Disclaimer: This transcript was generated automatically and as such, may contain various spelling and syntax errors

Germaine: [00:00:00] Hello, Future Tribe we’ve got a doozy of an episode this week. No, no logos or branding changes when it comes to the design aspect, but there is some branding changes from a, from a company name perspective. Rolling into it, we’ve got Vista print buying Crello which is a Canva competitor that we are actually a huge fan of and use and have been using for a couple years. Vista Print also bought deposit photos. Facebook changes to Meta which is their new name. More of, a lot more on that. Instagram lets everyone share story links now. So that’s the link sticker in your Instagram stories? Dollarmites is finished, very relevant if you’re an Aussie Aussie kid And LinkedIn launching a freelance platform to compete with Fiverr and Upwork.

Kelsey: Yeah. We’ll also be discussing Google is, well, Google might not be the default [00:01:00] Android search for much longer. Amp is bringing less revenue into publishers. TikTok is testing a tipping function as a few T’s in there. Apple forgot they added a notch, and finishing off with a direct integration between MailChimp and Shopify and what this means.

Germaine: All right. That’s Kelsey I’m Germaine and let’s roll the intro and get, get into.

all right. I am sure that everyone’s heard of Vista print. You’ve heard of Vista print.

Kelsey: Absolutely. It’s kind of the, I think it’s the name I think of whenever I go, I need like a business card or anything printed professionally. That’s probably the first name again.

Germaine: Yeah. Wow. I think office works, if you’re in Australia, has a lot to say [00:02:00] about that, but Vista prints massive.

I mean, so is office works but Vista print is a a global phenomenon when it comes to printing merchandise. And they’ve had a Wix integration, so they’ve been sort of working in the web space for a little while. They own 99 designs, which is a I guess a platform for freelances to, to deliver work through sort of relevant, I guess, talking about LinkedIn later on.

But the big news today for me at least, is that they bought Crello and deposit photos. So Vista prints gone from being this place where you order your designs on merchandise to being a place that can do everything. So Vista print can let you I mean produce it either get it produced for you by some, by their 99 design service or let you produce it using a graphical editor, like, like Crello which they’ve rebranded to Vista [00:03:00] create, I believe.

Yeah. And then you can source your stock photos as well, which is really handy when we were talking about the website side of things. And then of course you know, all said and done, you can produce it or they can produce it for you and send it in the mail. So. To me, this is an interesting move that they announced both simultaneously.

I think it’s a big sign that they are really going strong into this space. The I’ve heard various stats, but something. 30 or 30, according to a third of business of individuals in the U S will have a business over the coming years. And I’m sure that’ll increase and this just really puts puts the power to them because no longer do you need to, you know, contact printers or a contact or a graphic designer, you can.

Get it all done through, through Vista print all the way. Yeah.

Kelsey: It’s, it’s really just, it’s become a one-stop shop. I think previously, if you were going into business, it was really the case of you had to do your [00:04:00] research to know if you’re going to a printer, what information to give them and all of that sort of stuff.

And it can be quite complicated sometimes because of all the different options and all of that. And, you know, you’d be paying a graphic designer quite a bit in the past. And of course, if you’re wanting to design your own things, that was a whole different issue because you know, what programs do you need?

Do you need to be specially trained, all that sort of stuff. All of a sudden you go to one spot it’s nice and easy. There’s a pretty logical flow. I’m sure everything would integrate. And there would be a little prompts of, you know, once you’re finished. Do you want to give this to the printers or what’s going on there?

So I think it’s a really smart move. And it would be, I don’t know, I feel like there’s definitely other companies that have done this, none that spring to mind right now, but I’m sure that there have been a few that are following a similar path, but it’ll be interesting to see what other companies start to do this kind of thing, where they really get the full end to end process of one particular.

I did, if that makes sense. [00:05:00]

Germaine: Well, I would say, you know, for most businesses, it’s, it’s a goal, certainly to do that. And Vista print taken an interesting approach because they’ve just acquired all the other business units to make it all, all work, which is quite a smart move, I would say, because they don’t need to try and perfect that and, you know, spend years trying to, trying to get all these different things right. They just buy companies that have got it right. And then those companies can keep growing. They get to integrate into Vista print and everyone’s really, really happy. And, and, you know, I don’t think personally, I don’t think it makes it or or sort of threatens the existence of agencies, et cetera.

I think. Exactly. If you don’t want to worry about it, if you just want to leave it to the professionals, reach out to someone like Futuretheory here’s us or any other agency, and we can take care of it all for you. But if you want to design something for yourself or if [00:06:00] you’re just happy to, you know, just do it all yourself especially sort of looking at that stat of people, getting into small businesses or starting side hustles, this is extremely low barrier to entry.

I think there’s a free product, of Crello and there’ll be very if free or very cheap offerings across the board, and then your real cost is paying to get something printed onto either business cards or whatever else it may be. But, you know, by that stage, it’s also fairly, fairly affordable. So interesting move all said and done.

One thing I forgot to mention as well. If you’re wondering why there’s a concrete wall behind me, if you’re watching the video, you can’t, I don’t think you could hear a difference of where we’re talking from, but I should mention that we are at FT studio, which is our new studio space. It’s been an interesting few months sort of moving into this space and then going into lockdown just as we got ready to announce [00:07:00] it all.

But we’ll have links to the space and you can see photos and see a bit more about FT studio as well. I’m sure we will link to it in the description. Just wanted to mention that, put it out there. Now that now that we’re slowly coming out of, you know, at least a state of where we need to lock down.

Eventually once we don’t have to wear masks in the office Kelsey, I’m looking forward to us just sitting across the table, having a chat and this, this podcast sort of really being a lot more personable than, than video, then video calls

Kelsey: the way it was originally supposed to be.

Germaine: Exactly. You’re like a wall away, like far away, but we’ve got to be responsible at the moment and follow the rules. Anyway, moving, moving into something that it’s actually, it makes sort of the whole video calling sort of conversation interesting in that [00:08:00] Facebook’s announced that they’re changing the corporate name to Meta, that’s similar to Google changing to alphabet. I don’t remember when that was.

Kelsey: I’m still not, like you keep mentioning alphabet, but I’m still actually not aware besides you mentioning it of alphabet as a business.

I just only know Google, so I can’t answer that one. Unfortunately,

Germaine: I think you, you, you sort of make that point and to be fair, most people probably won’t notice that Facebook’s changing to match up because we’re talking

Kelsey: about 50 articles about

Germaine: it today. Same thing happened when alphabet was announced.

So maybe you just weren’t paying attention. So essentially what’s happening here is that I did think it was weird when they started calling the company Facebook and the product Facebook as well. So what we’re changing here is not the name of the platform. The platform continues to be Facebook, but we’re changing the company that oversees it, all the company that owns Oculus, [00:09:00] instagram.

Kelsey: Oculus is gone now, though.

Germaine: True. That they’re renaming Oculus as into something else. I forget what it is. And. I watched the 11 minute cut-down version of the whole announcement. I don’t think I assume it went for like an hour and a half, just like every other check event these days who’s got the time for that.

So we’ll include the 11 minute video link put together by the, by the team at CNet but I watched it and I thought it was, it was kind of weird. It’s not that surprising. Zach mark Zuckerberg. The Zack Meister was a bit of a robot. If you watch the video, I’m not, not that weird. I think he’s been called a robot for a little while.

And it’s sort of weird. He, he joked about, you know, in, in this AR AR augmented reality sort of world. Someone else who is choosing the avatar to be a robot and he makes a joke about it. And it’s all a bit sort of tongue in cheek. But I [00:10:00] think what ultimately what Facebook is trying to do is they want to become the, what I want to call the operating system for your social.

You or your like interactions. And when I say social life, I think, I mean, how you socialize with the world and with individuals the name Meta though, like metaverse,

Kelsey: it’s, it’s, it’s an a, it’s a weird one. I don’t really know what it means to myself. I hear people using it as like a descriptive word for people that are a bit like edgy and all of that sort of stuff, but it doesn’t really mean a lot.

Germaine: Yeah, well, the metaverse obviously looked it up for a formal definition. The metaverse is this speculative feature iteration of the internet made-up of persistent shared 3d virtual spaces linked into per se, the virtual universe. So like a, like a virtual existence. And so really what they’re trying to do at Meta is trying to bridge that gap.

So we talked about Oculus, which they bought and now they’ve changed the. [00:11:00] Oculus does augmented reality goggles and sort of gaming. So that’s how they’re, they’re talking about like a hybrid life. So you might sit at your physical. Next to your physical like colleague who’s there in person, but then they’re talking about how the next desk over could be in augmented reality.

You could, you could interact with augmented reality objects that are on your desk or in your. Within your space. And then look over and there could be either, either a hologram or an avatar of a colleague sitting there because they’re coming in from the, the sort of being fed in from their own setup of whatever it may be.

So it’s all quite sort of,

Kelsey: yeah, I’m not sure it’s making me feel kind of unsettled thinking about that kind of scenario. It’s making me think of like, Wall-E kind of vibes of like, where are we going to end up? Because everything’s automated and you no longer have to [00:12:00] get up and go and talk to a colleague.

For example, I mean, we were doing this on a video call. I don’t know if this is just like the very early iteration of where we’re going to end up, but I don’t know. I feel like there could be some issues that pop up.

Germaine: For sure. I think there’s definitely going to be issues, but I mean, see, I like what Facebook does.

I think, you know, mark Zuckerberg deserves respect, but at the same time, he’s a bit of a robot and he’s the head of a big corporation that does things that are more for profit than for the benefit of people. But he does talk about things like not having to commute to work anymore which I think opens up the possibility of say living in the country, Like working in a way that feels like you’re going into work, but doing that in a digital sense.

So you don’t have to physically be there. I think in the developing world, it probably raises the benefits of, you know, not necessarily needing to build out road infrastructure, but instead needing to focus on [00:13:00] the communication side of things, the internet side of things, and don’t get me wrong. All said and done, you know, Facebook at one point was with flying essentially blimps and drones around with wifi and enabling wifi in, I think it was in Africa.

So ultimately Facebook hit this problem where they were like, listen, not enough people have internet to keep using our services. So they literally decided to give people internet. So they would start up a Facebook and they’d make more money. So That’s what it’s driven by at the end of the day, they’re talking about stuff like subsidizing devices or selling them at cost increase adoption.

So this is a multi-billion dollar organization just saying, you know what? We just want everyone to have it. And we want to make it really cheap. Amazon has done that successfully with their tablets and the Amazon. Like didn’t you get a Amazon.

Kelsey: I don’t shop too often on Amazon, but I signed up or I went to buy something.

They said, Hey, sign up for Amazon 30 day free trial, free shipping. So yeah, sure. Why not? And then [00:14:00] they sold me a $10 Amazon Alexa, which I was like, oh, all right. May as well. And then cancel my subscription, which probably goes against what they’re hoping I do, but I got an, Alexa out of it and now they can spy on me.

Germaine: Exactly. And it’s part of your life, right? So they’ve sold, you a $10 a little device, which they probably lost money on, but for sure, every time you look at it, you think Amazon every time. So, I mean, we’re mentioning it like it’s a classmate. Yeah. We’re talking about it now. So they’re getting

all my search information and all of my music requests and all of that sort of stuff.

Kelsey: What time I wake up in the morning? Yeah.

Germaine: I mean, how much information can they just get by just being present? Like always. Like would hope not always listening, but, but who knows? And if you didn’t think it could get creepier some of the stuff that Facebook were talking about was like getting better at tracking how tracking a person’s face and emotions and working [00:15:00] better with face tracking when you have like masks on and, or be it it’s something that gets in the way and developing technology.

Avatars. So your virtual avatar can make eye contact with the person you’re talking to, which is I think, yeah, I get it. I get it. Don’t get me wrong. That’s that’s what it’s going to take to create experiences that are. So lifelike or real.

Kelsey: Yeah, I think there’s concern there though. I remember hearing a while ago, I want to say years ago, and I don’t know where this came from, but basically with animators, a lot of the time when they’re doing movies and TV shows, they actually need to like bring back how realistic the animations are, because then there becomes this disconnect between the audience and what they’ve created, where it’s like almost lifelike.

But people can tell that it’s obviously not real. And then there’s this discomfort. So they actually have to bring it back and make it more [00:16:00] cartoony so that it’s less like scary and all that sort of stuff. So imagine talking to something in the virtual world, that’s so lifelike, but you as a human would still be able to tell, like this is off there’s, this isn’t normal.

And I feel like there would just be a lot of discomfort and.

Germaine: At the start probably, but, you know, I guarantee you Facebook is going to try and get to the point where they can track every single bore on someone’s face and the map, how that would behave and react. It’s getting into the realm of creepy.

I do wonder, you know, you have all these big like companies with, with insane amounts of money in the bank. Yeah, what they have the power to do and what maybe governments should be doing to try and like intercept this we’ve talked about in the past that governments are often reacting rather than being proactive because it’s these private companies that push technology to the next next level.

But maybe this is one case where [00:17:00] they need to sort of step in and, and not allow certain things, but Yeah. Talking about Facebook or, well, Meta one of the Meta other Meta companies, Instagram has launched a S story link. So that’s like the link sticker that used to be a thing I think, reserved for people with a certain amount of followers.

Kelsey: I think it was, yeah, I think it was, I don’t know if it was like a verified thing or businesses that had yet particular. Sort of to show that you’re established enough. But just the regular old Joe or the regular small business with a couple of hundred followers, couldn’t do any of that. So it was classic link in my bio every single time.

So I think this opens up a good opportunity for those smaller businesses. To be able to yeah. Put in links into their stories. And if there’s, I don’t know, crowdfunding things or important information, that’s, you know, user shared. So you know, campaigns that are shared. Thousands of people’s [00:18:00] accounts.

They can now all link to the website where it’s meant to go. So I think that’s really positive and a good step. It’ll be interesting to see if that’s something that will contribute to people staying on the platform or not, because I know for me as an individual and as somebody who runs a business account, it’s very frustrating that we can’t put links into things.

And it’s just always trying to get people to go from story or post, to profile, to link to wherever it’s going after that.

It’s not fun.

Germaine: Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a bit of a removed sort of like you’re asking them for way too much. Really when someone’s just scrolling through social media I also wonder what this has, what this would do because from memory actually yeah, Facebook’s got, or Instagram in this case has the native browser.

So I wonder then how much of this stuff Facebook can track And how much, how much that would do for them in terms of analytics and if they would even give us those analytics as a, as additional [00:19:00] power for like business accounts. And I’ve heard interesting sort of thoughts about this, because some people say that it’s going to lead to more spamming on stories like spam links and just dodgy things.

But and it’s sort of taken away the exclusivity. I think. There’s a lot of things that technology has resulted in that sort of makes you go okay, if you have, you know, the, the cotton bud sticking out of your ears. And in terms of the AirPods, that’s a certain status symbol. That’s a certain thing that you can sort of hold over people or flex on, on the ground.

And, and feel like link stickers. That that was one of those things for better or worse. And now they’ve opened up to for everyone, but I don’t see. From an Instagram point of view. I don’t necessarily, apart from the verified take, I don’t know why they would want to keep things locked down to certain people because the more features they have, the more people can use those.

And you know, hopefully would improve their [00:20:00] retention.

It’s definitely one of those things I’ve never understood why they didn’t let us do easy linking why it was so restricted, but maybe they’ve started to listen. So that’s.

It might just be that they were testing it out for a little while and now they’ve sort of enabled it to see like, who knows how much they refined from there, that, that backend and what sort of data points they pick out there as well.

Dolomites has, has finished this. Commonwealth bank.

Kelsey: Yeah. So it’s a bit of an interesting one. So Dollarmites actually started in, like, I think it was 1931 from the article I read. So it’s been around for a significant amount of time and it’s a, it’s a big ethical gray area because it targets kids school aged kids.

And it’s a program that they sort of marketed as helping kids and parents understand the power of saving. So it was a case of you’d bring in this little yellow booklet on a certain day, each week filled with a couple of like gold [00:21:00] coins, hand it off, it would be taken to the bank and deposited. And then you get your little yellow book back to put in your pocket money for the next whenever I loved it, I was a Dollarmite and I think most people around our age were Dollarmites as well. But finally governments have cracked down and sort of said, this is not ethical. There’s nothing that’s showing, people are learning to save from this. It’s really just I can’t think of what the word is, but indoctrinating kids into the Commonwealth bank.

I mean, and I’m, I’m still with Commonwealth because I can’t be bothered to move or go anywhere else. And they’ve just been, you know, always there. Probably because I was indoctrinated as a kid through the Dollarmites program and just never, never thought to change. So it’s, it’s a bit of a concerning one. There’s always questions when it comes up around like marketing to kids and what you can do, what you can’t do.

And I’m sure there’s a lot of regulation around that, but Dollarmites from 1931 to 2021, it’s done apparently.

Germaine: So I [00:22:00] think it’s more. I think it’s eyeopening that this could have run for that long. Yeah.

Kelsey: It’s pretty crazy. And I think from the article, I read as well that Commonwealth like the valuation of the Dollarmites program to Commonwealth was in the range of $10 billion, which is, I mean, obviously we’re talking bank, so they’re dealing with massive numbers anyway, but $10 billion on one little school program where they deposit a couple of gold coins, each person.

$10 billion worth of sort of lifetime value that comes out of that. And that’s, that’s insane.

Germaine: Well, exactly. I mean, this is how much money do you think, like they’re going to have to now spend to make the, the loss revenue there or the, the, the lost indoctrination indoctrination. That’s probably a word. Yeah, I mean, and, and don’t get me wrong.

Like we’ve, I’ve, I’ve sort of contemplated how much we can reach out to universities, for example, [00:23:00] because and whether we go present at unis or get students as interns, Not just for the helping students side of things, but just the simple, you know, guess who’s going to be the marketing director or a CEO in the future.

It’s the students. So, you know, for us to get in there and sort of help them out has that marketing benefit now. We’ve got to really work hard for it and talk to universities and get them in where the co the Commonwealth bank could just, well, a lot of banks by the sounds of it used to have, or used to do educational sort of branded content.

And they can’t do that anymore. Apparently the, the whole thing was that parents really valued Dollarmites and that was their defense for sort of keeping it around. But they tried

Kelsey: yeah they tried to justify,

Germaine: they’d have to like, there’s no way that they’re going to say no, it’s like really good for us. It’s

Kelsey: it’s [00:24:00] they wouldn’t go down without a fight for sure.

Germaine: Exactly. But I mean, how many, in my opinion, our generation hasn’t been that great at saving. So really are they, I mean, did you learn a lot from saving through Dollarmites do you think, or do you think,

Kelsey: well, I think my the contributions actually just came from mom and dad handing me a few dollars on the day of our little yellow book, having to go in. Cause I, I mean, I don’t think we ever did like chores for money at home. It wasn’t really that case. It was more like you’re living here, you’re going to contribute. You’re not getting paid for it, but we’ll pay for meals. You know? So I think, I don’t know if I learned necessarily to save through that program at learn to save otherwise from my parents.

But yeah, I can’t say the Dollarmites had a significant impact on my life besides being my lifelong bank, because I couldn’t be bothered to.

Germaine: Well, and there’s that, that as well, right? The friction [00:25:00] to change banks is so, and then the more they put up those walls, the more you want to stay in. Like I started and I’m still, I’ve still got a Westpac account.

I have a CommBank account, not because of Dollarmites but just cause I think I had to open one for like one of the student’s societies, but again, it’s too annoying to close. I’ve still got some money in there. It’s just going to do its thing. Same with the Westpac. Like it’s too annoying to close though, you know?

Cause you’ve got to go to the bank, like they could make it very easy. They could just let you go online and close the close the account. But of course they’re not going to do that. They want your money. It’s not in their interest. So I think it’s fair to say that it doesn’t really have a lot of value apart from the value that it presents to CommBank.

I don’t know. I think about time if you ask me. Banks are under a lot of, a lot of threat from crypto and all these smaller digital banks, et cetera, that are, that are coming out. So this is just another one of those things. That’s, I’m putting pressure on [00:26:00] them, but moving on to LinkedIn, rolling out its freelance marketplace.

I mean, and when we say LinkedIn, we really mean Microsoft because they’re owned by Microsoft. As far as I know, this is the first move. And I’m trying to think. Surely it’s the first move of like a freelance marketplace nature by any of the big players?

Kelsey: Yeah, it’s an interesting move. I was thinking about it in the context of LinkedIn, obviously being a social network and it’s the only social network that really is work-related.

But I also feel like even though it’s, work-related, it’s very restricted to a particular type of work and that tends to be sort of, I think, in the marketing space. Anything that really requires networking executive level sort of stuff, whatever that looks like.

Germaine: very much professional

Kelsey: so then bringing in this freelance platform to compete with Fiverr and Upwork, and I think Fiverr and Upwork, I’m not super familiar with them, but my understanding is that it’s a lot of sort of [00:27:00] graphic design consulting copywriting.

Germaine: Yeah. Digital, well digitally, digitally deliverable professional services. Yeah.

Kelsey: I just think that this will open up a new avenue of potential accounts or users, I suppose, into LinkedIn who are in that freelance space. And previously weren’t super keen to go into LinkedIn and have that really manual networking kind of thing that they’d have to do.

Cause this gives them a proper platform to build that network and build a reputation on LinkedIn, where there are professionals that want these services. So I think it’s a really interesting move. I think it’s really smart move. It’ll be interesting to see how it does play out and whether it can compete with fivver and upwork who are obviously reasonably established in that space. It’s bringing the work to the audience.

Germaine: Yeah, apparently they ran a closed beta in the U S that led to 2 million users. Now that doesn’t say, I assume that’s 2 million people interacting on the platform, [00:28:00] whether they’re sellers or I thought it was,

Kelsey: yeah. An increase in 2 million users from the testing. It was my understanding I could be off.

Germaine: Well, it’s saying that this, the tech crunch article is saying that it’s already picked up to a million users from among the nearly 800 million users. So I think, yeah, it’s just 2 million users. Sort of interacting, but again, I, I, like, I wonder what that number really means, like is that sort of, you know, Kelsey going on from her LinkedIn to check out the marketplace or is it you buying something?

It’s almost certainly doesn’t represent the number of like sellers or service providers on there. That’s way too big, a number. But like I said, I think it’s interesting that these, the biggest like established. Company Microsoft to get into this space where they have a platform that delivers services like this.

I mean, Facebook has marketplace, but it’s nowhere near the same. [00:29:00] I feel like see with Fivver and Upwork they have a reputation for a certain quality of work. Right. And Facebook marketplace versus say something like Gumtree or eBay. They certainly have their reputations, but those reputations, we don’t directly correlate with the brand or with the company itself where we need to professional services like this.

I think you start to correlate your brand with the quality of those services. So if you have inferior service providers, I think that could quote unquote cheapen the LinkedIn brand, but then again, maybe it’s a good way for Microsoft to get into this space without putting the Microsoft name on the line.

And it’s just the LinkedIn name on the line.

Kelsey: Yeah. I don’t know how LinkedIn has been performing, but it’ll be interesting to see how this has an impact is. I mean, I have LinkedIn but I don’t think I ever actually go on there and scroll or do anything because it’s just so full of those inspirational, [00:30:00] I picked up a dollar today and I gave it to a homeless bag, like a

Germaine: that’s more like I, you know, grew up with a family of mice and didn’t have food for 10 years and, you know, I own a pest control company and that statistic, but but it’s just that sort of stuff. Like. I want to see work-related things not people patting themselves on the back really like, oh, and I’m not doing this to, you know, I pat myself on the back, but just saying that if more people gave, you know, ex prisoners a chance that they too might find the next VP of sales, like it’s just silly.

So I think, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I wonder if it will cheapen the brand. I wonder what sort of spaces I end up end up being, I think, five or not work, you know, have a certain reputation, even talking about 99 designs, certain reputation there. Specially if you’re [00:31:00] a professional within any of those spaces. So I guess we’ve got to wait and see.

Jumping from one big player to another one. Google might not be the default Android search. Android devices for much longer. This is essentially being brought around by companies. Sorry, not companies, countries. And in this case, Australia’s ACCC saying that it’s just, you just need to like Google, you need to provide options.

Cause at the moment you, you, you see your search bar, it’s Google, that’s all it is. We don’t have an option to change it. It is the on iPhone as well, but that’s because Google pays apple an insane amount of money to stay is to keep sort of being the default search engine. To me, this, I mean, this is how ingrained it is.

I didn’t even realize, I didn’t even think that we needed a different home. Like I never looked and [00:32:00] thought I really wish I had been here. I don’t trust. Yeah.

Kelsey: I think it’s a classic case of what we’ve discussed a few times in terms of governments trying to regulate and catching up with it. Because as you said, it’s gotten to a point where Google has such a monopoly on the search space that you don’t really consider other ones.

And there are like a minority. Yeah, exactly. You, you Google it. Yeah. So, I mean, there is minorities who are using other ones. I think Duck Duck Go is something you mentioned the other day, some of these other weird ones that I’ve never even heard of, but I think it is important to have variety in there so that Google can’t continue to be such a monopoly.

Obviously they have a good product and everyone does all of their SEO and all of that sort of stuff for Google. But I think that it’s important for that to be regulated so that they can’t continue taking up every little bit of internet space and life space without us realizing before we completely controlled by Google.[00:33:00]

Germaine: The, the thing with Google though, is that they’ve kept innovating. Cause I, I, I think in a lot of spaces, competition leads to more innovation, but for whatever reason, Google is just continue to continue to innovate in the search engine space. Not really having a competitor. Like, let’s be honest.

Kelsey: It’s probably preemptive in that case then.

Cause if they stopped innovating, something else would come up and people would be like, oh look, Google’s rubbish. They stopped doing X and Y, there’s this new person on the block. Let’s try them out. But if Google continues to innovate, then they are keeping every competitor at bay because people will just look at and go, I don’t want to compete with Google. I can’t compete with Google. I don’t want to try.

Germaine: Or, and this is this is a good segue into the next topic. Was it uh, was it because of the financial gain that they had I to, to make by making all these different changes to the search engine and how things are displayed.

We’ve talked about a few different search features and potentially could be money-related cause you [00:34:00] mentioned well you pronounced it as A M P which I don’t blame you Kelsey you’re not a developer, you’re not in the space that. It’s amp because A M P I think is a big financial that’s who I thought this

Kelsey: was about A M P I’m somewhat familiar.

Germaine: A M P or amp is, let me look up the amp websites. I think they call it. Excellent rated mobile pages. There you go. It was originally created by Google and essentially what they do is they strip back a lot of the content. You’ve probably noticed it’s once in a while, Kelsey, when you click through to search result on your phone, it pops up in like a very bare bones display.

Like there’s no ads floating around. There’s no real background color. It’s sort of just text and that’s it. And Google push it for a long time. And I think WordPress encouraged it as well, automatically encourages it as well. But what’s come out is that it’s actually led to less revenue being pushed through to website owners and [00:35:00] publishers, which is not a good thing, which is obviously not something that someone like Google would want to want anyone finding out about it’s come out as part of some unredacted antitrust complaints from Google and this is just directly from Google internal documents. So it’s something worth mentioning for developers out there. I was never a fan of amp. I think you just build a website so well that you don’t need this artificial, like, you know, just extract, text, get rid of everything else, sort of set up to make your websites, mobile experience good enough. I just think that that’s just, that was just too far. But. Yeah, it looks like there were, there were financial reasons because Google had to pay people less.

Really ultimately that’s, that’s what it was. Or at least Google get, gets to make more money than, than everyone else involved in that piece. So really had to mention that keeping the topic on money [00:36:00] Tik TOK is testing a tipping function which allows you to tip, create.

I don’t know. I think twitch lets you do that,

Kelsey: I was going to say, I think Twitch is the other platform that does that kind of model, as an Australian, I find it very weird. The thought of like watching and consuming digital content and then being like, yeah, this is great. Here’s five bucks. It’s a really odd concept to me, probably less weird to like Americans and other countries that have tipping culture.

Just, I dunno, it doesn’t sit well with me.

Germaine: Just pay people properly the first time, support them further by sort of making your own decision around, you know, how much you want to tip someone. Yeah, exactly. But it does, it does sort of increase, and I’m sure we’ve mentioned this previously that TikTok’s going to want to monetize and see how they can monetize moving forward.

And this to me is just a way [00:37:00] of saying, you know, what, if you want to, if you want to, you know, give some money to some. I do so I do wonder how much they will keep though. Users must be 18 years or older to send tips to creators. Oh. And you don’t even have to be following the account to tip them. So you can just tip whoever you like.

It is limited sort of release and it looks like accounts must be in good shape. On the platform and have at least a hundred thousand followers meet an age requirement and agree to TikTok’s tips terms. It’s a lot of T’s but I wonder, I just can’t see. They don’t seem oh, any money tip to creators will go directly to that individual.

Okay. For now.

Kelsey: That’s an interesting one. I really thought TikTok would take more of a step share that,

Germaine: Maybe do they get to hang on to your [00:38:00] financial information? And then when they add, you know, paid stickers and things like that, they’ve got a, they’ve got a user who’s already into there into the info and it makes it very easy to buy.

I know that that that’s certainly like a thing for me when I, when my card details already. It’s very easy to just go. Yup. Do it. Yeah. Very true. Maybe that’s what it is. Weird, but moving onto someone, moving on to apple, someone who’s used to taking a lot of money, big cut from everyone. I’m just on just getting on with my segues today.

I don’t know. I don’t know how you feel about it, Kelsey, but for our listener. Leave a comment. Tell me what you think about my segues. Are they good or are they sort of dad level jokes? But apple seems to have forgotten that it built an notch in the Mac book.

Kelsey: Yeah. This is something we touched on last week.

Actually, we had that conversation, but we were sort of saying, how will the notch interact with things, turns out [00:39:00] not well. Sometimes you have

Germaine: Notch well.

Kelsey: God that’s that, one’s a bad one. Yeah. So if people have been reporting on various Programs that popup. So probably a good example is maybe some of the Adobe suite that we’ll have lots and lots of tabs across the top.

And all of those tab options just continue until they get hidden by the notch and you can’t click on it and you can’t do anything. It’s just a menu item. That’s disappeared behind the notch. And I just thought. Ridiculous. You, I don’t know how you introduce something like a notch and don’t come up with fail safes and, you know, foolproof ways to make sure if you’ve got a menu bar, maybe it will like do a second level or it will split the menu.

I don’t know how, but just something else. Nothing

Germaine: do something about it.

Kelsey: Yeah. It just seems insane to me. How do you overlook something like that? Cause it was one of the first questions you’d asked, actually that was like one of the first things you thought about when it came to this notch. [00:40:00] So I don’t know how during all their planning and everything, they didn’t go.

What happens if there’s more than five menu options?

Germaine: Well there’s a video of a user, like to be honest, I’ve been trying to even find how the cursor or. Interacts within the notch. I’ve just, haven’t seen anyone do it. If it was, if the new Mac books were more affordable, I would have just said, let’s just buy one and check it out.

But I just can’t go and get myself to that, that level. But there are, oh, this is snazzy labs. Who’s who’s a big YouTuber. So let’s say, say.

Oh, gosh,

there’s just stuff behind the menu by, and he can’t see it and he’s hovering over it. Look at that.

Kelsey: Yeah, that’s really, it’s just a massive oversight from apple. Oh, so the mouse jumps. Oh, there you go.[00:41:00]

Wow.

Okay. Yeah.

Germaine: Wow. Hold on. What? Oh, that’s the DaVinci resolve and the thing here is

wow. So the thing, I mean, really we’ll have links to the original article by the verge. So if you’re listening to this, you should go use the links to really get that information. But these are not small. Like players, these aren’t like random, you know, small like developers who are building software, the photography and venture resolve and the Adobe creative suite.

And

Kelsey: it’s not a niche case that’s for sure.

Germaine: No. Well, it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s a neat niche device, but this software is used exactly by those like the device near niche case. You would think that it’s everyone who uses the [00:42:00] device.

Kelsey: Yep. It’s mind blowing,

Germaine: like how. Knowing apple, I think they will blame well in the past, they’ve blamed the users.

They’ve said, well, I think when an antenna gate, when people found out that holding a, one of the iPhones that in a way ruined it, I think it was internet connectivity or the phone signals signal drops. So. Point. Yeah. I mean, apple then blamed the user for holding the phone the wrong way

Kelsey: How dare you hold a phone that’s meant to be mobile and moveable

Germaine: exactly. And like we mentioned last week, they’re the, they’re the same people who put in a charging port on the underside of a rechargeable mouse. So this is somewhat expected for, but, but really weird for a company. The design prowess, or at least the effort they put into design.

Yeah, it’s a weird one, but the last, the last [00:43:00] one, the last topic for this week’s episode is that MailChimp and Shopify team up in an ecommerce boost. Tell me more about this one.

Kelsey: Yeah. So, I mean, it sort of says it in the title MailChimp and Shopify have partnered. So they’re basically doing a direct integration between the two platforms MailChimp, traditionally as that, you know, newsletter email kind of software, but they’re as I think we’ve discussed in previous episodes, branching out into sort of adjacent service offerings.

So I think I just wanted to mention this one because it was interesting to me. For these two to pair up, because of course you’ve got a lot of probably e-commerce platforms that would be using MailChimp to send out their newsletters for, you know, sales and all of that sort of stuff. So having that direct integration with Shopify just removes all sorts of barriers to purchase it.

And I think that’s really exciting. The other thing that the article sort of mentioned was around the analytics that people will be able to [00:44:00] access. So basically combining the analytics and MailChimp and Shopify, which I imagine will give you incredible customer insights about who’s clicking on things where they’re going, whether they’re buying from your emails or not.

Cause I think that can be difficult to track sometimes and all sorts of other stuff. So it’ll just be interesting to see how these two interact going forward and how, like, what that will mean for some of these smaller businesses who use platforms such as Shopify.

Germaine: Yeah, this is also interesting. Given what we talked about at the, at the start with a Vista print, acquiring another company.

This is, I mean, this is all the benefits of an acquisition. Without a company having to acquire the other though I wouldn’t be surprised if, you know, either one of these companies comes out and says we just acquired this other company. At some point I’m trying to remember that it was mailchimp bought recently,

Kelsey: I don’t know if it was bought. I think we discussed its valuation it had like, had some crazy valuation [00:45:00] maybe.

Germaine: Yes. Yes. I

Kelsey: don’t remember what it is off the top of my

Germaine: head though. Oh, yes. It was bought by Intuit, so sorry. It was bought by, into it for $12 billion. So I wouldn’t be surprised of into it, reaches out to Shopify to buy Shopify as well in time, but Integrations would have been in the works for a long, long time.

But like you said, Kelsey, I think it, it sort of puts more power in the hands of the consumer in this case, small business owners, which is never, ever a bad thing. So I think my big takeaway from this episode is that there’s a lot happening for, to make it very easy for small business owners to do a lot of design and websites and production themselves.

And the scary takeaway is just what Facebook is doing with the, with the change of name.

Kelsey: Yeah, absolutely. I’m I just feel sad about Dolomites, to be honest, I get it. And I agree with it closing, but there’s a little part of me that has a very strong connection to it. And the memories I have around

Germaine: it [00:46:00] kind of feels like.

Vegemite stopping production or any of that scale almost isn’t it for? Any, any Australian saying that Dolomites doesn’t have probably the international recognition that something like Vegemite has, but in Australia I would say Dolomites is, I mean, even Vegemite Dolemite that they sort of even go

on that note. Thank you for. Joining us on this episode of the podcast as always, we’ve got links to everything that we’ve talked about in the description including some bonus links for things like the 11 minute video that’s seen it put together about Facebook’s Metta announcement, along with all the other things that we talked about and multiple links where it makes sense to give you different perspectives.

As a reminder, as well, don’t forget to join the Facebook. Link for that in the description to where we talk about these sorts of things and try our best to bring you [00:47:00] as much value as possible. So thanks for listening to this episode, catch you on the next one. Catch you all

Kelsey: next week.