The Majority
The Devlins launch The Majority, a website that aims to unite the silent majority who are dismayed and frustrated about the rise of Nationalism in Scotland, and give them the tools to fight back.
NewsBlocks launches Blockchain-based trusted news platform
The Social News Company Ltd. launches NewsBlocks, a blockchain platform for building next-generation news applications, such as trusted news feeds, fact-checking systems and fake news detectors. NewsBlocks starts from the insight that the traditional news article — a form of news designed to be printed on paper and thrown away each day — is not well suited to the digital age of mobile, instant data. The project’s primary goal is to convert all the world’s news articles into data, and store it permanently on a tamper-proof, censorship-resistant blockchain, where it can be searched, sorted, filtered and organised by anyone in new ways to create trusted news applications. Because each piece of data also has a price, NewsBlocks also creates the first global marketplace for news data.
Mark Devlin, CEO:
Once news is data, it can — for the first time — be verified, stored and priced so that anyone can use it to create the next-generation of news products and services.
Launch Crisscross Social Network
Crisscross Social Network is launched. The site uses a sophisticated drill-down search to connect people with the multiple, diverse interests.
The system grows to over 30,000 users, mainly in Japan.
It was not until 2012 that sites like Facebook offered similar “graph search” functions. In 2012 the site was being prepared for relaunch in the U.S. as CRXSS, a social search engine.
Start Crisscross Internet
From 1994 Tokyo Classified readers are able to place ads using an online BBS system. As the Internet grows in popularity Mark & Mary start Crisscross Internet, one of the first Internet Providers in Japan. Crisscross’s “Instant Internet” allows anyone to access the Internet by calling a premium-rate telephone number from their modem for an per-minute fee of ¥20 (approx $0.2). The business grows rapidly and gains over 5000 customers.