Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett may have more in common than any two, randomly chosen Millennials.

This content is appropriate for people of all ages. And that's the point. The days of targeting media and products at people based on their age is over.

Whatever demographers may say, the "millennial" moniker has worn out its usefulness. I propose an alternative—one that transcends generational boundaries, which aren't reliable guides to traits or behaviors in the first place. Instead, let's talk about "perennials."

Meet The Perennials

Who are they? We are ever-blooming, relevant people of all ages who live in the present time, know what's happening in the world, stay current with technology, and have friends of all ages. We get involved, stay curious, mentor others, and are passionate, compassionate, creative, confident, collaborative, global-minded risk takers who continue to push up against our growing edge and know how to hustle. We comprise an inclusive, enduring mind-set, not a divisive demographic.

Perennials are also vectors who have a wide appeal and spread ideas and commerce faster than any single generation: Lady Gaga + Tony Bennett, Lena Dunham + Jenni Konner, Beyoncé + Jay-Z, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Fallon, Pharrell Williams, Justin Trudeau, Ellen DeGeneres, Malala Yousafzai, Sheryl Sandberg, Mick Jagger, Michelle Obama, Emma Watson, Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders, Diane Von Furstenberg, Lorne Michaels, Ai Weiwei, John Oliver, Aziz Ansari, the little girl on Stranger Things . . . all perennials.

Retiring Millennial Clichés

If you are older than 36, the upper limit of millennial age, chances are you've done your fair share of trash talking about this generation. I'm a culprit. But I stopped cold once I remembered I was far worse back in my day.

My partner Amy and I began our careers in the dotcom biz, when the internet was as fledgling as our ability to run a startup on angel funding. Amy was 27. I was 32. My accountant-trained parents asked how my company was going to pay back the million dollars I raised from investors. I said, verbatim, into my Motorola StarTAC, "Earned revenue is very 20th-century thinking, Dad. It's all about eyeballs right now. You wouldn't understand."

Millennials can't stand their moniker and are even harsher critics when it comes to judging their contemporaries, so why rub it in? It's time we rewire our collective Pavlovian response, millennials = entitlement, and find the overlap between all ages.

The Limits Of Generation-Level Claims

The term "generation" used to refer to parents and their offspring every 25 years. It wasn't until the 19th century that it mutated to describe the social cohort we are born into. The baby boomers (1946–1964) are the first and only officially recognized generation by the Census Bureau because of its clearly defined characteristics.

Leap forward to the influential 1991 book Generations, by William Strauss and Neil Howe, and the moniker "millennial" is coined. It took another decade for marketers and the media to upspin millennials—whose birth years fall within the range of 1982–2004—as "the next greatest generation" and begin focusing all their efforts to woo these limelit consumers, voters, and likers. As for the rest, born before 1982, well, the rest is history . . . irrelevant and in the past.

Tolerance feels unattainable when there are hard lines drawn between decades, and terms like boomers, gen X, and gen Y keep us separate and at odds. The media's adoring gaze is focused solely on the millennial timeline, and it's light's out for everyone else.

In a recent article in the ABA Banking Journal, it's suggested, in fact, that "attitudes and habits that are widely thought to be millennial-specific may actually be quite widespread among the general population." Relevance belongs to every age, not only during the period of a generation's ascension to power. Take Sarah Jessica Parker, who debuted on Broadway as little orphan Annie then went on to become the game-changer of fashion and friendship as Carrie Bradshaw. Today she stars as Frances on HBO's Divorce, a grittier take on conscious uncoupling. She's been a perennial all along.

Psychographics, Not Demographics

I spent the past year ruminating on an appropriate sobriquet to describe a set of people based on psychographics, not demographics, that would include millennials, as well as people of all ages. I began floating the term "relevants" to see if it stuck until a wise New York Times journalist pointed out that saying "I'm a relevant" could be misheard as "I'm irrelevant."

So I turned to my husband, Dave, the dude who writes NextDraft and is king of catchy headlines. (He was dozing off next to me on an airplane.) "I got it," he said. "You should call them perennials." I quickly searched all definitions of perennial: enduring, perpetual, everlasting, recurrent, ever-blooming. Thus, "perennials" was born.

It's time we choose our own category based on shared values and passions and break out of the faux constructs behind an age-based system of classification. By identifying ourselves as perennials, we supplant our constricting label with something that better reflects our reality online and off. Amazon and Netflix get it right with recommendation engines that target people based on behavioral data over outmoded generational stereotypes, so why shouldn't we?

Being a millennial doesn't have to mean living in your parents' basement, growing an artisanal beard, and drinking craft beer. Midlife doesn't have to be a crisis. And you don't have to be a number anymore. You're relevant. You're ever-blooming. You're perennial.

Gina Pell is Perennial #1 and the Content Chief of The What, a clever list for curious people. An earlier version of this article originally appeared on NewCoShift. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.

Amazon has had a good year thus far—huge revenue, AWS expansion. We'll be looking to see if its various pursuits are still going to plan.

Amazon is set to report its quarterly earnings report tomorrow, and we'll be keeping an eye out for some key takeaways. Over the last year, the company has been seeing green, with five profitable quarters in a row. Revenue for the Jeff Bezos-owned company has been steady; last quarter it hit $30.4 billion, which was a 31% increase year over year.

Now we're waiting to see how long this streak can last and what it's going to do to keep up the pace.

Here are our takeaways from Q2's report:

There are a few things beyond revenue that we'll be looking out for too:

• International expansion: Amazon has slowly been rolling out Prime to other parts of the world, including India, the U.K., and Japan. We'll be looking out for any numbers showing how these roll-outs are going and whether or not other regions will be added to the mix.

• Digital content: The company has been doubling down on content, with Prime Video going beyond the U.S. and into India. Last quarter CFO Brian Olsavsky announced that the company planned to triple the number of Amazon TV shows and movies. We'll be looking for more details on that.

AWS growth: Amazon's back-end services are quietly taking over the web. Last quarter its revenue saw 88% year-over-year growth. We'll be looking to see if that growth is steady and if the company has anything else to add.

New services: There have been endless rumors that Amazon is considering getting into logistics, since shipping is such an integral part of its service. While the company has been leasing trucks and planes, it has yet to officially say how (or if) it plans to enter the space. When asked, the company always says these purchases are to speed up delivery time. Let's see if they say anything more this quarter.[/list]

There's a lot more to look out for, too—namely, more hardware stats about products like the Echo. Amazon has a lot on its plate and hopefully tomorrow we'll get a temperature on how these things are going. We'll post the results as soon as they're live.

Google's parent company is expected to post strong ad sales Thursday, but some of its ambitious side projects are struggling.

When it comes to the large and ungainly Alphabet, we only care about two things this quarter: Is Google's ad business being eaten by Facebook and are its ambitious "moonshot" projects paying off?

Analysts are optimistic, projecting earnings per share of $8.64 on sales of $22.05 billion—up from around $18.68 billion a year ago. Alphabet will report third-quarter financial results on Thursday after the closing bell. When it does, Google's traditionally strong search-and-display ad business is expected to show that it has maintained its growth; the same goes for mobile and video advertising. But investors will be looking especially hard at YouTube ads and opportunities for expansion there.

Google is the number-one generator of digital ad dollars worldwide, but when it comes to display advertising, there is another king. Facebook commands the most annual revenue for its banner ads. And in the fast-growing ad segment, mobile, there's still no clear winner. Facebook has invested heavily in mobile advertising, so much so that mobile makes up 82% of its revenues, according to eMarketer. And in a forecast from last year, the market-analysis firm estimated that Google's share of the market would maintain at around 31.7% between 2016 and 2017, and Facebook would continue to grow its slice of the overall market in the same period. We'll be paying attention to Google's mobile segment to see if it can outperform the eMarketer projection.

Then we'll get to the fun stuff. We'll be looking for inklings that Alphabet's other bets are more than just a waste of cash. The holding company has shown that its ready to rein in its costly projects and we're hoping to suss out which projects are heading for the can.

Google Hardware: This quarter, Google launched its first-ever mobile phone hardware: Pixel. The iPhone lookalike may open up a compelling new source of revenue for the company, but obviously it's still too soon to tell. What we'd love to see are some early indications that people want this phone and we're hopping to see figures around pre-orders. In general we're interested in any tidbits we can get about Alphabet's hardware products, like its Amazon Echo competitor, Google Home.

Google Cloud Platform: Given Amazon's success with AWS and Microsoft's promising financials for Azure, investors are hungry for stats on Google's cloud business. We want to see if there's a glimmer of hope that the cloud platform can break up the AWS-Azure duel.

Google's self-driving car project seems to be stuck in neutral. Despite working on the developing a self-driving car since 2009, the division has yet to launch a product. Last year, the project's head left to pursue his own startup. And already Otto, a self-driving truck company founded by former members of Google's autonomous vehicle project, has made its first successful shipment. We're hoping Alphabet will shed light on what's next for this project and if an autonomous Google car is anywhere near commercial ready.

Nest: Earlier this year, Alphabet's connect home head, Tony Fadell, left the nest. The departure followed reports that Nest was underperforming. A Nest spokesperson told us in June that "revenue has grown in excess of 50% year-over-year since it began shipping products 4.5 years ago" with the third-generation thermostat hitting one million units sold in half the amount of time as its predecessor. Still, the smart-home industry is expected to worth $121.73 billion globally by 2022, according to marketsandmarkets. We're interested in hearing about the success of its recently launched outdoor camera and possible new products.

Verily: A report from earlier this year says all may not be well at Alphabet's future-of-medicine company, with roughly a dozen high-level employees departing under CEO Andrew Conrad, according to Stat News. But Verily has develop products this year, including a microscope that track activity under skin, a platform for managing diabetes, and a foray into bioelectric devices. In this earnings statement we'll be looking mostly for new products and possibly staff changes.

Cyber due diligence typically looks at overall policies and broad risk rather than scouring networks from top to bottom, experts say.

After Yahoo announced its users had been the victims of one of the largest known security breaches of all time, Verizon suggested it would take at least a second look at its plans to acquire the company's core businesses.

After all, the breach, said to have compromised user login credentials and other information as early as 2014, affected at least 500 million users and has reportedly led some users to close their accounts altogether. But if the hack proves significant enough to scuttle the Verizon deal, or even to affect the ultimate sale price, that raises questions about why the security failure wasn't uncovered during Verizon's due diligence process prior to the deal's announcement.

"It's very surprising to me, because Verizon has an excellent incident response and data breach response [team]," says John Reed Stark, a security consultant and author of The Cybersecurity Due Diligence Handbook. "They have their own professional consulting arm that is extremely good at responding to data breaches."

Just as companies will hire accounting experts to pore over acquisition target financials to avoid uncovering any irregularities or surprises, they'll increasingly engage digital security experts to uncover any cyber risks that might lie hidden in a company's networks or security procedures.

"There are so many categories of information that are worth looking at," Stark says. "You're going to look at every single one of them to try to quantify the risk, and it's very important, because any sort of data breach, any sort of cyberattack, can really cripple a company."

That can include talking to current and former employees about security frameworks and any prior known incidents, reviewing penetration tests and outside audits, and investigating security's role in the company's culture—everything from who's ultimately in charge of digital security and where they sit in the corporate hierarchy to what procedures are in place when a digital alarm sounds in the middle of the night, Stark says.

"Like any sort of due diligence exercise, you're gonna dig down and get granular and look at the people who are really doing the work," Stark says.

But in practice, experts say, cybersecurity due diligence is often limited by time, budget, access, and even expertise, with security skills in severe shortage across digital industries.

"Some firms do it very, very well and some firms don't," Stark says. "Sometimes circumstances don't allow for it and it just means increased risk."

Even talented investigators may only be given a few days to figure out the security risks in sprawling sets of computer networks. They may also get only limited, if any, direct access to the systems involved, says Sean Curran, a director in the security and infrastructure practice at Chicago consulting firm West Monroe Partners.

To acquiring companies, cybersecurity is usually just one part of a larger due diligence process, and to companies being vetted for acquisition, it's a disruption they're looking to minimize. And with both sides often looking to move fast, especially when multiple bids are in play, that can mean only a few days' access to people, records, and computers and a focus on overall signs of risk rather than particular breaches and vulnerabilities, he says.

"The ability to identify an ongoing breach that's actually occurring at the time of the breach is nigh on impossible unless you're talking to someone who's aware of the fact," Curran says.

After all, he points out, Verizon's own annual industry-wide study of security breaches has found many take weeks or even months to discover, often only with the help of reports from outside sources like law enforcement.

Yahoo's breach, which is said to have been the work of state-sponsored attackers, apparently went unreported for several years, meaning detection in a short diligence process may have been difficult. Still, that may be of little comfort to shareholders in either company affected by the uncertainty after the breach announcement.

"It could have been beyond the scope, but I'm sure the investors are going to be asking if it was beyond the scope, then why was it," says Scott Shackelford, an associate professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business who's written about cybersecurity due diligence.

Increasingly, companies are having to quickly decide which deals are too risky to do based on digital security risk, and the answers aren't always clear cut. A fast-moving internet startup might allow developers greater freedom to install software on their own machines than other companies, but take steps to ensure those machines can't compromise important data, Curran says.

"You've got to make a decision between the risk of this happening and the potential that you're going to miss out on this organization," Curran says. "In a competitive world, and a competitive landscape, that may be a very difficult position to be in."

A 28-inch screen, a very special hinge, and a new type of input device add up to an experience conceived with artists and designers in mind.

"Lean on it!"

Panos Panay, Microsoft's hardware chief, is gesturing toward the company's newest Surface device. Confused, I ask him what he means. "Lean on it!," he repeats.

I don't want to do it—after all, busting a new computer during an interview is bad optics. So he does it himself. Panay slouches over the 28-inch display of the new Surface Studio desktop PC with his left arm cradling the workspace on the screen in front of him. The display stays put.

Moments before, he had grabbed the top of the display and pulled it downward from its upright position until its bottom rested on the desktop in front of us and the rest angled backward to a 20 degree angle above the table. It kneeled. That 20 degree angle, it turns out, is the same angle illustrators like to position their sketch pads. In effect, the whole screen—a touch screen, mind you—turned into a digital drafting table.

The Surface Studio, which starts at $3,000 and goes up to $4,200 for a fully loaded version, isn't targeted at average desktop users. Microsoft named it "Studio" because it's aimed at giving creative types like designers, engineers, architects, and illustrators all the tools and power they need to practice their craft as well as perform everyday computing tasks such as email and web browsing, all in one place.

With this desktop machine, Microsoft took many of the features, design themes, and materials from the Surface tablets and the Surface Book laptop and applied them to a machine for the desktop—the first one it's ever designed and marketed. Like other Surfaces the Studio uses the pressure-sensitive Surface Pen as an input device. (The Studio's version is similar to the one that shipped with the Surface Pro 4, but with some upgraded electronics.)

The Studio's other input device is an optional rotary dial that sits directly on the touchscreen and calls up contextual menus, which the display situates around its base. The Dial, as it's called, is a prime example of Microsoft's effort to blend real-world experiences with digital ones in the interest of helping creative types stay in the zone.

"What we wanted to do with this product is take you from being the most productive person to the most creative person, and bring them as close together as you can possibly could be," Panay says. "That when you went to your desk, your desk was transformed into a studio—it was the thing you wanted to get back to."

Panay oversaw development of all previous Surface devices and in 2015 was given control of engineering for other Microsoft hardware, including HoloLens, Xbox, and phones. An energetic, bearded 40-something, he can be a little intense at times. And he sometimes lapses into a Steve Jobsian "Isn't this magical?" patter. But you get the feeling that it's all coming from a good place. He believes deeply in the products the Surface group is building, and in the ways the machines pull real creativity and productivity out of users.

What, Another Desktop PC?

I'd come to Building 87 on Microsoft's huge Redmond, Washington campus to see a new Surface machine, but I'd been told little about it. When the device was lifted up from under a conference table by Surface Studio product lead Pete Kyriacou, my first reaction was, "Does the world really need another all-in-one PC?" The category is already well established and popular, represented most prominently by Apple's iMac, which pioneered it.

Panay tells me he doesn't like to call the Studio an all-in-one, and I see his point. With its kneeling display, and pen and Dial input devices, the Studio seriously stretches the definitional limits of the term. When I saw the lengths to which his team had gone to put all the tools creatives need close at hand, I started to see how the Studio could be a real alternative to the Apple computers long considered the default choice by designers and artists.

Based on the release timing of the last few Surface tablets, it was reasonable to expect the next one, the Surface Pro 5, to be announced at the company's October 26th event in New York City. Instead, we're getting a desktop PC for creatives. (The Surface Pro 5 is in the works and will launch next year, says a source with knowledge of Microsoft's plans.) Microsoft is taking preorders for the Studio starting today and says it will ship in limited quantities by the holiday season; broader availability at Microsoft Stores and select Best Buy locations will follow in early 2017.

And, really, a desktop PC for creatives isn't a complete surprise. Last year's Surface Book was aimed at designers and power users, and started at an imposing $1,500 at launch. In fact, the Surface line as a whole has been shifting toward the high end, as the Surface Pro found its market and the lower-priced, less-powerful Surface RT and Surface 3 failed to set the world on fire.

Scuttlebutt about the Surface Studio, and even its internal code name, "Cardinal," had been swirling through the rumor sites for months. A 2015 patent for a "modular computing device" showing the exact outlines of the new machine showed up last winter. But as I would soon find out, the patent sketches and rumors didn't tell the whole story—not even close.

The Display As Drawing Board

The Surface Studio consists of a low-profile base unit that sits on the desktop and houses the guts of the computer. Those components include Intel's core i7 processor, a powerful Nvidia graphics processor, and a pair of stereo speakers, and the PC uses three fans and a heat pipe to keep it all cool. As Panay steps through these features, the included mouse and keyboard are sitting there, but he says nothing of them. He wants to talk about the display.

A two-armed chrome hinge extends from the base to hold up the 28-inch display, which is only 12.5 millimeters thick. When the display is in its kneeling position, it completely hides the base and the chrome arms of the hinge.

When Panay leans on the 13-pound display, the arms of the hinge behind it seem to have no trouble with the weight pressing down on it. I hear no creaks or groans. Nor does the display wiggle around. This is crucial for designers and illustrators drawing exacting lines on the touch screen, and a design concern that makers of conventional all-in-ones don't have to worry about.

Senior mechanical engineer Robyn McGlaughlin explains to me that the chrome hinge is loaded with 11 springs that work together to create a fixed range of motion between the upright display position we're used to on the desktop, and the 20-degree drawing-board mode. The user can position the display at any point between those two extremes. As the hinge moves downward from its upright extreme it begins rotating the display upward until it reaches the 20 degree position at the bottom of the range.

Ralf Groene, who leads Industrial Design for the Microsoft Devices group, says that he believes users will use the drawing-board display position for detailed work, then use the upright position to get perspective.

"I have this awesome picture of Matisse where he works on this huge piece and then he steps back from the canvas," he says. "You do this in your work, when you are working on the detail. . . working on this little solution here and then you step back to see how it fits within the whole—we all do this."

Microsoft industrial designer Kait Schoeck (who is, incidentally, one of the inventors of the Surface Book's unique hinge mechanism) tells me how the display positions fit into her workflow. "I do my normal CAD, fast sketching, whatever, [in sketchpad mode]," she says. "And then kind of prop it up and zoom back and do little tweaks here and there."

Not About The Megapixels

You'd expect that a $3,000 computer for artists and designers would have a retina-class display, and the Studio does. But making the pixels imperceptibly small wasn't the only challenge.

"The role of the display is ... to re-create the things you see in real life on the screen as accurately as possible," says Stevie Bathiche, a 19-year Microsoft veteran whose title is "Distinguished Scientist/Director of Research, Applied Sciences Group." As you might guess, he has a big brain. He's also a personable guy, tall and gangly with slightly out-of-control black hair. He talks fast, but, it seems to me, not quite fast enough to keep up with his brain.

Bathiche says that the strategy for building the display was to get it tuned perfectly with the operating system and apps, rather than going for spec records. Perhaps the most striking example of this optimization was when the Surface team decided to make the display true-to-scale, so that a character in 12-point font on the screen would be exactly the same size as the same character printed out on paper. An 8.5-by-11 piece of paper held up to the screen matches perfectly the size of its digital cohort—a major benefit for designers creating stuff that will eventually end up in print.

When Bathiche and his team were working out the specifications for the Studio monitor, Apple had recently released a 27-inch iMac with a 5K display. "I had the option to very easily beat Apple without really doing anything in resolution," Bathiche said. "So I went to Panos and said 'we can beat Apple by a megapixel, or we can do a true-to-scale display.'" Panay and Bathiche agreed that true-to-scale trumps bragging rights.

But the screen resolution and dimensions had to work out just right mathematically to make it all work. This started with a hard requirement that the display's have 192 dots per inch (DPI), because it made it possible for Windows 10's scaling software to work out the number of pixels necessary to display text and objects in their actual size on the display. That key number then dictated some of the other key specs, such as the screen's diagonal measurement of 28.165 inches.

The Studio display ended up having 4.5K resolution versus Apple's 5K. "That gives us 13.5 million pixels, which is a million and a half less than Apple, but more than enough to make the pixels disappear," Bathiche explains. "I'm trading off this tiny bit of resolution that doesn't matter at all."

When I stared closely at the Studio display, I could see no pixilation. And the clarity and color depth is as good as anything I've seen on a screen that size.

The Disappearing Computer

During my Microsoft visit, I heard the Surface Studio's inventors say over and over that they wanted to make a piece of hardware that brings creators up close and personal with their work. They like to talk about the theme of "floating pixels," meaning that the person using the machine is engaged with the touch screen, and everything else on the machine stays out of the way, or better yet, disappears.

This sounded familiar—it's a mantra repeated by Steve Jobs when Apple introduced the iPad. I also heard a lot of talk about tight and elegant integration of software and hardware, another big Apple theme from way back. Apple may have embraced these themes long ago, but both seem very relevant at Microsoft at this point in its history, as it takes on the challenge of building great hardware to run its operating system.

"Part of the philosophy is that the computer creates a stage for software, and we keep everything else quiet," Groene says.

Groene and his industrial design team did a lot to achieve that. There's almost no bezel around the screen, and no "chin" or "forehead" of black space below and above the display. The base unit and the chrome hinge hide behind the display when it's in drawing board mode.

The squarish base unit sits squat on the desktop, its outside surface nondescript (but not ugly) and almost completely devoid of details. A narrow groove runs around the machine just below its top edge; it contains small cooling vents, which were a problem for the designers because they created something to look at.

"We have a machine that paints the groove inside here and reduces the contrast that you have between the holes," Groene tells me. "And [senior industrial designer Tim Escolin] spent weeks with many trips to China making sure that the color is absolutely right and we get everything quiet."

All of these things have a cumulative effect. The base says "nothing to see here" so well that the eye just moves on. Same strategy with the chrome arms that hold up the display. The designers decided to use chrome so the arms camouflage themselves by reflecting the environment around them. And that's about the best a piece of metal can do to disappear.

Dialing It In

As Panay continues his conference-room demo, he produces a small aluminum alloy dial—about the size of a large tuner knob on an old stereo receiver—and puts it smack down on the touchscreen, which is then in drawing board mode. The touch screen immediately produces a circular menu around the physical perimeter of the dial. Then he starts turning the dial. By highlighting various menu items, he switches between various modes and functions of the app on the screen. I hear the word "whoa" come out of my mouth.

This was the Surface Dial, a totally new concept to me—if not altogether without precedent. It provides users with an outboard, tactile controller for navigation and selection that would normally be done digitally by tapping on the touch screen. It has a rubbery material on its bottom so it doesn't slide off (or damage) the Studio's touch screen. While a mouse's specialty is pointing, the Dial is designed for scrolling and moving quickly through menus.

"The vision for a long time when Pete and I were designing this product was connecting digital and analog worlds, and to continue to blend them until everything digital starts to feel analog," Panay says. "The idea that I can put something on the screen and watch it start to come to life, and this theory that you can blend these two worlds is a pretty impactful one."

The Dial can be used on the physical desktop or on the touch screen of the Studio, but it's when the user has the Dial up on the screen in one hand and is using the Surface Pen with the other that the Studio really sings. Back over in Industrial Design, Kait Schoeck sits in a tall drafting chair sketching in the Sketchable app. She has the Pen in her right hand and uses the her left hand to change ink colors and adjust stroke thicknesses with the Dial, which is sitting on the touch screen, in her left. All I see on the screen is a continuous line that keeps getting thicker and narrower and changing color. She tells me she gets so engrossed in sketching or designing on the Studio that the hours pass quickly.

Microsoft will launch the Studio with just seven app developer partners that have created custom on-screen Dial controls in their apps. They are: the CAD app NX (Siemens), the PDF navigation app Bluebeam Revu (Bluebeam), the PDF markup app Drawboard PDF (Drawboard), the illustration app Sketchable (Silicon Benders), the 3D sketch app Mental Canvas (Mental Canvas), the music composition app StaffPad (StaffPad), and the animation app Moho 12 (Smith Micro Software). The developers used an API Microsoft quietly released in August with the Anniversary Edition of Windows 10 to create the Dial controls.

Note that big-name apps such as Photoshop and AutoCAD are not included in that list. Microsoft says it's now talking to or working with a number of larger developers—including Adobe for Photoshop—that plan to add deeper Dial menus and controls to their apps next year.

The apps I saw that already have Dial integration use it to keep users locked in on their work rather than fumbling around with app controls. The device is especially handy in apps that use timelines, like music and animation apps. In StaffPad, for example, the Dial lets the music composer move forward and backward in a piece of music, changing notes here and there, all the while hearing the changes in the music through the Studio's speakers.

StaffPad also wanted to radically simplify navigation by putting many of the most-used tasks, such as play and pause, in a single menu around the Dial. In one of the wilder uses I saw, a composer can pick up the Dial and use it like a rubber stamp on the touch screen to paste oft-used figures to various points on the timeline.

The coolest app I saw running on the Studio with Dial was a 3D illustration app called Mental Canvas. It's a bit hard to describe, but it helps users make 2D drawings into 3D experiences by mathematically working out the 3D perspectives of objects.

Mental Canvas is the brainchild of a Yale professor named Julie Dorsey, who says that the Studio's display, pen, and Dial make it the perfect machine for her software. It uses the same general layout and some of the same tools you see in other illustration apps—color wheel, layering, pen settings, etc.—but rather than using a menu around the Dial on the touch screen to switch between modes and tools, the user just moves the Dial near a mode button at the bottom of the screen to go into that mode. This is a big click saver and can help keep the user focused on the work and not on the software.

"There was this kind of confluence of pen technology, and multi-touch through the tablet and so on, that all made the timing for this particular technology just right," Dorsey says of the Studio. "It's really like the device. When I saw this I was elated."

The Dial can be used to do some basic functions in third-party apps without requiring the developer to do any integration work. That's because the Windows team at Microsoft built a number of Dial functions into Windows 10. These include things like selecting, scrolling, or zooming. For instance, it will work for undo/redo and zoom in Photoshop, no work required on Adobe's part. Users can also use it in Windows 10 apps such as the Edge browser and Maps.

The Surface Studio and Dial work so well together that it seems like an odd decision on Microsoft's part not to have bundled them. Instead, the Dial is a $99 add-on, sold separately. (Microsoft is throwing in a free Dial for anyone who pre-orders a Studio from Microsoft or Best Buy before December 1, however.) The Dial also works with other PCs that run Windows 10 Anniversary Edition, but only the Studio lets users place the Dial directly on the screen.

The Surface Dial's arrival is the fulfillment of a very long-standing dream of Microsoft's, dating all the way back to the Surface table computer that the company released with much hoopla in 2007. (It didn't take off and eventually gave up its name to the Surface tablet line.) For that project, Bathiche's team used infrared cameras that could detect objects placed on the Surface's, well, surface—such as a board game with real pieces.

"The whole point was that we wanted to have physical objects interacting with digital objects," Bathiche says. Now the Dial does just that, in a way that enhances the Surface Studio's emphasis on creative productivity.

Seeya, Cintiq?

In some ways, the Surface Studio's biggest competitor isn't any Mac, but rather Wacom's Cintiq, the pen-and-touch digital display popular with many designers and illustrators. A current model with HD, touch, pen and a comparably sized screen—the 27QHD touch—costs $2,800. That's not including the cost of a Windows PC or Mac needed to drive the device.

The Studio combines a digital sketchpad and computing functions in one device. "We want to remove all these things around your desk that you think you need to work on, including papers, including a Cintiq or some other thing you were writing on, including any other device that might be on your desktop," says Panay. "I don't want to say [the Cintiq] is gone because I'm a big fan of Wacom but, fundamentally what this product is doing is replacing that."

"It's nice to stay focused on one device," says illustrator Mike Krahulik, who cofounded the video-game webcomic site Penny Arcade. He was one of a handful of artists Microsoft chose to beta-test the Studio and the Dial. And before he got his Studio, his desk was dominated by his Cintiq.

"My desk was for drawing and that's it; I'm not going to play games on my Cintiq, and even if I wanted to I can't make it sit vertically," Krahulik tells me. "If I wanted to answer email I did it on my laptop on the little screen."

Krahulik adds that his only qualm about the Dial is that it doesn't have the customization options he'd have liked: "It's incredibly handy and works great out of the box with my drawing software, but I'd love the ability to really go nuts and customize everything about what it can do on a per-program basis."

People like Krahulik do their design work from a home desk, but the Studio could begin to catch on with companies full of designers, too. I can see a scenario where a large design firm or ad agency might buy Studios for a whole department of creative people. If they'd otherwise need computers and Cintiqs, the Studio's price tag starts to make sense—assuming that nobody's so Windows-adverse as to make the Studio a non-starter. Krahulik told me the Surface Pro 3 and Surface Pro 4 have helped Microsoft's image among creatives.

Panay seems to have realistic expectations about the Surface Studio's acceptance curve, especially given that its price puts it at the tippy-top of the market. "Don't get me wrong I hope the demand is off-the-charts great, but it starts at $3,000, so it's not like we're coming out with an $800 PC," he says. "This is a premium [device], it's for professionals, it's for creators..."

Yet he doesn't believe that the Studio will ultimately be limited to commercial customers. "I believe that creators are everywhere," he says. "There's going to be a whole group of people who just want this device in their home because it's beautiful."

As for sales expectations, "we're going to take our time; this isn't one where I'm worried about 'are we going to ship 100,000 units, or a million units or 10 million units or 20 million units day one," he tells me. "We're going to ship the right amount to get it to market so that people can get their hands on it."

It's not like the Surface Group at Microsoft is desperate for an immediate hit. Only a few years ago people were making fun of the original Surface, but you don't hear that very much anymore. In Microsoft's most recent earnings report, it said that Surface sales (mainly of the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book) jumped to $926 million for the quarter; that's a 38% jump from the $672 million in Surface revenue in the same quarter last year. Bulk sales (read: enterprise sales) of 500 devices or more increased 70% year-over-year, the company reported—a fact that helps explain how Microsoft's PC line fits into the company's overall strategic emphasis on workplace productivity.

That growth is proof of Panay's understanding of the market, and it's gained him some real cachet within Microsoft. It could be that he and his people had some breathing room to plan and build a Surface machine they always hoped to create.

Still, he's not taking anything for granted. At the end of our meeting he shows me the Studio promo video that will be shown at the October 26 launch event. The music is a cover of "Pure Imagination," the late Gene Wilder's signature song in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. You see some sexy shots of the Studio—the thin display, the chrome arms. You see the Dial in action on the touch screen. You see people getting really into creating things. You see the Microsoft designers, and some of the people who developed apps for the Dial. It's slick.

As we walk down the hall after our meeting, Panay isn't sure about the music and whether it will play just right with the audience at Microsoft's October 26th event.

"When you're creating, at this point everything is at a paranoid stage," he says. "You're powering through and it's our baby, it's our latest, you know, and you don't want to miss, you don't want to make a mistake."

Hits and misses are hard to predict, but it's already clear that Microsoft has brought fresh thinking to the desktop PC with the Surface Studio.

While Facebook and Twitter offer an endless parade of links, Pocket wants to promote only the good stuff.

Gathering good reading material from around the internet is hard. You can't trust your friends on Facebook. Twitter is too noisy. And even if you're a master of RSS, you probably spend too much time sorting through filler.

This is where Pocket hopes it can make a difference. For the last nine years, the company—originally called Read It Later—has essentially run a glorified bookmark service, letting people save articles into a slick reading view on mobile devices and the web. To date, Pocket's 25 million registered users have stashed more than 3 billion links for later perusal.

Now, Pocket is turning all those saved stories into recommendations, helping people find reading material regardless of whether they do any bookmarking themselves. The idea is that any article worth saving is inherently more substantial than your average Facebook or Twitter link. Pocket wants to make itself a destination for those stories that dig deeper than the day's headlines.

"Once we have the save platform, and we have millions of people that are basically hand curating the web for us, we can build out really high-quality recommendations, and are able to power a better version of the web, so to speak," says Nate Weiner, Pocket's founder and CEO.

Deeper Dives

Pocket has been dabbling in recommendations since last year, but only as a way to help active bookmarkers find related articles. As of this week, it's opening up those recommendations to a larger audience. Visit the Pocket website (and, in the coming months, the Pocket app), and you can browse through topics like Technology, Food, and Fitness. To stock each section, Pocket looks at how many people have saved each link, and how engaged they've been with the text.

"Because the consumption happens within Pocket, we actually get to see how far people scroll, how much time they spend, if they share it or don't," Weiner says. "So we can go beyond what's popular, and actually add what's good, what people are actually spending time with."

There are no boundaries on the topics Pocket can include, either. Instead of curating each section by hand, Pocket generates topic pages automatically from users' tags and its own scanning algorithms. That means you can search for specific concepts such as "self-driving cars" or "natural gas pipelines," and get suggestions on related topics as you scroll through each section.

"There's an ongoing debate between whether curation should be humans curating and editorializing things or algorithms, and there's a big divide between those two," Weiner says. "For us, we actually think they're both wrong as a black-and-white thing. There needs to be a middle ground, and that's what's unique about Pocket."

The company is also stuffing more recommendations into its Chrome extension that lets active users easily save links from a web browser. The extension now brings a few suggested articles onto Chrome's new tab page, and shows a few related articles whenever users save a link.

These new initiatives are a big part of Pocket's business plan. Earlier this year, the company started experimenting with sponsored posts in its apps and website. By opening up recommendations, Pocket hopes to draw more eyeballs, and Weiner expects that in the long run, sponsored posts will comprise 80% of the company's revenue. (Users can avoid those sponsored posts with a $5 per month subscription, which also includes extra features for saving and sorting through links.)

For Weiner, the plan comes as something of a relief. After turning down an acquisition offer from Evernote five years ago, he largely put money making on hold, instead raising $15 million in venture capital. Though he doesn't rule out an acquisition by the right partner, he views the business plan as a path to independence. (Longtime rival Instapaper was snapped up by Pinterest in August.)

"I'm super pumped to be ramping our revenue again, and putting us on the trajectory for being pretty close to break-even next year," he says.

The Ethics Of A Better Web

Solid as that plan may seem, Pocket still has some issues to work on.

One ongoing challenge will be to make sure that Pocket's active users keep saving a steady flow of links. Weiner also acknowledges that users tend to get overwhelmed by all the links they've collected, so in the future, Pocket wants to add more ways for users to sift through their existing bookmarks.

"We still have that noise problem, even within our own product," he says. "But a big part of what we want to do is take all this insight and data that we have, and be able to help you to filter, and prioritize, and get through what you've saved, and power that up."

As Pocket grows, it may also have to do some deep thinking about its own mission. As a destination for other publications' written work, the risk is that Pocket could drive people away from publishers' websites, reducing their own ability to sell ads. The company, then, has some obligation to ensure there's enough quality content to begin with.

Weiner contends that Pocket isn't depriving publishers of eyeballs, at least not directly. Clicking on a link in the new recommendations section still takes you to the actual web page, he says, rather than Pocket's reading view. (This is only partially true; you can also click a "Save to Pocket" button to bypass the web view entirely.)

But if Pocket gets big enough, publishers might also see it as an opportunity. One thing the company is exploring now is the ability to include its recommendations directly on publishers' websites—sort of like a highbrow version of Outbrain or Taboola, content networks whose stories skew to material of the "Donald Trump's Most Scandalous Love Conquests" ilk. Weiner says it's early days for this effort, but one could imagine sponsored content being lucrative for both publishers and Pocket in that context.

Weiner also hasn't completely ruled out a consumer-facing subscription model that shares revenue with publishers. While he's a bit skeptical that people will pay for text content in the first place, he does believe a large-scale service that spanned many publishers would be the best place for that type of model.

"It's something we think could potentially work, but would require us to really get a lot of things right," he says. "I wouldn't count it out, but it's still a big question mark."

Serving as the web's curator also brings up a knottier question about the type of material that's being curated. Pocket's current user base tends to be politically left-leaning, a point that becomes clear while perusing some sections of the website. As we've seen with Facebook, the danger with algorithmic curation is that it can trap users in hyperpartisan bubbles that only get harder to break over time.

Weiner says he and his team think about this issue often, though the solutions aren't clear cut. It's possible that Pocket could weigh its algorithms differently or serve more recommendations that fall outside of a particular user's comfort zone—the same way Spotify occasionally does with its weekly playlist suggestions.

In any case, breaking people's ideological bubbles is something Pocket will need to figure out if it wants to stay true to its ethos of building a more informative web—and Weiner knows it.

"We want to expose you to unique perspectives and things you wouldn't see otherwise," he says. "It's definitely in line with the things that we want to accomplish."

One of the most advanced industries is still challenged by inefficiencies and bias in recruiting. Refdash hopes to change all that.

Though it's one of the most advanced industries with some of the most in-demand jobs, the recruiting and hiring process for software engineers remains highly inefficient and archaic.

Resumes are often judged based on brand-name educational institutions and former employers, coding tests and interviews are extremely time consuming, and candidates who are rejected are left without any indication of how they can improve in the future (mostly due to legal constraints). Employers, on the other hand, must make initial hiring decisions based on resumes alone, and spend countless hours putting candidates, a majority of whom they will not hire, through initial screening, tests, and interviews. No wonder the hiring process averages 23 days, up from just 13 four years ago.

Identifying inherent biases and inefficiencies in the tech-industry recruiting process has led to a variety of new technical solutions, including Blendoor, a Tinderlike app that reveals the exact opposite information the dating service provides, hiding a candidate's photo, name, age, employment history, and criminal background, so that potential employers only see qualifications. Others, such as HiringSolved, seek to change the recruiting process by injecting it with artificial intelligence, helping recruiters narrow down the massive pool of candidates into the most likely contenders.

Today, a new competitor enters the digital recruiting space for the tech industry that hopes to streamline the process for both recruiters and employers. Unlike the traditional model, Refdash provides a platform where candidates can be tested and interviewed once and have their results sent to the employers of their choice.

"We want to be a platform where you verify your technical ability once, and then apply that knowledge across different companies," says cofounder Nikola Otasevic.

Instead of applying directly to a hiring manager or recruiter, candidates are screened by a Refdash interviewer who has previous experience in tech recruiting, using the company's video chat and code-sharing platform. Unlike typical job applications, however, this interviewer actually provides feedback to candidates to help them improve as they move forward.

"We send a technical report based on these interviews, and companies can then skip their initial phases of their interview, because they get assessments of technical abilities from us," says Otasevic. Each company is required to fast-track Refdash candidates to the onsite interviewing phase. "That saves time for the candidate and the company," he points out.

Otasevic believes that this process can also help eliminate bias in the early stages of the recruiting process, where many candidates are eliminated for simply not having high-status schools and employers on their resumes.

"Our belief is that biases exist because of a lack of information," says Otasevic. He doesn't blame hiring managers for needing to narrow down hundreds of candidates into a few finalists based on their resume alone. He says it's a "perfectly rational thing to do when you don't have additional information" and a large talent pool to wade through. However, this can eliminate some of the best candidates from consideration. "We want to evaluate people on concrete information," he explains, "like how they code, how they understand problems, how they talk about technical infrastructure, things like that."

Refdash has also partnered with DiverseUp, which rates employers based on their gender inclusiveness.

Refdash launches today with more than 15 employers in the tech industry, including New York-based hedge fund manager Two Sigma and San Fransisco-based Coinbase, a digital asset exchange company. The service is free for candidates and only costs employers if they hire a Refdash candidate—and only if that candidate remains for a certain period of time. This cost structure is similar to traditional placement fees in the recruiting industry.

While Refdash is currently limited to software engineers, Otasevic says there's no reason why the company can't take its platform to other positions and industries in the future.

"Ultimately once you reduce this inefficiency in the whole system," says Otasevic, "we can start expanding and making the evaluation process deeper and more representative of what candidates can do, and not how they appear on paper."

Tommy Hilfiger shares lessons from growing too fast in the '90s and explains how to build a global, digital brand.

At New York Fashion Week this September, Tommy Hilfiger transformed the South Street Seaport into a public carnival, complete with a 40-foot Ferris wheel, arcade games, and cotton candy. Hilfiger, in collaboration with model Gigi Hadid, designed a "see now, buy now" collection that was unveiled on a runway on "Tommy Pier," to the delight of more than 2,000 screaming fans. Their excitement reverberated on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. "The show garnered over 2 billion impressions on social media," Hilfiger tells Fast Company. "The whole idea is that through social media, you really have the opportunity to keep your brand young."

In the three decades since Tommy Hilfiger founded his eponymous label, the fashion landscape has changed beyond recognition. In the '80s, Hilfiger telegraphed his brand of preppy American luxury through swanky stores and ads in glossy magazines. But Hilfiger, who continues to serve as the brand's principal designer, says that the strategies that once launched the brand into stratospheric success need to be reimagined for the digital age. He's been thinking carefully about how a fashion house can evolve and speak to a new generation of consumers without eroding its identity.

In an exclusive interview, Hilfiger explains that while he is focused on growing his brand globally and digitally, he also wants to expand cautiously and judiciously, after a period in the '90s when the brand grew too fast. "We learned that growing quickly is not healthy for the brand," he says.

In a recent report, I covered how premium American brands including Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Tommy Hilfiger, among others, have lost some of their cachet over the last decade. Hilfiger acknowledges that his brand has suffered from a slowdown, at least in the U.S., because the company grew so quickly that the market became oversaturated and diluted the brand. In the late '90s, Hilfiger and his team had to work hard to change direction. "To be honest with you," Hilfiger recalls, "it is not easy to all of a sudden put on the breaks and make a U-turn. It's a painful pill to swallow."

This meant becoming more disciplined in every aspect of the business and ensuring that every touchpoint with the brand—from the actual products to the retailers where they were sold—was of the highest quality. The result was a period when the balance sheet did not look very good. "We did all the right things, but it was not easy because we dropped a lot of volume at that time," he says.

Tommy Goes Abroad

But 17 years ago, even as Hilfiger and his CEO at the time, Fred Gehring, were calibrating the brand in the U.S., they saw the expansion of the brand in new markets throughout Europe and Asia as an opportunity to build a premium fashion label. Rather than becoming widely available quickly, they focused on building brick and mortar stores in high-end locations. In Singapore, for instance, Tommy Hilfiger storefronts are close to Lacoste, Yves Saint Laurent, and Ted Baker. "We positioned the brand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best premium and luxury brands in the world," Hilfiger says.

Over time, however, the brand steadily built a strong presence around the world, with 1,500 stores globally, nearly 500 of which are in Europe. This strategy appears to have worked, since strong international sales have accounted for the brand's 4% overall year-over-year growth, even as North American revenues have decreased by 5%.

Hilfiger points out that it wasn't enough to control the growth. He says that it was crucial to do very careful consumer research in each new market, then tailor both the products and the brand's messaging to each place. Country managers are tasked with understanding what will resonate locally, then collaborating with executives from the headquarters to create collections that are appropriate.

Sometimes those differences have to do with things like colors. In Germany, he says, customers like heavier fabrics and darker colors than they do in Spain and Shanghai. But sometimes the brand has to design entirely different collections from those in the U.S. to suit the tastes in the local market.

This is an interesting strategy for Tommy Hilfiger, which has always been known as a classically American brand and whose logo even evokes the American flag. "Originally, when we started expanding overseas, I think the people in Europe and Asia were embracing the whole American casual lifestyle," Hilfiger says. "But now, we've evolved to be more of a global brand."

Case in point: Last year, Tommy Hilfiger launched its first Ramadan capsule collection in stores throughout Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt. The 15-piece collection featured looks that were appropriately modest, including long dresses and boleros, made of laces, chiffons, and crepes. It was so popular that the brand followed up with another collection this year and is planning to make it an annual tradition. And given that there's a growth fashion scene in the Muslim world, Hilfiger will have the advantage of being among the first of the Western brands to design for Muslim women. (DKNY, Oscar de la Renta, and Zara are among the others that have launched Ramadan collections.)

Next-Gen Tommy

While the brand is careful to adapt to the needs of customers in each market, Hilfiger says that he has noticed some trends that have transcended geographic location. Consumers around the world are drawn to the idea of "affordable luxury"—high quality products at reasonable prices. For instance, this means using the highest-grade cashmeres and wools during the winter months.

Hilfiger believes that consumers around the world are now smarter than ever when it comes to understanding the quality and value of products, since they can do online research and price comparisons. In fact, many successful American online fashion startups, such as Everlane and Warby Parker, are built on offering designer-quality products without big retail markups since they sell directly to the consumer. In overseas markets, Hilfiger believes that his brand could have a leg up in the "affordable luxury" market, since the brand has been associated with premium quality for many years. "We have an advantage over either unknown brands, or brands that might not be as quality-oriented," he says.

Tommy Hilfiger executives are applying many of its successful strategies overseas—slow growth, narrow distribution, premium branding—back to the U.S. market, as they work on bringing the brand back to its former glory. It's also possible that the strong premium branding overseas is beginning to influence how American customers see the brand. "It did create a halo," Hilfiger says of the brand's successes in Europe.

Meanwhile, we can expect more sensational events like the Tommy Pier carnival. Hilfiger says that the brand is focused on reaching the next generation of consumers through projects like that, which tend to play very well on social media where today's young people spend their time. There will probably be more collaborations with social media stars like Gigi Hadid in the future.

In some ways, this focus on capturing the imagination of young consumers is part of the brand's DNA. While today's Tommy Hilfiger customers span a wide demographic—the brand has a children's line and clothes designed for older customers who have stuck loyally to the brand for decades—it has always been associated with fresh-faced models channeling vigor and youth. Says Hilfiger, "Keeping the brand younger keeps it cool."

It's packed with features and simple to use, and after a couple weeks of testing, I am in love.

Let's just cut to the chase: I love DJI's new Mavic Pro, and if I had $1,000 for a drone, I would buy it without thinking twice.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been testing out the Mavic Pro, which the world's largest maker of consumer drones, China's DJI, unveiled earlier this month. And while I'm by no means a sophisticated pilot, this foldable drone made me feel like I'd been flying for years.

The unit isn't the first of its kind. In fact, GoPro unveiled the Karma, its own foldable drone, just days before the Mavic was announced. Other companies, too, have foldables on the market—GDU and Hover, among others. This article isn't meant to compare the Mavic with any of its competitors, as I haven't had a chance to test any of those.

On the contrary, consider this article something of a love letter to the Mavic Pro, a drone that you can fold up and stick in just about any backpack or small bag. It could not be easier or more fun to fly, and its feature set, for a $1,000 product, is beyond impressive. Anyone can fly it within minutes of taking it out of the box. The drone is capable of shooting 4K video, automatically tracking and following a subject, automatically detecting and avoiding obstacles, and more.

All of which is to say DJI should be very proud of what it has accomplished, even though past history suggests the company will come out with a new-and-improved model before too long.

For someone like me, a sophisticated drone presents a bit of a challenge. I don't have much experience flying RC aircraft, and I've really only spent significant time with one other drone, DJI's Phantom 2 Vision+.

And yet I quickly had the Mavic Pro in the air and flying safely, both at low altitudes to take pictures of my garden and at high altitudes to shoot video of stunning sunsets over San Francisco Bay. With its dedicated remote control—which adds $200 to the drone's $799 base price—I felt like I was an expert, even with no training.

For one thing, you can have the Mavic Pro in the air within a minute or so. Simply pop your smartphone into the remote control, turn everything on, and get that thing soaring overhead. With the Phantom 2, I always felt like I had to wait a few minutes before it locked onto enough satellites to guarantee good GPS. But with the Mavic Pro, it has a GPS lock—essential for an inexperienced pilot like me—in seconds, so long as it has a clear view of the sky.

While I think owners will all want to have multiple batteries—extras cost $89 apiece—as well as replacement propellers, that's nothing that's not true with any drone. Perhaps it says something about how much DJI is offering casual drone consumers that the hardest part of using the Mavic Pro is physically connecting your phone to the controller, which in my case required plugging it into a Lightning connector. Once you've done that, it's a simple matter of pulling both of the joysticks down and to the center to get the props spinning. Push up on the left stick, and the Mavic eagerly vaults into the air.

As someone without a lot of time spent flying drones before, I generally tried to keep my piloting simple: Straight up and down at first, and then as I gained confidence, back and forth in my neighborhood. Within a couple of days, I felt comfortable enough to fly the Mavic around a bend to see if I could snap some pictures of a friend's house a couple of blocks away. By flying it to a high altitude, I was able to keep the drone in sight even as I navigated it (using the onscreen map) toward my friend's house. To be sure, since the Mavic is small, I lost sight of it a few times, but I always knew exactly where it was, thanks to the map, and because I could see a live view from the built-in camera, I knew it was always completely steady and stable in the air.

That said, it's important to keep an eye on the drone, and that's sometimes hard at any kind of distance, given its size. You can quickly fly the Mavic a fifth of a mile from your starting point, and if you're not careful, you can lose it in the sky. The FAA thinks that's a big no-no, and I agree that, for safety reasons, you should always ensure you can see it with your naked eye.

Once I had more or less mastered takeoffs and landings—even in a fairly narrow patch of concrete in my backyard—I took it to a nearby park to try out some of its tracking features.

In the end, I didn't have time to try everything, but I was able, after a few false starts, to get the automatic tracking feature to work. Simply draw a rectangle around a subject, hit "Go" on the screen, and it's off to the races. (I used myself as the tracking subject.) The Mavic was then able to follow me around the park, keeping me in the center of its view the whole time, without me having to do anything.

What's that good for? As with everything else on this flying camera, it's one more tool for shooting video or still photos from the air: Not Hollywood quality, but certainly good enough for a YouTube video or for posting in an article like this. DJI, of course, has heavier-duty drones, like its more expensive Inspire, that a lot of people in Hollywood love.

Still, for everyday use, this is a great tool for shooting video from the air. Even at altitudes of up to 400 feet—the highest you can legally go—the video is stable, thanks to the Mavic's gimbal. That's pretty standard on a lot of drones these days, but it's still always cool to see in action.

Another great feature is the Mavic's return-home button. I flew it to 400 feet high and sent it about 1,200 feet away, and then pressed the button. Within seconds, it was heading back toward my house, and finally came down gently in my backyard. A couple of other times when I tried it, I was worried it was going to hit my garage, so I disabled the feature and landed manually, but to be fair, I was asking it to land in a very narrow area with a lot of obstacles.

I wasn't able to try some of the Mavic's other features, such as flying with my phone, tap-to-fly (which lets you fly the drone to a specified point just by tapping the screen), or having it autonomously circle around a subject. Another I didn't get to was gesturing to it and having it automatically take selfies. But I did get a demo of the drone before launch and saw how those features work. Like most everything else on the Mavic, they were simple.

There are a lot of drones on the market today, and even DJI has plenty of models to choose from. But the Mavic is what I'd want to spend my money on given its size, ease of use, and feature set.

60dB is a new app that focuses on personalized, short-form audio. Could it reinvent radio the way Netflix changed TV?

One of the reasons Steve Henn moved to Silicon Valley six years ago was to preempt his own irrelevance. As a longtime public radio reporter, he knew the move promised access to the technology industry he covered for shows like Marketplace and Planet Money. But he also had a sinking feeling that, eventually, his industry would face disruption at the hands of digital forces akin to the ones that obliterated audiences and revenue for many newspapers and magazines.

"I came out here with the hope of being in a position to better understand the industry that's likely to really transform the one I worked in," says Henn of working in the Bay Area. "And ideally be in the position to help influence a transition that was really good for high-quality journalism."

Then, about a year and a half ago, he met John Ciancutti. A 12-year veteran of Netflix, Ciancutti was not only familiar with the digital disruption of legacy media, but had seen how such upheaval could change an industry for the better. Naturally, the pair started talking about how technology might be used to reinvent radio as well. Even as podcasting was entering its current renaissance, there remained lots of opportunities for innovation in audio that had somehow not been tapped. So together with fellow Netflix alum Steve McLendon, Ciancutti and Henn did what people do in Silicon Valley. They started a company.

The startup, called Tiny Garage Labs, aims to reinvent radio for the digital age. Today, the fruits of their labor are available on iOS. The app is called 60dB (pronounced "sixty dee bee") and at first glance, it may look like just another podcast listening app. And while you can certainly find most well-known podcasts on 60dB, there's much more going on here. The app focuses on short-form audio, algorithmic personalization, and "lean back" ease of use, using this formula to carve out a middle ground between radio and podcasts that, its founders hope, will change the way we listen. But first, it needs users.

If the internet is indeed going to upend terrestrial radio, the disruption is taking its sweet time. More than a decade into its existence, podcasting is only now drawing in mainstream audiences—not to mention serious ad revenue and VC funding. But it has a ways to go. In 2015, 91% of Americans still tuned into terrestrial radio, according to Pew Research Center. And while podcast listenership is rising, only 21% of Americans reported listening to podcasts regularly last year.

"In America this week, more of us will listen to radio than will log onto Facebook," says Ciancutti. Indeed, nearly 100 years after the first radio news broadcast, the medium remains surprisingly dominant in people's lives as newspapers shrink and cable cords get cut. But why?

The reason, according to Henn and Ciancutti, is multipronged: As popular as podcasts are becoming, a 30-minute or 60-minute episode doesn't always fit neatly into our lives. And unlike the radio, putting on a podcast requires work.

"One of the things I love about radio is it's one button," says Henn. "You turn it on and it's on."

60dB takes a crack at this shortcoming in digital audio, first, with design: The app starts playing as soon as you open it and they're already planning an integration with Amazon Echo to enable hands-free voice control on Alexa-enabled devices.

But perhaps more importantly, they want to relieve listeners of the need to manually seek out shows by making the experience a personalized one. Leaning on years of experience building recommendation algorithms at Netflix, the team trained 60dB to learn about listeners, taking cues from their social graph (you can sign up with Twitter or Facebook) and making note of behaviors like skipping, subscribing, liking episodes, and even searching for specific topics and shows. Like Pandora or Netflix, the more you use 60dB, the smarter it gets and, in theory, the less you need to think about what you want to listen to next.

Audio discovery and personalization are nice concepts, but their effectiveness depends heavily on one thing: Content. Ideally, lots of it. That's why 60dB is taking the unique path of focusing on short-form audio (called "Quick Hits" in the app), sometimes slicing up longer shows from providers like EPSN and breaking them into more specific, topic-based chunks that an algorithm can more easily pair with a given listener.

And while some podcasts are already short by design—news roundups from NPR and BBC, for example—most of them don't fall within the three-to-10-minute sweet spot that 60dB is aiming for. This is where another major pillar of their strategy—as well as Henn's expertise and Rolodex of fellow journalists—comes into play. To ensure an endless flow of relevant, timely audio shows into the ears of listeners, 60dB is teaming up with media outlets to create new short-form programs. Some outlets are already producing audio that would work well in this format. But to Henn, a high number of outlets are so painfully close to being able to do it, yet lack the resources, expertise, or time to produce a podcast in-house.

"The conversation about podcasts has made lots of publications interested in audio for the first time," says Henn. "I think we can help them with that in a way that's really powerful and that can reach a much bigger audience than a longform podcast ever could."

In many cases, 60dB's team will help empower newsrooms and media organizations to produce their own short-form podcasts in-house. But realizing that that isn't feasible for everyone, they're offering a much easier onramp to the podcasting revolution for those who are eager to start turning readers into listeners. Through partnerships with outlets like The Guardian, Wired, The Atlantic, Quartz, the Washington Post, and others, 60dB is publishing new shows that follow a simple formula. When reporters file a new story that might work as an audio piece, one of 60dB's on-staff hosts will conduct a short interview with the writer, do a little editing and production work on their end, and viola! A new episode is published.

This arrangement, which presumably will feature some kind of revenue-sharing split once things get off the ground, scratches itches for both organizations: These mini-episodes require virtually no extra effort on the part of the media outlet and for 60dB, it helps fuel a massive trove of original content that sets the app apart from other podcasting apps and lets its personalization algorithms get more granular about people's interests and preferences. As of today, Henn says, the system sees about 1,500 new stories per day that are each under 10 minutes long. If things go according to plan, this number will only grow as time goes on.

For listeners—who may see this new app and wonder why on earth they should bother with another podcasting app (especially if they're already committed to one)—this blend of unique, short-form content and personalization lets 60dB fire back an easy, compelling response: Our app has tons of stuff you won't hear anywhere else and it will save you the trouble of having to dig around for it. You can still find and subscribe to podcasts like you would on any other app (offering more handy intel to the ever-watchful algorithms), but you don't need to go hunting for something to listen to on 60dB. Again, the benefit is mutual: Simplicity for the listener, high engagement metrics—and eventually revenue—for 60dB.

"We have a long-term vision that 60dB will be everywhere that you want to listen," says Henn. Today, it's on iOS. Next, it will be on the Amazon Echo. After that, Android. This is an unusual trajectory for an app developer rolling out across platforms, but it's in keeping with the startup's mission to make listening as effortless as possible.

"Radio does not exist on a screen," says Henn. "Great listening experiences are not about looking or touching."

Indeed, for most Americans, many listening experiences still happen with the touch of a radio dial, quite often in a car. When it comes to music, streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, and Apple Music are growing and becoming more ubiquitous, whether they're sitting on people's phones or built right into their dashboards. With the explosion of interest and investment in podcasts, spoken-word audio promises a digital transformation of its own. If there was ever a time to tinker with the model and try to nudge things along, it would be approximately right now.

"Personally I was lucky enough where I could afford to take this risk," says Henn. "And I got to the point where I thought if I didn't, I would always regret it."

Declining training budgets and an increase in outside hires is causing high turnover and fueling a talent shortage.

More than half of all U.S. employers are complaining of a talent shortage, but a new report suggests they are largely to blame for causing it.

According to a recent study by the The Manpower Group, a Milwaukee-based human resource consulting firm, employers are struggling to find talent as a result of a rapidly changing labor market.

"Technology, shorter product cycles, shifting consumer demand, and new ways of working all mean that the jobs employers need done are evolving, and they need people with different skills to do them," explains Sunny Ackerman, the vice president and general manager of Manpower U.S.

While organizations are responding to these challenges with short-term solutions, a new report by the ADP Research Institute suggests that they are failing to get to the heart of the problem.

Dermot O'Brien, ADP's chief human resources officer, and Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and head of ADP Research Institute, writes in the report:

Many companies are experiencing a skills shortage, which we believe is caused by a number of factors, including the transition to a more transient workforce than in previous generations; a lack of training company employees to take on other tasks and transfer into new positions; and a failure to train younger staff to replace people when they retire.

The report—which draws on an earlier survey of more than 500 senior executives by the Economist Intelligence Unit and ADP, among other research—suggests that while most organizations acknowledge the talent shortage, few have a long-term plan to address it.

For example, 76% of respondents said the market for skilled talent will become tighter, and 69% agree that talent will become more expensive, but there is little consensus on who is responsible for solving these challenges. Of the 500 respondents, 58% believe it's up to senior management, while 28% believe it's the function of human resources.

The most popular response regarding a solution was to spend more money on strategic workforce planning software, which the study's authors suggest isn't the best approach.

"Companies will need to change their practices, particularly by rebuilding HR budgets for training, changing corporate culture to promote from within, and allow flexible work options," the report's authors write. "Our findings suggest that companies that have been recently focused on short-term needs are beginning to see that these bigger challenges require a long-term plan."

The report points to a turnover cycle that ultimately has adverse impacts on both employers and employees. Instead of training staff in-house, companies are increasingly looking to outside hires. This, in turn, increases the rate of turnover, as staff feel they need to look beyond their own employer for career advancement. As a result, the company requires even more outside hires to fill the gap.

"The perceived skills gap is because companies have stopped training and developing people internally," says Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School, who was interviewed for the report. "Before the 1980s, 90% of vacancies were filled internally and 10% were hired outside. Now, 65% of vacancies are filled from outside," Capelli says.

Cappelli adds that corporate training budgets also dropped by 20% between 2000 and 2008. As a result, employees now need to switch employers in order to advance their careers, taking institutional knowledge and skills with them, and increasing the burden on employers to replace them.

Though it attempts to shine a light on this problem, the report concludes that it's unlikely to improve anytime soon, as rapid technology advancement makes it difficult to set long-term staffing strategies. "Simply put, it has become impossible to know staffing and skills requirements well in advance," the report's authors state. As long as training budgets continue to decline and companies fail to advance their existing employees, their turnover rate, retention costs, and the shortage of skilled candidates will continue to grow.

Better notifications, algorithm-driven timelines, "deeper" conversations, and more.

After a year that saw the end of strictly 140-character tweets and the introduction of algorithmic timelines, Twitter users are likely to see even more changes to the service in the coming months. During Twitter's third-quarter earnings announcement on Thursday morning, company executives described how they intend to boost growth—both in ad revenue and in the number of active users—by continuing to improve the experience of using Twitter.

In 2017, artificial intelligence will play a larger role in shaping what users see and do on Twitter. "We're focused on adding more machine learning to everything we do," CEO Jack Dorsey said during a call with investors. Here are six key areas to watch.

1. Smarter push notifications. Twitter said it is using artificial intelligence (aka machine learning) to make the notifications it sends more relevant to users. It is also working on notifications that include media, rather than just text. Finally, CFO Anthony Noto described how Twitter hopes to make following a notification less of a dead-end experience so that people "can actually explore more of Twitter." This could involve surfacing related content around a tweet that a user arrived at via notification.

2. Increasingly algorithmic timelines. Another area where Twitter is deploying machine learning is the timeline. Already, Twitter shows you tweets you may have missed since you last logged on. Expect these suggested tweets to become more tailored to your interests, and perhaps to see more suggested content throughout Twitter. From Twitter's shareholder letter:

In Q3, the enhanced timeline drove increases in retention for both monthly active and daily active usage, as well as increases in Tweet impressions and engagement (in the form of Tweets, Retweets, replies, likes and time spent on the platform). The timeline will continue to improve over time as our machine learning systems get better.

3. More live events. A recent Fast Company cover story described how Twitter is betting its future on live events like NFL games. During today's announcement, Noto emphasized how important live events are for getting people to use Twitter. When asked whether the U.S. presidential election had boosted activity on the platform, Noto said that while the presidential debates (which were live-streamed on Twitter) had prompted a surge in Twitter use during the events, the election had not increased usership overall.

"We did benefit meaningfully on the particular days that we had the live debates and integrated product of that curated timeline," Noto said. "[But] we really need to have a debate every day on Twitter for it to meaningfully improve our metrics on a quarterly basis. And that's where we're headed." (Emphasis added.)

4. Deeper conversations. A rather cryptic paragraph from Twitter's letter to shareholders suggests the company is working on features that will make tweeting feel less like shouting into the void and more like participating in a thoughtful conversation. How exactly Twitter will achieve this is unclear, but here's what they said about that goal:

[W]e will make Tweeting easier and more meaningful by providing more context and letting people not only broadcast to the world but also have deeper, open conversations about the topics they care about. Expect to see more experimentation in this area soon.

5. Better onboarding of new users. If Twitter is to stay relevant as a social media platform (and become profitable), it needs to get better at attracting and keeping new users. To that end, the company is changing the welcome process for new users. In the past, new Twitter users were shown suggested accounts to follow. In the future, new users will be asked about their interests and will receive recommendations for topics to follow. From the shareholder letter:

For people who are new to Twitter, we're making onboarding more topic-based so they can quickly find the accounts that are Tweeting news and information they care about. Earlier in the year, we ran several experiments with a new topic-based onboarding experience. The final results showed new follows and mutual follows both increased 30%, along with an increase in time spent on Twitter as more people graduated into more active states.

6. New safety features. Twitter has long struggled with how to deal with the rampant abuse and harassment that takes place on its platform. While it has recently introduced better abuse reporting and a filter to hide trolls, it still has a long way to go. This morning, the company wrote that it plans to roll out more safety updates soon: "Next month, we will be sharing meaningful updates to our safety policy, our product, and enforcement strategy."

Amid a massive tech upgrade meant to improve accountability, body cameras are being limited by police policies and privacy concerns.

In the minutes before a Baton Rouge police officer killed 37-year-old Alton Sterling as he lay restrained in a convenience store parking lot, both the officer and his partner's body cameras "came dislodged" from their uniforms.

A month later, in August, a Chicago officer failed to turn on his body camera before he fatally shot unarmed 18-year-old Paul O'Neal in the back.

And a few weeks ago in Charlotte, the plainclothes officer who fatally shot 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott wasn't wearing a body camera. The other officer involved in the incident only activated his body camera after the shooting, a violation of city policy.

The failures—however accidental or convenient they may be—underscore the limits of a technology that is rapidly becoming a staple of the modern police officer's toolkit, amid an effort to build more trust between police and the communities they serve.

As she announced $20 million in federal body camera grants last month, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the money "will help more than 100 law enforcement agencies promote transparency and ensure accountability, clearing the way for the closer cooperation between residents and officers that is so vital to public safety." Arizona-based police technology manufacturer Taser, whose Axon division now claims to sell the majority of the country's police body cameras, puts the value proposition more simply in one of its slogans: "Protect Life. Protect Truth."

But the technology isn't foolproof. Cameras fall off, officers fail to record, and the video itself can be kept largely out of public view. When video collected for oversight purposes isn't shared publicly, critics worry citizens might become more suspicious about police misconduct, amplifying mistrust amid an effort to fight it.

"One of the main selling points for body worn cameras is their promise to bring transparency and accountability to police community interactions," says Harlan Yu, a founder of Upturn, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that provides analysis to policymakers, and the author of a recent national "scorecard" on body-worn camera policies. But the cameras, he says, "don't automatically provide accountability."

Yu points at recent high-profile failures by police to record deadly encounters. "And these are just the incidents that we know about because someone was shot and killed."

Civil rights advocates have raised concerns about hundreds of known instances in which cameras have malfunctioned, or in which officers simply haven't activated them during violent encounters. They have also raised questions about the way police manage and share the mountains of video they collect. Police, meanwhile, fret about the privacy intrusions of body-worn cameras—for victims, minors, informants, and witnesses, as well as for themselves—and the added costs and workload required to store torrents of video.

"Some chiefs are really concerned about that and the work that is associated with all of that," says Seattle's police chief, Kathleen O'Toole, who arrived in 2014 amid a series of reforms at the police department. "But you know, I think on balance transparency trumps all of the other inconveniences."

Still, the inconveniences are significant. Seattle, which sought to release much of its body camera video to the public during a trial in 2015, intends to begin deploying cameras to its officers by the end of the year. But the rollout has been delayed by disagreements over the correct policies for cameras, an issue has riven legislatures across the country. Transparency activists want the cameras always recording; police want to be able to turn them off at their discretion. Some local laws require quick deletion of police video while others may keep it indefinitely. Some punish officers for failing to record, while others do not. Only two of the country's 20 largest police departments make body camera footage public by default.

To O'Toole, the challenge is finding the right policies to meet the technology. "I'm not as concerned about the technology as I am about the policy, and we just want to get the policies right."

To build trust with the community, cameras must be implemented carefully alongside other efforts like community policing, de-escalation tactics, and public dialogue, says O'Toole. Cameras will be a "valuable tool" for accountability and training, she says. "But I think we have to be realistic: Body cameras are not going to be a panacea."

The major points of failure revolve around three central questions: how to reduce human or technical errors, when should officers record, and who gets to see the footage. Take the cameras from the shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. Though they fell off, according to a police spokesperson, they were still recording video and audio when Sterling was killed. That data has been turned over to the Dept. of Justice, but it remains out of view of the public: a Louisiana state law enacted in August—one of a number passed in recent months around the country—keeps most body camera footage out of the public record automatically.

Technical And Human Glitches

Since the shooting of unarmed, 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014—an incident that was not captured on camera—activists and city governments have stridently fought for more police oversight, and for what some call the fastest technology upgrade in policing history. "There is a reason the CMPD equips its officers with body cameras," Justin Bamberg, an attorney for Keith Scott's family, told a reporter after his death. "Because body cameras provide visual evidence so that when tragic things do happen we don't have to question exactly what happened."

Despite reluctance by some police unions and civil rights groups, body cameras have won over most of the chiefs of the nation's largest cities. While only a handful of the country's 18,000 police departments wore them before 2012, between 40% and 50% of cops in the U.S. now use body cameras, according to Michael White, a criminal justice professor at Arizona State University who studies the technology. Besides Charlotte, large cities like Chicago (2,000 body cameras so far) and Los Angeles (1,160) plan to outfit their entire forces.

Some police have come to accept these videos—many of them boring, some of them terribly heart-pounding and -wrenching—as a development as inevitable as the camera on civilians' cellphones, and as a necessary step toward building trust with their local communities. Police officers have also begun to depend on cameras to refute false allegations of abuse, while prosecutors have cited video as a linchpin in a growing number of police misconduct and criminal cases.

But the technology and the policies that surround it are only as effective as the people operating them. And no policy, process, or technology can completely prevent technical problems—or human malfeasance.

The Albuquerque police department equipped all of its officers with body cameras by early 2011, earning plaudits for transparency. Like most body cameras, the departments' Taser units were designed to record for the entirety of an officer's shift. Afterwards, videos can be set to automatically transfer to a police computer or stored on a cloud server. But for nearly three years, officers could delete whichever recordings they wanted at the end of their shift, before anyone else saw them.

Officials had enabled an "offline mode" feature in Taser's video management software, Evidence.com, that allows officers to upload footage to a local computer rather than to a cloud server, not unlike the way photos or videos get transferred off a consumer digital camera. The policy was not publicly known until last year, but it reportedly drew interest from officials at police departments across the country. This feature wasn't unique to Taser's cameras; in fact, most body cameras on the market, especially earlier versions, only offer an "offline" mode.

"One of the advantages of the way we built our system is to make sure we have really clear audit logs," says Taser CEO Rick Smith. But those audit logs only exist if the camera and its software is set to "online" mode.

The option to delete came to light after the police department dismissed officer Jeremy Dear. In April 2014, he fatally shot 19-year-old Mary Hawkes in Southeast Albuquerque, who he testified was armed. But there was no video of the incident captured by his lapel-worn Taser camera. The department and Dear indicated it "malfunctioned," but a test by Taser determined that the camera was in working order and was either unplugged or not recording when he shot Hawkes. Officer Dear said he pressed the large button on the battery pack to start recording, but blamed the camera's design.

"This issue with cords coming unplugged … I hear from officers all the time the issue with the cabling is a defect," Dear's lawyer told the Albuquerque Journal. "I think there's a design flaw."

In 2014, the city of Albuquerque reached a settlement with the Justice Department over a pattern of excessive policing. "We found very few examples of officers being reprimanded for failing to record force incidents," the Justice Dept. report states. Frances Crockett Carpenter, a civil rights lawyer in Albuquerque, points out that only a few of the nearly 40 police shootings in Albuquerque since officers began wearing cameras have been recorded.

"The citizens of Albuquerque, these Taser cameras were bought on their backs, taxpayer money: millions of dollars to get these cameras," Carpenter told local TV station KRQE last December. "It was gonna help, and we were gonna get those costs back, right? That money was gonna come back into the city because we weren't gonna have any more lawsuits. And so somehow the citizens were gonna get some of that money back, or it was gonna flush out. Well, it hasn't."

There are dozens of other cases. Last November, two deputies with the Alameda Police Department were caught on surveillance video using their batons to beat a car theft suspect in the middle of a street in San Francisco's Mission District. Eleven officers in all responded but only one activated his body camera, and did so by accident. Three officers were placed on leave, including two who are charged with assault. But no one was disciplined for failing to turn on their cameras because the department's policy at the time encouraged, but did not require, their use, according to an agency spokesman. Elsewhere:

• A study of the New Orleans Police Department found nearly 100 incidents where police used force and were wearing body cameras but did not have them turned on.
• Last September, two Vermont police officers shot and killed a man while wearing body cameras. Neither officer turned them on before the shooting; both were cleared of all wrongdoing.
• Just before knocking a woman's teeth out, two Daytona Beach, Fla., officers switched off their body cameras.
• A 50-year-old Alabama man was armed with only a spoon—"maybe 10-12 inches" in length—when he was fatally shot by a Tuscaloosa police officer, who was wearing a body camera he did not turn on. In doing so, the officer violated police policy, but was not punished.
• In September, police in Washington, D.C., fatally shot Terrence Sterling, an unarmed 31-year-old black man, after his motorcycle crashed into their car. But contrary to District policy, none of the officers at the scene activated their cameras until after the shooting. The footage the city released captures Sterling's final moments, but the video begins over a minute after shots were fired. The case is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney's Office. Now, D.C. officers are required to confirm with dispatchers that they've switched on their body cameras when responding to calls or interacting with the public.

In Chicago, where the dashboard camera video of Laquan Macdonald's death was found to contain no audio, police have been regularly disabling their equipment: One review by a police inspector determined that more than 80% of the department's dash cameras had non-functioning audio "due to operator error or, in some cases, intentional destruction." Police have even been seen throwing their microphones onto the roofs of their precinct houses. Similar abuse has been reported in Los Angeles.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law, most U.S. cities, including Chicago, Dallas, Denver, New Orleans, New York, and San Diego, don't currently specify penalties when officers fail to record.

"Even when department policies look strong on paper, these policies are only as good as how departments enforce them," says Yu. "If officers aren't appropriately disciplined when they fail to record required events—even for routine failures—they'll form bad habits, and we'll be certain to see more incidents where cameras aren't rolling when we need them most."

Technology may provide some assistance: Taser, VieVu, and other camera makers have begun offering a feature that automatically activates cameras when officers turn on a siren or draw a weapon, much the way that most dashboard cameras are designed to activate when the engine is started or a siren is turned on. In the future, this automatic triggering—and even live-streaming back to base—could happen when an officer enters a crime hot spot, leaves a police vehicle, or makes a call for assistance on the radio. This would avoid difficult situations like the one in Chicago, in which the officer, when giving chase, apparently forgot to turn on his camera.

Encryption used by many body cameras also makes it very difficult for videos to be surreptitiously modified while on the camera or after being transferred to a computer or cloud service. (Some of Microsoft and Amazon servers are federally certified to handle police evidence.) But as the case of Albuquerque's body cameras demonstrated, it isn't hard for officers to delete footage, intentionally or not, if videos are uploaded to a local computer rather than to a cloud server.

Last month, a police official in Oakland testified that a quarter of all video clips captured by the department's body-worn cameras during stops and investigations were accidentally deleted two years ago, when city technicians installed a software upgrade. A spokesperson claimed the deletion had not significantly affected any cases.

In Seattle, in-car dashboard camera video cameras have frequently dropped frames, at times leaving gaps of more than an hour in video records. Police IT workers and forensics experts have worked on the problem since 2014, according to the department, but the problem persists. And in late August, the department announced that over a two-day period it had lost over 2,000 dashboard camera videos (due to a computer bug) created with camera systems made by Houston-based COBAN International. Chief O'Toole called it "a technology glitch." "We want people to know that there isn't anything sinister here."

Cameras, whether attached to an officer's chest or head, can also come off in a struggle, says Smith, the CEO of Taser. The company "rigorously" tests its camera attachments, which tend to rely on strong magnets and clips, but the problem of cameras falling off is serious enough that the company has begun to develop stronger, sewn-in attachments for some departments.

Asked about the possibility of two body cameras falling off during the same encounter, as happened in Baton Rouge, Smith said it was "very rare." The two cameras that fell off weren't made by Taser but by Motorola Solutions. In a statement, the company said its "engineers have been on-site throughout the pilot to ensure the body-worn cameras meet the police department's mission-critical requirements," and that it had offered the Baton Rouge Police Department "various camera mounting configurations."

One of Taser's cameras, the Axon Flex, a lipstick-sized camera mounted on an officer's temple or lapel using strong clips or magnets, is designed to withstand speeds of up to 100 mph. But that can't doesn't account for everything an officer encounters. In a video captured last August by an Axon Flex, an officer in Grand Rapids, MI responding to a noise complaint approaches a group of people on a street corner. The conversation quickly escalates and during an altercation with an older woman, the camera comes loose and lands in a neighbor's yard. It's discovered, and the neighbors' efforts to return the camera are chronicled on video, which the department released to news media: an accidental short film about how body cameras fall off.

When attached and working, body cameras are still limited by their hardware and software, by their lenses and microphones. They tend to only capture what is in front of the officer, rather than their wider surroundings. When officers run, the video image shakes nearly beyond recognition. And when encounters become physical, the video can become indecipherable, frustratingly when it's most needed. Even if the cameras in Baton Rouge hadn't fallen off, they may not have captured much valuable visual evidence of the struggle that led up to the shooting, says Smith. "I don't know if you're ever going to reliably capture that level of detail in the middle of a fight."

When To Record

In many cities the debate over body camera policies has slowed their adoption. One sticking point, and a point of potential failure, relates to the question of when officers should record. Civil rights advocates tend to argue that unless police record every encounter, cameras could become a tool for abuse rather than reform. Police say that in order to respect the privacy of citizens, informants, vulnerable victims, and themselves, officers should have discretion about when and what to record.

Shankar Narayan, legislative director of the Washington State ACLU, and a member of a state task force on body camera policy, says body cameras present a new kind of privacy threat. Rather than limited views from police cruiser dashboards, the cameras offer up close and personal HD views of the worst days of people's lives. Some law enforcement leaders also say that cameras recording everything could be dangerous, and out of step with the nuances of community policing.

Still, he says, giving officers discretion about when to record could defeat the purpose of the cameras. "We should have them be able to turn them off on breaks, but when they're on duty, the cameras need to be on," he says.

There have been nearly 40 studies on the use of body cameras, including a dozen randomized controlled trials on the magnitude of their effect on policing. Generally, they have noted a decrease in complaints and assaults against officers who wear cameras, as well as reductions in use-of-force incidents. But, according a recent study by Barak Ariel at Cambridge University, use-of-force actually appeared to increase in cases where officers were given full discretion about when and what to record with their body cameras.

Some departments, including Memphis, allow officers to turn cameras off at their discretion. In Oakland, reprimands for officers who don't record their encounters with the public are often informal, at least for first-time offenders. Last year, out of 504 use-of-force incidents, 24 officers did not turn on their body cameras. Twenty officers were given reprimands from supervisors and the other four were sent to internal affairs for investigation. Since its camera policy was put into place, the department says it has had a 95% success rate in recording use-of-force incidents.

While New York lacks a statewide camera law, the State Municipal Police Training Council crafted a model policy last fall that states that officers are required to activate cameras "upon engaging in an enforcement-related activity." But recording wouldn't be required if turning on a camera placed an officer at a disadvantage, compromised safety, or delayed a response to a citizen in need.

At the NYPD, which recently announced plans to buy 1,000 VieVu body cameras, officers would not record when "interviewing the victim of a sex crime" or when conducting strip searches of suspects.

They would also not record during public demonstrations, in order to prevent against surveillance of political activity. But in theory, not recording during demonstrations could leave numerous contentious incidents unrecorded. (Under an earlier policy in Seattle, for instance, officers could turn on their cameras at demonstrations if they suspected that a crime was in progress.)

Civil rights groups focus on certain other parameters for body cameras, like those enumerated by Craig Levine, an attorney with the Bronx Defenders in New York City: Officers must write an official account of a stop or arrest before reviewing the video, lest they tailor their reports to the footage. Footage must also be provided to the prosecution and defense at the same time, to ensure fairness. And meaningful penalties must be imposed whenever an officer fails to comply with the body camera policy. None of these elements, Levine noted in a letter to the New York Times, are currently included in the draft New York Police Department policy for its body camera program.

In its decision to award grant money to help local departments buy cameras, the Justice Department ensures that police applicants have or are developing a policy regarding their use, which "should at a minimum increase transparency and accessibility, provide appropriate access to information, allow for public posting of policy and procedures, and encourage community interaction and relationship building." But the Justice Department does not offer specific guidance on how policies should be designed, only specifying that departments must have "a strong plan for BWC implementation and a robust training policy."

Who Gets To See The Footage?

Even when cameras work and footage exists, a growing number of local laws are putting restrictions on the release of footage. Police departments and state legislators are "making it more difficult for the public to get access to footage of critical use of force incidents or potential complainants to get access to that footage," says Yu, of Upturn. The effect, he and others argue, threatens to negate the transparency promised by the cameras.

Of the 20 largest police departments in the U.S., just two—Las Vegas and Chicago—have designated body camera video as public by default. Chicago police are required to release footage within 60 days, while Las Vegas typically releases video within 72 hours. And only Las Vegas and Washington have clear procedures in place for individuals who are alleging misconduct to review police footage. Meanwhile, two departments, Los Angeles and San Antonio, don't release such footage as a matter of practice.

So far, according to a survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures, five states make body camera video part of the public record. The states—Connecticut, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas—also provide caveats that allow police to withhold or obscure videos, measures that police and civil rights groups say are essential to ensure privacy. Meanwhile, eight states exclude video from public record requests outright, though some include exceptions for police shootings. Six states have not addressed the issue of public records, and 31 states have yet to finalize laws surrounding body camera footage.

New York Police Department's current draft policy for body cameras outlines numerous circumstances under which the police could refuse to release footage to the public: if it "interferes with active law enforcement investigations" or "would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy." In the case of controversial incidents, the policy states that the police will most likely consult with prosecutors "about releasing the video to the public in order to balance the public's right to information with the integrity of any criminal investigation or criminal prosecution." The department's policy is being crafted with feedback from civil rights lawyers and the public via an online survey, and will be reviewed by a federal court.

In Minnesota, the state will make footage of use-of-force public only if the force "results in substantial bodily harm." Video may be released in certain cases in which an officer discharges a gun or if the subject of a video requests that it be public. And footage can be redacted or withheld if it is "clearly offensive to common sensibilities." The rules don't apply to dash camera footage, which remains open to the public. And the law gives local departments discretion about whether to allow officers involved in a shooting to give a statement before or after reviewing the footage.

Under Louisiana's new records law, footage from body-worn video is exempt from disclosure if the agency in charge of the record determines that releasing it would "violate an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy," or if it is part of an ongoing investigation. Chad Marlow, the national ACLU's advocacy and policy counsel, expressed concern about letting the police decide whether a video would violate a civilian's privacy. "That's a little bit like the fox guarding the henhouse," he told the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "It's an ambiguous standard being determined by a non-neutral arbiter."

In North Carolina, where the police department gradually released all of its footage of the shooting of Keith Scott, a new law that went into effect Oct. 1 automatically removes such videos from public records. Instead, only people whose voice or image appears in the footage can request to see the video, and prohibits them from copying or sharing the video. It also lets departments deny requests for a variety of reasons, including concerns about the release of sensitive information and the need to protect "active or inactive" investigations or potential future investigations, a reason that is regularly cited around restricting police footage. If denied, a requester can appeal to a court to demand its release.

"Privacy needs to be protected," says Yu, "but if it requires a huge amount of time and resources or you need a lawyer to get footage in an incident, I think that's problematic and it raises questions about the extent to which cameras can reach its promise of transparency and accountability.

Yu says cameras can sow distrust if they aren't used for transparency. In Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina, police initially resisted releasing videos of fatal shootings because they were concerned doing so would harm an ongoing investigation and incite public anger. The delays led to widespread suspicions, a public outcry for the video, and violent protests in both cities.

One method for minimizing the privacy risks and costs of releasing video while enhanceing transparency is overredaction: A police department publishes all of its videos online, but uses software to automatically blur them to protect people's privacy. A civilian can then request a section of specific unredacted video. Despite some opposition, the idea became the centerpiece of Seattle's body camera pilot program last year, after an activist bombarded the police department with bulk requests for video; blurred videos from the small camera trial were uploaded to the department's YouTube channel, in an experiment that drew the attention of police across the country. The department is determining how it will release body camera footage in the future, but a spokesperson said that it hopes to release video of police-involved shootings within only 24 to 72 hours after such an incident, as it does with dash camera footage.

Third-Party Video Control

While departments insist they should have control over the video they capture, some civil rights advocates say that footage belongs to the public, and should at least be controlled and distributed by a third party, like the police oversight boards implemented in a handful of cities. Such a system, says Loyda Colon, spokesperson for Communities United for Police Reform, would help to ensure "that there is no tampering and access is available to the public without arbitrary restriction.‎"

But most police say they are opposed to that idea, arguing that body camera video should be controlled like any other police evidence. "Agencies may say they don't want to release it to the public because it's counterproductive or incendiary," says Taser's Smith. He noted some departments have considered the idea of letting controversial police video be handled by "a committee that represents the people" so that video can be reviewed and released to the public in a timely fashion, without the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Smith says that Taser "provides some guidance" to police customers as they craft body camera policies, and recommends that departments store video on "third party" cloud services. Taser sells storage on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services servers, which are certified to meet FBI security requirements that govern criminal justice data.

"If people don't trust the police—if they think, 'well, the police IT department may have gone in and modified the video'—that's why having that in a third system is a good fit for a law enforcement agency," he says. Taser, Smith added, "never touches" a department's data.

Given all of the hurdles that body cameras promise, some critics worry that cameras could be a high-tech distraction from more pressing policing needs. In a memo to local police, the Justice Dept. warns that the deployment of the technology "by itself cannot alter law enforcement–community relations, especially if those relationships have been characterized by long-standing tension and anger. Camera deployment cannot replace community policing." Some critics have said that body-worn cameras aren't only a time-sink for reformers and a waste of money for communities, but could potentially cause harm, especially in communities where police-community relations are already strained.

"Inserting body-worn cameras in an already corrupt system of policing is harmful. Body-worn cameras mean reinforcing the surveillance apparatus of the state," New York City organizer and educator Mariame Kaba said in an interview with MTV News. "The resources that are invested—in buying more cameras, paying for systems to retain [footage], etc. ... takes away from other social goods." Instead, more citizen footage—and better access to an increasing wealth of surveillance video—could be more valuable for stemming police abuse.

While signing the new body camera bill in North Carolina, Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican, praised the new gear, but also acknowledged its limitations. "When used by itself, technology can mislead and misinform, which causes other issues and problems in our community," he said, "so what we need to do is walk that fine line."

related video: are police body cameras worth the cost?

It's during your winning streaks that making a habit of gratitude counts the most. Eventually, just about every winning streak ends.

When my startup began to hit big numbers, my team and I naturally got really excited. There were a lot of high-fives and it brought us closer together. I wanted my team members to celebrate and see what their efforts had accomplished, but I also had to find a way to keep our egos in check.

I knew we had hurdles ahead of us to clear in the near future. We'd come a long way quickly but still needed to pace ourselves. Balancing our collective confidence with a little humility was no easy task. Actually, I thought, maybe it wasn't even humility we needed as much as a sense of gratefulness for having reached our goals. After all, we'd worked to get to this point, and that's why we'd met the benchmarks we had.

Why Humility Mattered So Much During Hypergrowth

In my own life, I've learned how humility can create a more positive and collaborative environment. And I've come to understand how important—and how difficult—that is to do during periods of rapid success. I've seen my own ego grow with the sale of a startup for a chunk of change, only to watch that big win shrink to nothing soon afterward and eventually lose everything—partly because I'd thought I was so awesome.

Experiences like this taught me that a big piece of the problem was tunnel vision; I was so busy riding high on the win that other important issues slipped from view. I wasn't able to really look ahead with the mind-set that there's more to accomplish and more work to do, and that those efforts couldn't flag or grind to a halt—ever.

So when it came to managing my startup team during a high-growth period, avoiding that rapid deflation after a series of big wins was a top priority. I wanted them to understand that it was important to ground that positive emotion in reality and continue to look ahead at what we still faced. Here are four ways I've been able to encourage more humility and gratefulness in my business.

1. Tell Others That They're Right (When They Are)

Acknowledging that others are correct sends the message that the boss doesn't always have to be the one who's right. It's humbling to say you aren't right all the time and don't have all the answers. That isn't something that diminishes employees' respect, either—it's important for leaders to walk the walk when it comes to humility.

That's especially true during times of success, but it's really a habit that's worth honing all the time. Every team needs to feel that their leaders value their opinions and count on hearing them. That empowers people and builds up their confidence, and it shows that you expect them to help one another and collaborate.

2. Let Others Pick The Rewards

By putting the reward system in your teams' hands, I've found the group dynamic undergoes a subtle shift. When I tried this, it made everyone think a little harder about what their colleagues did for the good of the group. One surprising result? A team member reminded the group that another team member had taken a big hit for the team but hadn't yet been recognized. That show of gratitude created a domino effect; suddenly everybody wanted to point out someone else on the team who'd played a big role in accomplishing our goals.

Talk about bringing a team close! It showed us all that every win we'd achieved together was a team effort, so the rewards needed to come organically from one team member to the next, not handed down from on high.

3. Scrap Individual Quota Systems For Group Performance Metrics

A little healthy competition is good in certain situations, but individual quotas for reaching certain quantitative goals can have their drawbacks. Particularly when startups gain some momentum, that approach often encourages everyone's egos to come out. And in my experience, some egos came out swinging—leading people to claim personal credit that really didn't belong to just one person.

When I switched to a team approach to achieving specific metrics, I saw a change in attitude. My team started to understand that they had to pull together or it just wouldn't work out so well. The competitive spirit didn't go away exactly—and during high-growth stretches, you don't necessarily want it to—but it became more lighthearted, allowing collaboration and communication to take center stage. It was an all-for-one approach that ended up pushing us to new wins and bigger celebrations, except this time they realized it took all of them to get the work done.

4. Reward Simple Courteousness

Today, while I do hand out performance rewards, I now make a bigger deal out of courteous behavior, because even though it's simple, those smaller acts are basically humility in a nutshell. This helps weave humility into our company culture in good times and bad.

If I see someone actively listening rather than checking their phone during a conversation, or if I spot somebody thanking a colleague for their help, I make a point of publicly recognizing that. I've found that's been changing the overall team attitude, reminding us all to be open-minded and respectful of others who contribute just as much—and sometimes more—than we do.

Your startup can't stay in hypergrowth forever, and the good habits you cultivate during your biggest winning streaks will come in handy more than ever once they end. Practicing gratitude and humility make us all stop and reflect on how we're behaving. It takes some work, but once that's common procedure, your whole team will start to become a little more thoughtful and more prone to celebrating collaborative wins. Now, we toast each other while staying conscious that we'll always have more to conquer together, just around the next curve in the road.

Thundercat produced Kendrick Lamar's critically acclaimed To Pimp a Butterfly. Here's how he makes creativity a team sport.

Creative collaboration isn't as simple as putting a few smart people in the same room.

That's likely why some of the world's biggest tech companies, whose offices are packed with some of the brightest minds, invest significant time and money into building policies, physical spaces, and a workplace culture to foster creative collaboration and innovation.

The Google Garage, for example, was specifically designed to ignite creative collaboration between employees.

Companies like Google understand that everything from managerial relationships to physical office layouts will ultimately dictate whether or not creativity is able to flourish. Whether in technology, business, or music, there are certain elements leaders must consider in order to get the most out of their teams.

That's also the philosophy behind the Red Bull Music Academy in Montreal, where a group of established musicians is mentoring the next generation of musical talent. Fast Company recently caught up with one of its studio tutors, Grammy award-winning producer and musician Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner, to discuss his work mentoring young creative talent. As the creative force behind Kendrick Lamar's 2015 chart-topping album To Pimp a Butterfly, Bruner shares five lessons that experience taught him about collaboration.

1. Make Sure Everyone's Roles Are Clear

Whether in a music studio or an office boardroom, Bruner believes that it's important for everyone around the table to arrive with a "knowledgable perspective and understanding" of what they want to achieve, and where each member of the team fits into the equation.

"If you are trying to extract creativity from coworkers in different departments, they need to take the time learn about each other's roles in the company before starting to collaborate," he says.

Bruner adds that the same is true when putting together a Grammy award-winning album with one of the country's hottest artists.

"Before working with Kendrick, I made sure I knew as much as I could about his career, his musical strengths, areas that he could explore further and areas I could support," Bruner observes, "all while trying to understand ultimately what kind of album Kendrick would want to end up with."

2. Find A Comfortable Environment

Though it may not seem significant on the surface, the physical design and layout of a space can have a big impact on fostering creativity. For example, when working on To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar abandoned his home studio in Los Angeles where he'd been recording for four years, in favor of a new space in New York City "in order to add a different vibe to the creative process," says Bruner.

Bruner believes that physical spaces ultimately dictate creative head spaces, so all aspects of the environment need to be considered. "The fabric of the couch, plants, and natural light all can make a difference," he says.

Like Lamar's decision to move his recording sessions across the country, Bruner says managers should consider taking the team to a comfortable and creative space offsite. "Boardrooms don't breed creativity," he adds.

3. Be Hands On, But Not Too Hands On

Though managers need to maintain some level of control, Bruner believes they also need to operate at a comfortable distance in order to allow creativity to flourish.

"As a leader, being hands on in the creative process is a careful balance between being involved enough to make sure everyone has a voice, and being removed enough to make them feel they are in control," he says. "Creativity is very personal. There maybe somebody who is not as comfortable expressing themselves, so you have to let them know there is no judgment in that space."

4. Find A Pace That Works For Everyone

Because of that highly individualistic approach to creativity, Bruner knows that collaborators often work at different speeds, but he suggests that they eventually have to find a pace that works for everyone. He explains that when he began working with Lamar, the rapper worked at an incredibly fast rate, and Bruner had to learn where to jump in and contribute.

"Once I got up to speed it was like 'drafting' in a bike race," he says. "Kendrick was creatively moving so fast that I was able to draft behind him and advance my own creativity."

5. Just Be Patient

Working well with others often requires a period of adjustment, which Bruner believes is an uncomfortable but vital part of the process.

"The first part of a collaboration can be messy, as you don't always click right away with the person you are working with," he says. "In order to get in step together creatively, you have to be prepared that you could be [in] sync before you achieve."

Though the process can be difficult at first, those initial frustrations eventually give way to a more collaborative environment. "Sometimes creative processes won't initially match and big ideas won't come easy," Bruner continues, "but if you provide your team with the tools they need to successfully collaborate, it will happen."

Audrey Gelman needed a place to work when she was on the go and loved the idea of a supportive women's-only zone. So she launched The Wing.

Audrey Gelman had an epiphany when she threw herself a girls-only birthday party at a New York City dive bar in 2015: Ladies' nights are underrated.

"It was one of the best nights of my life," the 29-year-old entrepreneur says. "I don't know if it's better, but it's definitely different. It's incredibly relaxing and nurturing."

With her birthday festivities in mind, the native New Yorker decided to launch The Wing, a women's space that is part social club, part coworking studio, and part beauty salon (they offer blowouts). The pink-accented offices are tucked into a loft space in the Flatiron district of New York. It opened its doors earlier this month to an exclusive list of 300 members who pay either a yearly fee of $1,950, or $185 a month. Investors include SoulCycle founders Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler, AOL cofounder Steve Case, and Harvey Spevak, CEO of Equinox.

The company has an ambitious agenda: To make women's clubs cool again. Back in the 1930s, there were over 600 such groups in New York City and 5,000 nationwide. Gelman wants to bring back that female camaraderie, but with an edge.

"We're a coven, not a sorority," reads The Wing's Instagram.

Gelman is an ambitious, well-connected woman. She was previously a political consultant who served as deputy director of communications to New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer. Her Detroit wedding was profiled in Vogue, where she made a bridal jumpsuit look both rebellious and elegant. Her bridesmaids' ensembles were custom-designed by J. Crew Creative Director Jenna Lyons. The New York Times once dubbed her "girl most likely." And as a close friend of Lena Dunham, she is said to be the inspiration for Allison Williams' character, Marnie, on Dunham's HBO show Girls. In season two, Gelman played the new girlfriend of Marnie's ex.

Given her gal-about-town status, it's not surprising that her latest venture would pique the interest of successful New York women from a variety of backgrounds, which is exactly what Gelman hoped would happen.

The "New York Woman"

Gelman's background in PR was helpful for launching a new business, but she needed a coconspirator—someone with the same level of entrepreneurial enthusiasm, only with experience in operations. She found a partner in Lauren Kassan, who was head of business development at such cult-status establishments as boutique fitness studio SLT and fitness startup Class Pass. Together, the duo decided to pursue the concept: a place for women of all types to gather and support one another.

It was born out of idealism as well as their own needs as urban women constantly on the go.

Gelman's busy schedule as a communications strategist often meant she'd spend her days zigzagging across New York City for personal and work commitments, with no time to run home to catch her breath, answer emails, or, depending on which meetings she was taking, change outfits. "For a while, I belonged to a gym just so I could use their locker room and shower—I never worked out there," she says. She relied on Starbucks bathrooms for wardrobe changes and pretended to be a guest in hotel lobbies to use Wi-Fi. "It was a nomadic experience."

Prior to their partnership, Gelman and Kassan independently tried out several coworking spaces and on-demand office apps such as Breather, but none felt like a place that also catered to their social interests.

"They were all cool, but they weren't what I was looking for," Gelman says. "I was always really hungry for a flexible space that I could use as a homebase in the city. We saw the potential for not only convenience and making women's daily lives easier, but also having it be a hub for community and connection between women."

Creating a space designed by women for busy professional New York City women was their main priority. Gelman does not want to suggest that men necessarily hold women back, but she does notice a certain ease and comfort when working in an all-female environment.

"The air feels different when it's only women," she says. "The atmosphere [at The Wing] is incredibly warm, there's an absence of competition or snark or cattiness. Everyone is just really excited to be here and to meet new people."

Laia Garcia, deputy editor of Lena Dunham's Lenny Letter, joined because she needs a spot to decompress and work in the city, especially during hectic times like Fashion Week. It just doesn't make sense for her to schlep back to Brooklyn, where Lenny Letter is based, in between events.

What Garcia didn't expect was how much she'd enjoy working at The Wing. While she had only been there a week when we spoke, she attested to the unique "energy" that permeated the main coworking area. "It feels like you're somewhere familiar," she says, comparing it to less inviting places such as coffee shops. "You can let your guard down a little bit."

Redefining A Work Space

The founders wanted to "flip the script" on what a coworking center or social club could look like. You won't spot any taxidermy, dark carpets, or tartan armchairs. "We wanted to create an environment that's really calming and airy," Kassan says.

The 3,500-square-foot space feels warm and bright, like an extension of one's ideal home, or as Kassan says, "a Pinterest board come to life." There's a coworking lounge, café, salon, and locker room decorated with modernist Scandinavian design in soft palettes. The minimalist furniture comes in Starburst colors: pale pink, tangerine orange, and bright yellow.

It looks refreshingly sweet, but with subtle kicks throughout: A custom illustrated toile wallpaper depicting busy New York women is on display in the locker room and lactation area, while a copy of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History sits on the library shelf. The soft decor is peppered with edgy details, as if Sandy and Rizzo were forced to share a dorm room.

The application process, meanwhile, almost reads like a Proust questionnaire: Which TV show do you hate that everyone else loves? What song do you currently have on loop? Who is a complicated woman you admire? Which fictional TV character is your spirit animal? (Gelman chose Elaine from Seinfeld.)

"The aim of it really was to get a sense of someone's personality," Gelman says. One of her favorite applications came from a physician who runs an HIV clinic and is "totally obsessed with Drake." She claims to have memorized every lyric.

"Those are the kind of women who are doing things that are incredibly courageous and inspiring, but are also people we'd want to be on a group text with," Gelman says.

Members range from women just entering the workplace, at the peak of their careers, or those looking to transition into a new line of work. Some are CEOs, some are moms, and their ages range from early twenties to late seventies. The more notable names include style maven Tavi Gevinson, Birchbox cofounder Hayley Barna, Buzzfeed chief counsel Nabiha Syed, stylist Stacy London, punk rocker Meredith Graves, and Governor Andrew Cuomo's chief of staff Melissa DeRosa.

"It's a really cool mix of a lot of different types of women . . . it doesn't feel stratified at all," Gelman says. "The professional eclecticism and diversity is really remarkable—it's everything from jewelry designers to robot engineers, math teachers, physicians, security analysts."

Gelman wants to maintain that diversity so that there's an ever-widening net of who one can meet at the communal tables. In keeping with that goal, The Wing organizes networking events that cater to a variety of interests and professions, and ideally, feel spontaneous and unlike stuffy conferences. Among the offerings: lectures on serious topics (women in journalism) to craft seminars (floral wall hangings workshop). The opening party in early October was a sleepover, complete with eye masks and monogrammed pajamas for attendees. A poker night was hosted by a professional player. There's a "braid night" with Glamsquad. Iranian-American novelist Porochista Khakpour hosts the book club, whose current pick is Alex Mar's Witches of America. There's even a speaker series planned for "the first 90 days of the Clinton Administration."

As for potential criticism that the business model might exclude creative professionals who cannot afford the monthly $185 membership fee, The Wing hosts several events each month that are open to nonmembers.

"We get asked a lot if we're a nonprofit," Gelman says, noting that The Wing's membership fees still fall under the $200 average for a coworking space. "We have to have the courage to create something that we think has value and to ask for market rate in exchange."

The Wing is now at capacity, with a waiting list growing longer each day. And they are already considering expanding to other U.S. cities in addition to opening a second location in New York.

"We've been getting so many emails and tweets and comments on Instagram from women in L.A., San Francisco, and D.C.," Gelman says. "They're waiting."

It's always made sense for IBM to have a presence in the San Francisco Bay Area—and now it's opening a major Watson center right downtown.

Next week, IBM is formally opening Watson West—a San Francisco outpost for its Watson "cognitive technology" platform, which the company is training to help everyone from doctors to merchants make smarter decisions. Occupying three floors of a gleaming office building in San Francisco's startup-heavy South of Market neighborhood, the office includes both space for employees involved in the Watson effort and a slick demo center where IBM can whip up enthusiasm among third-party developers, prospective customers, and other outsiders.

Watson West is, in part, a statement about IBM's desire to embed itself in the San Francisco Bay Area tech community. But it's also less of a striking departure than the latest chapter in a long story. IBM may be the archetypal big East Coast tech company, but it's understood the benefits of being at home in the Bay Area for decades, dating back to the era when it was a manufacturer of automation equipment, and the computer was still in the process of being invented.

IBM long ago shifted its emphasis from big iron to software and services. With Watson, it's a key player in the race to use machine-learning technology to train computers to understand big data in an array of fields—an industry trend that, in one way or another, has also swept up everybody from Google to Facebook to Microsoft to Apple. "IBM has a lead on this, having started a couple of decades ago," says Watson General Manager David Kenny, who is still a newcomer to IBM, having joined the company when it closed its acquisition of his former employer, the Weather Company, in January.

Computer scientists at the IBM Research-Almaden lab in San Jose were part of the AI research that made Watson possible in the first place and are helping to chart its future. Now, with Watson West, the company has a presence "at the top of the [San Francisco] peninsula as well as the bottom," Kenny says.

That's particularly important as Watson becomes the foundation for capabilities that can be commercially deployed in specific business sectors—a process that frequently involves startups who build on top of IBM's work. "Many of those companies are on the West Coast and funded by VCs on the West Coast," says Kenny.

Helping such companies work with IBM with as little friction as possible is key to Watson fulfilling its potential. "People can always travel, and people will travel for the most important relationships," says Slack cofounder Stewart Butterfield, whose startup announced this week that it was partnering with IBM to let third-party developers build Slack chatbots powered by Watson intelligence. What you lose with distance is the ability to participate in forms of collaboration and community such as hackathons without giving it a second thought. "You can fly out over and over again for that kind of stuff, or you can be in the Bay Area and catch the action," Butterfield says.

(In the case of the IBM-Slack collaboration, Slack happens to have search and intelligence staffers based in New York, which let them commute by foot to Watson headquarters in the city's Astor Place neighborhood, eight blocks away. But some meetings—including ones involving Butterfield—took place in San Francisco.)

In The Beginning

When IBM first put down roots in Silicon Valley in 1943, the area was known for its bounteous orchards, not technology. The company bought a 34,000-square-foot factory in San Jose and began manufacturing punch cards for its tabulating machines. (The computer industry didn't exist yet, though IBM was at work on research that helped create it.)

"Our decision to establish a plant on the Pacific coast is based not only on the large amount of business that we now have in the territory, but on our belief that after the war, the Pacific coast will be a far greater industrial district than ever before," explained legendary CEO Thomas J. Watson Sr. It would take decades before it was clear just how prescient he was.

In 1952, the company added to its San Jose presence with a lab based in the city's downtown area. Four years later, one of the industry's landmark achievements happened there when a small team of researchers invented the hard drive, which the company used as part of an accounting computer called the 305 RAMAC.

At about the same time, as part of a push to raise its profile on the West Coast, the company broke ground on an ambitious, innovative 190-acre research/manufacturing operation located on land formerly devoted to walnut groves. In 2014, I wrote about this prototypical Silicon Valley corporate campus, including the strange story of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's visit in 1959. (He was more impressed by the cafeteria than the computers.)

In 1986, IBM Research's San Jose arm moved into its current home, IBM Research–Almaden. Judged purely on the surrounding natural splendor—rolling hills, parks, and preserves—it may have the most beautiful setting I've ever seen for a tech-company office. But the location, at the southern end of San Jose, is not exactly convenient to the rest of Silicon Valley. You need to do a fair amount of driving to get to Intel (20 miles to the north), Apple (21 miles), Google (26 miles), and Facebook (33 miles).

That locale—proximity to the Valley's ecosystem, but not too much proximity—is intentional, even though many of its biggest players didn't exist back in 1986 when the Almaden office opened. "When the labs were first started, the idea was to place them near strong academic centers and strong centers of business and commerce, but not right in the middle of them, necessarily," says Jeff Welser, the IBM VP who heads the Almaden operation. The original research center in Yorktown Heights, for instance, is about 40 minutes north of New York City.

"We wanted to be close enough in that we can interact and take advantage of everything there, but separated enough that we can actually also do our work in our own area," says Welser. "Think deep thoughts, as our founder would say. In fact, actually at lunchtime, you'll see people literally walking a loop around this lab because you get a beautiful view of the valley."

The Almaden building does feel like a refuge where gifted scientists can squirrel up in their offices and put their brainpower to work without distraction, though it's hardly antisocial. (An open area called THINKlab is specifically designed to facilitate collaboration between IBM clients and researchers with various areas of expertise.) IBM Research's rich legacy testifies to the approach's success.

"Historically speaking, large corporate research organizations have had varying kinds of success," says Guru Banavar, VP of cognitive computing. "I would say IBM corporate research has been the most successful in terms of scale and impact."

As the official IBM Research-Almaden timeline indicates, the facility's three decades of history are a chronology of what was important to the company at any given point in time. Data—how to store it, retrieve it, and make it useful—has been an ongoing theme. In 1970, the relational database was invented there. In 1988, its researchers created a standard for speedier data recording on a disk. In 1998, as mobile devices gained in importance, the lab developed the Microdrive, a tiny hard disk. And in 2002, it proposed a database designed with protecting the privacy of personal data in mind.

Today, "If I had to sum up in a nutshell what this lab does," says Welser, "it's all about using data to expand what the human mind can do. That really is in essence what cognitive computing is about."

Despite IBM Research-Almaden's scholarly air, people are drawn here in part by the opportunity to create things that will be turned into businesses. "If you are someone who really wants to do academic research, you want to be a professor, you want to teach the next generation of students, a university is the right place to go." Welser says. "But if you want to be able to do deep research and have that get translated rapidly into something in a very broad portfolio of potential application areas, that's the kind of person that really likes IBM Research."

Some of the most wildly ambitious of those efforts—ones of the sort that Google would call moonshots—are instigated by IBM's Grand Challenges program. Watson itself originated as a Grand Challenge, back when the notion of training a computer to play Jeopardy better than a human champion sounded—at least to those of us who aren't among the world's savviest computer scientists—to be downright fanciful. That challenge was met. And now IBM researchers are leveraging Watson to tackle feats that could be far more meaningful than providing questions for Alex Trebek's answers.

Welser defines a Grand Challenge as "something that, at this point, we don't know if we can do or not, but if we could do it, it would make a huge difference to us, to our clients, to the world." One such project, dubbed "the Medical Sieve," aims to use cognitive-computing technology to analyze radiology images for signs of abnormalities such as aortic aneurysms.

The Medical Sieve exemplifies IBM's philosophy that Watson is best used to help human beings make more effective decisions more quickly, rather than to eliminate humans from the decision-making process altogether. "A radiologist in a typical emergency room situation may look at as many as 100,000 images a day," says Tanveer Syed-Mahmood, the IBM fellow who heads up the effort. "With that volume of imaging, they do have an overload in terms of high fatigue." The Medical Sieve's goal is to create an automated assistant that's as skilled at analyzing images as an entry-level radiologist, thereby freeing up time for medical professionals such as cardiologists to focus on work that requires their advanced expertise.

Of course, a task that would be entry-level work for a person is a remarkable accomplishment for a computer. "It has to apply clinical knowledge," says Syed-Mahmood. "It has to understand the appearance of organs in images and recognize them from different viewpoints. It has to reason with the information, know what the guidelines are, in order to cull this data, simplify it, and present it to the clinician." A range of IBM experts in AI, image processing, and medical topics are collaborating on the effort, along with external partners such as doctors; in 2015, the company also acquired Chicago-based imaging company Merge Healthcare to aid in the effort.

Elsewhere in IBM Research-Almaden, other scientists are working on "brain-inspired computing," a project—funded in part by the U.S. Department of Defense's DARPA—to create processors that think like humans. In the future, data centers utilizing vast quantities of such processors could be optimized for AI applications such as Watson's cognitive computing in ways that current computers are not.

Dharmendra Modha, the IBM fellow spearheading this research, is an IBM veteran who left for a spell to form his own startup, but he was lured back by IBM Research-Almaden's ambition, approach, and resources. "I live just down the hill here," he says. "Every day, I come up and it's just such a fresh experience that I'm grateful."

Watson In San Francisco

The fact that IBM Research-Almaden is situated on the southern periphery of Silicon Valley means that it's really quite far from San Francisco, which is well over an hour's drive away. But San Francisco, more than Silicon Valley, is the current epicenter of startup culture, which made it the logical place to build Watson West. (IBM already has another San Francisco office located right around the corner from Watson West: IBM Bluemix Garage, which helps developers and customers work with its cloud platform.)

If IBM Research labs are traditionally built a little out of the way to encourage contemplation, Watson West more or less flips that approach on its head: It's an interface with the outside world that's right in the middle of everything, with sweeping windows that never let you forget you're deep in the heart of San Francisco. The headquarters of kids' clothing retailer Gymboree are across the street—so close that its employees play tic-tac-toe with IBMers using a game board affixed to a window.

Much of the space at Watson West is devoted to rows of cubicles for developers, designers, and researchers, looking pretty much like the environs of any tech company. But there's also the Watson Experience Center, an area that IBM will use to show outsiders what cognitive computing is capable of doing for their businesses.

Like its predecessor at Watson's New York headquarters, San Francisco's Watson Experience Center has a high razzle-dazzle component; I find it reminiscent of a futuristic pavilion at Disney World's Epcot. A giant projection wall controlled by a touch screen lets visitors explore demos such as one involving a browsable guide to TED Talks that Watson created by crunching hours of raw footage and identifying topics and people. Nearby is a 360-degree multimedia theater where IBM can show off lavish, interactive mini-movies about specific Watson scenarios, including applications in medicine and commerce. I can't imagine anyone spending time there and leaving without feeling inspired by Watson's potential.

Bay Area startups and other locals who want to learn about cognitive computing are the most obvious constituency for Watson West, but IBM expects to draw guests from near and far. "A lot of people from around the world who do tours of Silicon Valley ask for a place to go as they figure out how to put all this together," says Kenny.

But that brings up an important point: Just as IBM has been in the Bay Area for more than 70 years to accomplish tasks it can't handle solely from the East Coast, it has aspirations that it knows can't be fulfilled entirely by people based on the West Coast of the United States, no matter how skilled they are. That explains why IBM's approach to innovation is so decentralized, with 12 labs on six continents.

"If you think about the kinds of challenges that developing countries in Africa or developing countries like Brazil might face, having researchers there immersed in it helps us come up with what they might need there," says Welser. "Rather than me guessing, from this beautiful place I live in California, what they might need in Africa. That's really the idea of having a whole global spread."

In other words, the company that's still formally known as "International Business Machines" remains deeply serious about the "International" part of its name—and Silicon Valley, important though it is, is only one pushpin on its map.

Delta's RFID tags are just the start of a push toward better bag-tracking tech.

Anyone who flies on a regular basis is likely to have a luggage horror story, whether it's a crucial missed connection, a mistaken suitcase, or a bag left on the tarmac as the plane leaves the gate.

If this has happened to you, it might surprise you to learn that the airline industry feels your pain. Reuniting a traveler with a mishandled bag costs about $70 on average, according to Delta, and the industry as a whole lost $2.3 billion to mishandled bags in 2015.

But now carriers are making a major push to keep better tabs on their customers' baggage. Delta recently spent $50 million on an RFID-based tracking system, which is more reliable than traditional barcodes. And the rest of the industry won't be far behind: The International Air Transport Association has mandated that all airlines adopt end-to-end baggage tracking by 2018.

Goodbye Bar Codes

Today, most airlines track luggage by printing a bar code, sticking it to the bag, and using laser scanners to send it to its destination. These systems are largely automated, which means they're prone to the occasional failure, says Bill Lentsch, Delta's senior vice president of airport customer service and airline operations. From the quality and position of the lasers to the quality of the bag-tag printout, a lot can go wrong as the bag winds through miles of conveyor belts.

"We only get about a 90% read rate on a good day with our current technology of reading the bar codes," Lentsch tells Fast Company. Bags that fail to scan get pulled from the belt for manual handling, which is how your luggage ends up missing its flight or traveling to the wrong city.

Delta's new baggage systems rely on radio frequency identification, or RFID. At the ticket counter, Delta prints out a tag with an embedded microchip and antenna, which the airline's tracking system picks up through radio waves. Instead of requiring a line of sight, RFID can detect bags by proximity.

"RFID will give us a 99.9% read rate so that bags move very efficiently through the baggage handling system," Lentsch says.

RFID also helps out on the tarmac. On each belt loader, scanners detect whether employees are loading bags in the proper order so that the ones with connecting flights come off first. (Lentsch says Delta can retrain those employees if they're not doing the job right.) And when bags come off the plane, employees can scan them quickly to single out the ones that have tight connections.

"Under a normal process, you'd have to wait for the majority of those bags to come out before we can cut the driver loose and send him over to your departing plane," Lentsch says.

The technology has a passenger-facing benefit as well: An update this week to Delta's mobile app lets passengers locate their RFID-equipped bags on a map without having to look up their baggage claim number. Soon users will also get push notifications telling them when their bags have arrived at each leg of the flight. And in those cases where mishandling still occurs, Delta is working on a way to file a claim from the sky.

Delta is now printing RFID tags at all of its airports, and in total it plans to install RFID scanners in 84 airports, which collectively handle 85% to 90% of the airline's baggage. The other airports, Lentsch says, handle so few bags that manual code scanning is accurate enough. He estimates that the $50 million investment will have paid for itself within about two years.

Return Of RFID

Delta has an early jump in embracing RFID, but it's not alone. The IATA has been following Delta's progress, and in a study with SITA—an airline IT group—it estimated that industrywide adoption could reduce mishandling rates by 25% over the next six years, saving more than $3 billion.

"RFID is the easiest way to track bags," says Andrew Price, IATA's head of airport operations. "It's the most cost-effective way for a large number of airlines, not just Delta."

RFID is not a new technology, and IATA has investigated its potential a couple of times over the past two decades. But those earlier tests only focused on sorting bags into their appropriate destinations, not complete tracking of the bags' whereabouts.

"We were solving about 20% of the baggage mishandling problem," Price says. "Our board of governors said, 'Look, go and solve the other 80% that can be solved without investing in this big technology, and then come back.'"

Since 2007, IATA has pushed to reduce mishandling through other means, such as visiting airports to identify systemic problems. Those programs cut down on mishandling by more than 50%, Price says. Today, 99.4% of bags never have a problem.

Now, the trade group is going a step further with a mandate for end-to-end tracking—that is, following a bag from the ticket counter to the airplane, through connecting flights, and back to baggage claim. While airlines can use whatever technology they want under the mandate, IATA is clearly throwing weight behind RFID with its latest business study.

"The reason we've put this out now is because it's been 10 years since we did the last one, and there's renewed interest in RFID due to the Delta implementation," Price says.

It probably helps that the cost of RFID tagging has dropped considerably in recent years. Delta's Bill Lentsch says each RFID bag tag costs about 10¢, which is about twice the cost of a standard bar code printout, but about half the price of RFID five to 10 years ago.

What's the next step for getting more airlines on board? Price says IATA will release an implementation guide as soon as November, and next year it'll start offering guidelines for different types of airports.

That said, there's no penalty if airlines decide to ignore the rules. "We're going to draw it to their attention, and other airlines will draw it to their attention as well, but we're an industry body," Price says. "We're not a regulator."

Beyond The Printed Bag Tag

Over the long term, printing out tags with RFID chips on them may not be the only way to improve baggage tracking.

One other possibility involves a permanent bag tag, which would connect to a smartphone via Bluetooth so passengers could transmit their flight information. Customers could then drop off bags without having to get a tag at the check-in counter.

But so far, there's no industry standard on how these tags should work, or what technology they should use. Qantas, for instance, currently offers bag tags that rely entirely on RFID, while British Airways and Alaska Airlines have experimented with e-paper screens that can refresh with new bar codes.

IATA's Price says the group is working on a standard for ways that data could be shared with the airlines, but he notes that it's early days for those efforts.

"We've talked about it in the industry a little bit, but it's way off," he says. "The idea is that we will make a platform that allows that information to be gathered."

Whatever standard emerges, Lentsch expects Delta's system to be compliant—in part because Delta is helping to develop it. The work that Delta has done on RFID tracking so far, he says, should support whatever standard emerges later.

"We're just starting to lay some of the foundation, but another possible expansion here is into the world of permanent bag tags, where you can purchase a permanent bag tag, put it on your bag, and whenever you fly on Delta we'll be able to read that tag," he says.

In other words, RFID will likely play an even bigger role in bag tracking, assuming more airlines get on board. And if they don't, that's probably good news for Delta.

"While we're already an industry leader in mishandled bag ratio," he says, "this is going to put a wider gap between us and our competitors."

Take a beat, watch your tone, and other techniques to deal with a challenging line of questioning.

If you watched the presidential debates, you may have come to the conclusion that answering questions is optional. If you don't want to provide an answer, simply insert your own topic and carry on.

When you're at work and your client or boss asks a question, however, it's not always smart to change the subject and promote your own agenda. Questions need to be addressed.

The right strategy to do that without sounding like a politician, says Stan Steinreich, president and CEO of Steinreich Communications, a New York City-based public relations firm that specializes in crisis management, "is not to dodge, but rather to satisfy the questioner."

From politely declining, to giving information you are willing to share, here are nine ways to address a question you don't want to answer.

1. Make Sure You Understand The Question

People are not always exact or clear about their language, and it's easy to assume what you think they're asking, says Jay Sullivan, author of Simply Said: Communicating Better At Work And Beyond.

"The first thing to do is clarify the question," he says. "You don't want to dance around an answer and then have the person say, 'No, that's not what I'm asking. I'm asking something different or simpler.' Make sure you're getting the question right," Sullivan advises.

Steinreich says this strategy mimics what most of us learned in grade school about inserting portions of the question in our answers, but adds a caution. "This strategy is treacherous when you are asked a negative question," he says, "One of the most important things to remember is to never repeat the negative language of a question."

2. Take Time To Respond

If you're asked a difficult question, give yourself a few minutes to determine how you want to respond, says Sullivan. "Take thinking time," he says. "You'll notice that when the presidential candidates don't answer the question they'll repeat or rephrase the question as a lead in. If they do it well, the stall gives an opportunity to think of ways to reposition the information."

3. Answer Part Of The Question

If you don't want to answer the entire question, find a part that you can address, says Sullivan.

"You can say, 'I appreciate that this is of interest, right now. Let's focus on this part,'" he says. "Briefly answering part of the question may be enough to assuage and satisfy them."

4. Postpone Your Answer

Another technique is to claim you do not have sufficient information to responsibly or intelligently provide an answer. Buy yourself some time by saying, "That is an important question and I want to make sure I give you the best and most complete answer I can. I will need to get back to you in (time frame)," says Nick Kalm, founder and president of Reputation Partners, a Chicago-based strategic communications firm.

"By the time you circle back to the questioner, you can pick and choose the aspects of their question that you want to address," he says.

5. Turn Around the Pronouns

There are three ways to communicate, explains Sullivan: talk about yourself, talk about your content, or talk about the audience. "Almost everybody talks about themselves or the content, but that's not how you connect with people," he says.

The difference between giving a good answer and a better answer could simply be your use of pronouns, says Sullivan. "Focus on other people," he says. "You can say, 'It's interesting that you think that,' for example. 'Why is this question of interest to you?' Changing 'I' to 'you' can take the focus off of you."

6. Divert The Question

You can also resolve the situation by diverting to a different topic, says Eldonna Lewis-Fernandez, author of Think Like a Negotiator: 50 Ways to Create Win-Win Results by Understanding the Pitfalls to Avoid. "Say, 'What I think you really want to know is…and this is how we are handling that,'" she says.

Kalm says this technique is called "bridging." "While this is most useful in media interviews, it can be used in almost any setting," he says. "Bridging involves acknowledging, not ignoring, the question with a phrase such as 'That's an interesting question, but I'd like to point out…' or 'That's not quite right. The fact is …' and then moving on to one of your key messages."

7. Give The Asker Some Control

Tough questions tend to be emotional because the person is frustrated or anxious, often when something takes too long or costs too much.

"Give the other person control over the conversation," Sullivan advises. "You can say, 'I understand you're frustrated. Would it be helpful if I shared some information about that?'" he suggests. "This gives the person control over the conversation, and he or she will automatically calm down."

8. Watch Your Tone

You can also refuse to answer the question, but be sure to be polite. "Say, 'I appreciate that this is of interest but we don't feel sharing the information is appropriate, especially at this time. But I'd be glad to answer other questions if you have them,'" says Sullivan. "Appreciate the interest but draw lines."

It can be tempting to answer difficult questions with only a "yes" or a "no," but it's important to supplement them with a key message instead, says Kalm.

9. And Watch Your Body Language

The way you hold your body is as important as your tone, says Sullivan. Maintain eye contact, and hold yourself in a neutral position. "The second you do anything makes you seem defensive, such as crossing your arms or avoiding eye contact, it puts the other person on edge," he says. "They think, 'Now I've got them.'" As Sullivan points out, "Neutral body language sends the message, 'I want to answer this question,' and that alone can help the situation."

Ram Devineni and illustrator Dan Goldman tell the story of Priya, an Indian superhero who empowers women.

Pokémon Go has made 2016 an exciting year for augmented reality (AR). The explosive popularity of the app proved the powerful attractiveness of the medium in the gaming sphere. But the creators of Priya, a comic book series about a young Indian woman named Priya who is raped, are proving that AR is ready to take on powerful social issues as well.

Cocreator Ram Devineni, a documentary filmmaker, and Dan Goldman, an illustrator, met at a tech meetup in New York and immediately bonded over a mutual interest in augmented reality. Together they created Priya's Shakti, the first in the series, which sees Priya recover from her rape and champion women's rights as a superhero in India with a little help from the powerful Hindu goddess Parvati.

Released in 2012, the timely comic also uses augmented reality filters to engage with readers and reach a broader audience. Now the creators of Priya are back with a sequel, Priya's Mirror, which addresses the problem of acid attacks in India using storytelling and an AR partnership with the Last Mask Campaign. Users can try on virtual Snapchat filterlike masks that help them empathize with victims of acid attacks, and share them on social media to promote awareness of the issue.

Fresh off an exhibition at the New York Film Festival, Fast Company talked with Devineni and Goldman about Priya, gender violence, and how comic books are an ideal format for teaching children about difficult topics.

I'd love to hear a little bit from both of you about your backgrounds. How did you guys get started with this project?

Ram Devineni: As you probably remember, there was a horrible gang rape on a bus in New Delhi a few years ago, which made international news and caused major protests. And I was involved in those protests and realized that the problem of rape and gender violence was not a legal issue but a cultural problem. So that's where this idea of creating a comic book superhero named Priya as a way to really educate and talk about gender violence, especially with teenagers, and teenage boys in particular.

Dan Goldman: I've been writing and drawing comics, first self-publishing and then creating artwork digitally, for about 15 years. The last couple of those have been on this project. Ram and I met at a tech meetup in New York and literally just bumped into each other and started talking. The more he explained how Priya's Shakti, the first book, would work and what the shape of it would be, I was just fascinated. I've always loved Indian culture and the iconography of Hinduism, the whole vibe of everything. Combining that flavor with activism, it was a sweet spot I didn't know I had.

Devineni: The place we met was called Story Code NYC. It's a meetup organized by people who want to do interactive stuff, and I was there, curious about interactive technology, especially augmented reality. And this was two or three years ago, so way before Pokémon Go came out. There were very few people doing anything interesting with augmented reality. Most of it was kind of gimmicky, for marketing and advertising. What Dan and I were really curious about was wanting to use this technology as a form of storytelling, which no one was doing then.

Goldman: Yeah, I recently met the guy who made Pokémon Go and I told him, "Man, we've been doing that for years."

What about comics or graphic novels made them a good medium to tell this story versus, say, a documentary film?

Goldman: It's something I've been playing with in the comics I've been creating. I've done several politically oriented comic books in the past, and what always seems so effective to me about comics is your ability to present them as entertainment, when in fact it's educational. There's an incredible amount of information you can sneak into a comic book and still make it appear as if it's just for fun. Comics are very subversive in that way, and it's one of their strengths.

Devineni: Yeah, I mean I should say this, we're tackling really horrifically subject matters—rape, gang rape, and acid attacks in these two comic books. I think the appeal of the comic book format, especially the way Dan has drawn the artwork to give dignity to the survivors and the characters, has made the comic books very accessible to general audiences, especially teenagers. If you tell someone this is a comic book about gang rape, most people would be very put off by that. But the mere fact that we told the story through the creation of a superhero, especially an Indian female superhero, which is unheard of, and using the context and the structure of Hindu mythology as a way of telling it—it made it appealing to audiences all over.

Goldman: You know, we're in this trigger warning culture now. And there's something about presenting these issues in this way, obviously drawn nicely and approached with respect, it seems to step around the trigger and let people actually engage with it and talk about it. Whereas a documentary on the same subject would be very upsetting on either one of the things we've tackled.

Devineni: I looked at documentary—it was my initial idea being a documentary filmmaker. But I quickly realized, especially around the time when the news was breaking in December 2012, that a documentary would never go deep into the problem and try to understand it. And then secondly, teenagers and especially Indian teenagers would never watch a documentary. It would turn them off, it's just not appealing to them. So we understood the audience and figured out that comic books were the best way to reach them, and secondly, adding the augmented reality and interactive technology on top of that, it was just a brilliant idea for teenagers. It's a perfect synergy of art, activism, and technology designed for young people.

Yeah, I played around with the augmented reality component online. How did you decide on that approach, where people can sort of put themselves in the story?

Devineni: Well we worked with a company called Blippar, and they are one of the biggest AR companies out there. The idea of using AR was to literally turn the comic book into a pop-up book, using a format that is so perfectly designed for AR. It's visually captivating and it's multilayered so you can embed videos, interactivity, animation perfectly into a comic book and it seems so natural. And we took it to another level by creating street art, because street art and comic book art fit closely together as well. So we took our characters and created murals all over India, and you can scan those murals and get animation out of it. We used the Blippar app and interface to make everything, and also Blippar worked closely with us in creating more complicated AR. Normally they would charge a ton of money for corporations to use the AR, but in our case they charged us nothing because they understood the beauty of what we were trying to do and the possibility of telling stories.

Does the augmented reality affect the way you think about the artwork as you're drawing, Dan?

Goldman: For me it's really that the story has to be complete in the lowest tech version of it because of who our target audience is. Not everybody is going to have a phone or access to broadband, so the entirety of the story has to work on the page. The way we build out the story using the AR is really the bells and whistles for a secondary audience. So what's in the script needs to be on the page first and foremost, and we have to get all those details and emotions there first, and then we use the AR to animate and bring an extra wow factor to pull in people that have access to that stuff.

Devineni: Well, I agree with Dan to that point, but I'll also tell a secret that Dan doesn't know, either. Dan's artwork, even before he created Priya's Shakti, is perfectly designed for AR. He is Mr. AR without even knowing it. I try to get him to do his own thing because I know the work he gives us is perfect for AR. And the reason why is he's one of those few comic book artists who merges comic book art with actual real sceneries and real things surrounding him. The backgrounds are real, they're photographs, things that exist in the real world . . .

Goldman: Yeah they're actually collages. I use photography, but I use it in such a way that I'm making fake worlds.

Devineni: Right, fake worlds using photography from the real world. That's what we're trying to do with the AR is add that moment of technology, the surreal on top of the real. And if you look at any AR like Pokémon, it is surreal to have this crazy little green dragon running around Central Park with 500 people running around chasing it. It's a virtual thing, it doesn't exist, but you make it real by looking through your phone at the app. And that was the whole purpose of working with Dan to make it real. And because the stories are based on women that I've interviewed, acid attack survivors and rape survivors, these are actual real people that help form stories. Dan's artwork works perfectly in sync with that, the real and the fantasy of comic book art.

I'd love to hear more about your research with survivors, especially going into Priya's Mirror, which focuses on acid attacks.

Devineni: So this all started back in December 2015. I was in Delhi and I met with a group of acid attack survivors through an organization called Stop Acid Attacks. They've been on the forefront of trying to change the laws in India. I sat down and interviewed two of them and they told me their stories, and that's when I realized the problem of acid attacks is so clearly linked with the problem of rape—the social stigma, the cultural isolation, the victim blaming. It happened exactly the same way as it did to the rape survivors I interviewed for the first chapter. We knew we had to make the second chapter about acid attacks.

Goldman: Our "villain" in this story is really interesting, because he's full of acid, but he's a victim himself. There's a very non-black-and-white view of a villain with this character. He's a survivor of acid attacks himself. The way he treats acid survivors, which appears to be loving and sheltering, is in fact keeping them victims instead of letting them grow beyond their attacks and return to the people they used to be. When the script came in, I was just blown away with this character, he's so much more than a standard "villain." He's a victim himself, just doing what he thought was the right thing but was the wrong thing for a group of women.

What kinds of AR components will be featured in Priya's Mirror?

Devineni: There's a lot of pop-up elements, but the one we're most excited about, that we're premiering at the New York Film Festival, is something called the Last Mask Campaign. Through the Blippar app you can put on a digital mask, a clear, transparent mask that is slightly disfigured, and you can share it on social media. The idea behind this campaign was started by Natalia, who is an acid attack survivor in Colombia. And she actually sent out physical masks to politicians, to soap opera stars, sports stars in her country, and all of them took photos in the masks and shared them and got a lot of media attention. And it was a way to tell the Colombian people that we need to change the laws in our country because it was very easy to get acid over the counter, and this campaign changed that. The punishment was very little, and this campaign changed that. We wanted to take the spirit of what she was doing in her country and put it into this comic book. She's also one of the characters in the comic book, I should mention. We want to hopefully create a global campaign where everyone puts on these masks and shares them, they put on these masks so hopefully no one else will have to.

What most excites you about the intersection of augmented reality and social activism and creativity?

Goldman: To me, having been a storyteller for a while, I think I hit a point where I was lacking this organizational component that helps the message land and make actual change in the world. That's my favorite thing about being a creator of Priya is that I'm seeing things actually manifesting instead of just having fans who are entertained or have their brains bouncing around a little bit with new information. You're actually watching things changing. That's what I've been looking for my entire career.

Devineni: Yeah, next year we're going to start a test program with the Lions' Club to implement the comic book at about a dozen schools in New Delhi. And the possibility of bringing this book as a way to talk about gender violence, especially with young kids and teenagers, is such a blessing and an ideal way for us to move what we're trying to do forward.