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For more information: https://umanologic.ca/ 

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Whatever your Mobile app development company in Alberta needs are, our team is ready to help take your business online with a professionally designed website that will make an impact on your customers.

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Are you looking for top mobile app development companies in Alberta? We have listed app development companies to hire for your enterprise app development.

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How blockchain may kill the password

How blockchain may kill the password

Imagine a company that can verify the background of a new employee and onboard them with the click of a single virtual button, or a banking customer who can verify their identity for a loan without exposing personally identifiable information – again with a click of a button.

That’s the potential blockchain holds for decentralized identity management. It’s done  by creating a digital wallet that serves as a repository for all kinds of personal and financial data, info that can only be shared after a specific request and only with the permission of the owner.

Blockchain distributed ledger technology (DLT) – in combination with digital identity verification – holds the potential to solve online privacy issues that plague everything from consumer sales and bank know-your-customer regulations to employee credentials that allow access to confidential business systems.

“There are multiple vendors in this space that are either in the early R&D stage or testing their products in pilot projects,” said Homan Farahmand, a senior research director with Gartner. “It is too early to declare any winner, by any means, because just having a working product is not enough. Decentralized identity requires a vibrant ecosystem, a robust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.”

One considerable security attribute of storing digital identities on an encrypted, distributed blockchain ledger is eliminating “honey pots,” or central repositories for customer account information, according to Julie Esser, chief engagement officer for CULedger, a Denver-based Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO). Those repositories are prime targets for hackers.

Credit Unions are already testing ID management

Like other CUSOs, CULedger is a cooperative owned by multiple credit unions for the purpose of providing back-office services; it was created a year ago to build out a blockchain-based identity management platform called My CUID. The platform is expected to launch in the second half of 2019 and will hand the keys to data protection over to customers who sign up for an app. CULedger has 36 investors – 26 credit unions and several CUSOs.

In October, CULedger began piloting My CUID with five other credit unions and another CUSO; it eliminated the need for user names and passwords and relieved credit union call centers from the obligation of resetting them when a customer loses them.

How it works: a new or current customer of a member credit union contacts a customer service call center, which sends a text message to the customer’s mobile device with a link to download the My CUID app. The credit union’s rep then issues the customer their credentials – a digital wallet, which holds personally identifiable information obtained during the initial customer contact. That information is encrypted and can only be accessed with the member’s authorization, which is requested when they make a transaction.

Each time a customer using My CUID contacts the credit union – or vice versa – their smartphone or tablet receives a pop-up dialogue requesting they confirm their membership before any transaction is completed.

“You’d click OK or Not OK. It doesn’t feel a lot different than what happens with other apps on your phone,” Esser said. “It’s all based on…the encrypted channels we’ve created, which is really cool. You’re creating a two-way secure communication channel. So, not only does your credit union know it’s you they’re talking to, but you also you know it’s your credit union calling you.”

CULedger has set a goal of issuing 1 million digital identities to credit union members in 2019. Because credit unions must comply with Know-Your-Customer federal regulations, the blockchain-based digital ID service would also fulfill regulatory compliance, Esser said.

Along with giving the customer control over their identity by handing them the blockchain encryption keys, My CUID would eliminate the need for user login names and passwords and dramatically reduce the time it takes for a credit union call center representative to authenticate a member.

It can take a rep from 60 to 90 seconds to authenticate a member before a transaction even starts. That can be reduced to 5 seconds or less with My CUID, according to Esser. “It’s not a pleasant experience to phone a call center because the customer is welcomed with 20 questions to identify who you are, so it’s a wonky process that needs fixing.”

Traditionally, credit unions and other financial services firms rely on third-party service providers for call center and customer authentication services, many of which are located outside the U.S. CULedger would place control back in the hands of member credit unions, Esser said.

In 2019, CULedger plans to begin building out its production customer permission network; it is currently considering several blockchain platforms, including IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric service and R3’s Corda, the biggest commercial blockchain consortium among banks, insurers and other financial service firms. CULedger is also considering working with the Hedera Foundation, the creator of Swirlds, a software platform for creating distributed applications (dApps).

Swirlds is based on the Hashgraph protocol, a DLT well suited to the financial services industry because it can process more than 100,000 transactions per second, unlike bitcoin, which processes three to four transactions per second.

“We need the ability to conduct transactions instantaneously – in real time,” Esser said. “We’d planned to create our own platform, but with the focus on a decentralized identification piece, this allows us to not recreate the wheel. There may be some applications that require different [blockchain] platforms.”

How a self-sovereign ID works

For consumers who are mindful of their online information – credit card numbers, date of birth, annual income, etc. – blockchain has the potential for “self-sovereign” identities like CULedger is creating, meaning the user controls who can see their data or get purchasing approval without releasing their income details.

Self-sovereign identities work like this: the user has a bank confirm a credit limit or an employer confirm annual income; that confirmation information is then encrypted, but available, on a public blockchain ledger to which the consumer holds the private and public cryptographic keys.

If a buyer wants a car loan from an auto dealership, for example, the consumer can give them permission through a public key to confirm that he or she has enough credit or annual income without revealing an exact dollar amount. So, for example, if the car dealer wants to ensure a consumer earns more than $50,000 a year, that’s all the blockchain ledger will confirm (not that they actually earn $72,587).

The confidentiality technique is known as zero knowledge proof (ZKP), a cryptography technology that allows a user to prove that funds, assets or identifying information exist without revealing the information behind it. Ernst & Young has created a public blockchain prototype it plans to launch in 2019 that lets companies use ZKPs to complete business transactions confidentially.

Sovereign IDs in the enterprise

CULedger is also working with the Sovrin Foundation, a new nonprofit that has created the blockchain-based Sovrin Network; it enables anyone to globally exchange pre-verified data with any entity also on the distributed ledger.

The online credentials issued via the Sovrin Network are akin to a physical ID you might carry in your wallet, such as a driver’s license, a company ID or a bank debit card. The virtual encrypted wallet (or crypto wallet) would link back to the institutions that created them, such as a bank, a government agency or even an employer, which, through the blockchain, would automatically verify the needed information to a requestor.

“Our market strategy involves working with enterprise partners to solve their ID problems rather than trying to go direct to end users, so yeah, we’re working hard in that area and have a number of partners who are doing things there. Three who come to mind are Government of British Columbia, CULedger and IBM/ATB Financial,” said Phil Windley, chair and co-founder of the Sovrin Foundation.

The Government of British Columbia and the Government of Ontario have already rolled out a production system using the Sovrin Network for business registration and licensing; together they’ve issued over 6 million credentials, according to Windley.

Sovrin development partners IBM, Workday and ATB Financial (a bank in Alberta) have also started pilot tests of the Sovrin Network.

The partners are demonstrating how digital credentials could work for IBM employees. ATB Financial issues a digital credential, which can be used for both logging into the bank and IBM’s user network. Along with validating the employees’ financial information, the distributed ledger application eliminates the need for employees to have a username or password, Windley said.

“Because it’s cryptographically based, it has a public key associated with them, and you [the employee] own the private key,” Windley said.

Gartner’s Farahmand said self-sovereign identities based on blockchain distributed ledgers are being eyed for all kinds of enterprises uses, including onboard new hires.

Each time a new employee is hired, a new decentralized identifier is generated by the that employee and passed to the enterprise. That identifier can then be propagated within the internal systems for user authentication to the enterprise network and applications, Farahmand said.

“This can be a powerful proposition as it speeds up the onboarding process and subsequent identity life cycle management activities, as well as enabling password-less authentication. It also helps with converging multiple personas a person can have relevant to the organization,” Farahmand said, explaining that the digital IDs can be used to access multiple systems within a company based on organization-based permissions.

A popular design pattern for decentralized identity is comprised of a core identifier and a set of “pairwise” identifiers, each for a relationship the user has with an organization. Pairwise identifiers are cryptographically derived from the core identifier. The pairwise identifier enables an enterprise system to uniquely verify a user identity for each relationship and potentially prevent correlation of user activity across different relationships, enabling privacy-by-design principles at the protocol level, Farahmand said.

For example, a bank employee can be a bank customer at the same time while using the same self-sovereign ID. The two personas are typically represented by two digital identities in two siloed systems – one as an employee and one as a customer of the bank.

“In case of a decentralized identity model, the same person can have two sets of identifiers … mapped to the same core digital identity, which can potentially simplify reconciliation of user activities,” Farahmand said.

Another benefit to a self-sovereign ID is the ability to streamline B2B scenarios where an employee of one organization can have access to systems in another. For example, Farahmand said, if the host organization trusts the decentralized identity that is attested by the guest organization, then a new pair-wise decentralized identifier can be generated to authenticate the user; that simplifies the onboarding and access governance for business customers or other partners.

Significant hurdles remain

While self-sovereign IDs based on blockchain hold significant promise for increasing privacy and efficiency, there are also significant technology hurdles that have yet to be vaulted. For one, trust in blockchain.

A 2018 Gartner CIO survey revealed on average that only 3.3% of companies worldwide had actually deployed blockchain in a production environment.

In a blog post, Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, listed eight hurdles blockchain needs to surmount before it can become a cure-all for virtually any international, transactional network need – from fee-less, cross-border payments to supply chain tracking.

One significant challenge is integrating DLT systems with legacy databases, the current repositories for corporate employee identities. A decentralized identity system also requires a vibrant ecosystem, a roust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.

“While we encourage our clients to watch this space and do some limited experimentation or even proof-of-concept projects,” Farahmand said, “we also caution them to make sure these products are battle tested, hardened and ready to withstand different types of attacks.”

Source link http://bit.ly/2Sw4gra

[adrianjenkins952wblr]

How blockchain may kill the password

How blockchain may kill the password

Imagine a company that can verify the background of a new employee and onboard them with the click of a single virtual button, or a banking customer who can verify their identity for a loan without exposing personally identifiable information – again with a click of a button.

That’s the potential blockchain holds for decentralized identity management. It’s done  by creating a digital wallet that serves as a repository for all kinds of personal and financial data, info that can only be shared after a specific request and only with the permission of the owner.

Blockchain distributed ledger technology (DLT) – in combination with digital identity verification – holds the potential to solve online privacy issues that plague everything from consumer sales and bank know-your-customer regulations to employee credentials that allow access to confidential business systems.

“There are multiple vendors in this space that are either in the early R&D stage or testing their products in pilot projects,” said Homan Farahmand, a senior research director with Gartner. “It is too early to declare any winner, by any means, because just having a working product is not enough. Decentralized identity requires a vibrant ecosystem, a robust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.”

One considerable security attribute of storing digital identities on an encrypted, distributed blockchain ledger is eliminating “honey pots,” or central repositories for customer account information, according to Julie Esser, chief engagement officer for CULedger, a Denver-based Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO). Those repositories are prime targets for hackers.

Credit Unions are already testing ID management

Like other CUSOs, CULedger is a cooperative owned by multiple credit unions for the purpose of providing back-office services; it was created a year ago to build out a blockchain-based identity management platform called My CUID. The platform is expected to launch in the second half of 2019 and will hand the keys to data protection over to customers who sign up for an app. CULedger has 36 investors – 26 credit unions and several CUSOs.

In October, CULedger began piloting My CUID with five other credit unions and another CUSO; it eliminated the need for user names and passwords and relieved credit union call centers from the obligation of resetting them when a customer loses them.

How it works: a new or current customer of a member credit union contacts a customer service call center, which sends a text message to the customer’s mobile device with a link to download the My CUID app. The credit union’s rep then issues the customer their credentials – a digital wallet, which holds personally identifiable information obtained during the initial customer contact. That information is encrypted and can only be accessed with the member’s authorization, which is requested when they make a transaction.

Each time a customer using My CUID contacts the credit union – or vice versa – their smartphone or tablet receives a pop-up dialogue requesting they confirm their membership before any transaction is completed.

“You’d click OK or Not OK. It doesn’t feel a lot different than what happens with other apps on your phone,” Esser said. “It’s all based on…the encrypted channels we’ve created, which is really cool. You’re creating a two-way secure communication channel. So, not only does your credit union know it’s you they’re talking to, but you also you know it’s your credit union calling you.”

CULedger has set a goal of issuing 1 million digital identities to credit union members in 2019. Because credit unions must comply with Know-Your-Customer federal regulations, the blockchain-based digital ID service would also fulfill regulatory compliance, Esser said.

Along with giving the customer control over their identity by handing them the blockchain encryption keys, My CUID would eliminate the need for user login names and passwords and dramatically reduce the time it takes for a credit union call center representative to authenticate a member.

It can take a rep from 60 to 90 seconds to authenticate a member before a transaction even starts. That can be reduced to 5 seconds or less with My CUID, according to Esser. “It’s not a pleasant experience to phone a call center because the customer is welcomed with 20 questions to identify who you are, so it’s a wonky process that needs fixing.”

Traditionally, credit unions and other financial services firms rely on third-party service providers for call center and customer authentication services, many of which are located outside the U.S. CULedger would place control back in the hands of member credit unions, Esser said.

In 2019, CULedger plans to begin building out its production customer permission network; it is currently considering several blockchain platforms, including IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric service and R3’s Corda, the biggest commercial blockchain consortium among banks, insurers and other financial service firms. CULedger is also considering working with the Hedera Foundation, the creator of Swirlds, a software platform for creating distributed applications (dApps).

Swirlds is based on the Hashgraph protocol, a DLT well suited to the financial services industry because it can process more than 100,000 transactions per second, unlike bitcoin, which processes three to four transactions per second.

“We need the ability to conduct transactions instantaneously – in real time,” Esser said. “We’d planned to create our own platform, but with the focus on a decentralized identification piece, this allows us to not recreate the wheel. There may be some applications that require different [blockchain] platforms.”

How a self-sovereign ID works

For consumers who are mindful of their online information – credit card numbers, date of birth, annual income, etc. – blockchain has the potential for “self-sovereign” identities like CULedger is creating, meaning the user controls who can see their data or get purchasing approval without releasing their income details.

Self-sovereign identities work like this: the user has a bank confirm a credit limit or an employer confirm annual income; that confirmation information is then encrypted, but available, on a public blockchain ledger to which the consumer holds the private and public cryptographic keys.

If a buyer wants a car loan from an auto dealership, for example, the consumer can give them permission through a public key to confirm that he or she has enough credit or annual income without revealing an exact dollar amount. So, for example, if the car dealer wants to ensure a consumer earns more than $50,000 a year, that’s all the blockchain ledger will confirm (not that they actually earn $72,587).

The confidentiality technique is known as zero knowledge proof (ZKP), a cryptography technology that allows a user to prove that funds, assets or identifying information exist without revealing the information behind it. Ernst & Young has created a public blockchain prototype it plans to launch in 2019 that lets companies use ZKPs to complete business transactions confidentially.

Sovereign IDs in the enterprise

CULedger is also working with the Sovrin Foundation, a new nonprofit that has created the blockchain-based Sovrin Network; it enables anyone to globally exchange pre-verified data with any entity also on the distributed ledger.

The online credentials issued via the Sovrin Network are akin to a physical ID you might carry in your wallet, such as a driver’s license, a company ID or a bank debit card. The virtual encrypted wallet (or crypto wallet) would link back to the institutions that created them, such as a bank, a government agency or even an employer, which, through the blockchain, would automatically verify the needed information to a requestor.

“Our market strategy involves working with enterprise partners to solve their ID problems rather than trying to go direct to end users, so yeah, we’re working hard in that area and have a number of partners who are doing things there. Three who come to mind are Government of British Columbia, CULedger and IBM/ATB Financial,” said Phil Windley, chair and co-founder of the Sovrin Foundation.

The Government of British Columbia and the Government of Ontario have already rolled out a production system using the Sovrin Network for business registration and licensing; together they’ve issued over 6 million credentials, according to Windley.

Sovrin development partners IBM, Workday and ATB Financial (a bank in Alberta) have also started pilot tests of the Sovrin Network.

The partners are demonstrating how digital credentials could work for IBM employees. ATB Financial issues a digital credential, which can be used for both logging into the bank and IBM’s user network. Along with validating the employees’ financial information, the distributed ledger application eliminates the need for employees to have a username or password, Windley said.

“Because it’s cryptographically based, it has a public key associated with them, and you [the employee] own the private key,” Windley said.

Gartner’s Farahmand said self-sovereign identities based on blockchain distributed ledgers are being eyed for all kinds of enterprises uses, including onboard new hires.

Each time a new employee is hired, a new decentralized identifier is generated by the that employee and passed to the enterprise. That identifier can then be propagated within the internal systems for user authentication to the enterprise network and applications, Farahmand said.

“This can be a powerful proposition as it speeds up the onboarding process and subsequent identity life cycle management activities, as well as enabling password-less authentication. It also helps with converging multiple personas a person can have relevant to the organization,” Farahmand said, explaining that the digital IDs can be used to access multiple systems within a company based on organization-based permissions.

A popular design pattern for decentralized identity is comprised of a core identifier and a set of “pairwise” identifiers, each for a relationship the user has with an organization. Pairwise identifiers are cryptographically derived from the core identifier. The pairwise identifier enables an enterprise system to uniquely verify a user identity for each relationship and potentially prevent correlation of user activity across different relationships, enabling privacy-by-design principles at the protocol level, Farahmand said.

For example, a bank employee can be a bank customer at the same time while using the same self-sovereign ID. The two personas are typically represented by two digital identities in two siloed systems – one as an employee and one as a customer of the bank.

“In case of a decentralized identity model, the same person can have two sets of identifiers … mapped to the same core digital identity, which can potentially simplify reconciliation of user activities,” Farahmand said.

Another benefit to a self-sovereign ID is the ability to streamline B2B scenarios where an employee of one organization can have access to systems in another. For example, Farahmand said, if the host organization trusts the decentralized identity that is attested by the guest organization, then a new pair-wise decentralized identifier can be generated to authenticate the user; that simplifies the onboarding and access governance for business customers or other partners.

Significant hurdles remain

While self-sovereign IDs based on blockchain hold significant promise for increasing privacy and efficiency, there are also significant technology hurdles that have yet to be vaulted. For one, trust in blockchain.

A 2018 Gartner CIO survey revealed on average that only 3.3% of companies worldwide had actually deployed blockchain in a production environment.

In a blog post, Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, listed eight hurdles blockchain needs to surmount before it can become a cure-all for virtually any international, transactional network need – from fee-less, cross-border payments to supply chain tracking.

One significant challenge is integrating DLT systems with legacy databases, the current repositories for corporate employee identities. A decentralized identity system also requires a vibrant ecosystem, a roust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.

“While we encourage our clients to watch this space and do some limited experimentation or even proof-of-concept projects,” Farahmand said, “we also caution them to make sure these products are battle tested, hardened and ready to withstand different types of attacks.”

Source link http://bit.ly/2Sw4gra

[vanessawestwcrtr5]

How blockchain may kill the password

How blockchain may kill the password

Imagine a company that can verify the background of a new employee and onboard them with the click of a single virtual button, or a banking customer who can verify their identity for a loan without exposing personally identifiable information – again with a click of a button.

That’s the potential blockchain holds for decentralized identity management. It’s done  by creating a digital wallet that serves as a repository for all kinds of personal and financial data, info that can only be shared after a specific request and only with the permission of the owner.

Blockchain distributed ledger technology (DLT) – in combination with digital identity verification – holds the potential to solve online privacy issues that plague everything from consumer sales and bank know-your-customer regulations to employee credentials that allow access to confidential business systems.

“There are multiple vendors in this space that are either in the early R&D stage or testing their products in pilot projects,” said Homan Farahmand, a senior research director with Gartner. “It is too early to declare any winner, by any means, because just having a working product is not enough. Decentralized identity requires a vibrant ecosystem, a robust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.”

One considerable security attribute of storing digital identities on an encrypted, distributed blockchain ledger is eliminating “honey pots,” or central repositories for customer account information, according to Julie Esser, chief engagement officer for CULedger, a Denver-based Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO). Those repositories are prime targets for hackers.

Credit Unions are already testing ID management

Like other CUSOs, CULedger is a cooperative owned by multiple credit unions for the purpose of providing back-office services; it was created a year ago to build out a blockchain-based identity management platform called My CUID. The platform is expected to launch in the second half of 2019 and will hand the keys to data protection over to customers who sign up for an app. CULedger has 36 investors – 26 credit unions and several CUSOs.

In October, CULedger began piloting My CUID with five other credit unions and another CUSO; it eliminated the need for user names and passwords and relieved credit union call centers from the obligation of resetting them when a customer loses them.

How it works: a new or current customer of a member credit union contacts a customer service call center, which sends a text message to the customer’s mobile device with a link to download the My CUID app. The credit union’s rep then issues the customer their credentials – a digital wallet, which holds personally identifiable information obtained during the initial customer contact. That information is encrypted and can only be accessed with the member’s authorization, which is requested when they make a transaction.

Each time a customer using My CUID contacts the credit union – or vice versa – their smartphone or tablet receives a pop-up dialogue requesting they confirm their membership before any transaction is completed.

“You’d click OK or Not OK. It doesn’t feel a lot different than what happens with other apps on your phone,” Esser said. “It’s all based on…the encrypted channels we’ve created, which is really cool. You’re creating a two-way secure communication channel. So, not only does your credit union know it’s you they’re talking to, but you also you know it’s your credit union calling you.”

CULedger has set a goal of issuing 1 million digital identities to credit union members in 2019. Because credit unions must comply with Know-Your-Customer federal regulations, the blockchain-based digital ID service would also fulfill regulatory compliance, Esser said.

Along with giving the customer control over their identity by handing them the blockchain encryption keys, My CUID would eliminate the need for user login names and passwords and dramatically reduce the time it takes for a credit union call center representative to authenticate a member.

It can take a rep from 60 to 90 seconds to authenticate a member before a transaction even starts. That can be reduced to 5 seconds or less with My CUID, according to Esser. “It’s not a pleasant experience to phone a call center because the customer is welcomed with 20 questions to identify who you are, so it’s a wonky process that needs fixing.”

Traditionally, credit unions and other financial services firms rely on third-party service providers for call center and customer authentication services, many of which are located outside the U.S. CULedger would place control back in the hands of member credit unions, Esser said.

In 2019, CULedger plans to begin building out its production customer permission network; it is currently considering several blockchain platforms, including IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric service and R3’s Corda, the biggest commercial blockchain consortium among banks, insurers and other financial service firms. CULedger is also considering working with the Hedera Foundation, the creator of Swirlds, a software platform for creating distributed applications (dApps).

Swirlds is based on the Hashgraph protocol, a DLT well suited to the financial services industry because it can process more than 100,000 transactions per second, unlike bitcoin, which processes three to four transactions per second.

“We need the ability to conduct transactions instantaneously – in real time,” Esser said. “We’d planned to create our own platform, but with the focus on a decentralized identification piece, this allows us to not recreate the wheel. There may be some applications that require different [blockchain] platforms.”

How a self-sovereign ID works

For consumers who are mindful of their online information – credit card numbers, date of birth, annual income, etc. – blockchain has the potential for “self-sovereign” identities like CULedger is creating, meaning the user controls who can see their data or get purchasing approval without releasing their income details.

Self-sovereign identities work like this: the user has a bank confirm a credit limit or an employer confirm annual income; that confirmation information is then encrypted, but available, on a public blockchain ledger to which the consumer holds the private and public cryptographic keys.

If a buyer wants a car loan from an auto dealership, for example, the consumer can give them permission through a public key to confirm that he or she has enough credit or annual income without revealing an exact dollar amount. So, for example, if the car dealer wants to ensure a consumer earns more than $50,000 a year, that’s all the blockchain ledger will confirm (not that they actually earn $72,587).

The confidentiality technique is known as zero knowledge proof (ZKP), a cryptography technology that allows a user to prove that funds, assets or identifying information exist without revealing the information behind it. Ernst & Young has created a public blockchain prototype it plans to launch in 2019 that lets companies use ZKPs to complete business transactions confidentially.

Sovereign IDs in the enterprise

CULedger is also working with the Sovrin Foundation, a new nonprofit that has created the blockchain-based Sovrin Network; it enables anyone to globally exchange pre-verified data with any entity also on the distributed ledger.

The online credentials issued via the Sovrin Network are akin to a physical ID you might carry in your wallet, such as a driver’s license, a company ID or a bank debit card. The virtual encrypted wallet (or crypto wallet) would link back to the institutions that created them, such as a bank, a government agency or even an employer, which, through the blockchain, would automatically verify the needed information to a requestor.

“Our market strategy involves working with enterprise partners to solve their ID problems rather than trying to go direct to end users, so yeah, we’re working hard in that area and have a number of partners who are doing things there. Three who come to mind are Government of British Columbia, CULedger and IBM/ATB Financial,” said Phil Windley, chair and co-founder of the Sovrin Foundation.

The Government of British Columbia and the Government of Ontario have already rolled out a production system using the Sovrin Network for business registration and licensing; together they’ve issued over 6 million credentials, according to Windley.

Sovrin development partners IBM, Workday and ATB Financial (a bank in Alberta) have also started pilot tests of the Sovrin Network.

The partners are demonstrating how digital credentials could work for IBM employees. ATB Financial issues a digital credential, which can be used for both logging into the bank and IBM’s user network. Along with validating the employees’ financial information, the distributed ledger application eliminates the need for employees to have a username or password, Windley said.

“Because it’s cryptographically based, it has a public key associated with them, and you [the employee] own the private key,” Windley said.

Gartner’s Farahmand said self-sovereign identities based on blockchain distributed ledgers are being eyed for all kinds of enterprises uses, including onboard new hires.

Each time a new employee is hired, a new decentralized identifier is generated by the that employee and passed to the enterprise. That identifier can then be propagated within the internal systems for user authentication to the enterprise network and applications, Farahmand said.

“This can be a powerful proposition as it speeds up the onboarding process and subsequent identity life cycle management activities, as well as enabling password-less authentication. It also helps with converging multiple personas a person can have relevant to the organization,” Farahmand said, explaining that the digital IDs can be used to access multiple systems within a company based on organization-based permissions.

A popular design pattern for decentralized identity is comprised of a core identifier and a set of “pairwise” identifiers, each for a relationship the user has with an organization. Pairwise identifiers are cryptographically derived from the core identifier. The pairwise identifier enables an enterprise system to uniquely verify a user identity for each relationship and potentially prevent correlation of user activity across different relationships, enabling privacy-by-design principles at the protocol level, Farahmand said.

For example, a bank employee can be a bank customer at the same time while using the same self-sovereign ID. The two personas are typically represented by two digital identities in two siloed systems – one as an employee and one as a customer of the bank.

“In case of a decentralized identity model, the same person can have two sets of identifiers … mapped to the same core digital identity, which can potentially simplify reconciliation of user activities,” Farahmand said.

Another benefit to a self-sovereign ID is the ability to streamline B2B scenarios where an employee of one organization can have access to systems in another. For example, Farahmand said, if the host organization trusts the decentralized identity that is attested by the guest organization, then a new pair-wise decentralized identifier can be generated to authenticate the user; that simplifies the onboarding and access governance for business customers or other partners.

Significant hurdles remain

While self-sovereign IDs based on blockchain hold significant promise for increasing privacy and efficiency, there are also significant technology hurdles that have yet to be vaulted. For one, trust in blockchain.

A 2018 Gartner CIO survey revealed on average that only 3.3% of companies worldwide had actually deployed blockchain in a production environment.

In a blog post, Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, listed eight hurdles blockchain needs to surmount before it can become a cure-all for virtually any international, transactional network need – from fee-less, cross-border payments to supply chain tracking.

One significant challenge is integrating DLT systems with legacy databases, the current repositories for corporate employee identities. A decentralized identity system also requires a vibrant ecosystem, a roust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.

“While we encourage our clients to watch this space and do some limited experimentation or even proof-of-concept projects,” Farahmand said, “we also caution them to make sure these products are battle tested, hardened and ready to withstand different types of attacks.”

Source link http://bit.ly/2Sw4gra

[umanologicinc]

Key Considerations When Hiring a Mobile App Developer: What You Need to Know

The mobile app market is booming, with millions of apps vying for user attention. If you have a brilliant app idea, bringing it to life requires the expertise of a skilled mobile app developer. But with so many developers out there, choosing the right one can feel overwhelming.

This blog post will guide you through the key considerations when hiring a mobile app developer, ensuring you find the perfect partner to turn your vision into a successful app.

1. Define Your Needs & Budget

Before diving headfirst into the developer pool, take a step back.  Clearly define your app's purpose, target audience, and desired functionalities. This roadmap will help you communicate your vision effectively and attract developers with the right skillset.

Here are some key aspects to consider:

App type: Is it a native app for a specific platform (iOS or Android) or a cross-platform app that works on both?

Features and functionalities: What are the core features your app must have? Consider potential future features as well.

Budget: Be realistic about your development budget.

2. Expertise and Experience

Not all developers are created equal. Look for Mobile app developers who have experience building apps similar to yours. Here are some areas to explore:

Technical Skills: Verify their proficiency in programming languages and frameworks relevant to your chosen platform(s).

Portfolio: Review their past projects to assess their design and development capabilities. Look for projects with a similar level of complexity to your app.

Client Testimonials: Positive feedback from past clients can be a telling sign of a developer's reliability and quality of work.

3. Communication and Collaboration

Effective communication is key to the success of any mobile app development project. When hiring a developer, consider their communication skills, responsiveness, and willingness to collaborate as important factors.  Here's what to look for:

Excellent communication skills: Both written and verbal communication are crucial. Look for someone who actively listens to your needs and provides regular updates.

Problem-solving skills: App development can encounter unexpected challenges. Choose a developer who is resourceful and can find creative solutions.

Transparency and honesty: Open and honest communication is essential. A good developer will transparently discuss potential issues and project timelines.

4. Development Process and Timeline

Before finalizing a contract with a mobile app developer, it's essential to discuss and agree upon the project budget and timeline. Be upfront about your budget constraints and inquire about the developer's pricing structure, payment terms, and any additional costs that may arise during the project. Similarly, establish a realistic timeline for the development and launch of your app, taking into account factors such as the complexity of the project, required features, and potential setbacks or delays.

5. Cost Structure and Payment Terms

Mobile app development can vary greatly in cost depending on the complexity of your app.   Discuss potential pricing structures with developers:

Hourly Rate: Some developers charge an hourly rate, which can be good for smaller projects.

Fixed Project Fee: For well-defined projects, a fixed fee can be more predictable.

Milestone-Based Payments: Payments are made at key milestones throughout the development process.

Hire Umano Logic's Skilled Mobile App Developers 

Hiring the right mobile app developer is a critical step towards turning your app idea into reality. 

At Umano Logic, we understand the importance of hiring skilled mobile app developers who can seamlessly integrate with your team and deliver exceptional results. As a leading mobile app development company in Edmonton, Our dedicated mobile app developers are committed to working within your timezone and maintaining clear communication throughout the development process.

By clearly defining your needs, vetting developers based on expertise and communication style, and understanding the development process and costs, you'll be well on your way to finding the perfect partner.

Get in touch with us for more!

Contact us on:- +1 (780) 993-6637

Email us at:- hi@umanologic.ca 

[lybiustech]

Hire the Best Mobile App Development Agency in Canada

We are a mobile app development agency that works with start-ups and enterprise-level businesses to provide them with sophisticated mobile applications. Our team can help you design and build a personalized, intuitive user experience that will delight your customers and help you achieve your business goals.

Our team of experts has extensive experience in building mobile apps for both iOS and Android platforms. We have worked with numerous companies across various industries to build their mobile app solutions.

 When it comes to technology, we're on the pulse. We help you find ways to improve efficiency, increase productivity, and save time. Lybius Tech team help you to find wide range of services to meet your needs, including: - App development and design

- Web app development and design

- Mobile app development, design, and testing

Our clients include businesses from all sectors, large and small, and we've helped them build some truly outstanding custom software. You are welcome to contact our Mobile app development Alberta team to discuss your requirements and our web applications are built using the latest technologies and best practices, ensuring that they're secure, scalable, and easy to manage. They will help you to develop an effective mobile app for your website. Also, if you have a vision that's burning inside of you, talk to us about it. You may just be surprised by what we can create together! Addition to this, we also offer several other services including prototyping, testing, cloud hosting and more.

Sources by: bit.ly/3x4rWbV

[mccartneynathxzw83]

How blockchain may kill the password

How blockchain may kill the password

Imagine a company that can verify the background of a new employee and onboard them with the click of a single virtual button, or a banking customer who can verify their identity for a loan without exposing personally identifiable information – again with a click of a button.

That’s the potential blockchain holds for decentralized identity management. It’s done  by creating a digital wallet that serves as a repository for all kinds of personal and financial data, info that can only be shared after a specific request and only with the permission of the owner.

Blockchain distributed ledger technology (DLT) – in combination with digital identity verification – holds the potential to solve online privacy issues that plague everything from consumer sales and bank know-your-customer regulations to employee credentials that allow access to confidential business systems.

“There are multiple vendors in this space that are either in the early R&D stage or testing their products in pilot projects,” said Homan Farahmand, a senior research director with Gartner. “It is too early to declare any winner, by any means, because just having a working product is not enough. Decentralized identity requires a vibrant ecosystem, a robust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.”

One considerable security attribute of storing digital identities on an encrypted, distributed blockchain ledger is eliminating “honey pots,” or central repositories for customer account information, according to Julie Esser, chief engagement officer for CULedger, a Denver-based Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO). Those repositories are prime targets for hackers.

Credit Unions are already testing ID management

Like other CUSOs, CULedger is a cooperative owned by multiple credit unions for the purpose of providing back-office services; it was created a year ago to build out a blockchain-based identity management platform called My CUID. The platform is expected to launch in the second half of 2019 and will hand the keys to data protection over to customers who sign up for an app. CULedger has 36 investors – 26 credit unions and several CUSOs.

In October, CULedger began piloting My CUID with five other credit unions and another CUSO; it eliminated the need for user names and passwords and relieved credit union call centers from the obligation of resetting them when a customer loses them.

How it works: a new or current customer of a member credit union contacts a customer service call center, which sends a text message to the customer’s mobile device with a link to download the My CUID app. The credit union’s rep then issues the customer their credentials – a digital wallet, which holds personally identifiable information obtained during the initial customer contact. That information is encrypted and can only be accessed with the member’s authorization, which is requested when they make a transaction.

Each time a customer using My CUID contacts the credit union – or vice versa – their smartphone or tablet receives a pop-up dialogue requesting they confirm their membership before any transaction is completed.

“You’d click OK or Not OK. It doesn’t feel a lot different than what happens with other apps on your phone,” Esser said. “It’s all based on…the encrypted channels we’ve created, which is really cool. You’re creating a two-way secure communication channel. So, not only does your credit union know it’s you they’re talking to, but you also you know it’s your credit union calling you.”

CULedger has set a goal of issuing 1 million digital identities to credit union members in 2019. Because credit unions must comply with Know-Your-Customer federal regulations, the blockchain-based digital ID service would also fulfill regulatory compliance, Esser said.

Along with giving the customer control over their identity by handing them the blockchain encryption keys, My CUID would eliminate the need for user login names and passwords and dramatically reduce the time it takes for a credit union call center representative to authenticate a member.

It can take a rep from 60 to 90 seconds to authenticate a member before a transaction even starts. That can be reduced to 5 seconds or less with My CUID, according to Esser. “It’s not a pleasant experience to phone a call center because the customer is welcomed with 20 questions to identify who you are, so it’s a wonky process that needs fixing.”

Traditionally, credit unions and other financial services firms rely on third-party service providers for call center and customer authentication services, many of which are located outside the U.S. CULedger would place control back in the hands of member credit unions, Esser said.

In 2019, CULedger plans to begin building out its production customer permission network; it is currently considering several blockchain platforms, including IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric service and R3’s Corda, the biggest commercial blockchain consortium among banks, insurers and other financial service firms. CULedger is also considering working with the Hedera Foundation, the creator of Swirlds, a software platform for creating distributed applications (dApps).

Swirlds is based on the Hashgraph protocol, a DLT well suited to the financial services industry because it can process more than 100,000 transactions per second, unlike bitcoin, which processes three to four transactions per second.

“We need the ability to conduct transactions instantaneously – in real time,” Esser said. “We’d planned to create our own platform, but with the focus on a decentralized identification piece, this allows us to not recreate the wheel. There may be some applications that require different [blockchain] platforms.”

How a self-sovereign ID works

For consumers who are mindful of their online information – credit card numbers, date of birth, annual income, etc. – blockchain has the potential for “self-sovereign” identities like CULedger is creating, meaning the user controls who can see their data or get purchasing approval without releasing their income details.

Self-sovereign identities work like this: the user has a bank confirm a credit limit or an employer confirm annual income; that confirmation information is then encrypted, but available, on a public blockchain ledger to which the consumer holds the private and public cryptographic keys.

If a buyer wants a car loan from an auto dealership, for example, the consumer can give them permission through a public key to confirm that he or she has enough credit or annual income without revealing an exact dollar amount. So, for example, if the car dealer wants to ensure a consumer earns more than $50,000 a year, that’s all the blockchain ledger will confirm (not that they actually earn $72,587).

The confidentiality technique is known as zero knowledge proof (ZKP), a cryptography technology that allows a user to prove that funds, assets or identifying information exist without revealing the information behind it. Ernst & Young has created a public blockchain prototype it plans to launch in 2019 that lets companies use ZKPs to complete business transactions confidentially.

Sovereign IDs in the enterprise

CULedger is also working with the Sovrin Foundation, a new nonprofit that has created the blockchain-based Sovrin Network; it enables anyone to globally exchange pre-verified data with any entity also on the distributed ledger.

The online credentials issued via the Sovrin Network are akin to a physical ID you might carry in your wallet, such as a driver’s license, a company ID or a bank debit card. The virtual encrypted wallet (or crypto wallet) would link back to the institutions that created them, such as a bank, a government agency or even an employer, which, through the blockchain, would automatically verify the needed information to a requestor.

“Our market strategy involves working with enterprise partners to solve their ID problems rather than trying to go direct to end users, so yeah, we’re working hard in that area and have a number of partners who are doing things there. Three who come to mind are Government of British Columbia, CULedger and IBM/ATB Financial,” said Phil Windley, chair and co-founder of the Sovrin Foundation.

The Government of British Columbia and the Government of Ontario have already rolled out a production system using the Sovrin Network for business registration and licensing; together they’ve issued over 6 million credentials, according to Windley.

Sovrin development partners IBM, Workday and ATB Financial (a bank in Alberta) have also started pilot tests of the Sovrin Network.

The partners are demonstrating how digital credentials could work for IBM employees. ATB Financial issues a digital credential, which can be used for both logging into the bank and IBM’s user network. Along with validating the employees’ financial information, the distributed ledger application eliminates the need for employees to have a username or password, Windley said.

“Because it’s cryptographically based, it has a public key associated with them, and you [the employee] own the private key,” Windley said.

Gartner’s Farahmand said self-sovereign identities based on blockchain distributed ledgers are being eyed for all kinds of enterprises uses, including onboard new hires.

Each time a new employee is hired, a new decentralized identifier is generated by the that employee and passed to the enterprise. That identifier can then be propagated within the internal systems for user authentication to the enterprise network and applications, Farahmand said.

“This can be a powerful proposition as it speeds up the onboarding process and subsequent identity life cycle management activities, as well as enabling password-less authentication. It also helps with converging multiple personas a person can have relevant to the organization,” Farahmand said, explaining that the digital IDs can be used to access multiple systems within a company based on organization-based permissions.

A popular design pattern for decentralized identity is comprised of a core identifier and a set of “pairwise” identifiers, each for a relationship the user has with an organization. Pairwise identifiers are cryptographically derived from the core identifier. The pairwise identifier enables an enterprise system to uniquely verify a user identity for each relationship and potentially prevent correlation of user activity across different relationships, enabling privacy-by-design principles at the protocol level, Farahmand said.

For example, a bank employee can be a bank customer at the same time while using the same self-sovereign ID. The two personas are typically represented by two digital identities in two siloed systems – one as an employee and one as a customer of the bank.

“In case of a decentralized identity model, the same person can have two sets of identifiers … mapped to the same core digital identity, which can potentially simplify reconciliation of user activities,” Farahmand said.

Another benefit to a self-sovereign ID is the ability to streamline B2B scenarios where an employee of one organization can have access to systems in another. For example, Farahmand said, if the host organization trusts the decentralized identity that is attested by the guest organization, then a new pair-wise decentralized identifier can be generated to authenticate the user; that simplifies the onboarding and access governance for business customers or other partners.

Significant hurdles remain

While self-sovereign IDs based on blockchain hold significant promise for increasing privacy and efficiency, there are also significant technology hurdles that have yet to be vaulted. For one, trust in blockchain.

A 2018 Gartner CIO survey revealed on average that only 3.3% of companies worldwide had actually deployed blockchain in a production environment.

In a blog post, Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, listed eight hurdles blockchain needs to surmount before it can become a cure-all for virtually any international, transactional network need – from fee-less, cross-border payments to supply chain tracking.

One significant challenge is integrating DLT systems with legacy databases, the current repositories for corporate employee identities. A decentralized identity system also requires a vibrant ecosystem, a roust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.

“While we encourage our clients to watch this space and do some limited experimentation or even proof-of-concept projects,” Farahmand said, “we also caution them to make sure these products are battle tested, hardened and ready to withstand different types of attacks.”

Source link http://bit.ly/2Sw4gra

[bobbynolanios88]

How blockchain may kill the password

How blockchain may kill the password

Imagine a company that can verify the background of a new employee and onboard them with the click of a single virtual button, or a banking customer who can verify their identity for a loan without exposing personally identifiable information – again with a click of a button.

That’s the potential blockchain holds for decentralized identity management. It’s done  by creating a digital wallet that serves as a repository for all kinds of personal and financial data, info that can only be shared after a specific request and only with the permission of the owner.

Blockchain distributed ledger technology (DLT) – in combination with digital identity verification – holds the potential to solve online privacy issues that plague everything from consumer sales and bank know-your-customer regulations to employee credentials that allow access to confidential business systems.

“There are multiple vendors in this space that are either in the early R&D stage or testing their products in pilot projects,” said Homan Farahmand, a senior research director with Gartner. “It is too early to declare any winner, by any means, because just having a working product is not enough. Decentralized identity requires a vibrant ecosystem, a robust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.”

One considerable security attribute of storing digital identities on an encrypted, distributed blockchain ledger is eliminating “honey pots,” or central repositories for customer account information, according to Julie Esser, chief engagement officer for CULedger, a Denver-based Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO). Those repositories are prime targets for hackers.

Credit Unions are already testing ID management

Like other CUSOs, CULedger is a cooperative owned by multiple credit unions for the purpose of providing back-office services; it was created a year ago to build out a blockchain-based identity management platform called My CUID. The platform is expected to launch in the second half of 2019 and will hand the keys to data protection over to customers who sign up for an app. CULedger has 36 investors – 26 credit unions and several CUSOs.

In October, CULedger began piloting My CUID with five other credit unions and another CUSO; it eliminated the need for user names and passwords and relieved credit union call centers from the obligation of resetting them when a customer loses them.

How it works: a new or current customer of a member credit union contacts a customer service call center, which sends a text message to the customer’s mobile device with a link to download the My CUID app. The credit union’s rep then issues the customer their credentials – a digital wallet, which holds personally identifiable information obtained during the initial customer contact. That information is encrypted and can only be accessed with the member’s authorization, which is requested when they make a transaction.

Each time a customer using My CUID contacts the credit union – or vice versa – their smartphone or tablet receives a pop-up dialogue requesting they confirm their membership before any transaction is completed.

“You’d click OK or Not OK. It doesn’t feel a lot different than what happens with other apps on your phone,” Esser said. “It’s all based on…the encrypted channels we’ve created, which is really cool. You’re creating a two-way secure communication channel. So, not only does your credit union know it’s you they’re talking to, but you also you know it’s your credit union calling you.”

CULedger has set a goal of issuing 1 million digital identities to credit union members in 2019. Because credit unions must comply with Know-Your-Customer federal regulations, the blockchain-based digital ID service would also fulfill regulatory compliance, Esser said.

Along with giving the customer control over their identity by handing them the blockchain encryption keys, My CUID would eliminate the need for user login names and passwords and dramatically reduce the time it takes for a credit union call center representative to authenticate a member.

It can take a rep from 60 to 90 seconds to authenticate a member before a transaction even starts. That can be reduced to 5 seconds or less with My CUID, according to Esser. “It’s not a pleasant experience to phone a call center because the customer is welcomed with 20 questions to identify who you are, so it’s a wonky process that needs fixing.”

Traditionally, credit unions and other financial services firms rely on third-party service providers for call center and customer authentication services, many of which are located outside the U.S. CULedger would place control back in the hands of member credit unions, Esser said.

In 2019, CULedger plans to begin building out its production customer permission network; it is currently considering several blockchain platforms, including IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric service and R3’s Corda, the biggest commercial blockchain consortium among banks, insurers and other financial service firms. CULedger is also considering working with the Hedera Foundation, the creator of Swirlds, a software platform for creating distributed applications (dApps).

Swirlds is based on the Hashgraph protocol, a DLT well suited to the financial services industry because it can process more than 100,000 transactions per second, unlike bitcoin, which processes three to four transactions per second.

“We need the ability to conduct transactions instantaneously – in real time,” Esser said. “We’d planned to create our own platform, but with the focus on a decentralized identification piece, this allows us to not recreate the wheel. There may be some applications that require different [blockchain] platforms.”

How a self-sovereign ID works

For consumers who are mindful of their online information – credit card numbers, date of birth, annual income, etc. – blockchain has the potential for “self-sovereign” identities like CULedger is creating, meaning the user controls who can see their data or get purchasing approval without releasing their income details.

Self-sovereign identities work like this: the user has a bank confirm a credit limit or an employer confirm annual income; that confirmation information is then encrypted, but available, on a public blockchain ledger to which the consumer holds the private and public cryptographic keys.

If a buyer wants a car loan from an auto dealership, for example, the consumer can give them permission through a public key to confirm that he or she has enough credit or annual income without revealing an exact dollar amount. So, for example, if the car dealer wants to ensure a consumer earns more than $50,000 a year, that’s all the blockchain ledger will confirm (not that they actually earn $72,587).

The confidentiality technique is known as zero knowledge proof (ZKP), a cryptography technology that allows a user to prove that funds, assets or identifying information exist without revealing the information behind it. Ernst & Young has created a public blockchain prototype it plans to launch in 2019 that lets companies use ZKPs to complete business transactions confidentially.

Sovereign IDs in the enterprise

CULedger is also working with the Sovrin Foundation, a new nonprofit that has created the blockchain-based Sovrin Network; it enables anyone to globally exchange pre-verified data with any entity also on the distributed ledger.

The online credentials issued via the Sovrin Network are akin to a physical ID you might carry in your wallet, such as a driver’s license, a company ID or a bank debit card. The virtual encrypted wallet (or crypto wallet) would link back to the institutions that created them, such as a bank, a government agency or even an employer, which, through the blockchain, would automatically verify the needed information to a requestor.

“Our market strategy involves working with enterprise partners to solve their ID problems rather than trying to go direct to end users, so yeah, we’re working hard in that area and have a number of partners who are doing things there. Three who come to mind are Government of British Columbia, CULedger and IBM/ATB Financial,” said Phil Windley, chair and co-founder of the Sovrin Foundation.

The Government of British Columbia and the Government of Ontario have already rolled out a production system using the Sovrin Network for business registration and licensing; together they’ve issued over 6 million credentials, according to Windley.

Sovrin development partners IBM, Workday and ATB Financial (a bank in Alberta) have also started pilot tests of the Sovrin Network.

The partners are demonstrating how digital credentials could work for IBM employees. ATB Financial issues a digital credential, which can be used for both logging into the bank and IBM’s user network. Along with validating the employees’ financial information, the distributed ledger application eliminates the need for employees to have a username or password, Windley said.

“Because it’s cryptographically based, it has a public key associated with them, and you [the employee] own the private key,” Windley said.

Gartner’s Farahmand said self-sovereign identities based on blockchain distributed ledgers are being eyed for all kinds of enterprises uses, including onboard new hires.

Each time a new employee is hired, a new decentralized identifier is generated by the that employee and passed to the enterprise. That identifier can then be propagated within the internal systems for user authentication to the enterprise network and applications, Farahmand said.

“This can be a powerful proposition as it speeds up the onboarding process and subsequent identity life cycle management activities, as well as enabling password-less authentication. It also helps with converging multiple personas a person can have relevant to the organization,” Farahmand said, explaining that the digital IDs can be used to access multiple systems within a company based on organization-based permissions.

A popular design pattern for decentralized identity is comprised of a core identifier and a set of “pairwise” identifiers, each for a relationship the user has with an organization. Pairwise identifiers are cryptographically derived from the core identifier. The pairwise identifier enables an enterprise system to uniquely verify a user identity for each relationship and potentially prevent correlation of user activity across different relationships, enabling privacy-by-design principles at the protocol level, Farahmand said.

For example, a bank employee can be a bank customer at the same time while using the same self-sovereign ID. The two personas are typically represented by two digital identities in two siloed systems – one as an employee and one as a customer of the bank.

“In case of a decentralized identity model, the same person can have two sets of identifiers … mapped to the same core digital identity, which can potentially simplify reconciliation of user activities,” Farahmand said.

Another benefit to a self-sovereign ID is the ability to streamline B2B scenarios where an employee of one organization can have access to systems in another. For example, Farahmand said, if the host organization trusts the decentralized identity that is attested by the guest organization, then a new pair-wise decentralized identifier can be generated to authenticate the user; that simplifies the onboarding and access governance for business customers or other partners.

Significant hurdles remain

While self-sovereign IDs based on blockchain hold significant promise for increasing privacy and efficiency, there are also significant technology hurdles that have yet to be vaulted. For one, trust in blockchain.

A 2018 Gartner CIO survey revealed on average that only 3.3% of companies worldwide had actually deployed blockchain in a production environment.

In a blog post, Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, listed eight hurdles blockchain needs to surmount before it can become a cure-all for virtually any international, transactional network need – from fee-less, cross-border payments to supply chain tracking.

One significant challenge is integrating DLT systems with legacy databases, the current repositories for corporate employee identities. A decentralized identity system also requires a vibrant ecosystem, a roust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.

“While we encourage our clients to watch this space and do some limited experimentation or even proof-of-concept projects,” Farahmand said, “we also caution them to make sure these products are battle tested, hardened and ready to withstand different types of attacks.”

Source link http://bit.ly/2Sw4gra

[courtneyvbrooks87]

How blockchain may kill the password

How blockchain may kill the password

Imagine a company that can verify the background of a new employee and onboard them with the click of a single virtual button, or a banking customer who can verify their identity for a loan without exposing personally identifiable information – again with a click of a button.

That’s the potential blockchain holds for decentralized identity management. It’s done  by creating a digital wallet that serves as a repository for all kinds of personal and financial data, info that can only be shared after a specific request and only with the permission of the owner.

Blockchain distributed ledger technology (DLT) – in combination with digital identity verification – holds the potential to solve online privacy issues that plague everything from consumer sales and bank know-your-customer regulations to employee credentials that allow access to confidential business systems.

“There are multiple vendors in this space that are either in the early R&D stage or testing their products in pilot projects,” said Homan Farahmand, a senior research director with Gartner. “It is too early to declare any winner, by any means, because just having a working product is not enough. Decentralized identity requires a vibrant ecosystem, a robust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.”

One considerable security attribute of storing digital identities on an encrypted, distributed blockchain ledger is eliminating “honey pots,” or central repositories for customer account information, according to Julie Esser, chief engagement officer for CULedger, a Denver-based Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO). Those repositories are prime targets for hackers.

Credit Unions are already testing ID management

Like other CUSOs, CULedger is a cooperative owned by multiple credit unions for the purpose of providing back-office services; it was created a year ago to build out a blockchain-based identity management platform called My CUID. The platform is expected to launch in the second half of 2019 and will hand the keys to data protection over to customers who sign up for an app. CULedger has 36 investors – 26 credit unions and several CUSOs.

In October, CULedger began piloting My CUID with five other credit unions and another CUSO; it eliminated the need for user names and passwords and relieved credit union call centers from the obligation of resetting them when a customer loses them.

How it works: a new or current customer of a member credit union contacts a customer service call center, which sends a text message to the customer’s mobile device with a link to download the My CUID app. The credit union’s rep then issues the customer their credentials – a digital wallet, which holds personally identifiable information obtained during the initial customer contact. That information is encrypted and can only be accessed with the member’s authorization, which is requested when they make a transaction.

Each time a customer using My CUID contacts the credit union – or vice versa – their smartphone or tablet receives a pop-up dialogue requesting they confirm their membership before any transaction is completed.

“You’d click OK or Not OK. It doesn’t feel a lot different than what happens with other apps on your phone,” Esser said. “It’s all based on…the encrypted channels we’ve created, which is really cool. You’re creating a two-way secure communication channel. So, not only does your credit union know it’s you they’re talking to, but you also you know it’s your credit union calling you.”

CULedger has set a goal of issuing 1 million digital identities to credit union members in 2019. Because credit unions must comply with Know-Your-Customer federal regulations, the blockchain-based digital ID service would also fulfill regulatory compliance, Esser said.

Along with giving the customer control over their identity by handing them the blockchain encryption keys, My CUID would eliminate the need for user login names and passwords and dramatically reduce the time it takes for a credit union call center representative to authenticate a member.

It can take a rep from 60 to 90 seconds to authenticate a member before a transaction even starts. That can be reduced to 5 seconds or less with My CUID, according to Esser. “It’s not a pleasant experience to phone a call center because the customer is welcomed with 20 questions to identify who you are, so it’s a wonky process that needs fixing.”

Traditionally, credit unions and other financial services firms rely on third-party service providers for call center and customer authentication services, many of which are located outside the U.S. CULedger would place control back in the hands of member credit unions, Esser said.

In 2019, CULedger plans to begin building out its production customer permission network; it is currently considering several blockchain platforms, including IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric service and R3’s Corda, the biggest commercial blockchain consortium among banks, insurers and other financial service firms. CULedger is also considering working with the Hedera Foundation, the creator of Swirlds, a software platform for creating distributed applications (dApps).

Swirlds is based on the Hashgraph protocol, a DLT well suited to the financial services industry because it can process more than 100,000 transactions per second, unlike bitcoin, which processes three to four transactions per second.

“We need the ability to conduct transactions instantaneously – in real time,” Esser said. “We’d planned to create our own platform, but with the focus on a decentralized identification piece, this allows us to not recreate the wheel. There may be some applications that require different [blockchain] platforms.”

How a self-sovereign ID works

For consumers who are mindful of their online information – credit card numbers, date of birth, annual income, etc. – blockchain has the potential for “self-sovereign” identities like CULedger is creating, meaning the user controls who can see their data or get purchasing approval without releasing their income details.

Self-sovereign identities work like this: the user has a bank confirm a credit limit or an employer confirm annual income; that confirmation information is then encrypted, but available, on a public blockchain ledger to which the consumer holds the private and public cryptographic keys.

If a buyer wants a car loan from an auto dealership, for example, the consumer can give them permission through a public key to confirm that he or she has enough credit or annual income without revealing an exact dollar amount. So, for example, if the car dealer wants to ensure a consumer earns more than $50,000 a year, that’s all the blockchain ledger will confirm (not that they actually earn $72,587).

The confidentiality technique is known as zero knowledge proof (ZKP), a cryptography technology that allows a user to prove that funds, assets or identifying information exist without revealing the information behind it. Ernst & Young has created a public blockchain prototype it plans to launch in 2019 that lets companies use ZKPs to complete business transactions confidentially.

Sovereign IDs in the enterprise

CULedger is also working with the Sovrin Foundation, a new nonprofit that has created the blockchain-based Sovrin Network; it enables anyone to globally exchange pre-verified data with any entity also on the distributed ledger.

The online credentials issued via the Sovrin Network are akin to a physical ID you might carry in your wallet, such as a driver’s license, a company ID or a bank debit card. The virtual encrypted wallet (or crypto wallet) would link back to the institutions that created them, such as a bank, a government agency or even an employer, which, through the blockchain, would automatically verify the needed information to a requestor.

“Our market strategy involves working with enterprise partners to solve their ID problems rather than trying to go direct to end users, so yeah, we’re working hard in that area and have a number of partners who are doing things there. Three who come to mind are Government of British Columbia, CULedger and IBM/ATB Financial,” said Phil Windley, chair and co-founder of the Sovrin Foundation.

The Government of British Columbia and the Government of Ontario have already rolled out a production system using the Sovrin Network for business registration and licensing; together they’ve issued over 6 million credentials, according to Windley.

Sovrin development partners IBM, Workday and ATB Financial (a bank in Alberta) have also started pilot tests of the Sovrin Network.

The partners are demonstrating how digital credentials could work for IBM employees. ATB Financial issues a digital credential, which can be used for both logging into the bank and IBM’s user network. Along with validating the employees’ financial information, the distributed ledger application eliminates the need for employees to have a username or password, Windley said.

“Because it’s cryptographically based, it has a public key associated with them, and you [the employee] own the private key,” Windley said.

Gartner’s Farahmand said self-sovereign identities based on blockchain distributed ledgers are being eyed for all kinds of enterprises uses, including onboard new hires.

Each time a new employee is hired, a new decentralized identifier is generated by the that employee and passed to the enterprise. That identifier can then be propagated within the internal systems for user authentication to the enterprise network and applications, Farahmand said.

“This can be a powerful proposition as it speeds up the onboarding process and subsequent identity life cycle management activities, as well as enabling password-less authentication. It also helps with converging multiple personas a person can have relevant to the organization,” Farahmand said, explaining that the digital IDs can be used to access multiple systems within a company based on organization-based permissions.

A popular design pattern for decentralized identity is comprised of a core identifier and a set of “pairwise” identifiers, each for a relationship the user has with an organization. Pairwise identifiers are cryptographically derived from the core identifier. The pairwise identifier enables an enterprise system to uniquely verify a user identity for each relationship and potentially prevent correlation of user activity across different relationships, enabling privacy-by-design principles at the protocol level, Farahmand said.

For example, a bank employee can be a bank customer at the same time while using the same self-sovereign ID. The two personas are typically represented by two digital identities in two siloed systems – one as an employee and one as a customer of the bank.

“In case of a decentralized identity model, the same person can have two sets of identifiers … mapped to the same core digital identity, which can potentially simplify reconciliation of user activities,” Farahmand said.

Another benefit to a self-sovereign ID is the ability to streamline B2B scenarios where an employee of one organization can have access to systems in another. For example, Farahmand said, if the host organization trusts the decentralized identity that is attested by the guest organization, then a new pair-wise decentralized identifier can be generated to authenticate the user; that simplifies the onboarding and access governance for business customers or other partners.

Significant hurdles remain

While self-sovereign IDs based on blockchain hold significant promise for increasing privacy and efficiency, there are also significant technology hurdles that have yet to be vaulted. For one, trust in blockchain.

A 2018 Gartner CIO survey revealed on average that only 3.3% of companies worldwide had actually deployed blockchain in a production environment.

In a blog post, Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, listed eight hurdles blockchain needs to surmount before it can become a cure-all for virtually any international, transactional network need – from fee-less, cross-border payments to supply chain tracking.

One significant challenge is integrating DLT systems with legacy databases, the current repositories for corporate employee identities. A decentralized identity system also requires a vibrant ecosystem, a roust identity trust fabric built on a distributed ledger or blockchain, tools to support user-friendly functionality and good developer experience to support broad adoption.

“While we encourage our clients to watch this space and do some limited experimentation or even proof-of-concept projects,” Farahmand said, “we also caution them to make sure these products are battle tested, hardened and ready to withstand different types of attacks.”

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[areesha-zahid-blog]

Interstellar

Cast: Matthew McConaughey Anne Hathaway Jessica Chastain Bill Irwin Ellen Burstyn Michael Caine

Sound: Gregg Landaker and Gary Rizzo were the film’s audio engineers tasked with audio mixing, while sound editor Richard King supervised the process. Christopher Nolan paid close attention to designing the sound mix, like focusing on the sound of buttons being pressed with astronaut suit gloves. The studio’s website stated that the film was “mixed to maximize the power of the low-end frequencies in the main channels, as well as in the subwoofer channel. Nolan deliberately intended some dialogue to seem drowned out by ambient noise or music, causing some theaters to post notices emphasizing that this effect was intentional and not a fault in their equipment.

Visual Effects: or Interstellar they created the effects first, allowing digital projectors to display them behind the actors, rather than having the actors perform in front of green screens. Ultimately the film contained 850 visual effect shots at a resolution of 5600 × 4000 lines: 150 shots that were created in-camera using digital projectors, and another 700 were created in post-production. Of those, 620 were presented in IMAX, while the rest were anamorphic.

Production: The premise for Interstellar was conceived by producer Lynda Obst and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. The two conceived of a scenario, based on Thorne’s work, about "the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans,” and attracted filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s interest in directing. The film began development in June 2006, when Spielberg and Paramount Pictures announced plans for a science fiction film based on an eight-page treatment written by Obst and Thorne. Obst was attached to produce. By March 2007, Jonathan Nolan was hired to write a screenplay.

After Spielberg moved his production studio DreamWorks from Paramount to Walt Disney Studios in 2009, Paramount needed a new director for Interstellar. Jonathan Nolan recommended his brother Christopher, who joined the project in 2012. Christopher Nolan met with Thorne, then attached as executive producer, to discuss the use of spacetime in the story. In January 2013, Paramount and Warner Bros. announced that Christopher Nolan was in negotiations to direct Interstellar. By the following March, Nolan was confirmed to direct Interstellar, which would be produced under his label Syncopy and Lynda Obst Productions.To research for the film, Nolan visited NASA and the private space program at SpaceX.

Screenwriter Jonathan Nolan worked on the script for four years. To learn the scientific aspects, he studied relativity at the California Institute of Technology. His brother Christopher had worked on other science fiction scripts, but decided to take the Interstellar script and choose among the vast array of ideas presented by Jonathan and Thorne, picking what he felt, as director, he could get “across to the audience and hopefully not lose them,” before he merged it with a script he had worked on for years on his own. Christopher kept in place Jonathan’s conception of the first hour, which is set on a resource-depleted Earth in the near future. The setting was inspired by the Dust Bowl that took place in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s. He revised the rest of the script, where a team travels into space, instead. After watching the 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl for inspiration, Christopher contacted director Ken Burns and producer Dayton Duncan, requesting permission to use some of their featured interviews in Interstellar, which was granted.

Filming Locations:

Iceland 

calgary, Alberta, Canada

Nanton,Alberta, Canada

Lethbridge,Alberta, Canada

Canmore,Alberta,Canada {road to NASA centre}

Westin Bonaventure hotel and suites

Okotoks,Alberta, Canada

Fort MacLeod,Alberta, Canada

Filming Location

12 August 2013 - 19 December 2013

Marketing

The teaser trailer for Interstellar debuted December 13, 2013, and featured clips related to space exploration, accompanied by a voiceover by Matthew McConaughey's. The theatrical trailer debuted May 5, 2014, at the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater in Washington, D.C. and was made available online later that month. For the week ending May 19, it was the most-viewed film trailer, with over 19.5 million views on YouTube.

Christopher Nolan and McConaughey made their first appearances at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2014 to promote Interstellar. That same month, Paramount Pictures launched an interactive website, on which users uncovered a star chart related to the Apollo 11 moon landing.

In October 2014, Paramount partnered with Google to promote Interstellar across multiple platforms. The film's website was relaunched as a digital hub hosted on a Google domain, which collected feedback from film audiences and linked to a mobile app. The Paramount-Google partnership also included a virtual time capsule compiled with user-generated content, made available in 2015. The initiative Google for Education used the film as a basis for promoting math and science lesson plans in schools

Paramount provided a virtual reality walk-through of the Endurance spacecraft using Oculus Rift technology. It hosted the walkthrough sequentially in New York City, Houston, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., from October 6 through November 19, 2014.  The publisher Running Press released Interstellar: Beyond Time and Space, a book by Mark Cotta Vaz about the making of the film, on November 11. W. W. Norton & Company released The Science of Interstellar, a book by Thorne; Titan Books released the official novelization, written by Greg Keyes;  and Wired magazine released a tie-in online comic, Absolute Zero, written by Christopher Nolan and drawn by Sean Gordon Murphy. The comic is a prequel to the film, with Mann as the protagonist. 

[betacompression-blog]

Post-Mortem of Top 20 failed start-ups - Lesson for Young Entrepreneurs

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Post-Mortem of Top 20 failed start-ups - Lesson for Young Entrepreneurs

They are not kidding when they say there is too much careful consideration needed when involved with a start-up company. When you are looking forward to running a start-up business, you are in for a gamble. If you are not smart enough then you will end up with the many failures – failed startups.

The root cause of failure can be from financial fraud to just running out money. There has been much of failure on the brain recently; it is partly because there is a good counterbalance to the typical survivorship bias-laden stories. Also; because understanding failure is critical to the algorithms underlying our product.

But, today we provide with this information, as the last thing we want is our young entrepreneurs to make the same mistake. Presenting you with post mortem reports of 20 failed startups lessons, so that you not make the same mistake.

List of Top Failed Startups

CueCat

The CueCat was invested by Belo Corp, General Electric, RadioShack, and The Coca-Cola Company, listed in top failed startups. The scanned printed bar codes and directed, the user’s Web browser to a page chosen by whoever published the code.

CueCat was the brainchild of J. Jovan Philyaw, who sold several big-time companies on the prospects for CueCat and its parent company, Digital Convergence Corp. Philyaw, a former infomercial producer, raised a sum total of $185 million from investors including Radio Shack, Coca-Cola, NBC, and Belo.

$6.50 was the cost of the scanners, and they were distributed for free to magazine subscribers and electronics store customers. What happened is there was a poor response from the customers, no one bought it and Digital Convergence fired has to fire most of their staff.

Read Also: 5 Hidden Costs Associated With Running a Business

ChaCha

The investors for this company were Qualcomm Ventures, Rho Ventures, Vantage Point Capital Partners, and Bezos Expeditions. Advertising revenue was declined sharply in 2016, for ChaCha, which left the company with no means to serve the debt.

The secured lender emptied ChaCha’s bank accounts. Scott Jones, the companies over has shared the fact that they sold their assets to cover their obligations, but it was not sufficient to cover it all. Which led Jones, debt holders and shareholders of the company to, unfortunately, write off their investment and listed in top failed startups

Sun Edison

The company’s core is Construction Company, the company wanted to venture out as a technology company. The company was well trusted by its institutional investors by managing risks. The company now faces lawsuits, for misappropriate use of paying off the loan instead of solar development projects.

Quirky

Quirky was an invention platform, where people were given a chance to vote on ideas which they liked. The hit ideas were later turned into products. Due to the almost non-existent margins of Quirky did not work in their favor. They were reportedly investing more in a development and selling minimally.

One of the products they invested in were they spent nearly $400,000 on a developing a Bluetooth speaker that only sold 28 units. The start-up ran out of money and filed for bankruptcy, which even affected their Wink unit. The business eventually sold its Wink smart home business for $15 million.

Homejoy

Homejoy, one of the failed startups provided on-demand home cleaning services, it was a low-cost cleaning service. CEO Adora Cheung blamed the worker for misclassification while the company faced lawsuits. As the company failed to raise enough funding to grow the company as big as they wanted. The company faced struggled to keep their customers when they later raised the price to meet their financial goals.

Read Also: 8 Deadly Mistakes Should Avoid That Kill Startups

Zirtual

Zirtual were providers of virtual assistants. They have full-time employees. Each assistant would work multiple accounts, depending on the workload, making it cheaper for corporate clients. The company apparently over-staffed without having matched the demands. When the funding failed to come through they laid off their 400 employees in the middle of the night via an e-mail.

Secret

The secret was an anonymous app that allowed for anonymous posting of snippets of text. It was often used to address rumors or confessions, which were shared with people. But the Secret app failed to meet the expectation of CEO David Byttow. He stated that the company did not represent his visions and therefore Byttow then noted to return the investors $35 million dollars.

Grooveshark

The music streaming service was a platform that let the users upload their music for others to listen to it. The service from immediately ran into legal problems due to the concerns about copyright violations. Despite their best intentions, the company failed to secure licenses from right holders for the vast amount of music on their service.

Rdio

Rdio was another music streaming site launched in 2010, it was done in competition with the Spotify. It was launched by the founder of Skype and Kazaa. Rdio was based on a subscription streaming model, unlike Grooveshark.

The company had struggled to compete against Spotify as the foreign music service entered when they market and offered a better free version. People, therefore, preferred Spotify where they paid less and then paid up for premium. Which only resulted in a failure of Rdio due to them not gaining any subscriptions.

Leap Transit

Leap Transit was supposedly a luxury commuter bus, this came into existence hoping to make streets less crowded due to cars. The start-up [now one of the failed startups] was suspended of its services due to disagreement with regulators. The receipt of a cease-and-desist letter put the services on a temporary hiatus. It became a permanent one and the buses were put up for auction. Leap Transit filed for bankruptcy after generating only $20,748 in gross income for the year.

Read Also: Why Every Small and Medium Business Need a Business Website

Powa Technologies

Powa Technologies was an e-commerce operation whose flagship product, was called PowaTag. It was a mobile payment app that allowed the customers to make purchases directly from their smartphone.

But the downfall of Powa Technologies was swift, as it had been found that Wagner alongside the company made false claims about their relationship with the Chinese company that was driving the value of the company. The many investors, which made the Powa Technologies look like such a promising company and a priced possession, did not invest in reality.

Zenefits

A company founded by Parker Conrad named Zenefits that aimed to provide human resource services to small businesses. The company’s downfall took place as Conrad could not fix the disorganization within the company.

He failed to overlook the positions such as office manager, IT workers, and even a receptionist. The internal problems at Zenefits led to both the illegal selling of insurance by the company and Zenefits falling short of its revenue goals.

com

At the end of the day, it ends up to get a new client for business. As the increase in the frequency of transactions and transaction sizes is growth in the business. Without those, there is no possibility of a successful start-up.

Mode Media

Mismanagement of finances by Mode Media, had them labeled as the most unprofessional. As for their clients, partners and employee base, it was an unethical experience imaginable. Thus the with the shutdown announcement, the manager receives emails from headquarters requesting immediate transfer of all funds and assets.

KiOR

Khosla Ventures, Alberta Investment Management Corporation, and Artis Capital Management invested in KiOR. The poor hiring decisions resulted in a predominance of lab researchers with Ph.Ds.’ That brought the downfall of KiOR was the lack of people with real operational experience. As unfortunate events such as scarcity of technical people with enough knowledge of carrying operational experience running energy facilities.

Lilliputian Systems

With investors such as Kleiner Perkins, Atlas Venture, and Intel Capital, The Nectar system decided to set its roots at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Lab. The system saw the downfall simply because they left the lab much earlier than they should have.

OnLive

Lauder Partners and Time Warner Investments invested in OnLive. They started off pretty well no doubt at that because of their ability to deliver a lag-free experience. Though the further studies show that the business indeed had some troubles which dragged them to bankruptcy. Which was later followed by big layoffs and a buyout.

Coraid

The Coraid operations failed to raise new funding, among other reasons which could have caused the end of the business. The company which was invested by Azure Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures closed up for good and filed for bankruptcy.

Cereva Networks

Cereva Networks was a victim of swiftly shrinking corporate IT budgets. The company failed to meet the demand for a start-up large-scale, storage systems. Resulted in abruptly shutting down and laid off 140 employees.

Aereo

Aereo users were assigned with a mini broadcast TV antenna, this infrastructure drove its online service. FirstMark Capital and Highland Capital Partners invested in Aereo. The service was no different than sticking a pair of bunny ears on your television, was said by the providers.

It was a technique by which, Aereo could avoid paying retransmission fees for broadcasters’ content. But unfortunately for Aereo, the broadcasters never bought this argument and neither did the law. Thus listed in top failed startups.

It is highly suggested for our future entrepreneurs to see through the cases of these unfortunate start-ups which met the downfall. Whether it be a case of wrong investment or not the exact visionary idea, you can definitely learn from the mistakes the above start-ups did. An advice to always research the depth of business you are looking to invest in.

  Author Bio:

Lewis Khan is a freelance content writer, currently associated with the firm Limetree Marketing (http://www.limetreemarketing.com/). He is a writer by passion and a sports person by heart. He enjoys regular swimming and jogging. He even opts to teach swimming to kids. He has a puppy named Max and prefers to spend his weekends at home playing with it and catching up on current affairs in the world. Reading is his passion and he prefers staying updated with current news.