Today’s Highlights

• AI: AI is Mastering Context: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP)

• Design: Figma Launches Pattern Library

• Science & Tech: A Mind-Controlled Robotic Arm by Neuralink

• Founding: Current Phenomenons in SaaS: Insights from 2024 SaaS Benchmarks

• Product: Don’t Obsess Over Strategy Too Much: Tips for Small Companies 

• Today’s AI image: Restored Strengths: Robotic Limbs

• Quote for the day: From Kahlil Gibran

AI

AI is Mastering Context: Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Anthropic has rolled out the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – an open-source framework designed to help AI assistants effortlessly tap into data from all sorts of sources, like content libraries, business tools, and development environments.

Up until now, even the sharpest AI models have struggled when they can’t access your company’s data.

Enter MCP, offering a simple way for developers to link AI to their app’s data via MCP servers or build AI that communicates with these systems.

It's designed with security in mind, meaning you won’t have to hand over API keys to your LLM providers. At the moment, MCP servers run on local machines, but don’t worry – remote server support is on the way.

Apparently, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is already a whizz at setting up MCP server implementations, and Anthropic has kindly shared pre-built servers for popular platforms like Google Drive, Slack, and GitHub.

Why is this a big deal?

While the best AI veterans of the world sweat hard to correspond artificial intelligence with human intelligence and even accomplished it to some extent, one complain has persisted for quite long - misinterpretation of context.

And Anthropic just stepped forward and sorted it out in the best way possible.

Besides, many AI applications are a hassle because they need to integrate with a bunch of different data sources.

Anthropic’s solution is a tidy, unified approach that swaps out messy integrations with a single protocol – which could be a game-changer for building truly context-aware AI.

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Also in AI

• Zoom Rebrands as “AI-first communications platform”

• Runway’s ‘Frames’ Image Generation Model: A features called ‘Worlds’ for stylistic customisations and niched styles like vintage film effects and retro anime

• Luma Labs Upgrades Dream Machine: The new Photon image gen model is 8x faster with higher quality and features like character generation, camera controls, style transfer, and natural prompt integration

• U.S. TRAIN Act: A Push for AI Model Training Transparency

• Not people of all generations feel the same about AI: Gen Z adopts best, then millennials and lastly older gens who are still uncomfortable

• NVIDIA Fugatto: Generates sound and music based on text prompts or audio inputs

• IMAX leverages AI for multilingual dubbing

Design

Figma Launches Pattern Library

The design platform, Figma, has dropped its Pattern Library, a handy collection of reusable UI components designed to streamline workflows and maintain consistency.

What's in the Library?

It’s a toolbox of UI patterns—buttons, forms, modals, input fields, and the lot—designed with accessibility, usability, and best design practices in mind.

Simplify, Standardise, Scale

As digital projects grow complex, keeping design uniform across platforms becomes a headache. Figma’s Pattern Library comes in to save the day, offering standardised elements to avoid fragmentation, inefficiency, and scaling issues.

The Benefits

No more reinventing the wheel. The library provides a single source for your design components, making it easier to maintain quality and consistency across your project.

Built with accessibility in mind, the components come with proper colour contrast, screen reader support, and keyboard navigation, ensuring designs are inclusive.

While it offers pre-built patterns, you can easily tweak them to align with your brand’s unique identity, from colours to typography.

Why is this a big deal?

It frees up time for creativity by taking care of repetitive tasks.

For teams, it encourages collaboration, particularly when you have teams spread across different locations or working in different time zones.

You can entrust it with maintaining your brand consistency along with sped up product delivery.

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Also in Design

• Adobe Teams Up with Arts University Plymouth: Goals of promoting creativity, digital smarts, and job-readiness with certifications and hands-on, industry-approved experience

• Harsh User Response to Spotify’s UI Change: Implies the vitality of user-centred design

• Adventurous Ideas for Designers

• 4-Point Grid System in UI Design: offers proportional scaling, precision, and cross-device consistency

• Making Cognitive Biases Work in Your Favour through UX Design: Negativity bias, anchoring, and peak-end rule

• Apple's New Design Language: Inspired by Vision Pro, focusing on depth, motion, and immersive 3D interactions

• Custom vs. Off-the-Shelf Design Systems: Choose efficiency with libraries or embrace flexibility with custom solutions

Science & Tech

A Mind-Controlled Robotic Arm by Neuralink

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, has kicked off a ground-breaking test that could one day allow people with paralysis to operate a robotic arm using nothing but their thoughts.

This experimental study, dubbed a "first-in-human" trial, is still in its very early days—so we're talking years before any device might be ready for widespread use.

The Ambition?

To enable individuals with Neuralink implants to control a robotic arm, opening up new possibilities for physical independence.

"This is a important first step in not only restoring digital freedom but also restoring physical freedom," the company proudly proclaimed in a post on X, referring to the trial as Convoy.

At present, Neuralink's implant allows users to control digital tools like computer cursors and iPads—it's already been successfully implanted in at least two individuals. While the tech is still in its infancy, this marks an exciting leap forward in the world of assistive technology.

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Also in Science & Tech

• SpaceX’s Internet-on-Mars Mission shows First Glimmers of Success

• You may be able to De-age your hair: A study showing possibilities to reverse gray hair

• Rumours about Thinnest iPhone Yet: iPhone 17 Air

• Boom Supersonic Sets a New Flight Record: One of its demonstrator aircraft reached an altitude of 25,040 feet

• Brain Study on Overthinking Social Situations

Founding

Current Phenomenons in SaaS: Insights from 2024 SaaS Benchmarks

Let’s go briefly through the totality of happenings in the SaaS industry this year. 

1. After prolonged phases of exciting growth, SaaS has slowed down on graphs. Public SaaS companies are facing slower growth. 

2. SaaS and AI startups with ARR below $1M are surprisingly outperforming larger players. Leaner teams (AI as the big guns), lower Customer Acquisition Cost payback period and far better retention rates. 

3. Early stage startups obviously also have rewarding ARR per Employee given their small teams, compared to bigger companies. Besides, they’re engaging in more founder-led sales and targeting accurate customer profiles. 

4. Horizontal SaaS (that targets a broader market) suffocates for growth because the SaaS market is so densely competitive with the rising boom of niche-specific vertical SaaS and AI-packed solutions. 

If you’re selling a horizontal SaaS product today, you could beat the odds by functioning like a vertical SaaS. How? Identify your best audience. A group of those who loyally keep coming back for your product. Zero in on them alone. Serve that one group but serve best. 

5. Companies are turning to usage-based and outcome-based pricing models abandoning the traditional “Pay for Access” models. 

Now instead of purchasing a subscription, their B2B (and B2C) customers have to pay based on their usage of the product. 

A step further, some companies have adopted an outcome-based pricing model where they charge for the results produced by the tool. 

This changes everything. With growing incorporation of such charging models, traditional metrics like ARR, MRR and LTV are either irrelevant or have to be defined differently to make sense out of them. 

SaaS in 2024 is all about smarter moves and leaner teams, with early-stage startups flexing their AI muscles and big players grappling with slower growth. The takeaway? Adapt fast, price smart, and don’t let the bots outpace your business instincts. 

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Also in Founding

• The Pre-mortem Meetings held by Meta and Instagram Teams

• Deliberately Forging "Scarcity” Situation to Create a Sense of Belonging and Luxury

• Honest disagreement and passionate debates: That’s what creates a strong product culture

• Software companies have experienced a notable surge

Product

Don’t Obsess Over Strategy Too Much: Tips for Small Companies

When a large man and a smaller man combat, though the large man has the benefit of size, the smaller man gets a more profitable advantage. Speed. 

Acting too orthodox and rigid with strategies and plans is a wasteful move for any small-size company. Because this way it is missing out on the days of relentless iteration, experimentation and execution.

See, being “small” means being sheerly agile. Smaller teams can easily adapt to the ever dynamic business environment. They can test more frequently, execute more frequently, fail more frequently and hence, learn more quickly. 

For larger companies, their huge teams and complex organisational structures often lag them behind and in order to evolve or grow, they have to drag hard their way forward. So here’s-

How to best exploit your unfair advantage: smallness? 

1. Playing an Emergent Game: Testing and iterating ideas back-to-back quickly and feasibly. Hence, frequent quick wins, a heap of insights to work with and ever warmed up teams. 

2. A Smooth Check-In Loop: Gather once in a while. Check in on what you are doing and how it is going. Based on that, figure out what you should do next. This way, you can correct the course faster than larger of your competitors.

3. Acting Speedily: Especially when the market is ridiculously dynamic. You can adjust quicker to changed environments and gain an edge. All you’ve got to do is ditch long roadmaps and stick to short-term, actionable plans. 

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Today’s AI Image

Restoring Strengths: Robotic Limbs

Quote of the Day

From Kahlil Gibran

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

Kahlil Gibran

What we’re working on

🧞Your wish is my command