There is going to be an economic explosion in the Black community due to technological advancements that we can apply to our urban infrastructure. Even communities that are pretty crapped out and deteriorated like Philly, Baltimore, Cleveland, Newark, Pine Bluff, Detroit can be transformed using digitalization.

Going a step further, the technological advance will be able to enable the BAME community in the United Kingdom from Liverpool, Birmingham, Croydon, and so on. We can enable villages in Africa the same way with container structures (prefer modular buildings over sea-salt flavored shipping containers) as well as throughout Latin America.

Let me explain in summary the environment in a paragraph really quickly. Brothas and sistas have been chasing charlatans and influencers talking up phony stuff. Meanwhile, India rose up in economic power, China rose up in economic power – Black folks didn’t progress because we been kicking the can down the road when it comes to establishing economic growth, pushing Black identity emotional bullcrap because folks didn’t have any skills or talent to make real things actually happen.  But a real brotha from the West Side of Chicago knew better and went out there and done better, that’s what Chicago West Side folks do when we see a chance; we built different from the rest of yall, for real.

There are no theories, there is no vaporware, there is no empty talk – I showed plenty of screenshots, plenty of code lines to show things are real. In addition, there are other platforms that we can integrate to make the Black economic explosion realized really quick. That’s why I can write an article like this while those clowns at Black Enterprise still writing clickbait emotional/motivation fluffy crap that doesn’t mean a damn thing at the end of the day.

This article, something they can never write at lame Black Enterprise is the top digital-first opportunities you brothas and sistas can start establishing with Toshikiso API or through major cloud solution providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as well. A digital-first firm is something you can host in a data center, have a perpetual engine running like a mechanical watch, and process workflows while you overseas hanging out in the South of France away from these ghetto folks talking stupid in a comment section before they go work at their gig economy job or an Amazon warehouse with a mask over their face all day.

Let me give you a solid warning before we get started. Ed Dunn loves his brothas and sistas who in turn, tried to downplay Mr. Dunn and what he was doing. But brothas and sistas failed to realize Ed Dunn was protecting them because what we were about to describe is an economic weapon. This means that non-Black folks can use these same solutions within our community and go first to market faster than brothas and sistas and take over opportunities. I don’t have a problem if an aspiring entrepreneur in Singapore or Doha or Delhi see this and build it out there in their city and expand it to our communities – that’s your damn fault for failing to give respect to the architect that is one of your own trying to do for yall, so let the chips fall where they may.

Here are the biggest digital-first opportunities brothas and sistas better get ramped up and going and become first-movers within our communities.

Payments & Engagement Consulting

This is the biggest opportunity for someone in our hood to stimulate economic activity. In the old days, we would have merchant account representatives that would peddle credit card machines for a specific vendor. Today, we need to have someone who is multi-verses in all payment schemes from multiple payment providers due to different channels of payment.

This is someone who can set up a buy-online-pickup-in-store system for a restaurant, someone who can set up QR code payments from mobile payment firms, someone who can create a subscription program for a content provider, notice we talking both online and offline payments. Even advise how to accept and process cryptocurrency as payments or mode of transaction.

But you need more than payments, you need engagement to drive people to payments. There is an opportunity to help businesses run pop-up shops, line queues, drive and pickup spaces with signs, QR code posters, self-serve kiosks, delivery, and pickup packages and supplies. This is the one you and your spouse better sit down at the kitchen table and ask if you can work out and master PayPal API, Stripe API, Apple Pay, Android App Store, PlayStation payments, cryptocurrency providers, QR code displays, and more. Horizon is wide open.

Event Microservice Modeling

We talked about this before, the future of business models is event-driven systems. The so-called business startup books out there are archaic – you can read these books and transform things into events and modernized a new form of business.

So a bar have events such as customer_seat_assigned where the host sat them at table #18, this event is recorded in an event log and microservices are notified and process their specific task such as start the clock of a customer session, notify the server staff a customer taken a seat, email the customer if they are a loyal member the special deals and discounts and so on – this is the new way of running a business, through a publish/subscription model of identifying events and acting upon them.

Your business is to consult startups or establish a business to create an event-driven system. This means you show them how to capture events like customer_order_requested where the customer hit a button saying they are ready to order and this fires off those published to the event to perform their task such as notify the cooking staff what food to prepare, notify the bar staff what drinks to make. You design this system for startups.

You don’t have anybody in your way to create this next-generation method for running businesses. You advise co-ops or employee-owned businesses or political organizations with an event like opposition_saidsomething_fuckedup and it triggers social media trolls to start posting, notify your candidate to make a statement to seize on the mistake and send out a newsletter about the incident and ask for a donation to fight the candidate who said something messed up.

You better start reading up on event-driven systems, learn how to event-storm and reverse-engineer startup business books, and convert those books into an event dictionary you can define and re-use. Ain’t a damn thing in front of you and you can start transforming and building up digitalized firms in your community and around the world.

Storytelling Agency

We have a lot of garbage Black writers creating propaganda content focused on “motivation” and “inspiration” and they put too much emphasis on the founding individual of the business. This is how that garbage Black Enterprise operates.  A real story campaign should connect the value of the product/service with a customer. You need writers who know how to identify with the customer problem then tell the story of a product or service that will solve the problem.

The storytelling agency should be modeled after the Netflix anime Violet Evergarden. You have a staff of story writers who sit down with the business representative and with a laptop, write the story of the product or service and how the business created this solution for the customer. You don’t do “ego-profiling” of the founder and talk about how much money they made or how much money they received in funding, that’s some cornball Tristan Walker stuff. You focus instead of creating both fiction or non-fiction stories like TV commercials that portray a product as a lifestyle solution, a memorial read, or a video that can be shared or talked about later.

This is a major need – it really sucks we got cornball Black writers always ego-casting the Black founder instead of selling the actual product or service. The story would be on how silky some woman's hair feels, how a vitamin pack gives a boost of energy to walk up an incline on a jogging path. Create compelling stories that the business owner will call you up in tears and talk about they could have not told a better story with the passion they have for their product or service.

That’s how we suppose to tell stories for entrepreneurs and businesses. Asian media does a great job of true storytelling of products and services – look at some of the product pages on Amazon with the lifestyle photos storytelling how their products can be used.

Advertising/Matchmaking Network

Do you know what I find funny about these garbage Black media outlets we got now? Like Blavity and Black Enterprise? They think content matters, focusing on clickbait and social media shares. But you look at CNN, Fox News, and New York Times and their revenue and it is all based on having an advertising network to host advertising and the content is secondary and contextual to the advertising.

Advertising and matchmaking networks are platform-building intermediary hubs to bring two parties together to make a deal. We don’t have these exchange setups in our Black communities and if someone else sets this up instead of brothas and sistas, the Black community will be screwed. We need to create hubs that match used sneaker sellers and used sneaker buyers, match good brothas with good sistas, and match insurance quotes to customers' current insurance needs.

Some say networks are hard to build because of a chicken-and-egg dilemma but in reality, storytelling to both parties is the best strategy to focus on instead of build and hope they will come. You sell the value to both sides and give simulation training for both sides so when it’s time to bring them together, they will know how to do business with each other.

Dating is very important to have credible matchmaking with qualified people. We got too many toxic feminists and toxic masculinity out there on these dating sites and people need to be vetted and not just be a good photo to drive clicks and subscriptions. Same with buyers and suppliers, we got too many low-quality businesses that should not be in the mix with high-quality businesses for a customer to choose from.

Setting up a matchmaking network is not as hard as you think; the real part is making sure you can get settlements through contract signing done with e-signatures and processed quickly. Have rules that impose fines and suspensions if one of the parties wants to start acting funny after committing to a deal on your system. Make sure you collect your coins as an intermediary as well.

Supply Chain/Logistic Blockchain

You can create blockchain-distributed ledgers to source and move products throughout the Black community, another infrastructure we don’t have.  We already have a similar blockchain built into our Kossier product used for tracking shipping but there are bigger things that can be done. Let’s talk about several blockchain implementations you should consider for the supply chain.

NFT blockchain technology can be used for any digital asset, not just art. And the best NFT is contract rights such as rights to stock the shelf of a grocery store in the hood, this is called slotting. So, someone can bid and win a contract with the exclusive right to slot potato chips in a store in the hood.

Blockchain can be used for a distributed event-driven system where someone can place an order entry on your blockchain and suppliers can be notified if they can fulfill the order and write to the blockchain price and volume and the buyer can decide how much to purchase, all done on the blockchain.  

You can establish plenty of distributed ledger blockchains to drive pipelines throughout the Black community such as hair care supplies, t-shirt distribution, used luxury bags, and more. But on the digital side, you can do a lot more – you can offer media like e-books and underground mixtapes as an NFT to sell on QR posters, please start thinking about the possibilities.

Royalty & Licensing Management

This is a game-changer that is needed. It is now possible to create a media player that can send events a song has been played and royalties are withdrawn from a prepaid account by the broadcaster that sends micropayments to all the contributors of that song.

Dream and Hustle work this way; yes, I actually get paid for these articles and we had people pay for Dream and Hustle, isn’t that funny you thought I wasn’t making money from Dream and Hustle when I was all this time? When an article is read or a podcast is streamed, the event records on a ledger and the actual money pool in the bank get a directive to payment distribution directly to my personal bank account – lol, yall thought wrong, didn’t yall? This is why only paid subscribers can listen to podcasts because the financial distribution is tied to the streaming event.

We have in Toshikiso a system called Settlement Directive API where all parties who have a stake in royalty distribution when their media is performed get their percentage. This allows an underground band for example set up their operating agreement on who gets paid what percentage or fixed amount. When the event is recorded and the Settlement Directive API is called, a micropayment distribution creates an account transfer directly into each party account.

What can this technology do? It allows us to create digital subscriptions where contributors are paid in near real-time to quickly recoup and start producing new material – noticed you cut out the record company and their shady deals. Noticed you can also cut out radio stations and other venues and can deal directly with the creatives.

The best option with this model is you can get licensing to play Indonesian pop songs or South African house music here in America and you can pay the foreign artists and labels quickly for the rights, an attractive offer on their part.

Digital-First Can Be Done Right Now

The good thing is the early adopters who supported Ed Dunn and Dream and Hustle can do all of this on Toshikiso API with no billing indefinitely. They can try and see if they can build digital-first solutions while the rest of you watch a video of a YouTube charlatan or a joker on social media talking up some philosophical stuff.  

But Toshikiso isn’t needed for most of these solutions – you can use the event systems on both Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure to process events and host microservices on Kubernetes to process those events and store them in a cloud database. Just don’t be shocked when you see how much that cloud hosting bill will end up, yep. Should’ve bet on Black, should’ve bet on the West Side.

We are going to have a Black urban economic explosion with digital transformation. People are going to be able to quickly launch businesses and have everything from delivery services to payment systems to recommendation engines (a form of matchmaking) all set up to get business flowing and revenue-generating fast. We are looking at a class of Black urban super-entrepreneurs that will scale at unprecedented speed and scale. Meanwhile, Blavity and Black Enterprise are still going to be writing joke articles trying to get a clickbait view for their outsourced pay-per-click advertising revenue model, lol.

Please do your research on these digital-first opportunities and realize how much potential we got out there. I’m sorry most of you chased that clown stuff but for the rest of us, the Black Excellence class, the future is looking very bright and transformative right now.