Hello and welcome to GG News!

This edition is all about saving you time and therefore saving you money! If you are constantly doing repetitive tasks, then this newsletter is for you!

If you are using multiple different applications that don’t necessarily talk to each other and can’t afford a developer, then this newsletter is for you!

Here at GG News, we have many feathers to our bow, we have the gadget-gal website to run, we have events to attend, we have articles to write, we have a podcast and well we have TV to watch!

The observant amongst you may have realised that most of this falls on our fearless leader Clare Petra Matthes 😮(Sorry Clare!) but all of this means we are constantly looking at ways to streamline our processes.

This is where Pabbly comes in! Pabbly is a “No-Code” automation platform that connects multiple applications. Check out below to get a better understanding of what Pabbly can do and if you are interested in trying it out then please use one of our affiliate links at the bottom of this newsletter, you will still get the best price💸 , but you will help us fund this newsletter😊.

Process automation is the key to unlocking time for you either in your personal life or for your business and after lots of research and testing we at GG News believe that Pabbly is the best platform for most use cases.

So, what do we use it for? 

The GG News team have various automations set up with Pabbly but below are our most frequently used ones:

📨📲Email to Telegram - there are certain mails we just do not want to miss and as a team we are frequently away from our desks. To stop us from missing these mails we set up keyword triggers from our emails and auto forward all of our mails to Pabbly. When the trigger keyword is detected, a notification is sent to the GG News telegram group containing the contents of the mail!

📤Podcast to Facebook post - As an extension to gadget-gal and GG news we also have a regular Podcast called Bit by Bit. Whenever we publish an episode of Bit by Bit, we have an automation which links via the podcast RSS feed. This automation is set to pull information such as the title, description and image URL from the RSS feed and posts an update to the Bit by Bit Facebook page. It’s amazingly useful and saves us time! ⌚

The excellent thing about Pabbly is the great support and great videos on their YouTube 📺page giving step by step guides on how to do almost anything you can think of!

What have we been having fun with? 🎉

So recently we have been testing Calendly which is a great tool for bringing multiple calendars together to assist in scheduling meetings and preventing endless back and forth.

As mentioned, the GG News team wear a number of hats and each hat has its own calendar! with Calendly we are able to consolidate all of those calendars into one schedule and share it directly via a link with anyone looking to book a meeting with us. The other party is then able to click the link find a slot that works for them and voila meeting booked!

The great thing is you can block out times that you may technically be free but would rather not schedule meetings and you can also set buffer zones, so meetings don’t get scheduled side by side.

If you want you can only allow meetings with 24 hours or more notice and maybe you want to limit meetings to no more than two per day with a minimum of 30 minutes between meetings, it’s all possible.

I also love the automation options which will enable you to schedule email or text message reminders for yourself and your attendees at any time prior to the meeting and you can even schedule a follow up email for after the meeting.

Trust me, your business needs a CRM -The one thing we have been very slow to get started with is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. If you’re not sure what CRM is check out this article from Hubspot.

Because we don’t really see ourselves as selling “products” we just didn’t see the need for CRM. That is until we started setting up Hubspot. You see a good CRM keeps you and your team accountable and can help to set up processes and workflows. Even if you are not selling physical products, it helps you manage your customers and contacts and even has built in email marketing software with analytics that tell exactly what you are doing right and also what you are doing wrong.

A CRM helps you to consolidate all of your customer and sales information in one place, this is especially helpful if an employee leaves because it enables someone else to jump in immediately.

But why Hubspot? - well to be honest our first reason was that the basic plan is completely free, and I can see lots of small businesses never needing anything more. The free plan definitely isn’t just a demo plan to entice you to buy as is normally the case it is a fully functioning CRM that will honestly blow you away! Give it a try…

🚩🚩Is OpenAI staying true to its founding principles? 📰

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Enterprise - OpenAI is now making its move to drive adoption in big business. In response to concerns about privacy and data security OpenAI has launched a new version of its chatbot directly targeted at large enterprises. According to OpenAI the new enterprise offering will have higher speeds, unlimited access to GPT-4, Enterprise grade security and data encryption along with many other things.

Our first impression of this was disappointment. Although OpenAI has already moved away from its founding as a non-profit research lab we were still hopeful that it would remain focused on democratising access to its tech. Now it is still early days, and the initial announcement is fairly vague, but it does seem to suggest that this may only be available to large enterprises let’s hope that isn’t the case.

At GG News we believe that large language models are an excellent tool that can level playing fields, and if OpenAI are not careful, they may end up with another BetaMax vs VHS saga with open-source models like Llama clearly on team VHS!

What’s in the news? 📰

💸💰OpenAI nears $1bn in annual sales - We have all heard the reports of the ridiculous costs to run OpenAIs large language models but maybe the tide is turning…

🦹🏻‍♀️Cyber criminals unmasked - In a beautifully poetic act it appears that one of the world’s top cybercrime gangs has been unmasked by a hacker!

🎥🚓 Cape Town’s Police officers get body worn cameras - In a move for better evidence gathering and increased accountability Police officers in the region will be kitted with body cams.

🤖🍟Huawei announces the launch of its Ascend910 AI chip - With the backdrop of trade restrictions and the “Entity” list Huawei has come out fighting with a chip to compete directly with Nvidia and Qualcomm.

AI tools

1. Jasper - Excellent for content creation with lots of templates and integrations.

2. Poe - Access all of the major chatbots in one place and also create bots of your own!

3. Spacely - An interior design AI to help you create amazing spaces in a fraction of the time.

4. AutoApply- In the job market? Let AI help you look for the perfect role.

Affiliate links

Below are our Affiliate links to sign up for Pabbly:

Pabbly has a special one-time payment plan which gives lifetime access for a single one-off payment, you can see these one-time payment options here.

For those of you who would like to look at their monthly recurring plans please check out the link here.

This week’s quote:

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi