Blockchain and NFT Content Creators

In this episode of the “Changing the World… One Blockchain at a Time.” video podcast, George Levy interviews Matt Cimaglia. Matt Cimaglia is the CEO and co-founder of Alteon, an ecosystem that streamlines creative workflows for content creators of all backgrounds.

Matt Cimaglia

We always say that we want to hone in on the individual creator (NFT content creators) because ultimately, they’re the people that are doing the work. They’re the people that are coming up with the creative process. They’re coming up with creative ideas.

Announcer

Changing the world one blockchain at a time with George Levy. Brought to you by Blockchain Institute of Technology.

George Levy

Hi, and welcome to Changing the World One Blockchain at a Time, where we feature the leading minds and personalities in Blockchain, bitcoin and cryptocurrency. I’m George Levy, and today we’re having the opportunity to speak to Matt Cimaglia. Matt Cimaglia is CEO and Co-Founder of Alteon.IO, an ecosystem that streamlines creative workflows for content creators of all backgrounds. An expert in cutting edge and web3 technologies with more than two decades experience running an award-winning creative agency, Matt stakes his reputation on a relentless commitment to every project he takes on. Matt, I’m really excited to be speaking with you today.

Matt Cimaglia

Thank you so much for having me today.

George Levy

Yeah, Matt, one thing that was great, I actually saw you live at BitBasel. We were actually at Art Week in Miami, and you ran a great session presenting some amazing developments that you’re doing. One of the things that I loved about the session was that you are basically opening the entire space of NFTs and content creation to basically the mainstream. A lot of people are afraid sometimes to get into NFTs, but you’re actually taking steps to open up and mainstream the whole space. Can you tell me more about what is Alteon.IO?

Matt Cimaglia

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, Alteon is a platform for creatives. And we always say that we want to hone in on the individual creator because ultimately, they’re the people that are doing the work. They’re the people that are coming up with the creative process. They’re coming up with creative ideas. And largely over my last two decades of experience of running an agency and being a creative myself, I didn’t have access to the tools that a lot of the one percenters had, meaning the bigger studios. We’re talking about the Warner Brothers or the Disney’s of the world. And when you think about it, we’re in a very different age today, as we’ve seen with social media or even what we’re doing right here, right now. Right. We’re not part of a larger studio system, but yet we’re using a technology that’s usable for us or acceptable for us to be able to get in from a cost perspective, but also from an ease of use perspective. So going back to the ethos behind what really drove the inspiration behind Alteon was, again, two decades of experience of knowing that technology could actually help advance the amount of work that I’m creating or help streamline the process.

Matt Cimaglia

Because there’s so much fatigue when you’re creating a production. And I know firsthand that when I get into a zone or when I get into a groove, I just want to create. I just want to focus on the storytelling component of what it is that I’m doing and having to go in and out of six or seven different platforms. Although they’re great and they help streamline some of the process, there’s a lot of fatigue or context switching that happens when you’re going from one platform to the next to the next, the next, to just complete one singular task or one production. So when we built Alteon, we really had that in the sort of mindset of how we were building it so that there was a huge ease of use or a very low learning curve to get into the platform. Accessibility is really critical when you’re building a platform like this. Just because, again, a lot of creatives might not necessarily be super technical people. And then when we also thought about it, again, I mentioned the bottom up approach. Right. We wanted to hone in on the individual creators. So anyone that’s a TikTok influencer, to a small brand or agency or as we’re starting to see now with some of the unfortunate layoffs that have been happening, people are getting creative about their potential job possibilities or they’re going out and creating their own post house or their own editing facility.

Matt Cimaglia

And it’s just them and maybe a friend or a colleague. And now having access to the tools that were once only accessible to the one percenters Alteon really grants them the sort of access to these tools that helps them truly collaborate in a cloud environment.

George Levy

Yeah, one thing that I loved about the whole session was how and you put it out there because basically you’re talking about there’s the ones that know how to use this thing, there’s the ones that have 50,000 different tools, there’s the ones that actually know how to navigate those 50,000 tools.

Matt Cimaglia

Right.

George Levy

And yet you’re actually stepping in and actually providing a solution that basically hits the entire mass market. Which is why I loved your session over at BitBasel. You were actually very defined, and basically you opened up your arms to everybody in the audience. I commend you on that vision.

Matt Cimaglia

Thank you. And I think that it takes somebody that actually has sat in the seat of everyone else to be able to create something. And I’m very fortunate that I had the means, but also I had the drive to be able to go out and say, I know that there’s dysfunction in the space, and I want to do something about that. And I’m really hoping that my peers, creative peers, all look at this from the perspective of everyone always has that idea of, oh, I wish I could do blank. I wish I could improve this process. And there’s very few people that actually go out and do that. And again, I’m crazy enough to be one of those people that said, you know what? Enough is enough in the space. Let’s move forward. With BitBasel, we were really fortunate because we were announcing our partnership with Opera, and the Opera crypto browser now is going to next month, actually have what we’re calling Alteon Launchpad embedded inside of it. And now this is slightly different from what we’ve built over at Alteon, but it builds into the same ethos of building on blockchain and taking advantage of the newer technologies that exist to us today and the newer processes that happen to be available to us.

Matt Cimaglia

And with Alteaon Launchpad, this is a very unique experience because when people traditionally talk about NFTs, at least for the last year or two, it’s always about how much can I sell an NFT for? Or how much did somebody buy an NFT for? So it’s very transactional. My viewpoint has always largely been on leveraging blockchain as a utility. So when you think about NFTs, getting out of that mindset of I’m going to mint an NFT just to go and sell it, I see a future, and it’s very near where I’m going to mint an NFT to show you a picture of me and somebody on vacation. It might be my Christmas pictures that I’m going to post as NFTs, not to go and sell, because I wouldn’t ever intend on anyone actually seeing value in those. But I’m minting it in the sense of I’m not giving that file or that asset away to a social media conglomerate that can then go and do with it whatever they want. And I think that that’s really unique to hone in on, and I think that we’re very optimistic in sort of this trajectory on showing people that there’s a wider use for it.

Matt Cimaglia

One of the examples that I gave the other day is when I was growing up, everyone had a disposable camera, right? And you’d get that disposable camera, and you couldn’t wait to get it developed because you’d go to the drugstore, give it to them, and pay $10, and they develop your film, and you’d get those physical prints afterwards, right? So there was a cost associated with that. And then when digital came out and I was posting pictures online, it was free, right? I could take a picture and I could post it. Well, there’s a cost associated with it somewhere, and it was a hidden cost. And that cost was really giving that right. Or giving that asset away to the social media company, as I said before. So I look at it now as, okay, well, if I go and spend twenty five cents to mint an image, it’s almost going back to that same original cost of me going to the drugstore and having that physical ownership over a photograph.

George Levy

Perfect. So actually that brings up a really big thing, because right now it’s great that you actually bring up the issue of the social media platforms, because that also brings up the issue of Web3 and decentralization, right? So now that you’re bringing NFTs and Web3 when you’re looking at the Alteon ecosystem, you talked some of it about it, but how would that tie into your entire vision that you’re actually rolling out the NFT and Web3 folks?

Matt Cimaglia

Well, I mean, think about Web3 as a whole, right. It’s a progress. It’s moving forward from what we’ve learned from the past, what worked, what didn’t work, how we need to improve. I think that’s the one great thing about the Internet is that it’s always moving forward. And we’ve seen this again, especially in my lifetime. I’ve been very fortunate that growing up as a kid, I had a computer in our house. I remember getting my first modem as a kid and being able to go online and hearing the annoying sound that we’re all accustomed to. I think of it now as this we’ve now gone way past that, and I think there are some areas that kind of caught us by surprise as society. Right. I think that we never intended for social media to be the thing that it is. I remember being in an office with somebody and them saying, what’s this Twitter? Why would I ever care to write a short little message and send it out there? Or even YouTube. I had a really big client when I was running my agency that brought me into their executive boardroom and said, hey, we heard about this thing called YouTube, could you guys produce content for it?

Matt Cimaglia

So again, we’re very much so in moving forward. So when you think about Web3, it’s really all about ownership and it’s all about securitizing data. And I think that when we go into leveraging blockchain for Alteon, one key element is metadata. So we’re working towards a mission right now of securing metadata for assets. Meaning I upload a file, I’m a news organization, and I’m putting in the metadata that it was shot in this location at this time, and it’s featuring these people. Right. Well, when that is locked in metadata, there’s no room for error in the future, nobody can go in and modify that. So it sort of starts to reduce the amount of fake news that we start to have because it’s factual as.

George Levy

NFTs, you actually lock it into the asset as an NFT?

Matt Cimaglia

Well, that would be part of the blockchain, yeah. So it would almost have like a metadata ledger that we’re creating for that. That wouldn’t necessarily be an NFT itself, but yes, we are leveraging on blockchain. Correct. And then when we look at NFTs themselves, again, it’s all about the creators, and it’s all about those creators having ownership and having that provenance of a file that exists in a platform. So again, I really want our biggest thing moving into the company and going about four years ago, almost, when we were thinking about really solidifying what we were building, it was always about the creator. We always wanted to focus on their experience first, their ownership of files. And we’ve been very fortunate that Web3 has advanced this. You have some bad actors out there. I’m not going to name them, but we’ve seen some ups and downs over the last even month. Right. But largely everyone’s a creator. And I think that when we start to think about how to use Web3 and NFTs for a positive reason, that’s really what we’ve been focusing on at Alteon.

George Levy

That’s excellent to hear, Matt. This has been a really valuable session for the audience. That actually a lot of creators in the audience. How can they actually find out more about Alteon? How can they get to use your tools?

Matt Cimaglia

Sure, yeah. It’s super simple. I encourage everyone to go to Alteon.IO and read about it. Right. Educate yourself on the platform on what we can do. We two months ago announced a partnership with Apple for Final Cut Pro. So if you’re an editor, you can actually take your content from Alteon Cloud and access it directly within Final Cut Pro. So that’s a really big key element if you’re especially working with remote collaboration. So somebody’s shooting something in one city and somebody’s editing something in another city. It’s sort of streamlining that process of post production. So Alteon.IO is the best place to go to where you can watch Webinars, you can read blogs, you can see what other people are doing on the platform. And better yet, there’s a free access so you can go sign up for free. All you need to do is put in your name and enter a username and password and then you’re on the system. We’re giving everyone a free access to ten Gigs of space so you can kind of play around with it. We have a holiday promo going on right now, so for $12 you get twelve months of access of standard usage, which includes 250 Gigs of free storage.

Matt Cimaglia

So, again, we’re all about trying to make this easy for users to come onto the platform and really start to play with it. We have a lot of advances coming out over the coming months ahead, and we have a roadmap right now where we’re geared up for NAB. We’re excited about what we’re going to be able to announce in April, but every month between now and then, we have a lot of new elements and little helpful things that are going to really streamline the process for content creators.

George Levy

Excellent, Matt. This has been a really, really I really enjoyed the session. I learned so much. I know that this is actually very valuable to the audience and I appreciate very much the opportunity to speak with you today and wish you much success.

Matt Cimaglia

No, thank you so much for having me today. I really appreciate it.

George Levy

I hope you enjoyed this video and that you learned something in the process. I bring you brand new videos every single week, so make sure to subscribe to this channel. And if you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. I would love to hear from you. Until next time. I’m George Levy. We’re changing the world one blockchain at a time. See you next time.