The business proposition happens in a laundromat. Here’s the part of the skit that pretty much sums up the idea behind NFTs:
Suit (Bruce McCulloch): “Yes!” This is how I think we should proceed — next time you come to do your laundry, you give us a call.
Mark (Mark McKinney): Heyyy! Are you trying to buy my dirty underwear?
Suit: [uncomfortable pause] N-no. I’m not trying to buy your underwear. I’m trying to lease your underwear.
Mark: I knew it!
Suit: No no, sir. It’s not what you think.
Mark: There was a guy in here, a couple of weeks ago. He tried to buy my dirty underwear, only he wasn’t slick like you.
Suit: That was my ex-partner, sir. W-we’re not trying to buy or rent your underwear, we’re just trying to lease your underwear. We just want the title of ownership.
Mark: What?
Suit: Yes, you get to retain possession of your underwear. It’s totally a paper transaction.
Mark: Huh. Is there uh money involved with this?
Suit: Of course, sir, there’s money involved. I’m a business man. There’s fifteen dollars [waves a stack of one-dollar bills so it looks like a bundle of money].
Mark: So, you’ll give me fifteen dollars for the title of ownership to my underwear, and I get to keep it?
Suit: Of course you do, sir.
Mark: But how do you make money doing that?
Suit: We’re idea people. We profit from the idea that we own the deed to your underwear.
And that’s NFTs in nutshell, once you strip away the technology veneer and blockchain bafflegab.
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, May 16 through Sunday, May 22, 2022.
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
StartupBus 2022 will depart from Tampa Bay!
If you’re looking for an adventure, a chance to test your startup skills, and an experience that will make your résumé stand out, join me on StartupBus Florida, which departs Tampa Bay on July 27, when it sets course for Austin, Texas!
On this three-day journey, “buspreneurs” will form teams, create a business idea, build a software demo for that idea, and develop pitches for that idea. When they arrive in Austin, they’ll spend two days pitching their startups to a panel of judges.
I was a “buspreneur” on StartupBus Florida in 2019, the last time the event took place, and our team made it to the finals and got the runner-up position. This time, I’m a “conductor” — one of the coaches on the bus — and our team is here to help you rise to the challenge.
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
What: A webinar presented by Tampa Bay Innovation Center on a topic that’s got all the “Web 3.0” people excited: non-fungible tokens, also known as NFTs!
When: Tuesday, May 24, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EDT (UTC-4)
Ken Evans, Managing Director of the Accelerator at Tampa Bay Innovation Center (and a regular sight at just about every Tampa Bay startup event of interest) will moderate.
How much? Free!
Please tell me what all these things are!
NFT
Ooh. This is a big one. I’ll give you the quick-and-dirty definition and then point you to some layperson-friendly longer explainers.
NFT is short for non-fungible token, which is a one-of-a-kind chunk of digital data stored on a blockchain (a digital ledger that uses math tricks to make it very difficult to alter past entries and is duplicated across the internet to make it very difficult to make fake ledgers) that authenticates a given asset as original and genuine. These qualities make it possible to use NFTs as digital certificates of authenticity and ownership that are hard to tamper with.
In the popular imagination, NFTs are digital pictures of apes, punk rockers, cats, and so on, but they’re actually the certificates of authenticity and ownership of those pictures. Digital pictures can be infinitely copied, but there’s always an originating image, and an NFT can tell you which one is the original and who owns it.
In theory, NFTs give digital artists something that only artists who worked with physical media had — a way to prove that a work was original. Anyone can tell the difference between an original painting and a poster print, and an expert can figure out the difference between an original work and a forgery, but for the first time, it’s possible to know if a digital work — an image, an audio file, a video recording, a program, a database — is an original or a copy. It’s believed that NFTs open up new markets and opportunities for people, especially artists.
This is a big topic, and these explainers can cover it in greater detail:
For nearly 20 years, they’ve been promoting and helping grow the entrepreneurial environment in Tampa Bay and Florida by:
Building technology companies
Building the innovation community
Teaming with innovation partners
They’ve been doing this by
Raising awareness for the startup community through educational programming and outreach activities
Advising and mentoring innovators and entrepreneurs
Connecting company founders with public/private funding
Hosting growing companies within a dedicated incubator facility
Artist’s rendering of the ARK Innovation Center
Recently, TBIC has partnered with ARK Investment Management (a.k.a. “ARK Invest”) to build the ARK Innovation Center in St. Pete. This facility is expected to open in July 2023 and will include a 200-person event center, an innovation lab for prototyping, an AR/VR studio, 2 state-of-the-art classrooms, conference rooms, and coworking space.
ARK Invest
ARK Invest is an investment management company with a theme: investing in technological innovations that disrupt the status quo, boost productivity and change the way the world works.
ARK was founded in 2014 by Cathie Wood, who was then chief investment officer of global thematic strategies at AllianceBernstein, left after they deemed when managed exchange-traded funds based on disruptive innovation was deemed her idea for actively managed fund on disruptive tech “too risky.”
I’m a supporter of the Tampa Bay innovation and entrepreneurial scene and a friend of TBIC, but I’m skeptical of the pie-in-the-sky promises of NFT promoters (more on this topic in a later post). Still, I’ve give this webinar a listen — the speakers know waaaay more about finance than I do, and I’m willing to keep an open mind.
One more time: how do I catch this webinar?
Register here, which will get you an invitation to the Zoom conference where the webinar will take place.
General admission ticket: $58.50 ($50 for the ticket, $4.67 processing fee, $3.83 sales tax). Includes admission, and happy hour appetizers and 2 drink tickets.
Student ticket: Free. Includes happy hour appetizers, but no drink tickets.
The agenda
When
What
1:00 p.m.
Opening Remarks by Jill St. Thomas, CEO, Tampa Bay Tech
1:05
Welcome to St. Pete! Welcome and overview
1:15
Blockspaces & Cogent Bank All things blockchain, crypto, NFTs
1:35
Accenture Meet me in the metaverse
2:05
AWS Tech for good
2:25
Hays & Synapse The state of talent
2:45
Break
3:00
Tampa Bay Business Journal / Tampa Bay Inno “The future is female-led” panel
3:30
ARK Invest & Metacity Fireside chat with Cathie Wood, founder/CEO of ARK Invest and Joe Hamilton, Head of Network, Metacity
4:10
CISO Panel: Cisco, Moffitt Cancer Center, Nielsen, and TD Synnex
4:55
Closing remarks and happy hour kickoff by Jill St. Thomas, CEO, Tampa Bay Tech
GeekRow: an expo hall of technologists holding live demos of their technology for attendees to see, learn and dive into!
Why go?
poweredUP will feature some interesting people, including Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of ARK Invest, who moved their office from New York to St. Pete in October 2021. ARK Invest made their name by investing primarily in disruptive technologies: cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, DNA sequencing, CRISPR gene editing, robotics, electric vehicles, energy storage, fintech, 3D printing and blockchain technology.
The session will cover today’s big tech trends: cybersecurity, the metaverse, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, sustainability in tech, tech for good, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion,) leadership, the current state of our tech workforce.
It’s also a great chance to catch up with local techies again, after having to shelter in place during the pandemic! I’ve been to previous poweredUPs, and in every case, I’ve either re-established an old connection or made a new one.
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, May 9 through Sunday, May 15, 2022.
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
StartupBus 2022 will depart from Tampa Bay!
If you’re looking for an adventure, a chance to test your startup skills, and an experience that will make your résumé stand out, join me on StartupBus Florida, which departs Tampa Bay on July 27, when it sets course for Austin, Texas!
On this three-day journey, “buspreneurs” will form teams, create a business idea, build a software demo for that idea, and develop pitches for that idea. When they arrive in Austin, they’ll spend two days pitching their startups to a panel of judges.
I was a “buspreneur” on StartupBus Florida in 2019, the last time the event took place, and our team made it to the finals and got the runner-up position. This time, I’m a “conductor” — one of the coaches on the bus — and our team is here to help you rise to the challenge.
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, May 2 through Sunday, May 8, 2022. That’s right, we’re going into a brand new month this week!
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
StartupBus 2022 will depart from Tampa Bay!
If you’re looking for an adventure, a chance to test your startup skills, and an experience that will make your résumé stand out, join me on StartupBus Florida, which departs Tampa Bay on July 27, when it sets course for Austin, Texas!
On this three-day journey, “buspreneurs” will form teams, create a business idea, build a software demo for that idea, and develop pitches for that idea. When they arrive in Austin, they’ll spend two days pitching their startups to a panel of judges.
I was a “buspreneur” on StartupBus Florida in 2019, the last time the event took place, and our team made it to the finals and got the runner-up position. This time, I’m a “conductor” — one of the coaches on the bus — and our team is here to help you rise to the challenge.
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
