The Roundup

Last week, Wordpress's parent company Automattic launched Newspack, a new publishing platform tailor-made for local newsrooms. And its backed by $2.4M in funding led by Google. 

How it works: Newspack will operate as a secure, inexpensive toolkit for small to medium-sized newsrooms that will make their technical decisions easier. It will definitely support existing Wordpress plugins and *maybe* include website design, commerce options or CMS configuration. 

“Sounds, essentially, like a sponsored/subsidized, hosted, distribution of WordPress” - Chris Messina

Interestingly, Facebook had a similar announcement last week too. 🤔

The tech giant announced a $300M (!) investment in local news over the next three years. For context, Google committed $300M to news products and initiatives last March — with Newspack now being one of the beneficiaries. 💸

It's worth noting that Facebook and Google control the online ad market, and digital publishers have traditionally tried (but struggled) to make money from online ads. Regardless, money is money and the survival of local media is good news for all. 

In other news (how many news puns is too many?), we've been playing with some new writing tools: Write Together is a new spin on blogging and 200 Words a Day is a dead-simple tool that helps you write a little every single day.

On the surface, it seems like the ride-sharing market is oversaturated. 🚘

There's already category leaders Uber and Lyft, as well as countless others — Gett, Grab, Via, Didi, etc., etc. 

The problem: These ride-sharing companies have the potential to create a monopoly, and ultimate raise the price of how much it costs to get you from point A to point B. 🤔

Last week, a new app called SoMo launched to combat this — and ultimately give riders some freedom when it comes to getting around. 

How it works: SoMo is a “social transport” app that combines all modes of transport that are not a ride-hailing service. It allows people to create free rides (yes, free) through “social circles” around a specific destinations — from sporting events to concerts to the daily commute. It's kind of like Uber meets Google Maps meets your neighborhood carpool. 

Some responses from the community: 

“I love the idea of sharing rides with a network that I know” - Tal 

“One of those things where you say 'why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?' Great App, great concept and a great solution. I’m hooked.” - Gabby 

“My 12-year-old was SUPER excited about this app. And going to tell her friends about it. Which means that me and other moms are going to use it a lot.” - Inna 

SoMo will be available in 15 cities to start, including London, Athens, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brussels, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Nice, Los Angeles, Helsinki, Piraeus, Thessaloniki, Almere Stad, Haarlem, and the Hague. If you don't live in one of those places, don't worry. The app's makers (Here Technologies) plan to launch in 10 new cities every month. 

We'll be watching where this goes — but you have to try it out for yourself.

We recently asked the Twitter-verse what their favorite productivity hacks are and got some....creative responses:

“Leave the charger at home” - Adrian

“Sleep after lunchtime for 30 mins” - Sasha

“Mushrooms” - Alex

Many of us spend a lot of time trying to hack, well, time. So might as well be unconventional.

We went down the Product Hunt rabbit hole and rounded up 10 of our favorite products to hack productivity:

Progress Bar OSX shows you the exact percentage of how much the day, month, year and your life has progressed in your OSX menu bar ⏳

“All technology is a time machine. Get your life back by treating it so.” - Chris

Taskr is a dead-simple task manager app that's perfect for small lists (and it's free) 📝

“I really love this app for planning all my work related tasks. It makes my daily planning in the morning so easy, since I can just grab my tasks from the backlog and start working. I think it sliced the time for the daily planning at least by 50%.” - Marius

Focuster ditches the to-list model and schedules your top priorities in your calendar 📆

“Focuster connects to your Google Calendar and helps you easily visualize how much free time you have and make the most of it. It flows around your existing events and is always updating so your most important work always stays top of mind.” - Jordan

Rooster is a Chrome extension that gives you insights on your browsing habits via push-notification when you lose focus 🙇‍

“Great app if you want to introspect your time and become more productive” - Kushagra

Social Pomodoro pairs you with an accountability buddy to keep you working for 25 minutes at a time 👫

“I had no idea having an accountability buddy in a pomodoro timer could be so amazing! I got done with tasks that usually talk me 2 hours withing 2 sessions- ie, 50 minutes” - Ayushi

7 Minute Workout is a scientific workout app from The New York Times that helps you get a realllly fast workout in 💪

“I love this workout. It's a great way to squeeze in exercise even on those busy days.” - Robleh

Thought Train is a menu bar app that keeps a list of your thoughts and tasks 🧠

“If anyone is like me and has a lot of balls flying in the air most days, it's super useful to when the 'wait, what was I working on again' thought pops up in my brain (like all the time) to do a quick glance at the top menu bar and go 'ah, there it was'” - Hrefna

The Most Dangerous Writing App loses your writing if you stop typing 😳

“Pretty good way to start your day. This is good for 'morning pages', without the pressure of writing something that can be 'saved for later'. “ - Sagar

Gone is like the Snapchat of to-do lists: all tasks will disappear 24 hours after adding them ⏰

“One big problem with to-do list apps is that to-dos tend to pile up. I specifically wanted something ephemeral - just for the day. This solves it perfectly.” - Dominic

Play (for Medium) lets you listen to Medium articles as podcasts to save time on reading articles 🎧

“If you write on Medium ... this should interest you.” - Arnie

What would you add to this list? Share it with us on Twitter and we'll RT the most useful, creative, or ridiculous recommendations. 😉

“Not only is Fortnite the new hangout spot, replacing the mall, Starbucks or just loitering in the city, it's become the coveted 'third place' for millions of people around the world” - Owen Williams 

2018 was the year of Fortnite. Drake played streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. The game launched on iOS. And the Switch. And Android. It even partnered with the NFL. 🎮

Since the third-person shooter game officially debuted a year and a half ago, it has turned into a cultural phenomenon that now has over 200 million registered players. 

But in the past few weeks, we've read a lot less about the game itself but more about what the game has created — a communal “hangout” spot for players online. 

In a nutshell, it's become a place where your friends are — and that sounds a lot like social media. 🤔

“Just speaking for our family, it's still clear to us that Fortnite needs tight rules in our house, but we've shifted to thinking about it less as a video game and more as we might think about a teen talking on the phone for hours.” - Ernie Tedeschi 

Fortnite's success as a social network largely stems from that fact that it's really for anyone (even Drake) — it's free to play and available on every device. 

This year, we also saw a few Fortnite-focused apps emerge specifically around community: 

FortLeague is an iOS app that gives players rankings in the game 👀

Where Should We Drop decides where you and your squad should land on Fortnite 🙌

Last week, Remove.bg launched and blew our minds.

“This is a huge time-saver for stock photos.” - Trish 

“No more stupid work in photoshop 🕶” - Dariusz 

“I was fully expecting this not to work, but it did it pretty much perfectly.” - Dan 

Remove.bg is a simple tool that removes the background of any photo in 5 seconds.

According to the Maker Benjamin Grossing, Remove.bg was originally part of a bigger app, but they decided to release it as a standalone tool since removing photo backgrounds can get superrr tiresome. We're anxious to see what the “bigger app” might be....

Until then, some of the most recent photo editing tools out there to play around with this week: 

📸 Lensa will improve your selfies with AI 

📸 Affinitiy is a professional photo editing tool for your iPad 

📸 Artini is a photo app for the ~artist~ in you 

📸 Luminar is superrr easy to use and has AI editing features built in 

📸 Lightroom — because it's a classic

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you had a baby with Elon Musk? Of course you have. Thankfully — with the power of AI — you can find out what your baby would look like.

Last week this tool launched, giving anyone with a web browser and internet access the power to swap faces with Elon (or anyone, including your friends).

Reflect isn’t the only one using AI to transform photos.

😯 Morphin (early access beta) puts you inside your favorite GIFs

😯 Face Swap Live lets you switch faces with your friends in real-time (like in Face/Off!)

😯 Emojiface turns your face into an emoji

😯 Zepeto turns your selfie into a Pixar character, currently at the top of the App Store 

😯 Headface will turn you into Obama or Trump

😯 Lensa, #1 on Product Hunt today, will make you even more beautiful (made by the team that built Prisma) 

Give Reflect a try and share your Elon baby photos with us on Twitter. We’ll RT our favorites. 😊

"I mean like, but anyway" - a five-word acceptance speech at the Webby Awards

What do Beyonce, Pokemon Go, Instagram, Lady Gaga, The Women's March, Airbnb, GIPHY and The New York Times all have in common? They're all Webby 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 http://webbyawards.com 💻
2. Your startup might fit one of the Apps, Mobile and Voice categories 📱
3. Fill out the form, select what applies to you (Social, Games and Entertainment) 📋
4. Select featured categories to enter (This is the first year honors for Voice 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), DeRay McKesson (Pod Save the People), Opal Tometi (Black Lives Matter) and more.

The deadline to enter (for reduced pricing) is Friday December 14th.

Our first-ever Product Hunt Makers Festival has been a celebration of creativity with teams and individuals from all corners of the globe coming together to launch something. Our showcase last week had close to 100 projects across our six themes: social impact, remote workers, voice and audio, health and beauty, inclusion and brain stuff. Makers also built awesome products outside the six categories!

We were so impressed with all of the projects that came out of this year’s Makers Festival. In fact, we're already planning the next one 😏

So without further ado, here are our winners and the runners up in each category:

Social Impact 👊

Cultural Fit is a collaborative list of cultural traits that make you love your workplace

Runners Up

Firebusters is a tool that automatically reports fires (as small as a tree!) to pinpoint its exact location

The Incredible League of Makers is a community for people to build and launch things that solve the world's problems

Voice & Audio 🗣

What would you choose is an Alexa Skill for the Makers Festival

Runners Up

Shuffl.fm is a music assistant that uses hands-free playback and discovery

Voice Lightshow lets you ask Alexa to start a light show

Health & Beauty 💅

Lab Lyfe is an app that offers guided self-experiments in diet, wellness and lifestyle

Runners Up

Keepin' it feel is a reflection exercise is for understanding your emotions

Therma lets you track symptoms and medication for your loved ones

Inclusion 🌎

Femake provides lots and lots of data on female makers

Runners Up

YC Census is an incomplete census of Y-combinator startup batches

Handsfree.js is a drop-in library to create computer-vision powered handsfree interfaces for the web

Brain Stuff 🧠

Teeny Breaks is a Chrome extension showing you one mindfulness tip based on science every time you open a new tab

Runners Up

21 Days MVP provides a starter kit to create and validate your idea in 21 days or less

Paper List syncs your paper and electronic to-do lists

Remote Workers 💻

Yelling Across Cubicles is like walkie-talkie for remote teams

Runners Up

My Timezone Is makes it super easy to update and share your current timezone

IndieWorkspace shows you the desks of other indie makers

Other 🤷

200 Words a Day wants to help anyone be a writer, 200 words at a time

Runners Up

Eureka is a web app that allows employees to put forward suggestions within their company

Stomp is a tool that helps you backup your email subscribers from email marketing platforms

Upvote Bell is a dashboard for your Product Hunt projects where you can see a chart with upvote stats

Congratulations to all and thank you to everyone who participated!