Blogs

The Entrepreneur, the Expert and the NDA

I recently went through a very tricky challenge whilst mentoring early stage founders. A #NDA, inappropriately written and sent in the wrong circumstances, triggered a surprisingly negative email response from an expert I knew as courteous and generous with their time and expertise.

Thankfully, we were able to solve this situation and we had a very productive discussion, far beyond my most optimistic expectations.

We also all learned from this painful mistake. We learned of the hidden costs of NDAs, and of their complete uselessness most of the time. We all agreed that their defacto use a prerequisite for any discussion in entrepreneurship has more to do with cargo-culting and fake expertise (reminded me of the mention on Linkedin of “advisors” in Sydney getting 20% of equity from founders) than with any “Innovation and IP Strategy”.

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Beehive

As you may know, I have not been in Australia much these past months, working and living primarily in Europe, Maastricht more accurately.

The work for which I was primarily here just terminated. Thankfully, during this time I have not been only working, but I have also discovered and involved myself in the rich and diverse local and regional community of musicians, international students and other creative minds of all ages. I have decided to continue this involvement with something a bit different from my usual medtech advisory activities. Stay tune - I will very shortly anounce what #Beehive is about.

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SXSW Sydney

South By South West.

Sydney.

First time in the South Hemisphere.

Lots of #hype for sure.

It’s #big. Huge actually. I’ve visited more venues in Sydney in the past 3 days than in the last 3 years. A great #showcase for #Sydney #TechCentral and all their partners.

It’s #loud. I like #loud, somehow…

It’s #fast. Very fast. Trust me on this one, I listen to podcasts at 1.3X speed in average. One has to be super realistic with their #time management and #FOMO expectations.

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Gratuite du Credit (In French)

I wrote this review of Gratuite du Credit back in 2007 or so, whilst living in New Zealand, for an website that has since disappeared, “bookine.org” The topic came up recently with a friend, and the host was kind enough to fish it for me :)

Adolescent gauchisant, par la suite jeune adulte AAA, non pas Ancien Alcoolique Anonyme (ceux qui ont de la bouteille LOL), quoique, mais Abstentionniste Anarcho-Apolitique, par le hasard des rencontres je me suis lié dernièrement d’amitié avec un membre des “instances” dirigeantes du parti Libertarianz. Plus connu dans les pays anglo-saxons qu’en France (quoique, vu de NZ du moins, ça ait l’air de changer un poil), cette mouvance prône ce qu’on pourrait qualifier grossièrement d’Anarcho Capitalisme (ne leur dites pas que je vous ai dit ça…). Pour une définition plus juste, ou en tous cas « reconnue par eux », je vous conseille Nolan comme point de départ. Pour en revenir aux faits, lors du soirée avec mes amis Libertarianz (y sont marrants avec leur T-shirts « Love Freedom, Fuck the State »), entre deux verres (ou plutôt vingt, la tendance « Bibinne » étant substanciellement représentée au sein de ce parti) et une Jam Session Velours-Souterraine, la discussion s’est tournée vers les auteurs Français ayant influencé ou combattu cette tendance, et notamment Bastiat et Proudhon. Et là, se rendre compte qu’un Kiwi connait mieux les auteurs Français qu’un Frenchy du cru (je suis né dans la même ville que Proudhon en plus), et ben ça fait mal au cul…Donc session rattrapage, d’où la lecture de la correspondance ici chroniquée.

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Creative May

The generative and creative AI explosion is here to stay.

The prompt to image hype of mid 2022, driven by the likes of Midjourney, was not just a hype after all.
It was a first step in a bullet-train race which reached the conversational AI station in late 2022.

Now the train has split into a set of gigantic pinball multiballs, causing havoc across all industries.

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Welcome to the machine

Welcome to the machine.

“Knock - Knock”
“Who’s there?”
“Me, a human”
“Welcome human. What’s your prompt? Think carefully - the few words you say will determine your fate”.

I stumbled the other day on promptperfect, a SaaS website that offers to optimize one’s prompt, taking into account the specifics of the various models that could be used. This works, allegedly, for chat-like LLMs, as well as for prompt to image applications. Prompt engineering has been a thing for a while, but I have never really dived into it - yet. Intrigued, I decided to give it a try - on the image side - to create a couple of pieced for my Insta profile, keeping up with an exercise initiated last year for #CreativeAI_Sydney, emulating famous rock album covers.

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Creative 23Q1

Diapason creative - 2023 Q1 Newsletter

Diapason’s resonances this past quarter

After a sold-out concert at Redfern’s iconic 107 venue, Lili Alaska and her band (yours truly included) were lucky to be the first to try out the newly equipped recording studio at the Bondi Pavilion. The same location we opened up with Lindy back in September.

Great feel playing with a brand new set of Zildjian cymbals (little known trivia: Zildjian is one of the oldest operating companies in the world). There was another crash cymbal in the set, I think we should have used it too - it’s important when using K Series. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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Socratic Bot

This is a follow-up from my earlier post.

This is really entertaining. It is also depressingly addictive. Self-indulging as well: what a luxury it is to be able to engage in a polite, seemingly rationale discussion with s̶o̶m̶e̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶ something that can reply almost instantly to each point, yet can wait with an infinite patience for my responses.

It also is a great support for fictional Socratic dialogues(*) - a very effective medium to convey philosophical ideas by guiding a student to reach the conclusion through their own reasoning. I used it with ChatGPT to talk about “regulatory narrow focus” which is an issue I have been looking in for a very long time.

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Chatbot consulting

Earlier this year, Diapason participated in the organisation of the CreativeAI_Sydney symposium. At this time, public attention on generative AI was growing exponentially, and focused very much on Dall-E2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion (in the order they entered the spotlight), i.e. ‘prompt to image applications’. Most of our discussions gravitated around the this fundamental question: “Can AI be an artist (and therefore be a threat to existing artists) - or is AI only a tool that artists can use”. This question had been answered 5 years ago almost to the day in in the field of medical imagery AI with the idiom Rads who use AI will replace rads who don’t, although this is still open to interpretation.

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Medical Devices Regulations 101

Regulations are a complex topic. According to Feynman, the best way to master a complex topic is to:
(1) study it
(2) explain it simply
(3) fill any gap.

Here’s my 2cts at step 2, which I wrote for a collaborative project. Feedback welcome for step 3.

National or multinational (EU) regulations impose various requirements for the commercialization of medical devices within (or from) their jurisdictions, that consist in - roughly:

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