Newsletter 9/2/2022: Jiggle That Mouse
From the Desk of Dennis:
Thanks for your patience as I’ve taken a few weeks off for vacation travels, including a lovely drive across the country with my brother, which gave us ample time for sales coaching. My brother is a full-time salesman for one of the biggest names in cybersecurity, and was more than happy to feed me reams of corporate HQ phone numbers to call and ask, beg, and barter for access to their CMO.
Cold-calling is super old-school, and a far cry from the high-tech algorithmic campaigns I’ve pegged my hat on for much of my career. At the same time, I’m enjoying the raw force of personality it requires and the massive volume of data I get from each conversation.
TGIF,
Dennis A. Wilson
This Week in Marketing and Technology:
CNBC, “This $30 mouse jiggler makes it look like you’re working when you’re not”
“The mouse jiggler may not help with keyboard usage or clicks, but it should address screen time monitoring by keeping your computer’s display on.“
As we head into Labor Day Weekend, its important for those of us in ownership and leadership positions in business to check our egos at the door and consider the impact on employee welfare that work inevitably produces, no matter what business you’re in. For those of us who have enjoyed the luxuries of working from home - time is our most precious resource, and WFH gives us all so much more of it - it’s craven and shortsighted to devalue that luxury for employees who are able to continue producing while working remotely by installing surveillance software on their machines.
ArsTechnica, “Valve bars Steam developer who posted anti-trans rant in patch notes”
“Dolphin Barn Interactive's v 1.3.25 patch notes for the game, published on Wednesday, asks for "respect" as the game changes from its "deadname" of "Domina" to the rebranded "Dominus," which has supposedly undergone a "sex change." The thinly veiled post gets more direct as it goes on to demean a well-known trans streamer and asks players to "stop destroying the innocence of children by lying to them about basic biology.”
It’s quite a choice to use childlike imitation to mock another group of people and then turn around and ask your audience to think of the children. Beyond the flagrant transphobia, I thought this story was notable that because Valve appears to be taking assertive and fairly quick action by banning the developer from their storefront, which is a bit of a pivot from the Steam storefront’s reputation as a low-regulation environment friendly to controversial content. I’m happy to see them stepping up against hate here, and wouldn’t mind them cleaning up all the shovelware on the store while they’re at it.
TechCrunch, “Nvidia the latest collateral damage in US-China tech war”
“Nvidia noted in an SEC filing that the U.S. government had imposed new export restrictions on two of its most advanced AI chips to China, its second-largest market after Taiwan, making up 26% of its revenues in 2021.
A100 is designed to provide high-performance computing, storage and networking capabilities for industries spanning healthcare, finance and manufacturing… H100 is the firm’s upcoming enterprise AI chip that is expected to ship by the end of this year and has part of its production done in China.”
I’m nowhere near being in the sales funnel for either of these chips, and I kind of wish I was. 3 TB/s in the H100 is no joke, and I bet it could run Crysis real good. Anyway, thought it was interesting to see the Feds step in at this level and ban specific chips - I don’t feel like this protects my next gaming PC build since they’re only targeting enterprise hardware. I also feel like the intent of this order is a little muddy since parts of the manufacturing are still happening in China, which in my mind is a more pressing security threat. Do China and Russia really have no comparable alternatives to these two chips? Feel free to email me if you have more insight than I do: dennis@looncallmedia.com
