I’ve been swamped with a project for the past 10 weeks. It ends next Tuesday (supposed to end Saturday, but you know how projects go).
The travails of Google with the US DOJ and Apple with the European Union focusing on the issues of monopolistic mature market and openness spurred some thoughts on similarities with the control and automation market. Those thoughts coalesced around the podcast.
Blogging, writing to a Web Log, began crossing my radar by the late 90s. I was curious about what was going on. I heard of Dave Winer. He was a software developer. Developer of RSS, something I still use.
Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of his blog Scripting News. And he is still going.
When we had Automation World up and running in late 2003, I began exploring. My first site was built on Winer’s Radio Userland—Gary’s Radio Weblog. The sales people at Automation World wanted to tie me to the brand, so I renamed it Gary Mintchell’s Feed Forward—the title of my monthly editorial.
When I left Automation World for the greener pastures of independent writer/analyst in the industrial and manufacturing market in 2013, the blog was renamed The Manufacturing Connection. The idea was emphasis on Connection. Over 21 years, I’ve written more than 3,500 posts.
The early days of live blogging CEO remarks were exciting. Walt Boyes, then of Control magazine and I had a fun competition going. The market has changed. All companies are now blogging and doing their own marketing. Most no longer support magazines or other media. I followed the fads of IIoT, Edge, AI, Cobots. This technology has become mature and somewhat stagnant. There are just a few software companies cranking out interesting products.
This is all a long time. Social media people came and went from Twitter (I was there in 2008), podcasts are big for a few (mine started in 2007). YouTubers are big in a few markets. It’s all cool. People who could never have had a voice now have the ability to broadcast a message. It’s all good.
Curation is a problem right now. The requirements for discernment on the part of listeners/readers is ever more important. If it’s easy for people to have a voice, it’s also easy for people to broadcast false and misleading ideas.
I’m happy to be able to do this. It’s been fun.
A marketing communications person I’ve known for some time sent news about a new client—and a product I never expected to see, let alone review. Foxit has built a PDF editor with expanding features. I wrote a couple months ago about its e-signature subscription plan. Below is news about an AI assistant added to its Editor and Editor Pro products.
I am no longer a power user of this technology. When Adobe went to a subscription model that cost much more than any benefit I could derive, I found workarounds. Foxit sent a courtesy copy of the application. I’ve been playing around with it for a month or more at this point. I like the interface and the user interface. I’ve found the annotation and ability to copy and paste to my blog text editor to be flawless. I like it and recommend checking it out.
Guess I should say that I’m not compensated for the review. But I do like it. Don’t know if I’ll return to power user status at this point. Foxit makes it tempting.
Speaking of subscription versus purchase, they have published a blog that analyzes the benefits and drawbacks. Personally, I hate it every month when I see the expense paid to Microsoft for Office 365 for the limited use I have for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. And I just dropped Adobe altogether except for the generic reader app. Subscriptions give you updates (occasionally free), but for my money you need to be really using the product. Check out the blog for a reasoned analysis.
And now the new product.
Foxit Announces PDF Editor and Editor Pro with AI Assistant, Now Natively Supported on PCs powered by Snapdragon
Foxit announced that its Foxit PDF Editor and Editor Pro with AI Assistant are now natively supported on PCs powered by Snapdragon processors. This integration will provide commercial and consumer PC customers with greatly enhanced performance and capabilities – such as those customers working with PDF files on Dell Technologies’ latest devices powered by Snapdragon.
Native Snapdragon support refers to software that is developed and optimized to run directly on Snapdragon processors, without the need for emulation or translation layers. This allows the software to take full advantage of Snapdragon’s capabilities – resulting in improved performance, compatibility, and battery life, as well as decreased complexity and maintenance demands – compared to running the software in an emulated environment.
Foxit’s solutions empower PC users to create, edit, collaborate and secure PDF documents with ease. By combining the advanced capabilities of Foxit’s PDF Editor with the AI-driven natural language processing of ChatGPT, PCs powered by Snapdragon allow users to interact with PDFs more intuitively and efficiently. The integration of ChatGPT provides intelligent automation and enhances the user experience by enabling intelligent interactions for tasks such as redaction, document annotation, and form filling.
Mainstream media, bloggers, and YouTubers join marketers with opinions and expectations surrounding Augmented (Artificial) Intelligence (AI) especially with the breakout of energy-guzzling Large Language Models (LLMs).
Despite the hype, I have seen a few actual applications of embedding an LLM into software applications. So, the product development engineers among us (I used to be one) must ask themselves—can we turn this into a product?
Well, a company called Tecton announced last month a platform expansion that is said to unlock the full potential of Generative AI in enterprise applications. They say that they empower AI teams to build reliable, high-performing systems by infusing LLMs with comprehensive, real-time contextual data.
Their argument for the limited adoption of LLMs thus far is “the unpredictable nature of LLMs when faced with dynamic business environments. This stems from LLMs’ lack of up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge and real-time contextual awareness. The true value of AI for enterprises lies in leveraging their unique, company-specific data to create customized solutions that are deeply connected to all aspects of their business.”
That is a valid point.
Tecton enhances retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications by integrating comprehensive, real-time data from across the enterprise. This approach augments the retrieved candidates with up-to-date, contextual information, enabling the LLM to make more informed decisions. The outcome is hyper-personalized, context-aware AI applications capable of split-second accuracy in dynamic environments. For instance, an e-commerce AI could instantly consider a customer’s browsing behavior, inventory levels, and current promotions to retrieve the most relevant product candidates, significantly improving recommendation quality and conversion rates.
Check out the details at their website.
Amazon stumbled into quite a business when it developed Web Services. Of course, Microsoft and Google entered the market proving it’s a real market. AWS has been gaining ground in the industrial software space. This news comes from PTC announcing that its Onshape business has announced entry into a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The objective is said to accelerate the growth of its Onshape cloud-native computer-aided design (CAD) and product data management (PDM) solution. This collaboration will focus on advancing Onshape product enhancements, customer adoption programs, and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, all of which are aimed at helping product designers and engineers create new, high-quality products faster and more efficiently.
