Technology
Needles to say, Ghostline drags tattoo stencil making ‘inkto’ the current millennium • TechCrunch
Some of us are fans of dip-n-rip tattoos with very little planning. Who cares, it’s not like tattoos are permanent, right? Others prefer a slightly more measured approach. If you’ve ever gotten a delicate, detailed tattoo, you may have been surprised by how long it takes your tattoo artist to go from doodle to having the rough outline of your soon-to-be body art transferred onto your skin. Ghostline recently launched an iPad app to try and change all of that, dragging (some) tattoo artists into the digital age.
“Everything in the tattoo industry is kind of antiquated at this point. Machines and tools have gotten better, but tech hasn’t really entered the space other than batteries and maybe digital art formats. We’ve been spending the same amount of time for years, and it became evident to me that there had to be a way that I could optimize the process of making a stencil, especially for artists who create realistic artwork,” said London Reese, founder at Ghostline, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We have iPads, we have software, we have all these drawing tools, but nothing would turn that imagery into a stencil that I could print out and apply it to skin. That takes anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes every day. That has always been part of the process, but I wondered and said, ‘Wait! I think I could make something like that!’”
To Reese, the value is saving time — spending six or seven hours per week on creating stencils could instead be spent tattooing more customers, and he laments either missing out on money or on time with his family.
The part of the process the app replaces is stenciling. Traditionally, you’d have to hand-design and trace a stencil on top of a photo, and then run it through a Thermofax or some sort of thermal copier. From there, you can apply that carbon stencil onto skin. The app replaces the need to hand-trace. In addition, it offers a few additional features that make it easier to resize work across multiple sheets of stencil paper or to do tattoo work in multiple sessions.
“We developed a way to make the app AirPrint compatible, so we can print directly from the app straight to a modern inkjet printer. Instead of using printer ink, the printer will have tattoo stencil ink and runs stencil paper instead of printer paper,” Reese explains. “You print it out, cut it out, apply it to the body and it’s ready to go.”
Ghostline produced a little video showing off how it all works, featuring Reese himself:
The app also has tools built in that make it possible to scale images up and print them over multiple sheets in a grid. By automating that process, it becomes repeatable, which means you can get exact measurements and then save it on the tablet. You can come back to it another day — weeks or months later — and reapply it, aligned with the tattooing that’s already completed, to continue the tattoo.
The company currently has around 3,000 users, growing at around 100 per day. It’s free to try for a week; after that, it costs $5.99 per month or $59.99 per year for unlimited use.
However, Reese admits the app may not be for everyone.
“You know, there is a cool old-school mentality in tattooing that I hope never dies. You learn the way of the forefathers of tattooing and you do it that way and you don’t bring anything else into it, because it works,” Reese laughs. “I love that. However, I’m a modern man in modern culture. If I can find something that will allow me to optimize my workflow, I’m all about it. I’ve been trying to optimize my workstation and my workflow for years, and this is just one little element of it. I don’t mind that some guys aren’t gonna like it or are gonna think it’s not for them. That’s fine. That’s tattooing. That’s art. Right? We all have a process.”
Jack Ma’s whereabouts are making headlines again roughly a year after the billionaire founder of Alibaba disappeared from the public eye.
Bloomberg reported Monday that Ma had chosen to stay abroad despite China’s efforts to restore confidence in entrepreneurs, citing unnamed sources. Within hours, however, news surfaced that Ma actually visited an Alibaba-funded K-12 school in Hangzhou, according to an article published by the school, Yungu.
The Bloomberg article had since been updated to reflect Ma’s appearance in Hangzhou, home to the founder and Alibaba, where he talked about how ChatGPT posed a challenge to education during the school visit.
The renewed attention to Ma’s location comes at a time when China is trying to voice support for the private sector following a years-long crackdown on the tech industry, including shelving the IPO plans of Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba. The movement prompted some founders to move abroad and seek overseas expansion.
The news of Ma also comes as Chinese tech firms are facing unprecedented pressure in the West. Last Thursday, U.S. lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in a congressional hearing that spanned five hours, firing harsh questions that brought to light the irreconcilable differences between the two superpowers. The hearing, as one Chinese founder said to TechCrunch, sent a chill up their spine.
TikTok isn’t the only one running into roadblocks in the U.S. A group of “businesses and individuals” have formed a “Shut Down Shein” campaign to question the business practices of Shein, the Singapore-headquartered fast fashion giant that has risen to global dominance thanks to its data-driven supply chains in China. Shein refuted a report that it faced risks of being shut down in the U.S.
Microsoft-owned GitHub took down a repository by a user named “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” that contained proprietary source code to Twitter after the social network filed a DCMA takedown request. The username certainly seems to be a jab at Twitter owner Elon Musk, who has claimed to be a “free speech absolutist” many times.
On Friday, Twitter filed a petition in the District Court of Northern California asking GitHub to take down the code and also help it find the perpetrator. The subpoena asks GitHub to disclose name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), email address(es), social media profile data, and IP address(es) linked with “FreeSpeechEnthusiast”.
The development comes days before March 31, when Musk will supposedly make Twitter’s algorithm related to the recommendation open source.
It’s not clear what part of Twitter was leaked on GitHub and for what duration. GitHub’s DCMA takedown blog just mentioned it took down the repository containing “Proprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools.”
The code-hosting site didn’t say if any users were able to access the repository before the company took it down. We have asked for a comment and will update the story if we hear back.
Twitter might be concerned about copies of the code that might not be present on GitHub. Twitter’s internal investigation suggested that the people who were responsible for the leak left the company last year, as per a report from the New York Times. The story also suggested that the social network’s executives got to know about the code leak only recently.
The company is facing a tough time after Musk’s takeover last year. Recent reports suggest that the Tesla CEO now values Twitter at $20 billion — less than half of the $44 billion he paid for the social network. According to a report from the New York Times, Musk also wrote an email to employees to announce a new stock compensation program that said Twitter could be worth $250 billion one day.
To get Twitter’s finances in better shape, Musk has taken radical steps for cost-cutting including mass layoffs and relaunching a new subscription program that offers verification as one of the benefits. According to data from analytics firm Sensor Tower, Twitter has managed to just get $11 million out of this new service. For comparison, Twitter registered $1.17 billion in revenue for Q2 2022.
At a recent conference, Musk said that time on users’ Twitter is poorly monetized.
“The average amount of time that people spend on Twitter per day that 250 million [monthly active users] is around half an hour or so. So what we have is — the thing that’s I think most interesting — is there are about 120 to 130 million hours of human attention per day on Twitter,” he said
“Every single day on, average, which is — I think it comes to a really interesting point which is to — just it’s startling how poorly monetized that is — because you have to say like how valuable is that attention 100 to 130 million hours of human attention per day of people that read — so these are the generally the smartest people in the world, the most influential people in the world.”
As expected, when we reached out to Twitter, we got a poop emoji.
Activist investor Elliott Investment Management won’t be proceeding with plans to nominate its own directors to Salesforce’s board, citing improved performance and a clearer “focus on value creation” from the enterprise software company.
Elliott — one of five activist investors within Salesforce’s ranks — announced ahead of Salesforce’s recent Q4 earnings that it was pushing several of its own candidates toward the Salesforce board after a turbulent 2022 for the company. However, after a return to financial form for Salesforce, beating growth forecasts and announcing more shareholder returns, it seems this has been enough to convince Elliott that Salesforce has corrected course.
In a joint statement today, the companies said that in light of Salesforce’s recently announced “profitable growth framework” dubbed “New Day,” alongside its strong fiscal year 2023 and a slew of additional “transformation initiatives,” Elliott won’t pursue its director nominations.
“I have great respect for Marc [Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff] and his team, and I have become deeply impressed by their strong ongoing commitment to profitable growth, responsible capital return and an ambitious shareholder value creation plan,” Elliott managing partner Jesse Cohn noted in a press release.
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