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Big Brands Are Counting On Startups To Guide Them Through What's Cool At CES

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Almost anyone who has ever been to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas knows it has a mixed reputation. Sure, it's where tech innovations like high-def TV and the Blu-ray disc debuted. But it can also be a logistical nightmare as 150,000 attendees struggle to discover the latest tech trends while managing a sea of hotels, convention booths, taxis, and parties.

Many of the world's biggest brands come to the event and executives say it's frustrating for them to find the emerging technologies that can make their teams work better. Now, they're using startups to cut the wheat from the chaff. Executives from Unilever and Univision will be guided by partners such as Buzzstarter, a marketing startup based in San Francisco, and 500 Startups, one of the country's leading accelerators, to discover innovation in mobile and social media.

"We are always keeping our eye out for the next big thing," says Lou Paik, Unilever's shopping marketing director. "Startups are the best partners for this. They are our eyes and ears on the ground."

The practice began a few years back, as execs from Unilever began touring with startup partners. As word spread about this, other companies got into the act to find even more "plugged-in" opinions on tech innovation. In the past, some execs visiting conferences like CES traditionally relied on PR firms to show them around.

Now even CES itself has created sections like Eureka Park, which showcases over 500 emerging companies.

"Brands get to bypass the hype and go straight for solutions relevant to their business," says Alex Gold, cofounder of Buzzstarter, which helps companies access emerging marketing channels. "At the same time, startups get to watch and learn from the masters. Startups get to see in real time what potential customers want."

What's So Confusing? Mobile

One of the more critical areas brands are looking for help in is mobile advertising. Take Unilever as an example.

"They are looking to startups as an avenue to get straight to solutions that change the game," Gold says. As a startup founder, he relishes the chance to show executives new tech that is disruptive. "This year at CES there are companies providing all kinds of solutions, like new hardware with bendable screens that give proximity-based brand messaging."

Some of the companies on display provide location-based software that ties directly into user data. That could be useful for food and personal care brands. "We're touring CES to get a leg up," Paik says.

The idea is, with connected devices like Fitbit, Nike's FuelBand, and smartwatches at the show, possibilities open up. It may be reasonable for the company to create integrated recipes or calorie trackers. One idea: Smartwatch or Fitbit users can receive recipe information at the right place and time. That could be beneficial for a brand like Unilever's Country Crock Margarine.

Emerging Social Media

Big brands are also looking to change the way they market themselves. "Unilever is actively looking for technology solutions that give access to new online marketing channels," Paik says. Companies like Unilever use banner advertising or even Twitter and Facebook.

However, by touring CES, big brands find companies like Buzzstarter that go beyond and provide marketing on emerging channels like Quora, Pinterest, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, and publisher and blog networks.

"This past year more than 80% of all marketers said they planned to invest more in emerging channels. Their use is growing fast and many companies are exploring these options," says Gold.

CES gives brands access to options like these and dozens of others. Startups cut through the noise and help the big boys find relevance. According to Gold, "brands are essentially using startups as 'external innovation teams' since they're already in the trenches on a day-to-day basis."


A Former Mars Rover Scientist Says The Boomer Generation Could Be Independent Forever

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When the Mars Rover was in production in the '90s, NASA senior computer scientist Rich Levinson noticed a limitation in its ability to make reactive decisions. The Rover could avoid falling off a cliff, but it didn't have the capability to backtrack or plan other routes of navigation. That's when he learned about a little-known term and much-needed brain process called "executive function."

According to the National Center for Disabilities, executive function is a set of mental processes needed to perform activities such as planning, organizing, strategizing, paying attention to and remembering details, and managing time and space. Ranging from mild to severe, the cognitive impairment of executive function affects more than 16 million people according to the most recent CDC report. The growing senior population is particularly at risk as they are expected to comprise 20% of the total U.S. population by the year 2050, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

At the time, executive function wasn't talked about much among clinicians, let alone the public, yet Levinson connected the dots.

"I was looking at the brain's operational properties at the same time as we were studying autonomy for robotics and realized there was a connection between executive function and the robotic systems that we were trying to combine planning and reaction to Artificial Intelligence," he recollects.

"If you increase your planning time, you can explore more possibilities and then compile them down into reflexes. Then when you get into a situation where you have to make a very quick reactive response, you actually can do a little more." In 1996 Levinson started NASA spin-off BrainAid to address those very problems.

Enter Planning and Execution Assistant and Trainer (PEAT), Brainaid's customizable smart-planning software. Unlike other task managing systems, PEAT automatically reorganizes a person's schedule based on their real-time task approval and customizable app integration. PEAT's cloud-based dashboard allows clinicians to view and share data collected from users' actions. The clinical integration helped teachers of autism organization PACE log outbursts and behaviors of autism students.

PEAT's customizable plug-in strategies help patients in overwhelming situations by selecting icons that walks them through therapist-suggested prompts such as "Wait five seconds before you speak," or "take a walk."

"We log when the patient presses the reaction icon and select a coping strategy so the therapist knows when they are doing the strategies on their own," Levinson says.

Entering its seventh year funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, PEAT is helping ameliorate another four-lettered cognitive killer--PTSD. The Palo Alto Department of Veterans Affairs' clinical neuropsychologist Harriet Katz Zeiner says PEAT is a much-desired invisible aid for the vets. "We don't find PEAT being rejected like others [cognitive aids] because it's great at being unobtrusive in a social setting," she says. "It's not like a cane and the world doesn't haven't to know that it truly is an assistant."

PEAT began integrating with wearable assistance in 2007, with an experimental RFID reader bracelet called iBracelet that would fail but set the stage for a new wave of wearables. Today, BrainAid is working with the AFrame Digital smartwatch to monitor heart rates and send the data to PEAT, which will then automatically cue the user of coping strategies. Last summer, the company began integrating with the Pebble smartwatch, which acts as a leash for mobile devices and displays tasks on its simple interface.

By reducing alliance on motor skills, PEAT's voice input is a game-changer, especially for physically handicapped veterans who can't use touch screens. But while voicing commands is one thing, holding a conversation is another.

"Siri does a search command but to have a conversation I expect you to reply and there's an overall structure to it," Levinson explains. "We're trying to build a conversational assistant that understands what having a conversation about adding a task is actually like."

BrainAid is also prepping in-home sensor systems for two veterans where they'll begin a case study this month. Strategically placed motion sensors on household items such as on medicine boxes, doors, and refrigerator pouches will signal PEAT when moved.

"If by a certain time of the day, the meds box hasn't opened, they'll get a cue, otherwise we won't have to cue them to take their meds," Levinson says. Zeiner said these sensors could help with forgetfulness. "A lot of times people will forget where they are and PEAT can remind you what room you're in," she says.

Zeiner also says it takes a big load off of caregivers who often experience "caregiver burnout"--a cause of high elderly abuse rates. "As you walk out the door, it can remind you to bring your keys, cane, and other things," she says. "When the schedule starts slipping, the caregiver doesn't have to take care of two schedules." Levinson also hopes to use motion sensors to monitor nighttime wandering.

In-home and wearable sensors are just the kind of sustainable, stigma-free assistance that Aging2.0 cofounder Katy Fike wants in new aging accelerator GENerator. Fike says independence is key to sustaining the growing senior population. "Right now we [seniors and caretakers] tend to go to things like 24-hour care or move into memory care units and we're going to need solutions like PEAT to maintain our independence because our health care system cannot support that scale at the rate we're going right now," Fike says. She also thinks Levinson's ideas could benefit people outside of the disabled community.

"There's great potential to help a lot of people--not just the cognitive impaired. Since it started with the hardest users first, it can have many uses for planning," she says. "But you couldn't do it the other way around."

With the help of Fike and GENerator, Levinson is looking for more consumer-friendly tweaks and funding to expand his currently high-end business model without losing sight of the bigger, brainier picture.

"The AI community said, 'Let's try to put this [real-time planning and reacting] together for a few years' then said, 'Ah, that's tough' and put it down so now we have these two different camps doing two different things," Levinson says fervently. "The theoretical concepts of 'Can we really take the computer science and the neuropsychology and build a better model of the human frontal lobe?' is still a goal but mostly now focusing on it working for people," he says. "But they [AI community] still have never really, in my mind, resolved this issue."

Where I Think Gaming Will Go In 2014

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In the 1980s I occupied a front-row seat for the drama that was the Seattle tech boom. Friends and family created successful startups in the '80s and the go-go '90s. (My then-husband, an excellent entrepreneur, was a cofounder of two of those startups: Aldus and Visio.) After close observation of the rollercoaster IPOs and acquisitions and later the dotcom disappointments, I like to think I developed an eye for trends. In my own industry, video gaming, I'm starting to see a few.

Here are my predictions for near-future of videogame-related trends:

  1. Despite the doomsayers, the new consoles will sell well, but they will never again be the only big thing. Dedicated gamers will buy an Xbox One or a PlayStation 4 to get the even-better graphics, motion capture, updated controllers, and blockbuster games, while other folks will continue to play their backlog of games on older consoles and computers. Mobile gaming will step up its evil campaign to dominate your life, but it, too, will be just another gaming option among many. You'll find yourself playing more and more on multiple screens as gaming devices converge with each other and with your TV and your computers. In other words, I agree with Phil Harris, a Microsoft executive who said in Eurogamer: "You're seeing a lot of growth in console but you're also seeing a lot of growth in gaming, full stop, whether it's on mobile phones, tablets, or consoles and a number of new entrants. So the games market overall is in an incredibly strong position."
  2. Games and play will lead the way as virtual worlds and reality overlap. New devices such as Kinect's motion capture with Microsoft's IllumiRoom 3-D projection, virtual-reality glasses, and Oculus Rift (which just got a $75 million investment) will begin to take gaming into realm of Star Trek holodecks. While these technologies will have vital applications in medicine and other fields, gaming will drive the early commercialization. (Personally, I can't wait to swing a sword in the first virtual-reality Legend of Zelda game.)
  3. Gaming will get even more social and take us with it. Already, more than 60% of gamers play games with others, either in person or online. With the rising popularity of online services like Xbox Live, PlayStation Network (with 110 million accounts), and Steam, not to mention the already crazy-popular, massively multiplayer online computer games like World of Warcraft and League of Legends, gaming with others will be the norm.
  4. Microtransactions will shake up the revenue models and shake down gamers (or make some gamers feel that way, anyhow). It's not just mobile games that make you pay to keep playing. Now even Grand Theft Auto is incorporating microtransactions as a way to increase revenues and keep people playing...and paying. Some gamers hate this trend; others appreciate an option to try out a game at a low price, or for free, and pay only for what they value.
  5. The fight over institutional sexism in gaming will come to a head as women kick a$$ in public. In 2012, Anita Sarkeesian was the target of a group of harassers who threatened to rape and kill her on Twitter--just for putting up a Kickstarter campaign fund her study of sexism in gaming--and and Twitter tried to ignore the issue. This past year saw several controversies over sexism in the gaming world that rose to the level of mainstream outrage. The #1reasonwhy Twitter tag called more attention to the fight against sexism and rape culture. Controversy over sexism at the world's largest gaming convention, PAX, raged in 2013 and will go on in 2014. It may be too early to predict better treatment of women in videogame culture and in the industry, but it's safe to say the battle will continue.
  6. Minecraft and its ilk will take over the world and the U.S. education system. (Well, maybe not in 2014, but soon.) Educational games are everywhere now, partly because of the growth in educational mobile games. But educational games are only part of the picture. More and more teachers are aware of the deep engagement games bring to learning, and they're bringing commercial games like Portal (physics), Minecraft (math), and World of Warcraft (team-building and leadership) into their classrooms.
  7. Games will drive the effort to make us all coders. Recently we've woken up from our stupor and realized it's a problem for America that 90% of all schools fail to offer programming in their curricula. A bunch of initiatives have commenced to push coding into the mainstream, and for kids games are the gateway. Last week at Seattle's Amazon headquarters, I attended a session of Coder Dojo, a grassroots movement for teaching kids to program their own games. Seldom have I seen so much enthusiasm for serious work. When President Obama, Shakira, and Ashton Kutcher (among others) participate in a video to promote everyone learning how to code, you know it's a movement that's here to stay.

And, overall, gaming will continue to enter the mainstream, driven by one simple fact: Gamers beget gamers. People who played videogames as kids in the '80s are becoming parents now and beginning to play with their kids. As a result of gamers growing up, we'll also see more videogame music at the symphony, videogame art in our museums, videogame tournaments in our sports arenas, and videogames in our homes, schools, workplaces, and even churches. Parents will play with their kids, and look out--gamer-grandparents may be the big trend in 2015.

What You Need To Learn To Code In 2014

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"Everyone should learn to code!" exclaimed the Internet in 2013. While some disagreed, services like Codecademy and Code School are making the learning-to-code experience different from the days of reading thick programming books and attending classes.

But even with these friendly UIs and encouragement from the community, learning new concepts in coding--new languages, patterns, frameworks, or just learning to code at all--can be daunting, particularly when it comes to making your new knowledge stick. Here's a crash course in how to prepare.

You Can't Build A House Without A Foundation

Even seasoned coders can relate: Sometimes a new job or project requires learning an entire new language. This often comes along with a deadline, limited learning time, and additional pressure when something big (a job! a raise! a product launch!) is at stake. Most coders prefer the "dive right in" approach to new languages, which can lead to problems if the coder is missing essential information on the new language.

This can cause frustration, particularly when the new language just doesn't seem to work the way the old one did, and programmers using new languages often follow patterns from the languages they already know, creating bad code that will need to be refactored later.

Experienced programmers do have a leg up on the n00bs, however: a frame of reference. They've hopefully already learned concepts of programming and have been thinking in if/else statements and other hallmarks of computer logic for some time, and they can apply those pieces of knowledge to learning the new language. The new online tools for learning programming emphasize the same "code first, learn later" approach that experienced coders prefer. While this approach does provide a way for learners to get over their initial fears of actually writing code and getting their feet wet, it doesn't build the new skills onto any existing knowledge, which may make it more difficult to stick in a learner's long-term memory.

In order to retain new skills, new and experienced programmers need to follow the principle of Elaborative Rehearsal, encoding new concepts by building on top of existing knowledge.

When I learned my first programming language, JavaScript, the only knowledge I already had to relate these new concepts I was learning came mostly from fuzzy memories of 9th-grade geometry class. Object-oriented JavaScript didn't fit in with the bits and pieces of JavaScript I'd previously used to add little effects to websites. I would often learn something, gain what I thought was an understanding of it, and then completely forget what I'd learned a week later and become frustrated by the experience. Even after I had a solid grasp of the language, concepts not present in JavaScript (like "compiling") would come up in conversations with the programming community and leave me confused.

The next language I attempted was SCHEME, for no other reason than my local hackerspace was starting up a group to study MIT's SICP book. At first I loved it; the book covered some of those principles of programming I'd missed when learning JavaScript. But eventually I became so bogged down trying to figure out all the math they used for their examples I couldn't keep up. I was drowning in Calculus. I didn't have the prerequisite knowledge for the information, and I found the entire experience frustrating.

The information I did manage to pick up from SICP proved useful recently when I took it upon myself to begin learning Objective-C. Not only did I understand concepts like variables and functions from learning JavaScript, but I now understood the purpose of a compiler and I'd brushed up on math I hadn't thought about since high school. Learning Objective-C was much easier than learning JavaScript because I had more information to build my new knowledge upon.

That said, some of the differences between the two languages tripped me up at times when I wanted to fall back into familiar JavaScript territory. I was still thinking like a JavaScript developer and trying to force the new language to fit into my existing knowledge, in other words, trying to code in Objective-C using a JavaScript pattern. If I'd had more experience with logical and abstract thinking, math, and communication I would have been able to attach concepts in Objective-C back to that solid framework of knowledge instead of trying to force the Objective-C shaped peg into the JavaScript-shaped hole.

I identified logical thinking, abstract thinking, math, and communication as the skills that build a framework for learning to code. Resources for learning programming languages are abundant, and resources for building a framework exist as well. You just need to know where to look. I've compiled a list of resources for each of the building blocks.

If You Can Think Logically, Then You Can Write Code

Computers are dumb. They do exactly what you tell them to do, no more and no less. Often when a computer isn't behaving the way I expect, I remind myself it all boils down to ones and zeros. Reminding myself that the computer's behavior is pure logic helps me gain perspective. Programming languages are based on logic, and understanding how an if-else statement works before attempting to code is essential. Forall x is an excellent resource for learning the concepts of logic. For more practice, play games like chess, soduku, and logic puzzles. A large portion of the LSAT includes logic puzzles, and you can find practice puzzles all over the Internet.

Abstract Thinking and Double Entendres--I Mean Meanings

Programming isn't generally thought of as a "creative" pursuit and I think this is misleading and doesn't give programmers enough credit. You probably wouldn't know from the thousands of lines of monospaced code programmers produce, but there's a lot of creative thinking going on between the programmers' ears.

Programmers receive abstract concepts from managers, designers, and clients and have to turn those ideas into a working component. This usually involves breaking something down from the big picture into doable chunks, and then completing those chunks while keeping the big picture in mind.

Plus, not everything's going to work right the first time around. Sometimes your first idea doesn't solve the problem in the right way, so you have to come up with a second idea. And even a third. And then once you get it working, you realize it won't integrate with the component your colleague built so you need to come up with an entirely new concept, while reworking as much of your existing code in as possible so you can limit your rework.

One way most people, non-programmers included, regularly use abstract thinking is through idioms, and playing with these nuggets of language can help strengthen abstract thinking skills. Instead of throwing around familiar idioms, find some obscure ones and see if you can figure out what they mean. I also found an idiom-related game called Wise and Otherwise, where you make up endings to old idioms to fool your friends into thinking your ending is the correct one. You'll be "thinking outside the box" in no time.

(Bonus: Can you find all the idioms I've used in this article?)

Math, It's What's For Dinner

Your teachers were right: You will use that stuff someday, if you're coding, that is. My SCHEME-learning experience made me wish I'd taken more advanced math classes, or at least paid more attention in the ones I was in. Even as a front-end developer, I sometimes find myself needing to understand a math concept to complete a piece of code. I have yet to find a programming course, book, or online learning tool that doesn't involve mathematical formulas in their learning materials. If the word "slope" only brings about images of downhill skiing, you might want to brush up on some beginning Algebra. From there, you can move on to more advanced concepts. If you're a practicing programmer and want to work on your Algebra skills, try out some of the problems on Project Euler.

Math, particularly Geometry, also relates directly to logical thinking in the study of proofs, so you can kill two birds with one stone. The first time I came across an if-else statement when learning to code, I instantly thought back to the if/then statements that make up Geometrical proofs. And boom! The concept of if-else stuck. It's a big deal in programming--you're constantly comparing things and doing different actions based on the results. Thankfully, the Internet has a variety of resources for learning about proofs, for free!

Yes, Virginia, You Have To Talk To People

Solid communication skills aren't usually associated with being a good programmer, but the best programmers can expertly receive and understand communication from others, such as in the form of user stories, and turn them into code. The reverse is also true: Programmers know how to effectively communicate their ideas and solutions with others. They need to be able to understand what you did, how you did it, and why you did it that way. This skill can be practiced in other areas of life, even things as simple as what you ate for dinner.

I also recommend reading mystery novels: Try and figure out who did it, how, and why before it's revealed in the book. This will help you in the future--sometimes you need to read in between the lines and pick up on clues as to what the client or manager really wants. Then, explain the plot to a friend and make sure you leave them with a solid understanding of the culprit, the motive, and the method.

See The Forest And The Trees

The idea that programmers have a unique way of thinking about problem solving, and even the world in general, isn't a new concept. Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving is a popular book that does exactly what it says on the tin--teaches you how to understand what it is you're trying to solve and creatively solve the problem through code. Chock-full of real C++ examples, Think Like a Programmer is for people who already have some coding experience under their belt. More approachable for the n00bs, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold, goes into communication betwixt humans and computers and among computers themselves. It provides a solid big picture understanding of computers, helpful for anyone looking to build code.

One thing I cannot recommend enough for new and even experienced programmers is finding a mentor. Having someone more experienced than you available to encourage you and provide answers when Google fails is invaluable. Mentors can come from all over the place. Most of mine have been coworkers, but I met one on the WordPress support forums. The programming community is full of people who love sharing what they know and you'll most likely run into would-be mentors just by interacting with the community. That said, here are some ideas for taking a more proactive approach.

Because Your Kid Is The Smartest

Teaching kids to code is the new hotness, and there are already tons of resources to help them learn, from robots and Lego kits to programming languages designed for kids. If your child is interested in this popular skill (or you want them to be) you can help them out by building them a foundation, too. Here are a ton of ideas for helping kids learn abstract thinking. As a kid, I loved solving riddles, and I'm sure that practice helped my abstract thinking and by extension my programming as an adult. Of course, kids learn math in school, but parents can always add to the equation. And what's more fun than doing math? Playing games with math, of course! Kids might enjoy playing these games so much they'll want to learn how to make their own.

The New Way Things Work is a well-known book that details how machines, like computers function. I should note that it was published in 1998, so its relevance to current technology is waning. Computer Science Unplugged is an online resource for teaching kids about computer science. It's aimed at teachers, but I'm certain it's totally legal for parents to utilize it as well.

Programming Doesn't Exist in a Vacuum

Think of it like the training an athlete goes through: They are working out the muscles they'll need to excel at their sport. A football player doesn't just practice throwing, kicking, and tackling over and over again. As a programmer, you're working out your brain and getting it rock-hard to tackle new languages and skills. Of course, there's no law saying that logical and abstract thinking paired with math and communication skills are necessary for learning code, but give it a try, and see if working on these skills also makes you a better programmer.

I challenge you to spend 25% of the time you would spend learning and practicing new programming languages working on the skills mentioned here and see if your coding and your learning abilities improve. That way when you actually do get your feet wet you'll have a life jacket of knowledge to keep you afloat.

Armchair Astronomers Help Discover Why Galaxies Stop Producing Stars

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Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is on a crash course with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. The collision won't occur for around 5 billion years but it's possible that such crashes, or mergers, play some part in "quenching" star-forming, spiral galaxies, turning them into dead elliptical galaxies. The theory suggests that this process takes place, but scientists are still in the process of obtaining observational evidence to support it.

Mergers aren't the only possible reason that galaxies stop forming stars. Supernovae explosions and supermassive black holes (known as Active Galactic Nuclei or AGN) are also on the suspect list. So how to solve this intergalatic whodunnit? Astronomer Laura Trouille has mustered a posse of citizen scientists to help find out.

Finding motivated members of the public to participate in a crowdsourced science project wasn't going to be sufficient to make the project successful. "We really needed to put the technology in place that would enable and support what people were doing," says Trouille. "It's really important to any science collaboration to be able to discuss the plots, analyze them together as a team, and move forward as a team. Those tools needed to be in place before we could even carry out an experiment like this." So the team developed GitHub-inspired software called Zooniverse Tools to let citizen and "salaried" scientists collaborate.

Galaxy Zoo

Trouille is an astronomer working at Northwestern University and the Adler Planetarium and her groundbreaking project is called Galaxy Zoo Quench. In certain fields like astronomy, there is just too much data for professional scientists to analyze, even with help from automated tools. Some problems require a human review step before certain types of analysis can begin.

The original Galazy Zoo project, which started in 2007, harnessed human beings to classify images of galaxies, for example to identify whether a galaxy is spherical or elliptical. 150,000 people contributed 50 million classifications in the project's first year. Some project participants didn't stop at classification. A Dutch scoolteacher named Hanny van Arkel noticed a set of small, green round objects, which fellow participants helped to analyze. These previously unknown galaxies later became known as green peas. Van Arkel also discovered another new type of object, a ghost remnant of an active black hole interacting with the gas it stripped away from its original host galaxy. It's now known as Hanny's Voorwerp (Hanny's object).

Galaxy Zoo's intrepid citizen scientists organized themselves via discussion boards to work on their discoveries. Galaxy Zoo Quench wants to formally involve them in the entire scientific process. Volunteers not only participate by classifying galaxies, but analyze the results in collaboration with the professional science team and will write a scientific paper based on the results.

Zooniverse Tools

To make all this possible, the scientists, salaried and otherwise, needed new software. Zooniverse had access to lots of additional data about galaxies which wasn't necessary to run the core Galaxy Zoo classification project. Being able to query and analyze this data would allow participants to independently investigate questions like the correlation between galaxies of a particular type and the age of the black holes at their centers.

Arfon Smith is one of the founders of Zooniverse, the website which hosts Galaxy Zoo and dozens of other citizen science projects, and he also served as its CTO. "We had nowhere to expose that information to people," says Smith. "So out of this came a desire to build an environment where you could start to delve into the some of the data behind the projects and that's basically what Tools is. There are lots of common tasks: plotting, tables, maps. When you have grabbed some data and plotted it, the dashboard is shareable within the community. Anyone who gets that URL gets a clone of that thing. There's always going to be a point where you want to pull down the data and do something in R or Matlab, but there's a whole bunch you can do that's quick and easy and will help you understand if what you are looking at is interesting. That's where Tools gets us to."

Zooniverse was already using MongoDB to store the the heterogeneous data required for its various projects and exposed a common API which was used by the projects. Zooniverse Tools was built on top.

Extreme Citizen Scientists

Galaxy Zoo Quench is using Zooniverse Tools and a collaborative writing environment called Authorea (also used by physicists at CERN) to enable its scientific work. The research issue being addressed is of a similar level of difficulty to a Masters project which might form the starting project for a PhD.

The first stage, like Galaxy Zoo, was classification. Post-quenched galaxies are rare but Galaxy Zoo Quench created a sample of 3,002 quenched galaxies and a control sample of the same number of non-quenched galaxies with a similar total stellar mass and redshift (the light from an object moving away from the observer appears to increase in wavelength shifting to the red end of the spectrum). 1,200 participants answered a series of questions helping to identify the characteristics of the galaxy's morphologies. A smaller group of around 250 participants then started to analyze them using Zooniverse Tools.

There was a huge range in the ability and experience of the volunteers when it came to exploring the data. Some volunteers seemed to be immediately comfortable. Others needed guidance, which the science team provided via a series of tutorials and summaries of relevant scientific papers.

"Anecdotally, we have a mixture of people who have careers in a technical field but they were not astronomers," says Trouille. "We have one person who has a really deep understanding of statistical analysis, so he has been an integral part of the research team. There's quite a good population of stay-at-home mothers who have always been interested in science and if they have an hour here or there they get online."

The citizen scientists spent several months exploring the data and sharing their findings with the salaried scientists and each other on the project's discussion boards. Then one of them stumbled across something interesting.

"One of my favorite examples is someone who didn't have a background in the technical side," says Trouille. "She posted one of our major plot results. The X axis is galaxy mass. The Y axis shows whether the galaxy has signatures of having collided with another galaxy. From her data you could see that there's a very weird statistical difference between our post-quenched galaxy samples, especially at the higher mass end. Those galaxies have a much higher likelihood of having undergone a major merger. It's a clear suggestion that major mergers are one mechanism for shutting off star formation." The team is starting work on a research paper documenting their results.

Science And Social Computing

One intruiging issue for future Zooniverse projects is how to best combine automated techniques like Machine Learning with human input, a field known as Social Computing. In fact, at least one Zooniverse project, Galaxy Zoo Supernova, has already automated itself out of existence.

"They would survey the sky every night with a telescope in Panama and they'd get about 50,000 candidates things which could be supernovae, " says Smith. "They'd cull about 49,000 of those and were left with around a few hundred to a thousand every night. It was a mixture of supernovae, variable stars, asteroids. All of these things look like supernovae unless your algorithms are incredibly good, and they often rely on a lot of additional information. That project after about a year and a half put itself out of business, because the team used the dataset from the project to train their algorithms to behave like the Zoo project."

There are some problems, however, machine and human brainpower can be combined to get the best results. The Planethunters project, for example, uses data from the Kepler satellite to find new planets. When a planet passes in front of a star, there's a dip in the star's brightness. There are accurate computer algorithms which can find elliptical planetary systems but citizen scientists have found more exotic objects like Planet Hunters 1 (PH1) which the computer algorithms didn't recognize. "What's definitely interesting for the future is the human computer interaction," says Trouille. "You have your computer algorithms but then have human eyes look through the data to see what has been missed and teach the algorithms what the humans have learnt."

Another strategy is to have an algorithm optimize the allocation of data to the human volunteers. A paper from Microsoft research used the original Galazy Zoo data but developed a dynamic model of the ability level and availability of the various volunteers to determine the optimal allocation of images to volunteers. The researchers estimated that the same classification fidelity could be achieved with only 25% of the classification events from the original project. Zooniverse plans to use the system, which is called CrowdSynth, in a future Zooniverse project.

But for now the focus of Galaxy Zoo Quench is to complete the last stage of its collaboration between citizen and salaried scientists by writing a scientific paper and having it accepted by a peer-reviewed journal. "As with any new experiment, you have no idea whether it's going to work," says Trouille, "whether people are interested, have the ability and motivation, so that's been a very happy surprise, that there is clearly interest both on the science teams and very much on the public side to take part in the whole process of science."

The IPO Wasn't The Only Big Thing Twitter Did Last Year

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Once Twitter announced its IPO, the company began dominating the tech and business headlines. Amid concerns of the company still being in the red, investors gravitated toward the initial offering. While Twitter's ability to pull in global revenue remains a concern, the company racked up some key acquisitions this year, improved its advertising offerings, made significant changes to its platform across all apps, and added 11 new Twitter Certified Products to extend the platform's value for businesses with more engaging experiences.

Acquisitions

Although initially acquired back in 2012, video clip service Vine has become one of the most famous acquisitions for Twitter spurred by its momentous growth. Launched in January 2013, the loopable six-second video sharing service immediately took off as a mobile-only platform with deep integration in Twitter. Twitter later blocked rival Instagram's display in Twitter Cards once its competitor Facebook picked that company up.

And with the launch of Nielsen's Twitter TV Ratings, that measures the total activity and reach of TV-related conversations on Twitter, it only made sense that some of Twitter's other acquisitions in 2013 hint at the company's continued strategy to remain relevant in the Social TV conversation. With the acquisitions of Bluefin Labs and Trendrr, Twitter not only gains a foothold in being the lead player in analyzing social TV chatter, but it also gains some content engagement tools for developers. For instance, with Trendrr's Curatorr developers can create rich real-time social engagement experiences for on-air, online, and in-app. Curratorr enables conversation discovery, display, and moderation for TV, media, and advertising.

Any investment Twitter makes into the Social TV market could prove a great investment given how the conversation on the platform about live TV has grown significantly in the past two years--19 million unique users in the U.S. composed 263 million tweets about live TV in Q2 2013, according to SocialGuide.

As well, in a move to expand its mobile advertising offerings, Twitter scooped up MoPub, a company that helps advertisers manage their mobile advertising inventory.

Twitter also acquired Crashlytics, a mobile app crash diagnostics company that many companies rely on to learn how their apps are performing on mobile devices. This acquisition highlights Twitter's intentions to do more in the mobile space in terms of app development and deployment.

Advertising Offerings

Focusing on its need to generate more advertising revenue now that its a public company, Twitter homed in on some key targeting opportunities for advertisers.

For a long time, demographic targeting on Twitter was based on the interest graph, but then came the launch of keyword targeting this year, enabling advertisers to reach users based on words used in recent tweets and with tweets they engage with. Then Twitter added broad match to keyword targeting, along with sentiment filtering and negative keyword match.

Advertisers now also have the ability to schedule tweets, either organic or promoted, for specific dates and times up to a year in advance. This aids in setting up product launches and overall promotions.

Enhanced mobile targeting was later rolled out allowing advertisers to segment users on iOS and Android by OS version, specific device, and Wi-Fi connectivity. Previously mobile targeting could only be conducted by operating system.

A final targeting feature added in 2013 was a Tailored Audiences re-targeting feature that lets advertisers reach users who have shown interest in a brand or category when not using Twitter. Ads can now be connected to information from web browser cookies. Advertisers can share browser-related details with Twitter that can be matched to a specific user. The information can include where the user is coming from, as well as the sites they visit to offer the user a relevant advertising experience.

Twitter also added a TV conversation targeting tool for advertisers that will better help them target users who post about specific TV shows with promoted tweets, whether or not the advertiser is running a spot in the program.

In addition, there was the launch of Twitter Amplify, enabling real-time dual-screen sponsorships for advertisers with in-tweet video clips. Both broadcasters and advertisers can leverage this new feature, as witnessed during the NBA finals and other sporting events with replays and real-time plays.

With the MoPub acquisition came Twitter's foray into native advertising. The new product will enable thousands of mobile app publishers on MoPub's exchange to use in-stream ads relevant to the content the user is already experiencing. With predictions that the social native ad market will grow 93% to $4.57 billion by 2017, this move seems to be a promising ad category for Twitter.

Tango is one of the first partners to make use of MoPub's native advertising offering.

On top of all of these new advertising features, Twitter has also offered all advertisers conversion tracking tools and expanded its Promoted Account timeline format to all advertisers.

New Products, Services, and App Updates

While some app updates made complete sense and evolved Twitter's platform in terms of user experience, there were also enough mishaps that inspired scores of angry tweets.

It was terribly difficult to follow conversation threads on Twitter, so the company introduced a vertical signaler with the addition of blue lines to connect related tweets in a conversation. What this does is organize the Twitter feed better and link all tweets in a thread together, no matter what time they were tweeted.

Continuing an emphasis on the visual aspects of the platform, Twitter enabled inline photos and videos within user feeds, making it easier for users to access this content. In the past, users had to click through to see images and video. Photo capabilities are also being better integrated into the composition of tweets with a new feature that rolled out on the iOS app. Now when a user begins a tweet on their iPhone, their photo gallery will display instead of their keyboard. To switch to keyboard, all the user has to do is tap on the blank text box.

Other new features came to iOS, Android, TweetDeck for Web, Chrome, and PC that bring more focus to images within direct messages. Now there's a direct link to Direct Messages in the tab bar along with the ability to send photos inside DMs. Twitter's move comes as a strategy to combat the direct messaging feature enabled in Instagram, as well as the host of teen messaging services like Snapchat that enable such capabilities. Along with the addition of Activity and Discovery timelines, and an icon tab bar, including Notifications and Direct Messages, the major new redesign in Q3 also included swipeable timelines. With a lot of these new features, Twitter positions itself in the messaging app avalanche of apps that are quickly gaining steam, like WhatsApp.

Homing in on the platform's role in delivering critical information to people in times of crisis like Superstorm Sandy or the tsunami in Japan, the company released Twitter alerts, enabling various official organizations like FEMA and the American Red Cross visibility during a crisis so that users can sign up to the organization to receive special emergency pop-up notifications in-app or via text messages.

Also useful, but a little too aggressive for some users, was Twitter's attempt at recommended notifications. The feature was built based on an experimental account @MagicRecs, that sends instant, personalized recommendations for users and content via direct message. Eventually, Twitter rolled out the feature to users not following the experimental account as a push notification service.

A pretty unsuccessful product launch by Twitter this year was the release of Twitter #Music in March. Australian-based music data company We Are Hunted provided the technology for this service that leveraged the activity from musicians and music fans, filtering all of their music conversations into charts. In April, the service was launched as an app on iOS and rose to #6 on the App Store charts. Most used by Internet radio services that make use of the #NowPlaying hashtag, the product never really gained much traction and was closed down within six months of launching.

Developer Offerings

On their developer blog earlier this year, Zach Hofer-Shall, manager of the Twitter Certified Program, introduced 11 new Twitter Certified Products to help businesses easily find tools and services that can make them more successful on the platform. These products included Brandwatch, BuzzFinder, Curatorr, Engage Manager, Flowics, NTT DATA, Offerpop, Scup, TRUE TELLER SocialDesk, SocialGuide Intelligence, and Wayin. The continued expansion of this program is a signal to developers of the kinds of products Twitter wants them to build.

There were also some updates to Twitter Cards, including mobile app deep linking and the launch of new cards including App cards, Product cards, and Gallery cards. App cards show information about an app from the App Store or Google Play, including name, price, icon, and rating. Product Cards show an image and description, and devs can customize two more fields to include price or ratings info. Gallery cards show an album or collection of images through a preview of the photo gallery.

In a move to enable third parties to integrate with the Twitter platform, the company launched the Twitter Ads API. This allows dev partners to use their own tools to manage Twitter Ad campaigns while easily integrating into existing, cross-channel advertising management solutions.

Why Do I Suck So Badly At Technology?

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When I look at my iPhone, I feel like a dog watching a movie. What I see is flat and flickering and usually a snooze. For me, the real world--the physical world, plus ghosts--was complicated enough without a whole new world of deep stuff to worry about. My already-cluttered mind doesn't feel like it has space for whatever was at work in there. I assumed it was powered by avatar sex parts. Without really choosing to be a Luddide, I began to observe (as things like iPhones became more prevalent) that I preferred to know less about their world than more.

I rationalized this ignorance by imagining I was scared; perhaps I didn't want to become reliant on brittle technology I couldn't depend on in dire circumstances. It's true that when Godzilla stomps the grid to bits our phones won't work, and most of us will be helpless and devoured. That's why I resisted the urge to Google first and think second. That's why I never crossed a busy street with my eyes in my phone hand.

Then I got some new bad news. It wasn't fear at all. It was... an intelligence issue.

I took an intelligence test and learned I'm a specific kind of dummy: I bombed the spatial relations part of the test. More than 83% of people are faster than me at duplicating patterns with colored blocks. I was told this means I have terrible spatial intelligence, a capacity which enables people to envision figures and shapes and move them around in their minds.

Psychologist and Duke University research scientist Jonathan Wai, told me via email that this "has to do primarily with three-dimensional mental rotation, and perhaps dimensions beyond that as well." As he argues in this article, standardized tests only test your grasp of "symbol systems of numbers and letters" and not your spatial ability, which explains why a given student could be a mechanically adept, genius tinkerer, but still do badly in school.

Suddenly, a few things clicked. I've always struggled with a slew of seemingly disparate and particular mental tasks: things like driving directions, the workings of an engine, Chinese finger traps. What had been a gnat cloud of individual annoyances now seemed connected through a new-found lack of ability. Spatially, it seems I'm naturally a flat and shallow thinker. Considering this further brought me back to the multi-dimensional digital world. I began to wonder if my lack of digital intelligence was based on a lack of spatial intelligence.

In his 2007 essay "Holding a Program in One's Head," writer, programmer, investor, and Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham wrote that mathematicians "try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will."

Mr. Graham told me via email that "there is probably a connection between the ability to visualize things in your head and programming ability." He said he often sees algorithms and data structures as shapes, and that when he can't understand part of a program, he has "a feeling very similar to the feeling of not being able to visualize a 3-D object." Without anything approaching that ability, even superficial software concepts I find befuddling.

The word of Paul Graham was enough, in my mind, to confirm this connection between the digital and the spatial, which may seem obvious to someone skilled in both, but it is not so clear to someone skilled in neither.

The feeling programmers might have when they can't understand part of a program is my constant state of mind, except there are no edges to it. There is nothing tangible to me, no existing part that I already understand to serve as solid ground. I can look at the doorways, my computer, and phone, but I can't really enter the digital world the way so many people do.

"Programmers and developers, who are likely high spatial people, certainly will see visual possibilities that many of us might not," Dr. Wai told me. "I think there are probably levels of digital intelligence just as there are levels of spatial intelligence."

What You Need To Know About Engineers To Do A Mobile Startup

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The App Store released its "Best Of 2013" just before Christmas, showcasing some of the best iOS developers in the industry. Every year, thousands of would-be CEOs see apps on that list and resolve to join the ranks, only to be frustrated by the iOS development process, or working with developers generally. So, what do non-technical people need to know to make a mobile startup work?

That's exactly the question I set out to answer when I wrote Mad Men of Mobile, a collection of one-on-one interviews with 13 of the greatest mobile innovators and entrepreneurs out there today. Here are five key points which the founders agreed on.

"One of the core desires of any software engineer is to create something that gets used by people, has impact, and makes the world a better place."

Adam Cheyer was cofounder and VP of Engineering at Siri. Creating a successful app is all about the end user--make sure your app or game makes a positive difference to your users' day, whether it helps save them time, enables them to be more productive, or entertains them for a few minutes, or hours, at a time. Great software requires a strong sense of empathy for the people who will be using your product.

"Always focus on innovative technology, real inventions, and quality. Business success comes as a natural consequence."

Philippe Kahn has successfully started and sold three tech companies, each for several hundred million dollars. His fourth company, MotionX, develops technology which is used in popular sports apps such as Nike+ GPS. Like most of the founders interviewed in Mad Men of Mobile, Kahn owns patents for the innovative tech which sits behind its apps, and this, in part, is where the value of many startups lies.

"There is nothing outside of music for us. There is no world outside of the musical world."

Michael Breidenbrücker, founder of RjDj, has worked with Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer to create apps for The Dark Knight Rises and Inception. RjDj specializes in creating context aware and augmented music apps for iOS. By finding a niche in the App Store, and honing a niche technical skill, the company has successfully cornered an area of the mobile market.

"UX is what rules the world of personal electronics."

Christian Kraft has worked as an innovation expert at Nokia for almost 17 years and invented several of the company's most successful patents, including threaded SMS chat. While many in mobile may believe the old adage that "content is king," those succeeding in this space understand it is actually less about content and more about context. No one can predict how and when your target audience will want to use your app until you have placed it into their hands, so get it out there and let them test it first, even in some analog way. Give surveys to your beta testers. Make mockups for people to see. Do as much as you can to validate the idea before you build any software.

"The number one determinant of entrepreneurial success is persistence. If you are not prepared to go to super human levels that are beyond rationality to realize your dream in this industry, then your chance of finding success is virtually zero."

When Chris Barton cofounded Shazam in 1999, there was no App Store, no iPhone, and certainly no investors looking to back a mobile startup (how times have changed). It was his team's sheer tenacity and dogged determination that convinced a market, and industry, that apps like his were going to be big. Fifteen years, and more than 350 million users later, it seems he proved them right.

These quotations were excerpted from Mad Men of Mobile, which is now available in paperback and Kindle.

Danielle Newnham was on the founding team of mobile apps agency Ubinow, and is cofounder of digital innovation studio We Make Play. She is also the author of Mad Men of Mobile, and Women on Top, a book about female tech founders, due for release in 2014. Find her on Twitter @daniellenewnham.


Advice On Getting Vine Famous From BatDad

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"Without Vine, it's pretty safe to say there would be no BatDad," says Blake Wilson, the man behind the mask in the wildly popular videos. "There was something about that six-second limitation that really grabbed me. You have to come up with a beginning and an end and you know exactly how much time you have to do it, as opposed to something like YouTube, which is more open-ended."

Every day there are new apps that let people make little multimedia projects and share them within a community of like-minded users. Inevitably, some users stand out. So what's the trick to making something that will make you, say, Vine famous?

Picking a network where you want to stand out should be like picking a way to exercise. If swimming is more enjoyable to you than running, then you're likely to be motivated to do it every day--so quit forcing yourself to run. In short, the best app is the one you actually like using. What sparks a creative fire in you?

"For me, Vine was my canvas that I created content on, and then people shared that content on other platforms. But others may find their creativity flow through something else," says Wilson.

Make Your Masterpiece

"There are some horrible music videos out there that cost millions of dollars," says Jesiah Bonney, Mindie's top featured user. Mindie allows users in a tap-to-record fashion to create seven-second music videos. Mindie has high-profile users like Jack Dorsey, iJustine, and Aston Kutcher, but it's the unrecognizable names on the recommended list, like Bonney, that are the most interesting.

Bonney reached the top spot on Mindie the old fashioned way, with plenty of hard work. The method of picking a song and then shooting a seven-second video appealed to the way he sees his surroundings.

"Sometimes it can take me just seven seconds and other times it can take me over an hour to make a Mindie," says Bonney. "That's just the filming time, if you add up all the brainstorming, staging, and all the failed attempts then it can sometimes take me days. Minimal tools equals maximum creativity, and my goal is make a masterpiece in seven seconds on my iPhone." A masterpiece! If that's not how you feel about the content you're creating, then you're probably creating in the wrong medium.

Even though a lot of Bonney's Mindies appear to require technical skills, one of his favorites is a simple one he calls "Science Fiction." "I was so happy with the result, the visuals were original and creative and the music went perfect with it," he says.

Why Meetings Should Cost Employees Money

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The problem with meetings, says Brian Bailey, is that they "can become the default response to uncertainty." An original member of the Gowalla team, Bailey says that meetings about uncertainty are even more likely to drag on and on than meetings with a defined scope--despite the fact that the most vague, emergency-style meetings also feel the most urgent.

The solution for most startup teams are stand-up meetings, an artifact of the Agile development method. A stand-up meeting is what it sounds like: The whole team meets while standing to ensure the meeting's brevity. For 15 minutes total, the whole team goes around and says what they did yesterday, and what they're working on today and tomorrow. Each team member only gets a few seconds to update their teammates, and the 15-minute meeting limit is typically strictly enforced.

But Bailey has another idea: Charge employees for meeting time as an incentive to keep things snappy. Here's how it works:

What if there was a cost associated with each meeting? Imagine if a 30-minute meeting with three people cost $50, and each additional person was $10. Adding 30 minutes doubles the cost. So, an hour meeting with four people would be $120.

But this concept may not go far enough. If the disincentive is really going to match the reality, then for every additional person you add to a meeting, the fee should increase marginally for each subsequent person. So instead of $10 per additional person, the cost for adding a person to a meeting should be n + 1, or $11, then $12, then $13.

Before you cry foul, Bailey isn't suggesting employees pay out of pocket, but rather with a company budget that is limited--funny money, so to speak.

The amount itself doesn't matter. The currency doesn't even have to be dollars. The key is that each team (or possibly individual) in the company has a quarterly balance to pull from, a balance that covers a minimal number of meetings.

The bonus, Bailey says, is an actual reason not to go to a non-essential meeting: "Sorry I had to decline your meeting request, but I only have two left for the quarter and I'm saving them."

Hat Tip: Brian Bailey

Siri Knows About The Movie "Her" And She Does Not Like It

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Those crack journalists at BuzzFeed have figured out that Siri is aware of her on-screen doppelgänger in the new Spike Jonze film Her. As 9to5Mac put it, "asking Siri about the actually artificial intelligence causes her to respond with a variety of disparaging lines that sometimes border on jealousy." When that writer tried inquiring about the film, he got his own interesting reply. The prompt BuzzFeed used was "Siri, are you her?" The Huffington Post also got some unique ripostes. The responses are above.

You can see why Apple's engineers would be so quick to make Siri aware (and cheeky) about the film. Artificial intelligence is portrayed in the movie as a high-tech security blanket for a deeply insecure man, a far-from-ideal bit of guerrilla marketing for Apple, which likes to position Siri as a "digital personal assistant" with far fewer emotional responsibilities than her on-screen counterpart. As the Seattle Times' review of the film says, "Theo wanders the streets alone but not alone, with Samantha in his ear, and they giggle and talk in the twilight just like any couple in love. It's a perfect relationship, even according to Theodore's ex (Rooney Mara). 'He always wanted a wife,' she notes, 'without the challenges of a real person.'"

Ben Horowitz Is Sick Of You People Picking On Rap Genius

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Venture capitalist and noted hip-hop fan Ben Horowitz opened a recent blog post with an unambiguous message: Stop hating on startups for playing fast and loose.

Lately, it's become in vogue to write articles, comments and tweets about everything that's wrong with young technology companies. Hardly a day goes by where I don't find something in my Twitter feed crowing about how a startup that's hit a bump in the road is "fu&%@d"...

He may or may not be referring to this post Valleywag entitled, "Is Rap Genius Fucked?." Prompted by Rap Genius's temporary delisting from Google, the writer (Sam Biddle) ponders whether a startup that relies so much on search results (specifically, Google search results) to outperform other lyrics sites can actually be sustainable.

"If there is one thing Google hates, it is unnatural links," explains Nick Sayers, who works at Moz, a search analytics firm. "Really the only thing that can be said is they sure did mess up," and it shows as soon as you try to look up a song. Google won't let anyone "win," and really hates it if you gloat about victory over the giant. So, the hot streak is over, snuffed out as artificially as it began.

When it's so easy to be "snuffed out" by Google's whims, Biddle says, Rap Genius should be forever paranoid. "It's easy to see why getting busted for SEO cheating seemed laughable," Biddle says. "Now they'll have to look over their shoulders, indefinitely," he adds, throwing in an extraneous comma for gravitas.

It would be easy to dismiss Horowitz's post as a PR band-aid, if it weren't for his too-subtle thesis, which slips by in the third paragraph:

From a psychological standpoint, in order to achieve a great breakthrough, you must be able to suspend disbelief indefinitely. The technology startup world is where brilliant people come to imagine the impossible.

Translated into real-speak, this means that the goal of any startup is to simply continue existing by any means, so that a future of any kind is possible. Does that require bending rules? Sometimes. Should you care? Not if bending the rules means your company survives one more quarter.

Remember, we're not talking about real rules here--we're talking about Google's rules. The Rap Genius founders weren't risking jail time when they crossed Google; rather they were making a rational play for big traffic numbers, hedging their risk by making sure not to do anything so link-farmy that it would get them permanently delisted.

And as we wrote yesterday, the hedging worked, and Rap Genius is not fucked after all: Its links have been re-listed on Google, although with slightly lower rankings than before, owing to Rap Genius cleaning up its "SEO game" to be more compliant. Take that, haters.

Automakers Are Choosing Sides Between iOS And Android, But Who's Winning?

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What do you look for in a car? Automatic or manual transmission? Front or rear wheel drive? How about iOS or Android?

Today Google announced the formation of the Open Automotive Alliance, a collective of tech and automotive companies that are committed to bringing Android to cars starting this year. Joining Google at launch is chipmaker Nvidia, along with car manufacturers Hyundai, GM, Honda, and Audi. The partnership aims to create a common, Android-based platform with an open development model that will allow developers and automakers to incorporate the mobile OS in a way that is safe, intuitive, and seamless.

The new Google partnership comes seven months after Apple announced its own plan to connect your vehicle, iOS in the Car, at last year's World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC). Compared to Google's newly formed partnership, iOS in the Car is a much simpler venture, offering a way to integrate apps and services like Siri, iMessage, Music, and Maps with your vehicle's built-in display. While the full service isn't rumored to launch until iOS 7.1 drops, car manufacturers like Honda have already begun to include deeper iOS integration in their newest models, and almost every major auto company has expressed interest in the functionality--including Honda, Mercedes, Nissan, Ferrari, Chevrolet, Kia, Hyundai, Volvo, Jaguar, and BMW, several of which have also joined Google's Open Automotive Alliance. For the automakers who are taking both sides, your car's OS may end up as a built-to-order option, allowing you to choose between Google or Apple camps the way you choose the car's color or trim package.

In-dash computing becomes a necessary consideration in a world where at least one in three smartphone owners use their device while driving. It's not just for calls or texts, either--one in four are accessing the Internet as well, trying to stay abreast of emails and social media while on the road. According to the Governor's Highway Safety Association, approximately 660,000 drivers are using cell phones or manipulating electronic devices while driving. Distracted driving resulted in 3,331 traffic deaths in 2011, the latest year for which data is available. It's a well-documented problem that doesn't seem to go away, but perhaps making our smartphones a part of our cars will help.

Will there be a winner and a loser in the race to connect our cars? Google's new partnership doesn't have any demonstrable tech yet, although it expects to hit the market by year's end. It's also an ambitious, ground-up approach that could possibly yield something far more interesting and intuitive since it would be open to developers, and could conceivably integrate with Google's self-driving car platform.

LG Wanted WebOS For Its TVs Because Of These Three Features

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LG has officially unveiled their highly anticipated WebOS-powered smart TV concept, which will power 70% of the new TVs LG makes. The company is really driving home the idea that this thing should be simple, putting that word in their marketing copy three times: "simple connection," "simple switching," and "simple discovery."

So, how does all this simplicity make itself known?

As you turn on the TV, an animated character named "Bean Bird" will take you through the setup of your new device--thus the simple connection. He (or she?) flutters around the screen encouraging users to complete their smart TV setup, because as WebOS's head of product management and design, Itai Vonshak explains to the Verge, "there's little point in spending the extra money on a smart TV if you don't take advantage of its features." Great--so the first "simple" feature is a setup tutorial. Not an auspicious start.

Similar to the doomed WebOS of HP/Palm descent, the dominant UI metaphor is "cards" which aid in changing from one app to the other (that's the "simple switching" part from the marketing copy). Hulu Plus, Netflix, Twitter, and Amazon Instant Video, which will be available in LG's app store, will all be accessible through the television's online browser, once your Wi-Fi is enabled, of course. Bean Bird will remind you to do that if you don't have Wi-Fi enabled, which is eerily reminiscent of Clippy, the much-hated Microsoft Office mascot. Additionally, voice and gesture-based controls will allow the user to easily control the TV, lending itself to the simple discovery feature.

Inspired by the "no signal" image from old TVs, WebOS's interface is playful and bright with an emphasis on ease and unity. Apps appear as an overlay on the bottom of the screen of what you are watching and as you navigate to the left or right, "app makers can give you a big, full-screen preview to entice you to click." Yet, the real novelty in the TV lies in its overall uniformity through the cards. If you plug in a PS4 for example, a PS4 card will appear instead of the common HDMI 1, we are all too used to seeing. Hence "simple discovery."

LG bought HP's WebOS shortly after the company released--and then abruptly discontinued--the TouchPad tablet device and the Pre 3 phone, both running on WebOS. They are currently the second manufacturer of televisions, behind Samsung, and the release of their smart TV couldn't come at a better time. The New York Times reported that "in the year that ended in November, 22 percent of televisions sold in the United States were Internet-connected TVs, compared with 11 percent in the previous year." Roku has also announced a smart TV at CES. The only question that remains: When will Apple enter the market?

Five Sweet Robots Announced During Pre-CES 2014

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Though CES officially starts tomorrow, companies have already begun to unveil what's next in the world of robotics. It's expected to be a sleeper year in terms of dancing, anthropomorphized robots and previously unseen, highly cogent AI technologies. However, what is exciting are the developments in consumer robotics, which is to say: intelligent playthings. The Next Web predicts this to be the year of the "automated hardware revolution" stemming from repurposing hardware already present in smartphones and tablets very literally for their own devices. This has slashed costs, making robotic toys and gaming robots more accessible. Here are some revealed during pre-CES 2014 that we'd be glad to have flitting around our tiny New York City apartments.

Jumping Sumo and MiniDrone

Parrot announced the Jumping Sumo, a two-wheeled leaping bot, and MiniDrone, the budget build of its popular big brother AR.Drone 2. Both are controlled with an app on iOS devices communicating over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, respectively.

The Jumping Sumo can reach heights of up to three feet with a spring-loaded arm in a 160-foot radius. Specific gestures highlight the impressive turning radius of each individually controlled wheel, and "preset performances like a high-speed pirouette," as The Verge notes, make what you're watching an "unintelligible blur." The front-facing camera apparently makes the Sumo a little clunky, but still fun for the 20 minutes its battery lasts.

Pilots can fly the MiniDrone for six to seven minutes up to 160 feet. It's larger predecessor, the AR.Drone 2, may have a camera, but what the MiniDrone lacks makes up for in its stability and ease of use compared to a somewhat confusing interface and mandatory mastery of controls. Instead, the MiniDrone comes with removable plastic wheels, dually acting as protective shields and ground transportation. The range and ruggedness of the 2 may be missing, but consider this petite flyer a reasonably priced alternative.

In tandem, the Jumping Sumo and MiniDrone are the most entertaining toys to dirty the kitchen and frighten pets. The promotional video told me so.

Available TBA; Prices Jumping Sumo TBA, MiniDrone less than $299

Sphero 2B

Image via GigaOM

Another remote-controlled motor toy, the Sphero 2B is Orbotix's new version of the Sphero, the rolling cue-ballish robot that lets you play augmented reality games. Expanded to the size of an aluminum can, the new Sphero zooms twice as fast on rubberized and customizable tires, and is outfitted with a camera to record video and augment reality as you please. An educational plus--the Sphero 2B will travel around classrooms, teaching students about physics and programming.

Available before Christmas; Price less than $100

Rydis H68

Image via CNET

Perhaps the most practical of pre-CES robots, the Rydis H68 is the next generation of Monueal's hybrid vacuum cleaners. On top of the previous model's capabilities as a vacuum cleaner and dry mop, the sleek H68 can also serve as a wet mop, able to hold a little more than six ounces of water in its reservoir. With a large self-dampening and removable mop pad and 3.23 inch clearance height, it seems to win the Miss Versatility Award of robots that may or may not get stuck under the couch when the batteries die.

Available spring 2014; Price $499

AIMe

Image via Jigabot

AIMe is a small, lightweight camera rig that detects motion up to 150 feet, or more with special sensors, effectually tossing the need to ask the friend or partner who doesn't understand how framing works to record something for you ever again. It's compatible with GoPro, camcorders, and most smartphones, and holds the intelligence to set up complex, multi-camera rigs with long-range sensors, rendering the AIMe user to be able to solo-shoot most anything.

Available June 1, 2014; Price $299.99

Keecker

Image via GigaOM

Keecker is the latest advancement in postmodern every time everywhere home entertainment systems. A microwave-sized "pillowy egg," as GigaOM puts it, the minimalist machine is a projector, camera, and speaker system on wheels. Watch movies, listen to a record, take a picture, check the weather even--the possibilities may certainly be endless considering developers are already working on native Keecker applications. The price is steep, yet predictable for an obedient and autonomous sphere that's able to "remember" a map of your living space.

Available end of 2014; Price $4,000 - $5,000


iBeacons Are Coming To A Grocery Store Near You

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IBeacon devices are coming to the place most people actually need it: the grocery store. For the uninitiated, iBeacons are pieces of hardware used to accurately deliver location-based notifications to iOS 7+ devices. (They're not complicated--in fact, you can build one yourself for about $70.) Until recently, any geo-reminders app you downloaded (say, Foursquare) would be haphazardly hit-or-miss because GPS geofencing is often imprecise, and iBeacon is also better than NFC, too, when it comes to payments. The goal of iBeacons is to provide consumers with timely, accurate geo-reminders--think a notification to remember the milk, dispatched as soon as you arrive at the store.

The company on the fore of grocery store iBeacon rollout is inMarket, which is bringing iBeacons to 150 grocery stores in the San Francisco, Seattle, and the Cleveland area starting today. "Our Mobile to Mortar network is like a concierge for shoppers in-store" says CEO and cofounder Todd DiPaola. "Depending on the apps someone uses, a shopper might receive reminders of their family's current shopping list, alerts to rewards available inside, or a timely coupon for discounts when she arrives at a store."

Opted-in users will receive a single notification when they enter a Safeway or Giant Eagle and depending on what apps they have installed, will be reminded about items on their shopping list, or informed about coupons for products where they are. "It's coming first to our inMarket family of apps: List Ease, CheckPoints, and Extra Extra" says DiPaloa, but more apps should be supported by the platform in the future.

Apple first started rolling out iBeacon devices to its retail locations in early December, but inMarket is now the first to do a multi-retailer store-agnostic iBeacon platform. Previously inMarket was using technology like barcode scanning apps to enhance loyalty programs for companies, but using iBeacons allows the company to provide an better experience, one the user barely has to think about.

Preventing Your Own Burnout Is Part Of Your Job

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As year-end holiday vacations come to a close, you might be feeling guilty about the week or two you spent away from your work. If you do, then stop it right now, writes Seth Bannon, founder and CEO of fundraising and volunteer platform Amicus. Rest is a natural part of any training cycle, and that includes difficult periods of work, too.

Professional runners take long breaks between marathons. They make no excuses for this, and no one judges them for it, because everyone knows that rest and recuperation is an essential part of being a pro athlete.

It's not that too few people take vacations; we all disappear from the office now and again. It's the excuses for being gone that peeve Bannon.

It's time we stopped making excuses for rest and relaxation. Doing so is not only bad for you, but sends the wrong message to the rest of your team. So next time you're planning a vacation, announce it with pride.

If you don't, Bannon says, then feel guilty at your own peril. Taking vacation is just another responsibility implicit in your job, and if you're not doing it, then you're failing to meet one of your responsibilities.

"Preventing burnout is part of your job. Staying well rested is part of your job. Sleep and exercise help, but occasional extended breaks are essential too, and their benefits on creativity, productivity, and happiness are well documented."

According to the Mayo Clinic, job burnout can seriously damage your productivity and well-being, and sometimes a vacation is precisely what you need to prevent it from happening. Don't have any vacation days? The Clinic recommends regular exercise, and working with your supervisor to manage your stressors and discuss possible changes to your workflow.

Freelancers might find vacation time more challenging than most. For the self-employed, no work equals no pay, plain and simple, although some freelancers have figured out how to hack their hourly rates. Not everyone can afford to get away from it all, but there are a number of options recommended by Freelance Folder. In short: Plan ahead, save a bit, inform your clients, and scale back as much as you can.

As beneficial as breaks may be, the post-vacation slump is a real thing. It might even lead you to question whether or not vacations are worthwhile--but don't let that dissuade you. In a column for Forbes, analyst Daniel Freedman writes about the productivity dip we suffer post-vacation, comparing it to the "summer learning loss" students experience in the gap between school years.

While it doesn't render the numerous benefits of time off as moot, there are things we can do to minimize what Freedman calls "vacation learning loss," like reserving the evening before returning to work for relaxing and re-adjusting in lieu of travel. We've also covered several strategies for how to hit the ground running after a vacation.

Just make sure you don't apologize for your vacation. You're just doing your job, after all.

Redditors Give You Prudent Advice On Early Seed Investors

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So here's the scenario: Ev, a Redditor with the username whatsupraleigh, is working on a potentially awesome, yet-to-be-released web app. He has the option to acquire a $50,000 investment from two brothers, plus a great "mailing list" of many people who have expressed interest in the concept. On the eve of setting up an LLC for his web app, Ev is now struck with a dilemma: How does he move forward while maintaining majority ownership of the company?

To find out, he turned to this Reddit thread, where he outlined five money-related questions, ranging from possible caveats of an LLC, to the numbers of shares to set up, to how to run a valuation of an app. So how did it turn out?

The consensus seemed to be that Ev should form a strictly outlined operating agreement with the brothers, and not include them when he incorporates. With ownership rights at stake and no current revenue stream, most of the commenters suggested consulting a startup lawyer to address some of the inherent conflicts of interest. Ev explained that he is friends with one of the investing brothers, but that didn't assuage the thread's concerns about money--in fact, it seemed to intensify their exhortations for caution.

One option would be to have an "operating agreement that sets other rules like who gets to make what decisions," says VisualCSharp. This may prevent the partners from a conflict later down the line as the app progresses. (Ev commented that he plans to look into an operating agreement.)

Fellow Redditor the gowdru advised Ev also on how to approach the valuation of an app. While there is a general equation to determine the valuation, it can only be used if there is stable revenue, which for Ev is currently not the case. He clarifies, "if there is no revenue then it isn't an exact science more what each party 'feels' its worth aka pulling numbers out of you arse to suit you."

It seems like Ev got what he was looking for and is now steering toward hiring a lawyer, probably not setting up an LLC--at the urging of many of the advice-givers on the thread--and definitely looking into an operating agreement. Good luck, Ev! Let us know when the app is done.

Should I Work For This Guy? A Secret That Will Help You Decide

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Working for a startup has halcyon connotations, but small companies can be extremely strenuous places to work when personalities (and tempers, and egos) begin to flair. The founder who seemed calm and collected in your interview might become totally unhinged when things go wrong, but it can be hard to know who's prone to freak-outs when you're only in the office for an hour's discussion.

One heuristic for judging executives' people-competency, says founder of the Homebrew seed fund Hunter Walk, is their ability to attract and retain former coworkers.

... [O]ne other undervalued aspect of evaluating talent is judging whether or not they can attract other needed hires. I don't just mean provide you with some referrals. I mean are they the type of person who once they join your company is going to start telling their friends and former colleagues that this is the place to be. And will those people listen to them.

Walk is talking from the perspective of the person doing the hiring, but this advice can be turned 180 degrees and used by the applicant, too. Before you take that startup job, ask yourself: How long did this founder work with his or her co-founders prior to starting the company? How many of the the co-founders former co-workers split from their day jobs to take a chance on this company? How open to referral hires are the co-founders; do they prefer to bring in strangers whom they can more easily isolate from decision-making discussions?

The inverse scenario--dealing with a founder who only hires friends, not qualified candidates--is perhaps as common. And there are more. Venture capitalist Mark Suster's blog has a great list of "things that go wrong" between founders, several of which are germane to the co-worker issue that Walk alludes to. A few of Suster's gems:

Conventional wisdom doesn't account for all of the things that go wrong in partnerships over time; especially ones that are formed quickly and without a long gestation period.

He continues:

Even if you *think* you know them, people change. One person gets more risk averse, the other has more risk appetite. One person gets married or has kids and starts to de-prioritize the business. One person loses the passion for what you do. Or you have disagreements about strategy, recruiting, funding, etc.

Finally, Suster adds this troubling if true bit of advice: If you're interviewing at a two-founder startup, beware.

50/50 partnerships can be hugely unstable--even if you've been friends since high school.

Hat Tip: Hunter Walk

You Can Buy Things Off Superbowl Ads, But Here's Why You Won't

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Department store H&M has plans for a new type of commercial during February 2nd's Super Bowl XLVIII: it will enable viewers to purchase H&M items directly from their television set when they see the ad. With a touch of their remote control, viewers will be able to buy the same Bodywear products from David Beckham's Spring 2014 collection that they see during the 30 second Super Bowl spot.

The technology is decidedly less magical than it seems. We know because it's on display at this week's 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and while it's a great opportunity to engage customers directly from the couch, there are some acute limitations.

Delivery Agent, in which Samsung is an investor, has a new commerce platform whose major flaw is that it only works with a select number of Samsung TV sets manufactured in 2012 and 2013, severely limiting the retailer's audience participation.

In fact, this limitation may be even more substantial than it seems, because some older models of Samsung TVs aren't even equipped with Wi-Fi out of the box--they require an extra dongle sold separately. For a celebrity known for "bending it," Beckham's Samsung campaign sure has some inflexible hardware requirements.

Hat Tip:Variety

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