The Format #001

Hello 🌞 lovely people. It’s hard to keep up with the tech world at the moment. It feels like if you look away for five minutes that there’s been fifteen ‘essential’ AI apps released, a new cryptocurrency is worth millions and a big tech giant has released another five (catchup) products 👀.

Our quick round up of some of the more interesting things that we’ve found:

Am I a Killer?

An honest and vulnerable insight from OPENFORMAT’s CEO, Sarah Weller, on starting the investment journey. For many of us in the startup world we never make it past the first round, it’s tough and right now it’s almost impossible. Follow Sarah’s journey, it’s worth it.

Small Applications, Growing Protocols

Wow, amazing post over at Not Boring on getting to the root of decentralisation. "Protocols that let users carry their identity, data, and relationships across Small Apps are a strong candidate". Essential read on how to look at the future of business and application development.

This 23-Year Old Snapchat Star Can Be Your AI Girlfriend—For a Price

Is this really the future that we’re aiming at? On the one hand an amazing entrepreneurial moment for an individual (that plays perfectly into the post above from Not Boring) on the other hand a potential look into our dystopian future of loneliness and social separation en mass.

Quadratic funding: The future of crowdfunding, explained

The Web3 world of DAO’s, love them or hate them are evolving new ways of thinking about voting and funding. The mechanisms are aiming for a more balanced way for people to have a voice and for a “fairer” distribution of funds. At OPENFORMAT we’ve been experimenting with Quadratic Funding, this is a good primer on this fast evolving mechanism.

Thanks for reading The Format! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.

OPENFORMAT News

We’ve got some things going on… 🙏🏽

Version 1.0 of the SDK is live

This toolset provides all developers with the ability to easily build decentralised applications. In Sarah’s “none engineering brain”, she thinks of it as LEGO and this is a great way to look at it. We’ve created the building blocks so that developers can come and put them together to make something without having to know Web3 speak.

Game, DAO, and Match

We've launched GetStarted, specifically for building the small, decentralised, gamified applications of the future. We have a tonne of use cases we’re already speaking to people about just on this template - supply chain authentication, learning and teaching platforms, employee on-boarding, new types of social media platforms.

IRL Hack Night

OPENFORMAT’s first hack night in Bristol on May 23rd. Developers, UI designers, and product people are all welcome and there will be food, music, prizes, cool people and just generally a lot of fun.

See you in a fortnight,

The OPENFORMAT team

Prompt (Generated by AI): ‘An abstract representation of growing protocols and small applications in the form of an expanding tree, with each branch representing a protocol and the leaves as applications. Inspired by the works of Piet Mondrian, focusing on geometric forms and primary colors. --q 1 --seed 2222 --chaos 0.3 --stylize 30 --v 5 --s 750’

Thanks for reading The Format! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.