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It would be nice if there really was a team of pollution busting superheroes with magical rings saving the rainforests and oceans. Sadly we don’t have a real-life Captain Planet, but climate change is a real-life issue. We’ve seen Makers with heroic intentions launch products designed to help in the fight against Climate Change.

Here are some environmentally friendly products designed to help in the ongoing battle to save our planet launched over the last year:

Plantyflix plants trees for every hour you binge on Netflix.

Joro is Fitbit for your carbon footprint. Connect your bank and Joro will automatically track your emissions.

Neutral helps to offset your carbon emissions from your shopping cart.

Wren aims to help you live a carbon neutral life by offsetting your carbon footprint through a monthly subscription, funding climate positive projects and causes.

Just One Earth offers visual representations of how everyday choices impact the environment.

Climatebase is a platform for climate actions, education and impact. You can look for climate related jobs, events and organizations in one place.

5 Vegan calculates how much water, grain, forest and CO2 you could save living a vegan lifestyle.

Carbon Removal Market by Nori helps you to calculate your own carbon footprint, then balance this out through purchasing carbon removals.

Reel offers environmentally friendly toilet paper made from bamboo instead of trees.

If you want to help the save the planet one product at a time...

Superpeer launched on Product Hunt in March as a way to book 1 on 1 meetings with experts.

Early feedback from the community was positive;

“Congrats on the launch, Devrim. This is such a cool idea. Can't wait to jam with people using it!” – Pablo

“This will definitely change how consultants work” – Fatih

Chris Messina even asked the question, “I'm thinking of adding video consulting to my Product Hunting offerings via Superpeer... what do you guys think?”

Well, we thought it was a pretty good idea and are proud to announce the launch of the Product Hunt Mentors Network in partnership with Superpeer. This network includes experts from product building, social media, PR, design, engineering and more.

We’re launching with 10 awesome mentors to start with; Matt Navara, Chris Messina, Lolita Taub, Justin Mitchell, Sarah Evans, Pablo Stanley, Ryan Hoover, Caro Griffin, Hiten Shah and Mubashar Iqbal, with more fantastic folks yet to be announced.

How it works: Read more about each mentor in their short bios, then click "Book a Call" to select a time. Each mentor sets their own fee and Product Hunt takes a small percentage.

If you are interested in launching your own network, you can read more about Superpeer Brand Networks here.

“Now, everyone around the world will have access to the best product minds in the world. They will be able to build products on par with everybody else and build their networks - like they’re in Silicon Valley.“ - Devrim, Superpeer cofounder

If you’d like to become a mentor yourself, please apply here. Or if you’d like to book a session with an expert mentor, you can...

In one of the best product explainer videos we’ve seen in a while, Phil Libin of Evernote fame, introduced his latest project, mmhmm. The name is cool but more importantly: it could be a game changer for video calls and presentations.

Here are some initial reactions from the community:

“That's an impressive innovation in a cluttered field.”- Guillaume

“Congrats on the launch! Love the 'daily show' format. Excited to try this out.” - Paul

“I can think of dozens of use-cases for myself, but I’m really excited to see this used in educational contexts.” - Lucas

Of course, there are many options to host your video calls right now, including Zoom, Slack, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Around, Tandem, Remotion, Brave Together, Pragli, and even Facebook (among many others). But mmhmm is unique, focused on making presentations more engaging. There will be no Zoom fatigue on your next company all-hands.

How it works: Select a room with a virtual background to set the tone for your meeting. Then project a screen to host your presentation inline, similar to old fashioned news anchors reviewing the weather forecast. The app also supports “Jedi-Ghost mode” (see the video) and on-screen floating.

With so many competing technologies hoping to make our remote work-life more interactive (looking at you, Snap Camera), working from home in our new normal could become more engaging and connected than ever before.

We’re talking houseplants. 🌱

With shelter-in-place a central theme of 2020 so far, we’ve all spent a lot of time at home. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then to discover new houseplant products piquing the interest of the community.

Showcasing your work from home station is the new MTV Cribs, and no self-respecting WFH setup is complete without a plant or two to set the ambience.

Terraplater is an inside-out planter for growing plants indoors. You can see the plant growing on the outside of the planter, which holds water on the inside. Looks pretty cute.

Choose your plant is a community dedicated to indoor plant fans. Talk with fellow plant lovers and discover what plant is best suited to your indoor environment.

Pico is a self-illuminating, self-watering, mini-farm, helping you to grow plants and herbs with minimal effort.

Click and Grow, a smart planter for herbs and spices, is still going strong 5 years after its launch on Product Hunt.

For those of you on team fake plants, check out the ever so real looking, but water-not-required, Slightly Browning Fake Plants.

Today Uber announced it’s acquiring Postmates, the SF based food delivery startup, for $2.65B in an all stock deal.

Postmates first launched on Product Hunt 6 years ago and according to cofounder, Bastian Lehman, the app was already soliciting addictive behaviour from its users even then:

“Food has a long tail just like books or music. In other words, everyone has a favorite restaurant and if you give them the ability to order from that place, they will. We have done deliveries from over 25,000 places. The more often you use Postmates, the more often you keep using it. For example, if you have used Postmates five times, you will (on average) continue to use it at least once per week.“

This is big news in the battle of the food delivery giants, with Uber having missed out on acquiring GrubHub earlier in the year to JustEat for $7.3B. JustEat is one of the biggest companies in Europe in this space, competing directly with Deliveroo and UberEats.

The food delivery industry is big business with a couple of dominant players emerging after a few key acquisitions. We saw DoorDash acquire Square-owned Caviar just last year for a reported $410M. Amazon even tried to get in on the game with Amazon Restaurants a few years back, although has since removed this from its online shopping empire.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen a rise in home cooking as people shelter in place. It might be a good time to invest in some Our Place kitchenware or buy a fancy June Oven. Or you could just...

If you’ve logged on to tech Twitter in the past few days and aren’t sure what the hell is going on, well, you’re probably better off. Time to log out, open Disney+ and watch Hamilton or Frozen 2 instead and start enjoying the long weekend.

In other tech news this week, the folks over at Yelling At Cubicles (aka YAC) hit us with an update. You might remember the team from their Maker Story last year where cofounder Justin Mitchell unpacks how 1 tweet led them to raise $400K. Pretty impressive stuff. Fun Fact: YAC started as a project during our first ever Makers Festival in 2018 where they went on to win a Silver Kitty Trophy.

YAC is a voice messaging app for remote teams, a kind of Slack-meets-Clubhouse scenario. In its latest update, you can leave a voice note for your team in Slack – in a group or in public. Anyone can sign up with their team, and for the next week, the Product Hunt community can get a 25% discount off their annual plan with the code PRODUCTHUNT.

With more teams working remotely now than ever before, we have seen a surge in similar tools start to emerge. We wrote about this in more detail back in May, looking in particular at Walkie and WaterCooler.

At Product Hunt we have recently started using Tandem for informal team hang time. So far so good. But we do love trying new products, so we’re not ruling out any of the newer tools from our Stack just yet.

Facebook has announced that it’s shutting down it’s TikTok competitor, Lasso.

When Lasso launched on Product Hunt nearly two years ago, a question was posed:

“Will Lasso still be around in 12 months?”

Some initial reactions from the community:

“Cool design but maybe a little too late to compete with now successful TikTok app“ – Sebastian

“Facebook has a tendency to fail with standalone apps - I don't think anything will be different here” – Rick

“No. FB is copy pasting the features. Might snatch some consumers but won't be able to kill it.” – Avneesh

Although Lasso has outlasted the initial 12 month timeframe, these predictions ultimately came true. But prophesying a new product’s failure is an easy bet. Most products fail. Even those from big co’s like Facebook. And that’s OK. Experimentation is very much a net good, and Facebook’s NPE team continues to try new ideas with Bump, AUX, Whale, and other projects.

It’s also been an interesting week for Facebook’s ad revenue team with large advertisers such as Starbucks and Coca Cola boycotting the company over concerns regarding hate speech. With a gap in their marketing budget perhaps these big co’s will move their ad-spend dollars to TikTok on their newly launched TikTok for Business platform. Although it’s reported that Zuck isn’t that worried.

TikTok has also had its fair share of knock backs this week with news that India has banned the Chinese based company from its app store. With over 200 million users in India, this is a significant blow for the company and one that CEO, Kevin Mayer, is said to be working to address.

What will happen next in the battle of the social media giants? Why not make a prediction over on Forecast, Facebook’s latest product launch that we covered just last week.

Hello! I’m Karen Gillan. You might know as me Ruby Roundhouse in Jumanji, Nebula in Avengers or Amy Pond in Doctor Who. Lovely to meet you.

I’m here to tell you about my new app, Ditto. I was inspired to make an app after seeing how my friends use photo editing as a means of communication.

Whether it’s a running joke, making fun of each other or even flirting; in my opinion, editing is a new type of conversation. I’m excited to be creating a new social network focussing on the creativity of collaboration. Think Instagram meets Photoshop.

So here’s the thing...I’ve built the beta version and now I’m looking for iOS engineers to join me on a weird and wonderful journey for a few months. So if you are a creative coder who also happens to love Doctor Who or Marvel movies, you’re gonna want in on this. Just kidding, you don’t have to be a Sci-Fi fan. Although you really should know which actor played Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

You can submit applications here.

When the time is right, I’ll be back to explain this app in more detail. I can’t wait to share it with you all and start some awesome collaborations! Please sign up here to be the first to know what happens next.

(Oh, the answer is Michael Dorn by the way.)

Two years ago Mirror launched on Product Hunt. The $1,500 at-home fitness trainer was met with skepticism:

“$1500 for Mirror + $40 per month is going to be a hard sell. There will definitely be a luxury market for it, but many will just set up a $5 mirror and a free YouTube video to achieve a very similar experience.” – Joshua

Others saw the value right away:

“I'm this close to trying it. Currently my husband and I never have time to work out. We have a 1 yr old and a 3 yr old and both work full time. Between drop offs and pick ups and play time and dinner, we do not have time to even sign up for classes at the gym right down the street.” – Heather

Since then Mirror – a 2018 Golden Kitty Award winner – has done well. As gyms remain closed during the pandemic, demand for Mirror and similar home workout devices have risen dramatically.

Now Lululemon wants to get into the game. Yesterday the apparel company announced their $500M acquisition of Mirror, likely the first of many attractive M&A opportunities in this category. A few others to keep an eye on:

Tempo, backed by Founders Fund, Khosla, and others, offers a similar form factor as Mirror but with greater focus on weight lifting.

Tonal, a $2,995 electromagnetic wall-mounted gym, is currently backordered by ~3 months.

And then there’s Supernatural, marrying VR gaming with home fitness. It’s unlike anything else we’ve seen.

Which co will be acquired next? 🤔

Last Friday, tech Twitter was flooded with the ominous phrase, ‘it is what it is,’ followed by the emojis 👁👄👁. Thousands of people joined the mysterious waitlist with curiosity.

Expectedly, many people started asking for an invite. The official Twitter account, @itiseyemoutheye, suggested they could jump the queue by sharing their donation receipt to a charitable cause.

Memes were created. Tech journalists got onboard. Even Elon Musk may have subtweeted the new ‘app’.

With just a landing page asking for email addresses and the Twitter storm that surrounded it, the project gained more hype and appeal than most startups ever achieve. But this wasn’t a startup. It wasn’t even a product. It was a statement.

Friday evening, less than two days since the the buzz began, the team of 60 young professionals in tech revealed themselves. They sought to capitalize on the wave of FOMO and raise money for charities supporting Black Lives Matter. And they did. Over $200K in donations went to The Okra Project, The Innocence Project, The Loveland Foundation Therapy Fund and others.

Although many have lauded the success of this team in carrying out their stunt, it has not been without controversy.

Some people on Product Hunt took affront to sharing their email address to an (intentionally) sketchy-looking website with the words “give us ur info”. Others were upset this was never a real app as advertised.

Over on Twitter, clashes between some members of the creative team and Black VC, Del Johnson, revealed support for the same cause can offend people at the heart of the movement if it's not carefully thought through and executed sensitively. The two parties have since resolved their original conflict, having even grown from it according to a recent Twitter exchange, including a sincerely given and graciously accepted apology. Something not often seen on Twitter.

Other investors appear to have had a more favorable opinion of the stunt, with the Makers hinting they have already received VC enquiries into their funding needs. Which, according to them, is totally missing the point.

Whether you see it as a prank, a movement, a stunt or as activism - it undeniably got people’s attention.