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Mark & Mary Devlin

Mark & Mary Devlin42 posts

Mark and Mary Devlin are media entrepreneurs. After studying engineering in Scotland, they moved to Japan in 1989. In 1993 they started handing out a four-page classified ads sheet on Tokyo streets. Over 14 years that sheet grew into Metropolis, Japan’s No 1 English Magazine. In 2000 they founded japantoday.com, the No. 1 news and discussion site about Japan in English. In 2007 Mark & Mary sold their businesses and moved to the United States where they opened Kroaky’s, a private karaoke room business. In 2014 they launched Newslines, an innovative news timeline site, which was followed by NewsBlocks, a blockchain-based marketplace for news data. In June 2020 they launched The Majority to fight back against Nationalism in Scotland. They have two children and live in Glasgow.

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10 Jun, 2020

The Majority

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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.

4 Oct, 2018

NewsBlocks launches Blockchain-based trusted news platform

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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.

May 2006

Launch Crisscross Social Network

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Crisscross Screen captureCrisscross 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.

24 Feb, 1995

Start Crisscross Internet

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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.