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The holidays are a popular time for technophiles and scrooges alike to circle back to a topic of regular speculation — what’s the latest on home robots?

Robotic mowers are awesome and floor cleaners get smarter each year. Still, one-function bots, from home tools to burger flippers, disappoint those who compare them to the intelligent and autonomous machines foretold in SciFi (although this one did not disappoint). Amazon Astro was probably the biggest headliner in the home robot market this year. Though it’s primarily marketed as a home security bot, its camera face does makes it a multitasker, however it’s TBD how well it all actually works.

Getting less conversation share, but making progress in their own right, are startups that are bringing the robotic arms that we associate with giant warehouses into our homes and small businesses. For example, we recently learned about UFactory in a contributing article from Kickstarter’s Laura Feinstein. The Shenzhen-based tech start-up is working to make robots more accessible to everyone and last year it “launched the most funded robot campaign in history.”

UFactory’s product range started with the uARM, a desktop robotic arm you can teach to complete simple tasks without code, and recently introduced the Lite 6, a lightweight arm for small and medium enterprises. Use cases for the Lite 6 range from helping engineers test touchscreens, to automating lab tasks for researchers, to simply making coffee.

Today, we’re also watching the launch of HUENIT, a modular robotic arm with an AI camera. Like UFactory, HUENIT is targeting everyday technophiles and makers who can find ways to leverage the dexterous robot arm in their daily lives.

The demo video shows the HUENIT 3D printing, laser engraving, and delicately suctioning and moving objects it recognizes one by one. The AI camera makes it “capable of a number of artificial intelligence technologies such as face recognition, image classification, object detection, line tracking, color recognition, human segmentation, and more,” explains maker Sangmin Lee. HUENIT can be programmed using block coding, python, Arduino C++, and G-code.

Maybe just don't program it to play Red Light Green light...

Remember that snarky website link you would send to people when they asked you a question they could find the answer to themselves with a simple Google search? Or maybe you would be on the receiving end of the link…

No matter. We bring it up because finding answers to your queries isn’t nearly as simple as we teased that it was. These days, we make a query and get a web of answers.

We’ve been watching this year as great minds build solutions from the ground up, rethinking the models, algorithms, and UIs of the search engine as we know it. But today’s newsletter is about productivity tools that enable you to navigate across the web like a boss with the browser you already have.

That includes tools like LINER, which we’ve watched evolve over the past years from a popular web highlighter tool to a search engine results curator. Today’s latest launch, Google Search Scanner, lets you filter out irrelevant search results with the click of a button right in the browser.

“As time passed, LINER's accumulated highlight data kept on getting powerful. We now have millions of pages that are confidently 'Picked by LINER,' and we wanted to provide users an extraordinary experience of searching.”

Founder Brian Woo also shared that the makers are planning a similar feature for image search, too.

So whether you still heart Google, Bing, etc., or want to share a few tools with your friends who do, here are 6 more tools to prevent endless scrolling.

Raycast - Complete tasks from a single command line instead of jumping from tab to tab.
Tabius - Auto-create new tab groups when you open a link, create custom rules, and more.
BetterViewer - Use various keyboard shortcuts to quickly pan, zoom images, and edit.
Linkwork - Sync a tab to a participant and chat on any webpage.
Tablerone- Browser history meets bookmarks; Find with a screenshot, share multiple links, and more.
Social Scroll for Twitter - Looking for an old tweet? Click between months/years to find them.

Golden Kitty 2020 winner, Zelf, is back with another colorful product that goes against the grain of traditional Fintech.

Rewinding to last year, founder Elliot Goykhman and a team of makers introduced us to Zelf, which gives users a digital debit card in less than a minute through chat apps like WhatsApp.

"Last year, the Product Hunt community helped us launch a neobank in messengers, bringing over 1 million registered users 🙏," Goykhman noted in today's launch.

With MetaPass, Zelf is launching into Discord and “positioning itself as the first bank of the metaverse.” We told you to keep an eye out for a lot more products working on infrastructure to power the metaverse — Zelf is one to watch in this space.

With MetaPass, Zelf is not only making its service available in another chat app but is working to tackle the problem of scams within gaming. That's probably necessary for the persistence of the metaverse. We’ve discussed this before — gaming is fraught with fraud. Most newbies won’t want to stick around Decentraland (or any metaverse) if they get ripped off by another person.

As Goykhman explains: “The pandemic accelerated virtualization of our world, boosted gaming industry, NFT, crypto, sprouting play-to-earn games… [but] trading in-game assets outside games is currently a $20 billion gray market fraught with scam and outlawed by game publishers.”

Zelf is partnering with game manufacturers to make transactions more secure, so that when you buy a skin or weapon off of another player, you receive money into your bank account instantly, right within in Discord (or vice versa if you’re the seller). The demo video shares a view of the seamless process. Goykhman also shared with a commenter inquiring about apps beyond Discord that the startup is in the Apple Pay certification phase, and hopes to give users more options by the end of December.

MetaPass could also help power the growth of the budding play-to-earn space. Startups in this space, like Axie Infinity, exploded in popularity over the last year (see: its $152M Series B). In the Philippines, some Axie Infinity players made wages that paid three times better than minimum-wage jobs during the pandemic. In the future, Zelf could help gamers like these instantly cash out their winnings into real money.

The community response so far is 🔥:
“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”
“Cool to see how bridges between #fiat #blockchain and #metaverse are built.”

Share your own thoughts and questions:

If you’ve been following along with the Daily Digest, you’ve likely seen a virtual office here and a new metaverse there. Makers have continued working away this year, constructing virtual HQs to support the uptick in companies with remote and hybrid teams.

With holiday parties fast approaching and Omicron threatening in-person gatherings too, we rounded up six of the newest products in the virtual HQ space, highlighting a bit of what makes each stand out.

Wonder 2.0: “[O]ur focus is not on making the spaces more immersive or complex, but facilitating interaction between participants… Wonder helps surface commonalities between users. We use icebreaker questions [and are] working on statuses that are searchable so that guests can find people interested in similar things.”

Topia 2.0: “The platform has been completely rebuilt from scratch since the original launch. We now have private zones (for having private group conversations), broadcast 'podiums' for panels and Q&A, embedded live stream video like Twitch and Youtube, teleporting, and much more.”

Skittish: “Host… in a colorful game-like 3D world. Camera shy? No problem. Use your mic to talk to others near you with our best-of-class 3D spatial audio.”

Teamflow 2.0: "This complete redesign [includes] walls and textures like grass, water, paths, or sand [to] allow for outdoor spaces, game rooms, and a full office floor plan… [plus] private rooms with permissions, shared browser for seamless co-browsing of any website,... [and] AI camera framing."

Kosy: “Make your space your own and customize it... Make your team more productive & cohesive with one of our integrations including whiteboards, screen sharing, Youtube, Miro, Google Drive, Figma... Elevators. Coffee machines. These are artifacts of the physical office that lead to social interactions”

Gather: “Gather has a wide selection of premade maps to choose from, ranging from a moon pond to a beach side castle…[Yo]u can place down interactable “objects” such as whiteboards to draw on, youtube videos to watch together, or even games to play together…

And of course, Meta’s Horizon Woorkrooms is in beta and Microsoft is working on its own virtual HQ too, but you'll have to wait a little longer to try that one out.

Breshna, a new no-code video game tool — “think Canva for video games” — launched today, and the Product Hunt community was quick to take notice:

“As someone who's a big user of no-code web/app development, I'm always so giddy to see the no-code movement tap into new territory,” wrote one commenter.

Breshna’s demo video reveals an interface with game templates like “Guess the Word” or “Run and Catch,” a platform-style game. Creators can customize various elements of each game from characters to question prompts to collectibles. Once finished, users can publish the game as a URL where it can be played across devices.

Mariam Nusrat is the founder and CEO of GRID Games (Gaming Revolution for International Development), the maker of Breshna. She’s also an Education Specialist at World Bank Group, the largest and best-known development bank in the world (for context: the World Bank, which you may be more familiar with, is one part of the group). There, she’s been working for over twelve years supporting education projects globally.

Nusrat writes on her social profiles that she “operates at the intersection of no-code, gaming, content creation & NFTs,” which is another way of summing up GRID Games. Half of the company’s focus is changing the way games are used. This includes GRID’s Not-For-Profit arm, which is working to gamify and influence behavioral change.

In a TedX talk from 2016, Nusrat explains that she views games as three components: a story, a crystal ball (i.e. the player sees the consequences of their actions), and a trophy. Armed with these mechanisms, the founder believes games have the power to overcome behaviors driven by misguided perceptions or bad habits — such helping a family in Zambia see the effects of sleeping under bed nets to protect them from malaria.

The other half of GRID’s focus is reimagining the way video games are created. In the same TedX talk, Nusrat notes that most of us have, at some point in our lives, created a game whether it’s with code, paper, or sticks on the playground. The no-code movement can enable anyone, from teachers to marketers, to communicate through games with tools like Breshna.

What potential use cases do you see for the platform? Share them and your feedback with Nusrat now.

If it's true that you learn something new every day, today might be the day you learn about the fishbowl method.

Stooa is a fishbowl tool that facilitates orderly, free-flowing, and participatory discussion. Makers Fran Lopez and Annachiara Sechi explained the concept to inquiring commenters. Four to six chairs form a circle, i.e. the fishbowl, while the rest of the group listens. The fishbowl has only two requirements: There must always be a free chair (remaining chairs are filled by the organizers/facilitators) and the conversation can only take place inside the fishbowl.

“The free chair can be taken by anyone in the audience who has something to input into the discussion: questions, insights, data, etc. When this happens, someone from the circle has to leave the fishbowl so that there is always a free chair. This gives everyone a chance to take part and enriches the conversation with relevant content.”

At only a glance, Stooa may look like any other meeting tool, but its automatic facilitation of the fishbowl method makes it unique from the Zooms of the world and many audio rooms, too. Unlike Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse, there’s no hand-raising or requests to join the stage. It’s easy to see how an open seat could enable communities, academic circles, and teams to welcome more inclusive and productive conversations.

We’ve seen other startups work to tackle inclusivity in meetings. Macro, which was acquired by mmhmm earlier this month, used an airtime map to visualize speaking time, adjusting the video size across contributing participants in the hopes of nudging participants to speak up or vice versa. Macro was sunsetted, but all of its makers have joined the mmmhmm team to continue building products to make meetings “more human.”

In today’s launch, the makers of Stooa also mention they follow an agile work methodology and implement a Kaizen culture: a philosophy where employees are actively engaged in suggesting and implementing improvements to the company. It’s worth noting here that Stooa is an open-source project with a public roadmap — that fits the bill, too.

We’re really intrigued by the idea of using the fishbowl methodology to support more inclusive discussion, especially among a growing workforce of remote and dispersed teams.

Would you try hosting your next discussion as a fishbowl?

“We know no one asked for this but weird stuff is what makes the internet beautiful.”

We couldn’t agree more! The team at humit launched WeirdSpot.fyi today, a fun tool to turn silly one-liners into playlists. What started as a side project by an intern looking to stand out to a crush snowballed into something more, explained maker Prithvi Sankar.

The side project sits alongside humit, a social networking app for community-driven (as opposed to algorithm-driven) music discovery that launched last year. Describing itself as “the love child of Spotify and Reddit,” hummit provides social features that Spotify doesn’t, like sharing 30-second snippets, dashboard stats, and subreddit-like forums.

The app works with Spotify through a seamless integration, which is great because the streaming giant has been hustling to become “the world’s number one audio platform.”

Last week, Spotify took a step towards becoming a bookseller with its acquisition of Findaway, an audiobook company. The move resembles its Anchor acquisition in 2019, when it doubled down on podcasting. And don’t forget when Spotify launched its own audio rooms, Greenrooms, after acquiring the company behind the sports-audio app, Locker Room.

These acquisitions will also help Spotify appeal to creators. For example, podcasters globally can now use Anchor’s paid subscription features to charge for content. At the same time that Greenrooms debuted, Spotify announced a creator fund to pay eligible content creators based on their audience size and “consumption of content.”

As for new features within the core music apps — there’s a host of those too. Top hunter Chris Messina recently spotted that Spotify is experimenting with a TikTok-esque stories feature for music videos. Messina also hunted Blend in June, a feature for creating shared playlists. The company also partnered with Peloton, Netflix, and Giphy this year to support more music discovery, plus Shopify to help artists sell merch.

And speaking of things no one asked for, Spotify took a moment to try hardware this year too.

Of course, the company's biggest social feature is due to return to you any moment now — Spotify Wrapped. We have fun with those every holiday season, but for those of you who want to want dive into social experiences year-round, you can try humit. But first…

It’s time to talk about NFTs again — unless you’ve been tracking and minting all along.

“I’m Geoff, I “stole” all of your NFTs,“ says Geoffrey Huntley, a software engineer, on his Twitter profile. Earlier this week his project, The NFT Bay, arrived on Product Hunt. It's a torrent site (modeled in the style of the famous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay) that lets you download 15 terabytes of people’s… JPEGs? NFTs?

That is the question.

Huntley’s project shines a light on an issue that some makers have with the current state of NFTs: the majority of images are not stored on the blockchain. Perhaps surprising to those who just wrapped their heads around NFTs, many NFT images are hosted on the same storage sites you use for work files. What likely is stored on the blockchain when you buy an NFT is a reference in the transaction metadata that connects you to the piece, but that doesn’t mean a lot if the platform storing your image goes MIA — does it?

“There is a gap of understanding between buyer and seller right now that is being used to exploit people. The image is typically not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images I've seen are hosted on web2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404 meaning the NFT has even less value,” wrote Huntley on Github.

You might call Huntley’s project “right-clicker mentality.” The term sums up the idea that NFTs are just images — by right-clicking and saving an image from your desktop menu, you can grab the same image another person paid precious ETH for. NFT enthusiasts get trolled all the time by right-clickers who say their JPEG is no different than the buyers’ JPEG.

Huntley’s project does resonate. Ryan Marr wrote on the launch page: “I bought this NFT, years ago, and for the majority of that time the website was down, and I had nothing to show for anything other than a record on the blockchain.” Like Marr’s NFT, some of the biggest headlining projects you’ve heard of (see: Apes) are not “on-chain.”

But then, some are. LarvaLabs launched Autoglyphs, “the first on-chain generative art on the Ethereum blockchain,” and then took CryptoPunks on-chain in August this year, years after first creating them. New projects like the buzzy Chain Runners are fully on-chain.

Where does that leave us? At the beginning still. The technology is evolving. Experts in this space say to buy art because you love it (and HODL!) Also, be on the lookout for makers in this space working to simplify the process of moving NFT artwork on-chain.

And join in the discussion! What still perplexes you about NFTs?

It feels like everyone is trying to solve real-time collaboration.

We first met Plutoview a year ago with its shared browsing solution. It took Product of the Week and #4 Product of the Month.

“Whoah! It's like a browser in GDocs way!!” wrote one commenter.

Plutoview isn’t the only shared browser we’ve seen (see RemoteHQ or Hyperbeam), but what differentiated it is tackling multiple screens at once. With traditional screen sharing users would share one screen at a time, but that’s not really the equivalent of what would happen in a room. You’d all have your own desktop spaces, each with your own apps and tabs open. In that way, Plutoview gets closer to recreating what an IRL team workspace would look like.

Co-founder Arkadiy Baltser was inspired to create Plutoview after his own experience in the classroom. The startup has been working to infiltrate the education space, where students learning remotely typically need to collaborate across tools from note-taking apps to education platforms.

Now the team has launched an API to enable makers of remote tools, virtual events platforms, and online education academies to leverage its co-browsing and real-time collaboration experience.

“Plutoview API turns metaverses into collaborative environments where all the work collaboration is hosted in-house. Your users get to enjoy their favorite web applications, browsing and working collaboratively, from within your own platform,” Baltser wrote.

He also shared that Plutoview is powered by edge level cloud-computing. We wrote about an alternative approach to edge-computing when we introduced Subspace. For those learning the term, we like this simple definition from Paul Miller via the Verge: “Edge computing is computing that’s done at or near the source of the data, instead of relying on the cloud at one of a dozen data centers to do all the work. It doesn’t mean the cloud will disappear. It means the cloud is coming to you.”

So while Plutoview isn't using Subspace's approach to low latency (yet), what the products have in common is that they’re both, at some level, working on infrastructure to power the metaverse.

Which is also what it feels like everyone is working on these days!

Cookie cutters get a bad rap, but if you start from scratch next time you’re making gingerbread men, you might end up with one of those Pinterest fails.

While there’s no doubt that the world needs space and tools for personal creativity, cookie cutters are templates that save us a lot of time with work.

And the Product Hunt community loves a beautifully-executed time-saver. designstripe shot to the top of the homepage on Sunday with its library of customizable illustrations. The tool’s online editor lets you swap out almost every object from the handmade illustrations, generate new color platelets (or add your own), and adjust the visual look of the graphic, even adding background elements to the image.

Imagine not just being able to customize your gingerbread man’s buttons, but adjusting its shape and house and giving him all the right colors with a tap.

“A big goal for us is to make sure that everything you make with designstripe comes out looking amazing,” wrote maker James Daly. For the future, the team is looking at templates, animations, and 3D (Canva, are you watching?)

In the meantime, you can start customizing illustrations or test out these 7 other template tools so you can focus on whatever it is you're best at:

Pitch Deck - 60 Figma templates based on real experience from fundraising
CommunityOS - Free workbook with resources like email templates to help build your community
Privacy Policy - GitHub repo with tested pop-up modal and layered doc with clickable elements
Product Management - 9 templates created by product leaders from Netflix, Amazon and Spotify
WhatsApp Marketing - 100+ chat templates for WhatsApp marketing
SaaS Emails - Emails from top SaaS companies like Zapier, downloadable as HTML
GPT-3 Template - A Serverless NextJS template to help you build GPT-3 apps
Inovatik - 24 free HTML websites templates available for free under MIT license
Phigma - Figma templates for your Product Hunt launch