We all know the power of Twitter to spread one person's voice across the Internet. Celebrities tweet out pictures of their daily lives, world-renowned scientists share the latest scientific breakthroughs, and even the President keeps us up to date on the politics in Washington--all to hundreds of thousands of adoring followers, with the single click of a button.

But what if you're not a celebrity, a world-renowned scientist, nor the President of the United States? What if you're just an average person who wants to get your voice out there? In this guide, I'm going to go over 5 tips that are guaranteed to increase your influence on Twitter without costing you a dime.

Some readers may be wondering: "Who are you to be writing a guide like this?" Well, I'm an average tech nerd who runs two of the top 5% most influential Twitter accounts in the world. I'm no celebrity by any means, but I've built these accounts up from scratch over a few months by following these tips to the letter.

What Does It Mean To Be "Influential" On Twitter?

In practical terms, it means that people actually pay attention to your tweets: They respond to your tweets, they favorite them, and if you're lucky, they like them enough to retweet them to their followers. This means that we can identify highly influential people on Twitter by finding Twitter accounts that consistently have others interacting with their tweets. It just so happens that there's a web site out there dedicated to finding those influential people on Twitter, called Klout.

Klout assigns a single number to each person gauging how influential they are on social networks. According to the Klout statistics, the average Twitter user--who's lucky to get a few retweets on every other tweet--has a Klout score of about 40. Meanwhile, the top 5% influencers on Twitter--whose tweets are regularly retweeted dozens of times--have a Klout score of 63 or higher. Easy enough.

Of course, Klout has its naysayers. They claim that nobody cares about Klout (but you should!). They eagerly point out that Twitter bots can achieve an average Klout score. They even claim that it's ridiculous that random people on Twitter are considered more influential than real-world influencers like Warren Buffet.

But it's time to face the facts: Real-world influence doesn't necessarily translate into influence in the Twitter world. Just how gut instinct gave way to data science in baseball in the 20th century, it's time for data science to take the throne for measuring influence on Twitter in the 21st century. If an average person--or even a Twitter bot--can have real users consistently interacting with their tweets, why shouldn't they be considered influential?

As a side note here: Don't waste your money buying a high Klout score. If you follow these tips, you can easily join the ranks of the top Twitter influencers for free.

Pick A Topic For Your Twitter Account

You won't get anywhere on Twitter if you can't pick the audience that you want to influence. Pick a topic that you care about--or that your company cares about, if you're a marketer--and stick to that topic. Websites like hashtags.org and Hashtagify.me will help you find out if there's popular hashtags already established for that topic. If there aren't hashtags for your chosen topic, consider choosing a different topic: It's an uphill battle if you have to create a hashtag from the ground up.

To be clear: Talking about yourself or how delicious that donut was this morning isn't the right topic. People only care about those kinds of tweets from celebrities, and let's face it, you wouldn't be reading this guide so closely if you were a celebrity.

To Lead, You Must First Learn to Follow

Followers are the currency of Twitter. The more people that follow you, the more likely someone's going to pay attention to and interact with your tweets. Essentially, you're playing a numbers game. If only 10% of the people who follow you are going to read your tweets, you can still get 100 people to read your tweets if you have 1,000 followers.

But numbers aren't everything. You can easily buy thousands of fake Twitter followers, but that won't translate into influence. You need real followers that are actually interested in your tweets, otherwise you might as well be talking to a wall. The best way to find likeminded followers is to search for tweets that use your topic's hashtags and follow the people who come up. If they don't follow you back within a few days, no worries--just unfollow them. You can only follow so many people on Twitter, and you can't fill up valuable follow slots on users that won't follow you back.

It'd be extremely laborious to do all that following and unfollowing by hand. Fortunately, there's dozens of automatic follow services for Twitter out there, and even fully loaded professional services that can follow and unfollow people in the thousands. But why pay for mass following and unfollowing when you can do it yourself for free? If you're familiar with basic scripting, there's a free Python script for DIY mass following and unfollowing.

Over a few months, you can build up thousands of real followers that are actually interested in what you have to say. Acquiring real followers is the first big step toward becoming a top Twitter influencer.

Use Collaborative Social News Sites To Find Interesting Content To Tweet

It's a good idea to post two or three good tweets a day so your followers come to know you as someone worth paying attention to and interacting with on a daily basis. Even the best content creators will struggle finding two or three good links to talk about every day, so how can you keep up?

Put social news websites like Reddit and Digg to work for you. Most social news websites sort their content by category, so find the category for your topic and tweet the top links and images for that category each day. The advantage of social news sites is that thousands of people have already voted over whether they like the link or not, so you can be pretty sure that the top links will sit well with your followers.

Use Favorites To Let Potential Followers Know You're On Twitter

The hardest part about connecting with people on Twitter is letting them know that you actually exist. With over 600,000,000 registered users on Twitter, it's easy to get lost in the crowd. If you regularly blog or closely follow some specific hashtags, go through and favorite all of the tweets that mention your blog or your favorite hashtags. Your favorite may be all the other person needs to follow you back, and now you have yet another valuable connection on Twitter.

Again, manually favoriting hundreds of tweets a day isn't feasible for most people, so it's necessary to automate the process. But there's good news yet again: That same free Python script also has the option to automatically favorite all tweets that come up in a search.

Give these tips a try for a couple months and watch your Twitter influence soar. Have any more tips? Leave them in the comments.

Yale University has a new hero. He's not a president, supreme court justice, or even an athlete. And to most, he may not even seem especially heroic, but Sean Haufler, senior computer science major, stood up to the giant that is the Yale administration, aimed his slingshot at the monster's eye, and the monster blinked (excuse the mixed mythological metaphor).

If you haven't been following, two Yale students, twin brothers Peter Xu and Harry Yu, put up a website called YaleBlueBook+ (or YBB+) that allowed undergraduates to choose and schedule their courses using any device on the network. It had a friendlier interface than the officially sanctioned application, and it also gave students more complete access to course evaluations.

Undergraduates started using the new, superior app, and the administration responded by demanding changes. The brothers complied, but the administration, unsatisfied, blocked the site from the Yale network and threatened disciplinary action. This was all spelled out quite openly in a letter from the Dean of Yale College, Mary Miller, to the community.

Another programmer on campus named Sean Haufler saw what was happening and decided he could build a similar tool into a Chrome extension, which the university wouldn't be able to block.

"When I heard that (YBB+) was blocked, I was in disbelief," says the mildly spoken Haufler. "Then I saw Dean Miller's letter; it was vague and some students felt that it was condescending." Haufler did what any self-respecting technology geek would do, he got together with a friend to vent.

"The pattern of actions made the reasoning sound inconsistent with their actual intent. First they said it infringed Yale's trademark. Then they said the data was used improperly. The only somewhat justified claim was a possible copyright issue. We thought, what if software existed that didn't violate copyright? That's when the idea for a Chrome extension occurred to me."

Adding functionality to a browser legally displaying Yale's pages couldn't violate trademark, wasn't using the data, and wouldn't infringe copyright. It didn't matter that Haufler had never written a browser extension before. That seemed like the easy part, and in about 12 hours, he had a working extension with all the functionality of the blocked site.

The hard part was writing the blog entry Haufler used to launch his extension. "The code was more of a thought experiment, but the essay had to be bulletproof." He spent twice as long on the essay, sought feedback from numerous friends, and even worked on the text with one of his professors, Brad Rosen. Rosen has BA and MA computer science degrees from Yale, and a Harvard law degree. He's a lecturer at Yale College and he teaches "Law, Technology, and Culture."

The blog post went up last Sunday at 8:00 a.m. Haufler worried that he could be dragged in front of the disciplinary committee, and that they might suspend him for "defiance." But his post went viral, hit the top of Reddit, and had over 500,000 page views within 24 hours. He knew that this was turning into a PR disaster for Yale, and he felt safe.

By Monday evening at 7:00 he was safe. A second open letter from Dean Miller went out to the community saying administration would take no further action. Haufler's Chrome extension continues to work.

Musical success in the iTunes era hinges as much on image and crafted messaging as it does on songs. Being an artist is in many ways like being a startup entrepreneur. Both are constantly looking to tap into an audience, build that following, and create a product that can both stand the test of time, stand up to the competition, and be adored by fans.

Fourteen years ago Curtis Jackson could barely pay his bills. Dropped from Columbia Records and recovering from a failed hit that put nine bullets in him, the future of the man who would become known as 50 Cent was very much in question. By his own account he was blacklisted from the rap game, repeatedly cut from record labels, music shelved before it was ever released.

But as luck would have it another former never-do-well rapper--Eminem--heard one of 50 Cent's controversial records and believed in him enough to fly the New Yorker to Los Angeles for a high-powered meeting that would change his life forever. Books. Movies. Video games. Brand endorsements. Clothes. Headphones. There's even a charitable energy drink that donates a portion of each purchase to ending world hunger. The man's come a long way from selling drugs on street corners in Queens.

In January he left New York's polar vortex for Las Vegas and the CES tradeshow to promote multiple projects, one of which is a Google Glass app called Hang w/, in which he's an investor. Hang w/ is a streaming service that 50 Cent will use later this year to create the first live-streamed music video, which is sent direct to Hang w/'s 1 million users and his millions of social fans. In between media appearances Fast Company got the chance to speak with the rapper turned entrepreneur about digital innovation, branding, writing, and the sometimes cutthroat world of technology.

Tell me about why you believe in Hang w/.

To be able to live-screen and have people watch in real time is exciting to me. You have more than the limited amount of time on Instagram or on Vine, those short videos. It's a way to directly reach the audience. The audience that I have on Facebook, I got like, what, 38 million people on Facebook, 8 million people on Twitter.

It's all about the ability to communicate directly to an audience. You have to work social networking. The Hang w/ app gives me the ability to show you what my life is like. Let's say you've never actually been to an (NBA) game live--I can actually show you in real time what's going on at the same time.

What's a key for you as an entrepreneur in terms of investing?

Off the top I do due diligence. I send attorneys to get an NDA, I get non-exploitive agreements that determine what companies I'm in. If they're a normal person, or I get a feeling I wouldn't do it, I won't do it. If you don't know them for many years, why would you do it? [I want to work with] people who have successful track records that have consistently had some success. It's interesting, I see people where it actually bothers them to see people become influential when they've been working at it so long.

I got some assistance, in the beginning of my career when I wasn't selling. There were companies that said they wasn't going to be doing nothing with no rapper. I wouldn't care where they came from. Mark Wahlberg came from music. Will Smith came from music. Some of the biggest talent--the biggest talent in Hollywood.

Doing the crossover thing with Hollywood, how much of your brand is Curtis Jackson, how much is 50 Cent?

The separation from 50 cent and Curtis is when I'm irritated. When it's hard circumstances I'm 50 Cent. What I'm doing is writing the roughest times in my actual life, in music. I'm creating that content that mirrors the dysfunctional behaviors in the environment that I grew up in. If someone doesn't have room for growth, or is not open-minded to things changing, I think their limited thinking is going to leave them behind.

Do you feel like one of the most powerful black entertainers in the world right now?

Do I feel like I'm one of them? Yeah, I do think so. What happens to me often, for example, people watch what words you choose. Because when they think there's a tone of arrogance they see me as the aggressor. If you're a new artist you utilize someone to add some energy into the conversation at the same time. New artists like Kendrick Lamar. He possesses the ability to allow people to feel like he didn't even know that this was going to happen. Like he didn't know. He was working hard as hell to make it happen. But when I watch him, I look at it and go "did he know?" Because he really convinces you that he didn't know it was going to happen.

Do you think he knew before he got with Dre, and was in Compton, on a smaller level?

I think he had to know it was going to happen for him one day to actually continue to do it at that pace.

When you were shelved by your record level, after you were shot and "How to Rob" came out, did you still feel like it was going to happen or did you have a dark time?

I had points in my career. I really felt like I was ready in '97 and I wasn't. Honest, I wasn't. And the bumps and bruises I received in process is what made me good enough when I did get there. I look at the circumstances like when you want it today, and it doesn't come, it doesn't mean it's not coming in the future. You got to believe it's going to happen in order to do the work for it to happen.

For Kendrick, he became a media darling because he didn't have arrogance in his character. When you can see some people didn't have anyone believe in them, if they weren't confident, if they weren't over confident, they wouldn't exist. They have to develop a defense mechanism for people not believing.

Let's translate that to technology where a lot of these lessons can be applied. Maybe the outward persona of engineers and technical people aren't as confident, maybe their chest isn't as puffed out. What was your take on CES?

The people who should be here, aren't. The youthful energy is not around.

Meaning?

They're watching the music instead of listening to it. If you listen to music, where do you hear it?

I go online these days.

You're going to go to YouTube. And even if it's just a static picture it's going to show you the title and the song, you'd actually be looking at it on a video player. Now people can sell a phone based on a camera. You have a camera that you might not even use. Give me that phone because the camera is better. People are concerned about taking pictures for Instagram. All the technology changes. Used to be a point where an artist would be on the entry level, or perform for a few hundred or thousand dollars. That's over. They've given in to the drill that they have 150,000 followers on Instagram. So a lot of the new talent that you would have seen performing at different places, they aren't going to show. [The audience] would rather see an attractive woman host a party then no other attractive women, than see a new artist.

What advice do you have for writers? How do you get creative and tap in?

For most writers they want to have the freedom to write different directions. But know that what you're going to hear is people put you in a box. You don't necessarily have to fight your way out the box. You can start to create a space for yourself, especially if the box is big enough. People are diverse. They can accept one thing from one artist and not the same from another. We can pick a path with the exact same material and they can look at it and go this is amazing [from one artist]. If it's an artist they feel like embodies other things or other qualities about them, and they interpret them differently, they want something different from that artist.

So how do you stay true to what you are and not get pigeonholed?

When you actually write things and your presentation is diversified from the very beginning you don't have to stay in one little space. If you come one way they're going to say "he can do all of it," if your record came out that way. If you lean toward what's hot, you can't get mad. If you write novels or screenplays, don't stay on one genre. Write different things out the gate. It depends on if you're passionate about it. If you're a talented writer, you know you can do it.

If you would do a techie version of your song "How to Rob," how would it go? Can you give me a couple bars?

[Laughs] Na, na. What would I be robbing? Samsung [laughs] and tech companies? Their element is different. Totally different from where I come from. But they could be as ruthless, trust me.

At its most accessible, a connected home can be created with consumer-friendly devices that require little or no installation--an approach largely popularized by the likes of Nest.

Take Canary: A home security product without a single wire that raised a staggering $1,961,862 on Indiegogo in July 2013 and is currently in pre-order.

One unified device is equipped with motion detection, temperature and humidity sensors, microphone and speaker--providing reassuring eyes and ears inside a home while you're away. Its key, however, is the sophisticated software it runs, according to Canary cofounder Adam Sager. Canary learns your habits, so it knows how to make the most of that sensor data--the idea is that it becomes smart enough to realize whether something happening in your home is normal or suspect.

"Instead of just being a binary sensor, we decided to add a lot of intelligence to our device. We looked at building artificial intelligence and machine learning into the device, so when we came out it was a different approach to security," Sager says.

Sager believes Canary fills a gap in the market for a consumer-level security device. A solution so simple, he says it doesn't even classify as DIY. In other words, it's not a solution geared for the Lowe's weekend warrior--instead, you might one day find it at a big box electronics store.

"[Canary] is designed for normal people to install and use, whether you're a renter or an owner or just someone who doesn't want to install a fully integrated system," he says. "That's the middle ground between the fully integrated model and the DIY model--the consumer model, and this wasn't being addressed at all."

DIY Home ntegration For Geeks And Non-Geeks Alike

The DIY model moves from single, simple devices to more complex, integrated systems. They typically include some kind of "brain"--either a dedicated device or computer running software--that gathers information from various sensors and then calls all the shots by sending commands to a slew of control devices installed throughout the home. Control devices are anything from a simple module plugged in between a lamp and the wall to smart light switches, HVAC, security systems, and whole-home media interfaces.

This DIY space has long been owned by the geekier among us, requiring comfort with hardware, programming, and electrical wiring. But that's starting to change.

Simpler, less costly smart devices that can wirelessly communicate to the "brain" have matured into reliable whole-home choices, making the decision to automate increasingly tempting for early adopters. Many of these wireless devices use an open-standard wireless technology called Z-Wave to communicate with other devices on the network. With technologies like Z-Wave, or other popular contenders like Insteon, DIYers don't need to mess with a hard-wired system or specialized programming to achieve the results they want.

Another emerging trend is simpler solutions to that all-important brain of the system. User-friendly, "no programming required" smart hubs, typically controllable from a mobile device, now offer an alternative to more technical choices.

One such solution, Revolv, plays nicely with technologies like Z-Wave and Insteon, along with brand names like Sonos, Philip Hue, and Yale Locks--aiming to elegantly tie them into one seamless system that is dead-simple to set up.

Revolv is a TechStars company that launched in November 2013. Ryan McIntyre, cofounder of Foundry Group, a venture capital firm based in Boulder, CO, is an investor in Revolv and believes solutions like Revolv and the third-party smart devices it integrates with afford much of the same convenience and functionality offered by pricy pro solutions.

"What Revolv and other crowdfunded device startups are doing will absolutely be disruptive to the incumbents over time," McIntyre says. "The real disruption is that we now have consumer-grade, readily available technology in the form of our handhelds and tablets that can finally make this technology accessible to a wider audience. A Revolv system and a smartphone could replace tens of thousands of dollars of functionality. Of course over time that's going to really disrupt the incumbents."

Mark Walters, chairman of the Z-Wave Alliance, a consortium of manufacturers and service providers dedicated to wireless control products based on the Z-Wave open standard, predicts that over time the concept of the connected residence will become second nature regardless of logistics of the install. "Who would have ever thought that we would be able to download apps to our phone, yet we do it all the time," he says.

Walters cautions that there is still the ability to get in over your head. "People buy these gateways to their homes that control their door locks and their lights and they leave the password as 'password.' Not only can they can get in over their heads by not thinking about simple things like passwords, but with electrical wiring too," he says.

While Z-Wave technology appeals to the DIYer, the bulk of their business is coming through the channel of third-party installers.

"[In the U.S.] we're probably 70%-75% assisted delivery, predominantly from security companies--the ADT's, the Vivints, the Honeywells," Walters says. "They put in about 6.5 million houses last year, that's about 75% of the home installations of 2013."

Walters maintains that home control can be done very successfully whether it's achieved by DIY or with professional home install. "If you do it right you get tremendous advantages, if you do it wrong you could be opening yourself up to some disappointments. Fortunately this stuff is not too hard to do and manufacturers are getting better at providing instructions on how to do it and ways to test it."

Professional: Ultimate Polish For A Price

Professionally installed solutions can range from subscription models--like those from security, cable, and Internet providers--to supremely customized, premium solutions. Their proponents argue they can deliver a level of refinement, aesthetics, security, and simplicity that goes beyond the capabilities of a DIY.

Tom Barnett, director of Residential Marketing for Crestron, a company that manufactures complete systems for home automation and audio/video control, likens the high-end professional install to a tailor making a great suit.

"They're going to ask questions, take measurements, figure out the design challenges and then deliver something that merges seamlessly with the design of the home," he says. "There is a bespoke nature of the whole thing where you have someone who has put in a number of home automation systems before that is very familiar with the various systems."

In terms of security, Barnett explains, "because you're building a bespoke system, you make all of your own choices about how that's going to work. For example, we have an iOS and Android app, but you don't have to have those apps at all and you don't need to connect your system to the Internet. You have the ability to customize what parts of your system are connected to your home and which ones are not exposed to the Internet." Which he considers a different and much more custom approach than most connected home devices.

He added that the market Creston serves often involves interior designers and architects working collaboratively with an installer. As such, sometime the best automation solutions are the most invisible. "It's the woodwork, it's the wallpaper, it's the furniture and the art that you want to have taking people's attention to the space, not a bunch of light switches," Barnett says. An example he gives is that a Crestron solution might eliminate the wall thermostat altogether, instead hiding the electronics completely.

Dave Pedigo, senior director of technology at CEDIA, the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association, agrees with the aesthetic advantage of the professional install. "As far as technology goes, residential technology has gone from a nice to have to a need to have. CEDIA has worked with American Institute of Architects, the National Association of Home Builders, and the National Association of the Remodeling industry to show the advantages, and they are significant, of using a professional to install technology in the home. Utilizing a professional who has the skills and expertise in these systems will ensure an end result that has the features, reliability, and performance end users are looking for."

The Trade:

According to Pedigo, some of CEDIA's members have been doing the smart home for two decades and most are focused on growing the market and showcasing the benefits of the pro solution.

"Many manufacturers are trying to sell direct to consumers because it's just the easiest path to revenue, so there definitely are products out there that a consumer can install, they don't need a ton of experience, and in general it works as close to or as good as expected. So for some of our members that is probably a little bit of a threat but that being said, there are new parameters and considerations that are changing the way these systems go in. We're seeing a significantly larger number of products that are going onto to a consumer's network and causing all sorts of strain. There are lots of products out there that a consumer can install, but are they doing it under the best practices, is definitely up for debate."

Pedigo goes on to explain that there are larger implications for the entire market when it comes to security. "There is such mass adoption of Internet-connected products, the concept of surveillance and data security is a little nerve-racking at the same time. A week or two Google acquires a robotic company [Boston Dynamics] that's making robots for the military and now they've bought Nest. One of these days I swear the house is going to tell you, "I'm sorry you're not allowed to leave today."

There are a lot of moving parts that are merging to provide the framework for mass adoption of the smart home, including incredible advances in technology and consumer proclivity toward technology. The first wave of digital natives are now in their teens so it is a given that this nascent trend will ultimately be a widespread reality.

As Ryan McIntyre says, "Smart home automation has been just around the corner from being mainstream for 20 years, why now versus then? A big part of the reason why it's going to happen now is we all finally have super powerful common interface devices, smart phones, and tablets, that was not something you could assume 10-20 years ago."

Mobile and tablets may well have been the missing links to the smart home movement. Fifty-six percent of American adults now carry a smartphone with them, according to a 2013 Pew study. As our always-on connection to the digital world, they are the gateways that open the door to our connected homes.

Brandy Alexander-Wimberly and Dave Hochanadel are independent writers and part of the Interrupt team, a strategic marketing agency devoted to the building materials and home improvement space. Follow them @InterruptWithUs

Since the NSA scandal broke, tech giants have been hammered for suspected sharing of user data with the U.S. government. Now Microsoft says it can offer customers safe harbor in offshore data centers--but no one seems to be able to verify if it's actually safe.

We talked to several lawyers. None would definitively say that Microsoft's foreign data centers would be safe from the NSA. We scanned the coverage. Nobody could say that Microsoft's offer would keep the NSA out. So why offer it in the first place?

The Financial Times notes that local laws may get in the way, but nobody is saying that Microsoft's foreign data centers will be immune from secret U.S. government court requests. Forbes threw up its hands and quoted other coverage to let readers come to their own conclusions. Microsoft itself even admitted back in 2011 that since it's headquartered in the U.S., all of its services are subject to American law and inspection. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt echoed that. So did ACLU privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian.

Microsoft says that its cloud-based hosting service Windows Azure is compliant with the EU's Data Protection Directive, but carefully states on its Azure Trust Center FAQ that the best they can do is either redirect agencies to you or provide you with copies of legal demands for your data--both of which could be legally prohibited by the agency anyway. Their only strategies are to increase encryption and challenge data request gag orders, said Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith in a December blog post.

In a panel at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Smith insisted that the company has "never turned over to any government any information that belongs to another business, another government or an NGO."

Microsoft is offering its users a "privacy placebo," says Bart Knijnenburg, a UC Irvine Ph.D. candidate who was recently awarded a coveted Google Fellowship in Privacy. Contributing to the problem is poor awareness of privacy control, Knijnenburg said. He pointed to a CMU study that showed how much more data users inadvertently shared when Facebook changed its privacy interface. NSA data tapping is a threat, but people don't comprehend how much data big corporations ingest.

"So maybe Microsoft is just pulling up a smoke screen to hide the obvious: that too much of your data is already out there, and already being used every day without your knowledge to make decisions about you that can potentially severely impact your life," Knijnenburg said.

After an uproar in October, Brazil proposed a law, Marco Civil, to require all companies housing data on Brazilian citizens to host it in-country. The tech industry remarked that this would be prohibitively expensive, especially for startups, and result in a Balkanization of the web. A consultant further noted that Brazil is the most expensive country to build data centers, with approximately 22% of the $60 million building cost going to taxes.

For foreign users, Microsoft is pledging to host their data in data centers outside the U.S., which are located in Dublin, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Singapore, and upcoming centers in Sydney and Melbourne. This must come as a grudging PR maneuver as Microsoft just bought another 200 acres of land for its 500,000-square-foot new data center in Quincy, WA, which is set to open in 2015.

Of all the ways to input text into a smartwatch, holding it up and saying, "Siri, text my wife 'we ran out of mayo'" probably isn't the most elegant. If these new wearable devices are going to catch on, they need a more seamless interface. Thankfully, developers are already taking a crack at the problem.

Minuum is a smartphone keyboard developer that's already thinking about the future of wearable interfaces. The startup recently showed off a smartwatch keyboard prototype in a blog post detailing its predictive text algorithm. If designed properly, Minuum says, a mini-keyboard like this could work well on even the smallest of screens.

Minuum simplifies the traditional QWERTY layout by smashing it down to about the third the size a typical soft keyboard requires. Doing this on a smartwatch, for example, leaves more room for other on-screen elements.

How does Minuum's flat keyboard work? It uses a spatial and language models to evaluate words based on two factors. The spatial model analyzes the accuracy of users' typing and combines that with the likelihood of word choice in a specific language. The company compares using the keyboard to Google's instant search, anticipating what someone will type next. The post breaks down the two models in some depth, including interactive charts for different word scenarios.

Fleksy is another keyboard that's been demonstrated on smartwatches, most notably on Samsung's Galaxy Gear at this year's CES. Unlike Minuum, Fleksy takes up a healthy amount of screen real estate, giving it an extra barrier to overcome. Still, not having to look at the screen (thanks to dead-on autocomplete) is a key feature for a watch. Fleksy has also been shown off on Leap Motion's consumer grade motion controller.

If you're itching to see what the future of input might look like, all of these alternative keyboards are available to try on Android, but not widely so on iOS. Third-party keyboards have never been permitted system wide, but the restrictions are easing with iOS 7 as individual apps can implement different keyboard choices. Fleksy first showed up in the text editing app Wordbox, but has slowly been creeping into other apps as well. Of these third-party alternative keyboards, some of the oldest options remain the most popular. Swype and SwiftKey, which let users drag their finger from letter to letter instead of actually tapping out a word, are widely beloved.

Rumors of SwiftKey broaching iOS through a dedicated note taking app have recently come about from leaked screen shots of such an app. This would be one more taste of a keyboard alternative for iOS users to try as Apple prepares some sort of wearable device. If any such iWatch were to accept input versus strictly providing notifications, the chances of a full fledged traditional software keyboard seem highly unlikely. More likely, these third-party keyboards give at least some insight into the future of input on wearable devices.

Last week, AOL purchased L.A.-based startup Gravity, a service that personalizes users' web and social searches. The $83 million purchase price is testament to the value of automated recommendation for a wide range of industries. In buying Gravity, AOL also acquired some new competition.

Gravity's biggest adversaries are two Israeli companies, Outbrain and Taboola. Small but noteworthy startups like Nara, Swayy, and MindMeld are also gaining traction in the field. Services like these use algorithms to determine user preferences, delivering content, ads, or other recommendations accordingly. Think Amazon or Pandora, but for the whole web.

Gravity's two biggest competitors take different approaches in personalization. Outbrain compartmentalizes the items you look at online into four categories: what's trending, what's relevant, the behavior of similar users, and a personal filter that won't recommend something you've already seen. By combining the analysis of these factors, Outbrain supplies personalized recommendations that people keep happily clicking, watching, and reading. And they have racked up a boastful list of publishers as clients so far including CNN, Fox News, Hearst, Sky News, the Guardian and the Sun.

Taboola's recommendations are famous for their "Content You May Also Like" callout. The company works with publishers, marketers, and brands looking to deliver the content users will consume next. Their algorithm for recommending content is similar to that of Outbrain's, looking at four key factors: social, similarity, personalization, and context. Initially, they used videos as their vehicle for customization, but have since expanded to other types of content. As of last year, Taboola was the industry leader for paid content discovery, servicing Time.com, the New York Times, USA Today, Bloomberg, the Weather Channel, and BusinessWeek.

Some smaller and still-developing startups are heralding extreme innovation when it comes to the rat race for a customized Internet. Nara is a cloud-based neural network, developed by a group of neuroscientists, computer scientists, astrophysicists, artists, and entrepreneurs. Their mission is to shorten your search time using artificial intelligence to give you personal recommendations. For now, Nara amasses data, indexes information, and gives you restaurant or hotel recommendations based on your preferences. The search engine will give you human-like suggestions and with increasing interest and financial investment in the company, they will eventually expand the technology into other facets.

Swayy is a content recommendation service with a strong focus on social. It bases its content suggestions on items you have shared in the past, the interests of your followers, and the genre of your brand. What differentiates Swayy is that they make recommendations by using a crowdsourcing platform, studying trending content and user behavior. They just launched a Chrome web extension, which recommends three relevant articles to you after you have shared an item online.

Newly released MindMeld, from Expect Labs, literally eavesdrops on your conversations and can surface answers to questions before you have even asked them. MindMeld, dubbed the virtual personal assistant, is a speech activated iPad app--so it listens as you talk, takes notes, and then offers you pertinent articles, apps, videos, pictures, etc. The app is a competitor to Google Now and Apple's Siri, which have dominated the personal assistant arena to date. MindMeld seems to take the idea one step further with high-level computation as it anticipates what you may want. This is personalization at its best because the app has heard you and now knows you, skipping all the lengthy algorithms of the other catering startups.

For some consumers, content personalization and targeted advertising raise serious privacy concerns. Others find it more relevant than traditional media. For advertisers, the potential is unmistakenly huge.

A shoddy user experience is always frustrating. But what if a rusty UX or missing detail could actually lead to a dead serious privacy faux pas? It wouldn't be the first time.

A transgendered woman recently committed suicide after her updated Android phone failed to keep her personal life personal. After the upgrade to KitKat, the new Google Hangouts app used her old male name in a text to a coworker, unwittingly outing her. Panicked, she reached out to Google for help. They never responded.

Also in January, Liz Eden, a blogger and graduate funding officer at the University of Oxford, discovered that her Google Calendar sent event invitations to email addresses she listed in the description of a private reminder. For example, setting a reminder for herself to email her boss about a pay triggered an email to her boss, inviting him to the "event." Not tragic, but still embarrassing. And it might be forgivable if it hadn't already been happening for years.

Google furnishes our lives with conveniences. It provides vast amounts of free information instantaneously, keeps track of our communication, and gives us driving directions. Its participation in the Reform Government Surveillance coalition and support of reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act would suggest that Google values users' privacy more than we tend to give it credit for.

Still, these products aren't actually free, even if we don't pay for them. Google gives us what we want in exchange for what it wants: our data. Inevitably, the human-programmed systems created to collect and store this data will fail.

Liz and her husband, Terence Eden, a mobile developer, originally reported their GCal issue to Google in early January. Here's what the Edens found, from Terence's original blog post:

• If you use Google Calendar on the web and put a Gmail address in the subject line, that user will have the event added to the calendar.
• They will not receive an email notification - although they will get a "meeting reminder" pop-up.
• Creating an event on an Android phone does not trigger a meeting request.
• Some non-Gmail addresses will also see the meeting in their calendar - but others will not.
• When you delete a calendar item, the "Cancellation" notification is emailed regardless of whether the user received the original invite.

Google eventually responded to Eden's complaint, saying:

[W]e agree that the behavior you identified is undesirable, and we filed a bug with the Calendar team last week. They've been working on changing the behavior to make it clearer that someone has been added to the event in the situation you described.

This is nice and all, but Lee Phillips, chief scientist at the Alogus Research Corporation, had reported the same issue back in 2010, pulling others' complaints from the Google Calendar support forum. Where was the action to change the user interface back then?

Good UX design is supposed to exploit the human capacity for laziness. It should be clear and simple, marking a stone path for an easy, frictionless UX. Google's UI design is well known for this kind of bare bones cognitive fluency. So when something bad happens with this thing we've come to appreciate for its integrity and reliability, we experience cognitive dissonance. Trust was broken, expectations went unmet. Ultimately, we were betrayed by a friend. Phillips explained over email how this misalignment of interpretations is problematic:

"These are examples of designers and users interpreting things very differently, with horrifying results--and of a corporate culture that seems willing to let a dangerous situation remain uncorrected for years, doing real harm to real people, because, to them, these people are obviously just wrong."

There's a name for this kind of "evil interface": Zuckering. The definition came about in 2010 when people were pissed off enough at Facebook's deceptive UIs to give a name to "the act of creating deliberately confusing jargon and user-interfaces which trick your users into sharing more info about themselves than they really want to." The difference here is that GCal is not intentionally trying to trick you into send defaming emails, but Phillips thinks the omission is just as worrisome:

"These interfaces are 'bad' in a larger sense, then: although they make it easy to get work done quickly, they fail to make it obvious in all cases what actions GCal intends to take on the users' behalf. For some kinds of software, this is OK. But when the software is in intimate contact with sensitive information, it's not good enough."

So, are we walking on eggshells when supplying our information for life's niceties?

"It's frustrating they've suckered me in with a great promise," Mr. Eden said, assuring his eventual delinking from Google, a pattern he thinks will be common in the upcoming years. Information leaks, from parsed NSA documents to strangers' sudden abilities to email you through Google+, are substantiating traditionally fringe phobias. 2013 retrospectives assign the year ominous titles like the "year of the personal data breach," and data hacks from LivingSocial, Adobe, Facebook (again), and the good ol' U.S. government make the claim difficult to refute. Are reactive outcries the only way to get companies to care about privacy?

"If one of your friends has their life exposed, people might temporarily change their behavior," says Eden. "How we get those new behaviors to stick is another matter. Companies have a responsibility to think about the most vulnerable of their customers."

The "Gordian Knot" of the publishing industry is: How do we unlock the value of our growing digital audience?

Right now, new media is being played with old rules from old media. Traditionally, there was a lot of guesswork and waste involved in the placement of print media ads. Since it didn't create a quantifiable effect, media companies priced units to advertisers using CPMs that had no functional basis in reality.

This hit-or-miss process has migrated to digital media, even though in digital there is much more data available about readers and their reading habits. Publishers have struggled to show advertisers the value of their audience because deals are still negotiated based on CPMs.

But why play by the old rules? Here is a way to get out of the business of CPMs and still be a high-value target for advertisers:

Affinity Engagement Index: An Audience Delivery Model For Advertising

The audience in digital media such as the web is measurable and can be analyzed far beyond the means of traditional media. It is this aspect that should be emphasized when constructing revenue models for content businesses. Instead of the old commodity model in which one audience member is as valuable as the next, the Affinity Engagement Index (AEI) model proposes to specifically show how valuable an audience segment is to an advertiser, in a way that can form the basis for a negotiation (much in the way that CPMs work now).

The model is based on two critical factors:

Affinity

Affinity, for the purposes of this model, is a measurement of how much the audience likes the publisher's content. While affinity can be measured on the basis of an individual for a specific content item, for AEI purposes, we look at audience segment affinity for "clusters" of content, which are organized together by common metadata (such as author, category, topics, etc.).

Engagement

Engagement is the level of an audience member's interaction with, and attention to, a publisher. A high-engagement audience member is more valuable than a low engagement audience member, because they are paying more attention.

The model would create scores for each factor through various methods:

AEI = % Affinity x % Engagement x 100

For a publisher's audience, we would look at the AEI numbers as well as audience size. With those two numbers an advertiser can make an apples-to-apples comparison among publishers.

Potential

Potential represents the value of an audience segment. Pricing for advertising should be compared against the Potential number (it is the equivalent of CPMs):

Potential = AEI x Segment Size

So for example if a segment had an AEI of 45 and contained 5,000 people, the Potential would be 225,000.

Segmentation

While you could describe a complete aggregate audience for a publisher in terms of their AEI score, it's likely that a publisher will want to segment their audience, both by gross divisions in affinity clusters (this portion of the audience is into web development, this portion is into typography etc.), but also by engagement levels.

You could imagine a publisher having a rate card that showed their audience divided into affinity clusters and engagement levels, and audience sizes for each, and then showing the ad rates for each segment.

Example: Tech Podcast

On the TWIT podcasting network, there's a show called "This Week in Enterprise Tech," which covers information technology concerns from the perspective of large enterprise. Recent shows have examined IPv6 (the Internet routing protocol), server virtualization, enterprise information security concerns, etc. It's clear that the show would appeal to people who work inside enterprise tech, from IT staff through CIOs.

The show looks like a good target for companies selling enterprise IT services such as firewalls, network equipment, virtualization technology, etc. However, the content of the show varies, so it would be nice to segment the audience into more specific affinity pools. For example, one affinity cluster-based segment might focus on networking topics such as IPv6.

The TWIT network would create a rate card for this segment balancing the size of the segment with the highest affinity ratings. This segment would be sub-segmented into engagement levels (high, medium, and casual). Segment size and AEI numbers would be available for each segment. Let's say that medium engagement segment here (70% engagement) represented 5,000 people and had an affinity level of 60%. The AEI score would be 42. (60% x 70% x 100).

Measurement Models

To make this work we would need to create standardized measurement models for Affinity and Engagement. Measurement activities would need to be auditable for adherence to the standard model.

Measuring Engagement

An engagement measurement model would essentially be a type of lead scoring in which engagement levels are inferred from user behavior. There would be a standard list of key user actions and associated scoring for each action.

Key user actions might include:

• Share content item on social network
• Bookmark content item
• Optimal amount of time spent with content item (too short indicates a bounce, too long means someone has walked away from the device).
• Print content item
• Return visit to content item
• Participation in online forum

Measuring Affinity

Affinity measurement could trigger off of many of the same user actions as engagement measurement, but instead of scoring the user, it creates a level of association (the affinity value) between the user and metadata associated with the content item in question.

For example, a user who took an action indicating affinity with an article (such as sharing it on a social network) might establish an affinity relationship between themselves and the topic of the article (such as "networks") and its tags (such as "cisco", "IPv6," and "Internet").

Example: Food Magazine

A food magazine with 1 million subscribers creates an AEI model for bakers.

Baker Segment (50,000)

The baker segment has an average affinity for baking related topics of 75%. In the segment, 5,000 are highly engaged (80%+), 15,000 have medium engagement (50%+), and 30,000 are casual (25%).

So, for baking supply providers, for this segment the AEI chart is:

Interestingly, the smaller medium engagement segment is worth the same as the larger casual engagement segment. Pricing is based on the potential number.

Wine Lovers Segment (100,000)

Analyzing a segment of 100,000 wine lovers, it turns out that it makes sense to break the segment down into a couple of smaller affinity clusters:

Trend Followers (60,000)

Not particular to specific wines, just interested in what is trendy. Bifurcated between high and casual engagement levels: (15,000 high engagement, 8,000 medium engagement, and 37,000 casuals). Base affinity level for trend followers is 70%.

Here's the card for trend followers:

(Interestingly, in this case reaching the 15,000 high-engagement layer in this segment is more valuable than the 37,000 casuals.)

California Loyalists

We identify 20,000 wine enthusiasts that are just partial to California wines. The average affinity for this segment is higher (80%), but the engagement levels skew more casual.

Again interesting that the medium layer is half the size of the casual layer, but worth the same.

Fifty years ago, a committee organized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded a study into automated language translation by saying that "There is no immediate or predictable prospect of useful machine translation."

Forty years ago, the idea that trained doctors could ever be challenged by algorithms was similarly the stuff of sci-fi novels and movies.

Ten years ago, respected MIT and Harvard economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane published their book The New Division of Labor, containing an optimistic chapter called "Why People Still Matter," which patiently explained why software could never replace a human driver.

In all of these cases, the people making the forecasts weren't idiots. They were doing what rational individuals ought to do: basing their conclusions on the available evidence, and then extrapolating on it to predict what was going to happen next. At the same time, in every one of these predictions the experts claiming that a certain part of life was automation-proof turned out to be wrong.

Today Google Translate, medical algorithms, and self-driving cars are all very much a reality. Almost every field of work--from lawyers and law enforcement officials, to accountants and architects--is undergoing an "algorithmic turn" as greater parts of it (including decision-making abilities) are handed over to automation.

"This is happening faster and faster," says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business--who has recently co-authored a new book with principal research scientist Andrew McAfee entitled, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. "I think that is why people are becoming scared by the process, because they're seeing the automation can affect a much, much broader set of jobs than ever before."

The Second Machine Age

The classic narrative of techno-replacement--as harsh as it might have been--stated that if you did a job straightforward enough to be replaced by a machine, you more or less deserved whatever happened. While blue collar jobs found themselves "disrupted" by new technology, white collar jobs typically enjoyed only the positive "sustaining" qualities of improved technology: help making their jobs easier and more efficient.

Now it's not so simple.

Suddenly it's not just "unskilled" jobs that are being displaced, but also the classic white collar careers that have historically been viewed as safe.

"In our book we distinguish between the first and second Machine Age," says Brynjolfsson. "In some sense, technology has always been destroying jobs, as well as creating [them]. During the First Machine Age automation was largely focused on muscle work, while the real transition toward cognitive work started in the early days of computerization--and gained momentum in the 1990s. It's only been in the past decade that it's really begun catching me off guard."

One of the big alterations to the old version of techno-replacement was the discovery by artificial intelligence (AI) researchers of what is called Moravec's paradox. Moravec's paradox essentially states that--when it comes to AI--it is the seemingly hard problems (such as analyzing the stock market) that turn out to be easy, while the apparently easy problems (such as replicating the facial recognition abilities of a four-year-old) are hard.

While advances in robotics are certainly happening (see the increased use of quadrocopters and drones, for instance) the real advances in automation aren't in jobs involving manual labor, but rather in ones like accounting, bookkeeping, and other roles that can be carried out using tools like routine information processing.

Widening The Gap

As Brynjolfsson notes, throughout history technology has rendered some jobs obsolete, but has also had the effect of creating others. In contrast to the Industrial Revolution, however, one of the big questions surrounding today's digital revolution is whether as many jobs are being created as are being destroyed.

Consider, for example, the case of Kodak versus Instagram. At the height of Kodak's power, the company employed more than 140,000 people and carried a valuation of $28 billion. Today, Kodak is bankrupt, and Instagram has taken its place as the new face of digital photography. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012, it employed just 13 people. Is it not reasonable to wonder where all those jobs went? And what happened to the wealth those middle-class jobs created?

"I think everyone was struck by how few employees Instagram had when it was sold," says Brynjolfsson. "It shouldn't, in theory, be bad news when technology lets us create more wealth with less work. It's bad news if we don't have the organizational institutions to take advantage of that in a way that lets us create shared prosperity."

Brynjolfsson's right. Pick up any almost any technology book predicting the future published in the 1970s and '80s, and you'll likely find a passage about how technology is going to bring about a 20-hour working week and retirement at age 50. The people making these predictions almost exclusively meant them as optimistic. Today, they are arguably coming true. but are also a whole lot less voluntary than most people thought. The reason you might have your work hours cut in half--or be laid off at 50--owes less to the fact that you can accumulate a large amount of wealth in less time than it does that a bot can, and often will, do your job cheaper and more efficiently than you can.

Rethinking Work For The Digital Age

The decline of middle-class jobs enlarges an already-existing wealth disparity between rich and poor that has grown rapidly during the digital age. Intuit's TurboTax system, for instance, automates the job of tax preparation. As Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out in The Second Machine Age, TurboTax's CEO made $4 million last year, while its founder, Scott Cook, is a billionaire. The job that its algorithms can do, on the other hand, would previously have been carried out by hundreds of thousands of human operators--now rendered unnecessary.

Similar "winner-takes-all" dynamics are taking place in a number of industries. In his book Failing Law Schools, law professor Brian Tamanha notes U.S. government statistics suggesting that until 2018 there will only be 25,000 new openings available for young lawyers--despite the fact that law schools will produce around 45,000 graduates during that same time frame. The problem is that tools like e-discovery systems can now effectively carry out much of the work that previously would have been carried out by junior lawyers. In this way, it is entirely possible to imagine a future in which law firms stop hiring junior and trainee lawyers completely, and pass their work over to artificial intelligence systems instead.

There are no easy answers to this, although Brynjolfsson suggests that we should respond by reimagining work and learning in a way that makes us less disposable. "Did you know that the word 'job' has only been around for about 300 years?" he says. "It arose in part as people looked for a way to structure tasks that fit around the machines they were working with. In many ways, humans became cogs in the machine themselves."

This can be seen in everything from the kinds of routinized jobs that represent widespread employment, through to the industrial paradigm of teaching that makes up the school system--with prisoner-students pitted against warden-teachers.

"That may have been great in the factory era, but going forward it needs rethinking," he continues. "Robots are great at following instructions. We need people who are creative, who have interpersonal skills. We should be encouraging that kind of transition. Today, machine intelligence has reached a point where humans are freed up to do the kind of unstructured tasks machines are particularly bad at."

The Soul Of Man Under Automation

The idea that automation should be used for the jobs we don't want to do--while leaving the things we enjoy--isn't new. In his pamphlet "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," Oscar Wilde wrote that, "The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves … Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends." There can be very few people who disagree with this point.

The problem, however, is in the idea that the "creative class" jobs are somehow any safer than any other. A company like Narrative Science, for example, is aiming to replace journalists--although the service currently is fairly straightforward. But while that is true now, will it always be this way? Possibly not. "I used to put limitations on what we do, assuming our stories would be specific to data-rich industries," Narrative Science founder Robbie Allen told tech writer Steven Levy. "Now I think ultimately the sky is the limit."

Ultimately, betting against technology is a bad idea. To some degree, all of us need to take a page out of economist Theodore Levitt's famous 1960 article "Marketing Myopia" and start "[plotting] the obsolescence of what now produces [our] livelihood."

But techno-optimists and techno-skeptics are also more similar than they would like to believe, since both act as though technology's forwards march is autonomous and unstoppable--and we can either like it or lump it. That's not true. How technology advances from here is an open question that needs to be grappled with at policy levels--as well as the right philosophical questions being asked about what it is that we want to hold back from automation. Faster, more efficient, and cheaper aren't the only metrics that matter, after all.

In the short term, companies will continue to need human workers to satisfy customers and succeed economically for the foreseeable future. Longer-term history has shown that we are bad predictors when it comes to how automation will affect our lives--although that's not stopping Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee from asking the questions.

"As big as the disruptions have been over the past 10 years, Andy and I think technology will have an even bigger in the next decade," Brynjolfsson says.

From anti-Google bus vandalism to Uber drivers being attacked in Paris, the rise in anti-tech tension is hard to miss. Some suggest that this is the beginning of a trend with more upheaval to come. But before we get all hysterical about robots replacing humans, we may want to take a look at the history books to understand our uprisings against technology.

We have a Terminator complex. We don't want the machines we create to outsmart us, leave us jobless, or worse. And yes, you could easily attribute overall high unemployment rates to a more automated economy, but you could just as easily pin recent drops in that rate to the vast number of jobs being created by the tech sector.

The Luddite movement in the early 1800s was history's most famous display of people organizing to prove how essential the human workforce is to the economy. Working class Englishmen, during a a seemingly endless war on Napolean's France and rampant low wages, lashed out at the Industrial Revolution's textile machinery. The men saw machines as a threat to their employment as they were gradually phased out and replaced by the technology. So they met at night secretly, sent death threats to magistrates, attacked the British army, and assailed the machines. Luddites didn't attack the foundations of emerging industry, but rather wanted high-quality machines run by well-paid, properly trained workers.

Still, society was fearful in early 1800s England that machines were jeopardizing their livelihoods as they knew them, a sentiment that sounds familiar today. Back then, machines were attacked. Today, Bay Area residents and Parisian taxi drivers are assaulting omnipotent technology in any form they can.

The situation in Silicon Valley has gone from bad to worse. Google's corporate buses are being vandalized by Bay Area protestors upset with rising housing prices and tech companies' limited investment in the local community. Last week, a Google engineer was personally vilified by fliers left around his home saying, "Anthony Levandowski is building an unconscionable world of surveillance, control and automation. He is also your neighbour." The activists objected to Google's role in creating military robots, so they followed Levandowski to his Berkeley home to publicly try to shame him.

In Paris last year, taxi drivers assaulted Uber drivers and passengers. They slashed tires and broke windows in protest of the startup stealing clients from the hard-working taxi chauffeurs. Additionally, Amazon was protested last year by employees demanding fair labor treatment. The protestors wore stickers emblazoned with their message in front of Amazon.com headquarters: "We are people! Not Robots!"

The parallels between the Luddites and the protests against the tech community are relevant but don't necessarily foreshadow what may come next. The uprising in the U.K. only lasted for six years, with little-to-no global significance on technological progress. The impact of today's protests has yet to be seen, but it's worth noting that it's not the first time people have lashed out at technology. Nor will it be the last.

Facebook has been teasing a Flipboard-style news reader since March 2013. Will it spontaneously combust like Facebook Beacon, Home, Lite, Places, Deals, Email, Real Time Ticker, or Gifts? The odds seem to say yes, but here's what could make News Reader different.

The news reader, rumored to be simply named "Paper", is the pet project of Michael Matas, Facebook designer and developer whose startup Push Pop Press was bought by Facebook in 2011. PPP's legacy was Al Gore's Our Choice, which everyone lauded for its tablet-friendly touchscreen interaction.

Facebook's project history is tumultuous due to the arbitrary changes in the company's engineering-centric culture, as Pando Daily suggests in its teardown of Facebook's Platform failure. While project leads like Mozilla cofounder Blake Ross have had the experience to keep the ship steady, Matas comes into the Facebook game with more external clout than past project leads. Though Matas has the reins on Facebook's betting horse, Matas has the proven track record to walk out of the Facebook spiral if Paper doesn't work out.

Matas got hired at Apple at 19, and also helped Nest during the company's early days, giving him a legendary quality among the Valley in-crowd. When Matas assured his well-wishers then that PPP's ideas and technology will be integrated with Facebook, it actually seemed plausible: Only someone with that kind of pedigree could stand up to Zuckerberg and ship a feature that people actually want.

A History Of Facebook's Flops

Facebook Lite was released in September 2009 to offer social media interaction for low-bandwidth users. The product was overseen by Mozilla co-creator Blake Ross, who was acquihired by Facebook in 2007. Lite was stripped down and sleek in a Twitter-ish way, a noted improvement for users bothered by the noise of sidebars and applications. The feature was shut down eight months later in April 2010 and many of the bandwidth-saving tech and clean aesthetics were integrated in the main site. Blake "Blade" Ross left Facebook in February 2013.

Then there was Facebook Places. Leading the project was Michael Eyal Sharon, who attended NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program alongside Dennis Crowley, cofounder of Places' rival Foursquare. Facebook introduced Places in August 2010 to let users check in--but only near the venue when using the Facebook smartphone app. The company "killed" Places a year later, but kept its location tagging feature.

Facebook then came full circle with Nearby (now Local Search), a smartphone-only feature for local discovery. Sharon, a Facebook Mobile Product manager, moved around to other projects like the standalone mobile apps Camera and Messenger. The companywide refocus on mobile meant every engineer would be responsible for both desktop and mobile, following Sharon's lead to be less specialized in order to grow synergy between mobile and desktop.

The new emphasis on mobile meant casualties--especially for features that had been standing since 2007, when Facebook was up-and-coming with only 24 million members.

Facebook Markup Language (FBML), for instance, was released in May 2007 as a simplified HTML for everyday users to create application pages. FBML was center to Platform, Facebook's grand strategy for apps to be built within Facebook. Over time, Platform grew troubled as Facebook pushed apps to grow while muting a portion of app notifications in order to nix spam and preserve the user experience.

The outdated FBML had to go. Facebook deprecated it on January 1, 2012, fulfilling its promise to kill FMBL-supported pages on June 1, 2012. Its replacement, iFrames, hosed casual page creators in favor of greater customization options for seasoned developers. iFrames also forced application developers to host content from their own servers instead of Facebook's, but that external hosting allowed developers to use HTML, CSS, and even JavaScript.

Not all buried features should be seen as failures. Facebook Deals, which launched in April 2011 to compete with Groupon-style coupon sites, got the axe four months after launching. If this sounds like a risk-projected decision, look to Deals' lead, Jon Fougner, the Fulbright Scholar with an Economics degree from Yale. Before Facebook, Fougner was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. Unlike Facebook's typical tinker-as-we-go engineering approach, Deals was killed off quickly, barely a month after it expanded to Canada and Western Europe. While Groupon is still acquiring companies for multimillions and LivingSocial is still solvent despite operating at a net loss, the saturated online coupon market has made growth for both companies difficult, making Facebook's decision to kill Deals appear prescient. Fougner, who had been with Facebook since 2007, is now a New York social media consultant.

Facebook does have one successful endeavor into crowded markets--Messenger, the most popular messaging app in the U.S. (and second behind WhatsApp elsewhere). Its omni-communication abilities make it the biggest success of Facebook's experiments, even if it'll have to fight tooth and nail to claim the data messaging crown as SMS slowly dies.

Facebook's company acquisitions bear mentioning, although of the documented purchases, many haven't emerged and are likely dog food. Of Facebook's acquisitions, only Instagram stands out as a distinct product that exists today.

Matas' contributions to Paper probably won't be dog food for two reasons: One, Paper has big expectations directly from Zuckerberg and VP of Product Chris Cox. Two, Matas' experience with Push Pop Press is exactly the meaningful engagement with news stories that Zuckerberg and Cox want. While other project leads mentioned above have been ideally suited for their products, Zuckerberg and Cox have personally championed Paper's upcoming value so much that Matas' contributions will be in the spotlight.

Can We Learn Anything From The History Of News Feed?

Facebook Paper's goal is ostensibly to give users a reading experience with more meaningful content and fewer garbage posts from friends. Facebook wants a fusion of social interaction and information--a morning paper for the next generation. The current News Feed is a list of activity updates with a relevance algorithm that tries to keep users informed of, well, everything.

Making a meaningful News Feed is a tall order. Its lifespan is fraught with backlash after new updates have rolled out. The News Feed and Mini-Feed were introduced in September 2006 followed by an immediate apology from Zuckerberg for not building in proper privacy controls. Major redesigns in 2008 and 2009 hid some old features, angering many users.

Facebook's 2011 update solved the clumsy compromise between the Top Stories and Most Recent feeds by combining them into the News Feed we see today. Using algorithms, Facebook sought a balance between friend activity and the higher quality content it wanted to push in order to raise the tide of content quality site-wide. To balance the increase in older, heavier-weighted stories, the 2011 update also introduced the News Ticker in the upper-right corner. The "creeper ticker" got its own share of tinkering back in a March 2013 update that emphasized photos and borrowed features from its mobile version.

The release date for Matas' radical, feed-redefining features is uncertain, but up-to-the-minute tinkering with the News Feed continues. Matas has the reins to a project that's too big to be swept under the rug. While it might euthanize other projects, the News Feed is so crucial that Facebook has always strong-armed its users into accepting News Feed changes.

With his experience and clout, Matas might just be able to keep the Facebook brass from pulling the plug on the new Push Pop-style experience he's bringing to Paper.

When Tile's Selfstarter campaign broke records, it demonstrated a real-world demand for the ability to wirelessly keep track of objects. But for Tile, the success has a catch: In crowdfunding more than $2 million, the Bluetooth-enabled tracker also invited a flood of competitors.

Bringrr at least tries to set itself apart. Part USB phone charger and part tracking tag, Bringrr focuses on those who commute or travel by car. The USB car charger changes colors to notify you if you don't have all your tagged items with you in the car. Instead of having to come back home, you're alerted about the missing object before you pull away.

Kensington's Proximo resembles the sort of traditional key fob you might use to access an apartment building or parking garage. The fob is fairly boring in that it's designed for a key ring and has limited functionality, but that might be enough to target general consumers uneasy with complicated gadgets.

StickR TrackR is very similar to Tile, especially with its ability to tap into the user base and find lost/stolen items by proximity to other StickR owners. It also works in reverse. In addition to having the Bluetooth tracker emit sound, you can also press the tracker to have your phone make a noise, even if it's on silent.

Of course, it's not just keys and wallets that people want to keep track of: There's also the family pet. The Beluvv Puppy is made to be worn on a pet's collar and tracks exclusively through Bluetooth, meaning if the dog goes beyond the range of Bluetooth, you'll be relying on other Beluvv owners to help triangulate the pup's location. Most of the other trackers indirectly advertise the ability to use for pets, focusing on the indoor house cat who's not likely to roam very far.

There's also StickNFind, inSite, and a slew of other competitors all very similar in form and function. Find'em Tracking Cards veers sightly with a card that fits in a wallet, but the goals are all the same. It's a useful hack for the absent-minded, but most likely a fad.

This whole Bluetooth as a device reminder function feels very temporary. As convergence inevitably happens between phones and wearable technology, the problem of forgetting goes away. At some point you won't forget your connected device because you just won't be able to function without it, so leaving it behind won't be an option.

Until that future arrives, however, it might be worth tagging your most valuable devices, or pets, so they don't go missing.

Tonight President Obama takes the stage for his annual address on the State of the Union. The First Lady and her guests will smile and wave, Democrats will stand and applaud, Republicans will scramble to ready their rebuttals, and you and I will check out #SOTU tweets while having a beer.

As political theater, it's not bad. But do you know what I'd rather watch? A series of product demos.

President Obama plans to "lay out a set of real, concrete, practical proposals to grow the economy, strengthen the middle class, and empower all who hope to join it," senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer wrote in an email to supporters over the weekend.

But it's hard for "proposals" to be real and concrete in ways that lead to well-designed products and experiences. If I heard a line like that from a team at a design thinking workshop, or a Startup Weekend, I'd recommend making a prototype and putting it in front of customers before doing anything else.

Why Washington Should Put UX First

The last presidential election woke Washington up to the importance of big data and back-end technology. But the government's front-end capabilities, and user experience design in particular, continue to be an afterthought.

Even the media seems to letting Obama and his administration off the hook for its user experience. Nearly everything went wrong in the botched execution of the Affordable Care Act website, but the technology community focused on taking the government to task for its outdated software processes and overly complex architecture. This critique was typical of the face-palm response:

Even though the front end design uses (a ton of) javascript so that the page does not have to completely reload between input screens, a loading icon spins after every push of the submit button. Add to these constant server calls the fact that the servers in question are not only at the Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Veterans Affairs, but also at the Department of Homeland Security, and more. Why is healthcare eligibility a matter of homeland security?

Without minimizing these issues, I'd put forward that the problems with the Affordable Care Act's signature platform go far beyond process and structure. When I tried to purchase a new plan, through the portal operated by New York State, the user experience was bad enough that I couldn't figure out whether I had successfully completed my checkout. I hoped a confirmation email would clear up my confusion, but one never arrived. A couple of weeks later an insurance card arrived in the mail, with no context or explanation.

The crux of the problem is that Washington defines written legislation as policy's end game, rather than product.

Think of when we celebrate policy changes --it's typically at the bill signing, as the cameras flash and the historic pens are handed out. From a product manager's perspective, that's the equivalent of throwing yourself a launch party after writing the technical requirements.

The uncomfortable truth facing Washington is that your user experience is the essence of your policy. The man-hours behind the thousands of pages stipulating the Affordable Care Act's rules and regulations could all be for naught if healthcare.gov fails to translate that legislative complexity into specific tasks that individual users can easily accomplish. That is the heuristic for a life-improving policy, and that's how people will judge it.

Product As Policy In Action: New York's 311

For an example of how policy as product can work effectively, take a look at New York City. One of the city's signature "products," 311, is how I experience the city's rules and regulations related to tenant rights, alternate side parking, and noise complaints. Earlier this month I called to report my landlord, after frozen pipes left my apartment without water for days. In response, the city investigated the issue on my behalf, and gave me a ticket number so that I could check the status of my complaint online.

I chose to call, but I could have sent a text message, completed a form online, or used the 311 app. I've never read the legislation governing the city's landlord-tenant policies, and I have no need to--because the product works. At the end of the day, I'd rather have imperfect policies made transparent by good UX than perfect policies muffled and distorted by poor UX. The former makes it easier for me to speak up and take action.

Last year approval ratings for Congress hit a new low --12%, the worst rating in 40 years. Clearly, it's time for Washington to embrace change in a big way. My recommendation: Opt for product designers over lawyers, and mockups over memos. If you can solve for product, and deliver simple, intuitive solutions to constituents, support for policy and brand should follow.

When you look at the complexities that go into making a physical dollar bill it's plain to see why most people don't start trying to print a new form of currency every day, but making a new digital currency is surprisingly easy for someone with even basic coding skills. But coding isn't the only step to getting your digital currency off the ground. Here are the five steps you should follow according to the makers of three cryptocurrencies.

1. Use Community To Nurture Currency

When you think about creating a new digital currency it's easy to assume the first step would be to begin coding your coin, but that's the wrong place to start, according to Chris Ellis, a London entrepreneur and a community activist at Feathercoin.

"The first step is to find a community and build a currency around them rather than building a currency and expecting everyone to show up," Ellis says. "It has to be sensitive to their needs and be relevant to their cultural heritage and background."

Feathercoin was created by Peter Bushnell in April 2013. Bushnell left his job as head of IT at Oxford University's Brasenose College because he wanted to start his own currency that put people at the center. This was in response to what he saw as a lack of community involvement and inclusiveness by the existing cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, on the popular cryptocurrency site bitcointalk.org.

Though he had not met Bushnell at the time, Ellis, who had been actively promoting and educating people on cryptocurrencies since last March, shared the sense of alienation and seclusion found on Bitcoin forums.

"These forums were very tech focused and not very welcoming to newcomers or minority groups which are often served better by smaller teams," Ellis says. "The forums did not make it easy for people to get involved in the development of the coin. Many people on these forums take a backseat and speculate on the price rather than actively getting involved."

Ellis found the cryptocurrency community activism he was looking for in Feathercoin, whose technical development he says benefits greatly from its community activism approach.

"For Feathercoin we were a group of crypto enthusiasts, some of whom were new to the scene but who felt shut out from the rest of the space," Ellis says. Everyone at Feathercoin feels it's important to demonstrate how a devoted group of people can establish a stable currency, he says. By working together a community of dedicated crypto enthusiasts are much better able to find and address vulnerabilities and security threats, like the 51% attack, which the community of coders at Feathercoin have successfully built protections against.

Building such protections and nurturing the development of your currency give your coin legitimacy and trust in the eyes of the public, something that is hard to do if those involved in the currency are passive spectators looking out for their own interests.

2. Code For The Long Run

Surprisingly, every single currency developer I spoke with said the same thing: Coding your cryptocurrency is usually the least time-intensive part of the process. That's because virtually every cryptocurrency on the market today is based on the open source code of Bitcoin or Litecoin that is available on GitHub.

"The creation itself does not take long. It is maybe only a day," says Peter Otterbach, one of the creators of Coino, which bills itself as the fastest cryptocurrency on the market with a maximum transaction time of only 50 seconds. "To start coding you just need to know about C++ to build your own features in it."

The length of time could be a little longer than a day, however, according to Kolin Evans, developer of the Quark cryptocurrency. "In coding the most complex steps may be related to how complex you plan to have the individual parameters of the blockchain," Evans says. "For example, many currencies just use the Litecoin code and copy it, but with Quark there was a whole new Hash algorithm---that is to say, it's separate from both Bitcoin and Litecoin---so this aspect if you were to change it would certainly be the most difficult." And time consuming. In this case coding a cryptocurrency could take months. However, Evans notes that if a developer is just reusing code from GitHub and changing some simple parameters, that's something a competent coder could do in "literally 30 minutes."

But just because anyone with some C++ skills can make their own cryptocurrency doesn't mean that there will be as many currencies as, say, iOS apps one day. "Feathercoin is in fact a fork of Litecoin," says Ellis. "It began with the minimum number of parameter changes because we felt the most important feature of a currency was survivability."

However, the Feathcoin team noticed that a few of the currencies that came before didn't last very long because they included a novel feature set which would gain short-term speculative hype but then the team often weren't able to follow through on the stewardship of the project longer term and the project would fail. In other words, the developers of those coins that failed probably wanted to make some cheddar on some quick coin creation and didn't want to work at developing the currency for the long run--something which doomed them from the start.

"You have a duty of care at the development end in terms of bug fixing and ensuring the promise made at launch but you also have a duty to educate people of the risks and give them what they need to secure their wealth," Ellis says. If you can't do that, no one is going to stick around to use your coin, and the mining of it will drop off as quickly as downloads did of the first Doodle Jump knockoffs.

3. Get Miners Onboard

Once you've developed your coin you need to spread the word so people start mining it, which raises awareness of its existence and hopefully begins to gain some value in the eyes of its miners and users. This is where makers of cryptocurrencies need to stop thinking like coders and instead look into how human beings put trust (and value) in things.

"A good start is half the way there and so this involves building trust, expressing your vision and intentions to miners, who have the hardware you need, and getting them on board with the opportunity ahead," Feathercoin's Ellis explains. "You have to be honest and respect people's expectations and their tolerance of risk, which many people overestimate.

"Overselling your coin will backfire. Including novel feature sets just to try and stand out will not work either. The market is there to test your grit and determination. You need a group of loyal miners committed to the cause who will process your payments even during slumps in price because they believe in the eventual outcome. It's about good communication and team building.

"Many coins have failed because they undervalue the 'soft stuff.' They think that throwing technology at a problem will make it disappear. Central banks think throwing money at problems does the same; the world has never worked this way. You have to be good at knowing what work needs to be done and be prepared to do the jobs nobody else wants to do."

4. Know Your Merchants

Let's says you've made it this far. You've conceptualized a good cryptocurrency and brought the right team together to code and nurture it along its way. You've spread the news around the cryptocurrency forums and there's a healthy dose of miners actively working to grow your currency. The next step is marketing your currency so all the people mining it have a place to spend it. This is no small feat. After all, you need to convince individuals and merchants that these digital bits you've created hold value and can be traded for things, just like traditional, trusted money.

"It's a process of confidence building," Ellis says. "It takes good stewardship and time to work out what you really believe and stand for. People will buy in to your motives more than your actions, so once you feel confident you then have to start talking about your currency to friends, merchants, on Internet forums and on social media."

The people behind Coino agree. "To start the marketing you need to find the exact target group," Peter Otterbach says. "At first you can just start at the cryptocurrency market itself because the people there know about coins and you see the first reactions. After that it gets more difficult. You need to convince people who mostly don't even know what a cryptocurrency is, so you have to get the currency accepted as a payment solution in online shops to get their attention."

"I would add it's not just about educating them with facts," Ellis notes, "it's about inspiring them to learn and discover the advantages for themselves. Money is a ledger, it is a tool that people will use as a way of achieving their goals and satisfying their needs. Understanding that will take you a long way in your marketing efforts."

Ellis says that merchant adoption is similar to miner adoption, it's just a matter of understanding their different outlooks. "Different stakeholder, same rules. The difference is that miners have a speculative sentiment and merchants are conservative." He notes that merchants have three principal aims: to make money, to save money, and to increase their awareness. "If you can bring them customers and increase their sales while reducing their payment fees, the rest is a matter of persistence and making it as easy as possible to get them started."

5. Global Acceptance Is Not a Step

The last step in your cryptocurrency journey is, according to pundits and conventional wisdom, world domination by your coin. But given that in over 5,000 years no single currency has dominated the globe, it's very unlikely--no matter what Silicon Valley Bitcoin enthusiasts say--that any one cryptocurrency ever will.

Besides, global cryptocurrency domination "doesn't have to be the goal," Ellis says. "Currencies can be local, indeed we think of Feathercoin as a local currency that can serve a global market."

And therein may lie the true market for the burgeoning field of cryptocurrency: hyper-local currencies for certain neighborhoods, cities, events, venues, and groups of people that are built around a community of like-minded consumers allowing them to trade freely, quickly, and securely for goods and services that are important in their lives instead of having to rely on the central banks and larger markets to tell them what arbitrary item, be it a copper coin or a plastic dollar, holds value.

Indeed, in a market where cryptocurrency use is defined by neighborhood boundaries or group memberships there is no need for any one cryptocurrency to "win." There's room for them all--except maybe the ones with memes.

For two years, Rob Wijnberg was the editor of NRC Next, a Dutch daily newspaper. After he was fired, he decided he would start over by launching his own publication--and using an entirely new business model.

"There are a lot of problems with news, the biggest one being that it's always about exceptions, never about rules," says Wijnberg. "Your world view becomes pretty skewed if you just watch the news and never get any context along with it. After two years the chief editor said we have to move in the opposite direction--more news, what is happening today."

So Wijnberg set out to create a news organ that truly served readers--not advertisers--with real reportage and context around stories.

His idea became De Correspondent, an independent, ad-free, Dutch-language publication and platform whose only investors are its subscribers and the founders themselves. The correspondents of the title cover niches from surveillance and satire to child care and "forgotten wars."

Launched four months ago after a crowdfunding campaign which raised $1.7 million, De Correspondent now has over 28,000 subscribers who pay five euros ($6.84) a month. If the Netherlands had the same population as the U.S., that would be equivalent to over 500,000 subscribers.

De Correspondent has a 5% profit cap, ensuring that the rest of its earning are re-invested directly in its journalism. The publication is already in the black. "If 40% of our members don't renew in September, we will still survive," says publisher Ernst-Jan Pfauth.

The Birth of De Correspondent

As the editor of NRC.nl, NRC Media's website, Pfauth was one of the first people who Wijnberg tried to recruit.

"It was a disaster, " Pfauth says of the NRC online presence. "The site was basically a copy-paste from a newspaper. The [web] writers were all just waiting until they were invited [to write] for the actual paper newspaper."

Pfauth had tried to innovate at NRC but the initiative failed. He had hired a group of young journalists and had them focus on providing quick online analysis by interviewing the correspondents of NRC Media's newspapers. "All the newspapers just wrote what the wires wrote," he says. "We had actual correspondents. The analysis of the correspondents had to wait for another day for the newspaper. We would interview them as if they were working for a different medium."

Pfauth then started a project to harness the expertise of NRC's readers. "NRC has a thousand doctors who are subscribers, "he says. "They know more than any one medical editor." Then the private equity firm that owns a majority stake in NRC Media killed the project, and Pfauth jumped ship.

Pfauth's focus on expert analysis converged with Wijnberg's redefinition of news to form the original journalistic agenda for De Correspondent. Now all they needed was a platform.

Technology Meets Journalism

The new journalism team went to visit digital creative agency Momkai. Momkai creates marketing campaigns for brands like Nike and Red Bull, building custom software as well as creating concepts and branding. "We right away noticed that if you want to do this well, you really need to partner up and see it as one company," says Momkai's creative director, Harald Dunnink. "With journalists and designers and developers working together from the get-go." So Dunnink and Momkai's CTO, Sebastian Kersten, joined Pfauth and Wijnberg as cofounders of De Correspondent.

First the team created the De Correspondent's spectacularly successful crowdfunding campaign, eschewing existing crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo to create their own site. "From a creative direction point of view, I really wanted to have control over the whole story," says Dunnink. "There's no Kickstarter telling me how I should present something."

The campaign was featured on the Netherland's top talk show and quickly set crowdfunding records for a journalism project. A total of $1.3 (1 million euros) was raised within eight days. By the end of the 30-day campaign,18,933 Dutch people had contributed a total of $1.7 million.

No More Links

Once the money was in the bank and the first correspondents were on board, Momkai set about building a custom content management system for the journalists, which it calls Respondens, as well as the site which subscribers would see. "Our journalism is not to get your attention. It's to go in-depth," says Wijnberg. "The design had to correspond with that mission."

Having already dispensed with ads, the designers began with a clean slate. Between them, the founders came up with several new features to increase reader focus by eliminating distractions. The first was banning links.

"I always hated that you have links in a story and it totally distracts you," says Dunnink. "I always hated it that you don't have a context for the link. We don't link." Instead of using links within the text of an article, there are side notes which add necessary background or context. If there are a few primary links, they are added at the end of the article like references in an academic paper.

Another feature fills in any information gaps a reader may have. "If you know that information already you skip over it," says Kersten. "It keeps the whole article clean and the writers don't have to assume a level of knowledge. You don't have to write too much information for those who already have a high level of knowledge about it and not enough for people who simply don't know, so they stop reading."

Images are optional. The first article that De Correspondent's image editor, Sterre Sprengers, wrote for the new publication was about how she planned to use less rather than more imagery in De Correspondent. "We put a lot of effort into the photography and illustrations," says Wijnberg. "Most of them we make them ourselves. But it's not just an image with the story. If there's no image that really adds to it, we just don't do an image."

Contributions, Not Comments

While encouraging focus was important in the design, the interaction with subscribers was crucial. "The whole platform, we are building that around the dialog rather than the monologue that it is usually," says Kersten. "You as the journalist are the conversation leader."

Subscribers can follow particular correspondents who share the build up to their stories, including their research and thinking as it develops, with them. Only subscribers can comment on stories, although they can also share the content with others. "After launch, we saw people commenting even more than we hoped for," says Dunnink. "A crazy amount. And they write a lot. What we noticed is that people feel liberated in a way because they know it's really a club. You have to pay to get on there. You have to use your real name. We don't talk about commenting. We call it contribute, to add value to the discussion. It's much more an intellectual debate."

Every month one correspondent hosts an evening for subscribers. This week conflict correspondent Maite Vermeulen hosted a "War for Dummies" evening where refugees from conflicts like that in Syria answered questions. Surveillance correspondent Maurits Martijn organized a crypto party where subscribers could secure their laptops. Correspondent evenings consistently sell out so the publication is currently looking for a larger venue to host them.

Subscribers can share articles with friends, and this is De Correspondent's main method of acquiring new members. "We can get a few hundred new members just due to one article, " says Dunnink. "It's our only marketing tool. The marketing is only the stories. We showed it to the New York Times. They said 'Oh we are going to steal this' (the sharing model). We walked out of there and said to Rob 'This is the first time we have been at an editor's office.' We had never been to any newspaper whatsoever."

Inside De Correspsondent

I sat in on De Correspondent's weekly editorial meeting, held in the cafe of Amsterdam's cinema museum The Eye. It's a five-minute walk from De Correspondent's office in Shell's former R&D lab A Lab. The majority of correspondents are in their 20s, with a few older veterans rounding out the team. Stories in the works ranged from a piece about homosexuals in Uganda to surveillance at Sochi and sexual hooligans (teenagers harassing elderly women) in the Netherlands.

"At a newspaper what generally happens is the the editor-in-chief says 'We have this news. What are we going to do about it?'" says Wijnberg. "There's no real personal attachment to all these subjects and why they are important. Here it's exactly the opposite. [The correspondents] tell me what are they going to write about and why they think it's important. It could be something in the news. That's fine, but if it's not, that's fine also. At a newspaper we would say, 'Why now?' The answer here is 'Because it's important.'"

Wijnberg is clearly proud of his team. "It all started with nothing," he says. "There was no platform, there was no example, there was no money. A lot of these people had very good jobs at established media. That all these people said 'okay, we were going to try and do this' and that it actually worked and that we are sitting here, is in some sense a miracle."

With wearable tech rapidly taking off and Google planning to publicly launch Glass by the end of this year, how do we safeguard privacy when the devices could be recording at any time? A team of researchers from Indiana University have a simple answer: Just teach your devices to recognize when it's not okay to have the camera running.

The researchers call their solution PlaceAvoider, a currently in-development software application designed to allow users of wearables with recording capabilities to identify places where they don't wish to record--or worse, upload to the web--by blacklisting them. The team's co-leader, Apu Kapadia, head of Indiana University's Privacy Lab, told us about the project's origins via email:

We recognized the many great applications of wearable cameras, as well as the privacy harms stemming from their use. Given our team's strengths in privacy-enhancing technologies and computer vision, it seemed like the perfect, relevant problem for us to address. In general, trying to have an algorithm discern whether an image is "sensitive" is a hard, if not impossible, problem. So we explored specific types of sensitive images that could be recognized. We realized that blacklisting sensitive spaces would be useful to people and may be a tractable problem to solve. And thus the PlaceAvoider project was born.

Such an approach suggests that the mounting ubiquity of wearable devices dictates a future in which recording is the default state--that, instead of actively having to turn our devices on, we'll have to consciously remember to turn them off. As such, it's going to be more difficult to tell when someone is recording you. Google Glass, after all, doesn't actually have a hardwired recording light.

While software like PlaceAvoider would be a boon to the personal privacy of those who use wearable tech, it could potentially be a reassurance to those around the user--provided there were some way of bystanders knowing that they were "off the record," so to speak.

When asked about this, Kapadia responded that while the issue is an important one, the approach taken by PlaceAvoider in its current state may not be best suited toward addressing it:

We think studying and addressing "bystander privacy" is of great importance, and we are currently exploring this issue as well. Already PlaceAvoider can blacklist spaces from other users ("please don't take pictures of my office"), but this approach requires cooperation from the camera owner to honor others' privacy demands.

However, privacy concerns aren't the only potential applications for PlaceAvoider. In a story for the MIT Technology Review, co-lead David Crandall states that its algorithms could be used to better automate the organization of vast quantities of images, thereby increasing the utility of image libraries.

Also, having the software in place could be a big help when law enforcement officials accuse you of using your wearable tech to conduct criminal activity.

As Bitcoin becomes more widely adopted and headlines of its use for money laundering abound, regulators have increasingly taken notice. This week, the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) held two days of hearings as part of a six-month-long inquiry into how to regulate cryptocurrencies.

As Gothamist reported a few weeks ago there are even plans to install a Bitcoin ATM in New York City. But in order for things like that to be feasible, the state regulatory authorities need to institute appropriate policies and give the currency (if it is in fact a "currency") their blessing. In addition, a number of business based in New York are involved in the Bitcoin market. The purpose of the hearings today and tomorrow are to have experts help inform NYDFS policymakers in their ultimate decisions.

Superintendent Lawsky stated that NYDFS hopes to "put forward, during the course of 2014, a proposed regulatory framework for virtual currency firms operating in New York."

Given New York's importance as a financial hub, any regulations put in place here will be a sort of pilot program for regulations elsewhere or at the federal level. Major online retailers such as Overstock.com and Rapid Tiger are now accepting Bitcoins via Coinbase and BitPay, making the issue of regulation more pressing.

The hearings were overshadowed by Sunday's arrest of Charles Shrem, CEO of the New York-based Bitcoin exchange BitInstant, for money laundering related to drug sales on Silk Road. His arrest came up multiple times during the proceedings.

Bitcoin's Silk Road Problem

Lawsky made it clear that his main concern is to put in place regulations that prevent money laundering. He reminded the expert witnesses and press in the room that what we call money laundering is often "too nice a term" for what we really mean: criminal financing that facilitates the trafficking of drugs, humans, and weapons. All of which are activities that Bitcoin, with its ability to conduct transactions near-anonymously, has reportedly been used for, most notoriously in its association with the Silk Road darknet website.

The first panel yesterday was comprised of Bitcoin investors, including the Winklevoss twins of Facebook fame/notoriety. (When Bitcoin's value temporarily surged to $1,000/BTC, the Winklevosses doubled down and released a statement saying they think Bitcoin is nowhere near its highest value. That's code for: We've made a huge investment in Bitcoin, so now we're going to hype it up more to try to increase the return on our investment.)

Other witnesses were investors Jeremy Liew, Fred Wilson, and Barry Silbert.

A focus of the discussion was on how to best approach regulation. Liew observed that how to pursue regulation is clearest around payment processors, such as Coinbase. But less clear for Bitcoin exchanges, such as Mt. Gox. For that reason, he explained, the largest Bitcoin processors are based in the U.S., while the largest exchanges are based abroad, in Japan and Slovenia.

Wilson applauded NYDFS, saying "You recognize that while we need regulation, we need regulation that doesn't reduce innovation. We should regulate at the edges of the system, but not how the system itself operates."

Gotta Regulate 'Em All

One question that Lawsky asked the panelists was whether they believed it more likely that we will end up with one overarching virtual currency (Bitcoin) or have a proliferation of multiple virtual currencies, from Litecoin to Dogecoin and others. Lawsky made it clear that he finds Bitcoin's public ledger of all transactions appealing from a regulatory perspective and bemoaned the fact that not all virtual currencies have implemented the same feature.

The panelists gave ambiguous answers to that question, likely because they recognized that one of the challenges of regulating virtual currencies is that even if one is regulated, another decentralized, unregulated one can pop up just as easily, ready to be used for the same money-laundering activities.

Chris Ellis, a cofounder of cryptocurrency Feathercoin, took this position when he spoke to FastCo.Labs, saying "They might try and regulate Bitcoin but they won't be able to regulate the cryptocurrency ecosystem and its protocol anymore than they can regulate earthquakes."

When Lawsky raised the issue of what kinds of regulations would be most helpful, Liew replied that Shrem's arrest was evidence that current laws are doing their job. He and other investors on the panel failed to understand that Lawsky's concern is with preventing money laundering activity in the first place.

It was clear that the investors' preference was to have as little regulation as possible, but also have the legitimacy that comes with having the blessing of state regulators. To that end, their statements attempted to emphasize the stability of Bitcoin and the promise it can bring to online commerce.

The Government's Perspective

In contrast to the investor perspective, the first panel on the second day was comprised of two government prosecutors, Cyrus B. Vance, District Attorney of New York County, and Richard B. Zabel, Deputy U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Vance made his view clear immediately: "It's our position that digital currency exchanges should require licenses in order to do business in New York State."

"We all thought growing up that a crime scene is typically defined by yellow police tape on a street corner. The reality today is that the Internet is our 21st-century crime scene," he began.

Zabel continued by emphasizing the danger of Bitcoin as an anonymous financial instrument, which prompted reactions both within the room and online--as Lawsky explained that it is closer to pseudonymous and Twitter saw a flurry of corrections.

Can Bitcoin Improve Commerce?

The second panel today featured Fred Ehrsam, a cofounder of Coinbase; Jeremy Allaire, founder of Circle Internet Financial; and Jonathan Johnson, executive vice-chairman of Overstock.com.

Predictably, this group of panelists focused on the promise of Bitcoin for both consumers and retailers. One example that Johnson raised is being able to process payments without paying a credit card transaction fee. Another example is the promise of Bitcoin as a "programmable currency" that web services can build on top of or add reference data to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Interestingly, Allaire said that one of the obstacles to adoption is the lack of clarity around taxation of Bitcoin income, calling it a "fundamental issue." For much of the cyber-libertarian wing, one of the allure's of Bitcoin is its ability to circumvent taxation.

Lawsky agreed and said that beyond the urgent issue of addressing money laundering, "the number two problem that lawmakers need to address is the tax and IRS issue."

Allaire also argued that U.S. exchanges can "mature" the Bitcoin trading platform and offer investment instruments such as hedges and derivatives. (Because if there's one thing we don't have enough of, it's ways to bet on assets in the market.)

The Future of Regulating Cryptocurrencies

The fact that state bureaucrats are trying to figure out how they should relate to Bitcoin and other virtual currencies is certainly a sign of the time.

For his part, Ellis issued his own warning to regulators: "If your default response is to fall back on the familiar territory of your rule book then all you will do is present someone else with an opportunity to do the work you refuse to do and eventually regulate yourself out of existence, he said.

"The regulation is baked in to the software, it's set by the developers at launch. Those parameters can change but only with the consensus of the network. Perhaps the U.S. government could issue DollarCoin and let the public decide [which it prefers]."

Chris Larsen, CEO of Ripple Labs, which created a decentralized payment protocol that supports both fiat currency and virtual currency, had a different perspective. Speaking to FastCo.Labs, he argues that clearer regulations are essential for commerce to grow.

"Regulations are an important part of driving traction for emerging payment systems and math-based currencies. Right now, developers are building groundbreaking applications in a cloud of uncertainty, wondering: Will I get shut down? Incumbents are engaged and excited, but the biggest remaining barrier to implementation is reputational risk, which can be alleviated with clear regulations."

"The existing laws around money transmission make sense for current systems, but new payment protocols require new regulatory tactics in order to optimize efficiency and security. It is critical that we build an operational regulatory framework this year for math-based currencies and payment protocols to really catch fire."

How did anyone make music before their devices were so powerful and connected? Whether it's shooting video of a live show or capturing some initial lyrics and melody on your phone, the pain it takes to create a song is slowly being eliminated. Here's some of the most impressive new gear aimed at musicians and the musically minded.

GoPro

Recently a musician friend asked me for a camera recommendation. There are plenty of good options, especially with new micro four thirds getting better all the time, but I recommended a GoPro, which recently announced the GoPro Hero3+ Black Edition/Music aimed at musicians. The camera is the same as what's been available, but it comes with clips and attachments for drums, guitars, and mic stands. The camera doesn't include the waterproof casing, which makes the unit slightly lighter and the ports more accessible for audio and streaming. With full HD recording, 4k support, Wi-Fi, and 12mp pictures it's hard to think of a better tiny camera for a band to take on the road.

Line 6 AmpliFi

Amps are usually about sound, not aesthetics. But it's hard to deny that Line 6's new AmpliFi series of guitar amps is beautiful. Each amp is packed with five speakers--the main one being a custom 12" one from Celestion--and Line 6 is promising fantastic sound at loud volumes. Bluetooth enabled, the amp can also be your party speaker for music from your mobile device. It can also be controlled remotely via the Line 6 app. Another cool feature? The amp can model almost any tone just from sampling a recorded song. So now you can sound like your favorite artist more quickly than ever before. If the amp delivers on its promises, it'll have beauty and the brains, still a rare combination in the music and tech space.

Hum

Do you need a dedicated songwriting app? Hum is a tool for building songs on the go. The iPhone app streamlines the hassle of keeping track of a progressing song and adds a few extras that the organized musician will appreciate. The first screen of Hum is for lyrics, the second is for organization--being able to tag a key, the dynamics, mood, and tuning--while the third screen provides room for miscellaneous notes. The most important part is the orange button prevalent through the app to record your idea, complete with count in and looping feature. Simple, yes, but Hum is focused on exactly what an iPhone carrying songwriter would want and need.

Singaling

Singaling brings vocal effects to your iPhone or iPad. It wasn't too long ago that on the fly auto-tune was a big deal, now it's in your pocket. Singaling requires a dedicated microphone to function, whether that's the one attached your earbuds you use to play around with or a higher-end third-party mic. Either way, the amount of programmable sounds and level of control from a $2 app is pretty crazy. Although there are plenty of preconfigured effects, it's the auto-tune that will most likely get the most use.

Jalapeno

What if you could remix a song based on your movements, would it increase your activity output? Jalapeno is a small hardware device that gets attached to your skateboard, snowboard, bike, or another piece of sports equipment and provides real-time changes to the music you're listening to. Go off a jump and the music slows and picks up again when you land--just like in the movies. Unfortunately with an asking price of $199 per unit, it doesn't look like the product will reach its funding goal.

Guitar Wing

Rather than connecting your guitar to a bunch of pedals, the folks at Livid think that the way to add effects to your guitar might be wirelessly with the Guitar Wing. The peripheral works with almost any existing guitar, is near universal, and is not limited to a single guitar or body shape. Once the project inevitably reaches its funding goal, it'll allow button pressing and finger sliding instead of pedal foot stomping. Livid is taking its expertise in console-based instruments and bringing it back to the guitar, part of the company's early roots.

Korg Gadget

Korg has already been experimenting with the iPad as an instrument since 2010, but its latest app, Gadget, takes things to a whole new level. The app features 15 different synths and drum machines--the "gadgets" that can be combined in multiple configurations. Korg is calling Gadget an all-in-one production studio, which appears to be accurate, but doesn't come cheap to the casual user at a price tag of ~$40.

The rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has finally made the dream of online classrooms a reality. But what happens when the government steps in to decide who can be in the classroom? Earlier this week, some Coursera users found out.

Thanks to restrictions on U.S. relations with other countries, students from Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Sudan wishing to take online courses on Coursera have found themselves blocked from the wildly popular MOOC service.

As it turns out, the U.S. government considers parts of Coursera courses to be "services" and thus subject to export restrictions from countries the U.S. government has sanctioned. Despite finding a loophole to partially clear services in Syria, Coursera continues to negotiate with the State Department and the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) as criticism mounts on their Facebook page and elsewhere.

But it won't be very constructive to criticize Coursera, said the affected course's professor, Dr. Ebrahim Afsah. In a letter to his students, Afsah admonished the U.S. government for playing politics with education and suggested that his affected students should use hola.org or VPN routers to work around Coursera's IP address restrictions.

Dr. Afsah cannot simply switch to another MOOC provider, since the decision to go with Coursera was made at a central level by the University of Copenhagen where he is employed. If he could, Dr. Afsah told Fast Company, he would go with a European platform to avoid the unilateral lawmaking that the U.S. imposes on the rest of the world, from copyright issues to data protection issues to sanctions and more.

"The point is rather symbolic, or actually political: Which message does the U.S. send out and we, as a European institution, unwittingly become complicit in carrying?" Dr. Afsah said.

Indeed, the restriction seems more symbolic than effective. IP address bans are notoriously easy to work around--just ask kids in other countries who use proxies to watch U.S. TV on Hulu. Whether streaming television or evading government firewalls, the Internet, uh, finds a way.

Like many things on the Internet, MOOCs are still new enough to operate without much regulation--until now. Previously, export control regulations for MOOCs had been unclear. Coursera interpreted them as allowing students in sanctioned countries to participate and receive free statements of accomplishment so long as Coursera didn't provide Signature Track certificates, which require financial transactions to sanctioned countries. Last week, Coursera received "definitive guidance" that any access to the course experience (like peer grading and forum discussion) is considered a "service" and subject to export restrictions.

After poring over OFAC legislation, Coursera determined that OFAC Syria General License no. 11A authorizes services for NGOs--particularly those that increase educational access. Coursera opened access to Syrian users on Tuesday but must still restrict users from acquiring or using Signature Track certificates.

Other MOOC providers, like MIT and Harvard's edX, are having similar troubles navigating the uncertain legal waters.

"This is new territory," edX general counsel Tena Herlihy told the Financial Times. "MOOCs have come up in the last year and a half, and we don't know the regulatory scheme." EdX received licenses to operate in Iran and Cuba last year. Evidently, negotiating with OFAC on a nation-by-nation basis is the only way not to run afoul of the Treasury Department's legal sanctions.

The State Department's restrictions for educational access are an ironic blow to last October's partnership between the department and Coursera. Deputy assistant secretary Meghann Curtis trumpeted the State Department and USAID's desire to increase access to high-quality education.

"We see this as an opportunity to draw an audience and create a forum for open and spirited discussion," Curtis told Fast Company in October. "One of the classes is American foreign policy. I think that will make an extremely rich forum to debate the issues."