I recently came across a quote from spoken word poet Phil Kaye's Repetition. In it, he says:
My mother taught me this trick, If you repeat something over and over again, it loses it's meaning...Our existence, she said, is the same way. You watch the sunset too often, and it just becomes 6pm. You make the same mistake over and over, you'll stop calling it a mistake. If you just wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up one day you'll forget why.
Repetition voids meaning. But what does this have to do with content marketing? If you, like I, practice inbound content marketing––or writing online of any kind really––you know that most of what's out there is reworkings, re–anglings, or iterations on what's already been written. While it can be very valuable to spin a concept to be more useful to your specific audience or brand, producing a stream of original content is even more valuable. I know from personal experience how rewarding it is when you're struck by a random burst of inspiration, but these moments can oftentimes be few and far between. Now I really understand why Hemingway famously said "write drunk, edit sober," but owing to laws of common decency, hitting up the in–office kegerator during the day is less acceptable these days. Fortunately, when you're caught in an uninspired rut, the solution you need might be right under your nose.
Amazon is kind of like a drug dealer. I order one book and it keeps suggesting (read: forcing) me to buy more and more. But this has actually done me well, because simply reading a chapter or two every now and then––especially when I'm feeling uninspired––helps me come up with more ideas to write about. Since I spend the entirety of my work week in front of a computer, it's important to me to step away and consume printed words every weekend. This might mean meeting a friend for reading and people watching over coffee, or it might be a three–hour block of sitting on my couch and reading until I feel like I've accomplished something. Just the way food is energy for your body and brain, other peoples' writing is fodder for inspiration.
My favorite of late is Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon. I constantly find myself trying to figure out how the topics in the book are related to my work, my beliefs, and my practices––it has been incredibly motivating and helpful. Kleon is clearly a believer in the "start before you're ready" mentality and encourages readers to just create something. That something, whether it's a stream–of–consciousness–style word collage or pages of mindless doodles, will help get your mind working and develop into something bigger. In a sense, he gives a vague guidebook for the living loop of creation, sharing, and connection. But if viewing Steal Like An Artist as practical hacks for inspiration, you could boil Kleon's message down to this: Be curious. Simply absorb the world around you. There's so much just waiting to be interpreted about such small things, so really diving in, reading new material, and understanding another person's perspective lets me think about things that I might not normally register.
Whatever everyone else is writing about, you probably shouldn't be. I completely understand the mob mentality that convinces some marketers to write about a hot topic, but what does this actually achieve? Unless you have something totally unique to say about the topic of the moment, stay away. Writing about what everyone else is writing about is not only unoriginal, but it just adds to the noisy web of uninspired content that already exists. We shouldn't be writing because we think we should be, but because we have the particular conviction to form an opinion. If you want to stand out then do it.
Andrew Chen writes "you'll have to differentiate on expertise and insight, rather than trying to tag along on whatever cool topic we're talking about these days." Think about what you have to offer as an individual within a specific role. What experiences do you carry that help you navigate your industry?
It's been said before, and it will be said again. Whatever you say, do it in the form of a story.Telling a story is inherently a personal and original process. In my opinion, it's the articles written by techies, entrepreneurs, and marketers who share their own opinions, insights, and experiences that resonate most with me. Roundups of the best products and tools are no doubt helpful, but they carry less weight and are less "real" than editorial articles. Using personal experience and examples (and by "personal" I mean anything related to one's self and one's career) shows your audience what exactly you have to offer; and by telling your personal story, you're inherently differentiating. No one else has your exact same story.
It seems that in startup land, we're all very wary of sharing our faults and only want to humblebrag about our successes. I get it: We don't want to make ourselves vulnerable. But I think there's something to be said about sharing the experiences that didn't work particularly well. In an industry run on capital that's available due to the successes of other businesses, doesn't it make sense that we should want to help each other succeed? Of course we're all each other's competitors, but if we're talking about small, everyday tasks (like PR best practices, or perfecting some technical skill), why not share our personal triumphs and tribulations? Where there's a learning experience, there's a story to be told.
Though written words do help me find inspiration, you don't always have time to sit down and read a book or sift through a bunch of entrepreneur's blogs. Fortunately we live in the digital age and there are so many media to choose from. If I'm feeling very focused but want some subliminal messaging, I'll put on a YouTube playlist of TED Talks and let them play in the background. If it doesn't distract you to hear voices while you're trying to work, try it; a lot of TED Talks are about specific topics, luckily your highly evolved brain can abstract the concepts and apply them to your own practical situations.
Another medium that's great for anyone with a commute: podcasts. NPR has an incredible directory of its programs, which is helpful because radio shows are on at random and/or inconvenient times. Now this is where I get really dorky––please don't judge. Sometimes, when I'm feeling really down and uninspired––which can make me feel depressed, like I'm failing at my job––I'll listen to commencement speeches and other motivational talks. (I cannot believe I just publicly admitted to that.) Since making its viral rounds a few months ago, one of my favorites is David Foster Wallace's This Is Water speech from Kenyon College's 2005 commencement ceremony, in which he states that true freedom is understanding how to think. What's interesting about this speech is that Wallace tries actively escapes the "banal platitudes" of typical commencement addresses, but remarks that "in the day–to–day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance." It's a complex sentence that needs to be broken down, which is exactly why I like listening to speeches like this. They get my brain going.
The point is, if you feel like you're failing, you won't write anything worth reading. It's a vicious cycle, but it's not one that we have to be trapped in. As they say, the world is our oyster, but I think we get sort of stuck in a revolving door of content because we become accustomed to continuously checking the same sites and sources. As content producers, relying on the same opinions, voices, and perspectives can be our biggest faults. Just like they say we are what we eat, and we are a combined image of the people we surround ourselves with; the content we choose to read will be reflected in our work. Refreshing our input can greatly affect the quality of our output.
Rishon Roberts is the marketing manager at Spinnakr, a new kind of analytics that takes action for you. She'd love to connect with you on Twitter.
Today's web programmers grapple with problems that people in the early days never had to deal with. They're building complex UIs, juggling a bunch of APIs, and running multiple processes at the same time. All of these tasks require mastering the flow of data between application components in real–time, something which even the most advanced developers struggle with.
Why can't things be easier? Most modern programming techniques descend from a 60–year–old computing paradigm which stipulates, among other things, that all programs must run one step at a time––not good for handling multiple tasks at once. But there's no reason it has to be that way. Many computer scientists have invented alternative programming techniques that attempt to solve these problems, only to be shunned by an establishment uncomfortable with thinking about programming differently. Fortunately, the dogma that exists today is now dying.
Dan Tocchini, CEO of a startup called The Grid, is part of a new generation of programmers who grew up struggling with complex multithreaded programming, asynchronous I/O, and nearly unlimited sources of data from hundreds of modern APIs. He believes that resurrecting an old paradigm from the 1970s might be the solution.
In the 1970s, a Canadian bank serving 5 million customers implemented a brand new computer system using a new and little heard–of software development paradigm called "flow–based programming" (FBP). The software was a hit, largely because it allowed the bank to build working applications using easy–to–visualize graphs of data flowing between components, which non–developers could understand. The new apps became so popular at the bank that some of them are still being used 40 years later, and yet FBP itself never caught on because most programmers at the time resisted adopting the new paradigm.
One of the reasons programmers didn't warm to FBP is that it requires a new way of thinking about development. Traditional apps become easier to break as they grow larger and more complex. The usual solution to this problem is to throw more developers at the project and use careful deployment strategies like continuous integration to avoid breaking things. Lots of developers swear by the brute–force approach, but it doesn't scale.
"What we need is not more programmers. What we need is to enable non–programmers to participate in the creation process, not just the ideation process," says Kenneth Kan, CTO of a company called Pixbi and a recent convert to flow–based programming. "Rather than making us humans think like machines, it's time to make machines to be able to think more like us."
Traditional programming paradigms force programmers to think one step at a time and combine the actual work done by an application, its program, with the order in which it runs, its logic or flow. The upshot is that applications quickly become tangled jumbles of code that rely on each other. If you want to change the order of one sequence of events, you need to rewrite everything that depends on it. And good luck getting anyone else, even another developer, to understand it.
"It just became a fucking mess. It was just unmanageable," says Tocchini about the nightmare project that prompted him to look for new solutions. His company is busy resurrecting flow–based programming with a framework called NoFlo, an implementation of FBP for NodeJS.
According to Tocchini, managing the expanding codebase of the JavaScript front–end MVC framework he was using became totally untenable as he added more features, increasing the complexity of components until it took a week just to make small changes. Switching to flow–based programming allowed him to focus on individual components, and understand bottlenecks visually.
Image by The Grid
"The workflow of sticking to the components, I love it man. It just feels so much better," he says. "You don't have those kinds of brutal moments and if you do, it's because you wired things wrong. Your spaghetti looks like spaghetti, right?"
"It doesn't 'feel' like programming," says Kan. Through NoFlo, he's become a convert to the FBP development process. "It's about solutions without coding much. As long as web programming remains a hacker–only party, FBP would have no room to thrive."
J. Paul Morrison, the creator of flow–based programming, has a slightly different take. He doesn't think that we need fewer programmers, but that programming will become mainstream as developers make way for a new type of application architect.
"There's two roles: There's the person building componentry, who has to have experience in a particular program area, and there's the person who puts them together," explains Morrison. "And it's two different skills."
If NoFlo succeeds, it could herald a new paradigm of web programming. Imagine a world where anyone can understand and build web applications, and developers can focus on programming efficient components to be put to work by this new class of application architects. In a way, this is the same promise as the "learn to code" movement, which wants to teach everyone to be a programmer. Just without the programming.
FBP seems like it could be the solution to many modern development problems. It's naturally parallelizing, which helps programmers handle multiple, concurrent tasks and complex, physics–based UIs. Because it lends itself to visualization, flow–based applications are easy for the increasing number of non–technical product stakeholders to understand. So why did it take so long to catch on?
Image by J. Paul Morrison
Morrison discovered flow–based programming a decade before he built the software for the bank, while working as an engineer at IBM. He was in Montreal experimenting with discrete simulations of cars moving through gas stations, when it occurred to him that the same techniques used in discrete modeling could be applied to software development.
"I said, 'What if we could have some different processes that were running at the same time, with data going through them?,'" recalls Morrison. "'How hard would that be to do for programming with business data rather than cars?'" I drew some pictures and suddenly came up with this beautiful component that would make a big chunk of programming more reusable."
The idea of modeling applications as graphs of data moving between independent, reusable blocks of code was not new. In fact, Morrison admits that he lifted the idea from his experiences working with early card–based computing systems where you could literally see stacks of cards carrying data moving back and forth in the machine room. What was new about the approach was applying it to Von Neumann architecture, the basis for all modern computer design.
John Von Neumann
Named for Princeton mathematician John Von Neumann, the design replaced the program–controlled card systems that Morrison worked on with computers that could store instructions in memory. It specifies, among other things, that these instructions must pass from memory to the CPU one "word" at a time, a constraint which forces programmers to write lines of code that execute one at a time, largely in the order in which they're written.
Morrison's flow–based concept effectively rebuilt the earlier program–controlled approach, where data is routed in streams to and from purpose–built applications, on top of Von Neumann architecture. This allows programmers to write individual functions that execute one step at a time, but route data between these functions asynchronously and concurrently using a network definition graph. According to Morrison, flow–based programming is an improvement over other approaches because it allows programmers to build reusable components that can be integrated into any application, and because it allows them to visualize applications.
"It capitalizes on the visual capabilities of human beings. Instead of doing reams of text, you can draw pictures," explains Morrison. "We used to do these diagrams on huge sheets of paper, and the neat thing about that was you could annotate them and they would get all dog–eared and people would draw cartoons on them and comments and you could put descriptive information on them. Then you could basically turn these into flow–based programming network definitions."
The idea was so obvious that IBM declined to patent the new approach, calling it "much more like a law of nature" than a new invention, according to Morrison. Instead, the company published FBP as a The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
"You have a computer that can do anything, and one thing at a time, and that's such a powerful paradigm, nobody sees any problem with it, any need to come up with something different," says Morrison. "All programs were loops within loops within loops. If you had a problem, you were told you just didn't think hard enough. It was not the computer's problem or the architecture's problem, it was your problem."
Kuhn's book on scientific revolutions includes a famous quote from physicist Max Planck about what really causes paradigm shifts:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Fifty years have now passed since Morrison first discovered FBP, and the programmers who worked during the beginning of the Von Neumann era are dying off. In their place, a new generation of programmers frustrated with the shortcomings of the traditional paradigms is coming of age, and they're willing to try something new.
Tocchini stumbled upon FBP almost by accident, when he saw some designers at Facebook using Apple's flow–based Quartz Composer tool to create iOS app mockups instead of Photoshop. Although the flow–based approach as described by Morrison never fully caught on, some flow–based concepts did eventually make their way to niche developer communities, like game development and film compositing, where flow–like tools are used to model physical interactions. Flow–based programming is especially useful for these applications, because modeling realistic physics requires running multiple equations simultaneously. To help app designers make use of the advanced graphical libraries available in OS X, Apple included the Quartz Composer mockup tool in the software development kit when it first released OS X in 2001.
Tocchini loved the idea of live prototyping, especially because web app UIs are becoming more complex and implementing more physics–based interactions, but wanted to take it a step further.
"One of the problems is that it has to be rebuilt," says Tocchini. "It's purely prototyping. The only reason it's like that is because of what you get out of Quartz Composer. There's no reason why you can't have a fully functioning final product with it."
So, he joined with Henri Bergius, the creator of NoFlo, and started porting his company's applications from their old MVC framework to the new paradigm.
NoFlo works by tying together CommonJS components with a graph, specified in JSON. It also includes a domain–specific language that allows developers to embed graphs in existing applications. It's been available for two years and has a small, devoted user base who have helped Tocchini and Bergius build 250 components.
Like Morrison's original FBP implementation, however, it hasn't become widespread, especially compared with traditional Node–based frameworks like Meteor or SailsJS. Tocchini and Bergius believe that NoFlo is missing a key component: An interface.
To facilitate building an interface for their framework, Tocchini and Bergius recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of a UI for NoFlo. The campaign raised $80,000 of the requested $100,000 in just six days, signaling that interest in FBP is growing.
One of the main benefits of flow–based programming is that it takes control logic out of the main program and instead abstracts it into a network graph that anyone, even those with no programming experience, can understand. Imagine a program as a graph of "black boxes" with inputs and outputs connected by wires that represent streams of data. Got it? Congratulations, you've built a program.
It will take developers giving up some of the "feel" and control over programming that Kan describes if FBP is to succeed. But in a way, the promise of FBP is every programmer's dream. Instead of struggling to make stakeholders understand why adding a new feature that requires reading yet another API concurrently is difficult, imagine if they could simply see and understand it. Instead of dealing with connecting bits and pieces of your applications, you could leave that up to the people who use it, and just focus on making things work.
Shopkeepers aren't so unlike us online writers. We do experiments: manipulate our content, headlines, and images to see what draws in readers and keeps you coming back. So do retailers: Put the blue shirt up front, now the red; see what sells.
The difference is that online experiments produce denser data. We know how many of you are reading this now, how far down the page you scroll, and how long you're engaged. If you like what you read and "like" or tweet it, we'll know; ditto if you "bounce" as soon as you visit the site. So we pick buzzier headlines, more engaging content, winning Fast Company "shoppers" by offering what you want. Physical stores do the same, featuring the newest gadget or the sexiest bra model; book covers relevant to news or movies; water sounds or peaceful music at the massage parlor; incense at the New Age health store; hip–hop or indie pop at the teen clothing store. Whatever's being sold, the seller and staff try baits to hook shoppers, to keep them engaged with products and convert them to loyal customers. The problem is, with little data measured, it's hard to say what works.
If you treat your retail store like a website, though, you'll sell more stuff: that's the bet that tech startup Locarise is making. Their smartphone tracking service offers to merge the worlds of on– and offline shopping. But whether or not this will creep out customers remains to be seen: When physical stores track shoppers' behavior, as Nordstrom did lately, customers often freak out, spooked by reminders of NSA spying. That's the challenge facing the latest developers to enter the fray.
The goal of the startup, led by three French coders based in Tokyo, is to give traffic measurements like those used online––"dwell time," "engagement," "bounce rate"––to brick–and–mortar retailers, where the bulk of money still moves from shoppers to sellers. The Top 10 sellers of stuff on Earth are still physical, after all; Amazon is still only #11. So while the bar to winning over skeptical shoppers may be high, the prize of telling retailers how to win more buyers is potentially huge.
Locarise is supported by Tokyo–based incubator Open Network Lab. Created in October 2009 by the Japanese director of MIT's MediaLab, Joi Ito, ONLab hopes to be Japan's version of Y Combinator: a seeding ground for globally minded startups to rival Silicon Valley giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. And Locarise, among the incubator's seventh batch, may be a promising contender for breaking out.
"What we thought with these kinds of dashboards is, none of them gives you definite analytics or insights into what you're seeing," says Locarise CEO Sébastien Béal, referring to online analytics tools for measuring traffic to web content. "They just give metrics, they don't go one step beyond––telling you what you should do."
Locarise, on the other hand, is designed to give retailers feedback they can act on. Since the Locarise sensors can pick up on weak signals from phones outside of a store, they are sensitive to "window conversion": what proportion of people who pass by the storefront decide to come in. The sensors can also tell how long customers spend in front of different displays; what proportion of shoppers are first–time visitors, returning customers, or "bounced" customers, who enter and leave without buying anything; weekly traffic patterns by day; and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, either offline or on.
"When we discuss with retailers," Béal says, "they often tell us they already count people, manually. In the store, the service people will be counting. And they accumulate piles of papers telling them when the customer entered and when he left. So they already have this data and they know it could be useful, they just didn't find the use yet. That's what we are trying to do: Not only bring the raw analytics, but also the tools that let you visualize and manipulate this data."
Store owners can respond to this data in concrete ways: If Monday and Tuesday mornings get light traffic, hire less staff for those times; if people are "bouncing" from a particular display, do something to make it more engaging; tailor web ads to in–store behavior.
"The online to offline topic is quite hot these days for retailers," Béal explains. "They try to understand how [a brand's online presence affects offline sales]. Our solution tries to bridge the gap a bit between the two."
Robots drew the three young French guys from Paris to Tokyo back in 2009, as computer science interns from France's most elite universities. They worked in separate Japanese cities–– Béal in Tokyo, Fabian Dubois in Nagasaki, and Victor Perron in Kyoto––but they shared a common goal: building autonomous, self–aware robots to be integrated into everyday human life. Health care, retail, traffic, policing, public safety, commerce: All were problems, they thought, robots could be involved in fixing.
"What is surprising when you come to Japan," Béal recalls in an email, "is that you expect to see robots everywhere, but you don't see them. Except they are actually there! You are surrounded by more than 6 million vending machines, from the train ticketing to the ones distributing iPods. All these machines can do a lot more than you would expect. Did you know that in case of disaster, they unlock themselves to give access to their contents for free, providing drinking water? That's how I realized you don't necessarily need an interface like an all–in–one self–sufficient system to build a robot: You can have the sensors disseminated in your surrounding environment and your smartphone as the human–machine interface."
Béal and his business partners came to this realization after a frustrating experience with traditional robotics.
They met when they worked in Tokyo for Orange Group, the global telecom corporation based in France. Their project was developing robots to care for old people––a major problem for Japan, with its aging population and dwindling birthrate, among the lowest in the world. But the "ambitious project," Béal says, quickly shrunk in scope.
Robotics, especially in Japan, is as dependent on space as on robots. The "intelligence" of bots tends to be in rooms and objects, more than localized in a single bot: The AI is distributed. Robots are often like an animal with no body, whose eyes and ears and tongue are scattered about in space, sending signals to the cloud. More hivemind than motherboard.
The old people challenge, likewise, boiled down to measuring position in space. The Japanese retirement home's formulaic layout could be taken for granted: Regulation doors, kitchens, bathtubs, could be programmed to be compatible with a robot designed to fit.
"In the end we narrowed the problem to: Identify the pose of the elderly from a robot's point of view, to detect if he's laying down or standing," Béal recalls. "By trying to solve this problem, we decided that we'd better put something on the elderly people, like a sensor to detect the fall, rather than trying do it with robots."
Why have a robot at all, when the "intelligence" we're designing is in sensors? That was the lightbulb moment that led to Locarise.
Why should robots be constrained to bodies? Béal wondered. Why not take intelligence outside of casing, remove the ghost from the shell? What if senses weren't embodied in a centralized position at all, but distributed, and decision–making was done by a combination of robotic analytics and human interpretation?
The first problem Béal imagined that could benefit from this solution was retail analytics. Pretty soon he'd recruited his two French friends from Orange Tokyo, and they were off.
Smartphones, carried by an estimated 60% of customers in Tokyo retail stores, emit public signals, which Locarise's sensors use to track shoppers' traffic patterns. The Locarise system anonymizes phone data, to protect owners' privacy, but recognizes devices later. So it can identify repeat customers, spot first–time shoppers or mega–buyers like Gucci addict Buzz Bissinger, as outliers. Key variables are "dwell time," the length of time a customer spends looking at a display, and "bounce rate," the percentage of people walking outside a store who don't come in, or don't stay. What Locarise promises to determine is: What makes your would–be shoppers leave? What entices them to buy?
Locarise analyzes and visualizes this data for the retailer in an online dashboard, somewhat like the one Chartbeat provides for online media, or Circle Media is developing to gauge audience engagement in marketing events. Retailers can use the patterns they see to design stores and organize their staff based on data, not just instinct.
Stores selling anything from groceries to electronics, books, booze, clothes, coffee, or even haircuts, would benefit from deeper data on customer traffic patterns, argues Béal. But the new metrics and tools Locarise is offering face some resistance in Japan's conservative business climate, where data–driven approaches to decision–making run counter to established protocols of top–down business decisions based on rank and tradition. And phone tracking itself has a shady reputation these days, in the wake of Edward Snowden's leak of the NSA's cyber surveillance program. So retail surveillance service providers have a tough sell to make with consumers.
Locarise's online approach to the offline world hangs on tracking smartphones. Spooky? Doesn't need to be, Locarise's creators say. Shopper tracking may scare off customers, the way Nordstrom did recently by following shoppers' phones, if it reminds them of NSA spying. But when the data is taken anonymously and in aggregate, not for targeted marketing but feedback to the retailer, they say, it's a win–win for customers and sellers.
Locarise's system anonymises all phone data, and no customer data is retained beyond 90 days. In addition, the system for coding phones is separate for each client store––so no single customer could be tracked shopping, say, at both H&M and Zara. This sets Locarise apart from competitors like ByteLight and Shopkick, whose services target specific phones with special coupons and deals, linking a specific shopper's online and offline behavior.
"We could do something like that too," Béal says, "but we don't want to, because it would compromise on the anonymity of our analytics. We don't want to be in a position of saying 'on the one hand, we are linking your phone with your ID and on the other hand we are not,' so we prefer to focus on the analytics."
Japan made an appealing target market for Locarise, given its ubiquity of smartphone usage––Japan has the 3rd highest smartphone penetration in the world, at 39.9%, after Korea's 67.6% and Norway's 55%––and its dominance as the second biggest retail market on Earth, accounting for 55% of the whole Asian market.
"If you go in the countryside in the U.S.," Béal explained from Tokyo, "you would probably have a lot less smartphone penetration, whereas here it's very dense, so you always have a lot of phones, a lot of signals around you, wherever you go in Japan."
If Locarise succeeds outside of Japan, it will be breaking new ground. Remarkably, although Asia has the largest number of Internet users––44.8%, as opposed to North America's 11.4 and Europe's 21.5%––you'd be hard–pressed to name a web service you use regularly, assuming you're a Westerner, that was created in Japan, China, Singapore, or India.
Japan has innovative web services of its own––the video–sharing service NicoNicoDouga（ニコニコ動画), in which users write comments onto streaming video, and the bulletinboard system 2–channel (２ちゃねる), for example––but these are popular within Japan, not worldwide like Facebook or Twitter. The culture of startups there, as in Korea, is weaker than in the U.S. LINE, the mobile messaging service owned by Korean firm NHN, has 230 million users––18 million from Thailand, 17 million from Taiwan, 15 million from Spain, and 14 million in Indonesia––but not much range beyond Asia.
ONLab hopes to free Japanese tech from this island problem, making Tokyo–based companies global. With any luck, they're betting, Locarise may be one seed that grows.
You may have noticed that if you really put your smartphone through its paces, probably by playing a complex 3–D game on it or running a GPS navigation app while also listening to music, that bits of its case get weirdly hot. This is thanks to the immutable laws of physics: Moving electricity around generates heat. Also the electronics inside a phone are jammed into a tiny space and there's not much room for the traditional cooling solutions used in laptops and PCs.
Mobile chips are actually optimized so they don't waste energy as heat and thus make your phone case melt or, more crucially, burn too much precious battery power. They use a number of tricks for this purpose, including strict power management via underclocking against their full potential clock speed. They are also sectioned up into task–specialized silicon, so that parts of the chip can go dark when they're not needed and only the light, and thus hot, bits are busy making a call or calculating the math for 3–D graphics.
Ideally to make a more powerful device, phone designers would like to cram more transistors into a tighter space and run the overall chips faster––and that's exactly the sort of progression that Apple's followed with each generation of its iPhone–powering Ax series of chips. It's a mini, mobile Moore's Law...if you like. But to do this is a difficult task, as the push to make a device more powerful has to be balanced against the need to keep the battery life meaningful and also the thermal properties of the circuitry and the phone casing.
Which is where, as Wired reports, the University of Michigan's innovation comes in. A team there has reimagined two aspects of mobile chip design: Cooling and chip power management.
The cooling aspect is rather remarkable. Instead of opting for merely letting the chip's packaging and the overall chassis of a phone act as a heatsink for a mobile chip, as happens typically now, they've covered the surface of a mobile chip with an ultrafine metal mesh. The metal, of course, has excellent thermal properties that carry heat away from the surface of the silicon and help it achieve more power efficiency. But they've filled the pores of this mesh with a high temperature wax–like material that acts as a second heat sink. When the chip overheats past a critical temperature as it's put to complex tasks, the excess heat energy is dumped into the wax...which absorbs the heat then melts. The wax material is actually a blend of paraffin wax and aluminium foam, together making what's called a phase change material.
Secondly instead of adopting a power management regime for mobile chips that switches portions of the chip off, the team has been testing "computation sprinting." It's a system where instead of causing chips to overheat by running them at full power for an extended period, the computer power is instead pulsed. In this model the chip effectively sprints, heats up, then jogs and cools down before sprinting again. The wax material can absorb way more energy than simple air cooling would allow, boosting chip operations enough that where a "sprint" profile would overheat a typical chip in just 20 seconds, the wax–cooled chip could manage to sprint for 120 seconds continuously.
In experiments with an Intel Core i7 chip that runs comfortably at a 10–watt power level, they've managed to "sprint" it up to 50 watts without overheating beneath the wax layer. That offers a significant computational power boost, and it's less than the 100 watts they're confident they can achieve.
These two technologies have amazing promise in the mobile world, when they're commercialized over the next five years or so. Your current generation smartphone is probably about as powerful as a typical desktop computer of about 10 years ago, and imagine what this power–boosting system could manage alongside the more traditional improvements in mobile chip design.
Mobile chips are already about to undergo a dramatic paradigm shift with the innovation of FinFET silicon, where the structure of transistors are stacked up vertically (in "fins") instead of the flat layout they currently use. TSMC, one of the larger Eastern chip foundries, has just signed a deal with Apple to produce FinFET chips down to a minuscule 10nm scale over the next three years. Married to the Michigan innovation, this innovation could easily mean 2020's smartphones are like pocket supercomputers.
The IPv4 to IPv6 transition is like a fire drill in an office building. There are plans and backup plans and meeting points and check–ins, and during the drill hundreds of people herd down stairs and out into daylight, where they stand blinking and generally milling about, not absorbing any of it. It's like that with IPv6, except this fire affects the whole Internet–connected world, and this is not a drill.
If you're not privy: Internet Protocol (IP) addresses are the numbers assigned to each device on a network for identification and addressing. They specify an identity and a digital location, as with mailing something to your friend's house at the address you looked up or he gave you. The current IP address system, IPv4, began with 4.3 billion combinations, or 4.3 x 10^9. As of this month the U.S. has less than one percent of these addresses left for allocation, and other regions of the world have similar extreme shortages. Theoretically if IP addresses ran out completely there would be no way to bring new devices online, set up new servers, or host new websites. In practice there are a number of workarounds that could extend the life of IPv4 (and are), but the idea is that it would be wasteful to invest in retrofitted infrastructure when IPv6 is ready to deploy.
But we're not exactly being blindsided by this issue. Widespread concern about IPv4 "exhaustion" has existed among computer scientists, network specialists, and the telecommunications industry since the late 1980s, and an alternative, IPv6, has been in the works since then. It has 3.4 x 10^38 addresses or 340 trillion trillion trillion. So yeah, we're probably gonna be able to chill with it for a while. There's not a lot of digested and condensed information about the IPv6 transition out there, though, so I read around, watched hours of YouTube lectures (like this one) and spoke to an architect at one of the biggest IPv6–enabled internet companies in the country for some background.
You may have heard of IPv6. You may know about World IPv6 Launch, which began in June 2012. You may have realized that the network settings on your computer have included IPv6 options for a while or that Linux has supported it since the mid–'90s. You may have even tested your readiness or intentionally replaced a broken router with one that is IPv6 ready. But if you're not on board as a developer you should be. Axel Pawlik, the Managing Director of RIPE NCC, which allocates IPv6 addresses in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, said earlier this month in TechRadar that "Businesses . . . do need to be concerned if they're investing money in hardware that will need to be updated in just a few years. They also need to be aware if they are IPv4 only, they are effectively invisible to anyone using IPv6."
IPv6 advocates seem enthusiastic about the transition's progression. The IPv6 World Launch Blog posted recently that "the total number of registered networks with IPv6 deployment results that we can publish [is] 216. The large increase comes about as we now have greater coverage of registered networks from more than one source of measurements, a requirement for our methodology." 216 doesn't sound like a big number on the scale of the Internet, does it? Furthermore, IPv6 adoption rates are about 4% in the U.S. and about 2% worldwide right now. This feels low. But the IPv6 community insists that the number will grow by leaps and bounds as large ISPs who are in the process of implementing IPv6 bring it online and begin offering it to customers.
And this is where developers really stand to gain from incorporating IPv6 into products and services now. It may seem like continuing to use IPv4 is just the quick and dirty way to get to market, but IPv4 is rapidly deteriorating in ways that can hurt new products. For example, targeted advertising and location–based services often use IP addresses as a shorthand for a user's position. If an IP address was allocated to a certain organization with regional affiliations years ago, it can be assumed to serve a device in that region. But as single IP addresses are shared among more and more devices to minimize demand, it becomes harder to pinpoint a user's actual location based on their IP.
Additionally, multiple users on a single IP mean that the actions of one may limit the potential to reach others. If 10 people share an IP address and one of them launches a phishing campaign that subsequently degrades the reputation of that IP, other innocent users may be unfairly penalized, and could be blocked from accessing and using your service. In a recent reflection on the IPv6 transition, network engineering consultant Chris Phillips wrote:
The opportunity to position yourself as an early adopter has come and gone, but being IPv6–ready still places you ahead of most networks. It may even create differentiation between you and your competition, giving you a leg up.
All the available IPv4 addresses for the U.S. will be allocated in the next year or two, with major ISPs continuing to dole them out for a time after that. This means it may be five years or so before hosts have no choice but to be IPv6–only. And since there are currently no plans to turn IPv4 support off, there will certainly be a long tail of consumers adopting IPv6 over time (those who replace hardware based on device lifespan will eventually upgrade without realizing it). It seems logical that ISPs won't turn IPv4 off until the cost of providing it outweighs the economic benefit of providing it. And that will be years.
Unlike the transition to digital TV, in which the government publicized the switch and subsidized analog–to–digital converters, the move to IPv6 is simply being fueled by a long–term need. In the former case, the government and telecommunication industry had a monetary interest in the parts of the radio spectrum they would be able to reclaim after the move to digital TV, but in the case of IPv6 the impetus for change is only pragmatic. In the short term it may be tempting to "go with what you know" and stick with IPv4. But adopting IPv6 is an obvious future–proofing tactic, and there are ways to present IPv6 support to consumers as a value–added feature. So why not be bold?
It's hard to find anyone in the technology or business community who doesn't believe America's patent system needs serious reform. The phenomenon of "patent trolling"––where mysterious patent holding firms sue companies for alleged intellectual property infringement, often for everyday technology like scanning documents or online shopping––is commonplace. Even the White House, which rarely intervenes in clashes between entrepreneurs and lawyers, decried patent trolls and called for reform. The root of the problem is that the American patent system developed before the digital economy's rise and is extremely ill–fitted to handling patents for intangible things like bits and bytes. Thus, enter the lawyers and these strange LLCs which patent anything and everything without actually developing the tech.
Alan Schoenbaum, head counsel for Texan hosting firm Rackspace, has been one of the loudest advocates for companies hit by the so–called "patent trolls." Last month, Schoenbaum appeared in the New York Times to discuss his firm's wranglings with IPNav, a "full service patent monetization firm" that has sued over 1,600 companies in the past few years. The big problem many firms are facing is the fact that the patent system currently allows for ambiguous patents to be filed––the same patent system which regulates gears and mechanical devices applies the same criteria to code. But when applied to software, United States patent law doesn't actually require reams of printed out code. Concepts and schematics are enough... which causes an obvious discrepancy between patent holders, troll–like or not, and the technology companies which do the hard work of actually conceiving, designing, manufacturing, and marketing technical innovation.
In a recent telephone conversation with Schoenbaum, Co.Labs explored what patent trolls actually mean to startups, and what to do if a company receives a spurious, and financially aggressive, infringement lawsuit. One thing emphasized in our talk is that not all companies are targeted by troll–y lawsuits; aggressive patent holders tend to go after large corporations, midsize firms, and small companies that are just enjoying their financial success. This leads to a dilemma: A company that is becoming prominent in their field actually puts themselves at risk of a lawsuit.
Unfortunately, the advice Schoenbaum gave for startups and small companies is something close to what you'd expect.
The first advice he gave to firms was to educate themselves, quickly. Schoenbaum is a particular fan of Trolling Effects, a site run by a consortium of organizations including the Consumer Electronics Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the UC Berkeley Law School. Trolling Effects is designed as a one–stop shop for basic information in patent law and technology. Alongside primers on patent law, the site offers one very important resource. The centerpiece of Trolling Effects is a recently launched archive of legal threats from patent holders that allows sued companies to easily compare and contrast anything they have received.
For tech companies on the receiving end of intellectual property lawsuits, Schoenbaum also recommends further education. He told me that firms receiving threatening letters need to brush up on "Prior art to help defend themselves, and to make sure that a patent has to be unique and non–obvious... something that's never been invented before. There are lots of ways to deal with this."
Then, most importantly, Schoenbaum stressed that recipients of threatening patent infringement letters need to lawyer up as quickly as possible. As he put it, "It's almost impossible to deal with it on your own; the entire system is rigged against ordinary people. But there are great lawyers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. But the high cost of lawyers is why we need to change this system." Although he did not mention any specific lawyers with background in the area, a quick Google search for patent troll lawyers found hundreds of legal professionals dealing with this area of the law.
Will patent trolls still be a problem five years from now? We simply don't know. Large companies like Intel and Twitter have aggressively begun cataloging patents for defensive purposes only in order to defeat patent trolls. Individual states such as Vermont, Nebraska, and Minnesota are all exploring innovative legal methods for foiling gratuitous patent lawsuits. But federal bureaucracy moves at a legendarily slow speed, and we still don't know how long it will take for reform to bring patent law into the digital age.
3–D printers have been established as the Cool Hobby Toy of the Year, as long as the thing you want to prototype is plastic (or, soon, metal). But that wasn't enough for four hobbyist makers in Massachusetts, so they built a box to 3–D–print, bevel, edge, and cut all manner of materials for your dream desktop project.
That project quickly turned into The Microfactory, a fully fledged miniature production facility that fits on a desktop. It uses four print heads with two independently controlled heaters, meaning it can print in four colors at once OR print simultaneously with two different materials.
The "machine shop in a box" is more than just prototyping. A central drill lets users mill and etch plastics, metals, and wood, meaning that you can mix machining and printing. For example, a framework can be cut out of the wood and metal and inlaid with printed plastic. In the video above, they demonstrated the milling and etching of a microchip. I'll let your imaginations run away with one that for a second.
The Microfactory fits on a desk and the drill– and print–space is sealed inside a clear door, reducing mess (it also has a shopvac port on the side to keep the interior workspace clean). The door also decreases the Microfactory's noise level by 10 decibels, while solid plastic and metal covers keep wandering fingers safe from whizzing pulleys and hot motors. A magnetic sensor on the door stops processes when it's opened, and a big red panic button does exactly what you'd expect.
The real potential of the Microfactory is that engineers can take it far beyond the fabrication lab. Hook it up to a generator and it'll run anywhere, allowing you to perform on–the–road repairs and prints. And don't worry about packing the thing in styrofoam peanuts: While it's currently set up to be programmed via a computer hookup, the Microfactory is connected to the Internet, allowing it to be controlled via a mobile device or even the frontside USB port. Jeremy Fryer–Biggs, one of the founders of Mebotics, the company that created the Microfactory, explains it this way:
If you had a database of parts for your Humvee you could connect the machine to a Wi–Fi hotspot, download the part you need from a directory, and make it on the fly out in the middle of nowhere."
Above all, these four hobbyists want their machines to be affordable, but to do so, they need your help. The Kickstarter for a bigger, badder version of this prototype, capable of milling steel, should launch in the next 30–60 days.
So if you're tickled by the concept of desktop production but know that the one–trick desktop 3–D printers you can buy on Amazon aren't going to cut the mustard for your mad experiments, sign up for updates on MEbotics' transformative, portable machines.
We've all heard of consumer drones that use rotors to carry cameras (or pizza) or anything else you can imagine, but this Japanese company ditched whirlybird propellers for the simplest of flight mechanics: flapping wings. The best part? Most of it can be churned out of a 3–D printer.
Ditching the popular quadcopter consumer drone format, in 2009 Osaka–based Flapping Wing Production Studio designed a drone called the Meganeuropsis, after the meganeura, a prehistoric dragonfly. Their newest model, announced last week, is 10% larger, and while it's unlikely that the membrane–thin wings can be printed, most of the gears and parts were printed out of a desktop Makerbot Replicator 2.0 at FabLab Kitakagaya, a citizen maker lab in Osaka. The new model clocks in at a staggeringly light 8.7g even with its 50mAhLi–po battery, far lighter than the market–standard Parrot 2.0 AR drone's baseline 380g.
It's uncertain how durable the new ornithopter drone is (although it crashes enough in the above video to indicate that it can withstand moderate abuse), but its winged design prevents the "dead drop" that quadcopters suffer when safety subroutines or battery failures occur. Even with styrofoam and plastic parts, most quadcopters place breakable gears on the outward arms, which are, from personal experience, often the first points of contact as a powerless quadcopter falls back to Earth. It's also unclear how much weight the ornithopter can bear (probably not heavy enough to strap on a GoPro ), but an outside demonstration uploaded a week ago has three ornithopters strapped together in a configuration called the Flying Crawler (and here's another configuration of four tied together, in case you just can't give up the word "quad").
The ornithopter is powered by a 6mm motor in the front that flaps the wings and a 4mm motor that drives its single torque–countering tail rotor, which stabilizes rotation much like a helicopter. A video uploaded back in June showed off the lift and propelling basics of the 3–D printed prototype, but the addition of a tail rotor seems to have provided horizontal turning capability.
As if the Flapping Wing Production Studio wasn't cool enough already, their blog lists several public workshops where they showed off the ornithopter, including one that they turned into a teaching seminar for kids.
This device should be every reporter's dream. Fumbling with iOS recording apps is hardly better than fumbling with a USB voice recorder, so having a microphone already on––and already on your arm––seems like it would be an ideal digital solution for off–the–cuff interviews. But it would be just the opposite.
Amidst the hotness of "smart watches" is a problem that few people discuss: that is, that "wearable" devices are the physical version of mobile apps, with all the same shortcomings. A mobile app is a single–purpose, streamlined piece of software meant (usually) to do one thing and do it well. With the exception of iMovie and a few other outliers, apps are not robust in terms of features and workflow. They are one–shot, quick–moving, at–a–glance software programs, not ideal interfaces for heavy–duty things like content production.
Every reporter out there has more "stuff" to edit than ever. As it has become easier to interview and research (hello, Google Hangouts!) we're left with overwhelming amounts of media for each story. Editing a story down to something worthwhile and quick is the most difficult part of participating in the news cycle today.
This watch is anti–editing: It's on all the time, meant for one–touch sharing of the last 60 seconds of audio it recorded. But 60 seconds is a long time, and I don't care what anyone says––no source is riveting for a full minute straight. I'm tabling my enthusiasm for this device until someone can tell me a journalistic use case I can get behind. Anyone? ––Chris Dannen
This recording device is a terrible idea, as is. The slightly less terrible idea is pivoting the objective from ambiguous recording device to safety and security focused. Back when Motorola's Moto X was still a rumor the leaked feature was an "always listening" mode which would allow the phone to perform convenient functions. The bigger implications, just as the Trayvon Martin case was wrapping up, were privacy and security. What if there would have been a phone always listening the jury would have been able to hear? What if someone was wearing a Kapture device, would it have made things clear–cut?
As Chris mentions, the ability to record and capture data is already fairly abundant and accessible, but that's not the problem that needs to be solved. And a wearable device that's always recording (audio) seems to only bring up privacy concerns, much like Google Glass has. Kapture is only interesting as a napkin drawing, but once it made it to an actual product focused on "sharing memories" is when it lost any appeal. The better option would have been to concentrate on a specific market like personal security, rather than leaving the user to find a use case. ––Tyler Hayes
This is obviously a pretty pointless product that will probably be a total dud, like most gadgets coming out of the wearable technology fad. But in addition, it also raises issues around journalistic ethics and secret or incognito recordings. Though I tend to side on the spectrum of debate that defends secret recordings when used to expose those in power, this device definitely opens up a lot of potential for abuse. Its always–on nature means that it would be possible to capture, after the fact, a comment designated as off the record and then publish that, sans the "off the record" disclaimer.
I think one potential is use case is for that rare moment when someone makes a comment they don't think will ever see the light of day. But 60 seconds of recording might not be enough to really reveal someone's misdeeds. Not to mention you're gonna have to have that thing on your wrist all the time for it to be of any use. I think this is more likely to be used to capture a really funny conversation or joke than anything of import. ––Jay Cassano
As Jay and Tyler mentioned, my response to Chris would be that I can't really think of a good journalism use case for this product, mainly because it's built for recording memories aka recreational use, not reporting. It might cut down on the media journalists have to sift through for their stories if out of a half hour interview they only have seven one–minute clips to transcribe, but I think if I were relying on Kapture for recording I would just press that 60–second save all the time rather than trying to figure out where a certain quote I wanted to record sat in time. In practice it would end up working like a regular voice recorder, just without producing one continuous audio file.
I totally agree with Chris that wearable tech is usually the physical equivalent of one–off apps. Kapture sort of reminds me of the lifelogging camera Memoto that clips to your clothes and takes two medium–res photos every minute of whatever is happening in front of you. Memoto can generate 1.5 terabytes of photo data per person per year, and the company offers cloud storage packages for wrangling all of those photos. First of all, why are we doing this to ourselves? How is this deluge of disorganized and unprocessed data useful? But also, as Jay says, you really have to wear something like Memoto or Kapture all the time to make it worthwhile. Until this stuff is implanted in us, it can only create a comprehensive body of data if we dedicate ourselves to positioning it for that purpose. Why be slaves to the machine while we still have a choice? Lily Hay Newman
If the above arguments haven't swayed you from paying $99–$130 for a one–note capture device, I'm not sure what will. Anyone who's interviewed with an audio recorder knows that the subject needs to forget that the audio recorder is on––which won't happen if you've got a neon–green grilled band that needs to be tapped every 60 seconds to upload audio. Unlike Glass, which is so multipurpose that folks won't always assume it's recording, Kapture's got one purpose: "gotcha" moments, almost guaranteed to make people shell up around the wearer.
Thanks to clumsy activation mechanisms for hitting "record," surreptitious smartphone surveillance has been awkward at best––at least Kapture sends a clear message that you're recording the world around you. Why not weaponize it? Acclaimed comic writer Gail Simone's current series The Movement spotlights an Occupy–esque social movement that uses smartphones to capture and autobroadcast incriminating video to other members; unlike smartphones that need activation to share, Kapture autouploads recordings to a nearby smartphone via Bluetooth. Even if a Kapture is confiscated, the recording is already uploaded to a remote device, and a little tinkering could send that recording straight to the cloud. Could Kapture be the wearable tech that sends a message––"We're listening, so behave"?
For the price of an iPod Nano or basic Kindle, Kapture gives you a device that nobody's really asked for yet. A little purpose (or a lower price tag) would go a long way with this thing. ––David Lumb
When the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) wanted to help Syrian war victims and the other 10.5 million refugees and 42.5 million forcibly displaced people the agency serves get better access to their services, they did what many large bureaucracies do: Hire an outside vendor. But in the UNHCR's case, they hired an outside vendor with a twist. They crowdsourced.
Using a system from analytics and innovation management firm Spigit, the agency launched a crowdsourcing initiative called UNHCR Ideas which solicited ideas from employees, partners, and academic partners around the world about how to improve access to the agency's services. Instead of doing a top–down review of how services functioned in the field, UN leadership decided to reverse the process and crowdsource improvements in their access and logistics protocols. Through the Spigit software package, researchers at the UN were able to identify broad trends and common complaint issues that the agency could remedy.
In an interview with Fast Company, Spigit CMO Shail Khiyara noted that one of the biggest benefits of his company's products is how it streamlines things for large organizations. "Innovation is the industrial revolution of the 21st century, and it's the lifeblood of many organizations. Organizations don't usually have a way of soliciting innovation from employees, vendors, and contractors at the same time. We give them a structure," Khiyara said. Spigit's software (and those of competitors like Brightidea) serve as a sifting mechanism for innovation management at large organizations––the idea is to use technology to create a clear path for performance enhancing– or money–saving institutional improvements.
Since UNHCR Ideas began on August 13, over 300 people have participated in brainstorming, primarily on improving access to information and services for refugees in urban areas. The bulk of UNHCR's participants gave advice on services in Ethiopia, Kenya, and India. Part of the process for the refugee agency involves Google Hangouts with stakeholders worldwide, where they share insights and suggestions. An archive of one of the Hangouts is shown below:
Spigit's stock in trade is offering mobile– and desktop–based innovation crowdsourcing products for large bureaucracies like Fortune 1000 corporations and government agencies. By using big data analytics and decentralized crowdsourcing, the idea goes, organizations can find and repair weak spots more quickly than by bringing in high–priced consultants. There's also the idea the organizational stakeholders––employees and partners––feel more involved in improving things when they're the ones giving the suggestions. For the UN Refugee Agency, which has a legendarily slow–moving bureaucracy, turning to crowdsourcing was a necessary step to improve functionality.
A similar process took place at another large organization, UnitedHealthcare. The health insurance giant turned to Spigit's platform to streamline internal processes–primarily those dealing with appeals of insurance decisions. Because their organization is so large and spread out, turning to a formal innovation platform gave the company a manageable way of sorting employee suggestions and implementing them.
At United, the innovation management platform was used to identify improvements without turning to outside consultants. "We push it out to employees to gather ideas, and alongside ideas we focus on fostering collaboration among employees––it's an issue of crowdsourcing, filtering and identifying solutions for us. Filling that need with a solution like Spigit helps employees feel like they are contributing to improvement," said United's Brandon Rowberry in an interview. Greg Hicks, the company's director of innovation, added that Spigit was rolled out to all employees worldwide––even development team members in India and Brazilian health insurer affiliate Amil.
But in the end, the major issue to think about is how Spigit occupies a market niche that shouldn't even exist. For a large institution––whether it's the United Nations' refugee agency or a large health insurer––to have to bring in an outside company to create an institutional pipeline for innovation means there's a structural flaw in that company or agency which needs to be fixed. Simply put, innovation shouldn't require software platforms.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the number of people served by UNHCR; it is 10.5, not 10.4 million under the mandate of UNHCR along with a larger population of forcibly displaced.
In probably just a few short weeks, the biggest change to iOS will be rolling out across iPhones, iPads, and iPods all over the world. Whether or not you're a fan of the new visual design, iOS 7 is shaping up to be a groundbreaking mobile OS. It's got dozens of killer new features for users and over 1,500 brand–new APIs for developers. It's also going from skeuomorphic to flat in one fell swoop.
What all that means for a developer who is transitioning their app to fully take advantage of the new OS is that they have their work cut out for them. But is it worth it? What are the pros and the cons of getting your app ready for Apple's new OS?
I talked to seven developers who gave me their opinion. Here's what they had to say.
Cons: "Transitioning from one version of iOS to another is always a challenge. Not because the new API features are difficult to understand, but because you as a developer get so excited with the new possibilities that you almost forget you have to support previous versions––meaning, all these new cool developer "gadgets" (APIs) are not available for people who haven't upgraded yet (or won't). If you have built a strong customers base you unfortunately cannot force them to update just like that.
One of the cons when preparing the app for iOS 7 is having to change somewhat the way you think about animations in screen and image processing. Things can be very simplified with the new APIs, if you're a developer in the image processing category, like me. With iOS 7 your app does gain value from cool animation and other UI tweaks, so you don't want to miss the chance of integrating cool–looking features. But there is a learning curve––a bigger one this time––that makes this task a big one. Sure, you can keep your UI as it is, but everyone else is going to study all the new, cool, innovative ways to show off content and change their UI and animations to build more attractive apps, so why not you?"
Pros: "On the pros side are creativity––both stylish and programatic; simplicity––again, both stylish and programatic; and a number of interesting solutions to the most common problems we developers face daily. Apple doesn't upgrade just to raise a number, they dig really deep into what developers struggle with on their current apps and try to simplify everything they can. By doing that, you as a developer get presented with wonderful new tools, and Apple––responsible for the hardware and operating system––gets stability, high performance, and attractiveness into their products.
I cannot think of better times than these for a developer to solve problems and create great–looking, fast–working apps for the most beautiful devices in the world. I love iOS 7 and it is going to set a big mark for mobile development."
Cons: "Supporting iOS 7 is major investment. We've been working nonstop on our iOS 7 since the WWDC. This has delayed other improvements we planned, but we believe it is well worth the effort to update our design to iOS 7 principles.
One thought I've heard from other developers is that apps should go iOS 7 only. I think that's a big mistake. We're spending the effort required to support iOS 5 through iOS 7 versions in one application. Keeping the loyalty of our installed base is extremely important. A majority of customers will likely switch to iOS 7 inside of a few months, but some will take longer, and it's worth helping them through the transition."
Pros: "Following the iOS 7 design principles of deference, clarity, and depth will lead to better applications. The timing was great for us, because our apps were due for a user interface update after four years of functionality–focused updates.
Platform transitions like these separate the great developers from the good developers. Software development is a marathon, and the competition may stumble in this transition."
Cons: "Talking about pros/cons of moving apps on iOS 7 we touch two points here––writing new apps and making existing iOS 6 apps compatible with iOS 7. Taking existing apps––it is not even pros/cons; it is a need because if you don't make an app compatible with a new version of iOS you will have problems when people start upgrading. Taking new apps––I would say the term 'moving apps to iOS 7' means creating apps with features that appear in iOS 7. From this point I would say we have pros/cons. The cons are:
iOS 7 is formally compatible with the still–popular iPhone 4, but really it runs very slowly on it. This means a loss of audience. Many people will not upgrade because of that and if you set your app target as iOS 7 you lose those people. Likewise, iOS 7 is not officially compatible with the iPhone 3GS and similar iPods. Many people will not upgrade and if you set your app target as iOS 7–– meaning you lose those people as well.
The UIKit framework in the iOS 7 SDK is quite different from several previous versions. As a result many standard UI controls look different. Sometimes it is just not good–looking and sometimes it looks buggy. So you will have to fix/re–implement/re–release, which is extra effort.
Some of the new key features announced are only compatible with a limited number of devices––those being the most recent ones. Even if a device is compatible with iOS 7 some features are not available. For example, let's say AirDrop is not compatible with iPad 2, iPad 3, iPhone 4/4S and similar iPods. If your app is using the AirDrop SDK some people will miss this functionality and you as a developer will have to put extra effort to determine the type of the device and implement additional logic to prevent the app from crashing and also alert people that 'this feature is not available for your type of device,' which is upsetting for customers."
Pros: "But generally every time something new comes up it has to do with the breaking of something existing––it is normal flow of things. Some of the pros of iOS 7 are: Cool new features are available for the most recent Apple mobile devices, such as AirDrop, 60 FPS video recording, etc.––so apps can be more functional when running on particular devices. Also, multitasking allows loading assets in the background, which leads to more efficient processor performance use. That means apps can be more independent and do some stuff while inactive. Finally, all the new social networks support means your app will be more functional in this important area."
Cons: "We are a team of four indie developers and make high–quality utility/productivity/imaging apps (as opposed to games/marketing freebies). As a consequence, it is imperative that we follow the move toward the new design of iOS 7. We have mostly focused on a single app only for now. It's an app that we just released in May 2013 as version 2.0 after a one–year development effort. It is very important to us that our app integrates nicely in the new OS, so that it feels right at home.
With that being said, the move to iOS 7 was not expected. At least, not with the kind of effort required for existing apps (it would be much easier for new apps, I suppose). We had to change the schedule of most of our future developments. It's hard to say if that will be worth it business–wise, yet we expect that not making that effort will harm the business. More, being coherent with the platform is a plus for our users. So we do it. We are basically releasing an unscheduled major release in three months.
Our app makes use of text––a lot of text––and there are many changes on that front (for the better, much closer to the Mac now). That required a lot of effort to adapt.
It's difficult to make design choices with so little prior knowledge and examples. We experimented a lot. We would have liked to see more stuff. Apple's apps are not always very good in the beta by themselves, nor are they coherent: paper texture (Reminders, Notes) in a flat world?
Also, some APIs are not documented and difficult to get. Some of them show the main iPhone background (which makes sense in the transparent world of iOS7), yet that feature seems to not be allowed in third–party apps (well, actually, Apple does not say anything about it when we asked). In summary: It's hard to be an early adopter as a developer."
Pros: "We started development with a bad mood. We didn't like many of the design choices Apple had made (the three of us were quite depressed when leaving the Keynote in June, seeing the new icons, etc.). Then upon using the iOS 7 beta, we were surprised to like those changes more and more (there remain things we don't like, though).
So made a new icon for our app, for more coherence with the new OS. Then we removed most textures and custom designs. That was pretty easy. The challenge now is to find the right color palette, and subtle animations. 'Less chrome' does not mean 'no chrome.' We have to be coherent with the new design language. Supporting both iOS 6 and iOS 7 seems to be very difficult, and we decided to focus only on iOS 7. That makes it easier to use the new stuff too (like speech synthesis, out–of–app downloads, etc.).
This iOS 7 announcement and following development phase has been a eye–opener, though. What many people would have considered poor or bad design just six months ago will soon be considered the norm."
Cons: "Not too many. Though the development costs for revamping GUI and code were higher than expected. Also, listening to Android users bitch is never fun."
Pros: "We think iOS 7 looks more modern, which means developers will push their apps' visuals and processing to suit the new paradigm––so that's good. Also, I think we'll see a potential surge in app downloads and updates because users will be inclined to use iOS 7–specific features. As for the SDK itself, the ability to process things in the app background, though still limited, is welcomed. There's also better control and handling of the app GUI, improved iCloud handling of data, AirDrop for sharing documents to other devices, and extended OpenGL capabilities, which means graphic objects can be rendered faster."
Cons: "The first time we launched our app in iOS 7, it didn't take long to realize we had a much larger project on our hands than originally anticipated. It looked out of place. It felt out of place. And like a lot of developers, we immediately went to work updating our app for Apple's most ambitious iOS update yet.
A lot has been written about the content–centric approach of iOS 7, and it's true that it does everything in its power to remove chrome and superfluous items. Over–designed apps are going to stand out like a sore thumb, as if they are legacy versions being run in a simulator. And even though our app puts content first and has a minimal design, switching to Helvetica and putting our icons on a diet did little to make it feel like a good iOS 7 citizen.
One of the biggest challenges we encountered was to follow the new design gestalt without becoming too generic and sterile. A lot of early release apps are going to suffer from all looking the same, by taking the safe approach. Knowing when to break the rules and add something that's not off the shelf will be key. Of course, this has always been the case, but so much has changed and everyone is scrambling to find their footing. And on the code side, it doesn't help that many of the new APIs are still in the process of being documented, and sometimes even change between releases. Getting up to speed is taking time, and because of this there's a casualty: support for older versions of iOS.
Like many other developers, we've decided our next update will be iOS 7–only. We're small and have limited resources, and can't support both. Trying to create a 'hybrid' app that bridged the chasm was immediately shelved. We were compromising both versions, and neither felt 'right.' But we are lucky, the current version of (app redacted) is fairly feature complete. If a customer has an old phone that can't run iOS 7, they will still have a great app that feels at home on their phone. I imagine a lot of devs that have less mature apps will be in a tougher spot."
Pros: "On the flip side, our developer has been able to rip out a ton of custom code that is now supported through APIs. Something that might have taken days to get right can be accomplished in minutes. Typography and physics controls are more fully baked in, which saves a lot of effort. It means we get to focus on additional features, fine–tuning, and testing. We have more time to sweat the details and make revisions. Our developer told me, 'If the typography is shitty, you can't blame me or the OS.' He's right––so I've been spending too many hours making sure line spacing and kerning and the page balance is just right, and I love it. We've decided to license a font from the Font Bureau because the typographic controls are wonderful. We think it's money well spent.
WIth iOS 7, customers are going to expect a much higher level of fit and finish. Developers that think they can simply spend a day putting a coat of paint on their apps will pay the price."
Cons: "iOS 7 is, by far, Apple's most disruptive update. Up until now, the process of migrating an application from a previous version of iOS to a new version of iOS was pretty painless. In most cases, your application would 'just work' for the majority of applications. However, with iOS 7, Apple finally made the decision to make a necessary break from the past in order to move their platform forward. It's definitely a win for Apple and will be a win for app developers as well, but not without some pain.
Probably the biggest source of uncertainty for most developers is going to be around the design and look–and–feel of their apps. In general, unless an app is a game or a custom full–screen app, I recommend that folks get with the times as quickly as possible, otherwise their designs will look very outdated. The best way to think about this is to imagine that the older versions of iOS never existed and that Apple just released iOS and it looks like iOS 7 and to design your app accordingly. This will be a huge context shift for a lot of designers, but it brings iOS up to date with and possibly moves it beyond current design trends and so the new look and feel of iOS 7 won't be going away. Apple will be shifting everything they do toward this new design scheme.
From a coding perspective, developers are going to have to deal with really annoying user interface layout issues. When building existing applications against the iOS 7 SDK, designers and developers will have to review every screen of their application in detail to find potential layout/display quirks. In particular, Apple has changed how the status bar at the top of the screen is treated within apps, and this is going to cause a lot of headaches. Previously, this area was off limits (although you could hide the status bar if you wanted to), but now apps are expected to use this area of the screen for display purposes, so it's a dramatic shift for applications."
Pros: "There's some really fun stuff in iOS 7 though, which includes background tasks and peer–to–peer Bluetooth functionality and new ways of handling text. The new peer–to–peer stuff is really interesting because it will make it easier for an app to do fun things between devices when those devices are close by. You used to have to jump through a lot of hoops to get this to work. Background tasks are really great as well since this brings iOS a little more inline with Android. Essentially, apps can now request more designated time to run in the background every so often in order to fetch new data from a server or do anything else that the app developer feels will enhance the experience of the application and potentially save their user some time. My one concern here with background tasks, though, is battery life, especially older devices with already–worn–out batteries. Some users might wonder why their phones are losing power more quickly with iOS 7 and might not be aware that a ton of apps are now periodically scheduled to execute in the background. Apple originally restricted this to save battery life but is starting to open the floodgates. Time will tell.
In short, I recommend that folks get going on iOS 7 support as soon as humanly possibly. Staying exclusively on iOS 6 isn't an option and keeping your current app design isn't an option either. Apple will be switching over its development toolchain to Xcode 5, and once that happens it will be painful for developers to keep two development environments going simultaneously. I find it's always best to switch over to Apple's newest tools as soon as Apple lets you submit to the App store using them (which is usually just before they come out of beta). I also recommend that folks drop iOS 4 and 5 support pretty much immediately. Supporting these versions of iOS at this point result in a very small return on investment. I think the adoption to iOS 7 is going to be fast and so I'd recommend that most folks stop supporting iOS 6 by early next year as it's going to be worth to keep their user interfaces up to date on iOS 6."
Take a lot of pictures with your mobile phone? We do, too, and it's not easy backing them all up to a safe place. ICloud's okay for syncing photos across devices, but you can't (freely) save all of your iPhone photos with it. The situation is probably worse for Android. A quick Google search reveals users desperate for ways to back up their photos. Too many of us leave our valuable photos living exclusively on our phones. Don't do it!
Here are several options to help you automate the process of backing up all the photos automatically to the cloud, pretty much as you take them on your phone.
Everpix provides a repository exclusively for photos, regardless of source. Accounts are free and unlimited in size, but photos are stored on a revolving 12–month basis, plenty of time to decide if you find the service useful. Photos aren't deleted, but after the one–year period, they're locked. You'll need to pay for a subscription, $4.99/month, for access to all of your older photos.
The standard sharing options are all available, including the ability to share photo mail to other Everpix users, create a photo page accessible on the web, and create a photo book through Mosaic. There are also additional features that make the Everpix service more useful. For instance, "Flashback" shows you photos taken one year earlier on the given day.
Everpix is able to import photos directly from services like Gmail, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter, which is absolutely delightful. You can, for instance, automate the import of Photos you're tagged in on Facebook. Gmail photo attachments in your Inbox will also show up automatically, which is practically magical.
Updated: Everpix is currently iOS only, but an Android photo uploader is coming 8/29/13 with other platform versions planned as well.
The Google+ service includes both social network–style shared photos and private photos as part of your Google+ account. By installing the Google+ app on your iOS or Android device, you can set up automatic backup of photos and video to a private photo album that's part of your Google Drive space quota. Backup is setup automatically for Android users, while iOS users need to give the app access to their camera roll. For Android devices, Google offers full–size backups while iOS is limited to a max pixel length of 2048. Full–size images count against your Google Drive space quota, while standard size images do not.
Automatic photo backup to a social network isn't ideal, but you can think of this automatic service as part of Google Apps through Google Drive (which is confusing, but that's how Google does it). At the same time, the aren't many Android options that are free, automatic, and that work seamlessly. Facebook's mobile app also provides automatic photo backups, but then you really are using a social network for archival purposes.
Loom is currently in a limited beta, but you can sign up to reserve a spot. Loom claims to be solving a different problem than other services. Not just photo sharing, but better tools to organize and manage a photo library. There's still overlap with existing services.
For instance, like Everpix, Loom is a cloud–based service dedicated to photographs (video will follow). Like Dropbox, Loom creates a file folder on your desktop that syncs with your account. Like Google+, free accounts have a 5GB storage limit, and you can expand that by paying a monthly subscription.
While in beta, Loom is iOS– and Mac OS X–only, but they plan to expand. They're focused on creating clean, highly useable apps, and don't yet have as many features as other services. But in the long run, they intend to compete against freemium services, such as Flickr and 500px, so keep your eyes on Loom.
Ever since Dropbox implemented automatic photo backups, it's been the most obvious choice for Dropbox users. It's extremely popular, there are versions for all the major mobile and desktop operating systems, and people find it easy to use. Turning on the feature creates a "Camera Uploads" folder in your Dropbox, and opening the app triggers an automatic upload of all new photos taken since your last upload. You can use your Camera Uploads folder for manual uploads from any source, as well. Dropbox provides 2GB of free storage, which is less than some others, but boasts bulletproof apps for every platform.
Stream Nation is the result of a year's study of existing services by a cofounder of Deezer, a web–based music streaming site. The Stream Nation home page sums up the service quite succinctly: "stream, share, and store your photos & videos securely."
The streaming aspect makes this feel more like a media storage center than the other services. This can also be felt in the interface, which has a more technical focus on formats and resolutions. There are simply more options and more flexibility with Stream Nation, including desktop applications, plug–ins, web apps, and iOS apps.
Stream Nation has a unique way of enticing users to try out the more advanced features. You're rewarded with additional storage space for going through the tutorials. You can go from the standard 2GB, all the up to 10GB of free storage. There are numerous paid subscription plans, including 500GB for $9.99/month, an incredible bargain compared to the plans of other vendors.
Stream Nation is especially good for those focused on video, but it might be overwhelming for the more casual photographer. The UI lacks cohesiveness, and the options layout can be confusing at first, though nothing that would prevent a more advanced or savvy user from making good use of the service.
If you're phone is unsupported by these apps or you don't want every picture saved, IFTTT may be your best option for automatic backups. The name, IFTTT, is an acronym for If This Then That, and the service is essentially a channel–based scripting tool. You use it to create recipes that trigger actions, like automatically backing up photos.
An account to use the service and web app is free. There's also an iOS app, but no Android app, yet. Try setting up a trigger to save your Instagram or Facebook photo uploads to your Dropbox or SkyDrive. When you post photos to Flickr have them automatically save to another cloud service. Or have a Vimeo upload backed up somewhere besides your mobile device.
The beauty of the service is in its flexibility. Even better, if you aren't able to create exactly the automated photo backup recipe you want, you can get help from IFTTT.
In the digital world, things are not always what they seem. Even the most ordinary and inanimate objects, everything from street lights to cereal boxes, are being transformed into software platforms that can be "programmed" to give us a limitless number of new ways to interact with them. Programmable things are also often able to understand us better, through sensors and data collection capabilities. This isn't vaporware; the growing programmability of our world can be seen everywhere today.
Let's start with 10 ordinary objects that the average person encounters on a daily basis, which are already programmable in today's digital world. Once "average" objects will become a developer's digital playground at a rapid pace, led by new innovation, imagination, and smart technology advances. In the next two years we are going to see a wave of programmable "things" that we wear, pass, and interact with in our everyday lives. Things like:
Streetlights: A far cry from candlelit lanterns used to light early travel routes, or electric or solar lighting, companies like Intellistreets have introduced "smart lights," which automatically dim as conditions change––not only conditions like the brightness of the sun, but also the dynamic traffic and conditions of streets and sidewalks. Tvilight is also innovating in the smart streetlight category by programming lamps to interact with ambulances, flashing red when they're nearby to alert drivers to pull over.
Cars: Companies like GM OnStar are already developing technology that allows cars to "communicate" tire quality, motor health, fluid levels, and more to drivers and even to manufacturers. This connected technology can actually pull and aggregate this type of data into visual messages on the car's dashboard with the power of APIs, while also connecting to available parts out there and even to OnStar's headquarters. To look further out, the next phase of smart cars in the world will even be able to sense driver reactions to driving conditions, such as braking fast on ice and recommend in real time how to counteract sliding.
Watches: The Pebble and PH Technical Labs' new watch have become programmable wear, and a new platform enabling application developers to create specialized content for the consumer. The Pebble offers custom applications that can track your running time, check your golf range, and even act as your music controller for your MP3 player. These simple but incredibly personal applications open the door to using watches as a larger programmable platform, one that sits right on the consumer's body all day long.
Roads: The Connected Vehicle Safety Pilot in Ann Arbor, Michigan is already testing vehicle–to–vehicle and vehicle–to–infrastructure intercommunication. Using intelligent railings and painted road lines that can sense and communicate with one another, relevant information can be pushed to both the car and driver in real time. Data pulled from these road sensors can alert a driver to speed, traffic, accidents, weather, and road conditions, preventing potential accidents, making traffic more efficient and keeping the driver informed beyond what they can see through the windshield and rearview mirror alone.
Tires: Manufacturers like Goodyear and Michelin are integrating new technology into tires. Tapping into the cloud, new applications, and tire data, Goodyear has created Air Maintenance Technology that proactively monitors tire pressure and performance, while optimizing fuel economy and overall life of the tire. Michelin also recently announced its fleet monitoring technology, utilizing cloud application services that track and monitor fuel efficiency, tire management, and vehicle productivity solutions.
Cereal Boxes: As seen in this short YouTube video, yes, even cereal boxes can be programmed. The ultimate family marketing platform for decades (think prizes, sweepstakes, and collectibles), the power of simple electricity was used to illuminate the colors and characters right on the cereal boxes in this example. Most any consumer packaged good could be programmed to grab the attention of, and interact with, consumers, right from the grocery or retail store shelf.
Parking Meters: Cities like San Francisco have incorporated smartphone technology, Near Field Communication (NFC), and the PayByPhone app for smarter street parking. Thanks to APIs, drivers no longer have to scrounge for change but can simply swipe their smartphone across a parking meter to pay. In the next stage, we may see phone companies adapt to this new type of phone interaction by delivering their own applications to make smartphones more like a charge or debit card, and the phone bill more like a credit card bill, redefining the way the phone is used and creating stronger value to the consumer.
Power Grid: The Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability has adopted technology and two–communication and undergone an initiative to "computerize" the electric utility grid, to gather network sensor data from the grid (i.e., meters, voltage, etc.). Smart power grids, or "smart grids" are interesting from a technology standpoint, but also from an environmental standpoint, as they have great potential to address resource waste and efficiency. By 2015, there's set to be 65 million
"smart meters" installed, over half of U.S. households, highlighting the growing interest in technological advancements in the power grid for consumers.
Bikes:Autobike is changing the way people ride by attaching a computer to the bike. Riders no longer have to worry about shifting gears, as sensors monitor their angle and speed and automatically change the gearshift. The computer chip onboard opens the door to new programmable possibilities for the traditional two–wheeler. Imagine maps and GPS, tire–pressure monitoring, and ride distance data, all linked to the rider's smartphone.
Shoes:Nike+ and Adidas' miCoach combine the athlete with new technology, allowing the sharing of data directly from inserts in the shoe to a smartphone. Approaching the shoe as a programmable platform already allows runners and other athletes to capture speed, distance, and more through a shoe's movement and pressure, in addition to competitive feedback, data benchmarking, and sharing features. This data aggregation offers specialized communication from shoe to device, all powered by APIs. Professional athletes will be able to use this technology to share their stats directly with fans, who can then test their own skills and benchmark against their favorite sport stars.
Smart cereal boxes, and even smart shoes may seem less significant to the world, but smart cars, bikes, roads, and even streetlights have the potential to change the way people travel and prevent unnecessary accidents, saving lives in the long run.
This is only the start––the next time you step out your front door, drive a car, or ride a bike, look around and imagine what else is possible. It's a programmable world.
Brian Mulloy is the director of Apigee Labs for Apigee and brings over 15 years of experience ranging from enterprise software to founding a web startup. He cofounded and was CEO of Swivel, a website for social data analysis. He was president and general manager of Grand Central, a cloud–based offering for application infrastructure (before we called it the cloud).
It has a Hollywood face––Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow, Zach Galifianakis––these are the people that make us die laughing. Another 50 people in L.A. work to keep the familiar faces pumping funny out to the online world. But the show lives or dies in an unfunny San Mateo, CA basement––rows of Macs, accumulated junk food, a kegerator––this is where about 20 engineers, designers, plus product and marketing people built and maintain the technology platform.
This oil–and–water combination of Silicon Valley and Hollywood makes FunnyOrDie a unique success story: the less–is–more agile, lean philosophy of startups poured over a big–budget business ethos. In an environment of over–hyped and under–researched projects, building killer technology has proven to be as effective as any straight man at keeping the laughs coming.
But like any popular video site, FunnyOrDie has serious growing pains, and a complete platform overhaul is scheduled for release next month. FastCo.Labs spoke with Mitch Galbraith, Patrick Starzan, and Ken Scott–Hlebek, who run the Silicon Valley office, to discuss the revamp and get a look inside the web's funniest startup.
Why was the site being revamped?
Mitch: The main reason for this overhaul is that FunnyOrDie launched as an experiment in 2007, but today it's evolved into a successful brand which encompasses not only the web, but also TV, movies, and games, not to mention mobile playing a much larger role. The product hasn't kept pace with this brand expansion.
We did a big overhaul of all our web and mobile products last week, and over the next few months will be rolling out new projects outside of the web. For example, one area where you'll see a lot more content is in the Pictures and Words part of the site. We've also now gone into films much more than we were six years ago. We've lined up financing to produce a slate of nine feature–length films with Scott Films over the next few years.
We're now into TV pretty heavily and have lots of new material lined up. We've got a new show that's going to be broadcast at midnight on Comedy Central right after The Colbert Report. It will be a "live" Twitter–based show where three comedians are going to compete live on Twitter trivia. We have a new six–part TV series on IFC in production called Spoils of Babylon, and a bunch more that have not yet been announced. We've created an eponymous card game in partnership with Hasbro, which is a take on Cards Against Humanity which recently became available in Walmart and Toys "R" Us.
Patrick: We're also launching the Oddball Comedy Tour, which will go to 13 different locations headlined by Dave Chappelle & Flight of the Conchords. It's going to be like the Lollapalooza of comedy tours. We're hoping this will become a yearly thing.
We're going to increase "thematic" projects planned in advance for holidays like for Halloween. One such example we're working on is "Bear week"––a take on Discovery Channel's popular Shark Week which we're really excited about.
So with all this growth and changes to our original idea of FunnyOrDie, an overhaul like this was long overdue.
Can you tell us about the beginning?
Mitch: Yes, this is something not many people know of. In April 2007, Sequoia Capital along with a few entrepreneurs launched Funny Or Die's first prototype not far from Stanford's campus. Once completed they sent out an email to their friends; it immediately went viral and crashed the server. Despite its Hollywood image, FunnyOrDie had a very Silicon Valley beginning very much like the early days of a Facebook or a Google.
Instead of doing it the Hollywood way by partnering with a studio and finding a producer, we followed the Lean startup philosophy and launched that first prototype with a couple of low–budget videos to see if the public would first love the concept. Had we waited to partner with a big–budget Hollywood production studio, there's no telling if the idea would have taken off at all. This initial act has set the tone for the company. So in true startup form, it started off as this really small really scrappy idea with no funding, no employees.
Any interesting stories from back then?
Ken: Absolutely, at that time, a yet–to–be–launched search company called SearchMe was one of Sequoia's portfolio companies (Michael Kvamme's father was a Partner at Sequoia) . Since we didn't have any resources or a team in place, we tapped the CEO of that company, Randy Adams, to help build the site. As I mentioned, there was immediate traction upon launch and we didn't have any resources at our disposal to handle that load (this was pre AWS, Rackspace, etc). But out of sheer luck Randy had a few hundred servers he'd already procured for his startup; as the site caught on fire over the next few weeks, he increased their capacity to five, then 10, then 50, and eventually a 100 servers before the site stabilized. It was incredibly fortunate that we had those servers at our disposal and avoided a meltdown.
Why have two offices: Hollywood and Silicon Valley?
Mitch: From the early days that was this vision for this company, to have one foot in Silicon Valley and one in Hollywood. We wanted to make sure we had the best of both worlds talentwise.
It's been a tough road for entertainment startups, there haven't been many that have cracked the nut. For example, back during the first bubble you had a lot of entertainment companies trying to have a tech component and vice versa, and that didn't work out so well. Then again in 2007 when YouTube got that great valuation, it lit up a lot of interest and dozens of startups jumped into the video/entertainment space; very few of them still exist. It's difficult because it's almost two completely different sets of business practices; we understood this from the beginning and we set off to try to do both the right way from the start.
We structured the company this way so we could get the best entertainment talent in L.A., and the best talent in tech and online marketing here in Silicon Valley. Also, we've been doing social media marketing since 2007 when we launched. It's a big part of our marketing, it's how we reach our audience and the reason we were able to use it so well is because being here in the Valley we're all innately passionate fans of Twitter and devices and early adopters in general. We know that when you get in on the ground floor of things, i.e., when you run into the founders of these companies serendipitously, you really understand what these technologies can do for you before anyone else.
Has this two–office structure contributed to your success?
Patrick: In some ways you can think of the success of the company coming from taking the Lean practices of startups and applying it to Hollywood. Studios routinely greenlight pilots for millions of dollars that may or may not turn into a show. That's a pretty sizeable investment in something that's not a definite. FunnyOrDie's approach is to produce a video for couple thousand dollars and produce a lot of these; some of these then might actually turn into something bigger and eventually into TV shows, which is what's happened.
Ken: We make around 25 to 30 videos a month. There are some in which we put a lot of budget into, but for the most part, a majority of our videos are built very cheaply and very quickly. In fact, it's not unusual for someone to walk in with an idea for a video in the morning and have a video produced by the end of that day. This is something traditional Hollywood knew nothing of and it's turned Hollywood on its ear a little bit.
Now the Lean startup method is ubiquitous, fashionable even, but that sort of task–measure–iterate approach where you make small investments in a number of different things, find some bright spots and follow those, was part of our DNA right from the beginning. And that's one of those things that often gets overlooked for us. We seem like an entertainment company, but that's what we do behind the scenes.
What kind of proprietary tech have you developed?
Ken: One morning Patrick walked in and had this idea. He said he'd been watching TV and noticed that most shows and commercials display hashtags in them. So his idea was that we should try displaying hastags right inside our videos, but make them so they're clickable from inside the video itself. The whole reasoning behind hashtags on TV is to aggregate a conversation about them online.
His thought was that instead of waiting for people to hatch a hashtag and possibly have a conversation online, why not just make it happen by embedding a clickable hashtag in the video itself? This would then enable them to have a conversation and aggregate it. This would take away the thinking part for their users.
So he paired up with one of the engineers and the two of them sat down and it was up on production that afternoon. In total it took six hrs to turn around. They embedded a hashtag in the corner of their videos for users to hover over. When users clicked on it, it opened up the Twitter share window with the short URL along with the hashtag. This allowed them to become much more successful with getting things to trend on Twitter by removing all friction for users.
Within 24 hours Twitter called us and asked how FunnyOrDie was suddenly getting so much Twitter traffic, and they started using this as a best–practice example. At the end of the day it was so successful that Patrick ended up filing a patent for it.
Patrick: Yeah, it's because we were here and we understood social media before anyone else and that it would become a great distribution channel for us. We launched around the same time as Twitter, and when we would go down to L.A. and tell them about Twitter all excited and stuff, their attitude was like, "We have no idea what you geeks are talking about but knock yourself out with this tweeting thing." As a company, we were early adopters of all these platforms and became proficient in them at that time. And it's been very successful for us because the overarching model for us has been producing great products at a low cost. So social media for us from a marketing perspective was just fantastic.
Here are some relevant social stats––we're nearing the 100th largest Twitter following, we're in the top 15 brands on Twitter, the #1 comedy brand on Twitter, and are a top 10 property worldwide in the Humor Category of Comscore. We're also doing really well on Tumblr and Facebook. A big part of that is that we're based here and we're building personal relationships with the people who are building innovative solutions… and experimenting with things that you can hear about at a tech meetup or a VC cocktail party… and other things that happen just because they're in this community.
Has being here made any difference to the bottom line? Has it helped you make any money?
Patrick: Well, since you asked, I have a better story for you. As you might know, one of the big things we do every year is an April Fools' prank and everybody contributes to this. The first one was in 2008, we did this thing where we ran a story saying Reba McEntire bought FunnyOrDie… and that it was now called Reba or Die… and we added Reba into every video that day and it was awesome. We didn't tell her but fortunately she had a good sense of humor and thought it was funny as well."
So the obvious advantage of being in Silicon Valley is that almost everyone on the team here is a former founder or entrepreneur. So one of the engineers proposed this––instead of using the standard blank image avatar for when a user doesn't upload a photo, why not replace all those with pictures of Reba McEntire? So he found like 40 photos of Reba, cropped them to the right sizes… and so there were 40 random photos of Reba… so it looked like there were a whole bunch of "Rebas" on the site all over the place. People loved it so much that even though the April Fools' section shut down after a day or two, that part was kept around, because we couldn't bear to part with it. It was so much more fun seeing these random pictures of Reba than seeing "no photo available."
And then we did it the next year too, and at that point the same engineer who came up with the original idea thought that this could be something we could sell. So he approached the sales team and asked if they would be interested in selling those avatars as a package, an idea they completely loved… so it became a package called the "Advatars." These were sold to studios and agencies who were trying to promote a movie, for example. When they bought the package, instead of seeing 40 pictures of Reba, users would see 40 different pictures of all the different characters from the film.
Mitch: And so in this subtle way, without really interfering with the user experience, we added value for the advertiser to support the ads and the skins that were already on the site. The beauty of this was that users didn't even have to do any work to see this. If they didn't choose a profile photo (and most don't), many of them get assigned these random photos. So then they get intrigued… and click on the avatar… and get taken to that movie's premier… or they Google it and find out for themselves.
This gave birth to a major revenue model for us––subtle branded entertainment. The centerpiece of it is this piece of content which stands on its own merit first and foremost. But there's a brand message integrated into it and that's been a staple of our ad business, which has been the majority of our revenue… and since early 2009 we've been doing these branded entertainment campaigns.
Are you guys still following the Agile and Lean startup methodology as you scale?
Mitch: Great question. And the answer is yes. For example, let's take Ashton Kutcher's Jobs which premiered recently; we made iSteve, which is a parody on the same subject obviously. iSteve started off as a spoofy web–based trailer, but then turned into a real project––a full–length 80–minute feature film. We distributed it to Hulu in May… and it was one of the top movies on Hulu for that month… and we made a lot of profit on it. We spent less money on this movie than what Jobs probably spent on the food for their stars. We got a lot of backlash for getting a lot of the details wrong, but as Macworld said about iSteve and Jobs, "At least iSteve was trying to be funny". This is definitely something that the Hollywood office picked up from us. The idea of taking chances on these little things and seeing what they become.
Ken: We're constantly testing new stuff like this and around our core product like a typical startup. Whether it's A/B testing around our related videos algorithm… or how to organize our pages… or how to deliver our content so that our pages load faster. And again, I think if we didn't have this startup mentality we think we may never have done all this. Most of our competitors blew through an awful lot of money awfully quickly on things that didn't matter.
From a culture standpoint, it's a best–idea–wins type of company. We have a conversation about why we want to do it and get input on what's the best way to do it. Which is great, because usually the best ideas rise to the top. We get challenged all the time and that just makes us better. We can't underscore the importance startup culture has had on this company. Which in many ways is the antithesis of the way Hollywood works.
What's changing?
Mitch: Some of the changes are due to our evolved brand identity as I mentioned above. So we've updated our logo to reflect that. It still retains the energetic, playful, and irreverent nature of our company, but doesn't look like it was put together in 10 minutes anymore.
Some changes stem from design best practices, like incorporating infinite scrolling into our home page. We've improved our search to live search and considerably improved accuracy and relevancy.
Ken: A major change was upgrading the responsiveness of the site so FunnyOrDie would be fully functional on all mobile platforms. Since we publish all forms of content heavily––text, images, and video––making our platform responsive across all mobile devices was a huge challenge. And because we receive so much traffic from shared links in social media, a good portion of our traffic is on the mobile web.
We've rebuilt our video player from the ground up, moving away from a Flash–based technology to a HTML5–first platform. This allowed us to overhaul our voting feature for videos, which previously were very limited on mobile. Currently you can't vote on embedded content, but the new HTML5 player will make voting available on embedded content as well. Plus, the player itself is much more slick. Given that voting is such an endemic feature (we are FunnyOrDie, after all!), a change like this has been a long time coming.
We will also be changing the way we display our content. Some users want an expanded view… they want to see as much content crammed into a page as possible… and some viewers want a condensed view and want to pick what they want to consume. We don't believe there is a best view… and different people prefer different views… and we're going to experiment what these two densities. In the coming weeks we will also be experimenting with these different densities of content.
AdBlock, a browser extension that filters ads before displaying websites, is running a crowdfunding campaign. They're going to buy advertising to tell people about a world without advertising. They've already raised more than $35,000, and with 27 days to go they're working toward $50,000 and beyond. The goal of the campaign is clearly to gain users, but it has caused them to lose at least one. I've been using AdBlock for more than a year, but I just uninstalled it.
Irony is the centerpiece of the AdBlock campaign and I think it's supposed to seem cute. Use ads to get rid of ads. Post an anti–ad video on a site like YouTube that is supported by ads. Promote an unencumbered open Internet by disabling commenting on your video. Good–humored fun! But noticing all of these aspects of the campaign just freaked me out. I'm a journalist so ad revenues pretty directly pay my bills and rent every month.
I always vaguely knew that it was bullshit for me to use AdBlock, because it was reducing the number of ad impressions I gave to news sites that currently pay me or might in the future. It was especially dumb because there are a lot of people out there who I think should get paid besides me. Journalism can't function if people in the industry aren't fairly compensated. But AdBlock runs so quietly in the background that it wasn't hard to justify. After the initial install I never even had to think about it again. No thought, no guilt.
There is a specific part of the AdBlock campaign video that motivated me to actually click "uninstall" in my Chrome preferences. Matt Krisiloff, an employee at AdBlock, grins as he delivers the lines, "The web is one giant community. We have the power to reshape it to be better for everyone. If the more than 80 million of us who have AdBlock help spread it to the billions who don't we will literally change the entire Internet." Yeah, Matt, you literally will. And it will be terrifying. I don't know if ads are the best way to monetize content production on the Internet, but right now they're the best idea in town, so I don't want to see the last ad I will ever see. ––Lily Hay Newman
As a journalist who also pays my rent (and the occasional Seamless.com order) with writing online, from publications that are in turn primarily funded from ad revenue, I definitely hear what Lily is saying. I have no illusions about the extent to which advertising funds online publications. But I disagree that the net effect of AdBlock would be a worse–off Internet. I'm an AdBlock user, though I have made the choice to specifically disable it on some sites that I want to make sure my clicks are supporting. So it is possible to make that kind of distinction, but by and large Lily is right that AdBlock functions as a "set it and forget it" tool that most people will never revise.
I'm more concerned with what advertising–driven journalism does to the state of our profession. It's why we have click–bait HuffPo tweets, BuzzFeed listicles, and CNN.com running Miley Cyrus twerking at the VMAs as their top story. I'd like to see more journalism that is driven by quality content rather than monetizing eyeballs. Yes, that means we need radical new distribution and publishing models. Yes, no one has really come up with a model better than advertising–per–impression. But isn't there some saying about necessity spawning invention? A critical mass of people using AdBlock would force publishers' hands. Sure, some––lots, probably––of publications would go out of business. Call it growing pains. But the end result would probably be better for digital journalism than maintaining the status quo. ––Jay Cassano
These 3–D printer things sound pretty cool, right? Prototypes printed right on your desktop! All you need is a CAD file (your own or one of thousands from an online database like the Etsy–esque Shapeways) to turn digital dreams to plastic reality. But as 3–D printing becomes more popular, the number of consumer devices available for purchase is exploding. Which one should you buy? Here's a breakdown, by cost, of the best consumer 3–D printers on the market today.
If you're looking to spend under $1,000, don't expect perfect, prototype–ready builds without working for it. If you're okay with sacrificing some quality or assembling your own machine, these models should suit you well.
The cheapest mass–market model available today is the $299 Printrbot Simple. While this model hasn't been professionally reviewed (it only hit the Maker Faire last May), it's an affordable and adorable trial option. At 3.5"x3.5"x3.5", it likely has the smallest build area on the market. Like its bigger brother, the $500 Printrbot Jr., it can only handle PLA filament, not ABS filament (lacking a heated baseplate) and cannot connect via Wi–Fi, relying on a USB cable. Both are basic, light, and perfectly good starter models, but shouldn't be counted on if you need to print medium or high–quality prototypes.
Taiwanese Kinpo Group just announced their XYZprinting line, which includes the vaunted $499 "da Vinci" model. The da Vinci will print using fused filament fabrication (FFF), the same additive manufacturing process as Stratasys's (needlessly trademarked) "fused deposition modeling" (FDM). Although the processes are similar to desktop models that cost upwards of $1,400, the da Vinci has yet to be reviewed for build quality. The da Vinci should be available to order in September, with XYZprinting hoping to ship to the U.S., Japan, and Europe in early 2014 by partnering with local and online retailers based in those countries.
Imagine a cheap, efficient 3–D printer that can print out more 3–D printers. For consumers willing to build their own, the RepRap line of open–source printers includes many options at a number of price points. The catch is that the printers must be assembled, but most parts can be printed out from another machine, meaning that the cost goes down once you've built your first unit. If you're just starting your RepRap printer army, you can order a kit for a Prusa model (for larger projects) for about $439 without printed parts or a kit for a Huxley model (smaller desktop footprint) for about $621.
If GNU and Share–Alike Creative Commons are your jam, these are fabulously cheap options that have been around for long enough to offer quality builds and a dedicated community to troubleshoot your 3–D printing needs. Other open–source 3–D printer kits can be compared here. And the best part about RepRap's hacker community? They'll often post "build days" in metropolitan areas where novices and veterans alike come together with a ton of parts and leave with a printer at the end of the day. You go, hackers.
The mid–$1,000 range offers plenty of choices of machines that strike a good balance between more features, better builds, and ease–of–use. Almost all models at this price range have heated base plates, allowing them to print with ABS material, which has its own advantages and disadvantages compared to PLA.
Though it's an affordable, sleek–looking machine that easily connects to your computer over Wi–Fi, Cubify's entry–level model, the $1,299 Cube, is somewhat disappointing if you want to experiment with your own designs or figure out why a certain design just won't print right. The Cube prints in both PLA and ABS (provided you buy the new, post–2012 model).
The $1,559 Afinia H–Series H479 is a solidchoice in the price range. The H479 has a higher resolution than the Cube, printing at a minimum 150 microns per layer compared to the cub's 200 microns, and prints in both PLA and ABS. Afinia's printer software sits between 3D Systems' sparse printing options and Makerbot's fine–tunable control. Its 5"x5"x5" printing baseplate is comparable to the Cube's.
The Lulzbot AO–101 is another solid choice, primarily distinguished from the competition by its broader (but not taller) printing baseplate (7"x7"x3.9"). It also has a micro SD card slot that designs can be uploaded from, although it lacks Wi–Fi connectivity.
If you really want to get serious, you'll need to spend north of $2,000. You'll get amazing resolution for this price, but to achieve it you'll have to sacrifice speed and, if you venture into industrial–style stereolithography, the number of downloadable printer files available for these models.
The Replicator 2 is still the best sub–$3,000 model when it comes to resolution, offering a minimum of 100 microns to the 125 microns of CubeX, Cubify's midrange model. The replicator can also print in a greater variety of midlevel resolutions than the competition. There's a catch, however: The Replicator 2 achieves that level of accuracy by only printing in PLA, a material that is much less finicky than ABS. The Replicator 2X adds ABS printing functionality, a heated base plate, and a second extruder head for printing in two colors simultaneously, but that drives the price up to $2,799.
While the mid–range Cube is limited, Cubify's higher–end model, the $2,499 CubeX, takes a favorable lead in most reviews over the crowd favorite Makerbot Replicator 2. Reviewers primarily cite the CubeX's larger build area, which is 66% deeper and 33% higher (10.8"x10.45"x9.5" for the CubeX, 11.2"x6"x6.1" for the Replicator 2). The price goes up rapidly if you want a dual– or triple–color model ($2,799 for two–color Replicator 2X, $3,249 for two–color CubeX, $3,999 for three–color CubeX), but the additional modules can be purchased after–market and easily installed.
If you want cutting edge, the Form 1 3–D printer is the best bet. Formalabs's innovative desktop printer dominated its Kickstarter last September, raising 29 times its $100,000 goal, so it's no surprise that the resulting model is sleek and dependable. The Form 1 steps away from the FFF/FDM additive printing, instead opting for an industrial technique called stereolithography. Instead of printing layer by layer, the printer works by pointing a laser through resin, which selectively hardens layers. The process, called photopolymerization, achieves a stunning minimum resolution of 25 microns, but the process takes more time. Switching to stereolithography also means a little bit of hoop–jumping to translate STL files from object databases using a program called PreForm that automatically adds scaffolds to 3–D designs so they can be printed on the Form 1. The resin, which costs $149 per liter (enough to make about 76 chess pieces), is currently only available in clear and gray.
Now this: news that the most tweeted moment in history is not a sporting event, nor a celebrity pregnancy, nor a political election––no, the most tweeted moment ever correlates to the explosion of a cartoon castle on Japanese TV.
"Japan is weird," is how Slate's Will Oremus reacted. To Western eyes, Japanese tweeting behavior looks bizarre (surely the otaku tweeters would be glad to know we think so). But the story raises deeper questions about why Twitter suits the Japanese––and why, based on Western Facebook narcissism, many Japanese might say the same thing about us.
Japan friended Twitter as soon as they met in 2008. But Facebook has fought an often losing battle against local social media sites in Japan since it arrived. The social juggernaut finally caught up with Japan's homegrown Mixi a year ago, but it since shows signs of losing ground. Why? What's different about what the Japanese want from their social media?
Twitter lets users self–efface, some have suggested, while Facebook is about the humblebrag––a major offense in traditional Japanese culture. When Japanese social networkers can enthuse about things that interest them––anime, games, music––without drawing attention to themselves, they seem glad to engage the broader world. But they are often uncomfortable being forced to broadcast their name and face. Homegrown Asian cyber social spaces have known this for years; Western ones might do well to understand.
This month, Twitter announced the latest record set by Japan: During the August 2 airing of the 1986 film Laputa: Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki on Japanese TV, the movie's climax became the most tweeted moment of all time.
The 143,199 tweets posted in sync with the (spoiler alert) magic word "barusu" (バルス) as it destroyed the flying castle, also exploded the previous Twitter record of 33,388 tweets per second. The old Twitter record had been set at the moment of New Year's Eve, 2013––not in Times Square, but in Tokyo. The trend of spamming the word "barusu" in sync with Castle in the Sky's finale began in March 2003, on Japan's message board service 2channel, during the annual broadcast of the anime classic. The events are called "barusu matsuri" (バルス祭り), or "destruction festivals."
Japan has set at least four tweet–per–second records––in the 2010 World Cup game against Cameroon (2,940), the 2010 victory over Denmark (3,283), the 2011 Women's World Cup Final against the U.S. (7,196); and during the 2011 airing of Castle (8,868), a few moments after Beyonce announced her pregnancy at the MTV Music Awards. When Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed, overwhelmed by 100,000 tweets per hour, and Twitter was forced to show users the "fail whale"; That's nothing compared to what Japanese tweeters did in one second this month––143,199 tweets––and yet Twitter held up this time under the onslaught. Apparently the Twitter bird is stronger than the Castle in the Sky. But Miyazaki's Twitter power remains impressive.
You can say a lot more in 140 Japanese characters than you could with roman letters. The word "kokusai," meaning "international" in Japanese, for example, takes just two characters: 国際. This is likely also the reason Twitter has caught on in China––despite being one of more than 2,600 sites blocked by the Chinese governnment. Japan's kanji writing system, made up of 1,945 ideographic characters, is derived from the ancestors of modern Chinese characters. Many symbols are exactly the same as the Chinese.
The tweeter with the highest number of posts on Earth is a 23–year–old Japanese man who calls himself Yougakudan_00, an anime fan, gamer, and programmer who has posted 37,281,273 tweets. If Yougakudan's tweets were strung together, they'd fill roughly 1,887,778 pages. That's 3,000 plus copies of Moby Dick in Japanese, 1,749.5 copies of Infinite Jest, or over 2,000 copies of Haruki Murakami's magnum opus The Wind–Up Bird Chronicle. A hell of a lot of tweeting. What's all the tweeting about?
Japanese Twitter users tweet more to socialize than to broadcast news. As Dutch researchers showed in a 2011 paper, only 4% of Japanese tweets use hashtags, versus 25% in German and 14% in English. Similarly, whereas hyperlinks are included in half of all German tweets, 37% of French, and 30% of English, only 11% of Japanese tweets link. On the other hand, nearly half of all Japanese tweets––and a whopping 77% of Indonesian ones (led by Jakarta, the tweet capital of the world)––include @mentions of other people, versus 28% in German, 24% in Spanish, and 50% in English. Similarly, a quarter of Japanese tweets are replies to others' tweets, similar to the rate in English, versus just 14% in German.
As the authors argue, Twitter behavior shows at least two patterns––degree of structure (tags and links) and communication paradigm––as a "broadcasting channel" or personal messaging. Germans are broadcasters of structured announcements, the archetypical Westerners. Japanese are personal messengers––representative of a broader Asian trend to privacy.
Twitter was discovered for the Japanese audience by a few Tokyo developers and MIT MediaLab director Joi Ito, an early Twitter investor, at the new microblogging platform's SXSW unveiling in March 2007. It was popular since it required minimal English to use, and you could send messages in Japanese by simply skipping a space and adding a period. Another crucial factor: Like Mixi, Japan's homegrown social network platform released in 2004, Twitter let users use fake names and cartoon pictures instead of their real names and photos.
Social sites in Asia, not just Japan, tend to have a focus on gaming, like The Sims and other multiplayer Internet games, or sharing of music and drawings, like Myspace.
CyWorld, the Korean social network site created in 1998, five years before Facebook, incorporated many features, like "mini–homepi" (mini homepage) similar to the Facebook Wall or Timeline familiar to Westerners. But the site works more like a game: Users have avatars who can interact, and buy decorations for their page with coins called dotori (acorns); virtual acorns sell for real money, and are used to pay for background music, pixelated furniture, and virtual appliances for their page. MikuBook, the social media site for the "vocal android" software Hatsune Miku, is likewise oriented around users sharing samples of music, lyrics, animated music videos, and clothing drawings based on Miku, the "virtual diva." Much like the Super Mario Brothers cast––Yoshi, Kupa, Princess Peach, etc.––this social network revolves around playing with a family of cartoon avatars, collaborating on content. IDs are cartoonish, with aliases. The point isn't extending real–life social lives, but creating virtual ones.
"Our users value a social space that is like a living room," Mixi founder and former president Kenji Kasahara told Bloomberg in 2011. "Private, comfortable, and personal."
Facebook worked hard to win over Japanese netizens. After opening the Facebook office in Tokyo in January 2011, Mark Zuckerberg made a stab at cultural understanding. Facebook let Japanese users post their blood type––commonly thought of as a personality marker, like a Zodiac sign, in Japan. This effort was pretty useless, though: Japanese still preferred their anime avatars on Mixi and Twitter to the personal exposure of Facebook.
In February 2011, Facebook had just 2 million registered Japanese users, out of 100 million online. That's 2% penetration, as opposed to 5% in Namibia and Nicaragua. Mixi had 20 million users then (20% penetration), as did the social gaming sites Mobage Town and Gree––another sign of how social networks in Japan are more gaming oriented. Twitter had 10 million users–– five times as many as Facebook. But the tipping point was coming.
The Social Network, David Fincher's movie about Facebook's founding, came out in Japan the same month Facebook set up shop in Tokyo, and grossed more than in any other country but the U.S.
Fast–forward to February 2013, and goo research reported Facebook had more Japanese users than Twitter––39% versus 36% penetration, with Mixi trailing in third place.
Another key tipping point in Japan's social media shift was the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in April 2011. When telecommunications networks were disrupted, the Internet proved the best way to spread emergency information fast, but online identities needed to be not cartoon characters with monikers but people's real names. Hence a surge to Facebook from Mixi.
Twitter also saw a surge in the wake of the tragedy, as did a new messaging app called LINE. Launched in June 2011 by programmers at NHN Japan, a unit of the Korean NHN Corporation, LINE started when the company's business was hampered by the quake. In just over a year, LINE had reached 50 million users. On July 3, 2012, its CEO Akira Morikawa announced new features "Home" and "Timeline"–– allowing users to share recent personal developments with friends and family. Most uniquely, the app also lets users buy and share "stickers"––cute images of cartoon animals, like emoji, tailored to the local audience's nationality. Ramadan–themed characters are available in Indonesia, and in Korea, locally produced designs are unique to the military experience, a mandatory part of growing up there. As the Wall Street Journalreports this week, LINE now claims an 80% overseas user base, including 18 million in Thailand, 17 million in Taiwan, and 15 million in Spain, plus 47 million Japanese users.
Facebook, meanwhile, is proud of the 21 million users it claims in Japan. Despite alarming reports in June––derived from Facebook's own self–service ad tool––that Facebook in Japan had declined by 19.5 percent in half a year, Facebook Japan's new director told the daily Nikkei on August 14 that its numbers are fine: 86% of the 21 million Japanese are using the mobile service (versus the global average 71%), and 72% of mobile Facebook users in Japan use it daily, much higher than the global average, 57%.
Still, when Facebook says it plans to increase its Japan ad presence by 100% in the next year, and launch TV ads there, it's clear they've got LINE on their mind.
No independent data are available for Facebook's latest performance in Japan, but The Guardian, among other media, have reported recent declines in Japan and other markets, especially on Facebook's desktop use. Japanese media have suggested this reflects not just the move to mobile, but a growing disenchanment with what's perceived as Western self–centeredness on social media.
The Japan Times recently reported a study suggesting that using Facebook makes people feel more connected, but less happy. The Tokyo Times in June quoted local users with lackluster attitudes toward Facebook, and enthusiasm for LINE.
"Recently, timelines are just full of the same people boasting about their lives," one Tokyo Facebooker said. "I have got no interest in looking at that anymore."
"LINE is so easy to use, I am tired of Facebook, it is too much of a pain," another said.
Japanese social network users––and perhaps those in other East Asian countries, like CyWorld––seem to want something else from a social media platform: less self–promotion, more content sharing. Silicon Valley startups like Apple, Google, and Facebook––created by Harvard whiz kids or pioneering individualists like Steve Jobs––have something distinctly American about their voice and style, which I believe explains a lot of what has alienated Japanese from Facebook in the past, and may continue to bug them.
I once gushed to a Japanese friend about Jobs's famous Stanford graduation speech––"stay hungry, stay foolish"––about dropping out of school, traveling abroad, taking acid, pursuing his dreams. I won't soon forget her reaction: To my surprise, she wasn't impressed, but disgusted. "What about his family?" she wanted to know. "Does he ever think of anything but himself?"
Facebook may have won some recent battles in Japan, but how it will fare in the war remains to be seen. If it wants to succeed, it would do well to pay attention to its Asian neighbors like LINE, Mixi, and CyWorld, to see how people unlike us might want to connect. Narcissism is not cool there.
The rest of us Facebook and Instagram narcissists might do well, too, to look up from our navels. If we think more about who we're talking to than about ourselves, we may notice how differently people are using communication tools around the world. And may even want to join in.
A small music agency from Portland, Oregon, Marmoset, is quickly becoming part of the solution for many independent bands trying to actually make money off their music. The problem many bands are running into is that despite substantial plays on Spotify or decent album sales, they still aren't able to sustain making music for a living. The most profitable way for bands to earn their keep is to license their music to film and TV producers for commercial use––but most licensing platforms don't speak in terms that Hollywood understands, making it nearly impossible for a small band to get discovered by them, even if their sound is a perfect fit.
But increasingly, there are exceptions. Samsung's Galaxy S3 ad featured music from a small band you probably haven't heard called Kye Kye. Sleeping At Last is another independent musician that regularly has his music featured in commercial work. Most recently it was his cover of "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" used on the show So You Think You Can Dance. That television feature boosted the song to #2 the next day on iTunes' Rock charts.
The music in these ads may seem like background, but commercial producers are relying increasingly on up–and–coming indie bands to lend their spots some creative cred. Services like Marmoset, which supplied the Kye Kye song for Samsung's commercial, help Hollywood discover these bands, and in turn, help those bands make money.
The company creates deals with hand–selected artists and helps them get their music placed in ads, television, and film. If one of the songs from nearly 300 artists they work with isn't good enough either, they also employ their own composers to create custom scores. Founder Ryan Wines, who once ran The Dandy Warhols' record label, and cofounder Brian Hall, are attempting to offer a one–stop shop for hip, youth–credible music for film.
"We've found the challenge with every other music licensing platform that exists is they speak in the language and vernacular of music nerds, instead of speaking the language of film geeks," says Wines. "We like to think of Marmoset as the Rosetta Stone for filmmakers, connecting and translating the music industry to the filmmaker and motion picture worlds."
The musical talent comes from the fair 50/50 that the company offers. Hall, the company's creative director, has also been integral to fostering local independent composers by working with each one–on–one, teaching them the intricacies of writing music for film. For small bands, Marmoset can be a huge meal ticket; the service landed a Super Bowl campaign with Bud Light in their first year in business, and after three years, are already approaching $2 million a year in revenue.
"If you take a step back and look at history of humankind, all the way back to before Christ, and really research things in–depth to find the time period where tons of artists were getting super rich making music––you'll find it was only for a teeny, tiny, tiny blip on the timeline," says Wines. "And if you remove that exception and treat it more as a random anomaly, you'll find music has been more of an art in the classic sense and definition of art and you'll find most musicians throughout the history of humankind have been blue collar artists at best."
Wines says that artists today are stuck on the past––an anomaly in time in which a few musicians got filthy rich. "Today's independent artists would be best served to erase their memories and hit the reset button on things," he says. "Forget everything you know and everything you thought to be true. Stop talking to the old guys about the good old days. Make no assumptions and ask lots of questions."
The company just spent the last eight months working on a new interface that will be central to the way they reach filmmakers big and small. Nearly half of development time was spent hand–tagging and categorizing roughly 10,000 songs for the filtering system that's used to find the right song for any ad campaign or film. During the initial categorization process, the team would regularly sit together, listen, and re–listen, to align themselves for the sake of consistency––something Wines says is the highest priority for a company doing what they do.
This is curation as a business. "One of the two mandatory weekly meetings is called 'The Listening Hour.' It's led by our senior music supervisor and producer, Ron Lewis, who is literally a living and breathing encyclopedia of music, not to mention an accomplished musician––he was a member of the Fruit Bats, the Shins, the Grand Archives and a laundry list of other, more obscure indie bands. The staff goes to a lot of concerts on the company's dime. When you make a living off your taste, it pays to listen closely.
The problem with webmail is that it has to exist somewhere. If it's going to be accessible from any device you have to be able to log in. That means that your credentials are being stored on a server. And those credentials are the key to reading even the most strongly encrypted emails.
"Perfect forward secrecy" works by sending messages between devices in real time, so decryption keys are generated randomly on the fly. Instead of using the same key over and over to encrypt and decrypt messages, the way PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) does for example, secure messaging apps generate random and transient keys that only work and exist in a given moment for a single message. A crucial component of this system, though, is that both parties be in the app and messaging in real time. It is this coordinated connection that differentiates these secure apps from "asynchronous messaging," or communications like email that can be sent at one time and read at another. If the message isn't being stored on a server until the recipient is ready to read it, there isn't a copy of it out there. It only exists locally on the device it was sent to.
But asynchronous messaging is popular and convenient for obvious reasons. Coordinating real–time (synchronous) messaging sessions can be difficult. So with competitors nipping at their heels, the makers of a tool called TextSecure are rolling out upgrades that don't require real–time interaction, but keep the perfect forward secrecy.
With secure communication becoming a bigger, and trendier, priority since revelations about the reach and scope of NSA surveillance, discussion is ramping up about whether webmail can ever be secure. Services like Lavabit have already shut down rather than face the implications of this predicament, namely that if they were subpoenaed they would probably have to give the government the keys to your correspondence castle. Available encryption options, like PGP, have drawbacks and are too involved for the average user. So consumers are turning to encrypted smartphone messaging as an accessible avenue to inaccessible communication.
The Wall Street Journalreported last week that the popularity of encrypted messaging apps like Wickr for iOS and TextSecure for Android has increased dramatically in the last few months. Though neither app would release exact download figures, both are working on expanding to other mobile environments. Wickr is promising an Android app, and TextSecure, which is developed by the open source group Open Whisper Systems, has an iOS release slated for the end of September.
One of TextSecure's developers, who goes by the name Moxie Marlinspike, has created a workaround using a concept called "prekeys." In a blog post about the approach, Marlinspike says:
[In] synchronous messaging systems . . . if someone sends you a message after the app has been out of the foreground for two minutes, you just don't get the message. This results in an awkward scenario. On the other hand, iOS apps like Threema and the proposed Heml support asynchronous messaging, but do not provide forward secrecy.
In the upcoming versions of TextSecure for Android and iOS, users all download 100 prekeys when they install TextSecure. Later when they send a message to someone who is not currently in TextSecure, the app uses information about both users' prekeys to allow the creation of a "shared secret" that is sent with the message. When the recipient goes to retrieve the message, the package contains what they need to decrypt it. Marlinspike explains, "Since the server never hands out the same prekey twice (and the client would never accept the same prekey twice), we are able to provide forward secrecy in a fully asynchronous environment."
TextSecure has competition from Wickr, as well as apps like Silent Text. As the market for secure messaging apps grows, TextSecure's asynchronous messaging with perfect forward secrecy will presumably create competitive pressure for other apps to build out their capabilities and offer increasingly secure environments combined with transparent code.
People's lives and decisions are complicated. And the more they live them online the more ambiguity they introduce. But we're not here to judge. This Bad Internet tracking story looks at offbeat or fringe Internet practices and people who are just trying to do a thing online. It explores the black hat spectrum, everything from scraping to vulnerability exploitation, and highlights utilities that could have both legitimate and dastardly functions.
Security researcher and law student Brendan O'Connor realized recently that with just a few hundred dollars, some Wi–Fi adapters and sensors, and a Raspberry Pi he could create a system that compiled and visualized all the unencrypted data coming from his laptop, iPad, and smartphone. Appropriately, he named it the Creepy Distributed Object Locator, or creepyDOL.
If he was on public Wi–Fi, O'Connor could identify the OS and make of nearby devices, monitor their web browsing, or find their unique IDs and then track their locations when they queried servers for emails or instant messages. He was all up in his own business, testing how much data was available about him simply through his Internet–connected devices.
Doing this to someone else violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, but why? Who could possibly care about the mind–numbing minutiae of a person's daily data? You browse Facebook and Twitter, shop on Amazon, read boring work emails, maybe watch some light porn and check the news. But I couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to date a guy––a wily, more obsessive version of someone like O'Connor––with the technical know–how to bug your entire life. So I went looking for people who could tell me.
Dear all, I was wondering which are the best ways to protect my computer from my ex–boyfriend who is a professional hacker. He is a very nice and honest person, just a little crazy: he still hacks me, in spite of my filling several reports with the police. It's just a game for him, but it's getting a little excessive.
And an aptly named MacRumors forum, "HELP, my ex hacked my iphone 4 and everything else," includes suggestions from users like, "Restore your iPhone and computer. Get a new boyfriend. Someone that's not a psycho and u can trust." And, "He probably sees that you are typing on this forum right now. You should just reformat your computer."
Data protection has become such a blanket topic recently that it's easy to forget the link between security and scale. Different types of data are vulnerable to different people or groups depending on their interests, and microdata that is attached to an identity is most useful to someone directly in that microcosm. The more I do online, the more I'm aware that my activity has value to specific people who may be motivated to figure out ways to screen it. And the more I'll check into the technical skills of the people I get involved with.
Every now and then I used to joke about Facebook reading my messages for targeted advertising, but since the PRISM debacle, I've realized I need to consciously acknowledge the availability of my data within services I use. And ideally I need to move some or all of my online interactions to more secure platforms (or at least a platform that will share some of the revenue it makes on my data).
Perhaps I'm not the only one feeling that way––and it appears developers can smell it. They're rushing to create products that fill the void like the secure messaging app, Hemlis. And after Skype's sketchy involvement with the NSA it makes sense that other competitor VoIP services would pop up claiming to be more secure.
One that looks promising is Tox, an encrypted messaging, phone, and video calling service that is currently in pre–alpha. TOX is largely being developed in the open, with input from Redditors and GitHub users, and promises total transparency, a necessity we've talked about before in this Tracking story. The big claim, pulled from the project's marketing copy:
Tox is both free for you to use, and free for you to change. You are completely free to both use and modify Tox. Furthermore, Tox will never harass you with ads, or require you to pay for features.
But some developers are concerned that Tox is simply part of a larger fad: Security as the new reusable shopping bag. In forums like Wilders Security, commenters are calling these types of products "privacy heroes," and point out that secure solutions with noble motives have been around since before it was cool. When discussing Tox, commenters point to jitsi as an open source alternative to Skype that's been around in some form since 2003. That's a long time.
The conversation hasn't really picked up on Twitter yet, but one frequent poster on Wilders Security put it this way:
I'm seeing a lot of "nobodies" coming out of the woodwork with promises that are harder to keep than most realize. I'm not at all saying this Tox or other providers are intentionally cashing in on the fear and distrust, but it's very easy to get sucked in . . .
That commenter may not be saying it, but I can. As long as people have strong concerns about their data security online, developers will make products to address the issue. Quality may vary, but price and transparency should be good indicators of whether or not a developer is trying to "cash in" or solve this increasingly worrisome problem.
A few weeks ago I was scraping data to make a map and I needed a tool that would merge some datasets. One set was in JSON while the rest were CSV files, meaning I needed a converter. Google found me thousands of options, which I quickly narrowed to three. The first two were unworkable––too many superfluous steps. The third one allowed me to upload a JSON file and then download its corresponding CSV version––just what I needed.
And then I started wondering who had made this fine little utility, and what compelled him to share it with the world. After all, developers build little hacks every day, but they don't share most of them––either for fear of showing sloppy code, for laziness, or for lack of time. I decided to find out what motivated this developer to share his hacks. So I called him.
Dan Mandle is a Colorado–based developer who runs Things I've Figured Out, a blog where he posts tricks and guides based on things he's working on. Many developers are active on StackOverflow, IRC, or various other channels, but I talked with him about his motivation for running the blog, and the sundry (and perhaps sketchy) ways people were applying his hacks.
I see lots of scripts and open source tools online, and I think it's really interesting that this is sort of a do–good thing in the dev community. Is that something you've encountered too?
Dan Mandle: Yeah, it's really cool. And the sole reason for my blog is just if it took me too long to figure something out because there wasn't enough information available, I write it up to share with other people. And so the issue with the JSON converter was there were a handful of them out there but none of them were particularly good, and the good ones you had to pay for. And it wasn't that difficult to code up, so I figured I'd make it available for everybody.
I saw that you put a donate button on the JSON to .csv converter. Did you do that from the start or only when it started to get really popular?
DM: I did that once it started to get popular. I'm up to 4,787 conversions and two donations since March 5 when I started running Google Analytics. But the reward is that I'm making something that other people find valuable and can use.
And what do you think they use it for? Something like your JSON converter was produced for legitimate work, but it could also be a step in some shady stuff. There's this duality to tools that are out there.
DM: Actually, that is sort of the origins of how I figured out how to make the converter. One of my roommates works for a company, and they needed to find out what every car had for roof rack adapters. And so he was originally tasked with going and looking at either pictures or physical cars to figure out what kind of roof racks they had. And so with a little bit of digging, originally on Thule's and then on Yakima's site, Yakima actually has a JSON and JSONP feed that essentially we can stitch together to find every make and model and what type of roof rack adapter they have. So we ran this script that basically fetched each of the combinations overnight, which I think was something like 96,000 requests to their website. They have one JSON feed for the different models and the car code and then you would have to plug it in for a query string to find out what kind of rack options it had. So I stored it in a JSON feed and kicked it out as a .csv so they could work with it in Excel. So I had done that a few months before and then found this other legitimate need for the JSON to .csv converter at work. I needed to pull some data out of Amazon SimpleDB and this was the easiest way that I could get it to my coworkers.
Yeah, there's so much data up on the Internet that people might not want you to have and yet they're the ones who made it available in some format.
DM: Yeah, it's definitely a gray area in terms of is this actually proprietary information or not? Do I have the right to use this? Is it in the public domain?
So what else are you going to "figure out" on your blog? Or we don't know yet?
DM: Yeah, we don't know until I come up with a big issue I run into. My next project is gonna involve learning Ruby on Rails so I may run into some issues!
Spam may be the bane of our cyber–existence, but there are geographic considerations that go into producing it. One way security companies guard clients against junk mail and other attacks is by blocking IP addresses where spam has been known to originate. When too many IP addresses get blocked in one place, spammers pack up and move to a neighboring country and keep going.
By looking at IP blacklist data, we can see one such dance taking place in eastern Europe earlier this year. In January, only about 5% of IP addresses in Belarus were being blocked, a number that rose to almost 30% in May. The same study, produced by international message security company Cloudmark, points out that Romania currently has the most blocked IP addresses of any country. Spammers probably switched to using IP addresses in nearby Belarus and Russia to get around the problem, causing the spike in blocked Belarusian addresses. But then hosting companies in those countries wised up, implemented tighter restrictions, and forced them back to Romania's more permissive hosts, which caused Belarusian IP blocks to drop back to normal levels in May.
It's difficult to assess spam output because there are multiple ways to measure it: You can look at it in terms of how many spam messages are produced, how many IP addresses are blocked, or the percentage of blocked addresses in a given country, to control for population. Many sources cite the three countries with the largest populations, China, India and the U.S., as the origins for the majority of spam. This makes some amount of sense, but it doesn't tell the full story unless you adjust the data for population and number of allocated IP addresses.
The security industry has operated using these measurements since email became a popular target for scammers, but the dynamics of spam are about to change. Now that all available IPv4 addresses have been allocated, security companies are beginning to turn their attention to what the spam environment will be like in IPv6. Once email providers moves to IPv6, some fear that spammers will have an advantage because they will be able to take over huge numbers of IP addresses without having to worry about the geographic constraints of a given country. But others point out that for this very reason an IP address's "reputation" will no longer be a good indicator of its credibility at all when there are so many addresses, and that this will motivate the industry to discard IP blocking as a security strategy and adopt better methods.
I don't expect IP reputation to become a complete non–issue. I think it's still valuable data for ISPs and filters to evaluate as part of the delivery decision process. That being said, IP reputation is so much less a guiding factor in good email delivery than it was 3 or 4 years ago. Just having an IP with a great reputation is not sufficient for inbox delivery. You have to have a good IP reputation and good content and good URLs.
As IPv6 rolls out among email providers and in general, the physical game of cat and mouse that spammers have been playing all over the world may morph into something different. It's unclear whether this change will meaningfully affect how much spam we get every day, so until we know, keep those filters running.
The PRISM frenzy has added significantly to a discussion that was already simmering about the level of security protection on messaging apps like Apple's iMessage. These services are so easy to use that most consumers don't think about who might have access to their data. But usually at minimum, the company providing the service can parse messages and conversations, and often advertisers or investors have some access as well. But a desire to take advantage of now–basic digital communication should not preclude users from privacy, right? And probably anyone planning a bank heist knows about these security holes.
Peter Sunde's new messaging app, Hemlis, promises to emulate the ease–of–use that makes messaging apps so popular, while also offering total anonymity from a data perspective. The company is saying that it won't sell ads or user data and the plan is to fund Hemlis through donations and paid premium features.
All communications on today's networks are being monitored by government agencies and private companies . . . That's why we decided to build a messaging platform where no one can spy on you, not even us.
But the question is, what security strategies will Hemlis use? Because the extent of its security features will, at least in part, dictate who uses it. And how much shady business can be conducted over it. A lot of companies claim that messages sent via their apps live in encrypted fortresses. Even services with lousy track records, like iMessage, are touted as secure.
Conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end–to–end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data.
But just by taking a moment to think about how iMessage works, it's clear that Apple is full of it. Messages must be somehow accessible if conversation histories are saved in iCloud for easy restoration on new devices, and if users have continuous, uninterrupted access to those histories even after they change their handset or iCloud password. These concerns were clearly outlined in a blog post by Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green a few weeks ago. He wrote:
That's the problem with iMessage: Users don't suffer enough. The service is almost magically easy to use, which means Apple has made tradeoffs––or more accurately, they've chosen a particular balance between usability and security. And while there's nothing wrong with trade–offs, the particulars of their choices make a big difference when it comes to your privacy.
These trade–offs are the crucial dictator for how a messaging service can be used for sensitive communication. If message histories are saved, even locally, the messages themselves are not secure. They can only function as such if their abstract meaning is transient and will not be useful to a later reader. A messaging system that works like SnapChat may sound like a better alternative, but it would run into similar issues between utilities that autosave received communications and the ubiquity of devices capable of taking screencaps.
No matter how sweeping a company's privacy statements, they always seem to turn out bogus. For example, in 2008 Skype claimed that it could not tap users' calls no matter what entity (private, government, etc.) requested data. Jennifer Caukin, Skype's then–director of corporate communications said, "Because of Skype's peer–to–peer architecture and encryption techniques, Skype would not be able to comply with such a request." But it turns out that this was never true, or at least wasn't true by 2010 when a pre–Microsoft Skype signed on to provide the audio from calls for PRISM.
If Hemlis can deliver on its lofty privacy goals there will be no reason to use any other messaging app on principle. But it seems like the only way for a service like Hemlis to be trusted for intensely private communication is for its backend to be totally open to scrutiny and evaluation. Without complete transparency, it will just be another black box into which people subtly allude to tax fraud, unwisely share their bank PIN, or correspond with their pot dealer.
Much of the media is simplistically categorizing the Syrian people into militarized loyalist or rebel camps. As this interactive map, shows, however, the actions and beliefs of Syrians cannot be delineated so easily. Created by the Syria Nonviolence Movement, the map presents and connects an immense number of organizations, local initiatives, and forms of media that are non–violently resisting the Assad regime.
Online tools like this network map are simple in form and drop–dead simple for programmers to build. This one uses the HTML5 Canvas element with help from SigmaJS, a simple library built specifically for such network graph visualizations. Thanks to the increasing popularity of infographics libraries like Sigma and general–purpose grapher D3, we're seeing more single–purpose infographics like these pop up to help the public understand the true complexity of world events. It looks like the United States may intervene in Syria as soon as tomorrow, so before that happens, it can't hurt to take a look at the depth of the Syrian resistance, enabled by new development tools.
The nonviolence map is broken up into clusters that represent formal groups, local councils, unions, specific days of protest, newspapers, the art world, and more. These categories are in some cases then broken down into subcategories like alternative cinema, art galleries, and human rights groups. Clicking on the end of the chain presents you with specific information about each node, giving you one tiny window into the world of Syrian opposition.
One example is the cluster of alternative films that have been produced by Syrians. Shown above is the node for a film by Bassel Shahade, a student at Syracuse University who was killed while making films in his homeland.
Another particularly rich segment of the map shows blue dots representing newspapers and magazines. Dissatisfied with state–run media, Syrians––youth especially––have taken to creating their own media outlets to tell their stories. Far from being shoddy amateur publications, some such as Souriatna (Our Syria), have developed into professional–looking weekly magazines.
The massive size of the cluster above should speak to the amount of local organizing Syrians are doing in their own neighborhoods. This group includes organizations like the coordinating committee for the town Kafr Anbel, which gained worldwide attention last year for their creative protest posters.
