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Google I/O was this week, Google’s annual developer conference. Interestingly, it was new hardware that took up most of the stage time, but that does make sense once you dig in.

Pixel Watch made its official debut after lots of whispers and leaks, especially after Google bought Fitbit for $2.1B last year. Although third-party smartwatch producers already use Google’s Wear OS (like Samsung and its Galaxy Watch), the operating system has lacked features like biometric tracking tools, which are Fitbit's bread and butter. Now the new Pixel Watch features a deep integration with Fitbit software, packaged on a sleek circular screen that’s nearly bezel-less.

Another biggie: the Pixel Buds Pro are Google’s first earbuds that have active noise cancellation (ANC), and when paired with a compatible Pixel phone, they’ll support spatial audio too. A Silent Seal adapts to your ears to maximize the ANC or relieve pressure for comfort. The buds even have bone-conduction capabilities to help pick up your voice for clearer calls, and a feature called Volume EQ that helps maintain a balanced sound profile when you change the volume.

As for the phones, the Pixel 6a is similar to the Pixel 6 that came before it except smaller at only 6.1 inches. And that’s a good a thing because with Google’s newer Tensor chip, the phone delivers most of the same features as the more expensive Pixels, which is a "big deal for a phone at this price,” Google’s SVP of Devices and Services said.

Google gave us a peek at the Pixel 7 but didn't give much information on it yet.

In some ways, we’re most excited about Google's tease of its next-generation AR glasses. The video shows a demo of real-time language translation on the lenses, “sort of like subtitles for the world.”

It’s been a decade since Google Glass debuted at I/O 2012…will Product Hunt kitty make an upgrade?

Congratulations, you made it to Thursday, which is in fact an accomplishment. It can be hard to step away from your phone period, let alone give your tired thumb a break from doomscrolling when troubling news looms.

That’s why the chatter around Zario today is giving us hope. The new app uses psychology-backed concepts to help you understand your screen addiction and overcome it. Co-founder Ondrej Zak shared his experience, and it’s resonating with many in the community.

“I reached my lowest when my boss approached me one day after a meeting. She told me to never turn on Tinder during meetings again. 😅 The scary thing was that I wasn't even aware of having used it…"

Zak turned to the book Indistractable by Nir Eyal. “I started exploring how my brain 🧠 was unconsciously programmed to reach for the phone every time I felt the slightest discomfort,” he continued.

Then came Zario. It works to help you find digital balances with “science-backed challenges” on your phone. Examples include things like turning your phone to black & white to make it less appealing and making an origami. The challenges aren’t meant to transform your life instantly, but help you find short-term relief that adjusts your behavior over time (“sooner than later my brain found a workaround.”)

One commenter, Sarah Jordi, added “⬆️ this part is really spot on… deleting or time-restricting TikTok is only symptom control and not addressing the issue at its root…”

Co-founder Killian Fjellbakk also chimed in to explain to one commenter how the team approaches the app's challenges, explaining "Novelty and scarcity is often a trigger that draws us to picking up our phones more often; fomo. We've been relying on extensive testing… Finding the right balance is definitely key.”

Now is a great time to join the conversation and give Zario feedback about its MVP.

Passwords are like the headphones that used to come with your new iPhone. No one really wants them. They do the job when you have no better option, but they otherwise offer bad sound and a bad experience.

Security experts hate passwords too. At the tail end of last year, we met a new competitor in the authentication space called Stytch. Julianna Lamb and Reed McGinley-Stempel had worked together on authentication features at Plaid prior to launching their new startup, which uses APIs and SDKs to provide multiple passwordless methods that are easy for companies to integrate into their products.

Just five months later, Lamb and McGinley-Stempel are back with a new product, stepping further into the user experience of logging in (which so happens to come a week after a big update from1Password). The idea for Vessel was guided by the idea of a “passport for the internet,” relevant for web2 and web3 environments.

Vessel lets you manage both your “digital identity and crypto assets” in a secure browser extension. In other words, there’s no need to create passwords or fill out forms again and again. For crypto holders, Vessel’s fully non-custodial Ethereum and Solana wallets (more blockchains to come) eliminate the need for seed phrases. And if you haven’t delved into crypto yet, a secret or seed phrase is a really long stream of random words you’re expected to hold on to safely for life, because passwords weren’t enough already.

“Vessel is our imagination of what authentication would look like if Stytch designed that root account and provided benefits for consumers and businesses across both Web2 and Web3,” Lamb shared.

More and more large companies are experimenting with web3 integrations to help their crypto-holding users. We’ll be watching to see if and how much Vessel helps to onboard more companies into web3, which could accelerate overall adoption.

Do Reddit, Twitter, and Twitch chat create a toxic environment?

Not necessarily, we presume, but it depends on the bubble you’re in and how much time you spend in it. For one e-sports community, creating a healthy place for discussion was important enough to put a stake in the ground.

We’re talking about Juked, the esports app that launched two years ago to aggregate everything you need to follow esports into one place. The app was co-founded by Chris Chan and Ben Goldhaber (aka "ChanManV" and "FishStix"), the latter of whom was also a founding team member at Twitch. Juked's new community grew quickly to start, reaching 50,000 monthly unique users. The startup also crowdfunded over $1M from on Republic last year.

Like all founders though, Goldhaber and Chan have been challenged to keep the momentum going. So, they spoke to their community.

“[We] discovered an even bigger problem: most esports fans (by our count, 75%) don't have a core group of friends to discuss the esports matches… So they rely on general use social media platforms… And as we all know, these platforms can be incredibly toxic, incredibly fragmented, and not conducive for nuanced conversations,” Goldhaber explained.

Juked’s new launch today signifies its adapted mission which is to connect likeminded esports fans in inclusive and accessible environment, and reduce toxicity in online discussion.

According to Alex Wilhem of TechCrunch, Juked plans to accomplish this through human moderation with AI in the future, in addition to its current onboarding processes which require users to sign up with a phone number and agree to terms that emphasize their community goals.

Would a healthy and inclusive environment lure you onto a new eSports community online? Share your thoughts with Goldhaber and Chan.

It sounds sexy, showering together, but is it?

Whether you're getting frisky in there or not, some couples see showering together as a way to nurture and strengthen their relationship. The problem is that most showers are built to support a one-person activity. That single stream of water leaves coupled cleaners with one person in the warmth and one in waiting.

The problem caught the attention of two engineers, Brett Skaloud and Jeff Feiereisen, who met while working at Amazon. Skaloud has over 15 years of experience designing products from the ground up, including Amazon Scout and Amazon Go. He teamed up with Feiereisen, who has worked as an engineering lead at Microsoft and Amazon (where he launched Amazon Go with Skaloud) to make Boona, a tandem shower.

The makers worked on numerous iterations of their product over the last year before launching it on Kickstarter. Now Boona has over 2,900 backers kicking in over $650,000 — over 65x their original goal, with a week to go.

So how does Boona work? It’s an after-market solution, meaning it was created to work easily within the setup you already have, making it an option for renters and homeowners. It fits like a tension curtain rod at the top of your shower, with two opposite-facing shower heads on either side connected by an insulted hose. There are three pressure settings and a valve allows you to adjust the flow of water between the showerheads.

And who said you can’t shower solo and enjoy two streams all on your own? No one.

Get more details on how Boona works.

It’s rough out there. While scrolling Twitter yesterday, you may have seen some founders announce they’re laying off parts of their teams. Significant cut-offs have been happening since the beginning of the year and we’ve already seen at least 22 companies join the list in Q2 alone.

If you’re curious to dig deeper into the data, one maker created a database tracking tech start-up layoffs since COVID-19. Layoffs.fyi gets all of the information from public reports. It even shows a list of folks looking for new opportunities with contact information.

But why is this happening now, you might ask. One reason is that fundraising has slowed down. While global VC funding in 2021 was on a high, recent reports show that Q1 funding fell for the first time in a year. That, paired with bloated valuations, start-ups struggling to find ways to increase revenue or become profitable, and a looming bear market, might be bringing us closer to seeing the bubble burst.

We like to look at the positive, though. There are plenty of companies out there looking to hire. Fortunately, we continue seeing makers find smart, creative ways to gather opportunities and help those wanting to make a career change.

Take Honter, for instance. The app launched today with an interesting discovery mechanism. “We found a good use for the matching system Tinder uses. We believe we can connect faster and better creative freelancers with potential new clients,” the maker shares.

Another tool worth mentioning is Himalayas, a remote job board that allows you to search 2,000+ open roles at 1,700+ remote companies. You can filter by time zone, visa, skills, company, salary, and tech stack. Alternatively, if switching to a career in Web3 sounds exciting to you, we recently wrote about it here.

Yours truly has some open positions too.

So you want to be a data-led or data-driven company? You go Glen Coco. Let’s forget about the semantic differences between the two for now. The point is, decisions that are guided by data are often better than a hunch. The hard part of making sense of the numbers — they’re everywhere.

ChartHop launched today to help distributed teams visualize their people data. Kind of like a people analytics platform. The app connects data from sources like Carta, Gusto, and Slack to create a dynamic organization chart, an employee directory, as well as announcements for birthdays and anniversaries. “You can get started in minutes by syncing directly with your payroll system or importing your data via spreadsheet,” wrote founder Ian White, who previously co-founded Sailthru and Startdog Ventures.

Also keeping visualizations and collaboration at the forefront, Outcode’s dashboard enables teams to create landing pages from data like monthly active users, revenue, and customer feedback. The no-code data page integrates with various applications to create automated workflows for actions like sending promo codes and emails to segments of users.

After being nominated for this year’s Golden Kitty Award for best SaaS product, June’s newest launch brings product-led analytics across all teams. “Everyone, not only PMs, should be empowered to understand how the product is actually being used. Engineers, designers, marketers, success, and sales all want and need to know that they are working on what really matters,” one of the makers shared. The app connects to your Segment account and instantly generates metrics from user behavior data.

Directus 9 made a splash last week when it launched Directus Cloud, a data-stack (as-a-service) that turns SQL databases into no-code apps and APIs, in the cloud.

You’ve now got the tools…

“This is a game-changer product, with infinite use cases,” someone commented on this launch today. Others seem to agree — the community has given a lot of positive feedback with 100+ conversations started so far. The launch video is getting a lot of praise, too.

We’re talking about folk, a CRM (that’s short for customer relationship management) tool that helps teams keep track of their contacts. Salesforce, one of the first CRMs, pretty much revolutionized how sales teams in SaaS companies were managing outreach. Times have changed and so have the use cases. Here’s where folk comes in.

The tool lets you build a customized CRM and choose from templates like “CRM for investors” or “CRM for user research.” You can build your contact list directly from LinkedIn and Gmail using a Chrome extension, assign contacts to others on the team, set reminders for when you need to catch up with someone and organize them by groups.

The folk team has been silently shipping this for 18 months while “trying to invent the next generation of the CRM.” Maker Thibaud Elziere also shares that the team was “very inspired by the new generation of No-Code tools like Webflow, Airtable, Notion, or Shopify. So we’re trying to bring the same level of customization, simplicity, and delight, to reinvent the CRM for all.”

Another popular launch we’ve recently seen in the CRM space is Feather. The maker started building the tool with the intention of filtering and consuming the content we see on Twitter more mindfully. Feather allows you to subscribe to people you want to hear from and add them to your contact list.

How do you keep track of conversations and people you want to connect with?

We might not have all been blessed with the perfect pitch of a musical virtuoso, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun creating music. The fact of the matter is, even the best artists use sophisticated technology to makes music production easier and more accessible (for you music lovers, we recommend Apple TV’s Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson for more on this).

Splice is one tool being used by millions of musicians and has been around since 2013. It offers a royalty-free sample library that can be used to build new beats or shape your existing sounds.

Today, the Splice team is launching a new product.

CoSo, short for “complementary sounds,” is an AI-powered tool that uses Splice’s catalog to find sounds that work together. CoSo’s goal is to create a fluid sound discovery and music-making experience. The way this works is through something called looping layers. Each layer represents a sound, which can be things such as vocals, beats, basslines, guitars, and keys. You can use up to eight of them for each song. Swiping right on any layer prompts CoSo to quickly find another compatible and complementary sound.

A big focus of the CoSo app is emphasizing the creativity of the users. Although the technology is similar to generative music, the human element (human-centered AI) of being able to choose what to tweak in your tracks makes it different.

“Music will always be subjective, the core principle for CoSo is a good starting point, that delivers on the promise of ‘sounding good.’ We can all agree that something that sounds good might not necessarily be interesting. That’s why we are giving users a set of mechanics to navigate that starting point and make it whatever they want eventually,” Head of AI/ML & Audio Science at Splice, Ale Koretzky adds.

We gave the tool a try and here’s what we came up with. A little bit of “Vintage Cassette” mixed in with some bass and vocals. Kinda groovy, right?

Share yours with the CoSo team.

“Moving forward, every company I found will be remote by choice,” shared Amir Ashkenazi in an article for Product Hunt about his opinions and advice on remote work.

This is a decidedly confident stance for a serial entrepreneur like Ashkenazi. The founder is perhaps best known from his time as VP of Product Search at eBay after his company, Shopping.com, was acquired for $620M. Or for his leadership as President of AOL Platforms following the acquisition of his advertising platform, Adap.tv.

Sure, remote working is becoming more commonplace. Airbnb just went fully remote, after all. Some question though why it took so long for a company in the tourism space to get there. Ashkenazi’s stance on this issue still stands apart from other seasoned entrepreneurs who got their start in the ol’ office.

But the pandemic changed Ashkenazi’s thinking for the good. It drove him to start Switchboard, which is emerging from stealth today with a new way to help teams work side-by-side remotely.

“It’s a collaboration tool designed for remote work: part cloud browsers, part conference room, part video call.”

The cloud-browser means that you and your colleagues can work together in a shared workspace, collaborating within the multiplayer tools you already use (from Figma to GDocs) without having to share your screen or download a new app. The rooms have what Switchboard calls “meeting memory,” so your team can pick back up right where you left off in the next meeting.

Ashkenazi also writes, “we’re in this remote experience together.” True. As the corporate world evolves, founders are going to have a lot of meeting and collaboration tools to experiment with, from virtual HQs and metaverses to screen sharing tools. Of course, they can always build their own too.

So far, the Product Hunt community seems to think Switchboard is a “game-changing” idea worth testing out. What about you?