The most important part about wearable tech, is making it wearable-both in comfort and in fashion. The second most important part is, of course, usability. Pebble is taking steps to address both the look and function of its watches by adding a higher end materials version and--yes, developers--its very own app store.
The app store is a welcome boon. Today, Pebble users have to use third-party sites and resources to add new functionality. By the end of January, Pebble will open a central web portal to find and download things like games, remotes, news and weather apps. This was the idea all along, of course--that developers would be able to fill in the missing pieces of software that Pebble couldn't (or wouldn't) build themselves. It appears to have taken longer to get the app store up and running than Pebble would have liked, but its still among the first of its kind.
Also on the docket: content deals. Pebble has partnered with ESPN, GoPro, Pandora, Mercedes-Benz, and more to provide functionality for their products on a person's wrist. ESPN will provide a score box, GoPro will allow remote start and stop of recording, and Pandora will allow thumbs up or down in addition to play/pause. While it's limited functionality that current Pebble devices enables through these partnerships, it's still the right direction to bring more people on board for wearable tech awareness.
The other smartwatch manufacturer trying to bring its watches inline with mainstream fashion expectations is Metawatch with the new Meta. All the emphasis for Meta's announcement is on the looks, with a redesigned watch by Frank Nuovo, who was previously with both Vertu and Nokia. Out of the box, Metawatch already highlights functions like stocks, weather, call controls, and more, but is limited to stock apps--no app store just yet.
Twitter is vital in the newsroom of any organization that creates content--this site, for example, finds the majority of its traffic there. But far less obvious than the need for Twitter is precisely how to use it.
In a recent post on Nieman Journalism Lab, some of the social journalism gurus at the New York Times outlined what they learned about Twitter on the front lines of breaking news in 2013. If you work for a media organization, their takeaways are well worth your attention.
Here's a truism that weaves itself pretty thoroughly throughout the technology landscape: As magical as algorithms and automation can be, they're nowhere close to fully replacing human intuition. This is true of everything from music discovery to smart thermostats. If we let the machines take over completely, eventually something's going to go wrong. It's also on true on social media, where many an editor has learned the hard way that auto-scheduling tweets can backfire.
At the Times, the lesson came in the form of an auto-tweeted weekend headline that incorrectly identified a Scottish tennis player as being English. Normally a quick fix, the faux pas won the Times hours of ridicule across the social Web.
Similarly, human intervention was able to turn a headline bound for print ("The Rock 'n' Roll Casualty Who Became A War Hero") to a much more specific, audience-friendly tweet ("He got kicked out of both Nirvana and Soundgarden. Then he became a war hero.") Both tweets went out over the official @nytimes Twitter feed and, as you might expect, the latter wording yielded far more clicks, retweets and favorites. Way to go, humans.
Even the most well-connected social media maven in the newsroom likely doesn't have as many followers as the news brand itself. Still, that doesn't mean everything has to go out over the official feed first. At the Times, the official Twitter accounts often defer to editors and reporters on the ground for details, which are selectively retweeted by the mothership.
This helps the paper maintain authenticity while leaning on third parties it knows are reliable. Meanwhile, editors and reporters get the serotonin high that comes with the trickle-down social exposure made possible by the mothership's massive following. It also builds a direct connection between readers and reporters, which can aid both in the long run.
Along these same lines, the Times has experimented with hosting Q&A sessions between readers and reporters, usually moderated by one of the official accounts.
Just because Twitter is virtually synonymous with breaking news these days doesn't mean the practitioners of news have any clue what they're doing when the news cycle kicks into high gear. This was a big topic of discussion at journalism conferences and news geek meetups all year long, especially after the Boston marathon bombing led to an online frenzy of misinformation.
Boston was hardly the only recent example of this, so newsrooms like that of the New York Times have established strict protocols and guidelines when it comes to breaking news events and how to verify the accuracy of reports that are rapidly making the rounds on real-time networks. For sake of one's reputation, it's something that comes highly recommended by the Times.
Indeed, many of the paper's top tweets in 2013 were about major, breaking news events like terrorist attacks, the new pope, war in Syria and the Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling. When you've got that much traffic riding on big news headlines, it's best to get the details right.
This has been a sticking point for a lot of legacy media outlets for years. Often, the pun-riddled, clever headlines written for the printed page wind up online, where they flop.
It's not to say that everybody needs to mimic BuzzFeed and Upworthy, but if the meaning of a headline isn't immediately obvious at first glance, it probably won't get as many clicks as it would if it were thoughtfully rewritten.
Think about the myriad digital contexts in which it's about to appear: as a tweet, RSS feed item or headline on an aggregated web page, usually without the context of a subhead, first graf or accompanying art. As Michael Roston writes, "readers don't click on or retweet us when we're being clever nearly as much as they respond to clearly stated tweets describing the meat of the stories they point to."
Now matter how Twitter-addicted they may be, few users are going to see every single tweet your news organization sends out. Thus, if a tweet goes viral on Wednesday morning, it's safe to assume it will garner clicks and retweets a few nights later. "It goes without saying that if you tweet more, you'll get more traffic overall," writes Roston.
"But what we found when we scheduled tweets on Saturday and Sunday was that the average click per tweet grew substantially. What that meant to us was that a story that was of great interest to readers on a Tuesday afternoon is likely to be of interest to readers grazing Twitter on a Saturday night who didn't see it the first time around."
Great products die every day. It takes more than product to build a successful business, yet founders proceed without addressing the important question: how do we get users? No matter how useful your product might be, it isn't a business without users.
With Product Hunt, we focused on user acquisition before we had a product. 20 days after its public launch, we had a community of 2,000 users that we acquired by doing things that don't scale. Here's how we did it.
Product Hunt, a daily leaderboard of new products, began as an email list using Linkydink, a tool for creating collaborative daily email digests. Contributors submitted links to products and each day subscribers received an email of new and interesting products. I seeded the community by inviting a few dozen founders, investors, and startup folks I knew. To my surprise, people really enjoyed the daily email and the subscriber base grew organically.
What began as an experiment, quickly grew into something much bigger. Encouraged by the positive feedback from the community, I sought to build the "real" Product Hunt and reached out to my buddy Nathan Bashaw for help.
Over Thanksgiving break, we designed and built Product Hunt. Meanwhile, we reached out to contributors in the MVP and other respected product people, sharing early mocks and gathering feedback. We weren't just doing customer development, we were getting them excited and making them feel like part of the product (and they were, helping guide our design decisions).
The conversation that proceeded helped us better understand our initial user base to build a desirable product.
5 days later, we had a very minimal but fully functional product. We emailed our supporters a link to Product Hunt, informing them not to share it publicly.
The supporters were thrilled to join and play with a working version of something they had thought about and indirectly, helped build. That day we acquired our first 30 users.
We still weren't ready to share Product Hunt publicly yet. It was buggy and we wanted to ensure people enjoyed the product before expanding to a larger audience. Over the next week we squashed bugs, gathered additional feedback, and invited a few more people to join.
Your first users matter. We knew how important it was to seed Product Hunt with the right people from the start. Initial users form the community's culture and once established, it is very difficult to change. By the end of the week, we had 100 users and felt ready to share Product Hunt with the world.
I reached out to Carmel DeAmicis, a reporter for PandoDaily. We met once before and the respect I earned guest writing on the popular tech publication helped me land a last minute meeting later that night. We met at Homestead, a bar in the Dogpatch district of San Francisco and I told her our story and vision for Product Hunt.
The next day Carmel confirmed an article would go live the following day. Immediately, we hopped back into our inbox to spread the news to our users.
Early contributors appreciated the note, hearing the backstory, and helping make Product Hunt a success. More than just share the news, our email included two specific asks:
Post a Product: It was important for us to have quality products and a healthy level of activity at launch. We were about to make a first impression for many.
Share the Article: To maximize exposure, we asked early adopters--many who have a large following and influence--to share the article. To make it even easier, we provided a "click to tweet" link that opened Twitter with a pre-created message.
The launch was a success and by the end of that day we acquired our 400th user.
Growth was fantastic, but in reality, user acquisition wasn't our primary goal. Engagement and retention is most important at this early stage. If people don't stick around, press goes to waste. Or worse, founders are fooled into thinking they're making progress.
So why bother with press in the first place? The PandoDaily article was strategic--we weren't just trying to acquire more users. The primary goal was to get early adopters excited and prove to the tech community that Product Hunt isn't just another one of my ephemeral experiments. We kept beating the drum.
We reached out to Chris Dannen, an editor at Fast Company. Similar to PandoDaily, I contributed several articles over the past six months, which made connecting easier. I sent Chris a draft of my article, describing the story behind Product Hunt and the "20-minute MVP" used to validate demand for the product. I believed the Fast Company audience would enjoy the piece and so did Chris.
Three days later The Wisdom Of The 20-Minute Startup was published, generating another boost of growth. Soon after, we acquired our 800th user.
Since public launch, we carefully monitored who was signing up, identifying influencers and those that we knew would make good contributions to the community. Tools like Intercom and Rapportive were very helpful, translating nondescript email addresses into identifiable people, surfacing people's Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Once we identified an influencer, Nathan or myself sent a personal email, inviting them to contribute and linking to the PandoDaily or Fast Company articles, to tell our story. A manual process indeed, but an effective way to recruit good contributors and open lines of communication for future feedback.
We also asked for referrals, emailing people using the product to ask if they knew of other product people that would make good contributions. We could have automated this but at the cost of delivering a less personal and effective message.
Most people had a few friends that immediately came to mind and gladly made introductions. As with getting press, asking for referrals was designed to build a stronger, more engaged community, not just acquire additional users. Product Hunt is more fun with friends, with people our community knows, respects, and trusts. The more one-degree connections, the more people are encouraged to use the product.
Our manual efforts growing the community paid off. 20 days after Product Hunt's private launch and several hundred emails later, we acquired our 2,000th user.
Although we've found early success growing Product Hunt, the future is always murky. Smart and skeptical entrepreneurs ask us:
Will people stick around?
How will you maintain quality contributions and discussion as the community grows?
Is Product Hunt limited to the early adopter, tech community or does it have mainstream appeal?
We think about these questions and will answer them as the product and community matures. We embrace this uncertainty as the best products are often born from polarization. If everyone knew the answer, Product Hunt would have already existed.
Ryan Hoover is the co-founder of Product Hunt. This essay is part of a series of posts where he shares the strategies, tactics, and surprises his team encounters building their product. Subscribe to my blog to follow along.
Contributoria is the newest experimental project to emerge from Guardian Media Group, the company behind both the Guardian and the Observer. If it is successful, it could help ever-struggling freelance writers support each other through every step of the writing process; proposing a story, writing the content, editing several drafts, and of course, getting paid.
According to its website, Contributoria works on a "rolling publishing cycle [that] operates in three different modes--planning, production and publication." In the planning stage, writers who have been pre-approved by Contributoria can propose story ideas, which are then backed by members through a point system--the number of points allocated to members ranges due to their membership fees.
For the March issue, Rich McEachran, has proposed a story titled, "How dirty is your chocolate, coffee or smartphone?" which will uncover the "atrocities behind the products we buy." Currently he has 7 backers, allotting him 395 points out of the 572 points he will need to get to the next phase--almost like a crowdfunding model but without any cash.
If McEachran does get all the points he needs, in month two of the project his peers will help edit various drafts, in the efforts of improving the overall quality of his work, while his byline remains completely intact. For its collaborative editing software, Contributoria partnered with Poetica, a platform that enables a live co-editing process for members, much like Google Docs.
Back to the "dirty chocolate" story--after three months of work, the final draft of McEachran's story would go live on the site, free to the public, available for re-use with a Creative Commons license. Writers are paid through a funding pool stemming from the community membership fees.
The project has enormous potential to draw in writers and reporters who are exhausted writing for free and/or having their articles shredded by editors at news organizations. By combining crowdsourcing and writing, while simultaneously ensuring that writers are paid fees for the production of their content, Contributoria might just change the landscape of journalism away from an editor-driven model.
The Guardian has been at the forefront of numerous amendments to that landscape with other projects like their API, a platform to read news stories one at a time, and n0tice 2.0, a community noticeboard where news and events are posted for everyone's use.
Contributoria, while pretty terribly named, could give underdog stories a bit of leverage. My favorite of this month's issue? An article entitled, "Can fish and chips make you British?" which you can check out on the Contributoria website here.
Apple has finally yielded to two major shareholders who were pressuring the Cupertino company to add more women and people of color to their board, according to Bloomberg. The iPhone maker announced today that it would add new language in the company's board committee charter promising more diverse board choices in the future. Apple has eight board seats, only one of which is occupied by a woman--former Avon CEO Andrea Jung.
It took five in-person meetings for major shareholders Trillium Asset Management LLC and the Sustainability Group to convince Apple to make the amendment. Being bullied by major shareholders doesn't sound like an ideal tactic for boardroom innovation--but such power-positions can make boards a bit tight-fisted. Just ask Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, both of whom still sit on the Microsoft board, one reason that no one's jumping to be Microsoft's new head honcho. What CEO wants to be a Manchurian candidate?
VC and profligate blogger Mark Suster has some suggestions for how a board should evolve: namely, bring in someone with startup DNA. Adding a board member to his portfolio company Invoca, Suster tapped an old friend, Josh Jacobs, who was a "perfect choice" because he could bring back the company's startup spirit. In a January 6 blog post he says:
But as importantly Josh was also formerly a startup CEO of a tech business and thus had empathy for startup land. By bringing in an industry player with startup DNA we brought somebody that could push the team much harder on how their value prop would resonate (or not) with customers, which verticals to target our offering to and importantly what others solutions were in the market and how we stacked up. This brought insider knowledge and perspective that frankly John & I lacked.
He's not talking about Apple specifically in this post, but this passage sure is apropos. How did Apple end up with a board that is almost entirely white men over 50? Comfort, says Suster:
Surprisingly some tech startups don't also evolve their board structures. The inertia of working solely with the board members who funded you early in your cycle becomes comfortable and making change on the board seems like a non-critical-path chore. But just as your company needs change with growth so too do your board needs and bringing diversity of skills, people, experiences and relationships on boards is critical to your continued growth and success.
When Steve Jobs and his then-retail sage Ron Johnson masterminded the brick and mortar Apple experience, they conceived of a special empathetic mysticism for customers. Employees were imparted with service standards to those comparable to luxury hotels.
The concierge systems began fishtailing during the iPad's release in 2010. Genius Bar workers reported were being overworked. Expectations were pressuring employees to double the amount of customers they'd help per hour. The retail experience was deteriorating into a slow-moving customer stasis. Johnson left in 2011 to help turn around JCPenny. John Browett was hired as replacement, but was fired six months after in October 2012, unable to navigate the corporate culture. Apple has been out of a retail chief since. In October 2013, Apple announced Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts would fill the position in spring of 2014. Here's the kind of problems she's facing as retail chief:
…Only 20 percent of iPhones are sold in Apple Stores. He believes that the other 80 percent are missed opportunities to sell the rest of Apple's suite of products. According to data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, 52 percent of consumers who bought their iPhones from the Apple Store also own iPads and 30 percent have Mac laptops; among those who got their iPhones from their cellular carriers, only 37 percent have iPads and 20 percent have Mac laptops.
Missed opportunities galore, chalked up to a bad retail experience. Who is Ahrendts to be the one to turn it around?
From a small town 20 miles outside Indianapolis, Ahrendts holds "Midwestern core values," what's described as humility, empathy and sensitivity, close to her professional life.
She started her career at Donna Karan in 1981, and in 2006 left to run British fashion house Burberry, where she's known for her internal transparency and communication with the staff. She's absconded with an "alchemic mix of accessibility and aspiration, mass market and luxury," and has crafted a best-prepped sales team in Burberry stores, integrating traditional retail techniques with iPads, merging the online and in-store shopping experiences.
She knows the potential of the Chinese market, a demographic where Apple has lost out miserably to Samsung, where the phones are cheaper, distribution is wider and the cellular network deals with China Mobile are more lucrative. Apple has nine stores in China. In comparison to Burberry, which has stores in 13 of the 15 major cities on the mainland, and Ahrendts insists on at least one Mandarin-speaking sales associate in every major store, nine seems paltry.
She's an advocate of the gentle sell, aligning nicely with Jony Ive's sales methodology, which rests in the faith of happy customers as better brand ambassadors than salespeople. The creative partnership of Ahrendts and Ives could be a dangerous one. Apple might see a turnaround in their retail establishments yet.
Read Jeff Chu's full profile on Angela Ahrendts in Fast Company here.
At CES this week, AT&T announced a new sponsored data service. For a fee, a company--like Spotify, for example--could become a Sponsored Data provider, and offer its service to mobile users without costing them any data. AT&T pitches it as a win-win situation: companies want you to use their services, and you get to save your precious, expensive data for other things. It would be pretty swell, if it wasn't so indicative of everything wrong about mobile data regulation in America.
Over at The Verge, Nilay Patel argues that the service is ultimately bad for every party involved except AT&T. Patel argues that it's a way for AT&T to muscle out smaller companies and play favorites: if you wanted to rent a movie and Amazon was a sponsored data provider while Google Play was not, where would you download from?
"Pull the thread out even farther and it gets even more evil: if sponsored data becomes a de facto cost of business in the exploding mobile market, those costs will just get passed right back to consumers. That "free" $4.99 Elysium rental will just end up costing $5.99, and advertising in apps like Facebook will just get more intrusive and creepy. And rest assured that AT&T will find a way to keep your service rates high and your contract terms restrictive; nothing about this plan involves shifting AT&T's profits, just increasing them. "
The program is essentially exploiting a loophole in existing net neutrality policy that exempts wireless providers from the same regulations: AT&T's Sponsored Data program would be illegal over wired connections. This gap in regulation is particularly frustrating as consumers moved to mobile devices in droves over the past year--it's where the data-using populace is going, and it's ripe for exploitation.
Furthermore, AT&T's program wouldn't exist without the institutionalization of data caps among ISPs. What was an inherently ridiculous instance of false scarcity is now the norm, and while connectivity options like Google Fiber demonstrate how much better our networks can be, there remains little incentive for ISPs to improve their infrastructure.
It would be nice to think that this is all needless handwringing, but history doesn't support that. We're already paying money for data limits that don't exist, and once one carrier finds success, the rest generally follow suit.
A company called Robocoin plans to expand its Bitcoin ATMs into the Asian market, allowing people to withdraw the booming virtual currency as cash in Hong Kong and potentially Taiwan.
Robocoin, which already has a Bitcoin ATM deployed in Vancouver, says the machines make it easy for customers to buy and sell the cryptographic currency without dealing with the cumbersome online identity verification requirements of many online exchanges. The Hong Kong ATM could be online by the end of January, according to the South China Morning Post.
After TechCrunch reported earlier this week that Las Vegas company's ATMs might also be headed to Taiwan, financial regulators there said the machines wouldn't be allowed, since Bitcoin isn't recognized as a currency, according to Focus Taiwan, a local news organization.
Robocoin's ATMs take images of users' fingerprints, faces and government-issued IDs to screen out known terrorists and others on regulatory block lists and make sure users stay below anti-money-laundering regulatory limits. The Internet-enabled machines can automatically buy and sell the currency on exchanges such as Mt. Gox and either send funds to an existing Bitcoin address or generate a new virtual wallet, printing the necessary credentials on an ATM receipt.
The company said in a blog post it's processed millions of dollars in transactions through its Vancouver ATM, which lets customers of Waves Coffee Shop exchange Bitcoin and Canadian dollars.
"Over one half of the buy-transactions generated new wallets, suggesting that Robocoin continues to attract first time Bitcoin users," the company announced in November.
Robocoin sells the $20,000 ATMs to entrepreneurs who get a percentage of each transaction and, according to a recent report on Chicago news site DNAInfo, plans to have machines installed in that city and on the East Coast early this year.
Robocoin ATM owners in the U.S. need to register with the Treasury Department as money services businesses and obtain necessary state licenses, the company's said.
The cryptographic currency's value is again on the rise after prices plummeted last month, when regulators in mainland China forced the exchange BTC China to stop accepting Chinese yuan in exchange for Bitcoin.
Despite a turbulent year for Bitcoin's valuation, the cryptographic currency has proven a rich market for entrepreneurs, with API tracking site ProgrammableWeb reporting Bitcoin APIs among its hottest categories for 2013. The site lists 95 Bitcoin-related developer interfaces for developers, from Beatcoin, a toolkit for building Bitcoin-enabled jukeboxes, to Coinabul, which facilitates Bitcoin exchanges for gold.
Some services take advantage of the currency's mathematical properties for their own purposes. One, called Proof of Existence lets users mathematically prove a document existed as of a particular date by embedding its cryptographic fingerprint in the shared Bitcoin transaction record--a 21st century answer to mailing yourself a sealed copy of a time-sensitive document such as proof of an invention.
And Robocoin isn't alone in building Bitcoin ATMs--New Hampshire company Lamassu Bitcoin Ventures said last month it's received more than 100 orders for its machines that convert cash into Bitcoin from 25 different countries and shipped more than a dozen. Lamassu's highlighted the relative simplicity of its machine, though Robocoin's poked fun at makers of machines like Lamassu's that only accept cash and don't dispense it and aren't intended to be left unattended.
"Seriously, how bush league is an 'ATM' if it can't do the equivalent of deposits and withdrawals or be left unattended?" Robocoin CEO Jordan Kelley was quoted as saying on the company's blog.
"Hollywood is a place that creates a viewer escape. What I try to do, as a director, I…," said a visibly nervous director-slash-producer Michael Bay at Samsung's press conference yesterday afternoon before conceding to a teleprompter mishap and excusing himself from the stage.
"The type is all off. Sorry. But, I'll just wing this."
"Tell us what you think," said the other co-host on stage.
"Yeah. I'll just wing it," Bay said, not sound confident, taking a deep breath before trying to eke out a genuine answer for why he directs in the first place. "I try to take people on an emotional ride." After that, the overwhelmed Bay could hardly focus on what he was there to do--talk about Samsung's curved Ultra High Definition Television--and so he left the stage.
Not long after, Bay took to his blog to flesh out what had happened.
Wow! I just embarrassed myself at CES - I was about to speak for Samsung for this awesome Curved 105-inch UHD TV. I rarely lend my name to any products, but this one is just stellar. I got so excited to talk, that I skipped over the Exec VP's intro line and then the teleprompter got lost. Then the prompter went up and down - then I walked off. I guess live shows aren't my thing.
But I'm doing a special curved screen experience with Samsung and Transformers 4 footage that will be traveling around the world.
Michael
"Excited," huh. I wasn't aware inanimate objects, such as teleprompters, could err so odiously and "get lost"--very cool that even unexpected machines possess the AI to make human mistakes. And how about that Ultra HD TV? It's curved!
Speaking on stage is one of the hardest things any executive has to do. How do you recover? What's the secret for keeping your cool when things go off-script?
Programmer Jakub Chodounsky writes that spontaneity and adaptability is crucial in these situations. And you probably shouldn't be working off of a memorized script anyway, says Dan Shipper, founder of Firefly. Instead, practice talking about the key points--you'll come off as an authentic and relatable person, and if things go awry, you'll be well-prepared and able to riff off what your consort or PowerPoint slide says. As startup CEO Josh Kerr notes on his blog, "There is no such thing as winging it. Even a 60 second pitch requires a ton of preparation."
Developer Matt Gemmel has some more specific advice--first and foremost, If you must be rehearsed on stage, then rehearse. We'll paraphrase the list here; click here to see his other tips.
Rehearse fully so nerves don't distract you.
Make eye contact with people around the audience.
Don't do demos unless you are sure they'll work.
Don't write code or debug during a presentation.
Don't just serve up slides loaded with bullet points; add some variety.
Make yourself comfortable, physically; adopt a powerful pose and project your voice.
Be dynamic and energetic.
Remember that in almost all presentations, you're telling a story, not conveying data.
Don't be careless--mind the details and anticipate questions.
Be funny and human--you're not here to act like a square.
Take a break if the presentation is long--people need a recess to stay attentive.
Watch yourself speak during rehearsal by recording video.
Relax beforehand, and consider your physical needs.
When you walk on stage, break the tension by talking loudly, saying good morning, or inviting the crowd to participate in an ice breaker.
And, for the sake of everyone's second-hand embarrassment, stay calm. If you stumble on an "um" or other subconsciously injected speech disfluency, embrace it, writes Jason Freedman, co-founder of 42Floors. Focus by acting like you're speaking to one or two people in the room. Find your ritualistic pose of confidence.
Oh, Michael. Poor Michael. It is clear now that live shows are indeed "not your thing." Better to stick to those "emotional rides," also known as... stuff exploding.
French-based startup Induct showcased an eight-person self-driving vehicle named Navia yesterday at CES. The shuttle, reminiscent of a Disneyland golf-cart, boasts a handful of gadgets like lasers, sensors, and various camera viewpoints that can sense en route obstacles, so as not to rely on GPS for navigation.
It will be the world's first autonomous vehicle to hit the commercial market. Powered by a 10 kilowatt-hour lithium phosphate battery that can be charged wirelessly, the car tops out at 12.5 miles per hour. Using a smartphone, you can call the shuttle to come pick you up like KITT from Nightrider or any number of Batmobiles. Once inside there is a touchscreen to input the location to which you want to be driven. Induct's software produces real-time maps, choosing the best routes, as well as a remote computer system that will set schedules and process requests.
Leaning more towards estate transit than real transportation, Navia has some leverage over Google's expected driverless car: it can detect pedestrians and change direction in a tenth of a second. It's also designed specifically to run on city streets and is even being shopped around as a viable substitute for conductor-driven buses--we can imagine these things saving a few car accidents in Florida's retirement communities, for example.
Induct's CEO, Pierre Lefèvre explained to Forbes that Navia would not replace conventional buses, but instead will manifest as a cheaper and more efficient public transit option where commuters can summon the shuttles on command.
"You can compare it to an intelligent robot," Lefèvre said. "It's safe. It's easy to set up." Unfortunately though, the vehicle has yet to go through the extensive safety tests needed to ascertain whether Navia will prevent accidents and deter in-shuttle overcrowding. But with beta programs setup at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Navia's future is looking pretty bright.
Yesterday Jerry Seinfeld stopped by Reddit for one of its famous Ask Me Anythings. In spite of the low profile he's kept after the show that bore his name ended; the comic has a well-documented work ethic, performing regularly and heading up side projects like his low-key YouTube series. As such, his responses had a lot of practical insights for getting things done, because, in Seinfeld's words, "comedy is no joke."
Run with the critics. Just like every comedian has to deal with hecklers, your new business or creative venture will have its share of critics. There will always be someone who believes that they're cleverer than you or that what you're doing isn't a very good idea. So set them off guard by taking them seriously.
"Very early on in my career, I hit upon this idea of being the Heckle Therapist…Instead of fighting them, I would say "You seem so upset, and I know that's not what you wanted to have happen tonight. Let's talk about your problem" and the audience would find it funny and it would really discombobulate the heckler too, because I wouldn't go against them, I would take their side."
Energy is vital. Enthusiasm is contagious, and it's important to maintain momentum on a project. But it will also carry onto your finished work. When commenting on the chemistry of Seinfeld's cast, the comedian noted just how vital it was to the show's success that everyone believed they were funny together:
"In fact I would go so far as to say that was the key to the entire show, was that we really felt like together we were funny, and then the audience felt it, and that's how you can somehow catch lightning in a bottle."
Know when to step back. One sharp Redditor noticed that, while Seinfeld was a show about a comedian, the lead character was often quite serious. Seinfeld notes that this was a secret weapon of the show's success:
"The reason I would play straight was it was funnier for the scene. And very few people have ever remarked on this, because it was a conscious choice of mine, only because I knew it would make the show better, and I didn't care who was funny as long as somebody was funny and that the show was funny."
There's a lot of pressure to be brilliant at what you do in order to perform well, but being a sounding board for those around you to shine is equally valuable. If you're on a team and one person scores, you all score.
Remember you're not a big deal. In one particular anecdote, Seinfeld talks about a club he performed in during the peak of his show's popularity where the owner treated him like just another performer. It served as a reminder to stay grounded, and helped him cope after the heady rush of Seinfeld came to an end:
"That's why I wanted to go back into doing standup comedy, because as the star of your own TV show you don't get treated like that but as a standup performer you do get treated like that. It was hilarious, and absurd, but standup is a life of just brutal reality which is the opposite of the life I had been leading in LA and that I missed."
Similarly, it helps to get out of your depth every once in a while, to be somewhere you're not an expert; where you're just another nervous person trying to figure things out.
Writer's block is a sham. Although there are a wealth of resources available to help you when you feel stuck with a creative problem, nothing will solve it like getting back to work. "Writer's block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work."
Your dream job is still a job. But you can dictate the terms with which you meet it.
"I chose comedy because I thought it seemed much easier than work. And more fun than work. It turned out to be much harder than work, and not easy at all. But you still don't have to ever really grow up. And that's the best thing of all."
That's the concept behind the HDR-AS100V, Sony's newest video recording solution. Up to five of Sony's AS100V cams can be linked to the "Live-View Remote" RM-LVR1 wrist controller, and while each camera is priced competitively ($299 per cam or $399 bundled with the wrist controller) compared to the latest Hero3+ GoPro, the little Sony cams are slim enough to duct tape to helmets and gear, removing the need for costly GoPro mounts.
The AS100V also inherits GPS tagging from the AS30V, which lets you tag location and speed to your recordings. Meanwhile, the included PlayMotion software lets you use location data to sync footage together for split-screen action. The AS100V's improvements over the AS30V include an ultra-wide lens with 30% higher resolution, an 18 megapixel sensor, and improved SteadyShot image stabilization. The AS100V is also splashproof without requiring external housing (though one is provided), making it easier to use than the AS30V and AS15.
While GoPro still rules the slopes/waves/skies, Sony's latest entry in its Action Cam line edges closer to a synchronized, device-controlled networked future for amateur extreme videographers.
Making money from digital content is notoriously tricky. Blogger and podcaster Zac J. Szewczyk incurs a monthly net loss from his website, but he's not interested in common options like ugly side banners. "I would rather write hosting costs off as part of an ongoing hobby and continue losing money than pollute my carefully crafted design with these abominations," Szewczyk writes. However, he does want his website to be profitable in a "respectful and attractive way" and he lays out several compelling strategies to do so.
His revenue model is largely based on increasing unique views. As traffic climbs, Szewczyk will adjust his monetization scheme accordingly. When he hits 2,000 monthly visitors, he'll seek sponsorships. At 2,500, he'll make code from his projects available to members. After the 3,000 monthly visitor threshold is crossed, he'll launch a members-only podcast.
Recognizing the potential of good, old-fashioned email, Szewczyk plans to launch a monthly newsletter similar to Brett Terpstra's Web Excursions that would contain "my take on topics I find interesting yet not compelling enough to publish as a standalone piece." Szewczyk outlines two newsletters he would send out as modes to drum up finances through the increasing readership. The Web Excursion-inspired one would be an accompaniment inspired by Scott Hanselman's Newsletter of Wonderful Things.
He also mentions the possibility of restricting one of his two newsletters to members only, which would follow a paywall revenue model for premium content that has proven quite successful for some established writers and online media outlets. Subscribers are thereby single-handedly supporting Szewczyk's fine-tuned content and supplying him all the more reason to continue to produce it.
Of course, he's far from the first blogger to consider the paywall experiment. Andrew Sullivan started his blog on his own in 2000 and for six years he wrote everything himself with little to no financing--his monetization model led him to eventually be completely self-sustainable. After leaving Newsweek in 2013, Sullivan launched The Dish, a blog and independent media platform that grabbed headlines with its bold monetization strategy. One year later, The Dish is entirely member supported with around 1.2 million unique visitors and an average of 8 million global monthly pageviews.
Sullivan, like prominent tech publishers John Gruber, Marco Arment and Jim Dalrymple, has shown that despite the challenging economics, it is possible to make online content pay. Yet as each of these cases shows, it helps to have a dedicated following to begin with.
"I think I have a rock-solid plan in that regard; now I just need the visitors," Szewczyk says.
Mozilla was targeting the emerging market with its mobile Firefox operating system, but judging by its CES announcements, there may still be an audience for it in the U.S. On the phone front, LG showed off its entry level phone, the Fireweb, but the biggest surprise came from Panasonic, which said it will be using the OS on its TVs.
Part of the reason the TV maker will be using Firefox OS over something like Android is the openness. Panasonic's U.S. vice president of Interactive Content, Merwan Mereby, told The Next Web that the alternative operating systems are too heavily controlled by their makers to be free to use in whatever way they choose. Mereby further indicated the marketplace for apps was the area Panasonic could customize most to compete against other manufacturers.
Mozilla is promising higher end phones from ZTE, citing two dual core devices currently being worked on. Right now, however, the only phones available running the Firefox OS feature low-end specs, aimed at first-time smartphone users. LG's Fireweb has been available in Brazil for a few months but will most likely make its way to the U.S. shortly.
The main feature of the OS is its search function, which highlights which apps/sites would facilitate the search query. For example, if you typed a song or a band's name in the search field, the displayed icons would switch to ones like SoundCloud, YouTube, Wikipedia, or others that apply. This type of featured placed front and center takes the guesswork out of searching for an app that may or may not do the ultimate goal like, say, looking for lyrics of a song. Mozilla is banking on this concept making more sense to users coming from a flip phone, unfamiliar with the whole app process.
Developing an app for Firefox OS really is as simple as building an HTML5 web app. Mozilla has also developed new web APIs, however, for access to things like Bluetooth and battery status--traditionally only available in native apps.
Further into the future might also include Firefox OS appearing on desktops and tablets. VIA is previewing a motherboard with the Firefox OS embedded as well as a traditional stand-alone computer. Neither one is ready for mainstream adoption, but the companies are hoping early adopters will jump on board to test the products. On the tablet side it looks like Foxconn will be the first to produce devices once the software is finalized and better optimized for the form factor.
Despite its many benefits, there still just isn't a whole lot of excitement for the Firefox OS. That may change though if LG, ZTE, or especially Panasonic can create compelling hardware to show off the open source software. Even with lackluster awareness, Mozilla is still proving there's a place for yet another mobile OS where most people thought there wasn't.
As you read this, check your posture. Back straight? Shoulders back? If you're like most people, probably not. Back pain is the single leading cause of disability according to a 2010 Census Bureau report, and studies show Americans spend more than $90B annually on back-related medical expenses.
Lumo BodyTech released a slouch-preventing wearable sensor called Lumo Lift at CES today. It sends vibrations to replace your mom nagging "sit up straight!" while providing visual data of users' bad posture habits in its iOS app.
The small, magnetic clip-on sensor detects when the user's upper-body posture goes out of an upright position, and then logs the data to its iOS app through Bluetooth connectivity. It instantly sends soft vibrations to remind the user to sit up. Unlike your nagging mom, Lumo Lift gives you the ability to turn off vibration notifications while it continues to track activity.
"The main focus with the Lift, is that it's important to stand or sit better with your upper body," BodyTech cofounder Charles Wang says. "When you hold yourself in open poses, you increase your confidence, power, and appearance. It's important for people who care about it for health reasons and also for those who want to look and feel better."
It also counts footsteps, calories burned, posture stats, and daily journaling options. The company says the Lumo Lift's battery life is five days and it includes a charger that recharges within two hours.
Within hours of its launch at CES today, Lumo Lift's "Early Bird Special" of 500 units sold out. It's still available for pre-order at $69 with shipping planned for late spring. It comes in three colors: white, black, and silver. The company is also selling a five-color pack of clasps at an additional $10.
BodyTech launched its first wearable sensor in the form of a waistband called the Lumo Back in 2012 after cofounder Andrew Chang wanted a preventative solution for the 12 years of back pain he endured. A newer, revised version of the Lumo Back launched in the summer of 2013 to include a lighter, more elastic waistband. While thin, it's less concealable than the Lumo Lift, but it lasts up to six days on single charge--one day longer than the Lift. Reaching a bigger area of the back and providing more data, the Lumo Back retails for a higher price at $149.95.
"The Lumo Back focuses on the pelvis and lower back and because it does so, it finds the foundation of the spine," Wang says. "If you get the spine foundation right, the back aligns nicely."
But, when more people began to voice their concerns about neck problems, Wang wanted to create a more specific resolution. "We really wanted to build something that would work for them, says Wang. "People wanted more options that are smaller and potentially even more discreet, so those things really influenced our decision."
I got a lot of funny looks around the office when I told people I was building this little web app to generate invoices. After all, invoicing is our freelancers' problem, not mine as the editor of this site. You see, the vast majority of stories you see published on the Fast Company are written by out-of-house writers who we've contracted to work for us--at the end of the month, they bill us.
And every month, someone manages to screw up the invoice workflow mandated by accounting. As I wrote in my first post about this topic, this error-prone process is like a lot of "training" issues that crop up in companies everywhere:
Each time you find a writer who has done great work in the past, there's an adjustment process to the tone and content of our particular publication. In a regular job, you'd call it the training period. These writers need to get to know how we do things, how we expect work to be rendered, how we edit, revise and fact-check, and how we incentivize and compensate them."
Even veteran FC writers manage to mess up the invoice process once in a while, resulting in a tiny workflow trainwreck. If a writer leaves out a piece of information on an invoice or incorrectly formats it, a flurry of emails appears between me, our managing editor, and the writer--who usually ends up re-invoicing the correct way after we catch the snafu. With 10-20 writers working for each of the Fast Company sites in a given month, this can be frustrating, especially as we grow and hire more writers.
Is invoicing the biggest problem our organization faces? Probably not. But it's all these shamefully unambitious little problems--the time-sucks--that your company can't afford to sleep on. Instead, I think we should be eliminating the inefficient friction points one by one so our company can operate more smoothly. As it turns out, focusing on the little problems can often reveal bigger ones, as was the case with the invoice app.
For the next version of the invoice app, the logical thing was to automate more of the invoice process. Instead of having each writer keep track of their stories, and the price I quoted them for each one, I figured we could reduce errors and pay people more accurately if the app kept track for us. Here's how the new app--which we deployed at an old domain name I had, Readliner.com--takes this automation to the next level.
First, Readliner sucks in each story that my site publishes using our RSS feed, along with its metadata. It presents me the day's stories in a neat list. There, I can assign a price to each story. Normally, I would verbally quote the writer a price and let them keep track of it. But we produce too many stories for me to go over each writer's line items one by one checking their prices against my memory, so this could be a major source of slippage, as they call it in the capital markets. (Slippage is the difference between what you think you're paying and the actual cost.) I'm not saying our writers are out to gouge us, but media companies don't operate on the beefiest of margins, so even a small amount of slippage here matters.
Now, with Readliner, here's the interface editors see. For privacy's sake, I've blurred out the prices.
This is where I (the editor) can go in and set prices for each story. You'll notice that Readliner also tells me the average price I pay this writer for a story, as a benchmark. The flow is simple enough: I login and price stories about once a week, then go about my business.
Each writer can also login into Readliner (with his or her Twitter account) to see a list of stories from the last 30 days, complete with the prices I'm paying them for each one. Thus, writers are happy because they get a neat, automated, and accurate way to track their earnings.
At the end of the month, when it's time to invoice us, they click the only button on the screen: Generate Invoice. Out comes a properly formatted, correctly priced, comprehensive list of their stories in a nice PDF invoice, which they can email directly to our accounting department. Because the system is automated, these invoices can be submitted without my approval, removing one more bottleneck for me to hire more writers and scale up my site.
Slippage is one potential issue, but a bigger one is how we price stories. Normally, I quote the writer a price on a story at the time they pitch it--which is also the point where I have the least information about how this story will turn out. The price I quote for a given story is based on a few factors: anticipated traffic, the amount of reporting, and the amount of research are three major heuristics. At the time of the pitch, I know very little about each of these--it's a nascent story idea, which is tough to assign value to.
By offloading the pricing on myself via Readliner, I'm able to price each story later in the process--after it's done and published and appearing in our RSS feed. This is a much better juncture to evaluate how much I want to pay the writer for the piece. How well did it turn out? How hard did they work on it? How much trouble was the editing process? These are all factors that deserve consideration when pricing, and didn't before Readliner.
I haven't been able to quantify whether (on the whole) this new workflow will cause me to spend more on content or less. But the major win here for me as an editor is that it has improved our accuracy--both in the way I price stories and the way writers bill for them. That's no small feat for a silly little PHP app that I wireframed on a Post-it note and then outsourced to a friend in Nepal for a total of $1,500.
That's why small problems are worth solving! They are often symptoms of larger issues, which may also be solvable with software.
Let me know if you have questions about this app or our workflow @chrisdannen on Twitter.
"We certainly don't want to cause any inconvenience to [San Francisco] residents and we're trying alternative ways to get Googlers to work," a spokesperson for Google said about the company's plans to boat people to work.
Inconvenienced? Not as much. Pissed off? Very.
Google and other Silicon Valley tech companies have come under fire from San Francisco and Oakland residents for the gentrification of the city--and for (they say) abusing free public transit to cart around mobs of employees. The fury erupted into protests last month, with residents vandalizing and blocking the path of Google- and Apple-bound shuttle buses.
Locals are pressuring tech companies to invest more money into the city amid issues with rising housing prices and strained transit systems. Google and other Valley tech companies have been using public bus stops to bus an estimated 45,000 employees between their homes and offices daily.
Instead of investing in the city, the company rented the Triumphant, a 149-passenger private catamaran that travels between San Francisco and Redwood City to cart commuters. The luxury Wi-Fi-equipped boat will run two trips in the morning and two trips in the evening for employees on a trial basis.
In a news conference on Monday, Mayor Ed Lee introduced an 18-month trial program that will limit the commuter buses to the use of 200 pubic stops (out of the total 2,500), operating under guidelines (like yielding to Muni), and paying "charges of around $1 per stop per day," according to Reuters. The result will pay an estimated $1.5 million, or about $100,000 per company, to the city, which is definitely small potatoes considering enterprises like Google are worth around $268 billion.
It is difficult to rectify this chump change as a means for helping Bay Area residents get back on their feet as the income gap widens. Jennifer Cust, an organizer for Eviction Free San Francisco, said this about Mayor's Lee's shuttle-payment plans in a press release for the Housing Rights Committee: "We are prepared to be demand more of City Hall if it appears that Mayor Lee's plan is not realistically aggressive enough to address the concerns of poor, working, and middle-class San Franciscans."
Mayor Lee's program will go up for a vote next month and may mitigate some upset from San Franciscans. However, the Triumphant, which is privately operated and therefore will evade any city payments, may contradict his efforts.
In any case, if Silicon Valley techies continue to complain about the city they inhabit (i.e. Peter Shih of Y Combinator and Greg Gopman, formerly of AngelHack) without illustrating real attempts to improve it themselves, locals will only get angrier.
Sony says it sold more than 4.2 million PlayStation 4 consoles in 2013, handily surpassing the "more than 3 million" Xbox One units Microsoft said it sold last year.
Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Andrew House announced the sales numbers Tuesday during his keynote address at CES, a day after Microsoft revealed the Xbox results. The PS4 launched on Nov. 15, giving it a week's head start on the new Xbox, which first reached consumers on Nov. 22. Sony's console is also easier on the wallet: It carries a $399 sticker price, while the Xbox One retails for $499.
Consumers also bought more than 9.7 million games for the PS4, including the latest installments in the Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed series, Sony says.
The system will soon offer streaming games through the new PlayStation Now service, which is slated to launch this summer, Sony announced at CES. Cloud-based versions of PlayStation 3 games will be available to stream on PS4 and PS3 systems as well as on Sony's portable PlayStation Vita and new models of the company's Bravia TV line.
The PS4 is now available in 53 countries, compared to just 13 for the Xbox. Microsoft has said the Xbox will become available in additional countries throughout 2014 and said the system was, for a time in November, the fastest-selling console in the U.S.
"Since our launch, demand for Xbox One has been strong, selling out throughout the holidays at most retailers worldwide," wrote Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi on the Xbox blog. "We are continuing to work hard to deliver additional consoles to retailers as fast as possible."
Nintendo, the third player in the console race, said in an October financial statement that it had then sold 3.89 million Wii U consoles. The Wii U launched in November 2012 and retails for $299, offering less powerful hardware at a lower price than competing systems from Sony and Microsoft.
While that formula worked well for the original Wii, which ultimately sold more than 100 million units worldwide, it's proven less successful for the Wii U, which faces new competition from games on other low-powered devices like smartphones and tablets.
In an overtly flashy keynote address to the packed CES crowd yesterday, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer presented the company's vertical move into online magazines. First up is Yahoo Food, which will focus entirely on the culinary realm. Afterwards, Yahoo Tech will launch spearheaded by David Pogue, who was poached from the New York Times last October.
According to Business Insider, 800 million people use Yahoo monthly and an estimated 400 million of those users are from mobile. And with that wide net cast, Mayer, who Vanity Fair deemed both a dictator and cool fairy godmother, has been readying herself at the helm to plunge Yahoo into digital news for some time. (Last year, Katie Couric was also added to the payroll.)
Yahoo's refurbishing plans are particularly unique in terms of their advertising strategy. Rather than bombarding users with common banner ads, the online mags will subtly fuse traditional glossy-mag advertisements with Yahoo's content, which are much more valuable.
"We have been hard at work re-imagining Yahoo's core businesses across search, communications, media, and video--all powered by two powerful platforms, Flickr and Tumblr," Mayer said. "We found our inspiration in magazines," she added, "they are elegant, beautiful, and have a distinctive voice."
She also presented plans for Yahoo News Digest that will amass online news for mobile users twice a month. The platform will be delivered on the mobile news aggregator Summly, acquired by Yahoo in 2013. Likewise, Mayer mentioned the purchase of the app Aviate that helps organize mobile user's smartphones based on their practices.
