Blockchain

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

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

Mediachain: Protect Digital Content With a Bitcoin-Based Metadata Protocol

Mine Labs, a New York-based blockchain startup has announced the development of Mediachain, a Bitcoin blockchain-based decentralized metadata protocol which relies on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to protect and ensure the rights to creative digital works.

Since early 2015, emerging blockchain startups have begun to focus on the development of blockchain-based identity and authentication systems to assist artists, freelancers and digital content providers to protect their work from being plagiarised.

To encrypt and store digital rights on the Bitcoin blockchain, most of these blockchain startups have either encoded an ID into the Bitcoin blockchain using OP_RETURN or CoinSpark to reference centrally hosted data or used a custom-built blockchain to attach metadata directly to transactions.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine

Does Blockchain Hold the Key to Music’s Future?

A song doesn’t just happen. There are composers, lyricists, performers. Rights of ownership are divvied up across those parties, labels, publishers, distributors and possibly other entities. And the sale of one company to another means a small forest worth of paperwork to keep the records current and ensure all parties are properly paid for their work.

What if there were an easier way, one that not only allowed all the rights and ownership privileges of a song to remain together in an open, publicly readable and researchable database, but also gave artists the ability to post their song directly and collect payment every time a download or album was sold?Welcome to the world of blockchain.

Source: A Journal of Musical Things

Could a Blockchain-Based Registry Ever Replace the Copyright Office?

Blockchaicopyrightn technology opens up the possibility for a provider to offer an immutable registry of transactions, held on a decentralized network of computers.

While financial applications continue to dominate the blockchain development landscape, as we’ve detailed in prior posts there are a growing number of companies offering registries for digital content, including Monegraph, ConSensys, Stem, Mediachain, ascribe and others.

A content registry, for the most part, is a registry of the ownership of intellectual property, most prominently copyright. Ideally, such a registry would accurately record original ownership of a work, and then also record all subsequent transactions involving that work. Since copyright interests are divisible, this can become an extremely complicated tree of transactions, very rapidly.

Source: JDSupra

The Key to Blockchain Adoption: Make It Cheaper

An awareness is dawning in the industry that blockchain—the technology behind (really, interwoven with) BitCoin—is the main story. BitCoin is almost a distraction, a sideshow to the real deal. Most people have heard of BitCoin, the “cryptocurrency.” In simple terms, BitCoin is value that resides in computer networks. It seems to be mysteriously reliable, partly because it is verified by multiple parties.

Source: Techonomy

Can BitTeaser’s Blockchain Ads Network Disrupt ‘Pay-Per-Click’ Market?

Advertising is indexbig business and as increasing activity moves online, so too do the marketing dollars. While 2015 saw an estimated $170.5 billion (bn) spent on online advertising globally, this figure is projected to mushroom almost 50% by 2018 to $252bn. But can anyone apart from the big guys snap up a slice of this lucrative business and leverage the Internet of Things to achieve it?

Until recently only the big players were able to get into it. Software though has made it possible for some webmasters to serve adverts and generate revenues based on their own traffic. Yet profiting from the advertising sector more broadly was a complex undertaking out of reach to the ordinary punter and investor.

Now to solve the problem, a group of future tech innovators from Denmark and the US have used the power of ‘peer-to-peer’ platforms to throw the doors open to everyone. Effectively they are offering anyone who wants it a piece of a pie that isn’t getting smaller any time soon.

Source: Forbes

Three Things the Music Industry Should Learn from Bitcoin about Disruption

The music industry is about to change.

Everyone knows it.

Applied blockchain cryptography and new virtual reality systems are about to change digital entertainment more radically than what portable digital music players and streaming content platforms have in the last 20 years. I’ve been involved in the tech industry since the late 90’s.

I saw, participated in, and profited from the tech bubble of the first decade of this century, mostly as a developer. I’ve been involved with Bitcoin and blockchain development since 2013. I have been on the vanguard of the disruption as it rippled through the financial sector, and for the last two years I’ve been working with various entities within the music industry to educate and prepare them for the coming of blockchain cryptography.

From the sum total of those experiences, I think there’s three things of which the music industry should take note on the eve of its own disruption

Source: ZapChain

Blockai Uses the Blockchain to Help Artists Protect Their Intellectual Property

While most of the discussions around blockchain have focused on its potential use in finance, startup Blockai is looking at something different — helping artists, photographers and other creators register their work so that they can protect it from potential copyright infringement.

CEO Nathan Lands is pitching this as an intermediate step between registering your work with the Library of Congress and doing nothing. Technically, your work is copyrighted as soon as you create the novel, drawing or whatever. However, registration is required if you want to sue someone for infringement.

Source: TechCrunch

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