Soundstripe Simplifies Music Licensing for Visual Creatives

1457843258331Soundstripe is changing the way visual creatives (filmmakers, marketers, agencies, churches, etc.) access and obtain stock music, sourcing affordable high-quality video production music via their new platform, Soundstripe.com.

Music licensing has been a very complicated matter for many years. From multiple pricing tiers based on usage, to intimidating contracts and publishing agreements, Soundstripe aims to fix all of that.

“We want filmmakers to get in, get their music, and get back to creating,” says Travis Terrell, Co-CEO.

Microsoft Adds Ethereum to Windows Platform For Over 3 Million Developers

Millions of Microsoft developers are now able to build decentralized applications using the Ethereum blockchain thanks to a collaboration between the software giant and ConsenSys, announced today.

By building Ethereum’s Solidity programming language for writing smart contracts directly into Mircosoft’s Visual Studio platform, developers will be able to build, test and deploy decentralized applications, or dapps, within an integrated environment they already know how to use.But don’t think this is a money play for either ConsenSys, or Microsoft, at least not yet.

Source: CoinDesk

Songwriters Strike a Discordant Note Over Control of Their Music

Knowledge@Wharton: Set the backdrop as to how this decree came into play and why the U.S. Justice Department is looking to make this change.

Lawrence Gelburd: Let’s start with copyright. When you’re part of a team that writes a song, or maybe you’re the sole songwriter, you initially have a set of copyrights and there are multiple rights. One is to have the song performed on the radio. There are mechanical license rights. So you own the right to say, “You can make a physical copy,” like a CD or an LP, and sell it. You also have sync license.

So you have the right as the copyright owner to give someone who’s making a film or a motion picture access to use your song legally in conjunction with that picture.

There are also grand rights for theatrical performances and print rights.This copyright that you own is a set of rights, one of which is the right for performing rights organizations like ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. They collect money, for example, from terrestrial radio, so that’s their focus. And they have strength in numbers. ASCAP has almost a half-million members, and BMI is quite large as well.

Source: Knowledge@Wharton

Stratumn is Building a Sort of Heroku for Blockchain Applications

Meet Stratumn, a Paris-based startup that wants to create a platform-as-a-service for developers interested in the blockchain. With Stratumn, you can build, deploy and run applications on the company’s platform, and these applications can communicate with the bitcoin blockchain.

It’s like Heroku, but for blockchain developers.The company just raised $670,000 (€600,000) from Otium Venture and business angels, such as Ledger Wallet CEO Eric Larchevêque.

Source: TechCrunch

PwC Report: Blockchain a ‘Once in a Generation’ Opportunity for Financial Services

Blockchain marks the next “jump” in business process/optimization technology, according to a newly-released PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report on fintech.

The report, “Blurred lines: How FinTech is shaping Financial Services,” compares blockchain to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that allowed entities and functions within a business to optimize processes by sharing logic and data within the enterprise.

Blockchain, according to the 36-page report, will enable entire industries to optimize business processes by sharing data among organizations that have separate or competing economic objectives. It notes that blockchain combines a number of cryptographic, mathematical and economic principles to maintain a database of market participants without requiring a third party reconciliator or validator.

Source: CCN

Will the Blockchain Expedite the IoT Revolution?

Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency in the world, but the currency might be overshadowed by a decentralized ledger system called “the blockchain,” which is starting to make its way into the Internet of Things (IoT) market.

The blockchain in IoT could solve the trust issues various developers, engineering firms, and businesses face when building smart devices that can communicate and operate autonomously. According to Pulse’s online editor, Sena Quashie, it might be the biggest innovation of the decade.

Source: ReadWrite

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

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