March-ing forward with wit, failure and innovation

Hi there Linkedin-friend, welcome to the fourth issue of the Binary Buzz.

How’s it going being you today?

If you missed our last newsletter and might want to catch up on that, you can do it here. It is a totally logical thing to do if you just found our newsletter and want more of it, but just can’t seem to wait for the next issue.

Aaah, March, the smell of a new month (did you see that we gave you a little treat there in the headline?). Speaking of that figuratively we actually asked ChatGPT how the month of March smells as a fun quirky little question, and it answered:

“The idea of a month having a scent is metaphorical and imaginative rather than literal. However, if we were to explore this concept creatively: March: The fragrance of budding flowers and freshly cut grass, signaling the arrival of spring and renewal”.

Obviously this fabulous and poetic natural language processor is not Swedish since it would have been “The fragrance of budding snowy slush and freshly cut dreams of spring ever arriving”. However we’re still delighted to explore this together. How about; The fragrance of gasping for air after taking care of your continuously sick children simultaneously as you’re being continuously sick as well, signaling the arrival of spring and renewal”?

If you’re not a parent laughing internally while having a poker face, and found this more boring rather than actually being seen, you can reset your brain palette here. If you’ve ever wondered how fast your brain is, give it a go.

There is something you need to know.

March is actually coming in hot with a new law to tackle Big Tech dominance that you probably haven’t heard of, which began to apply yesterday on the 7:th of March. Before you get eager to learn what it is, you might want to know if it will affect you? Well, let us answer that question real quick. Do you use an American search engine? Do you scroll through American social media feeds? Do you have a pulse? It’s probably safe to say that yes, it will definitely affect us all.

We’re talking about the EU's new Digital Markets Act (DMA), which aims to tackle the power of Big Tech to let smaller competitors in the marketplace.

In short, you will notice that you are no longer "forced" to use a tech platform just because it’s the most popular. The major gatekeepers who have an enormous amount of users, and use that as an advantage of the service, will be cracked open by this law. As an example, Apple will be made to allow iPhone users to download apps from rival app stores. WhatsApp will have to let users communicate with other rival messaging apps, yes - in their own app. If they don’t, they could face fines of up to 20 percent of their global turnover.

As Apple was just recently hit with the first-ever EU fine of €1.84 billion by European Union antitrust regulators over its App Store rules, the company will definetly stay on collision course with EU as the DMA kicks in.

With this follows of course accusations of the EU showing anti-Americanism writing laws so that Europe can concentrate its resources on reigning in the market power of Big Tech, since only companies with a market capitalization of more than 75 billion Euro and 45 million monthly active EU users fall under the scope of the act. One could wonder where these accusations come from (LOL - do we still say that?)… But whatever that means, this means change dear readers. Big changes for primarily U.S. tech giants. Quite exciting, huh?

You can read more about it here.?

The unfolding of Binary Brains, part 3

For our new readers, this section is a story told by our founder and CEO, Jacob Kihlbaum, about how Binary Brains started. If you are curious about part 2, you can catch up on that here.

Packed together into an old server room on the ground floor of the Statistics Sweden building, I sat at an IKEA cardboard table supported by two sawhorses, staring into a white woven wallpapered wall - together with Dan, Samuel and Niclas. While they had to keep running their old business to financially support their own salaries, I had to finance mine. We undeniably needed customers for my financial survival as well as for our AI-company, whose offering was still highly unclear. I started pulling strings and burning bridges. I also began contacting uncontacted contacts to connect me to local businesses. It felt like the potential for someone to dare to become a client was greater if the risk of running into me at the grocery store on a Saturday was higher.

Sure enough, after five years in the classroom studying entrepreneurship (among other things), with education free from sales knowledge (paradoxically enough) to avoid continuing to be a salesman, I was once again a seller. Always be closing, including the circles. One circle that also closed was that I experienced my biggest catch-22 - as the Catch-22 lover that I am. There I was, selling a company and an idea, but without references, without a clear product, without a price list or a business model. It was in the customer meetings that business development occurred. But with a focus on listening and curiously exploring the challenges the potential customers faced, both the product and the business model were shaped based on scope and needs - which also helped us to start finding common ground among customers. Suddenly, we had customers in three different industries with a vague denominator.

Studying economics doesn't mean you become economical - in exactly the same way, studying entrepreneurship doesn't mean you come out as a ready-to-use entrepreneur. We needed help. Life support. By chance, I heard about an incubator in town with the fitting name “Inkubera”. An incubator is like life support productised. Get in! Into the incubator quickly, before the oxygen in the server room runs out. The oxygen we needed turned out to be the people at the incubator - with our coach Mattias Kronberg at the forefront - along with the colorful and fantastic array of customers I initially managed to attract.

That white woven wallpapered wall above the IKEA cardboard table was no longer possible to stare into, there was far too much to do on the screen four degrees south in the vision field. We were unstoppable. We wouldn't need any funding for this ship. It had both propulsion and buoyancy. Little did we know which sea we were on, what boat it was, how it was steered, or what storms lurked on the horizon. The skipper's exam was still a long way off, but there and then, it was a blue - and calm - ocean.

AI, AI captain. Time for the monthly AI-tip.

Our tip of the month is pronounced in the name of love for AI, entertainment and a world that will never be the same again:?

Sora - OpenAI here, OpenAI there, Open AI everywhere. Back on the table, this is OpenAI’s new tool that can generate highly realistic 60-second videos based on a simple text prompt.

It uses the same technology as OpenAI’s image-generating DALL-E tool, a tool that creates images based on user input. But instead of images, it takes a user’s request and interprets it into a longer set of instructions. Then it uses an AI-model trained on video and images to create a new video.

Why it’s cool: The quality of AI-generated images, audio and video has rapidly increased over the past year with companies like OpenAI, Google (and its video generator Lumiere), Meta (with its video generator Emu), Stable Diffusion, Runway to name a few. But the length and quality of the Sora videos went beyond what has been seen up to now. It can take a simple photo and reimagine it as a video. HI (human intelligence…trying to be a bit funny here) has created an AI that can create anything in seconds, and let’s not even get into the results in comparison to the budget of the creation.?

Why it matters: Only the small fact that it will change our lives and the global economy. Imagine what it will do to the media- and entertainment industry as the lowest hanging fruit, aswell as the freedom for content creators. But we need to be aware of the rise of deepfakes, currently used within politics. For a while now, AI-experts have been cautioning that content created by AI could blur the lines between what is real and what's not. Weeks into a pivotal election year, confusion is on the rise as AI deepfakes are being used to spread misinformation.?No need to be afraid, just cautious. Hopefully tools that help us to easily separate real videos from fake videos will merge soon.

March - the best time to start normalizing failure

Now is the best time to start planting some seeds. And we’re not talking about gardening. We’re talking about the seeds that will make you grow.?

If you’ve read our previous newsletters you know that our founder and CEO Jacob Kihlbaum is cultivating a mindset around this little ego-threatening thing called failure. Our go-to questions will always be - what is a failure anyway? And when does “it” become a failure?

If you want to build a winning failure intelligence you’re just a click away from the right place, and another click away from an even better place, since you can listen to Jacob’s dialogues with amazing guests sharing their failures and thoughts about failures in his podcast Failpodden | Podcast on Spotify that he runs together with his friend in failure-crime, Per N?tby.

Have a great month now, and keep failing forward!