CategoryTechnology

Canva and HotJar price update

There was a bit of angst on social when Canva announced some price increases last week (up by 300% in some cases). Not to be outdone, I received the following ‘hold my beer’ notification from HotJar a few days later: Admittedly this is less about a price increase right now, and more a removal of a legacy discount against price increases a while back – but to the end user (ie me)...

Back to basics

Consider the following annualised generative AI revenue comparison: Accenture (a consulting company, advising on AI): $3.7B OpenAI (an AI provider): $3.4B (And further, OpenAI is selling more AI services than Microsoft.) People are spending more on AI advice than they are on the actual AI. (Sure, there’s lots of other AI companies besides OpenAI. There’s also lots of other consulting companies.)...

AI is the microwave oven of gourmet cooking

Saw this description of AI somewhere on Threads recently (wish I could find and credit the source) where they described AI as: AI is to business, as the microwave oven is to gourmet cooking ie it’s handy, saves time, provides ideas (preprogrammed settings), it’s available to most people, and anyone can get started using it and benefitting from it. But it’s not going to replace...

Musicians, robots and AI

I was recently reminded of the Music Defense League case in the late 1920s, organised by the American Federation of Musicians to combat the threat of music recordings. Here’s the quick summary: before the 1930s when you went to see a movie at the theatre, it had no sound music was provided by live singers and musicians but ‘technology’ was improving => music and sound was recorded and then...

Deepfake scams

You may have seen this recent deepfake scam, attempting to scam WPP. It’s easy to dismiss these threats thinking it only affects the ‘big companies’ – after all why would anyone bother going to all that trouble to target ‘a small company like ours’… But it’s only a (short) matter of time before these deepfake processes are easily emulated and can be...

Slop

Simon highlights (via a tweet that quotes another tweet) that ‘slop’ is the perfect word to describe the barrage of unwanted AI generated ‘content’ that we’re being forced to wade through on our trek to an actual answer. As they note, just as ‘spam’ became the word for unwanted email, ‘slop’ is the term for unwanted AI generated content. See...

Queensland launches digital drivers license app

Great that Queensland Government has launched an app for driver’s licenses. Nice of them to say this “We worked with our counterparts in other Australian states that have digital licences, to ensure we learnt from the way they developed and released their apps. But odd to also say this: “Queensland’s Digital Licence app will set the standard for mobile driver licence apps...

Crazy valuations part 734

Always tricky to understand valuations… we’re in a high interest rate period and yet AI startups are (selectively) breaking through and still getting crazy valuations. Recently Perplexity got a half billion valuation, even though current ARR is just $3M (note: revenue, not profit). That’s 150x It’s easy to ridicule, but then I’m reminded of DHH’s...

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