Pay attention to the future my friend, for these trends are the ones that are going to drive business in 2021.
Ghost kitchens are the wave of the future, thanks to Covid. Even when things go “back to normal”, ghost kitchens aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. These aren’t just a US thing, either… they’re in cities like Barcelona, Tokyo, and all over Europe.
Even Chipotle just came out with their first ghost kitchen, while the former CEO of Uber had a $130 million raise for his own too. They’re streamlining the restaurant biz and helping customers get the same dishes at cheaper prices.
Self-driving vehicles are going to fast track along with electric vehicles. The Cybertruck from Tesla is spearheading this, considering it’s an electric vehicle with sport-car type performance and a 500 mile range before needing a charge.
Cloud storage has been a trend for a while now, but now we’re seeing services like pCloud pop up who don’t delete your data after a certain point or limit storage like Dropbox and OneDrive. Once you connect pCloud to your computer, everything stays on the cloud. A user’s files will stay encrypted on their device before they transfer the files to a pCloud server. Even administrators can’t see files, making it super secure.
Of course 5G is going to take business and the way we communicate to a whole another level. Companies are already using 5G and AI to run autonomous ships, for example, and 5G is going to take everything already available in 4G and turn the speed up like woah. Buffering is completely out the window and computing will be faster than we’ve ever seen before.
What trend are you staying on top of and how? Hit reply and let us know!
The New Crypto on the Block
Is supposedly coming from Facebook in January. Is there anything Facebook won’t try to get their grubby hands on?
Libra is the name of their cryptocurrency that was going to launch a year and a half ago, but Mastercard, Visa and even the European Union backed out of the project. After the backlash, they came up with a few changes to make the payment system similar to PayPal’s structure.
Libra has yet to get approval from the Financial Market Supervisory Authority (which is based out of Switzerland), so perhaps what Facebook launches in January isn’t a payment system, just a stablecoin.
Not familiar with a stablecoin? Don’t blame ya. In essence, a stablecoin isn’t as volatile as cryptos like Bitcoin, it’s just a virtual currency that isn’t fixed. This one is going to be backed by the US dollar and therefore the same value… so it’ll fluctuate as the dollar does.
What’s Facebook’s plan with Libra? To use it across all of their platforms or sister platforms along with the digital wallet Novi, which is how crypto is sent and received on Messenger and WhatsApp.
Side note: Call us crazy, but what if we just used the dollar instead of a virtual currency that’s worth as much as the dollar…
Women Love Weed
…however, the cannabis industry hasn’t supported women, or much diversity period, with funding and investment. Curio Wellness, a medical cannabis company based out of Maryland, just started the WMBE fund specifically created to invest in women, disabled vets, and minorities who want to open a Curio Wellness franchise.
Unlike a lot of other franchises, the Curio WMBE Fund sets franchisees up to have full, 100% ownership after three years. Their business model is proven which is why they’ve chosen to help fund new Curio franchises rather than those starting their own cannabis biz. “Let’s bottle the success we have,” says Jerel Registre, the managing director of the Curio WMBE Fund.
The company walks their talk too, with 40% of their employee base being female, over half minorities, and 30% of management female.
The fund will help franchisees open their own Curio Wellness Center with everything from selecting a location, getting appropriate licenses, hiring their employees. They will also provide ongoing support in marketing, operations, sales, keeping employees up to date, and so on.
So far the fund has raised $15 million of their $30 million goal and will open applications early next year.
