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A team of data scientists, machine learning developers, and product designers to help get Christmas shopping done... we’re listening.

Outdone has just launched its AI-powered gift recommender that aims to tackle the rough experience of shopping for gifts online. Co-founder Hugh Lagrotteria painted a picture of what that looks like today. The TL;DR: Your Google search delivers a bunch of content, and you have to sort through it (from clickbait to sponsored and biased content) and figure out what’s disingenuous or organic.

Outdone tackles the problem in a couple of ways. First, a clean UI to contrast the messy search experience. Gift givers answer a few questions about the person they’re shopping for and Outdone recommends 3 to 4 apparel brands (apparel only so far) that the engine identifies are a great match.

Those suggestions are based on surveys of thousands of consumers. “[W]e used that brand preference data to build a neural net recommender system — a first of its kind in the gift-giving space!” Lagrotteria explains.

GiftPicker takes a similar approach in regards to using a modern UI and an “epic database” of gifts. The makers (a team from Presently which enables group gifting) called it “Buzzfeed quiz meets holiday shopping.”

Then there’s Giftpack which is also powered by AI but is focused primarily on employee gifting. It’s a CRM software to help you select, deliver, and track gifts in bulk. Giftpack also starts with a brief questionnaire. The software picks 5 of the best gift options and sends the suggestions to your email, where you can just make a selection and begin shipping globally.

Gifty also launched earlier this month with a different approach to gift-giving. It's a social platform where people can create gift lists, connect them with friends and family, and shop. Maker Ines Makula noted that she was motivated to create the app because of all the waste created by unwanted gifts:

“In the UK every Christmas people receive 120 million unwanted gifts that either end up in landfill or in storage.” Makula is looking for feedback so be sure to pipe up with any thoughts.

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?

Today, 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. And just yesterday, we watched founder Richard White launch Fathom to #1 Product of the Day with a tool that 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!”

Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Webflow.

You can take years to build a product or do it in a weekend. A maker can be a child prodigy or someone who can’t write a line of code. Anyone can be a maker, and that’s true now more than ever.

Few movements have made good on their promise to democratize something better than the no-code movement has democratized entrepreneurship. Webflow has a hand in that with its visual canvas that lets anyone build a site, with down-to-the-pixel customizations, all without code. The startup has enjoyed a gratifying year — it closed a $140M Series B, announced oft-requested features like Logic and Memberships, and reached over 3M users.

Now it has launched a new streaming platform to tell the stories of those users.

“We're curating stories that will inspire, and also producing original series that share stories about the impact no-code is having in the world,” wrote maker Mischa Vaughn from Webflow’s content team.

Webflow TV will feature original productions as well as a highly curated collection of inspiring stories while partnering with content creators like The Futur and Charlie Marie. Its first original docuseries is called Generation No-Code and looks at how no-code development is closing the gap between idea and impact and empowering historically “would-be” entrepreneurs with the tools to pursue their dreams.

“Going through all these stock [image] sites, I just couldn’t find diverse illustrations. I just didn’t feel like I was being represented. Who’s going to do this or release this — why not me?” shares maker John Saunders in the trailer.

In true no-code fashion, the team created Webflow TV with five tools in just one month, inspired by a project from the company’s internal hackathon where the team asked “Can a streaming platform be built with Webflow?” You can read about the tools and their build on the blog.

We’re looking forward to watching the series and have started checking out content on the platform. It’s all free, so you can start watching now too.

It may seem like a lifetime ago already, but Americans and all those who “celebrate” Black Friday and Cyber Monday were just chattering about deals, or lack thereof, this year.

Part of the decrease was due to supply chain issues, part to increased demand, and part to spreading out sales and shopping to earlier dates, but nonetheless, “consumers have been surprisingly willing to accept price increases,” Ken Perkins, founder of Retail Metrics, told Bloomberg.

Is this temporary? Most likely, as a result of everything we just noted, but there’s a possibility that the price slashing of the future won’t look the same as Black Fridays of the past. One more factor to consider is that more businesses are using, or want to use, better technology to drive their decisions. In Adobe's Digital Trends 2019 report, 50% of organizations said they planned to increase their CX-related spend, with AI and real-time experiences as key investment areas.

We’ve seen a few new tools recently that leverage AI to offer sellers dynamic pricing. Yesterday, Moonship launched its AI tools for Shopify merchants to offer personalized discounts. Moonship uses machine learning models to predict what visitors will end up purchasing, only giving a nudge in the form of a personalized discount to non-purchasers. Maker George Zeng (ex-Facebook and Groupon) says the tool can increase sales by an average of 20% and as much as 80%, and takes less than a minute to install without technical expertise.

Haglit is another AI-powered software for Shopify, but works as a chatbot that haggles with your customers to decide on a price they’re willing to pay.

On the B2B side, there’s Corilly, an AI-powered price optimization and localization service for SaaS companies. As co-founder Abel Riboulot notes, most companies tackle worldwide pricing by addressing a foreign market or two, but, “for instance, the purchasing power of Norway is 30% higher than the US, and Indian tech salaries are 60% lower than in the US.” Corilly’s API systemizes your pricing page and enables you to run price experiments. Last month, the YC-backed startup launched an update that included improvements to the service and more out-of-the-box integrations with payment processors like Stripe and Paypal.

If you’re a business owner, or know one, what do you think about using AI tools for adaptive pricing? Check out Moonship and leave your questions for Zeng.

The holidays are a popular time for technophiles and scrooges alike to circle back to a topic of regular speculation — what’s the latest on home robots?

Robotic mowers are awesome and floor cleaners get smarter each year. Still, one-function bots, from home tools to burger flippers, disappoint those who compare them to the intelligent and autonomous machines foretold in SciFi (although this one did not disappoint). Amazon Astro was probably the biggest headliner in the home robot market this year. Though it’s primarily marketed as a home security bot, its camera face does makes it a multitasker, however it’s TBD how well it all actually works.

Getting less conversation share, but making progress in their own right, are startups that are bringing the robotic arms that we associate with giant warehouses into our homes and small businesses. For example, we recently learned about UFactory in a contributing article from Kickstarter’s Laura Feinstein. The Shenzhen-based tech start-up is working to make robots more accessible to everyone and last year it “launched the most funded robot campaign in history.”

UFactory’s product range started with the uARM, a desktop robotic arm you can teach to complete simple tasks without code, and recently introduced the Lite 6, a lightweight arm for small and medium enterprises. Use cases for the Lite 6 range from helping engineers test touchscreens, to automating lab tasks for researchers, to simply making coffee.

Today, we’re also watching the launch of HUENIT, a modular robotic arm with an AI camera. Like UFactory, HUENIT is targeting everyday technophiles and makers who can find ways to leverage the dexterous robot arm in their daily lives.

The demo video shows the HUENIT 3D printing, laser engraving, and delicately suctioning and moving objects it recognizes one by one. The AI camera makes it “capable of a number of artificial intelligence technologies such as face recognition, image classification, object detection, line tracking, color recognition, human segmentation, and more,” explains maker Sangmin Lee. HUENIT can be programmed using block coding, python, Arduino C++, and G-code.

Maybe just don't program it to play Red Light Green light...

Remember that snarky website link you would send to people when they asked you a question they could find the answer to themselves with a simple Google search? Or maybe you would be on the receiving end of the link…

No matter. We bring it up because finding answers to your queries isn’t nearly as simple as we teased that it was. These days, we make a query and get a web of answers.

We’ve been watching this year as great minds build solutions from the ground up, rethinking the models, algorithms, and UIs of the search engine as we know it. But today’s newsletter is about productivity tools that enable you to navigate across the web like a boss with the browser you already have.

That includes tools like LINER, which we’ve watched evolve over the past years from a popular web highlighter tool to a search engine results curator. Today’s latest launch, Google Search Scanner, lets you filter out irrelevant search results with the click of a button right in the browser.

“As time passed, LINER's accumulated highlight data kept on getting powerful. We now have millions of pages that are confidently 'Picked by LINER,' and we wanted to provide users an extraordinary experience of searching.”

Founder Brian Woo also shared that the makers are planning a similar feature for image search, too.

So whether you still heart Google, Bing, etc., or want to share a few tools with your friends who do, here are 6 more tools to prevent endless scrolling.

Raycast - Complete tasks from a single command line instead of jumping from tab to tab.
Tabius - Auto-create new tab groups when you open a link, create custom rules, and more.
BetterViewer - Use various keyboard shortcuts to quickly pan, zoom images, and edit.
Linkwork - Sync a tab to a participant and chat on any webpage.
Tablerone- Browser history meets bookmarks; Find with a screenshot, share multiple links, and more.
Social Scroll for Twitter - Looking for an old tweet? Click between months/years to find them.

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 today'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:

If you’ve been following along with the Daily Digest, you’ve likely seen a virtual office here and a new metaverse there. Makers have continued working away this year, constructing virtual HQs to support the uptick in companies with remote and hybrid teams.

With holiday parties fast approaching and Omicron threatening in-person gatherings too, we rounded up six of the newest products in the virtual HQ space, highlighting a bit of what makes each stand out.

Wonder 2.0: “[O]ur focus is not on making the spaces more immersive or complex, but facilitating interaction between participants… Wonder helps surface commonalities between users. We use icebreaker questions [and are] working on statuses that are searchable so that guests can find people interested in similar things.”

Topia 2.0: “The platform has been completely rebuilt from scratch since the original launch. We now have private zones (for having private group conversations), broadcast 'podiums' for panels and Q&A, embedded live stream video like Twitch and Youtube, teleporting, and much more.”

Skittish: “Host… in a colorful game-like 3D world. Camera shy? No problem. Use your mic to talk to others near you with our best-of-class 3D spatial audio.”

Teamflow 2.0: "This complete redesign [includes] walls and textures like grass, water, paths, or sand [to] allow for outdoor spaces, game rooms, and a full office floor plan… [plus] private rooms with permissions, shared browser for seamless co-browsing of any website,... [and] AI camera framing."

Kosy: “Make your space your own and customize it... Make your team more productive & cohesive with one of our integrations including whiteboards, screen sharing, Youtube, Miro, Google Drive, Figma... Elevators. Coffee machines. These are artifacts of the physical office that lead to social interactions”

Gather: “Gather has a wide selection of premade maps to choose from, ranging from a moon pond to a beach side castle…[Yo]u can place down interactable “objects” such as whiteboards to draw on, youtube videos to watch together, or even games to play together…

And of course, Meta’s Horizon Woorkrooms is in beta and Microsoft is working on its own virtual HQ too, but you'll have to wait a little longer to try that one out.

Breshna, a new no-code video game tool — “think Canva for video games” — launched today, and the Product Hunt community was quick to take notice:

“As someone who's a big user of no-code web/app development, I'm always so giddy to see the no-code movement tap into new territory,” wrote one commenter.

Breshna’s demo video reveals an interface with game templates like “Guess the Word” or “Run and Catch,” a platform-style game. Creators can customize various elements of each game from characters to question prompts to collectibles. Once finished, users can publish the game as a URL where it can be played across devices.

Mariam Nusrat is the founder and CEO of GRID Games (Gaming Revolution for International Development), the maker of Breshna. She’s also an Education Specialist at World Bank Group, the largest and best-known development bank in the world (for context: the World Bank, which you may be more familiar with, is one part of the group). There, she’s been working for over twelve years supporting education projects globally.

Nusrat writes on her social profiles that she “operates at the intersection of no-code, gaming, content creation & NFTs,” which is another way of summing up GRID Games. Half of the company’s focus is changing the way games are used. This includes GRID’s Not-For-Profit arm, which is working to gamify and influence behavioral change.

In a TedX talk from 2016, Nusrat explains that she views games as three components: a story, a crystal ball (i.e. the player sees the consequences of their actions), and a trophy. Armed with these mechanisms, the founder believes games have the power to overcome behaviors driven by misguided perceptions or bad habits — such helping a family in Zambia see the effects of sleeping under bed nets to protect them from malaria.

The other half of GRID’s focus is reimagining the way video games are created. In the same TedX talk, Nusrat notes that most of us have, at some point in our lives, created a game whether it’s with code, paper, or sticks on the playground. The no-code movement can enable anyone, from teachers to marketers, to communicate through games with tools like Breshna.

What potential use cases do you see for the platform? Share them and your feedback with Nusrat now.

If it's true that you learn something new every day, today might be the day you learn about the fishbowl method.

Stooa is a fishbowl tool that facilitates orderly, free-flowing, and participatory discussion. Makers Fran Lopez and Annachiara Sechi explained the concept to inquiring commenters. Four to six chairs form a circle, i.e. the fishbowl, while the rest of the group listens. The fishbowl has only two requirements: There must always be a free chair (remaining chairs are filled by the organizers/facilitators) and the conversation can only take place inside the fishbowl.

“The free chair can be taken by anyone in the audience who has something to input into the discussion: questions, insights, data, etc. When this happens, someone from the circle has to leave the fishbowl so that there is always a free chair. This gives everyone a chance to take part and enriches the conversation with relevant content.”

At only a glance, Stooa may look like any other meeting tool, but its automatic facilitation of the fishbowl method makes it unique from the Zooms of the world and many audio rooms, too. Unlike Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse, there’s no hand-raising or requests to join the stage. It’s easy to see how an open seat could enable communities, academic circles, and teams to welcome more inclusive and productive conversations.

We’ve seen other startups work to tackle inclusivity in meetings. Macro, which was acquired by mmhmm earlier this month, used an airtime map to visualize speaking time, adjusting the video size across contributing participants in the hopes of nudging participants to speak up or vice versa. Macro was sunsetted, but all of its makers have joined the mmmhmm team to continue building products to make meetings “more human.”

In today’s launch, the makers of Stooa also mention they follow an agile work methodology and implement a Kaizen culture: a philosophy where employees are actively engaged in suggesting and implementing improvements to the company. It’s worth noting here that Stooa is an open-source project with a public roadmap — that fits the bill, too.

We’re really intrigued by the idea of using the fishbowl methodology to support more inclusive discussion, especially among a growing workforce of remote and dispersed teams.

Would you try hosting your next discussion as a fishbowl?