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Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
Pragli created a virtual office, where you can customize your own avatar and interact with your colleagues. You can use your avatar to give visual cues about what you’re up to through the day. If you’re at your desk, in a meeting, in the zone, or taking a break, it gives your team a better understanding of how to interact with you.
Here’s what the PH community thinks so far:
“These avatars seem like a great way to indicate that you're around, without having to be on camera all day.” - Ramy
“Only complaint is that I can't make my avatar look more like Joe Exotic - it's close though.” - Timothy
If you’re less into offices and more into making avatars that look like Joe, check out Facemoji Camera.
Another launch that hit our radar is Moodline. You can use the app to track your moods over time so you can manage them better. Find patterns in your moods, and use data to improve 💪
“It's an important time to learn how to manage our moods as humans” - Tristan
“Really useful and I enjoy the soft appearance” - Margaret
If you’re missing your colleagues, why not plan something creative to do together?
You could host an art party where you can draw with your team! NYC Draws just launched free virtual drawing lessons and coloring pages.
How have you been feeling about working remotely lately? Share your thoughts will fellow makers.
This successor to the iPhone SE is actually long overdue, the first version launched back in 2016 and was later discontinued. The iPhone SE 2nd Gen signals a big move by Apple to offer more accessible products.
Let’s talk about what’s under the hood:
📱Same A13 Bionic Chip as the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro
🤳Portrait mode enabled
📸Standard 12-megapixel wide camera
🙅♀️No night mode on this camera
🔋Same battery life as the iPhone 8
👖Pocket-sized
👆Touch ID
🔋Wireless charging
Pre-orders for the 2nd Gen start this Friday, April 17th. Here’s what the PH community is saying so far:
“Have been looking forward to this for a while. Essentially 80% of 11 pro quality at 40% of price. However, it's still a phablet.” - Robert Loustau
“For this price, go for a used iPhone X” - Ruben
“I like the small screen for privacy, battery life and video 4k” - Fajar
Not an iPhone fan but want a phone on a budget? Check out Light Phone II. More into the throwback phones? The "matrix phone" by Nokia might curb your interest 🍌
We want your thoughts on the iPhone SE 2nd Gen.
Today NBCUniversal entered the streaming war to compete with Netflix, Disney+, Amazon, Hulu, and many other incumbents.
They're calling it Peacock, named after their colorful logo. If you're an Xfinity X1 or Flex customer, you can now stream 30 Rock, The Tonight Show, Parks and Recreation, Law and Order, and most importantly, The Office.
As much as we all love The Office, it’s hard to get excited about yet another streaming service. So, we’d like to highlight a few lockdown-friendly alternatives you may not know about:
Pluto streams over 250 channels and 1,000's of movies for free.
Rheo is the TikTok of internet videos.
Blackpills produces original TV shows, 100% free to watch.
Quibi delivers quick-bite original content.
Thripy will transport you across the world, even when you’re in lock down.
Neverthink TV aggregates the best “TV of the internet”
As most of the world remains indoors (for good reason), we’ve seen the Maker community rally to relieve cabin fever and loneliness with a wave of new virtual-friendly products and services.
If you read the digest two weeks ago, you will remember YUR, a virtual watch that tracks your health stats when playing games in VR. We also covered Instagram’s exploration into co-watching parties.
While we’re all in lockdown together, we wanted to share a few more recent launches we can all enjoy together online.
🏡 Airbnb recently joined the trend by moving Experiences online, connecting hosts to new audiences remotely. You can book a magician to teach you magic tricks, learn how to cook with a Moroccan family, or even train with an Olympic athlete.
"Kudos to the Airbnb team and the hosts for creating an online experience to the people staying home and enjoy the experiences.” –Divyansh Patel
💇🏻♀️You probably need a haircut offers guided haircuts from hairstylists remotely. Alternatively, you could use Snap Camera to cover your shaggy head at your next Zoom birthday party.
“This is such a neat idea! I gave it a go yesterday and cut my husband’s hair and beard with the guidance of an amazing hairstylist.”–Aiman Batool
🎥 Vemos launched making it easy to watch movies with your friends and family. This free, open-source browser extension brings Zoom-like features to streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Hulu, and Disney+.
"This is a great piece of work by @nolaneo, highly recommend checking it out during this insane time in the world.”–Des Traynor
📚Goodnight Zoom connects isolated seniors to families with children so they can read bed-time stories together.
“This is the most heartwarming idea I have ever seen! This is such a uniting platform - in current times more than ever.”–Anastasia Orgaz
Enter Nod. This browser extension adds quick reactions to Google Meet so you can see in real time how your friends, students or colleagues are feeling while muted. Nod attempts to recreate the subtle physical cues we all give IRL.
Founder Jamie Carr explained that the app came from an internal team need to better aid communications on remote calls, and with nearly 1M users in only 2 weeks, his team was not alone in this need.
“I built this little extension to help my team at HomeHero better communicate in larger meetings, where most of the participants were muted. Like many, we found ourselves adjusting to working remotely, and Nod was built to help us replicate some of the things that we missed in our face-to-face meetings.
I first posted this on the chrome store just two weeks ago, and since then, the tool has reached close to a million users. While it has found itself inside teams at Netflix, Pinterest and the NY Times, many of the 900,000+ users have been schools, universities and other educators who have been forced into a new world of online learning.”
Let us know what you think.
Hims — the startup that sells self-care products to men, including hair loss prevention and erectile dysfunction remedies — launched a group therapy service this week. 🙏
Why? Stress and anxiety have become an everyday part of life for a lot of people right now, and Hims wants to help people handle hard-to-talk-about-issues, as they have previously with their line of wellness products.
“The world has been turned upside down. We feel it too. In times like these, it’s vital to take care of our mental health. And because individual therapy isn’t for everyone, we’re providing access to group support sessions—available through your phone or computer,” - the company wrote on its website.
What this means in practice: Hims will provide group therapy sessions for free, where participants will learn effective strategies from experienced licensed therapists and mental health professionals. Folks can use the service and remain anonymous by using an alias, and by turning off their camera during the sessions.
Each session is capped at 15 people, and will cover things like coping with coronavirus, trouble sleeping, difficulty motivating and focusing, relationship questions, managing anxiety, mindfulness and meditation. During the session, the therapist will answer real-time questions to guide the group discussion.
“This is very smart - its great to see Hims committing to their mission in ways that don't directly drive the bottom line.” - Evan
For an additional online therapy option, check out Talkspace, where you can text or video chat (one on one) with a therapist. 👏
Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at monday.com.
Working with a remote team — whether it’s your usual setup or if you’re new to the WFH gig — can leave you with a calendar full of sync meetings, and little time for actual work. monday.com solves that. Your whole team can manage their workflows in one place, from time tracking in order to meet important deadlines, assigning project ownership, communicating easily, and automating manual work. All you have to do is check monday.com and you’ll be fully up to speed.
A look inside monday.com‘s unique features:
Keep projects moving from anywhere. With simple, code-free automations, you and your team can make sure nothing slips through the cracks. Automations put the boring stuff on autopilot to help you focus on your actual work.
Let monday.com be your eyes and ears. Staying up to date on how your team is doing is even harder when you’re not together. Dashboards help you make smarter decisions, faster. You can gain easy insights into the activity of every aspect of your work, whether your team is sitting next to you or across the world.
Connect your team with integrations. monday.com houses all of your most important data, workflows, and communications. But teams can also use a variety of different tools on the platform; workflows from other apps (there are over 50 integrations available) are easily funneled into your account, making monday.com your easy-to-access point of reference.
To see how monday.com can refresh your work, get started here (there’s a 14-day free trial). 🎉
Calling all couples: Facebook has a new app for you. 👋
Facebook just (quietly) released a new app called Tuned — it’s a multimedia messaging app designed to help couples talk to each other. The move comes seven months after Facebook Dating (remember that?) launched, but instead of a matching app, Tuned is more of social network for *experimental* exchanges. 👀
From the app, people can share their mood, exchange music (via Spotify), share voice memos and create a digital scrapbook, among other things. Facebook is calling its messaging features a “private space” for couples to connect.
The app reportedly doesn’t require a Facebook account, but users’ data can still be used for ad targeting by the company. Tuned also comes out of Facebook’s ‘New Product Experimentation’ team, a group building consumer-facing apps to test out new ideas. Previously, this team built Aux, Bump, Hobbi and Whale, which we’ve written about before.
The app comes at an interesting moment, and is probably best served for couples who don’t live together right now.
Would you use this? Tell us here. 💕
Quibi, the highly anticipated short-form video platform backed by dozens of Hollywood A-listers and executives, finally launched.
“Much has been made anticipating this launch and its timing... will this be the Tiktok of professional video content, or something more like Tidal — an also-ran competitor with a substantial war chest but no chance of breaking out into the mainstream?” - Chris
Quibi, which is short for “quick bites,” has also been compared to “bite-sized“ Apple TV+ or Netflix, meaning it serves up content to short attention spans. It’s also been called a curated YouTube that you have to pay for. Media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg (who reinvigorated Disney in the late 80s, and then founded and sold DreamWorks Animation for $3.8 billion) is behind Quibi, along with co-founder Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay. Beyond it’s high-profile founders, Quibi has generated so much hype pre-launch in part due to the money behind it. The service raised nearly $2 billion before it launched. 💸
Quibi’s short-form programming includes shows where every episode is 10 minutes long, and many are shorter than that. You, the viewer, pay $5 per month to access these shows (with ads), and $8 per month to access an ad-free experience. For context, Hulu’s basic plan costs $5.99 per month, Apple TV+ costs $4.99 per month, and Netflix’s basic plan costs $8.99 per month.
Quibi’s lineup of homegrown shows feature a ton of well-known stars, including Joe Jonas, Idris Elba, Sophie Turner, Chrissy Teigen, Chance the Rapper, LeBron James, Jennifer Lopez, Reese Witherspoon, Liam Hemsworth, Christoph Waltz, Lena Waithe, Nicole Richie, Demi Lovato, Will Smith, Laura Dern, Kevin Hart, Tyra Banks, Zac Efron, Bill Murray and Laurence Fishburne. But so far, Quibi’s original programming has left a mediocre impression on critics, at best.
The reviews from the PH community were mixed. Some folks were disappointed that Quibi doesn’t support AirPlay, meaning you can’t cast any of Quibi’s content to your TV. Others wish there was more interesting content on the platform. And others were simply excited to see where Quibi goes. 📱
“Given the popularity of short clips and people running out of things to do at home these days, Quibi will be a home run.” - Omid
“Now couldn't be a better time for Quibi to launch while everyone's indoors.” - Ryan
“Quibi was built for people with short attention spans that primarily use mobile devices. Americans now spend more time on their smartphones than watching TV. This (along with Snapchat Originals) is embracing that trend and introducing a new form of ‘bite sized" entertainment.’" - Jared
Tell us what you think of Quibi here. 👈
Facebook Messenger recently launched a new desktop app so you can video chat on a bigger screen. TBH, it sounds a lot like Zoom.
The launch makes a lot of sense; in an announcement on their website, Facebook said that the company has seen more than a 100 percent increase in people using their desktop browser for audio and video calling through Messenger.
The news comes as, of course, as people have flocked to Zoom in droves, which has been met with a number of security and privacy issues. Group video calls via Facebook Messenger will be free and unlimited, and will come with all the same features as the mobile app. 👀
Some early reviews from the PH community:
“Many people are now doing virtual events and having a link is essential for people to just join. If they have that, I think people would easily move from Zoom or others.“ - Alexander
“Although I am completely distrusting of Facebook's privacy practices among other things, I am totally going to use this lol. The app so far seems really good.” - Brendan
ICYMI: We wrote about a new Zoom/Messenger/Hangouts alternative called Around a few weeks ago. Unlike its big tech competitors, Around prioritizes AI-based framing that finds your face as you move, as well as an auto-mute feature that eliminates background noise really well.
