We're just beginning to build computers that function less along the lines of rigid trains of binary bits flashing along the rigid roadways of silicon chips and more like the soup of simultaneous electrical sparks that light up our brains. This is, according to the chaps at IBM, the beginning of the age of cognitive computing, and Big Blue is concerned that our existing programming tools just aren't up to the task. So they built something that is: Corelet programming.

Instead of blindly following linear programs, IBM is certain that our next-gen computers will instead take a look at reams of data and think about it, reasoning meaning out of the mass and also from interactions with people. This form of cognitive computing is more akin to how human brains work, and will involve a radical rethink of every bit of computer tech from the silicon through storage to the human-computer interfaces. So the company's making devices that work like hardware models of the neurons, synapses, and signaling mechanisms of our brains. A whole new language is needed to make this sort of computer compute the tasks we would like it to contemplate.

While IBM's engineer John Backus created FORTRAN as a critical early programming language in what IBM says was the "programmable" era, the company says its idea for the cognitive computing future is all about the "corelet" model.

A corelet is a pre-designed code building bloc that's compatible with cognitive computing. Where a pre-designed old-fashioned piece of code of almost any language is designed, ultimately, to get a CPU to shuffle some numbers through the right kind of math, a "corelet" building block is designed to get the parts of a neurosynaptic processor core to do what you want. That is to make synthetic neurons fire, store memory in synapse-like modes, and communicate to other neural nodes. But because thinking about computing on this scale would make programming in assembly code look like child's play, each corelet in IBM's model is a black box: All that's exposed for the programmer are the external inputs and outputs.

Stick enough corelets together, IBM suggests, and like stacking individual Lego bricks into a completed model, the corelet software can achieve tasks that are much bigger than the sum of its parts. Clumps of corelets could also be created that peform certain tasks, and these could then be aggregated to create a program that can perform some really complex tasks.

IBM thinks this sort of programming may be a relatively low-effort task and could even be used by non-experts to create some sophisticated cognitive computing applications. This is, of course, part of the dream of cognitive computing because it really has the potential to change folks' everyday lives: Asking your home (cognitive) PC to calculate a more efficient route to work is likely to be much easier using tools like this than it would be to try to code that math in traditional C, FORTRAN, Python, or whatever.

Corelet programs should, in theory, be much more efficient at solving problems like real-world image detection in real time--the sort of tech that would make future Google Glass-like headsets even more useful--or for diagnosing medical conditions from a plethora of medical data gathered about a particular person.

Heading up this effort by IBM's SyNAPSE team is Dharmendra S. Modha. Depending on the success of IBM's cuture computing efforts and the adoption of Corelet thinking, Modha's name may be one that programmers remember for quite some time.

Are you excited about the idea of programming a neuron-like computer, something that's on the cusp of delivering sci-fi-like computer power? Or is this just another smart "AI" language like Lisp?

[Chalk Outlines: Gunnar Pippel via Shutterstock]

It’s the summer of the Pandora killers. Google kicked things off in May with the launch of its All Access streaming service and Internet radio bolt-on. A month later, its chief competitor let out a resounding “me too!” as Apple peeled the wrapper off of its long-rumored iTunes Radio. Today, music subscription startup Rdio unveiled their own personalized Internet radio feature in a bid to win over a chunk of Pandora’s users. For this ever-growing army of would-be Pandora killers, upending the Internet radio pioneer won’t be as easy as it looks.

Rdio’s new personalized and artist-based stations are powered by the EchoNest’s music intelligence API. It’s the same core technology behind Spotify’s built-in radio feature (not to mention countless other music discovery apps) and thus the results have a familiar feel. Oh, you like that band? Here, you might also like these guys.

What stands to set these stations apart from Spotify’s, however, is Rdio’s superior social layer. Since day one, Rdio has let users follow each other and has baked those relationships pretty firmly into how their product works. The new radio feature is no exception: In addition to stations based on my collection and favorite songs, Rdio lets me tune into stations based on my friends’ preferences as well. It also pulls in data about your musical preferences from Twitter and Facebook.

This heavy social focus is smart. Without it, Rdio’s Internet radio would function much like many of the other Pandora wannabes, all of whom face the same uphill battle: When it comes to music discovery, Pandora’s approach is hard to emulate. The human-powered musicological data from the company’s Music Genome Project is now combined with trillions of data points on the behavior of millions of listeners, collected over the course of eight years. The now finely tuned process is the reason Pandora has 70 million listeners, who collectively hear more than 1.3 billion hours of music in a single month. And it’s why, year over year, each of those metrics climbs northward.

“We've heard about Pandora killers for years,” Pandora chief data scientist Eric Bieschke told me. “The only thing we do is figure out the best music to play for people. None of these other competitors have that singular focus that they drive everything towards like we do.”

Bieschke has a point. A company that puts all of their energy into one thing is probably going to do that thing better than a company for whom that thing is just another feature. As of right now, the difference between Pandora and most of its challengers is evident after half an afternoon of playback.

Rdio’s Secret Weapon: The Familiarity Slider

Rdio knows that competing with Pandora is no simple task. That's why it wove all that social data in so tightly. Another feature that the company hopes will set it apart is the ability to adjust how familiar each station sounds. Pandora users sometimes complain about the amount of repetition they hear on personalized stations, something the company is tweaking. Rdio preempts that problem by giving users a slider on the radio interface with two extremes: familiar and adventurous.

For Rdio, the point may be less to cripple Pandora and more to lure a handful of its listeners to its own service, whose core purpose--all-you-can-stream music subscription--is different from that of Pandora's. This move is also about trying to stay ahead of Spotify, a direct competitor which launched a similar radio feature last summer.

It's worth noting one thing most Pandora competitors have in common: They're new. Aside from Slacker Radio, which launched in 2007, most of the services gunning for Pandora's addicted listeners these days are things that launched within the last year or so. One of Pandora's biggest assets, besides its focus and unique algorithmic approach, is time. It's been around for almost a decade and has learned a lot about its users along the way.

Insofar as these newer services take a crack at smart, personalized Internet radio of the sort Pandora pioneered, they all have a long way to go. They also each have their own potential advantages: Spotify's subscription marketshare and quickly improving discovery features. Google's machine listening power and web-crawling semantic analysis potential. iTunes Radio's immediate integration on millions of smartphones and tablets. Rdio's social layer and superior UI.

Each of these products is just getting started. As time passes, they'll each get smarter and better in their own ways--just as Pandora did. In the meantime, we imagine Pandora is keeping a close eye on each of them.

Why We’re Tracking The Rebirth Of Radio

What will radio look like in 25 years? Advances in time travel being as stubbornly slow as they are, a precise answer will require us to wait. But in 2013, we’re starting to see some clues. Just as has already happened with publishing, music, and now TV, the Internet and related technologies are poised to forever change the mere concept of what we once knew as “radio.”

Previous Updates

Pandora Radio: 2013 Is Your Make Or Break Year

June 20, 2013

For Pandora, the competitive terrain has never looked rougher. In the last month, the company was joined by two gigantic, notoriously disruptive competitors: Google and Apple. As part of its All Access music subscription service, Google launched a personalized radio feature that mimics Pandora's core functionality. A few weeks later, Apple unveiled iTunes Radio, a similarly Pandora-esque offering that happens to sit atop the world's biggest digital music store.

These new entrants come after a prior trickle of new Internet radio products, many of which are powered by the Echo Nest's music intelligence API. Most notably, Spotify Radio went live last year, bringing its own flavor of the artist-based, thumbs-up/thumbs-down Internet radio Pandora has long been known for. Similar offerings have come from Rdio, iHeartRadio, and a growing list of others.

“Anyone that offers radio we view as competition. There's yet to be a service that's been launched that's had any impact on our growth,” cofounder Tim Westergren told me in an interview late last year. In April 2013, 70.1 million active Pandora users logged 1.31 billion listener hours in just one month. That’s an increase of 24 percent over the same time period last year.

If you’re unacquainted, Pandora utilizes a complex algorithm that is based heavily on human intelligence. Unlike many other music recommendation technologies, Pandora eschews things like machine listening in favor of paying music experts with advanced degrees to sit down, listen to music, and map the “genome” using hundreds of different musical criteria, which can get very granular and specific. On top of that, years of user feedback (tapping the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons) have injected nuance and deeper intelligence into Pandora’s algorithm. This Music Genome Project, as it’s called, was unlike anything the world had seen when it first hatched in 2000.

Much has changed since then.

Its unique intellectual property is a big part of what has kept Pandora at the head of the Internet radio game. To power their offerings, products like iTunes Radio, Google Play All Access Radio, Spotify Radio and the other Echo Nest-fueled music discovery services all use different technical schemes for generating recommendations and playlists. Each has its own blend of human and machine intelligence. Obviously none are perfect, but as we’ve written on this site, iTunes Radio is looking pretty good.

For Pandora, the question is whether the secret sauce behind these other products can produce an experience that’s as good as (if not better than) what Pandora has been providing for years. The answer may vary wildly between casual listeners and hard-core music nerds of the type employed by Pandora to describe each tone, rhythm, and guitar effect in a Beatles song.

Meanwhile, Pandora faces rising tensions over artist royalty rates. The company’s attempts to have these rates (which it argues are unfair and onerous) lowered via congressional action have stalled. Last week, the company bought its own terrestrial radio station in South Dakota in an attempt to redefine the rules by which it’s required to pay out licensing fees to copyright owners. Calling the move a “stunt,” music royalty collector BMI promptly sued Pandora.

The contentious licensing debate will undoubtedly continue until some kind of middle ground is reached--or one of the parties caves in. If Pandora throws in the towel, it could mean dramatic changes for the users of the service, who are now limited to 40 hours of free listening per month thanks to the royalty costs. In time, it could mean an end to Internet radio as we know it today.

Radio’s evolution has been slowly underway for some time. Pandora Radio is now nearly a decade old and today faces its fiercest competition ever. Music itself has been radically democratized, from its composition and creation all the way to the way people find and enjoy it. This year, we’ll see more change in the in digital music subscription and Internet radio markets than we’ve seen in the last five years combined. Meanwhile, companies like Stitcher Radio, SoundCloud and NPR are rethinking the way that spoken word audio content is delivered to listeners in a hyper-connected world.

Make no mistake about it: FM radio is still incredibly popular. In fact, it’s unlikely to ever fully disappear (The Internet is great, but have you ever heard of radio waves going down?).

Instead, what we’re seeing a slow erosion in the number of listening hours people spend with terrestrial radio. According the latest research from NPD, 23% of the average weekly listening time among 13-35 year olds is spent with online services, an increase of 17% over last year (which saw double-digit growth of its own) and only one percentage point lower than AM/FM radio.

Fueling this somewhat sudden shift is the rapid uptake of always-connected mobile devices, which allow consumers to embed streaming services and Internet radio stations ever more deeply into their lives. Smartphone penetration will continue to spread while the radio programmers of the future begin stake out their next frontier: your car.

The growth of Internet radio is only going to continue as younger generations of connected and mobile device-toting media consumers come of age. You know those toddlers you see staring into iPads? They’ll be about as familiar with old-fashioned radio dials as they’ll be with the morning edition of the daily newspaper.

Not only are new entrants getting in on the radio game, but traditional players are teaming up technology companies or building out their own development resources to stay relevant in an age when the word “Radio” is finding its way into major product launch announcements from the likes of Google, Apple, Spotify and whoever’s next. In other words, even the parts of traditional radio that survive the Internet’s sophisticated onslaught will work and sound differently than they do today.

So, who’s shaping this future? Which developers are crafting the smartest solutions? What does it mean when the likes of Google and Apple join the fray? How does online music discovery work? We think these questions (and many more) make this broader story ripe for the Co.Labs news-tracking treatment. Every now and then, we’ll branch off of this stub to take a deeper dive into what developers are building and precisely which technologies are upending the long-familiar concept of what we call “radio.”

[Image: Flickr user Roland Tanglao]

Python is one of the most popular programming languages today, powering a ton of the technology we all use every day. It has a robust community and nonprofit foundation behind it, the Python Software Foundation. But like any segment of the tech sector, Python has struggled to build a diverse base of coders.

What makes the Python community different is its concerted effort to recruit and welcome people who are underrepresented in tech. From their detailed codes of conduct, to the plethora of community outreach groups, to the workshops they hold at their annual conference PyCon--which starts today--the Python community is in many ways a beacon of what the tech world should aspire to.

Diana Clarke attended her first PyCon in 2010 and helped start PyCon Canada in 2012. She chaired the first PyCon Canada last year; the second annual PyCon Canada is underway now through August 13. The Python community responded so well to her initiative in founding PyCon Canada that she co-chaired PyCon USA 2013 and has been made chair of PyCon USA 2014. Clarke has been working as a developer for over a decade, working with (predictably) Python as well as a host of other tools and frameworks.

How did you first get into software development?

I feel incredibly lucky to have discovered computing by chance during university. I was two years into a general science degree when I took my first computing science class. It was a required course, and not something I would have elected to take. Up to that point, I had worked really hard to get pretty average grades. The computing classes were different--less memorizing, more doing, building, creating, problem solving. I was doing really well for the first time in university, and almost immediately it started opening doors. Instead of working as a receptionist, cashier, or waitress, I was teaching undergraduate computer science labs, marking exams for my professors, and working at the university IT help desk. All of those jobs afforded me more money and flexibility than the stereotypically female jobs I had held in the past.

What kinds of support structures are in place within the Python community, beyond the PyCons, for women?

There are so many! Where do I start?

PyLadies is one of the most interesting and promising initiatives to come out of the Python community in recent years with respect to outreach for women. There are PyLadies chapters around the world teaching women Python, mentoring them through conference talk submissions, and hosting all sorts of women-focused Python events. They provide a ton of resources online to help others kick-start their own chapters and outreach events.

The Boston Python user group is another great community success story. It's the world's largest local Python user group. They host the "Boston Python Workshops for women and their friends," which is an introductory programming pipeline that has brought hundreds of women into the local Python community and is being replicated in cities across the U.S. The organizers, Jessica McKellar and Ned Batchelder are absolutely amazing educators and members of the Python community.

The GNOME Outreach Program for Women is something I really wanted to participate in this year, but there's only so much time in a day. It's like Google Summer of Code, but open to women that aren't necessarily still students. I've always thought that GSOC should stand for "Google Sabbatical of Code" instead, and that's exactly what the Outreach Program for Women internships are. A number of the projects were Python-based this year and all of them were open source. Such a fantastic initiative!

Do you think the Python community is especially welcoming or supportive of women compared to other development communities, either FOSS or corporate?

It's hard to comment on other communities from the outside, nor would I want to undermine their outreach efforts by focusing on isolated incidents. That said, I do think the Python community is particularly welcoming to women.

The Python community was one of the first communities to adopt conference and community codes of conducts as well as incident guidelines that set the tone for safe and inclusive environments.

The Python community is also backed by a mature nonprofit corporation, the Python Software Foundation, that funds a wide range of outreach and financial aid initiatives. The PSF awarded $100,000 in financial aid for PyCon U.S. 2013 alone. Much of that financial aid went to directly supporting diversity at the conference.

PyCon provides booths in the exhibit hall, free of charge, to open source and community groups such as PyLadies and Open Hatch. These are booths alongside our top corporate sponsors like Google and Facebook so they provide high visibility and reach for those groups.

The Python Software foundation funded a PyLadies lunch this year during PyCon that was so well attended people ended up sitting on the floor and standing in the back. The PSF also ran a charity auction that raised $10,000 with all proceeds going to PyLadies. The Python community is invested in the success of groups like PyLadies, and it really shows.

Less formally, the community as a whole is incredibly supportive of the various outreach initiatives. The bigger names in our community make a point of retweeting outreach meet-ups, calls for fundraising, diversity grant opportunities, etc. Not only do those big names set the tone and lead by example, but their support and influence enables these groups to reach their goals.

I’ve been seeing people talk about how this is a “curated” conference. What exactly does that mean and how is it at play in the current PyCon?

Last year's PyCon Canada was the first. As such, we couldn't rely on a proven track record to collect a sufficient number of talk proposals, attract sponsors, and drive attendance, so we deviated a bit from the traditional PyCon model of putting out a call for proposals, having a large review committee vote on the submitted talks, and announcing the selected talks months down the road. Nor did we have months; PyCon Canada was organized in a short four months.

Instead, the PyCon Canada team held multiple brainstorming session, reached out to the community for suggestions, and tapped our connections higher up in academia to come up with a wish list of speakers we wanted to see at PyCon Canada, and approached them directly about being featured speakers. Each year those featured speakers and keynotes comprise about 10 of the talk slots, with the remaining slots going to those that submitted a talk proposal for review by the talk selection committee.

We announced those featured speakers, one at a time, during the weeks leading up to PyCon Canada. This enabled us to generate the buzz required to draw in the necessary sponsors and attendees. It also allowed us to “curate” the speaker list and set a tone of diversity in both speakers and topics. Like PyCon U.S., we also put a significant amount of effort into encouraging women to submit talk proposals. Being able to show them a "featured speakers" list that already included incredible women from our community, reassured them that we weren't reaching out to them just because we needed a token female speaker. They weren't being straddled with the burden of being the only female speaker and the pressure of representing all women in computing.

That was some of our most frequent feedback from PyCon Canada. Over and over again, I heard people say things like, "That didn't feel like a tech conference. There were way more talks by women than usual, and none of them were token!" And really, none of them were token. From Bonnie King, a Linux sysadmin, who demoed a Geiger counter she built with a Raspberry Pi, to Elizabeth Leddy who gave a bold and hilarious behind-the-scenes account of managing an open source team, and Jessica McKellar whose opening keynote blew the room away, I am immensely proud of the lineups that the PyCon Canada team has been able to put together.

Our $500 diversity grants contributed to this atmosphere as well, as did the makeup of our board, team of organizers, and volunteers. Not only were there more women speaking, there were more women in the audience, women on stage introducing the speakers, women doing A/V, female volunteers running the green room and registration desk. Our board consisted of two women and one man, with yet more women on the organizing and talk selection committees. Our logo was designed by a woman. The skyline you see on the current PyCon Canada site was created by a woman. And I'm sure I'm forgetting a few more things like that.

It seems like the curated approach worked, as the featured speakers at the current PyCon Canada is exactly half women. How did you accomplish that?

We didn't set out to have more female featured speakers than male; there wasn't a quota we were trying to meet. What we did do is challenge our assumptions and ask difficult questions each step of the way. Being female doesn't make me inherently immune to gender bias and stereotypes. I'm a product of the same culture and environment. I had to ask myself the same difficult questions: "Why is it that the list of people I just suggested contains no women?" As a group we asked ourselves those kinds of questions as we built our speakers wish list, reached out to advisers, and approached people to volunteer for the various committees.

And then we did the hard work required to shift that bias. Because really there's no easy way around this one. Women simply don't submit talks to technical conferences at the same rate men do, even after accounting for the industry-wide gender gap in general. Opening a call for proposals, and then simply hoping a few women will submit talks is a surefire way to ensure your lineup will be almost 100% male. PyCon U.S. knows this, and spends a great deal of time reaching out to women individually and encouraging them to submit proposals. There's no guarantee that those proposals will get accepted, but at least you have a significant number of proposals from women in the funnel. Hours and hours were spent researching noteworthy women in computing. We watched their talks, solicited their feedback, asked them for potential leads, and then repeated the process until we were satisfied.

Obviously PyCon 2013 was in the news a lot recently with the episode of male attendees making inappropriate sexual jokes in the audience of a plenary. How has the leadership of PyCon responded to that incident and tried to create a better atmosphere at future PyCons?

What we're planning for 2014 are the same things we've been doing for several years, the same things that have been working to create an atmosphere that is second to none when it comes to technical conferences of this size. We'll continue to engage the partners we've worked with over the last few years, such as PyLadies and The Ada Initiative; two groups who have experienced strong growth in the last year. We'll continue to host an environment that is inclusive of all types of people, from all types of places, with all levels of experience, by sharing our Call for Proposals with everyone, and making sure our announcements make their way to as many places as possible. We'll continue our financial aid program to make the conference a possibility for as many people as we can help.

Without the years of effort by our organizers to foster this inclusive environment and atmosphere, and without the partnerships and sponsorships we've established throughout that time, PyCon would be a fraction of what it is today. We're looking forward to bringing another world-class event to Montreal in 2014.

In my own reporting for Co.Labs I found that some of the most technical job titles (network engineer, senior software developer, systems administrator) can be as low as 10% female. What are your thoughts, more generally, on why the technology sector has such a huge gender gap?

I don't think women are opting out, I think they simply aren't being exposed to computing at crucial milestones. It's hard to opt out of something you don't even know exists. I can only speak for myself: I didn't even know programming existed before I took my first computing science class in university. And I immediately fell in love with it. Immediately.

That there were few women alongside me in the workforce, upon graduation, wasn't really a shock. They weren't there to begin with. I was often the only woman in any given computing science lecture hall. To expect that that number would magically change as I entered the workforce, would have been delusional.

But I think we're making progress, especially with initiatives like the Young Coders workshops we hold during PyCon to expose children to computing at those crucial milestones. I think the entire tech community has had ample opportunity to learn, grow, and move past some of the 101 conversations about gender. I'd like to think we're now in the position to take some of these lessons learned and tackle the outstanding issues like class and race. The momentum behind Black Girls Code at the moment is incredibly inspiring.

[Image: Flickr user Paris Buttfield-Addison]

Today’s News Scrum Discussion: "These Silicon Valley Titans Think You Probably Shouldn’t Start a Company," by Marcus Wohlsen on Wired.

This comment by Dustin Moskovitz is a bunch of bullshit:

According to Moskovitz, the biggest problem in Silicon Valley culture is the fantasy that entrepreneurship is something you aspire to, in and of itself. “It’s total nonsense,” Moskovitz said. “I’m not really sure where it comes from, but every time I meet someone who says ‘I really want to be an entrepreneur’ but has no idea what they want to do, I really just think: ‘This person is totally aimless.’”

There’s nothing aimless about the assertion that you want to work for yourself. In his book Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham defines a startup founder--I’m paraphrasing here--as someone who wants to move faster than an existing organization is equipped to move. In other words, he explains, startup founders are focused on working at high velocity, or the measurement of productivity over time. Instead of earning (say) $2 million over the course of 30 years at a full-time job, they want to make the same amount in (say) two or three years.

The most appealing way to work at high velocity, for most people, is to start their own venture. College kids who aspire towards entrepreneurship are simply expressing a need to work hard on something they are passionate about and make progress quickly, rather than giving over 30 years of their lives before retirement. Is it so bad to aspire to an exciting career where you’re in control? I don’t think it’s aimless at all. -- Chris Dannen

I have to disagree with Chris on this one. The glamorization of entrepreneurship, and tech startups in particular, is a problem for the whole industry. 10 years ago when I came to Amsterdam to work for a Dutch startup, I barely knew what that was. The idea of starting your own company was just not part of the culture in Europe even among developers. Now you get hundreds of people turning up for Hackers and Founders Amsterdam, which is not a problem in itself, but more and more of those people are “startup wannabes” rather than people with serious technical or business skills or a real drive to create something meaningful. They just want to put “founder” on their business cards. When people trained as lawyers are aspiring to start companies, you know there’s a gold rush of some kind going on.

One of my favorite entrepreneurs is the late Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop and a true business revolutionary. She said “I often get asked to talk about entrepreneurship--even by hallowed institutions like Harvard and Stanford--but I’m not all convinced it is a subject you can teach. How do you teach obsession, because more often than not it’s obsessions that drive an entrepreneur’s vision?” This ties in exactly with Moskovitz’s view that you should not start a company unless there is no other way to implement your idea.

Only if no one else has started to build that thing should someone head down the startup path: “That should be almost the only way that entrepreneurs come into existence,” Moskovitz said. “And that’s not what’s happening.”

I can’t put it much better than Ciara. She wins this scrum. The only thing I’ll say is that Chris is nitpicking here. Moskovitz isn’t saying people shouldn’t pursue entrepreneurship, he’s saying they should see it as a means to an end they want to achieve rather than an end in and of itself. In fact, right after the passage Chris quotes, Wohlsen summarizes:

You shouldn’t want to start a company just for the sake of starting a company, he said. You should want to start a company because you believe in an idea.

And he’s right. Too many startups are solutions in search of problems. Given the quote Ciara cites, I’m sure Moskovitz would agree with Chris and Graham that if you believe you can solve a pressing problem faster and better than existing organizations, you should start a company rather than joining one.

But it’s nonsense to throw out Moskovitz’s level-headed argument that it can, at times, be better to come together to solve a problem than to go it alone. After all, the core of entrepreneurship is about solving problems as efficiently as possible. We shouldn’t blind ourselves to the fact that sometimes the most efficient way forward is to combine efforts just because we love the idea of working for ourselves. -- Gabe Stein

In today’s news scrum, we all gang up on our editor and get fired. I basically agree with Ciara and Gabe on this. The best businesses are the ones that genuinely improve some part of our everyday lives, not ones that try to manufacture a need--what Gabe calls “solutions in search of problems.” Consequently, if you’re starting a tech company, you really need to believe in what you’re doing and not just be out there to make a buck.

In the interest of rounding things out, I will criticize one thing Moskovitz said:

But Moskovitz told the crowd not to be fooled by Valley success stories into thinking startups are the best way to maximize their financial returns. The 100th engineer at Facebook, he said, made “way more money” than 99 percent of startup entrepreneurs ever will.

That’s probably very true, but it’s positing two non-options against each other: get rich by founding a company and get bought out/go public or by being the 100th engineer at a Facebook or Google. The truth is very few people are going to get there and make the kajillions of dollars they’re after, on either route. Which brings me back to why if you start a company you should believe in it--because chances are it’s not going to make you rich, so that belief may be all you’ve got. -- Jay Cassano

I'm going to have to go along with the majority here, because Moskovitz's statements really hit home with me. I'm what I would call a "reluctant entrepreneur" right now. Earlier this year I started a company--and spent tons of my own savings to do so--to prototype and bring to market a piece of health hardware I've always wanted to exist, but one that no one has ever made. I decided I had waited long enough, and if I want to see it, it's up to me.

Becoming a reluctant entrepreneur has been been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life. But, it's also been a time- and money-consuming headache like you would not believe. I would never advise anyone else to do the same unless they were doing it for the reasons I am, which Moskovitz so eloquently stated:

“It’s much better to start with: ‘I really want to manifest this. I want to bring this into the world.’”

For me, that journey will either end with riches or with one working prototype that I'll be able to use all for myself. Either way, I'll be glad I did it. If you can't say the same about your idea, don't do it. It's not worth the time and money. -- Michael Grothaus

I’ve only got $0.02 to offer, and four minutes to express it. As Gabe cited:

You shouldn’t want to start a company just for the sake of starting a company. You should want to start a company because you believe in an idea.

“You shouldn’t start a company because you want to get rich,” is another way to put this.

Because, as Jay and Michael have articulately put it, you probably won’t. The only reason obsessive entrepreneurism makes sense is if you want to create something you believe in. Otherwise, aspiring to be an entrepreneur is like saying you’re a “money-hungry amateur.” As I see it, you can only be an entrepreneur--or a writer--about something. -- Taylor Beck

[Image: Flickr user Joel Kramer]

Today’s robots use basic infrared sensors to navigate around obstacles (think Roomba), but tomorrow’s contraptions will have far better sensory organs, inspired by the best examples in nature. Here’s a look at the weird experiments harnessing insects, animals and fungi that are already producing fascinating solutions for the next generation of robots to better sense, navigate, and interact with the world.

Oozing Efficiency

Like your average teenager, slime mold avoids light and has a remarkable ability to find the fastest route to food--all without a brain. Scientists at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory have hooked yellow slime mold to a humanoid robot head and used its electrical sensory pulses (going to food or away from light) to control the robot’s facial expressions:

Not a single creature, but a conglomerate blob of identical unicellular organisms, yellow slime mold is known for its ability to solve problems with a superbasic memory akin to a memristor, the New Scientist reports.

Smelling Disaster

Back in February, researchers at the University of Tokyo released the results of an experiment that involved strapping a moth to a trackball of styrofoam on a wheeled robot rig. The moth was made to scuttle after female pheromones, thus “directing” the robot via trackball. The researchers also tracked the moth’s sensory antenna and movements to analyze how they so effectively sense odors.

It may seem silly, but improving the robotic sense of smell has the potential to save lives. Most chemical sensors have a slow recovery time and cannot detect the temporal dynamics of odors as insects do, lead sutdy author Noriyasu Ando said. Harnessing these delicate senses would speed up chemical spill robots’ ability to find the source of leaks.

In fact, it’s already happening. Achim Lilienthal, director of the mobile robotics and olfaction lab at Orebo University in Sweden, developed a lawnmower-sized “gasbot” that uses lasers to scan the chemical composition of the air and then makes a three-dimensional map of the gas plume. The gasbot was already used to spot a methane leak in a landfill and an underground gas leak--both of which could have resulted in explosive disaster.

Deep Sensing

But what about places where robots can’t even see? To survive in the ocean’s depths, European scientists have been testing the FILOSE (Robotic Fish Locomotion and Sensing). Their trout-shaped robot uses lateral-line sensing, which was inspired by the string of nerve clusters from lip to tail found on over 30,000 species of fish, to help it detect the speed and direction of currents. Maarja Kruusmaa, professor of biorobotics at the Tallinn University in Estonia, developed FILOSE with colleagues over a period of four years. The fishbot uses sensors to detect changes in pressure and can even slip in the “sweet spot” behind other fish to conserve energy, similar to drafting in car or bicycle racing.

It's no secret that the justice system can be less than objective on occasion. From prejudice and bias to accidental error, part of being human means making mistakes. Daniel Kahneman's 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow features a potent (and alarming) example of how, without deliberate malice or corruption, trained judges can mess up.

The book describes a parole board of judges in Israel, which was monitored over the course of one day as they approved or rejected parole applications. Parole approvals peaked at 65% following each of the judge's three meal breaks, and steadily declined in the time after––eventually hitting zero immediately prior to the next meal.

Forget about past behavior or predictions of future dangerousness––in this situation the single most important factor in determining whether a person was able to leave prison before their maximum sentence was completed turned out to be nothing more scientific than the randomly assigned time of day of their parole hearing. Surely, we can strive to do better.

How To Program A Law

On the surface, the idea that we should be able to build an automated judging system makes sense. Current efforts in artificial intelligence rely on rule–based systems, combined with specialized languages for formulating and communicating these rules. Law similarly consists of rules, complete with what appear to be binary yes/no divisions regarding whether those rules have been broken.

If this is the case, shouldn't it then be possible to formalize legal rules using rule–based languages? Deciding legal cases in this way would be a matter of entering the facts of the case, applying the rules to the facts, and determining the correct answer. In fact, similar algorithms are already widely used by law enforcers to forecast criminal behavior. Could the justice system ever employ a version of the technology to decide criminal trials?

"In principle it would be possible, although it's still a way away," says Judge Richard Posner, the man identified by the Journal of Legal Studies as "the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century." "The main thing that would be left out would be how the judges' views changed with new information. Any change that may affect the way judges think would somehow have to be entered into the computer program, and weighed in order to decide how he would decide a case."

The Perils of Attitude

It turns out that this point of view Posner describes––the ideology that shapes a judge's response to issues––is a far better predictor of how a judge will decide a case than just about anything, including political party affiliation. Outside of a few studies like the BU Law paper cited above, however, the ideological basis for a judge's decision–making process, which legal scholars call "attitudinalism," has not been subject to nearly enough study, particularly at the Supreme Court level.

Because of the lack of knowledge of how worldviews impact legal decision–making, Judge Posner recommends that AI researchers interested in law focus on helping judges uncover their biases. His suggestion is to build a sort of recommendation engine that builds a judge's profile based on his past decisions.

"This could be a useful tool to help judges be more self–aware when it comes to bias," he observes. "A particular judge might be unaware that he or she is soft on criminals, for example. When they receive their profile they might become aware that they have certain unconscious biases that push them in certain directions."

Elaborating on this idea in a previous paper, Judge Posner wrote:

"I look forward to a time when computers will create profiles of judges' philosophies from their opinions and their public statements, and will update these profiles continuously as the judges issue additional opinions. [These] profiles will enable lawyers and judges to predict judicial behavior more accurately, and will assist judges in maintaining consistency with their previous decisions––when they want to."

Do Algorithms Dream Of Electric Laws?

This notion that algorithms might have a place in the legal system is not a new one. As Christopher Steiner points out in Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World, the use of algorithms in matters of law dates back to the Babylonians, who applied a sophisticated math system to everything from trade to the courtroom.

In fact, the modern computational spectral promise of "algorithmic neutrality" as described by writers such as Tarleton Gillespie and Evgeny Mozorov, forms just part of a move towards scientific objectivism in law that has been playing out over the past two centuries.

In 1895, former Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. asserted that the "ideal system of law should draw its postulates and its legislative justification from science." Declaring that "the man of the future is the man of statistics," Holmes described a future where the world's "ultimate dependence upon science [since] it is finally for science to determine, so far as it can, the relative worth of our different social ends."

Holmes' notion that law should be practiced as a branch of statistics became the basis for the so–called "Jurimetrics" movement, a concept that some scholars still see as a potential utopian future for legal computation.

Law As A Natural Science

Despite the confidence of Justice Holmes, applying computational logic to law isn't as straightforward as computing a standard deviation. Unlike statistics, legal reasoning is largely a theory construction process that takes place through dialogue between judges, lawyers, and scholars. A question such as whether an ambulance driving into a park to save someone's life is a violation of a law that states that no vehicles may enter the park is more than a semantic problem to be solved through better machine learning and natural language processing tools.

While natural science is positivist, based on the idea that objective knowledge can be acquired through the discovery of natural laws, the laws humans construct are not as well–suited to positivistic study. Unlike natural laws, knowledge in a legal setting may (and regularly does) consist of opposing theories, where it is unclear which one is better than the other. Outcomes in this case are decided through a dialogue–based process, where legal representatives argue over which theory is the most appropriate in a particular situation.

Algorithms can have plenty of useful applications in the legal world, and may even help keep judges on the straight and narrow, but it looks like robots won't be handing down sentences anytime soon.

[Image: Flickr user Phil Roeder]

Despite what you may have heard, the state of music discovery is still in shambles. Even with Spotify and Rdio's recent enhancements to their discovery features, they're still competing for a very small group of deeply interested music fanatics. Online streaming services of all kinds are still pursuing discovery with a brute force mentality: If we can just suggest a few hundred more songs, maybe we can satisfy everyone! Unfortunately, the problem with discoverability isn't actually discoverability: It's the user experience that surrounds it.

The issue with music discovery sites used to be that they just weren't very good at picking music the listener enjoyed. Everyone's now much better at understanding the listener, but in trying to improve discovery algorithms, the algorithms themselves inadvertently became the sole focus of most music discovery. The result is essentially someone spouting off a thousand really good recommendations in a five–minute span, which is just as ineffective as if a friend gives you a single bad recommendation. It's a terrible user experience: Being overwhelmed by too many choices, however good or bad, is not an efficient way to get average, non–enthusiast listeners to find their next favorite band.

The problem is similar to the one Apple foresaw when they developed the App Store. How many new apps per month can a typical user add to their daily workflow? At most, maybe one new app per week. To solve this problem, Apple promotes roughly 8–10 new and noteworthy apps each week. People who are enthusiastic about cool new apps can find them on their own. The new and noteworthy features are for the much larger group of users who only open the App Store once a month.

The same is true about music. A typical person just can't sustain a new favorite artist every single day over the course of a year, which is why discovery playlists and stations just aren't very useful. What if, instead of bombarding users with suggestions, discovery services followed the Twitter ads model? In place of more stations and playlists, these services could slip a recommendation based on the people you follow naturally into your stream at a comfortable pace that doesn't overwhelm you. Users could check a few boxes in their profile to manage frequency and other customizations to music recommendations slipstreamed into their feed.

Spotify and Rdio's discovery features are pretty good for constantly engaged music fanatics, but that's not the majority of users––if it were, paid subscriptions to these services would be growing much faster. There's no doubt that Rdio and Spotify have good suggestions for everyone, but the hardest part is actually getting people to take advantage of these recommendations. Music recommenders have failed to convince a decade's worth of listeners to purposefully visit, pick an artist from a recommended playlist, and choose what to listen to. It's time to fix that user experience.

[Image: Flickr user Kara Harms]

You've come up with a great business idea, teamed up with trusted cofounders, registered your URL, thrown up your minimum viable product in WordPress, and emailed your link to a few VC friends to "gauge their thoughts." Now sit back, refresh your analytics dashboard, and wait for customers to sign up. Right? Wrong. If only it were that easy.

No matter how good your product is, customers aren't just going to magically start knocking at your door. There are two main reasons for this: First, the initial version of your product is almost certainly wrong. Second, your customers don't know they should be looking for you––and even if they do, they're probably too busy to try your product. This is why you need to go hunt[1]. You need to go earn people's trust, convince them to try your product, and listen to their feedback. Then you need to iterate and improve your product to the point where they'll pay you for it. Only when you've found your first set of customers and tailored your product to them can you sit go from hunting for users to gathering ones that just show up.

We're often asked how we went found our first 10 customers, and then found the next 100, so we thought it'd be worthwhile to summarize our findings. These are the six things that we focus on when building an enterprise software business. This is one method, and by no means the only way to do it––you might want to adapt some of these ideas to your use case.

1. Create Your List

You've done in–depth customer research to hypothesize who your archetypal customers might be. Now how do you go about generating your list of prospective customers? Assuming that your business is trying to solve a problem that you have, the best place to start is probably your own Rolodex. If you have a problem, it's likely that your business contacts have it, to.

Go through your address book, search your Evernote and email archive by subject, and check your LinkedIn connections in the industry you're targeting. Enter each relevant name and their company into a spreadsheet, and you're on your way. To supplement this collection of "friendly" targets, find public lists of companies that may be relevant: Often news articles on your subject are a good place to start.

Visit the websites of relevant industry associations and conferences to mine lists of members and attendees. To get contact information: check each company's website, run a Google search for "[first name]" AND "[last name]" AND "@[domain]," or use a paid service like The List Online. Of course, I also recommend looking companies up on DataFox, where you'll find a lot of information packed into our one–page tear sheets, plus links to their LinkedIn and Crunchbase profiles, etc.

2. Turn Your List Into A Tracker

You should now have a list of a few thousand targets, most of which will be 1st– or 2nd–degree connections. To empower you to prioritize and keep track of your outreach, you need to turn your list into a tracking tool. At this stage, there is no need to use CRM software. Everything you need can be done using Excel or Google Docs. I prefer the latter because it is easier to share with my team. One person should own the sales job, but the whole team should contribute to the list of prospects.

One of the main reasons not to use a real CRM is that you don't know enough about your customers yet. A spreadsheet gives you the flexibility to effortlessly change columns, rearrange rows, and re–prioritize your prospects. It also saves you time and money upfront.

Start with these columns in your tracker: name, title, company, last contact, status, notes. For the advanced user, add a few thin columns to denote milestones such as "first contact," "responded," "interested," "on trial version," "paying customer." Color coding using conditional formatting helps you digest your tracker visually.

You can also add columns that help you prioritize your outreach. I recommend organizing contacts into three priorities. Sometimes you can make a contact's priority determination based solely on the name of the company, but if your list is long you may want to include factors such as location, number of employees, expected willingness to pay, and expected benefit from your product.

3. Eat The Frog

Now the real work starts. Unless you have years of sales experience, cold–calling, emailing and seeking warm introductions to potential customers can be a grueling endeavor. Because it's so difficult, give yourself large chunks of undisturbed time to do this. Don't let other tasks distract you. The expression "eat the frog" refers to tackling your most arduous (and important) tasks at the beginning of the day, when your mental energy is high.

One way to save time is to use email templates rather than crafting custom messages to every lead. Use a tool like Evernote to save various versions of your outreach email: One version asking a contact for an introduction to someone else, one version asking for a phone call, one version asking the recipient to check out your website, etc. Use your spreadsheet to monitor the efficacy of different subject lines and contents in order to refine your templates and make them more effective.

It's important not to be disheartened if you don't receive results right away. Remember that, like you, people are busy and receive way too many emails. To help remind contacts about your product, use the 1–4–7 rule: if you don't get a response to your first email within four days, email again. A one–liner along the lines of "just bringing this back to the top of your inbox" will do. Three days later, send a third email.

At this stage, you're mainly looking for feedback that will allow you to iterate on your MVP, so ask for a 15–minute call. Sometimes it helps to say something like, "I promise to keep it short and interesting." It also helps to suggest specific times, like "1 p.m. on Wed., Thu., or Fri. next week." Above all, make it easy for the recipient to respond without needing to look away from their inbox.

When you do get a response, do your homework! Before a call or email, look the person up on LinkedIn and save the URL in your tracker so you don't have to do it again next time.

4. Do Things That Don't Scale

Paul Graham wrote a great essay explaining that doing things very manually early on in your startup isn't a bad thing––in fact, it's often critical to learning and iterating properly, even if you won't be able to repeat these steps at scale and in the long–run. For our purposes this means that you should go to absurd lengths to track down and delight your early customers.

At our company, we manually create accounts for new users and send them their login details personally. Our product allows users to track company growth, and we send handwritten email notifications to certain users informing them of developments at the companies they care about. When someone clicks the "reset password" button, my cofounders and I get an email and we manually send them a new password along with a question or a friendly message.

Doing things manually impresses your early customers and helps you receive constant feedback from users. It helped us learn what people actually want from alerts and notifications, and allowed us to re–engage users who stopped using the product for a while and forgot their passwords.

Treat your early adopters like investors. In fact, some of them may ask to invest in your company if they see the effort you're putting in and the progress you're making.

5. Listen And Collect Feedback

At this point, you have a small base of users. You're focused on delighting them and keeping them engaged. But it's not enough just to solicit feedback: Keep track of everything your customers tell you. I type away furiously on every call. During in–person meetings, I prefer to keep handwritten notes and type them up later, in order to appear more engaged at the meeting. All of my notes go in Evernote, and I enter summaries in a 40–page Google Doc that I share with my cofounders. Certain bug fixes or feature requests are prioritized and handled immediately, but larger projects enter our product roadmap once every few weeks when we get in a room and whiteboard all the feedback in our feedback document to infer what the critical and most common requests are.

6. Charge

Most founders feel a strange hesitation when it comes to asking a customer to pay for the product or service that's being provided. This stems from the fact that to a founder, the product never feels fully complete. There are always more bugs to fix and features to build.

It's important to be cognizant of this curse and to try to overcome it. No matter how bad it feels, ask your users to pay you when you see them engaging with and getting real value out of the product[2]. Until you realize that people are willing to pay for your product, it's going to feel weird. So don't wait. The sooner you start charging, the sooner you'll feel comfortable with it.

It's important to become used to charging, because having paying customers helps you focus your unscalable efforts, your attention, and your product roadmap. It also makes the customer value your product more, and gives them an incentive to truly use and support it within their organization.

Time Well Spent

There's a consistent theme here: Spend as much time with your customers as possible, including finding them in the first place. No founder has ever failed because they tried too hard to find and delight their customers. More importantly, these first users will help you find missing features, bugs, new opportunities, and ultimately, product–market fit. Once you have product–market fit in sight, charge your customers. As our advisor once asked us: Why would you open a beautiful store with great products without turning on the cash register?

[1] We are building a B2B business in a market where customers are used to paying subscriptions for valuable data and analytics.

[2]Getting to paying customers early isn't the goal of every business.

[Image: Flickr user Varin Tsai]

It looks like iOS 7 is shaping up to be popular. With some pretty impressive new APIs and a complete design revamp, Apple is set to wow people––on both the user and developer fronts.

While the changes are no doubt welcome, iOS 7 does raise an interesting question: With all the design and API changes, is it worth being backwards compatible?

That's the question that was going through the mind of Craig Hockenberry, the developer of the popular iOS Twitter client Twitterrific, as he began coding some changes to it to make it iOS 7–compatible. As Hockenberry wrote on his personal blog:

Like many of my fellow developers, I am in the middle of an update of an app for iOS 7. As you'd expect, it's a lot more work than previous versions of iOS. But results are stunning: both David Lanham and I have commented that our shipping version was "feeling old and clunky."

While cranking along on the update, a couple of thoughts occurred to me: how many other developers were doing the same thing and were they going to commit fully to iOS 7? The depth and breadth of the changes in iOS 7 makes it difficult to support older versions of the OS.

What Hockenberry did next was polled other developers to see what their take was on coding for iOS 7. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 95% of the developers that responded (out of 575 in total) said they were coding for iOS 7. Though that confirms that most devs think iOS 7 is an improvement over iOS 6, it's also a testament to the large number of iOS users that actually download updates (as opposed to other platforms, desktop or mobile).

Even more shocking is that 52% of those 575 developers said they were only coding for iOS 7, meaning if their users wanted to stay on iOS 6 (or their hardware won't allow them to upgrade to iOS 7) they are just out of luck. As Hockenberry noted:

Initially I was surprised that this number was so high, but then I remembered how much time and effort I was putting into my own work :–)

Considering iOS 7 won't run on the original iPad, nor on anything below the iPhone 4, the fact that so many developers are willing to leave users behind on those devices says quite a few things. First and foremost, it is good news for Apple. If developers are so set on iOS 7, the new API changes and the OS's design must have hit home with them in a big way. It also means that developers believe enough in the new OS that they think that users who don't own devices that can run iOS 7 will probably upgrade to more recent devices just to get the new OS.

Then there's the age–old considerations all developers must make: Smaller development houses have very limited time and budgets and, if you are going to continue coding for iOS and don't have a lot of cash or hours to spare, you might as well choose to code for the iOS of the future, not the past.

Are you a developer who has decided to code only for iOS 7? The author of this story would love to know why. Tweet him at @michaelgrothaus.

Previous Updates

Be Proud Anyway: Your iOS App Is An "iTunes Zombie"

July 17, 2013

Last week was the App Store's fifth birthday, and though it was celebrated with some impressive giveaways from developers and some pretty sweet stats from Apple, a report from mobile marketing company Adeven suggested that the App Store is quickly being overrun by zombies. Well, zombie apps anyway.

Just what is a zombie app? As Mary Beth Quirk writes for The Consumerist:

"[Adeven] defines zombie apps as those that never make an appearance in any of the thousands of charts published by Apple which are tracked on a daily basis. The charts track things like categories, price and criteria for various countries' stores.

"We call the apps that hold no position anywhere in the world zombies because they do not generate a significant amount of downloads to sustain their further development," explained Paul Muller from Adeven. "We can't say exactly how many downloads they have – Apple doesn't reveal this – but it is very small.

"Even if they get a few downloads every day, or up to 100, it's not enough for a developer to make much of his or her product, or provide any impetus for the app to stay alive."

From a developer's perspective, this might seem worrying. After all, at its current count, there are over 880,000 iOS apps on the App Store. Adeven says that 579,001 of those are classified as "zombies." And chances are the App Store will surpass one million apps in the next year at which discovery is going to be even more of an issue than it is today, thus creating more zombies.

But while the number of zombie apps may make developers go queasy with dread, I'd like to ask a question: Does it really matter if your app is a zombie?

Sure, if your app is designed as a product that is built to appeal to the widest audience possible (also known as the lowest common denominator), download numbers are all that matters. This is true for apps like Facebook, Angry Birds (and virtually any other game), Twitter, Instagram, and more.

But there are a large subset of apps that shouldn't have the goal of having 50 million+ downloads because, what's the point? These are apps like transportation apps (like Tube Tamer––if all 12 million Londoners have downloaded your app, does it matter if you conquer the New York market too?), niche accounting apps like for local Savings and Loans banks, special interest apps (which, by their definition, are niche and thus have a limited audience that would find them useful), time–limited event apps, and plenty of health–related apps.

The last one is particularly an area of interest for me, because I'm building a piece of hardware aimed to help diabetics. The companion app allows them use the hardware. In this case I really don't care if 10 million non–diabetics download my app because they aren't my intended audience.

Sascha Segan over at PCMag echoes my stance:

"I also have celiac disease, and so there are a bunch of gluten–free dining apps on my iPhone. Celiac affects a tiny percentage of the population, so I wouldn't expect these apps to ever be best–sellers. They're lifesavers (sometimes literally) for the few with the condition, though."

So my takeaway for developers freaking out about this zombie study is: relax. Download numbers don't always matter the most. Sometimes they're virtually irrelevant. What does matter is that your app is coded the best it can be and it meets the needs of the intended user. That's what ultimately makes it a success––and the only standard by which I think an app should be judged. So everyone stop freaking out about being bitten by the zombie bug.

Should Every iPhone App Work On iPad?

July 11, 2013

I own a health tech startup and currently I have two sets of engineering teams. One set consists of my hardware engineers: the guys hacking together the prototype that will eventually go to manufacturing. The other set of engineers are my software guys––the ones who are obviously coding the companion app. I've never coded in my life, but I've already learned a lot from my software engineers, which I am very grateful for. We have a lot of back and forth about what is best for the app and what is best for the user, but when it came to deciding whether to build a separate iPhone and iPad app or a universal one, the answer for me was nonnegotiable: You build a universal one.

For me "universal" is the only answer because I am looking at it from a user's perspective. As a user, I hate seeing two sets of apps saying "Skype" sitting next to each other in my iTunes app library. I like reducing things as much as I can, and for me one app build that works on all my devices is ideal.

Another reason that made "universal" the right one for my app is because the app will be free. It is there to support the hardware only. There is no financial incentive for me have a separate iPhone and iPad app. I want the people who purchase my hardware to only have to download one app. This makes things simpler for them and enhances their user experience.

However, as a developer, there are plenty of reasons why a universal app might not be best. Below I've collected some interesting arguments from developers both in support of and against universal apps. Here's a sampling of opinions on whether or not to "universal" your app based on a particular vantage point: coding work, App Store ranking, and financial gain.

Universal iOS Apps From A Coding Perspective

The great thing about universal apps is that it saves on a lot of coding. But that's not always a good thing as author and developer Erica Sadun writes for TUAW:

From a design and coding point of view, it's obvious that Universal Apps quickly become Frankencode. Separate projects (or, more realistically, separate targets with some shared code base and some platform–specific class files) greatly increase code readability and maintainability, even when the two projects share a great majority of features.

Consider the most Model–View–Controllerized app you can imagine. Even an app that offers glorious orthogonality between its visual design and its underlying code logic will suffer from universalization. It's just natural fallout from the conditional coding needed to deal with reality; the iPhone–based interaction modes that used to require multiple screens can now join together into simplified iPad interfaces.

Do Universal iOS Apps Do Better In Reviews and Rankings?

Good reviews and App Store rankings can make or break an app. Here's the advantage and disadvantage a universal app brings to rankings and reviews:

Here's Pierre of L'Escapadou talking about how universal apps can make reading (and acting on) your app's feedback challenging:

App Store reviews and ratings are not separated. On the App Store, you can't––and neither can potential buyers––distinguish between ratings and reviews for the iPhone or the iPad version. This is especially a problem if your app is very good on iPad but not so good on iPhone, or vice–versa. Again, you cannot use these reviews to make informed decisions for your future products. We found this impossibility to interpret accurately the reviews and ratings a major issue.

As for App Store rankings, here's Oliver from CocoaNetics on how having a universal app is helpful to climb high in the charts:

There were 27 universal apps in the free overall U.S. top 100 and 33 in the iPad chart. Of these, I could find 16 universal apps that were ranking similarly high in both charts. Eleven universal iPhone apps did not show in the top 100 iPad chart. Fourteen universal iPad apps did not show in the top 100 iPhone/iPod chart. Possibly they were only slightly outside the top 100––I did not check.

The percentage of successful universal apps is an order of magnitude higher than dedicated versions. Among the top 100 (again only quickly looking visually), I could only find four apps that both had separate versions.

I invite your scrutiny of this casual analysis of mine, however I think that this graphic can only lead to this answer to Daniel's question: Make your free app universal, if you are NOT Rovio. I think this analysis debunks the myth that making a free app universal is bad for it's ranking.

Do Combo iPhone/iPad Apps Make More Money?

The financial advantage to having two separate apps is obvious. More products to sell equals more money. But even if you only want to deal with a universal build, what good is selling one universal app for a higher price if you can offer an iPhone–only app for a lower price to a user who only wants it on one device?

Here's Mick, the developer of Things explaining to a user why he chose not to offer a universal app from a financial perspective:

I'm not sure what country you're in, but let's assume the U.s., where, on iOS, Things costs $10 for iPhone + $20 for iPad = $30 for Things on iOS. The cost of our software is something we have carefully considered, and we believe that our iOS offerings are worth $30.

• We could offer just a universal app for $30, but this would mean that someone who only wanted the iPhone app would be spending an extra $20 for no reason.
• We could offer three different ways to buy it: iPhone $10, iPad $20, Universal $30––but then there would be, for example, users who bought the iPhone app before getting an iPad and wanted to 'upgrade' to the Universal app. However, Apple currently provides no upgrade mechanism on its stores, which makes this an inconvenient and confusing solution. We'd rather just keep it simple.

I suppose that you are not suggesting you want the convenience of a single universal iOS app, but rather that you don't think our software is worth $30, an opinion you're quite entitled to hold. But for the time being, this is how we will continue to charge for and distribute our software––as individually sold apps at a combined $30.

The above quotes are just some opinions––each valid in their own way. And for each one, I could find a just as valid counterpoint. As a user, I would love to see all apps universal, however, as a developer, deciding to go universal isn't always an easy choice. Though I agree with many of the selections above, those developers are only right in the context of what is best for their app and business. Your app's situation is unique and thus your reasons to go universal or not could be very different than the next developer.

I don't think the "Should I go universal or not" question will ever be settled, and even three years after the debut of the iPad, the conversation surrounding the question is only getting started. I'm extremely interested in views from all sides, so please leave your thoughts in the comments below or tweet them to both me and Fast.Co Labs at @michaelgrothaus and @FastCoLabs.

Siri, Why Don't You Have An API?

July 8, 2013

A funny thing happened in Japan last week: The most advanced robot ever made was bashed by the press after a presentation to reporters because this walking, automated wonder couldn't recognize voice queries––something most modern–day smartphones can do. As Fred Attewill writing for Metro explains:

Asimo is programmed to answer questions when visitors raise their hands in the air but as guests held smartphones aloft to take a picture of the robot he became flummoxed and, instead of posing, repeatedly asked: 'Who wants to ask Asimo a question?' The glitch is an embarrassment for Honda. Asimo has no voice recognition software and can only respond to pre–set questions selected from a touch–panel device. That's led critics to call the robot an 'expensive, out–of–date toy'.

I point this event out because you know voice recognition has become ingrained in users' minds as something that is expected in any piece of modern tech when the technology press start bashing the most advanced robot on the planet for not having it.

Which brings me to this point: In spite of the 1,500 new developer APIs in iOS 7, it's odd that Apple didn't choose to offer the one API every developer has been asking for since seeing the iPhone 4S: Siri.

To be sure, iOS's digital assistant is something that's always been a bit underwhelming. It's useful for some limited queries ("Where's the closest gas station?" "Remind me to leave for the train at 1:30 p.m."), but in the end it falls flat, especially compared to Google Now's Voice Search. And that's exactly why Apple should have opened up a Siri API. When the first iPhone came out it had Maps, which were useful, but the true benefit of mobile maps didn't become apparent until Apple unleashed the Maps API to developers in iOS 2.0. After all, it's independent developers that often find the best uses for iOS features (via APIs)––and then Apple usually ends up integrating the best of those uses into the next version of iOS itself.

Until Apple releases a Siri API, the voice assistant will continue to just be another "meh" feature. Nice, but not critical––and nowhere as good as the biggest competitor's. I'm not the first to suggest that, for Siri to become useful, Apple needs to give devs a whack at it. As Christina Bonnington wrote for Wired:

The first step [to a robust Siri] must be a public Siri API. Building out a robust API for third–party developers could do for Siri what the App Store did for iOS: make it a rousing success. Developers are eager to hook into Siri to increase engagement and make interactions more natural and fluid.

But the Siri API didn't happen with iOS 7, so developers are left waiting (at least) another year for their next chance. Of course, developers aren't totally limited by Apple's lack of access. As Brian Roemmele on this Quora thread points out, there are a few quasi–Siri APIs now:

The Siri Text Message API

This API takes advantage of the iOS Phonebook and Text messaging to weld together a rather useful and elegant way to present data to a web based API that has access to either a Short Code Text messaging platform or a front end system that can receive Text Messages and parse the text string.

From the programmers perspective Siri would be delivering a text message that would be acted on based on the application keywords. The results can be any number of possibilities spanning from a resulting text message back as an answer all the way up to a much more complex series of results.

The Siri Calendar API

Siri can use CalDAV to communicate calendar events. Siri can also read back CalDAV events back, even if they have been modified. Thus we have a two–way communication Quasi API for transferring data in and out of Siri. It is not perfect. But with a little work the user can access data that is not native to Siri's current API relationships. And it works.

But until the real Siri API comes out, perhaps Siri and Asimo should drown their sorrows together over humanity's disappointment in them.

Mac Apps Get Subscription Billing––But At What Cost?

July 3, 2013

With all the focus of WWDC on iOS 7's redesign, OS X 10.9 didn't get a lot of showtime. While some of the more significant features got a quick preview, one feature developers have been asking for wasn't even mentioned: in–app subscriptions for OS X apps.

But that's exactly what's coming to the Mac App Store when OS X 10.9 ships this fall. As with iOS before it, now developers will be able to sell auto–renewing and non–renewing subscriptions in–app. As Juli Clover writes for MacRumors:

With the release of Mavericks, Mac developers will be able to provide services on an ongoing monthly basis with charges routed through the App Store's in–app purchase system. As with the iOS App Store, developers will be able to offer both ongoing subscriptions and subscriptions that expire after a set time, automatically charging a user's iTunes account.

For a developer this is very welcome news. In–app subscriptions in OS X apps will likely increase subscription sales to existing apps and services, like Dropbox (if it ever comes to the Mac App Store) or Evernote. Until now, companies like Evernote, who offer their OS X app in the Mac App Store, needed to direct those users to an external webpage to get their billing details and sign up for a subscription. Extra, tedious steps like this are always an impediment to users signing up. But now with OS X 10.9, users will be able to simply click a button in the app and enter their iTunes password to buy a subscription.

However, the ability for any app developer to easily enable app subscriptions could turn off a lot of users, especially if developers don't use subscriptions to offer extra options (like extended cloud storage) and instead make their apps only available via a subscription basis. Adobe and Microsoft have both gotten a lot of pushback from users by introducing subscription–only models of their flagship software, but because of Office's and Photoshop's importance in business, the two companies can get away with it.

But I don't think many users would tolerate smaller apps going to a subscription–only model. I'm a big fan of Pixelmator, VoodooPad, and OmmWriter, but I want to own those app outright. I don't want to have to pay $9.99 a year for their use. (I should note that I'm just using those apps as examples. None of those developers have told me they are thinking of charging annual subscriptions for use.)

In spite of this possibility, I think in–app subscriptions for OS X apps are a good thing. Developers work hard at making some very good, very indispensable apps. The more money they can make (through reasonable subscription offerings), the better. But to me the best thing about in–app subscriptions in OS X 10.9 aren't the subscriptions themselves––it's what they signal the future of apps in the Mac App Store could be like.

If Apple is open to in–app subscriptions, there's a good chance they are considering paid upgrades in the Mac App Store. This is something both developers and users have been clamoring for. As Taylor Marks (under the forum name of "ArtOfWarfare"), creator of Battery Status, explains on a MacRumors forum, even with subscriptions in OS X 10.9, developers are currently stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to revenue via the Mac App Store:

If I want to majorly improve an app right now, my options for funding that are:

1. Don't. Everyone gets a free update and I go broke.
2. Sell it as an entirely separate app. Many consumers won't discover it ever.
3. Charge subscription fees. Annoying to users who feel they're paying repeatedly for something I did once.

But if Apple is open to in–app subscriptions, then we may, sooner rather than later, see the ability for developers to offer paid upgrades in the Mac App Store. And if this happens, everyone wins. Users get the option to pay less for a newer version of the app (provided they have the previous version) and developers have a monetary incentive to continue to improve their apps and sell them via the Mac App Store.

Will that happen? Only Apple knows. But the signs seem to be pointing in the right direction.

iBeacons Allow iOS 7 Devs To Harness The Internet Of Things

July 2, 2013

When a friend asked me to clarify what Apple's coolest new API, called iBeacons, was, I explained it like this: If you're sailing a ship in the dark and want to know where the coastline is, you look out for a bright thing that's called a lighthouse. This lighthouse, or beacon, gives you spatial information that you can act on––in this case, that information allows you to not crash your ship into the shore.

Apple's iBeacon API works much the same way as the light from the lighthouse. It allows iOS devices to pick up micro–location Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) profiles (the "light") from miniature Bluetooth transceivers (the "lighthouse"). These micro–location BLE profiles carry in them spatial, and other, data that will allow your iPhone to do so much more than it can today.

iBeacons works by talking to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices, also known as Bluetooth 4.0 and Bluetooth "SMART," that are able to transmit data within a 150–foot proximity. If an iPhone falls within these geofenced BLE proximities, iBeacons automatically picks up data from those beacons and turns it into actionable user commands.

"But in what context are iBeacons useful?" you might ask. "After all, there are a dozen ways to beam information to an iPhone."

True, but never in a way like iBeacons before. As Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider, iBeacons will make indoor navigation easier due to the accessibility of cheap beacon transmitters from companies like Adomoly:

iOS 7's iBeacons can be used by app developers to do things like build an interactive tour of a museum, where the user's attention is directed to specific exhibits as they walk freely within the building. In more general terms, the feature can also be used enable indoor navigation similar to GPS in settings such as an airport or underground subway station where GPS signals aren't available, or specifically to enhance navigational accessibility for the blind or users with other impairments.

But what's even more interesting about iBeacons is that they are not just looking for signals from BLE transmitters. It turns out iBeacons turns your iOS device into a transmitter as well so it can send automatic commands to other BLE tech. What's amazing about this is that it means iBeacons opens the door (excuse the pun) to turning your iOS device into a key for any physical door (be it a car door or the door to your home) that is equipped with a BLE transmitter. Imagine arriving home and walking up to your house and having the door unlock automatically––no fumbling with the keys in your pocket. iBeacons does that.

Matter of fact, given the proper BLE hardware and a companion app, iBeacons allows for your iPhone to act like a key, or an "on" and "off" switch, for any device you can think of: doors, lights, alarms. With iBeacons, a thermostat company could make a BLE thermostat that talks to an app on your iPhone. In the app you could set it so that once you are out of range of your house when you leave for work in the morning, the air conditioning is automatically turned off to save on your energy bills. When you return home, the aircon automatically turns back on. No more setting the thermostat by time or manually turning it on and off. With iBeacons it could know if you're home or not and set itself accordingly.

The iBeacons API in iOS 7 will allow your iPhone to become the control center for that mythical "Internet of things" we all want to see, which means your iPhone will become more invaluable than ever. It will be your car keys, your secure ID badge, your house keys, your on and off switch for alarms, and lights, and thermostat. And perhaps most tellingly, it shows just how much Apple wants to make the iPhone the one tool you need with you at all times.

Game Time For Apple: New Hardware API Lets Devs Get Serious

June 24, 2013

A common thing I hear from serious gamers is that on no ecosystem Apple offers––neither iOS nor OS X––is gaming taken seriously by the Cupertino company. And until now, they may have been right. While there are some impressive games on iOS, they're only impressive for a smartphone. When you compare them to a PC or console game, they lose their luster. The same goes for OS X, which still only gets the most popular PC games years after they have come out.

Part of this can be blamed on game developers. It cost millions of dollars to bring a game to a new platform, so those systems with smaller marketshare (like computers running OS X) aren't going to get a lot of love. But who can really blame them? Game development is a business and if you can't get a good return on your investment, there's no point in wasting your time or money.

But another reason gaming, particularly on iOS, has been labeled nothing but "casual"––something people do to waste time in a doctor's office or on the commute home –– is because a smartphone like the iPhone doesn't provide the right tactile experience for complex games.

To see what I mean by this, imagine playing Red Dead Redemption on an iPhone or iPad. A game like that has such complicated controls, they only work well with physical controllers. And it's because those controllers exist in three dimensions we don't need to look at the controls to make a character walk forward or duck. We can feel it with our fingertips, which means we can concentrate on what is going on onscreen and not having to constantly look under our thumbs to make sure our fingers are actually touching the d–pad.

But the days of fingertips slipping from a touchscreen d–pad are about to end thanks to the new Game Controller framework Apple has just released in the iOS 7 beta (it's also available for OS X 10.9). The framework sets the stage for third–party game controller support that has Apple's blessing to talk to iOS. The official support from Apple means that games are about to get much more advanced on iOS because it frees users from the flat touch screen and gives them tactile controls like never before on an iPhone.

How big of a deal is this for gaming on iOS? Pretty big, according to Gerald Lynch of Tech Digest:

"On the surface it doesn't sound like a major deal––we've already had iOS gamepads from the likes of iCade and Ion. However, without any standardized API blueprint to work against, games developers had to put the effort in to optimizing their titles for each manufacturer's unique hardware control system. For many games devs, it just wasn't worth the extra hassle to add support for a controller that only a few thousand people (at best) may own, especially when the iPhone and iPad's touch controls worked out fine. But with the introduction of a standardized API, whatever Apple–certified game pad you buy going forward from the release of iOS 7 will adhere to a unified design, a single system that any game dev can easily add support for."

However, developers hoping to enhance their games with third–party controller support need to keep some things in mind. Even though Apple is now being more proactive in its approach to gaming, it's still Apple after all, and it does impose some limitations on how the controllers can interface with iOS games. Here's the one caveat from the iOS Developer Library notes devs should be aware of:

"Controllers Must Be Optional: If you write a game that supports controllers, there must also be a way to play the game without a controller. On an iOS device, that means taking advantage of the touch screen and the integrated sensors in the device. On OS X, this usually means an interface based on the keyboard and mouse. Either way, controllers must enhance game play––they must not be required."

What this clause is really saying is iOS may be more open to gaming, but it's still Apple's ecosystem and not the developer's. Apple doesn't want the iPhone becoming a glorified gaming system––like an Xbox mini––because the device is so much more than that. And most important, it doesn't want to piss off its users by making them think they aren't getting all they can out of the iPhone without buying additional hardware.

And to me, that's a smart move. If I see a game in the App Store, I want to be able to download it and use it as I can any non–gaming app––right on my iPhone, using only my iPhone and fingers to interact with it. For game developers, however, that does mean extra work. Because if you can develop a kick–ass game for iOS that users a controller, you also need to find out a way to make it work sans game pad.

Why We're Tracking The Future of iOS and OS X

Apple owned the most popular platforms for software development in the 1980s with Mac OS and again in the late naughties with iOS. Now the company is set to go through another significant development boom with iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 and beyond. Where will these development changes take us? Some think they'll lead to the unification of Mac OS and iOS. Some think they'll lead to a third or even fourth development ecosystem––one aimed at wearable tech and one aimed at smart televisions. Only time will tell where software development in Apple's ecosystem leads, but right now, there's plenty of interesting new stuff going on in the existing ecosystems to keep developers busy.

If you're interested in the future of development on Apple's ecosystems, be sure to follow this tracker. Here we'll explore the latest frameworks, tips, and advances in iOS and OS X. And if you're a developer doing something innovative on either platform, get in touch with the author @michaelgrothaus to let him know what you're up to.

[Image: Flickr user S. bär]

Think of the last time you went to the doctor: Say, to have a routine blood test, or a mole removed. Do you ever wonder what happens to the extra stuff hacked off your body?

Sometimes, the hospital burns it. But other times, the tissue is kept and sent to labs for research. Using your body parts in this way is legal: As long as your name is stripped off the test tube, it's considered an anonymous sample. But advances in genetics and new computer technologies are making this practice less anonymous than it once was, calling into question what doctors should be allowed to do with the pieces of you they take without asking permission.

The Genome That Started A Bioethics Tangle

HeLa, short for Henrietta Lacks, is the reason bioethics is in the news today: the canonical example of the problem with non–consent. It's the codename for the cancerous cell line taken, without permission, from an African–American tobacco farmer and mother of five in 1951. The stolen cells were unique: They copied themselves in petri dishes, which no human cancer cells ever had before. HeLa cells have since been involved in 74,000 studies, helping to develop cancer medicines and many other treatments. But Henrietta never gave her cells for research: They were taken from her, at a time before doctors had a concept of medical consent. Far from being anonymized, the abbreviation for her name became synonymous with research on cancer cells within the scientific community.

Rebecca Skloot, author of the best–selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks that chronicles this story, says that in the intervening years, little has changed.

"Right now, many if not most [patients whose tissue is used for research] aren't giving consent, because they aren't being told that their tissue is being used in research, because they're considered anonymous samples," says Skloot. "All this material is still daily being collected from people without their knowledge: Scientists are very clearly saying 'we can identify you from that [DNA]'... If you tell people, 'we want to collect these samples to use in research,' most people will say yes. The problem comes when they find out after the fact."

Shockingly, the scientific community made that mistake again with the Lacks family, 60 years after the initial transgression. In March, the genome of the popular HeLa cell line was sequenced and published by a lab in Germany. This prompted an uproar from journalists, geneticists, and bioethicists who were outraged that the Lacks family had again not been asked for permission. The data was retracted within days, and no more was seen of the HeLa genome until Nature republished it last Wednesday, along with an agreement between the Lacks family and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Most of the reactions to the agreement have been celebratory: The racially tinged exploitation of the Lacks family by opportunistic physicians who abused their access to Henrietta's tissue, and kept her family in the dark for decades, has finally been set right. But some critics believe that this event raises more medical ethics concerns than it resolves.

Your Genes Are Hackable

The deal with the Lacks family went a long way toward righting an historical wrong. Skloot also sees it as an opportunity to identify the holes that still exist in the medical consent process. It's important that we fill them: Due to advances in genetic technology, making sure that collected samples remain anonymous is becoming nearly impossible.

Thanks to genomic hacks by geneticists at MIT and elsewhere, computers and public genetic databases are fast making it possible for someone to infer your identity from your anonymous genes. What does this mean for you? Imagine a scenario right out of the movie Gattaca: A stranger could pick up a hair, or a coffee cup you've drunk from, and send a DNA sample off to a genetic testing company like 23–and–Me.

The company would send back a list of your genetic assets and risks. In a worst–case scenario, a would–be gene hacker could out you to an employer as a likely drug addict, or emotionally unstable, at risk for depression or suicide or PTSD. Your boss might fire you, your spouse might dump you, insurers might turn you away.

Unless we pass new laws protecting patients soon, all of this will become possible to decode from the samples of your body that you leave at doctors' offices and hospitals all the time.

Preventing The Next Henrietta Lacks

Unfortunately, researchers don't seem particularly eager to make changes. Skloot's book was an international best–seller for two years after being released in 2010. Now, it's required reading at some medical schools and read by just about everyone who works in biomedicine. Immortal Life was featured on a popular Radiolab episode, and Oprah Winfrey is producing a movie version for HBO. So why didn't the NIH address the blood on the biomedical establishment's hands back when the book first came out?

"Frankly, in the wake of the publication of the book, genome scientists were not out there saying 'well, wait a minute, let's think about what are the likely next steps and whether we should alter our course given this circumstance,'" says Dr. Kathy Hudson, NIH's Deputy Director for Science, Outreach and Policy.

"Hindsight is 20/20. We ended up getting involved when we became aware of the [HeLa DNA] sequence and the concerns of the family, and we got involved not because of the NIH but because we wanted to make sure the biomedical enterprise was able to advance and make use of this sequence. So: Why didn't people? I don't know. Anyone might have thought of this. But I don't think anyone thought 'Hey, let's think about what might be coming down the pike and engage the family in this.' Didn't hear it," says Dr. Hudson.

Cobbling Together A Solution

The Presidential Bioethics Commission in October 2012 released a statement on "Genomics and Privacy," but to date, laws are inconsistent. In most states, it's legal for doctors to take blood or tissue samples for research, without consent, as long as they were taken for a medical reason and stripped of 'identifying information' like a name or social security number.

"We're trying to cobble together an adequate solution for a pretty inadequate past," NIH's Dr. Hudson explains. "But moving forward, we'd like to create a system that will work more effectively than this."

When asked what the NIH is doing to upgrade the medical consent process to the era of identifiable genetic samples and open–access Internet databases, Dr. Hudson pointed to a joint proposal published by the Offices of Health and Human Services and Science and Technology Policy in July 2011 called "Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM)."

"This ANPRM seeks comment," the 20–page document's introduction explains, "on how to better protect human subjects who are involved in research, while facilitating valuable research and reducing burden, delay, and ambiguity for investigators." The document touches on all the right issues––consent for medical samples, genetic privacy concerns and family rights––and calls for suggestions from the general public, doctors, and scientists. But we've seen little progress. The government has been seeking comment for two years, and has not provided an update on when the policy might be put in place.

"Who knows where, but somewhere along the line that thing stagnated," Skloot says. "And it needs to be unstagnated."

[Image: Flickr user Max Braun]

Today's News Scrum Discussion: Why You Should Never Just Abandon An Online Community, by Jamie Condliffe at Gizmodo.

Condliffe's quick–and–dirty analysis of today's XKCD comic poses an interesting question about online etiquette in the social web world: When you leave a community, should you clean up after yourself? Condliffe thinks so:

Maybe you should do something about it. After all, it's like forgetting to get mail sent to your new address: there's a constant stream of information and news, slowly building up at your old place, that you'll never be party to ever again. And while it may mean nothing to you, it could be breaking somebody else's heart. You're better than that, right?

He makes a valid point. By choosing to use a service and connect with friends on it, you're setting up relationships with people that mostly exist online, and in the context of that network. You should probably get used to using it. There are few things more annoying in the online world than a friend who misses all your parties because he doesn't check Facebook messages, despite the fact that he's been on the service since 2009.

The problem is, we don't have a real online etiquette for un–using services. Maybe we need companies like Facebook and Twitter to start sending inactivity warnings to users who try to contact their idle friends. Or what about an "end of life" feature for social networks that helps you slowly wind down your activity, notifying friends that you're leaving, posting updated contact info for you, and then eventually closing your profile?

A network that provided that kind of service for its users might actually encourage more active usership by ensuring that all of your current friends are active users instead of zombies. Until then, we should probably work on developing the same goodbye habits for friends on social networks we leave as we do for friends we leave behind when we move. Speaking of which, I've got an about.me inbox to clean up. –– Gabe Stein

I love Gabe's suggestion for an "end of life" feature for social networks because I'm the kind of guy that likes to keep an organized and tidy digital life. However, as helpful as such a feature would be, there is no way any social network will ever have a clean and clear "exit strategy" for its users. After all, social networks brag about numbers first and active users second.

But this XKCD does hit home on the social etiquette front. In the past I've noticed one less Facebook friend from time to time, and when I realized who it was the last time I got quite worried that I had offended them or done something terribly wrong to hurt our real–world friendship. But the next time I talked to them in person they said, "You thought I deleted you as a friend? No, I just closed down my Facebook account." A nice goodbye notification in this case would have avoided a lot of unnecessary grief. –– Michael Grothaus

Does it take an old fart like Professor Walrus to point out that there is no debate, here, that Condliffe's point is pointless (beyond the humor of such a suggestion)? Online social communities are NOT genuine communities, they are services; and rather faceless services at that! We observe certain social norms, netiquette, when using such services, because our posts become our online persona. This is a much more public persona than most of us would ever have managed in the days of telephones–with–cords and letters–on–paper–in–envelopes–with–stamps.

In those bad–old–days, if I affix a stamp to an envelope with your name on it and you fail to reciprocate in kind, that was either bad manners or a brush–off. If I ran a bunch of postcards through an addressing machine and sent very private and important time–sensitive material to every member of the Flat–Earth Society, I'd be lucky to get 0.01% of the members writing back to me. It's a numbers game and the old social norms do not apply across the new social services.

Social Web Services are like junk–mail companies. The bigger their numbers, the more successful they are. Similarly, the "information" we generate while using such services pretty much amounts to junk mail. The value for us is in the interactions and much less so in the content. By all means, when you enter the room you'll want to say hello with all the social grace you deem appropriate. When leaving, don't even bother to close the door behind you. –– Professor Walrus

I also like the "end of life" idea, which would be the digital equivalent of a forwarding address. Ideally, I would like to delete my account, leaving only the end of life message for a certain grace period until that also disappears. At the same time, I am not sure that this is a very serious problem. You should be in touch with most of your real friends via multiple channels, so if you stop using one, you won't suddenly drop off the face of the Earth.

A related issue is what happens when some company buys your service/community and shuts it down or completely alters its nature. To quote from a recent interview with a developer who created a personal cloud:

I have seen so many services over the years where people people put in energy and effort and build their brand, their page and their content, and then it's all gone. This Tumblr acquisition by Yahoo! or Posterous by Twitter and now Posterous is closing.

In this case, the effort you have put into building up relationships and contributing to a community was enabled by a service. You can't buy a community, but you can buy a service.

–– Ciara Byrne

I think Professor Walrus is contradicting himself a bit here. If there is human etiquette and context attached to sending letters, why doesn't interacting on a social network constitute participating in a community? It seems to me that ignoring a letter is similar to ignoring a DM on Twitter. That being said, I agree that leaving a social network doesn't have to be a big deal. As long as you notify the communities you are a part of, what does it matter if your ghost personas continue to float in cyberspace?

My real question about this XKCD comic is: Where is everybody going? I don't join social networks that I don't feel fairly committed to, and if I do, I don't make enough connections for it to matter if I am dormant for long periods of time. For example, I don't think any of my 18 Foursquare friends particularly notice my perpetual inactivity. And when my Facebook or Twitter connections have gone off the grid for a period or deactivated all together, they've always given some warning or I've been able to figure out that they were gone and not specifically ignoring me because their profile was . . . no longer there.

Whether we are over–invested in certain social networks is a different question. For example, the fact that pretty much everyone is on Facebook makes it difficult for any of us to leave without making certain sacrifices. As this Atlantic post from February puts it:

If we lose reliable obscurity protections, individuals and society as a whole will bear the cost. Forget Lolcats. We'll miss opportunities for self–expression, personal growth, learning, support, and civic exchange.

In terms of the etiquette of shutting the door, it seems like you should apply the same standards to social networks as you do anything else in your community sphere. Send or post a mass message about what's going on and then mosey. My 2003–2005 MySpace profile, may it rest in peace, eventually dissolved into the ether like my Friendster account and my Excite.com email. They all went away without incident, and to my knowledge no one thought I hated them. ––Lily Hay Newman

[Image: Flickr user Matt Pratter]

You can probably trace the dream of the connected "smart" home back to when The Jetsons first aired in the 1960s. Ever since then most of us have wanted a house we could control with a few taps or even just our voice.

"Lights on." "Open door." "Run the bath."

It's now 2013, and that smart home is moving ever faster towards being the norm. After all, we have Nest thermostats and CubeSensors and smart TVs and Philips Hue lights to play with. We're practically living in the Jetson's world, sans flying cars.

But there's one thing the pastel–hued world of The Jetsons never dealt with (because, well, it was a children's cartoon): security. In a world where everything in our house is smart, security can't only consist of locking the door and switching on the alarm to protect our valuables and ourselves.

To show you what I mean, here are three disturbing proof–of–concept attacks that have happened on smart houses recently.

The Hacked Toilet

Yeah, that sounds like a bad joke, but a toilet has actually been hacked (hey, if a physical house key can be hacked, anything can now, right?). As Sean Gallagher writes for Ars Technica, the information security firm Trustwave found security vulnerabilities in a popular Bluetooth smart toilet on sale in Japan called the Inax Satis automatic toilet:

Functions of the Satis––including the raising and lowering of its lid and operation of its bidet and flushing nozzles––can be remotely controlled from an Android application called "My Satis" over a Bluetooth connection. But the Bluetooth PIN to pair with the toilet–"0000"–is hard–coded into the app. "As such, any person using the 'My Satis' application can control any Satis toilet," the security advisory noted. "An attacker could simply download the 'My Satis' application and use it to cause the toilet to repeatedly flush, raising the water usage and therefore utility cost to its owner. Attackers could cause the unit to unexpectedly open/close the lid, [or] activate bidet or air–dry functions, causing discomfort or distress to user."

Extra flushes = higher water bills. Talk about flushing money down the toilet.

The Hacked TV

I can't wait for truly smart televisions. I say that because many of the smart TVs on the market now are just modified Linux boxes with a front–facing camera, Internet connectivity, and a mediocre operating system. As this next example proves, no TV should be able to call itself "smart" unless it's absolutely secure.

Samsung, one of the most popular makers of "smart" TVs, got schooled earlier this summer when two hackers from security firm iSEC Partners were able to inject JavaScript into the smart TV's browser and some of its apps, including Skype. They even managed to turn on the front–facing television camera without the home user's knowledge, which enabled them to watch live video of everything the smart TV's camera saw and record still images from the video feed. Because the TV camera had no indicator light, the users at home had no way of knowing it was active. As Chenda Ngak writes for CBS News:

Grattafiori said that they tested their exploit on Samsung Smart TVs because they offer the most features, which create more of an opportunity to find security flaws..."They could actually either see live, streaming video into your home or office or to take still camera shots of you," Grattafiori said about potential hackers. "There's no physical indicator, nor visual indicator, that you'd be able to know your camera was on or taking pictures of you."

Take a moment to think about where you put your TVs: In your living room where your children watch their favorite shows, in your kitchen where you make breakfast in your pajamas, and in your bedroom where you and your partner sleep. What happens to your sense of privacy knowing anyone could be watching you and your family at any moment?

The Hacked...Everything

The hacked toilet? Kinda funny. The hacked smart TV camera? Creepy. The hacked EVERYTHING IN YOUR HOUSE? Scary as hell.

That's just what Kashmir Hill of Forbes was able to do to eight houses running a home automation software package from a company called Insteon. As Hill writes:

Googling a very simple phrase led me to a list of "smart homes" that had done something rather stupid. The homes all have an automation system from Insteon that allows remote control of their lights, hot tubs, fans, televisions, water pumps, garage doors, cameras, and other devices, so that their owners can turn these things on and off with a smartphone app or via the Web. The dumb thing? Their systems had been made crawl–able by search engines––meaning they show up in search results––and due to Insteon not requiring user names and passwords by default in a now–discontinued product, I was able to click on the links, giving me the ability to turn these people's homes into haunted houses, energy–consumption nightmares, or even robbery targets. Opening a garage door could make a house ripe for actual physical intrusion.

Now, thankfully Hill was not a nefarious hacker (and actually was nice enough to call all the houses beforehand and get permission from the owners for her to try to turn off their lights remotely), but the ease at which she could do all this sets the stage for some serious discussion about security in the future.

We all know that it's important to secure our laptops, iPhones, and tablets as best we can from potential attacks. We do this predominantly through usernames and passwords and anti–virus software. But as the three examples above show, when the smart house becomes ubiquitous, we'll have to start securing it in ways we've never had to before, changing our idea of what a "house" is in the process.

No longer will a house be just a place with four walls, a roof, and a door that can be secured with a key and an alarm system. When we have truly smart houses, we'll be living inside of a computer and we will have to learn to think of our houses as such.

Just as we don't secure our computers with a lock and key, we'll have to learn to secure our homes against digital attacks as well as physical ones using tools like firewalls, passwords, and biometric verification systems. If we don't, our homes could go from being our own personal safe havens to zoos where a hacker can see everything we're doing and control all the switches in our cages.

[Image: Flickr user Andrew Magill]

Even the most well meaning startups focusing on music discovery often neglect a growing industry concern––paying artists. It's a pressure point that doesn't seem to have a good solution. That's where Soundsupply comes in. The company markets itself as another service to help you discover your next favorite band, but they're really after a much bigger goal: Changing the music buying process as we know it, and paying artists in the process.

The model is similar to the curated subscription services that have been popping up for everything from cosmetics to coffee. Every month, Soundsupply gathers 10 handpicked digital music albums on a theme and sells the bundle for $15 for a limited time––just 10 days. An obvious deal for consumers, this model of selling music has also been more profitable for bands than any streaming service, in extreme cases by more than 400%. Last november, cofounder Tim Mortensen told me that one of the bigger bands featured in a drop (the company's name for their bundles) made $1,200 on 10 days of sales on Soundsupply. In the 3–month timespan before and after the drop, the same band made just $2.95 from Spotify royalties.

Although they won't go into the specifics of dividing up payments, both Tim and his cofounder and brother, Eric Mortensen, said that each artist is averaging a little over $1,000 per 10–days drop. Another number that the brothers are proud of: Artists are paid that money about 48 hours after the drop ends, a quicker turnaround than almost any other service.

Soundsupply started in early 2012 as a side project of the Mortensen brothers, which is also how they settled on the limited sale period:

"I wish I had a scientific answer that talked about media cycles or pay periods, but the 10–day timespan was originally chosen because of how we had to run Soundsupply given the schedules of our day jobs. You can only 'go to the bathroom' so many times to respond to emails and fix website issues before your boss gets suspicious (or worried about your health)," says Tim Mortensen. "The one thing we've learned is that no matter how many days the drop runs, there are always people who miss it and email asking if they can still get in on a drop that has ended. We hate breaking hearts, but everything has to end sometime, right?"

In early 2013, the two took on funding from Lightbank, which was an early investor in Groupon, and turned the project into a full–time business. The pair have since partnered with multiple music labels as well as the Vans Warped Tour, providing a themed drop featuring artists on the tour. That drop sold so well that it prompted the pair to explore other similar partnerships, including an upcoming bundle for a charity curated by one of the Mortensens' favorite artists.

The consensus among the labels who have signed on so far is that Soundsupply drops are good for business. Chris Hansen, who runs No Sleep Records, says that a drop "creates awareness for the artists, the albums, and the labels." Matt Lunsford, owner of Polyvinyl Records, concurs.

"We primarily view the drops as a way to increase music discovery for the artists on our roster," says Lunsford. "Because Soundsupply's users are engaged and paying for music, it seems more likely that they will discover a new band through the service than if they were given a free download or stream."

It's tempting to view services like Spotify, Rdio, and Pandora as brand–new digital distribution mechanisms, but in many ways they're working within the constraints created decades ago by the radio industry in order to move money around. According to these labels, Soundsupply represents a truly new take on leveraging digital media that they've never seen before. Selling bits in bulk makes money, paying for music creates a connection, and direct–to–artists/indie label sales means sharing the profits fairly.

[Image: Flickr user Melissa J. Muller]

Tech Hacks Won't Fix Our Surveillance Problems

Some suggest the best way to combat government spying is with even more technology. Why buying a dozen dogs doesn't solve your cat problem.

Google Fiber Banning "Servers"

Google's ISP users agreement dances around the tech giant's own basic philosophy. You're served.

Bleak Future For Apple?

Steve Jobs left Apple twice, this time for good. Larry Ellison explains hot the tech giant couldn't live with the cofounder, but can't live without him.

To The Creators

For what seems like forever, you've poured your own blood, sweat and tears into your product. So, what took you so long?

Use Encryption A Lot More

Intelligence agencies have access to all unencrypted communications on the Internet. Why are journalists taking this information so lightly?

Keep Reading To See Curated Reads From Previous Days' News.

August 7, 2013

The Anti–Apple

Conventional wisdom suggests Amazon.com serves as ying to Apple's yang. Horace Dediu's looking for an orange.

CE uh–O

Executives often live two lives. Can they keep their balance?

Reflections From A Manager

Looking for tips on how to be a better boss? Try the mirror.

Ego Depletion

When it comes to successful development, your user comes first. So get over yourself.

Bezos+Washington Post=Optimism

Jeff Bezos is successful and the Capital's paper isn't. There's room for improvement. Do the math.

Finding Your Purpose

Establishing why you want to do something and saying so up front takes [g]uts. Grow a pair.

New York City By Drone

Recently spurned by opera, a Phantom scaled some of the city's most beautiful buildings shooting stunning footage. Who is that masked man?

August 6, 2013

Objectively Stylish

Here are the New York Times' style guidelines––for Objective–C. Know the rules. It's the only way to bend them.

Open Thank–You To Open Source

Developers owe the builders of open source software big time. Take a letter!

You Literally Represent Everything Wrong With The World

Hey, you know what would make this movie better? The movie.

What Customers Hate About Social Brands

What drives customers the craziest? Your spelling. Also, your sense of humor.

Practice Makes Efficiency, Not Perfection

Researchers believe that repetition of tasks makes for simpler neural pathways and a less energy–indulgent brain. Monkey see, monkey do, monkey do better next time.

Tweets Really Can Boost Ratings

Nielsen determined that Twitter holds statistically significant sway in viewership. Networks, you're on notice.

Surveillance: The Enemy of Innovation

As technology grows more voyeuristic, public and private surveillance permeate our lives. Long live the status quo!

Jeff Bezos's Most Recent "Post"

Why did Jeff Bezos buy the Capital's newspaper? A source close to us has no idea.

NSA Surveillance And Mission Creep

Agencies outside the NSA are requesting surveillance information to use in their own, unrelated investigations. Oh, and the DEA's pants are on fire.

August 5, 2013

The Idea Maze

Founders should be students of their game, so take notes, there's a test. Do well, get cheese.

Dubstep

Music keeps societies' rhythms. Bassnectar gets us up to speed.

Working In The Shed

Attention spans are short, but Matt Gemmell knows a trick. Hocus focus.

Why Mobile Web Apps Are Slow

Mobile app speed is enough to drive you up the wall. Drew Crawford takes your brain for a spin.

Hard Work Isn't Always Enough

Think all it takes is dedication and follow–through to get better? Take a lap.

Why Quartz Values Email Newsletters

MailChimp works. Now dance, monkey!

Senators Can't Agree On Who's A Journalist

Senators don't know. But they're fleshing it out.

Words Are Hooks, Words Are Levers

When it comes to kicking words around, consider the impact: "Turf" toe.

July 31, 2013

What I Learned Writing 30,000 Words

Branding ain't easy. Unless, of course, you're motivated. Then it's a piece of cake.

Collaboration Doesn't Work

How do you increase productivity without ostracizing your employees? Stop calling meetings. And don't say the C–Word.

You Are Building A Brand – Whether You Realize It Or Not

Marc Barros doesn't think you should outsource your branding. After all, if they build it, who will come?

The Much Pricier Minnowboard

Intel's new minimalist PC may cost a fortune compared to its British counterpart, but I/O performance and expansion are as easy as Raspberry Pi.

Ghost[buster] Of Computer Science Past

Programmers often turn a cold shoulder to the greats who came before them, dooming them to the same frigid, digital landscape developed years ago. Don't forget your booties . . .

Why the Internet Needs Cognitive Protocols

As Internet traffic multiplies exponentially, network infrastructures will no longer be sufficient by the end of the decade. Antonio Liotta's getting nervous.

Slow Ideas

Some of the best ideas in human history are the last to catch on, but why? This renaissance surgeon reminds us the road to nowhere is paved with good inventions.

July 29, 2013

Down With Lifehacking!

When opportunity knocks, tell it the door's open. Take it easy.

Time Is Right For Video Initiatives

The Washington Post's "PostTV" brings online video content to readers everywhere. Tune into the noob–tube.

How To Hire The Best Designer For Your Team

Finding the right designer is about as easy as hunting unicorn. Braden Kowitz details a most dangerous game.

Silence Is Golden

Sometimes less is more. So shut up.

Understanding Google

You put the right one in, you get the right one out. Google gets horizontal.

3 Reasons To Write

Everyone wants to be a writer. So why doesn't anyone write?

3 Ways Running A Business Makes You A Better PM

Kenton Kivetsu knows what it takes to excel in your business: Know it like the back of your hand.

Why We're Doing Things That Don't Scale

Automation limits your company's most valuable, human resources. Jason Fried tips the scales.

After Award, Engineer Says NSA Shouldn't Exist

The NSA handed out its first "Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper" award last week to a most ungracious recipient. Joseph Bonneau bites the hand that feeds him.

Getting Back Your Series A Mojo

Mark Suster likes entrepreneurs with something to prove. After all, if something's broke, effing fix it.

July 24, 2013

You Can't Fire Your Investors

You can pick an investor, and you can pick what your investor knows. But you can't pick your investor's nose.

Great Products Have Stories

Marketing 101: Grabbing people's attention from the front of the class can be tricky. Unless, of course, it's show and tell.

Who Are You?

As an entrepreneur, it's imperative you get to know yourself. Have a seat on the couch.

Twitter Is Gaining In Popularity

Usage rates are up in virtually every media network over the last decade. Get Social.

Why Stylus Fit Better My Needs

New languages ain't easy. Stylus helps out with CSS syntax.

Roll Your Own Summer Coding Camp

Learning to code can be intimidating. Here's a way to teach yourself a new language, within your own specific time frame. Don't forget the marshmallows.

Data Compression Proxy

Google is rolling out a mobile browser that cuts data usage in half. You down with DCP?

NSA Implements Two–Man Control for Sysadmins

The NSA has implemented a brave new security policy to tighten things up: The Buddy System.

Religion And Our Evolution

Don't send a priest to do an anthropologist's job. Cadell Last examines religion in a contemporary world.

July 23, 2013

The Missing Step In Lean Startup Methodology

So your product solves all life's problems. Why isn't anyone using it?

Switching From iOS To Android

As the Android platform matures, people are finding iOS more and more restrictive. Why this professor pimped his phone.

Love What You Build

Not sold on your own product? Then why would anyone else buy it?

There Is No Application For Entrepreneurship

Kevin Rustagi has some advice: Stop asking permission to be successful. This is America, for crying out loud.

Victory Lap For Ask Patents

The boundaries of patent law are as blurry as any. This entrepreneur brings intellectual property rights into focus.

NFC–Enabled Jewelry

NFC technology has Europe and China under its spell. Here's one ring to fool them all.

Apple Flat, Google 3–D?

Google recently announced a drastically different design approach. It's different. But why?

July 22, 2013

Apple Acknowledges Hack

Apple says they're not entirely sure if any confidential information fell into the wrong hands during Thursday'ss security breach. Wait, which are the wrong hands again?

The Rebirth Of Windows Mobile

Windows missed the boat on tablets. Jean–Louis Gassée plots Steve Ballmer's new course.

Motorola X Leak

The phone maker's got a rat. Seth Weintraub's got the cheese.

How Yield Will Transform Node.js

Asynchronous code reads like a traffic jam. Alex McCaw breaks down how Yield can get things in sync.

Your Startup's Office Is Missing A Room

The most important aspect of your product is how it's put to work. Tomasz Tunguz fights for the user.

Parsing The $900M Surface RT Writedown

Microsoft announced a massive revaluation of their inventory Thursday. Alex Wilhelm is at a loss.

Negative Space In Design Terms

Is negative space an important design tool? Christie Johann thinks so. In fact, she's positive.

Why Most Apps Are Free

People will put up with anything, and Android users are cheap. Mary Ellen Gordon applies Flurry Analytics to app pricing.

Downward, Ho!

Can't see the forecast for the trends: Nathan Kontny explains how losing faith in the face of obstacles is no way to grow a business.

News Orgs Developing "Digestible Digital Weeklies"

Dailies and monthlies can be hard to swallow. How some magazines are cooking up something just right.

Explore Local Politics With Network Graphs

This journalism professor hates politics. Listen to him.

July 18, 2013

Apple, Google Join Forces, Request NSA Data Be Made Public

Sixty–three recently embarrassed tech companies are calling for more transparency in surveillance requests. What are the chances the NSA sees right through them?

DHS Puts Its Head In The Sand

Bruce Schneier came across a DHS memo detailing a strange new security policy: The Honor System.

iWatch's Novelty Emerges

Apple is putting together a team of experts in development of a new, fitness–centered piece of wearable tech. It's all in the wrist.

A Mathematical Look At The Arab Spring

Youth bulges beget political unrest. Or do they? Get a job, hippie!

Runaway Heron

Germany's The Bild posted video footage of a 2010 runway accident involving the popular drone. Is there a pilot on board?

What Journalists Need To Know About Responsive Design

There are seemingly endless formats for site design across platforms. Casey Frechette reminds us of a "core Web principle": It's all in the way you look at it.

July 17, 2013

The Creepy Practice Of Undersea Cable Tapping

The government has been monitoring underwater communications since the Cold War, but how much can they really dig up? Olga Khazan mines the abyss.

The Three Phases Of Startup Sales

Sales strategies must evolve with a business. Tomasz Tunguz lays down the steps to get you to the top.

Ring The Freaking Cash Register

Mark Suster has seen the cash dry up within many well–funded new startups. His advice? Put money in the till.

How Google Picked "OK, Glass"

How did Google settle on their activation phrase for their new wearable tech? It's the blind leading the blind, only now they can see.

Poor Quality Will Kill You

Startups fail for all kinds of reasons, but one thing is for sure: Shoddy product is not an option.

5 Things Journalists And Musicians Have In Common

Tunes and news have changed drastically in the last 20 years. Angela Washeck reports on how the two industries evolved in harmony.

NBCNews Still Finding Its Footing

One year post–split with Microsoft, NBCNews still looking for its legs. Jeff John Roberts maps out the network's quest for solid ground.

July 16, 2013

Disgruntled Google Users Live Low–Google Lifestyle

Sam Whited and Adam Wilcox have grown tired of the Google's ever–changing landscape, so they're cutting it out. Here's a peak at their new preferences.

Hackers Turn Verizon Box Into Spy Tool

The cell giant's network extender can be modified into a small transmission tower capable of picking up all cell traffic in its range. Someone alert the NSA . . .

Flexible Batteries That Could Power iWatch

ProLogium has developed new ceramic lithium batteries the bend the rules of smartwatch–making. Will Apple and the Taiwanese company band together?

Opbeat Nets $2.7M For "Web Ops" Control Center

The Danish startup is committed to providing development support to other startups. If it's broke, they'll fix it. Get to work.

How to Solve the Biggest Frustration Marketers Have

Social Media lacks reliable ROI measures, and it drives marketers up the wall. Mark Suster thinks it's time they took awe.sm for a ride.

Apple Pitches Ad–Skipping For New TV Service

Apple wants users to be able to skip ads during television programs, but still compensate the advertisers. But the service will come at a premium.

Choice Of A Rightly Paranoid Generation

Though not without faults of its own, Bitmessage offers users concerned with their privacy some peace of mind. How this hacker favorite might go mainstream.

How To Be A Better Writer: Fail Like A Comedian

Nathan Kontny knows what it takes to get better: Practice. Wait, that's not funny.

July 15, 2013

Microsoft Pays First "Bug Bounty"

Having long resisted bounty programs, Microsoft is finally putting their money on the line. Make check payable to "Google."

Apple Should Protect Us From Porn

A Tennessee lawyer filed suit against Apple claiming damages from devices that can display porn, and his own subsequent addiction. The first step is admitting this is someone else's problem.

Microsoft Reorg: The Missing Answer

Microsoft announced last week that they will reorganize their company's structure. Apple may not have fallen far, but this tree wants it back.

Not A Geek

Does decades of developing a geek make? Matt Gemmell waxes existential.

Data Storage That Could Outlast The Human Race

A million years from now and at 1000 C, 180 TB of information will still be readable on a single disk. And still, the glass is only half full.

The Complete Guide To Hashtag Etiquette

Hashtags gather people together for conversation. Shea Bennett reminds you to mind your manners. Pound it out.

How Intellectual Property Reinforces Inequality

Myriad Genetics' recent claim to DNA ownership looks like an unethical cash grab aimed at exploiting inequalities in the American health care system. Joseph E. Stiglitz reminds us everything that shines ain't patent leather.

Tiny Robotic Cubes Could Rule The Solar System

Researchers at the University of Michigan launched a kickstarter aimed at funding revolutionary new space probes they believe can be sent millions of miles into space. And they're no bigger than a breadbox.

Do Things That Don't Scale

Startups succeed for all kinds of reasons, most of them hard work. Don't be a quitter.

July 11, 2013

"What Running Has Taught Me About Entrepreneurship"

Adii Pienaar found parallels between exercise and enterprise. Here's a game plan to help you achieve your personal best.

"IFTTT: A Different Kind Of iOS Automation"

Federico Viticci and IFTTT separated ages ago. Can they rekindle the magic?

"Chromebooks Exploding!"

As laptop sales plummet, Google's hardware has the $300 and under–PC market on the defensive. Chance Miller has the intel.

"The New York Times Is Building A New TimesMachine"

The next generation online archive features increased functionality changing the way we view the past. But it's the technology behind it that's really in flux.

"Wired's Profile Leads With Wardrobe"

Cade Metz led with three paragraphs on fashion in his recent piece on Google engineer Melody Meckfessel. How progressive!

July 10, 2013

Apple's Plans For IGZO Display Integration

Apple has plans for IGZO displays in iPads and iPhones, we know. But are there plans for MacBooks?! Lighten up.

What Samsung's New U.S. Headquarters Says

The new LEED Gold–rated building in San Jose speaks volumes about the tech giant. Alexis Madrigal translates.

Build Brand Awareness First – Distribution Second

Many startups establish presence before demand. Marc Barros thinks that's back asswards.

Gaining Mobile Traction Is Harder Than Ever

The mobile marketing landscape has changed. Andrew Chen tracks the industry's evolution.

Post–Reader RSS Subscriber Counts

AOL Reader, Digg Reader, and The Old Reader don't publish subscription stats. Marco Arment wants to change that. Nothing personal . . .

A Refresher Course In Empathy

Customer support systems often lose sight of what's important. Emily Wilder wants things back on track. Where there's a skill, there's a way.

Dropbox Blows It Up

Dropbox already connects you to your stuff. What if they connected your stuff to your stuff? You're gonna need a storage unit.

July 9, 2013

Turn Anything Into a Drone

Sure, your bike has wheels . . . but can it fly? 3–D drone home.

Effecting Change From The Outside

Marco Arment believes Apple hears users' complaints and uses them to effect change. The creator of Instapaper encourages everyone to use their words.

The Dangers Of Beating Your Kickstarter Goal

Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert are almost a year late with their much–anticipated new adventure game. They ran into a notoriously BIG problem . . .

This Is Not a Test

America's Emergency Broadcast Systems are vulnerable to attack. Steve Wilkos is Nostradamus.

Former Windows Chief Explains Why It's So Hard To Go Cross–Platform

As platforms develop, bridging the gaps between them becomes increasingly difficult. Steven Sinofsky articulates the communication breakdown.

The Computers That Run The Stock Market

If you play the market, Citadel has likely handled your money. Meet the machines behind the Machine.

July 8, 2013

Modeling How Programmers Read Code

Michael Hansen shot video demonstrating how varying levels of programming skill affect a coder's pattern recognition while reading script. This just in: Practice makes perfect.

Technology Workers Are Really Young

PayScale took it upon itself to determine the median age of workers in technology. The results, next time on, "The Young and the Breastless."

Everything Gmail Knows About You And Your Friends

Researchers at MIT are mapping people's social lives by way of their email accounts. Stick your nodes in other people's business.

NSA Collaborated With Israel To Write Stuxnet Virus

Edward Snowden says that intelligence agencies dig deeper than we know . . . and they're working together. What else can he see with "Five Eyes?"

Facebook Begins Graph Search Rollout

Facebook announced the much–anticipated search function will launch this week with improvements upon beta. What all can we expect from the new tool?

iOS 7's Design Bold, Flawed

Christa Mrgan illustrates Apple's new 2.5–D design approach. Might wanna grab your glasses.

What Kind Of Crazy Scheme Is Motorola Hatching?

Google and Motorola are working on "the first smartphone that you can design yourself," but what does that mean? Smartphone buffet. Get stuff[ed].

UI Principles For Great Interaction Design

Interaction Design is a relatively new field and not everyone knows it well. Christian Vasile touches on the basics and lays down a working foundation for rest of us.

Designing App Store "Screenshots"

Travis Jeffery has some advice for iOS developers: Stop taking screenshots, start making them.

Apple, Google And The Failure Of Android's Open

Think Open Source is winning? Daniel Eran Dilger will be the judge of that. Case closed.

July 2, 2013

Build It, But They Won't Come

Too often developers value product over marketing, decreasing their chances of success. Andrew Dumont looks to level the playing field.

"Pick The Brains" Of Busy People

People with packed schedules aren't easy to pin down, especially for advice. Wade Foster plays to their egos.

iOS 7 GUI PSD

Ready to familiarize yourself with iOS 7's graphical user interface? So is Mark Petherbridge and he's got the Photoshop document to prove it.

Google Glass Updated

Google announced major software updates coming for its wearable device. OK Glass, whaddya got?

Forthcoming "Cheap" iPhone Potentially Hideous

Leaks suggest the newer, less expensive iPhone is manufactured in Candyland. Christopher Mims takes a lick.

How Facebook Threatens HP, Cisco With "Vanity Free" Servers

Facebook's DIY lab poses real questions regarding the viability of open source hardware. Efficiency is the name of the game . . . and what savings!

July 1, 2013

How Apple's iLife, iWork, iBooks Could Look

iOS 7 will change just about everything. Michael Steeber takes a crack at apps' new aesthetic.

HP Smartphone In The Works

Two years after shutting down its mobile division, Hewlett–Packard is back in the game. Just don't ask for a timetable. Better late than never . . .

Most Willing To Exchange Private Social Data For Better Online Experience

More than half the social media users in the UK say they are willing to share private information for a more personalized web experience. England as an open book? Hey, a deal's a deal.

Anatomy Of A Tweet

140 characters are worth a thousand words. Shea Bennett explores the makeup of the world's favorite micro–blogger.

Startup Investing Trends

The small business landscape has changed drastically in the last 25 years. So will investors make more money moving forward or less? Paul Graham says more. Lots more.

Data Journalism Is Improving – Fast

The Data Journalism awards showed that the genre is gaining traction. Frederic Filloux shares three personal insights into the ever–changing DJ landscape.

Google 'Working On Videogame Console'

Wearable tech may not be the only advent in the search giant's future. Google's got game.

Wibbitz Could Wipe Out Publishers' Video Businesses

Paul Armstrong details the newest player in news. Small markets just got a whole lot bigger.

June 27, 2013

An Open Letter To Apple Re: Motion Sickness

Craig Grannell is sick to his stomach at the thought of more full–screen transitions. But he can't be the only one. Anyone have a barf bag?

Women in Tech

Women and minorities are underrepresented in tech. But there are two crowdfunding projects trying to change all that. Cast your vote.

Pre–9/11 NSA Thinking

Fifteen years ago, the NSA assured the American people that our security and privacy were their top priority. Bruce Schneier takes a look at what changed.

WikiLeaks Volunteer Paid FBI Informant

Sigurdur "Siggi" Thordarson hid inside WikiLeaks as an FBI informant for three months and $5000. Secrets, secrets are no fun . . . and they don't pay for shit either.

PayPal/SETI To Create Interplanetary Payment System

Astronauts have long felt the need for intergalactic auto–autopayment options, but soon they might pay bills from space. Quick, phone home.

June 26, 2013

Make Better Business Phone Calls

Mark Suster knows how to build business relationships, and not with emails. The entrepreneur–turned–venture capitalist lists seven ways to improve your asking strategies. It's face time.

Premium Pricing, Exclusivity & A Higher Demand

Adii Pienaar employs cognitive dissonance in defense of PublicBeta's premium pricing structure. Either it makes you money or saves you money, but no matter what, it costs you money. You decide.

Can Apple Read Your iMessages?

Apple claims it doesn't share your information with the government. Cryptographer Matthew Green reveals two truths about iMessage's user security that might surprise you. Say metadata decryption 10 times fast.

eBay Builds New Engine, New Identity

In 2008, eBay found itself lost within the next generation of search engines. Marcus Wohlsen explains how chief technology officer Mark Carges took action, forsook auction.

Inside YouTube's Master Plan To Kill Lag Dead

YouTube recognizes the importance of progress bars, so they're reinventing the wheel. Instant gratification, here we come! It's the best thing since . . . how does that one go again?

Genes And Memes

Cadell Last draws on the parallels between genetic and memetic evolution. Is Richard Dawkins the missing link?

Why You Can't Find A Technical Cofounder

Guest writer Elizabeth Yin lists the things developers look for most in a technical cofounder, and a number of ways to gain traction. Remember the three things that matter least in tech startups: Location, location, location.

June 20, 2013

Something Old, Something New

Digg is slated to replace Google Reader by July 1. And while that may not be nearly enough time for some, Andrew McLaughlin keeps his promises . . . with gusto.

Check Out Tim Bucher's Secret Startup

The ex–lead engineer at Apple is pillaging tech giants for employees at Black Pearl Systems. Meet the internet's newest band of pirates. Argh!

"Steve Jobs Once Wanted To Hire Me"

Richard Sapper remembers his career in design, condemns commercialism, and reveals he once forsook geek Jesus. #OMGY?!

Does NDA Still Make Sense?

The first rule of nondisclosure is: Shut Your F#@%ing Mouth. But seriously, speak up.

Traveling, Writing, And Programming (2011)

Alex Maccaw spent almost an entire year abroad, killing it. Get ready . . . Jetset . . . Go!

Wrong Need Not Apply

R. E. Warner dislikes critiques . . . reading them, anyway. The coder–poet turns two wrongs righteous.

Schneier On Security

Scott Adams thinks we'll someday identify sociopaths by way of their Facebook usage patterns; Bruce Schneier thinks he's nuts.

Want To Work At Twitter?

Buster Benson's been with Twitter almost a year now. This is what it sounds like when ducks tweet.

June 19, 2013

Want To Try iOS 7 Without Bricking Your Phone?

There's a hassle–free introduction to iOS 7 available online. And while it may not be the smoothest transition, it gets the job done. Recumbo shows us what's what.

Moving The Web Forward Together

The open web is expanding evermore toward new frontiers. Chris Webb explains the necessity of new features, innovation, and trail blazing.

Asynchronous UIs––The Future Of Web User Interfaces

Alex Maccaw debunks request–response and outlines his vision for the future of user interface. Death to the spinning lollipop of death!

"Human Supremacists"

"The Superior Human?" questions whether or not human beings are superior to all other life forms. Humans: A) Rule; B) Are a disease; C) Abhor a Vacuum; D) Ain't so great after all. Cadell Last examines all of the above.

Wrong

Jony Ive's iOS 7 icon grid has supplied new inroads for design–related hater traffic. Neven Mrgan breaks down the gridlock.

On Discipline

Michael Heilemann declares iOS 7 the Alpha and Omega of modern operating systems. He's also pretty happy it's in beta . . .

Startup Beats Rivals, Builds "DVR For Everything"

Nate Weiner pasted Pocket together from scraps, but he attracted some vocal detractors. Stop copying!

Cat–Like Robot Runs Like The Wind

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) developed the world's fastest quadruped robot and hopes the Cheetah–cub stimulates search–and–rescue–related progress in robotics. Now if they'd only get to work on a bionic St. Bernard and some digital brandy . . .

June 18, 2013

Developer Finds Video Evidence In Instagram Code

Tom Waddington did some digging and found a mute button programmed into the popular photo sharing app. But don't get your hopes up, Facebook is likely to stay mum at Thursday's event.

Popular Ad Blocker Helps Ad Industry

Ghostery shares data with the same industry its users avoid at all cost. Scott Meyer explains how he keeps his consumers close, and his customers closer.

If You Could Eat Only One Thing …

Elizabeth Preston breaks down the latest food fad. Hint: It ain't people.

Humans Immortal In 20 Years, Says Google Engineer

Ray Kurzweil believes medical advances in the last 1000 years suggest that humans may outpace organic decay. Someone alert the Social Security Administration . . . whenever.

Get Rid of the App Store's "Top" Lists

Marco Arment thinks "Top" lists suppress app store progress, and he's got a solution: Grease creative palms, not squeaky wheels.

The NSA story isn't "journalistic malfeasance"

Mathew Ingram breaks down both sides of the most recent ethics debate in journalism. Conclusion: We're all dirty.

June 17, 2013

Why Is Exercise Such a Chore?

Daniel Lieberman tells Anil Ananthaswamy how the human body evolved for long–distance running. This guy's got his head on straight.

Sexism Still A Problem At E3

The Penny Arcade Expo banned booth babes, but E3 is still behind the curve. Gamer Anonymous highlights the first step to recovery.

President Orders Spectrum Open For Wireless Broadband

Obama promises more Internet for the people. But how will the G–Men free up the bandwidth?

Anthony Goubard Built Joeffice In 30 Days

The Netherlands–based developer explains how Java is a part of a complete office suite . . . you know, when it's done.

Real Answers or Fake Questions From Xbox One Document?

Owen Good analyzes some frequently spread rumors about Microsoft's new Xbox One. Something doesn't add up . . .

Designer David Wright Has Just One Favor To Ask

NPR's latest hotshot developer is leaving news for Twitter. Wright tells Nieman Journalism Lab why design is the most prominent challenge to modern journalism. The solution is simple.

Reporting Or Illegal Hacking?

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act makes life a living hell for whistle–blowers and highlights some glaring holes in the justice system. Just whom are we locking up?

June 14, 2013

The Most Effective Price Discovery Question for Your Startup

How much should your product cost? Ask your customers. Tomasz Tunguz outlines the importance of comparative pricing questions. He's always right.

Why The Hell Am I Building A Product With A Tiny Market?

Developing a product for a smaller market minimizes risk, but at what cost? Serge Toarca lists the pros and cons of niche programming.

8 Months In Microsoft, I Learned These

School and the real world just ain't the same. The recently matriculated Ahmet Alp Balkan tells it like it is.

The Code You Don't Write

Measure yourself by the work you don't do. Tim Evans–Ariyeh works smart, not hard.

iOS Assembly Tutorial

Matt Galloway breaks down what holds machine code together and teaches us to speak this intuitive language.

iOS 7 Icon Grid

John Marstall outlines Apple's new icon design grid. But don't think for one second he likes it.

Apple Uploads Its "Mission Statement" Videos To YouTube

Apple released a slew of new videos revealing to the world what they're all about. 9to5Mac takes a look at the new direction.

How Three Guys Rebuilt The Foundation Of Facebook

Facebook rode hip–hop to the tip–top. Cade Metz explains how the world's most prominent social network continues growing and preserves "The Hacker Way."

Consumer Vs. Enterprise Startups

Bijan Sabet outlines the difference in funding two types of startups and reveals his love affair with the consumer world. Maybe we're not just dreamers after all . . .

How To Build A Solid Product Roadmap

Outlining a plan doesn't mean it will execute properly, but it sure helps. Kenton Kivestu nails down the framework necessary in any product development process.

Getting Swoll

Travis Herrick works out, and he knows why: Nothing worth building comes easy, not even bodies.

Google Accused Of Hypocrisy Over Google Glass

Google Glass might be the most invasive piece of consumer technology ever, and Google knows it. Time to look in the mirror . . .

Stop Worrying About The Death Of Showrooming

Physical stores may be going the way of the dinosaur, but showrooming is by no means extinct. Casey Johnston shines some light on a new online model. Might wanna try on some sunglasses...

First look at Apple's U.S.–manufactured Mac Pro

Apple unveiled the new Mac pro at the 2013 WWDC yesterday. Here's a first look at the cylindrical powerhouse.

Will Apple Allow Third–Party Software Keyboards In iOS 7?

Rumor has it developers will be able to program their own keyboards in the new iOS. Can it be true?

Apple's New Promises To News Orgs

Apple announced a number of new products yesterday at the WWDC, not the least of which is iOS7. Joshua Benton breaks down the tech giant's big day.

Soon You'll Be Able To Read iBooks On Your Mac

iBooks are now compatible with Apple's new Mavericks OS. Read up. Take notes.

Google Reader's dead and gone, but Google Glass is on the case. Applied Analog is interfacing your face.

Instafeed Lets You Curate Instagram Like RSS Feeds

The new app supplements Instagram, curating your feed by topic. But are they really in sync?

WikiLeaks Is More Important Than You Think

The NSA is gleaning information off of some of the biggest players on the web. Matthew Ingram explains why having an independent leaks repository is invaluable.

Robots Will Leave Us All Jobless

Technological progress increases productivity across the board. But are those same advances costing people their jobs? Illah Nourbakhsh discusses the inconvenient truth surrounding the rise of machines.

Cops can't figure out the latest technology in car theft, and neither can automakers. Can signal repeaters used in conjunction with keys in close proximity be the answer? Repeat . . . Police stumped.

Your Information Is Fair Game For Everyone

The U.S. government monitors our every digital move. The NSA compiles vast databases of emails, calls, and browsing history. So why does China get all the credit?

The iOS and Android Two–Horse Race: A Deeper Look into Market Share

Apple and Google have long vied for control of the mobile marketshare. Mary Ellen Gordon breaks down the race and explains the difference between devie– and app–share. Win, place, and show us the analytics.

How Facebook's Entity Graph Evolved Into Graph Search

Harrison Weber explains how Facebook uses structured data to target users with ads so that they can target their exes. Stalkers . . .

You Won't Finish This Article

People just don't read like they used to. Farhad Manjoo breaks down the analytics of the ever–shortening Internet attention span. Wait . . . what?

Why Google Reader Really Got the Axe

Google sentenced its RSS reader to death. Christina Boddington outlines the deliberations, the verdict, and this particular trial's outcome.

The Secret Worlds Inside Our Computers

Ever wonder what's going on inside your computer? Photographer Mark Crummett employs his world lass diorama skills to open up a whole new world in his new show "Ghosts in the Machine."

Robotic Street Sign "Points" In The Right Direction

Brooklyn's Breakfast invented an interactive street sign. Drawing from a user interface, social media, and even RSS feeds, Points can show you the way to your heart's desire. Now, where the hell is Wall–Drug?

Your Ego, Your Product, And The Process

Too often, our process gets mucked up on account of feelings. Cap Watkins explains how letting go and opening up during the earlier stages of design can alleviate creative pains.

The Dawn Of Voice–To–Text

Carpal tunnel got you down? As the sun sets on hand–coding, Tomasz Tunguz explains the not–so–subtle nuances of dictation, and gives his wrists a well–deserved break.

11 Years Of WWDC Banners

The world's most popular developers' conference sold out in two hours this year. Here's a look at the banners from years past. Nostalgia!

Express.js And Node.js As A Prototyping Medium

Express.js and Node.js can intimidate first–timers. Fret not. Chris Webb shares a list of helpful hints to get you started and guide you along.

In–Store iPhone Screen Replacement And The Machine Making It Possible

Apple has announced a new service replacing damaged iPhone screens in–house for $149. The price is right, but what does it mean for AppleCare?

The Future of Shopping

Google takes aim at Amazon's Prime subscription with Shopping Express. From cosmetics to toys, they deliver anything within a few hours of your order. No toilet paper? Keep your seat. They'll be right over.

The Next Big Thing In Gesture Control

Thalmic Labs raised $14.5 million for its MYO Armband. With over 30,000 pre–orders already, the Canadian startup is poised to usher in a new era of touchless computing.

Who Is The Tesla Motors Of The Media Industry?

Some suggest that media is going the way of the American automobile. Matthew Ingram explains who's on cruise control, and who's bucking the motor trend.

Finding Good Ideas Through The "McDonald's Theory"

Creative block? Try Jason Jones's own intellectual Drano: Terrible Suggestions.

Why Are Developers Such Cheap Bastards?

Developers notoriously reject paying for necessary technology. In fact, many of them waste weeks writing their own, bug–riddled programs. But they will pay for services, like the cloud. What's the deal?

The Banality Of "Don't Be Evil"

Beneath Google's do–gooder facade lies something more akin to a Heart of Darkness. The tech giant got into bed with Washington, and now they're working together to implement the West's next–generation, imperialist status quo. But don't look, they're watching.

The Straight Dope On United States vs. Apple

The publishing houses have all reached settlements, but Apple's still on the hook. Here's a look at the core issues driving the government's case.

Everything You Know About Kickstarter Is Wrong

The crowd–funding site has never really been about technology, but new requirements make it even harder to raise money for gadgets. Artists aside, it's time to look elsewhere for cash.

A Real Plan To Fix Windows 8

Microsoft's "integrated" operating system never worked well for tablets or PCs. How InfoWorld aims to dissolve this unholy union and salvage what should be a healthy, digital relationship.

Why The Hell Does Clear For iOS Use iCloud Sync?

Milen explains why Clear and iCloud make natural bedfellows, and how they fell in with each other in the first place.

Here's What's Missing From iOS Now

FanGirls compiled a miscellaneous iOS wish list for all the good girls (and boys) to see. From Wi–Fi and Bluetooth to file systems and bugs, here are eight reasonable expectations for the future of iOS.

Startups, Growth, and the Rule of 72

David Lee uses Paul Graham's essay "Startup=Growth" as a jumping off point to explain the metrics of growth. And don't worry if you've lost your mathematical touch, he has too.

"Starbucks Of Weed," Brought To You By An Ex–Microsoft Executive

Andy Cush explains how Diego Pellicer plans to become America's first real marijuana chain. They're looking for $10 million in investments to expand into three new states. They must be high . . .

SUPER–CHEAP 3D–PRINTER COULD SHIP THIS YEAR

Pirate 3D is bringing the revolution to your doorstep, and for a heck of a lot cheaper than their competitors. Their goal? Get these things out to kids and see what prints.

A Story About The Early Days Of Medium

How do you create Medium and change publishing forever? By first gaining audience with the man behind Twitter, duh. And a couple other Obvious ones . . .

Why Google Is Saying Adios To Some Of Its Most Ardent App Developers

Google is laying off its App developers in Argentina on account of a logistical banking nightmare. Really, it's just paperwork. In a related story, interest in Google's Internship remains underwhelming.

This Guy Screencaps Videos Of Malware At Work

Daniel White infects old hardware with contemporary viruses for educational purposes. But don't Worry, he's not contagious.

The Rise Of Amateurs Capturing Events

You've met Big Brother, now meet "Little Brother." How the same technological developments advancing institutional surveillance are ushering in a new era of civilian watchdogs.

Three Mistakes Web Designers Make Over And Over Again

Doomed to repeat ourselves? Not so fast. Nathan Kontny shares a short list of some things he thinks to avoid.

Not So Anonymous: Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox Tightens Identity Requirement

Can we see some identification? Mt. Gox announces new verification procedures in response to a recent money laundering investigation into one of its competitors. And they've got their own legal problems, too .

The Wall Street Journal Plans A Social Network

The Wall Street Journal is working to connect everyone invested in the Dow Jones on a more private, financial network with chat. Suddenly, Bloomberg's got some competition.

Tumblr Adds Sponsored Posts, And The Grumbles Begin

Users are responding poorly to Yahoo adding advertising to Tumblr. Can sponsored stories save the day?

Sci–Fi Short Story, Written As A Twitter Bug Report

Anonymous man's @timebot tweets from the future, past, and present at once. But what can we learn given Twitter's rate limits. The end is nigh.

Thoughts On Source Code Typography

Developers read code more than anyone. David Bryant Copeland argues aesthetic in addition to content, and the importance of typography and readability of source code.

Marco Arment Sells "The Magazine" To Its Editor

Glenn Fleishman to helm progressive Instapaper as early as Saturday. It's business as usual, but with podcasts.

Mary Meeker's Internet Trends Report Is 117 Slides Long

The Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner will release her findings at the upcoming D11 conference. But you get a sneak peak...

Apple's Block And Tackle Marketing Strategy

Tim Cook explained yesterday why there are a million different iPods, only one iPhone, and the importance of consumers' desires and needs. But will things be different after the WWDC?

Why Almost Everyone Gets It Wrong About BYOD

To Brian Katz, BYOD is "about ownership––nothing more and nothing less." Why allowing people use of their own devices increases the likelihood that they will use the device productively.

Remote Cameras Are Being Used To Enforce Hospital Hand–Washing

Ever wonder if your doctors' hands were clean? So did North Shore University Hospital. New technology sends live video of hospital employees' hand–washing habits . . . to India.

8 Ways To Target Readership For Your Blog

Blog functionality has increased considerably in the last 10 years, but has that overcomplicated things? Here's a list from Matt Gemmell (aka the Irate Scotsman) of ways to simplify. Your readers will thank you for it.

Pricing Your App In Three Tiers: The Challenges Of Channel Conflict

Cost– and value–based pricing may at first appear in contrast to each other, but they exist for different kinds of consumers. Tomasz Tunguz explains some solutions to justify your pricing model and maximize your profits.

How Google Is Building Internet In The Sky

Google is already using blimp and satellite technology to bring the Internet to the farthest reaches of the planet. What they really want is television's white space, but they've got a fight on their hands.

You Wrote Something Great. Now Where To Post?

The writer's landscape has changed. But with so many new options comes confusion. How do authors with something to say decide where, and to whom, they say it?

Yahoo's Reinvention: Not Your Grandfather's Search Engine

CEO of Yahoo Marissa Mayer is bucking the minimalist trends she once championed at Google. Why the Internet portal may be making a comeback.

What Works On Twitter: How To Grow Your Following

Researchers at Georgia Tech University are working to shed light on one of the Internet's unsolved mysteries. Here are 14 statistically significant methods with which you can increase your presence on Twitter.

Financial Times Invents A Twitter Clone For News

With the launch of fastFT, Financial Times hopes to keep its readers closer than ever by providing a 100–250–word service for news. 8 journalists are now tasked with breaking the most important financial stories from all over the world.

[Image: Flickr user Tanakawho]

Walking into the UPS store felt like any other time I'd needed to ship a package. All of the basic machines you'd expect to see in a shipping and printing store were there: Scales for weighing boxes, copy machines, computers, and desktop printers. The only difference between this store and your average print shop, and it didn't even seem particularly out of place, was that on one of the counters, an inkjet or two had been replaced by an imposing Stratasys uPrint SE Plus 3–D printer.

This particular store is in San Diego, where UPS is beginning its national rollout of 3–D printers. Burke Jones, owner of the store, says he has received hundreds of questions and comments over the last week and a half about the new 3–D printer, the first UPS retail store to in the U.S. to install one.

"Big companies, small companies, and companies that aren't even companies yet, have been coming in and calling," Jones told San Diego's Fox affiliate.

Strewn around the printer, I found what looked like miscellaneous toys scattered around, unimpressive plastic objects like a wrench, bike chain, and mesh ball. Unimpressive, that is, until you realize that the roughly two and a half foot by three foot machine, in a store filled with paper copiers, had printed all those three dimensional objects.

It's telling that Daniel Remba, the small business technology leader for UPS, is the champion of the 3–D printer experiment. Remba believes that the demand for retail 3–D printers will come mostly from startups and individual inventors in the area who can't afford a printer of their own. Besides being UPS's hometown, San Diego, with its multiple innovation districts and tech scene built on a solid base of government–funded defense research, seems like an ideal place to test the market. Remba says that area businesses have already started using the machine.

"We have had a prototype electronic component from a major electronics manufacturer, a prosthetic hand from some medical students, an invention prototype for a heat sealing device, prototype pipes and valves, and prototypes of consumer grocery food containers," he explains.

To assist would–be inventors with their designs, each store that has a 3–D printer will also partner with a designer in the area to help customers make their designs print–ready. The idea is to make sure that technical ability is not a barrier to printing at the store. UPS also wants to make sure that the objects are as high–quality as possible, so that startups can walk away with a detailed, prototype–ready printout.

"The Stratasys uPrint SE Printer allows our customers to print detailed objects more accurately than a typical home 3–D printer could," says Remba, explaining why UPS chose to buy the expensive Stratasys model over something like the MakerBot.

When you hold the objects that come out of the Stratasys, you start to understand why UPS decided to splurge for these printers, which can cost as much as $15,000 each. Remba shows me several printed pieces, like the bike chain, which is rigid and strong, but still moves as fluidly as a metal one. You simply don't see this degree of precision from lower –cost, at–home 3–D printers. To make these more detailed objects, the Stratasys prints a filler compound alongside the plastic to support the weight of unsupported layers until the object is finished. Once completed, the compound is washed off and dissolved, leaving behind a complex 3–D object.

While I was there, the store printed a premade ball–bearing design for me. The Stratasys started almost as soon as I hit the print button, layering the insert tray with a base of filler compound and then slowly chugging away. The ball bearing printed in about 30 minutes. I was able to hold it in my hands just moments after it finished.

Even the folks at UPS acknowledged that retail 3–D printing is likely to be a specialized niche for the foreseeable future. They believe that by jumping on the trend early, they'll be able to tap into the growing market for 3–D printers among people who don't want to or can't buy their own: Early–stage startups, schools, hobbyists, and even professional prototypers in under–resourced labs who don't want to wait for printer time.

If the retail market takes off, we'll look back on this experiment as the one that proved it could work. If not, well, I'm glad I got a chance to experience it: I'm still trying to shake the giddy feeling of walking into a store with nothing and walking out with a tangible object printed out of thin air.

Hiring the right programmers and designers is crucial for any software business. Without a cohesive team, projects may never come together. But hiring a qualified developer can be such a long process that it can sometimes literally be endless: Just when one position is finally filled another may be opening up.

Big companies fix this problem by staffing up giant HR departments that take care of initial candidate screening and organize the company's developers to administer coding tests and other specialized evaluations. But startups and smaller companies don't have the same resources, even if they have a few HR people. With 325 total employees and about 60 iOS engineers, Mutual Mobile is large enough to have an HR "talent team," but when they first opened their HR department, they found that hiring iOS devs was draining all of its resources.

"We started originally with the traditional phone screening," says Ron Lisle, Mutual Mobile's director of iOS. "And we found that folks were getting pretty good at fooling us on the standard list of questions. We've had some folks that have applied to engineering jobs and I've gotta believe they've never programmed at all."

The iOS team found that the only way to get a clear sense of someone's skills was to fly them to Mutual Mobile's Austin offices for in–person interviews and code tests. But relying on on–site meetings to sort through everyone who got past the phone screen was costly and inefficient, especially because the candidates coming in weren't always prepared.

"About a year ago we were still doing the phone screen, but we got some folks where it was just really hard to tell," Lisle says. "It was like, 'okay this person might be really good, but I'm just uncomfortable about this or that. I can't tell if they really know coding.' And so we thought, well, instead of just writing the person off, if we had some sort of test we could send to them then we could actually see what they would do with coding up something. We could verify that they can actually compile and build code."

Asking developers to go through a pre–interview code test isn't new: Startups like Codility even offer automated testing as a product. But Mutual Mobile took their tests a step further. To get extra insight into whether a developer was right for the company (Lisle claims the company wants developers to "literally be crazy about mobile"), the company asked a few of its engineers working on the programming test to start adding run–time issues and other bugs to the code they would send to potential new hires. To decrease the impact on the company's business, Mutual Mobile turned to what it calls "bench resources," or employees that have finished one client's project and are waiting to begin something new, to write the tests.

"We thought, okay, so let's send them some code that they'll have to build, and let's throw a few bugs into it while we're at it and we'll kind of get a sense for are they able to find and fix bugs," Lisle says.

To see what the experience is like, Co.Labs asked veteran iOS and Android developer Chris White (who works with Co.Labs editor Chris Dannen) to download the test and give it a shot.

"It's interesting to engineer problems into the test, things that are broken" he says. "You don't want them to be too onerous, but you don't want them to be too obvious either. So I thought they did a reasonable job. If you've been using the iOS development tool exchange and XCode for a while then you should be able to fix these in a reasonable amount of time and already have provisioning profiles to run it on a device."

Mutual Mobile usually hires senior engineers, but the iOS team intentionally built three levels of bugs into the code so they can use it to evaluate a range of experience levels. Lisle emphasizes that the goal is not to hire people based on the test, but simply to use it as productive screening tool so that candidates who come to Austin for interviews and problem–solving tests already pass the company's basic requirements.

"We're almost always looking for really senior people and we hope this test will be such that somebody who gets everything would be at that level," Lisle says. "However, when we're hiring the middle experience level folks, they would get most of the questions but not all of them."

In thinking about the test a few weeks after taking it, White notes that coding tests which throw a candidate into the deep end are becoming more common. For example, White recalls that recently while applying for a job he was asked to do a pair programming project using a company's own code during an on–site interview. But sending a test like Mutual Mobile's out to first–round candidates, before they even ask for an interview, is still rare.

"It's a pretty interesting concept because oftentimes you're new on a project, you don't know the code at all, and you're given assignments so you've just got to basically jump in," White says.

Mutual Mobile is beginning to implement the test in hiring and Lisle hopes that the result will be a much more streamlined process. He took the test himself and said that it was "a bit of a challenge," but should be fun for engineers who love what they do. White says he enjoyed the test.

"I hope they were honest with me in telling me how well I really did," Lisle says, laughing. "The intent was it would not be this big burden, like do this work to prove yourself, but more here's something to play with and show us what you can do."

[Image: Flickr user Michael Himbeault]

Today's News Scrum Discussion: Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox, by Ben Horowitz.

At first I was glad to read this piece by Ben Horowitz because there is so much "advice to CEOs" out there, good and bad, but not as much discussion about whether or not founder CEOs fundamentally want this role and can be successful. It's so obvious that it's liberating to hear someone say "not every inventor wants to run a company." But by the end of the piece he moves in a very different direction.

Marc Barros, formerly of Contour, tackled the founder to CEO topic in a June piece for GeekWire. He pointed out that becoming a CEO involves learning a different leadership style and new set of management skills. For some people this may be an exciting or inspiring challenge, but for others it can feel like a distraction that weighs on them and inhibits their ability to pursue other creative projects.

As a former first–time founder and CEO, I didn't make it. I didn't understand, until it was over, just how hard the transition is from a founder to a CEO. A completely different role from getting a company off the ground, I learned that becoming a CEO is even lonelier than being the CEO.

Though, as mentioned above, Horowitz admits that not every founder will want to be CEO, he tries to make the case that everyone should want to do it. And his explanation of why it is important and possible will certainly motivate a founder who is already thinking about how to scale the CEO mountain. But it seems like it could have the opposite effect on someone who is already disenchanted with the job.

While talking about staying involved in products, Horowitz writes:

If you find . . . you cannot let go a little without letting go entirely –– then you probably should consider a CEO change. But don't do that. Learn how to do this.

It's a prescriptive generalization which puts more value on the work founders would do as CEOs than on the work some of them might do if they freed themselves to pursue other things. ––Lily Hay Newman

I'm going to disagree with Lily: Horowitz is right that all founders should want to be CEOs. Why? Because when you create a company and hire people to work for you, you're starting a community and asking other people to buy into it. If you bring other people along for the ride, you need to be ready for it yourself. If you're not, you shouldn't be the lead founder of a company in the first place.

That's what Horowitz is really getting at when he talks about a "product–oriented CEO." All of the people he cites were able to redirect their passion for products towards company operations. Instead of focusing solely on products, they turned to injecting their company culture with the same passion and vision that made it successful in the first place. That's exactly what Horowitz recommends:

At some point, you must formally structure your product involvement. You must transition from your intimately involved motion to a process that enables you to make your contribution without disempowering your team or driving them bananas.

In this way, it's not so much about forcing everyone to be a CEO, it's about re–imagining the CEO as the keeper of the company vision, not just a decisionmaker. I have no problem with asking everyone who starts a company to think about investing time into keeping that company focused. –– Gabe Stein

I agree with Lily here, in the anti–establishment tradition of the Scrum. I get Gabe's point, that a founder should be ready to lead his company as CEO. But the question here isn't about "founders" so much as inventors. It's possible to believe in a creation––a web platform, a search algorithm, a pharmaceutical product––without caring at all about running a business.

When Lily mentions "the work some [founders] might do if they freed themselves to pursue other things" those other things are the real work of an inventor––a tinkerer, an experimenter, a creator. The personality of a person who invents imaginative new products or reimagines a system is often not that of a great CEO. Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are exceptions, not the norm.

I'm new to the corporate world, but I've spent a long time in science labs. I've met plenty of brain–imagers, electrical engineers, mouse–brain researchers, computer scientists, and doctors, who are developing new technologies for decoding brain–signals and drugs for treating diseases. In many cases, the pioneers who invent these techniques, which often yield products and have impacts in the broader world of health and bio–tech, would never care to become administrators of the companies spawned by what they create. Great inventors often make terrible administrators: Why not let them pursue the creative work they're best at? –– Taylor Beck

Being the product–oriented CEO of a company of over 500 people, the point at which Horowitz claims that things get messy, requires a completely different set of skills from being an inventor or developer. In fact, you could compare it to an extreme version of being promoted to a manager because you are very good at your job as a developer, scientist, or whatever. Not every inventor is cut out for it, or even wants to be there.

When I was first promoted to software team lead, the most difficult thing I had to learn was how to let go of controlling everything and to stop imposing my work style on my team. I almost faced a mutiny from the first team I lead when I insisted that they sink time into analyzing the best tools to use. I am the analytical type, someone who will spend ages selecting the perfect tools, but my developers just wanted to start hacking. Or, as the famously engineering–centric Google discovered, even Google engineers want managers with good "soft skills," instead of stellar development skills. The best bosses didn't micromanage, but had a clear vision for the team and were results–oriented, which is similar to what Horowitz suggests for a good product CEO. Maybe the best combo is a pair––the engineering genius of a Woz combined with the product nous and charisma of a Steve Jobs. That way they each get to do what they do best. –– Ciara Byrne

[Image: Flickr user Michel Filion]

Most of the major breakout tech products of the last year, including Instagram, Tumblr, and Snapchat, have struggled to answer an important question: Can they be profitable? There's no question that these companies have incredibly engaging products. What we don't know is whether they can turn those products into profitable companies.

We often read about these fast–growing companies with the mantra "product first, revenue later," but there seem to be just as many companies that take a near polar opposite approach: revenue first, product never. In fact, the Internet has made it incredibly easy to build a company by taking advantage of customers, often with legally sound business practices. There's an entire industry of exploitation that relies on fear and shame as motivators for business. Though we may not always agree with these companies in principle, their singular focus on revenue makes them interesting case studies for effectively monetizing a business.

Legal Extortion

If you've ever been arrested, even if it was for something juvenile like throwing eggs at cars, you may notice some unfortunate results when you Google your own name. Your goofy–faced, crazy–haired arrest photo has probably made its way to four or five mugshot directories, where it will live on in infamy online to tarnish your reputation forever. That is, unless you're willing to pay three or four hundred dollars to have those sites take it down.

These mugshot websites are in the business of exploiting shame. Each day, they scrape thousands of publicly available mugshots from the Internet and upload them to their sites. This would be fairly benign if the photos weren't easily discoverable, so these sites tend to put their product focus on search engine optimization. If they've gotten a hold of your mugshot, it will usually show up in the top five or six search results for your name.

It's a perfectly legal practice (though there have been legal disputes this year) and, based on the number of competitors, I assume these sites are fairly lucrative. Why? Far from typical startups, which seek to solve problems, these sites have created a very real pain point for their "customers." Not only is a mugshot embarrassing, but it has the potential to hurt job prospects, relationships, and other areas of a person's life. Many people, already ashamed of what they've done, would rather pay up to clear their image than fight the potentially illegality of the sites.

Another exploitive enterprise, one that is definitely illegal and tends to hide in the abyss of Internet filth, is ransomware. Ransomware is a virus that manages to take control of your computer and demands that you pay a fee (a ransom) to the creator of the virus to unlock your computer.

A recent, particularly clever version of ransomware made the news last week when a man who had been viewing child pornography on his computer was interrupted by a ransomware virus. The virus preyed on his guilty conscience: A pop–up appeared on the screen, alleging that the FBI knew about his illicit activity and that he would face charges unless he opted to pay a fine.

Given that a person caught by this virus would feel incredibly vulnerable and guilty in the moment, it wouldn't be surprising to find that the ruse is actually fairly profitable. In the case of this particular man, the virus elicited an emotion stronger than intended. Rather than pay a fee "to the FBI," the man felt so horrible that he took his computer to the local police department and turned himself in. It's a unique demonstration of just how powerful a "business" based on emotions can be.

How to Motivate Anyone

The lesson to take from these examples is not that you should build a fear–based business. What these sites prove is that when you motivate people sufficiently, they take action. Whether it's paying to have a mugshot removed or showing up at a police station because of a guilty conscience, you can influence user behavior under the right circumstances.

Kerry Patterson, a social psychologist and best–selling author of the book Crucial Conversations, told the following story about motivation in his MBA course at Brigham Young University:

Imagine that there is a large glass jar, maybe two feet tall and one foot in diameter, filled with candy. There are thousands of harmless candies in the jar, but one of the candies is actually poisonous and could kill you. What would it take to motivate you to select one piece of candy randomly and eat it?

When he finished describing the scenario, Patterson looked to the group and asked, "Would any of you take a candy for a thousand dollars?" Two or three students raised their hands, mainly to get a laugh and be contrarian. Patterson continued. "How about $50,000? $200,000?" As he reeled off the dollar amounts, more and more students raised their hands, admitting that, for a certain price, they would take their chances with the candy. Around a million dollars, most of the class had given in. Then he asked: "Which of you would never take the candy, no matter the situation?"

At this point, only one or two students raised their hands and Patterson singled one out, a woman in the back row. "You'd never take it?" He asked, with the student vehemently denying that she would. "No matter what I did?" She shook her head no. "I'll bet I could get you to take it," Patterson grinned, baiting her into the final blow: "Do you have any kids?" The class erupted with laughter and the woman just shook her head and smiled, realizing Patterson's point: Under the right circumstances, we can be motivated to do just about anything.

Drawing the Line

The deciding factor in the story of the candies is when the actual dollar price, a financial incentive, becomes an emotional incentive. And that's the lesson we can learn from the industry of exploitation as well: People feel most motivated to take action when they find themselves in an emotional state. If we build products that tap into the strong emotions of our customers, they'll be very willing to pay for our services.

Of course, we have the obligation to draw the line between the services that we feel are ethical and those that are exploitive. Feelings associated with entertainment, enlightenment, productivity, and community are examples of the types of positive emotions that we can and should use to delight customers.

In writing about manipulative products, blogger Nir Eyal describes two categories of products: those that materially improve a user's life and those that do not. If your product does not improve a user's life, and you wouldn't use it yourself, he writes, "presumably the only reason you're [doing it] is to make a buck." It's a business of coercion. But if you're identifying real pain that your customers feel, and leveraging the positive emotions that result when your product relieves that pain, you'll soon have a successful product. Relieving pain for your customers should feel good to you, too, and you're likely to make some cash while you're at it.

Max Ogles is a writer and entrepreneur based in Utah. He does product marketing and content strategy for mobile health startup Coach Alba. Connect with him on Twitter @maxogles.

[Image: Flickr user Maike Van den Berge]

Sarah Young listens to Pandora constantly. From the moment the 27–year–old hairstylist wakes up in the morning, she's tuned into one of the service's infinite personalized radio stations. When she's finished getting ready, she flips her laptop shut and heads into work, where an iPad streams Pandora all day. On her way to and from the salon, she listens to the "'90s new wave" station on her phone. Lately, she's noticed more repetition.

"One time, they played this Portishead song five times in three hours," says Young. "Things seem to get more repetitive in the mid–afternoon."

Young doesn't know it, but she's a lab rat. Alongside 70 million others, she scurries around in virtual space, her every move monitored by the omnipresent eye of Pandora's massive and complex music intelligence algorithm. Just like in a real laboratory, scientists––in this case, data scientists––constantly tweak variables to see how she responds. To Young, the change in repetition felt subtle. Coincidental, even. It wasn't. Changes like this are part of Pandora's ongoing experimentation in how best to deliver music to its listeners.

At any given moment, the company's data gurus and engineers are running dozens of experiments on its vast user base. Listeners are split into segments, each of which is exposed to a slightly different experience. One group will hear mostly familiar songs, while the other will discover more new music. Do listeners want more local artists? Do they tolerate live recordings? Acoustic versions? What difference does the time of day make? How about geography? How much weight should the thumbs–up button have? Twiddling dozens of virtual knobs, Pandora's data scientists make small tweaks to the algorithm and watch what happens.

On Repeat

One of the biggest questions the company has is the same one that has long been critical to radio programmers: How frequently should you repeat a given song or artist?

"At the moment, we're running about two dozen tests that attack repetition in different ways," says Eric Bieschke, chief scientist and VP of Playlists at Pandora. "Some of them are about increasing exposure to new music. Some of them are about cycling songs in and out of a rotation so you're actually hearing the same concentration of really good music, but it's spaced out in such a way that people don't perceive it as a repetitious experience."

In Young's case, the increase in repetition was palpable. That probably means that when it first occurred, she didn't tap the "thumbs–down" or "skip" buttons any more frequently than usual. Or, she may have just been lumped into a larger segment of users based on other data about her listening behavior. From Pandora's standpoint, the most important piece of data from the experiment is that Young didn't leave. Or in the parlance of the company's analytics team, the "return rate" was not affected. Day in and day out, she keeps coming back.

"Every week, we're rolling out these experiments on real people in the real world," says Bieschke. "We don't have to spend a lot of time guessing what people love about music. We can actually just run experiments and find out."

Over the years, Pandora has conducted thousands of these tests. Some of them last for months. Some run for a few weeks and are quickly abandoned. Some of them permanently impact the experience for a small subset of users, while others are fed back into the master algorithm that sits atop the company's vast array of mini–recommendation engines.

Some of the repetition experiments, for example, wound up yielding insights clearcut enough to have a broad impact on the way Pandora works for everybody. That Young noticed more repeated songs during working hours was no coincidence. Pandora's data has shown that while users are often hungry for new music, they're less tolerant of discovery while they're at work.

Related Story: Inside Google's Infinite Music Intelligence Machine

Perhaps it's because Pandora serves as background music while they focus on important, productive tasks and they can't spare the mental bandwidth to appreciate something unfamiliar. Whatever it is, the data has spoken and as a result, Pandora will tend to play more familiar, often repetitive playlists during work hours.

"The reason terrestrial radio repeats so much of the same darn music is because that is the thing getting people coming back to the radio station," Bieschke says. Indeed, the rate at which users return to Pandora is one of the key metrics that every one of these experiments is aimed at boosting. As much as we all profess to hate the repetitive nature of radio, it apparently does the trick for the analytics team intently staring at the user retention needle. "It's the most annoying thing about terrestrial radio, but it's absolutely by design," he says.

Things like repetitiveness, song duration, and the order of tracks are obvious things to measure, but Pandora's experiments can go much deeper, thanks to its rich collection of musicological data. The team has found, for instance, that people who gravitate toward instrumental music are more receptive to discovering new things. Thus, people who put on a classical station or a station based on a Miles Davis song will hear more new music than people who listen to pop and rock stations. The distinction is so pronounced that stations based on instrumental hip–hop will yield more serendipitous moments of discovery than those based on lyric–heavy rap tracks.

In The Genes

Pandora Radio started with a simple premise: If you take academically trained music experts and ask them to tag songs with dozens of pieces of meta data, you can build a system with a deep understanding of music, right down to specific tonal qualities, instruments played, rhythmic nuances, and hundreds of other details. If you then feed that uniquely human knowledge into a computational algorithm, you can make previously impossible things happen. Someday, you might even be able to put radio DJs out of business.

"The Music Genome Project is absolutely a huge differentiator for people," says Tim Westergren, who cofounded Pandora in 2000. "There are trained musicians that come in every day and sit with headphones, entering numbers. I think it's the closest you can get to a friend recommending you music."

What these certified musicologists do when they sit down at their stations each month is tag each song they listen to with hundreds of specific musical attributes, or "genes." The result is a multi–point vector for every song in the database, with each track containing anywhere from 150 to 500 attributes, depending on the genre.

In a 2011 interview with Ars Technica, Pandora's chief musicologist Nolan Gasser illustrated the process with an example:

One of our classical analysts will get up a recording of Scriabin's "Third Piano Sonata" on their computer terminal, along with the full classical genome on the same screen. He or she will then go carefully through each of the four movements individually, so that the entire sonata will likely take well over an hour to fully analyze; but that's okay, because the beauty of it is that once the work is analyzed, it's complete in our database, and we don't need to re–analyze the recording by Glenn Gould and compare it to that by Ashkenazy, for example.

Over the years, Pandora's musicologists have applied this process to millions of songs across numerous genres. The resulting data is the secret sauce that tells Pandora what to play every time you start a new station or decide you don't like a given track. According to Pandora, this blend of human and machine intelligence is what gives their recommendation engine a leg up over competing services.

The system was the brainchild of Westergren and Will Glaser, both of whom joined forces with Jon Kraft in 2000 to start Savage Beast Technologies. The company initially focused on offering music recommendation services to businesses like Best Buy and AOL, but nearly failed before repositioning itself to target consumers instead. The newly rebranded Pandora Media made a bet that it could not only find value in a large audience, but also in the infinite stream of data those people would willingly feed into its core product. Their hunch was correct. Pandora Radio went live in January 2005 and the listeners––as well as the data––started pouring in.

Mixing Human And Machine Intelligence

Today, the Music Genome Project is just one piece of Pandora's music recommendation mega–engine. The waves of millions of users that have passed through the service over the years have all been collectively training the system, one play, skip, thumbs–up, or thumbs–down at a time. This behavior has generated what Bieschke refers to as Pandora's second "gargantuan pool of data."

"When we launched, there was no data from our listeners," he says. "Inherently, the thing we were building from was just the music. Today, our listeners are creating data far faster than our internal team of musicians."

The human–powered Music Genome Project still sits at the heart of what Pandora does, but the manual process of bulk–listening by ear has an inherent problem that user–generated data doesn't: scalability. There's just too much music in the world for a team of human beings to sit down and thoroughly describe all of it.

To offset this disadvantage, Pandora employs its own in–house machine listening technology, much like Google's new All Access music subscription service does. But unlike Google and other newly risen competitors, Pandora can merge machine listening with nearly a decade of human intuition to create a deeper understanding of the music its service spins. As far as machine listening has come in the last few years, as Westergren puts it, the technology "has not even come close to the sophistication of the ear."

Talk to anybody who specializes in online music discovery, and they'll tell you the same thing: The best approach is not strictly algorithmic, nor is it solely based on human smarts. Instead, the most effective way to connect people with a series of songs they're sure to love is by weaving together both approaches: machine learning techniques and good, old–fashioned human brains.

"We're never purely doing the musician–musicologist–expert technique and we're never doing the pure data scientist–machine learning–eningeering technique," explains Bieschke. "We pull all of these people together––engineers, data scientists, musicians, musicologists, curators––and put them all in the room and have them come at the problem from different directions. Sometimes the insight comes from people with music expertise and sometimes the insights come from the people looking at the pure data. Oftentimes, the true breakthroughs come when we're crossing those two worlds."

Pandora relies on what's known as an ensemble–style recommendation system to power its music discovery. That is, it combines a number of different statistical methodologies to form one complex monster of an algorithm. More accurately, it operates as a collection of algorithms, fueled by dozens of mini–recommenders.

"We've got 54 different individual recommenders that take entirely separate statistical approaches to how to recommend music to specific people," explains Bieschke. "The master algorithm sits on top, looks at all the other recommenders, and not only is it paying attention to what the collective wisdom is across all the individual statistical techniques, it's also learning which specific techniques work for you. It looks and figures out that on your Daft Punk station, you really like recommenders A, B, and C and on your Kinks station, you likes recommenders C, D, and F."

While many of these statistical observations find their way into Pandora's master algorithm, those that don't are still of value to system, Bieschke explains.

"There's no damage to adding new techniques to our system," he says. "As long as they're the best algorithm for one person, it's worth adding. The worst that happens is it works perfectly for that one person, and for everybody else it will just ignore it."

As Users Grow Up, So Does Pandora

Aside from the Music Genome data, Pandora's biggest asset is probably its age. As it approaches a decade of existence, the pool of data from which it draws insights only gets bigger. In fact, Bieschke says that the data explosion is so relentless that it "becomes a technology challenge to just figure out how to sift through in some sort of comprehensible way."

To help manage the flood, the team relies on big data favorites like Hadoop and Hive. They also swear by a large–scale graphing computation tool called GraphChi, although Bieschke is hesitant to divulge exactly how it's used at Pandora.

As the service's methodology evolves, so too do the listening habits of its millions of listeners. It wasn't something the founders were necessarily aiming for when they launched, but the passage of time has handed Pandora another valuable insight: A long–term view of how people's tastes evolve throughout their lives.

"If you look at what somebody has been listening to from 2005 to 2013, you can visualize their relationship with music throughout their lives," Bieschke says. "Their high school years and then their college years and post–college years. With the data we've got, we can sort of single out individual people and see where their musical tastes are going and how they're evolving over time."

Amy Webb is one such listener. The digital strategy consultant and author has been listening to Pandora since it launched. At the time, she was a single, twentysomething journalist and adjunct college instructor with a penchant for George Michael and other relics from her 1980s youth. Today, her obsession with George Michael lives on, but her tastes have otherwise evolved, as have her life circumstances. She now runs her own business and has a family of her own.

A self–professed geek with a technical background, Webb is keenly aware of how Pandora learns from her behavior and has spent years actively training some of her favorite Quick Mix stations. Several of them are based on artists from the '80s and '90s like The Beastie Boys, REM, and Alice in Chains, while others represent newer musical interests. For instance, she keeps a well–trained station based on a Mumford and Sons song, which serves as a children–friendly playlist for car ride sing–a–longs with her husband and their young daughter. These are types of changes that Pandora's music intelligence machine will pick up on over time as it tries to understand who Webb is and which songs should be streamed to her. But even as new artists find their way into Webb's life, her old favorites will keep popping up.

"People often return to their roots," says Bieschke. "The things they listened to growing up become very important to them. All of these sorts of things about people's lives moving forward and their musical tastes changing weren't things we were thinking about when we launched, but it seems very obvious now that we're looking at almost a decade of people's listening behavior."

If Pandora's data scientists are tweaking her playlists based on long–term life changes, she hasn't noticed. But like Sarah Young and other listeners, Webb has detected a palpable increase in repetition.

"I've trained a few of the stations pretty well," says Webb. "But I've noticed over the last year or so that I'm not getting introduced to new artists or songs as much as in the past. I listen to a lot of Motown, and it seems as though the catalogue isn't as expansive as it used to be."

For Webb, Pandora frequently serves as background music at work, which is when Pandora's data experiments show users to be the least receptive to unfamiliar things. It's possible that, as a result of recent algorithmic tweaks, she's getting more repeat songs at her desk during the day.

The Future: Why Smarter Devices Mean Smarter Radio

There's another reason why Webb might be seeing more repetition. Time of day isn't the only variable Bieschke and his team use to try different algorithms on users. Increasingly, they're finding that the type of device a user listens on is an important indicator of how they're listening, which informs what kinds of music they might want to hear.

"If I know you're listening on an iPad or you're listening on and Android phone or a Samsung device, or a Ford Sync car, there are huge amounts of information there about the type of music you want to hear," Bieschke says. "There are real behavior changes for people based on their device and their environment. If they're at home and they're cooking and the device is in other room… If we play something bad enough, they'll go in the other room and turn it down. It's a very textured sort of data landscape. The thumb–down you get on a Samsung player is very different than the thumb–down you get at a desktop computer during working hours. They mean different things."

For Bieschke, knowing the name of the device is just the beginning. He eagerly awaits a future in which more and more intelligence can be drawn from the hardware itself. Pandora's mobile apps don't use the accelerometer in smartphones to detect listening contexts (jogging, as opposed to driving, as opposed to sitting), but they've experimented with features like this during internal hackathons. Tests like these are extremely important for the company, because most of Pandora's listening happens on mobile today, and the company has been proactive about integrating with a variety of connected devices beyond tablets and phones.

But even the accelerometer idea feels slightly old–fashioned in 2013. Far more exciting to Bieschke and many in his field is the prospect of a future in which one's phone can broadcast ambient, contextual data that can be used for music discovery in a public setting. For example, imagine walking into a cafe that's using Pandora to stream music. The proprietor's tablet could detect the presence of other Pandora users in the room and adjust the playlist accordingly. If there are five such listeners in the cafe, Pandora could calculate a blend of the common Music Genome attributes found in each of their user profiles and pick songs that are statistically the most likely to please most of the people in the room. The results may not always be perfect, but they'd sure beat the whim of the FM radio DJ randomly selected by the guy who happened to be working behind the counter.

As phone hardware gets smarter, wearables become more fashionable, and sensors proliferate, the possibilities for music programming and discovery will know fewer and fewer limits. Such fantasies, Bieschke concedes, will face obstacles such as concerns over user privacy and, at least initially, the inherent limitations of processors and battery life. But as the tech continues to evolve, so too will privacy norms and consumer sentiment. To technologists like Bieschke, this hyper–connected future is not only inevitable, but preferable to the reality we know today. In the meantime, it's fun to daydream about the possibilities––as long as the dream features a good soundtrack.

Interested in where radio is headed in the 21st Century? It's an topic we're tracking here at Co.Labs. Follow along via our story tracker about the future of radio.

[Image: Flickr user Art Bromage]

The School For Poetic Computation, which just opened in New York,
is latest educational establishment to leap onto the "learn to code" bus that's being driven by the explosion in apps for mobile devices and the ever–deeper penetration of computer tech into every corner of life. But this new school is different. Instead of viewing code as purely functional, it teaches students that there's an inner beauty, and perhaps even joy to code.

The school's motto is "more poems less demos," and one of the four founders excels at this sort of cross–discipline thinking: Zachary Lieberman, a man Fast Company called "part R&D geek, part performance artist, and part hacker" back in 2010.

As the New York Times points out, the school is a startup that's already doing quite well: It already enrolled 15 students for the fall term, selected from 50 applications, each paying about $5,000 for their 10 week "course." The Times describes the candidates as being both traditional and mixed–arts folk, including a beatboxer and a PhD candidate "who wants to use data visualization to highlight problems in the prison system."

Many programmers do appreciate the internal beauty of code, including the writer of this article, who used to code professionally in a bunch of different languages. There's an inescapable feeling that you are creating art when you think about the structure of a program and see the lines of text instructions printed on the screen. Writing code can feel like dipping into a different world, one where time just flits by.

The School for Poetic Computation seems destined to take this notion one step further by focusing on the aesthetic value of what code can do alongside the internal beauty of its construction. The school website notes: "Hopefully what we make at School for poetic computation is for people, not computers."