Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

How Blockchain Startups Will Solve The Identity Crisis For The Internet Of Things

  

The popularity of technologies

like the self-driving car and Amazon Echo are rising; it’s not hard to imagine a world where your coffee maker knows when to summon your morning Uber to work, and it arrives with groceries and laundry detergent, ordered directly by your refrigerator and washing machine, as they have recognized that they were low on supplies.This future will be powered by a set of inanimate objects connected through an emerging network known as the Internet of Things.  However, just as the security around the transfer of data between humans and companies is required to safeguard humans from identity theft, the same will be required for objects within the Internet of Things.

Identity protection is an emerging area for the Internet of Things. Millions of inexpensive consumer devices ship with a default username and password, but some of them end up in your house. Last winter a piece of software called Mirai herded hundreds of thousands of home routers and cameras into the most potent botnet ever, which then generated the first terabit scale distributed denial of service ever seen. What if there were a solution that permitted companies to reliably identify their customer’s devices without putting them in the position of holding customer data? What if there were a way to ensure IoT devices only accepted configuration from their legitimate owners? I talked to HYPR CEO George Avetisov about their biometrics and UniquID CEO Stefano Pepe about their device identity work to get a better feel for how blockchains will be used to solve these problems.

The service HYPR provides is a framework for passwordless authentication via biometric encryption. They don’t develop biometric devices, the focus of their innovation is creating a distributed, secure system based on existing, tested technology. We've covered the concept of cryptographic fingerprints here previously. Any digital item can be subject to some sort of cryptographic hash, then the hash can be used to check the validity of a digital item without the validator needing to have a copy. As an example, your phone's fingerprint reader does something involving a scan and a company that has access to a hash of your fingerprint's digital representation can validate you, but they don’t have the ability to impersonate you.

Digital fingerprints are just the start. HYPR supports all types of biometric data, from simple authentication algorithms for facial and voice recognition to more complex algorithms such as the way you type on a keyboard, the rhythm when you text on your phone, or how you walk on the street. Your home, your car, and your office all have access requirements and there is probably some degree of smarts already included. HYPR positions IoT vendors to include biometric authentication without a huge investment in expertise, money, or time to implementation.

A big part of HYPR's innovation is complete distrust of the internet for transmitting biometric data itself, which never leaves the user's cell phone. A single phone might get cracked and the biometric data used, but there is no path to hitting millions of victims in a single event. Where does the use of a blockchain fit in all this? It will serve as a distributed, trustless store of biometrics validation data. There are several implications and not all are obvious. A blockchain based system is resistant to denial of service attacks that cripple centralized businesses.  Why?  Because instead of bringing down a single server farm hosting with the authentication data, a DOS attack would have to identify and bring down many blockchain nodes hosted by several parties within the same permissioned blockchain environment.

Equally important to DOS protection is business process interoperability. Avetisov explains, “We are building use cases around associative forms of identity through the blockchain.  Right now you can not authenticate between two different corporate entities, such as a bank and a car insurance company because there is not a shared identity between the two companies.  Each company has a different identity stack that is not interoperable.  By using a blockchain, you can have an interoperable ledger for identity between multiple entities without a complex infrastructure.  An insurance company can prove your identity to a bank or a credit card can prove your identity to a streaming service all through biometric data.”

How does it all work?  While the exact mechanics have not been finalized, it would involve each company acting as a validator of the data within the network running nodes that are constantly accepting biometric data. When a company that is not running a node wants to authentic a user, they would look to the network and the nodes would provide data on the last time stamp that a particular user could have been identified with a particular device accepting biometric data.  If the user can prove they had a device that the network has agreed is associated with their identity within a recent timeframe, the user is then authenticated.

The value here is that different companies can identify users based on their specialized identity stack and provide authentication to others without sharing any of their personal data.  Converting your customers to use biometrics is a complex, expensive project. But if 70% of your customers are already using a system from another company, and that system has been built with an eye on assisting third parties to make the jump to biometrics, the barrier to entry is dramatically lowered. Cost savings begin in quarters rather than years.

What sort of benefits accrue if diverse businesses authenticate their users with the same biometrics system? Here's a scenario Avetisov offered that's a nightmare today, but which would have a happy ending in a biometrics enabled world. Children don't typically have identity information until their later teen years when they start driving, so there is a three to five year window where they are allowed to roam widely without a formal ID. If they're brought to a hospital injured and unresponsive there is a delay while they are identified, wasting some of that golden hour in treating shock and trauma. A biometric solution accelerates that process and a blockchain allows that medical institution to authenticate through the identifying information collected from other companies.

These use cases could be implemented using Bitcoin's blockchain, but HYPR has chosen a private solution. While individuals are using biometrics to authenticate, they do so with large entities, and HYPR has focused on serving the needs of banks, health care, and insurance providers.  For these enterprises, regulation around data security is a great concern.  While a public blockchain with hashed or encrypted data provides high levels of data security, it is still unclear how managing data in such a way would fit within the current regulatory framework.  As such, private or permissioned blockchains are the fastest way to market without the need to educate regulators.

While HYPR is focused on how to build an interoperable environment for humans to be authenticated via various IOT devices, UniquID is building technology that identifies the devices themselves while they are offline through a very clever use of blockchain technology and smart contracts.

Pepe offered an interesting example of how an offline smart contract might work, “If you want to rent a Zipcar, what happens if neither your phone or the car cannot connect to the internet.  You can’t unlock the car with your smart phone unless the owner of the car comes with the keys in his pocket, drives the car out, and brings the car to a place to download a certificate. This is the only way for the car to establish a secure connection with your phone.  However, with UniquID there is a very different scenario.  Both the car and the smartphone have a UniquID wallet on the blockchain. Zipcar creates a smart contract on the blockchain that unlocks the car for a specific smartphone when a token is received in the car’s wallet.  The smartphone downloads [all or a portion of] the blockchain with the smart contract already executed.  Then when you go to the car without internet, your smartphone uploads the missing blocks of the blockchain that the car does not have, with the executed smart contract, and the car unlocks for the person with the correct smartphone.”

Through this innovative use of blockchain technology, devices do not have to be connected to the internet in order to communicate, identify and authenticate with each other in a secure way.  This is an important mechanic for devices to be able to capture real-time data and communicate with one another in real time.  

Unlike HYPR, which can be built on either a permissioned or public blockchain, this use case relies on the security provided through the proof of work mechanism of a public blockchain.  A private blockchain environment, particularly a small one, may have vulnerabilities that a motivated attacker could exercise, modifying data in ways an offline node could not detect. A public blockchain’s security mechanism, proof of work consensus, costs the same amount to fraud, whether online or offline. Global bitcoin mining capacity is 3.75 million terrahashes per second. Translating that to something you can visualize, an AntMiner T9 will do 12.5 terrahashes per second, costs $1,140, weighs twelve pounds, and consumes 1576 watts. You’d need 300,000 of those to match current global Bitcoin capacity and theoretical attacks could be done with 10% of the total – a hundred and twelve tons of gear consuming 37 megawatts of power costing $34 million.

If you’ve got a $20,000 vehicle but it would take the purchase price of a 220’ yacht to steal it, such attacks are going to remain at the proof of concept stage. However, it is important to note that a downside to the current layout of this plan may require a device to download an entire blockchain, which would be cumbersome for a small IOT device. UniquID has very ambitious plans on how to improve device identity and communication through a new type of secure network that will act as alternatives to SIM networks and certificate authorities that I call decentralized certificate authorities.  Unfortunately, UniquID has not yet released a white paper describing their service, so we’ll save that for another article.

You can see how these technologies will be required for a future with an Uber ordering coffee maker, a grocery ordering refrigerator, or laundry room that makes sure you’re always ready to do the next load. Humans will be identified by biometrics, devices by unique attributes like MAC addresses, likely in combination with the unique attributes of the human that first uses them, imprinting to their new owners the way some newborn animals do with their mothers.  When a service needs to leave a message for a device that isn’t always on if it’s small it’ll be placed directly on a blockchain, while larger data say a software update, will be left as a URL on the blockchain and a cryptographic fingerprint of the file.

We’ve had robotics on factory floors for two generations, lines of carefully laid out systems assembling goods. That sort of automation is going to spread from within a single organization to across multiple enterprises, reaching out to consumers, and eventually imbuing the entire supply chain with situational awareness, speeding deliveries and reducing the need for human interactions.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Blockchain Tracker:
Blockchain’s Role In Digital Advertising

  

Although it’s still in its infancy stage of being used

outside of the financial arena, blockchain technology is slowly showing signs of impacting other industries. On the tip of everyone’s tongue in the digital advertising arena is blockchain technology. Just as recent as this January, ethereum-based blockchain technology company adChain partnered up with decentralized application studio ConsenSys with the goal of specifically developing a blockchain solution for the online advertising industry.

ConsenSys’ Founder, Joseph Lubin, commented in the joint press release about how blockchain technology adds value to digital advertising: “There is tremendous value and disruption potential of this technology beyond FinTech. The development of smart contract-based applications in digital advertising is an ideal use case for blockchain. Supply chains and value chains are ideal use cases for Ethereum, as it enables many cooperating and competing participants to work fluidly together on a shared platform that they can all trust to realize an efficient and fraud-resistant n-sided marketplace. We’ve been iterating on the adChain blockchain implementation for a year and believe adChain will significantly change the way advertisers and publishers operate their supply chains to exchange ad impressions.” Developed through the Swiss non-profit organization, The Ethereum Foundation, ethereum is a blockchain platform that’s defined as “a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.”

As such, it should come as no surprise that the digital advertising realm is beginning to use blockchain to help prevent fraudulent advertising. The first example of the technology’s use in digital advertising comes from Los Angeles-based startup company MetaX. It seeks to fight ad fraud via its new adChain protocol, which enables its own supply chain to adapt in a scalable, trustworthy and secure manner via blockchain. MetaX’s Co-Founder and CEO, Ken Brook, understands how quickly the digital advertising arena is growing and thus believes standard industry procedures just won’t cut it. “Blockchain has a number of exciting implications for digital advertising. Fraud prevention is a natural first application given the transparency and security blockchain brings, and because fraud is such a major issue for the advertising sector,” he said.

Another avenue blockchain technology is being used for in digital advertising is ad-delivery verification. While trust in advertising isn’t at its highest point, some are touting that blockchain has the ability to be used to see if advertisements are being delivered and whether or not they’re going to the correct place. Blockchain also allows advertisers to track who opened the ad, where it was opened and what possible conversion rates are from the promotional push. Through all of this, blockchain ultimately helps out two parties, which include the digital advertising industry, with its budgeting, and streamlining its services and consumers with transparency into ad practices. By removing any third-party interference, access to information on how advertising works internally and the paths it takes to reach consumers will allow the public to likely have more control over incoming targeted messages.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

The “City of the Future” is One Step Closer to a Blockchain Based Economy

Dubai’s Blockchain Goals

Dubai has quickly grown into a global hub for trade. Now, it’s planning to use blockchain as the basis for its economy, further enhancing this status. Blockchain has the potential to simplify record-keeping and the transport of goods all over the world. In concert with Dubai’s advanced transportation infrastructure and near-zero taxes, businesses will experience Dubai as a secure, reliable business-friendly environment.

Although Blockchain is primarily known as the technological basis of the digital currency Bitcoin, the technology itself can function in many roles. Blockchain allows users to share and track information from transactions and contracts using a digital ledger, and the records are secure, verifiable, and permanent. With blockchain serving as the basis for both private business and government services in Dubai, service provision will be more efficient. In short, doing business in Dubai will become far simpler for any kind of business.

“We want to make Dubai the first blockchain-powered government in the world by 2020,” Aisha Bin Bishr, director general of Smart Dubai, a government office charged with facilitating innovation, told The Wall Street Journal. “It is disruptive for existing systems, but will help us prepare for the future,” she says. This commitment to using blockchain at the government level makes Dubai the first city in the world to promote the technology in this way.

In March, a citywide implementation effort began, led by Smart Dubai. The office will educate both the private and public sectors about the potential of blockchain, and conduct workshops with key stakeholders, public and private, to identify which services can best be enhanced by blockchain and prioritize them for implementation. It also will educate the public and private sectors about the technology’s potential. Once these efforts are finished, Smart Dubai predicts that the blockchain rollout will begin later this year as the public and private sectors collaborate on pilot projects. The office will also build a shared Blockchain as a Service platform for implementing government projects.

City Of The Future

Dubai’s vision for becoming the city of the future goes far beyond a blockchain economy. By 2030, 25% of Dubai’s road transport system will be using AI and will, therefore, be driverless. The use of rooftop solar power will be mandatory by 2030 — the same year the country plans to reach 25% of its goal to generate 75% of the city’s energy via solar power by 2050. With what will be the world’s largest 1000 MW concentrated solar power plant scheduled to open in Dubai in 2020, the city should be on track to reach that goal.

Dubai is also home to “Smart Palm Trees,” 3D-printed trees with Fiber Reinforced Plastic (FRP) that act as community tech hubs throughout the city. The trees provide free wifi, city information, and device charging powered by solar. Dubai is also going to be home to the world’s first 3D-printed skyscraper; the first 3D-printed office is already in use. The city is also planning for a hyperloop, and inviting entrepreneurs and innovators with working ideas for technical solutions to pressing problems to join the Dubai Future Accelerators program to foster more great work.

A blockchain economy will be the next step in this process, and it will fit right in. “We have a very clear objective to make Dubai the capital of the blockchain industry,” Ms. Bishr tells WSJ. “By 2020 we’ll have 100% of applicable government services and transactions happen on blockchain.”

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Reasons Social Media Marketing
Is Still Underrated

  

The numbers on social media marketing are impressive.

More than half of small businesses in the United States are planning to increase their social media marketing budgets in 2017, and the number of businesses using social media marketing has increased, year over year, for more than a decade.Still, social media marketing remains underrated. Business owners and marketers frequently treat it as a second thought—something for an intern to handle, rather than a strategically deep mode of building your reputation and attracting new traffic. Some have even abandoned the idea altogether, refusing to spend any time or money on a strategy that nets a positive ROI for up to 92 percent of businesses that use it. So what’s the deal? Why isn’t everyone on board with the strategy?

The "fad" angle.

Believe it or not, some people still believe that social media—or its use as a marketing strategy—is still a fad just waiting to fizzle out. This is an argument I could have understood back in 2007 when social media platforms were only in use by a small percentage of the population. But now that Facebook has reached more than 1.2 billion users and is still growing, with a corporate foundation that rivals those of Apple or Google, it’s a hard argument to defend. Users have gotten used to the idea of socially interacting online, and platforms keep evolving in new ways to maintain their interest.

You get what you pay for.

Psychologically, people tend to place more value on things that cost more money. For example, in a blind taste test of identical wines whose only difference is price, people claim that the more expensive (yet compositionally identical) wine tastes better. Take this principle to social media marketing; it’s free to claim and build a business profile and to post regularly (as long as you aren’t leveraging paid advertising). Because of that, people don’t value it as much as they do paid advertising. They’re also less likely to pay a professional to work on a social media campaign, knowing that—technically—anyone could do it for free (even if they never actually do it).

Unmeasurable effects.

The return on investment (ROI) of social media is hard to measure, and I’ll be the first to admit it. One of your biggest goals is attracting a large following of people who are enthusiastic about your brand, and improving both your brand’s reputation and brand awareness. These aren’t as objectively measurable as on-site conversions, but they can and do lead to greater consumer interest, which manifests as sales eventually. Trying to pin down an exact value for all these benefits is next to impossible, even for the pros, so the value of a social media campaign is almost always underreported.

Anecdotes.

People also use anecdotal evidence as a basis for their opinions about the strategy. For example, they may know of another business who used social media and didn’t see any results, so they stay away from it in the present. However, these anecdotal examples often don’t examine the types of tactics these businesses used, and they certainly don’t represent the average across multiple businesses.

Apples and oranges.

Ironically, these same business owners often cite the fact that anecdotal evidence can’t prove a strategy’s effectiveness for everybody. They point to major influencers or big businesses in the social media world and explain that social media works for them because it fits naturally with their industry, or because they have the resources to invest in a heavy campaign. It’s true that some industries may be naturally inclined to perform better on social media than others; tech companies and consumer-facing businesses are two good examples. However, social media marketing can be used by practically any company—it may just require an adjustment to your approach.

Poor targeting.

Some businesses look at their own results and use those results as a gauge of the long-term potential of their campaign. But they may not realise that their strategic targeting is interfering with their results. For example, if you buy 1,000 followers using some super cheap follower-adding service, but only 4 or 5 of them ever interact with your posts or visit your site, it could be that the remaining 995 don’t belong to demographics relevant for your business, or that you haven’t been using the right engagement strategies to cultivate interest. Don’t underestimate the potential of a well-researched, strategically focused campaign.

 Lack of investment.

Effective social media marketing can’t be done on a whim. It needs to be planned, researched, and strategically executed. That means you’ll need to spend a significant amount of time or a significant amount of money to see results; and since many business owners aren’t willing to make that investment, they never see a fraction of their potential results. By that point, they’ve seen what a small investment does, and they’re unwilling to make the jump to a larger investment.

Social media marketing isn’t an “underground” strategy; it’s talked about heavily (and I should know), and there’s no shortage of content covering its feasibility and best tactics. But the perceptions of marketers and business owners are still lagging behind the evidence, and they’re only hurting themselves in the process. The more you learn about the effective implementation of social media marketing, the more plainly beneficial it seems—but you have to treat it as a legitimate marketing strategy if you want to research it appropriately.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Ways to monetize your
social media followings

Turn your social media presence into a way to generate revenue — even if you don't have a massive following on Facebook or Twitter.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Does Your Company Really Need to Focus on SEO?

  

Q: Is search engine optimioptimisation important to your digital marketing strategy?
A: Yes and no.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference.

I’ve helped hundreds of local business owners bolster their SEO. In many instances, entrepreneurs have solicited my business after unsuccessfully trying to boost their own SEO for years. The issue isn’t that they are lacking effort, it is that they don’t know the best place to focus their effort.

I’m going to teach all local business owners how to crush it on their own local SEO, taking just five hours to do it. What entrepreneurs don’t realize is that if you have a physical location, you have a huge benefit in your local market. You need to make sure that you use that to your advantage.

What is local SEO? 

I’m sure you have done a Google search and seen the results populate at the top of the page with the map, star ratings, address and phone number. This is what I’m referring to when I say local SEO. This is Google’s Local Snack Pack. Depending on the industry, it has the potential to be the very first result on Google and can make a big difference when it comes to bringing new leads into your business.

Create a Google My Business page.

It is free to create a Google My Business page and shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes to cross this step off your checklist. This will get your business hours, phone number and directions onto Google Search and Maps. Make sure you add pictures of your business and add a great description so people can familiarize themselves with your local brand directly from your Google My Business page. To verify this process, Google will manually send you a postcard with a pin so make sure to check your mail!

Submit your business to local directories. 

After you enter your PIN and verify your Google My Business page, you still have a lot of work left! There are hundreds of local directories across the internet where your business needs to be submitted to. Since you are a busy entrepreneur and we only have five hours to bolster your local SEO, we are going to automate this process. Fortunately, there are services that will take care of this for you. Through Moz Local, Aabaco or Yext, you can get your business submitted to hundreds of directories. The cost associated with this is approximately $89.00 per quarter. This will be one of the most worthwhile investments you can make from a marketing standpoint. After submitting your business to one of the aforementioned services, you will appear on sites like MapQuest, FourSquare and Yahoo Local (to name a few). This process will take you 30 minutes and it will help align your local presence.

Tip: If you have moved businesses or are not confident that all of your local listings are consistent, run this test on Moz to check your listings. It is vital that you have consistency with your brand name, address, phone number and other local indicators.

Get reviews.

I’m frequently asked if reviews on a Google My Business page will help increase rank. The answer, unfortunately, is somewhat wishy-washy. Just because you have more reviews than someone else doesn’t necessarily mean that this will help you surpass them in rank. What reviews will help you do is increase your click-through rate, an important indicator to Google.

If you Google “Columbus SEO Company,” you should see my company populate towards the top of the page, in maps and organically. What I started to notice was that once I focused on getting reviews from customers, I started to get more high quality leads. It makes perfect sense. Reviews help establish credibility for your brand. When people are deciding between SEO firms, they are likely going to read reviews. If they like what they read from The Media Captain, they are going to click on to my site. Google likes it when you have a high click-through on the search results because it means you are clearly providing value to the user (otherwise, they wouldn’t click on your site).

Business owners should spend at least one hour coming up with a list of 50 customers or clients. Create a customized email for each brand advocate and tell them how important a review would be to your business. It is also important to train your staff to ask customers for reviews. Starting with reviews on your Google My Business page is a good start. But, don’t forget about Yelp, Facebook and the Better Business Bureau. Every Friday afternoon, before closing up shop at your office, make sure you’ve gotten some new reviews!

Tip: Don’t send a massive email out at once to all of your customers seeking reviews. This could raise a red flag to Google if you suddenly go from 0 reviews to 30. Be sure to stagger this out in an organic fashion so the reviews are naturally coming in. I always tell my clients, if you aren’t proactively getting reviews, you 5 Get’ll only get bad reviews! If you have a massive list of customers, signing up for a service like Stars or ReviewBuzz.

Acquire local backlinks.

How exactly is Google determining which local business to populate in the “snack pack” results? There is a lot of correlation between the domain authority of your website and the local SEO results.

If you are unfamiliar with domain authority, it is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. I wrote an article about this if you want to learn more about domain authority. To make a long story short, to increase domain authority, you need quality backlinks pointing back to your site from external websites.

For a local company, it is imperative that you have local links pointing back to your site. If you are an extermination company, for example, make sure all of your vendors link back to your site on the “partners” section of their sites. If you have a lot of corporate clients, see if they’ll link back to you. Get involved in the local community and sponsor a youth baseball team and they should link back to you on their “sponsor” page. All of these backlinks are indicators to Google that you are a local business.

If you are having a hard time coming up with local clients to link back to your site, revert back to my playbook on knocking on local business owners’ doors! (watch this video on how to acquire local links). Within 60 minutes, you can get at least five local businesses to link back to your site, regardless of whether or not the relationship is already forged. 

Step 5: Improve your on-site SEO.

Google is not going to know you are a lawyer in Little Rock unless you make this clear on your website. Make sure to include your business name, address and phone number on your website. In the title tag of your site, reference your local market. On your contact page, make sure to list out directions to your office and include local landmarks so people can easily find your location.

Your local search results tie back to your website. Your website needs to be a true local indicator. Don’t go overboard though; there is no need to mention Little Rock on your homepage 48 times. Google will get the point if it is naturally worked into the verbiage throughout the site. For a local business, you can optimize your site in 45 minutes to improve its on-site SEO.

Tip: You can sign-up for a 30-day free trial of Moz and use its on-page grader to determine how well your site is optimized for local keywords. For example, if you are curious how your homepage is doing for “Little Rock Divorce Lawyer,” this page will tell you your score and give you tips to improve it.

Open for business

If you haven’t taken the steps above to improve your local SEO, it is the equivalent of having a sign on your front door that says, “We’re Closed.” You want to make it known to Google that you are open for business. A common question I receive is what entrepreneurs should do if they don’t have a local business and work out of their home. This is more of a complex issue that I would have to analyze a case-by-case basis. What I will say is don’t try and game the system. Many businesses in the past have signed up for a Regus Virtual Office Space to improve their local SEO. Google is smart. It was able to pick up on the fact that 15 businesses shared the same suite number. It rolled out an algorithm called Possum and penalized those businesses.

If you have a local office and spend five hours in a smart and efficient manner on your local SEO, you will reap the benefits for years to come. Don't be discouraged if your business isn't ranking in the top three results within a week, though. Like anything in life, it can take time and continued work for Google to recognise your efforts. 

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member