It’s the year 2035.

The world has changed and you’ve been leading the charge to make it happen.

Artificial intelligence has liberated us from repetitive mental tasks the same way the industrial revolution freed people from repetitive physical tasks.

You pay for your groceries with cryptocurrency on your Samsung Galaxy smartphone. Blockchain-based protocols create your business contracts and you can access your data from trusted databases that are immune to corruption and censorship.

Everyone has a pocket supercomputer.

Computer processors are fast enough to power convincing virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) experiences. Advanced 5G connectivity has made it easy, comfortable, and affordable to meet your friend across the world, travel to space, or receive medical treatment for phobia and paralysis rehabilitation. Genetic sequencing is a routine part of medicine. With 24/7 tracking through the biometric sensors on your watch, you have completely personalized health care and better access than the current U.S president.

Excited about the future like I am? Let’s connect at the Samsung Developer Conference.

Learn more about what’s in store. See my post on Samsung Business Insights.

Platforms like Venmo, Simple and Square are starting to catch on in the developed world. While start ups, tech giants, and financial institutions are falling over themselves to introduce digital payment services in the developing world, mobile money is routinely used in countries like Kenya…

Africa has spearheaded the boom in digital payments.

Launched in 2007, Kenya’s M-Pesa system has become the poster child for mobile financial transactions. In 2013, approximately $24 billion in mobile transactions accounted for more than half the country’s GNP. The service expanded so quickly that the number of registered accounts currently surpasses the number of adult Kenyans.

Neighboring Tanzania leads the continent in total transaction value, and at least 8 countries in Africa have more mobile accounts than traditional bank accounts.

Asia and the Middle East are catching up. Telenor Pakistan, one of the largest mobile operators in the world, launched Easypaisa, the country’s first mobile banking service, in 2009. Within five years, Easypaisa had processed more than 100 million transactions with a total value of over $1.4 billion. Today, it’s the third largest mobile money service in the world. Six million customers can do almost all their banking on the mobile devices. If they need assistance, they can go to one of 25,000 Easypaisa shops in 750 cities and towns across the country.

On the other side of India, Dutch Bangla Bank opened the first mobile banking service in Bangladesh in 2011. At the time only about 13% of the country’s 160 million citizens had bank accounts, but close to half of its mostly rural population used mobile phones. As in Pakistan, the service employs thousands of agents around the country to help users open accounts and handle cash services, at a significantly lower costs than normal bank branches.

In Nepal, Laxmi Bank Limited launched the Mobile Khata payment system in 2012. The name comes from a traditional ceremonial scarf in Tibetan Buddhism that symbolizes compassion and purity. The service works with every provider in Nepal and was one of the first to be interoperable between multiple financial institutions.

Other countries throughout the developing world have seen the arrival of successful mobile money services including Guatemala, Iran, Mexico and even Somalia.

People use these mobile operators to transfer funds between people, merchants or utilities. They can also withdraw cash from ATMs or receive government allowances.

What’s more, mobile banking systems empower women, who are traditionally even more excluded from the formal banking system than men, according to the World Bank. Digital banking also makes it easier to save for routine expenses like school supplies and major events such as childbirth.

However, there’s still a significant gender gap in access to mobile banking. Women in developing countries are still less likely to own mobile phones than men. For example, 44% of Bangladeshi women have mobile phones compared to 72% of men. The gap represents a potential $170 billion market over the next five years, according to the GSMA, an association of mobile operators. In addition women tend to be more responsible in their spending and invest more in their families, prioritizing things like education, nutrition and healthcare, said Melinda Gates of the Gates Foundation. This has major economic implications to their communities.

A new mobile savings platform called Vumi, launched in South Africa in August, is designed to work on any network or mobile-money provider — and empower women at the same time. The pilot project is part of a nationwide program aimed at encouraging young girls to save money through their phones. Instead of relying on slow and expensive bank or wire transfer networks to transmit money, it uses a low-cost, open-source protocol called Stellar.

Today, platforms like Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Samsung Pay, Venmo, Simple and Square are starting to catch on in the developed world. In the developing world, these systems have the potential to improve the lives of 2.5 billion adults by allowing them to transfer funds, pay off loans and save for the future.

This feels like just the beginning. A decade ago we had no smart phones, no apps, and no mobile economy. Imagine where we’ll be in 10 years.

People love online videos.

YouTube is now the second-largest search engine,  and more people turn to the platform for answers as they face new daily decisions, questions, and challenges.

Let’s look at the numbers:

• YouTube has over 1 billion users  — almost one-third of all people on the Internet. 
• 4 billion videos are watched with billions of views generated daily
• More than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices
• On mobile, the average viewing session is now more than 40 minutes
• YouTube reaches more 18-49 year-olds than any U.S. cable network

Source: YouTube Statistics

As an enterprising brand, you can exploit this opportunity by providing useful content when people are looking for solutions.

Here are 10 ways to get started on YouTube.

1. Know your target audience

Mold your video to your client base.

What are their pain points?
What are their values and needs?
What messaging resonates?

Talk to your audience!

2. Talk to one person

Don’t think of this as posting mass communication to “people on Youtube.”

Think of one person whose problem you are solving.

3. Find your hook

Lead with one compelling point so your target audience will stick around past the first few seconds. Think of this as the most important point. Or the one-liner that you think everyone will want to tweet.

Be concise and compelling. Your hook can also serve as an organizing principle that keeps you from rambling. Your hook will snag both you and your viewer into the video. Make your message meaningful, memorable, relevant, relatable, and tailored to your target audience.

4. Use the right keywords

Keyword relevancy is a key factor that contributes to the SEO ranking of a YouTube video.

Search for the best keyword on YouTube. Simply type a relevant keyword in the YouTube search and see suggested keywords.

You can also get the VidIQ Chrome extension to see which keywords will get your video the most visibility.

For best results:

• Ensure the file name and the thumbnail are aligned with the keyword of the video
• Include at least one keyword in the video title (close to the front)
• Include the keyword in the first 1-3 lines and the first 3 hashtags of the description

Utilize tags fully with relevant keywords to optimize search results. While tags are not visible on the platform uploads, using consistent tags across similar videos will improve the likelihood of them referring to each other in ‘Suggested videos’. You can also use multiple-word tags that specifically relate to the video to help users find the video e.g. YouTube Marketing Strategy.

Track the performance consistently and remove ineffective Tags.

5. Customize your YouTube thumbnail

Thumbnails are crucial in ensuring your content stands out quickly in search results.

They act like billboards to help viewers decide to click on your content.

90% of the best-performing videos on YouTube have custom thumbnails.

Use custom thumbnails rather than automatically generated ones. Well-designed thumbnails attract fans to your channel and help make sure they know what to expect of your content.

Here are some Dos and Don’ts.

Do:

• Add graphics
• Apply the rule of thirds: objects should be placed closer to the central grid for focus
• Overlay with branding/ descriptive text
• Use consistent layout and colors
• Ensure your thumbnail works on desktop and mobile
• Use a color scheme that stands out
• Use high contrast
• Experiment with text
• Check and track thumbnail performance

Don’t:

• Use tiny, illegible text
• Incorporate too much text
• Be boring or use dull colors
• Use unclear confusing imagery
• Use irrelevant, misleading, or sensational imagery

6. Choose your title wisely

You want to attract human readers with your title, but you also want to attract search engines. Otherwise, readers might never find your post. You want a compelling promise that turns a browser into a reader and relevant keyword phrases in your titles to attract search engines. Use a compelling title with less than 70 characters to be fully shown on the search result.

7. Include hashtags in your description

You can be wordy in the description (and insert hashtags) because this supports search engine optimization. Use relevant keywords that suit your business and connect with your target audience.  The first 3 hashtags in your description appear as hyperlinks above the title. However, you should be careful about over-tagging. If a video has more than 15, all the hashtags will be ignored.

8. Be creative and consistent

More is better. Don’t just make one video. Post creative videos consistently. You should have at least a couple of videos on your YouTube channel. This is beneficial for your ranking in search.

9. Setup autoplay

Set the main video to play automatically when someone clicks on your channel. This gets the ball rolling fast and captures the viewer’s attention. You can create your own playlists.  You could also record 4 short “To Get More, Go Here” videos.  This is known as “the bumper.” At the end of each video, tell people where to go for the entire 20-video series.

10. Brand your YouTube channel

Use your logo and company colors. Leverage all your other social media handles. Post your video link to Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, etc. All these social signals still matter in search.

Given that most people are likely to search for videos about a certain product before making a purchase, YouTube is definitely the perfect platform to market your business. Your audience is facing a seemingly endless number of new questions and adventures every day. YouTube video moments are great opportunities for you to lend a hand, show empathy, entertain, inspire, start a conversation — in short, to be a life sidekick that will keep people coming back for more

Marketers are shifting their budgets away from “interruption”advertising. They realize most people now begin their purchasing experience by doing online research to compare prices, quality, and read reviews. Even if they end up making their purchase in a store, they start their fact-finding and decision-making  on the web.

Working on the wrong thing is devastating for a startup.

Here are some startup tips for identifying risk, gathering information, and making money.

Have you worked at—or run— anything where people were deeply committed and worked long hours, yet the project or company failed? Hard work and luck are important but do not really distinguish the startups that succeed from the ones that fail. What you choose to work on is actually your biggest lever, with a huge differential effect.

The way to make more money is to quickly gather information that helps you figure out the right things to work on. This advice from Dan Milsten made a huge difference for me when I was running my startup.

You should be very, very scared of working on the wrong things. In fact, you should be terrified. I would say you should be so terrified that you actually don’t work. You should only work if what you’re working on is the most valuable thing. – Dan, 2013 Lean Startup Conference

If you’re not sure that what you’re working on is the most valuable thing to you, stop working.

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You don’t get much information when you already know something; you get a lot when you’re uncertain.

As a startup, the kind of information you want to gather is the kind that answers the riskiest or most uncertain questions. Identifying your biggest risk can be hard because risk shifts constantly. What information is valuable depends on what decision you’re making.

Dan Milstein tells this story about a software product for hospitals, that used a public data set. Before selling or building it, the company’s biggest risk was that nobody would buy it. The startup creates a demo, and one hospital signs a $10-million contract for the product before it truly exists. That’s great! That was the right thing to do. The sales team goes out trying to repeat that and sell the second one. Then a bunch of engineers work on building that thing.

Then imagine a junior developer on the team – a bright young girl – is given a job of taking the demo app and turning it into a real production system. Working with this public data set, she discovers, to her surprise, that it’s not as comprehensive as everyone thought it was. It worked well for the demo, but for the actual hospital, it’s actually not going to work. The whole product that the company has sold is actually not going to succeed the way they’ve done it. They have to do it some other way. In the moment after this person makes this discovery, the biggest risk for the startup has changed. The biggest risk is no longer: Can we repeat this sale? The biggest risk is: Can we actually build the thing that we promised in the first sale that we thought we could build, but we just discovered we were wrong?

If the biggest risk has changed, the thing you should be doing to gather the most information has changed. Because the way you gather the most information is by going after the biggest risk. Therefore, the thing that’s going to get you the most information — and the most money — has changed. If the company is still doing what it was doing before that discovery was made, they’re doing the wrong thing.

In order for your company to move fast, the thing that will limit them is how fast they can respond to the changing nature of risk. It’s only by going after the biggest risk that you make the most money, and because risks are changing all the time, the entire organization has to be able to change direction.

Top two tips from  Elon Musk:

–Actively seek out and listen to negative feedback

–Reason with first Principles rather than by analogy. Boil things down to the most fundamental truths then reason up from there

In Silicon Valley it’s often common to pitch by comparing our products, services or ideas to what we already know, “It’s like Twitter for cat pics, or “Uber for deliveries.”

In this fascinating interview with Kevin Rose, Elon Musk says there’s a better way to innovate – first principles.

The benefit of “first principles” thinking is that it allows you to innovate in clear leaps, rather than building small improvements onto something that already exists. Musk gives an example of the first automobile. While everyone else was trying to improve horse-drawn carriages, someone looked at the fundamentals of transportation and the combustion engine in order to create a car.

First principles thinking for innovation, however, takes alot more mental energy.

See the full interview below:

What’s powering the music ecosystem?

Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio… Digital subscriptions with unlimited streaming and gigantic music catalogs.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) recently released its annual Digital Music Report. In 2012 the industry saw its first year of growth (+0.3%) since 1999. There were some fascinating data points:

• Digital revenues increased by an estimated 9% to US$5.6 billion in 2012, now accounting for around 34% of global industry revenues.
• Download sales increased in volume by 12% globally in 2012 and represent around 70% of overall digital music revenues.
• The number of people paying to use subscription services leapt 44% in 2012 to 20 million. Subscription revenues are expected to account for more than 10% of digital revenues for the first time in 2012.
• Digital channels account for the majority of record companies’ income in an increasing number of markets including the US, India, Norway, and Sweden.

The report also keeps calling out piracy as the main barrier to growth. However, there hasn’t been a significant change in this area that would explain the industry growth in 2012.  Digital subscriptions have become better and more convenient than piracy at an acceptable cost – that’s what is likely driving the growth.

Subscriptions are disrupting piracy. In Sweden, home of Spotify and the Pirate Bay, almost 50% of internet users used a subscription service in 2012.

Looks like companies are recognizing that this industry needs more carrots, less sticks!