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The Fast-Growing, Profitable Market For Kid "Influencer" Endorsements On Twitter, Instagram, Vine, YouTube, And Pinterest

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Who's getting the better deal here, the new age social media barons, or the brands paying them? And when a trusted viral voice is now in the pocket of a big company, what's in it for the audience?

Going Viral In Your Underwear

Twenty-year-old Carmel, Calif. native Cameron Asa runs arguably one of the most powerful parody accounts on Twitter: TweetLikeAGirI. In a phone conversation he told me so, proudly. And unlike some of his peers he even advertises his rates online. For an account with over a million followers, and talk of huge fees paid out to influencers, getting Asa's accounts to interact with you online won't break the bank. So, is this a business or just about bragging rights?

"Some people are content to make $200 to $400 on their accounts [per post]," explains David Orr. Orr claims to run a dozen major parody accounts, including YaBoyBillNye. He says Asa is part of a group not maximizing their potential. "He could hire a COO and turn his account into a business."

Orr won't reveal just how much he makes, but says "making a thousand dollars a day is by no means unrealistic" for influencers. He says the top 1% on Twitter can command daily rates of several thousand dollars--most of the people behind major accounts are inexperienced teens missing that opportunity.

"It's great that 16- and 17 year-olds are making $500 a day in revenue, working from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., after school," he says. "People like myself work from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. They're not looking at this from a business aspect. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm looking to maximize my revenue."

To do that the 22-year-old Illinois native and University of Arizona graduate spends an average of 14 hours a day online, seven days a week. He's so dedicated that he cut his Spring break trip short to get back to his work. Next week Orr is planning to launch his own engagement platform and management company, helping other influencers work with brands. Social Holdings Incorporated will pay tweeps based on click rates.

"Anyone with 250,000 to 300,000 followers is influential enough to work with," he notes.

Orr is cagey when it comes to specifics, but he's very successful. He recently bought a house. But he's somewhat of an outlier, learning about business as a teen after founding and running a consumer electronics company and an iPhone app. He started using Twitter around 2009. Most of the money he used to purchase his new lakefront home was gained in his previous ventures, not just from his work as an influencer. Orr says marketing is a long-term play, not an overnight hit. His advice for less savvy operators: Start saving.

"A lot of people haven't grasped that this money isn't forever," he says. "They're spending like there's going to be a paycheck every day for the rest of their life. Just because you're making great money now doesn't mean you should drop out of college or move out of your parents' house."

Another big personality on Twitter is Taylor Nikolai, who claims to have 4 million followers on a slew of accounts, including FacesPics. The 25-year-old says there's about 30 major account owners on Twitter, and "literally infinite possibilities on branding."

Read about social media marketing on campus: These Campus Celebs Are Huge On Vine and Instagram

Like Orr, he spends his days tweeting from his home, in suburban Minnesota. After graduating in 2010 with dual degrees in business and journalism, he couldn't find a job. So he spent a lot of time online, where he realized if he was willing to commit all his waking time to the web, he could have success on Twitter.

"The way that I started was creating a parody account of a fictional character, which is probably more common than you think." Nikolai won't say which character exactly. And he's hesitant when pushed to talk about his annual income, which he says has never reached over $100,000.

"I'm not making a lot of money right now like all my competitors are because I'm trying really hard to brand long term," he says. "I think that letting people know that I'm this parody account ruins the joke."

Nikolai is in favor of working directly with companies to build awareness instead of driving traffic to websites and getting paid off AdSense, which he calls unsustainable. And he's not into scheduling tweets, which forces him to be up and online all day, every day, tweeting on roughly 20 accounts. He thinks this engagement tactic is less alienating to followers, and keeps eyeballs on Twitter. Fans respond to originality, live-tweeting events, and piggybacking on trending topics. Starting out, knowing the players and getting them to cross-promote posts helps fledgling accounts build.

"On a good day 1,000 retweets and 1,000 favorites means the tweet was great, on any account," Nikolai says.

The Landscape And The Players

YouTube, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, Pinterest--these are the platforms where you find young buyers waiting to be influenced. Since Facebook makes users pay to reach target audiences, it's the only major social network not in the mix. Google+ is reportedly at work on AdHeat, a patented system connecting brands with influencers.

The kind of posts fans respond to may differ from network to network, but what many top influencers have in common is a major presence on most, if not all sites. Trendsetters are capable of migrating followers, which makes them attractive to brands looking to wrap their products around their content. The more of a reach, the more money involved.

These kids drive huge sales--as many as 60% of marketers are investing, according to data collected from the cloud communication company Augure. Judicious estimates could make this a billion-dollar segment of a half-a-trillion industry.

"Influencers" get paid per tweet or post, or work under contract on campaigns. Some get connected with companies covering multiple platforms, like theAudience, or specialty spots like Big Frame, CollectiveDigital, or Jukin Media, which focus on video creators. Then there's twtMob for Twitter, theAmplify for Instagram, or HelloSociety for Pinterest. A startup called Niche gives you a customized group of social media "celebrities" who will organically tweet, post, and talk about your products. This isn't canned material made by some agency coming out these kids' mouths. It's them.

In a nod to the growing market, Twitter has started to quietly reveal engagement numbers for major users, a real metric influencers can use to prove ROI.

Top influencers can make thousands of dollars a day in endorsements and merchandise. Big money is changing hands, much of it to teenagers, which has made this a topic the media has loved to cover.

But while the 16-year-old stars making big bucks are being celebrated, what's not as well known is that some of this activity is not legal. That's because in the U.S. the Federal Trade Commission mandates the disclosure of paid or sponsored content. Penalties are in the six figures, but many in the space say there's still a Wild West mentality at work.

If you've ever visited a web page and weren't sure if the material you were reading was editorial or promotional, this goes out to you. And if your favorite Vine, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter star is posting on behalf of a company for money, and not telling you, they're breaking the law.

In 2009 the FTC released guidelines concerning online endorsements. Last year those rules were updated. Before that, the code hadn't changed since 1980. There are more than 50 pages of regulations, but the main takeaway is this: If you're paid to post online, you have to make it known, and when it comes to social that means including an "s/p" designation (sponsored post), or tags that say #sponsor or #ad.

Who Are These Web-Savvy Pied Pipers?

Typically millennials in their teens and 20s, influencers drive engagement--creating tweets, videos, photos, memes that people respond to, share, comment on, or even steal. Originality, wit, and volume posting is key--and so is pulling at heart strings or tickling funny bones.

Forget your Klout score, followers and reach are key, but the main criteria hinges on "capturing an emotion or quality in a platform that is meaningful," explains Oliver Luckett, the founder and CEO of the social media publisher theAudience. Luckett's company works with hundreds of influencers, driving billions of impressions for household name brands who want to work with these kids. "It really boils down to how much engagement, both visible and invisible. That's the connective tissue."

Likes and retweets are visible. The magic metric marketers have long coveted, word-of-mouth and the positive mental association consumers make with a product, is invisible. When you say soft drink, having Coke instantly come to mind is equally, if not more valuable to a company, than celeb endorsements. Years of good marketing literally brand a company's product into the consumer's mind's eye. That's the mission and goal. And for influencers, selling out has become cool.

"It's a lot more acceptable now," says Jonathan Skogmo, who heads Jukin Media. Marketing directly to fans is more engaging and "easier than putting a billboard up. You don't know how many drivers act on them. On the digital level, it's easy to track."

Influencers are male and female, black and white, and everything in between. And they don't have to be traditional stars. The fact that they're relatable, and look and live like their peers actually make them more convincing than Hollywood. With mainstream magazines like Seventeen putting Instagram stars on their covers, commercials using user-generated videos, and brands like American Eagle turning Viners into models, are these the new secret celebs?

"People feel closer to them because they show up in their feed--they hang on every word and thing they're wearing," explains Lindsay Fultz, a Los Angeles engagement specialist at theAmplify, which brings together influencers and brands in 16 algorithm-based affinities like entertainment, music, and dining. Fultz says it's a win for teens to work with big companies that line up with their personality, and a win for brands to reach new audiences. "This is the way it's going."

The Origin Of Influencer Marketing

In 2008 a L.A. company called DigiSynd was acquired by Disney. The DigiSynd team included Oliver Luckett, who would go on to found and run theAudience, and his partner Rami Perlman, who is now the vice president of talent and influencers at theAudience. That duo was part of the group that started managing Disney's social media--and changed web history.

Perlman says back then Disney laughed when they proposed using an online heavyweight as a marketing tool. But in 2010 they convinced Disney to use the electronic musician Pogo to create an official remix for Toy Story 3. They also managed to twist Disney's arm and sell tickets for the film on Facebook. The video got almost 4 million views and the gambit was a huge success.

"First they laughed at us, then they wanted to destroy us, then they wanted to work with us," laughed Perlman. "So funny because I've been preaching this forever."

Now Perlman works with a growing stable of homegrown web personalities, bringing heavyweights together for live events like the #whatever series, where about 150 influencers reached 6 million impressions and 1 million engagements on Twitter and Instagram off only 228 posts. The onetime punk rock musician, and son of famed Israeli violinist Itzhak Perlman, also recently helped guide the Chainsmokers' viral sensation "#Selfie," stacking their music video with multiple influencers. The video has over 30 million views on YouTube--without a traditional record label or celebrity backing.

What's Next?

The stage influencers play on can lead to more than just endorsements. Taryn Southern has built a following of almost 350,000 subscribers on YouTube, parlaying that success into television appearances, a web series sponsored by Glamour magazine, and a deal with Hot Pockets. Southern, who appeared on American Idol when she was only 18, says she won't work with brands she doesn't actually have an affinity for.

"Your audience knows--it never works with a brand you're not passionate about," she told me. "Where I've made mistakes is trying to be clear of an integration that doesn't work for YouTube personalities. If people are being paid on social they have to be honest."

On YouTube, Vine, and Instagram, creators are the stars, but on Twitter, the trendsetters are largely parody accounts, which can leave the people running them feeling like the Cinderella of the ball. Do the people pulling the strings feel overshadowed by their made-up characters?

"How could I not," Nikolai admits, laughing. "If I have a really funny joke, I won't post it on my personal, I'll post it on my famous parody account."

Those growing pains, and deciding which brands to work with, will be the continuing narrative in this story. Content thievery remains rampant, as are selling accounts, and failing to disclose brand partnerships. Eventually the FTC will start cracking down. And what happens when influencers grow up? What will their role be then--will they lose their brand appeal or morph into a new commodity?

"I think we're in the beginning stages of social media," muses Nikolai. "I have nearly 4 million followers on Twitter but I think that could expand. Who knows where it could go? Who knows what other formats of social media I can drive that traffic to?"


How Smule Overhauled Its Social Rapping App So Users Just Get It

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AutoRap was doing just fine sitting in maintenance mode. The music app was generating users and revenue for its creators at Smule. But AutoRap, which turns spoken words into a faux rap session, still had one huge pain point the team needed to address. Today, Smule released version 2.0 of the app. Here's how they overhauled it.

In January, AutoRap introduced rap battles. It quickly had nearly a million users start a battle, but only a fraction--around 10%--managed to finish. The number was so low it indicated that there was something terribly wrong with the flow of the new feature--or worse.

Smule's chief product and design officer Jeannie Yang and her team got to work on addressing the mechanics and aesthetics of the app. "The 2.0 update simplifies the flow surrounding the drop off points," says Yang. "Funnel rate is a good indicator of user engagement, and 10% was just abysmal."

Among the other top priorities for the team was to fully integrate social into the app and bring it up to par with the other properties from Smule. There was also the task of making sure the slightly gimmicky app didn't lose it sense of playfulness and fun.

The social integration included the implementation of Smule Nation, the company's social layer that ties all its apps together and gives users a cohesive login experience for the online features--including battles. This took a lot of work under the hood, which began a few months before everything else. Without Smule Nation included, the app had a higher chance of eventually being canned.

"In order to justify that AutoRap belonged in the product roadmap, it was critical to me that the app had Smule's vision of connecting people through music," Yang says. "This meant it must be social in the 'Smulean' way, where you can connect with someone to make and share music."

Keeping the app's identity also meant not losing a sense of play. The addition of record scratching is part of this. Once something gets recorded it can be manipulated by spinning the vinyl record on screen. Adding the feature was actually a way to reward some of the longer wait times associated with the recording functions, but also create more interactivity.

Even the app's icon got a redesign, which wasn't exactly a straightforward process.

"I was surprised to find out that some users thought the 1.0 app icon resembled marijuana leaves, and liked it," Yang explains cheerfully. "That was not the intent at all, the old icon was inspired by the fleur-de-lis design, but we had a little debate about how much that might have given us unexpected street cred."

The team had a small debate over six different icons. In the end, an icon depicting a hand holding a microphone won out.

Looking back on a relatively quick turn around from start to completion, Yang has a few takeaways from the AutoRap 2.0 project.

Design From The Core Mechanics Outward

The core of AutoRap 2.0 is the flow of recording. It's the crux of the app and what the user interacts with the most. "We wanted to make it as frictionless as possible and give users a visceral, immediate connection to their recording," says Yang.

There were times that the team was designing screens ahead or in parallel of the recording mechanics and it never turned out well. It might seem like the process of recording audio and then looping it would be rather simple, but that was never the case. The addition of audio always kept the process a little more difficult than it would seem.

Talk To Users

"For the user research, we talked with local rappers, most of whom were from Oakland, and we attended a real-life 'cypher' in Redwood City to observe aspiring teenage rappers," Yang recalls. "It was fascinating and helped us push for a more cypher feel in AutoRap."

As Yang describes the cypher is similar to a battle, but less structured and with friendlier tones. "A group of people freestyle rap together, taking turns, usually in a collaborative and playful atmosphere where people just rap what's on their minds."

Reading user reviews from the App Store was also critical for feedback. It was a key indicator that people weren't just getting bored with the first version of the app, but were actually having problems navigating through some parts.

Know When To Stop

This is a common theme and problem for a lot of designers and developers, continuing to over-develop and never wind up shipping anything. Yang tries to clarify why it's important to let the product breathe with the public.

"Every product I've released has had a giant prioritized product backlog that becomes instantly obsolete once the product is out," she says. "Inevitably, the reality of what we thought the users would care about and what would matter was different once they got a chance to use it."

Yang also says that with a redesign project, the dangers of this can be higher. It's easy to fall victim to thinking that everything has to be perfect and not screw the app up worse than the previous version.

Choose The Right Team

"Personally, one of the hardest things during this redesign process was making sure there was transparency on the design update to ensure feedback, but also empowering the design leads with space and room to run and be creative," says Yang.

Since she couldn't be involved in every meeting or discussion, she needed to be confident everyone was on the same page.

"It was super important to me to make sure that high-level design goals were clear and to set the conditions right for the design leads to make the calls when needed."

Judging by tone and the constant praise for the team, Yang appears to have been satisfied with the results.

How JackThreads Gets In The Minds Of Dude Shoppers With Data

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Smartphones have revamped the retail experience for lots of people, but for the young male demographic, the entire e-commerce process--from browsing styles to buying--can happen completely on their phones.

"Mobile is insane for us," says Jason Ross, founder and CEO of JackThreads. The site, a "members only" service that offers subscribers daily sales of hand-picked street, skate, and surf clothes up to 80% off. It has 6 million subscribers and features over a thousand brands.

Unlike women, whose shopping habits consume a handful of media and tools both real-life and digital, JackThreads has learned through analytics that men like to shop on their phones--full stop.

To exploit that male demographic, JackThreads has fine-tuned its digital services for their dude shoppers. Here's how.

Mad About Mobile

It's not exactly news that nowadays dudes like clothes: Last year, the Guardian reported that British men under 45 spend more money on footwear than British women in the same age group. Another study found that fashion accounts for 83% of young men's total online spending in the U.K.

And it is heavily digital. According to a recent study, men shop on mobile devices more than women do..

"Over half of our sales and two-thirds of traffic come through mobile," says Devon Giddon, communications director at Thrillist, the men's lifestyle media company that bought JackThreads nearly four years ago.

Fast-forward to 2014, when JackThreads saw a whopping 51% of all revenue come from handheld devices. The company says that's more than any of its competitors. And it's because the company has zeroed in on the trend of young men shopping on their handheld device.

"Mobile is no longer the second screen," says Ben Lerer, Thrillist CEO and cofounder. "It's the first screen."

JT's Mobile Focus

JackThreads launched its first mobile app back in January 2012, but Ross admits they really didn't know what they were doing quite yet. But once the company made mobile its main focus, and really targeted the way young guys use phones to shop, Ross says the revenue growth was explosive.

The company noticed that the majority of their email clicks were on a mobile device. That's one of the reasons the company started ramping up mobile efforts, such as a souped-up app and mobile-optimized emails.

Lerer says mobile is where all other companies should be focusing their energy, too.

"Mobile is definitively the first place where everything happens," he says. "It's where the majority of our money is made, and where the majority of interactions with our guys is."

Womanly Advice

In addition to focusing on mobile, the company has studied its users' shopping habits in other ways. For example, it turns out dudes like to bounce style-related questions off a woman. So JackThreads created a feature that gives its customers such style advice on demand.

One of the pages on the JackThreads site reads: "As the all-knowing Ja Rule once growled, 'every thug needs a lady,' and this rings especially true when it comes to wrapping yourself in fresh threads.'"

That's an introduction to "Jill": an across-the-board moniker for the site's female shopping assistants. The site describes "Jill" as "our female stylist, bringing the freakishly fine-tuned shopping chops of the feminine mind to JackThreads."

As guys browse the site, they can chat with these stylists on demand, who can give tips, like how to care for jeans or how to nail a certain look. The service is called "Jill Says."

"We had noticed many of our guys had been asking to speak with a female customer service rep, and we realized how reflective this was of the traditional brick-and-mortar shopping experience," says Giddon. "When a guy goes into a store, he appreciates advice from a stylish sales woman helping to instill confidence in his purchase decision."

Data Mining

A quarter of the company's business is generated by six private label brands that were created after users' sartorial preferences were scrutinized.

"We took the data that showed what styles, colors, patterns, materials they were buying and actually created merchandise based off of that feedback," Giddon explains.

JackThreads used that data to create original lines that include six categories of menswear: athletic, street, tailored suits, shoes, accessories, and basic clothing.

"Our database tracks every purchase of every user so we are able to drill down to the item level to see what is getting traction," says Giddon. "Also, using Google Analytics, we are able to see what categories of products over-index on 'add to cart' rates, giving us early signals as to what users are looking for."

How It Started

Last year, Internet Retailer magazine named JackThreads one of the fastest-growing men's e-commerce sites that focuses on mobile. JackThreads may be on countless of dudes' smartphone screens, but it started out in Jason Ross's bedroom in 2006.

He says he's always been a fashion-focused guy, and when he started the site, he was jonesing for "cool fashion and cool shit." But he felt like he was part of a niche demographic that businesses hadn't tapped into yet. So Ross started that business himself.

Ross says JackThreads is telling guys how to look cool, and how to be cool.

"When we started Thrillist, we looked at national men's magazines like Maxim and GQ," says Ben Lerer. "They resonated tonally with us, and spoke to general wants and needs a guy had. Most brands tended to be sophomoric or aspirational. At the same time, we felt the content we needed had to be local."

And so Thrillist, as a standalone site, made itself known by telling young men where to eat, drink, and hang out in their home cities. That service-driven element geared toward men-about-town made JackThreads a no-brainer acquisition. A couple years later, JackThreads turned its attention to iOS and Android apps, eventually seeing great success.

Competition And Challenges

JackThreads and Thrillist are wading into increasingly crowded waters, however. Indeed, the modern guy does care more about what he looks like, and is wont to follow trends like sniffing out top tailors, where to buy the latest $300 sneakers, or what the "in" color for spring is going to be.

Media outlets like Complex, Hypebeast, Freshness, as well as competing online men's merchants like Topman, Bonobos, Ministry of Supply, Gilt, Brandid, Shufflehub, and Plundr, are all fighting for that relatively new market of fashion-minded young men.

Other men's style sites abroad helped prove mobile's effectiveness, too. Business of Fashion reported that in 2012, Japanese fashion e-tailer Zozotown saw 40% of its revenue generated by mobile, which are numbers that give JackThreads a run for its money.

To stand out, sites are going to have to individuate as much as possible. At JackThreads, for example, there are flash sales, where goods go for cheap for a brief time.

"We have a mixture of traditional e-commerce, but also the flash element. There's literally something new to see every single day. We're giving consumers a reason to come back--a lot of traditional retailers don't do that," says Ross.

Despite being a leader in e-commerce, at least among young men, JackThreads' mobile-heavy strategy might pose challenges.

"The issue with cross-platform is the time element," says Dr. James Bowen, an adjunct professor at University of Ottawa who specializes in tech, startups, and entrepreneurship.

"Mobile devices, and someday wearable computing, are the future. Such devices will become 'do everything' devices," Bowen says. "So having a mobile device means that our interest in a product can be temporal, and a retailer can design promotions on the last part of the customer's buying cycle--which is the purchase itself."

"Even at the time of purchase," Bowen says, "a last-minute deal can change a buyer's mind from one brand to the next."

"Fish Where the Fish Are"

Advice Ross gives to other entrepreneurs (other than going all-out on their mobile strategy) is to stay in touch with customers. "Behaviors change," he says. And that includes how your customers are viewing and buying your products. Monitoring your users' behavior and coming up with relevant services (like Jill Says, in this case) is key.

"If you're thinking about starting an e-commerce business, start mobile first," Lerer suggests. "Fish where the fish are. That's on mobile. It doesn't mean you need to be mobile only--but if I were going to launch an e-commerce business today, I would launch mobile first. No matter what."

More About Our Methodology: Tracking MH370 With Monte Carlo Data Models

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The article we published yesterday on the missing Malaysia Air flight has--big surprise--received some criticism and nitpicking on Reddit, which I'll address below.

Choosing The Heading

The plane direction model is a state dependent (Markov) random walk which at each stage takes the previous heading into account in choosing the new heading. (Specifically, it's normally distributed with a mean of the previous heading and a fixed standard deviation; hence I summarize it as quasi-random due to the weighting). If the standard deviation is large it will move closer to a uniform distribution, resulting in a stateless random walk.

But this scenario is only realistic if we think that the plane picked a totally random direction every hour. Planes trying to get somewhere don't tend to do that. So I make the assumption, through a smaller standard deviation, that the plane will tend to fly in the same direction it's flying in. However, I'll note that by using a normal distribution and varying the standard deviation, my model would have the capability to resemble a uniform distribution if that's an assumption I chose to make.

Adding Additional States To The Model

The values that I chose for the standard deviation are a reasonable balance between constant flight direction and the ability to explore the space. Ultimately the model of the plane direction--the heading state--is only one input; we also have the ping data to help constrain where the plane goes.

While it is true that even more states like altitude, speed, and remaining fuel would make for a richer model, that's only true if there was the data to constrain it, which I'm not aware of. For now, heading alone, plus the 5th ping, gives a very reasonable result.

Using The 5th Ping

There were 7 complete pings during the flight. Five occurred after the last radar sighting over Pulau Perak and those are the ones I refer to in the model. Each of these pings has a distance associated with it, and each distance has an error in the distance estimate. Unfortunately, Inmarsat and the Malaysian authorities have only released the distance of the last (5th) ping and have released no error estimates.

My original plan was to constrain the plane position at each stage with the ping distance for that stage. This is done by taking the product of the probabilities from the ping distance and the heading (suitably renormalized). Since the ping distances for the intermediate pings are unavailable, I constrain each ping by the final ping distance.

I assumed the error had a normal distribution with a standard distribution of 5%,10%, and 20% from the radius. Since we only have data for the last ping, the large error estimates effectively cover other pings also, according to the qualitative data schematic maps, besides the 5th ping error which remains unstated by Inmarsat.

Wind Information

The airport locations come from a database for an entertainment oriented flight simulator (X-Plane), but the wind data--which I decided was insignificant for the model--came from a professional pilot who used a service actually used to file flight plans for real flights.

Since it's the same information commercial pilots use when planning to fly the plane, I trust it more than an Internet weather service which is unlikely to have data across the latitude and longitude range, and cruising altitude (35,000 ft.) MH370 is likely to have experienced.

The Overall Goal

The goal of this Monte Carlo model is not to definitely show what happened, but help to explore space of the most likely scenarios using the information available to me. My model is not supposed to be the most complicated model--my model answers the simple question: With a few simple assumptions, how far can we go?

The answer is, about as far as the experts have, but with much fewer resources (data, time, people). If more information on the Doppler analysis and the pings were released, I could incorporate that into my model to give an even better estimate of where the airplane is. It would be great if this data were made available.

I also welcome any other suggestions, criticisms, and critiques, and data I can use.

Why Education Startup ClassDojo Is Entering The Messaging App Wars

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Messaging has proven to be an enormously valuable part of the consumer app ecosystem, justifying multibillion-dollar acquisitions. Now the message wars are bleeding over into the education space--and it could be exactly the disruption that sector needs.

Education startup ClassDojo is hoping it can get teachers communicating directly with parents over messaging using a major feature update. If ClassDojo can get messaging right, it will be far better positioned to start experimenting with whole-school features and revenue models.

With other startups vying for home screens in the some way, will ClassDojo's gamble pay off?

Teachers Hate Detention, Too

Until now, ClassDojo's growth has stemmed from its singular focus on a pain point that unites teachers worldwide: discipline, or lack thereof. Cofounder and CEO Sam Chaudhary heard a common refrain when he first interviewed teachers: "'I want to do something good. And instead I punish or bribe these kids.' It's this big ball of negativity," he says, "and the biggest reason teachers leave teaching."

Since it launched three years ago, ClassDojo, a mobile app, has been spreading like wildfire. More than a third of the teachers in the U.S. are using it--1.4 million, plus another 600,000 teachers overseas--all the more remarkable given that the app's distinctive "little monster" avatars are most at home in elementary school classrooms. For teachers, there's nothing else like it: a simple and fun way to make positive reinforcement of good behavior a viable strategy for classroom management.

Inspired by emerging research on the importance of character as a predictor of students' long-term success, Chaudhary set out to create a mobile solution that would help teachers positively reinforce good behavior. "The best performing school chains in the country, they say that more than half of what they do is instill things like grit and persistence and optimism," he says. "You need to have the socioemotional foundation for life."

But as any educator knows, encouraging qualities like respect and honesty is an uphill battle without being able to count parents as equal partners. What's more, parents are more than eager to get involved: Manoj Lamba, who leads marketing for ClassDojo, says he was "blown away" by the number of parents already downloading the weekly report that the app can automatically generate. "There was clearly demand for parents to learn more about their kids and play a bigger role in what's happening in the classroom environment," he says.

Fighting For The Home Screen

When ClassDojo launched, it benefitted from a lack of competition--indeed, that was part of the appeal of solving the problem of classroom management and student behavior. "Most ed-tech companies at the time were focused on delivering academic content in new ways, assessment software, or school infrastructure," Chaudhary says. ClassDojo, in contrast, "is not about developing what you know, it's about developing who you are."

But with messaging, ClassDojo enters a more crowded market. Remind101, so far the leader in the space, was founded at the same time as ClassDojo, during the summer of 2011, and is gaining momentum thanks to a $15 million Series B announced last month. "We have a very audacious, mission-driven goal of connecting every teacher, student, and parent in the world," says Brett Kopf, cofounder and CEO. Nearly 600,000 U.S. teachers have downloaded the Remind101 app, a footprint approximately half the size of ClassDojo's.

Investors are optimistic that ClassDojo is well positioned to compete, thanks to the loyalty it has nurtured among its use base. Niko Bonatsos, an investor General Catalyst Partners, which participated in ClassDojo's $8.5 million Series A last spring, described the messaging functionality as a way to lay the foundation for further growth: "With the release of this feature, the team doubles down on the network effects they are creating between teachers and parents, and enables a rich new communication channel that brings school and home closer together," he said in a statement.

Bring It On Home, Like Sam Cooke Said

ClassDojo Messaging becomes available today, making it possible for teachers to communicate with parents via an interface that resembles iMessage, complete with "read" receipts, without requiring teachers to divulge their personal contact information. Teachers will be able to send direct messages or broadcast announcements to all parents associated with a class.

"We're hoping that because of how simple it is to message, teachers will send a lot more positive messages home and keep parents involved in a very positive way," says Lamba.

The impact could go far beyond morale. A Harvard Graduate School of Education study on communication between teachers and families at a charter school in Boston, Mass., found that regular engagement improved behaviors associated with academic outcomes:

"On average, teacher-family communication increased the odds that students completed their homework by 40%, decreased instances in which teachers had to redirect students' attention to the task at hand by 25%, and increased class participation rates by 15%."

What researchers have studied, teachers know firsthand. Eusebio Jimenez, a fourth-year teacher at an elementary school in Davenport, Iowa, says that he started using ClassDojo in the fall after he struggled to stay on task with a particularly rowdy class. "It's really hard for me to teach when I'm disciplining students constantly," he says. When the class took a quarterly assessment this winter, scores had "jumped dramatically" since the fall.

Jimenez attributes the change to ClassDojo's effect on students as well as their parents: Students "love customizing their own avatar and seeing many points they have," while parents report that "'it gives me something to talk about with my kid.'"

Rapid Prototyping, Backed By Research

ClassDojo Messaging came together fast, thanks to the regular data analysis and in-person conversations that the small ClassDojo team leverages to stay on top of trends in user behavior. The team's experience is a good reminder that product development can be even more lean when it builds on a shared foundation of customer insight.

To kick off the project, a product manager, a designer, and a teacher support specialist "quickly mocked up some ideas," Lamba says. "In the course of one week we went from knowing that we wanted to do something in messaging, to having a design. Three weeks later we had it mostly built. All our [past] research informed everything that we did."

ClassDojo expects the feature to be a "major step forward" for teachers frustrated with disconnected phone numbers and printed notes gone missing. Down the road, the team is considering updates that would allow teachers to mute messaging during certain hours, and make available standard messages like the classroom equivalent of Airbnb's "Go ahead and book it." But for now, Lamba says, "We want to launch this and learn from it." With 5 million "feedback points" being awarded on ClassDojo each day, the team will soon have enough data to do just that.

Teachers' track record of dedication to the brand gives Chaudhary hope for the startup's future. Thanks to the presence of users in 180 countries, for example, teachers have crowdsourced translation of the ClassDojo site, now available in more than a dozen languages. "Teachers have done it with almost no management from us," he says. "When you make something people really want, they will do extraordinary things for it."

The Hardest Problem In Baseball (And The Robots Solving It)

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Baseball is a game of numbers and inches, but to date, analysts of the game have had to rely on paper, pencil, scorecards, and calculators. But not anymore.

At the 2014 SLOAN Conference, Major League Baseball's Advanced Media department (MLBAM) announced in-stadium technology that can track every detail of the game entirely with cameras. That means every data point in the game's geography can now be recorded--crucially, without the encumbrance of sensors on the players, equipment, or uniforms.

But a sensor-free data tracking system would require MLBAM to solve a problem called "seclusion"--essentially teaching computerized eyes to see players the same way humans do. Here's how they did it, and how it's going to completely upend the game experience for fans, coaches, and players.

New, Clear Escalation

Without exception, teams and players will utilize whatever information they can to gain a competitive advantage. But the numbers available haven't always told the whole story.

"When I was a video coordinator and we were doing stats analysis, whatever we had, we were going to use," says MLBAM CTO Joe Inzerillo, who likens baseball's statistical obsession to an arms race. "I absolutely think that we're going to [accelerate] analysis and say 'this is the best way to run bases' and 'based upon the way that people are running bases this is the way that we should actually counter that. This is where the positioning can go or this is the way that we should do this thing.'"

To track players, the system employs a small set of cameras, organized in pairs across the field from each other, to create a "binocular effect" that allows computers a certain depth of field. For the ball, they use basic radar.

The Pickle: "Seclusion"

The system differentiates between players crossing over one another in the camera's field of view by way of a process called "seclusion." Employing parallel vision to provide depth, computers actually see two images of the same player. By way of this "binocular" breakdown, individual players can be isolated from one another in-frame so that their data can be collected, rather than confused.

"This is by far the hardest problem to solve," explains Inzerillo. "It's a lot different if we were on say a basketball court where you have larger players, larger quality with a camera directly overhead, it helps with the seclusion side." But MLBAM has risen to the challenge.

"We finally feel like we got the technology to a point where we can solve it in a period of time. Our seclusion detection resolution started out at 67% of the seclusions. We're now getting to 90% of seclusions automatically resolved by the computer accurately," says Inzerillo.

The league plans are laid out in three stages. First and foremost, the technology is geared toward baseball operations, with nominal fan use in 2014. This year, three stadiums have been outfitted as a sort of soft opening for the technology: Citi Field, Miller Park, and Target Field. The reason for that is accuracy.

The typical camera array depends entirely upon the geometry of individual ballparks--some have three, some have six--all depending on dimensions. Each camera, however, has a twin on the other side of the park. On the backend, the two angles are stitched together in order to provide the necessary depth and perspective for the computers to understand x/y/z axis, field of play, and plane.

The system itself generates an astounding amount of data, up to 20,000 data points per second for a ball in-flight. For players, data points are recorded at a slower rate--something closer to 30 dp/per sec. But that's not all.

"Right now it's even more data because we're keeping the original video to do enhance trading and things like that. When you see a play that doesn't resolve with the artificial intelligence either quickly or accurately, we can adjust the algorithms and then leave them on the play without having to have another game played and get back to ground truth," says Inzerillo.

MLBAM envisions a future where fans can view games live, with these new data visualizations, in real time. And though the statistics will not be available to fans in-stadium at launch, the league has plans to get there.

"We want you to watch on your phone. We're putting in the connectivity on DAS (digital attached storage) and Wi-Fi so that you can actually get a [data signal] in the ballpark. It's all part of the coordinated plan to provide rich data sets, but also [give] the fans the connectivity to do so."

Why Not Wearables?

So why not put the technology on the players themselves? Some might suggest that placing a chip in players' jerseys would provide better, player-specific data.

"I think that's cheating," says Inzerillo. "When you fundamentally change the playing surface or change the uniform or change what the players are doing I think that it alters the game in some way, especially in a game with a rich tradition like baseball. I also feel like we've gotten to the point where the technology is good enough, we don't have to do that to achieve results that you're seeing both in real time and both highly accurate."

"As cameras are able to have more and more megapixels focused on the field, we get better and better detection, then it's easier and easier to dig up those details. We will be able to eventually resolve body position down to where the guy's fingertips are. We want to make sure the data is right. We want to make sure it's perfect."

A Futuristic Look At The Nation Of San Francisco

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"The best part is this, the people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology, won't follow you there... We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like without affecting anyone who wants to live under the Paper Belt... We need to build opt­-in society, outside the U.S., run by technology." Balaji Srinivasan, Stanford lecturer and cofounder of genetics startup Counsyl, in a talk at Y Combinator. [Source]


The word around the Bay Area is that it's impossible to build a "real" technology company anywhere else. They say the talent, the culture, and the money are all here.

Some people think it's such a perfect incubator for new, progressive industries and lifestyles that it should be designated a kind of experimental, low-regulation zone overseen by a CEO-type political official.

Now--don't get us wrong--this is an experiment we'd love to see executed. The world is dying to know what life is like when all the coffee shops are cashless, all the mail is reverse-delivered, and people actually use Path.

This has always been the Bay Area's thing. The Yellow Cab Co-Op in San Francisco got efficient computerized dispatch way back in 1989--the first in the country. Technology has long been equated with a rising tide here.

But you know that attitude is changing when technology "thinkers" call the rest of the country "the Paper Belt." Or publicly advocate for secession from the United States. Or say that California should be broken up into six states so they can start over with new Constitutions, even as other Californians plead for tech workers to be more active in communities already "constituted." Some of the language of today's tech acolytes sounds so brainwashy that it's just too easy to satirize.

And it leaves us here in New York speculating about whether we want this kind of place anymore. So we set out to see it: the Bay Area as its own unencumbered, progressive (if slightly plutocratic) nation with San Francisco as its capital. We trolled for inspiration in the news and sent our ideas to Matthew Rosenberg at M-Rad, a Los Angeles design and architecture firm, who rendered the scenes. We'd visit. --Ed.


"Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, whose vision is to network all of mankind online, has commissioned the equally famous architect Frank Gehry to create a new headquarters for his company. Of course this is not just any building. It's "the largest open office space in the world," as Zuckerberg says, an enormous room for 3,400 Facebook employees. The building itself will be covered with trees and meadows, allowing it to merge with the landscape. 'From the outside it will appear as if you're looking at a hill in nature,' Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook timeline." [Source]


Welcome to the experimental prefecture of the Bay Area. It's changed a lot since you last visited. Major companies have solidified their headquarters here in San Francisco ever since the Bay Area became a reduced-regulation zone. In easy reach of mass transit, cultural events, and city living, companies from all over the West Coast have consolidated here, bringing an influx of young, educated, and wealthy workers.

Nine different cryptocurrencies are accepted by retailers here alongside the U.S. dollar. Efficient hyperloop lines run between different regions of the Bay Area but don't travel outside it yet; plans are underway for a hyperloop going cross-country to New York by way of the southern route, passing through Austin, Texas, rather than the historical waypoint of Chicago, Illinois, which still has no interactive, music, and film conferences.

Jeff Bezos's dome-shaped Amazon headquarters has relocated here, filling dozens of city blocks and replacing the company's original domed headquarters in Seattle, where the State of Washington attempted to limited Bezos to an unreasonably small number of biospheres within city limits.

Other tech headquarters with limited real estate footprints have opted to build enormous mushroom-shaped podiums to act as platforms for their sprawling, grassy, all-inclusive corporate campuses, modeled to look like natural landscapes floating hundreds of feet above the street, complete with their own enclosed ecosystems, hydroponic vegetable gardens, and shopping outlets.

Power is supplied by massive wind turbines lining the Bay, as well as solar installations on rooftops, rendering the cost of energy nearly to a low monthly subscription price which is structured in a freemium plan. Citizens that use less than a certain number of kilowatt hours of electricity don't pay anything at all, but can earn free kilowatt hours for suggesting smart home appliances to their friends, provided they convert to becoming paying users for those appliances.

In many ways, this experimental nation is both more platform-like and less so. On one hand, completely modular systems exist for starting, growing, and building new business and parts of businesses. If you want something and it doesn't exist, you can network easily with other consumers who would buy that thing, and then coordinate quickly with local experts to form an ad hoc company. A first production run determines whether this business is scalable and profitable; if it is, it's added to your portfolio of projects. There is no fiat money, so the diversity of currencies has made room for new financial instruments; not all these products are physical or 3-D printed.

But certain infrastructure is so complex that--as with railroad networks and broadcast operators--some monopolies have been granted. Twitter has benefitted most, becoming an official replacement for municipal 911 and information services like school closings, weather warnings, earthquake response, and other urgent city affairs.

Politically, parties have become so sensitive to social network sentiment that they eventually become indistinguishable from one another, balkanized into sub-groups that mostly reflects the structure of political Reddit discussion boards.


"There are many, many exciting and important things we can do but we can't do because they're illegal or not allowed by regulations," Page said. "As technologists we should have safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society and people without having to deploy into the normal world. People who like those kind of things can go there and experiment." Larry Page at last year's Google I/O. [Source]


Most citizens hold economically libertarian but socially progressive beliefs, and these don't contradict. Economies of scale in the software business have created incredible wealth from growing markets in Asia and Africa, making it possible for a flourishing new movement toward socially-sustainable low-profit limited-liability corporations.

Recreation has changed, too. Growing concern over head injuries long ago eliminated school football programs and slowly dismantled football as a regional pastime. Arena video game matches have cropped up to replace them, featuring combatants wearing virtual reality masks and using real body motion to compete in a virtual world.

The most popular event is the annual Madden NFL Xbox Super Bowl, where the nation's top two players coach their computerized teams on large screens in front of crowds of tens of thousands. Enthusiasts and legal gamblers play alongside in fantasy leagues based on the virtual game.

Not every stadium seat is occupied by a human being, however. The explosion in telepresence drones has made it possible for a drone owner to be in several places at once, using a flying device or humanoid robot to act like your very own remote head, taking you virtually to meetings, concerts, polling stations, and maybe even your kid's cake-day party.

Drones don't just represent people physically; they take them to places as well. Uber now offers Uber Body-X, a drone pre-programmed with your destination which picks up your slow-moving body and moves it by air to the location you choose. Uber Body-X drones come with integrated noise-canceling Bluetooth headphones so you can listen to your own tunes on the way and not be bothered by the high-decibel whine of the six-to-eight electric rotors. Pedestrians once grateful for the quiet of electric cars now complain about drone-whine.

It's not as if Bay Area residents are slothful, however. In fact, they are some of the healthiest people in the world, thanks to tracked health metrics that monitor their every move as they transition from sleeping to coding to jogging and back to sleep again, sending data passively to doctors who monitor and alert their patients when abnormalities pop up.

There's no shortage of places to go for a run since the old highways were decommissioned when the hyperloop system came online; they're now pedestrian and cyclist routes. Taxi-goers are greeted by autonomous vehicles that take local roads, rendered traffic-free by synchronized driving and stoplight systems. Visitors to the area who come by car are required to park outside the country's limits and hyperloop in. Alternatively, they can pay a $250 toll for one-day access. Commercial vehicles pay $150.

As we leave the central technology district we come to an average neighborhood thoroughfare. Gone are the rows of Paper Belt stores like you find in the United States and a lot of the vestigal public art. There are no fast-food shops here (except Chipotle and Quizno's, which according to local laws "don't count") and no hole-in-the-wall businesses; those have been relegated to cart- and truck-based businesses by soaring rent prices. Former parking lots have earned the name "Taco Hoovervilles" for all the truck vendors who dwell there, turning the lots effectively into modular strip malls.

These days, most main streets are full boutique retail operations and pop-up stores held by companies testing new brands, which require constant piloting and data collection before they receive capital investment. Starbucks remains unseated as a neighborhood fixture, and its stores have actually proliferated since an entrance into the marijuana-infused coffee-and-pastry business made it the most valuable corporation in the world after Apple. (Yes, in the future, weed is legal.) Customers come for the coffee and stay for the fiber-optic Wi-Fi connection. And because they are too high to give up their customizable, massage-equipped seating, which bills them via NFC transaction at $12 an hour.

Gone are supermarkets and other high-inventory retail stores, replaced by same-day delivery services and at-home 3-D printing, which even allows doctors to send skin grafts and other minor physical treatments to patients electronically.

But contrary to what you may expect, the future isn't sterile. Citizens still compost. Many grow their own food. They use and preserve their natural resources like water, and insert them artificially where there are scarcities; where bees are scarce, small bee drones are being used to ensure regular pollination. Where bird populations suffer, larger flying poaching-prevention drones armed with tasers are permitted to punish local felines for entering the crouch-and-wiggle position that indicates an intent to hunt. Complaints about cat-tasing have led some affluent activist citizens to equip their cats with body-sensing collars that tweet complaints upon tasing. Cognitive testing indicates most cats may not actually be aware of being tased or of any other human activity of the last seven millennia.

Alamo Park is a great example of how the new city has left room for the old. It's a great place for a jog, or for tourists to take photos. Good "selfie spots" are indicated by Bluetooth-equipped signs that can insert friends or family members into the frame, photobomb style, so you can create a digital artifact of that fleeting moment in your imagination.

Education in this country is opt-in. Open education platforms have given way to a cottage industry of "education playlist" makers--algorithmic services which will custom-assemble a daily curriculum for you based on the things you read, bookmarked, Liked, and shared to friends on prior days like today. Degrees are awarded when you complete enough coursework that the algorithm can no longer find new coursework that prior performance indicates you can't easily master.

Prizes for degrees (which are free) can be redeemed in Amazon Rewards points, iTunes gift certificates, or Facecash, a semi-popular cryptocurrency that Mark Zuckerberg acquired and rebranded on a whim while sitting on his Facetoilet in 2015.

But the real question is: are people happier? Social network activity indicates yes, actually, they are.

How The Rise Of The "R" Computer Language Is Bringing Open Source To Science

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Thanks to dwindling research budgets and the rising cost of science software, "open science" advocates may be succeeding at getting science to go open source. And it's thanks in part to a little-known language called R.

R is free, open source statistical analysis software. Privately owned tools like MATLAB, the mathematical computing software, and SAS, the statistical tool, have historically been necessary tools in labs, much the way Microsoft Office was in offices. But the ballooning cost of the software and dwindling research budgets have prompted scientists to turn to R instead.

Now a growing number of researchers have joined the R development community to create new libraries that branch away from statistical analysis and into parsing the growing quantity of scientific articles and data that find their way online. And it could change the way we do science in a major way.

R's Origin In The Science World

Today, researchers use open source software to analyze data. And the R language is the de facto enabler for this trend, thanks to its early mainstay as a statistical analysis tool within scientific circles.

"I first started using R back in 2005 when I was doing my PhD, and it was a very obscure language that very few people knew and that we used for statistics," says Dr. Ted Hart, a member of the core development team of the rOpenSci project, which develops R packages for scientists.

"Most people I knew back then used SAS. It was just a giant, old, programming language, kind of like Fortran. It's analyzed line by line and whatnot," he says.

But when Hart started his post-doc in 2011, the lab where he did research only used R. "It was taught by this evolutionary biologist, Dolph Schluter. Every grad student I knew used it, as opposed to when I was a grad student. And I think I was the only one [who didn't use R] in my department. So I've seen that growth take off," says Hart.

Martin Fenner, the technical lead of the article-level metrics project at the scientific publisher PLoS, agrees. "There's just a lot of R, and everybody is just learning this as a student and is doing some sort of statistics," Fenner says.

Another benefit of R is that it costs no money and requires less administrative hurdles than would be needed to obtain licenses for large software packages, like SAS or MATLAB.

"I work at a government agency, and I don't think I can get access to MATLAB. I would have to write a long text justifying the expense for MATLAB. And somebody says, 'Well you can just use this tool for free. Why are you arguing for MATLAB?'" says Hart.

New R Projects

Hart's rOpenSci team has been a cornerstone of R's expansion outside of statistical analysis. "I think it's definitely branching out," he says.

A big sea change was the need to meet digital formatting requirements of scientific data. Hart and the rest of the team have created a set of packages that enables researchers to more easily share and store their research in standardized formats. The idea is the more shareable research is, the more science will progress. This is the foundation of the open science movement.

Large scientific publishers, like Nature and its forthcoming Scientific Data publication, are requiring researchers to submit their research data in specific metadata formats. Other scientific organizations also advocate pushing scientific data into various established repositories on the web in standardized formats.

Some of rOpenSci's R packages can help these scientists streamline their data formats to fit the scientific community's data standards.

"We have a package called EML, which basically lets people work with R and also write valid XML metadata from R directly into what's called EML, which is the Ecological Metadata Language that was developed by Matt Jones and the group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the UC Santa Barbara," says Hart.

The rOpenSci project has also given rise to new R ventures, like rOpenGov. The rOpenSci team began to play with data from public sources and inspired a team to start a new project to focus on accessing open U.S. government data and studying social science problems. The rOpenGov project exploits APIs that are made available through the Sunlight Foundation.

The rOpenHealth group now manages rOpenSci's rpubmed package, which interfaces with the National Institute of Health's biomedical and life sciences PubMed database. The project aims to better leverage public health and research data in the health care world.

R For Web-Native Applications

Hart attributes a lot of the spread of R to how open data is on the web. "A lot of people have written a lot of packages that can access this data on the web and convert to formats that it comes back in, like XML or JSON," he says.

He cites people like Duncan Temple Lang at the University of California and Hadley Wickham, chief scientist of RStudio. Wickham developed the httr package that rOpenSci uses to grab data from the web.

Another big R contributor is Ramnath Vaidyanathan, of McGill University, who created rCharts, rMaps, and Slidify.

"RCharts is the package that lets you push all of your data onto the web in JavaScript. And rMaps does something similar but with some of the open mapping formats, like Leaflet.js, which are JavaScript mapping visualizations and libraries. So it basically lets you take your data in R, and it converts it to these native formats so that you don't have to know JavaScript," says Hart.

Vaidyanathan's Slidify lets you create slide presentations using R Markdown that are ready to be shared on GitHub, Dropbox, or Rpubs. Markdown is a markup language that prepares plain text for web readiness.

"[Markdown] is something that I find very interesting because the distinction between code and defining something becomes very blurry. It all just becomes one document. The Python folks are doing something very similar," says Fenner.

"For example, I wrote a PLoS Biology article a few months ago, just giving some examples of article-level metrics. And, basically, there are five figures in there. The form of data is all done in R, and the R code is included in the article. You can just basically run this and get to the figures, with the data points included," Fenner says.

In addition, the rOpenSci team works closely with plotly, an online graphing tool. "We are in charge of working on their R interface for the web. So that's one way to be able to take R data and make plots on the web."

Getting Data Easily Through APIs

PLoS, the open-access scientific publisher, recently released a public API to allow interested parties to search through its metadata and all its articles' text. The hope is that interested R developers will pick up these APIs to create meaningful applications to analyze a paper's impact in the research community.

"If you want to sit down and analyze hundreds of thousands of articles in a variety of ways, then R is probably a good choice. Especially if it's something where you want to sit down for an afternoon and you don't want to spend a few weeks programming something," says Fenner.

When Fenner uses the PLoS API, he prefers to use R to create visualizations, rather than producing reports with hundreds of numbers. "I really use R for visualization. I'm not interested in statistical analysis," he says.

Views vs. citations for PLOS Biology articles published in 2010. Created by Fenner in R.

"R is very good because there are packages that make it easy to get data from these APIs and then to sort of massage them into the right format," he adds.

R's strength in working with APIs lies in its suite of packages, even if other languages can perform just as well without custom libraries. "Ruby is a little bit easier to interface with APIs because it's more of a web-native kind of language than R is. But R works," says Hart.

"I mean, the reason R works is because people are putting in a lot of work to write the packages to do that. Like the httr package makes it really easy to get the data from the APIs," he adds.

Branching Out Of Academia

ROpenSci focuses on creating packages that interface with biological data, but the team is working to spread into different areas. "It's kind of due to the fact that we're all kind of ecologists. And that's our expertise. We're definitely trying to branch out," says Hart. A grant from the Sloan Foundation has given rOpenSci the means to evangelize its work at various conferences and universities.

"There's a huge faction in the bioinformatics community. [Bioconductor] is almost like a huge suite of add-ons that you can get for R that is a bunch of packages that are used for bioinformatics. And I think that's another area that's an overlap between academic research and private industry," Hart says, citing R's growth in biotech.

Hart mentions a company called Revolution Analytics that sells R to do business data analytics. "You know, some are loath to use the term big data and data analytics and data science. With the rise of that, I think R is getting way more traction in the business world, as well. And just because it has a lot of packages already built for some of the machine learning and statistical algorithms," he says.

The R Of The Future

Creating packages that interface with more types of data and output more web-friendly formats are key drivers for R development.

"I would love to see it push the boundaries more on some of these web-native projects. And I think as you attract more seasoned developers into it, I think that package development will become more generalizable," says Hart.

And developing applications to make scientific research more searchable is just the beginning. "It will only be a few years' time before we see how these things correlate. There's a lot of things happening," says Fenner.

Hart sees the need to move toward creating stronger documentation and established roles for maintaining different packages that are submitted to such comprehensive storehouses. "To be perfectly frank with some of the scientific community, some of the algorithms I've seen for doing ecological research is hit or miss," says Hart.

"As it gains more traction, especially in the business world, it will attract more people who are actually programmers. You know, R is this ground-up community, and a lot of packages are written by scientists, and scientists are not programmers. I have a full-time job doing something else. I work on it in my spare time," says Hart.

Until then, Hart and the rest of the rOpenSci team will continue to push the language further into the scientific world. They will host a hackathon at the end of the month, where top R developers, like RStudio's chief scientist, have been invited.

Even with the language's ups and downs, one thing is certain for R's place within scientific circles. It has a supportive community. "The threshold of using R is pretty low. I don't think that it's the easiest language to use, but everything is freely available. It's a community where you can ask questions. So there's no barrier to use it," says Fenner.


Is The Oculus Rift Acquisition A PR Disaster For Kickstarter And Facebook?

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Today's discussion: I don't want to work with social. I want to work with games. Markus Persson, founder of Mojang, talks about his frustration about Facebook buying Kickstarter-backed project Oculus Rift. Is Kickstarter just a way of cheating angel investors out of equity? Will this create a backlash in the open source community against Facebook? Should it?

It's A Swedish Game Developer Thing

Persson's company Mojang is mission-driven. Facebook is not. That's why he sees Oculus Rift's sale to Facebook as selling out. Persson's mission was to create an independent games studio (Mojang's founders are its only investors), a utopia for game developers and their community of players. Mojang's CEO Carl Manneh describes it thus in an interview with VentureBeat:

What we try to do is have the games drive the company and not the other way around. Whatever makes sense for the players, for the community, for the games, takes the lead over business decisions. All the deals that we make, we have to make sure that the business relationships don't affect how the games are developed.

This isn't something you would expect from Facebook and that's exactly Persson's point. Mojang sees its game designers as creative artists, much in the way that Electronic Arts pioneered the idea of developer as artist in the 1970s. Manneh continues:

Game developers, like any artist, they want to show off their creative work. When you work at Mojang, and you make something and put it out, millions of people are going to use it. That's what people are excited about. The money is just something that follows."

There's a hidden element behind this company culture clash; Persson and his cofounders are Swedish. Scandinavian countries are famously egalitarian. Venture capitalist Sarayu Srinivasan argues that Nordic countries tend to create "equitable technologies" which level social, technological, and commercial playing fields--think Skype and Linux rather than Apple and Microsoft. Being openly driven by personal gain is anathema to Sweden's law of Jante. "You might say it's pretty much the exact opposite of how we think as Americans," observes Srinivasan.

In Mojang's first year, Persson gave away his entire dividend of about 25 million kroner, or $3.84 million USD, to his employees. Persson's Kickstarter contribution was not motivated by financial gain but by the possibilities of VR technology itself and the idea that a community can bring it into being, much as Minecraft is built largely by its players. Maybe the best you can say about this acquisition is that no animals were harmed in its making. Ciara Byrne

Kickstarter Isn't The Only Game In Town

If you think Kickstarter and Indiegogo are unfair for not offering ownership to backers, they aren't the only game in town. New models of crowdfunding are in development. A San Francisco startup called Inkshares is one example that I have written about for Fast Company. It's a platform for writers to publish print and e-books, and the company plans to let fans contribute to projects and take a portion of profits if the work is a success--think of it like a return on investment. This idea is still in nascent stages, but this could be huge, and a model for others. With crowdfunding laws in flux after last year's passage of the JOBS Act, we will continue to see more change. Adam Popescu

The Laws Need To Change

While Kickstarter has served as a springboard for such grassroots techies, it has increasingly become a mainstream way in which video games are funded and made. In 2013, Kickstarter amassed $57 million in funds just for games, and video game funding on the site shot up by 30% last year alone. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that Silicon Valley giants want a slice of the projects that come out of crowdfunding--it's big business.

Does that potentially screw investors out of equity? Yes--if you're talking about the United States. German crowdfunder Seedmatch allows backers to actually receive shares of the startup in return. That's not possible in the U.S. yet, but the JOBS Act is on track to change that.

It's easy to sympathize with Persson's disapproval. At least there are plenty of people sharing his disdain for Facebook in this situation. Bryan Lufkin

Just Calm Down! Everything Worked Out All Right

There is no way the Oculus team could have ever dreamed of being bought out by Facebook for $2 billion--much less had it planned. It's just a very fortunate something that happened for the team.

But here's another point: What successful Kickstarter proprietor only wants small-scale success? Of course every company looking for crowdfunding hopes to go on to become the next Pogo, Pebble, or, yes, Oculus. If you dream big enough to actually get a product to the Kickstarter stage, you dream for the long haul. Believing the people you are supporting don't have bigger dreams makes me wonder why you are support in them in the first place.

Persson got everything he was promised by donating to Oculus' Kickstarter campaign--a developer kit and a trip to their headquarters. He also got the added benefit of supporting a promising team of engineers with a great idea. But to be angry over their acquisition by Facebook just because he fears what Facebook might to with the technology down the road is silly. To that, I say: Calm down. After all, how much has Instagram changed since Facebook bought it? Not much at all. Mike Grothaus

Look To Germany For A Solution

Persson must know that the most one can expect to gain from contributing to a Kickstarter campaign is a feel-good prize. But this type of funding is changing in Europe. The German crowdfunding site Seedmatch just opened up the terms of its equity-based crowdfunding contracts this week, allowing greater donor contributions than ever before. But the cost of maintaining such heavy legal agreements means that not just any startup is accepted onto the Seedmatch platform. Instead, Kickstarter lets anyone take a crack at funding. So, giving up your say might be the price you pay for a platform that allows anybody, regardless of her pitch, to start her own fundraising campaign. Tina Amirtha

This Just Proves Platforms Like Alphaworks Will Succeed

The success of companies like Oculus Rift on Kickstarter is a sign that there's pent-up demand for "micro" angel investing, but it doesn't mean that Kickstarter has been "cheating" project backers out of equity. Rather, it's a sign that the ecosystem is primed for the imminent arrival of platforms like Alphaworks that allow non-accredited investors to play ball at the earliest of stages.

Until the new platforms launch, Kickstarter is in the awkward position of being an imperfect proxy for this kind of activity. The startup is explicitly for "creative projects," and grew out of a belief that it should be easier for artists, musicians, and others to make--and own--their work. Kickstarter's founders were motivated by a desire to combat the idea that creatives need to sell out in order to survive; maintaining full control of the creative work produced is central to the company's philosophy.

Nick Chirls, who is launching Alphaworks on behalf of its parent, Betaworks, believes that in the future Kickstarter campaigns will coexist alongside other forms of crowdfunding.

"A lot of hardware companies I'm talking with are starting to think about Alphaworks as a complement to Kickstarter," he says. Some backers will want first access to the product, along with Kickstarter-style schwag; some will want equity; and some will want both, or so the theory goes.

Of course, on the equity side of things, micro-angels will probably face better terms when it comes to investing in a neighborhood restaurant, with no aspirations to scale, versus a technology platform like Oculus. But if you're a betting man, your options are about to get more diverse and interesting than ever before. Ainsley O'Connell

How Facebook's Machines Got So Good At Recognizing Your Face

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The ability to recognize human faces has always been a benchmark for artificial intelligence. Facebook's new facial recognition technology--called DeepFace--comes astonishingly close to human intelligence in that measure.

Although it's currently still a research project--which Facebook will present as a paper at a computer vision conference this June--DeepFace has shown itself to be almost as accurate as the human brain when it comes to saying whether two photos show the same person, regardless of whether different lighting or camera angles are used. This has enormous implications for both users and Facebook going forward. Potential applications include everything from improved photo tagging and more accurate online ad selection to more foolproof user authentication. It also poses some serious ethical questions.

So how exactly does it work?

Deconstructing The Technical Problem With Facial Recognition

Although easy for humans, facial recognition is notoriously difficult for computers. Depending on the conditions under which a photo is taken, a computer will struggle enormously to recognize that two images are actually of the same person. Lighting, facial expression, haircuts, and age all contribute to the problem.

Around 2007, facial recognition researchers turned to deep learning neural networks to solve the problem. A neural network is essentially a piece of software designed to simulate how real neurons work. A part of machine learning, deep learning analyzes large amounts of data and develops high-level abstractions by searching for recurring patterns. As part of deep learning, researchers began using photos "from the wild"--meaning everyday photos of normal people rather than images taken under controlled conditions.

At first accuracy fell compared to the results found by earlier researchers. From 99% accuracy using previous, non-deep learning algorithms, accuracy using larger datasets and real-life photographs was suddenly only around the 70% mark. However, it quickly rebounded and moved from 70% to 80%, and then upwards to 90%. Xiaoou Tang--professor in the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and one of the world leading experts in facial recognition--describes the use of deep learning neural nets in facial recognition as a "small revolution."

The Importance Of Training Data

One of the companies using deep neural nets was an Israeli startup called Face.com. Face.com developed a free iOS app called KLIK which learned your friends' faces and suggested tags for photos instead of users having to manually do this themselves. In 2012 Facebook bought Face.com for $100 million. Although the news from the company has been pretty quiet since then, the newly published research paper shows that Face.com cofounder Yaniv Taigman and his colleagues have been using their time effectively. While KLIK was a nifty app which got better at recognizing people the more photos you took of them, it also was far from perfect. Pulling a goofy face or changing the lighting meant that mistags could easily happen. With DeepFace's human-level accuracy, those problems may be a thing of the past.

DeepFace works by using 3-D modeling techniques. Once it has an original image of a face it turns this into a 3-D model, which it can then rotate to generate images of the same face at different angles. Once this is done it can then use its neural network--equipped with 120 million connections--to look for high-level similarities between different photos of the same person.

Aiding the software is the enormous library of images available to the project's researchers. "Facebook has access to a huge amount of training data," says Xiaoou Tang. "To put it in context, our algorithm uses 80,000 photos--Facebook has 4 million. One good thing about deep learning is that the more training data you have, the better performance you achieve. This is different to the conventional approach to facial recognition, where once a certain point is reached adding new data will not do much to improve the performance. With deep learning, the more data you have the more the accuracy and performance increases. It's like the human brain--the longer we're on this planet, the more we learn and the better we get at solving certain problems."

A Difficult Tool

Facebook is keen to point out that DeepFace is still a theoretical research project, and not a product being used by Facebook currently. Over time the hope is that that will change, though.

In facial recognition, Facebook has a valuable tool--certainly valuable enough to offset its $100 million investment in Face.com. "In the immediate future, this technology would most likely be used to improve Facebook's face-tagging feature, which already uses some face recognition to suggest who might be in each of your photos," says Neeraj Kumar, a researcher at the University of Washington who has worked on face verification and recognition. "DeepFace would make it more accurate and require less corrections from the user. However, as photos become easier and cheaper to take and all our devices become 'smarter,' a critical piece of future software will be personalization and understanding of photos."

This personalization and understanding can have multiple applications--from targeted adverts based on a deeper understanding of you from your pictures, to the use of facial recognition as a means of creating more secure passwords, along the biometric lines of Apple's Touch ID. Of course, many of these potential applications raise ethical concerns--which might go some way to explaining why Facebook has been so quiet about the progress made by Face.com since its acquisition. Google, by comparison, claimed last year that it won't add facial recognition features to Google Glass--or approve third-party apps which carry out this function.

"[It's] a complex subject," says Seung Yoo, assistant professor of Digital Advertising in the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago. "The trade is between permission and convenience. In some ways getting permission for Facebook to use our data becomes easier and easier, because they also provide certain benefits to users." In other words, you get enhanced security features and better recommendations--Facebook gets to use your face.

There is still a way to go for perfecting DeepFace. "There are different ways to measure performance, and this 97% is for verification," says Neeraj Kumar, referring to the task of saying whether two faces are the same or not. "The more relevant one for general usage is recognition--given a face, identify who it is, from a database of possibilities." This latter task is much tougher, although DeepFace has also managed to score highly at it. Its continued success also depends on Facebook users. More users makes the task tougher, but more images per user results in higher accuracy.

Ultimately, however you look at it DeepFace represents a significant advance--and one that is helping (along with other researchers in the field) usher in a new era of facial recognition. "Because the technology has not been accurate enough for most consumer applications so far, I think we--the technology community--haven't even thought of most of the applications that will arise," says Kumar.

"With encouraging results like DeepFace and others, I think we'll soon see an explosion of different uses of this kind of research."

Is YouTube Risking A Creative Exodus?

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Billions of people around the world love YouTube. Since the domain was activated nine years ago by a trio of former PayPal execs, the service has revolutionized the way we watch, share, and make videos. Last year over 6 billion hours of video were watched every month.

Now a sleek production platform, YouTube has turned a host of web personalities into bona fide stars. Savvy creators are turning exposure into paydays, cashing checks from the Google-owned company, and benefiting from major branding and promotional opportunities.

But an avalanche of content, fluctuating ad rates, and heavy production costs burden many YouTubers. The pace is not sustainable--and high-level YouTubers will be the first ones to tell you. The hamster wheel system values volume over quality and creators are stuck. Burnout is increasing and the returns are decreasing. YouTube's choice to keep conditions that favor advertisers over creators is alienating the very talent that's made the site so popular.

Is this the beginning of the end of the homegrown YouTube star?

YouTubers Sound Off

In late December, King Russell, better known as the mega-popular Kingsley, announced that 2014 would be his final year on YouTube. Around that time a handful of big creators declared they were also going away. In a blog post Kingsley said he was fed up with big egos and the focus on money, which he said was sucking the "soul out of what YouTube once was."

In February, Olga Kay's admission to the New York Times that she produces 20 videos a week caused many to raise an eyebrow at her punishing pace. Kay, a former circus performer, is in bed with YouTube as part of the partners program. She's monetizing her work and getting a share of ad revenue, but when you look at her numbers, and the fact that YouTube generated an estimated $5.6 billion in gross revenue in 2013, it's a pittance.

The Siberian-born Kay has more than one million subscribers on half a dozen channels. But she's never made more than about $130,000 a year. Twenty videos a week translates to more than 1,000 videos a year, at around $125 a pop. On most of Kay's channels her videos get $2,000 for every million views.

When you factor in YouTube's cut of 45%, plus production costs for editors, cameras, staff, equipment, sound, lighting, and the time to write, shoot, cut, and post videos, she's lucky to keep it in the black. Or have time to leave her house.

I spoke to the 31-year-old in Los Angeles, and asked her how she keeps her creative juices flowing and pumps out material--and whether she's sacrificed her happiness for success.

"If you slow down you might disappear," she says over a vodka cocktail at a tech meetup in Hollywood. Her production schedule is nonstop. A day for brainstorming ideas, another for writing and blocking scenes, the rest dedicated to getting props, rehearsing, filming, directing, editing, cross-promoting, exporting and uploading, and waiting for videos to be approved by YouTube, for legal and copyright issues.

When she finishes her work for one channel it's not quitting time. Instead she sits down and plays "video games for four hours to record for my gaming channel. In four hours I can probably record 12 or 16 episodes, which would cover 12 or 16 days of gaming content."

When I asked her if she has any time left to have fun, Kay smiled and told me her career is her motivation.

"I rarely leave my apartment and if I do it's always work related," she says, admitting that the process does take a toll on her. When she breaks from her work "sometimes it stresses me out more because I know I have to come back. If I'm taking time off, and it's a lot of time off, I have to come back and work twice as hard."

Kay told me that her costs per impressions (CPMs) are dropping due to over- and undersold ad inventory. She says her main money source is her game channels, which have less subscribers than her main one. The February Times article claims ad rates are shrinking, but representatives at YouTube told me that's not true. ​They say partner revenue across YouTube increased by 60% over the past year, with partner revenue from mobile ad sales tripling.

Still, Kay says "at the end of the day I'm making less money than I'm used to," calling YouTube "over-saturated" with content. "If you have more views, CPMs are less than $3. People who don't do YouTube for a living have higher numbers with AdSense."

When I asked YouTube about this, sources there said that's not systemic--and it could be for hundreds of reasons. The algorithm used to determine ad prices is based on what advertisers are willing to pay, view rates, a creator's brand, content, demographic appeal, and who can buy advertising. And it's likely the bump in mobile views, about 40% of all site traffic, is affecting pricing, too.

Keeping It All Together

YouTube isn't exactly a digital sweatshop, but it's not an easy place to make a living. But that's a fact creators are well aware of when they decide to monetize, Kay says.

Kay takes home 10% to 20% of what each video makes, telling me at one point she made as much as 50% of video revenues. But she doesn't blame the platform.

"It's up to advertisers--I don't think YouTube can do any better," she says.

Almost like a tamed tiger in reverence for her Las Vegas trainer, she calls herself lucky that YouTube doesn't take more, particularly in regard to sponsorships, which at one point was against the company's terms of service.

The problem is advertiser demand hasn't caught up with the number of videos released every day. A constant check is a positive, but it's almost like a server at a restaurant who relies on tips over their minimum wage. The equivalent of tips would be the merchandise and promotional deals that have become the key to making money through YouTube. Kay's own brand has evolved into a sock line, a lifestyle website, and even a subscription care package. But when I ask if she's getting paid enough for her videos, her lips uncurl from her trademark smile and her brow furrows.

"We know what we're signing up for when we get on YouTube," she says. "We don't make as much as we should be making, as much as traditional media is making, but it's going to get there eventually. We're the pioneers and we have to suffer through the hard times."

Kay knows which side her bread is buttered on. The platform has been great for her, exposing her to millions. And it's allowed her to branch out into consumer sales and products.

"The opportunity is there," she says. "It's up to your popularity. If you're really, really popular you're making an amazing living." But for those who aren't, "a lot of people don't realize YouTube will take their cut no matter what," she says before finishing her drink.

Using YouTube As A Launch Pad

Taryn Southern is another successful creator navigating the sometimes choppy waters of YouTube.

"It's good for your brand, bad for business," says Southern, who has about 400,000 subscribers on her two channels, which she started almost two years ago. "Churning out content is exhausting--it doesn't lend itself to being creative. It's a machine and you have to keep up."

Southern says she and Kay often talk about their blistering work pace, and tells Kay, "Girl, you've got to slow down."

In order to stay sane, Southern takes periodic breaks to see her boyfriend in New York. And because there aren't as many creators back east, she says it forces her to stop working and recharge.

When she's back home in L.A., Southern says she stays busy on projects from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Southern's online influence on YouTube has garnered her endorsement deals, a web series with Glamour magazine, Hot Pockets, and a gig hosting Discovery Channel's Naked After Dark. Turning your brand into a commodity is a crucial route creators must use to make the YouTube model work. The trick is aligning a personality with a product, which can be challenging.

But Southern says the problem with working on so many things at once is "most of my time is spent on content for other people and brands," not her own. Yet she says keeping her nose to the grindstone is a sacrifice for the future, and a caveat to being independent from the traditional system.

"This is the time I need to power through it," she says. "My instinct is to work all the time."

Competing Platforms

YouTube is the biggest fish in the sea, but that may be changing. This week, Disney forked over a whopping $500 million for Maker Studios, the platform and content engine home to web stars like 24-year-old Swede PewDiePie. It's uncertain what Disney's plans are but it's likely to farm both Maker's talent and data analytics.

Other players include World Star Hip Hop, Vevo, Machinima, ZEFR. The list goes on and on. But even with good, viral content, most viewers prefer watching the same material on these companies' YouTube channels, not their sites. Which insures YouTube's dominance.

The only real competitor that might scare YouTube is Vine, which has ushered in a whole new generation of primarily younger, shorter-attention-spanned stars and viewers. But the future of that company and audience is still in the making. And even stars on that site are just figuring out how to make money off their success.

Drew Baldwin, the founder of Tubefilter, a site which tracks the industry and produces the web-video-focused Streamy Awards, points out that no matter what platform creators are on, they have to make more money.

"If my business is bringing in $100,000 a year, that's a very small business," he says, since YouTubers are getting paid on views and volume, and quality is suffering. "YouTubers are tied to their Google check," while teens on Vine, Baldwin adds, don't have as much to lose, and more to gain from brands willing to put money in their hands.

A Model That Works

There is hope for sustainability--and his name is Freddie Wong.

Wong is sort of a folk hero amongst YouTubers. He's done things no one else has, like turn his channel and following into a bona fide production company in RocketJump.

I first met Wong at the YouTube space in Los Angeles in early 2013. He was building a set on location there for Video Game High School, with money he crowdfunded. Since then he's raised almost $1 million (more money than any other web series ever) for the final season of VGHS. Now he's funneling his nearly 7 million YouTube subscribers onto pay-to-play distribution platforms like iTunes, Netflix, Xbox Live, and Sony PlayStation 3. This is the model, and this is the wizard.

Right now Wong is in the middle of filming the VGHS, but says when he wraps he will begin reaching out to more traditional investors to help grow RocketJump into a major content creator. He wants to release multiple series a year.

I spoke with Wong on the set of VGHS in Studio City, Calif. Half a dozen trailers lined the driveway up to the house being used for the shoot, and a production staff of 50 all worked like a well-oiled machine. Looking around, the evolution of Wong's process is like australopithecine to Cro-Magnon. If someone told me this was a Hollywood production, I would have believed it.

Wong looks at YouTube in three distinct categories. User generated viral videos, daily vlogs with thought and effort put into production, and big budget trailers and offerings from major film companies.

"The key distinction for me comes down to money," he says. "Category one doesn't cost anything to make. Category two costs some money to make. I would say category three you can't support on YouTube's ad infrastructure right now. Category two stuff you're looking at a brand deal and they come in and do it, or just use AdSense, and that can support you up to a certain point. And there's a lot of good content in that world. What we're doing with Video Game High School, and what I want to do and continue doing, is stuff that you can't just support off AdSense."

Wong says his team calculated budgets and returns back solely via AdSense. It would have been hundreds of millions of dollars. Catering, air-conditioned trailers, crew-these all cost more than YouTube's model can support. Wong ended up posting the budget for the series online: season one cost more than $600,000. Season two more than doubled to $1.4 million. Both were crowdfunded, along with contributions from sponsors like Monster Energy Drinks and Dodge.

"It's way cheaper than television but more than the usual YouTube video," he says. "Some people can live entirely off of what they make on YouTube, which we were doing for a bit before we were doing longer form stuff. But now in order to facilitate anything bigger than any weekly or bi-weekly short videos, you have to figure out other ways of funding it."

Wong still gives the show away for free on YouTube, in addition to VOD distribution.

"The challenge for us has always been how can you make it make sense financially," he says, and keep creative control, which both Kay and Southern told me is an integral next step. All three, and most YouTubers you speak to will tell you the same thing.

"It's harder to think about larger scale progress which is why I find what Freddie Wong does so impressive," Southern told me.

Kay, like Southern, says she wants to branch out into more mainstream fare, and both are moving in that direction. Like Wong, they want to do it on their own terms, and keep control.

"I'll never stop doing what I'm doing," Kay says. "My goal is to create a bigger production company and turn my channels into a network eventually, and create content where I'm not the face of the channel anymore, but I can still entertain the youth of America."

Wong is a few steps ahead. He also wants to keep his YouTube presence, but is open to "pretty much anything" that will keep his dream going.

"There is no regular route anymore," he explains. "What it really comes down to-is there a scenario that makes sense? We're not just a regular-director for hire. We're not just some production company in Hollywood. We find ourselves in a situation where we have full creative control over everything. That's a scenario that a lot of directors try to spend their whole careers to get. We're fortunate that we already have that ability. And there's compromises we have to make, because we don't have as much money to play around with as these other guys. But being able to have ownership of what we're doing and creative control, that's why I got into filmmaking. That's the motivation. I want to make movies."

YouTube Star Freddie Wong On What's Next For Online Video Stars

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Freddie Wong has proven YouTube is a place where you can produce high-quality content, and even profit off it. He's turned his millions of loyal subscribers into crowdfunding investors, gotten major sponsorships from big brands, and worked with everyone from Comedy Central's Key & Peel to action star Jean-Claude Van Damme. Even his fashion sense is a nod to individuality: His signature leather jacket and jeans combination is often finished off with open-toe sandals.

He started off making shorts at USC--now he's on Netflix.

Right now he's filming the final season of Video Game High School. Wong and partners Matt Arnold and Dez Dolly want to turn their RocketJump production company into a major content creator and release multiple series a year. I spoke to the filmmaker on-set in Studio City, Calif. about his next step and the state of YouTube.

How difficult is it to create a project like Video Game High School on YouTube?

I very loosely categorize YouTube into three overall content categories. I call category one viral video things: everything from rushing dash cams to a dad with his kid doing something funny and he pulls out his iPhone and takes a video of it. Or something crazy happens, protests in Syria, the kind of stuff that is captured in the world by the fact that we have so many cameras. One of the side effects of that is that most viral videos that go out, that's category one stuff. The other side of it, category two stuff, there's thought and effort put into this production. So any of the gaming channels, these guys are putting equipment together, or daily vlogs, they're doing some editing. And the third category is, for example, Marvel put out a trailer, or a Godzilla trailer just came out. Or Machinima shows, VGHS arguably. And even category two stuff--sort of like weekly shorts type of stuff, there's effort. The key distinction for me comes down to money. Category one doesn't cost anything to make. Category two costs some money.

Is VGHS supported by AdSense?

I would say category three you can't support on YouTube's ad infrastructure right now. Category two stuff you're looking at a brand deal and they come in and do it, or just use AdSense, and that can support you up to a certain point. And there's a lot of good content in that world. What we're doing with Video Game High School, and what I want to do and continue doing, is stuff that you can't just support off AdSense. We did the calculation for how much season one or season two costs. And we were like, yeah if we want to make our money back on that just off AdSense we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of millions.

Can you share what the budget is?

The full breakdown is on our site. We break down each series by season.

Is it to scale?

Yeah. Where we really save is on the post-production because we do a lot of it ourselves and we don't count that. If I'm editing it, I don't count that, it's just me doing it. And a lot of the stuff we're doing digital effects wise, we're trying to be smart about it and cut the cost in that way. But at the end of the day, it's way cheaper than television but more than the usual YouTube video.

Would you say it's fair to say, based on the way you have to fund, you can't wait around for a Google check for CPMs and AdSense?

What it comes down to is it's part of a greater whole now. I think some people can live entirely off of what they make on YouTube, which we were doing for a bit before we were doing longer-form stuff. But now in order to facilitate anything bigger than any weekly or bi-weekly short videos, you have to figure out other ways of funding it. And a lot of the more successful YouTube guys have all figured that out. Even look at guys like Wong Fu Productions, right? They have a very robust merchandise thing going on. They have a whole clothing line and stuffed animals. So they diversify out their source of income, which I think a good business has to do.

Tell me about your distribution model.

Season one and two is on Netflix right now. It's still available on YouTube and our site, but then Netflix took over territories around the world. It just becomes a little sticky with that stuff because a lot of time when you're talking about online streaming, you're talking about windowing and where it's first, who else has it, exclusivity, all that stuff. For us, we've always wanted to make a place where you can just get it, see it, for free. Because at the end of the day if you really want to see it, you'll see it for free. If you want to see something in this day and age, it's there.

What's next?

We want to do more shows like this. This is our last season. We're going to be doing more series on top of this. Not spin-offs, actually completely different things. We have a whole sci-fi action show planned, we have a horror show thing going, so we have a whole bunch of long-form series, but the challenge for us has always been how do you--how can you make it make sense in terms of just financially? Because, again, we're kind of in this weird place where it's very difficult to get the kind of money that we're talking about. Even if it's not that much compared to traditional, to do this type of show.

What options are you looking at besides crowdfunding?

It's always been a combination. Season one and two and three has always been a combination of private money, of AdSense, crowdfunding. And every season, not this one yet, has had a sponsor come in. So season one we had Monster Energy Drinks. Season two we had Dodge.

For product placement?

Product placement, stuff like that. The problem is with that, it's inherently limiting. You don't just say let's do this project. You're always waiting for someone else to do something which is ideally not where you're at. We started off doing quick, one-off action shorts. That's where we built our audience. But now, I really want to be able to do this next thing, which is do shows. To do feature-length stuff. To do TV-length stuff. And that's what we're treating this as. As far as a web series we do each episode like a half-hour television show.

If it is about funding, if a studio or a network comes to you and says we want to give you a deal, would you go that route?

Well yeah, of course. Here's the thing: When you say the regular route, there is no regular route anymore. What it really comes down to--is there a scenario that makes sense? We're not just a regular-director for hire. We're not just some production company in Hollywood.

How do you stay motivated?

We find ourselves in a situation where we have full creative control over everything. That's a scenario that a lot of directors try to spend their whole careers to get. We're fortunate that we already have that ability. And there's compromises we have to make, because we don't have as much money to play around with as these other guys. But being able to have ownership of what we're doing and creative control, that's why I got into filmmaking. That's the motivation. I want to make movies. And I'm not making them for anyone else besides myself and my friends. You don't need any other motivation that that.

Do you have someone in the industry you emulate?

Throughout the course of film history there were so many examples of guys who did something different. Like Charlie Chaplin--he had such creative control over everything he did and his output was so good. It's always difficult to go against the traditional ways of doing things, and that's what I want to emulate.

This Former Mozilla Engineer Turned London Into SimCity, With Real Data

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In 2012, people generated 2.5 billion gigabytes of new data every single day. Though this data likely holds the answers to many of our pressing environmental, health, and economic global problems, it also might hold the answers to your personal, individual, local problems--if only there were an easy way to interpret it.

That's a problem that bothers a former Mozilla technical evangelist named Robin Hawkes and his business partner Peter Smart. They've created something called ViziCities to help people visualize and use global big data in their own lives.

"Currently you have all this data that exists in spreadsheets," Smart says. "Census data, crime data, population density data. To your average person, it's not accessible. Most might not even know that they could even go and find that information about their local city, or maybe not even have the inclination to because the data is too frustrating to work through."

So what Smart and Hawkes put their mind to creating was a way to easily visualize big data and present it in a way any "average Joe" could immediately pick up on how to view, navigate, and manipulate it.

The Real World As Inspired By SimCity

But how? After all, most big data visualizations look something like this Twitter node graph, which resembles a big plateful of green spaghetti. While this may work quite well for data scientists, it's not much use to the average person.

The pair's solution is a SimCity for real life. ViziCities a fully interactive 3-D model of London that uses OpenStreetMap data, combined with 3-D-generated buildings to scale, mashed up with big data from sources ranging from the U.K. government to environmental agencies to Twitter. When complete it will allow anyone with a browser to explore the city with countless layers of past and real-time big data. That means citizens can view information about their local environment and act on it as never before--the promised benefits of big data to the average user.

The solution they came up with merges the latest web technologies with a visualization system inspired by one of the most popular video games of all time.

"We thought, 'What if we could try and make something like SimCity for real life?'" Smart says. "What is standing in our way? Because ultimately, an experience like SimCity, where you as the mayor are able to see your city in its entirety, see how it's performing and see things like traffic and crime and pollution, see things like transport, suddenly became... well, imagine the possibilities for real life. What value could that bring to the real world?"


Giving Maps A New Objective

Image: Flickr user zabdiel

"From the dawn of civilization people have drawn straight lines to indicate how to get from A to B," Hawkes says when I ask him why maps and not more conventional ways to visualize big data? "Ultimately the map is just a way to solve the problem and the tools used have always been tailored to the particular problems that people are trying to solve. For the most part, when you talk about navigation, 2-D maps do that really well."

But 3-D maps on the scale of ViziCities have the potential to do so much more, Smart argues. Currently Smart and Hawkes have built fully interactive 3-D models of London which allows anyone with a modern web browser to see the live status of trains moving through the tube system, the amount of flooding that would occur if the Thames barrier failed, and flight paths of planes over the city.

"What we're trying to do, the problems we're trying to solve for people," Smart says, "are ultimately creating an experience which is immediately intuitive, whether you're my grandma or whether you're the Head of Transport for London, you can come in and use this tool to understand complex data in a real-world environment. One which makes it immediately more tangible than a two-dimensional map, giving you more context, which makes it easier to make decisions based on all that data."

For these people, Smart argues, the project is less about making a pretty 3-D view of their city, which is already covered by things like Google Earth and Apple's Flyover maps. It's more about visualizing the local area in a way that they can understand, not just from 3-D buildings and 3-D objects, but overlaying all the big data a city generates daily.

"What we're doing is making that two-dimensional big data really accessible to people," Smart says. "We are creating an environment which is immediately engaging, and then we are using our visualization tools to then overlay this data that's become available."

Open Web Technologies Make It Possible

In the spirit of open source data, Smart and Hawkes want ViziCities to be as widely accessible as possible. That's why they decided to make it platform agnostic by using the latest web technologies like Three.js (also known as WebGL) built upon data provided by OpenStreetMap.

Matter of fact, Hawkes credits Mozilla's and Google's work on advancing the latest web technology in their browsers as being one of the main factors without which a project on the scale of ViziCities would have been impossible just a few year ago.

"Something else that would have made this impossible was if OpenStreetMap didn't exist," Hawkes adds. "We rely quite heavily on OpenStreetMap for pretty much all of the building outlines and geographic features. The existence of which is integral to the project, and it actually improves the project immensely compared to what we would have been able to have done with private data, or using data from other sources. That's because the way that OpenStreetMap works is that it's updated often, it's updated by a community, and if things need changing you can change it in OpenStreetMap and it will update in ViziCities within minutes."

Another technology built into ViziCities is the Web Audio API championed in browsers like Chrome and Firefox. Audio isn't something you normally think of when you think of maps, but Smart and Hawkes believe the more realistic you can make their SimCity version of the world, the more accessible and interesting it will be to the average user.

"This came down to the experiential side of things," Hawkes says. "We were trying to create something which was beyond a two-dimensional map, and actually felt more like the real-world environment that you were able to explore. We started doing some really creative things with audio. We began thinking about things like proximity to particular locations. We could actually have recorded audio specific to those locations. For example, in Underground Stations we could actually have the live announcements from the Underground chiming out as you were exploring that part of the city in ViziCities."

The use of audio in big data visualization opens up an entire new realm of possibility. Since many cities now have massive amounts of data on "noise pollution" for specific blocks of each city, it would be possible to translate that noise pollution data into actual city noises and play it back in ViziCities, allowing a user to hear, for example, how noisy it is on the street outside where he is thinking of buying an apartment.

"What we want to do with this is use audio in a way that enhances the experience and makes you feel like you're actually there when necessary," Smart says. "In the experiments that we've done it certainly does do that. You close your eyes and you feel like you're in a park when you're zoomed in in the park in ViziCities. So it really does add an incredible amount to it. And it's just audio--it's quite a simple feature."

A Global Network Of Developers Is Key

By releasing their code on GitHub Smart and Hawkes hope other developers will begin building out 3-D models of their own real-world cities until every town, city, and suburb on the planet has been created.

"What we'd like to see is developers taking live transport information and other live data they can use and visualize in ViziCities from their own cities, because the one thing that Peter and myself can't do is truly understand how things work in someone else's city," Hawkes says. "The best people who understand that and can implement that are the people who live in those cities."

But it's not just "serious" big data like census statistics, traffic information, and weather patterns that Smart and Hawke see developers visualizing in their virtual ViziCity.

Case in point, the two ran a quick visualization experiment using APIs from Twitter showing real-time tweets appear floating in the air in the locations they were tweeted from.

"It was a really, really fun experiment," Smart says. "The moment that we actually saw live tweets coming in was just an incredible moment. We have this ambition to see them pop up like little balloons all over the city. But we aren't limited to just that, as Twitter is one thing, but there are other API's that we'd love to leverage and provide the meta-layer to a city as well."

Thanks to the mass amount of open big data out there Smart and Hawkes believe the potential for ViziCities is only limited by third-party developers' imaginations. And it is that potential which will feed the Average Joe's desires to access big data, allowing them to act on it as they never could before.

"I think that as we start to see advances in technology," Smart says, "especially in browser-based technology, which is open and available to everyone, we'll start to see a new hunger within people to explore their own context and ultimately make better decisions about the areas in which they live, and we'll also see entire communities or public authorities work to use these new technologies to better our environment as well."

How Do You Know If A Startup Will "Make It"?

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Here's a thought experiment: Imagine a demo day startup competition. How often do women-led startups win prestigious startup competitions when facing male-led companies, per capita? If you guessed that they win less often, you'd be 100% wrong.

Women led startups indeed win just as many startup competitions as men, proportional to their entries--but the general under-representation of women in tech might have led you to make an incorrect assumption about this little scenario.

In fact, lots of misperceptions exist about which startups will "make it." But discerning which factors really predict success is a problem that no one has managed to solve since the invention of the SAT.

Now a company called YouNoodle is hoping that it can bring some of those under-recognized startups to the forefront, with hard data and a human touch.

Two Cofounders Part Ways

This isn't the first time YouNoodle has tried to change the way we all look at startups. Six years ago, YouNoodle made news with its controversial startup valuation algorithm. But the company eventually tossed that first product, started building the one we're talking about today, and this past March, it raised $1.1 million in new funding to help see it through.

Rebeca Hwang and Bob Goodson started the old YouNoodle in 2008 but would break up the company two years later. Goodson went on to found Quid, the data analytics company. Hwang decided to revamp YouNoodle with Torsten Kolind, who is now its CEO.

The team knew they would need to design a study. Given that Kolind and Hwang both worked at the old YouNoodle, wrangling data is in their DNA. So for the last few years, Kolind and Hwang have been building up data from startup competitions they facilitate.

YouNoodle's recent "YN1K" study took data from 232 competitions that it helped run all across the globe in 2013. The acronym stands for YouNoodle 1000, a nod to the top 1,000 startups that the company ranked with its new rating algorithm from the competitions' more than 17,000 entrants.

"We saw ourselves as this company, just helping competitions and entities with software, but we're now realizing that we have such an important dataset that we started trying to study it and understand across the world what are the things that explain, 'How can you see differences between different competitions' interests for startups across the world, you know, and basically in one industry, on one stage?'" explains Kolind.

Here's what they found.

Yes, Women Are Underrepresented

"There is a lot of talk and a lot of evidence that points to the underrepresentation of women in general in the entrepreneurial community," Kolind says. "But at the very least, in these competitions, we weren't able to see anything like that."

For 2013, the YN1K study showed that women-led startups comprise 28% of the top 1,000 startup-winners, the same percentage as the number that enters into competitions. YouNoodle stresses that this gender ratio drastically decreases in favor of startups headed by men by the first funding stage.

"There is no particular bias for or against women when you look at winning competitions. It's the same number, the same fraction that enters a competition in general, in 2013, as the ones we found in the top thousand," says Kolind.

That perspective could help defuse any counter-bias from the people who participate in and operate these sorts of demo day events.

"What we like about competitions and the nature of competitions is that they're unbiased. Everyone is evaluated on the same terms. And anything like education level, nationalities, gender just shouldn't matter. And we believe that these competitions level the playing field," he adds.

Letting The Computer Think, With Help

YouNoodle's data analyst and software engineer, Alexander Wesolowski, developed the algorithm behind YN1K's results. "It's all built in PHP at this stage because it's a very effective way of getting it done and a very effective way of prototyping," says Wesolowski.

"It's the framework we've used for the rest of the system. It's a relational MySQL database, and PHP is just how we crunch most of the data," he adds.

First, Wesolowski's algorithm aggregates all the scores per judge. "The 1,000 were selected based on how well they performed in their respective competitions, and this was obviously based on the scores that the judges gave them," says Wesolowski. "That score was normalized across the other competitions."

"The second factor was how competitive the competition was, so how difficult it was to get to the top," Wesolowski says. YouNoodle gave each competition a number from one to three, depending on how few entrants made it to the competition's final round and whether it was a local, national, or international contest.

"And the third factor was the nature of the competition. In particular, which stage it targets. There's a very big difference between a competition that is just about creating a pitch, or pitching an idea, and a competition where you actually submit a finished product," says Wesolowski.

The algorithm pitted all of the competitions' winners against the three factors, and the ones who scored the highest and won the most competitive competitions made it onto the YN1K list.

"So that's the subjective part. The only subjective part is the way we look at which competitions are more likely to contain high-quality applicants. It's more fair to select more of the applicants from those competitions," says Kolind.

How To Handpick The Right Variables

YouNoodle chose the numerical weights to denote how competitive and what the nature of each individual competition was. "We basically had to use our own professional judgment from our team in order to figure out which weights to use," Kolind says.

"Of course, we'll be looking at those over time and adjusting them as we go, but we had to start somewhere. We started simple," he adds.

According to the Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, the simplest algorithm is the best way to go. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman talks about how selecting just a few factors in predicting an outcome is better than letting a complex statistical algorithm run its course over a wide series of factors.

"One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the values to make them comparable (by using standard scores or ranks)," Kahneman wrote.

Gerd Gigerenzer, the social psychologist whose work Malcolm Gladwell popularized, has often trumpeted the power of intuition in selecting experimental variables. In a 2007 New York Timesinterview, Gigerenzer described a study he conducted to predict which Chicago high schools produced the highest dropout rates. He created an algorithm based on the type of pro-con decision-making lists that Benjamin Franklin liked to use.

"And we were astonished to find the computer-based versions of Franklin's bookkeeping method--a program that weighted 18 different cues--proved less accurate than going with the rule of thumb of 'get one good reason and ignore the rest of the information,'" Gigerenzer said.

YouNoodle's Data Future

Ricocheting into the direction that Quid did in 2010, YouNoodle plans on playing the data game for the time being.

"We definitely like the unbiased nature of competitions. There's certainly much more than just how it pertains to women. It's also, in general, when you look across the world, you see an explosion of new startups," Kolind says.

With YouNoodle's newest data capabilities, it plans to help startups everywhere better understand how they measure up in the greater startup world. "Everyone these days can do an app or do a little tech, web, mobile product. It's the enablement of tech startups everywhere that will allow new ecosystems," says Kolind.

And YN1K won't be its last study. "There will be many more to come," says Kolind.

But Kolind understands that a good algorithm mainly thrives on crucial human input. "We rely on thousands of locally appointed judges. So, not some crazy algorithm," he says.

How To Turn Your Corporate Party Into A Productivity Boon

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Meetup knows a thing or two about social gatherings. The company has facilitated countless get-togethers from organizers of all stripes. As most people know, work parties can be either fun or dreadful. But they are almost by definition unproductive.

The folks at Meetup don't think it has to be that way.

To Erin Dertouzos, Meetup's head of talent and culture, it's about lowering barriers and flattening hierarchies to create a fun environment in which great ideas can happen. As any company approaches the 100-employee mark--Meetup has about 115 and counting--not everyone knows each other as well as they once did, says Dertouzos.

"There needs to be an additional layer, sometimes built in [for that]. And we've really invested a lot in our culture and our values and making sure our values are coming across."

Those values include a scrappy, DIY mentality--referred to internally by the Meetup team as DIO, or Do It Ourselves--and presenting plenty of opportunities for employees from unrelated teams to interact and potentially come up with solutions and new ideas. And it's all done by virtue of the company's raison d'etre--meeting up.

The Meetup team will hold meetups both regular and impromptu. Along with the requisite holiday party (a tongue-in-cheek awards gala) an employee-catered annual picnic, all DIO'd, they'll gather to remodel the office, to start sports teams, or just to learn a board game or have a few drinks. Anyone can organize a meetup, and anyone can join in.

"It lowers the barrier for people to talk and share ideas for people to collaborate," says Dertouzos. "Part of the reason I took on technical recruiting at one point, is because I was at a DIO'd meetup talking to our CTO at the time and said 'I'm pretty sure I can do the tech recruiting we need.' And he said 'go for it.' That wouldn't have necessarily happened at the office, but over drinks I was a little bit more comfortable being like… 'I think I could be good at this' and was given the bandwidth to take it on."

To Dertouzos, it's about making it easier for creative people to bump up against one another and foster what she calls "stickiness"--the propensity of a company to attract brilliant talent that thinks highly of their coworkers. It fosters an environment in which employees care about one another and are motivated to help each other solve problems.

"There's a self-awareness that comes with it," she says. "If we didn't have that, if we didn't have social gatherings the way we have them it would create barriers that don't need to exist."

While such a philosophy could be applicable toward team building at any company, it certainly helps that the Meetup office culture is almost inextricably tied to the service they offer. "Meetup at its core is about finding others like you," says Dertouzos. "I really think that, at the end of the day, it's about getting out from behind the screen and actually doing something that makes a difference...it's about finding your people. And Meetup has definitely found [its] people."


Investors Say Lawbreakers Like Airbnb, Aereo, And Uber Are Increasingly Worth The Legal Bills

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Are you a venture capital investor with a portfolio company facing a lawsuit or a political headache? Then welcome to the club. From Airbnb's escalating skirmishes with the New York Attorney General, to Uber's showdowns with taxi commissioners in cities around the world, startups seem to be increasingly comfortable--even blasé--when it comes to taking on legal and regulatory risk. And so are their backers.

Asked whether his team at Union Square Ventures has turned down a pitch due to concerns about legal action or regulation, Nick Grossman, general manager for policy and outreach, says: "Not yet."

The standard refrain as to why? "Software is eating the world," the phrase coined by Silicon Valley kingmaker Marc Andreessen that has become industry shorthand for macro trends in technology, business, and society that seem destined to make software triumphant. In other words, investors told me, innovation is outpacing regulation, and sooner or later government will have to answer to the "social energy" of consumers.

That explanation is true to a degree, but it's a bit too easy--just because industries are being "consumed" by technology, doesn't mean the startup across the table from you is going to deliver an attractive return. So why are some VCs lining up, checkbooks in hand, to weather the legal storms? The answer is a surprising combination of finance 101 and graduate-level legal and political maneuvering that could have policymakers playing defense for years to come.

Numbers Don't Lie

Until recently, biotech was the one sector that regularly found fledgling companies embroiled in court battles. It's no coincidence that biotech was also the one sector that many venture capital firms, even those with wide-lens portfolios, would refuse to consider.

Then, in the last few years, everything changed. The naïvité that colored early interest in the "sharing economy" quickly hardened into something more calculated, as investors realized that when it comes to financing startups with bold, disruptive visions--and significant legal, lobbying, and public relations expenses--the numbers add up.

Let's do the math. First, a trend that's old news: The cost of validating a startup idea has dropped dramatically. "You can find out pretty quickly, before the regulators ever show up, whether the idea is succeeding or failing," says Jorge Torres, vice president at Silas Capital. Software costs continue to fall--witness the pricing war between Amazon Web Services and Google's Cloud Platform--and hardware and biotech startups are benefitting from 3-D printing and other prototyping tools that have made it remarkably cheap to enter a market.

Then comes a second equation. Legal and regulatory risks add major line items to a startup's budget in the form of billable hours for lawyers, lobbyists, and more, multiplied by the number of cities and states in which the startup operates. It's counterintuitive, but those expenses can actually make a company more attractive to investors. Why? Because founders need to give up a greater percentage of their ownership in order to pay the bills.

"VCs often like putting more capital to work--it means they can own larger portions of these businesses," says Nick Chirls, CEO of Alphaworks, a new funding platform. "Investors are building [the legal costs] into the capital costs of these companies, and the returns are fantastic."

In essence, lean cost structures undermine investors' negotiating position, giving founders an edge. The return of capital-intensive businesses has restored a balance of power that's more favorable to VCs.

Threading The Needle

On all this, investors seem largely aligned. But the industry's thinking is rapidly evolving on the question of how this new wave of legally dubious startups should go to market--and disagreements are starting to flare.

To understand the emerging approach, you first have to understand the old. Lot18, an e-commerce platform for wine, represents a more traditional strategy for managing regulatory risk: Follow the rules by finding a defensible way to "thread the needle." After a series of fits and starts as it sussed out a business model, Lot18 now has a competitive advantage in having navigated the maze of regulations that govern alcohol sales and distribution and lived to tell the story. Lot18 may look like an online wine store, but as its FAQs make clear: "Lot18 provides access to high-quality, hard-to-find wines at attractive prices [emphasis added]." All sales are final--because Lot18 does not actually sell wine.

At first glance, Aereo--the enfant terrible of streaming video, with a Supreme Court decision pending--appears to be following a similar playbook. Critics describe Aereo as a "Rube Goldberg-like contrivance" closer to the letter than the spirit of copyright law--indeed, Aereo appears to have built its technology from the ground up in order to "thread the needle" in the most provocative way possible. But when I sat down in February with founder and CEO Chet Kanojia, I was surprised to hear him describe a more expansive vision in keeping with recent recent content experiments at Netflix, Amazon, and Maker Studios. "Creative people can't get in front of the consumer because someone at a network controls the gates," Kanojia told me. In the long-term, he said, "a company like Aereo could change the power balance and open doors."

The Aereo of today is far from realizing that vision, but Kanojia appears to be aware of the new model that has captured investors' imaginations. Just repeat after me: "full-stack."

Full Stack FTW?

"Poetically: almost any vertical regulated by a TLA is ripe for an eventual full stack co IPO."

Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan tweeted those words recently as part of an extended musing on the nature of "full-stack" startups. Poetry, indeed: It sure sounds nice, but what is Srinivasan talking about, and what does it have to do with legal and regulatory risk?

Let's do a little textual analysis: To Srinivasan, the best way to build a billion-dollar business, circa 2014, is to go after the end-to-end value chain in industries regulated by "Three Letter Acronym" agencies like the FAA, FDA, or SEC. That means controlling the full product experience and bypassing incumbents at every industry layer. Srinivasan calls out "legacy physical" verticals as areas of particular interest, but that hardly narrows down the list; automobiles, education, hospitality--pretty much everything is fair game.

What Srinivasan doesn't spell out: "Full-stack," almost by definition, includes regulation. Full-stack startups are attractive because they bypass all incumbents, including regulators, and in so doing are positioned to write the rules of the future in their own image.

If that sounds like a stretch, just take a look at the de facto regulations that are already up and running (often quite effectively) at companies like Airbnb, in which hosts and guests rate one another and report bad behavior. Union Square's Grossman says the system at Airbnb is "essentially a regulatory scheme, but a trust-based scheme and not a public one. It's a direct affront not only to the incumbent businesses but to the incumbent regulators." The same could be said of new approaches to evaluating credit-worthiness, auto insurance risk, and myriad other applications. The difference with "full-stack" is that a company's scope of control becomes potentially problematic.

Learning From History

Once upon a time, regulators and incumbents were scoring wins and startups were feeling the pain. Napster, LimeWire--thanks to a spate of copyright infringement lawsuits, some of the most compelling ideas from a decade ago no longer exist. Silicon Valley did learn from those lessons--in very different ways, companies like SoundCloud and Spotify took them to heart--but rightly or wrongly that era feels like a very different chapter than the one we're in now. For one, the stakes are higher--the consequences of sharing a song are trivial compared to the potential consequences of sharing a car or a home. And what's more, the new order that startups are creating is far more embedded in our daily lives; as consumer habits and expectations shift, it gets harder and harder to reverse course.

"The Internet is creating new paradigms that were never contemplated when the regulatory regimes were created," says Amish Jani, managing director at FirstMark Capital and an investor in Aereo and Lot18.

Amid this reality it's easy to hail your next Uber and pity the regulators; the sand is shifting beneath their feet. But headstrong Silicon Valley has its decriers.

"When you have technology risk, team risk, competitive risk--why would you add regulatory risk on top of it?" says Yanev Suissa, who worked in the Bush and Obama administrations before joining the investment team at New Enterprise Associates. "They're betting on the notion that consumers want this. They'll get there, but the question is how much time and money and effort and distraction it will take to get there."

At Aereo, Kanojia is sanguine in the face of these obstacles. "In most cases, you don't know where the risk is. It ends up being you were too early, you were too late," he says with a shrug. "The ones that you know are better than the ones you don't know." Kanojia acknowledges that the "legal overhang" has made it more difficult to forge partnerships, but says he has not seen it affect hiring or other areas.

A Way Forward

So here is our new reality: Startups are building self-governing regulatory frameworks based on their own platforms and data, even as they fend off incumbent attacks, and investors are poised to reap the benefits. It seems like it's about time that Silicon Valley and Washington put their heads together in order to make sure that consumers aren't left in the lurch.

"If the Valley were to engage a bit more with Washington I think you'd have a regulatory environment and an investment environment that overlapped in a more productive way," Suissa says. "The Valley operates on a thesis of how things should get done. In Washington it's about what can get done."

Bridging that gap won't be easy, but it's feasible; many of the components are already in place, if we could find ways to map the data being generated to the definitions and requirements that policymakers have spelled out. Public versus private, professional versus amateur--the new paradigms don't fit the old categories, but smart use of data can bring the clarity we need.

"There's tremendous value in all the data that these networks are producing. An ideal regulatory approach would make use of that data as much as possible," Grossman says.

Whether policymakers at capitol buildings and city halls agree remains to be seen.

This Data Model Shows MH370 Could Not Have Flown "Accidentally" To Its Destination

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Over the past two weeks, FastCoLabs has been building a Monte Carlo model to predict potential paths of MH370. I wrote about Version 1 last week and after the piece hit Reddit I added a more technical description. Now I've updated and extended the model, using information that wasn't yet available earlier. This project is also available as code: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and as a full file via GithHub.

Picking Up Where We Left Off

We last left off with a relatively simple Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) model, trying to predict possible flight paths for the missing airliner. I used the plane's previous heading--assuming MH370 tended to along a similar direction as before, with some ability to turn--and the tendency to head to the last ping arc (8:11 am) at each time to probabilistically determine its subsequent locations.

The last ping arc took into account enough distance on either side--through the standard deviation--to effectively cover an area which blanketed the other pings as well [1]. Each new location only depended on the heading of the previous step, while the ping arc probability grid which made the plane tend toward the last ping arc, remained constant.

Results consistently showed, across a range of reasonable variations, that MH370 "chose" the southern arc most frequently and ended off the Australian West Coast, confirming independent Inmarsat Doppler analysis identifying a similar area of ocean nearby:

5% error, normal distribution

Heading Off Criticism

Yet the normal distributions I used for the plane heading, and the probability grid, were still criticized for being, well, too normal. So I implemented two heading choice distributions as well, both quite popular in some circles (unit circles, actually): the Wrapped Cauchy and the Von Mises. Both generated heading selections that were similar and then dramatically different, from how I chose the heading in Version 1.

I also found the Inmarsat ping error range: a specialty satellite industry blog pointed out a careful calculation on PPRuNe [2], which determined 1º to 2º error. For the last ping, where the satellite was 40º from the plane's perspective, this would mean error of 2.5% or 5% of the total distance between the satellite and the plane, measured by the lag time [3].

Here is one set of the results:

Von Mises, uniform distribution, 5% error

Wrapped Cauchy, quasi-uniform distribution, 5% error

All showed that if MH370 did a true random walk--picking plane headings which wandered any which way, and using just the ping arc to constrain MH370's ultimate location--MH370 ends up all over the arc within its flight range. This was the uniform distribution so vaunted on Reddit, confirming my original intuition on how to not pick the heading.

Desserting The Data Through Cherry-Picking

Next, I wanted all the pings to make my model the Queen of them all. Enough infographics had shown multiple pings, and my error assumptions were accommodating enough, that with some effort in Mathematica, I could now plot all of the plane pings. So each time step would have its own unique ping, instead of ping-ybacking on the generous error assumptions of another ping. I also plotted the Great Circle path from MH370's last known location to where it ended up in all of my models, a standard feature in the Python library I used [4]. Importantly, a Boeing 777 such as MH370 will either fly by magnetic bearing (unlikely just by eyeballing) or alternatively via the Great Circle to maximize fuel efficiency (via distance efficiency) between two waypoints.

Version 1 of the model simultaneously and independently came to the southern route conclusion; now, I wanted to see the complete picture of the flight. All of the plane's possible locations, over the whole duration. I had not yet seen modeled, let alone guesstimated with specific scenarios in mind.

The National Transportation and Safety Board provided Australia with few possible paths to aid in the search, in a reserved or miserly manner, depending on your perspective. Malaysia, in turn, has released its own few paths; but none of them appeared to plot the pings arcs to see whether these paths were actually possible, let alone showing them in the plot.

Now, it was time to generate thousands of paths. Our simulation would be the ultimate pathfinder (sorry, Nissan!) No more cherry-picking several fortunate few. This would be equal opportunity, Monte Carlo style, which would lead to unequal outcomes [5] in a fraction of the time and expense of the traditional way you can narrow down potential paths of MH370.

Reconstructing The Pings, And Why This Is Right (On Average)

Several quick points about accuracy:

  1. The error I assume in each ping is still generous; the standard deviation is 2.5% and 5% of the last ping's radius arc--which is more than the distance differences between the pings. So I am allowing for as much wiggle room as possible in terms of how I pick where the pings are; and then some.
  2. Even if the ping timings between the first ping and the last ping are not exact in an absolute sense, they certainly are in an average sense. Which means that using the plane's ultimate location on the arc, as the end point for the Great Circle, is a sound strategy.
  3. Looking at where the plane is plotted over time, the conclusions are plain to see--there is just not enough wiggle room to adjust the ping spacings in a way that allow for a flight path which does not make turns contrary to what an autopilot would automatically pick.

MH370 Flight Trajectory Through All Pings

So, here are the results, with the realistic normal heading assumption of Version 1 along with the realistic options in Version 2 for Wrapped Cauchy [6] and Von Mises:

normal distribution, 5% error

normal distribution 2.5% error

Von Mises distribution, 5% error

Von Mises distribution, 2.5% error

Wrapped Cauchy distribution, 5% error

Wrapped Cauchy distribution, 2.5% error

Autopilot Analysis

Through many thousands of simulations of various parameters specific to MH370's predicament, we now have a much better idea of what MH370's flight paths could be. My model shows likelihoods for MH370, not a definitive location. Is it possible that what is most likely is not in fact the case? Yes, of course, but the very notion of a Monte Carlo is predicated on the odds, meaning this analysis comes with an unfortunate realization--even if you don't want a scenario to be true, if all of the available information points to that, then it is the likely leading outcome.

What does this all mean? Autopilot is out of options. You see, here is the simple problem--none of the possible paths can be reconciled with a geodesic (Great Circle) which means that the plane turned at multiple points. How could it turn? Well, the plane was "flown" to its final location--either manually by a human, or by a program entered into the flight management system. These results strongly suggest that wherever MH370 is, the odds are that someone wanted it there.

Inmarsat Ping Timeline Table

2:11 am -- First ping.

2:15 am -- Last sighting of MH370 by Malaysia military radar.

3:11 am -- Second ping. First ping after plane disappeared [7].

4:11 am -- Third ping.

5:11 am -- Fourth ping.

6:11 am -- Fifth ping.

7:11 am -- Sixth ping.

8:11 am -- Seventh ping. Last full ping from MH370. (What earlier was thought of as the 5 th ping after disappearance, but is actually the 6th ping.)

8:19 am -- Partial ping?! (Still not understood.)

Source: MH370 Article, Wikipedia.

Additional Note: TMF Associates blog, with insightful previous analysis, references a different set of aperiodic ping times from 2:11 am and 8:11 am, and an MH370 radar disappearance at 2:22 am, inferred from Inmarsat Doppler analysis. These are at odds with the Wikipedia timeline. I use the hourly pings for simplicity's sake. The 2.5-5% error more than accounts for any timing discrepancies.


[1] 5%, 10%, and 20% of the distance from the last ping arc to the Inmarsat geostationary satellite, a coarse way to account for all pings with just the last one.

[2] Professional Pilots Rumor Network. No, I am not making this up !

[3] I was modeling 5%, 10%, and 20%, and trying to encompass multiple pings in that breadth, which wasn't bad but could be improved on.

[4] Matplotlib Basemap. "You know you want it!"

[5] Probably a libertarian's dream, so to speak.

[6] Note that using a Wrapped Cauchy distribution splits roughly even-steven north and south; all of my other results show southern tendencies.

[7] Below 1 hour; accounted for in my model.

New Hackathon Patterns That Don't Subsequently Disrupt Your Entire Life

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Hackathons often fail on the measure that most of us consider primary: the prototypes. After all, the end of the day is a demo. But lots of hackathon-born experiments don't turn out quite like their creators would like, which can end the day on a sour note.

After a few of those, you're not so excited about hackathons anymore.

Veteran hackathon organizers and judges I spoke to say it's critical to change the way we talk about the goals of the hackathon so participants don't come away feeling frustrated.

Many hackathons succeed in making great social connections between members of the same community or company, and the cross-pollination between skills can jolt creativity. If that's the idea, then make it clear. If the goal is real, deployable projects, then provide a structure and plenty of prep time. Here's how to do both.

Either Get More Technical...

If you want hackers to actually build something worthwhile in the end, try serializing a series of short technical hackathons that build into one larger project.

"The process is the number one thing: it's all about learning this rapid prototyping--how you get from nothing to a totally finished publishable product," says Jonathan Marmor, the founder of Monthly Music Hackathon NYC. "If you can do it in a day, then certainly you can do it with a bigger project in a month."

Marmor, a composer and engineer, says the music hackathon series attracts people with a wide variety of backgrounds, from instrument builders to programmers to music entrepreneurs.

"They're sharing different pieces of what they're working on with each other," he says. "Maybe somebody's building a web app and ends up talking to a scientist [about digital signal processing]."

And they're each just one day each, so there's not enough time to build out a large-scale project.

"Eight hours is not really enough for me to start a composition project from scratch and finish it and get the score done and then get an ensemble to rehearse it and perform it," he says. "I will take some nugget of an idea and try to develop that."

But that time limitation can be a powerful benefit, teaching participants to quickly prototype an idea and get feedback on it, he says.

"If you do it every month, you're going to become fluent in this process, and when you have a big idea you're going to be able to execute on it and sort of know the pitfalls of creating a minimal viable product and turning it into something bigger," says Marmor.

Make sure hackers know the requirements and have time to plan and prepare well before the event. And if the plan is to let participants tinker with new technology and build simpler prototypes, make sure that's clear, too, so hackers know they have the freedom to experiment and practice new skills before the starting gun goes off.

...Or Be Clear Your Hackathon Is More Casual

Not every hackathon project is going to become a full-fledged product, and it's important to make sure participants understand that so there's no hard feelings after the fact, says Mike Curtis, the vice president of engineering at Airbnb, which holds regular internal hackathons.

"The purpose of this is to create lots of ideas and to have fun together as a team, but not everything is going to ship to production," he says.

A few internal tools used by the company did evolve from hackathon projects, says Curtis.

"There's a few examples of things that we've built in hackathons that have ended up just being disruptive internally, how we operate day to day," he says, including an internal link shortener and an improved company directory system. Airbnb's holiday card program, that lets hosts and guests swap virtual greeting cards, got its start as a hackathon project, too.

The goal isn't to build a complete product from start to finish during the hackathon but to let good ideas materialize that can later potentially be fleshed out, he says. The hackathons also let employees who wouldn't normally work together collaborate on projects, he says, something that was echoed by Facebook's Pedram Keyani.

"We create this kind of alternate social graph," says Keyani, forming ties that help different departments work together even after the hackathon is done. "The social connections there are insanely valuable."

Some high-profile features like Facebook Chat grew out of hackathon ideas, but projects aren't limited to engineering and code, he says.

"Nonengineering teams will do hackathons," he says. "They'll say, 'let's rethink how we run Legal.'"

Hackathon teams with promising ideas get to present them to Facebook executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but it's understood that some of the most interesting ideas won't have a clear path to becoming products, he says.

"The instinct is to try to create some kind of prize system or incentive for people to hack or come up with cool ideas, but that sets up very shortsighted views of projects and gamifies it in a way that I think is unhealthy," says Keyani. "For us, hacking is the prize."

Hackathons let participants push their own limits as creators and developers and also get some experience pitching their ideas, says Prachi Gupta, a senior engineering manager at LinkedIn.

"You become a salesperson by the end of the day," she says. "It's an amazing transformation that you can go through in 24 hours."

LinkedIn organizes internal hackathons as well as public events like the DevelopHer hackathon for women and an annual hackathon for interns from companies across the tech world. The public hackathons have helped recruit potential employees, but that's not the only reason the company sponsors them, says Gupta.

"If you're only looking at hackathons as a recruiting tool, that's not good at all," she says. "We want people to come together and learn from us about things that we know how to do, and to teach us better about things that they know how to do."

Letting participants learn from one another was a big motivation for the Tribeca Film Institute in creating its Tribeca Hacks series, that brings filmmakers and other traditional storytellers together with designers, developers, and engineers, says Opeyemi Olukemi, Tribeca's manager of digital initiatives. (Full disclosure: I participated in Tribeca's Story Matter science storytelling hackathon last month.)

"It was really about understanding the lack of space for people to learn," says Olukemi, explaining that when Tribeca Hacks launched in 2012, filmmakers didn't have a place to learn to work with technical people to develop new kinds of content. Now, she says, participants from previous hackathons have gone on to apply for funding for larger projects from Tribeca's New Media Fund, and one hackathon project, a physical version of the iPhone game Flappy Bird, is raising funds through Kickstarter.

"The interdisciplinary collaboration across our hackathon is exploding, and I'm very proud to see that happen," she says.

How To Filter Hackers' Ideas

For hackathons where the primary goal really is to produce viable projects and ideas, it helps to make sure hackers are well informed about the problems to be solved, says Mike Mathieu, the cofounder of Walk Score and a sometimes hackathon judge who has previously written about the limitations of the format.

The Sunlight Foundation has also seen that giving people a clearly defined task leads to more useful code, as when the open government group asked attendees at the PyCon conference to write scrapers for their states' legislative sites.

"We had a very relatable task: iI was very well-documented and replicable," says Tom Lee, the director of the foundation's Sunlight Labs.

But even less structured events still have brought Sunlight some useful ideas and helped motivate supporters and potential employees, he says.

"It is also a way to bring in new people, whether that's from a staffing perspective or just sort of an organizational awareness and support perspective," says Lee. "People get a little more excited about our mission when they learn a little more about it, even if they're not going to become a coder themselves."

How To Become An Engineer With People Skills

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In the technology world developers are prized for their coding talents above all else. Little value has traditionally been given to their so called soft skills: communication, emotional intelligence, and the ability to work effectively with others. But as the pool of talented developers continues to grow, AngelHack CEO Sabeen Ali argues that it is soft skills that will make an individual developer more marketable in the future. She's created a curriculum called "The Whole Developer" which aims to get devs in touch with the softer side of things--making them better coders in the process.

A Double-Edged Sword

The problem Ali is determined to solve usually rears its head when a talented developer suddenly finds himself with a ton of venture capital.

"You have a developer that's locked in his room who created a really great platform," Ali says, "and suddenly an investor finds him. The investor dumps a couple of million dollars on him and tells the developer he wants him to scale and build a company around the product. That pressure takes this programmer and pulls him out of his comfort zone and forces him to run a company, which he, like many people, has little clue how to do."

Writing clever code, Ali argues, requires an entirely different skill set than leading a team of people at a company. But she says that it's okay for developers not to know that kind of stuff. Most people don't. The important thing is recognizing that while your coding skills may be a 10, your soft, or leadership, skills might only be a five.

That's where the Whole Developer curriculum comes in. It's a 12-week course beginning in June that aims to teach developers, designers, and business people soft skills, well-being skills, and how to become a more well-rounded human being. (We'll give you a crash course in this article.)

"Creating a company is a different beast than creating a product, something new entrepreneurs--coders turned CEOs--often find out only when they're way in over their heads," Ali says. "We focus on the art of communication, team building, and the importance of mindfulness and emotional intelligence. In a nutshell, we're not just trying to create great developers, but we're aiming to create great people."

According to Ali, here are the six areas where coding masters can turn their hacking skills on themselves to become a Whole Developer:

Communication

"Language is our most distinctly human capability, and it underlines everything that we do," Ali says. "Considering this, it's surprising how neglected communication has been in the business world, until very recently. Communicative acumen can increase team harmony, diffuse conflicts, and salvage reputations."

A big part of being a Whole Developer is communicating effectively. This goes beyond just getting along with people--it means being able to deliver persuasive, trenchant messaging that gets your point across and compels others to act on it.

Ali says that she's often seen brilliant products come out of the hackathons she runs but then when the developer gets to the stage to present their product, they don't have the communication skills to convey the product in all its glory.

"Salespeople, marketers, and spokespeople are masters at it, and developers would do well to learn what could be one of the most powerful tools in their soft-skill toolkit."

When conveying your idea to an audience, frame it in a context they can understand. For example, if your audience isn't technical, focusing on how much of an engineering marvel your product is won't excite them. Talk to them about how they will benefit from it. See things through their eyes and communicate with them as if you were watching them explain something to themselves.

Team Building

Despite the prevailing stereotype of the developer as an anti-social recluse, the fact is that developers don't work in a vacuum. In any organization, there are teams involved, and developers will need to interact with team members. These can be other developers, or marketers, administrators, or executives. Either way, it's important for developers to know how to manage and navigate team dynamics.

"Developers are known to be isolated workers," Ali says. "Because of this misconception many developers haven't had the ability to understand or take part in the full scope of work that's being created. Moreover, when placed in a leadership role the developer turned manager might take misguided approaches to forming a team, managing a team, and ultimately this leads to a non-productive work environment."

Ali says it's important to address any issues your team raises quickly, fully, and, most importantly, consistently. This can be done by planning ahead and exploring how you'd react to situations before they arise. Your "pre-attention" to matters will help build cohesiveness between your team. Specifically, developers turned managers should be prepared to address some of the following common issues around their teams:

"Where will each team member be more effective? What if a team member doesn't deliver? What if there's conflict? Is there potential for misunderstanding when working with multicultural teams? When should a leader become a follower?"

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is not a new concept--Eastern religions have espoused the power and importance of being mindful and present to one's actions for thousands of years. More recently, however, mindfulness has started to gain a foothold in the West.

"Mindfulness is a simple concept," Ali says. "Be aware of, and present in, the current moment, and be attentive (mindful) of your every thought, feeling, and action."

But that concept is surprisingly difficult to practice consistently. Like any skill, it requires steady practice over a long period of time to master. However, unlike many skills, mindfulness is accessible to almost anyone--even simple breathing exercises, done for 10 minutes at a time, make for good practice.

And there are numerous benefits, Ali says, "clearer thinking, better decision making, and a sharply honed intuition among them. Mindfulness is also especially useful during crises, allowing the practitioner to maintain a level head and not let external circumstances affect his or her decisions."

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of oneself, of others, and of groups. When people talk about being able to "read people" or even just "being perceptive," they're referring to their degree of emotional intelligence.

Lack of emotional intelligence often leads to poor interpersonal skills, poor networking, and a general unawareness of how one's actions and words affect the people around them, Ali says. On the contrary, those possessing a high EI often perform better in work and are better able to create and lead projects, according to an increasing body of scientific evidence backing its usefulness.

"Emotionally intelligent people are able to navigate social situations and adapt to different people and groups," Ali says. "Even more than traditional intellect, emotional intelligence is a huge predictor of success. It explains why the most charismatic candidate--even if he or she is not the most intelligent or even qualified one--gets the job or promotion. It's a highly useful, even critical, skill for the Whole Developer to possess."

EI is grown through mindfulness. As you become more aware of your own thoughts it becomes easier to see the meaning behind other people's words and actions.

Work/Life Balance

The sad fact is today many of the boundaries between work and life are blurred. Our devices leave us connected at all times, leading to increased "work creep" in our personal hours. But just as multitasking has now been proven to be detrimental to work, being always connected to work can be just as damaging.

"Too much of anything is detrimental," Ali says. "Just as too much chocolate will make one sick, and too much Vitamin A can be lethal, too much work is detrimental to one's mental, and eventually physical, health. Being able to balance work with other interests--education, hobbies, and a social life--will lead to a happier, more fulfilling life for the Whole Developer."

Ali says the Whole Developer has an opportunity to set an example for the industry, to show how living a healthy, well-rounded life actually results in more productivity, not less. She notes that turning off all our gadgets--even gadgets we are hacking together ourselves--will allow us to relax and refocus on the more important things in life, such as personal relationships. This allows our personal batteries to recharge, making us more creative and happier in the process.

"And a happy worker is a more productive worker," Ali says.

Social Responsibility

"We all have an inherent duty to act and engage with our surroundings and each other in a responsible and compassionate way," Ali says. "When I talk about or think through the idea of exposing people to code, I also think about the implications and the ramifications of when you teach someone how to code. What else do they need to be aware of because, ultimately, computer programming is very, very powerful. In some places you can even look at it as a weapon. If people are not taught properly the framework, a frame of reference behind what you're supposed to be using this for, how you use it, how it integrates in the rest of life, then it could take a very strong positive and turn into a very strong negative."

Therein lies the final, and perhaps most important tenant of the Whole Developer, Ali says. "We all have an inherent duty to act and engage with our surroundings and each other in a responsible and compassionate way."

In the workforce, this relates to working with others--not making the project or objective at hand all about you, but rather collectively advancing yourself and your peers to a higher level.

Outside of the workplace it relates to how we interact with one another, and the relationships we build to create an ever expanding and intertwined network of friends, family, acquaintances, and community.

"The idea of social responsibility rests on how we interact with and affect those around us," Ali says. "From maintaining personal relationships to contributing to the betterment of one's community, social responsibility must be ingrained into the Whole Developer's very DNA."

Do Coding Bootcamps Produce Inferior Engineers?

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Over the last couple of years, highly selective coding bootcamps like Hackbright Academy, Hack Reactor, and Hungry Academy have graduated bona fide software engineers into the coder job market. But some naysayers claim these "coding bootcamps" leave students with inferior skill sets. We spoke to some hacker school alums to find out the realities: Is this a gateway to a lucrative new field or just a conduit for hobbyists? Can you really bootcamp your way to a new career?

An Art Major Goes To Uber

Ingrid Avendaño studied art for a while in college until she changed majors to electrical engineering. But she didn't get a good coding background as an undergrad. Ultimately, she dropped out.

Her coding interests brought her to Hackbright Academy, which exclusively enrolls women. For her final project at the bootcamp, she chose to create a compiler, a program that translates code into a real programming language. She quickly accumulated detractors who thought she couldn't do it.

"That's all I really heard from people: 'Compilers are really hard. You probably can't do one in five weeks. And if you do it, it's probably not going to be that great,'" she says.

It was all the more troubling that she didn't completely understand what a compiler was at first. "I didn't understand why I needed certain tools to write a compiler."

After a week of poking around online at other people's explanations and examples, she got a boost from her Hackbright mentor, who stayed up with her until one in the morning one night. "I remember the moment when [my mentor] finally explained it, and I freaked out. I was like, 'Thank you so much!' And I went right to coding," says Avendaño.

"Compilers are great because they can compile languages together, so you can write a new programming language. For me, I interpreted it as a language that could be understood by a computer, and that was awesome," says Avendaño. "I actually made a really kick-ass compiler!"

Just after graduation, Avendaño landed her current software job at Uber in San Francisco. Now, she works on a team where she uses Python and JavaScript to build her own application for Uber to use internally. "I think that's pretty cool because it isn't like I'm just fixing little bugs; I'm actually building a tool from scratch," she says.

SurveyMonkey Promotes An Accountant To Software Engineer

After having worked on the administration side of SurveyMonkey's business, Dee Gill started to take notice of what her software developer-colleagues were doing. When she expressed interest in attending a coding bootcamp, her manager specifically recommended Hackbright.

SurveyMonkey put her through hacker school with the intention of hiring her back as an engineer. "They sponsored me through the whole process," she says.

After the three-month program, Gill's supervisors asked her to create an entire application to automate some of the finance team's tasks. "I built it from scratch, and I had to build a new service within our architecture," she says.

All the Python she learned at Hackbright paid off. "Having it work so well, and being able to co-exist with all of the other code and services we have in production in our architecture at SurveyMonkey was probably the proudest moment I've had so far," says Gill.

One of Gill's former finance pals was thrilled. "He was like, 'You saved me so many hours and hours of work!'" Gill says.

How A Data Analyst Became A Data Scientist

John Dvorak had a solid data background before starting the curriculum at Hack Reactor. But all of the JavaScript he learned in that intense learning period gave him what he needed to develop his own data tools, making the transition from analyst to scientist. Now, Dvorak is lead data scientist for NodePrime, a data analytics and management company for hardware. He manages one other data scientist, but three more will soon join his team.

"I've been kind of dividing up data scientists into two groups. There's the group that is analysts and another group that is developers. The difference between the two is that analysts generate reports, one-off pieces of information that just answers questions. And the developer side of a data scientist is they develop data products. Things that repeatedly give you more answers, something that keeps asking questions," says Dvorak.

At NodePrime, he's working on a front end application for general users. "At the moment, I'm working on a project that will make it easier for laypeople to analyze very large quantities of data about how their data centers are running." It's all coded in JavaScript.

And this November, he'll give a talk at a conference on how JavaScript is a powerful language for computation, much in the same way that the R language is.

Their Numerous Side Projects

Coding bootcamps live up to their name mostly because they demand long hours from their students. But the students want to be there. In general, the type of student the schools accept is excited about solving technical problems, and it shows in their extracurriculars.

Melanie Gilman got hired right away at LivingSocial after completing her training at Hungry Academy and is now in her second engineering job at Thoughtbot. At Hungry Academy, she built an entire application in the Ruby programming language that stands out as her shining moment.

"I was actually able to extract a little piece of what I had done in that project into a small open-source library. And I published a Ruby gem. So that was the icing on the cake," Gilman says.

A couple of years ago, Gilman spoke at the Frozen Rails conference and has also served as a coach for Rails Girls workshops.

Kate Jenkins, a Hack Reactor alum, headed a team of other Hack Reactor alumni at a recent hackathon. They built an app for hikers to auto-blog their itineraries. "We used a bunch of technologies we hadn't used before," she says.

Now, Jenkins is a software engineer at Ejenta, a company that uses artificial intelligence to help projects move along. NASA is a customer.

Jenkins tries to do a hackathon about once every month. "One of the cool things about hackathons is that you get a really low commitment opportunity to explore all these amazing, new technologies that are just blossoming all over the place, she says. "So, after that hackathon, we used D3, the visualization library, to plot our trail information. And when I went back to Ejenta, I was able to start using D3."

And Uber's Avendaño has created an online learning tool that outputs computer gate schematics according to logic expressions that a user types in. "I've been keeping analytics, and it's really nice knowing that a good number of people are actually using my website," she says.

Image: Flickr user Dave Herholz

Understand The Big Picture, Then Graduate

Getting through hacker school did not only entail picking up a few HTML goodies or JavaScript structures. Graduates came out understanding the big picture, the overall layout of how different coding technologies fit together. For many grads, this was the "Aha!" moment during their training that carried them through to the end.

"The main challenge for people was getting into the mindset of debugging, to get unstuck and familiarize oneself with the technical landscape, break down a problem," says Shawn Drost, cofounder of Hack Reactor.

With her electrical engineering background, Avendaño naturally looked at new information as pieces of a puzzle. But ramping up to planning out an entirely new tech project was her biggest lesson at Hackbright. "It is really difficult to have that intuition," she says.

When Avendaño started her compiler project, she began to see how all the pieces of what she learned fit together with her mentor's help. "When I figured out how that was actually done on a technical level, I felt like it opened the doors, and I actually understood a lot more things just in general," she says. "I was like, 'Oh, I don't have to reinvent the wheel!' And I could understand what other people had done better," Avendaño says.

Dvorak had the same issue as Avendaño. "I think the biggest training was the culture and learning how to think in the way that people who are already proficient in the task think," he says.

He gives an example: "Like, if you hang out with a lot of plumbers, you're going to suddenly get a kind of sense about what types of problems to look for and what types of ways to think about a problem that you can't really teach but you can pick up by just talking to these people and hanging out with them. And that is definitely one of the largest things learned by just being with these experienced programmers."

Struggling With Status

"Software development is a series of struggles. The machine is constantly telling you that you're stupid. You have to be just the right amount of egotistical to decide, 'No, I'm going to tell you what's what, machine. I'm going to conquer whatever your error messages are,'" says Jeff Casimir, cofounder of Hungry Academy and business manager of Jumpstart Lab.

Drost agrees that confidence is important. "[The students] are dwarfed by the challenge of imposter syndrome," he says.

Gill had a lot of friends in SurveyMonkey's software engineering department before joining the team, so she knew the kind of work they put out. "One of the biggest fears was producing the same quality work," she says, realizing that it happens to every engineer.

Thoughtbot's Gilman says, "It is really hard when you're in a class with another 23 very bright people, some of whom have a lot more experience, some of whom are really, really bright, to feel like you really know what you're doing, when it seems like everyone around you is so far ahead."

But Gilman's work in the professional arena has beat back her doubts, especially her work on a recent project. "[My mentor at Thoughtbot] said if I hadn't been helping him out with it, it wouldn't have been as easy. I'm not just sitting there, working on fluff," she says.

And Ashley Lorden, a software engineer at Lyft, says her experience at Hackbright lessened her anxiety. "For me, it was getting accustomed to being in that situation where I had to learn a new way to work, a new vocabulary, and prove myself that was scariest. But going through that with a cohort of other women in the same position was an incredible experience."

These hacker schools pick the most intelligent and motivated students whom they know could deal with the material. "The least educated woman in my class had a master's degree from Oxford," says Jenkins of her time at Hack Reactor.

There is nothing easy about mastering a technical subject that is constantly evolving within a few months. The caliber of the students who graduate from these coding bootcamps is evidence of how much hard work both the schools and the students put in to continue to shape the tech world.

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