hi bud buds,

last week, my newsfeed lit up with a uk-based tech company called nothing unveiling a new flagship smartphone phone (3) aimed at competing with samsung and apple. tbh, i hadn’t heard of them before.

if you’re unfamiliar as well: nothing makes android smartphones, headphones, and smart watches. think: the apple of the android ecosystem — consumer electronics with premium design and strong aesthetic pov.

their signature smart phone feature is the “glyph interface” — blinking lights on the back of the phone that display unique patterns and notifications. certain contacts or apps can be assigned different light patterns. this feature demos well and looks awesome, but feels gimmicky. a top use case they highlight: “playing spin the bottle with your phone face down”… feels like a quintessential feature you use once, then never again.

another interesting feature is their “essential spaces”: a dedicated app for saving screenshots, voice notes, and meeting recordings, which is then auto-organized and annotated with ai. i’m really excited to see how this develops as gen ai matures; feels like it could be very powerful. however, nothing about this seems hard for apple to copy if nothing were to identify a killer use case here.

after poking around their difficult to navigate website for a while today, i walk away feeling relatively underwhelmed. to me, nothing feels like a geeky side project masquerading as a mass-market brand / apple challenger. flashy demos, but not much functional differentiation. it’s hard for me to see this new flagship phone drawing any meaningful market share from apple anytime soon.

disagree? do we have any nothing power users in the house? please reach out! would love to interview you for a future issue of newpixels.

have a great week y’all.

xoxo - dj

last week’s product releases

💡 super interesting

  • substack announced more improvements to their new livestreaming platform: clip sharing to subscribers, performance metrics, and easy cross-posting to youtube + socials. i really love this entire product bet for substack:

    • for fans: livestreams feel like a highly intimate format that justify your monthly subscription fee

    • for creators: they can test content on their most loyal audience before sharing more broadly. if a clip flops, no big deal—true fans don’t care.

  • meta released chatbots that message you first. for example, as a film lover, you might get an unsolicited message from an ai chatbot about a new tarantino film. this feels like both a massive product opportunity, and also an extremely dangerous precedent. meta could use engagement data to target users when they’re feeling depressed / vulnerable, and hook them through chatbot “friendships”. could easily see a path where meta 10X’s engagement while dragging millions of people deeper into social isolation

  • similar to ^, meta also released business voice calling to whatsapp, enabling large businesses to contact customers via voice ai agents

  • tinder released face check, requiring a video selfie during signup to verify profile pics and flag reused faces. feels like a smart product feature for trust / safety that could quickly become standard for other dating + social apps

  • cloudflare released pay per crawl, still processing this, but this model feels radically intuitive to me, and thus potentially revolutionary. i could see this becoming a new, massive industry that emerges in response to gen ai

👍 nice!

🤔 hmmmm…

  • pinwheel, a kid-friendly tech company, released pinwheel watch for kids ~7-14, with gps tracking, camera, messaging, games, and an ai chatbot. feels better than giving your pre-teen an iphone, but… imo this still is too much. i remain #teamdumbphone

  • x released ai chatbots generating community notes. while this feels intuitive, does this sort of defeat the purpose of community notes / bring us right back to concerns about platform bias? i.e. what data are these chatbots trained on?

🤖 other ai product news

  • amazon released deepfleet, a gen ai model for optimizing its warehouse robot routes within the company’s warehouses. excited to see how gen ai impacts supply chains / logistics

  • anysphere (developer of cursor) released a web app to manage ai agents

  • google released veo 3 video-generation model, generating 8-second videos from text prompts.

  • perplexity released perplexity max, a $200/month plan with unlimited spreadsheet / report generation and early access to its ai browser

  • lovable released ai agent beta version, automating tasks like code editing and debugging

that’s it for this week. until next week: bye bye, i love you all.

love,

dj

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