How enthusiastic is your country about Extended Reality and the Metaverse? 🌎

#22 2022 | Sparkmate

Jun 1, 2022

How comfortable are YOU with the idea of Extended Reality (XR) and the Metaverse? How do you think it would affect our lives, or do you think it would have much impact at all?

With XR and the Metaverse continuously emerging, a study has finally been conducted on exactly where each country is in their adaption - and it’s pretty interesting! More about this below 👇

Here’s what we’ve put together for your weekly Spark reads:

80+ Shopify App tips in your fingertips 🛒
Up your debugging and UX game with Relicx 📲
How enthusiastic is your country about Extended Reality and the Metaverse? 🌎
Algae for energy 💚
Sparkmate x The Hive x Whub: 2022 Startup Trends & Insights 🔥

💙 NEWS FROM OUR MATES

80+ Shopify App tips in your fingertips 🛒

Trying to build a Shopify app? Or even building a business around it? Hear it from someone who’s been there, done that: Mat De Sousa. Mat has been building Shopify apps from 2017 and since, has failed with 3 of them - but it’s taught him so much he wanted to give all his learnings back 💙

In 2020, Mat decided to use what he learned and built WideBundle to create bundles for Shopify Apps - which quickly grew to $25K in MRR! He followed the same processes and tips to build WideReview, and that’s also gone to $1.3K in MRR. Discover everything he’s learned on his tips site and Twitter (a following of almost 6K has got to tell you something!), and support him on Product Hunt!

Check out Shopify App Tips

Support Mat on Product Hunt

🤸 FUN PRODUCT WE LOVE

Up your debugging and UX game with Relicx 📲

We all understand the importance of great and poor user experience - you can gain customers from it, but you can lose many more from it too. Good thing we’ve got tools like Relicx to help us 💻 It’s like Google Analytics + Hotjar for UX:

Features:

Record user sessions. Records live user sessions using a lightweight script tag. Relicx then starts monitoring user sessions, looking for DOM mutations, backend calls, and interaction events. Full user privacy is maintained and no PII or confidential data is captured.
Fix bugs with full user context
Monitor user sessions and see how users are experiencing your application with full session video replay, heatmaps and click-by-click interactions. Quickly diagnose issues with console logs and network waterfalls that stay in sync with video and step-by-step replay.
Generate real-world flows and tests
Extract real user flows from live user sessions using unsupervised machine learning and automatically generate end-to-end tests based on real user flows. Edit tests with full control over steps, input parameters, and assertions. Minimize time fixing broken tests with AI-powered self-healing tests and add/phase out new tests as your application evolves.
Validate User Flows in your CI/CD pipeline
Tests generated by Relicx can then be run in your CI/CD pipeline. They can be run in parallel to minimize test execution time and across development and staging environments. By running tests on aggregated user flows, your testing is highly efficient and effective. No more test sprawl from tests that don't represent how customers are actually using your product.
Score release readiness
Relicx scores each build based on quality as seen by the customer, providing a powerful tool for ensuring a high-quality release. You can see how many sessions are predicted to be healthy, testing status, the number of broken flows, and the percentage of user impact that broken flows will have to determine the overall risk of shipping your next release.

Who it’s for: Product Development ad User Experience teams

Price: It’s FREE with 1,000 sessions/month, until you need more test executions and their flow-based test suite, pricing starts at $499/month.

Check out Relicx

💭 TECH FOOD FOR THOUGHT

How enthusiastic is your country about Extended Reality and the Metaverse? 🌎

Ipsos conducted a survey with 21K adults aged 18-74 in 29 countries, including the United States, Canada, China, Germany, France and South Africa. It found that in total, about half of all adults are quite familiar with the Metaverse (52%) and have positive feelings about engaging with extended reality in daily life (50%).

A few fun facts from the report:

Turkey has the highest percentage of people who say they understand the Metaverse (86%), followed by India (80%), China (73%) and South Korea (71%)
China is the most keen country to welcome Extended Reality (78%), followed by India (75%), Peru (74%) and Saudi Arabia (71%)
Countries believe the Metaverse will mostly impact Virtual Learning (66%), Digital Entertainment (64%) and Virtual Work Settings (62%)

Read about it

Read the report

🌱 TECH FOR SUSTAINABILITY

Algae for energy 💚

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have designed a way to power a computer for over a year (and counting!) with algae 🌿 in a system fully made of common, inexpensive and largely recyclable materials.

The system is around the same size of an AA battery, and contains a non-toxic species of algae called synechocystis. How it works is that the algae naturally harvests energy from the sun through photosynthesis, and as it interacts with an aluminum electrode, it generates electrical current that can be enough to continuously power small computers.

In their research, they powered a microprocessor called Arm Cortex M0+, which is widely used in Internet of Things devices - and paves the way for even more green tech.

Discover the device

💥 WHAT’S ON @ SPARKMATE

Sparkmate x The Hive x Whub: 2022 Startup Trends & Insights 🔥

If you’re in Hong Kong 🇭🇰, we’re running an event with The Hive and Whub next week to give everyone an update on the latest trends and insights in the startup world 📊 including all about Web3 and the metaverse to watch out for 👀 It’ll be another #AskMeAnything session with Co-Founder and CEO of Whub, Karena Belin (they have one of the largest startup ecosystems in Hong Kong!)

💬 They will go through: