I went to the IOTA meetup in Chicago, which was hosted and presented by the IOTA team.
Never before did I see an entire audience be wowed by a women engineer.
They ignored the whole Microsoft partnership idea; anyone that asked just was given the answer "it'd be explained in a future PR release."
The drama was IOTA lied about microsoft partnership and deemed hosting on azure == partnership with microsoft. In talks with different microsoft teams == sending support tickets on azure for different services.
Whenever she talked, the crowd went "wow!" sort of like the laugh track on a 90's sitcom.
The crowd was 99.9% men. I'm a man too, and I will admit she is attractive. But what she demonstrated was nothing new, about the Tangle network which was discussed in the whitepaper, on youtube, bitcointalk, 4chan /biz/ and reddit.
Seeing IOT devices communicate by sending and receiving packets is nothing new or that exciting.
It was the same as if someone was showing you a bitcoin transaction. Literally, some tech babble, look at the pretty picture (girl in this example) and go wow.
When someone took a picture of her,a public figure of the IOTA team, other men with dates decided to white knight and tell the guy off "Don't take her picture." It almost escalated when one white knight went for his phone. Guy in question was taking pictures of presenters all night long yet no one complained.
I'm not an expert in any of these matters, but just witnessing the crowd reaction was really depressing as it goes to show Cryptocurrency is now mainstream (Good), alot of gender bias still exists (bad) and people do judge intelligence/authority on gender and age (double bad.)
Still the IOTA team is blah for lying about the MSFT partnership and the audience that night in which I was able to witness was double blah.
> We are excited to partner with IOTA foundation and proud to be associated with its new data marketplace initiative. This next generation technology will accelerate the connected, intelligent world and go beyond blockchain that will foster innovation real world solutions, applications and pilots for our customers. --Omkar Naik, Microsoft
IOTA made the announcement on their official blog, so as far as I know it's the source. If you're saying you don't trust the devs, then I guess we're talking about something different than I thought.
Here's the quote from the Microsoft guy involved, that caused the confusion:
> We are excited to partner with IOTA foundation and proud to be associated with its new data marketplace initiative. This next generation technology will accelerate the connected, intelligent world and go beyond blockchain that will foster innovation real world solutions, applications and pilots for our customers. --Omkar Naik
The update from IOTA was included in the linked article from The Next Web.
The IOTA founders' statement is: "We have never stated that there was any formal partnership with Microsoft, and instead always referred to them as a participant to the marketplace."
You can link to a Twitter thread where they threaten to sue someone, but that doesn't mean anything. (If anything, it's another black mark against the IOTA team that they'd use this technique straight out of the Donald Trump playbook -- threaten to sue, then never follow through.)
Never before did I see an entire audience be wowed by a women engineer.
They ignored the whole Microsoft partnership idea; anyone that asked just was given the answer "it'd be explained in a future PR release."
The drama was IOTA lied about microsoft partnership and deemed hosting on azure == partnership with microsoft. In talks with different microsoft teams == sending support tickets on azure for different services.