Briefing: Microsoft Recall, Spotify’s new font, Perplexity visualizations
Plus: How to design onboarding, Stripe adds passkeys, Nvidia tops the charts
Hi product people 👋,
Welcome to the 170+ new subscribers who joined us since last week!
Despite announcing a number of impressive new features at its annual Build event, there was one feature in particular that Microsoft unveiled that raised a lot of eyebrows this week. Recall is an upcoming new feature that records everything you do on your laptop by taking screenshots every few seconds to create a searchable history. However, regulators aren’t too happy with what they see and the UK’s data commissioner has confirmed that it is ‘making enquiries’ to understand how the feature works.
Given that the average consumer is still new to all things AI, there’s a real risk here that Microsoft and Copilot will be tarnished by the privacy concerns around Recall.
Meanwhile, Perplexity is rolling out a new feature which allows users to generate graphs using data from queries. The new feature is part of a partnership with data company TakoViz and the data is visualized in the form of “Knowledge Cards”. If you’re working on presentations which include data visualizations, this could be super helpful.
In other AI related news, Anthropic has appointed ex-Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger as its new chief product officer. It’s a major coup for Anthropic and it begs the question of whether the introduction of a new product-oriented leader at Anthropic will mean we start to see alternatives to the chat interface for Assistants like Claude.
Finally, if you’re looking for a new role at the moment, this neat tool allows you to filter for roles based on unique attributes like risk, industry and business type.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Key reads, tools and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
Process - How does automated testing work?
From regression testing to unit testing and integration testing, figuring out what each of these does and how they relate to one one another is sometimes a struggle.
Privacy - Cookies explained: your ultimate guide
Almost 80% of Americans say they usually or sometimes click to agree to privacy policies without ever reading them. In this Knowledge Series we cover everything you need to know about cookies with real world examples from companies including Linear, Spotify, Intercom and others.
(Department of Product)
UX - How to design an onboarding journey for active users
If you think about onboarding from the perspective of active users, not only are product tours a pain but they are preventing users from immediately interacting with your product or service. (Laws of UX)
Good prompts aren’t enough for your AI SaaS app
That’s why Copy.ai, Tavus, Writesonic and other leading AI companies use Paragon - so they can build integrations for their products 7x faster.
(Paragon*)
Case study - How Meta built Threads for the web in under 3 months
Meta software engineer Pascal Hartigsits down with Ally C. and Kevin C., two engineers on the Threads Web Team that delivered the basic version of Threads for web in just under three months. (Meta Engineering)
Tools you can use
Gamma - write a Doc but present it as a Deck
Tactiq - build your team’s knowledge base from meeting transcripts
Statsig - manage your product’s features at scale
*sponsored by this week’s partner, Paragon - ship every integration your customers want.
New product features, launches and announcements this week
Spotify has unveiled a brand new, custom-built font called Mix. Described as a sans-serif typeface that blends features from both classic and contemporary styles, the new font can dynamically change to fit marketing campaigns. It was designed by Berlin-based Dinamo Typefaces and will start to roll out to Spotify users this week.
Microsoft’s Build event 2024 concluded this week. Aside from Recall, here’s some of the other important announcements worth knowing about:
the ability for businesses to create custom AI agents
a new translation feature for the Edge browser
custom emojis for Microsoft Teams
a new AI-powered copy and paste feature
and external extensions for engineers to connect GitHub copilot to third party tools.
Google is planning to test ads in its AI overviews. VP for ads Vidhya Srinivasan said advertisers will have the opportunity to appear within the AI Overview in a section clearly labeled as ‘sponsored’ when they’re relevant to both the query and the information in the AI Overview.
Stripe is the latest company to add passkeys as an option for logging in.
Instagram is developing a new feature which allows users to send one, unedited photo that can be viewed once. It’s a nod to BeReal’s value proposition which is designed to encourage users to share unfiltered, authentic moments.
TikTok is launching a new AI tool called Symphony for brands to write scripts, produce videos and translate ad campaigns into multiple languages.
Apple is adding a new feature called Vehicle Motion Cues cues to its iPhone to help prevent car sickness.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Nvidia has topped the rankings as the tech company with the best reputation in America, scoring 81.2 out of 100 according to the annual Axios Harris Poll 100 survey. OpenAI was the lowest ranking tech company, at number 68 overall with a 71.8 reputation score.
Netflix can sell ads that reach just 10% of its subscriber base vs 90% of Prime Video users (who were automatically defaulted to ad plans). Amazon’s ads business is already huge but is likely to get a lot bigger.
Initial data shows that the rollout of Google’s Search Generative Experience actually led to an increase in traffic across a sample of 43 websites, despite predictions that SGE would have the opposite effect.
The web is starting to rot. 38% of all webpages from 2013 are no longer accessible.
Product marketers feel better about budgets this year with 72% of marketers expecting bigger ad budgets this year, up from 64% last year. Full Annual Marketing Report by Nielson.
The global vector database market is expected to grow to $4.3 billion by 2028, from $1.5 billion in 2023, thanks to the boom in AI feature development.
Other product news in brief
Replit is laying off around 20% of its staff.
AI translation startup tool DeepL has raised $300m at a $2bn valuation.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky is stepping down after almost 18 years.
The DoP Weekly Briefing is a product-led perspective of what’s happening in tech - and why it matters to product teams. If you want more than the weekly briefing, paid subscribers also get access to The Knowledge Series, in-depth DOP Deep dives to learn from the experiences of top tech companies and Chartpacks to feed your product brain and stay ahead.