The Roundup

We have two more Golden Kitty Awards categories to introduce you to before the big day.

Check out the finalists for 2021’s Best Community Member and Maker of the Year.

Unlike the other awards, finalists and winners for these categories are selected using data like comments, upvotes, and product launches from the past year. Winners will be announced very soon…

About that big day:

The Golden Kitty Awards 2021 virtual ceremony is THIS Thursday, January 27th at 9:00am PST. RSVP now or forever hold your FOMO. We’ll enjoy literal magic, live music, a panel with Ryan Hoover, and a couple more surprises. Our hosts Greg Isenberg and Sahil Bloom (who you know from the "Where It Happens" podcast among many other things) will guide us through it all, handing out Golden Kitty statues to the best products of the year along the way. We’ll all end up in the Doge Temple for a legendary afterparty.

From London to Austin, people in the community will be gathering to watch and celebrate one heck of a year in tech. There’s still time to host a meetup in your area, virtually or safely in-person.

Our friends at Flatfile are the champs helping us make it all possible. They’re the makers behind the unified platform that SaaS companies use to import customer data in less than 60 seconds.

Now, let's go!

The humble widget has viral potential. See: Locket, a widget that has unexpectedly risen to the top of the Social Networking category of the App Store. The widget shows live pictures from your friends, right on your home screen. Maker Matt Moss shared:

“I had graduated from UCSB that June, but [my girlfriend] was going back to school in the fall... We started using the app every day to stay in touch… Once our friends started asking to try it, we decided to release it on the store. Since then, a few viral TikToks have catapulted the app to wayyyyy more users than we ever expected :)”

“Simple but beautifully executed” is the popular opinion on the widget thus far.

Here are seven more mobile widget products from the last year you should check out to simplify your mobile experience.

Pretty Progress - Personalize your own countdown & progress widgets
Learn Geography - Put a country quiz on your home screen
Home Widget - Control all your HomeKit devices right from your home screen
Deliveroo Widget - Reorder from your favorite UK restaurants and grocery stores
Usage - Monitor your device with stats like storage and battery life
Meep meep - Track activity of any Instagram account
Wyd? - A widget “for smartphone addicts” to encourage you to do one thing

Last week, you nominated your favorite products for the Golden Kitty Awards 2021. We tallied up thousands of nominations and have the finalists for the first six categories!

Starting now, you can vote for the best in...

Mobile Apps
Audio & Voice
No Code
Productivity
Work from Home Anywhere
WTF?!

Voting closes Sunday, January 16 at 11:59pm PT.
Put everything on hold for a few minutes and go vote HERE.

Winners will get to share their acceptance speeches LIVE during our virtual awards ceremony. You're invited to join us in a global celebration. Expect...

🧠 Hosts Greg Isenberg and Sahil Bloom to drop insights
😺 THE Ryan Hoover to share his 2022 outlook as he hosts a panel
🪄 Magician Johnny Wu to leave us speechless
🤔 Fierce competition on tech-themed trivia with the Big Quiz Thing
🎤 Grooves from up-and-coming musical artists via Sofar Sounds
🐕 Doge overload with an after-party in the Doge Temple
❤️ Appreciation for our sponsor, Flatfile, the onboarding platform for importing customer data in as little as 60s

Tbh, missing this would be CATastrophe, so head over to the website to register.

We’ll be dropping the next handful of categories in tomorrow's Daily Digest so make sure to check back there for updates. Now, go choose the best.

We spent all of last week counting down the top 25 most upvoted products of 2021 in our Daily Digest newsletters here.

Without any further ado, your top five:

5. Lucky Carrot is an employee engagement platform that enables peer-to-peer recognition (with redeemable carrots) and promotes company values.

“Like your powerful insights on employee interactions…, predicting possible turnover. Great to bring visibility to employee relationships. Your "Interaction Graph" is supercool 🤩.” arakelyan

4. Typedream is a website builder with a Notion-like interface for making any website look good with minimal effort.

“Man, such a great match between how my brain structures and how websites render. Love it.” Daniel Shein

3. RobinWho comes from investing app Qooore, which wanted to release a product that (hilariously) weans you from making money on the stock market.

“Finally, a product that won't let me get to the moon with all my $DOGE. Having a job to attend and debts to pay, there's no time to get rich.” Jay June

2. Tango automatically creates step-by-step how-to guides as you complete your work, with screenshots, links, and descriptions.

“Awesome stuff! Superfast way to document processes — and even faster for the viewer since it focuses on the important highlights. Better than video for sharing step-by-step workflows!” Mark Lamb

1. Sprig (formerly UserLeap) is a product research platform that lets you run microsurveys within your product, record interviews, and test design concepts.

“Recruiting and creating authentic context are my two most significant pain points when doing user research; I'm thrilled to see a product that seems to address both 🎉” Josh T

Until next year!

Not sure about you, but we live in the gray space between mindlessly scrolling and absorbing everything the internet has to offer. We feel good when we’re able to dismiss those iPhone screen time reminders and chalk up at least some of that time to reading.

The problem is, we know much of it doesn’t stick. Time is wasted scrolling past unworthy reads to get to the good ones. And then we don’t always even read the best stuff — thank U headline, next.

Fortunately, this year brought a ton of products that are designed to guide our modern reading habits. Here are 9 of them (time to consider a New Year's reading resolution?)

Alfread: Manage your read-later queue with quick actions for archiving and snoozing using a familiar Tinder-like interface.

ReadBit: Upload or scan books and documents — ReadBit uses NLP to give you the key points of each chapter, tracks your progress, and more.

Thank you for Reading: Get one weekly Substack email digest from your favorite Substack writers.

Dark Reader: Choose a dark, dimmed, or colorful theme for every website on your iPhone and iPad running iOS 15.

Volv: A news app that gives you the latest stories (from election updates to Supreme's collabs) in 9-second reads.

Readwok: Upload your text (e-pub, text, etc.) and read it with progressive reader mode, paragraph by paragraph.

The Juice: Find marketing and sales content relevant to your work with curated lists or by searching by type (eBooks, reports, etc.). Then skip past content gates.

Context Note: Take notes on the web with their context with this Chrome extension that includes a tag system to manage your notes.

Bookstash: Read short ideas from books, podcasts, videos, and other online stuff and keep track of what you read.

It was only a matter of time before we saw no-code builders focus on web3 products.

Software that lets you build marketplaces and apps without code are still evolving within web 2.0 (i.e. the current phase of the internet that drives online collaboration). Now, as a wave of blockchain tech pushes us towards the next phase of the internet, no-code is perfectly suited to play a big part. No-code democratizes creation, and web3 is all about democratizing the internet.

Enter: thirdweb, a platform for building web3 apps and games without code. It launched last week alongside its announcement of closing a $5M funding round from high profile investors like Mark Cuban and Gary Vee (and Ryan Hoover).

thirdweb’s founders are Steven Bartlett and Furqan Rydhan. Bartlett previously founded a marketing agency called The Social Chain, and those in the UK may recognize him as the newest — and youngest — investor to join the "Dragon’s Den" (the "Shark Tank" of US or Tigers of Japan). Rydhan is a serial entrepreneur: the co-founding CTO of Bebo and then AppLovin. He started an incubator, Founders Inc., which is where the idea for thirdweb emerged.

“We've spent the last 18 months, in my incubator, working with a bunch of teams who are trying to launch NFT and web3 projects. During that time we learned the biggest barriers for developing these experiences is learning new programming languages and blockchains,” shared Rydhan.

thirdweb facilitates deploying smart contracts (using your own wallet) so that you can use widgets and interfaces with web3 features in your product, whether that be an app, game, or DAO. Makers can use thirdweb to launch NFTs, marketplaces, social tokens, and more.

The platform is free to use until royalties and fees are programmed into the sales of NFTs that are launched. thirdweb takes five percent of the royalties of secondary sales. At least one commenter expressed some disappointment with this model, but the makers support it, saying that it means the company's revenue is in direct proportion to the success of its customers.

Feedback otherwise has been overwhelmingly positive, with multiple early adopters commenting on the company’s strong customer service experience via Discord.

It’s of note that we did also just see related launches from Tellie, InLoop, and Nifty Generator, so if you’re building or integrating products in this space, check those out next.

Yes, we’ve covered new meeting software ad nauseam at this point, but can we help it if there’s still so much to surface here?

Last week, Headroom debuted its meeting software to the community. At a time when Zoom is still making headlines, what makes a competitor like Headroom stand out?

The tool is focused on filling user experience gaps, using AI to power the real-time legwork that goes along with having a meeting. And the founding team is stacked with AI expertise.

That includes co-founder Andrew Rabinovich, an ex-Google software engineer who worked on computer vision and ML algorithms for photo and video annotation. Prior to starting Headroom, he spent five years at Magic Leap where he was the Head of AI. Co-founder Julian Green is also an ex-Googler where he launched computer vision products like the Cloud Vision API and managed deep-tech moonshots (i.e. "innovation that achieves the previously unthinkable.”)

“Headroom uses real-time AI to make video conferencing smarter and more natural,” wrote Green on the launch page. That includes “enhanced video and audio quality at lower bandwidth, real-time transcripts, one-click notes, gesture recognition, real-time share of speaking time by participant, cloud video recordings and replays, searchable transcripts and notes.”

The demo illustrates the features, and we have to agree with the video that “the best part” seems to be that everything (across transcripts and collaborative notes) is searchable.

While we haven’t seen real-time gestures before (which are fun and much easier than finding reactions on your keyboard), we have been watching makers launch real-time, collaborative note-taking Zoom apps over the last year. Just last week we also saw Richard White's launch of Fathom, which shot to #1 Product of the Day and aims to eliminate note-taking on Zoom calls.

So if you want to keep Zoom at the top of your work vernacular, you can “circle back” to some of those apps. If you want to try Headroom, now’s a great time to do so and share feedback with the makers. The tool is free.

Green also threw out a challenge to “discover the 4th gesture recognized in Headroom meetings… 👍 👎 ✋ ? ... No, not that one!”

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 last week'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:

It may sound like the crypto space is having all the tongue-twisting fun lately with DAOs, web3, NFTs — but IT teams have recently worked new jargon into their repertoire as well. It’s worthwhile for non-technicals to get acquainted with, because there’s a growing list of thriving startups in this space.

Observability, in the software world, is when you measure and track a system’s state from the data it generates. There are three key pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. If you’re not an expert, you’d be forgiven for explaining the concept as “monitoring.” However…

“Put simply, monitoring measures something and then evaluates the result of that measurement against a defined standard to tell you whether something is good or bad...” explains the Grafana website. “Observability refers to gathering as much information as possible... to ask questions across that information… These are questions that are not anticipated in advance, like monitoring presumes, but rather questions that arise due to unexpected or novel events within a system.”

Grafana was one of three most-promising observability startups to earn unicorn status this year (along with Chronosphere and Cribl) and announced partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon to bring observability services to Azure and AWS. Epsagon has enjoyed a great year too. The Israel-based company offers serverless observability, enabling companies to search and troubleshoot events across microservices.

Epsagon makers first launched the product back in 2018, and updated the tech community last week with Epsagon 2.0. With the new launch, Epsagon has updated its pricing model, giving everyone access its tool for free, with up to 10M traces per month and unlimited alerts and metrics.

This comes a few months after the team announced its acquisition by Cisco. Cisco’s Liz Centoni sums up the value of the technology well in a blog:

“Cisco’s approach to full-stack observability gives our customers the ability to move beyond just monitoring to a paradigm that delivers shared context across teams and enables our customers to deliver exceptional digital experiences, optimize for cost, security and performance and maximize digital business revenue.”

A couple of teens have reminded us that age can be just a number when you’re a maker. First, SpaceHey from 19-year-old developer, An, started hitting headlines last week after reaching 200,000 users.

Then on her fifteenth birthday, Pranjali Awasthi beta launched Delv, an AI-powered engine that summarizes and graphs information to help you learn about complex concepts faster.

“Let's say you're getting into AI, you want well-researched information on a multi-layered concept like Classification Models, you plug in specific topics you want to know, websites you like reading from, Delv will build you a knowledge graph of connected concepts, with each node representing a highly relevant article's summary,” Awasthi explained.

Delv has been backed by Backend Capital, and Awasthi is an Entrepreneur In Residence at the early-stage VC firm founded by Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot. In her LinkedIn description, Awasthi describes herself as an “AI/ML & Computational Neuroscience Enthusiast” — others have recently written she’s a “child prodigy” and “superstar on the rise.”

Awasthi was previously a research intern at the Schwartz Center for Computational Neuroscience and interned at the Neural Dynamics of Control Lab at Florida International University. There she worked in the overlap of neuroimaging and machine learning on a project that involved building a classifier to detect errors in cognitive tasks using EEG imaging, supported by a grant she received from the New York Institute of Technology.

While Awasthi’s age may surprise and inspire, the young founder supports efforts to introduce more young students to AI. She was exposed to academia at a young age via her mother and father.

“I feel we need to start even more early and introduce AI as a core subject even in elementary school starting from basic projects to increase their knowledge base,” she told Analytics India Mag (Awasthi moved to the US from India with her parents four years ago).

When imagi launched (and Instagram Kids stalled), we wrote about how kids are obtaining mobile devices at younger ages globally — in the US, half have a phone by age 11. Like founder Dora Palfi, Awasthi sees good opportunity among this trend, telling Analytics India that mobile devices can introduce kids to the algorithms behind their favorite apps.

Your developed brain may not be quite as malleable as kids these days, but if you're interested in learning about NLP models, for example, you can submit your request to Delv's beta now.