Every company wants to be innovative. Unfortunately it's easy to underestimate what that requires, especially when it comes to organizing hackathons. But if you successfully pull one off, it can lead to connections and mindshare more valuable than any industry buzzword, according to Hacker League founder Mike Swift.

With more than 600 hackathon listings since its founding in 2011--and nearly 200 already listed for 2014--Hacker League and its founder have nailed down the fine-line formulas between hackathons that are badass and those that are just plain bad.

1) DON'T: Assume Hackathons Are For You

Wanting to be perceived as "innovative" is one of the most common reasons companies want to throw hackathons, according to Swift. But that's not a good enough reason, he says.

"A year ago I was fielding phone calls for hackathons on Hacker League and one woman said, 'Oh, we're going to run this hackathon, it's going to be great, and we're going to spark all this innovation around our industry.' So I asked, 'Well, why are you doing this hackathon?' She said, 'Well we just really want to spawn innovation and startups.'"

After explaining to the woman that there likely wouldn't be much in the way of innovation or new companies being launched, Swift offered alternate ideas. He suggested she offer a grant to startups that are already doing innovative things--which turned out to be a success.

"They just assumed a hackathon was the right answer, but they needed to think about the actual doable goals. You are not generating sustainable things that will take over the world or change the industry forever. Do things that you have a domain expertise on rather than just throwing it for the sake of throwing it."

There are plenty of good reasons to host a hackathon. Among them, Swift explains, are the ability to garner real-time product feedback and offer exclusive data for developers to use.

"Throw one [hackathon] if you have access to exclusive data--that no one else has--that would help developers somehow. Throw a hackathon if you're in a location that's not in San Francisco or New York that doesn't have hackathons every weekend--that way you can meet developers there."

Want to know more?New Hackathon Patterns That Don't Interrupt Your Entire Life.

2) DON'T: Prioritize Sponsors over Attendees

Swift says he often has to remind organizers that attendees are more important than sponsors.

"A lot of times, people will throw hackathons and the first ones they'll focus on are the sponsors because they helped put on the event or made it possible. But, really, if you focus on the attendees and optimize for them--everyone wins in the end," he says.

If the hackathon is a good one, sponsor praise will follow.

"If attendees think the event is great, they're going to think about all the sponsors who helped support it and they are going to want to come back and bring their friends. On the flip side, if you put on a bad event, they won't want to come back and they'll shame the companies that sponsored it," Swift says.

Swift says improving the physical environment and dietary options are simple ways to make attendees happy.

"Oftentimes, people will offer pizza and soda and that's the extent of the food but you should have some healthy options--fruits and vegetables and some granola bars. Take into account if people want to have places to sleep for a few hours. Often times, the expectation is attendees will want to be up all night but a lot of times, they'll want to take power naps or relax.

"Make sure the venue is clean. Have people there to pick up garbage throughout the night or weekend. Little things like that can go a long," he says.

Swift also recommends blogging about hacks after the hackathon has come and gone.

"Everybody loves when his or her products are written about. Blogging about some of your favorite hacks after an event can be a great way to highlight awesome developers and even make some networking connections."

3) DO: Have a One-Night Stand

More than 90% of hackathon projects don't go on to be anything after the event, according to Swift.

"I actually think that's a good thing," Swift says. "Hacks are art--it's a form of self-expression and the value is not building a product that lasts forever. It's more about building a product that demonstrates something cool."

A hackathon isn't the place for lofty goals or expectations.

"You have to approach it with the right goal. Some people will go into it saying, 'I want one of my hacks to be the next GroupMe,' which is unrealistic and probably most people don't want that."

Swift says hackers usually don't want to go into an accelerator afterwards.

"Some companies want to give hackers $24k in accelerator credits. And then guys are like, 'I don't really want to go to an accelerator, I kind of want to just be done with it.' Making sure your goals are aligned is really key--consider what your attendees want and optimize that," he says.

Garage48 cofounder Priit Salumaa says hackathons are like one-night stands.

"Weekend hackathons can be compared to building a business, like a one-night stand can be compared to a marriage. You can have sex with a stranger and leave the next morning, but building a family requires long-term commitment, trust, and friendship--a different kind of relationship," he says.

Sure, a one-night stand could lead to something bigger, but that's not the goal, says Salumma.

"A successful business after the hackathon is not our doing, but the effort of the individual teammates, people who decide to find the motivation to go on, and the ability to work together," he says.

4) DON'T: Offer Large Cash Prizes

"Prizes can make or break an event," Swift says. "I work on the largest hackathons in the world and I would never go over $1k."

"When you go above that price range it turns into a paycheck and suddenly the dynamic changes from 'I'm going to this event for fun' to 'I'm going for a payday.' I see some of the highest-quality events reduce the amount of prizes year after year," he says.

Swift did a survey from a few of hundred people where he found reasons for attending had nothing to do with the prize. "Eighty percent of them said the main reason they went to hackathons was to learn, while the other reasons included networking and fun," he says.

Instead of awarding big, cash prizes, companies should offer novelty prizes.

"At a Major League Hacking competition, the award was their [winning hacker's] name engraved on a trophy," Swift says. "There's no money, but they all wanted that trophy."

Nasdaq gave winning hacks and hackers screen time on the famous Nasdaq billboard in Times Square.

"I remember a Twilio hackathon where the winners got an action figure that looked exactly like them," Swift says. "Nobody would want that except you. Those kinds of prizes make for a better experience."

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson bemoans large prizes in favor of novel ones like action figures, a personalized WWE-style belt, or a Kindle Fire with a monthly book credit.

"You see hackathons with very large prizes or big ad campaigns and I just don't think that's the right way to reach developers," Lawson says. "They have to be genuinely part of the communities they are servicing, and give them something of value--it's not about the money."

5) DO: Offer Product Roadmaps… And Follow Through

Since acquiring Hacker League in December, Mashery has begun bringing developers' perspectives to enterprises by encouraging them to have an open platform mindshare.

Mashery's head of developer platform, Delyn Simons, says enterprises are trending toward private hackathons where the successful ones are giving developers access to exclusive data, heads of engineering, and potential incubation.

"Companies can say, 'We can only fund four projects this year and the top two [hackathon] winners are going to move to the top of the list,'" Simons says.

She says giving marketing power to developers is invaluable. "With bigger companies, a lot of the engineers can't get their projects funded because they're in a different division."

But internal hackathons can fall victim to lip service too. "The No. 1 way to ensure hackathon failure is to not prioritizing developers' needs," she says. "Saying, 'Show me your innovative idea and we might think about it' then not following through is where most companies fail."

6) DO: Redefine The Model Each Time

Swift says finding new ways to innovate the hackathon model is going to be the key to both short- and long-term success of any given company. "Everybody can do the 24-hour hackathon format, so finding a way to make it different is going to be increasingly important."

He says the most interesting hackathons show their niche verticals.

"Hack'n Jill kept 50% men and 50% women at their event because they were working on keeping things diverse--a notorious problem in the tech industry," Swift says.

Another was a tournament-like event called Hacker Olympics. "It was almost like an anti-hackathon. The idea was a really short, really competition-driven event. It was like the inverse of what people normally do at hackathons," he says.

Some of Swift's favorite models include both niche and non-technical features.

"Comedy Hack Day was where developers partnered with comedians and hackers to make hilarious hacks. Comedians were the ones demoing the product, so it really turned into a comedy show."

Condé Nast ran one on Hacker League called Decoded Fashion Hackathon--another favorite of Swift's.

"Fashion experts talked about their problems within the industry, and immediately after the panel, hackers pitched them ideas for solutions then formed teams. Having relevant industry people can work really well," he says.

What was your most memorable hackathon experience? Tell us in the comment section below.

As city dwellers know, it's awesome to live here but it can sure suck to visit. Without a pad of your own, out-of-towners are left skipping from Starbucks to Whole Foods to Starbucks to collect themselves and wait for bathrooms.

Montreal-based startup Breather wants to take an Airbnb approach to fixing this problem--without the overnight. The company lets people reserve quiet rooms in Montreal, New York, and--coming next month--San Francisco for an hour at a time. It's "the best friend's apartment that you're really jealous of," says chief engineer and CTO, Evan Prodromou. "A really nice place to sit down and get some things done."

The question is: How do they get people into strange buildings? "The biggest problem we had to solve was how to get people through the door. We're trying to say 'you have access to this room during a pre-agreed period of time, not before or after. And only one person can do it.'"

According to Prodromou, smart locks weren't reliable or readily available. Key handoff didn't make sense, given the short-term nature of rentals. So the founding team found a hack: hotel locks and cryptography. They turned to old one-time password algorithms to enable dumb-locks to intelligently grant access only during a specific period of time, only to the person who booked the reservation.

"The technical problem we're solving with the lock system is that we need to have a way to grant access to the rooms remotely without actually directly talking to the locks," says Prodromou. Here's how they solved it.

How Breather's Custom Door Locks Work

Picture a Breather customer walking up to a door at the beginning of the rental period. They're delivered a code through a push notification in the Breather app, and they punch that six-digit number into a keypad on the ordinary hotel lock called the Oracode 660K made by a company called ILCO. On the UX side, it's as simple as that.

However, what's happening behind the scenes is much more interesting.

"We used ILCO lock's API to map your reservation at a particular time onto the lock that you're using. You're supposed to be at this door at this time. We give you a code that's valid from about 15 minutes before you're supposed to be in the room until about 15 minutes after--we give you a little bit of a grace period."

"Our app calls the server side API, our API. Which in turn is using an API through ILCO to get a new code that we in turn forward to the end user. We show you a code through our app and you punch it into the keypad."

And then the door opens.

"It works every single time, unless you punch it in wrong," says Prodromou. "But most people get it the first time."

Breather didn't develop the lock technology itself. Two-factor systems like Google Authenticator and RSA key fobs use similar systems, but they did build a smart hack to make the app talk to the lock--and to ensure that it only works for the rental period.

Making The System Durable

The founding team considered smart locks and other app connected systems, but most of them weren't robust enough to handle multiple users a day. "We have between four and six users coming into a room a day. The kinds of locking systems we were looking at were hobbiest-oriented devices intended for home automation. They just weren't able to stand up to the use or abuse."

"We went with these type of ILCO locks because they've got that great disconnected mechanism," says Prodromou. Because of the way that cryptography works, the locks are robust in the face of connectivity failures. They don't depend on the Internet staying up, or the phone working--as would an app-controlled smart lock. "We're not depending on you holding your phone in a particular way or even necessarily having the same phone; you can use the locks that we have with iOS, with Androids, with other systems."

So how does a disconnected lock "speak" with a connected system to generate these codes? Complex math. As Prodromou says, "The lock gets a seed value when it's installed, and it does a transformation on that value over time. Since the server has the same seed value, and it does the same transformation over time, the two outcomes will be the same, even though they don't communicate directly."

"It's like if I put you and a friend in separate rooms and gave you a seed value of 139 and told you to add 1 to it every hour. After three days you'd both have 211 even though you haven't communicated with each other. The math is way more complicated than this. Much bigger numbers and more complicated transformations."

CEO Julien Smith describes it this way: "Your friend in a room, who you can't communicate with, chooses a number between 1 and 100. You can't reach them, but you have to choose the right number every time."

There's no chance someone can just remember the code and walk back in again. According to Prodromou, even if you know the algorithm and a past value you can't predict the next value. "The combination get reset based on the time, so the combinations only last for about ½ hour apiece, though we have some combinations that can last longer. It's really tied up with how the cryptography works. The crypto code depends not only on the values that create when we program the locks, but also on the current time. Every lock also has a clock."

It is also virtually impossible for the same code to come back up. With a six-digit lock code, there are more than a million possible number combinations.

While far fewer unique codes are needed at present, that will come in handy as the young company expands. Breather currently has 11,863 registered users. Of those, 652 have used the service and 410 have used it in the last 30 days. "We have a total of 10 spaces: five in Montreal, five in New York. Our next city is San Francisco. We are shooting for that sometime in May," says Prodromou.

What do users find behind the door? A couch, a table, comfortable chairs, a pillow and a blanket--a still spot in the middle of the city storm. Quiet, calm, and locked up tight.

When Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard classmates first logged in to TheFacebook in February 2004, the site's servers ran PHP, which had beat out Perl to become the hottest language on the web.

Using a now-popular framework like Ruby on Rails or Django wasn't an option--Rails' first public release was a few months later, and Django wasn't unveiled until the following year. A decade later, PHP's been widely derided for having a sprawling library of inconsistently named and defined built-in functions, syntax and semantics just different enough from related languages to confuse multilingual programmers, and a history of design decisions that made it easy to write insecure code.

"Every PHP programmer is familiar with day-to-day tasks that can be tricky or cumbersome," Facebook developers Julien Verlaguet and Alok Menghrajani recently wrote on the company's engineering blog.

But PHP hasn't gone away--Facebook and other big organizations and projects have millions of lines of code written in the language, and programmers still appreciate it for rapid development and deployment, even as they try to steer clear of its messier features.

To ease the pain of PHP programmers without making them abandon the language and years of software development, Facebook developed Hack, a new, PHP-derived language that's largely compatible with existing code and augmented with new safety features derived from functional programming languages and academic research.

"It has been specifically designed to interoperate seamlessly with PHP," says Verlaguet, the technical lead on the Hack project, whose background includes a mix of formal academic study of programming languages and industry experience. Facebook's been using and developing Hack internally for about two years, and has recently made the project open source and scheduled a public "developer day" for April 9.

"What we're doing is basically making Hack available out there to hopefully gather feedback from the community, and work with the open source community to make Hack a good experience for people outside Facebook," says Verlaguet.

Perhaps chief among Hack's innovations is the introduction of automatic type inference, a concept familiar to users of more esoteric programming languages such as Haskell and ML but less common in more mainstream languages.

Traditional PHP is dynamically typed, meaning the basic nature of a variable used in code--that is, whether it's a number or a text string or some other type of data--isn't specified until the program's actually running. Programmers enjoy that flexibility, but it creates room for errors that aren't possible in statically typed languages like Java or C, where the type of each variable is explicitly defined when code is written.

Hack takes a middle road: It lets programmers specify the types of some variables in their code and uses logic to infer the rest based on how variables are used together, issuing an error if the code's logically inconsistent. That concept itself isn't new, but it's previously been used in compiled languages, where programmers are used to waiting for their source code to translate into a form executable by the machine, and not in languages like PHP where programmers expect their code to be executable as soon as they hit save, says Verlaguet.

"The solution lies in building the type checker as a daemon," he says, referring to a background process that runs on a developer's computer. Instead of waiting for the programmer to explicitly run a compiler, the type checker asks the operating system to notify it when source code files have changed, similar to how services like Dropbox get signaled when a synced file needs an update.

"The kernel event that says that a file has changed is the starting point," he says. "Then, the new file is processed, and once the new file is processed, the two versions are compared to deduce what must be rechecked at a very fine-grained level: at the method level, not at the file level."

Individual methods that have changed are re-examined by the type checker, which makes sure they're still consistent with what it already knows about the rest of the code. Looking only at what's actually changed makes the type-checking process fast enough that programmers don't have to wait for it to run, even when they switch to new branches in a version control system like Git, Verlaguet says.

Hack also introduces other new features, like enhanced collection types such as vectors and sets to augment the PHP array and better support for short, anonymous functions used in functional programming. The new language lets Facebook gradually update its existing PHP codebase and still benefit from its longtime investment in PHP, says Ed Smith, the technical lead on Facebook's HHVM runtime engine, which will now support both Hack and PHP.

"Hack enables us to dynamically convert our code one file at a time," Smith says. "Switching to another language would be a lot more difficult."

It's too soon to say which other companies and projects will jump on the Hack bandwagon, with the project just made open source, Verlaguet says, though he notes the reception so far has been positive.

We're now entering the fifth week of the search for MH370, and here at Fast Company Labs, the fourth week of developing our Monte Carlo data model in order to figure out where it went. We determined that wherever the plane ended up, it's most likely course rules out the possibility that the plane was flying by autopilot. So were we right?

How We Modeled The Potential Flight Paths

1. First we Narrowed Down The Location Of Malaysia Air Using "Monte Carlo" Data Models.
2. Then after some feedback from Redditors, we added More About Our Methodology: Tracking MH370 With Monte Carlo Data Models.
3. Finally, we improved upon the model, showing MH370 Could Not Have Flown "Accidentally" To Its Destination.

When we read about the disappearance of MH370, we thought it would be a great real-life, real-time example of how to use computer modeling to answer the question: Where is MH370 most likely to be located?

We still can't say for sure, but we ought to be able to tell where MH370 is more or less likely to be, because we know several key data points--all of which are public information. We know:

1) Where MH370 deviated from its flight path, and we know where it was last visible to radar. And therefore...

2) We know the direction it was headed during that time period.

3) We know the approximate hourly arcs of where the plane could be, from reconstructing the Inmarsat satellite ping information. (In the spirit of our approach, we model these arcs as probabilities, not fixed locations, to account for the known error.)

In our model, we simulated the MH370's location at each hourly interval, determined from a combination of its tendency to move toward the satellite ping arcs--our known geography constraints--and not doing so in a way that would be unrealistic for a plane's flight path (for example, we ruled out the plane quickly doubling back on itself.) We assumed it was traveling at Boeing 777 cruising speed, Mach 0.83.

How Close Did We Get?

Here's what we predicted, and here's how close it has been to what we know so far.

• In the first version of the model, we ran thousands of simulations using different error margins, which all pointed to the same conclusion: MH370 is much more likely to have gone on the Southern track than on the Northern track. Additionally, we anticipated that the plane was off the West Coast of Australia. We did this just using the last ping arc for each update step, instead of all of them. Just after the model was finished, Inmarsat released Doppler analysis which was largely in agreement with our conclusions.
• In the second version of the model, we updated it to reflect new information since the model's development (6 pings, instead of 5) and by using each ping at its time step. We also reduced our error margins in line with published analysis showing the error to be within 2.5% to 5%, instead of 5% to 20%. Our final MH370 locations were now even closer to Inmarsat's analysis.

From this work came a second key conclusion: Given the possible spacings of the ping arcs, MH370 did not ever fly in a Great Circle route from its last location, to its most likely final locations off Australia. This means that the typical autopilot setting (which uses Earth's irregular sphere geometry to cover distances as efficiently as possible) could not have been used, unless waypoints were purposefully set; alternatively, the plane was flown manually.

On the day of publication, Malaysia classified the investigation as criminal, and several days later, this past Sunday, an unnamed senior government official believed that the southern route was designed to intentionally avoid Indonesian radar. That suggests foul play, presumably not at the hands of an autopilot, as we determined in our models.

More recently, there have been reports of black-box pings (separate from the satellite ping arcs) heard in the water further north than where prior search areas off Australia were, where we and Inmarsat believe the plane is most likely to be located. However, those unconfirmed black-box pings have not been heard in the several days since, and the black-box batteries will soon expire.

Next, we will further examine the range of places the plane could be using the most likely scenarios, and explain the limitations which prevent us from narrowing down the location further--stay tuned for more updates.

College students today stream movies from Netflix, queue up music on Spotify, and order late-night snacks on Seamless. But when it comes to buying textbooks, many students are still doing things the old-fashioned way: buying pricy paper copies from the campus bookstore at the start of the semester, then selling them back for a fraction of the purchase price when classes are done.

E-books were supposed to be a panacea, but the Kindle and iPad went mainstream and still relief never came. Companies trying to disrupt the industry say it has evolved slower than other content fields because the market is more indirect.

You see, textbook publishers market to professors who pick the books, not students who pay for them--where Apple and Amazon have traditionally directed their marketing. The key to innovation, these companies say, is to not try to beat the big publishing houses at their own game.

"Their customer base is not the student," says Nathan Schultz, the chief content officer at Chegg, which offers textbook rentals, e-textbooks and online study help. "Their customer base is the faculty member and, in some cases, the actual institution."

And every year brings a fresh batch of students looking to start college off right, making them wary of waiting for delivery of an online book, let alone experimenting with other ways of learning the material, says Texts.com CEO Peter Frank.

"Unlike with ordering dinner, students, especially younger students, are very unwilling to do what they perceive could put them at a disadvantage," says Frank, whose company operates a combination textbook marketplace and price-comparison engine. "They really just want to get off on the right foot."

And for students shopping with a parent's credit card, there's little incentive to shop around.

When Disruption Doesn't Work

So what's the solution? Find ways to offer students what the existing marketplace isn't delivering. "This has been attempted so many times, and the past is just riddled with failures," he says, even pointing to a list of "stupid fratboy business ideas" that includes the concept.

The problem, he says, is getting enough buyers and sellers onto a site so deals actually get made. Texts.com is attempting to get around that problem by offering buyers price comparison services for other merchants and making money off referral links as the marketplace grows.

But the students aren't the only source of inertia in the system, says Frank. Professors, many of whom grew up exclusively with print books, are often reluctant to experiment with alternatives.

"The textbook sales cycle is kind of like the pharmaceutical sales cycle," says Ariel Diaz, the CEO of Boundless, which develops interactive,cross-platform textbooks. "The one making the decision is not the one making the purchase."

And, says Chegg's Schultz, traditional publishers developing e-textbooks often contribute their own institutional inertia and just aim to render the successful print version on a screen, not build a new, interactive product.

"In general, publishers are saying don't mess with my book -- I just want you to create a digital representation of that same thing I sell in print," he says. "I'm losing the ability to create experiences for the student like 'turn my book into a flash card set' or 'turn my book into an image gallery, so I can just use the images to study from.'"

The big publishers are developing online supplements to textbooks, like Pearson's MyLab and Wiley's WileyPlus, he says. But those platforms also focus on the needs of instructors, he says.

"It makes the life of the faculty member a lot easier," Schultz acknowledges, offering features like online quizzes and reports on which students are at the top and bottom of the class. But those top-down tools might not match students' study needs, he says.

For that reason, Chegg tries to build student-centric tools, offering online study aids and expert help that supplement what students get from traditional textbook makers.

"We don't see ourselves as designing to replace that kernel," he says. "We see ourselves as an augmentation."

Considering The Professor As End User

Similarly, Boundless began by marketing its books directly to students as a low-cost supplement or alternative to their assigned textbooks, says Diaz. Boundless' textbook content is generally available for free under a Creative Commons license, and for $20 per book, students get the full interactive package with additional study tools.

"I think the key is to find innovative ways to reach the market," he says, explaining some students use Boundless' interactive books to study and then borrow a copy of an assigned textbook from a friend or the college library solely for the homework problems in the book.

"We started with a focus on students to make sure that we're building great products for them," he says. "In addition, along the way, we saw an increasing number of educators coming to Boundless to use the content in their classroom."

Now, the company's piloting customizable versions of its textbooks that professors can easily tweak to create particular reading assignments or add quizzes. With no print revenue stream to worry about or rely upon, it can easier for Boundless to innovate than a larger publisher, he says.

"I think that everybody in the industry sees that this is the future," says Diaz. "It's like any industry in transition: it's about figuring out what that transition looks like."

The most misunderstood axiom about technology among management is that building a successful digital product begins with the utility value. It doesn't require impressive branding, exquisite design, or a polished user experience, so those things should be left for last. Start with utility value and proceed from there.

As Jon Lax, cofounder of the digital agency Teehan+Lax told me: "Think about how many apps you download. You use them for two or three times and believe that they are really beautiful and well-designed. Next, you never use them again."

First Define The Scope

Utility value answers the question: What does your product offer? Defining your utility value is not usually straightforward. Lax points me to the "Jobs to be Done" framework by Harvard Business School's Clay Christensen.

Christensen focuses on the principle that we "hire" certain products and services to solve our problems. That's a great perspective to define the utility value of a digital product: Look for the same qualities in that product that you'd look for in a human being doing the same job.

"Very often clients come in saying they know their problem and they know their solution," says Lax. This is rarely the case, however. As you work on the problem you're attempting to solve, often your perspective changes. You learn to understand what the problem encompasses, including related or ancillary problems. This is called the "scope" of the problem, and it's often larger than you think.

Clarifying the scope of the problem is a matter of questioning clients and the audience that experiences the problem. By having a lengthy conversation about why it is experienced as a problem you learn that a user has certain needs you need to fulfill. Successful digital products dive deeper into the problem and discover needs which aren't necessarily obvious when you first encounter what frustrates people.

Next, Put "Jobs to be Done" Into Practice

Lax says once you've defined the scope of the problem, you can move onto core functionality. This involves reducing the purpose of the app to just one or two "main tasks."

"First we try to understand what job this product will be doing and what the core features are. That's your minimum viable product," he says.

Rather than be restrictive during the MVP process, be expansive--then whittle down your ideas to the absolute necessities.

"What are the 500 features that we potentially see a product [having]?" says Lax. "Of course, that's unreasonable as you could be working on a product for five years. What are the 10-15 that are the most important and solve the problem?"

This doesn't necessarily mean limiting the ambition of your app. "There are products which I wouldn't call simple but they do what they do very well. Look at Google Analytics," says Lax.

And forget about being a knee-jerk minimalist, too. "There's too much emphasis on that something which is gorgeous and simple will win. That's not true. That's not winning at all. I believe that you win when you create something that is valuable enough for a large enough market that uses your product on a regular basis and gives you the opportunity to build a business around it. Everything else is just noise," says Lax.

Then Shift Focus To Usability

Besides defining the utility value, usability also comes into play when creating digital products. Utility is what you offer, usability is how you offer it. In usability, there are three major principles to make sure your value offering is optimal.

1. Frequency: Prioritize what appears in your interfaces. Think about what users need frequently, then make those tasks easily accessible and blatantly visible on the page.
2. Sequence: Your UI needs a sensible order of actions. For example, you enter your credit card information at the end of an e-commerce flow, not when you initially land on the website.
3. Importance: What tasks or controls in the interface offer the most value? Design the UI around those tasks.

This is like socializing your app, says Lax. "Essentially, raise the product like a child."

Applying This Process To Extant Products

All of this makes a lot of sense for new products as you have the advantage of a clean slate, which has its pros and cons. What about old products or projects?

"Legacy is harder to deal with--you have to take more things into consideration. You have a lot more data to operate on, but that data might become limiting because you have all that legacy you need to continue to support," says Lax.

An example could be trying to make a product more accessible for a larger market. "Which users are we helping at the cost of other ones? There will be training wheels in the product. It's like switching from Final Cut Pro to iMovie. You can't make something work for everyone."

As you work on existing products, there's always an ongoing struggle. "You don't want to alienate the core audience. It requires discipline and bravery to take that risk." It's always a matter of making intelligent compromises to improve a product.

In conclusion, utility value is a useful starting point to get yourself on the right track. It's not necessarily about having a good idea, but rather about solving the right problem.

"I look at a lot of work in the digital channel as being work which has the purpose of creating demand. Their job is trying to engage you long enough to sell something," says Lax.

"On the other hand, there are products you hire to do something for you. It's the utilitarian value. Our tolerance for products simply selling something will become less and less. We want to give our attention only to products which will be solving problems in our lives," he says.

If it's two things you'd think belong nowhere near a classroom, it's immersive video games and Facebook. But not at Jackson School, a primary and secondary school outside of Melbourne. It's become one of a handful of tester schools for Oculus Rift in the classroom, even despite its link to new parent company Facebook.

"We've been using Oculus Rift to improve teaching students with disabilities, as well as potential therapeutic benefits for students with autism," says Mathieu Marunczyn, IT coordinator and a teacher at Jackson School. Students play Blue Marble, a demo game that lets players listen to their favorite music while exploring outer space. Marunczyn says that the game's peaceful chill-out effect is central to its usefulness as a classroom aid. "It allows them space away from usual school surroundings," he says.

Another Oculus demo he's been using at Jackson School is Titans of Space. It's a VR game that takes players on a tour of outer space, zooming in on planets and shrinking them down to one millionth their actual size. Marunczyn says the kids think the game is fun, but it's also jammed with actual educational content, like how many kilometers across each planet is.

But is virtual reality really learning, or is this just an expensive digital babysitter? And what happens when Facebook uses its enormous resources to push its agenda into education, whatever that might be? Is Oculus a Trojan horse?

What Facebook Wants In Your Kid's Classroom

In his Facebook.com blog post detailing his goals for Oculus, Mark Zuckerberg wrote: "We're going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences... Imagine studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world just by putting on goggles in your home." So it's clear FB has education on its VR radar.

"Facebook has access to almost one fifth of the planet," says VR expert Jeremy Bailenson. "Given Mark Zuckerberg has donated close to a billion dollars to charity, lots of it to education, I am hopeful that he can provide a unique lever to get the tech to classrooms." Bailenson founded Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, which studies the relationship between humans and VR technologies. He thinks that Facebook's inherent reach on the global populace could give VR the exposure it needs to become a mainstream utility.

And he says that once VR actually reaches schools, students will have an easy time using it, and teachers will have an easy time teaching it.

"The interface to VR is simpler than a computer," Bailenson says. "Instead of using an interface, a student simply turns her head or moves her arms." He says it's more natural-feeling, and more closely matches "learning templates we use in the real world."

But is this a good thing?

"As the technology gets more accessible and compelling, we need to manage the possible addictive aspects of immersive virtual reality," says Bailenson. And while Twitter and even Facebook have been used in classrooms to better connect teachers with students and their parents, Bailenson says "with VR, social networking will feel like a block party." An exceedingly addictive, virtual block party where you can do whatever you want with impunity. "There are no rules in VR," Bailenson says. "We can alter art without damaging it."

Wiebe de Jager is the guy making that experience possible. He's marketing manager at Europeana, a huge archive of over 30 million historical items from over 2,000 of Europe's museums and libraries. They've teamed with Dutch design agency ArchiVision to create a small, fictional museum that contains works from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. Users can "walk" around the facility and look at virtual replicas of real-life masterpieces.

De Jager points out that consumer-targeted VR is developing at breakneck pace, and "there is still no standard whatsoever." He warns organizations: "When developing VR applications, be careful not to bet on the wrong horse."

Still, Facebook may be able to do less damage to this potential learning tool than over-protective technophobic parents.

"As with anything new in education, you're immediately going to be faced with parents and staff members who will be concerned about its implications," Marunczyn says. "I've had a few people criticize me online for using the Rift with my students as it if were something barbaric or experimental." He says that since VR is so new, some people don't understand it, and it makes them uncomfortable or scared to have their kids exposed to it.

So while Facebook's influence could help extend Oculus Rift's reach in education, it doesn't change the fact that mainstream VR for consumers is in such infancy that educators' real goal should be familiarizing themselves with VR--as much as possible and as early as possible. But no matter how tremendous virtual reality's impact on education might be, one thing will always be true, says Marunczyn: "Nothing can replace a great teacher."

In the world of STEM education, coding bootcamps fill an important niche, re-educating the workforce to fill the growing number of vacant software engineering jobs in Silicon Valley and abroad. Now these bootcamps have their horizons set on traditional four-year colleges. Are the two antithetical, or will the college experience of the future be an amalgam of bootcamps and traditional semesters?

Take as an example a coding bootcamp called Hack Reactor. At the beginning of April, reps from the company met with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore to discuss how its brand of STEM education could work in the university system of that country. And now, Hack Reactor has chipped the tip of the iceberg of university partnerships stateside, in a new project with Harvard.

"We hosted a visit from a curious professor a few weeks ago, which has developed into a collaboration on Harvard's MOOC-like MCB80x," says Shawn Drost, cofounder of Hack Reactor.

Now, Hack Reactor is building a new Q&A video functionality for the neuroscience professor's course offered through the site. But a project that aims to integrate the curricula of both institutions seems further away--and one major issue is reputation.

Read the post that kicked off this discussion:Do Coding Bootcamps Produce Inferior Engineers?

Potential Student Pipelines

"We've discussed deeper partnerships with others, but universities move at a pretty slow pace, and we haven't moved on this yet," says Drost. Jeff Casimir, business manager of Jumpstart Lab and executive director of the Turing School of Software and Design, has also thought of partnering with the University of Denver but says his team is moving slowly on it.

"I see the big potential with university partnerships to be a student pipeline. Programs like ours can build skills that allow someone to become really valuable within their passion domain," Casimir says.

"Maybe you love American history and get a degree in it, but the jobs where you can apply those skills are pretty limited. Come to a program like ours, become a proficient developer, then you can go work with great teams at places like the Smithsonian or the National Park Service," says Casimir, referring to a former map-loving student who now works for the U.S. National Park Service.

Reputation Battles

Casimir notes it is difficult to win a respectable reputation in the market without the traditional entrance exams that define many universities' prestige.

"The issue there is that, given that there are no standardized tests in computer programming, it's all based on our word and our reputation. If we say you're good, everyone else is going to say you're good, too," says Casimir.

Even so, established education providers seem to overlook coding schools' main educational element and regard them more as an accessory. In the Harvard-Hack Reactor partnership, Hack Reactor provides technical support, not technical instruction about programming.

Similarly, Kaplan Test Prep had recently contacted both Hack Reactor and Jumpstart Lab to start a partnership. In fact, Kaplan reached out to many more coding bootcamps. In the end, it chose to partner up resources with the software consulting company thoughtbot, to start their forthcoming bootcamp Metis.

Although thoughbot developed the curriculum based on its in-house Ruby training programs, its expertise still lies in software development. The programming education experts are, invariably, the instructors at the coding bootcamps.

Today's discussion: I may not believe in same-sex marriage, but my company does. Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich came under fire for supporting California's Prop 8 before he became chief executive a few weeks ago. Then he abruptly resigned over the controversy. Should a CEO's personal beliefs matter to an open allocation company, where authority and oversight are so minimal?

Michael Grothaus

There are no two ways about it. Eich was right to step down. Even in an open allocation company like Mozilla, the beliefs of head employees do matter and can directly affect everyone in the community in awful ways. By donating to Proposition 8, Eich was indeed calling every LGBT employee at Mozilla inferior.

On the Riddle scale, Eich proved he would be get a score of one; tolerant people usually register a score of eight. If you are so repulsed by LGBT people that you are willing to give your money to deny them the same rights you have--I don't care if it's on your own time--how can you possibly believe you have the ability to lead your employees, many of who are LGBT, and motivate them to become the best they can be while expecting your known personal beliefs not to affect them at all?

Tina Amirtha

I beg to differ with Michael. It's not as though Eich made a public proclamation about his views on same-sex marriage while he was CEO of Mozilla--people learned about his views because the list of Prop 8 donors was public by law. How different would it have been if he had never donated money to support Prop 8, but still chose to believe privately that marriage is between a man and a woman?

This situation is vaguely reminiscent of when Marisa Mayer returned to work as CEO of Yahoo just days after giving birth to her son. The media made the move seem like Mayer's deliberate proclamation to women everywhere that taking maternity leave was unacceptable as a successful, working mother. Yet, it was her choice to come back to work. And her position at a publicly traded company should have had no bearing on how her decision panned out in the media. But if she were an elected politician, the stakes would have been different, wrote Ruth Margalit in the New Yorker.

William Saletan points out in Slate that the very social liberalism that has protected LGBTQ employees in companies has now ousted a man whose views don't align with the liberal agenda. No, he is not a minority, and no, he does not generally need society to fight for his basic rights. But, his right to contribute to Mozilla is just the same as anyone else's.

Bryan Lufkin

Startups and tech companies often spout their "values": affordable luxury! Privacy! Sustainable mayo! So when a CEO broadcasts an opinion that can damage those values-based reputations and divide users, then yeah, he or she should probably step down. Or at least remove themselves from public scrutiny, and keep those beliefs private. That's not to say these people aren't allowed to have opinions. But even beyond the techscape, PR nightmares like these have consequences. In this case, lots of Mozilla users are millennials, and according to Pew, nearly 70% of that group is pro-gay marriage. So a Prop 8-backing CEO probably won't get Gen Y-ers to flock to Firefox and Thunderbird.

Ciara Byrne

This is a case of pre-crime. Eich was forced to resign for what he might do: use his position as CEO of the Mozilla Foundation to discriminate against its LGBT employees or against members of Mozilla's community. But nobody has produced evidence that in all the years since Eich helped found the Mozilla project in 1998, that he has done anything of the kind, or planned to do so.

Eich is the creator of JavaScript, one of the backbone technologies of the World Wide Web. He is eminently qualified to set Mozilla's technical direction. As CEO, his conduct on any professional issue, including discrimination, should be examined, but Eich never got the chance to be CEO. The whole episode looks disturbingly like a witch-hunt.

The best commentary I have seen on the furore came from VentureBeat's managing editor Jolie O' Dell, who interviewed Eich shortly before his resignation and who also happens to be gay. "Personally, I don't know or want to know why he made that donation because, like Eich, I don't think it has any bearing on his performance as CEO," says O' Dell. "He is, in my own opinion, on the wrong side of history. He might be sparking the HR nightmare of the decade. And as unwilling a participant as he may be, he is nevertheless a real part of institutional homophobia, as are many of his peers in the tech CEO community. But he's still a great technologist with a lot of good to do in the world."

As professional technologists, as long as you share the same broad technical and ethical goals for a product and can work together with your team to reach them, that's all that matters--not your private views.

Tech parties often get a bad rap. At one recent event, the organizers paid for a 600-pound tiger in a cage and a monkey trained to pose for Instagram photos. Another party for a prominent Googler featured mounds of manmade snow in 70-degree weather. But not all corporate parties are the epitome of Silicon Valley excess.

In fact, historically the best Valley parties have left a huge mark on the industry.

The Importance Of Creating Connections

When people think of tech industry parties, the Startup and Tech Mixer may come to mind. Founded by Ari Kalfayan and Apple alum Andrew Vecchio, the Silicon Valley event has rapidly grown from a 75-person house party to a 2,500-person tech event. Mixing TED-style talks with mechanical bulls and in-door jousting, the Mixer was recently unflatteringly described by Valleywag as "the tech party so obnoxious it doesn't seem real."

While your chances of bumping into the mythical "brogrammer" stereotype may increase at an event like the Startup and Tech Mixer, Kalfayan and Vecchio are clear to point out that what they were doing with the event was to take a typically startup approach to the idea of tech parties. In other words, they took a problem (how to connect people in an often disconnected place like Silicon Valley) and tried their best to answer it.

"What we realized was how hard people work in Silicon Valley, and how often they are inwards-focused and don't have the time or opportunity to connect with other people," says Kalfayan.

Certainly it's one of the big ironies of today that the people helping to create the social networks and other tools designed to help us connect can often be antisocial themselves. While there's not necessarily any problem with being introverted, it can result in missing out on many of the serendipitous events that result in truly memorable innovations.

"When we've said [in the past] that the Startup and Tech Mixer wasn't a party it's because we didn't envision it being about people getting drunk or hooking up or doing any of the other things associated with nightlife," Kalfayan continues. "For me, a party is forcing everyone into one big room, handing them a drink, and saying, 'Connect.'"

With attendees from Google, Apple, Cisco, and Facebook--as well as dozens of smaller startups--the Startup and Tech Mixer certainly provides an opportunity to connect with exciting people. However, Kalfayan and Vecchio wanted to make sure that these connections were more about inspiration and genuine connections than just cynical networking. Because of this, the event features a range of talks, rooms themed by passions and values, or just entertaining ways of letting off steam.

"Because our events take place on a Friday night, after people get in from work, we wanted to create fun spaces to allow people to let loose," Kalfayan says. "That might be the bar, or an interactive exhibit, or arcade games, or the mechanical bull, or jousting--we just wanted to create unique spaces where people could have fun. Because if people are having fun they're more likely to be inspired, and to be 'present' in a way that feels authentic. Our mission statement is to build a more connected community."

SuperHappyDevHouse: Hacking The Party Scene

While events like the Startup and Tech Mixer focus on streamlining the social side of the party experience, other events focus on creating actual products--albeit in the kind of relaxed, free-form way that would not typically be possible in a work environment.

For the past eight years, engineers from companies including Google, Oracle, and others have gathered once a month for an event called SuperHappyDevHouse--a concept created as parties for hackers and thinkers. Starting out as 150 to 200 people in the Bay Area, SuperHappyDevHouse has now expanded internationally--with events in places as far-flung as New Zealand, Switzerland, and the U.K.

"SuperHappyDevHouse is really a monthly party for hackers, where they can get together and have a 24-hour hackathon," says Celestine Johnson, innovation partner at Innovation Endeavors. "The party element is about people coming together to create cool things that they're really passionate about, but may not normally have the time to do because they're too busy with work. It's also a great chance to get feedback from each other. It's a really collaborative atmosphere, with food and drink served, and good music playing. It's non-stop creation that's happening."

Each SuperHappyDevHouse event ends with a series of what are called Lightning Talks. These are five-minute talks given by developers in which they can present a new project that was fully coded during the devhouse in question. Lightning Talks help keep the party vibe of the event going by opening projects up for questioning and scrutiny from the group. Although this is the most organized part of SuperHappyDevHouse events, it still remains refreshingly relaxed and agenda-free: Using them to pitch your company, recruit new talent, or demo a product you're trying to sell are all strictly prohibited.

Despite its lack of focus on many of the "business networking" elements often seen at tech parties, DevHouse has been key in creating new products and ways of doing business. Programmer and inventor Otávio Good met his cofounder of augmented reality translation app Word Lens at the event. Discovery fund Mexican.vc and Hack the Future also happened as a result of DevHouse--while Facebook and Yahoo's hackathons are the direct results of the event.

"A lesson I think people could learn for their own businesses from SuperHappyDevHouse is to foster the kind of free-form, playful environment that makes people feel comfortable trying new things," Johnson says.

"There's definitely something to be said when it comes to using play in a way that lets people better connect to one another--where they're outside their comfort zone and open to new ideas. There's also kind of cross-pollination with artists and other creatives [I've also seen come out of the events] which can result in really inspiring content. It means thinking out of the box, and that's when really innovative things start to happen."

What's Old Is New Again

While technology moves quickly, this free-form party approach to innovation and startup culture in Silicon Valley goes back a number of years. In the 1960s and '70s Silicon Valley was known for two things: computers and the counterculture. In equal parts, both of these ideas helped structure the modern tech industry as we know it--a place where making money and providing profitable quarterly earnings is certainly important, but perhaps not quite as important as changing the world.

Although part of the '60s counterculture was certainly a response to specific political events happening at the time, an equally large aspect of it was simply about transforming the way people lived and worked. Look at business manuals from the time, for instance, and you'll find writers like Yale Law School professor Charles Reich who described how people could choose concepts like "liberty" and "freedom" over the routinized "robot life" of their parents. Partying was not simply about avoiding work--it was about imagining a whole different way to work.

"Silicon Valley has always been characterized by the conflict between the corporations to patent and lock down everything in sight, versus the zeal of rebels to share ideas," says Jim Warren, a retired computer programmer, entrepreneur, and activist. "I think you could look at something like the open-source movement as a direct example of the rebellious attitude you're talking about [with this article]."

Back in the 1960s, Warren became known for hosting "clothing-optional" parties in the Bay Area--events which attracted a large number of frustrated Silicon Valley engineers, including many IBM employees. Inspired by the success of his parties, and believing that there was a link to be found between innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, Warren went on to play a role in creating events such as the West Coast Computer Faire and the Homebrew Computer Club.

Why should you care about either of these? Because without them we wouldn't have some of today's most influential tech companies--including Apple, whose earliest computers premiered at Homebrew and began selling at the Computer Faire. By breaking down hierarchies and opening the doors to all comers, events like Homebrew and the West Coast Computer Faire started a way of thinking about innovation that leads directly to modern-day ventures like SuperHappyDevHouse. Key with all of these events is that partying isn't simply an awkward add-on to an existing corporate infrastructure, but a whole new way of thinking about business.

Rolling Out The Tech Party

Today the "tech party" approach to innovation can be seen in everything from the smallest hackathon to giant events like Burning Man. A more relaxed approach to business--based on party-like concepts such as serendipity and the gift economy--further serve to demonstrate just how core these ideas are to shaping social media and other aspects of tech here in 2014.

While a certain percentage of people are going to dismiss tech parties as elitist regardless of what they do, there has also been a real concerted effort to widen participation in this area. "When I saw how well the party environment was working [for SuperHappyDevHouse] I decided to try and scale it up," Johnson says. In 2012 she created what became known as the Super Happy Block Party Hackathon--which has only grown in prominence in the years since.

"I wanted to take the party DNA of the SuperHappyDevHouse, but make it something was accessible to the wider community," she continues. "Block Party was about bringing together entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, hackers, and the general public for a day-long event."

Ari Kalfayan and Andrew Vecchio are also keen to open up the Startup and Tech Mixer beyond just San Francisco. "Our three-year plan is to take this international," says Kalfayan. "Since our business is based on connecting people and exposing them to new ideas, we feel that this will help us take what we're doing to another level."

Silicon Valley has always been about play. Now it's time to roll that idea out globally.

Ted Henderson knows the inefficiencies of Capitol Hill all too well. But after seeing how technology can impact democracy, the former Congressional staffer set out to build an app that would change the relationship between representatives and their constituents. It's a badly needed disruption of old-school pagers as the Hill's information pipeline--and it just might work.

Capitol Bells recently launched as a web app, eight months after Henderson's creation first landed on smartphones. The app lets users upvote popular bill opinions--and then compares them to your personal district representative's record.Users can champion or condemn upcoming bill "Motions" and add a blurb of commentary for others to upvote, Reddit-style.

Get enough support and your fiery Motion rockets to the top of your district's page--or the even the pan-district Top Trending page. But the point isn't to preach within Capitol Bells' choir.

"The real point is to reach out to friends who aren't really engaged in politics," Henderson says. "You can reach out to them on Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter and say 'Hey, there's this bill and here's what I think about it and you should act on it.'"

Best of all, the web app lets you compare your "voting record" with that of your representative, along with the rest of the folks in your district. Requiring users to "vote" yay or nay on bill Motions they support/condemn lets Capitol Bells compare apples to apples between users, communities, and politicians. But the way users phrase their blurb justifying their position is important to drawing new users to Capitol Bells: Few people know what "Vote yes on HR 499" means but everyone understands "I support the legalization of marijuana."

Drawing Inspiration From The SOPA Backlash

Henderson first envisioned Capitol Bells when he saw the groundswell of anti-SOPA momentum. As a staffer for Rep. Dale Kildee (D-MI) on Capitol Hill at the time, he saw phone lines and email blow up to stop SOPA--and realized that the anti-SOPA effort was a super-effective grassroots movement thanks to support infrastructure from the EFF, Google, and Wikipedia. He wants us, the people, to be able to do it again.

Shortly after his congressman retired from office, Henderson started coding what would become the Capitol Bells smartphone app, which Henderson says was always "the egg" for the web app to follow.

"The web app is not really so much a forum as a tool to reach people who are harder to reach and engage and keep it on the record," Henderson says.

The web app will be a platform upon which congressmen and constituents can meet on neutral ground, where everyone can see what the constituency wants and how the members of Congress voted. Henderson's staff days proved to him that staffer-written response letters get a congressman's signature but no eyeballs.

When building an app to remake the legislative process, it helps to have elected officials as beta testers. Congresswoman Grace Meng, Congressman Matt Cartwright, Congressman John Garamendi, and Congressman Jared Polis all helped try it out.

"Jared Polis has been especially involved. As someone who's both a successful tech entrepreneur and a member of Congress, having Jared as a mentor has been invaluable."

Only physically going into the office could get a busy congressman's attention, something few individuals can make time for. That leaves congressional colleagues, lobbyists, and trade groups as the people most likely to have the time and money to score face time with a congressman. With Capitol Bells' web app, users get what Henderson terms "social media-style constituent correspondence."

Eventually, the Motion-voting web app functionality will cross over into the smartphone app--but that's after Henderson secures funding. He coded the smartphone and web apps himself with a combination of Python, Objective-C, Java, HTML/CSS, and AngularJS. He's shifted over to Google App Engine, which will automatically spin up more servers according to user demand, but creating a united codebase across phone and web apps will have to wait until he can afford to make Capitol Bells more than a one-man operation.

Through wondrous networking, Henderson earned a spot on the current crop of startups at Acceleprise, a DC-based incubator. He estimates around $500,000 in funding would be needed to expand Capitol Bells. Some of Henderson's more dramatic feature ideas harness the raw data coming in: a leaderboard of people who vote like you and perhaps even recognition of who among the Capitol Bells power users vote closer to you than your current representative.

Henderson hopes that Capitol Bells (or something like it) will finally push congressmen to hire a constituent analyst to harness all that constituent-voting data. Not only would it be a much more accurate way to hear what people in their district are saying--it would allow congressmen to communicate back.

If Facebook's acquisition of Oculus Rift for $2 billion last month did anything, it cemented crowdfunding as another rocket ship for growing startups. I'm in the middle of my own hardware Kickstarter campaign, so I decided to talk to those startups that raised one million bucks or more and share the advice I got in this article. Here's what I learned.

1) Study Successful Videos

It's almost a cliche now to say the most important part of a good Kickstarter campaign is the video. In its educational docs, Kickstarter says projects with videos succeed 54% of the time while projects without videos succeed only 39% of the time. Adam Rodnitzky and Jeff Powers, creators of the Structure Sensor, a camera attachment for 3-D scanning and CAD rendering on mobile devices, which raised almost $1.3 million, told me there's far more to it.

"[We] built an internal standard for all of our campaign assets--video, copy, image--that we felt met that standard we saw in other successful campaigns," says Rodnitzky. He and Powers set out to raise more than $1 million and studied the projects that had succeeded.

"Most people thinking about a crowdfunding campaign are already aware of the importance of the video. For us, we saw it as critical to our campaign's success--so much so, in fact, that we reshot our entire video three times before we finally felt that it was ready for our campaign. We also networked heavily to find the right people to lend legitimacy to our campaign by appearing in our video."

Study Kickstarter videos, they say, and you'll begin to hone an intuition for it.

"We became students of successful campaigns, and looked for patterns of what they did that led to their success. In fact, we even reached the point where we could watch a campaign's video and accurately guess how successful it was or would be," said Rodnitzky.

2) Help People Share Your Video

But Rodnitzky notes that the video is only as useful for garnering pledges as the number of people that see it. So during the campaign he and Powers built customtools to help their backers spread the word about the campaign to others.

"We crafted entertaining backer updates that went above and beyond what was typical to make sure our backers were informed and felt that they were a part of our journey. We even used judicious digital advertising in highly targeted venues to drive people who might otherwise not visit Kickstarter to our campaign to back us."

While raising nearly $1.3 million would make most founders happy, Rodnitzky says he and Powers would have done one thing differently if they could do it over again.

"We had hoped to launch a second video in the middle of our campaign to beat the doldrums that inevitably happen. Unfortunately, we didn't have the capacity to do that. Perhaps knowing our constraints prior to planning that could have been helpful."

3) Show, Don't Tell

"We crossed the $1 million mark on Day 2," says Daniel Cowen, one of the cofounders of 3Doodler, a pen the size of a hot glue gun that allows you to draw 3-D figures in the form of dispelled blue plastic, which raised a total of $2.3 million on Kickstarter. How?

"Really think about how you are going to show off your item," Cowen says. "And 'show off' is very intentional here. As someone smart told us, Kickstarter is more show and less tell. Share that vision of what can be created if backers get behind you. Make sure your video grabs people in the first 20 seconds. If you don't do that then the drop-off rate can be fatal. Have completely uninformed third parties proofread your campaign pages with a view to keeping them simple, digestible, and engaging. Don't overcomplicate your backing levels, either. Backers need to know what they are backing in an instant."

4) Don't Blow An Early Lead

Due to the excitement of hitting the $1 million mark in only 48 hours, Cowen from 3Doodler says he almost jeopardized the rest of his campaign.

"We almost tripped over ourselves in the early days of the campaign," he says. "In our desire to thrill backers even more, we came close to announcing a stretch goal in the form of some accessories for the pen. This would have been a mistake, and we received some very wise advice just in time: 'Focus on your core product, and don't overextend yourself. People are thrilled by what you are doing, and they'll be even more thrilled if you deliver that one great product on time. Don't jeopardize that.'"

5) Go On A Road Show

"We knew that the Kickstarter community was very active and held a level of credibility in the gaming industry," says Jan Goetgeluk, creator of the Omni, an omni-directional treadmill that enables natural movement and creates an unprecedented sense of immersion and presence within the virtual environment. "In the five months before we launched the Omni on Kickstarter we were sure to be active across all fronts."

Not only did and Goetgeluk his team participate at trade shows and engaged with the press and potential users on social media--they also hit the road, literally.

"We hosted a West Coast road show where I drove the Omni around in the back of a van," Goetgeluk says. "I started in Seattle and wound my way to Los Angeles, making stops along the way and showing people the Omni."

All of this, according to Goetgeluk, helped he and his team to prepare and build a loyal following who backed them on Day 1 of launch.

6) Create A Feeling Of Scarcity

But the other part of Omni's success was almost the opposite of generating awareness. Most Kickstarter campaigns can be 30 days or longer. That length of time doesn't necessarily compel people to back campaigns right away. Goetgeluk says the way to spur people to back you early is by creating scarcity with special time-sensitive offers that make people pull the trigger.

"It's important to find ways to create scarcity and demand for your Kickstarter campaign, rolling out efforts such as early bird specials, limited offers, and price discounts."

Scarcity, he says, generates early pledging, which generates increased awareness, which can snowball into hundreds or thousands of backers.

7) Try Mixing Up Your "Tiers"

The way Kickstarter campaigns have always worked--until this week--is that there are different levels, or tiers, of pledges. The more you pledge, the more schwag you usually get with the product you're pre-ordering. But no matter what, everyone always gets the main product at the same time.

That methodology went out the window this week thanks to the Micro, the world's first consumer-grade 3-D printer that surpassed the $1 million Kickstarter funding level in just eleven minutes.

"When we hit that level so quickly it was surreal," says Michael Armani, creator of the Micro. "We've definitely imagined the possibility of reaching that goal, and we had production plans in place for different levels of support, we just didn't expect to hit it so early in the campaign. And we aren't even 10% into our campaign yet!"

While Armani credits the amount of funding the Micro has raised (to date over $2.5 million) to a community and a consumer market of people who want an elegantly designed, low-cost 3-D printer, he notes that turning Kickstarter's tier rewards structure on its head also spurred backers.

"We challenged the status quo by trying a different reward structure," Armani says, "so that people who pay more money get an earlier printer. This was necessary since faster production requires smaller lots and has far more costs. It allows us to honor early backers by getting them a printer from a well-established production batch and at an incredible discount price."

Armani admits that since no other Kickstarter campaigns had done this in the past it surprised a few backers. "The vast majority of backers were silent about it, with many people praising the shift saying that it was the most fair structure they've seen. Some backers had yet to appreciate our reasoning fully, but after discussing it with them it became clear that many of them appreciated it."

But at $2.5 million and counting with 25 days to go, Armani recommends other Kickstarter campaigns try his approach. "We recommend it and anyone following in our footsteps now will refer to our success of using the reverse tier structure, and it will be less surprising to their backers."

8) Keep It About Product, Not Profits

"Kickstarter is a great place to start a hardware business," says Severin Marcombes, one of the founders of Lima, a piece of hardware which allows you to unify the files across all your devices. "When you're two young engineers and want to start the next Apple, investors ask you for two things before investing: to get a first product out, and to show your ability to sell it. Kickstarter enables you to do both."

The Lima team spent nine months preparing their Kickstarter campaign. "We did 19 versions of the Kickstarter page and 21 versions of the video scenario. We also spent a lot of time packing all our R&D into a complete product," Marcombes says.

So many versions of a campaign page and video might seem a bit obsessive, but that's because Marcombes believes Kickstarter is a place to show off your product instead of worrying about making a profit. He believes people who use Kickstarter just to turn a quick buck are going down the wrong path.

"The best advice for me is that to start a Kickstarter campaign, you shouldn't be looking for profits. It's all about the product and the way you present it. After all, a campaign is a communication strategy. You should be hoping for feedback and for market validation more than money. That's really where the best value of Kickstarter is."

Lima ended up raising over $1.2 million on Kickstarter due to Marcombes' approach.

9) Be Ready For A Full-Time Job

"The first feelings were the same for me as they probably would be for anyone in the same situation: a great sense of exhilaration and a massive sense of pride in what the team had achieved," Phil Bosua, cofounder of LIFX says. He raised $1.3 million on Kickstarter for his smart LED lightbulb, equipped with a range of mood lighting and manipulated through smartphones over Wi-Fi.

But once the excitement passed, he says, "the next feeling was blind panic. It's quite a responsibility to scale a company from zero to hero completely in the public eye."

A big part of that blind panic of scaling is not just about scaling as it relates to engineering or production. It's about being able to scale your communication efforts during the campaign.

"The campaign was definitely a full time job for multiple people," Bosua says. "Work on our project did not stop during this time but was certainly affected for the duration of the campaign. Running these things is all encompassing."

Matter of fact, Bosua says, "The biggest mistake we made along the way was underestimating the time and energy required to answer the hundreds of Kickstarter private messages we got every day, as well as the time to talk to press and bloggers. If I did it all over again I would set up a more structured approach to manage inbound questions."

10) Have A Communications Strategy

Structure Sensor's Adam Rodnitzky told me that initially, his team was "overwhelmed by the backer response and the influx of queries that came to our public wall, our private messages, our email accounts, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera." Cleaning up those accounts, setting up email filters and rules, and using IFTTT to auto-sort social messages would have been a smart move. "It took us some time to create a great response strategy that let us rapidly respond to everyone who reached out to us," he says.

Lima's Severin Marcombes said, "We didn't expect to have so much interactions with the backers. We exchanged about 6,000 messages back and forth during the campaign."

But perhaps 3Doodler's Daniel Cowen sums it up best: "As we advised another Kickstarter recently: You are in for a crazy ride. The next few days will be some of the most intense you have ever had. The next few months will be equally insane as you build not only a product, but a company. And you still won't be coming up for much air a year from now. But enjoy it as much as you can. It's an amazing ride and it's one that few get to take."

With more than 200 companies from publishing to health information services, Hearst is a big company. The kind that usually creates special research units to figure out how to cope with future technologies, like the boom in mobile device usage. But Hearst CTO Philip Wiser says that's exactly what his company didn't do.

"I'm not a big believer in a large, centralized R&D group," Wiser says. "If you have a centralized R&D group that's trying to envision what's going to happen five-plus years out, you're likely going to miss the mark. In the context of a content and information company like Hearst, I think it has to be much more pragmatic and focused on issues that we're facing within the next year or so rather than looking out five to 10 years."

Delegate to Developers

Instead of one R&D group, Wiser decided to decentralize his company's experiments with new tech. So he opened up Hearst's data to a select pool of developer partners--many of which have already surprised him with new ways of viewing magazine content.

Last year, Hearst partnered with a magazine at another publisher, Hachette Filipacchi Media's fashion magazine Elle, to create the first magazine optimized for Google Glass called Glassware.

"We felt that doing that would give us insight into how we would develop content and products with the next generation of wearable devices with different form factors and much more real-time interaction with the consumer," says Wiser. "It's a strategy where we have key domain experts that drop in and partner with other brand's teams to develop prototypes based on where we think the market is going and where technology is going."

In addition to internal collaboration, Wiser says the company has been experimenting with colleges. Recently, a Parsons student presented an image-based navigation tool that is now in serious development at Hearst.

"It will let users look at all the images across Hearst Magazines and let them browse using a mediated trail to find content of interest," Wiser says. "It's a very different approach than going into a branded destination site and looking at that information as a way of re-aggregating the content that works really well on mobile devices."

With the success of projects coming out of such collaborations, Wiser says the company is in the process of creating an even more public API.

"With our hackathons and development to date, we've found some experimentation and we haven't really taken it to an external party yet but we expect to do that this year. What we're trying to do right now is create the right framework so that when a third party develops against these APIs, they can develop something that can be useful in the marketplace.

"We see that with open APIs ranging from companies ranging from Twitter to Google are enabling the community of developers to move very quickly--that is the hacker mentality and that's what we're going for."

Better, Faster, Stronger Workflow

Wiser says that along with APIs, having a technologist perspective has been essential to making a company's R&D move at the necessary speed.

"Even when you have R&D or you have people hacking and developing things in a medical manner, general business management is trying to operate based on a rigid annual plan or a rigid product plan. Of all our challenges, that's been our single biggest challenge--to operate our businesses in a way that really supports this real-time innovation."

He says removing the distraction of traditional tech operating groups in the minds of higher-ups has worked as a good strategy.

"Changing the perspectives of what tech means within operating groups, general business leaders, presidents, the CMO and to different divisions on how they view tech as a partner in meeting our goals is important. Developing the talent is a key prerequisite to developing the tech," Wiser says.

"Trying to go in and teach a traditional IT team and ask them to do product development is obviously not in their traditional skill set. So we really focus on taking the traditional IT functions and pulling that into common teams so we can teach them to develop more custom product to work with the technical talent within the operating groups."

To stay up on the technical talent, Wiser says Hearst brought in a former Amazon.com employee with specific expertise in programmable interfaces and cloud infrastructure. He says bringing in talent with various technical and entrepreneurial backgrounds has been key to changing the culture and R&D efficiency.

"We're developing that culture so that this emerging wave of the next generation of technologists is really attracted to it. By bringing in talent from emerging media companies, pure online digital plays that are coming over to Hearst and finding the scale and support--I think that's just starting to create a really nice, virtuous cycle within the company right now."

Battle of The Hearst Hackers

By challenging internal and external developers to see who can create the best product first, Wiser has found that the friendly competition results in a quicker, more inspiring development process.

"With existing talent in the company, there is a strong desire to do hacker-like things--I've been delighted by the amount of people that raised their hands and really stepped up when given the opportunity. I think it's important to understand that a lot of what I consider fresh talent in the company has been within the company for quite a while but really sees the opportunity to do something bigger and better."

Wiser says there's a common quote the team uses to inspire and challenge them during development: "Ninety percent of the revenue that's currently generated across Hearst comes from businesses that did not exist in 1979--when our CEO took over."

He says it goes back to treating developers like the artists they are--not just another IT department to call for secondhand help.

"If you recognize that and give them the ability to create something really great--and you give them a platform where they can impact hundreds of millions of consumers on B2B scale and major industries like health care--you have the ability to affect large-scale change."

"Get the right technical talent in the company and let them do great things. I think that by celebrating and promoting those that have taken some risk and developed something creative makes others want that kind of recognition. It's that simple."

Aggregating Audience Data

In order to narrow down the right expansions on which to focus R&D efforts, Wiser says he and the team have needed to find innovative ways of using and measuring audience data.

"Moving to the cloud forces us to rethink the way we develop and some of the courtship abilities we have around things like audience data--that aggregation and use of data is a real asset to drive new products and elements of our business being a content and information company."

Wiser says the company has been able to create a company-wide data set of both on- and offline companies.

"We touch more than 100 million consumers each month online, we've now instrumented those digital touch points with off-line consumers--which is a much larger set of consumers. We're using that to create company-wide audience data sets that we can use to deliver personalized product."

But Wiser says big audience data has its drawbacks when it comes to focusing on key efforts--even with a big corporate budget.

"It's very easy to get enamored with the latest technical trends or being interested in too many areas that are impacting our products. You could waste a lot of time and money building the wrong things the wrong way if you don't have a good understanding of the data and objective decision-making of it. But to really affect change across hundreds of millions of people with content--that requires a lot of focus."

He says that finding where audience data meets profit works well for determining where to focus efforts for the next year.

"I've focused on the first couple of projects on the areas where we can really see real quantifiable business impact. And once we've built confidence and capabilities--then we could look at longer-term R&D efforts," he says.

"On the audience data side, we look at the rising use of programmatic buy-ins for online advertising and that could buy us an opportunity to apply some of our data analytics to give us a competitive advantage in the programmatic stages. Then, if we can improve on engagement with advertisers and the amount of where CTM lies with online exchanges, we have real quantitative measures to know that the tech we're building is producing a real, viable result."

Tracking progress on that data is one thing, but measuring overall innovation is another thing--one that Wiser has yet to quantify.

"We haven't yet conquered tracking performance and measuring what an increase in innovation and creating better products really means objectively," Wiser says. "You can look at the overall earnings of the company and if it's performing better but really providing something of substance to know whether or not you truly are creating a more agile or innovative organization--I think the jury is still out for that."

This past December, Foursquare users noticed something a bit different about the way their app worked. When they visited new venues or even new neighborhoods, their phones would ping them with tips about the location or requests to check in. These push notifications were entirely passive--even if a phone was lying in a user's pocketbook unused, it would still alert them to tips about visiting the Mission District or having dinner at Peter Luger. But Foursquare's technology wasn't built on thin air: They leveraged a newish technique called geotriggering, which is working its way into more and more apps.

Geotriggering services are offered through a few different SDKs for developers to experiment with; the best known is provided by mapping giant Esri and chipmaker Qualcomm's Gimbal. Esri's Johann Herrlin told Co.Labs that the goal of their geotriggering SDK was to "create location awareness applications. We want developers to be able to create immersive experience in apps where messages and other events can be triggered based on your' phones location." He likened the function to an invisible button that, once triggered by a user's geographic presence, can launch all sorts of actions--not just tips to open Foursquare. Both Esri and Qualcomm offer geotriggering capabilities that go far beyond iOS and Android's built-in capabilities--for instance, they offer the ability to trigger events by a user browsing a particular store aisle or driving down a particular highway.

There's big business in coders shaping their apps to turn users' physical locations into event triggers. These triggers wildly vary. In two case studies offered up by Esri, geotriggers were used in retail and surveillance apps. On the advertising side, 7-11 and Pepsi teamed up for a geotriggering app to promote AMP Energy Drinks. Whenever a user was in close physical proximity to a 7-11 that stocked AMP, the app would automatically send a push notification to their phone that the store had the drinks in the fridge. This was an opt-in promotion--users had to download a special app and were rewarded by prizes and swag--that gave additional bonuses to downloaders who then scanned drink barcodes inside 7-11 stores.

Meanwhile, geotriggers were used by uKnow, a manufacturer of apps that let parents monitor their childrens' Internet activity, social media usage, and physical location. By adopting Esri's SDK, uKnow set up functionality that lets parents or caregivers have their phones automatically messaged whenever a child enters a location they geofenced-whether it's a school, a mall, or a friend's home. Uknow's app also keeps extensive records for parents of where and for how long the children are at each physical location; the only technological skill required is knowing how to input an address or a landmark into an app.

According to Herrlin, geotriggers are also used in apps for a variety of other purposes related to tracking users and incentivizing physical locations. For instance, app makers can build quiet customer logging capabilities into their app; anytime a user with an app running in the background for a store walks past that store, the geotrigger capability quietly triggers a note in the company's internal servers that the customer walked by. But the big usage area is for companies building internal apps for employees. He cited organizations that contacted Esri looking for a way for proprietary smartphone apps to automatically send messages to employees if a customer who has ordered items online enters their store. Other uses include proprietary apps for internal use at financial services organizations that contain geotriggers which only let the app be used at a secure location like an office; the geotrigger automatically notifies IT if a user attempts to log in from an insecure place like a coffee shop.

Photo by Nicolas Raymond

What's the quickest way to start looping your digital emotions? Sure, you could fire up Photoshop and start building an animated GIF the old-fashioned way, but today's mobile-connected, share-crazy Internet demands something quicker. We tried out several GIF-making tools and rounded up some of the best, funnest, and simplest options.

1) Gifff.fr

In a word, Gifff.fr is easy. The site asks for a YouTube link and then crunches the video into a GIF. You can choose different sizes and speeds as well as also adding text on top or bottom. If the GIF is small enough in size--under 2MB--the site will then offer the option to post it to Imgur, or if it's too large then to Cloudpix. If you have other intentions for your masterpiece, the file can also be downloaded.

The whole process is very straightforward and a breeze when it works. In testing, there were a few minor connection hiccups, but it's hard to tell if it was attributable to the site or another factor. There are, of course, other YouTube to GIF solutions, like Makeagif or Gifsoup, but Gifff.fr is by far the best designed and not into the watermarking or spammy clutter.

Also read: Why Pinterest's Small GIF Performance Problems Matter Big Time For Team Morale

2) Face To Gif

Face To Gif is a bare-bones way to really personalize the emotion you're trying to indefinitely loop. Each generated GIF has a random, unguessable URL so it's up to you how far and wide your animation will spread.

Activating your webcam prompts a countdown before recording whatever it can see. From there, everything runs client-side. So no one will see any data unless you save it and share it. Being client-side also means that the web app will only run as fast as your computer. On a Retina Macbook Pro, I didn't have any hiccups, but there's a good chance older machines will experience slowness.

3) Recordit

Recordit gives GIFs a more productive use case than looped bloopers and cute cat clips: mini-screencats. The super-handy isn't solely for GIFs, but takes the idea that you might want short, embed-able .gifs to demonstrate on-screen functions rather than full videos.

The free Mac version of Recordit allows for five minutes of recording. After finishing a screen cast, the video is uploaded and given its own URL for easy sharing.

But the clever part is the "Generate GIF" button on each video. After crunching the video, a .gif file is presented and you can be on your way. The whole process is looped on the site's homepage as well. LICEcap is alternative screen capture program that can record directly to .gif, but in comparison, Recordit has taken simplicity to another level.

4) Gif Remix

Gif Remixer is an iPhone app that puts a little spin on GIF creation by letting you add sound. You can search their audio repository or record your own voice. The biggest challenge is narrowing down what sound you're going for, and then finding it. But again, you can always make the sound effect yourself.

5) Gif Brewery

A popular Mac app, Gif Brewery, is trying to take the legwork out for users that have personal videos on their main machines and want to convert short clips directly to GIFs.

The app allows users more customization options than some of the web or mobile apps, like amount of frames and adding delays. Plus there's also support for playing clips in reverse, text overlays, and color effects.

One thing it also has is mixed reviews, it seems to be a favorite or a flop, but the app is still being updated regularly.

6) Gifpop

Gifpop lets you create your own physical GIF cards. That's right, you can make your own or choose between a few artist prints and hold a GIF in your hands.

Gifpop's physical GIFs are created by printing up to 10 frames on lenticular paper. It's a special solution that Gifpop worked on and originally put on sale through a Kickstarter project. The cards have since blossomed into its own business available to anyone.

It doesn't come cheap, however, at $20 for a 3"x3" version or $100 for a 10"x10" version.

7) GifYourself

GifYourself is another handy way to personalize the sentiment you're trying to convey.

The iPhone app is all about instant gratification. GIFs are sorted into basic categories--including sponsored images--with each category filled with a manageable amount of GIFs, as opposed to several hundred of them.

Adding your face to a popular GIF can provide for quite a few laughs, but the results aren't perfect. As you might expect, adding a layer to something moving can be difficult to maintain the illusion. Still, it gets the job done and quick enough to use as a response to a text message.

Because you're able to use existing photos from your camera roll, in addition to taking new pictures, there's also the possibility of using other people's faces. Just use this feature wisely.

Call 2014 the year of the GIF. First Tumblr, then Twitter, then our own Fast Company homepage, and now Pinterest are using the file type. But as whimsical as they seem, GIFs present big technical challenges: They have large file sizes and stream slowly on the web. Compared to an HTML5 video, a GIF that contains the same content is slower and much larger than the video. Not only that, the GIF format compresses visual data into horribly low-quality imagery unless the colors are uniform.

But GIFs still beat out videos on the web for popularity. The HTML5 tag that supports video formats, video, just doesn't translate to every type of web content, like email signatures, blog themes, and emoticons. GIFs, however, require only the img tag, which is more universal on the web.

"We've known for a while that [GIF support] is something that would benefit Pinners," says Ludo Antonov, growth engineer at Pinterest. "But the biggest question was... How?"

Making GIFs Usable On Pinterest

The first problem to solve was performance.

Without special GIF support, web pages continually loop GIFs without control. On a site where several GIFs might appear on the same page, like on Pinterest's, that makes pages load slowly due to lessened bandwidth, and the individual GIF streams would break up. So the team needed a way for the user to control when a GIF would play and remain static to conserve bandwidth and maintain speed.

"The most difficult part was building the GIF playback implementation in a way that follows our brand's high-quality bar. We wanted to be sure to find a way to naturally fit GIFs into the Pinterest experience that Pinners know and love," says Antonov.

Eventually, the team decided on a play button on the bottom left-hand corner of a pinned GIF. Now, when a user clicks on the button, the GIF plays in a loop in the site's grid layout. Another click pauses the animation.

"Justin [the product designer] designed the visual way that the play triggers work in the grid, and determined the best placement," Antonov says. With the visual quality set in stone, it took just a little more to finish the GIF support concept.

The GIF team got the product working within a couple of hours and then rolled it out on the web for user testing.

Here are 7 dead simple apps for making your own GIFs.

Silvia Oviedo-López, an international operations manager at Pinterest, joined the GIF team as its product manager that night. She managed the coordination, testing, and international compatibility for the project. Using a special board she set up for testing, Oviedo-López got other "Pinployees" pinning their own GIFs way into the morning. She says, "It was fun to share the idea and execution with the people who still were around the office at 2:00 a.m., from engineers, to designers, to leadership."

Because the testing worked out well, Pinterest decided it would launch the GIF support for all users, a process it calls "shipping." At the time, GIFs were playable in standard browsers, but it was time to develop for mobile.

Over the course of a couple of weeks, three Pinterest mobile engineers and a product designer worked during normal business hours to round out GIF support for iOS and Android. By Valentine's Day, GIFs ran rampant on all Pinterest platforms.

Repins Of GIFs Are Booming

Both Oviedo-López and Antonov agree that the GIF support project could not have happened without an evening "make-a-thon," Pinterest's version of an impromptu hackathon.

"Although we're still a small company, it's hard to get everybody's schedules to align on side projects. This is what makes make-a-thons so valuable. It would've been impossible to get this feature out if it wasn't for the right set of people coming together, which is at the heart of every hacking night," says Antonov.

Oviedo-López adds, "One of the reasons why make-a-thons are the perfect venue for this type of project is because they allow us to take a step back from the roadmap and work on projects that are more spontaneous, which may include moonshots, fun features, or little improvements that can make our users happier."

But picking and choosing the right projects makes or breaks a hackathon. "The most important thing to remember is to think, 'Can I ship this in the amount of time I have?' on every step of the way. Sometimes making cuts is hard," says Antonov.

The team made the right call, going with the GIF support project during the make-a-thon. Antonov says, "The theme of this particular make-a-thon was to spur growth through a new feature. Our hunch was that a highly requested feature like GIFs could help us reach our goal, and we were right. GIF repins have been climbing ever since, and have nearly doubled since launch."

The Real Value Of Solving Small Problems

Cristina Petrovici, the other growth engineer on the GIF project team, gushes about the make-a-thon. "To me, that make-a-thon is a story I'll tell many, many times and that I hold dear. We got to build this thing we were so excited about, we got to know each other better, and we had tremendous fun. And, I'm telling you, that night, special friendships were born," she says.

"All three of us, Ludo, Silvia and myself, are from three different countries. So there all three of us were, speaking different languages, and having fun reading GIFs aloud and comparing in our native tongues, along with different customs and perceptions," Petrovici says.

While the make-a-thon forged a new team together and left them lasting memories, the biggest takeaway was making it easier for Pinterest users to share GIFs.

"There's no better feeling than seeing somebody get what you've built and enjoy it. Enabling GIF support allowed us to connect people with more content they really enjoy, and that's huge," says Antonov.

America has always loved its entrepreneurs, but recently it seems their cultural cache has reached a new high. Everyone on LinkedIn is a CEO, shows like Shark Tank are spawning copycats, and over half of Millennials say they plan to or have already started a company. Uber, the on-demand alternative to hailing a taxi, has proudly touted its plans to create "100,000 transportation entrepreneurs," which is a generous way to describe the drivers on its platform.

All this CEO-play doesn't appear to reflect reality. The official ranks of the self-employed have been stuck at around 10 million for the last few years, unemployment refuses to budge, and real earnings have been flat or even declining for many middle- and low-income workers. If everyone is suddenly an entrepreneur, why aren't we seeing the economic impact?

The problem is that by turning "entrepreneur" into an aspirational catchall for everyone from Bill Gates to your next Uber driver, we've lost our ability to measure and understand the macro shifts taking place--and their policy implications.

With Tax Day at hand, it's time to look at how work is changing--and why we need a better vocabulary for describing it.

The Incubator Entrepreneur

"Everyone wants to claim 'entrepreneur' in their own way, to attach themselves to that centripetal force," says Dave Blanchard, cofounder and president of Praxis, a nonprofit that runs accelerator programs for faith-motivated business and nonprofit founders. "It's turned from a profession into a zeitgeist, and on the net that's a positive thing. If you see yourself as entrepreneurial, that means you're creating new things, you're not waiting for someone to tell you what to do."

Like other accelerators and incubators, Praxis is focused on founders who aspire to scale their ventures; this is known as "high-growth" entrepreneurship, to borrow from the parlance the White House used to launch its Startup America initiative. (An extremely high rate of growth is what separates a "startup" from a regular business, like a new coffee shop.)

The Internal Entrepreneur

Hybrid businesses like the Maki Fund do both contract work and their own sweat-equity projects. Maki, a web development shop based in New York, has been using contract work to fund its pursuit of side projects with the potential to scale.

"In some ways it's very liberating, and in some ways it's a trade-off," says Casey Gibbons, cofounder and head of product. He identifies as both an entrepreneur and a small business owner, and says his team is constantly switching between priorities: "One is paying the bills, and one is hopes and dreams."

The Freelance Entrepreneur

Professionals who might once have labeled themselves "consultants" or "freelancers" are also adopting the entrepreneur label.

"The term 'freelance' limits how people think about you, and it limits how you think about yourself," says Sarah Doody, who specializes in user experience design and previously identified as a freelance designer. "I teach, I develop curriculum, I speak places. This year I've made a shift: I'm an entrepreneur who happens to design." Whereas consultant can sound "slimy" and freelancer can sound "transactional," Doody says that entrepreneur "feels more professional and more collaborative."

The Hobbyist Turned Entrepreneur

Hobbyists and other skilled workers who have discovered platforms that amplify and commercialize their abilities are another step down the entrepreneurial food chain. Etsy sellers are typical of this category; last year the company released a report on the economic impact of its community and reported that while nearly all sellers hope to grow their businesses, "very few aspire to be 'as big as possible'; the strong majority of sellers--61%--want their future shops to be 'a size I can manage myself.'"

Paige Nobles, who works in market research, started selling handmade cards on Etsy as a creative outlet. "Finding out that people liked it gave me confidence to enjoy my craft more," she says. "It was just really fun." She recently invested in a letterpress machine and can envision focusing on card-making at some point in the future.

The "Un-Job" Entrepreneur

Platforms that enable low-skill "entrepreneurship" are at the very bottom of this spectrum. Fiverr, Lyft, TaskRabbit: These marketplace-based startups position themselves as part of the sharing economy, offering prospective "entrepreneurs" a taste of freedom and income with minimal risk. Uber, one of the most prominent marketplaces, has coined what is perhaps the best (or the worst, depending on your perspective) way of describing this form of economic activity: "turnkey entrepreneurship."

But extending the use of the word "entrepreneur" in this way begins to erode its usefulness. Moreover, it masks the more fundamental economic shifts taking place.

If the wide range of roles described above share one characteristic, it's that they are not traditional jobs. In practice, "un-job" is what entrepreneur has come to mean, and why it's so ubiquitous in our still-struggling economy. Absent a more compelling title, it's no wonder that freelancers, consultants, contractors, independent workers, and their many free-agent peers have adopted "entrepreneur" as their own. Unfortunately for them, everything from our tax systems to our economic indices still revolve around the industrial model of full-time work for a single employer.

"Our conventional arrangements are structured around jobs," says David Autor, an MIT economist. "Uber is providing some infrastructure, but I wouldn't call it entrepreneurship." Autor points to the recent decoupling of pensions and health care from long-term employment as a portend of the future, but says that our instruments for measuring productivity and well-being in the new, un-job model are primitive at best. (Not to mention the fact that our existing data sources operate in silos, limiting their usefulness--tax data, for example, doesn't link to unemployment surveys.)

What Is A Job, Anyway?

Looking at "tasks" rather than "jobs," a past focus of research for Autor, represents one possible way forward. He challenges the orthodox understanding of labor and output in a way that sounds strikingly similar to the labor model underpinning the new wave of on-demand marketplaces:

A task is a unit of work activity that produces output. A skill is a worker's stock of capabilities for performing various tasks. Workers apply their skills to tasks in exchange for wages. Canonical production functions draw an implicit equivalence between workers' skills and their job tasks... Here, we emphasize instead that skills are applied to tasks to produce output--skills do not directly produce output.

Tasks are in some ways a promising alternative to jobs. For all of the roles described above, save high-growth entrepreneurs, "tasks" closely map to the way in which un-job workers spend their time and measure their productivity. However, the nitty-gritty challenges of measurement have so far been prohibitive to adopting a task-based framework--try to break your own workday into a set of standardized, replicable tasks, and you start to understand why.

We Need New Metrics For A New Economy

The way we define work could change thanks to big data. Economist Erik Brynjolfsson, also of MIT, is interested in using the data already being generated by platforms and technologies to "reinvent our statistics for this new economy."

"Tons of steel, bushels of wheat--those are easy to count," Brynjolfsson says, mentioning Google search data and online transactions as data sources that could inform future economic indices. "We do need to move toward more task-based measures, but there's no silver bullet. We have to step back and think what we really care about."

Arun Sundararajan, an expert on the sharing economy at New York University, is exploring measures that would capture the quality of life factors that appear to be increasingly important to workers. "How much would I have to pay you to do this work instead of something you love?" he says. "In dollar terms, that is the value that someone is applying to working only 30 hours a week so that they can spend more time with their kids. It's crude, but I see that as a way of measuring the impact more completely."

At the Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing entrepreneurship, researchers say they would simply welcome data that's cleaner and more current than the existing hodgepodge of definitions and sources. "We'd like to see data that's better reflective of on-the-ground realities," says Dane Stangler, vice president for research and policy. He defines an entrepreneur as "a person who sees an opportunity or solves a problem with scarce resources," and prefers to talk about firms "on the basis of their age and their size" in order to understand their economic impact.

Not Jobs, Still Work

If one thing characterizes the new crop of self-described entrepreneurs, it's that they tend to flock together. WeWork, the office space startup that calls itself "a home for amazing businesses of all shapes and sizes," has been growing in leaps and bounds; by the end of the year it will have added another dozen sites to its existing portfolio of 17 locations in six cities. WeWork's 20,000 members pay a monthly fee for desk space, and the company takes care of the rest, coffee included.

On a typical day at WeWork Fulton Center, also home to WeWork corporate headquarters, product managers in jeans are doing Skype calls in telephone booths and cofounders are rehearsing investor presentations in glass-walled conference rooms decorated with circus-themed stickers. Not everyone is an entrepreneur, exactly, but nor is everyone doing a job in the way that Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham cautioned against: "A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company," he wrote dismissively in Hackers and Painters.

"There are startups, there are small businesses, there are freelancers," says Noah Kerner, chief strategy and marketing officer for WeWork. "The focus is on building a community that can come together to solve business challenges." The company does look at the mix of tenants in each location, but deliberately levels the playing field by referring to all customers as "members" who are "doing what they love."

That message may resonate with WeWork's customer base, but it's little help for policymakers. A visit to Fulton Center is a reminder that the un-job is here to stay, whether or not it shows up in our official databases.

We're now entering the 6th week of search of MH370, and the 5th week of FastCoLab's MH370 model. There are two major developments since the last installment of this series.

First, a variety of alleged black box pings were detected close to where the first version of the model [1] showed MH370 most likely to be, further supporting the assumptions used in the model.

Then, recent reports of the co-pilot's cell phone being on in the cockpit indicate the plane might have been at low enough altitude to be in reception. This could be consistent with a subtle signal of foul play; pilots are well aware of cellular interference (creating static) with other communications equipment in the cockpit, and they have a strong job performance incentive to turn the phone off independent of regulations they are required to follow. [2]

But now that any black box pings have been silent for a week, it's time to reevaluate where the plane could be and establish some actual coordinates to search on the seafloor. If you're catching up, here are the first three posts about this project.

We left off with two model versions which effectively used two speeds: a slower scenario at 5/6 cruising speed, [3] and a more standard scenario at cruising speed. We explored rules by which the plane on its own tended to turn, as well as what effects the ping arc error as well as the ping arc itself had, on where the plane headed each hour as well.

This initially uncovered a lot of proverbial low-hanging fruit about the different plane possibilities, but to get a more precise estimate of where the plane is, we first need to increase the number of simulations. Many Monte Carlo models use hundreds of thousands, or even millions of trials. We increase the number by an order of magnitude and in the new figures, we see the vast range of ocean that 10,000 trials span. It's not particularly useful for the ultimate likelihood, as a few outliers will not dramatically affect where the average plane location is--its most likely location--but it does show the space problem recovery operations face.

There's a lot of ocean to search and especially at this point, any reduction of likely search area is all the more valuable. Since we're making more specific estimates, it's helpful to describe the results in more detail than before.

In Version 2 of the model, with 5% ping arc error, we do see some aberrations which have the plane go any which way (see the middle of the figure), but they're in the small minority. For the most part, MH370 winds up between 35 S and 50 S latitude and 75 E and 95 E longitude. Initially heading west and slightly south, MH370 ends up picking a good number of the possible circle headings after the first hour of disappearance that are not in the same direction (see the yellow dots in all of the above figures; MH370's location about one hour after disappearance), yet the plane doesn't completely reverse course, exactly as we imagine a Boeing 777 is likely to do. And, note from the Great Circle path, that there are essentially no possible routes, again.

With 2.5% error the end MH370 location range is much tighter--75 E and 90 E longitude, and 35 S and 47.5 S latitude. This is much more manageable, and quite frankly more realistic too, in my opinion, since with a standard deviation of 2.5% radius of the last ping, or every ping, we're already having the pings overlap each other.

Version 1 shows similar results, but further north: with 5% error, updating to only the last ping each time, the bulk of the final locations are from 25 S to 40 S latitude and 85 E to 105 E longitude. With just 2.5% error, 25 S to 40 S and 87.5 E to 102.5 E longitude.

In both model versions, the fact that we see a relatively consistent area in which MH370 ends up, means that we should be able to set bounds over a small area of ocean, relative to what's been searched to date.

Calculating The Averages

At 10,000 simulations, we're pushing the limits of what we can effectively visualize on the map. Any more and it would look a bit cluttered, or alternatively we wouldn't really get to see how frequently the final locations, and final ping locations occurred on top of each other. So rather than do a probability map or heat color scale, let's get a bit more quantitative (and brave) by returning actual latitude and longitude values.

We'll use the final ping arc locations, rather than the last-hour estimates of ¼, ½, ¾ and 59/60 of an hour. Here's why: If we were to average the not-quite last hour then we'd get ~30 minutes' worth of distance. Yet there's no reason to believe this is a better value than 10 minutes or 50 minutes, and it will just result in us being systematically off in most cases. So we'll ignore the end dots and just do the final locations, and then say "search within an hour's radius of this spot." Which, should over a lot of other "hour's distance" of likely locations as well.

The most obvious realization from our results to date is that MH370's final locations are bimodal (see histograms in the IPython notebook) in both longitude and latitude, which correspond to the northern or southern route that could MH370 take. We saw from previous model versions that MH370 is more likely to take the south, but this helps visualize just how much this is the case.

It turns out that in Version 2 and in Version 1 MH370 goes to the south over 80% of the time. This is important for us to know, because visually the dots pile on top of each other so we can't really tell how much more MH370 goes south in these situations, although we recognized the overall conclusion before.

Next, we separate our southern from northern tracks to get an average of the most likely location, of the more likely southern track; otherwise we'll get some useless mishmash of the two which will not reflect any of the results. We use histograms to inform us of where exactly to make the split. Since there are two clear distributions--latitudes corresponding to the north and south, and equivalent longitude arrangements--we truncate to get the larger one of each, and only return the latitudes/longitude pairs that are in both of the bigger distributions for the latitude and the longitude. Which are both in the southern scenario.

Now that we've filtered out the unlikelier-in-aggregate northern tracks, here are the averages with an idea of how much they vary, displayed to the nearest hundredth place of each calculation [4]:

Where to Look for MH370

Version 2, 2.5% ping arc error

mean latitude: -38.56

mean longitude : 86.51

median latitude: -38.61

median longitude: 86.44

latitude variance: 0.63

longitude variance: 1.65

Version 2, 5% ping arc error

mean latitude: -37.17

mean longitude: 88.79

median latitude: -37.87

median longitude: 88.57

latitude variance: 42.44

longitude variance: 9.00

Version 1, 2.5% ping arc error

mean latitude: -28.19

mean longitude: 98.71

median latitude: -28.62

median longitude: 98.66

latitude variance: 22.95

longitude variance: 1.93

Version 1, 5% ping arc error

mean latitude: -25.75

mean longitude: 98.78

median latitude: -28.80

median longitude: 98.77

latitude variance: 168.58

longitude variance: 7.87

Because we're searching an area, we should not be too concerned about taking the averages of both the latitude and longitude separately, instead of comparing pairwise (as a latitude and longitude result together). We do latitude and longitude separately as well to see if there are systematic differences in the end distributions of latitudes and longitudes.

With our fairly fancy ellipse function that we already use--one that is still highly accurate at low latitudes--we create an hour's worth flying radius no problem, without the distortion that creating a typical circle would be across our not-spherical Earth.

The above figures show 1 hour radius circles for the means and medians of Version 1 and Version 2 with 2.5% and 5% ping arc error. Depending on which scenario you trust the most, the dashed up-to-an-hour circles with the mean/median dots show the most likely regions where the plane is. Note that the variance increases for the more-rough estimates: Version 1 is more rough than Version 2, and 5% error is more rough than 2.5% error. Fortunately, within the circles, we have a partial Venn diagram going on; there's a fair amount of overlap between all four circles.

Search the Circles, Starting at the Center

We first did an exceptional job of averaging to figure out where to start looking. Displaying those averages, we have narrowed down more where MH370 might be, but as you can see from the plots, due to the limitation of up to 1 hour at the end, we unfortunately can't determine better likelihoods without more information. Thus, a good search strategy would be to pick the most likely scenario and start at the center, then head to sections where other circles overlap to first cover the areas of ocean more likely to have MH370, given the results of our model.

Additional Information, Black Box Pings and Search Areas

Australian Government Search Locations as of first week of April: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3

Daily Mail Infographic of Black Box Ping Locations: Link 1

[1] Completed March 23, and updated March 30, so 1-2 weeks ahead depending on how you count it.

[2] Although this is not really an issue in the main cabin, which is why the FAA in the United States has now largely relaxed the so-called "Kindle Rule."

[3] Cruising speed for 5 hours, which becomes 5/6 cruising speed for 6 hours, to get the plane's location at the last ping arc.

[4] If we were hardcore, we'd keep track and report significant figures; but I don't think this is necessary here. Rounding is important though because we really do not know the exact locations nearly as precisely as Python calculates it to be. Inmarsat et al. didn't even release error margins, and they are a legitimate engineering and technology company.

Frank Mitrick is a real estate agent in Chicago, Illinois. He and his wife, Cheryl, opened up their company, Real Tek Realty, 30+ years ago.

When someone's been successfully running a business for more than 30 years, and has my own loyalty as a customer for over 13 of them, you've got my attention.

Frank took me (and the woman who'd become my wife) looking for possible locations to purchase our first home. I remember walking into a place and Frank getting a phone call from his daughter about borrowing a car for her high school dance. Years later his daughter was at my dining room table, now a partner of her father's, helping us negotiate the sale of our home.

We've spent considerable time with this family of entrepreneurs. Here are just a few of the things they do to excel in a difficult industry, which I've applied to my own businesses like Draft.

Out-Teach the Competition

Those who teach stand the best chance of getting people to become passionate. And those with the most passionate users don't need an ad campaign when they've got user evangelists doing what evangelists do... talking about their passion. --Kathy Sierra

My wife and I had been renting for over three years together. We both had decent jobs and it seemed like it was a good idea to invest some of our money in real estate. But we're frugal. So we wanted to buy something inexpensive that we could still enjoy living in before remodeling and eventually selling.

When we met Frank, he did what you'd expect most real estate agents would do. He took us around looking at different places, giving us info about up-and-coming neighborhoods and buildings. But as Frank got to know us, and learned what we wanted from our home and investment, he took the education up another notch.

Frank taught us what he would do if he were us. He explained how he buys older properties to fix up and re-sell. For hours he drove us around, no longer looking at things for us to buy, but at properties he owns in different phases of his process to teach us item by item how we could do this too: what type of appliances buyers want; what neighborhoods work best for him--even what ceiling light fixtures he buys.

Frank got our business. Then, we followed his education, remodeled our place, and sold it years later for a profit in a real estate market that was well underway in its disintegration.

With Draft, my latest business venture to help people write better, the only marketing I've ever done is teaching. I blog, do webcasts, answer questions on Reddit, and write lengthy email replies to anyone who asks me for help running their own business--all so I can teach my audience to become better writers, entrepreneurs, and creatives. And my students repay me with helping spread the word like crazy about Draft.

Offer Complementary Services

Imagine a movie theater with a babysitting service. --Kim, W. Chan; Renee Mauborgne. Blue Ocean Strategy

Most businesses struggle to grow, while they fight within a narrow definition of their industry. But as the book Blue Ocean Strategy teaches, you can swim away from the cut-throat competition (the bloody "red ocean") by imagining how your business can become unique with complementary features and services. For example, Kinepolis is a movie theater chain that started offering childcare services--a move that filled their cinemas with parents eager for a date night.

Being a real estate agent is one of the reddest of oceans. So Frank does what this cinema did. He studied the entire process of home ownership, investing, and re-selling. He's made himself unique by becoming an entire package of other helpful services. When you're his client, he comes with the expected recommendations real estate agents have, for example a mortgage broker and real estate attorney. But again, Frank takes it up another level.

Frank has a construction guy, a cabinet guy, a granite guy, and every other guy and gal who could help us invest and remodel our home. He was a one-stop location for complementary services.

Writing software is a also a red ocean full of bloody competition. So like Frank, I've studied the process of writing--of which actual writing is just a fractional part: copy-editing, publishing to Twitter and 3rd party blogs, website analytics, productivity, and improving our craft. I've built complementary tools and services for everything along this entire chain.

I've created a one-stop shop to solve a writer's problems, making my solution stand out, not amongst the competition, but away from it.

Don't Just Use Your Product, Need It

Almost all bad product decisions start with people in a conference room saying "sure, that sounds good." Road to hell is paved with apathy. --Garry Tan, Partner at Y Combinator

When I was building my first business, Inkling, I quickly noticed that the lousiest parts of our product and the things that kept breaking were the things I'd build for other people that "sounded like good ideas." Our best stuff was the stuff we built because we needed to use it ourselves.

Frank is his best client. He's out there doing exactly the same things he's advising others to do. He's buying property in the same locations at the same prices. And he fixes them up the same way he advises everyone else. All his recommendations for people and services are the same ones he himself uses every day. You're getting his best stuff, because it's the same stuff he needs for himself.

I live and die with this principle in Draft--I'm it's heaviest user. I've already written 1,400 words in Draft this morning and it's only 10 a.m. I can't let it suck, or my day of writing would be miserable.

Follow-Up

It's incomprehensible that only a small percentage of us decide to follow up once we've met someone new. I can't say this strongly enough: When you meet someone with whom you want to establish a relationship, take the extra little step to ensure you won't be lost in their mental attic. --Keith Ferrazzi, Never Eat Alone

Every few months we get a newsletter from Frank teaching us more about the real estate industry and how we can take better care of our home. Every Christmas we get a card and a small gift. If my LinkedIn profile changes, he's the first one offering me congratulations on the news.

Frank knows I have a million things going on, and gently makes sure he has a relationship with me, even if I'm not in the market for anything.

When I was working on figuring out what my business before Draft was going to become, I needed to talk with a lot of potential customers. I'd send out cold and warm emails, and get little back. But I started following up with folks making sure we still had contact, and while I was once worried I'd come across as a pest, now I was told things like, "I'm so glad you followed up. I had meant to get back to you, but things just got in the way."

With Draft, I've made it a habit to follow up with people. If someone says something nice on Twitter, I'm there thanking them and trying to hear more about their experiences. If someone signs up, they get a note with more of my contact info in case they need anything.

Still, observing how well Frank does this reveals how much better I can be. Maybe I should be organizing the people I meet in a CRM tool like Highrise. Maybe I should be scheduling regular alerts to remind me to meet up with new and old friends. Maybe I should remember to thank the people I met with at a recent conference for their conversations.

There's a lot more I can improve.

Those are just a few things I've picked up watching Frank and his family successfully run their own business for so many years.

Who are some of your business heroes? What are you learning from them? I'd love to hear your stories on Twitter: here.

Ronald McDonald, Mr. Peanut, the Energizer Bunny--hundreds of companies use colorful characters to connect with consumers. But the tech industry isn't so quick to conjure anthropomorphic spokescritters. With the exception of the Twitter Fail Whale or the Reddit alien, there aren't many. Most disappeared over a decade ago. Does this mean there's something inherently different about the tech industry, and how it's marketed?

Some business experts say yes.

Sunder Narayanan is a clinical associate professor of marketing at NYU. He says that a mascot's essential function is to "humanize" its brand, and to play to the buyer's emotions. So in a rather unsexy field like auto insurance, one can see why this might be necessary.

"In insurance, people rarely think about it and rarely make insurance decisions, so it's low-involvement," says Narayanan. "In those situations, a mascot is effective in building warm feelings toward the brand, which can be activated into a purchase when the customer is ready."

Incidentally, insurance nowadays is a mascot cash cow: Two of America's most visible, Flo the Progressive Girl and the Geico gecko, both relentlessly hawk auto insurance to American TV viewers.

The Original Cast

Tech used to be as fond of mascots as any other industry. Take Jeeves, the cartoon butler Ask.com used back in the '90s and early 2000s. Back when everyday Americans were just discovering the incredible power of search engines, a butler was the perfect mascot: It reinforced to people that Ask.com (previously AskJeeves.com) can personally deliver any information you want, directly to you and put it at your fingertips, like a digital servant.

Sadly, as we all know, Jeeves didn't last forever. And he isn't the only tech mascot to symbolize a bygone era. There's the Pets.com sock puppet, the AOL Running Man, the RCA dog, the Monster.com monster, and Microsoft's favorite animated office assistant, Clippy the Paperclip. You won't see any of these guys, or any mascot for many tech companies, on TV or in magazine ads.

But back in the '90s, when the Internet and computers really started to take over American homes, tech companies needed those playful mascots to show buyers that this new technology wasn't so intimidating. And now that we've arrived in the age of smartphones and Oculus Rift, that initial consumer trepidation is minimal, but it wasn't always.

When A Mascot Helps

"For some types of products, customers experience anxiety when purchasing," says Jakki Mohr, professor of marketing at the University of Montana. "They might ask themselves, 'Will I be able to fully use this new product? Will it perform as promised? If I run into glitches, will the company help me solve them? Will the new product integrate seamlessly with my printer or other software?' The mascot can help create a friendly, less 'techie' image, and reassure customers about their purchases."

Microsoft took that strategy to new levels by including a cute cartoon in the actual Word software to help users navigate the program: The more-infamous-than-famous Clippy the talking paperclip.

Clippy, the virtual, troubleshooting assistant that popped up in Word from 1997 to 2003, struck sour notes with users. Today, Clippy remains in the form of Internet memes and parody Twitter accounts.

Kevan Atteberry was the artist behind Clippy. He was a graphic designer and illustrator for years before being contacted by Microsoft.

"Initially, my reaction to Clippy was a distancing of myself from him," says Atteberry, after Clippy was introduced to the masses. "I knew people hated him or ridiculed him, and I didn't want to be associated with that. I was afraid to include him in my resume."

But at the time, Microsoft's heart was in the right place. Back then, word processors were new to a lot of people. Microsoft clearly wanted to make Word less daunting to new users, and the cutesy paper clip, with big eyes and which could morph into different shapes, was designed to do that. After working with Microsoft to create Word's talking paper clip, Atteberry found success as a children's book illustrator, and recently sold a two-book deal to HarperCollins.

Is Tech Too Cool For Mascots?

It's not just our growing comfort level with tech that accounts for its lack of mascots. It's also a question of need. Services like Facebook and Twitter have become a utility for most Internet users, and since it's the network effect that draws them--not the quality of the product--these networks don't need to drown out competitors the way insurance companies do.

"With companies like Facebook, it's social media, so the relationship is with other people--not with the brand," Narayanan says.

Mohr says that mascots aren't just supposed to appeal to customers' emotions.

"Mascots can reinforce a company's unique values or value proposition," she says. "They become a way for customers both to identify the company, and what it stands for."

Today, in this post-Clippy, Google Glass-ready world, people no longer need a cartoon character acting as a Virgil who guides through the murky depths of software and user guides. But tech companies still need a way to convey character and personality. Enter the Google Doodle.

Is The Google Doodle A Modern-Day Mascot?

One Silicon Valley giant--Google--plays to users' emotions with its ever-changing, brightly colored, and frequently interactive Google Doodles.

In the past, the Doodle has been a Charlie Chaplin-honoring video, "Google" written out in Braille, and a playable game of Pac-Man. You can even purchase prints of select Doodles on posters or shirts. The now-iconic logo and its Doodles are likely the closest thing Google will ever have to a mascot, but Narayanan says the marketing nuance is slightly different. Similar is Reddit's ever-changing alien.

"The Doodle is more to create a nice, temporary feeling every time someone [uses Google]," he says. "Unlike a mascot, which can create a long-term connection with an enduring personality."

Narayanan says that West Coast-based tech companies are "far away from the glitzy advertising world of NYC," and that they've "focused on selling technology, rather than on creating warm, fuzzy mascots."

But one sector of the tech landscape, unlike the rest of the industry, just doesn't utilize mascots. It thrives on its mascots. That sector: Video games.

The Video Game Exception

Nintendo debuted Super Mario back in 1981, and he's turned into an incredibly enduring corporate mascot. The Japanese company's first-party mascots have become its lifeblood. One of its franchises, Super Smash Bros., is a fighting game that pits the pantheon of Nintendo mascots--Donkey Kong, Yoshi, Princess Peach, Luigi, and scores from the non-Mario universe--against each other in a cartoony multiplayer brawl.

The Smash Bros. series, first introduced in 1999, has proven so popular that Nintendo's arch-nemesis Sony responded with its own version in 2012 called PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.

"Tech itself does not seem the best place for characters in marketing, but consumer products from a tech company will always be ripe for character representation in marketing and brand establishment," says Atteberry.

Consumer electronics like video games are indeed fertile ground for mascots--and for the millions to be made in merchandising. Angry Birds, created by Finnish game devs Rovio, has taken the gaming world by storm in the last few years. Their cast of bulbous birds has spawned a market all their own. There are plush toys, beanies, socks, comics, stationery, lunchboxes, greeting cards, lanyards--even cookbooks and an in-app cartoon.

And since a lot of Angry Birds' target audience is kids, creating mascots and launching a toy and apparel line seems like a no-brainer. Meanwhile, back at companies like Mozilla, Apple, or Uber, there isn't much demonstrated interest in plastering mascots all over media for popular consumption.

"Some tech companies--often managed by engineers and programmers--find such 'fluffy' marketing tactics a bit, well, frivolous," Mohr explains. "The possible disconnect between the developers' and the customers' mindsets is what makes the topic of how marketing decisions are made in tech companies a particularly interesting area of study. It also means that anything tech companies can do to really understand the customers' decision process--say, through observation or ethnography--is so important," she continues. "Many tech companies realize this and are hiring anthropologists into their research departments."

Don't expect anything like the Geico gecko for now, though. But don't be surprised if the airwaves might one day be inundated with a technology company's new talking animal mascot, either.

"No matter how silly it seems or how reluctant people are to admit it," Atteberry says, "there are characters out there they like."