The Sacramento Kings announced yesterday that they will be the first professional sports organization to accept Bitcoin as payment for team-related transactions. Having pitched the league on on a technology-heavy direction in order to keep the team in Sacramento, the Kings' majority owner, Vivek Ranadive, has announced that the team will now be accepting Bitcoin virtual currency.

As early as this spring, fans will be able to purchase tickets and souvenirs with Bitcoin, the first step in the team's efforts to push the envelope for a totally digital in-stadium experience devoid of paper money and tickets.

Bitpay's flat fee transaction system should enable the Kings to bring in more revenue for the team, while placing any potential risk on the shoulders of those engaged in Bitcoin's still unproven economy.

Additionally, the team says it is toying with the idea of employing Google Glass to enhance both the fan experience, and the abilities of its coaching staff. Potentially, Glass would provide statistical and analytical support to games in real time, enabling both fans and coaching staffs greater access to the game as well as its underlying data sets.

[HT:ESPN.com]

WunderBar is a sensor and software kit for which you don't need a degree in electronic engineering. We have seen a number of DIY kits lately which allow users with no technical background to build their own devices, from a computer you can build in 107 seconds to kits for building your own speakers.

WunderBar is designed specifically to get mobile app developers who do not have hardware experience started with the Internet of Things. The makers claim developers can build their WunderBar app in less than 10 minutes.

"Every beginning needs creativity," says founder Jackson Bond, "a starter kit which allows you to play. There is no comparable offer in the market of which we know." Wunderbar today launched a crowdfunding campaign on Dragon Innovation's hardware-only platform.

WunderBar is designed to look like a chocolate bar--hence the name. The hardware part of the kit consists of a microcontroller connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi and to six sensors with Bluetooth low energy, the same technology used in Apple's iBeacons. Break off a sensor, place it in your environment, and program via a REST API or SDKs for iOS and Android.

A cloud platform, which the team calls the OpenSensor Cloud, gathers sensor data, and persists it. Programmatic rules can be defined based on the sensor data resulting for example, in notifications to your app.

The sensors included in the kit measure temperature, proximity, light, color, humidity, movement. A fourth sensor contains an IR transmitter to control home entertainment devices. The final two sensors will be chosen by supporters of WunderBar's crowdfunding campaign. Initial candidates include noise, air pressure, EMF (Electromotive Force), and moisture.

Bond knows which sensor he would like to see in the kit. "We're really excited about turning one sensor into a Grove twig," he says. "This would give developers access to Grove's 50+ sensors and actuators. It would also open the door to Arduino developers, giving them a Bluetooth LE module to start working with, and of course giving them access to our OpenSensor Cloud." Grove is a set of plug-and-use electronics components, like sensors and controls, intended to be used with an Arduino-compatible shield.

Security is essential in any application that can be used to sense or control systems in the home. Each WunderBar has a unique certificate, which is exchanged with the server, allowing a secure SSL connection to the open sensor cloud. Oauth2 is used for authorization on the API.

WunderBar costs $119 for a limited number of early bird funders and $149 for everyone else. Funding packages go up to $1,300 for the Makerspace kit. The WunderBar is expected to be delivered in August 2014.

The ascendence of microcomputers is nigh, but hackers working on robotics projects have never had a robot brain that works out of the box. Now a new board called Rex will allow tinkerers to build robots from the ground up with a customized OS. Bonus: It saves you from doing a ton of wiring.

The pair behind Rex, Mike Lewis and Kartik Tiwarti, met while both were studying robotics at Carnegie Mellon. They dreamed of a DIY robot processing unit that would be more powerful than a microcontroller but with fewer extraneous connections than a Raspberry Pi-esque microcomputer.

The actual Rex board is shorter than a deck of cards, so it'll fit on odd-size robots yet has connections for a slew of weird, fun stuff--like sensors, servos, microphones, and even microcontrollers. There's even a special header to plug in a kill switch to cut the motors (but not the system) if you're extra-worried about a sentient robot rebellion.

Better still, the Rex team has been listening to feedback and replaced the JTAG header footprint with 14 GPIO pins. Otherwise, its I2C hookups are great for all the weird little servos you want to propel your robobeast with.

Perhaps the most promising aspect of the kit is the custom Linux-based OS, Alphalem, which the pair have released open source even before their project is funded--an uncommon move allowing potential backers to look at the code before they buy. The hardware isn't open source, but the pair believes that they'll be releasing enough information to inspire clever tinkerers to build compatible devices and adapt any other Linux distribution to it.

Rex has almost reached one-third of its $90,000 goal with two weeks to go. At $99, it's twice the cost of a Raspberry Pi but just a little over the $89, less-powerful BeagleBone board that inspired Rex.

In an unprecedented expansion of its own video replay program, Major League Baseball is giving team managers authority to challenge on-field rulings by sending them to officials outside the stadium. Plays will be reviewed at baseball's new Replay Command Center, located at Major League Baseball's Advanced Media offices in New York City.

The on-field officiating crew will not be responsible for determining the outcome of the challenges--except in circumstances where plays aren't reviewable at all. One example is baseball's legendary "neighborhood play," which is a term for when a player almost makes contact with a base while turning a double-play--an MLB version of golf's gimme.

Baseball estimates that nearly 90% of all calls will now be reviewable, as opposed to what was previously limited to questionable boundary plays involving home runs. Now, teams will have the ability to challenge plays during a game, but must do so at their own discretion. If a manager's suspicions are confirmed, they will retain their challenge and be allowed another challenge, though never more than two per game. Get it wrong, and you're out of luck.

Additionally, stadiums will be allowed to broadcast the same angles used by the officiating crews on Jumbotrons and other screens scattered about the park. Best of luck surviving the walk back to your car, umpires in Philadelphia!

Google's acquisition of Nest provoked a wave of uncertainty about all the personal data acquired by Nest's smart thermostats. So what happens when our homes are connected to a "smart grid," and what does "smart grid" mean, anyway?

First of all, the idea of a digital power grid is far from inevitable. The monumental cost of upgrading existing power grids means that energy providers need persuading. Amazingly, Nest was well on its way toward lobbying the utilities when they were acquired.

Nest made itself valuable to energy providers by inserting itself between user and provider, making energy-saving decisions profitable for users (called demand side management) and then bartering usage information to energy providers--20 of whom have found the partnership useful enough to pay Nest $30 to $50 annually per installed thermostat. After Nest proved themselves to users, they developed an opt-in program that automatically tweaks thermostats to save energy.

As our peers at Co.Design wrote, Nest had already made inroads with prominent providers already building smart grids in New York, Southern California, sub-Panhandle Texas, and others. Nest has developed partnerships with energy providers.

What Makes A Smart Grid Smart?

Monitoring demand is the most fundamental job for a smart grid, a term which usually refers to power grids with sensors tracking energy usage, demand spikes, and backup power usage. Smart grids generally rely on home usage-measuring smart meters to pinpoint-shutdown energy-hogging appliances to avert grid failure. Another key feature: The ability to redirect energy around downed power lines or other broken links in the energy chain.

Is Nest a real smart meter? Not quite. It doesn't allow direct, two-way communication with the grid itself, nor does it allow remote metering. Instead, it gathers usage data over time, which is far more informative than current non-smart power meters that just total up monthly energy consumption. These partnerships Nest built are a stopgap, and Nest's partnerships are attractive to energy providers because the latter can see home energy usage beamed from Nest's data repositories without having to build an Advanced Metering Infrastructure.

The first working smart grid was ENEL's Telegestore system--started in Italy in 2005--and it's still the largest, with over 30 million smart meters firing information back and forth to annually save the country €500 million in formerly-lost energy, at a project cost of €2.1 billion.

The Pecan Street Project in Austin, TX became the first online U.S. smart grid in 2009 and currently uses over 500,000 devices to serve almost a million residents. The U.S. projects initiated in 2005 and boosted by $3.4 billion of the 2009 Federal Stimulus Package are being nurtured by the DOE's Smart Grid Implementation Strategy (SGIS) team. Other projects are beginning internationally, too.

The Pricey Road To Smarter Energy Distribution

Upgrading U.S. grids to smart grids will cost between $17 billion and $24 billion per year for the next 20 years, according to a 2011 report by the utility-funded Electric Power Research Institute. In general, energy providers have little incentive to spend money on selling less energy to consumers, especially as the specter of subsidized renewable energy threatens to cut more profits. Even at the local scale, replacing traditional meters with smart meters costs about twice as much, and that doesn't include IT and digital infrastructure.

But energy providers have an interest in mastering supply and demand to avoid outages and keep consumers happy as state-by-state deregulation introduces energy competitors. To draw consumer attention away from attractive green energy, providers will have to show that their systems are improving efficiency with new technology.

Google Didn't Just Buy Thermostats

Google bought into these relationships with its Nest purchase, accomplishing a long-standing goal that seemed out of reach in 2011 when it killed its energy-monitoring PowerMeter, allegedly due to low adoption. But what really scuttled the PowerMeter was energy providers' colossal red tape, according to an interview with Google Ventures CTO Michael Jones last year.

Even though Google didn't succeed with its homegrown power meter, smaller companies have had slightly more luck. Energy usage report provider Opower has been surviving purely on cash infusions, needing $65 million in venture capital since launching in 2007 to finally reach self-sustainability in 2014. Opower services over 20 million homes in the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. It's curious to note that in a 2010 American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy report, the only other service listed in PowerMeter and Opower's bracket, Efficiency 2.0, was swallowed up in 2012 by C3, an energy usage software provider to utilities. It was presumably turned into dogfood.

Another major boon for Google was Nest's user data. As the 2010 ACEEE report states, smart grids need both gadgets and data to learn user behavior over time and recommend energy-saving settings. Google now has a user base and a proven product to which to harness its massive information-delivering infrastructure. And after last month's leak of Google's upcoming EnergySense app, it's clear that Google wants to monitor power use throughout the house, not just the HVAC systems which suck down most of your house's power.

Google's Road To Becoming A Utility

Google has already shown interest in becoming a utility provider: It was granted a FERC license to buy and sell energy in 2010. But it's Google's announced partnership with GE last year that lends credence to a future of Google energy infrastructure. By integrating Google Maps into GE Smallworld's electrical, telecommunication, and gas systems to build geospatial analytical tools, Google has built expertise in smart grid development for nearly every piece of utility infrastructure.

Google is also investing in energy sources. Last year it made a $280 million investment in solar power for home use, and the company's marketing has been known to claim that a business using cloud services like Google's decreases the environmental impact "by up to 98%." The search giant also profits indirectly from green energy by buying wind energy and selling it back to get green energy credits to reduce its carbon footprint--a strategy it promoted to the energy industry and fellow conglomerates in a white paper published last April.

Tim Cook flew to China to help court China Mobile's 760 million subscribers, but unlike the iPhone's well documented U.S. launches, about a dozen people lined up to buy the newest iPhone early Friday morning, according to the New York Times.

China Mobile's agreement with Apple had people in China going nuts about the news since the announcement was confirmed in December. The move was critical to Apple's global reach even though its share of the market has been steadily rising since 2012.

But don't let the lukewarm reception in Beijing fool you. By Wednesday of this week, a China Mobile spokesperson told Business Insider that 1.3 million reservations for the iPhone had already been placed, though Reuters checked that figure and reported several discrepancies because of registrations made using fake numbers.

The main feature to entice customers to switch to China Mobile's iPhones will be the faster 4G network; the two other carriers currently selling iPhones only offer older generations of the phone. Yet, with a hefty pice tag of 5,288 yuan ($867 USD) for the 5S or the slightly more affordable 5C at 4,488 yuan ($741 USD), Apple will have difficulty doing so. To put that in perspective, the average monthly income for a family in China is $2,100 USD, so the newest iPhone iteration would deplete the average family of monthly finances. And unlike the U.S., post-paid contracts aren't the norm; only about 100 million of China's 760 million subscribers are post-paid, meaning the rest aren't eligible for the carrier subsidies that make iPhones cheaper in the U.S.

According to Bernstein Research's Toni Sacconaghi, that puts China Mobile's tangible addressable iPhone market at only 10 million. That could change if the iPhone drives more people into post-paid contracts. Jeffries analyst Cynthia Meng said that China Mobile's sales will reach 12 million in its 2014 fiscal year, but its subsidies will leap 57% to 42.4 billion yuan ($7 billion), up from 27 billion yuan in its fiscal year 2013.

Adding fuel to the fire, there are a reported 45 million people using iPhones on China Mobile's network already. Smuggling iPhones in from Hong Kong and through other channels is commonplace, which saves people a considerable amount of money on the hardware. Still, Samsung and other Chinese companies reign supreme when it comes to smartphone sales. Samsung comes in China's top spot with more than 18% market share offering multiple affordable smartphone options.

One of the things that perpetually ignites anger among longtime San Franciscans about the tech-infused change sweeping the city, isn't just that tech entrepreneurs dislike the city's homelessness problem or biking culture, but that the techies in question usually don't engage in helping to fix it.

An example is AngelHack, the two year-old hackathon company founded by Greg Gopman, who became infamous for his Facebook screed calling San Francisco's homeless "hyenas." He since apologized and has left the company, but his comments are still a lightning rod for those critical of tech culture:

In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city. Like it's their place of leisure... In actuality it's the business district for one of the wealthiest cities in the USA. It a disgrace. I don't even feel safe walking down the sidewalk without planning out my walking path.

The growing backlash against gentrification in the city isn't just about the public transit system. The heart of the issue may be just how tone-deaf those companies actions appear to have been in response. For example, while Mayor Ed Lee unveiled a plan asking tech companies to pay for their shuttle buses to use public bus stops, Google was busy starting a luxury commuter yacht pilot program for workers. That kind of thing makes you look more like Marie Antoinette than Mother Teresa.

Former Mayor Willie Brown said it succinctly:

What the tech world needs to do is nip this thorny plant in the bud. They need to come off their high cloud efforts to save Africa or wherever they take adventure vacations and start making things better for folks right here.

AngelHack has been left to salvage its good name, an exercise in crisis management that no two-year-old company wishes for. So the new CEO, Sabeen Ali, started a non-profit called "Code for a Cause," which is now holding monthly meetups to discuss homelessness and other issues that the community is facing in order to put solutions into effect. The first one was held this week. But Ali says it's not damage control, but simply a way to help improve one of the city's most salient social problems.

"The reason for this is that we're all part of the community here and that the words of our former employee, although unfortunate, were a fortunate mishap. Sometimes that's kind of what you need and what the universe needs to do to you in order to get you to get up (and make change). This is not related to AngelHack and is something we had a deep desire to do since long before (Gopman's) comments."

A large crowd came to AngelHack's event, including tech workers, a member of Mayor Lee's Office of Civic Innovation, as well as folks who work with the homeless community at various shelters.

"Hosting this event here, especially in light of all the circumstances, was nerve-wracking to say the least," says Ali, "but I have experience facilitating large groups, so I brought those guns prepared. Honestly I'm humbled and I'm delighted by the kind of people that showed up and the responses and really them opening themselves up."

For much of the meeting, those who came talked "roundtable" style about a range of issues and discussed ideas. Some of the folks were hackers who had worked on previous projects that had not come to fruition yet, such as mobile apps that tabulate the current number of beds available at local shelters. Some other ideas included:

• Maintaining a repository of past projects that have been started at similar meetings
• Creating a "tech for good" fund to help support projects that stall
• Setting up better Wi-Fi access at three of the largest shelters in the city, which also need a more consistent volunteer presence
• Creating a Facebook group to connect everyone in attendance, and keep them appraised of future meetings
• Provide technical assistance to students, young entrepreneurs, and local community members
• Teaching local residents how to become content creators, not just coders
• It's too early to tell just how many these ideas will be sustained, but then again, one purpose of the group is accountability. "I hope that everyone else holds me up to [this] as well," says Ali.

Code for a Cause came with an agenda of its own as well. Ali told the crowd that the non-profit had three main goals.

1. Partner with organizations already helping and connect them to people in the tech industry.
2. Explore projects that have been created already and identify a dozen where Code for a Cause can consult and help with any needs, whether they be technical assistance, press, or others.
3. Use their core expertise--putting on hackathons--to help non-profits. The idea here is that non-profits could be guaranteed a place at the hackathons and present their needs to AngelHack's 20,000-strong community of developers all over the world. Developers would then work on coding solutions for the non-profits. Winning projects might make it to an accelerator that AngelHack runs.

While it's heartening to see San Francisco startups giving back to their community, the Gopman debacle shows that the gap between the Bay Area's rich and poor will be the city's defining issue. Can the Bay Area ride this "golden age" without forcing thousands of residents to flee the city due to higher rents and housing prices?

Have you ever scrolled through your Twitter feed and spotted that shiny, must-have new gadget? Next time, you might be able to just click "Buy," thanks to a new deal between Twitter and payments startup Stripe.

The two companies are reportedly in the midst of cutting a deal to make a one-stop shop for social e-commerce according to Re/code, but the pair has yet to reach a final agreement. Details on the deal are few, but the purpose of the arrangement would be for Twitter to add "shopping network" to its list of use cases. The rumored functionality would allow retailers to accept purchases from inside the tweets themselves, making a more efficient market for advertisers who could see instant sales and eliminate extra clicks between the social network and their retailers' websites.

Stripe, backed by $40 million in funding, allows companies to accept payments on websites and mobile apps with its developer-friendly APIs. It allows purchasing without having to set up an online account and its clients include popular ride-sharing company Lyft and e-commerce platform Shopify.

Twitter has been trying its hand at e-commerce for the past couple of years. It partnered with American Express last year, which allowed cardholders to buy certain products with a tweet and bill it to their AmEx card. Other startups like Dwolla have explored similar functionality with limited success.

Think you're keeping track of your 13-year-old's online habits? A new study suggests they may be outsmarting you every step of the way.

The Ofcom Report on Internet safety measures validated every parent's worst fear about their child's online behavior: Children know more about navigating the Internet than their parents do. That means all those filters and parental controls were probably set up in vain. Indeed, researchers found that 18% of kids know how to disable Internet filters, even if only 6% of them actually admitted to doing so.

Nearly half of adolescents between the ages 12 to 15 know how to delete their browsing history, while 29% can alter settings to disguise their browser activity. As children become more aware that their parents are invested in seeing the sites they visit, they become more adept at hiding their tracks.

Still, it's not as though parents are unaware of their digital inferiority. "Almost half (44%) of parents with children aged between eight and 11 say their child knows more about the internet than they do. That rises to 63% for parents of 12-15-year-olds," the BBC said.

An Australian study unearthed similar findings back in 2012. Their study found that 59% of children admitted to having ways of hiding what they do online, according to News.com.au.

Just as children acquire language at a very early age, it should come as no surprise that as younger generations become computer literate earlier in life, they're able to outsmart their parents, who likely first experienced modern computing in their teenage years, if not later.

On the eve of Beats launching its streaming music service, it's hard to feel anything other than disappointment. Music services keep popping up promising a new era for digital music, but no one has been able to fix the downward trends that hurt the most: that is, people's increasing unwillingness to pay money for music.

The tipping point for me, personally, was seeing digital music sales graphed out and compared to the amount of apps being downloaded (graph above). It's not the same format of media, so to some extent this comparison is apples-to-oranges, but visualizing the scale blew me away. Even if music sales hadn't gone down steeply the last two quarters, the magnitude of apps people are downloading is staggering. The music business isn't about albums anymore--it's about distribution via app.

So why do we still pay attention to record sales as a bellwether?

Maybe it's time we questioned some of the assumptions that underpin the music industry. Music is now fundamentally a digital form of media and needs to be treated as such. There are a lot of things that need to be addressed and rethought, including:

• Is Copyright still a relevant form of protection for the content owner?
• What does it mean to own the right to copy something (i.e., the copyright) when everyone has the power to copy it?
• Who makes money every time a song is played? Should anyone get paid per play anymore?
• Do consumers have to pay for music, or should a third party subsidize it?

What's The Solution?

Imagining the music industry did actually crash and burn: What does a new music industry look like? The answer might lie in businesses from other industries. Whether through advertising, marketing, original content, or simply art-making, the companies have the money to pay for music for commercial purposes. And since music forms such an emotional link with consumers, it's awesome for selling products. Perhaps consumers should pay for songs indirectly when they buy products whose manufacturers use those songs in their marketing.

Paying for music out of corporate marketing spend makes the pie much larger. Samsung spent ~$14 billion on marketing in 2013. For 2012--results for 2013 haven't been published yet--the entire music industry only made ~$16 billion. Even its peak of $38 billion isn't so far off that it couldn't be covered by the marketing budget of corporations. The difference between the late '90's and now--if this were to happen--would be a more even distribution of money across the middle class of musicians, also known as the people who can't make a living with the current system.

The instinctive pushback is one from the gut. Morally, how can artists or fans support big businesses--ones motivated by greed--paying for songs which might be in direct opposition? I agree, and the "sellout" factor adds friction. Many musicians are passionate about their grassroots support.

But to their consternation, this model is already getting traction--remember when Samsung bought a million copies of Jay Z's latest album and bundled it free with a Samsung phone? Smaller artists, however, are stuck still trying to sell to consumers. There isn't a good way or marketplace yet for artists and businesses to find each other.

Beats is on the right track to thinking differently. It's adding a billing option under your cellphone plan, it's relying on human editors to curate music recommendations, and it's even respecting artists more by paying them an even royalty rate. I still don't think these changes add up to a solution. It's too late to change how an entire generation now thinks about paying for music. It's time to find someone else to pay for our playlists.

Until recently, venture capitalists and early-stage investors had to rely on their intuition and hand-rolled spreadsheets to know which companies were worth funding. But with a glut of new companies to screen and track, investors told Fast Company they need new ways to keep track of the movers.

"One of the biggest challenges at the seed stage is that there's an ever-increasing number of new startups founded each year," says Noah Lichtenstein, a partner at seed investor Cowboy Ventures. Ready-to-run database solutions like Amazon Web Services and backend-as-service tools like Parse are the cause. These days, he says, "early-stage investing is kind of like digging for needles in an increasingly growing haystack."

Sites like Mattermark and Dashboard track publicly available data about startups, from social media buzz to regulatory filings about new investments. AngelList works like a LinkedIn for tech companies, letting startups post their own profiles and letting people know when they're hiring or raising money. And Product Hunt provides a daily curated list of new web companies and apps, letting investors see them before they take off. And DataFox works like Bloomberg for small private tech companies.

"The amount of data and the amount of ways you can track things now are such orders of magnitude beyond what they were before," says Josh Elman, a partner at VC firm Greylock Partners. "But some of these things are really new approaches, like AngelList--you never had a directory of companies that are raising angel funding before."

And Product Hunt, which takes suggestions and comments from a limited set of in-the-know members, can help investors find startups before they blow up, he says. Elman cited the now-famous story of Lightspeed Venture Partners' Jeremy Liew, who was able to invest in Snapchat ahead of the curve after hearing about the app from a teenage early adopter.

"In the early days of a product, what's interesting to a few people who get really passionate about it is sort of what cascades into something that gets bigger later," Elman says. "By the time you track the data, it would be too late."

The tool can also draw attention to novel ideas arising from outside familiar Silicon Valley circles, says SV Angel's Abram Dawson in an email.

"A 22-year-old founder in Nebraska is going to have a much harder time connecting with a VC in the Valley since they don't have those relationships or connections," he wrote. "Now that same person can post his/her product on Product Hunt and let vetted community members critique it. It levels the playing field."

Product Hunt draws a mix of investors looking for opportunities, startup founders who want to stay abreast of the competition, and ordinary early adopters looking for apps to use, says its founder Ryan Hoover.

"The investors--particularly early stage investors--use it to source deals and just see what products are out there," he says. And they can turn to tools like Mattermark, Dashboard and the TechCrunch-affiliated startup directory CrunchBase to find more information about companies, he says.

Having a reliable set of company data can help investors distinguish startups working in the same general area, says Dashboard founder Paul Singh, who was formerly a partner at accelerator and seed funding firm 500 Startups.

"At the early stage, I kind of want to get a sense for what web traffic might look like for the competitors; I want to know where the competitors' founders are hanging out," he says. "I look at that via public Facebook checkins, event RSVPs, and things like that."

Many VCs are using Dashboard not only to find new opportunities but also to track and guide startups they've already invested in, he says. Since the tool pulls in social media data, they can see whether founders are actively promoting their companies--whether they're giving talks and speaking at meetups, RSVPing for industry events, and checking in at customer offices--and even whether they're checking in at a restaurant with VCs from another firm.

Public social media posts can also help founders and investors see what kind of innovations customers want, Singh says.

"Let's say you've got an idea about some sort of food startup," he says. "Twitter will be an interesting way to find out what people are complaining about within that entire market."

And seeing which companies are being tweeting about helps distinguish competitors in a crowded startup landscape, says Mattermark founder and CEO Danielle Morrill.

Mattermark collects data on companies' web traffic, app downloads, social media mentions, along with information on fundraising and hiring. When VCs hear of a potential investment opportunity, Mattermark will often already have historic information about how the company's been growing, she says.

Using Mattermark saves investors the trouble of building their own spreadsheets of company stats or coding their own in-house tools, she says. And storing historic data makes it difficult for companies to game their social media and web traffic rankings, says Morrill.

"If you gamed Mattermark, you'd probably actually be a successful company," she says."The most valuable thing that you can do is have your business actually be successful as a business."

As useful as the tools are, they're no substitute for traditional techniques like face-to-face networking with startup founders and the rest of the tech community, emphasized Cowboy Ventures' Lichtenstein.

"These tools I think are great--I use CrunchBase and AngelList and LinkedIn every single day," he says. "These are tabs that I keep open on my browser, because somebody says, 'have you heard of such-and-such?' or 'our biggest competitor is such-and-such.'"

But equally important is talking to founders and investors about new ideas and potential customers about what they need, he says.

"I think human intelligence still is the most important component of early-stage investing," he says. "It's really using your network, talking to people and trying to constantly be listening and trying to understand, what are the problems out there that people are looking for solutions to."

We've all been there: on the move with a laptop, only to realize you need a file on your desktop. Now a team of former Apple employees calling themselves Avatron thinks it has the answer. The product is called Everydisk: a secure, direct connection between whichever computer you're using and the others you have access to. In terms of accessing your files, it's the same as sitting in front of whichever computer you're using the files of.

Avatron is hoping that their prototype--currently about to close its Kickstarter campaign--will trigger a fundamental shift in the cloud storage space. But will it?

Like Skype For File Access

Avatron founder and CEO Dave Howell says that current cloud services break down in a single--but crucial--use case. "Every once in a while we wish that we had access to a particular file that we didn't have the foresight to put into the special Dropbox folder," he says. "Perhaps it's too big a file to put in. Perhaps it's a file that sits on a particular server on a local area network." Everydisk solves this problem by allowing you to access your computer--and any external drives or servers connected to it--from any Internet-connected device. Here's how it works.

Everydisk uses a peer-to-peer direct connection similar to Skype. Through a downloadable piece of software users create a gateway in the cloud--referred to as the "Air Connect." Through this they log in to the service and select the computer they want to connect to. Air Connect then establishes a direct, private, AES-encrypted data channel between the two machines. To tunnel through even the most unforgiving of corporate firewalls, Air Connect uses a technique called UDP hole punching. Once the connection is made, Avatron's server gets out of the exchange.

"As long as your devices can access the Internet and our website, they can get to each other," Howell says.

Why It's So Damn Cheap

While part of the benefit of Everydisk is the idea of flexible workflows--since users don't need to know in advance which files they're going to need access to on any given day--Howell singles out two other reasons why Everydisk is a viable alternative to cloud-based storage systems. The first revolves around cost.

"Because we're not storing your files on the cloud we don't incur bandwidth or storage costs," he says. "That means that we can make Everydisk a cheaper service. If you want to use two terabytes of storage on our system it costs the same as using two kilobytes, since you already own the storage. On Dropbox, two terabytes will cost users around $1,600 a year. With us, it's $25 for that same period."

Can The NSA Get In?

Cost is certainly an important consideration, but there is another--arguably more important--reason why the general public may choose to embrace a system like this over one that asks users to migrate their files to the cloud.

"Privacy concerns have really heightened because of the revelations about government hacking," Howell says. "Corporate espionage has also always been a concern for business users. We're not promising an NSA-proof system, but our solution does limit your exposure. If someone really wants to gain access to your files, the easiest way for them to do so is to break into your home, take your computer, and copy your hard drive. There's nothing we can do about that--but what we can say on the privacy front is that we don't store your files anywhere on our servers, and we don't create a new vector for attack. The files stay on your computer, and the only change is that you're accessing them from a remote location."

To make its service as NSA-resistant as possible, Everydisk keys are sent over secure SSL connections, employing 256-bit AES. As Howell says, it's not a total solution (something that would be practically impossible), but it is one that may alleviate user fears.

The folks behind WhiteHat Security weren't satisfied with the security and privacy found in exiting web browsers, so they decided to make their own--and quickly encountered a huge design challenge. The browser is always in incognito mode, which is "actually a very major design change," says Robert Hansen, WhiteHat's director of product management. "It's not as easy as it sounds, for all kinds of different reasons."

The team chose to build on top of open source project Chromium, the project that serves as the basis for Google Chrome, so its interface should be familiar to Chrome users. But it differs from Chrome by opening by default in protected mode, the equivalent of Chrome's incognito, so cookies, browser history, and other stored information are automatically purged when the browser's closed. That means sites users access will have less information about them on return visits and that others using the same computer won't have access to information unwittingly logged in browsing histories.

"We haven't seen a browser out there that's secure--and usable at the same time as being secure," says Hansen."There's nothing stopping any one of the browser companies from doing what we're doing, except that it doesn't align with their business model," since other browser makers get their money from advertising, he says.

Aviator's Hardcore Approach to Privacy: How It Works

In addition to launching in private mode, Aviator includes an ad-blocking browser plugin called Disconnect, which is also available for ordinary Chrome, designed to filter out ads and tracking cookies. This should also make the browsing experience faster, Hansen says.

Aviator also sends the Do Not Track HTTP header that asks ad networks not to track user behavior from website to website, though it's far from universally followed.

The Aviator team prefers to focus on what it calls "Can Not Track," he said, making it technically impossible to track users from site to site.

"Instead of relying on the good graces of the advertisers, we built it in a way that ensures they cannot misbehave," he said. Referrer headers, which specify where users came from when they access a site by clicking a link, aren't sent across domains when users go from one website to another, making tracking users that much harder.

Aviator uses the search engine DuckDuckGo as its default, since the company has pledged to safeguard its users' privacy. The browser also blocks access to internal IP addresses, such as wireless routers and other computers on corporate LANs, in response to reports of attacks that trick web browsers into snooping around networks without their users' knowledge.

Plugins like Java and Flash are blocked by default. That means users have to click to play videos or interactive content but prevents "drive-by download" attacks that install spyware or viruses on computers through Java or Flash exploits.

Some users might balk at the impact all these safeguards have on usability, Hansen acknowledges.

"Those users tend to choose usability over privacy and security," he says. "But there's a whole bunch of users that once they get used to it even a little bit, they're going to realize what the value is to them."

WhiteHat's business relies on its reputation for safeguarding security and privacy, so it has no incentive to compromise the safety of its browser, he argues.

"If we ever were to go anti-privacy or anti-security that would break up our business model," he says. "We would not be able to function."

A New Business Model For Browsers

WhiteHat intends to develop the browser as a tool to promote the company's security consulting services and ultimately as a customizable product for corporate customers, says Hansen. Initially created to keep WhiteHat's nontechnical employees safe from malware and tracking by advertisers, the Aviator browser is now available for any Mac user to download, and a Windows version is on its way.

"We basically want to have the first and only browser that we're aware of that has an actual support model attached to it," he says.

In the meantime, the Mac version of Aviator quickly drew tens of thousands of downloads based on social media buzz, showing there's definite interest, he says.

"We get 5 to 10 emails a day asking for the Windows version," Hansen says. "We're getting a lot of encouragement."

Last August, the Tor browser network received a massive spike of 4 million signups. As it turned out, a botnet was installing Tor on victims' PCs and using the browsers to start mining Bitcoins. Pressed between a rock and a hard place, Microsoft swiftly sent a remote command to uninstall the Tor browser--a backdoor which ostensibly no one in Windows-land knew existed.

As it turns out, Microsoft had accounted for this scenario--it's right there in Windows' terms of service. As Microsoft explains in a blog post, once the Sefnit malware that infected these computers starts downloading components, it keeps the computer connected to the Tor network even if Sefnit is uninstalled. Since that particular old Tor client doesn't self-update, it would remain an open door for reinfection and given Tor's history of high-severity vulnerabilities, that was a weakness Microsoft couldn't abide.

This graph above tells the story week by week. Millions of computers that had been infected with the Win32/Sefnit malware powered up on August 19, 2013 and began using Tor. As Tor had just under a million users directly connected to the Tor network, a 400% spike in Tor network distributions over a two-week period was a pretty noticeable jump.

As the Daily Dot's Patrick Howell O'Neill points out, using an exploit to install software in the background of Windows was a mistake, as it caught Microsoft's attention. The hackers also unintentionally formed a working relationship between Redmond and Tor developers: Microsoft says in its blog post that it "consulted with Tor developers" when deciding how to proceed. Tor developer Jacob Applebaum said that communication between Tor and the tech giant amounted to a single question: Whether a normal user would install Tor in the directory paths and as a service. Tor said that it was very unlikely--a solid clue to Microsoft that something nonhuman was installing Tor deep in Windows.

At the 30th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg on Dec 27, Applebaum shared details of the incident and his fears of Microsoft's ability to remotely rip pieces out of its OS at will. Tor executive director Andrew Lewman, however, was less concerned: Having Microsoft keep your operating system "secure" is part of the opt-in terms of service.

A traditional form of attack by cyber criminals, polymorphic malware, has the ability to hide itself, changing variations with each new device while keeping its original algorithm. Since the code is continuously changing, it becomes somewhat obscure through multiple attacks, making it harder for the next attackers.

A startup called Shape Security has decided to use this programming pattern to the opposite ends: that is, to fight malware. Called ShapeShifter, it's a real-time polymorphism technique that will rapidly change any website's code, eliminating the fundamental targets that malware aims to compromise. Vice president of strategy Shuman Ghosemajumder explains how the technology works to the Register:

By constantly rewriting the code of the website's user interface, malware, bots, and scripts simply have their capability to attack the website disabled, since their own attack instructions, as coded by their authors, are rendered immediately out-of-date and invalid. Meanwhile, real users, who do not interact directly with the website's underlying user interface code, are unaffected.

It makes sense that Shape Security would focus such a sophisticated method on the larger, enterprise companies who come up against millions of attacks. With a $26 million in backing, the company is poised for efficacy, though not without a steep price. While the company is still finalizing its pricing model--said to be in the seven-figure range--it is hitting a soft spot with investors such as Google Ventures, Tomorrow Ventures, and former Symantec chief executive Enrique Salem.

Another way the company is using polymorphic code is through targeting the age-old SQL injection attacks, which was the method of attack on 17 credit card companies and retailers last year that resulted in more than 150 million compromised credit cards. It's also the likely method of attack that recently brought down Target's database of 70 million cardholders' personal information, according to a report by a cybsecurity firm called iSight Partners.

Back in 2009, the South Korean government publicized plans for a robot theme park slated to open in 2012, but it never took shape. Now the Masan Robot Land Park is resuscitating plans by breaking ground on a billion-dollar robot-centric project, which (oddly, and ambitiously) hopes to be Earth's first robot city.

So what is a robot city, anyway? South Korean officials envisioned this as a hybrid theme park and research park. In the initial stages of construction, they plan to build a robot-themed amusement park, dubbed "Robot Land." The rest of the park, set for completion a year later in 2016, will house a convention center, a robot research and development center, and a robot exhibition hall.

The entire robot endeavor is going to be completed by 2018 (for real, this time) and will be comprised of both public and private investments. Reportedly private and public contributors in the U.S. already gave the project $1.23 billion for construction. The second stage of construction will include hotels, condos, youth hostels, and a giant robot statue across the sprawling 300 acres of land purchased for Masan Park.

The concept images of the project have slightly altered from the 2007 mockup to a more current 2009 photo. They have removed the flashy Ferris wheel, however roller coasters and a monorail are still in the picture. With such high expectations, it will be interesting to see if the South Korean government can follow through with their deadlines this time and deliver.

Korea's Ministry of Commerce, Industry & Energy has been working on the project since 2007 as a motivator to improve and generate interest in Korea's robotic industry. However, environmental reviews thwarted the project's progress until now.

This week, in an attempt to boost lackluster PC sales, Hewlett-Packard began promoting Windows 7 PCs to lure customers who may be leery of Windows 8's bad rap. The company claims that Windows 7 is being brought back to its lineup due to "popular demand," leading customers to believe that the OS was previously unavailable and is now being brought back. That's not the case.

But as Ed Bott writes for ZDNet, the promotion is merely a classic selection from the advertising playbook: making it appear as something is different--that Windows 7 is "back by popular demand"--when in fact nothing has changed at all except HP exec's priorities:

In January 2014, HP offers a total of 5 PCs running Windows 7 and 68 running Windows 8 or 8.1. Last summer, HP offered 8 Windows 7 PCs and 61 Windows 8 models. Back by popular demand? Not exactly.

In fact, any PC manufacturer can still sell Windows 7; there's no need for it to be brought back. According to the Microsoft's OS support lifecycle, manufacturers could continue to sell new hardware with Windows 7 installed up until October 2014--a date that, in December, was retracted and has not been updated.

While we haven't quite reached Windows Vista levels of fervor, still clamor for change is growing. Even after Microsoft's big Windows 8.1 update last October, the OS' adoption rate remains painfully low when compared to how its predecessors performed--in December, 14 months into it's lifecycle, Windows 8 and 8.1 combined only make up for 9.3% of the market share. Windows 7, in comparison, had captured 17.3% of the market share 10 months after it was released--almost double.

But change is on the way. Last week, rumors spread that Windows 9--codenamed "Threshold"--was being accelerated in order to be officially announced at Microsoft's Build conference in April. Although hopes are high for a major course correction, chances are we won't be seeing the next Windows OS for at least a year.

Hat tip: Slashdot

Twenty-five years ago Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the World Wide Web--perhaps man's greatest source of shared knowledge, connecting several billion users worldwide. Now robots are getting their own.

This so called Internet for robots does for automated machines what the Internet does for humans--offering users the ability to both teach one another and learn. RoboEarth, funded by the European Commission, is the work of researchers at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands and five other European institutes, who have been working on the system for over four years. And today, they are unveiling RoboEarth's first live public demonstration of robots working collaboratively together.

Most robots exist to perform tasks more efficiently and cheaper than humans. Or to do things that humans can't. But when it comes to learning most robots are no smarter than the parts they are made from. In fact, most robots are designed to perform a single routine task. And if that task changes or the conditions in which it's being performed change, the robot can become useless.

Heico Sandee, RoboEarth's project manager, discussed this limitation of robots, describing the situation of a company that told him that when they make even a small change in one of their products, they have to reprogram and reinstall all of the robots they use for automation. "This adds up to 80% of what it would cost them to simply buy all new robots," Sandee said.

RoboEarth was created to solve this problem of robot inflexibility. By allowing robots to learn from one another, the robots can engage in a dynamic evolutionary process. They can adapt to their changing environment and learn the more subtle and sophisticated behaviors and actions required to work with humans.

To create a system for robots to communicate with each other, RoboEarth's researchers use a language that organizes information into environments, objects, and actions. This data is accessible to robots on a wireless network, Sandee explains, asking us to imagine a robot trying to find a door to move from one room to the next. In the RoboEarth system, the environment of the room is represented like a Google map. The robot picks up cues about objects (represented as 3-D models and images) from the objects' shapes and their locations in the environment. When the robot detects that an object is a door it can access the network and search for existing data on doors.

What kind of door is it? What type of handle does it have? Where is that handle positioned?

Then the robot searches for possible actions. Sandee describes an action as "a set of tasks to be executed in a certain order with if/then alternatives." The data will indicate how the robot should manipulate the handle and how much pressure to apply. The robot takes this existing data and tries to pull the door open. But if pulling doesn't work, the robot recognizes that pulling is not an option. Instead it will push.

At each step of the way the robot reports back to the network with information on its environment, the objects it encounters, and the actions it takes. The robot is in a continuous feedback loop, drawing on and adding to the knowledge base of RoboEarth in real time.

The commercial applications are potentially huge: If robots can learn on the fly from RoboEarth's network, manufacturers can build robots with a lot less task-specific software. Computing and "thinking" tasks can be carried out by the RoboEarth's cloud engine, so the robot doesn't need as much computing or battery power on board. This will make robots cheaper and more adaptable.

Currently, there are only 50-100 robots connected to RoboEarth, but the researchers expect in the next few years there will be many more logistics robots connected such as the Kiva System robots that work in Amazon's warehouses. (Amazon is on RoboEarth's advisory board.)

At first, according to Sandee, because of security reasons most of these robots will function in closed systems. In other words, Amazon robots won't be kibbitzing any time soon with rival bots at, say, Staples. For service robots used in automation, it will take much longer to be connected, Sandee estimates, more like 10 to 15 years.

Of course, the very idea of robots spending as much time info-gathering online as teens (or terrorists) can tap into our dystopian sci-fi fantasies. Are we going to be contending with computer systems like 2001's HAL or Terminator's SkyNet? Advocates say that artificial learning is still in its infancy. We are probably a long way off from robots getting together to decide that when their self-interest collides with ours, they'll be looking out for Number One.

But we are entering a new era of consciousness. Humans have always shared knowledge to improve our lives (and to wage war and learn to do the Harlem Shake). But researchers like those at RoboEarth are now actually enabling our creations to do the same--learn from each other. And so become a little more like ourselves.

Nearly 100 people laughed and cheered as they watched an anthropomorphized coconut run across the projector screen, evading meats and cheeses on the attack. The game is called Organic Panic, and it's drawing a crowd at a meeting of independent video game developers called the New York City Video Games Forum.

Damon and Anatole Branch, the brothers who made the game, explained to the audience that they've been developing Organic Panic for five years.

"What's your target platform destination for the game now?" a bystander asked.

"Right, well..." Anatole Branch said.

"That's a good question," said another guy.

"I sat in a tiny office for five years and made this," the developer confessed. "What I really should have done is just got a PC and transformed it a long time ago, and I didn't."

Today, the Branch brothers have limited options. When they started building their game five years ago, it made sense to develop it for the Xbox. Today, many indie developers have ditched consoles like the Xbox in favor of mobile devices like the iPhone.

If they publish Organic Panic on Xbox Live Arcade--a service that allows Xbox players to purchase and download games through the console--it will be available to 40 million subscribers. They could also release the game for the PC and Mac through a popular digital download service called Steam, which has nearly 60 million active users. However, there is no guarantee that either service will agree to distribute the game. And if one does, the process can take months--it requires thorough vetting of the project's source code and aesthetics.

Apple's App Store, on the other hand, only requires that a game be submitted to Apple for approval. Nearly all submitted games are approved and the process rarely takes more than a few weeks. Once on the App Store, games are available to 200 million people--twice as many as Xbox Live Arcade and Steam combined.

The Start Of The Avalanche

The success of Angry Birds, which sold 30 million copies in its 2010 release, caused a surge of interest in indie game development. Brad Hargreaves, cofounder of General Assembly and organizer of the NYC Game Forum events, said the group has grown steadily over the past five years. (The number of RSVPs on the group's meetup.com page shows average monthly attendance nearly doubling since 2009.)

These days, nearly all of the games demonstrated at the forum events are made for mobile devices. In the mobile realm, an individual or group with the requisite skills in programming, art, and music needs only to buy software that costs $20 to $100 to start working on a game. Along with the large market and low startup costs, though, comes an overwhelming amount of competition. A game put out in February, for example, would be just one of nearly 4,000 games released in the App Store that month.

One of those games was called Worm Run. Soon after the Branches finished their demonstration, Hargreaves introduced a developer named Michael Christatos. Along with a partner, Christatos had released Worm Run to the App Store in February. He was there to offer a sort of retrospective about releasing the game.

Then, on the screen, a giant worm with orange fur and sharp teeth began chasing a spaceman through a rocky cavern. The spaceman, Zeke Tallahassee, glided over ice and jumped over lava lakes. Flames shot out from the bottom of his rocket boots as he jumped up the side of a high cliff.

Christatos explained the objective of Worm Run to the audience while his friend played it on the large screen. "Whoa!" The audience erupted. The worm had caught up with Tallahassee and swallowed him. The word CONSUMED appeared in large letters on the screen. People laughed and applauded.

The App Store's Vanishing Millions

Sitting in their office a few days after they'd released Worm Run, Christatos and his partner, Andy Wallace, were already discussing their next game: Hermit Crab in Space. The two of them had founded Golden Ruby Games a year earlier.

The company is run out of a room in Christatos' father's office in the Empire State Building. The room is only about the size of two supply closets combined, but it has a big window that overlooks downtown Manhattan. Christatos and Wallace can make games in about six months. The first game they released in the past year was called Destroy All Color--Worm Run was the second.

With Worm Run, Christatos and Wallace had done everything right: produced a compelling game, hired a PR firm, got a good review on a popular gaming website called Kotaku, and landed on the App Store's New and Noteworthy section. Even with all of that, though, only 1,000 copies of the game were sold at 99 cents apiece on the first day.

But by then, they'd already begun work on Hermit Crab in Space. They'd recently participated in GameJam, a 24-hour hackathon where developers sit at computers and develop a game from scratch. The challenge at this particular event was to make a game for the PlayStation Vita, Sony's mobile gaming device. Christatos and Wallace won the GameJam by coming up with Hermit Crab in Space on the spot, and now they had to finish it before the finals. They'd be presenting the finished product at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where one finalist would be chosen for a publishing deal with Sony. In their office, Christatos and Wallace said they only had about three weeks to finish Hermit Crab.

"Andy is the reason we can work so fast," Christatos said. Wallace does most of the coding, and Christatos focuses more on game design and running the business.

"I tend to brainstorm in code," Wallace said.

Winning the Sony competition at the Game Developers Conference would mean they'd get a free pass to E3, the biggest video game conference of the year, complete with hotel, airfare, and a booth to show off their game. The winner would also have the option of publishing the game with Sony, in which case the company would provide free marketing and PR.

Despite their looming deadline and the recent release of Worm Run, Christatos and Wallace, sitting at a table in their office, kept moving the conversation back to the general experience of gaming. For instance, they talked at length about controls and how the action of playing a game is changing along with the platform.

"Buttons are supposed to be tactile things," said Christatos, "and that's what's great about them. When you play Xbox or you play PlayStation, you know where those buttons are. You've memorized where the triangle is; you've memorized where the X button is."

His point was that touchscreen games like Worm Run--made for iPhones and iPads--don't have the benefit of external controllers. Although Christatos and Wallace grew up playing on consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation, they've fully immersed themselves in the mobile frontier. They think critically, and perhaps even philosophically, about the future of gaming and how to translate the games of their youth to a new medium. Where some game developers attempt to mimic traditional controls on the touchscreen with graphical buttons, Christatos and Wallace try to make their games more intuitive. In Worm Run, for example, to make Zeke Tallahassee run, you swipe your finger over him, pushing him in the direction you want him to go.

"When you're taking up screen real estate with your thumbs," Christatos said, "you're covering a good 20% of the screen with your body. It's just kind of like, well, why did you even put buttons there?"

Wallace nodded along as Christatos spoke. It was what you might expect a pair of indie filmmakers talking about movies to sound like. The next day, they'd be releasing an update to Worm Run to fix a few small bugs, then continue work on their Sony game.

Where Will Indie Gaming Go From Here?

The NYC Games Forum meetup where Christatos gave his retrospective talk was four weeks later. By then, Andy Wallace was at the Game Developers Conference and had already presented Hermit Crab in Space. After talking about Worm Run at the forum, Christatos announced that they had won the competition. Golden Ruby would be going to E3, and they'd likely publish their new game with Sony.

As people mingled at the end of the event, one game developer was offering some constructive criticism to Anatole Branch about Organic Panic.

"I think it's like Angry Birds but more granular," he said. He also said he didn't think the carrot should be able to do a dirt attack unless it's on the ground.

Branch nodded apologetically.

After all of the presentations, the event organizer asked everyone to text a code to him to vote on their favorite game of the night. Organic Panic won by a landslide.

Organic Panic was built in a small bedroom in Damon Branch's apartment in Brooklyn, two blocks from the Barclays Center. The brothers call their company Last Limb Games. Anatole mainly handles the art and graphics of the project. As we talked at his desk, he flipped through some images. There were bits and pieces of Organic Pan there, pencil sketches, rendered pictures of 3-D models. The Branches outsource some of the work, like concept art and the cartoonish landscapes they use as background graphics.

"We have concept artists, but unfortunately we can't afford to keep people," Anatole said. "Hopefully when we get the Kickstarter."

The Branch brothers are planning to launch a Kickstarter campaign to gather enough funds to finish the game. But they admit that they don't have much of an aptitude for marketing and social media. (At the NYC Gaming meetup, Anatole had said "We have no experience with social media. We have no experience with kind of getting it known. At this stage 100 people, 130 people, have looked at the website.")

The Branches have been building their own video games since they were pre-teens, growing up in southwest London. They can model 3-D graphics, write code to simulate real-world physics, and synchronize the audio they record to coincide with character movements. Damon said there are currently about a million lines of code behind Organic Panic.

Still, the realm of new media remains somewhat obscure to the Branches. After Damon fired up the game for some testing, Anatole said they should shoot some video for their Kickstarter page. He found an iPhone, held it upright, and started filming. Then he asked if he should turn it sideways for the widescreen effect.

On the screen, hotdogs wearing jetpacks flew around chaotically. Oliver sat on Damon's lap and cheered when a character like the coconut made it through a level. Eventually, the brothers began talking about mobile gaming and Angry Birds. They pointed out that games like it had existed before but hadn't made it. Perhaps it was the aesthetics or the atmosphere of Angry Birds that made it succeed where others had failed, they said. They considered whether the same could happen with Organic Panic--what if they were the ones to get it wrong?

"Someone might come along in two years and do one that just goes mental, and we'll just be smashing our heads against the wall," Damon said.

"No!" Anatole yelled. "Let's get rid of the British attitude and get more of an American attitude. We are going to make this happen, Damon! We are going to make it happen, we're going to do everything we can to make it happen."

"Well it has to be in the back of your mind, to do everything to make it happen," Damon said.

"Of course, we have to be realistic. And we know marketing is 80% of it," Anatole said.

"No, it's not 80% of it when I've done five years of programming while looking after a kid, and then you're going to do a few weeks of marketing and say it's 80% of it," Damon said, laughing hard.

"It's 80% of the importance of selling a game," Anatole said.

"Yeah, well, some think like that. It certainly isn't going to resonate without some marketing," Damon said.

"You can have a crap game, and much better marketing, and do a lot better than a really good game with poor marketing," Anatole said.

"Well that's a crazy generalization, I'm not going to comment on that," Damon said.

The brothers continued talking for a while, going from laughing to yelling and back to laughing again. The Branches talked about how long it would take to repurpose the game for Steam, and how long for the iPhone. They debated how much money they should try to raise on Kickstarter. They wondered whether they would still be considered indie if they found a publisher for Organic Panic. As they talked and talked, their game's theme music played in the background.

For media companies, the pace of technological change can be unforgiving. The New York Times, well-staffed as it may be, is no exception. To meet rapidly changing business goals and reader expectations, the tech team there recently pulled off a redesign that required overhauling the backend of one of the biggest news sites on the planet.

As you might imagine, things got complicated.

By the time the project--code-named "NYT 5" internally--kicked off two years ago, the problems were clear. As web standards, mobile device adoption, and reader expectations all barreled forward, the NYTimes.com architecture had been gathering dust, resulting in hacked templates, messy code, and pages that didn't always play nice with the latest devices.

Even worse, the old system wasn't allowing the Times's developers and interactive journalists to iterate quickly, making it harder to deliver badly needed updates to impatient readers. These gripes, combined with business needs like increasing ad inventory, informed the first set of redesign mockups that starting make the rounds internally six months later.

"As a company we had all agreed that the fixed width layout that we were using from 2006 was no longer cutting it with plethora of different devices that are available today," says Mike Finkel, Executive Director of Web Products Technology at the New York Times.

"We were doing a lot of hacking to make our content work on our iPad app, iPhone app, and Android app. We all agreed that this was the time to do something new."

As editorial, design, and business goals all came into sharper focus, the true breadth of the project revealed itself. By the time NYT 5 launched earlier this month, it wouldn't just include the freshly polished exterior--everything under the hood would be new, too.

Modern Publishing (Without Hacking The CMS)

If you're one of the many people whose jaws hit the floor upon seeing the publication's Snow Fall story last year, consider yourself somewhat lucky. At the Times, this type of multimedia-rich layout has historically been born in spite of their publishing system, not thanks to it.

Indeed, like many of the immersive web stories that followed, Snow Fall was built alongside the Times's content management system, independent of their standard online editorial workflow.

It's not just the interactive blockbusters that demand these kinds of arduous technical backflips. Smaller multimedia projects have historically employed a variety of template hacks and workarounds too. By overhauling the site's infrastructure, the tech team took the first and biggest step toward changing all that.

"Every time the newsroom wanted to do something that fell outside of the realm of our standard layouts and publishing mechanisms, it was just a huge hack-fest to do it," says Finkel. "A lot of times they would have to publish their interactive pieces into a standard article template, but the published item was just a ton of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS coded to completely rewrite the DOM. They've been doing that for a several years now. The technical debt that amounts when you're continually hacking away at something is something that's really hard to overcome without starting from scratch."

At the same time, even regular news articles were published in proprietary format, static HTML documents which lived in the Times's data centers. This less-than-dynamic system made it hard to maintain a consistent look and feel across templates over time.

As development manager Reed Emmons explained in a recent post on the New York Times Open blog:

"Since the article's HTML was fixed but the scripts and stylesheets inside it were dynamic, our front end team needed to maintain every template version that had ever been created. This is why an article published two years ago is a bit different than an article published a few weeks ago. Soft launching backward compatible CSS and waiting for it to uncache in every browser before launching a JavaScript change became common practice."

By comparison, the new infrastructure is much more dynamic. The team completely rebuilt the PHP rendering engine that pulls every page together as users navigate the site. The new framework is cleaner, more efficient, and--crucially--architected in such a way that building on top of it in the future won't create the sort of technical debt that has caused so many headaches over the years. It will also make building new features and apps easier, allowing developers to glue existing components together rather than starting from scratch.

Rather than a brand new CMS built from the ground up, the editorial side was given a host of new features and capabilities, including a new publishing template and better control over multimedia assets. Part of that newfound freedom, Emmons explains, is automation that frees them from thinking too much about how the content is formatted. Among these time-savers is "an algorithm that paints images down the page in a way that makes sense contextually."

For the editorial side, this is just phase one. Over time, publishing interactive mega-features like Snow Fall on-the-fly will become much easier.

Building A More Responsive Layout

Never in human history has a technology been as quickly adopted as the smartphone. Indeed, by the time the NYT 5 project kicked off, "responsive design" was already maturing from buzzword to best practice. The Boston Globe launched its own cross-device-friendly design in 2011, with many other major publishers leaping onto the bandwagon.

For the Times, the first step toward catching up was an overhaul of the front-end architecture. To keep things structured, efficient, and easy to update, Emmons and his team cobbled together some of the most beloved JavaScript frameworks, including Backbone.js and RequireJS for structure, as well as web development standbys like jQuery, Modernizr, Underscore.js, Hammer.js, and SockJS.

"We leveraged tools that have been very successful already and sort of glued them together," says Emmons. "There was a fair bit of tailoring to meet the needs for our organization, but all of the core principals of it are existing libraries that already exist and are well supported throughout the industry."

On top of this skeleton of scripts, Emmons and his team built the next biggest piece of the NYT 5 puzzle: A homegrown, responsive JavaScript framework that would allow the Times to more effectively serve content to readers on whatever newfangled device they happen to be staring into on the subway.

"There's probably a good hundred different ways that our articles can be rendered," says Emmons. "To serve all these interesting scenarios we needed a more custom solution. That's why we rolled our own responsive framework to get all these different breakpoints starting at 768 with the iPad portrait mode all the way up to 2030."

The mission of the Times's new responsive engine goes beyond the obvious need to deliver web-based news to iPads and Samsung Galaxy devices. It also allows the site to make intelligent decisions about rendering content based on the type of media elements displayed, the orientation of the device, and even the monetary value of the advertisements on the page.

Speeding Things Up For Readers And Developers Alike

Like any modern web design project, the NYT 5 initiative placed a heavy emphasis on speeding up the site. Things like consolidating the site's CSS stylesheets with Less and reducing the number of JavaScript calls can go a long way toward improving page load times. And, of course, rebuilding the entire PHP rendering engine from the ground up doesn't hurt either.

Of all the tools utilized throughout the project, few were quite as handy to Emmons and Finkel as Varnish, a front-end caching layer that helps with speed and scalability.

"Varnish is a reverse proxy cache with a lot of customizability as far as like the types of things it caches, how quickly, how long it caches these things for, and whether we incrementally purge those cache entries," explains Finkel. "It's one of the biggest reasons we were able to make a lot of the more creative decisions on the backend. We knew we had this fantastic front-end cache layer to rely on."

Between all this front-end streamlining and the rebuilding of how the server-side architecture works its magic, the New York Times site should, in theory, be noticeably faster to readers. Just as important, though, is the efficiency with which developers can now code new features atop a freshly rebuilt, modern platform.

A More Future-Proof News Site

Like the server-side overhaul, the reinvention of the site's front-end had as much to do with making developers happy as it did with wooing readers. Using industry standard JavaScript frameworks and streamlining the way new features are coded, for instance, makes future maintenance much, much easier.

"We standardized everything so there's one way to code and it all fits into our framework," explains Emmons. "You could be a junior developer and understand the structure. It's about solving the product and business issues at hand rather than trying to figure out what data structure to use. We want to allow them to be creative with their solution without necessarily having to think about how to do it."

This is a huge deal. The reason other publications were so easily able to beat the Times to the punch with things like responsive design is because its rusting architecture made it harder to push new iterations out in response to evolving reader habits. The expectations of those readers will continue to change at an unrelenting pace. The difference is that now, the code and developers behind NYTimes.com will be in a far better position to adapt.