BitClave, a company aiming to disrupt the traditional ad tech market, has partnered with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). This fall, BitClave is sponsoring a practicum project for graduate students in the College of Engineering’s Information Networking Institute (INI) at CMU Silicon Valley.
“Carnegie Mellon has long had a reputation as a leader in technology, so disruptive tech like blockchain is naturally very appealing,” stated Patrick Tague, BitClave CTO and associate director of the INI. “Combining blockchain with ad tech has a lot of potential, and I think it gets people excited.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”.@bitclave partners with @CarnegieMellon @crowdfundinsider #cryptocurrency” quote=”‘Carnegie Mellon has long had a reputation as a leader in technology, so disruptive tech like blockchain is naturally very appealing,’ stated Patrick Tague, BitClave CTO and associate director of the INI. “]
The practicum pairs teams of students with corporate, research and government sponsors to work on groundbreaking ideas that shape our future in everything from computing and mobile systems to things like ad tech and software development.
“Community is essential for any project to be successful. The CMU tech community has been very welcoming to our team and supportive of our mission. They’re always forward-thinking and I think they see a lot of promise here,” averred BitClave CEO Alex Bessonov.
BitClave will bring its blockchain and cryptocurrency knowledge to work with INI’s mobility and information security students on disruptive advertising technology. While providing the students a rich learning experience, this collaboration will also benefit the BitClave’s platform, i.e., one project will help to improve anonymization and ranking system of BitClave Active Search Ecosystem (BASE). BitClave’s software engineers will work in collaboration with INI students to improve the user’s search experience while still offering a comfortable level of anonymity.
“Bridging the gap between theory and practice, the practicum affords INI students the opportunity to innovate in the wild alongside experts in the field,” shared INI Director Dena Haritos Tsamitis. “A startup like BitClave provides exposure to entrepreneurial, startup culture and frontier technologies like blockchain, while also enabling students to apply classroom knowledge to solve real-world problems.”
BitClave, a startup company using blockchain to eliminate ad service middleman and create a direct connection between businesses and customers, is building a decentralized search engine that helps its users truly find what they are looking for and get compensated every time they click on search results for products and services from their favorite brands, making third-party advertising networks unnecessary and annoying ads a thing of the past.
[clickToTweet tweet=”.@carnegiemellon partners with @bitclave @crowdfundinside” quote=”‘Bridging the gap between theory and practice, the practicum affords INI students the opportunity to innovate in the wild alongside experts in the field,’ shared INI Director Dena Haritos Tsamitis.”]
On the BASE, customers exercise full control over their identity, deciding who has access to their data while earning CATs each time businesses use their data to make them offers. Through this platform, businesses can serve personalized, relevant offers directly to users who have already expressed interest in their products and services, significantly increasing their return on advertising spending.
Partnering with companies like BitClave is one way that the INI’s students in Silicon Valley benefit from hands-on, industry experience at the epicenter of high-tech innovation. The INI’s advanced, specialized curriculum combines rigorous technical topics, practical industry-oriented topics and real-world project experience to empower students to be the movers and shakers of the tech industry, whether launching a start-up, joining an enterprise R&D team or fighting cyber-crime.
And what ever happened to BitClave’s mid-September token sale?
“We have received an incredible amount of whitelisting applications which far exceeds the allocated number of tokens…we decided to move the official token sale to October to meet the demands of the growing community,” commented a BitClave spokeswoman via email.