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The Global EdTech market is set to reach $404B by 2025 according to a report by HolonIQ. Even at this level, EdTech and digital expenditure will only make up 5.2% of the $7.3 trillion (yes, you read it right) global education market in 2025. 🤯

EdTech is big business and with 2020 posing more challenges than ever before for students to access classes safely, online learning is having a real - and necessary - moment.

Yesterday, maker Jared Hsu launched StreamWork, a video streaming service for students (think Twitch - but for homework).

StreamWork is an academic live-streaming platform for A+ students to tutor classmates and friends. You can tune in to educational live streams, study collaboratively, get homework help, and receive donations.

While most students spend half their time setting up Zoom and trying to learn how to learn-from-home, makers have been building innovative solutions to replace and augment real-life experiences.

We’ve seen dozens of creative educational products launch this year including:

Speakeasy offers online talks and workshops led by top professors, authors, and performers.

Whiteborb is a shared online drawing surface you can use as a whiteboard.

Epihub is Shopify for tutoring, training, and teaching anyone online.

The Examiners is a quiz and flashcard generator for bioscience and medical students.

Virtually is a fully-customizable solution for teaching online and building an online school.

Trickle is a microlearning and personal knowledge management platform for lifelong learners.

Programiz is a free programming learning platform that provides beginner-friendly tutorials.

PictoBlox is an interactive AI education app for kids.

Attendance automatically tracks student attendance on Zoom classes.

The passion economy is reportedly now worth over $38 billion globally according to a report in Verdict.

OnlyTweets (we see what you did there 😜) launched yesterday as a new way to support your favorite creators on Twitter. An experiment from Stir, (a group of makers developing tools for creators) OnlyTweets helps creators monetize their content natively on Twitter through paywalled accounts.

In recent times we’ve seen the rise of paid newsletters through products like Substack and Ghost, as well as paid Zoom classes, video courses, and online coaching. This trend has been further amplified this year with shelter-in-place prompting people to explore alternative ways to safely make a living from home.

Here are some more tools from the community that help creators monetize their passion:

Current pays you to stream your favorite content.

Buy Me A Coffee gives your audience a way to thank you for creating content.

Cent is a network for Universal Creative Income featuring lots of amazing artists to support.

LiveKlass is an on-demand virtual classroom platform.

Glow offers a no-code way for indie podcasts to make $ through memberships.

Drip is a Patreon competitor by Kickstarter built to back creators.

Curious Fictions is a Patreon for professional authors and writers.

Flattr is an automatic way for creators to make money from their online content.

Supercast makes podcast monetization simple by adding a paid membership to your podcast.

Last year, Steven Soderbergh released “High Flying Bird,” his second consecutive film, shot entirely with an iPhone. It’s available on Netflix. 🤯

Last week, Nat Martin dropped Diorama, a tool for making beautiful movies with your phone.

Nat, CEO of Litho and one of the makers of Diorama, says now you can create Jurassic Park-like films anywhere from your bedroom to the beach. You can produce far more sophisticated animated visual effects than ever previously possible on your phone.

This is great news for makers and creators who want to create better content without spending a fortune. The iPhone is a pretty powerful machine as explained by Nat, “If you have an iPhone with an A12 chip or newer, actors can also interact directly with the props in your scene through body tracking, and the app has a selection of live video filters, which help blend virtual objects with the camera feed.”

To get the most out of Diorama, you’ll need an iOS device with ARKit support (generally iPhones no older than 5 years will support this) and a Litho AR controller which costs $99.

We’ve seen smartphones replacing photo cameras and now with the latest AR developments, we’re seeing smartphones getting into the big screens. Just imagine how many more talented producers will get a chance to bring their visions into reality.

Here are some early reactions from the community:

“Wow. That is sick. I've never seen such an interesting use of AR. Just awesome.” – Mi Wy

“The UI and workflow shown in the second video is just amazing.” – Aidan Wolf

“Looks cool! I like that you are recognising that accessibility and ease of use are a key to make it go viral!” – Sabina Weiss

Dreams of becoming a movie star suddenly don't seem so far fetched. 🎬

2020 has brought us some wild surprises, and tech is no exception.

Yesterday, Amazon held its hardware event and announced new products. One of the most innovative announcements is the Always Home Cam, a flying security camera for your home and it’s pretty wild.

Ring (owned by Amazon) launched an autonomous drone that can fly through your home giving you a view of whatever room you want without having to install cameras everywhere. Instead of getting multiple security cameras, get one that flies around your house on preset paths. And if you were wondering, no, you can't control it manually.

If you missed the full Amazon event yesterday, here’s a short version of everything that happened:

Amazon redesigned Echo and Echo Dot giving it a spherical look; revealed the new Echo Show 10 that now supports Netflix, and showed off a new cloud gaming service called Luna. 🎮

Ring announced the flying Always Home Cam, Car Cam, and other security improvements. 🚨

Amazon also updated Fire TV Stick, Eero 6, and Eero Pro 6, as well as unveiling multiple Alexa improvements including a new chip AZ1 Neural Edge and Alexa Guard Plus security monitoring system. 🗣

Would you feel safer with a drone in your home or will it end up as target practice for house cats everywhere? 😺

It turns out talking paintings from Harry Potter are real and you can create one yourself. It’s fun and creepy at the same time. Who knew our very own Ryan Hoover could sing like this? 😜

There’s a new meme generator called Puppets.World that launched on Product Hunt just last week. Record a video and bring a static portrait to life with AI.

You can create your own puppet from any photo of a person, a portrait painting, or even a hand-drawn sketch. It even mimics facial expressions from your video. 🥴

While deepfakes can have some serious implications in the wrong hands, (identity theft, cybersecurity, anti trust to name a few) one of the makers, Svetlana Ragimova, explained the difference between deepfakes and the app’s tech, “The technology developed by Puppets.World may look like deepfake, but it's different. It's closer to face tracking, which is used in computer games and movies to create lifelike characters.”

It’s fun to prank your friends, send birthday wishes to your family, and create cringe-worthy memes to share on social media but the creators are optimistic about commercial cases, “it could be used in business: as an avatar for contact centers, with integration to chat-bots. We plan to do voice-only animation — when a puppet doesn't need a video, just voice recording. And later — only text.“

Here’s what the community is saying:

“I can see the memes coming!” – Jordan Westerman

“This is so scary but so awesome at the same time.” – Marcos Do Canto

“The quality is impressive.” – Jeffrey Wyman

If you want to have fun with your friends using AI, you may also want to play with these apps:

Familiar lets you deepfake yourself into fun GIFs with a single photo.

Impressions create your own high-quality celebrity deepfakes in minutes.

Alethea.AI positions itself as a Cameo-like marketplace for deepfakes.

Muglife is an app that creates 3D character animations from any photo.

Avatar SDK is an AI-powered 3D avatar creator.

FaceApp transforms your face using AI in just one tap bringing you realistic effects.

MakeApp is an AI-based app that adds and removes makeup from any face.

Avatoon creates cartoon-style avatars that stand out.

Custom home screens are in right now. iPhone users are going wild with the latest iOS 14 customization options.

Earlier today, Maksim Petriv dropped Widgetly, allowing you to further personalize your iOS home screen with photo widgets, solid background widgets, and time display.

As we wrote earlier this week, Android users have had these customization features for some time, but if you’re an iOS fan, it’s time to get creative with your personalized home screens.

While Widgets are the latest addition to iOS, the custom icons workaround, which is actually a custom shortcut, has been around for some time and has gone largely unnoticed.

Here’s what to do if you’re having real FOMO and want to customize your app icons and don’t yet have the iOS 14 update:

1. Open up Shortcuts app on your iPhone
2. Tap on a plus icon (+) to create a new shortcut
3. Tap on Add Action
4. Tap on Scripting
5. Choose Open App
6. Tap on dimmed Choose button
7. Choose an app
8. Tap on three dots (•••) button
9. Type a shortcut name
10. Tap on Add to Home Screen
11. Tap on the icon at the bottom and take or choose a photo
12. Tap on Add link at the top right corner
13. Tap Done to confirm and repeat until you have a look you want.

Beautiful home screens as a trend is super hot right now and reportedly even pushed Pinterest to the App Store’s top charts and crushed its daily downloads records thanks to people seeking inspiration for their customizations.

Ordering your apps by category just isn’t going to cut it any more. 😅

We can't wait to see what you all create. Let us know on the post page or over on Twitter.

P.S. What are some apps you wish had an iOS 14 widget? 🤔

When your product raises $185 million and is celebrated among makers, big tech notices.

Google’s in-house incubator Area 120, just launched Tables, a tool for collaboration, workflow, and automation.

This new Google tool is drawing some direct comparisons with the no-code giant Airtable, which recently upgraded its new platform with Sync, Marketplace, Apps, and Automation while raising $185M. We wrote about this in more detail just last week.

Google positions Tables as a project management tool to get teams on the same page (and the same virtual table) with bots, automation, and seamless integration to other Google products like Sheets, Groups, and Contacts.

While there are many productivity tools in the market and many adopting a Kanban board approach, Trello, Monday.com, Asana to name just a few, Google has an advantage of tapping into its existing user base of millions of users already invested in Google’s ecosystem (Gmail, Drive, Docs).

The product was launched in a Google-like freemium fashion.

You can use Tables for free, with support for up to 100 tables and 1,000 rows. The paid plan includes a 3-month trial, starts from $10/month/user giving you up to 1,000 tables and 10,000 rows/table.

Would you switch to Tables?

The newly released iOS 14 brought some new features to iPhone and iPad users.

Most notably widgets. Yeah, we know Android users already have this, but it’s an exciting refresh and opportunity to personalize your home screen. We’ve seen you all getting creative on this already. You can even change your own icons (for better or worse, sorry icon designers!) 🎨

This weekend Aviary launched its modern iOS client for Twitter. It's simple enough to pick up and use immediately, with pretty cool features that let you tweak it just the way you want. Built for iOS 14, it has widgets, an ad-free feed and tweet filters.

The app is a one-time purchase ($4.99) and includes iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and (coming soon) Mac apps.

Here are some early impressions from the community:

“My favorite Twitter client, hands down. Congratulations on the big launch!” – Emmanuel Crouvisier

“I like! Reminds me of the Big Sur design 😉” – Michael Sieb

“I've been following this app development on @jpeguin1 twitter and it's visible that he does care about delivering a high quality product. It looks great :)” – Bunn

If you already installed iOS 14, here are some other apps that have widgets you can play with today:

Brief helps you understand the most important news in just a few minutes.

Soor is a premium music player app with full Apple music support.

Spark is a smart, fast, and free email client for iPhone with calendar features.

Streaks is a to-do list that helps you form and track good habits.

Weather Line is a visual weather forecast in a simple infographic.

Nudget positions itself as the budgeting app for the rest of us with speed and simplicity built-in.

Birch is a photo notes organizer for visual individuals.

Glimpse lets you add any webpage as an iOS 14 home screen widget.

Earlier this week, Facebook unveiled Oculus Quest 2, the much anticipated update to Oculus Quest that launched on Product Hunt 2 years ago.

Oculus Quest 2 includes a redesigned, all-in-one form factor, new Touch controllers, higher resolution display, a lighter headset AND it’s $100 cheaper than it’s predecessor at $299. As Brian Lee calls out, “From a tech perspective, the price to power value is amazing... There is nothing like this on the market.”

Facebook appears to be going all-in on the Quest platform as it confirmed the end of any future Rift or PC-only headset developments. Sorry if you were using and enjoying one. 😬

Many household name games are also coming to Quest 2, like Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, Myst, Beat Saber, Star Wars, and Medal of Honor, amongst others.

But VR is more than gaming. With the new Quest 2, you’ll be able to get in shape with a fitness tracker Oculus Move, and if you’ve missed your colleagues, you can get back to a (virtual) office with Infinite Office.

VR might have been a slower burn than many early adopters originally thought, but could this be the tipping point to make it more accessible?

Earlier this week, Airtable’s Product and Software Engineer, JB Bakst, announced Airtable Marketplace.

To most creators, it means that you can build custom apps on top of powerful Airtable infrastructure and get inspiration or reuse what others have created.

“Since day one, Airtable has been working towards our vision of being a true application creation platform, and today we’re releasing three critical pieces of the puzzle: Airtable Apps, Airtable Automations, and Airtable Sync.” – JB Bakst

Apps (formerly Blocks) let you create apps with add-ons, remix community creations, or build your own apps with JavaScript. Automations let you choose triggers and actions to build custom workflows. Sync links across Airtable bases.

500 million new apps are expected to be built in the next half-decade and Airtable wants to be at the top of mind for the next generation of software builders. The community is pumped:

“This is the best place for planning and organizing campaigns and content. Eager to unlock the new features and keep automating further with AT.” – Hilary Smith

“The battle over #NoCode/#LowCode/#AutomationAndWorkflows is heating up! This has the potential to be as important as the browser wars before, and then the social web wars after.” – Chris Messina

“Low code is to 2020's what mobile was to the 2010s. We are at the beginning of a revolution in moving from ME centered software to WE centered software.” – Chris Dancy

Over the last 7 years, we’ve seen Airtable evolve from a no-code tool into a powerful low-code ecosystem. Today, it powers over 200,000 users and a recent funding round put its valuation at $2.5+ billion. 🤯