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Have you started to notice more internet avatars wearing masks? There’s a reason for that.

Experts have increasingly acknowledged that the public use of masks could help prevent the spread of COVID-19, and the CDC is reportedly considering recommending wearing face coverings in public. The White House is also expected to urge Americans to wear face coverings when they leave their homes.

Accordingly, the movement #Masks4All has taken off online as more and more people make and wear homemade masks to wear in public. Jeremy Howard is behind the #Masks4all site, and the movement was started by Petr Ludwig in the Czech Republic. 😷

Of course, it’s important to remember that staying at home and social distancing should remain as a first line of defense against the spread of coronavirus, but masks may be helpful for when you need to leave the house for essential items like groceries.

How you can participate in the movement:

• Visit the #Masks4All site to learn more and to learn about how to make a mask at home 
• Share your mask photo and/or join the conversation on social media using #masks4all 
• Automatically photoshop a mask onto your social media profiles. 

This Twitter Mask tool is especially helpful for that last step.

“Yes, there is a shortage of manufactured masks, and these should go to hospital workers. But anyone can make a mask at home by cutting up a cotton T-shirt, tying it back together and then washing it at the end of the day. Another approach, recommended by the Hong Kong Consumer Council, involves rigging a simple mask with a paper towel and rubber bands that can be thrown in the trash at the end of each day.” - Twitter Mask Maker Lisha Li

And if you have spare N95 masks, please send them to healthcare workers on the frontlines who need them. Mask Match is a great resource for donating.

We’ve found solace in hearing from Makers lately. Despite the pandemic, teams are still building and launching new products, often aimed at providing resources to people on the frontlines and mental support to those quarantined at home. We rounded up our favorite advice from founders lately to give you some inspiration today. 👇

How to build a product in a pandemic 

Last week, Girls’ Night In launched Stay Home, Take Care, a resource-packed site that doesn’t prescribe one way of processing the global pandemic, but instead offers multiple ways of coping (comfort, entertainment, action, distraction, etc.) based on what you, personally, need.

The Girls’ Night In team built the site in seven days in response to COVID-19, and we talked to founder Alisha Ramos on what she learned building a full-fledge product in such a short period of time. Alisha says the rule book was “thrown out completely” and that her team needed to wear hats they weren’t used to in order to get the site live so quickly. 👀

“I personally learned that jumping on a quick Slack call to talk something out in 5-10 minutes is so much better than going back and forth typing on Slack. So much context can get lost. On a fast-moving project like this, it's important to not be so precious about wondering whether it's ok to call someone up.” 

How to keep your mental health in check 

Product Hunt recently spoke with Roni Frank, the co-founder of the online therapy app Talkspace, about how she “walks the walk” when it comes to mental health. Mental health is extremely important right now, and Talkspace has promised free online therapy to healthcare workers on the frontlines of the crisis. The app also started offering a special 16-day program (for subscribers) aimed at addressing coronavirus-related stress and there’s now a free therapist-led Facebook support group where non-users can seek guidance directly from licensed therapists. 🙌

“If I want to ultimately reduce stigma around therapy, I have to walk the walk and talk about my own struggles. But I’m not afraid of talking about it and I’m not afraid that people will think I’m a weak person because I suffer from anxiety, et cetera. It’s very important for me to talk about it and I think it inspires employees to talk about their own struggles too.” 

How to foster creativity at home 

Lightricks first built an app that allowed anyone to edit selfies (Facetune). When that took off, the team put all their resources into building more creativity-first apps. We spoke with co-founder and CEO Zeev Farbman about his advice on building a brand that promotes creativity. 🎉

“Recognizing we had an opportunity to provide creative enthusiasts with tools that translate their energy into beautiful and entertaining works of art, without users having to break the bank, is a great feeling. And being able to see the eclectic content users create has probably been the most rewarding aspect of the business.” 

“Over the course of the last quarter we've seen an incredible shift in the world due to COVID-19, people are looking for new avenues to stay active while at-home.” - Dilan Shah co-founder and Chief Product Officer at YUR

YUR is a VR fitness tracking tool that just rolled out a “virtual watch.” How it works: YUR lets you track fitness metrics (heart rate, daily calories, squat count, etc.) with any wearable heart rate monitor while you play VR games that keep you in shape. Note: It only works with Oculus Quest right now. 

The virtual watch interface is definitely novel and might be a fun way to enhance your at-home workouts. To date, YUR reports that over 5.1 million workouts have been logged on their system by over 60,000 users.

Some early reviews from the PH community:

“The YUR app is amazing to stay motivated. Amazing to see it in this format! Guess I won’t need an Apple Watch soon.” - Naomi

“Now I can keep track of my fitness metrics without wearing any physical watch. The future is here.” - Robin

“This product will change the way VR is used!” - Sahin

Some other cool VR products we’ve seen launch in the last 30 days (if you’re looking for some futuristic activities):

👀 VR-OS is an operating system that replaces monitors with a head-mounted VR display.

👏 CoBlix VR lets you create your own virtual world, and then view it in VR.

🎮 oQQur is a community for VR streamers, bringing technologies and artists who want to want to create immersive experiences together.

🛋 Couch Live is a virtual living room for watching TV with friends.

🙌 SPACES lets you have a Zoom chat in VR.

Garrett Camp has helped build a series of companies, including, most notable, Uber. He’s also the founder of Expa, a startup studio that works with founders to develop and launch new products, and StumbleUpon, a now defunct internet tool where you could discover random sites.

Today, Camp, along with Makers Mark Ulrich, Omar Diab, Tina Roh, Rahul Gupta-Iwasaki and Carl Spencer, took the hood off Every.org, a social platform for charitable giving. How it works: You use Every.org to discover nonprofits recommended by your friend and community and track your tax-deductible donations as you go. The aim of Every.org seems to center around network effects; if you see your friends explaining why they support a certain charity, you might be inspired to do the same. As many people are donating money and resources to help feed families and support healthcare workers amid the coronavirus outbreak, the launch couldn’t be better timed. 🙌

You can give to any 501(c)(3) nonprofit using the platform, and Every.org says that all donation transactions will be secure (they use Stripe and Plaid).

Every.org is a nonprofit itself, funded by gifts from other people. Overall, the site has the potential to convert non-givers into givers, making donating more rewarding through a social element — you create a “profile” on Every.org like you would for most social media networks. 💸

These days, we’re all on Zoom. We use the video conferencing software for both work and social settings as we continue to socially distance. Zoom launched on Product Hunt years ago, where early adopters lauded its high fidelity connections and simple design. The product stands out for its ease of use, and the company was growing quickly even before the pandemic. Though Zoom didn’t publicly share user numbers in its March earnings call, the company has seen a “large increase” in the number of free users as well as minutes spent on calls.

With Zoom making its way into the (necessary) zeitgeist, there are lots of tricks and apps out there to make using the software a better experience. We rounded up best tips for you — happy video chatting! 👋

🙌 VirtualOffice lets you brand the background of your Zoom calls. Simply select your office, fill in your information and upload your logo.

💯 Fireflies is an AI assistant that helps you record, transcribe, and search your Zoom calls all in one place. It also lets you pull up action items, dates, deadlines and metrics after the meeting.

👀 Zoom Virtual Backgrounds has a ton of great #inspo for your call backgrounds.

🌙 Goodnight Zoom connects kids (and their parents) across the U.S. to isolated seniors right now. The team behind Goodnight Zoom is working with nursing homes and linking them up families to get a regular remote interaction going.

🔊 Krisp is a browser extension that uses AI to cancel background noise and echoes on your Zoom calls.

😉 Snap Camera lets you apply Lenses to your face while using your computer's webcam (aka during a Zoom call).

Some pro tips for Zoom that we found over on YourStack: You can give yourself a beauty filter on your calls and share chat logs from your Zoom meetings on Slack. You can also hold the space bar to temporarily unmute yourself. 👏

An app in the U.K. rose in extreme popularity this week, going viral with over 750,000 downloads since it launched on Tuesday. The app, called the C-19 COVID Symptom Tracker, asks people to self-report coronavirus symptoms, logging the date, time and location. In turn, this helps medical professionals identify potential outbreak hotspots. As of yesterday, over 1 million people had actively reported their status.

The app, which was developed by a startup called Zoe and researchers at Kings College Hospital in London, is now the third most popular app overall in the UK on the Apple App Store. The team behind the app also plans to bring the project to the U.S., working with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford to do so.

Overall, the hope is that crowdsourced information from the app could be useful to medical professionals as they plan their responses to outbreak clusters. Apple, Google and Amazon also built a website (in six days) to do the same thing. 👈

Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen over 60 products launch in efforts to spread awareness and relief around COVID-19, along with many more products related to remote working, at-home entertainment, and self-care.

Today alone, we saw a portal of online classes from chefs, a community hub from Facebook that offers authoritative information on the outbreak, a Slack app to send signed birthday cards remotely, a care package service for WFH employees, an app to help save local bookstores, and a digital coach to cope with anxiety. 🙌

Over the past several years, we’ve put on Makers Festivals in order to encourage makers to build, tinker and launch products in a short period of time. It’s like a hackathon, but always online and open to people from all backgrounds (not just software developers), all around the world.

With the proliferation of work from home mandates over the past few weeks, we thought it would be a great time to host a global, WFH Makers Festival that focuses on relief efforts (in any form) for the COVID-19 pandemic. At Product Hunt, we’ve already seen a ton of products launch that focus on helping people during this time, including things like a rational shopping list generator, a mask matching tool, a self-quarantine book club, a resource  for supporting local businesses and database of projects looking for volunteers. We even launched our own Product Hunt Merch shop last week focused on WHO's COVID-19 response fund.

We encourage you to think outside the box, whether than means building products around self-care, at-home entertainment, ways to combat the spread of misinformation or products for healthcare workers on the frontlines of the crisis. You can work as a solo maker or in (remote) teams, and you can work on any platform. We’d like to see both no-code and code-based projects!

The Festival will go on for three weeks, and submissions will close on April 16th. Then we’ll open up voting to the community, and winners will be announced at the end of April. We’ll be featuring all winners in our newsletter and on our social channels, and of course, a silver kitty trophy will be given to the overall winner.

We can’t wait to see what you build! 🎉

In recent weeks, we’ve seen a ton of people searching for co-watching apps like Netflix Party and Showgoers on Product Hunt as more and more people are isolated at home. So it’s timely that Instagram launched “Co-Watching,” a new feature that turns Instagram away from a solo experience into a multi-person party.

Co-Watching lets friends who are hanging out on a video chat browse through Instagram content together, with the goal of making Instagram a more social and active place to hang out in online. 👋

“We've been FaceTiming everyone we know the past few weeks. I love a new way to help make it feel like we're actually hanging out with people during this isolation.” - Jacqueline

The sentiment behind Co-Watching reminds us a lot of Squad, an app that lets groups of friends screen share while they video chat. Just like Squad, up to six people can “Co-Watch” at once on Instagram, where they can consume all feed content except for IGTV videos and private posts.

In addition to Co-Watching, Instagram has rolled out a number of efforts to help spread awareness around COVID-19, specifically enforcing the importance of isolating at this time. If you’ve spent any time on Instagram lately (haven’t we all?), you’ve likely seen the shared Instagram Story from any accounts that you follow that have posted the “Stay Home” sticker to their Stories. Instagram has also removed COVID-19 accounts from recommendations (unless posted by a credible health organization) and rolled out the donation sticker in more countries to help people find relevant nonprofits to support.

Will you try out Co-Watching? If you do, let us know how it goes. 👀

In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, huge efforts have been made by big tech companies to combat the spread of misinformation, mobilize communities and speed up research.

Yesterday, Facebook announced an initiative where the company is giving government and UN health organizations free services to help them use Messenger to scale their response to COVID-19. Several days ago, Google launched a COVID-19 information portal that highlights safety and prevention tips, as well as official stats and insights (it’s only in the U.S. for now). Twitter is also prioritizing authoritative information by verifying experts (with a blue check mark) to provide credible updates around coronavirus. 🙌

For those stuck at home due to quarantine, closures and lockdowns, big tech also has solutions. Apple Music released an AI-generated upbeat playlist (it’s called the Get Up! Mix) that will be updated every week. It’s sort of like Spotify’s Discovery Weekly, but happier. Apple is also giving away free e-books and audiobooks (to people in the U.S.) when you launch Apple Books.

Meanwhile, Amazon wants to help parents out. The company is offering free access to over 40 titles of kid-friendly Prime Video content to anyone with a standard Amazon account, and the initiative is in effect worldwide.

Have you seen more smart initiatives like these from other tech companies? Tell us about them. 👈

In the sudden age of all Zoom everything, Around wants to make video meetings “less.”

From a UI perspective, Around looks different than traditional video conferencing software, prioritizing AI-based camera framing that finds your face as you move, cropping out the background behind you. There’s also optional filters to set a “vibe” for the call, meaning nobody has to feel “vampire-awkward” when tuning in at night due to different time zones. Around also has an auto-mute feature that uses AI to eliminate common background noises like sirens, dog barks, washing machines, smoothie blenders and laptop fans to prioritize the human voice (sort of like Krisp). On top of that, Around’s signal processing technology lets multiple laptop microphones and speakers stay enabled in the same room without echo or feedback.

“Around respects your time and privacy, and that's why we've built all the technology behind it — to make it even less distracting than any other video calling products on the market. Around is primarily a hard tech company — great audio and video is a real science, and off-the-shelf services and libraries are far from great. So we went heads down for two years and wrote all the audio and video greatness ourselves,” Around CEO Dominik Zane wrote on Product Hunt.

Similar to video conferencing apps like Zoom, users can simply share a link (or fire it up from Slack) to start an Around call. 👋

Here’s what early adopters think:

“This is an amazing antidote to being stuck inside a rectangle and unable to collaborate. Zoom is good but Around is essential for actually doing work like you are sitting next to someone.” - Garry

“Cool UI and AI features. How do I convince people to use this over from Zoom?” - Al

“One of the worst things about video conferencing is the failure to create a persistent or ambient connection. Sometimes you just need to have someone feel like they're with you for a while without really saying anything or disturbing you. This looks like it might really help with that.” - Dean

Would you use this? Let us know. 🗣