The content we read and write keeps getting shorter: tweets and text messages instead of emails, 40-minute TV episodes rather than whole movies, singles instead of entire albums. In the small world of literary fiction, there's flash fiction--but can anybody write an actual book this way?

A new app called Spine thinks micro-fiction can build into something larger. The app is akin to a fitness program for writers, asking them to write often and in short bursts. Spine lets its users write and publish micro-stories of up to 500 characters--roughly the length of three-and-a-half tweets--then throw it out there to a growing online community to see how popular it gets. Other users score each story, with the best-rated stories rising to the top.

"I wanted to create something that was quick and easy," says developer Ian Cahill. "You don't feel overwhelmed in the way that you would if you have to set out and write 200 or 300 pages as you would with a novel. You literally write a few sentences and concentrate on making them the best they can be. Then you hit the 'publish' button and see what happens."

Using Data To Search For The Next Best Seller

Fifteen years ago the suggestion that 500 well-chosen characters might net you a major book deal would seem improbable--or even downright ridiculous. But the entertainment industry circa 2013 is a place where popular blogs regularly become book fodder, and comedy Twitter accounts are snatched up by studios to turn into TV shows.

In other words, the idea that the next Michael Chabon or Dean Koontz--both of whom have offered Spine's founders their feedback--could be discovered from a 500-character story might not seem so farfetched. To find out if real novels could ever be sourced this way, we talked to sources in the book publishing industry--here's what they had to say.

The Importance Of A Writer's "Platform"

"Publishers are having to become more and more aware of different sources for material," says Anne Meadows, an editor for Granta Publishing, who earlier this year was part of the team behind the Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries.

"In the 'good old days' you would just rely on agents sending in manuscripts, but the Internet has really changed the way editors find things. To give you one example, a cookery blog that I follow announced a few weeks ago that it had been given a book deal. Simon & Schuster also recently commissioned a book from the creator of the Everyday Sexism Project blog. It's not essential that you do this as a publisher--but in my view it's a massive mistake not to look further afield for exciting new voices," Meadows says.

A vital part of becoming an author these days is proving to a publisher that you have a "platform," or a group of fans already there to read your work and help promote it.

"If you can see that there is already a fan base for something that you might be able to marketize it can be extraordinarily helpful," Meadows continues. "As an editor you're alone, and it can be difficult to know how audiences are going to respond to something that you like. If something has been successful on Twitter--or potentially on Spine--you could see the figures to back up what you're thinking, and start to gauge what audience might be out there."

But are these sorts of ratings really predictive of success?

Can Ratings Really Predict Book Sales?

"My biggest concern would be about whether quality would wind up being entirely based on user ratings," says Emily Bell, a fiction editor at FSG who last year published the novel Threats by first-time writer Amelia Gray. "Fiction writing is a business of subjectivity, and for me it would be problematic if we were determining 'best' purely on a combination of ratings and popularity."

But overall Bell is far from despondent about the possibilities offered by Spine. "In some ways, it reminds me of what we're doing at FSG with our 'Digital Originals' series," she says. "The rationale there is that if you only have a short amount of time to catch someone's attention, why not offer them a single short story at a reduced price? People love things priced at 99 cents, so the idea is that they will buy a short story that they might then be able to read on their phone on the subway. That could then serve as a teaser for buying a longer novel."

A similar thing, she feels, could well happen with Spine. In the same way that Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jennifer Egan last year serialized one of her short stories using Twitter, so too could Spine lure in readers by featuring either a synopsis or an excerpt of a longer novel to hook readers in.

But what about the idea that Spine's 500-character stories could become a genre in itself, a bit like the modern haiku? A number of commentators--most notably Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains--have argued that the web is "changing the way we think" by diminishing our ability to read deeply and absorb content. In such an environment, might it prove possible that Spine stories could find an audience receptive to self-contained stories designed to be read in under a minute? In an age of structured information, Ian Cahill certainly sees potential for the app's rigid format to find success.

"I would love for Spine to become, on some level, what Twitter is for messages, where it makes sense for people to go there and create an original piece of work," Cahill says. "There's a real skill to that. We see a lot of this on the web already. Increasingly comedians will crack a joke on Twitter that has to conform to the 140-character limit. It would be amazing to see people become professional 'Spiners'--or just for the idea to take off as a form in itself."

Anne Meadows agrees that attention spans are getting shorter, although she stresses her belief that there will always be an audience for longer-form stories. However, in the age of the long tail, the joy is that we don't have to choose: Both mediums can flourish.

"You can be writing short, brilliant stories--or 900-page, brilliant ones, and there seems to be an appetite for them both," she says. "I think it's wonderful."

Remote-controlled quadcopters like the push-propeller drones that mapped the Matterhorn have exploded in popularity this year. But exposed propellers make them a hazard to people, pets, and birds--not to mention they're easily breakable. The next generation of drones will be smaller and more durable, like this fist-sized drone that flaps through the air like a jellyfish.

To be clear, this little aqua-inspired floater doesn't yet have the lift of a rotor system (like this octo-rotor pizza deliverer), but it's certainly big enough to carry a camera--which is a lead feature of the popular AR Drone 2.0 Parrot. In fact, thumb-sized drones are being tested for military use for squad-based forward scouting, so the demand is there…and if folks are interested in that ⅛-pound military drone, they'll love the jellyfish's 2 gram weight, about 1/30th of the military drone.

Of course, the jellyfish is still experimental--it's tethered to a power source, but the lead NYU researcher, Leif Ristroph, is confident that fine-tuning the shape and flexibility of the wings would produce enough lift to hold a battery. Aside from power, however, the ingenious upright design eliminates the need for self-righting servos and sensors, and its light weight means it can be carried on a breeze, which Ristroph suggests would benefit jellyfish drones equipped with environmental sensors.

But whether it's a mountain or mapping the countryside, we're getting very good at surveilling territory and people with unmanned vehicles. This featherlight jellyfish drone is only the latest in a series of biolocomotion drones to derive lighter, more durable flying things that we could use to measure our world.

Thanks to digital downloads, people aren't buying CDs anymore--especially at concerts, where albums used to be hot merchandise. For bands, translating concert-attending enthusiasm into digital downloads is next to impossible.

Machine Shop, a think tank and creative studio owned by the band Linkin Park, thinks a new hardware device called PlugAir might be the answer to helping artists while enticing consumers. "Physical products will never be completely obsolete," says Kiel Berry, EVP of Machine Shop. "With everything going digital, it just means that the role of physical products will need to change."

It was apparent very quickly that vouchers for digital downloads were a non-starter: No one gets excited about paying money for a piece of paper. Selling vinyl records at shows has become more popular for engaged fans that want something to take home, but it's still not the long-term answer in a digital world.

With PlugAir, people buy a small plastic cube device which connects to the headphone jack of any phone and, in combination with an app, unlocks digital content instantly, giving the user the same instant gratification as buying a physical CD.

In its current, beta iteration, PlugAir is black cube that sports a 3.5mm headphone adapter, but Berry imagines future shapes could be as elaborate sculptures or collectible toys. "The possibilities are endless because the patent-pending technology can be embedded into almost any physical item," he says.

If the experiments of other music companies like Beats are any indication, digital products still need physical ones to sell well, and physical products are increasingly expected to come pre-packaged with digital content.

Other companies, like Rhapsody, have been continually trying to tie their digital service to physical products, with only mediocre success. In Rhapsody's case, that means offering 60-day trials with partner products like headphones, speakers, and other music related items. Again, it's one thing to have a paper coupon for headphones, and quite another to have instant access through your mobile device--so perhaps Rhapsody's middling success isn't necessarily a bad sign for PlugAir.

So far, the device has been used to distribute content to Linkin Park's fan club. Most artists are aware of the current situation and are becoming increasingly desperate for a new physical/digital hybrid to sell. The real challenge, says Berry, shouldn't be convincing touring musicians they need something like PlugAir--rather it's convincing indifferent consumers it's worth the hassle over a pure digital solution.

Google's "deep learning" clusters of computers churn through massives chunks of data looking for patterns--and it seems they've gotten good at it. So good, in fact, that Google announced at the Machine Learning Conference in San Francisco that its deep learning clusters have learned to recognize objects on their own.

Traditionally, computers have been great at transporting data, but terrible at understanding what's contained therein. The goal of movements like the semantic web have been to build webpages that understand what kind of content they're serving, but advances have been slow in coming. Whereas common pigeons have the conceptual ability to tell the difference between a tree and a shrub, even the most expensive supercomputers today would struggle.

Google software engineer Quoc V. Le said at the conference that he realized the deep learning clusters had made a breakthrough when they were able to recognize discrete workplace objects, such as distinguishing two different brands of paper shredders. Interestingly, Lee didn't train the machines this way--the software had figured that out on its own.

Le admitted that to program that level of classification, they'd have to reverse engineer the code from the results that the deep learning clusters spit out. "We had to rely on data to engineer the features for us, rather than engineer the features ourselves," Quoc said during the talk.

To be clear, Google is not afraid that this will blow up into a fully sentient computer system--but it's a stepping stone toward Google's goal to get its computers solving menial problems in order to free up human engineers, who currently spend innumerable hours programming data processing solutions. Google's using its deep learning clusters to better auto-recognize things in images, Android's voice recognition, and Google Translate, among others.

Using the software framework DistBelief, Google harnesses tens of thousands of CPU cores operating under billions of parameters to run its deep learning clusters, a large-scale neural network that Google insists is nonetheless applicable to any gradient-based machine learning algorithm, regardless of size. In other words, let Google's algorithmic deep learning model loose at any scale and it'll learn to recognize things beyond your inefficient human ability.

Technology Will Save Us is a haberdashery for technology, supplying DIY kits which allow users to make their own technology items, from a moisture sensor which tells you when your plants need water to soldering your own games console. The company recently teamed up with Google and Converse to host workshops in London where participants turned its DIY speaker kits and Converse sneakers (aka Chucks) into speakers and musical instruments. Here's how they came together.

DIY Music + DIY Fashion

Designer Bethany Koby and her partner artist Daniel Hirschmann started Technology Will Save Us two years ago after finding a working laptop in their trash can. "That started this dialog around the idea that we have so much technology in our lives and we don't really understand it, " says Koby. "We don't know how to fix it. We don't know what to do with it when we don't want it anymore. We don't know how to be creative with it, not because we don't want to but because we don't have the skills to do it. We are given these sealed pieces of technology. That's where the idea of kits came from, giving people simple easy to create things."

Technology Will Save Us supplies DIY kits which allow users to make everyday items related to everyday life themes like gardening, cycling, music, food and gaming. The company's DIY Gamer kit, for example, teaches people how to make a handheld games console, play games on it, and code their own. "We have identified the skills that we think are fundamental when it comes to making stuff with tech: soldering, circuitry, basic electronics, programming," says Koby.

Converse and Google approached Technology Will Save Us with a challenge to take some Chucks and see how they could be modified with the DIY Speakers Kit. The kit can be used to turn any surface into a speaker. Users solder their own amplifier, plug in a music source like a phone, attach an exciter which converts any surface into a loudspeaker emitting the music signal, and use a potentiometer to adjust the volume.

First Technology Will Save Us developed some prototype speakers. "When you use the Chuck in a certain way it creates more bass," explains Koby. "When you use it in another way it creates more treble. You can also turn everything into a speaker. You attach an exciter to the bottom of the Chuck and you put it on a wall, on a couch, on a window or any surface to which you attach your Chuck into a speaker."

Then they started to experiment with making musical instruments. "We used the shoelaces to create the strings on an electric guitar," says Koby. "We made a microphone, we made a contrabass, a feedback synth. We used our speaker kit and the box to create the amp connected to the instrument."

Last weekend the collaborators organized a set of workshops in London to allow the general public to come and have a go at making their own speakers and instruments. One participant took apart the entire Chuck and sewed the canvas into a glove that had the exciter embedded in the palm. Anything she touched turned into a speaker. Another sliced the Chuck in half, impregnated the canvas with glue to make it more rigid, attached the exciter to this, and added a more powerful amplifier. When bass-heavy music played, the Chuck would "walk." There were Chuck guitars and Chuck ukuleles.

Ultimately, Technology Will Save Us wants to give its customers the skills to manipulate and modify the technology around them. "We do find that when people make something, there's an invention component to it," concludes Koby, "We have had people modify the Thirsty Plant kit (which makes a moisture sensor which tells you when your plants are dry) to make automatic watering cans. Take the thing you have made and make it more bespoke, more advanced, more personal."

The appeal of 3-D imagery is innate: It can make the user experience in games, commerce, and communication more lifelike. But reproducing 3-D shapes in a computer takes hours of CAD work and rendering. Unless, of course, you have 64 digital SLR cameras rigged up to capture this stuff in real life.

"Three-D is inherently a more tactile medium," says photographer Alexx Henry, who has built a camera capture studio called the xxArray, which was used to create the interactive image above.

"To be able to actually reach out and manipulate something and use augmented reality apps to experience the content is incredibe and I think 3-D is the most logical next step. Putting it in everyone's hands in the mobile and tablet space is going to happen with or without us."

Oh, The Places You'll Go (In 3-D)

If you could capture a photorealistic 3-D model of just about anything, what you do with it? The xxArray makes 3-D imaging about as simple as entering a photo booth and pushing a button. And the implications for digital media forms are tantalizing to say the least.

Henry is using the rig initially for the launch of Art and Skin, a 3-D tattoo magazine launched just last week for the iPad. But other industries outside of media are already attempting to include more 3-D in their media. Ikea made a splash a couple months ago when it released its augmented reality catalog, and nearly every car, clothing, and bicycle manufacturer these days allows you to "test drive" their wares by spinning a 3-D rendering.

How The xxArray Works

The "array" in the name refers to a group of cameras: 64 Nikon D5200 bodies, to be exact. "There was a lot of trial and error involved in setting this up," says Henry. "We went through about four different setups before we got it right."

Software called Agisoft Photoscan stitches the images from the 64 cameras together to make it a cohesive whole. Agisoft was originally designed for the Geographic Information Systems industry as a tool for photogrammetry, which is the science behind Apple's 3-D maps, for instance. But the same techniques that capture buildings and topographic features apply equally to the contours and textures of the human body.

Using the whopping 15 gigapixels of separate images taken by the xxArray, Agisoft stitches together the 2-D photographs into one 3-D model. Normally the process is fairly labor intensive, but with a heavy dose of Python scripting, Henry says his team has gotten the process down to about 90% automated and 10% manual.

Over five dozen DSLR cameras that retail at around $1,000 each may sound like a lot. But in the world of photogrammetry, Henry calls it an "impressively low" number. Similar setups have used upwards of 80 or even 100 cameras.

"It's very easy to solve your problems by adding cameras. But in trying to keep our camera budget to a minimum, we had to be very creative in positioning the cameras," Henry says.

Using as few cameras as possible is crucial for Henry's project, if the xxArray is going to be able to scale beyond his studio's walls. Even with such a relatively low number of cameras, the rig makes extensive use of stereo pairs--cameras targeted at the same focal point--in order to capture rich textures, making images more lifelike.

"Stereo pairing gives incredibly high confidence for the software when you compare those points. We're getting really incredible texture quality," Henry says.

How The xxArray Could Be Commercialized

"We believe that the 3-D asset is the digital currency of the future," Henry says. This isn't Henry's first foray into the future of digital media; his studio has a track record of innovation in digital publishing, so it's worth taking Henry's foresight seriously.

Augmented reality apps could go far beyond Ikea's furniture catalog. With a 3-D avatar of yourself, a clothing store that integrates 3-D scans of its products could let you see how a suit or dress would actually fit on your body.

In video games, we might finally be able to do away with character creation screens. Instead, you could play as yourself and see your own face and body in the game, competing the immersion experience. Imagine if this combined with virtual reality video games and you could walk through a fantasy world and actually look at yourself in a mirror.

And of course 3-D printing would have extensive use for such a tool. It could join the growing list of software that is simplifying the CAD process, such as Tinkercad. It's foreseeable that software will be developed to translate a 3-D image directly to a CAD format.

Meanwhile, the JavaScript API WebGL builds upon the HTML5 canvas element so that all major browsers are capable of rendering and manipulating 3-D graphics. So we could start seeing this being used on the open web too, not just in apps and games. (The 3-D model above is rendered using WebGL.)

Will It Scale?

Despite the almost limitless potential of the technology, it's not clear if it's going to take off. "Right now there are two main problems that we need to solve," Henry says. "The first is getting arrays propagated. Second and equally important is getting people to want a 3-D scan. We need to have real meaningful use cases."

So meaningful, Henry says, that the practice might require new verbiage. "Think about what photography has always been. Photography has always been taking the latest bleeding edge technology and describing something in a new way. That's exactly what photogrammetry is."

After 70 years of publishing, Marvel Entertainment has built up an incredible universe of heroes, villains, and super teams--a sea of data that no mere wiki can organize. At long last, Marvel has embarked on a mighty quest of its own: to create an entirely new graph database and search system to conquer continuity malaise by visualizing each character across the Marvel Universe.

The time is now for a solution, and as Marvel cradles the newborn "Agents of SHIELD" and its upcoming Netflix tetrology, the company now depicts the same characters across multiple mediums, from comics to blockbuster movies. There's a wealth of information out there, and it's not pretty--holy massive backstory and hyperlinked contextually relevant other characters, Batman!

A Universe Of Power--And Complexity

The problem, like with any massive chunk of data, lies in getting the right data pieces in front of users--but for Marvel, the question becomes a semantic exercise. Just who is the character Hawkeye?

Well, he's Clint Barton, except when he's not; erstwhile sidekick Kate Bishop and villain Bullseye have taken the Hawkeye identity. He's a member of the Avengers, except when he's not; he's also been part of the Thunderbolts and West Coast Avengers. He got his skills performing trick shots in a circus, except when he didn't: He got them as an agent redeeming a murder conviction in the Ultimate universe and as a Black Ops SHIELD agent in the Marvel films.

You can see how fans who want to dig deeper into their favorite characters could be, ahem, easily waylaid.

It's telling that I checked the above Hawkeye information on Wikipedia and the fan-curated Marvel wikis...and not on Marvel's own wiki, which is clumsily organized, uncertain whether it wants to be an infodump or a recommendation engine for Marvel's Unlimited subscription service.

To be fair, no current website gives me a clear vision of a character across universes: To do so, Marvel has charged Peter Olson, the VP of Web and Application Development at Marvel Entertainment, and his team to start from the ground up. And that means figuring out a way to make all this data--every interaction between hero and villain across multiple comic titles over decades of publishing history--make sense.

Above is a powerful illustration of character connections, like a superhero social network with popular heroes exhibiting more centrality and heavily radiating connections outward. Notice Iron Man as the top-center spiral with thick connections nearly across the entire Marvel universe: Despite being surrounded by other well-known Avengers, Iron Man has appeared in many more books and interacted with many more characters.

Other popular names stand out: Spider-Man, Wolverine, and the X-Men, among others. Take note of the rogue spiral on the right: That's the Ultimate Marvel universe, a rebooted, continuity-free version launched in 2000 with Ultimate Spider-Man serving as a heavy connection to the normal universe.

That's just two universes colliding in a simple two-dimensional graph: Fold in the versions of characters from the Cinemaverse, video games, and television shows, and you'll get an idea of the scale they're trying to grasp.

"We want an uberframework--the words 'ontology' and 'taxonomy' get thrown around a lot," Olson said. "We want characters to appear as close to as possible from all their stories and iterations but, overall, we want the characters to bubble up to archetypes."

Olson believes that fiction is fluid when characters undergo change. This primarily applies to narrative arcs, but also to interpretations: from dark hero in the '40s to TV camp in the '60s to grim 'n gritty return in the '80s, Batman retains his elemental and iconic attributes as an archetype of the DC Universe. Likewise, Captain America still has his shield, even when Steve Rogers is dead and the mantle is taken by former sidekick Bucky Barnes.

But then a Captain America movie got in the works with Rogers as the titular hero: Neither Rogers or Barnes as the star-spangled Avenger are right or wrong, Olson says, but explaining the complexity is difficult. Hence, the forthcoming website, a visualization tool for fans new and old. Hence, the rush for Marvel to show, not tell its users about its pantheon of superheroes.

The Big Data Question

Most databases are relational, most easily visualized as tables of rows and columns: When you enter a search query, like "all products that sell for more than $3 but less than $5," the search system returns absolute answers based on data properties. Marvel still has use for this kind of database that returns queries with solid, irrefutable answers, like listing all the issues they've sold for the above prices.

The new database, however, will run on graph theory, looking for relationships between characters, teams, and events. The graph above displays relationships between characters, which would be extremely difficult for a relational database that might look for superheroes but leave out villains instead of showing more abstract values, like how popular/visible a character is across Marvel's comic titles.

This visualization uses the same data as the previous image, but color-codes teams as it maps character relationships: The X-Men are blue at the top, the Avengers in red at the bottom-right, Spider-Man in green at bottom-left, and Wolverine almost smack in the middle in purple. In the early '90s as Wolverine's popularity skyrocketed, the comic community jokingly wondered how Wolverine had time to be in five or six comic titles every month.

With data, we can see how many titles nabbed Wolverine facetime. Track this across titles, across time, and patterns begin to emerge. That's where the money is: Marvel won't just be able to provide users with the most layered exploration of a character and his/her versions, it'll intelligently recommend comics.

Marvel's Business Mastery Is A Boon To Fans

This is the much-sought key for comic universes: Instead of waiting for Amazon-style "users also bought" data suggestions, Marvel wants to track relationships within its vast library. Like the teen superhero angle of Runaways? Try Young Avengers. But wait, you just want to see more stories drawn in the style of original Runaways artist Adrian Alphona? The Marvel graph database will find an answer based not only on book similarities but nuanced metadata, like writer or artist style. Better still, it'll do what the venerable ComicBookDatabase cannot: confidently propose a list of essential story arcs for the new fan.

And lo, Marvel's multimedia empire strikes again: Aside from Sony's death grip on Spider-Man, Marvel holds the rights to all its major characters, so their recommendations aren't limited to subscriber-only comics on its Marvel Unlimited service. Let loose the hounds of suggested merchandise! Of course, this also means those ultra-streamlined character pages will become the most seamless portals to every character's stories that the Internet has ever seen.

The Future Of Universes Online

Olson's vision for a graph database isn't a niche product for one particular universe--it's a structural framework for understanding the relationships between any universes. Like the best "who would win in a fight" cross-universe nerd debates, Marvel's graph database thinks about abstract similarities and relationships between people and entities. Why not apply it to historical figures? Why not apply it to find unseen similarities between compatible companies?

The applications could be even more abstract, says Olson, comparing every Google Maps street intersection to a "node" of data whose traffic is chalked up to that of nearby intersections. That's how Google Maps plots the fastest route; why is it crazy that Marvel could plot the fastest route through suggested titles to convey the essence of each hero?

Olson and his team have chatted with others working in the intersection of comics and data, like Comics.org's attempt to create a massive pan-universe database. They've also talked to Schema.org, an organization dedicated to making the web more semantic so massive search engines can bring up better search results.

Since comics are basically periodicals, Olson and his team were just going to use the periodical schema for their content--but one didn't exist, so Olson and his team wrote one. The spirit of the comics community is great, says Olson--they really want to get their hands dirty with organization and answering the question, "How do you represent comics? How do you represent material?"

As pioneers of digital comics, Olson is proud of Marvel's commitment to harnessing graph databases to create the supreme experience for Marvel fans. It's easy to see the dollar signs pushing Marvel's progress, but the quest to translate Marvel's colossal data store into a native, novel service for fan exploration is easy to rally behind.

In 2013, the word "drone" has referred to a number of gadgets: on one end of the drone spectrum, there's a $300 consumer quadcopter that you can buy at a Toys R' Us that is a "drone". On the other, you have a $4 million piece of advanced government hardware that can do everything from monitor forest fires in order to assist with their containment to the deployment of surgical CIA-led missile strikes.

Both of them make headlines, but for different reasons. And it's causing headaches for advocates and researchers who build these devices. The world of drones is suffering from an image problem.

Where Drones Are Born

The annual Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference (DARC), which took place last October at New York University, is a three-day "multidisciplinary conference about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and drones--with an emphasis on civilian applications."

The conference's opening speaker, University of Pennsylvania professor Vijay Kumar, had perhaps the most telling quotation of the day: Scientific American quoted the roboticist's insistence that his creations aren't drones but "aerial robots," as the word "drone" "implies my robots are stupid, and they're not. They think for themselves."

Kumar speaks about drones all over the place--take a look at his bio on the conference website, or watch his TED talk about his work on aerial robotics systems that can be used in emergency response situations. Notice something missing? Indeed, Kumar does not use the D-word once.

But even if he didn't believe the word "drone" contrasted directly with the hard work Kumar has put into distributed intelligence, it's still hard to imagine that he'd want to be associated with it: Do a quick Google image search on "drone," and you'll probably get shots like this filling your page:

How about something a little less anecdotal? Here's a look at a Google Trends search for the term "drone":

Almost every major news headline corresponding to a spike in search interest corresponds to the use of military drones, most often regarding drone strikes. A recent Al Jazeera story dedicated to analyzing the effectiveness of "drone warfare," as well as the arguments for and against it, mentions the word "drone" 44 times without bothering to distinguish just what, exactly, a drone is.

That would seem to posit that it doesn't matter--the zeitgeist dictates that drones are remote-controlled aerial machines that are outfitted with weapons for controversial military strikes, most often made by the U.S. government. Hell, it was even a major subplot on Homeland. Except that's not what the word means. You know who says so? The U.S. government.

A May 2013 blog post for the publication DefenseNews elaborates:

What the average person on the street calls "drones" have different nomenclatures inside the five-sided building. And if you use the wrong term--say, calling something a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) versus RPA (remotely piloted aircraft) in a story--you'll hear about it, either from irate officials or irate readers.

It's not just a matter of technical nomenclature, either. The etymology of the word "drone" in this context--meaning "pilotless aircraft"--goes back to the 1930s. The British Royal Navy had developed a radio-controlled aircraft for the purpose of anti-aircraft gunnery practice, a training exercise far too dangerous to have a live pilot participate in. They called the aircraft the Queen Bee. When Adm. William Standley, the chief of U.S. Naval Operations, saw a demonstration of the Queen Bee, he then commissioned a similar program, calling his aircraft a drone as an homage to the Queen Bee. The name stuck--but it wasn't until recently that the term meant anything more than an automated aircraft to be shot at.

For the more versatile, expensive machines that are controlled remotely like the oft-photographed Predator, the proper designation is either UAV or UAS: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or Unmanned Aerial System.

Although their initial use was military, publications like Popular Science were proclaiming the potential civilian purposes for drones as early as 1946. But it has only been recently that such applications have flourished, and with them, an entirely different concern: privacy. The rapid proliferation of affordable, remote-control drones with affixed cameras like the Parrot AR has the public concerned for their privacy and civil rights, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a story on this species of flying machine without coming across the words "surveillance" or "spy."

With the D-word inhabiting such a hotbed of political connotations, is it best to follow Professor Kumar's practice and abandon it altogether? Would using more technically accurate terms to distinguish simple quadcopters from expensive weapons of warfare help much? Drone and data journalist Matthew Schroyer, who runs the blog The Mental Munition Factory, argues that it does:

At least using a technically accurate term opens the door to a more intelligent conversation about the technology, and one that isn't burdened by years of association with death and destruction. It's a chance to revise an overly-specific and incorrect definition.

In other words: These aren't drones. They're "unmanned aircraft."

Over time, it's more than possible that drones will be able to shed much of the current stigma surrounding them. It wouldn't be without precedent. Hackers used to be portrayed as cyberpunk anarchists--and to some extent, the image persists. But hackers aren't just criminals who steal your data, they're also the programmers who participate in code jams and hackathons developing the software we use every day, and the hacker ethos has found an innocuous way of going mainstream via the concept of life hacking and growth hacking.

Drones, then, can also come to mean more than one thing in the public consciousness, if we're willing to talk about them as such. Maybe then the efforts of engineers and scientists and developers to use a technology to better our lives wouldn't be buried by the fear that we've attached to it.

Like a lot of older technologies past their prime, MIDI was widely implemented and so it remains key for a lot of musicians--even some 30 years later. With an older standard comes the headaches of modernism, however, and because MIDI is a simple and linear technology it needs to be dragged into the future.

Instead of giving up on MIDI, WaveDNA, a music software company, is trying to improve on the past and make the standard more useful.

"Our system applies a non-linear structure to each bar of a MIDI music file that provides weightings for each of the possible note locations," says WaveDNA lead researcher Glen Kappel. "This accounts for the different colors and shadings in our visualization."

There are a few different impacts improving MIDI could have on the music industry, but the most obvious is the ability to manipulate MIDI tracks in new ways for faster workflows.

"Intelligent editing functions allows users to shift and change multiple events of a particular type within an arrangement all at once," says Kappel. "This can also be mapped to various external controllers including early eye-tracking interfaces, as well as tablets, or music-specific hardware controllers."

WaveDNA's practical application of this process is its beat creation software, Liquid Rhythm, which uses this new visualization. "Building a software drum-machine provides the first minimal footprint for our system" says lead developer at WaveDNA, Adil Sardar. "It highlights our non-linear approach along the horizontal or metric axis as an introduction to our process."

Liquid Rhythm isn't an end game for WaveDNA, it's just the first step, a trojan horse type of approach to rethinking MIDI and helping to bring others along. The company was looking to make sure it had traction with the complex ideas it was putting forth and so it has been taking incremental steps toward more ambitious goals.

Beyond composition, the company is looking at things like game applications, education, and even opening a set of analysis tools open to academic research. But, according to Sardar, the deepest possibility from their perspective would be something called Intelligent bookkeeping. "With our way of parsing MIDI, we can sort, order, and search musical ideas based on structural features of the actual music, rather than just by way of tags describing those features.

This could be of great value either for individual musicians to organize and access their own ideas and previous work, or as way for content aggregators like professional MIDI sites to sort their material in ways that could suggest 'similar' songs, or generality allow for more meaningful searches and comparisons."

There are a lot of steps and a lot of players that would need to get on board and be involved to make these improvements to MIDI universal, but once you have searchable data, the possibilities become much more monetizable. And as everyone knows, once money is in the mix, everything becomes more appealing.

Traditionally, fashion designers have had to rely on flesh-and-blood models to understand what their clothes look like on the human body, and shoppers have been wary of ordering clothes online without the chance to try them on.

But earlier this month, New York startup Body Labs announced BodyHub--a cloud-based platform that converts 3-D body scans of real-life models and consumers into virtual avatars that can be posed, animated, and dressed in simulated outfits.

Body Labs licenses technology from Brown University and Germany's Max Planck Institute and relies on data gleaned from thousands of body imaging sessions to turn laser scans from raw images into realistic digital models that behave like human bodies.

"You really don't want a scan," Body Labs CEO William O'Farrell said in an interview. "You want to be able to take it and make it into a body--you want to be able to animate and pose it."

The company's marketing its product first to apparel designers to use with fashion-oriented computer-aided design software.

"You can have all these fit models and have them in your computer rather than having them in to be draped and sampled and posed," O'Farrell said. Virtual models can be loaded into fashion CAD software, such as Browzwear and CLO3D, that already knows how to dress them and handle the physics of the clothing itself, he said.

"The texture stuff for us is actually quite straightforward," he said. "The hard part is getting the model."

Pose the avatar and the clothing will realistically bend; change its shape--height, weight, or inseam length, for instance--and the clothing's dimensions will adjust too.

"As you change a body's shape, we're automatically regenerating a pattern," O'Farrell said.

Once consumer-grade body scanning hardware similar to Microsoft's Kinect gets more accurate and less expensive, he predicts everyday users will be able to use images of their own bodies to order everything from bespoke suits to custom bicycles and skateboard gear. They could even create realistic video game avatars based on their own bodies, he said.

"We really believe in this notion of mass customization," O'Farrell said.

Body Labs would host adjustable models of customers' bodies and provide APIs for third parties, like clothing stores and online games, to access the data with permission, he said.

"We'll curate your body model for you, whatever you want to do with it," he said.

The software, which for scalability's sake runs in the Amazon Web Services cloud, works by matching points across body scans to create a realistic model of how humans are shaped, said Eric Rachlin, Body Labs' vice president of product design.

"To really do anything with scan data, you have to have some sort of correspondence between it," Rachlin said. "If point 587 is in the middle of my shoulder, then on your scan, point 587 is in the middle of your shoulder."

That process of matching points across scans is called registration. In Body Labs' system, based on published research by company founder and Max Planck Institute researcher Michael Black, points in new scans can be matched to the system's existing understanding of the human body and also used to improve its accuracy, Rachlin said. With that technique, called coregistration, an initial basic model can be bootstrapped into one that's more sophisticated, he said.

"We have this giant statistical model which we're pretty sure is the world's most accurate of 3-D body shapes and how it changes with pose," O'Farrell said. An individual model's shape can be changed, too--an interactive demo lets users tweak parameters like height, weight, and inseam length and watch the effect on a virtual model.

Using body-to-body comparisons could one day make for better online clothing recommendations than those that exist today, which tend to rely on user-submitted measurements, reports about customers' well-fitting existing wardrobe items or guidance from personal shoppers, O'Farrell said.

"We actually believe that we have a much better solution in terms of apparel," he said, matching customers to clothing that's known to fit bodies similar to theirs.

Body Labs' technology could also predict how users' bodies would change under different scenarios, ranging from pregnancy to a new gym routine, Rachlin said.

"When the last guy did the workout regimen, this is what happened, so this is what we think will happen to you," gyms might one day be able to tell customers, he said.

The term "full-stack developer" has been buzzing around the Internet for years as shorthand for a coder who can build everything from the back-end server to the front-end design and controls.

These optimally skilled people have inspired a "do it all" attitude across the entirety of the tech industry. Given their fragile nature, it's clear that startups in particular need these jack-of-all-trades types. But that doesn't just go for the engineering team.

With the relatively recent introduction of data-driven marketing, digital marketers are finally earning their keep in the eyes of the tech community. While full-stack devs are busy writing code in multiple languages, the ambitious "full-stack marketer" is carving out a comfortable place in startup culture.

This recent shift in digital marketing raises quite a few questions and reveals much about our values and our vision for the future of the industry. To dive deeper, I recently spoke with six full-stack marketers during a SpinnakrTalks panel to discuss where we're headed. You can see the whole conversation here, but I'll outline our main findings below.

Marketing Fluff Does Not Exist in the Digital Realm

Digital marketing is so much more than it used to be; it's so much more than the "fluff" of the past, and full-stack marketers are proving this with their daily successes. That age-old marketing joke about not knowing which half of your marketing spend is going to waste is no longer true.

With data analysis skills, full-stack marketers can segment social media management and sharpen branding. Zapier's Wade Fosteroutlined 21 skills that startups should look for in a full-stack marketing hire. Among them are SEO, PR outreach, A/B testing, lifecycle marketing, content distribution, and coding. During our conversation, Wade remarked that the reason he wrote about 21 skills was purposely to illustrate how diverse marketers at early-stage companies need to be. And when I asked our six panelists about what makes a successful digital marketer, almost all replied that the ability to measure, adjust, and measure again is key. WebbROI's Casey Armstrong said it perfectly: "If you can't measure your efforts and make decisions on them, what's the point?"

First Came The Growth Hacker

The concept of technically driven marketing harkens back to the time of the growth hacker, the magical marketing-engineering hybrid who we haven't heard much about lately. At the beginning of the year, it seemed like everyone was talking about growth hackers, but overuse of the term caused it to become stale.

I suspect that the growth hacker of yesterday is becoming the full-stack marketer of tomorrow, only this facet of their marketing faces in-house. Full-stack marketers need to get the technical team to keep the company marketing-friendly. Mention's Clement Delangue noted that a successful full-stack marketer should be able to convince the rest of the team that marketing matters using the data and analytics collected on a day-to-day basis. In other words, FSMs should be able to let their work make the case for more of their work.

Don't Try To Be An Expert In Every Layer

The marketing stack is complex and traverses every surface of the marketing funnel and the customer lifecycle. The beauty of a full-stack marketer is that he or she knows how to reach and engage every single touch point of these funnels and cycles. That's why it's important to understand search, social, blogging, PR, email marketing, remarketing, lead nurturing, and everything in between. Having this wealth of knowledge, however, does not mean that full-stack marketers need to be experts in every layer of the stack, but a company is better off hiring someone who has novice-like skills in HTML/CSS and search marketing and can build on those as needed, rather than someone who is solely driven by creative ideas.

Being an ambidextrous thinker--that is, using both the left and right brain--makes full-stack marketers qualified to work at lots of companies, and doesn't pigeonhole them into one specific niche or industry. Bislr's Gonzalo Mannucci was spot on when he said "startup culture has made marketers the 'entrepreneurs of their own careers,'" and that we're building "career security, not job security." If you can grow one company using the right tools and skills you can surely iterate on the process and improve upon those same skills at your next job. Doing so is simply a microcosmic action stemming from a person's work-related successes.

Master The Generational Link

Having studied generational characteristics and influence during college, I started to see a connection here. Gen Y and its desire to experience "startup culture" in the workplace (i.e., entrepreneurial spirit, casual dress and environment, flexibility, work/life balance, enjoyable perks) has begun to influence larger, more corporate companies. The reasoning is that if these are the types of environments our incoming workforce craves and wants to work at, larger companies will need to adapt to accommodate them, or Gen Y employees won't stay long term.

With startup-born full-stack marketing, I can see how this shift could start to permeate traditional marketing practices, just as startup culture as a whole has begun to influence the traditional business world. It will no longer be enough to come up with great ideas, you'll need to know how to execute them as well. And given that technically knowledgeable marketers are so much more efficient, it's plausible that larger companies will want teams of full-stack marketers, rather than continue to team creatives with the tech-savvy employees and mediate the back-and-forth until projects are completed to perfection. G2 Crowd's Eric Metelka says we're already seeing this happen: "Look at the movement to learn to code. There's also a lot of movement around data science. Both of these will bleed into marketing for the better." Let's hope so.

So Where Are All the FSMs?

The problem now is that every early-stage tech company wants full-stack marketers, but there aren't yet enough to go around. Red8's Victor Ramayrat explains that this is "why full-service agencies still exist, albeit at a higher price tag." So does the rise of the full-stack marketer mean the death of the digital agency? Only time will tell. For now, it's important to continue to support and encourage the thirst for technical knowledge that full-stack marketers crave. Now, if you'll excuse me--Dash, SumAll, and WordPress are calling.

Rishon Roberts is the marketing manager at Spinnakr, a new kind of analytics that takes action for you. She'd love to connect with you on Twitter.

If you run a small business or work in an enterprise setting, you know the routine for sharing files. Depending on your organization, you use Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, iCloud, or seemingly millions of other competitors. The need to share information and collaborate on projects means that cloud storage platforms are everywhere... and it has spurred its own sub-industries. One of these is the demand for security services for cloud file sharing.

Let's say it: Security at Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive is excellent, surely, but it isn't perfect. It's commonplace (and smart) for organizations to share sensitive documents via VPN or thumb drives when corporate competitors and other snoops lurk. But many employees don't always follow company policy or even the law; as I discovered at Fast Company last year, many doctors use Dropbox to store patient health information even though the federal government prohibits it.

Other times, speed and expedience trump security practices. A robust industry of companies offering additional encryption and security systems for cloud services has popped up, and eager enterprise customers pay for the added layer. They do it for good reason: Earlier this year, security researchers Dhiru Kholia and Przemyslaw Wegrzyn successfully gained access to private user files. If they could do it, others could too.

This is a major reason why Dropbox recently launched Dropbox for Business, an enterprise version of their cloud offering with enhanced security and collaboration features. On top of standard Dropbox features such as two-step verification, the new offering includes certifications and compliance for Amazon S3, file recovery and version history, disk wiping, and other additions aimed at a business audience. But it's still based on their core service; in an official statement, the company said "It give(s) you a personal Dropbox and a work Dropbox on all of your devices so you'll never have to choose between them. It'll be like having your house keys and your work keycard on the same keychain."

One of these cloud collaboration security companies in Dropbox's ecosystem, Massachusetts-based nCrypted Cloud, offers a core product which, among other things, lets users share and revoke access to individual files on demand with collaborators and layers on top of Dropbox. The company is currently working on layering their technology on top of Box for 2014. Their tool is used by organizations like Imperial College of London to allow safer file sharing for sensitive data; Ncrypted Cloud's model, says CEO Nicholas Stamos, emphasizes strict protection of all data in the cloud hard drives, and balancing between personal privacy needs and corporate data governance requirements. He added that they are supported through separate but equal privacy and audit controls providing extensive forensic level auditing trail for end users and information security professionals that show which users accessed which files at what time from which computer, device, or browser.

Ncrypted Cloud is just one of a variety of security startups and projects working in the added-cloud-security field. Onehub, Truecrypt, AeroFS, and Boxcryptor, among others, all offer similar services. It isn't just that Dropbox and Box can become very real security liabilities for companies because they're trusting data storage to a third party; it's also the fact that, for the sake of business and making investors or stockholders happy, it's preferable to add that extra security just in case.

All of this is a boon for smaller cloud storage providers. Companies like WatchDox promote their services to heavily regulated industries like health care by warning of horror stories caused by lax security on the mega-services. Other providers such as Rackspace emphasize that their products, which can be harder to use, offer clients more security for their buck.

It matters to businesses that a whole industry of second-layer security services for Dropbox have popped up and are thriving. But it matters even more to Dropbox. The company is currently seeking $250 million in financing to help fund a rumored IPO. But security remains as a weak spot for the company; Jeffrey Mann of research firm Gartner told The Daily Beast's William O'Connor that Dropbox is "The scourge of enterprise IT departments" because of its perceived risks. While companies struggle with preventive solutions for cloud storage security issues, Dropbox (and Box, and Google Drive...) have to deal with a much more serious immediate problem: The market perceives them as relatively unsafe. For products that want to become as much a part of contemporary office life as Microsoft Office or Salesforce, that's a considerable obstacle.

It's impossible to say this comprehensively, but most people in publishing hate the CMS, or content management system, they're forced to use at work. Increasingly, media companies are opting away from open source platforms like Drupal and WordPress and building custom content management systems to power their websites.

Exactly how integral is the content management system to good storytelling on the web? And what's so hard about building a decent one?

The Publisher's Competitive Advantage

Reuters columnist Felix Salmon predicted that media companies would either thrive or perish on the efficacy of their publishing platforms. Indeed, several companies, from BuzzFeed to Vox Media, publisher of the Verge, have made notable investments in their CMS, even as innovators in the space declare the CMS needs to be "burned to the ground."

Why so much pressure on the lowly CMS? For one, the complexity of editorial packages continues to increase, thanks in part to the success of projects such as the New York Times's "Snow Fall" and the Guardian's "NSA Files: Decoded." These interactive pieces get lots of attention, and publishers are seeking to better exploit the rich storytelling features offered by the web.

But how much does a site's underlying technology actually influence its day-to-day operations?

It's Not About Tech--It's About Workflow

Despite the hullabaloo over the clever design of projects such as "Snow Fall," the CMS arguably has a greater impact on editorial workflow than design. Take FastCompany itself--its CMS was rebuilt after the magazine launched two new sites, Co.Design and Co.Create. Previously, each site had its own CMS, slightly modified from that of the main site. When changes needed to be made across verticals, each site had to be updated separately. After joining FastCompany in 2011, CTO Matt Mankins decided to rebuild the CMS from the ground up on Node.js.

"It was my stance that the only rational way forward was to consolidate the CMSes and create a presentation layer," he says. In other words: All the different Fast Company client sites or apps would load their content from one common stack.

FastCompany's current CMS unites the main site and and its sister sites (including Co.Labs) under one platform, so that universal changes can be made at once. It also separates content from presentation. Writers and editors submit text, images, and videos for stories through a Drupal layer, a vestige of the old CMS. That content is captured and stored as data on a Solr server with a Redis caching layer, and then styled according to the site's master design using Node.js. Converting the content to data before adding presentation details ensures that even if FastCompany.com undergoes a redesign, the site will have a consistent look from story to story.

Other sites' content management systems are similarly structured according to their distinctive editorial functions. Pitchfork, for instance, depends on the timeliness of its reviews, which are largely written by freelancers, not in-house. To expedite the process of assigning and editing reviews, the site's CMS, which was built using Django, doubles as a schedule manager: It alerts writers when reviews have been assigned or canceled (say, if an album release is delayed) and reminds them of pending deadlines. The site's CMS also readily adapts web content for Pitchfork's mobile app, without editors or designers having to make alterations.

In the case of Quartz, the Atlantic's business-focused site, the CMS, a custom installation of WordPress, is designed to serve the site's mobile-first functionality. The company developed its publishing tools to equip its reporters and writers to complete most production tasks, such as developing charts and graphs, independently.

Doing so, says senior editor Zach Seward, encourages staffers to develop components of a story--from text to graphics--holistically rather than tacking on additional media after a story has been reported and written. "We've found that it helps people write more natively for the web," he says.

Perils Of Going Outside The CMS

Although well-designed content management systems can greatly expedite an online newsroom's day-to-day workflow, it also imposes limits upon a site's structure. After all, a CMS is a system meant to stamp out mass-produced online articles--not bespoke projects.

After the success of "Snow Fall," Andrew Kueneman, the New York Times' deputy director of digital design, told the Atlantic Wire, "This story was not produced in our normal CMS, which is probably pretty obvious… We don't have the luxury of doing this type of design typically on the web."

Other sites face similar issues. Pitchfork, for instance, uses a whole separate production process for its cover stories, such as its feature on Daft Punk, which typically include visual effects such as animations. In fact, the workflow for such stories is quite similar to the design process for print.

Once a cover story is written, the site's creative director develops the concept for the accompanying photography and video; the developers then work to produce those visual effects.

"It's typically done in a couple of days," says Matt Dennewitz, Pitchfork's vice-president of technology. "Some elements require some back-and-forth."

To expand their design capabilities without drastically altering their CMS, other sites have turned to supplementary software for special editorial projects. PandoDaily, for instance, has used ScrollKit, a visual editor built by Cody Brown with JavaScript and HTML5, to experiment with multimedia projects, such as an in-depth overview of the business challenges of the music industry. ScrollKit integrates with WordPress, which PandoDaily uses to run its site.

The Trouble With Custom

Adding such bells and whistles to the main CMS can have help editors and technologists build custom editorial packages, but they also let editors do too much. Plug-and-play tools such as ScrollKit can greatly expand the capabilities of smaller sites like PandoDaily; at larger publishers, custom features can help eliminate the silos that usually develop between writers and editors, designers, and technologists, allowing them to collaborate more effectively.

"It's best when producers, designers, and writers are working in tandem the whole time," says David Holmes, PandoDaily's head of social media and experimental journalism.

But making features such as parallax scrolling and 3-D animations central to a site's publishing platform poses the risk of abuse. Indeed, the most successful multimedia projects, such as the Guardian's feature on the NSA, incorporate various types of media in such a way that they are integral to the narrative, not merely supplementary. But doubtless a lot of publications overuse visual effects like parallax scrolling, to the reader's frustration.

Pitchfork's development team kept those caveats in mind when it developed a modular visual editor for the site's less intricately designed features. "It's good to limit what you do per piece," Dennewitz says. "That's a big driver keeping certain features out of the CMS."

To Go Custom, Or Not To Go Custom?

Evidently, a site's CMS can restrict certain modes of storytelling just as readily as it facilitates others. For media companies eager to propagate their distinctive brand of journalism, developing a robust CMS would seem to be critical to their ability to scale, as Salmon argues. But is developing custom software the best way to accomplish that goal?

On one hand, the size of a site's editorial operations seems to have little bearing on its choice of CMS, as illustrated by the number of large sites, from CNN to the Economist, that use customized versions of readily available systems such as WordPress and Drupal. "We've been joking for years that we should just run [FastCompany] on Tumblr," Mankins says.

Instead, the decision is often more dependent on the outlet's core editorial philosophy. Salmon, for instance, cites the distinctive, bespoke quality of BuzzFeed and Gawker's content management systems. In BuzzFeed's case, the CMS facilitates the rapid sharing of content across social media; in Gawker's, it enables readers' posts to be featured as prominently as its paid staffers' work. (A previous incarnation of FastCompany's site also attempted to promote readers' contributions alongside staff-written articles.)

But few sites have such a singular mission that an off-the-shelf CMS cannot be adapted to their needs. Though Quartz's mobile-first approach and classification of stories by temporary "obsessions" rather than permanent news categories lend the site a distinctive character, its editors and developers never considered building a custom CMS according to those features, Seward says. "A lot of us worked with terrible CMSes at other organizations," he says, "but it turns out there are a number of lovely systems out there."

On the other hand, a site's philosophy--editorial or business-wise--may change radically enough that its underlying technology also requires a major overhaul. Preparing for that possibility is one reason Mankins opted for a custom CMS for FastCompany's site.

"I think you should choose a technology where you have a clear understanding of how to modify it to grow with you," he says. "If you're lucky, you'll keep growing out of your CMS and there will be a new one, custom or otherwise, to take its place."

Do you work at a publishing company? What's your CMS situation? Let me know on Twitter.

Compared to their paper-based ancestors, today's maps are pretty incredible. Yet as mind-blowing as Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps would be to a 19th-century time traveler, these maps could be even better--if they were made by drones.

In a recent demonstration, data analyst Bobby Sudekum and a few of his colleagues at MapBox sent a SenseFly eBee into the air above Lost Creek Winery in Virginia. Within less than hour, the lightweight drone collected 100 acres' worth of photographic imagery, which was then pulled into MapBox's suite of tools for editing and publishing interactive maps.

The stunt was smart fodder for tech blog coverage, but it also made a powerful point: In the future, inexpensive drones could be used to quickly and accurately create maps of areas for which there might not be very good satellite imagery--or more commonly, areas for which the data is old.

"It's going to be huge," Sudekum says of drone-powered mapmaking. "Right now, the state of drones is like 1970s in the computer world. The sky's the limit."

While the technology will certainly continue to get cheaper and more advanced, drones already really good at at least one thing: producing photorealistic maps very quickly. As handy as the maps produced by Google or Bing are, they're old--check out your old neighborhood and notice what's changed since those satellite images were made.

Outdated maps are fine if you need directions to a store in the next town over. But for anybody interested in mapping things in a more timely manner--be it for journalism, urban planning, farming, disaster prevention, emergency response, or anything else--today's maps are too stale.

"I think drones are going to be playing a huge part in getting precise, accurate imagery. There's so much we can approve upon. There's so many awesome use cases, like agriculture and disaster relief," Sudekum says.

Last week's Virginia flyover was just the latest real-world example showing how drones can be used for making maps. In mid-October, a swarm of camera-wielding drones autonomously built a 3-D and highly detailed map of the Matterhorn. Meanwhile, ecologists interested in producing timely, three-dimensional maps of vegetation can turn to , a low-cost 3-D mapping toolkit supported by the National Science Foundation.

For an idea of how this new technology could benefit real people, look no further than Haiti. In April of this year, a team from an organization called Drone Adventures arrived in the country with three eBee drones and a stack of computers running Pix4uav, a desktop app for compiling aerial imagery and stitching it together to create 2-D and 3-D maps.

Over the course of a week, they mapped 28 square miles of land, including densely populating urban shantytowns and dangerous terrain outside the city. Like the Matterhorn and Virginia mappings, this one was more for demonstration than for practical usage. But one can imagine how handy up-to-the-hour maps would have been when an earthquake hit Haiti in 2010. There's something to be said for having recent imagery when buildings crumble and roads are suddenly in ruins.

For MapBox, drone mapping is still an experimental practice with no immediate impact on the company's product roadmap--at least, not yet. They're just exploring the possibilities for now, but are already beginning to think about where open source drone mapping might fit into their future.

"We've been thinking about extending the idea behind OpenStreetMap to a crowdsourced aerial imagery map," Sudekum says. "More and more hobbyists are adding cameras to planes and mapping their surroundings. What if they had a community network map where they could add their imagery? A worldwide crowdsourced imagery map."

When I was a product manager at Google, Apple, and Wildfire, there was a type of hacker I'd occasionally get lucky enough to spot in the wild and work alongside. Always lurking in the most sensitive areas of the business, they hunted for ways to manipulate, bend, and break complex systems. If you're smart (or just lucky) these "enterprise hackers," as I took to calling them, are already inside your company--and they might just save your bacon.

These days, I am seeing them in increasing numbers and in surprising places. Their growing legion makes perfect sense. Enterprise Hackers are being empowered by a new wave of web-based software (SaaS, in the parlance) to hack solutions to your top problems, often without any technical training. This movement is being driven by SaaS enterprise products with consumer-grade interfaces, freemium business models, and new "glue" services that allow the output of one system to be fed into the input of another. All without having to write a line of code.

Until recently, Enterprise Hacking was still largely the realm of people with technical backgrounds, and involved a lot of improvisation and duct tape. I spent several years at YouTube at one point leading a group that built tools for our internal teams to combat bullying, spamming, and other lousy behavior on the site.

We pieced together solutions with a mashup of code, scripts, and browser plugins, pretty much whatever got the job done quickly. It required recruiting people with a knack for support operations, but also some significant technical expertise. I found that these sorts of people were incredibly hard to find. That wasn't the only difficulty we faced. Maintaining and scaling our tools was also a constant challenge as YouTube's user base hurtled toward a billion. Touching any sort of user data was a big pain, as it is in many organizations. Headaches all around.

The situation is vastly different today. A growing crop of startups is providing SaaS tools that can be used by Enterprise Hackers without technical backgrounds, and the power of connecting these point solutions is tremendous. If I were doing this today, my YouTube team's arsenal would have included:

• Big data analytics and machine learning to spot spammer patterns (e.g., Wise.io)
• Business intelligence tools to create dashboards to track and communicate hot spots (e.g., GoodData, which I should disclose is an Andreessen Horowitz portfolio company)
• Powerful scripting languages that can string together both internal and external SaaS systems to automate a host of business processes (e.g., Zapier)
• Drag-and-drop ETL designers to more easily access data sets (e.g., SnapLogic, also a portfolio company)
• Tools to quickly create mobile versions of enterprise apps without writing code (e.g., Capriza, also a portfolio company)
• A/B testing services to redesign and optimize web app user experiences (e.g., Optimizely)

Folks in these organizations can enable your company to scale rapidly, adapt to change, and serve customers better because they are embedded in your organization and already know how things really get done. They've always had the relationships and intimate knowledge of products and customers to solve the problems they see around them, but now they also have the power tools to scale their ideas.

But as with all power tools, you'd better use them correctly or hazard some serious damage. Done right, the efforts of Enterprise Hackers can markedly improve the performance of your organization while also relieving some pressure on engineering and IT. Done wrong, and those same efforts can create unmaintainable patchworks of code and data that can dangerously leak into your organization's mission critical pathways.

That is the risk you take, but it can be managed. And more than likely, there are already Enterprise Hackers in your organization. So how do you leverage and promote the practice the right way?

First off, many SaaS tools can be trialed on a freemium basis, so it's easy for your team to get started as they cast about for a problem to attack. Encourage your Enterprise Hackers to first focus on improving your internal systems, where they may have an advantage over your engineering team. A consumer-grade user experience is the new enterprise standard, so leverage that recent college grad on your support team who is steeped in the latest consumer apps. They can help build a more intuitive consumer-grade user experience into the systems they use at work, and that can lead to a big boost in your organization's productivity.

Product and engineering will still play an important role in all this, however. They can provide a sandbox environment where Enterprise Hackers can stand-up new apps, access data feeds, and authenticate accounts without impacting production systems or data. Product and engineering should also clarify what they should exclusively manage and where Enterprise Hackers should stay clear.

The Enterprise Hacking movement can be especially valuable for startup CEOs. A startup environment with tight budget constraints can often drive people to build duct-tape solutions. This is often a better route than spending time evaluating and paying for an external solution. It's likely that you'll outgrow that solution in six months anyway, so why burn scarce resources purchasing something with a short shelf life?

CEOs should invite teams to prototype their ideas by providing a small budget in time or money that employees can tap into with a good proposal, and create events to publicly reward innovative hacks.

I am not suggesting that Enterprise Hackers are the answer to all your prayers. But they are a growing and valuable asset you may not even know you have, and one that can help solve your company's most pressing problems quickly and cheaply.

Tom Rikert is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz on the investing team. Previously, he was director of product management at Wildfire, a social media marketing company acquired by Google in 2012. Prior to Wildfire, Tom was a product manager for Google, where he worked on YouTube and AdWords. He's also held roles at Autodesk and Apple, and is a graduate of MIT and the Harvard Business School. Tom can be found on Twitter @tomrikert and more information about Andreessen Horowitz can be found here.

Hackathons and Hack Days bring programmers, designers, and other creative folks together to work on interesting and fun projects. They're opportunities to meet new people and build things you really care about. The best events reflect the DIY aspects of hacker culture that surface when business and money are out of the equation: when we can focus on building for the love of building. But corporate involvement and for-profit hackathon organizers threaten this culture and risk crossing the line from engagement to exploitation.

Hackathons have been around since the late '90s: The term was first used in 1999 when contributors to the OpenBSD project got together to work on cryptography software. Hackathons grew naturally out of open source software contexts--similar to open source, where many people contribute to projects in their free time, hackathons are often attended by professionals who build software every day for a living.

Now, interest in hackathons has exploded: It's common for 10 or more events to run in the same city over a single weekend. Previously the realm of technology companies and grassroots organizations, hackathons are seeing more participation from mainstream brands such as food companies and retailers.

Attendees aren't always as enthused as the organizers. Cynicism and "hackathon fatigue" is growing among would-be attendees. The benefits for companies participating in hackathons is clear: brand awareness among developers, feedback about their technical products, participation in unofficial research and development, and recruiting. But there must be equal benefits for the people participating. It's gotta be fun and make people free to work on things they love. Having a focus on pitching or competing for cash makes an event sound an awful lot like work--that's what developers and designers do during their day jobs, so why would they want to spend their weekends doing it, too?
If you want to earn money writing code or designing applications, you get a job writing code or designing applications. You don't go to hackathons with the hopes of coming home with money or a chance to pitch to a group of VCs. An emphasis on monetary rewards for participating in a hackathon attracts only those interested in creating for money, which is a shaky foundation for any kind of community.

The good news: Not all hackathons fall into this trap. There are many examples of hackathons and other developer events that understand hacker culture and the DIY spirit it embodies. SuperHappyDevHouse is a regular event that was started in 2005 with the goal of bringing hackers and thinkers together to have fun and talk tech. It's creation was a rejection of the business-focused aspects of Silicon Valley. SuperHappyDevHouse is a place to meet new people and talk about interesting things--not a place for pitches or talk of business models. Similarly, a number of hackathon franchises have tried to embody this spirit.

Comedy Hack Days, organized by Cultivated Wit, bring comedians, designers, and developers together to build "hilarious apps and hardware hacks." The emphasis is on having fun and building things with like-minded people. Comedy Hack Day events have been held in New York, Boston, and San Francisco.

We try to practice what we preach here at SoundCloud when we participate in Music Hack Day. The first Music Hack Day was organized by SoundCloud's Dave Haynes in 2009, and since then, Music Hack Day has become a global institution with events in over 20 cities in Europe, North America, and Australia. Events are typically led by local organizers who coordinate with a core group from companies including SoundCloud, The Echo Nest, Spotify, and SendGrid. This style of collaboration ensures that no company has control over the tone of a particular event.
Music Hack Days are non-competitive both in terms of not focusing on prizes and bringing together competitive companies to cooperate in organizing and sponsoring events. This environment of collaboration affects the tone of the event. The purpose is to have fun and build really cool music applications, not to pitch your app to a VC or to win a big cash prize. Furthermore, focusing on a single topic like music applications keeps the event rooted in the art of hacking rather than the business.

To further ensure that Music Hack Day events don't feel too corporate or competitive, prizes are kept small and participation is always free. There is no standard sponsorship package--companies pay what they can to support the events. This prevents Music Hack Days from becoming pay-to-play events. There's even a manifesto that outlines the values of Music Hack Days.

Music Hack Day even inspired an event called the Monthly Music Hackathon that takes place in New York City. Monthly Music Hackathons are small events that focuses on exploration and research in music technology. To further enhance the connection to art, the demo portion of the event is called a concert and all attendees are expected to participate.

There is still enthusiasm about hacker events. A recent Kickstarter campaign was launched to reunite the surviving original members of the Homebrew Computer Club (a legendary group of hardware hackers who met regularly in Silicon Valley in the '70s). The campaign surpassed its $16,000 goal.

This and the success of hackathon franchises like Comedy Hack Day, Music Hack Day, and the Monthly Music Hackathon show that the spirit of hackathons lives on: We just have to be vigilant against co-option from corporate interests looking to cash in on developer enthusiasm without giving anything but money back.

Paul Osman is the developer evangelist at SoundCloud, the world's leading audio platform, based out of Toronto. In this capacity, Paul is responsible for SoundCloud's API toolset, developer evangelism around the globe, and making it as easy as possible for third-party developers to build applications that use the SoundCloud API. Depending on the day, this can mean maintaining and improving SoundCloud's online documentation, writing technical articles and blog posts, coming up with creative inspirational hacks, or organizing or attending hacker events and doing presentations to groups of hackers on how to best use the SoundCloud API.

Prior to SoundCloud, Paul worked at Mozilla, where he led a small team of developers in all web development tasks related to the Mozilla Foundation. He developed Drumbeat.org, a Django application designed to allow people to promote projects related to Mozilla's core mission and values. The Drumbeat.org source code was also forked to build P2PU.org, an online resource for peer learning.

One day an entrepreneur named Daniel Cane found himself in the office of Dr. Michael Sherling, marveling at the lack of technology. Dr. Sherling, a dermatologist, told Cane he saw up to 50 patients a day, only to spend hours afterwards dealing with paperwork. Some patients have medical charts as long and complex as novels, but mysteriously there were no intuitive, modern software tools designed to help.

The pair decided to start a company to tackle the problem and immediately hit an impasse: What doctors actually do all day can be exceedingly complex, making the process of spec'ing an app nearly impossible.

Cane, who was previously a founder at Blackboard, figured he'd study the challenges of the medical milieu with Sherling in order to build the application. "The way you solve that traditionally in software is that you embed yourself in the domain, but to become an expert in medicine takes years," Cane says. "It was never going to be as efficient as for me to turn [Dr. Sherling] into an engineer."

Why Doctors Make Great Software Designers

Cane noticed that medicine lent itself easily to an object-oriented design. Diseases are "objects" with various attributes like findings and morphologies, and they have relationships with other diseases, like objects in a data model. The appearance of a disease in a particular patient, with his or her unique pathologies, was akin to an "instance" of that object.

Cane first taught Sherling basic design patterns and JavaScript and later moved on to XML. "We have this saying in medicine: See one, do one, teach one," says Sherling. "Whatever procedure or surgery you are about to do in medical school, you see one first, then you do one yourself, and then you teach it to somebody else. I saw how Dan coded and he would start me off. Now we have three dermatologists and I teach them how to do it."

Their company, called Modernizing Medicine, now has 17 on-staff physicians with specialities like ophthalmology, orthopedics, and plastic surgery. "In a lot of software design, you are at least one or two times removed from the customer," says Sherling. "Our customers are our developers. You need to be able to practice medicine in order to design the product. You will have ideas from talking to patients in clinic which you will express in code the next day."

One of those developers is Dr. Elana Oberstein. She's a rheumatologist who specializes in the autoimmune disease lupus. Oberstein has been practicing medicine for 15 years, but only coding for 10 weeks. Two days a week, she works at Modernizing Medicine, helping to build an iPad application called the Electronic Medical Assistant (EMA), which helps doctors to document examinations, order labs, and prescribe more quickly. There's a different version of the product for each medical speciality. Oberstein is working on a new version for rheumatology. She extends a complex XML schema and uses JavaScript to render parts of it in a humanly readable form. The rest of the week, Oberstein treats patients in her private practice.

"The extent of my tech world was using an iPhone and an iPad," says Oberstein. "I was extremely apprehensive. I thought it would maybe be more efficient for me to sit next to a coder and just tell them 'Well, a lupus patient presents with a rash and joint pain...' but then I said, you know what? I can do a lot of extensive procedures on a human body. This can't be that difficult. I'm shocked really by how quickly I have been able to pick things up."

The company's physicians work in scrum teams on XML schemas related to their speciality and also on rendering parts of that schema for different parts of a doctor's workflow, for example as a medical note or a bill, using the JavaScript implementation Rhino.

Last week, Oberstein worked on the schema for counseling, encoding the information which will be used to generate an educational printout for lupus patients on their disease, medication, therapeutic interventions, and lab data. The physicians learn what a branch is, how to merge code using Subversion, how to use Eclipse, and how to write and execute unit and integration tests. A team of traditional developers works on platforms, tools, and services that are used by the medical team.

How Apps Can Address Major Medical Inefficiencies

The first goal of Modernizing Medicine was simply to improve efficiency, but building an application which even matched the efficiency of paper was a challenge. In fact, the problem of switching to electronic health records (EHR) was the reason that Oberstein is now working at Modernizing Medicine.

"My office, which is five physicians, tried to go electronic with one of the EHR systems out there," she says."I usually see 40 or 50 patients a day. With the system that we instituted, I went down to seeing 17 patients a day. It was so cumbersome. My patient care started to suffer. We aborted the mission. We went back to our patient charts. I had heard about Modernizing Medicine from another physician and I thought this has to be done for rheumatology."

Sherling estimates that two-thirds of doctors using Modernizing Medicine's EMA are at least as fast as paper, but while efficiency was essential, the company's true objective is to improve medical outcomes by using the data that its users generate.

"We have a lot of patients with chronic diseases who have charts as long as novels, really 300 pages long, and there's really no fast way to consume the chart," says Sherling. "Doctors will look at the last note to try and get a sense before the patient walks into the room and the patient will ask them about something that happened four or five visits ago and we won't remember. So we created something called EMA Outcomes, which allows us to longitudinally view the peaks and valleys of treatment on one chart, almost like a stock. I can zoom in and see for the times when the patient's disease got worse, what were the treatments given that didn't work, or when they got better, what worked."

By pooling the treatment and outcome data of doctors all across the country, Modernizing Medicine will eventually be able to determine which treatments yield the best results in the real world. Pharmaceutical companies run randomized controlled trials, the gold standard in medicine, to determine the efficacy of new drugs, but they are expensive and only test on a small number of patients.

"What our doctors will be able to do is create a platform where every private practice in the United States is a lab," says Sherling. "We can figure out what works and what doesn't work by combining our experiences in an unbiased and objective way. We have more patients than academic medical centers do." Eighteen percent of all dermatologists in the U.S. now use EMA and those dermatologists treat 150,000 patients with psoriasis alone.

None of this would be possible without the company's physician-coders. Cane is now convinced that every software company should train domain experts as programmers.

"There is a misperception that a gifted engineer can build anything, but there's always something missing," says his cofounder Sherling. "That's even true for me as a dermatologist. I need a rheumatologist to build rheumatology."

In the 3-D-printed future, we will buy less and make more. Everything from food to human organs, we're told, can be manufactured this way. But the 3-D printers available now only print with plastic resins--which isn't going to cut it in a new industrial revolution. For that, we'll need to print in metal.

Three-D printing with metal isn't impossible, but it has been prohibitively expensive until this month. A team of scientists from Michigan Technical University led by Joshua Pearce have developed a 3-D metal printer that works just like its popular plastic-forming brethren--by laying down thin layers of steel to form any geometric shape the user has a digital plan for. What's more, their designs, software, and firmware are all completely open source and available to anyone with access to materials that will set you back less than $1,500.

The decision to make their printer completely open source and available to the DIY community was a conscious one, says Pearce in a recent iTech Post story:

Pearce is the first to admit that his new printer is a work in progress. So far, the products he and his team have produced are no more intricate than a sprocket. But that's because the technology is so raw. "Similar to the incredible churn in innovation witnessed with open-sourcing of the first RepRap plastic 3D printers, I anticipate rapid progress when the maker community gets their hands on it," says Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering/electrical and computer engineering. "Within a month, somebody will make one that's better than ours, I guarantee it."

Pearce is also aware that the printer, and the decision to make it open to the general public, doesn't come without risk. In its current configuration, the printer requires more safety precautions than a regular, plastic-making 3-D printer, and is only recommended for construction by those who have a shop or garage where it could be operated safely.

There's also the worry of what the technology could be used for. Should the ability to effectively 3-D print using metal become widely available, guns and other weaponry are going to become a very prominent and widespread concern--although it may be a moot one, considering that we don't need metals to 3-D print a gun.

Kyle Richter is a longtime Mac and iOS developer with four programming books under his belt--a Mac community guy if there ever was one. So he was intrigued when he discovered a popular iOS app using his app's name as a keyword; some fellow developer wasn't playing fair.

When he looked into the offending app, it was riddled with privacy and security flaws. The experience frustrated him--where's the solidarity, anyway?--and our conversation about it turned to the idea of codifying good developer behavior. Could computing professionals honor an opt-in credo as in other fields?

Tell me about what happened with QuizUp and what you discovered?

QuizUp first came to my attention a couple of weeks ago as it was using one of my company's product names as a search keyword. Having worked on several real-time multiplayer iOS apps, I became intrigued by the way it claimed to handle its networking. I began digging into the networking traffic to get a sense of how the game functioned, and while looking into the networking components I discovered a sizable amount of privacy and security issues.

I contacted Nick Arnott, a friend of mine who works as an iOS security researcher. We found dozens of issues: from storing Facebook contact information in plain text on the device, handling passwords unsafely, transferring the user's entire address book to the company insecurely without express permission, and sending each user's personal information to random strangers including their full name, location, date of birth, email address, and Facebook ID.

I attempted to alert Plain Vanilla Corp., the publisher of QuizUp to my findings in private. When several days passed without a response, I decided that, due to the considerable size of the user base that was at risk, I should catalog the issues on my personal blog.

After the article was up for a few hours, I was contacted by senior leadership at Plain Vanilla Corp. looking for additional details on my findings. Like most companies who find themselves in this situation, they were eager to fix the issues and move past them. A new version of QuizUp has recently been released which they claim corrects the privacy issues; however, I have not had a chance to thoroughly evaluate the update. From an initial inspection, though, it appears they are moving in the correct direction.

You've said that "more and more often we are seeing developers take the low road." Why does unsavory developer activity seem to be increasing now and what are some common examples?

The Mac development community was very small when I first started developing on the platform. Everyone knew each other and we all worked toward a common goal of creating the best third-party software experience for the small market share available. With the release of the iPhone there has been an incredible surge in developer interest in Apple's platforms. The community has grown from a few thousand active developers to over a million in a very short time.

With the large influx of new developers and products it should be expected that we would see an increased amount of problems. Among those problems the platform has seen is an increasing amount of aggressive behavior in order to succeed. Issues such as spamming users for reviews to forcing users to log in with social networks so additional marketing can be sent to users friends and followers are common and now, sadly expected. The aggressive use of pay to play, "freemium" type games, used to suck money out of player's pockets in order to allow them to continue progressing through a game, has become the standard model for the top 200 grossing apps.

Some notable and familiar companies have even changed their business models to one where they simply clone successful or novel indie games and repackage them to maximize profits while running the smaller company out of business. There has also been a huge influx in gaming the market place, including paying for app downloads and fake ratings. At least once a week I get an email about paying for reviews, downloads, or other gray market app services.

I would say the worst types of violations are those that take advantage of their users, exposing them to additional harm solely for the sake of profit. While these types of occurrences are rare, they do occur from time to time.

On the other hand, I think slightly misrepresenting the functionality of an app is on the lower totem of issues that users should be concerned about today. There are however a large number of apps that grossly misrepresent their functionality. It became such an issue that Apple began disallowing the updating of screenshots after app approval and it has made a significant dent in the number of instances of this type of cheat. If a product serves the purpose it was designed for it people will continue using it.

Are most of these ethical violations malicious, or do they arise out of lazy coding in trying to cut corners?

While it's a matter of semantics, I think to be unethical you have to be malicious, ethics is intertwined with the consciousness of the act. I don't consider it unethical to make a mistake in code that causes private information to be leaked.

Do I think that most privacy violations are malicious, however? No, I don't. Software development is complex and it's easy to overlook scenarios in which privacy may be breached, doubly so for green developers. There have however been some notable cases of unethical development practices, such as Path scrapping the user's address book without permission, and a multitude of apps that do not work as advertised. However, I think that most of the incidents come from oversight or lazy programming.

Developers, investors, and business owners are in such a rush to get apps shipped, while keeping budgets as tight as possible. With tight budgets and tight deadlines, things get overlooked and corners get cut, sometimes accidentally, sometimes to deal with the pressure. More and more, mobile developers are leveraging third-party code to quickly build and deploy apps, but many of those developers do not understand the code they are implementing or the ramifications of using them. It is getting very easy to build a mobile app, but it is harder than ever to build one well.

Who is responsible for making sure a developer adheres to ethical standards?

Surprisingly, a lot of different parties have varying degrees of responsibility. First and foremost, the developer should be self-moderating; they need to put care and thought into how their software interacts with a user's data. The publisher, Apple and Google, for example, also have oversight and guidelines for approvals, which have several sections overlooking privacy as well as malware. Lastly, the consumer--both the end user and the tech media--provides the final check. Supporting apps and companies who play on an unbalanced board does nothing but hurt everyone.

Do you feel that the major app stores like Google Play and Apple's App Store should have a Code of Ethics all developers must adhere to?

Apple and, to a lesser extent, Google do provide guidelines and rules for app development. These rules do cross slightly into ethical grounds. One such rule which QuizUp likely violated was 17.1: "Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user's prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used." These rules are often hard to enforce, however, most of the time requiring user complaints to spur any action. With the sheer number of new apps being submitted every day, it becomes quickly overwhelming. Neither Apple nor Google currently have the resources in place to thoroughly check for privacy concerns. When issues are found and receive enough attention, then the publishers react.

If there were a universal Developer's Code of Ethics, what are the main points you think it should entail?

Treat your users, customers, competitors, investors, and partners, as you would like to be treated if you were in their shoes. Ethics are hard to define and I don't believe its something that can be legislated successfully. Sadly, we live in a world where things often need to be spelled out in a bit more detail. I would love to see a group or advisory board from across the industry come together and provide some ethical guidelines for software--much as we do with standardized protocols like OpenGL or TCP/IP. It wouldn't likely be possible for this group to have any real power to enforce anything, which would limit the effectiveness and purpose of it from the start.

And what should be the punishment for developers found breaking this Code?

The U.S. government has previously fined software companies for ethical type violations, such as Path. The usefulness of these types of deterrents remains to be seen. Banning of a specific company or developer has been very rare, the most notable case being when Apple brought down a lifetime ban to Khalid Shaikh, pulling the 1,400 apps he had previously published.

We've reached the point where apps are becoming an essential part in our daily lives. Do you think it's time for the U.S. and other governments to set up legal guidelines regulating the developer community?

We have a fair amount of legislation already in regards to privacy and even specifically to software from decades of web and desktop apps. These same regulations apply equally well to mobile apps. I don't think there is a need for any more government oversight here; it often gets out of hand quickly and doesn't apply equally to all organizations. Our legislative representatives in the U.S. have proven time and time again that they lack the technical understanding to handle the regulation of the Internet or software.

Developers, users, and media should form a self-regulating industry. Companies should be held accountable by their users for unethical behavior. When people stop supporting businesses that are not doing the right thing, those businesses will adapt or fail. Right now, the vast majority of users don't care about their privacy and will even occasionally attack those exposing privacy concerns. This needs to change before anything real can happen. Class action lawsuits as well as small claim cases provide users a path of recourse if necessary.

One last question: Do you feel most developers are ethical?

Yes, I believe most developers are ethical, but I also believe that most businesses are not. Humans by nature tend to generally err on the side of good, but when these same humans are grouped those actions can change drastically. Developers tend to be people who strive to solve problems and understand technology, most of whom would do the job for free if they could find a way to live. Businesses on the other hand tend to want to expand and increase revenue; the easiest way has always been and will always be to cut corners and toe the line of unethical tactics.

After acquiring Philadelphia-based Neiman Group, Boston ad agency Allen & Gerritsen found itself with two teams of employees separated by 300 miles. It presented an increasingly common problem: When colleagues don't work in the same location, how can you foster a sense of not just collaboration, but camaraderie as well? Using its internal hacker space, A&G cobbled together hardware, sensors, and code to build something to help bridge the divide.

To do this, A&G Labs built Pic Tap Toe, an interactive rethinking of tic tac toe designed to give their Boston and Philly employees a way to connect in a context that's more fun than web-based collaboration software and conference calls. The game uses nine RFID sensors, and an Arduino Yun housed in a custom-built wooden box to control the board, which is made up nine LCD screens affixed to the wall of a common area of the firm's downtown Philadelphia office. Using a game piece equipped with an RFID chip, the Philly team places their "X," which has the additional effect of displaying an Instagram photo snapped by somebody from the Philly office in the same on-screen square. In Boston, an identical setup invites colleagues to place their "O," a pattern that repeats until either Boston or Philly wins (or there's a tie).

"We wanted to make it a gateway between the two offices," says George Ward, A&G's senior vice president of innovation. "Whether or not it bonds us closer, I think it's too early to tell. It's fun, though. People like playing it."

How They Built Pic Tap Toe

Pulling up the lid of the electronic game board, Ward reveals its guts: Wiring, RFID readers and the Arduino Yun, which wirelessly communications with a custom game controller application built by developers at A&G. That app, which runs on one of the Mac Minis hidden in a small room behind the screens, detects which RFID sensor was triggered by the game piece. Based on that knowledge, the controller application sends a data request to the browser using a Web Sockets API called Pusher. A database of staffers' Instagram photos--collected via a Node.js-powered module built by the agency's dev team--is queried for new images, one of which is displayed on screen with each team's turn.

"People's Instagrams are so personal," notes Ward. "Not only do we have a game connecting the offices here with the offices there, but you start to see the name of a coworker and go, 'Oh, they have three young boys. Oh, they bicycle a lot.' You can start to know hobbies and interests. That's one of the interesting things. That personal side of it."

It's true. Pic Tac Toe would function just fine without the photographs and Instagram usernames that pop up on the game board. But as you play the game, you see why this addition was worth the trouble. By building and querying that database of everyone's photos, the game adds a uniquely personal flavor: Here's a tiny slice of a colleague's life, from their own vantage point. Perhaps it's a shot of their lunch or a selfie, to take two common Instagram cliches. Or maybe it's a creatively composed shot of the side of a building in downtown Boston, giving you a glimpse of how they see the world.

The gameboard itself was also built in-house. After visiting nearby University of the Arts to use its laser woodcutter, the team assembled the box that houses the technical guts powering the gameplay. Elevated just high enough above the wooden box is a plastic apparatus with nine recessed slots into which the game's small wooden game piece fit snugly with each turn. The height of this component was just one of the seemingly minor details that had to be tweaked with precision: If the game piece hovers too closely above the RFID readers, they would all be triggered, resulting in some pretty chaotic gameplay. The box also sports a small speaker and an arcade-style button that initiates and resets games.

What R&D Means For A Creative Agency

For A&G, Pic Tap Toe offers something fun to do at Friday happy hours, when staffers shut down their workstations, crack open a beer, and socialize in the lounge. Except now, in both offices, they interact with colleagues who are normally a five-hour drive away. The game is also, as Ward isn't shy about pointing out, a good way to impress clients. As a digital ad agency, A&G is eager to show off a culture that it hopes will be perceived as both innovative and creative. It's the same reason it sends out holiday cards featuring interactive holograms and regularly tinkers with things like Leap Motion and Google Glass.

"We're just swirling around to understand the tech so we can offer a solution," says Ward, noting that gestural control and RFID were big on his list of must-try technology for 2013. "We're not just hedging it on one. And that's the purpose of the lab: R&D. To be confident, play around, get everybody conversant."

This time next year, each office's nine screens may well be displaying something entirely different. Ward is intrigued by the idea of connecting the offices using ambient, real-time data displayed on a massive dashboard. In Boston, the screens might show tweets from Philly-based employees and run some kind of basic sentiment analysis on them. Above that might be the current weather in Philly. Maybe some more social media posts. Back in the Philadelphia office, similar data would be displayed about Boston. Ward talks about putting sensors in everybody's chairs so colleagues in each sister city can get an at-a-glance idea about who's in the office 300 miles away.

"We want to respect employee's privacy," Ward says, acknowledging the potentially creepy vibe of an employee tracking its employees. "But if there was something we could put in the desks, or use the key fobs they use to get in the building. Or there may be more data visualizations to get the pulse and vibe of what's happening in the sister city.

"We're still exploring."