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How To Kill A Computer Virus Yourself

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When viruses infect personal computers, most folks will shell out $100 to McAfee to just make it go away. But why let a bloated antivirus app have all the fun, and all your money? For the adventurous DIY virus exterminator comes a mini-firewall to keep your computer connected to the Internet--but safely isolated from your local network--so you can freely study dangerous infections on your machine.

The mini-firewall, named Isowall, is essentially a diagnostic tool to analyze how your computer is erroneously trying to poke at your local network. As creator Robert Graham explains in his blog post, the mini-firewall, named Isowall, is pretty much a tool "for the paranoid," but it's better to be sure than inadvertently infect your network.

Graham's Isowall setup from his blog post: "As you can see, the laptop has a direct Ethernet link to the Raspberry Pi running isowall (short purple cable to white USB Ethernet), which then links to the rest of my home network (grey cable)."Photo by Robert Graham

Isowall uses an external processor to run interference between the (possibly infected) computer and your home network--Graham used a Linux-equipped Raspberry Pi, but anything with an OS that supports the libpcap C/C++ library for network traffic capture should work. The machine should be set up with three network interfaces--the first as normal, with a TCP/IP stack to SSH to it, and the other two completely blank (no TCP/IP stacks, no IP addresses--nothing). Restrict the process to IPv4 and ARP packets, set the appropriate conditions to inbound/outbound packets (found on Isowall's GitHub page), and run it. As Graham explains on the Github page:

"The security rests on the fact that there is no IP stack bound to adapters. What that means is that the infected targetted cannot touch the firewall machine in any way, except as allowed within the is_allowed() function. That function represents the majority of the attack surface for the firewall machine. And, as you can tell from reading the function, it contains almost no functionality, meaning that the attack surface is very small indeed."

While Graham admits that his solution won't offer 100% security, it's refreshing to see a programmer give us a relatively simple way to play doctor on infected machines.


An Open Source Phone That's Completely Unlocked, Hardware Too

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Smartphones only become obsolete because the manufacturers design them to. Motorola's tenuous partnership with Phonebloks and its own Project Ara are nice concessions, but too little, too late for users who want true modifiable open-source smartphones. Their answer has come: the Neo900, an open-source phone built out of the tried-and-true sliding Nokia N900.

What is it? A phone whose guts you can mess around with and upgrade to your specifications. What isn't it? The most powerful smartphone on the market, which the creators admit--but they're willing to bet that their laundry list of features will convince you to switch, even if it means trading in iOS for something with a physical keyboard.

The Neo900 builds off the OpenPhoenux project for open-source phones (who are so committed to avoiding "big data" that their only social media broadcast is through a mailing list). Like the other OpenPhoenux phones, the Neo900 just replaces the PCB guts of an old phone (Nokia N900) with a laundry list of current tech. When that gets outdated, just buy new boards. Simple.

Along with the expected sensor suite (RFID, accelerometer, and both GPS and the Russian GLONASS), the Neo900 has an LTE modem--a forward-thinking decision that puts the Neo900's connection on par with only two other chipmakers equipping their modems with LTE: Intel and Qualcomm. Best of all, the Neo900 supports all operating systems available for the established GTA04 motherboard--which has no locks in bootloader or its kernel.

Currently, the Neo900 is still in the crowdfunding stage, but it already raised €35,100. From there, each threshold of orders for a ship-complete-to-your-door Neo900 reduces cost per unit: The Neo900 motherboard is expected to cost €500-€700. Open-source aficionados kvetching about Apple's/Google's chains, now's the chance to put your money where your mouth is.

Why Are We Building Jailbait Sexbots?

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A phenomena known as Webcam Child Sex Tourism--adults logging into sex-chat rooms with minors in developing countries--is on the rise. It is estimated that tens of thousands of adults currently prey on children this way each day, and the number keeps growing according to international researchers.

Last week a team of coders, animators, and researchers announced they had created a solution: a computer-generated 10-year-old girl named Sweetie, intended to catch predators in the act. In just 10 weeks this bit of CGI wizardry and software caught 1,000 predators. But it also raised a lot of questions, like: can you commit a sexual crime against a piece of code?

Why Webcam Child Sex Tourism Is Getting Worse

"It was simply overwhelming, we were inundated, swamped by an avalanche of men," says Hans Guyt, whose organization first deployed Sweetie.

For 10 weeks earlier this year, Guyt and his team at Terre des Hommes Netherlands, an organization that fights child exploitation, worked out of a secret location in a warehouse in Amsterdam. The secrecy is necessary to avoid backlash from culprits.

WCST usually works like this: A customer logs into an Internet chat room and purposely seek out a child to engage with. Some may just chance their luck by trying to find unsuspecting children on Facebook or other non-purpose-built chat rooms. However, the FBI has identified thousands of Internet chat rooms dedicated solely to Webcam Child Sex Tourism. This means that the children in these chat rooms aren't just there for curiosity's sake, or just hanging out virtually with friends and are then unfortunate enough to be lured into a random predator's cyber arms.

"These children are either young prostitutes working from Internet cafes or children who, forced by their parents or other family members, perform sex shows in front of a webcam from their homes," Guyt says. "They surf public chat rooms to establish contact with men."

Once the children make contact, the men on the other end of the Internet connection then pay via PayPal or Western Union Online to watch live streaming video of the children acting out their sexual desires.

The sexual exploitation of children is unfortunately nothing new. But with the rise of cheap, affordable technology like webcams, high-speed Internet access, and online payment methods, now a person can, ironically, safely exploit a child halfway around the world from the comfort of his own living room--which is why WCST has exploded in recent years.

Why Combatting WCST Is So Morally Confusing

But even as this behavior increases, a large portion of the adult customers engaged in it can't be technically classified as pedophilic, a psychiatric designation that is characterized by a long-term primary sexual attraction to prepubertal children. Instead, many WCST customers seem to be people who engage in it simply because the opportunity arises and they get curious.

In other words, if Skype, PayPal, and the Internet did not exist, these people might not be seeking to exploit children in the physical world.

There is no doubt that the 1,000 individuals on the dossiers Guyt and his team identified were engaging in sexual acts (usually including sexual conversations and masturbation via webcam) with Sweetie. However, judging the criminality of such actions gets confusing because Sweetie is not a 10-year-old girl--no matter what she looks like. She's not even a "she." Sweetie is an "it." And it's code.

So I'm left wondering what crime have these men (and women, as Sweetie did have female solicitors) actually committed? Couldn't it be argued that these people haven't broken any laws? Guyt admits that is a valid argument. But, he says, "That wasn't our point anyway. These men had and have the intention to commit crimes against young children and should be stopped before they do. The novel approach that we promote does exactly that."

How Sweetie Was Born Of Code And Conscience

To prototype Sweetie, Guyt and his team first set up a pair of two-member research teams. One member on each team would create a fake profile and imitate a 10-year-old girl named "Sweetie" in chat rooms, while the other team member collected information the customer was revealing through IM messages, which they then used to piece together the real identity of the predator.

But they quickly discovered a (perhaps appropriate) level of paranoia in their marks, who frequently requested visual confirmation that they were indeed talking to a real underage girl and were not part of a sting operation.

That lead Guyt's researchers to get to work on creating an advanced CGI model of Sweetie. The result was a ultra-realistic 3-D model of a 10-year-old Filipino girl that would fool even the most accomplished Hollywood blockbuster animator. The development of Sweetie itself took six months and, though Guyt wouldn't divulge the software or the coding language used to make Sweetie, it's likely that it was rendered in Maya.

The researchers then programed a separate application to control the 3-D Sweetie on command. For the first time ever, while the researchers were having an active IM conversation with the predators, the predators were seeing real-time video of a software-fabricated child typing away at a keyboard.

It's Alive!

The ploy worked. In just 10 weeks Guyt and his team positively identified 1,000 sexual predators before they shut Sweetie down for good and then handed Interpol the dossiers of the individuals they positively identified.

To be sure, Sweetie marks an historic advance in identifying predators. Never before has such a technique been used. Indeed, it could not have been, as previously, in order to make predators believe they were talking to a 10-year-old girl with the confirmation they wanted, they would need to see video footage of a real 10-year-old girl interacting with them live on screen, which would have broken a number of international laws and put the health and safety of the girl at risk.

Sweetie changed all this. But it also raised that question: Did any of these 1,000 predators actually commit a crime?

Can You Commit A Crime Against Code?

Sweetie was never meant to run forever. It was a proof of concept application to inspire global law enforcement agencies to realize how much more could be done to fight child exploitation using advanced technology. It also, of course, was a publicity stunt to bring more attention to the problem of WCST--and at that it was a resounding success.

But besides bringing WCST to light in the press, Sweetie raised other issues that weren't widely reported on--primarily, can you commit a crime against code?

Guyt says that there are too many difficulties in trying to prosecute online predators engaging children in sexual acts for money, which is why a technological deterrent like Sweetie must exist.

"The victims won't come forward. They are either young prostitutes trying to survive and make some money or they are children forced by their parents. They won't come out either to testify against their own families. Secondly, there are no witnesses on the Internet. This is live streaming video and when the perpetrator switches off the computer, the evidence is gone. No victim, no witness, no evidence, no case. We should therefore intervene before a crime is committed. Though the Internet must be free it should not be lawless."

Public chat rooms should be observed, monitored, and patrolled by law enforcement, says Guyt. Once potential predators are identified, police could take the next step by issuing a warning. "This will serve as a deterrent to hundreds of thousands of potential so-called 'casual' pedophiles. It will scare the living daylights out of most of them."

I don't disagree completely with Guyt. Child exploitation and human trafficking are a huge, very real and pressing problem in the Internet age. And he is right that a deterrent like Sweetie to warn predators they are being monitored can scare many so much--especially the more casual one--that they stop for good. To that end, Sweetie is an admirable attempt to use tech for good.

One Step Toward "Pre-Crime" Enforcement?

But taken further Sweetie veers into Orwellian or Minority Report "pre-crime" territory and I'm wondering if any of the predators identified can actually be convicted for exploiting children because, though she looks like a 10-year-old girl, Sweetie can't suffer like one. She is non-sentient code: So, again, where is the crime?

This question is something governments, law enforcement agencies, technology leaders, philosophers, and members of society will have to increasingly debate as technology becomes more adept at identifying potential crime. For now, Sweetie is a good starting point, but its solution is not the only way to use technology to fight child exploitation, as some like Google and their partners have taken a very different approach.

Still, having spoken to trafficking victims in my research and seeing the horrible psychological effects exploitation has, it's understandable that people explore questionable methods to try to stop it. New technology will inevitably always be used by some to inflict suffering on others, and trying to fight that use can seem like an uphill battle.

As Guyt tells me, "Ask anyone who works in the area of cyber crime prevention to describe their job and you'll most likely be told that it's like running to stand still. Just as we all enjoy discovering the benefits that each new wave of digital technology brings us, so to do others enjoy discovering what new criminal capabilities the latest development affords them. We just have to keep on running…"

If you're interested in learning more about Sweetie and support the technology to catch potential predators engaging in Webcam Child Sex Tourism, you can sign the petition here to urge international justice ministers, police chiefs, and child protection chiefs to crack down on public chat rooms where WCST is rampant.

The Government Wants Gigabit Wi-Fi All For Itself

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If you think your Internet is slow now, just wait. As more and more devices connect to Wi-Fi networks in the U.S., those networks are beginning to creak under the weight. The new gigabit Wi-Fi standard promises to ease the pain, but there's a problem: The latest standard in Wi-Fi technology--802.11ac, also known as gigabit Wi-Fi--only works on the 5 GHz band, and that frequency is already being used by some influential organizations, some inside the government itself.

This was the topic of conversation in yesterday's hearing by the U.S. House Energy Subcommittee on Communications and Technology: Can the federal government open up access to the 5 GHz band of wireless spectrum for expanded Wi-Fi usage without pissing off anyone important?

Today, the 5 GHz spectrum is used by critical government communication systems, as well as car companies like Toyota and GM for Internet-connected cars.

Meanwhile, companies like Comcast and Cisco--both of whom sent executives to testify before Congress yesterday--are clamoring for access to that same slice of the wireless pie.

"Gigabit Wi-Fi is here, it's real and our customers are demanding it," Cisco CTO Bob Friday told lawmakers. "But it requires wide bands of contiguous spectrum to handle the massive increase in demand driven by video. Technological improvements aren't enough. Policymakers also have a major role to play and should provide more spectrum for Wi-Fi."

What Is Gigabit Wi-Fi--More Importantly, When Can We Have It?

Gigabit Wi-Fi, as its name suggests, promises to deliver connection speeds of up to 1.3gbps, thereby nobly saving us all from the painful crawl of congested networks. As anybody who's ever run a speed test on their home or office Internet connection knows, the download and upload speeds of today's Wi-Fi networks are dramatically lower than the advertised speeds we all pay for, which are really only achievable by plugging one's computer directly into the modem. You might have signed up for 50mbps, but your iPad would be lucky to pull down 20mbps. Gigabit Wi-Fi will change all that, delivering much snappier downloads (even if the promised 1.3gbps rate remains a rarity).

But it's not just about faster movie downloads. As Friday explained in yesterday's hearing, network congestion in places like university lecture halls and hospitals is already becoming severe, which runs the risk of slowing innovation in the facilities where potential is the greatest (so much for those Google Glass-augmented surgeries). The so-called "spectrum crunch" problem is only going to worsen as more and more Wi-Fi-capable devices ship--15 billion of them by 2017, predicts Cisco.

On paper, gigabit Wi-Fi is a promising antidote, but for it to proliferate, the FCC would need to open up access to the 5 GHz band, working with tech companies to ensure that there's no interference with existing systems operating there. To that end, Cisco (which, like Comcast, stands to profit handsomely from gigabit Wi-Fi) has put forward a conceptual proposal for how to handle that.

So how soon can you fire up your gigabit Wi-Fi modem and get blazing fast wireless speeds? There's no hard deadline for a decision, a Cisco spokesperson told us. Right now, the FCC and Congress are exploring the feasibility of opening up the 5 GHz band for Wi-Fi, with a final decision coming from the FCC at some point in the future. In the meantime, well, maybe you could try resetting your modem. That usually helps.

How Anti-Sexting Software Could Change The Web Forever

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Social media and smartphones have created the ultimate outlets for teenage angst. Last month, Rebecca Sedwick jumped off a ledge at 12 years old, killing herself. A bully she knew later published these words on Facebook: "Yes IK I bullied REBECCA nd she killed herself but IDGAF." Kids are mean.

After the bully was arrested, a big debate set off about whether parents of a cyberbully should be legally liable for the crime. Most of the conversation on the parent's defense blamed not having the tools or time to monitor their child's social media and phones. The NSA spying frenzy has its hands on all of our information, yet the average parent has no access to a technology that can tell the difference between sexting, bullying, and harmless texting on their child's cell phone.

That's because there's no way for a computer to tell what's in an image--it only sees bits and pixels. But one Texas company may be about to change all that.

It's called ImageVision, and the company thinks it can solve this oh-so-nuanced social problem with brute force software filtering. ImageVision built something they call Eye Guardian, which allows parents to monitor their child's texts and Facebook account by reporting any illicit images or text. This is the story of how it works--and how teaching computers to "see" images could revolutionize the web.

The No-Man's Solution To Sexting

At the beginning of our interview ImageVision's cofounder, Mitch Butler, made one simple statement: "We do not intend to dictate morality or parenting standards."

In his southern accent, Butler explained the event that led him to build EyeGuardian--"An inappropriate text from, ehh, I'll call him Johnny from school, to my daughter and about four or five other little girls which contained inappropriate text commentary. But also, a picture of Johnny's Johnson."

His daughter was in her last year of middle school at the time, which was four years ago. The average age of an eighth grader is 13-14 years old. These teens stack up about 60 texts and spend around 7.5 hours online daily. On top of this, more than 22% of teens admit to sexting. ImageVision started out with one goal--trusting computers to keep an eye out for the kids by teaching machines to "see." Here's what this means for marketing and big data.

When Butler tried downloading an app to monitor his daughter's phone, he found nothing. ImageVision differentiated itself from the rest of the industry by initially focusing on body parts.

"Essentially, what we do is we teach computers to see," explains Butler, who was also attracted from a business standpoint. "We wanted to improve the way technology worked by automating the photo reviewing process."

ImageVision's image recognition software breaks down pictures at a pixel level and classifies them based on context, shape, texture, and color. Whether it decided to notify a parent of suspicious activity depends on the skin texture and skin tone in the images. If the machine thinks it's seeing a lot of skin, it lets the parents know.

Butler himself admits he has always been a no-man. "I am always saying, No don't do that. No, don't play in the street when you're a toddler. No, don't play with fire. No, don't drive and text." He likes to think of the application as an extra eye to help with that.

"We are so busy and social media travels at the speed of light. I have my own kids and I can't keep up with everything they do--every Facebook post."

Today's average first-time smartphone owner is 11 years old. "We walk them into the wireless store, we hand them a smartphone and say 'have fun' and they're off to the wild, wild, west. No training," says Butler.

How Visual Data Blows Text Out Of The Water

"We realized that the Facebooks of the world, the Instagrams, the Photobuckets, the Yahoo's, are all going to be hosting an enormous amount of visual content. In fact, recent studies state that in the big data world, 89% of a corporation's data is visual," says Butler. Yet until recently, most of the big data movement has focused on words and numbers.

Social media's greatest asset is the free supply of user-generated content. Most of the inappropriate photos circulating the web have either been scanned by the system before or are duplicate copies of this content.

"We're just focused on training computers how to sort through visual content, after paying virtual models that focus on contextual analysis," says Butler.

For example, if you're sitting at a light-colored wood conference table and someone took a picture, previous generations of image analysis software would recognize it as skin. This is because of the similarity of colors and texture.

"We're looking at that table and saying, wait a minute, let's do a textual analysis. We're not only using color analysis, texture palettes, and shape models. We're using artificial intelligence," explains Butler.

ImageVision was able to do this utilizing machine learning methods and multiple analysis algorithms that classify an image at the pixel level. This classification is based on different features such as color and shades, texture, and shape. But now, a revolutionary application of ImageVision's decision tree is able to detect and recognize context of environment.

This is important, because a big part of being able to tell what is in an image comes from the ability to differentiate where the photo was taken. This technology can recognize whether the image is in a bedroom, out in the woods, or at the beach.

ImageVision migrated to a Hadoop architecture this year in search of better scalability, processing efficiency, and workload flexibility. Hadoop basically allows for a necessary structure for big data and the large amounts of information extracted from websites that are rich with visual content.

Look At Me Meow, I'm Getting Paper

Butler knows that anti-sexting software might not be a big seller, so to fund the project, ImageVision has been working big companies, leveraging their technology to serve up better online advertisements.

While working with an image hosting service, ImageVision found pet selfies made up a large percentage of user-generated content--particularly cats. ImageVision aggregated this information for advertisers like Pedigree and Purina.

"A lot of my friends have gotten the 'lose belly fat' ad," says Butler. "The problem is most of the time it's a misdirected ad because they are active and in shape." ImageVision deployed on a social networking site could ensure these ads only appear to users who, in their photos, appear to have a certain body shape. That means advertisers could tailor their spending more accurately. "It's all about [showing] the thing they are looking for versus the thing they don't need to see," says Butler. The system could even be used to replace "flagging" systems on a network like Facebook.

Right now the company is working on silicon chips that embed its technology in other hardware, giving the software access to all the content on a device, not just certain apps. ("A very large Android OEM has engaged us for multiple products for different business projects," says Butler.) Let's hope it's used to prevent innocent kids from suffering, and not for any other kind of censorship.

Startup Failing? You Might Be Asking The Wrong Questions

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First, a parable: I did fine in Catholic school, up until 6th grade. I don't know why Sister Freda hated me, but I think she was trying to teach me a lesson. And I did learn a lesson from her--just not the one she had in mind.

The turning point happened like this. During a reading comprehension exercise about becoming a veterinarian, Sister Freda asked me, "Name one challenge people have in becoming a vet." I gave an answer. It was wrong. She told the entire class that this was an example of what happens when students don't pay attention. If I had done the work, she explained, I would have seen the section in the reading that held the correct answer. It was intended as a humiliating lesson.

At lunch, I showed Sister Freda the reading passage in my book. She apparently wanted me to regurgitate the challenges that students face when becoming vets. But I pointed out a later paragraph that contained my answer--that many vets struggle to run their own practices as business people.

"Ah, ok," she said, and that was it. She saw that my answer wasn't wrong--if anything, her question had been too vague.

At that moment, I realized that teachers are like everyone else--they make mistakes. And if I was going to be a great student, I couldn't be so passive about my education.

Starting in 7th grade, I asked a ridiculous number of questions. My hand lived above my head. I forced myself to think of hypothetical or advanced questions beyond the realm of the text or the day's lesson. People groaned when I was called on.

I remember a fellow student turning around when tests were handed back. He noticed that I had gotten the higher score. "How did you get a 100% when you're always so confused and have to ask so many questions?"

Despite ridicule from my peers, I kept at it. My grades soared, and at the end of 8th grade I graduated second in my class. If only I had asked more questions, sooner.

Don't Forget The Real Question

Someone emailed me recently with the subject: "A question about start-ups." But the email didn't contain a question mark or anything remotely looking like a question.

Often I get advice seeking emails ending with, "Do you have any feedback?"
But that's not a question; it's a cop-out.

Similarly, I've attended meetings where entrepreneurs make presentations to experts expected to share helpful guidance. But often the presentation is, "Here's my product, what do you think?"

Same problem. That's not a real question. And so a conversation with these experts is unfocused and frustrates the entrepreneur because her real problems go untouched.

I've made the same mistake myself, but I've been lucky to learn a different way. The most valuable feedback session I ever had with a mentor came before I released Draft, my latest product to help people write better. I was prepared. Instead of asking for feedback, I asked how this mentor and successful entrepreneur would design a specific feature in Draft or how would he communicate the business model I had planned? I got much more than feedback; I got answers.

How To Ask Better Questions

There are plenty of people who'd love to help you with your business; you just have to ask, but they don't have time to waste helping you figure out what your actual problems are. Get the most out of a potential mentor by approaching them with specific questions you've already identified and they've probably answered for themselves. How would you:

  • Increase the conversion rate?
  • Set up pricing?
  • Design this feature so that it's clear and easy to use?

And force yourself to go deeper with your questions.

Toyota's engineering processes are famously effective. One reason is that employees are taught to ask why five times when trying to solve a problem.

  • Why is the battery dead?
  • Why is the alternator broken?
  • Why didn't the customer get alerted to this before?

This process helps engineers identify and fix the root problem instead of just treating symptoms. The same practice can be applied to your startup venture.

Act like a Toyota engineer and ask why at least five times.

  • Why is my business not making enough money?
  • Why am I not measuring my conversion and attrition rates?
  • Why is attrition so high?
  • Why haven't I surveyed anyone who has canceled?
  • Why haven't I added feature X which most canceling users are asking for?

And most importantly… Don't worry about looking silly with the number of questions you have; just ask more of them.

Nate Kontny is the creator of Draft, a collaborative platform to help make you a better writer. He'd love to meet you on Twitter.

How We Built A New Design Language For "Aware" Apps

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We are living in a time of context-aware applications. Driven by the forces of mobile computing, big data, ubiquitous sensors, social networks, and GPS, these "aware" apps are becoming commonplace: Siri, Google Now, Tempo, Donna and, perhaps most saliently, the Google Glass platform are all examples.

However, the voice of product designers has thus far been largely missing from the conversation. For over a decade, product design for the web has primarily meant creating wireframes and user flows directly from high-level business objectives, but wireframing is a poor fit for contextual apps. How do you draw a wireframe for Siri or Google Now when most of the functionality changes dynamically in response to the circumstances of the user?

Without a design language to articulate contextual application behavior, the development of contextual apps is bottlenecked. Since we're building the technology to power these kinds of apps here at our company Axilent, we care about this sort of thing.

We decided to see if we could address the design gap by creating a totally new design language. What we created is called CAVE, or Conversational Architecture Visual Expression. It's designed to be used between ideation and the various discipline-specific activities of product development--engineering planning, UX design, visual design, and content strategy. Plus the name is fun: "Do we have CAVE drawings for this app?"

It's now in alpha state at this point, but once we're further along, the entire language will be released under a Creative Commons license, free for anyone to use. Here's how we developed it.

Designing Contextual Apps

We started by asserting that product designers should use natural, one-to-one conversations as the fundamental design metaphor to describe contextual apps. It was a good start, but we needed to take it a step further.

We wanted a visual design language that could fully articulate the behavior of a contextual app, and that could provide all the project participants the information they needed in order to do their jobs in the development of the app: Developers would know what to build, copywriters would know what to write, visual designers would need creative direction, and so on.

For our language, we decided there would be four requirements:

  • It had to be whiteboard, napkin, and fancy presentation-friendly.
  • It had to be methodology neutral. At this point, the best practices for contextual app design are unknown. Therefore, we chose to just create a language, not a methodology. (The difference is a language lets you express ideas, whereas a methodology tells you how to approach the project.)
  • It had to both scale up and down: You should be able to describe a complicated app in a holistic way, but also illustrate a simple facet of an app.
  • Finally, everyone involved in the creation of an app should be able to read the language's description of that app and understand what they needed to know in order to do their jobs. That includes business stakeholders, user experience designers, and developers.

The Challenges Of Language Design

Creating a language is an ugly process. It involves making up a way to say something at the same time as you're trying to say it. You frequently struggle to express yourself. You find yourself wondering if there is an idea missing from the conversation, waiting for you to invent a name for it.

We had to fight scope creep. With earlier versions of the language we were trying to solve adjacent but ultimately different problems, such as identifying customer segments for business stakeholders or prioritizing features for the product team. While these are admirable activities, they are not part of the problem that we're trying to solve. We found that we needed to remind ourselves that our goal was to describe a contextual app for the product team. Period.

Finding in the right level of abstraction for the language was another challenge. The underlying design problem for contextual apps is that they are potentially very, very complicated. They shift and change depending on a wide variety of circumstances. If the language was too high-level, it would miss describing critical details.

On the other hand, if the language was too low-level, app descriptions would be too complicated to be practical. We felt that the language needed to support detailed but practical levels of abstraction, and that it should let the app designer transition from one level of abstraction to another, as they felt appropriate. We decided to focus on three levels of abstraction that were critical for describing contextual applications: raw data, meaningful context, and application behavior.

Finally, we had to keep it real: Throughout the design process we continuously tested the language by using it for actual contextual application design. The design process quickly brought out any weaknesses in the language.

What CAVE Does For App Design

CAVE shows the relationship between devices, sensors, and data, and how they relate to user context. It expresses an application's modal response to context, and how that response relates to any user interfaces.

CAVE diagrams are meant to be read by the whole team, and we imagine that they may also be authored by more than one member of the team, as different disciplines may be more comfortable with different abstraction layers. For example, a technical lead may choose to author the data layer of an application, whereas an experience lead may author the application's modal response.

Starting With Data

Context starts with data. To make a contextual app, you need to know what data is available to you, and where it originates. In the era of mobile computing, a large amount of data comes from sensors attached to mobile devices.

However, sometimes data isn't collected directly, it comes from an external source (such as Facebook).

Building Context From Data

In order for data to be useful, one needs to extract context from it. In CAVE, a user's context is expressed with four kinds of elements: Persona, Affinity, Goal, and Environment (PAGE).

A Persona is behavioral segment for users. It represents a long-standing pattern of behavior for a user that is unlikely to change much over time. Examples might be "social sharer" or "discount shopper." Affinity represents a user's preference for something. A Goal is a task that a user is attempting to accomplish at a given time and the Environment represents everything surrounding the user's interaction with the app.

We get from data to context via *inferences*, drawing conclusions about the user from conditions found in their behavior. An inference with a condition looks like this:

In this case, the square brackets indicate an inference is being made from the "Motion" data associated with the user. The condition is "Motion Detected" and the resulting context is On The Move (a part of the user's Environment).

Sometimes no condition is required for an inference to build context.

Here we're capturing a user's product affinity from their Facebook data, regardless of what it might be.

Modes: Responding to Context

An application may respond to a given user context with a mode. A modal response looks like this:

The modal response diagram is organized into three columns. The left column shows the triggering user context. In this case the user must be proximate to the supermarket Goodways (part of their Environment) and she must currently have the Goal of needing to shop for groceries.

The right-hand column is a representation of the user interface of the modal response. In this case it's an audio interface, so it represents the words spoken by the application to the user.

In the middle lies the mode inventory. This shows all of the elements required of the application in its response to the user context. A modal response can consist of Content, Functionality, Rules, and Style.

Content is content: text, speech, video, audio, and so forth. Functionality represents interactive features of the application, Rules refer to business rules adhered to by the application, and Style is the subjective manner in which the app interacts with the user.

Organizing The Application

All of an applications modes are organized in a stack, prioritized from top to bottom. The idea is the application will look for a user context match at the top of the stack, and then fall down through it, looking for a match, until finally reaching the default mode at the bottom. We call this structure a Switch.

Applications can be single-Switch, or organized into multiple Switches (probably a good idea for anything but the simplest contextual applications).

Where Are We Going From Here?

We will be putting up a more formal definition with some examples at cavelanguage.org and requesting feedback from as many people as possible. We'd love to hear from anyone who's interested. Send me your thoughts @LorenDavie on Twitter.

Loren Davie is the CEO and founder of Axilent, which aids developers in building contextual applications. You can find his blog here.

This Grad Student Hacked Semantic Search To Be Better Than Google

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Google may be the dominant search engine, but it's far from ideal. One major problem: How do you search for things you don't know exist?

Using Google's own experimental algorithms, a graduate student may have build a solution: a search engine that allows you to add and subtract search terms for far more intuitive results.

The new search engine, ThisPlusThat.Me, similarly looks for context clues among the terms. For instance: Entering the arithmetic search "Paris - France + Italy" gives the top result as "Rome," but if I search the same thing in Google, I'll get directions between Paris and Italy, restaurants in France and Italy, and a depressing Yahoo Answers of whether Italy is in Paris (or vice versa). "Rome," on the other hand, is an association you, a human, would make (I want This, without That but including Those)--and the engine makes that decision based on each answer's semantic value compared to your search.

Until now, search has been stuck in a paradigm of literal matching, unable to break into conceptual associations and guessing what you mean when you search. There's a reason Amazon and Netflix have scored points for their item suggestions: They're thinking how you think.

The engine, created by Astrophysics PhD candidate Christopher Moody, uses Google's own open-source word2vec algorithm research to take the terms you searched for and ranks the query results by relevance, just like a normal search--except the rankings are based on "vector distances" that have a lot more human sense. So in the above example, other results could have been, say, Napoleon or wine--both have ties with the above search terms, but within the context of City - Country + Other Country, Rome is the vector that has the closest "distance."

All the word2vec algorithm needs is an appropriate corpus of data to build its word relations on: Moody used Wikipedia's corpus as a vocabulary and relational base--an obvious advantage in size, but it also had the added benefit of "canonicalizing" terms (is it Paris the city, or Paris from the Trojan War? In Wikipedia, the first is "Paris" and the second "Paris_(mythology)." But millions of search-and-replaces in Wiki's 42 GB of text was intensive, so Moody used Hadoop's Map functions to fan those search-and-replaces to several nodes.

A search query then spits out an 8 GB table of vectors with varying distances; Moody tried out a few data search systems before settling on Google's Numexpr to find the term with the closest vector distance.


How Google Glass Could Revolutionize The Music Industry

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As more creative connections are being formed online through social media, more collaboration is happening online instead of in the same physical space. While online collaboration is maturing in areas like writing, it hasn't really advanced in regards to music and the entertainment industry. For musicians recording remotely--say, from their tour bus--collaboration is a huge pain.

Sound engineer Young Guru, who has worked on most of Jay Z's albums, among many other projects, envisions using a telepresence headset like Google Glass as a solution. "I think collaboration is the main thing people are going to find interesting," he says. "Seeing what others see, and being able to work hands-free."

While some of the miscellaneous parts of creating a new album lend themselves to remote work, most of the process, like the actual recording, still happens in person. For musicians to set up their own remote conferencing solution, even using a product like Skype, is still complicated and lacks the intimate feel a lot of musicians thrive on.

"Imagine sitting there and being able to look at the actual drum set that's being played or looking at the guitar and being able to easily collaborate. There will be apps to record in real time with that other person and coach them versus having to send an email of an audio file. You won't miss the human interaction [with Glass]," says Guru, who has been part of the Google Glass explorer program. In partnership with Google, he has also helped announce more music commands coming to Glass. The headset can now identify songs around the user as well as pull up songs on demand, just by asking.

The Internet has already delivered on its promise of disrupting the major labels' stranglehold on distribution, but it has yet to fully deliver on disrupting the music recording process. There are bands out there that are currently willing to make the Internet work for them as a musical platform like independent band, Canopy Climbers, but they are just few and far between. The three band members from Canopy Climbers had previously lived in close proximity to each other, but when the time came to record a sophomore album, none lived in the same city, or state. The band took to the cloud and recorded each part of the whole album on their own and shared the tracks using Dropbox and other tools, eventually mixing the music all together. Would Glass have helped during recording remotely? "Collaboration is almost always a good thing. A way to feed off of one another's energy and ideas," says lead singer Alan Thomas.

Google introduced Glass with a broad vision, but few specific examples of how to use the product. Getting Glass into the hands of industry professionals like Guru allows them to take theoretical ideas and put them into practice, seeing if the tool actually works. Beyond any prompting from Google, talking to Guru about Glass allowed me to hear his passion and belief that Glass will transform the way musicians connect and collaborate online in a meaningful way.

The most important question for struggling independent musicians, is will Glass--as a music tool--enable them, even without the patience of Canopy Climbers, to record and be a band in different locations? Most likely it will. Guru added, "Glass is going to extend everything people are currently doing now. It frees you up instead of keeping you looking down at a phone."

#Antisec Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond Given Maximum Sentence

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In a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, Judge Loretta Preska, who was previously asked to recuse herself due to a possible conflict of interest, sentenced Jeremy Hammond to 10 years in prison--the maximum sentence for the violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) Hammond pled guilty to.

Hammond was indicted for hacking the servers of Strategic Forecasting (aka Stratfor) and leaking 5 million emails to WikiLeaks and releasing private information, including credit card numbers and physical addresses, from Stratfor's database. He pled guilty to one conspiracy charge.

Upon hearing the sentence, the courtroom--packed with Hammond's supporters and sympathetic activists--was notably distraught. Prior to the sentencing, when the judge asked for victims of Hammond's crime to step forward, one man stood up and addressed the court saying that he was "a victim of NSA surveillance." He was shortly thereafter restrained and removed from the courtroom.

In his statement to the court, Hammond said that his hack used a "zero-day exploit" in the Plesk webhosting platform. This gave him root access to Stratfor's servers, which he used to release emails revealing that Stratfor was acting as a private intelligence firm in cooperation with law enforcement agencies and corporations. Among its activities were surveilling Occupy Wall Street protesters and spying for Dow Chemical on people campaigning for compensation for the victims of the Bhopal environmental disaster.

The broader significance of his case is that it illustrates the overreach of the CFAA, the same law that Aaron Swartz was prosecuted under before he committed suicide. The digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a statement on its website, calls the law "draconian" and states that "damage figures for CFAA charges can easily be inflated" and "the sentencing guidelines are broken for the CFAA, leading to excessive sentences and unjust results."

Roy Singham, the head of IT consulting firm Thoughtworks, where Aaron Swartz was employed at the time of his death, was present at a press conference outside the courthouse. Speaking to a small crowd of journalists, he said, "What is the complicity today between corporations and NSA surveillance? These titans of tech industry are celebrated as innovators, as disruptors. Why the discrepancy? No charges against these people and yet 10 years for Jeremy."

Addressing the tech community directly, he continued: "This is an unacceptable outcome for the tech sector. I say shame on the rest of tech sector for not coming to Jeremy's defense. It's an embarrassment that there are so few tech sector people here with me today."

Following his 10 years in prison, Hammond will have three years of supervised release. The conditions of his release include that he may only receive electronic equipment capable of Internet access with approval of his probation officer and that any computers or network-capable devices he owns will be subject to search and may have monitoring software installed on them by his probation officer.

A Brief Guide To Marketing Your Dev Shop

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Let's be honest: Many folks in tech take a dim view of marketing. Very early in my tenure with Mutual Mobile, an Austin-based app developer, I was told no one in marketing could produce anything as compelling as the engineering team.

To a degree, that opinion was right, but only if you're talking about typical marketing--chest-beating blog posts, superficial banner ads, and other forms of hyperbole. But that that sort of marketing didn't interest me either.

I'd been reading about native advertising, specifically content marketing, and wanted to explore this subtler approach and find out what it could do for us. Instead of shilling Mutual Mobile's services, I thought we could educate, inform, and better connect with our audience, and that's exactly what our team did over the next year. Here are six key lessons we learned along the way:

Lesson #1: Think Big, Start Small

Before I joined Mutual Mobile, the company had produced a copy-heavy, super-dry white paper. You know the one, the "Definitive Guide" every tech company produces--good bedtime reading for nights when you have insomnia.

No way was I going to condemn us to weekly blog posts like "Nine ways mobile can transform your sales processes!" We needed better ideas, so I looked around. I saw what our competitors were doing, what the tech giants were up to, and identified a few stand-out strategies in our very crowded tech marketing world. But before I could explore these, I first had to come up with materials that would drive some immediate sales leads.

When you're given lemons, make lemonade. I started with that massively dry definitive guide, and devised a plan to convert it into 10 emails, six blog posts, a handful of Slideshares, and several "mini" infographics. In short order, the team had created over 20 pieces of tactical content, everything we needed for the short-term. Meanwhile, I could now focus on what I really wanted to do: comprehensive thought leadership programs.

Lesson #2: When Everyone Zigs, You Zag

Fortunately for me, none of our competitors was doing any remarkably successful marketing. Most obviously, there was a huge opportunity to stand out in our field with the addition of some video marketing.

My team's first experimentation with video was an employee-hosted series featuring the mobile news of the week, which we called Mobile Minute. Mutual Mobile is relatively unknown outside of the Austin startup scene, so we knew it would be a hard sell. That's why we shot a pilot first and doggedly shopped it around. After getting rejected by several tech editors, I heard back from the managing editor at ReadWrite. He liked the idea and offered to run it every week.

Just before launch, ReadWrite's corporate parent vetoed it because they couldn't monetize it. But we were able to find a home on the more B2B-focused MarketingProfs, where we've had modest success. 68% of the traffic MarketingProfs sends to Mutual Mobile's site are new visitors, and the bounce rate is a low 35% (those who spend five minutes on at least four pages).

Lesson #3: Scare Yourself, a Little

With a successful weekly video under our belt, I felt confident enough to explore daily content. I'd read about brand journalism efforts at companies like Intel, GE, and IBM. This inspired me to launch our second major thought leadership program: The Push, a blog dedicated to the trends, platforms, and strategies shaping mobile.

On the strength of their success with IBM's Midsize Insider, I contracted content creator Skyword to provide 20-plus articles a month (allowing us to publish every business day). Heading down the brand journalism path was a significant financial investment for Mutual Mobile and not without risk. After all, we'd never done anything like it. What if no one read the posts? Even worse, what if no one liked them? Despite the loss of sleep this anxiety caused me, it felt like the right thing to do.

It turns out all the worry was for nothing. By spending several hundred dollars a month on retargeting and social media ads, we were able to drive over 40,000 pageviews in the first 90 days. Once we tapped fellow Austin startup OneSpot to boost our retargeting efforts, that number swelled even more. Among our readers: directors and VPs at Dell, Netflix, Cisco, Kimberly-Clark, and Prudential.

Lesson #4: Keep the Momentum Going

After six months of regularly producing Mobile Minute, and a few months of publishing articles to The Push, I decided to up the ante by adding another video program. Having missed out on securing a premium partner for Mobile Minute, I set my sights on Ask A Developer, a twice-weekly video series where our iOS and Android teams answer questions from real people.

Once again, we shot a pilot and this time handed it off to INK, our just-hired PR agency. In a matter of days, they had me on the phone with an editor at Mashable. Intrigued by the concept, he promised to send it through, but cautioned us not to get our hopes up. The next day, however, we were asked to take a call with Mashable's content director. From there, things went pretty fast and my team soon found themselves cranking out videos that were getting thousands of views and tons of shares.

Lesson #5: Don't Pause for Self-doubt

Fair warning: Until things take off, and even after, your initiatives might be called into question. You may be asked to scrap something entirely or to change directions. In these cases, politely resist and let the data make your case for you.

I recommend using a hosting service like Wistia, which tracks viewers and links across social media, so that you know who's viewing your content and where they're coming from. And you should always keep tabs on your traffic stats with Google Analytics. I was faced with doubting executives several times, and in each instance successfully headed off interference by presenting a progress report backed up by hard data.

Sometimes, you need to show third-party approval to justify the legitimacy of your efforts. Mutual Mobile's marketing team surveyed readers of The Push and sought feedback from Forrester analysts on Mobile Minute episodes. In addition, we started to submit our productions to various award shows judged by peers so that we could generate some unbiased feedback.

Lesson #6: Do the Unexpected (for Better-Than-Expected Results)

Thankfully, Mutual Mobile began to see wins once our content marketing programs hit the six-month mark. Just last month, one of the market developers cold-called an EVP in insurance who recognized us as "the Mobile Minute guys." And two weeks ago a global electronics manufacturer contacted us after reading The Push. This is in addition to the hundreds of leads our new content marketing programs have spurred.

Obviously, getting Mutual Mobile's programs to where they are today wasn't without its trials. Winning approval for untested efforts was tricky, and asking leadership to be patient was even harder. There were many times when it would have been tempting to take the easy way out, but I chose not to. Of course, the advantage of doing things differently was that we stood out and were able to showcase our expertise in ways competitors haven't. If that's not worth taking some risk for, I don't know what is.

Chris Boyles (@chrsboyls) is the former Content Director at Mutual Mobile. He recently left to join Chaotic Moon, a software development firm in Austin, TX.

A Chemistry Set For Hackers, Made Modern

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Chemistry sets were the original hardware hacker's cookbook, teaching kids about the modular nature of matter in ways that would be consistent with today's homebrew projects and mashups. But safety has trumped intellectual curiosity in recent years, neutering chemistry sets in the process.

"Kids sit and are entertained by electronics rather than going out and doing something and building something themselves," Robert Bruce Thompson has said; he literally wrote the book on chemistry sets. "There are just so few kids that actually do hands-on stuff."

But a new Kickstarter project from Kansas City chemist and maker-store owner John Farrell Kuhns could help change that. The Heirloom Chemistry Set, as it's called, is modeled after a classic A.C. Gilbert chemistry set Kuhns remembers from his own boyhood--but with a few modern twists.

The kits come packaged in plywood boxes individually hand-assembled by Kuhns, and each of the 56 chemicals included are precisely measured and bottled in his lab, he said. And each chemical's bottle comes labeled with a scannable QR code linking to an online materials safety fact sheet. That means budding scientists can look up key data on their smartphones without having to laboriously dig through paper documents like in the old days, Kuhns says.

"That's not exactly convenient when you have your gloves on, your goggles on, and you're in the lab and you say, 'I wonder what these are incompatible with,'" he says.

Before the Kickstarter began, Kuhns had already sold a few of the kits through his Parkville, Mo., store H.M.S. Beagle--named, of course, for the British Royal Navy ship that carried Charles Darwin to the Galapagos, where he made many of the observations that would inspire his theory of evolution.

"I have been able to build a few, but not enough to satisfy the demand and meet our mission to provide the sets to a larger audience," he writes on his Kickstarter page.

Kuhns believes every child should have a home laboratory by the age of 12, whether it's specializing in chemistry or robotics, paleontology, or perfume-making.

"A kid can go and get away from everything--especially away from video games--and work on things of their own and still have the supervision of parents as appropriate and needed," he says.

H.M.S. Beagle offers training and supplies in all those fields and collaborates with Make: KC, a family-friendly venue and organization in Kansas City that's part of the larger maker movement encouraging ordinary people to participate in do-it-yourself experiments, engineering, and crafts.

"We sell beginning soldering kits and beginning robotics kits, and I think it's great the kids do that," Kuhns says. "Soldering and putting things together--that's really the heart of the maker movement. You can go out and buy a robot, but why not learn how to build it yourself?"

The Kickstarter launched Nov. 11 and has already exceeded its funding goal of $30,000, but Kuhns said he doesn't intend to set any limits on the number of donors to whom he'll provide rewards, ranging from e-book editions of classic chemistry texts to the heirloom chemistry kit itself.

The chemistry include every chemical from the 1936 edition of chemistry set maker A.C. Gilbert's book Chemistry for Boys, Kuhns says.

"There are chemicals in there that when I started doing this, I didn't have access to," he says.

One example is a substance called red saunders.

"I had a vague idea of what it was, but I really didn't pay much attention to it," he says.

It's a type of wood also called red sandalwood, it turns out, and it's included in the Gilbert book in an incense-making lab.

"You don't get incense-making experiments in any of the kits today," Kuhns says.

Another chemical found in the Heirloom kit but not in many other home chemistry sets is ammonium dichromate, which produces an impressive volcano-style blaze when set on fire. That demonstration's still done in schools, but at-home kits have recently preferred the tamer vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano due to concerns about ammonium dichromate, which can be toxic if ingested or handled improperly, Kuhns says.

But every chemical in the kit is safe if handled with proper care, Kuhns says. If parents are concerned about their children using particular substances, Kuhns is happy to suggest and substitute alternatives. The kits should only be used by children 9 and up who are able to read the instructions and have proper adult supervision, according to the Kickstarter page.

But providing chemicals and proper instructions and supervision is better than leaving kids with an interest in science to find chemicals and experiment on their own, he says.

"If they don't know how to do it safely, if they have an interest, they'll acquire the ingredients and possibly hurt themselves," he says.

Kits like Kuhns' help make sure that talented, inquisitive students find their way into scientific fields, says Thompson. He markets his own kits and home science curricula aimed mostly at high-school-age students, including homeschoolers, under the brand name The Home Scientist.

"If we don't encourage our really bright kids into these fields, we're basically destroying our seed corn," Thompson says.

Magazines like Make, for which Thompson has written, and basic electronics kits serve the same purpose in other areas of science, he says.

"Before Make, kids did very little that didn't involve passive use of electronics," Thompson says. "If you don't give kids the opportunity, they're never gonna do it."

And to have a real understanding of chemistry, up-and-coming scientists should have the basic understanding that comes from doing their own low-level experiments with a chemistry set, Kuhns says.

"If you can't open it, you don't own it," Kuhns says, quoting a maker-movement adage about modern consumer electronics built to be impenetrable to tinkerers. "The same thing with chemistry: If you don't know how to make it, you don't know how to do chemistry."

How Optical Circuits Will Keep Pushing Moore's Law Toward Insanely Fast Chips

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Computers will only move as fast as their digital organs can talk to each other via electric current. Now researchers are looking into a shorter-wavelength--and therefore faster--solution: using light to transmit information instead of electricity.

Using a hyperthin array of nanoantennas, researchers have managed to shrink the wavelength of light to transfer data through a "metasurface" sheet thinner than any copper circuit. The bottom line: Science is making optical circuits a reality.

"If we moved to shorter wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum--like light--we could make things smaller, faster, and more efficient," said University of Pennsylvania Professor Nader Engheta in 2012. The development of the light-controlling "metasurface" opens the door to transmission and processing of data inside chips using single photons (light particles) since conventional photonic devices cannot reduce the wavelength of light, which is naturally too large to fit in the tiny components needed for integrated circuits.

The Purdue scientists who developed the 30-nanometer wide "metasurface" shined a laser through it to project a hologram surface 10 microns above, displaying the word "Purdue" to a width of 100 microns--the width of a human hair.

Xingjie Ni, Birck Nanotechnology Center

Obviously, this has applications for digital and 3-D displays, especially with the hologram's resolution of one-micron-wide letter strokes. But by simply tweaking the direction of the V-shaped nanoantennas that make up the metasurface, the researchers gained control over the intensity and phase/timing of light shined through the metasurface--which opens the door to bringing so-called "optical circuits" into operational use.

Other important thresholds have been breached in the last year, such as the creation of a polarizing filter that acts as a transistor to terahertz-wavelength light . There was even an optical circuit-lined cable, the Light Leak, that Intel planned to deploy that doubled USB 3.0's transfer speed of 5 Mbps. Critics panned the higher cost and lack of need for 10 Mbps transfer rate back in 2010, which led Intel to find a cheaper copper method to attain those speeds--and Apple adopted the rebranded Thunderbolt cable for its fleet of devices. But back in September, Corning released the first optical versions of the Thunderbolt cables--which, while not able to provide power to devices like copper cables, can expand the 3m length limit of data-transferring copper-wired cords to 100m. They're 80% lighter and 50% smaller in diameter to boot.

This Prediction Algorithm Can Tell If Your Startup Will Fail

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Where the ancients sought alchemy, today's investors wish they could accurately predict the success of startups. Now one company thinks it has built an algorithm that can make that wish a reality.

Instead of guessing, consulting, or offering advice based on years of experience, Growth Science is trying to take the disruption theory to a whole new level. "As far as I know, there isn't anyone else in the world who predicts startup survival or failure for a living," says CEO Thomas Thurston. "At least not in any quantitative way, it's all guesswork and intuition out there."

Business model simulation as a service doesn't have a recognizable acronym--like SaaS--because it isn't a thing, and no one else does it according to Growth Science, except them. "A few people use simulation software to model things like cash flow, supply chain, et cetera, but nothing remotely similar to what we do," says Thurston. "But nobody out there simulates business models, just us." The company had previously only been doing this for huge, Intel-size, companies, but the newest and most important change has come with automating the processes in order to bring costs down to become accessible on the startup level.

About 80% of Growth Science's process is now automated. "There's a kind of data that is very valuable to predicting business survival or failure that's related to technology trends, even for low-tech products. We used to harvest all that information manually--for example, human researchers--which was slow, expensive and difficult," explains Thurston.

"Similarly, we've found about 80% of the predictive value for a startup has to do with externalities--market, customers, competitors, et cetera. Only about 20% of our algorithm looks at the startup itself," says Thurston. "That's a big surprise for most people. Also, the team only accounts for around 12% of our equation. 88% of what our algorithms look at has nothing to do with the team whatsoever, whereas most VCs list the team as the number one thing they focus on when investing in a startup."

Most of the research for the algorithms used to predict success (or failure) come from the year Thurston spent working with Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School. Christensen has been known for his disruption theory which tries to explain why, and which, companies are able to disrupt whole industries. Growth Science uses this data science to look at three key areas: the likelihood of the business surviving or failing, the growth expectations, and what changes can be made, in the case of failure, to increase the odds of success. While the exact algorithms are highly protected, Thurston did mention a few companies it's found favorable, such as Dropbox, Tango, Indow Windows, Practice Fusion, and CloudFlare. All of which he described as successful disruptive businesses.

In case it's not clear from past examples, including the one set forth by the book Moneyball, using certain data as a prediction tool isn't about giving the decision making process over to machines, it's about trying to expand the way we think and use every tool available. Is it an unfair advantage to some, or does not using all the data an artificial limitation?

This is also going to affect the way startups think about their own business. It can be an intimidating obstacle to know there's a company like Growth Science out there capable of calculating the odds of success before ever launching a product into the market. Thurston, of course, describes Growth Science--and I think all similar types of ventures--as a benefit. "Think about it this way--everyone uses CAD to simulate new products and tweak them in a virtual environment before building a 'real' one. Why not do the same with businesses? In other words, the business is basically a prediction factory."

How This Freelancer Hacked His Hourly Rate

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How much is an hour of your life actually worth? It's the first question pondered by any freelancer, and arriving at an answer is seldom easy. Rather than concocting some random number based on the "market," a programmer named Joshua Gross wanted to let the invisible hand decide for itself--so he began experimenting with his prices.

The Brooklyn-based consultant launched a site called OneHour.me and started selling his time for $1 per hour, increasing the price by another dollar each time an hour was sold. In a matter of days, he was booked for 76 hours of time. Gross, who runs a design and development firm called Planetary, has been meeting with an array of startup founders and developers for the last few weeks in one- to three-hour chunks.

Gross's clients--who range from a software developer in Brooklyn to a Louisiana college student with a fashion startup--have all arrived to their sessions (usually conducted remotely) in the earliest stages of launching a tech business with a distinct need for some kind of insight. For some, it's as simple as feedback on design wireframes. Others seek answers to bigger, more existential questions, such as how to make money from their open-source tech projects.

Startup Therapy: You Can Do A Lot In An Hour Or Two

"It's felt a bit like startup therapy, which has been an interesting dynamic," says Gross. "Since it's such a short amount of time, the client and I have a chat and they talk through their position and problems. Oftentimes, they're able to actually identify their own issues and just need a push to think about the problem in another way."

With initial sessions set at $10 and below, one may expect the project's early days to be littered with half-baked ideas and missed appointments. Not so, says Gross.

"Though the price was set exceptionally low, everyone has had an unusually high amount of respect for my time," he says. "Not a single person has missed a call, even if they only paid a few dollars, and they've been insistent on staying below the allotted time, not wanting to waste my time."

Not surprisingly, the number of hours sold has dropped off as the cost has increased. Indeed, after an initial burst of bookings, the price for Gross's time has remained steady at $76 (meaning he's had that many hours purchased) for the last week or so. That may change as the project gets more attention (perhaps this article will help). In the meantime, he's busy meeting with the forty-some-odd clients that have already booked time through OneHour.me. In each one- to three-hour sprint (he says he doesn't get many two-hour bookings, for whatever reason), he works to identify the core goals and challenges of each client, doing his best to offer actionable ideas in that short time frame.

"You can often find ways to produce huge amounts of value that the client didn't necessarily consider before," he says. "For example, a client might come to you looking to redesign their site to increase conversions, meanwhile, you realize they run a fairly successful but ad-free email newsletter, already have interested advertisers, and aren't taking advantage of that potential revenue stream."

Viable Or Not, This Model Can Drive New Business

He says he plans to schedule follow-ups with each client to see how useful his input turned out to be. Their response will help him determine how successful his experiment is. Whether or not this unique stab at rethinking the typical pricing model turns out to be profitable, there's a clear advantage for Gross, who gets the experience of working with a wide range of clients in rapid-fire fashion, learning from each as he goes. Of course, each brief meeting is another connection with a new person, who may seek longer-term consulting in the future.

"I think a lot of freelancers and consultants could execute something similar to this, really only at the cost of their time, as an opportunity to expand their potential client base," he says. "It's low-risk and only requires as much time as the person cares to give to it, but seems as though it has a high potential return."


Founder Of MongoDB Has Only One Wish

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Dwight Merriman is a developer who has founded not one, but three, enormously valuable companies. DoubleClick was acquired by Google for $3.1 billion; Gilt Groupe's last round of investment valued the company at more than $1 billion; and until recently, Merriman was the CEO of MongoDB, worth approximately $1.2 billion. His idea of a side project? Starting news site Business Insider.

Now that Merriman has moved from CEO to chairman of MongoDB, he may finally get what he wants most: more time to do technical work. Co.Labs talked to him about databases, cofounders, and staying technical--even as his management roles expand.

You moved from CEO to chairman at MongoDB partly so that you can do more technical work. Why do you still code?

I enjoy it, so it's slightly selfish, but also I've implemented significant pieces of the product historically so it's both useful and I like to do it. My background is software and development. It isn't being a pure business person. I don't have an MBA or anything like that. The company is around six years old. For the first five years I was CEO but also coding a significant amount, not 10% but 35%. When you are small you can do that. Then we tripled in size in three months and there's so much to do and the percentage of my time that I spent on development just started tailing down toward zero. The goal was to get back to what I was doing a few years previously as CEO. Because we are growing so fast, I still don't get all the technical time I want.

Is there pressure on developers to move into management rather than staying on a more technical track?

This is a classical conundrum for developers. At some point there's a fork in the road. There's engineering management or technical lead and I think a lot of times people feel pressured to go on to a management track. Just because you are the best engineer in the building doesn't mean that you are even a competent manager. You also have to ask yourself even if you are going to be good at it, will you like it? People shouldn't feel forced to go down the management track. Often it feels like there is more headroom in that direction. My advice would be don't be afraid to resist that kind of pull. People default in that direction so, if anything, bias a little bit in the other direction.

At the margin, I've tried to avoid having too many direct reports by hiring VPs of engineering at certain times in the past or when Max (MongoDB's current CEO, Max Schireson) joined, by setting up a very vertical reporting structure where basically Max reported to me and everyone else reported to him. A slightly less extreme example might be Facebook where Mark Zuckerberg has product report to him and then all the other business stuff is off on the side.

You have an interesting working relationship with your long-time business partner, Kevin Ryan (currently CEO of Gilt Groupe). What's your advice for developers choosing a cofounder?

We met in DoubleClick in January 1996. He was president for a while and then CEO and I was CTO and cofounder. I'm technical and he's a great business person but there is some overlap when you think about business strategy and high-level decision making. We were on the same page, philosophically aligned. We virtually would never have a big dispute about anything.

If you are really good technically, I would look more for a partner with business domain skills. Is he or she awesome at what they do? It's easier for a technical person to interview a business person rather than vice versa. It's very hard if you don't have a technical background to interview a software engineer and know if they are good or not. Does the person have good insights and thoughts? Are they smart? And then regardless of how good they are, are you on the same page? Are you tending to agree on things? You can have two smart people who are perfectly amicable but there's two of you--there's no tie breaker--and you have to reach a consensus. It's just going to be inefficient if every time you have to make a decision you have to talk about it for eight hours to get to the decision.

A considerable chunk of MongoDB's new round of funding is earmarked for R&D. What's next for the product?

Part of the R&D is just perfecting the product--it's still young--and part of it is making it very easy to operate for dev ops and DBAs, and then part of it will be adding new stuff. Databases are not simple and it takes them a long time to reach peak maturity. With relational databases the theory was invented in around 1970, the products came out in 1980, and about 15 years later is when you really got to the point where you said, "I don't need the next release because it's going to be pretty much the same." It takes time.

I really want to see us doing a lot of work on performance and parallelism of the system and then also on wrapping it in software to make it very easy to operate and manage at scale with large clusters. If you have a thousand servers, on average one will die every day. We build in automatic failover, recovery nodes, that kind of thing, but there are a lot of other things which just could be made easier like upgrading the software on the entire cluster. Today that would require some scripting on the part of the operator.

Is the rise of data science influencing the direction of the product?

There's quite a lot of usage of MongoDB and Hadoop together where MongoDB is either the source or the sink or both for a MapReduce job and you are using Hadoop to do the modeling or analytics that you are doing. That's getting to be pretty common. The way that the data model works in MongoDB, it's a good place to capture information for later for data science purposes, this notion of store everything or speculative storage. You don't know a priori what's going to be important. A good principle for IT is store first and ask questions later. If you go back 15 years that would not be a best practice, that might be a path to disaster. So that's a big change. If you have it in your hand, store it instead of dropping it on the floor. Maybe most of it you don't use, but if there's a minority of it you do use, the only way you will have it, is if you have kept all of it.

What are some of your own favorite applications using MongoDB?

It's pretty cool what (insurance firm) MetLife has done. They have created a 360-degree view of the customer. When you call them the person you talk to actually has all the information required. This may seem like an easy problem for a small company, but when you get to that scale and you have so many divisions and products, it's actually really hard to do. They take data from 70 different data sources that are being updated in real time. How often does the schema change on one of those 70 input databases? If it changes once a year then you have got a change in the aggregate store daily, and it changes more than once a year. They were able to build it quite quickly and have had phenomenal success with it internally.

One which is interesting, just because the use case is interesting, is Craigslist. They used it to create their archive database. Their online database, that's the database of current listings, since the beginning has been MySQL. Then there's an archive of every listing ever, which is obviously gigantic, but they need that for various purposes including if they get a subpoena for a listing. The neat part is how elegant a solution it proved to be to transfer the relational into this non-relational MongoDB thing. If you archived it into a relational database, first it's pretty big, but there's another problem which is that your schema changes in your online database over time and the archive needs to have everything from schemas in the past. It used to be that we had this column which we don't have anymore. It has turned out in that case to be easier to archive a relational database in a non-relational database. I find that fascinating.

Where do you think database technology is headed?

I do believe for database tools that one size fits all is over, but I don't think you want a dozen different tools that you have to be an expert on. You want three of four and some of those are your existing tools: an RDBMS and maybe some data warehousing technology. You're going to add a NoSQL database to that toolbox. We are seeing a lot of usage by big Global 2000 companies now. NoSQL in general and MongoDB is getting to be something that's used by companies of all sizes if they write any apps at all.

Inside Tessel, The JavaScript Microcontroller That Is Changing Everything

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In early October, startup Technical Machine blew up the crowdfunding scene with its first product: Tessel, an open-source, Arduino-like microcontroller that runs JavaScript on the chip. Finally, web developers could have an easy way to prototype hardware projects.

People went crazy for it. Enthusiasm was so high that the campaign met its $50,000 goal in just three hours. (Full disclosure: enthusiastic myself, I was one of the first customers). By the time it was finished, the company had raised $196,682, nearly four times the campaign's target amount.

So why do people care so much about a little microcontroller running a popular web language? JavaScript is easier to learn and far more widespread than the C/C++ hybrid that powers Arduino devices. Many developers won't have to learn anything new to immediately take advantage of the hardware. Tessel also makes it easier to connect to the Internet--surprisingly hard to do with a typical Arduino. The Tessel, on the other hand, ships with onboard Wi-Fi and will be compatible with the popular NodeJS web framework and package manager NPM out of the box, meaning it already supports a huge set of familiar libraries.

Now Technical Machine is shipping its first units to beta users and taking pre-orders for the next round of devices. We spoke to cofounder Jon McKay and head of marketing and finance Kelsey Breseman about the device's origins, its potential, and how the company plans to monetize its open-source designs and software.

How did the idea for the Tessel come about?

Jon: Last year, we did a senior capstone project at school for Facebook and we were asked to make Internet-connected devices beyond the phone and laptop. Facebook wanted to see how people could interact with their website when they weren't sucked into a screen. We made devices like a bracelet called "Elephant" where if two people were wearing it and they shook hands, it would automatically record the content around the meeting--who they met, where they met them, things like that.

When we were doing that, we realized one, that it was really fun to make these things; two, a lot of people wanted to make them; and three, it was really hard to make these things, especially for people like us with a web background. We decided that it was a problem that we really wanted to try to solve and something that we are excited to do.

What exactly was hard about developing these devices?

Jon: Just connecting to Internet was really difficult. We were using an Arduino the majority of the time, which meant that we'd have to go out and buy a Wi-Fi shield for somewhere between $35 and $80. Once we get the Wi-Fi shield, solder on some jankety wires and then figure out where to plug it in, and then write the HTTP protocol so that we can actually send a request. Then once we get a request, there's about 8 kilobytes of RAM on there, at least with the Uno we were using, and it would fill up after one JSON packet. It was just a horrible experience connecting to the Internet from the get-go.

The Arduino's been around for a while now. Why is it still hard to connect to the web with it?

Jon: I think the Uno wasn't made with the web in mind, really. I think it was made for people learning how to move things and dabble in programming and hardware. It just wasn't made for the added complexity of the web.

So, how did you make sure the Tessel wouldn't have that problem?

Jon: Once we decided that we wanted to make an Internet-connected device for web developers, we thought how we could make the hardware so that web developers were instantly comfortable with it. There are a couple of things that we thought were really important.

The first was a programming language. We picked JavaScript, because JavaScript is one of the most successful languages, it's the most popular language on the GitHub, and it's the language we know really well.

We also decided to be compatible with NodeJS because we really admire the speed of development on NodeJS and we think that Tessel could really benefit from that. Hardware, in general, could really benefit from that sort of open-source environment and really, really fast development times.

We also wanted to make sure that Tessel was solderless so that people could just plug things in. Going back to that Facebook project I was talking about, we found that soldering was a huge obstacle. Not because soldering is hard, per se, but just because you have to go out and find a soldering iron, find solder, find the things you need to solder together, and spend time doing it and hope you don't break it. It adds a lot of barriers that don't need to be there. We decided early on that we wanted a new system that you didn't have to solder anything; it was just plug in and go from the get-go.

Once we had this set of core features in mind, we went about designing the hardware. We knew we really wanted Wi-Fi, because it's something that web developers are used to, we started looking for Wi-Fi chips. We found the Texas Instruments CC3000 chip. It's become really popular because it's relatively cheap and it has some cool technology.

How did you prototype and test your initial boards?

Jon: Don't tell the fire marshal, but we just had a $20 skillet from Target in our office for the first three revisions, where we had a pretty large board. It was 4 inches by 4 inches and we were just making sure everything worked. So, we would then place all the components on there by hand, by putting little dabs of solder on every little place where the pads touch the PCB and then putting it on the skillet for three to four minutes. Just one side, lightly.

Kelsey: Sunny side up.

That's really funny. Switching gears, let's talk about the software. The Tessel's main selling point is that it runs JavaScript on the chip. For those of us who don't understand the hardware world fully, what does that mean, exactly?

Jon: That phrase is a little misleading because the JavaScript isn't actually being run on the chip. It just means that you can program it in JavaScript and not worry about how it's being implemented. The way we're doing it right now is you write the JavaScript file and when you push it to our device, [cofounder] Tim [Ryan]'s software will compile it to a programming language called Lua, zip it up and then send it over Wi-Fi or USB to Tessel, which is running a Lua interpreter. So it will just take that code and just throw it in the interpreter and run it.

This is our prototype software. It's really slow. We're going to be changing it before we release to something that's really fast.

What's the new version going to look like?

Jon: For this next version, we're going to take the JavaScript file, and when you push it, we're going to push that file directly onto a file system on Tessel. Once that file is on there, there's going to be a compiler in Tessel that compiles that JavaScript to Lua bytecode, and then we're going to be running our own, open-source version of the LuaJIT runtime, which, in a benchmark, was as fast as statically typed languages, so it's going to be really speedy.

Let's talk about the funding campaign itself. You met your initial goal within...how many hours was it?

Kelsey: Three.

Unbelievable. To what would you attribute that success?

Jon: I think it's really the community. We had this base of people who were already excited about it and so as soon as we started the campaign, we told them, "Hey, guys, we're open for business. Come and get the Tessel." They responded, which was really awesome. I think people are really excited that they can use the same skills that they use to make website to start making physical devices.

On that note, we have this buzz phrase, "the Internet of things." Do you buy into the idea that everything ought to be connected at some point?

Jon: It's interesting that you say that. We were talking with Kelsey's mother recently and she hates the idea of everything connected to the Internet.

Kelsey: She doesn't hate it.

Jon: She's skeptical about it. I think the Internet of things will happen. I personally don't think it's going to be as sexy as everyone thinks it will be. I think it's going to be a lot about agriculture, a lot about putting sensors in cities, and a lot about optimizing our lives in ways that we can't really see. Hopefully, we'll be able to notice eventually and say, "Hey, we're using this much less energy or making this much more food. We're doing good things for the planet, finally, with the technology we're using. It's not because we're stuck to our screens four hours a day, it's because it's working constantly behind the scenes for us."

What were your mother's reservations, Kelsey?

Kelsey: Well, I said there's nothing that you couldn't connect to the Internet and not get some useful things. She said, "Well, what about my socks?" I told her people are actually doing that now. You can get socks that can measure the way your foot is used and then you can use it to get better shoes for your feet, especially if you're a runner. She's like, "Well, what about the painting behind you?" Oh, yeah, you could it hook up. Say you really cared about this painting. You could put it an ambient sensor on it and find out how much UV light it's getting, find out if it's getting a little too humid or whatever.

It seems silly to connect everything, but my take on it is there's something you could do with everything that would probably be useful for someone.

What kinds of things are people talking about prototyping with it?

Kelsey: We've gotten some really varied responses. We've had people talk about biosensors. There's a lot of little companies that have reached out to us and been really excited about integrating it into their specific product. Then there are probably the people who are most excited, people who are just really into JavaScript, who are like, "I'm getting your product. I don't care what it does. I'm getting it." But I'm sure they'll figure out eventually what to do.

Jon: Yeah, I'm sure once they start plugging in modules and just trying different combinations and using different web APIs, ideas will emerge.

Are these companies talking about prototyping, or do you think there's the possibility they'll embed your chips directly into their final products? Is that something you'd support?

Jon: That's exactly what we want. We want our runtime to power every embedded device that gets made, ultimately. These people do want to embed our runtime in their fully manufactured device and that's exactly the direction that we want to go.

So given that, it seems like the purpose of the Tessel is to just get this technology into people's hands. But the chip designs and the software are open-source. So, where does Technical Machine, the company, ultimately stand to profit from this? Selling units, consulting on the implementation of the runtime?

Jon: What we really want to end up doing is being able provide new services for people who are making hardware devices. Services like, being able to see how people are using your device, which is something that we know we can do because we have Wi-Fi built in. So we can say, "All right, you made this device and 90% of people are using feature X but not feature Y. Let's take out feature Y." In the same vein, we can have tools for them to update the firmware wirelessly, so that whatever hardware devices they start making can start being updated just like your iPhone apps will.

We could also do things like send out automated crash reports. There's a lot of things that are being built around websites that we can start building our own physical devices once we know that there's Wi-Fi built in. That's real value we can add to hardware companies.

The three founders are web developers at heart. So anytime we work on hardware we can't help but describe parallels between it and the web. Web development has become the standard for efficiency and optimization. Those are things we don't see in hardware, so we sort of naturally see things that the hardware community can benefit from that the web development community has already made possible.

That's a really interesting way of putting it. What other things should hardware developers be doing that's currently in the domain of web development?

Jon: I think what would be really interesting is A/B testing with hardware. Obviously, you can't change the form factor right now, but you can change the firmware and how things react to people. You can see how people use it. So, just a simple thing might be different error messages, or you add a faster algorithm and see how people react to it. I think A/B testing would be something super interesting to have on hardware and something I want to play around with.

Very interesting. It occurs to me that the idea of extending web development tools and ideas everywhere, particularly JavaScript, kind of runs parallel to that discussion of the Internet itself being embedded in everything. Do you think that this one language, this one set of tools, should be repurposed everywhere, or do we need to be cautious that we're not stunting the development of other tools that might be better suited for these tasks?

Jon: I think it's a valid question. I think that there's always going to be a language that could be better for what you're doing. But really, when you want to see really cool things made, when you want to see devices made, the creativity is going to happen when a lot of people are putting a lot of ideas together. The way you get that is you have a lot of people working on it and the way to get that is you have something that's successful to everyone.

One of the reasons we picked JavaScript and web developers in general is that they have a whole culture of innovation around them. There is this idea of open source that is sort of a shrine that everyone bows to and is really useful. A lot of people in the web developer community are just putting ideas together and making a minimum viable product, and seeing how people like it. The fact that they can now do that really quickly means that we're going to see a whole lot more devices being made. And the fact that they're using JavaScript is sort of not important. The devices are going to work the way they're going to work.

The people who are making these things, they just want to have the ability to make them. Our runtime is portable, so if they prototype something and want to manufacture it, they can use that exact same code to manufacture it. If they decide that JavaScript wasn't the right tool for them, they can go ahead and port it to C or whatever other language they want. The real important thing here is accessibility and creativity.

Kelsey: Jon mentioned that getting to an MVP was one of the pieces of JavaScript and I want to highlight that. A big piece of what Technical Machine is really excited about is the idea that people can have a great idea and put it together in a short time without needing to start a company already, without needing to get an electrical engineer on board. They just need to get to the point where they can say, "Hey, this is a viable product. Now I could start a hardware company." Yes, eventually, you're going to need somebody who knows electrical engineering if you're going to do a hardware company. But, getting to the point where you know you need that person currently sucks and now it doesn't have to.

Finally, A Way Everyone Can Keep Their Data From the NSA

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Ever since Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA snooping this summer, the general public has begun to take an interest in the privacy of their data. Whether its Gmail, Dropbox, or iCloud, consumer services have collaborated with the NSA to install backdoors to user data and introduce weaknesses into encryption systems. Tools like Owncloud provide safer alternatives, but you have to run your own server, configuring a LAMP stack and setting up port forwarding--a lot of overhead.

A new project called arkOS may finally bring private, secure, self-hosted cloud services to the masses. Led by an ambitious 23-year-old developer named Jacob Cook, arkOS is an open-source operating system that is currently being developed for the Raspberry Pi. The $35 credit-card sized computer is a perfect device for affordable home server hardware that is within reach for the everyday Internet user. (And we already know that the Pi is up to the challenge of functioning as a home server.)

Cook originally had the idea for arkOS after Google Reader, the popular RSS aggregator, shut down. Back then, he thought it was important for users to be able to run their own comparable services independent of corporations.

"I think that the idea of decentralizing infrastructure and getting people to be more self-reliant when it comes to hosting their own data is very beneficial to society," he says.

But things really kicked into gear after Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA's far-reaching surveillance program.

"When the Snowden revelations started this project took on a new urgency and a new emphasis on being free because of all the things we know now about the access the NSA and the GCHQ have. Centralized infrastructure by definition makes that kind of access easier."

By far the biggest roadblock to decentralizing the infrastructure of the Internet is that the tools to run your own server require significant technical know-how. Cook is a self-taught sysadmin and built his first PC when he was six years old. Shortly thereafter he began experimenting with Linux and building websites. That means he's one of the few 23-year-olds alive who has firsthand experience of the Internet when Netscape Navigator was ascendant.

It also means that his command line fu is way above the level of your average Internet user. Even so, Cook says it still took him way too long to get a fully functioning self-hosted personal cloud.

"I'd set up everything on my own server by the command line and it took me quite a long time. If it took this long for me to do it with my skillset then it's going to be impossible for everyday people to even think about doing it."

That's when he realized that what the Internet really needs is a user-friendly way for everyone--not just developers--to host their own data, privately and securely.

The process to get up and running with arkOS couldn't be much simpler. There are installers available right now for Mac OS X and Linux. All a user needs to do is download the installer, select their SD card, and hit "next." Then pop the SD card into your Pi, plug the Pi into your router, and voila: Point your favorite web browser to http://arkOS:8000 and you're ready to start installing arkOS's "apps."

That's where the magic really happens. What sets arkOS apart is its user interface, an impressive application called Genesis. To the technical readers: Genesis is a graphical server management app bundled with autoconfig scripts for a suite of hosted web services. For everyone else: It's an app store for your personal cloud. Eventually, Cook hopes, the general public will use it to sever their dependency on third-party corporations handling their data.

Cook has also long-term plans for arkOS. Before releasing a 1.0 candidate, there will be a full code audit, which he says a number of security experts have already volunteered for. He also recognizes that the one pitfall of a home server is that it allows physical access to a user's data in a way that isn't the case for a tech giant's server rooms. To that end, he also plans to implement disk encryption in order to secure your data from the average house burglar or, say, a raid by a government agency.

At present, arkOS is still in alpha stage. Right now a user can run apps such as a WordPress website or an Owncloud instance (which itself offers a boatload of web services), but not much else. Implementations of the rest of the suite, such as an email server and handling security certificates, are still to come.

Cook has been working on arkOS for months now at nearly full-time hours--on top of his schoolwork and day job. He wants to have a solid beta release out in the world by April 2014 and a 1.0 by the end of 2014. In order to accomplish that, he wants to make it his job for a full year. So he's set up a crowdfunding campaign (self-hosted, naturally) to be able to pay himself a salary and invest in some infrastructure for the project. In just 15 days he's already met 75% of his $45,000 goal. You can help his progress by contributing to his fund here.

Former Journalist Creates A Homebrew Computer Buildable in 107 Seconds

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The halcyon days of the late 1970s birthed companies like Apple and Microsoft out of the homebrew computer movement, wherein people in garages used cheap commodity parts to build computers--and then wrote the software to run them.

These days, electronics are becoming increasingly like modern automobiles--fully sealed and most definitely not user serviceable. But when accessibility dies, so does the ability to tinker.

Kano is a computer which anyone can build. Based on the Raspberry Pi, a $25, credit-card sized computer for kids running GNU/Linux, Kano's DIY kit adds all the peripherals and software you need to make a fully functioning machine and then learn how to program on it. Kano launched on Kickstarter today at a price of $99.

"People of all ages had this latent hunger to look inside a computer," says Alex Klein, cofounder of Kano. "I think that's one of the reasons that so many people bought a Raspberry Pi. The problem is that the people who could actually do something with it weren't actually the target of the (Raspberry Pi) foundation. They were hackers and engineers, people who are already comfortable with this stuff. We wanted to make it accessible to everyone."

Klein is a former journalist who started learning Linux a couple of years ago. "I thought of myself more as a creative and programming was for engineers," he says. "Whatever you think about software and the world of tech, whether you think it's intimidating or geeky or unfathomable, we want to convince you that it's just a different medium like clay or paint."

Once booted, Kano runs a customized version of Debian Linux called Kano OS, which was inspired by game console dashboards and aims to make Linux less intimidating to beginners as well as improving the Pi's performance. The Raspberry Pi has been criticized for being difficult to set up. Configuring Wi-Fi, for example, is much simpler in Kano OS than on the Pi and boot time has been reduced to 10 seconds.

Also included is a visual programming environment called Kano Blocks, which introduces the user to programming by modifying games. In fact, the whole setup and usage of the machine is framed as a series of game levels through which the user can progress. Kano's team spent a year testing the product with kids, although the computer can be used by any age group. "We designed this with children because most of us only have the experience with this stuff that a young child has," says Klein. "Lego has always been the guiding spirit for us, for the software as well. The idea was to create something which has that kind of step-by-step, call-and-response fun of Lego. You do it yourself, you put little pieces together, and you combine them in complex ways." This is part of the reason that Kano Blocks focuses on games like Minecraft and music.

Several major changes were made to the software based on workshops where kids used Kano Blocks. "We tried doing something that was more like (MIT's programming environment for kids) Scratch, which was to have kids work for 30 minutes and at the end they had a simple game," says Klein. "But the approach that was way more electrifying for the kids, was to give them a simple game like Pong and give them the opportunity to change it and remake it." The user can use Kano Blocks to modify the Pong implementation to change the speed of the ball, increase the size of the paddles, or even cheat. An implementation of Sonic Pi, which teaches programming concepts by creating new sounds, is also included. "The main objective of the kit," explains Klein, "is to give people a way to make something cool and enjoy themselves and then to teach them what that meant--'What you just did, that's programming.'"

One major difference between Kano Blocks and Scratch is that Blocks outputs Python and JavaScript. "I love Scratch but it's self-contained," says Klein. "The problem is in transitioning to something like Python. We have found that we lose everyone." Showing the code for the same function in Python makes the transition a bit more obvious, although how a user should progress with Kano after completing all the current "levels" is not entirely clear.

Kano is thinking global from the beginning. The documentation is already available in Spanish and Arabic with more languages to follow. "We want to be able to build a global company which can bring these computer kits anywhere in the world," says Yonatan Raz-Fridman, Kano's CEO. "To New York, but at the same time to Nairobi, Freetown, New Zealand, Latin America. Not just say that when we are big, after we have made a billion dollars, that we will start looking at the rest of the world. We want to start looking at the rest of the world today."

How To Make Infographics With Zero Design Skills

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Data isn't sexy, and getting you to think it is takes a lot of work. Infographics--what we call data that's gone to a graphic designer to get all gussied up for prom night--require a level of expertise and resources to make that aren't readily available to everyone with a story to tell and content to create. Enter startup InfoActive, which plans to break infographics wide open and make it simple and easy for anyone looking to present their data in a way that's both visually interesting and interactive.

InfoActive's beginnings came about through cofounder and CEO Trina Chiasson's work in data visualizations in newsrooms as a fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Her gambit: that she can construct a robust visualization tool that will not only eliminate weeks of design and development work, but also widen the scope of data visualization by supporting both static and live data.

"People no longer need to just see data--they need to explore it," says Chiasson. "We're looking to bridge the gap between companies' existing technology and the data stories they're trying to tell."

InfoActive, then, is a web-based platform that will allow users to connect either static or streaming data and have a customized infographic generated for them, complete with a full suite of analytical tools and supplemental features. It makes use of live data sets uploaded via Google Spreadsheet or CSV with up to 10,000 rows of data to work its magic, with plans to support several other live data APIs and even larger datasets. Users would be able drag and drop charts, text, and maps, as well as filter and search by any parameter in their survey.

If InfoActive works and achieves its funding goal--the company's Kickstarter has just gone live today--then it would undoubtedly be a boon to its intended market of smaller publications that lack the resources to develop a svelte-looking interactive data visualization. The playing field would be leveled, and the kinds of stories writers and researchers would be able to tell would increase dramatically.

You could even whip up an infographic about it.

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