March, 2016

Music Vine is a New Music Licensing Platform for Filmmakers

Music Vine is a new music licensing platform for filmmakers that offers some quality tracks at an affordable price-point. With an expanding database of songs, they’re joining the race to add better music to your films.

Over the last decade, quality standards in video and film have made leaps and bounds of progress.

Audiences can now expect stunning cinematography and crisp, vibrant visuals as a given—and if video content is to stand a chance at holding its viewers’ attention, it must speak with authenticity and personality.

Source: cinema5D

Protecting Rights to Digital Works with Blockchain Technology

A New York startup called Mine Labs has started a metadata protocol based on blockchain technology called Mediachain that uses the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a “hypermedia distribution protocol,” to protect rights to digital works, according to Nasdaq. Other blockchain-based authentication systems use an encoded ID to reference centrally-hosted data, but these have limited storage per transaction.

To encrypt and store digital rights onto the bitcoin blockchain, most blockchain startups do one of two things: 1) they encode an ID onto the blockchain using OP_RETURN or CoinSpark to reference centrally-hosted data, or 2) they use a custom-built distributed ledger to attach metadata directly to transactions.

Source: CCN

Ethereum, a Virtual Currency, Enables Transactions That Rival Bitcoin’s

A new virtual gold rush is underway. Even as Bitcoin, riven by internal divisions, has struggled, a rival virtual currency — known as Ethereum — has soared in value, climbing 1,000 percent over the last three months.

Beyond the price spike, Ethereum is also attracting attention from giants in finance and technology, like JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft and IBM, which have described it as a sort of Bitcoin 2.0.

The rise of the relatively new virtual currency has been helped by a battle within the Bitcoin community over how the basic Bitcoin software should develop.

Source: The New York Times

Behind the Scenes at the Launch of a New Blockchain Consortium

blockchain-ownerless-firms-4Last night a group representing 40 banks, accounting firms and members of the media gathered for the public launch of Domus Tower, a whispered-about startup rumored to be developing a blockchain capable of facilitating more than 1 million transactions per second.

At the event on the seventh floor of Museum Tower in Midtown Manhattan, the company’s chief technical officer demonstrated an early version of the blockchain, though one admittedly not running at anywhere near its theoretic top speed.

But beyond the geeky tech demos, the startup with an unusual history and new approach announced it was in the early phases of launching a new trust-based blockchain consortium. The group would be dedicated to settling equities in the US and eventually comprised of five companies each representing a different sector.

Source: CoinDesk

IBM Blockchain Leader Jerry Cuomo using ‘Shadowchains’ to Launch Moonshots

IBM has been building momentum behind blockchain by championing the Linux Foundation’s Hyperleder Project and creating its own Open Blockchain (OBC) among other things.

IBM’s vice president of blockchain Jerry Cuomo, who recently gave testimony before US Congress about the uses of the technology, likes the idea of a revolutionary IoT, blockchain-enabled insurance paradigm for driverless cars. Or perhaps it’s the more day-to-day business of migrating supply chains to blockchain.

Source: IBT

Coinify and iPayDNA Plan to Bring Blockchain Merchant Payments to Asia Pacific

Leading Blockchain currency payment service provider, Coinify ApS and Hong Kong­ based payment service provider, iPayDNA International Ltd. are proud to announce a new partnership that will bring advanced Blockchain payments to a vast amount of merchants residing in the Asia Pacific region.

Partnering with iPayDNA is another step of Coinify’s recently announced push into the Asian market. The new PSP agreement will allow Coinify to extend their Blockchain merchant processing solution distribution channel throughout the Asia Pacific region where iPayDNA holds a dominant position.

Source: Blockchain News

Sony Started Using Blockchain for Hassle-Free Education Certificates

On February 22 2016, Sony Global Education, a division of the Japanese electronics giant Sony Corporation, announced a new blockchain technology to share educational data with third parties.

Sony teamed up with Holberton School, an alternative software engineering school, and Bitproof, a blockchain notary in issuing blockchain based academic certificates to its graduates.

MIT Media Lab has also begun issuing digital certificates, and in July 2015, they began issuing ‘coins’, that serve as physical versions of their digital certificates, to members of their community.

Source: Coin Telegraph

Wall Street is Blockchain’s Weak Link

Blockchain — the “B”-word — is in vogue among bankers.The Blockchain BugUBS CEO Sergio Ermotti said this month the technology could disrupt the current financial system. JPMorgan and Citigroup were among several banks to pour over $50 million into Blythe Masters’ blockchain startup, Digital Asset Holdings, in January. A group of 40 banks is trialing the use of distributed ledger in the commercial paper market.

Source: Bloomberg Gadfly

How The Bitcoin Protocol Works

bitcoin-codeAn increasing number of businesses and consumers are now considering bitcoin, a new type of currency that offers a potential global-encompassing digital payment method. With this growing acceptance, it’s important to learn the essential components of this platform designed to change how we buy and sell products and services. My own company — a time tracking and invoicing platform — is using it, and I’d like to share what we’ve learned.

Personally, I find this technology beneficial, and hope that others will join the growing community.Bitcoin is one of the pioneers of the peer-to-peer electronic cash system, introducing what is known as blockchain protocol to oversee the system. Here’s essentially how it works.

Source: How The Bitcoin Protocol Works – Forbes

Hype Springs Eternal for Blockchains

Normally, it is Simon Taylor’s job to persuade sceptical colleagues at Barclays that rapid technological change will disrupt the bank’s business. So it comes as something of a surprise to have to dampen the excitement about the blockchain. “It’s quite silly. I get ten invitations to speak at a conference every day,” he says. “The technology will have real impact, but it will take time.”

The blockchain is the technology underpinning bitcoin, a digital currency with a chequered history. It is an example of a “distributed ledger”: in essence, a database that is maintained not by a single actor, such as a bank, but collaboratively by a number of participants.

Their respective computers regularly agree on how to update the database using a “consensus mechanism”, after which the modifications they have settled on are rendered unchangeable with the help of complex cryptography. Once information has been immortalised in this way, it can be used as proof of ownership. The blockchain can also serve as the underpinning for “smart contracts”—programs that automatically execute the promises embedded in a bond, for instance.

Source: The Economist

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