The product of a collaboration between technology–artist Geoffrey Lillemon and the Amsterdam–based creative agency Random Studio, "The Nail Polish Inferno" is, quite plainly, an immersive gallery space with a surreal soundtrack. But strapping a user into a headset with accompanying audio is already enough for game journalists to wonder whether game designers should add functionality like auto–pause to horror games if users keep flinging their headsets in panic. In short, since it blocks out external stimuli, the Oculus Rift headset gives developers incredible control over the user experience. While the author of this post wonders whether this Oculus Rift guillotine simulator would make a great sequence in a future game, "The Nail Polish Inferno" is an argument for the experience itself, subverting expectations of interactive agency by limiting the user.
While non–combat games like Amnesia and its horror ilk (including the Oculus Rift–specific Dreadhalls referred to above) do not have combat options, they are driven by exploration and pursuit; "The Nail Polish Inferno," on the other hand, is devoid of gamification. With the wide availability of the Oculus Rift, what other experiences will developers and artists want to curate for us?
If you need more convincing than the extensive testimonials in the Structure's Kickstarter video, consider its crowdfunding progress: Since launching this morning, it's made $40,000 out of its $100,000 goal. It's easy to see why: At the $349 Kickstarter price, the Structure is a stereoscopic scanner with paired infrared LEDs that capture invisible patterns of light to form a 3–D model, all encased in an attractive anodized aluminum case. There's even an included battery with four hours of usage life so it won't drain your iPad.
Yes, you can scan objects into a CAD 3–D file (say, for 3–D printing later), but the possibilities for digitizing your world are extensive: Scan your house, the above video demonstrates, and keep the dimensions on your phone to make sure home improvement projects only need one trip to the store. Or, if your partner's out with the scanner, have him or her scan and send it to you to gauge at home. Plus, who doesn't want to see what 3–D games can come out of a 3–D–conscious iPad app?
But as the video points out, Occipital is a software company––it wants to get the Structure out into the hands of developers, giving them a software development kit (SDK) for complete low–level access to the sensor (with a less–intensive option to write in Xcode and deploy). The drivers and CAD specs are open source and will be available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Android (which can connect to the device through a USB OTG adapter).
The Structure runs off the Lightning connector favored by current iOS devices; sadly, that likely means older iPads and iOS devices are out of luck. The Occipital–preferred model is the iPad 4 (which is what they based their bracket design around), though they note that other Lightning–equipped models like the iPad Mini and iPhone 5/S/C should work just fine with it.
There's one big problem with the Arduino development environment, also known as an IDE: There's no network hookup to directly share and browse code you're writing for these little microcontrollers. It's not surprising, then, that an answer has come in the form of a web–based IDE. Codebender is an in–browser dev environment that can store your code, copy from other users, and upload it to most Arduino boards.
Obviously, operating from within your browser means Codebender has zero installation, unlike normal IDEs such as Arduino IDE, Apple's Xcode, or the IntelliJ IDEA IDE that Android Studio is based on. Codebender was founded by Vasilis Georgitzikis and Alexandros Baltas out of the European seed fund LAUNCHub where Georgitzikis, a computer engineer, experienced his own frustration learning the Arduino code language.
Codebender allows you to flash sketches to your device, clone other pieces of code and modify it, share your sketches, and embed code into your own website, blog, and tutorials. There is also a "Cloud Flash" feature to program networked–enabled devices like the Arduino Ethernet or Arduino & Ethernet Shield.
Evidence of a larger push for simple, instant flashing to microcontrollers without an installed IDE can also be found in the Tessel, a Wi–Fi–enabled board that has made twice its crowdfunding goal with 22 days left. It runs JavaScript on the device, no server necessary, and you can even control all the outputs via a smartphone app. Instead of solder points, the Tessel uses Node.js nodes, available online and reasonably priced, allowing you to pull it out of the box and start pushing JavaScript commands in minutes.
Both efforts indicate tiny revolts in the non–networked IDE programming norm for microcontrollers of today. Opening the microcontroller world to browser–based code flashing and sharing along with Wi–Fi–enabled microcontrollers? Sounds like we're moving closer to an open–programmable world.
Visually speaking, things will never be the same for iOS users. This week's public launch of iOS 7 marks the most substantial shift in the look and feel of Apple's mobile operating system since it debuted in 2007. While the design overhaul will make for a palpably different experience for users of all stripes, it may be especially noticeable for jailbreakers.
One of the perks of jailbreaking one's iOS device has long been the ability to apply custom design themes via a platform called WinterBoard. In recent years, however, WinterBoard's ability to re–skin ever–evolving versions of iOS has slowly degraded. With iOS 7, the prospects look particularly dim, according to developers and designers in the jailbreaking community.
So what's changed? The interface overhaul in iOS 7 certainly doesn't help, but the gradual erosion of WinterBoard's compatibility with iOS has been underway for a while now. Some of this degradation is the natural result of an evolving operating system, whereas some of it stems from lackluster communication among developers and designers.
So for the iOS 7 haters out there, what will it take before you can override the new bubblegum look?
First a short history lesson: WinterBoard was created in 2008 by Jay Freeman, aka @saurik, the developer best known for building Cydia, the alternate app store available exclusively on jailbroken devices. Through WinterBoard, designers can create their own designs for most interface elements in iOS, including things like the default app icons or the appearance of the home screen dock, lock screen, various backgrounds and the phone dialer, to name a few. Any element that is represented by a graphic––right down to granular details like UI animations, the transparency of icons, and background gradients––can be modified by a theme designer in order to create what feels like a completely new interface.
Re–theming the iOS is, by any definition, a hack. And a tedious one, at that. All elements of the UI live together in a file with the extension .artwork, which needs to be unpacked to reveal a set of .png image files that can then be modified individually in an image editor like Photoshop. Extracting these images requires a specially programmed piece of software that operates beyond the purview of standard file–unzipping applications like WinZip or StuffIt on the Mac.
In a recent blog post, theme designer Sk37cH described the complexity of some of these images:
Now begins the laborious task of recreating all these images. Some are animations made up of 16–20 still images. Some images are stretched and some are tiled. The battery percent was controlled by images and is now dictated by the system font being used. Some images are clipped to "masks" and some are affected by the gyroscope.
After redesigning and then recompiling these images back into the iOS–friendly .artwork format, the theme designer is often left to tweak things on a pixel–by–pixel basis, with each change requiring the device to be rebooted again and again.
For design–conscious users, the end result of all this hard work is a repository of alternative themes. These can be used to replace the graphical interface with which iOS ships, something Apple has never given users the option to change without jailbreaking. On iOS 4, WinterBoard was fully capable of replacing pretty much all of the visual elements found within the iOS interface. With the launch of iOS 5, some of WinterBoard's functionality broke, but the issues were minor and easily fixed, says Freeman. Then came iOS 6.
"As it stands, there are tons of things on iOS 6 that took WinterBoard a long time to support, and there are still tons of things that it doesn't support," says Freeman. "Clearly, that the situation will not change for iOS 7, is not really news to anyone. The only thing vaguely interesting is why, and it isn't because I don't care somehow: It's because I'm not a theme artist and I don't even know what these things are that it doesn't support."
To remedy this, Freeman says, theme designers should file bug reports consistently and in thorough detail so that when a new version of iOS affects WinterBoard's functionality, a fix can be more easily applied. To date, he says such reports have been infrequent and lacking in the type of specifics that a developer such as himself needs in order to properly fix bugs.
These bugs can result from things like changes in how Apple caches images on iOS, which was one factor that led to theming issues in iOS 6. Additionally, as Sk37cH pointed out, Apple has begun hosting some graphical elements remotely for its own apps, such as the App Store, making it more difficult for theme designers to replace them. Issues like this can usually be resolved, but doing so often requires the installation of an additional tweak from Cydia. In some cases, all that's required is for a bug report to be filed, but the communication between designers and developers––as is so often the case––can sometimes be murky.
A lot has changed since WinterBoard launched. Not only have various design elements within iOS been restructured, but jailbreaking and the culture around it have evolved as well. For one thing, the practice itself is growing more popular. Each untethered jailbreak release is met with hordes of eager users, most of whom have put off installing Apple's latest iOS upgrade for months in anticipation of a jailbreak. When the evasi0n untethered jailbreak for iOS 6 finally went live last year (five months after the release of iOS 6 itself), the sudden influx of users rendered Cydia unusable for about 24 hours as Freeman scrambled to fix broken functionality. The lapse in Cydia's stability was a momentary one, but it illustrated the growing popularity of the alternative app store, which by then had been downloaded over 22.5 million times.
Since its inception, iOS jailbreaking has become a pretty big deal, even if the numbers pale in comparison to the total size of Apple's mobile user base. For Freeman, maintaining Cydia and its many moving parts (not to mention being actively involved in the online community of jailbreak developers) has made for an increasingly full plate. To thrive, a secondary project like WinterBoard will require the diligent attention of the entire community behind it, designers and developers alike. With iOS 7, Apple may have spruced up the joint, but the ecosystem remains a closed one: Simple things like choosing a default web browser and tinkering with the way the software looks remain elusive for iOS users who don't crack the system open so it can run things like Cydia and WinterBoard. As pretty as iOS's facelift may be, the demand for jailbreaking isn't going away.
Of course, it will be some time before an untethered jailbreak is available for iOS 7. The operating system goes live on Wednesday and if history is any indication, the public may not see a jailbreak tool until early next year. Projects like OpenJailbreak aim to use a collaborative, open source approach to expedite the process of finding and executing exploits to make a jailbreak possible. But that open source framework is brand new and even divided among numerous developers, so the hard work of finding an exploit can be time–consuming.
It remains to be seen precisely how iOS 7 will impact designers' ability to re–skin the interface painstakingly overhauled by Jony Ive and his team. One already–discovered change is that the design is no longer controlled via the traditional .artwork files and instead has switched to .car files. According to Sk37ch, the software many theme designers use to extract editable .png files from .artwork files won't be upgraded by its author to support the new format. Other solutions will undoubtedly be forged, but it's just one example of how OS upgrades can break old functionality and force theme designers to alter their already complex process. As Sk37ch writes, "So long as the community is there, I think the new obstacles can be overcome."
From Freeman's vantage point, WinterBoard's continued ability to properly support iOS depends on how well theme designers document the issues they experience as the operating system evolves. After all, WinterBoard is an open source project and patches can be applied easily, so long as the issues are clear to developers.
"WinterBoard will be on iOS 7, clearly," says Freeman. "It hooks the image loader, and the image loader will always be there. But how much stuff it can theme, and how well it themes? That is up in the air, and is related to the number of bug reports people actually bother discussing, particularly on the #winterboard IRC channel where development happens."
As a journalist, you usually see the same patterns in people's stories. Each story is impressive it its own right, but you rarely find a new pattern. But that changed with the last interview I did. The company is called 99dresses, and it's an online trading network for women's clothing.
Nikki Durkin
At 20, CEO Nikki Durkin––who had no programming skills or a fancy MBA––applied to Y Combinator and got accepted. Now three years later, 99dresses is making its North American debut on the iOS App Store on September 23. Here's what she had to say about solving problems, learning on the job, and being a woman at Y Combinator.
99dresses doesn't sound like a problem a guy would have ever thought of solving.
(Laughs) 99dresses was pretty much trying to solve a problem that I had myself. I had the idea when I was 16, and sure, it's something quite relevant to the whole "women in tech" conversation because I don't think a guy would have come up with that idea. I was trying to solve a problem that hadn't really been solved properly and it was a by–product of scratching my own itch as a woman.
Most teenagers have problems and ask their parents to solve them. But instead you wrote a business plan, right?
Yeah. I was in school and I was running this other business called Kultkandy and my business studies teacher wanted me to enter a business plan competition. At the time, I had been having a very fortunate problem: I was taking all the money I was earning from my other business and spending it on clothes because I had no expenses, I was 15. I spent hundreds of dollars every week on clothes and then I'd get bored of them after a week and then they'd just sit there doing nothing. It was this vicious cycle, but the same one most women have: a full closet with nothing to wear. So I came up with a more efficient way for women to consume fashion. I wrote the business plan and it won the National Business Planning competition.
What I find really interesting is the market research you did before you launched 99dresses. You called it "creative prototyping" because not everyone has the money to actually get a real prototype off the ground.
Yes, it's important to get some kind of validation so you know you're on the right track. I had this idea for 99dresses, but I needed to know if other people would like it. I had no marketing budget, so I started a Facebook event. I said, "Hey, my name is Nikki. I'm 18, I have this problem: I have a closet full of clothes, but nothing to wear and all my friends have the same problem and it's kind of stupid and no one's solving it so I figured I would just do it. This is my idea on how this all can work. If you'd use a website like this, can you click the 'Attending' button and if not can you click 'Not Attending'?" It was a free way to easily post a survey before Facebook allowed you to have polls. It ended up getting 40,000 "attendees" and went viral in Australia.
And it was very successful in Australia. But then you decided you wanted to break into America, so you applied to Y Combinator and got accepted. YC and the tech industry in general are male dominated. What was the experience for you like?
I loved YC. I was a starry–eyed. I was a 20–year–old girl going to America for the first time, which was a huge deal for me, and went to Silicon Valley, which is what I'd been hearing about for ages. The main value of YC for me was that I came over as an international person trying to break into the American market and I immediately had mentors. I immediately had a community of other people doing startups, some money, connections, and then a level of respect that came from being a YC company. People would just talk to you if you said, "Oh, I'm in YC," and they're like, "Oh!" and they actually take notice of you, which was good because there's so much noise, there's a lot of stuff happening. I had an amazing experience. I thought it was great.
But being a woman there?
There weren't that many girls, true. But, honestly, a lot of people complain about that like it's a big problem. Yes, in some ways I guess it is, but at the same time I like that. Why? Because "It's better to be a purple cow." You're female. Use it. You'll stand out because you're quite different from a "normal" coder or "geeky guy" founder. I found at demo day I got a lot of attention just because of the fact that I was some young girl solving a problem for young girls. We can complain about lack of women in tech, but I see it as a massive advantage because I am female.
But did you ever feel like you had more to prove walking into the room?
Yes. But not because I was a woman. What I didn't like was being the non–technical founder. I wish that I had the technical skills. I felt that if I had anything to prove it was on the basis of, "Oh, I wish I could learn to code and be like the rest of those guys and come up with an idea and just execute it." None of those feels came from being a certain gender.
Do you think the "women in tech" debate is overblown? For example, there was a lot of outrage in the tech media over the Titstare app. Some said it exemplified a boys culture in Silicon valley.
I feel like people will take the smallest thing that might be misconstrued as sexist and run with it. The Titstare app, for example. I thought it was funny, but a lot of people took offense to it. I don't think it's derogatory to women specifically in the tech industry. Maybe that's also part of my personality, but if you view everything though a "is it sexist?" lens, that's not good.
You've never experienced any sexism in the tech industry?
No, I haven't. Then again, I've heard of some other people who've had slightly sexist experiences. But in terms of what I've experienced, I think it's a big overblown. Yes, I'd like to see more women in tech just because I think more cool problems would get solved, but I feel like getting on your high horse about it is not really helping. On the flip side, like I said, I haven't experienced sexism. I'm sure if I had experienced sexism, I would feel differently. But sexism is everywhere, not just in tech.
Sexism aside. There's no question there are fewer women in tech than men. Why do you think that is?
When I was going to high school I had a scholarship to one of the best schools in the country and it was an all–girls boarding school. My brother had a scholarship to an all–boys boarding school––and it was just down the road. I got offered electives like textiles. He got offered programming.
So it's a gender issue that starts in schools?
You need to put programming in high schools regardless of gender. But yes, in Australia girls aren't even exposed to it. Even in university not a lot of girls are taking science and math–based subjects. That means you're not even getting exposed to developers, which means that the chance of you being a developer or meeting a developer that you're friends with or who you want to start a company with are pretty slim compared to guys who do code. Whereas even if you're not a developer, but still studying maths or sciences you are going to get exposed to developers. That increases the likelihood of you meeting someone who you're going to start a company with. I think that's got a lot to do with why there's so many more men doing this stuff.
Do you think women in technology have things to offer that men can't match?
Definitely, and that's one of the big points I make when people do ask me about women entrepreneurs in tech. There aren't that many women in tech, which means that there are a lot problems that aren't being solved. Guys aren't going to think of solving the same problems as girls. That's why there's so much opportunity for women who want to get into tech: They can actually solve these problems and offer different perspectives than men can.
And what advice would you have for women with a tech idea?
"Just do it." I feel people like to talk about their ideas and they go to networking events and they "look into" it and they sit on the sidelines, but they never actually do anything. I always find I get itchy when I have an idea and I just need to go and do it, so I will just do it. I think that's kind of key. If you're not going to start anything, nothing's going to happen.
And if they're apprehensive about being a woman in a male–dominated industry?
Like everything else about you, your gender is also an asset. I find I get more opportunities because I am female; because we do have different strengths. I was on the front page of one of the major newspapers in Australia. They told me it was for this article about Australians going to Silicon Valley. There's a lot of Australians that go to Silicon Valley, so why me? The reporter said, "We need a girl on the front page." So they put me above the fold on the front page of one of the biggest newspapers in Australia just because I was a chick in tech. You can call that sexist but I'm going to take it.
After four months in beta, iOS 7 was released today. But there seem to be problems. Developers have been saying that the iPad Gold Master wasn't stable enough for public release, and they're freaking out as they try to finish iOS 7 versions of their apps. Others have decided to take their time transitioning to iOS 7.
This sentiment by Matt Johnston, the CMO of software testing company uTest, is representative: "We have companies coming to us in an absolute panic. You are going to read some horror stories of very popular apps two weeks after launch that suddenly see their app reviews go way, way down." Below, some other quotable reactions.
Peter Steinberger, an app developer based in Vienna, tweeted on Wednesday:
And the weather forecast app company Dark Sky tweeted that they won't have an iOS 7–compatible app ready by the 18th:
U.K.–based programmer Mike Tendler is working down to the wire:
As is Apple itself:
And the Twitter client Tweetbot is just waking up to the problem:
But some apps like Reeder and Happier are on top of it and have already released iOS 7 versions:
If the Nook App has it together there's really no excuse.
The iPad Gold Master complaints are concerning, too. Everyone from iOS developers to beta interlopers is noticing bugs and problems with the iOS 7 iPad release.
One thing Apple and iOS developers have in common right now should be a desire to quickly and efficiently resolve their respective issues to maximize positive buzz and minimize profit losses from code that just isn't ready. Maybe it's lucky, then, that a whole subset of people are tweeting about their reluctance to leave the security blanket that apparently is iOS 6.
If you were planning to get an app into the 7 store for day one then hopefully you had it ready to submit as of the end of the keynote as submissions opened up just a short time after Elvis Costello left the stage. As expected, review times are rising sharply at the moment so if you are in the queue I wish you good luck on getting it live in time.
Ever notice how your favorite bands are great at repetition? You might see their concert today, but they have another show tomorrow, in a different city, playing the same set list to a brand new crowd. And they do it without losing their enthusiasm.
The best bands don't just repeat studio versions of their songs, either. If they want to keep their customers and themselves happy, they reinvent the same song. They'll play acoustic or remixed versions. They'll add other artists or new instruments. Some of the greats improvise large portions of their music. No two listens are the same.
And some musician's best tracks aren't even originals. They're repeats of someone else's music, sampled, remixed, or re–imagined in their own style.
One thing that holds many of us back as creators, inventors, and entrepreneurs is simply our inability at repetition.
I'll watch new entrepreneurs lament as they try and come up with an idea: "Everything has already been done." And yet Facebook wasn't the first social network. There were other popular social networks. Dropbox wasn't the first file–sharing solution out there. There were many. Airbnb wasn't the first place you could list your extra room for rent. People had already been doing that on Craigslist for years.
But these entrepreneurs weren't afraid of repeating an idea that had already been done by making it their own. Facebook was Myspace the way Mark Zuckerberg would have (and subsequently did) do it.
And it's not just the fear of repeating someone else's idea holding us back. We also suck at repeating ourselves. We'll launch a product on a forum like Hacker News, or we'll spend days spilling our souls into a new blog post, and then... crickets. No one shows up. No one signs up. So we declare failure and move onto the next shiny thing.
But great inventors know how to repeat themselves. Airbnb didn't get it right out of the gate.
If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We launched 3 times.
Airbnb reinvented what they were doing three times before people started paying attention. But sometimes what's blocking you from being heard isn't even poor execution. Ad agencies know this better than any of us. A common rule of thumb in that industry: It takes seven ad impressions before someone will take action.
James Altucher, a successful serial entrepreneur and writer, excels at repeating himself.
James has about 82,000 Twitter followers as I write this. If he tweets his latest blog post to that group, he's going to get quite a bit of traffic and readers. But he doesn't rely on one tweet. He'll tweet again about a blog post he wrote months ago––he knows many of his followers never saw it the first time.
James is also great at repeating similar themes in his writing. He advises exercising your idea muscle, like any other muscle in your body: Record 10 new business ideas every single day. But he doesn't rely on this advice sinking in the first time you read it. It won't. So this theme is mentioned over and over again in his blog posts, talks, and books.
Any success I have today is because I've simply grown accustomed to and better at repetition. Draft is just another online word processor I created. It's an idea that's been done very well before by Google and Microsoft as well as a million small developers. But I'm not afraid to repeat something and make it my own. The book Blue Ocean Strategy has a framework for doing this, if you need inspiration.
Instead of competing with Google Docs directly, feature by feature, I focused on what Google Docs doesn't do. I'm not trying to reach feature parity. Why sing Google's song the way they do?
I shifted my attention from things Google already does well, like formatting and real–time editing, and I placed it onto things Google doesn't pay much attention to, like merging individual changes and publishing. And I introduced features that haven't even been a battlefield before, like on–demand copyediting built right into the product itself.
And it's working!
Repeating myself is helping grow my audience too. There's still days I'll blog and no one shows up. But I'll retweet the same blog post, or retell the same anecdote a week later, and this time thousands of people will read it.
Maybe it's because I told it a little better this time. Or maybe it's simply because Apple didn't announce anything this week and people aren't distracted. Whatever it is, learning to repeat myself as a writer has resulted in an increasing audience of my work.
You don't have to look far to see that some of the most admired and successful people in the software industry have spent their entire lives chasing the same few ideas (and in some cases literally building the same product ad infinitum).
Superconductivity has always sounded like a ridiculous pipe dream, or perhaps a weird plot device from one of the stranger episodes of Doctor Who. But as a huge story from the Institute of Physics points out, we already live in a world where superconductivity is used pretty often. And soon it seems it will hit the mainstream, and possibly affect your life.
But before we get to the juicy bits, you need to ask the following question: What exactly is superconductivity?
A superconductor can actually be described in one deceptively simple–looking phrase: Superconductors can allow electrical current to flow through them forever, with no external power source needed. That's basically the inverse of every single electrical thing you've ever touched or seen in your life. From the cables in the overhead electrical grid to the microscopically tiny gold strands that connect the silicon in your computer's chips to the black metal and plastic box you think of as a chip, every electrical wire has a certain resistance. Simply put this means though they can let electrons flow through them to create electrical current, they're not too fond of the fact...they "resist" it. To get over the resistance and to push the electrons through the wire, you have to apply a force––which may be a new way for you to think of applying "voltage."
Superconductors have zero resistance––they love having current flowing through them. The how and the why of this involves some freaky and difficult physics, and varies between materials. We're still working it out. But the upshot of zero resistance is that when you squirt some electrical current into a superconducting wire, it'll happily just rush around forever with no voltage "push" required.
Why's this useful? For starters it's much less wasteful in terms of energy. Every single electrical wire that has normal resistance wastes some of the electrical energy pushing through it––this is true for both your computer circuitry (ever wondered why your laptop gets hot?) and overhead grid wires. In an era where we worry about climate damage, this is a bad thing. It's also a bad thing for your lap when you're gaming on your portable PC. Superconducting wires can, in many cases, lead to very very little energy being wasted when you're moving some current from point A to point B.
Superconductors can also create some very weird and wonderful effects, like incredibly powerful electromagnets. It's helium–cooled superconducting loops inside an MRI machine that let the device make all those amazing scans inside the human body, with particular success in scanning the brain. Similar magnets make the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva work its magic, pushing back the boundaries of science (and ultimately leading to breakthroughs that will touch your life. Remember where the computer came from). But the size and complexity of an MRI machine, to say nothing of the LHC, are all notable.
This is what breakthroughs in superconductor design will change.
A more portable superconducting magnet can, for example, very precisely and swiftly separate out many impurities in water, leading to potable water in situations where it may be difficult to find. A superconductor magnetic sensor could very accurately and safely detect the presence of unexploded ordnance, or land mines, in a post–conflict area with greater safety than rival systems. Superconducting magnets in levitating trains could allow for swifter, safer, and much more energy–efficient mass transportation––there are even some prototypes out there that prove this. Superconducting mains electrical wires leading from power stations mean that more of the power they generate will get to the end user without being wasted as heat.
And superconducting technology supercomputers could perform mind–bogglingly swift calculations, using incredibly tricky algorithms that could help us design better technology or at least better understand climate change without contributing to the problem themselves.
In fact brand new research into a weird class of superconductor suggests that we could make reliable, or "fault–tolerant" quantum computers using a strange material called a topological insulator. Quantum computers are technologically a bit fragile, and the quantum bits that they process are easily messed up by resistance in a regular conductor. That's not the case in a superconductor. And the potential for quantum computing to change the world is very well known, even if the details are only now being fleshed out. Thus the quantum computer may prove to be the place where superconductors really have the biggest impact.
Is all this going to happen tomorrow? Not necessarily. Superconductors that work at normal, everyday temperatures aren't really here yet. But we've advanced our understanding and ability to work with the technology to the point where superconductors going to become much more common. Next time you see the word in a headline, which may be soon, you'll know more about it.
At the top of the Kickstarter guideline page are the words cannot be used to raise money for causes––a single sentence that rules out hundreds of nonprofits whose fundraising arms are desperately in need of innovative funding models.
Buried in paperwork, devoid of data–driven tactics, and largely unable to pinpoint which strategies bring in the most revenue, nonprofits end up throwing blind darts at big donors, hoping to hit it big. New startups like WeDid.It are rushing in to fill the void. According to its founders, there are two fundamental differences behind nonprofit and project–based fundraising: human capital and analytics.
"When we started, we noticed the current solutions in the market were all similar in the sense that they offered a technological solution at a monthly or annual fee––and then they kind–of said: Hey, good–luck," explains Ben Lamson, one of WeDid.It's cofounders.
WeDid.It's big differentiator is something that could spell a new direction for all crowdfunding projects; the company provides a personal assistant available to each campaign. "We felt that a lot of nonprofits needed more guidance. We wanted to add a human factor into our business that enabled our client to take the guesswork out of their fundraising efforts."
As anyone who's tried Kickstarter can attest, building a trustworthy, popular campaign is an enormous amount of work. "If nonprofits had a fundraising coach or a rep on their side of things, if they had someone they could email with quick questions or schedule a 30–minute phone call with, then we thought we could increase that likelihood of success," says Lamson. "Everything we do is really built around this human–capital model."
Another interesting aspect of nonprofit crowdfunding which could have ramifications for mainstream platforms: recurring fundraising projects. "With crowdfunding, like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, it's very much about a one–off fundraising campaign," says Lamson. "Most product projects are concerned with just the one project and getting it off the ground. Funding it, delivering it, and sales."
"The nonprofit world is not really selling a tangible product, they're selling their vision," Lamson says. "Take it a step further, and you realize that they are about more than just a one–off project. Their main concern is relationship building. So sure, nonprofits have fundraising that includes crowdfunding in it, but its much more than that. It's about enabling your current potential supporters to engage with you and sustaining a relationship with them. Here, you're really hoping it's not just a one–time donation. Your goal is bringing down and acquiring new donors to continue to give throughout their lifetime. It's about continual donations."
Beginning at 11 a.m. on September 26, Kiessling will paint at the Ovalhalle in Vienna's MuseumsQuartier, and his two industrial robot "partners" (one in Berlin's Breitscheidplatz, another next to Nelson's Column in London's Trafalgar square) will create an identical image in real–time via satellite transmission. Spectators will be provided screens at each location to track the progress of the other two works–in–progress while a live stream will go up for online viewers.
Kiessling appears to be using ABB IRB 2600 model industrial robots, a compact, lightweight model with a variety of industrial applications, from dispensing to assembly to arc and laser cutting. Sensors linked to Kiessling's movements will route directions to the robots; while the video above has the robots using ink markers, there's no indication what material Kiessling and his robots will use.
Kiessling does, however, admit that, due to several factors, the robots' editions will not be identical copies of his production. These inconsistencies means each robot will give its own "signature" to its piece, resulting in a triptych of eerily similar (but not identical) works. Kiessling's artistic focus is on virtual worlds––alternate realities––and the complex levels of man's existence. Heady stuff, but applicable: In this case, where does the artist end and the robot replication begin? We've integrated robots so much into our lives, but it may not be long before they start asking for credit for their work.
Talk about capitalizing on a gimmick. Knock, an app that allows you to unlock your Mac via Bluetooth by double-tapping on the back of your iPhone, certainly sounds gimmicky. But for Knock's founders, this new form of wireless user authentication is about something much, much bigger.
"It's a gimmick, there's no question about that," says Knock cofounder Jon Schlossberg. "But it's a gimmick that solves a real (albeit small) problem, and it's a gimmick that we can ship and sell today to bootstrap our company and start working on the larger vision."
What Schlossberg and his cofounder William Henderson envision is the elimination all passwords, for everyone, for everything. So how do you get from knocking twice--not three times, that means something else--on your phone to killing the password? Schlossberg says it's a bunch of small steps. "Knock's authentication experience needs to grow into something close to ubiquity. Knock would need to support everything and be everywhere." Supporting everything would need to include, among other things, partnering with software companies like 1Password and Lookout to addressing the other end of the spectrum of hardware like August, Lockitron, Nymi, or even Schlage or Kryptonite.
"We can offer fully automatic two-factor authentication using the Knock experience (something no other two-factor authentication company does) for free just to get installs. Basically, we can make deals with large companies, universities, etc., and give their IT dept free two-factor (currently expensive) that is a significantly better experience than what's out there today. We've figured out a way to make it not terrible. So these organizations use our free two-factor and in exchange, all their computers are running our authentication platform."
Despite many enormous potential hurdles, Schlossberg makes getting rid of the need for end users to enter passwords sound like an achievable goal. They're not the only ones working on the problem, which was declared with renewed urgency by Wired's Mat Honan last year. Apple is doing its part by rolling out TouchID, one of the first biometric security methods to find its way into smartphones. Apple's fingerprint sensor may reach mass adoption quickly, but may or may not become ubiquitous.
One of the many dreams of Ubuntu's Edge phone was the ability to have your desktop computer and mobile phone combined into one device. When docked and connected to a monitor, the phone uses a desktop environment. When undocked, it goes back to being your phone and mobile device, letting both environments share data. Such a solution would eliminate the need for cross-device authentication, but with the Edge phone not making its crowdfunding goal, the Ubuntu for Android feature has a bigger hill to climb for general public awareness as part of Ubuntu's mobile OS.
If Schlossberg and Henderson can pull off what they're attempting, it will be a win for consumers as much as it will be for them. Ultimately the desire to attack the password problem is adding (some) security in the easiest possible way.
Gestural control is something with which we're all familiar, thanks to products like the Wii, Apple's multitouch iPhones and iPads, Microsoft's Kinect, and Leap's Motion. But while gestures can be an extraordinarily efficient control mechanism for many pieces of technology, it's more difficult to implement them on smaller devices simply due to the more limited touch-surface real estate offered by, say, a smartwatch. Ultrasound physics and a minuscule device developed by researchers at University of California at Berkeley and Davis may fix this.
The system is called Chirp and it's an innovative development in ultrasound transducer technology. Ultrasound is, of course, best known for enabling sonograms of amazing imagery inside the human body--but if you remember, it was once used as an early form of remote control for TVs. What the UC team have done is take ultrasound emitters and receivers and miniaturized them, stacking a number of the sound systems into a very small array on a semiconductor.
Chirp incorporates everything needed to transmit ultrasound waves, receive them, and process the basic information received when the ultrasound reflects from a "target" in front of the array. Chirp has a sensing area shaped like a small hemicircle above the chip. If you put a finger or your palm into this space you will reflect some of the emitted ultrasound back to the sensors and thus alert the chip that there's a target in its way. Moving your finger will change the quality of the sound echo received by different parts of the sensor array. By processing the complex mass of sound signals it receives back from each part of its array, Chirp can actually work out how an object like a hand or perhaps finger is moving within its sensing range.
Combined with the electronics in, perhaps, a smartphone or TV remote, this gives the system the opportunity to react to some quite complex hand gestures, such as those you may make when trying to set up a game on an Xbox via the Kinect 3-D sensor--although Kinect uses optical sensing systems of a higher resolution. But the tech in Chirp can easily be scaled, so it could be installed in a device like a smartwatch or perhaps a wearable headset like Google Glass. To zoom in to a photo, say, on a smartwatch using Chirp you could perhaps draw your fingers together above the screen of your device.
The system has a couple of advantages over conventional touchscreens or optical sensors. Firstly it doesn't require you to touch the screen, and this sort of 3-D gestural control could allow you to interact in some quite sophisticated ways with a device like a watch. Secondly the processing requirements to analyze ultrasound signals can be slower and less burdensome for a mobile chip to carry out than optical sensors--meaning the sensor doesn't eat up much power, and thus is ideal for mobile devices.
The practical upshot is that 3-D gestural control could be coming to devices as diverse as smartphones, smart watches, wearable computers, and perhaps even your TV. The opportunity for innovative user interfaces, control paradigms, and even apps like gaming simply cannot be overstated, and you may soon find yourself coding for a touch-sensitive device its users never actually touch. The effects may literally feel like "magic." Given that Apple has patented aspects of a 3-D gestural UI, this code may first run on iOS.
Graphene gets written about a lot. The so-called "wonder material" could revolutionize everything from the design of space elevators to cancer drug delivery. Thanks to a recent breakthrough at the University of California, it may also be at the heart of the chips found inside your next generation, super-powerful computer. Right in the place silicon used to be.
The innovation from researchers in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is all about making a complete integrated circuit design, complete with discrete electronic components and interconnects, on a single flat atom-deep layer of graphene.
So, why do this? As we push silicon-based integrated circuit designs forward, using ever smarter tricks and techniques to fashion more, smaller transistors onto a chip--boosting its computing power and reducing power consumption--scientists are bumping up against the laws of physics. One of the big limiting factors in future silicon chip design is contact resistance. This is different from the usual linear resistance to electrical current flow you think of when you think of a piece of wire or, ahem, a resistor. It's extra resistance caused when parts of a component touch each other, or a component is touching an interconnecting wire, such as a semiconductor transistor connected to a metal interconnect. Essentially it saps just a little bit of energy from the current flowing across the connection and introduces some noise into the current--and in most cases it's not a problem. When you've got billions of transistors and interconnects on a chip, however, those little bits of energy quickly add up. And as you cram smaller components more densely onto a silicon chip, things get worse.
This is where graphene comes in. Since you can adjust the properties of graphene to act as both a metal-like interconnect and as a semiconductor component like a transistor, you could theoretically fashion an entire integrated circuit onto a sheet of graphene and more or less avoid any contact resistance issues whatsoever.
The team at UC Santa Barbara have worked out how to etch narrow and wide circuit patterns into a sheet of graphene--acting as components and interconnects--and then use deposition techniques to layer actual graphene-based transistors on the top. Their proposed circuits have 1.7 times higher noise margins, and 10 to 100 times less power loss compared to typical CMOS chip tech. Though the chip is just a theoretical concept at the moment, breakthroughs happening around the world are very likely to make its production possible very soon.
The upshot of this sort of tech could be more powerful chips that eat less power, and thanks to the properties of graphene itself, it could even mean regular chip designs that consume amazingly low power, or flexible and transparent computer systems. Remember us asking at FastCoLabs "if the walls could compute?" Yup, your graphene-embedded wallpaper could be a computer.
With the rise of 3-D printers, homebrew hobbyists can now make enclosures for electronics like Ardiunos. But until recently, those hobbyists still couldn't make the actual computing components--there's no cheap and easy way to print circuit boards. Unless of course you have an inkjet printer and some time to hack.
New research shows standard inkjet printers can be modified to print functioning circuits. These instant inkjet circuits, as they're called, could make prototyping circuitry as easy as printing your resume--something you'll never have to do again if you succeed in making a digital gizmo that people love.
Image via Georgia Institute of Technology
The image above shows a single-sided wiring pattern for an Arduino microcontroller on a transparent sheet of PET film. That's right: With this tech, you could pump out a microcontroller of your own design. The cost? $300 in equipment to transform your desktop inkjet into a 60-second circuit-printing beast. Slap some double-sided conductive tape between your printed circuit and desired components, and bam! Circuit connection.
Prototyping and education are the biggest benefits of this hack: Lowering the barriers to entry (crucially, price and time) will be useful for experimenting with new designs. Shaving production time down to 60 seconds also streamlines the student learning experience. And in the spirit of education, the results have been written up in an award-winning paper, "Instant Inkjet Circuits: Lab-based Inkjet Printing to Support Rapid Prototyping of UbiComp Devices," presented at 2013 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing conference Zurich, Sept. 8-12, and offered free of charge.
Inkjet circuit printing has been around for at least a decade, but only via equipment that topped $50k, according to Ben Cook, PhD and student at Georgia Tech, which partnered with University of Tokyo and Microsoft Research to bring inkjet circuit printing under the cost of a smartphone.
Image via Georgia Institute of Technology
The key is in the ink: silver nanoparticle ink, to be precise. As previously proposed by a University of Illinois professor, silver liquid ink allows for a much smaller (100 nanometer) nozzle than previous metal-particle-filled inks, and it can bond with more surfaces at lower temperatures (90 degrees C/194 degrees F) that are within desktop machine range. These lower temps allow the silver nanoparticle ink to bond without the need for the material-damaging sintering process, so the ink can be inlaid into many more materials (including PET film and resin-coated paper). Just think about all the circuits you can churn out on scientist-approved glossy photo paper!
You know CAPTCHA, that string of distorted characters that forces you to prove you're human? We hate it too. Which is why we were fascinated to find that a six-person startup called Vicarious was claiming it had cracked CAPTCHA altogether, fulfilling a 10-year ambition to create an algorithm able to think and identify characters as well as a living person. In the process, they are disrupting everything we know about machine intelligence.
"We started off by using machine learning tools to create a model of what comprises individual letters--thereby training our system to recognize them," says Dr. Dileep George, who with D. Scott Phoenix heads the team of AI researchers at Vicarious. That's not hard. But the next step was to make the system good at learning, even when there wasn't much data available to suggest a pattern--something much, much harder for a computer to do.
Unlike normal machine learning algorithms, which use large datasets to learn patterns, Vicarious's algorithm was designed to operate on a tiny sample size, without long learning sessions beforehand. This effectively mimics the conditions people find in real world CAPTCHA tests. It's not that CAPTCHA is bulletproof--people have cracked it before in limited ways--but its small scope makes it perfect for demonstrating the Vicarious algorithm's power to learn on the spot.
Normally, machine intelligence starts with long practice sessions in which the computer is shown thousands of different versions of an item (say, a chair) and is corrected by a human being when wrong. But that's a far cry from the abilities of real human beings, who can identify something after seeing only a couple of examples.
"It is easy to create an illusion of intelligence by using large datasets," Phoenix says. "It takes a child only a few dozen examples to learn the shapes of letters like 'a' and 'b'. This is because human brains are very good at generalizing from a few examples--the hallmark of intelligence," he says. "Limiting the number of training examples is important because it shows that the algorithm is able to generalize like the human brain," says Phoenix. To accurately recognize reCAPTCHAs, the Vicarious algorithm only requires between one and five training examples per letter.
Standing for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart," CAPTCHAs have been among the front line of anti-spam defense for years now. They help Gmail block automated spammers, let eBay screen its marketplace for bots from overloading the site with scams, and prevent Facebook hackers from creating fraudulent profiles.
As with many technologies, the first few generations of CAPTCHAs were poorly designed--with each letter separated out in a way that was easy to solve using standard machine learning techniques or Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Other successful attempts to break individual CAPTCHAs similarly centered on learning to exploit specific bugs or idiosyncrasies within the image generation process.
"If you look at the history of CAPTCHA, there have been a bunch of researchers who have solved one particular CAPTCHA, at one particular point in time, using one particular hack, that only works with that CAPTCHA," says Phoenix. "For example, they might have taken Yahoo's CAPTCHA at a time when all of the letters were slanted at exactly 45 degrees, and when the noise that was added to the image had a certain specific set of properties. In other words, what they were creating wasn't an all-purpose solution."
Today, George points out, CAPTCHAs have become far more advanced, with letters crowded closely together in a way that can be difficult even for a person to read. With these new CAPTCHAs old solutions have a zero percent chance of solving them. "These are far more complex to solve because in order to separate out the letters, you need to actually understand what the letters are," he says. "This is where state-of-the-art machine learning tools come in to play, because these are what is needed to understand segmented letters."
So what does Vicarious's work mean for anti-spam security in a world that is post-CAPTCHA? For now, website owners operating under this system can breathe a sigh of relief since Phoenix and George are not releasing the software publicly. But long-term security will have to improve. "How we distinguish between a human and a computer is going to have to change," says George. "What people need to understand is that CAPTCHA is a temporary solution. People have got to start thinking beyond it, and to their credit many people are already doing that. Google, for example, has recently announced that it plans to track click patterns and other heuristics to try and filter out bots."
The real forward momentum of Vicarious's work, however, has nothing to do with anti-spam software and everything to do with artificial intelligence. "Understanding how the brain creates intelligence is the ultimate scientific challenge," George continues. "Vicarious has a long-term strategy for developing human level artificial intelligence, and it starts with building a brain-like vision system. Modern CAPTCHAs provide a snapshot of the challenges of visual perception, and solving those in a general way required us to understand how the brain does it."
It is this breakthrough in image recognition that makes what would be simply a neat algorithm into an infinitely scalable solution. "In the real world when you're trying to recognize all of the objects in [a] particular scene that you're perceiving at any given moment, the objects aren't cleanly presented to you against a white background with none overlapping with the others," Phoenix says. "Disambiguating which contours belong to which objects is an example of something that is very easy for our brains, but has historically been next to impossible for computers."
There is a whole world of textual data contained in images that computers are unable to understand, which could benefit from this work. It may be, for example, that this technology could allow for the intelligent automated reading of X-rays, where a computer could pick up on information that may otherwise be missed by doctors. "In the long run we're trying to create systems that can think and learn like the human brain," Phoenix continues. "Anything that a brain can do, our system should be able to do as well."
Breaking CAPTCHA might initially sound like a minor computer science puzzle, but as Vicarious's founders point out, its implications are anything but small. Having received funding worth $16.1 million since May 2010, Vicarious could well be at the forefront of cutting-edge artificial intelligence work over the next several years.
"We should be careful not to underestimate the significance of Vicarious crossing this milestone," says Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, who serves as a board member at the startup. "This is an exciting time for artificial intelligence research, and [D. Scott Phoenix and Dr. Dileep George] are at the forefront of building the first truly intelligent machines."
There's huge potential for San Diego to be a hotbed of live music--if we southern Californians weren't so laid back. Venues here cater to small and independent artists who rarely stick around too long before disappearing. Nearby Los Angeles guarantees there will always be some activity, but like a lot of other small cities, the San Diego music scene's biggest problem is just getting people to regularly attend shows. Can apps help?
When you break it down, low concert attendance is a data problem. If venues knew precisely the listening habits of their customers, they'd be better equipped to book relevant artists, even matching complementary acts on the same night. Back in the original MySpace days, Eventful had a popular widget that let users "demand" an artist, showing there was interest for them in a particular location. And in Brazil, a crowdsourcing platform called Queremos lets fans lobby to bring bands to their cities.
Here in the United States, a new app called Jukely works like a virtual concert promoter, aggregating local venues' calendars to present their users with a targeted, curated list of shows in their city.
"We don't automatically feed shows into Jukely through various listings--we identify venues and promoters in each city who are putting on good shows and follow their calendars," explains cofounder Bora Celik. "We then curate. We don't put everything in the app, only shows that have a good match with our member base in that city. We also don't put shows from artists that are too popular, you wouldn't see Rihanna in Jukely. We still try to be focused on discovery mostly so we have a top and bottom threshold for artist popularity."
As a former concert promoter himself, Celik also recognizes the social aspect is a huge factor for most people. "Over time, the success of my shows mostly came from the ability to get groups of people excited about a having a good time with friends, as opposed to the popularity of the artist," says Celik. No one wants to go to a show alone. So while discovery is important, cities like San Diego would benefit the most from people using these apps to find friends, even acquaintances, with similar musical tastes.
As far as Jukely is concerned, it wins if the venues are successful. "We believe our monetization is closely tied to the way we work with our promoter partners," says Celik. "Their success is our success, and the more traffic we send their way, we share the profits of that, engineered in various ways. We grow city by city with a model like this and we're looking at a world map with 250 pins on it."
There are some cities where awareness is the only thing that matters. People only need access to when their favorite bands will be coming into town. For a lot of other places around the country, however, it takes more, whether it's a social connection to make concerts more meaningful, or apps that do a better job at highlighting new and undiscovered acts. It's not an insurmountable problem, but one that might eventually be taken over by virtual concerts if it's not addressed soon.
The morning after scoring a new sex record with the Spreadsheets app, you wake up feeling refreshed, checking your sleep quality reports with Sleep Cycle. On your walk to work, you check how many steps you've taken with Moves. More and more, our life stories can be told with simple algorithms which collect data about our lives. But even in the midst of all this self-quantification, the movement hasn't provided any practical way to keep track of perhaps the most important input in the equation: what we eat. This is more relevant than ever, thanks to the FDA's recent release to ban artificial trans fat for good, people are becoming more aware of what they eat.
Last week when we wrote about TellSpec, the company was still short of its $100,000 funding goal, which it plans to deploy to manufacture a pocket gadget which analyzes ingredients and calories inside our food quickly and on the go. Finally, quantified-self nerds can keep track of what and how much they are eating, the caloric value of every bite, and its nutritional makeup. "It's about time people know what they eat," says Isabel Hoffman, CEO of TellSpec and mother to a highly allergic daughter.
As gym rats are fond of saying, fitness is 80% diet and 20% exercise. Now you can actually measure that 80%--but the real news here is that TellSpec is making their platform open to developers, who can build apps using the user-generated food data. As of today, the company has surpassed its Indiegogo goal by $33,000.
TellSpec is well aware that its data model is only as good as the apps behind it. On their campaign, they included the $690 developer option which comes with access to a well-documented API and a software development kit for Android and iOS, giving developers access to TellSpec data as a source of information for projects. A team of TellSpec's engineers is also available to support a dev's queries or any interfacing with the program.
With this option, TellSpec figures it can capitalize on different communities of food-focused users. Body builders could build models based on trans fats, sugars, and body mass index. Weight-loss counselors could build custom services which help people control their actual calorie intake. For the highly allergic or diabetics, information on ingredients and net carbs could prevent catastrophes. Another promising area: medical correlations that have never been seen before.
"An interesting conversation with a dentist revealed the idea of using TellSpec to monitor food intake to determine if there is any correlation between gum infections and a person's consumption of Vitamin C," said Melony Jamieson, a specialist behind the campaign.
This gadget could even make it possible to interact with multiple APIs, and Seamless and Urbanspoon could now include data on the calorie levels of a restaurant's food. Folks could keep food diaries on their Facebook timelines. Epidemiologists could extract the data and correlate disease with food much earlier on.
"One really cool idea that would help all developers would be a tool to integrate our data, which includes calories per 100 grams, with a method to track total volume of food consumed. A person can track their net carbs and exact caloric intake. This would be a way to identify the food volume--perhaps by 3-D camera or a scale mechanism," said Jamieson.
TellSpec's data strategy is to perfect the accuracy of food information by compiling everyone's scans over time--and then improve research by sharing its data with medicine, says the company.
The sensor itself, which is a keychain-size laser and Raman spectrometer, works by pointing a light beam at the food, altering the energy states of the food's molecules. The spectrometer inside the TellSpec counts the photons reflected off the food and based on their wavelengths determines the chemical compounds in the food.
The campaign roots its mission on changing the way people think about food, and they want to educate those unaware of harmful chemicals. During our interview, Hoffman emphasized why they did not follow the traditional route of venture capitalists and instead turned to crowdfunding. The big-data model that TellSpec expects will solidify their information is only possible through a large number of user scans. "It is an idea by the people and for the people," says Hoffman.
News broke today that the Stuxnet virus--widely believed to be a U.S.-created weapon to disrupt Iran's nuclear program, now rampaging across the Internet like a mad dog--had infected a Russian nuclear facility. But renowned security expert Eugene Kapersky also revealed that Russian astronauts spread a computer virus to the International Space Station (ISS).
So, will the ISS fall out of the sky?
If it was going to, it would have happened already. The infection happened some time ago; Kapersky declined to discuss how significant the infection was to the space station, stating instead that he had been told of virus infections on the station from time to time. As far back as 2008, ISS laptops were infected, but NASA described the infection as a nuisance affecting non-critical systems like email, as the virus was ostensibly designed to steal credentials for online video games (but may actually have been designed by the U.S. and Israeli governments). Even then, NASA emphasized that infections happened on occasion.
So long as the virus infects only the laptops that the crew works on, however, the space station's operations shouldn't be affected. A virus could jump around the local network that connects the laptops and could (worst-case scenario) shred millions of dollars of experimental data by wiping laptop hard drives, says a security expert in New Scientist's story on the 2008 infection.
But--duh--the ISS is in space, and not connected to the Internet. The ISS's only wireless communication is through Ku band ("under K-band"), the frequency range used by TV stations to communicate with satellites. In other words, unless someone formats a virus to beam up 250 miles to the space station, it's hitching a ride with the astronauts. And sure enough--the second round of Stuxnet infections in the ISS were traced back to a USB device carried by Russian astronauts. "What goes around comes around," Kapersky said. "Everything you do will boomerang."
Two years ago, the two greatest Jeopardy champions of all time got obliterated by a computer called Watson. It was a great victory for artificial intelligence--the system racked up more than three times the earnings of its next meat-brained competitor. For IBM's Watson, the successor to Deep Blue, which famously defeated chess champion Gary Kasparov, becoming a Jeopardy champion was a modest proof of concept. The big challenge for Watson, and the goal for IBM, is to adapt the core question-answering technology to more significant domains, like health care.
WatsonPaths, IBM's medical-domain offshoot announced last month, is able to derive medical diagnoses from a description of symptoms. From this chain of evidence, it's able to present an interactive visualization to doctors, who can interrogate the data, further question the evidence, and better understand the situation. It's an essential feedback loop used by diagnosticians to help decide which information is extraneous and which is essential, thus making it possible to home in on a most-likely diagnosis.
WatsonPaths scours millions of unstructured texts, like medical textbooks, dictionaries, and clinical guidelines, to develop a set of ranked hypotheses. The doctors' feedback is added back into the brute-force information retrieval capabilities to help further train the system. That's the AI part, which also provides transparency for the system's diagnosis. Eventually, this "knowledge" will be used to articulate uncertainty, identifying information gaps and asking questions to help it gather more evidence.
Health care is just the beginning for Watson. Other disciplines that rely on evidentiary reasoning from unstructured documents or the Deep Web, including law, education, and finance, are also on the road map. But let's consider another potential domain here, perhaps less lucrative than the others, but nonetheless important: news and journalism.
Media startup Vocativ identifies hot news stories by trawling the depth of the web, data-mining the vast seas of unindexed documents for information that might point to a story lead. Often journalists pair up with analysts, manually exploring data from different perspectives. The Associated Press's Overview Project aims to build better visualization and analysis tools for investigative journalists to make sense of huge document sets.
What if much of this could be automated? A cognitive computer, like Watson, could search reams of evidence, generate hypotheses, and collect supporting and/or contradicting evidence. Potential news stories would be presented to journalists and analysts who would weigh the evidence, assessing its accuracy, and decide which story ideas to pass on to an editor for further pursuit. In this scenario, Watson would be providing a well-sourced tip.
Adapting Watson to new domains isn't easy. According to a paper from IBM Research that describes the application of Watson in health care, the system has to be able to parse and understand the format of a variety of domain-specific documents. Then it needs to be re-trained so that it learns how to weigh different sources of evidence, and any special-purpose taxonomies or logic that drive the domain also need to be accessible to the system. For investigative journalism, documents might include interview transcripts, legal codes and statutes, social networks, other news articles, PDFs from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), or even requests or document-dumps from sources like WikiLeaks. Through an iterative process, the system would have to be trained, going back and forth with editors as it suggested stories and was told "yay" or "nay," each new vote modulating how the system weighs and integrates evidence.
Given a lot of re-engineering for Watson, how might an acumen for investigative reporting play out in a real-world news scenario? Earlier this year the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published a database of 2.5 million leaked documents about the offshore holdings and accounts of more than 100,000 entities, including emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, images, and four large databases packed with information about offshore companies, trusts, intermediaries, and other individuals involved with those companies. Undaunted, it took 112 reporters 15 months to analyze the data--a lot of human time and effort.
For Watson, ingesting all 2.5 million unstructured documents is the easy part. For this, it would extract references to real-world entities, like corporations and people, and start looking for relationships between them, essentially building up context around each entity. This could be connected out to open-entity databases like Freebase, to provide even more context. A journalist might orient the system's "attention" by indicating which politicians or tax-dodging tycoons might be of most interest. Other texts, like relevant legal codes in the target jurisdiction or news reports mentioning the entities of interest, could also be ingested and parsed.
Watson would then draw on its domain-adapted logic to generate evidence, like "IF corporation A is associated with offshore tax-free account B, AND the owner of corporation A is married to an executive of corporation C, THEN add a tiny bit of inference of tax evasion by corporation C." There would be many of these types of rules, perhaps hundreds, and probably written by the journalists themselves to help the system identify meaningful and newsworthy relationships. Other rules might be garnered from common sense reasoning databases, like MIT's ConceptNet. At the end of the day (or probably just a few seconds later), Watson would spit out 100 leads for reporters to follow. The first step would be to peer behind those leads to see the relevant evidence, rate its accuracy, and further train the algorithm. Sure, those follow-ups might still take months, but it wouldn't be hard to beat the 15 months the ICIJ took in its investigation.
Watson isn't going to "solve" investigative journalism, as if it were a great jigsaw puzzle, but it might speed things up and help us deal with scale, and it might help identify overlooked starting points and leads for journalists to delve into. Still, as much as Watson appears to be smart, it lacks human traits, like creativity, judgment, empathy, and ethics. Document dumps in an investigation can be a messy business that are hard for anyone to interpret and make sense of. All of the logic and data might suggest a person is using an offshore account to evade taxes, but the world can be a nuanced place, and we'll still need people driving these big cognitive appliances to make the final call.
As big data and algorithms grow to exert more power on society, it stands to reason that their power might also be directed back toward holding more traditional institutions accountable. Building thinking machines that can help investigate fraud, abuse, negligence, and incompetence in government or corporations could help amplify the volume and impact of investigative journalism. But if news organizations are serious about our watchdog function, we'll need to invest in developing ambitious new technologies, not just adapting off-the-shelf toolkits. It took IBM five years to build that first Jeopardy-winning version of Watson and it's taking years more to adapt the technology to other new domains. Would media companies, philanthropists, or foundations fund the journalistic version of Watson, or could IBM one day be publishing competitive news scoops instead?
Growth hacking is sexy these days: surrounded with hype but often misunderstood. Most people equate it with viral user acquisition, when virality is actually just one part of the methodology. Another big piece--which will be the focus of this post--is word of mouth.
For the uninitiated, the concept of growth hacking involves the use of empirical, iterative processes to build a successful, sustainable business at speed. This isn't just about acquisition, though; it also encompasses the optimization of the entire user lifecycle, beginning with acquisition and extending to activation, retention, and monetization.
Last Thursday I attended the third edition of the Growth Hackers Conference along with 500 other attendees, filling the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, to capacity. Attendees eagerly scribbled notes as Silicon Valley's top practitioners took the stage--Andy Johns, Sean Ellis, Gagan Biyani, Dan Martell, James Currier, Jared Fliesler, and other expert growth hackers, armed with strategies and tactics from Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter, Square, and other wildly successful, high-growth companies.
"It's not a gimmick, it's a philosophy," says James Currier, one of the speakers and cofounder of Ooga Labs. He's talking about his "framework for growth," which breaks up the user acquisition stage into three discrete tactics: viral, paid, and word of mouth, or WOM.
According to Currier, virality has become harder today--one reason why paid acquisition and WOM are worthy of more attention for anyone peddling an app. In 2007, the Facebook Platform gave developers the ability to build apps on top of its rapidly growing 20+ million user social network, opening a huge new channel for opportunistic growth hackers like the startup SpeedDate's viral success.
SpeedDate's former CEO Simon Tisminezky told conference-goers he leveraged Facebook to acquire millions of users per month in the early days of the platform, but that since those days, many of Facebook's viral channels have dried up or become less effective, ending the boom. What worked six years ago--let alone last month--won't necessarily work today.
Currier defines word-of-mouth as the passing of information between people--a friend giving a restaurant recommendation, or water cooler conversation about last night's Breaking Bad episode. How can growth hackers influence this organic, social interaction?
Here are four more strategies for WOM growth hacking from other startups that were in attendance.
Jared Fliesler, former VP at Square, retold the genesis of the iconic Square dongle. He admits that while attractive, the dongle is awkward, plugging into the iPhone or iPad audio jack and jutting out from the frame of the devices. Its stark white brush magnifies its clumsiness against the device's black matte. For a company intensely focused on design, you might expect something more elegant. But in reality, its gauche appearance is entirely intentional.
Square went through several design iterations and even considered offering a black version to better match the color of most mobile devices but decided against it. Doing so would make the device less noticeable. Its awkwardness attracts attention, inspiring conversation. "Square found a way to be visible in an invisible world," said Fliesler on stage.
Sometimes effective growth hackers execute less scaleable tactics to drive WOM. Every Thursday, Dan Martell, CEO of Clarity, picks up the phone to call 25 to 30 users and asks how the company can make a better product to suit that user's needs. Dubbed "smile and dial," he gathers direct feedback but he isn't just doing customer development--he's inspiring WOM.
How often do you receive a phone call from a company that isn't trying to directly sell something? Almost never. Dan delights his users with genuine interest and conversation. This manual, human touch is memorable and sharable. In fact, one enthusiastic user even asked Dan to surprise her father with a phone call. Dan's serendipitous phone call gives users a story to tell their friends, driving WOM and attention to Clarity.
I've experienced a similar sensation when ordering shoes from Zappos. After purchasing a pair of Converse sneakers with frugal 5-7 day shipping, I received an email from the company an hour later. The unexpected email informed me that my order was upgraded to overnight shipping, free of charge. The following day, the package arrived as I smiled ear to ear. I've shared that story dozens of times, advocating the brand, and now I'm sharing it here again. WOM is incredibly durable!
Mobile brings technology products into public places. Next time you're walking down a busy sidewalk, look up from your phone and observe how many others are glued to their device, nearly colliding into one another. Before mobile, technology products were largely used at home or work, tethered to the desktop. Today, websites and applications are increasingly used in public places, opening new opportunities to inspire WOM.
Products that get users to do behave strangely always stand out. Restaurant discovery and review app Urbanspoon leveraged the mobile device accelerometer to create a unique interaction and draw attention to the application. When users shake the device, a new restaurant recommendation surfaces. You can keep shaking to get more recommendations. A similar effect: the app Bump, which requires a ritual fist-tap between phone owners to exchange information.
This sort of abnormal behavior instigates curiosity in others nearby. "Why is he violently shaking his phone? What's wrong with him!?" The mystery inspires people to ask questions, triggering conversation and discovery of Urbanspoon. Of course, the app can and does provide a more traditional touchscreen interaction to find restaurant recommendations, but this bizarre behavior creates new WOM opportunities to acquire new users.
Music discovery app Shazam sparks similar odd behavior. We've all been struck with nostalgia or curiosity triggered by a song playing at cafe, bar, and other public places, leading to questions like, "I know that song but can't remember the artist's name!" or "This song is fantastic but who's it by?" Fortunately, Shazam is there to unearth the answer. Simply launch the app and tap a button to "listen" to nearby music. Once identified, the app reveals the artist and song title. But to properly identify the music, Shazam requires a clear, audible signal devoid of background noise often found in public areas.
When the song cannot be identified, the app informs the user, "We couldn't find a match. Get close to the sound." Although subtle, these instructions inspire people to raise their arm, holding the phone closer to the speakers and hushing nearby friends as the Shazam listens to the music. Rarely do you see people raise their phone in a gladiator-like fashion but when they do, nearby spectators and friends take notice.
There are many ways to instigate WOM through the design and marketing of a product. But as with any piece of advice, it's critical to understand whether these tactics are actually relevant for your business. Some products simply don't lend themselves to WOM. Rarely are people willing to share their favorite porn site with friends, let alone use it in public, for example.
Above all else, growth hacking tactics should not get in the way of the app's role as the solution to a user's problem. To use an extreme example: Let's pretend Twitter required all tweets to be dictated audibly. Of course, this would instigate much more attention as users composed their tweets in public, driving WOM, but crippling the user experience in the process.
Likewise, WOM is a powerful agent for user acquisition, but it won't do much to preserve existing users who are disgruntled about your app for other reasons. In sum, hack your product's growth with care, and you will be duly rewarded.
