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Amazon Echo gets multi-room audio just in time to take on Apple’s HomePod

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If you have multiple Amazon Echo devices at home, you can now play music on them together like a Sonos system. The multi-room audio feature is available today on Amazon’s Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Show in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. Third-party Alexa devices will be able to tie into the same system early next year.

Amazon is also releasing developer tools that will let connected speakers respond to voice commands from an Echo or other Alexa device. Sonos, Bose, Sound United, and Samsung all plan to support Alexa controls soon.

Sonos-style music playback is becoming table stakes in the battle between smart home platforms. Google already supports multi-room audio on its Chromecast Audio dongle, Chromecast-enabled speakers, and Google Home speaker. Apple won’t be far behind with iOS 11, which adds multi-room audio for connected speakers (and eventually, HomePod) via the AirPlay 2 protocol. Amazon’s own multi-room support is arriving just in time to fend off the company’s biggest competitors.


A Field Guide To Truly Audacious Philanthropy

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About 80% of the world’s richest philanthropic claim to want to invest in social change, but only 20% do. That well-documented fact dubbed the “aspiration gap” stems from the fact that tackling complex societal issues far trickier than, say, just donating huge sums to your alma mater or building a new museum wing.

Big complex investments also take time to pay off. In fact, an analysis of 15 of major societal changes–from the advent and widespread adoption of CPR to establishing marriage equality–shows that 90% of those efforts took over 20 years of continuous effort to develop, according to Bridgespan, a nonprofit consultancy,

They were also complex: 80% of those ventures required changes to government funding or policies along the way, while 75% involved coordination across numerous industries. And price? The majority also cost $10 million or more. To incentivize major philanthropic funders to keep at it, Bridgespan researchers have developed a “framework for audacious philanthropy,” which was just published in Harvard Business Review.

According to the HBR report, mega-charitable efforts that succeed tend to do 5 main things: Build a shared understanding of the problem and its ecosystem; Create emotionally compelling winnable milestones; Design for massive scale; Drive (don’t assume) demand; Embrace course correction. Any group chasing the next big social good gain should be thinking about these elements as a necessary checklist; the best movements have included all of them, ensuring their massive amount of time and money was being well spent. Bridgespan offers a trove of additional research here.

Build A Shared Understanding Of The Problem And Its Ecosystem

Take the fight to cut the smoking rate: Over at least five decades, the American Cancer Society allied with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to first study how exactly tobacco use was harmful, and then make the habit less appealing by regulating advertising, upping taxes, and limiting where people could smoke and where cigarettes were bought and sold. As a result, smoking rates have dropped from 42% to around 15% today.

Create Emotionally Compelling Winnable Milestones

The battle for marriage equality, in particular, is a good demonstration of how messaging matters: LGBT equality groups used polls and focus groups to figure out their core mantra “love is love”–it worked better than advocating for equal tax breaks–and began a state-by-state battle to shift public perception with each place a milestone for toward federal inclusion.

Design For Massive Scale

CPR is so popular today because the American Red Cross and American Hearst Association have figured out an easy way to teach it to lifeguards and high schoolers alike. The method only spread, though because doctors worked hard to figure out a shorthand process for restarting a heart, which once required open chest surgery.

Drive (Don’t Assume) Demand

Sesame Street took off in the late 1960s because The Carnegie Corporation realized that in order to get folks to tune in, it needed to drive demand from the outset, and so spent heavily on both production and advertising values (not to mention measuring its impact and reach, to share important early education milestones).

Embrace Course Correction

The Depression shaped the National School Lunch program, which was initially considered a huge success until researchers discovered that local assessments were off, leaving many kids still hunger. This prompted the creation of federal guidelines, an influx of funding, and better targeting to find those most at-risk–a great example of course correcting.

“For the types of social challenges targeted by audacious philanthropists and other change makers, adaptation informed by robust measurement is key,” add co-authors Susan Wolf Ditkoff and Abe Grindle in the HBR article. “To fuel progress, funders need to make sure that both their attitudes and their funding reflect that reality.”

Report: Apple wants Hollywood to stop suffocating 4K video with high prices

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Apple is reportedly asking Hollywood studios to stop marking up 4K HDR video as it tries to bring the new format to iTunes and its next Apple TV. Today, studios typically charge $25 to $30 for 4K HDR purchases in other stores, but sources tell the Wall Street Journal that Apple wants those prices dropped to $20, the same as new HD movies.

Fat chance of that happening. TV industry executives are still sore about how they footed the bill for HD content only to see television makers reap the profits. Transitioning to 4K is a similarly expensive endeavor, so studios are somewhat justified in demanding higher prices for what they produce. Even if Apple can negotiate a price drop, completely eliminating the markup over HD seems unlikely.

This issue might have been avoided had TV makers and studios put their marketing muscle behind 1080p HDR, which is cheaper to produce and visually more striking than 4K alone. But that’s a whole other story.

How Silicon Valley Could Be Part Of The Solution In North Korea

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With all the recent disturbing saber rattling from U.S. president Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un, East Asia has become much more unstable. World leaders and seasoned diplomats are urging constraint and intensified diplomacy to defuse the potentially catastrophic situation.

In April I wrote about why tech companies (which tend to stay out of geopolitical emergencies) should be particularly concerned about the situation in North Korea, and begin making preparations now for what could happen later.

That remains true, but tech companies, in my view, could do more than just prepare. They could think about what they can do to help bring about a peaceful solution in North Korea. We’ve all heard about how there are “no good options” in Korea, but that refers to short-term military solutions. The weapon to which North Korea may be most vulnerable is information.

RelatedIs Silicon Valley In Denial Over The Threat Of An “Unthinkable” War With North Korea?

It certainly wields it effectively on its own people. The tight control of information is the Kim Jong Un regime’s most powerful instrument of control. It couples a constant barrage of nationalist propaganda with a smothering control over exposure to outside information and opinions. Children growing up in North Korea, for example, learn very early in life that the United States is their country’s biggest enemy and the cause of all its problems. The end result is a people enslaved to an ideology that goes unquestioned and uncontested.

The tech industry could do a lot to test how well that regime can defend against information from without. Many oppressive regimes before it have not fared well. I’ve seen this up close.

Oppression, Up Close

Back in 1973 I travelled with a group of 51 international youth to protest the lack of personal and religious freedoms in the Soviet Union. We planned to hold our rally in Red Square during their May Day celebration that year. We drove the route from Helsinki to Moscow, with stops in Kalinin and what is now St. Petersburg. We entered on tourist visas and did not declare our real intentions.

During the first part of the trip we saw how depressed the country was and how downtrodden its people had become. All they knew is what their leadership had told them. We saw that their leaders created fear by fabricating myths about how evil the outside world was.

Despite our secrecy, our group fell under suspicion from the time we entered the Soviet Union. The trip went smoothly during our stay in Kalinin, but by the time we got to St. Petersburg the government had concluded we had other intentions than just sightseeing. We were arrested, roughed up, then kicked out of the country within two days.

The experience, naturally, stayed with me. Seeing firsthand how totalitarian leadership can enslave an entire country played into another key decision I made in the mid-1980s. Already entrenched in the PC industry, I started to think about ways of getting information from the outside world into the Soviet Union.


Related: Using Cyberattacks To Stop North Korean Nukes Not Easy, Experts Warn


The Fax Offensive

In 1985, about two years before President Reagan gave his “tear down this wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, I began working with a group of people in Hamburg, Germany, whose goal was to smuggle fax machines into the Soviet Union. They wanted to write, and deliver via fax, newsletters about what was going on outside of Russia to make people in the Soviet Union more aware of the lies of communism.

The group already had some success getting fax machines into the Soviet Union, mainly by hiding them in the cars of people who routinely went back and forth over the border (they were less likely to be searched). I provided some funding and some of the technical support information that accompanied the fax machines headed for the Soviet Union. Once inside, the fax machines were connected to the phone lines using acoustic couplers (that thing David Lightman sat his phone on in WarGames) so they could receive the newsletters.

It worked very well, and it mattered. The newsletters spread like wildfire. And the Soviet leadership had no clue how to stop this flow of information. You can look back in history and see that the flow of information played a key role in the breakup and collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, Michal Gorbachov, when asked at a major policy event in New York City in the mid 1990s about what forced the collapse of the Soviet Union, he specifically called out the government’s inability to control information coming in from the outside. He mentioned that fax machines had played a major role in conveying that information.

When Mr. Gorbachov spoke at Stanford a year later, I had a chance to briefly interview him. I asked him about that statement. Once people got more information about the free world, he told me, and when the Politburo could not control this flow of information, things began to change rapidly. Ironically many of the Soviet people learned of Gorbachov’s ouster via fax machine, as it took days for the Kremlin to circulate the statement confirming the change in leadership.

Technology was also credited with playing a big role in bringing about the Arab Spring. A large, city-crippling protest, spread through viral social media, helped stoked political unrest and disruption in countries across the region, and eventually, arguably, at Wall Street.

If tech helped bring about such big changes in the Soviet Union and the Middle East, it is at least feasible it could do something similar in North Korea. The North Korean people could use smartphones and the internet to gain a better understanding of outside world. They need to learn that they are being enslaved by ruthless leaders who use propaganda and fake news to control them. This might influence their views of the Kim regime, and over time cause Kim himself to loosen his grip on the people of this Hermit Kingdom.

Phones For Defectors

Access to information and information technology within North Korea is slowly growing. In an important piece in Politico, former State Department official Tom Malinowski describes how that access could help bring change and peace to North Korea. Here is a key passage:

“Virtually all recent North Korean defectors say that despite the risks, they consumed these media before leaving their country; usage by the general population may be lower, but is growing each year. In a recent survey, 87 percent of defectors say they purchased media devices and other consumer goods, including food and clothes, using money earned outside their official occupation—a sign of how ubiquitous black markets now are in North Korea. As a result, the regime has shifted its strategy from trying to deny its people access to information technologies to controlling and monitoring their use. But the more people use these devices, the harder it becomes for the state to spy on everyone.”

Malinowski goes on to say that Chinese smartphones are legal and abundant on the black markets, and could be used to get political and cultural information from South Korea and and elsewhere. The challenge for North Koreans is keeping their secret access hidden from the authorities: A recent article in The Economist titled “What North Koreans Learn From Smartphones,” states that North Korea has actually sanctioned broad 3G wireless networks but wants to maintain tight control over the content delivered over those networks.

Drones And Thumb Drives

The tech industry can support the spread of information to North Korea in a couple of ways.

First, technologists need to continue to work on ways to un-jam the signals that countries like North Korea is using to control the content that the people can receive on their computers, phones, and TVs. While this can be expensive and the U.S. and the South Korean Military no doubt are trying to do that now, Silicon Valley companies who have this technology should be working closer with these efforts to get more information in and out of the Hermit Kingdom. For instance, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx, the Pentagon’s two-year-old Mountain View outpost, is already tapping ideas from across the Valley.

Second: We need more USB drives slipping into North Korea via underground channels, the way they are doing today, functioning like the fax machines that were once used to disseminate new ideas into the Soviet empire.


Related: The Dangerous Mission To Undermine North Korea With Flash Drives


Silicon Valley companies and other people who want to see North Korea freed from the clutches of Kim Jong Un can also provide technical and financial support to groups like the Human Rights Foundation that are creating soap operas, serials, and other content designed to spread messages of hope and freedom to North Koreans and expose them to the real world that exists outside the strict controls of their leadership.

Third, the tech world can invent new technologies. Consider the winning idea at a recent hacakathon sponsored by the Human Rights Foundation: a pair of Korean-American teenagers partnered with a former Google engineer to create a flat and easily concealable satellite dish that could be surreptitiously slipped across the border to break through the government’s information firewall, and deliver the kind of videos that HRF is making.

Even with tight controls by the government, The Economist notes, “Many watchers believe that, if North Koreans had enough mobile phones, received enough outside news and saw enough soaps depicting the South’s freedoms and riches, the regime would founder.” Thae Yong Ho, a North Korean diplomat who defected to South Korea last year, tells the magazine he believes the regime will “collapse on its own when enough external information introduced through drones or USBs reveals the truth of the Kim regime.” (In one recent poll of defectors cited by The Economist, 98% said they had used USBs to store illegal content.)

In no way do I suggest that technology would be “the” savior that frees the North Korean’s from being enslaved by the Kim regime. However, given my own experience with the Soviet Union and seeing how technology impacted the Arab Spring, I do hold out hope that tech could be part of the solution. Opening channels of free communication from outside North Korea could help the poor country’s people push for and achieve greater freedom of speech and expression. It could touch off a warming process that might lead to the ouster of North Korea’s current leadership.


Contributor Tim Bajarin is a long-time Silicon Valley businessman and analyst. He is president of the tech market research firm Creative Strategies.

NASA is heading on a journey to the center of Mars

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Someone tell Elon Musk to strap the Boring Company aboard his next SpaceX rocket, because NASA might need some help with their next endeavor. The space agency is moving forward with plans to make their next mission to Mars a very Jules Verne-sounding journey to the center of the Red Planet.

Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. (aka InSight) will be the first mission to focus on looking at what lies beneath the surface of Mars in the hopes of understanding how our very own rocky planet was formed. “Because the interior of Mars has churned much less than Earth’s in the past three billion years, Mars likely preserves evidence about rocky planets’ infancy better than our home planet does,” said InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is leading the team. (Guessing Brendan Fraser and Josh Hutcherson were busy.) They will plant a lander near Mars’s equator before using a robotic arm to embed a seismometer and a heat probe into Mars’s surface. They will also start monitoring radio transmissions between Earth and Mars. They aren’t looking for signs of intelligent life in the universe (or intergalactic Coldplay fans), but to “assess perturbations in how Mars rotates on its axis, which are clues about the size of the planet’s core,” according to a press release.

This latest mission will take off in May 2018, and will continue to lay the groundwork to send humans to Mars sometime in the 2030s. Perhaps Brendan Fraser will be available then.

This Is The Process I Follow To Stop Negative Thoughts From Occupying My Mind

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This piece originally appeared on Shine, a free daily motivational text, and is reprinted with permission. 


Most people have heard plenty of ways to combat negative thinking: Practice mindfulness, go for a walk, call a friend or family member. But the challenge with negative thinking isn’t knowing what you should do when it happens–it’s knowing when to put these tactics into action. Negative thoughts are pretty sneaky. They often start out innocently, but then they quickly intensify and build on other negative thoughts.

This tendency was identified in a 1988 study titled “Depression and mental control: The resurgence of unwanted negative thoughts.” The study concluded that “depression involves an enhanced accessibility of interconnected negative thoughts that can undermine mental control efforts.” What this means for us is that the more we let our negative thoughts occupy our mind without interruption, the more interconnected they will become.

But what if I told you that you can see the future? That you can know when your negative thoughts are getting worse? It would make it a lot easier to make healthy decisions. You’d be much better at nixing your negative thoughts before they get worse. You would even have more time to “experiment” with different coping strategies. You could even improve your ability to communicate your emotions, and you could give those around you ample notice if you need a break or need to vent.

Negative Thinking Comes With Warning Signs

Much like earthquakes often have “tremors” or foreshocks ahead of the mainshock, people have early, often subtle, signs that their negative thoughts may be worsening.

My negative thought warning sign: I start senselessly criticizing myself. A recent example happened during my weekly pick-up basketball game when I missed an open layup. I cursed myself out loud instead of quietly laughing it off and running back on defense like I usually do.


Related:3 Tips To Help You Worry Less And Get Back To Work 


For me, it was a sign that I needed to check in with myself about how I was feeling in regards to my goals and responsibilities. After some self-reflection, I found the problem: My to-do list had been piling up, and I was avoiding some tasks that needed to either be delegated or taken head on. Cue the negative thinking.

That check-in allowed me to take earlier action than I might have if I had just ignored my self-insulting behavior. Your warning sign to negative thinking, however, might be different from mine.

Subtle Thoughts And Behaviors to Look Out For

●︎ Are you a nail biter?

●︎ Hair picker?

●︎ Toe tapper?

●︎ Self insulter?

●︎ Impulse buyer?

●︎ Emotional eater?

●︎ Snooze button smasher?

●︎ Caffeine abuser?

In a lot of ways, these are all “self-soothing” behaviors, even if some of them can cause more problems than they solve. But they are also behaviors that we do often without noticing. Forcing ourselves to pay attention to these behaviors gives us the opportunity we need to use more effective coping strategies.


Related:How To Ditch The Bad Habits That Will Hold You Back This Year 


One of these behaviors on their own might hardly be noticeable or not even considered negative. But when we pay attention to the timing and frequency of these types of behaviors, we can start to pick up on patterns that can inform us exactly where we are headed. They could be early signs of depression, a warning of an imminent panic attack, or just early signs that you’re about to give up on your New Year’s resolution. Either way, when we notice these subtle signs, we can better anticipate increases in negative thoughts and take preventive or healing actions.

Another benefit of noticing these subtle signs: You may start to notice that they happen around certain people, at certain times of day, or even in certain places. If you are able to identify these triggers to your negative thoughts or self-soothing behaviors, you may be able to eliminate the trigger altogether. This may not always be an option, especially if the trigger is an important job or close family member, but it may be a sign that you need to deal with that person or place in a different way.

How To Stop Negative Thinking Once You Spot It

So let’s say you get really good at noticing your self-soothing behaviors, maybe even to the point of being able to head off negative thought patterns. What can you do to stop the negative thinking once it starts? Well, using my previous example, you could do a check in with yourself and examine your current thoughts and expectations about how things are going. Or, you could also use a popular Dialectical Behavior Therapy technique called “Opposite Emotion Action”. The technique works as follows:

1. Identify your negative feeling
In my case, it might have been self-loathing or disappointment.

2. Identify an opposite emotion
For me, it might have been self-love or gratitude.

3. Act as if that is how you were feeling
This might have caused me to think something like “I’m running really well today.” or “At least I got out of bed this morning to exercise!”


Related:Science-Baked Ways To Build Confidence When You Feel Like You’re Out Of Your League 


This technique can shift your negative thoughts to more neutral or even positive thoughts, and will certainly help prevent them from getting worse.

Spotting our negative thoughts before they turn us into a ball of stress isn’t easy–but when we pay a little more attention to our automatic thoughts and behaviors, we can start to see the future and prevent negative thoughts from taking hold.


Shine Text is a free, daily motivational text service. To sign up, text “SHINE” to 759-85 or go to www.shinetext.com to learn more.

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BuzzFeed, Once A Banner-Free Zone, Embraces Ads

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Along with lists, quizzes, and cat videos–and, more recently, breaking news–BuzzFeed has long been known for its refusal to host those annoying banner and square ads that clutter the pages of most other media sites. Founder and CEO Jonah Peretti has even been known to wax philosophic about the problems that plague online advertising. “They are slow and show ads that are terrible,” Peretti said of competing media websites in 2015.

“When a site loads slowly, you blame the site, but it’s actually often the banner ad coming from somewhere else online,” he told the New York Times in 2014. The future, he said, was in BuzzFeed’s special sauce: Native advertising coupled with targeted social media distribution.

So it came as a surprise yesterday when BuzzFeedannounced plans to introduce ads on its desktop and mobile websites, using existing technology from Google and Facebook.

The reason for this strategic shift, according to Peretti, is so that BuzzFeed can make more money. Why the company needs to do so at this moment in time is not clear. Native ad revenue slowing? Increasing revenue in preparation for an IPO? Not selling enough of those Tasty One Top electric hot plates?

Whatever the rationale, banner ads are likely to have a real impact on the site itself–and not just visually. Programmatic ads do increase the amount of time it takes a web page to load, often adding more than a second, which is why many media sites are so painfully slow (think of the many eons you wait when loading CNN or The Hill, and the endless number of ads on those sites). BuzzFeed, on the other hand, is a breeze.

To see the difference, we used Pingdom’s website speed test analyzer and compared the load time for the home page of BuzzFeed to one of its chief rivals, Vice. The results are striking: BuzzFeed’s page loads in under 2 seconds, while Vice takes over 4 seconds. What’s more, Vice’s home page is actually lighter than BuzzFeed’s (8.7 megabytes vs 13.1 megabytes).

Peretti, in announcing the move to display ads, told Business Insider that programmatic technology has gotten better over the last few years. “Tactically, programmatic has improved in terms of loading times, mobile experience, and ad quality and opens up another way for us to monetize our huge audience,” he said. The only problem is that it’s not entirely true.

I talked with a marketing executive with years of digital ad experience–specifically related to programmatic advertising products–who said that the technology has remained relatively stagnant in terms of page speed. According to that expert, programmatic technology has not gotten any faster. In fact, the problem has gotten worse as publishers have begun using “header bidding,” which makes webpages even slower to load in the name of unifying the ad-buying process.

Indeed, latency is one of the biggest problems that publishing executives wrestle with. Vice, in fact, has been able to speed up its site significantly, but the answer was not thanks to some industry-wide technological upgrade. It’s the result of very bespoke under-the-hood tinkering by its talented engineering staff.

In a memo to BuzzFeed employees, which was obtained by Fast Company, publisher Dao Nguyen admits that the company did once rail against such advertising technology. “Since its inception, BuzzFeed has rejected this kind of programmatic advertising, and for good reason: in the past, banner ads meant building highly intrusive user experiences which served advertising that wasn’t even relevant to the person viewing it,” she wrote. But now, “programmatic advertising has evolved.” She went on:

Companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Instagram have shown that it is possible to do advertising that is both programmatic, relevant, and familiar to users. Today we use Facebook advertising to help distribute BuzzFeed branded content, as well as serve Facebook ads across our Instant Articles.

When we look at the much-improved state of programmatic advertising and consider the opportunity we have to monetize our O&O platforms, it’s clear that we should be open to evolving our perspective. We still believe strongly in our ability to influence our industry with innovative and creative formats that no other media company can deliver. Programmatic advertising is simply an addition to our many revenue streams that, added together, make BuzzFeed an even stronger business.

The first experiments will add Google AdX and FAN ads to the homepage, b-pages, and mobile apps. We look forward to sharing the results with you all. As always, thank you for all your hard work and creativity and for making BuzzFeed so amazing.

It may be true that display ads are now more relevant to readers than before. And while they are also likely to make BuzzFeed slower and more cluttered, who can blame the executives there for wanting to increase revenue? Still, it’s hard not to read the tea leaves on this move and see a bad omen for the media industry as a whole.

This VR Video Game Is Actually Part Of The World’s Biggest Dementia Research Test

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If I were to tell you about a new virtual reality video game that featured a sea monster who loved to eat hot dogs, chances are you wouldn’t immediately link it to serious academic research. And yet, here we are.

Sea Hero Quest VR is a virtual reality game that is designed to test our ability to navigate–the deterioration of which also happens to be one of the first signs of dementia. Created in partnership among University College London, University of East Anglia, gaming design company Glitchers, Alzheimer’s Research UK, ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi London,  and brand sponsor Deutsche Telekom, Sea Hero Quest is an expansion of the mobile game that launched last year.

The original mobile game, which won agency Saatchi London nine Cannes Lions, attracted one million downloads in its first two weeks, and three million players overall. The game collects anonymous data based on players behavior, which is then evaluated by neuroscientists. Glitchers co-founder Max Scott-Slade told the BBC that virtual reality should provide more detailed information because it can separate where players’ eyes are looking with which direction they’re steering the boat.

Christophe Hoelscher, chairman of cognitive science at ETH Zurich, also told the BBC, “No project ever has collected data from 3 million people of real interactions in this depth. That allows us to do a number of analyses that you would never be able to do with classical studies.”

For Alzheimer’s Research UK, the overall goal with the games is to help identify people with dementia much earlier than they previously could.


This new blood-testing startup swears it’s not another Theranos

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Two college dropouts plan to boldly walk in Theranos’s footsteps. Tanay Tandon, who left Stanford, and Deepika Bodapati, who bailed on USC, have raised $3.7 million from investors for their new at-home blood-testing company. The portable blood analyzer makes many of the same claims as Theranos, as it can allegedly run a complete blood-cell count from an at-home fingerprick test. As soon as they can prove their test results are legit (they have already submitted them to the FDA) they could start charging customers $20 a pop for the testing.

The founders are very aware of the skepticism any claims they make about their product will face after many investors were burned after the glorious rise and fall of Theranos. However, Theranos proved there was interest in the market, and Tandon and Bodapati claim they are learning from that former unicorn’s well-documented mistakes. For starters, they’ve proved their nerd cred right off the bat: They named their business Athelas, which, Bloomberg notes, comes from the healing plant in The Lord of the Rings. Read more over at Bloomberg.

Just Got Fired? Get #WhopperSeverance From Burger King

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What: A unique offer from Burger King to anyone who just got fired from their job.

Who: Burger King

Why we care: While so many brands are busy chasing the youth all over Snapchat and Instagram, for its latest social stunt Burger King went straight for the suit-and-tie crowd on LinkedIn. The deal? Admit publicly on the business-focused social network that you’ve been fired, and the brand will send you Whopper Severance in the form of a free burger coupon. What better way to celebrate losing your health insurance than with 650 flame-broiled calories for free?

Burger King is also offering the first 100 recipients of the severance a free 30-minute session with career satisfaction firm The Muse.

This Generic Millennial Ad Is Everything Wrong With Advertising To Young People

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What: Stock video firm Dissolve uses its stock footage to create a spoof of all the insufferable pandering brands do to get millennials to like them.

Who: Dissolve

Why we care: It’s all here. The party shots. The specialness. The dancing. The 100% plastic product they made 10% smaller that one time. This is the young people version of Dissolve’s amazing Generic Brand Video from 2014. You’ve seen them everywhere already, but seeing every cliche compiled together like this just makes it that much worse. #BoldLikeThat.

This Taxi Service Is For Indian Women, By Indian Women

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India’s growing middle class is emulating the developed world’s car culture, but women are being left out: Even as the number of driving licenses issued to women has doubled since the early 2000s, still only about one in 10 drive. That means women have to rely on rides from men or brave public transportation, where instances of sexual assault, acid attacks, and rape have reached crisis levels.

There’s now a fix in the Indian state of Gujarat that could save lives. It’s like Lyft, but for pink auto-rickshaws.

Called the Pink Auto Service, it’s designed to help address pervasive violence against women in India, ferrying women safely from point A to B. The just-launched service is operated by women for women (and girls).

[Photo: pjhpix/iStock]
“We have a batch of 70 women and 15 are ready to begin work. They have driving licenses and we also help them to get work from schools in the area. We have concentrated on girls’ schools and girl students for women drivers,” SMC assistant commissioner Gayatriben Jariwala told the Times of India.

In Gujarat, the service was born from a partnership between the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC), a civic body in the southwestern state of Gujarat, in partnership with Bank of Baroda. With the goal of having women own their rickshaws, the SMC is subsidizing some of the cost of the vehicles and the bank is issuing drivers loans of Rs. 84,000 (about $1,300) at 7% interest. Each driver earns a minimum of Rs. 18,000 (or $280). While that may not sound like much, the annual median per capita income in the country is about $600.

“They can easily pay their monthly installment to the bank and also save enough money,” said Jariwala in the Times. “We everyday read about harassment of women commuters in different cities. This is why we thought of this service which not only provides employment to women but ensures safe travel for female passengers.”

(The Surat Municipal Corporation did not respond to several Fast Company requests for comment.)

[Photo: siraanamwong/iStock]
Despite lacking a digital app, the service is quickly gaining popularity, popping up across the subcontinent over the last few years—the WorldPost reports that there are “branches” in Mumbai and Noida (an industrial zone) near Delhi, as well as other locations.

Now, will it work at scale? Because of the small number of women currently licensed as drivers, there are long waits at pick-up zones for Pink rides and many potential customers are instead turning to transportation options like buses or regular rickshaws—the exact rides the Pink Auto Service is intended to replace.

In Noida, to deal with this shortcoming, the government has distributed stickers that men can slap onto their auto-rickshaws as a signal of solidarity. The stickers read, “For Women At Nights.” It’s a nice gesture from both the government and feminist-leaning male drivers, but again, it may not always protect women from violence.

And then, of course, there’s the issue of road rage and supposed gender roles. How male drivers react to Pink auto-rickshaws–on what they believe are their roads–remains to be seen.

All these Harvey hoaxes are another reminder of how hard it is to fight fake news

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You may have heard that there was a shark swimming around in a flooded highway in Houston. Well, that’s wrong, but it went viral anyway thanks to a hoax tweet. Similarly, an airport in Houston is not underwater, despite false pictures showing planes under water. And Obama is not on the ground in Houston feeding meals to evacuees, despite false reports.

Currently, in the face of the havoc wreaked from Hurricane Harvey, hoaxes are circulating like wildfire. The Washington Post countsat least 10 viral posts disseminating misinformation. Alas, this is something that happens quite often during these times of heightened fear. The Vergewrites that natural disasters are a time when hoaxes are rampant because people are more inclined to believe the unbelievable and want to share information to feel like they’re part of the event. It’s a perfect storm, really.

Which makes it even tougher for tech platforms that are now in the throes of a battle against fake news. Indeed, Facebook announced just yesterday that it would not allow sites that repeatedly share misinformation to advertise on its platform. But even in these efforts to curb the spread of hoaxes and conspiracies, the content runs rampant.

Once things begin to quiet down, the Harvey hoaxes will quiet down, too. All the same, I’m guessing that the next time a major flood hits the country, a picture of a shark swimming in the streets will go viral once again.

FEMA tamps down rumors that immigration agents would be patrolling Harvey shelters

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The two agencies principally responsible for immigration enforcement “have stated that they are not conducting immigration enforcement at relief sites such as shelters or food banks,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency says in a section of its Hurricane Harvey website titled “Rumor Control.”

Social media posts had earlier reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents declined to stop enforcement efforts in the Houston area—where an estimated 600,000 undocumented immigrants live—even as residents struggled to find shelter from rising floodwaters. After ICE posted a picture of agency investigators assisting in rescue efforts, skeptical replies suggested they were actually rounding up immigrants for deportation. Here’s one such false claim:

“In the rare instance where local law enforcement informs ICE of a serious criminal alien at a relief site that presents a public safety threat, ICE will make a determination on a case-by-case basis about the appropriate enforcement actions,” according to FEMA’s statement.

FEMA says the Red Cross also doesn’t ask for identification for those using its shelters. “The Federal Government strongly encourages all persons to follow the guidance of local officials and seek shelter regardless of their immigration status,” according to the agency.

“I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what your status is,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said Monday. “I do not want you to run the risk of losing your life or [that of] a family member because you’re concerned about [Senate Bill] 4 or anything else.”

The state Senate bill, which goes into effect Sept. 1, outlaws “sanctuary cities” in the state and allows state and local law enforcement officers to check immigration status. Turner, who is a lawyer, even said he would personally represent any illegal immigrant who faces deportation for seeking shelter during the storm, Fox News reported.

During the first months of the Trump administration, ICE has come under criticism for detaining people appearing in court on unrelated matters, including at least one victim of domestic violence, leading to calls for them to refrain from making immigration arrests in courthouses.

FEMA also warns Harvey victims that, contrary to rumors, the agency does not charge for services such as damage inspections or contractor repairs. To deter scam artists posing as government officials, aid workers or insurance company employees, the government warns people to ask for identification and not to “sign anything you don’t understand or contracts with blank spaces.” Additionally, “don’t be afraid to hang up on cold callers.”

Read more:All these Harvey hoaxes are another reminder of how hard it is to fight fake news

Thousands of Katrina evacuees who moved to Houston are reliving a nightmare

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Among those affected by Tropical Storm Harvey’s unprecedented flooding of Houston are likely thousands of survivors of Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 strike on Louisiana, who in some cases are once again seeing their homes destroyed by rising floodwaters.

Katrina hit New Orleans 12 years ago today. After the levees failed, inundating the city, as many as 250,000 evacuees temporarily relocated to Houston, and about 40,000 stayed permanently, according to a 2015 report in the Houston Chronicle. They and other Louisianans who came later generally praised Houston for its growing economy, with better jobs and salaries than in the New Orleans area. Parents also saw Houston as having a stronger school system, though many evacuees lamented the region’s sprawl and other cultural differences.

Even the former head of the New Orleans food bank now leads a similar charity in Houston—and he saw his home flooded by Harvey this weekend, ultimately evacuating by a neighbor’s boat after climbing through a second-story window, according to the Washington Post.

One 22-year-old Houston man fled his flooded apartment almost 12 years to the day that Hurricane Katrina pushed him out of New Orleans. “Most traumatic experience of my life, repeating itself,” the man, Romeo, told KHOU on Monday, according to the New York Post.

“That’s the crazy part … You see the cars under water. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing again.” Romeo’s grandmother died in the wake of Katrina, he said. “Don’t forget to tell people that you love them because you’ll lose people.” (So far, Harvey, which some have called worse than Katrina, has claimed an estimated 10 lives; the aftermath of Katrina ultimately claimed over 1,500 lives.)

Living through even one serious storm isn’t psychologically easy: Studies after both Katrina and 2012’s Superstorm Sandy found many affected people had lingering mental health issues. And, The New York Times reports, therapists in Louisiana say their clients find news of Harvey stirs up painful memories—what one therapist calls “Katrina brain”—even if they don’t expect to be directly affected by the storm.

Related: From Katrina To Harvey: How Disaster Relief Is Evolving With Technology


This Furniture Gives New Life To Drought-Killed, Beetle-Infested California Pines

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From 2010 through last year, a severe drought gripped California. Aquifers dried up, agriculture suffered, and, according to the U.S. Forest Service, over 100 million trees shriveled and died across 7.7 million acres of the state’s forests. Without a consistent supply of moisture, California’s majestic pine trees began to dry up from the inside out. Parched trees are especially vulnerable to invasion from mountain beetles, which burrow into the bark, lay eggs, and eventually eat their way through the bark, blocking the circulation of water and nutrients around the tree.

“One of the silver linings around this tragedy is that these California trees are huge.” [Photo: SapphirePine]
The drought and its fallout reached such severity that in October 2015, California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency and organized a task force to remove and deal with the dead trees, which, in large quantities, post a catastrophic fire risk. So far, the task force has largely focused its efforts on getting the dead trees out of the forests, and either using them as biofuel for energy, or shipping them to China for construction. Sandra Lupien and Sam Schabacker, students at U.C. Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, have a different idea: Turn them into furniture.

“Someone can literally sit at a dining room table and count the rings of the tree to figure out how old it was.” [Photo: SapphirePine]
Beetle larvae leave a fungus that creates unusual streaks of color in the timber of the trees it kills: The sandy pine tones are streaked through with orange, green, and blue ribbons, signifying where the pests burrowed in. Among furniture purists, Lupien says, the streaks are seen as impurities. “But we thought they were beautiful,” Lupien tells Fast Company. Once the damaged pine slabs are fired in a kiln, killing the live fungus, they are just as durable as untainted wood.

In early 2017, Lupien and Schabacker, who met while working for an environmental nonprofit before beginning graduate school, founded SapphirePine to prove the value of the drought-killed trees. They reached out to private landowners and excavators who were working to harvest and remove dead trees from properties in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and asked if they could source wood from them to turn into furniture. So far, the SapphirePine team has custom-built around a dozen pieces of furniture to fill word-of-mouth orders, and have launched a Kickstarter to expand its Oakland-based operations.

SapphirePine furniture centers around single-slab design, taken from the cross-section of a single dead tree. [Photo: SapphirePine]
Schabacker grew up in Colorado, where a similar drought and beetle infestation created an overabundance of fungus-streaked conifers, which local artisans transformed into furniture that decorated his childhood home. Seeing the same conditions strike California, and seeing no efforts on the part of the state to create a supply chain to repurpose the wood, he and Lupien decided to launch SapphirePine to bring the concept to California.

“One of the silver linings around this tragedy is that these California trees are huge,” Schabacker says. Where he grew up in Colorado, pines reach only around 10 inches in diameter; a table made from Colorado pine would take several slabs of wood to complete. “But here in California, you have Ponderosa pines that are three or four feet in diameter,” he says. SapphirePine furniture centers around single-slab design, taken from the cross-section of a single dead tree. “Someone can literally sit at a dining room table and count the rings of the tree to figure out how old it was,” Schabacker says.

For months before they incorporated as SapphirePine, Lupien and Schabacker worked with mentors at U.C. Berkeley’s businesses and design schools to build out a market strategy plan. For the time being, they’re fielding orders online, but coordinating with gallery spaces in the East Bay to set up small-scale displays. The Kickstarter funds will enable them to buy a truck to make local deliveries from their Oakland-based shop, and source more wood and tools to speed up turnaround time on the furniture.

Here’s What To Expect From Uber’s New CEO

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After months of internal drama and boardroom infighting, Uber has picked a new CEO. The current head of Expedia, Dara Khosrowshahi, has been offered the role—and he accepted. Khosrowshahi brings a neat package of experience to Uber’s very messy table. In the 12 years that he’s worked at Expedia, which ignited online travel booking and the demise of the travel agent, Khosrowshahi vastly improved the company’s value. The stock has gone from roughly $15 per share to $143 as of this writing, delivering steady returns for investors.

That’s likely what he’ll do for Uber, says Arun Sundararajan, professor at NYU Stern Business School and author of The Sharing Economy. “My guess is that the board has brought him in as someone who can rapidly take them to short-term profitability,” he says.

Last year, Uber lost $2.8 billion, not including its China business. In an interview with Betakit last February, former CEO Travis Kalanick said the company’s China business was losing $1 billion a year. This year, the company has begun to control its spending. In first quarter of 2017, losses totaled a little over $700 million, according to Axios. In the second quarter, Uber reduced losses to $645 million. Uber investors like Benchmark Capital, which is currently suing former CEO Travis Kalanick for eschewing his fiduciary responsibilities, are probably giddy to get someone at the top who can ready Uber for a public offering.

Innovation, Profits, Or Both?

The question is, at what cost will profitability come? Uber has so far invested in two longer-term projects: autonomous driving and a platform for connecting truckers with freight loads. Both projects face heavy competition. In the race to develop self-driving cars, there are no clear winners. By contrast, UberFreight faces a lot of incumbent competition. Neither will prove profitable in the near term, but both could be crucial to its future. As Khosrowshahi tries to bring Uber’s financials under control, some of these projects could get less support.

That’s in part because investors are antsy. Kalanick left a big mess in his wake, including a spate of negative headlines and a lawsuit with Google’s self-driving car unit Waymo. Board members are suing each other. To quell some of the dissent on the board, Khosrowshahi will likely refocus on Uber’s core products just to regain trust in the company. He might not have the luxury of pursuing projects that don’t have a clear path to profitability.

“The kind of options that a company like Google has are very different, because Google has a multi-tens-of-billions-of-dollars-a-year profitable business already,” says Sundararajan. Not only is Google investing in self-driving cars, but a whole cornucopia of other projects in the healthcare and urban development sectors that may never pay off. Sundararajan says Google, which produces results for shareholders, has earned the right to make these kinds of innovative investments.

But not all companies are concerned with their shareholders. Amazon, as an example, lost money for years paving the road to digital retail. But Jeff Bezos is a rare kind of CEO, and Khosrowshahi seems less likely to take this particular route.

That’s not to say he won’t invest in innovation. After all, at Expedia, Khosrowshahi facilitated an important investment in hotel comparison tool Trivago, as well as the purchase of Airbnb competitor HomeAway. As a result, UberEats and UberEverything are likely to get a boost. But more outlandish bets may come after Uber’s house is in order, and there’s no telling how long that will take.

This crowdfunded camera is like an offline version of Instagram

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Who says your next digital detox means you can’t snap a picture of that latte? If Lomography has its way you’ll leave the phone in your bag and use its new Lomo’Instant Square film camera to capture the moments that would otherwise go tragically undocumented.

The Lomo’Instant Square, a smaller version of the Lomo’Instant that even sort of resembles the original Instagram logo, recently blew threw its Kickstarter funding goal by nearly 200%, raking in over $195,000 by Tuesday evening, thanks to 1,211 backers. Those who backed the project in the first day of the campaign could acquire a basic Square package for a discounted price of $129.

This is the first square photo instant camera by the Vienna-based company, but it’s certainly not the first time it has successfully crowdfunded an analog photography gadget: The company has a solid track record in this department, funding projects like the Lomo’Instant Automat and the eye-catching Petzval series of vintage-style camera lenses.

Read next: How An Analog Camera Company Can Thrive In The Instagram Age and Instagram Is Eating Dining

Google Broadens The Reach Of Its Assistant To More Speakers And Home Appliances

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Today Google announced that some new smart speakers will use its digital Assistant for a brain, soon enabling a whole set of home appliances from washers and dryers to vacuums to respond to its commands.

Google Home

Big tech companies are vying to provide the personal digital assistant that helps you run the technology in your life, and in that contest reach is everything. That’s why Google (and Amazon and Apple) is trying to make its Assistant present in, or understood by, more and more consumer tech products. It made the announcement on Wednesday morning at the IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin) conference in Germany.

The Assistant is already accessible in the Google Home smart speaker, in some Android phones, in the Google Allo messaging app, in the Android Wear operating system for wearables, and on iPhones via an app.

Zolo Mojo by Anker

Smart Speakers

The new Assistant-powered smart speakers announced today include the the GA10 by Panasonic, the TicHome Mini by Mobvoi, and the Zolo Mojo by Anker. Users will be able to talk to the devices in a natural voice to play music, ask questions, and control lights and switches via the Assistant.

“Since it’s the Google Assistant, you can expect great speech recognition, natural language processing and the ability to ask those ‘tough’ contextual questions (‘Where is the Eiffel Tower?’ followed by, ‘How tall is it?’),” writes Taneja in a blog post today.

Google points out that the Assistant can distinguish between the voices of various people using smart speakers around the house, so it can support multiple user accounts.

TicHome Mini by Mobvoi

Google says the speakers will be available later this year, and that most will be available for purchase in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, Germany, and France. More Assistant-powered speakers will be announced later at the conference, Google says.

Home Appliances

Google says later this year we’ll start seeing more home appliances like washers, dryers, and vacuums from companies like LG that can respond to commands spoken to the Assistant running on a phone or smart speaker.

Taneja says you’ll be able to give commands to the Assistant like “OK Google, start vacuuming,” “OK Google, are my clothes clean?” and “Is the laundry done?” The appropriate connected appliance will then respond by initiating a function or providing a status.

Like Amazon, Apple, and others, Google is trying to connect its Assistant with as many connected home appliances as possible. The company says the Assistant already can connect with appliances from 70 companies including Honeywell (lights), Netatmo (thermostats and cameras), and TP-Link (plugins, switches, network gear).

We’ll keep an eye on additional digital Assistant-related announcements coming out of IFA, and update this post as needed.

How To Fake Humility (And Why You Sometimes Should)

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We’re generally quick to celebrate arrogant, egotistical people, especially when they’re clearly talented (Kanye, anyone?). But what if–like most people–you’re not extraordinarily capable? The answer is simple: You’re better off being humble.

Or at least seeming humble to others. Psychological studies have found that when people appear to be less competent than they believe–when their self-image is more positive than others’ views of them–they’re likely to be less popular and successful. In other words, confidence and assertiveness are adaptive only when they’re proportionately backed up by competence. Thus we are better off seeming more competent than confident, even if that might mean faking humility.”

The Cultural Element

Most people aren’t naturally humble. That’s true despite certain cultures valuing outward shows of humility more than others.

According to Gaijin Pot, a website that helps people around the world find study, jobs, and travel opportunities in Japan, “my stupid son” and “my foolish wife” were common expressions used by Japanese men to refer to their families until quite recently. “It is said not only because is it frowned upon to say nice things about your family, but it is actually better to sound like you are putting them down,” the site’s blog informs Western readers. And as the British social anthropologist quips in her 2004 book, Watching the English, the typical Brit would only report being “quite good” at a sport only if they’re the world champion in it.

While every culture has its own norms for encouraging modest self-presentation, most people (and societies) favor humility when interacting with friends and family, yet permit a measure of braggadocio when dealing with strangers. Either way, it’s likely there will be certain occasions where you’ll need to deliberately come across as more humble than you actually feel. Here’s how to do it convincingly.

Talk Less About Yourself

Research shows that there’s a positive correlation between how frequently people use self-referential pronouns–words like “I,” “me,” or “mine”–and their likelihood of narcissism, a trait describing self-centered, egotistical, and entitled behavioral tendencies. And while we all talk about ourselves without even noticing it, those who come across as more humble spend less time focusing on themselves while speaking with others. So if you consciously tamp down how often you refer to yourself, you’re likely to appear more modest.

Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously

If you do have to talk about yourself, do it light-heartedly. Although humor is somewhat culture-specific, the ability to laugh at ourselves is pretty much universally advantageous. If you can be a little self-deprecating, you’re likely not just to seem modest but also witty, moral, and smart. Even leaders have been found to be more effective when they use a dose of self-effacing humor.

Compare Yourself To More (Not Less) Capable People

A simple way to aim high while remaining humble is to put your performance into context with those who are more capable and talented. You’ll still benefit from putting yourself in their theoretical company, but you won’t seem obnoxious in the process. By the same token, if you draw comparisons between yourself and those who are generally seen as low performers, you may artificially inflate your ego while seeming arrogant and tone-deaf to others.

Resort To (Gentle) Flattery

No matter how smart we are, most of us are highly susceptible to flattery, even when it’s blatantly false. In fact, even computers are deemed more likable when they suck up to us. Stroke other people’s egos and they will see you as both more genuine and more humble. And the good news is that this is probably the easiest rule to implement. As the hedonistic villain Svidrigailov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment puts it, “nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery”–uncomfortable coming from him, but not too far off the mark.

If feigning humility feels dishonest or manipulative, think of it this way: You’re simply toning down what you believe to be your praiseworthy accomplishments to give other people a chance to see them as clearly as you do. After all, just consider the alternative; people who spend most of their time talking about themselves, being “brutally honest” and critical of others, and taking themselves way too seriously often end up worse off. Rest assure that despite appearing genuine, people who operate this way are likely to be unpopular (this is true even on social media, by the way).

So just as there are times when you’ll want to fake confidence when you’re feeling unsure of yourself, remember there are other times when you need to do the reverse. A little modesty goes a long way, no matter how self-assured–or even arrogant–you may actually feel.

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