Today’s Highlights

• AI: Perplexity’s AI will lend you a hand when Shopping Online

• Design: eBay's Renovated Interface: Gen Z-and-Millennial-friendly

• Science & Tech: Overheating issues in Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs

• Founding: What NOT to do? Lessons from a Founder who Bootstrapped his SaaS Startup to $1M ARR 

• Product: Is your tech Changing OR Bringing Change?

• Today’s AI image: A Man-Made Man that goes shopping with you

• Quote for the day: Become People’s Hope

AI

Perplexity’s AI will lend you a hand when Shopping Online

Perplexity, an AI "answer engine," is stepping up its game by adding shopping features. Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s happening:

• Shop Directly on Perplexity: Pro users can now make purchases in just one click without leaving the platform, complete with free shipping.

• Smarter Product Search: Queries like “top quality mushrooms under 5$” yield curated comparisons. Results include features, prices, reviews, and a handy "Buy with Pro" button.

• Snap to Shop: Snap a product photo, and Perplexity tells you where to buy it, plus other key details.

• Shopify Integration: Supported merchants use "Shop Pay" for seamless transactions. Non-integrated items link to the seller's site.

• Pro-Only for Now: The feature is exclusive to US-based Pro members but will roll out globally soon.

• Merchant-Friendly Moves: A new Merchant Program lets businesses showcase products directly in Perplexity’s search results.

Why is this a big deal?

• Unique Edge: Chatbot interfaces are blending together, but Perplexity stands out with real-time, organised info and effortless transactions.

• Strategic Partnerships: By collaborating with Shopify and data providers, Perplexity is taking on big players like Google and Amazon—without even owning a cutting-edge AI model.

• Amazon’s Absence: While not yet partnered, Perplexity’s CEO is open to working with everyone, Amazon included.

Given its excellent record of innovating out-of-the-box tools and features (that too, before others), fair to say Perplexity is showing how smart features and partnerships can disrupt giants.

Read More

Also in AI

• Mistral’s 124B parameter multimodal Pixtral Large: Image gen, web search, huge document analysis (like books and charts)

• ChatGPT Outsmarts Doctors in Diagnostics

• Sam Altman joins the team of San Francisco's mayor-elect as co-chair, marking a step toward stronger collaboration between the tech industry and local government

• AI Jesus in Swiss Chapel: A Replacement of Priest in Bible consultancy

• Smaller, Smarter Models Leading Innovation

• U.S. and China commit to keeping AI out of nuclear command systems

• ElevenLabs allows you to create personalised conversational AI agents

Design

eBay's Renovated Interface: Gen Z-and-Millennial-friendly

eBay’s recently unveiled design revamp, dubbed "eBay Evo," is all about simplicity and approachability, aiming to resonate with younger audiences while staying functional for its long-time users. Here’s the scoop:

• A Modern UX Overhaul
  A sleeker, softer aesthetic with responsive layouts, increased white space, and rounded edges that ditch the site’s historically cluttered vibe.

• Tidier Search Results
  Search pages now feel less overwhelming, with fewer text lines per result and the removal of intrusive “X sold” stats.

• Product Page Facelift
  Inspired by minimalist sites like StockX, eBay's product pages now feature larger images and simplified layouts.

• Warm, Human Branding
  New marketing materials and product photography emphasise subtle colours (think honey mustard and lilac) and inject a personal touch—like human hands holding featured items—to create a more relatable vibe.

• Focus on Younger Users
  The redesign aims squarely at millennials and Gen Z, who’ve gravitated toward cooler platforms like StockX and Shein.

The Big Picture

With this gradual refresh, eBay’s prioritising growth among younger shoppers without alienating its loyal base. It’s a delicate balancing act—less about reinventing the wheel and more about polishing it for a new generation of buyers.

Read More

Also in Design

• WWE RAW Logo Redesign: Pays tribute to past designs but complexity is criticised by fans

• TikTok’s Symphony Creative Studio has partnered with Getty Images: Access to licensed visuals, multilingual dubbing, customisable AI avatars, and remixable content

• Design in Finance is becoming more youth-friendly

• Best products are easy to use as well as yield valuable results: Maximum Usability & Utility

• How Venture Capital Shapes Product Design

• An AI tool to recolor objects in images

Science & Tech

Overheating issues in Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs

Nvidia’s much-anticipated Blackwell GPUs for AI might be fashionably late—and not by choice. Here’s a breakdown of what’s cooking:

• Overheating Woes
  Blackwell GPUs reportedly overheat when crammed into Nvidia’s high-density server racks, which link up to 72 GPUs. The company is scrambling to tweak the rack designs, potentially causing even more delays.

• Previous Snags
  This isn’t the first hiccup. Earlier reports pointed to a “design flaw” delaying the GPUs.

• Cooling Solutions in Focus
  GPUs are notorious for generating heat, especially power-hungry ones like Blackwell, which boasts 30x the speed of its predecessors.

• Cloud Partners Stay in the Loop
  Nvidia assures everyone that these redesigns are just routine “engineering iterations.”

• Energy and Cooling Crisis
  The broader AI industry grapples with similar headaches, with firms exploring extreme measures like immersion cooling and even nuclear power deals to keep their energy-guzzling data centres operational.

While Nvidia’s stock has soared thanks to AI’s booming demand, Blackwell’s thermal drama might leave its biggest customers sweating it out—literally and figuratively.

Read More

Also in Science & Tech

• SpaceX's Starship Test: Plans to recycle the Super Heavy booster with a stylish dive into the Indian Ocean

• AI Provides Info on Subtypes of Brain Disorder: Great help with Precise Diagnosis

• A Pennsylvania school stirred controversy as students shared explicit AI-generated deepfakes

• Research links stress to disrupted memory formation and increased anxiety

• Study explores how inhaled dust mites trigger immune responses, causing allergies

Founders

What NOT to do? Lessons from a Founder who Bootstrapped his SaaS Startup to $1M ARR 

Melissa Kwan, a 14 year startup founder, heroically bootstrapped her company, eWebinar, to $1M in ARR. In this article, she enlists some of her biggest Go-To-Market strategy mistakes. 

• Completely throwing off the Marketing burden onto agencies

Previous to building her own company, Kwan’s career was all about enterprise sales. Given her lack of experience in marketing, she had the urge to delegate all the marketing operations entirely to digital marketing agencies. 

Result? Poor returns.

Since marketing involves directing the brand towards founder's perspective, letting the agencies take up the work completely was not wise.  Besides, when a brand owner is not clear on the brand messaging, marketing takes a wrong turn. 

Solution? Carefully choose your recruits or learn the marketing philosophy yourself. Or both. 

• Stuffing Mediocre Content in the Blog

Hoping to gather prospect attention, Kwan hired SEO agencies and PR companies to vomit out bouts of content that could be stuffed into their blog to lift conversions. 

But of course, aiming for volume made them compromise with quality and what they produced was a pile of mediocrity and sleepy conversions. 

Later renovating the content strategy, Kwan and her team owned it all. Crafting best articles in moderate volumes, they were able to push the search conversions from 0 to 22%. 

• Inaccurate Email Outreach

Strangely, high-ticket solutions are easier to sell through cold outreach compared to outreaching for low-ticket products. 

eWebinar’s email outreach cycle turned out to be a bad trade-off because cold emailing efforts couldn’t pay back well for their low-ticket offer of $99/month. 

Kwan believes that hard work shouldn’t be put into cold outreach when the ROI from each sale is poor. 

Read more

Also in Founding

• Venture capital is being shaken up by three powerhouses: mega investment firms raking in billions, big institutions hunting for stable returns, and AI startups gobbling up cash like never before

• AI is outpacing traditional robotic process automation, birthing new possibilities for automating complex workflows and cutting operational costs

• Programmatic SEO: Using AI and automation to scale content creation, target long-tail queries and react quickly to changes

• Growth & Design: A Common Conflict Pair that needs to be resolved

Product

Is your tech Changing OR Bringing Change? 

A smartphone company, say Apple, rolls out a new feature in its devices. This could surely improve Apple’s user experience. But such tech upgrades would be limited to Apple only and wouldn't necessarily ‘disrupt’ the market. 

This is merely Evolution. Or Changing. 

On the contrary, let’s recall the time when OpenAI first came up with ChatGPT; an idea completely novel to the market. Not only did it help its own users, but the concept of GenAI made other technologies viable, too. It includes deriving ideas from its LLM training, data feeding and generative capabilities. 

Introduction of GPT was followed by other chatbots, robot training on Language Models and even totally different versions of AI generation, i.e. Image, Video and Audio. 

This is Revolution. Or Bringing Change.

Market revolutions thrive on critical technologies turning fresh stacks into game-changers. Companies must either level up their current game or jump headfirst into the shiny new playgrounds of innovation.

Read more

Today’s AI Image

A robot that does your groceries and comes home to prepare dinner. Yes please.

Quote of the Day

Become People’s Hope

"You are a torch against the night - if you dare to let yourself burn."

A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir

What we’re working on

🧞Your wish is my command