Moderating the Media and Entertainment industry discussion at Microsoft with Audu Maikori, Executive Vice Chairman of Chocolate City Group has been a highlight of my career. Maikori is a visionary and industry leader behind one of the largest entertainment companies in Africa. The impact and reach of the event exceeded expectations, with much positive feedback.
I am pretty excited about hitting this milestone: a published patent application with IBM, where I have had the privilege of building a career and being part of an amazing community. The invention is a multimodal data visualization technology that will adjust in real time to fit the needs of individuals with varying levels of sensory acuity: #Accessibility #Technology #Inventor #Data #DataVisualization #Enugu #Firsts.
It depends.
Blockchain has evolved from the concept of a platform for trading cryptocurrencies to one that exchanges all kinds of digital assets, from flowers and luxury goods to medical records and supply chain documents (smart contracts). When considering adopting a private blockchain model for your business transactions, you should ask yourself these four questions:
What are my transactions?
A first step is identifying the assets that you will be exchanging on a blockchain network. A transaction is simply an exchange, trade or transfer of an asset, a digital one in this case, between two or more parties. If your asset will change hands, then you will need to keep a chain of records documenting the activities of the exchange. This is the essence of a blockchain, to manage and secure digital transactions as part of an open, transparent and decentralized system of record. And don’t worry, your blockchain data is confidential and private.
A blockchain is a shared ledger of key-value hash chains, representing transactions, that is distributed amongst approved parties. It records data from member transactions and updates the ledger securely and efficiently, in a way that is both verifiable and permanent. This system of record is publicly visible to each approved member of the network, and when written to blockchain, each new transaction record is linked to the record before it, making the system auditable and immutable, the latter meaning it cannot be altered, as long as the encryption on the blockchain remains intact. Computational algorithms and approaches are deployed to guarantee that the transaction recording on the database is permanent, chronologically ordered, and available to all members of the network.
Will I leverage network effect?
A network effect is the effect, described in economics and business, that one user of a good or service has on the value of that good or service to others. When a network effect is present, the value of a good or service is dependent on the number of others using it.[1] A greater number of users increases the value to each.
The strength of a blockchain network is in its numbers, and this is where the concept of consensus comes in. In his lucid blogpost for Evergreen, @EricJorgenson explains the nuances between virality, network effects, and economies of scale. The network of users acts as a consensus mechanism. Having more users or nodes on the network generally means more distributed operators will review and agree on all addenda before the data is permanently committed to the blockchain. This means that each member is creating the same shared system of record simultaneously. Because the database is distributed, each party has access to the entire database and its complete history, making data manipulation very difficult, if not near impossible. This also eliminated the potential of having Single Points of Failure (SPOF) in any one part of the system, leading to a more robust system overall than a traditional centralized database could offer.
Can I pool resources?
For the purpose of pooling resources to achieve a common goal, business networks can come together to form a consortium that benefits from sharing reference data. A consortium blockchain platform is essentially a private blockchain model that will allow its members to retain privacy and control, while reducing their transaction speed and cost. This model might be appealing to parties spread across industrial, geographical or regulatory boundaries.
Each member of a consortium blockchain platform plays a different role in meeting their common goal, with a visionary who will be responsible for leading the pack. Hyperledger Fabric, for example, obviates the need for having a visionary to build the code, therefore a potential barrier to easy adoption.
What is the business use case?
Beyond building a minimum viable product that will be deployed on the blockchain, what is the overarching vision?
In summary, businesses today should be on blockchain, but not all businesses qualify. Blockchains are well-suited for certain functions, while for others, they are not.
Links:
[1] – Network effect (n.d). In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 5, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Resources:
Curated list of blockchain services and exchanges – Imbaniac, Github https://github.com/imbaniac/awesome-blockchain
I had the privilege of guest speaking this past Sunday, June 11, 2017, at the RCCG Career Day to the young adults and recent grads in the community.
SpeakerDeck: https://goo.gl/igJXD6
This month, I am featured in a series of TV commercials for the New York state, themed Tomorrow Starts Today. The commercials are currently airing on prime time TV nationwide (United States and Canada).
Credits: Phillipvan.com
See more on Youtube:
New York State: Rust Belt to Brain Belt
“Millennials are heading to Upstate New York for rapidly expanding job markets in fields like technology, engineering, and even gaming.”
New York State The Millennial Effect
“Millennials are reshaping Upstate New York by creating vibrant communities full of diverse restaurants and nightlife.”
New York State: The New American Dream
“New York is evolving into a hub for Millennials to chase the new American Dream with an array of career opportunities and a high quality of life.”
LinkedIn is a data-driven company that relies heavily on Big Data processing and storage systems like Hadoop to drive critical decisions and features for its business applications. In this session, software engineer Vinitha Gankidi shares some experiences at LinkedIn with respect to challenges and solutions around scalability and performance while allocating and monitoring resources, and running workflows on Hadoop. Some of the results impacted the following areas:
The role of (information) technology in business is to facilitate business outcomes. If this statement is true, then it solves the chicken or egg causality dilemma – Tech for business or Business for tech, while also making a case for “hybrids“ i.e. having people in an organization that are able to combine business acumen with tech savvy. Hybrids are the real MVPs saving companies from waste, and analytics solutions are the tools that enable these superhero abilities. The context of data, as in the title is from viewing data systems as a product, and the goal of this session is to provide a guide to empower business users to make better data-driven decisions.
Behind business goals are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) dressed up as questions that crucial for organization success. Business users are desperate for data and tools that will provide these answers. They are curious to know for example – how well their marketing campaigns are performing, elapsed time between orders, etc. Placing analytics solutions in the hands of product teams that need to be business smart and data savvy will not only maximize effectiveness but will transform how teams work to make products smarter and better decisions.
To empower business users with data, it’s important to start where the organization is. Below are some pointers to consider when planning a data product.
Bringing it all together, remember which comes first as you combine and bridge business acumen with technology and let these work in tandem to get the job done.
Measuring civic life is critical to improving it. This was the core message I got from an enlightening panel of five women in the field of data science, who introduced themselves by their favorite data sets, and Civic Data to the audience – what it is, who owns it and how citizens could leverage it. At the intersection of analytics and social good, the conversation touched on topics of real life data sets and issues that spread across transportation and safety in New York City, water consumption in cities like Flint, Michigan and historic droughts in California, human trafficking and labor exploitation, racial and ethnic bias in patent filing and rates of arrests.
In developed countries today, we live in data saturated environments. The deluge of open data comes with tons of benefits. It’s impactful when conversations are reoriented as a result of this uncovering or discovering and sharing of knowledge. For example, one of the panelists, Katy Dickinson (pictured below) has been part of an exciting project with a goal to improve public transport in Tunis, which is a North African city in Tunisia, where citizens have major pain points dealing with sporadic bus schedules and routes. Her team will be making a map of public transport in the city and the schedules. But as usual, benefits are usually not without costs. Behind numbers are people, and these people who provide their information must be considered and protected while maintaining a human centered approach. Managing the risks of personally identifiable information (PII), consequences of integrating and differential privacy were weighed in with examples such as using tip line data to help human trafficking victims.
Overall this was a profound session for more reasons than one, and most importantly, it inspired and expanded my thinking. As mentioned before, there’s a deluge of open data in developed countries with access to tools for computing and storing this “big data” so much that tinkering is easily the norm – which is phenomenal. On the other hand, I would love to say the same for the rest of the world. Depending on where you stand, the reach of the digital age might seem widespread, but from a global viewpoint, we are not there yet. My heart and mind went out to developing and undeveloped countries that are neither privy to access this wealth of data or even create theirs. I don’t believe in the saying that ignorance is bliss. Their challenges and priorities are different as they are valid. I talked with Katy and Erin Akred after the session and learned about the Tech Women Initiative (supported by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs), as well DataKind‘s mission, involvement and outreach. As my call to action, I’ll love to be a part of expanding the ecosystem and improving the chances of success where people are otherwise not so privileged.
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I blogged about attending Grace Hopper last year and some of the great things that followed as a result. With exactly a week to go, GHC 16 is upon us and I’m looking forward to being there, not only as an attendee but also as a volunteer blogger! Let’s connect in Houston, TX.
Hybrid 