The Leaderboard
Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
Elon Musk launches 1st Boring product 🚀
Elon Musk, known for leading technology’s most futuristic projects from space exploration to neural brain implants, just announced his most ambitious project to date.
The first product release from the world's most boring company is accessible to many thanks to its ultra premium velcro technology, adaptable for all sizes. Priced at a reasonable $20 shipped, it’s truly the most boring product.
Congrats to Elon Musk and team on the launch. 🚀
The first product release from the world's most boring company is accessible to many thanks to its ultra premium velcro technology, adaptable for all sizes. Priced at a reasonable $20 shipped, it’s truly the most boring product.
Congrats to Elon Musk and team on the launch. 🚀
Facebook acquires App Store's #6 app 💰
Yesterday, Josh Constine broke the news that Facebook acquired tbh, the anonymous app where teens send each other compliments.
First reaction: that was fast! But it comes as no surprise, the app was going viral with the teens and became the #1 app in the App Store last month. As of today, tbh is just under Facebook in the #6 spot – quite impressive for a 9-week old app.
A quick snapshot of the App Store charts does show just how powerful Facebook is in the app world. Mark Zuckerberg and team deserve a lot of credit for acquisitions like Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, and time will tell if tbh becomes as meaningful as those ones. Although, it's certainly a fun app you should try.
P.S. Mark Zuckerberg's most notable skill may also be Evan Spiegel's most underrated assets.
First reaction: that was fast! But it comes as no surprise, the app was going viral with the teens and became the #1 app in the App Store last month. As of today, tbh is just under Facebook in the #6 spot – quite impressive for a 9-week old app.
A quick snapshot of the App Store charts does show just how powerful Facebook is in the app world. Mark Zuckerberg and team deserve a lot of credit for acquisitions like Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, and time will tell if tbh becomes as meaningful as those ones. Although, it's certainly a fun app you should try.
P.S. Mark Zuckerberg's most notable skill may also be Evan Spiegel's most underrated assets.
A preview of the future… from LA 😎
Engadget launched an Alternate Realities grant program back in May, giving away $500,000 to fund immersive art projects that push the limits of storytelling through emerging technologies. The 5 grant winners present their futuristic art at The Engadget Experience.
The event takes place on November 14th in Los Angeles, where you'll get to see humans and flamingos come together in an interspecies, an augmented reality-dance off, and relive America's first reported alien abduction in virtual reality, along with exhibits and talks from some of the leading minds in AR/VR.
Tickets are currently on sale, but one of you can win 2 free tickets, plus lots of other tech prizes!
🎟 2 Tickets to The Engadget Experience
✈️ $1000 for Airfare (to fly to LA)
🏙 2-Night Stay At The Ace Hotel
🏠 $1000 Smarthome automation bundle
🎆 $200 IfOnly experience voucher
🗣 An Amazon Echo
🕶 Samsung Gear VR
📱 Samsung S8 (Android iPhone X, without the notch)
The event takes place on November 14th in Los Angeles, where you'll get to see humans and flamingos come together in an interspecies, an augmented reality-dance off, and relive America's first reported alien abduction in virtual reality, along with exhibits and talks from some of the leading minds in AR/VR.
Tickets are currently on sale, but one of you can win 2 free tickets, plus lots of other tech prizes!
🎟 2 Tickets to The Engadget Experience
✈️ $1000 for Airfare (to fly to LA)
🏙 2-Night Stay At The Ace Hotel
🏠 $1000 Smarthome automation bundle
🎆 $200 IfOnly experience voucher
🗣 An Amazon Echo
🕶 Samsung Gear VR
📱 Samsung S8 (Android iPhone X, without the notch)
What do Instagram, Spotify & Airbnb have in common? 🤔
"I have interviewed Steve Jobs 8 times on stage, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, all those f*ckers, and the only one my plumber ever watched was my interview with Kim Kardashian." – Kara Swisher
Stephen Colbert, Chelsea Peretti, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Spotify, Instagram, GIPHY, Airbnb – what do they all have in common? They're all Webby Award Winners.
In honor of new tech related categories, we partnered up with the Webby Awards to tell you: your startup can win a Webby Award too!
Here's how it works:
1. Go to webbyawards.com 💻
2. Your startup might fit the Mobile Sites & App category 📲
3. Fill out the form, select what applies to you (News, Travel) 📋
4. Select featured categories to enter (1st year Best Use of Machine Learning and Best Use of Augmented Reality are included) 😉
5. Submit your application and hope the judges will choose you 🤞
The Webby Awards are judged by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Members include Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Biz Stone (Twitter), Emily Weiss (Glossier), Logan Green (Lyft), and more.
The deadline to enter (for reduced pricing) is Friday October 27th.
Stephen Colbert, Chelsea Peretti, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Spotify, Instagram, GIPHY, Airbnb – what do they all have in common? They're all Webby Award Winners.
In honor of new tech related categories, we partnered up with the Webby Awards to tell you: your startup can win a Webby Award too!
Here's how it works:
1. Go to webbyawards.com 💻
2. Your startup might fit the Mobile Sites & App category 📲
3. Fill out the form, select what applies to you (News, Travel) 📋
4. Select featured categories to enter (1st year Best Use of Machine Learning and Best Use of Augmented Reality are included) 😉
5. Submit your application and hope the judges will choose you 🤞
The Webby Awards are judged by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Members include Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Biz Stone (Twitter), Emily Weiss (Glossier), Logan Green (Lyft), and more.
The deadline to enter (for reduced pricing) is Friday October 27th.
Best Keyboard Shortcuts ⌨⚡️
Stack Overflow just released a keyboard. 🐥
You can save a lot of time if you leave your hands on the keyboard. Secret: this is how Superhuman makes emailing 2x faster. And so, it's no surprise that Gaurav from the Superhuman team asked:
Which apps offer a great keyboard shortcut user experience? 🤔
The community responded with these:
🖥 Magnet & BetterSnapTool: Use keyboard shortcuts to move/resize windows around the screen. Both of these are amazing
⌨ Keyboard Maestro: Conduct your Mac like a pro. Arun says: "Keyboard Maestro is crazy awesome. I have been using for an year now for a ton of automation and hotkeys."
⚡️ aText: It's like text-replacement, but super easy to modify, with the ability to add custom fields. Accelerate your typing.
👻 Ghost Browser: The productivity browser for tech pros. It has keyboard shortcuts for some of the most niche developer use cases that exist.
😏 Cheatsheet shows you available keyboard shortcuts in your current application.
🎩 Alfred: Will make you never use your mouse again.
You can save a lot of time if you leave your hands on the keyboard. Secret: this is how Superhuman makes emailing 2x faster. And so, it's no surprise that Gaurav from the Superhuman team asked:
Which apps offer a great keyboard shortcut user experience? 🤔
The community responded with these:
🖥 Magnet & BetterSnapTool: Use keyboard shortcuts to move/resize windows around the screen. Both of these are amazing
⌨ Keyboard Maestro: Conduct your Mac like a pro. Arun says: "Keyboard Maestro is crazy awesome. I have been using for an year now for a ton of automation and hotkeys."
⚡️ aText: It's like text-replacement, but super easy to modify, with the ability to add custom fields. Accelerate your typing.
👻 Ghost Browser: The productivity browser for tech pros. It has keyboard shortcuts for some of the most niche developer use cases that exist.
😏 Cheatsheet shows you available keyboard shortcuts in your current application.
🎩 Alfred: Will make you never use your mouse again.
Google Glass was ahead of its time. 👓 🕶
Today for the first day of Oculus Connect, Facebook's big event for the VR community. We have a special guest: SVRF co-founder is Sophia Dominguez is here to tell us about what's happening in the industry.
P.S. The SVRF team is curating the best 3D content for AR that you can browse through and download, for free. 🔥
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The debate of “AR vs VR” feels never ending, and this distinction is counterproductive. They are in fact, one industry: Immersive.
Think of everything before Immersive as looking through a glass window: you see only what the (phone) window allows you to see. With the new generation of Immersive content, you can stick your head out the window, touch things outside the glass, move into new worlds, and control your perspective and surroundings.
Where every medium before has limitations, Immersive does not.
Virtual (VR), Augmented (AR), and Mixed (MR) Realities sit on a continuum – from less to more control of what is virtual and what is “real”. In VR, your real world fades away and another world begins. With MR and AR, you can still see your real world environment, but digital objects are seamlessly integrated within.
Today, ARKit and ARCore applications are limited to what your phone permits you to see. In the future, when “headsets” (likely to look more like 👓/🕶) are omnipresent, people will choose if they want to view their experience with opacity (VR) or without opacity (AR/MR).
Before you ask yourself, will AR be bigger than VR? Ask yourself, which product will be compelling enough to be used in whichever reality.
Here are some of the products that are doing just that today:
• Blocks, by Google: Easily create 3D models in virtual reality 📦
• Gravity Sketch: An app to easily create 3D models by sketching 🖌
• Sketchfab: Lets you explore a million things in AR & VR 💎
• Remix 3D, by Microsoft: Totally forgot that this was made! This is awesome.
P.S. The SVRF team is curating the best 3D content for AR that you can browse through and download, for free. 🔥
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The debate of “AR vs VR” feels never ending, and this distinction is counterproductive. They are in fact, one industry: Immersive.
Think of everything before Immersive as looking through a glass window: you see only what the (phone) window allows you to see. With the new generation of Immersive content, you can stick your head out the window, touch things outside the glass, move into new worlds, and control your perspective and surroundings.
Where every medium before has limitations, Immersive does not.
Virtual (VR), Augmented (AR), and Mixed (MR) Realities sit on a continuum – from less to more control of what is virtual and what is “real”. In VR, your real world fades away and another world begins. With MR and AR, you can still see your real world environment, but digital objects are seamlessly integrated within.
Today, ARKit and ARCore applications are limited to what your phone permits you to see. In the future, when “headsets” (likely to look more like 👓/🕶) are omnipresent, people will choose if they want to view their experience with opacity (VR) or without opacity (AR/MR).
Before you ask yourself, will AR be bigger than VR? Ask yourself, which product will be compelling enough to be used in whichever reality.
Here are some of the products that are doing just that today:
• Blocks, by Google: Easily create 3D models in virtual reality 📦
• Gravity Sketch: An app to easily create 3D models by sketching 🖌
• Sketchfab: Lets you explore a million things in AR & VR 💎
• Remix 3D, by Microsoft: Totally forgot that this was made! This is awesome.
A new tool for distributed teams (early preview) ✨
Expa, the startup studio led by the co-founders of Uber, Foursquare, Envoy, Addthis, Metrolyrics and others, and known for companies with amazing domain names like mix.com and kit.com, is working on the next great collaboration tool for teams. It's called Input.
We've seen soooo many attempts to replace email and help teams coordinate. There's an AI-powered scrum master for your daily stand-ups, a cloud-based Sketch competitor for designers, and Facebook's big bet with Workplace.
Input takes a unique approach, blending familiar email-like threading with a Slack-like chat interface. Its beta users are using Input to collaborate on projects, brainstorm, host wikis, and coordinate their Product Hunt launch. 😉
The Input team is heads down, preparing for public release. If you'd like a sneak peek and early access to the beta, claim your spot.
This update was written by the Product Hunt team in partnership with Expa. Learn more about Ship.
We've seen soooo many attempts to replace email and help teams coordinate. There's an AI-powered scrum master for your daily stand-ups, a cloud-based Sketch competitor for designers, and Facebook's big bet with Workplace.
Input takes a unique approach, blending familiar email-like threading with a Slack-like chat interface. Its beta users are using Input to collaborate on projects, brainstorm, host wikis, and coordinate their Product Hunt launch. 😉
The Input team is heads down, preparing for public release. If you'd like a sneak peek and early access to the beta, claim your spot.
This update was written by the Product Hunt team in partnership with Expa. Learn more about Ship.
How to build a product without writing code 💻
Last week, a listener of the YC podcast kicked-off an interesting thread around the term non-technical, tweeting: "@rrhoover didn't realize you were non-technical, gives us all hope!"
It takes a team effort to build a successful company. People who write code, the technical talent, are critically important – as are those in sales, marketing, design, and other roles. Just like in baking, you can’t skip on ingredients. A baguette without yeast results in a very sad baguette.
Also, knowing how to code is not a requirement for starting a startup. Product Hunt started as a newsletter. AngelList too. You can use tools like MailChimp and Revue to validate if your idea has traction, and starting with email lets you iterate quickly and often.
Ask your audience questions with Typeform and gather feedback on your mockups with InVision. Build a community by involving your users in the product development process, before and after you launch. These approaches have work well for us and for many others. It’s this realization that led us to build Ship, a toolkit to help makers build awesome products. ⛵️
You don't have to know how to code to build a website. One of the most popular new tools for doing that is Carrd. You can use it to build a quick landing page or make something more elaborate, without writing a line of code. In fact, we used Carrd to build: deals.producthunt.com
This Week's Deal: 50% off your first year of any Carrd Pro plan. 🔥
It takes a team effort to build a successful company. People who write code, the technical talent, are critically important – as are those in sales, marketing, design, and other roles. Just like in baking, you can’t skip on ingredients. A baguette without yeast results in a very sad baguette.
Also, knowing how to code is not a requirement for starting a startup. Product Hunt started as a newsletter. AngelList too. You can use tools like MailChimp and Revue to validate if your idea has traction, and starting with email lets you iterate quickly and often.
Ask your audience questions with Typeform and gather feedback on your mockups with InVision. Build a community by involving your users in the product development process, before and after you launch. These approaches have work well for us and for many others. It’s this realization that led us to build Ship, a toolkit to help makers build awesome products. ⛵️
You don't have to know how to code to build a website. One of the most popular new tools for doing that is Carrd. You can use it to build a quick landing page or make something more elaborate, without writing a line of code. In fact, we used Carrd to build: deals.producthunt.com
This Week's Deal: 50% off your first year of any Carrd Pro plan. 🔥
Biggest innovation since the Internet ⛓
AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant sat down with Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin at Disrupt SF. The topic of conversation was cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Key takeaway: Blockchains are the biggest technological breakthrough since the Internet.
What is a Blockchain?
Vitalik defines it is as "a decentralized system that contains some kind of shared memory." It's a public ledger showing all the transactions of the cryptocurrency. Here's a visual demonstration.
“The internet is programmable information. The blockchain is programmable scarcity.” – Balaji Srinivasan
Blockchains are the Internet protocols for allocating scarce resources. Today, you can use all the server power you want by paying AWS. In the future, you'll use a decentralized network for digital storage where people can rent out their spare capacity in exchange for a digital token payment.
Over time, we may even see solar grids, electric grids, self-driving car grids, and other decentralized networks in the real-world that will be controlled and administered by blockchain without human intervention.
Crypto Products You Can Use Today
• Blockstack is creating a gateway to a new, decentralized internet
• Toshi is Coinbase's mobile browser for the Ethereum network
• 21.co replaces your public email with an inbox that pays you
• Lionshare: Crypto price & portfolio tracker for Mac
• Game of Coins: A virtual cryptocurrency trading game
P.S. Check out Cryptominded and WTF is Ethereum to learn more about the space.
What is a Blockchain?
Vitalik defines it is as "a decentralized system that contains some kind of shared memory." It's a public ledger showing all the transactions of the cryptocurrency. Here's a visual demonstration.
“The internet is programmable information. The blockchain is programmable scarcity.” – Balaji Srinivasan
Blockchains are the Internet protocols for allocating scarce resources. Today, you can use all the server power you want by paying AWS. In the future, you'll use a decentralized network for digital storage where people can rent out their spare capacity in exchange for a digital token payment.
Over time, we may even see solar grids, electric grids, self-driving car grids, and other decentralized networks in the real-world that will be controlled and administered by blockchain without human intervention.
Crypto Products You Can Use Today
• Blockstack is creating a gateway to a new, decentralized internet
• Toshi is Coinbase's mobile browser for the Ethereum network
• 21.co replaces your public email with an inbox that pays you
• Lionshare: Crypto price & portfolio tracker for Mac
• Game of Coins: A virtual cryptocurrency trading game
P.S. Check out Cryptominded and WTF is Ethereum to learn more about the space.
Google launched the future 🚀🚀
Sundar Pichai kicked off Google’s big event with a bold declaration: “We're shifting from a mobile first to an AI-first world, rebuilding every Google product with a focus on Artificial Intelligence."
Google announced a new GoPro-like wearable camera that clips onto things. But unlike the GoPro, Google Clips has machine learning built-in to the device to make your footage look amazing.
Google announced a new GoPro-like wearable camera that clips onto things. But unlike the GoPro, Google Clips has machine learning built-in to the device to make your footage look amazing.
As expected, the company showed off the new Google Pixel 2. It's stunning. Apple fans everywhere are secretly canceling their iPhone X pre-orders. P.S. it has the highest rated smartphone camera ever built.
Then, in a never-ending stream of new hardware releases, we got to see the Google Home Max and the $49 Home Mini – two smart speakers powered by Google's AI assistant. Also, new computer machine. 💻
