Business Critical: Bitcoin’s Creator, Olive Garden’s New Logo, Getty Images
By Ryan Parlee
Bitcoin Founder “Unmasked,” Then Re-masked
Who the $!#@ started Bitcoin?
That’s been the question on minds since the crypto-currency rose to prominence earlier last year. The digital coins were masterminded by a reclusive developer known as “Satoshi Nakamoto”, which has always been thought to be a pseudonym.
But, this week, Newsweek published a cover story detailing their search for the actual founder, who they claimed to have found living modestly under the same name in California. Although the story pinned Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto as the man behind Bitcoin, there was never a confirmation of that fact from anyone involved.
This led to many doubts about the legitimacy of the report, followed by an interview that AP conducted with him later in the week, where he outwardly denied being the currency’s creator. At this point, it seems unlikely that Dorian Prentice is the Nakamoto responsible for Bitcoin’s creation, but we can expect further speculation and reporting on the topic.
As with other recent stories on Bitcoin, this serves as a reminder that the decentralized currency model may not quite be ready for prime time, despite many major retailers already buying into it enough to accept the coins.
Read the Newsweek story and the AP follow up.
Olive Garden’s New Logo Draws Ire
The Italian food chain revealed a new logo for their restaurants this week to much criticism from designers and brand experts across the world.
Although the changes to the logo are fairly modest — they traded in one bubbly script font for a slightly different version and replaced their grape-bunch corner piece with an illustrated twig — the consensus seems to be that the overall direction of the new look is simply a misstep.
This is, of course, not the first time that a major brand has revealed a new logo to distaste from critics (see: Gap, et al). But, it does remind us that brand identities are both fragile and an inexact science. When even the biggest brands in the world sometimes get it wrong, it puts that much more importance on the ability to get it right.
Read AdWeek’s coverage of the critiques on the new look.
Getty’s Images get set Free
Photo publishers have been losing the copyright battle online since just about forever. With so many people publishing content and things like Google image search making photo-finding easy for the casual blogger, the people who produce those photos are rarely seeing so much as a head nod from the use of their snaps.
This week, Getty Images, one of the largest photography services in the world, announced a big change in their policy. Rather than trying to police this unruly state of affairs with an iron fist, they are taking a give-and-take approach, allowing any/all publishers to use their photographs — free of watermarks, even — in non-commercial purposes (ads, etc) for the cost of simply providing a proper citation.
Check out the full details on Getty’s photo-embed program on their site.
Top image via NBC News.
