Robot written newsletters, AR that lets you lose weight, and turning air into water (seriously).

This week we’re talking about Ludlow.io & how it helped make this newsletter, a Microsoft patent helping people diet, AR giving surgeons x-ray vision, a new solar-powered device converting air to water, and a 21st century cassette player.

Introducing . 

Ludlow
This topical newsletter is through Ludlow.io, an internal project we’ve been working on at SWARM. Still in beta, Ludlow quickly pulls in articles based on subjects your audience is interested in, and automatically formats them into a newsletter.

AR .

Microsoft’s new patent helps you diet
How do you merge Augmented Reality with dieting?
Microsoft has a clue. Imagine grabbing a bag of skittles, and then your AR smart glasses project nutritional info over that bag. Seeing “43 grams of sugar” floating in the air may make you go ‘Uh, no thanks.’ So, Microsoft recently secured a patent to do just that.
So, how do the glasses identify the food?, or confirm it’s you eating it? An embedded camera recognizes the food, and an audio receiver confirms it’s you from your audible chewing. Pretty sweet stuff. The question is, will they end up more in the Google Glass or Spectacles territory…

More AR .

AR for surgical ‘x-ray vision’⚕️
The more information the better. A new augmented reality platform from Cambridge Consultants in Boston can build a 3D image of the inside of a patient’s body from MRI and CT scans. The different organs are color-coded by software and can be virtually tagged with notes for use by other doctors. It’s also interactive. If a surgeon wants to look behind a visually obstructed organ, they can simply tap the obstructing organ to have it disappear.
The platform is being considered for use in real surgeries. Hypothetically, a surgeon could let the AR platform guide them in real-time. This could reduce risk during keyhole surgeries, and potentially result in fewer incisions made solely for visual access. When? While they are testing on mannequins currently, real operations with this type of AR could be a few years to decades away.

SUSTAINABILITY .

New device converts air to 🚰
This is truly mind-blowing. A new ‘water harvester’ uses a sponge-like material to convert air into water. This includes dry, low humidity air. The device can convert 3 liters of water a day, more than the daily recommended average of 2 liters. Yes, this could provide relief to billions of people, also in the driest areas of the world.
To best explain how, here’s a direct quote, “The new water harvester is made of metal organic framework crystals pressed into a thin sheet of copper metal and placed between a solar absorber and a condenser plate.” Clearly, a collaborative effort between researchers at University of California Berkeley and MIT. There are hurdles towards making the water harvesters more widely manufactured, such as the cost of the materials, but the researchers have already identified cheaper alternatives that could fulfill the same purpose. If this was a Kickstarter, it would be probably the most successful, ever.
As always, check out our blog for more. That’s it for this week.✌️

A letter to friends: we’re stoked to introduce Ludlow.io!

Hi friends,

We’ve gotten a ton of positive feedback about our weekly newsletter (Ludlow.io), and we thought we’d share our story – why we created one, how we decided to revamp it, and then the exciting stuff. We want to thank you for all your support (you guys are awesome, really).

As some of you know, we’re a modest sized team here in NYC. Bootstrapped with little time to devote to outbound marketing. Knowing full well the benefits of brand building, we looked at ways to maximize this aspect of our marketing funnel while minimizing the time we would allot to it. Questions were, how do we show our friends, audience, and potential customers that our team is passionate about tech, that we have funny, smart dialogues on things like machine learning, and that we have real insight on the latest product news? Newsletters? We already had a list of 1600 emails. The question was: where do we source the material?

“Look at our Slack channels,” one of our team members, Alex Hartwell, suggested. Slack showcased our quirky team culture, and it was the platform we were already engaged with, meaning we didn’t have to spend more time curating content. So we thought: why not share the content we already discuss in Slack in a weekly newsletter?

So here we are 8 months in.

We’ve grown our subscriber list almost two-fold, from 1600 to 3,000. Our website traffic has increased drastically, and the feedback from good friends and clients has been overwhelmingly positive.

We tested our assumption that if we used curated content from Slack in a newsletter then this would 1. save us time and 2. provide value for our audience. We decided to build our own platform that connects Slack to Mailchimp, so that other small teams can easily create newsletters with this simple strategy.

Long story short… after heavy brainstorming and sleepless nights coding, we are proud to announce that our idea is a reality: Ludlow.io. Ludlow takes content your team is sharing on Slack and beautifully arranges it for you to send out as a Mailchimp newsletter. The whole process takes no more than 5 minutes on mobile or web.

Ludlow is a real passion project for us, and we’re excited to announce that Ludlow is available in early beta. Click here to sign up for early access! We’re excited to see how Ludlow.io can help your team, so sign up, stay tuned as we keep building.

All the best,

Team Ludlow @SWARM
As always, check out our blog for more. That’s it for this week. ✌️
— This newsletter was made with Ludlow.io —