Hi there,

More living space? Don’t worry, Earth’s got you covered by creating more new land all the time. You can watch a brand-new island being born off the coast of Japan this past week.

In this Open Letter:

• Next wave: 5 Big new tech shake-ups.

• Oxygen on Venus, half-price PS5s & electric Uber.

• Insider smarts: Bootstrapping a major CyberSecurity platform.

• How you invest: Behold, the often-surprising results.

• Tell someone: Share this & get free business tools.

TRENDING NOW

5 Major New Tech Shake Ups

Inside the brand-new BombGPT Altman just dropped…

Just as we start relaxing into a world with AI, OpenAI drops a bomb at their first-ever Dev summit – and, once again, some rippling waves will reach our shores soon…

Why, you ask? Most media are just putting us to sleep with long lists of incremental performance improvements announced at the event – how far back it can recall and boring stuff like that. And that’s great, you can go read yourself to tears about that elsewhere.

We’re talking about that pivotal moment when Altman shows how they’re giving users the ability to create apps (or GPTs as they call them) and make them available on a new OpenAI GPT store. 

Missed it? Behold:

“App Stores” are big business

Some context: Last year, Apple grossed about $80 billion in app store revenue. But that’s nothing. Through the store, Apple has ±36 million registered developers who maintain almost 1.8 million apps – apps that add value to 373 million weekly Apple users without Apple having to do a thing.

Now imagine OpenAI can get millions of developers contributing to making apps for its 100m weekly active users. The best part? Looking at the demo video, it might only take a few minutes to build a useful app. Building a proper iOS app? Probably a few months.

If the revenue share is lucrative (which it likely would be), expect to see a lot of apps hitting the store once it opens to the public.

However, building apps within minutes without requiring code has some implications for the broader tech space.

What happens when AI goes there….

1. Wrapper apps are in trouble

Many startups built frontend chatbots around specific themes using OpenAI in the background. I.e. a social media post-writing app that uses the Open AI API with some context overlaid. With the GPT Store, it will take minutes to build such an app and with a major distribution channel in Open AI store, it will be tough to go up against it. 

2. The end of traditional apps as we know it?

We only use app interfaces for certain tasks because large language models have always been bad at understanding what we want these apps to do. Now we can speak to apps and get them to execute tasks for us – meaning we might no longer need an app between us and the services it needs to execute.

3. A new era of UX

User experience design was a field that originated to fill the gap between humans and software communicating with each other. Now with large language models that can understand what we want done, do we still need those interfaces? Some for sure, but many will likely be replaced by voice or text prompts.

4. AI’s new attack on software developers

A large part of building software is about building the interfaces we as humans engage with. And whilst there has been a lot of talk about how AI will end up writing software, what if AI makes the need for building software interfaces mostly obsolete? 

5. AI is going mainstream fast

With an easy-to-build platform, major adoption and an army of developers, I think we will see more happening in this space in the next few months than ever before. 

Will anyone catch Open AI? Once their store is established and paying developers well, it will be a tough battle for anyone to dethrone them.

As far as app ideas go, we have a few ourselves, more in the opportunity pick section below.

OVER TO YOU

IN SHORT

🖐️ Access Denied. The SABC has seen a recent additional funding request to treasury denied. The request for an additional R1.5 billion was turned down by the Finance Minister. The SABC has previously warned it would collapse financially without an urgent cash injection.

🗼Catastrophic Debt. The same failing SOE (SABC) is also a threat to broadcasting signal distributor Sentech whom it owes R700 million – roughly 50% of Sentech’s annual revenue.

🫁 Venus Air. Oxygen has been discovered on Venus, but don’t hold your breath – or maybe do. Scientists have found a thin layer of atomic oxygen (consisting of a single oxygen atom, not the breathable two-atom kind) smushed between two other layers of Venus’ atmosphere.

🎮 Discounted PS5s. FNB has launched their Black Friday deals and, among others, you can pick up a brand spanking new PlayStation 5 plus 2 games for a cool R6’660. The deal coincides with FNB’s 185th Birthday and will only run on the 24th of November for 185 units.

🛵 Uber Services. Uber in SA just celebrated 10 years in the country with a bunch of interesting announcements including an electric scooter fleet for Uber Package, Uber Store Pick-ups for collecting prepaid items from any store, Uber Van expanding to Cape Town, and Uber Live where Uber Eats delivers food to any large event like a festival or sports match.

HOW WOULD YOU BUILD IT?

Spotting Major Opportunities in CyberSecurity

If you’re inspired to start looking for where corporates have gaps with easy GPT apps, you’ll love the story in our latest 30-minute podcast. We spoke to Dan Thornton, co-founder of cybersecurity training platform GoldPhish.

Dan explains how initial engagements with CyberSec firms’ helpdesks led to a whole host of innovations and opportunities.

A few lekker highlights

1. Great things evolve out of hands-on experience

GoldPhish didn’t start as a big training platform, as Dan mentions here, they initially just entered with your standard training courses and programmes. But then, being in that space, Dan and team quickly learnt that the real issue for CyberSec is the human element, as he mentions here. 

And it was from that moment of realisation onward that they could confidently build up the platform to what it is today.

2. This allowed them to fund development themselves

Going to market with an initial product and getting some clients first, quasi-service-based, Dan and team managed to generate some income initially and were then able to use that revenue to build the platform – almost no funding rounds required – which is awesome and savvy bootstrapping.

3. And the whole thing is run fully remotely

Don’t tell Dan full-on remote can’t be done. As he explains here, his co-founder is in the UK and he’s in Saint Francis Bay, so they started off working remotely and through the years assembled an amazing team of top tech people from all around the country.

Still working fully remotely, they use tools like Slack, Loom and a suite of Google products and basically meet face-to-face once or twice a year for, we assume, a bit of gees.

Or if podcast app is your vibe, catch them here:

Like our podcast? Remember to subscribe and never miss an episode.

THE RESULTS

We asked if you would pay R25pm to trade on EasyEquities and, well, “users say OK!”

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 😊 With a smile! (I make money with them) (23%)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🚫 Not a chance (even if I made money last year) (19%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🙌 Yes, I’m pro investment accessibility, so will support them, win or lose (26%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛏️ Never, I’ll stuff that R25 in my presidential mattress instead (6%)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💰 Nope, I don’t trade stocks and shares and stuff (13%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💹 I only invest through unit trusts or brokers (9%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😕 What is a “stock market”? (4%)