Uncategorized | Tarzi Design Studio

Rebrand Your Business Without Losing Your Audience

by Nour | Dec 4, 2022 | Uncategorized

Learn how to change your company identity while maintaining your customer base.

Rebranding your company can involve updating your design, mission and name.
Before tackling this endeavor, consider your strategy and motivation for rebranding.
Engage your current customer base throughout the process.
This article is for small business owners seeking to rebrand.

Rebranding can take many forms, from renaming your company to implementing a new business model. While these changes are taking place, businesses must still work to connect and communicate with customers.

Is it possible to rebrand a business without losing your audience and disappointing current customers? Find out what a rebrand involves and learn tips from five business owners on how to make it all work.

What does a rebrand involve?

Modernizing design

Your business may have outgrown the design you initially put together years ago and maybe it’s time for a refresh. Overall design can include your company’s logo, email templates, brand colors, website and business cards. Because these design elements are so closely aligned with your firm, it’s imperative to allocate significant time and resources to create a comprehensive plan that touches each element.

Updating mission and vision

A successful business must adapt to an evolving world and changing customer preferences. Maybe your business started selling one product but have since added more popular items. When an opportunity to expand or reach a new market presents itself, it’s time to rethink brand strategy for customers to continue to connect. It is important to consistently look at how your customers engage with your brand and adapt with their changing habits.

Renaming your organization

Much like the design, your business may have outgrown its name. Perhaps your company merged with another so the name must reflect the new partnership. In any case, a name is what is most associated with a business, so changing it must not be taken lightly. The name should reflect the company’s identity and support your core mission, but is still able to adjust to future growth.

What to consider during a rebrand

Rebranding your business can add value, market share and customer engagement while making you stand out from competitors. It is, however, an incredibly complicated undertaking that requires planning, strategy and research.

1. Know why you are rebranding.

A rebrand is a major undertaking, involving your marketing, web presence, client list, employees and mission. The process is more likely to succeed if you can focus on a compelling reason to change.

As head of marketing and customer support for RetireReady Solutions, David Black helped guide his company through a rebrand that involved both a major name change and a refocusing of services. In their case, a rebrand was necessary to encourage growth and clarify their services. However, if that’s not the case for your business, he explained that rebranding could do more harm than good.

“If it isn’t essential, there may be easier ways to grow your business,” Black said. “If [your] company is leaning toward rebranding, make sure to think through everything that will be affected and consider the time, expense, and work that will need to go into it, and whether the [return on investment] will justify the expense and effort.”

When Rod Hughes, president of Kimball Hughes Public Relations, helped oversee the company’s rebrand from Kimball Communications, he worked hard to disclose that the change was primarily about earning and maintaining their clients’ trust.

“I became an owner [and] partner in the business in 2016, and we wanted clients to understand when they worked with me, they were working with a decision-maker for the business,” Hughes said. “We felt it was important to our existing clients, as well as prospective clients, to see a continuity of leadership and a long-term transition plan for management of the agency.”

2. Plan a comprehensive strategy before you begin.

Many businesses are surprised by the complexities involved in a rebrand. While initial plans may focus on a new name and matching domain, the process is likely to involve designing new logos, products, a new website design and content, product guides, the services you offer and even the clients you pursue. To ensure the process runs smoothly without losing customers, have a strategy in place before you begin.

“The decision to rebrand was a fairly easy one to take,” Black said. “The difficulties arose in the details and the implementation. Like peeling back layers of an onion, you don’t realize all that goes into a rebrand until you get into it.”

Plan for the changes that will need to be made as well as which parts of your marketing and business strategy will be affected. Designate members of your team to be in charge of each area, from making design decisions to communicating with the public.

“Rebranding is a process through which you reset your mission and priorities going forward … [so] work to reflect that in your branded materials as well as in the minds of your customers,” Hughes said. “It’s a significant undertaking and should be treated as such.”

3. Anticipate questions and concerns.

Communicating with customers during a rebrand is key to maintaining your existing client relationships. If customers don’t understand why changes are occuring, they may lose trust in the business, and you could see a significant drop in revenue.

Brian Moak, owner of HEART Certified Auto Care based in Chicago, rebranded his family’s business to expand it into a national franchise. But during the process, he found that many existing customers worried that the name change and expansion meant the family-owned business had been bought out. To preserve their trust, Moak worked to anticipate the questions customers would have and provide answers before they took their business elsewhere.

“During a rebranding process, keep your communication simple, straightforward, and speak to people’s fears and concerns,” Moak said. “Change is scary, and people … need clear explanations and reassurance to understand, support, and buy into your vision.”

When marketing agency RepuGen – formerly GMR Web Team – rebranded to focus on clients in the healthcare industry, owner and founder Ajay Prasad found that understanding the concerns of employees was as important as anticipating questions from customers. Employees, he pointed out, are the ones responsible for communicating with customers, and without their support and understanding, customers will be left in the dark.

“Make sure you have a sound business reason for rebranding,” Prasad said. “Discuss [it] with your team and get their buy-in. That way, your employees can easily communicate it to existing and potential clients, and understand the goals they should be tracking. Every rebrand is meant to improve a business, so everyone needs to understand where to expect those improvements.”

4. Publicize your rebrand.

Communicating with your customers doesn’t have to be internal or even private. All of these business leaders found that talking about their rebrand as publicly as possible didn’t just help them maintain their current level of business – it led to an increase.

“We … used social media, press releases, and media contacts to communicate with customers and the general public,” Black said. “We saw an increase in traffic to our website and greater interest in our company because there was a better understanding of what we offered, and it was easier to find us in search engines.”

When Moak’s team went public about the reasons for HEART’s rebrand, his customers stepped up to offer their encouragement and support. “Our customers are thrilled that we are trying to expand our mission to other communities,” he said.

Kris Gösser, vice president of marketing at Shipium, oversaw the rebrand of his former company, Datica, right before its industry’s largest trade show of the year. With such a high-profile event coming up, Datica’s team was slated to publicly discuss the rebrand and the reasons behind it.

“We had an overwhelming positive reaction from our customers,” Gösser said. “They definitely liked our new name, new identity, new aesthetic and new vibe in the market. [Customers] were more happy to associate with Datica than they were with [our former] brand.”

5. Prepare your existing customers.

Strategies like being transparent about your rebrand and having a clear plan for how to accomplish it will go a long way toward retaining customers. But the best way to avoid a drop in business is to focus on maintaining excellent service, no matter what else is going on. Learn more about maintaining customer service to avoid drop-off in business.

“If possible, ensure that the rebrand affects your existing clients as little as possible,” Prasad said. “It will take time for the new focus to start paying off, so you do not want the current revenue flow to drop.”

In the course of its rebrand, RepuGen narrowed its client-acquisition focus to the healthcare industry. But Prasad also made sure that existing non-healthcare clients knew they were still a priority. “We sent a blast [by email] telling them that we will only accept healthcare-related businesses as new clients and that nothing will change for them. Our clients like us, and no one had any issue with our repositioning decision. We even kept our old website live … and told our non-healthcare clients to use [it].”

Hughes found that his firm’s rebrand took longer than anticipated, partly because existing clients had to be the company’s top focus. “The process of rebranding will take longer than you expect,” he said. “Competing priorities – especially client- or customer-facing priorities – will always require your time and attention ahead of the rebrand.”

That willingness to delay the rebrand to focus on service paid off, Hughes added. The firm didn’t lose a single client during or after the rebrand, and old customers are just as happy as new ones.

Source : www.businessnewsdaily.com

5 Reasons Why Your E-Commerce Business is Tanking

by Nour | Nov 3, 2022 | Uncategorized

No matter where you play online in terms of e-commerce, there are fundamentals you need to get right to have success. Now, you could play in the Shopify space and have your own online store, or you could be selling on Amazon.com. E-commerce doesn’t discriminate, it will beat you down and spit you out if you don’t get things right across every part of the business. I have extensive experience in both Shopify and selling on Amazon and I’ve seen literally thousands of products that are selling online.

I understand what works, but most importantly, I know the reasons why your e-commerce business is tanking.

Your unit price is too high

This one is obvious, but you would be surprised how many times I see people get this wrong. Your e-commerce business could be tanking because you have no profit left over after costs. It’s simple, if you have a high unit price from your supplier this will impact your profit. The reason unit price is so important is that we are bound by the market and what we can sell our products for. So, we need to ensure that we have a unit price that will allow us to factor in other costs such as packaging, shipping, tariffs, ad spend and more. The aim is to make a profit for every single unit we sell online after all the hidden costs are factored in. Margin solves all problems, so negotiate a good unit price.

Your niche is too small

What keeps e-commerce stores afloat is product sales, and to make sales you need to be selling in a niche that has demand. If you’re selling in a niche that has low demand, your sales will reflect this. It’s as simple as that. So, one problem you may encounter is selling in a low demand niche. And to be honest, there’s not much you can do about it. The only thing you can do is to launch more products in niches with high demand. The product in a low demand niche could be utilized as an upsell on your e-commerce store to increase your average order value. The key lesson here is to always launch products backed by data. You need to always confirm that there is a large addressable market who you can sell to.

Your ad costs are high

Remember the hidden costs that I mentioned above? Well, ad spend is a key component that you need to factor in to ensure profitability. This is where the difference is exposed between selling your products on Amazon via the FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) or FBM (Fulfilled by Merchant) program or having your own online store. When selling on Amazon, you already have traffic and most importantly, it’s traffic with buying intent. This is the holy grail for e-commerce businesses. If you have your own e-commerce store, you need to generate traffic and you guessed it, traffic costs money. So, to give yourself the best chance of winning, it all comes back to your margin. If you have an insane profit margin, you can absorb high ad spend and still make a profit.

ROAS (return on ad spend) is a metric you need to understand to assess any given ad campaign’s performance. If your ROAS is poor, you need to kill the ad. Successful online sellers have campaigns with multiple ad groups that are targeting the same or similar targeted interests. On top of this, each ad in the ad group has a different creative and it’s all about testing. The ROAS is always being monitored and ads with a good ROAS are being fed more ad spend. Ads with poor ROAS are being turned off. If your ROAS is too high across the board, you are only making the platform you’re advertising on more wealthy. Monitor the data and try not to persevere with poor ads. Fast decisions are needed in this situation.

Poor product quality

You’ve done all the hard work; you’ve advertised your products online and you’ve made a sale. You would think that you can rest easy now. I’ve got news for you, you’re wrong. Because now the ultimate test comes when the customer receives your goods. They instantly assess the quality of the product and value for money. If your product is poor, you are possibly going to get a return, a poor review, a negative comment on your ad post or all three! Ensuring you’re selling a good quality product is super important to avoid the above scenarios.

The best way to make sure you’re selling a good quality product is to get the product in your hands and make your own assessments. Or, engage a QC (quality control) inspection company to do the inspection on your behalf. I’ve seen e-commerce businesses sell items that were poor and it was a nightmare. Especially when they have 5,000 units sitting in their garage or warehouse. So be diligent with this part of the e-commerce business and make sure the quality is perfect before pulling the launch trigger.

Product imagery is poor

Online, consumers shop with their eyes. I’ll say it again, buyers shop with their eyes. So your hero image and supporting product images need to be high quality. Think about it. If you’re buying something online and the images are blurry or look fake, will that instill enough confidence in you to purchase that product? No!

With product images, you need to invest money. You need to hire an awesome photographer or 3D renderer to create stunning, crystal-clear images. Also, you need to plan your sequence of images like you’re telling a story. The hero image is the star of the show. But, the other images and infographics are the supporting actors trying to convince people to buy your goods. In conclusion, having an e-commerce store is tough, but it can be very lucrative, fun, enjoyable and rewarding if you eliminate the above mistakes.

Source : https://www.entrepreneur.com/

7 Steps to Starting a Small Business Online

by Nour | Oct 23, 2022 | Uncategorized

Step 1: Start a business that fills a need.

Most people who are just starting out make the mistake of looking for a product first, and a market second.

To boost your chances of success, start with a market. The trick is to find a group of people who are searching for a solution to a problem, but not finding many results. The internet makes this kind of market research easy:

Visit online forums to see what questions people ask and what problems they’re trying to solve.
Do keyword research to find keywords that a lot of people are searching, but don’t have a ton of competition with other sites.
Check out your potential competitors by visiting their sites and taking note of what they’re doing to fill the demand. Then you can use what you’ve learned and create a product for a market that already exists — and do it better than the competition.

Step 2: Write copy that sells.

There’s a proven sales copy formula that takes visitors through the selling process from the moment they arrive to the moment they make a purchase:

Arouse interest with a compelling headline.
Describe the problem your product solves.
Establish your credibility as a solver of this problem.
Add testimonials from people who have used your product.
Talk about the product and how it benefits the user.
Make an offer.
Make a strong guarantee.
Create urgency.
Ask for the sale.

Throughout your copy, you need to focus on how your product or service is uniquely able to solve people’s problems or make their lives better. Think like a customer and ask “What’s in it for me?”

Step 3: Design and build your website.

Once you’ve got your market and product, and you’ve nailed down your selling process, now you’re ready for your small-business web design. Remember to keep it simple. You have fewer than five seconds to grab someone’s attention — otherwise, they’re gone, never to be seen again. Some important tips to keep in mind:

Choose one or two plain fonts on a white background.
Make your navigation clear and simple, and the same on every page.
Only use graphics, audio or video if they enhance your message.
Include an opt-in offer so you can collect e-mail addresses.
Make it easy to buy — no more than two clicks between potential customer and checkout.
Your website is your online storefront, so make it customer-friendly.

Step 4: Use search engines to drive targeted buyers to your site.

Pay-per-click advertising is the easiest way to get traffic to a brand-new site. It has two advantages over waiting for the traffic to come to you organically. First, PPC ads show up on the search pages immediately, and second, PPC ads allow you to test different keywords, as well as headlines, prices and selling approaches. Not only do you get immediate traffic, but you can also use PPC ads to discover your best, highest-converting keywords. Then you can distribute the keywords throughout your site in your copy and code, which will help your rankings in the organic search results.

Step 5: Establish an expert reputation for yourself.

People use the internet to find information. Provide that information for free to other sites, and you’ll see more traffic and better search engine rankings. The secret is to always include a link to your site with each tidbit of information.

Give away free, expert content. Create articles, videos or any other content that people will find useful. Distribute that content through online article directories or social media sites.
Include “send to a friend” links on valuable content on your website.
Become an active expert in industry forums and social networking sites where your target market hangs out.

Step 6: Use the power of email marketing to turn visitors into buyers.

When you build an opt-in list, you’re creating one of the most valuable assets of your online business. Your customers and subscribers have given you permission to send them an email. That means:

You’re giving them something they’ve asked for.
You’re developing lifetime relationships with them.
The response is 100 percent measurable.
Email marketing is cheaper and more effective than print, TV or radio because it’s highly targeted.

Anyone who visits your site and opts into your list is a very hot lead. And there’s no better tool than email for following up with those leads.

Step 7: Increase your income through back-end sales and upselling.

One of the most important internet marketing strategies is to develop every customer’s lifetime value. At least 36 percent of people who have purchased from you once will buy from you again if you follow up with them. Closing that first sale is by far the most difficult part — not to mention the most expensive. So use back-end selling and upselling to get them to buy again:

Offer products that complement their original purchase.
Send out electronic loyalty coupons they can redeem on their next visit.
Offer related products on your “Thank You” page after they purchase.

Reward your customers for their loyalty and they’ll become even more loyal.

The internet changes so fast that one year online equals about five years in the real world. But the principles of how to start and grow a successful online business haven’t changed at all. If you’re just starting a small business online, stick to this sequence. If you’ve been online awhile, do a quick review and see if there’s a step you’re neglecting, or never got around to doing in the first place. You can’t go wrong with the basics.

Source : https://www.entrepreneur.com/

The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2022

by Nour | Oct 4, 2022 | Uncategorized

Here we go again: Virtual reality, now called “the metaverse,” will be a thing. So will the smart home.

Each year, I look ahead at what’s new in consumer technology to guide you through what you might expect to buy — and what will most likely be a fad.

Many of the same “trends” appear again and again because, to put it simply, technology takes a long time to mature before most of us actually want to buy it. That applies this year as well. Some trends for 2022 that tech companies are pushing are things you have heard of before.

A chief example is virtual reality, the technology that involves wearing goofy-looking headgear and swinging around controllers to play 3-D games. That is expected to be front and center again this year, remarketed by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other techies as “the metaverse.”

Another buzzy category will be the so-called smart home, the technology to control home appliances by shouting voice commands at a speaker or tapping a button on a smartphone. The truth is, the tech industry has tried to push this kind of technology into our homes for more than a decade. This year, these products may finally begin to feel practical to own.

Another recurring technology on this list is digital health gear that tracks our fitness and helps us diagnose possible ailments. And automakers, which have long talked about electric cars, are beginning to accelerate their plans to meet a nationwide goal to phase out production of gas-powered cars by 2030.

Here are four tech trends that will invade our lives this year.

1. Welcome to the metaverse.

For more than a decade, technologists have dreamed of an era when our virtual lives play as important a role as our physical realities. In theory, we would spend lots of time interacting with our friends and colleagues in virtual space, and as a result we would spend money there, too, on outfits and objects for our digital avatars.

“We’re in a world where people several times per day send out an image reflecting themselves,” said Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist who has written extensively about the metaverse. “The next phase takes that visual representation and dimensionalizes it. You go into an environment and express yourself through an avatar.”

That sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. But throughout Year 2 of the pandemic, a critical mass of factors came together to make the metaverse more realistic, Mr. Ball said.

For one, the technology got better. Last year, Facebook announced that it had renamed itself Meta after shipping 10 million units of its virtual-reality headset, the Quest 2, which was a milestone.

For another, many of us were willing to splurge on our digital selves. Hordes of investors bought NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, which are one-of-a-kind digital objects purchased with cryptocurrency. Eminem and other investors invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to join a virtual yacht club.

There’s more to come this year. Apple plans to unveil its version of a virtual reality headset, which will look like a pair of ski goggles and, for computing power, rely on a separate computing device that is worn elsewhere on the body. Apple declined to comment.

Google has also developed virtual reality products for years, and Microsoft has offered a virtual reality headset for businesses and government agencies.

The metaverse could still turn out to be a fad, depending on what products emerge and who buys them. Carolina Milanesi, a consumer technology analyst for the consulting firm Creative Strategies, said she worried that it could become a reflection of the privileged few who can afford to treat their digital selves.

“The boating market is dominated by white upper-class middle-aged men,” she said. “Will we just transfer all of that into the metaverse?”

2. The smart home.

Over the last few years, smart home products like internet-connected thermostats, door locks and robotic vacuum cleaners made major progress. The devices became affordable and worked reliably with digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Apple’s Siri.

Yet the smart home, for the most part, has remained chaotic. Many smart home products didn’t work well with other technology. Some door locks, for example, worked only with Apple phones and not Androids; some thermostats were controlled by talking to Google Assistant and not to Siri.

The lack of compatibility has created long-term issues. An Apple-compatible lock isn’t useful for the family member or future tenant who prefers Android. It would also be more convenient one day if our home devices could actually talk to one another, like a washing machine telling a dryer that a large load was ready to be dried.

This year, the tech industry’s biggest rivals — Apple, Samsung, Google and Amazon — are playing nice to make the smart home more practical. They plan to release and update home technology to work with Matter, a new standard that enables smart home devices to talk to one another regardless of the virtual assistant or phone brand. More than 100 smart home products are expected to adhere to the standard.

“We’re all speaking a common language built on already proven technologies,” said Samantha Osborne, a vice president of marketing for SmartThings, the home automation company owned by Samsung.

This means that later this year, when you shop for a product like an automated door lock, look for a label indicating that the device is compatible with Matter. Then, in the future, your smart alarm clock may be able to tell your smart lights to turn on when you wake up.

3. Connected health.

Fitness gadgets like the Apple Watch and Fitbit, which help us track our movements and heart rate, keep getting more popular. So tech companies are experimenting this year with smaller wearable devices that gather more intimate data about our health.

Oura, a health tech company, recently introduced a new model of its Oura Ring, which is embedded with sensors that track metrics including body temperature to accurately predict menstruation cycles. This week at CES, a tech trade show in Las Vegas, Movano, another health tech start-up, unveiled a similar ring that stitches together data about your heart rate, temperature and other measures to inform a wearer about potential chronic illnesses.

Medical experts have long warned about the potential consequences of health tech. Without proper context, the data could potentially be used to misdiagnose illnesses and turn people into hypochondriacs. But if the widely sold-out Covid rapid test kits are any measure, more of us appear ready to be proactive in monitoring our health.

4. Electric cars.

Last year, President Biden announced an ambitious goal: Half of all vehicles sold in the United States would be electric rather than gas-powered by 2030.

In response, major automakers are hyping their electric cars, including at CES this week. On Tuesday, Ford Motor announced plans to increase production of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck. Later this week, General Motors plans to unveil a battery-powered version of its Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. Other carmakers, like Mercedes-Benz, have shared plans for electric cars to be released in coming years.

While there’s lots of marketing hype around electric cars, those of us looking for battery-powered vehicles this year will probably still gravitate toward Tesla, Ms. Milanesi said. That’s because we have yet to see widespread deployment of solar power and charging stations for electric cars, especially in more rural areas. Tesla has a head start because it has been rolling out charging stations for years, she said.

“There’s so much from an infrastructure perspective that needs to happen,” she said. “So it’s a lot of talk, but I don’t know how much of a reality.”

Source : www.nytimes.com

The $2 Billion Emoji: Hugging Face Wants To Be Launchpad For A Machine Learning Revolution

by Nour | Sep 23, 2022 | Uncategorized

hen Hugging Face first announced itself to the world five years ago, it came in the form of an iPhone chatbot app for bored teenagers. It shared selfies of its computer-generated face, cracked jokes and gossiped about its crush on Siri. It hardly made any money.

The viral moment came in 2018—not among teens, but developers. The founders of Hugging Face had begun to share bits of the app’s underlying code online for free. Almost immediately, researchers from some of the biggest tech names in the business, including Google and Microsoft, began using it for AI applications. Today, the chatbot has long since disappeared from the App Store, but Hugging Face has become the central depot for ready-to-use machine-learning models, the starting point from which more than 10,000 organizations have created AI-powered tools for their businesses.

Hugging Face announced Monday, in conjunction with its debut appearance on Forbes’ AI 50 list, that it raised a $100 million round of venture financing, valuing the company at $2 billion. Top-tier venture capital firms Coatue and Sequoia won slots as new backers in the hotly contested Series C, joining A.Capital Ventures, Addition Capital and lead investor Lux Capital as major stakeholders in the Brooklyn-based startup.

“Machine learning is becoming the new way to build technology, replacing software,” says Clément Delangue, cofounder and CEO of Hugging Face, which is named after the emoji that looks like a smiling face with jazz hands. “The old school of building technology was writing a million lines of code. Machine learning is starting to do that, but much better and much faster.”

Speaking from his home in Miami, where he moved during the pandemic (weather, not web3, he explains), Delangue, 33, says he believes that what GitHub is for software, Hugging Face has become for machine learning. That’s a confident comparison, considering the widespread popularity of GitHub, which is used by more than 70 million developers to share and collaborate on code and was last recorded making $300 million in revenue at the time of its $7.5 billion sale to Microsoft in 2018. Hugging Face, by contrast, generated less than $10 million last year, according to three people familiar with its finances. Delangue declines to comment on the number, but he and investors think that machine learning is already becoming the single most important technology of the 2020s, and that Hugging Face can eventually make billions in revenue with its own army of AI-minded developers.

“The companies you would assume are competitors on first blush—whether it’s Google or Amazon or Facebook—almost all of them are proponents,” says Lux Capital’s Brandon Reeves, who first invested in Hugging Face in 2019. “It really feels like this Switzerland-like piece of real estate in the ecosystem.”

“I don’t really see a world where machine learning becomes the default way to build technology and where Hugging Face is the No. 1 platform for this, and we don’t manage to generate several billion dollars in revenue.”

Growing up in La Bassée, a small town of 6,000 in the north of France, Delangue recalls an idle childhood until he got his first computer at age 12. By 17, he’d become one of the top French merchants on eBay, selling ATVs and dirt bikes he imported from China and stockpiled in his father’s garden equipment shop. That prowess impressed eBay, which offered him an internship once he began college at ESCP Business School in Paris. Representing the company at an e-commerce trade show, Delangue was accosted by another attendee who trashed eBay’s recent acquisition of a barcode-scanning app—barcodes, the man said, would soon be obsolete because of advances in AI.

The man turned out to be a cofounder of Moodstocks, a startup making image-recognition software using machine learning. “With a very small team, they were managing to do stuff on par with what Google was doing with 100 times more people,” he says (years later, the company was acquired by Google). Impressed by the nimbleness of startups, Delangue never looked back. He declined eBay’s offer to extend his internship so that he could spend his free time at Moodstocks. After graduating in 2012, he turned down a job from Google to run his own startup. Delangue’s idea for a collaborative note-taking app didn’t go far, but in the tight-knit European startup scene he met Julien Chaumond, a fellow entrepreneur building a collaborative ebook reader. The pair riffed on their mutual interest in open technology and talked about starting a company together.

That time came in 2016, after both their companies had ground to a halt. A third cofounder was recruited in Thomas Wolf, a college friend of Chaumond’s who had gone on to receive a Ph.D. in physics and written research papers on machine learning. For the business idea, they settled on “open-domain conversational AI”—in other words, a chatbot that could understand any kind of conversation topic—because they felt it was the most difficult problem in technology they had the expertise to tackle at the time, Delangue says. “There’s this dream we all have to speak with an AI about everything, like you see in sci-fi.”

Hugging Face began as a personalized, Tamagotchi-like friend powered by a form of AI known as natural language processing (NLP). To train the chatbot’s natural language capabilities, the team also built an underlying library to house various machine-learning models—for example, one to detect the emotions behind a text message and another to be able to generate a coherent response—and the many datasets for understanding different kinds of conversational topics, like sports or classroom gossip. Harking back to the founders’ values for open collaboration, they released free pieces of the library as an open-source project on GitHub. The company participated in a bot-specific accelerator program run by the New York-based startup studio Betaworks and raised seed funding from venture capitalists as well as NBA star Kevin Durant. But two years in, their chatbot hadn’t made much money and was losing its hold on the attention spans of its young users.

Around the same time, researchers at Google and OpenAI announced the development of “transformers,” a new type of NLP model that demolished the reading comprehension abilities of both humans and the best AI incumbent at the time. By 2019, Google was powering its search results using this model. Hugging Face’s open-source library appeared at the perfect time for organizations that wanted to harness these NLP breakthroughs but didn’t have the same machinery as Google to build them from scratch. It became a near-instant hit as the machine-learning community converged around it as the central base for deploying transformer models. “We released things without thinking too much about it and the community blew up, as a surprise even to us,” Delangue says.

Reeves, the Lux investor, first met Delangue at a coffee shop in downtown San Francisco on a Friday near the end of 2019. Scared to miss out on a chance to invest, he offered a term sheet the following Monday at an $80 million valuation. “For 90% of the companies I’ve invested in, I’ve known them for many weeks or months or years,” he says. “I don’t think any have come over a weekend.” Since Delangue accepted Lux’s check, usage has continued to skyrocket. The developer community has built more than 100,000 machine learning models on Hugging Face, enabling others in turn to use those pretrained models for their own AI projects instead of having to build models from scratch. On GitHub, Hugging Face has accumulated “stars”—a vanity metric measuring the popularity of an open-source project—at a faster pace than the projects behind Confluent (annual revenue of $388 million), Databricks (more than $800 million) and MongoDB ($874 million).

Although funding rounds for companies with similar stature were plentiful in 2021, the growth-stage venture capital market has since slowed to a near halt. Hugging Face’s latest financing then indicates a more rarified vote of investor confidence, but some in the data startup ecosystem have privately expressed curiosity about how Delangue can grow Hugging Face’s revenue enough to validate its hefty valuation. Delangue thinks that if enough free users get hooked on Hugging Face, the money will follow in time from some of the companies that employ the users. “Given how valuable machine learning is and how mainstream it’s becoming, usage is deferred revenue,” Delangue says. “I don’t really see a world where machine learning becomes the default way to build technology and where Hugging Face is the No. 1 platform for this, and we don’t manage to generate several billion dollars in revenue.”

Hugging Face only started to offer paid features last year and counts more than 1,000 companies as customers, according to Delangue, including Intel and his former stomping ground eBay. Pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Roche pay for enterprise-grade security features, while Bloomberg uses Hugging Face to build new natural language products on top its existing infrastructure. Microsoft is not a customer, but prominently uses Hugging Face as the basis to train its Bing search engine to better understand natural language queries.

“They prioritized adoption over monetization, which I think was correct,” says Sequoia partner Pat Grady, one of the new investors. “They saw that transformer-based models working their way outside of NLP and saw a chance to be the GitHub not just for NLP, but for every domain of machine learning.” Indeed, over the course of the last year, Hugging Face has started to become a hub for machine learning models for a variety of uses, such as computer vision to train image recognition in self-driving cars and recommender systems to help pharmaceutical companies predict the effectiveness of new drug therapies.

If his assumptions of machine learning supremacy are wrong, Delangue says Hugging Face is close to breakeven and has all $40 million from its previous fundraise still in the bank to reorient. “One of my personal learnings as an entrepreneur is to not think too much strategically with a big business plan of ten years, but more to experiment and follow the validation of the community and what they’re telling you,” he says. If the vision pans out, Reeves thinks the prize could be a $50 billion or $100 billion market capitalization on the stock market. It’s no wonder that Delangue says he’s turned down multiple “meaningful acquisition offers” and won’t sell his business, like GitHub did to Microsoft.

“We want to be the first company to go public with an emoji, rather than a three-letter ticker,” he says with an emoji-like smile. “We have to start doing some lobbying to the Nasdaq to make sure it can happen.”

Source : www.forbes.com

The Top 10 Tech Trends In 2022 Everyone Must Be Ready For Now

by Nour | Sep 15, 2022 | Uncategorized

As a futurist, every year, I look ahead and predict the key tech trends that will shape the next few months. There are so many innovations and breakthroughs happening right now, and I can’t wait to see how they help to transform business and society in 2022.

Let’s take a look at my list of key tech trends that everyone should be ready for, starting today.

1: Computing Power

Computing power will continue to explode in 2022. We now have considerably better cloud infrastructure, and many businesses are re-platforming to the cloud.

We are also seeing a push towards better networks – 5G is being rolled out, and 6G is on the horizon. That means even more power in our phones, in our cars, and in our wearable devices.

2: Smarter Devices

Growing computer power is enabling us to create smarter devices. We now have intelligent televisions, autonomous cars, and more intelligent robots that can work alongside humans to complete more tasks.

In 2022, we’ll see continued momentum for this smart device explosion, including the introduction of intelligent home robots.

3: Quantum Computing

The trend of quantum computing — the processing of information that is represented by special quantum states – enables machines to handle information in a fundamentally different way from traditional computers. Quantum computing will potentially give us computing power that is a trillion times more powerful than what we get from today’s advanced supercomputers.

I predict that in 2022, quantum computers could fundamentally change how we approach problems like logistics, portfolio management, and drug innovations.

4: Datafication

Data is a key enabler for all of these trends. All of the digitization in our world today means we have enormous amounts of data available, and data has now become the number one business asset for every organization. We can use data to better understand our customers, research key trends, and get insight into what’s working inside our organizations.

5: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Organizations and researchers are now using all their data and computing power to provide advanced AI capabilities to the world.

One of the key trends in the AI world is machine vision. We now have computers that can see and recognize objects on a video or photograph. Language processing is also making big advances, so machines can understand our voices and speak back to us.

Low-code or no-code will also be a huge trend this year. We will be able to build our AI using drag-and-drop graphical interfaces, so we can develop extraordinary applications without being limited by our coding skills.

6: Extended Reality

We now have more augmented reality (AR) capabilities on our devices (particularly our phones and tablets), and we’re seeing an even bigger push toward virtual reality (VR). In 2022, we’ll see new, lighter, more portable VR devices, so instead of having clunky headsets that require WiFi connections, we will have devices that are more like glasses that connect to our phones and give us superior VR experiences on the go.

These extended reality advances pave the way for incredible experiences in the metaverse, a persistent, shared virtual world that users can access through different devices and platforms.

7: Digital Trust

Blockchain technology, distributed ledgers, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are transforming our world, and we will continue to see advances in this technology in 2022. These innovations go beyond Bitcoin to things like smart contracts that allow us to verify ownership with NFTs. This year, we will see more companies and individuals enhancing physical objects with blockchain technology and tokens.

8: 3D Printing

We can now make things with 3D printing that we would never have dreamed of a decade ago. In 2022, we’ll see transformations in manufacturing and beyond, from 3D printing technological innovations, including mass-produced customized pieces, concrete for houses, printed food, metal, and composite materials.

9: Genomics

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to two scientists, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, for their work developing a method for genome editing. Genomics, gene editing, and synthetic biology are a top trend of 2022 because these advancements can help us modify crops, cure and eradicate diseases, develop new vaccines like the COVID-19 shot, and other medical and biological breakthroughs.

Nanotechnology will also allow us to give materials new attributes by manipulating them on a subatomic level, so we can create things like bendable screens, better batteries, water-repellent, self-cleaning fabrics, and even self-repairing paint this year.

10: New Energy Solutions

The last hugely important trend is new energy solutions. As we tackle climate change, we’ll see continued advances in the batteries we use in our cars, as well as innovations in nuclear power and green hydrogen. These new trends will allow us to power our ships, our planes, our trains and generate energy for the general public.