That works fine if the company itself stores the data, but becomes difficult to enforce when 3rd parties store the data. Imagine a company with an EU presence stores it's EU data in US, with a hypothetical cloud provider that doesn't have an EU presence.
The company would need to have a DPA with it's cloud provider. That cloud provider technically would also need a corresponding DPA with any 3rd parties that they themselves use, except without an EU presence that is hard to enforce.
In this case where there is one hop you could argue that it's the companies responsibility to ensure that their service providers are operating in compliance. Imagine the same scenario, but with one, two or more middlemen and the whole thing becomes an unenforceable mess of jurisdictions for the company to do meaningful due diligence on their service providers.
It's much easier for the EU to say EU data has to be stored in the EU, and know that any party touching the data is likely to be in compliance, and significantly easier to investigate if they are not.
There's also the Cloud act, which makes it illegal for US cloud providers to refuse data access requests from the US government.
As far as I understand, the EU is fine with you sending data to other countries, as long as those countries have the same standards for data protection. In the EU's opinion, the Cloud act, as well as the whole NSA situation, mean that the US doesn't fulfill this definition.
I just gave Martin a go. What I'm looking for is an AI PA that can:
- do some research on a given company/individual/website and give me a summary.
- preferably also identify a contact email.
- handle selecting a good time for meetings according to my availability and preferences.
- handle the communication with the other party.
- let me know when it is arranged, or if it's given up.
I signed up and gave it a UK phone number, and got a UK number back for texting Martin. I'm not sure why it has to be SMS when it could be an in-app chat. I was expecting to get a confirmation SMS or similar, but it just accepted it straight away. When I texted the number I was given (several times), it was delivered but there was no reply.
Martin sent me an email welcoming me. I replied asking it to set up a meeting for early next week with another email address. Martin replied saying it is unable to email people on my behalf, and suggested I set it up myself.
> Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send emails to other people on your behalf. However, you can easily send an email to ** to schedule the meeting for early next week in the afternoon.
I reminded Martin that there is an example on the website homepage of doing just that, and it replied saying it can indeed schedule meetings, and asked for the details again. I replied with the same details, and it confirmed the meeting was set up.
I checked my other email, and there was no message setting anything up. I told Martin that the other party needs to know about the email, and it replied with:
> Understood. I'll make sure to inform ** about the meeting details.
Still nothing received. Furthermore, I checked the app and I haven't even connected my calendar, so I'm surprised it didn't warn me or prompt me to do this when I asked for a meeting.
I gave up with that and decided to try something else. I forwarded Martin an email thread from a lead, which included a lot of back story on their organization, offering, and some areas that they think we could potentially collaborate on. I asked Martin to find out more about the company, and evaluate the options for collaboration.
This lead is in the AI space, with their primary product being a document digitisation solution to help surface and discover business documents.
Martin replied describing it as a "nearbound revenue platform to streamline revenue operations", with a key feature being "Automated lead scoring and distribution to prioritize high potential leads". As far as evaluating the collaboration opportunities, it instead gave me a list of collaboration features within the platform, none of which exist.
At the end, it linked to a blog post to their recent funding round. Except, the blog post was from a completely unrelated company with a similar name. Bear in mind that the originally forwarded email was from their business email account, and the body contained multiple links and references to their website.
I decided to try one more test, and asked it to do some research on my own business website and let me know what it finds out. It's been 20 minutes, and I haven't had a reply. I checked the app to see if there was any indication it's working on something for me, but nothing their either.
I love the idea of Martin, but I'll be canceling my trial - it just doesn't seem anywhere near ready yet - especially given I have to trust it to communicate on my behalf.
Thank you for all the feedback! Just wanted to hop on and address a few things.
- I totally resonate with your criteria for an AI PA - this is very much what we're working towards with our email integration. We had been focused on voice for a while, but recently started tackling all the email use cases. Really want to get these right for you!
- Sorry for the poor onboarding job - we should make it more clear that you have to sync your calendar before we send you an email inviting you to send and forward scheduling items to Martin.
- For sending emails to contacts, this is one of our upcoming integrations that we've been building for a while - but just not ready yet! We want to make it able to send/reply to emails and fully act on threads that you attach it to. This means issuing you a unique email address for "your Martin" and managing it's behavior on threads and memory of other contacts. It's a harder problem than we first anticipated, so we're working through it steadily! It should be ready in the next month or so. For now, the communications feature is just limited to texting contacts on your behalf.
- For "deep searches", it definitely isn't the greatest at digging into a topic or generating a thorough briefing for you right now. We're not sure how deep we'll go into this use case in the future, but we do plan on integrating with more specialized functions, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Maps, etc. which should make this a lot better.
Sorry again for the poor onboarding experience. I think we also got an email from you, so will reply there as well to ask for more feedback!
“It definitely isnt the greatest at digging into a topic”
I think this is the greatest drawback to using a tool like this. It does good with the low hanging fruit tasks like responding to a txt. But it does poorly at a loooong range of long tail tasks like conpany research, or summarizing a topic or gathering the latest headlines for a topic, or finding leads or alerting me when someone mentions my brand on Twitter or when someone links to my blog post.
And when soneone tries to do any of those things and gets a bad user experience, theyll give up on your tool
That is what valuable customer feedback looks like. I won't be surprised if Apple uses your feedback for their upcoming Siri. Unfortunately based on this and other feedback here it looks like Martin had a very late launch. Hope this turns into a proper product because we do need a Siri competitor.
for what you're after, my app howie.ai would work well. we don't do nearly as much as Martin does, instead we're narrowly focused on getting the scheduling use case right. i'm a@howie.ai if you want to try it out!
An alternative for the background which might be slightly easier would be to use the same image as the vinyl, but apply a blur and scale up.
Other ideas for branding:
- Use the image to generate a colour palette to ensure text content has good contrast on light/dark images and is on-brand
- Allow users to add links to the track on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music etc and generate a short random link (e.g vinlo.co/VUSNF) to use instead of the vinlo.co mark. You can use this to a) provide track links for end users, b) provide analytics to creators, and c) understand which creators are driving traffic
In your analogy it would be more like paying someone to mow your lawn because your neighbour got it done for $10, then being charged $100 because your house number is even.
It might be in the terms and conditions, but it’s bad faith to not give any warnings or controls before the services are rendered.
It's great you've share this, I've been searching for something like it for a while. I've also struggling finding 'basic' wysiwgy builders, a lot of the existing solutions have trended towards adding as many features as possible.
HN has always been quite anti-crypto, but I'd like to pose a counter argument. I run a remote services-based organisation in a related industry, and we switched to 100% crypto payments across the business.
It's massively simplified our processes, and improved UX. Our customer base is already crypto-native, which is what makes this possible.
Users pay us simply by sending funds to our wallet. Our entire payment processing engine is under 300 lines, including USD-denominated fees in crypto. Payments arrive instantly, with almost zero fees, from any country.
We have no chargebacks or (traditional) payment fraud.
Our remote staff are paid in crypto, arriving instantly with no cross-border issues.
The cognitive dissonance here is amazing. Here is an actual application of crypto that is downvoted, while empty talking points around how crypto has zero use cases are always the top comments.
The irreversibility of payments in nearly all crypto systems does NOT prevent providing a refund to a customer. That can always be done by making a new payment to the customer.
One might argue that crypto makes customers unable to demand a refund, or that it is impossible to send a refund to a customer who is so anonymous that the merchant cannot even communicate with them, but these are less obviously a "no-no" for a business.
> Our customer base is already crypto-native, which is what makes this possible.
You've said it yourself. If the only way to accept crypto payments is to have a "crypto-native" userbase, what does this say about its utility for society? If the entire crypto industry is self referential, then once you peel back the layers there's not much left but a big system that moves money around in a circle.
YouTube used over 175 times more energy watching Gangnam Style in 2019 than Ethereum uses per year. Paypal uses 100x the power consumed by PoS Ethereum in a year [0].
This argument was (and still is) valid for PoW algorithms, but energy consumption is now barely a factor for Ethereum, which is the main network we take payments on [1].
I am not opposed to proof of stake but your arguments that youtube and paypal are more wasteful isn't super convincing- after all, you picked a video that's been watched billions of times, and paypal provides a very important service.
My argument isn't that Paypal is more wasteful necessarily, it's more pointing out the inconsistencies in how value vs sustainability is weighed up.
Ethereum is currently doing 30 TPS [0], and Paypal ~200 [1]. Assuming that energy usage scales linearly (a naive assumption, but for arguments sake), it could deliver similar value with 10x lower energy consumption, I don't find arguing against the adoption of PoS crypto solely based on sustainability very credible either.
FWIW we’ve been using ffmpeg-wasm on one of our products [0] for a couple months and the main issue is garbage collection. You’re limited to 4GB memory, but if you don’t kill and restart the workers every N operations it crashes the browser tab (even with proper unlinking of files in the virtual FS).
I suspect you could still make it work with clever usage of the File System Access API as a cache, and process larger files in chunks. Then you’d mostly be limited by the Blob storage limits [1], and memory required to merge processed chunks together.
The company would need to have a DPA with it's cloud provider. That cloud provider technically would also need a corresponding DPA with any 3rd parties that they themselves use, except without an EU presence that is hard to enforce.
In this case where there is one hop you could argue that it's the companies responsibility to ensure that their service providers are operating in compliance. Imagine the same scenario, but with one, two or more middlemen and the whole thing becomes an unenforceable mess of jurisdictions for the company to do meaningful due diligence on their service providers.
It's much easier for the EU to say EU data has to be stored in the EU, and know that any party touching the data is likely to be in compliance, and significantly easier to investigate if they are not.