happy 2016-2030 with blockchain and sustainability MBA

we will try and use space december 2015 to copy all the best news we ever see on blockchain
eg bravo

Chinese Bitcoin News

China’s Internet Giant to Roll Out Blockchain Tech for Payments

Andrew Quentson - July 11, 2016

Ant Financial, the online payments affiliate of Alibaba and the world’s second most valuable private technology company with a valuation of more than $60 billion, announced they are rolling out blockchain technology for payments.

Blockchain tech will be first applied to Alipay’s donation platform to increase transparency and provide a trust mechanism with each payment and spending of donations recorded on the blockchain.

Ant Financial further raised the concept of “patient capital” which was described by Thomas Friedman as having “all the discipline of venture capital — demanding a return, and therefore rigor in how it is deployed — but expecting a return that is more in the 5 to 10 percent range, rather than the 35 percent that venture capitalists look for.” A new model which, combined with a blockchain, may help non-profit organizations increase self-sufficiency and turn donations into a more sustainable endeavor.

Ant Financial and the Microfinance Management arm of China’s Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFPA), China’s largest and most influential non-governmental organization that specializes in poverty alleviation, have reached a strategic co-operation agreement to expand a model that takes targeted measures to help people lift themselves out of poverty with the aid of the internet and now blockchain tech to more than 300 national and provincial counties within three years.

Unlike America’s internet giants of Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, the Chinese equivalent have begun exploring and investing in blockchain technology. Baidu, China’s google, invested in Circle, one of the biggest bitcoin companies. Tencent, owners of Wechat, joined a financial blockchain consortium with 30 other finance and tech firms and Ping An Bank, one of China’s financial conglomerates, joined R3.

China’s banking infrastructure is not as developed as in the west. Some are therefore speculating that blockchain tech and the internet may allow the country to leapfrog the banking system just as cell phones allowed developing nations to leapfrog phone lines.

According to a Citigroup report, fintech companies in China have passed the tipping point, with more customers, some 450 million a month, using Ant Financial’s Alipay and other fintech apps than traditional banks. They also tend to be more innovative in payments as WeChat’s 760 million users send 36 billion “red packets,” a lottery like changetip, but with yuan, with more than eight billion red envelopes sent in just one day on the Chinese new year.

Blockchain technology, therefore, may find readier adoption in the world’s second biggest economy as shown by its dominance in bitcoin trading and mining. Wanxiang, one of China’s richest companies, has strongly backed this new invention, funding Wanxiang Blockchain Labs which is to hold Shanghai’s Secong Global Blockchain Conference in September as well as creating a new VC fund focusing on blockchain investments.

In the west, giant tech companies seem to be more focused on blockchain’s industrial uses with Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and numerous other tech companies launching a number of internet of things (IoT) initiatives to give physical items a basic level of intelligence by connecting them to the internet and blockchain tech, potentially ushering what some now call a fourth industrial revolution.

We may therefore see financial applications of blockchain technology more widely used by the world’s second biggest economy while the west focuses on its advanced technological knowledge to employ blockchains for industrial uses.

Special Thanks for translation go to Yifang LIU, a researcher at China Galaxy Securities and a post-doc at Tsinghua University.

• TAGS
• Alibaba
• Ant Financial
• blockchain
• CFPA

POP goes the world. If you are alive and learning today, you are part of the historic human race that spent 4000 times more money and time on worldwide communications than ever before.  Beginning in 1946 we peoples started doubling these borderless spends every 7 years. By 2030, livelihoods ( and our species futures to be or not to be) will have  linkedin 12 doublings (4096 value multipliers)- an Entrepreneurial Revolution mapped by The Economist as early as 1972 as at least 10 times more impactful-  exponentially up or down- than the industrial revolution. online library of norman macrae-- How do marketsreality fit into consequences of our human race?

.....Ask yourself which markets does your knowhow participate in, or collaboratively search out joyful goodwill around. SO how purposefully do these markets' reality map the most sustainable impacts you and yours (including virtual networks and real communities) celebrate for future generations.? Take fashion garments for  example. We worldwide citizens could be proud that the world's poorest nation in 1972 is now the second greatest exporter. With Women4Empowerment, we could be celebrating how the people who produce these garments have predominantly been mothered by village women who were illiterate and suffering from having none of the infrastructure benefits ( electricity grids, running water, communications) that other places had gained from the industrial revolution. But then we in 2015, we cannot close our eyes to the reality that we still live in a world where 2 years ago over 1000 such brilliant young women were killed by a factory collapse. In other words the fashion markets shames us all starting with those it beautifies the most  (fashion4development.com seeks to put this right at the start of each new UN year including september 2015's which the UN has stated as needing to be the most transformative in its existence if sustainability goals are to be empowered by millennials). As we live with the final 2 doublings of 2030now, will we 7 billion beings united round transforming fashion (and every markets reality) that isnt yet a win-win with optimalising every human livelihood?. If you are alive and open to learning, which marketsreality will you linkin changing next? Take health for example - a market whose purpose The Economist surveyed in 1984 as likely to be a lead indicator of whether we design all the most life critical markets sustainably or not. 2015now: Have all the most expensive health practices and masters of adminstration in the world also learnt from what their networking will need to change from the bottom up if we are never to risk an Ebola crisis again in any hemisphere?. ........

shocks of lateness of million dollar teacher celebrations

references 1 2
for those of us who started Entrepreneurial Revolution debate 40 years ago that learning has to be the main 21st C economy the first shock is that the word of the rich, "social media" and public service left it as late as 2014 to inaugurate the first million dollar teacher awards

the second shock is how little learning media give to this- so what did the winner do that other teachers (or schooling systems) can now be emulating - what can be learnt from the the runners up; can we broaden the prize - either more philantropists and so more prizes; or other prizes more targeted at teacher collaborations- why arent their reality tv apprentice shows led by worlds greatest teachers instead of over-trumpers - what happens to a nation who idolises the wrong sort of wizard apprentice (search right kinds eg MIT sorcerers apprentice  fir menu of my favorite square mile (kendall station boston) walking tour -where yours? chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk)

most of all why not a blockchain on each winner and near winner- so that we who value the greatest #learninggeneration can map all the solutions that could now be open spaced around million dollar teachers

This article was originally published on BBC Online by BBC Education Correspondent, Sean Coughlan. 

This year saw the first Global Teacher Prize award ceremony being beamed around the world.

Nancie Atwell, a teacher from Maine in the United States, received the million-dollar prize and then, in the spirit of public service, announced that she was giving it all to her school. Applauding her on stage was former US president Bill Clinton and, looking down benignly from a video screen, Bill Gates.

Much less conspicuous was the man who had come up with the idea in the first place. Sunny Varkey was the founder and funder of this global project to bring status and recognition – as well as some glitz and glamour – to teaching. But Mr Varkey admits that before launching the project almost everyone told him it was a terrible idea.

They thought it would go against the grain to see an individual teacher getting a prize of a size usually associated with a film star’s payout or a banker’s bonus.

But he ignored them and followed his own instincts.

Teacher status

“Teaching needs to be the most important profession in the world and they’ve got to be given their due respect,” says Mr Varkey.

It irritated him that reality TV stars were more likely to be splashed across magazine covers than people who really made a difference, such as teachers.Sticking to your own instincts in the face of opposition, says Mr Varkey, is one of the characteristics of an entrepreneur.

“This has been the story of my life,” he says.

The Indian-born billionaire, based in Dubai, is one of the most successful education entrepreneurs in the world, operating private and state schools in 14 countries – the greatest number concentrated in the Gulf – but also stretched across the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe and the United States.

Mr Varkey says he wants to expand his GEMS education group, suggesting the Far East, Latin America and Africa as likely target markets.

Migrant school

But having made a fortune from education he now seems more interested in giving it away, through a philanthropic foundation with a mission to promote and improve teaching.

Teaching is in his blood. Both his parents were teachers, Christians from Kerala in south India, who migrated to Dubai in 1959.

“It was a Herculean task,” he said. They travelled to the Gulf by ship and then set up a private tutoring business, before opening a school for the local Indian community.

Sunny, as a youngster, helped by driving the school bus.

“I remember the respect that my parents were given – and back in India, teachers were held in very high esteem.”

But he was “shocked” at how this high status seemed to be disappearing.

“As I got more involved in the education business and setting up more schools, I kept finding that the image and the respect for teachers was in decline.

“You have teachers who have helped to make prime ministers, presidents and scientists and nobody cares for them,” he says.

When he went to the World Economic Forum in Davos he found the same lack of attention among the political elite. “There was no-one highlighting teachers and education.”

Based in Dubai, a city which speaks every language apart from understatement, the Global Teacher Prize was built to be big enough to impress. The award ceremony attracted world leaders and some of the finalists went to the Vatican to meet the Pope.

The message was that teaching didn’t always have to be the poor relation.

“I talk about it all the time, how important the teacher is in all our lives,” he says.

Teacher shortage

But in swathes of the developing world the big problem for schools is that there are no teachers at all. The United Nations has warned that more than four million extra primary and lower secondary teachers will be needed in the next 15 years in sub-Saharan Africa.

Mr Varkey, a Unesco goodwill ambassador, has funded the training of 12,000 teachers in Uganda through his foundation, with plans to expand this to 250,000. For every private pupil they teach, they aim to reach another 100 pupils outside of fee-paying schools.

There is also an innovation unit, experimenting with ways that technology can be used in the classroom, to improve teaching or to help teachers reach more pupils.

“Technology has done so much in other industries and I think education is going to follow suit, it’s only a matter of time. Technology is going to play a part in delivering education and bringing down the cost.”

Global citizenship

Dubai is a global crossroads, and the Varkey schools grew as the Gulf’s oil and gas industries attracted more overseas workers and demand rose among a wealthier local population.

But the wider Middle East region has faced conflict and deep tensions between religions, countries and cultures.

Among Mr Varkey’s next projects is the idea of teaching “global citizenship”, promoting tolerance and mutual understanding.

His own story represents this multiple cultural identity – an Indian Christian running a business in an Islamic Arab country, his international schools as microcosms of different cultures working together.

For better or worse, he says it all comes back to what people are taught.

“All the problems and solutions in the world are in education. Look at the divide between rich and poor, peace and terrorism, the gender inequality, lack of skills, unemployment.

“It all comes back to education.”