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Even if your country celebrates Valentine’s Day, today is a divisive day for many people. We get that. Maybe it serves as an unwelcome reminder. We know how many emails are in your inbox right now with last-minute Valentine’s Day offers, too. Of course, we do love a good product discount, but they don’t always set the right mood.

That’s why we love projects that enable you to do something truly thoughtful for someone else, even if that’s a stranger.

HeartMail is giving you the tools to send a Valentine’s Day letter to other internet humans today. You can choose from a shortlist of interests too if, for instance, you want to include your favorite uplifting quote for another movie-lover out there.

We also rounded up a few more unique options for quashing loneliness with loving vibes today.

Koya: Send thoughtful, timely messages and micro-gifts
Okel: Connect with people over meals at local restaurants
HeyBuddy: Find a buddy to train and exercise with
Thousand Face Club: Creators, find peers and seek mentorship
Daffy: Choose from 1.5M+ charities and contribute cash, stock, or crypto

And for those of you looking for a last-minute gift for your crush or significant other, Poolsuite just launched Suities. Tell them you want to HODL forever with a virtual playlist.

Happy Valentine’s Day to the best community on the interwebs. You’re ameowzing and we truly love you.

Perception of AI: Let’s build an app that recognizes photos of birds.

The reality: “AI is f*cking hard.”

A few new products have reminded us that there’s still much to do about making AI coding systems accessible and usable, but these makers are on it.

Nyckel is a product built by engineers with backgrounds in APIs, machine learning systems, and high-scale cloud computing platforms. It helps makers build AI into their tools and apps and can be used to do things like tag appropriate versus inappropriate posts, categorize photos, or predict whether a customer is likely to purchase. The startup hopes to help companies avoid having to hire a machine learning team or build costly ML infrastructure.

You can watch the launch video (narrated by one Nyckel maker, and Personal Finance Club creator, Jeremy Schneider) to see a demo of Nyckel in action as a model is trained to identify bird photos.

Then there’s Riku, a platform where makers can use multiple AI providers. As maker Stuart Lansdale points out, OpenAI has been growing in popularity, but there’s more technology than just OpenAI. There’s just “no central place to create prompts, swap out the tech to see different outputs or see what the best prompts are from the community.”

Riku lets makers build AI prompts with OpenAI, Cohere, AI21 or GPT-J. “Switching between tech couldn't be easier and is as fluid as hitting a dropdown.”

And TagTeam is the one serving the realness that opened this newsletter. AI is hard, and “developers haven’t been able to fully utilise the AI-driven solutions that exist… [while they’ve] been guarded by dominating organisations with specialised data scientists,” maker Hannah O'Connor shared.

TagTeam is an NLP API, or a software interface that lets makers extract information and insights from the contents of text and documents. Common NLP language tasks are sentiment analysis, classifications, tokenization, text summarization, and text generation. In the demo video, you can see how TagTag extracts information from a receipt.

If you’ve been sitting on questions about building with AI, now’s a good time to ask a few makers who are working to make AI easier and accessible.

The rebels are back.

No, we’re not talking about rapping bitcoin thieves. We’re talking about Malala Yousafzai, Frida Khalo, and RBG, to name a few.

Yesterday, Rebel Girls launched its app filled with audio stories of the adventures and accomplishments of women from around the world and throughout history.

Rebel Girls got its start in 2016 when founders Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo launched a Kickstarter campaign for a book called “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.” The book featured a collection of one-page stories from the past and the present, illustrated by 100 female artists from all over the world.

With a background in journalism, Favilli had moved from Italy with Cavallo (who has since left Rebel Girls for other pursuits) to start a publishing company. She began writing a newsletter with text, images, and stories about famous and unknown women and it began generating interest and subscribers. Her next step was launching her concept as a book on Kickstarter, which could be seen as a bit rebellious itself given traditional publishing models.

The book blew past its funding goal. Within weeks the makers raised $675,614 in pledges on Kickstarter and $1.2 million in total with funds from IndieGogo.

Good Night Stories went on to become a New York Times bestseller and sell over 3 million copies. The Rebel Girls media and publishing company has published several more books and a podcast that features stories narrated by modern, influential women.

The new Rebel Girls app carries its award-winning storytelling, eye-catching illustrations, and narrations from admirable women into a new digital format. As an example, you can listen to the story of Simon Biles, the Olympic gymnast tied as the most decorated gymnast of all time, read by decorated alpine ski racer, Lindsey Vonn.

“Every story in the app is filled with inspirational messages and highlights various socio-emotional needs,” shared Rebel Girls Cheif Product Officer, Melissa Mazman.

Rebel Girls has a number of stories available to listen to for free, from Beyonce to Maya Angelou.

Longevity goes hand in hand with fantasy and science fiction in entertainment, though it’s not all make-believe. You’ll find tech startups in this space working to hack human biology. Case in point, Altos Labs, a biotech company focused on cellular rejuvenation programming that Jeff Bezos reportedly invests in.

Hearts Radiant is in the longevity tech business but its app, Rosita, is centered around practical methods to help people extend their lives, and perhaps more importantly, enjoy that extra time.

Co-founder Clara Fernández Porta introduced Rosita to the community along with her co-founder (and husband) Juan Cartagena, and CTO David Gil. Fernández Porta is also the founder of a “longevity school” or “longevity summer camp” at Balneario de Cofrentes in Spain. The school has developed a comprehensive approach to education for seniors that looks at their lifestyle, prevention of diseases, and the newest scientific discoveries in the field.

For these founders, longevity is not just about fitness. Cartagena told TechCrunch that fitness is “limited in scope. And we are trying to go beyond that — it’s just the starting point [for reducing frailty].”

The Rosita app includes tests, over 10 daily live sessions with healthcare specialists, and 600+ hours of fun content and chat groups with top longevity experts. Users can learn about topics from biology to pharmacogenetics, and participate in things like metabolic boot camps.

The launch comes timed with the app’s US launch and a second seed round. The first funding was used to develop a personalized AI coach and conduct research into whether coaching can yield tangible reductions in frailty through a digital experience. The app currently has around 2,000 “very active” users.

Rosita is interesting because of its focus on enjoying that last inning of life. This writer can’t be the only one who’s heard their aging parents say “I hope I don’t live THAT long.”

“Life expectancy (LE) in Western Countries is 85, but healthy life expectancy (HLE) is only 65. Our loved ones live 20 years with pain or a disease that could be prevented in most of the cases,” Fernández Porta explains. And Rosita’s 10-year longevity plan isn’t about just living longer, but reaching “the top Range of Excellence.”

The team is offering a 50% discount, so now is the time to try the app or pass it on to a senior in your life.

In December, we did a roundup of startups that are reinventing spreadsheets. Products like Actiondesk empower users to pull data together and gather insights so they can answer questions on their own (i.e. without having to wait on engineers or the BI team.)

Clay is a new launch today in that space, offering a tool that “creates spreadsheets that fill themselves.” Perhaps the best way to understand Clay is through sample workflows that users can create without code. A marketing or sales representative, for example, can directly pull in LinkedIn data, add emails and phone numbers from sources like Clearbit and Hunter.io, add their formula for determining qualified leads, and then sync those qualified leads back to the CRM.

“I love the integrations, especially that they work out-of-the-box without the need to enter my own API keys,” wrote early adopter Luca Rossi.

Clay lets you scrape data from the internet to turn any website into a data source. It may not be the only scraping tool, but Clay's Chrome extension is generating interest from the community.

Maker Kareem Amin explains: “​​For more adventurous hackers, our Chrome extension makes it possible for anyone to 'map' a webpage so that eventually when every page on the internet is mapped, no one will have to waste time scraping data again!”

What if the data falls out of date? Amin explains that mappings can be edited, so when someone sees data that is out of data, they can simply update it and help the whole community. The team plans to define a way to reward users who do so.

Maker Yogesh Agarwal adds:

“IMO the beauty with the extension is that it's insanely easy to reconfigure the scrapers so that whenever someone sees something that's broken they can update it themselves in a few seconds.”

You add your feedback for the team by clicking through below, or go ahead and help your fellow internet goers and...

We know how this community loves an open-source alternative. Medusa’s launch today may strike a chord with those who run or support a business on Shopify, as it did for this commenter:

“This looks great, I'm a huge fan of Shopify and ran a store for nearly 8 years. I agree that I've written some horrible code to get Shopify to do what I want…” - Simon Barker

Maker Sebastian Rindom explained that he and his cofounders were motivated to create Medusa, a headless commerce platform, after often finding themselves hacking together solutions that left them “cringing while writing the code.”

If you’re feeling bad for Shopify, we’ll take a moment to remind you that they’re doing well. Shopify enables 1.75 million businesses to sell to their customers in 175 countries worldwide. The tech giant also consistently explores new partnerships and features to support sellers, making it a favorite tool for businesses and makers.

While Medusa’s solution offers out-of-the-box building blocks for your store along with plug-n-play integrations, similar to Shopify, the startup promises more customization that developers can leverage (“when you need to you can take full control over any part of Medusa and make it your own.”)

Anyone can checkout Medusa’s code (as open-source goes) and at least a couple of makers already took a peek under the hood and are feeling good:

“I'm really impressed by the architecture and code quality,” Cristian Toba commented.

Head to the link below to check out Medusa and leave feedback for the team.

Or, if you clicked on this email hoping to see a lot more open-source, we direct you now to Open Source Alternatives, a resource to find open-source tools by topic, from newsletters to observability platforms.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen this much discourse on Tech Twitter. Last week, Calendly took the spotlight as the most discussed product. It felt somewhat reminiscent of the 2015 “The Dress” viral phenomenon (is it blue or gold?!) dividing the Internet, except this time, the debate was focused on the question of "is sending a calendar link rude?"

The discussion stems from a post by former Facebook VP, Sam Lessin, arguing that Calendly is “The Most Raw / Naked Display of Social Capital Dynamics in Business.” The Twitter crowd can’t really agree on a consensus either: some shared a satirical response, while others offered up alternative products.

The Calendly team has been addressing concerns like these through a Calendly Etiquette series they started last November.

Still, if you side with Lessin or are just looking for an alternative calendar experience, here are others to check out:

Cal.com is an open-source Calendly alternative that you can self-host and integrate into your business. It's also launching Cal.com for web3 today. 👀

SavvyCal overlays your calendar and your recipient’s calendar, giving them the choice of how long the meeting should run.

Coffee Chats helps you build a no-code website that is connected to your Google Calendar. Think Carrd meets Calendly.

Zcal offers a free Calendly alternative that allows you to customize your booking page.

Hera Calendar was built with remote teams in mind, allowing you to schedule meetings and share availability across all accounts and timezones.

Woven Calendar leverages group polling to find the best time for larger teams to meet.

Speaking of The Golden Kitty Awards, what did you think?!

We’d love to hear your feedback so we can make next year’s ceremony even better. Please take a moment to fill out this survey and be entered to win one of two $100 Amazon Gift Cards we’re giving away.

2021 was a breakout year for Solana.

“If you’d invested just $500 in Solana at the start of 2021, you’d have roughly $47,500 at the end of the year,” wrote Muslim Farooque for Yahoo News. Solana is a programmable blockchain, like Ethereum, whose native currency is SOL. It’s been called “the Ethereum killer” as more developers have been turning to the platform to build their own decentralized apps (dapps) and cryptocurrencies.

SOL has not been immune to the “crypto winter,” i.e. the recent market plunge that’s affected Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which some investors speculate will turn into a prolonged downward trajectory. Regardless, Solana’s momentum towards being a leading blockchain platform progressed this week with a new launch.

Solana Pay is a new way for merchants to accept crypto payments with Solana-based tokens like USDC, a stablecoin tied to the US Dollar. It was developed with partners Checkout.com (which just raised $1B), Circle (which founded USDC), Citcon (a mobile wallet payment provider), and wallets Slope and Phantom (a Golden Kitty Award nominee for web3). The makers are also working on an integration with Shopify.

“Cash is king — and Solana Pay is more cash-like,” writes Tomio Geron for Protocol. Solana Pay offers merchants and customers a direct connection through a decentralized payment gateway. For merchants, that means they can skip intermediaries like Visa. For consumers, smart contracts could enable a host of opportunities, like the ability to hold funds in escrow for big-ticket items. Solana Pay is also attractive for the speed and cost of transactions. Ethereum, in comparison, is too slow to settle and too costly, noted Sheraz Shere, Head of Payments at Solana Labs.

That’s not to say that Solana is criticism-free. For example, as Solana grew in popularity last year, it experienced congestion problems and slowdowns. It was also in the headlines just one day post-launch after a hacker stole $320 million in assets through Wormhole, which offers a bridge between the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. The attack was not a direct hack on the Solana network, but the incident could have a negative impact on the ecosystem.

So far the community has embraced the promise of Solana Pay. Add your thoughts. 👇

A new report by McKinsey looks at the economic impact of transitioning to net-zero emissions by 2050, assuming nine "system-level requirements" (like economic and societal adjustments) are met. The cost comes to about $275 trillion in this hypothetical scenario.

There’s some bad news:

“A disorderly transition could come with high economic costs as well as a backlash that delays the transition.”

And some good news:

“For all its short-term risks, the transition will also create rich new opportunities across sectors and geographies, for example in the form of new markets for low-emission products and support services.”

Climatiq Emission Tracking API is a great example of such low-carbon emission products we hope to see more of soon. The new API makes it easy for companies to embed and automate carbon measurements in their software. Maker Hessam Lavi shared that the team of makers wanted to do their part to help the climate crisis.

“The problem is that emissions and the activities that cause them are largely invisible to us. The picture is particularly muddy when it comes to the environmental impact of businesses. This includes messy scientific data and methodology, and a lack of simple and affordable tools. Crucial insights, therefore, remain inaccessible to non-experts…”

So in collaboration with the science and sustainability community, the makers created an open emission factor database (OEFDB) and an API that allows for computations of emissions in real-time.

Climatiq has a free plan you can start using. The team is looking for feedback and suggestions.

As the McKinsey report also notes, despite the costs of transitioning to net-zero, we can’t lose sight of the longer-term and physical risks of global warming. So better get moving.

It’s not all just fun and games. Sometimes it’s also a business opportunity where you never saw one coming.

Creator Josh Wardle sold his viral word game, Wordle, to the New York Times for an undisclosed amount in the “low seven figures.” The NYT said the game will continue on for free “initially” and Wardle said he's working with the media giant to make sure your wins and streaks will be preserved. Wardle, an ex-Reddit maker, created the word puzzle for his girlfriend (*nudges partner*).

Jonathan Knight, General Manager of Games at the New York Times, stated that Wordle “captured our collective imagination.” We saw that in the form of Wordle artwork and memes across the internet. Here at Product Hunt, we’ve also seen a lot of Wordle-inspired products, from analytics to tools that help solve your Wordle. And these great riffs off the five-letter game:

Pictle: A companion game where you must create specific pixel art patterns
Custom Wordle: Make and share your own words to challenge friends
Chengyu Wordle: Guess Chinese idioms in 6 tries
Stockle: Wordle, but with Stock tickers
Numble: Wordle for math lovers

If words are not your cup of tea, we got you. Check out these newcomer games others in the community are playing.

For web3 devotees: punksVshapes
For parents: Joon
For doodlers: PenPlay
For parties (remote or in-person): Mafia
For history lovers: WikiTrivia

Or tell the community what internet game you're obsessed with. 👇