Americans have notoriously short attention spans. After six months of unrelenting war in Ukraine, Americans seem to gain more distance from the war and its casualties on a daily basis. 

About a month ago I met a vivacious young Ukranian woman, Inna Kosianets. She’s beautiful, brilliant, and exhilarated about the power of tech to solve real-world problems. By day Kosianets is a Senior VP at an NYC-based investment firm. After hours she and other activists, many of whom are part of the Ukrainian diaspora, are all working feverishly to coordinate a hackathon that they believe can help solve some of Ukraine’s most pressing wartime problems. The event is called Kyiv Tech Summit and runs from Sept 6 to Sept 9th. 

It will be a live event, but only local Kyiv residents can attend in person, and the location still remains undisclosed because of safety concerns. The event will also be streamed online. Kyiv Tech Summit’s mission is to engage the local blockchain community of programmers, designers, and innovators, as well as others across the globe, to build technology that will “make war-time life easier for Ukrainians and the world.” Learn more about it on Devpost and see how you can get involved.

You know, there used to be hard and fast research about what types of profile pictures got the best results from your viewing audience. Well, toss that wisdom aside. These days, it’s your NFT PFP (Picture for Proof) that speaks volumes about who you are. PFPs can either be bought, or created. Folks are posting their PFPs on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Discord, TikTok, and Instagram. (Less so on LinkedIn because it’s more business-oriented.) They’re using them to divulge their interests, gain some social cred, create community, and earn bragging rights. Even as NFTs might be losing some of their potency as high-value revenue generators, they may be a quick source of small, but more scalable revenue for a mass market.

Used somewhat interchangeably, the initials “PFP” are shorthand for “picture for proof” or “picture for profile.” A succinct definition comes from Kate Irwin at Decrypt. ”In short,” she says, “it’s an image, typically static and two-dimensional, that can be bought and sold as an NFT. Typically, they take the form of a head-and-shoulders portrait depicting an animal, person, or other such anthropomorphized creature.” And here’s a TikTok video showing you how the “in crowd” is using its NFT PFPs. 

Why is this important? Because social media companies are realizing NFTs’ super powers. And they’re learning how to authenticate true NFTs as opposed to mere screenshots. Twitter Blue, Twitter’s paid subscription service, is not performing very well as a revenue stream for Twitter, but one of the service's highlights is that it allows you to upload an NFT from your wallet and use it as your profile image, as explained by Input. Meta recently announced NFT verification for Facebook users and has already released it for Instagram users. When users can connect their wallets to their social media and showcase their collections with proof of ownership and authenticity, the nascent NFT industry benefits. 

Zoom is still conferencer-in-chief, according to recent data, but Microsoft Teams is enjoying growing popularity. Tech Radar, relying on data from SimilarWeb, stated that roughly 730,000 more people visit Zoom pages each month than Teams. Teams’ big advantage is its integration with Office 365. To get the same functionality in Zoom, you'd have to delve into their Apps and deal with the complexity of their app store. 

And then there’s Google Meet. It’s slimmer in features than the others, but it has two big advantages. First, it’s the default choice for meetings in Google Calendar, which is a lazy scheduler’s delight. Second, it just got a killer new feature that eliminates the squirrely effects you get when you use a virtual background. The underlying tech issue Google solved is that your computer gets confused about which part of a webcam image belongs in the foreground and which goes in the background. The results are those disappearing arms and pixelated heads that happen when you conference with a virtual background. Google’s solution is to use its hardware in the cloud to process the effect when the computer doesn’t have adequate performance. Offloading to the cloud also lets the new version of Google Meet be more efficient in overall CPU use, leading to longer battery life for laptops. 

Elsewhere in conferencing wars, Protocol created a nice piece of content about how “Zoom uses Zoom.” Some great tips like using personal chat to take notes, turning yourself into an avatar so you can sneak in a quick lunch, and suppressing background noise, make this a worthwhile read.

Metaverse Mainstream
When NBC daytime TV takes you on a metaverse shopping trip, you know the ship has sailed. Plus, the VMA (Video Music Awards) added a new category this year, ”Best Performance in the Metaverse.” With performers like Justin Bieber, Arianna Grande, Travis Scott, 21 Pilots, and Lil Nas X all strutting their virtual stuff, the award seems like a timely addition.