George Deglin

Apple’s contact-sharing crackdown Apple almost certainly implemented its contact-access changes in iOS 18 to dismantle these growth schemes. Given the use of a prompt mechanism, it’s tempting to view Apple’s contact-sharing crackdown as redolent of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy. But the comparison ends there. ATT served as a drag on the entire digital economy by constraining growth that would have otherwise been re-invested. Apple’s contact-sharing crackdown will simply abate the short-term windfalls that derive from successful implementations of contact harvesting growth tactics.

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Huge thanks to Fynn Glover and Schematic for having me on their podcast. Here are just a few highlights from our convo: My experience with B2B SaaS pricing, packaging, and monetization as CPO of CallRail on our journey to $100M in ARR. 🚀 CallRail's Monetization journey👇 🌀 From Simplicity to Complexity ➡️ CallRail started as a simple product, but evolved into a multi-product offering with hybrid billing models, multiple tiers, free, discounted, and extended trials, & promotional pricing. At one point the company had well over 1,000 SKUs! 🔧 Engineering and Product Challenges ➡️  For Ryan, one of the key learnings has been the non-trivial complexity of supporting pricing & packaging as the company's offerings evolved, resulting in a dedicated EPD team focused on billing. 💡 Advice for Scaling Companies ➡️ "My advice to product and engineering leaders is to outsource monetization infrastructure earlier than you think. It's crucial for maintaining business agility and mitigating the risk that entire product & engineering teams become dedicated to billing, pricing, and packaging on a full-time basis." Link to the full episode in the comments! https://lnkd.in/e7HajPPP

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Did you know Shopify’s checkout extensibility works on the Shop app via Shop pay? Here’s an example of Checkout Blocks running on Ippodo Tea surfacing several blocks seamlessly into checkout: - required phone field specifically for international orders. Not possible natively. - a checkbox for preorder acknowledgment - preorder ship date using our Liquid powered line item content block. - upsells using Shopify recommendations All without any custom code. 🤌

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Claude's integration into our platform was a game-changer, generating high-quality, human-like content that perfectly captured intended tones and styles. The real magic happened when we put Claude in the hands of our own Nathan Thompson. With Claude-powered Copy.ai, Nathan's content creation process transformed overnight, allowing him to publish high-quality blog posts daily. Our customers slashed content creation costs, increased output, and created marketing and sales content that resonated with their audiences. Anthropic's commitment to responsible AI development ensures we provide customers with a safe, secure, and ethical tool. Copy.ai and Anthropic are shaping the future of go-to-market. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gtgaxm-H

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App Else Announces Revolutionary New Screen Time Features for Protecting Children Cupertino, California - June 11, 2024 - Else App Inc. is thrilled to announce the release of our long-awaited, cutting-edge new features for Screen Time, powered by Apple iOS and designed to provide parents with enhanced tools to protect their children from excessive and uncontrolled screen time and cyberbullying. With a commitment to fostering safe and balanced digital experiences for young users, these new features bring powerful solutions to the fingertips of families worldwide. New features include: 1.⁠ ⁠Time For a Break: Introducing the groundbreaking “Else Break” feature, which mandates a 10-minute break every 30 minutes of continuous screen use. This break helps reduce cognitive fatigue, promotes healthier screen habits, and encourages children to engage in other activities. It serves as a gentle reminder to balance digital time with other enriching experiences. 2.⁠ ⁠Digital Wellness Coaching: Children are invited to complete a weekly well-being questionnaire to reflect on their emotional state and how their screen time affects their daily life. This self-assessment encourages children to recognize the impact of their digital habits on their overall well-being. 3.⁠ ⁠Real-Time “Free Time” Tracker: Our innovative real-time tracker displays the amount of free time children have left each week, calculated based on an average of 20 hours. This visual representation helps children and parents understand the impact of screen time on their overall free time, promoting mindful usage. 4.⁠ ⁠Else Academy: Else Academy offers a library of educational content tailored to both parents and children. These resources cover essential topics like the impact of screen time on mental and physical health, digital addiction, and strategies for balanced screen usage. The Academy aims to educate and empower families to make informed decisions about their digital lives. 5.⁠ ⁠Collaborative Installation Process: The installation process of our new features is designed to be collaborative, involving both parents and children. This approach fosters open communication and mutual understanding, ensuring that the settings reflect the family’s needs and the child’s perspective. It culminates in a symbolic “contract of trust” signed by both parent and child, reinforcing a sense of shared responsibility. 6.⁠ ⁠Positive Reinforcement and Notifications: To support the development of healthy screen habits, children receive positive reinforcement and encouraging notifications about their screen time usage. These notifications help them stay aware of their screen time and celebrate their progress in managing it effectively. Availability: All these features are available today from the App Store France and in a few weeks from all the App Store around the world.

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Had so much fun recording this episode of Jamstack Radio where we got to jam out about local-first software, SolidJS, and other components of our real-time collaborative stack. Brian Douglas is a long-time mentor and friend and one of the most knowledgeable people about new trends and technologies in the industry. https://lnkd.in/etCYRBhG P.S. if you want to get started with open source or get insights into open source projects, you have to check out Brian's company, https://opensauced.pizza. There's nothing that compares.

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Nintendo don't play when it comes to emulation. They are literally working to wipe Yuzu from the internet. They may well succeed. ----- VideoGameChronicle: "Nintendo takes down more than 8,500 clones of Switch emulator Yuzu with a single DMCA notice. The notice was filed at Github this week and wiped out a large number of Switch emulators. Nintendo has taken down more than 8,500 clones of Switch emulator Yuzu with a single DMCA notice. As reported by TorrentFreak, the company issued a DMCA notice at GitHub this week, which led to GitHub removing 8,535 repositories containing versions of the emulator. In a statement made on GitHub’s page, the site explained that since Nintendo had pointed out more than 100 repositories that it alleged were offering the emulator, GitHub applied the same action to all of them. “Because the reported network that contained the allegedly infringing content was larger than one hundred (100) repositories, and the submitter alleged that all or most of the forks were infringing to the same extent as the parent repository, GitHub processed the takedown notice against the entire network of 8,535 repositories, inclusive of the parent repository,” it stated. The speed and size of the takedowns appear to have been affected by Nintendo’s decision to sue Tropic Haze, the creator of Yuzu, in February. Nintendo had claimed that Yuzu was “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale”, and Tropic Haze settled the lawsuit just weeks later, agreeing to pay $2.4 million in damages. As part of the judgment by the US District Court of Rhode Island, Tropic Haze was issued with a permanent injunction preventing it from offering or marketing Yuzu or any of its source code in the future. Other users have seemingly taken it upon themselves to redistribute variations of the emulator via GitHub, hence this week’s mass takedown. In its initial lawsuit documents, Nintendo claimed that last year’s biggest Switch release, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, was pirated over one million times in the week and a half before its release in May 2023. “With Yuzu in hand, nothing stops a user from obtaining and playing unlawful copies of virtually any game made for the Nintendo Switch, all without paying a dime to Nintendo or to any of the hundreds of other game developers and publishers making and selling games for the Nintendo Switch,” the company said. “In effect, Yuzu turns general computing devices into tools for massive intellectual property infringement of Nintendo and others’ copyrighted works.” VideoGameChronicle: https://lnkd.in/gFszsXhS #gameindustry #nintendo #switch #emulation #piracy #gamelegal

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Excited to share the launch of Verix from Virtualness! As we embrace the AI era, the need for authentication, transparency, and security is more critical than ever. That’s why Virtualness has developed Verix—a self-serve platform designed to simplify the verification of skills, tickets, certificates, products, and content. Powered by blockchain and GenAI, Verix allows businesses to effortlessly manage verification processes, complete with real-time analytics and alerts. With a product that offers dynamic verification badges, design customization, global digital shareability, enterprise-grade workflow, and engagement and personalization, their mission is simple: to build a future where everything real can be verified, trusted, and celebrated. If your business thrives on trust, verification, and recognition, now is the time to get involved. Sign up today at https://lnkd.in/g_g2sUUW #Verix #NewBeginnings #DigitalTrust #Blockchain #Innovation #ProductLaunch #Virtualness

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Yesterday, my team at Vareto announced the first-ever multiplayer modeling platform for Finance. 😍 Now that I can finally speak publicly about what we've been working on, the first thing I want to share is a screenshot from a live multiplayer session we did internally at the company. One of the interesting things about building enterprise software as a startup is that we're still too small to *need* our own product. So instead of doing what our customers do--expense budgeting, headcount planning, etc.--we use Vareto's multiplayer modeling to forecast fun things like total pet spend. Yep, that's right. We had 40 people go into a Vareto model and enter in bottom-up inputs for how much they expect to spend on their cats and dogs this year. 😂 While this isn't very useful--especially since many people entered in clearly exaggerated numbers--sessions like this helped prove that our new 2.0 platform can handle even "extreme" usage situations. (In reality, even if some enterprise customers have thousands of users in Vareto, only a handful are ever likely to be in the same model page at the same exact time given granular data permissions.) You can see more useful, realistic ways that finance and business teams can use Vareto multiplayer here: https://lnkd.in/gV9gqKwz

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FireHydrant is a huge fan of Temporal Technologies – and we're about to hit 2.5M workflows completed for Signals *alone*. That's a lot of events, alerts, and notifications processed since February! And with the recent accounts stolen from the incumbent alerting providers who are about to onboard, this number will only continue to accelerate. We're also closing several of the gaps between us and the 10+ year old tools. We'll be at roughly 90% of the alerting surface area of the green logo company by EOY (the other 10% is hardly used in the market anyways and is trivial to build). Software design decisions are business decisions.

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For folks selling in the cybersecurity market, how do you think about the trade-off between exposing product capabilities self-serve vs. gating behind a compliance check? At Stytch, we’re big believers in product-led growth. As a dev-focused company, we know and understand that our target audience likes to see how things work. They like to get into the details. They want to try it. That’s why our auth products are all free to get started, with the details of our API in the docs. But our device fingerprinting products are a bit different - to access them, we require a basic compliance check, proof that you are who you say you are and have a legitimate (non-nefarious) need for our product. Having to gate products isn’t fun; we’re proud of our solutions and want people to try them out. But we also want to make it more difficult for attackers to set up easy lab environments for brute force testing. This GitHub repo is a perfect example of how that plays out in practice; without precautions, your cool sales demo becomes a reliable testing site for new evasion tactics: https://lnkd.in/gaNFXnF2 Anyone else building security products who’s dealt with this kind of trade-off? How did you balance encouraging product discovery/PLG with maximizing product security?

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Wait let me guess. Microsoft buys ABK for $69 billion. Call of Duty, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Overwatch all head to GamePass. Meanwhile King forms the center of a Microsoft mobile store with Activision (Call of Duty mobile), Blizzard (Hearthstone), and older XGS adding other titles. Is this surprising? I could literally go to ChatGPT and put in "Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard King, what are the likely results for GamePass and Xbox Mobile store." And ChatGPT would output the same thing. This is 2+2 =4. Sigh... ----- GameDeveloper: "Report: Xbox planning to make Call of Duty a core part of Game Pass. After a lot of debate about sales and subscriptions, the shooter is arriving on Game Pass." (Danielle Riendeau, Editor-in-Chief) (May 17, 2024) "Call of Duty is coming to Game Pass after all, according to a new report by The Wall Street Journal (spotted via Kotaku). That's brand new for the series, which was part of Microsoft's major acquisition of Activision Blizzard last year. Microsoft was reportedly planning to reveal the news at its June showcase, but the cat is now out of the bag. There are no details available yet whether the games will only be available on certain tiers of Game Pass, or whether the price of the service could increase again, after a hike in July of last year. It's also unclear what, exactly, caused the decision at this time, as the question has been high on the minds of Microsoft leadership for quite some time. Reporting at the Verge claimed there was uncertainty at Microsoft about putting the shooter on the service. It's such a financial boon that some reportedly worried it was counter-intuitive to do so. There is some credible evidence that Game Pass eats into game sales, lending credence to those fears. Did Diablo set the tone for Call of Duty on Game Pass? There is perhaps some precedent here with Diablo IV, which arrived on Game Pass in March. "Last month we added our first Activision Blizzard title, Diablo IV, to our Game Pass service. Subscribers played over 10 million hours within the first 10 days, making it one of our biggest first party Game Pass launches ever," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an April earnings call. The good news for some studios comes with bad news for others. Just last week, Microsoft announced major cuts at its Zenimax branch, including the closure of Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks. With even more pressure on the series to succeed, it seems Microsoft is placing a bigger bet on Call of Duty and Game Pass simultaneously here." GameDeveloper: https://lnkd.in/gq8Gm6pU #gameindustry #xbox #gamepass #abk #callofduty #activision #gamepublishing

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Yesterday, Zenimax workers were added to the Labor Neutrality Agreement between CWA (Communications Workers of America) and Microsoft. This definitely showed a glimmer of hope for its layoff-impacted devs, but how effective is it? In a small yet complete context - After the MSFT acquired AB in 2022, QA workers from Raven Software and Blizzard Albany started unionizing because they were severely under-compensated and undervalued. (This is not the story for only ABK QA workers, right?) However, AB opposed recognizing Albany QA workers as a union, and surprisingly, Microsoft was not against it at all. MSFT acknowledged this issue and signed a labour agreement with CWA backing the QA Workers Union. In 2023, Zenimax workers also formed a union called Zenimax Workers United, backed by CWA, to improve the game industry's working conditions. Even they were voluntarily acknowledged by MSFT all along, with yesterday being a moment of happiness for them. After being added to the agreement, Zenimax workers can now unionize and manage their own working environments without any interference from MSFT. So, the real question is how beneficial this agreement will prove regarding your job security at MSFT. Allowing unionization might give the game devs a sense of power, but does it guarantee their job security? Studios were still shut down, people still lost their jobs, and MSFT hasn’t broken any silence on it even now. Many were impacted this year by MSFT alone. We can’t comprehend even a single per cent of the problems they must be going through. But what we can do is find resources for them! So here’s a list of resources we have been tirelessly collecting to provide game developers with every tool that could possibly help them at any game development stage. The Layoff Support Kit 2.0 (Link in the comments) This Support Kit contains: 1. YouTube Channels, Playlists, and Videos: 219 Resources to learn basic and advanced Game programming concepts. 2. Unity and C# Boot Camps: Over 50 vital sources to learn Unity and C#. 3. Reading Resources: 394 tutorials on game programming, designing, art, animation, and game engines. 4. Free Engine Assets: 200+ free 2D and 3D game engine assets to help you in building games. 5. Podcasts: Over 30 podcasts on developing games, Virtual Reality, and how indie developers can grow from games industry experts. 6. Tools and Game Engines: Widely used game engines and game art tools across the industry. 7. Communities: 91 largely known Reddit and Quora communities dedicated to all things video games. 8. Frontline Warriors: A list of all the top warriors on LinkedIn working day and night to help the layoff-impacted folks get back strong in their careers. I am also requesting Kelly Bender, Alexander Rehm, Caitlin Cooke, Jordan Mazer, Ruty Rutenberg, Hailey Rojas, Kevin F., Kat Craig, and Ali Farha to drop their resources in the comments below or add them directly to the Support Kit 💪 #layoffsupport #gamedev

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Here comes California Privacy Protection Agency from the top rope! Handing out their first Data Broker settlements to Growbots and UpLead! Growbots and UpLead both had to pay for not registering as Data Brokers with the CPPA for not registering between the deadline of Feb 1st, 2024 and July 2024. I've personally reached out to these companies to warm them about the risk, but I take no joy in seeing businesses penalized like this. If your company is in lead generation - YOU ARE VERY LIKELY A DATA BROKER. This is just the start. Fines are accumulated for every day of non-compliance. Enforcement is happening. Be safe not sorry. Superset can get help you figure out if you need to register. Let's book some time to keep you out of the fight against California: https://lnkd.in/dXYYQqtR https://lnkd.in/gNbyhchN

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This might be a lesson for 2017, but hardly one for today. Startups have much better access to integration tools like Redox or Medplum to name a couple. As someone who works in third-party development, we would only ask that there be a level, transparent playing field for access to patient data. The 21st Century Cures Act codified data interoperability and patient access to their own health records. These health records are often fractured across multiple systems, provider groups, insurance companies, etc., so the patient has no complete view of their own health. Providers or monopolistic software firms like Epic, Cerner, or PointClickCare do not own these records and have no right to block or impede others' legitimate access. This is patient data that rightfully belongs to patients. I would advocate for more open innovation to expand the ecosystem of companies working to improve the quality of care delivery. Do we really want innovation in healthcare to move at the speed of these few firms? Who made them the gatekeepers of America's healthcare?

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Shmoody  app onboarding - Utilizing video, music, and animations, it's engaging but could be even better 🤓. № 164 in Health & Fitness, ~20 onboarding screens 👤40k users, 💰100k revenue - past month info ✅ The user is greeted by a launch screen with loading animations, background music, and text slides hinting at the essence of the app: “..Building positivity,.. Conjuring joy..” ❓ It's worth noting that the text on the slides is quite small and changes quickly, requiring a lot of attention to read. ✅ The welcome screen greets you with a background video setting the mood (I really like the use of video. I believe it's the future of onboarding—an interactive movie whose plot changes based on user choices). ❓ There's a UX mismatch in the footer of the screen where two equally important buttons are stacked on top of each other leading to completely different actions: 1 Log In, 2 Mute Sound. Such UX can increase cognitive complexity. ❓ The main proposition of the app might be missing from this screen (mentioned in the launch screen slides, but they are hard to read, remember, and understand). 💡It’s crucial to show users that they are in the right place right from the start. ✅ Color theme selection screen. This could be a smart move, providing the user a quick win—“These guys let me customize everything to my preferences!” (a small victory with immediate results). ❓ I think swapping this screen with the next one (user goal selection) would work even better. The user selects goals and gets explanations -> To make it easier to achieve these goals, let's create a comfortable atmosphere for YOU—choose a color palette that helps you focus, calms, etc. 💡This way we achieve a small victory directly related to the user's goals. ✅ Reasons for joining the app screen -> a social proof screen - "You are in the right place, we will help." ✅ Feature suggestion screen: “We think you should check out these features first:” ❓ The “Back” button takes up a lot of space in the footer. Perhaps it should be moved to the navigation bar in the header (a standard pattern that reduces cognitive load). ✅ User goal selection screen. .. ❗️The entire analysis didn't fit in one post, I'll add an article with the full breakdown in the comments. 🤓 Overall, the onboarding is interesting, and I would like to add: - More personalization focused on user needs (goals) - Some work on UI/UX. 💡 Reviewing feedback, I found indirect confirmation of this: “First of all, for someone (high functioning) with ADHD, this interface is absolutely overwhelming and kind of useless IMO. How can you expect someone with focusing issues to answer millions of questions? And the way it is visually organized is too messy. Would like to see a cleaner interface to help with focus; it's just confusing.”

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I’ve been looking at how startups can compete with the Big 3 cloud providers. While they’ve been humbled by NVIDIA’s rise to become the central power broker in today’s ecosystem, they’ve pushed back hard to build their edge in AI. That’s created huge opportunities for a handful of startups, and stiffer competition for everyone else. But there are still areas where startups can build value in the AI stack. They just have to approach competition a little differently than before. In this “Big 4” era of AI cloud, everybody needs everybody: NVIDIA has the chokehold on GPUs and recently entered the cloud provider market, the Big 3 still win on cloud computing and distribution resources, but startups have the agility and speed to actually innovate us to the next phase of the AI shift. This has changed the nature of incumbent + startup partnerships, funding patterns, GTM, and exit strategies in the process. In a new essay with my colleague Jason Risch, we outline where startups have the advantage, which areas are already saturated, and areas where we believe incumbents are most likely to win. Many will agree that LLMs and compute are largely spoken for, but there is ample opportunity in devtools and infrastructure; vertical and horizontal apps; codegen, robotics, and, of course, security. These observations come through our daily work and from our ongoing data collection and analysis for our Castles in the Cloud project. Check out our essay here, and if you are building in any of these areas, please get in touch with us. https://bit.ly/4bFF5up

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🚀 Launch Series - Day 3/4: Announcing Tarsal's newest source connector: Tray.ai 🚀 Tray was a fun connector because it's our first webhook-based one. You create the connector, we give you a Tarsal webhook URL, and you can point Tray logs directly at Tarsal. Tarsal's goal has always been to paper over all the differences in how sources provide logs, whether that's in the interface (e.g webhook vs. API) or definition (e.g auto-normalizing IOCs). Glad to launch Tray.ai to make further progress towards that goal.

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