The PRISM frenzy has added significantly to a discussion that was already simmering about the level of security protection on messaging apps like Apple’s iMessage. These services are so easy to use that most consumers don’t think about who might have access to their data. But usually at minimum, the company providing the service can parse messages and conversations, and often advertisers or investors have some access as well. But a desire to take advantage of now-basic digital communication should not preclude users from privacy, right? And probably anyone planning a bank heist knows about these security holes.
Peter Sunde’s new messaging app, Hemlis, promises to emulate the ease-of-use that makes messaging apps so popular, while also offering total anonymity from a data perspective. The company is saying that it won’t sell ads or user data and the plan is to fund Hemlis through donations and paid premium features.
All communications on today’s networks are being monitored by government agencies and private companies . . . That’s why we decided to build a messaging platform where no one can spy on you, not even us.
But the question is, what security strategies will Hemlis use? Because the extent of its security features will, at least in part, dictate who uses it. And how much shady business can be conducted over it. A lot of companies claim that messages sent via their apps live in encrypted fortresses. Even services with lousy track records, like iMessage, are touted as secure.
Conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data.
But just by taking a moment to think about how iMessage works, it’s clear that Apple is full of it. Messages must be somehow accessible if conversation histories are saved in iCloud for easy restoration on new devices, and if users have continuous, uninterrupted access to those histories even after they change their handset or iCloud password. These concerns were clearly outlined in a blog post by Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green a few weeks ago. He wrote:
That's the problem with iMessage: Users don't suffer enough. The service is almost magically easy to use, which means Apple has made tradeoffs--or more accurately, they've chosen a particular balance between usability and security. And while there's nothing wrong with trade-offs, the particulars of their choices make a big difference when it comes to your privacy.
These trade-offs are the crucial dictator for how a messaging service can be used for sensitive communication. If message histories are saved, even locally, the messages themselves are not secure. They can only function as such if their abstract meaning is transient and will not be useful to a later reader. A messaging system that works like SnapChat may sound like a better alternative, but it would run into similar issues between utilities that autosave received communications and the ubiquity of devices capable of taking screencaps.
No matter how sweeping a company’s privacy statements, they always seem to turn out bogus. For example, in 2008 Skype claimed that it could not tap users’ calls no matter what entity (private, government, etc.) requested data. Jennifer Caukin, Skype's then-director of corporate communications said, “Because of Skype's peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques, Skype would not be able to comply with such a request.” But it turns out that this was never true, or at least wasn’t true by 2010 when a pre-Microsoft Skype signed on to provide the audio from calls for PRISM.
If Hemlis can deliver on its lofty privacy goals there will be no reason to use any other messaging app on principle. But it seems like the only way for a service like Hemlis to be trusted for intensely private communication is for its backend to be totally open to scrutiny and evaluation. Without complete transparency, it will just be another black box into which people subtly allude to tax fraud, unwisely share their bank PIN, or correspond with their pot dealer.
People’s lives and decisions are complicated. And the more they live them online the more ambiguity they introduce. But we’re not here to judge. This Bad Internet tracking story looks at offbeat or fringe Internet practices and people who are just trying to do a thing online. It explores the black hat spectrum, everything from scraping to vulnerability exploitation, and highlights utilities that could have both legitimate and dastardly functions.
Hollywood needs to rethink their home video release strategy immediately, or they’re going to be in big trouble when smart TVs become ubiquitous. Before I jump into why (and someone accuses me of hating the communal experience of viewing movies), let me say I love going to the movie theater. I love it so much I’m happy to go by myself, grab a big bucket of popcorn and soda, and sit in the dark with total strangers for two hours enjoying the latest onscreen magic--even if that costs me almost $35 (as it does in London, where I live).
With that being said, going to the movie theater has increasingly annoyed me since I got my Apple TV. Because, let’s be honest, there is plenty to complain about movie theaters: 20 minutes of commercials before the previews, sticky floors, obnoxious people in the audience, and smartphone users who just don’t know when to turn their devices off. But now with Netflix and the iTunes Movie Store at my fingertips, and my 50-inch television, the dollar to comfortable-experience ratio is quickly working against the movie theater’s favor. For the cost of a Netflix subscription or an iTunes rental (about $4) and a bag of microwave popcorn, I can get a pretty sweet--and cheap--theater experience in my home without the drawbacks.
Of course, you may point out that I can’t see the latest blockbusters on my Apple TV--I need to go to the theater for that. And you’d be right. For me, I accept that and that’s why I keep going. But that’s also the big problem.
Hollywood’s home video strategy hasn’t changed much since the 1980s. A movie comes out in the theater and it takes 3-4 months to make it to home video (DVD, Blu-ray, or digital download). While that may have been okay in the '80s and '90s--and even the naughties when people’s digital download options meant watching a movie on their computer--it’s not okay anymore when we can throw any video from our computer to that 50-incher sitting in our living room.
I know plenty of people who have an Apple TV (or another streaming media player) and they’ll use it to stream pirated “CAMS” (illegal camera recordings in theaters) from their computer to their TV. And I’ve seen CAMS before--they’re not as bad as you may think. And those people I know that want a crisp, pristine version of a movie for their home viewing will often wait until to download an advanced Blu-ray rip when it becomes available on the torrent sites--often weeks before the official consumer release date.
This is obviously a problem for both movie studios and theaters--and it will only get worse once smart TVs capable of streaming content from anywhere are in the norm in every living room in America. For better or for worse, we live in an age of instant gratification where we expect whatever game we want to play, whatever book we want to read, and whatever movie we want to watch, to be immediately available for download--and that expectation will only grow. But if Hollywood is smart, they can turn that to their advantage.
When it’s not available legally, people will try to get it illegally--the music industry painfully found that out in the 1990s, before Apple swooped in and saved them with the iTunes Music Store in 2003. However, the legal availability of digital music is different than digital movies. That’s because when, say, a new Jay-Z album comes out, it isn’t released in a concert hall where customers can only listen to it if they pay for a ticket and then need to wait for three months to own it. For movies that’s how it is. And it’s that long wait time between seeing a movie and having to wait to be able to buy it that encourages piracy--even among people who are willing to pay to see it in theaters and at home.
Case in point: I have a friend who loves movies, pays to see them, but then often goes on to illegally download the ones he loves because he needs to wait so long to buy them.
I asked him if he thought his illegal downloading activities were in conflict with his professed love for Hollywood and the hardworking people in the movie industry that makes the films he loves.
His answer? “Sure. But when I see a movie in a theater I love, I want to watch it again and again at home that week. If I could pay to do that, I would. I can’t, so I download.”
So I asked that if after he downloads the illegal copy, will he go on to buy the legal copy once it comes out?
“Sometimes, but not too often anymore,” he answered. “The ‘wow’ effect has worn off, you know?”
In sales terms, this “wow effect” he is talking about is known by another name: the impulse buy.
And I get that impulse buy a lot when I see a movie I love. I walk out of the theater and think, “If I could buy this for $20 on iTunes today I would do it.” But by the time the movie becomes available on Blu-ray or iTunes three months later, I’m often left thinking, “I enjoyed it, sure. But is it worth $20? Nah, I’ll wait for Netflix.”
Because of their distribution timeline--a three-month wait between the excitement of walking out of the theater, high on how good a film was--movie studios lose that all-important impulse buy opportunity (and increases the impulse to download it illegally). In contrast, due to the distribution method of music--hear a song on the radio, open iTunes and download it right away--that industry captures the impulse buy perfectly.
I’m not suggesting that Hollywood says “See you later!” to the movie theaters and releases the latest blockbusters on iTunes instead, but I am saying their current home video distribution method needs to change.
And Hollywood knows this. It’s why they are trying things like the "Super Ticket" and “Mega Ticket” combo. The Super Ticket comes to us courtesy of Warner Bros. and Cineplex Theaters in Canada. As Richard Lawler writes for Engadget:
Available at Cineplex theaters, it lets moviegoers pre-buy a digital Ultraviolet copy of the movie for $19.99 ($24.99 in HD) that's promised to arrive before anyone else can get it, plus 725 points for its loyalty program and some exclusive extra content, all viewable on the CineplexStore website.
Earlier in the summer Paramount and Regal Theaters offered a similar “Mega Ticket” promotion for World War Z. For $50, customers could go to an early viewing of the movie in 3-D and get a pair of collectible 3-D glasses, a movie poster, a small popcorn, and a downloadable HD digital copy of the movie when it's released on Blu-ray.
This is a great deal for movie studios and theaters: It sells tickets and guarantees a home video sale too. But it’s a bad thing for film buffs: why would I pre-pay for a home video copy of the movie that I haven’t seen yet? What if it sucks?
Clearly, this method doesn’t solve the problem. It can potentially alienate film buffs who feel that they’ve wasted their money on a home video copy of the movie (if it’s bad) and even if they do like it, it doesn’t stop them from downloading a pirated copy before the three-month-plus wait for the home video release.
Apple is the answer. Or, at least the iTunes Movie Ticket Store that I invented in my head is.
Imagine this: You buy your movie ticket via the new iTunes Movie Ticket Store. The ticket is sent to Passbook on your phone. This is a confirmed sale and gets you through the theater doors so the venues have a chance to make their profits from popcorn and soda sales.
Movie studios happy? Check.
Movie theaters happy? Check.
Now, once you leave the theater, you can log into your iTunes Movie Ticket Store account and are presented with the option of buying a digital copy of the movie you just saw, available for download that day. Movie studios get your theater ticket purchase and also get your impulse buy purchase locked in. Apple gets an iTunes sale. Film buff gets his immediate gratification.
Movie studios and theaters happy? Check.
Apple happy? Check.
Film buff happy? Check.
More so, digital downloads sold in this manner could go for a premium, say $24.99, instead of the average $15 movie price on iTunes. Apple could even offer some of their 30% cut of download sales to the theater chains as a way to sweeten the pot for their involvement (besides, Apple would be getting a slice of ticket sales).
Even if Apple and the studios imposed reasonable time limits--such as requiring you to decide whether you want to buy the movie within 24 hours of seeing it, or not making it available for download to your account in the first week or two of a movie’s theatrical release; even limiting it to one device, like an Apple TV--everyone still wins.
Will such a distribution method ever happen? As a movie fan, I hope so. Apple, studios, theaters, and viewers all benefit. If not, as smart TVs and home theaters get better and better, as a consumer’s expectation of instant gratification only grows, movie piracy will continue to increase--and in the end, that’s bad for everyone.
In June, we started embedding audio into a select group of Co.Labs articles as part of an experiment with the startup SpokenLayer. We theorized that adding audio to some articles would increase the time spent on site for those articles, as well as decrease the bounce rate as people spend time listening to articles rather than skimming through them. So far, we've added audio to four articles. Although it's a small number of posts, we received enough traffic on them to run some basic tests to see how effective having the audio has been. Moreover, as a publisher, we need to be able to move quickly to validate results so we can direct our limited resources efficiently. Fortunately, we bought a set number of SpokenLayer recordings, so we basically have to use them. That means we can use these results to refine, rather than stop or expand, the experiment. Here's what we found.
In the period from June 1 to today, the site received 482,681 views on articles (meaning non-homepage and taxonomy pages). Readers spent 8,839 total hours engaging with this content. Of those 482,681 views, 228,901 were bounces--that is, views where the visitor did not go on to visit another page on the site.
We ran four articles with SpokenLayer. Although we don't know the exact number of plays yet (I'll update this when we do), we do know thanks to Google Analytics In-Page that readers are clicking on the play button quite a bit when it's available. But it's actually not particularly important to our test. We're not only wondering if people stick around longer to listen to audio, we're interested in whether investing in audio sends a signal to a reader that the article is worth paying attention to.
To determine whether the differences in time spent and bounce rate were statistically significant, I compared them to the overall site numbers using a two-tailed t-test. Using a two-tailed test is important because I wanted to make sure that if it wasn't helping us, at least adding SpokenLayer wasn't hurting us. Here's what I found.
Before discussing what these numbers mean, it's worthwhile to discuss a few caveats. Of course, lots of factors go into what causes a reader to stick around longer on an article or click into another article on the site, including the length of the article and attached audio (the ones we samples are around the same length in both), where traffic comes from (we see lots of bounces from search, less from social), and purely subjective measures like article "quality." In other words, it's hard to prove that SpokenLayer alone caused any of these differences in article performance. This is why it's important to stress once again the small sample size of four articles against a site that publishes almost twice that every day. As I said above, we're not looking for conclusions to the experiment from this data, we're looking to refine it based on what we've observed so far. In that light, here are a few observations.
So far, adding audio to our articles has had mixed results. Two out of the four articles saw statistically significant increases in hours spent on the article vs. the rest of the site. Three out of four saw bounce rates decrease significantly. However, one article each actually performed statistically worse on bounce rate and time on site. I'm going to focus on these.
One of these articles--Mike Grothaus's piece about a telescope in London that sees through weather--is particularly interesting because it has more pageviews than any of the articles and had fewer bounces, but was actually statistically worse in terms of time spent with the article. The piece is also unique among the four in that it is the only slideshow. Looking deeper into the metrics, I can see that the slideshow contributed to the increased number of pageviews (although it was also a good performer in unique views) and the bounce rate. Looking at other slideshows we've run on the site, I can see a similar trend of low bounce rates and less time spent with the article, so I wonder if any effect of adding audio to the piece wasn't nullified by including a slideshow, which in our site layout also appears significantly above the audio player. I'm going to hypothesize that having too many interactive multimedia elements on a page can overwhelm users and actually cause them to spend less time on the site. Going forward, we should test letting audio stand alone vs. combining it with other types of multimedia and see which performs better.
The other article I want to focus on is (not to pick on him) Grothaus' article about Apple and Hollywood. This is the newest article, which means it's also the smallest sample size. But it also did worse than any other article, with time spent not statistically better and bounces actually statistically worse. Looking at the traffic behind this article, I can see it got most of its traffic from a link on the aggregation site Real Clear Technology. As most publishers know, aggregators can send a ton of traffic your way, but it tends not to be good traffic--that is, readers who stick around. What's interesting to me is that having audio on the story didn't signal to these casual readers that the article was higher quality. I wonder if that has anything to do with the appearance of our audio widget, so I'm going to suggest that we A/B test different sizes, placements, and calls to action to see if any one performs better.
It's still early in this experiment, but we know what we can focus on: selecting stories that deserve audio (stories with lots of multimedia already probably aren't good choices) and testing different audio widget designs to see if we can better signal to readers that there's more value to this article than they would have initially assumed.
It may not be obvious yet, but publishing and software are converging. Code is increasingly its own type of content, and content is becoming inseparable from the platform used to create it. That's why we started Co.Labs. This website is more than just a technology vertical: In addition to publishing stories, we operate as an internal laboratory at Fast Company, running experiments that (we hope) will help shape the future of this magazine, and maybe even the industry at large.
This post is a tracker (one of our experiments) that will document every update to every experiment that we run, so that everyone can learn from what we're trying. If you'd like to participate, feel free to drop us a line on Twitter or comment on this post. We're glad to have you along for the ride.
Before you see finished articles like this one, the raw materials live scattered across the hard drives of reporters, editors, videographers, photo editors, producers, and developers. Every time you start a big article, you feel like Sisyphus grabbing the boulder: You forage for info, you share things, you brainstorm--and you almost immediately start to lose track of your raw materials. Writebot is Co.Labs Editor Chris Dannen's attempt to solve this surprisingly complex problem.
Online publishers have been offering email subscriptions to their content since the beginning of the web. At the time, it was the best way to "push" content out to readers. But email, which needs to be repeatedly checked and sorted through, was never very good as a push notification service. Moreover, as platforms like Facebook and Twitter continue to draw users away from the inbox, we need to do a better job of reaching out to our readers where they spend time the most.
Twitter, in particular, is much better suited for "pushing" content to individual users with its direct message and @-reply features. To take advantage of these features, Co.Labs technical intern Jiyhun Lee is building a Twitter application that will allow readers to subscribe to our newsletter and updates to individual tracking posts, receiving links to new material via @-reply. We think users will enjoy receiving these messages on Twitter because, frankly, it's less annoying than email. The benefit to us is that these messages are public and much easier to share via retweet than emails, and we can track clicks and engagement much more easily than with email.
There's one more feature we're building in for our own use. We're addicted to real-time analytics, a problem that manifests itself publicly in the "Trending Articles" section of the sidebar, which pulls data from Chartbeat's API. In order to create a better feedback loop between analytics and our writers, Jiyhun's bot will soon send authors public encouragement via an @-reply when one of their articles is trending. Our hope is that this becomes a non-invasive way to help writers understand how their work performs, in real time.
Measures of Success:
Number of subscriptions
Number of bot re-tweets
Number of bot replies
Number of bot favorites
Clicks on Twitter-bot links vs. clicks on email newsletter links
Lots of publishers are trying to make money by reselling their content as e-books, and Fast Company is no exception. We recently signed an agreement with e-book publisher Vook where we can decide to produce and sell any content as an e-book as long as it's over 20,000 words long. When we heard this at Co.Labs, we immediately thought of our tracking posts.
On the one hand, these stories are good candidates for short e-books because they're focused on a single subject, but they're broader than a single blog post. Over time, they grow to be long enough-- some are already approaching the 20,000-word mark--that reading them page-by-page is preferable to consuming them in the browser. Most importantly, these trackers contain lots of individual stories around the same theme that connect to each other in fascinating ways that don't make sense to explore in our "slow live-blog," but would work great as a book.
To help with the process, Co.Labs editor-at-large, Clay Andres (aka, Professor Walrus), a veteran of the technical publishing industry, is going through and cleaning up our stub posts: Formatting them properly, tying up loose ends, looking for connections between discrete updates that can be expanded into new chapters of the story.
On the other hand, considering these posts as material for e-books raises some thorny legal and ethical questions. Many of our trackers excerpt and link to articles on other sites not produced by Fast Company. Our guideline for citing other posts is that we never use them as the main text of the article. Instead, we use them as starting points for our own analysis, adding value and new insights to the original author's work. While we believe this qualifies as fair use on our website, the rules might be different when we start to package and sell the text as standalone works. We're working with lawyers to hammer out some of these details, because we believe that they would make excellent e-books.
Assuming we can figure out the legal issues, look for some of these collections by the end of the year.
Online publishers know the value of images--people love to flip through those things!--and video (hello, engagement), but unless they have a dedicated podcasting division, most seem to have forgotten how much readers love simple audio recordings. There are numerous benefits to having an audio version of an article: You can experience it while in the car, on a device without a screen, or with your eyes closed, and we're willing to bet that we're missing out on a significant readership because we don't offer audio. That's why we're experimenting with adding audio versions of some of our most important articles using a startup called SpokenLayer. Our first attempt is this article about Writebot, another one of our experiments. Expect plenty more to come.
We're writers and developers, so we care deeply about all our language. That's why our dev team helped us implement GitHub Gist embeds directly into our CMS. This means we can easily embed code in our posts with proper syntax highlighting for just about any programming language. So far, we've used this feature to display the hidden messages embedded in Bitcoin and demonstrate how parallax scrolling works in our CMS. Expect to see a lot more code from us in the future.
In mid-April, we went live with a half dozen articles which we call "stubs." The idea here is to plant a flag in a story right away with a short post--a "stub"--and then build the article as the story develops over time, rather than just cranking out short, discrete posts every time something new breaks. One of our writers refers to this aptly as a "slow live blog." Here's what we learned.
To celebrate Pac-Man's birthday, Fast Company developer Harry Guillermo built his own version using JavaScript. Just for fun, Fast Company's CTO, Matt Mankins, used Guillermo's work to build a social version of Pac-Man.
You can build an app that might save a day of work for everyone in your company but might also end up wasting more of your time than it saves. Or, you can or spend 3 hours doing mindless manual tasks and make everyone else who touches your work miserable. We chose to spend the time building a quick Chrome extension that helped save nearly a day of our judges' time on the Target/CoLabs Retail Accelerator.
It’s useful if you’re one of our core readers who knows who we are and wants to read every article. If you’re not one of those people (and the chances are pretty good you’re not), you may benefit more from something like the new Co.Labs Back Page.
Measures of Success:
Backpage click-through rate vs. home page click-through rate
So you had an iPhone and now it's gone--broken, lost, sold, history. Coincidentally around the same time you activate your new non-Apple phone, you notice your iPhone-wielding friends have lost total interest in talking to you. It's not their fault--it's Apple's.
You see, you didn't realize you were never texting these people in the traditional sense: You were iMessaging them. And now that you've left the Apple ecosystem, the chain of communication has been broken, and you can't seem to figure out how to fix it.
That’s because iMessage is different than texting in one major way--it doesn't actually send its message over the same SMS infrastructure that texting does. Instead, iMessage is more like Gchat--it works over your 3G/4G connection--and it hijacks your text messages before they go out over traditional SMS. When you get your new iPhone and start texting, you notice that with Apple-owning friends your messages appear in blue. That's how you know you're iMessaging. When service is bad, or you talk to an Android or dumbphone user, you'll notice your message bubbles revert back to Green--normal text messages.
Here's the problem: When you stop using your iPhone, iMessages continue to be delivered over iMessage--they don't revert to SMS automatically, just because your iPhone is off, broken or deactivated.
This has been a problem since at least a year ago, and searching the web will net you any number of hapless iPhone owners on messageboards far and wide, trying to figure out where their messages are going.
One solution is to delete the old device via your Apple support profile. But for most people who have their Mac nearby, there’s a quicker solution: Open the Messages app in OS X, find the account settings, and uncheck your phone number from the active handles on your account.
If you don’t open Messages often, doing so will result in a cascade of missing texts--these are messages that haven't been getting delivered to your non-iPhone, but have ended up on your iMessage-enabled Mac, otherwise the last place you’d go to receive a text. Now the lightbulb should go off. Perhaps you get a little pissed. Apple is punishing you for ditching your iPhone by cutting you off from your friends, and they want to make it feel like you need to be on an Apple device to talk to the people you care about.
As soon as you begin using your iPhone, Apple automatically activates iMessage without your asking. What it's actually doing, in effect, is signing you up for a de facto messaging service where your phone number is your handle. When two iMessage users text each other, Apple makes the connection and hijacks the conversation into iMessage and out of the nominal SMS protocol. They do this to enable fancy features like read receipts.
I've spoken with more than a few friends who got zero help from tech support (both Apple and carrier) with this "feature." It’s been happening so long that there doesn’t seem to be any intention on Apple’s behalf to fix it. This is a jerk move, even more so for the company that makes products that are supposed to be user-friendly.
After running into this issue myself a couple months ago, I've run into dozens of people griping about the same problem. To Apple's credit, so few people ever switch away from iPhones that this problem won’t affect most users. Let’s hope in iOS 7 Apple isn’t so greedy.
Microsoft must be feeling it's lost a little sheen on its tablet and smartphone products--no matter how nicely they're designed they're just not selling well. This class of device is surely playing a part in the gentle slide of the traditional PC market, which is Redmond's main stomping ground. So addressing the mobile tech world and achieving success there is likely critical to the company's long-term fortunes. So how's it going to do this? The latest hot MS rumor gives one possible answer: It's going to make a smartwatch.
The Verge has heard from sources that Microsoft is quite serious about smartwatches, and has progressed to the point it's prototyping them. It's said to be requesting 1.5-inch displays from component manufacturers and has seemingly settled on a design
that includes removable straps. Some rumors suggest MS is testing prototypes made of oxynitride aluminum, also dubbed "translucent aluminum" in a very Star Trek style. This space-age material is light, strong, optically transparent in the visible range, and is four times harder than silica glass and nearly as hard as sapphire--the wonder material that some speculate may end up as smartphone screens. All in all it sounds great.
But there's an interesting wrinkle in the story. The Mwatch--let's call it that for now--was previously being developed by the Xbox accessories team, and was centered around the idea of the "Joule" heart rate monitor that would sync with Kinect and help users track their digital workout routines. Now the Mwatch has fallen under the control of the Surface team, probably as part of the company's recent restructuring and realignment. The prototypes have Surface connectors and are said to run versions of Windows 8 so that they can connect up to other Microsoft devices powered by Windows.
The intention is clear here. If the rumors prove true, Microsoft is going to try to build a companion smartwatch that supports Windows Phone or Surface tablet devices in much the same way that we presume Apple's rumored iWatch would do--and in the same way many existing smartwatches function. You'll probably be able to tap at your watches' touchscreen and control music playing on your device, answer or reject calls and so on.
It's at this point you start to wonder when someone will crack a BSOD or RROD joke about the Mwatch. Given Microsoft's track record in reliability and virus susceptibility, it's inevitable...as are big questions about the viability of an Mwatch. It is arguable that recent MS success with high design values may solve the "ugly smartwatch" problem. But, Surface on your wrist--is that something the average Joe would like to buy? Would the consumer look past Microsoft's small market share in the tablet and smartphone world, disregard the "helping the NSA" issue and trust Microsoft enough to wear their gadget on their wrist 24-7-365?
The Mwatch might work well if it integrated with the Xbox, not least because you'd be able to interact with your gamer friends through the device and possibly, if its tech is up to scratch, game on it to a certain extent. But with an iWatch looming on the horizon, also certain to be a joy to look at and to take many lessons in mobile computing from the iPad and iPhone, run a flavor of iOS and--just possibly--bring Siri to your wrist, can Microsoft leverage its not-so-successful Surface into a successful wrist-borne Windows machine? It's a huge gamble. But Microsoft's engineers and business planners will be sensitive to the datapayoff and the brand exposure of any future Mwatch device...so presumably it's worth the risk.
Ross Baird founded the Village Capital startup accelerator program four years ago to assist mission-driven companies tackling major social problems, who might not otherwise get access to capital. At the end of each program, the 15 or so companies in a cohort select two of their peers to receive a $50,000 investment.
Now he has a problem. Roughly half of the 250 Village Capital alumni companies have a female cofounder, but those companies are 50% less likely to get follow-on funding than those with all-male founding teams. This is in spite of the fact that female-led Village Capital companies are 15% more likely to be profitable and 78% more likely to be selected by their peers for investment.
“The process favors entrepreneurs who are more substantive and less flashy,” says Baird. “We find that women tend to under-promise, over-deliver, hit milestones but are maybe not as free to brag about themselves up on stage. Men, and I say this fully aware of being one, will oversell anything. Women undersell and this is a problem particularly in fundraising across our alumni. The shift in power dynamic in peer selection corrects for some of that. One of our female entrepreneurs has said that she often felt like she didn't get a fair shake in the traditional investment process in that she wasn’t really given the time to demonstrate her value, to demonstrate what she was creating.”
Baird thinks that the power imbalance between investors and founders is a bad thing for everyone. “Many startups are trying to figure out what investors will invest in. There is an overemphasis on 'What do investors like?' and less emphasis on 'What value can we provide to the world?' Raising money should not be your primary goal as a startup. We say that if you build a company which solves a major problem and people are willing to pay you to get the problem solved then investment will come. Investment is the result of achieving your goals. It shouldn't be the goal itself.”
As a result, Village Capital’s program concentrates on customer validation, acquisition, and revenue rather than pitching to investors. On top of the peer-to-peer review process, this emphasis on customers may favor women. “'We will get as many users as possible and we will figure out how to monetize them later' is not in the long term a successful business strategy. A lot of what we do in the program is distinguishing between customers and users. In the peer-to-peer process, customer acquisition rather than user acquisition is rewarded,” says Baird.
That peer-to-peer review process involves three open peer ranking sessions where each company ranks the others based on team, product, customer, financials, scale, and return of capital. The final session results in the selection of the teams which get an investment. Baird insists that that process is more productive for everyone than the traditional investment model.
“In the prize mentality or the ‘get the investment’ mentality in a startup competition, two people get funding, 15 people get skewered and ripped apart by people trying to make themselves look good, and the non-winners just don't get anything,” explains Baird. “In the peer-reviewed process everyone gets something out of it. Entrepreneurs when they give feedback to each other are very thoughtful because they care a lot about each other and if they are unfair to each other it comes back to them. The process is productive even for the non-winners.” Could this emphasis on collaboration, rather than competitive pitching, be the key to the success of female entrepreneurs in the Village Capital program?
When I ask Baird to choose his favorite Village Capital graduate he doesn’t hesitate. “Kickboard. Peer selected from the first program. The founder is a woman who is a teacher and coder and she has a data management process which allows teachers to manage student performance data so they can improve teaching. She didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. She built this as a teacher to solve problems for other teachers.”
Kickboard founder Jen Medbery tried to get the company off the ground for a year before finding Village Capital. Four years later Kickboard has raised $2 million in mainstream capital. “To see her not raising funds in the traditional angel investment world but being the overwhelming favorite of her peers, getting her first investment peer selected and becoming incredibly successful in solving major problems in U.S. education is a story I am really excited about,” says Baird.
Growing up in Ireland my three siblings and I had a favorite game; We called it James Bond. One of us would play the coveted role of secret agent, and the remaining siblings tried to stop them from snatching some top secret papers.
The twist? We’re all sisters--not a James in the bunch.
As children, nobody ever told us that it was strange for four girls to impersonate James Bond plots. Yet we girls do get the message early and often that engineering is not something for us. The CEO of website builder Moonfruit, Wendy Tan White, recently described in the Guardian how she speaks at schools about careers in technology:
"Raise your hand if you want to work in technology," I ask students. Predictably, but sadly, no hands go up. But when I ask girls to raise their hands if they like Facebook, every arm in the room reaches for the sky. The "geeky" label is still attached to technology in schools, so it's little wonder that students can be indifferent to the subject: it's not presented in a way that's appealing.There needs to be a greater focus on showing what technology allows you to do: cross geographical boundaries; make stuff; unleash your creative side; talk to friends; and share your latest musical creation.
That brings us back to Goldie Blox, a construction kit for girls from the age of six up. CEO Debbie Sterling is herself a Stanford engineering graduate, and after talking to young girls about the toys they love most, she came to a realization: Girls love to read because they love stories. My sisters and I were all voracious readers. “Most construction and engineering kits, which are touted as ‘technical and numerical toys,’ don’t include the storytelling that appeals to many girls,” reports Forbes.
So Sterling designed a kit to be used in conjunction with a story book starring a girl inventor called Goldie who builds machines in order to solve problems, in the first book a spinning machine to help her dog chase his tail.
With the Spinning Machine, Sterling introduces girls to the idea of a belt drive and the concept of tension by using a plastic pegboard, spools and ribbon to teach them how to turn one and then multiple wheels as part of a story involving Goldie’s dog Nacho and several other characters.
GoldieBlox reached its $150,000 funding target in the first four days of a Kickstarter campaign last year (It eventually raised $285,811) and Toys ‘R’ Us will stock the $29.99 “GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine” in more than 600 stores.
This is a generalization of course--but girls are often more interested in machines and technical systems when they are placed in a larger context, where there’s a problem to be solved or an obvious benefit to society. It’s no coincidence that women study medicine in much higher numbers than engineering, even though both tracks are technical; It’s obvious that doctors help people.
Girls don’t just want to have fun--they want to know why.
Last month we took a statistical look at how job titles break down by gender. This month we’re looking at why women are not represented at the highest levels of their work sectors. (Read back through our previous updates below if you need to get caught up.)
A study published in the May issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin may help. It seems to suggest that women don’t take as much credit for their work as their male counterparts, undervaluing their contributions to a project when working with men. From the article’s abstract:
Women gave more credit to their male teammates and took less credit themselves unless their role in bringing about the performance outcome was irrefutably clear (Studies 1 and 2), or they were given explicit information about their likely task competence (Study 4). However, women did not credit themselves less when their teammate was female (Study 3).
The full study is unfortunately behind the ivory tower academic paywall, but Wired U.K. has more details on the study and noted that “teamwork is an essential component to most professional roles, so if women repeatedly undervalue themselves in group situations, in front of coworkers and employers, it could be extremely detrimental to overall job progression.”
This study offers a strong, plausible reason for why women are not as likely to be recognized as leaders in their workplaces: You often have to speak up for your accomplishments in order to advance in your career.
Another bit of research put out last week in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology reveals that female scientists (evolutionary biologists, in the case of this study) don’t present their work at conferences as much as their male colleagues. Apparently, women are underrepresented even in relationship to the gender gap that already exists in science fields. In other words, the percentage of female conference presenters is even lower than the percentage of female scientists.
Apparently, one of the main causes of this underrepresentation was that women turned down conference speaking invitations at nearly twice the rate (50 percent) as men (26 percent). One of the study’s main authors, Dr. Hannah Dugdale, elaborated on the implications of the study's findings:
“It’s important that we understand why this is happening and what we can do to address it--high-quality science by women has low exposure at the international level, and this is constraining evolutionary biology from reaching its full potential. We’re currently investigating the reasons behind this lower acceptance rate--it could relate to child-care requirements, lower perception of scientific ability, being uncomfortable with self-promotion--there are many potential contributing factors.”
It could also be related to the social psychology study above: If women don’t feel as confident in their accomplishments, then they may feel underqualified to speak at international conferences.
Obviously neither of these studies look directly at gender dynamics in the software development space. But looking at both of these studies, it seems like some aspects might apply to software while others might not as much. For instance, it’s definitely true that women coders are underrepresented in conference keynotes. And the observation of Dugdale’s coauthor, Dr. Julia Schroeder, that “[f]ewer women in top positions mean fewer female role models for students who aspire to be scientists” certainly rings true in the software world as well.
On the other hand, depending on what type of developer someone is, they might work on their own a large part of the time, possibly even freelancing from home. In that case, the social psychology of attributing success to male colleagues isn’t as relevant. Of course, many developers work in corporate office jobs where that dynamic could very much still be at play.
In other news, the fact that half of NASA’s eight newest astronaut trainees are women, selected from a pool of over 6,100 candidates, is a good sign. It shows that some progress is being made in STEM fields more generally, especially considering the fact that until now only 10.7% of the people who have been in space are women. With NASA astronauts being the elite of their fields, not to mention role models for every third grader in the country, having more women in space certainly bodes well for the prospect of more role models for women interested in STEM careers.
The software industry has a gender problem. Men far outnumber women, and while most of those men like (dare we say delight in?) having women around the office, the cool-bro rock star nerd culture makes it harder to attract, hire, retain and--most important--listen to women engineers. We'll be tracking successes, conflicts, and visionaries in this vein, and narrate as the status quo changes. We won't stop tracking this story until there are as many women working in software as men.
We’re not the only journalists tracking women’s roles in technology. Laura Sydell, a longtime technology reporter for NPR, covers the intersection of technology and culture, and we caught her story a few weeks ago about the changing lives of female programmers. We asked her to give us the behind-the-scenes scoop on her recent piece profiling prominent developer Sarah Allen, who led the team that created Flash video and now runs a mobile app design firm. Sydell has seen the reality of ingrained sexism and thinks that building momentum is the only way to undo industry habits.
“My take is that it’s about visibility,” Sydell says. “I mean who do you hear about in the news? Who do you see in the news? Twenty percent of programmers are women—that’s a significant number,” Sydell says. But where is the coverage?
One obstacle is that women in tech are sometimes reluctant to talk about sexism (“like it’s a disease they might catch” says Sydell.) She speculates that pointing out a gender disparity at their jobs may not feel like it will ultimately benefit their personal situation. “This doesn’t mean they don’t experience sexism,” Sydell says. “They just want to fit in and they’re working hard to get ahead.”
If her sources are mum about office sexism, Sydell says, they’re even less open about the flaws they see in hiring practices. “I have had some off the record conversations where people are like, ‘well I’m afraid to hire a woman if she’s around childbearing age because we can’t afford for somebody in a startup to take maternity leave.’ But nobody says, ‘I don’t want to hire a man of childbearing age.’”
It makes sense that one obstacle to women’s proliferation has stemmed from a lack of computer science exposure in childhood, which can lead women to feel like they are at an insurmountable disadvantage once they start college. Expanding curriculum options and entry-level college courses, efforts being tested at schools like Harvey Mudd in California, may be one solution for leveling the playing field.
“You know unfortunately my take is that a lot of people who get into computers and programming start before college,” Sydell says, “which often does turn out to be young guys and so the women end up feeling intimidated.”
And it seems like computer science and engineering may currently be taught in a way that caters to how men think and conceptualize problems. “I remember people saying that for some reason guys are much more willing to work in the abstract for longer,” Sydell says. “I don’t know why this is, but women like to see pretty quickly that something they’re building is having an effect.”
This perspective could ultimately be a strength that draws women to coding, though, if other barriers are addressed. “It’s not that they can’t do the abstract,” Sydell says, “but once they see that programming can have this immediate effect they get more interested in it.”
While reporting for her recent piece, Sydell attended a 25-person mentorship event with Sarah Allen for young entrepreneurs. After the event, the only three women in attendance came over to Allen and started chatting. “None of them talked about discrimination really,” Sydell says, but “they did talk about how they sometimes felt isolated. They all mentioned that in school they sought out a female colleague for support.” Yet even this small and understandable measure, they feared, could have unintended consequences. “They also debated whether it was possible to do too much networking with other women,” explains Sydell. “The problem is that the men have the larger networks and so you don’t want to limit your connections.”
Sydell has seen progress as an increasing number of hard working and qualified women enter tech, but she has also concluded that only a sustained, concerted effort will continue to draw women into the field. “I think one of the most important things that Sarah Allen said is find an industry where there isn’t sexism. If you get up to the higher echelons of anything the world is sexist. And the more money that’s involved, the more it seems to be guys. And what’s up with that?”
We don’t hear from the women who are actually working in software often enough. Ellen Ullman, a former software engineer, recently penned an opinion piece in the New York Times called “How to be a ‘Woman Programmer’.” It’s an important firsthand account of what it actually feels like to be a woman working in technology--invaluable for men like me who will never subjectively know that actual experience.
I looked around and wondered, “Where are all the other women?” We women found ourselves nearly alone, outsiders in a culture that was sometimes boyishly puerile, sometimes rigorously hierarchical, occasionally friendly and welcoming. This strange illness meanwhile left the female survivors with an odd glow that made them too visible, scrutinized too closely, held to higher standards. It placed upon them the terrible burden of being not only good but the best.
Other parts of her article resonate with what we recently found in the gender gap by job title breakdown from Bright Labs: namely, that the more technical a job within the tech sector is, the wider the gender gap tends to be.
We get stalled at marketing and customer support, writing scripts for Web pages. Yet coding, looking into the algorithmic depths, getting close to the machine, is the driver of technology; and technology, in turn, is driving fundamental changes in personal, social and political life.
But perhaps the biggest takeaway for me and other male allies to women working in software, is this: It’s important to talk about the challenges facing women in software, but it’s just as important to recognize the achievements of women engineers as programmers, not merely as trailblazers. Ullman writes:
But none of it [experience as a programmer] qualified me as extraordinary in the great programmer scheme of things. What seems to have distinguished me is the fact that I was a “woman programmer.” The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.
Bright Labs has released new research to Co.Labs about which roles are most male-dominated, and some patterns begin to emerge.
This is one of the most complete snapshots of the gender gap in technology employment we’ve seen so far. Co.Labs readers have been eating up the slices of data on the gender gap we’ve been dishing out. It’s clear that "women in software" is a topic that begs for more coverage. So we got in touch with our friends at Bright Labs to provide us with some previously unreleased numbers on what the actual gender breakdown is by job title.
The first thing to keep in mind with these numbers is that job titles can be pretty arbitrary and may not actually reflect the kind of work being done by any given individual. With that said, there are a couple of interesting trends worth highlighting here. But first, the stats:
Let’s break down these numbers. First of all, it looks like tech support positions tend to bubble up and be the most of a dudefest: IT support, computer technician, network technician, and desktop support technician are all more than 90% male. Does this mean corporate suits feel more comfortable talking to a male IT geek about their problems with Outlook than a female IT worker? Or perhaps the IT help desk is a particularly unfriendly place for women to integrate? Either way, it’s important to note that these numbers are domestic; it would be interesting to see the gender breakdown in outsourced IT, or internationally.
On the other hand, “analyst” positions like data analyst, help desk analyst, and senior programmer analyst tend to be the least--though are still significantly--male-dominated, floating between 53.8% and 75% male. With these numbers, we’re starting to see a clearer picture now: The less a job deals with the back end of a development environment or network infrastructure, the more open (for whatever reason) it is to women working in that role.
One final interesting data point to note is that senior software developers are 89.5% male, while plain old software developers are only (“only”) 78.1% male.
What’s the gender breakdown for these positions like in your company? What do you make of these numbers? Do you have your own research you’d like to share? Tweet @jcassano and @FastCoLabs with your facts, insights, and opinions.
Want to improve economic conditions in developing countries? As usual, the best approach is to focus on women.
If women can’t get online, then there’s no chance they’ll get a job in software. Here at Co.Labs we’ve been on a number-crunching bit when it comes to women in software. So far we’ve taken a look at two important slices of data: perspectives on obstacles to getting more women in tech and how new tech jobs are mostly going to men. Now we take a look at the third piece of the puzzle: the gender gap in accessing the Internet.
Earlier this year, Intel released a massive study crammed full of useful research. It’s a lot to digest, so we’ve pulled out some of the most provocative trends.
The report focuses on women’s access to the World Wide Web, particularly in developing countries. One consistent but unsurprising pattern is that the less economically well-off a country or region is, the wider the digital divide between women and men tends to be.
On average across the developing world, nearly 25 percent fewer women than men have access to the Internet, and the gender gap soars to nearly 45 percent in regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Even in rapidly growing economies, the gap is enormous. Nearly 35 percent fewer women than men in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa have Internet access, and nearly 30 percent in parts of Europe and across Central Asia. In most higher-income countries, women’s Internet access only minimally lags that of men’s, and in countries such as France and the United States, women's access, in fact, exceeds men's.
Intel stresses that this is bad for business for two main reasons: first, the loss of revenue from online transactions and second, the reduction in economic opportunity for women who might use the Internet to find work. According to the report, there will organically be 450 million new women online by 2016--the report’s main recommendation is to boost this number by another 150 million in that time period. This will reportedly open up market opportunities of at least $50 billion.
Intel’s researchers also home in on the fact that 30% of women with reliable Internet access have used it to search for jobs or otherwise improve their economic standing. A lot of efforts to overcome the digital divide work narrowly on just getting more people online. That’s great, to be sure. But in a section called “not all access is equally empowering,” the authors write:
The Internet can convey numerous benefits to women, but unlocking these benefits depends on how deeply women engage online. “Fully engaging” on the Internet requires feeling conversant--knowing what to look for, how to search, and how to leverage networks, knowledge and services--as well having fast, unrestricted, reliable access.
Our study showed that the longer a woman had been using the Internet, the more likely she was to report concrete benefits such as earning additional income, applying for jobs, and helping with her studies. Users with multiple platforms to access the Internet were also more likely to report these concrete benefits than users of either computers or mobiles only.
The report also features an interesting breakdown of the different demographic groups and how they are likely to access the Internet: computer-only, mobile-only, or multi-platform. In general, mobile-only users are younger women who use the Internet daily, but are unlikely to use it to apply for a job. Computer-only users (laptop or desktop) tended to be middle-income female homemakers and often use the Internet for education and study. Multi-platform users, naturally, tended to be wealthier women who use the Internet daily and are likely to use it for education and shopping.
How one accesses the Internet also affects one’s attitudes about it. Women who access the Internet through both mobile and computers, for instance, hold the strongest belief that Internet access is a fundamental human right. This suggests that there’s a positive feedback loop at work: The more regularly women access the web, the more they begin to see it as an integral piece of social fabric--something that everyone needs to be a part of.
This is good to know because if we’re serious about overcoming the gender gap in software, the first job needs to be getting more women around the world online. Computer programming is a skill that any individual, with enough access, can learn on their own to improve their economic standing. This is true even--and perhaps especially--in the developing world. If the next wave of new computer programmers is going to come from outside developed countries, then it’s imperative to get more women online now so that they can enter the job market on equal footing.
Despite all of the increased attention the gender gap is receiving, new data suggests that it might be widening rather than shrinking. Spoiler alert: We need more women engineers.
The data doesn’t lie. For all the talk about tech becoming a less male-dominated space, women are still a vast minority in the industry. In fact, recent data from Bright.com suggests that the gender gap is widening--at least momentarily.
We recently covered a survey by the freelancing site Elance, an online marketplace for self-employment. That survey mostly focused on the attitudes of men and women freelancers towards how tech can become more open to women. A new survey from job search platform Bright tackles the nitty-gritty details of who’s actually snagging new tech jobs.
The number of jobs in the technology sector has grown a substantial 3.8% nationwide in just the first four months of 2013 (compared to the last four months of 2013). In April 2013, some of the known tech geographies where among the fastest growing regions in tech, including San Jose, Austin, San Francisco, Boston and Seattle, however other areas less well-known for their tech jobs also displayed strong growth, including Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Tucson, and Indianapolis.
Nothing new there. We know that tech is one of the country’s fastest-growing sectors, and that it tends to grow the most in traditional geographic hotbeds like the Bay Area. It is interesting to see that New York’s much-touted “Silicon Alley” didn’t make the growth cut while Kansas City continues to explode under the influence of Google Fiber.
The real question we’re interested in is, who are companies hiring to fill all these new jobs? The report tackled this question head on:
These jobs are trending to favor male job seekers. While the tech sector is predominantly male overall, an estimated 71% male, the titles displaying the largest increase in available jobs have also trended towards male-dominated roles, including Systems Administrators (89.7% male) and Senior Software Engineers (77.1% male).
Let’s take a moment to unpack these numbers. We know that men account for about three out of every four people working in tech right now. On top of that, the job areas that grew the most in the first four months of 2013 tended to favor men by an even larger percentage than the industry as a whole. If this trend keeps up, the gender gap may end up widening rather than shrinking, despite heightened awareness of the issue.
To be clear, we know the problem is probably even worse than it seems because a lot of the women who are counted as working in the tech sector often work in PR, HR, or marketing. The answer shouldn’t be to just keep hiring women in those roles. According to Bright Labs, the most in-demand job titles in April 2013 were all technical positions. Companies need to hire women engineers if they want the gender gap to shrink.
The war for engineering talent is so hot that companies are trying everything to lure top candidates. Sometimes, these incredible bonus packages are a great way of finding talent who will fit in with the team. Other times, the tactics become so gimmicky and specific that they’re almost guaranteed to screen out a diverse set of candidates.
Take, for example, Saatchi and Saatchi Tel Aviv’s recent decision to screen candidates for a software engineering position by conducting interviews inside Diablo III.
The idea to test skills like teamwork and thinking under pressure using a video game is worth exploring. The U.S. Army, for example, uses video games to help train soldiers how to recognize friendly people from insurgents disguised as civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Choosing a specific game with no relation to the job other than the CEO’s preference, however, was probably not the way to go if the company wanted to have any shot at hiring a woman. Technology is already a male-dominated field, especially in Israel. Moreover, Diablo III’s playerbase is 69% male, meaning that by choosing the game you’ve already narrowed down the pool to an incredibly homogenous group.
Even if you did find a qualified woman gamer-developer, there’s another problem with conducting in-game interviews that most men would never even think about. Due to a combination of their relative scarcity and the anonymous nature of online gaming, women who play Internet games and identify themselves as such face a constant barrage of sexist trash-talking from their male counterparts. The problem is so severe that some women have created entire sites to document the misogyny they face playing online on a regular basis. Given the stigma attached to female gamers, it wouldn’t be shocking if women didn’t want to participate in an interview where their potential boss was giving them orders over the same system so many jerks use to berate them.
Although it’s tempting to search for new and inventive ways to find candidates, companies have to be careful not to automatically weed out too many qualified candidates just by the interview criteria. There’s a fine line between offering perks that help you find someone who will fit well on the team and searching for such specific traits that you’re almost guaranteed to find someone exactly like yourself. Unfortunately, Saatchi crossed that line.
According to a survey conducted by Elance, the greatest deterrent to getting more women in technology fields is a lack of female role models. Elance is a popular platform for freelancers, so survey respondents come primarily from that share of the tech marketplace. And some questions are specific to working from home. Still, it’s probably a safe assumption that a lot of the same trends apply for women working in technology fields whether remotely or in-office.
It’s definitely worth reading through the results of this (fairly short) survey. Here are three stats we’ve pulled out for you:
66 percent say that for women to be successful in tech will require equal pay for women and men with same skillsets
Only 22 percent of respondents believe technology needs to be made more “glamorous” or “cool” in order to appeal to women
80 percent are “optimistic” or “extremely optimistic” about the future of women in technology
Female readers: Do these figures resonate with you? The most interesting stat here is the one about unequal pay, because it demonstrates that the women responding to this survey expect to get paid less off the bat, even in more progressive companies. Also--it’s telling that nearly a quarter of respondents don’t find technology “cool enough” to compete with careers in more feminine organizations. Help us unpack what these stats mean by sharing your take on Twitter.
A recent NPR segment, “Blazing The Trail For Female Programmers,” profiled the lead developer of Flash video, Sarah Allen. It’s part of an ongoing NPR series called “The Changing Lives of Women.” NPR talked with Allen about what it means to work in a field where only 20 percent of her peers are women.
Today Allen is CEO of mobile design & development outfit Blazing Cloud. In addition to Blazing Cloud’s volume of work speaking for itself, Allen is also getting business from startups who value their genuine emphasis on diversity, as opposed to just hiring women as “window dressing.”
Allen reflects on the decades she spent being the only woman on a development team and how things still haven’t changed too much. She tells a story about being being one of six women at a 200 person Ruby on Rails conference a few years back. Coming out of that experience Allen started RailsBridge, an organization aiming to increase diversity in tech through free workshops for “women and their friends.”
She also emphatically makes the point that the issue is a lack of supporting for women who already want to get into tech:
We've really proven that demand is not a problem. Every single workshop we've ever held has had a waiting list.
There are lots of other interesting moments in this quick 8-minute segment: According to NPR, the proportion of women studying computer science has actually decreased since the mid-20th century (that’s ponderous stat #4, for those counting). While you’re listening, also check out the April 29th broadcast of NPR’s All Things Considered for a complementary segment about Harvey Mudd’s efforts to get more women in computer science degree programs.
Should all-male software companies be on some kind of wall of shame? Here at Co.Labs we’ve celebrated the success of specific companies that have actively sought to increase diversity within the programming community. But what about those companies with particularly egregious records? Is it really so bad to have an organization that’s all one sex?
It seems like a total no-brainer for a dating product to have a gender mix on the design team, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s why no one’s heard of Couple.me. Read previous updates to this story below.
Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC) was started by Berlin Rails Girls organizers to help Rails Girls get into open source, a focus that distinguishes it from Google’s original Summer of Code. Ruby on Rails is a full-stack development language that you can learn more about here.
Just as in Google Summer of Code and Ruby Summer of Code, students will be paid so they're free to work on Open Source projects for a few months. Unlike those programs, the Rails Girls Summer of Code is about helping students to further expand their knowledge and skills by contributing to a great Open Source project (rather than producing highly sophisticated code).
Targeting women in tech is great, and helping them become active, productive members of the vibrant Rails and open source communities makes this program particularly exciting. To get involved as a student or mentor, write to summer-of-code@railsgirls.com or catch RGSoC on Twitter.
Stacey Mulcahy wrote a letter to her 8 year old niece and posted it online. Why does that matter? Well Mulcahy—aka @bitchwhocodes—is a developer who has personally come up against the shortcomings of the tech community when it comes to gender equality. Inspired by her 8-year-old niece’s decision to become a game developer when she grows up, Mulcahy wrote this letter“to a future woman in tech.” It’s full of hopes for her niece and for the developer world in general:
I hope that when you attend a meeting that is mostly male, that you never get asked why you are not taking meeting notes. I hope you say "fuck this" more than "it's okay".
...I hope that skill will always be held in higher esteem than your gender--if you had no skill, you would not be part of the discussion, and your gender is simply a modifier.
...I hope that no one ever tells you to "deal with it," "relax," or "ease up" because you refuse to laugh at something that simply is not funny.
...I hope that you attend conferences and find yourself complaining about long lines for the bathroom.
A lot of the lines in this letter will be familiar with anyone who follows even the slightest the grievances of women in tech. But it’s a powerfully original way of framing the issue, by focusing on the positive vision of the kind of developer community Mulcahy would like to be a part of, rather than just railing against the shortcomings of the one that currently exists—it's empowering. (Hat tip to @NGA_Anita.)
We can talk about the gender divide in tech all day, but it’s also important to celebrate the achievements of women in software. In fact, if it weren’t for the work of one woman, Ada Lovelace, computers as we think of them today might not exist. Lovelace worked closely with Charles Babbage on his early mechanical computer designs. Although today Babbage is considered the "father of computing," it was actually Lovelace who is believed to have written the first computer program. She also imagined computers as more than just calculating machines, influencing the thought of several pioneers in modern computing.
An interdisciplinary conference celebrating the achievements and legacies of the poet Lord Byron’s only known legitimate child, Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), will take place at Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, New Jersey) on 18 October 2013. This conference will coincide with the week celebrating Ada Lovelace Day, a global event for women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). All aspects of the achievements and legacies of Ada Lovelace will be considered, including but not limited to:
Lovelace as Translator and/or Collaborator
Technology in the Long Nineteenth Century
Women in Computing: Past/Present/Future
Women in STEM
Ada Lovelace and her Circle
So if you care about women in software, then, now, or in the future go ahead and submit a paper. It’s a good way to honor the legacy of the world’s first coder -- a woman.
For those who missed it, "donglegate," as Wired dubbed it, is the latest blowup after a display of sexism in the coding community. Although some people, including women in tech, took issue with the way Adria Richards handled the situation, Wired's Alice Marwick puts it in context very bleakly:
Regardless of the nuances of the incident, the fact remains that Richards faced a gargantuan backlash that included death threats, rape threats, a flood of racist and sexually violent speech, a DDOS attack on her employer--and a photoshopped picture of a naked, bound, decapitated woman. The use of mob justice to punish women who advocate feminist ideals is nothing new, but why does this happen so regularly when women criticize the tech industry? Just stating that the tech industry has a sexism problem--something that's supported by reams of scholarly evidence--riles up the trolls.
Jezebel also chimed in, pointing out the how these kinds of jokes are possible and seem normal because of how much of a dudefest tech is. It seems particularly egregious that these guys made these jokes right when the speaker was talking about bridging the gender gap in tech.
Richards was distracted, mid-seminar, by a couple of tech bros sitting behind her making some shitty sexual puns about "dongles" and "forking." (She blogged about the full chronology of events here.) Richards did not enjoy the jokes. She especially did not enjoy the disrespect shown to the speaker, who happened to be specifically, at that moment, addressing programs designed to make the tech community more welcoming to women. Meanwhile, in the audience--Richards's photos reveal a sea of men--a couple of dudes felt 100% comfortable cracking the kind of crude jokes that people generally reserve for their home turf. And that's because, to a lot of dudes, tech is a space owned by men.
Bruce Byfield, who has written extensively on all things free & open source, gives an overview of sexism in the FOSS community. As a subset of the broader development community, FOSS has a lot of great things going for it because of its transparency and emphasis on collaboration. Unfortunately it still shares many of the same problems when it comes to gender. Byfield takes an informative look at initiatives that are trying to fix the gender imbalance, like the Geek Feminism Wiki, Ada Initiative, and Ubuntu Code of Conduct.
Carla Schroder credits Ubuntu for its all-purpose code of conduct, which she calls "a radical departure from the dominant 'freedom to be a jerk' ethos that prevailed before." As a result, Schroder adds, "Ubuntu has also attracted large numbers of contributors and users from more diverse walks of life than other distros.
However, in the last two years, FOSS feminism has paid special attention to anti-harassment policies for conferences. Most of this work has been developed by the Ada Initiative, an offshoot of the Geek Feminism Wiki, which has developed templates for policies that can be used either unmodified or as starting points for discussion.
The rationale offered for this emphasis is that anti-harassment policies can be a starting point for changing other aspects of the community.
All in all a thorough and well-reasoned piece worth a read (even if the pagination on datamation is ridiculously annoying).
Ashe Dryden, a Drupal and Rails developer, did the software community a huge favor by starting to answer the question "How can I help tech be less sexist?" She gives concrete, applicable steps that people can take to make conferences more diverse, like:
Anonymize and remove gendered pronouns from abstracts/bios before handing the data over to your proposal review committee. Someone who is outside of your proposal reviewing committee should be assigned this task.
Pretty simple, but makes a huge difference. Dryden's post is full of tidbits like that. It also includes a pretty thorough list of different marginalized populations, going far beyond gender diversity to include, for example, physical disability and economic status. But women in tech is still the focus of what Dryden is writing about.
The headline of this article in Forbes elides individual (and organizational) responsibility by saying that women are "accidentally" excluded from tech. That said, it still makes a great point that tools like Codecademy are democratizing technology and thereby removing a lot of the traditional barriers to women, like it being hard to find mentorship in a boy's club.
It's no secret that the games industry, by and large, lacks diversity. In this case, that is gender diversity. This is actually a huge shame as it limits the stories and points of views different types of people bring to the collective table of gaming.
Landers contrasts the way she handles representation of female characters and motherhood with the way major video game studios do, which is pretty obvious in her artwork.
The differences in the way I create concept art and models is pretty self-explanatory. Basically, notice how the female characters aren't half naked with giant breasts? Yea, this is a pretty easy one to be aware of...I'm kind of surprised this is even "different" to treat them with that level of respect.
The influential gaming site Penny Arcade picked up the story, with a really interesting take on how gaming can be a safe haven for certain marginalized populations.
Games themselves may offer a safe place for transgender, genderqueer, questioning, or other LGBT community individuals, but the gaming community has been less receptive. When Landers was promoting her game in one gaming community forum, users hijacked the thread and began posting "tranny porn," telling Landers she should find new work in the adult film industry.
Articles and features on gaming sites that bring up gender representation of any kind, be it transgender or otherwise, is typically met with the 'Why is this important?' 'How is this relevant to video games?' style responses. It should be apparent by now that games can be far more than just entertainment to some individuals. To some, it's a necessary escape, or a safe haven where the question of "Who am i?" can be safely explored.
So, a pretty prime example of women being reduced to sexual objects in the technology world is this article on Complex, "The 40 Hottest Women in Tech". At first glance the article is a weird mix of acknowledging sexism in tech followed by outright sexism from a publication covering tech. It begins:
Technology has been a boy's club for most of its existence. Just another unfortunate repercussion of the patriarchy. But that's been slowly changing, and over the last decade we've seen a number of wonderful, intelligent, and cunning women make inspiring strides in the field of technology. Through web development, social media, space exploration, and video game design, we see the world of tech becoming a more equal playing field. Here are 40 women we admire doing work in the field of innovation.
Followed by a slideshow of scantily clad women or typical "hot" women, including noting that one of them was a Playboy playmate. Commenters on the piece were justifiably outraged, writing:
How can you open with "sure, tech hasn't been friendly to women for ages, but it's better now!" and then proceed to objectify the women who have fought through this bullshit? Do you not see that you're only perpetuating the toxic culture?
And:
Funny you would mention patriarchy in your opening paragraph, then proceed to perpetuate it by subjecting all of the hardworking and talented women in this field to, effectively, a 'hot-or-not' list. Shameful.
I was assigned to write the 50 Hottest Women in Tech by Complex and it really bummed me out, because the idea of perpetrating the same old gender divisions in an area like tech - which has predominantly been a boy's club throughout history - seemed like kind of a messed up thing to do. It represents the most banal form of internet content that exists. But it's hard to say no to a paycheck.
So what I tried to do was see if it was possible to make something called "The 50 Hottest Women in Tech" earnest and empowering and an actual good thing. I pretty much only included normal looking women, who were involved in something really crucial or exciting in the tech space. I made no allusions to their looks in the blurbs, and ended up with simply a long list of very exciting women.
Of course when the piece actually ran, I discovered that over half of the women I had included were replaced with people like Morgan Webb, complete with the usual lascivious dialogue. Sigh. It's hard to win when you're writing for Complex, but please know that I tried.
That explains why tech-entertainment celebs are mixed in with actual female technology innovators like Gina Trapani and Marissa Mayer. It's the mark of a bad publication that it would not only assign a piece like this in the first place but that it would so drastically alter it after the fact. Fortunately, people in technology fields weren't buying what Complex was selling, as evidenced by this tweet and this tweet:
There’s a lot of gun violence in Baltimore. It’s a city with few economic opportunities, little social mobility, and problematic sprawl. I went to college there, and Baltimore’s motto “The City That Reads” used to depress me whenever I saw it on a city bench. It seemed so cruelly out of touch with the priorities of many local residents. But when I was living there (doing a lot of reading as part of my privileged education and feeling the irony with every page) certain moments reminded me that the slogan was really true of the local community. Or could be.
I read about one such moment today in BaltimoreBrew. An event on Saturday, “Stop Shooting, Start Coding,” offered Baltimoreans the opportunity to trade a gun for a fully functioning laptop and IT training courses. Sponsored by Digit All Systems, a local nonprofit, and the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, the event drew more than 50 people who traded their guns for a refurbished Dell laptop.
As Fern Shen reports, local residents were excited about the opportunity, and everyone she talked to wanted the laptop so they or a family member could do things like open a business, read the news, or send emails. For example, Shen interviewed a Maryland Transit Authority employee, Marcel Simpson, 56, who had no home computer. He said that, “I came in to do the right thing--to get it off the street.” And he added that he would use the laptop “to read news, look at websites, and do positive things on the Internet.”
Shen describes residents unloading their guns before handing them in:
Wrapped in t-shirts, towels, newspaper and plastic bags, guns of all kinds were removed from pockets, purses and shopping bags. There were lots of small-caliber ‘Saturday Night Special’-type handguns, a .357 Magnum in a cardboard box, and several long guns, including a double-barreled shotgun, the kind that can be sawed off and made concealable.
“Stop Shooting, Start Coding” is part of Digital All System’s Guns For Computers Initiative, and aims to take guns off the street at the same time that it provides computer certification courses for community members who do not have access to this type of training. The hope is that people who take the courses will have more marketable skills and opportunities for a wider variety of jobs. Lance Lucas, the founder of Digit All Systems and a native Baltimorean told Shen:
“Look at the unemployment in neighborhoods like Rosemont – 15%, 20%. If there was a Ford plant over there, there would be no crime like we’ve been having . . . We’ve got to look at the link between lack of education and poverty. And we’ve got to change peoples’ expectations about our community.”
Dell laptops distributed at the event were reconditioned for $33 each. The Baltimore Police Department will melt the guns down.
The Co.Labs and Target Retail Accelerator challenged entrants to design and build an app that would extend the Target customer experience into new areas, leveraging mobile software--native or web-based--to produce new and pro-social effects in their community, family, school, or social network.
This week, we’re interviewing the winners: Team Pilot, which created an app called Divvy. This interview is with the team’s designer, Eric Kopicki.
What was your role in working on Divvy?
I was the senior designer on the project--well, the only digital designer. Chris Reardon came to me with the project and presented me some of the ideas that just he and Juuso [Myllyrine] had pulled together by that point. They had some sketches put together and Chris had some thoughts on the overall flow and user experience. But they were just sketches. At that point, I began fleshing out the design. To begin with, I did a little bit of research, looking at Target's digital properties: the website and existing app. My theory was that this experience [in Divvy] should go hand-in-hand with the existing digital work. So I tried to keep Divvy looking and feeling very similar in the way that it was designed, even down to the use of color.
What sort of tools did you use for prototyping the UI and your designs?
Pretty much we originally just worked with sketches on paper. It wasn't until late in the project that Chris [Reardon] actually put together a formalized wireframe. The first really polished designs were put together in Photoshop because we were working really quickly. We were experimenting a lot, but also trying to work towards the finish, polished product from the get-go.
What was challenging about your area of work on Divvy?
Well, from the design perspective I didn't want to visually get bogged down in lots of textures or any sort of superfluous elements like that. The idea of the app is very simple. It's a way to make and share lists. The challenge was coming up with the various visual representations of these lists because, essentially at some point you have a list within a list within a list. There's lists, there's receipts, the items in a receipt, and so forth. There's a list for the products you want to purchase and a list of the contributors to a shopping list. So the challenge was how to distinguish a receipt from a product list and things like that. That's why we decided to bring in a little bit of that tactile paper texture, to drive home that aspect of it. For example, when you're looking at a receipt we included a drawer where you can pull up who bought what and how much they owe. Those types of organizational bits were the hardest part of the project.
Where there any specific ideas you had on the design that ended up not getting implemented?
I was less involved in the conceptual phase, but one idea I worked on was to have a function where multiple people can come together to pay for a specific item. Kind of a cross between a gift registry and crowdfunding. But at the end of the day we wanted to keep the app focused. We didn't want to overload it with too many features. We were hoping to build something that did one or two things really well. So we approached that goal with a laser-like focus and I think we were able to achieve it in the end.
Can you tell us a bit about your past work experience?
Coming out of college I moved to New York and started for AOL as an interactive designer. I worked on several of their digital properties. I guess that's where I really sunk my teeth in and got to know the pure digital experience that I'm able to leverage now in my current position working on interactive advertising.
So what fills your time outside of work hours?
I try to stay active in terms of more traditional forms of creativity: painting, drawing, things like that. It's always helpful when designing to have that sort of background. So I paint in my free time and stay active with my sketchbooks. I'm always brushing up on my skills trying to learn new tools and techniques.
The Co.Labs and Target Retail Accelerator challenged entrants to design and build an app that would extend the Target customer experience into new areas, leveraging mobile software--native or web-based--to produce new and pro-social effects in their community, family, school, or social network.
This week, we’re interviewing the winners: Team Pilot, which created an app called Divvy. This interview is with the team’s producer, James Skidmore.
What was your role in working on Divvy?
I worked as the producer and project manager of Divvy.
So what was your day-to-day like in that position?
I guess the weird thing about the way we work together is that we're a really flat organization throughout, meaning that even though I was the producer and project manager, I was also contributing to market research and concepting. We assembled a team based on each of our specialties and what it is we do for our day jobs in mind. Despite that, we all played a role in pretty much every stage except for the actual development, since of course not all of us can code.
What did you find challenging in your work area for Divvy?
One of the biggest challenges in being a producer on this is that we were trying to work with seven guys who are all really busy every day already. So trying to find time we could all talk in a room together was hard. And not only just in the room, but in the room and focused--so we could come up with something great.
I guess the secondary challenge was that, as a day job, all of us work in advertising and we take on projects like this quite often. But we normally have a pretty specific target we're working toward. In this case we were getting a product category that we didn't have a lot of background knowledge in. So we had to learn the industry very quickly and nail our focus down to something really specific that we could tackle.
How did you go about getting a sense of the retail landscape so that you could move forward on the project?
Well, the first thing we did was take a look at the Target app itself. Then we looked at some of the apps from the other big box retailers. We were taking stock of the features Target's app had and the competitor apps had and then tried to figure out what we thought was missing.
Where did the team get the idea for Divvy?
I think it just started from the broad category of social shopping and narrowing that down as we talked about how we all shop. Part of it is the fact that we all were in New York City, where it's not always easy to go to the store. Specifically, it's not always easy to take a trip to Target, or more specifically, to take a non-stressful trip to Target. I mean, for a person who works on a normal Monday-Friday 9-5 or 9-6 schedule, it can be difficult. We have two Targets that are accessible to the majority of us, and you can imagine what those look like on a Saturday afternoon. So just knowing that and thinking about the situation of having roommates and maybe only one person has a car or one person has time, we realized it could make life a lot easier to have a way to coordinate your shopping list. That way you can divvy up A) the responsibility of going to the story to make the trip and B) the payment. Because the secondary hassle is figuring out who owes what, with tax, et cetera.
As a producer, what do you think makes a good product that you can market and show off to potential clients?
I think that any product should be one that you can just pick up without needing much or any instruction. I think there should be a simple UI without a lot of distractions. You should be able to visually lead the user where they need to go without having to spell it out for them.
What's your work experience like outside of Team Pilot?
I work in advertising doing digital production and project management. I've been in the industry for about four years now.
How did you get into advertising?
I actually started out in college selling ads. I studied advertising in college. I don't know why I ended up selling ads instead of making them in the first place. But somehow that led me into marketing and doing event production. I started writing for blogs and building some social media apps on Facebook, back in the days when they were still called apps. That's what led me to the advertising world.
What takes up your time outside of work?
At the present moment: Wedding planning. But in a normal year I'm into fashion and music. I also love to play basketball. I used to run an indie music blog, but I took it down because of a lack of time.
It's a question that technologists must ask: can monitoring technology prevent tragedies like the one that happened in Florida in February 2012 from becoming lethal while maintaining our privacy? We know that police districts that require their officers to wear always-on cameras see marked decreases in complaints filed against them by citizens. What if this same technology became commonplace, for everyone?
According to leaks, the latest not-so-secret flagship Android phone has an always-on listening mode. In theory, a constant state of listening could allow the Moto-X to perform certain simple functions without any taps, even helping to negate the constant swipes on the lock screen. With every site that reported on the leaked feature, however, came the predictable and obvious response in the comments: What is this actually good for? Do people really not care about their devices eavesdropping?
Asked whether an always-on listening feature will be accepted by general consumers, senior editor Chris Ziegler at The Verge, responded, "I think it's going to depend almost entirely on how it's marketed. ‘The phone is listening to you at all times’ is not a message that's going to resonate with potential customers in a positive way. They'll need to be more creative than that."
Consumers are already ill at ease after NSA's PRISM program was uncovered, and the idea of your individual electronics (not just your web services) logging detailed personal metadata may put a finer point on the paranoia. But there is some precedent for devices that are “aware” of their owners' non-digital doings.
Microsoft's controversial Xbox One will also come with an always-listening element, the Kinect. Described as listening in a limited capacity, having the peripheral be available will allow users to turn on and off the console with their voice, in addition to other functions. Backtracking on user demands like Internet connectivity and game sharing, always listening wasn't changed, cited as motion/sensor controls being a next generation gaming experience gamers were craving.
Google Glass doesn't currently have an always-listening feature yet, but it's being tested and is available via hack, clearly a goal Google would like to move toward. LG also has an upcoming device rumored to incorporate always-on. David Pierce, a product reviewer for The Verge, echos Chris Zeigler’s earlier point, but adds “...until we're sure our phones aren't collecting data from our pockets, they're going to worry a lot of people--especially in light of recent revelations about the data that's already being collected. Eventually I think we'll reach a middle ground that makes sense, but both sides need to tread lightly until then.”
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has said consumers don’t want privacy. But what he’s really saying is that sometimes the value of privacy is exceeded by the value an “aware” machine can add. Joining Facebook, for example, does require you to sacrifice some personal data--but if that’s the conduit through which you met your wife, got that new job, or caught a killer deal on a vacation, then you might consider the trade worthwhile.
The only excusable instances of “machine awareness” that we can think of pertain to safety. If a device could listen for certain markers in speech, or certain phrases that indicate panic--raised voices, epithets, cursing--it could alert friends, family members, or authorities that the user is in danger but is apparently unable to summon help themselves.
For elderly users this adds another dimension of comfort as well; First Alert pendants and “help” buttons located around senior citizens’ centers aren’t always accessible when things go wrong. We can’t help but imagine how technology like this could reduce the likelihood of tragedies like the one in Florida, keeping an accurate voice record of what transpired, or simply alerting neighbors that an altercation was taking place nearby. Let’s hope Motorola finds a way to use this technology to insure us against ourselves--not invade our private lives.
The key to Amazon’s success has been its “users also bought” follow-up service made possible by the accumulation of shopper data--and now, retail stores are trying to beat Amazon at its own game.
Realeyes, based in London, which analyzes facial cues for responses to online ads, monitors shoppers’ so-called happiness levels in stores and their reactions at the register. Synqera, a start-up in St. Petersburg, Russia, is selling software for checkout devices or computers that tailors marketing messages to a customer’s gender, age and mood, measured by facial recognition.
“If you are an angry man of 30, and it is Friday evening, it may offer you a bottle of whiskey,” said Ekaterina Savchenko, the company’s head of marketing.
Although a recent Nordstram’s experiment with “customer tracking” came to a halt after customers complained about the in-store signs alerting customers that they were being tracked, other companies quietly track data that customers don’t even know they’re sending. If a customer’s smartphone is set to passively search for Wi-Fi networks, their movement can be tracked within a 10-foot radius, even if they don’t connect to a Wi-Fi network. As each phone sends a unique ID code when searching for networks, companies can even track return customers--or how many wander past the store without going in. Though this passive accumulation of data seems a violation of privacy, retailers defend its practice as an intelligent substitute for online visitor metrics.
“Brick-and-mortar stores have been disadvantaged compared with online retailers, which get people’s digital crumbs,” said Guido Jouret, the head of Cisco’s emerging technologies group, which supplies tracking cameras to stores. Why, Mr. Jouret asked, should physical stores not “be able to tell if someone who didn’t buy was put off by prices, or was just coming in from the cold?”
Of course, some retailers are acquiring customer data voluntarily via branded apps that offer deals and coupons. In return, the app accumulates personal data to build a customer profile, tracking her time within the store and where the customer spends it. If the customer hovers around shoes, the app relays that information to the retailer and they might send the customer a footwear coupon.
Customer volunteering of information is a more democratic vision of data collection than passive accumulation, but with the attention on global Internet privacy, retail experiments in local data might be too small a fish to fry for privacy advocates.
HP has promised to commercialize the memristor next year and bring it to market, but some of the fundamental truths about this bizarre but incredibly powerful electronics innovation are only coming to light today.
The memristor is a device that was first suggested by Professor Leon Chua in 1971, and it's a strange mind-bending thing: Half transistor and half resistor, the memristor can change its resistance depending on the direction current flows through it and remember its previous resistance level. Far from being an esoteric quirky device, memristors may be able to replace transistors in chip designs--taking up less space. They can also act as non-volatile memory, with switching times that outpace conventional NAND flash memory. Because of their nonlinear behavior, lash enough memristors together and you could get a network that operates on fuzzy logic-style principles, and potentially acts as a form of AI.
Now Chua and Indian researchers have looked into the fundamental physics of memristors and explained their findings in two papers. Memristors, it seems, are actually everywhere already--even in simple electrical systems where an imperfect contact exists. Though no one is likely to use an imperfect connection as a clever computing device, the research breakthrough is likely to lead to many more companies than just HP developing memristor systems. In a few years the tech may be pretty ubiquitous--and that will have some very important upshots for the developer community, not least because of the potential for creating wholly new kinds of computing.
I worked at Apple for five years and have stayed in touch with many of the people I knew there. Over the last few years as a journalist, I’ve also gotten to know several of Apple’s public relations people. Now, journalists have a real love/hate relationship with PR folks. Like people in any industry, you have the ones who are annoying hacks and then you have the ones who are the utmost professionals. All the PR people I’ve met from Apple are the latter.
My last meeting with Apple PR was one of the most pleasant meetings I’ve ever had with anyone in public relations. Half of the meeting saw us literally laughing about some of the ridiculous Apple rumors floating around the blogosphere, and also about a certain analyst’s long-running insistence the the real Apple television is always just around the corner.
But at that last meeting I was also told that Apple’s PR reps (who are all in-house and not contracted) often hear from journalists that the company needs to be more forthcoming with them. For these journalists (like me) it is often easier to get a quote or a demo or a full interview from companies like Google and Samsung than it is to get even a breadcrumb from Apple. And while Apple’s PR people acknowledge that, there is nothing they can do about until the further-ups at the company say it’s okay to open up more.
In this day and age, that’s a problem.
This isn’t 2007 anymore. The iPhone isn’t the only good smartphone in town. Google’s, Samsung’s, and even Microsoft’s smartphone offerings are each really good in their own ways. Those companies are also much more willing to talk to journalists than Apple, which means--because journalists like to (and get paid to) write stories--it’s much easier to put out a story about these companies than Apple.
Now don’t get me wrong, Apple doesn’t have a problem getting people to write about them. An entire ecosystem of websites have popped up over the last decade that are dedicated solely to writing about the company. But let’s face it, much of what is written about the company is bullshit speculation. And some of that speculation, often reported as “news,” is so bad it actually wipes billions off of Apple’s market cap at a time. But Apple is rarely ever proactive about such speculation because of its closed-mouth policy, which ultimately makes it harder for them to control their media message--something that could increasingly hurt the company.
There was a huge variation between each launch, from the level of conversation generated, all the way through to the tactics each used on social media. Take the iPhone 5 for example, which on the face of it, was the perfect launch. It generated over 1.7m mentions on social media platforms, a number unmatched by any of its rivals.
However, Apple was not proactive enough pushing positive messages about the iPhone 5 and any innovation it offered, resulting in a low level of conversation around its features. It also received a high level of criticism – 20% of its launch conversation. Apple has established itself as being more innovative than its rivals and some fans felt that the iPhone 5 didn’t deliver on this reputation. And Apple did little to answer these questions.
On the other hand, the Samsung Galaxy S4--while getting only 140,000 social media mentions--had a much lower social media criticism rate with just 11% of social media mentions being negative. I point this out because the iPhone 5 is clearly the best smartphone Apple has ever made, yet the launch was heavily marred by negative press over iOS 6’s new Maps app, which translated into negative social media mentions and shares. Matter of fact, I was one of the first “Apple” journalists to harshly lambast the company in public (for which I literally received a death threat for being a “traitor”) and do you know who was the first company to reach out to me after my piece? Samsung.
I did hear from someone at Apple, about a week later, and not a PR person, but they told me not to write about what we discussed. So I didn’t. And I didn’t write about it not because Apple said so, but because if I reported on what I was told it wouldn’t serve my readers in any meaningful way; it would have just created more, ultimately meaningless, gossip.
My point here isn’t that journalists who complain the loudest should hear from a company (and to Apple’s credit, Tim Cook issued a very visible public apology regarding Maps). But when Apple’s competitor is contacting those journalists willing to talk about Apple’s trouble and Apple is not contacting anyone, that is a huge problem in an age where the iPhone maker’s competition is getting better and social media is everywhere. If Apple isn’t willing to talk to most journalists--the best of who serve as the bullshit-filters for all the Apple speculation flying around--then that lack of openness makes it hard, if not impossible, for the company to get a grip on any negative social media messages spreading on Twitter and Facebook.
Very rare controlled leaks from the company aside, Apple needs to start being more open with journalists to (truthfully) control their message--just like Samsung and Google are--or, one day, their lack of communication will lead to a tidal wave of negative social media mentions (perhaps deserved, perhaps not) over something that will irreparably damage the company.
Today Apple's hardware and software set the standard for computing design, and the company itself is a consumer product hit machine. For a time the world's most valuable company, the empire that Steve built, is facing threats from all sides: aggressive Android manufacturers, changing consumer tastes, and the new primacy of social technology all threaten to rock the decades-old Mac paradigm. This story lays out what developers need to know about Apple in a post-Jobs world.
The story of Apple's imminent demise seems to be perpetuated by those with a vested interest in seeing the company fail. Such people comprise two primary groups—those that bet against the stock, as discussed earlier,—and a select group of tech media who benefit from controversy.
When I learned to be a journalist, we had one rule: We did what was the right thing for the readers. That sometimes meant annoying companies like Apple, if ‘doing the right thing for the readers’ meant giving them details of an unannounced Mac. Sometimes it meant giving large advertisers bad reviews. But whatever it meant, it always meant giving them the truth: facts we found out, put into context so the readers could understand what was going on better.
By those standards, David Gewirtz’s piece over at ZDNet entitled “iOS developers abandoning sinking Apple mothership: biggest drop ever” isn’t just bad journalism. It’s beyond that. It’s anti-journalism. Where journalism is about fact, Gewirtz brings us speculation. Where journalism adds context to make things clearer, Gewirtz removes it in order to make things more difficult to understand.
As Betteridge points out, Gewirtz took data about from a piece of unscientific research that measured relative interest in programming languages, notably Objective-C, which is used to write iOS apps. From that data Gewirtz removed all context from the report, then combined the remaining data with attention-grabbing lines like developers are “abandoning the sinking Apple mothership.” After reading Gewirtz’s article, you couldn’t blame casual tech readers for thinking that developers were fleeing Objective-C -- and thus iOS development -- in droves.
But of course, they aren’t. How do I know? Because tickets to this year’s WWDC sold out in two minutes today. Besides, interest in Objective-C does not necessarily equal interest in iOS development. After all, it’s possible that there are less OS X developers (who also develop in Objective-C). Or, this could be a sign of a natural maturation of the market. As the iOS development ecosystem matures, hobbyists that coded simple fart apps in the past are more likely to fall away as the pro devs gain a foothold. And that doesn’t even account for the short-term variances every programming language has. As Betteridge points out, interest in C# took a dive at the end of 2010, only to recover nicely since then.
So, given all the reasons above, why would a tech journalist write such an article about Apple?
Betteridge says a real tech journalist wouldn’t. Matter of fact, he calls Gewirtz’s article "anti-journalism.”
Gewirtz may be a brilliant example of anti-journalism, but he’s really just a symptom of how low technology journalism has sunk, and how the average pageview-hungry “anti-journalist” treats readers with contempt.
Maybe this is in part down to “readers” no longer being a defined group who regularly read a publication, but simply a swarm of who-knows-what people arriving from Google. Maybe it’s because all the readers are, to anti-journalists, is a number on a screen which adds up to more ad impressions, and thus more cash in their back pockets.
Is Betteridge right in his assertion? Yes and no. I’ve been a tech journalist for almost four years now. And I do consider myself a “journalist.” By that I mean I always check the facts of a story before any rush to be first with it out the door--and believe me, the desire to be “first” with a story in the age of instant news is strong. I try to remain independent from the companies I cover (and when I can’t, I say so). And I always put my readers’ interests first—which I take to mean they are seeking the truth about whatever I am writing about. I’ve been lucky enough to work with many wonderful colleagues at different publications and many of them hold these ideals. Many wonderful writers on the web who only call themselves “bloggers” also hold these ideals.
But then there are the “anti-journalists.” That is a very real group of internet writers—and they are legion—who only care about pageviews or other personal interests when they write about a story (or just make one up). And what these anti-journalists know is that readers are exceptionally emotive about Apple as both a company and a driving force in our culture today. So if they can drum up outrageous headlines, they know the clicks will come. It’s not right. It’s not fair. But it’s reality.
The good news is that if you’re a regular follower of tech news, it’s relatively easy to spot the true journalists and bloggers from the anti-journalist hacks. And at that point the power is in your hands--and that power is immense. Your clicks and taps count, so choose what you click and tap on wisely.
In the realm of fanboyism, the "–hater" suffix is common. You have Microsoft-haters, Samsung-haters, Google-haters, and of course, Apple-haters. Until recently, the –hater suffix was nothing but harmless fanboyism. Recently, however, it seems that Apple-hating has become a full-time job for financial professionals, some of who stand to make millions every time someone disparages the company.
The health of a company as sophisticated as Apple—which encompasses an entire ecosystem—is a difficult thing to measure. It's even more difficult when that company is Apple: A brand replete with goodwill and cash. So people fall back on a reductive measure: Stock price.
Apple's stock has declined from $705 to the low $390s in just over seven months—that's 40%. This decline has most people in the media screaming, "Apple is dead! Abandon ship while you can!" And why not? It's good for page-view, and who doesn't enjoy a little schadenfreude?
But there are hidden actors at work here, namely money managers and media companies, who like to promote every instance of Apple-doubting in the media. Here's just one example of the media playing up Apple's death without getting their facts right, as John Moltz points out on his blog:
Spot the error
Erik Sherman writing for CBS about the “Apple meltdown” (via Sat Tara Khalsa):
"Anonymous supply chain sources say that iPad mini unit sales could drop 20 percent to 30 percent this quarter, compared with the same period last year."
(Emphasis mine.) Apple’s apparently doing so badly that returns of the iPad mini will be so high next quarter that they’ll drive sales into negative numbers. Which is the only way they could sell fewer than zero. That pretty much sums up the current state of reporting on Apple right there, doesn’t it?
Shoddy reporting is one thing, but here's a more serious example. This one comes from Philip Elmer-DeWitt at Fortune. He's talking about the rumors in recent days that—wait for it—Tim Cook is being handed his hat by Apple. Here's what Elmer-DeWitt says:
The last time we wrote about Doug Kass -- a small hedge fund manager with a large presence on CNBC -- it was to document a nifty piece of stock manipulation played out on his Twitter feed in February, the day before Apple's annual shareholder meeting.
Apple's (AAPL) share price was down and Kass was long the stock. He tweeted a rumor that the company was about to announce a split, the stock went up, he sold his shares at a profit, he tweeted that the rumor was baseless and then spent the rest of the day hurling insults at his critics.
Well, Kass is at it again. On Sunday, citing the same "Gnome" that was the source for his stock split story, he tweeted: @DougKass: From my Gnome, high above the Alps - "Is Apple's Tim Cook... Cooked?
Many assume people only make money on a stock if that stock goes up and they sell. But in reality, people can make millions shorting a stock as valuable as Apple's. So, as Elmer-DeWitt points out, professional Apple-haters like Kass have a lot to gain. And who else is in that group? Many, Elmer-DeWitt finds:
We've got the tweet from Doug Kass, whose main Apple-related claim to fame was to publish his "Bear Case for Apple" the day before the stock began a nosedive that lopped nearly $300 billion off the market cap of the world's most valuable company.
We've got "The impossible task of fixing Apple" by Rob Enderle, a consultant for Dell (DELL), Microsoft (MSFT), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and others, who has made a career of bad-mouthing Apple in print and on TV. (For background on Enderle, you can start with John Gruber's 2003 Putting the 'anal' in 'analyst'.)
We've got "Sunday's Is Apple Looking For A Replacement For CEO Cook?" in Forbes.com, the online arm of a once-respected business publication whose experiment in what it calls "incentive-based, entrepreneurial journalism" has led to what Macworld calls "a relentless clown show of anti-Apple contributors."
Usually financial news of a company and a company's stock price should be of little concern to developers. But when there is so much disinformation (but let's call them "rumors" to be nice) spreading about a company's impeding demise—a company that's paid $1 billion dollars to developers in just one month—developers need to start getting angry, because this effects their livelihoods.
After all, if consumers believe a healthy company is one step from death's door, why would they buy its products and, ultimately, your apps?
Wall Street turns on Apple. The New York Times documents how Wall Street has turned on its former darling as Apple's share price continues to slide, a total decline of 44% since September 2012. This story seems to be as much about a shift in sentiment toward Apple as the numbers themselves.
Apple remains enormously profitable and the envy of corporations worldwide. And yet Apple’s decline in the stock market has been so swift and so brutal that the development has begun to change the way investors view the company. Apple no longer looks like a sure thing.
Apple looks cheap by the most popular way of gauging a stock’s value, the amount of profit it generates for each outstanding share. Investors are willing to pay about $15 for a dollar of profit of the average Standard & Poor’s 500 company. But for Apple, they will pay less than $9. At its current price, investors are betting that Apple will grow more slowly than the average American company.
Apple announces its Q2 results next week and earnings are widely expected to be lower than previous quarters. Motley Fool lists 4 things which may go wrong for the company, including lower earnings, a drop in revenue growth, and no rise in dividends, which would indicate that Apple is hoarding its dormant cash.
The bearish case against Apple revolves largely around deteriorating margins, so even worrywarts may not realize that analysts now see Apple's top line growing in the single digits this quarter. Wall Street's eyeing just 8.9% in revenue growth to $42.68 billion. A miss here would probably be even more catastrophic than a sharper decline in profitability.
Time magazine also weighed in, suggesting that while Apple raked in 69% of the profits of the entire smartphone industry last year, it still needs a new product to counter its competition.
Few believe Apple can maintain an edge based solely on the strength of incremental improvement to the iPhone and the iPad. Instead, many investors feel, the company needs new breakthrough products of the kind Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs delivered repeatedly during his remarkable career.
Chinese "app store" lets Chinese Apple fans download pirated apps. Chinese site 7659.com has turned Apple’s own bulk enterprise licensing technology against it to make pirated apps available for free. You don't even need to jailbreak to use them. VentureBeat takes a closer look:
The site, which is only available within China unless you spoof your location via a proxy server, offers a wide selection of iPhone and iPad apps. In just a few moments, I found Final Fantasy V, a $16 iPad game; Badland, a newish $4 app; Le Vamp, a $2 game for iPhone and iPad, and many others.
The rather inventive justification of the company behind the site, Kuaiyong, is that many Chinese Apple users find it difficult to manage iTunes.
In order for Chinese Apple fans to download applications securely, Kuaiyong developed its own method of giving users access to thousands of free apps without having to jailbreak their devices.
Our goal has always been about bringing Chinese Apple users with quick, convenient and pleasant IOS experience. Since the introduce of Kuaiyong, the proportion of jailbreak in China has declined dramatically from 60% to around 30%.
The problem for Apple of course, is that it is not earning any revenue from the pleasant iOS experience of all those Chinese users.
Apple core rot. Software engineer, photographer, and former Mac-fan Lloyd L. Chambers' blistering attack on Apple is a few months old but still worth a look. Chambers contends that OS X is no longer a platform fit for serious work. He laments the decline of the core operating system quality, the lack of updates in hardware for professional use, the arbitrary removal of APIs, and Apple's less than benign dictatorship of design and content.
OS X is degrading into a base for an entertainment platform. As it stands, the trend is entirely downhill for serious work (albeit a mild grade so far, but steadily downhill nonetheless).
Core operating system quality is declining as resources are diverted to software development in more profitable lines: iPhone, iPad, iHaveNoRealWorkToDo products. Apple forgets its history and leaves it core professional base twisting in the wind.
Not everyone agreed with Chambers, with commenters at Hacker News describing the post as containing "misinformation and half-truths" (commenter Osmium) or even insisting that the trend is in the opposite direction: "I see more and more developers switching to Mac and taking it seriously. My last office switched completely from Ubuntu to Mac" (commenter logn).
However, commenter Vonguard had the following to say:
Apple clearly has no desire to keep any users that don't see their iMac as a giant iPhone. The Mac OS was always for casuals, but when they added Unix, it changed and both casual and hardcore could love the same OS. But clearly the hardcore are no longer of any interest to Apple. It's a real shame because the Mac OS was very stable and useable for many years. Now, it's just a toy.
What's gone wrong at Apple? According to industry observer Paul Kedrosky, the design team led by Jony Ives (just listed as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world), has too much power within the company.
When Jobs was alive, Kedrosky implies, this "tension" between the design teams and manufacturing teams was in almost perfect balance. Jobs's brilliance as both a product designer and business executive kept the company from "over-designing" its products, or, just as bad, focusing so much on the numbers that its design standards sagged.
But now that Jobs is gone, Kedrosky suggests, Jony Ive's design team has been given too much power--without a critical check and balance on whether Ive's products can actually be produced in the quantity and timeframe that Apple needs to produce them to meet demand.
Has the dominance of design gone too far? And if it has, what does this mean for other hardware manufacturers?
The post's author, filmmaker Ryan Koo, insists that creativity shouldn't be restricted to those who can pay for a high-end Mac.
Many creative pursuits require the latest technology--especially working with video, which requires a lot of processing power and storage space. But when Apple recently announced new Mac Pros for the first time in almost two years, I wondered why they were so expensive, concluding that they were “not a good value proposition.” As far as video editors were concerned, I also wondered why they no longer offered nVidia graphics cards as an option, despite (or because of) the fact that Adobe Creative Suite uses nVidia cards to get drastically higher performance when editing video.
On the surface, Microsoft's new Companion Web idea seems like it could be a big win for the PC maker because it centers around the only screen the company has really dominated for the last few years: the television. The concept, according to Luke Wroblewski, cofounder of Input Factor and inventor of the popular Polar app, which is one of the first adopters of Microsoft's concept, is to start building websites that the user can interact with on multiple devices at the same time, which is increasingly how consumers watch television.
"What we're doing with this new experience is connected. One device controls the other," says Wroblewski. "We use what each device is good at. The TV is a big display where you can see a lot of content but it sucks for input. The remote control is terrible. Whereas the phone, it's a very small display, so you can't see a lot on it, but it's super easy for input."
Polar's first stab at Companion Web is a version of their popular social opinion-sharing software that can be displayed and controlled from any device. This means that someone sitting in their living room can pull up the Polar website on their TV, scan a QR code or enter a code on their phone, and then control the TV's display using their mobile device. It’s not unlike some of the phone-controlled game demos we’ve seen this year.
The site will work with any modern browser, meaning you don't technically need a Microsoft product to use it. Despite the compatibility, the concept is clearly built to show off one of the most exciting features of Microsoft’s new Xbox One: the ability to watch TV and interact with the (finally) standards-compliant IE10 browser at the same time. Polar’s demo video shows one person watching sci-fi thriller Prometheus while sharing opinions about the movie on Polar using “Snap Mode,” the split-screen feature available on the new Xbox and any Windows 8 device. It feels like a completely natural fit for Polar to be sitting next to a TV screen, and it’s an exciting proposition that could add a new dimension to the viewing experience and blow away other living-room offerings.
Unfortunately, there’s a major catch: Polar’s app doesn’t actually know what TV show you’re watching. To repeat the experience shown in the video, you have to manually type in "Prometheus" on your phone while you’re watching.
“That secondary frame is not talking to the web browser,” admits Wroblewski. “We think it should be, we think it could be, and that would be yet another way to make these connections.”
Chris Butler, the developer who built the new Polar experience, says that Polar has the capability to adapt the questions it asks to the content on the main screen. They just need a signal from the connected-TV device.
“There's this concept of tags that Polar has that's been around for a while, and when you switch to a tag it will change you to that context. It looks like a hashtag from Twitter,” says Butler. “We're ready for something to broadcast what it is, and then we can hear that and change the content accordingly.”
That’s not the only problem with the Companion Web user experience. Despite building an entire suite of devices on the Windows 8 platform, Microsoft gives developers no way to know when a particular device has entered the room, meaning users need to manually enter a code or snap a picture of a QR tag on each device to sync the experience.
Other companies have attempted to solve the problem. “Apple has things like AirPlay, but it's a proprietary standard,” says Wroblewski. “Netflix and YouTube are working on this thing called DIAL that does device identification, but all that stuff is proprietary to the app world and not part of web browsers. But if there was a web browser world equivalent to that, a discovery service, that would be amazing.”
Ultimately, the lack of such a discovery service, combined with the inability of the TV to broadcast any information about its content to the browser, means that the consumer will need to do a lot of manual work to realize the full potential of the idea--exactly the kind of thing someone sitting on their couch watching a show and playing with their phone doesn’t want to do. That’s a shame, because the potential of connecting web and TV devices is powerful, and Microsoft seems like they should be in the perfect position to do it with the Xbox, by far their best device. All they need to do is provide developers with a few more (hopefully open) tools.
Even though this initial attempt at a smart TV experience falls short, developers should start to become comfortable with the idea of websites on one screen being controlled by a separate device using WebSockets. This can be tricky for web developers not used to working with lots of asynchronous events from multiple sources that drive UI changes.
“I'd done some WebSockets work before, but it's usually a one-to-one communication,” says Butler. “Having to deal with what is really any kind of asynchronous event flying around is a different task. Essentially, you need to be able to know what order they're flying in and be able to handle a lot more states.”
Butler says he used the popular sockets service Pusher to handle message passing because it provides the ability to broadcast events manually and a pre-built log to help see events in action and debug them more easily. Despite the help, he says it was still challenging to debug asynchronous events bound to the DOM.
“You have to have a lot stronger state management," Butler explains. "Especially with all of these CSS transitions and all these other things that can go on in the page. You start having the events stepping on each other and the DOM changing in a way you don't want to happen, so you would queue the incoming events in a way that I wouldn't have probably done in normal, single-page apps.”
“I just built in a queue locking process where you say 'this thing is happening, so don't try to resolve any of these other things.' The hardest thing is where you have all of these events chasing each other and you try to get to the endpoint where everything is stable without losing any of the information along the way.”
Thom Yorke is pissed. In case your Internet's been down, the Radiohead frontman has joined longtime creative co-conspirator Nigel Godrich in decrying Spotify and the economics of streaming services like it. Atoms For Peace, the Radiohead side project on which Yorke and Godrich collaborate, has pulled its catalog from Spotify, citing inadequate compensation for new artists. I've been a happy subscriber to Spotify since the day it launched in the U.S. But these guys have a point.
This latest round in anti-Spotify sentiment is best summed up in a single sentence: "It's bad for new artists," Godrich wrote on Twitter. He went on to elaborate, spelling out why he thinks the model is unbalanced for new artists.
"The reason is that new artists get paid fuck all with this model. It’s an equation that just doesn’t work… If you have a massive catalogue – a major label for example then you’re quids in. It’s money for old rope. But making new recorded music needs funding. Some records can be made in a laptop, but some need musicians and skilled technicians. These things cost money."
Thom Yorke piled on, tweeting, "Make no mistake new artists you discover on #Spotify will not get paid. Meanwhile shareholders will shortly being rolling in it." Spotify defended itself, saying that it's paid out $500 million to rights holders, to which Godrich fired back, making the crucial distinction between "rights holders" and artists. For good measure, he reiterated his gripe about the way new artists are compensated compared to older artists with expansive, already lucrative back catalogs. Meanwhile, Radiohead co-manager Brian Message chimed in defending Spotify as well as Yorke and Godrich's right to spark a healthy debate about the whole thing. And spark it they have.
This isn't the first time artists have made a stink about Spotify's pay model. These guys are just among the most high-profile and respected members of the artist community to lash out. This matters because Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich were largely responsible for the most critically acclaimed rock album of the 1990s and their work (along with that of the other members of Radiohead) has remained a hugely relevant cultural force ever since OK Computer dropped in 1997. Plenty of artists have complained about Spotify, but rarely are they this influential.
Indeed, this issue has been an ongoing P.R. crisis for the company, which is eagerly trying to paint its all-you-can-stream model as the future of music consumption. In two short years in the U.S. market, Spotify has seen explosive growth and impressive subscriber conversion rates. And for good reason. The service has a massive library of music, lets you merge your own tracks, sports very useful third-party apps (on desktops anyway) and is continually investing in their mobile presence. What's not to love?
For some new artists and smaller labels, this new era in music consumption has been marked by a great deal of anxiety over compensation. I can see why. Spotify struck huge, expensive deals with the major labels and countless indies and indeed pays out an extraordinary amount of its cash to these rights holders. At issue is how much of that money trickles down to the artists themselves. The labels are clearly satisfied enough with Spotify's terms to sign these licensing deals. But record labels and artists are different entities, the former not being known historically for its generosity to artists. As many well-publicized cases have illustrated, the streaming revenue that trickles down to artists is often minuscule.
In its own defense, Spotify argues that a given song or album can be more lucrative over time than downloads can, since downloads are paid for once and streams accrue a tiny bit of revenue every time somebody listens. So, if a record has staying power among fans, Spotify argues, it can make them lots of money over time. Meanwhile, the company is banking on its ability to grow paying subscribers and ad revenue over time, which will theoretically increase the revenue pie for everyone.
But while Spotify argues about the long-term potential, artists are hungry now. Recording and producing an album may be easier than ever, but doing it well still costs time and money. Pressing vinyl or any other physical release is another big expense, and a necessary one for bands who are playing shows and want to show up with more than a stack of MP3 download cards on their merch table. There's a reason bands are turning to Kickstarter to get their music and other creative projects funded. This stuff is expensive. And paradoxically, in today's music marketplace, the correlation between popularity and financial success isn't necessarily a given.
There is a similar-seeming controversy swirling around Pandora right now. As familiar as much of the rhetoric may sound, the Spotify royalties debate is actually quite different from that. Pandora is an Internet radio service, whereas Spotify provides on-demand access to albums and songs. It thus has a much greater potential of cannibalizing album sales, at least in theory. It's easy to see why. There are at least a dozen albums that I stream regularly on Spotify. Whenever I see one in a record store, I'll buy it on vinyl if the price is reasonable and it comes with a free MP3 download. But there are plenty of them that I simply haven't come across, so my access to them on Spotify effectively serves as a type of ownership. As long as I dole out $10 per month to Spotify, those albums will be available on my laptop, iPad, and phone whenever I want to hear them. In all likelihood, these artists aren't getting much money from my obsessive listening.
When Godrich and Yorke complain about the inadequacy of Spotify and its competitors for new, up-and-coming artists, it's hard not to be sympathetic. Diehard fans may still seek out the album for purchase, but what about those more casual listeners who habitually turn to Spotify to listen to music at work or in the car? If they weren't paying for Spotify, would they buy those albums? Would they just pirate them? Would they even know about them? Perhaps future studies will unlock insights into the answers to these questions. In the meantime, it's impossible to know for sure, and all those question marks make artists queasy.
Yorke and Godrich are right to raise a stink about this and remove the Atoms For Peace and Thom Yorke records as leverage. Spotify, Rdio, and the other streaming services are awesome, but they exist on terms that were hammered out between tech companies and record labels, not necessarily with the interests of new artists in mind. If the industry is going to continue forward with this all-you-can-stream, only-buy-music-sometimes model, artists have every right to step up and make a grab for their rights. The idea (hopefully) isn't to shut down the Spotifys and Rdios of the world, but rather to make sure that artists who aren't Metallica can get a fair cut in this new world.
While I'm sympathetic to Yorke, Godrich, and the other artists who have complained about Spotify's model, I'm no less enthusiastic about the potential Spotify holds for my own band, a psychedelic rock project called Harsh Vibes. Next week, we're releasing a four-song EP on a small cassette label in Savannah, GA. It's a tiny operation, so digital distribution is on us. We already have half of it up on BandCamp, and will add SoundCloud and YouTube soon. I've already set up an artist profile on Google Play and am getting ready to go through an aggregator like TuneCore to ensure the entire thing lands on iTunes, Amazon, and yes, Spotify.
As a band, we're not at all nervous about Spotify. Instead, we're excited about the idea of getting it up on as many services as possible, but we're not even thinking about money. What's more enticing for us, as a new, unknown band, is the prospect of getting the music out there and heard by as many people as possible. Meanwhile, we're playing shows locally, embarking on short tours, selling shirts, and hoping the widespread availability of our music online doesn't deter from spending a few bucks on our records at shows.
It only seems fair to mention that playing music isn't my full-time job, nor is achieving that coveted status my intent. I have a day job that I love, mostly writing about stuff like this. In fact, I'll certainly get paid more to write this article than my band will see from a year's worth of streaming on Spotify. Thus, my perspective isn't quite the same as that of somebody brave enough to try and become a full-time musician. For those people, the potential to actually make money is limited and despite the paradigm-shifting magic of the Internet, whatever money-making possibilities exist feel like they're constantly dwindling.
I play in a band because I very much enjoy it, but when I think about the amount of energy (and money) that goes into it, the paltry financial payoff feels like it should enrage me. I wouldn't put this much energy into anything else that didn't pay a salary, so why this? The short answer is that I love it. But that rationale only stretches so far. At some point, we'll need to at least break even for this to be worth our time. Selling recorded music may or may not be a significant part of that equation. For now, we're content to use Spotify and similar services as a promotional vehicle. Eventually, something will have to give. Even if Spotify can't cut us a bigger check, there are definitely things they could be doing to help artists.
For Spotify, there's no simple way forward. They could consider tilting the balance of their payouts so that independent and up-and-coming artists get a cut that feels more substantial. But the company is already locked into necessarily pricey deals with the labels that eat up massive quantities of their revenue and there's not a lot of wiggle room on their balance sheets as they try to prove that this model makes financial sense in the first place.
But they've got to do something. Perhaps while the larger business model is shaking out, they could build tools that help artists drive other types of revenue and more easily promote themselves. The desktop add-on app for Songkick, which notifies users of upcoming concerts by bands they've listened to on Spotify, is a great start. The process of buying tickets could be integrated into the Spotify desktop client. Maybe Kickstarter integration is one of the next steps. Like this artist? Click here to fund their campaign to record their next album. We already have your credit card. We'll just debit it from your account next billing cycle.
Tighter integrations with other artist-friendly platforms should be a priority. So should giving artists the ability to claim and control their own artist profiles. Add a Facebook like button. Follow us on Twitter. Buy our merch. Here's a paid download of the album you seem to love so much. Here's a track you can't stream.
There are plenty of options to make life easier for artists, and it doesn't feel like Spotify has come anywhere close to exhausting them all. If it wants to quell this P.R. nightmare before it flares up any further, perhaps baking a more artist-first mentality into their core product is the way to go.
Jay-Z’s new album Magna Carta Holy Grail was projected to sell 450,000-500,000 units, not counting Samsung's bulk purchase. The actual tally, according to Billboard: 528,208. And it's hard to imagine the 325,000 Twitter mentions and the extra 46,000 followers he gained during the impromptu Q&A didn’t somehow play into giving Jay-Z his 13th number one record.
Justin Timberlake and Kanye West, the other top album sellers this year, have also been socially active and promiscuously sharing with fans, leaving Daft Punk the odd man out with hardly a social presence. Are fans, subconsciously or not, now demanding artists to be social media aware?
Thomas Meyer, who does artist relations for Sonos, says that as a fan, he doesn't need his favorite artists socially active online. "If an emerging or even an established act doesn't put in the time to understand how their fans are absorbing them, the fans will move on," he says.
Hype Machine's Anthony Volodkin sees musicians providing a different product that can't necessarily be changed by social media’s instant feedback. He describes it as "…musicians aren't making websites or iPhone apps where bug reports actually improve the product, they are creating something expressive which hopefully doesn't instantly bend to feedback." And adds, "I bet if you asked the musicians that are relatively active on the networks, they'd also point to a complex relationship with those tools. It's not all great."
Twitter’s head of artist relations Tatiana Simonian indicates the trend is clear: “In recent months, we've seen contemporary and legacy artists like Jay-Z, Rod Stewart, and Neil Young turn to Twitter during release week, particularly by doing real-time Q&As with fans.” Late last year after Neil Young participated, his album rose on Amazon from the 10th spot to 5th. Beyond Jay-Z's impromptu Twitter conversation contributing to increased sales, it also led to him giving good advice for a new, social generation of artists: "Unlearn anything they taught you. They know not what they speak."
One of two gadgets carried by James Bond in last year’s Skyfall was a palm-reading Walther PPK pistol, which locked up when a thug pointed it Bond’s way. Smart guns have been around since the '90s, but for some reason, gun owners don’t want to buy them. Why not?
Gun advocates say they’re striving to keep firearm ownership limit-free, and gun manufacturers maintain that the demand simply isn’t there. As Meghan Neal writes for Vice, it may take a government mandate to implement personalization technology that limits use to registered gun owners. Of course, registration can easily fall between the cracks during private sales and vendor sales at firearms exhibitions, most of which don’t require background checks. Implementing smart gun tech would inhibit these sales, SUNY Cortland professor Robert J. Spitzer told the New York Times.
But digital hacking hasn’t captured the imaginations of gun owners yet. You could think of the equivalent of mechanics eschewing chip-synchronized modern cars for pre-'90s self-tunable machines--only recently have car modders begun messing with newer cars’ computer systems, as the tools and the knowledge have become democratized.
Still, modding is a huge draw for gun owners. Jon Stokes’ profile of the AR-15 and its transition from pariah to superstar of the gun modding world credits the gun’s hackability for uniting the hunting rifle old guard with the tactical-savvy community, presenting a united front advocating for gun rights. So what’s it going to take before these guys get into electronic gun hacking, and--let’s hope--some of the owner-specific features that could help prevent misfires?
Consider the Adafruit Flora, a pre-fabricated node that Adafruit builds off of with DIY recipes for practical application. It has all sorts of components from a GPS unit to a voice changer. Perhaps lining your M-4 with running lights isn’t at the top of your mod list--but you get the idea. Gun hackers need a simple, digital gun hacking kit. Instead of a GPS-powered, LED-lit directional bike helmet, let them create a gun whose safety turns on and off by the owner’s voice only, or one that can tell when it’s been stolen.
From fingerprint sensors to RFID chips keyed to a ring or wristband, “smart gun” tech today exists only in finished (and expensive) consumer products--not very exciting stuff if you love modding. Irish company TriggerSmart has even patented a childproof “smart gun” that shuts down when inside the radius of a school broadcasting a “Wide Area Control” safe zone signal--exactly the kind of thing gun owners hate. True, politics is at the heart of smart gun tech implementation, and Rep. John Tierney of Massachusetts’s Personalized Handgun Safety Act of 2013 (which would require personalization of all guns sold within two years) has had an uphill battle in the House, even after the shooting at Sandy Hook.
In the face of gun control championed by liberal politicians and public safety campaigners, it’s easy to see gun modders falling on the conservative side of the divide. The de-politicization of gun modding seems nearly impossible today, especially as gun control advocates call for smaller magazines and bans on nebulously defined “assault rifles.” But kindred hacker spirits have built communities around improving the human experience before. Who will step up and start the digital gun hacking movement?
There is a reason why Chrome is the default developer browser. When compared to the lagging Internet Explorer or Firefox, Chrome is accelerating ahead with every update. It’s fast, has a large developer community creating extensions, an amazing number of developer tools out of the box, and it’s based on WebKit, which dominates the mobile browsers. Here are a few of my personal favorite tools for developing with Chrome.
Possibly the best thing to come out of Adobe since Photoshop 4, Adobe Edge makes mobile development simple. Here’s how it works:
Install the Adobe Edge Inspect extension for Chrome.
Install the Adobe Edge Inspect app on any mobile devices you have (iPhone, Android, etc.).
Connect them all to the same Wi-Fi network.
Go through a simple pairing process.
Visit any page in Chrome and all your connected mobile devices will go to the same page.
No more typing in long URLs on your phone. No more emailing yourself that long link. Just launch Adobe Edge Inspect and use the time you gain for more coding!
Live Stylesheets lets you view and edit the raw CSS. As an added bonus it has a “Prettify” button which makes any optimized CSS human-readable. Like the built-in Google Developer tools, the changes you make show up instantly.
As the name implies, Built With will give you as much information as it can reasonably skim off a given website. IIS or Apache? Drupal or WordPress? Is Google Analytics installed? These questions are easily answered with one click, so you won’t have to waste any time the next time you find yourself asking “how did they build this awesome site?”
Built by Google, this lets you take a screenshot of an entire page, which is super helpful for tall pages. Because it’s taking a shot of the page it will show it as YOU see it, so it can also screenshot logged-in pages. Like many Google apps it’s a little buggy, but better than most others out there.
There are number of platform-specific plugins ranging from a Drupal plugin to PHP Console. While the usefulness and quality of these vary, it’s certainly worth a little bit of time to find out if your development workflow could benefit from a plugin built for the language or platform you’re working with.
Okay, this one’s not strictly for developers, but it sure saves me lot of time searching for code examples. It allows you to quickly search your favorite sites directly from the URL bar using self-defined shortcuts (I use “a” to search Amazon and “w” to search our company Wiki). Go to the preferences menu and click on “Manage search engines...” to take control of your searching.
There are lots of great extensions out there, but it’s worth remembering that Chrome actually ships with a best-in-class suite of developer tools that blows every other browser out of the water. Here’s what I use on a regular basis during development.
The built-in “inspector” lets you view the DOM of your website, letting you see the HTML structure and CSS on your page:
Using the inspector (which can either be docked to the bottom of your window or detached and made free-floating) you can easily see which element is causing that annoying bit of extra padding and why it thinks a particular element’s font size should be 12px. You can also make changes on the fly and see your changes in real-time, meaning you don’t need to edit code, restart your dev server, and refresh the page to make UI changes. There’s a magnifying glass on the bottom which lets you point to any element on the screen and select it, or you can simply right-click on any element of your page and bring up the inspector.
Trying to debug speed issues? The “network” tool shows you how long each element on your page is taking to load. Different types of elements are color coded differently (in the example below you see blue for PHP, orange for Javascript, green for CSS, and purple for images). In addition, the bar shows at a glance how much time is spent waiting for the server vs. receiving data.
In the example above, all the elements loaded in less than 1.2 seconds. Drupal (PHP) loaded in 82ms from start to finish. The slowest spots were the Javascript, CSS, and the images. The example above shows that connecting to the server and waiting for a reply on one piece of JavaScript took 346ms even though the file itself was tiny and that only took 4ms to load.
It’s not uncommon with a slow-loading page to find one or two resources that are dragging down the entire page. When Google Analytics first came out, the script was famous for loading slowly and, depending on where it was called, dragging down the entire site. By identifying these elements and focusing on them you are able to spend your time on the biggest issues instead of spending your time guessing.
Built for online banking (and often called “porn mode”), Incognito has become a web developer's best friend. No longer are you forced to logout of your CMS or swap to another browser or profile to check permissions or take a look at public views of HTML/CSS templates. Instead, just open a new Incognito window (Command-Shift-N for Mac or Control-Shift-N for Windows) and emulate a logged-out user, or even temporarily login as a non-admin user.
We’ve come a long way since Chris Pederick first came out with his Web Developer Tools for Firefox in 2003. What used to require a browser extension is now baked right into our web browsers, and the extensions we have at our fingertips give us more and more power every year.
If you have a Chrome extension you can’t live without that’s not mentioned here, tell me about it in the comments or on Twitter.
Last week was the App Store’s fifth birthday, and though it was celebrated with some impressive giveaways from developers and some pretty sweet stats from Apple, a report from mobile marketing company Adeven suggested that the App Store is quickly being overrun by zombies. Well, zombie apps anyway.
"[Adeven] defines zombie apps as those that never make an appearance in any of the thousands of charts published by Apple which are tracked on a daily basis. The charts track things like categories, price and criteria for various countries’ stores.
“We call the apps that hold no position anywhere in the world zombies because they do not generate a significant amount of downloads to sustain their further development,” explained Paul Muller from Adeven. ”We can’t say exactly how many downloads they have – Apple doesn’t reveal this – but it is very small.
"Even if they get a few downloads every day, or up to 100, it’s not enough for a developer to make much of his or her product, or provide any impetus for the app to stay alive."
From a developer’s perspective, this might seem worrying. After all, at its current count, there are over 880,000 iOS apps on the App Store. Adeven says that 579,001 of those are classified as “zombies.” And chances are the App Store will surpass one million apps in the next year at which discovery is going to be even more of an issue than it is today, thus creating more zombies.
But while the number of zombie apps may make developers go queasy with dread, I’d like to ask a question: Does it really matter if your app is a zombie?
Sure, if your app is designed as a product that is built to appeal to the widest audience possible (also known as the lowest common denominator), download numbers are all that matters. This is true for apps like Facebook, Angry Birds (and virtually any other game), Twitter, Instagram, and more.
But there are a large subset of apps that shouldn’t have the goal of having 50 million+ downloads because, what’s the point? These are apps like transportation apps (like Tube Tamer--if all 12 million Londoners have downloaded your app, does it matter if you conquer the New York market too?), niche accounting apps like for local Savings and Loans banks, special interest apps (which, by their definition, are niche and thus have a limited audience that would find them useful), time-limited event apps, and plenty of health-related apps.
The last one is particularly an area of interest for me, because I’m building a piece of hardware aimed to help diabetics. The companion app allows them use the hardware. In this case I really don’t care if 10 million non-diabetics download my app because they aren’t my intended audience.
"I also have celiac disease, and so there are a bunch of gluten-free dining apps on my iPhone. Celiac affects a tiny percentage of the population, so I wouldn't expect these apps to ever be best-sellers. They're lifesavers (sometimes literally) for the few with the condition, though."
So my takeaway for developers freaking out about this zombie study is: relax. Download numbers don’t always matter the most. Sometimes they’re virtually irrelevant. What does matter is that your app is coded the best it can be and it meets the needs of the intended user. That’s what ultimately makes it a success--and the only standard by which I think an app should be judged. So everyone stop freaking out about being bitten by the zombie bug.
I own a health tech startup and currently I have two sets of engineering teams. One set consists of my hardware engineers: the guys hacking together the prototype that will eventually go to manufacturing. The other set of engineers are my software guys--the ones who are obviously coding the companion app. I’ve never coded in my life, but I’ve already learned a lot from my software engineers, which I am very grateful for. We have a lot of back and forth about what is best for the app and what is best for the user, but when it came to deciding whether to build a separate iPhone and iPad app or a universal one, the answer for me was nonnegotiable: You build a universal one.
For me “universal” is the only answer because I am looking at it from a user’s perspective. As a user, I hate seeing two sets of apps saying “Skype” sitting next to each other in my iTunes app library. I like reducing things as much as I can, and for me one app build that works on all my devices is ideal.
Another reason that made “universal” the right one for my app is because the app will be free. It is there to support the hardware only. There is no financial incentive for me have a separate iPhone and iPad app. I want the people who purchase my hardware to only have to download one app. This makes things simpler for them and enhances their user experience.
However, as a developer, there are plenty of reasons why a universal app might not be best. Below I’ve collected some interesting arguments from developers both in support of and against universal apps. Here’s a sampling of opinions on whether or not to “universal” your app based on a particular vantage point: coding work, App Store ranking, and financial gain.
The great thing about universal apps is that it saves on a lot of coding. But that’s not always a good thing as author and developer Erica Sadun writes for TUAW:
From a design and coding point of view, it's obvious that Universal Apps quickly become Frankencode. Separate projects (or, more realistically, separate targets with some shared code base and some platform-specific class files) greatly increase code readability and maintainability, even when the two projects share a great majority of features.
Consider the most Model-View-Controllerized app you can imagine. Even an app that offers glorious orthogonality between its visual design and its underlying code logic will suffer from universalization. It's just natural fallout from the conditional coding needed to deal with reality; the iPhone-based interaction modes that used to require multiple screens can now join together into simplified iPad interfaces.
App Store reviews and ratings are not separated. On the App Store, you can't--and neither can potential buyers--distinguish between ratings and reviews for the iPhone or the iPad version. This is especially a problem if your app is very good on iPad but not so good on iPhone, or vice-versa. Again, you cannot use these reviews to make informed decisions for your future products. We found this impossibility to interpret accurately the reviews and ratings a major issue.
There were 27 universal apps in the free overall U.S. top 100 and 33 in the iPad chart. Of these, I could find 16 universal apps that were ranking similarly high in both charts. Eleven universal iPhone apps did not show in the top 100 iPad chart. Fourteen universal iPad apps did not show in the top 100 iPhone/iPod chart. Possibly they were only slightly outside the top 100--I did not check.
The percentage of successful universal apps is an order of magnitude higher than dedicated versions. Among the top 100 (again only quickly looking visually), I could only find four apps that both had separate versions.
I invite your scrutiny of this casual analysis of mine, however I think that this graphic can only lead to this answer to Daniel’s question: Make your free app universal, if you are NOT Rovio. I think this analysis debunks the myth that making a free app universal is bad for it’s ranking.
The financial advantage to having two separate apps is obvious. More products to sell equals more money. But even if you only want to deal with a universal build, what good is selling one universal app for a higher price if you can offer an iPhone-only app for a lower price to a user who only wants it on one device?
I'm not sure what country you're in, but let's assume the U.s., where, on iOS, Things costs $10 for iPhone + $20 for iPad = $30 for Things on iOS. The cost of our software is something we have carefully considered, and we believe that our iOS offerings are worth $30.
We could offer just a universal app for $30, but this would mean that someone who only wanted the iPhone app would be spending an extra $20 for no reason.
We could offer three different ways to buy it: iPhone $10, iPad $20, Universal $30--but then there would be, for example, users who bought the iPhone app before getting an iPad and wanted to 'upgrade' to the Universal app. However, Apple currently provides no upgrade mechanism on its stores, which makes this an inconvenient and confusing solution. We'd rather just keep it simple.
I suppose that you are not suggesting you want the convenience of a single universal iOS app, but rather that you don't think our software is worth $30, an opinion you're quite entitled to hold. But for the time being, this is how we will continue to charge for and distribute our software--as individually sold apps at a combined $30.
The above quotes are just some opinions--each valid in their own way. And for each one, I could find a just as valid counterpoint. As a user, I would love to see all apps universal, however, as a developer, deciding to go universal isn’t always an easy choice. Though I agree with many of the selections above, those developers are only right in the context of what is best for their app and business. Your app’s situation is unique and thus your reasons to go universal or not could be very different than the next developer.
I don’t think the “Should I go universal or not” question will ever be settled, and even three years after the debut of the iPad, the conversation surrounding the question is only getting started. I’m extremely interested in views from all sides, so please leave your thoughts in the comments below or tweet them to both me and Fast.Co Labs at @michaelgrothaus and @FastCoLabs.
A funny thing happened in Japan last week: The most advanced robot ever made was bashed by the press after a presentation to reporters because this walking, automated wonder couldn’t recognize voice queries--something most modern-day smartphones can do. As Fred Attewill writing for Metro explains:
Asimo is programmed to answer questions when visitors raise their hands in the air but as guests held smartphones aloft to take a picture of the robot he became flummoxed and, instead of posing, repeatedly asked: ‘Who wants to ask Asimo a question?’ The glitch is an embarrassment for Honda. Asimo has no voice recognition software and can only respond to pre-set questions selected from a touch-panel device. That’s led critics to call the robot an ‘expensive, out-of-date toy’.
I point this event out because you know voice recognition has become ingrained in users’ minds as something that is expected in any piece of modern tech when the technology press start bashing the most advanced robot on the planet for not having it.
Which brings me to this point: In spite of the 1,500 new developer APIs in iOS 7, it’s odd that Apple didn’t choose to offer the one API every developer has been asking for since seeing the iPhone 4S: Siri.
To be sure, iOS’s digital assistant is something that's always been a bit underwhelming. It’s useful for some limited queries (“Where’s the closest gas station?” “Remind me to leave for the train at 1:30 p.m.”), but in the end it falls flat, especially compared to Google Now’s Voice Search. And that’s exactly why Apple should have opened up a Siri API. When the first iPhone came out it had Maps, which were useful, but the true benefit of mobile maps didn’t become apparent until Apple unleashed the Maps API to developers in iOS 2.0. After all, it’s independent developers that often find the best uses for iOS features (via APIs)--and then Apple usually ends up integrating the best of those uses into the next version of iOS itself.
Until Apple releases a Siri API, the voice assistant will continue to just be another “meh” feature. Nice, but not critical--and nowhere as good as the biggest competitor’s. I’m not the first to suggest that, for Siri to become useful, Apple needs to give devs a whack at it. As Christina Bonnington wrote for Wired:
The first step [to a robust Siri] must be a public Siri API. Building out a robust API for third-party developers could do for Siri what the App Store did for iOS: make it a rousing success. Developers are eager to hook into Siri to increase engagement and make interactions more natural and fluid.
But the Siri API didn’t happen with iOS 7, so developers are left waiting (at least) another year for their next chance. Of course, developers aren't totally limited by Apple's lack of access. As Brian Roemmele on this Quora thread points out, there are a few quasi-Siri APIs now:
The Siri Text Message API
This API takes advantage of the iOS Phonebook and Text messaging to weld together a rather useful and elegant way to present data to a web based API that has access to either a Short Code Text messaging platform or a front end system that can receive Text Messages and parse the text string.
From the programmers perspective Siri would be delivering a text message that would be acted on based on the application keywords. The results can be any number of possibilities spanning from a resulting text message back as an answer all the way up to a much more complex series of results.
The Siri Calendar API
Siri can use CalDAV to communicate calendar events. Siri can also read back CalDAV events back, even if they have been modified. Thus we have a two-way communication Quasi API for transferring data in and out of Siri. It is not perfect. But with a little work the user can access data that is not native to Siri's current API relationships. And it works.
But until the real Siri API comes out, perhaps Siri and Asimo should drown their sorrows together over humanity's disappointment in them.
With all the focus of WWDC on iOS 7’s redesign, OS X 10.9 didn’t get a lot of showtime. While some of the more significant features got a quick preview, one feature developers have been asking for wasn’t even mentioned: in-app subscriptions for OS X apps.
But that’s exactly what’s coming to the Mac App Store when OS X 10.9 ships this fall. As with iOS before it, now developers will be able to sell auto-renewing and non-renewing subscriptions in-app. As Juli Clover writes for MacRumors:
With the release of Mavericks, Mac developers will be able to provide services on an ongoing monthly basis with charges routed through the App Store's in-app purchase system. As with the iOS App Store, developers will be able to offer both ongoing subscriptions and subscriptions that expire after a set time, automatically charging a user's iTunes account.
For a developer this is very welcome news. In-app subscriptions in OS X apps will likely increase subscription sales to existing apps and services, like Dropbox (if it ever comes to the Mac App Store) or Evernote. Until now, companies like Evernote, who offer their OS X app in the Mac App Store, needed to direct those users to an external webpage to get their billing details and sign up for a subscription. Extra, tedious steps like this are always an impediment to users signing up. But now with OS X 10.9, users will be able to simply click a button in the app and enter their iTunes password to buy a subscription.
However, the ability for any app developer to easily enable app subscriptions could turn off a lot of users, especially if developers don’t use subscriptions to offer extra options (like extended cloud storage) and instead make their apps only available via a subscription basis. Adobe and Microsoft have both gotten a lot of pushback from users by introducing subscription-only models of their flagship software, but because of Office’s and Photoshop’s importance in business, the two companies can get away with it.
But I don’t think many users would tolerate smaller apps going to a subscription-only model. I’m a big fan of Pixelmator, VoodooPad, and OmmWriter, but I want to own those app outright. I don’t want to have to pay $9.99 a year for their use. (I should note that I’m just using those apps as examples. None of those developers have told me they are thinking of charging annual subscriptions for use.)
In spite of this possibility, I think in-app subscriptions for OS X apps are a good thing. Developers work hard at making some very good, very indispensable apps. The more money they can make (through reasonable subscription offerings), the better. But to me the best thing about in-app subscriptions in OS X 10.9 aren’t the subscriptions themselves--it’s what they signal the future of apps in the Mac App Store could be like.
If Apple is open to in-app subscriptions, there’s a good chance they are considering paid upgrades in the Mac App Store. This is something both developers and users have been clamoring for. As Taylor Marks (under the forum name of “ArtOfWarfare”), creator of Battery Status, explains on a MacRumors forum, even with subscriptions in OS X 10.9, developers are currently stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to revenue via the Mac App Store:
If I want to majorly improve an app right now, my options for funding that are:
Don't. Everyone gets a free update and I go broke.
Sell it as an entirely separate app. Many consumers won't discover it ever.
Charge subscription fees. Annoying to users who feel they're paying repeatedly for something I did once.
But if Apple is open to in-app subscriptions, then we may, sooner rather than later, see the ability for developers to offer paid upgrades in the Mac App Store. And if this happens, everyone wins. Users get the option to pay less for a newer version of the app (provided they have the previous version) and developers have a monetary incentive to continue to improve their apps and sell them via the Mac App Store.
Will that happen? Only Apple knows. But the signs seem to be pointing in the right direction.
When a friend asked me to clarify what Apple’s coolest new API, called iBeacons, was, I explained it like this: If you’re sailing a ship in the dark and want to know where the coastline is, you look out for a bright thing that’s called a lighthouse. This lighthouse, or beacon, gives you spatial information that you can act on--in this case, that information allows you to not crash your ship into the shore.
Apple’s iBeacon API works much the same way as the light from the lighthouse. It allows iOS devices to pick up micro-location Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) profiles (the “light”) from miniature Bluetooth transceivers (the “lighthouse”). These micro-location BLE profiles carry in them spatial, and other, data that will allow your iPhone to do so much more than it can today.
iBeacons works by talking to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices, also known as Bluetooth 4.0 and Bluetooth “SMART,” that are able to transmit data within a 150-foot proximity. If an iPhone falls within these geofenced BLE proximities, iBeacons automatically picks up data from those beacons and turns it into actionable user commands.
“But in what context are iBeacons useful?” you might ask. “After all, there are a dozen ways to beam information to an iPhone.”
iOS 7's iBeacons can be used by app developers to do things like build an interactive tour of a museum, where the user's attention is directed to specific exhibits as they walk freely within the building. In more general terms, the feature can also be used enable indoor navigation similar to GPS in settings such as an airport or underground subway station where GPS signals aren't available, or specifically to enhance navigational accessibility for the blind or users with other impairments.
But what’s even more interesting about iBeacons is that they are not just looking for signals from BLE transmitters. It turns out iBeacons turns your iOS device into a transmitter as well so it can send automatic commands to other BLE tech. What’s amazing about this is that it means iBeacons opens the door (excuse the pun) to turning your iOS device into a key for any physical door (be it a car door or the door to your home) that is equipped with a BLE transmitter. Imagine arriving home and walking up to your house and having the door unlock automatically--no fumbling with the keys in your pocket. iBeacons does that.
Matter of fact, given the proper BLE hardware and a companion app, iBeacons allows for your iPhone to act like a key, or an “on” and “off” switch, for any device you can think of: doors, lights, alarms. With iBeacons, a thermostat company could make a BLE thermostat that talks to an app on your iPhone. In the app you could set it so that once you are out of range of your house when you leave for work in the morning, the air conditioning is automatically turned off to save on your energy bills. When you return home, the aircon automatically turns back on. No more setting the thermostat by time or manually turning it on and off. With iBeacons it could know if you’re home or not and set itself accordingly.
The iBeacons API in iOS 7 will allow your iPhone to become the control center for that mythical “Internet of things” we all want to see, which means your iPhone will become more invaluable than ever. It will be your car keys, your secure ID badge, your house keys, your on and off switch for alarms, and lights, and thermostat. And perhaps most tellingly, it shows just how much Apple wants to make the iPhone the one tool you need with you at all times.
A common thing I hear from serious gamers is that on no ecosystem Apple offers--neither iOS nor OS X--is gaming taken seriously by the Cupertino company. And until now, they may have been right. While there are some impressive games on iOS, they’re only impressive for a smartphone. When you compare them to a PC or console game, they lose their luster. The same goes for OS X, which still only gets the most popular PC games years after they have come out.
Part of this can be blamed on game developers. It cost millions of dollars to bring a game to a new platform, so those systems with smaller marketshare (like computers running OS X) aren’t going to get a lot of love. But who can really blame them? Game development is a business and if you can’t get a good return on your investment, there’s no point in wasting your time or money.
But another reason gaming, particularly on iOS, has been labeled nothing but “casual”--something people do to waste time in a doctor’s office or on the commute home -- is because a smartphone like the iPhone doesn’t provide the right tactile experience for complex games.
To see what I mean by this, imagine playing Red Dead Redemption on an iPhone or iPad. A game like that has such complicated controls, they only work well with physical controllers. And it’s because those controllers exist in three dimensions we don’t need to look at the controls to make a character walk forward or duck. We can feel it with our fingertips, which means we can concentrate on what is going on onscreen and not having to constantly look under our thumbs to make sure our fingers are actually touching the d-pad.
But the days of fingertips slipping from a touchscreen d-pad are about to end thanks to the new Game Controller framework Apple has just released in the iOS 7 beta (it’s also available for OS X 10.9). The framework sets the stage for third-party game controller support that has Apple’s blessing to talk to iOS. The official support from Apple means that games are about to get much more advanced on iOS because it frees users from the flat touch screen and gives them tactile controls like never before on an iPhone.
“On the surface it doesn't sound like a major deal--we've already had iOS gamepads from the likes of iCade and Ion. However, without any standardized API blueprint to work against, games developers had to put the effort in to optimizing their titles for each manufacturer's unique hardware control system. For many games devs, it just wasn't worth the extra hassle to add support for a controller that only a few thousand people (at best) may own, especially when the iPhone and iPad's touch controls worked out fine. But with the introduction of a standardized API, whatever Apple-certified game pad you buy going forward from the release of iOS 7 will adhere to a unified design, a single system that any game dev can easily add support for.”
However, developers hoping to enhance their games with third-party controller support need to keep some things in mind. Even though Apple is now being more proactive in its approach to gaming, it’s still Apple after all, and it does impose some limitations on how the controllers can interface with iOS games. Here’s the one caveat from the iOS Developer Library notes devs should be aware of:
“Controllers Must Be Optional: If you write a game that supports controllers, there must also be a way to play the game without a controller. On an iOS device, that means taking advantage of the touch screen and the integrated sensors in the device. On OS X, this usually means an interface based on the keyboard and mouse. Either way, controllers must enhance game play--they must not be required.”
What this clause is really saying is iOS may be more open to gaming, but it’s still Apple’s ecosystem and not the developer’s. Apple doesn’t want the iPhone becoming a glorified gaming system--like an Xbox mini--because the device is so much more than that. And most important, it doesn’t want to piss off its users by making them think they aren’t getting all they can out of the iPhone without buying additional hardware.
And to me, that’s a smart move. If I see a game in the App Store, I want to be able to download it and use it as I can any non-gaming app--right on my iPhone, using only my iPhone and fingers to interact with it. For game developers, however, that does mean extra work. Because if you can develop a kick-ass game for iOS that users a controller, you also need to find out a way to make it work sans game pad.
Apple owned the most popular platforms for software development in the 1980s with Mac OS and again in the late naughties with iOS. Now the company is set to go through another significant development boom with iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 and beyond. Where will these development changes take us? Some think they’ll lead to the unification of Mac OS and iOS. Some think they’ll lead to a third or even fourth development ecosystem--one aimed at wearable tech and one aimed at smart televisions. Only time will tell where software development in Apple’s ecosystem leads, but right now, there’s plenty of interesting new stuff going on in the existing ecosystems to keep developers busy.
If you’re interested in the future of development on Apple’s ecosystems, be sure to follow this tracker. Here we’ll explore the latest frameworks, tips, and advances in iOS and OS X. And if you’re a developer doing something innovative on either platform, get in touch with the author @michaelgrothaus to let him know what you’re up to.
While Google Glass's arrival date as a consumer-facing product remains something of a mystery, as does the final pricing structure, we do know it's in the hands of only a few developers and it currently costs $1,500. This obviously set a challenge for a startup in Italy that thinks it can do better, and at a cheaper price point of just $300 with a March 2014 delivery date. They've just kicked off a $150,000 Indiegogo campaign to fund the devices, but claim also to have already found private backing.
GlassUp is the name of this AR device and it promises a laundry list of services: Through its tiny on-glasses projector unit it will display
Emails, texts, and other status updates like calendar events and calls
Breaking news
Real-time feedback for sports activities
Turn-by-turn navigation instructions
Translations
Subtitles at the movies
Augmented information when at locations like a museum
There's also the promise of AR data for surgeons and the idea the wearable device can act as a hearing aid for the hearing impaired. Technically speaking the device is similar to Glass because it's an Android-powered second screen smartphone "companion," hooked up via Bluetooth, rather than a stand-alone phone. But while the team says its battery life is better and that it projects closer to the center of vision for less eye strain, it does have some limitations--mainly its monochrome screen. This is almost certainly a cost-saving move.
But GlassUp is deliberately distinguished from Glass by looking more like a regular pair of glasses and because it's a receive-only machine. That means there's no camera, and thus no privacy issues...although we guess that some of the snootier venues that have banned Glass already won't stop to check the difference.
It's definitely intriguing, and with a aviation-HUD engineer on board it'll likely work well. I'll be unsurprised if the team achieves its Indiegogo target. Color me slightly dubious about the future utility of GlassUp, however. It's going to come with APIs so developers can send the relevant data from phones to the wearer's eyes...but unless a miracle happens the device isn't going to sell by the ton. That means there's not going to be an enormous incentive for developers to invest time and effort on coding for GlassUp, versus coding for what's likely to be a more successful product from Google. Though it's cheaper than Google's developer editions of Glass, it's also functionally limited in some ways, and this fact is going to serve against its success.
Still, GlassUp confirms two important facts. First, we are going to see a ton of face-worn computing efforts that attempt to undercut or outmaneuver Google's product. Second, if there's going to be a thriving market for these products the only way developers will be able to profitably code for them is if someone develops a common API framework that will work between brands.
