Spring of 2019 has been an exciting time for Scrypt.Media. In this period, we made major steps in gathering global insights, expanding our network, onboarding new partners and collaborators, and taking on new responsibilities. Here are all the details!

We are very proud to add two additional team members to our growing team that already made a big impact this spring. Welcome to the team!

“Having had the privilege to grow up in nine countries, making me a Global Nomad and Third Culture Kid, I am currently based in London and doing my PhD in marketing. My research is focused on the increasing prevalence of play in marketing, whether through the way companies utilize gamification or how emoticons change the way consumers communicate. Before embarking on my PhD I worked successfully for Cisco in sales. As a boundary spanning role my experience working for Cisco gave me significant insights into how to be successful in sales. I currently aim to bring together my experiences to help start-ups and smaller companies with interesting or innovative concepts that are about more than making a profit with their marketing and sales strategies.”

Cris Torres Fernández is a blockchain consultant and a women’s health entrepreneur. Her focus is on healthcare, data management and identity. Her first blockchain research was focused on exploring blockchain supply chain in the healthcare industry and more specifically on the fertility field. She believes blockchain can enable regulation and guarantee the integrity and liability of gametes and embryos in the global market. Cris has spoken in several forums like the Hyperledger Global Forum in Geneva and consulted for different blockchain projects. In her first article for Scrypt.Media, Cris explores the limitations of GDPR in the context of data privacy and data ownership: Read it here.

Our co-founders Khalid and Maike spent substantial time in both South Africa and Kenya in the beginning of the year. This journey brought valuable connections to local start-ups and ecosystems, as well as participation in events around blockchain and emerging technologies.

In Cape Town, we met many startup founders and researchers working on impact measurement, which is an important topic for us. It was great to share knowledge and insights.

In Nairobi, we found an impressive hub for innovations and development involving Blockchain, machine learning, IoT and other emerging technologies. We were happy to exchange ideas and learnings, learn about the distinctiveness of the African market and understand the challenges innovators are trying to overcome.

More on this will soon be shared in a dedicated update.

Afrobytes is an organization that brings together entrepreneurs, academics, innovators, investors, tech enthusiasts and media to explore business opportunities between the African tech ecosystem and players in the global tech world.

The Nairobi event was hosted in iHub and incorporated great discussions around blockchain applications for Africa, legal and regulatory perspectives, usability and design thinking, investment, diversity, and many more. Our co-founder Maike joined a panel discussion on bringing opportunities to African Markets with blockchain, and we had some major takeaways from the event that Maike shared in her LinkedIn post.

The first Women in Tech Africa event was held in Cape Town on March 18^th to 19^th, 2019 as a part of the Women in Tech World Series. More than 300 participants from the whole continent and beyond came together to discuss technology and diversity. Maike gave a workshop here on Usability, Design Thinking and Blockchain: “Building a product fit for purpose using blockchain design principles”. Here you can read her article on the need for human-centred design in emerging tech.

Our co-founders attended the first Hyperledger meetup of South Africa, joining valuable and insightful discussions around use cases and applicability of various Hyperledger solutions. It was really interesting to meet Supply Chain experts talking about the solutions they are developing on Blockchain right now.

The SDG Global Festival of Action was organized by the UN SDG Action Campaign in Bonn from May 2nd – 4th. It has been an impressive firework of ideas, inspirations, valuable connections, and insights. The festival is also a clear reminder of the urgency related to moving forward with the SDG agenda. We had the pleasure to attend this festival together with our friends at PositiveBlockchain.io and met a lot of inspiring people along the way.

We are very proud the be one of 105 founding members of INATBA, the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications. Initiated by the European Commission, INATBA offers developers and users of DLT a global forum to interact with regulators and policy makers and bring blockchain technology to the next stage.

The big launch event of this association took place on the 3^rd of April in Brussels. While Nethal had participated in the preparatory meetings and thereby established Scrypt.Media as a founding member, Maike and Khalid were present for the launch event that included a ceremony with Mariya Gabriel and a panel including key members of the governmental advisory board of the association. As Maike was elected to be a member of the Board of Directors of the association, she got the chance to introduce herself and her observations of the day during a panel of board members in the afternoon.

Interesting exchanges and more dedicated work efforts in various Working Groups have already begun, and we are excited to advance and collaborate with all other members on topics around governance, regulation, use cases, development standards, social impact, and more.

PositiveBlockchain is an open-source database, media platform and community exploring the potential of blockchain technologies for social and environmental impact. The initiative is supported by many technology and social impact actors. After more than 6 months of collaboration, we are happy to announce our partnership. The partnership will consist of:

• Co-organization of events, workshops, hackatons
• Mentorship for startups in the PB.io database
• Joint research efforts

We are looking very much forward to further collaboration!

Despite being based in Paris, France, Scrypt.Media is distributed and diverse by design. We will do everything to make sure it will keep growing the same way. We are continuously discussing with talented people from all around the world and from diverse backgrounds to join us, and we would love to hear from you if you are interested to explore opportunities.

We are also in discussion with development, training and design companies to establish partnerships by Q2 2019 to widen our scope of services and to create a distributed network of service providers.

And finally, we are exploring the co-organization of workshops and events in Europe together with our partners.

So stay tuned! And don’t hesitate to subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Social Media for more updates!