B-Commerce Company Crowdz Announces Blockchain Platform
Joins With Canada's Creative Destruction Lab to Launch Smart Transaction Networks
MONTRÉAL, Jan. 24, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Silicon Valley-based e-commerce startup Crowdz—The B-Commerce Company™ on Tuesday announced the launch of its new blockchain-based Smart Transaction Networks as part of its participation in the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL)– Montréal accelerator program.
The Creative Destruction Lab is Canada's largest program for seed-stage, science-based businesses with high potential for growth. In five years, this unique initiative has helped more than 100 startups grow, thrive and generate in excess of $1.2 billion in equity value. Crowdz was selected to join the flagship cohort of CDL-Montreal, which is focused on data-science ventures, last November.
"We couldn't be more pleased to be a part of this exciting and innovative program," said Payson Johnston, Crowdz's CEO, said upon making the announcement. "Blockchain is an immensely powerful and promising technology, but it's also a very complex technology whose potential is just now being explored.
"This exploration benefits immensely from visionary organizations like Creative Destruction Lab and its partners, who not only see but understand the enormous potential that blockchain offers to businesses of all types in the years ahead."
Millions of Lost Sales Opportunities
Crowdz's blockchain-based commerce—"B-Commerce"—platform is designed especially for businesses seeking to cost-efficiently increase their sales and boost their revenue—particularly B2B-focused companies that either have limited reach online or else haven't fully entered the digital age.
"Throughout the world, business-to-business commerce remains in its infancy," explained Johnston. "Today, almost 90% of all B2B commerce in the United States still takes place in highly manual fashion, such as via paper catalogs, telephone orders, fax, email, EDI, and sales representatives." In the United States alone, "fully half of all small businesses don't even have a website—an amazing statistic."
The cost of these cumbersome, largely manual ways of doing business are huge, says Johnston. He points to studies showing that companies worldwide are suffering a combined $4 trillion in unnecessary costs and lost sales each year as a result of these inefficiencies.
One of the most important aspects of the Crowdz's blockchain-based solution is that it can eliminate the need for outdated and highly inefficient payment systems like EDI (electronic data interchange)—in effect using the blockchain to "kill off" EDI, a technology that originated in the 1940s, nearly half a century before the commercial Internet was born.
As Johnston points out that, "if Crowdz can help eliminate even a small percentage of these transactional inefficiencies by revolutionizing an antiquated business-commerce system, that represents billions of dollars in value for companies worldwide. We believe that this provides enormous growth opportunities for leading technology innovators like Crowdz."
Building Smart Transaction Networks™
Blockchain has emerged over the past few years as an exciting technology with the capability of transforming such wide-ranging commercial functions as payments, logistics, authenticity assurance, and product provenance. But Crowdz is dedicated to employing blockchain in an even more revolutionary manner: to automate and accelerate online and offline commercial transactions.
Specifically, blockchain's' distributed, immutable ledgers and decentralized operation permit the creation of rich, permanent databases of product attributes, inventory levels, demand elasticities, and so on, which can serve as the basis for real-time, artificial-intelligence-based buyer/seller matching, dynamic price optimization, and enhanced predictive data analytics.
These capabilities are then deployed in advanced B2B commercial marketplaces that are intrinsically more intelligent and more efficient than any online marketplaces created to date. The reason: all data points within each such marketplace are organically interconnected, with one change anywhere instantly propagating everywhere. The result is a fully-automated, fully-self-aware blockchain-based transaction infrastructure: Crowdz's patent-pending Smart Transaction Networks™ (STNs).
The Future of Data Science
Creative Destruction Lab is equally excited about the potential inherent in Crowdz's blockchain-based Smart Transaction Networks, particularly with regard to their implications for data science.
"We view technologies like Crowdz's blockchain-based transaction networks as a key part of the future of data science," said Justin Smith, Senior Venture Manager for CDL-Montréal. "Crowdz's Smart Transaction Networks have the ability to create and capture billions of business-relevant data points in real-time in ways that were never before possible. Thereafter, by using the unprecedented efficiencies of the blockchain, this data can be instantly employed to intelligently automate, accelerate, and optimize transactions throughout the world."
About Crowdz
Silicon Valley, Calif., based Crowdz, is building the world's first blockchain-based B2B ecommerce transaction networks. Applying cutting-edge artificial-intelligence principles as well as emerging digital technologies like smart contracts and attribute-based search to antiquated B2B commerce systems, the Crowdz platform allow manufacturers, brands, and other suppliers to quickly identify and engage the right customers with the right products at exactly the right time—accelerating buyer sourcing and purchasing, opening lucrative new market opportunities, and multiplying sales volume.
Founded in 2014, Crowdz is headed by Payson E. Johnston, former B2B supply-chain senior manager for Cisco, and its executive team boasts more than 90 years of combined experience in B2B sourcing, supply chain, blockchain, e-retail, and ecommerce. Crowdz's technologies are currently covered by seven pending patents, and a beta version of Crowdz's sourcing system is currently being used by 240 seller companies offering 1.3 million products. Crowdz was recently listed as on of the hottest blockchain startups to watch in 2018 by TechStartups blog @ https://techstartups.com/2018/01/01/hottest-blockchain-startups-watch-2018/ & was reviewed by the China Tech Publication 36KR @ https://36kr.com/p/5107623.html.
For more details, please visit: http://www.crowdz.io.
About Creative Destruction Lab
The Creative Destruction Lab is Canada's largest program for seed-stage, science-based businesses with high potential for growth. In five years, this unique initiative has helped more than 100 startups grow, thrive and generate in excess of $1.2 billion in equity value. In addition to CDL-Rotman, the program is now up and running at the Sauder School of Business (UBC), Haskayne School of Business (University of Calgary), Rowe School of Business (Dalhousie), and HEC Montréal.
CDL- Montréal employs the CDL-Rotman method, which is rooted in an objectives-based mentoring approach led by accomplished entrepreneurs and world-class angel investors, including Michael Cegelski (Director, Passwordbox Inc.) and Daniel Robichaud (serial entrepreneur and angel investor).
The purpose of this specialized program is to develop tech startups and create value, working closely and openly with the existing entrepreneurial ecosystem. CDL-Montreal concentrates on the data-science sector. Selected applicants benefit from the world-renowned, cutting-edge research developed at Montreal's Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO) with regard to data science, operational research, and artificial intelligence.
The implementation of CDL- Montréal is under the leadership of Executive Education HEC Montréal. The first cohort, focusing on data-science ventures, became operational in December 2017.
For more details, please visit: http://www.hec.ca/en/executive-education/creative-destruction-lab/index.html.
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