by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Medium Enterprise, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : You may soon login to Facebook with Blockchain-based authentication, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has indicated.
In a public interview with Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain late on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said he is “potentially interested” in putting the Facebook login on the Blockchain technology.
“I’m thinking about going back to decentralised or Blockchain authentication. Although I haven’t figured out a way to make this work out but this is around authentication and basically granting access to your information and to different services,” Zuckerberg told Zittrain.
According to him, Blockchain could give users more powers when granting data access to third-party apps.
Facebook last year promoted one of its senior engineers Evan Cheng as the Director of Engineering at its recently launched Blockchain division.
Earlier in May, Facebook set up a group within the company to explore Blockchain technology and its potential use for the platform, headed by Messenger chief David Marcus.
Media reports also said Facebook was exploring to develop its own cryptocurrency.
Facebook has over 2.3 billion users globally and launching cryptocurrency will allow them make payments using a virtual currency like Bitcoin.
In a statement, Facebook said: “Like many other companies, Facebook is exploring ways to leverage the power of Blockchain technology”.
According to The Verge, the risk of further data-sharing scandals is one of the main reasons why Facebook is wary of implementing the change.
“You basically take your information, you store it on some decentralised system and you have the choice of whether to log in different places and you’re not going through an intermediary. There’s a lot of things that I think would be quite attractive about that,” said Zuckerberg.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Economy, Markets, News, Technology
By Gokul Bhagabati,
New Delhi : By increasing productivity and reducing cost, Blockchain technology has the potential to create value of up to $5 billion in India in the next five years, a top official of IT industry’s apex body Nasscom has stressed.
“The Blockchain ecosystem is evolving in India. Creating awareness on how this technology is simpler and easier to use with the existing social media and Cloud technology can go a long way in helping the country realise its potential,” KS Viswanathan, Vice President (Industry Initiative), Nasscom, told IANS in an interview.
Based on distributed storage of data, Blockchain technology can enhance the speed of transactions while increasing transparency. It is widely recognised as having the potential to transform several sectors of the economy, including banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industry, travel, retail, healthcare and supplsy chain, among others.
But despite its potential, the response of Indian organisations to adopt this technology has been far from enthusiastic.
The primary factors that are holding back the widespread deployment of this tehnology in India is lack of awareness, unavailability of adequate skilled persons and insufficient computing infrastructure, Viswanathan, who also head Nasscom’s 10,000 Startups initiative, said.
“There are currently just 20-30 good Blockchain startups in the country,” Viswanathan said, adding that one way to increase investment in Blockchain is to invest in startups.
To create awareness on the importance of the technology and develop skill sets for Blockchain adoption and deployment in India, Nasscom in February tied up with Blockchain Research Institute (BRI), Canada.
The two entities agreed to collaborate on various activities, including joint webinars and knowledge sharing.
The industry body earlier this month also launched a platform, called FutureSkills, for skills development in eight varied technologies — Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), robotic process automation, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data analytics, 3D printing, Cloud computing, and social and mobile.
This platform was launched with the aim of up-skilling two million technology professions and skilling another two million potential employees and students over the next few years.
While cyber security was later added to the list as the 9th skill, Viswanathan said that Blockchain will be added to the list as the 10th skill by October this year.
In collaboration with BRI, Nasscom also started the first Nasscom Industry Partnership Programme (NIPP) Blockchain challenge from June this year.
The shortlisted teams will come together for a 36-hour session in Bangaluru, to be held on July 28-29, to explore new opportunities for co-creating innovative solutions in the areas of Blockchain technology.
For the challenge, eight large corporates including Fidelity Investments, Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI), ICICI Bank, Amdocs, SAP Labs, Wipro and IBM (which is also the knowledge partner) have joined the initiative as strategic partners.
“Boosting skill levels, creating awareness on how this technology is simpler and easier to use with the existing social media and Cloud technology, organising multiple hackathons and getting international research papers on Blockchain published are among the priorities that Nasscom is focusing on to increase deployment of the technology,” Viswanathan said.
He said that time is not yet ripe for India to think about a regulatory framework specifically for Blockchain as it can come under the ambit of regulations on data security and privacy.
(Gokul Bhagabati can be contacted at gokul.b@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Opinions, Technology
By Amit Kapoor & Kashish Arora,
The use of the internet has undergone rapid evolution in a matter of a few decades.
In the 1990s, the internet was described as “a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents” or simply put, ‘The Internet of Information’ which was primarily used to access data resources and services administered on the web browsers.
Back then, no one would have thought how it would fundamentally change our daily lives in the future. It has rapidly evolved from a platform to gather information to a space where we can shop, bank and communicate. The digital revolution has made the world realise the value of the internet and its implementations.
So, today we are gradually moving towards what Canadian strategist Don Tapscott calls ‘The Internet of Value’; that is the fountainhead of digital assets. Blockchain, which allows us to enable the exchange of any asset across the globe in real-time, ranging from stocks and bonds to music and art, is the next inevitable step in the global progress towards ‘The Internet of Value’.
Various applications of the internet have been made possible which are efficient like peer-to-peer money transfer, because internet reduces the transactional and communication cost to a bare minimum. This is the same force driving the new platforms that have emerged to deliver goods and services at levels of efficiency previously unimaginable, and blockchain is leading the revolution in redefining the new-age internet.
Like a traditional ledger, blockchain is essentially a record of transactions. These transactions can be any movement of money, goods or secure data — for example, a purchase at a supermarket, or the assignment of an Aadhar number. It works in three basic steps. First, it gathers data that the user has provided in forms of smart contracts, transactions IDs. Second, it orders the received data into blocks and finally chains them together securely using cryptography making it decentralised and accessible via any computer/mobile device across the network.
Now the question here is why do we need it? What is it that will change the way groceries are bought, stocks are purchased, money is transferred, bills are paid, and land deeds are made? The answer possibly can be the demand for trust and security emerging from both people and enterprises alike. Blockchain best serves these purposes as the trust factor is native to the medium. For example, if you are transferring money online to your friend, then your medium becomes the internet and to secure your transfer, a clever programming code is written. The same concept is applied by blockchain, but the security is made more secure by cryptography.
Blockchain has the potential and can be implemented across diverse sectors such as banking, education, and health. For instance, we keep our savings, assets and cash with banks because they are trustworthy and secure. However, their data is centralised, making them quite prone to cybercriminals that can bring the entire banking system to a halt. Now consider a person working abroad who wants to send a remittance to his family back home but has to encounter multiple clearances before his family receives it. With blockchain technology, the concept of crypto currency comes into picture, thus resulting in an open-access registry of monetary flows which makes the intermediation of financial institutions unnecessary and even costs less.
Second, in the field of healthcare, while big data analytics and artificial intelligence are simplifying healthcare delivery by smartly diagnosing the diseases from the patterns of numerous plugged-in electrocardiograms, blockchain is turning out to be a perfect platform for recording the medical attention of a patient and identifying a trend from the data recorded. Consider health card: A database which can be perceived as your health identity as it carries your entire medical history. Such technologies can find effective application in reducing information asymmetries within the healthcare and insurance markets by providing the most accurate data on patients.
Finally, blockchain can reorient the education system by delivering academic transparency. It can build an e-portfolio of academic credentials which has your test scores since the day you entered school. Paying for school fee in crypto currency — which is decentralised — from anywhere around the world on a secured network is commendable. Hence, this multi-trillion-dollar industry of education is indeed revolutionising.
Also, if implemented in government operations, blockchain will help break down barriers built from bureaucracy and corruption by providing a means to bypass existing power structures. It could be used to transform the way charities are created and regulated. By implementing a transparent system of transactions that include deposits of cash, transfers of donation and expenses spending will bring about a paradigm shift on how rules are enforced for these organisations.
Moreover, this technology has the competence to revamp the present system by automating manual processes, eradicating frauds and controlling the issues for authorisation. Its implementation across diverse sectors can be a solution to the most foundational problems of mankind. Hence, blockchain could be the perfect platform to transform a knowledge-driven economy into a digital-inclusive society.
(Amit Kapoor is Chair, Institute for Competitiveness, India. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at amit.kapoor@competitiveness.in and tweets @kautiliya. Kashish Arora is data analyst, Institute for Competitiveness, India.)
—IANS
