Digital Deep Dive Show:: EP 010

This article is part of the Digital Deep Dive Show,?which aims to showcase incredible technology and the exceptional people building it, using it, and the impact it has on business and society at large.?Subscribe here?and?follow me?to read future editions Digital3DShow.

In this episode, we discuss current news in tech, a Chicago spotlights on ClearFlame Engine Technologies, a Podcast feature on the Digital Transformers Podcast with their episode 'The 2023 Retail Industry Breakthrough, featuring IBM' with Sandra Campos ( LinkedIn ), CEO of Cynosure Holdings and Mark Meister (LinkedIn) is a Partner in Supply Chain Transformation for IBM Consulting. We take a deep dive into my new favorite meeting notes app Fellow. Closing out the show with events I am attending in IRL so we can connect and enjoy a Negroni together!

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IN THE NEWS

Story-1:: Microsoft Copilot brings ChatGPT to ‘transform’ Office life

Overview: The online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and Outlook – which sit under the Microsoft 365 banner – will soon receive Copilot integration. Microsoft 365 Copilot — your copilot for work. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet.

Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more — to unleash creativity, unlock productivity and uplevel skills.?

Today we’re also announcing an entirely new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads.

With Copilot, you’re always in control. You decide what to keep, modify or discard. Now, you can be more creative in Word, more analytical in Excel, more expressive in PowerPoint, more productive in Outlook and more collaborative in Teams.

Key takeaway:?Overall, the addition of AI to the Office suite has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency and productivity of workplace tasks. By automating repetitive tasks, improving accuracy and quality, and personalizing the user experience, AI could help workers to focus on the tasks that matter most.

AI has the potential to automate many of the repetitive and time-consuming tasks that office workers face on a daily basis. For example, AI could be used to automatically format documents, create charts and graphs in Excel, or suggest layouts for presentations. This would free up valuable time for employees to focus on more important tasks, such as analysis, decision-making, and creative work.?

It could also used to personalize the Office suite experience for each individual user. For example, by analyzing a user's past work patterns and preferences, AI could suggest shortcuts and automations that would be most relevant to that user. This would make the Office suite more intuitive and user-friendly, reducing the learning curve for new users and improving productivity for existing users.

Link: Bing Link Here

Story-2:: Changes and YC

Overview: YC is rightly known for early-stage investing. In recent years, we have also done some late-stage investing. But late-stage investing turned out to be so different from an early stage that we found it to be a distraction from our core mission. So we’re going to decrease the amount of late-stage investing we do.

Key takeaway: Directly, there is a headcount reduction. Directly, it is just a showing of the changing times in the start-up ecosystem, and the impacts the cost of capital has on firm strategies and their associated tactics. It will be interesting to see if YC deal velocity increases or decreases from 2022 to 2023 now that they are renewed in their focus.?

Link: Y-Combinator

Story-3:: Meta & NFT

Overview: In less shocking news Meta is winding down its NFT Groups for Facebook and IG

Key takeaway: I never got into the NFT crazy, but there are practice applications for contracts and agreements. It is not?surprising ?Meta to close it down due to the cost-cutting measures. Will be interesting to see how NFT continue to grow and expand and how they are used for less marketing and art standpoint and more utility.?

Link: Twitter Post

Story-4:: Meta Latest Round of Layoff

Overview: Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is laying off another 10,000 people and instituting a further hiring freeze as part of the company’s “Year of Efficiency”, the chief executive announced in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

“Over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates.”

Key takeaway: The market came down on Meta for overspending on the Metaverse, 2023 seems like the year of course correcting, pulling back on funding and stripping away staff on projects less critical to the core. The only issue is Meta hasn’t been that great at innovating, rater, they have been better at acquisition. So that leads to the next question, what will they acquire next??

Link: The Guardian

Story-5:: Twitter 2 Go Open Source

Overview: In a post on the social media platform, the Twitter CEO announced that the company will open-source the code used to recommend tweets on March 31.?

Key Takeaways: Open-sourcing Twitter's code used to recommend tweets would be a big deal for a few reasons:

1. Transparency: By open-sourcing the code, Twitter would be making the algorithms and technology behind its tweet recommendation system transparent to the public. This would provide greater clarity into how Twitter decides what content to show to users, which could help to address concerns around algorithmic bias and manipulation.
2. Innovation: Open-sourcing the code could encourage innovation and collaboration among developers and researchers, who could use the code as a starting point to build new and more sophisticated recommendation systems. This could ultimately benefit Twitter and its users by improving the quality and relevance of tweet recommendations.
3. Competition: By making the code available to competitors, Twitter would be risking its competitive advantage in the recommendation space. However, it could also encourage other companies to adopt similar approaches to transparency and collaboration, leading to a more open and innovative tech industry.

Overall, open-sourcing Twitter's code used to recommend tweets could have a significant impact on the tech industry and on how social media companies approach transparency and collaboration. If Twitter were to move in this direction, it would put pressure on other social companies, say let Meta for example to move in a similar direction.

Link:?Twitter

Story-6:: AI Images Are Becoming More Realist

Overview: MidJourney only hit the AI scene one year ago and is on version 5. If you review some of the side-by-side examples from @nickfloats?of v4 vs v5, as well as some new prompts and crowd shots, you can quickly see how far this has come.?

Why It Matters: Version 5 promises less post-generation editing and perhaps photo-perfect images sooner than we can imagine. This prospect is indeed both exciting and frightening to creatives, and I suppose people are looking to connect on the internet. But the question will be, how did the model get trained once again? Those with the data that can train the model, will become the winners in any area long-term.?

Link:? Twitter Example

Chicago Spotlight:: ClearFlame Engine Technologies

Overview: ClearFlame Engine Technologies, a company that develops technology for diesel engines to run on?renewable liquids, secured $30 million in a Series B funding round on Thursday. Mercuria Energy Group led the raise.?

Key Takeaways:?ClearFlame’s technology modifies diesel combustion engines, allowing them to run on a wider range of fuels without sacrificing performance or increasing costs. It can be applied to both new and existing diesel engines and a wide variety of applications. The technology enables engines to use cleaner and less expensive fuels – a win-win for the environment and customers’ pocketbooks. Thanks to their simple cost cal on their website, you can drill into the value it is driving to your bottom line.?

Link: Chicago Business Journal

Show Overview: The 2023 Retail Industry Breakthrough, featuring IBM

Episode Feature: From the Digital Transformers Podcast, ‘The 2023 Retail Industry Breakthrough, featuring IBM’. Sandra Campos (LinkedIn), CEO of Cynosure Holdings, is a Board Member, 3x CEO, 2x entrepreneur, and advisor, and Mark Meister (LinkedIn) is a Partner in Supply Chain Transformation for IBM Consulting. Listen in as they join host Kevin L. Jackson to discuss why retail is smarter, faster, and more innovative today than ever before. Hear about the need to transform legacy systems, the important work that must go into building the next generation of talent, and why sustainability is finally becoming a ‘table stakes’ discussion.

Key Takeaways: Mark Meister a Partner in Supply Chain Transformation for IBM Consulting and andra Campos, CEO of Cynosure Holdings do a fantastic job of talking through 2023 industry, what to expect, and how to navigate the challenge ahead.?

Episode Links: LinkedIn | Youtube

Deep Dive

Overview: Fellow App

Overview: Say goodbye to unproductive meetings. Fellow helps your team build great meeting habits through collaborative agendas, real-time notetaking, and time-saving templates.

• Show up prepared: Review past notes and encourage everyone to add talking points to the meeting agenda.
• Collaborate on notes: With a full history of meeting notes archived in Fellow, you’ll never forget what was discussed.
• Record action items: The most important work comes after the meeting. Ensure that your team has clear objectives by recording action items in one spot.
• Send meeting notes: With a single click of a button, you can send meeting notes via email or Slack so that everyone feels like they were a part of the discussion.

Asana User:?

• Sync action items from your meeting notes to Asana project. Streamline task management by automatically sending action items generated during your Fellow meetings over to Asana. That way no tasks get left behind and the completion status stays in-sync between both tools!
• Turn task organization into your superpower
• The most effective meetings are ones that end with clear outcomes where everyone knows what to do by when. But this isn’t useful if those action items get lost within your pages of meeting notes.?
• Turn those takeaways into clear action items. Then send that item to a specific Asana project for tracking.

Efficiently manage projects

• Projects often involve multiple meetings like project kickoffs, weekly check ins, requirement meetings, and more. Which can be a lot to keep track of
• So if your project boards live in Asana but your project meeting agendas live in Fellow, sync both tools to ensure action items are completed and followed-up on.?Syncing is automatic – no manual transfer required from Fellow to Asana.
• Which leaves you more time to complete those tasks, and less time organizing!

Key Takeaways: Asana has become a go-to-tool for me over the last year. Using it from personal-to-do, meeting minutes, sales trackers, etc. The multihoming capability allows me to keep everything tagged and organized. The one thing I haven’t loved is the PDF nature of meeting minutes. It is great for capturing and sharing, but then the recipient of those minutes can’t edit or really use efficiently if they are not in the Asana ecosystem. From the look of Fellow, this seems to be the missing piece and I can’t wait to try it out and report back in a couple weeks on my progress. In fact, as I am wrapping up this paragraph I am adding a to-do item to follow-up on the Digital3DShow to discuss this topic in 8-weeks.?

Learn More: Company Website

Event: The Taste of Innovation

Description: Join us as we spotlight?innovation?in the ever-changing world?of food.?This year’s event features:

• Food industry innovators discussing 2023 emerging trends that excite them
• Creative dishes from James Beard Award winning Boka Restaurant Group
• Drinks served by both humans and robots, and much more
• Bon appétit!

Date & Time: March 21st 5-7:30pm

Location: Chicago Shakespeare Theater?

Event Link: Event Details

If you are planning on being in the same city over the coming weeks. Please feel free to reach out on?LinkedIn,?Email, or Twitter?@ReedDailey

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