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The Challenges Of Building A Third-Party iPhone Camera Lens

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As a full-blown Instagram addict, it was an all-to-familiar scenario for me. I was walking by a small church in my neighborhood just as the sun was setting. To my eye, it looked amazing--but when I pulled out my iPhone, the angle was too wide and the shot looked awful.

That's why iPhones aren't great replacements for DSLRs, no matter what the New Yorker says: They lack interchangeable lenses. Even as phones become the most widely used cameras on the planet, they lack the ability to adjust focal length. Companies like Photojojo make third-party attachments which let you add lenses, but without being OEM equipment, results will leave you tepid.

"It's very difficult to do," says Michael Thomas, a lens designer working on a new camera mount for iPhone called Moment. "When you put a lens attachment on the iSight camera, it's almost inevitable that you're going to get a decent image in the center, but the image quality falls off rapidly and gets fuzzy at the edges due to aberrations like chromatic blur and astigmatism."

The goal of Moment is to build high-quality third-party iPhone lenses with no compromises. The startup launched on Kickstarter today, and is working on a pair of high-quality, snap-on lenses for iPhones and Samsung Galaxy smartphones. With backgrounds in building cameras and cinematic-quality lenses, the team behind Moment is hoping to strike the crucial balance between image quality, lens size, and cost that has proven so hard for others to nail.

Thomas knows a thing or two about camera lenses. He comes from Hyperion Development, a company that has built lenses for aerospace and entertainment-industry clients for more than 25 years. He joins Moment cofounder Marc Barros and designer Erik Hedberg, both of whom came from Contour Cameras, a company that makes wearable HD video cameras.

"Other products out there serve a purpose in terms of changing field of view of the iSight camera, but they're very low-end, usually made in China," Thomas says. "We decided to use our propriety process for designing cinema lenses and decided to come up with something that did not detract from the iSight camera image quality at all."

Achieving this particular combination of simplicity, quality, size, and affordability presented its fair share of design challenges for the Moment team. One goal established early on (thanks to extensive user research) was the need for the lenses to work with phones with or our without a case, for example. Hedberg and a colleague thus came up with the backplate and twist-on bayonet mechanism, which had to account for the varying sizes of the camera holes in iPhone and Galaxy cases. Then there was building of the lens itself.

How Moment Works

With Moment, the experience looks roughly like this: Both the 18 mm wide-angle lens and its tighter 60 mm counterpart are small enough to carry around in your bag or pocket. Your phone is equipped with a special plate so you can easily twist and snap each of the lenses on in the bayonet-style mechanism used by DSLRs. You snap your photo, easily swapping between each of the $50 lenses as needed.

"We needed to find the level of quality where people perceive this lens to be as good as the iSight camera," says Thomas. "If we go over that, we're just over-engineering and adding cost and complexity. If we go under that, people will say 'It's a pretty good lens, but it's not as good as a camera.'"

Physical and time constraints also forced the team to forgo certain features they would have liked to include. The original concept for the lenses, for example, included connectivity that would enable it to more smartly integrate with the phone itself. This, along with additional focal lengths and extra accessories are things the team will be looking at focusing on next, presuming the Kickstarter campaign goes as planned.


A Formula For Waging Perfectly Timed Cyber Warfare

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In the hopes of helping defend against national security threats, the National Academy of Sciences may have brought us one step closer to developing a formula that can be used to determine when a target is most vulnerable to a cyber-attack.

This is the latest development in an escalating digital arms race between nations, hackers, and private companies. The research paper is entitled "Timing Of Cyber Conflict," and the formula is as follows:

V = Pr(s≥T) [G(T) + w S V] + [1 - Pr(s≥T)] w P V

Simple enough, right? According to authors Robert Axelrod and Rumen Iliev of the University of Michigan, the formula hinges on three basic variables:

  • Persistence: the probability of a given exploit remaining viable if an attacker refrains from using it.
  • Stealth: the probability of an exploit remaining usable after it's used.
  • Threshold: the conditions under which it is worthwhile to carry out an attack.

But the paper isn't just a breakdown of mathematics and case studies. Axelrod and Rumen allude to the stockpiling of zero-day exploits and other cyber resources being conducted by nations--a practice we know the U.S. government to engage in, thanks to NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

In fact, Stuxnet, the 2010 virus used in an attack designed to delay Iran's nuclear program--and reported to be developed jointly by the United States and Israel--could arguably mark the moment the new digital Cold War went public. Now, digital stockpiles are being built up instead of nuclear ones, but this time it's different: Anyone can potentially have an arsenal of exploits at their command, not just the world's superpowers. And as the world economy increasingly relies on a secure Internet, mutually assured destruction has taken on a devastating new meaning.

To that end, there are a number of businesses that thrive on finding and selling exploits to interested parties. Security expert and former Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs cites Stephen Frei, research director of information security company NSS Labs, whose work is instructive in the proliferation of zero-day exploits:

According to Frei, if we accept that the average zero-day exploit persists for about 312 days before it is detected (an estimate made by researchers at Symantec Research Labs), this means that these firms probably provide access to at least 85 zero-day exploits on any given day of the year. These companies all say they reserve the right to restrict which organizations, individuals, and nation states may purchase their products, but they all expressly do not share information about exploits and flaws with the affected software vendors."

Frei's research resulted in a study called "The Known Unknowns", in which he finds evidence that "privileged groups have the ability to compromise all vulnerable systems without the public ever being aware of the threats."

And that's before you even start to consider the criminal element.

Ultimately, according to Frei's work, a formula for calculating when an attack is most likely to happen won't do much to upset the balance of power. Because we're already compromised, the only way to be truly secure is by assuming we never will be--we just need to get better at discovering when we've been exploited.

And so the arms race continues.

Nest Is Just Part Of Google's 2,000-Patent IP Binge

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Look out, world: Google is on an intellectual property binge. According to the IFI Claims Patent Services, Google is climbing to the top of the patent assignees list, sitting at the No. 11 spot with 1,851 grants, just behind LG Electronics. The Financial Timesreports that Google's new ranking is the result of the company nearly doubling its patent claims from the previous year of 2012, where it sat at No. 21. (Apple followed Google closely on the patent assignees list, sitting at No. 13 with 1,775 grants, while IBM took the No. 1 spot with 6,809.)

Thanks to all the Google Glass patents it filed last year, the company has a leg up in securing rights to head-based wearable technology as opposed to the saturated smartphone and smartwatch markets. Experts say Google's patent selection patterns emulate those of Apple.

Google's recent acquisition of Nest will add to its patent stockpile as well. Last month, Nest CEO and former Apple hardware mastermind Tony Fadell said that Nest had already settled 100 patents, had 200 on file, and another 200 ready to file. "At Nest, what we did was make sure that we are putting [effort in] a ton of patents," Fadell said. "This is what you have to do to disrupt major revenue streams." Google will also inherit Nest's patent agreement with global invention company Intellectual Ventures (IV), which has a colossal patent collection of 40,000 effective patents.

One recent Nest patent, for example, covers something called "event forecasting," which could potentially detect future weather-related events such as when an earthquake might strike. Other features include motion sensing, automating sprinklers, and social-network integration. "A user's status as reported to their trusted contacts on the social network could be updated to indicate when they are home based on light detection, security-system inactivation, or device usage detectors," the patent reads.

The patent also says users can share home-related data. "A user may be able to share device-usage statistics with other users. Rules or regulations can relate to efforts to conserve energy, to live safely (e.g., reducing exposure to toxins or carcinogens), to conserve money and/or equipment life, to improve health, etc."

But, perhaps more worrisome features include the ability for government officials to access and notify homeowners of events such as "tornado warnings" through their Nest thermostats. More frivolous patents include Patent 8621366, which would allow Google to be the sole repository for social network-based cartoon embedding.

Google's recent patent frenzy comes after losing various patent wars, including smartphones, costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars in litigation. "Our hope is to avoid a war," Allen Lo, Google's chief patent lawyer told the Financial Times. "Hopefully we can learn from the smartphone litigation."

[Hat tip: Financial Times]

Apple Devices Will Likely Outsell Microsoft PCs In 2014

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Cumulatively, Apple devices are on track to outsell Microsoft PCs this year, according to a recent analysis from Asymco founder Horace Dediu. Dediu didn't include phone or tablet sales in Microsoft's tally, but we imagine those numbers aren't, ahem, statistically significant.

2004 was the year Microsoft peaked and things begin to change. The consumer market started beating out the enterprise market, and device mobility became important to consumers. Apple had the better laptop option; soon after, they released a newfangled music playing device called the iPod. Those people liked their experiences--the barrier to entry of Apple products was obliterated, so consumers decided to stick with Apple. Eventually, Apple released the iPhone, an even more pertinent game changer for the mobile phone market and reported a 13.5% market share in 2013. Window's Phones only outsold iPhones in 24 markets, and held a 4.1% market share. (Both lost miserably to Android phones.)

Apple has been dominating the tablet market, and it's rumored that the company will be unveiling a 12- or 13-inch iPad Pro, targeted at businesses. Microsoft's Surface's struggle to take off lead to a $900 million "inventory adjustment." But, honestly, who wants to buy a device with barely 100,000 apps when there's 10 times that amount for iOS devices, 475,000 native iPad apps alone?

Microsoft's been clinging onto hope as Office remains the most popular productivity software. As the nature of work life changes and the need for cloud-based computing increases, web-based software has become more integral. Apple-loyal employees working under Bring Your Own Device pretenses are merging the consumer and enterprise markets, the latter the only place where Microsoft could claim a kingdom.

Tim Cook is looking to change that by making corporate email systems more easily connectable to and enhancing the data encryption of iPads, which are already popular as point-of-sale machines. Ninety percent of all business apps were released on iOS in the third quater of 2013. Square, used by many smaller retailers, is only available on iOS and Android devices. Just sayin'.

Apple, already giving away Pages, Keynote, and Numbers for free with new device purchases, announced new, free iOS versions of iWork, their own office productivity software, at last year's WWDC, which might have solidified Microsoft's slow death.

Still, a study recently released shows that Microsoft is a more "trustworthy" brand than Apple, which was allocated "remarkable" and "unmistakable," perceived as being riskier.

If Dediu's analysis is correct, and Apple really is unprecedentedly closing the gap between two traditionally segmented markets, it'll be a new challenge with which other companies have not really been successful coping.

Don't Forget That Looks Still Matter In Tech

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The businesses of software and science like to see themselves as meritocracies, and in many ways they are--but the package in which talents arrive can still matter. But perhaps because computer science is a broad field that takes requires deep expertise to understand, people still fall back largely on looks.

Before he went to MIT and became a computer science professor at the University of Rochester, Philip Guo had no programming experience--unless you count an 11th grade AP course. Still, when he arrived on campus, no one ever questioned his ability to code. Why?

Even though I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag", he says, "I had one big thing going for me: I looked like I was good at programming. As an Asian male student at MIT, I fit society's image of a young programmer. Whenever I attended technical meetings, people would assume that I knew what I was doing (regardless of whether I did or not).

Contrast this with Meg McGrath Vaccaro's sad story of being a "stupid girl" in STEM. Back in 7th grade science, Vacarro (who is now 30) remembers being issued a brain-teaser by her science teacher. "What has matter," he asked, "but has no mass?"

"'An idea,' I said, proud of myself that I had the gall to break the silence, while still thinking over my justification in my head: it's definitely something that is real, but it can't be quantified in standard units of measure." Vaccaro's science teacher did not take this well.

He sneered at me as he continued, "only a girl would say something as stupid as," in his most obnoxious little girl impression, "an idea." Yet still he continued, spending the remainder of the class period, without exaggeration, railing against the inherent stupidity of girls and how he wishes he needn't have to teach them since girls would simply never understand science or math and would be a constant distraction with their dumb answers. Prior to his class, I had loved science, and math for that matter. I had a microscope, collected rocks, kept a notebook where I would do algebra equations for fun, and my friend and I were teaching ourselves HTML. But what I learned from this science teacher is that it didn't matter what I was interested in nor what I was good at. What mattered was that he didn't think I could be good at science.

In 1978, Eileen Pollack graduated with a Bachelor's degree in physics from Yale, having excelled in quantum mechanics and gravitational physics, but she didn't pursue a career in the field. In her article in the New York Times on why there aren't more women in science, she explains why.

I didn't go on in physics because not a single professor--not even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis--encouraged me to go to graduate school. Certain this meant I wasn't talented enough to succeed in physics, I left the rough draft of my senior thesis outside my adviser's door and slunk away in shame. Pained by the dream I had failed to achieve, I locked my textbooks, lab reports and problem sets in my father's army footlocker and turned my back on physics and math forever.

Things may be improving when it comes to encouraging girls with an interest STEM, but we still live in a world where even female scientists are biased against female scientists.

"This kind of privilege that I--and other people who looked like me--possessed was silent," says Guo, "manifested not in what people said, but rather in what they didn't say. We had the privilege to spend enormous amounts of time developing technical expertise without anyone's interference or implicit discouragement. Because we looked the part."

Net Neutrality Is Down, But Not Out

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It's finally happened. Yesterday, a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down the FCC's net neutrality rules--the only thing standing in the way of ISPs restricting web traffic in all sorts of evil ways. For proponents of an open Internet, the outlook is bleak. But hidden within the court's argument against the FCC's case is the means by which net neutrality might survive in a far more definitive way than before.

First, the bad news: The floodgates are now open for private regulation of web traffic by ISPs. Providers like Verizon can now restrict bandwidth to companies like Netflix or Hulu in favor of their own ventures, or ask big content providers that get enormous amounts of traffic to pay up for the bandwidth necessary to use their services at speeds that aren't cripplingly slow. It allows for preferential treatment and effective censorship--if your web page or service doesn't load fast enough, it might as well not exist.

The decision also has dire implications for web entrepreneurs and the digital startup industry. As venture capitalist Fred Wilson writes, ISPs will choose preferred web content providers and establish a barrier to entry too costly for most bootstrapped startups to compete. AT&T is already doing this over mobile networks with its sponsored data plans, but yesterday's ruling has made similar stunts over wired connections just as viable.

But an open Internet is still possible. Over at the Washington Post, Brian Fung writes that the rationale for the court's decision lays the groundwork for the means by which we could achieve stronger regulation than currently possible.

The idea is called reclassification, and it basically transforms broadband providers from the untouchable companies they currently are into the kind of telecommunications companies the FCC regulates without question all the time, such as wireless operators.

It's a simple tactic that is well within the range of the FCC's power to do, but it's one that will be met with immense opposition from industry groups. But Fung believes it's one the FCC will try, for its own benefit if not for that of the consumer: If the FCC can't regulate broadband access, then it risks being marginalized, excluded from playing any substantial role online where millions of Americans are increasingly spending more of their lives.

Of course, almost any course of action taken by the FCC will result in further litigation, which means Americans will just have to cope with the new status quo for the time being. But according to Bloomberg, widespread awareness of net neutrality issues will keep most ISPs from making any drastic changes to their policies for the time being.

Once the first one does, it'll be open season.

What Not To Say In Your Kickstarter Campaign

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Kickstarter generated $480 million in pledges in 2013, but that doesn't mean your project is guaranteed a piece of the cash flow.

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers studied hundreds of thousands of Kickstarters for hints of what made successful projects. They focused on the copy-writing inside the projects. Using data-mining software, researchers studied 45,000 Kickstarter projects and analyzed 9 million phrases, according to New Scientist. What they found: Language that evoked gift-giving was a big donation-getter, just like the word "green," as in "sustainable." Turnoffs: a lack of confidence.

Researcher Tanushree Mitra says Kickstarter phrases that offer a strong "reciprocity" led to successful funding. Offering a gift to backers generated the most funding, regardless of the value of the gift. Consider the price jump for backer incentives. You could be missing out on a lot of collective dollars from middle-ground backers by jumping from $50 to $100.

Mitra also says confidence is key. Researchers found that even the slightest hint of desperation is backer repellent. Don't use these three words: "even a dollar." Researchers found that phrases "even a dollar short" and "even a dollar can" resulted in a failed project. They team said it reads as "groveling" for money, which is a big turnoff.

Critics also say there's a big missed opportunity in the word "green." Failing to acknowledge or include a sustainable feature could be a game changer. Any chance to get the word "green" in there will score extra points with Kickstarter's eco-friendly crowd.

The researchers studied Pebble Smartwatch's wildly successful Kickstarter campaign against failed campaigns. Pebble made history last April when it became the most backed project on Kickstarter to date. Originally seeking $100,000, the company received more than $10 million--$2.6 million of which came in the last few days. (Statistically, technology and gaming projects have the highest amount of successfully funded campaigns in the $20,000 to $1 million range, but fall to the bottom of the barrel at any price under that.)

Aside from words, numbers obviously play a key role in any crowdfunding campaigns. Kickstarter whisperer Vincent Etter says founders need to be realistic about their asking prices. "Campaigns that fail usually ask for more money, over a longer time period--with the exception of video games, for which successful campaigns have a higher goal on average." Still not sure if you're under or over-pricing yourself?--Bring in the experts. Companies like Dragon Innovation have helped Kickstarter projects including Pebble's campaign.

"Crowd funding at present is a bit like the internet in 1995," Tom Walkinshaw, founder of successfully funded nano satellite startup PocketQube, told New Scientist. "Everyone agrees it could be really game-changing, but there is a real lack of in-depth knowledge on why some campaigns work while others just fizzle out. This could undoubtedly be beneficial to both crowd funding hopefuls and new crowd funding platforms."

Plummeting Surveillance Costs Make Spying Cheap And Easy

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Modern tools like GPS and cell-phone tracking make police surveillance dramatically easier and cheaper than ever before, two privacy experts say this month in the Yale Law Journal. In 2012, for instance, the FBI had about 3,000 GPS tracking devices deployed on suspects' cars across the U.S., they say--a level of vehicle surveillance they estimate wouldn't have been possible even with every FBI agent in the field tailing cars for 24 hours every day.

When new techniques make monitoring the public literally orders of magnitude cheaper, they argue, courts ought to see that as a sign that the new methods are violating traditional expectations of privacy and keep a close watch on how officers are using those tools.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Jones in 2012 that police monitoring a GPS unit and transmitter they attached to a suspect's car without a proper warrant violated his Fourth Amendment rights. But the justices were divided on how to determine when a new law enforcement tool requires a warrant or other court scrutiny, argues the paper by Kevin Bankston, the policy director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, and independent privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani.

"Trying to make sense of the Jones concurrences and reduce them to a clear and administrable rule--or, alternatively, arguing that they make no sense and cannot be so reduced--has become something of a cottage industry amongst privacy law scholars," the authors wrote.

They argue that people's expectations of privacy are driven by a mix of legal restrictions and practical restrictions--like the fact that the FBI can't deploy all of its agents to follow suspects without sleep for days at a time. So, they say, when new technology makes surveillance cheaper by an order of magnitude--that is, when the dollar cost falls by a factor of 10--courts should recognize that an existing expectation of privacy is likely being breached.

"Drawing the line at an order of magnitude is admittedly somewhat arbitrary, " they write, "but is also an indisputable benchmark and easily applicable test for whether or not a particular type of surveillance has become radically less expensive, which is ultimately the question on which we are suggesting courts focus."

Automated GPS logging with a hidden transmitter that sends a car's location to a central server costs about 36 cents per hour, while actually following a suspect's car costs hundreds of dollars in agent salaries per hour, the authors estimate, so the threshold would be met.

On the other hand, switching from a standard five-agent surveillance team to using a more primitive short-range transmitter that lets one pair of agents trail the car from up to a couple miles away only cuts costs by about 60%, so it wouldn't be treated as a fundamental change.

"Using order-of-magnitude difference as a rule of thumb is just one way of using cost as a metric, and we welcome other such proposals for assessing whether a radical technology-prompted rights-shift has occurred," the authors wrote.


The End Of Manual Self-Quantification Is Fast Approaching

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Saving articles to Instapaper or Pocket isn't hard, if you remember to hit the button. To simplify things, the New York Times research labs is working on putting these manual processes of quantifying your own behavior--including web browsing--out to pasture. Curriculum is the automatic check-in for online reading.

Curriculum parses pages for topics and then adds them to a public stream. So instead of someone seeing the URLs you visited, they'd see topics like "3-D printing" or "cyber warfare." Having your browsing history anonymously sorted and curated is another tool for those interested in quantifying and sharing everything they do. There are already tools that break down the amount of time you spend on different sites, but part of Curriculum's appeal is its semantic listening. A simplified list of topics is more likely to spark intrigue than a list of URLs or even page titles.

The Nieman Journalism Lab does a great job of breaking down some of the more technical aspects and also makes the case for something like Curriculum to be implemented in every news room. For those concerned with privacy, it's also worth noting that this is still very much a lab project. Far from being a finished product, Curriculum is an experimental project that can be used to inform other endeavors.

Twitter #music played around with this idea briefly, trying to curate recommendations based on followings and sift through vast data to help users discover new music. Ultimately though, its full potential wasn't able to be realized. iTunes is another music service trying to quantify your history with its genius recommendations, but it lacks the social aspect: You can't see other people's histories.

Even though we have the world's information at our finger tips, we still have the problem of where to start. Curated lists is one solution. Where do we find interesting articles to add to our Pocket account? Where do we find interesting places to check in with Foursquare? What websites are worth visiting? In the future, quantified semantic listening may hold the answer to questions like this.

Could This Be The First Snoop-proof Phone?

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In an age of stories like the NSA spying scandal and Snapchat's recent hacking, true mobile privacy seems impossible to come by. But one encryption company claims to have the answer.

Blackphone is a snoop-free smartphone announced by a pair of companies specializing in encryption. Founder Phil Zimmermann is a well-known cryptographer who also founded an encryption company called Silent Circle.

Zimmerman's company joined forces with Spanish telephony startup Geeksphone to collaborate on hardware for a private Android operating system, which they named "PrivatOS." According to the product's introduction video, PrivatOS holds all of the same available apps as Android but includes an "additional security measure for encrypted messages."

The companies claim Blackphone allows secure calls and texts. "You can exchange and store secure files; have secure video chat; browse privately; and anonymize your activity through a VPN," the website states. But it seems as if concealed content such as texts would likely require all parties to have a Blackphone for it to work.

Zimmermann, who specializes in secure text messaging, says he's been waiting for technology to catch up with his ideas of privacy technology. "The No. 1 priority is to uphold the objectives of privacy, not to serve some business model of monetizing customer data," Zimmerman says in the video. "We're trying to create a smartphone whose whole purpose is to protect privacy."

Blackphone's creators don't deny storing any data, instead claiming to only store the bare minimum of information. "Blackphone stores minimal detail from its web server and other logs," the website states. "We delete logs as soon as reasonably possible. We turn the logging level on our systems to log only protocol-related errors. Our goal is to have nothing to turn over or disclose to any third party."

Still, the critical public is going to need more assurance that it does, in fact, give them hack-proof safety. It's unclear about how the company is going to achieve this, but based on Zimmerman's reputation it could be a good bet. Blackphone will be available for pre-order on February 24.

Could A Hashtag Bring Digital Justice To Sudan?

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Sudan has an Internet problem. Thanks in part to U.S. sanctions, citizens of the war-torn country are very limited in what they can see and do online. Could a soon-to-be-launched social media campaign change that?

#SudanSanctions is a grassroots online campaign aimed at pressuring the U.S. government to ease its sanctions against Sudan, where those with Internet access--currently 21% of the population--are barred by the sanctions from making online purchases. Activists say the sanctions unfairly limit civilians and hamper innovation in the country.

Prior social activism from the Sudanese people have come in small doses, but "this coming campaign definitely represents the first concerted effort to harness media...to raise their voices for change and demonstrate how the sanctions need to be adjusted to reflect new digital realities," freelance writer Amanda Sperber told FastCoLabs via email.

A coalition of Sudanese activists are behind the campaign, which will include other hashtags like #techsanctions and #Sudan. Sometime over the next few days, a press conference with media outreach will be held to release a documentary-style video "with interviews from professors to female programmers talking about how the sanctions have impacted their work," explained Sperber. "Some American NGOs and think tanks who can't currently be named," she added, are working with the activists in getting the word out on "social media with hashtags, article sharing and the video."

The Sudan Sanctions Program, "which imposed a comprehensive trade embargo on Sudan and blocked the assets of the Government of Sudan," were imposed because of Sudan's implicated involvement in international terrorism and human rights violations. As a result, the Sudanese people cannot buy any products online--they haven't been able to since the sanctions were passed into law in 1997. That includes software updates, apps, anti-virus software, and online education classes. One Sudan University of Science and Technology student, Afnan Kheir, explains, "we don't have the luxury of Visa or MasterCard, which deprives us from many things not only IT related." Without the option to pay for anything online, Sudan's tech sector is not advancing.

There is one exception to the trade embargo: gum arabic, a key ingredient in all sodas, including Coca-Cola. Sudan is the world's largest producer, making and distributing 70% to 80% of the world's gum arabic. The U.S. would never want to hinder Coca-Cola's performance, especially seeing as it has been the world's most valuable brand in previous years--Apple just beat them out of the top spot for the first time in 13 years.

Sudanese activist and tech worker Mohammed Hashim Kambal wrote to Tech President explaining that the Sudan Sanctions Programs are "true for the Sudanese regime but normal people ha[ve] nothing to do with that."

Engineers, programmers, and developers are not the only ones afflicted either. Students and non-profit entities are constantly trying to find modes to move around around the sanctions, instead they oftentimes endure delays and several roadblocks nonetheless.

People are finally speaking out now within the country as well as outside, pleading for a U.S. mandate. Many people affected by the digital sanctions, like the once-censored Nuba Mountains Indiegogo campaign, are involved in the struggle. A campaign called "smart sanctions," endorsed by the U.S. special envoy to Sudan, aims to target the government instead of civilians.

New opportunities for Sudan's tech sector have only recently begun to emerge even with the U.S. regulations remaining in place. For example, the U.S.-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), which has 600 Sudan-Subsection members. They held their first ever Conference on Computing, Electrical & Electronics Engineering last year, that ended up attracting two American professors as keynote speakers.

A paper released in December of 2013 by the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, argued that a failure to lift the outdated sanctions is negatively impacting Sudan's population. The hopes for the #SudanSanctions campaign are to persuade the U.S. government to do just that: to lift the antiquated bans that are squashing the Sudanese population's progress into the digital age.

[H/T:Tech President]

Why Are Millions Of Teens Fleeing Facebook?

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Your mom, your mom's mom, and your mom's new puppy have a Facebook profile these days. It's no wonder the site is seeing a rapid decline in traffic from teens, who are increasingly turning their attention to newer social networks.

Digital consultancy iStrategy Labs released a study on Wednesday showing that young people are leaving Facebook. The firm reviewed data from Facebook's Social Advertising platform in 2011, comparing it with data from January 2014.

The report shows that as of January of this year, there are 3,314,780 fewer Facebook users between the ages of 13-17 than in 2011. Additionally, in the age range of 18-24, over 3.4 million users have left the platform. And if you look at the numbers per "current enrollment," the decline of high school and college students on Facebook is 11,240,920 combined. That's a big drop in just three years.

"It seems like [young people] don't use Facebook anymore," President Barack Obama was overheard saying on Tuesday. Atlantic contributor Robinson Meyer, echoed the President's sentiment, writing that "Facebook is so uncool even the president of the United States knows it."

The younger generation has a habit of shaping global trends, so the news could have a dramatic affect for Facebook's overall strategy. Then again, mirroring the downshift in youth text messaging and the increase of senior citizen texting, Facebook is seeing a surge in users from the 55+ age range--there has been "+80.4% growth in the last 3 years."

The rise of Twitter and Instagram among teenage users can be attributed to the shift away from Facebook. A Piper Jaffray report found that in 2013, only 23% of teens thought that Facebook was important, down from the 42% in 2012. The Pew Research Center 2013 study observed that 94% of teens have a Facebook profile, but Twitter usage has exponentially increased in that age group. It is important to note that the Pew study concluded that, "these youth are mindful about what they post, even if their primary focus and motivation is often their engagement with an audience of peers and family," thereby affirming the notion that adolescents are eager to leave Facebook behind--where your mom and grandma frequently post and peruse.

Troy Carter Thinks Mindie Is The Future Of Music

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Who thought music videos of the future would be seven seconds long? Mindie, an app that lets users shoot short clips backed by music, just raised $1.2 million in a first round of funding with the hopes of changing music discovery.

"Mindie's way to crack music discovery is to offer a passive discovery experience" says cofounder Stanislas Coppin. "People are not searching for new tracks but discovering new music while watching videos."

Troy Carter, Chris Howard, Dave Morin, Michael Arrington, and Pete Cashmore are among some of the early investors trying to take the simple mobile app beyond the early adopter crowd. "Our investors are from tech, media, and entertainment industries" says cofounder Gregoire Henrion. "By creating a new format of consumption, I think Mindie is more of a cultural company than just a tech company." Other investors include Lower Case Ventures, Cashmere Entertainment, Betaworks, and Summly's Nick D'Aloisio.

On first blush Mindie looks similar to Vine, which also takes tap-to-record videos, but the services are aimed at different crowds. Mindie cofounder Clement Raffenoux says, "You're not only capturing a moment, you're creating a story while you record a video. Our experience of consumption is strongly focused on contents due to the fullscreen feed and the minimal UI. We erased as much meta data as we could. That's why we define Mindie more like a TV channel than a traditional social media." Beyond design, the app is also wildly clever in its use of the iTunes API, which gives it access to every song on Apple's service, including exclusives.

One of the most important things for a content creation app to have, especially early on, is passionate users. Vine has inspired a lot of hilarious clips, including those from Blake Wilson, otherwise known as BatDad. In a similar way, Mindie has already captured the imagination of users, including Jesiah Bonney, who rose to the top featured spot based off his impressive videos. Bonney took to the service because he immediately understood the value music can add to a video.

When Mindie first launched a few months ago, it was hard to see how a single feed of short clips could impact the music industry. It may not be clear why Mindie works, but it's part of an evolving music industry that takes very few cues from the past.

Print Magazines Can Survive If They Prioritize, Says Study

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Print journalism is dead--or at least that's what media outlets have been saying about themselves since 2008. But a glimmer of optimism about the publishing industry arrived today from a University of Toronto Scarborough study.

As it turns out, print magazines are viable if--and only if--they prioritize their digital departments. The coexistence of a print magazine and a companion website brings in more revenue through advertising than either type of media alone, according to the study. Magazines are catered for a specific audience and "the more homogeneous the magazine's audience, the more attractive it is to advertisers looking to target a specific type of consumer."

Furthermore, "multihomers," or people that consume information from more than one medium, are the most appealing type of consumer for advertisers. The thinking goes: If consumers see an ad more than once, they are more inclined to buy the advertised product. Therefore, magazines that have an online component are more attractive to advertisers because readers have two "homes" in which to find the same ads.

Print magazines have long been thought to be archaic media forums, (even Newsweek famously went digital-only last year and then switched back). Despite this assumption, the amount of new online publications being published surged in the last year. The Rookie Yearbook, the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and the Pitchfork Review are just some of the new print magazines that will grace newsstands this year, reports the L.A. Times. Luckily, Rookie, the L.A. Review of Books, and Pitchfork already have the infrastructure of a website, setting themselves up for a successful business model.

It's still not clear what the split should be between digital and print, in terms of resources. But with media staples like New York magazine cutting back publication to become a biweekly and pumping up their websites, it would appear that most print magazines lean too heavily on print today. For now, it is a comfort to readers (and writers) everywhere to know that their favorite glossies aren't extinct, after all.

[H/T:Science Daily]

What's Powering These Giant Morphing Faces At The Sochi Olympics?

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Remember those pin-art toys that formed to your hand as a kid? Well in a few weeks, Sochi Olympics visitors will be able to do the same thing but on a massive scale.

Hailed as "The Mount Rushmore of the Digital Age," a 2,000 square-meter pavilion and structure called MegaFaces will take the shape of visitor's faces at the entrance of Olympic Park. Three-D photo booths located at various sites around Olympic Park will allow visitors to get their face scanned. The concept is to let "anyone"--no word yet on if the gays are included--become "the face of the Sochi Olympics."

Taking images from several angles of the face, the booth will send one completed image through an engine and cable system, then through the screen's actuators. The system will take about one minute to process the model from the different scanned images. Made of more than 10,000 actuators and narrow tubes, the screen will morph into a 3-D face portrait for 20 seconds each.

According to Dezeen, each actuator will have an RGB-LED light at its tip to determine the position of each pixel. The stretchable fabric membrane allows a smooth surface when changing forms. "In the area of a three-dimensional modeling of organic forms, a trigonal structure is more suitable, because it makes three-dimensional forms appear natural and flowing even with only a small amount of pixels," chief engineer Valentin Spiess told Dezeen.

A digital scheduler will display each user's time slot of when their face will appear on the giant screen and participants will be emailed a short video of the special moment. MegaFaces designer Asif Khan says the booth's face scanning software will have an algorithm to assure scanned faces are just that--no other body part. (Apologies to your inner adolescent.) Human moderators will make sure you don't find a way to fool it.

No stranger to digital art installations at the Olympics, Khan made the Coca-Cola Beatbox, an interactive installation that remixed recordings of athlete's heartbeats, shoes squeaking, and arrows hitting a target remixed by the gestures and movements of the visitors, at the 2012 London games.


Do Remote Workers Actually... Work?

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If you're looking for a job right now, chances are you'll come across a listing for at least one listing that involves telecommuting. Census data shows that more Americans are working remotely, and studies show that having the option to work from home can increase worker productivity. But while the viability of the remote workplace has been much discussed since several high-profile tech companies decided to eliminate telecommuting, most outlets have merely examined it in terms of efficacy--i.e., does a remote work environment benefit a company's overall productivity?

Fewer consider the very specific set of demands that a remote work environment makes of individual employees. A recent blog post from Kurt Mackey of cloud database company MongoHQ argues that we haven't paid enough attention to what it takes to build an effective remote working environment, and that we worry more about the logistics of working remotely than the impact it can have on employee morale:

Like most decep­tively sim­ple ideas, remote work is easy and amaz­ing when every­thing is going well. If your com­pany is killing it, all the hockey sticks point up, and every­one gets along amaz­ingly well, the remote work cul­ture is prob­a­bly good. There is dan­ger, how­ever, when things go south. We've expe­ri­enced the emo­tional troughs as a com­pany, and had indi­vid­u­als fight their own per­sonal battles.

While it is important to consider if a new hire has the skill set necessary to work remotely, a company must also take care to create an environment that is friendly to remote employees. It's necessary to be cognizant of things that are given up in a remote work environment--like office culture and any sort of rapport among coworkers--and to go out of the way to make up for it. "Work­ing in a way that's inclu­sive of peo­ple who aren't phys­i­cally (or even tem­po­rally) present is not entirely nat­ural," writes Mackey, "and exclud­ing remote employ­ees from impor­tant inter­ac­tions is a quick path to agony."

It requires a lot of trust on the part of the employer--something that's harder to do with someone you're rarely going to see in person, but no less necessary, writes Adii Pienarr for UC Berkeley's Scalable Startups blog:

This means that from day one, new team members know what's expected from them, and they know that we won't be around (sometimes because it's physically impossible) to check up on them to make sure they meet those expectations. This trust also creates a blank canvas for team members to do their best work, where they have the freedom to solve a problem in the best way they see fit, whilst possessing the opportunity to be accountable and responsible for their own work.

Unfortunately, the business world has yet to establish an effective standard for how to best manage and structure a good remote work environment--or a traditional work environment, for that matter--but the immense flexibility that it affords in conjunction with the wealth of collaborative tools available allows for endless tinkering, and that's a good thing. Ask around and see what works best for others, suggests Zapier's Wade Foster, who lists a number of resources in addition to his company's approach.

While it's tempting to merely consider the pros and cons of working remotely as if all approaches of doing so were equally effective, doing so could be a detriment to a company's success and employee morale. Working remotely is a work in progress for everyone involved.

Founding Team Member Of Ouya Muffi Ghadiali Is Leaving The Project

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Ouya was a much buzzed about product when it came to the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. It quickly raised $8.5 million in funding, marking the project in Kickstarter history. The promise: Ouya could revolutionize the gaming industry with its hackable platform, allowing gamers to also be developers without licensing fees. The team welcomed Muffi Ghadiali as VP of product development in 2012 to spearhead a team of engineers, but TechCrunch confirmed this morning that Ghadiali is departing from the company, putting Ouya's roadmap in question.

Ghadiali came on board originally because he saw "the potential for an open technology to change how gaming works." He left his project managing position at Amazon where he was integral in the Kindle launch, to work with the Ouya lineup to make it a "viable consumer product."

Ouya has hit plenty of roadblocks already. When the company finally released the cube-shaped console in March 2013, it faced considerable competition from new iterations of Apple TV (complete with AirPlay streaming from game-laden iOS devices) as well as Xbox One and PlayStation. Fast Company writer Kevin Oke advised the Ouya team to create innovative parental controls and market directly toward parents. Whether that would have worked, who knows--but Ouya's sales numbers fell flat. We'll see if Julie Uhrman, Ouya's founder, can reignite her team's (and her Kickstarter contributors') enthusiasm.

Do Barcodes Work Better If They're Beautiful?

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Digital symbology needs a redesign. Barcodes aren't universal, and QR codes--which are--have never caught on. Together, they're a fairly disgraceful conduit between real life and digital life. Artists have attempted to pretty up these scannable data codes by assimilating logos into QR codes and using them as the basis of glitch art, and barcodes' vertical lines have been treated as design elements for more eye-catching package design. But generally speaking, consumers will only use technologies that are people friendly--much to the consternation of retail stores and advertisers, whose in-store barcode scanners and QR marketing campaigns inevitably flop.

But what if machine-readable codes were human-enjoyable as well?

They're called aestheticodes, and they're the brainchild of Steve Benford, a professor in the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham, England. In a video produced by the YouTube channel Computerphile, Benford demonstrates how they work using the experimental aestheticodes mobile app, outlining what he calls a new experience for what he calls "visual code recognition technology." His goal: To decorate the world with interesting, interactive surfaces.

A technique using "the topology of an image as a way of encoding information" was invented by Enrico Costanza, a physical sciences and engineering professor at the University of Southampton. It works like this: A shape with a certain number of connected regions with a certain amount of "blobs" in each of these regions forms the encoded illustration. Similar images can have different codes, and different designs can carry the same information. The secret is in the redundancy of the pattern in the image, creating a more robust code pattern.

Clever designers are able to exploit the visual processing of both computers and human eyes with this method. Cameras aren't designed to the laws of prägnanz, or ordering proprioceptive experience the way human eyes and brains are. Cosmetic embellishments can be added to prettify the image while keeping the central code in tact, and humans barely notice them. We just perceive it to be a complex illustration.

Ricoh, the printer and copier company, has another solution it calls Clickable Paper. It lets users take a picture of, say, a pair of jeans you really like in a magazine, and directs you to a screen of multiple links instead of a specific website. But we prefer this method, which becomes a kind of hybrid machine-human art form.

The concept was introduced to the ceramic design department at Central Saint Martin's, the art school in London, where students screened designs onto conceptual plates and menus for a Thai restaurant chain. Want the recipe for the food you just ate? Snap a picture of your plate. The day's offerings? The cherry blossoms on the front of the menu will tell you just that.

Right now, Benford sees scalability and confusion as the biggest limitations to aestheticodes' implementation in reality. In theory, there are an arbitrary number of regions per code, and a phone might not be able to interpret a large-scale image. Users may be confused as to how they're supposed to be interacting with a beautiful yet slyly encoded image. Benford says the solution to that are clear, contrasty visual cues cameras can pick up--like, say, a penguin.

Aestheticodes is available to play with on iOS and Android devices.

[Images screenshots of The Penguin Barcode by the Computerphile channel]

This Bell Labs Campus Was The Googleplex Of Its Day, And Now Its Dead

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Bell Laboratories wasn't just a single building. Rather, it was nationwide constellation of labs responsible for global marvels of scientific discovery and seven Nobel prizes. The mantle began to disintegrate with the closing of the famous Manhattan office, but now Bell Laboratories' Holmdel facility in suburban New Jersey has closed--and the community is left to wonder what to do with the cavernous monolith where wonders once sparked into life.

Designed by famed Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, the architect responsible for the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the Holmdel building is a quarter-mile long of sheer mirror outside and 1.9 million square feet of atrial space inside. Even before the Saarinen building was constructed between 1959-62, the site's claim to fame was Bell Laboratories employee Karl Guthe Jansky's inventing radio astronomy there in 1933. At its peak, the Saarinen building held 6,000 employees and claims the location for the laser cooling work that earned Bell researcher Steven Chu a Nobel Prize. Research at the facility led to fax technology and cell phones.

Bell began moving out in 2007, but thanks to a New Urbanist developer, the Holmdel building will likely be split into a mixed-use urban center with 237 of its 472 acres lopped off for residential development.

The Saarinen building was one of 11 Bell Laboratories facilities in New Jersey, and six years after the huge mirrored campus was first expanded in 1966, the New Jersey locations boasted 12,000 of Bell Laboratories' 17,000 scientists and engineers across the nation. Responsible for the first long-distance television transmission, invention of the transistor and photovoltaic cell, and first successful operation of a gas laser, Bell Laboratories reads like the Google of its day. Half of its employees were in the top 5% of their graduating class and Bell paid full rides for its Bachelor degree hires to go back to school, as they only employed Master's degree holders.

While aerial views depict the Saarinen building as a tight rectangle between fanned-out splays of car parking, the inside is quite cavernous, with the large atrium areas between walls of cubicles spanned by bridges at all floors. The space made some lament the decreased chance that serendipitous run-ins would spark creative moments, while others painted the modernist design as cold and inflexible. Still, the space was eminently productive and almost a town unto itself, with its own postal service, dry cleaner, and cafeteria.

Ralph Zucker, the New Urbanist president of Somerset Development, has been working to keep the Saarinen building intact since 2007 and convince local businesses that multi-use commerce is the way to go. To raise part of the $100 million needed for renovations, Zucker sold 237 acres to residential developer Toll Brothers, which plans to sell homes around the Saarinen building for $1 million apiece.

How Much Do Data Scientists Get Paid?

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Business Insider's story about a Google developer who makes $3 million a year caused something of a furor this week, despite the fact that IT World could not confirm whether this $3 million man actually exists. So how much do companies pay the bearers of the hottest job title in tech: data scientist? The answer is not as much as you might think.

Tech publisher O' Reilly surveyed the 2012 and 2013 attendees at the Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California and the Strata and Hadoop World events in New York, some of the top data science events in the world. Respondents came from 34 countries including the U.S. but O' Reilly, rather bizarrely considering the subject, does not provide numbers on the total number of respondents.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary for an software developer in 2012 was $93,000. Glassdoor's statistics show that the average total compensation for a Google engineer, including bonuses, is $144,546. The median salary of the U.S. data scientists surveyed by O' Reilly was $110,000.

Two major factors caused big variations in salaries. The first was the tools used by respondents. O' Reilly analyzed the correlations between tools and found two clusters. The Hadoop cluster contains R, Python, most of the Hadoop platforms, and a variety of machine learning, data management, and visualization tools which are designed to be used with large data sets. The SQL/Excel group contains more traditional, query-based tools such as Excel, SAS, and several SQL/RDB tools.

Users of the tools in the Hadoop cluster got paid more, and the figure climbed the more tools they used. The median salary was $85k for those who do not use any tools from the Hadoop cluster and climbed to $125k for those who use at least six.

The other major factor influencing data scientists' salaries was the type of company for which they worked. Early stage startups actually pay the most, a median salary of $130k, while those working in the government and education sectors languished at the bottom of the scale at $80k. Public companies paid a median salary of $110k.

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