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At Sparkmate, we run Rocking Fridays 🤘 for the team where everyone gets to focus on polishing their skills, learning new tech or just trying new things through mini projects we choose! These projects can be anything at all, like a disco ball launcher from the ceiling in our Paris office, an automated chicken-coop door opener, electric skateboards or just making our AC smarter by regulating room temperature. Check out the disco ball launcher down below! 🕺🏼🕺🏼
Here’s what we’ve put together for your weekly Spark reads:
💙 NEWS FROM OUR MATES
Xano gets published on Product Hunt 🔍
Our friends at Xano have been hard at work building one of the world’s first, and most comprehensive no-code platform to build scalable backends for apps! They got “hunted” and already got “#2 Product of the Day” last week. If you’re looking to develop an app and have limited knowledge in programming or building backends, note that anything you can do in a programming language you can do in Xano -without any code. Check them out and their reviews!
🤸 FUN PRODUCT WE LOVE
Make video editing simple with Veed.io 🎥
Video editing can be tedious and time-consuming, and barely allows any collaboration when you’re using applications like iMovie or Premier Pro that work with only local files. This is why discovering Veed.io was a gem for us! Veed.io allows you to video-edit online, automatically add subtitles (pretty well done too!), transitions, elements (like stickers, logos, progression bars, music visualizers, etc.), filters, text and more. It’s pretty much all you’d need for simple but fast video editing without compromising quality.
💭 TECH FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Beethoven’s last symphony finished by Artificial Intelligence 🎹
Beethoven died in 1827, and left his 10th symphony unfinished. He left only a few handwritten notes on his plans for the piece, but mostly just incomplete ideas or fragments of melodies. To mark the 250th Anniversary of his birth, a team of musicologists, composers and computer scientists came together to analyze and learn his style, to teach an AI to complete it. Read more about how they did it!
🌱 TECH FOR SUSTAINABILITY
This farm run by robots is boosting sustainable agriculture 🌾
Did you know that 40% of all fruits and vegetables are wasted before they reach anyone? Iron Ox aims to do their part in updating agriculture for the 21st Century by growing food renewably using robotics and artificial intelligence. They have indoor farms that uses robots to ensure each individual plant receives the optimal levels of sunshine, water, nutrients, and keep pests out. These robots use 90% less water, 75% less energy and use 30x less land - there is no wonder why they’ve just raised US$53 Million, backed by Bill Gates!
💥 WHAT’S ON @ SPARKMATE
Building a Disco Ball Launcher 🕺🏼
We mean it when we say we like to work hard AND play hard 😏 We sometimes host parties for the team and mates around town, to celebrate a hardworking week or to just catch up and have a great time. Now that we’ve had great music sorted, neon lights installed across the office, even smokey fog to set the ambience, one thing was missing: a disco ball. But where were we supposed to put it? So for one of our Rocking Friday projects, we built a disco ball launcher. How do you like it? ;)
Have ideas on what projects we could try next? Suggest some!
Exciting things are happening every day ⚡️ Follow us on social media to stay tuned!