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Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
We see a lot of *quirky* things launch on Product Hunt. But some of our favorites are those that you can eat (or drink).
We went down a rabbit hole and found 10 weird, wacky new foods for you to try:
💦 Liquid Death Mountain Water for water in a can
🥣 Magic Spoon for high-protein cereal (with top-notch branding)
🍔 Impossible Burger for a burger made from plants
🍅 Imperfect Produce is exactly what it sounds like: ugly vegetables
🥕 Kencko is an instant fruit and veggie drink
☕️ Dripkit is for coffee in a box
🥑 Brightland is *elegant* olive oil
🍺 IntelligentX Brewing Co. is AI-powered beer
😋 Yumble is like Blue Apron, but for kids
💪 Soylent Squared for mini-meal bars
Over the past five-ish years, we've seen a growing trend among millennials. Let's call it the rise of renting.
Instead of buying cars, Gen Y is hailing Ubers and Lyfts. Instead of buying clothes, the group is renting occasion pieces through Rent the Runway. Rather than spending thousands $$$ on couches and chairs, they're borrowing furniture on Feather to better suit a more nomadic lifestyle. And on the other side of things, Omni lets people rent anything (bikes, cameras, drills, ladders, etc.) to others.
Renting is more affordable than buying everything upfront (in the short term) and often more eco-friendly. Instead of buying cheap, disposable things that could end up in landfills, young folks are renting quality items to repurpose to others later on.
The rise of renting is further fueled by the rise of sustainability as consumers invest their dollars into companies that treat our world a little better. The sustainability market is reportedly expected to reach $150B by 2021, with 75 percent of millennials already altering their buying habits with the environment in mind.
What else can you rent, do you ask?
👀 Echo.rent lets you rent anything to other marketplace members
🎙Podcast Rental lets you rent, and share podcast studios
🚲 Spinlister lets you rent bikes anywhere in the world
👕 The Rotation is Rent the Runway for men
🚘 Getaround lets you rent cars on-demand
But before that, we asked the Product Hunt community to share their predictions. Unfortunately we didn't see a Daft Punk AR helmet. Or a privacy-focused search engine to compete with Google. Also no wild 4 camera iPhone.
But, Tim Cook and team revealed a few exciting things:
iOS 13 now with dark mode (queue the applause).
macOS Catalina now with less iTunes (now you can stop using this).
iPadOS now with its own OS (best feature: multitasking).
watchOS 6 now with a dedicated App Store (and ways to stay fit)
New Mac Pro now starting at $5,999 (but it's powerful).
They also unveiled more Memoji customization, AirPods audio sharing, and better photo-sharing. But the most important and surprising announcement:
Apple is creating a privacy-focused identity layer for the future. Sign In with Apple comes a decade after Zuckerberg introduced Facebook Connect which has become the preferred login for millions of people and arguably their greatest innovation to date. 😯
It's given Facebook tremendous amounts of data, made it easy for users to bring their information (friends, likes, identity) with them across the web, and created lock-in among consumers and makers.
Of course this move from Apple has been in the works a long time as they've been laying the foundation for your digital identity. Memojis = Your digital avatar. Apple Pay = Your digital wallet. Contacts = Your digital (and “IRL”) friends.
We're excited to explore it at Product Hunt although us and many others have major concerns. According to Apple's updated App Store guidelines:
“Sign In with Apple will be available for beta testing this summer. It will be required as an option for users in apps that support third-party sign-in when it is commercially available later this year.”
Translation: Apps in the App Store that support Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other 3rd party logins will apparently be forced to integrate Sign In with Apple. That's very concerning and frankly a surprising bet from Apple as it and other big tech co's risk anti-trust regulation.
We'll see how it plays out. In the meantime, share your thoughts in the thread.
Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Gitalytics.
Measuring software development is complicated.
There's no magic formula to ship features or secret sauce to improve quality. It's why Gitalytics has spent years testing their platform with all levels of software teams from CTOs to junior developers. 👀
To date, Gitalytics empowers over 300,000 developers to help them transform their git data into meaningful insights. How it works: A developer imports their GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab repositories for processing. Gitalytics then analyzes the history of the repos to provide visual reports of dozens of metrics.
In the end, the tool gives engineering managers more visibility and helps devs improve their workflow. Everybody wins.
How Gitalytics is different: The platform avoids stack rankings or penalizing developers with lower scores. Instead, Gitalytics is focused on delivering relevant metrics that support industry best practices and proven strategies. The platform cuts through the noise of “Lines of Code” to focus on meaningful improvements like Time to Review, PR Success Rate and Code Ownership Distribution. There are no shortcuts or secret recipes — it's simply real data with tested solutions.
Gitalytics is already working with multiple Fortune 500 companies, who use the tool to measure impact on big changes, week to week planning, budgeting and headcount allocation.
Check it out 👇
Earlier this week, Apple gave a long overdue refresh to one of its older products — the iPod Touch.
In case you need a refresh on what the iPod touch even is; it's looks like the iPhone, but it's just an iPod.
The iPod Touch update is the first from Apple in nearly four years, and the revamped version is getting the same processor as the iPhone 7 and a new 256GB storage option.
Why hasn't Apple discontinued a product like this, you may ask?
From the comments:
“For those who are asking 'but why' one answer is 'for my kids.'” - Andreas
“For all those that hate the idea of a smartphone and want to have their entire music library - that took years to import into iTunes from CDs - available to listen to anytime anywhere.” - Tyler
In March, Apple demonstrated how it's leaning into services when it took the hood off a bunch of new products, including Apple TV Plus, Apple News Plus, Apple Card and gaming subscription Apple Arcade.
Apple Arcade may be the real reason behind the iPod Touch upgrade, as the company is reportedly making sure it can run all of its upcoming games on the device.
It's worth noting that Apple isn’t the only big company to revive old tech. Palm reinvented the Palm Pilot in a small form factor endorsed by Steph Curry. Nintendo shrunk the Nintendo Entertainment System so you can relive life as 16-bit Link. Nokia reimagined its classic phone and yes, it includes Snake.
Here's a thought: Imagine hearing about Apple products from Steve Jobs himself. Or perhaps you'd rather have a conversation with Elon Musk about going to Mars. Want to ask the Dalai Lama about spirituality. Well now you can.
Earlier this week, Sidekik launched on Product Hunt with the mission of creating “Digital Humans” through artificial intelligence. The Maker, Johannes Tammekänd, hopped into the comments to discuss the inspiration behind the product. 💬
Last year, Johannes's grandfather passed away. Like a lot of people, he regretted not spending more time with him, and ended up exploring what he left behind; letters, photographs and videos. The experience inspired an idea to bring memories to life through AI and neural networks, starting with important figures in history. The long-term vision? Seven billion digital humans so all of our legacies can have a voice.
What the community thinks:
“I think the digital preservation of folks is something really critical and opens up whole new avenues for learning, entertainment, and real conversations” - Joel .
“The same question to each of the AI personalities gave me similar but different answers, really cool!” - Sercan
“The Dalai Lama just reminded me of how important meditation is to preserve a healthy mind.” - Sten
Who should Sidekik replicate next? Bieber? Oprah? Vote for your favorite here.
In the meantime, more avatar apps:
👀 Chudo
👀 Icon
👀 SelfiMoji
👀 Facehub
👀 Toonstar
👀 Genies
Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Plaid.
Plaid, a platform that lets people connect their bank accounts to an app, announced its expansion into the UK today. The company will support major UK banks and neobanks as part of the launch.
Whether you’re a start-up with the next big innovation to serve the underbanked, or a large enterprise looking to leverage the latest in fintech on a global stage, you can now partner with Plaid to access banks globally.
A brief history of Plaid: Plaid was founded in 2012 with a focus on lowering the barriers to entry in financial services by making it easier and safer to use financial data. Companies like Acorns, Betterment, Coinbase, Transferwise, and Venmo all use Plaid, and tens of millions of people have successfully connected their accounts to apps they love using the service. In the past six months, Plaid raised $250M and acquired Quovo to give developers access to investment and brokerage data.
Plaid's products include:
🛍 Transactions: Access detailed transaction history and balance data
🏦 Auth: Instantly authenticate bank accounts for payments
👤 Identity: Verify users’ identities and reduce fraud
💸 Balance: Verify real-time account balances
📖 Assets: Verify borrowers’ assets straight from the source
💲 Income: Understand income and verify employment
You can also play around with Plaid's API for free. Start building here.
P.S. New developers get 500 free connections for UK banks.
P.P.S. Founder Club members get an additional special offer on Plaid.
ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, is reportedly working on its own smartphone.
What we know: The phone would come with preloaded ByteDance apps, which includes TikTok, chat app Flipchat, video-messaging app Duoshan, Slack-like work messaging app Lark and news aggregator Jinri Toutiao. Over the weekend, rumors broke that ByteDance is planning to launch a music streaming service. The company also confirmed it made a deal with phone maker Smartisan earlier this year — now we know why.
ByteDance isn't the first company to make smartphones as a growth hack. Selfie app maker Meitu also builds smartphones pre-loaded with photo editing apps, and recently sold this arm of its business to Xiaomi. Amazon tried this with its Fire Phone (launched in 2014) and Facebook with 'Home' (launched in 2013). Both companies have since discontinued these products.
Ultimately, it's pretty easy (and cheap) to download any app you want on say, an iPhone, without buying a smartphone preloaded with a suite of apps.
On a related note, we have seen a ton of cool new smartphones launch in the past year if you are thinking of shaking things up. Some to check out:
📱 Palm is a tiny smartphone that fits in your palm
📱 Blackview is a super rugged smartphone
📱 Redmi Go is a $65 smartphone from Xiaomi
📱 Huawei P30 is a photography-centric smartphone
📱Samsung Galaxy Fold is a foldable smart phone
We’ll keep you posted when the “TikTok smartphone” launches. Until then, send us your best Lil Nas X lip sync videos. 😉
It's official: Facebook is getting into crypto.
The tech giant reportedly plans to test its cryptocurrency “GlobalCoins” by the end of this year. The move comes as part of Facebook's larger plan to launch a digital payments system by 2020.
The big goal: It seems like Facebook is looking to create a system that *successfully* combines sending messages with sending money. As the owner of WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, Facebook's cryptocurrency is poised to do just that.
GlobalCoins' status: Mark Zuckerberg has already met with Bank of England governor Mark Carney to discuss the cryptocurrency, and U.S. lawmakers have sent Zuck a letter of regulatory questions regarding the token. Facebook is expected to outline more plans about GlobalCoins later this summer.
In the meantime, check out these recent crypto products that caught our attention:
Fundabit.co is like Patreon, but built on Ethereum 🙌
Honeyminer Mac is a superrr simple mining application 👏
Lolli lets you earn free bitcoin when you stop online 🛍
Cheeze Wizards is a crypto-native game by the CryptoKitties team 🧀
CoinsCrate is a lightning fast crypto market data provider ⚡️
Birdchain pays you in crypto for watching ads 💸
CoinBits automates bitcoin investing 🤑
Prediction: your next shiny new toy will be yellow.
Yesterday, Playdate, a tiny *yellow* Game Boy-like device made headlines for its black-and-white screen, chunky retro buttons and...hand crank. 👀
Panic, a company mostly known for making Mac apps, is behind the console, with help from hardware design company Teenage Engineering (the team behind Pocket Operator).
How it works: Instead of buying cartridges or downloading games, Playdate will release a “season” of games by unlocking one new game each week. The hardware is anti-smartphone and deviates from devices like the Switch, in that its aiming to be a distinctly *different* gaming experience.
Naturally, the Product Hunt community had some mixed reactions.
Some thought the device seemed quaint...
“What an awesome little collectors item” - Jonno
Others were surprised by Panic's design choices...
“IT HAS A CRANK???” - Ryan
Others were intrigued, but confused...
“I want it but I am not sure why” - Cody
Playdate will cost $149 and is expected to ship in early 2020. 🚀
Tell us what you think here.
Until Playdate ships, here are over 9,000 old school arcade games, playable in your browser for free. Happy Friday!
P.S. In case you were wondering, the crank is supposed to work as an analog stick that breaks us of the “touch psychosis” that smartphones have caused.
