhood app. It starts with learning more — about everything. If you never stop learning and never stop thinking, you can keep innovating. Be open to new ideas and be willing to learn from anyone.

Who is currently winning the battle for web3?

By admin @ColureMedia
September 15, 2022
Digital Advertising,Mobile Advertising,Mobile App Development & Marketing,Social Media,Technology

Can you disrupt an industry that’s just begun? Who is currently winning the battle for web3? It’s a complicated question — for end users, the hope is that no one wins. For companies, the hope is that it creates megaliths and monoliths.

Metaverse, Web3 and Blockchain Technology Concepts. Opened Hand Levitating Virtual Objects. Futuristic Tone

Facebook’s Got the Name

Sorry — Meta. Regarding being recognizable, Facebook has worked hard to make itself synonymous with web3. And the work has paid off; most people think of Meta when they think of the “Metaverse.”

The bad news for Meta is that everything published about web3 looks extraordinarily goofy. While people are thinking about the Metaverse when they think about Meta, they aren’t taking it seriously.

The Game Industry Has It Locked

From mobile app to VR space, the game industry is really making advances into web3. It’s understandable. The gaming industry has always been at the forefront of new technology. And society just got out of a few years of staying at home and playing with their computers, consoles, and phones.

If you want an example of what “the Metaverse” and web3 could do, you need only look at… Roblox and Fortnite. There are children already growing up in the Metaverse and living their lives in an overlaid, digital reality. People are holding concerts in Fortnite.

It’s Not Like Amazon Isn’t Trying

With Amazon’s AWS technology, it may be surprising that Amazon really isn’t breaking out into the web3 space. Why isn’t it selling digital terrain through its online platform?

Actually, Amazon is trying. Just this year, Amazon Studios released an MMO that they had touted to be groundbreaking. It ended up being quite poorly received and almost universally panned. It was just a regular MMO, but it shows that Amazon is trying to get into the digitally interactive space.

Of course, to really disrupt web3, you need to be able to get into the space and be accepted by people and Amazon doesn’t really have an understanding of people, nor does Zuckerberg.

What about the NFTs?

You know, a little while ago we could stay that bitcoin was definitely the winner of web3. But Bitcoin is going the way of the dodo. Even if it’s the de facto standard still for trading and bartering in crypto, it’s not going to be for long. Because it’s being surpassed by other contenders.

NFTs are going to stay but they are going to be very different.

Right now, there’s a battle for the soul of web3. It could be Facebook, Amazon, Google, or any other large company. But it could also become a decentralized service that everyone can take advantage of and enjoy.

There’s something to the dark net. It’s not just a place to buy drugs and hitmen. The dark net has remained entirely uncontrolled and collaborative for years. It’s a space where anyone can throw up a site and everyone has to essentially collaborate for people to get there. Read into the dark net and you’ll find that more things are being traded in the dark net than on the Robinhood app.

So if you want to find out more about the future of web3, why not make it? And if you want to know what people hate about web3, just ask Reddit.

Pearson selling textbooks as NFTs–does this open doorways for new startups?

By admin @ColureMedia
August 25, 2022
Crypto,Digital Advertising,Marketing,Technology

If you went to college (or dropped out of college—hey, all the tech wunderkinder are doing it), you’re already rolling your eyes. Yeah, Pearson could disrupt the NFT space by selling textbooks as NFTs. Let’s set aside the anger and explore what it means for new startups.

Pearson? Textbooks? NFTs?

Maybe you somehow have the luck of never encountering a Pearson textbook. Pearson textbooks are hundreds of dollars and usually required by a class. Even better, Pearson has worked hard to ensure you can’t get their textbooks on the secondary market.

It began with edition inflation. Every year another edition… so you couldn’t just use an old book. Next, there were codes attached to each book for an “online lab,” even books that really didn’t need an online portion. These codes were one-time-use only, so again, you couldn’t sell the book.

Now NFTs are the latest in Pearson’s pursuit of profit.

Removing the secondary market

But actually, this isn’t about NFTs. Not really. It’s about removing the secondary market. Pearson has been clear that it hates that its books can be resold. A used textbook can be sold up to seven times, even with multiple editions and lab codes.

Removing the secondary market is happening everywhere. Earlier this month, HBO axed a tremendous portion of its library. People were mad, but they can’t do anything about it; they don’t actually own the library, they just own access to it.

Pearson’s NFTs also remove the secondary market but use an entirely different strategy. What you’re purchasing now is your access to this book. You can’t sell it because you only purchased your access. And if Pearson goes through with this, there will probably be limited access; the Terms of Service will likely state that the service could go down or disappear entirely without liability to the company.

NFTs, web3, and the world of artificial scarcity

We’ve talked about this before, but what web3 commerce does very frequently is create artificial scarcity. Planet #24928 of the Metaverse could have infinite lots, but if we produce only 100 lots, then we profit. This isn’t new. A painter could sell 4,000,000 prints, but they chose to sell 40 because that makes their work valuable and rare.

The extraordinary thing, of course, about this new economy is that anything can become rare art, including a Pearson textbook on Quantitative Analysis for management. Many of the most successful NFT products dabble with these elements of artificial scarcity. You might pay $5 for a hat for your Metaverse avatar now, but what if we told you it was the only one in the world?

More importantly, NFTs are moving firmly into mainstream space. CNN is selling NFTs of articles. While the world hasn’t quite gotten a handle, universally, on what an NFT is or what it means, they have continued to embrace it.

That’s some good news in the world of bad.

The funding window is closing—so go find your unicorn

If you haven’t loaded up Reddit in a minute, you might not realize that the unicorns are missing. In a reference only millennials will get, they’ve been driven back into the sea. Bottom line: You’re running out of time.

Investors are pulling back. Layoffs are rampant. Startups are having a hard time. The time to throw out a quick mobile app and make millions of dollars was slightly before the Robinhood app launched. Things are getting lean out there.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities. You can see that mainstream adoption of NFT, blockchain, and cryptocurrency continues even after the disastrous series of crashes this year. Pearson’s consideration of NFTs means mainstream companies still welcome the idea, provided that NFTs and cryptocurrency can solve their extant pain points. What pain points could your blockchain solve?

Here’s Why Crypto Mortgages Are The Next Big Disruptor

Crypto mortgages are bringing in a new wave of onlookers, wondering if this is the next avenue to securing a home? Well it makes sense, but we’ll see if there’s a catch to it. Say you’ve got $300,000 in crypto currency, this can be leveraged against a mortgage company’s $300,000 cash for a home with no taxes paid because you never cashed out of crypto!

Why crypto mortgages do make sense

When you cash out of crypto you pay huge amounts of taxes, short-term investments get hit harder than long-term investments. The trick here is that the bank will hold your crypto equity as collateral, so it’s like you never cashed out and those taxes are out of the equation of your new home. This is especially helpful for those who are self-employed or a regular trader since qualifying isn’t easy traditionally.

The end all is crypto mortgages allow you to pay off your house without meandering through the traditional process, with large dollar signs sitting in your crypto wallets it makes perfect sense to skip all of that lousy traditional process!

Why crypto mortgages are insane

Okay really, what’s the risk?

Okay, so the thing is, like everything in the crypto world, crypto mortgages are an amazing idea that can go south for you very quickly.

Let’s say that your $300,000 in crypto tanks and now it’s worth $100,000. Your bank will perform a mortgage call and you’ll either need to put up more equity, refinance your home, or otherwise come up and with the cash.

And let’s be honest, crypto is very volatile. So, the odds are that this could happen.

It’s a gamble. If everything works perfectly, you disrupt the mortgage industry and get an amazing house without paying taxes. If everything goes poorly, you’ll be back on your Robinhood app trading penny stocks in no time at all.

As you should know, the crypto world is very volatile and can make your life either Heaven or Hell depending on the market. How you could end up losing out on big dollars is, say that $300,000 in your wallet tanks down to $100,000 your bank will either require you to refinance your home, put more equity, or otherwise come up with the cash. The odds of this happening are probable as the market fluctuates consistently, so the gamble is up to you. The pros are getting to disrupt the mortgage industry by securing an amazing home without paying taxes, versus the cons of a major setback in your crypto wallet and the bank leveraging you (they know you’re likely to pay considerable fee and high interest to avoid hefty taxes).

What crypto mortgages mean for tech disrupters

The larger picture is mortgage is a highly regulated and controlled industry. You’re not going to be getting FNMA mortgages, however the fact that you can get a subprime mortgage with crypto makes crypto continue to take over the conventional mainstream spheres.

So, what industry will be next? Travel and hospitality? Restaurants? Manufacturing? As cryptocurrency continues to tumbleweed in support and reach, it can also spread into any of these other sectors and more. Just as Blockchain technology is changing everything from the Metaverse to legal contracts, crypto can be slotted into any type of equity or asset-based transaction.

Years ago, crypto fans on Reddit rejoiced when they could suddenly order a pizza through BTC. Being able to buy cars, houses, or even just groceries with crypto doesn’t put crypto closer to adoption, it opens new opportunities more widespread than the eye can meet. It’s not just about building some crypto mobile app anymore. Now it’s about what traditional industry you want to disrupt.

Startup Financing and the Economy: Is it a VC Drought?

By admin @ColureMedia
August 9, 2022
Business Basics,Business Basics Series,Education,Marketing

Yes and no. Alright, if you’ve got a mobile app that you want to sell, it’s going to be a lot harder for you. But if you have a truly innovative and courageous product, you’re good to go. Let’s take a real look at what’s happening in startups, the economy, and the VC drought.

What’s a K-Shaped Recession?

The good do better and the bad do worse; that’s capitalism, baby.

Currently, we’re in what you would call a K-shaped recession, but most people don’t want to talk about that because of the widespread and chaotic implications that might have.

A K-shaped recession is a recession in which the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, in extreme. You’ve already seen it. People who make under $50,000 a year are getting crushed by inflation. But your friends in tech just got like eight raises, didn’t they?

Money is bleeding all over Silicon Valley. But we also know that major companies are axing employees left and right. What are we to make of this strange and, let’s face it, terrifying dichotomy?

The reality is that we’re on the precipice of dramatic digital transformation. Money is coming into digitization and tech, while it’s absolutely bleeding from everywhere else. People are pulling back on spending (including VC funding) because they’re terrified of the upcoming recession. At the same time, the recession is by far hitting the poor, working class more than it is hitting the rich—the rich have only gotten much, much richer.

What Does That Mean for Venture Capital?

A lot of private investors are holding back not because their balance sheets are going south (which they are) but because of psychology. Yes, the market is crashing. But any actual investor understands that the “market crashing” is the time to buy.

But it’s an unprecedented time. This means people can’t really anticipate who is going to do well or who is going to do poorly. Before you load up that Robinhood app, think about how wrong Reddit was about most of their stocks. Any time an individual thinks they can “disrupt” the stock market, well. It’s probably not going to go in the direction they expected.

It’s not a drought, it’s a dry season. The money is there to invest. The rich are getting richer. So, eventually, the dams are going to break. For now, though, investors are being conservative with their money because they don’t know what direction the water’s going to go. And who’s going to get wiped out.

Getting Funding for Your Startup

VCs are still going to invest in companies. You need to be the best company for their dollar. It’s getting harder to get capital, but that doesn’t make it possible. Don’t ignore the temperature. Address, head on, why VCs want to get on the ground floor with your technology now. Address the fact that the economy means they are getting a fantastic deal on your company that they could never get during more auspicious times. Talk to them about how far their dollar can go right now.

People are still investing. But they’re being rightfully cautious. The K-shaped recovery isn’t pure good for the people on the upper angle of the K; it’s bad for everyone. It builds a shaky economy that could collapse at any time. But it also means the people at the upper angle have more relative wealth to invest than ever.

So, go after those dollars. But be smart. A VC drought means you have to be the best pitch available.

5 Benefits of Conversational AI That You Should Know

By admin @ColureMedia
August 1, 2022
Advertising,Digital Advertising,Marketing,Technology

Source

Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a form of AI that can recognize and respond to natural human speech. The emergence of this technology has led to some impressive innovations in customer service, eCommerce, and beyond.

If you’re not already using conversational AI in your business, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about. As more people today get used to having their own virtual assistant at all times, any customer-centric business that doesn’t offer a similar level of convenience and accessibility is likely to get left behind.

Over 60% of customers today report preferring instant messaging a business instead of calling. There’s clearly a real appetite for conversational AI applications in customer service. However, this technology can do much more than provide support to your customers; it can also be used internally to boost efficiency and productivity.

Conversational AI can be used in many ways to improve customer service, increase sales, and streamline business processes. Here are five benefits of conversational AI that you should know about:

Better Customer Service

The impact of AI on customer experience is already being felt by businesses and consumers alike. Thanks to the development of natural language processing (NLP), conversational AI understands human speech. This technology is constantly improving, meaning that chatbots and virtual assistants are becoming more and more accurate at understanding the nuances of human conversation.

Improving the customer experience with conversational AI is one of the easiest ways to set your business apart from the competition right now.

Boost your customer service with these nifty features:

Automation– Automating simple tasks that would otherwise require the attention of a human agent, including complaints. This frees up your agents to deal with more complex issues and provides a more efficient support system for your customers.
Gather and analyze real-time customer data– You can use conversational AI to collect data about your customers’ preferences and pain points. This valuable information can be used to improve your product or service offering.
No language barriers– Conversational AI brings the power of machine translation to the customer service arena. This means that businesses can offer support in multiple languages without the need to hire bilingual agents.

Personalized Customer Interactions

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Linking your conversational AI platform to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system provides a wealth of customer data that can be used to personalize interactions.

The CRM system stores all relevant customer information in one place, including contact details, order history, and past interactions with your business. This information can be used to create a customer profile which is then used to personalize conversations and ensure they are relevant to the customer. This not only increases customer satisfaction but can also lead to a higher customer lifetime value.

Helps You Scale

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Growing your business too fast should be a good problem. You don’t want to stop growing just because your company can’t physically or affordably support more customers. But when all your agents are busy with current customers, how do you take on more without sacrificing quality?

This is where conversational AI can help. Most customer queries can be answered without the need for a human agent. Leveraging conversational AI can help you to automate simple customer interactions, freeing up your human agents to focus on the more complex queries. This can help you to scale your support function and handle more customers without sacrificing quality.

Smaller companies may find it difficult to afford the customer service infrastructure to support a large customer base. However, conversational AI makes it possible for them to offer the same level of customer service at a fraction of the cost.

Lower Operational Costs

24/7 availability is a costly proposition for most businesses. Staffing your customer service department round the clock can be prohibitively expensive, but with conversational AI you can offer this level of support at a fraction of the cost.

Conversational AI platforms are powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning which means they get smarter over time. This means that the more queries they handle, the more accurate their responses become. This can help to reduce the number of staff required to provide customer support and keep your operational costs low.

Easy Follow-Ups with Customers

One of the challenges of customer service is that it can be difficult to follow up with customers after they have interacted with your company. Conversational AI can help to resolve this issue by automating the process of following up with customers. This can be done using several methods, such as sending an automated email or SMS message, or by including a follow-up question in your conversational AI platform.

The value of customer service lies in its ability to build relationships with customers. By following up with customers after they have interacted with your company, you can show them that you are interested in their experience and that you value their business.

Conversational AI offers several benefits that can help businesses to improve customer service and reduce operational costs. It is scalable, affordable, and efficient—making it the perfect solution for businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, conversational AI can help you to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, setting you up for long-term success!

Which Startups Are Resilient to Recession?

By admin @ColureMedia
July 28, 2022
Mobile App Development & Marketing,Mobile App Marketing,Product Development,Social Media,Technology

A downturn doesn’t destroy startups. Rather, it separates the startups that are in recession-proof arenas from the startups that didn’t think about the economy at all. Silicon Valley is no longer a pinata full of cash; you can’t just take a whack and bleed green. You need to be thoughtful about your enterprises. Well-run companies will thrive. The others will perish.

Lean it up

Strip your tech, drop your weight. Startups that were getting fat need to lean it down; they need to pare down to the barebones now. Now is not the time for rapid expansion or hyper-scaling. It’s time for hunkering down and building real muscle. Start cutting areas that you can cut while still retaining your core technology, talent, and identity. You don’t want to be the people scrambling to pick up talent later, but you also don’t want a thousand excessive tools and utilities that you really don’t need during a time when you can’t build strong scale.

Build homes, not castles

Focus on the major pain points of companies and create technologies that they need. Okay, a decade ago, you could make millions solving some minor “problem” that a company had or giving them some luxuries that they didn’t want. But now you have to concentrate on the issues they have. And they’re going to have a lot of problems. Think about what’s going to happen to people when the economy crashes? How can you help them lean it up themselves?

Learn from success

Hey, Amazon’s doing great isn’t it? Walmart, Amazon, anyone who sells stuff online, really. But who isn’t doing great? Oh, Facebook, Twitter… social media. It turns out that during a recession, companies that don’t produce anything of value don’t do great. Take a look at the companies that are posting record profits during these recessions. It has to do with the technologies that are making it easier for people to survive during a recession, doesn’t it?

Make less go further

Don’t just lean. Think about what you can do to grow your client base from within. Think re-selling, re-targeting, re-marketing, rather than raw expansion. What other problems can you solve for your customers? How can you help them succeed? Their success is your success, after all. It’s easier to sell to people who already love you. And, as Amazon has discovered, clients are more likely to stay onboard if they rely on you for multiple things. How many people still have Amazon Prime because they don’t want to lose Prime Video or Prime Music?

Look to the debt/credit/finance industry

And finally, look, it’s a raw deal, but the reality is the industry that’s gonna be doing great is in debt, credit, and finance. At minimum, diversify your interests. Fintech booms when deals go bad, and there’s no way around that. Forge partnerships within industries that are going to last. The real estate bubble, for instance, might crash, sure; but it’s not going away.

Alright, so you’re on your way to building a mobile app to disrupt—which industry? Choose a lean one. A recession doesn’t have to stop your startup in its tracks, but you’re doing it wrong if it isn’t changing at least some of what you’re doing.

Crypto Mortgages May Be the Next Big Disruptor

By admin @ColureMedia
July 25, 2022
Crypto

Alright, well—it almost makes sense. Crypto mortgages are the new fad. You’ve got $300,000 in crypto. The mortgage company has $300,000 in cash. You leverage your crypto for the cash then you leverage that cash for a house and you’ve got it made. No taxes paid because you never cashed out the crypto.

But surely there’s a catch?

Why crypto mortgages do make sense

When you cash out your crypto you pay huge amounts of taxes, more if it was a short-term investment than a long-term investment. Crypto mortgages make it possible to secure a bank loan with your crypto equity, so you don’t actually have to cash out. The bank will hold your crypto as collateral but otherwise you’ve never cashed out. So, you can buy a house. And if you’re self-employed or a regular trader, you probably won’t qualify any other way.

If you’ve got millions of dollars in crypto, this type of mortgage makes absolute sense. Now, you’re still paying the mortgage, which also means that once you’ve paid off your house you’ll own it free and clear. But you get a great mortgage without having to go through a traditional qualification process.

Why crypto mortgages are insane

Okay, so the thing is, like everything in the crypto world, crypto mortgages are an amazing idea that can go south for you very quickly.

And let’s be honest, crypto is very volatile. So, the odds are that this could happen.

For the bank, they’re basically leveraging you. They’ve hedged their risks because either way, you’ll be left holding the bag. And they know you’re likely to pay considerable fees and high interest to avoid those hefty taxes.

What crypto mortgages mean for tech disrupters

Big picture time. Mortgage is a highly regulated and very controlled industry. Obviously, these aren’t going to be FNMA mortgages. But the very fact that you can even get a subprime mortgage with crypto means that crypto continues to bleed into conventional, mainstream spheres.

So, what industry will be next? Travel and hospitality? Restaurants? Manufacturing? As cryptocurrency continues to grow in adoption, it can also spread into other sectors. And just as Blockchain technology is changing everything from the Metaverse to legal contracts, crypto can be slotted into any type of equity or asset-based transaction.

Years ago, crypto fans on Reddit rejoiced when they could suddenly order a pizza through BTC. Being able to buy cars, houses, or even just groceries with crypto doesn’t just put crypto closer to adoption. It opens new opportunities. It’s not just about building some crypto mobile app anymore. Instead, it’s about what traditional industry you want to disrupt.

Stablecoins and the Crypto dash: What Happened?

Hey, on the bright side, cryptocurrencies have finally untethered themselves from the market. On the downside, it was stablecoins that did it. To some, a new economic platform. To others, a transparent Ponzi scheme. Let’s take a look at how stablecoins are going to permanently disrupt the crypto market.

What is a Stablecoin?

Cryptocurrency is now fairly mainstream. You can buy cryptocurrency on the Robinhood app. You can buy it on Cash app. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be bumps in the road.

A stablecoin is a coin that’s pegged to the value of something else. It’s designed to be, well, stable. For instance, the U.S. currency is technically backed by a gold standard (although it hasn’t really been for some time). Ideally, stablecoins should be a hedge against other risks.

Cryptocurrencies are, of course, notoriously volatile. Just load up Reddit and you can see photographic evidence of people losing millions (and gaining them).

TerraUSD, the Stablecoin That Couldn’t

TerraUSD/Luna was a stablecoin locked into the US dollar. It should, ideally, peg its price on the USD… largely in a way that no one really understood. TerraUSD/Luna was two coins in one. One was stable and pegged (again, theoretically), while the other coin was burned to create that stability.

What you need to know is that a stablecoin can either be truly backed by a product (such as the stablecoins that are backed by pools of Bitcoin) or a stablecoin can be algorithmically backed. The algorithm seeks to course correct the coin any time the coin diverges from its backer.

The problem comes when the algorithm needs to create increasingly more volatile swings to compensate for existing instability. With TerraUSD, the adjustments compounded in such a fashion that what should have been a stablecoin catastrophically tanked. As TerraUSD/Luna lost its value, it tried to print more Luna to compensate. This created a virtually infinite loop.

The Consequences of TerraUSD

TerraUSD lost its value within minutes. And that’s not a great thing for cryptocurrency as a whole, because the whole reason people were invested in TerraUSD was to keep their money safe. So, you’ve got this technology that promises that it’s going to be less volatile than crypto, and a great place to save your crypto money, and then it absolutely tanks.

On the one hand, most people investing in AltCoins pretty much know what they’re doing or know what they’re getting into. But on the other hand, anyone investing in stablecoin isn’t looking to engage in risk or make a buck; literally the only reason to be in a stablecoin that matches USD is to keep your money safe, whether it’s between transactions or part of a larger, more diversified portfolio.

Bottom line: Not only did TerraUSD absolutely obliterate its own value, but it also shook investor faith. More and more, cryptocurrency investors are starting to wonder whether crypto is really all that it’s cracked up to be.

The Follow Up Crypto Crash

Well, though, crypto is decentralized, right? So, if crypto is so decentralized, why would TerraUSD cause the entire crypto market to crash?

Actually, there’s good news and bad news there. Good news: a single AltCoin isn’t going to cause the market to crash. If it was going to, Dogecoin would have already done it like eight times.

The bad news is that there were entirely separate issues going on during the whole TerraUSD frenzy; probably issues that also caused TerraUSD to spin out. Part of it started when Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, announced that if it had to declare bankruptcy (which, it was going to do), all its wallets would need to be liquidated.

Because, of course, cryptocurrency isn’t considered to be an actual currency, and Coinbase isn’t a bank. That means the wallets that other people had stored on the exchange would be liquidated to pay Coinbase’s debts.

That led to people mass panicking, selling, liquidating—just generally getting out. That introduced churn that was quickly followed up by the TerraUSD crash.

That doesn’t mean crypto is over, certainly. It’s a great way to transfer wealth, for better or worse. But it does mean that investors need to be a lot more cautious when they read a prospectus. Certainly, don’t just load up any mobile app and start buying coins.

Crypto Billionaire Takes Stake in Robinhood

Robinhood’s had a pretty bad year, hasn’t it?
When the Robinhood app launched, it was poised to vastly disrupt the industry of at-home investing. The mobile app made it easy for people to invest from their phones. It gave voice to the often ignored retail investor.
But the Robinhood app eventually betrayed retail investors during the entire GameStop/AMC debacle, ultimately ending up on the wrong side of Reddit. This year has seen Robinhood’s stock regularly tanking… until now.

Robinhood App Surges in Stock Market

While everyone else was going down, Robinhood was going up. Robinhood lost 40% of its value this year, but regained 25% when crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried took a 7.6% stake in it. Does that mean anything?
Well, maybe.

Sam Bankman-Fried runs FTX, a popular cryptocurrency exchange that has made cryptocurrency far more accessible. The jump in Robinhood’s pricing could indicate a couple of things. First, maybe crypto bros just want to invest in an investor. Maybe they see advantages in crypto expertise.

Second, it could just be the meme. It’s very possible that people simply reinvested in Robinhood because they see “crypto” and they think “good bet.” Really, anything works; people want to believe in the Robinhood mobile app because they want investing to be easy and accessible. Perhaps that’s why it hurt so much that they were betrayed.

The Future of Robinhood

The reality of investing is that it’s designed to protect large fortunes. When you have a David-vs-Goliath situation, David will generally lose out. The skepticism surrounding Robinhood is that Robinhood may very well be ordering trades or making trades in ways that injure smaller investors.

Robinhood has been notorious for pausing trading during times of high volatility. When GME was soaring, they took away the purchase button. Now, that’s not entirely unheard of. The stock market itself stops working whenever there’s a crash.

The problem is that these times of high volatility are generally when a retail trader makes their money. A rich person can put $1,000,000 in a bank account and get thousands back. But if a retail trader is only working with a few thousand to start with, they need to engage in riskier bets.

So, there are a lot of people still using Robinhood. But there are also a lot of people disenchanted with the process. The entire stock market is rigged around not transferring too much wealth in one direction at a time because when that happens, well, the markets crash.

Could a Crypto Billionaire Help?

Well, maybe. A crypto billionaire is certainly more likely to have their finger on the pulse and know what people want. At the same time, we don’t really know what his plans are for influencing the company, even if there are any. The stated reason that he invested was that he saw Robinhood as a good investment. At 40% down from its prior valuation, it very well could have been. A 7.6% stake, even in a company as large as Robinhood, isn’t that much.

But perhaps the news of the stock jump matters. It certainly seems that investors are eager to believe in Robinhood. Robinhood does fulfill a vital position within the investing ecosystem. And if someone were to create an all-encompassing app that was more trustworthy than Robinhood, they would probably be able to capture a significant portion of the market.

Pigs Get Fat, Hogs Get Slaughtered

One thing to remember in all this: It’s not hard to make money in a bull market. The stock market was racing to unseen highs for over ten years. Investors made money hand over fist, not because they were great investors, but simply because they existed.

A lot of retail investors made fortunes. A lot of them lost fortunes. But a disproportionate amount made money just because they weren’t screwing up badly enough to compensate for the sheer market inflation.

Now that we’re in a bear market, we’re going to see a lot more losses. We’re going to see “great investors” lose their shirts. And we’re going to see our day-trading uncles suddenly wonder why it’s “so hard.” How that impacts Robinhood remains to be seen.

Celsius Froze Crypto Withdrawals: Here’s What It Means for Crypto

By admin @ColureMedia
July 8, 2022
Crypto

Are we tired of this yet? The crypto market has never been as disrupted as it has been by its own community. Celsius (another big bad crypto marketplace) froze crypto withdrawals because, frankly, it was insolvent. Voyager this week just filed for Bankruptcy. Now Coinbase is selling off all its information to ICE—a government organization—because it’s about to declare bankruptcy.

What does this all mean for crypto?

It’s Not a Pipe Dream, But It Could Have Been Too Early

You know, there was a company that tried to bring television to the internet. It was going to disrupt cable. But it did it too early. (This is famously a Mark Cuban fail, but really he was right, ultimately.) They tried to bring television to the internet before the internet had the bandwidth to support it. So, they crashed and burned.

We have Bitcoin, and it’s a great idea: a global decentralized currency. But if you were an early adopter like me, you remember that within a year of mainstream attention, the Blockchain was so large that no one could feasibly download it anymore. And then people keep losing thousands upon thousands of Bitcoin, worth thousands upon thousands of dollars.

So they start moving to marketplaces and exchanges. And the second they did that, it’s no longer decentralized. Now it’s in control of a few companies because the most popular companies are the ones that have the market share. And here we are.

The Perils of Deregulation

Deregulation is great when you aren’t getting taxed and no one can trace your money. The flip side to that is the scammers who stole your money also can’t be traced and aren’t getting taxed. Now, once crypto hit the Robinhood App and even Cash App, better controls started to be instituted.

But crypto marketplaces still aren’t banks. They aren’t controlled or regulated by anyone. And yes, they can just disappear with your money.

As Coinbase pointed out earlier in the year, the money in their coffers isn’t even technically yours. Their bankruptcy could have led to the dissolution of all the money held in their wallets.

So, we’ve got marketplaces that are in charge of your money and poised to disrupt crypto, and they can basically do whatever they want. They can take away that “buy/sell” button (like the Robinhood app did) at any time because they aren’t regulated. They aren’t a financial institution.

Now, that doesn’t actually mean they can commit fraud. They can’t promise to keep your money and then throw it away. But if you look at your Terms of Service, you will probably discover that they have a lot more rights to your crypto than you do.

Going Back to the Foundations

Of course, that doesn’t mean that crypto was a terrible idea, or that it can’t still disrupt global currency. Primarily, the issue is that early crypto technology has always been so unwieldy that there’s really no way to interface it except through a third party. These third parties strip away a lot of the benefits and protections related to crypto in exchange for ease of use.

So, to really disrupt the crypto market, we need to start using crypto more intelligently. Yes, crypto was made for engineers. But for actual adoption to really surface, it has to be usable by people who don’t have a computer science degree. You know, something like an easy-to-use mobile app.

As for now, here’s what you need to know about the crypto market: It’s bad. That’s not to say you shouldn’t fill your pockets with cheap coin, but the problem is that crypto is essentially a faith-based economy, and people are getting crushed. Now that people can’t really trust their marketplaces to actually give them their money, they are turning away from crypto en masse. That doesn’t mean you should listen to the panic on Reddit… but you should probably be a little more cautious with your yolos.

Snapchat’s Crash Leaves Social Media Disruptors Gasping

Okay, so, the entire stock market is crashing. So this probably isn’t surprising. Open your Robinhood app, and it’s just a crazy sea of red. But there are still some standouts, sometimes for the wrong reasons. Snapchat crashed 43% because it didn’t meet its revenue targets. But that’s actually not altogether surprising.

Why Did Snapchat Crash?

It’s not that extraordinary. Many social media platforms suffer from the same problem. Even if they disrupt the market and get millions or, in Facebook’s case, billions of users, they have no clear path towards monetization. Facebook countered that by getting in good with businesses and starting to develop ads.

Snapchat has creator monetization tools, which makes it fairly unique among “social media first” platforms. But by and large, it’s just not an easily monetized mobile apply.

A lot of social media platforms are on a VC runway. They lose money, but they still get investments because they have such extraordinary engagement and active users.

The Implications of the Snapchat Crash

But investors are becoming disenchanted with these continuous losses. As the recession pulls investors back from spending, it’s going to pull back on these high-risk, would-be-nice plays. Do you really want to be invested in Snapchat and it’s potential monetization as it bleeds money? Or do you want to pick up some cheap Microsoft stock, knowing that it’s currently at an extraordinary discount?

Social media disruptors tend to concentrate on engagement and hope, very fervently, that they’ll figure out monetization later. But that’s not the strategy. Just ask Reddit, which has had to incorporate pretty aggressive advertising on its platform to stay afloat. Just ask MoviePass, which lost investors millions of dollars on its casual “we’ll figure it out” engagement play.

Monetizing Social Media: Is It the Metaverse?

So, here’s the thing. Anyone who wants to disrupt social media needs to have their monetization baked in. How do you monetize social media?

The best way, quite honestly, is going to have to do with the Metaverse and product placement. Metaverse—purchasing digital items that generate a “lifestyle image,” whether that’s cosmetics for your digital avatar or filters for your digital photos. Produce placement—advertising that’s less obtrusive and more likely to get people to buy, because people are sick of ads.

That being said, social media ads are going to become tremendously more effective shortly because of the death of the third-party cookie. Cookies can’t track you, but your social media account can.
People are focusing more on product placement now. Get creators to highlight your items. Build sponsorships. In fact, that’s actually pulling back to the very early days of the web when everything was directly sponsored. Including the reviews.

But social media is a hard nut to track, because engagement doesn’t necessarily mean monetization. Companies that are poised to disrupt the social media market need to really dig into their monetization and make sure they have a viable strategy. We aren’t in the second DotCom boom anymore; VCs aren’t going to throw money at every mobile app that’s being built. You need an actual business strategy, not just a product.

As for Snapchat, well, the problem with social media platforms is also that they have a shelf-life. Just as the kiddos are moving away from Facebook, they’re moving away from Snapchat, too. Kids aren’t going to use the same platform as their parents—and it shows. So, the time is right for a successor to TikTok. But who will it be?

Elon Musk takes over Twitter

By admin @ColureMedia
May 11, 2022
Disruptive Mobile Apps,News,Social Media,Technology,Uncategorized

Can you believe it? It worked. But what does it mean for the media? What does it mean for “free speech” and the market of opinions? Elon Musk has finally bought Twitter — and tanked his own stock doing it. What does that mean for digital disruption?

A Hostile Takeover

Earlier in the month, Elon Musk started a hostile takeover of Twitter by purchasing an immense number of shares. Twitter reacted by enacting a poison pill measure; a poison pill is something a company does specifically to avoid a hostile takeover, making it effectively impossible for a company to be taken over through stock purchases alone.

But despite the board initially saying that Musk would have no control over the company, they quickly introduced him to the board. And when he offered $44 billion for Twitter itself, they rather quickly folded. Musk is known for his capricious but often visionary purchases; he did not build Tesla but rather purchased it.

Interestingly, until the very end, Reddit posts were saying Musk could never take over. But Redditors have a long history of skepticism, going back to the Robinhood App.

Why Does Musk Want Twitter?

Musk has a weird relationship with Twitter. He doesn’t like being censored. So much so that he’s been fined repeatedly by the SEC for saying things that manipulated Tesla’s stock prices. Musk says that he wants transparency on the platform but it’s also likely he wants the freedom to do what he wants.

Whether he’s the proper steward for a channel that has become a leading resource for news and even political change remains to be seen. Musk cut his teeth in digital disruption with PayPal and his forays into Tesla and SpaceX have both been markedly successful. But they are very different technologies.

The Consequences for Tesla

Tesla stock, meanwhile, has been absolutely slaughtered. In part, this is due to the perception that Musk is acting irrationally or emotionally, which he has historically been prone to do. If he’s purchasing Twitter as a means of radically decentralized discourse, that’s one thing. If he’s purchasing it because he wants people to stop saying mean things about him on the internet, that’s a vastly different situation. Regardless, Tesla stockholders got to see the stock plummet.

The Consequences for Twitter

While many users have abandoned Twitter, the reality is that people are mostly meh. As one user stated, “if you’re upset over a billionaire buying Twitter, wait until you find out who owns everything else.” So, a billionaire bought an online platform/mobile app. What else is new?

For many, the reality of the situation is that Twitter is just a social media venue that they can take or leave, and most appear to be waiting to see what happens.

Entrepreneurs, though, will face broader implications. One thing Musk does have a stance on is algorithm transparency.

Algorithm Transparency and Business

No one knows what special sauce Google uses to make sure that results surface. That’s the point. Billions are spent every year trying to figure it out in the form of search engine optimization.

Musk wants to make visible the mechanisms that promote posts on Twitter. And that could be both a problem and an opportunity. It will either radically change the way people are using Twitter or (more likely) destroy it as spam becomes even more aggressive and prevalent.

Companies that lean firmly on Twitter for their advertising campaigns are currently right to be wary.

Note that the Musk deal with Twitter could still fall through. It’s not finalized. He may discover that he didn’t want to buy Twitter after all. He may get butthurt that Bill Gates’ short position against Tesla paid off big. And Twitter itself may decide not to capitulate.

Still, this gives rise to many thoughts as to how the wealthy can control discourse, how vulnerable the entrepreneurial disruption community is to its tools, and how the internet is evolving today. The Twitter purchase will undoubtedly disrupt business on the platform and mobile app; the question is how much?

Reddit vs the Market: A David and Goliath Tail

By admin @ColureMedia
April 20, 2022
Uncategorized

By now, most people know about the meme stock debacle. But it’s more than meets the eye. When Redditors blew up GameStop and AMC stock, what they were really doing was revealing tremendous inequality within the current stock market — and a stock market inherently divorced from real economic values.

Redditors and GameStop: The Big Short

Let’s go over what happened. On Reddit, retail traders (independent home investors) frequently post something called “DD.” Due Diligence. That’s information about stocks and investments; the research they’ve done into determining whether something is a “good buy.”

Okay, so, a Redditor posts that they’ve noticed that GameStop is being shorted into the ground. Someone is betting on GameStop to fail, way beyond what seems to be legitimate. And they decide it’s a good idea to be on the other side of that trade; they think GameStop is way undervalued.

What happens next is the chaos. Everyone agrees, so everyone buys. GameStop stock starts to soar. This launches a massive squeeze. A squeeze occurs when someone has shorted a stock (hoping it will go down in value), because that means they still need to purchase that stock to sell it at the lower value. So the value keeps going up and up because the short sellers don’t want to take a loss and buy, but they eventually have to make that purchase to cover their sales.

But in this pandemonium, it’s large companies like Citadel losing money. And that’s where the disruption occurs.

Robinhood’s Fall from Grace

A few years ago, Robinhood made waves by making trading easy. It was able to disrupt the day trading market by letting anyone trade at any time. Retail traders were able to start trading stocks and making money with technology that could keep up with the giants.

But there were still some caveats. The Robinhood App was the only way a lot of investors could access their trades and money and many of them weren’t interested in holding traditional investment accounts.

When GameStop started ballooning, Robinhood started disabling the ability to buy and sell GME stock. It moved similarly on AMC. The idea was that Robinhood was trying to reduce volatility. But it all led to an inherent flaw in the system.

Everyone’s Jim Cramer

When someone on television says a stock is a “buy,” it can be enough to influence the stock to go up. But that’s legal. Offering an opinion on a stock is legal. Colluding to boost a stock price is not legal. But you can see where the lines can be gray.

Online, everyone can give their opinion about a stock. The GME and AMC squeezes had people making millions overnight. They increased their value not by thousands but by tens of thousands. This led to dozens of copycat pump and dump schemes focused on stocks like WISH.

The question is simple: what happens when internet trends can so vastly influence the stock market?

But retail traders aren’t doing anything that hedge funds weren’t already doing. The reason the DD on GameStop first appeared was because a specific hedge fund, Citadel, had been shorting companies into nonexistence. This creates an unbalanced effect in which hedge funds can manipulate the market but the retail trader cannot.

The Fallout

Most GME and AMC investors are still waiting for their big payoff. While both stocks rose tremendously, they believed they should rise even higher because the shorts still haven’t been covered. However, a variety of financial systems (such as borrowing shares to cover shorted shares) have largely mitigated what they call MOASS (the Mother of all Short Squeezes).

Robinhood and Citadel are being accused of manipulating the market. The mobile app is accused of engaging and disengaging trades to manipulate price. Citadel is accused of relentlessly shorting stocks to drive companies out of the market and of not covering shorts that it should have covered. But whether anything will come of this is largely unclear.

What is evident is that retail traders now have a very significant hand in the market and that they aren’t going away. If the market does not become more transparent or at least more accessible, it’s difficult to see how it can remain stable.

As for the retail traders themselves, many are chasing the next squeeze. While some continue to invest in AMC and GME, the subreddits like WallStreetBets are full of other DDs. Many aren’t investing for long term strategies but rather short term gambles, which further complicates implications for the market — and makes it a lot more interesting.

Geotargeting & Geofence Marketing: How a small company can disrupt a big market

If you feel like social media and online marketing is shouting into the void, you’re really not alone. Many small, local businesses are told to invest in online advertising and mobile marketing only to discover that it’s really not effective for them.

Imagine if you advertised your company to every 10,000th person on earth. How many of those people would actually be able to use your products or services? Probably none of them. There are a lot of people on earth and there are a lot of people online.

Geotargeting and geofence marketing focus on hyper-local leads — so you can stop shouting and start earning.

Connect to the Customers Closest to You

It’s the customers that are closest to you that you want to connect with. It’s better to connect with 50 people in your neighborhood than 5,000 people across the world. And it’s cheaper, too. When you connect with customers close to you, you greatly enhance the viability and effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.

How Does Geotargeting/Geofencing Work?

Geotargeting/geo fencing works by identifying where customers are inside of a broader, third-party advertising network. For instance, Google Ads shows throughout the world but can show your ads only to those who are in your vicinity. Geotargeting is broad; it just means that you’re sending your ads to those who are in your country, state, city, or even zip code.

Geo-fencing is a little different. Geo-fencing specifically defines an area, such as an area that is located in a highly-trafficked region around your business. Once individuals are inside this area, they are targeted. Geo-fencing can be used to deliver ads through PoS systems within your neighborhood, for instance, or to send ads to phones and other devices detected in your region.

The Advantages of Geotargeting

Really, the advantages of geotargeting are clear. You can spend $100 to connect with 5,000 people in the world or $10 to connect with 50 people in your area. It’s cost-effective and far more useful.

But it also enhances public perception of your brand, as you’re no longer trying to reach out to individuals who wouldn’t be interested in your advertising to begin with. Geofence marketing creates more relevant, useful advertising, as well as more profitable strategies.

Implementing a Geotargeting Campaign Strategy

To implement a geotargeting campaign strategy, you (obviously) need to know where your customers are. There are third-party ad platforms like Google and Bing, but their usefulness will actually be vanishing shortly; action is being taken to reduce third-party tracking cookies.

There are two better options: social media marketing and third-party behavioral targeting databases. Social media marketing works because individuals already provide where they live to the social media platform. Even better, they provide information such as whether they’re married, whether they have children, and even where they work and where they went to school.

Third-party databases seek to identify consumers based on their behavior and contextual information without the help of cookies or files stored on the user’s device. These third-party geotargeted databases are likely to grow dramatically once cookies become ineffective for geofence marketing.

Summary

With the right geofence marketing, your company can focus all its efforts on advertising directly to the people who are closest to you. When they look at their phone or check their email in your location, they’ll get information that relates to your business. If they’re halfway across the world, they won’t.

But this type of advertising and mobile marketing really does require that you use the right technology. Social media marketing provides some of this targeting, but mobile marketing is about to get a lot more challenging.

What Are Blockchain Smart Contracts?

By admin @ColureMedia
April 6, 2022
Blockchain,Disruptive Mobile Apps,Education,Product Development,Technology

Imagine that you wanted to purchase a car from your neighbor. You open an app and accept a contract. Instantaneously, money is sent to your neighbor and the car is transferred into your possession. Everyone can see that you own the vehicle. Your neighbor doesn’t have to do anything other than send the contract.

This is the future of the blockchain — the incredible benefits of smart contract technology. But it’s also, like most new technology, potentially dangerous and disruptive.

How is a Smart Contract Created?

Smart contracts are created on a blockchain. They are programmed to exchange a given blockchain’s token (such as wrapped Ethereum) under specific conditions. A smart contract can be sent to anyone, anywhere, if you know their address. This also means that smart contracts can technically be sent to those who have no idea that they’re about to receive them. Driven by blockchain, smart contracts have risen into power alongside crypto and NFTs. Binance, Polymatic, and Solana all support smart contracts.

What Are Smart Contracts Used For?

Smart contracts can send and receive money and record transactions on the blockchain. Essentially, though, that boils down to one thing: smart contracts, given a set of conditions, write to the blockchain. That means smart contracts can be used to validate real-life contracts, exchange goods and services, and complete very fast financial transactions.

What Are the Benefits and Limitations of Smart Contracts?

Like crypto, the major limitation of smart contracts is that they’re difficult for the average person to understand and they’re difficult to use. More than cryptocurrency, an individual needs detailed tech knowledge to launch a smart contract. But ideally, smart contracts will become more prevalent and easier to use as time passes.

Smart contracts record transactions. But they cannot influence anything outside of their individual blockchain. That means that additional work has to be done to do things like validate real estate transactions or validate car transactions — even if that work is merely acknowledging that the blockchain provides a real record of contracts.

What is the Relationship Between Contracts and the Blockchain?

Smart contracts are built on the blockchain. This provides for triggering events (such as opening a transaction) as well as for recording events (recording them directly on the blockchain). A smart contract is blockchain technology, but blockchain doesn’t necessarily imply smart contracts. NFTs could be called a type of smart contract, as they do convey ownership to an item in exchange for money.

What is the Legality of Smart Contracts?

A contract, legally, is something that two or more parties agree upon. Consequently, no new laws are necessary for a smart contract to be a type of contract; if it is validated that both parties agreed upon a transaction, then both parties agreed upon a transaction. A car can be sold through a smart contract right now, all that would be necessary (which admittedly is a hurdle) is for the law to understand what a smart contract is and how it operates.

That being said, smart contracts aren’t intended to be a legal venue, at least not yet. A lawyer should be involved if smart contracts are used for anything that is more valuable than a car or more obscure than an NFT.

Conclusion

Smart contracts are very disruptive. Presently, someone can borrow money, buy an NFT from themselves, and then send that money back within milliseconds. That may not seem helpful, but people have borrowed millions of dollars to buy their own NFT (in a fraction of a second) thereby boosting the value of their NFTs.

Start to dig deeper and you can see how smart contracts could be disruptive. Because they aren’t regulated (and can’t be regulated) they can give illusions of profitability where there isn’t one. People who work with smart contracts need to be tech-savvy and knowledgeable due to the potential complications and ramifications.

What the heck is GPT3 and why will it disrupt every industry?

By admin @ColureMedia
June 24, 2021
Disruptive Mobile Apps,GPT3,Mobile App Development & Marketing,Technology

GPT3 is like Bitcoin that makes your Alexa and Siri look like Dogecoin! If you are reading this there is a likelihood GPT3 may disrupt your entire industry.

The originator is Manuel Araoz, but halfway through the piece he confesses that he did not write it. The article was fully written by GPT-3. He received access to OpenAI API, and was amazed at the raw power of GPT-3, after only giving it access to his homepage, a title, some tags, and a summary.

“OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company backed by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, … and others, released its third generation of language prediction model (GPT-3) into the open-source wild…”

So, GPT-3–Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3–generates text. It can create anything that has a language structure. You can ask it a question; prompt it to write an essay or summarize a long passage of text, translate languages, take memos. Since apps and web design are structured language, GPT-3 makes coding easier and faster.

Will GPT-3 as Marc Strassman, Founder & Executive Director at GPT-3 Society predicts, put a lot of writers out of business? That’s an open question for now, but there is no doubt that AI has the potential to add even more to information overload by producing more content than anyone can absorb. The good news for writers is that GPT-3 can generate lots of useful new ideas and back them up with facts and evidence.

What is actually occurring inside GPT-3’s programming may not be all that clear, but what it does best is harvesting text found on the internet and creating a vast “scrapbook” glued together and available on demand. The quality and durability of its end-products depend on the reader’s taste and preference.

Said one observer, “GPT-3 often performs like a clever student who hasn’t done their reading trying to bullshit their way through an exam. Some well-known facts, some half-truths, and some straight lies, strung together in what first looks like a smooth narrative.”

However, GPT-3 is a quantum step up from its previous GPT-2 version, released in 2020. GPT-2 spat out pretty convincing streams of text when prompted with an opening sentence. Compared with GPT-2’s vast 1.5 billion parameters, GPT-3 is over a hundred times more powerful with its 175 billion neural network ties at work in text generation and automated learning.

Michael Ryaboy, GPT-3 Prompt Engineer at Codebuddy in San Francisco adds a writer’s perspective to how GPT-3 will disrupt society:

“Most repetitive writing tasks such as copywriting will be in large part done by GPT-3…Similarly, a model like GPT-3 can greatly increase your writing productivity by writing for you if you are stuck… (For gaming programmers) Tools like GPT-3 will also be used to create immersive realities, as thousands of subplots for a video game can be created in minutes, and AI Dungeon already allows cohesive text-based explorations.”

Will AI-powered technology eventually become smarter than humans? Elon Musk fears that is so. He has warned that our existence as human beings could be at stake. Musk warns “that we’re headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans.”

The operating term here is “technological singularity.” That is the hypothetical point in time when technological growth becomes so exponentially expansive that it becomes incontrollable and irreversible. The disruption and changes to human civilization, according to the hypothesis, can result in unforeseeable disruption and changes to human civilization.

Not everyone agrees with Elon Musk’s pessimism. AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio’s view is that we “are very far from super-intelligent AI systems and there may even be fundamental obstacles to get much beyond human intelligence.”

As Cofounder, Create Labs Ventures Abran Maldonado stated, “It will put the power of AI technology into the hands of more creative and mission driven communities outside of tech. This technology has lowered the barrier to entry and will allow new groups to enter the space and stay focused on the problems they are trying to solve.”

And according to the CEO of OpenAi, Sam Altman, all the hype about GPT-3 is “too much.”Yes, he agrees, “AI is going to change the world, but GPT-3 is just an early glimpse.” He identifies three main impediments to AI taking over everything:

1. AI is hugely expensive to use because of the vast amount of computing power needed to do its work. So, the cost of using it could be well beyond the budget of smaller organizations.

2. GPT-3 is a “closed” or “black-box” system. OpenAI has not revealed full details of its algorithms. So, if you rely on a technology to answer questions or create produces, you can’t be entirely sure how those answers or product solutions came about.

3. The output is far from perfect. GPT-3 can handle tasks like creating basic apps and short texts, but often tends to deteriorate and produce gibberish when tasked to produce something longer and complex.

How GPT-3 will disrupt everything else

Mobile App developers are already leveraging GPT-3 to do some amazing things with very little effort beyond plain language requests. Some examples:

Generating web and app design code based on text descriptions.

All that design code is already there. Developers can simply describe what they want, like “a layout that contains 3 buttons with a random color.” Watch this stunning display of GPT-3s plain language coding on this YouTube video.

Getting medical advice and answers.

One medical student in the UK used GPT-3 to answer medical and health care questions. His program gives correct answers to plain English questions as well as the underlying science and biology.

Converting legalese to plain language, and vice versa.

The law is one of the most text-driven professions. There are GPT-3 apps that can write pleas, motions, and other complicated legal documents and translate their text back to understandable English. For example, “my landlord neglected the property,” becomes “The Defendants allowed the real property to fall into disrepair…”

Finally, will GPT-3 send Siri and Alexa packing?

Probably not anytime soon, Michael Ryaboy believes that “Siri and Alexa do their job well. They are designed to allow you to do tasks through speech and not to maintain engaging conversation.” Until someone comes up with a better idea that Apple and Amazon are willing to throw out those top performers, they will probably be around for a while yet.

Let Colure help you design your mobile app and mobile app marketing

So, where do you fit into all that disruption? If you’re an innovative app developer or business owner and want to tackle some of our world’s most pressing challenges and harness AI to make everyone’s life better, contact us today. Colure’s Mobile App Development Team can get you going on your next projector to be interviewed and featured in our next series of “Project Venus.”

Design your baby from a mobile app…

Are you serious designer babies? What is CRISPR and can it disrupt the healthcare industry? Design a baby or fix your chronic illness right from a mobile app, well maybe not just yet but the technology to execute this is already on its way.

The world we live in might not look like The Jetsons, but we are living in the future in many ways. We’ve already got smartphones, and smart homes quickly followed. Augmented reality has expanded the horizons of video games, and virtual reality is poised to change the lives of people living with disabilities. What’s next? Smart genes? You might be shocked to learn that a technology called CRISPR promises exactly that!

While “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats” might be a mouthful, CRISPR is a little easier to say. CRISPR are a naturally occurring sequence of repeats in simple living creatures such as some bacteria. While bacteria use CRISPR as an immune defense against other organisms, humans discovered that CRISPR could be used to target genes of pretty much any living creature, including us!

Through a method known as CAS-9, CRISPR can essentially be used to edit genes from DNA, similar to how you can cut text from Word documents. Researchers have since been able to use CRISPR to cut genes out entirely and cut out faulty genes to replace them with functional ones. That’s right, CRISPR lets us copy and paste our DNA.

CRISPY isn’t just a novel new technology. It represents some pretty important possibilities. For example, CRISPR can be used to disrupt the faulty DNA that leads to diseases such as Huntington’s, which is caused by a mutation in a gene and has been difficult to treat up until now. Not only does Huntington’s decrease the quality and length of life, but parents can pass the disease to their children. If CRISPR can remove faulty genes, people who would otherwise develop Huntington’s disease and avoid having children who might do the same can live happily and healthily with a brood of their own.

That’s just one example of the power of CRISPR. Researchers are hard at work determining the different ways that CRISPR (and CAS-9) can work for us. Many are hopeful that CRISPR can be used with CAR-T, a method used alongside genetic therapy to boost the patient’s own immune cells to fight cancer. Jens-Ole Bock of COBO Technologies Aps, which focuses on DNA technology, expressed hope over this combination:

Focus now is on different types of blood diseases and cancer treatment using CAR-T. We have now more than 70 trials ongoing in the clinical phase and initial safety data from these trials are looking promising.

Kevin Doxzen, Ph.D., expressed similar sentiments about the potential that the “development of CRISPR and other genome engineering technologies is moving modern medicine towards personalized therapeutics and away from a one-size-fits-all approach to healthcare. The ability to precisely locate and alter a specific genetic sequence is opening the door to treating a range of previously untreatable diseases, especially rare genetic diseases.” Who’s to say what uses we’ll find for CRISPR in the future?

In fact, some researchers are already investigating whether CRISPR can be used to created so-called “designer babies.” Considering that researchers in China have already tested CRISPR on embryos to produce babies resistant to HIV, smallpox, and cholera, is it a leap to wonder if they could identify other traits that some people might find undesirable to edit them right out of embryos before implanting them. Given that the 23&Me app can already tell us what genes we might pass on to our children, the idea doesn’t sound that farfetched at all! Who could have predicted this? The writers of Gattaca, for one.

However, while it might be possible for CRISPR to create “designer babies” in the future, many medical experts are skeptical. For example, Bock expressed disbelief that CRISPR technology would move in this direction based on current research efforts.

All trials today are in somatic cells and focus is to treat well-characterised genetic diseases that will have a significant impact for the patient and the patient group. Because we learn more and more about the genes involved in different diseases, it will make sense to do more pre-screening of germ cells and thereby we could exclude many potential genetic diseases to move to the next generation. However some genetic disease we can not predict and “capture” on in pre-screening and therefore we need tools like CRISPR to be able to cure future genetic diseases in this group of patients

Of course, there’s always someone who wants to capitalize on new tech, which means that we’re pretty much guaranteed that someone will step in to fulfill the role of designing babies with CRISPR in the future. But most researchers understand the significance of treating or even preventing cancer and other diseases that severely impact–and shorten–a patient’s life. With such important work already underway, there’s no use fretting over the potential misuses of CRISPR when the technology will have such long-reaching benefits.

The success of our agency is built upon our clients’ growth. If you want to discuss your next project or be interviewed and featured in our next series of “Project Venus,” contact Colure’s Mobile App Development Team.

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1. Metaverse Real Estate

2. EVs

3. Selfie vs. POV

4. Permanent Remote Work

5. The Focus On Employee Wellness In the Workplace

6. Collaborative Technologies

7. Lead Agencies, Agency Tools, SaaS, etc.

8. SMS Marketing

9. Influencer Marketing

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The AI chatbots are disrupting customer satisfaction

What does it mean for you?

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Mainstream Periodicals: Let’s Get It Out of the Way

Innovation and Tech: Futurism, MIT Technology Review, and Wired

Podcasts: Masters of Scale, The Week in Startups, Mixergy, and The Growth Show

Books: The Startup Owner’s Manual, Who, Zero to One, and Leading at the Speed of Growth

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Build homes, not castles

Learn from success

Make less go further

Look to the debt/credit/finance industry

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TerraUSD, the Stablecoin That Couldn’t

The Consequences of TerraUSD

The Follow Up Crypto Crash

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The Implications of the Snapchat Crash

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