Hello community members. Please see what we will be covering this week below:

PR agency announcement: Who are they?

Q1 2018: Quick update on Q1 2018

New Hire: Introducing our new front-end engineer

Video: Summary 2017: Alan and Annika will be looking back on the year

Christmas Party: A few images from our team Christmas party on Wednesday night

PR Announcement

We are finally in a position to officially announce the award-winning public relations firm who we will be working with in 2018: Elevator Communications, LLC.

“Frankly, we’re not like other agencies. We focus on absolute results, not hourly-billing, sluggish PR processes typically offered by firms, which have yet to figure how to get out of their own way.”

They came highly recommended and are specialists in the tech space. We are thrilled to welcome them on board the Aventus team and believe they are a great fit for our business. They have worked with big tech companies including Google.

Q1 2018

Following on from our PR announcement; a very quick update on our plans for Q1 2018. We have observed a degree of negativity in our Telegram and Discord communities after the past weeks, mainly due to the delay in the exchange listings process. We have covered the listing procedure in great detail on multiple occasions, however just to say it once more: The individual exchanges decide the exact date and time of the listings. We have signed NDA’s and cannot reveal anything from our side until they have officially announced us across their channels.

Moreover, we have two important events in Q1&Q2 of 2018. Firstly, as we have already publicised, we will be attending, exhibiting and presenting at the Ticketing Business Forum in April 2018. Summary from their website of the event:

“TheTicketingBusiness Forum is a high-level networking and knowledge exchange event designed to address the specific needs of key executives engaged in the development and implementation of entertainment ticketing solutions. Drawing a crowd from 40+ countries, the Forum is Europe’s leading ticketing business meeting. Join us on 17–18 April 2018 for two days of live debate, discussion and demos at the Forum, and an evening of celebration at TheTicketingBusiness Awards — the industry’s first awards recognising leadership, innovation and achievement in the application of ticketing.”

Additionally, we have a very exciting event planned for around March. Regretfully, we cannot disclose any further information until we have finalised the details. There will be considerable PR surrounding this event organised by our PR agency and it will serve as a major milestone for the Aventus Protocol Foundation. More will follow in the New Year.

New Hire! Meet Andy Bryant our new front-end engineer

Andy is the latest team member to join our London office. We are now 11 people strong and have two more front-end engineers hired and started with us shortly. This concludes our first round of hiring and we will post an up-to-date team blog shortly, including images and summaries of all team members. Additionally, the new website will include all Aventus team members.

Can you first introduce yourself please, tell us a bit about you? Maybe a fun fact we wouldn’t expect?

I’m originally from Wales, in the South Wales valleys North of Cardiff. I moved up to London for university (UCL and Imperial). I studied Maths intending to be a mathematician, but while I was in the process of doing that I discovered Java and was led into a career into computing. Now I live in South West London with my wife, who is from Azerbaijan, and two small children.

What is it that you do at Aventus? How did you hear about the company and what made you apply for your role?

At Aventus I’m a Front End Developer. In my team we build the user interfaces that are used to interact with the protocol and service layers of the Aventus system.

I heard about the company via a recruitment agent who I’d worked with in the past. I wasn’t looking for a new role, but with the growing number of applications of blockchain I was interested in finding out more, especially as I liked the principled, innovative and ethical approach to solving the secondary market ticketing problem.

Tell us a bit about your prior work experience — what did you work on, do you think any of the previous projects you worked on would be particularly applicable to what you will be doing at Aventus?

I started out working on the CMSs of the Daily Mirror newspaper (and it’s many brother and sister papers) primarily using Java. After 4 years of Java there I decided to round off my skill set a bit and do some front end browser work. I found a lot of challenges there as the front end technologies grew and changed to meet the demands of building full browser based applications and have spent the last 6 years building user interfaces. That’s encompassed more media work, finance and also e-commerce.

I think the main thing that I bring to Aventus is a good understanding of how to put together maintainable user interfaces, together with a solid computer science and Maths background (which helps to understand some aspects of block chain itself and to produce more complex user interfaces).

When did you first hear about blockchain? What is the most interesting thing about it to you?

The first time I heard of blockchain was about 2–3 years ago. I was working near Old Street Roundabout at the time (Silicon Roundabout as they call it). I walked past a Bitcoin ATM and I started doing some research to find out what it was and that led into articles on blockchain.

The most interesting thing to me is seeing the societal impact that it has on all of the infrastructure that has been put in place to manage trust relationships (banking, accountancy, the legal profession) and the empowerment that could potential be brought to individuals.

What do you hope to achieve at Aventus? What are you particularly excited to work on?

I hope that I can use my experience to give a solid foundation to how we build user interfaces here at Aventus. It’s exciting to be working on user interfaces over totally new technologies and business practices and to have the opportunity to be amongst the first that are solving the problems that arise from that.

How can the community get more involved with what you are doing at Aventus?

My understanding is that from time to time some of our new user interfaces will be published in alpha and beta versions and when that happens it would be useful to give feedback via our social channels. Also, I guess there could be opportunities to get involved in early stage user testing of our products and I guess if that happens updates will be posted in the blog.

Why do you think Aventus is relevant for society, and specifically for ticketing?

The secondary ticketing market is totally broken and it’s affecting consumers and the companies that are putting on events alike (the people that tickets are created for). The founders of Aventus have come up with a totally ethical and economically sustainable way of solving that problem. That also sets a great example for how other companies and individuals can improve society with blockchain-based technology.

What are your hobbies?

I like computer games, Dickens novels, playing the piano. I’m currently learning Russian (from my wife and kids) and I’m a real fan of NFL (though it looks unlikely that my team are going to make the playoffs).

Video: Summary 2017

On Friday we will be releasing our weekly YouTube video. This week Alan and Annika are looking back at 2017, discussing some important phases of the development of Aventus and going in detail on some important topics. Likewise, they will briefly cover Q1 of 2018.

Christmas Party

On Wednesday evening the whole Aventus team got together for a Christmas meal and bowling. It was a great team building event, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. We all participated in a Secret Santa and the fun can be seen in the below images: