Amazon SVP Rohit Prasad said that the feature can mimic any voice when given a less than a minute of audio samples, saying that it’s intended to “make the memories last” after “so many of us have lost someone we love,” in a reference to the pandemic as well (as another instance of the worst tech bros’ belief that death is optional.)
The “hear long-lost relatives speak again!” is a strange pitch, and it’s just as likely that Amazon’s simply responding to some demand for Alexa to feature celebrity voices. By providing this voice impersonation feature, they put the responsibility of capturing a famous person’s voice onto the user, and thus Amazon doesn’t have to pay any licensing/likeness fees.
If you watch Black Mirror, you’re probably remembering the episode Be Right Back, in which a woman recreates her dead boyfriend with readily-available technology:
The report was created by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph Team, who based it on data from 6 million LinkedIn members with “identifiable engineering or IT talent from January to May each year since 2019.” This means that the three-fourths of the time covered by the study was during the disruptive COVID-19 era, the Great Resignation, and the recent economic downturn.
The study also focused on metro areas showing the fastest growth rates, which would rule out more-established places like that other, lesser Bay Area and Austin.
The other Florida city is Cape Coral, which is nicely situated halfway between Tampa and Miami and features beautiful surroundings and relatively affordable houses — if you can work remotely, it’s a pretty nice place to set up shop.
You should be a regular listener/viewer of the Arguing Agile podcast, a YouTube show hosted by Tampa Bay techies Brian Orlando and Om Patel that features local techies talking about software development, agility, and everything in between, completely unscripted and unrehearsed — just real conversations about real tech work. In the past year, they’ve published 66 episodes, the latest of which features…me!
In this episode, titled Personal Agility and the Great Resignation, we talk about doing work in the brave new world of post-2020 and discuss things such as:
The power of team-building ceremonies and exercises, and why they have to be meaningful and not just “doing team stuff for team stuff’s sake.”
In the past couple of months, I’ve had my first chances to meet with my team at Auth0 (Developer Marketing) after working with them for a year and a half — first at a small summit in Salt Lake City, and last week in London.
Earlier in your life, it’s much easier to work ultra-hard in the quest to advance your career, but you can’t do it for an extended period. This is the exact thing that generates mid-life crises, and physical and mental health issues.
We talk about my time at Microsoft where I was a Windows Phone Champion, Albert Shum’s design for its “Metro” UI, and Microsoft’s thinking during the Ballmer era: “The mobile platform is the desktop platform, but lamer.”
I was at a gathering of P2P people at Microsoft in 2001 that was attended by Tim O’Reilly and Dave Winer, where we were told that “IE6 will be the last browser, because the future is applets.”
A story from my time at Cory Doctorow’s startup where how I show how hard it is to predict the future.
The importance of communication when working remotely and keeping Conway’s Law in mind.
Strip away the technology, and a teacher from hundreds of years ago would still recognize a present-day classroom and the lecture format.
We share stories about learning by doing, with Om talking about his daughter at med school and me talking about a story about the Logo programming language, where children learned beyond what they were being taught.
Our first computers: I had an Apple //e and Om had a Spectrum ZX, two serious Generation X machines.
I learned how to program at a computer store that tolerated my hanging out: Batteries Included, in Toronto.
Learning new languages: Python and Lingo, and picking up new languages to get the job done. This may be the first time on the podcast series where the languages Lisp and Prolog get mentioned.
A question that Brian asks during interviews: “Tell me about a time in the last 18 months where you did something to update your skills.”
Software isn’t a what, it’s a how. If you make software for an industry or field, you’re not in the software industry, but the industry or field that you’re making the software for.
About not participating in what Scott Galloway calls “the menace economy”: “I want to earn fair profit for my effort, but I don’t want to do it by stepping on somebody’s neck.”
There’s so much traditional culture force behind the way work is done. Ebenezer Scrooge’s accounting office in A Christmas Carol isn’t all that different from its modern-day counterpart.
Om: “I like to see a sitcom called The Home Office.”
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, June 20 through Sunday, June 26, 2022.
Every week, with the assistance of a couple of Jupyter Notebooks that I put together, I compile this list for the Tampa Bay tech community.
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
StartupBus 2022 will depart from Tampa Bay!
If you’re looking for an adventure, a chance to test your startup skills, and an experience that will make your résumé stand out, join me on StartupBus Florida, which departs Tampa Bay on July 27, when it sets course for Austin, Texas!
On this three-day journey, “buspreneurs” will form teams, create a business idea, build a software demo for that idea, and develop pitches for that idea. When they arrive in Austin, they’ll spend two days pitching their startups to a panel of judges.
I was a “buspreneur” on StartupBus Florida in 2019, the last time the event took place, and our team made it to the finals and got the runner-up position. This time, I’m a “conductor” — one of the coaches on the bus — and our team is here to help you rise to the challenge.
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles.
Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
The title of this post should be a big hint: Everything you need to know in order to win StartupBus North America 2022 is contained within a podcast. This is the third in a series of posts covering the “Startup Bus” series of episodes from Gimlet Media’s Startup podcast, which covered the New York bus’ journey during StartupBus 2017.
…and here are the lessons I took away from this episode:
If you run into a difficult person in the morning, you ran into a difficult person. If you run into difficult people all day, you’re the difficult person. I don’t want to reduce Ash, one of the buspreneurs, to a single quality — difficult person — but his “hey, I’m just being real” approach to everyone and everything is one of the hallmarks of difficult person-ry. One of the challenges of being a difficult person is that people will work with you only if you provide value that outweighs your difficulty, and that’s not easy to accomplish. This episode gives us a deeper look at Ash. While he can be a difficult person, we get a better understanding of who he is. Which leads me to me to my next observation:
“The thing about StartupBus is that it really is like a reality TV show. It’s so intense that every interaction, every personality can feel like a caricature of real life.”In the previous episode, Eric the narrator observed that StartupBus feels a lot like one of those “reality TV” competition shows. In this episode, he takes the observation one step further by noting that in a high-pressure setup like StartupBus, it’s all too easy to reduce your busmates to the most obvious aspect of their personality. Remember that people are more than what you see on the surface.
Even though the company you’re creating on the bus isn’t “real,” it helps to get real users, and you either get them through your social network or through advertising. It’s more impressive to the judges at the finals when you can say “Even at this early stage, we already have x users for our product.” You may be working under a compressed timeline, but it’s still doable, and not only do users give you cred with the judges; users can also give you valuable feedback.
Pay attention to the details when you’re spending money. One of the teams paid for Facebook ads, but clicking on the ads took users to https://phishly.io when their site actually lived at plain old http://phishly.io. That was 65 dollars down the drain.
StartupBus may be the “wild card” that you need in your life. As Madelena Mak, one of the conductors on the bus says: “I think like lot of people who join the bus have that same feeling I felt, like that they want to be dealt a wildcard. That they want to be pushed to the limits so they can break out of their own old molds. Like they want to be something more than who they think they can be. It’s not about the bus. It’s about learning something about yourself.”
The pitching gets tougher. As the bus approaches the destination city — New Orleans in the case of StartupBus 2017, Austin in this year’s case — you’ll be pitching in front of judges who’ll ask questions that will require you to have thought through more angles. For example:
Team Daisy — the folks behind the funeral-planning app — were asked if they’d considered handling issues beyond just the funeral, such as death certificates.
Team Denari — the team with the app for sending cryptocurrency to people in need — got stuck on a question that exposed their blockchain-induced blindness. When they said that they could outdo GoFundMe because it services only 19 countries, one of the judges countered with “You are talking about now securities exchange over multiple countries. Maybe there are reasons GoFundMe only deals with 19. Which I haven’t heard you guys say. Is it cause they don’t want to? Because that’s kind of what it comes off as. It’s like, ‘GoFundMe is the largest one, they’re only in 19 countries.’ Why is that?”
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, June 13 through Sunday, June 19, 2022.
Every week, with the assistance of a couple of Jupyter Notebooks that I put together, I compile this list for the Tampa Bay tech community.
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
StartupBus 2022 will depart from Tampa Bay!
If you’re looking for an adventure, a chance to test your startup skills, and an experience that will make your résumé stand out, join me on StartupBus Florida, which departs Tampa Bay on July 27, when it sets course for Austin, Texas!
On this three-day journey, “buspreneurs” will form teams, create a business idea, build a software demo for that idea, and develop pitches for that idea. When they arrive in Austin, they’ll spend two days pitching their startups to a panel of judges.
I was a “buspreneur” on StartupBus Florida in 2019, the last time the event took place, and our team made it to the finals and got the runner-up position. This time, I’m a “conductor” — one of the coaches on the bus — and our team is here to help you rise to the challenge.
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
Apparently “scooter rental” — a more accurate description of Bird’s business — wasn’t “TechCrunchy” enough, so they went with the phrase “shared micromobility company,” a case of title inflation that will someday join the ranks of “sanitation engineer.”
