Making music with plants 🌱🎶
It was yesterday but if we haven’t had a chance to personally greet you and your team:
Happy International Women’s Day! 🥳🎉 We’re celebrating all women and girls this week who inspire us and are changing the world with their innovation, grit and pure hard work!
Especially to our very own queens 👑 meet them and read more about this below!
Here’s what we’ve put together for your weekly Spark reads:
💙 NEWS FROM OUR MATESSay goodbye to spam emails with Mailwarm 📧
When you’re in B2B (or B2C for that matter), getting your emails into inboxes mean OPPORTUNITIES! But when you’re sending so much and aren’t getting many replies, your sender reputation goes down - landing in spam and affecting your ability to reach your leads at all.
Our mates at Mailwarm are hard at work to help with this 🤗 Mailwarm is a tool that “warms” your emails, simply by using your account to send thousands of emails to Mailwarm accounts, all of which will come back opened, marked as important, marked as not spam and replied to - all the possibilities that will help boost your sender reputation back up! It’s a straightforward tool you never thought you needed 🚀
🤸 FUN PRODUCT WE LOVEProduce amazing podcasts with Riverside 🎙
If you ask for any of our tribe’s favorite podcast tools, this would have to be up (or 1st!) on our list 🙌
Riverside allows you to record podcasts anywhere in the best qualities possible. All you’ll need is to set up your “studio” where all your recordings will be stored, and you’ll be ready to send a link to your guests to join the recording. You can bring any of your recordings to their Magic Editor to complete post-production in minutes - allowing you to choose which videos and audio files to include (they separate everything!), edit video styles, enhance the audio, and add subtitles or transcriptions. Riverside also has “Clips” where they help you reuse and cut long-form podcasts into quick, catchy social media videos.
Spotify, Microsoft and The New York Times are also loving them! Pricings start at US$9/month, but if you’re looking to try it out first, we’re sure you can reach out to them for it!
💭 TECH FOOD FOR THOUGHTMaking music with plants 🌱🎶
You’ve heard of Bass House, Disco House, Techno House… What about Green House? 😂
Stan Smeets, a motion designer who loves to dabble with technology, have created a a modular synthesizer (a machine that electronically generates and modifies sounds) that plays the rhythm of patterns of plants and its environment, including wind, landscapes and the sun’s position. These rhythms are generated through microscopes and sensors that are placed on the plants and their surroundings. With the use of electrodes, it measures fluctuations in the electrical current between different areas of the plant, which are then translated into notes within certain keys.
The plants don’t make the music per se, but with it, it inspires beats of many music producers, and can use it to manipulate and build songs!
🌱 TECH FOR SUSTAINABILITYSeals: Our research buddies in the Antarctic Ocean 🦭
Ocean circulation plays a huge role in how marine ecosystems develop, but has been poorly studied due to extreme weather conditions - Antarctica holds the lowest measured temperature on Earth of -89.2 °C! 🥶
Japanese researchers have found ways to carry their oceanographic research under the thick ice by deploying deals with antenna on their heads! These antennas are satellite data loggers, which are about the size of a small Rubik’s Cube, and can log info on water temperature, salt levels, and flows of water and nutrients around the southern continent.
Our little buddies have been a huge help - researchers have seen them travel as far as 633km in depths of 700m!
💥 WHAT’S ON @ SPARKMATEHappy International Women’s Day to all queens 👑
To all the women and girls who are challenging status quos, breaking ceilings, continuing to push possibility, or even just making us happy, THANK YOU 💙
And to our very own queens, who not only make us who we are and why we do what we do, but are also inspiring many other women and girls in technology/engineering!
Yes, we’ve got only 3 queens on the tribe right now - not a big number at all, but there’s no shame there. We are proud of them. We’re just in an industry where equal representation is still needed 🦾
For innovation to go further, diversity must come first. And with our queens, we’ll be sure to be part of making that happen (Something made by queens, for queens coming soon! 👀🛠)
Quick update: 4 queens now, now that Sylviane has joined the team today! 🚀
Exciting things are happening every day ⚡️ Follow us on social media to stay tuned!