Amazon, the internet retail giant, has successfully acquired a patent for a streaming data marketplace that will serve subscribers by delivering real-time transaction data of different cryptocurrencies.
This patent revolves around a system where any individual or organization can bring streaming data feeds on the market for sale allowing interested customers to subscribe. The patent has been granted to Amazon Technologies which is a subsidiary of Amazon, the largest global e-commerce and cloud services provider.
The patent filing outlines multiple possibilities for the developers including building real-time dashboards, capturing exceptions and generating alerts, driving recommendations, and making other real-time business or operational decisions. Moreover the filing also mentions website click streams, manufacturing instrumentation, marketing and financial information, social media, operational logs and metering data.
The filing raises the point that data streams individually may not carry much value citing the example of bitcoin and cryptocurrency transaction data. But creating a context by combining these streams with information from other sources means we can make them much more valuable. The patent says:
“For example, a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address. The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream.”
The patent filing also brings up marketplace’s potential application and value for law enforcement agencies as it states:
“For example, a law enforcement agency may be a customer and may desire to receive global bitcoin transactions, correlated by country, with ISP data to determine source IP addresses and shipping addresses that correlate to bitcoin addresses. The agency may not want additional available enhancements such as local bank data records. The streaming data marketplace may price this desired data out per GB (gigabyte), for example, and the agency can start running analytics on the desired data using the analysis module.”
It is interesting to note that this isn’t the first time the idea has been explored. During last week, application for a patent on a Blockchain based storage system filed by Bank of America got published. Winklevoss brothers also won a patent for a protocol which improves digital transaction security in a cloud computing system.
In coming days, we will see how Amazon goes about it and if the e-commerce giant is interested in pursuing the idea to its execution.
