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The world is a better place when you randomly send pasta to your unsuspecting friends. ✨

PastaDrop is shipping an ‘innovative new noodle’ each week, and the idea is to send pasta to your family, friends, neighbors, or anyone as long as you have their address and they have a passion for pasta.

It’s more of a social experiment than a true food delivery service, and you never know quite what you’re going to get in the noodle department. PastaDrop was created by Matt Rutledge who also founded Woot, the popular daily deals site from the 2000’s.

“We want to build a weird little online pasta-giving community,” say the founders. “We are facilitating lasting connections one PastaDrop at a time.”

Speaking of special deliveries, you can now effectively avoid the post-office all together and send snail mail from home. Send mail from your device or your computer by uploading your docs and typing out the address, and it will be remotely printed and sent via USPS for you.

And since you’re already in the online ordering mode, get something for your favorite co-worker too. You can ship a WFH care package to yourself or a teammate. The packages have lots of goodies like candy and snacks, a gift card and a logic game book.

Last thing on the shipping n’ shopping list, it’s time to treat yourself to an inventive beverage to go with those noodles. Are you more of a Ginger Yuzu person, or an adaptogenic coffee person? 🍹☕️

OK, our shopping cart is now officially full, and so are we. 🛒

This week Twitter informed their team they can work from home ‘forever’. And they're not the only company considering going full distributed.

Companies like Spatial have been preparing for this movement for years. Yesterday they launched a 3D video platform that feels a bit like a Zoom meeting just morphed into VR. You can hop on Spatial from a VR or AR headset, or with your computer or phone. You may be secretly wearing sweatpants, but your avatar doesn’t have to be. Just take a 2D selfie and create a lifelike avatar to send to work in your place. 🙌

“We've been really surprised by all the various use cases, probably in light of COVID-19 and en masse WFH. Initially we had demand from 40% of the Fortune 1000 including Manufacturing (Mattel), Healthcare (Pfizer), Finance (BNP Paribas), Automotive (Ford) and others,” says the maker Anand. “But now everyone is WFH we've had doctors to telemedicine visits to patients, a professor at the University of Arizona teaching a Afro-Futurism course, Weill Cornell planning COVID response, digital agencies collaborating and even just people doing virtual happy hours,” Anand says.

One of the biggest challenges with remote work is organic team collaboration. Here are some other remote tools that focus on upping camaraderie and creativity:

• Tandem is like a virtual hub for remote teams, with messaging and video chat baked in to a collaboration platform with integrations to Notion, Github and Trello

• Screen feels a bit like a multi-player video game mixed with a white-boarding session, you can visually create and brainstorm with your team in parallel screens

Back to the radial shift to WFH, we’ve already seen a lot of talk of people and HQ’s moving out of cities like SF. Google, Zillow and Facebook also recently announced their teams can work remotely until at least the end of the year. Lucky for us on the Product Hunt team, we haven't had to change our work environment. We started as a distributed company and now we're spanning across 9 countries.

We’ll be watching to see what products come from this movement next. 🤔

Newsflash: you aren’t a diehard fan of The Office until you join this Slack channel. 🤜🤛

MSCHF just launched an ambitious project where every single episode of The Office will roll out on Slack in succession. Each day from 9 am to 5 pm ET you can get your fix of office antics while you work from home.

“Ever since The Office aired, the nature of work and office culture has changed drastically – a lot of which is centered around the way we use technologies. Given that, we are recreating all 201 episodes of The Office in Slack, and yes we went through every episode by hand and rewrote them to make sense in Slack,” says the maker Daniel Greenberg.

It takes a village to make this project work, and Daniel recruited a group of MSCHF loyalists to participate and bring Scranton to life. So far over 11,000 people have joined the Slack community with numbers growing every hour.

A bit of background on MSCHF, as their name implies they are usually up to something. They drop a mystery box every second and fourth Tuesday of the month at 11 am EST and many of those gems end up on Product Hunt.

Here are some of their popular drops:

• Boomer Email gives you a weekly dose of unhinged email chains sourced from anonymous boomers for your guiltless enjoyment

• Bull & Moon recommends stocks for you based on your astrological star sign

• Branded Books took four classic novels and remixed them to include brands that are popular now like Casper, Zola, Netflix and Apple

Looking forward to their next drop on Product Hun in a few weeks. 😏

Shopify’s stock price over the past year has been going up and to the right. 📈

They’ve been on fire these past few weeks. Between business surging with the pandemic pivot to ecomm to being named Canada’s most valuable company, they somehow found the time to ship an impressive product too.

That product is Shop, formerly known as Arrive. It’s like a personal shopping app that learns more about you as you use it, and it makes the shopping experience pretty seamless with no form-fills. You can follow brands on Shop to watch for new drops or choose to shop locally and find online stores near you. When you use Shop you’re automatically offsetting the carbon emissions your deliveries produce, which is pretty neat too. 🌿

“I’ve been using this app (it was called Arrive) for a few months and it’s seriously awesome for automatically tracking packages from Amazon, UPS, FedEx, etc. Plus, it’s so simple and beautiful!” - Nick

We’ve also seen an upswing in products launched for Shopify by partners and the maker community. Promo launched a video-maker so that store owners can create pro-quality videos to embed on product pages or use for social posts, and OneSignal built a tool to remind shoppers about abandoned carts through push notifications. Square made a product photography robot to take better photos for your store without the overhead of a pro photo shoot.

And while we’re at it, we wanted to refresh your memory on the lesser-known launches by Shopify:

- Burst is Shopify’s answer to Unsplash with thousands of free stock images for store owners

- Hatchful is a free logo-maker that auto exports social media icons

- Draggable creates custom drag and drop experiences with a library of options

Keep an eye on the PH homepage for all things Shopify, we have a feeling more launches are coming soon. 👀

This is a big week for Bitcoin. It’s about to go through a process called the “halving” where the number of new bitcoins entering circulation every 10 minutes will drop by half from 12.5 to 6.25.

This rare Bitcoin event happens every four years, like a crypto Olympics. If the demand for Bitcoin remains the same, and the supply is immediately reduced by half, that’s going to change the value pretty quick.🤔

If you’re keen to toss a coin in for the halving, we’ve seen some neat crypto launches on PH:

Donut let’s you invest your spare change in Bitcoin to earn interest.

Robinhood, the stock trading app we all know, also supports BTC trading. It has a fee-free cryptocurrency exchange.

Lolli unlocks Bitcoin that you can earn while you shop online.

This is actually the third time that the halving will take place, and by design there is no central authority on Bitcoin that’s triggering the event. In the past after the halving, the bitcoin price started to rise steadily over the following 12 or so months. Right now, global finances are incredibly hard to predict and the crypto market has matured, so we’ll be watching closely to see how this one unfolds.

On Friday the price had shot up by 6.24% in anticipation of the halving. “The entire market capitalization or value of the cryptocurrency market had jumped by more than $13 billion from the day before, as of around 1:39 p.m. Singapore time. That move had been largely driven by bitcoin which makes up most of that figure. The value of the entire market stood at $268.07 billion,” says CNBC.

Since then, the price has been fluctuating wildly over the weekend, with the value trending down due to a new dumping of Bitcoin holdings. The major trading app Coinbase had an outage this weekend as the value of Bitcoin shot down 10% in 30 minutes as reported by Coindesk.

If you’re still entirely confused about Bitcoin, you’re not alone. Here’s a visual demo of how transactions actually work.

You know you've made it when makers and startups build on top of your business.

We saw it in the early days of Product Hunt before we even offered an API. Twitter, Reddit, and Snap are just a few others that attracted a lot of developers unofficially tinkering on top of their platform early on.

Today we're seeing a rise in apps built to make Notion better.

Notion, the all-in-one workspace, has endeared itself to the tech community since 2016. In 2018 when they launched Notion 2.0, they hit #1 product of the month on PH, and by September 2019 they had over a million users. This April, Notion raised another $50 million at a $2 billion valuation. Quite the impressive two-year feat when you consider that when they launched Notion 2.0 on PH in 2018 they had less than 10 people on the team.

Here are a few of the companies building on top of Notion:

Super turns your Notion docs into a website. You can customize Notion docs with Google fonts, inject JS snippets for analytics or live chat, and customize social meta tags and images using Super.

Fruition makes Notion pages much prettier with custom domains. It’s a lot like a starter version of Super, and it’s open-source and free to use.

Notion Charts helps you create interactive charts that are tailored for Notion’s embed blocks. Although the reports aren’t totally “live” you can create live-ish dashboards and charts via a connection to Google Sheets.

Reports for Notion creates embeddable charts and tables from CSV Files, JSON links, GitHub, Trello, and Google Sheets.

This might just be the start of a new wave of Notion tools. 🌊

Turns out, being basic is so in right now. With this new range by Microsoft, it’s whats inside that counts.

With the new Surface Book 3 announced yesterday, the focus for Microsoft was increasing performance by 50% to appeal to gamers and designers. The Nvidia Quadro RTX 3000 is the source of that power, and the idea is to get render time down. Reducing charging time was a factor too, so the previous 102W charger on the 15-inch model was upgraded to a 127W for this launch.

The Surface Go 2 is the second iteration of their tiny tablet. The $399 base model has a Intel Pentium 4425Y with 4 GB of RAM and a focus on keeping the price point low. If you want to use the tablet more like a laptop, a higher-end version with an Intel 8th Gen Core M3 and 8 GB of RAM was released too.

The other big Microsoft launch yesterday was the Surface Headphones 2. In the same vein, the focus was on bettering the basics, so the battery life has been extended from 15 hours to 20 hours. Noise cancellation saw some upgrades too, now it’s tuned active noise cancellation for the human voice. If you’re working from home with family right now, this might carry some extra appeal.

Now let’s talk about Apple, they’ve been busy lately launching a new 13" MacBook Pro and a iPhone SE 2nd Gen. The MacBook Pro is touting double the storage and a magic keyboard, while the new iPhone is priced at a wallet-friendly $399 for what looks to be a pretty capable device.

We’re keeping an eye out for the rumoured AirPods 3, so watch the PH homepage for more apple launches coming soon. 👀

The one thing that has the potential to dramatically increase the value of your brand, the impact of your marketing, and the conversion of your products is simple: better copywriting.

If you spend your time anywhere in the early stages of launching a company, honing your writing and your pitch can be a big help with acquiring customers long term.

If you already have copy to work with, a good way to find out if it’s working for you is to test it with your audience, and that’s what Copytesting is doing. Although much of what you can do in startups is inherently measurable, it’s really tricky to get data around your copy.

Another copywriting product that caught our eye this week was Gramara. If english is your second language, this will be particularly useful, it was built to help english-learners specifically. Gramara uses natural language processing and AI to increase the fluency and clarity of your writing. It will catch not only errors but will intuitively draw conclusions on what you meant to say to suggest the right corrections.

The maker, Jack Qiao, was inspired by his ESL family who was having trouble with the mainstream grammar apps like Grammarly “They assume that your writing is mostly correct, and don't perform sentence-wide changes that are sometimes necessary. They don't parse your text for semantics, and most of the time they simply can't detect that anything is wrong at all,” says Jack.

If your english is already pretty good, you can use Gramara to generate paraphrases in alternative writing styles. See what works for your audience, and you’ll be golden. ✍️

You don’t have to be born a star to become a musical icon. You just need the right tech in your dressing room.👨‍🎤

If you’re new to it, learning music is a bit like learning a new language. You can fast-track the tricky parts, like figuring out how to read musical notes using ChordIQ, which claimed #1 product of the week last week.

It gamifies the learning experience by having you guess-the-note, key signatures, and chords using memory-friendly patterns.

“Went from guessing 1 note a round to 4 notes a round, progress!” - Evgeniya

The other neat thing about ChordIQ is it’s scope. You can use it to become a better singer and get feedback on your range, or perfect your instrument skills with guitar, piano and saxophone training.

Since quarantine is an ideal time to level-up your music skills, here’s a couple more finds from the community to get you jamming again:

You can use Piano Companion like a search engine. It’s a chord and scale dictionary, where you can contribute your own scales to the community. It shows chord and scale notes on the grand staff, degrees, relative scales, intervals, and fingering for both hands in major and minor scales.

If you don’t know what any of that means quite yet, go back to step 1 and check out ChordIQ.

Next up, compose music using only your voice. Just sing a melody and Symphonia will detect it and turn it into an instrumental.

Lastly, it’s time to embarrass yourself in the name of fun. Sing a song for your friends and have them try and guess the track you’re laying down with Warbly.

It turns out, kitchen nightmares can be averted with just a pinch of technology, and of course, a splash of Sriracha. 👌

If staying at home has you cooking up a storm, you might be logging some fails by now. In the wise words of Julia Child, “No matter what happens in the kitchen, never apologize.” Lucky for you, the PH community is your perfect sous-chef.

First things first, if you’re fresh out of ideas on what to make, let Cook Magic be your friend. Launched last week, you can text the ingredients you have on hand and get a reply in seconds with tasty meal recommendations and recipes.

If you’re on the bread-baking bandwagon, you can get a fitness tracker for your sourdough starter. Monitor the height, temperature and humidity of your starter with Sourd.io.

Your oven can be smart, too. June created a computer-based oven to take the guesswork out of cooking times and temperature control.

And an oldie but a goodie, the New York Times has a free cooking app with over 17,000 chef-tested recipes.

Bon App-étit 👨‍🍳📱