The Format #011

Things are moving fast. If their statuses are anything to go by, then our dev team have taken a deep dive ‘into a nerd hole’. We’ve brought in some extra (and very capable) hands to help. And we’re all in sprint mode.

We still had time to put together a round up of some of the more interesting things we’ve found. Spoiler alert, things are moving fast in the tech world too…

Telegram starts to look like a super app, echoing WeChat

First Twitter (or ‘X’), and now Telegram. Is this the year of the super app? With an active userbase of 800m, partners like Tencent, and plans to introduce a 3rd-party ‘mini app’ ecosystem, Telegram seems primed to become super. The interesting thing to us: their blockchain plans… with rewards for game builders.

DOJ finally posted that “embarrassing” court doc Google wanted to hide

It must be a pretty awkward situation when, as the VP of Finance at Google, you get caught claiming only ‘cigarettes or drugs could rival’ the economics of your business model. Although this evidence (from Google’s antitrust case) does seem somewhat hyperbolic, and was taken from a public speaking class, it shines a light on everything Google have been vehemently defending and potentially the internal mentality towards their ‘monopoly’ on search.

OpenAI Upgrades ChatGPT: The AI Chatbot Can Now “See, Hear and Speak”

The Twitter posts and Youtube videos showing how ChatGPT ‘can 100x your productivity with this 1 simple trick’ had just started to die down, but with OpenAI’s recent wave of functionality the hype is in full force again. Multimodality will lead to a wave of crazy... 🤯

The TL;DR: DALL-E 3 is being rolled out producing ‘insane’ images. ChatGPT-Plus will soon have voice chat. GPT-4 has vision meaning it can discuss images. Microsoft is upgrading AI for Office, Bing & Windows 11.

What’s Stopping Fortnite and Call of Duty From Using the Same Items? It’s Not Just NFTs

It seems more and more likely that the ‘Metaverse’ will exist as an ‘internet built by gamers’. You could even argue that what Epic Games are building with Fortnite and UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite) is the start of a metaverse. But to achieve an open and decentralised ‘Metaverse’ interoperability is a must. This piece discusses exactly what that looks like, and the problems in getting there.

Andreessen Horowitz leads $24 million Series A round for web3 loyalty app Blackbird

Blackbird found a killer problem: restaurant’s profit margins have dropped from 20% to 4% since 2000. Then set out to solve it using Web3 and game mechanics. The reason why Blackbird is significant, they showcase that if you find the right problem, it’s possible to get a lot of traction and raise some serious money with technology that’s readily available. (In fact I’m sure you could build something similar with the OPENFORMAT toolkit pretty quickly…)

OPENFORMAT News:

We’ve also been building up a bank of case studies to showcase all the epic things that have been built using the OPENFORMAT toolkit.

From ‘Pokemon Go for brands’ to a Slack-based rewards system with a Shopify store for exclusive merch, these case studies might fire up your imagination, as to what is possible with Web3. I fed the case studies into GPT-4 and got some wild ideas that I will definitely be (trying to) prototype this weekend.

The first two case studies are…

Landmrk

Landmrk used the OPENFORMAT toolkit to build a proof of concept geofenced 'treasure hunt' system that offers digital rewards for real-world exploration, transforming passive observers into engaged brand superfans.

UNTAGGED

For highlights from the UNTAGGED event check out the video below:

And that’s all for this week.

Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽

Prompt (Generated by AI): “a world where Fortnite, Call of Duty, Roblox and Skyrim all exist in the same universe and can use the same items, show characters from each game, vivid, gaming style, no imperfections”