How artificial intelligence can deliver real value to companies | McKinsey & Company

… early evidence suggests that there is a business case to be made, and that AI can deliver real value to companies willing to use it across operations and within their core functions. In our survey, early AI adopters that combine strong digital capability with proactive strategies have higher profit margins and expect the performance gap with other firms to widen in the next three years.

Significant gains are there for the taking. For many companies, this means accelerating the digital-transformation journey. AI is not going to allow companies to leapfrog getting the digital basics right. They will have to get the right digital assets and skills in place to be able to effectively deploy AI.

Source: How artificial intelligence can deliver real value to companies | McKinsey & Company

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Blockchain Could Help Artists Profit More from Their Creative Works

Enter blockchain-based platforms and programmable templates called smart contracts. Blockchain is a new technology platform, running on millions of devices and open to anyone, where not just information but anything of value — money, titles, and deeds, but also music, art, scientific discoveries, and other intellectual property — can be moved and stored securely and privately, where trust is established not by powerful intermediaries like movie studios, streaming services, banks, or other companies, but rat

In this new ecosystem, we see a place for Netflix and YouTube; a place for studio curation; and a place for fan-generated content. The film industry will still need people to sift through the hundreds of millions of hours of video created every day all over the planet. The key point is that the artists themselves will finally be feasting at the center of their own ecosystem, not starving at the edges of many others.

Source: Blockchain Could Help Artists Profit More from Their Creative Works

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Blockchain to Disrupt Balance of Power in TV, Music and Film Industry

The Blockchain is a perfect storm that makes sure the owners of content and the artists get what they are entitled to and don’t get squeezed out of the game. Smart contracts can enforce and automate the rights and distribution of wealth as payments to key parties. The Blockchain is the equalizing balance that puts the power back in the hands of the artists. Those with the talent can now decide how their content is used, who gets access to it and, more importantly, that nothing is tampered with, copied or hi

Source: Blockchain to Disrupt Balance of Power in TV, Music and Film Industry

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Deloitte Demos Blockchain Use Case for Art Industry – CoinDesk

The blockchain distributed ledger can trace the journey of artworks. When this technology is used in the art market, all events in the life cycle of an artwork are recorded and traceable. The application addresses one of the main concerns in the art market today, namely the fragile documentation related to the provenance and movements of a piece of art.

Source: Deloitte Demos Blockchain Use Case for Art Industry – CoinDesk

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How Blockchain Tech is Inspiring the Art World

“It just kind of can be used for anything, to get rid of lawyers, to bypass copyright law – which is obviously really important for artists. It [the blockchain] will completely empower artists.”

Although it is still early days and crypto 2.0 is still in its relatively nascent stage, it seems that distributed consensus ledgers such as the blockchain will continue to gain momentum among artists, who are typically interested in ways of eradicating the middle-men to gain greater control over their work and their profits.

Source: How Blockchain Tech is Inspiring the Art World

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A blockchain explanation your parents could understand | Jamie Skella | Pulse | LinkedIn

It’s happening in an increasingly frequent manner: “Jamie, explain this blockchain stuff to me. I’ve read a bunch of articles and I’m no wiser.” The problem with most blockchain explainers is that they provide more detail than what matters to most people, using language that is foreign to most people, which winds up leaving people more confused than when they started. Instead, without worrying about being a technically perfect description, here’s an explanation of blockchain your parents could understand…

Source: A blockchain explanation your parents could understand | Jamie Skella | Pulse | LinkedIn

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Big law is having its Uber moment – Macleans.ca

AI-powered tools are potentially more accurate. Whether they realize it or not, even the sharpest lawyers inevitably bring their own biases to legal research. That, in turn, skews their ability to realistically gauge their chances before judges, who harbour their own preconceived notions of how law should be applied. Tax Foresight, by contrast, isn’t concerned with how a judge should rule, but rather what’s the most likely outcome based on past experience. It’s essentially Moneyball for tax lawyers.

Source: Big law is having its Uber moment – Macleans.ca

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What Are Smart Contracts? A Beginner’s Guide to Smart Contracts

Example: Suppose you rent an apartment from me. You can do this through the blockchain by paying in cryptocurrency. You get a receipt which is held in our virtual contract; I give you the digital entry key which comes to you by a specified date. If the key doesn’t come on time, the blockchain releases a refund. If I send the key before the rental date, the function holds it releasing both the fee and key to you and me respectively when the date arrives. The system works on the If-Then premise and is witness

Actually, when it comes to smart contracts, we’re stepping into a sci-fi screen. The IT resource center, Search Compliance suggests that smart contracts may impact changes in certain industries, such as law. In that case, lawyers will transfer from writing traditional contracts to producing standardized smart contract templates, similar to the standardized traditional contracts that you’ll find on LegalZoom. Other industries such as merchant acquirers, credit companies, and accountants may also employ smart contracts for tasks, such as real time auditing and risk assessments. Actually, the website Blockchain Technologies sees smart contracts merging into a hybrid of paper and digital content where contracts are verified via blockchain and substantiated by physical copy.

Source: What Are Smart Contracts? A Beginner’s Guide to Smart Contracts

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ICOs and VCs | AVC

So, while ICOs represent a new and exciting way to build (and finance) a tech company, and are a legitimate disruptive threat to the venture capital business, they are not something I am nervous about and they are not something USV is nervous about. We are excited about them when they are the right thing for our portfolio companies and we are encouraging those companies to use this new approach. We are also investing in tokens, through token funds, and directly on or own.

Thanks Chris for the find!

Source: ICOs and VCs – AVC

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