Dream and Hustle

2012 Fall Outlook Guide for Entrepreneurship and Opportunities

Despite the news about high unemployment for African-Americans and our first Black President stating he is not the president of Black America, there are still promising opportunities for brothas and sistas to pursue. This article is going to be a quick read on the opportunities with the hope brothas and sistas start plotting their course for the next year or two to go in a direction of getting true prosperity

STEM is Not Optional for Brothas and Sistas

One of the biggest struggles I’m dealing with is centered on African-Americans not wanting to take STEM seriously. The frustrating part is I already know how it will go down for African-Americans if they continue to ignore STEM. Quite frankly, Black folks are screwed for the rest of their lives if they think they are going to get by without knowing STEM.

Let me make this very clear – I, Ed Dunn take STEM very seriously to the point I do not accept any more emails or requests or deal with anybody who thinks technology is something they can brush off or hire someone else to do. In fact, me and my girl is both studying for technical certification right now meaning I’m only f*cking chicks who are about STEM and that’s how serious the game is in my world.

Everybody from President Barack Obama to other tech brothas and sistas is straight telling you African-Americans the same statement about STEM – you are going to need it to maintain a middle-class lifestyle from this point on. No one is telling you that you need STEM to be rich; I’m telling you that you need STEM to prevent your Black ass from being poor which is extremely likely in the next 5 years if you ain’t got your ish together.

Look at yourself homey – you got immigrants doing manual labor work cheaper than you right now and they stacked up 20 people in one house. You also got the $100K salary jobs shifting worldwide to overseas cats doing the work for 40K and quite frankly, doing a better job. Let’s not forget most cats in the American workforce just does an alright job with the sense of entitlement and privilege. The capitalist powers don’t like your American ass and your sense of entitlement and your ego unless you can produce value. And the way you produce value in the workplace nowadays is through STEM.

Everything you do as a job has scientific theory, technical framework, engineering patterns or mathematic formulas and this is the foundation of STEM that set cats apart competitively over others. You cannot even do a US Patent without STEM, so I don’t understand why the hell brothas and sistas have this problem and adverse objection to learning STEM and I don’t give a sh*t how old or hip your Black ass is.

This is not some student school crap where you didn’t like learning math or thought science was boring and that only nerds do technology and engineering. You need this STEM embedded in your life for your survival and your way of life. We are way beyond glass ceiling and racial discrimination when I see job listings in Beijing and Singapore for programmers and engineers. You better get yourself right about taking this STEM stuff seriously because it ain’t an option and it is everything to get you to the next level and beyond.

Mobile Commerce is Still Wide Open for Brothas and Sistas

Dream and Hustle been covering mobile money opportunities in the USA for brothas and sistas since 2010 with the hopes our people take the first mover lead. Well, brothas and sistas didn’t do much but thought what I wrote was just an interesting read. However, I was getting contacted by non-Black cats in the financial and technology sector worldwide in my inbox asking about mobile business models and even on how to exploit FX trading in the global mobile money scheme.

Here is the thing – the major entities trying to get mobile commerce setup in the USA are all confused and this is an advantage for brothas and sistas. You got ISIS which is some banks and telco firms and you now got MCX which is Wal-Mart, Target and 7-Eleven. Then you have technology firms like Google Wallet and Paypal. But all of them share one major problem where they have a big void of missing key in the puzzle of delivering end-to-end mobile commerce.

Based on reality and worldwide implementation of successful mobile commerce operations, the only environment in the USA that can make it happen is the Black community or the Hispanic community. You have to bring mobile commerce into the picture as a new paradigm bringing on people who are unbanked or been dealing outside of high street banking services like merchant accounts. You cannot convert old farts that still write checks at the supermarket checkout counter or Generation X cats who like to swipe with a magnetic stripe card.

You going to have to setup new merchants that can launch business models based on mobile commerce and setup people without bank accounts on mobile commerce and take advantage of peer-to-peer transfer like remittance from America to their home country like Mexico. Both the Black community and Hispanic community have the environment and density to make mobile commerce take off. Right now in the USA and this is entirely due to racism, the current mobile commerce offerings want the image of White people doing m-commerce first in the USA and that a vulnerability on their end that you as a brotha or sista should exploit.

Massive Retailing Revolution is Underway

The era of e-commerce is coming to an end while the era of m-commerce is rising. The problem with e-commerce is you could not see the product first and probably had to “showroom” at Best Buy before seeing if that is the product you want to order online. For e-commerce operators, cats built the e-commerce web site but didn’t know how to market and someone sold them on some BS called SEO and they bought into that crap, not reaching their customers effectively and directly.

The problem with brick and mortar retailers is they could not compete with price and no internet sales tax. However, many brick and mortars thrived based on people who want a product here and now. However, the big box chains like Border’s bookstore holding large physical inventory could not compete with just-in-time and drop-shipping inventory strategies. In addition, stuff like Kay Bee Toy store could not fight against the big box retailers like Wal-Mart who had a more aggressive everyday low pricing (EDLP) strategy and a supermarket section on the other side of their store.

But smart phones is changing the landscape where you can order from your mobile phone items from an e-commerce web site and pick up the product physically from the brick and mortar, bringing the best of both worlds. This shifts the retailing experience back to brick and mortars that now have to create more interactive experiences in their store and provide hospitality elements.

This means brick and mortars can create their own in-house e-commerce interactive system to interface with mobile phones, interface with people using gestures and augmented reality and in some ways encourage social interaction that is not available on the Internet paradigm. So this is all a major boom in the retailing industry and about to blow the f*ck up into a trillion dollar industry and create the next economic boom.

The opportunities are sick from creating kiosks and interactive signage to creating video effects and sound effects to RFID programming and inventory models that need mini-warehouses and transport logistics, creating massive job creation. F*ck a green job – retailing will transform from bullsh*t minimum wage jobs to the biggest economic expansion of capitalism as we know it if we brothas and sistas take the first mover and early lead on this.

Next Generation Jobs Will Be Outside of North America and Europe

If you haven’t traveled anywhere, then you simply don’t know what’s up, plain and simple. You cats sitting up at some worthless job fair when cats are sitting up at the international terminal taking a flight to China to find a job there teaching or whatever. I had a brotha overseas, a Black brotha just asked about trying to hire some brothas to help with his logistic company he setup in Asia to deliver furniture and stuff – this is the type of stuff you cats ain’t even on the level yet of thinking about how you can make paper in this world.

In places like Latin America or Africa, they cannot wait to train their people for technology and they do not trust the former colonists and would like to talk to smart brothas and sistas to help them do what they want to do down in their country and make it happen. However, with all of this opportunity, African-Americans want to stay at home in Ohio, stay broke and stagnant and complain there are no jobs and the Black unemployment rate is 15% but really 50% if you break down the numbers right.

Look, this is like STEM where it is not an option – you got to have some global experience and reality right here and right now if you want to compete and especially for the big jobs. You ain’t going to be some cornball working in Ohio all your f*cking life and think you are better than some Indian cat that worked in USA, Middle East, Europe and Asia in the same career field. You need to have the same comparative experience on your resume. In some cases, you don’t have to travel because I already done work in every region of this world except Africa and the Middle East on technology from the United States but you have to accept going global as your reality.

For some reason and many other people can testify to this – non-bigot money just looks a hell of a lot better for some reason. Green backs is not always green, it something about making money from someone other than these bigots just is a breath of fresh air, homey. That’s why I want you chasing new markets and new money out there instead of still being some sellout cornball trying to assimilate. Stop being scared and do what everybody else your age is doing and going worldwide and international or watch you get left behind real fast.

Black Media and Independent Media is Wide Open

If you think about it, do you really need a radio station in the 21st century? Do you really need a BET or TV One in the 21st Century? Do you need a record label in the 21st century or even a news channel in the 21st century? The answer is no in case you are confused and the only person that would argue we need all of that BET, Radio One crap is a cat scared of losing their job in the media industry.

We can create our own hyperlocal media firms that can cater to let’s say just the Chicago area that promote Chicago brothas and sistas. This is not the same as those generic cable access channels with weird shows, we talking real production studios. There are ways to micro-monetize these shows even in a high-density region to financially sustain itself. I’m hoping you cats understand the only reason this hasn’t happened because brothas and sistas don’t want to learn STEM to do it.

Right now, we have a few talented Black producers and cats in the industry but they are few and far between. We need more brothas and sistas learning how to do this media stuff from a STEM level and learn to setup channels to broadcast media in an independent fashion. For example, why can’t we build our own 55 Rockefeller Place where brothas and sistas go skating and we have a television studio that broadcast our news and we have a crowd that gathers in front of it? Why can’t we build our own labels to push music to individual music players to pay us directly through Android, have you thought about that ish? Why f*ck with iTunes with most of the world is using Android?

Summary

Retailing, mobile commerce and media are the biggest sectors brothas and sistas should be looking at right now. In addition, we need to keep in mind that nothing disappears, it is transferred. That means the opportunities are being transferred worldwide and brothas and sistas are going to have to start looking worldwide for hustles.

I know we are in a recession right now but this is not our recession, this recession is these bigots in America recession and I say f*ck them and their economic woes. We brothas and sistas can align with emerging nations and build up our own paper that way and do our own thing that way. However, we must understand we have to bring something to the table and what we bring to the table is STEM.

We brothas and sistas need to have STEM engrained hard into our lives and study it like our lives depend on it because it does. This ain’t some ish where we say we didn’t like it back in school and many of us believed during school we will never use STEM in the real world. In reality, none of you cats are working a non-STEM job that can be wiped out from someone who does knows STEM and want to exploit the job you are doing.

I hope this article serves as a guide for brothas and sistas to know the direction things are heading and where they need to be at. Even though it is rough right now economically, only the cats who ain’t got their ish together is going through it the worse and it ain’t going to get better for them either. You should truly understand that those who embrace STEM, understand the global economy and see opportunities in retailing and media are going to be the ones that stack paper, buying second houses, have money stashed away overseas while all these other Black folks are catching hell and keep trying to defend and reinforce their ego and pride.