The Format #029

The season of big tech announcements is well underway with Apple’s WWDC happening earlier this week. It was met with quite a lot of contraversy, especially around their partnership with OpenAI. Also the Ipad now has a calculator! (wait, it didn’t before?)

My takeaway from the WWDC… big tech keynotes are very long, in the future I’m going to stick with 12 minute Youtube round ups.

Speaking of round ups, here’s the news we found most interesting this week, spoiler alert there’s a big focus on revenue splitting and royalties…

Why AI Needs Crypto’s Values

When the term AI is mentioned, a few of names immediately come to mind, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, maybe even Apple (Intelligence). All huge tech companies who own and monetise foundational AI models.

The big question: should the tools of the future, which have been trained on the collective intelligence of humanity, be owned by a handful of companies?

Twitch announces a program allowing DJs to split revenue with record labels

We LOVE to see creators, devs and artists getting paid for the things that they make and the downstream value that those things create when they’re used or ‘remixed’ by others.

Twitch’s latest revenue splitting programme is a real step in the right direction. Twitch DJ’s are able to earn revenue without copyright concern, and the artists whose music is used getting a fair share of that revenue.

Decentralized Game Infrastructure

This is a really interesting post that dives into the rise of ’live service games’ - essentially games that include some form of online feature, virtual economy or social system. The task of building a digital economy is no small feat and until now has costed the average game studio $22M. By moving towards decentralisation, game developers can tap into a marketplace of off-the-shelf solutions, and all the opportunities and improved unit economics these provide.

Our theory is that this will very quickly move beyond the gaming industry, after all, everything is a game…

Human Native AI is building the marketplace for AI training licensing deals

An AI model needs a HUGE amount of data to be useful, and the companies that are building these models need to have a right to use that data. Human Native AI is trying to give creators some level of control and compensation for the data they contribute to the models via licensing deals.

It feels like for these models to be truly fair though, they would need to be designed in a way where everyone is fairly rewarded for the value they’ve added to the models, not just those with enough leverage to negotiate a licensing deal. Maybe that would look like a decentralised system with a huge amount of royalty splits built in, something that’s now possible with the blockchain… 👀

Creatives are right to be fed up with Adobe and every other tech company right now

Creatives trust in big tech companies is free-falling towards an all time low, and with a recent T&C’s update Adobe have really tested this trust. Users have been treated to a ‘must accept’ update in their terms of use which allowed Adobe to copy and sub-license the users assets, with absolutely no talk of royalties.

Adobe claim they won’t use it to train their Firefly AI, but after all the recent creative-AI company lawsuits and dodginess some things are just hard to believe.

OPENFORMAT News

With just a week left of the competition, we’re full steam ahead with all sorts of events, live sessions, masterclasses and tutorials…

Building Products with Traction

From the competition so far we’ve learned that, thanks to a whole range of amazing no-code tools that exist today, the process of going from idea to app isn’t the giant task it used to be. Going from idea to a monetisable business, that’s a much bigger task, a task that many no-code builders are struggling with.

As part of our competition JP from Who’s Fabio ran a masterclass on how to rapidly get traction with a project, and how to turn a product into a movement - watch the YouTube here

A Successful Hack Night

Last tuesday we hosted our first no-code hack night, and it was A LOT of fun!

We wanted the hack night to be accessible to anyone, and that meant we had everyone from developers and CTO’s to product people and even people who’d never built anything before.

You can check out a bit more about what people built here.

And Another On The Way…

Since the hack night was so much fun, and we learnt such an incredible amount, we’ve decided to make these sorts of events a MUCH more regular thing.

So we’ll be hosting another event next thursday (the 20th), and we’re also going to be hosting regular games nights. If you’re near Bristol and fancy coming to an event we’d LOVE to see you at one of our events, you can see what’s happening on our Meetup.

Some More Tutorials...

We’ve been working hard on releasing more step-by-step walkthroughs showcasing how you could use OPENFORMAT.

These have included everything from setting up a Discord bot to reward your community to building a Pokemon Go style app for the Natural History Museum.

That’s all for this week.

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

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