An artisanal cheese factory in California was on the verge of bankruptcy. Today it is a buoyant business thanks to something: AI agents

North of San Francisco there is a city called Petaluma where there is a cheese factory with the same name. Petaluma Creamery has more than a century of history and generated $50 million in its golden age, but several factors caused it to be on the verge of disappearing. The story of their salvation is proof that AI does not always come to destroy jobs, it can also save businesses. A legendary cheese factory about to disappear. They count in Fortune that Larry Peter bought Petaluma Creamery in 2004 when the cooperative was about to close. It was he who turned it into a renowned brand that supplied hundreds of supermarkets and restaurants. After more than a decade of success, 2020 was the beginning of the end: the pandemic caused orders to drop, Larry had health problems and they lost Chipotle, one of their most important clients. The computer cousin. It’s not a meme. Larry Peter had a cousin, Daniel Peter, who was not a computer scientist but something even better: 17 years working at Salesforce implementing planning systems for manufacturers. Furthermore, he had just taken a sabbatical so it was the perfect opportunity and he ended up becoming the CTO of the cheese factory (goodbye, sabbatical). What Daniel found was a company that operated in a completely archaic way. All orders were recorded on paper, but invoices were entered in QuickBooks, an accounting software. The problem is that each of the more than 150 items had a code that employees had to know by heart, such as CY for yellow cheddar. As if that were not enough, it was invoiced in pounds, but the orders were always boxes or pieces. Goodbye, gap year. First step: digitize. The first thing the company’s new CTO did was install fiber optic internet and began taking all the data accumulated over decades to the cloud. Once everything was digitalized and the house was tidy, Daniel built an operating system based on Salesforce and the Agentforce AI platform. This is where things got interesting. AI agents to the rescue. With the house now in order, the intelligence layer was added and different tools were created to run the business. The first thing he did was load the jungle of codes for each article and replaced it with one that allowed searching with natural text. In addition, it automatically transforms boxes or pieces of cheese into pounds, making order registration a much faster process. Another of the agents that he implemented is capable of predicting what a customer is going to order based on the purchase history, so orders can be placed faster and if a customer forgets something the system remembers it. There is also an agent who plans delivery routes that can be modified with natural prompts and, finally, an agent is dedicated to controlling the traceability of the milk, recording data such as weight, temperature, time and origin. The human touch. AI agents improved the entire company’s operations, but there is one thing they do not know how to do and that is search for clients. For this, Larry Peter had the help of Kevin Goddard, who worked as a salesperson in the sector for decades. The result of joining their network of contacts with the new tools, managed to make the company go from having only 13 clients to more than 300. Petaluma Creamery is still far from billing 50 million at its peak, but they already plan to reach 10 million next year. The future. AI is reconfiguring the labor market and in many cases that translates into massive layoffsbut this is not always the case and the story of this cheese factory shows the other side of automation and AI. “It is very likely that this place would not exist without her” says Daniel Peter, the CTO cousin. In the end, it seems that he liked life between the factory and the farm and the sabbatical year is going to last a little longer than expected. Image | Petaluma Creamery In Xataka | Enterprises have successfully embraced AI agents. So much so that they are drowning in them

The most buoyant market right now is selling streaming and satellite images of US movements to Iran.

In recent years, the number of active satellites in orbit has exceeded 7,500many of them dedicated to observing the Earth with a precision that allows us to distinguish objects just a few meters away. At the same time, millions of position signals from aircraft and ships were broadcast every minute openly throughout the planet. Never before has there been so much accessible information about what is happening, in almost real time, anywhere on the planet. A new war market in real time. The war in Iran has opened a unexpected showcaseor where each military movement becomes almost immediate content, packaged and disseminated as if it were a live event by an international artist. Chinese technology companies have detected that opportunity and have begun to offer detailed analysis on US bases, deployments and operations using open data combined with artificial intelligence. What previously required state intelligence resources is now presented as an accessible, visual and viral product, capable of circulating both on social networks and specialized platforms. The result is a kind military streaming where the movements of a superpower are transformed into information merchandise. Fusion between open data and AI. I counted this week the Washington Post that the core of this phenomenon is in the combination of public sources (such as satellite images, flight trackers or maritime data) with algorithms capable of processing them on a large scale. Here are companies that we had already talked about before like MizarVisionwhich use these resources to reconstruct entire deployments, identify aircraft types or follow naval group routes in near real time. Although much of the data already existed, the difference now is in speedautomation and the ability to cross-reference information on a massive scale, turning simple scattered signals into coherent military narratives. This drastically reduces the distance between the public and the strategic. Intelligence as a commercial product. The real turn is not only in technology, but in the business model that surrounds her. These companies do not operate like traditional intelligence agencies, but rather as suppliers that sell visibility on military operations, promoting their capabilities with real examples of active conflicts. Signatures as Jing’an Technology They have even gone so far as to publish alleged records of communications or mission reconstructionsreinforcing the idea that they can “see everything.” Thus, war ceases to be just a geopolitical scenario and becomes a source of income based on the exploitation of raw information transformed into digestible intelligence. Money flows in only one direction. Behind this apparent democratization of intelligence there is a very specific economic flow that mainly benefits the Chinese technological ecosystem. They remembered in the post that many of these companies have grown under the umbrella of the integration strategy Beijing civil-militaryreceiving funding and indirect support to develop dual capabilities. Every report sold, every analysis disseminated and every platform used rstrengthens that industrial fabricfeeding a circuit where data (often generated by Western infrastructures) ends up generating value within China. In practice, monitoring the movements of the United States not only exposes its operations, but also helps finance the technological development of a strategic competitor. A diffuse but growing threat. Although US authorities doubt that these companies can penetrate truly sensitive systems, the problem lies not so much in absolute precision as in the trend that they can represent. The ability to map movements, detect patterns and anticipate deployments is already a advantage in scenarios crisis, even if the data is not perfect. Furthermore, this model offers China an additional advantage: it can benefit from the information without officially getting involvedusing private companies as intermediaries. The consequence is something of a new type of battlefield, one where open, processed and commercialized information becomes a strategic weapon in itself. Image | MizarVision In Xataka | The US is redrawing the map of its bases in Europe. And none of the countries that have said “no to war” appear In Xataka | Of all the paradoxes of the war in the Middle East, few imagined this ending: with a “half-way” deal between the US and Iran

We have our attention so broken that a buoyant industry has emerged: keyboards “without distractions”

In 2024 more than 90,000 books. It is estimated that in the United States the figure was much greater and reached three millionincluding self -published books. Those numbers make something very clear: The world has been filled with writers. Those who write do so in addition to many ways. The traditional typewriter has practically disappeared to give way to the computer, and the versatility of this technological product has made the experience more personal than ever. The blank folio, but on the screen Thus, while some write on the desktop computer, others do it in the laptop, but in that experience they import the details, such as the type of keyboard used – with the popular ones Mechanical keyboardsfor example – or, of course, the application that each one uses to write. The famous case of George Rr Martin with The mythical and very old Wordstar It is almost anecdotal, because there are currently many more modern rivals. Microsoft Word is the obvious option, but the rivals have pressed remarkably in this sector. Thus, a huge amount of applications and services designed for writers have appeared such as Scrivener, Ulysses, iawriter, Manuskripteither Ghostwriter. In many cases one of the foci of these applications was not just to help the writer in areas such as the structure of the novel or the organization of the characters and the plot. They also usually have a mode without distractions, which usually manifest with the digital version of the blank folio: the totally empty interface, without tool or menus bars. Only a cursor flashing and waiting for us. Welcome to keyboards without distractions These software applications are also accompanied by some hardware devices specifically written oriented. They are a modern version of traditional writing machines: products totally thought to do one thing and only one: write. Freewrite Traveler. These “keyboards without distractions“They usually integrate small screens in which the text we are writing is showing, but there is nothing more than we can do with them. They have internet connectivity, but only with the aim of being able to synchronize those texts with the cloud to save them. Nothing of web browsers, no social networks, nothing of (is supposed to) distractions. All of them try to create a” concentration bubble “so that whoever writes is centered exclusively on it. The clear reference in this segment is Freewriteof the Astrohaus company, which manufactures several keyboards without distractions with that proposal. In them we normally have: Internet connectivity Small but sufficient flash memory to store several manuscripts Internal battery Screen: Normally of electronic ink, but also LCD This electronic ink screen of several models makes it more comfortable to have long writing sessions and contributes to the autonomy of the battery being lasting. The most remarkable alternative to Freewrite machines is Pomberaof the Japanese company King Jim, which has launched some of its smodels on collective financing platforms such as Indiegogo. Pomra DM250US It is, of course, devices with a high price for how specific they are. Here it is likely that the limited production lots will ensure these products, but still Your price/benefits ratio is not remarkable. Freewrite Traveler, for example, has a price of 603.95 euros In the official Freewrite store. Pomera’s recent rival – with LCD screen – has an official price of $ 449, almost 400 euros. In Xataka we have contacted three users of these devices: two of them English -speaking, and a young Spanish. All of them have bought and used at least one of these types of keyboards without distractions or some similar alternative, and have had the kind of sharing the experience with us. Looking for digital substitute to the notebook and the ball ILIA EPIFANOV, writer and editorhe has published more than 30 works, among which are short stories, books and even comics. When he decided to buy one of these devices, he tells us, “I was looking for a compact machine and allowed me to write without distractions.” Discovered the Freewrite devices“But the price seemed high, and I also looked for something more portable. Ended up deciding on the Nokia E7a smartphone launched in 2011 that had a drop -down physical keyboard under the housing. “It is small, well done and causes nostalgia,” he said, “although it certainly has its limitations.” He admits that he would not recommend it to most people, especially since the keyboard is not suitable for use for long periods of time. But for this user one of the keys to this old device is that it is old and most of its applications are useless today. That makes it focus only as a keyboard without distractions, because as he says “I love its simplicity: you display the keyboard and simply write.” Carl Dikington “Pseudonym that.” Use in Reddit Our second guest – is an autonomous worker who writes both professionally and for hobby. He also began looking for alternatives to write without distractions, and began by the cheapest and less technological: a notebook and a ball. He soon realized that did not seem practical, and after looking for devices of this type, he opted for the Freewrite Traveler, who chose for his portability but that “if I am honest, I chose in front of others for aesthetic reasons. I simply liked her appearance, and I thought that if I was going to spend a good part of the day looking at him, I wanted me to like her design.” This type of products “do not magic,” he confessed. “You still need to force yourself to sit and write, and that will always be a complex task. And that is the real problem. We let computers distract us because we want to avoid the difficulty of writing. Eliminating those distractions does not eliminate the desire to be distracted, and the world has a lot of additional distraction sources to which we can submit.” It is an important reflection, and reveals the reality of some devices that of course avoid the distractions … Read more

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