Apple's new Swift language is the first time Cupertino has seriously changed its software underpinnings since it bought NeXT, which became the guts of Mac OS X. So how different is it, really? And more importantly--why fix what isn't broken?
"Its pretty wild, man," was the first reaction from Brooklyn-based senior iOS developer Christopher White after he saw the news. White is lead developer on the Cameo app at Vimeo (as well as my former business partner at an iOS dev shop in Williamsburg). "It's what a lot of native developers have wanted," he told me. "To do something more like a scripting language."
That's because more and more programmers are becoming fluent in web languages. White says Swift's scripting-like syntax modernizes Apple's developer environment in a way that will feel more familiar to web developers. "It lowers the barriers of entry for anyone who comes from a scripting background," he says, which would include a lot of web developers--especially developers used to writing in Perl or PHP. "Their Hello World app is one line--that's very much like a scripting language," says White. "So they're just modernizing the style, really."
There are performance improvements, too, but White says the sandbox feature--"where you can run stuff in Playgrounds to be able to change code on the fly without recompiling"--is an even bigger boon. "The overall syntax is very JavaScripty in a way--they're moving toward not having hard type variables," White says. He calls it a mishmash of a scripting language, with all the power of a compiled language. "It's still native, it still compiles, but it's a style of programming that a lot of people--especially backend developers--are used to."
There's another facet to Swift, however: keeping up with the Joneses. "They're doing more now to advance their languages and maintain technical dominance, competing with Google, which has Go," speculates White. "It's cachet, in a way. You're doing your own language, Google? We're doing our own language too, assholes!"
But Swift's changes aren't entirely positive, at least at first glance. Objective-C was famously verbose, meaning it was easy to read. "[Swift] definitely seems less verbose, whereas with Objective-C it's so goddamn verbose! You can almost always follow what's going on [in Objective-C] because the method names are so detailed. Whereas [in Swift] you'd have to have a little more familiarity with the language before you picked it up. Especially someone else's code."
More of an obstacle is the learning curve. "It'll take a little time," says White. Developers will be asking themselves: Do I start running Swift, or do I make my project manager happy? "Most people are gonna learn it on nights and weekends, so if they get an assignment they can write it using Swift code," he says. Mixing code also means switching context, White explains: "It'll take a while for the community at large to come to grips with that. Before the bigger enterprises adopt it, they'll want to see more engineers [using it]."
Nevertheless, White is diving in. "I generally take on Apple's newest stuff and don't look back, because Apple's not looking back. It's worth it to learn Swift because that's where everything's going for them."
What's really unique about Swift? "How they kept this secret--their ability to do that is almost more amazing than anything else," says White. We wanted to get more specific than that, so we set about to do a quick teardown of Apple's Swift guide and find out exactly how Swift departs from Objective-C and other C-derived languages. Here's what we found.
The first thing that piqued our interest: You can now use emoji in your code. (Not to be confused with artist Ramsey Nasser's all-Emoji language, which we covered here.)
Perhaps to make up for the slightly less verbose nature of Swift, you can now nest multi-line comments in your code to help others (or yourself) know what each section of your codebase does.
Semicolons aren't required anymore, except where they are.
Operators in Swift make arithmetic easier--as well as more advanced floating-point calculations. It helps you prevent careless errors when writing those operations, too.
Writing in Swift also means fewer overall package files, since a single file can auto-generate its own interface for other parts of the application to access it. The "note" below feels like an overture to web developers. Traditionally in Objective-C, individual instances of a type are called "objects," as in "object-oriented programming," hence the name Objective-C. But in object-oriented web JavaScript, for example--a fairly new programming pattern for web development--these individual objects are called instances. Apple has chosen to go with more web-native vocabulary here.
Sub-properties of an instance are also easier to manage.
And object inheritance also behaves in a more straightforward way, which should save web developers from tearing their hair out during debugging, trying to figure out why their object/instance is inheriting properties seemingly from nowhere.
After shaking off my excitement about the Swift programming language this morning I awoke to an innocent, bewildered tweet from Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times, who wondered aloud why anyone would need another programming language.
I would love to read a somewhat but not extremely technical article on this question: Why are we still seeing new programming languages?
Indeed, there are computers in nearly everything these days; doesn't the world have enough computer languages already? The short answer is: No. Here's a dead-simple, Luddite-friendly explanation of why we'll keep seeing new languages as long as there are people to learn them. (Hat-tip to our very own Node.js ninja Chris McClellan for discussing this post with me.)
If this question can be framed as a chicken-and-egg problem, we'll start with the egg. The origin of many languages (such as BASIC, my first language) begins with the impetus to make programming concepts easier for beginners and hobbyists and human beings in general to grasp. The language computers actually "think" in is binary code. The reason for this is simple: If you break all your instructions to the machine into "yes" or "no" questions, represented by 1 or 0, then it's impossible for the computer to mess up (unless of course your code is wrong.) This brilliant innovation came from a guy named Claude Shannon, who realized after WWII that radio signals (which fade in and out) were terribly unreliable vector for important information, like the kind you might send to be stored or processed by a computer.
Pretty much every language designed since binary has existed to make it easier for humans to write reliable, human-readable instructions for a machine, without anyone clawing their eyes out from the boredom and redundancy of writing in binary. (Writing the letter "A" for example, in binary code, is 01000001. A lower-case "a" is 01100001. So writing a whole word this way would take a while, never mind the thousands of lines that make up most programs.)
When a language uses a lot of plain English words, making it easily readable, it's known as "verbose." Objective-C, Apple's programming language, is infamously (even absurdly) verbose, which is part of the reason why Apple got its reputation for being user-friendly. It's not just the computers that are easy to use. It's the language itself. This is dummy code, but a function in Objective-C looks like this. Even if you've never programmed in your life, you can sort-of, kind-of, understand what the engineer is telling the computer to do:
In fact, the reason there are so many "hacker kits" out there for physical electronics is that making real-life gadgets is often the most palatable way into programming concepts for people who are turned off just staring at code like this. So if the above sounds boring, that doesn't mean programming isn't for you; just try starting with hardware instead of software.
Like other innovations, languages often begin as someone stubborn person's attempt to do things their own way, aka "The Best Way." Here's an example from the early days.
In 1971, most people were programming in Lisp. An engineer at Stanford had figured out how to edit Lisp code in what today we would call a primitive text editor--think of the TextEdit app on your Mac. But it wasn't exactly straightforward to use.
One could not place characters directly into a document by typing them ... but rather one had enter a character in the TECO command language telling it to switch to input mode, enter the required characters, during which time the edited text was not displayed on the screen.
Then you had to hit the Escape key to see your changes made, almost like saving and viewing the draft of a blog post. Anyway, it was a pain.
Another engineer from MIT saw this innovation on a visit to Palo Alto and decided to reproduce it himself back in Cambridge, but with a few improvements. Colleagues eventually began writing "macros" for this new interface--reusable bits of code that saved time. When they formalized the collection of macros into a system, they called it EMACS, short for "Editing MACroS."
"But that doesn't sound like a new language!" you might be saying. True, but like spoken languages, programming languages are often derived from a neighboring language and then touted as "a new language" when it is sufficiently different from the original one that its proponents can make that claim. The story of EMACS brings us to the next reason why programming languages get invented: They save work.
If you're a liberal arts type, don't get scared by this term--it means the same thing in programming as, you know, life. Think of it this way: In writing, we call a group of words a "paragraph." That's an abstract concept which refers to a thought, or a chunk of a written statement. We employ the word "paragraph" so that we don't have to recite the entire text of that paragraph when we tell people which section of the article we are referring to.
Similarly, programmers are always trying to create reusable bits of code, because like other humans, they are lazy, and they seek to not repeat themselves. About 30 years ago, there was a big movement toward making computer programs almost entirely out of reusable parts, which programmers called "objects." (It's kind of like the modular movement in architecture, car, or furniture design.) This is a design pattern known as object-oriented programming, and it was so innovative at the time that NeXT, Steve Jobs's company after Apple, championed it as the future of programming. They were so sold on object-oriented programming that they decided to put it in the name of their version of the C language, and Objective-C was born. Apple inherited Objective-C when it bought NeXT, and turned the company's OS into Mac OS X.
Swift, Apple's new programming language, is simply another layer of abstraction built on top of Objective-C, made so that web developers can write in a style that is preferable to them. But when the program runs, Swift still compiles into good old-fashioned C code. Lots of languages are like this--meant to simply accommodate the style of the writer. CoffeeScript is an example of JavaScript written in a different style, but when the computer compiles and runs the program, CoffeeScript gets turned into JavaScript all the same. (Here's a more detailed rundown of what makes Swift different from Objective-C.)
Sometimes you need a new language because there are tectonic changes that need adapting to. This has been happening lately with the coming of the "cloud."
Traditionally, programs have run locally on your computer. These are today known as the "apps" you download and install on your computer. Every once in a while, something called "the Internet" comes along which makes it possible to deliver apps running on one computer to another computer, far away. These are web apps, such as Facebook.com or Twitter.com. They're "applications" in the sense that they are not just static information pages like, say, the documents the DMV posts on their site. In a web app, you can take actions and see those changes reflected (seemingly) instantly, even though the actual Facebook.com "app" is running on servers somewhere, not your actual computer.
Building apps this way is actually quite expensive: You use up a lot of computing power and bandwidth delivering "software as a service," aka "from the cloud," as it's called. Those clouds cost a lot of money to operate, mostly to air condition the servers. So recently a bunch of geniuses got together and created an open source platform called Node.js, which makes it drastically cheaper to run apps over the web for reasons I won't go into here.
Many developers would already prefer to have their apps running as services, because a website has lots of advantages over a downloadable app, such as: nothing to download! Making web apps cheaper to run at scale has caused an explosion in popularity for Node.js, which is written in JavaScript. Node (and and a few other popular libraries like Meteor.js and Angular.js) explain why JavaScript as a language has exploded in popularity recently.
This isn't to say that the most popular languages totally dominate. Other languages like Erlang have gotten renewed interest since apps started moving into the cloud, too; in fact, the far-less-popular language Erlang is what powers WhatsApp.
Programming languages are made by people for other people. As a result, they carry all the cultural artifacts of their makers, and some of those cultural artifacts are turnoffs to other groups of engineers, who turn around and make their own version. This has happened countless times in the history of computer science, leading to lots of dialects of the most popular languages. But nowhere is it more starkly apparent than in the first Arabic programming language. As we wrote last year about Ramsey Nasser, who also created the first Emoji programming language:
Nasser commented that even in computer coding, "the tools we use carry cultural assumptions from the people that made them." When Nasser created قلب, he ran into trouble when he tried to translate the words "true" and "false" into Arabic. He ended up using "correct" and "incorrect" instead, and though the concepts did not exactly align, he said it "turned into an amazing conversation that [he] got to have with [his] parents and friends." Nasser aims at creating universality in coding: "Emojinal is an attempt to step away from cultural baggage."
This is another way of saying that old adage: The language you speak changes the way you think. Some languages are good for some types of thinking; others are better for others. As we wrote in April:
"Not only are languages different tools for different jobs, but they are technologies that shape how you think about programming," says Richard Pattis, a senior lecturer of Informatics at UC Irvine who invented the Karel educational programming language in 1981...To expand their minds, Pattis recommends that versatile programmers learn languages from different language paradigms, whether it be object-oriented languages (e.g., C++/Java), functional languages (e.g., ML and Haskell), scripting languages (e.g., Lisp and Python), logic-based languages (e.g., Prolog), or low-level languages (like C, the Java Virtual Machine or a machine language).The point is not necessarily fluency, but gaining a conceptual vocabulary to attack problems in new ways. Good programmers don't just learn how to code--learning core concepts teaches them how to wrap their brain around a problem and produce efficient code to solve it.
Programmers--if you can think of other reasons why languages rise (or fall) please let me know on Twitter @chrisdannen.
[GitHub language popularity graphic courtesy of RedMonk]
The problem Co.alition is addressing with their new smart backpack is a multi-pronged one. With more and more electronic devices, how do you ensure they stay powered? How do you store digital content alongside physical content? And how do those things all fit together?
Their answer is the Colfax, a backpack that smartly charges gadgets and allows users to store and access files. For founders Jeff Popp and Casey Lorenzen the challenge was designing a product that treated all the unique issues of blending physical and digital content into a single unit equally.
"These other products look like they were designed by engineers--which they were--that are certainly smart but don't "get it" when it comes to style and what it takes to design a great looking, functional bag, Popp says. "For them it's electronics first, bag second. We saw the electronics and bag on equal fields of importance so we didn't want to overlook one or the other."
One thing the founders weren't necessarily expecting was the pushback from critics. To some, it might seem that you could use any battery or hard drive to turn any old bag into an electronic one.
Popp dismisses this notion. "Not only is the proper integration of electronics into fabric of a backpack a big part of this product, but the actual electronic components are much higher quality and function better than any cheap off-the-shelf battery or hard drive," says Pop. "Take CamelBak as an example, people can still buy a water bottle and a pack, but it's not a hydration system because it's not integrated."
The "smart" part of the Colfax bag is its power source, which smartly routes power among devices. Instead of just sending power to one device or another, it doles out power intelligently to the devices that need it most.
"Basically this power supply actually thinks and auto-senses power demand for buttonless operation," says Popp. "High-speed pass-thru charging charges both the integrated power supply and your device at the same time from a single wall outlet cord. No other charging system can do this. The power supply is able to calculate how much power it can send to the device to safely charge it as fast and safely as possible and any leftover power will go to charge the power supply itself."
The higher-end Colfax PHD includes a 500GB wireless drive in addition to the power feature. The drive can create its own local Wi-FI network (LAN) to which iPhones and iPads can connect alongside laptops and desktops. The team partnered with Seagate to help create the unique digital storage solution.
The actual bag part of the Colfax is something Popp and Lorenzen have been working on for about two years. The pair had previously designing outdoor packs before deciding to turn their attention toward the urban market by blending digital into the equation.
The future of inherently digital products being carried around in the physical world is still very much in the shaking-out stage. We live in a world that demands always-connected access and yet we can't rely on power and Internet everywhere we go.
Having files and power integrated into the bag you carry your headphones and other personal items in only makes sense. If the new company can successfully Kickstart their smart bag, it seems they'll have a jump-start on other manufactures to help keep us more connected.
Today's discussion: Facebook product manager (and former CEO of Blip.tv) Mike Hudack thinks the media has hit a quality nadir. "It's hard to tell who's to blame," he writes. "But someone should fix this shit." Who is to blame? And who is going to fix this shit?
The writers at sites like BuzzFeed aren't lazy--they're just following orders. The heads of new media sites (including this one) are targeting the new generation of readers--people they call SYBAWs. That stands for Smart, Young, Bored At Work. As Jay Lauf, publisher of Quartz, told a conference last year, "If you aren't attracting SYBAWS, you are dead as media."
SYBAWs are people who look at their smartphones instead of doing, you know, work while at work. SYBAWs are a generation of todays teens and twentysomething that have the attention span of a fruit fly. These are people that can finish university without ever taking the time to read a book while there, so of course they think a webpage with 36 pictures and a few words is an "article."
The question is are the SYBAWs failing us or are the media failing them? In a perfect world I would say it's up to the media to stop pandering to SYBAWs and show them just how much is to be gained by reading actual journalism. But of course this world of new media is so afraid to change anything that can cost them clicks. So who is failing who? It's a lot of both. - Michael Grothaus
The problem is threefold. First is diminishing attention spans. Second is a corporate infrastructure that demands page views and likes. And the third: a natural shift toward social rather than traditional media consumption. The problem is him, and you, and me, and everyone. News needs help, sure, but that's why companies like Uncoverage are popping up. More visibility for voices without ties--that is one solution. However, to say hard news and honest, thorough reporting are all but dead? It's an affront to those who have chosen and who excel at this discipline. - Leah Hunter
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I don't think many people would disagree with Hudack. The obvious irony is that every commenter is quick to call Facebook the problem and censure Hudack for using Facebook as his medium for this discussion--and yet there they are, all writing paragraph-long responses on the exact same medium. Instead of lamenting it endlessly, we should be trying to play this new game by the new rules. I hate listicles, but if a Crimea-related listicle prevents someone from thinking Crimea is a new STD, then that's an improvement. The bottom line is that as journalists, our job is to inform and educate and make people aware of the world. You can only change people so much, and in this age of easiness and speed, we're just gonna have to meet them halfway. - Emma Holland
Hudack's opinion about journalism is not one the public should consider, because he doesn't know what "journalism" means. He is not a practicing journalist, nor does he contribute to any journalistic venture. A real journalist knows that any story she produces should serve the public in some way. It doesn't matter how small--like Vox's Levi's story--or big the story is; as long as it gives the reader useful information she did not know before, it's kosher. Besides, Hudack's argument falls apart when one considers that he works for an outlet that uses hype-seeking algorithms to pick out what news its users see on their feeds. As an ad guy, he knows that the number of clicks a link gets directly correlates to how much money the creator gets. For him, more clicks means the more happy his ad clients are. Hudack's personal diatribe's only true effect is that it discredits his ability to represent himself and his employer. - Tina Amirtha
The media isn't to blame because there isn't a problem in the first place. Mike Hudack's media rant seems to be merely an observation of globalization in progress. I mean, what was supposed to happen when billions of people gained access to publication tools and an expanding audience? Of course content and the media would be swallowed up in the process. All that's happened is that we've crossed the point at which "real news" is not the most popular content and that seems to bother some people. What's most popular is rarely the "best" in most of our opinions anyway.
The problem with the media isn't a problem--as long as there are still some people digging into the issues and doing solid reporting on the facts. There will be a course correction at some point; the unofficial motto of the Internet is, of course, "where anything can be found." People who want the real news, rather than reading about freezing jeans, will find it. Or they'll go out and create it. - Tyler Hayes
Mike, you keep using that word... The use of the word "media" to refer to "journalism as a whole" is a lazy, reductive, and problematic. In his post, Hudack summarily bemoans broadcast, print, web, and magazine journalism, conflating them all. Yes, CNN has big problems, but those problems are best examined within the context of the 24-hour news cycle. Yes, young Americans get their news from The Daily Show--but why is that a bad thing? After all, a cartoonist helped bring down Tammany Hall.
Even more perplexing is Hudack's indictment of leading national newspapers. He claims they are incapable of "breaking real, meaningful news at Internet speed," and seems to imply that they merely parrot sources like Edward Snowden. He seems to have not visited any newspaper's front page--it took me two seconds to find careful analysis of Snowden's leaks. Maybe he doesn't have access to the paywall? Also, I'd reconsider putting Vice on a pedestal. - Joshua Rivera
Things aren't helped by a 24-hour news cycle, pushed into overdrive by the possibilities (and demands) of real-time reportage via social media. But for every 10 "newz sites" less concerned with telling good stories than with providing a constant stream of content generation, we see one example of a prominent original voice that might not have previously been given a forum.
Does the gain offset the loss? I'm not sure, but it does mean that you can't offer a blanket damnation of what the Internet has done for journalism. So what's the answer? Better discovery tools in my opinion. As with music, it's too lazy to say there's no longer good stuff being produced--you just need to know where to find it. Apps which allow you to pick one or two news topics of interest and just follow these don't do anyone any favors in the long run. Nor does the hits-based "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality to content, which prizes fast food sensationalism over balanced journalism. - Luke Dormehl
Historically, small-venue local marketing doesn't generate the kind of buzz (or money) many musical acts deserve. And unless you're what StubHub's head of social commerce Ray Elias calls a "Social Maven"--someone with an enormously ambitious social calendar--chances are you've missed out on more than one opportunity to support a local band you like.
StubHub has a new service called StubHub Music that the company thinks could finally help local music discovery--a problem that many a startup has tried and failed to conquer. Their strategy? Tailor experiences to their customers for big concerts, learn their tastes, and then drive some ticket sales to lesser-known events. "We've always known that our opportunity was to elevate to the top of our funnel, to be a place where fans come to discover things to do and who to do them with," says Elias, "as opposed to just coming to us when they already know what tickets they need."
To date, event discovery apps have been limited in their capacity not only to provide specifically tailored suggestions to customers, but also an easy way to purchase tickets--and they all lack one critical feature: a box office.
Most people don't need to filter through a list of everything happening in their neighborhood on a particular day; they know what they like. The problem is, they may not know how to find it. "If we present people with four options and two of them are attractive and they pick one, we've done a great job," says Elias. "I don't think you have to show people 50 things going on. The idea here is the right content, right people, right time, as opposed to overwhelming somebody with our huge list of stuff."
Instead, Elias and his team intend to use their previously existing platform GoTogether and aggregate data compiled over years of dominating ticketing's secondary marketplace to supply StubHub Music with the kind of information necessary to cater to people's individual and group taste.
"The reason we've really started doing music is it's a huge opportunity to drive a lot more traffic and interest to the smaller venues, to the smaller artist," says Elias. "Typically, in our industry, marketing is terrible. Everybody in our industry focuses on the head events and the sellouts and there's a lot of inventory and a lot of things that go unnoticed out there."
The company isn't guessing there's an opportunity--it did its homework first. And while it's currently only available in San Francisco, Music is expected in every StubHub market in less than six weeks. "Keep in mind, we see what people actually buy and we have a ton of data on that over many, many years, so that's an advantage in terms of our ability to bring these things together and weave together a really nice rich personalized experience," says Elias. "No one needs an app to know that Beyonce is in town."
"I personally don't find that stuff terribly useful," says Elias of social media promotion--even though the word "social" appears in his title. He doesn't think Facebook and Twitter are the key to local events' popularity, even though that's where most of the solutions have focused.
"One really interesting thing about our space is people are already 'socially' doing these things, so we're not creating an inorganic experience here. Our average order size is two and a half, three tickets, so we're talking about a small surface of people and posting that stuff out there on Facebook isn't necessarily conducive to the experience. We're doing a lot of testing around what kind of features would be integrated the right way, really see what's easy to use if you say discover you want to go to this event down the road and you want to bring two of your friends into the mix, how can you easily just hit a button and fire that out."
And there's more to it than just tunes--local sports can also use the same model. It's not hard to figure out where the home team is playing, it's fairly obvious. But what about the finer points of tonight's game? There are myriad details separating one game from another, and Elias thinks the ticket counter is the place to let you know what makes tonight's game worth seeing.
"The pitching match up," says Elias, citing an example. "That makes a tremendous difference in a ballgame. Are they a left handed? If you're going to sit out in the bleachers, where are you more likely to catch a home run? Is it Bobblehead night?"
Apple's WWDC was jam-packed with announcements about iOS 8 and Apple's new programming language, Swift. Due in the fall, there are some big new headlining features, but there are also plenty of little features and enhancements that iOS fans didn't get to see on stage. Here are 12 of them.
Previously if you wanted to message someone a picture you had recently taken, you would have to click the picture icon and then choose "photo library," even if you knew it was the last photo you took. Now, with iOS 8, when you send a picture in messages, you'll also see the last few pictures you've taken.
The little search engine that could is joining the big leagues. DuckDuckGo is a small but fierce competitor to Google search, but its focus on protecting users' information and allowing anonymous searching has struck a chord with users. Speaking of search, Spotlight search is more high-profile in both design and functionality, and Bing even got a mention with its translation extension in Safari. Apple seems to be putting the squeeze on Google and giving users every alternative available.
Since video previews will be showing up in the App Store soon, it only makes sense that there would be an easy way to screen-capture apps in use. You'll be able to perform the function by connecting an iOS 8 device to a Mac running OS X Yosemite and using QuickTime to record what's happening on the iPhone's screen.
This is actually a real boon for frequent travelers who might want to pack an Apple TV and use it on the road. IOS 8 will now allow AirPlay to function in a peer to peer mode. Previously you needed to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the Apple TV, but now no Wi-Fi network is required. This feature seems to be aimed at enterprise users; instead of buying an expensive projector, many companies have been moving toward the smaller and less expensive Apple TV for presentations. Not having to have a Wi-Fi network present only makes impromptu meetings easier.
Most of the time, if a mobile optimized site isn't performing the way it should a user spends a good chunk of their time hunting for the "desktop site" button. The new version of Safari will help with this by adding a "Request Desktop Site" button alongside the bookmarks.
Photo album folders were a new thing in iOS 7, but soon there will a new and extremely handy one: A "Recently deleted" album available to users. This un-Apple-like safety net may be a result of iCloud's improved photo management.
Recommending the use of certain apps based on a user's location could turn out to be a huge promotional feature, but for now Apple just seems to be experimenting with it. Say you walk into Starbucks, with the store's app already on your phone; you'll see a tiny Starbucks icon on the bottom left side of the lock screen. To get to it directly, you just flick up, similarly to the quick camera function. Apple had toyed with recommending apps based on location in the App Store, but this is much more likely to increase engagement with apps. It could also help users with hundreds of apps remember to use the ones they have.
Another potentially huge feature is the ability to make calls over Wi-Fi. This could all but guarantee every iPhone user will be able to reliably make a call in their own home. The only problem standing in the way? The user's carrier needs to support the feature, so as of today only T-Mobile customers will get the benefit. Hopefully more carriers jump on board before launch.
As cool and useful as the predictive text bar will be right above the keyboard in iOS 8, you just might not want it sometimes. It can be turned off, but instead of some menu item, just swipe it down to close it.
This is a feature Android users love to rave about. It's incredibly helpful to be able to dig down and see exactly which apps are causing battery problems and which are doing just fine. You could previously see general battery stats, but now you'll be able to see how much energy each app is using.
Just like per-app battery usage, finer control over location services is a welcome addition in iOS 8. It's nice that you can turn location services on or off on a per-app basis, but sometimes that's too ham-fisted. The new options will be to turn location services on or off per app, as well as "only when using the app." That means that an app can still use GPS and location when you open it, but not once you close it.
Just like using the camera to scan an iTunes gift card was handy addition, it looks like Safari will gain the trick as well. There's a screen shot of Safari prompting to scan a credit card as an input method, rather than have to manually enter it on checkout while shopping.
EyeQuant is a startup which isn't too unusual in the fact that it deals with machine learning and artificial intelligence and has big-name clients like Google and Spotify. But the company's current fascination--using machine learning to train their AI to recognize bad aesthetics and poor website design--takes it into uncharted waters. "We use machine learning and computational neuroscience to build predictive models of how humans look at web ites," founder Fabian Stelzer told Co.Labs. "We focused on attention before but we are now branching out to more general things like why people prefer one image instead of another or what are the factors that drive trustworthiness of image." And he's betting that machines can be trained to detect web pages that most of us think are ugly.
EyeQuant, whose web eyetracking has previously been featured in Fast Company, is betting on one simple fact: Once a sample size reaches a certain size, Internet users in English-speaking countries tend to identify the same sorts of websites as ugly or aesthetically cluttered. Stelzer told me that the company based their new machine learning platform on a sample of several thousand Internet users in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere. As Stelzer, whose company is based in Berlin, freely admits, the AI ranks sites according to the aesthetics of English-speaking desktop Internet users. Sites are than given a score along a scale of 0-100 depending on how cluttered they are, with 0 being the worst.
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"If we used a different data sample, say 3,000 people from Shanghai, it might lead to a completely different AI because their perception of clutter is completely different," Stelzer addded. "But if you look at the Chinese or Japanese web, it all looks very cluttered which compares to what we found in our data." Because Chinese and Japanese are written differently than Latin-based languages, Asian web aesthetics differ significantly. But Berlin-based EyeQuant says their AI ranked Scandinavian websites, rather than German or American sites, as the most aesthetically pleasing.
According to an analysis of Alexa's top 10,000 websites, EyeQuant's analysis found that Scandinavian websites were the cleanest, followed by British and German sites. Among major commercial websites, Apple's pre-iOS 8 page received a 94% score, while poor Best Buy only received 33%.
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EyeQuant claims their AI can rank a website' design clarity at 95% the accuracy of a human observer, and are using the algorithm-generated scores (referred to as Clarity scores) as part of an online service designed to help commercial websites and designers tweak their web presences to maximize conversion rates.
Next up for the company is the release of a Clarity-score product for mobile sites; Stelzer says the mobile edition should be launched later in 2014.
When Tim Cook took to the stage this year it was the first time in WWDC's history where Apple dedicated a third of the event to talking about the new developer features in OS X and iOS during the keynote. Cook called it "the mother of all releases for developers" and no one can say he was exaggerating. By the end of the keynote Apple had announced over 4,000 new APIs for iOS.
But the thousands of new APIs weren't the thing that generated the most excitement among developers. The announcement that garnered literal screams of elation from the crowd was when Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, walked onstage with a big grin on his face and announced Swift, the company's new programming language that has been secretly in development for years. Federighi said Swift "totally rules." But does it? We talked to some prominent developers to find out.
Befitting its name, it didn't take long for coders to launch into creating test apps using Swift. One of the first people out the gate was Nate Murray, cofounder of Fullstack.io, creator of the popular Game for Cats (not humans) and an early employee at IFTTT. Instead of the "Hello World" message programmers traditionally use to test a new system, Murray created a Swift implementation of Flappy Bird, the frustratingly addictive mobile hit which did the rounds earlier this year.
"It took me about four hours to read the e-book on programming Swift and put it together," he says. "I put out a tweet right before I went to bed just to share it with a few friends and it blew up. That tweet [got] almost 500 retweets." Less than 24 hours later, the news had already amassed 2,700 stars on GitHub.
"Swift is surprisingly fantastic, especially for a language that's been developed in secret for years," he continues. "It has the functional programming features that folks like the Ruby community will like, coupled with performance features lower-level programmers demand. And [it's] fast--surprisingly fast, even to compile."
This point is one that is echoed across the developer community.
"My first impression is that it is a fun, clean language to work with that should result in easier-to-read, shorter code," says Keith Blount, the developer behind acclaimed writing software Scrivener. "The introduction of the ability to have multiple return values from functions is particularly welcome. In Objective-C, if I want to, say, create a function that tells me the most commonly used font in a document and how many times it is used--and maybe also whether it is used in more than half of the text--I either have to have separate functions or create extra pointer parameters, which results in some pretty clumsy and ugly function or 'method' names. That's going to be much more elegant in Swift."
That same code in Swift would actually be far more straightforward:
var favoriteNumbers = ["Jane": 7, "Bob": 21, "Sarah": 99]
While the Objective-C line won't make much sense to non-coders, the Swift line is quickly comprehensible to anyone. "More readable code is more maintainable code," Blount says.
"Swift will be a powerful new way to quickly develop certain classes of feature or entire apps," says Till Schadde, CEO of equinux, the Apple Design Award-winning company behind VPN Tracker, Mail Designer Pro, and Spot Maps. "We hope that it will be possible to speed up some standard aspects of app development that are currently still quite time-consuming. By eliminating things like memory management issues and other common pitfalls, Swift should also help to increase overall app stability and quality."
"Coding is the new literacy" is a phrase that has resonated through the halls of various departments of education around the world in the last few years. It's not just hyperbole either. The number of programming jobs is only thought to grow in the coming years, so it's important to get younger people into coding. To that end Swift will likely be a valuable tool in ushering in a new wave of developers, many of whom will bring fresh ideas to the party.
"We've found that it usually takes students a while to get to grips with Objective-C," says Schadde, who runs an annual iOS development course with Munich's TU Technical University in his native Germany. "Despite recent improvements, Objective-C is still very much a C-based language and it shows. Students typically have Java, C#, JavaScript or other scripting language experience, so dealing with memory management--be that allocation or deallocation of memory--and other issues you don't have in more modern languages is often a challenge."
In this space, he thinks Swift will be a marked improvement.
"We hope that Swift's easier learning curve and safe programming model will allow our students to focus more on creating great user experiences and UIs, and spend less time on battling with the intricacies of Objective-C and write less boilerplate code," he says.
Of course, a valid question is whether or not an easier barrier of entry is going to be viewed as a positive by established developers in an already crowded app marketplace. While Apple benefits financially from the 1,206,899 apps (and counting) currently in its iOS App Store, established programmers may well feel different. However, Rishi Modha, director of FIPLAB, says that this fear is overrated.
"Whilst Swift may encourage more developers to start writing apps for Mac and iOS due to a lower barrier to entry, I think the impact of greater competition for established market players who are already developing top-quality applications will be negligible," he says.
Sustained success in tech demands a long-term vision, and while lower barriers of entry might mean a slew of new app makers entering the frame, in the long haul a stronger developer community will be better for everyone.
As for users, is Swift likely to make an impact? Sort of.
"As developers get up to speed with Swift, they'll be able to build better products by writing code faster and more efficiently," Modha says. "However, the end user impact from this may not be immediately obvious for anything other than games and resource intensive applications." When all is said and done, the real impact of this year's WWDC may wind up being some of the "value added" features Apple has incorporated into iOS 8, such as Widgets, Extensions, and the seamless Handoff switching between devices.
"It's hard to be objective (no pun intended) about a new language when you have hundreds of thousands of lines of code in the existing language," says Keith Blount. "My hope is that Objective-C will continue to be supported for years to come, so that developers with large and complex apps such as myself can transition gradually. Although Swift looks exciting, converting an extensive, mature, and stable codebase written in Objective-C is not something that can be done overnight. So as much as I'm enjoying learning it, I'm also dreading implementing it--which is why I'm very glad that Objective-C and Swift files can sit side-by-side in the same app."
For all of these reasons, Swift is unlikely to overtake Objective-C overnight. "At first I was very annoyed [when I heard about Swift]," says Lee Armstrong, CTO at Plane Finder. "We work on a lot of other platforms here so already do a lot of Objective-C, C, C#, JavaScript, Python, PHP, and Java. However, after digging into the docs and having a quick play it appears to have some of the niceties of a scripting language, but the performance of native compiled code. I think once the learning curve has been overcome it will make development much faster and more importantly less crashes in developer code. Transition will be slow and I can see it being 2-3 years before Objective-C becomes the poor relation."
Ultimately, there are also few, if any, discernible disadvantages to Apple's new language. "Swift is the future of programming for Mac and iOS devices," says Frankie Laguna, lead developer for FIPLAB. "It takes all the good parts of Objective-C and makes them fun, fast, and best of all, less verbose. Also, it lowers the barrier to entry for developers who are looking to start developing for the Mac/iOS because its new syntax feels familiar to languages people already know such as JavaScript and C."
No wonder Craig Federighi looked so happy at WWDC.
With summer on the horizon, we're already gritting our teeth in preparation for a few of our not-so-favorite things: the sweat, the 20-minute wait before you cool off after your commute, and most definitely the energy bills.
Omer Enbar has been thinking about these problems for almost 10 years; he just had to wait for the world to catch up with him to properly execute his solution. It's called Sensibo, and today Enbar is the CEO of a small company that is producing them for public sale.
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While there are plenty of smart-air devices on the market these days, end-to-end solutions like Nest aren't really the ideal solution for most people, who already have appliances and controls that work perfectly well. They simply don't do a lot of thinking.
"There were projects like smart thermostats--but most of the world does not have thermostats," says Enbar. He wanted to build something more adaptable. It's solutions like his--the stopgaps--that are the real harbinger of change when it comes to the networking of all our appliances. In this case, the bottom line of converting all those machines could be huge.
"We put a couple of sensors on the prototypes, and we started analyzing the data from the sensors," says Enbar. Using algorithms to schedule when the machine turned on and off, Enbar says, "we discovered that you can save a lot of energy."
Ideas for things like Sensibo have been popping up for years, well before the technology was ready for it. "It was before the iPhone and before Android and smartphones--and it was hot," Enbar says, setting the scene for his brainchild, which first occurred to him eight years ago. He came up with a solution fit for the times: "Back then I sent an email to the computer and it listened to the subject. That means the subject was 'switch on,' and the air conditioner switched on."
This year, the Sensibo team gave more advanced prototypes to friends and family and tracked both responses as well as data gathered from the early pods. Unlike the early prototypes, what the team has built eight years later is something viable for wide distribution. Best of all, it's low-waste.
"I would say that air conditioners are already good at what they're doing, they're very efficient at cooling, but they just don't know how to do it smart because they don't know what's going on in the world," says Dror Bren, the creative director of Sensibo. "'We didn't want to replace one billion ACs in the world."
The open-source nature of the project is crucial. While out-of-the-box it only works to control ACs, Enbar says people are already trying to improve upon it. "It's possible to control the TV if you want, for example, with the API. This is not what the purpose is, but people want to make it better. So we decided to open the API and make it cooler."
When the team started out with their prototype, the device was connected to electricity and placed near the AC.
"From the responses we got from users, we understood the few flaws in that design, of having a single unit placed in the room," Enbar says. The first was that not all users had a direct line of sight from the unit to the air conditioner. Another was the annoyance of mounting something to the wall. A third followed with difficulty syncing with the regular remote.
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"Let's say that I'm at home and my mother comes for a visit, and she doesn't have a smartphone," says Enbar. The unit had to be accessible even for people who weren't technophiles (but still wanted their house cooler, for less money).
Another hurdle the team took into consideration was the use of Wi-Fi. We've all got it, but as anyone clinging to their iPhone battery knows, it's a huge drain on the battery. When they made the decision to power the pods with batteries, the team had to consider other alternatives.
"We decided to go with another technology called ZigBee, which is different from Wi-Fi, very efficient for power, and actually creates a meshed network that the pods can communicate with each other, so it can reach a very long distance," Bren says.
Sensibo recently completed a $72,000 Indiegogo campaign, and is available there for preorder for $99. Sensibo uses a small pod that can be mounted to any existing air conditioner and controlled using the Sensibo app.
Earlier this week, Apple announced some big news: There's a new programming language named Swift, and it seems to be a huge leap forward for iOS development. Swift brings together many safety and convenience concepts and represents Apple's first new language since the never-finished Dylan project of the mid-1990s.
First, a little history: Objective-C has been the preferred language for iOS and Mac development for about the last 14 years, ever since Mac OS X was released. Over those years, Objective-C has had some significant updates, most notably the addition of Blocks in 2010 and then Automatic Reference Counting in 2011. Objective-C's balance of simplicity and power has served the developer community extremely well, but with Swift, I feel like I've seen the future of iOS and Mac development. (I worked at Apple as a senior iOS developer from 2006 to 2010.)
When writing code in Swift, it's much more difficult for a developer to make common errors. The Swift compiler prevents entire classes of bugs which were previously very easy to introduce in C or Objective-C. For example, you can no longer forget to initialize a variable, thereby leading to nasty bugs caused by junk data. All data mutability is explicit, which means the programmer must go out of her way to mark data as being changeable. By reducing the amount of mutable state, another entire class of software bugs is mitigated. Recall Apple's "goto fail" SSL bug from February 2014. It's worth nothing that this bug wouldn't have been possible if the code had been written in Swift, as it requires braces within a switch statement. And the compiler forces the programmer to explicitly handle all possible values, and without any implicit fall-through. I've touched on just a couple of Swift's myriad safety features, and it is clear that Swift will produce safer code than is typical of C and Objective-C.
Swift also allows developers to be more productive by eliminating some of the more cumbersome programming tasks and also by adding lots of convenient features. The compiler's type inference frees programmers from having to re-specify data types throughout their code. Header files are no longer needed. Tuples allow for multiple, named returned values. Structs and enums can be extended. Swift also brings optionals, generics, pattern matching, shorthand syntax, and many other niceties too numerous to list here.
To be clear, none of Swift's concepts are new; all have been borrowed from other existing languages like Rust, Objective-C, Ruby, and Python to name but a few. But what differentiates Swift from existing languages is that it is built atop Apple's Objective-C runtime, which means Swift is already compatible with all of the existing Mac and iOS frameworks. Developers can mix and match Swift and Objective-C, so we can get our feet wet without having to dive in.
For example, our Swift code can present UI using UIViewController and run methods on a background thread using Grand Central Dispatch, just as we did before. Since the framework APIs haven't changed, existing iOS developers need only learn some new, mostly straightforward syntax in order to get started with Swift.
Finally, Swift also lowers the barrier to entry for aspiring developers to get started writing code for Apple's platforms. With its playgrounds for language exploration and its REPL (Read-Evaluate-Print Loop), beginners can experiment quickly and repeatedly. And like many modern languages, beginners won't initially have to worry about memory management.
After spending just a tiny amount of time reading about Swift and attending some WWDC sessions, I'm incredibly optimistic about how Swift can improve the experience of writing software for iOS and the Mac. Of course, it's very early to be so excited. However, Swift brings so many clear advantages that I'm wholeheartedly embracing this brave new world. I can't wait to get started with Swift.
Berlin has solidified its status as a hotspot for tech startups. But it's more than just the likes of SoundCloud and EyeEm that call the German capital home. The city is becoming a hub for medical tech startups--but what is it about Berlin that is attracting developers and founders in the dHealth space?
The reason? Goderma, a startup that is part of the Berlin boom, says it's the result of a two-faceted need. They knew they needed the U.S. as a market. However, expanding to the U.S., especially in a space as regulation-heavy as tech-based medicine, is a huge leap.
"We started in Germany as a test market, but from the beginning we wanted to build a global company. So getting the regulations right all over the world--being able to move our product worldwide--and now focusing the market to really localize was a challenge we had," says Bolz.
He describes the moment when it became clear that a two-market startup was absolutely necessary. "Our whole team was sitting in front of our Geckoboard in our then still shared office space in Schöneberg. Our U.S. test campaign had just launched two days before and numbers were already beating the German market performance (which had been live for weeks)," says Bolz. "We actually said to each other, 'Let's go U.S.A. or go home.'"
Simon Lorenz and Simon Bolz
However, before the team made its move to address the American market, they had to learn how to build a medical-focused startup and do it globally. In the process, they learned a thing or two.
Bolz says one the first keys was to find investors who were more focused on the vision than on the difficulties of international regulatory wrangling.
"Especially in medicine, there's a lot of regulations everywhere--regarding diagnosis, regarding treatment. But if you really think about the bigger picture, we want to change how doctors and patients communicate with each other. The most important thing is getting the right investors who share the belief that technology is going to change the way medicine is working," he says.
His advice for how to spot that kind of investor? Listen carefully to the questions they ask. "If an investor starts asking the right questions about why your product, why your vision, why you think it will succeed from a consumer's perspective and a doctor's perspective, you understand" that they are the right kind for you, Bolz says.
However, he explains, if they just start asking questions about regulations right off the bat, they're probably not right. "If they're [of that mind-set] you have somebody at your back who always will occupy your mind. This is something I think is really important for the medical entrepreneurs to understand."
While Bolz doesn't pick investors who just focus on regulation, he does think the topic plays an important role in hiring. At least part of your team should be made up of people who understand it. "You should have people on your team who understand the regulatory stuff--being aware of how far you can go and what would happen if you would break some boundaries," he says.
"There has to be somebody who understands the day-to-day life of doctors. You need somebody who understands the day-to-day life of patients. And you need somebody to understand the payers. These three stakeholders will define your product," he explains. And whether you will be successful or not.
HIPAA compliance is a giant pain for U.S. dHealth companies. Bolz and his team realized just how tricky it was when they started researching how to build their server stack--without breaking the law or the bank.
"We had been doing research for over a month on how exactly to build our server-side infrastructure stack for compliance. At Amazon Web Services they offer servers which are HIPAA compliant. They are very expensive, more expensive than regular servers because they're HIPAA compliant. They start at $2,000 a month. But then you have to have someone to set them up for HIPAA compliance on a technical level, on an administrative level, and on a physical level," he says.
"We spent a month researching this. Then we found a company called Catalyze.io. We just found them a couple of months ago when they were in alpha. They pretty much solved that problem completely and they do everything for you. That saved us a lot of money in the monthly fees. And also saved us from from employing two more developers who would have been responsible for only dealing with maintaining and monitoring server infrastructure. They cost even less than AWS hosting."
His other most important tip for helping new med tech entrepreneurs cut corners? Find an angel who is the top expert in your field--one who has played globally and understands the differences between markets.
"We cut a lot of corners around which markets we were going to and which people are we talking to in the U.S. because we found ourselves a business angel who was a CEO in biodermatology," he says.
"He told us to go to the U.S. first because, from a payer structure [perspective] the U.S. is a market where people are willing to pay more than in other markets for health products. Also that the market is more advanced than in other parts of the world," says Bolz. "He told us we should go to Brazil next because it's very interesting in terms of the vanity about health."
"He also told us a lot about different markets like Russia," Bolz explains. "In Russia for example, products against acne are a supermarket thing. In France, they're all at the dermatologists and prescription-based. In France, it's seen as a disease if you have acne so you have to go to a doctor and he treats you, even though from a regulatory perspective it could be sold in the supermarket. But it's the way the people think. It's the same with different products."
Even if skincare isn't your area, it is worth considering: Do you know this much about the cultural expectations and values around your product? How might the nuances you don't know affect your growth? Bolz points out that getting up to speed on the cultural nuances that drive consumer behavior has been really important for his company. And it can happen a lot faster with the help of an expert angel. "The tip here is to think about giving someone a chance to be an angel investor to a good condition in the beginning who knows more about the market than you do," he says.
Bolz also seeks advice from another of his early investors, angel Christophe Maire--a name worth knowing.
In many ways Maire is the quiet force behind the Berlin boom. He is known throughout the startup scene as a man with the golden touch when it comes to picking winners. We talked with him about why companies focused on medical innovation are on the rise (hint: it's a huge whitespace in Europe) and what makes the Berlin innovation so hot right now.
"Medical tourism doesn't play as big a role in the U.S. as it does here and in the rest of the world," Maire says. "Medical," he explains "is an example like that [of a whitespace in Europe versus the U.S.].
One notable example he gives is MEDIGO, a platform for medical tourists--people that seek treatment at medical clinics abroad. Medical tourism is a $150 billion phenomenon, with sites like MEDIGO acting as a sort of Trip Advisor for medicine. "It's a good example of the kind of business that emerge from Berlin."
Maire also talked about other hot companies coming out of the city, and why European business models are something to keep an eye on (hint: the good ones migrate to the U.S.).
"The quality of the ventures coming out of Berlin is going to be surprising to some. There are already a few companies that are already in the unicorn league. You have the obvious like ResearchGate or SoundCloud. But you also have the next wave like GetYourGuide for local activities or GoEuro, which is a Kayak for trains and buses. And then you have companies like EyeEm which are doing very well; it's a photo app but they have cracked the code on monetizing crowdsourced photo stock. I'm quite enthusiastic about the new batch of companies," says Maire.
"It's interesting to see Europe as an emerging market," Maire says, "but I think in tech at least there are undiscovered and under-discovered ecosystems here. I think you will see the potential for a number of significant businesses to be created here."
When it comes to business models? Germany and Europe's have it going on.
"A friend of mine invested in a company called Farfetch, which is in the fashion business. Klarna--I think Sequoia invested in them. It's an example of an original, they give people instant credit for buying online. That's a model that emerged here. They are really good examples of models that are somehow a product of the way things are being done in Europe. And that being taken and adapted to the U.S," Maire says.
As to what makes German Berlin startups interesting, both Maire and Bolz agree that it has a lot to do with global teams. And that Berlin is attracting top talent.
"You find today Berlin has become a magnet for talent across Europe," says Maire.
Bolz goes even further than that. He explains how the low cost of living and creative boom in Berlin is helping to draw and keep top talent, giving startups lots to draw from.
"If you start a startup in Berlin, you are international or global just because of the people who are here. We have a very international team. We have people from Eastern Europe, from San Francisco, from Spain, from Asia. You're bound to find a developer from Spain because all the talent from Europe is either going to Berlin or London. But mostly here because Berlin is still affordable, and London is not. Now we even have one or maybe two people who have come from San Francisco. They are coming here accepting pretty much a third or a quarter of their salary because living cost here is so low."
Bolz also explains that the confluence of low cost and creative culture might well be one the core reasons for the success of German innovation.
"Here you can get by with small money and try things out," say Bolz. "You can be a little bit more radical about your ideas maybe without having so much experience being a serial entrepreneur. Like in the Silicon Valley if you did things before--maybe two failed, then one was successful, they would start giving you more money. Here you actually can start building something with your money, maybe easier than somewhere else.
"That's always the reason artists move to cities," Bolz adds. "New York 30 years ago was the same: it was broken down, it was poor, there was a lot of heroin and everything. But it was cheap. And a lot of cool things were happening. So the creative people started to live there. This is something that makes a city more innovative."
When Tim Cook took to the stage at WWDC this week you could tell something was different. Usually the keynote is dedicated to showcasing all the front-end, user-centric features of the next iOS and OS X, with the new developer tools taking a backseat at private labs during the week. But this time Cook revealed that a full third of the keynote would be dedicated to showcasing the greatest features of the iOS 8 SDK--something Cook boasted was the "biggest release since the launch of the App Store."
It turns out that wasn't just hyperbole. As WWDC winds to a close here are what developers told us are four of the massive changes to the iOS SDK that will make coding for it better than ever. What's most surprising? In an uncharacteristically sympathetic way for Apple, they seem correspond to the most prevalent developer complaints.
"It appears that Apple really listened to a lot of the issues being raised by the app development community and has responded with a release that is focused on addressing our concerns, which is reflected in their claim of 4,000 APIs in the iOS 8 SDK," says Kris Ramanathan, CEO and cofounder of Netomat, the company that makes the critically praised Spotliter photo and video app for iOS.
Ramanathan's assertion is something that I'm not used to hearing from developers, who always seem just a bit dissatisfied after each WWDC. However this year things seem different and virtually every developer I spoke with agrees with Ramanathan's statement.
The reason so many developers are so excited about the iOS 8 SDK is because it appears Apple has finally heard their number one call--for iOS to be more open--and given it to them. This is apparent in various areas of the OS. Area's like Touch ID, Apple's biometric security feature that developers can now use for identification in their apps. Area's like the iOS keyboard, which now allows developers to make their own keyboards and for the user--if he or she so chooses--to propagate that keyboard out to the entire OS.
But perhaps the biggest area where Apple has shown it has heard developers' cries for a more open iOS is that of what the company calls Extensibility. For the first time ever, third-party apps can now use extensions to talk to other third-party apps in iOS and share data back and fourth.
"Extensions are fantastic," says Dan Nolan, engineering lead & cofounder of Proxima, one of the first companies to take advantage of Apple's iBeacon API when it was released last year. "The ability to share information between apps in an easy and seamless way is something iOS has sadly missed for a long time, but it's obvious Apple wanted to do this thing right. From playing around with extensions I can say it's obviously something that's been thought through quite extensively. We're going to see some very awesome stuff come out of extensions."
But iOS 8's newfound openness isn't the only thing developers who I spoke with have been celebrating. That's because Apple finally got around to fixing its much maligned iCloud service with a new framework called CloudKit, which seems to fix virtually everything that was wrong with iCloud from a developer's perspective.
"CloudKit is the elephant in the room here," Nolan says. "It's a huge amount of data and capabilities given to the developer for free. It's going to set off a massive renaissance in terms of cloud-capable apps that users are going to love. CloudKit is also going to enable young developers--instead of having to set up databases or handle backends--young developers that want to make social, sharing, or other apps can do it on iOS with a few lines of code. To me, that's incredible."
CloudKit eliminates the need for developers to write server-side application logic and also provides developers with authentication, private and public databases, and structured and asset storage services with an allowance all the way up to 1PB in asset storage and 10TB in database storage at no cost to developers.
"I think it is what iCloud should have come out as with iOS 5, where Apple hosts pretty much anything you can throw at it," says Lee Armstrong, CTO at Plane Finder. "This is a step in the right direction and is similar to services such as Dropbox's API, and Parse [now owned by Facebook]."
But Armstrong notes that iCloud still isn't perfect. "Our biggest issue though is that it appears this is iOS/Mac only. For someone with [an Android app] and a web presence it is not clear if they can also connect into the iCloud backend."
"It's no secret that every app developer now looks for some sort of way to get Apple to feature their app as that is far and away the single biggest driver of downloads," says Spotliter's Kris Ramanathan. "However, it appears to us to be a total crapshoot as to which apps get featured and which don't. Our Spotliter app has gotten excellent reviews on blogs and by users who have downloaded it but because it wasn't featured in the U.S. App Store; generating broad awareness of its existence and its wonderful capabilities is difficult."
Ramanathan is describing the bane of most developers' existence. You spend months--sometimes years--creating an amazing app, but when you release it into the App Store, it simply gets swallowed up and lost among the other one million-plus apps in the Store.
And as the App Store gets more crowded the chances of someone discovering your app diminishes. It's this discoverability problem that is the number one complaint Apple hears from developers about its Store. That's why in iOS 8 Apple has taken steps to help users find more of the apps that are relevant to them. In iOS 8 a new tab will be added to the App Store called Explore. Here users will be able to easily search through categories and subcategories of apps. They'll also have access to a new trend chart, which suggests apps for whatever people are talking about most on social media.
"These are important steps to discoverability and quite important to smaller developers like us who don't have large marketing budgets to heavily promote our apps," says Ramanathan. "Apple has seen and acknowledged this issue and now seems to be taking meaningful steps to address it."
"I think it goes a long way to help solve the issue," agrees Lee Armstrong. "Discovery in the App Store right now is broken and it is great to see them attempt to fix it. The biggest issue is search. We do a lot of work on trying to optimize our Store text but it is more a dark art than a science."
"Those changes were needed and are definitely huge improvements over the current App Store in terms of discoverability. We all know as developers how hard it is to make your app stand out from the crowd unless you get featured," says Jeremy Le Van, cofounder at Sunrise, but he cautions, "Let's hope that the algorithm feeding the trending and related searches are working well."
Of course discoverability is only one piece of the puzzle to getting someone to download your app. The other piece is making your app's App Store page appealing with the limited marketing tools--only text and five screenshots--Apple gives you.
In an effort to improve in-App Store marketing in iOS 8 Apple is allowing developers to upload short videos demoing their apps. Virtually every developer I spoke with said they expect the ability for users to see video previews to be a big factor in the ability to increase download numbers.
"Because Spotliter is a photo and video camera app with unique visual touch effects," says Ramanathan, "these videos will help us highlight the unique features and the absolute simplicity of our app and will hopefully drive additional downloads."
Steve Kusmer, cofounder at Abvio, agrees, yet he expresses a concern others have told me. "Videos provide a richer way to get the values of our apps across. However, they take a lot of work and special talent to do well, so I worry a bit about what this does to the overall ecosystem. Will small development teams be able to keep up with huge teams with big video budgets?"
While Apple seems to have hit it out of the park with the latest iOS 8 SDK, most of the developers I spoke with are still hungry for more. The biggest "wants" still left on their lists include the ability to allow third-party apps to be set as the default clients on a user's device and a Siri SDK so Apple's virtual assistant can be used to control their apps.
However, with the continued refinement of the OS and iOS 8's more open ecosystem, new powerful Swift programming language, and its host of new frameworks virtually all developers agree with Tim Cook's assertion that the iOS 8 SDK is the biggest release since the launch of the App Store.
"This is a massive leap forward in terms of developer support, tooling, and capabilities," says Proxima's Dan Nolan. "The apps we are going to make on iOS 8 are like nothing you've seen before on a mobile device. Coupled with extensions, integrations, and the ability to bring more of your code back to the Mac we're probably going to see a renaissance in Mac development--more than we already have. Apple's going hard on ecosystem and their's is unparalleled--from CloudKit to Handoff they're making it so that regardless of what device you're on you can keep working on what you're doing. It's a huge change."
Last week Apple announced the long-awaited HealthKit framework, a smartphone dashboard for tracking health information, at its WWDC conference. But the founders of Cue--a hardware device that puts lab-quality medical testing in the hands of consumers--are already one step ahead.
"They're just kind of tipping their toes into it, aggregating information from different devices. This goes one level deeper," says cofounder and CEO Ayub Khattak, as he demonstrates how Cue works.
HealthKit is a data interface, but Cue gets under the skin: The device processes biofluid samples in real time, enabling a form of self-diagnosis that leaves resources like WebMD in the dust. Worried that you might have the flu? Take a sample from your nose using the Cue wand, load the wand into a pale green cartridge roughly the size of a thumb drive, and within minutes the results appear in the Cue app, via Bluetooth.
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"You have this result. Now you can do something with it," Khattak says, envisioning a world in which you contact your physician, alert your network, and manage your prescription pickup more efficiently than ever before. As for Apple, Samsung, and the rest of the tech giants developing software for the consumer health market: "We haven't made specific plans for integrating, but are looking into it."
In recent years consumers have been experimenting with an avalanche of new products promising to improve health and wellness, from wearables that track steps per day to smartphone alarms that adjust to REM rhythms. Some, like Scanadu, have started to erode the barriers between hospital and home by allowing consumers to track vital signs like temperature and blood pressure. Cue takes the Scanadu model one step further by capturing and analyzing biofluids--blood, saliva, nasal discharge--in real time.
"It doesn't make sense to us that all that information is locked up with gatekeepers," says Clint Sever, Cue cofounder and chief product officer. "You have to go through a doctor, you have to go through a lab. There's a wait time associated with that, there's a high cost associated with that."
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The cofounders launched Cue in May after years of collaborating on prototypes that married Khattak's biosciences background with Sever's mechanical engineering skills. Along the way they quietly raised over $1 million from a network of scientists, doctors, and investors near their home base in San Diego. The initial product package, set to ship in spring 2015 for $199, will be able to test for fertility, influenza, inflammation, testosterone, and vitamin D.
"It's the hub of health in the home," Sever says. "The whole family can use it."
That aspiration aside, so far the product's early adopters are predominantly fitness enthusiasts looking to quantify their molecular selves. (Among pre-order customers, testosterone cartridges have been the most popular, followed by inflammation and vitamin D.)
To prove the product's value to athletes, Khattak and Sever turned themselves into a mini-experiment. Though their thoughts are in sync, in appearance the two could not be more different: Khattak with second-day scruff, glasses, and the blinking gaze of a creature just emerged from underground, his whole figure crying out for an iron; Sever with clear eyes, slicked hair, and a pressed button-down that echoes the root meaning of his name. Seeing an opportunity in that yawning gap, they switched daily routines in order to gauge the impact of those choices on inflammation, testosterone, and vitamin D levels.
"I ate well and he ate poorly," Khattak says.
"Because I started low and he started high," Sever explains.
"We saw which foods helped to lower inflammation, and which foods increased inflammation," Khattak says. "You see the impact in real time."
Passing the snuff test with regulators and insurers will be a higher order. Federal Drug Administration approval is still pending, and insurance reimbursement for the device is still a distant possibility. "Against common tests found in labs, we're very pleased with the performance of the product," Khattak says.
For now, that will be good enough for some consumers. And it's not hard to imagine that someday, it will be good enough for doctors, too.
This weekend, as thousands descended upon New York Harbor for the Governors Ball festival, many concertgoers were pleasantly surprised to find fewer lines.
Thanks to mobile payments, this year's Governors Ball was a paperless experience--and in festival terms, that means less waiting. Partnering with PayPal and TOURtech, event organizers enabled mobile payment for concessions and goods over Bluetooth, allowing vendors to bill patrons by simply selecting their name from a pre-loaded list of concert attendees--almost the way Square payments work. There's nothing to scan, so the phone doesn't even have to be visible.
"You just order with the bartender, you ask for a beer," explains Yoni Reisman, partner at Founders Entertainment, which produces Governors Ball. "You tell him you're paying with the Gov Ball app, then they'll see you in their system. [The purchase will] just be charged directly to the credit card you've attached to your account, and then you're on your way."
Mobile payment was available concessions and merchandise tents, or at least within Bluetooth range. To jump-start usership, the event offered anyone who sets up a PayPal account for the first time $5 off any purchase.
"Basically it's all through the PayPal app," says Reisman. "It works just like PayPal app will work in Manhattan or anywhere else. There's going to be some PayPal brand ambassadors around that area, there's going to be some signage telling people that pay with the PayPal app."
But implementation of such a complicated network wasn't cheap or easy, either. Especially on an island that isn't normally outfitted for heavy network usage.
"Randall's Island doesn't have hardwired Internet, so everything is kind of beamed over," says Reisman. "For example, at other events where you're not on an island, they have hardwire Internet wires. There's no wires to the island, which is a challenge."
Enter TOURtech, a mobile Internet service provider that sets up temporary Wi-Fi networks for remote locations hosting events like the Ball. From a 24-foot trailer, TOURtech operates a network catered to the specifics of each event that can broadcast for miles.
"We talked to the local bandwidth provider and get them to set up a temporary link into Randall's Island, into the icon stadium towers, then we relay that data down to our trailer," explains Bunky Dunn, the Governors Ball account manager at TOURtech. "From the trailer it goes into our routing system, and then we relay that signal with point-to-point links around the site, as well as using some hardwired connection."
TOURtech is responsible for all connectivity at the site, a primary reason that concertgoers did not receive Wi-Fi access at this year's event. It's just too expensive a service to provide. But the infrastructure TOURtech provides Randall's Island is what makes the festival work.
"We're backstage, point-of-sale, production, sponsors, media support, productions, Wi-Fi, production hardline, network printers, the point-of-sale stuff, sponsorship requests, which is always becoming more and more interesting as things go on," says Dunn.
"Miller Time (a promotional area at the festival where fans can drink in the shade) has asked for a high-density Wi-Fi deployment as well as a live stream of the main stage. So we're having to bring in some special equipment to kind of transfer that live feed all the way over to their activation area there."
With the concert in full swing, the system was working without a hitch. This ain't your parents' music festival--except, of course, for the mud.
Software developers at NPR are currently tackling a huge problem. Its massive library of archival content is gathering dust and the system organizing it all needs an upgrade. The organization is weighing its options of building the software versus buying an off-the-shelf solution--looking at spending upwards of six figures to address the problem of taxonomy and cataloging the growing content the organization creates.
Because NPR creates lots of content in different formats, this is a pretty complex problem. Naturally, the solution won't be simple either.
"We've got our radio folks who are producing stories and programs and providing their own set of metadata," says Jonathan Epstein director of software development at NPR. "The library, in charge of their cataloging and archival of 40 plus years of our content, is doing their own effort. Then you've got bloggers who are tagging [web posts]. This is all sort of happening independently of each other and we really see a problem of wanting to connect the dots here."
This problem isn't unique to NPR. The recently leakedNew York Times innovation report details how even an organization as well-staffed and forward-thinking as the Times can struggle with structured data. At the Times, the lack of metadata surrounding much of its archival content has led to major headaches.
In the digital world, tagging is a type of structured data -- the information that allows things to be searched and sorted and made useful for analysis and innovation," says Epstein. "Some of the most successful Internet companies, including Netflix, Facebook and Pandora, have so much structured data -- by tagging dozens or even hundreds of different elements of every movie, song and article -- that they have turned the science of surfacing the right piece of content at the right time into the core of thriving businesses.
Epstein says NPR is currently figuring out the best path to take, whether by building something internally or buying a ready-made solution. Ideally the library would own and manage this yet-to-be-discovered tool, which would connect all the meta data between different areas of the business.
"We don't always know exactly what we want when we start," says Epstein. "We know some details of what we want to build, but we really have to get our hands dirty with things. This is where research spikes come in and are key to this."
During the organization's most recent "serendipity days"--personal time every quarter dedicated toward projects of interest--two software engineers presented a project that touched on several of the metadata problems NPR is looking to address.
As part of this agile process, the company is now setting up a research spike and seriously looking into how it can leverage inside talent to tackle some or all of its current library problem.
Without mentioning specifics, Epstein hinted that not doing the technical due diligence has bit NPR in the past and so it's been figuring out ways to work that out before it gets too deep down one rabbit hole.
The "process"--which isn't really defined--is definitely an iterative one. "Failure is part of that process," Epstein adds.
For example with the library project, it's unclear if a homegrown solution is even possible because of how extensible it will need to be. But it's still an option worth exploring at this early phase.
Epstein isn't expecting to build the whole thing in the two-week research spike window, but he is looking to get a better visual idea of what this still unknown piece looks like.
"It's [about] starting to define the problem better," Epstein explains. "So even if we can't do that, we've at least developed some sort of artifact where we can start to better understand when we're looking at these individual vendors that we're still talking to."
For businesses, though, it's all about the money. Whether you're talking about the straight-up sticker price, or the absorbed employee time. It comes down to the dollars and cents in one way or another.
"For us, buy doesn't always mean buy," Epstein says. "It could mean open source, particularly because we are so reliant on it adhering to the overall NPR mission. It's very much the open organization and open source is sort of the technological representation of that same mission."
Besides the metadata project, the most recent buy-versus-build decision turned out to be one that took the open source route. Epstein says that contributing back to the open source community is a critical part of working toward the common good, while helping boost the organization's tech reputation.
Most recently, during performance testing and looking for bottlenecks, the team discovered some issues around MySQL and connection management. The load wasn't being evenly distributed on a bunch of clusters and in some cases were overloading on one server while another one was sitting idle.
After a few false starts of trying to correct the problem, the team took a step back and realized that this couldn't be unique to them, so they found a PHP plug-in that addressed the issue they were having. After some testing, the fix went live a few days ago.
It's unclear whether having a dedicated guideline to reference for when to build or buy would be helpful for Epstein and his team, but chances are it wouldn't. It seems for NPR, it's all about the circumstances of the project and being able to move quickly.
Ten years ago, searching for a recipe online may have turned up a few results from the Food Network, at best, and miscellaneous entries from amateur cooks, at worst. A few years later, swelling activity on blogging networks began to proliferate communities of food bloggers. And fast-forward to now, where food bloggers have become brands, sharing the same online publishing space with innovative food websites.
In just a few years, the online food publishing industry has gone from standard photo-and-text blog posts to full-blown interactive websites. To gain a competitive edge, food websites, whether run by bloggers or bigger brands, now leverage the latest web tools in the online food world.
"It was only a matter of time before Silicon Valley started looking into the food world," says Dave Feller, CEO and cofounder of the recipe search site Yummly. Grassroots websites started to become profitable businesses over the last few years. CNet acquired the online food forum Chowhound in 2006, which eventually became CBS Interactive's CHOW. Other online-only food publications fell in line, like Food Republic and Eater.
Feller's story is not much different. After working in marketing and strategy for a few tech companies, like StumbleUpon, Feller created Yummly as a tech startup, receiving funding to build his team of developers. Startup investors were taking notice of the online food world.
Aside from attention in the startup world, social networking has driven a lot of growth in food sites, especially among food-blogging communities. One online food enthusiast knew this early on. Babette Pepaj started her site, BakeSpace, as a tech website first and a food website second. She recognized the need for other foodies to be able to use the tools of social media to connect on one site. She describes its original concept as a sort of Facebook for food bloggers.
Eventually, Pepaj started the food-blogging conference TECHmunch to teach bloggers how to best utilize web technology to bring their content to wider audiences. The conference recently took place in New York City and will roll out in Chicago on June 27th.
[View the story "TECHmunch NY 2014 in Pictures" on Storify]
At TECHmunch, food bloggers benefit not only from socializing with their fellow bloggers but also from learning directly from tech and marketing experts on how to improve their craft. A lot of the learning curve involves mastering cross-posting across different social media outlets, like Vine and Tumblr.
"Most bloggers are really good at one or two things that they have mastered. Like they know how to use Twitter and how to use, you know, Instagram, or to write a great blog post. They know how to take a great photo," says Pepaj. "But there's always one weakness." Pepaj says that her conference helps food bloggers improve on those areas that might be lacking.
Another big lesson for food bloggers to learn, she says, is understanding search engine optimization and leveraging keywords within blog posts. "Just knowing to use a few key words makes all the difference," Pepaj says. Focusing on a few topics can motivate a blogger to generate more specialized recipes, better interact with her audience and drive readership, she notes.
Sites like Google Analytics and SEMrush can help food bloggers understand where they stand in the blogging space, relative to their competitors, as well as understanding how keywords affect their web traffic. Pepaj also recommends that bloggers try out different themes for their sites before launching. A useful tool to do this, she says, is ThemeForest.
When he created Yummly, Feller knew he wanted to create a central place where picky people with any food preference could find recipe ideas with ease. Feller is a self-proclaimed mustard hater.
"We've mapped the food genome," Feller says. Yummly's search algorithms contain variables like spiciness, taste, and cuisine, which make its database of recipes searchable from several angles. Essentially, he and his team have turned food into data. The company's research scientists frequently muse on the character of certain dishes, like which characteristics make some foods more Super Bowl-friendly than other foods.
Yummly's most popular searches by day of the week, screenshot. Check out the interactive graphic here.
Yummly's team can parse other sites' hrecipe formats to extract recipes onto its site, locking onto information like the ingredients used, cooking instructions, and cooking time. But Yummly mainly uses machine-learning techniques based on a graphical model to scour the web for good recipes to feature. Still, Yummly invites users to submit their favorite recipes from elsewhere on the web to the site.
Yummly has an API that lets developers customize their food-related searches, drawing upon its vast recipe database. Large sites like DuckDuckGo and Instacart use it. But smaller developers have used the API to figure out better ways to cook, like this site that educates users on how to use up indeterminable vegetables.
Jason Jeffries had a solid background in programming and web design when he decided to venture out on his own. Together with his wife, who used to be the creative director at another design agency, he started the interactive design agency Blenderbox. Outside of programming, his passion lies in food. He owns two cheese shops in New York, one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan. In a former life, he ran a coffee shop in Williamsburg.
So it is only natural that the company's culture is culinary. Its client portfolio centers heavily on food. Blenderbox has done the websites for the Brooklyn Brewery, The Brooklyn Kitchen, and the artisanal food store D'Artagnan. Its corporate office in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn also boasts gourmands. Blenderbox's director of UX has published an illustrated book on cocktails, and employees there benefit from beer that is brewed in-house.
Jeffries takes the mobile user experience into careful consideration when designing sites for restaurants.
"Eighty percent of restaurant sites you go to, you know, they have these old, outdated sites that have a 10-megabyte PDF file of their menu or wine list that people would have to download," says Jeffries. Or they would have Flash elements or a movie that would poorly transfer to a smaller mobile screen.
Blenderbox's current method of tackling mobile is responsive web design. Responsive web design, or RWD, not only adjusts the content to the platform but also scales it for the screen size.
"The person is just sitting in the back of the taxi, and they just want the phone number or the address," says Jeffries. Even Yummly's Feller attributes a lot of the advancements in food websites to the surge in mobile Internet consumers, so designing for mobile is key.
RWD is an improvement on the dated practice of keeping a separate site for mobile, which one would typically recognize with the string "mobile." or "m." before the rest of the URL. Now, the ability to shift content by platform is ingrained within the CSS code for a single, main site, thanks to improvements in CSS technology, called media queries. Another feature that has come about with better CSS tools is the collapsible section, which is recognizable by three horizontal lines on a tab in the page, the "hamburger" in developer jargon.
Before concentrating on using RWD, Blenderbox relied on older CSS technology and parallax design. The sites were decidedly colorful, marked by the distinct static and moving components when scrolling up and down a page that parallax technology provides. One of these older sites, FiveThirtyBrew, was nominated for a Webby Award in 2012. Incidentally, the beers featured on the site are the ones that Blenderbox brews in its offices.
Whether the more technologically advanced food websites will usurp the text-and-picture food bloggers remains to be seen. Feller thinks that sites like his have a certain technical advantage over the ones that have fewer resources. "There are certain things that bloggers are never going to be able to do," Feller says. Things like creating shopping lists and calculating nutritional information of a single recipe are second nature to the tech experts at Yummly.
Yet, Feller sees Yummly's evolved search algorithms as a complement to standard food bloggers. "Really, Yummly allows those recipes to be discovered. You know, not just being able to discover a recipe but being able to discover bloggers, being able to discover them based on your tastes, but then we drive all the traffic to these guys," he adds.
Sure, staying on top of the latest web design technology, social networking trends, and marketing tools has become a priority to food scribes on the web. But food experts don't have to become authorities on online technology. In fact, Jeffries's cheese shops' website uses Shopify to integrate online shopping onto its site; he didn't build that feature from scratch. The tools are out there for foodies to use. And the online culinary world only stands to expand its reach to consumers because of these trends.
Like most technologists, Lari Numminen and Jukka Kekäläinen founded their company called Zilta with the aim of making people's lives better through software. In Zilta's case, the two founders wanted to solve the problem of making smartphones easily accessible for people who were not technically savvy. To that end, they created an Android app that acted as a beginner's home screen, with clear easy access to the essentials--but they soon ran into a problem. Their app couldn't solve all of Android's user-unfriendliness. So the pair decided to enter the hardware business and bring a Zilta smartphone to life.
Here's why they rejected the major smartphone platforms--and how they sourced their own hardware to improve upon them.
"There is a learning curve adopting new technology, and we're not making things any easier by making things like smartphones so complex," says Lari Numminen, when I ask him what's the matter with the current state of the smartphone. "Both the last two smartphones I owned came with over 35 pre-installed apps all clamoring for the user's attention. In reality, we only use a handful of apps on a regular basis, and many of us outside of the tech circles don't actively go out and look for new ones."
Zilta aims to tackle this complexity problem when it goes on sale to the public later this year. It's a smartphone that a non-technically inclined user can understand how to use in a matter of seconds. It does this via a simplified OS built on top of Android 4.4 that divides the home screen into six tiles, five of which are the main apps people use--email, photos, contacts, a web browser, and messages (the sixth tile takes users to additional apps and settings).
If that home screen sounds a bit familiar it's because Numminen and Kekäläinen turned to the past to be inspired to find the solution to what a large group of smartphone users want today.
"One of our role models is the old Nokia phones from the '90s that only did a handful of things, but they did them very well," Numminen says. "In fact, quite a few people use their classic Nokia phones today."
"We had a rough idea of how our smartphone should look and feel like," says Artem Klimkin, marketing manager of Zilta, who along with Numminen, Kekäläinen, and four other members including two Android developers, one UX designer, and a product designer, comprise the entire Zilta team. "When you look at it, the working principle of our device is entirely built around the law of the vital few (aka the Pareto principle), where the majority of the effects comes from the fewest causes. This is the reason Zilta's home display has only six buttons, which users can configure to suit 80% of their demands."
Ironically, the team behind Zilta never dreamed of creating a smartphone at first. When they first conceived of Zilta it was only meant to be one of the hundreds of thousands of apps on the Google Play store, though one which was solving a major Android issue.
"The initial idea was to build an app that made Android easier to use and see what happens," says Numminen. "We started off with a small number of installs in our first week in Google Play and a lot of encouragement from a couple of forums we wrote on. Over time, the number grew to about 10,000 installs from 185 countries."
During that beta period, however, Numminen and his team discovered a lot they never expected. For starters they assumed their Zilta app would be most used by seniors like their parents--and they also assumed that there was no need to simplify smartphones for people under 50.
"We started off specifically focusing on 'smartphones for seniors' but over time we realized that wasn't the right strategy," says Numminen. "We saw that our average user base was younger than we expected: 55-64-year-olds. But also, it simply isn't sensible to define your product by demographics. We've seen totally net-native 90-year-olds and almost totally computer illiterate younger people."
But more importantly than discovering it was fruitless to code for demographics, the Zilta team discovered that their app was never going to reach the majority of the users it was designed to help the most.
"While we got good early traction in terms of downloads," Numminen says, "everyone we talked to in person as potential customers told us they don't download apps at all; they buy phones with all the basic apps installed."
If that was the case, what was a startup with an app that could help make smartphones easier to use for millions of people to do if those millions would never download an app on the smartphone they just bought?
The answer, Numminen decided, was that they were going to have to make their own smartphone.
But it wasn't only the unwillingness of their target users to download apps that is the reason Zilta got into the hardware game. "[Another] major reason why we decided to move from apps to hardware was because our initial beta testers were simply using the wrong smartphones," Numminen says. "We saw quite a few initial testers with either complicated high-end expensive devices or then ones that had big flaws, such as inadequate amounts of RAM memory. When all phones look the same in the store, who is going to tell a first-time buyer over the age of 60 which phone is right for them?"
Most software startups would probably jump ship to another project upon the realization that for in order to get their app into the hands of those it would help most their startup would need to supply both the software and the device it runs on. But for Numminen and the Zilta team it was the next logical step--and an achievable one, they believed, because of the state of the smartphone market.
"Smartphone hardware itself is becoming commoditized. The big question is what you do with it," says Numminen. "An analogy I found is that around 1922 Ford's Model T had over 60% market share of cars sold in the U.S. after it had revolutionized the manufacturing process. A couple of years later there were 109 different car brands, as every one sought to differentiate. We think something similar is happening with smartphones, and every week we read about new brands like Oppo, OnePlus One, et cetera."
Since the Zilta team had created their custom OS (which runs on top of Android 4.4 KitKat) they knew better than any what hardware requirements would be the best for their OS and their users' needs. They decided on a five-inch screen with a MediaTek MTK 6582 chipset, a quadcore 1.3 GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 4GB ROM, and a 1800 mAh battery battery so the phone was both power efficient and powerful enough. They topped the Zilta off with a 5MP rear and 2MP front camera and dual SIM cards.
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But as a group of software developers who had bootstrapped Zilta so far they had neither the resources, experience, or money of a company like, say, Apple, which could build its own manufacturing plant and production lines. This meant that these first-time hardware vendors would need to rely on existing manufacturing outlets to bring Zilta to market.
"Once we had made decisions on the hardware specifications we started to think who could manufacture it," says Jukka Kekäläinen, the lead developer and cofounder of Zilta. "We learned about OEM (original equipment manufacturer) and ODM (original design manufacturer). We knew we needed to find an ODM factory that could manufacture and customize the phone according to our specifications."
Like many startups that are entering the hardware game, the first source that came into Kekäläinen's mind was alibaba.com. Kekäläinen also did some Googling and found a similar site called dhgate.com. Both sites are massive wholesale operations similar to eBay where you can buy everything from Steve Jobs dolls to intricate computer components custom ordered through various factories' storefronts.
"I gathered a list of about 15 factories from web searches and accounts that sell phones through these sites and started contacting them with emails," Kekäläinen says. "The pivotal number [to look out for] is a 'minimum quantity order,' which meant how large was the batch they would sell. We got a reasonable response from about a 10 of those factories on the list and the minimum order was typically from 2,000 to 10,000 units, which would be a huge financial commitment for a small company like us. There were also two factories that could deliver a minimum quantity of 300 or 500, but the quality of the sample photos weren't that convincing."
Before committing to a relatively large order from one of these factories, Kekäläinen decided to order two phones from the factories as test units as a precaution--and it's a good thing he did. The phones he ordered as sample units were flagged by Ireland's import office as counterfeit.
"It was just a horrible experience to a comical proportions," he says. "It took about a month [to get the samples] and, once the Irish customs had red flagged them, the notion, 'Where's our counterfeit phones' became a running joke at the office."
In the end, they decided to go a different route. Kekäläinen contacted a local importer who already had over a decade of experience sourcing through companies that had established relationships with reputable factories in Shenzhen.
"He found an ODM factory that could manufacture the phone according to our specifications and got a sample from their existing model," Kekäläinen says. "We benchmarked the hardware and the quality was even higher than we expected."
For startups going down the similar route of sourcing factories in China to make their hardware products Kekäläinen does note that it is possible to find a cheaper deal by contacting these factories directly, but he recommends startups spend the extra money and go through an established supply chain expert who has existing contacts in China, lest their first batch of hardware gets detained at customs for breaking copyright laws.
Now that Zilta has managed to source the right factory and received prototype units of their first smartphone, they are just finishing making tweaks to the software and finalizing the hardware before the Zilta phone goes on sale to the public for €139 (about $189USD) this December.
But though the coding and hardware is nearing completion the seven member team has to worry about something software developers have long taken for granted: distribution. After all, there is no Google Play or Apple App Store where their hardware can be stored and immediately distributed for a 30% cut.
"We will handle distribution ourselves, but we're also talking with potential supply chain partners," Numminen says. "To start with, we will ship to Ireland and handle the logistics from here ourselves. For the moment, we only take pre-orders in the European Union, so we treat it as a common market. As things progress, we would naturally like to revisit other international opportunities, but for a small team, we're fully focused on delivering on our first batch by Christmas."
As for other startups that may want to make the jump to hardware, Numminen says it's not as daunting as it at first seems. The trick is to do your research and don't rush into any manufacturing agreements without checking out the product first. Numminen points to companies like Fairphone, which crowdfunded its initial batch of ethically sourced phones, and Jolla, which raised funding to produce its own line of smartphones as examples that demonstrate that it is easier than ever for software developers to produce hardware in today's age.
"We've never made or considered making hardware before," he says. "But we do think that the barriers to getting started are falling. Designing or combining hardware and software is easier than it ever has been."
These days, marketing moves fast. Gone are the days of singing frogs on logs; now agencies create campaigns that reflect what society is discussing at the moment. But there's a problem: If your creatives are always locked in a room inventing campaigns, how are they supposed to stay in touch with the tectonic cultural shifts happening in the outside world?
To promise social currency for big clients like Microsoft, the creative agency Mother created something like a mixture of an externship and Google's former 20% time program. By encouraging employees to work harder passion projects, the thinking goes, it will get them more in touch with the zeitgeist in their particular niche--which can lead to a more authentic kind of inspiration.
"That deep knowledge about a particular vertical can be a useful thing that we can take to our clients," says Mother partner Tom Webster, talking about his employees' passion projects. "It does something very good for the clients and it does something very good for the individual, because they're fulfilling a passion, a dream that they've always wanted to do and creating good out of that kind of stuff. And Microsoft suddenly has a little bit more swagger in its step that it can now talk about art, or talk about gay rights. It gives them a social currency, really. It's great."
Microsoft, in case you aren't aware, has not classically been associated with artistic street cred. The Mother-designed 1MSQFT project aims to change this, and it was the explorations of one Mother employee that led to the team discovering the perfect art for the campaign--Harlem's Vogue house dancing. Mother strategy division's Marissa Shrum pitched Vogue because it fit the project's goal to give space to unique art with passionate communities. It inspired a dazzling "21st-century version of a 19th-century ball" between Shrum's New York Vogue and New Orleans Bounce court communities, the centerpiece of May's New Orleans Music Festival--and the largest 1MSQFT event to date. The video above is the culmination of the festival--a hot rod rally with freak bikes, horse riders, and every vehicle in between.
Mother is guided by a playful philosophy: "To make great work, have fun, and make a living. Always in that order." Its atrial three-floor New York office is filled with the likes of a taxidermied bear and a red British phone booth, homey knickknacks that disarm the professional chill of its pristine white desks.
Silicon Valley titans may have the market cornered in stocked fridges and free cafeterias, but Mother's balance of irreverence and productivity makes it a warm, homey, and fantastic creative environment. Add to that a "flat, fluid" workplace that shifts desk assignment every three months (so new hires can rub elbows with agency partners) and you get a company that dispenses with everything it can--especially hierarchy--to forge a creative environment.
If this sounds loose and fuzzy, that's how Mother's creatives describe it--producing a self-acknowledged "cult of Mother" earned by an office-wide culture of respect. A positive feedback loop that forges loyalty from great creative leeway.
A project may appear that a creative believes would absolutely jibe with a band or artist the creative has made inroads with during Mother's pseudo-20% time. But the creative isn't subject to the typical pitching slog up the company hierarchy. Instead of approval, the creative hunts down allies within Mother, be they creative directors or content editors. Make a strong case and Mother could go all-in on partnering with said brand or artist for a high-profile project--and suddenly Microsoft is holding a ball and shakedown for the Vogue and Bounce courts.
Microsoft entrusted Mother with 1MSQFT because the creative agency had helmed Microsoft's launch party for the Surface tablet in New York City two years ago--and knocked it out of the park. Instead of hiring celebrities or musicians to perform, the Mother creatives channeled the tablet's personalization angle via NYC living ...by keying up a tablet for each NYC neighborhood. The resulting project, "Microtropolis", created a 200-foot-long Manhattan to walk through.
"In each neighborhood we had devices on top of buildings that represented Chelsea, the West Village, SoHo, Gramercy, Hell's Kitchen. We worked with local partners who we felt represented those areas, so we had Lincoln Center in the UWS and The Whitney in the UES," says Mother creative Josh Engmann.
Each neighborhood partner took ownership of their Surface and filled it with content representing their corner of Manhattan.
As it happens, The Whitney's participation led them to strike up a conversation with Microsoft--and now the software giant is a technology partner of The Whitney. To Mother, that new relationship made this project a success.
"That's what we mean when we talk about immeasurable, intangible value being exchanged that then turns into very tangible value," Shrum says. "These win-wins are being created for all parties."
Failure, then, is when the end result of the project doesn't satisfy Mother's triple goal to "make great work, have fun, and make a living."
"When things fail, they're not enjoyable here. The outcome might be successful. It's not because it didn't sell X or it didn't achieve Y--it's that everyone working on it wasn't very happy. It could've made us loads of money! But it just made everyone incredibly unhappy, would be a failure," Engmann says.
"The other component piece with experimenting is learning. Feeling like we learned something that will help us continue to empower creative people so that we can get better," Shrum says. "So the experiment could go terribly wrong, or nothing happened and it fizzled, and I learned that this combination of things doesn't produce."
Which is lofty--after all, somewhere near the top of any company, a bean counter is measuring the value of endeavors in dollars and cents. But Mother sees the abstract, intangible success of relationship building as groundwork for business partnerships.
"Yeah, there is someone at Microsoft looking at this line item and wondering 'what's this about?' How much value is this adding back?" Shrum says. "Being able to say 'intangible relationship building is leading to tangible results for this company' helps."
Financial results aren't the only metric of success. After all, the goal of 1MSQFT is for Microsoft to create culture and make inroads with artists. When Mother creatives bring on artists as partners for a project, they give the artist extensive leeway to produce what they want. The artists produce work near and dear to them--work of which they're proud enough to invite their friends and community.
"People take it very seriously when you're not controlling them. When you're giving them open space in which to create, there is this sense of personal responsibility to their art," said Shrum.
"[Knowles] guest-curated the space. She actually had her own artwork. It was this entire wall of gold with this giant gold speaker stack," says Mother creative Thomas Kemeny. "Then at around midnight, someone was like 'Um, Beyonce just showed up.' And that goes to the point of artists inviting their friends, saying 'Hey, you gotta check this thing out!'"
Mother may nearly require its creatives to delve into extracurricular passions, but the agency itself experiments on a macro scale. Mother Ventures, LLC started Dogmatic, an NYC-based hot dog chain, and White Pike Whiskey, a small-run craft whiskey line, among others. No Mother Ventures endeavor produces tech or expertise that directly improves Mother's advertising game. Instead, Mother learns the workings of entirely different fields.
"There are things you learn that you don't know you're learning. Like White Pike allows us to dive deeply into understanding liquor distribution that applies to our client Diageo on a massive scale, or then to look at craft whiskey," Mother partner Webster says. "So when it comes to talking about a bespoke project at another time, we can talk about how whiskey can be a bespoke product as well."
Eight or nine years ago, Mother experimented by creating entire internal divisions, like Design and Experiential, Webster says. Today, that integration has built Mother a streamlined idea-to-prototype pipeline.
"A lot of shops have to go outside to find those resources, but we have a lot of really good producers in-house who can fast-prototype stuff across all different kinds of mediums--digital, physical, architectural, design," Webster says. "We can do a lot of that stuff really quickly in-house and then we have a huge fuzzy edge of makers and creators and specialists who we can tap into that we've worked with before to come up with the latest greatest thing."
At the end of the day, Mother is about making connections--from the client to the artist to the demographic. So when you have a hot rod vehicle rally in New Orleans judging the best rides from a chaotic mix of fancy cars, freak bikes, and dancing horses, you're going to be making some culture.
"What happened in New Orleans is that we just brought all of these different combinations of things together and it was almost hard to explain to people," Shrum says. "Then these magical things happened when all these pieces combined. In the rally, we got people who were passionate about cars, people who were passionate about bikes, people who were passionate about horses, baton twirlers, and a hip-hop icon and we're gonna go meet in the 9th Ward. Under a bridge. In an abandoned dirt lot. And look at all these connections that happened and people whose perceptions were transformed?"
"I made a point of asking the participants, 'did you enjoy yourself?' And all of them said yes. That's an anecdotal measure of success," Engmann says.
Horse racing statistics at Belmont Park have always been collected by humans and stopwatches. But this year--almost in lockstep with leagues like the NBA and Nascar--horse racing added digital tracking equipment to The Belmont Stakes. For the first time, horse tracking happened digitally, thanks to a company named Trakus, which tracked every step of each leg of the race and augmented broadcasts with identification information and vital statistics--like split times--in real time.
In North America, there's a runoff to the official starting line for thoroughbred racing. The starting line isn't actually at the gate. In fact, the race doesn't begin until the first horse breaks the starting line. At most racetracks, Trakus provides that information and its system times the race. The photo-finish provider determines the order in which the horses race, but the actual timing of horse racing is provided by the Trakus system.
"The technology we use is two-and-a-half gigahertz per spectrum, so similar to Wi-FI," says Bob McCarthy, CEO at Trakus. "We use our own programming and our own hardware. All the electronics that are provided by Trakus to the racetracks are Trakus designed. The design is proprietary from the circuit board all the way up through the software and into the presentation of the graphics."
Trakus uses RFID to track horses as they move around the track. The company outfits all of its partner racetracks--14 thoroughbred tracks worldwide-- with around 30 antennas and RFID chips for each horse.
Once the Trakus system collects the data, it's wired to Equibase--a thoroughbred racing information company--and Trakus' partner racetracks to provide sectional timing and margins and other statistics such as trip distance and speed into files the racetrack can display on their websites.
"That allows us to use the antennas sort of in an opposite way of GPS," McCarthy explains. "The antennas are the receivers. The tag on the horse is the transmitter. We track the horses typically 30 times a second, so within a foot. We provide that information with near-zero latency into a graphic and it's overlaid on the television broadcast or over the simulcast feed."
That enables live replay and production enhancements, including full-field running order, sectional times and margins, a "progress" meter, and photo-realistic 3-D virtual replays.
"It's Viagra for horse racing," says Pat Cummings, Trakus's director of racing information.
And while the order of finishing is still determined by photo-finish systems at every track, Trakus is responsible for recording the statistics supporting the official results. The officiating of the race is done in North America by the Equibase chart caller and the stewards. Once that information is published, there's one set of results as a combination of Trakus and other technologies, the photo-eye technology and the red broken beam.
"The technology is completely integrated with the photo-finish system. If there are other systems out there, whether it's predecessor technology or otherwise. Because we do so much more tracking of each runner individually, there's an open interface for the integration of information before it's presented."
Trakus, originally a spin-off from an MIT Entrepreneurship Competition, was involved with more team-based sports at first, and was featured in Nascar and the 2001 NHL All-Star Game.
Around 2004-2005, however, the company reorganized to focus on all forms of horse racing, primarily thoroughbreds. In 2007, Trakus went live in Toronto at Woodbine Racetrack. Since then, Trakus has expanded to tracks all over North America and even into Hong Kong, Singapore, Istanbul, and Dubai.
Trakus was installed with New York racetracks at the end of 2013 and has been operating at Aqueduct and Belmont Park. Trakus already operates at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby and, while Pimlico is the final holdout for Trakus' own triple crown, 2014 marks the first year the technology will be featured at the Belmont Stakes.
"We operate every day at all of our partner racecourses, so we're more than a television product," says Cummings. "We're part of the racetrack's own simulcast feed."
It's hardly a secret that online dating giants OKCupid and eHarmony serve very different audiences--eHarmony being an older and more rural crowd, OKCupid a younger and more urban user base. But Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj "Misiek" Piskorski has recently uncovered evidence that confirms these demographics also have totally different ways of communicating--or e-courting, for lack of a better term.
Piskorski, the author of the newly released A Social Strategy: How We Profit From Social Media, is one of a handful of researchers worldwide who have obtained data sets from both OKCupid and eHarmony. In the course of writing his book, which is designed for businesses with social media presences, Piskorski found out about the online dating habits of millions of users. After personal information was anonymized, he got to the meat of the matter: How users send messages to each other, how they flirt online, and how they use the sites.
"Where eHarmony varies dramatically is communication," Piskorski told me in a recent telephone interview. "People reach out to each other more on eHarmony, and get more responses on there. The people you traditionally would think have the hardest time reaching out to people do very well on eHarmony."
In his book, Piskorski explains that older women and a subgroup he categorizes as "men who are shorter, older, or overweight" are more likely to send messages to potential partners on eHarmony than on OKCupid. He attributes that to the different demographics which use eHarmony, but he says most of it is due to the site's design. Because users are connected with a relatively small pool of partners--rather than letting them pursue the entire site as in OKCupid's case--he feels that encourages otherwise timid users to go ahead and message.
EHarmony gave him a large data set in exchange for unpaid consulting work, while he purchased site records from OKCupid. Both data sets were scrubbed of personal information that could identify their customers, and then Piskorski went to work to see how they tick.
Piskorski told me that he feels eHarmony's much-vaunted matchmaking algorithms are less central to the service's success than most people think. Instead, he feels eHarmony became a popular and profitable online service primarily through user experience.
"Stereotypical norms of courtship dictate that men pursue women, and women wait to be courted--this is not a very efficient solution to dating problems," Piskorski says. "EHarmony instead is a place where women are much more likely to reach out to men than on any other site I've seen. EHarmony managed to subvert the norm to quietly empower women to reach out to men, and you see the same with older people and others who might be at disadvantages in dating markets."
"EHarmony markets itself as a place where the algorithm makes all the difference, but it's really restricted communication (that leads to the service's success). EHarmony only allows you to communicate with a limited number of people with a limited number of matches, and, of course, the people you message also have limited matches. This leads to better odds than Match or OKCupid."
OKCupid's "Quiver" feature, which appears to have been removed from service earlier this year, ended up being used disproportionately by women in Piskorski's analysis. In his book, he writes that the service, which used algorithms to recommend several potential contacts for site users, allowed some women to message potential male contacts without feeling any social stigma from stereotypes that men should make the first move.
Meanwhile, OKCupid's "Quickmatch" feature is disproportionately used by male site members. According to Piskorski, it is used in statistically significant amounts by "young, tall, and athletic men" who normally do the least number of user searches on the platform.
Piskorski says that OKCupid's visitors feature, which (optionally) shows the identities of users who view a user's profile, makes men who are shorter, older, or overweight "particularly likely to write to women" who show up in their visitors list. He tells of speaking with one OKCupid user during his research who said "If I see a woman visited my profile, I am thinking, she saw my picture, and the little blurb about me, and something must have attracted her to me. So chances are, if I write to her, she might write me back." His subsequent investigation found that this was the case for many users.
The data sets used for this story can be found here.
