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Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
And we're not talking about a Christmas mouse. Or Jack Dorsey stirring the web3 pot.😼
We're talking about the Golden Kitty Awards!
We’ve been cooking up the Golden Kitty Awards 2021 and you’re going to love what’s on for this year.
New here? The Awards are an annual celebration of the year’s new products and the makers behind them! They’re a really big deal. Nominees go down in history with winners like Robinhood, Figma, and Notion, oh my. And the best part? You’ll help pick the winners across categories from AI to No Code.
This year’s ceremony and celebration are going digital again, but don’t worry about one of those stuffy, snoozy streams. We're planning a lot to celebrate 2021 right (think less "agenda items" and more metaverse).
To make sure you take advantage of your chance to vote, and to be the first to get the details on the event, sign up for notifications right meow.
We love Christmas traditions as much as the next Buddy the Elf (okay maybe not that much), but a lot has changed this year, like our grasp on the metaverse and NFTs. Mulled wine and jingle bells are awesome, but it’s in our nature to wonder “what new?”
So we’ve put together a bunch of ideas for new ways to have fun this holiday season as you gather with loved ones, rest and relax, and prepare yourself for the new year ahead.
Connect with loved ones
📹 Create memories - HomeMovie has the nostalgia of the old-school Camcorder with a twist: This app lets you create and record together with friends.
💻 Watch together - If you can’t be with your loved ones this season, browse and watch with them online using a tool like Hyperbeam.
📱 Play together - Or challenge each other to games in iMessage with Gamebytes.
Plan your next trip
🚴 Cycle somewhere - This BikeSpot crowdsourced app helps you find the best bicycle tracks with info on things like difficulty level and elevation details.
🏡 Work from anywhere - Work remotely now? Wander has a network of smart homes that will set you up for up for your next workcation.
🏕️ Get outdoors - Camperguru works with photographers and experienced campers to find the creme de la creme of camping spots for you.
✈️ Streamline your planning - Puffin Maps is an all-in-one trip planner that lets you drag and drop locations to shuffle your itinerary, track travel times, and use real-time collaboration to plan with others.
Learn Web3
🥽 Enter the Metaverse - Haven’t taken a walk around the metaverse yet? Decentraland could be a good place to start according to one user: “Just getting my feet wet but this has potential to be something big/special. Reminds me of a blockchain-based "Second Life" that's accessible via a web browser.”
🎨 Learn NFTs - How to NFT is a free resource for creators to be able to create, mint, and explore the NFT ecosystem.
🤑 Learn, play, and trade - vig provides gamified decision intelligence for stocks, options, crypto, and ETFs — and lets you play fantasy stocks games.
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.
Last week, we hit you with awesome new products that make it easier to gift, but this time of year everyone’s struggling to stay on top of their to-dos. Whether you’re still shopping for the perfect gift or you just want to bookmark these for later, we rounded up 10 truly unique gift ideas we discovered this year, including a few for the last-minute gifter.
EarlyBird: No supply chain issues here! This app lets family and friends collectively invest in & gift a financial future to a loved little one.
Ethercard: Ethercard is like Amazon gift cards but for Ethereum. We can't think of a more on point gift for 2021.
Ray-Ban Stories: Creator vibes. Ray-Ban and Facebook teamed up this year to create a Spectacles competitor and they might be a perfect fit for the creator in your life.
Opal C1: We’re all spending a lot more time on Zoom meetings now so why not give a highly upvoted camera that will have them looking their best all year?
Nothing Ear: These ultralight earbuds with active noise-cancellation feel like nothing — which is much better than gifting nothing.
Phone Cell: There are so many types of people who might like this phone display (and conversation piece), from artists to techies.
The Minimalist Entrepreneur: Its a manifesto for "a new generation of founders who would rather build great companies than big ones" and could be perfect for the hustler in your life.
NanoFoamer is great for coffee drinkers and the Clara French Press would be a win for tea drinkers, too.
Fart Sender: For the one who has everything? Because this list wouldn't be complete without a “WTF?!” gift.
Spotify Wrapped is four years old now (though Spotify first started throwing out your yearly stats in 2015 under a different name). In stuff-that-goes-viral years, that’s pretty old. But the internet hasn’t tired of it yet.
Plenty of journalists have done rounds of interviews to dig into why it is we love our Spotify stats so much (despite the fact that Wrapped is a reminder that Spotify is tracking us). One emerging theme is that our data gives us a peek at our persona or brand.
This year, maker Ios noticed that Apple music users were left out of the fun (and self-discovery). Ios had previously launched TuneStalgia, a music nostalgia app that imports your Apple Music data and tells you daily the songs you forgot you loved. Wanting to delight disappointed Apple users, he built a “wrapped” into the app in just 8 days and now we Apple Music users can grab some of our stats, too.
“When people go to listen to music they’re looking for a change in their day, mindset, ability, perspective, heart. They want to hear music that makes them feel something, or maybe — a feeling they’ve once felt before. This was just another chance to do that,” wrote Ios.
That all being true, music is obviously only one small slice of us and our days. So here is are six more ways to wrap yourself up this year.
Favo.so Wrapped (Your Twitter likes)
2021 Looped or 2021 Your Year in Meetings (Your calendar stats)
Tis’ the season for kindness. Thankfully, we're sharing a handful of new products that are making it easier to give.
Over the last few decades, cause-marketing has become a powerful tool for nonprofits and charities to fundraise. So powerful that in a recent survey by Sprout Social, 66% of respondents said they think brands should take a stand on social and political issues. Cause-marketing lets for-profit businesses enjoy increased profits and give back to a cause that aligns with similar goals, while nonprofits reap the donations.
That’s why we think POGO is an interesting product. Maker Joe Perl launched the charitable platform last month which is “powered by purpose-driven brands.” In other words, brands like Vita Coco (coconut water) and allplants (plant-based meal delivery) can use the platform to offer discounts to customers in exchange for a donation to the charities they are funding. In a way, it feels like personal fundraising pages, but for brands. Perl shared that POGO is an MVP, but is onboarding 20+ partners each week with 300 users so far.
You may have caught the launch of the Carbon Neutral Club with a related offering but targeted on fighting climate change. Users calculate their carbon footprint by answering a few short questions about their habits, and the platform determines the cost of your membership based on your footprint. Members can take advantage of savings across sustainable brands partnered with Carbon Neutral Club.
Two more new products to check out in the charitable giving space are Headado and Daffy which are working to make charitable giving easier, as part of your regular routine.
Hedado is working to simplify your charitable giving by handling donations for you as a single transaction. Just choose which charities you want to give to, allocate your support, and Hedado will make your regular donations and track your receipts for tax time.
Daffy has a similar offering. Users can choose how much they want to put aside on a regular basis, and lets you contribute via cash, stock, or crypto. Your giving fund can also grow through “one of [the company’s] nine modern investment portfolios," where it grows tax-free. That means more money to the charities you want to support. 🙌
What would social media look like if was created by creators? We looked at that question with the latest Clash launch in October, but we’re excited to dive back in after the debut of HiHo.
“HiHo is an idea I became obsessed with immediately after selling my prior companies, JibJab (in 2018) and StoryBots (to Netflix in 2019). People were more comfortable than ever with face-forward video for communication, however, the world’s largest public discussion forums were exclusively text-based…” wrote Gregg Spiridellis in yesterday’s launch.
To add more context, Spiridellis co-founded JibJab with his brother, Evan, back in 1999. After achieving video virality in 2004, the brothers started collecting achievements like ABC’s People of the Year. Maybe it's been a while since you made a JibJab but despite being one of the first video creation tools on the internet, the platform persists in a crowded market today. It has 1.4 million paid subscribers and only 25 full-time staff + freelancers. The company was acquired in 2018.
Then only months later, the founding brothers’ animated kids show, StoryBots, was acquired by Netflix. The show had been introduced by the Spiridellis brothers on YouTube in 2012 and five years later, it started winning Emmys. The founders were inspired by Sesame Street, but wanted to teach modern-day lessons (e.g. “What is DNA”) to today’s device-centric children. They found success with their clever animated bots.
For the new endeavor, HiHo, Gregg Spiridellis is joined by co-founders Mike Bracco (formerly on the Product team at JibJab) and Gustavo Barcena (an ex-JibJab and Facebook engineer).
Aside from the founders, what sets HiHo apart? The app approaches social through TikTok-like video but is built for asynchronous conversations, like Twitter and Reddit. Users can thread their videos, reply to others with video on their own time, and download stitched conversations to share. There are also public forums, private DMs, and groups where you can meet people with similar interests.
The founders are also focused on building a “more civil social experience” that promotes kindness, positivity, and authenticity. “... We’ve made a number of important decisions around what to leave OUT of the product: like buttons, view counts, camera filters, and predatory algorithms,” wrote Spiridellis.
The question remains: Can async video take off the same way written forums have? (Now seems a good time to mention that Reddit, announced it filed its confidential plans for IPO yesterday.)
A video thread of what's trending in meme stocks does sound pretty cool… Thoughts?
Last year, we wrote about Canva taking on Adobe with its desktop app. Then in October, we wrote about how Canva is killing it.
We are here for this competition, since we get to reap rewards with some excellent software.
Adobe re-branded and re-approached Spark and just launched it as Creative Cloud Express, which is likely the most direct aim we've seen Adobe take at Canva’s market yet. On the Adobe blog, Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky wrote:
“Creative Cloud Express draws on our decades of experience… It makes the core technology in our industry-leading products… available with just a few clicks — and with no learning curve… [It’s] is an app that only Adobe could develop because it takes some of the magic from our professional creative technology and makes it accessible to anyone.”
I.e. Adobe wants you to remind you that it’s the long-time expert in this space. Even though its Creative Cloud Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) has focused on design professionals, Adobe’s Ashley Still told TechCrunch that the company has seen a lot of growth from non-professional users in recent years. So Adobe took Creative Cloud Suite's world-class design software and gave it a non-professional-friendly experience.
Belsky also shared example after example of use cases from non-expert designers, from a tattoo artist sharing his latest design to a student creating an interactive history report.
The product features certainly resemble a Canva experience. There’s a library of templates, background removal, filters, convert to PDF, and much more. You can also use the integration with Creative Cloud Libraries “to take assets from Photoshop and Illustrator that maybe a colleague created for them and then re-use them in the Creative Cloud Express app.”
Creative Cloud Express is free and you also can pay to unlock premium features, like access to Adobe’s 175 million stock photos and 20,000 fonts.
After you test it out, don’t forget to let us all know what you think in the comments. Thrilled to see Adobe step up their game for non-professionals, or will you be sticking to Canva (or another competitor)?
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 yesterday 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.
Is this a spreadsheets renaissance? Or are spreadsheets just another beneficiary of the no-code movement.
Regardless, beyond the haters but before the people with the “I heart spreadsheets” mugs, is a growing population of inbetweeners. Marketers, small business owners, and beyond may not know how to code, but they do feel proficient enough with integrations and no-code builders to create tools that work for their specific needs. Still, they haven’t been able to quit Excel for good. Perhaps new products will change that.
“The world runs on spreadsheets, but the last time they got a major update was in 2006,” wrote Rows co-founder Humberto Ayres Pereira.
Rows (formerly dashdash) launched earlier this month, a year after opening its public beta. Rows' “spreadsheet superpowers” include interactive elements (buttons, input fields), sharing (without letting others mess up your formulas), automated reports, integrations with tools like Google Analytics and Crunchbase, and the ability to connect custom APIs.
Back in July, Spreadsheet.com opened up its beta to allow more people to try its “all-in-one spreadsheet” solution. Put simply, it works like the Excel you know (and maybe love) but adds a “whole new set of capabilities that give it the power of a database and project management system.” This includes rich data types, file attachments in cells, connected worksheets, Kanbans, Gantts, and more (of the spreadsheet tools here today, this one feels the most like a direct Airtable competitor).
Grist launched its relational spreadsheets product last month. The tool lets you do things like link records across tables, drag-and-drop your data, and more. Some commenters shared that they saw Grist as “the only viable alternative to Airable,” but a note by co-founder Dmitry Sagalovskiy’s best explains Grist’s approach to the market. While Airtable would be best be described as a relational database, the makers built Grist so that it’s easy to start with just a spreadsheet.
“You can start building a spreadsheet, and end up with a proper relational database and a versatile custom application, all in one.”
Rows is also pretty unconcerned with comparisons to software in this close quarters, from Airtable to Zapier and Notion. Ayres Pereira told TechCrunch: “Yes, we overlap… but I’d say we are friends. We’re all raising awareness about people being able to do more and not having to be stuck using old tools. It’s not a zero-sum game for us.”
