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Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
Too stressed to pick a subject line
"Everyone should meditate for 10 minutes a day. If you're too busy for that, meditate for 20 minutes a day." –Blocktower Capital's Ari Paul
"Life hack: 10 minutes of compassion-focused meditation in the morning instead of checking Twitter or the news." –WSJ's Christopher Mims
For many, meditation reduces anxiety, stress, and that never-ending loop where you open every app on your phone. But it isn't easy to get into a meditation habit, so we put together a list of the 17 Best Meditation Apps to get started:
🌊 Calm, Apple's 2017 App of the Year, curates the best guided meditation. They also launched Sleep Mist to help you doze off at night. They're also hiring for 10+ positions.
🌳 Oak teaches you how to meditate, no app required. Built by Digg founder and now VC, Kevin Rose.
🎧 SelfMonk is an AirPod-first meditation app. Just tell Siri you're ready to relax, and SelfMonk kicks into action.
🤖 Trixie is a meditiation chatbot that reacts to your emotions.
The Tesla of Headphones 🚗
May 22nd: Consumer Reports publishes a damning report about the Tesla Model 3's braking distance. "There are big flaws." 😬😮
May 29th: Elon Musk pushes a software update to the Model 3, and the braking issue is immediately fixed. It's like magic. 🚗✨
Our cars now get software upgrades. Why don't your headphones?
Now they do. We've teamed up with our friends at Pioneer to get you an early access discount to the new Rayz Pro, the world's smartest headphones built for the Apple ecosystem:
🙉 Smart noise cancelling to drown out anything
⏯️ Auto-pause when you remove your earbuds, just like AirPods
🔘 Customizable button to open your favorite app, mute calls, etc.
Best part: the Rayz Pro get software updates with new features, so you can avoid that awkward thing where your headphones go out of date with Apple's every release cycle. Get a pair now with code KITTY25 for $25 off. 😻🎧
Facebook quietly launched a magazine 🤔
Last week, Facebook announced they were taking on YouTube, Twitch, HQ Trivia, Netflix, and China's Tik Tok.
Now Zuckerberg and team are launching original content. Meet Grow by Facebook, a new business magazine for business leaders. Most innovative: it's available in print. 😮
Facebook isn’t the only big tech company to expand to print: Airbnb recently launched Airbnbmag, a print magazine featuring stories from around the world for its millions of properties. Tech's favorite stock image curator Unsplash also launched a coffee table book.
Psst! We also published a book on How To Break Into Tech, featuring advice from Arianna Huffington, Jack Dorsey, and more. 📚
10 Products from LGBTQIA Makers 🏳️🌈
In honor of San Francisco's Pride Festival this weekend, we'd like to honor 10 great products made by LGBTQIA makers beloved by the Product Hunt community and curated by Kiki Schirr:
🤖 Josh.ai lets you control and automate your home from anywhere.
👩❤️💋👩 Her is the largest social network for lesbian, bisexual and queer people.
🏘️ Misterbnb lets gay men feel safe and secure when traveling abroad.
Whose products should Kiki add to her collection? Send us your favorite products from LGBTQIA makers on Twitter. 🐣
Instagram launches a YouTube competitor 📺
Facebook is taking on... YouTube? And Twitch? and HQ Trivia? 🤔
Two weeks ago, Zuckerberg launched Facebook Gaming, a streaming platform for creators. Streamers will be able to directly charge users for exclusive Fortnite #content, a direct shot at Amazon-owned Twitch. On Tuesday, they launched an extra feature-set built for live game shows like HQ Trivia directly on Facebook.
Just yesterday, Instagram launched IGTV, a new app dedicated to long-form videos. It's a mix of YouTube, Netflix, and China's Tik Tok, the #1 most downloaded app in the App Store globally.
If Snapchat wants to be the future of communication, Instagram is hoping to be the future of television:
🔴 You'll be able to subscribe to your favorite channels and creators directly inside Instagram or in the new IGTV app. Lele Pons, former Vine star King Bach, and Fortnite streamer Ninja have already signed up.
🕓 Videos are capped to one hour, just like really any TV show. Anybody can start their own channel.
🙅♂️ No ads... just yet. We don't expect this to last: just this week, auto-play video ads started to appear in Messenger.
Clearly Instagram has expanded beyond its initial photo-filter product, now reaching 1 BILLION users every month. What do you think about IGTV? Share your thoughts.
A new anonymous app built by high school women
A group of high school female makers built Trill to save the Internet.
Social media is ironically isolating. Between manicured feeds of Instagram #selfies and angry rants on Twitter, it's harder than ever to find welcoming communities. Group chats are the new Facebook, with entire communities shifting to Telegram and other chat apps.
Everybody deserves a place connect with others to discuss the same anxieties, frustrations, and worries you probably won’t post to LinkedIn.
Trill is a supportive anonymous community of over 13,000 people to date. While anonymous-based apps are incredibly difficult to moderate (remember Secret?), they’ve found early success in countries with restrictive speech or cultures and within the worldwide LGBTQ+ community, who often can’t safely discuss their sexuality.
The team of four includes a three-time WWDC scholar, who raised a small seed round to bring Trill to the world. Check it out.
This isn't the only app to launch in the space:
📹 Huddle is a video peer-to-peer support community.
🚀 Startups Anonymous is a confession board for startup employees
🙏 YC's Leap lets women in tech talk about anything they want
Psst! Trill is hiring an iOS developer for this upcoming summer.
NEW from Google 🎙️
Google Podcasts has arrived.
Last week the IAB shared some good news for the podcast industry: Revenues are up 86% from last year. BUT, podcasts are still tiny, representing less than 2% of radio ad spend in the U.S.
We’re hopeful Google’s investment into the ecosystem, introducing a pre-installed podcast player for Android folks, will expand the pie and ultimately help podcast creators find an audience.
The new Google Podcast app will be available worldwide in a few hours, with:
🙏 Personalized recommendations for new podcasts
🎙️ Progress and listen history synced through Google Assistant
🕓 Playback speed adjustments
Your next favorite podcast is waiting to be discovered:
🚀 Y Combinator's Official Podcast on starting up a startup
😮 Reply All covers the oddities on the internet
📝 Venture Stories take you inside the world of venture capital
📰 Techmeme's Ride Home Podcast aggregates the best news
📰 Techmeme's Ride Home Podcast aggregates the best news
If you're looking to upgrade your podcasting experience, Breaker, Chorus, and Overcast are fan-favorites. All have built-in social networks to surface your network's favorite podcasts.
Psst! We're working on a secret podcast project. Get early access.
World's first flying car 🚁👀
Last-mile transportation is heaaaaating up. 👀
Scooters and helicopters aren't the only competitors in the space:
🛩️ The Flyride actually lets you fly, powered by water.
👟 Low-tech Flaneurz convert your sneakers into clip-on rollerskates.
📈 The Onewheel is a self-balancing electric skateboard with only one wheel. Modern version of the hoverboards that went #viral last year.
What's your favorite innovative way to get to work? Let us know. 🚲
Decentralized scooter company Bird is raising at $2B valuation less than a year after they started. Dockless bicycle startup JUMP was acquired by Uber for $200M earlier this year. 12 different companies have applied for scooter permits... in San Francisco alone.
Not all last-mile solutions have wheels. 🚁
Flying cars have arrived, and Casey Neistat got a sneak peak. Meet the Kitty Hawk, a personal drone backed by Google co-founder Larry Paige.
"Oh my god, this thing is so f*cking fun." We can see why. Check out Casey's video review. The soundtrack is dope.
🛩️ The Flyride actually lets you fly, powered by water.
👟 Low-tech Flaneurz convert your sneakers into clip-on rollerskates.
🕳️ Elon Musk's Boring Company wants to build tunnels that criss-cross your city and cut your entire commute down to minutes. They just got a $1B contract from the city of Chicago.
📈 The Onewheel is a self-balancing electric skateboard with only one wheel. Modern version of the hoverboards that went #viral last year.
What's your favorite innovative way to get to work? Let us know. 🚲
Dark Mode for evvvverrryyything 🙏🌚
Night mode is the best when burning the midnight oil in front of the LCD. Unfortunately, most sites don’t offer this option to night owls.
Frustratingly, not every website has a Night Mode available.
Dark Reader is an extension that turns every website into Night Mode. It's magical, and available for Chrome and Firefox. There are also specific extensions for GitHub, Medium, Google, and Messenger.
This isn't the only extension built to make your web browsing better:
🐦 Refined Twitter is the Twitter we've always wanted. Embedded Instagram pictures, a chronological feed, and auto-loaded new tweets.
🐱 Refined GitHub linkifies issue/PR references in code, comments in titles, marks issues and PRs as unread, preserves Markdown, and much much more. Open-source Sindre Sorhus is behind both Refined GitHub and Twitter.
📑 Toby cleans up your browser tabs. No more tab hoarding!
😬 Grammarly for Chrome prevents typos in yur importnt emaails.
NEW from Snap 👻
Biiiiig Snap news: meet the new Snap Kit, a privacy-safe platform for developers to build apps on top of Snapchat.
Unlike Facebook, Snap Kit doesn’t share your friends with app developers (perhaps to avoid some of the issues and controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica). They've already partnered with Tinder, Patreon, Postmates, and GIPHY.
Snap Kit comes in four distinct parts:
📝 Creative Kit lets you integrate your own stickers, Filters, links, and more directly in Snapchat.
🔒 Login Kit will log you into other apps using Snapchat... and bring your Bitmoji with you. This is a big shot at Facebook log-in widget, which sucks up data from other apps at the same time as logging you in.
👋 Bitmoji Kit brings your Bitmoji anywhere. Yesssss.
📸 Story Kit embeds Snapchat Stories directly in other apps. We're excited for the inevitable wave of "Stories for X" extensions that will launch in the coming weeks.
Facebook and Twitter’s early success was largely driven by its developer community. We’ll have to see if Snap can do the same, and avoid some of the mistakes made by other developer platforms. 🦄
