It’s another morning and another Bitcoin Weekly. This day opens up with an exclusive interview with CEO of Mt. Gox Mark Karpeles giving an exclusive interview to The Daily Beast, the first interview he’s given since the police investigation of the $500 million bankruptcy that hit his Bitcoin exchange. Bitcoin API vendor Gem just finished a $2 million funding round. And CNN Money has added a new composite Bitcoin market index and tweeted about it.

Last, but not least, last week missed some important news about IBM looking into using the Bitcoin block chain as the underlying distributed technology for an Internet of Things communication platform. IBM intends to join up with Samsung to produce an open-source platform that will combine a block chain with BitTorrent to keep a mesh of devices up to date and communicating, see below.

The price index for Bticoin continues to fall this week: dropping to $450 from $485 a week ago. This downward trend has continued since a spike on August 20 that jumped the price to $520 for a few days out of the $470 band. Overall, the price has been falling mostly for reasons unknown.

Exclusive interview with Gox CEO Mark Karpeles in The Daily Beast

Every celebrity culture has its villains and amid Bitcoin popular figures one of the the most infamous is Mark Karpeles, the CEO of now defunct Mt. Gox. Once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, now gone in a smoldering crater left behind by apparent bad management and the staggering loss of approximately 750,000 bitcoins.

Karpeles spoke to Nathalie-Kyoko Stucky of The Daily Beast and parts of the transcript from that interview have been published online. The interview reveals a man who grew up a geek and a programmer who got into the Bitcoin scene because a client offered to pay him in bitcoin. He admires Niel deGrass Tyson and his hero is Iron Man.

This is the first interview Karpeles has given since the police investigation into the bankruptcy of Mt. Gox started.

Karpeles is the favorite public face of the Mt. Gox disaster for the Bitcoin community to turn to, but the interview in The Daily Beast does a fair job of portraying him as a human being. It’s unlikely to change his image.

Bitcoin API vendor Gem nets $2M in seed funding

Gem, a new Bitcoin API developer, just announced the completion of a seed funding round led by First Round Capital and Tekton Ventures to the tune of $2 million.

The release of Gem’s Bitcoin API appeared in last week’s Bitcoin Weekly, following the initial release announcement which happened during TechCrunch Disrupt. The California-based company says that this money will be used to help accelerate growth of the new API.

Gem’s hope is to stack up a solid, secure Bitcoin API against a market that is already beginning to teem with them. The goal of the company appears to be to provide an API with solid security without sacrificing simplicity of use for developers so that development can attend to applications rather than worrying about the bitcoin transaction level.

For more information see last week’s Bitcoin Weekly or Gem’s website.

CNNMoney tweets about new Bitcoin quote page

Yesterday, @CNNMoney tweeted about a new Bitcoin composite quote page, making CNN Money the newest indexing service to join the flock. Like many other Bitcoin indexes from the financial market, Bitcoin’s symbol is “XBT.”

https://twitter.com/CNNMoney/status/511799183951417344

CNN Money’s Twitter account has more than 810 thousand followers and an extensive number of tweets about the financial world.

Previous Bitcoin indexes to appear in the mainstream have been from Thompson Reuters, Bloomberg, the Winklevoss “Winkdex”, Yahoo! Finance, as well as Google and Bing. For spot-pricing of Bitcoin globally, Bitcoin Weekly still uses BitcoinAverage because of its multi-market composite strategy and transparent indexing.

IBM, Samsung, the Internet of Things and Bitcoin

Recently something interesting and curious came out research into the Internet of Things: IBM began looking into a distributed system for keeping mobile devices on the same page and started to look at the Bitcoin block chain technology. According to an article in GigaOM, Paul Brody, the head of IBM’s mobile and internet team, proposed a system called Adept that would integrate a block chain the BitTorrent protocol.

The product is expected to be completed for demo at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2014. The platform will also be released on GitHub as open-source software.

As blogger and Bitcoin analyst TwoBitIdiot points out, IBM will be working with Samsung closely on this project. This places two major players in the technology industry together to work with the fundamental technology of Bitcoin: the block chain.

In his treatment of the subject, TwoBitIdiot includes a quote from Dan Primack that really drives the point home:

Yesterday’s most consequential tech announcement had nothing to do with watches. Instead, it was IBM saying that it will use bitcoin’s block-chain technology to build a distribution platform for the Internet-of-Things. As I’ve previously written, the real promise of bitcoin is the underlying technology itself, rather than its various applications for stored value or payments. And this appears to be the first time that a large tech company is putting serious resources behind trying to achieve that promise.

Much like Primack, it has been the longstanding consideration of this reporter that the real gold in Bitcoin isn’t just in the technological solution to money, but the underlying technology itself.

The Bitcoin block chain is a tool with many uses and with IBM and Samsung looking to make the block chain their workhorse could most certainly lead to innovations that would be applicable back to Bitcoin itself.