How do you transition people from physical music--CDs, radios, home theater--toward Internet listening? In the mind of Daniel Conrad, founder of Beep, you connect that existing stereo system to the cloud.

"With our dial, and the way the lights respond to touch, we hope that we're evoking some of that magic again," he says. "At the same time, Beep is a digital product. So we present a simple interface for the digital age--for example, tap once to start the music."

Like an Apple Airport Express, Beep is a small piece of hardware that enables almost any pair of speakers to become an output for streaming music. But unlike other wireless speakers, you actually interact with this device: It's a large tactile dial that has light indicators for volume level and blinks to show it's buffering--like a smarter version of the giant volume knob already on your receiver. This initial product is up for pre-order with wider partnerships planned for the future.

Who Cares About Wireless Speakers?

Wireless speakers may not seem important, but it's the foundation of transitioning people from locally stored music files to music that's streamed from the Internet. The only way streaming music works out financially is if there's a lot more people paying into the pool to pay rights holders. This is why the wireless speaker space and the incumbent Sonos has seen increased competition from Bose, Samsung, and Pure, to name a few.

If Sonos follows the Apple and iOS model with a closed and controlled system, then Beep is Android. Beep was born out of the need to be more flexible and cheaper. It makes sense that Beep has partnered with Pandora, which has also taken the same open approach and tried to be a part of as many devices as possible. Conrad wouldn't tip his hand about future partners other than to say there definitely would be more music sources coming. If I had to guess, however, Spotify seems like a good fit as the company already has Spotify Connect in place for just this type of thing.

If Beep can do the same on the hardware side and make every speaker sold at Best Buy or Target a Beep speaker--sold by whatever brand--there's the better chance the company can push its vision for all speakers to be connected. Conrad says that he sees every speaker being wirelessly connected to streaming content within two to four years.

The Reality Of Connected Speakers

Not only does Beep allow someone to stream music directly to a pair of speakers, if there are multiple units connected you can sync them up and play music throughout the house. I saw a live demo of this function: multiple Beep devices synced up and streaming music together. It worked great, but did make me wince a little to think of the technical details making this all happen since Beep connects using standard Wi-Fi rather than some proprietary protocol.

Anyone responsible for their home's wireless router understands the frustrations that come along with the technology, so sending high-quality music over a Wi-Fi network seems like a bad idea. I asked Conrad how the team built something to account for homes with unreliable networks as well as other potential problems.

"Wi-Fi loses packets of data all the time, communication latency is unknown, and so getting synchronization right is far from trivial," says Conrad. "Building a system that is robust to all of these potential failure points, that music keeps playing and stays synced, requires a lot of testing and a lot of work. We've spent the last year and a half effectively building a software layer that abstracts away all these network failure points so the music can keep playing seamlessly even when the network is unreliable."

The team even created its own Wi-Fi router software for testing. "We call it 'Evil Router,'" he says, and it is "designed to break in every way a Wi-Fi network can: throwing out packets, interrupting connection, knocking Beeps off the network. So we're building a system that's stable even in the worst environment."

A day after Philip Seymour Hoffman had died of a drug overdose, a year-old article by comedian and actor Russell Brand on why he gave up drugs suddenly burst into the Guardian's top 10 most read list. There was gradual growth in Facebook traffic throughout the day culminating in Brand himself tweeting it at 11:13PM, setting off a massive wave of Facebook referrals.

"Somebody tweeted that yesterday completely independently of us," said Guardian architect Graham Tackley. "So we posted it on our Facebook account," says Tackley. "We wouldn't have noticed that it had gotten popular if we didn't have real-time feedback."

That real-time feedback came from the Guardian's in-house "attention data" tool Ophan. It tracks all of the Guardian's traffic and makes it available to 400 journalists, editors, and developers with a time-lag of less than five seconds. Users can see what's being read most on the Guardian's various home pages. The data can be filtered by by country, time period, section, mobile app and devices, browsers, referral sources, and more.

For a particular story, journalists can see how the traffic has changed over time and get data like which tweets have driven the most traffic or the effect of internal promotion (putting the article on the Guardian's home page).

The Guardian's developers use Ophan to track load time on its various web and mobile sites. The team releases several new version of the website per day. "You can tell when you have broken something because the graph drops to the floor," says Tackley. "If you get that feedback in a couple of minutes you can fix it and the impact is not so great."

From Hack Day To Essential Tool

Last year the Guardian had 84 million unique readers every month but its third-party analytics tool only provided traffic data with a four-hour time lag broken down per hour. Most Guardian journalists and editors didn't even have access to that data. This made life difficult for the newspaper's digital audience manager, Chris Moran. One of his responsibilities was SEO for 400 pieces of content the Guardian can produce in a day.

"When he (Moran) was trying to promote stuff and tweak headlines he got very limited feedback four hours later," says Tackley. "For a news organization, that's pretty poor." So Tackley decided to take on the problem during one of the Guardian's in-house hack days.

Tackley already spent a lot of his time analyzing the Guardian's web logs to identify the causes of any problems with the site. Every reader visit was also logged there. He tailed the logs on to a couple of servers, pushed it to a messaging queue, and created a Scala Play Framework app to consume and display the data on a dashboard.

Since Moran only cared about what was happening now, Tackley stored the last three minutes of data in-memory in a Scala list. He was still only sampling 10% of the Guardian's traffic at this point but for the SEO team, it was a revolution. "What this enabled them to do was learn for themselves what worked and what didn't," says Tackley. Moran asked Tackley to keep the dashboard running, which for six months he did on his own desktop.

Word got around and more and more Guardian employees started to use Tackley's dashboard, now named Ophan. Tackley decided to upgrade it to capture the Guardian's entire click stream, which generates between 15 million and 25 million events a day and store the data for seven days. This meant moving from his desktop to Amazon Web Services.

A JavaScript hidden pixel on the website now records every event instead of retrieving it from the logs and places it in a message queue. Since there were now too many events to hold in-memory, an app called Serf takes the message queue, extracts what was needed, and inserts it into an ElasticSearch cluster. The dashboard asks the same questions of ElasticSearch, a real-time search and analytics engine, that it had previously posed to the in-memory event list.

Analyze This

Journalists and editors can now explore and understand audience attention for themselves and take action accordingly. If a great piece isn't being read it can be promoted internally or externally. If there's an unexpected hit like Russell Brand's article, it can be boosted accordingly. The team that manages the front page even uses it to see what has been published recently.

"Historically as an organization we have been a bit nervous of looking at how many people are looking at our content," says Tackley. "In a serious news organization like ours there's obviously a fear of the BuzzFeed-ification of news, especially as social starts to catch up with traditional search referrals. People traditionally think that the only thing that does well on Facebook is 'top 10 cats.' Actually our serious journalism does really well as well. People are realizing that looking at what people read is not evil. It shouldn't be the only thing you chase and it's merely one input into the editorial process but it's not necessarily a negative thing."

Ophan has helped the Guardian get a lot better at posting on Facebook. "Most of that is applying the subbing rules you use in a traditional print product. Pick out the key line. Pick out the key quote" he says. "There's a number of journalists who run their own Twitter accounts who have actually started seeing the style of tweet that works for their content."

"It used to be that when your article was queued to be printed, that's it. It's over, " says Tackley. "One of the things we have realized, and we see it again and again, is that if you publish something on the web and it doesn't do very well in the first hour, probably it's not going anywhere ever. Understanding how people are going to find an article from the moment you have published it is a really important part of the production cycle. We are certainly getting better at that."

New software products are born every day to great fanfare, complete with Twitter back-slapping and a TechCrunch headline. But over time, as growth stalls, they often end up in the shadow world of broken URLs and bounced emails. Or as Jason Fried, cofounder of 37signals, puts it: "Every time a product is released, it's a ticking time bomb."

Gracefully retiring a product is one of the hardest parts about succeeding at software. Fried knows; since founding his company 15 years ago, he and his team have launched nearly as many products and books as they have hired people. Then yesterday, Fried made a surprise announcement: 37signals was rebranding as Basecamp, its most popular software product with 15 million users, and would be phasing out all other offerings in favor of a simpler approach. "How to make progress on projects together--that's the fundamental thing," he says.

But does this kind of radical focus actually make life simpler for companies and their customers?

Will Rebranding Actually Work?

"Every time you have to explain something, you're losing a customer," says Ryan Jacoby, founder of innovation consultancy Machine and former New York location head for Ideo. "Basecamp means something to buyers in a way that 37signals doesn't." So at least in a sales and marketing sense, having one product and one brand should ease confusion.

We know, at least, what happens in the reverse scenario: splitting one company into two. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings can attest, the backlash can be swift. "It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility," he wrote as a mea culpa in September 2011 in response to the revolt that followed his left-field Qwikster announcement.

The carefully orchestrated death of Google Reader was far more successful. Google announced its decision to put the product out to pasture with enough lead time for new alternatives to emerge--Feedly, Digg Reader, NewsBlur, and others were quick to step up--and eased the transition by giving customers a painless way to export their data. But some users still spewed anti-Google venom into the social networks.

Product Retirement Is Hard Work

To avoid a Reader-like debacle, Fried will try to keep Highrise and Campfire users supported for as long as possible. If he can't find buyers willing to keep the products alive, he plans to do so himself.

"It's not a cheap commitment to make," Fried says, but "that's our problem, that's not our customers' problem. I'd like to see more companies do that sort of thing. The problem is, a lot of companies don't have a business model that makes that possible."

Giff Constable, CEO of Neo, a product development shop, says that companies often forget that there's effectively a second validation cycle to consider when developing products. "It has to be right for the customer--you need to validate that first," he says. "But it also has to be right for the company: values, resources, domain expertise."

A Different View From Down Under

Sydney-based software company Atlassian represents a different school of thought. Founded in 2002, Atlassian is roughly the same age as Basecamp, it similarly builds software designed to support team collaboration, and it also relies on customer service and word-of-mouth marketing rather than traditional sales.

But the commonalities stop there. Earlier this week Atlassian announced that it had raised an additional $3 million in venture funds, topping off the mammoth $60 million Series A it raised in 2010. Moreover, its product suite keeps expanding, thanks to acquisitions like HipChat and in-house builds like Stash, which offers teams a way to manage Git repositories behind the firewalls of their own private clouds. With a track record that includes 10 straight years of profitable quarters, Atlassian's founders are now preparing for their IPO. Between 5 million and 10 million users log in to Atlassian products on a daily basis.

Basecamp is on a different kind of trajectory. It plans to stay small--there are 43 employees scattered around the world, with 14 at headquarters in Chicago--and instead grow in its ability to understand and solve customer problems. "A customer isn't thinking about a feature; they're thinking about an outcome," Fried says.

Still, Fried promises that there is R&D underway. "There's a lot of room for invention and creation around Basecamp without creating new product lines," he says, mentioning possible add-ons for integrations, time-tracking, and video conferencing.

All within the bounds of the Basecamp values, of course: "All of these decisions that we made public today come down to maintaining our company culture," he says. "If we aren't happy at work, we won't make good stuff."

Where does that leave customers looking for solutions they can depend on, built to last? If you're a large-scale enterprise, you can pay for that security. If you're a smaller organization, Basecamp is betting that you're going to look for a product backed by values you can trust--and they might just be right.

Language-learning tool Duolingo was named Apple's App of the Year for 2013. Its game mechanics make memorizing foreign words for medical terms or days of the week fun and addictive--as do Duolingo's other gamified competitors like MindSnacks, Babbel, or even the lolcats-inspired CatAcademy.

Can these cheap or free games can pose a real threat to the Rosetta Stones and Pimsleurs of the world? And where do language game apps fall short?

"It can definitely be a nice supplement, but it's lacking the interactive component," says Kelsey White, a doctoral student in linguistics at the University of Wisconsin who's written about Duolingo's efficacy. "It doesn't really train you to listen to another person's utterance and provide an appropriate response. There is also little to no cultural or pragmatic training, as of yet. You still may be unaware of certain conventions needed to carry out a polite conversation."

Right now, Duolingo, MindSnacks, and other gamified language apps offer mini-games or challenges that revolve around vocabulary and basic grammar. If you make three mistakes and lose all your lives, for example, or let the timer run out, you lose the lesson. Do well, and you'll set the high score among your Facebook friends, or get rewarded in virtual currency you can use to "buy" power-ups. The games' colorful interfaces and catchy gameplay have sparked a frenzy of downloads that has catapulted into the millions. But the apps don't offer any extensive training in listening or conversing. You can often listen to a recording of a native speaker, and repeat the sentence back aloud, but there's no back-and-forth with another human.

"Speaking face-to-face is critical, and we certainly recommend pairing that experience with using the app," says Jesse Pickard, CEO and cofounder of MindSnacks. "Learning a language requires multiple tools to master."

There are certainly online tools that help you find real humans to talk to, though. But none of them have the slick presentations and video game influence that helped launch apps like Duolingo to App Store fame. HelloTalk trumpets itself as being the first mobile app that connects language with real speaker partners, while Conversation Exchange matches you with native speakers of your target language in your area, facilitating Skype sessions or face-to-face meetings. Verbling offers in-browser video chat with people all over the world looking for conversation practice.

To be fair, the issue is apples and oranges. It's way more complicated to gamify human conversation than it is to gamify the rote memorization of French breakfast foods or cardinal directions. But those more itemized elements of language learning--vocabulary, grammar, syntax, spelling, visual recognition--that's where game-centric, goal-driven apps like Duolingo or MindSnacks shine.

"The truth is, any method that claims you can reach perfect fluency is misleading. Mastering a language takes years and often involves moving to a different country for full immersion," says Gina Gotthilf, Duolingo's head of communications. "What we do know is that we're at the level of college classes, and that currently, users who begin learning a language from scratch on Duolingo can reach an intermediate level at the completion of the course."

And she's right. According to a study conducted December 2012 by the City University of New York, it would take a completely novice user of Spanish "on average 26 to 49 hours of study with Duolingo to cover the material for the first college semester of Spanish." Note: Duolingo funded the study, but the data collection and analysis were conducted independently by CUNY's research team.

That being said, the study does contain limitations. For example, the study can't generalize the results to account for other languages other than Spanish. Since the study only consisted of American adults whose first language is English, it might take longer for the same subjects to learn a non-Romance, non-Germanic language, like Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, which use completely different writing systems and are the most difficult foreign languages to learn among native English speakers. Duolingo says they're working on those East Asian languages, by the way--they're shooting to launch them in the next six months or so.

Also, no matter how many high-score challenges or unlockable achievements or cartoony fanfares you throw into an educational product, it's no guarantee that users are going to actually stick with it. A Portuguese tutoring app can be the next Angry Birds or Super Mario Bros. in terms of fun factor, but if the user's heart isn't it, it doesn't matter how exciting the service is to play.

"Many people dropped out of the study or spent less than two hours studying Spanish," the CUNY study says. "It is highly recommended that Duolingo develops some kind of individual online clock which shows how much time each user spends by date or week. If they spend less than two hours studying for two months, their expectations for improvement cannot be very high." (Duolingo currently has a line graph that tracks how many points you've accumulated in the games over the course of a week.)

Further research is needed, but so far, gamified language apps seem like they're great as either a primer or to hone basic grammar, survival phrases, or themed vocabulary, and the game elements make the material more engaging. And the fact that apps like Duolingo and MindSnacks are so popular and well-received means users are interested in learning about new languages and cultures, which is fantastic.

But even if the game itself is super fun, it all comes down to the individual. If you really want to get that job, travel to that country, or woo that cutie at the bar, self-motivation is the greatest power-up you'll get.

"A positive attitude towards the subject means a greater reception towards learning it," MindSnacks' Pickard says. "Games really help with this."

Ever since he was a kid watching Doctor Who, Chris Wild had the burning desire to travel back in time. Today, the 43-year-old English museum curator is webmaster of Retronaut.com, a site leading the Internet's recent obsession for finding, sharing, tweeting, and pinning historic images.

Like Retronaut, @HistoryInPics, Historypin, @History_Pics, and WhatWasThere.com have all enjoyed spikes in popularity in recent years. What makes Retronaut different? Its images are relatively obscure, carefully gathered from museums and archives, and are what Chris Wild dubs "disruptive."

"As you know, 'disruptive' is a big word among startups," he says. Wild credits disruption to Retronaut's success. He's talking about disruption in a temporal sense--meaning, the images on his site are specifically chosen to make the viewer feel like they're looking not at the past, but rather at a different version of the present.

The example he points to is the most popular image on Retronaut, and the first post on the site to go viral, which happened back in 2010: 1949 photos of London's Piccadilly Circus in full color. Instead of seeing grainy black and white, viewers see the crisp, colorful streets of one of England's most bustling and most famous intersections, with the quality of how it'd look in person. It's not just a vignette from a distant decade. Wild says the high quality makes it a "different version of now." Technology, according to Wild, will permanently alter the way we think about time and trends--and that's Retronaut's core mission.

"In the next few decades, our notion of history will change," Wild says. "Prior to the Internet and widespread digital technology, history was analog, and becomes less and less granular the further back we go. Most of those pictures are in black and white, and the pictures become fewer and fewer. History becomes something that is ghostly and old and sepia and dusty--that's never going to be the case again. From this point, we will have an almost immaculate recording of everything. Google Street View is updated all the time, for example. It won't be something we can ever notice, because it'll just be the case."

Other examples from the site that evoke a remixed version of the past include color photos of the Hindenburg's interior (because Wild says you rarely see images inside any zeppelin, let alone ones in recognizable color), photos of Afghani female scientists in the 1950s (women in laboratories suit 2014, but it's a jolt to see such progressive photos in a country that Westerners deem challenging for women), and hi-res color photos of World War II-era Manhattan (the 70-year-old images could've been taken with a digital camera).

"I use Pinterest and Reddit all the time," Wild says. "Retronaut works very well as a viral post site, so it's got a BuzzFeed element to it. It's the very visual sort of stuff you're likely to share on your lunch break, so it's got that superficiality about it, which I like." And the site clearly borrows elements from social media: Registered Retronaut.com users can "favorite" thousands of images from the site to create personalized, digitized time capsules.

The images that make it on to Retronaut all must have that disorienting, disruptive quality. That's made his site so successful, with its over 200,000 Facebook fans. Wild recalls a recent trip to New York City, in which he meandered down to Battery Park. As he stood near Ground Zero, he unwittingly found himself near St. Paul's Chapel, Manhattan's oldest church and where George Washington supposedly attended service on his inauguration day. Wild noticed the weathered headstones outside. One of the still-legible epitaphs read: The wife of William Holly, who departed this life 1785, aged 26 years and 9 months.

"That stone hasn't moved," Wild said. "She was once living in this small, rural town that was once Manhattan, and her headstone is still there," in what's now America's financial hub. "That's what I mean by 'disruptive,'" Wild says--it literally rocks your brain out of its complacency. That psychological disruption has landed him a book partnership with National Geographic: On September 2, Random House will publish his 350-page, image-filled book, Retronaut: The Photographic Time Machine, which will showcase some of the website's greatest hits.

So how does Wild assemble his collection? It's actually quite easy--provided you've got years of experience working in museums, which Wild does. The site's content stretches a span from prehistory (cave paintings) to the Dark Ages to the present day, and he works closely with cultural institutions who supply the choicest images. In addition, he's digital curator of Europeana, the gargantuan archive of more than 30 million historical items supplied by 2,300 of Europe's galleries, libraries, and museums. Wild curates a capsule a day for their website, and in doing so, created the most-viewed image on Europeana's website (a very small child standing next to a very large pig), as well as the most-searched term ("plastic surgery," particularly nose jobs in the 1930s), of last year. "For our children, their notion of 'history' will be very different than ours," says Wild.

Crunch time: the last-minute all-nighter, the deadline rush, the sweat and Red Bull and sleeping at your desk. For fledgling companies, it can be a perverse milestone--one which has become largely taboo. But there's one corner of the tech industry where billion-dollar products still live and die shamelessly by crunch time: video gaming.

Culture Of Overwork

Over-exertion is a problem in a lot of industries, but in gaming, whistleblowers and disgruntled employees regularly vent to the press, often anonymously, indicating that marquee game studios have formalized the habit in a way that other industries haven't.

For most game developers, the crunch is a fact of life. An industry survey of approximately 1,000 developers found that 52% of of those surveyed put in between 40-60-hour workweeks during a crunch period, while 32% put in 61-80 hours or more. Furthermore, the study found it almost always negatively affects the personal lives of developers:

Asked to measure the impact crunch cycles have on their social and family life, 1% of devs respond that it has a very positive impact, 4% report a somewhat positive impact, 17% see no impact, 50% see a somewhat negative impact, and 28% see a very negative impact. In general, devs start reporting a negative impact on their social/family lives when crunch schedules exceed 50-hour weeks.

How It Feels

To get a feel for what this was like, I reached out to a game developer with experience at three different marquee studios who agreed to speak to me on the condition of anonymity. According to the developer, the crunch experience varied from place to place. "I've had it both ways. I've had it where I was happy to stay late... and then I had times when it was imposed on me and it had lasting damage to my relationships and my life."

The experience the developer referred to occurred from 2011 to 2012 where they worked for a major studio on a top-selling, highly rated first-person shooter. Their troubles began when top brass at the studio decreed early in 2011 that the game's release date was moved up a full year--from an original Fall 2013 projection to Fall of 2012.

"Despite our engineering, creative, HR, every kind of risk that we posed to them, and all of our concerns, we were given a due date... So people scrambled to make new decisions, cut features, deprioritize features, come up with a whole new production pipeline."

In the mad dash to adjust to an accelerated timeline, the required crunch time began to escalate.

"It kinda crept on. It was like, 'Hey guys, we're gonna be ordering food on Tuesdays and Thursdays every week. If you are staying past 7 p.m.; if you have a lot of work to do, email us, and we'll make sure you get a meal.'" For a month or two, that arrangement stood. But then another email went out, adding another day to the list. And then another.

"In it's final form, it was lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday and then some people were coming in on Sundays."

The word, "crunch," the developer says, was never used.

"This is people coming in at 9. Working all day. Leaving 10, 11, 12, 1, depending what they were doing. And then coming back the next morning and doing it all over again, six to seven days a week. To my knowledge, five couples got a divorce because of this. Almost the entire creative leadership has now quit, after ship. It was toxic; it was a toxic environment."

"My relationships became affected," the developer said, "I became affected as a person. I wasn't sleeping, I wasn't eating very well. I was going out to drink a lot [sort of laughs] It was the only way to deal…[you start] shirking work, because you feel the anxiety. I'd wake up in the morning, and I'd be like, 'Oh god I have to go to work. I do not want to get out of bed today, because I don't want to deal with this crap.' Because if people on the ground are feeling this, it means the leads are feeling it, the execs are feeling it--and they push down harder and make it worse, you know?"

Word About Game Company Abuse Begins To Spread

The game industry is an insider affair, but in 2004, a Live Journal post by the disgruntled spouse of an Electronic Arts employee exposed the darkside of crunch time. The post described a management that required longer and longer hours, eventually mandating shifts of 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week "with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30 p.m.)."

The post struck a nerve in the game development community, and set off a media firestorm in the industry press. Its author, Erin Hoffman--who had remained anonymous for three years for fear of retribution--stepped forward in 2007 after EA settled two resulting class action lawsuits out of court, paying out over 30 million dollars to employees and reforming a number of practices.

While "EA Spouse" remains a seminal, widely cited case study in the gaming industry, its impact did not seem to herald widespread change.

In early 2010, a group of similarly disgruntled spouses organized themselves and published an open letter on industry trade publication Gamasutra. This time, the studio in question was the San Diego branch of Rockstar Games as its developers crunched to release Red Dead Redemption by mid-2010. Following the letter's publication, employees of the San Diego studio stepped forward anonymously to corroborate the letter's claims of poor management, as did a former employee of the company's New York office, who claimed there were similar conditions at the studio's East Coast head office.

A year after the Rockstar debacle, a report surfaced detailing comparable conditions at Team Bondi, the studio behind the Rockstar-published L.A. Noire. Last November brought the topic to light again when an ill-advised tweet from development studio Crytek bragged of the thousands of dinners they served during crunch time. And two weeks ago, a Reddit user claiming to have worked on Ubisoft's alleges numerous unrealistic expectations and unfair demands by management.

Is Crunch Time Forever?

Most notable figures in mainstream game development believe that crunch will never go away. It's an inevitable evil in a field where most projects have an immeasurable number of unknowns and a marketing commitment to a seemingly arbitrary ship date, and it can be caused by any number of reasons. Some of them can be good--an organic response from the team in order to meet a goal that's in the project's best interest.

But Avery Wong, cofounder of independent mobile game studio Critical Bacon, does believe there is an element of exploitation in the industry. "You're not in the game industry because you like money. You're in the game industry because you have this passion to make games. So, a lot of crunch time is tolerated because of this passion."

That passion, and the insular nature of the industry, perpetuates harmful crunch periods to this day, 10 years after EA Spouse. It makes it impossible to find employment and have a family, and even affects the livelihood of a few who work independently, outside of the demands of a large studio. It's also why, of the many instances cited here, few of the people involved use their real names.

When I asked our anonymous developer about the condition of their anonymity and why they felt it was necessary, the dev first quoted the EA Spouse, Erin Hoffman:

I am retaining some anonymity here because I have no illusions about what the consequences would be for my family if I was explicit. However, I also feel no impetus to shy away from sharing our story, because I know that it is too common to stick out among those of the thousands of engineers, artists, and designers that EA employs.

Then they used their own words.

"It is understood that major publishers have the litigation dollars sue into submission. They may not actually follow through but the implied threat is enough for people to remain quiet. Frankly, it's not worth the risk to go out publicly. And on top of that, the industry is a very small place. It may forgive, but it rarely forgets."

With each passing auto show, we keep hearing about how cars are the new smartphones. Sure, cars have been becoming more and more like our computers for years and pretty soon they'll even drive themselves. But what about the car's leaner and greener cousin, the bicycle?

Bicycles, with their gears and pedal power may seem like the Luddites of the transportation family, but the technology available to improve your ride is out there, it's growing, and it's helping more Americans consider bikes as a method of transportation than ever before.

If you're a cyclist, or have friends who prefer two wheels to four, you are aware of how passionate people can be about bicycles, and specifically their enthusiasm for bike evangelism.

Tyler Doornbos, of Bike Friendly Goods in Grand Rapids, Michigan, chatted with me about some of the "barriers to entry" for getting more people on bikes, and how new technologies are addressing some of those issues. I've taken his advice and put together this short guide to digitizing your bike commute.

Navigation

Anyone who has biked down a busy city street (or had to drive around a cyclist) can understand how this might deter potential bikers. If you're someone like me who can't get anywhere without GPS or Google Maps directions, getting lost may also be a concern. You may have already heard about biking apps like MapMyRide and Strava, which can be used to find a bike route, track your progress, and even propose to your girlfriend.

San Francisco has taken this idea even further by asking cyclists to collect data while they ride using the smartphone app CycleTracks. The city can then use this information to make improvements for cyclists by looking at the collected data to compare various options. San Francisco also takes into consideration factors learned by the first phase of the program, such as how a route with a bike lane feels half as far as a route without one even if the routes are actually the same length. Gear heads and data heads who want to collect and use information for their own benefit can tap into Cyclemeter, which combined with sensors, captures data on bike speed, cadence, and power.

Physical Gear

While apps can be useful for navigation, they require mounting your smartphone to your bicycle and distract your eyes from the road. The Hammerhead and Schwinn's CycleNav are tools that attach to your bike's handlebars and provide simple LED signals for directions. Hammerhead boasts a collaborative database of bike routes and lets you race against yourself to push yourself harder and faster. CycleNav includes spoken navigation so you can keep your eyes on the road 100% of the time.

Knowing where you're going is essential, but what about when you arrive at your destination? Bike security is a major issue for many riders and bike thefts are a common occurrence in major cities. Four years ago when I was living in Arlington, Virginia and wanted to ride my bike, I was told that the only way to keep it secure was with a hefty U-lock. The lock was heavy and didn't mount very well to my bike and kept hitting me in the leg while riding. The options for bike security now are much lighter and smarter. Take for instance, the TiGr lock, which Doornbos describes as "a giant pair of titanium tweezers for your bike" or the recently kickstarted Foldylock, which actually folds up so you can easily carry it with you.

Anti-theft

But what if you want to know where your bike is and what it's doing at all times, even when you're not riding it? For that you'll need a higher-tech solution, which is where BikeSpike and Bike+ come in. Coming in Spring 2014, BikeSpike is a little piece of equipment that acts like Big Brother for your bike by tracking it on GPS, notifying you if the bike jostles, falls, or moves, and even alerting emergency contacts if you and the bike get into an accident. Bike+ also includes ride tracking features, so you can measure your own progress and keep the thieves at bay at the same time. Just in case these systems fail, you can register your bike on the Bike Index and if any well-meaning cyclist comes across your bike they can cross-reference it with the index and let you know! Plus, unlike the aforementioned gadgets, the Bike Index is free.

Protective Gear

This next section is the one your mom wants you to read: bike safety. If you were a kid like me, you probably wanted to ride your Huffy without a helmet, in the dark, with no lights or reflectors. It's a good thing my parents didn't go for that or I wouldn't be here writing this article. Still, helmets aren't the most attractive things ever, helmet hair is pretty gross, and helmets are almost as annoying to carry as U-locks, so innovators have been coming up with some alternatives. (Note that I do not advocate for or against these options, nor can I vouch for their safety and reliability compared to traditional bike helmets.) Closca is the collapsible helmet you can put in your bag. It has a trendy vintage look to it as well. Since even the Closca might ruin your lovely locks, inventors in Sweden have come up with one that looks like a giant collar--until you get into an accident, when the helmet pops out like an airbag. You can feel the wind in your hair! Or you can go Happy Endings style and wear a helmet sprouting perfectly coifed hair.

Lights

Visibility has really come a long way since those square reflectors. Perhaps the coolest looking are the Revolights, which boast 360-degree visibility. The See.Sense lights are super smart: They recognize what kind of environment you're in, and adjust the light accordingly. It can tell if you're in fog, on a cul-de-sac, in an urban area--it's almost creepy, it knows so much. Also it's hackable: It runs on a programmable microcontroller. Meeting over five times its goal for the recently successful Kickstarter is the Magnic Light iC which is powered by eddy current technology, which means you never have to put in batteries or charge it up. It just keeps shining, which means your mom won't have to worry about it going out.

Electronic Assistance

According to Doornbos, getting up hills is one of the biggest obstacles preventing potential bikers from getting on two wheels. This may not be an issue for the physically fit set, but come on, we're talking about Americans here. There are, of course, e-bikes, but it's hard to justify the expense of one when you have a perfectly fine working bike at home already. Various kits exist to add extra e-bike-like power to your existing ride. The Rubbee boasts a super fast and easy installation process. This attachment uses a rotating drive roller at the back end of the system which touches the rear wheel of your bicycle to give you some help moving forward. For hipsters, I mean, people with fixies, there's the FlyKy. It's actually a wheel for your fixed-gear bike and includes anti-theft detection that works with your smartphone. The nerdiest option is the Copenhagen Wheel, developed at MIT. It saves energy when you don't need it for when you do (those hills!) and the SDK enables developers to write their own apps. Whoever said "don't reinvent the wheel" clearly wasn't thinking straight.

Urban Bikes

Unfortunately you cannot yet ride your bike everywhere. For urbanites who want an electric bike but still want to easily take their bike on the metro, there's the CMYK 3.0, the foldable electric bike. It weighs only 25 pounds; that sounds doable to me. However, I found the best solution to what to do with your bike when you can't ride it to be very simple and low tech: a handle for your bike. It's the kind of thing that makes you slap your forehead and think, "Why didn't I think of that?" while your other hand is comfortably carrying your bicycle.

What isn't comfortable is getting your pant leg stuck in the bike chain. People who aren't regular cyclists often don't know what to do with a bike chain either, and greasing and repairing chains can get messy. Belt drives (the same technology used on motorcycles) on bicycles aren't necessarily new, but until the Trek Soho they were single-speed and often required a DIY installation. Besides kicking the chain annoyances to the curb, bikes without chains run more smoothly and quietly. Dynamic Bicycles' Shaft Drive and Sonoma's D-Drive system keep the components protected so they require much less maintenance. These new systems work by using a drive shaft which carries torque from the bike pedals to the back wheel.

Finding This Gear

Despite the numerous new technologies aimed at making biking better (look at the #bikes tag on Kickstarter if you don't believe me) I think innovation in this area is just going to keep growing. Bike tools are going to get even more portable, like this itty bitty air pump successfully funded earlier this month. E-bike kits will help the heavy-but-incredibly-useful cargo bikes, popular in Europe, become even more viable in the U.S. People will be 3-D-printing their own bike parts, and even their own bikes. Now if only the snow would melt so I could get out on my bike.

Big-name brands usually knock the small fish right out of the water when it comes to the product launch. After watching thousands of product launches, Donald Brewer noticed that if companies could assess their products contextually within the marketplace and gauge consumer desire early on, they would have more of a fighting chance to survive in the vast sea of e-commerce.

So he went to the drawing board to reconceptualize the pre-order method and out came Prelaunch.

During the website's development, Brewer, Prelaunch's president, made an executive decision. "We borrowed some elements from crowdfunding sites," says Brewer. As he was creating the pre-order platform he said that, "It started to be a mashup of crowdfunding meets flash sales sites meets sort of a direct customer solution, [and] that I ultimately think is brand building."

Collective Contributions

By taking cues from the Kickstarter business model and blending them with direct-to-consumer solutions and analytics, the Prelaunch team has built a platform that less established brands can use to build names for themselves.

Small outfits can't cover ghastly expenses like market analysis, hiring a PR firm, or exploring several options for a launch. But on Prelaunch, they can offer exclusive incentivized deals and build customer loyalty early in the product's lifecycle, which can lead to higher profits.

Brewer exploited the popularity of crowdfunding, using it as a roadmap for how to shift an archetypal e-commerce exchange into something more reflective of current trends. Even more so, he aggrandized the experience by looking at how established brands constantly build hype with a pre-order option, which can oftentimes become a marketing tool. Prelaunch offers that same experience to companies tying in with their crowdfunding-like component.

Prelaunch users get perks like limited-edition offers and brand-sponsored contests, in addition to the ability to pre-order a product. There is also the opportunity to contact the behind-the-scenes creators, which ascribes to that sense of personal participation that is a successful motivator for many crowdfunded-site backers.

Outsmarting the Competition

"I worked with major brands Fossil, Epson, Microsoft, et cetera, and if you look at each of their e-commerce spaces obviously they're [each] an amazing company, but [their site is] not a brand-building kind of site. They allow anyone to market a product in their space and that can negatively affect," promising companies sales, sometimes even leading to their demise, Brewer says.

The simple way to understand this is to think about every time you go on Amazon to buy something. "Amazon is going to market competitive products," on your user page Brewer noted, which ends up impacting brand loyalty. For established brands this may not be an issue, but smaller companies suffer from this type of mixed-marketing messaging.

Through the analytics provided by Prelaunch, brands have the opportunity to create product pages that are fine-tuned to customers, another potential leg up for tiny startups.

Brewer says that oftentimes the copy on small business' product page is written by bottom-feeder retail people who don't know the first thing about analytics or marketing strategies. That "webpage becomes permanent for the next 12-24 months that that product lives on," so if it is executed poorly patrons will likely not return to your e-commerce site.

Brewer added that he created Prelaunch because after years of watching product launches, he believes "there's a better way."

"We believe [Prelaunch is] an opportunity to sell a hundred unit pre-orders and do multi-varied analysis with optimized tools, not just surveys, and figure out exactly the kind of tactic for the kind of people who purchase this. Then our belief is that their launch may not be a thousand units, maybe it's fourteen hundred units."

Ultimately, small brands are in a much better place to market products against their competitors. So the small fish can confidently swim right alongside the bigger ones.

The LG G Flex is the first widely available phone with a curved, flexible display. While this unique six-inch screen is eye-catching, it's more of a bar trick than a feature. The thing that really stands out about the Flex? The phone is huge.

With the Flex, the line between phone and tablet has now been eliminated. Unlike previous phablets, the Flex's curved screen and thinness minimize the inconvenience of carrying it around. It should go without saying that the upside to having a huge screen is more real estate for reading and browsing the web.

The side effect of using a six-inch phone is that every other handheld device feels tiny, especially an iPhone. In fact, returning to the iPhone 5s after using the Flex is almost painful. That may not be the case for long. Rumors of a bigger iPhone screen continue to heat up, with even Tim Cook alluding to the possibility.

No matter your size preference for a mobile device, the LG Flex pushes the boundaries of a socially acceptable big phone. Its curved glass display makes it a more natural fit in your hand, but it doesn't change the fact that the device is still enormous.

How big is the LG G Flex compared to everyday objects? Check out the photos above.

Toronto programmer Vitalik Buterin was just 17 when he first became active in the world of Bitcoin. Now, at 20, he's one of the creators of a new currency called Ethereum, which its founders hope will be the next generation of cryptocurrency.

Just as Bitcoin made it possible to send and receive money outside of the traditional banking system, Ethereum could make it possible to set up binding contracts outside of the legal system. In addition to a virtual currency called Ether, Ethereum includes a full-fledged programming language that makes it possible to encode binding agreements embedded in the same transaction record that tracks the flow of Ether.

"I think Bitcoin really feels empowering in a sense," says Buterin, who also cofounded Bitcoin Magazine in 2011 and works as a developer on the cryptocurrency marketplace site Egora. "If you look at the way all the other different monetary technologies work, there's a lot of barriers around them--you need to have a credit card, you need to have a bank account, you need to have a merchant account and so forth."

Within the next few weeks, the Ethereum team plans to debut a version of its software including a scripting language that's Turing complete, meaning it's as expressive as languages like C, Java, and Python. Users will be able to encode automated contracts in that language, essentially represented by bots that can send and receive Ether currency when certain conditions are met.

"It'll be a client that people can use where they can actually start experimenting with some of these actual different contract types," says Buterin.

For instance, Buterin says, a banker and a customer could contract to establish a savings account that lets the customer use a cryptographic key to withdraw 1% of the balance daily and the banker withdraw 0.5% of the account every day. If both keys were used in tandem, the customer could withdraw as much as he wanted. That way, if the customer's key were stolen and he notified the banker, or the banker turned out to be insolvent or crooked, the customer's losses would be limited.

The contract establishing the account would be a piece of code executed by everyone tracking the Ethereum-shared transaction record. Other contracts could establish what Ethereum's founders call distributed autonomous corporations, where code written in Ethereum's scripting language could automatically poll company shareholders or nonprofit board members about how to spend company accounts according to predefined voting rules.

"Really any kind of organization could potentially fall under this model," Buterin said.

The scripting language would allow the contract bot to disburse Ether and could potentially even generate emails or online banking transactions, says Buterin.

"The contract itself would actually create the HTTP packet that would initiate the session with some bank," he says. "Then, that packet is already encrypted and signed, and somebody would have to take the packet and forward it to the bank, and the bank would take the packet in response and that same pass-through person would have to take the packet and send it back to the contract, and so forth."

An auction house could set up escrow accounts for its buyers and sellers, Buterin says. A two-thirds vote of the buyer, seller, and auction house would tell the contract bot to either forward the escrowed funds to the seller or return them to the buyer, letting the auction house easily function as an arbitrator for disputed purchases.

Contracts, or their human supporters, would have to pay small fees to cover the cost of their computation and data storage, Buterin says. Some of that money would go to miners of new Ether coins, and some would simply be deleted from the system, in a ratio to be determined as the currency evolves.

Buterin says that although Ethereum might seem attractive to underworld figures seeking to form anonymous binding contracts, the Bitcoin-style shared transaction record should limit many potential criminal uses. Regulators may not be able to shut down an autonomous corporation running in the Ethereum system, but they'll be able to trace where it's sending money, he says.

"The thing with the blockchain [transaction record] is that everything is still very public," he says. "The favorite currency for criminals is still cash."

Product Hunt began as an experiment, inspired by my desire to geek out about interesting new products with smart folks. Similarly, my "20-minute MVP" was surprisingly well received and the 30-person email list was soon built into an influential community of over 9,000 people.

But these were not happy accidents. I've experimented with various ideas over the years and refined the qualities I look for before jumping into my next startup.

We all come up with startup ideas day to day but choosing the right one requires introspection and careful thought. While I've enjoyed experimenting and learning from various projects, asking these five questions would have saved me time wasted on unviable ideas that I didn't really want to pursue long-term:

1. PASSION

Am I excited to pursue this for several years?

Despite the perception caused by demo days or product launches on TechCrunch, startups are never an overnight success. It takes several years of building and marketing to create a prosperous business. During this time, entrepreneurs face inevitable struggles that, without passion, are incredibly difficult to overcome.

Over a year ago, I considered building "Uber for laundry." I called it LaundryMate (I know, terrible name). As San Francisco residents know, an in-home washer and dryer is a luxury. Knowing how busy SF professionals are, I saw a need for a service like this so I created a landing page to collect email address to measure interest and start a dialog with potential customers. My confidence in the idea increased after receiving positive feedback in the service from those that signed up. A few days later I killed the project.

Despite my confidence in the problem hypothesis (busy professionals hate to do laundry and are unsatisfied with existing solutions), I didn't want to be in the laundry business. Surprisingly, linen and the smell of freshly ironed clothing doesn't excite me. Thankfully, I recognized this quickly before investing more than a weekend on the idea. Ironically, a year later on-demand laundry startup Washio launched.

2. PRAGMATISM

Do I have the right skill-set and team?

I fully support ambitious entrepreneurs but sometimes ambition and excitement blinds them from reality. We're not all Elon Musk. Wise entrepreneurs evaluate their ability and team honestly.

A friend of mine once pitched an idea for a social restaurant discovery app. The concept was similar to Yelp but with more emphasis on recommendations from friends. Let's assume people want a more social Yelp. Even if that were true, the product must be adopted by a massive audience to become a successful business. Not to mention, it would be in direct competition with Yelp, Foursquare, and other incumbents in a crowded space.

Some entrepreneurs have the experience and capital to pull this off. With utmost respect, my friend who had never worked in a startup environment did not. Like many, he underestimated the level of effort, capital, and marketing required to succeed with this particular idea.

I'm not advocating that entrepreneurs avoid swinging for the fence but sometimes a base hit is the best strategy to score. Consider solving a "smaller" problem first and before swinging, be pragmatic, evaluate the market, and recognize your strengths and weaknesses.

3. EXISTING USER BEHAVIORS

Are people doing this already?

It's very difficult to change user behavior, let alone create entirely new ones. Most successful startups leverage existing behaviors, enabling people to do something they are already doing but better or more frequently. Ev Williams articulates this best:

Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time... identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.

• Rarely do successful startups introduce new behaviors.
• Before Instagram, amateur photographers snapped photos and uploading them to their computer to beautify them with Photoshop or similar photo-editing applications.
• Joel Gascoigne wasn't satisfied with his current solution for sharing on Twitter and other social networks so he created Buffer, a better way to share updates and links. Joel built it for himself but also the millions of others tweeting, posting to Facebook, and sharing on the web.
• Mobile messaging app WhatsApp, didn't grow to 430MM active users by changing peoples' daily behavior. Communication and desire for social connectedness is innate in all of us. The service simply made communication easier and more accessible.

Once you've identified an existing behavior, you have to provide a much better solution than what they're doing today. As an active blogger, people often share my writing on Twitter, sometimes pulling quotes from the essay. But I wanted to encourage my readers to share even more by making it easier. So I created REQUOTE.

I whipped up a simple JavaScript script that enabled writers to highlight snippets of text on their blog. When clicked, a Twitter share prompt opened with a pre-filled message. I used it on my own blog for several months but few readers used it. It failed. People were satisfied with existing solutions. REQUOTE wasn't valuable enough.

4. GROWTH ENGINE

How will I acquire users?

As we all know, building a great product is just part of the challenge. You also need users. Without traction, even the best products die on the vine. Go-to market and growth need to be considered on day 0.

Having a thesis for your startup's growth and an understanding of your business economics will help identify opportunities. For example, many e-commerce companies that sell expensive merchandise leverage paid channels such as Google AdWords or Facebook ads to acquire users and generate revenue on the direct sale. Massive growth may not be important or realistic to achieve success when each user generates hundreds of dollars in revenue.

Advertising-based businesses have a very different trajectory and require a large user base to become a big business. In part, this is why startups like Pinterest and Twitter didn't focus on monetization in the early stages. Relative to the high-end e-commerce business, revenue per user is much lower and relies on word of mouth, press, SEO, App Store distribution, and other non-paid channels to grow.

Consider asking: How many users do we need to reach our revenue goals? Can I acquire users affordably through paid channels? What will encourage people to spread the word?

5. MONETIZATION

How will I make money?

Turning mindshare into money is often just as challenging. In 1999, Nick Swinmurn famously conducted a "Wizard of Oz" test to prove he could make money selling shoes online. At the time, e-commerce was relatively new and it was unclear how many people would be willing to buy shoes before trying them on in person. Before investing in a sophisticated e-commerce platform and buying inventory, he put up a simple website and hosted photographs of shoes from local stores. If people made a purchase through his online store, he would return to the shop to buy the shoes and ship them to the customer. To his delight, people bought them, proving there was an opportunity to build an online marketplace for shoes. Nick's experiment became Zappos, one of the largest online retailers of shoes.

I went through this thought exercise on another project of mine called Wall of Awesome. 2012 was a good year for PlayHaven. We were growing fast, doubling headcount within a six-month period. Having seen the importance of nurturing a positive company culture, I sought to build a simple product that enabled people within the company to recognize and appreciate each others' work, delivered as a weekly email digest.

I created a landing page and promoted it across my network (I had a much smaller audience at the time). Within the first week, I received over 200 email signups and far more interest than my REQUOTE project. But then I took a step back and asked myself, "How will I monetize Wall of Awesome?" I recognized how difficult and slow it would be to convert companies into paying customers, especially when there's little to no direct measurable benefit from the service. The path to revenue was unclear and I lacked the passion to sell Wall of Awesome to companies, so I ended the experiment.

New, creative monetization models may be an innovative advantage but if unproven, they may lead to a dead end. Find a way to validate those monetization ideas cheaply as Nick Swinmurn did and learn from the success or failure of similar businesses.

Before embarking on your next startup adventure, ask yourself:

• Am I excited to pursue this for several years?
• Do I have the right skill set and team?
• Are people doing this already?
• How will I acquire users?
• How will I make money?

The world of Bitcoin is growing and traditional media can't make heads or tails of it. But Bitcoin's value continues to rise and new cryptocurrencies join the fold every day. A community of enthusiast bloggers, podcasters, and YouTube channels have emerged to tell Bitcoin's story--and the Mad Hatter of Bitcoin wants to make your education as zany as possible.

With a puffy top hat, bug-eyed goggles, and mesmerizing monotone, Thomas Hunt spouts the news from every corner of the Bitcoinverse in a daily video digest. Like the stage persona of his hero Stephen Colbert, Hunt's MadBitcoiner gives the news an appropriately weird edge. And like Colbert, Hunt believes the zany edge makes his viewers absorb more news in between laughs.

In the nascent ecosystem of Bitcoin reporting, Hunt saw a lot of long coverage but no bite-sized digest--and he found his niche. Lasting the length of two or three songs, each episode of MadBitcoins is less daunting than other cryptocurrency shows like the hour-long Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast. While other shows debate the logistics and ethos of Bitcoin, MadBitcoins is content to deliver a bulleted list of cryptocurrency headlines.

Hunt is no economist. He doesn't need to be. He takes his role as a silly newsman with more responsibility than reverence. After missing out on the spike last April that saw Bitcoin leap from $200 to $250 in a day, Hunt posted the first episode of MadBitcoins to clue people in on the Bitcoin game.

And folks might keep missing out if they don't start paying attention. Bitcoins are currently hovering around $650. Hunt sees his regret for missing Bitcoin's early days mirrored in the public scramble for Bitcoin-inspired altcoins they hope will similarly spike in value.

While he discusses his altcoin preferences and purchases in the show, Hunt refuses to endorse or tell his viewers to buy or sell. Bitcoin pundits who do recommend particular coins could be pumping and dumping, encouraging viewers to buy a certain altcoin so the pundit (and friends) can sell their stock at an artificial high.

The smaller and newer the altcoin, the easier it is to pump, Hunt says. And with names like Litecoin, Mastercoin, and Coino, it's easy to mistake one coin for another. But even the flashy new coins with wildly uncertain futures have a leg over Bitcoin.

While individual computer CPUs mined Bitcoins in the early days, dedicated industrial-scale farms of ASIC and FPGA processors now rule the Bitcoin mining game. Many altcoins, including the recently released MaxCoin by financial journalist Max Keiser, have intentionally built their mining algorithms so ASIC and other scrypt-based mining rigs can't mine them. This puts the power back in the hands of the lone miner chugging along with his computer's CPU.

All this uncertainty has perturbed traditional media. Hunt hopes to fill the gap for viewers who also take Bitcoin seriously. He started The Bitcoin Group, a weekly Friday videocast featuring Let's Talk Bitcoin's Adam B. Levine, technologist and entrepreneur Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Bitcoin Not Bombs' M. K. Lords, and other enthusiasts for a roundtable Bitcoin talk.

Even if he leaves behind his hat and goggles for Friday's serious discussion, Hunt maintains that his goofy MadBitcoins satire is one of the best ways to inform. Indeed, Pew Research has repeatedlyfound viewers of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to be the most informed. But like Stewart's famous retort on Crossfire, Hunt says that the whole Mad Hatter getup is designed to keep viewers from taking him too seriously and accepting his words as gospel--a way to get them thinking for themselves.

Americans spend $2.7 trillion a year on doctors, prescription drugs, and insurance plans--and the price is only going up. Desperate for cheap health care, more and more of us are traveling overseas to save money. But there's not exactly a Fodor's guide to the $100 billion industry of medical tourism. So a couple of engineers are building software to help you plan and execute your own overseas medical excursion.

It's called Emissary. The fledgling "medical destination" startup was founded by ex-Zynga and Google engineers Jonathan Howard, Tom Wu, and Woody Hooten. They're low profile--as of this writing, about 25 people follow them on Twitter. But the ambition of their company is outsized; the new service will help travelers vet doctors and facilities, book travel and accommodations, and even get patients situated in-country. Think Lonely Planet meets Airbnb for medical tourism--navigating what could otherwise be a confusing, and potentially dangerous journey. The company is preparing to release a private beta soon.

Putting Doctors Under The Microscope

Emissary vets surgeons by examining public and private outcome reports, complication and infection rates, and the number of procedures a surgeon performs annually. Hospital and medical facilities are similarly scrutinized to meet international accreditations like JCI to form a baseline of care.

"We make sure they use the same FDA-approved medical devices you'd get in the U.S.," Howard says. "And we don't make these up ourselves. This comes from our advisory board of U.S. surgeons who help us interview their respective counterparts abroad."

Prospective patients can research physicians and locations and book entire trips from the site, and use the service in-country via a mobile app.

Emissary's cofounders personally meet every doctor and medical professional they work with. Once doctors are cleared, Howard says the focus then moves to "concierge-level care," which includes hotel and transportation partners, and Emissary staff physically meeting patients right off the plane. Full-time nurses and special recovery suites for surgical patients are a part of the package.

"Even the drivers we work with specialize in surgical patients," Howard says. "We make sure that they have sophisticated bilingual concierge care on the ground, from the time you get off the plane, to the time the doctor clears you to go back."

Right now Emissary is launching after months of medical testing services in Costa Rica which included everything from Lasik procedures to dental inlays, orthopedics, dermatology, and physicals.

The idea for the company came after Howard contracted chicken pox while traveling in Israel. He says the care he experienced, and the relatively low price, opened his eyes to the potential for a new way to experience health care. Upon returning stateside in 2011, Howard underwent oral surgery in San Francisco; shuttled from specialist to specialist, and paying thousands after experiencing "assembly-line" treatment, he was convinced there was a better way.

"When a friend told me his mother had gotten arthritis treatment in India, paid for the whole family to stay with her for a month, and still saved tens of thousands of dollars, it all clicked," Howard said. "When I looked at the space, it was like the Wild West. A lot of the competitors are willing to send you anywhere, so introducing a patient-centric competitor that leverages the latest in mobile technology made a lot of sense."

How Emissary Vets For Risky Patients

Destination health care, as the founders call it, is a nascent field with tons of upside--but matched by a great degree of risk for both patients and Emissary. So far a limited patient pool has shared glowing reviews. But it only takes one slip-up to cause a PR nightmare, a tightrope Emissary's founders are well aware of.

To help minimize hazards, Howard says surgeons won't accept risky international patients. "By the time you buy your plane ticket, you've already got all the test results the surgeon's requested, and probably Skyped with them as well. That said, surgery is surgery, and even general anesthesia carries its risks."

Patients can buy complication insurance from insurance providers and hospitals also have malpractice insurance policies, and an arbitration process available to patients, Howard explains. Because Emissary acts as a marketplace between practitioners and patients, the company cannot legally offer opinions about specific medical options.

"We can only provide information or defer to the doctor themselves," Howard explains. "And we make sure to go through these details with a patient who engages with us to make sure they fully understand. But we defer to the doctors and other care providers in all things, so any medical disputes would be between the patients and the appropriate care provider."

New Vs. Old Medicine

Income for primary care physicians rose 10% from 1995 to 2012. Specialists like dermatologists, gastroenterologists, and oncologists saw their wages grow at least 50% in that period, even with inflation.

Surgery has fast become a one-way ticket to debt for many, even those with insurance. That's because since procedures, such as topical biopsies and treatments, have skyrocketed, some insurance providers are limiting coverage. And with with huge payouts to specialists, anesthesiologists, and sometimes physical therapists or recovery centers, timely pay-offs begin to resemble Mafia collectors rather than modern medicine.

Surgery and recovery options outside of the U.S. are much cheaper. Hip replacement in Costa Rica is around $15,000 versus north of $100,000 in the states. And Emissary offers packages which includes hospitalization in private rooms, private transportation (one round trip to the airport and three round trips to the hospital), plus hospital fees, pre-op exams, a post-op appointment, and eight physical therapy sessions. Howard says about half of medical travelers have procedures paid for by their insurance.

"We're not in the business of convincing people to go outside of the U.S.," Howard says. "We're trying to make sure all the people who do choose medical travel do so safely, comfortably, and with as much transparency as possible."

The Challenge Of Medical Tourism: Actually Traveling

While this service could be a boon for those seeking surgery, that specific functionality may also alienate others.

"It looks interesting, but it's not really applicable to chronic pain patients," warns Roei Eisenberg, a 26-year-old Israeli national who spent the last decade in Los Angeles before moving back overseas. Eisenberg was diagnosed with lymphocytic colitis and fibromyalgia at 16, and has been dealing with medical bureaucracy for most of his adult life.

"The larger idea is interesting, like the idea of pot medical tourism to Uruguay, but Emissary is more of a service to save you the cost of expensive surgery in the U.S.," he says. "People who need close monitoring for weeks or months can't fly somewhere. I can't just leave my job and go to Costa Rica while doctors take me through a hurdle of tests."

Eisenberg is right. It isn't easy for most people to just up and leave their country and work, even if the service is cheaper. Plus with out of pocket prices lowering because of Obamacare, overall fees could drop even further.

"The question is what percent of individuals, who have insurance, are still going to go down to Costa Rica or Panama to have surgeries," says Dr. Warren Roston, a Beverly Hills pulmonary disease specialist with more than 30 years of experience.

Roston says the long-term success of services like Emissary depends on how much insurance companies cover, and how much patients will have to pay out of pocket. "If the numbers are anywhere close, I don't think people will run down there."

Howard says Medicare does create demand, because of coverage caps. And since elective procedures aren't often covered, he says, there will always be need.

"Many employer health care plans are already including the option to choose international treatment in exchange for lower or no co-payment," Howard says. "The financials and quality make just as much sense to insurers as consumers."

While Howard acknowledges it's tough to have to vet every medical professional Emissary works with, he's convinced his company is getting a head start in a hot sector.

"We don't actually need to scale that quickly. If we had five new patients a day, we'd be a close to $100 million company," Howard predicts. "The biggest challenge there is to invest heavily in working with high-quality partners who share your vision and your values. Because partnering with a new network is probably the least scalable part of the business, you need trust there."

An estimated 8 million people travel overseas for medical care every year. If Emissary can navigate the challenges of insurance companies, customer acquisition, and provide affordable, quality service, the company could be a major player.

If you're interested in buying Bitcoins, you may have heard of Silk Road, the online agora for contraband--you know, the one whose founder called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts. The cryptocurrency was vital to Silk Road's anonymous transactions, but Bitcoins aren't just useful currency for people who call themselves Dread Pirate Roberts. In fact, anyone can buy Bitcoins. Sort Of.

At least, that's what a lot of the Bitcoin cottage industry is hoping. Bitcoins today can be used to purchase legitimate goods and services on thousands upon thousands of websites and counting. And 5,000 bitcoin ATMs are projected to pop up globally in the next five years.
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Bitcoin actually scares NYDFS, the guys who regulate banks in New York, enough that they had a hearing about whether or not to regulate it. And a Bitcoin center opened next to the New York Stock Exchange in January, to both evangelize its future and serve as a hub for educational seminars and events.

If you're one of the believers, this is how you go about buying in.

How To Make Money With Bitcoin

The simplest way to make money with Bitcoin is to let it appreciate. The downside, of course, is Bitcoin's price volatility when valued against the dollar. Two years ago, 20 cents could buy one whole Bitcoin. As of Februrary 6, one Bitcoin was valued at $849 USD. February 9 it dropped to $687 USD. The peak? Almost double that: $1,203 last November. It's a roller coaster.

You can make more money mining, but it's a lot more technically complicated. The documentation for mining is open source, so anyone can download and program any kind of computer to be a network node. Through participating in the "game" of discovering blocks, a group of transactions in a certain window of time, miners are rewarded in Bitcoins when they solve a block's puzzle--essentially gained interest. (The current reward is 25 BTC. That value started at 50 and halves every 210,000 blocks, which equals out to about every 4 years.)

The most recent block is sequentially added to the end of the blockchain, listing and confirming the transactions in that block to the Bitcoin ledger. Advanced cryptography is set up so that blocks are mined about every 10 minutes and the puzzle difficulty is recalculated every 2,016 blocks, and adjusts to get harder over time. A sole miner will rarely, if ever, mine back-to-back blocks.

Getting Into Mining

To see how this works, I visited IT freelancer Jon Cevera, who's been dabbling in Bitcoin and alt-currencies for about a year, intending to talk about the easy ways to get into Bitcoin. It was immediately apparent that mining was not for someone casually invested in the venture. "Pretty much anyone with an IT background could do it," he assured me. Even then, it's possible that you won't be successful.

He's currently active in a Litecoin pool called LTCRabbit, which miners can join to increase the efficiency of their block discovery by grouping their resources and evenly distributing the rewards from mined blocks. Some pools are significantly more successful than others; BTCGuild and GHash.IO command almost a 50% share of discovered blocks.

Cevera, though, is just looking to pay his electricity bill through his mining. With a computer eating up electricity and constantly transferring data to mine, the returns can be diminishing. Miners rely on cheaply bought computers set up to be solely dedicated to mining. Alternative hardware amplifies the block mining speed, and the best rigs can get very complicated and very powerful. Bitcoin Center NYC has screenless machines whose only indication of effort is their tremendous heat.

CoinDesk, bitcoinmining.com, startbitcoin.com, and the Bitcoin wiki are all good resources to learn more about the basics of mining. For the rest of us, there's speculation.

Buying And Selling

So mining isn't for you. If you want to get ahold of some aftermarket Bitcoins, here's how you do it.

The most secure way to buy Bitcoin is in person with cash: people list Bitcoins for sale on Craigslist and other classified sites. If you want to go the online route, the first step is setting up your personal wallet that's properly encrypted and secure. Making a wallet sets you up with a public address that's used to buy or receive Bitcoin, and a private key, which is used to access the funds in your wallet. Your address makes it so that transactions are pseudonymous.

There are many options of wallets available for the web, desktop, or mobile devices. Generally, desktop wallets like Bitcoin-Qt are considered the most secure as you can either print or store your private access key on a USB drive, but they take up a bunch of space on your computer.

Howtobuybitcoins.info is your best bet for a prospective buyer's options, country by country. It lists 17 different options for the United States alone, the majority being popular Bitcoin exchanges. Mt. Gox is the largest bitcoin exchange, but recently suspended its account holders from withdrawing funds, inevitably sparking a massive backlash of infuriated account holders.

Coinbase is another option that acts as both an encrypted wallet and exchange market that's incredibly easy to use. Bitstamp, based in Slovenia, is a similar option. These kinds of services make it easy to cash out your Bitcoins to dollars with low transaction fees, and are cheaper and far more secure than something like PayPal or eBay.

In the Vice podcast on Bitcoin, guest Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center and Bitcoin expert, addressed the problems for an average person's willingness to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange:

"Consumers are not going to want to download Bitcoin software. And they're not going to want to meet with somebody on the street to exchange dollars for Bitcoins and then keep it on their laptop. It's very complicated. They're going to want a turnkey solution. A consumer solution. So they're going to want exchanges that are trustworthy, that are regulated. They're going to want online wallet services that are as easy as PayPal."

And they'll probably get them.

Los Angeles has never been a real tech titan. The city has yet to breed its own Facebook, Google, or Tumblr, whose vast successes generated sophisticated tech ecosystems in San Francisco and New York.

The big question lingering over every coffee shop and meetup in Silicon Beach right now: Will Los Angeles's growing hotbed of startups finally yield a blockbuster company? There are reasons to be optimistic. Snapchat recently turned down a $3 billion buyout offer from Facebook, a bold move for any startup.

"Have you ever heard of an L.A. company doing that?" said Mike Jones, former CEO of Myspace and founder of Los Angeles "company-builder" called Science Inc. "We've heard of Google or Facebook turning it down, but not L.A. companies. That's a good sign." The Los Angeles tech scene has grown at a dizzying pace in the past few years. Los Angeles saw 130 technology venture capital deals in the first three quarters of 2013, valuing a total of $943 million, according to CB Insights. This is a 60% increase of $591 million valued from 95 deals for all of 2010.

"I was in New York at the beginning of Foursquare and Tumblr, and that was a great moment for New York," said Courtney Holt, COO of Maker Studios, one of the hottest startups in L.A.

"(In 2012) I started to feel that energy here," Holt added. "There's a lot of companies with a lot of wind at their backs."

A Map Of Startup LA

So where are all of these entrepreneurs planting their feet?

Los Angeles is a sprawling city. Bad traffic and isolated neighborhoods make it difficult to form a tight community. Rather, several pockets have emerged across the city. Eli Portnoy graduated from the TechStars accelerator in New York and then moved to L.A. to start his company, ThinkNear. "When I was out in New York, there was a very concentrated area where startups were. You'd walk into a coffee shop and bump into an investor. That happens less in L.A."

Santa Monica is undeniably the densest patch, earning it the title "Silicon Beach." Silicon Beach houses 36% of all L.A. startups, according to represent.LA, a website that tracks startups in Los Angeles. Santa Monica boasts Snapchat, Hulu, and Riot Games, as well as popular local incubators Launchpad LA, Science Inc., and MuckerLab. Five miles east lies Culver City, another hip breeding ground. Pasadena, West L.A., Orange County, and downtown L.A. have also developed into budding hotspots.

The tech community is making strides to sew these neighborhoods into a cohesive group. In January 2013, a members-only club tailored toward the tech crowd opened in Santa Monica. Local entrepreneurs such as BeachMint founder Josh Berman invested in 41 Ocean, an upscale beachfront property off of Ocean Avenue. The Spanish-style courtyard restaurant attracts entrepreneurs, investors, and venture capitalists alike. It's become the unofficial clubhouse for the tech community, says Angelo Sotira, CEO of online community DeviantArt. 41 Ocean is just five blocks away from Third Street Promenade, where hip coffee shops are another magnet for the Silicon Beach crowd. "The promenade is probably the number one place to find people," says Portnoy.

What's Harshing L.A.'s Buzz?

But there's a major roadblock that keeps Los Angeles tucked into the shadow of the Valley: money. Namely the dearth of it.

We're not talking about rich people--we're talking about capital. Venture activity in Los Angeles pales in comparison to Silicon Valley (as everyplace else on Earth does). Los Angeles has about one-tenth of the venture capital investment of Silicon Valley, according to incubator Be Great Partners' 2013 L.A. startup industry report. Justin Choi, CEO of Nativo, named the hottest startup at L.A.'s November 2013 Tech Summit. Choi recalls that two years ago, when meeting with a VC firm in San Francisco, the partners expressed interest but told Choi there was one problem: "You're all the way down in L.A."

Choi calls the incident "disheartening," but says he doesn't hear these comments anymore. Silicon Valley funds are now visiting Los Angeles regularly to stake out local prospects. Lightspeed Venture Partners, a Menlo Park fund, backed Snapchat and Whisper. There's still a severe lack of locally based investors. There are now roughly 50 angel and VC firms in L.A, making an average of about $4.07 million into each startup venture, according to Be Great Partners. "There's a thriving angel community emerging, but it's still thin in terms of pure L.A. based VC funds," says Jones.

That Hollywood DNA

Hollywood is deeply embedded in the DNA of Los Angeles, and the tech world is no exception. Hollywood and startups are becoming increasingly intertwined as technology seeps into the core business that ran this town for the past 100 years. Entertainment, adtech, e-commerce, and media dominate the startup industry. Walter Driver, CEO of Scopely, says this is no accident.

"L.A. is about producing cultural experiences," Driver said. "Snapchat, Whisper, Tinder, Scopely. They're about finding new ways for humans to interact with each other." Celebrities are on board. Ashton Kutcher is one of the most active angel investors in town. Leonardo DiCaprio, Justin Timberlake, Kim Kardashian, and many others have dipped their toes in the water with investments and endorsements. Hollywood's golden hand also shapes the talent pool. The classic stereotype, that every waiter you meet in L.A. is an aspiring actor, may need to be updated. Hopeful actors, writers, and producers are catching on to the job opportunities in tech.

These are inexpensive, creative risk-takers, looking for flexible schedules and quick paychecks. Portnoy says it's "an easy match." "An actor or screenwriter has a dream, but in the meantime they want to pay the bills, and they want flexible hours," he explains.

Others make a longer-term switch. Walter Driver was a screenwriter before founding Scopely. Courtney Holt studied film and worked in the music business for decades before joining Maker Studios.

It Takes An IPO

Even the most devoted Angelenos admit that Los Angeles will probably never be the (Silicon) Valley. Still, there is hope that a game-changing company can nudge Los Angeles out of its little- brother status. According to Mike Jones, L.A. needs a big name to "really go for it," launch an IPO and breed a mature tech ecosystem.

"One of the magic parts of the Valley is that someone like Zuckerberg says: I'm not going to sell. I'm going to build a huge company here," said Jones. "And then he (Zuckerberg) creates billions in wealth, and an ecosystem is born."

Whether or not it blossoms into Valley-esque proportions, Los Angeles is carving out an identity. As Walter Driver puts it, Hollywood is "the business of providing an escape, a peek into other realities."

"That's why film was invented. And these companies that are coming out of L.A. are a part of that," he says.

It's yet to be seen whether L.A. will get its long-term billion-dollar asset, although technology blogs are teeming with rumors that Snapchat or Rubicon will go public soon. Los Angeles is certainly approaching a tipping point, says Holt: "It's a fascinating moment in time for us here."

I recently needed to update how Draft, an online word processor I created, supports comments. When I originally added comments, I kept them very simple; a list with a text box beneath--reminiscent of comments on a blog. To help people understand the context of the comment, you could hover your mouse over a comment, and if it contained any quoted text, it became highlighted in Draft, like this:

It did its job, but with room for improvement. For example, the context awareness wasn't very good. Also, users wanted to reply to a single comment.

So I broke up comments on the page and aligned them with the text. It wasn't super easy, but I had it ready in a couple of days.

The ability to reply to a single comment was ready in hours. But after I was done, I wanted to see if I could improve the "hover over a comment and highlight the text" bit.

I realized the main editor technology would need to be changed to support better highlighting. So I spent weeks changing a core piece of my product, and even came close to releasing something, until I realized I broke the browser's native spell-check capabilities.

I spent even more time learning how to incorporate a spell-check service--even brushed up on my probability theory and learned to derive Bayes' Theorem trying to write my own.

Eventually I got an English spell-check system in place. But then, I looked at a map of Draft's users: Half of them are outside of the United States in non-English-speaking countries.

After weeks of effort, Draft's improvements still weren't ready.

You Can Learn A Lot From A Terrible Drummer

As I was worrying how I was going to fix my problems now with spell check, I watched the pilot episode of The Tim Ferriss Experiment, a show starring Ferriss, the best-selling author who teaches people how to do impactful things in less time.

Tim's entire method can be boiled down to the Pareto principle: For many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. You want 80% of the benefit from exercise? Figure out the 20% of what's most important to get you there. Want to learn to be a great chef? Determine the 20% of what great chefs learn that has the most impact.

Tim now has an entire TV show teaching people what can be done in as little as four days: learning a foreign language or building a business. But does he always succeed?

In the pilot, Tim is challenged with learning to play the drums in just four days. On day 5, he'll be up on stage at a rock concert to play drums for the band Foreigner during one of their songs.

So Tim starts learning how to play the drums. Intensely. He has the best tools and education money can buy. He's practicing all day and night. But it's not working. Doubt sets in:

I'm effectively having an anxiety attack.

With only about a day left, Foreigner came for a sneak peek at Tim's progress. Tim was awful. Kelly Hansen, the band's front man, scolds Tim:

This is no joke, man.

But the visit from Foreigner also brought this advice from the band's drummer:

Play the song. Don't play the drums.

You saw the light bulb turn on. Tim realized he had complicated his true goal. He was learning how to read music, play different types of drums, improvise, and use flourishes during the main heartbeat of the song. But none of those things mattered for the task at hand, which was playing a single song he had already picked out.

With just a day left, Tim focused on just what he needed to learn the main heartbeat of the song, ignoring everything else. He was on stage a day later successfully rocking with the band: If that was possible, what other impossibles do I have in my life that I should really question?

How Starting Over Solved My Problem

That night after watching Tim, I walked the dog with my wife and talked with her about the episode. Had I just done the same thing with this new comments feature? The original goal was to improve comments, and now I'm creating my own spell check.

So, I started all over again with a new focus and constrained to only the task at hand. The main editor technology in Draft would not change. I had to find a way to work around it. And, sure enough, I did.

In just a few hours, I improved highlighting without replacing core parts of Draft. In a fraction of the time I had already spent, I was done. I shipped the new comments feature a few days later, and without all the complexity and risk of the path I was pursuing.

http://t.co/pKWTjfZ11I leaped ahead of any other writing software with recent feature additions. @natekontny LOVE the in-line comments

- JAVIER SANDOVAL (@SpanishCurls) December 14, 2013

I don't know why we are so good at making what could be a small problem so much more complex. It's easy to fall prey to letting our dreams and projects snowball into things we can't accomplish. And just like that, more of our time vanishes.

The great news is that the solution is simple--constant self-reflection: What's the smallest possible thing I could do to accomplish my true goal? Have I made this much more complicated than it needs to be? Is there a way to do a fifth of what I'm doing right now?

Or, in other words:

Am I learning to play the drums, or could I just learn to play the song?

Nate Kontny is the creator of Draft, a collaborative platform to help make you a better writer. He'd love to meet you on Twitter.

With last week's launch of Facebook's new app Paper, it's hard not to wonder if every Facebook product is cursed. As doubts about the social network's continued longevity become a growing concern, the narrative surrounding Paper has overwhelmingly skewed toward whether or not it will help the company stay relevant.

What makes Paper interesting, then, isn't whether it will shake up competition between Feedly, Flipboard, and other reader apps. It's about one question: How much of a difference can a new approach to UI make? Can it overpower a brand as familiar as Facebook, with all the connotations that come with it?

Outside of its striking design, which has been pored over and detailed at length, Paper only adds one thing to the typical Facebook experience--more outside content. It bundles your Facebook feed with a currently limited RSS reader in an extremely attractive package.

"It's a really polished UI for a news aggregator," says Andrew Maier, cofounder and editor-in-chief of UX Booth. "It's something that I feel has been done many, many times. There are lots of people who are trying to put a newspaper feel on a RSS feed, or a social magazine."

But is Facebook ready for magazine status? Or is that a stretch?

"I think it's possible to reposition yourself, but I don't think it's possible to change how people understand your business," says Maier. "Seeing the layout of paper it feels journalistic, it seems like it wants to be a publication… We're in a weird place in news outlets, in journalism, where the line between citizen journalism and formal investigative journalism--that line is blurring. The consumption is changing, and Facebook is trying to capitalize on that."

In a recent blog post, Adam Sigel, UX product manager for Aereo, argues that Facebook's approach to Paper is solving the wrong problem. Design was never an issue with Facebook, it was content--and now we have a lovely new app for displaying everything on Facebook that already annoys all of us.

The Paper interface will undoubtedly be better for at least one thing--ads. By removing some of the linearity of the timeline and devoting half the screen real estate to curation, Facebook is creating an environment to deliver promoted content in a way that feels less intrusive to users. Paper will likely lead to more revenue for Facebook, but will it address their core user erosion? Am I, a Twitter addict, likely to come back to Facebook for my news? Can curated content bring back the tweens? I'm not optimistic, but the app is still in its infancy.

The problem with Paper is that it's a mere curiosity. It adds little value for those who have already decided that Facebook holds no value for them, even with its renewed focus on content. As Kyle VanHemert writes in Wired:

...our relationship with Facebook today isn't one of dependence so much as habit. At this point, we have all sorts of avenues for sharing, promoting, and consuming. Every time someone posts something to a competitor, that's one page that doesn't end up in Facebook's lovely magazine.

Besides, it could really hurt your thumbs.

If your team is trying to build the next Flappy Bird, you should stop reading now.

But if you're trying to build products that can stand the test of time, and processes to match, you should lend an ear to the team of craftsmen at Steinway & Sons, masters of the acoustic technology that has set Steinway pianos apart for over 150 years.

Fabled piano maker Steinway & Sons has been operating in New York City since 1853, transforming over 12,000 individual parts, from Indian amber to green poplar, into pianos worthy of Carnegie Hall. At one time, in the late 19th century, the company was the city's largest employer. Today a team of 350 craftsmen keep the Steinway tradition alive, turning out 2,000 pianos a year. They range from the most basic upright, which costs around $12,000, to the Model D, which retails for $160,000 or more. Custom finishes, from gold plating to carved "feet," can kick prices closer to seven figures.

It's the Steinway sound that fetches those prices--not the filigrees and rare materials--although there is a vault on site with over $3 million in exotic veneers, waiting for the right buyer at the right time.

How has Steinway produced such high-quality pianos, and so consistently, for so many years? Fast Company visited their headquarters in Queens to investigate.

The Customer is Always Right--Sort Of

Steinway is happy to let buyers customize the appearance of their pianos--but not the sound.

"Inside the belly of the beast, anything that's musical--that can't be tampered with in any way," says Anthony Gilroy, director of marketing. At first it seems counterintuitive, but Steinway does not welcome mixing of engineers and musicians.

Professional pianists are treated like royalty when they visit to select an instrument, sometimes deliberating for months in the chapel-like windowless showroom room designed for its acoustics. But everything "inside the rim" is off limits to those who want to customize. Steinway technicians have years of experience in their fingertips, and each team member is master of his domain--no questions asked. The veterans who bend the layers of hardrock maple--forming a grand piano's distinctive curve--are so skilled that they can determine which way the wind blew when a tree was growing just from a slice of the wood.

A Holacracy By Any Other Name

From the outside, Steinway appears to have a traditional management structure. But in practice, the company org chart doesn't tell the full story.

Everyone starts at the lowest rung on the ladder, even the eponymous Steinway sons, and the onus is on line workers as much as foremen to control for quality. As technicians assemble the piano action--the mechanism by which the depression of the keys is translated into the motion of the hammer striking the strings--their work is evaluated at each step by the peer rotating into their position.

That flat management structure extends into the continuous improvement program that the factory runs on an ongoing basis. "We can't control the cost of labor and materials, but we can control the efficiency," Gilroy says.

Steinway teams run more than 100 improvement drills each year, spending at least a day at a time on small portions of the manufacturing process. Sometimes the fixes are as simple as moving a set of tools to a different workbench; sometimes the fixes are larger. But the goal remains the same: expediency without any sacrifice in quality.

Legacy Hardware Hacks

At other times, teams take on far more ambitious improvement projects. With a deep bench of craftsmen and engineers, Steinway has the ability to take a DIY approach to its equipment. Nearly everything in the factory is a legacy hardware "hack," in the sense that 19th-century machines sit alongside mainframes from the '80s, all tweaked for 2014.

To test the quality of each piano's action, a custom-built machine pounds on the keys for over three hours, resulting in wear that's the equivalent of six months of regular use.

If one thing is clear from the tour, it's that Steinways, despite their history and price point, are not meant to be set on a pedestal. The pianos' prices appreciate over time--they've performed better than the stock market--but there's a catch: They must be played. With proper maintenance, more use leads to a better sound and a more valuable piano. Even museum curators need to arrange for models on display to be played at least once a week.

With that kind of product design, it's not hard to imagine that Steinway will be operating for at least another 150 years.

Bitstamp on Tuesday became the second Bitcoin exchange to halt withdrawals in recent days after a denial-of-service attack exploiting a property of the Bitcoin protocol made it difficult to verify transactions and customer balances. But Bitcoin experts say the issue, which also shut down withdrawals at mega-exchange Mt. Gox, can be averted with a few tweaks to how exchanges and wallet services track transactions.

"No funds have been lost and no funds are at risk," Bitstamp emphasized in a statement. "This is a denial-of-service attack made possible by some misunderstandings in Bitcoin wallet implementations. These misunderstandings have simple solutions that are being implemented as we speak, and we're confident everything will be back to normal shortly."

The attack relies on a property of the Bitcoin protocol known as transaction malleability that makes it possible to make slight tweaks to records of Bitcoin being sent from user to user without making the transactions invalid or changing the amount of money sent. The changes do, however, alter the computed hash, or digital fingerprint, that's stored with the transaction record and used as a transaction ID.

"If you've got, say, one Bitcoin that you're spending in your transaction, you can write that as '1 Bitcoin,' you can write that as '01 Bitcoin,' or you can write that as '001 bitcoin,'" says Bitcoin expert Andreas Antonopoulos, who is the chief security officer of Bitcoin wallet company Blockchain.info. "All three of those are valid transactions and will spend that one Bitcoin, [and] they all have different hashes."

Since Bitcoin transaction records propagate through a peer-to-peer network of Bitcoin users, that makes it possible for attackers to make these modifications to transaction records before propagating them through the network. At some point, either the original transaction or the modified one will make it into the shared transaction record called the blockchain. If the modified transaction makes it there first, the parties to the original transaction will look for the original hash in the blockchain but won't find it.

When an exchange or wallet service fails to find the hash, it might believe the transaction didn't go through and, if a confused or malicious customer complains, it might repeat the transaction, actually sending double the amount of Bitcoin intended. Once Mt. Gox revealed it was vulnerable to malleability-based attacks, other exchanges were slammed by attempts to trick them into issuing duplicate withdrawals, Antonopoulos says.

But Antonopoulos says Bitcoin users have known for some time about transaction malleability, which was first reported in 2011, and can ultimately defeat the attacks simply by not relying on the hash as a unique and static identifier until after it's entered into the verified blockchain.

"In a few days they're going to resume withdrawals and the network will be more resilient," Antonopoulos predicts of Bitstamp, adding that Blockchain and some other exchange and wallet services, as listed in our recent Bitcoin investment guide, haven't been affected.

Neither Bitstamp nor Mt. Gox immediately offered a timeline for when customers would be able to withdraw their Bitcoin. Bitstamp said in its statement it was working on a "software fix," and Mt. Gox indicated it was working with Bitcoin developers to standardize an additional, non-malleable hash.

Stewart Butterfield cofounded Flickr with his wife and then launched a nonviolent MMO that gained a cult following. Today, he's releasing Slack, a team messaging unifier and archiving app for Mac OS X which got this resounding tweet of approval from Marc Andreessen yesterday. For all his feats, he should be Internet famous. But unlike his other famous Flickr cofounders, Butterfield has been innovating under the radar, attempting to solve one of the hardest problems in business. So how did he get from Flickr to gaming to here?

"Slack is gratifying to work on in the same way that Flickr was," Butterfield says. "The mission is to make people's working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive."

It might sound strange to find a common thread between a photo community, an online video game, and a productivity portal. But Butterfield's work has always been to get people talking, and he concerns himself with how to architect the environment where people talk. The path Butterfield took to get to this pure vision, however, is a strange one.

Flickr: Proto Web 2.0

"People sometimes forget how early Flickr came," Butterfield says. "Facebook didn't add photo sharing till a year after Flickr was acquired by Yahoo."

Flickr was famously developed as a side feature for the MMO Game Neverending that Butterfield was developing with his then-wife Caterina Fake and the rest of their company, Ludicorp. The team realized that the photo-sharing aspect of the game could be spun off into its own service. This was 2003, and the new Flickr was the first home on the Internet for users to interact with each other's photos--one of the first gasps of Web 2.0.

Flickr was lauded for its FlickrLive chat service that let users swap photos in real time, a unique novelty in 2004. In 2005, Flickr became the first Internet beast swallowed by Yahoo. Initially, the purchase paid dividends for Flickr users as monthly user storage space was increased from 20 MB to a then-massive 100 MB in Dec 2006. But being enveloped by the Internet titan engulfed the startup team in a sea of competing internal projects vying for precious resources. Flickr was stifled.

"It was impossible to squeeze money to hire people," Butterfield says. "Even when YouTube was 1/20th of Flickr's size, they had twice as many people working on it. You just couldn't do things you wanted to do. There are big plans we had back in 2006 and 2007 that Flickr still hasn't done."

Back To Gaming With Glitch

Butterfield left Flickr and Yahoo in 2008 with one last cheerful, bizarre letter, his hallmark humor intact as he headed out the corporate door. Free of the competing priorities of the media giant, Butterfield went back to his startup roots.

After six months, he formed Tiny Speck along with several Ludicorp alumni. They returned to gaming with Glitch, a browser-based nonviolent MMO where players roamed the minds of 11 cosmic giants. Rather than fighting each other with swords, Butterfield told CNET, players could have their rival religious factions battle each other for converts.

Glitch launched in Fall 2011. Zany and filled with lore, Butterfield remembers it being described as "Monty Python crossed with Dr. Seuss on acid." That indescribability confused critics, however, and popularity went to the bland, straightforward Skinner box browser games FarmVille and CityVille. Despite gaining a cult community, Glitch shut down a year later in Dec 2012.

Butterfield's Defining Moment

The closure was brutal, Butterfield says. He couldn't make it through 60 seconds of telling his employees that the game was over without getting upset. Tiny Speck had money left over from VC investment, and paying that back would've made economic sense.

Instead, Butterfield and a skeleton crew of Tiny Speck let about 30 employees go, but spent a chunk of the VC money and a solid month finding every exiting employee a job--a move this reporter has never seen in any startup. Then the scrappy studio hearkened back to its Flickr invention and took a hard look at what they could turn into a product.

Butterfield and the rest of Tiny Speck were old-school web folks--they used IRC to communicate during Glitch's development. Eventually, that wasn't enough. But instead of choosing a middling team messaging software to improve productivity, Tiny Speck built their own. Then they added hacks to include features. And then added more hacks. And more hacks. So when Tiny Spark pulled the plug on Glitch, they had a customized, turbocharged team communication platform: Slack.

The platform worked so well that after devoting themselves full-time to Slack in January 2013, they left their beloved IRC behind and integrated all communication through it by March. Dogfooding led to rapid feature inclusion. By June, they were inviting friends in other companies to try Slack out for themselves, including folks at Rdio. Positive testimonials from companies including BuzzFeed litter Slack's website.

Through sheer word of mouth, Slack has gained 16,000 users since opening a quiet beta--viral growth that investor Andreessen called "unprecedented" in yesterday's tweet. Though his vested interest derives from the millions invested by his company, Andreessen Horowitz, Slack has received constant Twitter love since last fall.

Communication For Teams, Love For The Internet

Around Slack's Fall 2013 soft launch, Tiny Speck released open source all but a few pieces of code and game art as a farewell to the Glitch community. The generous donation of hundreds of hours of code and animation marks Butterfield as much as finding jobs for his laid-off employees at Glitch. He's gone into the corporate rabbit hole and come out looking for new ways to keep people talking.

Whether it's in the brain of a cosmic god or making team coordination a library instead of a heap of unmarked file cabinets, Butterfield has breathed new air into the way people communicate with the Internet--all with signature humor.