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Hey Openbeta,

Jared here, and your phone owns you. The fact that email, Instagram, texting, gaming, streaming, scrolling, scrolling, and browsing wield enormous psychic control over the mind is, I think, news to no one. Cultural awareness of the grip of technology is higher than ever. Some of this awareness can be attributed to binge watching Black Mirror, which is—and I cannot emphasize this enough—ironic. But most of this awareness can be attributed to the nascent movement for anti-surveillance and human-centered technology, a movement of designers, developers, ethicists, and xooglers who have gathered to create a new paradigm for building technology. Not just screen time limits, not just data protection. Humane technologists aspire to build products that work for us, rather than vice versa.

To us at Betaworks Ventures, humane is not only an emerging category of investible businesses but more importantly a way to framework seed investing. Are you growth hacking users with $1000 LinkedIn ads, or are you seeing community-driven, organic excitement? Are you harvesting user attention with infinite scrolls or encouraging them to go out into the world to live? Investing in products that prioritize user agency and consumer privacy today pays dividends tomorrow, when President Bernie Sanders will outlaw Facebook forever!!

And so, to explore this framework further, the next theme of our RENDER conference series at Betaworks Studios will focus on the impact technology has had on the world around us. Over a day-long conference on July 26th, we’ll explore humanistic technology for a new era. We’ll define the landscapes of Humane Tech and Mindtech, showcase the work of key practitioners and identify investment opportunities, with confirmed speakers including Douglas Rushkoff, Jessey White-Cinis and our very own Danika Laszuk. Get your ticket before they're gone.

See you at the conference!

Betas for you to try

This week's beta is a conversational profile of Mayer Pete Buttigieg. The idea is that rather than go through a website's content the way the site designers wanted, people can ask about specific issues they care about.

Having spent lots of time analyzing why some chatbots work and others don't, one thing that makers Matt Hartman and Sarah Adler found that seemed to work consistently is taking people through more of a story, rather than just asking them to have an open-ended conversation. So Pete BOT-edge-edge first takes you through a more narrowly controlled script, and then the conversation opens up where you can ask about any issue. 

You can text Pete BOT-edge-edge at 574.406.2050 and you can send your thoughts and feedback to Matt and Sarah on Twitter.

Events + Jobs + Reading

🎡 Join us 7/26 for RENDER: Human After All to explore the impact technology has had on the world around us. 

💅 Portfolio company Breaker are hiring a Senior iOS Developer. Are you, or someone you know, a whizz at creating iOS apps in Swift? If so, get in touch with the team.

💅 Check out the 5 open positions at Betaworks Studios and the 121 open positions across our portfolio companies.

🧠 Read the story of the JPEG, the humble file format that produces the highest visual quality with the smallest file size.

🧠 “I’d rather laugh over memes than cry over a bad test grade”. This week we read about the grave risk students take in posting memes about their AP tests, despite being banned from doing so by an anti-meme moratorium issued by The College Board.

🧠 We read that GANs, the technology most commonly used to create deepfakes, is being employed by researchers to synthesize medical images. This effectively multiplies the data set to give researchers the necessary volume of scans to train their pattern-matching algorithms that detect different types of cancer in a CT scan, differentiate diseases in MRIs, and identify abnormalities in an x-ray. 

👀 And finally, check out Cross & Freckle. It's a T-shirt company generated by AI, which Wired calls "a glimpse into the nascent world of AI-generated fashion". It's the brainchild of Betaworks team members Sarah McBride and Tyler Becker and Studios member Paul Blankley. 

~~

That’s all for now!
—Jared

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