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Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
We've been patiently waiting for the next Pokémon GO, or another mobile game that taps into today's zeitgeist and becomes an instant cultural hit. Well, maybe that game is already here.
Design Home launched in late 2016 to bring virtual spaces to life with real-life furniture, and it has become quite popular under the radar. How it works: Players are presented with “challenges” to furnish a few empty rooms every day. They then choose a room to furnish, pick out the furniture and it's rated by others. It's kind of like The Sims, but for millennials who used to play The Sims.
Something to watch: this type of video game points to the future of advertising. When users are picking out furniture “virtually,” they're presented with a catalog of pieces from retailers like West Elm, Design With Reach, etc. Like the Sims, Design Home allows an escape from real life in favor of a fantasy. In this case, the fantasy is beautiful apartments filled with expensive furniture.
To date, the game has been downloaded over 50 million times and over one million people (typically women between ages 25-55) play the game every day.
We're also seeing products like this launch that aren't even gamified. Back in January, Amazon debuted Showroom to let shoppers virtually decorate their homes.
Prefer to live in the real-world? We went down the rabbit hole looking tools to improve homeownership:
⏰ Cost of Living Calculator for seeing how far your salary takes you
👀 Omni rentals for earning $$$ on stuff you own
🏠 Home Assistant for home automation
⛓ Rentberry Rent Payments for paying and collecting rent with crypto
🔎 Nobbas for house searching
🛀 Fairy for home cleaning
🙌 Hello Alfred for everything
🛋 Havenly for interior design
“What's a tool that changed your life?” - us to freelancers on Twitter yesterday.
Why we think this is an important question: freelancing often means unchartered territory. When you work for yourself, it's up to you to find clients, lead projects, manage payments, find insurance, get dressed every day, etc. But freelancing as a career option is on the rise — reports predict that a majority of the U.S. workforce will be freelance by 2027.
Want that life? Here are some of the apps that freelancers are currently using:
Freshbooks for getting paid 💸
Slack for communication 💬
Notion for an all-in-one workspace 🙌
Webflow for web design ✍️
Qlearly as a tabs manager 👀
Nuzzel for news monitoring 🗞
Unsplash for images 🌄
Things for managing tasks 📝
Pastel for feedback and questions❓
1Password for security 🔒
AND CO for invoicing, expenses and proposals 👏
Robots will take over the world, they said.
But for now...the robots are helping us complete day-to-day tasks. And they're getting *creative* in the process.
Yesterday, Hexbot, an all-one-robotic arm that turns your desk into a production line launched on Product Hunt. The robot can do all types of work: drawing, laser engraving, 3D printing, etc.
From the Product Hunt comments:
“Can it make coffee? No seriously.” - Amelia
Well there's already a robot for that.
Here are eight other robots to make your life a little easier.
Roomba is a Wi-Fi-connected robot vacuum 🙌
Terra will mow your lawn for you 🌿
Kamibot teaches your kids to code ✔️
Serve will deliver your Postmates order 🚐
Robomart is like a self-driving grocery store 🍪
Varram will keep your pet company when you're not around 🐶
Scout will deliver your Amazon order 📦
Peeqo only responds in GIFs and videos. It's just the cutest. 🎬
There's a new wild west in tech: foldable smartphones.
Last week, Samsung officially unveiled its “Galaxy Fold,” after teasing the new technology back in November. The Galaxy Fold folds like a book, with a large screen on the inside protected by an outer cover — which also has a screen on it. And this new tech comes with a hefty price tag: $1,980 to be exact. 😐
Now, not even a week later, the Galaxy Fold is facing some competition. Huawei launched its own foldable smartphone, dubbed the “Mate X” at Mobile World Congress yesterday. The Mate X folds depending on how you hold the phone, using one screen on the outside in three different ways. Compared to the Galaxy Fold, its screen is bigger, it folds flatter and it's thinner overall. But it'll run you $2,600. 😳
Foldable phone hype doesn't stop there! LG also launched its own version of a foldable device yesterday, but it's really just a phone that has a second screen.
We know what you're thinking — is there going to be a foldable iPhone? Maybe. Apple hasn't joined the foldable phone race just yet, but it's been reported that Apple may be working on a foldable iPhone that could launch in 2020. 🔮
If you’re not a fan of this foldable trend and miss Snake, pickup this Nokia classic.
Remember how we wrote about GAN, the technology behind the creepy fake face generator This Person Does Not Exist?
The TLDR: When you click on the website, it generates an image of a person’s face. Refresh the page, and you’ll get another face. But none of these people are real. They’re generated entirely by AI.
Needless to say, it's a trend now. This week, a whole new set of GAN use cases launched on Product Hunt, because the internet needs this #content!
Unsurprisingly, someone created This Cat Does Not Exist, which generates — you guessed it — photos of AI-generated cats.
“Please do this with food” - Nabeena
“Next would be dogs” - Arunkumar
“This is why I pay for my internet” - Amrith
Today, it's Which Face is Real?, which lets you guess if an image is a real human or GAN.
Go forth and create more GAN apps, Internet. Happy Friday!
Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Nurx.
A few health stats you should know:
😳 Nearly half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned
💊 More than 19 million women in the U.S. do not have nearby access to healthcare clinics that offer a full range of contraception
💸 Even if you do live near a doctor, an appointment to ask for a birth control prescription can run you anywhere from $35-$250
Healthcare company Nurx is on a mission to change those numbers.
The details
Nurx launched back in 2016 to help people take control over their own healthcare decisions and break down barriers to care. Their first product was on-demand birth control delivered straight to patients’ homes in discreet packaging.
Some immediate reactions on Product Hunt:
“I just ordered birth control in < 5 minutes. Hands down most useful product I've found on Product Hunt to date” — Kelsey
“This is great - solves such a huge (and undeserved) pain point. A real game changer” - Ruchita
“This is incredible, and such a huge pain point/need for me personally” - Constance
How it works: To get birth control delivered, patients download the Nurx app and share some information about their health history. Nurx’s medical team then reviews the information and determines if they can write a prescription for the best birth control option for the patient. Nurx offers over 50 brands of birth control, many of which are affordable and cost-effective — even for those without insurance. You can also request and get Plan B delivered to your home through Nurx.
Nurx’s overall mission is to revolutionize healthcare by putting control back in patients’ hands, and this starts with with making birth control affordable and accessible. With insurance, birth control through Nurx is typically free. Without insurance, birth control starts as low as $15 per month. 🙌
A brief history of Nurx
After the healthcare company found success with birth control, Nurx introduced PrEP, a daily pill that helps HIV-negative people stay HIV-negative. Nurx is the only company where patients can request PrEP and do all the necessary testing without needing to visit the doctor or lab IRL.
Last July, the company raised $36 million led by Kleiner Perkins. Public health leader Chelsea Clinton and Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin also joined Nurx’s board of directors.
Just last month, Nurx launched an Home HPV screening test to help women get tested for high-risk types of HPV that lead to cervical cancer. It’s a great option for women that haven’t been getting pap smears as regularly as they should. The HPV test costs $69 without insurance or $15 with insurance.
What’s next
Nurx is now available in 22 states and the District of Columbia, providing access to nearly 80 percent of the U.S.
Yesterday, Webflow launched a new tool called 'Webflow Ecommerce' — an entirely visual platform for building and launching online stores. The tool is a direct competitor with Shopify, the current leader in an easy-to-use solutions for digital stores.
But here's Webflow's edge: It's code-free.
Y Combinator graduate, Webflow, has been around since 2013 — it's a an all-in-one web design/CMS/hosting platform. And users love it.
“This is an *amazing* tool. I've done front-end web dev for a decade and I would rather build sites using this tool.” - Sameer, 2013
“Webflow is such a powerful tool for Makers.” - Julie, yesterday
And here's why Webflow Ecommerce could take market share away from Shopify: Makers want flexible, customizable, powerful, code-free tools. It's another example of the rise of rise of “no code.”
This month alone, we've seen these code-free products launch:
🚀 Actiondesk is a Google Sheets/Zapier hybrid
🚀 Glide lets you create mobile apps from Google Sheets
🚀 Tinybot helps you create powerful Twitter bots without code
🚀 Sheety turns Google Sheets into an API
🚀 Look Mom No Code gives you no-code templates for your next startup
In fact, three of the top five products on Product Hunt yesterday use Webflow to power their websites. 😳
Note: Shopify’s not doing so bad themselves:
So we're eager to watch how no-code unfolds in the land of ecommerce. 👀
There are a lottt of reasons to love Dark Mode. Things like:
✅ It's good for your eyes
✅ It's good for your device's battery
✅ It's good for your sanity
✅ It is elegant
Dark Mode is oft-requested and the tech giants take heed. Popular apps like Twitter, Medium, Reddit, YouTube, Kindle and Wikipedia all support darker themes. Last week, Google released a set of 14 alternate Chrome color palettes, including “Just Black” aka Dark Mode. It's also rumored that the upcoming Android OS will have system-wide Dark Mode. And Apple is reportedly adding a new Dark Mode to your iPhone later this year.
If you need more Dark Mode and you need it *now* — there's Dark Reader, a browser extension that turns every website into Night Mode.
As of this week, Dark Mode's reach extended to IRL products, such as a black dot grid notebook made for designers.
Need more?
Here are 91 apps that support dark browsing bliss.
Pro Tip: You can now skip non-skippable YouTube ads with the MacBook Pro Touch Bar.
Which is really great news because...we're giving away a 128GB Macbook Pro! Courtesy of our friends at Finimize, Triphop, Bloom and Hunted.
In addition to the Touch Bar, that Macbook has:
🚀Super high‑performance processors and memory
👀 Advanced graphics
📦 Blazing-fast storage
Enter to win here.
That is all.
We're going to warn you right now — this is creeeepy.
Yesterday, This Person Does Not Exist surfaced on Product Hunt and presented the internet with random, computer generated people. You have to try it for yourself to see why we have the heebie-jeebies.
If you're too scared, here's how it works: When you click on the website, you conjure an image of a person's face on to your browser. Refresh the page, and you'll get another face. The creepy part: these people never existed in real-life, even though they look so real. It's an AI magic trick.
“How am I so scared and so impressed all at once?” - R. Colin
“This is stomach-turningly good. Yikes.” - Elizabeth
“This kind of stuff is going to be huge in a near future in opinion. Not only in stock photos/videos but also in film making / Broadcast. Imagine having fake but 100% real-looking actors/anchors?” - Sabastien
How it actually works: The technology behind This Person Does Not Exist is a type of algorithm called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). It basically splits AI into separate, competing sets of algorithms — one set tries to create something while the other set judges if it's a real or fake. In this case, the GAN is used on photos of people’s faces, but it can work on anime, artwork, etc., etc.
The technology has the potential to revolutionize a lot, such as video games, 3D-modeling or tools used for mockups and prototypes.
In the meantime, some other fun tools for your face:
😀 Reflect Face Swap
😱 Face Swap Live
😛 FaceApp
😊 Facehub
🙃 Flesh Mesh














