Should your heading 1 tag <h1> on the page be your logo, or the first headlines on the page? This is a topic that has provoked numerous arguments online, with "true believers" on both sides, and it gets at the heart of your web strategy: What will Google and other search crawlers prefer?
Those who believe the logo is the most important element on the page will wrap it in an H1 tag, while others keep those H1's ready for important headings throughout content. Since both methods will pass code validation and are semantically correct, the question is: Why does it matter which one you choose?
Headings are a way to define document structure and to organize content. The first heading on your site should be the one that best describes the content of your page. Sometimes this is your logo––but most of the time it's not.
The reasons you usually shouldn't wrap your logo in an H1 tag are:
Usability: The tags <h1> to <h4> should be used to organize information and orient users. The logo is not actually information or orientation; it's metadata about the site, not relevant information about the content of the page.
Accessibility: Think of the content on your page as an outline; having a "bogus" headline such as your logo means extra text that must be heard on every page by users with screen readers.
Robots: Crawlers of all sorts scan your website for any number of reasons. By adding false H1's it may confuse them on the structure and content of your page, misrepresenting your content or miscategorizing it in aggregators elsewhere.
Search engines are the crawlers that matter most. Their interpretation can be considered a "best practice." According to Matt Cutts, who is the man when it comes to Google search, too many H1s or bunched up H1s dilute your search and cause the Google crawler to think you're spamming it.
Also keep in mind with search engines that Google is aware of the context of your page. It already know that this page is on your company website. And unless your website is mind–numbingly cryptic, it probably already knows the name of your company, just based on the URL and some other "hints" it picked up along the way, such as inbound links. It has even probably figured out what department or division within your organization this page is part of. Unless you've done something unique with your page structure you can trust Google to have this basic information down pat.
This concept tends to come naturally to anyone who works with a lot of content. It's just like a Table of Contents (ToC) in a book. You don't want your book title in your table of contents, people already know which book they're reading, or to apply that analogy to the web, which page they've navigated to.
Amazon cares about usability. It works hard to make things easy for users. It also cares about search engine results; Amazon products are frequently discovered through Google search. The company also wants their site to work well with screen readers. So, when it codes a page, it makes the "meat" of the page the heading: In the example below, the H1 is "All–New Kindle Paperwhite."
Be like Amazon: Save your <h1> "big guns" for your actual page headings:
Product names
Services you offer
Regions you serve
Keep in mind, it's okay to have multiple H1s on a page, if there are multiple topics on a page. For instance, the home page of a website, or a company's main products page could very well have multiple <h1> tags. But don't make everything a H1 though.
If you're having trouble with your company showing up when people search for your business name this is a very good idea. You're telling Google on every page of your site that your company name is vital, so Google will notice. But if you're already coming up at the top of the search engines when people search for your company name, you probably don't need to do this.
Bristol University, a university with a proud science heritage that includes educating quantum physics pioneer Paul Dirac, has a center for quantum photonics...and here they keep a two qubit device. This is an honest–to–goodness experimental quantum computer, and instead of keeping it to themselves the university has created "Qcloud," a public access web portal that lets anyone from scientists to school kids to try out the technology.
Lest you forget, almost every single computer running in the world today runs on more or less unsurprising digital electronic principles, flipping an extraordinary number of bits of data around its circuits––obeying pretty mundane laws of physics. The bits are made of pulses of electrical current, symbolizing the binary states "1" and "0," and faster computers simply shuttle more pulses around at a faster rate. Though there are some revolutions going on in post–silicon chip technology, pretty much every computer will operate on this principle for a while.
But quantum computing is a wholly different and rather more excitingly weird thing. Instead of storing information in digital electrical bits, quantum computers use the freaky common sense–defying laws of quantum physics to store information in qubits. A qubit, or quantum bit, is similar to a digital bit in that it has a 0 state and a 1 state, but unlike a regular bit a qubit can be in one state, the other state, or both at once at the same time. Think less like a light switch and more of the famous Schrodinger's Cat experiment, and you're getting closer to what a qubit is.
Quantum computing, which is literally computing with quantum bits, is very much in its infancy. But the bizarre fact that qubits can be both on and off at the same time means that near future quantum computers could have fantastic power...like solving algorithms that would take today's supercomputers an impossibly long time to do, or taking on number–crunching tasks so frighteningly vast that we simply couldn't afford to build a digital computer to perform the same calculations. Quantum computing could be one route to creating really unbreakable cryptography or even more realistic artificial intelligent systems, for example.
Instead of retiring the two–qubit chip they built in 2011, the decision by the university to put the device online seems to have borrowed some of the thinking "maker" trend, and it's being described by the team behind it as the "Raspberry Pi of quantum computing." Not everyone will get to run algorithms through the chip at first, and there's a complex simulation built into the software that users try their code out on first. But the educational value of the idea, and perhaps even the potential for some real ground–breaking discoveries, can't be denied.
The ability to compose thoughts and numbers in cloud documents today has become a must–have business need. We've come a long way from the days of dedicated, single–use word processing machines in the 1970s in terms of backend technology, but not that far in terms of interface. The Microsoft Office suite has dominated home and office computers for years, which has been great for compatibility and ease of use. Other than the transition to .docx and the occasional Apple devotee sharing a laughable .pages file, things have improved painfully slowly. Apple's WWDC iCloud demo looked like the most promising change in years.
But in a software category with minimal competition, minimal innovation seems to be the rule. Sure, Microsoft has done cosmetic updates on its Office suite over the years and has added new features when convenient, but in almost 40 years there hasn't been a fundamental reinterpretation of what word processing is or what productivity suites should provide. It seemed like cloud–based suites would be the kick in the pants the industry needed, though. Microsoft is now competing with Google Drive, which is robust and highly usable, as well as Apple's iWork, which has the potential to home in on anyone invested in the Apple ecosystem. And smaller developers like the makers of Quip have even stepped up to compete. It seems like a much better environment for transformation. But so far things haven't been going great.
In a meditation about word processing on Medium, Dragon Z. noted:
Most of the contemporary word processors are bloated with features that distract attention, and clearly derive from the tradition of the printed page. But as we are moving on to the era when writing, editing, and finally, publishing happens online, it is time we changed our methods of writing itself ––it is time for the digital first composition. On the level of the interface it means a simplification of the writing tool; on the level of the logic of working mechanism it means a new paradigm.
Every time something like iWork for iCloud looks promising it turns out to have numerous drawbacks and weaknesses. Of course nothing is perfect on the first try, but that is exactly what is so frustrating about the current state of productivity suites: This is in no way the first try. And it's clear that the market is yearning for a radical departure. It seems like Quip was overhyped simply because people are so ready to see something novel that they're reading greatness into anything that comes out. And iWork looks like another example.
When Apple opened the iWork beta to anyone with an Apple ID, they clearly weren't expecting the deluge of users they received. Which was dumb, because early adoption during beta testing is clearly becoming a trend among average users. And furthermore everyone is so desperate for new productivity options that they'll try just about anything to see if it can meet their needs across multiple devices and with a group of collaborators. As it stands now, iWork doesn't seem ready to fill the void (even if and when Apple pulls it together to offer full user support). It will be interesting to watch Microsoft, Apple, and Google continue to jostle for control in this space, but it will be even more interesting to see if new developers can come out of nowhere and carry the day.
There are tons of word processing apps out there. Maybe too many: 69 pop up if you search "word processor" in the App Store, and 240 show up in Google Play (admittedly, some aren't particularly relevant). But Quip, founded by former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor and Google App Engine creator Kevin Gibbs, is getting a lot of attention as something radical and totally new. Which it isn't. So what's the deal?
Quip's built–in chat is its most innovative and universally liked feature. The chat lives in a sidebar that shows edits and comments so you can work on and talk about a document in real–time with other people. Lots of productivity suites for web, like Google Drive, integrate chat, but there aren't many phone or tablet apps that do it. It's a nice feature, especially if you and your collaborators are working together on a deadline.
Other than chat, however, Quip is a pretty standard mobile word processor, with all the usual limitations. It's intentionally minimalist, maybe to a fault: You can't change the size or color of the words within pre–set styles for headings and body text. There's no word count, you can't run a grammar check or align text. In fact, there's very little paragraph formatting available at all.
You might think that that's the whole point. We don't need to pretend we're still writing on and formatting for 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper. It's a brave new world! But adding colors and changing formatting has more to do with idea organization and visual continuity than it does sticking to thousand year–old conventions. I still want these features, even if the document is only ever going to be viewed on a mobile device.
Quip's other supposedly revolutionary feature is the way it tracks changes. It's true that most word processors, like Microsoft Word, feature cumbersome, only minimally useful change tracking, so new approaches should be welcome. But Quip's implementation is a tough sell, especially for intense work. The app adds "slips of paper" to its sidebar for every change. Each slip includes the time when a change was made, whether it was made on mobile or web, what was added, and what was deleted. Over time, the sidebar begins to accumulate a comprehensive timeline of everything that has ever happened in the document. But as the slips add up, the app starts visualizing them as teetering piles of paper. If you make a lot of minor changes (like we do pretty much every time we open a document), Quip starts to feel overwhelming.
I think it's because people are desperate for a new era of word processing so they can't help themselves from proclaiming it in their reviews of Quip, even if it's premature. The fact that Quip raised $15 million in initial venture funding shows that it's not just tech writers. Investors, too, know that users are hungry for a new solution, and that any new word–processing–related idea will seem like a godsend to the masses compared to the options available today.
Quip may push out updates that make it more usable and reliable, but even if it isn't an immediate threat, Microsoft 365, iWork, and Google Drive should all beware. Quip's undeserved hype is a sign that the big three have so far failed to produce quality solutions for mobile word processing, or in the case of Microsoft even release mobile apps in a timely way. The Pages app is popular, as is the Google Drive app, but only because they're serviceable in comparison to lousy alternatives. Word processing on mobile needs to completely break free of analogies to paper, push the limits of in–app collaboration, and find a way to provide powerful and limitless formatting while still keeping everything minimal. Quip is not that app, but someday, something will be. Big tech companies should be scared.
I've always been prejudiced against Apple's iWork suite. I think it stems from a time in the mid 2000s when iWork applications, especially Numbers, were behind the Microsoft Office curve. But when Apple announced iWork for iCloud at WWDC last month I realized that my assessment of the suite was outdated. iWork was lookin' fly. And now developers with early access are raving about the iCloud version. When it comes to inhabitants of the Apple ecosystem it seems like Microsoft and Google are going to have real competition.
It's true that Excel still edges Numbers out for most professional users, but in terms of overall features and integration of a web–based suite, iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) seems rock solid. And while Microsoft Office 365 has only taken limited first steps to specifically engage Apple users, especially on mobile devices, iWork is poised to grab market–share. When iWork for iCloud is publicly released in October, it makes sense that the cross–platform compatibility will lure Apple users to go all in on iWork, whether they had previously adopted the local applications or not.
An important factor in all of this is price. Currently Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are $20 each in the Mac App Store, and the iOS versions are $10 each. That puts the whole package at $90 if you want all three apps on your computer plus mobile. Microsoft 365 is $100/year or $10/month for access to local and mobile applications. But like Google Drive, it seems that iWork for iCloud is going to be free.
The Internet rabble is saying that it would be inconsistent of Apple to offer iWork for iCloud for free while continuing to charge for the local and mobile applications. And many people are predicting that Apple will make iWork free on all of its devices. They argue that such a strategy would be in line with the precedent set by the iLife suite and mobile apps like iMessage, and could be a talking point that helps Apple sell even more hardware.
But I don't see the conflict, and to me it doesn't even seem necessary for Apple to make iWork free. If they want to do it, great, and it would probably be a solid strategy for luring users away from Microsoft and Google, but I don't see it as make or break. With the iCloud rollout, iWork will be offering a Google Drive competitor. And it will also be rivaling Office 365, still for $10 less, with significantly better integration and mobile capability than Microsoft will be able to offer for at least a year. For those in the Apple ecosystem, iWork will draw users and be an attractive option whether or not all versions become free. It also seems possible, though there hasn't been mention of this as far as I know, that local and mobile iWork applications could move to a subscription model like Office 365.
The group I see thinking most seriously about switching to iWork will be Mac owners who have and use old versions of the Microsoft Office Suite right now, but have been confused or deterred by Microsoft's move to Office 365. I would think that these users would be most tempted by iWork, because it will offer everything, free web apps like Google Drive, local applications like the traditional Microsoft Office Suite, plus iOS apps with more extensive functionality than what Microsoft is offering. By the time Office 365 catches up in mobile, iOS customers may be gone, and likewise Google Drive may lose out because it has limited local options for people who don't have consistent Internet access. Google and Microsoft need to make moves if they want to keep iWork for iCloud from eroding their respective user bases, and they need to do it soon.
A day after Creative Cloud came out it was cracked and posted on The Pirate's Bay. We all expected it to happen eventually, but a one day turnaround is pretty legit. It might mean that hackers have become unstoppable. That it doesn't even take effort anymore for them to work around an authentication/limited sharing system. But this seems unlikely. Why would hacking so greatly outpace legitimate development? Perhaps the answer is much simpler: Adobe security just wasn't trying very hard.
A desire to reduce piracy may not have been the only motivator in the decision to move to Creative Cloud, but it was certainly understood to be a factor. Photoshop alone is one of the most pirated pieces of software ever. Yet when Mark Wilson interviewed Adobe's director of product marketing, Heidi Voltmer, after the Creative Cloud announcement she said,
Reducing piracy really isn't one of the key things we looked at with the Cloud. The reality is people learn how to hack around copy protection and pirate if they really want to. There's no way to avoid piracy.
And Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen told Mashable around the same time that, "It allows us to provide different offerings in different emerging markets without worrying about gray markets."
The idea seems to be that if Creative Cloud's price per month is cheap enough, it will entice most average users to simply pay for full privileges, rather than making a foray into the unreliable and frustrating world of disable activation scripts or serial generators. Even if Creative Cloud only acts as a minor deterrent to pirates it may be enough of a gain to satisfy Adobe for now. And there seems to be the beginning of a more general shift toward thinking about piracy as a demand indicator and sign of consumer enthusiasm rather than a death knell. It's been years since there was any question that piracy was here to stay, but many industries that would benefit from a new point of view haven't been able to reframe piracy in a productive way. If Adobe is using Creative Cloud to let go of old battles and test the waters they might actually be pushing cloud suites forward.
More and more developers are taking their work suites and services into the cloud. They're providing ways for users to work anywhere, from any machine and maybe collaborate more efficiently. Maybe. This model allows software makers to deliver incremental updates more easily and reduce illicit installer distribution. But most users are accustomed to working with what is available locally on their computers and sharing work by transferring documents via email, a local server, or even a thumb drive. How can they break free of those habits, and what do developers need to deliver for people to work better and faster in the cloud?
Microsoft Office isn't the best suite for everything, but after dominating word processing, spreadsheets, and slide sets for 20 years, it certainly has brand cachet. And when Microsoft introduced the cloud–based Office 365 in October 2010, it was supposed to represent a logical next step in the suite's evolution. Progress. But in the ensuing 2 and a half years, Office mobile apps have been glaringly missing from the iOS and Android ecosystems. Microsoft seems to have been intentionally keeping them exclusive to Windows Phone and the Surface tablets.
Without deep mobile integration, though, the SkyDrive aspect of Office 365 seems pretty wasted. Cloud syncing doesn't hurt, but it's not regularly useful if a user isn't on multiple devices. And the newly released iOS app has the same functionality as the Windows Phone version. It's good for minor rewording or typo fixes, but it's not the place to conjure a document or slide set from scratch. Basically the app iOS users have been waiting for isn't even that dynamic, and it's the same build that's supposed to be drawing users to Windows mobile. The strategy is limited no matter which way you look at it.
Rick Sherlund, an analyst at Nomura Equity Research, noted that Microsoft is probably keeping Office mobile apps from other platforms, specifically the iPad and Android, in an attempt to make Windows mobile devices like the Surface more appealing.
Launching Office Mobile on the iPad could present additional competitive pressure for Windows 8 and Surface. Microsoft may be dragging its feet on Office for the iPad and Android for competitive reasons intended to give Windows 8 and Surface a chance to gain traction. Our view is that this delay is enabling competition for Office to entrench itself on these platforms and Office is a bigger business for Microsoft than Windows, so we see more urgency to preserve and extend the Office franchise cross platform.
With the launch of a more unified iWorks at WWDC last week and Google's continued improvement to the Drive app, it seems more dangerous than ever for Microsoft to withhold Office from Android and iOS users. People who would normally turn to Office out of habit will seek platform–available alternatives out of necessity and may never come back.
Where are the Japanese Googles, Facebooks, Twitters, and Apples? Who is Japan's Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs, and why isn't he, or dare I say she, globally successful?
Trying to answer this question, I found some young Japanese entrepreneurs who don't mince words about what they say is wrong with their country's corporate culture.
"All the big work is done by old men," said Tetsuya Ohashi, PR manager of Terra Motors, a young startup that makes trendy electric scooters, now the top seller in Japan. Their "e–scooter," released in July, is the world's first smartphone–connected scooter, which logs the vehicle's route history and battery life data through the phone.
In journalist Yuri Kageyama's recent AP story on Terra, 26–year–old Kohshi Kuwaharu put it even more bluntly: "If you're stuck in a system that promotes by seniority, it's living a slow death, like animals on a farm. I wanted to be in a tough, competitive place."
Terra's founder and CEO, Toru Tokushige, 43, faced a similar frustration working at insurance company Sumitomo when he was 25 to 29. So he left Japan for Stanford Business School, where he met venture–minded entrepreneurs whose energy and vision he brought back to inspire young Japanese to quit following and invent their own careers.
"There are limitations for young people in Japan," Ohashi explains. "Bosses don't take risks. Japanese workers can't challenge the boss. If you give opinions, they don't listen. Bosses don't give young people opportunities: Only old men get to do interesting work."
So some young Japanese are inspired to leave crusty top–down corporate dinosaurs to join startups. That's awesome. But why is it that so few Japanese startups go global?
Startup–dating.com, a Japanese website tracking tech startups and venture funding, boasts an array of new Japan–produced apps and services, especially for smartphones, but most are targeted to the Japanese market. At the Tokyo SeedStarsWorld last week, an initiative touring 20 cities worldwide to find startup talent for a global competition, the winner was Locarise, a "Japanese" startup based in Tokyo and funded by startup incubator Open Network Lab, but the team, recently featured in a Co.Labs profile, is three French coders. Why don't Japanese entrepreneurs win these competitions? Why aren't more young Japanese motivated to make their own global companies?
Language is no doubt a barrier. Japan ranks famously low among Asian nations, given its high economic status, in English proficiency exams: 22nd out of 54 countries, versus Singapore's 13th, Malaysia's 14th, and South Korea's 21st in this year's Education First global English proficiency test. But Ohashi thinks two other factors are more important.
"Selfish, greedy, untrustworthy: That is the image of the entrepreneur in Japan since around 2000," Ohashi says. Why 2000? Here's why.
Japan did have its own would be Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs, 13 years ago, and his reputation is mythic, too––only his is a "bad, black image," Ohashi says with a sigh.
Horie Takafumi launched Livedoor, a website that became a popular Internet portal and blog platform in Japan, after dropping out of the University of Tokyo at age 23. Takafumi, also known as "Horiemon," after the popular robot cat Doraemon he supposedly looks like, shared American tech pioneers' informal dress style (T–shirts and unbuttoned collared shirts, provoking the typical Japanese salaryman's suit), and having dropped out of ToDai, often called Japan's Harvard. He wore a mohawk at times and flaunted a counterculture image that irked traditional Japanese businesssmen during his heyday. But his site shut down in 2006––after a decadent and public career, buying horses, hostilely taking over companies, running for office––when he was arrested for lying about profits to hide losses at Livedoor, and sent to prison for almost two years.
Aside from this poisoned image of the startup founder, Ohashi says, Japanese people tend to be risk averse. They prefer to follow someone else's example––a bad sign, frankly, if what you want to be is a pioneer. Still, Ohashi uses a baseball analogy to make his point.
Nomo Hideo was the first Japanese baseball player to make it in the American Major League, in 1995––but he was followed by a flood of players, like Ichiro Suzuki and Daisuke Matsuzaka––more than 50 in all so far. Baseball had been huge in Japan since it was introduced there in 1872 by American professor Horace Wilson, but it was not until a century and a quarter later that Japanese pros started competing internationally. Terra Motors hopes to be the Nomeo Hideo of Japanese startups––the startup of startups, pioneer of pioneers.
"There is no model case yet," Ohashi says. "We have no Facebook, no Google, no Twitter, so young people don't believe Japanese startups can succeed. Our CEO's vision, what he wants to do, is to change that culture."
Terra Motors leads Japan's market in electric scooters. But Chinese knock–offs still dominate Asia, which makes up 80% of the world's motorbikes, Ohashi says. India has 13 million gas–powered bikes, Vietnam 3 million, versus Japan's 400,000––and China's got 20 million motorbikes. Most are imitations of Japanese models by companies like Honda, which tend to be "broken," Ohashi says––and lacking maintenance, spare parts or service; those markets, along with Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, which is full of motorbikes, are some Terra hopes to penetrate soon.
Japan is a rich country, with one of the best education systems on Earth. Yet what service do you use regularly, made by a Japanese startup? Sure, we love Japanese electronics––the Nintendo and Sony Playstation games we grew up on in the '80s; cars by Toyota or Honda, and clothes by UNIQLO or Rakuten, maybe. But those are old companies. My new Onitsuka sneakers may look sweet and modern, but the guy who stitched the first pair in his Kobe living room, Kihachiro Onitsuka, opened shop in 1949––yup, four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1977 his shoe company became ASICS and spread to the U.S., in time for the running boom that swept up my parents and many other twentysomethings in those days.
Japan's inspiring revival after World War II, as told by MIT historian John Dower in his Pulitzer–winning book Embracing Defeat, was spurred by demand from America's army, stationed at Japanese bases while waging war in Korea and Vietnam. That's when the famous giants got their start: Honda, the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer by 1964, sold its first "Dream" bike in 1949, during the Allied Occupation; Sony started in the war's wake, when Panasonic transformed as well: its big product before the war had been bike lamps; after the war, radios and TVs sold all over the world.
Internationalism is the most striking difference between Terra Motors' employees and most of their contemporaries in Japan. Kuwahara worked for Panasonic in Tanzania before joining Terra; another employee came from French tire maker Michelin; and Ohashi studied abroad in Pakistan, traveled to India, Myanmar, Russia, and elsewhere. Among Japanese young people, who are well known for their shy reticence to speak openly to foreigners, in the historically closed island nation, this is an adventurous crowd.
Ohashi, like most of Terra's 15 employees in their mid–twenties, ditched the prospect of working for a famous company to take a risk at a job where he'd be challenged. Ohashi was recruited by Mitsubishi from Hitotsubashi University, one of Japan's best, but he decided against the job when he heard of Terra through a venture capital recruiter.
"I quit because there is no chance to go abroad when you are young, or to do big work. Young people aren't given interesting chances. Maybe every young person in Japan has this frustration." This is ironic, he points out, because "the people who want to try the hardest are the young ones."
American young people often think of youth as the time for taking risks, a time when we're curious, ambitious, and restless. So many Americans, especially in New York, make a stab at starting a business or doing creative work, like music or writing, in our twenties.
"Japanese young people are also restless," Ohashi told me, "but we have no successful examples." Not many recent Japanese startups have succeeded on a global scale, he stressed again. And few Japanese students go abroad. When Ohashi's friends hear about the time he spent in the Middle East, their usual reactions are "You've got guts"; an envious "sounds interesting"; and fear: "Why do you go to such dangerous places?"
"People want to stay at a big company," Ohashi's roommate added, in the background over Skype––11 p.m. in Tokyo, 10 a.m. here in New York. Safety is the priority; they think "'We will succeed if we follow this company'. But Japanese companies can't continue this [generous lifetime employment system] much longer."
The cozy security of Japan Inc. is bound to crumble soon. In the meantime, though, "Young people don't have incentives to take risks."
"After World War II," Ohashi said, "40 years ago, [Japanese] people took risks. But Japan is almost a developed country now," and many have grown complacent.
Okay, but what about the incentive of personal curiosity? Hunger for a challenge, a taste of adventure, or the natural restlessness a creative person feels? What happens to a dream deferred? In America, we're told that it explodes. So when will Japan's youth catch fire?
If Terra's idealists are any indication, what we're seeing may be just the first spark of a coming inferno.
It seemed inevitable, with enough backlash, that Google could be persuaded to reverse its decision to shut down its RSS reader. However painful it may have been, Google stuck to its guns and we now live in a (two–month–old) world with no default RSS client/backend. Like many, I exported my data ahead of the shutdown and tried Feedly, Feed Wrangler, and Feed Bin, but none of the alternatives were a good fit. So I turned to Twitter as a solution, mostly out of desperation.
There's not an automated process to transition from RSS to Twitter lists, but the benefits of getting updates quicker (than RSS feeds got updated) do make up for the the initial effort. You also get the convenience on mobile devices of not having to jump in and out of multiple apps.
I set up a private list in Twitter called, appropriately enough, "RSS."
I looked at my RSS feeds and tracked down the corresponding Twitter account for the different sites. I was able to duplicate my feeds about 95%.
It's incredibly useful to be able to group people or companies into different lists, but Twitter doesn't make it easy to use in its own apps and website.
My preferred method and the reason lists caught on as an RSS reader alternative in the first place is because Tweetbot made it easy. Since Twitter's official apps work for the average user, third–party apps need to feature and promote hidden functionality, so most handle lists pretty well.
Using lists on Tweetbot's mobile app makes switching back and forth between your timeline and managed lists simple. After getting your account set up with the app:
The top bar, which says "Timeline" and has your avatar, is the toggle to get to lists.
Tapping the bar reveals your lists, and once one is selected, it appears as your main feed in place of your timeline. Tap it again to go back.
You can't create new lists in Tweetbot's mobile app, but you can add users to them.
To add a user to a list, tap on a user's icon, then tap on the gear to the right of their name.
The first option will be "Manage List Memberships."
Select the list you'd like that person to be a part of.
Using lists on Tweetbot's Mac app is one of the more powerful ways to intertwine your news and social media. Setting up a command center–type situation takes a few steps once you log in with your Twitter account:
On the left–hand side of the app, click on the icon with four lines, two paces up from the bottom.
This will show you your lists where you can select the one you want.
In Tweetbot's top bar, click the gear next to "Edit" and select "View list tweets."
After that, click the small gear in the column's bottom bar and select "Open in new column."
TweetDeck is owned by Twitter, but it still feels like a third–party app, or like a black sheep. The thing TweetDeck users have always loved about the program is how customizable and powerful it can be. Using lists on TweetDeck's website can be set up like this once you log in:
On the left–hand side of the screen, click the "+" button and select "lists."
Select the specific list you want and confirm the choice with the button at the bottom of the window.
TweetDeck also has a Chrome app that works similarly.
After making a list, adding companies and sites you'd like to keep tabs on, there are a few other tools that can help connect all the pieces and make Twitter's unintentional solution for Google Reader's demise a little easier to swallow.
Using a mobile Twitter app for lists and the purpose of replacing RSS makes it quicker to scroll through the news, but it doesn't make for the best reading experience. The solution for this is to connect your preferred read–later service such as Pocket or Instapaper.
Most Twitter apps support adding read–later accounts, even Twitter's official app, so saving a few stories to read later is as simple as long–pressing on the link and selecting "Save" or "Send to."
Tweetbot also supports Pinboard, my preferred place to save links for further review later.
Digging deeper, you can set up an IFTTT action, which sends any tweet (and link) you favorite to your preferred service such as Delicious, Evernote, Instapaper, Pocket, and so on.
If you don't use Twitter, heaven forbid you got this far, you can set up an account strictly to use the service as an RSS–type reader and would not need to create any lists.
Most people, upon getting familiar using Twitter, declared it RSS's replacement years ago. And in practice, it does function similarly for a lot of people. Making dedicated lists for tech, or sports, or other interests, however, may be the final convincing straw someone unhappy with Google Reader alternatives was looking for.
Sure, the obvious downside to using Twitter instead of RSS is that not every site also cross–posts to Twitter, but this is Twitter's peak––enjoy its wide–reaching, all–encompassing benefits.
Since it first walked onto the court, APBRmetrics has divided basketball culture into two camps: those who believe that basketball is best understood visually and those who believe the game is best analyzed statistically. The National Basketball Association, long thought of as an eye–test league where statistics told only so much of the story, has recently transitioned into a new era of analytics. With cameras now analyzing players' on–court moves, basketball is becoming data driven.
The shortcomings of APBRmetrics, the old guard argues, are that individual matchups, defensive schemes, and other such subjective elements of the game are not taken into account in understanding individual performance. The new generation suggests simply that numbers can tell you more about how a team performs with certain players on the floor than a coach's, or a sportswriter's, eyes can. In the wake of the Sabermetrics revolution, however, the league has reached an agreement with STATS to outfit every team's home arena with SportVU cameras that track each player's every move on the court.
The data can, in fact, tell us even more than that. For decades, basketball analysts have relied upon correlational data and nonspecific statistics to measure player and team performance inside specific matchups. The number of statistical categories themselves might very well multiply exponentially. Using technology originally designed to track missiles, however, SportVU cameras can break players down statistically in ways never before measurable. Originally an Israeli company, SportsVU (recently acquired by STATS) has been used for tracking similar trends in football (aka, soccer) now for some time.
The cameras, a six–unit system mounted in strategic locations across the arena, are able to differentiate individual players from one another at all times and offer unique opportunities for comparing individual players as they perform against one another on the court, as opposed to simply amassing and comparing their individual statistics. In short, SportVU cameras might very well close the chasm between Sabermetrics and basketball purists, and give everyone around the game a whole new subset of data upon which to draw conclusions that may very well influence this year's championship. Long considered the least statistically oriented major American professional sport (especially defensively), basketball now enters the fray as a legitimate contender to the most mathematical baseball, and in a period of particular note: The game is more popular than it's ever been.
And with the start of the regular season now less than two months away, the NBA has stated that every arena will be outfitted with the technology by the time the defending–champion Miami Heat tip off against the Chicago Bulls on October 29. The technology's advent, then, may very well usher in an entirely new era of basketball, one where old fogies and young bucks alike meet the game at center court.
For music services like Rdio or Spotify, the size of their music catalogs used to be the major differentiator. But now that they are all roughly the same, there are two other factors they need to distinguish them: the first is the physical goods they sell along with their digital media and the second is software. Gracenote is the latest company to realize the latter.
Bundling music with a pair of headphones works because the music itself is becoming a commodity product. But headphones will play any music, making the package deal a simple merchandising trick. To really differentiate, media companies will need bespoke software, and since music companies aren't exactly known for their legions of cutting–edge dev teams, this will mean building a platform for third parties.
This may seem like an obvious strategic move to software companies, since APIs, frameworks, and platforms are a great way to get the public to build things for you, pre–validated and exactly what they need, essentially for free. Platforms also have the benefit of allowing people to customize a technology they like for other uses. In this case, it's the Shazam–like technology of music identification.
Gracenote's MusicID Live technology is a platform for exactly this function. A lot of festival–goers wander to different stages, not knowing the name of the band or song being played, as do people who drift through radio stations or hear a song in a commercial. Gracenote already powers iTunes Match (among many other things) but is now smartly allowing people to build this feature into anything they want. Other media companies could take a hint. Each one has information in their servers that could be put to different use––remixed, for lack of a better term––by individuals who have a specific need or idea.
In the late '90s with its initial developer program, Gracenote found out that without a dedicated purpose and support, focus tends to drift and the ability to maintain a developer program properly becomes too hard. In February, Gracenote opened its new developer program and says that 100,000 registrants want to use its technology already. As for why now, president Stephen White says that though Gracenote has been aware of the demand, ultimately resources inside the company are too limited to create all of the things it would like to accomplish. "I've always been a big believer in it [developer access], so getting back was important to me," White says.
One of the fruits the new program that Gracenote saw early on was having a single developer enable song identification for the streaming service Deezer. Neither Shazam or Soundhound offered a way to connect to one of Europe's largest streaming services, so Gracenote's fingerprint database was able to make that happen. The developer has since partnered with the telecom Orange.
In early August, Gracenote introduced MusicID Live to developers at the Outside Lands music festival and hackathon. The Live technology––which fingerprints music coming off the soundboard, allowing apps to identify live music on the fly––was a perfect fit to offer up to interested developers. One of the uses for it was an app that crowdsourced the live data and could recognize which band was playing which song at each stage in real time.
When I spoke to Gracenote about this new technology, White and VP of marketing Graham McKenna both pointed to Soundcloud and The Echo Nest as examples of other companies letting developers push the limits for them. They also acknowledged that allowing developer access is just something any competitive music company needs to be onboard with. Software is the differentiating value add for music subscribers now; it's not the song catalogs anymore. And those without proper developer programs must be in denial––just ask Rhapsody.
Have you ever wanted to sit on a wall of sound? At the 2013 São Paolo Design Week last month, a Brazilian artist–designer put a real–time spin on his Nóize Chair concept, which merges ambient sound with design, by hooking up a microphone to a 3–D printer and building an audio–warped chair in front of convention–goers' eyes.
In 2012, architect Guto Requena partnered with Galeria Coletivo Amor de Madre to create the first Nóize Chairs. The seats are a kind of audio/physical mashup that mix three classic Brazilian chair designs that have been scanned and digitally modeled with audio files from different areas of São Paolo (Grajaú, Cidade Tiradentes and Santa Ifigênia) using custom software. The resulting chairs are expressions of the city, mixing the function of Brazilian furniture with urban life, as Requena says in the comments under the project's YouTube video:
São Paulo is a beautiful city. Non–obvious, complex, diverse, multiracial, improvised, surprising, ironic, tolerant towards different peoples, beliefs and cultures –– a patchwork filled with hidden beauties. Falling in love with it is a matter of survival.
The three pieces developed by Estudio Guto Requena for the exhibition seek to assimilate the beauties of São Paulo, especially those which are off circuit. They constitute a digital experimentation of noises, deconstruction and mixing through the new possibilities brought to us by new digital technologies.
For SPDW 2013, Estudio Guto Requena partnered with META–D to put this audio–structural transformation on display as "Live Nóize: A Design Performance". A CAD file depicting the Girafa chair (one of the classic models used in 2012) was projected on a wall for conventioneers to manipulate via microphone, resulting in freaky spikes and spazzy perversions in the files. The microphones also picked up ambient chatter and buzz, using the entire convention environment as input to distort the chair's design.
After being processed by Grasshopper, a graphical algorithm editor tightly integrated with Rhino's 3–D modeling tools, a Metamaquina 2 3–D printer made miniature models of the hybrid designs.
The PINH5AD is an evolution of sorts from Schlemmer's 3–D–printed 35mm PINHE4D camera that he uploaded to Thingiverse back in late August. Like the P4, the P5 has only one moving part: the shutter blade that exposes the 4x5 negative to light through the pinhole, reducing the likelihood of breakage. The standard P5 has a 90mm lens for a .40mm pinhole with an f–stop of f/225 and a 70–degree horizontal field of view, but Schlemmer has recently updated the design for a 150mm "Normal view" extender that shaves the horizontal field of view down to 46 degrees but drops the f–stop to f/300. If you came up as a digital photography native and have access to a 3–D printer, this is your chance to try analog large–format printing without investing hundreds of dollars in an antique large format camera.
The Rubicon looks identical to the Digitizer: Two lasers on either side of a camera sit pointed at the center of a turntable. An object placed at the center of a turntable is painted by the lasers and photographed by the camera to map the laser positions. Then the table turns .45 of a degree and the process repeats to gain a 360–degree scan of the image, which takes about 800 rotations. The Digitizer takes 12 minutes to complete an 800–rotation scan, while the Rubicon takes just three.
Unlike the camera bolted into the Digitizer's solid plastic frame, the Rubicon's camera is separate, allowing you to move it to take in larger objects. It's unclear if the camera pictured in the video (a Logitech c920) is included with purchase of the Rubicon as its specs compare the commercially available Logitech, which maxes at 15 megapixels, to the inboard Digitzer camera's 1.3 megapixels. Even if it isn't included, the Logitech c920 retails for around $80, keeping the whole Rubicon kit far below the Digitizer's price tag.
But part of the Digitzer's cost derives from being part of the MakerBot suite: The Digitzer page claims that it works just fine with non–MakerBot printers, but is optimized for its Replicator fleet and its free, bundled MakerWare software. Rubicon comes with software to mess with the scanned wireframe mesh, adjust density, and export the hi–polygon mesh or a structured/optimized model.
The Rubicon currently runs off an Arduino microncontroller board and stepper motor, but part of the $25,000 campaign requests will go toward developing a unique PCB. The campaign has raised about $5,000 and plans to ship Rubicon scanners around mid–December.
Anyone who's worked in music production can tell you that working on headphones just doesn't cut it––you need the full sound of studio monitor speakers to correctly master tracks. This little module by Light Harmonics, the Sacramento–based innovators who gave the world the professional–scale Da Vinci Digital–to–Analog Converter (DAC), might change that forever.
Light Harmonics has brought its audio–enhancing quest to the midrange crowd with the GEEK, a three–inch box that ditches your laptop's paltry headphone jack for a USB experience boasting ten times the audio power.
DACs are found on any electronic device that translates digital binary information to sound, from a chip in your laptop that converts streamed music into sound to a disc player (remember those?) that reads digitized music off a CD. But the GEEK isn't just a DAC chip on a circuit board: it's a Light Harmonics–termed awesomifier, which means it engineers the sound pumped into your ears to where it SHOULD be. When you listen to a stereo, for example, emerging sound has been processed to hit your ears in directed cones so that there's no left–speaker sound hitting your right ear (as the recording artist intended). Headphone sound seems to originate in the middle of your brain, so each ear gets spillover from the other headphone. Not so with the GEEK: It changes the sound's intended direction so it hits your ears from realistic angles.
All this tech usually comes at a price, and Light Harmonics' vaunted Da Vinci model is built–to–order at $12,000 a pop. Hence the Kickstarter: bringing an audio engineering middleman to the masses in order to make those midrange headphones perform better than they can from your $4 headphone jack. While the GEEK will retail for $299, it's being offered at various Kickstarter–friendly rates. But fair warning: Every level of early–adopter rate from $99–$149 has sold out, because 800 backers beat you to the campaign. Juggle the numbers and it's easy to see how the GEEK hit its Kickstarter goal of $28,000 in eleven hours and has raised over $260,000 thus far.
The GEEK comes in three variants: regular, Super, and Super–Duper, with differing max output voltages (2.65 Vrms/3.4 Vrms/4 Vrms) and max output voltages (450 mW/720 mW/1000 mW). Standard GEEKs are still available at the $159 Kickstarter rate, with Super and Super–Duper coming in at $189 and $219, respectively. All models have two 3.5 mm jacks for line out and headphone (with 64–bit precision) and buttons for volume control. Stretch goals for cute–color cases have already been met and Light Harmonics hopes to ship GEEKs in January.
In late August, Omni Group, one of the oldest and most respected Mac software developers around, released an app called OmniKeyMaster that allowed users who purchased Mac App Store versions of Omni's software to verify that they have done so and then allow them to purchase discounted upgrades in the future via the company's web store. But within the week Apple told Omni that if the company continued with OmniKeyMaster its apps would not be allowed to be sold in the Mac App Store any longer––Daniel Jalkut, founder of another renowned Mac dev shop called Red Sweater Software, called it "a chilling message from Apple."
With OmniKeyMaster, Omni Group was trying to address one of the Mac App Store's greatest flaws: the lack of upgrade pricing. And though the Mac App Store is an excellent––and increasingly important––distribution point for OS X developers, the argument goes that its lack of upgrade pricing ability ultimately hurts developers in the long run. After all, after spending lots of money and man–hours to release a major update to an existing app, a developer with that app on the Mac App Store can then only choose to release it for free––or not at all.
I sat down with Omni Group's CEO Ken Case to discuss the paid upgrade problem, the advantages and disadvantages of using Apple as your distributor, and the difference between apps that are consumable and apps that are tools.
Despite what happened earlier this month Ken Case doesn't think badly of Apple or the Mac App Store. He loved it upon its launch in 2010 and still does today. "Two and a half years later we still think the App Store is the most convenient way to buy our software––it's just more limited in its pricing options," he explains when I ask him about what happened and why he felt the need for OmniKeyMaster to exist. "We were simply trying to offer all of our customers the same benefits, no matter how or where they purchased our app––much as we've previously done with retail boxes. In my ideal world, we would be able to offer upgrade pricing through the App Store itself."
Case says that Omni didn't intend to try to skirt around Apple's rules when it released OmniKeyMaster––the company was simply trying to meet the needs of its users. Matter of fact, the company publicly announced its plans for OmniKeyMaster way back in January, eight months before the app went live. Perhaps that's why Case was a bit shocked when Apple notified Omni Group in early September that it had run afoul of the company's strict hold on distribution agreements.
"When we sell an app through the Mac App Store, we are not allowed to distribute updates to App Store purchases through other channels," Case explains. "This isn't news; it's why we removed our apps' built–in software update feature before publishing them to the App Store. On September 4th––the day we turned off OmniKeyMaster––I gained a broader understanding of that rule: I had previously assumed that it only applied to that SKU, not to other editions which are sold under different SKUs."
Case could have continued to support OmniKeyMaster against Apple's wishes and accepted the removal of Omni's apps from the Mac App Store. After all, though he admits that Omni's apps do very well in the Mac App Store, most of Omni's customers still buy directly through their own online store. Instead he says he pulled OmniKeyMaster because he and Omni Group have a long history with Apple and he respects their relationship. Still, Case suggests that Apple should learn the difference between apps that are consumable content and apps that are tools worthy of financial investment.
In Case's eyes there are two types of apps: ones that are consumable content and others that are tools. Apps that are consumable content are like many of the ones you find in the App Store for iOS. These are apps such as games, or fun photo editors, or newsreaders. However, on the desktop side of things Case says apps are more often than not tools to get a job done. Sometimes these tools are very expensive and users can't afford to shell out for the entire cost of the app again the next time the developer wants to do a major upgrade.
"In the world of consumable content that dominates Apple's iTunes Store and App Store––music, videos, and games––upgrade discounts are largely irrelevant," Case admits. "When I buy a movie or play a game, I don't expect to get a discount on any sequels. In fact, the sequel is actually more valuable to me because I was hooked by the original content. Since this sort of consumable content dominates Apple's online stores, I haven't been at all surprised that they haven't prioritized adding support for providing upgrade discounts. Instead, they've prioritized features that are useful to those content providers, like buying an entire music album or TV series at once for a discount."
If all apps on the App Store (Mac and iOS) were consumable, that would be the end of the story: The current model works great for that, Case argues, and points out that the stores' top grossing charts are dominated by apps which succeed under that model.
"But the kind of apps we build at Omni are intended to last for decades, not weeks," he says. "Most of the value of purchasing a productivity app comes from the initial investment: When I buy a spreadsheet or 3–D modeling software, I can use it to do things I couldn't do as efficiently before. I'm not using the app because it entertains me, I'm using it because the cost of investing in that tool is less than the cost of trying to do that work (or not doing that work) without that tool. Investing in the tool saves me money over time."
In other words, if a user invests $1,379 on a 3–D modeling app like Modo by Luxology, the high cost of the app is worth it because it's an investment that allows them to get work done. For an animator, the price tag is just the cost of doing business.
But for a developer, the price tag is the value of return that dev needs to get to make a living. So what happens when the developer wants to add new tools to the app––all of which costs him time and money––so he can offer better tools to his users? Oftentimes the new tools aren't enough to justify releasing a brand new app that the user would reasonably be expected to shell out the same amount of money for.
"I can already use the older app to do many of the same things as I would do with the new tool," Case says. "So the value of the upgrade is simply how much better it is than the previous version. Since I'm buying a tool, not consumable content, I can't justify the cost of making a full $1,379 investment in the app all over again."
The solution, of course, is an upgrade pricing path––an option that allows all parties to win. "As someone who has already invested in the previous version, what will make investing in the new tool worthwhile will be discounted upgrade pricing based on the relative increase in value of the new version, rather than having to pay for the full value of the app all over again. Otherwise, it may not be worth purchasing," Case adds.
But therein lies the problem: In the Mac App Store it's either a brand new, high–cost version of the app each time, or free upgrades for everyone. In that situation someone will always lose: either the user or the developer. And as Case and Omni found out, even trying to offer an external third–party upgrade path for apps bought in the Mac App Store are forbidden. It all goes back to the fact that, for Apple, consumable content––and not tools––is king.
"Apple is certainly aware of our desire for upgrade pricing," Case tells me. "It's something I've been asking for since before the launch of the original App Store in 2008. However, that doesn't mean they agree that it's important. For many titles in their online stores, it's not."
Case's only hope is for an increased dialog from both users and developers about the upgrade pricing problem, which is why he sat down with me to talk about it. And though he admits that for many users the Mac App Store is a more convenient solution for purchasing software––something Apple is very aware of––he's keen to note that pricing flexibility on the App Store has continued to improve over time, signaling Apple's willingness to test different sales models if enough people demand it.
"Since we originally entered the App Store, they've added support for institutional educational pricing, for In–App Purchases, for content subscriptions, and for business–to–business custom app development. I still have hope that upgrade discounts are slowly making their way up their priority list," he says.
"From Apple's perspective, I think upgrade pricing will make the App Store channel more attractive to developers and consumers of high–end productivity apps, and they can reap some of the same benefits as we would––after all, many of their apps are sold exclusively through the App Store, and I have no doubt that they would make more money from Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro if they could offer upgrade discounts to customers rather than changing their initial prices from $999 to $199."
While Case does admit that many customers are happy to get apps like Final Cut Pro X for only $199, he thinks Apple's current software pricing strategy on the Mac App Store is keeping developers and users from investing in high–end software. That's something many of Apple's pro users would agree with, as they are long weary of signs the company is moving even farther away from its professional solutions.
"While depressed software pricing may make the platform more attractive in the short term (and Apple can make up for their own software losses with increased platform sales), over the long term it discourages developers and consumers from ever investing in high–end software solutions. I suspect the lack of this flexibility may be one big reason why we don't find apps like Modo and Mathematica in the App Store," Case says.
In my talks with other developers of big name professional apps, I can say with one hundred percent certainty that Case is right on the money.
Before I let him go, I ask Case about Omni's long relationship with Apple. Has the skirmish over OmniKeyMaster changed anything between the two companies?
"Our relationship with Apple has always been great––and this certainly doesn't change that," he says. "I don't think they're trying to work against our interests; they just have to decide where to focus their efforts, and our priorities are not always their priorities."
Google Glass isn't just out of reach financially for a lot people, it's also out of reach conceptually for most. Everyone gets the idea that we're moving toward a world with more information that's easier to access, but beyond the quirky and creepy things like snapping pictures of everyone you meet, it's still hard to get a handle on how someone would actually use Glass and the data. What are the benefits of having an ugly piece of metal voluntarily strapped to your face? Well, if you're at all interested in sports, baseball in particular, you finally have your answer, its name is Blue.
Blue is a essentially a HUD for a live baseball game, taking baseball's raw data and delivering the best of television merged with the live experience. The app takes info previously reserved for the hard–to–read scoreboard and puts it in Glass's display, giving you get info like pitch count, speed, and whether it was a ball or strike. The app goes further, though, with actively involved players' stats, a definite wow factor for those desperate to keep getting closer to the game.
Seeing Blue in action, via the demo video, really clarifies why Glass is worth caring about, even if it flops. Glass is about taking raw data from everyday life and connecting to you in some meaningful way, or at least that's what it should be about. Baseball, like many sports, is something that connects with a lot of people, and this Glass app allows a way to dive further into the game data.
Why was Michael Lewis's Moneyball such a hit and a game changer when it was released in 2003? It took raw data and made sense of it. More recently, the NBA has begun all outfitting arenas with cameras that track players, for the same reason, to collect raw data and try and use it in a meaningful way.
After all of Google's efforts, I still hadn't cared about Glass. Seeing a simple app make sense of the enormous amounts of data baseball has to offer however, I get it. At least I get why Glass could be great. Now it's up to other developers to take Blue's "aha" moment and exploit it like crazy if there's any hope of Glass catching on.
Ever see the perfect color for your living room on a swath of street art? A wildflower? Photos give a general sense of the hue, but aren't nearly precise enough. Enter Nix, a Bluetooth–connected color sensor that pipes color scans to an app on your smartphone. Never lose a sweet color again.
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The Nix fits in the palm of your hand like a large gem. To use, place it face down on the desired color: The sensor in the middle has its own light source, preventing ambient light from altering color readings (an issue with smartphone camera–based color–sensing apps). The Nix beams the reading to a paired app on your smartphone, which allows you to convert the color to other media (interior wall paints, oil paints, makeup, hobby paints, etc.) and can even populate an area map with paint stores selling your color.
The Nix aims to replace the fanned paint decks that professional designers haul around in heavy totes, but that's only the tip of its applications. As they note in their Kickstarter page, the team was inspired by a friend's work with burn victims and patients with severe skin disorders: Finding skin–matching makeup is a costly and extensive process, but with the Nix, costs dribble down to $200 a unit ($99 for early Kickstarter rate), allowing Nix to be shipped all over.
But at its core, the Nix is an open–source light sensor, meaning people have built and will continue to build weird applications for it. Want to see if your fruit is ripe? Set a shade preset for "optimum ripeness." Want to make sure your plants are getting the right amount of sun? Make a preset for ideal brightness. Whether one sensor in a suite or the core sensing element, Nix's open source framework should be a playground for tinkerers, especially given its Bluetooth connectivity.
Two days after launch, the Nix has raised over $5,000 CAD of its $35,000 CAD goal and, if funded, plans to ship in February 2014.
More appetizing details: The algae is dispensed via inkjet–like printing, which Sawa has developed in partnership with Imperial College London. The Algaerium Bioprinter is an attempt to create a domestic "food farm" where particular algae combinations can be printed according to nutritional needs as part of a greater urban agricultural effort to fight food desert conditions. So while the fare itself might not sound appetizing, the amount of resources it could save sure do.
The microalgae in question––Chlorella, Spirulina, and Haematococcus––are a suite of "superfoods" rich in vitamins and minerals, resulting in some (like Chlorella) being industrially produced to satisfy demand for global foodstuffs. The Bioprinter can pump out vibrant combinations of the microalgae, and some of their colors can indicate nutrition features: Chlorella's green pigment, for example, comes from its high concentration of chlorophylls.
The Algaerium Bioprinter, deriving from Sawa's earlier research in aesthetic application and functionality of algae, is part of her doctoral research at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Her next step is to explore printed algae–based energy devices and filters.
There have been on–again, off–again rumors about NFC capabilities in Apple's iPhone for years. Recently the dial swung to "on" when a patent surfaced that combined a novel fingerprint sensing tech with an NFC sensor––with some added spin considering Apple seems to be using this system to read your fingertips. But, sadly for some, there is no NFC in the new iPhone 5S. That's because Apple has iBeacon.
iBeacon was a tiny throwaway detail on a slide Apple showed about iOS 7 during its WWDC presentations earlier this year. But as GigaOm points out, more details about the service have emerged thanks to Estimote––a company that plans to integrate with the iBeacon system.
The key phrase to bear in mind about iBeacon is probably new for you: micro–location. We're all aware that location–based services (LBS) are a very rapidly emerging trend, be it "check–in" type services like Foursquare, or Apple's "apps popular near me" feature in the brand new iOS 7 App Store refresh. The principle behind these services is simple: If your device can tell where you are with reliable accuracy––say within a hundred yards at least––it can use this information in some way to either deliver you relevant information about your locale, or it can tag some piece of information you're sharing online with the location so it can be used by other users or services. But using a–GPS and Wi–Fi technology (such as navigation systems use to get you from A to B and which some department stores use to track the whereabouts of their patrons) means this sort of LBS isn't a wonderfully accurate system. And since there's not necessarily much security built in to these systems, there's a problem with positive authentication of a user's identity.
That's one of the issues NFC payment technology can tackle. It's effectively an incredibly precise "micro–location" system that positively identifies a user from data in their phone or, more simply, their NFC–enabled credit card. It works wirelessly and over what are typically very short ranges––such as the air gap between your NFC phone and a payment pad at a cash register in a store. During NFC payment transactions a simple process takes place: The register handshakes with the phone or credit card's circuitry over radio. The phone or credit card detects the signals, and responds with a coded answer that contains the user's payment data, and acts as a de facto authentication device. The NFC system is saying, effectively, the user identified with this payment data is the real owner.
But this is a very simple interaction between cash register and payment device. It's a modern analog of the chip–and–PIN system popular in Europe, where the card reader interrogated an encrypted chip embedded in the card, and it works in a similar way––just offering the bonus of a slightly speedier interaction because you don't have to plug your card into a slot. NFC isn't capable of very much more than this.
And this is where iBeacon comes in. It's based on Bluetooth Low Energy technology, which is a new variant on Bluetooth that works over shorter ranges than the typical 20–plus yards "normal" Bluetooth is capable of. This allows it to be run with a much lower energy burden on devices, which can run for significant periods off the equivalent power of a small wristwatch cell. Bluetooth is, of course, a wireless data channel that can handle much more bandwidth than a typical NFC interaction––it is powerful enough to carry live stereo audio signals, for example.
When BLE is applied to a payment system there's a lot of potential for more sophisticated interactions between the payee and the merchant's computer systems. For example, if you enter a store that's equipped with a BLE–powered iBeacon device, you would be carrying your smartphone into a sea full of radio waves. iBeacon would immediately know that your phone is within a very short range of the beacon itself.
At this point a number of things could happen: Your phone could get an alert telling you of the special offers of the day, or share a special dedicated coupon that's tailored to your needs, based on your previous shopping data. The iBeacon system could also direct you to the right part of a store to find a particular product––acting as "indoor GPS" if you like.
It's also easy to imagine that wireless or "touchless" payment systems would work very swiftly over iBeacon, because the beacons authenticate a particular user by their phone's unique codes and confirm that they're in a particular store––perhaps even standing at a particular cash register. There would be no need to swipe a card or even bump your phone against a sensor to share your payment data because that could all happen over a secure Bluetooth interaction without you even having to get your phone out of your pocket.
If you think that's fanciful, then remember Apple's EasyPay service which has evolved to the point that for some Apple stores, iPhone users don't even have to speak to an employee or visit a cash register to make a purchase: They use the App Store app on their phone, scan the code of the item they want to buy, authorize a payment over their iTunes account, and leave the store.
And there's one last trick that the new iPhone 5S has in favor of a mobile payment system using wireless services like iBeacon: positive user identification. This could come courtesy of the phone's built–in fingerprint sensor, which means the iBeacon system has the following set of authentication data: The user's phone is physically present in a retail location; the phone is properly ID'd, and shares coded payment data in the right way; and that the user of the phone, and thus the owner of the payment card, is positively identified as being with their device. Added together that equates to a level of security that makes credit card signatures on a slip of paper look positively medieval in comparison. Even an NFC payment interaction looks unimpressive compared to this.
There's just one problem, although it may be more of a perceived threat than a real one. The iBeacon service relies on an iPhone user (or, presumably an Android user with a BLE–capable phone that's running the right app) sharing their data over the radio. Without the ability to handshake automatically with a store's beacons, the service won't offer any value to the user...but the user may be concerned their data could be stolen, or "officially" snooped on, or remotely hacked and exploited for criminal purposes. With the right kind of encryption, however, the hacking and theft issues go away. And if users are concerned about data surveillance, then they're better off not even using credit cards.
If Apple plays its iBeacon cards right, it could even turn out to be the best kept secret superpower of iOS 7 and the iPhone 5S. All sorts of payment systems and LBS facilities could be created––the most interesting of which we probably can't imagine right now. And where Apple beats a path to the future, other firms will likely follow.
The way two of the guys behind Forecast tell it, they started by "cheating until it worked," and by "it," they mean everything: design, function, usability. The three guys, in their 20s at the time, knew exactly what they wanted, but didn't have anyone around to convince them theirs was the wrong way, or too much work, or not modern enough.
In Troy, NY, you can achieve that kind of isolated focus. Troy is where the three met up, after attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, working jobs in game and web development, and deciding to team up on a project to solve the founder's inspirational problem: having no idea when it would start or stop raining, exactly.
None of them had backgrounds in meteorology, and none intended to plant a flag for the web as platform, HTML5 and JavaScript over Flash, or other benchmarks. They wanted to smooth out the "clunky, jerky and hard to follow" radar maps, unleash modern data–mining tools on the standard weather prediction models, and make it all look nice.
Feature requests poured in: humidity, wind speed, seven–day forecasts, and, most notably, international coverage. The team decided to expand Dark Sky into Forecast, a free webapp that scaled nicely on desktops, tablets, phones, or nearly anything else with a screen. They make money with a tiny bit of advertising, but also through a robust API that can power other apps and sites. And they keep on pointing new data technologies at far–reaching questions.
Their newest venture, launched this past week, is Quicksilver. The web app provides a "hyperlocal real–time map of global temperature," with "the highest resolution map of its kind anywhere." As with Forecast, the Dark Sky team is quite open about how they achieve rich results with the same data available to everyone, writing up their process in a detailed blog post and encouraging developers to download their data and do "something fun with it."
But back to Forecast, and its mostly text–based design and function: That text was anything but easy to generate. "As we looked at the data, we realized that it's really hard to describe what the next hour of water in the air is going to be," said Adam Grossman, a partner and cofounder in The Dark Sky Company. "There could be piddly sprinkling for 10 minutes, then ramping up into a hard rain. There are sudden downpours... There was more work to the weather in the next hour than we had originally hoped."
Cofounder Jay LaPorte said what really mattered, in both the next hour and the description of a day, was the delta––the difference between what people expect (hot and humid in Washington, D.C. in the summer, rain in Seattle) and what is brewing in the sky. "Tell me something I don't know, really, is how it works," LaPorte said. "We've always tried to focus on what's relevant to you, to filter out all the unnecessarily extensive data."
If you want to know why something looks, acts, or feels the way it does in Forecast, that's your answer: The team is trying to pack away the details that overwhelm many weather dashboards, letting you dig in with taps or clicks to get to it. "We sort of took the newspaper model," LaPorte said. "The first (paragraph) is a summary of what's going on. If you want the nitty–gritty, turn to A–12."
There were a few firm guidelines for Forecast's interactions. Chief among them were avoiding the hints and feeling of looking at a webpage. No underlined links, and no data dumps that would require scrolling down the page. Get as much native app feel into the thing as possible. Again, not because they were flexing their design and HTML5 muscles, but for 3–guys–in–Troy pragmatism: "We were making a free app, and we wanted it on as many platforms as possible," LaPorte said.
Forecast's look was similarly simple but considered at length. The site was almost entirely hand–coded in JavaScript. "Jay and I have a distrust of big frameworks," Grossman said. "You can make something really quick, but then you want to do something fun and useful, you hit a wall, and you find out you're stuck."
The site's monochromatic, very gently moving icons were also made by hand by LaPorte, with procedural animations (which Grossman thought would never work). The team wanted the icons to look like a printed page, and stuck to what they knew as non–designers.
"For the basic design of the site, we looked at a few different color schemes, but all of them clashed, or became too busy," LaPorte said. Similarly, it was hard to pick colors for animations that would mesh with other animations' colors, all while keeping the palette together."
"The way we ended up solving the problems was to cheat. We ended up using mono, and using color only for the really salient points, and a little blue for emphasis. ... Cheat until it works, really."
As for the justly admired smoothed–out radar animations, those are HTML5 Canvas, with every pixel redrawn once a frame. On some devices, like the iPhone 5 and decent laptops, you might get away with that kind of brute–force computation. But to get the site looking smooth on all kinds of devices, LaPorte wrote his code in such a (painful, machine–minded) way that a device's JavaScript interpreter does the absolute minimum to act out the code, and its graphical processor handles more of the work that usually slows down the main processor. Writing code by hand with explicit performance targets is possible, Grossman said––"just not advisable."
Not everything shipped under the keep–it–simple banner worked out. For the icon that smartphone and tablet users see when they add Forecast to their home screens, the first version was, in Grossman's words, "a complete failure."
"The thinking was, 'Let's not have an icon at all! Let's just have a wet piece of metal!' It was going to be this clever thing: no logo, just some water drops. I tried to convince myself it was good, but it failed. We fixed it, and it's much better now."
It didn't take long after Apple announced the iPhone 5S and its swift and secure fingerprint–sensing technology for nonsensical articles like this one at the Guardian to appear: "iPhone 5s; Would thieves really chop off your fingers to access it?" Satirical, and possibly serious, tweets to much the same end have also flourished on Twitter and I've heard so–called "jokes" in person on the matter. Can we just apply some science, logic, and clear thinking and nip this in the bud right now?
Yes, we all know that some fingerprint sensors of old can be fooled by using gummy bears, molded gelatin, or even just a photocopy of a valid fingerprint. There's a wonderful MythBusters episode all about this, and it's the reason why many security–conscious services around the world won't rely on optical fingerprint scanners to secure property or data. The keyword is "optics," of course: This scam is all about creating a believable image of a valid fingerprint to fool the sensor. Fooling an iPhone scanner of this design would take some clever thinking, and access to a fingerprint––something the super–shiny surface of a typical smartphone is very likely to serve up on a platter.
But Apple's sensor doesn't work like that. The company's taken some time out to explain just a few details of how it works, and this is enough to make us believe the sensor is the novel one we at CoLabs talked about just a few weeks ago. In its tech explanations, Apple points out the sensor scans just beneath external skin layers to see the real living fleshy wrinkles that comprise the loops and whorls of your unique print patterns to get a more reliable "reading" (one that ignores effects something like fluff on your fingertip). Apple also points out that the sensor is fallible, and if your fingertip is wet, for example, or perhaps is heavily scarred the high resolution capacitance–scanning sensor will be unable to get a good image of your print.
The keyword there is "capacitance," since it tells us about how the sensor works. Let's talk about the physics of fingertips and touchscreens to show why this is important. Modern touchscreens look for the presence of a material with a particular dielectric quality above a sensor pixel. The material changes the capacitance of some of the thousands of tiny circuits on the display, and that's how the screen knows you're touching it at a particular point.
This is why you can't simply prod at your iPhone screen with a pencil or a gloved finger: The electrical signature of these objects near the screen won't trigger the sensors simply because they don't "feel" right. The screen is really crying out for flesh. That's why some smart–thinking individuals in chilly Korea discovered that carrying a frozen sausage around is a handy iPhone alternative to un–gloving your fingers in the snow––the meat in the sausage has just about the right electrical properties.
So, the iPhone's new sensor will likely be looking for a substance with all the right electrical properties to activate its fingerprint scanning systems. You won't be able to fool it with a simple low–tech photocopy of a fingerprint. That should dismiss worries that your iPhone 5S will be vulnerable to fast–and–simple fingerprint hacks...even a fake print stuck onto a real finger wouldn't work.
But what about molding a fingerprint in ballistic gel, or a gummy bear or some other material? That may or may not work, depending on the precise electrical characteristics the sensor is tuned to detect. But given that Apple's noted that a real–life wet, human fingertip may cause a sensing failure, we're guessing you'd have to get the bio–electrical parameters of that gummy bear to match human flesh pretty darn well. That would take significant time and effort.
How could you fool this sensor then? Maybe, just maybe, you could somehow pattern a real piece of meat with the patterns of a valid fingerprint. That would require that you have an accurate 3–D scan of a print, and both the time, technology, and inclination to try the trick. These aren't the characteristics of a typical mugger or opportunist thief, who would seem more likely to sell a stolen iPhone as quickly as possible without even trying to crack its access code. Even someone like the NSA isn't going to try this, as they've probably got swifter, more electronic ways to hack in. The whole idea may not work anyway if the 5S's sensor is particularly tuned to "living" flesh.
Which is also one reason simply snipping a finger off may not work. If Apple says scarred human tissue isn't ideal for the sensor, then––how to put this?––a "dead" finger may not work either.
That doesn't mean folks wouldn't try, though. But let's be honest: Someone who mugs you for your phone is pretty unlikely to also be unhinged and/or stupid enough to steal your finger too. And if you meet a crazy person of that magnitude, then you've probably got much more life–threatening things to worry about. It'd be less risky to simply coerce you into unlocking the phone...and that's something they could do even if the phone's locked with a simple code.
If you're a cyclist, chances are you've seen Hammerhead Navigation's pitch for a crowdsourced option to make the biking experience safer from the streets to the trails: the Hammerhead, a handlebar–mounted LED heads–up–display blinking directions in the cyclist's peripheral vision while keeping their focus on the road. But the Hammerhead isn't just a product––it aims to be an open API platform that will streamline biking navigation for any app that wants to build on it. Likewise, Hammerhead Navigation is more than a one–off startup of Silicon Valley regulars––it's an international three–person team of cyclists who know the pitfalls of urban biking firsthand.
The Hammerhead is appropriately simple, with strips of LEDs left, right, and center in a "T" shape with a single button at the bottom and, since safety is the name of the game, bright LEDs pointing forward and at the arm ends to illuminate either side of the bike along with indicating turns to cars. The strips pulse left and right down the "T" arms for impending turns, as expected, but it's the center strip that gives the Hammerhead its depth (so to speak).
Adding a "Y" axis opens up surprising functionality for the screenless device: Just how close is my next turn? The strip of green lights blinks out bottom to top to indicate approximate distance. Am I on pace to complete the route I chose? The LEDs may blink in a pattern to indicate how fast you're comparatively going. The point isn't to display all the information relevant to the cyclist's ride––it's to offer the minimum information essential to keeping them en route while freeing mental bandwidth.
It's useful to point out that the Hammerhead team used prototypes of their own device as they biked the streets of Jersey City, NJ looking for office space, encountering the pitfalls of unmaintained streets, dead ends, and errors in human navigation that would forge the Hammerhead into a brilliant tool for all levels of cycling. But it sells the team short: These are three people with thousands of hours of biking and outdoorsmanship to whittle away the features and gizmos that clog many crowdsourced product visions. What's left is an enthusiast–first survival tool, built by experience.
Piet Morgan, chief and founder of Hammerhead Navigation, grew up in South Africa riding with childhood friend Chris Froome, the 2013 winner of the Tour de France. During one of their later bike rides, they were mugged, though Morgan and Froome followed the muggers, informed the police, and got their stuff back. That kind of thing didn't happen when Morgan came to the U.S. to attend Yale and biked from Connecticut to San Francisco as part of a multi–week Habitat for Humanity campaign. What did happen, regretfully, was a series of deaths and tragic injuries over successive years that ultimately resulted in removing the biking aspect from the Habitat for Humanity campaign altogether. Urban biking was obviously dangerous, but rural and off–road biking share navigational pitfalls. This was the Hammerhead's genesis.
Laurence Wattrus had been a biking partner of Morgan's in high school who graduated with an electromechanical engineering degree from the University of Cape Town, spending much of his time competing on the university cycling team and navigating much of the southern tip of Africa by bike. He came to Brown University in Rhode Island for a master's degree and met back up with Morgan, who explained the Hammerhead idea over dinner. The team had its engineer.
Morgan quickly realized his self–taught coding wouldn't be enough and sought out Raveen Beemsingh, who Morgan met at a hackathon at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where Beemsingh was getting his master's. Beemsingh, graduate of the National Institute of Technology Surat in India, winner of the HackPrinceton 2013 hackathon, and avid hiker/mountaineer, was instantly excited about the concept and brought his 10+ years of software engineer experience to the team.
The team moved into a tiny apartment/workspace in Jersey City and got to work. How would they fit all the navigational data and computation onto a circuitboard inside the Hammerhead's molded plastic? Their answer: It doesn't––it steals all the navigation data from your phone. Using Hammerhead Navigation's smartphone app, the device rips GPS data along the route you've planned. Since cell phone signal is notoriously spotty on non–urban bike trails, the Hammerhead app caches route information and syncs back up when you re–enter civilized, cell–broadcasting areas. In the meantime, the internal accelerometer can be used for a compass feature, illuminating a single red LED on the top bar that adjusts to show north.
Broadcasting GPS data to the Hammerhead obviously drains some battery, but the Bluetooth connection uses little phone and device power and the app works with the screen off. The Hammerhead currently uses a LiPo battery that lasts 12 hours (which they hope to upgrade to 20 by release time) and is rechargeable through a microUSB port.
Remember that center button? Hit it if you find an obstacle in the road and the app will mark that space as a warning zone...which it uploads to the cloud for every Hammerhead user who comes down the same road. Likewise, if another Hammerhead user has plotted a warning signal, twin front red LEDs blip to warn you of impending danger.
"The nice thing with cycling is that we don't need to have a tremendous amount of riders on the road," Morgan said. "We really only need one or two cyclists riding the route to recommend it. We don't need a massive community to add value."
It's the simplest of community–building features, but it belies the protective nature that binds many biking communities together: that of enthusiasts endangered by carelessness and lack of consideration, especially unmaintained hazards like potholes or oil slicks that barely faze motorists. Looking out for fellow cyclists is the basic functionality that the Hammerhead team hopes will draw users into deeper app features like building off of other users' routes and creating challenge races. Most useful to cycling groups will likely be setting the Hammerhead's route to one of your app friends, allowing you to hunt them down mid–ride without the agonizing repeated calls of "Okay, where do you think you'll be in 10 minutes?"
The Hammerhead device, which weighs as much as a Garmin fitness watch (180g), sits in front of the handlebars on a central mount...but you don't need your own bike to use it. The Hammerhead team developed a mount for Bixi–built bikes, which supplies bicycles for bike share systems in New York City, London, Boston, Minneapolis, Melbourne, Toronto, and many others.
The Hammerhead device has been tested, refined, and its crowdsourcing campaign has begun––to overwhelmingly positive response, having raised $25,000 of its $145,000 goal in two days. The early–bird price points are out, but you can still reserve a Hammerhead for $75 (it will retail for over $100). And if you're wary of jumping on the crowdsourcing bandwagon (despite the device's remarkable funding progress), Dragon Innovation is a funding platform to appreciate: Taking lessons from the delayed delivery and outright implosion that often happens to fully funded Kickstarter campaigns, Dragon Innovation takes a vested interest in ensuring that crowdsourced campaigns deliver what they've promised––and, ideally, surpass one–off productions to form innovative companies.
Funding the Hammerhead is by no means the end of the road for Hammerhead Navigation. With the tech in place, the team is set to upgrade the Hammerhead's functionality with regular firmware updates. The first will establish turn–by–turn navigation using light patterns in all biking conditions and release route discovery options for all kinds of riders and routes.
But the team's real excitement lies in releasing the Hammerhead software as open API: It's been designed with navigation apps like Strava, MapMyRide, and GTX in mind to use the Hammerhead hardware to increase functionality of their apps, along with Windows Phone and Firefox OS app integration. Depending on demand, they might even adjust the Hammerhead to work with motorcycles.
Which only spells great things for the Hammerhead's acceptance, but the possibilities that leave them giddy, the team realized after many group test rides along the Hudson, lie in using the API to program awesome games. Take, for example, Fox & Friends/FoxHunt: The lead bike is the Fox, the others Hunters, and the center strip marks distance between the hunters and the hunted. For personal use, inspired by smartphone apps like Zombies, Run!, Beemsingh suggested Packman––go too slow and you'll get gobbled up. Of course, there are more sensible ideas, like using the API to develop apps mapping out disaster evacuation routes that are ideal for bikes.
More than a product, Hammerhead Navigation is a team, and funding the project means being a team in one place: After receiving his master's from Lehigh, Beemsingh's visa expired, and the team has spent the last two weeks working across the world from each other. Getting the Hammerhead funded has the quiet bonus of getting Beemsingh back to working with his teammates face–to–face on the next great project they're already dreaming up.
These days there's something extra revitalizing about cracking open a book. I don't just mean in a strictly geektastic, hooray–for–reading kind of way. I mean, it's actually mentally refreshing. For those of us who live online, there's no better way to wrap up a hyper–connected day of status updates, tweets, and pageview–thirsty headlines than by diving into a single, focused, long–form story or work of nonfiction. Well, it'll be nice as long as it lasts, anyway.
If it wasn't already obvious, the era of social books is right on the horizon. One of the companies leading us there is Readmill, the purveyor of a social reading app that takes Amazon's crowdsourced highlighting concept to the next level and makes e–books more interactive than ever. Not to be outdone by some scrappy startup, Amazon will integrate the next version of its Kindle Paperwhite e–reader with Goodreads, the book–centric social network Amazon acquired in late March. Neither of these new social reading environments amounts to a full–blown, Facebook–inside–your–book type of experience. But the line between social networks and books is only now beginning to blur. Prepare to get even more distracted.
As my colleague Michael Grothaus––himself a paper–loving e–reader holdout––wrote recently, "e–books are going to explode beyond just containing stories, becoming niche social networks where we discuss our favorite passages with other readers and even authors and publishers buy our data to make more informed decisions."
Sounds awesome! Damien Walter, writing for the Guardian, fleshes out the picture in enticingly forward–looking detail:
Imagine reading a book published in 2013 in the year 2063. In the 50 years between now and then, dozens of critical texts, hundreds of articles, thousands of reviews and hundreds of thousands of comments will have been made on the text. In a fully networked reading experience, all of those will be available to the reader of the book from within the text… Authors are able to shape the discussion on their books, moderating comments in a system similar to a blogpost… And perhaps most interesting of all, readers can find each other through the books they read.
Normally, the prospect of a more networked, collaborative form of mass media is something I find very exciting. And indeed, the potential here is enormous, especially for academic and nonfiction works. Yet I can't help but cringe a little at the thought of classic novels morphing into mini–Facebooks.
My attention span is already stretched thin. The deluge of new things to read is relentless, kicking off mere minutes after I wake up in the morning. It starts with the day's tech news headlines (required reading in my line of work) and stories in Flipboard, Feedly, and Reddit. After a hefty round of work–related reading and mining for story ideas, Twitter incessantly projectile–vomits headlines my way. I don't dare check Facebook during peak hours, lest I get roped into another nostalgic BuzzFeed listicle. The stories and blog posts that do pique my attention (but aren't germane to me doing my job) get corralled into Instapaper using the "Read Later" button. Of course, every saved article is another item in the bedtime reading queue, which has a way of piling up faster than I can keep up with. When I do finish an Instapaper reading session, I close my iPad's cover and place it down atop a stack of print magazines, through which I'll eventually plow. Hopefully.
This massive, permanent backlog of must–read material has made it more and more difficult to carve out time to read anything longer than a few thousand words. In the last few years, I've found myself reading fewer books and those that I start take longer to get through. There's just too much other stuff to read.
I am, of course, not the only one to feel somewhat overwhelmed by the Internet's firehose of insights, imagery, and information. Taking some sort of "digital detox" as Baratunde Thurston recounted in a recent Fast Company cover story is now a common practice among the uber–connected. Indeed, the very phrase "digital detox"––which was added to the Oxford dictionary in May––effectively compares our reliance on the Internet to a junkie's desperate need for a fix. Meanwhile, a growing stack of journal articles, magazine cover stories, and books have weighed in on the subject of whether or not the Internet is literally driving us all insane. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what those books are about. I got a few press copies in the mail, but I haven't had a chance to page through any of them yet. Maybe someday.
Lately, I've started reading more books. That's because I've been more deliberate about shutting off the Internet and setting aside time solely dedicated to reading. Much of the time, I'm paging through good, old–fashioned paper books. When you've conditioned your brain to expect to switch tasks at any moment (even as I write this, there's a nagging feeling that an editor or source sent me a really important email), going back to reading things on paper feels that much more focused and relaxing.
It also helps that I recently bought my first Kindle, which allows me to breeze through digital books much more effortlessly than the distraction–riddled, notification–dinging iPad (on which I do the vast majority of my blog, news, and magazine reading). Without email, apps, aggregators, and notifications, my Kindle serves as a much more focused reading environment. I enjoy the limited amount of social networking intrinsic in the platform, which amounts to Kindle calling out areas that are frequently highlighted by other Kindle readers.
As it turns out, each class of device lends itself well to a different type of consumption (or creation, for that matter). Phones are great for "chunking" information––there's a reason Circa is designed the way it is. Tablets are better for medium–length articles, PDFs, and mini–books. Paired with an external keyboard, they can also make delightful writing tools. If all I want to do is read one long item at a time––not check email or browse headlines or anything else––the Kindle is perfect. There will always be a place for analog, paper–based reading (I hope), but as reading and book discovery become an increasingly digital experience, single–purpose devices appear to be the best way to maintain prolonged focus on a single text. Which makes me all the more ambivalent about social networking creeping into this device.
But what happens when that John Grisham novel starts dinging with new status updates? And sure, the Steve Jobs biography would be even more informative with links to related reading, multimedia, and collective wisdom infused right into the text. But the damn thing is long enough as it is without endless tributaries branching out all over the place.
Having just settled into a new, more focused digital reading environment, the last thing I'm clamoring for is another social network. I certainly don't need one inside my book.
