China’s Digital Yuan Could be the Future of Money. China is making promising progress with testing its digital yuan currency.
It has announced the success of a pilot in Suzhou City, near Shanghai in eastern China, where 181,000 consumers were given ¥55 (£6) of free money in digital wallets to spend at participating outlets in the Double Fifth shopping festival between May 1 and 5. This was part of a bigger test by the People’s Bank of China targeting 500,000 consumers in 11 Chinese regions since April. For those eligible, there is a straightforward app to download which gives them a wallet. Corporate America's Blockchain & Bitcoin Fever is Over. Maersk/IBM Launch Blockchain-Based Platform for Global Trade. First Blockchain-Based Election run in Sierra Leone. Spotify Goes Blockchain to Improve Royalty Payment Tracking. Spotify, the largest European streaming music platform, has announced its decision to acquire Blockchain-related startup Mediachain.
According to Investopedia, the main objective of the acquisition is to improve Spotify’s tracking and processing of royalty payments thanks to the distributed ledger technology. What’s Mediachain? Mediachain was launched in 2016 thanks to seed funding received by Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. The New York-based startup created a peer-to-peer database to register, identify and track the online distribution of creative works. Wendy's to Add Automated Kiosks to 1,000 Restaurants in 2017. In Brief Wendy's is the third largest burger chain in the world after McDonald's and Burger King, and their new self-serve kiosks could be the key to topping the charts.
Scientists have predicted that automation would takeover jobs in many industries, and food service may be one of the first where robots are the most cost-effective and efficient. Experts have predicted that machines will take over a good number of jobs in the next five to ten years, but for a Dublin-based Wendy’s the automation began last year with their self-ordering kiosks. The demand for the technology has been rather high, coming from both costumers and franchise owners.