Friend Software Corporation and the Golem project to partner

Friend and Golem are pleased to announce a formal partnership to ensure the advance of decentralized computing, peer-to-peer networking, and blockchain technologies as a whole.

The partnership involves a minority equity investment of $750,000 from Golem into Friend and the forging of closer ties between both pioneering tech teams. As a result of this cooperation, Golem will be able to dramatically improve its user experience by integrating with Friend’s operating system FriendUP. On the other side of the partnership, Golem will be helping Friend transition to the decentralized world.

Together, over the coming years, both organisations hope to create an easy to use infrastructure that simplify user access and heavily improve developers’ options for distributing their software and services.

Speaking about the partnership, Arne Peder Blix, CEO of Friend Software Corporation AS, said:

We are delighted that after several years of development, the Friend Unifying Platform, (FriendUP) which is ideally suited to the blockchain and decentralized computing paradigm, can be opened up to a project like Golem to utilise.The ability to form efficient partnerships is going to be a determining factor for success in this rapidly evolving environment. We are thrilled that Golem, who have incredible complementary technology, and a very competent team, have recognised that by working together with Friend we both become even stronger.

Golem’s CEO, Julian Zawistowski said:

Friend has one of the best engineering teams we’ve come across. They are building incredible technology at an incredible speed. I’m very glad we have both recognised that by cooperating, we can advance our technology much faster than by working alone.And it also goes without saying that we are so happy to see another team working on decentralised technologies and building on top of Ethereum.

Describing the partnership as a “perfect collaboration”, Friend COO Hogne Titlestad, added:

When Friend started in 2014, we decided to focus first on the corporate SMB market. However we always envisioned decentralization being part of our roadmap. Now, Golem is advising us in our transition to the blockchain realm and helping to decentralize our technology for the community at large.FriendUP allows developers to produce both modules and services that implement server functionality which will support everything from processing data to executing calculations. In this way, the Golem Network can rapidly expand its offered functionality far beyond the first proof of concept.

The Friend Unifying Platform

Released on Github, Q2 2017, FriendUP v1.0.0 offers a complete operating environment that combined with blockchain and decentralised technologies can bring great value for cryptocurrency communities.

Developed as a device agnostic operating system, FriendUP provides all the infrastructure necessary for safe and responsible exchange of information.

By leveraging web technologies, FriendUP can be accessed and used anywhere through a browser and provides a customisable desktop environment that is shaped by the needs of its users.

Golem

Golem is creating the world’s first open-sourced supercomputer. The project is doing this by building a decentralized marketplace to bring idle processing power into use for the planet’s compute needs.

By substantially lowering the price of computations, Golem will make processes like CGI rendering, DNA sequencing, machine learning and countless other future applications more freely available and less costly to everyone.

The Partnership

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) are just some of the application based points at which FriendUP and Golem meet. Fundamentally, the two companies are natural and complementary partners because of their shared commitment to decentralized processing.

Shared goals include:

• Peer to peer networking.

• Device agnostic use of infrastructure.

• Secure data flow between each node within a network.

• Evolving technologies in a way that is organic and will genuinely benefit its users.

• Helping to create stronger networks, empowered communities and a fairer world.

The Friend Unifying Platform

Golem

The Partnership

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