Agenda: Institute for the Future, PayPal/ eBay Inc., Dialect Inc., Namo Media

Tuesday morning we arrived in Palo Alto and got ... to the future. This happened thanks to Sean Ness, Director of Business Development at the Institute for the Future. Institute for the Future is an independent, nonprofit organization with a long history (founded in 1968), which deals with research, development of global forecasts and modeling of the future with their subsequent graphical visualization. Three main areas of research and forecasts at Institute for the Future are technology, health and organizations. The Institute regularly publishes a variety of reports and maps from which you can easily find out what awaits us decades later in different areas of our lives. Many companies from the Fortune500 list use the services of Institute for the Future, in order to identify trends, prevent potential problems, and to anticipate the needs of the future (foresight - insight - action). At a meeting with Sean, we talked about the trends, technologies that affect the quality of life, and, of course, eco technologies as one of the most promising and popular trends of our time.

Our next stop was the holy of holies of e-commerce - the headquarters of PayPal/eBay in San Jose. There was an incredible interactive use case presentation waiting for us there, showing different ways of using PayPal payment system.

Today the number of active registered PayPal accounts – both personal and corporate is 152 million. Payment transactions are carried out in 100 currencies on 203 markets and these numbers are growing. Every day more than 9 million payments are carried out through PayPal.

After the presentation we had a fascinating showcase tour, where we were shown a variety of examples of the use of PayPal payment system (whether it's shopping in the grocery store, ticket service, clothing store, etc.)

PayPal office is actually equipped with virtually real shops with goods in order to be able to demonstrate all the benefits of the products and their customization options to the visitors, guests and potential clients!

Our entire group was very impressed by what we saw. At the end of the meeting we were treated to a wonderful lunch and were shown around the office and the territory of PayPal. Our findings continued. It turned out to be not just an office, but also a town with restaurants, terraces, playgrounds, small parks and even a pond. A complete delight! Many thanks to Sergey Ivashov!

After the tour to the wonderful world of PayPal we returned to San Francisco to meet the Happy Farm mentor John Gower. John Gower is a top manager with over 15 years of experience in the field of branding (magazines, videos, web and mobile applications). He has worked on 3 continents with the world's biggest brands in virtually every industry: games, technology, fashion, finance, art, automotive industry, sports, music, movies, and many more. John is a Founder and CEO at Dialect Inc, a branding agency based in San Francisco. John has given our group a presentation on promotion and publishing of mobile games.

In the evening, thanks to one of our startups - the founder and CEO of Bethclip Rashid Aliyev of Azerbaijan we met up with one more Azerbaijani startup - Namo Media. Namo Media's technology allows any mobile app to do mobile advertising like Facebook: beautiful mobile ads that sit in-stream rather than in annoying banner ads. The startup was founded in 2013, and in the summer of 2014 Twitter bought it. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Techcrunch wrote that the new acquisition cost Twitter about 50 million Dollars.

We spoke with the co-founder of the company Tural Badirkhanli who told us about his startup's path in such a short period of time.Our guys were very interested and inspired by this story, they asked Tural a lot of questions about how they built their work after moving to the Valley, how Twitter took interest in them, etc. Tural's main message is to not get hung up on idea of selling the company:

'It's difficult to be acquired if you are aimed to be acquired. Your first goal should be building a great product', Tural says.