How a Blockchain can disrupt real estate agencies business model

In the last years I've been involved in some activities with the real estate companies. Dealing with real-estate agencies business have some disadvantages. Let's imagine the next scenario a person who wants to buy a house or apartment goes to the real-estate agency. The all process is bureaucratic and time-consuming. One modality to solve this problem is with the creation of a blockchain. Actual transactions are done following the path that you see in the next picture. As you can see all process is complex. 

 Today worldwide transactions reached a high record.

Dealing with a large number of transactions actual systems posses a lot of vulnerabilities and inefficiency. Back to our main topic of how a blockchain network can disrupt a real-estate agency business model?  First, with the help of a blockchain network, third parties that are involved in transactions will disappear in our case real-estate agencies. And second, the process of buying and selling properties will be done more quickly.

Blockchain Network

For those who are not familiar with the term "blockchain".  We can define blockchain as a process that facilitates and records transactions in a business network. 

  Advantages of a blockchain network vs real-estate agency business model

• more efficient and reliable 
• cost-effective ( Commission for real-estate agencies will disappear )
• information about transactions   are more secure ( In traditional transaction systems every breach can pose a real threat to all system, instead in a blockchain network even is a breakout all system will not be compromised)
• All transactions will be recorded in a shared digital ledger
• A smart contract will appear, it will be an agreement between two people under a computer code
• A public database will be created

ANDREW CARNEGIE BY DAVID NASAW

"Live the American dream" is a sentence that is widely used by many people in the world. There is no more suitable person that is fitted for this title than Andrew Carnegie. Known by many as steel business magnate the richest man in the world in that period. Andrew Carnegie together with John D Rockefeller were considered agents in the triumph of America industrial capitalism.

Carnegie remain in history records as person who was involved in many philanthropic activities, creating the biggest philanthropic organization in the world.  Actual Giving Pledge Non Profit Organization founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet imported some ideas of Andrew Carnegie.

As businessman Carnegie was ruthless capitalist who was guided after the principle "The more you earn the more you have to give it away"
Thanks to David Nasaw who wrote this book, I have discovered important aspects related for his activity and life. Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835 Dunfermline Scotland .  Like many other european people he saw the potential of new world country and the decline of United Kingdom and other european countries that were drived by colonial expansion. He started his career in the new world as telegraph operator at Pennsylvania Railroad.  At age 30 he resigned to start his own first business with Tom Scott and J Edgar Thomson and culminating with the sale of " Carnegie Steel" to J P Morgan in the early march of 1901 and the formation of US Steel Corporation. US Steel become the first company with over 1 billion $ capitalization.  At that time Andrew Carnegie net worth was 226 millions $, merely 120 billion $ today.

One of his biggest regrets in his life was that he has not given away as he wanted. According with his treasurer Robert Franks at the time of his death he had given away more than 350 millions $ !!.
Like I said at the beginning of this article he was not only a ruthless capitalist but also a person who militate for slavery abolish. Was one the vehement critique at colonial expansion, one of the reasons of the start of first world war. He openly has critiqued United State military interventions in Venezuela and Philippines.  Despite his business has flourished from the building on naval battleships , he was strong critique to military buildup spending. During his entirely life he tried to promote peace and stability among countries. All his efforts were in vain , he could not prevent the start of the WWI.

What I did not like to Andrew Carnegie?

Andrew Carnegie achievements in life are amazing, great business leader, great philanthropist a person who has contributed to the building a society that no other.  Achieving this, he become an important person with great  power to influence people. Former US presidents like: Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were influenced by Carnegie marked the beginning of a period where Rockefeller and Carnegie influence started to become part of United States policy.
In the end I firmly recommend David Nasaw book to discover the life of one of the most important person in our modern society.

7 Reasons why we should eat lab grown meat

The natural resources that we found on Earth are not endless who probably many of us think. I consider the biggest challenge for the next period is " How we can preserve our natural resources. Mankind are looking to find viable and alternative solution to solve these problems. Global warming is a big concern among specialists. Thanks to industrial expansion which in many cases is done by deforestation and transform it in agriculture and industrial land. For me was very sad to see how the Amazon rainforest is exploited by humans in desire to obtain more profit and to feed an increasingly world population. For many who do not know the Amazon rainforest is responsible with the production of 20 % of our planet oxygen. It is hard to imagine how our planet with look with no Amazon forest. One of the reasons why people are deforesting
the forest is to create agriculture land to feed humans and animal. With the expectancy that world population will grow to 9 billion by 2050 , makes more challenging any attempt to find alternative solutions to not damage the nature and to feed the world.

One of the product that are wasting a lot of natural resources to produce it is meat. Meat is a source of food that always will be in demand no matter of economic situation and social class. One innovative solution found to solve this problem without to harm nature is to produce meat by culturing muscle cells so called lab grown meat. In today article I will present reasons why we should adopt lab grown meat. From the beginning I do not want to denigrate traditional meat producers, is not the purpose of this article. I consider that how meat is produced today wont be sustainable in the future.

1 Greenhouse gas emission

According to UN Food and Agriculture Organization animal agriculture is responsible for 14,5 of the world total greenhouse emission. Animal agriculture is responsible of methan production which has a 25 % greater potential to global warming than CO2. Animals like: cow, sheep and goat are responsible for methan production.

2 No Animal Slaughter

Animal ethics we do not need to slaughter animals to produce meat.

3 Environmental  issue

As I said of the beginning of this article Amazon rainforest produce 20 % of oxygen on Earth. Amazon deforest is one dangerous and stupid action ever took. 70 % of Amazon deforest is used as pastures and 30 % is used to raise animal crops. !!! Livestock farming are taking 70 % of arable land around the globe.

4 Viruses transmission

In our history many viruses and diseases have been transmitted from animal. Diseases like: influenza, avian, swine and bovine spongiform are transmitted through livestock.

5 Antibiotics issue

Industrial production of meat ca not be done without the use of antibiotics. To force animal grew quickly meat producers are using different hormones and antibiotics. Many of them poses a really treat to human body. To produce meat by culturing muscle cells will not need hormones and antibiotics.

6 No need for factory farms

We conclude than animal farming is efficient for land and environment. Industrial animal farming is done by farms where animals are kept in many cases in inappropriate conditions . Maintaining animal the wellbeing of animal is almost impossible , time consuming and nobody cares so much.

7 Nutrition of growing world population

Feeding with meat of entirely whole world population will be assured without to harm the nature.

Can Remote Work Disrupt Real Estate Office Business ?

If I have to list something that most successful entrepreneurs have in common is the power to disrupt certain industries. Jeff Bezos by his Amazon was able to disrupt and redefine entirely retail industry, Brian Chesky Airbnb was able to give tourism industry other perspective. These are few examples of how business are evolving during the time.

Being force to stay home due to government restrictions to prevent spread of Covid-19, I wasn't able to go to event meetings. I spend important part of my day watching webinars and live stream events. Yesterday night I was watching a webinar " VC's view of series funding in a post Covid world " and suddenly a light bulb went off in my head. Not far from the present days I had strong believes in real estate office business. Due to lockdown measures many business have stopped their activities and some are continuing their activities even in this period of time. To keep social distancing many organizations were forced to take some unusual measures like to allow their employees to work from home. A new trend has appeared "remote work from home". Social media channels are bombarded with live stream events. Zoom application, Skype and Yotube live are few tools that companies are using even in this period to continue their business. 

Back to our main topic "Can this new trend be a real threat to office business ?" , and " How business will redefine after post Covid period ?"  I consider office real estate business solid business with good margin of profit. Dublin is important tech hub in European Union, many important tech companies and not only have offices here. I remember october 2019 when Green REIT shareholders have decided to sell the business. For me was a sad news in that period, first a source of dividend was cutted and second to own a piece of that business  was something that not many people have this opportunity and have tenants (customers) like: Bank of America, Vodafone, Barclays, AIB and so on was something special.  In the late of november 2019 the transaction was made Henderson Park bought Green Reit plc in 1.34 billion euro , 1.9135 euro/share for each shareholder. That transaction was the largest real estate transaction in 2019 and the largest real estate ever sell in Ireland.  

Since the transaction was ended many important things have happened the world entered in lockdown. The next office real estate developers should ask: "How office real estate business will look in post covid period ?"  Can developers face the imaginable scenario where tenants (business) will redefine , instead of looking huge offices with many square foot many companies will look for more small offices and more dynamic. For them the lockdown and the new trend of work from have created a dangerous perspective.  For many organisations the perspective to allow their own employees to work from home can be cost effective in special in this period of time. If the business will find this solution efficient and cost effective will apply this solution in the future which might represent a real threat for real estate office developers.

Challenge accepted ! Build a Machine Learning Model to play Board Game

This board game is one of the games that I used to play and I'm still playing with my friends when I have time. Being a very popular board game in Eastern Europe, I have decided to do something different more exactly to build a robot or machine learning model to play this game.
Being influenced and have study case AlphaGo a computer program developed by DeepMind Technologies.  In 2017 AlphaGo shock the world by beaten the best Go chinese players . Go is a very popular game in China is about strategy and was invented 2,500 years ago. For China the defeat of their best players was a huge humiliation that was given by US. Since than The Chinese Communist Party has settled that by 2030 to be the leading power in artificial intelligence.

Ken Jie a chinese guy who has never beaten by a computer in Go game said he had "an horrible experience .  The next question we should ask our self is how AlphaGo did this ?
The reality is very simple the computer programs have always beat humans , that happen with Garry Kasparov. The secret of AlphaGo were deep neural networks , containing million of connections similar to the neurons of the brain.

Back to our example the rules of the Board Game are simple for this game you need a pair of dice and game chicks. In the above picture you have an image of how the game looks. Let's say you are with white chicks , you need to come with all your white and put them in the right side at the bottom and after than you start to clean the place, the winner is the first who finish.

In the process of building the model I will use machine learning which is sub field of artificial intelligence , linear algebra, probabilities and as programming language Python.
Machine learning models can have more methods depending of what type of problems you want to solve. This methods can be:

• Supervised Learning
• Unsupervised Learning
• Semi-supervised learning
• Reinforcement learning

In our case I will gone use reinforcement learning.

Reinforcement Learning

The reason why we use reinforcement learning is that we have an robot that we want to train over a period of time to interact with an environment in our case the board game and improve is performance over a period of time with actions performed by the environment (board game) . The first step is to teach the robot with rules of the game. Being familiarized by the rules and strategies of the game the robot start to become smarter and familiar with the game.

The main steps of the reinforcement learning:

• Train the robot with rules and policies
• Select optimal policy and perform action
• Get corresponding reward(penalty)
• Update policies if needed
• Repeat steps until the robot learn most policies

Capital Gain vs Cashflow

We live in uncertain time, many economies are locked down due to government measures to try to stop Covid-19 spread. Many business have stopped their activities, some are on the verge of collapse, workers are laid off temporarily, social payments for unemployment pays have increased.
For many people to invest or start own business looks a crazy idea. To invest in this condition can provide you good investments opportunities.

In today article I will present my on view regarding investment activity. For many times I had a contradictory view with one friend regarding investment activity. His view on investment is you invest a certain amount of money in let's say a business in hope that business will go up in value and in some point you will sell your participation in that business and you will make a profit, this is know as " Capital Gain" . What my friend missed to say is that investment is not only capital gain, but also cashflow earnings. Being involved for several years in certain investment activities , I have gained some experience and I want to share with you from my experience. From the beginning you need to understand that I not make investment recommendations. So let's get started:

 1 CAPITAL GAIN

Is the simple and easy to understand form of investment. You invest X amount money in something, if the price of that asset goes up at one point you sell your asset. The difference between your initial investment and the price you will obtain is know as capital gain. You can obtain capital gain if you invest in many asset categories. I will try to enumerate the most important of them:

Own Business    

Is the most important type of investment you can make. Being a business owner can provide you huge opportunities, your are accountable for your own decision and so on. Startups are in general very risky to invest but in the same time have huge rewarding potential. Ventures Capital companies are looking to invest in startups with potential to scale up quick. They are looking investments that can provide 5 to 7 times return on investment. For that reason to invest your money in a startup is the best decision that you can make.

 Public Companies

Is perhaps the most easy way to invest. Public traded companies provide opportunities to average people to invest. You don't need huge amount of money to invest, with few hundred dollars you can open a brokerage account. Capital gain can be obtained by investing in Company X and selling when price goes up.

Real Estate Properties

Type of real estate properties are : houses, residential properties, commercial, office and logistic parks. The same principle will apply like the previous two. You buy a property a certain amount of money and you will sell when the price will goes up.

Physical Gold

Seen by many as "God Money" gold is doing very under uncertain periods of time like we live now.

2 Cashflow

Many people see investment as an activity to obtain gain, which is true but not 100 %. They forgot to mention as source of extra  income. It is nothing more happy for a person to obtain additional source of income by not doing any effort and work. People can choose to invest in different category of assets that can provide valuable source of income.

Startup

As I said above, startups can be the most rewarding type of investment that you can make. Let' say you help your friend to start his business by borrowing him money in exchange for equity in his business. By the end of each year you will share the profit by not doing any activity.

Dividend Stocks   

Is one of my favorite source of passive  income. Public trade companies usually pays dividends once or twice per year in Eurozone Area , in US quarterly . There are companies in the world that have impressive dividend record payments for more than 50 years. These business are large with strong competitive advantage, however you need to be aware that in this economic conditions of Covid-19 pandemy some companies will cut dividend payment. ECB (European Central Bank)  send a directive to all commercial banks in Euro Area to cut dividend payments for 2019 financial year.

Real Estate

Is widely used by many people, is an exceptional source of extra money. Let's say you own an apartment and you rent it to a person in exchange for monthly rent payment.

Amazon FBA

If you have a product and you are looking to sell it online, Amazon can be the right platform for you . The principle is simple you send your products to Amazon fulfilment center and the company will take care for your products and orders in exchange for weekly fees (storage, handling, shipping). This is an exceptional way to have extra source of income.


In conclusion the decision to invest or not is up to you. To keep your money in cash is not seen as wise move, however with all of us should be aware of the importance of cash in special on this economic conditions of pandemy. Cash can be the king !! Let's imagine you are a person who was laid off by government lock down to have extra cash can be extremely important can help you to pay (rent, bills, food, mortgages and so on). The same principles applies to business, cash for business is like to oxygen for people, making a sad analogy with what happen today with some people infected with Covid-19, without air people slowly dies, the same principle will apply for business.

MY TOP 12 MOVIES ABOUT ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Watching movies is not regarded like an activity that can improve your skills and is seen by many as a waste of time, however there are movies that can be a real source of inspiration and motivation.
In today article I will present my top 10 movies that might be a source of inspiration for entrepreneurs. Despite it is not something that can guarantees you that will become entrepreneur 100 %. I made this ranking after I've seen those movies. Let's get started:

12  American Gangster 2007   produced by Ridley Scott with Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe

From the beginning you have to know that I not support criminality and other activities related to organize crime. This movie presents the evolution of Frank Lucas who smuggled heroin in US become one of the most important important drug dealer in US. This movie can be a source of inspiration for those who have entrepreneurship drive. Frank Lucas come  from poor black family and become one of the most important figure of New York organize crime.


11 Goodfellas 1990 produced by Martin Scorsese  with Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci

From the beginning you have to know that I not support criminality and other activities related to organize crime.  Classic movie about organize crime , this movie presents the rise and fall Henry Hill. This movie can be a perfect study case of how you can make money from scratch starting with smuggling and robbery.

10  The Godfather 1972 directed by Francis Ford Coppola with Marlon Brandon , Al Pacino and Robert Duvall

Voted one of the best movie all time. The story of this movie presents evolution of Corleone crime family. Al Pacino in Michael Corleone role can be a source of inspiration about leadership and negotiation.

9 The Social Network   2010  directed by David Fincher  with Jesse  Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake

Facebook is the most popular social media channel. Many people are using are present on it. The story of this movie presents the evolution of Facebook from the beginning to present.

8 Arbitrage 2012  directed by Nicholas Jarecki with Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon

Hedge Funds are managing billion $ , the story of this movie represent the life of Robert Miller (Richard Gere) a successful fund manager who was involved in many scams investment scheme activities.

7 Wolf of Wall Street 2014 directed by Martin Scorsesse with Leonardo Di, Jonah Hill

For many people Wall Street is regarded like a place, where money are flowing every day. The story of this film presents the evolution of Jordan Belfort a stoke broker in New York, who have created the brokerage company Stratton Oakmont.

6 The Count of Monte Cristo 2002  directed by Kevin Reynolds with Jim Caviezel and Guy Pearce

Having the base the novel " The Count of Monte Cristo" written by french novelist Alexandre Dumas this movie is one of my favorite movie. The key figure is Edmond Dantes ( Jim Caviezel) who was imprisoned for 13 years on Chateau d'if. This movie can be a good source of inspiration for entrepreneurs .  In the life of every entrepreneur betray is very common , people who you trust one day can betray you letting you alone.

5 Gold 2016  directed by Stephen Graham with Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramirez

Gold will always be in demand no matter of how economy will go. What entrepreneurs can learn from this movie?  Every entrepreneur dream to create a company and to have a successful IPO ( Initial Public Offer) .

4 The boy who harnessed the wind 2019 directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor

I found this movie very interesting, the main character on this movie is William Kamkwamba a boy in a poor african family . One of the problem of Africa that is facing is drought. Coming from a poor family William Kamkwamba was able to create an improvised system of irrigation system by using wind as power generator.

3 Nightcrawler 2014 directed by Dan Gilroy with Jake Gyllenhall, Rene Russo

Louis Bloom ( Jake Gyllenhall) a psychopath who record violent events than happen in the night in LA. The story of this movie is how to create a video recording company.

2 The Pursuit of Happyness 2006 directed by Gabriele Muccino with Will Smith, Thandie Newton and Jaden Smith

I 've seen this movie recently and I found it captivating. The life is tough if you want to achieve your goals you need to make sacrifices. Chris Gardner (Will Smith) a person who was straggling financial was able to create a portable bone density scanner from his savings and got a job as stoke broker.

1 The Shamshak Redemption 1994  directed by Frank Darabont  with Tim Robins , Morgan Freeman

This is by far the my best movie. The movie is the story of Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) a banker who was sentenced to life prison for the murder of his wife.