😸 Orkut is back…maybe

Marv ↗ — An AI cursor companion that shows you what to click

Imagine you're are staring at an app, you know exactly what you want it to do, and you have no idea which of the forty buttons does it. Marv sits next to your cursor, and when you hold a hotkey and ask, it talks back out loud while drawing on the screen: circling the control, pointing at the menu, writing notes over the top of whatever you are in. Finding the export option buried three menus down, working out a spreadsheet formula, getting through software you touch twice a year. Cameron has put as much into the character as the answers, on the theory you want something you would keep on the desktop.

Ghostifier ↗ — Companies have your data. Ghostifier gets them to delete it.

Ghostifier connects to Gmail, reads the headers to work out every company sitting on an account of yours, and shows you the list, which is a genuinely unpleasant thing to look at. Day one it unsubscribes you and files opt-outs from sale and sharing. The deletion requests wait until the return window on anything you bought has closed, because being forgotten by a shop that owes you £80 is a bad trade. Then it tracks who replies, and researchers who ran this by hand on 90 services found 27% of them did not actually comply. Banks, doctors, schools and your employer are left alone.

Ownfeed ↗ — A social feed of people who need your product

Ownfeed wants one thing from you, which is your product's URL. Overnight it reads Reddit, X, Bluesky and Hacker News, and in the morning you have a feed containing only posts from people who sound like they need what you built, each one marked as a pain point, someone hunting for a tool, or a mention. There are no keywords to set up and no alerts to tune. It will not write the reply and it never touches your accounts, so the five minutes you spend on it each morning are five minutes of actually talking to strangers.

ClawCall ↗ — Your AI agent's phone to dial, hold, and reports back

Ask ChatGPT to cancel your gym membership and ClawCall dials, works the phone tree, sits through the hold music and comes back with whatever the person said. It rings you when there's an actual decision, tells you who's waiting, and won't read your card number out to anyone. Companies have employed robo-agents for years, their bots misunderstanding you on purpose, while Americans spend something like 43 days on hold across a lifetime. And you know what? It's about time we give them a taste of their own medicine.

Playground by Google Labs ↗ — Create, play, and share your own games with Google AI

Describe a game, pick a genre, and Playground builds you something playable in the browser in a few minutes. Then you keep going: ask it to change a rule, swap a character, turn the gravity down, and it rebuilds around the change. That second part is the hard bit, because a lot of tools can make a game from a sentence and then fall apart the moment you edit one. Google has not said whether an edit keeps your save state or starts the game over. Playing is free, generating costs weekly tokens, and it is US only for now, so there's the catch. Unity Spark is coming in a later update to handle proper 3D.

Nothing beats a good team-up. Deadpool and Wolverine. Vin Diesel and The Rock in Fast Five. Product Hunt and Google Cloud.

Okay, stay with us here. We’re running a Google Cloud Run Hackathon. Everybody who signs up, spins up an app on Google Cloud Run, and schedules their launch for October 14 gets $50 in build credits while supplies last.

Prizes include $500 in Google Cloud credits, 1-on-1 convos with Cloud Run engineers, and shoutouts in Google Cloud channels. So why wouldn’t you build something?

By Ivan Semenov (Causo)

There are plenty of event calendars out there, but most just tell you when and where something is happening. As a founder, that's only half the information you actually need. What I wanted to know was:

• Which investors actually attend?
• Is the event relevant to my startup's stage and industry?
• Can I apply to pitch, and what could I win?
• Are there discounted or free startup passes?
• Is it worth spending a few days and potentially thousands of euros attending?

So we built a free startup events directory. We've now researched 148 events across 51 countries, covering everything from major conferences to smaller, more specialised startup and investor events…

Orkut, a social networking platform that once boasted 300 million active users worldwide, is coming back. Maybe.

Its founder, former Google engineer Orkut Büyükkökten, has put up a petition. Those who sign it are asking for Orkut “to create a new social network focused on authentic people, real connection, and genuine belonging.”

Why not just bring it back? Why a whole new network? Well, Büyükkökten was with Google when he created it, so Google owned it. But Büyükkökten owns Orkut.com. Though Orkut was popular in India and Brazil, the search giant shut it down in 2014 because it didn’t need another competitor to Google+.

But Büyükkökten is unhappy with how things turned out, subtweeting Facebook, X/Twitter, and others. He writes: “Twenty years spent optimizing for your attention. Feeds built around engagement, not connection. A generation of kids surrendered to algorithms that addicted them, divided them, and sold them to advertisers. No surprise that they grew up lonely and anxious.”