What is Babka? | The Nosher - My Jewish Learning

What is Babka? | The Nosher - My Jewish Learning

To start, it’s a dense bread that’s swirled with chocolate or cinnamon and often topped with nuggets of cinnamon-sugar streusel. Until recently, it could only be found in Jewish or Eastern European bakeries and the occasional grocery store. Now, though, we’re seeing babka (and creative adaptations of it!) in cafes, bakeries, and food blogs everywhere. Even Trader Joe’s sells babka!

Perhaps what makes babka so irresistible is the contrast between the slightly-dry layers of bread and the sticky, delicious swirls of chocolate spread. Because it manages to be both light and dense at once, it’s difficult to stop at just one slice! And while it’s perfect alongside coffee, it’s by no means limited to morning consumption and can be all-too-easily noshed on as an afternoon snack or dessert.   

Babka’s history is as rich and interwoven as the swirls in its dough. Ari Weinzweig’s illuminating history of babka reveals that babka, which means “little grandmother” in Ukranian, Russian, and Eastern European Yiddish, has always been popular where those languages are spoken.

New Feature Demo - Toxic Link Audit and Disavow Feature Software Release

New Feature Demo - Toxic Link Audit and Disavow Feature Software Release





Here at HubShout it's Penguin Awareness month as we are gearing up for Google's much anticipated Penguin 4.0 update. Given that it could happen on any day and at any time now, we have an exciting new software release for our resellers to help them prepare for this update as well. We have added a brand new toxic link audit feature to our dashboard, allowing us and our resellers to disavow any toxic links that could potentially hurt their websites when the Penguin update rolls out. Check out this Daily Brown Bag to see how it works and what it can do for you to get your websites in shape for Penguin.





TRANSCRIPTION:



Hello and welcome to The Daily Brown Bag. Today we're going to be talking about Penguin Awareness Month and some new software that we've rolled out to help you with link audits. I'm Chad Hill and I'm joined by Adam Stetzer.



Great, Chad, this is a cool topic. Good afternoon everybody. It is Penguin Awareness Month here at HubShout. And the reason for that obviously is that if you've been following the SEO news, there's going to be a large Penguin release coming up. They said originally it was going to be in the bottom half of last year, but the months slipped by and 2015 has left us. And now Google is giving us guidance that it's going to be in the first quarter of 2016.



Now this is noteworthy because there has not been a Penguin update since October, I believe, Chad, of 2014. So it's been about 16 months, which is a long time. And these are confusing topics. First and foremost because Penguin and Panda are two different shadow algorithms or refreshes that target different things. We've got other videos. There's lots of resources if you need to understand the difference. I would encourage you to read up on them.



Once you understand the difference between Panda and Penguin, then it gets even further confused by the fact that you've got Google and its core algorithm that is constantly in a recursive and iterative way looking at lots of different signals and making daily adjustments to who ranks on what keyword. And then you have these refreshes, which sometimes we call shadow algorithms. And in addition to applying these, they're now telling us that these are going to join the core algorithm and be updating in real time.



So this is just a ton of information. We can unpack some of it for you here. We also want to tell you about software tools that we're bringing out that will help you make some sense of this. So Chad, what have we got for our folks today to help demystify all this?



Good question, Adam. And I think that's a great intro to Penguin and the length of time it's been since the last refresh. I think we want to first introduce some of the ideas behind, what can you do? What are some of the mitigation tools that Google has advised webmasters to take in order to prevent the issues that Penguin's looking for? Namely low-quality and manipulative backlinks to your website. And so they've really given webmasters two tools. One tool is to essentially find those links and then contact the webmaster on the other site, the publisher, and say, "Hey, I don't really want you linking to me."





But in many cases, that's not practical so they've given webmasters this other tool, which is called the disavow, which allows webmasters to proactively look at their backlinks to their websites. So this is the person's website looking at who's linking to them, which is a whole debate onto itself of how much someone has to police the links to their own website. But once you take that on and you're looking at those links, you then have the ability to upload a file to Google with a lot of disclosures and whatnot at Google's side to say, "Hey Google, don't count or disavow these links."



So let's talk about what a disavow really means. Or at least what our philosophy and approach has been on disavows. So generally speaking, we think what you're essentially telling Google when you load that disavow file is that you want Google to treat that link to your website, from another website, as a no-follow link. It doesn't really get rid of the link a hundred percent, right? If you want to get rid of the link, you need to contact that webmaster...and potentially many, many webmasters...and say, "Hey, you're a low-quality website. Don't link to me." So the disavow is basically just a way of saying, "Don't credit that link towards my rankings and my movement."



The risk here is that we don't always know which links are the links that are helping your website's rankings and which ones don't. So you might look at a link linked to your website and say, "Looks good to me." But Google could actually be, "It could ultimately hurt you," and vice versa. So the thing you have to realize is that when you upload these disavow files, you need to be very careful because there is a chance that you could actually hurt your own rankings in the short run. And who knows whether or not that link would have impacted you when this new Penguin roll-out comes down the road?



So what we've done is we've taken some steps to help people, guide them through this process, and find the links that we think really are bad. And should give you tools to disavow those and also to do some other analysis. So the screen you're seeing in front of you right now is our new link audit screen. And this has been rolled out to all of our resellers' dashboards for any program that's in one of our managed SEO plans. And what you see on the screen, at the very top, is a history of all the link audits performed on your client's campaign.



A couple of real high-level stats here. You're going to see the number of referring domains. So this is the number of websites linking to you. It's not the number of pages linking to you because you could have multiple pages on a single website. Those will count as multiple links, backlinks, but one referring domain link. So it shows the number of websites linking to you. And then shows you the number of unique IPs linking to you. And the reason this is important is because sometimes you might see that you have a lot of root domains, but only a few IPs. Or even Class C IPs.



What that usually means is that you're somehow mixed up in potentially a link network or something where there's a bunch of websites all hosted on the same IP address or Class C IP address, that is a good signal that maybe there's a problem. So you want that ratio...you want to be as close to one as one as possible. You're not always going to get that, but as close to one to one as possible.



You then will see two other pieces of information on the screen here. You're going to see the number of toxic links. So in this particular case we're looking at, there are 22 toxic links, which is 23% of the total root domains or referring domains. And then you also see that there's five that are in this twenty to thirty range. And I should stop right there and make sure we explain some stuff. So the way we're identifying toxic links is any link whose Ahrefs domain rating is less than 20. Those are toxic links. And we've looked at a lot of these links and they are not good websites. So we've just made a wholesale cut and said, "Anything below 20, you should just disavow." You can always look at it, but just disavow it.



The next group, 20 to 30, we're saying you need to review. And so you would want to actually proactively look at those and make a determination for yourself, is this good or not good? So let's take a look at, in this particular case, where this client benchmarks against all of the campaigns at HubShout. What you're going to see is that the vast majority of the campaigns that are currently using us for SEO services have less than 7% low domain rating backlinks.



Okay, so when you look at this curve or the distribution of all of our accounts, you see there's a whole bunch, like a hundred or so, that have zero low domain rating backlinks or toxic links. And then there's this next group here, all the way up to around 7%, which is the vast majority. And then there's this long tail. And this particular campaign that we're looking at fits in...it's pretty, it's midway down the tail here, where they have 23% of their backlinks are low domain rating.

If you keep scrolling down this new screen we built, you'll then see a list of all of those websites, sorted from lowest domain rating to highest. So if you wanted to then again just check it out and see, what do these websites look like? You can always right-click on these, go check those websites out and see for yourself. Do these look like high-quality domains or not? So you have the ability to check that out.



But again once you come to conclusion we have...which is, in the vast majority of cases, anything below 20, you should disavow...we then give you the ability to just click "Add Disavow File." And this is really cool because we now give you a text file that's in the format that Google wants for a disavow. And again, we're disavowing at the domain level in all these cases. So you would simply grab this text file, put it in a Notepad editor, and then save it as a text file and upload it to Google's Disavow Center. So very slick.



And then what we're going to be doing as well on the screen is then remembering which links and domains you've disavowed so that when you come back and get a new link audit, we'll actually know, are there any new low domain rating websites versus ones that we know you've already disavowed?



So pretty slick that we're building this altogether because this kind of functionality that remembers exactly which disavows you've put in place and then is able to scan going forward, it's a great idea. It's something that we don't think there are many other tools that are doing it at this particular...as part of your ongoing SEO program. There are standalone audit capabilities, but this is a very nice ongoing monitoring feature that we've built in. And we think that it's going to be an awesome feature for people going forward.



One final point here before we end this video. I do want to also bring your attention to another feature that we've added, which is the ability to analyze your anchor text backlink ratios. This is another signal for Penguin that if you use the same anchor text over and over and over again, Google will see that as a manipulative signal and potentially you could be caught up in this Penguin refresh coming out or update that they're doing. And so again, you want to be on top of this.



And you can see, in this particular case with this client, a lot of their anchors are on exact match anchor text. A normal client that you might see would have...usually their first couple highest anchor text ratios are going to be the name of their company and the URL of their website. And then you might start getting into a couple that target keywords that they're working on from an SEO standpoint. But this particular one, you can see here, really you can see that the top several anchors are all keywords that they're trying to optimize their website on, which is a clear signal that, in this particular case, there's over-optimization and this would need to be addressed.



So Adam, I think that's a quick overview. We're doing a webinar next week and we'll have a full hour on this. That's it for now.



Chad, that's awesome. Tons of information in there. So if you're confused by any of these things, what you need to do right now is stop, rewind, and watch this video again. If you're in our reseller program today, we view it as your responsibility to be talking to your clients about these things. We'll reiterate again, these are our best shots at understanding these things. Nobody really knows, aside from Google.



But being experts in the field, we think it's really important that you're transparent, that you do solid analysis, and that you follow industry practices. And it is a best practice if you see really crappy links, really toxic links, that you talk to your client and get their consent to get them out of their backlink profile. The quickest way to do that is through the disavow process that we've presented here today.



So a lot of terms. Panda, Penguin, real-time updates, shadow algorithms, refreshes. It's important you have a handle on these and we're trying very hard with our software to give you very strong guidance on what we think is best. But ultimately you and your client have to make that decision and then you need to act fast because Penguin is coming. It's been 14 months in the making but it's on its way. And that's our coverage for Penguin Awareness Month. Thanks for joining us and of course we hope to see you back here real soon.

The Penguin in the room: what to do until Google rolls out its latest update | Search Engine Watch

The Penguin in the room: what to do until Google rolls out its latest update | Search Engine Watch

The Penguin in the room: what to do until Google rolls out its latest update

Adam Stetzer

Google’s Penguin 3.0 update affected less than 1% of U.S./English queries in 2014. Granted, Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second, which translates to a staggering 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide, so Penguin 3.0 ultimately hit 12 billion search queries.

What’s scary though, is that Penguin 3.0 wasn’t too bad. Penguin 1.0 hit 3.1% of U.S./English queries, or 37.2 billion search queries. The quasi-cataclysmic update changed the topography of SEO, leaving digital agencies forever scarred by the memory.

Now, Google is supposedly going to roll Penguin 4.0 out in the imminent future. Everyone expected the monolithic tech company to launch the update in 2015, but the holidays delayed it to 2016. Then, everyone expected it to drop sometime in Q1 2016.

However, the SEO world still waits with bated breath.

Why is everyone so afraid of the Big Bad Penguin?

Google first launched the Penguin Update in April 2012 to catch sites spamming its search results, specifically the ones who used link schemes to manipulate search rankings. In other words, it hunted down inorganic links, the ones bought or placed solely for the sake of improving search rankings.

In the time it took for Penguin 2.0 and 3.0 to come out, digital agencies wised up. They heard the message loud and clear. Once a new Penguin update comes out, they know they have to take action to get rid of bad links.

Google targets links that come from poor quality sites, have little to no relevancy to the backlinked site, have overly optimized anchor text, are paid for, and/or are keyword rich.

However, what makes Penguin truly terrifying isn’t only the impact it can have on a site’s ranking, but on an honest marketing campaign.

Earning backlinks is tough. That’s why some stoop to paying for them or working with shady link networks. The most tried-and-true way to earn backlinks is guest blogging, which is not only difficult, but time consuming, as well.

Although Google usually ignores backlinks earned by guest blogging, that’s not to say that they’re completely Penguin-proof. Your guest blogging backlinks may have become toxic in an unlikely, but entirely possible scenario.

In other words, people are so afraid of Penguin because it can ruin a lot of the hard work you’ve put into a campaign.

How can you slay the fearsome Penguin?

Luckily, there are a number of preventative measures you can take to avoid Penguin’s wrath.

The first thing you’re going to want to do is look at your backlink profile using Open Site Explorer,Majestic SEO, or Ahrefs. Look at the total number of links, the number of unique domains, the difference between the amount of linking domains and total links, the anchor text usage and variance, page performance, and link quality.  

If this sounds like too much work, there are tools that will automate the analysis process for your and apply decision rules for a fee, such as HubShout and Link Detox.

If you find a bunch of toxic links – the backlinks that came from link networks, unrelated domains, sites with malware warnings, spammy sites, and sites with a large number of external links – you need to take action before the Penguin strikes.

Your next step is to remove the links manually. Contact the site’s owner to request he or she remove the links. Failing that, you can always disavow them. This tells Google not to count the links when it determines PageRank and search engine ranking.

How can you recover after a Penguin attack?

If Penguin 4.0 does wind up pecking your campaign to the verge of death, don’t worry. You can recover.

Analyzing your backlink profile and removing toxic links – what you should do to prevent a Penguin issue – are also the steps you need to take to recover.

However, the thing about disavowing a link is that it may actually hurt your campaign. No one but the Google hivemind really knows whether or not a link helps or hurts. You can only make an educated guess. Despite this risk, you still need to disavow any links that appear to be toxic.

The next logical step after purging your backlink profile is to build it up again. Although you should never stop trying to earn backlinks, it’s a smart idea to redouble your efforts after a Penguin attack.

Guest blogging isn’t the only way to earn backlinks, either. Entrepreneur offers a great list of creative ways to get people to link to your site, such as:

• Broken-Link Building: Check a site for broken links, and compile them into a list. Then, take said list to the webmaster, and suggest other websites to replace the links, one of which being yours.
• Infographics: The thing about infographics is that they’re more shareable than blogs. Research shows that 40% of people respond better to visual information than plain text.  The idea here is exactly the same as the idea of content marketing. You create a great piece of content – an infographic, in this case – and people are going to share it. In the case of an infographic, other sites and blogs could repost it. Success isn’t guaranteed, but this method can work.

• Roundups: Similar to guest blogging, reaching out to bloggers and sites that run weekly or monthly roundups is a great way to get some backlinks. Search your keyword and “roundup,” and limit the results to the past week or month. Once you’ve found a few, send the webmaster a link to one of your guides, tutorials, or other pieces of content (like, say, a new infographic). Sites that run roundups are constantly looking for content, so there’s a good chance they’ll include your work in their next edition.

https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/02/29/the-penguin-in-the-room-what-to-do-until-google-rolls-out-its-latest-update/

How to Create Content that Connects with Your Customers - Brian Solis

How to Create Content that Connects with Your Customers - Brian Solis

How to Create Content that Connects with Your Customers

Guest post by Jessica Ann (@itsjessicann), CEO and Creative Director of Jessica Ann Media, and author ofHumanize Your Brand: How to Create Content that Connects with Your Customers.

We’re living in a post-advertising age. Instead of lamenting the past, or focusing on “the good ole’ days” of traditional marketing, we’re now being called to get more real. Everyone (and their mom) is affected by how we’re consuming the fast-paced media of today. And in turn, the content that we create is influencing the future of business. If you’re not proactively taking part in the profits and process of being more human, you’re missing out on the fun, authenticity, and serendipity that happens when you fuse technology with marketing.

If this sounds like some science-fiction meme out of The Matrix, you may (or may not) be right. It depends on the pill you take (do you want the red pill or the blue?)

Before we slide through another version of reality, we must understand that it’s not only the color of our content that matters – it’s the context behind the red or blue reality that we choose.  The content that we create can act as a catalyst for cultural change – not only within your own company, but for the collective of business as a whole.

This means that marketers who strive for more meaning in their written messages will flourish. According to Demand Metric, 86% of people skip TV advertisements. Yet 60% of people are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it. Businesses who conceptualize and create Human Content understand that the need for a massive cultural change within their organizations are building the new world on the web.

Here’s what will need to happen to create more meaning and cultural change. Human Content will need:

1. More empathy than traditional advertising.

This isn’t hard to do. Empathy is the undercurrent to the ebb and flow of sticky content. This incredible emotion is how we recognize ourselves and our lives in the stories of others, and it’s how we build relationships that foster connection with people and companies (big and small).

Breaking free from the oppressive mold of yesterday’s advertising (through the use of empathy) isn’t a trend. It’s not the future. It’s not a buzzword. It’s right now. And it’s liberating.

Companies who stop advertising and start humanizing are part of the transformative shift in business. Will you be one of them?

2. Context. Lots of context.

The former days of advertising had little context. The “spray and pray” approach often sends customers running in the opposite direction (often with their hands over their ears). But when we use human content, we add layers of context to effectively reach customers in a fun, informative way. This more personal way of communicating is needed (and necessary!) to thrive in the noisy world of today.

As consumers (and readers) of the interwebs, we’re looking for relevant and inspiring content to either 1) get us through our day or 2) educate us about a product or service so that we can make an eventual purchase. When Human Content connects with us in the right way, it builds relationships that help us to addeven more context to what we’re creating.

3. Relevance and meaning

Many brands go out of their way to get as many eyeballs as possible. But consumers are getting smarter. If we’re going to be shown an ad, we want a good experience. We want to be left feeling better than we started (which is hard to do when most ads intrude into our personal space).

This brings us to the curious case of the chicken and the egg. Is the future of marketing “custom content” because of the sheer amount of of annoying ads (and the ability to block them)? Or is the future of marketing “custom content” because we have no other choice? This is a rhetorical question – because the answer is both. And the stats prove it.

According to Demand Metric, 78% of CMOs believe custom content is the future of marketing. And it’s no surprise that the young folks don’t like ads either: 8 out of 10 Millennials have clicked out of a website because they were turned off by an ‘irrelevant or intrusive ad.’  

Instead of turning the younger generation (and everyone else) off, turn them on by creating Human Content that has empathy, context, relevance, and meaning. The upshot is that you’ll slowly create cultural change within your organizations because it’s more accessible and real – no matter the color of the pill you choose.

26 Disruptive Tech Trends for 2016 - 2018 - Brian Solis

26 Disruptive Tech Trends for 2016 - 2018 - Brian Solis

26 Disruptive Tech Trends for 2016 – 2018

Each year at this time, I read all of the predictions for the new year plus the “top X” lists wrapping out the previous year. Add to that the first week of chaos that is CES and all of the new tech debuting in Las Vegas. And each year, I’m left wanting more substance as I plan my research. So, in 2015, I officially threw my hat into the mix with my inaugural look at “25 Disruptive Technology Trends in 2015 – 2016.”

Rather than look at just one year ahead, I organized my research against a two-year horizon and then added an analytical layer of what each trend meant and why each was important. But that still wasn’t enough. Nothing moves in calendar cycles except for taxes, birthdays, anniversaries, earning reports, etc. So, this year, I added one year to the event horizon…

Introducing the “26 Disruptive Technology Trends for 2016 – 2018.”

In this report, we’ll explore some of the disruptive trends that are affecting pretty much everything over the next few years-at least those that I’m following. It’s not just tech, though. The report is organized by socioeconomic and technological impact.

26 Disruptive & Technology Trends 2016 – 2018 from Brian Solis

Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list of every technology and societal trend bringing about disruption on planet Earth. What follows thought definitely affects the evolution of digital Darwinism, the evolution of society and technology and its impact on behavior, expectations and customs.

Disruptive Trends: Socioeconomic trends that are notably impacting civilization in the near-term.

1) The New Brand: Experiences are More Important Than Products

Customer experiences become more important than products; companies now have to consider how products and services enhance specific lifestyles and workflows.

The legacy value of brands is overtaken by brands that earn relevance by investing in engagement and collaboration in moments of truth…beyond creative. Marketing becomes CX. This includes the sum of all disparate parts, marketing, product, sales, service, support, CRM, R&D, etc. Brands must also zero-in on the needs, values and aspirations of a generation that defines everything radically differently than previous generations.

2) Goodbye Sharing Economy, I Want My On-Demand Economy…Now!

Was there ever really a sharing economy if no one was actually sharing? The sharing economy officially dissolves: everything becomes on-demand and this forces economists and ultimately businesses to understand new markets and workforces that create alternative supply based on rising demand. On-demand companies and their ecosystems of workers and customers trade on the value of reputation + trust + value.

Beyond seeing the “Uber or Airbnb of everything,” new classes of services will rise and fall based on new behavior and expectations. I also refer to this movement as the “selfish” economy in that consumers will expect every business, even those that are traditional, to do business where transparency, immediacy and context reign supreme. Everything will be on-demand, including B2B services.

3) Digital Detox Improves Digital Productivity

Digital is its own drug. People will learn how to hack their workflow because they have to. There’s too much email, too many meetings and not enough leadership to change routines. This leads to the need for individual productivity hacks. These acts go beyond employee efficiency; they will improve experiences and relationships professionally and personally. Everyone will need some sort of digital detox and/or focus.

While some will simply unplug from the Internet, others will discover and share “life hacks” such as…

• Writing down distractions from tasks at hand
• Checking email once a week
• Scheduling meetings in 20-25 minute increments
• Listening to music without lyrics
• Spending 10 minutes a day on Headspace
• Fasting from media
• Not responding to every txt
• Turning off all desktop, social and mobile notifications

4) Every Company Undergoes Digital Transformation and Gains Empathy in the Process

Digital transformation – the re-alignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to more effectively compete in a digital economy – becomes standard. Companies will invest in digital customer experiences to improve experiences for all customers and employees.

There is no one type of customer or employee. Thus, digital transformation efforts will not be informed by digital trends; instead, social science will help decision-makers better understand how digital trends affect how people work, shop, communicate, what they value etc. Technology will then be an enabler to human-centered transformation in the enterprise to create more adaptive models, processes and systems to evolve.

5) The Dynamic Customer Journey Changes Brand Dynamics

The customer journey decentralizes, becoming a series of non-linear mobile-centric micro-moments, mimicking everyday consumer activity and communication. This sets the stage for relevant brand and product serendipity.

For example, Google learned that 90% of smartphone users are not absolutely certain of the specific brand they want to buy when they begin looking for information online. And, 65% look for the most relevant information regardless of the company providing it. How companies become discoverable and how they lead customers through their journey requires a new marketing infrastructure to support a customer journey comprised of micro-moments. This means that legacy strategies are good only for yesterday’s customers. To reach mobile customers in each moment of truth requires new methodologies for search, advertising, content engagement, sales and support.

6) The Consumerization of Work Turn Employees into Collaborators

The consumerization of work goes beyond IT and devices; workflow, behavior and expectations mimic real-world apps like Snapchat, Uber, Tinder, etc.

Digital employees and customers think, act and expect differently. They want every business to feel, serve and work just like their favorite apps.

Enterprise software will start to mimic consumer apps and ultimately reshape the role of IT and the processes it manages to support employees. Slack is just the beginning of an enterprise renaissance that doesn’t just change tech – it changes how companies (and people) work.

7) Humans Need Not Apply for Old Jobs

The gap between expertise for the jobs of yesterday and tomorrow is widening. Everyone becomes students again. Yes – robots already are and will continue to automate workflow. Factories aside, intelligent devices are replacing people in front-line roles such as those at eateries, including Eatsa and McDonalds.

Traditional education no longer suffices as people are learning basic skillsets without understanding or knowing how they correlate to tomorrow’s careers. People will specialize in tasks that computers need humans to complete. Scholastic and workplace education will formalize computer-proof and computer-partnered careers and programs, and thus education becomes a constant.

8) The Age of Corporate Renaissance

Old ways give to new business models, processes and philosophies; disparate departments merge, uniting tech and complementary disciplines.

Marketing and IT work together rather than compete. CX, CRM and marketing form new experience teams.

CIOs realize the “I” stands for “innovation” and as such understand external/internal behavior to rethink how people and tech work together now and in the future.

Training and education become proactive to help modernize the workforce.

HR undergoes a renaissance to provide a workplace that is native to Millennials and up-and-coming Centennials.

9) Corporate Innovation Centers Displace or Complement R&D; The Maker Movement Becomes Threat or BFF to Incumbent Companies

Traditional R&D is no longer sufficient. Big companies invest in innovation centers: some aim to act like startups, others set out to partner with or acquire them, and some seek to lure people away from #startuplife.

Either way, innovation centers allow slow-moving, risk-averse companies to spark new ideas, experiment faster, fail faster and gain momentum to affect HQ and force change from the outside-in.

Some great innovation that cannot see the light of day within larger organizations will develop new markets, upset incumbents and either succeed solo or rollup into those companies that could not innovate.

The maker movement is “Shark Tank” for geeks and it doesn’t need judges to fund them; there’s Indiegogo, Gofundme, Kickstarter, et al. for that.

10) Culture Finally Gets Its Time in the Spotlight – Welcome to Culture 2.0

Culture is largely misunderstood and undervalued by the C-Suite today. It’s one of the reasons morale is at an all-time low. This will change because it has to. Employee engagement or the lack thereof creates a morale-busting “engagement gap”, giving way to an executive-level charter to invest in “culture 2.0”

11) Businesses Must Live by Radical Transparency to Gain Trust and Business of Customers

Businesses must also practice radical transparency or risk irrelevance. Customers want to do business with companies that match their beliefs and values. Customers are more aware and informed now. This means businesses must run counter to its normal practices, change and communicate this vision and changes in everything. With a more plugged-in understanding of human nature, businesses will not only create a happier and more productive culture: they will benefit from empowered employees, leading to an internal renaissance that yields new and innovative products, services, processes, and more.

12) Schools Pay Students to Learn and Become Agencies that Connect Companies with Expertise

The race for technical talent extends to Africa and other non-traditional establishments (such as prisons, etc.) to train qualified students computer and engineering sciences. Specialized schools will identify and teach students – even pay them to learn – and become an IP lab for companies to employ, similar to how outsourcing of other business functions works today.

Technology Trends: Technology trends that are changing how people live (and for how long), communicate, network and work.

13) Jarvis is Your New Chat Buddy and He Ushers in a Dawn of Conversational Commerce

Chatbots (and a dash of human interaction) turn messaging into concierge services (aka virtual assistants) and eventually predictive services that simplify everything from search to shopping to travel to customer service.

This sets the foundation for “conversational commerce.” The ability to buy products and order services without leaving the chat window becomes the new norm for everyday shopping, much like Amazon has become the standard for e-commerce.

Intelligent attendants such as Microsoft Cortana, Google Now, Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri will become staples in how people navigate life and work. Very soon, the complicated and often silly questions you ask of Alexa and Siri, will be answered.

You’ll be taken aback for a split second and then you’ll go on as if you couldn’t have lived without it.

14) Mobile-first Behavior Transforms the Web

The entire Web will be re-imagined for a mobile-first and mobile-only world that is screen, location, context and intention-aware. This radically transforms the purpose of the web to become more dynamic, personal and useful at a time when people are forcing the end of a traditional information-broadcast, page/form-based, keyword world. Everything from websites to apps to commerce will require overhaul or complete innovation to cater to the EGOsystem, or the demand for real-time personalized engagement.

15) The New @Machine Age Discovers the Fountain of Sleuth

Quantum computing dramatically accelerates the artificial intelligence race, applying machine calculations that are 100 million times as fast as today’s machines. IBM’s Watson is being applied to healthcare, finance and even cooking, to explore new solutions in cognitive computing. AI can sort through and assess information that humans may have missed or never considered. This type of work is already leading to new treatments, products, services, and yes, recipes. You can bet it will also be applied to call center technology and may or may not make you want to use counter services such as @service in response.

Artificial intelligence is just one area that will benefit from experimentation. Machine learning will also yield innovation in pattern recognition, predictive analysis, mimicked common sense, and even new ways to compute and solve problems.

More immediately though, breakthroughs in programming will eventually iterate and innovate existing engineering issues, air traffic control, curing diseases, etc.

16) Reactive Medicine Gets Proactive

Regenerative medicine cuts through the ethics debate by helping everyone gain access to cloneable organs.

Nanobots will be able to assess and fix us from within. Those made from our own DNA will eventually help cure us from deadly diseases ranging from blocked arteries to cancer.

Healthcare and athletic brands will also learn from Disney’s massive Magicband investment to bring big data insights to improve health and life experiences as part of a Human Operating System (Human OS). A human operating system becomes a platform for innovation that mimics the Apple product and iCloud universe. A Magicband-like device and other products designed to work in its ecosystem are constantly plugged into personal clouds accessible by healthcare providers. Blood, oxygen, vitals and more will shift the practice of medicine from reactive to proactive care.

17) The Sh#tshow that is The Internet of Things Finally Plugs into the Human OS

The Internet of Things becomes the Internet of Sh#t because it’s a mess with too many products and apps competing for consumer attention. This creates confusion and chaos as devices are proprietary, capabilities are too narrow and not reflective of everyday life and only a few companies such as Google’s Nest and Apple’s Homekit are designing plug-and-play smart ecosystems. Even still, technology must be invisible and interoperable.

Developers must plug into the Human Algorithm and the Human OS, envisioning the body and critical activities as an ecosystem/platform rather than technology and device-first products.

On the immediate horizon, smart connected products (The Internet of Things) will help consumers in transparent means, such as in-product communication, where products communicate to manufacturers, users and suppliers about state, maintenance needs and updates. This will be done in-home and also onsite where locations become smart about visitors to better guide experiences.

18) Live! Streaming! Mobile! Video! Now!

Live streaming (video) continues to bring niche moments to life, interrupting streams everywhere, making conversations on demand a form of engagement and entertainment. This makes everyday activities such as gaming, sports, concerts, events, TV, discussions, etc., become content and its hosts and participants the new weblebrities. This puts pressure on Youtube, Vine, Facebook, Snapchat to rethink video algorithms and subsequently monetization/advertising platforms. With streaming services forcing the unbundling of traditional subscription channels and the democratization of content production and distribution, consumers re-define programmatic content and reshape the definition of “TV.”

19) Say Hello To My Little Mends; Drones Join the Workforce

Drones will continue to revolutionize photography and videography but real innovation will derive from utility in vertical applications such as delivery, care, exploration, etc.

20) Ctrl-P: Print Solutions at Will

The proliferation of 3D printing solves problems and creates solutions in vertical industries (healthcare, aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, etc.), disrupting supply chains as it matures.

Personal applications will initially be served by brick and mortar establishments such as home improvement, auto repair, and other services where parts take time, are too expensive or unobtainable.

21) Siri, Take The Wheel

You may already own your last car. Autonomous vehicles will start to make their way onto public roads as laws rapidly iterate to make way for the inevitable. v1.0 will be very beta, with initial cars shipping with steering wheels and requiring drivers to “take a back seat” but be ready to take over at a moment’s notice. Fully autonomous, self-driving cars will be on the road by 2025. Cars will learn not only how to drive, but also how to limit or strategically consider accidents, injuries and even death of passengers, drivers and pedestrians.

Intelligent transportation not only changes how people, goods, etc., get from point A to point B, but also how vehicles and technology talk to one another to create safer passage ways. Each will also transform regulation to expedite a connected grid where transportation engineering and infrastructures as well as vehicles, gear, components, etc. work together.

22) Experiences Get Real Virtual

Oculus, Hololens, MagicLeap are bringing the virtual world to life. Immersive computing will find its niche beyond industrial design and start to permeate high-end gaming and other experiential sectors. It will open up an entirely new world that truly brings VR/AR alive…or closer to lifelike.

VR/AR are already a given. As gear becomes increasingly portable (think something like Google Glass), though, experience architects and next-gen imaging equipment will design immersive 360-degree experiences that don’t just replicate everyday life, but instead enhance and even challenge it. Think about shopping with products and attendants that appear out of nowhere, or information about products that come to life as you pick them up. When you visit Hawaii and the land where Jurassic Park was filmed, you will have the opportunity to actually visit Jurassic Park. Playing games where the field of play is your physical environment with challenges greeting you in your own space. Total Recall and Minority Report are just around the corner.

23) Power On…ward

In-home battery systems provide an entry-level solar solution to those with electric cars. Systems such as Tesla’s Powerwall and Powerpack lead to a battery innovation race that benefits households, devices/appliances and other goods powered by less eco-friendly means and the greater power sector.

24) Fashion Sense Gets Smart, Darlings

Intelligent or smart fabrics (E-textiles) make clothes more than fashionable or useful: they become part of a new genre in the wearable movement. Working together, many types of sensors integrated into one larger garment can tell different stories and unlock new possibilities.

Clothes will have beacon-like technology to control/inform surroundings. Clothing articles will transform based on environment and activities, and also sustain desired body temperatures.

Through Bluetooth technology, clothing will communicate body status to core devices that track performance, state, etc. for you and your healthcare provider.

25) Finance Gets a Makeover Inside and Out

The blockchain allows you to create a public ledger system that’s accessible for all, and secure. Blockchain technology will influence global financial organizations to rethink banking infrastructures. Rather than transacting based on the individual, currency and ultimately goods become individual assets. Each transaction becomes a micro-purchase around your account, but it doesn’t actually involve your personal authentication. Authentication is performed by your assets. All of this is recorded on your bank’s open blockchain ledger in real-time, easily and inexpensively.

Speaking of banks…based on the rise of the “selfish economy” and the consumerization of all tech, the idea of what a bank is and how people interact with it creates new micro-banks that look, act and perform banking functions for a digital/mobile generation.

26) The Cloud Takes Over Business

Critical ERP systems beyond CRM, marketing, etc. move to the cloud. Businesses cannot compete at the speed of digital Darwinism if they don’t change how they “do” business.

Nearly a third of all enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in the world will attempt the migration to the cloud in the next two years.