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What would your mind look like if you could see it as a whiteboard or mood board? We imagine there would be a bunch of snippets or sticky notes with random mental notes you’ve collected.

That’s how you could describe My Mind, a new product from serial maker and designer, Tobias van Schneider. The tool lets you dump your notes (images, links, videos, quotes, PDFs, articles) in one visual space, and uses artificial intelligence to sort it all for you. No need for folders, labels, or organizational systems. To find something search for a word, color, or object that you remember.

Van Schneider started working on the product after becoming frustrated with note-taking tools that require time to manage, and then fall apart when we forget to tag things or encounter something that doesn’t fit into the categorization structure we initially created.

My Mind has an element of Pinterest — pin things from across the web or upload them to a board to save them for later — but the tool isn’t about discovery like Pinterest. Perhaps more importantly, it’s absolutely not a social tool.

“When everything we do is seen by others, we act differently. We start curating our identity, whether consciously or subconsciously,” explains the My Mind website.

My Mind is designed to be a private space, without any social features to inspire chasing vanity metrics, like comments or likes. Although, if you do want to share “a little piece of your mind” with a friend, you can use a share link that expires after 24 hours.

We just covered the launch of Personal AI which plays in a similar space — leveraging AI to do the manual work of organization and recall for you. Pair these with tools like Scribe AI, which automate note-taking in your meetings, and you have to wonder...

Will we be soon be saying RIP to note-taking soon too?

The Information published its second-ever 50 Most Promising Startups this week where journalists try to spot “under-the-radar startups that could be the next Shopify or Snowflake”.

Reporters limited the field to non-unicorn startups that either raised less than $100M or started running operations in the last three years.

To spot the best, reporters looked for companies they believed had the “most potential to be valuable," which involved looking at their business models, growth prospects, and revenue. This years' list includes startups from Hugging Face to DoNotPay, across 6 categories.

Since the Daily Digest covers the newest tech, we perused the list looking for those startups with the newest launches, and found most of those hiding in crypto. Dig into three of the most promising startups (according to the Information) from that space.

Audius - A decentralized and censorship-resistant SoundCloud competitor
QuickNode - An API & node service to power your blockchain applications
Chia - The eco-friendly Bitcoin competitor that uses a “proof of space and time” to validate transactions (note: chia transactions were enabled in May of this year)

"That's awesome! But what else is new?" you say. If you're bullish on this space, check out these three popular launches from just the last week.

vig - Just-launched vig provides gamified decision intelligence for Stocks, Options, Crypto, and ETFs. Its Fantasy Stocks experience also lets you play in any one of the startups daily Fantasy Stock, ETF, and Crypto Games to gain experience, have fun, and compete.

Thresholds - This startups goal is to build a simple way for users to spend, earn, and invest in crypto. The DeFi growth account lets users earn up to 6.25% on their USD (earned in Bitcoin with other cryptos coming soon).

MyNFT.fyi - This tool lets you quickly verify ownership of your NFT profile picture (think of it like a blue verified checkmark for your NFT on social). Users enter their Opensea NFT URL, sign off with their Ethereum address, and get a certificate for everyone to see.

Is the next biggest Coinbase here?

We love when products combine our favorite things, and today’s launch of iOS App Icon Book does just that, pulling together tech, apps, and design into one product.

The iOS App Icon Book celebrates the art of app icon design and preserves the history of the art that has lived on our mobile devices.

Maker Michael Flarup writes: “Many apps featured in this book aren't around anymore or have evolved — which means the work we've been doing to capture this artwork have bordered on internet archaeology.”

The book surpassed its €10,000 goal (with €54,930 pledged at the time of writing) on Kickstarter with 594 backers.

It’s been a while since we put tangible products in the spotlight, so let’s check out a few of the top voted crowdfunding products from the last year for real tables and desktops.

Lomi Home - Home composter able to break down bioplastics, odor and mess free
Keychron K7 - Ultra-slim mechanical keyboard with a hot-swappable option for custom keys
Nano Garden - Everything you need to grow plants on your desk
Lumina 4K Webcam - Look great on every call with AI and Computer Vision

What did we miss? Hunt your favorite crowdfunded products.

Earlier this year, you met a new search engine that’s challenging Google’s monopoly over search. Neeva wasn’t the first to take on Goliath, but the startup introduced a cohort of newcomers in the space that want to make the competition more… competitive.

You.com is here now too and battle-ready. It just launched the public beta of its new private search engine that summarizes the web.

Co-founders Richard Socher and Bryan McCann are AI experts. Socher is the fifth most-cited Natural Language Processing (NLP) researcher in the world. He was most recently a chief scientist at Salesforce, where he helped build Einstein AI after joining the team when Salesforce acquired his AI company, MetaMind.

Tech experts are pointing out that Google is feeling the heat under antitrust scrutiny — some would like to regulate the company’s monopoly on the market. That might make this a good time for competitors in that space, they say.

While that might be true, Socher is more focused on AI. In an article for Product Hunt, he wrote about how he believes there’s no better time to launch a new search engine:

“Without the surge of deep learning, unsupervised, semi-supervised and transfer learning, it would have been impossible for a small company like ours to build an entirely new search engine experience, from scratch.”

Socher also explained the many reasons why he finds Google’s dominance so concerning, for both users and businesses. One issue points to how Google serves as a gatekeeper to content.

“It keeps the bulk of search traffic to itself — nearly 65% of searches worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2020 were "zero-click," ending without that traffic going to another website… I predict the trend of zero-click searches will only increase, and ads will continue to proliferate in the search results.”

In addition to its web summaries, You.com offers “superior” (and optional) privacy choices, personalization, and 100+ apps that make relevant content readily available. For example, you can search Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow, and Medium with a single query to explore one topic from different angles.

The startup is backed by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff who’s leading a $20M funding round, and counts support from techies like Justin Kan, who hunted today’s launch.

What do you think of the new Google search competitor?

Who remembers Yo?

The app went viral back in 2014 to the surprise of many people, including the makers themselves. They had built the app — the one with a single button to say “Yo” — in 8 hours as a quick way to communicate with family and friends. With its own momentum, and buzz generated from Product Hunt and Reddit, Yo launched to the top of the App Store.

Then there was Push Party almost exactly one year ago today 🤔... we're still waiting for an update on that one.

The reason for our nostalgia? A new app that hit the top of the App Store last week across 5 countries, called Push it. The app has a single feature. The big red button lets you send a push notification to everyone who subscribes to you on the app. Simple as that.

Yo comes from the makers of Sendit, an app that lets Snapchat users play games (like Truth or Dare) and start AR-powered conversations with their friends. The app has been gaining traction with 9 million downloads worldwide, so the makers created Push it to explore more mechanics for driving interactions between friends.

We’ve seen other startups tackle the challenges of push notifications, but products in this space are almost always meant for businesses. We’re looking forward to seeing where this P2P push goes, but unfortunately, most of us will have to wait a bit longer. Push it is only available to users in California and Australia for now.

“But didn’t you say it’s at the top of the app store in five countries?” Yup. The buzz is strong with this one. If you don’t live where Push is live yet, you can always add it to a collection on Product Hunt and save it for later.

In the meantime, we rounded up a handful of new apps from the last year to help you connect with your friends.

Party Blends - Share a link, connect to Spotify, and create a music mix with your friends
TICE or Beacon - Two options for location and ETA sharing, while staying private
XSight - Find friends and get deets with AR using your phone camera
Hyperbeam - Browse and watch movies together in your browser
Friendspire - Get and share recs for food, movies/shows, books, and podcasts
Letterloop - Create private, group newsletters with family and friends
Call Your Friends - See how long its been since you’ve been in touch and get reminders (mom will probably like this one too)

Last week, the Edtech platform Udemy went public. The IPO did not go quite as well as investors hoped. Nonetheless, it was a big day for the 11-year-old company and its co-founder Eren Bali (who stepped down from CEO to chairman and later started a newer company) and an inspiring story for many. Udemy was Bali’s second attempt at an online learning company after his first in his home country of Turkey failed.

Udemy is one in a string of Edtech companies (Coursera, Duolingo, Nerdy, Powerschool) to have IPO’ed this year. While Edtech companies going public isn’t new, Crunchbase notes that it indicates a potential shift towards US-based Edtech since Chinese-based companies have been dominating the US IPO market in recent years. Online education and distanced learning have been popular in China for quite some time, but the US saw a boost because of the pandemic.

A number of startups (ClassDojo, CourseHero, Quizlet, Codeacademy) have also closed big funding rounds after going years without doing so. Codeacademy raised a $40M Series D earlier this year, though founder Zach Sims didn’t attribute that to the pandemic. The company has achieved $50 million in annual recurring revenue and has been steadily doubling its growth since 2018.

This week, Codeacademy launched its newest product: Docs, a free coding documentation site for popular programming languages and frameworks.

“Codecademy Docs is a low-key big step for the team because it's our very first step into the realm of open contribution and UGC (user-generated content),” maker Sonny Li shared on launch day.

Li also shared that the site has surpassed 700 entries across 18 different topics. A leaderboard on the homepage highlights contributors and the entries they've authored.

Codeacademy had previously said it would be using some of its funding to grow internationally in India and invest in its Codeacademy for Business product, which competes with Udemy’s enterprise product.

We’ll be on the lookout for updates. 👀

That moment when you walk into a room and forget why... A new product wants to fill the gap every time your memory fails you. Which is a lot — we forget 80% of the information we experience daily.

Personal.ai is, well, a personal AI. It captures your spoken, written, and visual memories on a “Memory Stack” (even using legacy data from Google Calendar and Twitter) to help you remember things later by delivering proactive or timed messages. Your AI can even engage with others for you – sort of like the son of Anton, for all you Silicon Valley viewers.

"Think of all the time that you can save when your AI can message in your own voice, trained on your own memories."

Your AI gets better/is trained the more you use it over time. “GPT-3 is built on the memories of the public internet, while [Personal.ai] is built on the memories of your private self,” co-founder Suman Kanuganti explained to TechCrunch before competing in TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield 2020 under its former name, LutherAI (link in quote added by us).

We know what you’re thinking: What about privacy? Handing over all my data — even voice records — to a company?

“We’ve decentralized your memories from your identity and secured them with blockchain technology to ensure no one — not even us — can see what you capture with your AI,” wrote Xiaoran Zhang with today’s launch. Zhang, an NLP product builder, is part of a co-founding team of AI experts led by Suman Kanuganti. The founding team brings combined experience from past work at LinkedIn, Google, and Intuit (to name a few).

Privacy is a centerpiece topic for the company. The makers of Personal.ai are adamant about building an AI product that will have a positive impact on humanity. Personal.ai has pledged to never sell your data for advertising, but blockchain technology is what’s at the crux of the company’s work to keep your “virtual identity” safe from bad actors. To store users’ data, it uses Oasis Labs, a privacy tech company built on a permissionless blockchain. In addition to decentralizing your data, maker Marc Ettlinger explained to a commenter that users can delete their data from the system forever, if they so choose.

What do you think? Do you want to see what it’s like to train your own virtual assistant, or do you still have questions? Don’t be shy. 👇

We saw Google’s answer to Notion back in May. Now we officially have Microsoft’s too — or you could compare it to Google Wave (put to rest in 2010) as TechCrunch did. No matter who did what first — people are pretty impressed with Microsoft’s delivery now.

Microsoft introduced Loop, a new app for collaborative documents, at its Ignite conference yesterday. If you were following closely, you might have seen this coming.

In 2019, Microsoft introduced Fluid Framework, a new platform for developers to build real-time collaborative products. Then last year, the company put the code on GitHub, open-sourced it, and announced they were building Fluid into its productivity apps.

Loop is made up of three parts: components, pages, and workspaces. Components are live content, from standard items like lists and tables to sales opp records via Dynamics 365 records. Updates to components happen in real-time, across multiple apps. Developers will be able to build third-party Loop components, too.

Pages are pretty self-explanatory, and a workspace is a whiteboard-like hub where your components live. You can see them all at once (including the ones not built by Microsoft) and who’s working on them.

Loop hasn’t been given a release date (“the upcoming months”) but we’re supposed to see components arriving inside of Teams, Outlook, and OneNote this month.

That will hold us over until 2022, when we can use Mesh for Teams too. It's Microsoft’s metaverse platform for work which looks a whole lot like Facebook’s Meta’s Horizon Workrooms.

Mesh will let users create avatars and, like Horizon Workrooms, your movements and gestures are mimicked in the metaverse within an immersive office space where you can use Teams features like Together mode and Presenter view. Or you can all get “out of the office” to somewhere more fun — a team-building location of your choosing.

"As a company whose focus is on productivity...it’s something that customers are really asking us for, and it’s coupled with the vision of mixed reality that we’ve been working on for 12 years. It’s all coming together," said Microsoft Technical Fellow and HoloLens creator, Alex Kipman.

The topic of generative art has received a boost over the last year thanks to the success of NFT projects like CryptoPunks.

Earlier this year, a collection of nine CryptoPunks sold on Christie’s for almost $17M. The original 10,000 CryptoPunks were generated via software algorithms by the makers at Larva Labs. Each Punk was given its own unique combination of distinctive and randomly generated features.

Generative art is art that’s made using a predetermined and autonomous system where ideas, forms, shapes, colors, and patterns are generated algorithmically. Bauhaus Art Generator and Mondrian Art Generator from maker Andrew Brother are recent examples of products in this space.

So are Art by an AI and today’s launch of starryai. The products are built with a GAN or general adversarial network, a machine learning model where two neural networks compete with each other to produce more accurate predictions.

starryai is an app by an AI artist named Mo Kahn who was inspired to “remove barriers to entry to AI art generation and make it as simple as two steps.” Enter a few words into a text box, select an art style, and a few minutes later, you’ll have a work of art that’s yours to keep and even mint into an NFT.

Despite the subject line of today’s email, it would be short-sighted to describe generative art as fake — however, products built using GAN are being used to create synthetic design work for business purposes.

See: Virtual Models, Face Generator, and Malivar.io. Malivar launched last month with a tool for businesses and content creators to produce synthetic, digital spokespeople. Users generate a face with their ideal attributes, upload their own videos, and malivar automatically applies the face to produce a whole new avatar for your business.

“We believe that the future digital world is going to be filled with avatars. Everyone will have their own avatar and especially big brands,” founder Valery Sharipov wrote.

If you’re new to this space, you can trial generating new art in most of the products we’ve linked to. Makers might also be interested in checking out Generative Art in Go, a book introducing you to the basics of algorithmic art with the Go language.

Every organization and division faces transition. Employees leave, new ones are onboarded, and projects are passed off. For software, the issue to speak of is introducing a new developer to the product’s codebase.

“First, let's level-set: Understanding codebases is hard,” wrote founder Shanea (King-Roberson) Leven with today’s launch of CodeSee.

CodeSee is a new tool to make codebases easier to digest with auto-generated, self-updating diagrams that help makers visualize an entire codebase. Developers and product teams can use CodeSee to create tours/visual walkthroughs of the code, add labels and notes with color-coding, highlight activity across a codebase, and more.

“With Maps, you can… provide context to other devs to support faster onboarding, planning, and code reviews,” Leven explained. Prior to CodeSee, she led product teams at Lob, Google, Docker, eBay, and Cloudfare.

Even if you’re not a developer, the value of a product like CodeSee isn't too difficult to see — even more so in the context of open source projects. Many makers now view open source as the only viable option for building their products, but when makers open up their codebases for modification, codebases can become difficult to navigate. Thousands of developers could be contributing to the project from all over the world.

Codesee is leaning into the inherent fit — the makers have also launched an open-source community called OSS Port to help developers participate in open source projects.

CodeSee is off to a strong launch, with makers of various backgrounds chiming in:

“Not a developer, but I've had to be very aware of our codebase in past projects. Something like this would've saved me so much time then!” Wilhelm Rahn

“It looks this will make my life easier, allowing me to highlight only the important files and tour about a project to get started. Congratulations!” Kristina Anderson

Leven wants to hear about the unique codebase challenges developers in the Product Hunt community face. Add your voice: