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cryptowavesxyz · 5 years ago

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London Blockchain Summit: Crypto Meets Coronavirus

Day One, March 5

The world has a fever. A fever for blockchain. But that’s not the only infectious substance in the room. The spectre of the spiralling Coronavirus crisis looms large over today’s conference in the United Kingdom. London has sold out of hand sanitizer and some of blockchain’s biggest names are fist-bumping and elbow-tapping at London Blockchain Week to avoid hand contact.

Although the summit is about extolling the virtues of blockchain, coronavirus is the elephant in the room. And there’s certainly room for an elephant in the cavernous main hall of 8 Northumberland Avenue, in the beating heart of the U.K. capital, with many of the speakers subject to travel bans or self-isolation.

But organisers of the event are taking a rosy view of a grim situation, and that’s not only due to the intense pink neon lighting that illuminates the venue. Organizer Dr. Jane Thomason kicked off the blockchain bonanza by acknowledging the impact of coronavirus on the event:

‘We’ve had a lot of dropouts, a lot of our international speakers haven’t been able to make it. No one knows what’s going on but you need to wash your hands a lot and don’t sneeze on anyone!”

Blockchain is changing finance and our online reality

Founder and CEO of Outlier Ventures Jamie Burke, opened proceedings by ribbing the audience about the fact they were even there in the first place, “I wondered who’d be stupid enough to come to a conference now. I didn’t have a choice!” he said.

Burke spoke passionately about the potential for blockchain to bring about Web 3.0, a new phase in which advanced machine learning fundamentally changes the way in which the internet functions.

Burke told the audience that blockchain can alter the way that predatory platforms use our data, often without consent. “Sovereign software restores the world,” Burke said, adding that Web 3.0 could see a “Cambrian explosion of machine learning,” in which users would experience a new internet framework where it was possible to “bring your own data.”

He doesn’t think we will have to wait long to see big changes: “Sovereign identity will be the thing this year to catalyse web 3.0,” he said.

The industry can’t rest on its laurels

You might expect a blockchain conference to be full of slavish boosterism, but London Blockchain Week included some pointed criticisms. While crypto media often gives the impression that nothing stands in the way of blockchain technology, some heavy-hitters in today’s conference were cautious about how much impact crypto and blockchain will have in the short term.

Parim Solutions Pty Managing Director Joanne Thornton said that despite the progress that has been made, there was still a long way to go before wholesale investors are ready to get involved in a meaningful way:

“Wholesale investors require regulatory certainty and a high degree of liquidity. There isn’t sufficient liquidity, and a lot of evolution is required for the majority of wholesale investors to be involved in that space.”

Swen Werner, Managing Director of State Street, echoed Thornton’s reservations about the lack of a concrete regulatory framework and insufficient liquidity. Rockaway Capital managing partner Viktor Ficher added: “Liquidity is still the endgame that we are trying to reach. The biggest point is the lack of good assets to invest in.”

DeFi needs more work

DeFi, or decentralized finance, is fast becoming one of the buzzwords of 2020. But speakers today were split over the issue. Jonathan Dunsmoor, founder and principal of Dunsmoor Law, P.C., asked the audience how many of them had a digital wallet and suggested the fact that nearly half did not as evidence there’s still much more work to be done for DeFi to become a reality.

Not one to mince words, Dunsmoor was the enfant terrible of the day, stating that digital currencies are an unsuitable basis for DeFi due to their volatility. Dunsmoor’s provocative statements drew criticism from the crowd, with one attendee bellowing “Bull—-”.

Daniel Coheur, COO of Luxembourg-based Tokeny, criticised the term ‘DeFi ‘and argued the direction the burgeoning industry was going in was toxic for growth:

“I think we should stop talking about DeFi. What we do is centralized finance on a decentralized network. What we must avoid is fragmentation. This market will never grow if we start building silos. We need something standardized because it is killing the market. We need critical mass.”

Francesco Roda, Chief Risk Officer at Koine, agreed. “There are so many different initiatives taking place,” she said. “Interoperability is the key element for adoption. We should have critical mass on one particular standard.

Conclusion

For now, it seems the conference will soldier on despite the impact Coronavirus has had. But since I sat down to write this update, the UK has announced its first death from Covid-19. The day’s first speaker Jamie Burke, had ended on a morbid note, telling attendees he would “try and see you next year, no guarantees on that.”

My next update from London Blockchain Week is due tomorrow. Let’s see how that pans out.

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zawilski · 7 years ago

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Reflections on ReInvent 2017

This years AWS ReInvent was bigger than ever before - the conference spanned five different hotels/conference centres along the Las Vegas strip so getting your daily allocation of steps in was no challenge. Roughly 43,000 people attended the event this year! If you’ve attended ReInvent in previous years you would know that there is a fair amount of walking involved - this year really kicked it up a notch with people shredding shoes in a matter of days

Physical exercise and footwear aside this year event provided what seemed like an endless list of new services in almost every category. CEO Andy Jassy kicked things off with his keynote presentation which riffled through a bunch of new service announcements. They key ones for me were:

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), a managed Kubernetes service running on top of AWS. Simplifying running and managing containers.

Aurora Serverless—on-demand, auto-scaling Amazon Aurora. This service eliminates the need to provision instances, automatically scales up/down, and starts up and shuts down automatically. It was very clear that AWS is keep to liberate customers from the tyranny of their existing database vendors (leave you to guess who they mean...)

In the Machine Learning space Andy introduced Amazon SageMaker (leverages open source Jupyter project). SageMaker provides built-in, high performance algorithms, but doesn’t prevent users from bringing their own algorithms and frameworks. SageMaker also greatly simplifies training and tuning, and helps automate the deployment/operation of machine learning in production.

DeepLens, the world’s first HD video camera with built-in machine learning support. This technology is incredible - I attended the workshop session and walked away with a DeepLens unit so expect more detail on this front in the coming few weeks/months.

Amazon Translate, which does real-time language translation as well as batch translation.

Andy’s keynote focused on what ‘builders’ wanted and how they would build the organisations and societies of the future. It’s very clear that AWS is trying to take the heavy lifting out of technology, making it simpler for anyone to be a builder.

It’s very clear that AWS is sticking to it’s ‘customer obsessed’ mantra, not only in terms of how it delivers services to its customers but also in the types/range of services its bringing to market for AWS users to utilise to improve the experience of their customers. Investments in voice technologies, AI and machine learning are all geared towards re-inventing how organisations interact with their customers.

In contrast Werner Vogels’ keynote was light on service announcements and more focused on 21st century architectures and how technology will shape (and will be shaped) by the world in the coming 5-10 years. Werner’s presentation also showcased a number of female techies doing some impressive things in their respective organisations/industries - pretty inspiring stuff.

Werner did announce a couple of key services which stood out for me:

Alexa for Business is a fully managed service for Alexa voice-controlled devices at work.

AWS Cloud9, a cloud-based IDE which AWS acquired last year. Cloud9 is a clean and feature rich IDE but the ‘killer app’ is collaboration. You can invite other AWS users to join your project for pair programming sessions with a nice little chat box to help you work through bugs (it comes with a full debugger for solo projects as well).

Lambda language support for .Net and Go meeting a long requested feature request.

Serverless architectures and services were definite a headline topic this year. A number of the presentations included case studies of AWS customer leveraging serverless technologies to deliver on-demand applications and services. This is consistent with the AWS strategy of ‘business rules being the only thing you will need to code’ in the future.

One of my special interest categories this year was around artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s clear that AI/ML will bring about unprecedented workforce/job changes in the coming decade. I think a lot of people assume that AI is coming when in reality it’s already here and getting better every day.

A number of services announced were intended to make AI/ML accessible to a wider user base - to take it out of labs and into the hands of people building front-line products and services. These AI/ML developments - paired with things like DeepLens - will pave the way for potentially changing the way we interact with technology in every aspect of our lives.

Cloud adoption still seems to be variable - based on the people I talked to and the round-table sessions I attended. Many organisations are still pursuing the ‘lift and shift’ approach with variable benefits. There are organisations re-engineering their processes and applications as part of the move to cloud but they are still the exception. Worryingly I was actually part of a couple of round-table sessions where some people seemed to be advocating for the on-premise model as a better option.

On a global scale what we are doing around cloud adoption in New Zealand still seems to be on par with what leaders in other parts of the world are doing.

In terms of logistics, you could perhaps argue that ReInvent got too large this year. The travel times between venues were high and I know lots of people missed sessions they wanted to attend due to travel times or popular sessions not offering any walk up spots. From what I remember the 2016 event (which was all at the Venetian) seemed to flow more smoothly with fewer frustrations from attendees. Perhaps it’s time to split ReInvent into two events - one in the US and one in Europe?

#ReInvent #AWS #Vegas #AWSCloud

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