Hong Kong newspaper SCMP partners with museums for historic NFTs with Flow blockchain
The South China Morning Post is joining Dapper Labs, the creator of the popular non-fungible token (NFT) series NBA Top Shot, to release a number of NFT trading cards commemorating the history of Hong Kong, with the first drop expected to cover 1997 during the end of British colonial rule in the city.
Founded in Hong Kong in 1903, the Post has been the paper of record for the city with a 118-year-old media archive. The news organisation released its full whitepaper on its NFT project ARTIFACT on Tuesday with details of the NFTs based on Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain.
More specifically, the company is looking to release in the coming months a series of NFT trading cards based on many iconic moments in Hong Kong’s history. The inaugural drop of the 1997 Series will cover many historical moments in 1997, including the July 1 ceremony commemorating Hong Kong’s handover to the Chinese government, the passing of Deng Xiaoping on February 19 that year and the death of Princess Diana in August.
“We are delighted to join the Flow ecosystem and partner with a major global blockchain innovator in Dapper Labs. This partnership is essential for creating world-class NFT experiences of our historical archives,” said the company’s CEO Gary Liu, “Through our ARTIFACT whitepaper, we look forward to inspiring other ‘guardians of history’ to share our vision of making history more discoverable, connected, and collectable.”
Different ARTIFACT trading cards will be assigned to various rarity levels.
Tuesday’s whitepaper also announced the establishment of a Council of Experts to guide the forming of the ARTIFACT standard, including Alibaba Group Holding’s co-founder Joe Tsai, President of Christie’s Asia Pacific Francis Belin, Dapper Labs’ co-founder Mikhael Naayem and Animoca Brands’ chairman Yat Siu. Alibaba is the sole owner of the SCMP, and Tsai is the chairman of the publisher.
The Post first announced its ARTIFACT project in July, joining other media organizations around the world that see NFT as part of the future for the digital publishing industry. In June, CNN launched “Vault by CNN” to tokenise its history of news coverage. In August, Fortune raised 429 ether, valued at about US$1.3 million at the time, in its first-ever NFT sale.
The Post’s inaugural 1997 Series collectible cards will be divided into four rarity levels which correspond to the varying degrees of significance of the events these cards are based on.
The card based on the Post’s front-page coverage of the 1997 handover ceremony will be classified as “Super Rare,” while another commemorating the outbreak of the bird flu will be of the “Rare” grade. Other events such as the arrest of Hong Kong’s jockeys and horse racing trainers will be of the “Common” grade.
(source of news: https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3157065/scmp-and-nba-top-shot-series-creator-launch-their-1997-series-nft-trading?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3157065)
Cathay Pacific’s Rewards Programme Happy with its Blockchain Port
In May last year, the Cathay Pacific Group, via its rewards programme Asia Miles, launched an app utilising smart contracts via blockchain.
The campaign at the core of the new platform was a newly launched Asia Miles dining promotion in Hong Kong. Asia Miles members will have their miles credited to their accounts the following day, an unusual move from the usual months-long process for calculating miles before.
Today, it’s now close to a year since Asia Miles has incorporated blockchain into its operations, and it has been an interesting journey of melding the regular call center-style operations Cathay Pacific had been doing until recently, with the tech-forward blockchain-based operations.
Seemingly to commemorate their now almost 1-year-old dalliance with blockchain, Forbes held an interview with Micheal Yung, the Head of Digital Product and Technology at Asia Miles. According to Forbes, Micheal has helped grow the company and helped it continue its evolution into becoming a digital leader in the loyalty space for 5 years now.
The Asia Miles loyalty programme was launched in 1999, accumulating over 11 million members, and about 700 partners around the world to serve those members.
As a 20-year-old programme that previously primarily operated via newsletters and call centers, making the shift to blockchain requires a partnership team that is able to work with its extensive partner list to ensure that targeted members are channeled to the partners so they can grow their business.
There is also the issue of providing the right offers, products and services to members so that they see Asia Miles as something of value.
As a result, of the blockchain port, the typical several-month wait for bonuses to arrive at the consumers has been shortened to mere hours via smart contracts—as this removed the need for real-life teams to make the calculations, data retrieval, and reconciliations before awarding bonus hours.
Yet, Micheal reports that they still have members who have been around for more than a decade that still prefer the call center.
Then, it is all about finding a better way to sell their offers to the right members: which Asia Miles attempts to do so by tabulating their persona, their lifetime value and their stage in life.
Looking ahead, Micheal is now eyeing self service technologies like chatbots and robotic process automation. For one thing, these technologies improve back-office efficiency and allow them to link legacy systems together.
As such, they continue to be deeply interested in blockchain and smart contract technology, as with their loyalty program, Asia Miles can save time and effort in reconciliation, data integrity and other important areas.
Asia Miles has its contemporaries across the globe. Malaysia’s AirAsia, around the same time, announced that it was mulling a cryptocurrency-based rewards program as well, and Singapore Airlines’ KrisFlyer, was set to launch a new digital wallet app, powered by blockchain.
(the source of news: https://fintechnews.hk/9231/blockchain/cathay-pacific-asia-miles-blockchain-rewards-program-smart-contracts/)