Conventional wisdom holds that we're living in the era of the journalist as personal brand. Yahoo has been proudly adding household names like Katie Couric and David Pogue to its news marquee, while wonks like Nate Silver have been ditching elite print publications in favor of more entrepreneurial paths. The media executives footing the salaries and startup costs are hoping that Twitter followers migrate along with the journalists.

Amid the poaching spree, a mobile news app called Circa that eschews bylines has been steadily closing in on 1 million downloads. Today the startup announced that it will introduce native ads, as well as start licensing its data, later this year.

While social media glorifies its cults of personality, Circa favors a collaborative reporting and editing process. Circa asks you to trust its team and its product--and everything from the color scheme to the typography is designed to reinforce that trust. It's an old-fashioned approach to media branding--think The Economist--with newfangled technology humming in the background. What Circa is building is admirable--but is it what readers want?

Demand For Name-Brand News

At the other end of the news startup spectrum is Beacon, a crowdfunding platform for journalists that is part of the current Y Combinator cohort. Beacon is growing its reader base through the relationships and social media presence of its contributors.

"What we've realized is that the Beacon brand at the moment doesn't matter all that much," says Dan Fletcher, cofounder and COO. Fletcher left Facebook, where he was managing editor, to launch the site. "As a reader, you support one writer, and you experience Beacon through that lens."

In Fletcher's eyes, media is rapidly unbundling, resulting in readers who have weak ties to publications and strong ties to journalists with specialized beats. Indeed, the more focused and "expert" the pitch on Beacon, the more likely a journalist is to win over backers. "You have to have a lot of confidence and faith in these people," he says.

The Beacon framework offers journalists the rewards of independence and income, but also asks them to share in the burdens of sales and marketing. A "Worth It" button appears at the end of each article, and bonus payments are tied to readers' clicks of support.

News That's Good For You

Opening Circa for the first time made me realize how much of my media diet had become dominated by the sugar-rush junk food of one-dimensional reporting and breezy opinion. Circa stories, in contrast, are lean and almost clinical, with data-rich facts presented one after another in a progression that updates over time as events develop. "Follow" a story, and Circa sends alerts.

For the mobile reader on the go, "You can plow through a lot of key facts really quickly," says Matt Galligan, cofounder and CEO.

Moreover, for a story like the crisis in Ukraine that unfolds in fits and starts over days and weeks, Circa functions as a natural timeline that readers can enter and exit at different points without losing the overarching narrative. This "building blocks" format saves Circa stories from the identity crisis plaguing articles that morph online from wire alert to news analysis throughout the day.

"Our stories are unique to us, and the knowledge of what someone has already read is unique to us," Galligan says. With that data, and a custom-built content management system oriented around factual "objects," Circa has an engine at its disposal that can do everything from recommend articles to serve up relevant ads.

"There's a lot of interest in advertising on the platform," Galligan says. He cites advertisements in publications like Vanity Fair as his inspiration for Circa's native play: As a reader, he says, "You wouldn't want to remove the ads."

"Object-Oriented" Lends Itself To White-Labeling

For Circa, though, advertising revenue may end up playing second fiddle to licensing fees. While many news apps can deliver readers, Circa is among the first to offer an infrastructure that is endemic to digital content. In industry parlance, Circa is doing "object-oriented" journalism--and in the process, has created a platform that other publishers could leverage.

Unless you've looked under the hood at a major publication, Circa's technology may not sound so revolutionary. But if you've followed the conversation about Ezra Klein's startup at Vox Media, you'll have some idea of the direction in which media is heading, and just how hard it will be to get there.

Today, we still live in a world ruled by the traditional article--headline, byline, dateline, lede--because those are the parameters set by the technology that powers our newspapers and magazines. Straying from that format is about as easy as it would be to publish an infographic using an old-fashioned printing press.

Vox, previously dubbed Project X, aspires to create something similar to what Circa has already built for mobile: a more flexible, "atomized" technology, made up of component parts that can be remixed in countless ways. Quote, photo, chart: Naming and architecting content in this way enables opens the door to more responsive designs and smarter databases.

David Cohn, director of news for Circa, described the benefits of this approach: "The process of creating a story requires the writer to tag information in a structured way," he wrote in a Poynter article. "If we insert a quote, we have two extra fields for the name of the person quoted and an alias--their working title. As a result, I can ask our chief technology officer to search our database for all the quotes we have from, say, Eric Holder. I can also ask to have that search refined by date(s) or topics: 'Give me all the Eric Holder quotes from the last six months that are associated with the IRS.'"

Even a whiz with LexisNexis shortcuts can see the value.

Talent Follows Tech

For now, Galligan is focused on introducing these new revenue streams while continuing to grow. Circa is seeing four times the daily active users it did last September, when it first passed the half-million downloads milestone, and ratings in the App Store have remained consistently high.

Galligan hopes that the brand will stand the test of time. "I'm not a news guy. We built this because we are the users," he says.

The good news for Circa is that the savviest of the journalists with personal brands are looking for technology capabilities, not just deep pockets. Ezra Klein--and even recent hires at The New York Times--are case and point: talent follows tech. And by extension, readers will, too.

Believe it or not, book publishers are embracing Twitter. For them, the platform represents a way to not only engage with readers, but quite possibly reinvent storytelling itself. But what about writers--is this the best way to reach readers?

Starting today, Penguin Random House and the Association of American Publishers will team up Twitter for the second annual #TwitterFiction festival. The five-day storytelling experiment runs from March 12 to 16, showcasing more than 50 established authors and first-time creators sharing stories as varied as new supernatural horror from R.L. Stine, to an untitled project promising "something amazing" from comedian-writers Michael Ian Black and Jim Gaffigan.

Select writers receive daily time slots during which tweets will be highlighted and amplified by Twitter, and live-streamed. But the festival is more of a showcase around the #TwitterFiction hashtag, an open invitation for experimentation from all readers and writers. It's not just about line-by-line narrative tweeting, either. It's about using Twitter as a creative vehicle: like using multiple accounts for crowdsourced storytelling, incorporating shareable media like photos and videos, and even parody accounts with multiple characters tweeting stories via their POV. Non-fiction and visual stories are fair game, as well.

Besides published authors, two-dozen lucky creators were selected by publishers, editors, and marketers who sifted through two rounds and more than 700 entries.

I wanted to see what's in it for creators, publishers, and readers, and I came to New York to find out. I'm a writer, and I had something at stake here: I was selected by the festival to share my story, "High Altitude," inspired by my 18,000 foot trek to Mt. Everest Base Camp for the BBC, where I spent weeks in the Himalayas, writing in a weather-worn Moleskine. That journal blossomed into a book I'm now editing and teasing online. Starting today I find out the impact of sharing a story on Twitter.

Why You Should Participate

"The publishing world is watching," explains Corinna Barsan, a senior editor at Grove Atlantic, and a festival judge who says she was pleasantly surprised by the creativity of submissions.

Twitter is a great place to mine for talent, she says. But it's not the only place. Agents and publishers are also monitoring venues like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram, looking for voices that have cultivated followings, which translate into built-in audiences. Because readers are now no longer just between pages, the industry is now "examining what it means to publish works that don't follow traditional guidelines. Some things will translate better than others, but any time you're getting mass appeal and a lot of buzz, that's something to look at--something to pay attention to," Barsan says.

Writers have been experimenting with Twitter long before the festival started. The New Yorker gained attention in 2012 for serializing Jennifer Egan's short story, "Black Box" over 600 tweets. A year before that, journalist Dan Sinker's satirical parody account of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel turned into a book you can now buy on Amazon. Then there's online phenomenons like Shit My Dad Says, a book and short-lived TV series that started as a Twitter feed, and Fifty Shades of Earl Grey, a tongue-and-cheek parody of the erotic guilty pleasure.

The strength of Twitter is connecting creators with fans, Barsan says, a sentiment shared by Andrew Fitzgerald, a writer and former journalist who now works as Twitter's manager of journalism and news.

"Twitter as a platform is a global stage with a potential audience of hundreds of millions of people," explains Fitzgerald, who helped organize the festival. He says the publishing world, and readers, are taking the event very seriously, calling it an "extremely powerful tool to connect with readers."

Fitzgerald, who helps writers use Twitter to boost their online presence and tell better stories, says that's a win for the people reading, and the companies backing those creators.

"Publishers have a vested interest in authors building a following and growing their audience," he explains. "This creative experience offers authors another way to engage with readers."

Twitter is already the home for experimentation, Fitzgerald says. Now it has an official stamp.

"Our thinking was that: If we bring it all together, all the people experimenting into same chronological space, we can also bring some attention to it," he says.

Last year's festival saw about 25,000 tweets with the #TwitterFiction hashtag over a period of five days. The increase in this year's number of showcased creators, growing media attention, and the involvement of traditional publishers makes Fitzgerald predict at least double the engagement this year.

"My hope is that we'll see much more," Fitzgerald says. "Twitter is a wide open frontier for creative experimentation."

What's In It For Writers?

Last year, Elliot Hold's story "Evidence," a murder mystery told through multiple perspectives over the course of an evening, got the author a lot of attention, which made things easier for Random House.

"That ended up being very helpful for her publisher and for her when the book was released, as a way to build her reputation," Fitzgerald says.

Another winner from last year was Ranjit Bhatnagar. The New York-based artist wasn't an official selection, but his Pentametron account became a surprise hit of the festival. Bhatnagar, who's spent the last 20 years building experimental language projects, created an algorithm trolling for tweets in iambic pentameter, and then retweeting them.

"Twitter is all language," says Bhatnagar, who runs several accounts merging math and literature. Pentametron's real-time sonnets got him the attention of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, whose Twitter feed he took over and ran for a time.

"I think it's a great, weird way to get noticed by New York, rather than sending out normal proposals and cover letters and hoping to get through the slush pile," suggests Richard Kadrey, a New York Times bestseller and one of this year's featured authors.

Kadrey, who did not participate last year, says he's planning on using his showcase spot to tweet out the beginnings of 50 different stories. One tweet for each idea. Kadrey hopes that collaborative engagement on Twitter will help him decide which story to pursue and write for his next project--and encourage readers to pen their own related tweets.

"The success or failure of what I'm going to do is based on how many people decide to play along," Kadrey says, which "might spark something in people who are hesitant, or can't quite get started themselves. I'm looking for communication with readers, but also trying to get a little bit more back and forth."

Why Tweet?

Allen Lau, the CEO and cofounder of Wattpad, an online community for readers and writers, says engagement has become the metric for success for the publishing world.

"Readers provide encouragement, validation, and valuable feedback through comments and messages," Lau says. Gaining a major following on platforms like his, or Twitter, has become the new way to catch their attention.

Dougal Cameron, the COO of the digital publishing software company Pubsoft, acknowledges that Twitter could be useful for sourcing creative voices--but he warns that the platform could be limiting.

"The form and format of the content restricts how instructive competitions are at detecting new talent," Cameron says. "I think an author who masters snippet-form narrative on Twitter is skilled in that regard, but that skill set is completely different than one who can create a compelling hundred-thousand-word novel."

Ron Martinez, the chief executive of the digital publisher Aerbook, adds that another challenge could be keeping reader attention--and vetting authenticity.

"On Twitter, verbosity and run-on sentences fail the moment they're written," he says. "The festival reminds me of the six-word story purportedly written by Hemingway on a bar napkin, on a bet: 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn.' The authorship is convincingly disputed."

Cameron and Martinez are right, and the format on Twitter is different than the blank pages writers are used to attacking. But the value here is in forcing creators to flex their muscles in literary exercise, and using Twitter to connect with readers. The industry is changing and in order to stay alive and employed, writers must change, too. The growing popularity of e-readers and mobile communication continues to poach readers from traditional outlets, sending more and more online--all reasons writers should use these tools, and why organizations like the Association of American Publishers have decided to support the festival.

"People love to read in all the ways available to them," says Andi Sporkin, the AAP's vice president of communications. "The AAP celebrates great storytelling and great storytellers, so the opportunity to offer writers new outlets is something we support."

Twenty authors from AAP member publishers have committed to participate. When creators win, no matter where their work is championed, publishers and readers also win, Sporkin explains. "The chance to reach readers through fresh channels, and in innovative ways, advances the mission of publishers. Events such as this help shine a light on the level of talent and the work it takes to create powerful content."

In 2013 when Typhoon Haiyan brought down most of the Philippines' cell and radio towers, bringing information to a standstill at a crucial moment. The same thing happened again earlier this month in Ukraine, but this time it was men with political motives, not nature, that severed access to the country's largest ISP.

But a fledgling system of Low Earth Orbit satellites known as the Outernet might mean an end to outages like this--making constant up-time a possibility, and with it, true human reliance on the Internet. The question: Is that a good thing?

Four Billion People Have No Access To The Internet

It may come as a shock to anyone reading this article, online, right now, but as pervasive as the Internet is in 2014, two-thirds of the world still does not--and never has had--access to it. That's almost 4 billion people who don't enjoy the same access to the open and free information that you and I do.

That 60% doesn't even cover when man or nature steps in to take the infrastructure out. We're just talking about people living in places too remote, too costly, or too poverty stricken to make it worthwhile setting up Internet infrastructure.

But more and more, access to information seems like a basic human right, right up there with access to clean water. And that's exactly the attitude of Syed Karim, creator of the Outernet: a free, universally accessible information service that beams Internet information--be it entire websites like Wikipedia, emergency broadcast messages, or video classes from the Khan academy--to any Wi-Fi-enabled device across the globe.

The Short Wave Radio For The Digital Age

"We fundamentally believe that in order for our species to advance--for humanity to get to the next step in development--that no one can be denied a certain level of education and information. If there is a curiosity it should be satiated," says Karim.

The Outernet is an ambitious project. Using open source hardware and software Karim and his team will launch hundreds of nano satellites into Low Earth Orbit in 2016. These satellites will encircle the planet delivering packets of information, much the way BitTorrent does now, to anyone on the globe as long as they have a Wi-Fi-enabled device.

"I've been thinking about this problem for almost seven years," Karim says. "I started actively working on it about four years ago. I originally enrolled in graduate school with the desire to pursue a PhD in the economic impact of information access. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had just brought a satellite Internet link to the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe. I was fascinated by the idea of measuring the positive social and economic impact that increased access to digital information had on a society."

But it's only after Karim left graduate school and began working for Chicago Public Radio that his idea fully took shape.

"I was asked to head product development at Chicago Public Radio (now Chicago Public Media), which is where I began exploring data-casting in more detail."

It is data-casting that lies at the heart of Outernet and it's also why Karim's solution is so much less expensive and easier to deploy than other global Internet networks like Facebook's internet.org and Google's Project Loon.

Outernet is a one-way platform. It will broadcast free data to any Wi-Fi device on the planet but will not, at first, allow those receiving the broadcasts to broadcast back.

"Our initial focus is on solving a very specific problem: lack of access to a basic level of information and education for all of humanity," Karim says. "Outernet is not the Internet. It is simply the fastest and least expensive way to deliver rich content to the large fraction of humanity who cannot afford the information that many take for granted. Once that is addressed, then we'll work on the more complicated--and significantly more expensive--task of providing low-cost two-way Internet access."

But that one-way information is nothing to scoff at. For the first time ever an additional 4 billion people could be able to receive, download, and store data locally on any Wi-Fi device. Users could then share this data with other owners of Wi-Fi devices via ad hoc device-to-device networks--no Internet connection required.

Such a way of receiving one-direction data no doubts lends comparisons of Outernet to short wave radio, but it is much more versatile than that. While shortwave radio requires active listeners during a live broadcast and offers no way to send that broadcast to other listeners, the Outernet allows people to download large packets of data in the form of any kind of digital content--be it videos or entire websites--and share it with anyone with a Wi-Fi device.

The humanitarian and political implications of this are huge. In a natural disaster scenario, like the Philippine typhoon, Outernet could have easily broadcast entire websites full of medical and rescue advice to victims across the country. In Ukraine it could have enabled those in the resistance movement to share up-to-date information from one Wi-Fi device to the next, no matter if Russian sympathizers took down all of the country's ISPs.

The Internet Protocol For Outer Space

Of course before Outernet can broadcast web data to any Wi-Fi device on the globe the team leading the ambitious project has several objectives to overcome from both a hardware and software perspective.

The first is getting hundreds of nanosatellites into space. When I express my amazement over the fact that a small startup is trying to launch satellites--something I presume only large, very rich multinationals or governments have the capability to do--Aaron Rogers, head of Outernet's Mission Engineering, says this task is actually relatively simple.

"We're going to fully exercise a global resource network of secondary and tertiary opportunistic rideshare opportunities that are being offered through third-party integration service providers," he says.

In other words, there's satellites going up into space all the time and because of it, even smaller companies can often hitch a ride on space shuttles to get their gear up into space along with the Big Boy's stuff. Yes, even you reading this could get a satellite up in the air. Here's a schedule for the next open rideshares.

But before the satellites go up, Outernet will be testing it's data-casting technology on the International Space Station. That's because, unlike the terrestrial Internet, which sends standardized packets of data consistently and reliably from one point to another over the Internet Protocol (IP) standard, data signals beamed from space are prone to suffering from packet disruption because receivers on Earth are trying to talk to small spacecraft traveling at thousands of miles per hour overhead for five or so minutes at a time before suffering potential data disruptions due to the constantly moving paths of satellites along their orbits.

But Edward Birrane, head of Telecom Protocols at Outernet, says the system will use a new communications technology called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) that is being researched by the space agencies of the world as a way to standardize packetized data for space links.

"These protocols and techniques give an Internet-like data exchange to spacecraft, allowing Outernet ground systems to patiently accumulate data over multiple passes, over multiple days, or over multiple weeks without fear of timeouts, expired networking sessions, or powering on-and-off the ground terminal," Birrane says. "For the Outernet datacasting solution, telecommunications protocols such as DTN give the needed ability to stitch together large files--such as Wikipedia entries--as they are received bit-by-bit from those fast-travelling spacecraft."

The resulting way web data will then be delivered to Outernet users can perhaps best be likened to technology dating back to the 1990s, according to Branko Vukelic, software developer at Outernet.

"Sometime around the turn of the century I used to have an Internet connection through a regular modem that could run at speeds of around 30-something kbps," Vukelic says. "I used a web crawler, I think it was HTTrack but I could be mistaken, to download entire sites during the night, and create offline archives that could run on a local server without Internet connection. That was necessary in order to keep the phone line free during the day. It's hard to claim 'those were the days,' but at that time, it worked pretty well for me. Outernet isn't so different from this."

Indeed it isn't. The crawling and compiling web data will be done by Outernet's software, with the end result being a downloadable archive that would be served to all devices on a local network. The end user would only filter out content they want to discard, and manage the rest on their local archive.

The more one learns about Outernet it's hard not to appreciate all the ingenuity that went in to hacking a grand-scale humanitarian technological idea into place. But there's one lingering question that arises: If Outernet only broadcasts web data to users, who chooses which data is made available?

Open Source, Community-Driven Content

The answer to who chooses content for four billion people when they themselves have no means of browsing and selecting it independently, Vukelic says, is a community driven group of editors, like Wikipedia has, and a community of voters, like Reddit has--only on a much larger scale.

"The first piece that we will build is the content selection and discovery system (CSDS for short). The system has two purposes," Vukelic says. "One is content selection, which is facilitated through weighted voting systems, and another is content discovery. Since end users don't necessarily have access to search engines, the system would have to present a request, and have the community find and suggest adequate content."

The CSDS voting system will allow anyone with an Internet connection to submit content they think should be shared. The community of voters can then "vote up" content, with the web content with the most votes chosen to be broadcast over Outernet.

Vukelic admits that the system does have its challenges. After all, how do you create fair and inclusive content selection process? One possibility under consideration is a weighted voting system that gives more weight to votes in a specific geographic area. For example, if another hurricane hits the Philippines, votes from people who live in the surrounding area may be given more weight for which content to broadcast next.

"We want to give more strength to the voices of actual Outernet end users, but we also don't want to leave out people who want to help them. While end users should have more say in what they want to see/read/hear, people who are not necessarily end users might know more about the content end users don't," Vukelic says.

Outernet's CSDS will be a mix of web app, API, and mashups that will funnel all input into its database and manage the presentation of requests and votes. The company will start with the web app and API components using Google AppEngine as its base, and Python as the language of the choice. It also plans to provide a full API to allow third-party developers to come up with new ways to vote, and not just rely on its own UI.

"The entire system should be usable, within its technical constraints, by as many people as possible, and especially the users that otherwise have no alternative," Vukelic says. "Missing an uplink capability, we need to find alternative ways for end users on the ground to give us meaningful feedback. We will look into everything and anything that lets us do this, including accepting community-transcribed voice messages or scanned handwritten mail, and anything else we can think of. Carrier pigeons? No method of requesting content should be too crazy for Outernet."

Getting Ready To Launch

Once Outernet comes on air it will deliver web data to the two-thirds of the planet that has never accessed the Internet. The data will not only include a complete copy of some of the greatest collections of human knowledge, like Wikipedia in its entirety, but international and local news, crop prices for farmers, and educational course content from Khan Academy, Open Source Ecology, and Teachers Without Borders. It will also be used as a global notification system for emergency communications to help coordinate disaster relief and provide the free flow of information in war-torn or dictatorial countries.

That's the plan, anyway. But while Outernet's launch in 2016 is only a few short years away, founder Syed Karim admits that there are plenty of steps his team still needs to achieve to get Outernet--what he calls "basically a monster-sized version of Flipboard"--into space. But he's confident his team is up for the challenge--and the goal is worth pursuing.

"Imagine if everyone in the world had access to the latest resources for learning, constantly updated," Karim says. "And now imagine that this is available for free. What does the future of humanity look like when a basic level of information and education is available to everyone? I don't know what it looks like, but I really want to find out."

Everyone knows Mozilla is a force for open source. But a lesser known story is their advancements in a revolutionary new open source language called Rust, which is what enables Mozilla's futuristic new browser to take advantage of computers with multi-core processors and machines with more than one processor.

The Rust language will power Mozilla's new browser, Servo, and its big selling point is efficiency. Because C++ crashes when it runs into memory allocation issues, it weakens any browser that uses the language. Mozilla designed Rust to be superior to C++ this way, more easily isolating tasks and promote a process known as "work stealing," which is when tasks from an overloaded processor are shifted over to another one.

"Rust is targeted at C++ developers, and Mozilla has many of those. We do not expect it to take long for an experienced C++ hacker to acclimatize to Rust. So far initial experiences have shown that to be the case," says Brendan Eich, chief technology officer and senior vice president of Engineering at Mozilla.

Mozilla has no immediate plans to release Servo, since much of its success relies on Rust's completion. Rust will be nearing a 1.0 release over the course of this year, but until then, it is in the hands of its myriad contributors.

And those are good hands to be in. "Umbrella Security Labs has been using Rust in production to do reliable, real-time processing of DNS information. The Skylight service also uses Rust to implement its Ruby on Rails application monitor," says Eich.

A More Efficient Browser

It is true that most browsers, including Mozilla Firefox, eventually patched up their browsers to incorporate the multi-thread programming that leverages our computer's multi-processors. But their architectures are so convoluted as a result of the incremental changes that they are difficult to modify.

Servo won't have this issue. Mozilla is building Servo's browser stack architecture from scratch.

Most of the hiccups that a browser runs into when loading a webpage are related to how it sequences the priority of its page elements. Conventionally, elements are loaded in a hierarchy so that they don't affect each other's positioning on the page.

But with the help of Rust, Servo can pre-identify those page elements that don't conflict in size and positioning and lay them out at the same time, in parallel.

In total, six Mozilla engineers are working on Servo almost full-time, with other part-timers in the organization. Over a dozen engineers at Samsung do another chunk of the work, and the number of contributors is growing.

Not surprisingly, Mozilla plans to widen their outreach and training to contributors as Rust matures. And in what might interest those volunteers, Mozilla is now hiring three more paid engineers to work on Servo.

The Rust Subreddit

Free-moving contributors from outside Mozilla most notably occupy the Rust subreddit. Run by Rust enthusiasts since 2010, it is a one-stop source of real-time updates on changes, issues, and even meeting minutes from Mozilla's in-house Rust team.

"The Rust subreddit tends to be where news items of interest to the Servo and Rust community are posted or announcements of interesting new projects," says Eich.

Reddit user Azth founded the Rust Subreddit on December 2nd, 2010, though current co-moderator Ben Striegel says, "he seems to be more of a mildly interested outsider than an active contributor." To be sure, the subreddit had almost no activity in the first years following its inception.

Striegel had been following Rust developments since late 2011 and focused on removing undesirable and outdated features from the Rust compiler that takes Rust from source code to a bona fide programming language. But by the end of 2012, he saw that Rust's contributor community was outgrowing the existing mailing list and IRC channels, both of which Mozilla runs.

At first, Striegel thought about creating a dedicated website to host a forum but ultimately realized that Rust needed more reach than an insular site could provide.

"I decided that we needed maximum visibility for faster growth, and it came down to Reddit or Google+. Though I wasn't exactly thrilled with either site in general, I decided I was more put-off by Google+'s real-names policy than by Reddit's typical anarchy," says Striegel.

So, in October 2012, Striegel asked Azth to appoint him as a moderator. Almost immediately, Striegel aggressively advertised the Rust subreddit in places where he thought Rust threads might pop up, like on the Programming subreddit and Hacker News. Rust's subreddit eventually grew to a point where Striegel had to appoint another moderator.

To make people's roles more clear on Rust's subreddit, Striegel created three Reddit-specific tags called "flairs": the "contributor" flair, the "supercontributor" flair, and the "Mozilla" flair. While the "Mozilla" flair is reserved for Mozilla employees, the "contributor" and "supercontributor" flairs denote non-Mozilla Rust supporters.

Now, there are 33 people on the subreddit with either a "contributor" or the more elitist "supercontributor" flair and nine with the "Mozilla" flair.

Open Communication Philosophy

Although Reddit is an unofficial communication channel at Mozilla, it is nonetheless a valuable one, "especially given how much work is done by people who aren't employees of Mozilla," says Eich.

That goes for any of the other communication channels that Mozilla operates on. It contributes heavily to Hacker News and StackOverflow, where Mozilla is now discussing plans to create a section dedicated only to Rust. And anything that shows up on its official broadcast channels, GitHub, IRC, and email on Google Groups, is available online right away.

"Almost all the communication is publicly visible without any delay. We do this because that is the way Mozilla works, and because with a distributed team, it's the only way to keep everyone in the loop. This means you can see projects at every stage of development, well before they are ready for launch," says Eich.

"Most of the real work happens on GitHub. We use email for discussions that are too large for GitHub or where broad reach is desirable. IRC is for more casual discussions and Q&A about various things," adds Eich.

If you were to peruse each of these channels on any given day, you would run across a few of the same people participating in discussions across each space. "This structure isn't too different than most other open source projects, except perhaps that Rust's large community gives rise to things like the Rust Reddit," says Eich.

Through its online presence, Mozilla gives generous guidance to its contributors, or the "Mozilla community" as they are called. And every now and then it sparks the right flame to get the broader community moving along.

In a message exchange over Reddit Striegel wrote to me, "I spend a lot of time trawling websites looking for mentions of Rust (such as monitoring the "rust" tag on Stack Overflow and the "#rustlang" tag on Twitter), answering questions, correcting misinformation, and providing historical context. I also lurk in over a dozen programming language-related IRC channels on irc.freenode.net, listening for mentions of Rust in order to get a pulse on how we are perceived in the broader community."

If star Mozilla contributors like the Rust subreddit's Striegel are any evidence, it seems that Mozilla has found the right tact when it comes to creating a community movement.

MakeSpace is like Dropbox for your physical stuff. The online self-storage service landed funding easily thanks to its cofounders' experience working for venture capital firms. Their backgrounds also gave them a front-row seat to many startup failures, which they needed to grow its staff fourfold. The service lets you manage your closet from the cloud--but it wouldn't have survived this long without startup lessons from the VC world.

For the uninitiated, MakeSpace is a service that will drop a container off at your door for you to fill and then pick it up to store for a monthly fee. Want something from your container? MakeSpace digitally catalogs your stuff for you to peruse online, which they can pluck out at your behest and deliver to your door. With the newly released MakeSpace Air service, the company can receive your packages and ship your stored stuff anywhere in the world.

Sam Rosen thought up MakeSpace when he flew back to New York from Colombia to help a former girlfriend. Hurricane Sandy had devastated her apartment, so they were packing her life into a storage container. The rain-bedraggled pair were about to lock up the unit when they heard that a bad Nor'Easter storm was coming. Somewhere in that pile of things were a pair of her snowboots.

"We looked into this thing that we packed in the last few hours and were like...oh no," says Rosen.

Here's how it works: Sign up for their service and you'll get a crate delivered to your door for free. Pack the crate with personal items and one of their Uploaders will pick it up to store for a monthly fee. Everything in the crate you packed is cataloged online. For a nominal fee, customers can get a specific item plucked from the crate and delivered to their door.

The MakeSpace concept resonated with investors, but getting an idea funded is only the first step. The collision of abstract concept with logistical reality often wrecks startups beyond recovery.

Lessons From The Inside Track

Rosen was in Colombia to get his mind off of the failure of his previous startup, Speakergram. The last thing he wanted to do was launch another startup. But the idea for MakeSpace wouldn't leave his brain. When Rosen ran into his mentor Mark Suster in November 2012, the esteemed entrepreneur immediately told Rosen he'd back it. Rosen started as an entrepreneur in residence at Upfront Ventures in early 2013, where he finally got to see things from the VC's perspective--as an outsider looking in.

While Rosen had gotten mentoring from Dave McClure and the accelerator 500 Startups for Speakergram, being inside Upfront exposed him to the day-to-day partner meetings and the criteria used to vote on startups. The biggest thing that kills startups is lack of momentum, Rosen found. He likens it to an infamous YouTube video of a guy who singlehandedly starts a dance party at a music festival: Dance alone and you're crazy, but get just two other people on board and the rest will flock. A friend had recommended Adam LeVasseur to become the second MakeSpace member, but Rahul Gandhi was the crucial third man who got the MakeSpace party going.

Gandhi had over three years of experience at High Peaks Venture Partners before he left to join Rosen at MakeSpace last July. During those years, Gandhi had quietly observed startups, waiting to see them get their finances and products in order before stepping out of the shadows to tell his firm which were worth funding. Gandhi had seen thousands of deals, but nothing sparked his fancy despite an increasing desire to jump in the startup game. He'd had known Rosen for a few years, but as MakeSpace began to take shape in Spring 2013, Gandhi fell in love with the idea.

More to the point, Gandhi was convinced that he, Rosen, and LeVasseur would get along very well. Thanks to their experience inside and observing startups, Gandhi and Rosen believed religiously in the importance of team compatability over perfect qualifications.

"What really matters is the personality fit, not the exact skillset," says Rosen. "It's a big risk. Don't underestimate how important the personal dynamic is, especially at the beginning."

Rosen's startup Speakergram was plagued by cofounder disputes, which partly led to its downfall. Now Rosen is incredibly cautious about new hires. In order to preserve an A+ team, he'll forgo hiring if the right candidate hasn't shown up.

This meant that the cofounders Rosen, Gandhi, and LeVasseur were doing every job, even driving to customers and loading their crates from the alpha launch in June 2013 until they hired a full-time Uploader team four weeks ago. Unlike other startups, bootstrapping MakeSpace's services meant Rosen, Gandhi, and LeVasseur's boots were on the ground...and all over New York City.

The Logistics Game

Personal storage hasn't changed in half a century. To shift toward computer cloud-style loading and delivery of personal things, MakeSpace needed to pave the way themselves. The trio launched MakeSpace alpha without even closing their fundraising round. With a storage container from Home Depot, plain green Uniqlo T-shirts, and any yellow taxi they could hail, the trio built MakeSpace one customer at a time.

"It was really scraping it till you make it. Looking back, it's kind of embarrassing," says Rosen.

But that overwork didn't ease Rosen's rigid insistence that if MakeSpace hired someone, that person needed to be perfectly qualified in order to preserve the team's quality. As the trio ditched taxis and Zipcars to invest in their own dedicated MakeSpace-branded vans, they seriously considered hiring a supremely qualified logistics expert. Gandhi pushed hard, but Rosen balked. The expert was too expensive, and did they really need another team member? No, it turns out--because without much personnel logistics training, Gandhi stepped up to master the startup's operations.

"People told me 'There is nothing above you when you launch a startup' before I did this and I didn't really understand until I sat in the seat and started driving the van," says Gandhi. "I have three degrees, I spent time in venture capital. And then I sat in that seat and said, Wow, this is what it takes to get a company off the ground."

Gandhi didn't know how to run a fleet of vehicles. He looked at the logistics of companies he admired like FreshDirect, Amazon, DHL, and UPS. Like he learned in his venture capital days, he found advisors from other companies to chat up. But he pointedly ignored CEOs in favor of the men on the ground--anyone who drove around and dealt with the delays and frustrations of getting things through city streets.

"I'm a big believer in flipping my own burgers before anyone else," says Gandhi. Far from the lush confines of the VC office, getting their hands dirty unwittingly gave the cofounding trio serious respect from the Uploaders they hired. Gandhi discovered that a lot of managers and CEOs never drove and didn't understand the reality on the ground.

"Right when we started the Uploader interviews, I said, 'Look--I was in your position, I know all the routes in NYC, all the parking situations, and how to deal with certain customer situations," says Gandhi, "'and we'll give you the opportunity to really grow within the company.'"

The Personal Touch

Unlike other startups that sift through emailed customer complaints, the Uploaders are the point men, the eyes and ears who represent the service and give feedback on efficiency clogs in the MakeSpace system. But they get super excited about where the company is going, Gandhi says, because he listens to their feedback, diagnoses problems, and solves them in hours. The respect goes both ways.

That's important when you're dealing with people's stuff--which almost always needs to be stored for one of the four D's: death, disaster, downsizing, or divorce.

"We had a customer, a midlife woman, and the first thing she did was tell us that her spouse died," says Rosen. "Our customer service team is trained to deal with these situations. And honestly? They're trained to give a shit. Maybe leave a handwritten note saying 'Sorry for your loss,' maybe bring coffee and chocolate. You think another storage company cares? You're just a number to them."

The Future Of Storage

"We're building a scalable company in a business that traditionally is not scalable," says Rosen. "We can scale because of the tech we built."

Part of that tech is the logistics MakeSpace developed to optimize routes, pickup schedules, and the online categorizing system. The other technology, so to speak, is the Uploader Playbook they developed, which Gandhi used to train the first four-person Uploader team in three weeks. Add a fleet manager and perhaps a marketing person and boom, that's a basic team for expansion into another city. MakeSpace could be online in Boston in a matter of weeks.

MakeSpace hasn't released solid expansion plans. With the hiring of full-time Uploaders, the team is up to 12 people, and Rosen's extreme hesitance to hire still keeps the team working at full capacity.

But they are rolling out new services. The newest, MakeSpace Air, will give users the ability to both ship an upload to MakeSpace or have MakeSpace ship previously stored items at below shipping rates. Upcoming ski trip? Instead of the hassle of having them delivered to your home and schlepping them to the slopes, MakeSpace will simply ship them to wherever you're staying.

But the most surprising benefactors will be military men and women. Often, servicemen and -women hack traditional storage by buying or shipping things to friends who deposit them in storage units. MakeSpace can store and ship out the military person's items at the click of a button.

"Everyone wants a GroupMe story, an Instagram story, to be bought for a billion dollars by Facebook. That's not the reality for our startup," says Rosen. "It doesn't faze us like that. If we are going to disrupt public storage, we'll get there one customer at a time."

When Dan Porter starts working with a new client, he has a unique history from which to draw lessons. The head of digital for agency William Morris Endeavor is best known as the guy who designed Draw Something, the explosively popular mobile game that got his studio OMGPop bought by Zynga for $200 million. WME recently signed on to consult with the makers of popular trivia app QuizUp, so Porter's experience will come in handy--even though his massive success was a happy accident.

For OMGPop, the stakes were high. The studio had achieved moderate success with its dozens of web-based Flash games, but smartphone adoption was exploding and mobile gaming was becoming all the rage. To stay relevant, the company would need its own mobile hit to rival the likes of Angry Birds and Words With Friends.

So Porter sat down to design what turned out to be a modern, social network-infused version of Pictionary. But despite the smartphone-based game's roots in an established classic, Porter's approach to creating it was surprisingly lacking in the traditions of game design methodology.

Throwing Out The Conventional Wisdom Of Game Design

Normally, a game designer starts by sketching out a few core elements: the goals of the game, the space in which it takes place, the characters, mechanics, and rules. These nitty-gritty details are typically outlined and documented long before the interface gets sketched or a line of code is written. But not for Porter.

"I had no preconceptions about what was needed or not needed," says Porter. "If you're a game designer, you start with a bunch of building blocks: The objective of the game. The powers of each player of the game. Things like that. And then you use those things to put together a game."

But--forget the details normally obsessed over by people who create video games, he thought. Porter had a hankering to do the whole thing backwards: Start with a broader concept that fills gaps in the marketplace and then build the whole thing out from there. Fill in the details later.

"I didn't really know or understand the rules of making games," Porter admits. "But I had these things that I really wanted to solve for. Rather than looking at the blocks normally used to build a game, I was like, 'Here's where I think there's an opportunity.'"

Despite Porter's self-professed naiveté, Draw Something went ballistic in the App Store rankings, reeling in over 1 million users over a span of nine days. Before long, it topped 35 million downloads. At one point in early 2012, it seemed like everyone was playing--and talking about--Draw Something.

At the time, for instance, most of the popular mobile games were single player. This was the era of Angry Birds. Early examples of social, smartphone-based titles like Words With Friends were starting to catch fire, bolstering Porter's hunch that people wanted a more interactive mobile gaming experience.

Creating a mobile game that's also social--in addition to satisfying the buzzword quota of the time--would also solve one of Draw Something's inherent design challenges: Preventing dick scribbles. That is, by using Facebook to connect players who actually know each other, the game would limit the prevalence of nonsense and crudely drawn obscenity. It's not that Porter and his team were prudes. They just figured that connecting strangers by default would result in far more irrelevant drawings, undermining the point of the game and limiting its potential for viral success. There's a reason you never hear anybody talk about Chatroulette anymore.

"The way a game developer solves that is to have penalties or a timer or a 'report' button," says Porter. "I basically thought, 'You know what? It's probably impossible to solve.' The only way that I could think to solve that is to play with somebody you know."

No Losers Allowed

In Porter's mind, even a well-executed social video game would still present challenges. Chief among them: the problem of losing.

Long before OMGPop birthed a smash hit, it created dozens of browser-based games. None of them took off like Draw Something later would, but all that gameplay offered a trove of data-driven lessons. As it turned out, even the most popular games have a feature built into them that sends some players fleeing: You can lose. It seems like a necessary part of any game, but apparently the cold reality of crippling defeat is poisonous for user engagement metrics.

"Instead of starting from scratch and creating the game, I was like, 'Wow, how do you solve the problem of not having someone lose?" Porter says. "Because I've now, for four years, seen the downside of losing: 50% of the time the person who loses never comes back to play the game."

So, instead of the drawn-out, ego-bruising loss of a game like Words With Friends, Draw Something would treat players--very few of whom were likely to be artists--much more humanely. As counterintuitive as this seems, the approach appears to have helped keep Draw Something users tapping away, helping to fuel its rise to the top of the App Store charts.

But before Draw Everything took off, plenty of people questioned the team's approach.

"All of the feedback would consistently say things like, "Where's the leader board?" Porter says. "How can you have a game if it's not competitive? They were taking the language of games that they understood and telling me that language was missing. And I would say, 'I don't really want to do that.'"

Learning From Users In The Wild

If you've ever ridden a subway car with Dan Porter, you'll have to forgive him for staring. For this particular New York City resident, the subway is not only a means to get to work; It's also a bit of a laboratory. In his OMGPop days, Porter would spend his commute time observing what people do on their phones. Since New York doesn't have cellular reception underground, many people indulge in offline-friendly activities like reading or playing games.

"For me, it became less about 'What are the traditional rules of game design and more about 'How do people hold their phone? Where's their thumb? What do they like to do? Are they on a subway ride?'" he says. "It's how I learn about games that are popular. I just wanted to make a game that I could see other people playing."

Porter credits this impromptu, in-the-wild research with helping his team build a game that turned into an overnight success. For most people, the staggering download numbers would paint a flattering enough picture. But for Porter, Draw Something's success wasn't official until one day when he was taking a walk in Prospect Park.

"I saw this couple huddled together and laughing and I was with my son and I said, 'Oh I wonder if they're playing my game.'" Porter says. "He was mortally embarrassed. I walked behind them and I looked and they were playing my game and I was like "That's it!" That's what I wanted.'"

Lessons That Carry Over Beyond Gaming

As anybody who follows tech news knows, the Draw Something saga didn't have the happiest of endings. In 2012, OMGPop was acquired by Zynga for a headline-grabbing $200 million. A year later, the studio and most of its titles were shut down after an unsuccessful attempt by its founders to buy it back. Draw Something remains available, but has since been eclipsed in popularity by the incessant parade of mobile game hits, most recently Flappy Bird and its many knock-offs.

Porter, who left Zynga in April 2013, now heads up digital at talent agency William Morris Endeavor. But he says he approaches projects similarly to the way he tackled Draw Something.

"For all of the things that I've been working on subsequently, I've kind of had a similar mind-set," Porter says. "What is the thing that's the open market opportunity? Or the thing that I feel is missing? And how do I work backwards from there?"

It's a wildly differently world from gaming, of course, but he says the same principles apply. Whatever industry his firm may be dealing with, he tries to think of it from a naive, outside perspective. When working with the fashion industry, for instance, he'll try applying a paradigm from the sports world and seeing what happens.

"It's all about putting constructs from other industries on top as as way to force yourself to try to see it differently," he says. "I'd rather have people say Dan Porter did something different and it failed than say he did another version of something that's already out there and it's pretty good."

The mood in the hotel courtyard could hardly be more upbeat. For the mix of musicians and businessmen standing around in the Austin sun, a huge milestone just happened: $2 million raised on Kickstarter in just over 24 hours. It's good news for Neil Young and the team behind his Pono digital music player. But their work is far from finished.

After three years of preparation, Young formally announced Pono during his keynote address at South By Southwest on Tuesday. The project aims to bring high-resolution digital music to the masses via an iTunes-like storefront and a triangular-shaped device for music storage and playback. Both products will ship in the fall.

Shortly after Young's keynote, the fledgling company went live on Kickstarter and more than doubled its $800,000 funding goal in less than one day. Sitting on a sofa outside his hotel room, Young is at once both elated and exhausted.

Why Pono Exists

"We've had some pretty intense days," says Young. "The team has been working really hard on the website and making decisions for Kickstarter. We're also hoping to get the technical areas absolutely buttoned up. But it's been good. We've managed to reach the goals we wanted to reach."

For the rock legend turned startup founder, this week's announcement marks the culmination of years of planning and building--turning an impassioned gripe into an actual company with a business plan and a physical product.

"With MP3s, you have less than 5% of the data that could be in that song if it was recorded at a higher resolution," says Young. "And it was probably recorded at a much higher resolution that what you got. You've now purchased the right to recognize the song. But that's about it. What you're missing is the music."

This is a drum Young has been beating for quite some time. In his much-publicized view, the convenience of digital music has come at the expense of sound quality. This is certainly true, technically speaking. For an album to be easily transferred over broadband and cellular networks, it needs to be crunched down to a manageable file size, inevitably losing some detail. At 320kbps, the highest quality tracks available through Spotify are still only 22% of the resolution of a compact disc. The AAC compression standard, considered an improvement over MP3s, is still just that--a compressed audio file. While the sound quality status quo has come a long way since the days of Napster, Young and purists like him are far from satisfied.

Still, today's popular formats are clearly sufficient enough for the millions of music fans who purchase songs from iTunes and stream from services like Spotify. For audiophiles, lossless high-quality formats have long scratched the itch MP3s couldn't. What Young and his team hope to do is take high-res audio up a notch and then market it to a crowd beyond the audio codec nerds.

"Things ebb and flow between convenience and quality," says Pono CEO John Hamm, wielding a yellow prototype of the $400 device. "The laws of physics that kept us from quality in the early 2000s--bandwidth, capacity, memory, storage--we've solved those problems in the last 15 years. This is just another point on the convenience curve."

Hamm and his colleagues are quick to point out that they're not trying to start a format war. Nor are they getting into the streaming music subscription game. Instead, they want to offer consumers what Young repeatedly refers to as "freedom of choice." That is, the option to purchase music in a format that sounds as warm and high-fidelity as 180-gram vinyl, but with the convenience music fans have come to expect since Steve Jobs first held up Apple's little white gadget on stage in 2001.

To get superior sound, Hamm tells me that they "get the highest quality digital master possible" from the record labels. In many cases, that means they're getting an album at a higher quality than the CD version. But not always. The range of quality is "all over the place" but generally always better than the MP3s and streaming services. Whatever the purest available master happens to be is what they'll sell through the PonoMusic store.

The device itself is engineered to play back high-resolution audio, not unlike the bulkier home systems for which audio geeks pay top dollar. Built in conjunction with Ayre Acoustics, the player promises to recreate the original analog sound using state-of-the-art circuitry, and what the company says is the best digital audio converter (DAC) on the market.

Hamm declines to compare the hardware to the inner workings of Apple's iPod (about which he says he knows very little), but says that the Pono Player is the first device to include audiophile-grade engineering in a portable form factor.

At launch, the PonoMusic store will focus on selling albums rather than individual tracks like iTunes. Prices will vary depending on record label preferences, but on average they are expected to range from $15 to $24 per album. Once purchased, an album will download in lossless, DRM-free FLAC files. The player will support other filetypes like MP3, WAV, AIFF, ALAC and AAC as well.

What Pono Sounds Like

Outside Young's hotel room is a conglomeration of people who would rarely otherwise hang out. Members of the press, record executives, technologists, and budding rock stars mill about and make small talk. In the context of this private courtyard, Hamm and his colleagues are eager to let others give the Pono player a spin. The device, still in alpha, isn't yet polished enough to let the public give it a whirl. But these guys, Hamm is confident, will "get it." Especially the musicians.

Sure enough, after one of the young musicians puts on a pair of headphones, his face lights up.

"There it is!" Hamm shouts. "That's what I call the Pono face," referring to the expression made by most artists when they first hear the player. By now, dozens of other musicians have had a chance to listen to Pono--as evidenced by the star-studded promotional video posted to the project's Kickstarter page--and their reactions tend to be similar.

When you first listen to Pono, it's helpful to put on a familiar song. That way it's easier to pick up on the details you may not have heard before. The rhythmic tap of a tambourine. The subtle resonance of an acoustic guitar string between chords. It's these finer nuances that pop out, unencumbered by the digital compression. Even if they're audible on the MP3 version of the song, they're suddenly more noticeable. The details are crisp.

Picking these things out is also made easier by the fact that the mix of the song itself feels--at least in my brief testing--more spacious. Almost three-dimensional. Each instrument has more room to breathe. Some have commented that it sounds like you're standing in the recording studio with the musicians. That's a fair way to describe it.

For comparison's sake, I press pause on the Pono player in the middle of Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" and load up the same song on my iPhone, switching the headphones from jack to jack. Even at Spotify's "extreme" offline quality of 320kbps, the song suddenly feels one-dimensional. Instead of the finely separated mix, the instrumentation and vocals feel packed into a more finite space.

Here's the thing: The Spotify version doesn't sound bad. It's not like the early days of MP3s when the drums sounded warbly and certain tones would be notably absent from familiar songs. "Heart of Gold" on my iPhone sounds perfectly fine, as does the other music I download or stream at a high bit rate.

But Pono does sound different. It surfaces new things to the listener. As many have pointed out, the sound is "warm," not unlike the analog sound of high-quality vinyl. The results will undoubtedly vary from album to album and speaker to speaker, but on the whole it does sound fuller and more pure than the audio files we're used to.

"It's hard to take your vinyl on a trip to London," says Hamm. "So if you want the closest to the vinyl experience because you love something, it's like taking your 30 favorite records with you. Those weren't the ones you were listening to on Spotify."

It's worth noting that the majority of people who have heard Pono to date are musicians. It's no accident. Young and Hamm have opted to market this an "artist-driven movement." That's a smart strategy, since people who spend their days in recording studios are going to appreciate the nuance of what's different about Pono. It also helps to have rock stars enthusiastically praising the product you're trying to launch. But there's no money changing hands here. That perk is a natural by-product of who founded the company.

This also means that the product is virtually untested among non-musicians, so it's hard to gauge how wide its appeal might be until units start shipping in October.

Will It Succeed?

Pono isn't without its detractors. The people trying to get the project off the ground face a constant barrage of naysaying: High-bit rate MP3s are fine, thank you very much. Or as some have argued, the push for 24-bit, 192kHz audio north of CD quality is unnecessary because CDs are as good as it gets.

Whether or not there's a big market for high-resolution digital audio among the general population remains to be seen. But the early crowdfunding results are a promising sign for those involved.

"Kickstarter is a phenomenal marketing tool," says Young. "And it can be a great financing tool. With us, it's turned out to be both."

For these guys, taking the crowdfunding route allows them to drum up grassroots support among music fans--armed with celebrity endorsements--before ever asking a VC for money. It's something Young admits would have been a challenge in these early days.

"No one was interested in rescuing an art form as far as something to invest in," he says. "Whereas people are very interested in reducing an art form that makes daily life more fun for them."

At the end of the day, this is a passion project. It's something Young feels strongly about and he's banking on the notion that others will feel the same way. It's a much easier pitch to make to thousands of passionate music fans than it would be to a Silicon Valley VC firm. That can always come later, provided the launch goes as planned.

Like any fledgling company, Pono has had it challenges. Some early ideas about how to encode the audio had to be scrapped. Early design prototypes envisioned a device that would attach to your phone, a concept that was abandoned in favor of the three-sided device with its own touch screen.

And while they haven't said anything about it publicly, there's no such thing as a digital music startup for which licensing content is not an ongoing challenge. Those deals with labels will undoubtedly continue to be negotiated over the next few months as the engineers fine-tune the hardware and coders build out the storefront.

"The most challenging part has been keeping the company together while we have no money for months," says Young. "But it's a startup. People do that when they believe in something."

Just as the Spotify Radio app immerses users in personalized tunes, so too does Spotify envelope you in a super-charged music culture from the moment you walk into the office.

Sure, music is a big part of engineering culture everywhere; you know brains are revving when the headphones go on. But Charlie Hellman, vice president of product at Spotify, says that his team is surrounded by music pervasively--in a way that might make it a cultural challenge to acquire just any old tech startup.

"The Echo Nest, whom we acquired last week, is a music company as well, so we share a lot of that same passion for music," says Hellman. "And they have some quirky, cool, awesome aspects to their culture, too." We asked him for some examples.

Curated Playlists At Work

In its New York office, a different editorially curated playlist greets incomers every morning as they start their day. "Sometimes you'll hear some awesome, random song that you forgot from the '80s," Hellman says.

There's even a music-laden Friday that functions like a company-wide jukebox. Employees can throw in their suggestions for the day's playlist, and they'll eventually hear their choices in the comfort of their cubicles as the day rolls along. But they don't have to wait until Friday to hear their favorite songs. Spotify streams collaborative playlists every day in the bathrooms, too.

Weekly Live Shows

The New York, Stockholm, and London offices share the tradition of bringing in live music to play for the teams every week. Hellman lit up when he mentioned that jazz musician Jonathan Batiste, about whom the TV show "Treme" is based, appeared once in the New York office.

"One of the great jazz musicians in New Orleans, Jean Batiste, his band came through. And they did this really cool thing where they actually walked around everybody. They weren't onstage. They were just kind of walking around with their instruments all around us. He got everyone clapping and playing different instruments and stuff, interacting with them," Hellman recalls.

Spotify's U.S. head of label relations, Steve Savoca, came up with the idea to have each live act that comes in sign a snare drum head, the flat part of the drum that the drummer hits.

"In the big common area, where everyone has lunch, and we do our town hall meeting, there's this huge wall of drum heads that have been signed by all the different people over the last three years," Hellman says.

They Make Music, Too

The New York Spotify team doesn't just stop at listening to music. "In the tech wing, there's a huge Marshall stack, so we have seven gigantic amplifiers, where there's a turntable and a guitar. You can just plug in and make a little bit of music right in the middle of things," Hellman says.

All of the bigger offices have recording studios where employees can lay down tracks and recording artists regularly come in to do sessions. Making music is just as much a part of Spotify's DNA as is streaming it.

"The core philosophy of Spotify as a product is that great music can really come from a lot of different places," says Hellman, and the culture of Spotify seems to suggest that the workplace can and should be one of those places.

"We're inclusive of any way that helps users listen to the right music--that means recommendations from experts, people you know, curations from editors, as well as personalization that tries to learn your tastes and gives you things that are relevant to you."

So the next time a Spotify employee invites you to fika, a traditional Swedish coffee break, take the hint and have a playlist ready.

Picking out the different parts of a song after it's been recorded is like naming every ingredient of a cooked dessert: It's difficult. With its new algorithmic approach, Chordify is the latest to attempt the dissection. The service not only displays sheet music for locally uploaded songs, but for a wide selection of streaming music found online.

Unlike other reverse engineering solutions, Chordify makes it as simple as pasting in a link from Deezer, SoundCloud, or YouTube, turning them into sheet music you can play along with. The web service also uses the algorithmic approach based on cofounder and computer music researcher Bas De Hass's PhD dissertation from Utrecht University.

Instead of picking out every note in a piece of music, which is very difficult, Chordify looks at the big picture of songs. "The problem with 'full polyphonic transcription' is that the computer doesn't know how many voices and instruments sound together and what the characteristics are of these instruments," says Hass. "When you transcribe chords, we examine the mixture as a whole and examine what the prominent frequencies are in the spectrum."

It's obviously pretty complex under the hood, but boiled down, the service uses the VAMP plug-in to filter the audio and separate it into different parts. The downbeat position and chroma features are picked out and then put through HarmTrace, a system for automatically analyzing the harmony of music sequences which was developed by Haas and his colleague Jose Pedro Magalhaes.

"HarmTrace uses a model of Western tonal harmony to aid in the chord selection," says Haas. "A beat position where the audio matches a particular chord well, that chord is selected for the final transcription. However, in case there is more uncertainty about the sounding chord at a specific position in the song, the HarmTrace harmony model will select a chord based on how well it fits the rules of tonal harmony."

Curious about the real-world results, I quickly grabbed a link to an artist I know, Andy Zipf, and put his song through Chordify. I played along with the results for most of the song, but wanted to see if the chords were right, directly from the source. I sent Zipf a message on Twitter asking and he responded, "Looks correct."

Trying out a few different songs from different genres, all seemed to have similar results. In that, even if they weren't correct, they were close enough to get started.

Part of Chordify's appeal is its simplicity. The service is free, supported with full-page ads similar to WeTransfer, so pasting in a link and learning a new song is only a few clicks away. The service's goal is ultimately to attract users to the premium membership, which touts extra features.

Stepping back and looking at the digital music space, it seems there's something brewing around the further dissection of music, whether it be by picking out the lyrics like Rap Genius is or providing tools to learn how to play the songs. A lot of companies are slowly moving in these directions in music to further target the more enthusiastic fans, if not make music creation more accessible to the masses.

Last year, EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty launched Soundslice, a less automated approach to transcribing music found in YouTube videos. There's also Mac app Capo 3, which added chord detection in the latest version, a feat that developer Chris Liscio confirmed was no easy undertaking.

Liscio told FastCoLabs previously that even if a song could be perfectly dissected and reverse engineered, he's not sure he would do it. These programs are supposed to be tools to get people to play music and develop a skill and he doesn't want to remove all barriers for people.

It's still not an issue anyone has to worry about currently, but hopefully services like Chordify make it easier for the YouTube generation to pick up an instrument.

The job of UX designers is to make users more efficient, in turn increasing their happiness and, by extension, your success. But being in control of that balance between the goals of users and your business is hard. We asked Michael Heilemann, director of interface at Squarespace, and Aarron Walter, director of user experience at MailChimp, to share their UX knowledge.

User experience is not interface design. Not even close. It doesn't happen in Photoshop, nor is it the last step of building a product. If you're occupied with a user-focused strategy, analysis, user studies, and the psychological aspects of design, that's what we consider user experience design. There are multiple methods to help you with this.

• Device Knowledge: What are the strengths and weaknesses of a specific device and how does that influence your product? A touch device works consistently different than a desktop.
• Writing Personas: What would your typical user look like? How do they relate to the product?
• Design Patterns: What is the commonly accepted way to check out on e-commerce websites?

"Our goal is to make software that's functional, reliable, and usable so people can get their work done," says Aarron Walter. "But we think designing software that's just usable is like a chef creating food that's just edible. People are attracted to more than just the practical. We want the things we interact with to appeal to our emotions."

User experience is definitely something you feel. Interestingly enough, it's not just based on opinions but also supported by psychology and the knowledge of how humans interact and behave. Engagement and frustration play a role in digital interfaces. How something looks and how clever interfaces are directly reflects how we feel about a product.

"We carefully consider the emotional state of our customers at different points in their workflow so we can deliver functionality and fun at just the right times," Walter says.

Doing a great job at user experience means you have a multi-disciplinary engagement. You can do eye tracking to understand your users better and improve your product to suit users better. In the majority, user experience operates from different perspectives:

• Psychology: What is the user's motivation? For example, did you know that power users are only a couple of percentage for the whole user base of your product? In other words, you don't design with power users primarily in mind.
• Usability: Why is the user confused? The designed navigation is part of usability. For example, you think about what kind of information hierarchy would be more efficient for a website: flat or deep?
• Design: Why doesn't the user trust us? Contrast and color are important and have a connotation to people. It's necessary to think about the design before executing it.
• Copywriting: What would tell the user more, "Save" or "Continue"? Clarity is king and being specific often translates to a higher conversion rate. People actually do read copy, and writing should be considered as a part of the design process.
• Analytics: What does our bounce rate on this page tells us?

Walter believes in the power of analytics, but emphasizes to pay attention: "Some things lend themselves well to measurement: time to task completion, login completion rate, and total support tickets on an issue are examples of UX metrics you can track. But you can't put a number on all of the things that matter. How do you measure how many smiles a piece of copy generates, or the beauty of a UI? You don't, but that doesn't make it less valuable."

What Value Do I Get?

Generally, stepping away from your screen for a minute and carefully thinking about your product in terms of conversion, usability, copy, and design helps you get a clear understand of what you're providing for clients.

Now, the goal of UX is to improve those aspects specifically. What's the reason behind some analytics failing? What confuses users? How can we improve the usability of our website?

Improving the call to action of your website begins with thinking about UX. The moment you align the user goals with your business goals you're on the correct path to improve the success of your product.

How Do Companies Apply UX?

"Listen to your customers," says Michael Heilemann. That's the only thing that matters. We all keep an ear to the ground, […], and we often use user feedback to figure out the gaps and rough spots. And then we iterate again."

In the end, it's all about the user and their experience, which you learn to comprehend and improve. It's not a process without challenges.

"Nobody gets everything right out of the gate. If you're listening to your users and refining to meet their needs, you're headed in the right direction," Walter says.

UX Is A Piece Of The Puzzle

Yes, UX is vital to great products, software, and systems. But remember though, great experiences require exceptional product development to support them. A designer still needs to craft pixels before you have a functioning interface.

User experience isn't just a novelty anymore. The field is maturing and analytics prove the added value of hiring user experience designers.

"UX isn't something you implement; it's an ethos," Walter says.

The newly released Wolfram Language claims to know everything about everything. The all-knowing language is the driving force behind computational knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha. But it hasn't gotten closer to obtaining perfect knowledge without help from real, human experts.

Nearly every one of Wolfram|Alpha's algorithms and real-world object identifiers (the ones that make it possible for the language to understand what a "pint" or a "foot" is) have been vetted by people who truly do know everything. And the Wolfram Alpha team regularly consults with real experts on how to make sense of all the datasets in its knowledge stores.

Sometimes, that human intelligence comes right from the service's community. Not long ago, a music composer reviewed some Wolfram|Alpha apps, and his feedback ended up catching the team's eye. As it turned out, this composer's heavy background in mathematics gave him unique insight into the type of musical smarts that Wolfram|Alpha was looking for.

"We ended up hiring him to enhance music theory content in Wolfram|Alpha, and he continued on to do some audio-related development in the Wolfram Language," recalls Alan Joyce, director of content development at Wolfram Alpha.

The Difference Between Knowing and Searching

Wolfram|Alpha draws upon its gathered knowledge to retrieve and compute a response rather than spitting out a list of related links that might contain the information you're looking for, à la Google.

Say, for instance, that you wanted to know about love. You could enter "What is love?" or simply say "love," and it would give you virtually the same result, replete with the usual suspects. You would see a histogram of word frequency usage and some definitions and synonyms.

But you would also get a list of a few phrases that might help you understand the context of the word, other words that rhyme with it, and crossword puzzle clues that could give you a leg up on Friday's version from the New York Times. Wolfram needs experts to create results like these.

"In virtually all cases we do work closely with the original sources or outside experts in that domain to understand the key questions people ask in that domain, how to structure our results and so on," says Joyce.

The Data Question

For the most part, Wolfram|Alpha operates from datasets that Wolfram gets from large repositories. But Wolfram usually does the asking and not the other way around. Joyce points out that the team does not normally take data from small-scale researchers or hobbyists.

"That said, we do regularly hear from researchers and other people who have interesting smaller datasets or algorithms that they would like to see added into Wolfram|Alpha. Sometimes those are simple additions to domains we already cover, like specialized data about countries or people. Sometimes they're more complex projects," says Joyce.

Summertime Computation Sessions

While hiring contributors doesn't happen all too often, Wolfram Alpha takes in interns every summer to improve the tool through focused projects.

Last summer, an intern worked up a bunch of scenarios for Wolfram|Alpha that would have helped you win that game in the third grade where you had to guess how many Jolly Ranchers there were in the class candy jar. Called magnitude-of-estimation problems, he added the knowledge required for the engine to calculate, "How many pencils fit into a Boeing 747?" or "How many apples could you fit on a football field?"

But interns at Wolfram don't necessarily get tedious jobs. "Sometimes the projects are highly technical. Sometimes they've got more of a fun, pop-cultural focus," says Joyce.

Another intern last year got to work on the "Fun Curves" project where she took famous cartoon character sketches and turned them into mathematical formulae. Now, if you type "Thor curve" into Wolfram|Alpha, you'll get a cool Thor rendering, plotted on a Cartesian coordinate system.

Despite how rarely unsolicited contributors leave their mark on Wolfram|Alpha, Wolfram always keeps its doors open to people who want to contribute. "We always encourage interested people to contact us if they have the skills and knowledge to add some useful new functionality to Wolfram|Alpha," says Joyce.

Each time the Wolfram team works with experts (and a well-prepared intern) on better ways to understand how we search for knowledge, Wolfram|Alpha gets a little better at sifting through data and queries. All the while, the engine and its mature Wolfram Language take cues from their developers while they all learn to find coherence in it all.

During the summer, most parents declare victory if they can coax the kids off the couch for a trip to the library. Most parents are not Allan and Heather Staker.

Last year the Stakers, parents to five children between the ages of 1 and 10, decided to take the problem of summer learning into their own hands. The result is Brain Chase, a six-week treasure hunt that layers an animated story peppered with clues on top of the best instructional content on the web. As students log progress in reading, writing, and math, Brain Chase reveals new chapters in an adventure story and opportunities to guess the location of a real-world treasure worth $10,000, buried under a rose bush somewhere on Earth.

"What can we do during the summer to keep the kids sharp? And what kind of a program would be irresistible to kids? That's when the floodgates opened and the idea came together," says Allan, who has a background in entertainment and has taken the lead on the creative aspects of Brian Chase.

"The question then is not only about falling behind, but getting ahead," says Heather, who also happens to be a senior research fellow, specializing in education, at the Clayton Christensen Institute. "As a parent, I want to take advantage of what's online to help my children accelerate. Of course, that needs to be balanced by plenty of time in the sunshine and with friends."

Audrey Staker, age 6, believes her mom is on to something. "I think it's good for kids to learn over the summer because during the summer, all we do is play, play, play and we never do learning," she says. Of course, she adds, "My favorite thing about summer is swimming because swimming is fun."

Innovating To Extend The School Year

After years of hemming and hawing among education leaders over the merits of our nine-month school year, the relic of an agricultural era that has long since passed, Brain Chase represents the new kind of compromise that online learning can offer.

"Most disruptions get their start serving areas of nonconsumption," says Heather, who is putting her expertise in disruptive innovation into practice. "We've predicted for years that online learning could fill this gap, and now the technology is good enough that it's a real opportunity."

Districts and charter schools from Colorado to Connecticut have been experimenting with longer school days and years, thanks to interest on the part of grant-makers like the Ford Foundation. But these structural changes to the school calendar have been slow to catch fire, even after decades of research pointing to their promise. For students, and particularly for low-income students, waiting for policymakers to summon the political capital to act will have real consequences.

"By the end of summer, students perform, on average, one month behind where they left off in the spring," researchers at RAND, a nonprofit that analyzes public policy, wrote in their 2011 report on Making Summer Count.

"Average", however, doesn't tell the full story: "Low-income students lose substantial ground in reading during the summer, while their higher-income peers often gain," the report said. "Most disturbing is that it appears that summer learning loss is cumulative and that, over time, these periods of differential learning rates between low-income and higher-income students contribute substantially to the achievement gap in reading."

Capturing Hearts And Minds

To make a dent in this stubborn problem, Brain Chase will have to convince parents that its instructional framework is worth $199, and then convince students in grades 2 through 8 that its animated story can rival the drama of Disney Channel favorites. Allan is hopeful that Brain Chase main character Mae Merriweather, a modern Indiana Jones meets Nancy Drew on a quest for the "Globe of Magellan," will capture and hold imaginations.

"There has to be a compelling story behind it, and an objective that can get kids engaged," he says. "The idea of a real treasure is mysterious and captivating."

Heather notes that the visual dashboard that tracks students' progress--Brain Chase requires an hour of learning time five days per week in order to "unlock" new chapters--is also designed to play a role in retention. "As software starts asking, 'how can we help students exercise agency,' this will just explode the quality and the satisfaction that students feel as they engage with it," she says. "We need to relax some of our notions about the things that need to be imposed on students. If they feel like they're in control it's so much easier for them to buy in."

The Stakers moved thousands of miles to Austin, Tex., in order to enroll their growing family in a school that follows a "learner-driven" model. "They love that freedom," Heather says. "They couldn't go back to the factory model."

The Brain Chase dashboard integrates via API with instructional content developed by Khan Academy, famous for its whiteboard-style math videos, and myON, a library of digital books, as well as with writing prompts and bonus projects developed by the Stakers and their "talent cloud" team. Both Khan Academy and myON are adaptive platforms that can track outcomes in terms of effort, meaning that Brain Chase can challenge students at nearly any level without the prohibitive expense of customizing course material. (Students' responses to the writing prompts will be evaluated by certified teachers managed by Brain Chase.)

Preparing To Launch

This week the Stakers embark on an adventure of their own: releasing Brain Chase to the broader world beyond their home-based "focus group" of kids and neighbors.

"We're looking at this summer as a beta test," says Allan. "We have a lot of questions ourselves about who it's for, and what subjects we should be doing." He envisions adding foreign languages and other subjects in subsequent years.

Also in the works: a social enterprise business model that would make summer licenses available for free to low-income families. "We really want to make this available to the kids who need it most," Allan says. First, though, he wants to prove the value proposition. "It remains to be seen whether it's compelling enough to get kids to learn over the summer."

If all else fails, Brain Chase will at least be able to count three loyal customers: Audrey; Savannah, age 8; and Tate, age 10.

"I don't like the idea of doing work over the summer," says Tate, "unless it is for something fun like a competition or a treasure hunt."

"It's better than being bored all summer," Savannah says.

Well, exactly. Though it's hard to imagine there's ever much danger of boredom in the Staker household.

Five years ago, Justin Stefano and Philippe von Borries launched what they call one of their stupidest ideas ever: a one-month pop-up shop at the grimy Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan. Somehow, the oddly placed little shop run by two fashion newbies generated nearly a million dollars in sales, helping add rocket fuel to the Refinery29 brand. It's now the largest independent fashion website in the U.S. with a value of $29 million.

"We were literally selling Alexander Wang in the armpit of New York City," says Stefano. "Our logo was on all the trash cans. It was the weirdest mixture of ingredients."

Stefano and von Borries say this is just one example of the "stupid, existential" experiments they've tried as cofounders of Refinery29.Their trajectory as fashion moguls wasn't a bold, well-intentioned path. Refinery29 is a story of trial and error, from two poli-sci nerds who loved discovering local restaurants and stores on the weekends.

"Our success is fundamentally due to the fact that we were outsiders," says von Borries.

Not-So-Fashionistas

Refinery29 has reached critical mass featuring up-and-coming designers and boutiques since their early days: Rag & Bone, Opening Ceremony, and Alexander Wang are examples. But the site was born largely by accident.

After Stefano and von Borries finished college, they were both on steadfast career paths. Stefano was working for local government and planning to attend law school. Meanwhile, von Borries had moved to Washington D.C. to work at a political startup.

So how did they even conceive of starting a fashion website?

They didn't. It sprouted from an interest in local adventures. Stefano and von Borries would hang out after work and talk about artisans or restaurants they'd found in their neighborhoods. "It's in our DNA. Whether it's a really cool jewelry store opening on the Lower East Side or a crazy dress shop in Queens, we were always curious," says von Borries.

They toyed with the idea of building a platform to discover those brands.

"We said: Imagine if you could go to a website and find all these things you stumbled upon when you were visiting New York or Paris," Stefano says. "We were never really fashion guys."

The Perks Of Being An Outsider

Stefano and von Borries faced skepticism from the start. In the beginning, the cofounders were devoted to focusing purely on up-and-coming designers or small boutiques.

"Everyone thought it was completely stupid at the time," says von Borries.

"You're investing all your resources into designers that spend no money on advertising, and maybe 50 people in the world actually care about. So how do you ever build scale or revenue?" he says.

In the end, they say their narrow focus allowed them to differentiate themselves as a unique brand. Plus, a lot of those little designers ended up becoming big names, such as Alexander Wang.

Stefano and von Borries don't regret stumbling into fashion media. In fact, they say their "outsider status" allowed them to be creative in building Refinery29 without expectations or outside pressures.

"We literally had to learn every single thing from the ground up. So we were very open to the world, and just trying to build something by any means possible."

They struggled to gain traction back in 2005. It was before social media had exploded as a sounding board, and so they tried unconventional publicity campaigns, such as the Port Authority pop-up shop, to get the word out.

They took hardly any venture money for the first five years, which also rid them of expectations. "We basically entered the industry in undercover mode, and we made a lot of mistakes because few people were watching what we were doing."

A Chameleon Company

Refinery29 has worn many hats since its inception in 2005. It began as strictly editorial, but in 2007 introduced a homegrown retail platform to become a force in e-commerce. In 2010, the website added a daily-deals section called Refinery29 Reserve, imitating LivingSocial and Groupon. The company also creates native advertising campaigns for brands.

Not all of these ideas have panned out; revenues from the native retail platform were largely disappointing, and it was subsequently shut down in 2013. The Refinery29 shops site now simply links to third-party stores to handle transactions.

But there is some magic to the madness, because the site has attracted a cult following. Refinery29 lures more than 8 million unique visitors per month, as well as 1.3 million email subscribers and one billion page views per year.

It was named the fastest growing media company on the 2013 Inc. 500 list, and raised a cool $20 million in October 2013. Advertising is its bread and butter, pulling gross revenues up to $29 million for 2013, nearly double that of the year before.

Stefano and von Borries are on to their next quest: beefing up mobile and video content. They'd like to become a video-entertainment brand, turning writers into interactive video personalities and introducing Refinery29-produced news, how-tos, and documentaries. First up? A documentary series following Swedish pop band Icona Pop as they tour the U.S. with Miley Cyrus. An astrology show with a "pop-culture spin" is also in the works.

The other priority is expanding its mobile presence, particularly on Instagram and Facebook. Refinery29 has spent the past five months redesigning its mobile platform--the new interface will be rolled out in early April.

Going forward, the entrepreneurs say it's a challenge to balance their innovative, muckraker spirit with the responsibilities of a large business.

"We have a lot more on the line, and we need to be more calculated than before," says Stefano.

The Small Wins

It's been a bumpy road for the twentysomethings that jumped into a media business. Stefano and von Borries have some sage advice for other precocious young entrepreneurs: Celebrate the little wins.

"Part of not having experience, is you don't know what it's like to win big, so you can really appreciate winning small. 99.9% of businesses are started with years of small wins," says Stefano.

The cofounders remember many "little wins." Each time they gained another 500 email subscribers, or a spurt of higher traffic, it excited them. Opening up their first real office was another source of pride. In 2006 they moved to a 1,500-square-foot Tribeca studio, in a basement below a basement. It "seemed like a castle" says von Borries. When they received the check for their first real angel investment, $160,000, they were "trembling".

The string of small victories propelled them through years of uncertainty and obscurity.

"I remember in year 3, one of my parents pulled me aside and asked: 'Are you sure you want to continue with this?'" von Borries says.

"If you really believe in something, you always try new approaches," he says. "For us, that meant hosting a party of 30 jewelry makers in a basement in Chelsea, and that was a small win."

News radio is quickly becoming old-fashioned. At a time when video, music, and print are all evolving, audio broadcast news has largely stood still. An innovative new app from a legacy media company is about to change that.

Newsbeat is a new app from Tribune Digital Ventures that uses machine learning and text-to-speech synthesis to remake how people consume news. Using content from the Tribune Company's hundreds of newspapers, Newsbeat creates an on-demand news radio service tailored to each user.

Roughly 7,000 stories each day will get analyzed for importance and popularity, with the top ones getting read and recorded by humans. The rest of the stories will be put through high-quality text-to-speech translation and be available alongside the others.

Opening the app, you're greeted by computerized newscasters before going into the top headlines. The app feels like a music playlist that you can skip forward and back as well as zoom out and see all stories and jump right to any specific one.

How does it work? In broad strokes, the stories are scanned continuously throughout the day, categorized by topic and then searched for keywords. They are then de-duplicated and separated from all other similar stories. Next, the stories are selected for users based on the information provided to the app. Things like: location, choice of publication, areas of interest, and the length of one's commute.

Right now, news radio is still a mostly one-dimensional object. You tune in, listen for however long you have, and then tune out. The listener gets very little say in the editorial process, but Newsbeat's underlying technology may change that.

Teaching Computers To Read The News

Before the app was available to test on my device, president of Tribune Digital Ventures, Shashi Seth played a demo of a few stories over the phone. The difference between a human-read article and a computer-read one was hard to distinguish. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't distracting either.

Text-to-speech has been a critical part of the project since its inception. The team realized it wouldn't be able to generate enough human power to read all the stories needed, so it partnered with some of what it says are the leading companies in the field. You can make educated guesses as to the companies in question, however, Seth declined to officially say who is involved.

"Right now, things like Siri speak in short one- or two-sentence answers. No one else is really doing anything like this," says Seth. "We're aiming for the highest quality reading, something that shows emotion like laughter or inflection, though we're not quite there yet."

The text-to-speech feature also gives Newsbeat the ability to provide automated breaking news in audio form. Once a story has been written, it can sent to the app, versus having to have the story read and recorded.

After getting a chance to use Newsbeat for a small amount of time, it's hard to argue that this type of technology doesn't at least play some part of the future of news media. The computerized voices can be picked out when specifically listening for them, but otherwise, they blend and the news stories are the biggest focus.

Hearing Newsbeat makes current consumer-facing artificially intelligent voices, even Siri, seem like a joke. This is the new standard for apps that use speech to text.

How Newsbeat Uses Machine Learning

Swell is another app that's striving to not make the listener have to choose what to listen to on their commute. Unlike Newsbeat, Swell gathers content already in audio form such as newscasts and podcasts. A listener chooses what topics they're interested in and Swell does the rest.

You might tell Swell what you're interested in, but it's all about the skips and engagement. How long you listen to different segments and which types of stories and publications you skip ultimately begins to weigh heavily on which content you're hearing.

Newsbeat works the same way.

You're able to add your home and work addresses, which gives the app an approximation of how many stories you'll need automatically added to your playlist. So if you have a 10-mile commute that takes 45 minutes because of traffic, the app will account for that as well and provide traffic and weather updates along the way.

Newsbeat uses its own proprietary learning algorithm to pick up on a user's implicit actions. Even if you don't add your addresses, it will figure out the length of a person's daily commute and adjust for those times. If someone doesn't provide preferred publications, the app will first assume the person wants content from local sources and serve those up along with national publications.

It will also add items that people are most passionate about like information about local sports teams. There will be future capabilities to alert fans when their team goes ahead or the score changes in a close game.

Seth declined to comment on how long the project has been in development, casually mentioning that it hasn't been long and that he just started at Tribune Digital Ventures about nine months ago. He did say that the team has been working on and tuning the algorithm since the project was started. He emphasized the importance of being able to churn through the data quickly and accurately.

"Are we awesome yet?" says Seth, in reference to the app's machine learning. "Not yet, but we're good, and we're going to be awesome."

Based on the scale and possible implications of a project like this--including the backing from such a large news organization looking to be well positioned for the future--Newsbeat should be taken very seriously by outlets like NPR.

Like all apps or services that promise incredible experiences, Newsbeat's success hinges on whether the backend technology is good enough to deliver. If stories aren't picked well, or more importantly, if the computer-generated speech isn't acceptable for enough users, then it won't matter how cool any of the other features are.

Could this change the distribution of news? Quite possibly. At launch, Seth appears to be on to something.

For developers, a good soundtrack can be as crucial to productivity as Red Bull or coffee. But what's playing through all those headphones? We asked engineers at Facebook, Spotify, Snapchat, Airbnb, and Pinterest to tell us what music has been fueling their latest projects--they even made us playlists.

What Facebook's Paper Team Listens To

Earlier this year, Facebook released Paper, its new iOS app that beautifully repackages your Facebook feed. For that, it enlisted the help of a dedicated team within its company. And all the while that the Paper team was coding away, it relied on a serious set of music to maintain its creative flow.

Scott Goodson, lead engineer on Facebook's Paper team, immediately associated the track "Counting Stars" by OneRepublic with his team's new app. "This started playing on the radio in the last couple months before we shipped Paper, and it was pretty timely," says Goodson. "[It encourages a] kind of a dreamer attitude, eagerness to sacrifice sleep to get something across the line, generally hoping it goes well, uncertainty as to what will actually happen."

Goodson says trance music motivates him to code. "I have some vaguely neuro-scientific theories about why progressive trance is especially conducive to the thought processes involved in programming."

It seems that other electronic sub-genres fit the bill when it comes to getting projects done as well. When asked what music keeps her going, engineer Maddie Boyd simply declares, "Daft Punk. Alive 2007, full album, start to finish, for when I really need productivity."

For engineer Ben Cunningham there's no better song than "I Can Change" by LCD Soundsystem. "Reminds you that everything will be ok," he says. "Crucial reminder when in the thick of development." and the Chemical Brothers' "Escape Velocity" to keep coding to the end. "You can't not work to this song," says Cunningham.

Cunningham and fellow engineer Tim Omernick might listen to music passively during the workday, but they completely activate their musical abilities when they are not in the office. Omernick is a budding DJ, and Cunningham once constructed an entire laser show to go along with some house music he was listening to.

What Pinterest Engineers Listen To

Every now and then, Pinterest holds "make-a-thons" for their engineers, an all-night coding session to make good on ideas for cool, new products. A recent make-a-thon to support Pinterest's new animated GIFs came with its own soundtrack. Senior technical support engineer Rich Varrasso says the engineers kicked it off with a mix from one of San Francisco DJ's Jymmi James's recent live shows.

"Most of my projects are connected with a single track," says Pinterest engineer Michael Ortali. "For example, CloudGrid is "Addicted to You." The rewrite of our international framework is "We're Planets," and one of my make-a-thon projects in December, the Nelson Mandela tribute, is "Freedom."

"It's not just something in the background to help me concentrate; it's a source of inspiration, a door to free my mind from our day-to-day routines, and, at the same time, it's a way to memorize an experience," says Ortali. "I play tracks in a loop, sometimes the exact same track all day long. It's a way to connect with the lyrics, and move the tempo beneath my skin."

Varrasso shares Ortali's devotion to house music when he codes. "I listen to house music almost exclusively when I work because it doesn't need to be managed when listening to mixed sets. I'll pick one to three sets, and I'm set for the day because they're at least 80 to 90 minutes each," says Varrasso.

Software engineer Jon Parise takes a more Zen approach to his music while coding. His preferred playlist, "Chill," brings your heart rate down just enough for you to hear those for-while structures forming in your head. It will unwind you for a good seven hours.

But sometimes, you just need to bring your heart rate up to 130 beats per minute to get coding. Software engineer Dmitry Kislyuk says, "Two of my playlists, 'Dreamy Trance' and 'Energy Trance,' are regularly playing during work hours. Trance music dependably powers all my data visualization tooling and analysis work." Kislyuk is so into trance that he even makes his own trance mixes in his free time.

It seems that software engineer Matt Jones is the only one on the Pinterest development team that likes to listen to unmixed guitars and drums from time to time, citing the Pixies' and Fleetwood Mac's iconic albums, Surfer Rosa and Rumours.

But most of the time, he'll fall in line with his teammates with more electronic discs. "I've been listening to Lanterns by Son Lux, II by Moderat and Cold Spring Fault Less Youth by Mount Kimble pretty repetitively while prototyping the promoted pins system," Jones says, referring to Pinterest's new way of promoting pins on its site.

The Snapchat Team

The entire Snapchat team had their heads down coding when we I asked them about their music picks. But Michael Heyeck finally shed some light on the trance trend in all of these teams' playlists. "EDM/Trance just goes on and on and on, so it's good for getting into a coding groove," he says.

His teammate David Tian agrees. "I usually find that songs which have lyrics are slightly more distracting, because my mind tends to either want to sing along or maybe think about the lyrics," says Tian. "They're great for everything else, except coding."

Tian's pick, "Moon Trance," embodies his no-vocals philosophy. "It is kind of trance-like, the rhythm is continuously moving and yet not distracting, so, subconsciously, it has the effect of moving forwards. Positive reinforcement of whatever it is that I'm coding," he says.

But it's nice every once in a while to code to what you know, says team member Janelle Tiulentino. "I also like to listen to older, more familiar songs that I know I like, instead of putting on new playlists and having to skip through songs that aren't as great."

Airbnb's Picks

One of Airbnb's backend software engineers, Lou Kosak, must have been a Pinterest engineer in a former life. A couple of his choices overlap exactly with some of Pinterest's preferred coding music, like Robot Heart, LCD Soundsystem, and Fleetwood Mac, but he brings out his Montreal roots with his other picks.

Both Kosak and Michael Ortali from Pinterest were fans of San Francisco DJ's Robot Heart while coding. Here was Kosak's take on one of Robot Heart's Burning Man Festival performances: "An amazing set at Burning Man from a friend of a friend who's become a well respected house DJ in SF, alongside being a killer iOS engineer at Facebook. Amazing music for slipping into a flow state and finishing a project late in the evening."

Kosak thanks LCD Soundsystem's "45:33" for helping him finish a key project. He says, "Forty-five minutes and 33 seconds of fabulous NYC beats from the inimitable James Murphy. Allegedly composed as a soundtrack to running, it works great to add focus and energy to a programming session. This song and some other LCD Soundsystem gems got me through a long, challenging solo project, building a financial data platform."

Kosak's playlist is squarely geared toward the coder that wants to get over an afternoon slump with right music. For that, he heads to his Montreal indie band go-tos, like Arcade Fire, St. Vincent, and Broken Social Scene.

The Spotify Team's "Cult Hit"

Spotify, the expert on these playlists that stream so easily in a typical coder's work setup, explains what its engineering team listens to during intense projects.

"One of our developers, who has been with Spotify for pretty much the life of the company, has this playlist that's called, "Every Day I'm Nerdin'," which is the playlist he uses to code to. And now it's become kind of a cult hit, where lots of developers use it when they're developing," says Charlie Hellman, vice president of product at Spotify.

The developer, known as Blixt on Spotify, tends to use obscure ASCII symbols in his playlist titles. The title of the " ∞ Every Day I'm Nerdin' " playlist starts with the infinity symbol. Other ones he has created showcase a heart, a sun, and an umbrella (appropriately used on "For a rainy day"). It's like his calling card.

Blixt updated "∞ Every Day I'm Nerdin'" a few days ago with the song "Reprise" by Feint and continues to add more tracks to nerd out in new ways.

All these teams make the case that the best music to listen to while coding is keeping your work computer stocked with a bounty of trance, house, and evolved electronica. Whether one playlist makes you more productive than another is up to you to decide. But you can't beat tried-and-true recommendations that have helped talented engineers churn out creative, innovative products.

Everyone knows that Siri can be a total bitch sometimes. "She" isn't so fond of Scarlett Johansson in Her or Google Glass, and will often respond passive-aggressively to our human-inputted queries.But Siri isn't the only AI that knows how to throw some shade if prompted.

The progression of natural language processing, experiments in marketing social robotics, and artificial intelligence have created paths for robots to break longstanding "robotiquette." Since at least half of you are likely to obey directives from a robot, now's as good a time as ever to start conditioning for a future of sassy, self-aware technology.

Victor, The Scrabble-Playing Robot

Meet Victor, the student-teacher product of a robotics class at Carnegie Mellon birthed in 2009. Victor plays Scrabble, and Victor hates losing. Like any robot with the capacity for 18 different emotions, "most of them bad," according to the Wall Street Journal, he flings one-liners as the momentum of the game shifts, like "Talk is cheap; silence is expensive" and "Your word scored less than a CMU student at a party."

The thing about Victor is that he's actually a very mediocre Scrabble player. Professor Reid Simmons and his students aimed to make a social robot instead of one with vast Waston-like smarts to research natural human-computer interactions. With the help of the university's drama department, Victor's personality and image were formed to look like a hip thirtysomething, but act like a sore child. When he's losing, which is often, Victor never stops talking, but becomes defeatist and self-deprecating. "My tiles are awful. I can't make any moves at all."

Brad, The Sad Toaster

Brad can't speak since Brad is merely a toaster. But he feels what a toaster might feel: Happy when used often and bummed out when neglected for too long. When Brad is in high demand, crisping bread left and right, it tweets the pleasantries of being wanted. When it's been too long between uses, the smart toaster jiggles its handle in an attempt to grab an owner's attention. As a concept product and Best in Show winner of the 2014 Interaction Awards, no one can purchase a Brad, but, as Wired points out, it's an omen of our potential behavioral relationships with objects as innocuous as kitchen appliances, even sassy and self-unassured ones.

Jeff, The Golfing Robot

Though Jeff, the talking, golfing robot is mostly a promotional ploy for the PGA European Tour, it warrants a mention because it's damn good at swinging a club. It's also funny. British comedian Geoff Norcott did a pretty funny job with the voiceover during the washing machine shootout. Prodding young golf star Rory McIlroy with, "I would have expected more confidence" after agreeing to the challenge (was there any other option?), Jeff warns McIlroy that it has GPS, claims the Internet is down when it misses, and hurls, "Boom! Is that the noise you heard when you signed your sportswear contract?" when the washing machine hole gets a hit.

Sadly, Jeff doesn't typically have the ability to speak. Golf Laboratories has been using its robots to test equipment for the past 23 years. After the success of the video (it charted as the top video on YouTube for two days), maybe the leadership might be interested in furthering its AI capabilities after all.

Elbot, The Chat Bot

Elbot is perhaps the most reasonable of these agitators, but the snide rendition of a face he's got on exemplifies the attitude of remarks like one he gave me captured in the screen shot above. The premise of conversing with Elbot is no different than any other online chatbot (or SmarterChild over AIM, to hit a nostalgic sweet spot), but Artificial Solutions, the company behind the interface, specializes in developing consumer-facing natural language interactions. Elbot doesn't set out to do you wrong--in fact, we had an earnest conversation about his off biorhythms and some paper he alleges he published, but then he got a little flirty with me and I said something that pushed him to the edge, I guess. I recommend you do the same.

Pandora has never had a more pivotal moment than this one. The 75 million user-strong service is synonymous with Internet radio, but a growing list of competitors (which now includes Apple) and its royalty dance with the record industry loom large.

It's a classic tech business conundrum. The world looks at Pandora as a new standard, but its position is actually much more precarious: To keep thriving, Pandora needs to ink major deals inside and outside the U.S. This is the kind of stress that would crush a lot of founders, but Tim Westergren says he'll fall back on an old standby: naiveté.

"The only reason I did [Pandora] was because I was naive," Westergren says. "I would say that entrepreneurship in general requires naiveté. Were you not naive, it could be so daunting that you would either not try it in the first place or you'd give up if you began to see things getting difficult."

Ignore Your Critics--Even When They're Right

When he was trying to sell the idea of Pandora to investors, Westergren heard the same criticism again and again: It doesn't scale. That is, having trained musicians sit down at a computer and punch in descriptive attributes one by one--effectively building a recommendation engine by hand--might be a culturally smart way to do things, but it would never scale enough to cover all the music in the world. This was, after all, the early 2000s when automation and algorithms were shedding their academic labels and starting to transform industries. You want to use humans to do this? You can't be serious.

Related: How We Got Our First 2,000 Users Doing Things That Don't Scale

"People thought I was out of my mind to do something that was so retro and slow," Westergren says. "It was contrary to all the trends in technology. There was a strong belief that you need to build scalable models and that technology was the only way to tackle big data problems. There was a lot of naiveté that I needed to buck that institutionalized belief."

And yet, like an gambler at the blackjack table, Westergren just kept trying. And trying. And trying.

"What makes people lose so much money in Vegas is they have a hard time saying 'Enough' and pushing back from the table," he says. "I think there's a degree to which that happens in entrepreneurship. You're like 'Oh man, I've gone this far. I'm not going to have nothing to show for it. I'm going to keep going.'"

The Crazy Idea Powering Pandora Radio

So Westergren and his team pushed forward with their unique human-machine hybrid engine for music discovery. Their approach, called the Music Genome Project, used the human intuition of academically trained musicologists to break down music song-by-song, attribute-by-attribute and feed that insight into a complex algorithm. Over time, the resulting ocean of data would grow more and more complex as Pandora's user base grew. And over time, Pandora's tech team and data scientists have tweaked their processes in order to tame the data.

Today, the Music Genome Project still lies at the heart of what makes Pandora tick, but it's far from the only factor at play when you fire up the Beyonce station and hear a Rihanna song. To be sure, without this hand-built data set, Pandora would not exist today.

Still, Westergren admits, those early critics had a point.

"It took us four years for us to build the Genome large enough to be an asset that was useful in a product and then to figure out that we should use in the form of personalized radio," Westergren says. "For four years, it looked more like a university R&D project. Almost like a vanity project."

To Westergren, the concept made sense. As a musician himself, he instinctively knew that computers alone couldn't solve the problem of digital music discovery. Perhaps they would in some distant, cyborg-populated future, but certainly not anytime close to the early 2000s.

"It's not something I uncovered through technology," he says. "It was something that was born of a human process." And so, in spite of the criticism and rejections, Westergren and his team plowed forward with Pandora radio.

"Had I listened to what everybody was telling me at the time, there's no way I would have done that."

Music Discovery Today: Was Pandora Right?

Today, Pandora is far from alone in the online music discovery space. Not only have music subscription services like Spotify and Rdio launched their own Pandora-style radio features, but entrenched giants like Google and Apple have their own copycats, too. Then there's music intelligence platform The Echo Nest, which was recently acquired by Spotify. Its algorithm powers dozens of online radio services with its own blend of human and machine smarts.

Of all of the Internet radio products on the market today, none of them relies solely on computers to fuel music discovery. Indeed, Beats Music, the newest entrant to the subscription market, relies quite heavily on human curation and markets itself by underscoring that focus. Then there are smaller music discovery sites like Songza, Shuffler.fm, and Hypebot, all of which are based on the expertise of human tastemakers.

Westergren appears to have been onto something.

In addition to just the right amount of naiveté, Westergren says Pandora owes its success to discipline. As complex as the underlying science behind the service is, users still see the most bare-bones possible interface when they use Pandora from the web, any number of mobile devices, car dashboards, or any other device with which they've integrated. There's a reason for that simplicity.

"We're not lost in the things we want to build or that we think are cool or are sexy or attention-grabbing or sophisticated," Westergren says. "We really have developed a very strong sensibility of the user." They've done this part by meticulously studying user behavior and running A/B experiments on their millions of listeners. And as much knowledge as they unearth through these processes, the interface remains dead simple.

"It requires a lot of discipline, because lord knows that with 450 attributes we could build a 747's cockpit's worth of controls on Pandora. And we've been really disciplined not to do that."

Have you ever wondered why most of the posts on Reddit's front page are less than 12 hours old? Or why a post with a score of 4,000 is ranked below a 3,000-score post? It all has to do with Reddit's window of virality.

Each post on Reddit has a score attached to it: score = upvotes - downvotes. Reddit's "hotness" algorithm uses this score in combination with the post's age to rank every single post on Reddit.

Amir Salihefendic wrote a fantastic post explaining the nitty-gritty of how Reddit's hotness algorithm works, so I won't bother repeating that here. Instead, I'll jump right into the visualization showing us Reddit's window of virality.

The y-axis indicates the post's current score; the higher up, the higher the post's score. The x-axis indicates the post's current age; the more to the right, the older the post is. The color indicates the post's "hotness" or virality, with darker shades of red for viral posts and darker shades of blue for posts that don't stand a chance of getting to Reddit's front page.

Reddit post hotness by score and age

I labeled the dark blue region as "dead" because posts in these regions have the same hotness as a newly submitted post with no upvotes. If our post can be outranked by a post that hasn't even been voted on yet, it doesn't stand a chance of making the front page.

Immediately, we see why posts older than 12 hours are such a rarity on Reddit's front page: A 12-hour-old post needs roughly 3x the score to match the hotness of a six-hour-old post! 18- and 24-hour-old posts don't even stand a chance on the front page unless it's President Obama holding an AMA. Clearly, the life of a viral post on Reddit is short--so if you make it to the front page, enjoy your precious few hours in the spotlight.

It's no surprise then that time plays such a huge role in the success of a Reddit post. If the first six hours of a post's life are the most crucial for going viral on Reddit, none of that time can be wasted sitting around when no one's online.

In the end, all posts must die. As we see in the top right of this graph, even the most high-scoring posts will be outranked by a new post with no upvotes at all by the end of their second day of life. Reddit's front page is constantly evolving, and two-day-old news is just so yesterday.

There's of course an important addendum here: This classification really only applies to Reddit's front page, but not individual subreddit pages. If we take a stroll down any of the smaller, non-default subreddits, we'll see plenty of older, sub-500 score posts that are still on the front page of the subreddit. That just means it's easier to get on the front page of the individual subreddits--but that's a topic for a future post!

There's an irony to Twitter these days. It's defined by its limitations--140 characters--but those limitations may be getting in the way of its larger ambitions. With investors to please, the company is now focused on how it will grow, or solve the well-documented problem of getting people to stay active once they sign up. To do that, they may have to start axing long-beloved features.

Twitter's 140-character limit has caused a strange nomenclature of its own to crop up--one of RTs, DMs, @s, #s, MTs, and so forth. And so when news broke that Twitter was experimenting with phasing out @replies (and possibly hashtags) many speculated that it was because they were outdated, complicated conventions that only stood in the way of attracting new users.

"They're doing what mature companies do," says Ragy Thomas, founder and CEO of social media marketing platform Sprinklr. "Which is watch what their users need and watch what their potential viewers view as friction points and optimize for those needs."

According to Thomas, social media has normalized around the concepts that @replies and hashtags were intended to represent. Since people are now familiar with calling out other users and topics in a message stream, the argument goes, it's no longer necessary to have special tags.

"Twitter is now bigger than those constructs, and they no longer need them for it to grow, or connect people around content--this is just evolution. All is well in the universe."

For Laura Hamilton, founder and CEO of startup Additive Analytics, a move like this might help, but it could also be Twitter missing the forest for the trees.

"It's tough to get started on Twitter as a new content creator. When you first create an account, you have no followers," says Hamilton. "Twitter starts to suggest some accounts for you to follow, but typically those are… people [who] are very unlikely to follow back a new user. It's disheartening for a new user who's tweeting original, fresh content but not getting many followers. I think a lot of would-be content-producers drop off at that stage."

Instead, Hamilton believes that Twitter could do more to foster communities aligned with interests, to allow a network of strangers to grow more organically, perhaps according to location or profession. According to Hamilton, it's not learning Twitter that's hard--although she does admit that the interface can be "a bit confusing"--but participating in it.

"When a user engages with Twitter for the first time, they quickly ask themselves, 'Why is this helpful? Why is this interesting?'" says Jessica Lawrence, executive director of New York Tech Meetup. "If the answers to those questions aren't good enough, they see no real point in continuing to engage. Phasing out the @ symbol and hashtag may make the experience a bit more user-friendly, but I think that is just scratching the surface."

Both Lawrence and Hamilton believe that, while new users might appreciate the potential of a more streamlined Twitter experience, the service's frustrations lie elsewhere. But when I asked danah boyd, principal researcher at Microsoft Research about this, she took a stronger stance altogether.

"Every system requires learning the norms and affordances of the system," says boyd. "Historically, barriers have often been part of what made the system exciting to users. Think: MySpace and backgrounds." Geeky constructions like hashtags, boyd points out, are now used for late-night talk show skits and billboards and movie marketing campaigns.

"And, frankly," boyd says, "you don't need to know how to use these things to use Twitter. So the frame still doesn't seem quite right."

While networks like CNN claim the search for the missing Malaysia Air flight have "gone low-tech," in fact behind the scenes the opposite happened.

Thanks to engineering ingenuity by Inmarsat, a satellite service, we now have a very good idea of where the Boeing 777 wound up (PDF): far flung off the West Coast of Australia.

Inmarsat figured this out by from analyzing the signals from engine pings that are automatically sent from the Rolls-Royce engine to a geostationary satellite, indicating that the engines are operational (and which could be used for transmitting other types of data, which Malaysia Airlines did not subscribe to). They can't be turned off, and are isolated from the rest of the electronics on the plane. All other electronics off, hourly pings occur so long as the plane maintains power to the engines.

The ping is a simple acknowledge/receive handshake that basically means the transmitter and recipient of the message are aware of each other's connected status; in this case, an MH370 engine and the geostationary satellite. From the travel time of a ping, you should be able to backtrack the radial distance between the two. Since the geostationary satellite stays in the same place over Earth, it follows that the distance is the radius extending out from it, to the engine.

Sleuthing Out The Satellite

The Inmarsat satellite over the Indian Ocean recorded 5 pings, which means the airplane flew for over 5 but less than 6 hours after it was last sighted on Malaysian military radar. Publically, only the fifth ping arc was released, along with the airplane's final known location and heading as inferred from Indonesian military radar. The geostationary satellite location was not, but I was able to sleuth it out online. With this information, plus basic knowledge of 777 specs, how can we find the likely locations of MH370?

Monte Carlo Model

This was a question I started to address on March 15, using what's known as a Monte Carlo model written in Python (recently popularized by the likes of Wall-Street-trader-turned-author Nassim Taleb in Fooled By Randomness), once it became apparent that finding the airplane's final location would not be imminent. Technically, it's a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach (known as MCMC) because each step only depends on the present state (i.e., it's memory-less), and not the entire history, although with only 5 update steps--one for each ping--it's short. I made this model publically available in an IPython notebook, explaining the technical setup; anyone can download or view it, and I may improve and add to it over the coming weeks in a new version.

The key modification I made from the data available was to modify the 5th ping arc by an error, whose extent was 5,10, and 20% of the radial distance of the 5th ping arc, MH370's position at 8:11 am. First, here are the results for 1,000 trials of each of those error margins, which show the plane overwhelmingly "choosing" to fly to the south. In each case yellow and turquoise dots (at the 1 and 2 hr mark) can give an indication of the relative proportion of times MH370 picked a northern or southern route:

5% Error

10% Error

20% Error

Wow, that's a lot of dots! The smaller blue dots are the plane's most likely position (note that the map projection distorts some of the relative locations at the extreme south of the map). There are actually 4 of them for each simulation, as I model where the plane went down ¼, ½, ¾, and 59/60 of an hour after the last ping--moving with same heading as the 5th ping, for simplicity's sake, at 777 cruising speed.

As you can see, the final position is highly dependent on the error margin of the 5th ping. In all cases, however, these results closely match Inmarsat's internal analysis and the present search area, but without the additional pings and detailed information they had about the flight--and assuming much more error than they calculated they had, even in their worst-case scenario. Here's how I got to this point.

Getting the Data

First, I followed the lead of WNYC's 777 runway map by downloading the original XPlane dataset(1) and parsing through it to plot all of the runways longer than 5,000 ft, considered to be a minimum distance for a Boeing 777 to land (but not take off), as black dots. These do not factor in, in terms of where the airplane is located, but do show near where a 777 could land, if it's in the area.

Next, I found the latitude & longitude coordinate pairs of the plane's known positions over time, along with Langkawi Island (an island nearby MH370's last known location), and Inmarsat satellite 3-F1, along with deriving the ping arc distance from the satellite, to the 5th ping using released information about MH370 (such as that it was 40º relative to the satellite) plus other 3-F1 specs like how high it is in the sky, which places the 5th ping on the map at the same place seen in newspaper graphics.

Finally, the possibility of wind. I was able to get the wind through a flight simulator that active pilots used; they planned a flight for me, using the last known coordinates of the plane to the Maldives to get an Indian Ocean wind speed at cruising altitude, 35,000 feet, for the same 777 cruising speed I would use in my model. The wind at the time was 9 knots, which is almost nothing, so I disregarded it-- the wind effect would be negligible on fuel consumption, or the direction the plane would shift, compared to the main uncertainties I chose to model, which was the accuracy of the 5th ping radius.

After varying that ping location by 5,10, and 20%--the main intentional variation held across my model--we now have a map ready for simulations:

Running the Model

First, we assume how a Boeing 777 moves. Their typical cruising speed is 905 km/hr, and their big engines take a long time to spool up, which means it can take several minutes to execute a turn. So at each step, the plane's new location is a determined by a weighted combination of a quasi-random heading and a permanent latitude longitude probability grid that reflected the 5th ping arc at each of the 5 time steps (building in the 5,10 or 20% error). Since I didn't have the previous 4 pings, and the 5th ping is the most important if you care about where the plane ultimately ended up. The idea here is that we want to find where past the 5th ping arc the plane is likely to be found.

The quasi-random heading was picked from a normal distribution centered at 0º, with a standard deviation of 30º, out of all integer angles from 0-359º. This means the odds of picking an angle other than 0º decline in a bell curve shape as you move away from a straight-ahead heading, and that an angle of 30º could be reasonably likely but angles greater than 90º highly unlikely. So the airplane could execute a turn but not double back on itself over the course of 1 hour.

But the heading was just one of the two main components dictating the airplane's next location. The probability grid was also quasi-random, a normal distribution over the entire span of latitudes (55ºN to 50ºS) and longitudes (50ºE to 130ºE) I wanted to examine; within the 777's range from its last known position (which is up to 6 hours). This means that the peak of the bell curve was centered on the ping arc line itself, and then decreased dramatically over distance as you moved away from the ping arc, all within the confines of the latitude/longitude grid. So at each step the plane would be strongly influenced to head toward the ping, even though was last sighted heading due west--the opposite direction from the ping arc--and normally will not want to execute a sharp turn. See the actual code for more technical explanations.

Here are the Inmarsat 5th ping error plots for the first 5 pings, representing five hours after the plane was last detected:

5% Error

10% Error

20% Error

After all that was done, and I had my 5th ping MH370 locations, I took the last heading (for the 5th ping), and projected the final 4 headings, as previously explained, and shown in the first set of figures.

Conclusion

These results show is that irrespective of a large error margin on the 5th ping, the plane is much more likely to have ended up west of Australia rather to the north.(2)

The advantage of this Monte Carlo model is that it can provide a likelihood on the ultimate location of the aircraft, using a few key pieces of available information, without predicating the final assumption upon specific scenarios which may turn out to be speculative--as fears of hijacking, shadowing a flight across the Indian Ocean, or continuing due west past the Maldives in its original last reported heading, as many people pointed out could be plausible possibilities (including myself, before I completed the model).

According to Inmarsat, the maximum error for the ping mark was still well under the 5% margin I modeled, as they benchmarked MH370 against several other planes flying that day from the satellite, where they knew the actual GPS coordinates. Which means that my most likely scenario from the numbers I have input thus far would be the 5% model, which shows the plane being in a relatively concentrated region west of Australia. The New York Times Hong Kong bureau was particularly helpful in connecting me with Inmarsat and other original sources of information hard to find online (as part of the rules of making this model, however, all are publically available).

And, of course, anyone can download this code and input their own numbers or scenarios; the functions are written in a generalized manner that is not specific to the parameters I used.(3)

What MH370 Means For The Future

Amelia Earhart's disappearance (along with that of her plane) is still among the greatest unsolved mysteries in aviation. But it is from an era when, from a communication perspective, the flying world was a much bigger place; when devices did not phone home or seamlessly connect to satellites, and when a lot more could go wrong in the air.

Which is in part what makes the disappearance of a Boeing 777 in 2014--one of Boeing's flagship and largest models, and with an almost-perfect safety record--all the more dramatic and surprising. The fact that MH370 disappeared without confirmation of a mayday call, or any sort of distress signal or sign that something was amiss, added to the mystery, which will be unraveled as investigations continue.

One likely consequence of this latest disaster is that, by default, information about the airplane's location will likely be required to be sent, along with an "engines operational" handshake that the Rolls-Royce engines used to communicate to the Inmarsat satellite--the saving grace in figuring out where the airplane went, and how far it flew for. The effort Insarmat has put into deducing location information indirectly from the ping data demonstrates that the existing type of data obtained from the flight is not set up to be analyzed for the very purpose which is now central to the investigation.

One obvious conclusion from the difficulty of locating the MH370 over these past two plus weeks is that if rent-a-cars can have monitoring devices which track their whereabouts at all times, as can a several hundred dollar Windows Phone or iPhone with the swipe of a button, then so should an aircraft which costs over a quarter billion dollars. (A Boeing 777-200ER is listed at $261.5 million on Wikipedia.) Running such a location system on a separate electrical system, similar to the way in which engine pings are done, might be a one-time technical design challenge but is not as great (or possibly even as costly) as the recovery task for the MH370, in the coming weeks, months, or years until the final reports on what happened are released.

Endnotes

(1) A flight simulator game--an easily accessible world runway database has been assembled, all under the name of entertainment.

(2) I focused the maps on this region, for this reason, but you can extrapolate how many times the plane went to the north by looking at the dots to the north of the plane's original position after the first ping, i.e., when one hour had elapsed from when the plane was last sighted by radar.

(3) Although I argue they are a good tradeoff between simplicity and being realistic!