This Week in Tech: Demand and the Pandemic Edition

There’s no end to the pandemic in sight.

It’ll disappear for a few months and people will complain about those kids flocking to the beaches for the summer months. Come October we’ll have the usual questions about lockdowns and whether this year’s strain is going to be as bad as the one before it. It’s become something of a routine and while we’re all sick of it, most of us will comply.

What it means for tech is demand for certain items will increase.

One of these is telemedicine, another blockchain (and especially the metaverse), because what else are we going to do on nights where we can’t go out except play video games and maybe get high? Soon you’ll be able to do both in the metaverse.

Victory Square’s Offers White Label Telemedicine Option

Victory Square Technologies (VST.C) touts itself as a company builds, acquires and invests in promising startups, and gives its leadership the resources and tools needed to get it on the map. They boast a portfolio of 25 global companies using artificial intelligence, VR/AR, and blockchain in sectors like fintech, insurance, health and gaming.

In this particular instance, we’re talking about health and more specifically the VS Digital Health (VSDH) platform.

VSDH is a white-label digital health platform that’s suitable for any level of facility, be it an individual practitioner out of a one-man office to a small boutiques to larger scaled businesses. They use a business to business subscription model with a fixed annual rate and revenue sharing. VSDH helps connect patients with healthcare providers in a fashion that’s both secure and completely customizable. Useful during a pandemic, for sure.

The total number of active licenses for nurses in the United States was approximately 5 million, according to the 2020 National Nursing Workforce Survey. Each nurse could theoretically find an excellent partner in a system like VSDH’s white label tech, turning their hard fought skillset into a side hustle using the platform.

Basically VS Digital Health is like Shopify for digital health. You don’t go into the doctor’s office. There’s no long wait in a room trying to avoid being breathed on by other sick people. There’s none of that. You get your appointment and the doctor appears on the screen. You can show him your booboo, or whatever it is you’re there for, and get advice right there over the screen.

Sweet deal in a pandemic.

Finding Efficiencies in Patient Flow

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Vitalhub (VHI.V) confirmed their subsidiary Intouch’s with Health’s licensing deal for a suite of patient flow solutions with West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust.

Patient flow is exactly what it sounds like. It‘s the movement of patients through a healthcare facility and it’s not something you want to allocate one or two people and a clipboard to do. It’s one of those things computers were built for, and getting in on the ground floor with a program that facilitates that produces efficiencies. And pandemic revenue.

“This sale marks our fourth Intouch with Health transaction announced during the quarter, further ratifying the strong demand for patient journey solutions within the NHS and providing demonstration of the leadership role Vitalhub plays in this market,” said Dan Matlow, chief executive officer of Vitalhub. “We look forward to working with West Suffolk to deliver a best-in-class patient flow management solution in their existing facilities and toward assisting the trust in planning and designing systems to support optimally efficient patient flows in their new hospital.”

Specifically, The West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust requested an enterprise licence, which gives them access to the entire suite of Intouch’s flow management modules. When properly employed it will deliver improved patient experience in addition to greater efficiency, and these benefits will happen in the fields of patient flow and room utilization.

CloudMD takes aim at big name government contracts

CloudMD Software and Services (DOC.C) recently opened a new public sector division.

The division combines experience winning large scale request for proposals and contracts from public sector organizations across North America. There’s a sizeable increase in demand here as well. The public sector has been throwing money at finding a solution for reducing wait lists, improving mental health and wellness, and addressing anxiety, depression, PTSD and substance use issues. All of which have been worsened by the pandemic.

“As a lifelong mental health caregiver, I have seen the toll stigma and lack of access to services can take on families. As a long-time public servant, I saw the impact on people, our health care system and our economy. People need supports wherever and whenever they are ready — at home, at work, at school — and I am proud to be working with CloudMD and our public sector patient and employer partners across North America to provide effective, holistic and timely care that improves health equity for patients, students, workers and their families,” said Colin Andersen, head of the public sector division at CloudMD.

CloudMD’s Mental health support solutions service picked up 107 new contracts in January and February, adding another 50,000 new employees under subscription services. CloudMD has added several contracts within the public sector division, including:

  • Subscription iCBT services for a major college employer in the Atlantic region of Canada;
  • Three new employee and family assistance programs (EFAP) contracts for townships and municipalities across Canada;
  • Mental health coaching for the employees of a major Ontario university.

It’s difficult to say definitively whether or not blockchain-based technologies like The Metaverse and NFTs have a positive or adverse affect on mental health. Delving into a private universe where you can socialize with other people while wearing customizable avatars doesn’t sound connected to reality to me, but at least they’re staying safe from whatever the pandemic has coming up next.

So let’s talk about blockchain and the metaverse.

Professional wrestling and the metaverse may be a marriage made in hell

We’ll start off with Imagine AR (IP.C) and their brand new multi-year partnership with the newest professional wrestling organization on the block, Control Your Narrative (CYN). Yeah. Never heard of it.

They’re providing a augmented reality immersive mobile app, and getting the talent roster to record e-greeting holograms. This also includes a revenue sharing partnership for all AR activations and sponsorships.

“Through our television, live events and now partnership with ImagineAR, CYN will offer the most unique and interactive experience a fan can seek. To be on the forefront of the metaverse with a company on the cutting-edge, CYN and ImagineAR will provide true connection between performer and fan. This is the future, and the future is now,” said ec3, CYN founder.

Right. I watched pro-wrestling as a kid and have recently had a chance to watch some pro-wrestling live, and I enjoyed both for completely different reasons. As a kid it was the stories and the pageantry and something I could do with my Dad. As an adult, it’s to watch the guy jump off the twenty foot ladder, do a somersault and land back-first on his opponent. Because damn, son.

That doesn’t mean I want to hang out with these folks in the metaverse or get some personalized greeting.

That just sounds ridiculous.

But hey. Your mileage may vary and the pandemic makes weirdos of us all.

BIGG Digital Assets picks up some Decentraland Real Estate

Bigg Digital Assets (BIGG.C) bought virtual real estate for $2.7 million dollars to build an entertainment destination in the Decentraland metaverse. In what world does that sentence make sense?

It’s not the metaverse itself. It’s not the company getting involved—that makes sense. It’s the fact that they picked up a 185-parcel of virtual real estate and paid $2,775,000 for it.

Technically, it’s not them directly. It’s their subsidiary TerraZero, and it’s going to include experiences like virtual concerts, film screenings, shopping, and cultural and educational experiences. Didn’t Ernest Kline cover all this in RPO and its sequel? (Yes. There’s a sequel to Ready Player One. As you might expect it’s called Ready Player… Two. Surprised? Yeah. Me neither) But at least they’ll be ready for social distancing when round 14 of the pandemic fires up next year.  Good deal there, I think.

TerraZero is also bringing on a tech executive and Decentraland entrepreneur (what? The Metaverse has entrepreneurs now?) Carl Fravel to act in an advisory capacity. He’s bringing his metaverse strategy and execution expertise to TerraZero’s portfolio of products, including the Metaverse Studio. He’s also the guy they bought the “land” from, so that makes sense.

What I want to know is how does one get the job of a Metaverse entrepreneur?

“I see the metaverse in the early stages of a paradigm shift to deep substance — major entertainment, highly functional real estate, Web3 commerce, experiential advertising, education, telemedicine and entirely new use cases. The opportunities within the metaverse of benefit to humanity are endless and I can’t wait to help support and grow TerraZero, a company whose vision, leadership and ethics I have greatly admired. I am thrilled to be a significant shareholder of TerraZero and I am excited to watch the future of the metaverse unfold,” said Fravel.

Admittedly, the prospect of a digital doctor’s office one can go to in a pandemic does strike a curious chord.

Currencyworks gets a little bit country

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This guy, apparently.

Technically, this isn’t about the metaverse. But anything involving NFTs is going to be considered “metaverse adjacent” because most of everything you’ll buy in Decentraland or The Sandbox of Axie Infinity is a non fungible token. So I’m counting it.

Regardless, Currencyworks (CWRK.C) is helping Michael Ray, country singer, mint his first NFT. If you don’t know who he is you’re not alone. I don’t either. He has four number one hits, a few gold-certified albums, and lives in Florida. Because he’s a country singer and apparently that’s where country comes from—Florida. With the gators.

Explains a lot.

Regardless, he’s minting a Michael Ray No.1 Country Music Airplay Commemorative NFT, and limiting it to a 100 tokens, which will drop on Currencyworks platform MusicFX later on this month.

“This is another amazing partnership for MusicFX,” said Cameron Chell, executive chairman of Currencyworks and co-head of MusicFX. “Our concept for a truly community-focused NFT platform within the music industry has resonated with dozens of artists, and we’re now scaling our resources to meet the demand. I’m really excited to see the fans’ reaction to Michael’s first MusicFX NFT.”

Because it seems silly to not at least find one of his songs and embed it if you’re at all curious. Here’s Michael Ray. I didn’t listen to it.  Country’s really not my thing.  But if you’re into it, don’t say I never get you nothin’.

The Chemical Wedding of Weed and Blockchain

Global Cannabis Applications (APP.C) latest software license agreement is worth $1.5 million, and it’s a binding commitment for EMTRI to distribute APP’s Efixii blockchain software to California cultivators.

EMTRI is involved in branding and retail marketing for cannabis cultivators and its distribution network, and located in California’s Medocino, Humboldt and Trinity countries, which are collectively called the Emerald Triangle, or so I’ve been told. Here more than 20,000 cultivators produce over 750 million grams of cannabis each year.

EMTRI also has a blockchain technology that issues Emtri Tokens (EMTs) to cultivators that supply Efixii data. The idea is that the provenance and immutability of the blockchain lends itself to legitimacy of what they’re selling. The premium weed chain can be taken back to earlier blocks where presumably you can derive authenticity. Sure. I can’t say for certain that most buyers particularly care about the specifics of their weed, but I’ll admit to having a reasonably small sample size.

The Efixii solution is APP’s blockchain based provenance machine that follows every plant throughout its lifecycle, with each stage codified and dropped on the blockchain for safekeeping. They’re thinking 10 million grams of cannabis for the first year at USD$0.15 per gram. Not too shabby.

“Efixii combined with our EMT token is a game-changer for cannabis cultivators and distributors in California. For year-1, I believe that 10 million grams under management are the tip of the opportunity iceberg for Emerald Triangle weed. Once other cultivators see the value that Efixii disclosures bring, we believe that our reach will expand and our sales will grow. EMTs will be the next big token in the DeFi space,” said Eric Kennedy, CEO of EMTRI.

And as Kennedy said, you can take the coin to a DEX and potentially swap it out, or maybe find some liquidity mining gig for it. Could be interesting.

So that about wraps up our rising demand and pandemic weekly roundup. If there’s a company you’re interested in having covered in one of these things, feel free to drop a line on our discord chat and we’ll see what we can do.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go wash my hands for the twelfth time and maybe try to forget about the pandemic for five minutes.

—Joseph Morton

The post This Week in Tech: Demand and the Pandemic Edition appeared first on Equity.Guru.

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