Open Source Project & Paper: Blockchain proof of concept

Late last year I wrote a small paper (for my MBA program) and developed an accompanying proof of concept (Javascript/Node/P2P) on the implementation of blockchain in the retail or food distribution network around protecting goods from food fraud.

Source Code: https://github.com/paschmann/blockchain_origin

Abstract

Food fraud is a crime which has the potential to negatively affect the brand image, financial resources and impact multiple parties in the supply chain paradigm of food distribution. The ability to track and trace the origin and touch points of products throughout the network is imperative to limit the impact caused by a food fraud incident or a food safety issue. Blockchain has the potential to disrupt multiple industries by providing a shared and trusted ledger of transactions which no single company controls. One practical application of blockchain is utilizing the platform as a static register – a distributed database for storing reference data. In this paper I will describe a technical implementation of a blockchain in a practical scenario which shares the details and a proof of concept of a food origin scenario. The implementation will share a simplistic JavaScript application of a digital ledger based blockchain allowing manufacturers to register data on the food origin in the static registry and vested parties the ability to augment and view the data for the purpose of traceability and accuracy. read more

Side project: HighlighTV

HighlighTV was developed to address the market of non-main stream sports highlights and videos on the Apple TV platform. I was personally tired of searching for new, exciting and interesting videos by opening blogs, magazines and websites on a daily basis. RSS helped me considerably but there was a lack of connection between my RSS reader (Feedly) and my Apple TV to watch the content when I had the free time.

It seems there is this disconnect between me exploring and finding content, and when I subsequently want to consume it. I visit around 4 – 6 websites daily to catch up on news and events and I often find content which I would like watch or read, but seldomly have the time right then and then to do it. Facebook has “Save for later”, Feedly has “”, Twitter, I store bookmarks of this type of content in Evernote, etc. all these main stream apps are aware of the problem, but as usual, there is no central consolidated way to quickly find something, and dependent on the device I am on, give me the option to consume it. The tagline for HighlighTV is: read more