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Spotify wants to become a podcast company. Correction: Spotify wants to become the podcast company.

This past weekend, news broke that Spotify was in talks to buy podcasting network Gimlet Media for over $200M. Today, it was confirmed that Spotify not only acquired Gimlet but also bought DIY podcasting platform Anchor. AND Spotify isn't done with its shopping spree — the company reportedly intends to spend up to $500M on acquisitions this year.

Your move, Apple.

Apple is the current market leader in podcasts and the second-most-popular paid streaming music service — after Spotify. But Spotify's latest acquisitions point to a marked attempt to level up against its competition.

Why Gimlet: First and foremost, Gimlet is a content producer, and it helps Spotify to have high-quality, proprietary shows on its platform. They launched their first podcast StartUp – a brutally honest behind-the-scenes look into starting a startup – over four years ago. On Product Hunt, co-founder Matt Lieber shared:

“We really are building this company in real-time, and documenting it as we go.”

Why Anchor: Anchor's set of tools make it super easy for anyone to create their own podcast (for free). The technology will help Spotify produce more high-end content in-house — as well as give podcasters better tools to create externally. The company launched ~3 years ago on Product Hunt with a different direction — bite-sized podcast production.

“So, we built Anchor to solve these problems and enable anyone with a smartphone to easily record and publish 2-minute audio clips, sort of like bite-sized podcasts. Best of all, audio in Anchor is interactive -- so anyone can respond with their actual voice, like a real conversation.” - Anchor co-founder Mike Mignano

In any case, would love a new season of StartUp on this. 😉

What will Spotify acquire next? Here are a few popular podcast products from the rabbit hole:

Breaker lets you follow what your friends are listening to 🎙
Lyrebird is a voice imitation platform 🎙
Koo! is a social network for short-form audio 🎙
Medium, from Odeo co-founder Ev, has been experimenting with audio 🎙
Product Hunt Radio 😉

Yesterday, Periscope announced a new feature that lets you invite guests to participate in live broadcasts — like a talk show. 🎙

The Twitter-owned live streaming service launched audio-only broadcasts back in September, and this seems to be an extension of that. How it works: Once a person goes live, viewers can request to join the conversation, and then drop in and out at any time. It's reminiscent of calling into your local radio station — but you're calling into your favorite Twitter personality instead.

Guests will be audio-only for now, but Twitter says it's working on incorporating video into the shared broadcasts.

Of course, the idea of live broadcasts isn't new. There's already Twitter Live. And Instagram Live. And Facebook Live. And Dialog — a community dedicated to live audio conversations.

But Periscope's new guest feature may be more of a foray into “live podcasts,” marking the latest case in big tech going after the nascent podcast market.

There's already Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. And over the weekend, news broke that Spotify is in talks to buy podcasting network Gimlet for over $200M. 😳In January, Facebook launched its first U.S.-based podcast focused on entrepreneurship.

But we're still interested to see how the talk show concept plays out on Twitter — so we're going to do a livestream today to test it out. 😉

Over the weekend, a particular “Newsletter Guide” launched on Product Hunt and caught our eye. Yes, this newsletter is about to get very meta.

The Newsletter Guide is a collaboration between email gurus Yellow Brim, The Shorenstein Center and Lenfest Institute. It's not an intro-level newsletter course, but more of a “201”-level toolkit of resources, strategies and open-source templates for people who run newsletters to collaborate on.

The idea behind the project is to reduce the technical strain behind making a newsletter, and allowing editors to focus more on editorial. Some things the Newsletter Guide covers:

• How to grow your email list
• How to monetize your newsletter
• How to evaluate success metrics
• How to track where subscribers found you
• How to avoid accidentally breaking laws

And soooo much more.

The Newsletter Guide comes alongside an uptick in products that make it superrr easy for people to launch newsletters without much hassle. Here are a few:

💌 Substack gives writers a CMS built for publishing paid newsletters

💌 Revue helps you quickly spin up a personal newsletter

💌 Email Newsletter Checklist helps you send error-free emails

💌 Good Bits lets you create newsletters from the best links on the web

💌 Send Check It helps you write better email subjects

💌 EmailDrips is like Dribbble for email drip campaigns

“Find a nap on every corner.”

That's the latest tagline from hotel-by-the-minute app Recharge, which expanded to homes this week. It's pretty much the same concept as Airbnb — but for much shorter stays. 🏠

But whether a short-term booking is for a nap, a shower, a quiet spot to work, or um, the occasional romantic meeting — the sharing economy definitely lends itself to under 24-hour rentals.

How it works: You open the Recharge app and choose a nearby place to rent (hotel or home). You book the space and it will be instantly ready for you when you check in. You receive 30 minutes of complimentary travel time that starts immediately after you book a rental. When you're done using the space, you self checkout. That's it.

The idea is rooted in spontaneity and convenience — a trend cropping up among other startups as well.

Earlier this week, an app called Popup launched on Product Hunt as a marketplace for “ephemeral coffee shops,” aka coffee shops hosted out of people's homes. Breather ($122.5M raised), an app for on-demand private workspaces, currently has more than 500 workspaces on its platform across 10 major cities. And just last week, Airbnb acquired short-term rental marketplace Gaest.

Important to note: Recharge can avoid some of the regulatory issues Airbnb has faced because guests aren't allowed to stay overnight. 🤔 Recharge is launching its homes feature with about 1K listings in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York — but 80K people who want to rent out their homes are on the app's waitlist.

“I'm a tab hoarder” - everyone, always.

Yesterday, a nifty new Chrome extension called Qlearly launched on Product Hunt to help you collect bookmarks for different projects and categories. It's sort of like Trello for managing your tabs, and the community was preeeetty excited about it:

“I use Qlearly every day to save podcasts and free design resources for interfacer. It has defs made my life easy.” - Ben

“Works like a Kanban board so it's super easy to use” - Cathleen

“Once you go Qlearly, you never go back 😆 (true story)” - Eduardo

This made us wonder what other browser extensions are currently loved by the masses, so we posed a simple question on Twitter: “What are your fav browser extensions?”

Some recommendations:

Lolli lets you earn bitcoin when you shop on the internet 🛍

Loom helps you create videos in a snap using screen, mic, and camera recording for Chrome. 📹

Video Speed Controller does what it sounds like...speeds up any video in your browser. 📼

Honey scours the web for the best coupon codes before you buy something online 🤑

Pocket (acquired by Mozilla) lets you bookmark interesting articles to read later 📚

Vookmark is like Pocket but for videos — it lets you bookmark videos to watch later 👀

Grammarly will fix you’re tyops and grammer ✅

FYI works like magic to help you find your documents (and was a runner up for this year's Life Hack Golden Kitty Award) ✨

Ghostery was upvoted by 1.3K people and makes internet browsing faster 👻

Snoopie uncovers what's tracking you around the web 🔎

PixelBlock blocks email trackers for you 💌

Aaaand keep your eyes out for a new browser extension from yours truly 😼

PSA: The milkman is making a comeback. 🥛

But instead of fresh milk, he'll be serving up deodorant, mouthwash, ice cream, shampoo, etc. in reusable containers — and then circling back to pick them up when you're done.

This week, a solid lineup of big-name consumer brands — Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever and Danone — banded together to pilot a new reusable packaging subscription service called Loop. The mission? Phase out single-use plastics.

How it works: Like with Amazon, you create an account online, add items to a virtual basket and checkout. But on top of payment for your items you'll pay a fully refundable deposit for each package too (which will range from $1 to $10). Then, your items will be delivered in a tote bag, which a delivery person will come back later to retrieve with your used packaging. The packaging is then sent to a cleaning facility and recycled for another customer. ♻️

Some reactions on Product Hunt:

“Prediction time: Amazon will buy them or recreate if it's mildly popular.” - Antoine

“I could easily see this having some kind of discount for reusing the same containers” - Alex

“With all the deliveries we get from online shopping these days, packaging is getting ridiculously wasteful. This is a brilliant solution” - Tim

The subscription system will start out in New York and Paris later this year, but if you don't live in one of those cities you can still join the #zerowaste movement. Here's few suggestions:

Get JUST Water (backed by Will Smith!). It's a paper-based bottle made from sugarcane with a 74% smaller carbon footprint than standard plastic bottles. 💦

Eliminate your cup altogether with GO Cubes. It's chewable coffee. ☕️

Buy eco-friendly sunglasses like Joplins. They're made from bamboo fibers — which are 100% sustainable. 😎

Use Moo's recycled business cards made from cotton t-shirts. ♻️

Avoid plastic straws with ELO's reusable smart straw. 🥤

Happy belated Data Privacy Day!

Apple rang in the holiday with a FaceTime bug that lets you eavesdrop on the person you're calling before they pick up. It was also reported that dismissing an incoming FaceTime call by pressing the power or volume button gives the caller a live video of the recipient's front-facing camera.

As of last night, Apple disabled Group FaceTime and said the glitch will be fixed in a software update later this week. Until then, it's probably a good idea to disable FaceTime in your phone's settings.

Obviously, the bug is a pretty serious issue for any iOS user and comes at a bad time for Apple. Apple has been very public about its pro-privacy stance in recent months — especially as its rivals (like Facebook) suffered from data breaches. For example, this tweet — sent hours before the bug was reported — hasn’t aged well:



The company is also expected to report its Q1 earnings today after cutting its revenue forecast (for the first time in 16 years!) earlier this month.

If you've got the privacy blues like we do today — here are 10 apps that launched in 2018 making privacy a priority:

🚀 1.1.1.1. by Cloudflare is a privacy-first consumer DNS service that will speed up your internet

🔒 DuckDuckGo's mobile app and browser extension give you encrypted private browsing that blocks trackers

📈 Simple Analytics gives you the analytics you need without invading your user's privacy

👀 Mozilla Facebook Container is a Firefox extension that keeps your Facebook data isolated...to Facebook

🤫 ShareUrl lets you share accounts (think Netflix, Hulu, etc.) without giving out your password

🔑 Cryptee is an encrypted home for your private photos, files, docs, and notes

💪 Outline (made my Alphabet) lets you build your own VPN

👻 Ghostery's new AI tool will block ads and stops trackers for you

💌 Burner Emails gives you fake email addresses to avoid spammers

🔐 Google Titan is a 2FA device that protects you against hackers

When you think back on the breakout startups of 2018, you think scooters.

Bird ($415M raised) turned one in September, announced 10 million rides taken and is reportedly worth north of $2B. Lime announced it surpassed 11.5 million rides last fall, and is expected to take in $400M in a new round this year (also valuing the company at about $2B). In November, Ford bought scooter company Spin for around $100 million.

But what's in store for 2019? Some predictions for breakout companies this year:

Notion is a powerful note-taking app that does it all when it comes to productivity (think the best features of Dropbox, Excel and Google Docs). 🗒

“Notion has done a great job of building a cult-like following by over delivering on the product side. I'm really excited to see what they do this year and beyond.” - Chika

Netlify ($44.1M raised) makes it super easy to deploy websites — and is definitely another one to watch. 🙌

“The fact that anyone can spin up a web app (with serverless functions and authentication) in minutes is super powerful. Plus they recently raised quite a bit of money. If they could make data storage as simple as they've made everything else, they'd be 💯” - Parker

Niantic Labs is the studio behind Pokémon GO. In 2018 the company rekindled its first game, Ingress. But we're all waiting with bated breath for their highly anticipated Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. 🧙

“I would bet on big comebacks from MagicLeap and NianticLabs. 'Harry Potter Go' will definitely be a hit.” - Benjamin

Lambda School ($48.1M raised) is a coding bootcamp that you pay for with a cut of your future salary — and it's already made some noise in 2019. Earlier this month, the company announced a $30M round, and said it plans to train 3,000 students this year. 🎓

This company is also up to something. 😉

What other startups should you keep an eye on in 2019? See what else the community had to say. 👀

If you want to add your own predictions, tell us here. 🔮

About a month ago, Postmates debuted Serve, a cute last-mile delivery rover that looks like a mix of WALL-E and a Minion. 🤖Serve is expected to roll out to “key markets” this year, starting with Los Angeles.

But of course, when new tech throws out the word “delivery,” Amazon is obviously going to get involved. So it wasn't surprising yesterday when Amazon took the hood off its own on-demand delivery robot called Scout.

Scout is about the size of a hamper or a cooler, and rides on six wheels at walking pace. Only six devices are currently rolled out in Snohomish County, Washington.

Some early reactions from the Product Hunt community:

“Wonder how my package will arrive next day at that speed ” - Aaron

“The implementation of lasers inside the visor will surely eliminate all other food robot delivery competition.” - Andy

“What about thieves?” - Stefano

It's worth noting that both of these devices look a lot like the delivery robots from Starship, a robotics firm founded in 2014 by the co-founders of Skype.

Regardless, the war of the sidewalk bots is undoubtedly heating up — and rightfully so. These little rovers may make up 85 percent of last-mile deliveries by 2025. Unless the drones get there first.

Yesterday, a new startup called One Health made headlines with a fresh $5 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Lerer Hippeau and Y Combinator. Contrary to what its name might suggest, One Health is not just another healthcare startup. Its mission is to help your dog fight cancer. 🐶

Brandless also had some pet-related news yesterday: the company is expanding beyond it's $3 price point to launch a line of dog (or cat!) Frisbees, collars and freeze-dried treats for $9. Pssst: They're competing with Amazon.

Both announcements point to the fact that pet tech is booming.

Need more evidence? BarkBox ($81.7M raised) reportedly delivers its pet-themed boxes to over 600,000 subscribers each month. And let's not forget that on-demand dog walking service Wag raised $300 million from SoftBank last year. Shortly after that, Wag's biggest competitor — Rover — raised a $155 million round ($310.9M total) .

Basically, when it comes to our beloved furry friends, the potential to make $$$ is high.

What else will pet owners pay for?

🐾 Custom socks with prints of your dog

🛏 Casper dog beds

🍗 A pet meal subscription service that delivers fresh food

🐩 Dog collars and leashes that are easy to clean

😁 Chew toys to help your dog brush its teeth

🐕 Handmade stuffed copies of your pet

Not a pet owner? Maybe forward this email to your doggo-obsessed friend.