From carbon offsetting to better Slack to seamless workflow tools and more – meet this month's Pioneers, building inspired new companies in all corners of the world.
Hero - Alvaro Sosa, Fernando Varela
Mixpanel for personal productivity
With recent excitement around startups like Roam Research, it seems like high-end productivity software is in vogue again. Hero joins this trend—it’s personal workflow software that’s meant to help you stay in flow. They’ve paired powerful task management software with analytics, and packaged it in a lightweight browser extension.
No need to toggle between tabs. Activate your next task with a keystroke on any page, at any time. Even integrate mobile reminders through WhatsApp for select activities.
Profiled - Emile Paffard-Wray
The modern-day resume for developers
Emile has seen candidates and employers alike express frustration when using GitHub to judge an engineer’s best work. Profiled takes a developer’s profile and auto-generates an appealing static portfolio website in seconds.
The outcome is easily customizable and you can connect your own domain. Don’t waste time hacking away at your personal website when you could be building projects.
Carbonly - Oliver Carmont
Carbon offset tracking in your browser
Current carbon calculators and flight offsetters don’t do a good enough job motivating new, greener habits. Tracking your carbon footprint should happen automatically, easily and in concert with your friends.
The Carbonly browser extension uses social leaderboards and web scraping to provide full carbon transparency, insightful analytical and offsetting tools, as well as curated promotion of sustainable products.
Cursive - David Huang
Slack meets Google Docs
Cursive is messaging software that organizes your team’s conversations into collaborative documents. It enables your team to edit each other’s messages or change the order of the chat in real-time. Use it as a regular messaging app, then save the best parts in a searchable wiki. Cursive’s goal is to fight entropy in the workplace by bridging the gap between communication and note-taking.
Aud.io - Sacha McElligott
Instagram filters for audio
What if you could swap and customize Snapchat voice filters with the ease of a video filter?
Aud.io allows users to take a video on their phone or computer and the system will automatically convert the audio from the video into a voice of their choice. Ellen, SpongeBob, Mike Tyson, their best friend. It is the first ML-based system to convert voices for entertainment purposes.
Social media is the obvious initial market. But the uses and implications are far more wide-reaching: call centers, movies, universities, video conferencing, and more.
If these people and projects sound interesting to you, check out the full list: http://pioneer.app/winners. And if you’d like to earn your place on that list… just start playing: https://pioneer.app.