The global spread of COVID-19 will eventually reach deep into urban communities and results will not be good. We have a sizable number of urban dwellers with the identified “underlying conditions” that COVID-19 will make worse or fatal due to urban pollution (smog asthma) and urban habits (smoking weed) that affects lung health.

And if the health does not get to us, the economic devastation is going to be worst than 2008 and 2001 combined and some of us know how bad that was. But however, with COVID-19 this is a different – people are going to change their lifestyle habits towards a Fourth Industrial Revolution paradigm that was already maturing in Asian growth economies.  

This digital transformation could be a very good thing coming out all of this COVID-19 crisis. What’s even gooder is the cats who been rolling with Dream and Hustle already going to have the platform to handle this whole digitization scenario proper. We are already seeing the digital transformation going on as people having to stay indoors and work from home and the digital urban opportunities emerging.

Here are the five digital opportunities emerging as a result of COVID-19:

Digital-First Transactions

People will want to do transactions with less physical interactions. Touch screen kiosks are already not cool as I was in the store and saw a guy wipe his nostrils with his fingers before touching the touch screen on the self-checkout. Even Apple Pay require users enter a pin on the cashier pin pad after performing an contactless transaction and NFC still create a close contact scenario. So these methods are not going to be the future due to COVID-19 concerns.

What we are going to see is QR code push payments that has already proven to be the best method of digital payments and the most widely adopted system in the world. In addition, QR payments are cheap and easy to implement, the merchant can have one phone with many apps alerting when a push payment has been made.

Mobile apps will be the new interface screen for the customer to perform the checkout. A one-time token will be generated that can verify the order – the same token method you log into Dream and Hustle as a subscribed member. You will see urban entrepreneurs who used to be broke and basic like you become token service providers who will have database of millions or billions of tokens to sell to merchants or payment providers to facilitate payments making .007 per token, the same royalty rate a punk ass rapper makes from streaming.

Cashless will be moving forward despite city bans that can be overturned by a court decision using freedom of expression as the basis – you don’t have to take cash for payments, that’s your right. So those who don’t have cash will be just like Asian cultures where the cash goes into a kiosk and digital currency goes unto a phone number or prepaid card to make transactions.

Social Credit Systems

As interactions move online, we not going to put with lying ass people on the Internet. A lot of people think they can hide behind a social media alias name with no real photo, think they can type some fake news or try to mislead under a nickname and think they innocent - nah, we got something for that called a social credit system.

For example, let’s look at Facebook marketplace which is currently the best online marketplace. Because you can see if the person on Facebook has real friends and a real person and you can even see if they are someone you want to engage with in real life unlike other apps where you end up meeting a stranger you don’t even know any background on. This is the kind of platform we are going to see and they will be using their own social credit system to enforce acceptable social behavior online.

Back in the day, someone get on Twitter and start talking goofy hiding behind a fake name. Or you see these “blue checks” on Twitter talking cornball like Jack Dorsey is smirking behind their back proud of what they just tweeted. That’s the old days. Today, thanks to COVID-19, people going to want more accountable and credible online platforms to engage with. And social credit systems are going to become the norm to create a proper digital culture to attract high worth demographics.

Today social credit systems are going to operate as hybrid with both online and offline interactions. You act stupid in real life, you may not be allowed in certain platforms which will use 5G voice/data interactions based on your real-life stupidity. And if you online acting stupid, you may find yourself not getting the job you like, not admitted to the social clubs and gym clubs you like and not dating that single chick online you thought was fine because of your social behavior online and offline – some of yall goofy people going to be just outcast and blacklisted just like those Asian loners and outcasts who be acting out of turn in their societies.

Entrepreneurs setting up social credit databases can be done with a graph database and guess what – we already got a social credit system ready for our community, so yeah, keep hiding behind that alias talking up stuff because guess what – those fake online alias are just as good as a fingerprint to track someone throughout the whole internet because artificial intelligence can track your writing dialect, language, your agenda and platforms you show up on.

Interactive and Immersive Streaming Content

Being at home, people are not going to watch sitcom TV – they going to want more raw and real content and more information they can choose from. You are going to see a demand and growth of international-based streaming content watched by millions of people around the world.

One of the biggest genres coming out of Asia is the cooking and eating genre. While most the videos are in Asia, you are going to see more healthy cooking due to the COVID-19 virus threat and cooking based on maintaining health and good immunity system – lifestyle cooking shows. You going to see more lifestyle digital content as well made by regular people, not bodybuilders who want you to feel body shamed of your physique while they try to show off their hard body – those days are gone, people want real people like them talking to them.

Another major opportunity is micro-sporting events. In Asia they have pay-per-view video streaming of 20-minute mixed martial arts (MMA) fighting similar to UFC and have millions of viewers paying to watch a fight. Another sport I found in Tokyo was ping-pong with attractive women and men with logo sponsorship all on their uniform and rotating ads throughout the small arena – they don’t really need fans in the audience, they making their purse from the streaming.

Let me give you a bonus hint – for micro-sport events with advertising, you don’t need to find a major corporate sponsor to cover the streaming event, you can place “green screen” placeholders in the micro-arena and dynamically place advertising on those green screens that can either be personal to the user online behavior or local business or national and you can change the advertiser each time the video is played making advertising revenue opportunity perpetual for future viewing of that sporting event for years to come – just change the ads on those green screens.

Another major opportunity is going to be streaming information radiators that is going to replace radio stations and tv stations. These are similar to those chill-hop YouTube stations that stream anime and underground beats as a live stream. You can create for example offer an information radiator that play motivation podcast show from different podcasters in the morning while showing morning traffic, morning news, morning weather and sports scores and news streaming on YouTube from a desktop. Just like those pre-recorded church programs on AM radio, you can take that model to YouTube with new content and get an audience big enough to run advertisement with.

Micro-Logistics and Reservation Systems

Many cities around the world are engaged in “lockdown” where businesses and restaurants with public seating have to be closed due to the COVID-19 virus. The only exception is pickup and delivery – this is already the model in urban Asia and has been for decades. I need you to understand this about Asia.

People who work hard in Asia don’t have time to grocery shop and pay people to shop and deliver food, that’s been the norm over there. Second, most services like barbershops and auto repair are not “walk up” – you have to do reservations in advanced. I’m pretty sure if you went into an American Korean restaurant you would have realized you needed to reserve one of those private booths for your party well in advance and found out those booths were already reserved weeks ago – it ain’t the Cheesecake factory where you sit outside with your side piece waiting for your pager to buzz to get seating.

You are going to see a new paradigm of people learning to organize their groceries from the computer. This create an opportunity with data curators who will compete with Weight Watchers and sell you a list of diet items to shop at from the supermarket for shoppers to pick out for you – any of you can curate that shopping list right now for Kroger or Publix online delivery and call it the South London diet or whatever to sell to people looking to organize their grocery and personal items to buy.

Restaurants who did not offer mobile pickup and delivery are going to start realizing they need to become “ghost kitchens” and operate taking orders online and get delivery people to ship out the order. We already have this feature setup in Kossier, the same Kossier you use to log into Dream and Hustle called tracking. An order can be placed and tracked to deliver grocery and other items and entrepreneurs can set up their own logistic services in their own hoods using this service.

The other rule where restaurants can have only 10 or 25 people social distance at a time or a barbershop or hair salon want to be selective – reservation systems can be quickly established to accommodate this to allow a restaurant “throttle” how many people can be there and this can be controlled by artificial intelligence to market to people to fill up 10 at a time, all the time – that’s better than what most restaurants get before COVID-19 restricted them.

One thing you may not have noticed people are buying up – they are buying up those white vans to start their own delivery service because they see how micro-logistic operations are going to take off after they get laid off their corporate job and trying to get this up and running real quick. Because COVID-19 got old rich folks sitting in their homes all scared to go out and shop among these diseased Bernie-voting millennials showing no symptoms.

Virtual Lifestyles

And last but not least – you going to see more and more virtual lifestyles. People thought it was funny when they heard the news some Japanese dude married his virtual girlfriend. I want you to think about something because guess what – we found this out creating virtual black models in Tokyo and saw this possibility.

Some of the virtual AI girlfriends our Tokyo artist generated by computers were so damn fine with curves and dimples and smile and hair and personality that we know a brotha would pay serious money to have exclusive rights of her digitized form to have pictures of her on their walls, phone background and even a personality. And we know sistas would pay top dollar to have a virtual guy in the same format appealing to her taste – this is not a laughing matter anymore if you know the real market opportunity around the world. People tired of meeting and trying to date fake standoffish people and would love to get a personalized commission of a virtual boyfriend/girlfriend they would love to be with while they focus on their main hustle.

We also going to see more virtual friends where in my personal life, I have a lot of cool friends for over 10 years I either met for a few hours in real life at a festival or never met and we just on social media talking to each other. They better than the fake and phony people I got around me in real life. Going to see platforms try to hook up these people and this is not dating online, this is finding people who see people they want to hang out with.  

Virtual gifts are popular in China streaming media where guys provide expensive virtual gifts to a woman streaming online. There used to be an online space called Second Life and they have a Netflix special about it – people would create 3D spaces and sell them as commodities like a 3D dress an avatar can wear or a house an avatar can live in. Today, we are looking at the absurd where someone can build a huge intricate art museum in 3D with original curated they “gift” to someone they like and let people around the world tour the 3D museum – this is going to be the absurd kind of virtual gifting that will be going on in the near future.

Artificial intelligence is going to play a big part in developing these virtual spaces and lifestyle. The Black Mirror episodes where they use AI to find a compatible match is going to drive most of these virtual lifestyles designed for people unhappy with navigating through random encounters.