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10 Great Examples of Unboxing Videos to Mimic for your Own Products

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10 Great Examples of Unboxing Videos

Unboxing videos are a very specific genre on YouTube. These are just what the name implies — people opening products up and talking about what they’re doing and seeing. For small businesses, this specific corner of YouTube is important. Statista reports the video platform has 1.5 billion users around the globe. That number is expected to rise to 1.86 billion by 2021.

Examples of Unboxing Videos

Check out these 10 great examples of unboxing videos for small businesses that are great samples for your own online marketing efforts.

Petite ‘n Pretty PR MAKEUP

It’s important to make sure that you’re using a good camera for any unboxing video like in this example. The iPhone camera has come a long way. Still you might want to consider investing in a camcorder that keeps pace with UHD/4K video and other advancements.

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Nike Adapt BB – Futuristic Self Lacing Sneakers

This video makes our unboxing list because it has a nice clean backdrop. People don’t want to watch an unboxing video from a messy desk or cluttered room. Use a professional backdrop for your video instead to add quality to your video production.

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Calia Hair Care

Being personable and approachable helps to add to the popularity of any unboxing video. Being authentic is infectious. It’s important to be genuine. If you have someone who’s playing a part, viewers will see through their fake energy about your goods and services.

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Hot Toys Spider-man Homecoming Spider-man Sixth Scale Figure

We’ve already mentioned that a good camera is important to a good unboxing video. It’s also critical to make sure that you use a good mic like in this example. There is no need to spend a bundle of money to pump your sound up to a professional level.

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LEGO City 60200 Capital City Construction Toy

The product might be simple enough that you can demonstrate it just using visuals like in this example. If that’s the case, having a soundtrack in the background always adds to the entertainment value of your unboxing video.  Just remember to pick an appropriate score. The light happy tune they’re using here works. Something heavy or dark wouldn’t fit.

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The Top 10 Sneakers Of 2018

If you’re looking for an excellent marketing technique for your unboxing videos, take a page from this one and develop some kind of relevant list. It doesn’t need to be a top 10 for the whole year. It can be something like “5 easy ways our product does the job.” However you decide to use these lists, they attract viewers.

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Funniest Unboxing Fails and Hilarious Moments

This one kind of breaks with our previous tip about having a nice tidy background, but it works because it uses humor. The whole idea behind any unboxing video is about entertaining and informing. Funny sells. If you don’t believe that, just take a look at the views this unboxing video got.

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Crayola Melt N Mold Factory Crayon Maker Play Kit!

Enthusiasm. That’s the one word that makes this video stand out. For small business, you want to get the most out of these and have someone who really gets behind your goods and services upfront.

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HUGE UNBOXING HAUL! *New/Favorite Makeup & Clothes*

This video was included since it highlights a huge haul that’s a popular trend. There are other trends that work well to like making ‘sent me’ unboxing videos.

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Segway Shoes!!! Segway Drift W1

Finally, this video was included because all of the shots here are stable. It’s important to make sure your unboxing video isn’t jerky even when there’s action involved. There’s a few different techniques you can use like holding the camera close to your chest or placing it on a chair or table.

Image: Unbox Therapy

This article, “10 Great Examples of Unboxing Videos to Mimic for your Own Products” was first published on Small Business Trends



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Shaq Is Investing in 9 Papa John’s Locations and Joining the Pizza Chain’s Board

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The NBA Hall of Famer will also become a brand ambassador for the pizza chain.


2 min read


This story originally appeared on Business Insider

The NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal is joining the Papa John’s board of directors and is investing in nine locations in the Atlanta area, the company said Friday. He will also become a brand ambassador for the pizza chain.

“We are thrilled to partner with Shaquille and welcome him to the Papa John’s board,” Jeff Smith, the Papa John’s chairman, said in the press release. “Shaquille has an excellent entrepreneurial background, including as a restaurant franchise owner, and is a natural creative marketer.”

O’Neal is no stranger to the restaurant business. He owns a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts franchise in the Atlanta area and has previously owned 27 Five Guys Burgers and Fries locations, the press release said. He also owns a fast-casual fried-chicken restaurant in Las Vegas and a fine-dining restaurant in Los Angeles.

Friday’s announcement comes amid a shake-up at the pizza chain. In February, the hedge fund Starboard Value invested $200 million in the company and named its chairman as CEO. A month later, Papa John’s settled its dispute with its founder, John Schnatter, who agreed to drop a lawsuit and resign as an independent director. Schnatter still owns about 30% of the chain.

Papa John’s is seeking to reshape its image after Schnatter’s exit from the company’s operations. In December 2017, Schnatter stepped down as CEO after facing backlash for his criticism of NFL national-anthem protests. Then, last July, he stepped down as chairman after admitting to using a racial slur on a company conference call. In its most recent earnings report, Papa John’s said it spent millions of dollars on “reimaging costs” at the end of last year.

Papa John’s was up almost 18% this year through Thursday, trading near $47 a share.

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SBA STEP Program Helps Small Businesses with Exporting

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Improving the SBA STEP Program

Small businesses earn trillions for the U.S. economy. And they employee tens of millions of people too. But when it comes to exports they face an uphill climb.

Luckily a government program seeks to help small businesses. The State Trade and Expansion Program (STEP) offers money and assistance to help small businesses become exporters.

Democratic Rep. Abby Finkenauer from Iowa held a recent hearing to try to tweak the program. Finkenauer now serves as Chairwoman of the Small Business Subcommittee on Rural Development, Agriculture, Trade, and Entrepreneurship.

Congress launched STEP after the global financial crisis.

Congress Seeks to Help Small Business Exporting

The hearing looked at the tough times small businesses face in the export market. It also focused on businesses in rural areas.

In a press release, Finkenauer said, “I … know that it is incredibly difficult for the small business in a town like Maquoketa in my district whose owner may want to do business overseas but lacks the staff capacity or doesn’t know where to start. Today’s hearing was a chance to hear how we as lawmakers can ensure our small businesses have these opportunities.”

The hearing looked at problems the program already faces. But officials also tried to seek ways to improve it. The Small Business Administration Inspector General made some suggestions for improvements. And the Government Accountability Office made suggestions too.

Recommendations from Kimberly Gianopoulos, Director of International Affairs and Trade for the Government Accountability Office include some of the following.

Gianopoulos urged the SBA to assess the risk to achieving program goals posed by some states’ low grant fund use rates.

And she recommended examining the challenges that states reported related to the program’s application, award processes, administrative burden, and communication.

Finally, Gianopoulos suggested the SBA enhance collection and sharing of best practices among states that receive STEP grant funds.

The SBA STEP Program

The Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 created STEP.  It began with a three-year pilot program. The success of the program led Congress to move forward. And the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act made STEP permanent in 2015.

Congress also authorized $30 million in funding through the Fiscal Year 2020. To date, the SBA has awarded around $139 million in funding to almost every state in the country.

STEP aims to increase the number of small businesses that export and the value of exports by the small business sector.

The Federal and state partnership competitively awards grants to the 50 states. Grants also go to the District of Columbia, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa.

In addition to financial contribution, the program also supports small businesses with trade goals outside of the US. These include trade missions and market sales trips. But they also include export trade show exhibits, training and subscription to services provided by the Department of Commerce.

The Federal government provides 75% of the funding for the total project. And states provide 25% of the cost for operating.

Image: Small Business Subcommittee

This article, “SBA STEP Program Helps Small Businesses with Exporting” was first published on Small Business Trends



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3 Best Phone-Tracking Apps for Monitoring Your Employees or Children

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Most phone-tracking apps rely on basic GPS navigation, so they can tell you someone’s location.

Other than that, they can give you information about someone’s calls, messages, and Internet surfing. Therefore, if you need phone-tracking software to keep tabs on someone’s location, as well as learn other information from their phone, there are many apps available. Here’s a brief review of the top three.

RELATED ARTICLE: THE VITAL IMPORTANCE OF CONFIDENTIALITY FOR STARTUPS

1.  
mSpy

With mSpy, you can easily view phone calls someone either received or made from their number. Also, you’ll see the timestamp and call duration.

phone-tracking apps 1
Image source: phplens.com

Additionally, you can easily record most of these phone calls. What’s more, if you’re doubtful about any specific number, you can set recording controls on the phone-tracking app for phone calls your subject receives or makes to that particular number. You can even block incoming phone calls from specific numbers.

For example, if you are afraid that your son or daughter might be getting into trouble behind your back, you can at least find out what your child is doing on their iPhone. You can find an easy-to-follow guide to help you keep track of their phone. There are five easy methods at this link: https://bestcellphonetrackerapps.com/how-to-track-an-iPhone-of-my-daughter/

You can also keep track of texts that a phone sends or receives. Additionally, you can check any and all content sent or received from email services such as Outlook, Gmail, and so on. Plus, if the person who uses your target phone has saved some sites as favorites, you can easily view all of them and check with your phone-tracking app to see if they contain inappropriate content.

mSpy Has Lots More Features, Too

Just like any other application, you can use this phone-tracking app to temporarily block or unblock sites for specific times of the day. Also, you’ll be able to see most of your subject’s calendar entries, along with a record of any activities they create on their phone. For example, you can acquire records of Skype calls and chats, WhatsApp chats, iMessage’s SMS texts, and more.

Keep in mind that your tracking would likely be incomplete unless you review online hangout sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. You can easily keep a record of updates your children or workers make by using this particular feature.

Finally, if the device you’re tracking should be misplaced or stolen, you can execute a wipeout on your own device. While this action would remove from your device the information you’ve gathered, you would still be able to access it from data backups in the phone-tracking app’s main database.

2.   Mobile Monitor

In addition to being able to track messaging, video, audio, call, images, and email, Mobile Monitor allows you to monitor a number of other activities of a particular target’s cell phone.

phone-tracking apps 2

However, you’ll need a couple of minutes alone with the target cell phone to install the phone-tracking app onto it. Then you can connect with an online dashboard on the receiving end.

If you’re using an iOS, you’ll be acquainted with the WhatsApp feature that many people use for sending and receiving free messages and calls. You’ll be able to easily record all the texts, images, and call data that your target shares over WhatsApp.

Another popular application is Skype, the application that many people use for video calling. However, people often use this application for inappropriate purposes. You’ll be able to check all the messages and phone calls your subject makes and receives over Skype.

3.   SpyBubble

Another good phone monitoring application is SpyBubble. This app allows you to track phone calls made or received on your target’s phone. For example, you can get information about call frequency and duration between any two numbers.

phone-tracking apps 3
Image source: c2c-reviews.com

Moreover, knowing your offspring’s current location has become a lot easier thanks to Google maps and the GPS navigation tracker.

Wrapping Up: The Best Phone-Tracking Apps

It’s important to note that in order to track your children’s or your employees’ text messaging on their phones, you’ll need to install the application of your choice on the phones you plan to monitor. You’ll also need to pay either a monthly or a one-time fee for this tracking service. These types of services are appropriate for employee tracking and parental control.

Feature Photo by Noelle Otto from Pexels

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Uh Oh! Small Business Optimism Fading, Report Finds

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Uh Oh! Small Business Optimism Fading According to the Spring 2019 Paychex Business Sentiment Report

The ebb and flow of the economy and its cyclical nature means there will be good and bad times. With such a strong economy in the last couple of years, it was inevitable that the record-high small business optimism would eventually start fading.

Spring 2019 Paychex Business Sentiment Report

According to the latest Paychex Business Sentiment Report, business owners’ optimism has gone down in several areas since October 2018. Owners said business outlook, ability to fill open positions, and ability to raise wages are trending on the downside.

The report comes from 500 randomly selected business owners surveyed between February 15 and 26. Participants were polled on topics impacting their profitability and prospects for growth.

They were asked to rate their optimism on a scale of 1-100. One would represent the highest level of pessimism and 100 the peak of optimism.

As the third installment of the Paychex Business Sentiment Report, overall business owner sentiment is still optimistic. But as Martin Mucci, Paychex president and CEO, pointed out in the press release for the report there is a decline compared to the last report.

Mucci said, “The decline seen in these latest results are primarily around hiring and the ability to raise wages.”

He added, “This is the lowest level of confidence in employers’ ability to fill openings with qualified workers that we’ve seen since starting the Business Sentiment Report in July of last year. While jobs growth remains steady, business owners are still having a hard time finding candidates with the right skill sets to meet their needs in today’s tight labor market.”

The Tight Labor Market

The ability to fill open positions is getting harder because of the tight labor market. Unemployment levels are historically low, which makes it a job seekers market at the moment.

In the survey, the optimism level in finding the right qualified candidate is down by 8 points to 43/100. But overall small businesses are finding it less challenging to find talent.

Only 10% of companies with 1-19 employees said it was very challenging, while 23% with 20-99 employees and 40% with 100-500 employees said the same.

Wage Disparity

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for February 2019, wages are up. Although it is only 3.2% over the last 12 months, the numbers are better than the stagnant wage growth over the past decade.

The problem mirrors the results in the Paychex report as the ability to raise wages is down 10 points to 41/100.  A further breakdown of the data reveals rural areas have it much harder when it comes to raising wages.

Urban regions in the US said their outlook was 49/100 in their ability to raise wages, while rural parts of the country it went down to a low 15/100.

Overall Optimism

The overall optimism in the US economy is positive when you remove the ability to raise wages and finding qualified talent.

In this report, the number is 72/100, which is up from the fall of 2018 when it was 65/100.

The economic outlook is brighter for large organizations. Businesses with 1-19 employees said their optimism level was 62/100, while those with 20-99 workers said 71/100. Companies with a workforce of 100-500 people were the most optimistic at 75/100.

Here is an infographic with some data points.

Spring 2019 Paychex Business Sentiment Report

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, “Uh Oh! Small Business Optimism Fading, Report Finds” was first published on Small Business Trends



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Every Minute Online Is a Battle for Consumer Attention

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Check out this not-to-scale visualization of what is happening on the internet every single minute of every single day this year.


2 min read


This story originally appeared on PCMag

We all know the internet is a big place with a lot going on, but the chart above — put together by media consultants Lori Lewis and Chadd Callahan for All Access Music — really points out the sheer amount of activity vying for (or constantly stealing) our attention. (We found it on Digg.)

Pulling public records and claims from major internet companies, the two have for the last three years cobbled together a chart of what happens on average every minute of the day online. The numbers are staggering.

All of the following are happening each minute: 188 million emails and 18.1 million texts sent. 41.6 million messages sent on Facebook and WhatsApp combined. 1.4 million swipes on Tinder.

The sheer amount of video consumed on Netflix (694,444 hours per minute), YouTube (4.5 million videos) and Twitch (1 million views) alone should make traditional entertainment companies despair.

The comparisons go back to 2017, and not much has radically changed, except that numbers keep going up. The comparison chart here showing 2018 versus this year gives a pretty interesting view.

Notice first that just about every measure has risen. Facebook is probably more hated than ever, but it still has more people logging in every minute than last year. Google has more searches. Netflix more than doubled the number of hours watched. More apps are downloaded. More money is spent online (from $862,823 per minute up to $996,956 per minute this year; 2020 should crack a million per).

The only numbers that appear to have gone down are Snapchat’s, probably because they redesigned, and everyone hated it. Twitter’s looks lower, but the social media site switched the metric from tweets sent in 2018 (481,000 per minute) to number of people tweeting (87,500 per minute), so it’s not a direct comparison.

There are a few new metrics for 2019: 4.8 million animated GIFs served per minute by Giphy is one, and it shows just how important that outdated image format remains. Adding WhatsApp to the “messages sent” list is another. The number of streaming music subscriptions started is also new for 2019: it’s only 41 per minute, but that’s going to add up to 21,549,600 new subs for the year.



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4 Tips for Creating a Digital Product That Can Make You a Tidy Profit

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It has no physical form, and therefore little or no development cost; but a ‘digital product’ like an ebook or audio cost can earn you a bundle.


5 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.


In the past, creating your very own product may have seemed like a pipedream. There was so much work involved in building a product, not to mention the fortune often required just to get a product to market. But not anymore.

Related: Research Finds Digital Goods Area a Tougher Sell Than Entrepreneurs Think

Now, anyone can create a digital product and make money online. One of the biggest perks of creating this category of product is that you create it once and sell it over and over again.

So, what does a “digital product” mean? It means a product without a physical form. Consider these examples:

  • ebooks and pdf guides

  • video tutorials

  • audio courses

  • templates

  • WordPress themes

  • images and icon sets

  • stock photos

These products are low-cost to create because you don’t have to deal with shipping or manufacturing costs or a lengthy development time. The product is also all yours, so you get to keep all the profits. Plus, while creating it is super low-cost, it has the ability to generate you a ton of money.

Before you dive in head-first, however, make sure your digital product will be successful. Check out these four tips for creating a digital product that sells.

Related: The Top 8 Digital Trends to Watch in 2017

Choose a winning digital product.

The first step is to choose the right digital product: What good will it do you to spend your time creating something that no one wants to buy? That’s why you’ve got to create something that solves a problem for your audience.

To determine what niche will sell best, look at what your audience comes to you for, now. Do they come to your blog for budgeting advice? If so, consider creating budgeting templates. Is your most popular blog post a beginner’s guide to email marketing? Then create an ebook guide for email marketing.

If you don’t know what the pain points are for your audience, look at your website analytics or consider asking your visitors by adding a survey or poll to your site. Analyzing what your audience is most interested in from you will help you come up with a digital product that’s irresistible to them.

Make your product visually appealing.

Just because you’re creating a digital rather than physical product doesn’t mean it shouldn’t look good. Consumers buy with their eyes; if your product looks impressive, they’ll be more likely to want it, and even to pay for it. According to a study on Science Direct, when a product’s design is powerful and impressive, consumers are less sensitive to its price. So, make sure you spend time to create visually appealing product images.

Now, you might be wondering how to create images for a product that isn’t actually tangible. For most digital products, you don’t want to post a photo of the product itself, but instead visually demonstrate a glimpse of what the user will be getting. For instance, you could create a little mockup of what’s included in a guide or workbook, as in the example below.

Image source: Melyssa Griffin’s Pinfinite Growth blog 

Establish and promote your expertise.

If you’re thinking of creating your own digital product, you probably already have your own website and a blog. If not, you need them ASAP. Because, of course, not many people will want to buy a digital product from some mystery person online. A website and blog will establish you as a thought leader in your industry and help build trust between you and your potential customers.

And trust is key to generating sales of your digital product. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, when trust is high, people are much more likely to take risks and make a purchase.

So, start blogging on a regular basis and make sure your blog posts relate to your digital product. If your digital product is a course on Pinterest marketing, write about Pinterest marketing. This will show your potential customers that you know what you’re talking about. Don’t forget to promote yourself across social media too; and consider guest-blogging on other popular online publications to broaden your reach and further prove your authority in your niche.  

Collect feedback.

After you’ve created your digital product, it’s time to send it off into the world … or is it? Before you let your digital product loose for people to buy, first do some testing, and collect feedback. It would be a disaster to release your product, only to find out it doesn’t meet expectations. To avoid disappointing your customers, make sure first that what you’ve got is a hit.

Consider offering some of your biggest fans the chance to preview your digital product and then collect their feedback. Updating a digital product is easy, so take your audience members’ feedback into account. If they suggest adding another element you may have overlooked, you can easily add it. By getting feedback, you can ensure you’re putting out the best digital product possible.

Related: The Road From Product to Experience for Luxury Offerings

Over to you.

When you first launched your website or blog, you might never have thought creating a product was in your future. But with these tips for creating a digital product that sells, you can add “digital product creator” to your resume and watch your revenue grow.

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This AI Predicts Online Trolling Before It Happens

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It’s being used to weed out fake reviews, but could also help predict and curb online harassment.


4 min read


This story originally appeared on PCMag

How do you keep online trolls in check? Ban them? Require real names?

Dr. Srijan Kumar, a post-doctoral research fellow in computer science at Stanford University, is developing an AI that predicts online conflict. His research uses data science and machine learning to promote healthy online interactions and curb deception, misbehavior, and disinformation.

His work is currently deployed inside Indian e-commerce platform Flipkart, which uses it to spot fake reviewers. We spoke to Dr. Kumar ahead of a lecture on healthy online interactions at USC.

Dr. Kumar, how do you counteract online harassment using data science and machine learning? How does your system identify the trolls? 
In my research, I build data science and machine learning methods to address online misbehavior, which transpires as false information and malicious users. My methods have a dual purpose: first, to characterize their behavior, and second, to detect them before they damage other users. I have been able to investigate a wide variety of online misbehavior, including fraudulent reviews, hoaxes, online trolling, and multiple account abuse, among others.

How are you teaching the AI to spot these patterns? 
I develop statistical analysis, graph mining, embedding, and deep learning-based methods to characterize what normal behavior looks like, [and] use this to identify abnormal or malicious behavior. Oftentimes, we may also have known examples of malicious behavior, in which case I create supervised learning models where I use these examples as training data to identify similar malicious entities among the rest.

Your research is currently being used in Flipkart. What problem were they trying to solve and how are they measuring results? 
The key problem that I helped address on Flipkart was of identifying fake reviews and fake reviewers on their platform. This is a pervasive problem in all platforms; recent surveys estimate as much as 15 percent of online reviews [are] fake. It is therefore crucial to identify and weed out fake reviews, as our decision as consumers is influenced by them.

What’s the method called here? 
My method, which is called REV2, uses the review graph of user-review-product to identify fraudsters [who] give high scoring ratings to low-quality products or low scoring ratings to high-quality products. REV2 [compares] our recommendations to previously identified cases of fake reviewers.

Is it possible for AI to keep an eye inside social networks and raise the alarm when bad behavior is about to arise? Is this purely pattern-based analysis with sentient data crunching or something entirely different? 
It is possible to proactively predict when something may go wrong by learning from previous such cases. For instance, in my recent research, I showed that it is possible to accurately predict when one community in the Reddit online platform will attack/harass/troll another. This phenomenon is called “brigading,” and I showed that brigades reduce the future engagement in the attacked community. This is detrimental to the users and their interactions, which calls for methods to avoid them. Thus, I created a deep learning-based model that uses the text and community structure to predict, with high accuracy, if a community is going to attack another. Such models are of practical use, as it can alert the community moderators to keep an eye out for an incoming attack.

Do you see a logical extrapolation of your work used in “nudges” to prompt users to clean up their act prior to prosecution? Akin to a teacher at the front of the class keeping a wary eye on the troublemakers in the back row before they fall into criminal masterminded gangs? 
Absolutely! A natural and exciting follow-up work is how to discourage bad actors to do malicious acts and to encourage everyone to be benign. This will help us to create a healthy, collaborative, and more inclusive online ecosystem for everyone. There are many interesting challenges to achieve this goal, requiring new methods of interventions and better prediction models. Enabling better online conversations and nudging people to be their better self is going to be one of my key thrusts going forward.

Have you have personal experience with online harassment or was this more of an interesting AI problem to solve for you? 
One of the major reasons for me to follow this direction of research was seeing some of my friends being harassed by social media trolls. This led to look for non-algorithmic ways to curb this problem. Being a challenging task, it piqued the interest of the scientist inside me and I eventually learned to create data science and machine learning methods to help solve these problems.

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Only 3 Percent of US Retail Sales Completed Via Mobile Wallet

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Latest Mobile Wallet Usage Statistics: Only 3 Percent of US Retail Sales Completed Via Mobile Wallet

A new infographic from Expert Market has mapped out mobile wallet usage in 36 countries around the world. In the US, only 3% of retail sales were completed through a mobile wallet.

The global penetration rate of this technology is still very low topping at 6%, except for one country. The one outlier in this report is China, which has a staggering 36% of the population using mobile wallet. This is nine times the global average of 4%.

As consumers move away from cash, businesses have to implement payment solutions capable of addressing this change. This is because they now have more ways than ever to pay for the product and services they purchase.

Businesses have to make the payment process as seamless as possible and remove any pain points for their customers. With smart mobile phones, consumers have a technology which brings most of what they need in one platform.

Lucy Crossfield of Expert Market, addressed this aspect of the technology in the emailed press release.

Crossfield said, “Mobile phones are becoming the no.1 device for everything from chatting to friends to watching TV to paying for all of our worldly possessions, and why? Because it’s just so much more convenient to have everything in one place -in today’s world, convenience is king!”

It is this convenience which will drive in more customers to your place of business. As Crossfield added, “Our study confirms it – the days of fumbling around in your wallet for your credit, debit and thousands of loyalty cards are seriously numbered.”

Businesses have to start deploying mobile wallet technology as part of their overall POS system sooner than later.

Besides China, What Countries Are Making Gains in Mobile Wallet Adoption?

The report by Expert Market says by 2022 only 17% of global payments will be made using cash. And digital wallet usage will go up to 28% during the same period, an increase of 24%.

The growth in China will be more dramatic as e-wallet users will increase by more than 140 million people every year.

One of the challenges for the rest of the world is the reliance on contactless card payment systems. The reason China has high numbers of mobile wallet users is they all but skipped credit cards in the country.

People in other countries are going to have to wean themselves out of using credit cards and get used to mobile wallets.

When it comes to Europe, the UK is the top mobile wallet user at 5%, with Spain and The Netherlands coming at 3%, and France at 1%.

In the Americas Argentina is first at 4%, with the US coming in at 3% followed by Brazil with the same amount, and Canada at 1%.

For the rest of the world India and the UAE were above average at 6%, with Australia at 2%.

Who is Using Mobile Wallets?

According to the analysis from Expert Market, millennials make up 35% of the mobile wallet users around the world.

A further break down of the group reveals 40.4% are high earners, 32.2% medium income, and 27.4% low income.

The report says businesses who renovate their payment infrastructure and adopt new technologies can seize the opportunity this lucrative demographic will provide as they grow in purchasing power.

Take a look at the rest of the data from the Expert Market infographic below.

Mobile Wallet Usage Around the World

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, “Only 3 Percent of US Retail Sales Completed Via Mobile Wallet” was first published on Small Business Trends



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MoviePass Is Bringing Back an Unlimited Plan, but There’s a Catch

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The movie-ticket subscription service has been working hard to bring back a plan similar to the one that got it so many subscribers two summers ago.


3 min read


This story originally appeared on Business Insider

MoviePass is bringing back an unlimited plan.

Despite the recent exodus of executives and managers at the company, the movie-ticket subscription service has been working hard behind the scenes to bring back a plan similar to the one that got it so many subscribers two summers ago: a $9.95-a-month unlimited plan.

The launch has been delayed for weeks, according to a source with knowledge of the decision, who told Business Insider that it will likely be set live in the coming days. And there are other signs that MoviePass is on the cusp of bringing back the unlimited option.

A staging URL showing details of the plan was posted on StockTwits over the weekend, and viewed by Business Insider. By Sunday afternoon, the link was brought down:

The design of the MoviePass site when it unveils its unlimited plan, according to the staging URL that was live over the weekend.

Image credit: MoviePass

According to the details on the staging page, the unlimited plan will be available to new subscribers for a limited time for any 2D movie. But there’s a catch. In a clear move to limit power users, subscribers’ choices will be restricted in response to “excessive individual usage.”

For further explanation of what that means, they direct you to a section of the Terms of Use:

Section in Terms of Use addressing the unlimited plan.

Image credit: MoviePass

There it says that “MoviePass makes no guarantee on the availability to any particular theater, showtime, or title presented on the app.” It also states that it may use its algorithms to restrict users “based on their location, day of movie, time of movie, title, and the individual user’s historical usage.”

These restrictions are similar to ones MoviePass already has put into place, which remove some popular showtimes and movies from the app.

That’s not the only catch in the new plan. MoviePass wants subscribers to pay the $9.95-a-month price on an annual basis through eCheck of ACH. With MoviePass’ management turmoil and heavy losses, some subscribers might be wary of paying for a full year up front, especially before they know how much MoviePass will restrict the available showtimes and movies. The ACH option would also require subscribers to give out their bank accounts.

Image credit: MoviePass

Currently, MoviePass offers a three-tier pricing plan ranging from $9.95 to $19.95, depending on where you live in the country. MoviePass abandoned the unlimited plan last August after gaining millions of subscribers, but burning through hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for their tickets.

MoviePass has recently said it plans to “create a more closely connected relationship between our subscription service and original content production unit, MoviePass Films.”

So why go back to an unlimited plan?

It’s a move that has some inside the company baffled, and contributed to recent management turnover, a source close to MoviePass told Business Insider.

Last week, Business Insider reported that Khalid Itum, the executive vice president who was in charge of the day-to-day operations, had resigned along with three other management-level staff.

MoviePass was not available to comment.

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