To date, Nascar pit crews have relied on videotape and stopwatches to measure pit stops. But no more. Michael Waltrip Racing has announced a partnership with Zebra, makers of MotionWorks, a software package designed to bring RFID tracking technology to nearly every lug-nut on the track. Using technology developed to maximize industrial efficiency, Zebra hopes to lend its experience in manufacturing to the track.
MotionWorks allows the crew to track the pit crew, car, wheel guns, jacks, as well as those things' speed, direction, acceleration, and physical location in real time. And while the technology has yet to be approved for race day, MotionWorks measures pit-stop efficiency in practice runs right now, helping teams measure their performance in ways they couldn't before.
Waltrip Racing car and pit crew
"Every weekend we live and die by pit stops," says Tom German, chief technical officer of Michael Waltrip Racing. "Every step we can take to make those pit stops faster, evaluate the athletes and make sure that we're choosing and using the right athletes, give them the right training tools so that they can identify where they're strong and where they're weak, and continue to improve those areas, is a benefit to us. The intent is for us to have a better pit stop at the end of the day."
Unlike the NBA's SportVU camera-based, or MLB's X-Ray systems, MotionWorks allows race teams the ability to measure every aspect of their crew's performance, from every angle, without the inconvenience of obstruction--of which there can be quite a bit on pit row. The high-frequency location-based system measures proximity within a 3-D space devoid of line-of-sight limitation.
"The problem is that with videotape, if there is anything blocking, you can't really know what's happening," Says Jill Stelfox, general manager of Location Solutions at Zebra. "Every two and a half seconds--lug nut, lug nut, lug nut... Where do they get hung up? Do they have a weak side or a strong side? How do you--really get down to that micro-movement improvement?"
Using an ultrawide band frequency, MotionWorks RFID chips send information--or "blink"--roughly 25 times per second, with a broadcast range of just 1,000 feet. The limited radius allows for even more communication than that, as the chips are capable of blinking 80 times per second.
Waltrip Racing car and pit crew
But these chips aren't just for humans. Waltrip intends to put the chips on just about everything for training purposes in practice. Given the simplicity of the data sent and received, pit crews only need a couple of receivers to capture every bit of information they can think of and process it in roughly 120 milliseconds. When the system is implemented this summer, a 3-D rendering of exactly what's happening during a tire change, for instance, will be available on computer monitors instantly.
Originally, Waltrip wasn't even aware that such technological possibilities existed. The majority of tech developed for pit crews was--and still is--video based. But that all changed when Zebra gave a presentation to the race team and showed off MotionWorks' capabilities.
"We have been using this technology in industrial manufacturing for a dozen years," Stelfox explains, "but it wasn't until we started working with some sports teams that we started saying 'wait a minute, this could really matter.' Part of it was a technology perception that setting up an active RFID system was complicated. I think we all got stuck in the science and, now that everyone is figuring out that there is no mystery or secret behind the implementation, it's really taking off. Physically, we put tags that weigh less than nine grams, so you can hardly feel them and they're about the size of the top of your thumb. They're really tiny."
"It wasn't a technology that was really on our radar," German admits. "It was a technology that was really more advanced than what I had expected, and had some distinct benefits relative to some of the comparable technologies. At Waltrip Racing here we've done a lot of work with our pit crew in the last couple of years, to build that program, make it stronger. This seems like a natural progression to really add a lot of value to that program."
During pit stops, where milliseconds are critical and real estate comes at a premium, MotionWorks seems like a no-brainer, with the most immediate application coming down to nuts and bolts. Race teams are assessed huge penalties for loose or missing lug nuts in a race. Officials pull cars off the track and back to pit row to fix the issue, a costly infraction that can derail even the best car. Nascar, however, has yet to approve MotionWorks for competitive uses.
Waltrip Racing car and pit crew
"But in training," says Stelfox, "where we are trying to refine movement, we intend to have chips on everything, on the wrist, on air guns, on the lug nuts, on the tires so that you can see all the interaction of how that stuff moves together. It's almost like we are creating a ballet around the movement of how that pit stop was really happening and then once you see it on the computer you can improve it. It's so orchestrated when you slow it down. You know it's funny, I'm not sure the pit crew guys want me to call it a ballet. They are very tough guys."
At the outset, the technology will focus on the pit crew specifically, but the applications are endless. Information packets can be carried on the same signal with the proximity measures so, moving forward, even a pit crew member's vitals could be carried across the network in real time and determine a person's biological performance as well.
Building upon the RFID chips' own communication network, Zebra will release new tags in 2015 that have built-in Bluetooth technology that will enable heart monitors and temperature sensors--or any other kind of sensor--capable of the same real-time information transmission. Then, MotionWorks has the potential to alter movement on and off the track. By tracking athletes' vitals, MotionWorks hopes to measure performance in pressure situations versus practice.
"We've done some early testing of this and what we see is that, just like taking a test, some athletes train really well and then, when adrenaline gets going in a live game situation, the performance isn't necessarily the same. The other side of that [some people] don't train great but they perform really well."
But MotionWorks' contributions could have league-wide implications as well. Says German, "I think we both see this as a long-term, industry-wide, sanctioning-body type of tool. We hope to develop it in our practice arena, and then hopefully we'll see the industry catch on to that, move forward as a whole. Our job right now is to prove out the technology and demonstrate that it's capable of doing everything that we believe it is, and then go on from there."
The U.S. Navy loves sensors. The same gyrometers and motion detectors that fuel smartphones and Microsoft's Kinect also keep drones in the skies and aircraft carriers in sharp order. But the Navy--which is the size of a large global megacorporation and also saddled with a huge bureaucracy--also has problems dealing with the flood of data that sensors create. The RAND Corporation is arguing for something unorthodox to deal with that data influx: A cloud for the Navy (PDF).
In a paper called, succinctly, "Data Flood," think tank analyst Isaac R. Porche argues that the United States Navy needs a private cloud service to cope with the influx of data created by sensors on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other smart military devices. Porche and his coauthors argue that there's a precedent for creating a private cloud service for the military--the little-known fact that the NSA, CIA, and other American intelligence agencies are building their own cloud. In late October, Amazon Web Services reportedly sealed a $600 million, 10-year deal with the CIA to develop a custom cloud infrastructure for U.S. intelligence agents.
Porche and his team argue that if the Navy doesn't adopt a cloud infrastructure, there will be a tipping point as early as 2016 where analysts will become less and less effective because bandwidth choke will prevent access to the information they need. "2016 is the year when the number of UAS (drone) systems will be high enough and generating enough sensor data/imagery to overwhelm human analysts," Porche told Co.Labs by email.
According to RAND, as little as 5% of the data collected by Naval intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance tools actually reach the analysts who are using them. Because the Navy has specific challenges like getting fast Internet on board ships at sea, there are some daunting bandwidth issues for any potential Naval cloud to tackle.
And, it needs to be said, the Navy collects a ton of data. To give just one particular example from one particular slice of the Naval world, contractor Raytheon is making $8.5 million to create network-enabled sensors for electronic warfare. Their sensors will be deployed as part of a combined surveillance, communications, and electronic warfare radar system. Multiply that $8.5 million by the many other sensor-enabled projects inside the Navy's sprawling infrastructure, and that's a lot of money.
But there's one big issue for the Navy--the security of cloud computing. Any sort of distributed network means that the Navy has to deal with unprecedented security issues. The Edward Snowden leaks showed that the vast infrastructure of contractors the United States government relies on for IT are an omnipresent security worry; the next Snowden might just sell their findings to a foreign intelligence agency instead of becoming a whistleblower. These are the sorts of issues that keep military IT supervisors awake at night.
There are very specific challenges in creating a cloud for the Navy as well. Porche told me that "The Navy's cloud has to work in bandwidth poor, intermittently connected environments that are somewhat unique to their fleet forces. There would be 'supply chain' issues as well. Not all hardware and software developers can be trusted or used."
However, it looks like the Navy will adopt cloud computing for their drone and sensor infrastructure sooner rather than later. Navy CIO Terry Halvorsen announced in March that the Navy is moving non-classified data to cloud servers, and the Navy also released new cloud computing guidelines last year which appear to pave the way to a cloud for classified military material.
Earlier this month the Senate Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government held a hearing in which they called on Steven VanRoekel, the nation's top chief information officer, to explain why the federal government is so bad at developing and managing IT projects. This wasn't just about the rollout of Healthcare.gov last year, but also the other 200 major government IT programs that are delayed, over budget, or at risk of catastrophic failures.
These 200 programs currently have a whopping $12 billion total budget that most startups--even established companies--would kill for. And that $12 billion is just a fraction of the $82 billion the government will spend on IT projects this year alone. If the government clearly has the financial resources why are citizens more likely to see federal digital services launches go the way of Healthcare.gov instead of blooming like Facebook?
The answer is twofold, according to the people I spoke to. First is the government's inability to think and act in an agile way. Second is failing to make "coding for the Government" sound like a sexy gig for young developers. Here's what Uncle Sam needs to do to turn things around.
Matthew McCall is a health technologist who last November created a popular petition to get the government to open-source Healthcare.gov when it was going through its darkest days. But besides being an open source activist, McCall works for the nonprofit , where he's helping to build and grow a community around VistA, an open-source government-created Electronic Health Record currently run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. This means that McCall is one of the only people among the large group of critics of government IT projects that is actually working from the inside to try to fix them.
"In short? The government doesn't take the same approach to software development that startups do," McCall says when I ask him why the U.S. government is so bad at rolling out big digital services when it has tens of billions of dollars at its disposal while startups with virtually no money and a skeleton crew often achieve wildly successful product launches.
McCall says a startup is focused on building a "Minimally Viable Product" where it brings the solution to market as quickly as possible in a basic form, and then iterates on the product using agile methods. This allows the startup to gather user feedback and rapidly iterate and improve the product and is almost the exact opposite of how the government works, which is more of a waterfall method.
"Government development focuses more on gathering comprehensive requirements up front, issuing a contract for the work, and managing the contractor during the buildout," says McCall. "This 'big bang' approach typically means longer development time with little to no customer validation. If requirements do change over time, it is usually driven by competing organizational interests rather than customer needs, which makes it very easy to get away from understanding if what is being built is actually useful or relevant any more."
McCall says there are unfortunately a number of regulatory policies in place that make it very difficult for the government to function more like a startup. He points to The Paperwork Reduction Act as just one example. "[It] makes it nearly impossible for developers in the government to ask questions of the public in a timely manner, so user-validated development is very challenging. There are also policies that dictate which technologies you are allowed to develop in, and how you implement them. These are generally a good thing, to make sure software is maintainable and secure, but it adds a great deal of overhead in terms of process and time, and makes using emerging technologies which a startup would use a much tougher sell."
But it's not just bureaucratic red tape that stymies billion-dollar IT projects. It is also a cultural difference. McCall says the government is risk-averse by nature--something anathema to the ethos embraced in Silicon Valley. But of course, if a startup gets hacked, it's not nearly as big of a problem if the government does. It's a point McCall concedes, but he notes it can often be used as a red herring to keep the organization from trying new and interesting things.
"While I was in government working on Blue Button, I was yelled at by a developer claiming that I was going to wind up killing patients because I was giving them access to their medical records," he says. "[It was] a completely untrue notion, but it was enough to give me pause, and I'm sure there are similar stories all over government."
At the Senate Subcommittee earlier this month Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-MD., said, "We spend billions... on technology projects that are often ineffective or lacking in utility. And often, we end up doing it again and then again and then again. And I think it's time we get our arms around this."
It is those billions that probably worry most senators more than any other problems with government IT projects. After all, we live in an age of austerity and "government waste" is sure to anger voters going to the polls later this year. But the thing is the government is rife with waste--and not just at the federal level. State and local governments waste billions every year due to inefficiencies with sorting through financial data to see where they are actually spending their money. It's a problem in search of a technical solution that you would think most state governments would be actively working to solve. But in fact virtually every state and local government still relies on the 30-year-old spreadsheet to sort through their big data.
That's where Zac Bookman and Mike Rosengarten come in. Bookman is the CEO and Rosengarten is the CTO of OpenGov, a startup that empowers state and local governments to ditch their spreadsheets and visualize big data all through the humble web browser.
On the outside OpenGov may seem like a relatively "boring" startup compared to Oculus Rift or other hip headline grabbers, but it very well could have a greater impact on your day-to-day life than anything Facebook offers. That's because it solves the problem of the government's big data overload by organizing government's financial data into dead simple visualizations officials--and residents--can act on.
"There is an epidemic in governments of all shapes and sizes across the country in that they use enterprise accounting systems that run on software written 30 years ago," says Bookman. "If you are the mayor of a city and I ask you a basic question about your data like, 'How much have you spent on police hours over the last five years?' you probably don't know of the answer. You often will have to call IT to run a report from the accounting system, or you'd have to call finance to weigh into a 20,000-row Excel spreadsheet to pull out a few disparate lines of data. Some people would laugh at that but we find it to be a really serious issue and so do those who are on the inside who are struggling with the technology because they need that data to make real-world decisions."
Those real-world decisions can sometimes affect lives. For instance, cities using the OpenGov platform can now see in a matter of a few clicks how much they have spent on fire and safety and if they can pull money from any other areas to give more to fire precincts ahead of deadly wildfire seasons.
Because of OpenGov's ability to quickly visualize complex financial, census, and other big data it has often been called the Mint.com of city governments. And it's a service major cities like Los Angeles and Palo Alto are using.
"What's unique about OpenGov is it was developed in a creative partnership with a sophisticated local government--the City of Palo Alto--so it represents the best of both worlds," according to Rick Cole, Deputy Mayor for Budget & Innovation, for Los Angeles. "It originated from the desire of a local government to create a tool that didn't then exist in the marketplace, but it now has the industrial strength of a constantly evolving product with a broad customer base that supports ongoing development."
Cole notes that OpenGov isn't only useful to city officials either, as it has a front-facing portal any resident can view in their browser. "It's to our benefit as public servants to demystify budget data to rebuild trust through transparency and accountability. As a user-friendly and dynamic platform, OpenGov allows us to show residents how we are investing in specific priorities."
But again, if OpenGov is the tool local governments have needed for years to make sense of decades worth of big data, why hasn't the government itself created the solution before now?
The answer to that question, according to OpenGov CTO Mike Rosengarten, is that while many local, state, and even the federal government might have had the drive and even the money to produce such digital tools, they often lacked the talent.
"This particular topic resonates deeply with me because as a software engineer and now an entrepreneurial software engineer, I see it from a few different angles, but one of the most important and prevailing issues for me is that the best engineers don't want to go work for government. They want to go to Google. They want to go to Facebook," Rosengarten says. "So when Healthcare.gov or any of these other local municipalities need internally built tools they build their own solutions and they're just often subpar and really expensive. The best engineers are just not going in to local government saying, 'Where can I get my hands dirty? How can I help? How can I innovate?'
The lack of interest from young developers who want to work for Uncle Sam is primarily down to the poor recruitment tactics from state and local governments compared to the big tech companies.
"I've done a fair amount of recruiting at this point, especially out of colleges, and what I've come to find is that if you're in front of the student's eye, you're going to get their attention," Rosengarten says. "I've yet to see the City of Pasadena come to my school and say, 'Come work for me.' So I think part of it is just the presence, the recruiting effort that these large companies are taking, and maybe it's that they have a financial backing to do it."
"I think if more students understood the problems or that the potential opportunity to solve real hard challenges with the local governments, they would get more excited and they'd probably join. But the problem is they're just not getting that information, and so they're diving into whoever is buying them dinner, taking them out, and whatever else recruiting techniques these big companies are using."
Bookman points out that he and Rosengarten took a group of top students from the University of Maryland to dinner once as the students were visiting companies in Silicon Valley. "They visited Twitter, Square, Dropbox, and Google, and all these students are talking about how cool it is that Twitter has an arcade in their office. At that point they don't even seem to be thinking about the business of Twitter itself. They're focused on perks. How can local government compete on perks against Google?"
The perks and sex appeal of the major companies are indeed one of the obstacles the government needs to overcome in recruiting top talent, agrees McCall. But he stresses the most important is thing the government can do is explain to coders why their talents are needed and how those talents can be used to code a better world.
"The government's culture is very different from that in the startup world or at companies like Google," says McCall. "I've worked at some companies with great perks and I get why people want to work for those companies. I don't think working for the government will ever be 'sexy,' but that isn't why people should want to work for the government."
"I think what the government could do is a better job of explaining why you would want to be part of the government. Working for the government is a form of public service, and you have an opportunity in doing so to help be a part of the solution to our country's challenges, rather than an armchair critic. The guys that fixed Healthcare.gov are heroes to me. I got a great sense of pride in working for the government, and I know many people in government who love doing what they do because of their sense of duty. They might not be as big of heroes as our troops, but what they do every day matters. If government can attract and retain people who want to make a difference and are given that opportunity, I think it will go a long way."
While the government has many obstacles to overcome McCall is hopeful about the future of a government's ability to handle massive technology projects. As evidence he points to how the U.K. government has recently completely revamped their web services with www.gov.uk.
"They are doing some really interesting stuff in the U.K. right now, trying to simplify how their citizens interact with government via a unified experience," McCall says. "Rather than having the thousands of websites we have here in the States, they are trying to have a single point of contact, and affect cultural change at the same time."
But McCall cites examples closer to home. He points to 18F, a digital services agency within the United States federal government that is based on the lean startup model. It was created after the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov and aims to reform the front-end of government systems its citizens interact with on the web.
"I'll also throw in a plug for the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, which is now starting up its third class," he says. "It's a great way to have C-suite support for trying innovative things in government, and tackling pointed challenges."
Are these initiatives enough to ensure a debacle like Healthcare.gov never happens again? Of course not. But each shows the government shares at least one crucial element with the startups that are successful: Learn from your mistakes and keep trying.
Stripe has an enviable reputation among all sorts of product people and engineers--exactly what any platform could wish for. But getting people to use your dev tools--never mind adore them--is anything but formulaic. I sat down with Stripe's cofounders, the Collison brothers, and their CTO to find out how they do it.
Devs love the payments-processing app's simple API, for one. But it's more than that. Stripe's entire focus is developer-driven: from its API to its appetite for recruiting talented devs, regardless of location--40% of its employees are from outside the U.S. The brothers had no background in payments back when they founded Stripe in 2010, either. But they did have a knack for software. And they noticed that collecting online payment was an enormous problem.
"It was like stepping back in the 1970s," says Patrick, describing the online payments scheme from a few years ago. "The online equivalent of the card imprinter, but that's about it. We wanted a service where you sign up, and you'd be accepting live payments in five minutes," he says.
The brothers say that even though they don't have a background in finance, it didn't matter. Their background in software--and their understanding of how a developer's brain works--is what makes the service successful. For example: "We publish snippets of code that allow you to literally copy and paste--like you would in an email or word document--the code into the terminal to make it charge a credit card, or otherwise test out our product," says Kelly Sims, head of Stripe communications.
Other cool usability bits that devs dig are numerous. "Users can 'freeze' to a particular version of our service, meaning they never have to worry about us changing something that breaks their working integration," says Sims. Another: "We publish 'smart libraries' in each programming language, which will automatically figure out how to support many new features we release," Sims says. "This means you'll rarely have to upgrade the library we give you. That's not something anyone would think of unless they themselves were a developer," adds Patrick.
Another reason why the dev community admires Stripe: They take the BS out of small interactions by using plain English error messages, as one example. Instead of just, "Error: Could not process request," you get a message more like, "Error: You're using this in test mode." It's about giving as clear feedback to the user as possible, which makes the experience easier and more user-friendly.
CTO Greg Brockman joined as a dev early on because he felt a kinship to the Collisons. When they first met, "I was talking to Patrick about storing passwords--he stores them in GPG-encrypted files in his computer," Greg says. "So do I. So we had similar approaches to things."
But geeking out over similar password storage methods was just the beginning. Over the years, Stripe has created a seemingly "for developers, by developers" approach when recruiting. An example is Stripe's "Capture the Flag" competition. The competition is a game that allows players to exploit simulated security vulnerabilities in a sandbox environment. One of the Stripe engineers started the contest because they thought it'd be cool. The company has recruited about a dozen employees from among the winners of this competition--and they're people who are excited and already engaged with the product.
"This isn't their first time interacting with Stripe," Brockman says, who also works closely in Stripe's recruiting efforts. "They're like, 'I've been watching Stripe for a long time. Now I'm ready to join.' It's about making this long-term investment [with employees]. Not just having a one-off thing."
"We believe that enabling transactions on the web is a problem rooted in code, not finance," states the Capture the Flag page. "We want to help put more websites in business."
Hanging in the Stripe offices are over a dozen countries' worth of national flags. Each of these flags represents each country in which Stripe is up and running. It's a list that includes Australia, Luxembourg, and the U.K. The embassy-esque collection of banners also reflects the decidedly multicultural staff at Stripe. Over 40% of the 100-person Stripe team is from outside of the U.S. Stripe execs think focusing solely on the U.S. market is a serious mistake.
"It's a shortsighted view of the world," says Patrick Collison. "Increasingly, there won't be a Kenyan or a Chinese Internet. This was the motivation for Stripe."
The founders focus on the fact that they want commerce to "happen frictionlessly across the Internet." It's the idea is that a Kenyan in Nairobi can seamlessly complete a transaction with a consumer in say, San Jose, California. In terms of Internet-based finances, he points to Kenya has an example of an emerging market that needs to be taken seriously by Silicon Valley. One investment banking service there--M-Pesa--has nearly 20 million subscribers, nearly all of the nation's adults.
But a service like M-Pesa likely wouldn't work in the U.S. now, because America already has so much financial infrastructure in place, says Patrick. Thinking of the Internet as fragmented, discrete markets that are wildly varied country by country is a huge obstacle, and faulty thinking for any Internet-based company.
"American companies trying to go international--from America alone--and failing at that because they're lacking global knowledge and nuance," John says. "We view Stripe more as a global product than a U.S. one."
Greg Brockman, who's also been very active in recruiting, says that this international perspective is key to Stripe's identity. "It's a lot more than just localizing our website," Brockman says. "It's about making sure we're building a product the right way for all these markets--that we have a global mindset."
Today, Firebase is a popular backend-as-a-service company, letting developers sync their apps and websites to Firebase's cloud without having to worry about database management and scalability.
But the service didn't appear overnight--Firebase actually evolved from two prior startups launched by company founders James Tamplin and Andrew Lee. Tamplin, the company's CEO, says that evolution wouldn't have happened without their working hard to find out what their customers actually wanted.
Tamplin and Lee first started SendMeHome.com in 2008. The service started by generating printable tracking tags for users' valuables and evolved into a social networking site geared around real-world objects.
"To begin a story, a user must register an object at SendMeHome.com," that company explained in 2009. "The object is then passed from person to person; each person who receives the item can use its unique SendMeHome ID as a key to add a chapter to the online story."
SendMeHome wanted to let its users chat in real time but struggled to find a reliable chat tool to drop into the website, Tamplin says.
"There were absolutely no good ones out there, so we ended up building our own," he says. Then, Tamplin and Lee realized their problem probably wasn't unique, so they decided to focus on making embeddable, real-time chat widgets for other sites.
The two founded Envolve, which launched its chat-as-a-service platform in 2011, with backing from Y Combinator.
"Their main advice is go and talk to your customers and figure out what their needs are," Tamplin says of the incubator. "This is actually one of [Y Combinator founder] Paul Graham's famous theories, or maxims: You're always one or two hops away from something huge, and you just need to invest in good teams who can execute and make those leaps."
And, after releasing its chat API, Envolve discovered a lot of the messages passing through its system weren't actual chats at all--developers had started using Envolve's chat API to as a way to sync data across their users' computers.
"Our gaming customers were trying to send game data through the chat system," says Tamplin. "Instead of just letting the users talk to each other, they were sending character hit points through the chat system in these private rooms."
It turned out many of Envolve's customers had skilled front-end developers but just didn't have the resources to set up real-time backend syncing for their apps.
"There were very, very few developers who could build these scalable real-time systems, real-time backends," Tamplin says.
So the founders decided to pivot again, and separate the real-time synched database backend, which became Firebase, from Envolve.
"We ended up divorcing the interface of chat from this real-time architecture," says Tamplin.
And Firebase is still taking customer feedback into account, he says. The company even holds a weekly in-person and online office hours in its San Francisco headquarters and goes out of its way to be helpful to developers, whether they're existing customers or just potential ones.
"We go to hackathons and we'll help people build their projects, whether they're using Firebase or not," says Tamplin. "We'll stay up all night and always have someone at our sponsor booth when all the other sponsors have gone home."
Firebase also just added hosting for web assets, like HTML, JavaScript, and image files, so developers don't have to set up separate accounts for webpages that are simply going to communicate with Firebase's backend. That, too, was in response to user requests, says Tamplin.
"We built the database, but we just didn't have the method to deliver the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, et cetera," he says. "And that's where people were getting hung up."
Bluetooth LE (low energy) isn't new, but the technology is only just now hitting its stride. Some of the most impressive implementations are the simplest--the latest example being Notifyr, which sends iOS notifications to a Mac. It's a simple concept, but because of how seamlessly it kills the little annoyances, its impact belies its function.
Apple devices have a healthy supply of Bluetooth accessories and apps in part because of how many older Apple devices can still support the latest Bluetooth 4.0 spec. Apple has also been active in developing its Bluetooth framework for iOS, with services like ANCS (Apple Notification Center Service), released with iOS 7.
"ANCS is pretty basic, as it only notifies you when a notification is added, or when one is read," says Notifyr developer Joost Van Dijk. "It doesn't provide any reply functionality, which is why I can't let users reply to their WhatsApp messages, for example. Once Apple adds new functionality to the protocol, I'll be sure to take a look at it, and to see if it might be worth integrating it into Notifyr." (The Pebble smartwatch also has ANCS to thank for easily enabling notifications from all apps turned on in notification center.)
Installing the paid Notifyr iOS app on your phone is the first step, then add a free system preference on your Mac and you're done. Of course, Notifyr isn't the only one to use the low-energy tech to dazzle users with timesaving tricks. Knock is great example of the wildly creative uses Bluetooth LE has enabled. The iOS app, once set up, allows users with a Mac to simply tap twice on the phone's screen to securely log in to the password-protected computer.
The implementation of something like Knock is a lot more complicated than Notifyr, but the effects are the same. Even though Knock may initially seem like a party trick, it's actually part of a bigger plan the founders have to kill all passwords.
Authy is a two-factor authentication service which is using Bluetooth to take the hassle out of security. With two-factor authentication, the issue becomes having to constantly get new a new key and type those numbers in all the time. Authy can use Bluetooth to send that information to your computer allowing you to be able to click, copy, and paste.
There's also apps like Scribe which take the sting out of getting links, files, or other information from your computer to your phone--without sending emails to yourself.
"Bluetooth 4.0 allowed us to very quickly connect and disconnect devices and have transfers work without Wi-Fi. A similar app could have been built using Wi-Fi, but definitely not Scribe," says Scribe tech lead Taylan Pince.
Pince also adds, "Apple's iOS and OSX SDKs for using Bluetooth LE tech are really well designed and reliable. We found it really easy to integrate Mac and iOS devices when developing Scribe. There were a few unexpected bugs and the obvious hardware problems that crop up when building any alternative networking app, but overall it was so much easier than what we expected."
There are plenty of alternatives for getting contact info, snippets of text, or directions over to your phone from your computer, but Scribe is by far the easiest. With a hotkey combination the data is transferred over Bluetooth LE and is automatically copied to your iPhone's clipboard. Just open whichever app you needed the information in and hit paste.
On the music side, Apollo enables the transfer of MIDI controls over the low-energy spec. It can be used from iPhone to iPad or from mobile device to Mac, using one device as a controller for the other. This type of functionally has been prohibitively costly in the past because you needed dedicated controllers or other specialty equipment. Now, it's wireless, just as effective, and easy on the battery.
Although most of these Bluetooth 4.0 connections have been to computers, Automatic uses it to connect to your car. Automatic's Link device tracks your car's data, monitoring information like hard breaks, speed, and where you parked. The Link connects to phones over Bluetooth and uses the mobile data rather than having to be directly connected itself--part of the reason for the reasonable onetime cost. Automatic has backed away from solely supporting the 4.0 standard, however.
"Automatic supports both standards and can silently switch between them as needed," says cofounder Thejo Kote. "On Android, we use classic Bluetooth because it's much more widespread, while on iOS the best choice was Bluetooth 4.0 because it's lower power and allows us to support emerging technologies like Apple's iBeacon."
Apple's iBeacon is still getting its feet wet, but it may turn out to be the biggest reason Apple has invested so heavily in Bluetooth and making sure any many devices as possible support the 4.0, low energy standard.
The suggested link between cell phones and cancer has been around for decades, but it's never been ameliorative until recently. Now a new project currently at the University of Texas is exploring whether an iPhone app can identify a suspicious mole or lesion and determine whether it is likely to be cancerous. But would you actually use an app without going to the doctor, too? What's the point of a medical app if people don't trust the tech as much as a human?
DermoScreen, developed by University of Houston professor Dr. George Zouridakis and the MD Anderson Cancer Center, works simply enough. Users snap a picture of a potentially problematic mole or lesion, then the app automatically analyzes the picture using algorithms based on the same criteria used by professional dermatologists to identify cancerous growths--namely the so-called ABCD rule, 7-point checklist, and Menzies' method.
But here's the crazy thing: Early testing of the technology has shown it to be accurate about 85% of the time, which is similar to the accuracy rate for trained dermatologists--and more accurate than non-specialist primary care physicians.
There have been other apps in the past that have taken advantage of the iPhone's built-in camera to help screen for cancer, but they've always used human beings on the other end of the app. "Most [apps claiming to do the same job] offer a telemedicine type service, whereby a user uploads a picture to a website and then it is analyzed off line by a dermatologist," Zouridakis says. Several years ago the University of Michigan created UMSkinCheck, an app that does a similar task as DermoScreen, but using human beings in a mechanical-turk-like way to analyze user photos.
Within 10-15 seconds of taking a picture, the app provides a score based on a series of objective dermoscopic rules, which look for the presence or absence of certain characteristic features of melanoma. These include lesion geometry (whether the lesion is symmetric or not), color (is it single or multi color? Is there the presence of blue-white colors, or black dots?) and texture (is it smooth or rough? Are there irregular streaks, or star-like pigmentation?).
To enable the app to spot the low-level features not always visible to the human eye, Zouridakis' development--at least in its current state--uses what is called a dermoscope, a magnification accessory, with a built-in light, which clips on to the iPhone like an Olloclip detachable lens. The result is hospital-quality imaging from the comfort of your own home.
DermoScreen is also not your everyday app. Far from a side project, or a quick hack to take advantage of changing iPhone features, the app's development has occupied Zouridakis' professional focus for most of the past decade (even though the iPhone has only been around for seven years).
Prior to moving to his current position at the University of Houston, Zouridakis was a faculty member at the University of Texas Medical School. One day a colleague showed him an early model dermoscope--a prototype of the same device DermoScreen uses today. Zouridakis was impressed by what the technology could do with the aid of a digital camera, but felt the process was unnecessarily slow.
"The images captured with the camera had to be transferred manually to a PC for offline visual inspection," he says. "I told my colleague that we could develop automated analysis algorithms and even put a microprocessor in the dermoscope to do all the analysis on the device in real time. He said, 'Sure, go ahead!'"
Zouridakis did. When he moved to UH Computer Science, he began working on the subject of automated lesion analysis. While he was doing this he was approached by a student doing a PhD dissertation, who was also a full-time employee of Texas Instruments. By coincidence, another colleague from Electrical Engineering was also supervising a different PhD student from Texas Instruments. Together the team worked to develop software and design boards, eventually building two separate hardware prototypes that could capture images, process them in real time, transmit them via Bluetooth to a PC, and display them on a monitor. In 2007, Zouridakis carried out a demo of his first hardware prototype at the Texas Instrument Developer Conference in Dallas.
The real breakthrough, Zouridakis says, was the launch of the iPhone that year. Once he saw a portable device featuring a built-in camera and enough computing power to process its image, he knew he had found what he was looking for. "After that, we focused exclusively on software," he says. "Several PhD dissertations and MS theses later, we have better and faster algorithms, while the iPhone itself is faster and more efficient."
Today DermoScreen is getting closer to the necessary approval stages needed to create a public-facing product. "We have [successfully] tested the software engine behind the app with thousands of images published in databases and atlases of dermoscopy," Zouridakis says. The recent partnership with MD Anderson Cancer Center, arguably the best cancer center in the word, will conduct prospective studies and validate the technology against the gold standard of medical practice.
Currently the app is not ready to be rolled out--its interface being unfinished, for one thing. But it's getting there--and Zouridakis is also starting to look into other diagnostic uses for the technology, such as testing the device's ability to screen for Buruli ulcer, a flesh-eating bacterial disease, in Africa.
Ultimately he believes tools like DermoScreen could have a transformative effect on the lives of millions of potential patients.
What makes DermoScreen particularly fascinating is, paradoxically, that it's not unique. The past few years have seen a wave of transformative medical and health-tracking devices and applications. And if the rumors are true, Apple is set to do what it does best: Take this existing technology and help popularize it by packaging it in a sleek, user-friendly experience.
In the same way that the arrival of the personal computer in the 1970s took computing out of the laboratory and made it a one-on-one experience, so too do today's health care apps democratize medicine by placing the patient at the center of his or her health-tracking universe.
"The current medical system is crazy when you think about the technology that's available to us now," says Dr. Jesse Slade Shantz, the Chief Medical Officer behind OMsignal, a $199 sensor-filled shirt that works with your iPhone to keep tabs on your stress, fitness, and general well-being. "We have GPS, we have accelerometers, we have all these ways of tracking biometrics--with the tools we have we can really start to democratize health care in a way that empowers patients. We want to turn the current sick-care system into a health care one."
In the same way that fields like facial recognition and data-driven analysis have moved from interesting hypotheticals to actionable fields in the past few years, thanks to advances in technology, so too is the subject of patient-driven health care.
"The trends are coming from every direction at once with the proliferation of data and information that can be accessed and used," says Chris Garson, cofounder and CTO of Nudge, a new mobile health app for iOS and Android which indexes data from the 100,000 health-tracking apps available in one dashboard. "We've always been in charge of our health tracking, in terms of deciding when to visit the doctor and such, but there's not previously been the capabilities and additional interfaces to use to take actionable next steps. That's what I see this whole field being about--allowing patients to control control of their own situation. This simply didn't exist 10 years ago."
Even giant companies like Apple (with its upcoming health-tracking iWatch) and Samsung have demonstrated that they believe health-tracking to be tech's next big wave--investing millions of dollars in the bet that it can be the next iPod in terms of mass market engagement.
Since the 1950s--and the publishing of Paul E. Meehl's groundbreaking book Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence--it has been known that predictions made by statistical algorithms consistently beat out those clinical predictions made by trained experts. This is the same in medicine, which is why algorithms have played an increasingly big role in the field over the past several decades.
With the addition of tools like DermoScreen--which demonstrate that even our smartphones now have the tools to make accurate clinical predictions--what does this mean for the future of the physician? Well, as with every other profession, the democratization of technology means that roles will change.
"I don't see this replacing the need for doctors, although it definitely will change people's relationship with their physician," says Mac Gambill, CEO of Nudge. "As the patient, today you can capture everything that happens outside a medical office and take it into your doctor's office where--between you--you can make a more educated decision based on all the data that's being captured."
Zouridakis, too, considers it a step change--although not one that means we'll be waving goodbye to our local GP any time soon. "Even though several studies have shown that computer models can match and in certain cases outperform human experts, in my opinion it is too early to delegate diagnosis to machines," he says. "Until the accuracy and efficacy of a smartphone app has been validated by different clinical groups and under different conditions, deployment of these devices for home use should be done primarily for screening purposes only."
"Current technological advances and increased acceptance of tracking and monitoring systems will soon be enabling more personalized and patient-driven health care," says Peter Flach, professor of Artificial Intelligence at the U.K.'s University of Bristol, and also one of the driving forces behind residential home-quantified medical project SPHERE. "It seems clear that [giving physicians as well as individuals access to medically relevant data] can bring great advantages--as with mobile phones and the Internet, we will soon wonder how we ever managed without. On the other hand, there is no magic: We may not always get better answers, but an ability to phrase the question more precisely is already very welcome."
As with the best technological solutions, the aim is not to replace humanity--but to augment it. "[These tools] should be seen as assistive devices that can help physicians make a better decision," Zouridakis says. "Otherwise, in the hands of non-experts, when smartphone apps are used as a replacement for medical advice, they may give a false sense of security, delay diagnosis of a malignant lesion, and ultimately harm the patient."
It's an exciting time to be involved with medicine--even just as a patient.
Oilfield workers have dangerous, messy, and exceedingly complicated jobs. And energy multinational Schlumberger is trying out something that might make their jobs easier: Google Glass.
Glass has had a mixed reception amongst consumers, but may be more practical for workers who need access to data, schematics, maps, or video capture while using both hands for doing actual work. As part of a new pilot project, Schlumberger is testing out Glass as part of a workflow management tool for oilfield workers. The workers will wear Glass to guide them through their daily tasks.
But most importantly, Glass will also give real-time performance metrics back to management. "Everything is based on information in the oil industry," Feiger said. "The time it takes a field service worker to get information can be very lengthy, and can increase overall cost to a company. Google Glass can provide ambient data and information to individuals in the field. We feel that will drastically improve the efficiency of a worker's ability to work in the field."
Schlumberger is using Glass headsets with software created by San Francisco-based Wearable Intelligence, which exited stealth mode this past April and also creates a Google Glass platform for health care clients including in-hospital use at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center. Chase Feiger, Wearable Intelligence's founder, told Co.Labs that the Schlumberger trial project was designed to show Glass' utility in industrial settings.
"We also give skilled service operators hands-free workflow for completing standardized procedures. All head gestures and voice commands in field data can be collected through dictated messages, photos, and videos. Later in the day, operations managers can ask why it takes this worker five, 10, or 30 minutes to do a task when its supposed to take two minutes. As each step is completed in workflow, the length of time is saved in the backend analytics system," Feiger says.
Many of the checklists that oilfield employees go through for workflow take hours to complete. At this point in time, pen and paper or small tablets are commonly used because workers are frequently in dirty, dangerous environments where they need their hands to be free.
"Imagine you're a worker dealing with a big piece of machinery. Your hands are covered in grease and oil, but you need to complete one of these checklists," Feiger added. "You can't hold the tablet in your hand if it's covered in grease, and Glass means being able to use both hands without constantly stopping to write STEP 1 COMPLETE, and so on. This saves tremendous amounts of time."
Because Wearable Intelligence is creating Glass solutions for sensitive areas such as the oil industry and emergency rooms, they use security as a selling point for potential customers.
The company says customers are given customized versions of Glass that disable consumer-facing apps which are believed to send information to Google's servers. The idea is to have all information stay within the enterprise and not going back to Google's servers. In addition, a custom dictionary is believed to be added to the platform to help Glass's voice recognition platform understand energy industry-specific firms (though Wearable Intelligence refused to confirm this). As Feiger put it, "You just can't expect Glass to work out-of-box in an oil field."
Although exact details of the trial have not been disclosed, Schlumberger is believed to be testing Google Glass at several locations in the United States and overseas.
Last month, Tumblr and Pinterest users received notification emails from the respective services, asking them to change their login passwords. The now infamous security bug, Heartbleed, had just popped up on their radars, and they knew it could leave their users' data open to theft from Internet burglars. Since then, the sites have patched up their servers, but the event has opened up a new discussion over how the wide-reaching the Heartbleed bug could have been prevented in the first place.
The most common way developers protect Internet users from data theft is by incorporating OpenSSL security technology into their sites. Troublingly, many of these sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, use the same code for these secure connections, meaning they were all susceptible to the same security threat as Tumblr and Pinterest.
So how can technology companies prevent a Heartbleed-like loophole in the future?
There are two real courses of action to preventing security loopholes from causing problems in your company.
Ditch older languages. Newer coding languages (which don't usually have OpenSSL libraries) may inherently guard against this brand of theft. A language called Jeeves, previously reported on FastCo.Exist, is an example; a closer look at the language reveals that its approach to memory allocation, as well as information flow, keeps many security errors at bay.
Don't fail to keep abreast of advances in security technology. These days, there are lots of companies producing educational content to help their users prevent security breaches. The popular CDN and security provider CloudFlare has been educating web professionals for years on how best to secure their sites and also develops its own techniques that offer an alternative to OpenSSL.
This year's Heartbleed is not an isolated incident. There have been other types of attacks on the SSL/TLS protocol in the recent past. Last year, there was Lucky13, and Beast appeared the year before. The Heartbleed bug only affected websites whose SSL/TLS protocols were implemented in OpenSSL. The code had a two-year old gaping hole that a few Internet perpetrators figured out how to exploit this year. The hackers could have possibly downloaded private information that users gave to these websites, like passwords or banking information. The above video from Elastica gives a thorough explanation of the bug. Still, more types of web assaults occur, like the DDoS attacks that make use of huge botnets to attack a specific server. And last Thanksgiving, Target Corporation's human errors got the best of its customers' credit card data.
So while not every security threat is alike, but understanding how different technologies could curb potential threats should be universal.
One of the issues that makes it difficult for sites to account for their data is its choice of development language on the backend. OpenSSL is written in the C language, a language which requires coders to manually manage memory allocations.
Languages with runtime programs that de-allocate and allocate memory automatically for programmers make it easier for these coders to avoid the type of mistake that led to Heartbleed in the first place. Called garbage-collected languages, most newer languages, like Java and Python, fall in this class, but C does not.
"Any language that manages memory for you makes the program much less susceptible to a bug like Heartbleed because there's just these whole big classes of memory errors and memory vulnerabilities that don't exist anymore," says Jean Yang, a PhD student at MIT.
Yang and her group developed a research language called Jeeves to take garbage-collected languages one step further than just automatically managing memory for programmers. These languages typically still contain "missing active control check" errors, which could translate into a situation where a site, like Facebook, accidentally could leak some of your private pictures to the public sphere. This time, the error would arise not out of memory mismanagement but out of some other coding oversight.
Jeeves lets programmers attach a policy to a piece of data, like a private photo, so that the data is consistently protected throughout the site, regardless of incremental changes to the backend code. Now, coders are prone to letting data treatment slip since they have to manage information-flow policies by hand, reviewing every instance of sensitive values in the code. Jeeves lets the programmer declare the photo "private" once and ensures it will stay private.
The language is yet another way of alleviating manual stress on programmers when it comes to managing privacy. "What we're trying to do is make information-flow policy languages in the same way that, you know, Java and Python and all those languages manage memory essentially do," says Yang.
The most comprehensive way to make sure sites stay protected from unwanted activity is to keep reviewing its existing security policy. In the days following Heartbleed, security experts recommended that companies run regular security audits. But many people do not know where to start or do not have the resources. The company CloudFlare understands this and regularly educates its customers on the best ways to keep its privacy standards, as well as SSL/TLS protocol implementations, up to date.
"We spend a lot of time thinking about SSL here at CloudFlare, or TLS. Like, a ton," says Michelle Zatelyn, one of CloudFlare's cofounders. "Historically, if you look at SSL on the web, I mean, so few websites use it. And it's because it's very hard, and usually there's usually a performance tax when it comes to SSL."
Apart from educating the public, CloudFlare also sells its own security product to websites, in much the same way that Amazon Web Services does, with the additional benefit that its proprietary code speeds up its clients' sites. CloudFlare's brand of the SSL/TLS protocol makes sure https traffic doesn't lag too far behind http traffic in terms of speed. "We've spent really a lot of time hyper-optimizing every part of the handshake to make sure that's the case," Zatelyn says.
CloudFlare constantly updates the security protocols its clients use, and it regularly reviews the most effective cipher suites to use for the protocols. This managed approach leaves everything security-related to dedicated professionals.
Still, the most common security techniques remain open to the public and open-source. CloudFlare makes it a point to regularly contribute to the open-source community. It has contributed to the OpenSSL protocol, with an update earlier this month. And it has created a way for the open-source web server, nginx, to validate security certificates. CloudFlare contributed its patch to the nginx community earlier this year, but before then, nginx did not have a method of validating certificates from origin computers that wished to communicate with its server.
If a third-party service, like CloudFlare's, does not fit into a site's business model, then understanding and tweaking the existing code is worth the effort. That could mean reviewing the site's code line-by-line or re-writing everything in a new language, like Jeeves. "Taking a language-level approach is more expressive and ultimately lets you do more things," says Yang.
As a coda to Heartbleed, the big websites have now banded together to pour money into the OpenSSL project, in hopes that bigger funding will translate into less sloppy code. But Zatelyn would agree that their initiative is not a cure-all. Securing a website requires iteratively adding layers to the code, continually improving it. She says, "You can never think you're 100% secure. It's almost like a marathon."
Techies are big customers for the food industry in the Bay Area. The food keeps coders fueled, and coders keep the eateries running. Now many places are specializing in options that keep energy levels up without any of the personal health implications of drinking two Red Bulls an hour for a whole weekend. No matter what size company, whether it's a studio office of 20 people or a large tech campus, I found in the course of this article that many of the dining habits of Bay Area tech people are focused on the same few companies. Here's a look at the cottage industry of energy food service that keeps Silicon Valley buzzing.
"A lot of startups are competing over the quality of their lunches, and there is an entire swath of catering startups that have emerged because of it," says John Dvorak, data scientist at NodePrime. Some notable options he mentions are SquareMeals, 415Catering, and SpoonRocket.
SpoonRocket typically delivers curbside within 10 minutes after a customer places an order on its website or through mobile. It caters toward people who don't have much time to cook, which personifies most tech engineers. "We are their personal chef," says Ashley Wong, head of product at SpoonRocket. Most of the company's meals center around fresh ingredients, with salads, pastas, and meat dishes that change daily.
Larger companies are notorious for having gourmet food onsite, a perk that programmers at startups only hear about, including Dvorak. "Those people are of another tribe. They have free time, and buses," he says.
Facebook has one of the most well-known food establishments in Silicon Valley that is, of course, free for all its employees. In her book, Dot Complicated, Randi Zuckerberg wrote about how everyone at Facebook would incessantly check the Facebook Culinary Team's Facebook page when pages on Facebook first became a thing. Indeed, the page is open to everyone in the public to gawk at. It regularly showcases the team's West Coast take on the Juicy Lucy, Tex-Mex dishes, fresh smoothies, and food truck offerings in Hacker Square and other locations around campus.
Although Facebook people don't typically take advantage of Bay Area food services during the day, they still make a good showing outside of normal business hours. Hackathon organizers traditionally order nighttime snacks from Jing Jing, a Chinese restaurant that Facebook hackers have been ordering from for the last eight years. "I think we're so large now that whenever we place an order, they have to close down for the night in order to make enough food for us. They're delicious," says Bob Baldwin, software engineer at Facebook and hackathon co-organizer.
Pedram Keyani, engineering overhead and hackathon co-organizer at Facebook, gushes over Jing Jing's food. "Honey walnut prawns are killer. I mean those things go so quick. And they have these cream puffs. They come, they're frozen when they come, and then within an hour, they're just like--I'm getting hungry," he says. When the organizers don't order in, local food trucks set up on campus.
The café culture is big in the Bay Area techie scene, mainly as places for casual meetings but not hours-long coding sessions. A couple of years ago, local cafés started instituting laptop-free days, where they regularly ban computer usage over a few days per month. Some coffeehouse staples are The Creamery, Blue Bottle, Ritual, Front, and Four Barrel. In fact, all-night hackathoners from Facebook ritually go to The Creamery for a 6:30 a.m. breakfast.
With so much variety available to the tech crowd in the Bay Area, unhealthy habits tend to surface. Trays of food just sit out for people to eat whenever they want. "By the morning, it looks kind of gross," says Baldwin. In addition to all the available savory food, Facebook hackers usually keep a baleful stock of donuts around for the length of a hackathon.
SpoonRocket understands those weaknesses. It makes it a point to deliver all of its meals individually wrapped, so that large metal trays don't pile up on the premises. "I don't know if you've actually seen a dumpster at one of these tech places. Usually, they have special places just to put all of those aluminum foil things because everyone caters, and then they have to throw it all out. And they actually run out of space," says Rene Shen, head of finance at SpoonRocket. All of SpoonRocket's packaging and utensils are 100% compostable and keep low profiles.
For a while, SpoonRocket started offering dessert with its health-centric meals, teaming up with the cookie brand The Cookie Department. But it decided to replace the cookies with smoothies and more salads to maximize its nutritious offering. "We have programmers here, and we love them. They don't necessarily take care of themselves. You know, their focus on life is work; it's the passion of their lives and their love. So what we do is we try to take care of them," says Wong.
That is not to say that The Cookie Department's cookies are empty calories. "You get your indulgence with, you know, butter and flour and sugar. But you also get, with each cookie, you get a benefit, of, you know, from protein to coffee--caffeine--to probiotics, antioxidants, detoxifying spices, super foods," says Akiva Resnikoff, The Cookie Department's founder.
"You know, we basically create a product that goes beyond just being an indulgence product. It actually becomes a healthier option for the average consumer," Resnikoff says. The protein-packed Tough Cookie is a popular option at gyms.
Google stocks up on cookies from The Cookie Department for its employees. "Google was just the start of our tech 'take-over' in Silicon Valley," wrote Resnikoff in an email to us. In a recent update post for its original Kickstarter backers, he announced that it seemed like he was adding about one tech campus every week to his client base, counting Westfield Labs and Sony PlayStation among his various tech customers. The company delivers to everywhere in the U.S. and Canada and plans to expand more this year.
To keep its customers on the healthy side, The Cookie Department scaled down its cookies by half, to a "break size." Resnikoff says he made the change in direct response to feedback he got from Google, which, he notes, is conscious of supplying its employees with healthy food options. His original Awaken Baked cookie contains 300 calories, but the snack-sized version has only 170. Even with its regular-sized cookies, the Cookie Department recommends only eating half for the right snack-sized portion.
Resnikoff's newest creation, the gluten-free Cherry Bomb cookie, showcases his innovative spirit. With the cookie, he considers himself to be the first within the artisan cookie space to have incorporated probiotics into the baking process.
During Cherry Bomb's development, he struggled with fickle probiotics, since they tend to break down at high temperatures. But Resnikoff finally found a specific probiotic whose outer surface contains spores that protect it from decomposing until it is digested. He took his time to get a perfect product and did not sacrifice using the highest-quality ingredients, even if they were on the expensive side.
Resnikoff started The Cookie Department with a lot of the same zeal that drives much of his tech clientele. Like many food companies in the area, his site is hyper-functional, and he has a considerable social media presence. And he understands that his innovative customers would understand the boundaries he is pushing with his high-tech cookies. "People in tech want everything to be better than it's been, to solve problems and to look to the future," he says.
In the late 2000s, Wall Street stock traders encountered a puzzling problem: Large blocks of available stocks would "disappear" upon purchase, but then reappear at slightly higher prices, ready to be bought. This happened repeatedly, to the point where it took several clicks, several seconds, and several thousand dollars more to complete a large trade. As the money added up over time, this mystery became more inconvenience than oddity.
The delay turned out to be due to a special type of high frequency trading--the kind made famous by Michael Lewis's new book Flash Boys and the 60 Minutes segment that interviewed IEX founder and CEO Brad Katsuyama, an electronic trading floor that time-throttles trades to eliminate this HFT price sniping in the U.S. equities market.
IEX is located on the 30th floor of 7 World Trade Center in New York City--just one floor above the Fast Company offices. So we decided to pay our upstairs neighbors a visit and see if we could learn the step-by-step process of an IEX trade, which the media coverage has merely glossed over. What's really going on here?
A trade is entered on a Wall Street brokerage computer on behalf of a client, to buy a certain number of shares of stock. The trade request leaves the firm and gets routed to one of 12 U.S. equity exchanges such as the NASDAQ or NYSE. (The order can also be routed to an Alternative Trading System, also known as a "dark pool," of which there are currently several dozen.)
By law, the exchanges are connected to provide consistent pricing information across them. This pricing feed is called the SIP, and ensures that the buyer of the security gets the lowest price across the board--the one true market price, also known as the NBBO. The exchange needs to sell the stock at the lowest price across the exchanges. Many times there will not be one exchange that has all the number of requested shares, so the order gets broken up and fulfilled across several.
For the past few years, the fastest exchange has been the BATS exchange in New Jersey, so trades involving shares across multiple exchanges reach there first and execute. This is not because of BATS's superior technology per se, but because of its geographic proximity in New Jersey from Wall Street where the trades initiate. Even though these digital signals are going at several miles per second, geographic distance still matters hugely.
High frequency trading firms who have paid for a direct connection to BATS see that order appear on their system that's directly hooked up to BATS--before this order has time to complete. That's key, because it's the time between the order appearing and completing that a faster trader can intercede and make money on the deal. Of course, this tip-off comes at a price, which can be $40,000/month for the $5 cable.
Now that the HFT firm has seen the order appear--but not complete--it can "front run" the trade by sending a buy request for the same stock at other, known-to-be-slower exchanges. Then the HFT firm can sell the stock to the initial Wall Street broker requester for the market price. Since the HFT snapped up the stock, the requester's order can't be fully completed--so they end up buying only some of the shares they intended to buy. Because the HFT trade effected the "one true price" of the stock, the remainder of the order is now more expensive.
While often substantial, the extra cost is just a percentage of a purchasing budget which can be millions, so the trader's thought is: Whatever, I'll just complete the buying and get it done despite the extra cost.
The HFT almost immediately sells back the stock to the original requester, at a slightly higher price than before, thereby keeping the difference--the price differential. They don't make a ton of money each time, but they took on almost no risk. So it's a great deal, and in the aggregate, these transactions amount to millions of dollars every year.
The trade is completed, albeit a few seconds later, with several clicks of the mouse and at a cost of several thousand additional dollars, all of it borne by the client.
In the past, everyone was happy with this arrangement: The HFT made a small profit, the exchange's trading volume gets pumped up, and they receive a small commission for all this extra activity. And the client is happy out of ignorance. But in reality they're overpaying by just a little bit each time, on everything.
In 2009, this practice peaked cumulatively at an estimated $5 billion in profit for HFT firms in the U.S. Now it's back to below $1b, leading skeptics to point out that HFT could once again be slipping into obscurity and irrelevance, although HFT trades will continue to dominate a large fraction of total trading volume for the foreseeable future.
Worth noting, and perhaps underplayed by Michael Lewis in his book, is that most HFT nowadays is done in international markets or commodities, where traders at firms like Goldman Sachs arbitrage oil and Asia equity differences instead, which don't use the NBBO. Thus U.S. equities is a niche problem, even in the world of high-frequency trading.
Recently, people like Katsuyama, the CEO of IEX, have pointed out the unfairness inherent in the opaque U.S. equities exchange system. They only allow legitimate HFT trading strategies and other types of arbitrage that aren't a result of a tilted time-playing field.
IEX compactly coils connecting cables from its front end, where the trade arrives, to its back end, where the matching the order with the available stock takes place, to create physical distance which delays an order into IEX's matching system (where the stock transaction takes place) by 350 microseconds on the way in, and again on the way out. Meanwhile, IEX uses their faster connection (270 microseconds compared with 350 microseconds) to update the SIP prices as the trade is coming in. Because everyone has to go through the delayed door to trade via IEXís matching engine, this means that no one will have more up-to-date information on the markets than IEX will already have, and the price stays fair and accurate.
A combination of hunger and disease kills millions of people each year in the developing world--especially diseases like malaria. So an ambitious project to kill both epidemics with one panacea--like the one at University of California, Riverside--could change the lives of tens of millions of people.
Using cutting edge machine techniques and inexpensive sensors, a small team of researchers led by Professor Eamonn Keogh thinks a solution lies in the sounds insects make in flight. He and his team are applying machine learning algorithms to recordings of insect noises in the hope that they can audibly identify an anodyne bug from a malicious one. Harebrained? Not to the Gates Foundation, which has shown interest to the tune of a $100,000 prize awarded as part of Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative.
Here's how Keogh is using that money to smartly combat insect-borne human suffering.
"Insects rule this planet. As mammals we're really more of an afterthought," says Eamonn Keogh. Indeed, each year insect-vectored diseases like malaria kill more people than most wars while herbivorous bugs wreak havoc on their crops. Yet we also rely on insects to pollinate the majority of crop species that we eat, and to feed the birds which control other pests and support ecosystems--so it's not as if we can simply kill them all. Being able to understand insect behavior--and sort the good insects from the bad--is therefore of utmost importance, both for eliminating insect-borne diseases and keeping people fed.
"A staggering one-sixth of the world's total population--over a billion people--is malnourished, says Agenor Mafra-Neto, a chemical ecology researcher and CEO of ISCA Technologies, a company specializing in the development of semiochemical solutions for pest management, robotic smart traps, and nanosensors. "At least 6 million children die of hunger every year. One of the simplest answers to solving this problem is to efficiently grow and store more food at the local level where it is needed. By monitoring insects in real time this will allow for earlier, very targeted pest control that will ultimately improve food yields and save lives in impoverished rural areas."
For years people have tried to keep tabs on insect populations, often using low-fi and inaccurate measurement tools. For instance, the most popular measurement tool is the sticky trap, a piece of cardboard coated in a sticky layer of glue. The idea is that insects get stuck to the sticky trap, and they can then be counted and used to make forecasts. The problem with sticky traps is that they're inaccurate, and can take up to a week to deploy and process. When dealing with insects whose adult life-span may well play out over that time, a week is about six days too long.
"I thought that if you would be able to gather this information in real time, the interventions you could stage would be much more accurate," says Keogh. "This can have an enormous impact on how you respond. For example, if I was to tell you about a particular infestation now you might be able to go into a field with a hand spray, spray each corner of the field, and the problem's gone. But if you had to wait one week [to be told the same information], you would have to bring in a helicopter or an airplane to blanket spray. On both a cost and an environmental basis, that difference is massive."
Keogh's idea relies on classifying insects by recording the sound that they make. Until recently, this methodology has been limited by the shortcomings of traditional audio recording devices.
"The problem with these devices is that insects don't make a lot of noise," Keogh says. "If you make [your recording device] more sensitive by having a higher gain, the moment a helicopter flies past or a dog barks in the next field it will swamp the recorder--and probably blow your eardrums off in the process."
Keogh's concept is instead based around a specially designed optical sensor that doesn't record sound, but rather uses lasers to record "pseudo-sound." If this all sounds like something right out of a James Bond movie, that's because it is. When Keogh was a kid, he was struck by a scene from a spy movie he saw on TV. One character was spying on another by shining a laser onto the window of a room, where a secret conversation was being held. By measuring the vibrations the speech patterns caused in the glass window, the spy was able to translate the reflected light back into sound waves--thereby allowing him to listen to the conversation from a great distance.
"I remember thinking to myself as a kid, 'What would happen if a bee flew past the laser?'" Keogh says. "That idea was in my head all those years. It was only later on, when I started working in this field, that I got a chance to use that insight."
For his version of the optical trick he doesn't rely on a reflective window, but rather on a photodiode which measures the amount of light emitted from a source. The received light has the sound of whatever passes through it embedded within it. Using this method, the sound of an insect can be recorded in crystal clear quality--even down to how many times it flaps its wings per second.
Unlike traditional audio recorders, Keogh's method also means that nothing is recorded outside of the small recording plane of his sensors. "Anything outside of the sensor's plane of interest won't get picked," he says. "You could have a machine gun going off and, if it's outside of the area we're focused on, it won't show up on our recordings."
Of course, recording the sound isn't everything--you also need to identify it. This is where the project's software component comes into play. "We're the first people in the world to do big data for insects," says Keogh. "We've been able to train models to recognize insect sounds and flight patterns."
This was more difficult than it initially sounds. One of the key researchers in this area is Yanping Chen, a PhD candidate in computer science and engineering. "One of my main tasks was to find a good classification algorithm that would let me identify the individual species of insect," Chen says. "We spent a lot of time collecting the data--24 hours a day, for several years, recording multiple insects in parallel." Once this was done it was her job to help create the machine-learning tools that would sort one insect from another. To give a sense of how tricky this task is, she compares it to the typical task of a smart email service which has to differentiate between only around four different types of message--including spam, and business and personal emails. With insects, on the other hand, there can be hundreds of thousands of potential classes.
There exist, for instance, 3,528 types of mosquito. Of these, a minuscule 3% cause problems for humans, while the rest are totally harmless or even beneficial. Having an algorithm that can simply tell a mosquito from a cicada isn't enough--it also needs to say what kind of mosquito you're dealing with. With that kind of granularity required, the team turned to the music world, where they looked at algorithms used to analyze compositions and recognize the individual instruments within them.
The data can then be used to make efficient recommendations for vaccines and possible interventions. Malaria, for example, has well over 100 possible inventions that can be staged--from handing out bed nets in a home, to spraying various types of pesticide. Almost all of these cost money, and Keogh's work can help make these recommendations as accurate as possible. Unlike tests such as the sticky trap, this real-time data can provide minute-to-minute details about insect populations whose behavior can vary enormously depending on time of day or weather and environmental patterns.
"If you have bad information, it can be almost worse than no information," he says. "That's our aim: to provide pinpoint-accurate information that can be used."
While at present, Keogh's work has remained a laboratory investigation, he is now keen to roll it out to the field. Doing this meant modifying his experiments--including developing far cheaper sensors.
"We knew that if we had an expensive sensor, there was no way we could do this practically," he says. "We want to have 100,000 or even 1 million of these sensors deployed in the field throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. You cannot do that with a $100 sensor since it would be prohibitively expensive and they would also likely get stolen and sold for parts," he says.
His goal is to create a low-cost sensor for no more than $5--a goal he is getting closer to by the day. "When we started this project our first sensors cost $1,600--now we've got it down to around $10-15," he says.
For both Keogh and the team working with him, it goes far beyond an academic computer science project.
"Most of the work you do when you're studying computer science is just for publishing a particular paper," says Yanping Chen. "Here I can see that the work had the potential to save lives. It gives me a sense of accomplishment to work on something like this. There will likely be more challenges as we deploy our research in the field, but I'm confident that we can overcome them, and that this will be a valuable tool for fighting malaria and other diseases."
"This is going to be my life's work," says Keogh. "You always hope that you'll be able to do something which can help people in a real-world sense--and to find a project like that is quite rare in computer science. I always wanted to try and find something that would leave a lasting impact. I can't think of anything more important I could be trying to do than to save lives."
If you're a college student in Buenos Aires or Chennai, you may have come across an unorthodox way of making extra money. Using your Android phone, an American corporation will pay you to stop by the supermarket on the way home; snap a picture of how much bread or tomatoes costs that day; and submit the price of those commodities into an elaborate data system. California-based Premise, as they're called, uses this information as fodder for an unusual business model: getting inflation and commodity price data before governments do, sourced from regular people on the street.
Using thousands of college students and other part-time workers, Premise gathers raw item prices from retailers and street markets worldwide. The information Premise's workers collect is used to help develop live inflation indexes and food security data for clients including hedge funds and government agencies. David Soloff, Premise's CEO and the former head of analytics firm Metamarkets, told Co.Labs that the company's goal is to apply crowdsourcing and digital information-gathering technology to the still "post-World War II" methods of generating inflation data.
"We see people making really big important decisions like printing more money," Soloff says. "But they're basing those decisions on information collected through a data supply chain that arose in the years following the Second World War. Provisioning of actual data points in these old supply chains leads decision makers to make bad decisions." In other words, Premise believes they can offer decision makers more accurate global financial information more quickly.
While Premise's strategy sounds ambitious, enough venture has been put behind the company since their 2013 founding to make it worth paying attention to. This past March, Soloff's firm raised a $11 million Series B round lead by Social+Capital Partnership. Other investors in Premise include Google Ventures, Harrison Metal, and Andreessen Horowitz.
According to Premise, the company is currently collecting economic data in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, India, China, Japan, and Australia. Crowdsourced part-time employees, mainly college students, download a proprietary Android app which gives them "tasks" to complete in their city in exchange for financial compensation. Once the employee photographs a price tag or a for-sale sign, that information then goes through the company's servers for QA and evaluation by supervisors in the United States. The crowdsourced data provides one half of Premise's data stream; the company also uses price information scraped from tens of thousands of e-commerce websites.This information is then used to generate real-time indexes for Premise's customers.
Right now, Premise's efforts are relatively modest. The $11 million they raised in March is intended toward expansion into additional international markets and bulking up their presence in markets where they are already operating--as of October 2013, they only had 22 part-time employees covering all of Mumbai. According to a Premise publicist, the company currently has 1250 part-time employees worldwide with that number expected to expand to 40,000 by the end of 2014.
Premise is currently offering their indexes to corporations and financial service providers, to government agencies, and to marketing organizations. Of these, Soloff feels government agencies have the biggest potential for licensing Premise's indexes. "Government banks own huge data capture buckets, a huge trove of data expertise. They have a lot of wisdom but don't necessarily have fast-moving data pipelines. We see them as a natural customer set, and we want to learn how to be a data provider for some of these entities," says Soloff.
As a secondary revenue stream, Premise is also considering licensing their crowdsourcing model and workflow pipeline as a market research tool. According to Soloff, Premise's platform can be used to keep tabs on corporate competitors' product placement, and on where counterfeit products show up in foreign markets.
But in the end, Premise's biggest potential is their promise to offer more accurate economic data than governments, more quickly. In Argentina, one of their biggest target markets, the government has been accused of fudging inflation data for years. By applying a TaskRabbit or Mechanical Turk-like approach to gathering economic indicators, Premise is engaging in untested (but highly promising) methods.
Ever throw a party and have a hard time getting people to pay up afterwards? Yeah, it's the worst.
It's also one of the reasons why event-centric social network Meetup decided to build their own way of handling payments. Previously, the company had used off-the-shelf solutions to handle payments whenever a Meetup required the exchange of money. The company made use of both PayPal and Amazon Payments to handle transactions on the network--the sort of readily available tools used by digital ventures of all sizes.
But then the company noticed something about it's network: The most successful, active Meetups involved payments.
"The toughest part about having a community and switching to a model where you're asking people to contribute money, is that there's that fear of asking people for money," says Matt Trush, VP of product at Meetup. "What the initial system didn't do was that it didn't really keep track of who was paying and who hadn't. It didn't celebrate the people who were paying, and on the user end… they had to jump through the hoops of getting kicked over to Amazon Payments, or getting kicked over to PayPal."
Using off-the-shelf solutions to handle payments on Meetup, whether they be for member dues, tickets, or contributions, was introducing an unnecessary level of friction in the experience--and it also presented a way to improve upon behaviors that made money and social gatherings difficult.
"The way that we look at it is, 'how can it help organizers, how can it help members, how can it help members strengthen their relationships with these groups, how can it strengthen the overall network?'" says Trush. "Because groups that tend to have transactions flowing through them tend to have higher levels of participation and tend to stick around longer."
That desire to strength the connection between its members is what helps dictate whether it will devote resources to developing a homegrown solution to a problem. This same philosophy led the company to also dedicate development resources toward proprietary messaging tools.
"One of the businesses that we're in is creating conversations between people and giving people permission to talk to each other," says Trush. "There had been series of experiences that had existed for a while that were a bit disparate and siloed, and so there's a team that's been working on making those much simpler and making those available across all platforms."
According to Trush, Meetup had considered using off-the-shelf solutions for their messaging tech, but all the solutions surveyed would have proved extraneous to Meetup's core competency of conversation between people.
So they would build their own. It would take time, but that's an upside to Trush--he holds that one of the perks of developing your own homegrown solution to a problem is having the leeway to "rope off what level of functionality we want to introduce and to what subset of a network we want to introduce it to."
For Meetup, it's a logical rationale--iteration is a conversation between a product and its users, and a fitting one given that Meetup is in the business of conversation. And, Trush adds, the data supports it. Just like Meetups that involve some sort of payment are more successful, so are the Meetups in which members communicate with each other before and after.
To that end, Trush and his team are working on tools and services that facilitate conversation in two spheres: public and private. In the public space, with tools set to roll out this summer, Trush describes something that looks less like the service's currently endless comment stream and more like a robust forum, with tools that will help organizers and participants become more engaged.
Similarly, in the "private" realm, Trush and his team plan to replace the current system--which works through email--with something more like a built-in chat system that most other networks offer, with the given Meetup serving as the nexus of communication.
Despite the investment development of such tools and services require, Trush and his team don't ever see them as risky endeavors, because they are all natural extensions of Meetup's core service. Choosing to build a solution over buying one, to hear Trush tell it, is a simple choice.
"We had something out there," says Trush. "And determining whether or not you want to continue to invest in that by making it easier and making it a new normal for people--it was seen as kind of a no-brainer for us."
Technology changes the world. Whether it's smartphones or quantum computers or internal combustion engines, tech is often a harbinger of great change. But that change can be co-opted--whether by corporations, lobbyists, or pundits-- to bring about a future that leaves the average citizen out in the cold.
Last week, on the final day of events at Internet Week New York's Manhattan HQ, a panel took the stage to discuss how digital technology is being used to achieve the surprisingly difficult goal of enacting positive social change. Inspired by the forthcoming release of The Internet's Own Boy, a documentary about the life and work of the late programmer and hacktivist Aaron Swartz, the panel included representatives from organizations like WITNESS, Purpose, and Games For Change, along with the film's director, Brian Knappenberger.
"This is really important," said Sam Gregory, program director of WITNESS, which uses video content to promote human rights issues. "Because otherwise things remain in activist ghettos."
Much of the panel's discussion revolved around how to bring the social concerns of the tech world to the forefront of the mainstream developer world--to keep tech companies big and small from engendering an environment that prefers businesses over the individuals whose data they use.
Gregory held that the mainstream tech community needs to find a way of building a stronger concern for human rights values and ethics into its culture. "Because at the moment, a lot of this happens retrospectively or it's happening on the edge. We've got to think about that differently, because otherwise Snapchat, Facebook--all of these tools we all use--will not have the values we care about," he said.
The concern Gregory put forth is certainly one that's at odds with the Silicon Valley mentality of disrupt first, ask questions later. Programming is often portrayed as apolitical--progress in tech is good in and of itself, and should never be impeded. But a post-Aaron Swartz world should know better, according to Brian Knappenberger.
"[Programmers] need to understand that their actions don't take place in an isolated room, by themselves," said Knappenberger, after the panel. "We all live online, and their acts and creations are helping to create the world that we live in. What kind of world do we want that to be? What kind of world do we want? What kind of Internet do we want?"
Barring the inclusion of any sort of formal ethical training when we teach programming languages, what should be the guiding principle of young startup coders and developers? According to members of The Guardian Project--a free, open-source initiative dedicated to developing apps and devices that uphold activist ideals--it's all about a Tron-esque fight for the User.
"One of the primary 'ethical' considerations we base our work on is designing software around use cases or user stories that are usually ignored or not valued," wrote Guardian member Nathan Freitas in an e-mail. "Most of the time security software is designed with a corporate, government, or military mindset. Instead we start with regular citizens… and come up with our features and goals based on that."
While having user scenarios as a guiding principle during development is key, the Project's members think it's far from the only one. The tech world, according to Guardian Project member Hans-Cristoph Steiner, needs to dial back its positivity and introduce more healthy skepticism.
"One simple rule that is rarely applied is: Always discuss the possible negative impacts whenever discussing the positive," says Steiner. "As many satires of tech culture point out, there is frequent discussion of working on technology to change the world. That talk always implies that new technology will only bring positive change, which has been clearly proven wrong. If creators of technology consider the damage that they might create along with the benefits, then I think we will see much better, more useful technologies being developed."
Berlin-based Clue is a period and fertility tracking app, one among a spate of similar if slightly different positioned products including Glow, Kindara, and Ovuline. It is an emerging space and potentially big business--a Chinese competitor Dayima has 65 million downloads. Joanne Wilson, angel investor and wife of Fred Wilson has invested in Clue, suggesting womens' health offers opportunities for any innovator in search of whitespace.
But there's still a big problem: Going after this market can run your company into a stone wall of invisible gender barriers that determine whether and when you get funded. How do you get support for products that are labeled "for women" in a male-dominated investment world? And how do you do it in the way that gives you the greatest chances of success?
"In general, the lack of females in the VC industry is leading toward a bias toward male-focused products," says Hans Raffauf, Clue Cofounder.
Certainly it is a hot topic right now given the disproportionately fewer numbers of women in the VC industry--and lower numbers of female-founders being funded. Journalist Josh Constine recently nailed a notable Silicon Valley VC on stage about gender inequality in his own hiring. And according to a July study done by the National Association of Women Business Owners in conjunction with Wells Fargo, about 38% of U.S. businesses are owned by women. Yet just 2% of the money invested by venture capital firms goes to women-owned firms. (That report is not publicly available online, but one other interesting studies are.)
While fertility is an issue for men and women, it didn't show up that way for Raffauf and Tin when they were first pitching VCs. And not just because of the period tracking part.
"There was one investor who was saying I can't feel the product because he's a guy. While he was saying that, he was beating his breast with his fist. It was very gentle and friendly. But still clear," says Raffauf. "In building out Clue, we knew this was a problem so we took steps to build our business accordingly."
Obviously, the biggest challenge any founder can face is to build a strong business with a product people want. Accounting for how gender perceptions can shape investors' decisions unconsciously? That was a whole other issue. I asked Raffauf and Tin to give me a roadmap for the issues.
Choosing angel investors appropriately is no small thing. After all, they help to mentor, advise and shape the future of your business. The question is: how do find great angels--and find the right mix?
Her advice--connect with people who are friends of friends. Especially individuals who come highly recommended by several different people you trust. "Often when we'd explain our product, people have someone in mind who they know it will resonate with. It was amazing how often we would have meetings and the person would say, "You must talk to X," says Tin. "When X's name would come up with three different people, we'd know it was worth reaching out."
Aside from character, there a some specific skill sets other entrepreneurs should look for in figuring out which angels to include.
"Angels should be able to contribute something that is either specific about your business, e.g., in our case...Knowledge about how to scale an app, health apps or data analysis," says Tin. "Or have general business value--an angel that is or was a CFO, Product Manager, et cetera. On top of that it's massively valuable if they have great networks future investors or potential partners."
Still, there's no substitute for having a female investor.
"Given that we still have a long way to go before we reach gender parity in terms of female-led startups and product offerings, I think that it would be difficult for any angel, male or female, to 'specialize' in womens' products even if they tried. At the end of the day it's about recognizing an opportunity when it's in front of you," says Tin. "Maybe that opportunity is a little more obvious to female investors if it's a product that they can relate to on a personal level," says Tin.
Women as angels is not a new topic. Dave McClure addressed it in his argument that more women should become angels, a post worth reading for the comment thread alone. And 500 Startups' controversial Women Investors Now challenge asks women to commit to investing in at least 3 startups, giving them each $5,000 each over the next year.
But finding excellent female angels is becoming easier for founders and more women are taking up that charge. The Women 2.0 series "this is what an angel investor looks like" spotlights powerful female angels. And angel and advisory groups like the 37 Angels and the Golden Seeds are built around women who support startups by mentoring, advising, and providing financial backing.
It is also getting easier for female founders to get angel investment. The Center for Venture Research won't release new numbers until October, however according to stats from the first half of 2013, women-owned ventures accounted for 15.9% of the entrepreneurs seeking angel capital and 23.6% of these women entrepreneurs received angel investment. Those are still low numbers. But they show that a higher proportion of women are getting funded this way. In short: the angels are rising. This is working.
As Raffauf points out, the power of the network can be as important as willingness to to write a check. "Ultimately we asked our angels to be involved because of their skill sets and huge networks," adds Raffauf. "But it is important that they are women."
When your investors can't relate to your product for whatever reason, it gets tougher to successfully pitch them. "As a general rule, investors tend to invest in products that they can use themselves or see themselves using," says Tin. "For us, it is important that leaders in the fund get the female perspective--no matter what level--and that we ask them to do that. We get a far more positive response when that happens," says Raffauf.
"Sometimes that means asking their partners to use the product," he adds. And in a comment that gives great pause about the current VC landscape, "sometimes it means pulling in their secretaries."
"It's the same way an investor who has children might be more receptive to a kid-focused product. So that approach that has proven successful when talking to male investors," says Raffauf. Tin adds, "At the end of the day it's about figuring out how your product and your company story resonates with the potential investor, regardless of gender. But also if they have people in their surroundings who are users or can be users, that is another entry point."
When you look for financing, you're investor-dating--and it usually ends up in marriage. You want to know that this person not only understands you but also loves you.
"Do some research on the VC. Check out their Twitter feed. Read their bio. See if they have a blog," says Tin. "See if you can find interviews or presentations they have given. If they talk about their family, their passion, or causes they believe in (even in their professional context), that is often an indication that they look at investments with both an analytical and empathetic eye."
She also advocates that when you meet investors, it is important to find out whether they are interested in solving the problem on a deeper level or whether they only talk about money and exits. "Ask them how they solve company troubles," she says. "Some investors will tell you straight that they replace founders if needed. Others say we never replace founders. Ask them directly."
Raffauf and Tin also employ a tag-team strategy during pitch meetings. "It goes back to strategizing which founder is the best fit for that particular meeting. Some investors think the way we're planning to incorporate men into our audience and future roadmap is interesting, and then I might do the pitch," says Raffauf, "Some like the visionary founder story. Then Ida takes over."
To address the tricky part that comes from women's product, they employ a different strategy: framing the conversation differently depending on who they're talking to. "We talk with the less empathetic ones less about the problem [period/fertility tracking] and more about the business opportunity."
While gender should ultimately be stripped out of the conversation altogether, it is still an issue when it affect which products, projects, and founders get funding. The question is: how do we solve the problem?
"I think as we see more successful startups (that happen to focus on women's products) become successful, there will become less of an inherent bias against them," says Tin. "But there also needs to be more education on the investor side, so they can be aware of what subconscious resistance they might be carrying into a first pitch meeting because they think they can't relate to an idea for gender-based reasons. And we should have gender equality among investors."
Perhaps more helpful in Clue's case, "once a sector is seen as 'hot' everyone will want to jump in on it," or so Tin believes. She is right. Womens' health is heating up, meaning more entrepreneurs will be dealing with these issues--both male and female. As Tin says, "It's not even close to being a niche area."
Using an activity tracker to arbitrarily count your steps can be very hit or miss in its usefulness. It makes more sense to get one designed to track a specific activity in order to get the most insight out of the data.
For tennis players, Smash is a new wrist band meant to help improve their game through data. The device includes an accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer, able to collect data 250 times per second. This allows for really precise measurements which, combined with open API access, might help it find a wider audience with third party developers.
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The goal with opening up an API as a stretch goal in the Kickstarter campaign is to expand into other sports and beyond. It's been obvious for awhile most niche products need help from a community of interested developers.
"We'd love to move Smash into more sports, however we can't do them all at once," says Smash Wearables founder Rob Crowder. "We've had some great feedback and requests ranging from baseball to badminton, table tennis to Padel--which is huge in Spain. To do them justice we'd need to spend significant time on algorithms and an experience that makes sense," Crowder continues. "So, for devs we'd love to offer a simple toolkit so they can collect measurements for whatever sport they're passionate about. This is what we're working on as a stretch goal."
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But having a wrist band that that can track really precise movements could also be used outside of sports. Crowder says he's also heard feedback about Smash being used for things like physiotherapy and rehabilitation.
"Not from sports injuries necessarily, but people requiring [physiotherapy] due to surgery or other injury," he says. "Recovery time could be shortened if they were able to repeat the correct movements more often."
As for the actual device, all data processing happens inside the hardware unit itself and then the results passed to an app on a phone. This means that even while Smash is generating peak data, it doesn't require one of the latest smartphones to capture the information. The data processing onboard the device does affect battery life, but right now in its initial phase Smash gets around 6 to 8 hours.
The wrist band collecting so much data also brings up the issue of separating the noise from the signal. This has been a constant area of focus for Crowder from the beginning. He says that recognizing a person hitting the tennis ball is easy, it's everything beyond that which is tough.
"The clever bit is recognizing events within a shot that demonstrate good technique," says Crowder. "This is where the majority of time has been spent, writing algorithms which identify technique markers within a stroke. Taking the forehand as an example it's about dropping the wrist at the back of the backswing, driving forward and upwards with the right angle of wrist through contact and finishing with a nice high follow through to ensure decent topspin. Each stroke currently has between six to twelve events."
As more devices include tracking sensors, effectively measuring data from wearables will become more important. If device manufactures support open APIs, it can help make devices say for tennis, attractive even to people who don't care for the sport.
Zepp is another example of this type of gadget not being saddled to one sport. The quarter sized device can attach things like a gold club, tennis racquet, and baseball bat. Zepp has the same goal, which is to get players immediate feedback on their technique.
It's still early for Smash, but with over 250 backers and quickly approaching a quarter of the funds, there's a good chance third party developers will be able to get this tracker into their hands.
Whether it's violating the Human Interface Guidelines, calling undocumented APIs, running adult content, or engaging in other sanctioned business, there are lots of ways to run afoul of Apple's App Store developer rules. We found 10 odious cases where Apple took action to allegedly protect users from malicious third parties (or themselves).
There's no nudity, graphic violence, or other things in Send Me To Heaven that you'd expect to see from a banned app. So why was it banned? The "game" measures how high a user throws their iDevice in the air--something Apple is naturally not eager to endorse. Wired talked with developer Petr Svarovsky, who confirmed that his goal was to get people to destroy their expensive devices.
The 50-year-old from Prague said he had hoped to have people shatter as many iPhones as possible. "The original idea was to have very expensive gadgets, which people in certain societies buy just to show off, and to get them to throw it," he said via Skype. He has not been without some success, however. Send Me to Heaven has been causing ample destruction for reckless Android users, who have been leaving negative reviews on the Google Play store, where the game has been available since April 28.
Codea is an app for coding on the iPad. By all accounts it's a tremendous step forward into the next generation of computing, and yet the app is still suspect in the eyes of the App Store.
Apps aren't allowed to distribute code, which is a feature that happens to be a big part of Codea's functionally--and its name. If you build something with the app generally you'd like to share it with other people. This puts the app constantly straddling the boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable within Apple's digital store.
From Codea's forums, Two Lives Left founder and developer Dylan Sale addressed the issue.
We received a call from Apple about violations regarding downloadable executable code (namely, the .codea packages). Edit: We have worked with Apple and have resolved the issue. The app will be available to download/purchase in the future, but we have removed the sharing feature in the next update. We will attempt to convince Apple that the feature is benign and that we should be able to keep it using their official channels.
The thought is that if you can make apps within other apps and then distribute them, it would be very easy to bypass all other rules and regulations. For now, Apple and Codea have reached an agreement, but it only takes Apple feeling fickle (perhaps at the introduction of a competing or similar product) to rescind their approval again.
AppGratis was one of the many apps that tried to gain popularity by piggybacking off of other apps' marketing in a sort of spammy app-download Ponzi scheme. AppGratis was removed from the store because it was found guilty of confusing users with promotions of other apps. This is basically Apple's way of trying to stop large scale scamming efforts. AppGratis was also violating a rule which prohibits sending advertising via push notifications. AllThingsD had some further insight to what AppGratis might have been trying to do with its app.
Apple declined further comment on AppGratis's ouster, framing the move as a standard response to guideline violations. But sources close to the company say it was more than a little troubled that AppGratis was pushing a business model that appeared to favor developers with the financial means to pay for exposure. "The App Store is intended as a meritocracy," a source familiar with Apple's thinking told AllThingsD.
Try and find a single Bitcoin wallet app on the App Store--you won't be able to. Blockchain.info's app was the last one to be removed, but with it also went the last hope users had at managing their Bitcoins through a native iOS experience.
Apps like Coinbase and BitPak have been removed from the store as well. Blockchain was notified via email that the reason was "unresolved issues." Business Insiderhas an idea about why Bitcoin in general is a problem for Apple.
Bitcoin isn't illegal in the U.S. It's not regulated though, either. It's in this weird in-between state. It's an unregulated currency. In other countries, Bitcoin is in a similar position. In China, for instance, financial firms aren't allowed to use it, and the biggest e-commerce company in China has banned it. So, basically, it looks like Apple is waiting for legal clarity with Bitcoin before it starts approving apps that do Bitcoin transactions.
Supposedly, app development company Tawkon was able to detect radiation from cell phones via an app. When it was rejected from the App Store, the developer appealed directly to Steve Jobs by email, who simply replied "Not interested."
The app being rejected came hot on the heels of the company raising $1.5 million in funding. While the app was still made available on Android, this case goes to show why investors consider an iOS-based business risky: No matter how good or useful an iOS app could be, Apple's whimsy can knock a company completely out of range of mainstream adoption.
I Am Rich was one of the earliest App Store controversies, taking place back when the App Store was very much a work in progress. The app was priced at $999.99 simply because that's what the upper limit allowed--perfectly within Apple's rules. But also in bad taste, the iPhone-maker ruled. The L.A. Times reached out to I Am Rich developer Armin Heinrich as the app was starting to cause waves.
In the e-mail, Heinrich said there seemed to be a market for the program. "I am sure a lot more people would like to buy it--but currently can't do so," Heinrich said. "The App is a work of Art and included a 'secret mantra'--that's all."
Reportedly, eight people bought the $1,000 app, which only presented a static image of a red jewel, before it was removed from the store. Apple didn't release an explanation when the app was pulled.
I can speak for everyone when I say Nintendo should take it upon themselves to release official first-party games for iOS. Until that happens, however, third parties will likely keep trying to rip off familiar mechanics or just flat out build counterfeits.
The GameBoy emulator didn't make it in the store, but it was able to be distributed to standard non-jailbroken iOS devices. The app took advantage of Apple's iOS Enterprise Program which allows side loading of apps, a method traditionally used for large companies to distribute internal tools or utilities.
TouchArcade tracked down 18-year-old developer Riley Testut and got the whole story behind the emulator.
He wouldn't go in to too many details as to where it came from, but he describes the situation as "lucking out," with a connection with someone who could buy an existing enterprise certificate GBA4iOS 2.0 could use to allow for the same jailbreak-free install magic that made the original so popular. Typically, being blessed with the ability to sign your own apps involves all sorts of hoops to jump through and other associated paperwork with Apple to release internal corporate applications and sidestep the App Store entirely.
While the source of the GameBoy emulator app was found and its certificate revoked, lots of other standard developers are now using the iOS Enterprise Program to get around the 100 device testing limit. This problem will likely present itself again sooner or later.
If Molinker wasn't the first large scale App Store scam, it was the definitely the first big one to get caught. After being noticed by a blogger and reported to Phil Schiller directly, Molinker had about 1,000 apps removed from the store. Many of the apps had reached the top charts and one even made it into a staff pick selection. The developer had apparently been giving out promotional codes in exchange for five-star app reviews.
You may be surprised to hear that Amazon was an original instigator in Apple's App Store. Amazon has always had a delicate relationship with the App Store primarily because the company sells so much content and constantly bumps up against the in-app purchase rules. This was most likely a major factor in Amazon developing its own content platform on the Kindle.
Comixology didn't have a problem coughing up 30% of in-app purchases until Amazon acquired the company. Pulling the functionality for users to buy comics directly within the app was a main component and has caused quite a bit of outrage. The decision to remove the functionality has also caused technology commentators to take up the topic of App Store rules once again. Amazon has also built web versions of its apps like Kindle in order to allow users to purchase books in the same space as reading, without cutting Apple into the deal.
It's really hard to pin the blame on the app maker for this one. FreeWeibo was developed in partnership with Radio Netherlands Worldwide and gave people in China a way to circumvent the country's Internet censorship. The app was said to be removed from the Chinese App Store because of pressure from the Chinese government. The reason the developer was given was that the app violated local laws. Apple has also removed other books and apps in the past that pushed up against what the government in China found acceptable.
Line is obviously still in the App Store, but about a year ago it tried to add gifting of paid stickers and was asked by Apple to remove the functionality. Why? The company was gifting in a virtual currency, which isn't allowed in the App Store. The function also bypassed Apple's in-app purchase rules, keeping the app from having to pay Apple's 30% in-app purchase tax. Gifting of stickers remains in the app, but they're now free.
As adorable as it is novel, Little Printer won the hearts of design nerds everywhere when it was introduced two years ago--but its launch left its creator, Matt Webb, feeling bereft.
"Little Printer shipped on Dec 4, 2012, a year and five days after we put video up," says the U.K.-based Webb. "I thought I'd feel like I had achieved in something huge," says Webb. "Instead, on the day it shipped, I felt empty. It was like we ran off the end of the business plan."
One of the reasons: his company was still in a different business, doing design consulting on things like interactive magazines and lab-grown meat, and now they were being pulled in a new direction: making physical products. While they'd played with hardware, that wasn't Berg's core--the company was a far cry from the way it is today. That transition was bumpier than expected, but also a ton of fun, says Webb.
"We were about 15 employees at the time. We are now only eight. They're very very different mind-sets, a consultancy and a hardware startup. While I thought the transition would be easy, the psychological difference is huge. The biggest difference for me with a hardware company is the Reid Hoffman idea, 'If you're not embarrassed of your product when you're launching it, you're launching too late.' "
Learning to prototype and ship early was one of Webb's first lessons--here's what else he learned in turning his service-based company into a hardware shop.
"We've always been interested in hardware, but the thing we're experienced with is the design and software," says Webb. "It's a new thing in the world being able to do hardware."
Webb describes his early experiments, which began back in 2006. "The very first thing we tried to make was called Availabot. We announced this back in 2006. We licensed it to a toy company that year, and for awhile we thought we'd be in the IP business. Eventually, we took it back and tried to make it ourselves."
They also did a series of experiments to learn about physical product. "Before we'd made some posters and sold them to learn about production. We also made comics you could only read when you shined a blacklight at them," says Webb. "That was partly an experiment in ordering in China, partly an experience in warehousing and customer service."
Since those early days, Webb and his crew have built a platform for making connected products, and used it to hack a washing machine and connect it to the Internet, build a cuckoo clock that sings when you get a tweet, and develop Pixel Track, a "dumb" sign that updates via an API and the cloud to work and look similar to an e-paper display.
The big lesson he's kept in mind while making all of these? That thoughtful design starts with the materials. It's easier to smartly source materials up front than to deal with customer service caused by cheap parts. "When you're shipping things into people's hands, you live or die by customer service," says Webb. "When we realized that, that that led us toward components that were really good. The receipt-printing component of Little Printer has been around since 2008 and is very well proven. We evaluated a product to do with ink by contacting factories. You need to know that the technical problems of creating a product are nothing compared to the customer service for it."
Webb points out that in hardware, there are things you might not think about. For instance, with hardware, there are specialist insurers."With software, what's the worst thing that could happen? The website could crash," he says. "The worst thing that can happen if we put out Little Printer--it could stop someone's pacemaker. Or what happens if all the product has to be recalled? That's 200,000 pounds sterling. You need product recall insurance, that's the name for it."
The best way to learn tips like this? Hang out with hardware people. "As hardware companies this is the kind of information we share with each other. We're like a new class of company it's all about sharing and growing up together," he says. "This stuff is so new."
It isn't like traditional manufacturing anymore, he points out. "The days of focus-grouping a product to death and slow-to-market are gone. The pace is different now. As are the players. The kind of people with the relevant experience and expertise are PCH, the Highway1 accelerator, or Dragon Innovation. There are reasons the London Hardware Collective or Wearables London exist. There's a reason people are gathering together," he says. "Find people like you. When we did Little Printer, Kickstarter didn't exist in the U.K. If I were going to do this again, I'd Kickstarter. These resources and best practices are gradually appearing."
The time to think about manufacturing is much earlier than you think--Webb says it's well before you prototype. "Manufacturing needs to happen so early because it tells you things like the cost… Just having a rough idea about how these things are going to be done really early is really important."
He should know. He learned about supply chain issues the hard way.
"Right before Christmas we had this 34-page manufacturing guide," says Webb. "We thought we had everything figured out. But as it turned out, getting the glue to set took 30 seconds longer than we anticipated. Thirty seconds."
Because of that, they had to pull that batch of product to sort and evaluate it. That added three days to production. It also made them miss the weekly truck out of the Czech factory, and left their entire factory and customer service team sitting around with nothing to do.
Lesson: don't assume that you know. And make sure your manufacturing partners do.
"For both plastics and electronics, experience doing what you need is key," Webb says. "With the plastic we wanted a high quality finish and low variation--our production partner has experience with medical equipment, so we know they're dependable. Electronics--we should have started considering electrical certification earlier, because that's not the production facility's job. We were lucky in that our manufacturer was nearby in Europe so that shipping iterations was quick."
He is quick to share that his Little Printer assembly partner was fantastic, in part because they helps to create a Quality Assurance guide for all their workers. (QA is especially important in hardware because mistakes are costly and hard to fix). However, for a new maker, he recommends an alternate, easier route: "Consider going with a contract manufacturer who will look after everything. It will let you put your time where it's needed--product invention, and marketing," says Webb. "We didn't because we had a desire to understand the whole process better, but it's worthwhile taking advantage of someone else's experience."
He also offers this bit of advice: "Keep the supply chain short. Ours is long: twenty weeks for Little Printer, and 4-6 weeks for the business version. This is a problem because it reduces flexibility and the ability to take opportunities like large customized orders."
More than just an evolving hardware maker, Webb is a thought leader in how the category is going to grow. As he said at Berlin's ThingsCon last month, "The reason we did Little Printer right in the beginning was to learn enough about making connected products so we could help other people make connected products. In hardware, there's going to be new categories we haven't even dreamed of yet. How are those things going to happen? They're not going to happen in the R&D group at Samsung. It will be someone randomly experimenting. It is incumbent to me as a product designer to leave the wires hanging out. I'm quite up for letting people find their own answers."
To help us better understand and appreciate the opportunities and constraints of the iBeacon profile we decided to create a small prototype using iBeacons. We called it Social Jukebox, an autonomous jukebox that automatically adapts the playlist based on audience preferences. Here we briefly describe how Social Jukebox works and what we learned from the prototype.
Social Jukebox was inspired by the frustration caused by conflicting music tastes in the office. Its function was to solve this by providing a democratic service that played songs based on the collective preference of those in proximity. It achieved this by automatically checking people in as they entered pre-set zones. Once checked in, their stored song tastes (genre, album, BPM, date) would be amended to that zone, and songs matching the dominate tastes had a higher chance of being played.
This was made possible using iBeacon, a Bluetooth LE (BLE) profile created by Apple that enables a battery-efficient way of detecting proximity. In essence it works by broadcasting its identity every few seconds so that any devices listening can intercept these advertisements and, if desired, process them.
The technology is still relatively new, so we thought this project would be a perfect way to test out its capabilities and limitations. Here's everything we learned.
If you read a lot of tech news you would presume that iBeacons offer some special intelligence or gateway to your user, but this is not the case. iBeacons broadcast their identity, which in turn offers an opportunity to act intelligently. This intelligence comes entirely from the device and the apps running on it.
When your application is active, detection of an iBeacon can take anywhere between 5-10 seconds (longer when exiting the region). When closed this can take considerably longer. The reason for the variable delay is that the discovery requires the broadcast and search to coincide with each other--affected by how frequently the iBeacon advertises itself and how often the receiver scans, and there is an obvious trade-off between responsiveness and demands on the battery.
As mentioned above, iBeacon is a profile built on top of BLE. Thus, any device supporting BLE can detect an iBeacon including Android devices with Android OS 4.4+ installed.
Previously when designing software you had a relatively linear user experience. In contrast, the essence of context-aware computing is about adapting and behaving accordingly to different scenarios--even with this simple prototype required a fair amount of code to handle the different states.
One common request from our testers was to allow some form of explicit influence over the playlist either via their phone or a central device. Even though this prototype was designed to be invisible, it's still important to ensure you expose enough functionality to give users a sense of control.
One suggestion was to provide a way for users to filter their playlist by mood, providing the opportunity to influence the environment based on the collective mood of the audience.
What if a competitor's app also listened out for your iBeacon's identities? iBeacon identities are public, so if these are static then there is nothing stopping anyone from listening out for them. In some instances this is desirable, in others its not, and luckily for those instances when its not desirable technology vendors have already solved this. GimbalT offers a solution that uses rolling, dynamic identifiers, making piggy-backing more difficult.
Designing context-aware experiences is on the rise due to the ability to deliver tailored and automated digital experiences. iBeacons by themselves are not that interesting but you can add an effective environmental signal that can be used to better understand the user's current context. It gives those of us who design and build digital experiences an opportunity to start building simple contextually aware interactions and figuring out what works and what doesn't.
