Author: azeeadmin

Blippar seems to have avoided a total collapse following its dramatic descent into administration after it failed to pull together an emergency funding deal.

One of the AR startup’s main investors, Candy Ventures, has acquired the company’s assets in a patent sale and will be keeping the brand alive underneath the leadership of founder Ambarish Mitra and “many of Blippar’s original key engineers.”

Blippar may have blown up in dramatic fashion, burning through over $130 million in funding for its dream of building an augmented reality empire, but it seems the new startup will continue to focus on its old haunts, namely Blippbuilder, its SaaS AR creation platform. The company devoted significant efforts to capturing the consumer markets after achieving some success with their enterprise-focused platform, it’s likely that a reborn Blippar will strip down its efforts.

At one point, the startup had over 300 employees and claimed a $1.5 billion valuation.

Candy Ventures is a UK-based portfolio of companies and investments led by property tycoon Nick Candy. The firm led Blippar’s $37 million Series E  in September and seems to have bought into the company’s broader mission.

“Rish and the team built a great business which had to adapt to the challenges of a constantly-evolving industry. With the right application of its powerful AR technology, there is huge potential for the new company to drive innovation in AR and position itself at the forefront of the industry,” a spokesperson for Candy Ventures wrote in a statement.

Facebook has agreed to plough more resource into combating the use of its advertising platform by scammers, saying it will do more to tackle scam ads that use well-known public figures to try to trick consumers.

It plans to launch a dedicated scam ad report button in the UK, slated to go live in around three months’ time, as well as set up a specialist, locally-based team to monitor ad reports, keep an eye on scammer trends and generally work on getting celebrity-exploiting scam ads taken down more quickly than its current AI-aided ad review systems have been doing.

The new measures were announced in a joint press conference with UK consumer advice personality, Martin Lewis, who launched a defamation lawsuit against Facebook in April, saying the social network giant had failed to stop scammers using his image on scores of ads that aimed to swindle consumers, thereby damaging his reputation.

Some of the ads had tried to use Lewis’ image to promote crypto scams.

Lewis filed suit after becoming frustrated by the scale of scam ads bearing his image and Facebook’s tepid response to the problem its platform has created — telling the Guardian last year: “What is particularly pernicious about Facebook is that it says the onus is on me, so I have spent time and effort and stress repeatedly to have them taken down.”

He confirmed today that he’s dropped the lawsuit after Facebook agreed to make changes.

“There were over 1,000 on Facebook in a year. And the way that the company acted then wasn’t good enough, so I had to resort to [taking legal action],” he said during the press conference, adding that he had wanted to see “tangible real change to the number of scam ads on the platform”, so was happy to drop the lawsuit because he believes the new report button will do that.

Facebook has also agreed to provide funding to help get a citizens scam advice service up and running in partnership with UK consumer advice charity, Citizens Advice. Lewis said he was delighted with that outcome.

The social network giant, which took in $13.73BN in revenue last quarter, said it will donate cash and Facebook ad credits to the value of £3 million over the next three years to help set up the new scam advice bureau within the charity.

This will be called ‘Citizens Advice scams action project’ (aka Casa), and the pair said it will aim to provide information and support to consumers who are concerned they are being targeted by or have fallen victim to a scam.

Facebook’s support for Casa breaks down into £2.5M in cash over the next two years, and £500,000’s worth of ad credit coupons for ads on its own platform, which it said will be distributed in tranches over the next three years.

There was little detail on exactly how Casa will operate at this nascent stage but given the ad credit donation its work will presumably include running scam awareness ads on Facebook — funded (initially) by Facebook itself. Ergo, part of the company’s donation will be ploughed straight back into its own ad business.

Pressed on whether its approach with an ad report button still puts too much onus on consumers to have to protect themselves from scams being spread on Facebook’s platform, its regional director for Northern Europe, Steve Hatch, claimed it does already take down “huge amounts of these ads” but admitted its ad review systems are “not perfect” — hence the company seeing value in introducing a button for direct user reports of dodgy ads.

For his part Lewis said he had never wanted to have to go to court but said his intention had rather been to draw attention to the problem and pressure Facebook to do more. He said he was therefore pleased it had agreed to do more to tackle scam ads.

“This button is only in the UK. This is not Facebook worldwide. This is unique to the United Kingdom that has not been done anywhere else and it is a direct result of this scam ads campaign. And I’m actually very grateful to Steve and his team here in the UK for pushing this on what is normally a global organization that works in a global way,” he said.

Albeit, to be clear, Facebook is not accepting legal liability for scam ads. And there’s no suggestion that any existing victims of the scam ads which bore Lewis’ image are going to be in line for any direct compensation from Facebook for their losses.

Asked directly about the compensation point, Hatch sidestepped the question, saying Facebook is focusing on what more it can do to stop scammers from defrauding people in the first place.

Also pressed on why it had taken a lawsuit by a celebrity consumer champion to get it to do more, he said: “This is an area we’ve focused on for a very, very long time. But what [Lewis] has really pushed us towards is this specific focus about the use of public images and celebrity.”

While the new measures are UK only for now, Hatch suggested Facebook might look to expand the approach elsewhere if it proves successful.

“We’ve started in the UK,” he said in response to another question. “Like any system if we find it works — and we sincerely hope that it does, we think we’ve got the right amount of focus, we think we’ve got the right amount of investment behind it — it’s very imaginable that we would take this out to other markets. But what we want to make sure is we’re getting this right.”

He also said it would be important for Facebook to find the right partner to work with in other markets, as it’s doing with Citizens Advice in the UK.

While Lewis sounded happy to end his publicity focused legal battle against Facebook, having won some tangible concessions from the company, he warned that unchecked scam ads persist on other platforms, and said he is “not ruling out another lawsuit if things don’t improve”– namechecking Google and Yahoo as two of the other platforms now in his sights.

“Over the last few weeks I have again been plagued by scam adverts. A few of them have been on Facebook and when we’ve told Facebook they’ve taken them down very quickly. I can’t expect more. I accept that the technology isn’t perfect. What I want is proactive response, good team set up and them being taken down quickly. But that’s not the case with Google,” he said, adding that the problem is even more difficult to combat where Google is concerned given it’s more difficult to know where the ads are being served, as they can be served across even more touchpoints.

“I believe they’re not even giving us a direct contact at the moment,” he added, discussing Google’s response to complaints his team has filed about scam ads bearing his image. “We’re just having to go through the normal reporting channels, that everything goes through, even though I’m a major target of scam ads. By the nature of what I do, by both being on television and the subjects that I talk about — and being relatively trusted on that subject — means that my click through rate, apparently, for scam ads is really good!”

We reached out to Google and Yahoo for a response to Lewis’ comments. (Disclosure: TechCrunch’s parent, Verizon Media Group/Oath, is also the parent company of Yahoo.)

A Google spokesperson told us:

“Because we want the ads people see on Google to be useful and relevant, we take immediate action to prevent fake and inappropriate ads. We have a tool where anyone can report these ads and these complaints are reviewed manually by our team. In 2017, we removed 3.2 billion bad ads and we’re constantly updating our policies as we see new threats emerge.”

“The big problem that we face is that [online advertising] is a Wild West,” Lewis continued, saying the problems he’s faced extend to “many other online advertising tools”.

“This is an absolute Wild West with people sitting all over the world, and with very little regulation, no criminal enforcement — because frankly the Met Police are not going to go to whatever these country these people are in and arrest them, and that’s the problem with online advertising. Hence why I’ve targeted the platform to say the only thing we can do… is deny them the oxygen of publicity and deny them access to the individuals.”

“I want online advertisers to see this as a warning shot across their bows,” he also said, calling on Google and the online advertising industry as a whole “to start to take responsibility”, adding: “Real people are seeing their livelihood taken away, their life savings taken away. People are losing money that they need to live on by irresponsible advertising protocols. It’s about time other firms stood up, took responsibility, improved their reporting protocols and started to give money to Citizens Advice scam action.

“Scam adverts make people distrust advertising. So this isn’t just an issue for the people who put the adverts out there but any company who does advertising in the UK legitimately, trying to get their message across, this is diluting what you are doing. So the advertising industry as a whole — not just the platforms — need to try and make sure this stops. Otherwise you’ll get close to the point where someone like me says never trust an advert online.”

The issue of direct compensation for consumers scammed via online platforms is a matter for policy makers and regulators to work on, he added.

Lumigo, an Israeli startup, announced a healthy $8 million seed round today, as it emerged from stealth to help companies monitor serverless architecture. Investors included Pitango Venture Capital, Grove Ventures and Meron Capital.

The company was started by a couple of ex-Checkpoint execs, Erez Berkner and Aviad Mor. They decided to head out on their own to solve a problem they were seeing around monitoring, as developers moved to serverless environments.

Serverless computing lets developers code applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. That’s because services like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions provide the exact amount of infrastructure resources required to run the application at any given moment. It is incredibly convenient for developers trying to move more quickly, but it poses challenges for the operations team trying to manage and monitor the application.

To help solve this, the company uses a visual map to show operations exactly what’s happening  inside the application. The map enables operations teams to see and understand every request and get to the root cause of a problem. It can trace the path not only from the serverles infrastructure, but also to adjacent services like database and storage.

For starters, the company is working with AWS, but plans to add support for other cloud platforms down the road. Moving forward, the founders’ vision is more than just serverless. They  plan to expand to monitor containers and API services like Twilio and Stripe.

For now, it’s still early days, but the company has eight employees and a dozen customers using the product. The money should allow them to hire more engineers and begin building out the product further.

Adobe today announced that it has acquired Allegorithmic, the French company behind the Substance tools for creating textures that are widely used by AAA game creators, as well as visual effects artists, animators and designers. Over time, Adobe will bring many of Allegorithmic’s technologies to its various Creative Cloud tools, many of which already offer complementary tools. Beyond those integrations, though, what this acquisition is really about is the fact that 3D design and creating 3D content is becoming increasingly important for the creatives who use Adobe’s tools. With Adobe Dimensions and, more recently, Project Aero for creating AR experiences, the company has started focusing on 3D, and this acquisition will bring both talent and technology to the company.

It’s worth noting that Adobe previously invested in Allegorithmic and that Dimensions already features integration with Substance, so today’s announcement has clearly been in the works for a while.

As Adobe’s chief product officer Scott Belsky told me, it’s worth remembering that many of Adobe’s most important products today were acquisitions, including Photoshop back in 1995. “Adobe is a company that has always embraced new DNA and has grown through these critical acquisitions,” he said, and noted that Adobe always looks to these acquisitions to see how it can change through them — not how it can change the company it acquires. “For Creative Cloud, this is one of these acquisitions,” he added.

He also noted that while Substance has been around for more than 15 years, there’s a lot of tailwind in the industry now that it’s often easier to render and image than set up a photo or video shoot and then edit and retouch those images. Adobe, of course, wants to catch as much of that tailwind as possible.

Adobe’s Stefano Corazza, who is the company’s head of AR, also noted that the Allegorithmic team was among the first to focus on physics-based rendering and that tools like Substance will become increasingly important as creatives try to build realistic AR experiences that need to be as photorealistic as possible — and to do that, you need to be able to create materials that are able to reflect light properly, for example. He also stressed that new technologies like Nvidia’s RTX raytracing hardware will keep pushing the boundaries on photo realism.

The current Substance product line will remain intact, by the way. Adobe obviously knows that it is acquiring a set of tools that have been used for creating games like Assassin’s Creed, Forza and Call of Duty, but also movies like Blade Runner 2049. Those use cases aren’t going away. But while Adobe obviously has a long history in the movie industry, this is also a move that takes it deeper into the world of game development. Don’t expect to see Adobe launch a competitor to Unity or other game development tools, though. What Belsky seems to be more interested in — besides the existing use cases — is to enable a wider range of people to make objects in games, for example. He noted there’s already a flourishing number of games that allow players to use their own objects and textures, for example, and Adobe wants to offer tools for them, too.

The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition.

I’m not allowed to tell you exactly how Anchorage keeps rich institutions from being robbed of their cryptocurrency, but the off-the-record demo was damn impressive. Judging by the $17 million Series A this security startup raised last year led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Khosla Ventures, Max Levchin, Elad Gil, Mark McCombe of Blackrock, and AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, I’m not the only one who thinks so. In fact crypto funds like Andreessen’s a16zcrypto, Paradigm, and Electric Capital are already using it.

They’re trusting in the guys who engineered Square’s first encrypted card reader and Docker’s security protocols. “It’s less about us choosing this space and more about this space choosing us. If you look our backgrounds and you look at the problem, it’s like the universe handed us on the aisle platter the venn diagram of our skillset” co-founder Diogo Monica tells me.

Today, Anchorage is coming out of stealth and launching its cryptocurrency custody service to the public. Anchorage holds and safeguards crypto assets for institutions like hedge funds and venture firms, and only allows transactions verified by an array of biometrics, behavioral analysis, and human reviewers. And since it doesn’t use “buried in the backyard” cold storage, asset holders can actually earn rewards and advantages for participating in coin-holder votes without fear of getting their currency stolen.

The result is a crypto custody service that could finally lure big-time commercial banks, endowments, pensions, mutual funds, and hedgies into the blockchain world. Whether they seek short-term gains off of crypto volatility or want to HODL long-term while participating in coin governance, Anchorage promises to protect them.

Anchorage’s story starts eight years ago when Monica and his co-founder Nathan McCauley met after joining Square the same week. Monica had been getting a PhD in distributed systems while McCauley designed anti-reverse engineering tech to keep the US military data from being extracted from abandoned tanks or jets. After four years of building systems that would eventually move over $80 billion per year in credit card transactions, they packaged themselves as a “pre-product acquihire” Monica tells me, and they were snapped up by Docker.

As their reputation grew from work and conference keynotes, cryptocurrency funds started reaching out for help with custody of their private keys. One had lost a passphrase and the $1 million in currency it was protecting. The pair realized there were no true standards in crypto custody, so they got to work building Anchorage.

“You look at the status quo and it was and still is cold storage. It’s the same technology used by pirates in the 1700s” Monica explains. “You bury your crypto in a treasure chest and then you make a treasure map of where those gold coins are” except with USB keys, security deposit boxes, and checklists of where they are. “We started calling it Pirate Custody.”

 

Just ahead of this year’s Super Bowl, Google’s live TV streaming service YouTube TV is rolling out nationwide, the company announced this morning. The service has been steadily expanding since its April 2017 debut, and became broadly available a little less than a year ago when it then reached the top 100 U.S. markets, or 85 percent of the country. Today, YouTube TV will begin its expansion in an additional 95 markets, covering over 98 percent of U.S. households.

The remaining markets will follow shortly after, YouTube says.

The company’s strategy was not to launch with a limited service nationwide, just so it could claim wide availability. Instead, it focused on making deals with the local affiliate stations ahead of each market’s launch. This allowed subscribers to access to at least three of the top four major broadcasters (CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX), including their local news and sports.

This had been something of a competitive advantage for YouTube TV as some rival service didn’t include local stations, or only in select markets. With a few exceptions, that wasn’t the case for YouTube TV, however.

Along with the start of its nationwide availability, YouTube TV also said that it’s now providing complete local coverage – meaning feeds from the four largest broadcasters – in over 90 percent of the markets where its service is available.

Despite a $5 per month price hike last March, YouTube TV has been growing quickly. At the beginning of the year, it had a reported 300,000+ subscribers, and by July it had scaled to nearly 800,000, reports claimed. It’s reasonable to think the service has since grown to at least a million subscribers if not more by now, but YouTube TV won’t share its numbers.

However, even at the million-subscriber mark the service would trail Hulu with Live TV, which reached this milestone in September. DirecTV Now and Sling TV, meanwhile, are much larger – 2.3 million and 1.8 million, also as of last fall.

On paper, YouTube TV has a compelling offering, with some 60+ TV networks for $40 per month, unlimited DVR, and support for 6 accounts per household. The company has scored some notable promotional partnerships to raise awareness, as well, including one with the MLB for the World Series and another with the NBA.

But it has stumbled at times, as many of these streamers do – once even going down during the World Cup for an extended period of time. That can make people nervous about relying on live TV services like this for major sporting events, where it’s critical to not miss a single play. With nationwide availability, YouTube TV will have to prove itself as capable when the Super Bowl airs or risk further damage to its brand.

 

Tech and political leaders sounded the alarm bell today about the potential for artificial intelligence to exacerbate huge inequalities across the world. The mood music coming out of the World Economic Forum is that AI is seen as having great potential to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues (such as climate change), but if individual organizations and countries implement AI systems and others do not, then they will race far ahead, spreading inequality between economies and leading to unforeseen consequences for the planet.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, the President of Colombia (Iván Duque Márquez), Marc Benioff (chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce) and Kai-Fu Lee (the Chinese venture capitalist, and an artificial intelligence expert) backed a new WEF initiative to expand its network of “Centres for the Fourth Industrial Revolution” to Columbia and other emerging economies. Joining Columbia will be Israel and the UAE, and other affiliate centres are planned.

The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) was created by the WEF as a hub for “global, multistakeholder cooperation to develop policy frameworks and advance collaborations that accelerate the benefits of science and technology.” But in particular, it has a focus on how rapidly and equally advanced technologies are spread across the world.

One of the problems with the spread of high tech is that government policies governing emerging technologies can be incredibly piecemeal, with some areas becoming regulated heavily, and others hardly at all.

When it comes to the spread of AI, which could have exponential effects on companies and economies, the resulting inequalities would be a sort of ‘weaponization’ of the space, the WEF argues.

Benioff himself has championed the creation of the C4IR
in San Francisco, being as it is at the epicenter of many of the greatest advances in technology. But he’s also acutely aware that the city is grappling with huge inequalities between those who’ve benefitted from the march of technology and those who have been almost entirely let behind. During the WEF this year he called San Francisco a ‘train wreck‘ of inequality because of Silicon Valley.

“The fourth industrial revolution
It’s an extraordinary moment in history,” he said. “The fourth industrial revolution holds great promise in the creation of new jobs, new ways to cure disease and relieve suffering. But on the other hand there’s a risk that it will worsen our economic, racial, gender and even our environmental inequalities. This can be seen with AI. We are risking a new tech divide between those who have access to AI and those who do not. I strongly believe that AI is going to be a new human right. Every person and every country needs to have access to this new critical technology.”

He continued: “Today, only a few countries and companies have access to the best AI in the world. And this who have it will be smarter, healthier, richer and of course, their warfare will be significantly more advanced. That is why it’s critical that we ask the equation now, especially in regards to equality. What are we doing to really bring these technologies to everyone? Those without with AI will be less educated, weaker, poorer and sicker. So we must ask ourselves, is this the kind of world want to live in?”

He then went on to reference the obvious inequalities in San Francisco. “We also have a tremendous crisis of trust in the misuse of data and privacy,” he said.

“We are in a crisis of trust in the industry. The ‘techlash’ has never been bigger. We’re at the tip of the spear [in San Francisco], we are in a great place [to study tech]. We are a little big in the future.”

His view is that the WEF’s network of Centres for the Fourth Industrial Revolution will help to address how companies and governments can apply hi-tech like AI across society and economies.

Benioff said technology was neither good nor bad itself but it’s “what we do with it matters”. “We can see our planet is in crisis. By 2050 we will have an ocean with more plastic than fish, according to the WEF… all of these issues could be addressed through ‘fourth industry revolution technology’. He praised the WEF for launching this new center in Columbia.

Dr Kai-Fu Lee, the chair of the WEF’s global AI council, said: “Various consulting firms have estimated that AI could create 13-17 trillion dollars of incremental GDP in the next 11 years. And every country is now producing an AI plan.” But, he said, AI will have profound effects on jobs, privacy, and security. “We hope to be a center that considers many viewpoints. We have to recognize that the attitudes and visions for AI across countries and regions may be different and we have to find a way to work together. A simple catch-all approach simply will not work. The unique advantage of the WEF is that it was born out of inclusiveness. We’re not here to impose western or indeed eastern values onto the whole world.” He said bringing together nations to work on AI would create a better approach to the application of AI globally.

Fu Lee the race for AI was “moving too quickly and many people misunderstand it. It’s creating tension between countries.” So we need a “transparent discussion.”

Since launch, Brandless has looked to make shopping for everyday items simple by pricing everything at $3. Today, for the first time since the company came on the scene, Brandless will be adding new items that exceed its own $3 limit.

The e-commerce brand is adding baby and pet products to its portfolio.

Baby products include Premium Diapers with no latex, lotion fragrance or chlorine processing, organic baby food pouches and cruelty-free baby care products like baby wipes, lotion, shampoo and diaper rash cream. Pet products include protein treats, supplement chews, non-toxic toys, hemp collars and pet cleanup waste bags made with a TDPA technology material that breaks down faster in landfills.

Though some of these products won’t wear the $3 pricetag as a uniform like other Brandless goods, the company says that 90 percent of its products still fall into the $3 category. Products that are not $3 or less will be $9.

Brandless recently introduced a subscription, giving users a stickier way to interact with the brand, especially on the heels of the launch of pet and baby products.

The subscription is free, but it asks users to meet a minimum of $36 for free shipping, and it auto-fills the box with goods you’ve chosen for monthly resupplies.

The time between purchase and receipt is difficult for products like the ones Brandless sells. Toilet paper, snacks, pet food etc. all come in different amounts that last a different length of time. This means that options like Amazon Prime, which offers shipping as fast as same-day in some cases, become incredibly attractive to restock on that one thing that ran out too quick.

Edison Trends took a look at Brandless over a period between 2017 and 2018 and found that retention was the company’s most pressing issue. Only 20 percent of customers who bought something in late 2017 came back the next quarter for a purchase, and only 13 percent came back the quarter after that.

Since Brandless gives back the cost of marketing its products to consumers, word of mouth and customer loyalty are the two pillars upon which the company is built. Subscriptions and new product categories are two ways to bring on new users and build loyalty with an existing customer base.

But the seven-year-old company has plenty of work to do. With nearly $300 million in funding, investors and shareholders are expecting big things from Brandless.

Two years ago this week, AppDynamics was about to IPO. Then Cisco swooped in with a big fat check for $3.7 billion and plans changed quickly. Today, as part of Cisco, the company announced it was expanding its monitoring vision across the business with a number of enhancements to its product suite.

AppDynamics CEO David Wadhwani says the company wants to monitor your technology wherever it lives in the enterprise from serverless to mainframe. That kind of comprehensive view of a customer’s computing environment requires a level of built-in intelligence, and being part of a large organization like Cisco helped move more quickly towards this approach.

Last year when Cisco bought Perspica, a machine learning startup, it folded the engineering team into AppDynamics with a plan to make the product more intelligent. Given the sheer amount of information, a product like AppDynamics is monitoring it’s a perfect use case for machine learning, which feeds on copious amounts of data.

Today the company announced the fruit of that labor in the form of a new Cognition Engine. Instead of simply pointing out that there is a problem, and leaving it to the DevOps team to figure out the root cause, the Cognition Engine handles both in an automated way. When you combine that with a rules engine, you can move from detection to root cause analysis to remediation much more quickly than in the past. Eventually Wadhwani expects the Cognition Engine can learn from the rules engine and begin to build even more automated fixes.

The company is also announcing some new monitoring capabilities including AWS Lambda, the serverless service, which has been gaining momentum in recent years among developers. Teh approach poses challenges to a monitoring tool like AppDynamics because the application doesn’t sit on a defined virtual machine, but instead uses ephemeral resources, served up by AWS at any given moment based on resource requirements. AppDynamics now offers a way to trace transactions on this type of infrastructure.

Finally, now that it’s part of the Cisco family, the product is looking not only at the application layer, it is expanding that vision to incorporate the networking infrastructure as well to help understand issues and set policies just as it does with applications.

All of this is part of what Cisco is calling a “central nervous system” for enterprise computing. It’s a marketing term designed to encompasses the overall vision of trying to locate issues, find the causes and fix them in an as automated way as possible across the enterprise computing landscape.

Steemit, an early blockchain startup that’s developing an alternative to Reddit, has a new chief less than two months after laying off most of its staff as part of cost-cutting measures.

Celebrated as an early success story in the crypto world, the company shed 70 percent of its employees back in November on account of the ‘crypto winter’ which has seen the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies plummet by 90 percent or so. Steemit is far from the only blockchain startup forced to restructure, and now its rebuilding plans rest in the hands of newly-appointed managing director Elizabeth Powell.

Formerly the company’s head of communications and advocacy, Powell has replaced former CEO Ned Scott — who is now executive chairman — at the helm of the business, which has 12 full-time staff.

“We recently published our updated Mission, Vision and Values, as well as its roadmap focusing on increasing ad revenues, protecting Steem assets’ value and cost reductions. My job is to execute the roadmap,” Powell said in a post introducing her to the community.

Founded in July 2016, Steemit was an early blockchain project that showed promise and, with over a million registered users, it has been one of the most successful in terms of adoption. The premise is a Reddit-like space that is supposedly decentralized — so not subject to removals — and where users are compensated in tokens for creating or curating popular content.

However, like many blockchain startups, it has so far failed to compete with existing services on the internet and offer a truly differentiated experience that appeals to users outside of the crypto community. 

Its ‘Steem’ token, meanwhile, has suffered as the market has crashed. Valued at $7.31 during its peak in January 2018, it is currently priced at $0.41, according to CoinMarketCap.com. Unlike others, the company didn’t hold an ICO, instead it opted to mine tokens, but still those falling prices mean loyalists and the company have lost the paper value of their investments.

One major positive to adopting tokens is that, when used to raise capital, they can alleviate financial concerns and allow companies and services to focus entirely on the user experience without prioritizing monetize. But, following its financial wobbles, Steemit is testing advertising “as part of our strategy for improving the economic sustainability and decentralization of Steem.” That’s certainly controversial but, as Powell wrote, it is now very much part of the roadmap.

Powell is a relative newcomer to Steemit, having only joined the company last year. In response to her appointment, some users raised concern at her relative inexperience on the site — she has published just one original post and shared a further two  — but others suggested that the appointment of an ‘outsider’ brings a new perspective that can help wider Steemit’s audience.

Either way, Powell certainly has a challenge on her hands if Steemit is to fulfill its early promise.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.