Kodak Announces Its Own Cryptocurrency, Watches Stock Price Skyrocket (theverge.com) 135
Kodak has joined the cryptocurrency craze by launching its own KodakCoin, a cryptocurrency for photographers. As soon as the news was announced, Kodak's stock (KODK) jumped more than 60 percent. The Verge reports: KodakCoins will work as tokens inside the new blockchain-powered KodakOne rights management platform. The platform will supposedly create a digital ledger of rights ownership that photographers can use to register and license new and old work. Both the platform and cryptocurrency are supposed to "empower photographers and agencies to take greater control in image rights management," according to the press release. The digital currency is meant to create a new economy for photographers to receive payment and sell work on a secure platform. But while Kodak's proposed blockchain-powered platform and virtual coin sound good on paper, it's not clear why the photography company needs to use blockchain to achieve its goals, rather than just create another social media platform instead. It appears that Kodak, like the other tea and vape companies that received media attention last month for making the abrupt leap to blockchain, could just be trying to capitalize on the current cryptocurrency mania.
Kodak moment (Score:2)
The modern version of a "Kodak moment" is when you realize your crypto-currency just lost all its value.
Too much is hidden? (Score:2)
This summer, will children be selling their own crypto-currency in front of their houses?
putting the bandwagon before the horse... (Score:2, Funny)
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$6 is better than $3. Photography's changed a lot since Kodak was at their peak and apparently they haven't kept up.
it's not clear why the photography company needs to use blockchain to achieve its goals
Kodak's stock (KODK) jumped more than 60 percent
Sounds like they achieved their goal.
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Maybe you're under the impression that companies care about performance beyond the end of the quarter? Maybe if they did Kodak wouldn't be in the shape they're in now.
Interesting. (Score:5, Funny)
Don't have mod points (Score:2)
Re:Don't have mod points (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Don't have mod points (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Don't have mod points (Score:4, Funny)
Stop, *then* fix, if it's a monochrome blockchain.
Colour blockchains need a bleach process in there, before or with the fix.
Re: Don't have mod points (Score:5, Funny)
Too late, you're over exposed.
Please (Score:1)
Please, I shutter at the thought.
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Thats too black and white a view.
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Funny)
I fear lots of people will get overexposed and end up washed out financially.
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Funny)
I fear lots of people will get overexposed and end up washed out financially.
Definitely. This might look like cryptocoin's golden hour, but the market is oversaturated. Every ordinary company is trying frame their product in cryptocoin terms, instead of just staying focused on their core product. Companies keep pulling this crap, but it's only a matter of time until they push it too far and investors see that this shit doesn't pan out they way they say it will. Once one or two fail, get ready to watch the speed at which they all shutter.
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Informative)
Definitely. This might look like cryptocoin's golden hour, but the market is oversaturated. Every ordinary company is trying frame their product in cryptocoin terms, instead of just staying focused on their core product. Companies keep pulling this crap, but it's only a matter of time until they push it too far and investors see that this shit doesn't pan out they way they say it will. Once one or two fail, get ready to watch the speed at which they all shutter.
Outstanding! In one short paragraph you've packed 11 references to photography: 'golden hour', 'oversaturated', 'frame', 'focused', 'pulling', (two meanings there), 'push', 'pan', (another double entendre), 'speed', and 'shutter'. Bonus points for the references that only someone familiar with film photography and darkroom work would get. Well done!
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I'll see your prediction and add that "Blockchain" will become the "pumpkin-spice" of technology products.
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Even if they're not washed out, their balance may be off and they're going to be mighty red-faced.
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Even if they're not washed out, their balance may be off and they're going to be mighty red-faced.
No, I think they will be very pale when the final picture emerges.
In semi-related news ... (Score:2)
It appears that Kodak, like the other tea and vape companies that received media attention last month for making the abrupt leap to blockchain, could just be trying to capitalize on the current cryptocurrency mania.
Rapper 2 Chainz [wikipedia.org] now regrets the spelling of his stage name - remarking, "Missed it by *that* much."
Re:In semi-related news ... (Score:5, Funny)
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"Rapper" Kodak Black also regrets missing it by THAT much.
How the mighty have fallen (Score:3)
It is kind of sad to see this. Kodak was once synonymous with photography. Then they developed digital photography, patented the technology, and sat on it for fear of disrupting their lucrative film business. Others eventually developed digital photography as the patents expired and Kodak obstinately clung to their film business. In the end, they went down with their ship and all they had left was some patents, which it turned out weren't worth as much as they thought they were.
I really hope that they turn things around, but this sort of thing is sad, like watching a formerly successful businessman rooting around in the garbage looking for aluminum cans to sell for recycling.
Cryptocurrencies look like they might have some promise, but the way everybody is trying to jump into the space just smacks of a gimmick.
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Yeah, they only had $1.5 billion in revenue last year and $16 million profit. Poor guys.
Give it time:
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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God damn it. Another asshat website that shows something different when you don't have a google referrer. Sorry about that. The graph showed:
2005 - $11.4 billion revenue
2006 - $10.6b
2007 - $10.3b
2008 - $9.4b
2009 - $7.6b
2010 - $6.0b
2011 - $5.1b
2012 - $4.1b
2013 - $2.3b
2014 - $2.0b
2015 - $1.7b
2016 - $1.5b
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The graph at that link worked for me, but I'm using TCP/blockchain/cryptocurrency/IP.
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Then they developed digital photography, patented the technology, and sat on it for fear of disrupting their lucrative film business.
They did do Photo CD [wikipedia.org], which was crap and way overpriced.
But it is silly to suggest they would have been successful if they went digital sooner. They would have lost anyway. Whatever format they created would not have been able to compete with JPEG at a price point of $0. What possible reason would I have to pay Kodak to take a photo with my phone?
Re:How the mighty have fallen (Score:4, Informative)
But it is silly to suggest they would have been successful if they went digital sooner. They would have lost anyway. Whatever format they created would not have been able to compete with JPEG at a price point of $0.
That may be true based on where the market is today. However, if you look at where the market was 25 years ago, Kodak decided to leave a vacuum and let others shape the future of photography because they didn't realize that they were looking at the future of photography. Incidentally, JPEG was introduced just about 25 years ago.
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Indeed. One need only look at MP3 and MPEG to see that if you get in early and get your foothold, you're pretty well set even if something free and better comes along.
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One need only look at MP3 and MPEG to see that if you get in early and get your foothold, you're pretty well set even if something free and better comes along.
I am confused. I pay this much to use an MP3: $0, and this much to generate an MP3: $0.
MP3 may not be free as in IP, but it is free as in beer, and that is all the general public cares about.
OGG may be better technically, but it is not cheaper.
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PhotoCD was cool in that it had multiple resolutions available for each photo.
That was about it though... even with my employee discount at a retailer the PCD was too expensive to be worth it. I just put an SD card in the scanner (yes, it supported writing PCD format to SD) and did it that way.
neat machine:
SD, USB, CDR, MMC, and photo scanner all tied to a digital projector that exposed the paper.
so it was Film == input only, Paper == output only, everything else was I/O and you could basically go from any
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I have some of the photo CD's from back then, or probably a bit before then as this was before I remember those machines around. These only have one resolution available, not counting the tiny thumbnails, and it's a bit better than than XGA, about 1100x800ish with each photo slightly different. My guess is they all scan at some standard resolution and then they crop it. It's a bit of a curiosity, but not very impressive compared to the film scanner I have.
Kind of a missed opportunity for them, as they co
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What would people have done with a 10MP image? or 20MP even...which was about the limit of normal film with higher end stuff going several times higher.
Computers in the mid 90s would choke on a 20MP image and you'd fit about one roll of uncompressed imaged on a full CD. Excluding professionals with money to spend ... why bother?
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Yeah sounds like you have first gen ones. Those were crap, because even if you went to a *real* printer the output was noticeably degraded. That said the final gen wasn't all that much better...
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*Sony boy.
U cudda bin a contendah.
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IBM fits this business model, as well.
How about some WatsonCoin?
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I fold and say, well played.
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Then they developed digital photography, patented the technology, and sat on it for fear of disrupting their lucrative film business.
Another way of looking at this is that Kodak was too far ahead of the curve in patenting digital imaging before it was practical for the mass market. When I bought my first Casio digital camera, around 1998 IIRC, it was 320x240 pixels, had terrible low-light capabilities, got massive green streaks if any areas were over-exposed, and I think it was nearly $200 too, even with that toy-like performance. My next camera was a Kodak, and it was a quality 1MP camera that had a flash, optical zoom lens and good u
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Even today, there's not a lot of name recognition in digital photography
Nikon, Sony and GoPro are the only brands that come to my mind today. Both, Sony and Nikon, were on the camera business since the analog times. Kodak just missed the ship, the same way that Polaroid did.
Re: How the mighty have fallen (Score:1)
Canon
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No...if Kodak was smart they'd have gotten involved in managing your digital images as much as providing the hardware to take them. But they weren't an internet era company or even internet focused. Their couple of too-late, too-buggy attempts at camera docks and image management just further sunk them.
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Actually I think this could be a good idea.
A decade from now we'll see which cryptocurrencies were the Amazon / Google ideas, and which were just the petz.com. This sounds like it has some potential, so I would not write it off immediately. The timing definitely looks like it is trying to boost their stock price by riding on the current popularity.
Once you have a public ledger to establish ownership of goods then you need goods that make it work. These are the missing ideas. Bitcoin's big idea is showingn o
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That'll be: All of them.
This blockchain hype is straight up snake oil, and the people selling it either know it , or are too innept to realise it yet. Almost everything these companies are promoting block chains for can be achieved trivially with a boring old PKI exchange , and whatever can't be done is going to turn out to be either "Bitcoins" or "Pointless". No company wants to stick their
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That is not true at all.
Blockcoins solve the problem of updating a public ledger using only a distributed system. This cannot be solved by PKI alone. The specific problem is The Byzantine Generals’ Problem and it is the core coordination problem in a distributed system. [slashdot.org]
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My first digital camera was a Kodak, it was great (for the time). Since then it's been HP and Canon.
Now is the time... (Score:5, Funny)
Now is the time for BLOCKBUSTER to join in. That name is just begging to be converted to something-crypto-something-blockchain-something.
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Someone should call up the Myspace guys... this could be their comeback story!
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Now is the time for BLOCKBUSTER to join in. That name is just begging to be converted to something-crypto-something-blockchain-something.
My new IPO for my company "BLOCKCHAINBUSTER" is about to go public. Get in while you can. It's gonna be 'UUUGE.
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hoo u gonna call
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That's actually not that bad of an idea. You could use blockchain as the backend for a distributed media trading/rental system. It would work essentially like the physical media form of Netflix, but all transactions would be peer to peer. The company just facilitates shipping between them for a small fee.
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Blockbuster used to be a chain store and now they're in a crypt.
You may be on to something.
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I hear Radioshack and Sears have some retail storefront space to throw into the pot.
Escape the CC payment (Score:2)
No CC banking percentage to take away from every payment.
This is getting old fast (Score:2)
That sure is starting to look like the good pump & dump strategy with the ignorant masses who can't understand that these coins won't ever be secure or distributed...
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That sure is starting to look like the good pump & dump strategy with the ignorant masses who can't understand that these coins won't ever be secure or distributed...
There has to be some automated trading being manipulated here.
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I felt this way during the dot com bubble. Guys were raking in huge fortunes with little more than a domain name and a bad powerpoint stack.
At the time a friend and I had a small consultancy developing software for public health agencies. We paid ourselves a good, middle class wage, and it we had the personal satisfaction of putting a real, useful product in the hands of people doing important work -- work that prevented suffering and maybe even saved lives. So I count us well-paid for our efforts, but
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Good Idea (Score:2)
Even if the coins are worthless, enough trading volume will generate some sizeable revenue.
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Because some fraction of worthless has value? Sell at a loss and make it up in volume?
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Because some fraction of worthless has value? Sell at a loss and make it up in volume?
Depends on the fee structure, but most transactions have a minimum fee.
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Whoosh. Fees are in the coin of the realm. So if the coin is worthless, so is the fee.
I think you're missing the point. The financial institutions will earn the real dollar transaction fees anyway, they don't care if the underlying assets are valueless.
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April 1st already? (Score:1)
Not sure about this (Score:2)
Reading through the Kodak announcement, there is a website to eventually sign up for more details as a photographer - but clear directions on when investment will be opened. So how can anyone invest in a service where the use is utterly undefined?
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AppleCoin is almost a cert. Disney Dollars have made a fortune for the old mill and you can get them from the little blockhouse just inside the chains, near the entrance.
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CowboyNeilCoin
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I'm in!
Next Hi-Frequency Trading bubble in the making (Score:5, Insightful)
Because cryptocurrency trading requires significant computational resources to occur quickly, expect the same developers and traders who created hi-frequency trading to invest their time and money in cryptocurrency arbitrage. With the current wildly fluctuating currency prices, it leaves them opportunities similar to those in hi-frequency trading on the NASDAQ and other stock exchanges to engage in precisely the same draining of consumer profit out of cryptocurrency arbitrage that these companies perform in more standard currencies and stocks.
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Kinda interesting how the one advantage "no-one can make more of these than what we have decided there ever will be" doesn't really hold true so much any longer with close to infinity number of sets instead.
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It strikes me as almost madness to not believe that most of the opportunities in cryptocurrency trading are already in arbitrage because of the desperate people trying to make (and not lose) money - and that these opportunities are not being massively exploited by many already!
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Too late, they're already [cmegroup.com] in on the fad.
Wow! Very nice (Score:5, Funny)
Cryptocurrency as ponzi (Score:1)
It's an old scam. And if you're at the front of it doing a so-called "initial coin offering", you can make a lot of money for nearly zero effort. We play hot potato and when the music stops if you still haven't liquidated, you're fucked.
Our stock market's being run by bots. (Score:3)
The answer to our problems (Score:2)
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Better get started on mining your TaxCoin now, returns are due in 4 months!
Why? (Score:2)
Shovel rentals (Score:3)
I saw their brochure. They're renting you a shitty Antminer S3 which you can buy for $1500 flat out for like $3,000+ AND they take half your bitcoin mined.
2 types of news these days (Score:1)
In the world of cryptocurrency.... (Score:1)
It's not Kodak (Score:2)
If you read the PR and website it looks a bit too sleek. I wondered which ad agency had gotten Kodak to buy in (providing its name and perhaps not much else). Apparently Deloitte's blockchain solutions division hired Wenn Digital to build it. Unfortunately since they also use the buzzword "artificial intelligence" without clarifying what it does, one wonders if there is enough useful functionality being delivered and will they have the stamina to build it over the long term. Some photo agencies spend money
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But all you're talking about is the law.
The first burden of proof is copyright ownership. If Kodak really has a good technical implementation of this, this is huge. And if it's de-centralized like most other crypto-currencies then it means people can't hack the ownership of the photos.