#105 - 🥊 Canva vs Adobe, Microsoft vs Notion, AI news

Hello, how are you this week!

Everything is fine for me even though I struggled to get this newsletter out to you on time. It must be said that the news is crazy at the moment and I am delighted to have a medium to share with you my enthusiasm, my questions and everything that these innovations will change in the way we live and work.

On the menu this week:

• 🥊The battle Canva vs Adobe relaunched by AI features
• 🥴TikTok
• 🕵Microsoft finally gives access to Loop, its alternative Notion and how it could change the way we work
• ❄️An avalanche of news #IA

❄️Canva announces an avalanche of new products

Last week during its big event Canva Create, The web design platform has announced a massive suite of new AI-powered branding and design tools.

A new Brand Center is being added to Canva's Visual Worksuite, offering tools to help users stay consistent with their organization's visual identity. Instead of a shared drive and endless Slack messages to designers, users will now create a brand kit with company-specific elements like logos, fonts, colors, and design guidelines.

Canva also offers AI-powered tools, like “Magic Replace,” which can replace an element on all your designs with a single click if you simply need to update an outdated logo or brand graphic. There are also tools such as "Magic Eraser" which allows you to remove any unwanted objects in an image and "Magic Edit" which allows users to replace an object with something else using generative AI.

Canva has also added a "Magic" tool Design” that generates a personalized selection of templates (such as posters or birthday cards) from any uploaded image, as well as an AI-powered writing assistant that can generate written content from a text invitation that you can use in presentations and website content. There's also a tool that generates full brand layouts.

Finally, Canva has added 953 new fonts and a host of non-workspace-specific tools for editing the layouts, layers, styles and gradients of your designs, as well as the ability to generate alt text for images directly in Canva.

🦋Adobe releases Firefly, its boosted tools platform AI

We knew Adobe, the image editing giant, could not miss the tide of generative AI such as Midjourney or DALL-E. We now have a clear idea of ​​how the publisher intends to integrate its new technologies into its suite.

Firefly facilitates the integration of new elements into a photomontage, adds styles or textures to texts, and allows you to change the atmosphere or weather of a photo or video. Adobe aims to integrate Firefly into all of its software, starting with Adobe Express, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

The beta program is currently available to members via an online form. Adobe ensures that Firefly does not infringe copyright and plans to remunerate individuals who make their productions available on Adobe Stock in order to train Firefly. will allow you to reset the counters

The strength of TikTok is definitely its recommendation algorithm which constantly learns from what you watch (or not). However, your video feed can quickly become polluted if you discover a passion for a somewhat shameful subject like “Married at first sight” 😒.

Fortunately the social network will allow users to reset their “For You” feed if they are no longer relevant. In a blog post, the company announced this new feature which will allow users to “refresh” their For You feed recommendations if they are no longer relevant to their interests. Until now, to start from scratch, you had to create a new account...a bit radical.

The function will be deployed gradually over the coming weeks and will be accessible in the application settings.

🔥TikTok goes to the grill in the US Congress

Last week, US lawmakers held a hearing to question TikTok CEO Shou Chew over the company's efforts to protect user data and its ties to the Chinese government.

Despite no evidence that TikTok is a spy tool for the Chinese Communist Party, lawmakers gave the CEO a hard time by questioning the app's ties to China. Some elected officials renewed calls for the app to be banned in the United States over concerns about its ties to China.

The hearing was characterized as a political "spectacle" rather than genuine concern for user data protection.

France Connect +: your new digital identity

In the latest episode of our podcast, we deal with the evolution of connections to online services with the arrival of Digital Identity via France Connect +.

This new functionality makes identifications more secure and avoids identity theft by requiring in particular verification by SMS and ID. It also discusses the benefits and risks of digital identity and highlights the need for stronger security to protect personal information.

🚀Microsoft launches Loops, its alternative to Notion

Notion is one of the craziest apps released in the last 10 years. In addition to having transformed what we expect from a tool in terms of possible customization, it has influenced a large number of applications with its system of blocks that can be called up with a simple press of the "/" key.

Microsoft, as the great master of business productivity, had to offer an alternative. This is the objective of Loop this new collaborative tool.

Just like Notion, Loop te allows you to organize information by workspace and pages. Each page can be made up of an infinite number of blocks (text, image, video, table, list, etc.). Microsoft's approach is still original since it offers nothing less than a new approach to the construction and collaboration around documents.

Each block can become aninteractive component on which participants can react or comment but more interestingly these components can be shared between different Office applications: Word, Teams, Outlook,... and these components can be updated from anywhere while being synchronized.

By for example you can create a checklist which will be integrated into an email and a Teams conversation and if you check an item in Outlook it will automatically be checked in the Teams message.

This is very clever because until now it was complicated to have both up-to-date and decentralized information. The cloud and tools like Google Doc have certainly provided an answer at the document level but not at the information level. This is precisely the promise of Loop.

The application is available in beta now!

🤖AI news

Well you will have understood, you are not going to cut it, this week again I have plenty of news to share with you around AI and everything it makes possible.

I suggest you keep it short and effective with an express sharing of the links that should not be missed:

• For getting the most out of generative AI such as ChatGPT or Midjourney, the key lies in the art of prompting, that is to say the art of knowing how to ask well. This problem is new and it requires real learning to get the best out of it. Fortunately the site PromptPal offers a base of proven prompts for all situations. A real time saver.
• Use ChatGPT to respond to support requests? This is a relevant use case when we know that 80% of support requests are in fact simple tasks. This article lists 6 super relevant use cases such as: responding from an FAQ, offering multilingual support,…
• Certainly the biggest announcement of the week, Open AI announced its plugins, it's the equivalent of a real appstore that you could call from any ChatGPT window to interact with third-party applications and more generally the entire web in real time. It's not yet available to everyone but the possibilities offered have just multiplied EXPONENTIALLY.
• Is reading Youtube videos in x2 still too long for you? This Chrome extension allows you to summarize the content of a video with one click on ChatGPT based on the transcription.
• Hey, speaking of Google, they have opened access to their Bard service in a few countries (but not in France). Well, there is obviously still work to be done before we get to the quality of the ChatGPT experience coupled with Bing.
• Surprise, Mark Zuckerberg is changing his tune! Exit the Metaverse, THE priority is now AI!
• Besides, the equivalent to ChatGPT developed by Facebook is called LLaMA and leaked a few weeks ago. And some smart guys have used it as a seduction coach to be a hit on Tinder. The idea? Ask the AI ​​to react to a conversation in the best way based on the “victim’s” profile data.