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Unlocking Brand Success with Alchemer’s Brand Health Tracker
If you ask any brand marketer, they would agree—competition is fiercer than ever, and brand perception can shift in an instant. That’s where brand health tracking comes in—and Alchemer is here to make it easier than ever for you to monitor and improve your brand’s performance.

The Alchemer Brand Health Tracker is a game-changer for businesses of all sizes to stay on top of brand performance. By continuously collecting and analyzing key metrics like brand awareness, customer sentiment, and loyalty, you get a real-time snapshot of how your brand is performing – all in one place.

Why is Brand Health Tracking So Important?

Think of it as a fitness tracker for your brand. Just as checking your health stats helps you make smarter choices about your well-being, tracking brand health gives you the continuous insights to adjust your marketing strategy, fine-tune your messaging, and strengthen customer relationships.

When done right, tracking brand health allows you to:
- Stay ahead of trends: Spot emerging shifts in customer preferences and market dynamics before they become mainstream.
- React quickly: Implement real-time adjustments to campaigns or customer touchpoints to improve engagement and sentiment.
- Build long-term loyalty: Use data to nurture customer trust and elevate brand equity over time.
How Does Alchemer Help?

Alchemer’s Brand Health Tracker provides a robust solution that integrates seamlessly into your existing workflow. With customizable surveys, real-time dashboards, and easy-to-understand insights, you’ll get a deep dive into what’s working and where there’s room for growth.

In-house Team:

The Alchemer Research Solutions team brings high-level expertise to brand tracking and market research. With PhD-level researchers ensuring survey best practices, advanced programming solutions, and a dedicated project management team, we deliver high-quality, actionable insights. Our strategic partnerships provide access to over 100 million respondents worldwide, ensuring diverse and impactful data.

Whether you’re a well-known consumer brand, or a fast-growing startup, the Alchemer platform gives you the tools to continuously track, analyze, and act on customer feedback—ensuring that your brand stays aligned with market expectations and remains competitive in a rapidly changing landscape.

The Bottom Line?

If you want to future-proof your brand and create lasting connections with your customers, understanding how your brand is performing is essential. Alchemer’s Brand Health Tracker empowers you to make smarter, data-driven decisions that impact both short-term wins and long-term growth.

Ready to take your brand to the next level? Learn more about how Alchemer’s Brand Health Tracker can help you make more informed, confident marketing decisions today.

Schedule a Consultation

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18/04/2025
Art Fans of All Ages Will Definitely Enjoy The Great Sneeze

The fun game begins before an exhibition showcasing the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Just before it begins, a powerful sneeze throws everything into chaos.

A trio of friends, Kaspar, David, and Friederike, are tasked with saving the exhibition. During playing, you will solve a number of puzzles while chasing after the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog while he journeys through Friedrich’s works.

The game’s point-and-click mechanics make it accessible to players of all skill levels.

While I was somewhat familiar with all of Friedrich’s work before playing, I enjoyed getting to learn more about the artist and all of his works.

The Great Sneeze is for the iPhone and all iPad models. It’s a free download now on the App Store. There are no ads or in-app purchases.

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18/04/2025
5 Key Data and AI Innovations to Keep an Eye on in 2025

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

At the end of the first quarter in 2025, now is a good time to reflect upon the recent updates from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to their services that provide data and AI capabilities to end customers. At the end of 2024, AWS hosted 60,000+ practitioners at their annual conference, re:Invent, in Las Vegas.

Hundreds of features and services were announced during the week; I’ve combined these with the announcements that have come since and curated five key data and AI innovations that you should take notice of. Let’s dive in.

The next generation of Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker has historically been seen as the center for everything AI in AWS. Services like Amazon Glue or Elastic MapReduce have taken care of data processing tasks, with Amazon Redshift picking up the task of SQL analytics. With an increasing number of organizations focusing efforts on data and AI, all-in-one platforms such as Databricks have understandably caught the eyes of those starting their journey.

The next generation of Amazon SageMaker is AWS’s answer to these services. SageMaker Unified Studio brings together SQL analytics, data processing, AI model development and generative AI application development under one roof. This is all built on top of the foundations of another new service — SageMaker Lakehouse — with data and AI governance integrated through what previously existed standalone as Amazon DataZone.

The promise of an AWS first-party solution for customers looking to get started with, increase the capability of, or gain better control of their data and AI workloads is exciting indeed.

Amazon Bedrock Marketplace

Sticking with the theme of AI workloads, I want to highlight Amazon Bedrock Marketplace. The world of generative AI is fast-moving, and new models are being developed all the time. Through Bedrock, customers can access the most popular models on a serverless basis — only paying for the input/output tokens that they use. To do this for every specialized industry model that customers may want to access is not scalable, however.

Amazon Bedrock Marketplace is the answer to this. Previously, customers could use Amazon SageMaker JumpStart to deploy LLMs to your AWS account in a managed way; this excluded them from the Bedrock features that were being actively developed (Agents, Flows, Knowledge Bases etc.), though. With Bedrock Marketplace, customers can select from 100+ (and growing) specialized models, including those from HuggingFace and DeepSeek, deploy them to a managed endpoint and access them through the standard Bedrock APIs.

This results in a more seamless experience and makes experimenting with different models significantly easier (including customers’ own fine-tuned models).

Amazon Bedrock Data Automation

Extracting insights from unstructured data (documents, audio, images, video) is something that LLMs have proven themselves to excel at. While the potential value borne from this is enormous, setting up performant, scalable, cost-effective and secure pipelines to extract this is something that can be complicated, and customers have historically struggled with it.

In recent days — at time of writing — Amazon Bedrock Data Automation reached General Availability (GA). This service sets out to solve the exact problem I’ve just described. Let’s focus on the document use case.

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) isn’t a new use case for AI — it existed long before GenAI was all the rage. IDP can unlock huge efficiencies for organizations that deal in paper-based forms when augmenting or replacing the manual processes that are performed by humans.

With Bedrock Data Automation, the heavy-lifting of building IDP pipelines is abstracted away from customers and provided as a managed service that’s easy to consume and subsequently integrate into legacy processes and systems.

Amazon Aurora DSQL

Databases are an example of a tool where the level of complexity exposed to those leveraging it is not necessarily correlated with how complex it is behind the scenes. Often, it’s an inverse relationship where the simpler and more “magic” a database is to use, the more complex it is in the areas that are unseen.

Amazon Aurora DSQL is a great example of such a tool where it’s as straightforward to use as AWS’s other managed database services, but the level of engineering complexity to make its feature set possible is huge. Speaking of its feature set, let’s look at that.

Aurora DSQL sets out to be the service of choice for workloads that need durable, strongly consistent, active-active databases across multiple regions or availability zones. Multi-region, or multi-AZ databases, are already well established in active-passive configurations (i.e., one writer and many read-replicas); active-active is a problem that’s much harder to solve while still being performant and retaining strong consistency.

If you’re interested in reading the deep technical details of challenges that were overcome in the building of this service, I’d recommend reading Marc Brooker’s (Distinguished Engineer at AWS) series of blog posts on the topic.

When announcing the service, AWS described it as providing “virtually unlimited horizontal scaling with the flexibility to independently scale reads, writes, compute, and storage. It automatically scales to meet any workload demand without database sharding or instance upgrades. Its active-active distributed architecture is designed for 99.99% single-Region and 99.999% multi-Region availability with no single point of failure, and automated failure recovery.”

For organizations where global scale is an aspiration or requirement, building on top of a foundation of Aurora DSQL sets them up very nicely.

Expansion of zero-ETL features

AWS has been pushing the “zero-ETL” vision for a couple of years now, with the aspiration being to make moving data between purpose-built services as easy as possible. An example would be moving transactional data from a PostgreSQL database running on Amazon Aurora to a database designed for large-scale analytics like Amazon Redshift.

While there has been a relatively continuous flow of new announcements in this area, the end of 2024 and start of 2025 saw a flurry that accompanied the new AWS services released at re:Invent.

There are far too many to talk about here in any level of detail that’d provide value; to find out more about all of the available zero-ETL integrations between AWS services, please visit AWS’s dedicated zero-ETL page.

Wrapping this up, we’ve covered five areas relating to data and AI that AWS is innovating in to make building, growing and streamlining organizations easier. All of these areas are relevant to small and growing startups, as well as billion-dollar enterprises. AWS and other cloud service providers are there to abstract away the complexity and heavy lifting, leaving you to focus on building your business logic.

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18/04/2025
Resident Evil 3 Lands on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Here’s the official description of the game, which was originally released on consoles in 2020:

A series of strange disappearances have been occurring in the American Midwest within a place called Racoon City. A specialist squad of the police force known as S.T.A.R.S. has been investigating the case, and have determined that the pharmaceutical company Umbrella and their biological weapon, the T-Virus, are behind the incidents—though they’ve lost several members in the process. Jill Valentine and the other surviving S.T.A.R.S. members try to make this truth known, but find that the police department itself is under Umbrella’s sway and their reports are rejected out of hand.

However, soon reports of a grisly “cannibal virus” begin to surface, and vicious dogs begin roaming the streets. With the viral plague spreading through the town and to her very doorstep, Jill is determined to survive.

However, unbeknownst to Jill, an extremely powerful pursuer has already been dispatched to eliminate her.

While you can play the game on the touchscreen, Capcom recommends you use a controller.

 Resident Evil 3 is a free download now on the App Store. You can play a limited part of the game.

To unlock the entire game, you’ll need to make an in-app purchase. Until April 16, that’s just $9.99. You can also make a $1.99 in-app purchase to unlock all in-game rewards.

You’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro or later to play on iPhone. On the iPad, you’ll need a tablet with an M1 chip or later, or the current-generation iPad mini. For a Mac, you’ll need an M1 chip or later.

One purchase will unlock the game on all three platforms. You can also start playing on one device and pick up right where you left off on another.

Finally, the game will take up 31GB of space on your device.

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18/04/2025
Navigating Non-Profit Budget Cuts with Feedback
We hear it every day: federally funded organizations are on edge. Budgets are uncertain, valuable employees are at risk, and anxiety levels are high. 68% of non-profits receive at least some federal funding, and much of this funding is in jeopardy, forcing program staff to do even more with less.

Amid this uncertainty, it’s critical to stay relentlessly focused on your people—employees, community members, and of course, donors. Their voices matter now more than ever. Here’s why:

Feedback as a lifeline

“Everything is on the table for cuts, so it’s a scary time for all of us that are federally funded. We have no way of knowing what will or won’t be cut.”

– Program Director at a Non-profit

For non-profits where every dollar and every decision counts, feedback is a lifeline in challenging times. Continuing to push your mission forward while staying within budget requires careful listening to donors, staff, volunteers, and community members.

With public funding falling short, non-profits must rely on individual donors and private grants to close the gap. Feedback plays a crucial role in understanding what motivates donor behavior, helping you tailor outreach efforts that truly resonate. Additionally, by listening to your community, you can uncover authentic, compelling impact stories that inspire donors to give—and keep giving.

Feedback programs also help you navigate budget cuts by identifying inefficiencies, significantly reducing manual labor, and providing clear data to justify critical resource allocation decisions.

Make the right cuts and investments

“Nonprofits like us are not going to have the budget for expensive feedback solutions, but we need more than Google Forms.”

– CFO at Guided Discoveries

When facing budget reductions, it’s not just about spending less—it’s about spending smarter. The challenge for non-profits is knowing where to cut without compromising the mission. That’s where feedback becomes a strategic tool.

Clarity through employees and outside stakeholder insights helps you make confident, data-informed decisions. Rather than rely on guesswork or internal politics, organizations with effective feedback systems:
- Identify high-impact programs that deserve continued or increased investment.
- Recognize underutilized services that may be candidates for streamlining or consolidation.
- Understand what matters to your community, ensuring limited resources go toward what people value most.
- Demonstrate transparency and accountability by showing stakeholders how decisions are backed by real input.
This kind of clarity transforms budget conversations from painful guesswork into purposeful prioritization. By making the right cuts—and the right investments—you can preserve and even strengthen your impact, despite financial constraints.

To effectively stay mission-driven amidst budget cuts, nonprofits need feedback platforms that deliver those necessary insights at a manageable cost. Here’s what you should look for in a feedback platform:
- Easy survey creation: Quickly design branded, customized surveys without technical expertise.
- Diverse question types: Gather both qualitative and quantitative feedback using versatile survey options.
- Personalized experiences: Engage diverse stakeholders through multilingual support and customized survey logic.
- Seamless integrations: Connect your feedback tools with existing donor management and CRM systems for efficient analysis.
- Robust data security: Maintain trust by choosing a secure platform that protects your data and meets security standards, like HIPAA, ISO 27001, and SOC2 Type 2.
We are here to help

Times are tough right now, but you don’t have to navigate these challenges alone. At Alchemer, we’ve helped thousands of federally funded organizations collect the feedback they need to move their mission forward and at price point that doesn’t get in the way of their goals.

Here are a few resources to checkout:
- TechSoup Case Study: See how Alchemer’s survey capabilities, translation features, and HubSpot integration helped TechSoup scale their non-profit outreach program.
- Calculate Your Feedback System Costs: This 3-minute assessment will help you identify potential savings opportunities across your organization. You’ll receive a customized report showing your estimated current spending on feedback tools, potential consolidation opportunities, and projected annual savings.
Learn more about how we can support your mission by visiting our non-profit solutions page.
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18/04/2025
These Cities Have the Most Affordable Rent in the US: Report

As the cost of rent has increased by more than 50% over the last decade, some popular cities like Miami are becoming less and less affordable.

To find the most affordable cities for renting in the U.S., financial site WalletHub compared the median annual gross rent to the median household income in 182 cities, ranking them from most to least affordable.

Related: Here’s How Much a Family of 4 Needs to Live ‘Comfortably’ in Every U.S. State, According to a New Report

The most affordable city was Bismarck, North Dakota, where the median annual gross rent is around 15.3% of the median annual income. The average salary in Bismarck is $69,989 per year, according to ZipRecruiter. The average rent, meanwhile, is $1,023 per month, per Apartments.com.

The second most affordable city was Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The mean annual gross rent there costs around 16% of the median income. Cheyenne, Wyoming, came in at a close No. 3 — residents spend 16.1% of their earnings on rent in the city.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Fargo, North Dakota, rounded out the top five most affordable.

The bottom of the list featured Glendale, California (No. 178), followed by Detroit, Michigan; New Haven, Connecticut; Newark, New Jersey; and finally, in the last spot (No. 182), Miami, Florida, where residents spend 33.48% of their income on rent.

In Miami, the average salary, according to ZipRecruiter, is $55,183. The average rent is $2,950, per Zillow.

“In the most affordable cities for renters, the median cost of rent is as low as 15% of the median income, compared to more than 33% in the most expensive cities,” said WalletHub Analyst Chip Lupo. “This gives people in the least expensive cities a clear financial advantage; the money they save on rent could go toward their emergency fund or savings for future home ownership.”

View the full list of all 182 cities, here.

Related: Here Are the Best and Worst States for Retirement in 2025, According to a New Report

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18/04/2025
The 5 Best Puzzle Shooter Games

If you enjoy pinball games on your iPhone or iPad, then INKS is one you need to check out. This fun game gives you the classic pinball action with a colorful twist.

Each time your pinball hits a color on the table, ink splatters. The colors will be in different spots, with various methods of hitting them, across the different tables. This makes for a truly distinctive pinball experience and if you like the ink creation you have made, you can take a snapshot of it to save or share.

The game offers 100 different pinball tables to play on, each with its own unique design. And of course, there are challenges that are a lot harder than they look. So, do not be too distracted by the colorful canvas you are creating because you still need to complete the table.

Your goal on each of the tables is to hit all of the colors. You will continue getting more pinballs, but cannot complete the table until all colors have been splattered about. Once you succeed, your pinball will retire to its home in the center of the table.

The game is $2.99.

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18/04/2025
Here’s What Being an Entrepreneur Is Really Like — From Someone Who Did It

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Becoming an entrepreneur is one of the most exciting decisions you can make. But is it hard? Well, yes. It’s not a stroll in the park, but it’s also not impossible and can be incredibly amazing. Starting your own business is rewarding, challenging and everything in between. Here’s the honest scoop on what it’s like, from someone who’s been there over and over again.

1. You’ll wear many hats

When you’re just starting out and unless you have a huge budget, you are the CEO, the marketing team, the accountant and the janitor. Balancing all these responsibilities can be overwhelming, but it’s also an incredible opportunity to learn. It forces you out of your comfort zone and gives you the chance to truly understand the inner workings of a business. Look at it as an accelerated MBA, except the stakes are higher (and there’s no graduation ceremony).

2. Time management will be your new best friend

When you’re working for yourself, the lines between work and personal life blur, big time. Suddenly, you’re answering emails at 10 PM and brainstorming ideas while cooking dinner. The key is to prioritize and set boundaries. Learn to schedule your day like your life depends on it. Trust me, a little structure goes a long way in keeping the chaos manageable. I finally have learned how to manage my time, especially if you have multiple businesses. This is crucial to become successful.

3. You’ll face rejection

Here’s the thing about entrepreneurship — not everyone is going to believe in your vision. Investors may say no. Customers might not immediately flock to your product. This stings, but it’s also a chance to develop some thick skin. Each no you hear is one step closer to a yes. Use rejection as fuel to refine your offering and improve your pitch.

Related: You Will Get Rejected — How You Handle It Will Make You Successful. Here Are 3 Ways to Turn It Into Power.

4. Your passion will be tested

Loving what you do is important, but passion is not the whole story. There will be moments when the going gets tough and motivation wanes. What keeps most entrepreneurs moving is their why — the deeper reason they started their business. Stay connected to that purpose, and you’ll push through even the toughest days.

5. You’ll have to network (a lot)

Networking is crucial to success in any industry, but it’s especially important for entrepreneurs. Knowing the right people can open doors and provide valuable insights and advice. Attend networking events, join online communities and don’t be afraid to reach out to successful business owners for mentorship. Building a strong network can make all the difference in your entrepreneurial journey.

6. Failure is part of the process

As an entrepreneur, you will inevitably experience failure. But here’s the thing — it’s not the end of the world. In fact, it’s often just a stepping stone on the path to success. Embrace failure as an opportunity to learn.

7. Money management is crucial

Starting a business often means living on a tight budget. Maybe you’ll have to skip some dinners out or hold off on that big vacation — and that’s fine. Being mindful of where every dollar goes is essential, especially in the early stages. If you can master your finances now, you’re setting the stage for long-term success.

8. Success doesn’t happen overnight

Don’t believe the hype of overnight success. Those stories usually leave out years of hard work, failures and pivots. Building a business is a marathon, not a sprint. Celebrate the small wins along the way, because they’re what keep you going. Each step forward is progress, even if it’s not as glamorous as viral internet fame.

9. It’s the hardest job you’ll ever love

Here’s the truth. Starting your own business is hard. It’s exhausting. Sometimes, it’s lonely. But it’s also thrilling. Few things compare to the sense of accomplishment you feel when you see your idea come to life and know you’re building something that’s entirely your own. The hard work and sacrifices will be worth it when you’re doing what you love every day. So keep pushing, stay focused and never lose sight of why you started this journey in the first place. Your passion will see you through the toughest of times and lead you to success. Let rejection only fuel your determination to refine your offering and improve your pitch. The road to success is not easy, but it’s worth it in the end.

10. You must keep learning and evolving to succeed

Finally, remember that starting a business is an ongoing process. You’ll never stop learning and growing as an entrepreneur. Stay open to new ideas and opportunities, continuously seek out knowledge and resources to improve your skills, and be willing to adapt and evolve with the ever-changing market and industry. Embracing growth and constantly striving for improvement will help you stay ahead of the game and ensure long-term success for your business.

Related: 10 Ways Continuous Learning Can Take You From a Good Leader to a Great One

Final thoughts

I have even thought about giving up at times, but I somehow still keep going, and I am so happy that I’ve stuck with it. If you’re up for the challenge, becoming an entrepreneur can be the most rewarding thing you’ll ever do. It’s not always easy, but the sense of accomplishment, independence and possibility makes it worthwhile. Are you ready to take the leap? Because, trust me, there’s nothing quite like it.

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17/04/2025
Why an omnichannel approach to customer feedback is critical for tech companies
For tech companies, customer feedback is an always-on faucet—flowing through surveys, reviews, in-product interactions, and website engagement. The problem? This feedback is often scattered across different channels, making it hard to piece together a cohesive picture of what customers really think and feel.

The key to overcoming these challenges? An omnichannel feedback strategy that consolidates all customer touchpoints into one comprehensive view, allowing teams to make informed, data-driven decisions that truly reflect customer needs and sentiments.

Here are three reasons why an omnichannel approach is the right one for software and technology companies:

This post references our latest e-guide, “The Software Industry’s Guide to Collecting Customer Feedback”. You can read the full (and free) e-guide, here!

1. See a complete view of the customer journey

In the software and tech industry, customers don’t interact with your company in a straight line. They might begin with an online search, move to reading app reviews, engage with your product through an in-app feature, and finalize their decision through a support chat or social media conversation.

Omnichannel feedback allows tech companies to capture insights from every interaction, creating a 360-degree view of the customer journey. In fact, 73% of customers use multiple channels throughout their entire purchasing journey, and that’s something software companies can’t afford to ignore.

A robust understanding of customer experience enables tech companies to identify friction points, understand user preferences, and deliver highly personalized experiences at every stage of their customer journey.

2. Resolve customer issues faster

Omnichannel feedback isn’t just about gathering insights; it’s about responding to them quickly. Rather than waiting for formal complaints to come in, tech companies can use real-time feedback from social media, app reviews, NPS responses, and other sources to spot issues as they arise. This allows them to identify pain points in the user experience before they escalate into bigger problems.

By addressing issues proactively, software companies can prevent negative customer experiences from damaging their reputation, ensuring customer satisfaction stays high. Fast issue resolution also strengthens your brand’s image as a responsive, customer-centric company.

3. Find insights that empower CX improvements

Today’s customers expect to feel heard, no matter where or how they choose to interact with your brand. Whether they’re submitting feedback via a support chat, posting about their experience on social media, or engaging with your app, it’s essential to collect feedback from all those touchpoints to gain a broader, more nuanced view of their needs.

For example, a software company that receives consistent in-app feedback about a specific feature, such as navigation issues within their mobile app, can act swiftly to improve it. Let’s say users report difficulty accessing certain functions like settings or support. By collecting detailed feedback through surveys or targeted prompts, as well as examining usage data, product teams can directly address these issues in the next update.

Acting on feedback in a timely manner shows customers that their opinions are valued and leads to increased trust, loyalty, and retention. Over time, this proactive approach translates to better customer experiences and a higher lifetime value.

Continue reading

Don’t let limited insights hold you back. Unlock the full potential of customer feedback! Download our new e-guide, “The Software Industry’s Guide to Collecting Customer Feedback”.

In this guide we:
- Dive into the challenges of managing feedback across multiple channels and how an omnichannel approach brings everything together.
- Showcase real-world examples of how tech companies are leveraging customer feedback to drive product innovation, boost retention, and optimize digital experiences.
- Highlight key features to look for in a customer feedback platform, including integration capabilities, ease of use, and real-time insights.
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17/04/2025
EarthSnap Brings Nature into Focus as You Scan, Identify, and Learn Instantly

That’s largely because of the welcoming EarthSnappers Community. This feature of EarthSnap allows you to share their discoveries, as well as engage with fellow users on where to find the species or plant you’re searching for. Thanks to this the database of information at your fingertips is growing day by day as well.

There’s the chance to save and organize your personal discoveries in a digital library too, and even cross-platform accessibility to make looking at these simple across mobile and desktop.

With over 15 million visitors to Earth.com every month there’s clearly a massive hunger for AI driven tools to help people embrace exploration of the natural world around them.

So make sure you get involved by downloading EarthSnap now via iOS and Android. There’s the app’s official site here too.

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17/04/2025