Brendon Kim, Managing Director and Head of Investments, Samsung NEXT

Future fare: By 2020, orchestration tech, like Blockchain, will be an essential, says Brendon Kim, Managing Director and Head of Investments, Samsung NEXT.

"Blockchain is part of our larger investment thesis," Kim told TechRepublic. "Our thesis is that the world is becoming more distributed and decentralized. Over the last five years, there was centralization of data, memory, storage and computation in the Cloud, and we believe in the future it will be a distributed decentralized world, not only because of use cases like Autonomous Driving, but regulatory trends and societal trends that emphasize empowerment of the consumer, privacy, and security.

Blockchain is a huge enabling technology to lay the groundwork for a more distributed and decentralized world. If you look to 2020, people predict 20 billion devices connected.

All those devices can't communicate with each other without some kind of orchestration technology. Blockchain is going to be fundamental to that, devices can talk to each other, can verify each other, can do transactions with each other. "

Using Blockchain will make things easier, Kim insists, "I'll go back to the IOT example. For example, washing machines should be able to communicate with, perhaps companies like Proctor and Gamble or something similar, where if a detergent is running low in the dishwasher, it can automatically connect with a machine on the P&G side to order more detergent. We get detergent right away. Industrial IOT is another big-use case. There are many different analog meters, different plants, and if you connect all of those analog meters and make them into IOT devices, those devices can communicate with each other across different silos, across different systems, for a better understanding of how a plant is operating and how it might operate in the future.

There's been a lot of buzz around a few different topics here at South by. AI continues to be a big topic, but really this year people are talking about Blockchain a lot more. There's a big buzz around Blockchain, and what it can do. Especially with the recent rise of ICOs, and the tokenization of everything, it's really interesting to see a lot of people taking about ICOs, Blockchain and coins.

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