When Todd Beauchamp was 18, he couldn't afford a new lighting kit for his camera. So he decided to make his own out of a piece of all thread, leaving the spool on his shelf for future use. It's a habit that has stuck with him ever since: crafting hardware solutions out of whatever objects he can find. It might sound haphazard, but the approach was once enough to placate an angry Steve Jobs.

Beauchamp, who now serves as president and founder of home theater company UnityHT, has always benefited from this sort of experimental tinkering. Indeed, he's currently planning a yearlong road trip in an RV for both a personal getaway and on-location product experimentation. And while it's been his M.O. since his youth, Beauchamp's tendency to plug hardware problems with nearby objects first reaped big rewards while he was an audio engineer at Apple.

How A Tiny Blue Tube Saved The iPhone

Three months into working at Apple, the first iPhone's audio was completely broken, which is what Beauchamp says the team had been working on for over a year.

"I was told that Steve [Jobs] pulled a bunch of people in and was jumping up and down, cussing and screaming, 'Fucking fix this!'" says Beauchamp. "My boss comes into my office on Friday and says, 'You're taking over iPhone on Monday' and handed me the iPhone."

Getting to the source of the problem, Beauchamp popped the phone's black cover off, and looked at the design for the microphone boot.

"There was a scrap piece of blue tubing lying on my lab floor that was stripped off a piece of wire," he says. "It was about one inch long. This is gonna sound really weird. I visualized an air molecule and how it would bounce around within the phone. I think of what would cause that problem, and understanding down to the molecular level how I can fix it. I picked up the piece of tubing, shoved it in the microphone boot, hand-made a little tiny gasket, popped that plastic black cap back on the phone, and made a phone call."

In 15 minutes, the problem was solved.

"I have that phone and a sticker on the back of it that says, 'Blue tube solution,' that got handed to Steve the next day to show him that the problem was solved."

It's all part of Beauchamp's solution to avoid disruption when he's in the zone, he says.

"I'll literally be in the middle of a project and I'll grab something completely random and make whatever I needed to make in that moment," he says. "If I have a harebrained idea, and I need a few small things, I can walk over to my shelf and pull it off the shelf, and not disrupt that creative peace. Being in the moment of that creativity, and being able to walk over in the moment, whether it be noon or midnight, I can walk out and do that."

Piecing Together a Unified Experience

After five years of working at Apple, the company's belief in product design inclusiveness inspired Beauchamp to create his own company, UnityHT, which is currently utilizing software for its next phase--personalized entertainment content.

"They [Apple] focused on the full experience and did not look at hardware or software as independent pieces of a puzzle," Beauchamp says. "When building out the UnityHT platform we took a step back to look at the bigger picture--What have our customers lost in the experience, not the technology?"

Like the molecule in the iPhone, hardware is merely a gateway to full experiences that, if done correctly, could fill the missing piece of the home entertainment puzzle, Beauchamp believes.

Using his design M.O., Beauchamp says he imagined all of the random thoughts and actions viewers have while watching television, such as wanting to find content outside of the home without disturbing their current program.

"Whether watching another movie, finding a song, or going to the theaters, the content that we're consuming in our living room is a trigger point for me to do something else."

In order to search content without leaving that particular moment, Beauchamp says he wants the product to be able to cater personalized experiences to each viewer's moment.

"It's like iTunes--there's five people in the home, and each person has their own iTunes account that has their own personal style of music they like," he says. "We want to bring that to the media in the living room."

Given his love of the television experience, the irony lies in Beauchamp's upbringing in an electronics-free household, which he says helped shape his random design methods.

"I don't think it would have created that behavior or style that I do today that allows me to be really effective in engineering and come up with solutions really quickly."

"I'm fortunate that I grew up without TV because it made me who I am, but had I had something like the product that I'm making, and been able to connect to the things that actually interest me--not The Cosby Show or silly shit like that--it would have accelerated that. That's the difference that I want to make, is not have it be a mind-numbing experience, but an educational or expansion."

Designing From The Road On A Yearlong Trip

Beauchamp hopes to find an educational experience in an upcoming yearlong road trip, which has, for the first time, forced him to leave his lab behind and make room for new items.

"It's been an interesting thing going through the house and packing up the house for this trip. I didn't really realize, because I was so in the thick to it, of how much stuff I had consumed," he says.

Using few resources and picking up new ones along the way, Beauchamp says he's going to build a small lab inside of the RV he'll be taking so he can design from the road.

"I'll be taking acoustics like microphones and analyzers, and stuff that I can do," he says. "This test equipment will allow me to actually be able to test the acoustics right in my own little portable mobile space, but be able to take it into their space and do testing right at their facility as well, so I can test how a speaker sounds on location."

He says geographical location will be only an additional, intangible random object to add to his collection.

"My factory is in Asia, so whether I jump on a plane here or jump on a plane from Denver or wherever, it doesn't really matter if you think about it. It's so easy to think that we've got to be in this one spot to make it happen, when actually we don't. That's the neat thing--It doesn't matter whether I'm sitting in a seat in San Jose or sitting in a seat in Montana."

Beauchamp says he'll try to connect those dots--bouncing around the country, meeting seemingly random people and seeing what comes of it.

"I don't have a schedule. I don't have anywhere I need to be. It's just wherever," he says. "When I was 18 years old and just met some of the most amazing people in my life. If I found some little town that I liked, I stayed there for a day or I stayed there for a week, or stayed there for two weeks. It really didn't matter. There's some really cool freedom with that."

Beauchamp was getting ready for an experimental road trip last week when he realized he needed to make a piece of broken camera equipment work. So he walked over to where he placed that all-thread spool, put it in his flash adapter, and voilà! Problem solved.

Today's discussion: When journalism's business model falters, should we all jump ship to "corporate storytelling," also known as content marketing?

Is there room for a news business in the media landscape that doesn't include paid PR? This recently departed USA Today editor doesn't think so. Where (if anywhere) do we see evidence that news can still be a big business?

As a journalist I see the appeal of leaving a noble profession and becoming a corporate storytelling hack. Journalism is really hard work. It's more than just sitting down and writing. It's leveraging your contacts to find a good story, it's following the latest events on a daily basis, it's research, research, research, interviews, and then, finally, writing. And for all this work--one article could easily take 30-40 hours to complete--journalists don't make a lot of money. And the money they make is going down.

That's where corporate storytelling comes in. As more print and digital journalism outlets forgo meaningful content in favor of clicks, more journalists say the industry is going in the wrong direction. Many news outlets don't respect journalists anymore--and it shows. So why shouldn't the journalists jump to soul-crushing corporate storytelling, which, by the way, might as well be called "corporate spin"? If you're on a sinking raft and have a mortgage to pay it's better for you and your family to jump ship to the corporate cruise liner--just don't call yourself a journalist anymore.

Of course the good news is that some news outlets have begun to see the error in their ways of treating journalists as mere content monkeys. Good magazine has just announced it is hiring its editorial staff back after laying them off in favor of becoming a community crowdsourced content platform last year. Their traffic dropped almost 20% since that disastrous decision, which shows just how valuable a good editorial staff truly is. Hopefully other news outlets will reverse course on how they treat journalists or we'll see many more talented writers running to become corporate shills so they can pay the bills. Michael Grothaus

Despite the rise of content marketing, there is always room for publications that champion opinion. An extreme case, Valleywag particularly stands out from the crowd. The site is the antithesis of public relations fodder. When Valleywagwrote about Sean Parker's opulent Big Sur wedding last year, they called it "Tackier Than We Ever Dreamt." It is hard to believe that a corporate PR person would try to push that sort of snarky message through Valleywag's channels, so the article was definitely free of corporate meddling. Most importantly, the piece's opinionated stance got eyes on the page. Snark and subversion are funny. PR is not.

But there is certainly room for paid content in the media, as well. Companies always need to tell their stories to frame their products to gain consumer interest. The journalism startup Contently has made its business by connecting big brands with freelance journalists. Meeting both parties' objectives, companies have access to talented writers, while freelance journalists can make money on their stories through Contently's business model. The companies and the writers win. Whether the reader wins is questionable.

In both scathing blogging-journalism and company-backed stories, someone's agenda is going to reach the reader. Whether it is taking down a tech entrepreneur through personal attacks or selling airplane tickets through a paid travel feature, the reader will ultimately have to decide how the people producing the content affects their understanding of the situation. The issue is not how to save journalism but how to make us better readers. Tina Amirtha

Martin says content marketing is "a massive opportunity for journalists," but this final sentence of Martin's piece appears to be missing a key word: former. This veteran of USA Today, Red Herring, and CNet is doing something new, and it's in no way journalism. That distinction that is sometimes blurry in this internal industry debate over content marketing and the future of journalism. But I like to think that for readers, the line is not so fuzzy, and that corporate PR disguised as news will send bullshit detectors flashing.

The Atlantic/Scientology sponsored content debacle is the most encouraging evidence yet that readers are indeed paying attention. Yet for us practitioners of these two different professions, the distinction isn't always as clear as it could be. Often, it is clear, but we dabble in both because we are freelance writers trying to pay the bills (I've been there). And as it turns out, the website bankrolled by the major brand cuts bigger checks and deposits them more quickly than the overworked editorial assistant at the understaffed magazine.

But to pick on Martin a little bit, he rightly points out that "companies can now bypass trying to get news coverage, making traditional news media even less important… Corporations are racing to exploit this opportunity to better reach audiences with stories."

All of this is true. But the premise that journalism and content marketing are thus interchangeable rests on an assumption that would make any of my J-school professors squeamish: That journalism exists in part to help corporations tell stories. Imagine if Standard Oil had offered Ida Tarbell a healthy salary to edit their corporate newsletter instead of writing all those pesky exposes. Would she have taken it?

Of course, modern journalism often does have an effect that resembles "corporate storytelling." I've written plenty of stories profiling interesting startups or illustrating the successes of larger companies. But when I do that, I'm always reporting and writing as a service to our readers, not the companies I'm writing about. Often, these companies are thrilled with my stories. Sometimes they're pissed.

USA Today is a newspaper. And just because legacy outlets like it haven't returned to its 1990s peak of profitability (nor will they) doesn't mean the entire profession is going down in flames. The good news is that people are trying new things in publishing every day. Armed with new tools and platforms, smart people can experiment with new ways to deliver news, tell stories, explain just about everything, and yes, even do investigative, Pulitzer-winning journalism. New journalistic enterprises are launching. Venture capitalists are even opening their checkbooks for publishers. If you ask me, it's an exciting time to be in the industry. John Paul Titlow

News is what somebody does not want you to print, and the rest is advertising. "Corporate storytelling" is not journalism, but then neither is most of what you see in the technology press, either. In fact, there has actually been progress in this regard. The early online tech press didn't even tell stories. It described features or spouted opinions about gear. I see my own articles mostly as fascinating stories which happen to involve technology, but are actually about people.

Journalism is more than storytelling. At their best, journalists use skilled storytelling to tell uncomfortable truths, to bring to light significant facts which would otherwise remain in obscurity. That means identifying what's important, verifying the facts, separating the naked truth from the corporate spin. It's also the naked truth that this is not what most journalists do on every story. There simply isn't enough time or budget, and maybe there doesn't need to be. Yet another product launch frankly may not merit this kind of scrutiny, but there are stories in the tech world that do, and those are the ones for which we need journalists, not just storytellers.

A world where news is delivered by social media doesn't need less of these old-fashioned journalistic skills, it needs more, as startups like Storyful have demonstrated. When there's a constant deluge of unfiltered information, much of it supplied by corporations, what and who can you trust? Ciara Byrne

Mozilla released a petition on net neutrality to the Federal Communications Commission this week, in an attempt to persuade the FCC of a sort of "third way" approach to the current impasse in Internet regulations. The actual legal petition is quite long and the shorter blog post requires a little explaining to grasp, so we went to Mozilla to ask for the layman's version.

Here's the background: Much of the debate around net neutrality boils down to whether Internet service providers (ISPs) should be allowed to slow down or block traffic based on which website a subscriber is accessing, and charge that site for faster speeds.

If ISPs were classified as "common carriers," they would fall under increased FCC regulation, making this kind of behavior illegal. But they're not classified that way today. Mozilla's aim in their petition is to avoid a fight over reclassification by simply disentangling the different services that ISPs provide. In other words, one classification for the service ISPs provide to end users, and another classification for the service they provide to tech companies.

In the meantime, protestors calling for net neutrality have set up an encampment outside FCC headquarters in advance of its May 15 meeting, where new net neutrality guidelines are expected to be proposed. Mozilla's petition has garnered a lot of media attention, as well as some confusion in the press reports. I spoke by phone with Chris Riley, senior policy engineer at Mozilla, and one of the architects of the petition in order to get some more details and clarify exactly what Mozilla is calling for.

Why did Mozilla release this petition?

Mozilla's mission as an organization, as a project, is to protect the open Internet for our half-billion users of the Firefox web browser and Firefox OS phone and for the many makers and developers of the web who use our products and our open source code in their own work. Net neutrality is an issue that we've worked on in the past and that we care quite a lot about internally. We worked to help the FCC craft good open Internet rules a few years ago and were very disappointed when the D.C. Circuit sent those rules back. We've been watching the FCC as it starts to put together a response plan and we're very concerned by what we've heard.

We're concerned that what the FCC is planning to do--as far as we can understand now--won't adequately protect users or business on the Internet. So the motivation behind our petition was to get the FCC to take a different tack forward. We want the FCC to give itself more clear and secure authority in order to adopt meaningful and effective rules to protect net neutrality. We want to get to a place where there are real, enforceable, clear net neutrality rules on the books--meaning no blocking, no discrimination, no paid prioritization. And this should be applicable to wireless as well as wired Internet.

Why does net neutrality matter to the average Internet user?

Net neutrality is very important for Internet users to protect their choice of content online. It's best to think of this in a negative sense: What would the world look like without net neutrality? And the answer is essentially an Internet that looks more like cable television. You may have a lot of choices. But a lot of them aren't going to be things you want. Not having net neutrality jeopardizes this fertile, dynamic, evolving ecosystem where every year there's a new multi-billion-dollar company with a fascinating product used by millions of people. We have this steady stream of innovations on the Internet thanks to the net neutrality. If we lose that dynamic then we as Internet users are going to have fewer awesome things to do online. And when we have our own ideas we might not be able to turn them into businesses because we'll have to pay additional fees up front and face a less open market for our own entrepreneurship. That's the net neutrality baseline.

And how does Mozilla's petition help us get to that point of having net neutrality?

Essentially what we are saying is to get to net neutrality you have to have the federal agency charged with overseeing communications platforms--the FCC--in a place where it can protect the Internet. But we're not in that place now. We're not in that place because there has been an evolution of the law in this space that has not been paying attention to the way that technology and the market have evolved. So if you look at this pattern over the last 20 years, the evolution of the technologies and the market of the Internet and the evolution of law around it are heading in different directions. What our petition does is try to merge these two things back together and reorient the law to reflect the current technology and market. And get those things working together going forward and that will arm the FCC, charged by Congress with overseeing communications in this country, to be able to move forward with real net neutrality.

Do you see this petition that you've put forward as the end game of achieving robust net neutrality or is this just the first step?

This is the first step for sure. Our petition does not propose actual rules. It is really about getting the authority to create rules. The reason the FCC is looking at weaker rules right now is because the D.C. Circuit said to them "on the current path that you're on for authority, there are limits to what you can do with net neutrality rules." So the FCC listened to that, but they listened to it in one particular way and said "Okay, let's figure out what rules we can do that fit within the limits of what the D.C. Circuit has set for us." We're asking the FCC to change the game. We're saying to change their authority and listen to the D.C. Circuit, but in a different way and thereby get to better rules. Stage two of this process, after the authority process, will be the actual net neutrality rules.

Let's talk about this idea of how technology has evolved in the last 20 years. In your blog post announcing the petition you talk about how there are new "two distinct relationships" in terms of how Internet traffic gets distributed. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Earlier in the Internet it made sense to think about your local ISP--AT&T, Verizon, Comcast--as really only talking to you and to other network companies. They took your traffic, they gave it to another network company and that company sent it off somewhere. And where it to at the other end your local AT&T or Comcast operator didn't know and didn't care. But that is not the world we live in now. We now live in a world where AT&T and Comcast have the ability to pay attention to every individual website you're talking to as one of their subscribers and to decide to speed up or slow down your communications with different websites. And that changes the root of the net neutrality problem. If we had an end-to-end Internet as we did 40 years ago, we wouldn't have a problem. But instead we do have a problem because there is this new capability of looking at and differentiating among the Internet services and content that you as a subscriber are looking at. Because ISPs can differentiate based on the content provider that's way off in some remote portion of the Internet, it's best to understand it as a service that they are offering to that remote provider. And then to look at that from the perspective of the laws that we have on the books.

And how does Mozilla's petition get the law to catch up with how the Internet has evolved?

Basically by looking at this Internet traffic as a "remote delivery service" that's being offered to the content and application end points on the Internet. That's something that has never been defined by the FCC. The FCC has the ability to look at the statute that sets out categories and types of services. It defines some services as telecommunications services and others as information services. And the commission has a choice to make: We have a new service here with this remote delivery service. If they choose to articulate that as a significant and standalone category of services then they have to choose whether to put it into the Title II--telecommunications--bucket or the Title I--information services--bucket. Our petition walks through that exercise and explains why the commission should put it into the Title II telecommunications bucket. So we're taking the statutes and precedents that have evolved over the past twenty years and applying them to this new remote delivery service construct.

There's been a some confusion in the coverage of Mozilla's petition. Forbes says that you're calling for "common carrier" reclassification, while Ars Technica says that wouldn't be necessary under your proposal. Can you clarify and explain where that confusion might be coming from?

Our petition asks the FCC to use Title II, which is the common carrier authority, but we're not asking for reclassification. Crucially, we're not asking the FCC to change any of its existing precedents. So there's a distinction here and it's one that's often elided over in the press articles. There's a common carrier service and then sometimes providers as an entity are described as common carrier providers. But that's not really the best way of looking at it. It's better to look at the specific services rather than providers as a whole. So the reclassification concept says to take the Internet access service as we know it today, which is currently an information service, and reclassify that service as a telecommunication service. What we are doing is different. Instead, we're saying leave that service alone. But look at a mirrored partner of that service, which is the remote delivery service. And put common carrier onto that service, while leaving the original Internet access service alone. So we're using Title II common carrier authority, but putting it onto a different kind of service and not changing the service that has already been classified. We are only targeting the traffic within the ISPs' local network that is associated with these companies' services and content delivery.

A lot of press coverage has talked about "fast lanes" that established companies could pay for, which would crush upstart competition. But is there a scenario where business might actually want to pay for preferential treatment and therefore might not want net neutrality?

I think there are probably some inclinations along those lines from some of these companies. But at the end of the day they know that once they start paying for prioritized treatment, even if it gives them a short-term advantage over the competition, they're going to have to keep paying that in perpetuity. And no business wants another line on its expense sheet for getting basically the same kind of open Internet they're getting today without paying access charges. I would be very shocked and think it would be myopic of any business to say, "no, we want to be able to pay for prioritized access." I don't expect to hear that as a response. It's important to note that these technology companies are not in any way shape or form subject to anything or any regulations based on our petition. Really, they're the beneficiaries because a service that's effectively being offered to them would be regulated. And so actually one of the other benefits of our petition is to wall off technology companies and the services, applications, and content that they offer from FCC authority. So I think the long-term effect of the Mozilla petition will be to separate what network operators and telecommunication service providers do from the Internet industry. The trend the FCC is on now could be a slippery slope toward greater regulation of the technology industry. The Mozilla petition helps forestall that.

The web charting library Highcharts isn't widely known outside of data visualization circles, but it's used by organizations like IBM and NASA, the BBC and the Financial Times. Why? It's easy to use, well documented, and--most importantly--compatible with browsers from Internet Explorer 6 forward. That's a big deal, because IE compatibility hamstrings a lot of other sites and tools that work fine on Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Firefox. But that kind of cross-compatibility means extensive testing on all sorts of devices. Here's how they do it.

First, a primer on what Highcharts does. Developers can use it to add interactive elements, line and scatterplot graphs, as well as more a few more exotic visualizations like adding speedometer-style gauges to their website, by filling in the blanks in a JavaScript object which specifies everything from the chart margins to the formatting for the tooltips on the individual data points to the dataset itself.

Then, when a user visits the website, the library draws a chart to a specified element on the website, using SVG graphics or VML, the pre-SVG vector markup language used in older versions of Internet Explorer.

"When we first talked about it some four or five years ago, IE8 support was a big selling point," says Highsoft CTO Torstein Hønsi. "It's becoming less of a selling point now, but it's still very important because there's so many enterprise systems and in-house solutions than still run on IE8."

Big Time Testing

To make sure new versions of the software still work with browsers from the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox to IE6 to the native browser from Android 2.0, Highsoft runs an extensive series of tests before each release, Hønsi says.

"We run automated visual tests for the SVG-enabled platforms," he says. "We have a test suite of about 1,000 samples and we compare programmatically rendered version of the charts with the previous version of Highcharts."

The automated tests typically finish in a few minutes, but for other platforms, the company will often spend a day or two running manual tests and fixing regression bugs, he says.

"For VML and for different browsers, we don't do all the automated tests, but we do selected tests manually, so we have a recipe for manual testing like IE8, IE7, even IE6 and also mobile browsers," he says. "For each feature, like a certain touch gesture or a graphical visualization in legacy IE, we have a manual test."

And for each testable feature, the company also provides at least one complete demonstration in a JSFiddle online debugging environment so coders can experiment before deploy to their own sites, he says.

The extensive set of built-in options for basic charts and copious documentation makes Highcharts appealing to corporate customers, since it means new developers can more quickly get up to speed than with more abstract libraries like D3.

"Versus D3, Highcharts has a much lower entry point, so if you hire someone to create some charts on your website, then they will get started much quicker with HIghcarts than with D3," says Hønsi.

What Testing Gets You: Love

Media organizations praise the library for the same reasons: Journalist Malik Singleton tweeted last year that the "best time to master @Highcharts API is on deadline," and editors and producers from organizations from the Washington Post to Southern California Public Radio have blogged about using Highcharts to build visualizations for news stories.

More advanced developers can write more complex code, though, adding JavaScript code that gets called when users interact with points on the map or drawing graphical elements like lines, points, and arcs atop the chart.

An interactive mapping module for Highcharts, called Highmaps, is currently in beta--Hønsi says that despite the wealth of web-mapping toolkits already available, from Google Maps to Leaflet, mapping was one of the company's customers top requests.

"What our clients are saying is they don't want to use two different tools if they can do it with one," he says. "They prefer not to use another tool for the mapping, so we when we released a Highcharts map product it can also run side by side with Highcharts as a Highcharts module, which, of course, is much more efficient than learning two different libraries."

At the moment, the Highcharts JavaScript library needs to be installed on a customer's site and invoked through developer-written HTML and JavaScript. The library's free to use for noncommercial projects, with various license and support options available for commercial use.

But in the near future, Hønsi says, the company will be rolling out a cloud-hosted version of the tool that won't require any coding at all. Highcharts Cloud, currently in alpha, generates charts that can be embedded on a website or shared across social media, he says.

"We have created a beta now, which we launch in two weeks," he says. "We're also very, very close to coming up with a business model and a subscription model."

It's easy to take the basic functionality of a social network for granted, but even something as simple as an "activity feed" (like so many apps have) has complex moving parts. And when a site scales, those parts begin to break down. For engineers at SoundCloud, rebuilding their feed technology was so labor intensive that they decided to spare the rest of humanity from the task. And thus, they opened sourced it.

Here's their solution: It's called Roshi, a new open source distributed storage system for "time series events" in feeds--in laymans terms, news feeds. Roshi was developed by Peter Bourgon and other engineers at SoundCloud in order to scale up without slowing down the performance of the very social streams that keep users engaged.

What's A Feed For?

Let's say you follow Snoop Dogg on SoundCloud. If he reposts (SoundCloud's equivalent of retweeting) a track by an up-and-coming hip hop artist, you'd naturally expect to see the song in your stream. The traditional way of doing this, known as "fan out on write" essentially treats each user's stream (equivalent to the News Feed on Facebook) as an inbox, pushing updates out to each of them individually. It works, but it's inefficient, the storage costs add up, and changes to the social graph can become a pain to implement.

"At some point, those caveats and restrictions started affecting our ability to iterate on the stream," explains Bourgon. "To keep up with product ideas, we needed to address the infrastructure. And rather than tackling each problem in isolation, we thought about changing the model."

Rethinking Social Time Series Events With Roshi

SoundCloud's new approach relies on a methodology called "fan-in-on-read." When you view the stream of SoundCloud users you follow, the system will grab the most recent events (favorites, reposts, and the like) of those people and then dynamically merge that information on the fly. It speeds up writes and minimizes storage, but presents new challenges.

"Reads are difficult," Bourgon explains. "If you follow thousands of users, making thousands of simultaneous reads, time-sorting, merging, and cutting within a typical request-response deadline isn't trivial. As far as we know, nobody operating at our scale builds timelines via fan-in-on-read."

For Bourgon and the other developers working on Roshi, the solution came in the form of a specific CRDT (Convergent Replicated Data Type). These conflict-free replicated data types "manage to sidestep a lot of the common problems and pitfalls associated with distributed systems," Bourgon explains.

And with that, Roshi was born.

"One thing that's much easier to do on the new system is to handle social graph updates," says Bourgon. "If you follow or unfollow somebody, in the old system, that could take quite a while to propagate and to become visible on your stream. In the new system, that's more or less immediately apparent."

In the short-term, this streamlines certain backend processes, but it also primes SoundCloud's infrastructure for future product updates. "You could imagine that from there, any new feature that involves dynamically adding or removing content to your stream is now a lot easier to do," says Bourgon.

That will come in handy as the platform continues to grow. Since launching in 2007, the Berlin-based service has become known as a sort of "YouTube for audio" and today sees 12 hours of audio uploaded every minute.

When Building Is Better Than Buying

Of course, the SoundCloud team could have crammed any number of off-the-shelf products into this hole and done the trick. The old system, for example, was based on Apache Cassandra, a distributed database system that probably could have been bent to meet SoundCloud's needs in this case as well.

"The problem that we're solving with this thing is so simple to articulate and so simple to get your head around that it felt like the cognitive burden of learning a massive system like Cassandra and operating such a big black box felt like it wasn't worth our time," says Bourgon. "Not when we could relatively easily--Roshi is around 2,000 lines of code--craft something that solves specifically the problem we're trying to solve."

In this instance, crafting a homegrown, hyper-specific solution turned out to be more cost-effective and operationally useful than shoving some generic product into place. Of course, that's not always the case, but Bourgon hopes that projects like Roshi will help bolster the case for building, as opposed to buying, whenever appropriate.

"For me, the biggest thing is the shift in philosophy," Bourgon says. "I think a lot of startups are eager to buy software off the shelf that seems like it might fit and then sort of hammer it into place and solve whatever problem they might be solving. And it's not an invalid strategy. But I think we lose sight of the fact that that's just one option."

Skateboarding looks so much cooler in video games--you get to see everything from all those crazy camera angles. But what if you could bring that perspective to real life? One startup thinks you could by adding a piece of quantifying hardware to the bottom of skateboards, giving skaters a more complete look at the tricks they're attempting and mastering.

Syrmo, a HAXLR8R-backed startup, is launching its Kickstarter campaign today to bring motion-tracking hardware to skateboards for an initial price of $99. It will also allow skaters to not only view their own action as a 3-D animation, but take video that automatically tags each trick and selectively adds slow-motion effects. You know, just like in the video games, but starring you.

"The idea came while we were playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and we realized it would be awesome to have a device to make the video game real life," says cofounder Matias Fineschi.

Attaching special riser pads--the piece of plastic between the wheels and wood board--that contains sensors allows the capture of skating data. The hardware includes a gyroscope and accelerometer which can also track airtime, height, distance, and pop force.

The hardware and app combo can also capture and tag video. Algorithms detect tricks being performed and automatically convert them to slow-motion. This automated process eliminates the need to fiddle with manually filming the action and adding effects.

Quantifying The Skateboarding Experience

The 3-D renders displayed in the app aren't pre-set models, but actually display the motion each individual board takes. Each trick also takes less than a second to render its own 3-D model.

"We created a 3-D model of a skateboard with a CAD tool and then exported the associated STL file. Currently a webGL engine loads the STL model and then a physics engine models all the board movements," Matias explains.

"As iOS (and Apple) is not longer offering support for webGL in future devices we are changing the webGL engine into our own native libraries which are coded in C++," he says. "The software team will begin to develop this libraries in about two months. This libraries can be compiled either for iOS and Android since it's native code C++."

As far as how those tricks are initially detected, that's the complicated part.

"We started with a database of around 2,000 tricks, which isn't much, and those included the three canonical tricks--each of them is compose by rotations on each of the 3-dimensional axis--the ollie, kickflip, and shove-it," says Fineschi. "Most other tricks are made by a combination of these tricks, though not all. That's why we focused first on those three tricks to see how accurate our algorithms could be."

"With this data gathered by our sensors we were able to develop an algorithm which could identify a trick with 98.5% accuracy, which is just the start," Fineschi says

Improving Skate Videos

In addition to displaying a 3-D display of the skateboard in motion, Srymo is also trying to improve on the video experience.

"The device attached to the board runs an algorithm which detects when the skater performed a trick, and then sends the data via Bluetooth to the phone. The app will then apply the algorithms to see if the data received was effectively a landed trick or not," Matias says.

"If a trick is performed the algorithm allows the app to trigger slo-motion on the exact moment you perform a trick," he explains. "The app will also crop the video to avoid heavy data on your phone and make them easy to share. That's how we can create a cool video in three secs, with only a few taps."

The team of three software engineers and a mathematician have been working on machine learning trick algorithm for the last six month. It's not enough to come up with a defined set of rules, because skateboarding is constantly changing and tricks are always evolving.

"You can never throw a dart to the exact same place," Matias says, describing the data output of the same trick done by different people.

The difficulty of detecting tricks isn't unique to Syrmo, however. The startup Krack ran into the same problems while developing a similar device to quantify skateboarding. The conclusion both companies have settled on is that no two tricks are the same. Ultimately it becomes all about cutting out as much data noise as possible and then determining which trick the real-time data matches the best.

For runners and gym buffs, there have long been an array of activity tracking apps available on the market. The likes of Krack and Syrmo are opening this universe up to skateboarding enthusiasts--and with both products still in development, they're only getting started.

Since the introduction of iBeacons, first mentioned at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference almost a year ago, we've begun to get a peek at different use cases. The protocol for dedicated hardware devices is Apple's way of getting data to users in ultra-specific locations without relying on GPS or other battery-draining technologies.

When Apple announced the technology with the inclusion of iOS 7, it gave the company a way to sidestep a dedicated NFC (near field communication) chip while still being able to offer its benefits. In addition to wireless payments, iBeacons are also capable of everything from triggering reminders to indoor location routing.

Looking back over the last year, where are iBeacons beginning to show up?

Apple Stores

Apple stepped up to the plate pretty quick to implement its own iBeacons across all its 250+ retail stores. Currently it uses the devices to assist customers--if the Apple Store app is installed--while they're moving between different sections of the store.

inMarket

inMarket has been moving fast with iBeacons and was the first third party to roll out the technology nationwide in the U.S. It started with select grocery store chains at the beginning of 2014.

The company provided the data that after only a few months it found that users who receive a geofence push in-store are 2.7x more likely to use that app than those who don't receive one.

Today, the company is announcing its partnership with the Gannett-owned app Key Ring to bring the technology to an even wider audience.

Walking into a store associated with Key Ring, users will get reminders, coupons, and other info from the app right on the lock screen. Having the app automatically remind you instead of you having to remember to use it was the scenario CEO Chris Fagan tells FastCo.Labs his app was meant for.

"What I wanted to build in the beginning was just a coupon app, where you could walk into a mall, it would instantly know you were in a mall and it would present you deals and offers available. When I started looking at it I thought, 'this is really interesting,' but the technologies just weren't there," Fagan says. "Now coming full circle, we actually have these really sophisticated geo-fencing solutions in the form of beacons that are now here."

inMarket also worked with Conde Nast to bring the iBeacon technology to its app Epicurious. The integration enabled reminders for ingredients and food items while in the grocery store.

Motorola

Motorola's new indoor positioning system called MPact includes iBeacon technology as well as Wi-Fi. Unlike competitors, however, MPact with iBeacon will allow information to be pushed to customers not connected to the guest network.

Talking with TechTarget, Motorola explained the addition of multiple technologies in its hardware.

Retail businesses need to be able to connect with end customers who may or may not be using the [guest] Wi-Fi," said Gary Singh, WLAN product marketing manager for Motorola. "Wi-Fi [is] good for presence-based offerings, but when it comes down to micro-locationing, Wi-Fi could be a very expensive offering, and the granularity is very hard to achieve--a consumer might be on the other side of the aisle with Wi-Fi-based location services, versus where the actual marketing needs to take place.

Virgin Atlantic

Setting up shop in London's Heathrow airport, Virgin Atlantic is beginning to test iBeacons. The example given by Re/Code about the implementation was a notification for currency conversion when flyers passed by the shop.

Virgin is using beacons sourced from Estimote, a 2012 startup funded by Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, and BetaWorks, among others.

Sports

Major League Baseball has long been embracing new technology and the 2014 season is no different. Between 20 and 30 baseball stadiums will get iBeacons, and if the iPhone user has the MLB At The Ballpark app installed when they go to a game, they will "check in" automatically.

Engadgetdescribes some other uses as well:

Generally speaking, iBeacon strategy is controlled by MLB: The league tells teams where to place the hardware and what sorts of stuff can be sent to folks who check in using the technology. For now, that means fans get a welcome message when they check in, and maybe an offer to upgrade their seat or get a discount on concessions.

The Golden State Warriors were the first NBA team to include the iBeacon technology. The use case here was to notify fans walking to the cheapest seats about ticket upgrade options to get closer to the action.

The Super Bowl stadium this year also included iBeacons, again, mostly an experimental way to fully use the technology. It was simple things like finding the closest entryways and retail experiences fans were receiving notifications about.

Some Miscellaneous Places

iBeacons inside Walmart stores would be huge news, unfortunately right now it's still in the retail chain's testing lab. But that does mean you shouldn't be too surprised if Walmart does eventually announce widespread support.

The Tribeca Film Festival used iBeacons this year to assist attendees with finding theaters, movie times, and other offers.

iBeacons are also making their way to bars and museums.

But as The Guardianpoints out, the problem for iBeacons might not be anything more than making sure the easily implemented tech isn't wasted on superfluous things. Annoying consumers is one of the quickest ways to destroy something potentially useful.

At its recent F8 developer conference, Facebook announced FbStart, a new program designed to help app developers by providing free tools and services to get themselves up and running. Having initially been available to only F8 attendees, today the program is opening up to all developers.

"The goal of FbStart is to help mobile apps grow and monetize," says Vijay Shankar, one of the program engineers behind FbStart.

Selected parties get credits for Facebook advertising and Parse, plus free services from companies working in product testing, recruiting, customer care, video conferencing, and document management.

Learning From Experience

As a brand, FbStart isn't new. Originally used as the name of a series of developer-oriented events Facebook organized around the globe, its success led to Facebook expanding the program for its current incarnation. This, in turn, meant working out what was good about the program and then applying it on a grander scale.

"We used a lot of the feedback from those events to help shape FBStart," says Shankar. "For example, one thing we heard from developers was that they wanted access to more tools and services, as a way of helping take their apps to the next level. From there it was just a matter of figuring out which tools would be most valuable to a startup, and working out deals with the great partners we're working with."

The partners working with Facebook on FbStart include the likes of Adobe, Appurify, Asana, Blue Jeans, Desk.com, MailChimp, Proto.io, Quip, SurveyMonkey, UserTesting, and Workable.

Of course, Facebook itself is pretty far from a plucky upstart these days. With this in mind, it took a bit of trial and error before the company was able to settle on the exact services it should offer.

"One of the things that was interesting for us to learn was what mobile apps need at different stages in their life cycle," Shankar continues. "If you take the hockey stick curve that people typically use to look at how apps grow there is an initial phase where people are trying to find product market fit--where you're trying to build the best possible app and find the right audience for it. At the next stage, it's about trying to scale the business, and the challenges that came with that. We took these two phases, and tried to structure the whole project around that."

Accelerators And Boostrappers

The result is two separate "strands" of FbStart, called Bootstrap and Accelerate. Bootstrap (which offers $5,000 worth of services) is a track for companies just getting started, while the Accelerate track ($30,000 worth of services) is for apps that have demonstrated initial traction and are trying to grow.

"For Bootstrap the bar is really just for you to have a working iOS or Android app," says Shankar. "You don't need to fulfill any criteria beyond that to be eligible. For Accelerate, that bar is much higher, and there are far fewer spots available. We're looking for a combination of growth and quality to admit someone into the Accelerate track. With both Bootstrap and Accelerate, we're trying to walk a line between both getting as many people as possible onto the program, and also keeping the quality high."

This desire to keep the quality high was evident from the very beginning. As a company with its fingers in many digital pies--from facial recognition to augmented reality--as an accelerator FbStart shows surprising focus: mobile apps.

"I believe that this is the first program of its kind to focus exclusively on mobile apps, and what it takes for them to grow and be successful," Shankar continues. "Other accelerators and programs focus on helping entrepreneurs generally, but I think that our focus on mobile helps set us apart. It's what the mobile startup ecosystem has been waiting for. If you're a startup and you have a mobile app, it doesn't get easier than this."

Pluses Versus Minuses

So far the feedback from other accelerators has been positive.

"I definitely view it something which can run in conjunction with, rather than counter to, what we're doing here at Techstars," says David Brown, cofounder of the startup accelerator, which offers seed funding and mentorship.

"A hypothetical team could start a company, based on an idea for a product that would be run on Facebook's platform," says Brown. "They could then take advantage of some of the services that are offered as part of FbStart, and then join the Techstars accelerator to help refine the idea and help bring a product to market."

"It's never been more straightforward to create a startup, and a big reason for that are tools like the ones Facebook is offering with FbStart," says Sidharth Kakkar, CEO of Frontrow education, and a graduate of Imagine K-12, a startup incubator focused on ed-tech. "It basically offers you a lot of the backend components and core components, which startups therefore don't have to make themselves. That's a major upside for developers."

Kakkar describes the tools offered as part of FbStart as "nice to haves"--tools which are useful to a would-be startup, but not necessarily essential. Some, like Facebook's offer of $500 of ad credit to developers on the Accelerate track (Bootstrap trackers get $50) is significantly more than is offered in many other places. The user-testing tools and one-year access to Adobe Creative Cloud are also excellent, since these can be expensive services for a new developer. Other tools are perhaps less valuable, since other versions are available for free, or because they appear at times in the startup life cycle when they can't yet be taken advantage of to the maximum.

"The downside of this is that, if you experience major growth--where you're picking up tons of users--then a lot of your free credit runs out for services such as Parse, and you can now be charged the regular prices for these services, which in many cases can be quite high," Kakkar says. "At that point as a developer, you're kind of stuck."

Ultimately, it's not the "added extras" which make FbStart valuable, since this pales in comparison to the physical cash offered by some incubators. In fact, the real advantage of FbStart might simply be that you get the chance to learn from the best--in this case from the people working at Facebook. Although apps don't need to be integrated with Facebook to be supported by FbStart (just as developers can develop for the Facebook platform without joining FbStart) this seems to be the best way to take advantage of all that is offered.

"We're continuing to run global events which come under the FbStart banner," says Shankar. "Companies which are part of the program have priority when it comes to attending these events. These are useful because it means that developers can work with us to learn what it is that makes a successful app. We also spend one-on-one time with developers, answering questions about what we've learned building apps for Facebook."

Not The First, But Maybe The Best?

Facebook isn't the first tech giant to offer support to startups, of course. Both Microsoft and Amazon offer or have offered similar support in the past. What makes Facebook particularly valuable in this role however is that--despite its tech giant status--it too is undergoing many of the same shifts as the much smaller apps that use its platform.

"Over the past two or three years we've become a mobile first company," says Shankar. "We learned a lot of great lessons in the shift. If you look at some of the problems and challenges we've faced, we feel like we're well placed to help developers working in the mobile space."

Certainly Facebook has had both successes and failures along the way, while positioning mobile front and center. Some apps, such as Paper, have been widely acclaimed. Others, like the now defunct Poke and Camera apps, have proven to be flops and have now been thrown to one side. Where Facebook has been a pioneer, though, is as a driving force in the quest for could be termed "single purpose" mobile apps.

Unlike the the early days of mobile, when too many apps tried to be all things to all people, Facebook has led by example when it comes to splitting its core services into different apps according to function. As a company still going through many of the teething problems thrown up by the switch to mobile first, Facebook is therefore able to draw on this well of knowledge for the benefit of FbStart startups.

Not A Venture Business

And what does Facebook get out of this?

For one thing, Shankar is keen to point out that there's no equity stake involved for the company. "This is not about Facebook trying to get into the venture business," he says, while Facebook later confirmed by email that the company has no financial stake in the companies involved with FbStart.

Instead, Facebook is playing a longer game. "I think Facebook is viewing this as a way to build integration with its services," says Sidharth Kakkar. "The way I view FbStart is as another step in Facebook's goal of becoming a core utility of the Internet. It's a long-term, high-level play, that in some ways is not all that dissimilar from how Google operates. If more and more apps use Facebook as their login mechanism, then Facebook becomes entrenched in the way that people operate online. And as people share information from those apps on their Facebook walls, those apps become more reliant on Facebook, and Facebook becomes harder to replace."

This summary seems to mesh with Shankar's vision for the program. "The more successful mobile apps are out there, the better it is for the entire ecosystem," he says. "Our goal is to partner with some great companies, who are also interested in engaging with startups, and then making as many tools available as we can. Because at the end of the day, if these apps are successful all of us stand to benefit."

It might be too early to call FbStart an undisputed winner, but as a concept which clear benefits to both Facebook and startups, it's definitely a giant step in the right direction.

When you're in a big, Fortune 500 company, collaborating with different departments--especially with IT--can be hard if not impossible.

But as corporations start to embrace the idea of software-first future, they're taking a page out of the tech book by adopting hackathons for everything from R&D to talent retention.

"Industries that you would never think are trying see how they can harvest the benefits of hackathons," says Angelhack founder Sabeen Ali. "It's decentralizing their IT in favor of a greater collaboration between developers, marketers, and CEOs to create products or simply get ideas flowing outside the typically constrained box."

Long-Term Change

Unlike typical weekend hackathons whose programs span 24 hours, Fortune 500 companies are using hackathons to reap meatier ROI that includes talent retention, product roadmap, and prototyping. "For Fortune 500s, it's more than just a sleepover, it's a change initiative," Ali says.

Ali, who has worked with Verizon, Qualcomm, and Ford, says hackathons needs to be managed like an internal workflow shift--not an event. "We put a change strategy toward it, meet with stakeholders, and we help them sustain the result of the hackathon."

To sustain results, Ali says an ecosystem is put in place where all participants and developers are stakeholders and regular incentives are rewarded to bring hacks to the finish line.

One of America's oldest toy companies, Hasbro, recently held a hackathon where 150 developers came and developed 45 products--equivalent to billions of dollars in traditional R&D, Ali says.

"They were dissecting Elmo and incorporating it with the Operation game which was really neat," she says. "It's much more of change management and breaking that gap between some of these older industries hoarding their IT," she says. "Ultimately, that's really what's going to be the game changer."

No More Hoarding Data

When Hasbro held its hackathon at their headquarters in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, it symbolized it was opening its doors and data to a more public audience.

That break away from tradition is what Mashery's head of developer platform, Delyn Simmons, says is needed to accommodate the changing talent currency.

"Its a cultural challenge to put their trust in developers and open-source with their data, IP, or assets," she says. "More and more companies are realizing that software is the future in almost every industry," she says. "And developers want data."

Simmons says corporations have the dollars to incubate such ideas but constantly struggle to meet developers' needs. "A lot of enterprises could be a lot more successful if they pay attention to the developer rather than what the enterprise themselves," she says.

"In this day and age, you can't retain enough technical talent. Likely the companies not headquartered in Silicon Valley and they don't live near that talent pool so companies will have hackathons and say, 'we might hire you or purchase the IP from you or even incubation.' It can also be used as a focus group," Simmons says.

Sabeen Ali says, for Angelhack organizers, there's a fine line they must walk when it comes to working with Fortune 500s to open their data.

"We try to create some constraint and some control that still lets the enterprise and corporate client keep their IT and make sure not too much of the data is getting out into other hands, but at the same time, there's an exchange where the attendees get enough information that they can create relevant solution for these corporate client," Ali says.

Simmons and Ali say more car and telecom companies are embracing the open-data model to attract developers where they wouldn't traditionally excite.

"Companies like Chevy and Sears wouldn't necessarily come out on top of a marketing or brand focus group--they've had their challenges," Simmons says. "But the brand matters very little to the developers if you give them access to hands-on data to build something really cool."

Traditional automobile industries are using hackathons as a means of creating in-car apps and safety features, according to the hackathon organizers. Last year, Chevrolet offered eyes-free 4G LTE integration data with AT&T to allow hackers to create apps for the vehicle's safety while Ford has experimented with hackathons for social driving apps.

Edmunds.com has been teaming with Fortune 500 companies for invite-only hackathons called Hackamotive, where a variety of people get to hack the car-shopping experience using its vast auto data, Mashery's Delyn Simmons says.

"You didn't have to be able to code, you could be a marketer or someone else in a different industry," she says. "Prototypes were embedded with product marketing so they [all participants] had a say in the hacks. And that was a big success because it was an inclusive event with a lot of collaboration and a really interesting turn on the traditional hackathons."

Internal Collaboration

More and more Fortune 500 companies are steering toward a trend of in-house hackathons to keep a closer eye on their data, according to Simmons.

Unlike typical hackathons, enterprises that hold private hackathons require participants to sign an NDA contract, which can sometimes create more friction than just showing up to a weekend hackathon, Simmons says. But, it could also pay off more.

"If you're inside a company and convinced you have the best thing and if only you could get visibility in front of your CTO--then an internal hackathon is a great way of enticing the internal developers to skip to the top of the list, get an exclusive peak of data or even incubation."

In the last two years, financial service corporation Capital One has run internal hackathons for a variety of internal innovation according to VP of innovation at Capital One Labs Skip Potter.

"This includes developing proposals, forming teams, building prototypes, and pitching ideas to senior business and technology leaders to secure funding," Potter says. "We've organized several internal hackathons focused on creating new products, introducing new capabilities, and adopting solutions like APIs."

"Internal hackathons are also a great way to help enable a 'maker' culture that is required in a modern technology company," says senior director of innovation at Capital One Labs Joshua Greenough. "These can be a place for a developer to scratch an itch or experiment with new tools or platforms in a low-risk way."

Angelhack's Sabeen Ali says internal hackathons are opportunities for corporate employees to step outside of their regular role in an otherwise constrained work environment.

"They get to lower their typical boundaries, typical restriction, and build something that they think isn't part of their immediate role or immediate responsibility," she says. "There's a freedom to it."

Prepping Corporate Hackers

But she says getting employees to think outside of those parameters is easier said than done.

"Organizations like Hasbro say, 'We tried internal hacking, nothing really too groundbreaking came out of it,' but we found that you have to also prime these people-- these typical R&D workers to get ready for thinking outside of the box,'" Ali says. "This is a big initiative that reinforces it's okay, we are putting a ton of resources behind drawing this event that ultimately breaks every rule and restriction that we've put on you Monday through Friday," Ali says.

Ali says for companies like Accenture, hackathon team-building exercises need to be more literal.

"We start off our event and then by bringing in people to teach our coders how to do things like break dance, juggle, or make sushi, " she says. "We bring in acupuncturists, go-karts, archery lessons, and laser tag. We literally get their blood pumping because ultimately, that's going to help them be much more energized, think clearly, and have more productive thoughts."

By giving employees a chance at thinking outside of the box and outside traditional corporate structure, Ali and Simmons say companies are creating some friendly competition among themselves.

"It's not always just about technology. It's about how you can implement it, how you can work as a team, how you can solve problems, how you can work with shifting environments," Ali says. "If anything, I think they're using it to give their internal team that burning platform and that inspiration that they need to be a little bit more innovative."

With shifting environments comes risk, whether or not Fortune 500 companies see it as a viable one is a different question.

"Every single time, our organizers are amazed at what the internal teams come up with," Ali says. "At the end of the day, it comes down to how big of a risk do they want to take. Ultimately, the bigger risk you take most and likely will be the bigger reward."

Have you attended or thrown a corporate hackathon? Tell us about your experience in the comments below.

The founders of Frontback originally made a much bigger, more complicated photo-sharing app. When it wasn't getting off the ground, they were faced with the big problems of high investor expectations and low valuation of a seriously complicated product. The app was called CheckThis.

"We got stuck. We had raised a lot of money, but we had to change the valuation of the company by proving to investors that they should invest more," says Frédéric della Faille, the CEO and designer of Frontback.

Eight weeks from running out of money, they did a quick pivot, validating on Facebook. "The way CheckThis was designed, it let you combine a bunch of different pictures. I had this idea of using the both cameras of the iPhone and only doing two pictures," della Faille explains. "I put one photo front and one photo back. I shared it on Facebook; I got a lot of comments from friends. I looked really really tired. They loved it."

Experiment Quickly And Quietly--Until Something Works

"My cofounder came from Brooklyn for a month. I said I think we should build this. We took four weeks. We built it. And we didn't tell our investors," says della Faille. "Then we released the app. We had 100,000 downloads that first month. That completely changed my relationship with my investors," he says.

"We really did that as a hackathon fighting against time, removing features, shipping the fastest as we could."

"We realized that only one thing mattered: the content. We wanted only one action: the act of photo creation and only one action for consumption--liking the content. At first we had no profile. We had no notifications. We had no list of likers. You had no idea who liked your content, or when. You had to go through the feed and see the post from two hours ago. But basically people don't really care as long as the main action is there," says della Faille.

"Then week after week when we saw the number of users growing, we thought 'Okay let's continue to work on these things.'"

But first: They had to tell their VC, Steve Schlafman, what they built.

"One Friday night I went out to dinner with Fred and Melvyn at Siggy's Good Food in SoHo. I'll never forget it," says Schlafman. "I can even remember where we were sitting. It was at that dinner where they told me about it."

"They were doing it on the downlow, but at some point they had to spill the beans," says Schlafman, "It was certainly a surprise to me. But they really had no other options. At the time they only had eight or 10 weeks of cash left. I had two choices: to lambast them or say 'I'm going to support you.' Taking the latter approach was more pragmatic."

"They showed me the alpha on my phone. I instantly got it," says Schalfman.

It certainly didn't hurt that the demo was well built, or a product with a uniquely viral appeal. But Schalfman said his reaction as an investor was based more on his belief in entrepreneurs--and his expectations around seed stage pivots.

"I think some investors would view being in the dark as being duped. I sort of come at it, particularly at the seed stage, that you get one or two pivots. I generally believe, and maybe I'm naive when I say this, that if an entrepreneur can clearly articulate why they were pivoting, it can work."

"I also think every time an entrepreneur has their back against the wall they need key allies," he says. "It was one of those moments where they had to go all in. I like to think that my pep talk helped them get their heads around burning the boat."

Don't Code Without Thinking

"From CheckThis, we had experience on building feeds and could code without thinking. We'd already learned about mobile," says della Faille. "But when you build an app like ours, you don't really realize that every feed is different because of the people. You have to build the feed so that when the user opens the app, the feed is there."

"This is a JPG of our first prototype (above)," says della Faille. "I basically first did some drawing--took me two days. Then we built this interactive prototype using POP for iPhone--took me another three days. And Melvyn coded this into a beta we could touch--took us three weeks.

Cofounder and lead developer Melvyn Hills adds, "We learned a lot while working on CheckThis, we made many mistakes, also on a technical point of view. With this knowledge we were able to build something much simpler as an MVP and still very solid with the right technology choices that could evolve until now to handle more and more traffic without a hitch. We used the Heroku and Amazon platforms to be able to deploy and maintain the whole API very easily with only one backend developer."

It also comes with surprises. For instance, how to build a custom feed. "When you build an app like ours, you don't really realize that every feed is different," says della Faille. "Building a feed can be complicated for multiple reasons: They contain lots of information from very different sources, must be infinitely scrollable, pageable, sortable, and last but not least, they must be really quick to load, as users expect them to be available instantly."

"We had a bad prior experience on CheckThis with complex MongoDB normalization techniques, which was overkill for the size of the app and resulted in unexpected behaviors, slowness, and was hard to maintain. We went the simplest way using some basic caching mechanism added to PostgreSQL's basic but powerful relational database features."

"More advanced techniques will probably become a necessity at some point for Frontback," he says. but so far the K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) approach has proven to be the best for us."

Go With Microinteractions

"Because we started from scratch, we didn't have any constraints," says della Faille. "I could see the trend of cards. Now in mobile, everything is about cards. Think about Tinder, Snapchat, every piece of content is one screen. With Frontback we didn't have any constraint of a product we had to switch to mobile. So every piece of content was one swipe, created for one screen. That's the problem we had with CheckThis. It didn't really fit for mobile because the content was too long or too short."

Smart Design creative director Dan Saffer literally wrote the book on microinteractions. He agrees that cards are the way to go for people building new apps. Here's what he has to say about why they work psychologically and which apps are doing them especially well:

"Cards provide an immersive alternative to lists or grid views or even menus. The reason we like cards so much is that they dissolve the Paradox of Choice, turning what could be an overwhelming list into a simple 'Do I like this one? Yes or No?' or 'Which one of these two?'"

He adds: "The physics of designing cards is very important. The gesture itself can be very satisfying, to dismiss a card by flicking it away. It's like crossing off an item from a to-do list. It can feel like progress. The active daters in our office swear by Tinder, because flicking through the cards feels like speed dating, but also like progress. There's a dopamine rush in that you don't exactly know who you'll see next, what's behind the next card. Traditionally, uncertainty is a bad thing in interaction design, but with a card-like structure, it can be used effectively, just as long as you don't need to remember where a card is in a stack."

"Focusing on microinteractions can be a very valid strategy, particularly in a crowded market where your features (like Frontback's) are basically commodities," he says. "Take the Mailbox app, for example. They focused on the microinteractions--even for signing up for the beta--and were acquired by Dropbox before they even officially launched."

Long gone are the days when mainly fresh-faced college graduates populated Facebook's desks, considering that even Mark Zuckerberg turned 30 this week. Ten years since the site's launch, Facebook has a sprawling Menlo Park campus with several employees that have been at Facebook for around a decade. For this more seasoned crew, office culture staples--like impulsive, all-night hacking sessions--have started to become onerous, especially since they now have their own families to get back to in the evenings.

"Some feedback we started getting about a year to a year and a half ago was that it wasn't really inclusive of all types of employees, specifically people with families, who have other nighttime obligations," Facebook software engineer Bob Baldwin told me. It used to be that Facebook's all-night hackathons would start at around 8:00 p.m. on a workday and go until 6:00 a.m. the next morning.

So for the last year or so, hackathons at Facebook have been starting at 11:00 a.m. (although they still go late into the night, Baldwin says). But that's not the only change. Here's how else Facebook has adjusted its sprints to accomodate everyone.

An Aging Giant

"We are the oldest people in the company!" jokes Pedram Keyani, engineering overhead at Facebook. Keyani is 36 years old, and Baldwin is 28. Pedram has been at Facebook for seven years and Baldwin, five.

Baldwin and Kewani are Facebook's hackathon organizers, but they don't officially bear claim to those titles. Keyani has been organizing them for years, and Baldwin has been involved in the last year and a half. They both have full-time roles as engineers at Facebook.

From his experience, Keyani has generally seen the youngest Facebook employees jumping to do all-night hackathons. After one of the first all-night sessions a group of interns attended, "The interns got so excited that they were doing a hackathon a week. Which to me seems insane because it takes me a day or two to recover every single time I go to a hackathon. So the fact they were able to just do that and do their regular projects, was really impressive," says Keyani.

Given the smaller emphasis on sacrificing sleep, attendance at the current day-to-night format has become popular among more age groups at Facebook. "We still have a pretty good mix of older and younger developers. More recent grads will be into participating all night," says Baldwin. But that does not completely rule out the older crowd staying to the end. "People with families still participate in the longer format. They go all night."

Here is how the new Facebook hackathons typically pan out.

One Month Out

"Initially, when we would set up a hackathon, it would be within 24 hours of the hackathon starting. So someone would send out an email to the company saying, 'Does anyone want to hack?' And if enough people responded, the next night, we would have a hackathon. And they would get in a circle and say what they wanted to work on. There would be 40, 50, 100 of us," says Keyani.

"Now, with hackathons, because we work with more complex projects and want more innovative things to happen, we give people several weeks of notice," says Keyani.

About a month ahead of time, Keyani and Baldwin will typically set up a wiki page devoted to the upcoming hackathon. The site acts as a forum for interested people to post ideas for prototype projects and tends to create more pre-fabricated groups and creative ideas than if there were no forum. The momentum builds up over the month, and the participants are better prepared than they were for the old ad hoc hacking nights.

"So, hackathons have evolved not only to support families and people with nighttime obligations but actually because we have bigger, more complex operations for building cool, mobile apps. We're trying to give more space for more ambitious projects," says Keyani.

11:00 A.M.

A typical day-to-night hackathon will ceremoniously commence at Hacker Square, the Facebook campus's central converging point. There, the hacking group gathers around a crane that has morphed into a large platform over time, a relic from Facebook's past at Palo Alto's Hewlett Packard building. It has symbolically served for years as a totem for the ensuing coding session. "We've kicked off hackathons there every year," says Baldwin.

Keyani could not imagine Facebook without the crane once they moved to the Menlo Park campus a couple years ago. "When we decided to move over here, I asked someone in Facilities if we could borrow the crane and put it in our new facilities. And it magically appeared one day," says Keyani.

While not everyone at Facebook will participate in the hackathon, day-to-day activities keep going for the non-hackers. But Keyani and Baldwin do their best to drum up support from each department's managers. They generally request that recurring meetings be cancelled for the hackathon participants, both on the day of the hackathon and the day after, for those needing recovery time. What sets the hackathoners apart is they follow one simple rule: Do not work on your regular daytime projects.

5:00 P.M.

Once the hackathon is well underway, all of the separate teams work in parallel in one, dedicated space. Keyani and Baldwin pay special attention to the space, making sure there are couches for people to lounge and brainstorm while creating a feeling of togetherness for the event. The hackathon feels like a party, even if some of the coders don't stay for the late-night festivities.

Besides building prototypes, a hackathon participant might give a talk on a specific topic. "One of the things that we like to do is give people the space to give tech talks or tutorials for different technologies or areas that we want, as a company, to get good at. So, for example, when we bought this company Parse, we would give tech talks on how to use our APIs," says Keyani.

Baldwin says that people with families will normally code through the day and stay for a couple hours after the regular day ends, within reason. As normal employees' working days wind down, the hackathoners receive reinforcements in the form of beer. In the late afternoon, a few beer kegs appear in the hacking area.

And there is no shortage of food since all Facebook employees eat gratis at any of the number of restaurants on campus. "During the day, we typically just use the Facebook facilities because we have world-class chefs here," Keyani says.

Post-Hackathon

The all-nighters sleep in the next day and work a little from home. "This is not a company where you're expected to work 9 to5. No one clocks in or clocks out. It's all about impact. If you do 80 hours of work in 20 hours, that's even better than doing it in 80 hours. No one is watching you, as long as you cancel the meetings you're supposed to go to," says Keyani.

After everyone has sufficiently recuperated, the participants attend a prototype forum, where everyone talks about what they created. Not long after, about 10 of the best projects get presented to Mark Zuckerberg. "Those teams get special time with him just to get some feedback on how to build out these things to the next level," says Keyani.

Visible projects that have come out of past hackathons are the Facebook timeline, calendar-view events, weather integration with events, and letting users know what photos they have in common with one another. "The more interesting thing is that a lot of these hackathon things influence things years later--months or years later--and actually influence the product," says Keyani. "It's an experimentation framework."

"We have this saying internally that code wins arguments. Meaning that you can debate a feature for a long time and never really come to a conclusion; whereas instead, you could just build a prototype of it and hand somebody your phone that has the prototype built on it," says Baldwin.

On Declining

Taking part in a hackathon might mean the difference between simply working on a team and propelling your career by spearheading a whole new project. So, declining to take part in a hackathon might close up some potential opportunities. But Keyani says that there are no real consequences to forgoing a hackathon.

"We are a company that really believes that you hire really smart people, and you give them the freedom to do what they think is best. So, there's no forcing of people to go to hackathons or giving them a hard time. It's really about, 'What are you most excited working on?' There's really no stigma on whether you decide to attend or not," says Keyani.

That hackathons are well organized today does not mean that Facebook rigidly expects its employees to take part. Before Baldwin and Keyani built up the planning structure they have now, engineers would always wonder when the next hackathon would take place. Actively putting them together just seemed like the logical next step.

The change Facebook made to its hackathons focuses on accommodating the working styles of all of its employees. A more mature culture merits changes like this. And the fact that the hackathon organizers are listening to the rest of the company is paying off. "I see every year that more people come, and more people get excited about it," says Keyani.

All last year, problematic weather conditions in Latin America put coffee crops in jeopardy. Mounting temperatures there are thought to have brought on one of the worst recent outbreaks of a disease called coffee rust, which kills the leaves of coffee plants. Guatemala has declared a state of emergency in light of the outbreak, and in Brazil, drought has severely reduced output, increasing coffee prices so much that Starbucks has talked about stopping buying Arabica beans for a foreseen period.

Most of these coffee producers reside in rural areas, with little access to information that could help them manage their businesses better. What if there was a way for small coffee producers to have up-to-the-minute information on climate trends, advice on sustainable farming practices, or coffee market conditions?

Three organizations, the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Columbia, SAP, and a U.K. startup called WeatherSafe, are now getting data into the hands of small coffee producers through separate mobile technology projects.

Leveraging Mobile Data For Small Farmers

Knowing coffee prices ahead of time might save a grower and his family from paying for a lengthy trip to the nearest trading post. Seeing rain in the forecast could translate into gallons of water reserves for when drought season arrives. And understanding techniques to manage coffee rust could salvage a producer's income from year to year.

In 2012, SAP started collaborating with the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia, or the FNC, to help coffee growers in that country gain access to agricultural training and business data. The FNC and SAP already had an established relationship before the project started since the FNC uses SAP technology to run its enterprise resource planning software.

The FNC decided to make its "coffee portal" application, which uses a SAP database backend, available on mobile. The federation bought tablets for growers to use, where the growers can check coffee prices and product sales in real time and use email. SAP helps support the app. "We work together and decide what is the best information that will be useful for them. For example, the price of coffee, every day, is so important for them," says Kira Angulo, National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia account lead at SAP.

Growers can also see whether their product has been sold at the regional cooperative, rather than waiting for their next trip to find out. "If they sell some coffee that they left at the cooperative, they want to know this information. Through the portal, they can see that," Angulo says. "Or they can see if the coffee is in the cooperative, and nobody buys this coffee."

Under its corporate social responsibility scheme, SAP has been providing the funds to support the FNC's technical training for Colombia's coffee growers. The FNC training not only covers how to use the tablets and the app but also better farming management and coffee cultivation methods. So far, 500 growers and their families have been trained, but the FNC hopes to eventually reach the 560,000 families that it represents.

The SAP-FNC project is essential to bringing mobile technology to Colombian coffee growers. The hope is that through better education and technology access, these coffee growers can improve their situation.

Battling Climate Challenges With Precision Agriculture

It turns out that Colombia has been better prepared to combat coffee rust than its neighbors. Due in large part to the FNC, the country's growers are so organized that they benefit from new ways to share best practices for ensuring robust coffee plants. But other countries could benefit from the same type of access to resources.

A small U.K. startup called WeatherSafe is currently rolling out its mobile apps to Rwandan coffee growers. The apps, which come in grower, co-op, and government versions, run on high-resolution satellite data and agronomic data models. Their database technology is based on European Space Agency tools.

WeatherSafe cofounders David Mills and Francesco Liucci had been conscientious of the growing issues in the coffee industry. During a hackathon last year, Mills and Liucci decided to tackle weather-related farming challenges head-on and teamed up with the Rwandan government's meteorological agency. WeatherSafe claims the apps can help farmers revive their crop in two to three years from coffee rust, while the disease typically runs its course on the vegetation over 10 years.

That is where precision agriculture comes into the picture. Through satellite imagery, hyper-local weather data can signal forthcoming conditions and give targeted warnings to farmers. Coffee farmers can even upload images of trouble spots in their fields to get advice from researchers on how to manage the situation. Data models for the farming areas can also help the growers decide how to handle their fields.

Mobile technology use is growing in the developing world, notably in the agriculture industry. SAP's and WeatherSafe's apps capitalize on this trend. But even more transforming is how this technology shapes everyone involved. "Many growers have never used a computer. But they have children in the family who want to see the technology work," says Diana Osorio, lead for Latin America CSR at SAP.

The big data frenzy continues. It's permeating nearly every industry, flooding companies with more and more information, and making software dinosaurs such as Excel look more and more inept. Data crunching is no longer just for nerds, and the need for sophisticated analysis and powerful, real-time processing is greater than ever.

So what are the best tools to sift through gigantic data sets? We talked to data hackers about their favorite languages and tool kits for hardcore data analysis.

R

It would be downright negligent to start this list with any language other than R. It has been kicking around since 1997 as a free alternative to pricey statistical software, such as Matlab or SAS.

But over the past few years, it's become the golden child of data science--now a household name not only among nerdy statisticians, but also Wall Street traders, biologists, and Silicon Valley developers. Companies as diverse as Google, Facebook, Bank of America, and the New York Times all use R, as its commercial utility continues to spread.

R has simple and obvious appeal. Through R, you can sift through complex data sets, manipulate data through sophisticated modeling functions, and create sleek graphics to represent the numbers, in just a few lines of code. It's likened to a hyperactive version of Excel.

R's greatest asset is the vibrant ecosystem has developed around it: The R community is constantly adding new packages and features to its already rich function sets. It's estimated that more than 2 million people use R, and a recent poll showed that R is by far the most popular language in data science, used by 61% of respondents (followed by Python, with 39%).

It's also catching on on Wall Street. Traditionally, banking analysts would pore over Excel files late into the night, but now R is increasingly being used for financial modeling, particularly as a visualization tool, says Niall O'Connor, vice president at Bank of America. "R makes our mundane tables stand out," he says.

R is maturing into its role as a go-to language for data modeling, although it's power becomes limited when a company needs to produce large-scale products, and some say it's already being usurped by other languages.

"R is more about sketching, and not building," says Michael Driscoll, CEO of Metamarkets. "You won't find R at the core of Google's page rank or Facebook's friend suggestion algorithms. Engineers will prototype in R, then hand off the model to be written in Java or Python."

Paul Butler famously used R to build a Facebook map of the world back in 2010, proving the rich visualization capabilities of the language. He doesn't use R as often as he used to, though.

"R is becoming a bit passé in industry, because it's slow and clunky with large data sets," said Butler.

So what is he using instead? Read on.

Python

If R is a neurotic, loveable geek, Python is its easygoing, flexible cousin. Python is rapidly gaining mainstream appeal as a hybrid of R's fast, sophisticated data mining capability, and a more practical language to build products. Python is intuitive and easier to learn than R, and it's ecosystem has grown dramatically in recent years, making it more capable of the statistical analysis previously reserved for R.

"It's the big one people in the industry are moving toward. Over the past two years, there's been a noticeable shift away from R and towards Python," says Butler.

In data processing, there's often a trade-off between scale and sophistication, and Python has emerged as a compromise. IPython notebook and NumPy can be used as a scratchpad for lighter work, while Python is a powerful tool for medium-scale data processing. Python also has the advantage of a rich data community, offering vast amounts of toolkits and features.

Bank of America uses Python to build new products and interfaces within the bank's infrastructure, but also to crunch financial data."Python is broad and flexible, so people flock to it," says O'Donnell.

Still, it's not the highest-performance language, and only occasionally can it power large-scale, core infrastructures, says Driscoll.

Julia

The vast majority of data science today is conducted through R, Python, Java, MatLab, and SAS. But there's still gaps to be filled, and Julia is one newcomer to watch.

Julia is still too arcane for widespread industry adoption. But data hackers get giddy when talking about its potential to oust R and Python from their thrones. Julia is a high-level, insanely fast and expressive language. It's faster than R, and potentially even more scaleable than Python, and fairly easy to learn.

"It's up and coming. Eventually, you'll be able to do anything you could have done in R and Python, in Julia," says Butler.

Youth is holding Julia back, for now. The Julia data community is in its early stages, and more packages and tools are needed before it can viably compete with R or Python.

"It's young, but it's gaining steam and very promising," says Driscoll.

Java

Java, and Java-based frameworks, are found deep in the skeletons of the biggest Silicon Valley tech companies. "If you look inside Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook, you will find that Java is the foundational language for all of their data engineering infrastructures," says Driscoll.

Java doesn't provide the same quality of visualizations R and Python do, and it isn't the best for statistical modeling. But if you are moving past prototyping and need to build large systems, Java is often your best bet.

Hadoop and Hive

A flock of Java-based tools have popped up to meet the enormous demand for data processing. Hadoop has exploded as the go-to Java-based framework for batch processing. Hadoop is slower than some other processing tools, but it's insanely accurate and widely used for backend analysis. It pairs nicely with Hive, a query-based framework that runs on top.

Scala

Scala is another Java-based language and, similar to Java, it's increasingly becoming the tool for anyone doing machine learning at large scales, or building high-level algorithms. It's expressive, and also capable of building robust systems.

"Java is like building in steel. Scala is like working with clay that you can then put into a kiln and turn into steel," Driscoll says.

Kafka and Storm

What about when you need rapid, real-time analytics? Kafka is your friend. It's been around for five years, but just recently became a popular framework for stream processing.

Kafka, which was born inside of Linkedin, is an ultra-fast query messaging system. The downside to Kafka? It's too fast. Operating in real time lends itself to error, and occasionally Kafka misses things.

"There's a trade-off between precision and speed," says Driscoll. "So all the big tech companies in the Valley use two pipelines: Kafka or Storm for real-time processing, and then Hadoop for batch processing system that will be slow but super-accurate."

Storm is another framework written in Scala, and it's gaining enormous traction for stream processing in Silicon Valley. It was acquired into Twitter which, unsurprisingly, has a huge interest in rapid event processing.

Honorable mentions:

MatLab

MatLab has been around for eternity, and despite its price tag, it's still widely used in very specific niches: research-intensive machine learning, signal processing, and image recognition, to name a few.

Octave

Octave is very similar to MatLab, except it's free. Still, it's rarely seen outside of academic signal processing circles.

GO

GO is another newcomer that's gaining steam. It was developed by Google, loosely derives from C, and is gaining ground against rivals such as Java and Python for building robust infrastructures.

In conflict or disaster areas, violence, injury and disease are major threats. Collecting statistics about these scenarios is extremely difficult in real time, especially when infrastructure like hospitals and law enforcement aren't reliably keeping records. Other times, the data exists, but sharing and analysis are too slow and unwieldy.

The right data can help avoid mass suffering, property loss, and cost--but much of it sits under our noses, uncollected or uncollectable. Now a small group of tech nonprofits are devising their own ways of filling in the data gaps in these troubled regions of the world, so that aid organizations can respond faster and more intelligently.

The challenges are big. In order for the data to have an impact, these nonprofits must rely on cooperation from volunteers that need quick technical training, other data-collecting organizations, and the local authorities, who can nullify even the most bulletproof evidence in the data.

If their efforts succeed, these nonprofits can help quickly evacuate vulnerable groups, secure healthier living conditions for refugees, and even obtain overdue justice.

Build A DIY Data Meter

When measuring a few data points becomes a time-consuming chore, it can be advantageous to build a custom device that automates it all, especially if that means getting people out of a toxic environment faster. Take, for example, the nonprofit Safecast.org, which started in response to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Sean Bonner, now the director of global operations there, was interested in measuring the amount of local radiation after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

In the aftermath of the nuclear spillage, there was very little public data on current radiation levels. "The little data that we had was vague. An analogy I like to use is if you were in San Francisco, and you wanted to find out the weather, then the data you could find was an average of all of California," Bonner says.

So Bonner wanted a higher resolution of readings, but finding the means to independently measure them proved difficult. "In the days following the Fukushima disaster, it was impossible to find mobile Geiger counters," says Bonner. Geiger counter suppliers could not meet the demand, sometimes receiving up to 1,000 requests per day, whereas they were used to selling only five per month, on average.

After calling around, an organization called International Medcom gave Bonner some of its second production handheld Geiger counters. Bonner and his colleagues doctored up the new gear by attaching an Arduino board, a GPS, and a datalogger to the donated devices. They christened the new DIY Geiger counter the "bGeigie nano."

"It looks like a bento box," says Bonner, referring to a traditional Japanese-style lunchbox. All of the components are convenient enough to fit inside a small encasement and are altogether cheaper than an ordinary Geiger counter.

Besides its compactness and value, the device's extra gadgets eliminate any need to manually log readings. "Prior to this, if you had a device, you would have to look at the screen, see what the reading was, write it down on a piece of paper, and go decide if you were going to email that to somebody. You would have to have some other device tell you where you were located," says Bonner. Now, Safecast.org's bGeigie device tags each radiation reading to a GPS point every five seconds.

Take Your Own Data

As of this month, Safecast.org has put together 18 million data points worldwide. With the help of its team in Tokyo and the bGeigie device, the Japanese data has forced local authorities to concede that their designated evacuation areas were incorrect and changed the official boundaries of the affected areas. In addition, numerous studies based on the open data have been published in academic journals.

Anyone can build a bGeigie device. About eight months ago, Safecast.org finished redesigning the original concept into a simple kit. Bonner says, "It's mostly off-the-shelf parts that anybody can just source themselves."

Now, volunteers all over the world are taking data with the bGeigie. Data that has been gathered by or shared with Safecast.org is open for everyone to access on the web, under a Creative Commons license. The Safecast.org site has an available API for interested developers, but it has its own iOS app as well. The iOS app now hosts the most up-to-date dataset of every radiation reading in Safecast.org's scope, a nod to Safecast.org's preference for storing data on the go.

Tracking Radiation Levels in Baghdad

Earlier this year, Bilal Ghalib, who creates hackerspaces in the Middle East through Gemsi.org, set out on a project in Iraq. Before leaving for a PeaceTech camp there, he spoke to Bonner about how he could help an Iraq-based NGO create data visualizations about the levels of depleted uranium in the country. Bonner gave Ghalib a bGeigie device to take with him.

Experts believe the radioactive uranium has given rise to and birth defects since its introduction into Iraq, but the World Health Organization recently put out a contradictory report, discrediting those claims. After learning about the bGeigie device, the NGO looked to Ghalib for guidance on how the technology could clear up these reporting conflicts.

Ghalib eventually linked the Iraqi NGO up with a hackerspace he knew of, also based in Iraq. Within days of the PeaceTech camp, Ghalib and members of the NGO and the hackerspace started taking readings with the bGeigie device to create a radiation map in the areas surrounding Baghdad.

After Ghalib returned to the States, the crew continued taking readings in the southern Iraqi town of Basra. There, they found a heavy prevalence of radiation levels. "In Baghdad, the areas with radiation problems are off limits, i.e., presidential palace, airport ... but in the south, the radiation is pretty severe," Ghalib wrote in an email to us.

Figure Out What You Don't Have

Megan Price is a biostatistician-turned-conflict analyst, now director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). She quantifies violence in conflict zones for organizations as big as the United Nations and the Human Rights Watch and as small as the most local organizations in the battling regions. The data she investigates deals with counting things: victims, injuries, and documents.

Price sees a few problems when gathering intelligence in areas under siege, especially outside of the Western world. First, most data of interest is incomplete. Second, local, national, and international organizations are not necessarily willing to share data. And third, much less information is typically available in non-Western countries. For example, homicide numbers in a Western European country will be more complete than those in Syria, she says.

"Our general rule of thumb is that all data are incomplete. And particularly, we think about data about violence, and inherently, that tends to be the kind of thing that people want to hide," Price says.

Price's main data analysis tool requires fitting a model to the data that ends up in her lap. That way, she can see whether there are gaps in the data and what more needs to be included. The method, called multiple systems estimation analysis, lets Price look at patterns across lists of data, for example, lists of victims. The resulting model reveals how much data is missing, to a degree of uncertainty. Price does not make any assumptions about the data beforehand.

"There is a wide variety of things that could be considered data," Price says. In a project in Kosovo, her colleague obtained and copied border-crossing records of people who fled Kosovo into Albania. In Chad, other colleagues copied bureaucratic data about a prison's management. Often, data collectors will write the info down on pieces of paper or get it through interviews.

Once HRDAG gathers the data it needs, it is hard to say what the outcome for those seeking justice will be. Even the best analyses risk political dismissal. One of Price's most successful data projects compared the risk of death for indigenous versus non-indigenous populations in Guatemala in the 1990s. During a court case, her team proved that indigenous populations had a five-time greater prospect of death than the other group. "The result was consistent to genocide," Price says.

The Guatemala Truth Commission later convicted the responsible general for genocide, based on HRDAG's analysis. But the commission overturned the ruling 10 weeks later. In some cases, hard data will not win over politics.

Lobby For Open Data

Now, Ghalib and the team are lobbying the authors of all the relevant radiation public health studies, including the WHO, to release their data on radiation readings and negative health effects from the respective studies. The goal is to uncover the origin of their mysteriously conflicting conclusions through sharing open data.

Ghalib's ultimate objective, getting all the data out in the open, seems far away at this point. The WHO has disregarded past demands for access to their research data. And obtaining direct access to researchers at such a large organization is not so straightforward. On top of that, not every researcher shares an open data ethos, but Ghalib believes the public deserves open access to all research material. "We paid for all this data, right?" he says.

But some data might never reach the public. "Organizations in conflict regions or in regions recovering from conflict tend to have good reasons to not have a trust in other groups or to need to keep the data that they have access to confidential. We try to respect and understand that," Price says.

Still, there might be hope for Ghalib. Earlier this month, the WHO ended up releasing some data on worldwide pollution levels. But the data did not belong to a previously published report, as it is in the case of the radiation studies that Ghalib is trying to unlock.

Gathering data in areas that need it most requires some sleuthing. Whether that means piecing together your own data meter or relying on pen-and-paper accounts of what happened, taking the initiative might pay off in better public health services or overdue justice to the local communities. And a little technical know-how doesn't hurt, either.

When Facebook announced their $2 billion acquisition of Oculus Rift, Jaunt swears it took them by surprise. The small Silicon Valley company is working on the goal of creating cameras and audio recording equipment that lets anyone create a fully immersive, 360-degree virtual world. Jaunt's particular product goal, which still is in prototype mode, is a modular camera system designed for immersive films.

The prototype, which physically resembles a Lego set, is designed to let camera operators easily shoot in any direction imaginable and then work with a tech backend to stitch together footage from a whole lot of cameras into a seamless experience. Quickly.

After raising nearly $6.8 million in funding in early April, the company added three entertainment industry veterans to their board of directors. Tim Haley, a member of Netflix's board, joined, as did Dolby chairman Peter Gotcher and BskyB entertainment director Stuart Murphy.

CEO Jens Christensen told me that "the portable prototype we are working on shoots onto SD cards, typically with a two-hour limit. We need to build our own hardware, because it needs to be frame-synced--the company is currently in the process of fabricating our own camera modules and sound recorders."

Done right, Jaunt's product can be amazing. I sat down for a demo viewing several weeks ago of some of the company's sample videos in downtown Los Angeles. As I strapped on a prototype Oculus Rift headset (Jaunt's leadership notes that their movies can be viewed on any other VR headset, and indeed on tablets and smartphones as well), I was impressed. Various clips of a day in the park in San Francisco, of martial arts demonstrations, and of other outdoor events came through with full immersive video and all-engulfing audio. Instead of the polygons and almost-real-but-not-quite textures of other Oculus products I had used, this was real video.

But the highlight of the demo viewing was a horror-movie like scene where the viewer is trapped in a small environment with monsters. It worked quite well. "We see it as a new medium, something different that totally transports you compared to televisions and movies," Christensen told me. "It's something creative people will have to put their stamp on. It's a world of firsts for the next few years... we'll see the first truly immersive sci-fi movie and the first truly immersive adventure."

And Jaunt's pioneering work is just one part of a growing ecosystem of tech companies adopting Oculus Rift for all sorts of commercial purposes.

Condition One is a small San Francisco startup devoted to making movies for Oculus Rift. They are working in much the same sphere as Jaunt, and the company plans to release a movie for Oculus called Zero Point later this year. Judging by the trailer, it's an intriguing proof-of-concept for Oculus as a movie-watching platform.

A laboratory at the University of Southern California is exploring ways to turn the Oculus Rift and headsets like them into journalism devices. Late last year, I wrote about how a researcher at USC named Nonny de la Pena is working with Google, the Associated Press, and the Tribeca Film Institute to create 3-D, fully immersive journalism through virtual reality. Two fully-immersive videos her lab has put out so far place users in a food bank line where a bystander is going into diabetic shock, and at the U.S.-Mexico border when a man was beaten to death by Border Patrol officers.

Although both videos use computer-generated images rather than actual footage, they leverage original audio from the scene along with faithful re-creations of existing footage. The total effect puts the viewer there.

In another unique project, students at the Zurich University of the Arts leveraged Oculus to create a bird-flight simulator. Birdly is a self-described "installation which explores the experience of a bird in flight" where participants lay horizontally, put on an Oculus headset, and flap their arms to fly. They see what a bird sees, hear what a bird hears, and experience nick, roll, and heave through lying on a special table. Just to make things even more unique, the Birdly rig also emits realistic smells during flight time.

Ingrid Kopp, the director of digital initiatives for the Tribeca Film Institute (which has worked with makers of virtual reality films in the past), told Co.Labs that "The Oculus Rift presents exciting creative possibilities for filmmakers but it also throws up some really juicy challenges. How does editing change for example when you are now sculpting with both time and space?

This is something that struck me when I watched the excerpt from a film called Rise at the Tribeca Film Festival this year. Freeze frames take on a different quality when you can move through space while time stays still. There is also a very different relationship between the story and the audience. There are clearly technical challenges right now in terms of creating live-action experiences in the Rift but I am really excited and a little bit terrified about how VR will influence filmmaking. I will never, ever watch a horror film on the Rift. Full immersion has its limits for me."

The reason Facebook paid billions for Oculus wasn't just to poke Sony in the eye over Project Morpheus. Menlo Park sees a lot of future commercial potential in Oculus, its developer community, and the potential use cases for the virtual reality headset. Although Oculus Rift has a reputation as a gaming tool first and foremost, that isn't all it will be. Over the next few years, expect a lot more companies and organizations to start participating in Oculus's developer ecosystem.

Our first attempt at mobile was born out of a hackathon. Our team here at TheLadders had built a small app for job recruiters, turning to PhoneGap to craft something truly cross-platform. Not only did it let us utilize our existing expertise in HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, but we were able to turn it around quickly. Best of all, it would be on all the major mobile platforms. Win-win, right?

Wrong.

Once we started building out the public-facing version of the web app, that hopeful rationale soon gave way to the stark reality of mobile app development. One by one, the challenges piled up. Before we knew it, we'd be switching gears and building native apps instead.

Why HTML5 Didn't Cut It For Us

While we initially thought that PhoneGap's smaller learning curve would be an asset for us as non-iOS developers, we quickly discovered that PhoneGap has its own peculiarities and technical challenges. The resulting experience looked and felt substantially less polished than that of a native app. Before long, we'd abandoned it.

As it turns out, the QA process of testing the app on iOS and all the various flavors and screen sizes of Android proved to be quite a chore. We spent countless days and weeks trying to massage the PhoneGap code into something that presented itself adequately on all platforms. We had to make painful trade-offs, which hurt the experience. Ultimately it was only released for iOS and proved to not be a successful product. We pulled it from the App Store.

PhoneGap was not the only reason the app wasn't a hit, but it might have been symptomatic of a misguided approach. The goal of "write once, run everywhere" is a noble one. On the back end, most of the code being written today and deployed in production around the world is running on virtual machines. Java, Python, and Ruby all compile to bytecode and run seamlessly in a virtual machine on a variety of platforms. Native code is getting rarer. No one is writing a website in C. Native languages are increasingly niche platforms for circumstances where raw performance is paramount. You won't see Call of Duty written in Java or Final Cut Pro in Ruby anytime soon, but you can bet a vast majority of the Internet's websites are running on a virtual machine neatly distanced from whatever hardware is underlying.

The success of this virtualized approach on the back end has not materialized on the front end. Early cross-platform GUI toolkits like Java Swing helped change "write once, run everywhere" to "write once, debug everywhere." Aside from the challenge of debugging on all possible platforms, user interface norms and patterns vary wildly from platform to platform. Mac OS X does not look or feel anything like Windows 8. Compounding the problem, cross-platform UI toolkits don't mirror any of them.

Embracing Native App Development

So when the time came to work on our job-seeker app a year later, we bit the bullet and went native. We thought the smoother, more consistent and polished experience we could achieve with a native solution would pay off with our customers. With a strong engineering team, mastering Cocoa on iOS proved to be far easier than we thought. Lots of documentation and a strong developer ecosystem actually resulted in us moving much faster with native code than PhoneGap, and the app looked and felt much more modern.

The major disadvantage to this approach was that Android had to be developed completely separately. However, a lot of the complexity is generally in the service layer and we made sure to have an extremely clean and well documented REST API supporting the app. We chose to figure out the experience on iOS first and then port Android using the same REST service layer.

We began working on Android in September of 2013 and had a final build around Thanksgiving. With an iOS app serving as a prototype in hand and plenty of documentation and examples of the REST API, it was a pretty quick build. We also had the freedom to change parts of the UI to match the accepted Android UI idioms and gestures.

Of course, there are subtle and stark differences between iPhones and Android devices that your app must account for. Android has a very different navigation mechanism than iOS. Android devices also have a physical back button, so there's no need to put one on the screen. The additional buttons on Android phones also make having bottom menu or toolbars cumbersome, and accidental clicks are common.

Going native really allowed us to effectively manage these issues and tailor the look, feel, navigation, and gestures of the app to the specific platform. Aside from solutions like PhoneGap, options like Titanium exist, which compile JavaScript into native code and use native widgets. With these options, even though you have native widgets, you'll still need to somehow resolve the platform differences like back button versus no back button.

It's all been a learning process, but we've moved through the conception to delivery phases relatively quickly and have now released a total of three apps for job seekers and recruiters. For now we are sticking with separate native implementations: We develop on iOS then write a native Android port. So far it's working for us, but we like to reserve the right to change our minds.

For years, specialized tools like R and SPSS have been standard for anyone working in statistics and analytics, whether in private industry or the academic sector.

But for many in the business world, those languages are unfamiliar, which means companies haven't been able to leverage these languages the way that, say, universities have. But that could change thanks to an open-source Python data-analysis library called Pandas, which offers many of the same analytics tools as R in a language developers are already using, but in languages businesses can work in.

"One of the reasons we like to use Pandas is because we like to stay in the Python ecosystem," says Burc Arpat, a quantitative engineering manager at Facebook. "We have a lot of systems inside Facebook, or infrastructure that allows us to either use Python to talk to those systems or integrates with Python very easily or is written in Python."

Many of the engineers working on analytics projects at Facebook are well acquainted with R, which the company also uses for certain tasks, but Facebook's existing Python codebase often makes Pandas easier to work with. That's a common reason for developers to choose Pandas, says the library's creator, Wes McKinney.

"In companies that have an engineering culture, just because of the general growth of Python, it's made Python and Pandas an easy choice," he says.

McKinney began work on the library while working at the financial firm AQR Capital Management, where he was using R for quantitative finance projects and basic "data wrangling," he says.

"I was frustrated on multiple fronts," he says. "I felt that R was not strong enough for software engineering--for building big software, R left a lot to be desired as far as the tooling for debugging and building big systems."

McKinney started building his own toolkit in Python, which he saw as better suited to larger projects, and that evolved into what was open sourced as Pandas.

Like R, Pandas is oriented around manipulating "data frames"--two-dimensional matrices of structured data similar to a well-organized spreadsheet or a SQL-style relational database. Pandas has built-in support for quickly reading in data frames from Excel spreadsheets or comma-separated value files, filtering rows and columns, and generating aggregate statistics like sums and means.

Those data frames can also be passed to other Python number-crunching libraries, like the powerful statsmodels package that handles linear regressions and more esoteric statistical tasks, or the Scikit-Learn machine learning toolkit.

And having stats-intensive coders work in Python means their work can more easily be integrated with production code, says Dave Himrod, the director of ad-quality engineering at the Internet advertising exchange AppNexus.

"In a lot of places, your data scientist or your quants or analysts, whatever you call them, they analyze the data and create this model in R or SPSS, and then an engineer has to take that and translate it into whatever your production system is," he says. With Pandas, that's often not necessary, says Himrod.

"It's nice that you can have your production environment and your researchers all using their same tools," he says. "They just say, 'Here's what's going on in this code,' and everybody just knows the basic operations of Pandas and some of the [Python math] libraries like SciPy or NumPy."

A new version of Pandas due out this month also offers better integration with a variety of SQL databases, says Jeff Reback, one of the lead developers on the project. Reback says Pandas' ability to translate between different structured data layouts, like SQL, Excel, and more obscure formats like HDF5, is a crucial advantage in a world where Python has come to be the intermediate language connecting companies' various computer systems.

"Python is now the new glue language," replacing earlier choices like Perl, says Reback.

Still, Pandas users and developers emphasized, there's still a place in the statistical world for R, which McKinney says has really improved in terms of engineering tools since he began work on Pandas, thanks to the team behind the IDE RStudio and library developers like Hadley Wickham.

"The work that R-Studio has done to build a better development environment for R has really changed the game for R programmers," he says. "R and Python are both rapidly growing--and taking market share away from proprietary tools like SAS, SPSS, and Matlab."

A decade after Google's legendary "20 percent time" first inspired copycats, and a year after the practice was declared "as good as dead," the nature of experimentation inside technology companies is changing, refining--maybe even growing up.

Here's the fundamental tension: Good ideas take time to gestate, but time costs money. With finite hours and energy, the companies we talked to still condone messing around--they just find ways to get people to do it efficiently.

The value of radical experimentation might not always be obvious up front, but tinkering that doesn't immediately move the needle on critical business metrics can still be valuable: from a healthier culture to big, lucrative new businesses.

Here at FastCo.Labs, we're also tinkerers. We're big on toying with our processes, conducting small publishing experiments and coming up with new ways to measure our progress. Lately, we've asked some of our writers to pitch us feature stories based around a single, central theme. This first package of stories has to do with the state of experimentation today in technology companies, and where it's going next.

Why Mega-Publisher Hearst Ditched "R&D Labs" And Opened Up Its Data Instead

Instead of one R&D group, Hearst CTO Philip Wiser decided to decentralize the publishing giant's experiments with new tech. So he opened up Hearst's data to a select pool of developer partners--many of which have already surprised him with new ways of viewing magazine content. Hearst's atypical experiment has helped spawn things like the industry's first magazine formatted for Google Glass. Armed with a massive set of audience data and empowered to tinker away, the company's small army of developers is only getting started. [Read Full Story]

How This Dev Team Made $1 Million In 24 Hours By Forgetting Their Focus

Game studio Double Fine Productions is no stranger to experimentation. Their 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. Just by tinkering around, Double Fine went from a studio on the brink to one that does business in a way that allows indie studios to survive and maintain their independence. [Read Full Story]

Why Do Big Companies Do Hackthons?

Hackathons aren't just for startups anymore. As corporations start to embrace the idea of a software-first future, they're taking a page out of the tech industry's book by adopting hackathons for everything from R&D to talent retention. For Fortune 500 companies, hackathons represent not just a source of new code and fresh ideas but an opportunity to totally shift their internal cultures. [Read Full Story]

How This iPhone Hardware Engineer Stays In His Creative Zone

When Todd Beauchamp was a teenager, he developed a habit of solving hardware problems using random objects around him. It came in handy years later when he was working at Apple and was asked to fix a potentially launch-delaying problem with the audio on the first iPhone. His unconventional approach not only worked, but saved the device and pleased the company's notoriously temperamental CEO. [Read Full Story]

OK Glass, Launch This Rocket

Chaotic Moon will probably never build an Internet-connected rocket for any of its clients. But should the Austin, Texas-based dev shop get such a request, it will have some experience to draw from. Earlier this year, a team of coders and hardware engineers at the company rigged up a small model rocket with a GoPro camera and some sensors. They then wrote an app for Google Glass that let them launch the rocket using a voice command and then view real-time data like altitude, temperature, and speed. [Read Full Story]

How To Virtually Unite Remote Teams With RFID, Arduino, And Beer

Chaotic Moon isn't the only creative shop hacking new technology to show off for its clients. Allen & Gerritsen runs an internal hackerspace called A&G Labs that does it all the time. After the Boston-based ad agency acquired Philadelphia's Neiman Group, it suddenly had two teams separated by 300 miles. To help bridge the divide, A&G's hardware and software gurus cobbled together sensors, hardware, and code to build a giant, interactive game of tic-tac-toe that connects the two offices. [Read Full Story]

How Writing And Art Must Change If The Comic Book Will Survive

The economics of comic books sucks. It's ironic considering how much money superhero movies rake in every year. But alas, publishing in all its forms is undergoing a tricky transition from print to pixels and comics are no exception. Thrillbent is a digital comic book publisher that isn't content to see the medium flounder in the digital age. To these guys, experimentation comes naturally. Everything from the creation to the distribution of comic books is ripe for new approaches. [Read Full Story]

The second time he does the trick, I'm still mesmerized. Osmo cofounder and CEO Pramod Sharma is demoing his company's iPad apps and hardware, which bridge the gap between on-screen gaming and the physical world. If it meets its $50,000 funding goal, Osmo could change the way kids play.

Sharma's iPad is propped upright with a picture of a turtle on screen, along with six placeholders inviting us to spell out the name of the animal. Instead of reaching for an alphabet tile with a "T," he scoops up a random handful of letters. As he dumps them onto the table with the delight of a child knocking down a tower, the game on his iPad instantaneously identifies and sorts each letter, complete with chirps and "wanh wanh" sound effects. We've "guessed" the right answer--"T-U-R-T-L-E" is now complete--but with so many incorrect letters in the mix we lose the round.

This interplay between the physical and digital realms looks and feels like magic. Sharma, a former Google engineer, prefers to call it "reflective AI," or artificial intelligence. But for all the technical wizardry happening in the background, the product is simple: A beautifully designed toy with the potential to transform how students and families play games.

"Osmo can connect anything around you to the virtual world," Sharma says. The three apps that he and his team have built take advantage of advances in computing speed and camera power to redefine the idea of "natural" play with a digital twist, no instructions required. Sharma envisions "a five-year-old playing with a grandma, and both having fun."

While at Google, Sharma developed the infamous technology for rapidly scanning millions of books, in addition to working on other projects. After leaving the search giant, Sharma set out to develop a new form of play rooted in the physical world, but enhanced by technology. He raised a seed round from K9 Ventures, built and patented the reflective software, and then tested over 40 game variations with hundreds of children, including his four-year-old daughter. Along with cofounder Jerome Scholler, a fellow Google engineer with experience in game design, he narrowed the prototypes down to three games, two of which require Osmo-built physical props.

Now the startup is launching with a $50,000 crowdfunding campaign, based on pre-sales, that it hopes will cover its first manufacturing run. A starter set that includes an iPad stand and camera mirror, as well as the props for the games called Words and Tangram, will cost $99. Early backers will pay $49.

In addition to families, Osmo is looking to schools as a potential market. In the Bay Area, near Osmo's Palo Alto headquarters, more than 100 classrooms have signed on to use the games, which are appropriate for children ages 6 to 12.

Schools farther afield have also expressed interest. Vaughn Kauffman, an educator based in Montana, says teachers in her districts plan to use Osmo as a strategy for developing students' problem-solving skills. "The thing that hooked me the most was watching the engagement and how willing kids were to keep working even when they couldn't figure it out," she says. "In traditional schoolwork, if they can't get it the first time, most of them won't try it again." Kauffman is hopeful that learning perseverance will help them "stick with the content" in other subjects.

Of the three games, Newton--the most open-ended, designed for "natural interfaces" like pen and paper--appears to be Sharma's favorite. He recalls his childhood loves of drawing and playing with clay--traditional activities that Newton can reflect back, and make interactive. "There's a sense of freedom that adds to the excitement and fun," he says.

It's hard to imagine that kids won't agree.

If startup Aviso has their way, sprawling corporate enterprises will turn to analytics dashboards and application programming interfaces (APIs) to handle their financial metrics. The company, which just left exited stealth mode last month, is backed by $8 million in Series A funding from Shasta Ventures, Bloomberg BETA, and several other investors. Their goal? Creating a dashboard that lets large companies understand their finances in real time--before quarterly reports are issued.

K.V. Rao, the service's cofounder and CEO, is best known for being the brains behind enterprise automation firm Zuora. During a phone conversation, he told me that Aviso's mission statement is to "democratize quant science for the enterprise" and give corporations the same access to their financials that individuals have through services like Mint.

Once a company installs Aviso's dashboard, they are able to input any real-time data feed for analytics. According to CMO Jeff Yoshimura, this means analytics for customer interactions, enterprise resource planning, revenue assets, custom data feeds, and what the company calls "real-time market signals" that include Bloomberg data. This information is then used to produce predictive analytics for the client's corporate financial team, centered around a risk score that takes both their financials and larger market trends into account.

Rao added that Aviso's customer market is what he calls "mid-size companies" with between $100 million and $1 billion in annual revenues. Over the past two years, Aviso has been in stealth mode and has picked up clients including security giant FireEye, SaaS vendor RingCentral, and enterprise software firm Saba. Although they aren't household names, they're examples of the financially well-situated companies with tech-forward internal infrastructure that Aviso presumably wants to target.

But Aviso isn't alone. As the cost of analytics platforms and clouds for data crunching have drastically declined over the past few years, a variety of other companies have begun offering financial analytics dashboards. One of the best known of these is Addepar. The brainchild of Joe Lonsdale and Jason Mirra, best known for their work with big data platform Palantir, Addepar markets a real-time personal wealth management platform aimed at the super-rich.

Both Aviso and Addepar have staked out niches in the financial analytics ecosystem. While the technology for making decisions via real-time financial analytics dashboards is out there, both companies also face varying resistance to real-time analytics outside of the cloistered worlds of Wall Street quants and hedge funds.

When I asked Rao and Yoshimura about Aviso's advantage versus traditional analytics and dashboard tools for corporate finance, Yoshimura emphasized that it was a single platform that made analysis much easier. "If you ask CFOs, they use legions of spreadsheets and accountants in CRM. Then there are big databases like Oracle. We bring full data from all these sources and append them with real-time market data, so companies are able to measure risk, analyze data, and do very similar things to what a trader chooses to do for a hedge fund."

And with the next wave of quarterly reports coming in July, Aviso will hopefully help some companies avoid unexpected bad news.