Each week I’ll have a curated list of links from the latest tech to just interesting reads or videos, as well as updates on my own entrepreneurial endeavors. Thanks for joining on this journey!

Topics for this week:

• divs.progress

• Perplexity

• The Future of Live Streaming

• AI Ad Pipeline

• Writing With and About Technology

divs.progress

After a week of pain management, I’ve almost completely returned to normal (with fewer teeth), so I began ramping up progress on my business plans. I created divs.design a few weeks ago, but I want to get some extra practice with Webflow because up to this point, I’ve only built and published 2 sites in total (jaypeters.dev being the other one). If I’m going to be offering services to clients, it can’t hurt to have experience building a variety of websites.

Naturally, that idea spawned a whole series of questions and opportunities. I really like the “divs” brand so I researched some ideas on how to structure the company beyond the design agency and ended up purchasing domains for:

• divs.ventures

• divs.digital

• divs.media

• divs.holdings

Domains are only purchased, no hosting yet so unfortunately those aren’t clickable, check back on that 😉

Sticking with the “divs.” theme, each will have it’s own focus, with .ventures as the parent company, .digital for running sites and practicing SEO, .media for video and social media content, and if things go well, .holdings for finances and investing.

A long road ahead but I’m excited about the “divs” brand. Stay tuned!

Perplexity

I was catching up on AI this week, which is a task in and of itself given the rate that AI changes now, and I ran across this video from Wes Roth about Perplexity.

With more and more paywalls and layers of ads, he’s encouraging people to try searching with Perplexity AI. It’s an AI built to be a search engine, or basically what Google should have been (or AskJeeves pretended to be). You can ask it a question like you’d ask a person, and it’s able to understand, do the search for you, and provide links to the articles it referenced for it’s answer, not only providing a stronger answer, but also bypassing the ads and paywalls. It sounds like it uses a mixture of AIs giving it a nice advantage over Google since Google has to stick with their own model and still try to play within the bounds of their ad system.

I still highly recommend ChatGPT, but doesn’t hurt to have options. I’ve been using the free version of Perplexity throughout the week and I’ve been impressed. Not only are they well explained and supported answers, but it recommends 3 suggested follow-up searches after each search and I always found myself getting side-tracked clicking on follow-up after follow-up. I’d recommend giving it a shot. Full Perplexity video below:

The Future of Live Streaming

I’ve fallen off my streaming schedule with the holidays and wisdom teeth removal, but it’s in the works for the future, and these videos re-inspired my interest.

Gary Vee tested out streaming on Twitch at the end of last year, but now he seems to be making it a regular thing, streaming his full work day, occasionally unmuting and interacting with chat. He posted a video yesterday saying streaming is the biggest opportunity on social media in 2024, so he seems confident in the idea.

Ludwig was one of the biggest streamers on Twitch, with 2nd highest subscription total ever at 283,066 subscriptions in one month. He moved to streaming exclusively on YouTube, and now he streams on both, but he seems to still believe in streaming. He’s been a top streamer for years, and points out it’s changed quite a bit, but streaming in general is going strong, however the platforms may vary in which people stream on. He also recently released a video on how to be successful at streaming (from a video game streaming perspective) but still some lessons to be learned from an expert.

From a more business perspective, Think Media has been recommending streaming on YouTube for years, and repurposing parts of those structured streams into individual videos that you re-upload later.

Safe to say streaming isn’t a bad idea right now.

AI Ad Pipeline

Another example of the YouTube algorithm doing it’s magic, this video popped up in my feed and I ended up watching it because the “1 Prompt = 1,000 Ads” line got me. Can’t say no to a 1000x.

I was more than impressed with the guest on this video - Rory Flynn. You can tell it’s someone walking the walk and explaining the process very well. I have a love-hate relationship with pipelines so I’m always interested in a well executed pipeline idea. He breaks down his company’s process on how to use Midjourney to generate professional ad images and further details how to optimize that process to scale it to 1000s of ads in an hour. Interesting stuff for sure.

It’s basically a full hour but it’s worth a watch if you have the time:

Writing With and About Technology

I wasn’t familiar with Chris Dixon until I saw a tweet about his new book this week, and shortly after, he showed up on Gary Vee’s channel. Chris leads crypto investing for a16z which is the Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz investment firm and has been in tech for a long time.

Chris started blogging about technology decades ago, but recently saw an opportunity to write a book about the technology behind cryptocurrency and NFTs to help change the narrative. The technology itself will have some huge applications but, like anything, there is an incentives problem, which Chris refers to as The Computer vs The Casino.

In his new book Read Write Own, he lays out the history of the internet to give context to the role that decentralized tools like crypto, blockchain and ledgers will play in the future. One opportunity is ownership. At a time where there’s growing concern of deepfakes and software able to recreate anything, cryptographic tokens will play a pivotal role in proving that you are the one that made that thing. Fascinating stuff for sure.

His full conversation with Gary Vee, and David Perrell below:

And that’s it for this week! Another newsletter all about the future: streaming, AI, crypto and divs.

Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

If you want to start a newsletter like this on beehiiv and support me in the process, here’s my referral link: https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=jay-peters. Otherwise, let me know what you think at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected], I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks for reading!