#i also have a problem with mobile and adoptable browser games so its not only the app but... u know

[ancient-reverie]

"I can quit when I want"

....but the Raiku event....

[ultimateseoorg]

Visit Adobe Flash Ends A Decade Late for the whole story

Adobe Will No Longer Support Flash After 2020, 10 Years After Steve Jobs Argued Why It Should End In 2010.

Google Announced in September 2019 that it was phasing out support for Flash from its Chrome browser following Adobe;s announcement that they would end support in 2020.  Apple users wont likely hear much about the end of Flash, in 2010,  Steve Jobs wrote a scathing review of Flash and in it explained why Apple products wouldn’t support it.

Google’s Flash Announcement:

For 20 years, Flash has helped shape the way that you play games, watch videos and run applications on the web. But over the last few years, Flash has become less common. Three years ago, 80 percent of desktop Chrome users visited a site with Flash each day. Today usage is only 17 percent and continues to decline.

This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash. They’re also more secure, so you can be safer while shopping, banking, or reading sensitive documents. They also work on both mobile and desktop, so you can visit your favorite site anywhere.

These open web technologies became the default experience for Chrome late last year when sites started needing to ask your permission to run Flash. Chrome will continue phasing out Flash over the next few years, first by asking for your permission to run Flash in more situations, and eventually disabling it by default. We will remove Flash completely from Chrome toward the end of 2020.

If you regularly visit a site that uses Flash today, you may be wondering how this affects you. If the site migrates to open web standards, you shouldn’t notice much difference except that you’ll no longer see prompts to run Flash on that site. If the site continues to use Flash, and you give the site permission to run Flash, it will work through the end of 2020.

It’s taken a lot of close work with Adobe, other browsers, and major publishers to make sure the web is ready to be Flash-free. We’re supportive of Adobe’s announcement today, and we look forward to working with everyone to make the web even better.

Steve Job’s Adobe Flash Note:

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

First, there’s “Open”.

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

Second, there’s the “full web”.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

Fourth, there’s battery life.

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Fifth, there’s Touch.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Conclusions.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 250,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs April, 2010

What This Means In SEO

If your site uses Flash, you have a year to stop or no one will see your site content unless they uses an older version of a browser that still plays Flash.

Hits: 0

The post Adobe Flash Ends A Decade Late appeared first on Ultimate SEO | Backlinks - Forums, FAQs & Guides.

[supercoolgamesstuff-blog]

Google Stadia Reviewed – Against The Stream

New Post has been published on https://www.coolgamingzone.com/google-stadia-reviewed-against-the-stream/

Google Stadia Reviewed – Against The Stream

Introduction

By the mid-2000s, Blu-ray felt like the future of media. Blu-ray video looked incredible and offered cleaner picture and sound quality than previous media formats. “Surely,” we thought, “the technology that comes after Blu-ray will look even more impressive!” But then something strange happened; as streaming services like Netflix took off, more and more of us ditched physical media in favor of the cloud. Streaming didn’t offer the same level of fidelity as Blu-ray – or sometimes even DVD – but it was good enough. More importantly, it was convenient. The desire to watch anything anywhere outpaced our desire for image quality.

Now it’s 2019, streaming services have come a long way, and tech goliath Google thinks it has figured out how to Netflix the gaming industry. The tech is surprisingly functional, but its ability to upturn the industry will depend largely on its ability to implement its grand blueprint. Sadly, Stadia’s current design is missing several important pillars.

Gaming on Stadia

Gaming on Stadia

Stadia’s concept still sounds a bit like science fiction: Earlier this year, Google sold a vision of players using wi-fi-enable controllers to communicate with a hive of supercomputers in the cloud, which would allow users to stream the most advanced gaming software to decade-old laptops and mobile phones. Google’s system worked well at trade shows, but those were highly controlled environments. How does the service work now that we’ve been able to test it in the wild? Surprisingly well … if you have a stable internet connection.

On the whole, Stadia performs better than I expected. The high-speed internet at the Game Informer offices regularly gets download/upload speeds of 280 Mbps, so I rarely noticed even a hiccup while playing games at work. Mortal Kombat 11 on a stable Stadia connection booted up in seconds and feels about as responsive as its console counterparts. I had no problem dialing in combos and Fatalities even though my inputs had to travel through miles of infrastructure to bounce off Google servers.

Unfortunately, the experience quickly degrades as your internet speeds dial down. At a nearby coffee shop, where I recorded download speeds of 38 Mbps, I noticed a few frame skips every couple minutes. At home, where my speeds regularly drop to 20 Mbps, I experienced some visual artifacting and a regular picture stutter. With these slower internet speeds, I didn’t feel competitive in Destiny 2’s PvP modes, but I was able to complete a strike without a problem. Everyone’s tolerance for this kind of experience will vary, but my frustration over the occasional hiccup was mitigated by the revelation that I could play Destiny 2 in public on my phone (see the controller sidebar for more).

Stadia’s service only dropped out completely on me once due to a poor signal, but an instance of my game was saved and I had five minutes to hop back online and pick up where I’d left off. I wish Google would extend that grace period and allow users to create their own save states (a feature called State Share, which is still in the works), but I never lost any progress in a game, and my experience was stable enough across the board that I didn’t live in fear of being unable to access my games.

Google’s service isn’t a one-size-fits-all streaming solution, and you should carefully measure your internet speeds before committing to the platform. Many will find Stadia’s occasional stutters unbearable, while others will feel that it’s good enough. Personally, I can’t imagine trading any of my game consoles for a Stadia stream anytime soon.

  What about that controller?

An online-only streaming service seems like a bold new direction for the gaming industry, but Google isn’t interested in reinventing the controller. The Stadia controller smartly hews close to modern controller design. The pad itself has a nice weight and feels a lot like the PS4 controller thanks to its ergonomic shell and symmetrical analog sticks. The buttons produce a satisfying click and feel sturdy, and I got about seven hours of use from a single charge. Of course, Google has its equivalent of the start, options, and home buttons. However, Google added a screen capture and virtual assistant button to the mix, and this creates a jumble of buttons near the center of the controller. I constantly hit the screen-capture button when I meant to pause a game, which was frustrating.

At launch, the controller also doesn’t work wirelessly with any device other than the Chromecast. This means that in order to play on a laptop or phone you have to connect your device to a controller using a USB C cord, which I found cumbersome. In fact, I was actually a little embarrassed to pull out my tangle of gadgets to play games at Starbucks.

I also wasn’t able to connect the Stadia controller to wi-fi that featured a web browser login, meaning you probably won’t be able to use Google���s controllers wirelessly in locations like hotels that -require a secondary login screen. The Stadia controller might be a nice piece of physical hardware, but these tech issues need to get ironed out as soon as possible.

Under Construction

Under Construction  

Google’s streaming tech might be ready for prime time, but its service certainly isn’t. Many of the more exciting features either aren’t available for launch or won’t roll out until 2020. For starters, Google’s Pixel smartphones are the only phones that Stadia users will be able to use for streaming at launch. Achievements also won’t be viewable at this time, but Google says that Stadia is recording your progress, so once the feature is enabled, users will receive credit for everything they’ve done since then.

The Google Assistant is another exciting feature that is being kicked down the road. During the Stadia reveal event, Google said that with the tap of a button users could speak into their Stadia controller and pull up YouTube walkthroughs or other helpful advice for any game they played. This feature is absent at launch. Google says that the Google Assistant will be available soon, but even then, the Assistant will only be available from the Stadia home screen and only allow users to launch games or turn on their TV.

Stadia’s incomplete feature list is so long it’s a little embarrassing. What about Stream Connect, which is Google’s way of supporting multiplayer by allowing Stadia users to create local couch co-op experiences via split-screen? Coming later this year. What about Family Sharing, which lets you share games with other users in your family? Sometime soon. What about Crowd Play, which lets streamers play games with their viewers? Hopefully, sometime next year. What about streaming over cellular networks? I’ll let you take a guess. If Stadia had all these features, it might feel like the next big leap in gaming, but as it is, the platform is just a basic streaming platform that offers less than a home console. 

In the end, Stadia’s biggest problem is likely its lack of software. Stadia doesn’t have many dedicated experiences that will drive longtime gamers to the platform. The system’s launch lineup features some great games, such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Red Dead Redemption 2, but those are all more than a year old and there isn’t a single triple-A exclusive on the horizon. This is a big problem for Google. If the company hopes to attract more people to the service, it needs to provide a reason to be on Stadia. In other words: It needs more games.

A look at Google’s data center that allows Stadia to run

Launch Lineup

Google Stadia Launch Lineup:

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey  

Attack on Titan: Final Battle 2

Destiny 2: The Collection (available in Stadia Pro)

Farming Simulator 2019

Final Fantasy XV

Football Manager 2020

Grid 2019

Gylt

Just Dance 2020

Kine

Metro Exodus  

Mortal Kombat 11

NBA 2K20

Rage 2

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Red Dead Redemption 2

Samurai Shodown (available in Stadia Pro)

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Thumper

Tomb Raider 2013

Trials Rising

Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Reportedly Releasing Before The End Of 2019:

Borderlands 3

Darksiders Genesis

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint

The Bottom Line

The Bottom Line: 6 out of 10

Stadia seems tailored for a different crowd – the kind of game-curious individual who only pays attention to the occasional blockbuster release and isn’t willing to throw down a few hundred dollars on a dedicated piece of gaming hardware. Next year, when Google launches the free version of the Stadia service, the platform might find that audience. On the other hand, Stadia’s service isn’t currently valuable enough to justify the $129.99 early adopters price tag. Anyone devoted enough to follow industry trends probably cares enough about this hobby to spend the extra money on a console that provides a lag-free experience.

Still, I want something like Stadia to succeed. Purchasing a game and immediately booting it up without concern for downloads or updates is liberating, and when you have a stable internet connection, streaming games off the cloud feels like magic. Oddly enough, Stadia filled me with excitement for a game-streaming future, but it left me with less confidence that Stadia would be the platform to usher us forward.

Editorial Note: This review was conducted in a pre-release environment. We may revisit this review as we play more games after launch and as Google releases console updates.

Understanding Pricing

On day one, consumers can purchase the Stadia Premiere Edition for $129, which includes three free months of Stadia Pro, a Google Chromecast Ultra, and a Stadia Controller. Stadia Pro is Google’s subscription service, which costs $9.99 a month and gives players access to the highest quality streams (4K/60 fps/HDR/5.1 sound) as well as exclusive discounts on game purchases (TBA). Early next year, everyone will be able to stream games through Stadia at no cost, however, the streaming quality will be throttled to 1080p/60fps with stereo sound. No matter how you approach the service, games still need to be purchased à la carte.

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[warmdevs]

New Post has been published on https://warmdevs.com/wechat-chinas-integrated-internet-user-experience.html

WeChat: China’s Integrated Internet User Experience

The big Internet companies of the Western world have proclaimed “conversational user interfaces” and chatbots to be the Next Big Thing, with major initiatives led by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Even Taco Bell has a “TacoBot,” a service that allows users to order and customize their tacos using a natural-language UI.

Much of this hype stems from angst generated by the success of the Chinese WeChat service, which had 700 million users as of April 2016. WeChat has been touted as the poster child for conversational user interfaces. In this article, we report on user research we did in China with WeChat users. The study aimed to uncover practices in which WeChat users engaged, as well as why and in which cases its users preferred to use WeChat instead of regular mobile websites and apps.

WeChat: All You Want in One Place

As the name implies, WeChat started as a mobile instant-messaging (IM) app, launched by Tencent in 2011. However, WeChat quickly added other features; today, it is no longer primarily an IM application, but it also includes:

A payment service. 200 million users have connected their bank accounts to WeChat. This capability allows person-to-person money transfer, including 8 billion “red packets” (so called because gifts of lucky money were traditionally given in red envelopes) sent during the 2016 Chinese New Year celebrations, as well as easy payments to either online or real-world businesses.

A platform for companies’ online presence, with 10 million “official accounts.” Official accounts are WeChat-supported mini-websites that are easy to establish and especially convenient for small businesses, compared with the high-tech skills needed to build and maintain an interactive website.

An ecommerce platform, which is particularly convenient because it’s integrated with the payment service.

Social networking. The “Moments” feature is somewhat like a Facebook wall where friends can post messages in different formats (e.g., text, audio, pictures, stickers, videos). Furthermore, message dialogues allow users to interchange text, audio, pictures, stickers, short videos that are taken within WeChat, links, contact cards, and documents.

Other social services, such as “people nearby.”

Games.

A broad range of 3rd party services. Examples include ordering a taxi, booking train and airline tickets, buying movie tickets, and paying utility bills.

Integration with the physical world. QR scanning is widely used to quickly access WeChat official accounts, and exchange information (for example, contact information). There are even plush toys that connect to WeChat.

The Mon Mon plush toy for little children to interchange voice messages with their parents’ WeChat accounts. (Still from advertisement created by the vendor, the Chinese toy company Dan Dan Man.)

In total, more than a third of the time spent by Chinese users on mobile is on WeChat. No wonder Western companies want to get in on the action.

However, the key UX advantage of WeChat is not that it grew out of a chat service; it’s the integrated user experience. Each individual service is fine, but not necessarily better than those offered by other companies. In fact, our user testing of WeChat revealed many usability problems in various areas. What’s superior is how these services play together and reinforce each other. Most importantly, these benefits are not the result of a superior, simple conversational UI; instead, they are often provided through a simplified graphical user interface (GUI).

WeChat is similar with a megaportal providing access to a huge number of services. It’s almost a parallel, alternate web, whose explosive evolution seems to be rooted in two different aspects:

A huge initial adoption of the IM service and, later, of the payment ability

The scarcity of mobile-optimized sites and services on the Chinese web

The first aspect led to widespread adoption and provided a convenient substitute for credit cards (a less common method of payment in China); the second provided one (and often the only) convenient way of online access to a business or a service.

We asked our Chinese research participants to draw their mental models of WeChat, and as shown in the following examples, many of them considered the smooth payment service and the official accounts more central than that the chat service.

Mental models of WeChat, as drawn by two of our study participants.

User Research

We conducted two rounds of user research in China:

A diary study, in which 12 participants logged their WeChat use for 7 days:

Users sent us a WeChat message each time they used a special WeChat functionality.

Users also completed two questionnaires at the end of each day: one about their use of basic WeChat features and one about their use of special WeChat features. Basic features were defined as messages and chat with friends, checking Moments (the Facebook-wall equivalent), and reading articles published by official accounts. All other activities were considered special features; these included interacting with official accounts, posting to Moments, using payments, scanning QR codes, and shopping.

A usability test, using the thinking-aloud method, where 14 participants used WeChat and other mobile apps to perform representative tasks during 90-minute sessions. At the end of these sessions, most users sketched their mental models of WeChat.

About half of the users were in Beijing (one of China’s advanced “tier-1” cities, with 21 million inhabitants) and the other half were in Tangshan (a smaller and more traditional industrial “tier-3” city, with 7 million inhabitants). The specific location doesn’t usually matter for usability testing, but, in this case, market research suggests that WeChat penetration varies in different parts of China: 93% market penetration in tier-1 cities vs. 43% in tier-3 cities. Local services (e.g., offline businesses using WeChat official accounts and payment tools) also differ in these two types of cities.

About half the study participants owned iPhones and the other half owned Android phones.

Here are some examples of usability-testing tasks (translated into English):

You are planning a trip to Beidaihe next Tuesday. Use WeChat to find what train tickets are available.

Use WeChat to check how crowded it is now at Sanlitun.

Your friend recommended “Jacky’s Crawfish.” Order some crawfish, and have it delivered to our testing location. Please stop before just before completing the purchase.

WeChat Payments Rule

In the diary study, fully 32% of all recorded WeChat activities were payments, confirming this service’s central role in WeChat. On average, during the 7-day diary, each participant made 6 payments — about one per day. The majority of the payments were directed towards offline businesses or physical persons, and actual ecommerce payments were in the minority.

Recipients of WeChat payments made by our study participants.

The main reason for the popularity of the WeChat payment service was its smooth user experience and its ability to cut across channels and across the business/social divide. As one study participant said, “When I am paying with WeChat, I only need to take my phone out — no bank card, no signatures, no cash, no change — so convenient!”

The next two major uses of WeChat were Moments (the Facebook equivalent) with 16% of use and official accounts (miniwebsites hosted by WeChat) with 10% of use. The many other WeChat features accounted for the remaining interactions and thus summed to 42% percent of the overall use.

Integration and Consistency of User Experience

What makes WeChat superior is its integration: many features that all work together and build on each other. Once users subscribe to an official account, they can receive content pushed by that account. They can also access the WeChat page of that account and find more relevant information about the company or read associated pieces of content. They can purchase products or send money to the company. Thus, subscribing to an account opens up a world of interaction possibilities with that company, all strongly tied into WeChat.

Palace Museum account: The user can select one of the tabs at the bottom of the screen to interact with the Palace Museum (top left). Each tab opens up a submenu (top middle). A list of articles about the Palace Museum accessed through one of the menu options (top right). A WeChat “webpage” for the Palace Museum can be accessed through another one of the menus (bottom). (Note, however, that the Palace Museum’s webpage accessed through a regular mobile browser is actually not mobile optimized.)

These WeChat services are often not available through other mobile channels — for example, the Palace Museum does not have a mobile-optimized website available through a mobile browser. Thus, many users will prefer to interact with a company through the consistent and relatively predictable WeChat interface instead of risking to go to a different channel and have an inferior user experience.

The Palace Museum website as accessed through a mobile browser is not mobile optimized.

For companies, WeChat is an inexpensive way to ensure a presence on mobile; that presence has the advantage of offering a standardized, consistent user experience. Users are likely to succeed when engaging with an official account because most of them look the same — they are the equivalent of websites designed according to the same design pattern. The interaction is thus easy to learn and is made of the same WeChat supported building blocks that people are already familiar with from countless previous interactions with other companies.

WeChat vs. Traditional Websites

Although the mobile web is perhaps not as strong in China at this point (with many sites not having mobile versions), it is most likely that WeChat and regular websites will continue to coexist because they each have advantages and disadvantages. Our users didn’t expect the WeChat official accounts to cover all their needs, but they saw them as an easy way to access commonly used features.

Our users said that they preferred using companies’ official accounts on WeChat for several reasons:

Ease of access. WeChat is the primary QR-scanning application, freeing users from typing which has high interaction cost on mobile phones and is particularly unpleasant for older users.

Ease of interaction. As discussed above, it is easier to interact with an official account — you know where to click and how to use it because they all share the same basic interaction style.

Access to small businesses. Many such business (e.g., a fruit shop, handcraft, interest-based organizations) are unlikely to invest in a real website.

Special discounts. Followers of a WeChat account often receive promotions or exclusive campaigns.

Up-to-date information. There’s obviously no fundamental reason why a company’s website could not be kept as current as an official account, but users’ perception was that websites were more static, whereas WeChat accounts were updated more frequently.

While WeChat official accounts have their benefits, users continued to use traditional websites in parallel with WeChat, for several reasons:

More complex functionality, beyond the simple WeChat-supported UI

Spam: Too many articles pushed by WeChat official accounts can easily become annoying, even for followers of those accounts. Some abuse users’ trust and flood them with ads.

Closed system: WeChat excludes access to frequently used services such as Taobao (a major ecommerce site) and important music providers.

Impaired findability: Often different accounts will have similar names, and some of them may belong to a legit company and others may be fake and trying to impersonate that company. To make things worse, the same company may have different WeChat accounts, and the accounts themselves may be of different types (service accounts vs. subscription accounts) with different capabilities (service accounts will support payments, while subscription accounts won’t). Finding the right account can thus be challenging for users.

Trust issues: Some articles on WeChat spread fake information.

WeChat search results for Palace Museum (left) and for Xuxian, the fruit business (right). Checkmarks indicate that the account is verified by WeChat. But these verification checkmarks do not help identify the desired account, because many verified results may actually be returned. Some of these results will belong to the same company but will have different functionalities, and some will belong to a fake company that may take advantage of a better-known brand’s name. Users can differentiate companies by clicking on their introduction page or checking their messaging history, but these operations are time consuming.

Some of these problems are similar to those faced by users of traditional search engines, whereas others are unique to WeChat, especially the peculiar distinction between subscription and service accounts, which breaks the integrated model of the service and seems to be a legacy of WeChat’s history.

WeChat Usability Problems

Our user testing revealed plenty of usability problems in WeChat and the various official accounts we tested. This is no surprise, since the perfect user interface hasn’t been built yet, but should come as a warning to those technology enthusiasts who believe that simply moving to a new platform or embracing a new interaction style will result in great user experience. On the contrary: any design will still need polishing and adaptation to users’ real needs, as opposed to companies’ internal hopes for what their customers will do. We’ll just give two examples here.

Team Maker allows users to define group events. The setup screen requires users to enter a name for the new event, but 10 of 14 study participants overlooked this field and went straight for the second field (denoted by a clock icon) to enter the time of the event.

Team Maker’s official account: The top field had the instructions “Event Title (Required),” but it was overlooked by most test users.

Several design issues combined to cause this problem:

Banner blindness possibly made users overlook the top field because of the graphic.

The prompt was shown as a placeholder text within the field, which is less noticeable than a separate field label.

That field was not aligned with the other fields in the form, and thus looked as if it was not part of a form, but rather a static title.

The activity title prompt was shown in low-contrast text, especially compared with the brighter text used for the time field.

Users may have had a selfish-action bias, preferring fields related to their own needs (the time of the group meeting) over fields related to system needs (the title).

City Heatmap is a WeChat feature that indicates how crowded a given location was. This feature is available under Wallet → Public Services → City Heatmap. Our users had great difficulty finding it. This navigational path was simply not expected, and suffered from a convoluted information architecture and problematic naming with poor information scent.

Such issues are not special to WeChat and we’ve seen them many times in usability studies. New platforms have old usability issues, because the main determinant of usability is the human mind and people’s needs, not technology.

Text-Based Interaction Gets Limited Use

WeChat supports two different types of interaction with an account:

Text-based: Users can text a number or a keyword to a service account and receive an IM reply from that account. (The reply can be automatic or can be generated by a customer-service representative in charge with responding to WeChat queries).

Menu/link based: Users can select a link embedded in a text message or they can use the menu buttons available on official-account interfaces and in the chat window.

Sometimes all these interaction methods were available for an account, but in other situations only the more basic text interface was supported.

Palace Museum’s official account: users can interact with this account either by texting back one of the numbers 0–6, or by tapping the GUI menu button in the bottom left corner of the screen and selecting some of the available options. On some pages (but not in this case), the numeric options inside the text message are themselves tappable links. (In fact, many of our test participants tried to tap the options inside the message and were disappointed when that action did not produce any result.)

In our diary study and in the usability-testing sessions, we noticed only limited use of the text interface. In particular, some users texted back a number in response to a first message received after subscribing to a service account. They also occasionally texted back a keyword hoping to get back matching search results from that company. However, most users much preferred a menu-based interaction over the more effortful text-based interaction. Whenever the bottom menu was available for a service account, users relied on it, as a more expedient way to interact with the company. They also attempted to tap on the numerical options displayed in the chat message as an even faster way to make a choice.

Our initial interest in WeChat was to better understand conversational text interfaces. The appeal of such natural-language interfaces is that they supposedly allow users to simply express their goal and then sit back, while letting the site do all the work for them. No clicks or taps are involved once the initial query has been formulated, so in a sense, such interfaces have the potential of getting closer to the holy grail of usability ­— zero interaction cost. (Such interfaces do assume that users will be able to formulate a goal — an assumption that does not always hold, because users do not always know the search space well enough.)

We did not find evidence for sophisticated natural-language understanding in WeChat. (Those human-staffed official accounts that reply to individual user queries are definitely not scalable in the long run and were not the norm in our study.) Instead of a true conversational text interface, we discovered a system that warrants the interest of an evolutionary web scientist for the way in which it mimics the evolution of the mobile web — a world in which historic, simple interaction such as the numeric-menu selection and keyword-input coexist with more sophisticated menu-based interfaces or GUIs. These latter methods are newer and often preferred by WeChat users for their lower interaction cost, yet, at this point, they have not yet completely erased the chat-box interface.

Conclusion: WeChat Integration Builds Convenience

If conversational interfaces are not a strength of WeChat, what is the secret behind its success? When we asked our users for their top likes about WeChat, the most frequently mentioned attribute was convenience.

WeChat shines in several ways that build convenience:

A wide variety of services and features

Integration of these features among themselves and, especially in the case of WeChat payment and QR codes, with the physical world

Simple, consistent interaction that stays the same across different official accounts — in marked contrast to the diversity of user interface techniques that plague websites

Integration and simplicity are especially important because WeChat is mainly a mobile service. User interfaces are more difficult to use on mobile devices because of their screen-size limitations and error-prone touch input. A simple interaction style that provides a seamless omnichannel customer journey is essential for mobile designs.

Different usability aspects of WeChat were cited as major positives (second most common after convenience) and as major negatives by our study participants. No UI is completely good or completely bad in terms of usability, and while this interface had many good parts, there were others that definitely needed improvement.

Our study participants’ likes and dislikes about WeChat.

The interplay between usability and convenience points to one of the major contrasts in our field — that between usability and user experience (UX). While usability applies to well-designed user interfaces (UIs), usability is not enough for a good UX. Users need useful features that address their real needs instead of their imaginary ones. When a system is convenient, it goes beyond usability and succeeds in being useful and simplifying a previously complicated task.

WeChat does all of this, and that’s why it’s successful. Not because it grew out of a chat site or originally used a conversational user interface.

[tak4hir0]

Every market is ruled by certain common concepts, and JavaScript development is no exception. The product lifecycle is a concept that you can apply to several different environments to understand and predict their behavior. It is a business concept that helps us understand the stages that a product goes through during its life, explaining the impact of these stages on its popularity measure—in most cases, sales. If we observe market behavior patterns, we can estimate the current stage of a product and therefore make some predictions about its popularity. There are four stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline, and on the chart above, you can see the impact on expected product sales for each stage. For example, smartphones sales aren’t growing like five years ago—actually, quite the opposite is true—so we can fairly say that smartphones are getting into their maturity stage. In the past few years, we’ve seen the introduction of a lot of new technologies in JavaScript, but we needed time to see how the market was going to adopt them. Nobody wants to be the specialist on another promising technology that ends with zero adoption. Now, however, is the time to take another look. In this article, I will take a look at how popular JavaScript is becoming and the factors that may have affected this popularity, and I will try to predict what the future of JavaScript will look like. The Future of JavaScript Language Features Since the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) established the year-based release cycle for ECMAScript, a standardized JavaScript specification, we haven’t seen a lot of new features coming to the language—just a few each year. This could be one of the reasons we saw an increase of adoption of languages that compile to ES5 like TypeScript or ReasonML, both bringing features to the language that are highly requested by the community. This is not new—JavaScript went through this process before (CoffeeScript) and, in the end, those features ended up being merged into the language standard itself, and that’s probably the future that we can expect for these new typed features, too. But now we are starting to see a game changer move in the compile-to-js market with the increasing availability of WebAssembly in the browsers. Now, we can use almost any language and compile it to run at almost native speed in a browser and, more importantly, we are starting to see support for future-proof features like support for threads that will allow us to take advantage of the multi-processor architecture that represents the inevitable future of all devices. The official toolchain for WebAssembly will help you to compile C/C++, but there are a lot of community provided compilers for different languages, like Rust, Python, Java, and Blazor (C#). Particularly, the Rust community is pretty active and we started to see complete front-end frameworks like Yew and Dodrio. This brings a lot of new possibilities to browser-based apps, and you only need to test some of the great apps built with WebAssembly to see that near-native browser-based apps are a reality now, e.g., Sketchup or Magnum. Adoption of typed languages that compile to ES5 is mature enough, the players are well established, and they won’t disappear (or be merged with ES) in the near future, but we’ll see a slow shift in favor of typed languages with WebAssembly. Web Front-end Frameworks Every year, we see a big fight on the front-end frameworks market for the web, and React has been the indisputable winner for the past few years—since the introduction of their game-changer technology, the Virtual DOM, we saw an almost obligated adoption from their counterparts in order to remain relevant in the battle. Some years ago, we saw the introduction of a radical new approach to web application development with Svelte, the “compiler framework” that disappears at compile time leaving small and highly efficient JavaScript code. However, that feature was not enough to convince the community to move to Svelte, but with the recent launch of Svelte 3.0, they introduced real reactive programming into the framework and the community is thrilled, so perhaps we are witnessing the next big thing in front-end frameworks. Inspired by the destiny operator: var a = 10; var b <= a + 1; a = 20; Assert.AreEqual(21, b); Svelte brings reactivity to JavaScript by overloading the use of label statements with reactivity at compile time by instructing the code to be executed in topological order: var a = 10; $: b = a + 1; a = 20; Assert.AreEqual(21, b); This is a radical new idea that might help in different contexts, so the creator of Svelte is also working on svelte-gl, a compiler framework that will generate low-level WebGL instructions directly from a 3D scene graph declared in HTMLx. Needless to say that React, Angular, and Vue.js won’t disappear overnight, their communities are huge, and they’ll remain relevant for several years to come—we are not even sure if Svelte will be the actual successor, but we can be sure of something: We’ll be using something different sooner or later. WebXR and the Future of the Immersive Web Virtual reality has been struggling for the past 60 years to find a place in the mainstream, but the technology was just not ready yet. Less than ten years ago, when Jon Carmack joined Oculus VR (now part of Facebook Technologies, LLC), a new wave of VR started to rise, and since then, we’ve seen a lot of new devices supporting different types of VR and of course the proliferation of VR-capable applications. Browser vendors didn’t wanted to lose this opportunity, so they joined with the WebVR specification allowing the creation of virtual worlds in JavaScript with WebGL and well-established libraries like three.js. However, the market share of users with 6dof devices was still insignificant for massive web deployments, but the mobile web was still able to provide a 3D experience with the device orientation API, so we saw a bunch of experiments and a lot of 360 videos for a while. In 2017, with the introduction of ARKit and ARCore, new capabilities were brought to mobile devices and all sorts of applications with AR and MR experiences. However it still feels a little unnatural to download one specific app for one specific AR experience when you are exploring your world around you. If we could only have one app to explore different experiences… This sounds familiar. We solved that problem in the past with the browser, so why not give it another shot? Last year, Mozilla introduced the WebXR Device API Spec (whose last working draft, at the time of this writing, is from two weeks ago) to bring AR, VR, and MR (ergo XR) capabilities to the browser. A few of the most important browser vendors followed with their implementation, with an important exception: Safari mobile, so to prove their point, Mozilla released a WebXR capable browser under the iOS platform WebXR Viewer. Now, this is an important step because the combination of AR and VR brings 6dof to mobile devices and mobile device-based headsets like Google Cardboard or the Samsung Gear VR, as you can see in this example, increasing the market share of 6dof devices by a large margin and enabling the possibility of a large-scale web deployment. At the same time, the guys at Mozilla have been working on a new web framework to facilitate the creation of 3D worlds and applications called A-Frame, a component-based declarative framework with HTML syntax based on three.js and WebGL, having just one thing in mind—to bring back the fun and ease of use to web programming. This is part of their crusade to the immersive web, a new set of ideas on how the web should look like in the future. Luckily for us, they are not alone, and we’ll start to see more and more immersive experiences on the web. If you want to give it a try, go ahead download the WebXR Viewer and visit this site to see the possibilities of the immersive web. Once again, standard browser-based apps won’t fade in a year or two—we’ll probably always have them. But 3D apps and XR experiences are growing and the market is ready and eager to have them. Native Support for ES6 Almost every technology invented in JavaScript in the past decade was created to solve problems generated by the underlying implementation of the browsers, but the platform itself has matured a lot over these past few years, and most of those problems have disappeared, as we can see with Lodash, which once reigned the performance benchmarks. The same is happening with the DOM, whose problems once were the actual inspiration for the creation of web application frameworks. Now, it is a mature API that you can use without frameworks to create apps—actually, that’s what web components are. They are the “framework” of the platform to create component-based apps. Another interesting part of the platform evolution is the language itself. We’ve been using Babel.js for the past few years to be able to use the latest features of ECMAScript, but since the standard itself started to stagnate a little bit in the last few years, that was enough time to allow the browser vendors to implement most of their features, including native support of the static import statement. So now, we can start to consider the creation of applications without Babel.js or other compilers since we have (again) the support of the language features in the platform it self, and since Node.js uses the same V8 VM as Google Chrome, we’ve started to see stronger support of ES6 in Node.js, even with the static import statement under the experimental-modules flag. This doesn’t mean that we’ll stop seeing apps being compiled at a professional level, but it means that starting with a browser-based application will be easy and fun as it once was. Server-side JavaScript Even though JavaScript started with server side in 1995 with the Netscape Enterprise Server, it wasn’t until Ryan’s Dahl presentation in 2009 that JavaScript started to be seriously considered for server-side apps. A lot of things happened in the past decade to Node.js. It evolved and matured a lot, creating once again the opportunity for disruption and new technologies. In this case, it comes from the hand of its very own creator, Ryan Dahl, who has been working on a new perspective of server-side secured apps with Deno, a platform that supports natively the latest language features as async/await, and also the most popular compile-to-js language TypeScript, targeting the best performance thanks to their implementation in Rust and the usage of Tokio, but more importantly with a new security philosophy that differentiates it from most of the server-side platforms like Python, Ruby, or Java). Inspired by the browser security model, Deno will let you use the resources of the host only after the user explicitly granted the permissions to the process, which might sound a bit tedious at the beginning, but it might result in a lot of implications by allowing us to run unsecured code in a secured environment by just trusting the platform. Node.js will still be there in the future but may be we’ll start to see serverless services like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions to provide the Deno functionality as an alternative to provide unsecured server-side code execution on their systems. Conclusion These are exciting times in the JavaScript world—a lot of technologies have matured enough to leave space for innovation, the active community never stopped to amaze us with their brilliant and incredible ideas, and we expect a lot of new alternatives to well-established tools since their mature stages are arriving quickly; we won’t stop using them since a lot of them are really good and there is plenty of proof in the battlefield, but new and exciting markets will start to emerge, and you’d better be prepared. Staying up to date with the latest in JavaScript world isn’t easy, because of the pace of development, but there are some sources that can really help. First, the most important news source, in my opinion, is Echo JS, where you can an incredible amount of new content every hour. However, if you don’t have the time, the JavaScript Weekly newsletter is an excellent summary of the week in JS. Besides this, it is also important to keep an eye on the conferences around the world, and YouTube channels like, JSConf, React Conf, and Google Chrome Developers are wonderfully helpful. Conversely, if you’re interested in seeing some constructive critique of where JavaScript is heading, I recommend reading As a JS Developer, This Is What Keeps Me Up at Night by fellow JavaScript developer Justen Robertson.

[suzanneshannon]

What the web still is

Being a pessimist is an easy thing to fall back on, and I’m trying to be better about it. As we close the year out, I thought it would be a good exercise to take stock of the state of the web and count our blessings.

Versatile

We don't use the internet to do just one thing. With more than two decades of globally interconnected computers, the web allows us to use it for all manner of activity.

This includes platforms, processes, and products that existed before the web came into being, and also previously unimagined concepts and behaviors. Thanks to the web, we can all order takeout the same way we can all watch two women repair a space station in realtime.

Decentralized

There is still no one single arbiter you need to petition to sign off on the validity of your idea, or one accepted path for going about to make it happen. Any website can link out to, or be linked to, without having to pay a tax or file pre-approval paperwork.

While we have seen a consolidation of the services needed to run more sophisticated web apps, you can still put your ideas out for the entire world to see with nothing more than a static HTML page. This fact was, and still is, historically unprecedented.

Resilient

The internet has been called the most hostile environment to develop for. Someone who works on the web has to consider multiple browsers, the operating systems they are installed on, and all the popular release versions of both. They also need to consider screen size and quality, variable network conditions, different form factors and input modes, third party scripts, etc. This is to say nothing about serving an unknown amount of unknown users, each with their own thoughts, feelings, goals, abilities, motivations, proficiencies, and device modifications.

If you do it right, you can build a website or a web app so that it can survive a lot of damage before it is rendered completely inoperable. Frankly, the fact that the web works at all is nothing short of miraculous.

The failsafes, guardrails, redundancies, and other considerations built into the platform from the packet level on up allow this to happen. Honoring them honors the thought, care, and planning that went into the web's foundational principles.

Responsive

Most websites now make use of media queries to ensure their content reads and works well across a staggeringly large amount of devices. This efficient technology choice is fault-tolerant, has a low barrier of entry, and neatly side-steps the myriad problems you get with approaches such as device-sniffing and/or conditionally serving massive piles of JavaScript.

Responsive Design was, and still is revolutionary. It was the right answer, at the right place and time. It elegantly handled the compounding problem of viewport fragmentation as the web transformed from something new and novel into something that is woven into our everyday lives.

Adaptable

In addition to being responsive, the web works across a huge range of form factors, device capabilities, and specialized browsing modes. The post you are currently reading can show up on a laptop, a phone, a Kindle, a TV, a gas station pump, a video game console, a refrigerator, a car, a billboard, an oscilloscope—heck, even a space shuttle (if you’re reading this from space, please, please, please let me know).

It will work with a reading mode that helps a person focus, dark and high contrast modes that will help a person see, and any number of specialized browser extensions that help people get what they need. I have a friend who inverts her entire display to help prevent triggering migraines, and the web just rolls with it. How great is that?

Web content can be read, translated, spoken aloud, copied, clipped, piped into your terminal, forked, remixed, scraped by a robot, output as Braille, and even played as music. You can increase the size of its text, change its font and color, and block parts you don't want to deal with—all in the service of making it easier for you to consume. That is revolutionary when compared to the media that came before it.

Furthermore, thanks to things like Progressive Web Apps and Web Platform Features, the web now blends seamlessly into desktops and home screens. These features allow web content to behave like traditional apps and are treated as first-class citizens by the operating systems that support them. You don’t even necessarily need to be online for them to work!

Accessible

The current landscape of accessibility compliance is a depressing state of affairs. WebAIM’s Million report, and subsequent update, highlights this with a sobering level of detail.

Out of the top one million websites sampled, ~98% of home pages had programmatically detectable Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors. This represents a complete, categorical failure of our industry on every conceivable level, from developers and designers, to framework maintainers, all the way up to those who help steer the future of the platform.

And yet.

In that last stubborn two percent lives a promise of the web. Web accessibility—the ability for someone to use a website or web app regardless of their ability or circumstance—grants autonomy. It represents a rare space where a disabled individual may operate free from the immense amount of bias, misunderstanding, and outright hate that is pervasive throughout much of society. This autonomy represents not only freedom for social activities but also employment opportunities for a population that is routinely discriminated against.

There is a ton of work to do, and we do not have the luxury of defeatism. I’m actually optimistic about digital accessibility’s future. Things like Inclusive Design have shifted the conversation away from remediation into a more holistic, proactive approach to product design.

Accessibility, long viewed as an unglamorous topic, has started to appear as a mainstream, top-level theme in conference and workshop circuits, as well as popular industry blogs. Sophisticated automated accessibility checkers can help prevent you from shipping inaccessible code. Design systems are helping to normalize the practice at scale. And most importantly, accessibility practitioners are speaking openly about ableism.

Inexpensive

While the average size of a website continues to rise, the fact remains that you can achieve an incredible amount of functionality with a small amount of code. That’s an important thing to keep in mind.

It has never been more affordable to use the web. In the United States, you can buy an internet-ready smartphone for ~$40. Emerging markets are adopting feature phones such as the JioPhone (~$15 USD) at an incredible rate. This means that access to the world’s information is available to more people—people who traditionally may have never been able to have such a privilege.

Think about it: owning a desktop computer represented having enough steady income to be able to support permanent housing, as well as consistent power and phone service. This created an implicit barrier to entry during the web’s infancy.

The weakening of this barrier opens up unimaginable amounts of opportunity, and is an excellent reminder that the web really is for everyone. With that in mind, it remains vital to keep our payload sizes down. What might be a reflexive CMD + R for you might be an entire week’s worth of data for someone else.

Diverse

There are more browsers available than I have fingers and toes to count on. This is a good thing. Like any other category of software, each browser is an app that does the same general thing in the same general way, but with specific design decisions made to prioritize different needs and goals.

My favorite browser, Firefox, puts a lot of its attention towards maintaining the privacy and security of its users. Brave is similar in that regard. Both Edge and Safari are bundled with their respective operating systems, and have interfaces geared towards helping the widest range of users browse web content. Browsers like Opera and Vivaldi are geared towards tinkerers, people who like a highly customized browsing experience. Samsung Internet is an alternative browser for Android devices that can integrate with their proprietary hardware. KaiOS and UC browsers provide access to millions of feature phones, helping them to have smartphone-esque functionality. Chrome helps you receive more personalized ads efficiently debug JavaScript.

Browser engine diversity is important as well, although the ecosystem has been getting disturbingly small as of late. The healthy competition multiple engines generates translates directly to the experience becoming better for the most important people in the room: Those who rely on the web to live their everyday lives.

Speaking of people, let’s discuss the web’s quality of diversity and how it applies to them: Our industry, like many others, has historically been plagued by ills such as misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and classism. However, the fact remains that the ability to solve problems in the digital space represents a rare form of leverage that allows minoritized groups to have upward economic mobility.

If you can't be motivated by human decency, it’s no secret that more diverse teams perform better. We’ve made good strides in the past few years towards better representation, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Listen to, and signal boost the triumphs, frustrations, and fears of the underrepresented in our industry. Internalize their observations and challenge your preconceived notions and biases. Advocate for their right to be in this space. Educate yourself on our industry’s history. Support things like codes of conduct, which do the hard work of modeling and codifying expectations for behavior. All of this helps to push against a toxic status quo and makes the industry better for everyone.

Standardized

The web is built by consensus, enabling a radical kind of functionality. This interoperability—the ability for different computer systems to be able to exchange information—is built from a set of standards we have all collectively agreed on.

Chances are good that a web document written two decades ago will still work with the latest version of any major browser. Any web document written by someone else—even someone on the opposite side of the globe—will also work. It will also continue to work on browsers and devices that have yet to be invented. I challenge you to name another file format that supports this level of functionality that has an equivalent lifespan.

This futureproofing by way of standardization also allows for a solid foundation of support for whatever comes next. Remember the principle of versatile: It is important to remember that these standards are also not prescriptive. We’re free to take these building blocks use arrange them in a near-infinite number of ways.

Open

Furthermore, this consensus is transparent. While the process may seem slow sometimes, it is worth highlighting the fact that the process is highly transparent. Anyone who is invested may follow, and contribute to web standards, warts and all.

It’s this openness that helps to prevent things like hidden agendas, privatization, lock-in, and disproportionate influence from consolidating power. Open-source software and protocols and, most importantly, large-scale cooperation also sustain the web platform’s long-term growth and health. Think of web technologies that didn’t make it: Flash, Silverlight, ActiveX, etc. All closed, for-profit, brittle, and private.

It also helps to disincentive more abstract threats, things like adversarial interoperability and failure to disclose vulnerabilities. These kinds of hazards are a good thing to remember any time you find yourself frustrated with the platform.

Make no mistake: I feel a lot of what makes the web great is actively being dismantled, either inadvertently or deliberately. But as I mentioned earlier, cynicism is easy. My wish for next year? That all the qualities mentioned here are still present. My New Year’s resolution? To help ensure it.

The post What the web still is appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

What the web still is published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[whorehousenyc]

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Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

January 23, 2019 Dr. Demetrios Zamboglou

Since the turn of the century, an entirely new phenomenon has arrived to improve the lives of consumers and businesses alike. Still in its infancy, blockchain technology is developing at seemingly breakneck speeds to solve many of the as yet unresolved problems in modern business. As an early sign of what’s to come – and also to wet the appetites of consumers globally – cryptocurrencies have emerged to deliver a kaleidoscope of benefits to users.

Faster payments, better accounting, secure storage, precise shipping – you name it and blockchain technology can deliver it.

The ongoing developments of the blockchain industry are delivering a variety of solutions, but still, many problems remain unsolved. One of the major challenges has been translating the blockchain prowess from the highly technical into the understanding for the layman. In other words, how to make such poignant technology usable, functional and popular amongst hordes of people, rather than just for a few niche businesses.

From this perspective, cryptocurrencies, blockchains and distributed ledgers remain at the embryonic stage of development. However, 2019 promises to advance the gifts of this so-called new technological dawn into the stockings of the mainstream.

“The gap between what is relevant and what is people understand is so large, there is going to be a large lag time when new technologies come into the mainstream,” says Benjamin Cordes, from Macro Exchange.

“For Bitcoin this was about eight years, for Ethereum it was around four. The advance I am most excited about is improvements on the core economic protocols, namely the proof of work algorithm. And more generally for systems to become available which allow for a decentral economy, democratising finance and access to markets,” says Mr Cordes.

SEE ALSO: Why the development of next-generation blockchain platforms must be led by the community 

Blockchain to make its charge

Several blockchain projects stand ready to make a meaningful impact in 2019. With special regard for the mainstream consumer, one of the prime development focuses are cryptocurrencies and their future.

Some industry experts like Tim Draper argue (quite rightly) that for every growth step taken by the world’s leading spearhead cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will likely mean reciprocal legislative measures are also undertaken to enable safe passage for its prior growth to continue.

“Identity and Know Your Customer (KYC) are certainly hot topics but focusing on the Blockchain as some sort of magic is misguided. It is like giving a 5-year-old a mobile phone without a network connection – after about a minute what was cool becomes useless, unless you add connectivity,” says Bradley Hall, Founder and Chairman of ICON Capital Reserve, a financial software company that’s currently advancing a rather unique crypto product that aims to secure investor interest in gold.

In terms of gold, a trusted store of value with a 6000 year legacy, I think Ray Dalio founder of Bridgewater Associates put it best when he said ‘Those who don’t allocate 10% of their portfolios to gold, don’t understand history, economics or probably both.’ It seems the future has arrived and it is getting a little more evenly distributed,” says Mr Hall.

The company’s flagship product is AUREALS – a fusion of Gold and the blockchain that insulates holders from currency, institutional and systemic risks.

“PC’s first created by IBM were ornaments until Microsoft offered them DOS and then changed the game entirely when they embedded Windows software on OEM devices. Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee created the ultimate geek club with the World Wide Web, but the internet was unleashed when Netscape re-imagined his browser and Google began to index the treasure trove of information,” says Mr Hall.

The same evolution is occurring within blockchain whereby a magnificent root invention is now being harnessed by various companies in a variety of ways, for the benefit of consumers.

Not forgetting regulation

China is readying a draft of regulations concerning cryptocurrency and blockchain companies that are expected to come into effect in February this year.

Nick Szabo, one of the pioneers in blockchain, notes that more people will turn to cryptocurrencies. Thus, different approaches will occur given the decentralised nature of the entire concept, and also, to accommodate the variety of applications required by users.

For example, security tokens were offered through Security Token Offering, which is designed to protect investor’s ownership rights. By taking possession of a particular token, the holder gets a certain amount of rights within the ecosystem and can help trade value within it. It also acts as a toll gateway in order to use certain functionalities of a particular system.

On a wider global scale, the first legitimate national cryptocurrency is set to be launched later this year, linked to a fiat currency from a G20 nation. Several industry experts concur that improving the image of cryptocurrencies will be one of the most challenging goals faced by blockchain and cryptocurrencies – possibly because of the inherent risk of loss when used as a speculative investment vehicle.

Banking and cryptocurrencies, a match made in heaven?

According to Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, “There will always be banking but not necessarily banks”, and it could well be the blockchain industry and cryptocurrencies that facilitate what may turn out to be Mr. Gates’ prophetic claim.

However, it’s not just the private sector that wants to get in on the action when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

From an establishment perspective, it is expected that central banks might start to supplement their gold reserves with cryptocurrencies as a result of growing mistrust of foreign central banks and governments and the vulnerability of national gold reserves.  Furthermore, it is expected that additional integration with different platforms will occur in terms of being able to pay for services. New types of cryptocurrency have the stage to make their ascent, like Stable Coins. Unlike Bitcoin, these coins are designed for price stability and to be largely insulated from often volatile market conditions.

According to Margot James, the British government is committing millions of pounds to fund blockchain projects in areas such as energy, voting and charity through Innovate UK and research councils. Solutions like Lightning Network, a Bitcoin protocol which makes small transactions possible using its native smart-contract scripting language, are also expected to continue their growth in 2019.

Silvio Schembri, Malta’s Junior Minister for Financial Services, declared that “2019 will see the materialisation of The Blockchain Island, firmly putting Malta at the epicenter of this industry”. One of the applications is “digital remote voting” that is believed to be widely adopted after the successful pilot program in West Virginia, USA.

Another variant is Hybrid – a blockchain that attempts to fuse the best parts of both private and public blockchain solutions, when, for instance, governments are not able to become entirely decentralised by using only public blockchains.

According to Mr Hall, “there is a bit of an arms race going on in financial services and in particular in payments where DLT based solutions like AUREALS are disrupting incumbents, as the command and control hierarchies of the last 70 years begin to decay and implode under their own weight.”

The private sector

Despite the rumblings coming from public institutions, governments and central banks, the private sector is where the major blockchain developments are set to find fertile ground in 2019.

“The next wave of innovation is being constructed with distributed ledger technology (DLT) but simple ledger entries that act like ‘claim checks with nothing to claim’ will revert to their intrinsic value of zero – as Voltaire noted all fiat currencies do and powerful replacements representing assets and cash-flows will take centre stage,” says Mr Hall.

In the private sector, an increasing number of companies are transforming their business models and operations to adapt blockchain into their existing business processes. One of the largest being deployed is by the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. The US company is currently developing and testing a blockchain system to streamline its sprawling global consumer market empire.

Smart contracts are also evolving. One example is ‘Ricardian contracts’, which unlike standard smart contracts, can be read as it uses human-readable text. Another system called Chainlink uses cryptography and a type of secure hardware called a ‘trusted enclave’ to securely feed data to smart contracts on the blockchain.

Other applications being developed are seeking to integrate blockchain with artificial intelligence (AI). According to Nick Dryden, 2019 is going to be a year which sees biometrics flourish, whereby personal data will further rely on such uniquely human traits like veins.

Further examples of blockchain technologies that are expected to be seen in 2019 include CyberLogitec’s soon-to-be-launched solution, dubbed ‘FREIGHT9’ and ‘OPUS9’ which promise to pave the way for a purely digital system for maritime businesses, eliminating the hassle of paper-based documentation for all shipping.

SEE ALSO: The future of open source: An increased focus on security and performance

The Hedera Hashgraph Platform presented solutions using the virtual-voting consensus algorithm and asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT). The Energy Web Foundation is building a “blockchain of blockchains” that wants to let consumers sell the energy they generate at home in markets worldwide using the EWF open-source software application, thereby helping to create a confluence of digital links between existing energy trading platforms.

“The area we are working on at economic networks is algorithm trading, market making and open source finance. The current financial system is dominated by large institutions which are ineffective and very costly. The future of markets is a global one and driven by protocols. The Internet so far has been mostly a medium for communication, but we mean to repurpose it for use as a robust transaction network,” says Mr Cordes.

“If you currently book a flight online you will access two systems: the web for the website and a financial network in the background. The future will be a seamlessly integrated holistic network,” he adds.

According to the highly-respected publication MIT Technology Review, the year 2019 is when blockchain technology “finally becomes normal”. With so much happening at once in blockchain development all at once, in some respects, the gold rush is far from over but is only just beginning.

The result is that this coming year is set to deliver applicability in all sectors spanning the public and private divide – and possibly most satisfying for consumers – will work for the benefit of all market participants.

Source link http://bit.ly/2AZSJK5

[mccartneynathxzw83]

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

January 23, 2019 Dr. Demetrios Zamboglou

Since the turn of the century, an entirely new phenomenon has arrived to improve the lives of consumers and businesses alike. Still in its infancy, blockchain technology is developing at seemingly breakneck speeds to solve many of the as yet unresolved problems in modern business. As an early sign of what’s to come – and also to wet the appetites of consumers globally – cryptocurrencies have emerged to deliver a kaleidoscope of benefits to users.

Faster payments, better accounting, secure storage, precise shipping – you name it and blockchain technology can deliver it.

The ongoing developments of the blockchain industry are delivering a variety of solutions, but still, many problems remain unsolved. One of the major challenges has been translating the blockchain prowess from the highly technical into the understanding for the layman. In other words, how to make such poignant technology usable, functional and popular amongst hordes of people, rather than just for a few niche businesses.

From this perspective, cryptocurrencies, blockchains and distributed ledgers remain at the embryonic stage of development. However, 2019 promises to advance the gifts of this so-called new technological dawn into the stockings of the mainstream.

“The gap between what is relevant and what is people understand is so large, there is going to be a large lag time when new technologies come into the mainstream,” says Benjamin Cordes, from Macro Exchange.

“For Bitcoin this was about eight years, for Ethereum it was around four. The advance I am most excited about is improvements on the core economic protocols, namely the proof of work algorithm. And more generally for systems to become available which allow for a decentral economy, democratising finance and access to markets,” says Mr Cordes.

SEE ALSO: Why the development of next-generation blockchain platforms must be led by the community 

Blockchain to make its charge

Several blockchain projects stand ready to make a meaningful impact in 2019. With special regard for the mainstream consumer, one of the prime development focuses are cryptocurrencies and their future.

Some industry experts like Tim Draper argue (quite rightly) that for every growth step taken by the world’s leading spearhead cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will likely mean reciprocal legislative measures are also undertaken to enable safe passage for its prior growth to continue.

“Identity and Know Your Customer (KYC) are certainly hot topics but focusing on the Blockchain as some sort of magic is misguided. It is like giving a 5-year-old a mobile phone without a network connection – after about a minute what was cool becomes useless, unless you add connectivity,” says Bradley Hall, Founder and Chairman of ICON Capital Reserve, a financial software company that’s currently advancing a rather unique crypto product that aims to secure investor interest in gold.

In terms of gold, a trusted store of value with a 6000 year legacy, I think Ray Dalio founder of Bridgewater Associates put it best when he said ‘Those who don’t allocate 10% of their portfolios to gold, don’t understand history, economics or probably both.’ It seems the future has arrived and it is getting a little more evenly distributed,” says Mr Hall.

The company’s flagship product is AUREALS – a fusion of Gold and the blockchain that insulates holders from currency, institutional and systemic risks.

“PC’s first created by IBM were ornaments until Microsoft offered them DOS and then changed the game entirely when they embedded Windows software on OEM devices. Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee created the ultimate geek club with the World Wide Web, but the internet was unleashed when Netscape re-imagined his browser and Google began to index the treasure trove of information,” says Mr Hall.

The same evolution is occurring within blockchain whereby a magnificent root invention is now being harnessed by various companies in a variety of ways, for the benefit of consumers.

Not forgetting regulation

China is readying a draft of regulations concerning cryptocurrency and blockchain companies that are expected to come into effect in February this year.

Nick Szabo, one of the pioneers in blockchain, notes that more people will turn to cryptocurrencies. Thus, different approaches will occur given the decentralised nature of the entire concept, and also, to accommodate the variety of applications required by users.

For example, security tokens were offered through Security Token Offering, which is designed to protect investor’s ownership rights. By taking possession of a particular token, the holder gets a certain amount of rights within the ecosystem and can help trade value within it. It also acts as a toll gateway in order to use certain functionalities of a particular system.

On a wider global scale, the first legitimate national cryptocurrency is set to be launched later this year, linked to a fiat currency from a G20 nation. Several industry experts concur that improving the image of cryptocurrencies will be one of the most challenging goals faced by blockchain and cryptocurrencies – possibly because of the inherent risk of loss when used as a speculative investment vehicle.

Banking and cryptocurrencies, a match made in heaven?

According to Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, “There will always be banking but not necessarily banks”, and it could well be the blockchain industry and cryptocurrencies that facilitate what may turn out to be Mr. Gates’ prophetic claim.

However, it’s not just the private sector that wants to get in on the action when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

From an establishment perspective, it is expected that central banks might start to supplement their gold reserves with cryptocurrencies as a result of growing mistrust of foreign central banks and governments and the vulnerability of national gold reserves.  Furthermore, it is expected that additional integration with different platforms will occur in terms of being able to pay for services. New types of cryptocurrency have the stage to make their ascent, like Stable Coins. Unlike Bitcoin, these coins are designed for price stability and to be largely insulated from often volatile market conditions.

According to Margot James, the British government is committing millions of pounds to fund blockchain projects in areas such as energy, voting and charity through Innovate UK and research councils. Solutions like Lightning Network, a Bitcoin protocol which makes small transactions possible using its native smart-contract scripting language, are also expected to continue their growth in 2019.

Silvio Schembri, Malta’s Junior Minister for Financial Services, declared that “2019 will see the materialisation of The Blockchain Island, firmly putting Malta at the epicenter of this industry”. One of the applications is “digital remote voting” that is believed to be widely adopted after the successful pilot program in West Virginia, USA.

Another variant is Hybrid – a blockchain that attempts to fuse the best parts of both private and public blockchain solutions, when, for instance, governments are not able to become entirely decentralised by using only public blockchains.

According to Mr Hall, “there is a bit of an arms race going on in financial services and in particular in payments where DLT based solutions like AUREALS are disrupting incumbents, as the command and control hierarchies of the last 70 years begin to decay and implode under their own weight.”

The private sector

Despite the rumblings coming from public institutions, governments and central banks, the private sector is where the major blockchain developments are set to find fertile ground in 2019.

“The next wave of innovation is being constructed with distributed ledger technology (DLT) but simple ledger entries that act like ‘claim checks with nothing to claim’ will revert to their intrinsic value of zero – as Voltaire noted all fiat currencies do and powerful replacements representing assets and cash-flows will take centre stage,” says Mr Hall.

In the private sector, an increasing number of companies are transforming their business models and operations to adapt blockchain into their existing business processes. One of the largest being deployed is by the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. The US company is currently developing and testing a blockchain system to streamline its sprawling global consumer market empire.

Smart contracts are also evolving. One example is ‘Ricardian contracts’, which unlike standard smart contracts, can be read as it uses human-readable text. Another system called Chainlink uses cryptography and a type of secure hardware called a ‘trusted enclave’ to securely feed data to smart contracts on the blockchain.

Other applications being developed are seeking to integrate blockchain with artificial intelligence (AI). According to Nick Dryden, 2019 is going to be a year which sees biometrics flourish, whereby personal data will further rely on such uniquely human traits like veins.

Further examples of blockchain technologies that are expected to be seen in 2019 include CyberLogitec’s soon-to-be-launched solution, dubbed ‘FREIGHT9’ and ‘OPUS9’ which promise to pave the way for a purely digital system for maritime businesses, eliminating the hassle of paper-based documentation for all shipping.

SEE ALSO: The future of open source: An increased focus on security and performance

The Hedera Hashgraph Platform presented solutions using the virtual-voting consensus algorithm and asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT). The Energy Web Foundation is building a “blockchain of blockchains” that wants to let consumers sell the energy they generate at home in markets worldwide using the EWF open-source software application, thereby helping to create a confluence of digital links between existing energy trading platforms.

“The area we are working on at economic networks is algorithm trading, market making and open source finance. The current financial system is dominated by large institutions which are ineffective and very costly. The future of markets is a global one and driven by protocols. The Internet so far has been mostly a medium for communication, but we mean to repurpose it for use as a robust transaction network,” says Mr Cordes.

“If you currently book a flight online you will access two systems: the web for the website and a financial network in the background. The future will be a seamlessly integrated holistic network,” he adds.

According to the highly-respected publication MIT Technology Review, the year 2019 is when blockchain technology “finally becomes normal”. With so much happening at once in blockchain development all at once, in some respects, the gold rush is far from over but is only just beginning.

The result is that this coming year is set to deliver applicability in all sectors spanning the public and private divide – and possibly most satisfying for consumers – will work for the benefit of all market participants.

Source link http://bit.ly/2AZSJK5

[courtneyvbrooks87]

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

January 23, 2019 Dr. Demetrios Zamboglou

Since the turn of the century, an entirely new phenomenon has arrived to improve the lives of consumers and businesses alike. Still in its infancy, blockchain technology is developing at seemingly breakneck speeds to solve many of the as yet unresolved problems in modern business. As an early sign of what’s to come – and also to wet the appetites of consumers globally – cryptocurrencies have emerged to deliver a kaleidoscope of benefits to users.

Faster payments, better accounting, secure storage, precise shipping – you name it and blockchain technology can deliver it.

The ongoing developments of the blockchain industry are delivering a variety of solutions, but still, many problems remain unsolved. One of the major challenges has been translating the blockchain prowess from the highly technical into the understanding for the layman. In other words, how to make such poignant technology usable, functional and popular amongst hordes of people, rather than just for a few niche businesses.

From this perspective, cryptocurrencies, blockchains and distributed ledgers remain at the embryonic stage of development. However, 2019 promises to advance the gifts of this so-called new technological dawn into the stockings of the mainstream.

“The gap between what is relevant and what is people understand is so large, there is going to be a large lag time when new technologies come into the mainstream,” says Benjamin Cordes, from Macro Exchange.

“For Bitcoin this was about eight years, for Ethereum it was around four. The advance I am most excited about is improvements on the core economic protocols, namely the proof of work algorithm. And more generally for systems to become available which allow for a decentral economy, democratising finance and access to markets,” says Mr Cordes.

SEE ALSO: Why the development of next-generation blockchain platforms must be led by the community 

Blockchain to make its charge

Several blockchain projects stand ready to make a meaningful impact in 2019. With special regard for the mainstream consumer, one of the prime development focuses are cryptocurrencies and their future.

Some industry experts like Tim Draper argue (quite rightly) that for every growth step taken by the world’s leading spearhead cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will likely mean reciprocal legislative measures are also undertaken to enable safe passage for its prior growth to continue.

“Identity and Know Your Customer (KYC) are certainly hot topics but focusing on the Blockchain as some sort of magic is misguided. It is like giving a 5-year-old a mobile phone without a network connection – after about a minute what was cool becomes useless, unless you add connectivity,” says Bradley Hall, Founder and Chairman of ICON Capital Reserve, a financial software company that’s currently advancing a rather unique crypto product that aims to secure investor interest in gold.

In terms of gold, a trusted store of value with a 6000 year legacy, I think Ray Dalio founder of Bridgewater Associates put it best when he said ‘Those who don’t allocate 10% of their portfolios to gold, don’t understand history, economics or probably both.’ It seems the future has arrived and it is getting a little more evenly distributed,” says Mr Hall.

The company’s flagship product is AUREALS – a fusion of Gold and the blockchain that insulates holders from currency, institutional and systemic risks.

“PC’s first created by IBM were ornaments until Microsoft offered them DOS and then changed the game entirely when they embedded Windows software on OEM devices. Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee created the ultimate geek club with the World Wide Web, but the internet was unleashed when Netscape re-imagined his browser and Google began to index the treasure trove of information,” says Mr Hall.

The same evolution is occurring within blockchain whereby a magnificent root invention is now being harnessed by various companies in a variety of ways, for the benefit of consumers.

Not forgetting regulation

China is readying a draft of regulations concerning cryptocurrency and blockchain companies that are expected to come into effect in February this year.

Nick Szabo, one of the pioneers in blockchain, notes that more people will turn to cryptocurrencies. Thus, different approaches will occur given the decentralised nature of the entire concept, and also, to accommodate the variety of applications required by users.

For example, security tokens were offered through Security Token Offering, which is designed to protect investor’s ownership rights. By taking possession of a particular token, the holder gets a certain amount of rights within the ecosystem and can help trade value within it. It also acts as a toll gateway in order to use certain functionalities of a particular system.

On a wider global scale, the first legitimate national cryptocurrency is set to be launched later this year, linked to a fiat currency from a G20 nation. Several industry experts concur that improving the image of cryptocurrencies will be one of the most challenging goals faced by blockchain and cryptocurrencies – possibly because of the inherent risk of loss when used as a speculative investment vehicle.

Banking and cryptocurrencies, a match made in heaven?

According to Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, “There will always be banking but not necessarily banks”, and it could well be the blockchain industry and cryptocurrencies that facilitate what may turn out to be Mr. Gates’ prophetic claim.

However, it’s not just the private sector that wants to get in on the action when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

From an establishment perspective, it is expected that central banks might start to supplement their gold reserves with cryptocurrencies as a result of growing mistrust of foreign central banks and governments and the vulnerability of national gold reserves.  Furthermore, it is expected that additional integration with different platforms will occur in terms of being able to pay for services. New types of cryptocurrency have the stage to make their ascent, like Stable Coins. Unlike Bitcoin, these coins are designed for price stability and to be largely insulated from often volatile market conditions.

According to Margot James, the British government is committing millions of pounds to fund blockchain projects in areas such as energy, voting and charity through Innovate UK and research councils. Solutions like Lightning Network, a Bitcoin protocol which makes small transactions possible using its native smart-contract scripting language, are also expected to continue their growth in 2019.

Silvio Schembri, Malta’s Junior Minister for Financial Services, declared that “2019 will see the materialisation of The Blockchain Island, firmly putting Malta at the epicenter of this industry”. One of the applications is “digital remote voting” that is believed to be widely adopted after the successful pilot program in West Virginia, USA.

Another variant is Hybrid – a blockchain that attempts to fuse the best parts of both private and public blockchain solutions, when, for instance, governments are not able to become entirely decentralised by using only public blockchains.

According to Mr Hall, “there is a bit of an arms race going on in financial services and in particular in payments where DLT based solutions like AUREALS are disrupting incumbents, as the command and control hierarchies of the last 70 years begin to decay and implode under their own weight.”

The private sector

Despite the rumblings coming from public institutions, governments and central banks, the private sector is where the major blockchain developments are set to find fertile ground in 2019.

“The next wave of innovation is being constructed with distributed ledger technology (DLT) but simple ledger entries that act like ‘claim checks with nothing to claim’ will revert to their intrinsic value of zero – as Voltaire noted all fiat currencies do and powerful replacements representing assets and cash-flows will take centre stage,” says Mr Hall.

In the private sector, an increasing number of companies are transforming their business models and operations to adapt blockchain into their existing business processes. One of the largest being deployed is by the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. The US company is currently developing and testing a blockchain system to streamline its sprawling global consumer market empire.

Smart contracts are also evolving. One example is ‘Ricardian contracts’, which unlike standard smart contracts, can be read as it uses human-readable text. Another system called Chainlink uses cryptography and a type of secure hardware called a ‘trusted enclave’ to securely feed data to smart contracts on the blockchain.

Other applications being developed are seeking to integrate blockchain with artificial intelligence (AI). According to Nick Dryden, 2019 is going to be a year which sees biometrics flourish, whereby personal data will further rely on such uniquely human traits like veins.

Further examples of blockchain technologies that are expected to be seen in 2019 include CyberLogitec’s soon-to-be-launched solution, dubbed ‘FREIGHT9’ and ‘OPUS9’ which promise to pave the way for a purely digital system for maritime businesses, eliminating the hassle of paper-based documentation for all shipping.

SEE ALSO: The future of open source: An increased focus on security and performance

The Hedera Hashgraph Platform presented solutions using the virtual-voting consensus algorithm and asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT). The Energy Web Foundation is building a “blockchain of blockchains” that wants to let consumers sell the energy they generate at home in markets worldwide using the EWF open-source software application, thereby helping to create a confluence of digital links between existing energy trading platforms.

“The area we are working on at economic networks is algorithm trading, market making and open source finance. The current financial system is dominated by large institutions which are ineffective and very costly. The future of markets is a global one and driven by protocols. The Internet so far has been mostly a medium for communication, but we mean to repurpose it for use as a robust transaction network,” says Mr Cordes.

“If you currently book a flight online you will access two systems: the web for the website and a financial network in the background. The future will be a seamlessly integrated holistic network,” he adds.

According to the highly-respected publication MIT Technology Review, the year 2019 is when blockchain technology “finally becomes normal”. With so much happening at once in blockchain development all at once, in some respects, the gold rush is far from over but is only just beginning.

The result is that this coming year is set to deliver applicability in all sectors spanning the public and private divide – and possibly most satisfying for consumers – will work for the benefit of all market participants.

Source link http://bit.ly/2AZSJK5

[vanessawestwcrtr5]

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

January 23, 2019 Dr. Demetrios Zamboglou

Since the turn of the century, an entirely new phenomenon has arrived to improve the lives of consumers and businesses alike. Still in its infancy, blockchain technology is developing at seemingly breakneck speeds to solve many of the as yet unresolved problems in modern business. As an early sign of what’s to come – and also to wet the appetites of consumers globally – cryptocurrencies have emerged to deliver a kaleidoscope of benefits to users.

Faster payments, better accounting, secure storage, precise shipping – you name it and blockchain technology can deliver it.

The ongoing developments of the blockchain industry are delivering a variety of solutions, but still, many problems remain unsolved. One of the major challenges has been translating the blockchain prowess from the highly technical into the understanding for the layman. In other words, how to make such poignant technology usable, functional and popular amongst hordes of people, rather than just for a few niche businesses.

From this perspective, cryptocurrencies, blockchains and distributed ledgers remain at the embryonic stage of development. However, 2019 promises to advance the gifts of this so-called new technological dawn into the stockings of the mainstream.

“The gap between what is relevant and what is people understand is so large, there is going to be a large lag time when new technologies come into the mainstream,” says Benjamin Cordes, from Macro Exchange.

“For Bitcoin this was about eight years, for Ethereum it was around four. The advance I am most excited about is improvements on the core economic protocols, namely the proof of work algorithm. And more generally for systems to become available which allow for a decentral economy, democratising finance and access to markets,” says Mr Cordes.

SEE ALSO: Why the development of next-generation blockchain platforms must be led by the community 

Blockchain to make its charge

Several blockchain projects stand ready to make a meaningful impact in 2019. With special regard for the mainstream consumer, one of the prime development focuses are cryptocurrencies and their future.

Some industry experts like Tim Draper argue (quite rightly) that for every growth step taken by the world’s leading spearhead cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will likely mean reciprocal legislative measures are also undertaken to enable safe passage for its prior growth to continue.

“Identity and Know Your Customer (KYC) are certainly hot topics but focusing on the Blockchain as some sort of magic is misguided. It is like giving a 5-year-old a mobile phone without a network connection – after about a minute what was cool becomes useless, unless you add connectivity,” says Bradley Hall, Founder and Chairman of ICON Capital Reserve, a financial software company that’s currently advancing a rather unique crypto product that aims to secure investor interest in gold.

In terms of gold, a trusted store of value with a 6000 year legacy, I think Ray Dalio founder of Bridgewater Associates put it best when he said ‘Those who don’t allocate 10% of their portfolios to gold, don’t understand history, economics or probably both.’ It seems the future has arrived and it is getting a little more evenly distributed,” says Mr Hall.

The company’s flagship product is AUREALS – a fusion of Gold and the blockchain that insulates holders from currency, institutional and systemic risks.

“PC’s first created by IBM were ornaments until Microsoft offered them DOS and then changed the game entirely when they embedded Windows software on OEM devices. Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee created the ultimate geek club with the World Wide Web, but the internet was unleashed when Netscape re-imagined his browser and Google began to index the treasure trove of information,” says Mr Hall.

The same evolution is occurring within blockchain whereby a magnificent root invention is now being harnessed by various companies in a variety of ways, for the benefit of consumers.

Not forgetting regulation

China is readying a draft of regulations concerning cryptocurrency and blockchain companies that are expected to come into effect in February this year.

Nick Szabo, one of the pioneers in blockchain, notes that more people will turn to cryptocurrencies. Thus, different approaches will occur given the decentralised nature of the entire concept, and also, to accommodate the variety of applications required by users.

For example, security tokens were offered through Security Token Offering, which is designed to protect investor’s ownership rights. By taking possession of a particular token, the holder gets a certain amount of rights within the ecosystem and can help trade value within it. It also acts as a toll gateway in order to use certain functionalities of a particular system.

On a wider global scale, the first legitimate national cryptocurrency is set to be launched later this year, linked to a fiat currency from a G20 nation. Several industry experts concur that improving the image of cryptocurrencies will be one of the most challenging goals faced by blockchain and cryptocurrencies – possibly because of the inherent risk of loss when used as a speculative investment vehicle.

Banking and cryptocurrencies, a match made in heaven?

According to Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, “There will always be banking but not necessarily banks”, and it could well be the blockchain industry and cryptocurrencies that facilitate what may turn out to be Mr. Gates’ prophetic claim.

However, it’s not just the private sector that wants to get in on the action when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

From an establishment perspective, it is expected that central banks might start to supplement their gold reserves with cryptocurrencies as a result of growing mistrust of foreign central banks and governments and the vulnerability of national gold reserves.  Furthermore, it is expected that additional integration with different platforms will occur in terms of being able to pay for services. New types of cryptocurrency have the stage to make their ascent, like Stable Coins. Unlike Bitcoin, these coins are designed for price stability and to be largely insulated from often volatile market conditions.

According to Margot James, the British government is committing millions of pounds to fund blockchain projects in areas such as energy, voting and charity through Innovate UK and research councils. Solutions like Lightning Network, a Bitcoin protocol which makes small transactions possible using its native smart-contract scripting language, are also expected to continue their growth in 2019.

Silvio Schembri, Malta’s Junior Minister for Financial Services, declared that “2019 will see the materialisation of The Blockchain Island, firmly putting Malta at the epicenter of this industry”. One of the applications is “digital remote voting” that is believed to be widely adopted after the successful pilot program in West Virginia, USA.

Another variant is Hybrid – a blockchain that attempts to fuse the best parts of both private and public blockchain solutions, when, for instance, governments are not able to become entirely decentralised by using only public blockchains.

According to Mr Hall, “there is a bit of an arms race going on in financial services and in particular in payments where DLT based solutions like AUREALS are disrupting incumbents, as the command and control hierarchies of the last 70 years begin to decay and implode under their own weight.”

The private sector

Despite the rumblings coming from public institutions, governments and central banks, the private sector is where the major blockchain developments are set to find fertile ground in 2019.

“The next wave of innovation is being constructed with distributed ledger technology (DLT) but simple ledger entries that act like ‘claim checks with nothing to claim’ will revert to their intrinsic value of zero – as Voltaire noted all fiat currencies do and powerful replacements representing assets and cash-flows will take centre stage,” says Mr Hall.

In the private sector, an increasing number of companies are transforming their business models and operations to adapt blockchain into their existing business processes. One of the largest being deployed is by the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. The US company is currently developing and testing a blockchain system to streamline its sprawling global consumer market empire.

Smart contracts are also evolving. One example is ‘Ricardian contracts’, which unlike standard smart contracts, can be read as it uses human-readable text. Another system called Chainlink uses cryptography and a type of secure hardware called a ‘trusted enclave’ to securely feed data to smart contracts on the blockchain.

Other applications being developed are seeking to integrate blockchain with artificial intelligence (AI). According to Nick Dryden, 2019 is going to be a year which sees biometrics flourish, whereby personal data will further rely on such uniquely human traits like veins.

Further examples of blockchain technologies that are expected to be seen in 2019 include CyberLogitec’s soon-to-be-launched solution, dubbed ‘FREIGHT9’ and ‘OPUS9’ which promise to pave the way for a purely digital system for maritime businesses, eliminating the hassle of paper-based documentation for all shipping.

SEE ALSO: The future of open source: An increased focus on security and performance

The Hedera Hashgraph Platform presented solutions using the virtual-voting consensus algorithm and asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT). The Energy Web Foundation is building a “blockchain of blockchains” that wants to let consumers sell the energy they generate at home in markets worldwide using the EWF open-source software application, thereby helping to create a confluence of digital links between existing energy trading platforms.

“The area we are working on at economic networks is algorithm trading, market making and open source finance. The current financial system is dominated by large institutions which are ineffective and very costly. The future of markets is a global one and driven by protocols. The Internet so far has been mostly a medium for communication, but we mean to repurpose it for use as a robust transaction network,” says Mr Cordes.

“If you currently book a flight online you will access two systems: the web for the website and a financial network in the background. The future will be a seamlessly integrated holistic network,” he adds.

According to the highly-respected publication MIT Technology Review, the year 2019 is when blockchain technology “finally becomes normal”. With so much happening at once in blockchain development all at once, in some respects, the gold rush is far from over but is only just beginning.

The result is that this coming year is set to deliver applicability in all sectors spanning the public and private divide – and possibly most satisfying for consumers – will work for the benefit of all market participants.

Source link http://bit.ly/2AZSJK5

[adrianjenkins952wblr]

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

January 23, 2019 Dr. Demetrios Zamboglou

Since the turn of the century, an entirely new phenomenon has arrived to improve the lives of consumers and businesses alike. Still in its infancy, blockchain technology is developing at seemingly breakneck speeds to solve many of the as yet unresolved problems in modern business. As an early sign of what’s to come – and also to wet the appetites of consumers globally – cryptocurrencies have emerged to deliver a kaleidoscope of benefits to users.

Faster payments, better accounting, secure storage, precise shipping – you name it and blockchain technology can deliver it.

The ongoing developments of the blockchain industry are delivering a variety of solutions, but still, many problems remain unsolved. One of the major challenges has been translating the blockchain prowess from the highly technical into the understanding for the layman. In other words, how to make such poignant technology usable, functional and popular amongst hordes of people, rather than just for a few niche businesses.

From this perspective, cryptocurrencies, blockchains and distributed ledgers remain at the embryonic stage of development. However, 2019 promises to advance the gifts of this so-called new technological dawn into the stockings of the mainstream.

“The gap between what is relevant and what is people understand is so large, there is going to be a large lag time when new technologies come into the mainstream,” says Benjamin Cordes, from Macro Exchange.

“For Bitcoin this was about eight years, for Ethereum it was around four. The advance I am most excited about is improvements on the core economic protocols, namely the proof of work algorithm. And more generally for systems to become available which allow for a decentral economy, democratising finance and access to markets,” says Mr Cordes.

SEE ALSO: Why the development of next-generation blockchain platforms must be led by the community 

Blockchain to make its charge

Several blockchain projects stand ready to make a meaningful impact in 2019. With special regard for the mainstream consumer, one of the prime development focuses are cryptocurrencies and their future.

Some industry experts like Tim Draper argue (quite rightly) that for every growth step taken by the world’s leading spearhead cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will likely mean reciprocal legislative measures are also undertaken to enable safe passage for its prior growth to continue.

“Identity and Know Your Customer (KYC) are certainly hot topics but focusing on the Blockchain as some sort of magic is misguided. It is like giving a 5-year-old a mobile phone without a network connection – after about a minute what was cool becomes useless, unless you add connectivity,” says Bradley Hall, Founder and Chairman of ICON Capital Reserve, a financial software company that’s currently advancing a rather unique crypto product that aims to secure investor interest in gold.

In terms of gold, a trusted store of value with a 6000 year legacy, I think Ray Dalio founder of Bridgewater Associates put it best when he said ‘Those who don’t allocate 10% of their portfolios to gold, don’t understand history, economics or probably both.’ It seems the future has arrived and it is getting a little more evenly distributed,” says Mr Hall.

The company’s flagship product is AUREALS – a fusion of Gold and the blockchain that insulates holders from currency, institutional and systemic risks.

“PC’s first created by IBM were ornaments until Microsoft offered them DOS and then changed the game entirely when they embedded Windows software on OEM devices. Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee created the ultimate geek club with the World Wide Web, but the internet was unleashed when Netscape re-imagined his browser and Google began to index the treasure trove of information,” says Mr Hall.

The same evolution is occurring within blockchain whereby a magnificent root invention is now being harnessed by various companies in a variety of ways, for the benefit of consumers.

Not forgetting regulation

China is readying a draft of regulations concerning cryptocurrency and blockchain companies that are expected to come into effect in February this year.

Nick Szabo, one of the pioneers in blockchain, notes that more people will turn to cryptocurrencies. Thus, different approaches will occur given the decentralised nature of the entire concept, and also, to accommodate the variety of applications required by users.

For example, security tokens were offered through Security Token Offering, which is designed to protect investor’s ownership rights. By taking possession of a particular token, the holder gets a certain amount of rights within the ecosystem and can help trade value within it. It also acts as a toll gateway in order to use certain functionalities of a particular system.

On a wider global scale, the first legitimate national cryptocurrency is set to be launched later this year, linked to a fiat currency from a G20 nation. Several industry experts concur that improving the image of cryptocurrencies will be one of the most challenging goals faced by blockchain and cryptocurrencies – possibly because of the inherent risk of loss when used as a speculative investment vehicle.

Banking and cryptocurrencies, a match made in heaven?

According to Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, “There will always be banking but not necessarily banks”, and it could well be the blockchain industry and cryptocurrencies that facilitate what may turn out to be Mr. Gates’ prophetic claim.

However, it’s not just the private sector that wants to get in on the action when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

From an establishment perspective, it is expected that central banks might start to supplement their gold reserves with cryptocurrencies as a result of growing mistrust of foreign central banks and governments and the vulnerability of national gold reserves.  Furthermore, it is expected that additional integration with different platforms will occur in terms of being able to pay for services. New types of cryptocurrency have the stage to make their ascent, like Stable Coins. Unlike Bitcoin, these coins are designed for price stability and to be largely insulated from often volatile market conditions.

According to Margot James, the British government is committing millions of pounds to fund blockchain projects in areas such as energy, voting and charity through Innovate UK and research councils. Solutions like Lightning Network, a Bitcoin protocol which makes small transactions possible using its native smart-contract scripting language, are also expected to continue their growth in 2019.

Silvio Schembri, Malta’s Junior Minister for Financial Services, declared that “2019 will see the materialisation of The Blockchain Island, firmly putting Malta at the epicenter of this industry”. One of the applications is “digital remote voting” that is believed to be widely adopted after the successful pilot program in West Virginia, USA.

Another variant is Hybrid – a blockchain that attempts to fuse the best parts of both private and public blockchain solutions, when, for instance, governments are not able to become entirely decentralised by using only public blockchains.

According to Mr Hall, “there is a bit of an arms race going on in financial services and in particular in payments where DLT based solutions like AUREALS are disrupting incumbents, as the command and control hierarchies of the last 70 years begin to decay and implode under their own weight.”

The private sector

Despite the rumblings coming from public institutions, governments and central banks, the private sector is where the major blockchain developments are set to find fertile ground in 2019.

“The next wave of innovation is being constructed with distributed ledger technology (DLT) but simple ledger entries that act like ‘claim checks with nothing to claim’ will revert to their intrinsic value of zero – as Voltaire noted all fiat currencies do and powerful replacements representing assets and cash-flows will take centre stage,” says Mr Hall.

In the private sector, an increasing number of companies are transforming their business models and operations to adapt blockchain into their existing business processes. One of the largest being deployed is by the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. The US company is currently developing and testing a blockchain system to streamline its sprawling global consumer market empire.

Smart contracts are also evolving. One example is ‘Ricardian contracts’, which unlike standard smart contracts, can be read as it uses human-readable text. Another system called Chainlink uses cryptography and a type of secure hardware called a ‘trusted enclave’ to securely feed data to smart contracts on the blockchain.

Other applications being developed are seeking to integrate blockchain with artificial intelligence (AI). According to Nick Dryden, 2019 is going to be a year which sees biometrics flourish, whereby personal data will further rely on such uniquely human traits like veins.

Further examples of blockchain technologies that are expected to be seen in 2019 include CyberLogitec’s soon-to-be-launched solution, dubbed ‘FREIGHT9’ and ‘OPUS9’ which promise to pave the way for a purely digital system for maritime businesses, eliminating the hassle of paper-based documentation for all shipping.

SEE ALSO: The future of open source: An increased focus on security and performance

The Hedera Hashgraph Platform presented solutions using the virtual-voting consensus algorithm and asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT). The Energy Web Foundation is building a “blockchain of blockchains” that wants to let consumers sell the energy they generate at home in markets worldwide using the EWF open-source software application, thereby helping to create a confluence of digital links between existing energy trading platforms.

“The area we are working on at economic networks is algorithm trading, market making and open source finance. The current financial system is dominated by large institutions which are ineffective and very costly. The future of markets is a global one and driven by protocols. The Internet so far has been mostly a medium for communication, but we mean to repurpose it for use as a robust transaction network,” says Mr Cordes.

“If you currently book a flight online you will access two systems: the web for the website and a financial network in the background. The future will be a seamlessly integrated holistic network,” he adds.

According to the highly-respected publication MIT Technology Review, the year 2019 is when blockchain technology “finally becomes normal”. With so much happening at once in blockchain development all at once, in some respects, the gold rush is far from over but is only just beginning.

The result is that this coming year is set to deliver applicability in all sectors spanning the public and private divide – and possibly most satisfying for consumers – will work for the benefit of all market participants.

Source link http://bit.ly/2AZSJK5

[teiraymondmccoy78]

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

January 23, 2019 Dr. Demetrios Zamboglou

Since the turn of the century, an entirely new phenomenon has arrived to improve the lives of consumers and businesses alike. Still in its infancy, blockchain technology is developing at seemingly breakneck speeds to solve many of the as yet unresolved problems in modern business. As an early sign of what’s to come – and also to wet the appetites of consumers globally – cryptocurrencies have emerged to deliver a kaleidoscope of benefits to users.

Faster payments, better accounting, secure storage, precise shipping – you name it and blockchain technology can deliver it.

The ongoing developments of the blockchain industry are delivering a variety of solutions, but still, many problems remain unsolved. One of the major challenges has been translating the blockchain prowess from the highly technical into the understanding for the layman. In other words, how to make such poignant technology usable, functional and popular amongst hordes of people, rather than just for a few niche businesses.

From this perspective, cryptocurrencies, blockchains and distributed ledgers remain at the embryonic stage of development. However, 2019 promises to advance the gifts of this so-called new technological dawn into the stockings of the mainstream.

“The gap between what is relevant and what is people understand is so large, there is going to be a large lag time when new technologies come into the mainstream,” says Benjamin Cordes, from Macro Exchange.

“For Bitcoin this was about eight years, for Ethereum it was around four. The advance I am most excited about is improvements on the core economic protocols, namely the proof of work algorithm. And more generally for systems to become available which allow for a decentral economy, democratising finance and access to markets,” says Mr Cordes.

SEE ALSO: Why the development of next-generation blockchain platforms must be led by the community 

Blockchain to make its charge

Several blockchain projects stand ready to make a meaningful impact in 2019. With special regard for the mainstream consumer, one of the prime development focuses are cryptocurrencies and their future.

Some industry experts like Tim Draper argue (quite rightly) that for every growth step taken by the world’s leading spearhead cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will likely mean reciprocal legislative measures are also undertaken to enable safe passage for its prior growth to continue.

“Identity and Know Your Customer (KYC) are certainly hot topics but focusing on the Blockchain as some sort of magic is misguided. It is like giving a 5-year-old a mobile phone without a network connection – after about a minute what was cool becomes useless, unless you add connectivity,” says Bradley Hall, Founder and Chairman of ICON Capital Reserve, a financial software company that’s currently advancing a rather unique crypto product that aims to secure investor interest in gold.

In terms of gold, a trusted store of value with a 6000 year legacy, I think Ray Dalio founder of Bridgewater Associates put it best when he said ‘Those who don’t allocate 10% of their portfolios to gold, don’t understand history, economics or probably both.’ It seems the future has arrived and it is getting a little more evenly distributed,” says Mr Hall.

The company’s flagship product is AUREALS – a fusion of Gold and the blockchain that insulates holders from currency, institutional and systemic risks.

“PC’s first created by IBM were ornaments until Microsoft offered them DOS and then changed the game entirely when they embedded Windows software on OEM devices. Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee created the ultimate geek club with the World Wide Web, but the internet was unleashed when Netscape re-imagined his browser and Google began to index the treasure trove of information,” says Mr Hall.

The same evolution is occurring within blockchain whereby a magnificent root invention is now being harnessed by various companies in a variety of ways, for the benefit of consumers.

Not forgetting regulation

China is readying a draft of regulations concerning cryptocurrency and blockchain companies that are expected to come into effect in February this year.

Nick Szabo, one of the pioneers in blockchain, notes that more people will turn to cryptocurrencies. Thus, different approaches will occur given the decentralised nature of the entire concept, and also, to accommodate the variety of applications required by users.

For example, security tokens were offered through Security Token Offering, which is designed to protect investor’s ownership rights. By taking possession of a particular token, the holder gets a certain amount of rights within the ecosystem and can help trade value within it. It also acts as a toll gateway in order to use certain functionalities of a particular system.

On a wider global scale, the first legitimate national cryptocurrency is set to be launched later this year, linked to a fiat currency from a G20 nation. Several industry experts concur that improving the image of cryptocurrencies will be one of the most challenging goals faced by blockchain and cryptocurrencies – possibly because of the inherent risk of loss when used as a speculative investment vehicle.

Banking and cryptocurrencies, a match made in heaven?

According to Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, “There will always be banking but not necessarily banks”, and it could well be the blockchain industry and cryptocurrencies that facilitate what may turn out to be Mr. Gates’ prophetic claim.

However, it’s not just the private sector that wants to get in on the action when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

From an establishment perspective, it is expected that central banks might start to supplement their gold reserves with cryptocurrencies as a result of growing mistrust of foreign central banks and governments and the vulnerability of national gold reserves.  Furthermore, it is expected that additional integration with different platforms will occur in terms of being able to pay for services. New types of cryptocurrency have the stage to make their ascent, like Stable Coins. Unlike Bitcoin, these coins are designed for price stability and to be largely insulated from often volatile market conditions.

According to Margot James, the British government is committing millions of pounds to fund blockchain projects in areas such as energy, voting and charity through Innovate UK and research councils. Solutions like Lightning Network, a Bitcoin protocol which makes small transactions possible using its native smart-contract scripting language, are also expected to continue their growth in 2019.

Silvio Schembri, Malta’s Junior Minister for Financial Services, declared that “2019 will see the materialisation of The Blockchain Island, firmly putting Malta at the epicenter of this industry”. One of the applications is “digital remote voting” that is believed to be widely adopted after the successful pilot program in West Virginia, USA.

Another variant is Hybrid – a blockchain that attempts to fuse the best parts of both private and public blockchain solutions, when, for instance, governments are not able to become entirely decentralised by using only public blockchains.

According to Mr Hall, “there is a bit of an arms race going on in financial services and in particular in payments where DLT based solutions like AUREALS are disrupting incumbents, as the command and control hierarchies of the last 70 years begin to decay and implode under their own weight.”

The private sector

Despite the rumblings coming from public institutions, governments and central banks, the private sector is where the major blockchain developments are set to find fertile ground in 2019.

“The next wave of innovation is being constructed with distributed ledger technology (DLT) but simple ledger entries that act like ‘claim checks with nothing to claim’ will revert to their intrinsic value of zero – as Voltaire noted all fiat currencies do and powerful replacements representing assets and cash-flows will take centre stage,” says Mr Hall.

In the private sector, an increasing number of companies are transforming their business models and operations to adapt blockchain into their existing business processes. One of the largest being deployed is by the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. The US company is currently developing and testing a blockchain system to streamline its sprawling global consumer market empire.

Smart contracts are also evolving. One example is ‘Ricardian contracts’, which unlike standard smart contracts, can be read as it uses human-readable text. Another system called Chainlink uses cryptography and a type of secure hardware called a ‘trusted enclave’ to securely feed data to smart contracts on the blockchain.

Other applications being developed are seeking to integrate blockchain with artificial intelligence (AI). According to Nick Dryden, 2019 is going to be a year which sees biometrics flourish, whereby personal data will further rely on such uniquely human traits like veins.

Further examples of blockchain technologies that are expected to be seen in 2019 include CyberLogitec’s soon-to-be-launched solution, dubbed ‘FREIGHT9’ and ‘OPUS9’ which promise to pave the way for a purely digital system for maritime businesses, eliminating the hassle of paper-based documentation for all shipping.

SEE ALSO: The future of open source: An increased focus on security and performance

The Hedera Hashgraph Platform presented solutions using the virtual-voting consensus algorithm and asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT). The Energy Web Foundation is building a “blockchain of blockchains” that wants to let consumers sell the energy they generate at home in markets worldwide using the EWF open-source software application, thereby helping to create a confluence of digital links between existing energy trading platforms.

“The area we are working on at economic networks is algorithm trading, market making and open source finance. The current financial system is dominated by large institutions which are ineffective and very costly. The future of markets is a global one and driven by protocols. The Internet so far has been mostly a medium for communication, but we mean to repurpose it for use as a robust transaction network,” says Mr Cordes.

“If you currently book a flight online you will access two systems: the web for the website and a financial network in the background. The future will be a seamlessly integrated holistic network,” he adds.

According to the highly-respected publication MIT Technology Review, the year 2019 is when blockchain technology “finally becomes normal”. With so much happening at once in blockchain development all at once, in some respects, the gold rush is far from over but is only just beginning.

The result is that this coming year is set to deliver applicability in all sectors spanning the public and private divide – and possibly most satisfying for consumers – will work for the benefit of all market participants.

Source link http://bit.ly/2AZSJK5

[cryptswahili]

Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry

Since the turn of the century, an entirely new phenomenon has arrived to improve the lives of consumers and businesses alike. Still in its infancy, blockchain technology is developing at seemingly breakneck speeds to solve many of the as yet unresolved problems in modern business. As an early sign of what’s to come – and also to wet the appetites of consumers globally – cryptocurrencies have emerged to deliver a kaleidoscope of benefits to users.

Faster payments, better accounting, secure storage, precise shipping – you name it and blockchain technology can deliver it.

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The ongoing developments of the blockchain industry are delivering a variety of solutions, but still, many problems remain unsolved. One of the major challenges has been translating the blockchain prowess from the highly technical into the understanding for the layman. In other words, how to make such poignant technology usable, functional and popular amongst hordes of people, rather than just for a few niche businesses.

From this perspective, cryptocurrencies, blockchains and distributed ledgers remain at the embryonic stage of development. However, 2019 promises to advance the gifts of this so-called new technological dawn into the stockings of the mainstream.

“The gap between what is relevant and what is people understand is so large, there is going to be a large lag time when new technologies come into the mainstream,” says Benjamin Cordes, from Macro Exchange.

“For Bitcoin this was about eight years, for Ethereum it was around four. The advance I am most excited about is improvements on the core economic protocols, namely the proof of work algorithm. And more generally for systems to become available which allow for a decentral economy, democratising finance and access to markets,” says Mr Cordes.

SEE ALSO: Why the development of next-generation blockchain platforms must be led by the community 

Blockchain to make its charge

Several blockchain projects stand ready to make a meaningful impact in 2019. With special regard for the mainstream consumer, one of the prime development focuses are cryptocurrencies and their future.

Some industry experts like Tim Draper argue (quite rightly) that for every growth step taken by the world’s leading spearhead cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will likely mean reciprocal legislative measures are also undertaken to enable safe passage for its prior growth to continue.

“Identity and Know Your Customer (KYC) are certainly hot topics but focusing on the Blockchain as some sort of magic is misguided. It is like giving a 5-year-old a mobile phone without a network connection – after about a minute what was cool becomes useless, unless you add connectivity,” says Bradley Hall, Founder and Chairman of ICON Capital Reserve, a financial software company that’s currently advancing a rather unique crypto product that aims to secure investor interest in gold.

In terms of gold, a trusted store of value with a 6000 year legacy, I think Ray Dalio founder of Bridgewater Associates put it best when he said ‘Those who don’t allocate 10% of their portfolios to gold, don’t understand history, economics or probably both.’ It seems the future has arrived and it is getting a little more evenly distributed,” says Mr Hall.

The company’s flagship product is AUREALS – a fusion of Gold and the blockchain that insulates holders from currency, institutional and systemic risks.

“PC’s first created by IBM were ornaments until Microsoft offered them DOS and then changed the game entirely when they embedded Windows software on OEM devices. Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee created the ultimate geek club with the World Wide Web, but the internet was unleashed when Netscape re-imagined his browser and Google began to index the treasure trove of information,” says Mr Hall.

The same evolution is occurring within blockchain whereby a magnificent root invention is now being harnessed by various companies in a variety of ways, for the benefit of consumers.

Not forgetting regulation

China is readying a draft of regulations concerning cryptocurrency and blockchain companies that are expected to come into effect in February this year.

Nick Szabo, one of the pioneers in blockchain, notes that more people will turn to cryptocurrencies. Thus, different approaches will occur given the decentralised nature of the entire concept, and also, to accommodate the variety of applications required by users.

For example, security tokens were offered through Security Token Offering, which is designed to protect investor’s ownership rights. By taking possession of a particular token, the holder gets a certain amount of rights within the ecosystem and can help trade value within it. It also acts as a toll gateway in order to use certain functionalities of a particular system.

On a wider global scale, the first legitimate national cryptocurrency is set to be launched later this year, linked to a fiat currency from a G20 nation. Several industry experts concur that improving the image of cryptocurrencies will be one of the most challenging goals faced by blockchain and cryptocurrencies – possibly because of the inherent risk of loss when used as a speculative investment vehicle.

Banking and cryptocurrencies, a match made in heaven?

According to Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, “There will always be banking but not necessarily banks”, and it could well be the blockchain industry and cryptocurrencies that facilitate what may turn out to be Mr. Gates’ prophetic claim.

However, it’s not just the private sector that wants to get in on the action when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

From an establishment perspective, it is expected that central banks might start to supplement their gold reserves with cryptocurrencies as a result of growing mistrust of foreign central banks and governments and the vulnerability of national gold reserves.  Furthermore, it is expected that additional integration with different platforms will occur in terms of being able to pay for services. New types of cryptocurrency have the stage to make their ascent, like Stable Coins. Unlike Bitcoin, these coins are designed for price stability and to be largely insulated from often volatile market conditions.

According to Margot James, the British government is committing millions of pounds to fund blockchain projects in areas such as energy, voting and charity through Innovate UK and research councils. Solutions like Lightning Network, a Bitcoin protocol which makes small transactions possible using its native smart-contract scripting language, are also expected to continue their growth in 2019.

Silvio Schembri, Malta’s Junior Minister for Financial Services, declared that “2019 will see the materialisation of The Blockchain Island, firmly putting Malta at the epicenter of this industry”. One of the applications is “digital remote voting” that is believed to be widely adopted after the successful pilot program in West Virginia, USA.

Another variant is Hybrid – a blockchain that attempts to fuse the best parts of both private and public blockchain solutions, when, for instance, governments are not able to become entirely decentralised by using only public blockchains.

According to Mr Hall, “there is a bit of an arms race going on in financial services and in particular in payments where DLT based solutions like AUREALS are disrupting incumbents, as the command and control hierarchies of the last 70 years begin to decay and implode under their own weight.”

The private sector

Despite the rumblings coming from public institutions, governments and central banks, the private sector is where the major blockchain developments are set to find fertile ground in 2019.

“The next wave of innovation is being constructed with distributed ledger technology (DLT) but simple ledger entries that act like ‘claim checks with nothing to claim’ will revert to their intrinsic value of zero – as Voltaire noted all fiat currencies do and powerful replacements representing assets and cash-flows will take centre stage,” says Mr Hall.

In the private sector, an increasing number of companies are transforming their business models and operations to adapt blockchain into their existing business processes. One of the largest being deployed is by the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. The US company is currently developing and testing a blockchain system to streamline its sprawling global consumer market empire.

Smart contracts are also evolving. One example is ‘Ricardian contracts’, which unlike standard smart contracts, can be read as it uses human-readable text. Another system called Chainlink uses cryptography and a type of secure hardware called a ‘trusted enclave’ to securely feed data to smart contracts on the blockchain.

Other applications being developed are seeking to integrate blockchain with artificial intelligence (AI). According to Nick Dryden, 2019 is going to be a year which sees biometrics flourish, whereby personal data will further rely on such uniquely human traits like veins.

Further examples of blockchain technologies that are expected to be seen in 2019 include CyberLogitec’s soon-to-be-launched solution, dubbed ‘FREIGHT9’ and ‘OPUS9’ which promise to pave the way for a purely digital system for maritime businesses, eliminating the hassle of paper-based documentation for all shipping.

SEE ALSO: The future of open source: An increased focus on security and performance

The Hedera Hashgraph Platform presented solutions using the virtual-voting consensus algorithm and asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT). The Energy Web Foundation is building a “blockchain of blockchains” that wants to let consumers sell the energy they generate at home in markets worldwide using the EWF open-source software application, thereby helping to create a confluence of digital links between existing energy trading platforms.

“The area we are working on at economic networks is algorithm trading, market making and open source finance. The current financial system is dominated by large institutions which are ineffective and very costly. The future of markets is a global one and driven by protocols. The Internet so far has been mostly a medium for communication, but we mean to repurpose it for use as a robust transaction network,” says Mr Cordes.

“If you currently book a flight online you will access two systems: the web for the website and a financial network in the background. The future will be a seamlessly integrated holistic network,” he adds.

According to the highly-respected publication MIT Technology Review, the year 2019 is when blockchain technology “finally becomes normal”. With so much happening at once in blockchain development all at once, in some respects, the gold rush is far from over but is only just beginning.

The result is that this coming year is set to deliver applicability in all sectors spanning the public and private divide – and possibly most satisfying for consumers – will work for the benefit of all market participants.

The post Looking forward to a golden future for the blockchain industry appeared first on JAXenter.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

[mbaljeetsingh]

Bringing Artificial Intelligence to the Browser with TensorFlow.js

TensorFlow.js allows web developers to easily build and run browser-based Artificial Intelligence apps using only JavaScript.

Are you a web developer interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Want to easily build some sweet AI apps entirely in JavaScript that run anywhere, without the headache of tedious installs, hosting on cloud services, or working with Python? Then TensorFlow.js is for you!

This paradigm-shifting JavaScript library bridges the gap between frontend web developers and the formerly cumbersome process of training and taming AIs. Developers can now more easily leverage Artificial Intelligence to build uniquely responsive apps that react to user inputs such as voice or facial expression in real time, or to create smarter apps that learn from user behaviour and adapt. AI can create novel, personalized experiences and automate tedious tasks. Examples include content recommendation, interaction through voice commands or gestures, using the cellphone camera to identify products or places, and learning to assist the user with daily tasks. As the ever-accelerating AI revolution works its way into smart frontend applications, it might also be a handy skill to impress your boss or prospective employers with.

In Part I of this series we will briefly summarize the advantages of Tensorflow.js (TFJS) over the traditional backend-focused Python-based approaches to show you why it’s such a big deal.

Artificial Intelligence, Liberated

In the past, many of the best Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) frameworks required fluency in Python and its associated library ecosystem. Efficient training of ML models required the use of special-purpose hardware and software, such as NVIDIA GPUs and CUDA. To date, integrating ML into JavaScript applications often means deploying the ML part on remote cloud services, such as AWS Sagemaker, and accessing it via API calls. This non-native, backend-focused approach has likely kept many web developers from taking advantage of the rich possibilities that AI offers to frontend development.

Not so with TensorFlow.js! With these obstacles gone, adopting AI solutions is now quick, easy, and fun. In Part 2 of this series, we’ll show you just how easy it is to create, train, and test your own ML models entirely in the browser using only JavaScript!

Besides allowing letting you to code in JavaScript, the real-game changer is that TensorFlow.js lets you do everything client-side, which comes with a number of advantages:

Apps are easy to share

Provide the user with a URL, and voilà, they are interacting with your ML model. It’s that simple! Models are run directly in the browser without additional files or installations. You no longer need to link JavaScript to a Python file running on the cloud. And instead of fighting with virtual environments or package managers, all dependencies can be included as HTML script tags. This lets you collaborate efficiently, prototype rapidly, and deploy PoCs painlessly.

The client provides the compute power

Training and predictions are offloaded to the user’s hardware. This eliminates significant cost and effort for the developer. You don’t need to worry about keeping a potentially costly remote machine running, adjusting compute power based on changing usage, or service start-up times. Forget about load balancing, microservices, containerization or provisioning elastic cloud compute capabilities. By removing such backend infrastructure requirements, TensorFlow.js lets you focus on creating amazing user experiences! However, we must still take care that the client’s hardware is powerful enough to provide a satisfying experience given the compute demands of our AI models.

Data never leaves the client’s device!

This is crucially important as users are increasingly concerned about protecting their sensitive information, especially in the wake of massive data scandals and security breaches such as Cambridge Analytica. Users are increasingly concerned about protecting their sensitive information. With TensorFlow.js, users can take advantage of AI without sending their personal data over a network and sharing it with a third party. This makes it easier to build secure applications that satisfy data security regulations, e.g. healthcare apps that tap into wearable medical sensors. It also lets you build AI browser extensions for enhanced or adaptive user experiences while keeping user behaviour inherently private. Visit this repository for an example of a Google Chrome extension that uses TensorFlow.js to provide in-browser image recognition.

(Top) The conventional ML architecture involves a diverse tech stack and requires coordination and communication between multiple services. (Bottom) TensorFlow.js has the potential to considerably simplify the architecture and tech stack. Everything is run within the client browser using JavaScript.

The TensorFlow.js architecture can be simplified further if a pre-trained model is available. In this case the client downloads the model and skips the training entirely. If further specialization of the model is necessary, considerable effort and training time can be saved by using extended training (transfer learning) on a pre-trained model rather than training from scratch.

Easier access to rich sensor data

Direct JavaScript integration makes it easy to connect your model to device inputs such as microphones or webcams. Since the same browser code runs on mobile devices, you can also make use of accelerometer, GPS, and gyroscope data. Training on mobile remains challenging due to hardware limitations as of early 2019. On-device training will become easier over the next few years as mobile processor manufacturers begin to integrate AI-optimized compute capabilities into their product lines.

Highly interactive and adaptive experiences

Real-time inferencing on the client side lets you make apps that respond immediately to user inputs such as webcam gestures. For example, Google released a webcam game that allows the user to play Pacman by moving their head (try it here). The model is trained to associate the user’s head movements with specific keyboard controls. Apps can also detect and react to human emotions, providing new opportunities to surprise and delight. Pre-trained models can be loaded and then fine-tuned within the browser using transfer learning to tailor them to specific users.

An image from Google’s WebCam Pacman game, where your head becomes the controller!

A demo of the pre-trained PoseNet model in action, which performs real-time estimation of key body point positions.

TensorFlow.js also has the following helpful perks:

Use of pre-trained models

Tackle sophisticated tasks quickly by loading powerful pre-built models into the browser. No need to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch. Select from a growing number available models (at this link), or even create JavaScript ports of TensorFlow Python models using this handy TensorFlow convertor tool. TensorFlow.js also supports extended learning, letting you retrain these models on sensor data and tailor them to your specific application through transfer learning. There is huge value in building on top of pre-trained models, which have often been trained on enormous datasets using compute resources typically beyond the reach of most individuals, let alone the browser. Let others do the heavy lifting, while you focus on the lighter training task of fine-tuning these models to your user’s needs.

Hardware Acceleration for all GPUs

TensorFlow.js leverages onboard GPU devices to speed up model training and inference, thanks to its utilization of WebGL. You don’t need an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA installed to train a model. That’s right -- you can finally train deep learning models on AMD GPUs too!

Unified backend and frontend codebase

TensorFlow.js also runs on Node.js with CUDA support. In this sense, it extends JavaScript’s traditional benefit of “writing once, running on both client and server” to the realm of artificial intelligence.

Requirements

A couple of notes on what to consider before going full TFJS. TFJS can use significantly more resources than your typical JS applications, especially when image or video data are involved. For example, the Webcam Pacman app uses approximately 100 MB of in-browser resources and 200 MB of GPU RAM when running in Chrome v71 on MacBook pro with Mojave v10.14.2. *(2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4, Radeon Pro 555x 4096 Mb, Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB).

Best performance requires browsers with WebGL support plus GPU support. You can check whether WebGL is supported by visiting this link. Even with WebGL, GPU support may not be available on older devices due to the additional requirement that users have up-to-date video drivers.

The requirements for modern hardware and updated software to achieve optimal performance can cause user experience to vary substantially across devices. Therefore extensive performance testing on a wide variety of devices, especially those on the lower end, should be done before distributing a TFJS app.

There are a couple of strategies to deal with potential performance limitations. Apps can check for available compute capabilities and choose a model size accordingly, with a corresponding tradeoff in accuracy. A 5-10 x reduction in memory requirements can often be achieved by reducing the model parameters without sacrificing more than 20% in accuracy. Reducing the model size will also help save bandwidth in scenarios where a pre-trained model is transferred to the client’s device. Good memory management can help keep the footprint of the app low by avoiding memory leaks (e.g. with TFJS’s tf.tidy()).

Finally, nothing can beat a good understanding of the data and problem domain. Many problems in image recognition, for example, can be solved by using images of surprisingly poor resolution. Some problems can also be simplified by using conventional algorithms with lower resource requirements or by guiding the user to do part of the work, e.g. by centering a to-be detected object.

Examples

Sounds great! So how do we get started? Visit Part II of this series to learn how to build your very own TFJS applications!

Here are some more fun examples to get your creative juices flowing!

Let’s Dance! A holiday-themed interactive animation created by the Rangle.io team for December 2018.

Emoji Scavenger Hunt by Google. A fun game where you are challenged to seek out and photograph objects that look like emojis, under a time limit!

Teachable Machine by Google, where you can train a neural network to recognize specific gestures and use these to control an output image or sound.

Rock Paper Scissors by Reiichiro Nakano, a fun twist on the classic schoolyard game.

Emotion Extractor by Brendan Sudol, which recognizes emotion from facial expressions in uploaded images, and tags them with the appropriate emoji.

Brendan Sudol’s Emotion Extractor. Source: https://brendansudol.com/faces/.

In addition to games and apps, TensorFlow.js can be used to build interactive teaching tools for conveying key concepts or novel methods in machine learning and deep learning:

GAN Lab: an interactive playground for General Adversarial Networks (GANs) in the browser.

GAN Showcase: a neat demo by Yingtao Tian of a Generative Adversarial Network that ‘dreams’ faces and morphs between them.

tSNE for the Web: an in-browser demo of the tSNE algorithm for high-dimensional data analysis.

Neural Network Playground: while not technically TFJS, it was built from code that eventually became TFJS, and can be considered the browser app that started it all!

To see even more amazing projects built in TensorFlow.js, check out this showcase!

Click here to learn more about Artificial Intelligence at Rangle.

via Rangle.io | Blog http://bit.ly/2RlnoLX

[barbosaasouza]

The Best Headphones, DACs, and Amplifiers For The Desktop Music Lover

How To Build The Best Gaming PC Guide Hub

While gaming is often the primary motivator, people build or buy PCs because of the versatility they offer. Unlike dedicated consoles, gaming PCs also function as top notch web browsers, content creation stations, and media consumption devices. There are loads of users who spend hours each day in front of their PC for work or recreation. Since wide adoption of the MP3 codec back in the late 1990s, music playback is one of the most commonly used functions of a PC. In a previous guide, I went into depth on the use of studio monitors for desktop music listening. You can get amazing results going that route, but it may not be practical in every use case. This is where headphones come in. In the last several years, the market for enthusiast headphones has exploded (with much of the interest coming from the rise in popularity of the Beats headphone line) and PC users have a ocean of choices when it comes to great products for music playback.

For recorded music lovers, this is inarguably the greatest time to be alive. File compression and the global adoption of the internet has made finding and acquiring music easier and cheaper than it has even been in the past (much to the chagrin of some labels and artists). Streaming music platforms put massive libraries of tunes at the fingertips of the masses and even diehard audiophiles are having their needs served (via Deezer, Tidal, or Qobuz). Platforms like Bandcamp give independent acts the chance to be heard (and sell) to millions. Many users may have locally stored files that date back to the days of Napster and Kazaa. Music is everywhere and for those that are serious about their listening, a high-end set of headphones can take the experience to another level.

Choosing The Right Headphones for Music on Your PC

Open-back, Closed-back, Over-ear, or On-ear?

Before diving into the world of high-end headphones, you need to take a moment and ask yourself what you want to get out of the experience. There are many types of headphones and some types excel at certain things and fall short in others. Listeners who primarily consume EDM or pop music will value strong bass reproduction and an “in your face” presentation. While the popular Sennheiser HD600 headphones may be of excellent quality, their open-back design and relaxed sound signature will be lacking in bass impact and lack an upfront presentation. These qualities make them an excellent choice for vocals and jazz, but that won’t help you much if you aren’t consuming those types of recordings often.

Unlike CPUs or GPUs, you cannot simply spend your way to objective upgrades across the board. At a certain point, the differences in headphones boil down to differences in sound signatures rather than the quality of the music reproduction. While you can generally expect a $1000 set of headphones to sound better than a $150 set of headphones, there is no guarantee that you will get more enjoyment out of the more expensive set if its design does not compliment your listening tastes or preferences. Acoustic isolation can be another important factor. While most headphone enthusiasts prefer open-back headphone designs for music reproduction, those designs are worthless for users who want to avoid sound leakage or external ambient noise/distraction.

Most enthusiast headphones come in two flavors: on-ear and over-ear. On-ear designs were very commonly included with Walkmans or portable CD players in the 1980s and 1990s. They rest on top of your ears and typically have foam padding to give your ears a bit of extra comfort. They offer no acoustic isolation, but are still very popular for portable use due to their size and affordability. Over-ear designs have large cups that surround your ears and keep the driver from resting on your ear. They can offer sealing properties that will help block outside sounds and help prevent your music from leaking out and bothering others. The design offers the user the most comfort. For the purposes of this guide, I’ll be focusing on over-ear headphones as they offer a better experience to the critical listener.

What Are DACs and Headphone Amps and Do I Need Them?

While most headphones will work fine with the jacks you have on your motherboard or laptop, there are several reasons to consider upgrading to a dedicated DAC and amplifier (or a combination unit). Motherboard audio solutions are often made with the cheapest possible parts and are susceptible to EMI and other noise problems. They may often introduce unwanted noise or distortion into your music. Some of these solutions simply lack the power to drive high-end headphones to acceptable volume levels. Motherboard audio chips typically use low-cost parts that combine a DAC (digital to analog converter) and a mosfet amp into a small package. In the same way better amps and sources for their living room or car audio setups improve the listening experience, desktop headphone DACs and amps can offer the same improvements.

Add-in sound cards used to rule the world of gaming PCs. Once Microsoft removed sound acceleration when it introduced the Windows Vista operating system in 2005, the dedicated internal sound card began to die off. Newer games could no longer make use of the dedicated sound chips and software surround and effects processing made huge strides. While a few models are still available commercially, most PC music enthusiasts have shifted to using outboard USB devices for DAC and amplification purposes. In addition to offering improved audio quality, removing the sound device from the PC itself can help eliminate EMI and other problems that can affect your signal.

Headphone impedance is another consideration that must factor into your purchasing decision. Low-impedance headphones are designed to work well with low-power sources like mobile phones, motherboards/laptops, or handheld gaming devices. High-impedance headphones are designed to be used with dedicated amplifiers or high-end home audio receivers. While you can use either type of headphone with any source, you will get the best results when you properly match headphone impedance with the capability of your source device. For slightly more in-depth explanation about why headphones use varying impedances, I highly recommend you check out this guide from CNET’s Steve Guttenberg. The short guide explains why using smaller wires on the voice coil of the headphone driver can result in better sound quality, but requires a high-impedance. Generally, headphones with an impedance of 25-70 ohms can be used with portable devices and low-power sources. When dealing with headphones using 100 ohms or higher impedances, you are going to want a dedicated amplifier (though lower impedance designs can still benefit from a quality amp).

The Best Headphones for Music Listening

Under $100

Samson SR850 Superlux HD668B

If you want to dip your toes into the world of enthusiast headphones, there is no cheaper way to do it than with the Samson SR850 or Superlux HD668B. Both of these semi-open models are designs that could accurately be considered a knockoff of the more expensive AKG studio headphones. China don’t care, and in this case, is giving you an exceptional product at an unbeatable price. These headphones offer a similar level of performance and have low impedance, so they play well with all sources. The main difference between the two sets is that the Samson uses a velour padded ear cup while the Superlux uses a pleather covering. The pleather pad will offer better sealing and slightly more impactful bass, at the cost of comfort and increased heat retention on your ears. While these headphones are relatively dirt cheap, they are still good enough that you can clearly hear the advantages of upgrading your DAC and/or amplifier down the road.

Sennheiser HD280 Pro Sennheiser HD 579

Sennheiser is one of the most trusted names in high-end headphones for good reason. They have been offering high-quality designs for years and their products have stood the test of time. The HD280 Pro is a closed-back set that offers good isolation and clear, even music reproduction. These qualities have made the HD280 Pro a mainstay in recording studios for years. The pleather ear cups offer good isolation and impactful bass. The HD 579 is one of Sennheiser’s newest open-back sets. For around $100, this is the set to choose if you want to get the “Sennheiser sound” at a good price. While they are not the best option for bass fanatics, their open-back design and laid-back sound signature make them perfect for vocals, stringed instruments, and live music. The velour ear pads are very comfortable and the set just looks luxurious compared to virtually any other set you’ll find in its price range. The HD 579 will give you performance similar to what you’d get from the much more expensive Sennheiser G4ME headsets (without the mic, of course).

Philips SHP9500S

If I was asked to recommend a set of headphones to someone that wasn’t exactly sure what they wanted, but was excited to enter the world of high-end headphones, I would choose the SHP9500S every time. These are simply one of the best headphones you can buy at any price, so the fact that you can often find then for well under $100 is pretty awesome. They do everything pretty well and manage to be comfortable at the same time. With only 32 ohms of impedance, they can be plugged in to anything and sound great, but can also be improved with a nice DAC/amp. The user-replaceable cable is a huge plus, though the non-replaceable ear pads is kind of a bummer.

Sony MDR 7506 Audio Technica ATH-AD700X

Sony’s MDR 7506 is a headphone that’s been around forever. Similar to the legendary MDR V6, this closed-back set can be found in virtually every studio on earth because of its sound quality and sturdiness. While some may not be fond of its flat EQ, you can’t argue that it will let you hear exactly what is in the recording. The coiled cord could be a plus or minus depending on the user, but most find the foldable design to be ideal for portability.

The Audio Technica ATH-AD700X is the current generation follow up tp the company’s legendary ATH-AD700 headphones. This set offers the best comfort of any headphone design (unless you have a small head) and its large, open-back drivers deliver a massive soundstage. The AD700X make it effortless to pinpoint where the individual instruments are in a recording (and this accuracy made them incredibly popular with competitive gamers). These are perfect for acoustic guitars and female vocals, though they lack bottom-end impact that EDM fans might be hoping for.

$100-$300

Audio Technica ATH-AD900X Audio Technica ATH-M50X

The Audio Technica ATH-AD900X is very similar to its cheaper sibling the AD700X. They share the same basic design and construction, meaning they are some of the most comfortable headphones you can buy at any price. The AD900X is simply better by any measure than the AD700X while still retaining a similar sound signature. Fans of acoustic rock, alternative, or folk will be absolutely smitten with the AD900X (and they make for an outstanding gaming experience as well thanks to the massive soundstage).

Users looking for a closed-back set of headphones that bring an incredibly lively sound signature should consider the Audio Technica ATH-M50X as a primary option. This stylish option has swiveling cups and can be folded for portability. The successor to the wildly popular ATH-M50, these headphones can make pop, hip-hop, EDM, and metal come alive. They also respond very well to amplification, particularly the lower registers. If you consider yourself a basshead, the ATH-M50X can literally shake your eyes in their sockets if you give them a slight EQ boost in the 40-60Hz range. A stronger clamping force is required to produce the bass impact, so these may not be ideal for those with large heads or for wearing over extended periods of time.

HIFIMAN HE-400I HIFIMAN HE400S

The HIFIMAN headphones are pretty different from all the other options in this guide in that they use planar magnetic drivers. In the simplest terms, planar magnetic headphones often sound “clearer” than dynamic headphones, although they aren’t capable of the ultrawide soundstages you will find on the best open-back headphones. The HIFIMAN HE400S is a big, comfortable set of headphones that work well with just about any type of music. The HE-400I is the company’s replacement for the 400S, though both can still be found in retail channels. The 400I offers better earpads and a flatter EQ than its older sibling. While both of these sets have a low impedance, it is highly recommended that you pair them with a powerful headphone amplifier (due to the planar magnetic design). There is currently no cheaper way to get into the world of planar magnetic headphones than these models from HIFIMAN, so they represent a great value for those who are curious to try them out.

AKG K701 AKG K702

AKG headphones have been around forever. The Austrian company is world famous for its microphones and headphones as they have been mainstays in professional recording environments since the mid-70s. The AKG K701 and K702 are a great choice for those looking for a comfortable set and enjoy a more detailed sound signature. The biggest differences between the models are the colors and frequency emphasis. The K701 is white/silver and has a slightly boosted top end, yet it never produces a harsh, sibilant sound. The K702 comes in black and has a flatter frequency response. Neither of these headphones are recommended for bassheads, though. The AKG sets do offer a very wide soundstage and work very well in gaming.

Sennheiser HD 599 Sennheiser HD 600 (300 ohm) Sennheiser HD 650 (300 ohm)

The Sennheiser HD 599 is similar to the previously mentioned HD 579, while offering more accurate bass and a midrange that is very relaxed. Once the clamping force on this set relaxes after a few hours of use, they can be worn for hours. While they do have an open-back design, the soundstage is not as wide as those found in the Audio Technica or AKG headphones. The tan and brown color scheme is polarizing, but the design and materials scream “high quality”. If you like the HD 599 but are repulsed by the color scheme, Amazon offers a similar version of this set known as the HD 598 SR.

The HD 600 and HD 650 are legendary among headphone enthusiasts. Released forever ago (the HD 600 in 1997 and HD 650 in 2006), these headphones have stood the test of time. Before high-end headphones became all the rage, these Sennheiser units stood alone as masters of the market. Enthusiasts consider the HD 600 to be the cheapest headphone available that is considered to be “endgame quality”. Many audiophiles and music lovers begin their equipment journeys with cheaper options and work their way up the totem pole. Most that reach the HD600 find it to be the top of the mountain (with a select few willing to venture into the >$1000 market).

Upon the first listen, users may wonder what all the fuss is about, as the Sennheisers offer a sound signature that is anything but lively, yet once you adjust to it, you wonder how you ever lived without it. The midrange and high-end reproduction is incredibly smooth and you can listen to them for hours with no fatigue. Those that prefer their high to sparkle may not enjoy these as much as the AKGs or Beyerdynamic DT 880s, though. The main difference between the HD 600 and HD 650 is the sound signature, with the HD 650 having more bass and an overall darker presentation.

With 300 ohms of impedance, amplification is a must with these headphones, though they do work well with even the most modestly priced options. Headphone enthusiasts love these models because they are good enough to reveal upgrades in your signal chain in price categories way above their MSRP. It is not uncommon to find people who pair their Sennheisers with amps costing $1000 or more. Bargain hunters should also look into Massdrop’s Sennheiser HD 6XX, which is just a rebranded HD 650 for $200 (though quantities are limited).

Beyerdynamic DT 770 32 ohm Beyerdynamic DT 770 80 ohm Beyerdynamic DT 770 250 ohm

Beyerdynamic DT 880 32 ohm Beyerdynamic DT 880 250 ohm Beyerdynamic DT 880 600 ohm

Beyerdynamic DT 990 32 ohm Beyerdynamic DT 990 250 ohm Beyerdynamic DT 990 600 ohm

Germany’s Beyerdynamic is a major player in the enthusiast headphone market. If Sennheiser is Coke, Beyerdynamic is Pepsi. The DT series of headphones offers option for all type of listeners in a durable, comfortable package. All of the models have metal construction with premium velour earpads, with a premium look and feel. The closed-back DT 770 gives strong bass and sparkling highs along with an “in your face” presentation. The open-back DT 880 has a sound signature that leans more toward a lush midrange and crystalline highs. If you like you music presented with a slant towards high-end detail and a wider soundstage, the DT 880 fits the bill. Finally, the DT 990 makes use of a semi-open design, sporting a sound signature that has the classic “V” shape, with the low-end and top-end being emphasized. While its midrange is more recessed, instruments and vocals remain clear. The DT 990 should be considered the most “fun” sounding of the set, but critical listeners may prefer the DT 880.

Each of these Beyerdynamic headphones are offered in a variety of impedances to suit the needs or equipment of the listener. Generally, they all sound the same, with the high-impedance models having slightly lower distortion and getting the edge in overall quality, provided you have enough power to drive them.

The Best DACs and Amplifiers For Desktop Music Lovers

Combo DAC/Amps

FiiO E10K

The FiiO E10K is a small USB-powered DAC/Amp combo that gives life to your music and pairs wonderfully with virtually any low-impedance headphones. It uses a micro-USB plug for signal and power, using its DAC chip to give your digital audio a much cleaner signal that you’d get from a motherboard solution or a laptop. It also features a hardware bass boost switch to give your cans a little extra oomph on the bottom end. The E10K also has a line out if you’d like to send a fixed signal to an external amp or a set of desktop monitors. For $75, I can wholeheartedly recommend pairing with all of the sub-$100 headphones in this guide and a few of the more expensive choices (ATH-AD900X and HD 599).

AudioQuest Dragonfly Red

The Dragonfly Red is Audioquest’s newest Dragonfly DAC revision. It features a better DAC chip and more power than its Dragonfly Black predecessor. This ultraportable unit is perfect for use with laptops and can even be paired with a USB OTG cable for use with Android phones or a Lightning adapter for use with iPhones or iPads. It is relatively pricey at $200, but you do pay a premium for its portability and size.

Schiit Fulla 2

The Fulla 2 is Schiit’s cheapest combination unit and, like all Schiit products, made in the USA. This desktop DAC is perfect for your low-power headphone needs and also works perfectly as a desktop preamp for your powered studio monitors. It’s shiny, luxurious knob feels great in the hand and makes it easier to adjust the volume of your monitors (when used as a preamp). Performance is similar to the FiiO E10K, but the extra $20 gets you that premium knob (and I’m the kind of guy who really appreciates a quality knob).

Schiit Lyr 3

If you have hard-to-drive or high-impedance headphones and you’d really like to have a slick box of Schiit on your desk, the Lyr 3 may be just what the doctor ordered. This tube-powered monster can deliver 9000mW per channel at 16 ohms and 450mW at 600 ohms. Like the Fulla 2, the Lyr 3 also acts as a preamp when the headphone jack is not being used. Unlike the Fulla 2, the Lyr 3 runs the signal through its tube stage to give your music some of that “tube magic” before it’s sent off to your desktop monitors. It features a modular design, allowing the use of a USB DAC module (the same DAC found in Schiit’s Modi 2) or a phono preamp (for those who love spinning wax). You can also buy the Lyr 3 as just an amplifier without either module for $100 less. With either module included, the Lyr 3 costs $599, but it will drive literally everything and may be the last amp you ever need to purchase.

Headphone Amps

Schiit Magni 3

If someone asks me to recommend a headphone amp, I’m gonna go with the Schiit Magni 3 every time. At $99, this solid monster has enough juice to drive power hungry planar magnetic headphones like the HIFIMAN HE-400I and the finesse to work well with earbuds (using its low-gain switch). Like the other Schiit amps, the Magni 3 has preamp outputs so you can use it as a volume control for your desktop monitors when the headphone jack is not being used. It can produce 430mW at 300 ohms, meaning it has more than enough oomph to work with the Sennheiser HD600s or the high-impedance Beyerdynamics. The Schiit Magni 3 simply has no equal in its price range and is the best bang for your buck in this market. It is made to be paired with Schiit’s Modi 2 DAC and both units will sit in a neat little stack on your desk (I have been rolling with a Schiit stack myself for years - currently using a Modi 1 with a Magni 3).

Little Dot MKII

Listeners who are curious about dipping their toes into the world of vacuum tubes without wanting to break the bank should give some consideration to the Little Dot MKII. This is the cheapest you will be able to find an all-tube design (rather than units that only use tubes for the buffer stage). Tube enthusiasts will be pleased to know that the MKII supports tube rolling (term for swapping tubes) for dialing in that perfect sound. It is not recommended that you use this amplifier with extremely low-impedance headphones or IEMs (earbuds).

Schiit Valhalla 2

The Valhalla 2 is Schiit's cheapest all-tube amplifier. You get similar performance to the Lyr 3, though the Valhalla lacks the ability to have a DAC module built-in (or installed). Its preamp can be used with a set of desktop monitors and it supports tube rolling. Unlike most OTL tube amps, the Valhalla 2 can be used with all of your equipment, from high-sensitivity IEMs to 600 ohm planar magnetics. At $349, this amp can be the centerpiece of your desktop audio setup.

DACs

Schiit Modi 2 / Modi 2 Uber

When it comes to dedicated desktop DACs, the Schiit Modi 2 is the only unit I’ll recommend. For $99, you get a high-quality DAC with a quiet, clean output. It is a perfect match with Schiit’s Magni 3 and Valhalla 2 amplifiers or any other amplifier you have. Spending more money than this for a desktop DAC puts you into the realm of insanely diminishing returns. The Modi 2 Uber variant costs an extra $50, but you get coaxial digital and optical inputs, along with a front panel input selector switch. The Modi 2 Uber can be a perfect match for your CD player, Chromecast Audio, or other device with a digital output. I use the Modi 2 Uber with this exact setup in my listening room, allowing me to have my PC, CD player, and Chromecast making use of its high-quality DAC and outputting into my preamp.

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