Proof is Necessary
With their alpha launch on the horizon, Proof has released this explainer video to offer you insights into how the platform operates. Co-founder Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo leads you through the steps necessary in helping combat false information online.
Wearable Reality
Preseries is an automated platform that helps you track early stage investments. To date, they’ve ranked nearly 400,000 companies. Recently, they released their top five list of Augmented Reality startups, with our portfolio company, Augmate, coming in at #2. While the crypto market is going through a rough patch, as Augmate recently wrote, blockchain itself is gaining speed and, most importantly to a company focused on shaping the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” scalability. Patience is a hard concept in the age of immediate gratification; the smart money stays focused on the long game.
Family Inspiration
In a recent interview with Nasdaq, Translo founder Kamran Khan describes how his father’s disc herniation led to his founding his blockchain-based medical data sharing platform. While he initially found blockchain through cryptocurrency, he realized the potential to use blockchain solutions in biomedical research as he was studying at Harvard. The goal is to share data from large-scale studies in a transparent and immutable way—a big win for everyone, given the nightmare involved in gathering medical data and the bureaucratic roadblocks inherent in the process of dealing with insurance companies.
China Rising
In one of the most statistically-dense articles I’ve read in a while, great insight into how China is creating dominant middle and upper classes by using supply chain through an intensive focus on production in Africa is put forward. Ethiopia opened four giant publicly-owned industrial parks in 2014 (with eight more planned by 2020), backed by Chinese tax incentives. China has given the nation $10.4B in loans this decade alone, resulting in the creation of a giant Free Trade Zone. And, as the author highlights, blockchain will become an integral piece in the supply chain management of this relationship.
As China moves manufacturing to Africa, they will continue the pattern the government is forming and encouraging, using technology to remove friction points in existing systems. Blockchain technology is part of that solution and it will be tested in supply chain management.
This will become especially important in tracking the development of counterfeit goods, a trend that cost the US $1.7 trillion in 2015. It is estimated that proper tracking of goods can help victims of counterfeiting to the tune of over $1T. This will also be critical in growing the Chinese middle class, which he states is 450 percent larger than the American middle class in terms of population.
In effect, a supply chain blockchain solution will now align the interests of Chinese companies who are manufacturing and shipping goods to China so they don’t lose value to counterfeiters with the interest of the new largest middle class in the world who want to make sure they are getting genuine goods.
New Industrial Revolution indeed.
Closing Thoughts
From Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder:
The purpose of incurring the costs of the chain is to address the doldrums of centralization, insecurity, and sclerosis afflicting the current information economy.