#9 – A small gift makes people want to reciprocate. People who received a small no-strings-attached gift from a stranger were twice as likely to buy raffle tickets from him than those who were just pitched on raffle tickets.

I’ve seen this used a million times by online marketers. It’s the famous free giveaway method. Offer a free downloadable ebook or course to your visitors. Ask them for their email, send the “free item” by email and a few days later some follow ups with products you might be selling.

# 22 – How to impress a potential customer with credentials without being labeled as a show-off? Public speakers have someone else introduce them, a real estate company made a slight improvements to their phone service by directing people to “Jane, who has 10 years of experience with houses in upper price range”, and physicians display their diplomas on the walls.

This can be used in online support, adding a few credentials to your representative can certainly improve the perception of your brand and service.

I could comment on several of these, I’ll just leave the link here. I recommend bookmarking it for whenever you are about to start writing a sales letter or launching a new marketing campaign.

Click here to visit: Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Ber Persuasive.

Before I give away my billion dollar idea, there are a couple of things I’d like to make clear, just in case they are not obvious for some. This is just one idea I had, don’t take it too seriously. Feel free to try to undermine my arguments. I risk sounding like a presumptuous a-hole here, but I am doing this because some of the uses for technology I predicted in the past have since become true, so instead of just talking about these things with friends, I have decided to write them down. Here’s the first one I take my time to document, I present to you: The Time-Machine!

It all started several years ago, I was browsing the web when a link led me to a page with an interactive 360 video (if you don’t know what I am talking about please visit this page). It was from a camera attached to the bottom of a helicopter. If i’m not mistaken, it was a video of Sidney, Australia. Being able to move the camera around and point it at any direction, as if I was controlling it live, seemed unreal. At the time I started thinking about the consumer uses for such technology, and to be honest, I could’ve written this post back then. Why did I think about this several years ago and only decided to write it down now? Well, recently my brother downloaded an iPhone app called 360 panorama, it is an amazing piece of software that allows you to take 360 pictures with your smartphone. You can then see the picture on your screen and move around as if you were at the place the panorama picture was taken. This brought me back to the time I saw that first 360 video so I decided to document this before what I envisioned back then becomes a reality and I kick myself for not writing about it on time. Better late than never.

First of all, a few technical aspects of how panoramic video works. A special camera, or more precisely a set of cameras that use fish-eye type of lenses, is used to record 360 video. It then uses software to render these videos together and create one single video. So, how could this be improved? My idea is to double the number of cameras in a way that one more camera is added parallel to each of the cameras that are already in the current existing panoramic cameras. In this way, two separated videos would be rendered. These two videos would be, if you haven’t already guesses, one for the left eye and other for the right eye. To view the videos the user would have to wear virtual reality glasses and a pair of head-phones, or as I like to call it, the Time Machine Helmet™. This would allow the user to hear and see the video as if he/she was there, immersed in the place and time the video was recorded. It would allow users to move their heads around and see what happened with real perspective and together with the surrond sound it would feel as if the person is transported to wherever the video was recorded.

The difference here is that instead of looking at a 2D picture in your monitor, you would be placed inside a 3D recording of a previous time in your life. And I say placed because it gives you the ability to look around, hear what’s around as if you were there. I hope one day we can use a device like this to look back into our vacations, birthday parties, moments with loved ones, in other words, any moment worth keeping.

Privacy is one issue of decreasing importance, at least on a macro-level, people are willing to display personal information online in social networks and other services. The race for the next generation of innovation and services based on this new reality has started. New business models are being created in order to take advantage of the possibilities that arise from being able to constantly know where customers are located.

To stay ahead of competition, the questions that needs to be answered is; how can your business benefit from knowing where your customers are at all times?

The TEDxNHH event was amazing. The team worked very hard and managed to successfully make this a memorable event. I am glad I was a part of it. The video above was developed by me with the help of a few other people.

Besides working on the new Curtti features, I have been planning the development of Sharoo.org. The concept of Sharoo is a bit unusual, the idea is to help non-profit organizations with donations and also incentivise the people supporting the causes they love. As of now I am building a team of programmers, designers and other web development personal to collaborate in this project. If you are interested in joining Sharoo’s development team send me an email.

You can check the website at http://www.curtti.com/ – it’s in Portuguese! Enjoy.

Barack Obama heads the list, no surprise here, considering he is the “leader” of the world’s richest country. Second place goes to Hu Jintao, president of the People’s Republic of China. According to growth data and predictions from economists and analysts, China will soon become the 2nd largest economy in the world (it has already surpassed Germany). Third spot goes to the Prime Minister of Russia, Vladmir Putin. At 4th sits Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, the man in charge of reestablishing the American economy. These are the four men which are currently in charge of guiding the governments and economy of some of the most influential countries in the world.

Other than placed in high government positions, all of them have something in common. Their spot in the top of the list, and maybe even in the list as a whole, is temporary. And I don’t mean temporary as in ‘they will all die one day’, but rather, their terms will soon come to an end. As it happened to George W. Bush, Jian Zemin, Viktor Zubkov and Alan Greenspan, which are not present in the list, the current top four will  soon pass on their influence to their successors.

Now you may ask: “OK, but where are you trying to get with all of this?” And the answer is… drum-roll… number 5! Ta-da!

At number five we have Sergey Bryn and Larry Page, the guys behind Google. Nerds are placed at number five in the Forbes list. There’s no need for me to talk about Google, you know what it is. My point is, these guys will most likely remain on the list longer than any of those who are currently listed above them. They may never be first or go higher than five, someone will always be the president of the U.S. or China, and so on. I’m not saying they are going to be in the list for as long as they are in business. I’m not even saying they are going to be in the list next year. Google may go bankrupt or whatever, but a very probable scenario is that it will remain as the leading  search engine on the planet for the foreseeable future. What is impressive about this is that these guys reached fifth place because of the information they have gathered about the world. People often say that ‘knowledge is power’, and Google is probably the best example of the truth behind that saying. They are not the largest nor the most profitable company out there, but they possess something much more valuable, they know what the world wants.