Game of Thrones showrunners’ next series will be about an America where slavery never ended

With Game of Thrones entering its final short seasons, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are now working on ideas beyond the world of Ice and Fire. HBO announced today that the pair have gotten a series order for a drama called Confederate. The series will be set in an alternate America where the Southern states successfully seceded from the Union, slavery persists into the modern era, and the country is on the brink of a third Civil War.

According to HBO’s announcement, Benioff and Weiss have been working on the idea for years, initially intending on developing it into a feature film. In a joint statement, though, they say HBO was the right place to take the concept. “Our experience on Thrones has convinced us that no one provides a bigger, better storytelling canvas than HBO.”

The series will explore the tensions between the United States and the Confederate States of America, with characters living on either side of what’s known as the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone. The cast will feature freedom fighters, abolitionists, journalists, and, of course, slaves and slave owners. Working on the show with Benioff and Weiss as executive producers are Nichelle Tramble Spellman (The Good Wife) and Malcolm Spellman (Empire).

€˜Confederate’ sounds like a response to series like”The Man in the High Castle’ and”The Handmaid’s Tale’

Conceptually, Confederate sounds like a response to the recent crop of series like The Man in the High Castle and The Handmaid’s Tale,both set in alternate realities where the villains of history won. (It also closely resembles Ben Winters’ recent bestseller Underground Airlines, which also deals with slavery persisting in the South, in an alternate present-day America.) However, HBO is almost certainly courting controversy with the drama. Arguments have been made in recent years about the Hollywood landscape already being flooded with slave stories. What’s more, Benioff and Weiss have been heavily criticized for their treatment of people of color on Game of Thrones. It’s not clear the decision to greenlight this project will do much to address those criticisms.

Production for Confederate will begin after the final season of Game of Thrones, which may be pushed back in to 2019.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/19/16000756/game-of-thrones-showrunners-confederate-hbo-drama-america-slavery.

The Better You Know Your Customer, the Better You Can Position Your Brand

By Jim Joseph 
Marketing should begin and end with your customer, and the same could be said for developing your brand’s positioning statement. How you position your brand should begin and end with your customer.

That’s why the classic positioning statement we are de-constructing in this series of articles starts with a “To,” which is meant to describe your target customer, demographically.

Age, sex, geographic location, household income, education, number of children — these are all examples of demographic features of your target customers. These are the facts that you could use to describe them.

You need to decide what demographics best represent your target customers before you can continue to develop your positioning statement. You have to know who they are before you can position your brand for them.

For example, you may decide that you want to target women 18 to 54 years old. That would be a good start. But the more specific you can get about your target market, the more meaningful you will be able to make your positioning statement.

What part of that age range is the most likely to be a good customer? Are these women married, do they have children and what is their household income? Do they live in city centers or the suburbs? What’s their level of education?

The more layers to the demographic information you can add, the richer your positioning statement. The more specifically you can describe your customer, the more specific you can make your positioning for them, and ultimately the more specific you can craft a brand experience.

Psychographics will also help to add more dimension, and we will get to that, but for now we will focus on building the best demographic profile of your customer to best understand who they are and where they are living their lives.

I recently witnessed one small-business owner who really seemed to understand her brand’s target customer, demographically. She owns a small chain of hair salons, and gets very specific about the neighborhood where she operates. She targets “local, high-income, working women with curly hair.”

Now is this enough for her to build a brand experience? Not yet. We have to blow out the entire formula. But hopefully you can see that really understanding the demographics of your customers can start to shape how you communicate with them.

In this case, you’ll appeal to them on a neighbor-to-neighbor level, with incentives that work within their busy schedules and that show how investing in the management of their curly hair would make a big difference in their lives.

Off to a great start, I would say!

Jim Joseph is worldwide president for New York-based communications agency Cohn & Wolfe, part of the media company WPP Group PLC. He is the award-winning author of The Experience Effect series and teaches marketing at New…

This article originally appeared at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236628.

Daimler’s ‚¬100 Million Ethereum Bond Is Bigger Than Mercedes-Benz

I’ve been reading up on Schuldschein and how it’s helped streamline financing in corporations. 

Leads me to think about how blockchain with extend this. Not just easier for big companies, also could adapt to allow many more investors and smaller players than the regulations have allowed in the past

Imagining a future where instead of buying a car, we invest in a transportation company and cooperate. Whether that’s ride sharing in auto driven cars, voting on features or rent/lease for personal use. 

We adapted from buying a car outright to installment loans and lease instruments. The future may bring more fractional ownership in cars, or the companies that make them. 

And this applies to more than just transportation.

When the manufacturing company behind Mercedes-Benz issued its first blockchain bond last month, it did something that impacts much more than just a single automobile brand.

As revealed to CoinDesk, the ‚¬100m bond, issued on a private version of the ethereum blockchain signals the first step in a much larger plan by Daimler AG to explore the technology. But it’s the type of bond -called a Schuldschein -that gives the project a truly global scale.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, this German version of a private placement has seen an explosion of use around the world, now totaling more than ‚¬20bn annually.

But while Daimler itself says large-scale use of an ethereum-based Schuldschein isn’t likely anytime in the near future, its success is already encouraging the German firm to test even more use cases.

According to Daimler AG’s senior manager of treasury process management, Eva-Marie Scholz, multiple business departments in the firm are now exploring use cases as a result.

Scholz told CoinDesk:

“It was definitely not disappointing. [Reflecting on] the process, we are able to review the potential of blockchain to make real business model changes for overall capital markets and banking transactions.“

More specifically, the Schuldschein is a way for corporations to borrow money from a small group of private investors with only minimal disclosure and regulatory requirements, typically for between 3€“10 years and in amounts as high as ‚¬500m.

For Daimler’s first blockchain-based bond, which was designed to simplify the lending process, the automaker partnered with Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) to sell a relatively short-term one-year bond to savings banks Esslingen-Nürtingen, Ludwigsburg and Ostalb.

But for a firm that generated ‚¬153bn in revenue last year, the bond signals just a drop in the bucket of the total number of Schuldscheins sold in a typical year.

“Daimler issues around 50 to 70 bonds annually,” said Orhan Oezcelik from Daimler’s capital markets division. “While we don’t expect blockchain to impact the total volume of issuances, the technology could allow a greater number of transactions which would then be smaller in size.“

Cryptocurrency Hit Record Low Values Over the Weekend

Over the weekend, cryptocurrencies suffered one of the most severe decreases in value in history when their market cap fell from a record high of $116 billion in June to $60 billion on Sunday July 17. Early this week, the market has started to rise again, but the plummet will not soon be forgotten: throughout the day on Sunday, Bitcoin dropped from over $2,000 to as low as $1,758.20, and Ether fell 20 percent to $130.26.

As of Tuesday morning, it seems the downward trend has ended, with all major cryptocurrencies reporting rising rates again: Bitcoin is back over $2,000 once more, with Coin Market Cap reporting the currency is now trading at $2,307 (9:00 EST), while Ether has risen from a low over the weekend to a current value of $196.58. The total market cap has regained losses of around $10 billion, according to Coindesk.

Despite the improvement, however, cryptocurrencies  are a long way off the meteoric successes they enjoyed in June, where they saw a market cap as high as $116 billion. Since then, Bitcoin has lost around 30 percent of its value, with its highpoint being $3,000 in contrast to today’s figure of roughly $2,000. Ethereum has suffered even more severely, dropping from $395 to $164. Despite these falls, 2017 remains a record breaking year for cryptocurrency overall.

There have been three main reasons for the 48 hour cryptocurrency flop.

First,the bitcoin”civil war’ that seems imminent as of August 1st when the Bitcoin improvement proposal 148 is set to activate. For one, the proposal concerns the possibility of increasing the cryptocurrency’s block size, (a decision which has divided miners and investors). At any rate, and regardless of the eventual decision, the uncertainty right now has caused many investors to liquidate their virtual assets.

Second, a flurry of startups have chosen to get out of the game after profitable rounds of investment derived from initial coin offerings (ICOs). Two particularly striking examples are EOS: after raising $200 million worth of Ether earlier this month, they have been offloading it to Bitfinex and TenX, which raised 200,000 ETH ($67 million at the time) in its token sale-30 percent of which has already been sold. This contributes to uncertainty and danger in the marketplace, which can precipitate decreasing value.

Third, the presence of amateur sellers that the bitcoin market attracts through its fundamental lack of regulation and policing can have a multiplier effect on every market movement, namely through frantic, if not occasionally panicked, buying and selling practices.

While the ultimate success of cryptocurrencies remains speculative, one thing we know for sure after observing their activity over the last few days is that financial currencies remain volatile and prone to unpredictability.

This article originally appeared at: https://futurism.com/cryptocurrency-hit-record-low-values-over-the-weekend/.

This 3D-Printed Human Heart Can Do Everything a Real One Can

Soft robotics and 3D printing have allowed a team of researchers from Switzerland to develop an artificial heart that works like the real thing. This proof of concept design was successfully tested in the lab, but it may take a while before it will be ready.

Scientists have been developing artificial hearts for quite some time now. However, many of the current designs are unfortunately clunky, which presents difficulties in successfully integrating them into human tissue. To approach this issue, a team of researchers from ETH Zürich decided to take a cue from the biological human heart.

Instead of using separate parts, the Swiss team, led by Nicholas Cohrs, 3D-printed an artificial heart using a soft, flexible material. The material was molded into a single part (or a “monoblock”) which allowed the team to design a complex inner structure complete with pumping mechanisms able to be triggered by silicon ventricles. This method imitates a realistic human heartbeat.

“[O]ur goal is to develop an artificial heart that is roughly the same size as the patient’s own one and which imitates the human heart as closely as possible in form and function,” Cohrs said in a press release. The team successfully tested this artificial heart, pumping blood-like fluid at human body-like pressures. The team published their research in the journal Artificial Organs.

However, this design is still a proof of concept, which means it’s yet to be ready for actual implantation. The materials used are, as of right now, unable to last more than half an hour or some few thousand heartbeats, though that could vary a bit depending on a person’s heart rate. It’s a limitation the team will continue to work on, as new materials and design improvements advance. Once perfected, this design could potentially improve the lives and health of around 26 million people worldwide who suffer from various heart conditions.

Zug to Use Blockchain for Citizen ID

Zug is being called Switzerland’s crypto-valley and rightly so: the city in the autumn will present a digital passport for its citizens based on the blockchain software.

Starting in September, the city of Zug will provide a digital identity to its citizens -the first community in the world to do so. The electronic identity will be based on an application which secures personal information with the help of the blockchain technology and linked to a crypto-address, Zug said in a statement.

Citizens will register their identity via the application, which is then being verified by the city administration.

Fintech Cluster of Zug

«We want a single electronic identity -a form of digital passport -for all sorts of purposes. And we want this digital identity not centralized with the city, but on blockchain. We only verify and confirm the identity of the person,» said Dolfi Mueller, Zug’s mayor.

Ethereum, the Zug-based startup, is the driving force behind the development of the digital identity. The Institute of Financial Services in Zug (IFZ) and the two companies Consensys-Uport and Ti&m are also part of the initiative.

Swiss Voting in for a Revolution?

The region of Zug has a high density of startup firms specializing in the development of blockchain. Ethereum and Xapo are two of those companies.

Zug will gather more experience with blockchain in the third quarter in a bid to hold a non-binding e-referendum in spring of 2018. The software has come to be seen as a potential technology to revolutionize the Swiss voting system, which today still relies on ballot papers and hand counted results.

DC security robot quits job by drowning itself in a fountain

I’m sorry to inform you that perhaps some robots are taking this whole “be more human” thing a bit too far. I’ve seen people make jokes about jumping into a river or out of a window when they feel distressed, but one DC-based security robot appears to have interpreted this on a literal level.

Our D.C. office building got a security robot. It drowned itself.

We were promised flying cars, instead we got suicidal robots. pic.twitter.com/rGLTAWZMjn

We don’t yet know the full story of what happened, but it appears the robot-a Knightscope K5-ran itself right into a water fountain inside an office complex. No word on whether it survived its injury or why the incident occurred. Did it hate its job? Did it just overhear some horrifying news? Did it realize that the future is not, in fact, now?

The K5 is evidently prone to making headlines about things falling over. Earlier this year, a drunk man was arrested for knocking the K5 over, though the robot wasn’t always at the victim end of the spectrum after tripping up a toddler and coldly driving away last summer. The K5 was created to be used as a security patrol robot, standing at five feet tall and weighing 300 pounds. Its rocket-like shape and armless design make it difficult for it to get back up after toppling over, but today’s fall straight into a fountain seems truly like an act of free will. I wouldn’t want your job either, K5. Live your truth.