Day: May 25, 2018

IBM’s pursuit of 1,800 blockchain jobs in France is a signal of intent to expand research and development in several areas, primarily focusing on blockchain technology, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and IoT (Internet of Things), as detailed in an interview with chief executive Virginia Rometty on Wednesday.

IBM is one of the largest and most established research organizations in IT and computing alongside companies such as Microsoft and Google. The company currently holds the record for the most patents generated in a year as well as the last 25 consecutive years. IBM assigned 9,043 patents in comparison to Samsung Electronic which filed for 3,300 putting them in second place.

IBM has previously reported working with up to 63 blockchain clients on over 400 projects related to blockchain technology. The tech giant is confident that blockchain will streamline solutions and be a leading innovator in its field. Earlier this year CFO Jim Kavanaugh stated: “For us, blockchain is a set of technologies that allow our clients to simplify complex, end-to-end processes in a way that couldn’t have been done before.”

IBM securing the market

There have been regular headlines of IBM and collaborators looking to enter the blockchain space. IBM started a partnership with Maersk and Agility, a global logistics provider, announcing their plans to track shipping containers using blockchain technology back in February.

IBM has been pushing for the lead in the race for adopting blockchain technology working alongside various industries and supporting giants like Visa, HSBC, and Walmart. Walmart’s vice president of food safety and health Frank Yiannas explained that:

“As a global advocate for enhanced food safety, Walmart looks forward to deepening our work with IBM, Tsinghua University, JD and others throughout the food supply chain. Through collaboration, standardization, and adoption of new and innovative technologies, we can effectively improve traceability and transparency and help ensure the global food system remains safe for all.”

Although cryptocurrencies have been met with some skepticism many industries are starting to understand the potential benefits of the underlying blockchain technology. Industry leaders and the European Union are pouring millions into research and exploration of blockchain projects. The EU announced plans in February to increase funding over the next two years from EUR 83 million to around EUR 340 million. IBM’s general manager of blockchain, Marie Wieck previously highlighted research predicting the value-add of the blockchain economy growing to more than USD 176 billion by 2025.

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International Business Machines (IBM) recently announced initiatives and investments which will create 1,800 jobs in France.

News of IBM’s intentions broke after the Tech for Good summit in Paris hosted by the president of France. Over 50 tech CEOs were present, including Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and Biran Krzanich.

The openings require “new collar” skills, a term coined by president and CEO Ginni Rometty. New collar skills involve knowledge in data science, cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain. New graduates and experienced technical professionals alike will be hired to fill these opportunities.

The new positions will be created within the next two years. They include 400 IBM hired in March for research at the French AI for Humanity summit. IBM has been steadily reducing its presence in France since 2012, but new hirings will help IBM return to previous numbers.

IBM has also announced a partnership with the French government regarding its Pathways to Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) education system. P-TECH gives disadvantaged people the ability to obtain skilled labor.

It is to no surprise that Rometty spearheaded discussions about education during the summit, and will use insight gathered to better French education. The company is also introducing IBM France Academy supplemented with online courses. This will train IBM France employees, partners, and clients in skills that will prepare them for the AI-era.

Most of IBM’s clients within France utilize Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, to accelerate their business operations. Introduction of blockchain technology could potentially make Watson more potent.

IBM has won deals in multi-line insurance, bank guarantees, the automobile industry, and global food-supplying industry, among others, thanks to its strides in blockchain technology.

According to a report by MarketandMarkets, blockchain tech is expected to be worth USD 2.3 billion by 2021, growing at a CAGR of 61.5%. IBM has been slowly gaining ground within the blockchain space and its investments in France are just their latest efforts.

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Even though all of the cryptocurrencies are slowly going back in the green, it remains to be seen how long this positive momentum will last. Yesterday was a rather troublesome day for all currencies, which also makes it slightly easier to recover the massive losses. The EOS price is definitely on a roll right now, thanks to a solid 12.63% increase over the past few hours.

The EOS Price Recovery is in Effect

After the steady declines yesterday, it is rather impressive to see some cryptocurrencies gain any sort of momentum in the past few hours. So far, the EOS price is clearly in the lead when it comes to short-term gains, although this momentum may not necessarily last all that long. Even so, EOS holders will be quite pleased with this latest development, even though there’s still a lot of work to be done in the process.

With the EOS price dipping below $12 yesterday, some users were concerned about how things would continue to evolve. Those concerns were only compounded when the EOS price dipped to $10.8 and slightly less late last night. Most of that dip has now been bought up again, as the value seems to be stabilizing around the $12 mark as of right now.

This EOS price increase is also made possible thanks to gains over both Bitcoin and Ethereum. More specifically, EOS has gained 12.77% on Bitcoin in the past 24 hours, as well as an 8.73% gain over Ether. It is evident there are some positive developments in this regard, although it will be interesting to see how things will evolve in the coming hours and days. It appears the bearish pressure is not completely gone just yet.

The trading volume for EOS is on the rise again, which can only be considered to be a good thing. More specifically, there is $2.222bn in trading volume, which makes EOs one of the most liquid markets in the industry next to Bitcoin. If this volume remains in place, things will certainly get rather interesting for this particular altcoin moving forward.

The way things stand right now, Bithumb is leading the charge in terms of EOS trading volume. Its lead over Upbit is pretty big but not insurmountable by any means. Huobi completes the top three, followed by OKEx and Bitfinex. With three fiat currency pairs in the top five right now, there appears to be a clear demand for EOS in the cryptocurrency industry as of right now.

Whether or not the positive momentum will remain in place much longer, is a different matter altogether. Although it is time things turn around in favor of cryptocurrencies, the overall trend throughout 2018 has been incredibly negative. Even so, experts still predict bigger and better things to come in 2018, albeit it remains to be seen if and when those changes will materialize.

The U.S. state of Alabama has issued cease-and-desist orders to three ICOs that were allegedly soliciting residents with unregistered securities.

In 2017, cryptocurrency prices outran reality. This year, the opposite is true: all investors seem to feel the energy and enthusiasm draining out of the market. All except the true believers, of course.

One of Japan’s most innovative personal financial management startups Money Forward Inc. announced it will set up its own cryptocurrency exchange by the end of 2018.

New Exchange Will Begin with a Media Platform

Money Foward CEO and founder Yosuke Tsuji made the statement on the company’s website that a newly created subsidiary called Money Forward Financial Co. Ltd would be the flagship for the new project.

The firm’s plan of action begins by establishing a crypto media platform to ‘dispatch news related to virtual currency and price comparison of domestic and overseas exchange centers’. Led by President Junichi Kanda, the media platform will be the stepping stone on which the company will eventually launch its exchange.

The statement refers to the goal of prioritizing a secure and easy to navigate interface on the exchange whether it be on the web or as a mobile app it will ‘display transaction history and asset status in an easy-to-understand manner’.

Concurrent with its mother company’s start in personal finance management, Money Forward Financial plans to expand upon the type of services offered by cryptocurrency exchanges to include a crypto account book that can file data spread across 20 different local and foreign-based cryptocurrency exchanges as well as a tool to allow users to generate profit and loss data for tax filings. These services would be an extension of a digital asset remittance system based on legal currencies and electronic money.

Money Forward has Sound Base in Japan

Money Forward began as a tiny startup in an apartment in Takadanobaba, a neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward, by Yosuke Tsuji five years ago. It quickly grew to employ 230 staffers of which about 40% are engineers. The companies IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market raised roughly $27 million in revenue. Since then Tsuji has been approached with offers of all type and his company is now valued at about $500 million. He said in 2017 about the success of his IPO;

  “It’s not just about raising funds. I think the IPO has given our credibility a boost,”

With Money Forward already a huge success in Japan with 5.5 million registered users the expectation is that Money Forward Financial will reap the benefits of that support and be able to roll many of those customers into its newly offered services. Both companies have overseas markets in their sights and Tsuji has addressed the issue of expansion saying;

“Money issues, including payment methods, are different depending on the country, so it’s not a matter of simply translating our service into English, we need to think of how we can adapt to each country.”

Image from Shutterstock

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The High Court in Harare, Zimbabwe has issued an interim order lifting the nationwide cryptocurrency ban decreed by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe on 11 May 2018. Apparently, officials from the Reserve Bank, including Governor John Mangudya, failed to show up at court, resulting in a default judgement against them.

The lawsuit was brought forth against the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe by Golix, a cryptocurrency exchange which is based in Africa and one of three primary cryptocurrency exchanges that operate in Zimbabwe, the other two being Bitfinance and Styx24.

In the lawsuit, Golix argued that the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe had no jurisdiction to ban cryptocurrency, since that is equivalent to lawmaking which is a power reserved for parliament. Therefore, by banning cryptocurrency, the Reserve Bank was infringing on the parliament’s power.

The temporary lifting of the ban has brought great relief to Zimbabwean cryptocurrency traders. Golix is hoping to get back to business immediately and is aiming to begin processing trades in their order book which has been on halt due to the ban.

It is unknown whether banks will cooperate with the temporary lifting of the cryptocurrency ban. There was supposed to be a 60-day grace period after the issuance of the decree which occurred on 11 May 2018, but within a week banks were already refusing to facilitate withdraws from Golix. Since the banks didn’t even follow the order of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to give cryptocurrency users 60 days to get their affairs in order, it seems they have some independence regarding the decision to allow cryptocurrency trading through their respective banks, and if they decide not to cooperate Golix won’t be able to function.

While this is a big win for cryptocurrency in Zimbabwe, it is only a temporary order and there will have to be more court proceedings before a final decision is made. The only thing that is certain is a big legal battle is about to ensue between cryptocurrency and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, and this battle will determine cryptocurrency’s future in the Southeast African nation.

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Key Points

• Bitcoin price found support near $7,260 and bounced back above $7,400 against the US Dollar.
• The BTC/USD pair is currently attempting a close above a crucial bearish trend line with resistance at $7,650 on the hourly chart (data feed from Kraken).
• A successful close above the trend line and $7,700 may perhaps open the doors for more gains.

Bitcoin price is showing positive signs above $7,400 against the US Dollar. BTC/USD must break the $7,650 and $7,700 resistance levels to recover further.

Bitcoin Price Analysis

There were further bearish moves below $7,500 in bitcoin price against the US Dollar. The BTC/USD pair traded close to the $7,200 support level before buyers appeared. A low was formed at $7,258 from where the price started an upside correction. Buyers succeeded in pushing the price back above the $7,400 resistance, which is a positive sign.

During the recent upside move, the price also crawled above the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the last drop from the $8,593 high to $7,258 low. More important, there was a break above a key connecting bearish trend line with resistance at $7,600 on the hourly chart of the BTC/USD pair. However, the pair is currently struggling to move above another bearish trend line with resistance near $7,650 on the same chart. A close above $7,650 and $7,700 is required for buyers to gain control. The next major hurdle is near $8,000 and the 50% Fib retracement level of the last drop from the $8,593 high to $7,258 low.

Looking at the chart, the price is forming a bullish pattern, but it won’t be easy the bulls to clear the $7,700 resistance. Should they fail to move the price above $7,700, BTC/USD could drop back towards the $7,300 and $7,200 in the near term.

Looking at the technical indicators:              

Hourly MACD – The MACD for BTC/USD is back in the bullish zone.

Hourly RSI (Relative Strength Index) – The RSI is now well above the 50 level.

Major Support Level – $7,200

Major Resistance Level – $7,700

The post Bitcoin Price Watch: Can BTC/USD Break This? appeared first on NewsBTC.

Faceter, a blockchain platform for video surveillance and video stream analysis, completed its ICO in March 2018. The project managed to reach the Hard Cap of $28 ml. thanks to the contributions of more than 80,000 investors. This is a great achievement for 2018 as the ICO market, on the whole, is experiencing a sort of recession and the only a small percentage of the projects reach the hard cap during Token Sales. This article discusses the business specifics and functions of Faceter and the problems that the platform is solving and development prospects of the video surveillance market in the near future.

Current problems of the video surveillance industry

To understand the importance and prospects of innovations in this market segment, it is enough to have a look at the recent numbers: the market potential is estimated to be $75 bln. while by 2019 there will be 841 mln. cameras installed across the globe.

Here are the major not yet solved problems that impede the development of the market for video surveillance solutions:

• First, the video stream from so many cameras is a huge data array that is to be not only stored but also processed. Nowadays, the cloud technology is capable of partially solving the problem but even it is unable to cope with this load;
• Second, CCTV cameras belong not only to state enterprises but also to commercial organizations and private persons. Merging them within the framework of one video surveillance system is a rather global task that requires not only resources but also software with good infrastructure;
• Third, the modern video stream analysis systems still have a rather big share of false positives and failures, while the operators are unable to monitor all cameras simultaneously, therefore many accidents remain unnoticed;
• Fourth, servicing a modern video surveillance system is very expensive, which includes the video equipment and maintenance of it, data storage etc.

The result is that the modern video surveillance system is inefficient, works unilaterally and is unavailable to the general public.

What does Faceter offer?

Faceter is developing a brand new decentralized system of video surveillance and unique software for face recognition and video stream analysis. Moreover, Faceter also found the solution for processing and analyzing video data online by merging the advantages of mining and cloud computing.

In 2017 the company launched B2C alfa-version of its product, which has been successfully tested by several large companies from SAR Currently the developers of the project are working on the beta-version of SaaS-solution for the mass market. Faceter partnered with distributed computing platform SONM for research and development. The Companies will test the work of Faceter face recognition and intellectual analysis of video stream algorithms on SONM IaaS capacities.

The developers expect that the use of cloud computing will offer more than tenfold decrease of the computational infrastructure costs. Let us recall that these costs are a significant part of expenses for the implementation of complex machine vision algorithms. MVP – the product should be launched by the middle of 2018.

How does the ecosystem of the platform work?

The goal of Faceter is to develop a system that makes video surveillance smart by making it capable of “thinking” for more efficient recognition of faces, objects and online analysis of a video stream. At the mature stage of development, all these capabilities will be merged into a single one, namely, “understanding” of the situation and reacting to it. If implemented successfully, this will significantly enhance safety and reaction time if emergency actions are required.

The main functioning elements and capabilities of Faceter network:

Blockchain. Faceter uses the capabilities of smart contracts to provide flexible and transparent computational methods as well as the mechanisms of cloud computational network.

FACE Token. It is the settlements basis of the decentralized network used as a flexible, transparent, trans-border and closed settlement mechanism for all members.

Cloud computing. Using video cards miners will perform computing for recognition in the decentralized network with the opportunity to earn a higher income. The algorithm of this technology has been tested and approved by LFW and MegaFace, one of the most reliable industry experts.

Face recognition. Expands the capabilities of video surveillance systems to identify potential threats and other actions such as a smiling client or a concentrated employee etc.

Data protection. Faceter processes the source of the video signal in the safe environment while only non-personified data is transferred to the decentralized network.

Decentralized network and miners

As the video stream analysis requires enormous computational power, the platform developers are planning to create a decentralized network of “cloud” computations, significantly decreasing the price of the product, which will make it affordable for private consumers and business owners across the globe.

The simplified operation structure looks like this:

So the platform ecosystem successfully integrates the computational power of the miners, which should also positively affect the development of the project as it increases its importance for the community. Any GPU owner can join Faceter network and earn FACE tokens as rewards for contributing to the global safety.

Turnover of FACE tokens in the platform ecosystem

FACE token is a part of Faceter business model, it is the nucleus of the decentralized network used as the Proof of Recognition as well as a flexible, transparent and trans-border settlement mechanism for all members. It is a cryptocoin for payments made by clients. FACE token is also used to make payments to the members of FOG decentralized network.

In simplified form, the turnover of FACE tokens and funds in Faceter ecosystem is shown below:

Also, a very important feature of the model is the fact that a part of FACE tokens will be burned by the developers, which facilitates the increase of the exchange value of the coin and motivated the holders to hold the asset, which is essential for the development of any cryptocurrency.

Development prospect and the use of video surveillance technology

Video surveillance can be useful not only to record crimes and maintain law and order (as nowadays) but also to estimate the crowd density at the stadiums and in the airports, monitor the efficiency of advertisement and showcases, analyze traffic jams, inform about accidents weather abnormalities, emergencies etc.

Moreover, “smart” cameras could independently evaluate situations potentially dangerous for a particular person and react to them. For example, if a camera noticed a theft or an attack attempt, it can call the police. In the event of health issues (i.e., loss of consciousness) it can call the emergency etc.

Naturally, intellectual video surveillance would be a perfect add-on for smart home systems. Imagine having an “invisible guard” at home that analyses the situation and can react to it.

Many experts mention that the potential of video surveillance cameras will not be fully implemented unless the cameras will provide for real bilateral interaction, instead of merely recording the reactions of people and maintain the records. Today the possibility of development of this technology is real and Faceter is doing exactly this.

Successful Token Sale and issue of FACE tokens

ICO took place at Ethereum blockchain with the token standard ERC20, which provides for the fast integration of project tokens with the cryptocurrency exchanges to ensure the coin liquidity.

The detailed information about the structure of FACE tokens issue and the distribution of funds raised during the ICO is shown below:

FACE token will be listed at several trading platforms and will become available for free trading in the nearest future.

Official resources of the platform

Please refer to the official website of the project https://tokensale.faceter.io and to the blog https://medium.com/faceter for the latest development news, new partnerships, and agreements.

The post Faceter Is a Blockchain Platform for Video Surveillance and Video Stream Analysis appeared first on NewsBTC.

No team, plagiarized white paper, McAfee pump, promises of bitcoin-like returns, brand hijacking, a fake blog. Welcome to ICO-land.

Key Highlights

• ADA price formed a decent support at $0.1880 and recovered higher against the US Dollar (tethered).
• There was a break above a key bearish trend line with resistance at $0.2050 on the hourly chart of the ADA/USD pair (data feed via Bittrex).
• The pair may continue to move higher as long as it is above the $0.2000 support level.

Cardano price is showing recovery signs against the US Dollar and Bitcoin. ADA/USD could correct further higher towards the $0.2250 resistance zone.

Cardano Price Analysis

After a major decline below $0.2000, ADA price found support above the $0.1850 level against the US Dollar. The price traded as low as $0.1880 before starting an upside correction. It moved higher and traded above the $0.1950 and $0.2000 resistance levels. Moreover, there was a break above the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the last decline from the $0.2600 high to $0.1880 low.

Recently, there was a break above a key bearish trend line with resistance at $0.2050 on the hourly chart of the ADA/USD pair. The current price action suggests positive signs above $0.2000. However, there are a few important hurdles on the upside near $0.2200 and $0.2250. The 50% Fib retracement level of the last decline from the $0.2600 high to $0.1880 low is at $0.2240 to act as a resistance. Moreover, the 100 hourly simple moving average is just below $0.2240. Therefore, if the price corrects further higher, it may perhaps face a lot of selling interest near $0.2400 and $0.2450.

The chart indicates that if the price fails to move above the $0.2250 level, it could drop once again. On the downside, the $0.2000 support holds a lot of importance. A break below this will most likely push the price below the recent low of $0.1880 in the near term.

Hourly MACD – The MACD for ADA/USD is slowly gaining pace in the bullish zone.

Hourly RSI – The RSI for ADA/USD is flat above the 50 level.

Major Support Level – $0.2000

Major Resistance Level – $0.2250

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