The Bitcoin community's enthusiasm for the Lightning Network has waned due to its complexity and reliance on custodial wallets. The Lightning Network faces key issues like channel liquidity and the inability to receive challenges offline. Mutiny Wallet aims to improve this by integrating fedimint technology, offering a more user-friendly, self-custodial solution that can dynamically share ownership of UTXOs and interoperate with Lightning. It represents the current best approach to scaling Bitcoin.
Mercari, Japan’s digital flea market platform with over 22 million monthly active users, is planning to allow users to purchase products in Bitcoin by June this year.
Some thoughts on how to maximize your earning potential this cycle.
Asset management firm and potential Bitcoin ETF provider VanEck will donate 5% of the profits from its fund (if approved) to Bitcoin developers Brink.
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit has officially obtained a Major Payment Institution license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
A new company called Clicks Technology has announced an iPhone case with a built-in keyboard on the bottom. Clicks brings the tactility and precision of a physical keyboard to the iPhone so people don’t have to wait until they return to their desks to create or communicate with the satisfying feedback only actual buttons can provide.
Dutch startup Nuwa has developed what they claim to be the "world's most advanced pen". The Nuwa Pen uses an inbuilt camera system, motion sensors, and algorithms to capture handwritten text on any paper, storing the notes in their app and allowing users to organize, share, and integrate them with various apps.
Three lessons from InVision’s rise and fall: marketing hype can only take you so far, teams need to prioritize small wins and improvements before it’s too late, and acquiring great companies instead of catching up with the paradigm shift doesn’t help.
Pagination makes it easier for users to transverse many results by presenting them in defined amounts per page. Designers should use numbered representation, truncate page navigation, consider using “first” and “last” buttons, show the count of items per page on top of long lists, and consider using an infinite scroll.
2024.01.09·coyleandrew.medium.com·5 min read·TLDR Design Feature quality — usability, accessibility, performance, and consistency — starts high and stays high. The quantity of completed features resembles an “S curve” over time, accelerating gradually before flattening as the launch approaches. Feature stability increases throughout implementation, but reversals are common and expected to refactor things already made based on what was learned.
A competitive usability evaluation looks at how competitors do things, what's working, and what's not. With it, you can make objective decisions, reduce risks, improve value-driven design, and understand different approaches to similar design challenges. The two methods of conducting these evaluations are competitive reviews, which involves looking at a series of related products, and competitive testing, which consists of testing your and your competitors' designs.
Turn SVGs into high-quality 3D renders that can be adjusted with parameters such as resolution, lighting, and shadow effects.
With Kartiv, you can use AI to turn product descriptions into compelling and customizable images and videos easily and quickly.
Uniqode allows you to upload your brand’s logo and add it to the center of your QR Code, change code color and background, and download it in many formats, including SVG, EPS, and PNG.
Designers, entrepreneurs, and founders answer, “How has entrepreneurship changed your perception and practice of design?” They share lessons on value creation versus performance theater, how to pick battles, shifting to a revenue-generating mindset, finding a balance between revenue, impact and effort, and seeing the big picture.
Naturally, designers will prefer library components that cover more stuff, including interactions and animations. However, that only sometimes provides the best output. In some cases, Figma needs to be more sophisticated to demonstrate an interactive behavior adequately.
2024.01.09·alicepackarddesign.com·4 min read·TLDR Design Three new categories are being introduced for the 13th edition of Fast Company's Innovation by Design Awards: Interior Design, Advertising, and Type Design. The distinguished panel of judges includes design anthropologist Dori Tunstall, Google's VP of Design Ivy Ross, Pentagram's Giorgi Lupi, and Marcus Engman, IGNKA's creative director. Entries are judged based on innovation, impact, and aesthetics across over 50 categories.
Test your usability knowledge by taking NNG’s latest UX quiz. All questions and answers are based on articles that they published last year.
Market research firm Hanover found that 75% of companies revamped their visual identities post-2020, while UpCity’s 2022 survey reported a 51% change in brand strategy due to the pandemic. Two key drivers stand out: necessity and opportunity.
Illustration challenges are a great way to reboot your creative brain because they offer structure, motivation, and a sense of community to help you out when you can't get motivated by yourself. These challenges are designed not just to help you create consistently, but also to explore new ideas, refine your skills, and even step out of your comfort zone.
Google Chrome plans to eliminate third-party cookies by Q3 2024, but some sites will still be able to temporarily enable them until December 27, 2024. Eligible websites can enable the third-party cookie deprecation trial by using JavaScript to provide unique access tokens in Chrome. The program is specifically designed for embeds and services that use third-party cookies and meet Google’s strict eligibility criteria.
Expect to see more companies leveraging partnerships not just for market penetration but as a precursor to strategic acquisitions this year. There will also be an increased demand for integrated tools, an emphasis on nurturing smaller deals for growth, and a surge in fractional leadership roles post-layoffs. Authenticity will remain crucial, urging companies to be socially responsible and transparent for lasting customer relationships.
An online retailer redesigned its product pages with the goals of creating a more modern design and streamlining the checkout process. This involved creating a new page layout and introducing a sticky ‘Add to Cart and Buy Now’ bar. On desktop, the redesign resulted in a 56% increase in order completion rate and a 33% increase in revenue per visitor. The redesign did not make a significant difference on mobile, suggesting mobile user behavior and preferences don’t align with those on desktop.
This post includes a visual breakdown of a LinkedIn ad by Dovetail, a customer insights hub. The ad text copy speaks directly to the company’s target persona. The creative illustrates the target’s pain point and makes it memorable. The bottom section of the ad that contains the CTA should be used to incorporate a closing argument (ie. the product’s benefit or capability).
Reechee.io helps SaaS companies monitor and win over unhappy customers of their competitors. The tool monitors competitors’ product reviews and provides AI-powered sentiment analysis of their negative reviews. It offers a free plan that includes tracking of 1 competitor.
Normally, the process of comparing how page content has changed over time is quite manual. The SEO Diff tool allows you to easily compare a page's content between two dates and get an AI-driven summary of the changes. You need an OpenAI API key to enable the AI summary, but without it, the tool will still highlight content changes. The tool is free to use.
Content curation involves gathering and organizing diverse content types and sharing them via social media, blogs, or email. The benefits include becoming a go-to resource, expanding reach, and driving traffic. To curate effectively, identify your audience’s unique needs and wants, perform topic research, and source content from trusted outlets. Tools to help speed up content creation include Google Alerts, Semrush’s Social Poster, and Brand Monitoring.
The right partnership helps guide businesses to profitable opportunities and gives them extra strength to compete. There are several types to consider, including channel partners, and referral partners. This article contains case studies of how brands have used partners to grow, as well as pitfalls to consider with this strategy.
Marketers without a strategy that is closely aligned with their customers’ journies fail to generate engagement and conversions because their targeting is too broad. To be successful, have a clear target audience and prioritize the leads based on where they are on their journey. The priority should be those with a high ROI, such as customers who are ready to buy today or soon, followed by those who bought an alternative and those who may be ready at some point in the future.
With Google phasing out third-party cookies and Consent Mode V2 becoming mandatory by March, ensure you implement consent mode, enhanced conversions, and server-side tracking.
Johnson & Johnson is set to pay around $700 million to resolve over 50,000 lawsuits from more than 40 states over allegations that its talcum-based baby powder failed to warn consumers about potential cancer risks.
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Experimentation is key for driving growth, and you need a solution that enables you to move quickly. Eppo [6] lets you run reliable experiments [6] and centralize A/B testing workflows across your org. Powered by a world-class statistical engine, Eppo makes it easy for anyone to set up, monitor, and analyze experiments on their own.
Zero-sum products require winning over competitors, while positive-sum products can succeed without direct competition. Figma/Sketch and Uber/Lyft illustrate these concepts. It’s important to recognize where a product falls on this spectrum for strategic planning and market entry.
InVision recently announced that it will discontinue its services at the end of 2024. This article delves into six crucial lessons that can be learned from InVision’s downturn.
LMMs are the new LLMs, new techniques (CoT, RAG, RLHF, etc) will push the limits of AI model capabilities and continue to define the AI infra stack, and domain-specific AI will power a new crop of vertical SaaS.
2024.01.09·nextbigteng.substack.com·12 min read·TLDR Product Prioritization is crucial for product managers, balancing user needs, business objectives, ROI, and adaptability. This task is as much an art as it is a science, requiring a careful balance between short-term gains and long-term vision, user requests and innovative solutions, and effectively managing risks.
An exploration of how trust issues can impact an organization and why it is so hard to address them. The article concludes with ideas on how to break the loop and see past the swirl.
Product strategy can be analogous to gardening as both require growth, learning, and adaptation. The analogy illustrates how not every strategy component (or 'seed') will be successful, but each offers valuable lessons. It highlights the importance of flexible execution and learning from failures, reinforcing that embracing potential failure is key to developing a successful product strategy.
Competitive usability evaluation can help teams identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of competing designs. The goal is to closely examine how your competitors are solving similar design problems, what’s working, and what’s not. This article offers a comprehensive guide on how to conduct these evaluations.
How to notice when the Reporting to Peter Principle becomes true and develop a symbiotic relationship with your manager instead of developing resentment.
2024.01.09·theengineeringmanager.substack.com·3 min read·TLDR Product Snaptchat+ is a $3.99 monthly subscription that offers users a suite of generative AI features that enhance existing Snapchat experiences. With a base of 7 million paying users, this marks a significant milestone in the generative AI field. Its success suggests a pivotal strategy shift: instead of solely inventing new experiences, the integration of generative AI to augment existing products could be the key to real wins.
Figma has introduced FigJam AI, a set of tools designed to improve meetings and creative processes. These tools, leveraging OpenAI's GPT models, offer functionalities like suggesting meeting icebreakers, summarizing notes, and aiding in brainstorming. Figma's focus on integrating AI into its platform reflects a shift towards enhancing collaboration and creativity in technical and design meetings.
Some key steps to becoming a great technical partner include querying data, practicing browser editing, and understanding client and server sides. Engaging with resources like ByteByteGo and Quastor will help product managers continuously build and learn through hands-on projects.
The importance of candor and the consequences that may arise when it is missing.
A must-do exercise for PMs before launching a product.