While I personally have my doubts about crypto as a currency (beyond simply a medium of exchange between fiat), I do think that the blockchain is an interesting piece of technology with huge potential. With it brings digital immutability, and I believe that will prove very valuable to many industries. With the blockchain also comes smart contracts, which are an intriguing concept that is still far from realizing its true potential.

But just when no one was looking, Smart Contracts and the blockchain are about to get a lot more interesting.

Tim Wagner, formerly the general manager of AWS Lambda, API Gateway and the Serverless Application Repository, has left Amazon and joined Coinbase as head of engineering. An interesting move, for sure, but even more interesting when you hear what he has to say.

In an interview with Forrest Brazeal of ACloudGuru, Tim reveals the connection between his old job and new (emphasis mine):

Blockchain offers a transparent distributed data store with a really unique trust model. But today, it lacks an easy way to connect that model to arbitrary code execution, and that limits what you can do in a smart contract, as interesting as they are.

And then on the flip side, you have something like AWS Lambda with its scalable and reliable execution of third-party code from a trusted vendor, but today it doesn’t offer a mechanism to use that code as a contractual agreement between two parties. Setting that up would require application code.

The marriage of smart contracts and serverless computing feels like it could be big. And who better to lead the charge than the person who basically created Lambda in the first place?

It’s still going to take time before we see any results here. But this space may become very interesting very soon.

The post A new hope for the blockchain? first appeared on Dann Berg.

Accenture’s R&D division has spent the last year developing breakthrough product placement technology that can seamlessly insert a brand into online video, including the ability to replace existing labelling.

And also:

“[We wanted] to [be able to] monetise (sic) huge back catalogues of existing video content as well as offer content creators a way to place advertising in a non-disruptive way, open it to the marketplace and give them the benefit of a programmatic platform,” said Naressi.

The world of 30 Rock — where Jerry Seinfeld is being digitally inserted into NBC’s new programming lineup without his knowledge or consent — is becoming real.

I foresee advertising getting really…subtle. Like, when I see a Microsoft Surface in a TV series now, I know it’s a paid product placement. But soon everything will be a product placement, and it’ll change depending on whether you just searched Google for new socks or for pimple cream.

NBC’s Superstore is going to thrive.

The post All the world’s an ad, and we are merely watchers first appeared on Dann Berg.

Within a few days, the story, which had taken him 15 minutes to concoct, had earned him about $5,000. That was a sizable share of the $22,000 an accounting statement shows he made during the presidential campaign from ads for shoes, hair gel and web design that Google had placed on his site.

He had put in perhaps half an hour a week on the fake news site, he said, for a total of about 20 hours.

What an asshole. Seriously.

The post Economics of fake news first appeared on Dann Berg.

“The problem is that with Gawker gone there was no one around willing to proudly play the heel and do the wrong thing.” While publishing the full dossier might have been off-brand for Vox, we should be grateful that BuzzFeed is filling some of the vacuum left by Peter Thiel’s vengeful erasure of the political left’s most influential rumor board.

The outcome of the Gawker lawsuit, and subsequent shuttering of the website, was the canary in the coal mine. We now have a president who hates the media, who now has a very recent playbook for taking publications down.

Fighting fake news with fake news is not the answer. The political left is still trying to figure out how to ethically combat those who have no problems fighting dirty. I sure hope we figure it out soon.

The post Canary in the coal mine first appeared on Dann Berg.

The post It’s been a long journey first appeared on Dann Berg.

Computer programs that scan facial expressions have been used to detect whether people respond positively to commercials or whether hospital patients are in pain. Can they also read a CEO’s mind?

James Cicon thinks they can. A finance professor at University of Central Missouri, Cicon built software that analyzed video of the faces of Fortune 500 executives for signs of emotions like fear, anger, disgust, and surprise. The emotions, he found, correlated with profit margins, returns on assets, stock price moves, and other measures of performance at the associated companies.

“What do you think of my profile in Fortune Magazine?…I look what? The shares are what?…Oh.”

The post Finally getting featured in Fortune Magazine first appeared on Dann Berg.

5. Whiskey Shivers – Gimme All Your Lovin’

4. DYE – Fantasy

3. Major Lazer – Pon De Floor

2. Biting Elbows – Bad Motherfucker

1. Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart

Honorable mentions: DJ Snake & Lil Jon – Turn Down For What, Major Lazer – Bubble Butt, El Guincho – Bombay

The post Best music videos ever made, ranked first appeared on Dann Berg.

There was another nightmare that I had as a child that’s a little more fuzzy. In fact, I don’t remember a single detail. But here’s the weird part: I vividly remember not ever remembering a single detail. In the days and weeks that followed this event, I couldn’t tell you what took place in the dream. I only knew the subject of the dream: the Berenstein Bears.

It wasn’t one of those dreams that wakes you with a start. In fact, it wasn’t even a dream that comes back to you in when you open your eyes in the morning. Instead, I remember seeing a Berenstein Bears book and getting a sudden jolt of dread. Of re-remembering something terrible. I couldn’t place my finger on what it was. Some sort of deja vu. It must have been because of an unremembered nightmare.

This happened in the early ’90s. The memory had lied completely dormant, until The Berenst#in Bears Theory started growing in popularity.

I’m not submitting my experience as proof one way or the other. But this is a 100% true story, and I’m feeling all weird inside now.

The post Berenst#in Bears hit close to home first appeared on Dann Berg.

Berkeley Earth’s scientific director, Richard Muller, says breathing Beijing’s air is the equivalent of smoking almost 40 cigarettes a day and calculates that air pollution causes 1.6m deaths a year in China, or 17% of the total.

Um, holy crap.

The post The Easyway to quit Beijing first appeared on Dann Berg.

From Rob Rhinehart’s How I Gave Up Alternating Current:

With no fridge, no dishes, no microwave, no oven, no range, no dishwasher, no utensils, no pests, no cleaning products nor dirty rags, my life is considerably simpler, lighter and cleaner than before. I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it.

Also, he too has a magnet in his finger, so I guess that makes us best friends.

The post A “simpler” life first appeared on Dann Berg.