Connecting the dots from Newton to SEN
Richard Northcott has a history of seeing something and fixing what’s missing.
In 1993, when he was among the first to get an Apple Newton at MacWorld Expo in Boston, he discovered that one of its best features, the Assist function, wouldn’t work in Japanese until key words were registered. He took matters into his own hands, downloaded the developers’ kit, and wrote a program called “Add to Dict” on the plane on the return from MacWorld Expo.
Within a year, he’d founded Enfour and released UniFEP to convert the Newton OS to Japanese, something that Apple decided not to do. Doing this meant that Richard and Enfour effectively opened the Japan market for the Newton.
Newtons became the must-have tech tool of the mid-90s. It was so successful that in 1996 Enfour opened The Newton Store in Ginza, Tokyo, to sell the hardware, accessories, and software they and others had written.
Leap forward twenty five years. Today everyone carries smartphones and they are indispensable to our lives. The latest challenges on the plate are not as much about technology but about policy and payments.
Richard’s experiences with online content and entertainment media have given him good insight into the trouble creators face in getting credit for and paid for their work.
“Creators need to be rewarded. The Internet is rich with content — from cat GIFs to hotel reviews to long reads — but this bread-and-butter material is created by people who see no economic benefit from their efforts. We, the users and our friends, create almost everything we consume on the InternetWeb but we do not see any of the rewards,” he says.
The connections between the unfairness of advertising model and the tangled mess of copyright contracts are crystal clear to Richard. Middlemen eat up all the money in both systems. But a technology breakthrough — cryptocurrency and smart contracts — combined with fast processing for micropayments, and a broad acceptance of digital money worldwide, make the time right for tackling the problem.
SEN is the solution. It will be a cryptocurrency backed payment system for creators of all sorts. Everyday Internet users, independent artists, mega-artists, and rights-holders can all benefit from registering with SEN’s copyright clearinghouse. Platforms and developers will have various ways of letting people use the coin to pay for content instead of feeding unwanted ads.
SEN’s a little more complicated to implement than writing that first Newton app on the plane, but we are underway and Richard is leading the charge.
