Simon Edhouse
Bio
"My background spans Music, Film and Video Production, winning songwriting awards and the Young Composer's Award 'Music to Film' category. In the early 1990's I transitioned again, into the field of Holography, Lasers and Optics, as Managing Director of Australian Holographics for 6 years, (1992-1998) building an international reputation and clientele for the company, selling large format holographic-displays to Expo 93 in South Korea, Holographic-Billboards for the Singapore Military and installations throughout Asia and Europe. Following this, I moved into Advertising as Alliance & Innovation Manager with DDB Digital in Sydney, followed by a stint as Managing Director of OgilvyInteractive in Shanghai, (just before the 'dot com crash' in 2001).
I returned to Australia with my young family, and after a short period as a Business Development Manager for a Graphic Design firm, I returned to University and undertook a Master’s degree in ‘Commercialization of Science and Technology’ at Adelaide University.
My Company Virtusoft Pty. Ltd was formed in 2005 to act as an IP holding Company for projects that grew out of ideas developed during my Masters Degree. These ideas mainly revolved around developing our own digital currency solution called D-Net, (which stood for Device Network). Working with a number of Computer Science graduates, we took an artificial neural network (ANN) approach to try to solve many of the issues that we considered problematic on the internet, being secure communications and digital property rights, (independent of ICANN) and to use D-Net to facilitate a way to ‘monetize the exchange of digital data’ in a dedicated file sharing system, (an 'Independent Digital Music Market' the precursor of Bittunes), which integrated 'accounting peers' as a means of distributed validation of financial transactions, (somewhat similar to the way the Bitcoin system subsequently configured it's Blockchain concept)
However, what was difficult at that time was to conceive of a reliable digital currency that could be used that would allow users to convert their earnings back into dollars, (or whatever fiat currency they desired). This in fact was the hardest problem, but it wasn’t a problem of technical complexity, but rather a problem of integration with other 3rd party systems.
At the time, it was clear that conventional Banks would not be interested in facilitating such a system. We did look for a time at Hong Kong’s Octopus Card which was a non-Bank Government backed transport card system that had become diversified over time and was being used a cash surrogate (in place of cash) throughout HK. However, again we did not think it was realistic that the HK Government would want to partner with an Independent Digital Music Market, so we put the plan for this project on the back burner.
We then turned our attention to developing a number of Chinese language web services, to increase our familiarity with operating inside a Chinese cultural and language paradigm, as we felt that this market was going to be incredibly important. Further, we conceived of, (and began patenting) a new kind of hybrid P2P search and recommendation platform and network that utilizes the processing power of the user’s device, its storage capability and its proximity in relation to the user, as a privacy protective heuristic network, to add precision and relevance to search results for each individual user.
In the middle of finalizing this patent, Bitcoin made its sudden rapid ascendance in April 2013 and we made the decision to re-start the 'Independent Digital Music Market' (Bittunes) project, as clearly something profound had started to happen and things would never be the same again.
Since then we have moved through the important early stages of commercialization, building and testing prototypes, attending the San Jose and Bitcoin conference & hackathon in May 2013, and becoming a sponsor/ exhibitor at the Singapore Bitcoin Conference in November 2013, while (through the year) taking a basic web service and Android M.V.P. through increasing stages of complexity, while working with the Bitcoin protocol to attempt to get the protocol to function in a way that would enable the (apparently) non-obvious distribution of digital micro-payments to end users, rather than using micro payments as a way for end-users to pay for web-services."