Plugged in 3verywhere: NBA Top Shot Goes Mobile as Adam Silver Brings AR to All-Star Weekend
Issue #13
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Adam Silver Brings Virtual Experience to this years Tech Summit
Puma launches PFP project with 10KTF
Puma, the renowned sports brand, is making significant strides in the world of web3 to celebrate its 75th anniversary. The company recently announced the release of Super PUMA PFP NFTs, which complement its Nitro Collection web3 project. These NFTs, which feature the brand's famous cartoon mascot, Super PUMA, can be used as profile pictures on social media, much like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club.
According to the chief brand officer, Adam Petrick, Puma's new PFP project was born out of feedback from the brand's existing web3 community. The goal is to build a community, and the Super PUMA PFP allows the company to engage with its audience in narrative-driven ways that are popular in the space. Part of the storyline involves following Super PUMA, who travels back in time to be part of Puma's greatest historical sports moments. Petrick sees the emerging web3 medium as an extension of Puma's existing marketing and storytelling efforts.
Web3 is a particularly suitable medium for Puma due to the strong correlation between sports, fashion, and web3 culture. It's a space where consumers and brands can take risks, test out digital designs they never thought possible, and rely on technology to bring digital and physical together.
The PUMA PFPs will drop towards the end of this month, with 10,000 available in partnership with 10KTF. 4,000 will be airdropped to current Nitro Collection NFT holders, 4,000 will be sold publicly, and the remaining 2,000 will be reserved for the 10KTF partnership. Going forward, the Super PUMA character will also appear in physical form on IRL product.
Puma's new initiative follows its activity during September's New York Fashion Week, where the brand staged an immersive fashion show with live performances and unveiled Black Station, an interactive metaverse space featuring NFTs that could be redeemed for physical sneakers. Petrick notes that web3 is a great space for Puma to test out some of its most innovative designs and products. "Collectibles, whether physical sneakers or digital NFTs, are representations of culture, and we are excited to be an active participant in the evolution of that culture," he says.
In conclusion, Puma is ramping up its web3 roadmap for its 75th anniversary year by introducing Super PUMA PFP NFTs, which are web3 enabled interpretations of the brand's famous cartoon mascot. The company views the emerging web3 medium as an extension of its existing marketing and storytelling efforts, and it plans to continue testing out its most innovative designs and products in the space. With the PFPs dropping towards the end of this month, it will be exciting to see how Puma's web3 community responds to the new initiative.
Kyrie Irving's 'No Concern' Becomes a Collectible: The NBA Star Ventures into NFTs
Baron Davis Aims to Revolutionize Photography with Blockchain, Taking a Unique Approach Beyond NFTs
Imagine yourself attending the Super Bowl, a sold-out concert, or a high-octane NBA game. History is unfolding right before your eyes, but are you even watching? Chances are you're not; most likely, you're taking a photo on your phone. Photography and videography have never been more central to sports, music, and entertainment. Still, they've also never been less respected as mediums, according to two-time NBA All-Star Baron Davis.
"There was a time in America, during our renaissance, when photographers were just as famous as celebrities, when they were treated as artists," Davis told Decrypt in an interview. "I think they're more treated as a commodity today." However, Davis wants to change that and thinks he can do it using blockchain.
On NBA All-Star Weekend in Salt Lake City, Davis announced the creation of SLiC Images, a rights management platform for photography and video backed by NFT technology. SLiC Images is a subsidiary of Sports Lifestyle in Culture, a platform created by Davis to facilitate the distribution and monetization of independent cultural content.
Davis believes that despite their centrality to capturing culture, photographers are currently getting a raw deal from the corporations benefiting from their labor. A few professional photographers sell photos of sports games and live events through pre-existing deals with image libraries and media outlets, often forfeiting rights to future profits generated by those works in the process. Independent photographers, meanwhile, often have few opportunities to profit from their works while maintaining ownership.
The SLiC Images platform will allow creators to tag their works with unique digital signatures and license them for commercial use for clearly delineated timeframes via a transparent bidding process. Davis believes that "now photographers as a collective can have ownership in the channels, relationships, and partnerships that are created from their work. They get to benefit from it."
The project is being built with a $250,000 grant (a third of which has been disbursed so far) from NFT platform Mintbase, which operates on the NEAR blockchain. SLiC Images was chosen as one of 16 projects funded through the Mintbase Grant program, which aims to support technically sophisticated NFT projects that might otherwise go overlooked by more mainstream funding sources.
Smart contracts underlying SLiC-backed photos and videos will also be customizable to allow for split ownership; every party associated with a work will continue to receive royalties generated by it upon every resale.
Despite the centrality of NFTs to SLiC Images’ core function, Davis is hesitant to associate the contentious technology with his burgeoning platform. "For a while, we definitely don't want to call them NFTs," Davis said, with a laugh.
SLiC Images is still in development, with no exact launch date. However, Geier and Davis are hopeful to have a prototype of the platform ready to show at ETH Denver at the end of this month. Davis believes that it might be wiser to sell people a useful product than to focus on that product's technical composition. "I mean, it’s a photo. It's a collectible photo... That is definitely where we want to start, is just by explaining what it is, and the utility behind it, instead of trying to explain the technology," he said. "People tried explaining things from a technology standpoint, and culture hasn't adopted it."
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