A Blockchain-Secured Home Security Camera Won Innovation Awards At CES 2020 Las Vegas
Similarly, “Internet of Trusted Things” startup IoTeX was showing off its Ucam device, a home security camera that shares footage to the cloud, but it isn’t actually branded as IoTeX. A Blockchain-Secured Home Security Camera Won Innovation Awards At CES 2020 Las Vegas
Ucam
“Our company is a blockchain platform, and we are working with other IoT and hardware manufacturing companies to make private and secure IoT devices,” IoTeX’s Dorothy Ko explained.
Instead, a company that’s been building cameras for years, Tenvis, will build and offer the device. The product earned CES 2020’s recognition in the Cybersecurity & Personal Privacy category.
“This is a hyper-saturated market,” IoTeX Head of Business Development Larry Pang told CoinDesk. “Tenvis came to us looking for the next feature, and that’s privacy.”
Ucam footage will be viewable through a mobile app and that app will hold the private key for everything it captures. That way, even if the user decides to store the data in the cloud, the cloud service provider won’t be able to view it.
The App Can Handle One Or Several Cameras
Video can be held on board the camera on an SD card, stored in the cloud or even on IPFS, though cloud storage of any kind is likely to incur a fee. IoTeX will offer that service but the price isn’t set yet, Pang said. If the user just holds it locally there will be no additional charge.
“We really want to give people the ability to have privacy and a great user experience,” Pang said. Ucam will retail at $50 when it comes out, he added.
Hardware Ambivalence
Neither company wants to devote itself to making hardware.
“The good thing about this is all the cameras you see on the [CES] floor today can ultimately be powered by IoTeX,” Pang explained. His company is working from a platform-as-a-service model.
They’d like to see IoTeX running various indoor and outdoor cameras by various brands, all connected to one app and a private key controlled by the owner.
IoTeX was able to bypass the hardware execution process by partnering with an existing company that already had it down.
Updated: 1-13-2020
Mobile Phone Retailer Joins China’s Blockchain Land Grab With US Startup Investment
Dixintong Technology Group, whose parent company, D.Phone, is one of the largest smartphone retailers in China, has entered the blockchain space by acquiring a minority stake in a U.S. startup called Monsoon Blockchain.
The two companies confirmed to CoinDesk the purchasing agreement was signed on Jan. 7, but declined to disclose any financial terms on the deal. However, people familiar with the matter said the deal values the blockchain startup at over $100 million.
The partnership between the two companies comes at a time when China is encouraging enterprise blockchain adoption as well as the development of emerging technologies.
Dixintong’s chairman and founder Donghai Liu said the deal will allow his firm to explore potential use cases that require both blockchain and other emerging technologies like 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Started as a mobile phone retailer in 1993, D.Phone went public in Hong Kong in 2014 with four anchor investors including Lenovo Group, Qihoo 360, China Telecom and TCL Corporation. Alibaba’s major e-commerce rival, JD.com, has also acquired 9 percent of Dixintong worth $30 million in July. The firm’s total market capitalization is around $200 million.
According to its 2018 annual report, the company sold nearly nine million cell phones in its more than 1,500 physical stores across the country, generating over $2 billion in revenue and $46 million in net profit for the year.
The parent company has made efforts to expand its businesses to other related industries. It partnered with China’s Tianjin city government in December to build an industrial park focusing on 5G and IoT with a total investment estimated to be over $3 billion.
Political Boost
A slew of tech companies have explored blockchain technologies since Chinese President Jinping Xi called on the country to “seize opportunities” in the space. Stock prices skyrocketed for companies whose businesses are related to the new technology.
“When you have that level of endorsement from the government, everything moves much faster,” Donald Basile, the startup’s CEO, said.
The country’s two largest telecommunications services providers, China Mobile and China Telecom, are members of a consortium that runs Blockchain-Based Service Network (BSN), a state-backed blockchain infrastructure project.
The Chinese government is also rolling out 5G services in 2019 across the nation. The emerging technology would require new mobile devices. Most major carriers in China have started to offer 5G data plans and cloud services.
The Shanghai government plans to spend millions of dollars on supporting a public blockchain project and open an incubation center for startups that want to build decentralized applications (dapps) on the blockchain. Meanwhile, the Guangdong province has launched a blockchain-based project to help small and medium-sized businesses borrow money from commercial banks.
Top Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba and Baidu have also launched their own projects to integrate blockchain with cloud services.
“There will be great potential for blockchain adoption given the support from the Chinese government,” Liu said. “That is one of the biggest reasons why we want to form a partnership with Monsoon Blockchain.”
Blockchain-based Marketplace
Monsoon Blockchain touts an ethereum-based protocol that aims to use smart contracts to provide a more efficient marketplace for cloud service providers and potential clients, according to Basile.
He said prices for cloud computing and storage services could vary over time between data centers, depending on locations and capacity. Basile believes that’s where blockchain can play a role.
The firm aggregates prices and collects information about the conditions of data centers across the world. It then submits the data to the blockchain network, he said. On the other hand, companies that want to buy computing and storage services can submit their specific requirements.
The peer-to-peer blockchain-based protocol will use smart contracts to match those companies with the most suitable cloud services provider for them, according to Basile.
Users now need to buy the network’s native token with fiat currency to use the smart contracts on the blockchain. While the token is only circulated within the network, the firm may consider launching a private token sale or issue a public offering in the future when regulators have a clear guidance on the processes, Basile said.
Monsoon Blockchain worked with a spate of IT giants including IBM, Oracle and Alibaba as a data services distributor, said Basile, who previously headed Fusion-io and Violin Memory, both of which are data processing software and hardware providers.
Billion-user Access?
While Monsoon Blockchain primarily serves enterprise clients, the deal with Dixintong could boost a consumer-oriented business, potentially bringing users onto its blockchain protocol.
Besides mobile devices, Dixintong also sells telecommunications services such as data plans as a licensed virtual services operator.
Basile said the partnership with Dixintong would give Monsoon the access to billions of users in China to reach a larger scale, which would be otherwise impossible in the U.S.
He said Monsoon could assign a unique identity to each smartphone user on its blockchain platform where they can enjoy cheaper data services thanks to its optimized cloud services solution.
In return, users’ data will be processed and stored in the network. When people use 5G services or devices that are connected to the internet they create much more data than the current network, and that can be valuable for companies to analyze for their business decisions, according to Basile.
“With the scale of people in China, you can have 20 million users in no time, so that’s a huge amount of computing and analytics needed to be harnessed,” Basile said.
Updated: 9-29-2020
Blockchain Technology Now Powers A Privacy-Focused Security Camera
The new camera from IoTeX reportedly features a private key for access and end-to-end encryption of all data.
IoTeX, a privacy-focused platform for the Internet of Things, has partnered with camera manufacturer Tenvis Technology to offer Ucam, an indoor security camera powered by blockchain technology.
Head of business development at IoTeX Larry Pang told Cointelegraph that Ucam users can access their camera data through a decentralized system and log in with an “uncrackable” password. The camera or a user’s mobile phone handles all the computing, meaning decryption occurs on the devices, letting users control their own data.
“A private key is used to end-to-end encrypt all the data,” said Pang. “We need to have technology that guarantees our privacy and our ownership instead of terms and conditions and policies.”
The system was designed to avoid the type of data and security breaches that have haunted many companies behind internet-based surveillance cameras. Amazon’s Ring users reported a series of breaches in December, some of which involved hackers using the system to harass people in their homes. There were similar incidents from Google Nest camera users this year, one of which involved a bad actor playing pornographic sounds into a 2-year-old girl’s bedroom.
“These kinds of hacks are all ‘walking through the front door,’” said the IoTeX exec. “They’re password-based hacks, where they’re brute-force hacked. An 8-character password can get breached in a few minutes.”
By using blockchain infrastructure, Ucam will reportedly bring the end-to-end encryption typical of cryptocurrencies to home surveillance by using blockchain infrastructure. Pang said that even non-tech savvy Ucam users will start to see the benefits of the technology, offering the traditional camera features they want with the crypto concept of “not your keys, not your coins.”
“What better kind of daily life problem is there than peace of mind and privacy? That’s the first kind of intro for people to crypto.”
“We can try to convert [customers] into crypto users,” said the IoTeX exec, stating the underlying technology would provide a brand new way to reach those unfamiliar with digital currency. “We’re not talking about speculation of assets. They don’t really need to know about blockchain — they just need to know privacy is the goal, privacy is the result.”
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