Over the next five years we will begin to manage our homes in the cloud. Getting access to our information and monitoring our energy use, controlling devices and automating appliances when we are not there will be commonplace. 

In February 2011, founder of Net-a-Porter Natalie Massenet told the Financial Times; ‘Media companies are going to become retailers and retailers are going to become media companies” Fast-forward two years and Massenet’s predictions prove true, as announcements of new partnerships between media and e-commerce companies and emerging shoppable magazines are proliferating.

A rapidly growing digital start-up, Viewsy is helping retailers the world over understand customer behaviour in physical stores.

Any publisher who has taken note of the digital revolution knows that content analytics in all shapes and forms, from social media monitoring to web analytics, has completely transformed their business model. Today, media titles know more about their audiences than ever before, and are able to refine their offering as a result.

The mobile payments revolution has begun. Cheques are declining in usage, most of our banking activity has moved online and digital players such as Square, Apple’s Passbook and Google Wallet are all vying for the number one spot in mobile payments and transactions.

Mark Hoffman is an American-born entrepreneur who has spent most of his career founding billion dollar companies right out of the country's tech hub, Silicon Valley. He tells entrepreneurcountry what growing up in the US taught him about being an entrepreneur, why he’s now disrupting financial services with his latest start-up, Oxygen Finance, and what he thinks British businesses could learn from the US.

This month I spoke to Stefan Jeschonneck, Co-founder of SumUp. SumUp is a great example of Ecosystem Economics™ in action within the realm of financial services, offering a digital, disruptive solution to payments. SumUp empowers any business or sole trader to accept debit and credit card payments securely, using a smartphone and their portable card reader. With recent investment from American Express and daily deals company Groupon, I ask Stefan to share how his entrepreneurial journey began and to reveal his plans for the future.

In the romantic version, entrepreneurship and individualism are synonymous. He or she is a lone visionary, a Don Quixote tilting against the windmills of business as usual, with no resources beyond an impossible dream, a mulish stubbornness, and a maxed-out credit card.

I grew up near Palo Alto, so if I had a bias, it would be that Palo Alto is the epicentre of the tech world. And as ‘all things tech’ come to be understood as the driver of growth in business, like a massive snowball picking up speed down the mountain, it should be more important what’s happening in and around Palo Alto.

Today, 75 percent of people globally have access to a mobile phone. Of the six billion subscriptions worldwide, 77 percent are held by people in developing countries. And despite the great disparities among high and low-income regions globally, there is a reasonable parity in access to mobile phones.