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“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. 🗣

Our community has been asking us where they can get Product Hunt merch for a while. Historically, we’ve shipped swag to school hackathons around the world and surprised our community with lots of stickers, but we decided to finally shake things up.

We recently spoke with our friends at fourth wall and they helped us whip together a shop. Starting today, you can buy Product Hunt t-shirts, sweatshirts and stickers here (thanks to our team members for modeling).

All profits from merch sold will go to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Response Fund. 😸

Get your merch! 🎉

P.S. Product Hunt sweats are very comfortable while working from home.

Well, this was well-timed. Slack released its biggest redesign yesterday, making improvements that specifically target those new to Slack given the recent change to mass remote work.

For Slack veterans, you’ll find new navigation, a new compose button, custom sidebar sections, a new shortcut button for apps and new themes are coming soon. Overall, the stripped down redesign aims to be more customized and simplified, addressing the less intuitive ways the messaging app works for Slack neophytes. 💬

“These changes address a basic challenge that has grown naturally with Slack: with size comes complexity. As different product teams added new capabilities piecemeal, Slack started to feel not intuitive for people trying it out for the first time,” the Slack team wrote in a blog post.

We’ll see if the new Slack design appeals to a wider range of business users, given that more and more industries have made the recent shift to a distributed workforce.

Speaking of new releases, Apple unveiled its new iPad Pro yesterday. The iPad resembles a laptop more than a tablet; it comes with a new “magic keyboard” Check it out here. 💻