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
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
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 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
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
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
Last 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 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
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
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