Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Technology / General

Your Blockchain Close Encounter Of The First Kind

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This is the third article in a series about Blockchain technology and its implications. The first, in June, was an introduction, and the second, in July, was how Blockchain works and its role in creating digital trust. This article is about your likely first contact.

As small businesses have increasingly become vertically integrated with Big Business customers, they’ve had to step up their Main-Street-Mom-and-Pop game to become more sophisticated while continuing to be nimble, quick, versatile, and efficient. With this integration, larger customers have notified smaller partners of their evolving expectations, as driven by macro events and trends.

Consequently, over the past 25 years, millions of small businesses have received letters requiring compliance with four of those macro markers: [Continue Reading]

Blockchain: It’s The Future Of Trust

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A few weeks ago, I introduced you to how Blockchain works. This offering is about how it can create digital trust. But first, let me remind you – Blockchain is a complicated topic, so thanks for your continued focus.

To understand Blockchain, we must first contemplate the primordial role of trust. Just as every chemical process in the human body takes place in the medium of water, every human interaction – each one – takes place in the medium of trust. As civilization, societies, and markets evolved, all were made manifest by the existence of, and singular devotion to trust. It’s the cornerstone, the keystone, and the capstone of our civilized existence. As the original open-source model, trust is the intangibly awesome foundation of equilibrium and creator of order.

This will be on the test: For 10,000 years, humans required analog trust. In the Digital Age, humans will require digital trust. As open-source technology beyond cryptocurrency, Blockchain is enabling trust’s metamorphosis from analog to digital, as it becomes synonymous with digital trust.

For Satoshi Nakamoto, creating Bitcoin was easy. But making his peer-to-peer cryptocurrency deliver on[Continue Reading]

In The Age Of The Customer, Relevance Trumps Competitiveness

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For 10,000 years, customers refined their search for products and services down to a couple of semi-finalist sellers based almost entirely on the classic competitive value proposition: price, product, availability, service, etc. I’ve termed this period the Age of the Seller.

That was a nice trip down memory lane, wasn’t it?

The new prime differentiator today is no longer the competitive model, but rather a customer’s appraisal of how relevant a seller is to them, often before they even know if a seller is competitive. So, does this mean that sellers no longer have to be competitive?

Not at all – no one will pay you more for less. But consider three new marketplace truths: [Continue Reading]

Cloud Computing Is Awesome – But Not Always

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In aviation, being “in the clouds” is a universal flight condition referring to a pilot’s inability to see the ground.

It’s also a common lament of parents about the troubling coordinates of a teenager’s head, which might seem to be “in the clouds.”

In the 21st century, “in the cloud” is a reference that has established itself in the marketplace vernacular as the interaction and delivery point between providers of “cloud-based” digital applications and customers.

Cloud computing is the availability of incremental processing power that resides on an application provider’s servers, instead of your hard drive. For example, community-building technology, like social media platforms. When you post something on Facebook, you’re in the cloud. When you conduct online banking, sell a stock, or hail an Uber from your smartphone, you’re doing that in the cloud. If you use Google’s G Suite of office products, or Microsoft Office 365, all are cloud-based. And, of course, hooking up on Zoom, et al, are all meetings “in the cloud.”

No question, cloud computing is another example of technology increasing business efficiencies and leverage. And for small businesses, it’s been a godsend, because [Continue Reading]

Are You Prepared For The Next Business Interruption?

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This year marks an ignominious 20th anniversary. On August 13, 2003, a single outage in the electric grid cascaded across eight northeastern states, putting 55 million people in the dark for days, and thousands of businesses out of business. The Great Blackout of ’03 was a catastrophic reminder that we’re all one nosy squirrel in a transformer away from an instantaneous, put-you-out-of-business event.

Two decades later, the evidence isn’t in favor of less exposure for the next 20 years. Consider this report from CNBC: “The FBI warned Russian computer hackers had compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers.” And this one from the Department of Homeland Security: “Russian government cyber actors have been targeting U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, including energy, nuclear and commercial facilities, since at least March 2016.” And more recently, experts allowed that the Chinese balloon that recently circumnavigated the U.S. could have been carrying an EMP, or electromagnetic-pulse device, that when detonated, essentially fries the electric grid below.

Prior to 2003, most businesses surveyed reported they were aware that a business disruption/interruption was possible, but incredibly, they also admitted they weren’t prepared for one. Thankfully, that response is different these days, as one of our recent online polls indicated. [Continue Reading]

How “The Cloud” Can Empower Your Small Business

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One of the greatest products of human society is the marketplace. Webster defines it as a place where goods and services are offered for sale.

Over millennia, innovations took markets from local to global, and now to the 21st-century iteration – virtual. Virtual markets are powered by “cloud computing,” aka “the cloud,” and accessed via the Internet and a handy interface program presented on a screen of some size.

Historically, as trade expanded markets, products led the way because services were difficult to convey to the last mile of consumption. But technology has helped services catch up, and now digital services are delivered efficiently from the cloud. And more than anything else, this last reality is helping small businesses compete and grow in ways that were formerly the domain of larger companies.

Here are five cloud-based resource categories that help your small business operate more efficiently, competitively, and profitably. [Continue Reading]

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