Building software is complicated, so most companies use a product manager to coordinate developers and designers. But at Behance, the creative portfolio platform owned by Adobe, typical product managers don't exist.

"We don't have the traditional role of product manager," says Scott Belsky, head and cofounder of Behance, which helps artists showcase their client-fetching work. The site drafts its own creative types to serve as that liaison between devs and designers.

At Behance, product managers are people with design and UX backgrounds who are making key decisions in how Behance looks and how it's used, giving the service a sort of "for creatives, by creatives" approach.

Zach McCullough is a senior designer at Behance. He's one of the people who wears both hats of designer and product manager.

"I have the advantage of being the audience I'm designing for," he says. "I'm involved in the entire process. It becomes a more iterative, flexible exchange."

But the roles of designer and product manager require different skills, so conflating them can get complicated. However, once you find those people who can easily bounce between the two, it significantly improves your company's design process. For tech companies, that's become more crucial than ever.

Designers Deserve Greater Control

"Design demonstrates the way you approach your product," Belsky says. "Even without having built anything yet."

He believes design has become a competitive advantage, so he warns against putting design on the periphery, or having it outsourced. Having an external team working on your product's design slows everything down, which hinders your company's ability to innovate at a quick clip.

And since having talented, in-house designers is so important, it can pay off to put them at the head of the table. How'd Behance arrive at this conclusion? At first, it just sort of happened out of circumstance.

McCullough says that it's hard to justify the formal role of product manager when you're just starting out and you've got a room of five people. As a company grows, a product manager becomes necessary. But as more people are introduced into the equation, McCullough says the higher the likelihood of miscommunication, and the greater the chance of the designer being sidelined as a product's getting pushed out the door.

So when Belsky started to bring in fresh blood, he wanted to scale the model by hiring designers with a solid sense of product, strategy, management, and diplomacy. Then, those folks brought those skills--as well as that design-centric perspective--into their product manager jobs.

"Designers who 'just want to design' won't succeed on our team," Belsky says.

In McCullough's case, he worked on Behance's activity feed, its notification system, and its redesigned job list. He acted as the creative force (as a designer) and the organizational force (as a product manager), seeing those projects from inception to completion. Splitting his efforts gave him greater perspective and control over his projects. He was one person doing what could be a two-person (or more) job.

"If you have a designer through every step of the process, considering every detail that comes up--of which there will literally be thousands," McCullough says, "the end result is much tighter, and makes more sense."

"Design Is the DNA of Everything"

Belsky points out that, at many tech companies, designers have risen to leadership roles across the board: Airbnb founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia are both designers, for instance, as is Pinterest's Evan Sharp. (Belsky cofounded Behance with graphic designer Matias Corea.)

Why does Belsky think this trend is happening? It's because he believes "design is about a lot more than product." Design can be a key factor in a company's success, from "illuminating the importance of typography in brand identity" to "creating an office space conducive for collaboration."

"Quite simply, design is the DNA of everything," Belsky says.

This appreciation made Behance a natural pair with Adobe, which bought Behance in late 2012.

"If you look back at Adobe's history, you'll see it was backed by engineers who wanted to make something," says Russell Brady, communications director at Adobe. "That made it easy for Adobe to acquire [design-focused] companies like Behance and give those kind of companies empowerment."

For McCullough, who used to design ads for luxury liquor brands, having such influence in a project he's designed can be especially fulfilling.

"You're like, why am I working on JohnnieWalker.com?" he says. "But the prospect of designing something for an audience of designers, and also helping other designers, is really attractive."

It's even more attractive to the company as a whole. Putting innovative designers--who are flexible and are good at coordinating with non-designers--in control can maximize a product's potential.

"In the early days, when you're selling the vision to investors and, more importantly, to early employees, great design helps people visualize the possibilities," Belsky says. "You can give them a glimpse of the future."

Behance's hybrid role helps the company make sure that its future is as promising as possible.

Every computer science student learns the basics of graph theory--a set of mathematical abstractions for modeling networks and the connections within them. But few developers ever work with network data on the scale of Facebook's social graph, with its more than 1 billion users and hundreds of billions of connections, or edges, between them. So in 2012, when Facebook engineers started thinking in earnest about ways to efficiently process all the network data they'd amassed, they found themselves in uncharted territory.

"As far as I know, there's been no work to be cited working with graphs as large as a half a trillion or a trillion edges," says Facebook engineer Avery Ching.

But Facebook still wanted to be able to measure basic statistics about their users' connections, and efficiently do computations like measuring affinities between users to suggest potential friends, or finding mutual friends of sets of users. To make this possible, they turned to an open source graph theory toolkit called Apache Giraph, derived from code originally donated to the Apache Software Foundation by Yahoo.

Making Giraph work at Facebook's scale required a bit of engineering, which Facebook documented on a company blog and contributed back to the open source effort, but Giraph's overall computing model proved to be the ticket to parallelizing huge network graph computations across Facebook's servers.

"It was really easy for us to use," Ching says. "The model itself was very expressive--it allowed you to do a lot of different things."

How Giraph Works

Giraph is based on what's called the bulk synchronous parallel model, a class of parallel computing algorithm developed in the 1980s by researchers led by Harvard computer science professor Leslie Valiant. BSP algorithms take place across multiple computers over a series of steps, and at each step, each computer does a bit of computation and, if it wishes, sends messages about its results to others in the system, which they can incorporate into their computations at the next step.

In Giraph's case, the individual computations are done as if from the perspective of the individual nodes, or vertices, of a graph. And at the end of each step, each node can choose whether to send a message to its immediate neighbors. Before Giraph, that model had been proposed in a Google paper describing an internal tool called Pregel, and Facebook engineers found it's an easy way to describe many graph theory problems in a way that makes them possible to parallelize, by having different computers handle simultaneous computation on behalf of different sets of nodes.

"For large-scale graph computation at Facebook prior to Giraph, people were trying to [use] frameworks such as Hive and MapReduce," says Ching. "You can do it, but it's just really, really slow--think 50 to 100 times slower than it is today."

Finding The Degrees Between People

As a simple example, Giraph's manual presents an implementation of the single-source shortest path algorithm, which measures the distance from any particular node to every other node in the network.

Logically, the length of the shortest path to any particular node is the length of the shortest path to one of its neighbors, plus the distance from that neighbor. So, under Giraph's model, each node begins each step by figuring out the shortest path it knows to itself from the start node, notifying its neighbors if it's learned of a shorter path since last messaging them. Those messages let each node redo its own computation in the next step and again see if it's learned of a shorter route; when a step ends without any nodes needing to send revised paths to their neighbors, each node knows the best path from the source.

And Giraph works for more complex problems, too: A Facebook blog post from earlier this month described how Giraph can be used to assign Facebook users' data to particular database servers. Facebook runs more efficiently when users' information is stored on the same servers as that of their friends, since it means fewer cross-server lookups for common operations, but maximizing the number of users on the same server as their friends is hard with a billion accounts.

The Giraph approach assigns each node to a particular set, representing one server, and lets it tell its neighbors where it's located. At each step, it randomly decides whether to move to another set, with the probability of a move proportional to the number of neighbors in that set.

After a few dozens iterations, that algorithm improved handily on simply assigning nodes to sets based on geographic location, according to the post.

"An early adopter within the company was a service in which typical queries involve fetching a considerable amount of data for each of a person's friends," according to the blog post.

And Facebook remains committed to improving Giraph and contributing the changes it makes back to the open source project, so that it can be used by others dealing with graph data, although some of the algorithms it runs on top of the platform are only shared internally, Ching says.

Before any of Facebook's improvements to Giraph itself are deployed internally, the changes are pushed to the Apache project's open source code repositories, he says.

"We contribute everything we do first to Apache, and then we pull it back through trunk," he says, referring to the project's development branch.

"We work with some researchers and other folks outside the community to just advance Giraph generally," he says. "If people are going to use Apache Giraph, they should use it in the best way possible, which is the version that we're using."

Like a lot of Fast Company readers, I was intrigued by the mention of a "space elevator" concept under development at Google's skunkworks lab, known simple as Google X.

"You know what a space ­elevator is, right?" DeVaul asks. He ticks off the essential facts--a cable attached to a satellite fixed in space, tens of thousands of miles above Earth. To DeVaul, it would no doubt satisfy the X criteria of something straight out of sci-fi.

Space elevators would be a game-changer on the level of electricity or powered flight. As an engineer who has designed space elevator concepts for Boeing's space systems division, and occasional FastCoLabs contributor, I thought I'd add some details to this promising, mirage-like concept.

Space is already a $304 billion business, but it has the potential to be much larger if it weren't so extremely expensive to get there. Any future business like space tourism (which involves shipping people) or asteroid mining (which requires shipping raw materials) runs up against the current cost to deliver anything to space.

SpaceX offers the least expensive launch prices at $2,550/kg, or about four times the price of silver. When your costs are measured in multiples of a precious metal, you need to cut costs. So engineers like myself look for cheaper ways to get things into space.

The Design Challenges Of A Space Elevator

One appealing way to reduce the cost of shipping cargo and people into space is a "space elevator."

And it would presumably be transformative by reducing space travel to a fraction of its present cost: Transport ships would clip on to the cable and cruise up to a space station. One could go up while another was heading down. "It would be a massive capital investment," DeVaul says, but after that "it could take you from ground to orbit with a net of basically zero energy. It drives down the space-access costs, operationally, to being incredibly low."

Exactly--this idea of a space elevator is simple, appealing, but most likely wrong. In order to see why it's wrong--and how we can salvage parts of the concept--we need to look deeper into their design and economics to see what approach makes the most sense, and when we might build such a thing later in this century. As the piece says:

Not surprisingly, the team encountered a stumbling block. If scaling problems are what brought hoverboards down to earth, material-science issues crashed the space elevator. The team knew the cable would have to be exceptionally strong-- "at least a hundred times stronger than the strongest steel that we have," by ­Piponi's calculations. He found one material that could do this: carbon nanotubes.

Carbon nanotube cables are theoretically 12 times stronger than the best steel, but 5 times lighter, thus 60 times better in strength-to-weight, which is what matters for space elevators. Pound for pound that's 60 times stronger.

The design of any structure, whether skyscraper, bridge, or space elevator is governed by the need to support all the loads present at each point. In a tall building that not only includes the contents, but also the support columns above the point you are looking at. So the lower floors must be stronger to carry the weight of everything above them.

If the steel or concrete holding up the building is the same strength throughout, the only way to make the columns stronger is by making them larger. Tapering from bottom to top is most visible in the Burj Khalifa and Eiffel Tower, but it also goes on under the skin of boxy office buildings.

Read the feature story that inspired this response: The Truth About Google X: An Exclusive Look Behind The Secretive Lab's Closed Doors

The structure for a space elevator also has to handle the loads all along its length, but instead of being supported from the ground, it is mostly hanging from synchronous orbit. At that altitude, gravity and the centrifugal acceleration of the orbit are balanced; this is true of every stable orbit, which is why things remain in orbit and don't fall down.

Here's The Big Problem, Explained

However, as you move down the elevator, gravity gets stronger and the centrifugal acceleration gets less; you are moving slower as you get closer to the Earth. The elevator structure also sees this difference as weight it needs to support with more structure.

Net forces can be demonstrated in a moving car: you always feel the Earth's gravity, but when you accelerate forward, you also feel that force. Something dangling from the rearview mirror will hang at a backward angle from the combined force. On a space elevator, gravity pulls you down, and centrifugal acceleration pulls you up, and your apparent weight is the difference.

In other words, that hanging elevator structure has to support more and more weight from everything below as you go up from near the ground to synchronous orbit. That includes the structure itself, and any contents like cargo capsules, rails, power cables, or aircraft warning lights.

If we use the strongest available material, currently carbon fiber, then the elevator must get thicker as we go up, to support all the weight below that height. How much thicker it needs to get can be found from two properties of any material: the strength and the density. Strength tells you how much you need to support a given load, and density tells you how much more load is added by the material itself. The ratio is called "specific strength." For the best carbon fiber, with reasonable design margins for safety and overhead, this is 150 km.

When you do the math, it works out you need to increase the area and weight of the cable by a factor of "e" (2.718…) for each 150 km of load, to keep the cable stress from going above your design limit. Unfortunately, the Earth's gravity well from the ground to synchronous orbit is equivalent to 6,230 km. Therefore the cable mass will be the factor e 41.5 times (e41.5 ) or 1.1 million trillion times the cargo mass. You can never ship enough cargo to justify such a massive cable.

We either need a stronger material, or to make the elevator shorter, so it doesn't have such an extreme mass. As the original article says, carbon fiber isn't the only option. There are also carbon nanotubes.

But no one has manufactured a carbon nanotube strand longer than a meter. And so elevators "were put in a deep freeze," as Heinrich says, and the team decided to keep tabs on any advances in the carbon nanotube field.

So, will those work?

Carbon nanotubes have extraordinary theoretical strength, but in reality it cannot reach those levels of strength because of defects. A study predicts an actual cable strength, allowing for design margins, of 623 km, or about 4 times better than current carbon fiber. This is now 1/10th of the Earth's gravity well, and the cable mass falls dramatically to e10 = 22,000 times the cargo mass.

So does that mean a space elevator is feasible is this idea in the future?

A cable mass of 22,000 times the cargo is a vast improvement over a million trillion, but is still not low enough to make a viable elevator. For the moment, we will ignore that today we can only make carbon nanotubes in microscopic fibers. We assume that researchers will eventually be able to make it in enough quantity and cable thickness for the elevator structure.

But there's another problem: payback time for the elevator.

The Space Elevator Speed Problem

The mass ratio of the cable to the cargo capsule it carries is fixed for a given material and design. If you have multiple cargo capsules in transit, you also need multiple amounts of cable to support them. For simplicity, we can then consider one capsule and one unit of cable.

There has to be some kind of mechanism to raise the capsules from the ground to synchronous altitude (35,000 km). Conventional elevators are raised by cables, but that is too slow to consider. The fastest existing elevator, in the Taipei 101 tower, would take 24 days. Instead, let's assume you use magnetic levitation as fast as the fastest existing maglev train (581 km/h). That would get you to the top in 60 hours.

To deliver 22,000 cargoes--or about as much mass as the elevator cable itself--would then take 150 years. That's right. If we started today, it would take until 2164 to deliver its own weight.

Since you have to launch the space elevator itself into space, you want it to deliver more cargo than its own mass. Otherwise why not skip the elevator and just launch the cargo directly?

So if it takes 150 years to do this, your rate of return is a 0.6% percent per year, which just isn't viable from an economics standpoint. But what about making them smaller?

Will We Ever Build Sensible Space Elevators?

The original idea for a space elevator, from the ground to synchronous orbit as one giant structure, was first described by rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895. It was intended to be theoretical, like Isaac Newton's illustration of a cannon on a mountain firing into orbit. It was not intended to be a practical design.

And indeed, it isn't: 60 hours, or 2.5 days, to deliver 1/22,000 of the elevator's mass as cargo means it takes a long time--150 years--to deliver enough to make the elevator worth building. As an analogy, imagine a tractor trailer (big truck) that can deliver 3 pounds every 2.5 days. Not very useful, is it?

So let's dispense with two assumptions in the [original] idea: that it needs to be one giant structure, and that it needs to do the whole job of reaching orbit.

The larger lesson here is that any Google X idea that hinges on some kind of new development in material science cannot proceed. This is not the case with electronics--X could go forward with a device that depends upon near-term improvements in computing capability because Moore's law predicts an exponential increase in computing power. That is why DeVaul's team is confident that Google Glass will get less awkward with each passing year. But there is no way to accurately predict when a new material or manufacturing process will be invented. It could happen next year, or it could be 100 years.

This is one place where the community of space elevator researchers diverges from the Google X folks. We all want stronger materials, because that makes the cable much lighter--but for Earth, even with ideal materials, it's too hard to do a one-piece full elevator.

The Moon and Mars have smaller gravity wells, so we can consider one-piece solutions, but for Earth we need to break it up into smaller pieces and offload some of the work to a rocket.

We have more control over the viability of a space elevator than we think, by questioning the two assumptions above.

You see, conventional rockets also have a mass ratio problem. To reach synchronous orbit, they are about 100 times as heavy as the payload they deliver. Most of this is fuel, and the rest, until now, has been expensive aerospace hardware which was thrown away after one use. So it makes sense to divide the work between a rocket and an elevator. This lowers the mass ratios of both, and the sum of the combined mass ratios will be lower.

Combining Rockets And Space Elevators

We can also divide the space elevator into two parts, one in low orbit and one near synchronous orbit. The lower one passes the cargo capsule to the upper one using orbital mechanics, rather than a maglev rail. Crossing the gap between them using nothing but physics will be cheaper than a maglev rail--they are not cheap. The smaller elevators will also have exponentially lower mass ratios than a single one doing the same job.

To put some numbers to it, the rocket supplies 4,600 m/s (plus various losses like drag), the lower elevator supplies 4,800 m/s to the cargo, and the upper one adds another 1,500 m/s. Since the rocket is doing far less of the work, it's mass ratio is now 10-15 instead of 100. The exact number will depend on how much of the savings is used to make it last much more like an airplane (20,000 flights) than a disposable rocket.

The lower elevator, using existing off-the-shelf carbon fiber--not some future nanotube stuff--will have a mass ratio of 14, and the upper one 1.4. These are much more sensible numbers. These numbers may not be the optimum, they will depend on a number of design trade-offs which nobody has done yet, but they are much more encouraging than the "one big elevator" approach.

In sum, a space elevator may be impossible--but smaller rockets assisted by space elevators may indeed happen within our lifetimes.

Before anyone knew they could make a million dollars with Kickstarter, there was Tim Schafer of Double Fine Productions and a game with no name. This was back in 2012 before anyone knew what a record-breaking Kickstarter looked like. Schafer was about to show the world. But his team's success didn't start with crowdfunding--it ended up there, thanks to their lack of focus.

Double Fine's now-ingrained tradition of the "Amnesia Fortnight" involves a two-week period where the entire 60-person studio simply forgets what they're working on. Instead, they divide into four teams, and each team makes a small game prototype unrelated to the company's main project.

"Our first couple games took about four or five years to make. So it was a long investment of time and everybody was immersed in this fantasy world that was really specific," says Schafer. The first Amnesia Fortnights happened during the development of Double Fine's second game--a heavy metal-themed action game called Brütal Legend that starred Jack Black--as a way to keep the team from burning out. "I thought, I love being in this crazy heavy metal fantasy world for five years, but maybe not everybody does. Maybe they would like a break," says Schafer.

The development of the Jack Black game happened to coincide with the release of Geometry Wars, an addictive, low budget, arcade-style game that changed industry perceptions of what a successful game looked like.

"There was this idea that you could make smaller games and not everything has to be this huge 20 million dollar epic or more," said Schafer. "There's a place in this world for small ideas as well as big ideas."

Schafer was also imitating acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-wai who, as the story goes, paused a languishing film project, took a spare crew and almost no script, and went off and filmed what would become two incredible (and complete) films: Chungking Express and Fallen Angels.

"I just thought that was so inspiring, because you [take] these big projects, with these elaborate plans, you've got this enormous document that you're trying to implement--all of these features, all of these people and moving parts," Schafer says. "And then you just step away from that for a second and say, 'What if I just did something tiny and quick really fast?' And sometimes that tiny quick, small, idea, can be even more rewarding than the big ones, but finding their own place in the world for sure."

Amnesia Fortnights, Kickstarter Success, and Double Fine 2.0

Despite his company's internal Amnesia Fortnights, Schafer's intention was always to build a sequel to the Jack Black game. But when that sequel was canceled, what started as a morale-boosting creative experiment--the Amnesia Fortnights--would keep the studio alive.

With their sequel game dead, the team had four small games developed during their Amnesia Fortnight experiments. All four--Costume Quest, Iron Brigade, Stacking, and Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster--were released within two years' time.

But even though Schafer's studio had stumbled upon a way to remain in business almost entirely by accident, it wasn't going to rest easy.

"I think even the act of experimentation has to be experimented with," says Schafer. "So we change how we do the format of Amnesia Fortnight every year, and we come up with new twists to it all the time. Because even if you're doing this wild and crazy experimental thing, if you just do the same thing every time people will start to repeat ideas."

This was taken even further in 2012, when Double Fine's make their next Amnesia Fortnight a public event. All Double Fine employees were invited to pitch a game, and fans who followed along online would vote for the ones they thought were best. Then, the studio would break into teams to develop the winning ideas into game prototypes over two weeks, in a process that was filmed and put on YouTube for the world to see.

"[One] of the essential things about it is that we try to have a blend between low stakes and high stakes, because one of the things about a big multi-million-dollar project is that the stakes are so high you're afraid to experiment," Schafer says. "So you say, we'll just spend two weeks, and then the stakes are low, right? It's an experiment, it's a goof, it doesn't matter. Let's just try something crazy! That releases your brain from all the self-censorship that you normally do. And that allows things to happen."

But go too far in that direction and the end result can be nonsense, cautions Schafer. So while the structure of the experiment allowed for a lighthearted, anything-goes mentality, it would be mitigated by the very real chance that any one of these pitches could be Double Fine's next game.

A Tool To Fight The Power

Schafer wanted to make an adventure game, but he also wanted to fix what he believed was a major problem in the industry--the uneven distribution of power between the publishers who market a game and the developers who make them.

"You definitely feel accountable to the [Kickstarter] backers, and those people we always want to please--but they were the people that you wanted to please before anyway," says Schafer. "It's just that now you don't have this middleman, of a publisher or some other person who's risking their money, who wants to tell you what they think the players want."

Schafer's Kickstarted game--now called Broken Age--was a wild success. It also ushered in a new era of transparency and interaction with fans; one full of quirky videos, episodic documentaries, and lots of forum conversations. But Double Fine had one more new thing to try, another quiet subversion of the established order: It would become a publisher.

"It started out as--we had just wanted to publish our own games," Schafer says. He cited his prior frustrations: creative control, and financial deals that require every game to be a huge hit if the developer wants to see any money. "After we went through that process many times, we realized we had this infrastructure for testing and localizing and distributing and publicizing games that other people can benefit from."

"We'd see other indies come up with that feeling of like, 'Oh gosh, I just want to worry about my game, I don't want to worry about this other troublesome stuff, maybe I should go to some big publisher and let them worry about it.' And our message to them was, 'You really don't!'"

Just by tinkering around over the past five years, Double Fine went from a studio on the brink to becoming a new kind of publisher, to one that does business in a way that allows indie studios to survive and maintain their independence. Even the fact that Schafer himself--likable, funny, and beloved by gamers--is so open about his studio's work is notable, and all too rare in the industry.

"I really like laying it all out there for people, because people really appreciate seeing how games are made," says Schafer. "A lot of people in our fan community are people who maybe want to make games themselves, or maybe had not thought that they could make games themselves, but now they watched our documentary and they see that, 'Oh, I guess there's not really any magic formula to it. These people are just figuring out as they go like I would.'"

"I think my worst habit is struggling with technology," says Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked: How To Build Habit-forming Products, "even though I know how this stuff works, I need to bring conscious thought into how I use [it]."

Eyal teaches entrepreneurs how to create habit-forming tech products which users open without any conscious thought at all. A habit, he says, is an action we take automatically in response to an environmental trigger. "We are what we repeatedly do," said Aristotle; maybe you reach for a doughnut every time you feel stressed or take the same route to work every day. Professor Wendy Wood found that 45% of daily behavior is repeated regularly and therefore has the potential to become a habit.

So what can we learn about habits that informs the way we build products? Habitual behavior is a sort of autopilot operated mostly by the subconscious brain--which is why once a habit is established it's so hard to change. If developers can understand how their product can become a habit, they can create extremely loyal users.

Getting Users "Hooked"

Eyal's formula for habit formation is to repeatedly guide the user through a sequence he calls "the hook." A hook starts with a trigger such as a situation or an emotion like feeling stressed. Often the trigger is a negative emotion. You might check Facebook when you feel lonely or fire up Candy Crush to escape boredom. The user then takes an action in order to get a reward, in this case the doughnut.

Products can give different types of reward. Eyal calls social rewards like a message from a friend rewards of the tribe. Resources, including information, are rewards of the hunt and gaining mastery or control he calls rewards of the self; variable rewards have been shown to increase focus and engagement. Finally, the user makes some kind of investment, like personalizing the product, which makes him more likely to repeat the hook.

"I wanted to create a toolkit which I would have wanted as an entrepreneur to use these principles of psychology in product design," says Eyal. "Some startups totally forget the trigger. In some the action is too complicated. Others don't have a variable reward, which maintains mystery. A lot of companies forget to ask for an investment [from the user]."

According to Eyal, the most habit-forming technology out there is old-fashioned email. "That's a technology that has all three types of variable rewards: tribe, hunt, and self," he says. "It's rare to find a tech product that has all three. There's lots of situations where email provides a solution to an emotional problem. There's tons of internal triggers around email from boredom to loneliness. The action couldn't be easier, especially when it's this ubiquitous and this easy to access. The variable reward is tribe; it's social connection. It's hunt because it's connected to our workplace and it's an information reward. And it's self in that the completion of checking the unread messages gives you the satisfaction of control and mastery and then of course the investment is every time you send a message you are increasing the likelihood of getting one back."

Displace An Extant Habit

You can't turn every product into a habit. The first pre-condition is frequency of use. "The cutoff point seems to be about a week or less," says Eyal. "The most habit-forming products are intra-day behaviors. We take out Snapchat or Instagram or Pinterest multiple times a day."

It's difficult to create a completely new behavior; instead try to displace an existing one. "Pinterest replaced the habit of bookmarking and in fact the people who are avid Pinterest users, they install this PinIt button on their browser geographically very close to the old bookmark button. That's not by coincidence. That's the old trigger."

If you think that your product has the potential to be habit-forming, then it's time to start habit testing. Eyal defines three steps in this process: identifying, codifying, and modifying. First you identify what a habituated user looks like.

How frequently should someone who's habituated use my product? Then you go looking for these habituated users in your data. What percentage of your users are habituated? Codify the path that those users took.

"There's the classic Twitter example, "says Eyal, "that they found that people who followed X number of other people were the ones who became habituated users." The final step is to modify the path so that other users become more likely to follow the same path.

Many startups miss the investment stage entirely and that means that users stop coming back. "A lot of websites are built to be slicky where the idea is how do we get the customer what they want as quickly as possible and get them out of here?" says Eyal. "We forget to ask for some type of investment to bring them back later. There's data. If you use personal finance software or Pinterest the more data you put into the site the better it becomes. The more content you put into iTunes, it becomes more and more valuable as your music library. You've got followers--the more followers you have the more valuable the product becomes--and then finally reputation. Those are all means of investing in a product thereby loading the next trigger. "

The Morality Of Manipulation

I asked Eyal whether developers have a moral responsibility to build habit-forming products which are truly of benefit to their users, and not just their makers.

"I'll tell you a secret here, which is that the book is a Trojan horse," says Eyal. "You buy the book because you think it's going to make your product super-engaging but you can't read the book and not encounter this chapter The Morality of Manipulation, which gives a very clear framework around how individual makers can think about their role and their responsibilities. You should use this psychology all guns blazing if you are the kind of person who is making something for themselves and if you believe that the product you are making materially improves people's lives. I call these people facilitators. If you can meet those two criteria, use away."

There's another type of product maker Eyal calls a dealer. Dealers make a habit-forming product they know doesn't benefit users, although it may offer them a temporary reward. Gambling apps might fall into this category. "There's a great book by Natasha Dow Schüll called Addiction by Design where she profiles machine gamblers in Las Vegas and it turns out that they all across the board have some kind of deep sadness they are escaping by getting into the zone of gambling." Needless to say, dealers don't use their own product.

But can you really hook users successfully and not end up creating addicts? "Habits can be good or bad whereas addictions are always bad," says Eyal. "I agree with Paul Graham that the world is becoming a more addictive place. Even if you are a facilitator, you are still going to get addicts. Social games, those businesses could not survive without these overusers. The industry calls them the whales. Is there a moral responsibility when your business depends on whales? Maybe they are 2% of the population but I think there is a really important moral question there of what do you do when you know someone is hooked? If you make alcohol you can throw up your hands and say 'We don't know who's an alcoholic!' But these companies know. They can see the data. So does Facebook have a moral responsibility for its 2%? A moral responsibility to say 'You know what? You should probably use Facebook a little less.'"

Before hackathons existed, there were rapid-fire content creation blitzes. Ad hoc creative teams have produced magazines in 24 hours, created films in a week and written novels within a span of 30 days. These events are not unlike today's hackathons, but with words and pictures instead of code. So what can hackathon organizers learn from these old-school creative blitzes?

The Rise Of The Media Creation Blitz--And The Lessons That Follow

Campus MovieFest started in 2001 when cofounder David Roemer saw the new iMovie software as an easy-to-use and far cheaper version of traditional film editing software. It let students make a movie in under a week--which just wasn't possible before.

CMF has since spread to dozens of campuses worldwide, some of which chose to retire their smaller film festivals in favor of CMF's proven model, resources, and corporate partnerships. If you can provide networking and improve the experience with corporate deals, participants will flock to you.

"Any school can run a student film festival and showcase the films in their auditorium, but we can showcase their winners in-flight on Virgin America," Roemer says.

Freelance writer Chris Baty launched the ostentatiously titled National Novel Writing Month for himself and 21 Bay Area friends back in 1999. The goal: write 50,000 words in the month of November with other dreamers. Even as NaNoWriMo grew to attract hundreds of thousands of writers, Baty's groundedness and humor made the hiccups in service bearable for the bootstrapped staff and legions of participants alike.

When things fall apart, Baty found that humor and honesty give you leeway--even with thousands and thousands of participants hanging on to your authority and direction. As NaNoWriMo was growing in the 2000s, Baty and his skeleton crew rushed to manually plug in servers when media coverage overloaded the NaNoWriMo website. So long as Baty kept participants in the loop and poked fun at the logistical struggle, all was forgiven--even when a catastrophic website failure in the third year led Baty to throw up his hands and ask writers to step forward on the honor system if they'd passed the 50,000-word mark.

"Having a sense of humor was really key. We were criticized for the humor and joy, that this wasn't something that needed to be taken with the utmost seriousness. I would encourage anyone looking to grow something to have a sense of humor," Baty says. And NaNoWriMo has indeed grown in the 15 years since it launched, getting 450,000 participants last year from 30 countries.

#24MAG, on the other hand, locked a couple dozen creative folk in a room in NYC to put out a full-color multimedia magazine in 24 hours. Founder Sara Eileen Hames had numerous creative luminaries she wanted to work with but nobody had the time--so she challenged them to blitz out a magazine in a weekend.

In contrast to the lack of diversity in most hackathons, Hames deliberately made #24MAG's space tolerant, welcoming, and very open to discussion if content was troubling. She sought out minority and LGBTQ collaborators. Shocking nobody, such an inspiring environment forged the collaborators into a community--and they kept coming back.

Your First Year Will Be A Nightmare. Here's How To Survive

Creating a blitz event from scratch is no mean feat. Expensive gear is important, but so is food, water, and power: Many a hackathon has been tripped up by a lack of power strips.

With barely $500 in campus funding and some donated donuts, the CMF founders were determined to make sure the festival's first year at Emory University still went smoothly--so they "begged, borrowed, or stole" all the equipment their participants needed to make films. Their belief outweighed the logistical nightmare and resource scarcity that so often sinks events before they start.

"I think we were naive. I think we didn't know what shouldn't have been possible. If we had known that we shouldn't have been able to do all this stuff, we never would've tried or we would've given up at some point," CMF cofounder Dan Costa says.

No matter how much you plan, things will go wrong. Accept it, says Baty of NaNoWriMo--but enjoying the ride will save you.

"You're not always going to get it right," Baty says. "Have fun be a part of the equation. It's going to be really really hard, but if you love it, it won't feel like work."

Hames and her contributors had blown their 24-hour mark their first year, finishing after 30 hours. Crushed and exhausted from the weekend, she consulted with an editor who had helped produce Longshot, a similar weekend magazine blitz.

"I was so worried--nobody's gonna like us anymore, y'know," Hames says. "He told me, 'No no--Longshot blew their first deadline by seven hours. Nobody cares.' It's not like a 24-hour play where there's an audience showing up at 8 p.m."

Learning while you go is totally fine. But you have to be willing to dive in already. And you have to accept that your first year will be a total mess.

"If you're working with a team that's excited to be with you and you're working for an audience that's excited to be with you--your sins are forgiven," Hames says. "If you don't know exactly how things are going to work and you're honest about that, people will say 'Okay, we'll figure this out.'"

If The Goals And Rewards Are Unclear, It's Your Fault

If your hackathon doesn't make its goals clear from the get-go, your participants' entries could be all over the map--and much harder for you to judge at the finish line. Be open and upfront about both what you want created and what prizes they should be gunning to win. People will enter a creative jam, even if there isn't a monetary prize at the end of the rainbow.

CMF only has one real requirement--all films screened for competition must be under five minutes. Winning films net prizes, including exposure to film and production folks within Hollywood and the private sector. There are even a few corporate partner challenges that students can compete for alongside the main competition. But most importantly, the FAQ is stacked with information on what you can and can't do--and there are half a dozen contact options at the top of that page to get in touch with someone at CMF any time of day. They know that a competition with real prizes needs to get the ground rules across as clearly as possible--and keep lines of communication open so eleventh-hour students get their questions answered before the finish line. The higher the stakes, the greater YOUR responsibility that everyone's on the same page.

NaNoWriMo has one goal--write 50,000 words of anything--and one non-monetary reward amounting to digital bragging rights. It doesn't even fill a podium with the month's "best" novels--mostly because judging among the 30,000 winners who beat the 50,000-word mark would be impossible. But so many users return, enrollment continues to grow, and people keep hitting that 50,000-word goal.

Why? In a word: community.

Instead of glorifying a "best" entry, NaNoWriMo exists to change a traditionally solitary endeavor into a social experience. The website tracks everyone's progress and allows participants to post excerpts and comment, but local groups are where the encouraging magic happens. Part communal therapy and part networking, NaNoWriMo writing groups spring up without any supervision from NaNoWriMo staff. Whether it's a group chant to kick off a night of writing or just the ritual of a weekly drink, group culture keeps people coming back to write.

#24MAG's promises are similar to NaNoWriMo's: Nobody's here to make money, so focus on making something cool with your multi-skilled peers. But by laying stern ground rules for tolerance from the get-go via its editorial policy, #24MAG sets up a space unique in creative blitzes--one dedicated to trumpeting marginalized voices. Combined with its exciting blitz process, this open and accepting atmosphere forges #24MAG into a strong voice.

By outlining its mission upfront alongside its non-financial rewards, #24MAG's contributors accept that the opportunity to create with other dynamic artists is well worth their time and effort--even at the nightmare pace of a 24-hour blitz.

Integrate Your Sponsor Presence Well--Or Say Goodbye To Respect

CMF was founded by filmmakers, but several of them had substantial marketing and business experience too. It was natural to look at business and corporate sponsors as partners to both fund CMF's growth and showcase work by CMF participants to sponsors looking for young talent. So long as they were honest about the sponsors' presence and found that everyone involved got something out of the experience, nobody had a problem with the merging of creative and business worlds.

"The first thing we talk about with our corporate partners is how do we authentically integrate them and not just slap a logo on something?" Roemer says. "We found that as long as we provide value to the students and the school thanks to the partners, we really don't get criticism."

Universities will be wary of introducing more corporate presence on their campuses and students can smell brand bullshit a mile away. You'll have to get a balancing act going to make sure everyone's happy, but the end result is worth it.

"It's really brought the festival to a whole new level with prizes, exposure, and tools we're able to provide to the students," Roemer says. "Some of our winners are creating Super Bowl ads for Doritos or creating web series for Adobe. All great opportunities that we could never have brought to students without corporate support."

No matter how creative you want your blitz to be, your participants have to eat--and should be building job-friendly skills. It's your job to illustrate how meshing corporate presence in with the "pure" creative process is a win-win for everyone.

"The ongoing challenge of artists is to try to figure out whether you're going to support yourself with your art or whether your art will make money at all--that dialogue absolutely saturates everything we as artists deal with," Hames says. "It's a logical extension to try and bring those skillsets together."

Avoid Hackbro Culture--Make Your Jam Accessible To All

Hackathons have made strides to welcome women and nonwhite programmers to combat the pervasive White Boy's Club culture in computer science. And yet, meeting the high-water mark of diversity set by other hackathons means you're still stuck in the status quo. Setting a higher standard for diversity won't just keep your hackathon progressive--it'll earn you the devotion of returning participants.

Before every #24MAG blitz, Hames began by citing the sternly tolerant editorial policy, which set ground rules that let contributors feel comfortable enough to pipe up about someone else's unsettling content.

"Very simple rules like that mean that anybody who showed up felt like they could be their true selves, do the work that was exciting to them, and not have to worry about how that work was received by their peers except for a critical, collaborative standpoint," Hames says. "For many of those people, that's the first time that they've been in a space where those kinds of rules were observed."

Such rules created communication--and contributors came back not just to work in the space, but to work alongside each other.

"They know that they're in a space where their creative work is valued, their identity is valued, and at the end of the day, they're going to walk away energized--not shut down," Hames says.

Obviously, securing physical space is critical for any creative blitz--but it has to be the right space. As serial hackathon organizer Peter Morano tells Dice, providing that physical and mental safe space for developers to create at their upper limits is what keeps him coming back to put on more hackathons. Provide the right space and people will return, Morano echoes.

Got Problems? Get Experts

A well-timed piece of advice can save a bridge that might be burned by miscommunication.

CMF felt they needed to be present on campuses to maintain the integrity of the CMF experience, but they'd essentially grown it into a deployable model.

Then the CMF founders made a brilliant move: They hired an experienced university administrator. With insider knowledge, CMF avoided situations like bringing a sponsor's soft drinks on a campus that already had a contract with a rival soft drink company. The administrator was able to anticipate campus demands, streamlining the process to build CMF out to new universities.

"Each school has a lot of policies in place about how to promote, and what kind of brands can be on campus. A lot of times it's starting fresh on day one at each school to make sure we're working within their guidelines," Roemer says. "The administrator made sure that we are a partner with these schools as opposed to a guerilla marketer and that we were not going to cause trouble."

Show Your Participants' Work

If you put on a great hackathon, your participants will walk away happy--but they came to create a cool new app/program/service. To show the scope and productivity of your creative jam, those projects should be uploaded and visible for the world to see. If you don't display the worth of your hackathon, it won't grow.

For public display, it doesn't get much bigger than CMF's annual Film Summit in Hollywood, a combo top film showcase and workshop camp. But even those who can't get out to Southern California can see every submitted film up on CMF's site. It's one thing to post your student video up on YouTube. It's quite another to see it trumpeted to the masses on your creative jam's site.

The first #24MAG was funded via a successful Kickstarter campaign, but subsequent issues were put out with angel investment. Most of this came from Hames herself: Despite orders of physical copies of the mag, she ate much of the cost for each issue. Nevertheless, all six issues of #24MAG are available to view online, free of charge.

Showcasing work both keeps your participants happy and, when they show off the work they did, it boosts the profile of your hackathon. Suddenly, your hackathon is known to attract talented people who produce interesting projects.

For years, comic book movies have been breaking records and raking in cash every summer. Funny thing, though: The source material, comic books, aren't selling that well. Technology has made it easier than ever to get into comics, but they're still relatively obscure. Enter Thrillbent Comics, the digital publisher that believes a little bit of experimentation is what the comic book industry needs.

"The economics of comics is bad," says John Rogers, Hollywood screenwriter and cofounder of Thrillbent. "No other entertainment form has increased in price adjusting for inflation harder than comics. It's $3.99 right now for a comic. Which is 10-15 minutes worth of entertainment--which is hard."

Launched in 2012, Thrillbent is a joint venture between Rogers and acclaimed comic book writer Mark Waid, as a platform designed for experimentation on two fronts: the distribution and creation of digital comics. "Right now, most digital comics are just print comics scanned. You're writing for an old medium. The screen is widescreen," Rogers says. "Why are we not writing and doing art for those as the delivery system, rather than as just a secondary way to look at [comics]?"

Every year since its inception, Rogers and Waid have pushed the limits of what Thrillbent could do. At first, it was just a single-serving webcomic service, where Waid would host his free weekly digital series Insufferable, free for everyone and not beholden to print conventions. One year later, the Thrillbent team continued to iterate, with multiple titles from creators willing to play fast and loose and a notable new feature: making their comics embeddable. After all, if YouTube videos could be posted anywhere and go viral, why couldn't comics?

Last week, Thrillbent announced its latest experiment: a proprietary iPad app and a Hulu Plus-esque monthly subscription. For $3.99 a month, customers will get access to an array of new, forthcoming titles, in addition to what's already regularly being released for free. Will it work? Rogers is optimistic.

"I was convinced, based on our readership and our enthusiasm, that people were waiting to pay us for the material," said Rogers. "I firmly believe people will pay a reasonable price if they feel they're getting the entertainment value they want. For $3.99, the cost of one comic book or access to, it will be, by end of day, eight to ten titles by quality creators every month by us."

Rogers believes that it's working. Without disclosing numbers, the publisher describes himself as pleasantly surprised. "We have, I would not say blown through our projections, but we have met them handily and exceeded them comfortably."

Thrillbent's Netflix-style approach isn't the only game in town. Last year, major publisher Marvel Comics launched Marvel Unlimited, a monthly subscription service for customers interested in exploring a wealth of titles from Marvel's 60-plus year history--in the hopes that it would spur interest in newer titles currently on stands.

The digital future of comic books is one that's currently in flux. Things looked bright for the medium when Comixology, the iTunes of digital comics, was purchased by Amazon--only to get complicated very quickly by business decisions enacted by the new owners. Whether or not digital distribution will continue to succeed in introducing new readers to comics remains to be seen, but it's the untapped potential of creating comics in a digital space that most excites the Thrillbent team.

"We're creating a new visual vocabulary," Rogers says. "Much like in the early days of film where you had to create a new way to talk about certain shots, or having to create a new way to talk about certain transitions… that to me is cool."

Today's discussion: When the CEO isn't "the boss," does he turn into a liability?

In most companies, the leader is expected to display paradigmatic behavior. But in an open allocation company, where that role isn't so vaunted--are abuses of power even easier to get away with?

Eliminating the traditional power hierarchy doesn't eliminate the exercise or misuse of power within a company. GitHub has admitted in a recent blog post that in the case of Julie Ann Horvath, former CEO Preston-Werner "acted inappropriately including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office."

Shanley Kane, the co-CEO of Model View Culture, addressed exactly this issue in a previous interview with Co.Labs about startup culture. "One of the things which makes it especially difficult to examine startup culture," said Kane, "is that we (in the startup world) are so against the idea that power is functioning inside our workplace at all. The problem is that power is an aspect of every human interaction, even if you don't have managers. When people say 'we got rid of managers' they think 'we don't have to think about, or deal with, or critique power in the workplace.' In places where there is no formal hierarchy, you actually have to pay more attention." This sounds like exactly the kind of environment that GitHub created.

I asked Kane for her take on the GitHub controversy. "GitHub spent years advocating a dangerous and irresponsible concept of 'non-management', " she said, "in which there was no formal management structure, and meritocracy and self-organizing were imagined to provide enough structure to keep the company healthy, safe, and successful. Within such 'unstructured' environments, power dynamics that absolutely exist are not made explicit and visible, which makes them more insidious and more dangerous. Add to this a de-professionalized culture, dominance of men within the company, and lack of a competent human resources department--this equation was ripe for abuse."

Horvath previously told TechCrunch that Preston-Werner's wife Theresa had harassed her in various ways and that Preston-Werner himself demanded that Horvath's partner, who also worked for GitHub, resign. Obviously none of this should happen in a professional organization and GitHub's open allocation management structure may be one of the reasons that it did. Ciara Byrne

When your company is unorthodox in everything from management to employee workflow there's bound to be some 503 notifications when it comes to business. Code for America's Catherine Bracy says this problem is lack of central leadership.

"The problem with management isn't managers, the problem with management is bad managers," Bracy wrote back in March. "And it's not hard to imagine that people who don't understand how power works aren't going to be very good managers."

Harassment and inequality are present in all things and industries, but perhaps none more than tech, home to a heavy bro culture of formerly marginalized males who are now the ones carrying a big stick. But they don't always speak softly, and women are often their targets. This boys' club mentality is a problem in tech in general, ironically far and away beyond the anti- "making the world a better place" outside perception Silicon Valley desperately tries to project. Doing PR cleanup, GitHub cofounder Chris Wanstrath tried to explain it all away, saying "rapid growth left the leadership team, myself included, woefully unprepared to properly handle these types of situations."

Done, right? Not so fast. In his farewell post on his personal blog, the "guilty" party, Tom Preston Werner, denied engaging in "gender-based harassment or discrimination," a claim which prompted further allegations in the Valley's Upstart Business Journal suggesting this problem may not be sexual in nature. Confused yet? The bottom line is the more convoluted a company's internal structure, the harder it is to sort out messes when they happen. When a company is accused of wrongdoing, it can feel like the house is on fire. And when it's the top executives blamed, it can seem like they're the ones setting the fire. But as hard as it sounds, it may be in the best interest for everyone involved to punish the ones responsible, even if they are both the head of the household and the ones that struck the match. Adam Popescu

GitHub's recent face-plant is a good reminder that distributed leadership means distributed accountability. Contributing to and sharing equally in a company's success sounds great when everything is moving up and to the right, but is far less attractive when that trajectory goes south. GitHub employees are now facing the darker side of the freedom they value.

From what we can tell from Chris Wanstrath's post on the investigation into engineer Julie Ann Horvath's allegations, GitHub has taken proper steps to determine what happened and effect changes as necessary. Wanstrath says that the company does not plan to make significant changes to its culture or working environment: "Women at GitHub reported feeling supported, mentored, and protected at work, and felt they are treated equitably and are provided opportunities," he wrote.

It's hard to square that conclusion with the investigation's revelations regarding Preston-Werner's behavior. If Horvath wasn't the only one to witness the CEO's abuses of power, why was she the only one to speak out? GitHub may not think so, but to me that silence is the sign of a culture unprepared for the higher bar that flat management structures demand.

Trite as it may be, there's truth in the idea that "to whom much is given, much is expected." I'd feel more confident about GitHub's future if Wanstrath had shared evidence of that philosophy in action. Ainsley O'Connell

GitHub's former CEO gave more strategic leadership to the company than its open-allocation management structure would have you believe. In an interview with Co.Labs last year, then GitHub CEO Preston-Werner talked about his regular "beer-thirty" Friday chats with GitHub employees. As he described it: "It happens at 4:30 p.m. every Friday, and that's a chance for me and some other people to communicate to the entire company what we're thinking about, from a strategic perspective, how we think about culture, how we think about hiring, how we think about approaching business, all of these things."

When one of the GitHub cofounders reportedly told designer-developer Julie Ann Horvath it was "bad judgment" to date another GitHub coworker, he expected the rest of GitHub culture to comply. Or when the cofounder allegedly asked her partner to resign from GitHub, it was a clear indication of how he viewed GitHub's employment practices. Based on Preston-Werner's account of his beer chats, one can imagine this was the case.

Ostensibly casual communication at GitHub might only have concealed a repressive management style from its business leaders. Regretfully, even an open-allocation structure, like Github's, does not guard against the occasional despotic leader. Tina Amirtha

As we all know, design is more than just pushing pixels. Clever designers think about design patterns while they design. A design pattern is a reusable solution to a common recurring problem that your users have. Often, design patterns are used in software interface design. From the iconography of emoji to the checkout flow on an e-commerce website, you'll find specific patterns everywhere, online and offline.

But which design pattern you choose for a site depends on the problem you are trying to solve. I spoke with two design-centric web development teams, Threadless and Squarespace, to learn more about how they solve for design patterns.

Threadless: Connecting Buyers To Makers

Threadless faces the same design challenge as many dual-user sites. Their e-commerce website gives designers (the first type of user) the opportunity to create designs which will appear on clothing. At the same time, the website sells winning designs to consumers, who are the second type of user.

I spoke with Billy Carlson, director of UX at Threadless and Nathan Hinshaw, lead front-end engineer, to understand how they tackle these problems.

It all begins with a high-level strategy, Carlson says. "Our website allows to connect artists with a global audience of patrons who can support [designers] with a simple click of a button." Important to their success was understanding that the user experience of the whole community would be crucial. This wasn't an easy challenge, according to Hinshaw: "We have to close the gap between people who come to be part of the community and those who come with the sole aim of purchasing shirts."

There's always an opportunity to beat the status quo by designing new interfaces and stepping away from popular existing design patterns. Results can be mixed, but experimenting with your interface can lead to greater success. "We designed a feed that streamlined the viewing and scoring of submissions--and has led to much more voting," Carlson says.

Threadless understands that design patterns exists out of multiple components and not just the user experience. Some examples they gave me include the copy on their website, the scoring system to grade designs, and a unified design language including a subtle color palette, consistent interaction guidelines, and a focus on process driven development. It pays off.

Efficient Design Patterns Require Experimentation

Instead of using standard interface elements, customizing and experimenting has become a part of their strategy. This effectively created new interface design patterns to use. "Our job is to hold the work [of the community designers] but not to overshadow it," Carlson explains. Hinshaw emphasizes that it's a dynamic process. "The design strategy […] is first and foremost trial and error. We've moved away from a comp-to-code mentality, and instead approach design as much more fluid, something that is iterative and communication driven."

Threadless enters new waters as they test new e-commerce flows or update specific components of their website. When I ask what their worst design pattern change to date was, Carlson replies: "Our site redesign. We made some assumptions that confused our users. As we learned in our testing, guiding a new user through the different areas of our site requires a very coherent and disciplined design strategy. The visuals and words we use need to be simple, definitive, and actionable." Hinshaw agrees, "Making assumptions about how people will use a site is almost always doomed to failure. Navigation and catalog flows are prime examples of this."

Data collection to measure success is an important part of the Threadless design strategy. Every decision is accountable. "Through conversion experimentation and analysis the end product is better than the sum of it's parts," Hinshaw concludes.

As design patterns are applying best practices, you would assume they are a great starting point when designers tackle a problem. Hinshaw emphasizes that we need to think for ourselves, and for our users. "Design trends get run through a photocopier, eventually becoming a washed-out reference to the original idea. As someone who is creating for the screen, whatever that screen may be, you need to ask yourself why you are making the choices you are. Read the history and theory, listen to people, talk with people, try new ideas, but find the solution that is best for your users and know why it is the best."

How Squarespace Makes Tools Everyone Can Use

Squarespace, the company which provides beautiful accessible templates to a diverse group of users deals with similar challenges. Not only do they have to think about the interface and their variety of use cases for their templates, but also the backend CMS, which needs to be equally as accessible and useful for their user base.

I spoke with Michael Heilemann, director of user interface, and Josh Kill, director of platform, to discover how they tackle these problems and what kind of challenges they come across while building and improving Squarespace.

"It's surprising hard to design things that are future-proof," Heilemann begins our conversation, "We want to be where the [web] business is going. When we redesign an interface, it is obviously based upon what the business wants. Often we require to involve design very early on." Kill explains that Squarespace has some unique challenges. "We have to build a product which works for everyone, yet is specific enough as every industry has their own standards," he says.

As it's straightforward for seasoned designers to apply best practices, I ask both how they know what requires improved designs. "It comes from our experience, or our top end of users. Sometimes we discover new needs," Heilemann says. "We like to verbally define the problems."

Challenges Of Iteration

Improving existing design is of course something which any designer tackles. It has consequences as well. "It's hard to take things back [once released]. We have soft launches," Heilemann says, "I look at numbers and figure out what is actually being used. A product is never finished." Kill agrees, saying "There's always the compulsion to do things new and fresher. We understand the value of iteration and polishing."

He emphasized that they're a company which is not metric-driven and that improving design patterns shouldn't necessarily be based upon numbers, but it shouldn't be based on gut feelings either. "I want to redo everything all the time. But, shipping creates the real value so we can see how it goes," Heilemann explains. Kill says there's always the problem of knowing when to ship and how much one can iterate. "Just enough. But what is just enough? There's always a certain balance and some things live in testing forever."

"A lot of stuff could be a lot more simple," Heilemann says, as he emphasizes that content management software can be brought to a broader level for consumers. Challenging the status quo and stepping away from existing design patterns is a natural component of this goal. "You're bored with trends quicker and compelled to design something new," Kill says.

Long known for its pricey premium TV events, the WWE is changing course, moving away from pay-per-view events toward Internet distribution. The upside: Having its own network means connecting directly with consumers, eschewing the cable and satellite companies who act as gatekeepers. But there's a huge risk to this strategy, too--that viewers won't move networks with them.

Sure, the potential upside is huge--hundreds of millions of dollars in found revenue. But the WWE could also alienate approximately 42 million of its 50 million fans: "casual" wrestling viewers for whom wrestling and PPV were synonymous. If the league ditches PPV, how will it call viewers to action and get them downloading WWE video over the web? And for the 8-10 million fans that WWE says are "passionate," there's no guarantee they'll follow wrestling to digital, either.

How does a company in a shifting landscape calculate the risk here? We sat down with the WWE to learn how they think about digital.

The Number Crunch: Digital vs. Analog

First, the basics: The new WWE Network provides unlimited, 24/7 access to the first exclusive web-delivered network with both a linear stream of live and original content. "Our pay-per-views used to cost 60 or 70 bucks a month for one three or four-hour show," says George Barrios, chief strategy & financial officer for WWE. "You now get all of them, you get all that new content, you get that nice VOD (Video On Demand) library for $9.99 a month, and you access it just like you would access Netflix."

For decades, WWE and pay-per-view have gone hand-in-hand--but these PPV events averaged $75 each, with about one per month. A lot of that cash goes to the cable and dish network operators, who aren't happy with this digital competition.

If relations with the networks sour, and the WWE forgoes all of its pay-per-view profits, that's $82.5 million in missed revenue, if you go by 2013 numbers. That shouldn't be too hard to replace with digital content sales--the new WWE web network needs only one million subscribers for the company to break even--but it's still a big risk.

"We've been out public and said, even if you assume the entire pay-per-view business domestic is cannibalized and you don't have additional costs to run this network, we need to get to about a million subscribers," says Barrios. "That gets us somewhere between 80 and a 120 million in revenue. That breaks even."

In fact, in conjunction with already-existing pay-per-view partnerships, WWE needs only about 400,000 digital subscribers to make money. Which means, at roughly 495,000 subscribers reported in Q1 2014, WWE Network is already turning a profit.

Informing the Digital Split Decision

The WWE listens to its fans. Over the last four years, it's designated huge resources to watch what's happening in their industry, validating data and collecting analytics, all while keeping an eye on Netflix. In that time, WWE found that more and more of its fans, especially in the U.S., were consuming more and more long-form video through set-top boxes like the Apple TV, also know as "over the top" content.

"The last data we saw, at this time last year, the average person in the U.S. was doing about five hours of long-form video a week over the top. Our [biggest] fans were doing about 13, over-indexing," says Barrios.

All this research is how the WWE knows it has 50 million U.S. fans. According to the league's research, about half of American homes have some history with wrestling and, in 30 million of them, at least one fan who is up to date. The audience--with regards to their affinity for the sport--is divided into three categories: Lapsed, Casual, and Passionate.

"Lapsed means you were a fan, but you haven't watched in the last year, and there's about 22 million," explains Barrios. "Casual fans are current fans, but they may not consume as much as our passionate fans. There's about roughly 20 million of those homes in the U.S. Passionate fans are our most intense viewers. In the U.S. about 10 million homes have a passionate fan or more in them."

Defending Tag-Team Champions

Today, the most popular device on which to view services like Netflix is PS3, and WWE knows it. Game consoles, ranging from PS3 and PS4--and, as of Wednesday, Xboxes One and 360--are carrying WWE Network. But why stop there? "We launched on Kindle Fire, Apple TV, on Roku, iOS, and Android," says Barrios. "We'll do things like get on Fire TV, Amazon's new box. We'll do Chromecast, we'll do smart TV."

So will WWE be missed by the cable networks? Definitely, says Barrios. "When you look at the numbers that we deliver, we average about 3 and a half million viewers across our prime time hours, which is more than NASCAR averages on their national contract, or the NBA or Major League Baseball. It's an important piece of programming to our partners. I find it hard to believe that anybody would go away from that."

Barrios even goes so far as to cite research suggesting WWE's potential value add to standard television service providers. "Especially if they move it up a tier," he says. "If it's not on the most basic tier, but if they move it up one. There's enough demand that people who sit on the lower tier would upgrade their subscription package to move up and there's a value add to the provider."

As WWE remains a product and not a channel, it's currently engaged in drawn-out negotiations for its network television deals. The idea of their own television network has long since been abandoned.

"Signing carriage agreements, whether for a dual revenue stream network with an affiliate fee or for an a la carte network. Those are difficult conversations. MVPDs generally, over the last few years, have been pretty vocal about saying the last thing they need on their platform is another network," Barrios says.

Parts Unknown: The Future Of WWE Distribution

When it comes to pay-per-view, WWE intends to let the fans decide how they want to consume their wrestling. But they've done the analysis necessary to determine what happens if PPV goes away.

"We're going to keep giving people the choice," says Barrios. "If people continue to buy pay-per-view and are subscribing to the network, great. That's a good business for us."

On the programming side of things, however, pay-per-views still reign supreme--these events may stick around as a flagship series. There's one every month and WWE considers them its best content. Says Barrios, "It's something that in and of itself used to sell for 60 to 70 bucks a month and now it's part of that $9.99 package."

Again, that's not all. WWE is launching an entire line of original programming aimed to capture its audience's attention at all times of the day. The network launched a new reality series, Legends House, for instance, and produced a documentary series chronicling the war for wrestling between Ted Turner (WCW) and Vince McMahon (then WWF) in the early 2000s called Monday Night War. They also own WCW's catalog.

"When we do Monday Night War," reveals Barrios, "we'll also bring to the VOD library every episode of Nitro, which was WCW's number one show. We've got so much."

That legacy library of 1,500 hours, by the way, includes every pay-per-view event WWE has ever produced. WWE's library? 130,000 hours. And that may be the steel chair across the back of professional wrestling pay-per-view's skull.

With terabytes of data at hand, every business is trying to figure out the best way to understand information about their customers and themselves. But simply using Excel pivot tables to analyze such quantities of information is absurd, so many companies use the commercially available tool SAS to cull business intelligence.

But SAS is no match for the open-source language that pioneering data scientists use in academia, which is simply known as R. The R programming language leans more frequently to the cutting edge of data science, giving businesses the latest data analysis tools. The problem: With loose standards and scores of diverse contributors, it is shaky ground for business. Will that ever change?

The R Evangelists

At least one company thinks R is ready for commercial prime time. Like RedHat is to Linux and Cloudera is to Hadoop, Revolution Analytics is to the R language in the commercial world. Several years ago, David Smith, chief community officer at Revolution Analytics, noticed that a lot of academics and students used R but saw less usage in industry. "At the time, there was no company there to support R, provide expertise around R, or provide any kind of commercial backing for R. So that's how Revolution Analytics was founded," says Smith.

To call Smith an R enthusiast is an understatement. He is a co-author of the programming manual An Introduction to R that comes with RStudio, the coding environment for the R language. And he has a team of like-minded R evangelists working with him, who keep any mention of R in the business world on their radar, while also publishing R-related news on the company's blog and giving educational workshops to other companies. He is an example of a curious breed of creative entrepreneur that only exists in the tech sector: someone doing great work on a free, open source resource, and in so doing, creating a commercial opportunity for themselves on the flip side.

"I always look out for journal articles where R is used. I hear back from customers. And whenever a good visualization is used, there's a good chance that it was created in R, so I can always trace back to the author. I'm always on social media, so whenever I see a reference to R, I usually shake down to [the team]," Smith says.

All of R's programming libraries are free, but Revolution Analytics makes its business from its service packages, which give customers access to the libraries the company develops in-house. These commercial libraries are suitable for corporate customers who frequently deal with large amounts of data, in the terabyte range. Not exclusively limited to R, Revolution Analytics also creates user interfaces and algorithms, frequently using C++ to write its algorithms.

Some of the libraries the company develops eventually do become open source, like the RHadoop project's libraries. RHadoop's free libraries enable users to leverage the data-computing environment Hadoop to manage their data. But if a user does not have access to Hadoop, Revolution Analytics still steps in and provides its services.

Dealing With Tons Of Business Data

Here's what their packages actually do. One, ScaleR, helps businesses go through all of their data by scaling it to work on parallel processors. Using standard R packages, machines will run out of memory when dealing with such large amounts of data, but ScaleR repurposes the data to process chunks of it on different servers simultaneously. Smith calls this parallel processing algorithm its "secret sauce."

DataSong, a marketing analytics company and one of Revolution Analytics' clients, uses this parallel processing power to split up its large customer datasets across nodes in Hadoop.

"Base R didn't have big enough muscle," says Tess Nesbitt, director of analytics at DataSong. Using Revolution Analytics' packages, Nesbitt is able to do more sophisticated statistical analyses and interim checks on the data during processing than using open-source R alone.

"Our models have actually benefitted from it because not only are we allowed to use more data now, we can take more passes at the data and fine-tune our models and get more statistically advanced compared to what we used to do, just kicking off a logistic regression, letting it run for a day and hoping it didn't crash," says Nesbitt.

At DataSong, Nesbitt does something called feature engineering. She creates a bunch of variables about a retail customer to essentially create a quantitative model. She might have 30 million rows of data for 60 variables, which she can now run in about 10 minutes, using commercial R packages. She says the method beats using SAS.

Although Nesbitt started her career at DataSong using SAS, the company eventually moved over to R. She says, "I've always been a fan of R since my grad school days."

Cool Graphics

At Facebook, the data science team's data visualizations in R give it the best overview of what kind of data it is dealing with. The data can range from something like News Feed numbers to correlations with the amount of Facebook friends a user has. Although these packages are not commercial, Revolution Analytics has kept tabs on Facebook's R usage for some time.

"Generally, we use R to move fast when we get a new data set," says Solomon Messing, data scientist at Facebook. "With R, we don't need to develop custom tools or write a bunch of code. Instead, we can just go about cleaning and exploring the data."

Messing and the other Facebook data scientists regularly use open-source R packages from Hadley Wickham, chief scientist at RStudio. Wickham's packages, like ggplot2, dplyr, plyr, and reshape, allow the team to explore new data through custom visualizations.

Messing particularly likes using ggplot2 to create dot plots and scatter plots. In his personal blog, Messing writes about how these plots best represent every kind of data and how he uses R to execute them.

The Facebook data science team uses R so ardently to visualize data that it even created a MOOC that teaches students what it knows. The MOOC's course materials are available to everyone, even without registering for the course.

Nesbitt agrees that R is strong in visualizations and graphics. "One of the things we like about R is that it can create beautiful graphics compared to, for example, SAS, which has very ugly, horribly ugly graphics," says Nesbitt.

Talent Is Everywhere

In school, data scientist Casey Herron studied statistics and came to Revolution Analytics with an already intimate understanding of R. Having used R as an undergraduate, she continued using it in her master's program and when she moved into her first job after graduate school, as a statistician. She has now been at Revolution Analytics for 10 months.

"I think the number one value to businesses [in using R] is access to talent," says Smith. "So many businesses now are doing much more with data, especially with the big data revolution and doing much more with analytics. And because they're hiring people coming out of school. They know R already."

Data scientists like Herron have commonly spent years in college, coding in R. "That's a typical story that kind of led the company to be founded. We saw, way back in 2007, just how R had taken over academia. Everyone that was studying statistics, or machine learning, or what we, today, call data science was doing it in R," Smith says.

DataSong's Nesbitt is also a statistician by training. "SAS was just kind of used in industry, for whatever reason. I have an academic background, and a lot of other people who are coming out of academic backgrounds are very trained in R," Nesbitt says.

She adds, "The job applicant pool is already trained in this language, which is a huge advantage of trying to use it in industry, too."

The Cutting Edge Of Research

Aside from the numerous fresh graduates with training, Smith presses home the significance of R's presence in the research community.

"R can do literally everything, and all new research is done in R. So especially for businesses that really want to out-compete their competitors on the basis of advanced analytics, they can get access to everything they need within R, things that might not come for five or 10 years through commercial software," says Smith.

Facebook, for example, uses a technique called power analysis in order to figure out whether it has collected enough relevant data when it studies how users interact with new features on the site. It is all thanks to research data scientists who have developed the appropriate statistical tools in R and made them available to everyone.

"When someone develops a new predictive model or a new visualization, they don't just publish their research in a journal, they also publish R code in open source that anybody can access and use," says Smith.

When it comes to data science, the academic and business worlds are colliding. There is cross-pollination between the analysis methods researchers use in the lab and how career data scientists study their customer's data models. And it looks like their common language, R, will continue to bolster their data science exchange for some time to come.

It feels like a cross between a video game and an acid trip. But as you walk through the neon, geometrically tripped-out cityscape, the music you hear is no hallucination. Every measure of ambient electronic tones and textures is composed in real time by your own brain waves.

It may sound surreal, but the above scenario was reality for several hundred people during last week's Moogfest music and technology festival in Asheville, North Carolina. It was there that emerging media studio Odd Division, working with production company Tool, launched Conductar, an experimental music and virtual reality app for iOS.

During the five-day event, participants were invited to don brain wave sensors connected to iPhones and walk around the actual city of Asheville while being electronically immersed in an alternate, far more surreal Asheville. These headsets measured each user's state of mind--How alert or meditative are you?--and played back a sample of minimalist, mood-appropriate music.

"What we set out to do is create a musical, generative song experience," says lead developer Jeff Crouse. "It's a 16-bar structure. Every four bars we play additional sounds. Each time a new sound starts, we ask the system what clip best suits this state of mind. It's never-ending."

While Conductar is best experienced with a brain wave-sensing headset, the cyborg-errific fashion accessory is by no means a requirement. As Moogfest attendees traversed Asheville with the devices, they left behind data points mapping their own mental state in specific locations. That way anybody else who downloaded the app could meander through the virtual city and hear collectively composed, location-aware music.

While the team behind Conductar has plans for expansion, right now the live, immersive walkthrough functionality only works in Asheville. But that doesn't mean it's not worth taking the app for a spin. Now that Moogfest is over, users of will be dropped in downtown Asheville with an on-screen joystick that lets them navigate and hear the citywide composition locked in time by the brainwaves of festival attendees.

What Conductar Is Made Of

The project, which took about three months to complete, is comprised of a few components: an unmodified MindWave headset, custom-built iOS app, and music clips composed by Odd Division's Gary Gunn. Those clips were mapped to states of mind and sequenced using a back-end system architected by Crouse.

"I don't think the technology we used was as defining as our approach," says Aramique, the founder and creative director of Odd Division. "From the beginning we wanted to create a system that could travel and be set up anywhere. We also wanted an audio-visual world that was platform-agnostic."

The app itself is built using the Unity3D gaming engine and various plugins thereof. "We picked Unity3D so that we could easily adapt the world to Oculus Rift, projection mapping, desktop or Android," says Aramique. Indeed, the team's installation during Moogfest included a version of Conductar running on an Oculus Rift.

Crucially, Unity3D has an audio package called FMOD that allowed Crouse and the team to build a music sequencer within the app. To map Asheville (and presumably other cities in the future), they used data from OpenStreetMaps.

Arguably the simplest component, says Aramique, is the brainwave sensor, which the team used in a previous project. The MindWave headset was used as-is out of the box to generate the state-of-mind data points that were then mapped to music.

"None of us are neuroscientists, so we're not totally experts on this, but they have an SDK and we really like working with it," says Crouse. "It has 11 different frequencies that it detects through these contacts on your forehead and on your earlobe. We use those as the input for a kind of music sequencer that's built into our app. This device just provides the raw data."

What's Next For Brain-Controlled Music

At first glance, Conductar seems like little more than a jaw-dropping art-tech project designed to wow festival-goers. And that it was. Around 800 people borrowed headsets during Moogfest, wearing them for an average of 30 minutes at a time.

But while the app would seem to have limited practical value post-Moogfest, it's wild-eyed experimentation like this that tends to drop unmissable hints about the future.

In this case, we can start to see where music consumption and creation might be headed in the age of wearable computers. Today, music apps like Moodagent and Beats Music try to auto-curate playlists for us based on our mood as we describe it. Meanwhile, engineers at Pandora are tinkering with ways to alter your radio experience based on your location and activity, pulling whatever clues they can from the device being used.

In the future, one can imagine a more seamless experience as devices get smarter and more aware of the context in which we're using them. Instead of tapping a button to declare my state of mind, I could focus my attention elsewhere as a music app simply reads my brainwaves.

And I won't need to wear a goofy headset to do it. Presumably, there will be a well-designed, socially acceptable version of Google Glass on the market at some point. Such a wearable heads-up display would eliminate the need for both the smartphone and a separate brainwave sensor. Meanwhile, Apple is already reportedly working on earbuds lined with biometric sensors.

As for Conductar itself, the team does plan on rolling it out beyond Asheville, once a few technical hurdles are overcome. Most notably, the building-level mapping data is not easy to come by for all cities. OpenStreetMaps doesn't provide it, so for the Moogfest project, Odd Division and Tool's designers had to trace the footprints of the buildings by hand. It might be possible for them to get that type of data from Google, but if not they'll have to find another source. In the meantime, the rollout would necessarily be limited to larger cities for which that kind of data is publicly available.

"We wanted to build a story world that could spread easily across the world," says Aramique. "For our next iteration, we would like to develop the world further into a more immersive non-linear narrative that takes advantage of OpenStreetMaps to make a site-specific story-world. We have also thought about turning it into a world-building tool where people could populate it with their own narratives, design, and game mechanics."

If you've ever stopped for gas in the mid-Atlantic, it might have been at a Sheetz--a major convenience store brand with 450 locations. Rural gas stations aren't usually the petri dish of prescient technology concepts, but back in 1993, the chain began experimenting with touchscreens to order deli sandwiches. More than 20 years on, Sheetz says the touchscreens (called "order points") haven't just become a part of their brand--they actually encourage people to try new foods--and order more of them.

CEO Joe Sheetz told me the touchscreens had some intended effects, too: They reduced the number of times customers claimed sandwiches were made incorrectly, increased turnaround time for the kitchen, and helped upsell items by steering customers towards ordering more toppings.

But the real boon was the touchscreens' crucial role in introducing new menu items.

When Sheetz introduced espresso-based drinks to their locations in 2007, they faced a challenge: Many of their customers who lived in rural markets were unfamiliar with espresso-based drinks and their various special titles. In response, the company made the drinks prominent on the touchscreen order points, where the user could see pictures of the drinks and clear, easy-to-read descriptions of all the espresso bar items. With a screen-based food ordering system, "you can put descriptors on anything," says Sheetz.

For food items like sandwiches, salads, and nachos, "People discovered toppings they didn't know we have. We cannot show a menu with all possible scenarios, but we can in touchscreens. We can offer condiment screens, vegetable screens, and a whole bunch of choices people can take their time going through," Sheetz said. "You find that some people have interesting tastes, thanks to the touchscreen (laughs). They will put mayo on something you and I would never put mayo on. Some of things you add on to a sandwich are free, others are upcharges, which are right on the button--like bacon, cheese. You can easily put that upcharge right on the sandwich. You wonder how people will fit all the things you order onto a roll when it's volume heavy!"

Last but not least, the chain is also able to obtain valuable data from the touchscreens. Sheetz's systems retain data from the touchscreen, which they chain then uses to track item sales, margin management, and inventory management. Next up for Sheetz? They are currently running a test at 35 drive-through locations, where the traditional drive-through loudspeaker is supplemented with a touchscreen for ordering food.

But it's not just Sheetz that discovered digital orders differed from analog orders.

Why iPad Users Spend More On Food

San Francisco-based online ordering service Eat24 is the younger, scrappier brother to industry giant GrubHub/Seamless. Best known for publicity stunts like sponsoring their own strain of marijuana and advertising on porn sites, the company has also built an impressive market share with over 25,000 restaurants signed up.

"The difference between online ordering and offline is that most restaurants tell us orders are bigger and higher," says Eat24's chief marketing officer Amir Eisenstein. "For example, if you order a pizza over the phone you'll just tell them to bring an XL pizza and a Coke. But when you go online, you see the whole menu. All of a sudden, people order appetizers, ribs, salads, and stuff they don't normally order over the phone. They have more time on the menu, they spend more time on the menu, and they order slightly more items than over the phone."

According to the company, they can even segment behavior by device: Mobile users typically spend more than desktop consumers per order. Eisenstein says there is more revenue from apps than desktop customers, that app users order more frequently than desktop users, and that Eat24's retention rate for mobile app-first users is higher.

These order rates "also includes customers trying new stuff. When you're on Eat24, going over the menu, you are exposed to all the options. You'll try stuff you never thought about ordering over the phone, and that's something we see across the board at all restaurants."

Domino's Pizza: Touchscreens Make Customers Happier

With more than 11,000 stores, is one of America's biggest chains. The franchise has staked their consumer business model around rapid turnaround for a menu constructed out of relatively few items, which can be reassembled in an assortment of configurations (chicken-crusted barbecue bacon pizza, anyone?). A staggering 40% of the chain's domestic sales come from orders through desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets; last week, the company introduced an iPad app designed to spur sales even further.

Chris Brandon, a spokesperson for Domino's, told Co.Labs that a primary benefit from the company's online ordering is that it increases sales for add-ons. "Customers love it because they can experience more of the menu," Brandon said. "With Domino's before, you only needed to know a phone number and to think of your regular order or pizza order. Now that we have sandwiches, specialty pizzas, chicken, all these additional products and desserts, it increases sales."

A secondary benefit for Domino's is that it reduces errors made in the kitchen and makes customer orders much more coherent for restaurant staff. This increases customer satisfaction.

"Orders are a bit more accurate both from the customer standpoint and the order taker on our side, sometimes phone ordering can be tricky if it's a noisy store, or a busy environment on the customer's side.There are 34 million ways to make a single Domino's pizza, and a lot of conditions can get lost in translation. Digital ordering can take care of a lot of that," says Brandon.

There's an additional benefit too, one that secondary benefit for the large pizza chain: Gimmicks such as the Domino Pizza Tracker and a 3-D modeling feature in the iPad app help retain all-important younger users, who are likely to stick with the digital offering--which offers Domino's and other companies much more data exhaust--in the future. Leveraging customer data through digital orders is a big priority for Domino's; information processed through a bespoke geospatial business intelligence system, for instance, allows the chain to discover "over-performing stores" that could be split into two and to target specific areas based on ethnic eating habits.

Spitz: The Add-On Effect

Individual restaurants that take digital offers through Eat24 and Seamless see their bottom lines boosted by a simple psychological effect: Having to order with an entire menu in front of you leads you to order more items.

Spitz is a Los Angeles mini-chain with four locations which sells Turkish doner kebabs (gyros) alongside an extensive menu of side items. Bryce Rademan, the chain's cofounder, says that the big advantage of digital ordering for his company is that it boosts add-on sales and upselling.

"When the menu is on the screen and you're hungry, you add a side dish. You click, its ready to go. Over the phone you just order what you set out to. We see way less impulse purchases of appetizers over the phone. We also see a lot more upsells, items like street cart fries are two bucks extra with the meal because it's in front of you."

The restaurant offers a wide menu of riffs on Turkish food like french fries topped with kebab and feta cheese, and Mexican taquitos (fried tacos) filled with kebab meat. During lunch orders, having orders come through online has helped the restaurant greatly. Rademan says that online orders are typically larger and for groups, rather than individual customers. For Spitz, like Domino's, digital orders are more reliable too. "It's loud in the restaurant," Rademan said. "Phone is really the least reliable way to do orders ever."

And for Spitz, if digital ordering means a group is more likely to order add another portion of fried olives and garbanzo beans, it's great news.

Video editing today is more art rather than a science, which makes it exceedingly hard to automate. In fact, you might even think it would be impossible. But it's not--it's just really frustrating.

"These extremely creative people, when they have a problem, they solve it ad hoc," says Oren Boiman. "They have no idea how they did it." Boiman is the CEO and cofounder of Magisto, a mobile app that automatically edits videos for its 20 million users. For most app developers, automating something is mostly a matter of mimicking a clearly laid out human workflow. For Boiman, it's as if the people he's automating can't even explain how they do what they do. And that matters big time, he says, because the value of a piece of video is entirely in the way it's cut.

"The emotion is not in the footage itself. The emotion is in the editing," says Boiman. "In order to get a very strong emotional response you need to sync the audio, the soundtrack, the pace, the cuts--everything together."

To figure out how software could imitate this process, Boiman's engineers observed professional video editors in their natural element, codifying their behavior into editing rules that could be built into its "emotional" algorithms, which the company calls styles or themes. A style is a way of telling a story which creates a particular mood, so for example, the Party Beat style is quick and energetic while the Love style is dreamy and romantic. You can take exactly the same footage, apply a different style, and get a very different emotional response.

"The mood, which we set here with the editing style, sets expectations about how you want to re-create a life experience," says Boiman. "If I capture something with my kids I'm going to make it cute and when I see that I'm going to think 'yeah that's how I felt.' With Magisto we say we help you show how it feels."

How Magisto Auto-Identifies Human Story Elements

Injecting emotion is the actually the final stage in Magisto's elaborate analysis process. First, the app needs to extract the basic elements of the story being told in the raw video footage: who the main characters are, what they did, and where they did it.

Magisto uses a plethora of vision analysis and machine learning techniques to go from a mass of pixels to a semantic understanding of the story the video captures. Object analysis identifies the objects in the footage and how often they appear. Action and topic analysis determine what is happening while scene analysis figures out where the action occurs.

In Magisto's world a character is an object which gets a significant amount of screen time, displays some behavior and interacts with the camera or other characters. However, screen time isn't enough to make an object into a character. Another person may be standing behind a character when you shoot a video but he will not be part of the story if the character doesn't interact with him.

Characters are not always human. Magisto videos often feature animals, gadgets, or even computer games as characters. If a person grabs a ball and throws it, the person and the object interact, making the object more likely to become a character. When it pinpoints a human character, Magisto's technology can recognize the character's face when it occurs again, analyze the facial expression, select the right shots, frame them, and polish them up as a professional photographer would. It will also detect and analyze speech.

Once the software has recognized the story's characters, it uses action analysis to study their movements and behavior and recognize common actions like walking or running as well as interactions--actions which involve more than one character. If a clearly important character A interacts with another character B, that implies that B is relevant to the story. Some interactions, for example when two characters talk, bind them together more strongly than merely standing together.

Topic analysis is a machine learning task where Magisto uses all the information from the other analysis modules to infer the topic of the story based on the topics of millions of previously analyzed videos. Is this video of a landscape, a wedding, or a sports event? The topic is derived from various story elements and is used, in addition to the selected style, to direct the editing and production processes. If Magisto detects a sports topic, for example, it will focus more on activities than on dialog when selecting cuts.

Adding Feeling Into The Footage

The initial analysis makes no judgment about the most important or interesting parts of the footage, but given the length chosen by the user for the final edited video, Magisto must now start to make those choices. Boiman tells me that anything that repeats itself is boring. "Boring is very easy to detect but the fact that it's not boring doesn't make it interesting," he says.

Figuring out what's interesting is part of the job of the style algorithm and that's not straightforward. "If I choose something like Sentimental," says Boiman, "it will be slow-paced editing that gives more space to, for instance, dialog of the main characters. If you take something like Party Beat, it will be an MTV-style video. It's going to be very high-paced and it will probably choose different parts of the video." For a travel video, Magisto will select more footage of landscapes, while same scenes will be considered less relevant, or more boring, by the Party style.

Fast cuts can generate an energetic feeling in the right setting, but discomfort in the wrong one. If the footage shows a couple dancing to slow music, fast erratic cuts will not match that mood. "So it's not what are the most important parts, but what are the most important parts to tell a story in the way you want to tell it," Boiman explains. The selection of shots which make up the final video must not only be suitable for the style but feel like a coherent whole. "You need to make sure that as much as possible you don't feel the cut," says Boiman.

Then it's time to finally add some emotion. "In the editing we're controlling the mood, and the emotion is the resulting perception of that mood," says Boiman. "For instance, in a Love theme we try to generate a relaxed yet dramatic mood by keeping a low to medium pace, using close-ups and slow-mo for a bit of dramatic effect. A single ingredient doesn't generate a mood. This is art, not science, but only a coherent set of editing and production rules, in the right sequencing and timing, creates the right mood."

The Sentimental style is slow-paced so Magisto will choose longer cuts and use clean editing with few transition effects. The Sentimental theme will also override the soundtrack music with dialog more frequently than other styles. The Party Beat theme does almost the opposite, putting the soundtrack in the foreground. Thus each theme has its own recipe for which elements to emphasize and how to use them in conjunction.

The final ingredient in Magisto's mood mixture is music. Magisto recommends music to match each style but users can also upload their own. "When people pick their own music," says Boiman, "it often feels better even if according to the analysis it doesn't fit as well." The software will analyze uploaded music in a similar way to the video by identifying low building blocks like the different instruments being played and then higher-level musical concepts such as a song's chorus and emotional peak. The music elements will then be synced with the story elements by, for example, cutting on the beat.

Ultimately, though, Boiman's objective is bigger than helping people to make better videos. "We are trying to shift the paradigm," says Boiman. "The paradigm right now says you capture and it goes to your archive. We say if it was important enough for you to take out the camera, we are going to make it unforgettable for you. We are talking about billions of life experiences per day that go to the archive. If they go to the Internet there is going to be a different Internet."

New York-based Kinsa Health makes something simple: a mobile phone-connected digital thermometer. Nothing thrilling there. Not even brand new. Why it is especially interesting: Their device connects with the phone via the headphone jack, an increasingly common way to tie peripherals to phones--and not just for credit card readers.

The problem? Jacking in is tricky, made more so by differences in iOS and Android, and everyone is building their hardware solutions from scratch. There's no common standard for peripherals on mobile phones.

"When we thought about the product, the problem we were trying to solve was as follows: How do we create a truly cross-platform product that is even lower cost than the non-connected analog?" says Singh. "This is where the headphone jack came in. The headphone jack is on every smartphone out there. If you try to use any other connection points--the Apple 30-pin connector--that's only for one platform, so it's not truly cross-platform. If you use mini-USB, those work on many Android devices and many other devices, but they don't really work on Apple devices. So the headphone jack made a lot of sense."

However, piggybacking off the universal port headphone jack comes with a few engineering problems. There are challenges with automatic gain control. There are potential power issues. And there are software issues on the iOS versus the Android system, since they implement audio settings very differently.

"How do you turn off the sensing software that connects to your headphones that does the noise reduction? How do you make sure you're not changing the signal that we're sending back into the phone? How do I pull enough power from the phone to actually power the device, and do that when each of the hardware manufacturers have it set up differently?" asks Singh.

Here's a primer on the fundamentals of building for the hardware jack.

Turning Information Into Sound (And Back)

No matter what your headphone-connected device can do functionally, all the information it passes back and forth with the phone must be translated the same way as audio: Tones and key presses are the Morse code of headphone jack hardware development.

Singh explains, "There are multiple different approaches to using the headphone jack. The most obvious approach would be to use a Morse code signal where you have beeps. Beep beep beep. Or alternatively you could have different tones. You can use the tones or frequency to actually accomplish the objective." That's the most obvious method, he says.

"What we decided to do was to send an audio signal out of the headphone jack [and] allow it to be changed by, in our case, a temperature sensitive resistor called a thermistor, and allow it to be channeled back into the phone," Singh says. "So what we're really doing is we're processing an audio, an analog signal. We are interpreting that analog signal and the changes in that analog signal to determine a very precise temperature reading."

Doing this translation accurately requires calibration. "We just basically try, in very simplistic terms, to read the settings on your hardware. You can detect the hardware parameters to make sure the signal you're detecting across different devices is the same," letting his engineers adjust for variations in device by calibrating to each model.

Other people are using sonic technology in different ways, across different industries. AliveCor heart monitors convert ECG signals into ultrasonic FM sound signals, transmitted through an audio transmitter to the microphone of the iPhone where it is processed and displayed on screen.

Nerf Cyberhoops uses a different type of sonic technology and "contacts" the iPad or iPhone "by playing inaudible sounds that the device playing the app picks up on." This saves power when compared to methods such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

How Can You Pull Power From The Phone To Power The Device Via The Jack?

Another big challenge in building headphone jack peripherals is powering the device. Since you have a battery in the phone itself, can you somehow draw enough power from the headphone jack to make it run?

"In our device we don't have power issues because we don't need power," says Singh--a function of the way he chose ultimately to design the thermometer. "We're simply changing the audio signal. However, other devices have power issues."

Singh offers some advice for people going this route. "There's a third party that's written something called The Hi-Jack technique. It came out of the University of Michigan. That is one method to try to draw some power from the headphone jack."

The availability of power is a big advantage over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. But perhaps the headphone jack's biggest advantage is its low cost.

"Wi-Fi is very expensive. It requires heavy componentry. It's high cost. Low-energy Bluetooth is marketed and positioned as a very, very low-cost alternative and it is compared to Wi-Fi--but it's still not low-cost enough today. Using the headphone jack is ultra, ultra low cost.

There are also questions of standards and ubiquity across devices. Bluetooth LE, for instance, isn't built into mobile phone models older than the Android 4.3. It gets more complicated in hardware where developers are constantly faced with the challenge of developing for every single model out there.

"Hardware guys think about not only Android versus iOS but they think about every single different type of phone that's out there because they're all manufactured slightly differently. It's much, much more fragmented than you think," says Singh. "It's the intersection of both of those together that impacts how you think about hardware connectivity." As he points out, "every phone has a headphone jack."

Russia is home to some of the world's biggest tech companies, and is one of the world's leaders in computer science education. It's also a hotbed of cybercrime and digital fraud. The recent Target credit card case originated in Russia, and so did a host of other prominent e-crimes.

So why is web-based crime so appealing for Russian nationals? Despite Russia's excellence in STEM education and a booming tech sector, salaries in Russia for tech workers remain extremely low. According to Payscale.com, the average Russian software developer can expect to earn only a bit more than $15,000 annually. Even with the much lower cost of living in Russia, that kind of money doesn't go far. In addition, Russian government authorities have traditionally taken a lax approach to prosecuting computer crimes. Those are two reasons why a recent report by Russian security firm Group i-B estimated their domestic cybercrime market at $1.9 billion/year.

Trend Micro, a Japanese security firm, recently issued a fascinating white paper on Russian credit card fraud and digital crime. Max Goncharov, the study's author, says that Russian-language web forums are a primary venue for selling credit card numbers and offers to hack accounts, develop malware, launch DDoS attacks, or engage in various varieties of fraud.

"The number of Russian underground forums has been growing each year," he writes. "Even though some forums come and go, the most popular ones just change hosting service providers and domain names every so often but keep their loyal members. The most popular Russian underground forums such as verified.su and ploy.org can have 20,000 to several hundreds of unique members," Goncharov continues.

In particular, Russian forums are a hotbed for credit card numbers, trojans, and traffic direction services (which function as distribution services for malware). It's essentially capitalist; individuals with skill sets or valuable information like credit card numbers offer their wares at a price the market will tolerate, and interested buyers then obtain the products or services.

Not only that, but prices for illicit credit card information on these forums have been dropping due to increases in supply. Goncharov and his team used an automated data scraping system to collect information from an undisclosed number of websites and forums accessible both through standard http or https access and Onion routers like Tor.

It's not just credit card numbers being trafficked here. Sometimes, companies and individuals can even buy traffic for their sites through these forums. Criminals can purchase iframes, which are inserted into high-traffic websites that redirect traffic over to the criminal's site; Trend says that traffic from Australian, American, German, British, and Italian IP addresses are particularly prized.

But Goncharov's most interesting discovery is on pricing. It's not just credit card numbers getting cheaper; everything else is, too. Traffic redirections from American Internet users that would have cost $400 in 2011 cost only $130 in 2013; trojan software packages that cost $500 in 2011 were only $35 last year. Forged European passports could be obtained for $1 a pop; forged Russian passports or passports from ex-Soviet nations like the Ukraine and Kazakhstan go for between $1 and $2. Although Trend's chart didn't take into account new trojans and new virii that weren't around in 2011, they stated that the price dip was consistent across the board.

In the end, Russian cybercriminals have created a black market economy of surprisingly low prices--a place where American credit card credentials can be purchased for the staggeringly low price of $1 and German credit cards cost $6. Spammers can obtain floods of 10,000 Skype messages apiece for under $90, and it only costs $100 to hack a Facebook account. Maybe crime pays after all.

Absentee and ineffective moderators are dragging down Reddit, and it's causing some of the site's 114 million monthly users to revolt.

In late April, popular subreddit /r/technology--one of the site's largest--was removed from the default subreddits when moderators took a "hamfisted" approach to banning certain content, to quote Reddit overseer Erik Martin. New moderators were appointed by the Reddit admins and changes were promised, but as TechCrunch pointed out, similar demotions on other influential subreddits had been handed out in the past.

But this isn't like those other times. It's not just the technology subreddit that's seeing dissension; worldnews, another monstrous subreddit with several million subscribers, is also under attack. Since these initial eruptions, something unexpected has occurred: a sustained, systematic downvoting of almost every link submitted on behalf of the community, punishing posters with double digit karma losses.

As of Tuesday evening, the vast majority of the 400+ "top posts" still have double- or triple-digit negative karma. And there is no sign of this stopping. This reaction is not ignominy or apathy--this is open revolt. And Reddit, so far, has found no effective way of dealing with it. "Vote brigading," as mass downvoting is called, is a pernicious way to undermine a subreddit, as Reddit's algorithm effectively counts 1 downvote as much as 10 upvotes. A lot of leverage can be created by a few troublemakers, if they are able to remain undetected, especially if downvoting occurs soon after the link's submission. ("Downvote bots" are easier to deal with than humans, since votes are coming from predictable, mechanized source.)

Comments on the /r/technology situation--the only medium of exchange on the site, besides links--reveal a larger issue. As Reddit has evolved, it has developed a ruling class of moderators: a handful of people who vet new posts, decide the rules, and enforce them. For the most part in Reddit's eight-year history, this has worked well, as it's rewarded carefully curated communities with autonomy, and ostensibly democracy in how the site can be used. (You don't like what's there? Create your own subreddit, or contribute to an existing one to get it changed.)

Except now that the site has matured, the stakes are higher. It isn't quite as easy to start a new subreddit that becomes enormously popular as it was, say, in 2010--especially if, like the technology subreddit, other verticals are getting placed on the homepage by the admins. Tone-deaf or absentee moderators now control large, powerful subreddits and don't want to relinquish their position even when they are inactive, which can lead to overzealous censorship as a means of policing content, such as wantonly banning keywords.

Once-rival to Reddit, Digg, saw this danger of influence asymmetry for its active, early users and in 2010 took great lengths to make power users weaker; recognized in retrospect as its final mistake which dug Digg's grave. Will Reddit be able to intervene further without further antagonizing the subreddit, and losing what is effectively several years of work growing the site's influence on technology news via /r/technology?

In the intervening time, once-reliable /r/technology leaves no strong heir apparent to take its place, although a meta-discussion has popped up at reddit.com/r/technologymeta. Here's why the technology subreddit is so insurmountable. By the subscription numbers:

/r/technology: 5,042,000

/r/Tech: 49,000

/r/technewstoday: 24,000

/r/technews: 10,000

/r/futurology: 186,000

/r/gadgets: 175,000

Note: Numbers rounded to the nearest thousand, as of May 6, 2014.

Since the days of the Old Masters, it's been difficult to tell an authentic masterpiece from a fake. And once artists like Andy Warhol began using mass production techniques in their own studios, authentic originals became even harder to distinguish from knock-off copies, leading in Warhol's case to high-profile disputes about what constitutes a genuine work. (And that's to say nothing of the added complications of copyright to authorship.)

With purely digital forms of art, what it means to "own" a work gets more complex still--where an entire work is ultimately a series of bits on disk, what is the gallery actually selling?

"I've seen firsthand the difficulties that artists working digitally have in participating in the traditional art markets," says artist and New York University professor Kevin McCoy. "Non-object-based art doesn't have the same traction."

It's so difficult for digital artists to sell their work through traditional gallery channels, in fact, that some leading some artists have changed their practices, adding tangible components to their art to make it more marketable, says McCoy.

The more digital art sells, however, the more likely it will be counterfeited. To solve that authentication problem, McCoy and serial entrepreneur Anil Dash created Monegraph, which allows artists to digitally sign their work using the cryptocurrency Namecoin. The signature, along with a digital title recording who owns the work, is preserved in Namecoin's public shared transaction registry, or blockchain, which is essentially a modified version of Bitcoin's blockchain letting users publish arbitrary data. If owners choose to transfer the work, they can publish a record of the title change to the blockchain as well.

"Only one copy of a digital image can ever have a valid monegraph signature," McCoy and Dash wrote on the Monegraph website. "Monegraph images are just ordinary image files, so they can be duplicated and distributed like any other images, but only the original file will pass validation against the monegraph system."

Namecoin is primarily designed to serve as a decentralized domain name registry service, where users can register, renew, and transfer Internet domains without the need of any central authority by publishing to the blockchain. But the blockchain is designed to let users store arbitrary data in key-value pairs, not just domain name records, so it can be used for other purposes, too, like recording the title to artwork.

To register a work through Monegraph, the artist records a URL pointing to the piece, the piece's cryptographic hash, a brief explanatory, and a second URL pointing to a more detailed announcement of the claim. That claim gets posted on a site known to belong to the artist, such as his or her Twitter account, verifying it's indeed the artist registering the work.

McCoy and Dash launched Monegraph at The New Museum in New York on May 3, as part of the digital art group Rhizome's Seven on Seven, essentially a hackathon pairing influential figures from art and technology. Now, they're working on making the system easier to use for artists, McCoy says.

The initial version was designed with images in mind, but once the platform is further built out, there's no reason the same concept wouldn't work for authenticating and tracking ownership of any kind of media file, from music to film to the written word, he says.

"Everyone in the art world that's dealing with technology, they get it right away," says McCoy. "Now, we're at the beginning of the process of trying to roll it out, from a protocol to a platform, which is a bigger job."

Solid is where hardware engineers, software developers, product managers, roboticists, designers, innovators, and business leaders will gather to explore opportunities this perfect storm of intelligent things will bring--covering everything from wearables to robotics, to the Internet of Things and frictionless manufacturing.

We're giving away a FREE conference pass to O'Reilly Solid to Fast Company readers via raffle. To enter the raffle, please email fastcolabs@gmail.com with "O'REILLY RAFFLE" in the subject line. Submit your email by 12 a.m. EST on Monday May 12, 2014. The winner will be notified by email at 10 a.m. EST on Tuesday May 13, 2014. Travel to San Francisco is not included, but Co.Labs Editor Chris Dannen will be at the conference, and he'll happily buy the winner a drink--coffee, beer, tea, juice, kombucha, or whatever else you please.

Or use code COLABS to save 20% when registering as a paid attendee.

The London Underground is one of the world's oldest public transportation systems. Until recently, it was also an organizational mess. Duties for repairs and maintenance were spread among a host of separate divisions that didn't communicate with each other, leading to disasters like a 1987 fire in Kings Cross station that killed 31 people. Although the Underground has become much more organized since 1987, they were looking for a way to make repairs even easier. That's where the Internet of things (or as the rest of us say, smart devices) come in.

Transport for London, the name of the organization that runs the Underground, has been working with contractors to install network-enabled sensors in their CCTV (security camera) systems, escalators, PA loudspeakers, air conditioning systems, and subway tunnels that allow central systems to manage, monitor, and automate individual tasks. The smart devices, which run on a Microsoft Azure Intelligent Systems Services backend, were installed in the Underground by telecom firm Telent and sensors developer CGI.

According to a blog post by Microsoft's Barb Edson, Transport for London uses a central control center to monitor and aggregate sensor data from across the tube system, as shown in the video below.

Edson added in a statement to Co.Labs that the sensors are used for tasks like identifying when escalators vibrate oddly, which leads to pointing out potential mechanical issues before they actually occur. Metrics like power and temperature are recorded, along with additional information recorded by the sensors.

Transport for London's central control centers use the aggregated sensor data to deploy maintenance teams, track equipment problems, and monitor goings-on in the massive, sprawling transportation system. Telent's Steve Pears said in a promotional video for the project that "We wanted to help rail systems like the London Underground modernize the systems that monitor it's critical assets--everything from escalators to lifts to HVAC control systems to CCTV and communication networks." The new smart system creates a computerized and centralized replacement for a public transportation system that used notebooks and pens in many cases.

This means cost savings for Transport for London; Microsoft expects that the new system will make running their rail support network 30% cheaper while also improving customer service levels. The smart devices will primarily be used to automate manual processes, detect equipment issues in real time before they cause service problems, and for infrastructure planning.

For Microsoft, Telent, and CGI, this also means a valuable profit opportunity. Sensors on connected devices generate massive amounts of data when aggregated; Scott Gnau, the CEO of Teradata (a Microsoft partner) told Fast Company several months ago, during a separate interview, that a single functioning jet engine can generate up to terabytes of data per hour. Large, decentralized infrastructure projects like the London Underground are massive moneymaking opportunities for companies serving the smart device market.

And what is being used in the London Underground will someday come to the United States. Tim Libert, a researcher on technology and privacy at the University of Pennsylvania who takes a generally skeptical view on the Internet of things, pointed out to Co.Labs that predecessor systems such as E-ZPass have been around the United States for years. Someday soon, most American highways and mass transit systems will be filled with sensors--and, for better or worse, the Internet of things will be a part of every commuter's route.