Posts Tagged ‘sebastien’
Provenance | Case Studies
Tracking sustainability claims through global chains
Can we prove that products are sustainably-sourced and slavery-free? In an international pilot, working with IPNLF and 12 tuna producers, we used Provenance to track fish through the complex Southeast Asian fishing industry for the UK, Japanese and US markets.
Pioneering a new standard for trust in food retail
How can we empower customers all along the supply chain with data they can trust? Provenance partnered with the UK’s largest consumer co-operative The Co-op to track fresh produce, and their product claims, from origin to supermarket.
Increasing transparency in fashion with blockchain
Can tech help boost trust and transparency in the fashion industry? Collaborating with businesses along a UK-based fashion supply chain, we’ve used blockchain to track raw alpaca fleece from farm to finished garment.
Boosting the value of small, independent food brands
How does the Provenance platform benefit small businesses? Enabling producer, shop and shopper to collaborate on product stories and journeys, Provenance demonstrated a new way to increase trust and visibility for independent brands.
Showcasing craftsmanship via smart labels
How can we give shoppers the information they need to chose your product? Provenance presents the journey of material to finished product through interactive labels.
Raising the value of single-origin coffee
How can single-origin coffee producers prove the provenance of their product? We trial location data verification to differentiate between authentic single-origin coffee from mere marketing buzz.
Tracking towards a circular future for cotton
How can tech help cotton producers increase demand for the sustainable, renewable and biodegradable, fabric? We use Provenance to track cotton from origin to finished good and beyond, closing the loop.
Source: Provenance | Case Studies
Read MoreFrom Farm To Finished Garment: Blockchain Is Aiding This Fashion Collection With Transparency | Forbes
Each garment has a unique digital token, enabling Provenance to verify every step of its production and create a digital history of that information including location data, content and timestamps, all of which is presented to consumers via an interface they can access through their item’s QR code or NFC-enabled label (so that it works on both Apple and Android devices).
Another keyword for the blockchain therefore is storytelling. As Drinkwater adds: “Where transparency and sustainability play a part, then there’s really beautiful storytelling to be told. And brands can do that actually fairly easily. For Martine, there was a real desire to show off the craftsmanship and ability [of the partners]. Rather than just presenting the final product, it enables every partner to show off their expertise and their brilliance in a very visual and engaging way. Ordinarily when you look at a finished product you never think about that.”
Source: From Farm To Finished Garment: Blockchain Is Aiding This Fashion Collection With Transparency
Read MoreWill Provenance Be the Blockchain’s Break Out Use Case in 2016? – CoinDesk
Much has been said about the blockchain as an ownership layer. But what exactly does that mean?
It means that blockchains represent ownership of an asset in terms of control over the data relating to that asset. In other words, only the current owner can authenticate a transaction that would cause that asset to be transferred to another owner.
This is provenance expressed in protocol form. The word “provenance” is derived from the French “provenir” which means “to come from”, and is used to describe the custodial chronology of an object.
Provenance is one of the backbones of economies, whether it relates to artifacts or real estate. There has always been a need to authenticate that a party actually owns an asset prior to any business dealing involving that asset, to ensure that the asset is “true” rather than stolen or faked.
In the past, trusted third-parties have traditionally played this role.
However, blockchains can streamline this function by serving as the infrastructure for registering and authenticating asset ownership between untrusting parties with common interests.
Source: Will Provenance Be the Blockchain’s Break Out Use Case in 2016? – CoinDesk
Read MoreIBM Think Academy: Blockchain, How it works
What is Blockchain? Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger for recording the history of transactions. It fosters a new generation of transactional applications that establish trust, accountability and transparency—from contracts to deeds to payments.
Frees up capital flows, speeds up processes, lowers transaction costs and most importantly provides security and trust. We believe that Blockchain will do for business what the Internet did for communications.
Source: IBM Blockchain
Read MoreThe difference between public and private blockchain – Blockchain Unleashed: IBM Blockchain Blog
The sole distinction between public and private blockchain is related to who is allowed to participate in the network, execute the consensus protocol and maintain the shared ledger. A public blockchain network is completely open and anyone can join and participate in the network. The network typically has an incentivizing mechanism to encourage more participants to join the network. Bitcoin is one of the largest public blockchain networks in production today.
A private blockchain network requires an invitation and must be validated by either the network starter or by a set of rules put in place by the network starter. Businesses who set up a private blockchain, will generally set up a permissioned network. This places restrictions on who is allowed to participate in the network, and only in certain transactions. Participants need to obtain an invitation or permission to join. The access control mechanism could vary: existing participants could decide future entrants; a regulatory authority could issue licenses for participation; or a consortium could make the decisions instead. Once an entity has joined the network, it will play a role in maintaining the blockchain in a decentralized manner…
This type of permissioned blockchain model offers the ability to leverage more than 30 years of technical literature to realize significant benefits. Digital identity in particular, is fundamental for most industry use cases, be it handling supply chain challenges, disrupting the financial industry, or facilitating security-rich patient/provider data exchanges in healthcare. Only the entities participating in a particular transaction will have knowledge and access to it — other entities will have no access to it.
Source: The difference between public and private blockchain – Blockchain Unleashed: IBM Blockchain Blog
Read MoreBeyond Bitcoin: How Enterprises Can Integrate Blockchain | AppDynamics
Blockchain is already used in a handful of applications including cryptocurrency. This year, as more people set their minds to understanding the technology and finding creative applications, we will see a sharp increase in new use cases in industries as diverse as agriculture, finance, healthcare, energy, and manufacturing.
Click to read more about supply chain, food and beverage and “Limited blockchains”
The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2025, one-tenth of our GDP will have made its way onto the blockchain. For a nascent technology, that’s a bold prediction. But we’re living through a period of technological transformation that moves at unprecedented speeds. If you’re not already thinking about blockchain, you may already be behind.
References to what’s also known as Provenance and Private Blockchains
Read MoreBlockchain – A Platform for Disintermediation – Infocast
Disintermediation is the investment magnet for blockchain-related ideas, riding on the success of the business and underpinned by peer-to-peer and crowdsourcing models. The promise of blockchain for enterprise goes beyond its role as an industry disruptor. It also has tremendous potential to improve existing business processes, as well as to improve efficiencies in existing transaction systems, leading to exponential cost saving for the enterprise and the end consumer. I like to draw the analogy of the impact of information dissemination due to the internet serving as an information network. Blockchain technology promises a similar explosion in trade, ownership, and trust, as the tenets of both technologies rely on principles of distributed governance and rules established for a time-tested protocol.
Source: Blockchain – A Platform for Disintermediation – Infocast
Read MoreBasicAttentionToken | A new token to value user attention on the internet.
Basic Attention Token radically improves the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers, and users. It all happens on the Ethereum blockchain.
The token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement.
Source: BasicAttentionToken | A new token to value user attention on the internet.
Takeaways
Despite the eye-candy of Former Mozilla CEO raises $35M in under 30 seconds for his browser startup Brave | TechCrunch, it is a prime example of how Blockchain promises disintermediation, or, compressing a transaction’s endpoints. All of today’s advertising middlemen, ad trackers and fraudulent players can be eliminated, or, drastically reduced.
By the way, if you’re swept up in the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) aspect of this, then please take not the founder is Brendan Eich and his Venture Capital (VC) backers:
Read MoreFrom the creator of JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox, with a solid team – funded by Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, DCG, Danhua Capital, and Huiyin Blockchain Venture among others.
Don Tapscott: How the blockchain is changing money and business | TED Talk | TED.com
18 minutes and 49 seconds well spent!
What is the blockchain? If you don’t know, you should; if you do, chances are you still need some clarification on how it actually works. Don Tapscott is here to help, demystifying this world-changing, trust-building technology which, he says, represents nothing less than the second generation of the internet and holds the potential to transform money, business, government and society.
Thanks Jeff for the find!
Source: Don Tapscott: How the blockchain is changing money and business | TED Talk
There really is more. just click below…
Read MoreIndia Is Likely To Become The First Digital, Cashless Society | Forbes
The top news out of India over the past 12 months has been Prime Minister Modi’s move to ban 85% of the currency in circulation. However, something much more far-reaching has happened.
…A 2015 report from MasterCard found that India was one of the countries least ready to transition to a digital payment system.
Yet, 12 months later such a system was rolled out.
If the transition to a digital society can happen in India, where just 2% of transactions were non-cash a few years ago, it can happen anywhere.
India Stack could fast-track the move to digital payment systems across the developed world and mark the end of cash.
Thanks Jeff for the find!
Source: India Is Likely To Become The First Digital, Cashless Society
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