Coworking spaces are all the rage right now, but coming from a graduate program in the hardware-hack-happy MIT Media Lab, James Patten found his coworking options weren't nearly as appealing here in New York as they were when he was in Cambridge, with its labs, libraries, tools, and workspaces.

"People would just kind of stop and talk in the halls and answer each other's questions about whatever they were working on," he says of the Media Lab. "I think I learned more in that kind of experience in school than anywhere else, and so I wanted to try to re-create that."

The kind of "serendipitous" workplace that Steve Jobs famously loved is even more important when all the products in the building are in prototype stage--a common case in coworking and incubator spaces. And while that's the titular purpose of traditional coworking spaces, hardware coworking spaces have different requirements--like more space, more spare parts, and a different kind of "maker" clientele.

"Our landlord is the junk collector, and so that sets the tone for the space," says Patten, who has founded his own hardware hacking loft in downtown Brooklyn called Dark Matter Manufacturing Collective.

"A friend of mine was doing a project for a retail store a few months back and he needed some mannequin arms--he went down to the basement, and sure enough there is a box full of mannequin arms there," says Patten.

Why Hardware Projects Matter

Patten's own company, Patten Studio, resides in the Dark Matter space. He creates and builds interactive user interfaces and surfaces for spaces like museums, as well as for industrial applications. Patten Studio's projects focus on touch, which he says is critically missing from our interactions with computers today.

"Touch screens are basically everywhere now, but when we're using them, you're not actually getting very much information from the screen through a sense of touch," he says; touch screens feel the same whether you're tapping an on-screen keyboard or tapping a device that's turned off.

In the real world, he says, "it's tactile feedback that allows you to direct your visual attention to another place. The more we take advantage of the sense of touch, the more it becomes like riding a bicycle."

That's good, he says, because it means more humans can collaborate with a single computer. "It's hard for multiple people to reach in and participate at the same time," Patten says of touch screens. "It's hard to follow what people are doing, because the input and output happen in different places. If we use what we call tangible interfaces, then we can tie into these existing social practices of sharing, and it's easier to follow what other people are doing."

Patten's projects consist mostly of playful art installations, such as museum exhibits; his interactive exhibit of the periodic table of elements is on display at the Chicago Museum of Science.

But Patten says his favorite and perhaps most versatile project is Thumbles, pictured above, which are small robots that drive around a tabletop surface under computer control. People can interact with and control the Thumbles by moving them, and the computer can react to those interactions via a smart tabletop called the Sensetable, which Patten says will have real-world computing applications.

The Minds Inside Dark Matter Manufacturing Collective

Along with Patten Studio, Dark Matter Manufacturing Collective is home to 13 other companies. They pretty much cover all the bases, from the country's first community biolab to Andy Cavatorta, who made a "gravity harp" for Bjork's tour.

The other teams in residence here are a motley group, but Patten says it's not about creating a club for "hardware hackers only." Instead, it's more about attracting people of a certain mindset.

"With one exception, we all make stuff and make physical things with our hands. But beyond that there is a lot of variation from where people are coming from," Patten says. "Whether it's software and electronics like me or mechanical engineering or music, costume and set design, there's a lot of variety--which means that if you get stuck, there are a lot of different perspectives that people can offer to try to help you solve your problem."

A variety of colorful residents means colorful projects, and challenges that normal labs or coworking spaces couldn't accommodate.

"We were doing a kinetic installation for Barneys and for part of it we had to figure out how to drill a hole exactly through the center of a bowling ball," Patten says. "It turns out this is actually really tricky to do." Between the group in the loft, they figured it out.

Beyond hardware hacking, Patten wanted a unique social environment for his space, so he instituted some interesting membership requirements. To join the space, a new member has to be recommended by someone who is in the space already. They also must give a presentation and Q-and-A session about their work, and then be voted in by a two-thirds majority.

"The people in this space sort of share this large intellectual network and because of that there is a lot of trust from the beginning," he says. "You know, this person's not going to steal my idea or whatever so I can be really open about that idea with them and then maybe in turn they'll have something to add. So there's this kind of free, open sharing of knowledge that I think is sometimes difficult to have in a traditional coworking space."

Doctors aren't big users of social media--their schedules don't leave a lot of time for casual status updates, and a state-by-state patchwork of ethics rules limit what they can post and who they can friend, says Toronto critical care physician Dr. Joshua Landy.

But, Dr. Landy says, they are signing up for a specialized smartphone app called Figure 1, created by a company of the same name he cofounded. It's a specialized photo-sharing hub for physicians and other medical professionals, letting them share photos of medical conditions for teaching and diagnostic purposes while incorporating safeguards to ensure patient privacy and consent.

"From my users' perspectives, the way that privacy gets dealt with in the app is essentially, if you can think of the phrase, the best way to keep a secret is not to have it," Dr. Landy says.

That means doctors are prompted before they share an image to make sure they have proper consent and to delete any identifying features from their photos and captions, like patient faces, tattoos, or potentially unique facts like the dates of a hospital stay. Redacted parts of a picture are actually scrubbed from the image file, not merely obscured, he says.

"After that you submit the images, before they're released for anyone to see, they're reviewed by our privacy moderators, and then once they've been moderated or released, if anyone has any concern about any images, they can be flagged or removed immediately," Dr. Landy says.

Dr. Landy, who as a visiting scholar at Stanford University studied doctors' use of mobile devices, said health care workers were already snapping and sharing pictures of patients' medical conditions with their colleagues before Figure 1 launched about a year ago.

"But what they're not doing is saving those pieces of information: those interesting cases, those teachable moments, that sometimes happen at 4 in the morning when you're alone," he said. "There's no current way, or there hadn't been [before Figure 1], any way to archive these great educational assets."

The company formally markets Figure 1 as an educational tool, not a diagnostic one, and, Dr. Landy says he's seen doctors use the tool to quiz students and residents about medical conditions. About 15% of U.S. medical students use the app, estimates cofounder and CEO Gregory Levey.

Dr. Landy says Figure 1 lets doctors and other medical professionals see a wider range of cases than they might see in ordinary practice.

"There's so much just outside the usual circle of regular diagnoses," he said. "You only learn how to make that diagnosis if you've read a case or seen that case in person."

While the site is open to any licensed medical professional, Dr. Landy says it's definitely not intended for patients looking to self-diagnose.

"People get called out if it seems like someone's trying to hide their own medical condition as a patient's condition that they're trying to help, and I think that makes sense," he says. "People are here in a professional environment, and they want to talk to each other and learn from each other."

But, he says, patients he's spoken to are generally okay with doctors anonymously showing their colleagues photos of their medical conditions through the app.

"Almost every patient I've asked is interested in having the images shared as long as they're being shared in the interest of education and being able to help people who are in similar circumstances," he says. "Obviously if someone says no, that's pretty much the end of the conversation; the first principle of medical ethics is pretty much patient autonomy."

Weeks after Google released their diversity data, LinkedIn followed suit, with Yahoo most recently releasing its numbers. Everyone is disappointed by the mostly male company portraits here--but what is truly unsettling is that these statistics don't give us enough information about how many female engineers there actually are.

At Google, women hold 17% of tech roles, while women at Yahoo hold 15% of those roles. LinkedIn did not report how many women made up its tech workforce. But these companies don't go into any more specifics. Why are these numbers so vague?

What Are These "Tech Positions"?

Saying women occupy "tech roles" is a start, but would be interesting to know is what kinds of roles fall under what these companies call technical positions. We really can't be sure whether all their engineering teams are made mostly of men since a "technical position" could relate to something softer, like interaction design or product management. Let's get data on how many women are actually developing and creating the products that these companies put out.

Yahoo's infographic is typical of the lack of detail in these diversity reports; it shows that 15% of its tech employees worldwide are female, but the data does not get any more detailed than that. Neither does Google's.

A look at an Equal Employment Opportunity report that Yahoo made available along with the graphic shows a different breakdown of job roles. In the report, the category that might best correlate to technical roles that require bachelor's degrees is "Professionals." Because EEO reports have to follow certain standards, this breakdown doesn't vary from company to company. LinkedIn's report was done the same way.

It is hard to say whether companies are hiring female computer science graduates or not. Google used a figure from the National Center for Education Statistics that showed that 18% of computer science graduates are female in the U.S., a reason for which it might have trouble hiring women into tech roles. But that statistic only holds true for bachelor's degree holders. The National Science Foundation shows that females are more widely represented at the master's and doctoral levels.

When looking at these companies' data, there is no indication of what type of degree these female tech employees hold. Women in tech roles could hold any type of STEM degree that teaches programming in its curriculum, whether it is at the bachelor's, master's or doctoral level.

On average, in the professional world, the numbers of female techies beat out those from Google and Yahoo. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, developer, programmer, and IT roles held by women in industry range from around 20% to 33%. Those numbers are much higher than what either Google or Yahoo reported in the tech category, and they exceed the figures for female computer science degree holders.

If available labor is not the issue, than maybe retention in the tech industry is. Females leave the tech profession for many reasons, which the Anita Borg Institute frequently highlights in its reports about the tech industry.

The data is great to have, but understanding the root of the numbers is the greater task.

Accountability, Not Data

Now that the data is out there, these tech companies know they have work to do, as they have said themselves.

"What Google has done now is set the bar for this," says Telle Whitney, CEO of the Anita Borg Institute. "I mean, people are going to be watching them, and I'm certainly expecting those numbers go up. I think they understand that expectation."

When Google published their numbers last month, Laszlo Bock, SVP of people operations at Google, pointed out on its blog, "Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it's hard to address these kinds of challenges if you're not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts."

A lot of meeting those challenges seems to group into corporate social responsibility initiatives, on a macro scale. Google says that it has given $40 million to support computer science programs for women and girls since 2010. LinkedIn is one of the sponsors of the Anita Borg Institute's annual Grace Hopper Conference. LinkedIn created an annual women's only hackathon. Dell gave a $1 million multi-year award to the women in business advocacy organization Catalyst in 2012 to fund its research and campaigning programs.

There are also some good programs in the works for the employees. Google has made its diversity policies and programs very visible on its site. And Dell just became the first tech company to take part in a pilot program from Catalyst that brings men into the discussion around retaining women in the organization.

Getting Data Released

It could have been media pressure that got Google to release its diversity data. Jesse Jackson went on a tour of tech companies earlier this year to get them to open up about their diversity numbers, focusing on minorities. When Google was eventually ready to release its diversity data, it invited Jackson to its shareholder meeting to mark the decision. Before Jackson's advocacy round, CNN tried for a year and a half to get diversity data from Silicon Valley's largest companies. Many decided not to share.

"Many of them do not release their data internally, broadly, let alone publicly. There's a real reluctance to talk about these numbers publicly," says Whitney.

Dell, however, is one of the more compliant companies. For the last three years, they have published diversity numbers in their corporate social responsibility report. Last year, around a third of the Dell non-managerial workforce were comprised of women, around a quarter of managers were women and women made up 15% of the board. Dell's numbers do not get more detailed than this.

Vivek Wadhwa, the academic and tech pundit, has also been putting pressure on the tech industry to address its shortcomings in diversity. His tweets alone are enough to cause a commotion in the Twitter-sphere. Last year, he criticized Twitter for not having a single woman on its board when it went public. He has been working on a book on women in tech, for what seems like forever. It is common for companies and the media to listen to him when he speaks out on the matter since he is so consistent on the topic of women in tech.

So when Yahoo put their data out there, it was a big deal for Wadhwa.

Whitney agrees that it is a good thing that this data is out there. The issue now is trying to understand it and how best to act on it.

The Unwelcoming Tech Industry

That women feel shut out from engineering positions is no secret. A Valleywag article from last year featured several interviews with female ex-programmers who have been otherwise shut out from the field because of gender discrimination and the brogramming culture.

A new study by the startup competition hosting company YouNoodle backs up the claim to how exclusive tech culture can be to women. Among top female business founders taking part in startup competitions around the world, 16% start businesses in the IT and software sectors, more than any other business sector. However, these techie women-led startups tended to find less success down the line than those in the commerce, services, and life sciences industries.

To create the infographic, YouNoodle sifted through its internal dataset on the startup competitions it helps run, globally. It concentrated on the 1,000 women-led startups that received the highest scores, relative to their peers, during the competitions' judging processes. All of the scores were normalized to account for different judging strategies across competitions.

Torsten Kolind, CEO of YouNoodle, and his colleagues are not quick to analyze why the data looks the way it does for these women. They simply wanted to put the numbers out there to show how startup ecosystems differ around the world. Still, they recognize that many women want to come into the IT and software industries but generally find more success elsewhere.

"We decided to just publish what we know from the data. The rest, right now, I think is mostly speculation," says Kolind.

Last week at the MIT Tech Review Conference, Thad Starner, professor and director at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, showed off some special gloves that could change the way blind people "see" the world.

A few years ago, Starner's team built gloves that could teach people to play piano melodies in less than an hour, by sending motor vibrations through their hands. His new team just finished a study that proved they could do the same thing with Braille.

But this time around, something even more important happened. Researchers were surprised to discover that people could not only type Braille through passive haptic learning, but that they could actually read the Braille phrases afterward. (Note that these aren't people who'd been exposed to Braille in the past.) And it wasn't just their fingers that learned the phrases, some kind of muscle memory--it was also their brains.

"What we already found is that you can learn single hand melodies just using vibration while you're doing other things like reading email or watching a video or doing a math test," Starner explains. "You just go do your daily business and at the end of this, you can play the melody for 'Amazing Grace.'"

However, this time around the problem is much more complex--and the implications much bigger. "Music is a particular low-level region of the brain," Starner says. "But if you're doing things like typing, that's much higher levels of the brain. So this time we tried Braille. It's six fingers, six dots. It's chorded between two hands. It has all sorts of implications. It means we could access different parts of the brain. Braille was an ambitious goal for us."

The study, conducted by Starner and PhD student Caitlyn Seim, worked like this: Each participant in the study wore a pair of gloves with tiny vibrating motors stitched into the knuckles. The motors vibrated in the same order as a typing pattern of a pre-determined phrase in Braille. Audio cues let the users know the Braille letters produced by typing that sequence. Afterward, everyone tried to type the phrase one time, without the cues or vibrations, on a keyboard.

The sequences were then repeated during a distraction task. Participants played a game for 30 minutes and were told to ignore the gloves. Half of the participants felt repeated vibrations and heard the cues; the others only heard the audio cues. When the game was over, participants tried to type the phrase without wearing the gloves.

According to Starner, participants who felt the vibrations during the game were a third more accurate. "Some were even perfect," he says.

What's cooler--participants also picked up additional unexpected skill. "Remarkably, we found that people could transfer knowledge learned from typing Braille to reading Braille," says Seim.

"This finding is significant because it suggests that we can teach both these critically important skills at once, passively. Now that we've done it, what we can show is by having you play four hours of Candy Crush Saga, you hear the words spelled out and as you tap with your fingers, in about four hours you know the alphabet. The funky thing is since it's Braille is simple, you can also read it visually and tactiley."

How well did people learn the language? After the typing test, passive learners were able to read and recognize 93.3% of a phrase's letters. Because the study also didn't include screens or visual feedback, participants never got to see what they had they typed. And they had no indication of their accuracy throughout the study. It was all done through passive haptic learning.

"People always ask how long does this last," says Starner. "The answer is we don't know yet. The Braille study is brand-new." However, Starner does tell the story of working with a passive haptic rehab patient. The man didn't have feeling in his hand. Months before, he had used the glove to learn to play piano. And then he had forgotten how. On his next visit to the lab, after 10 minutes of wearing the glove, he could play the whole song again. Muscle memory is powerful stuff.

Passive Haptic Learning: A Growing Field With Massive Potential

Passive haptic learning opens up all sorts of new possibilities for blind people--especially since Braille is hard to learn for diabetics, wounded veterans, or older people with cognitive impairments. According to the most recent World Health Organization statistics, there are 39 million blind people in the world today, most in developing countries.

It also points to all sorts of new opportunities in haptic learning. There are currently very few other companies or researchers working in the space. Jun Rekimoto's work at the University of Tokyo on the Possessed Hand is an interesting example. So is the powered exoskeleton at Atlanta's Shepard Center for spinal column injury, a wearable robot that can not only help paraplegics stand up and walk but also send electrical stimulation pulses to muscles (assuming that there is some muscle control). It essentially retrains them to walk on their own.

"There's some astonishing stuff in rehab," Starner says. "But it's not passive learning. It's active. The only other passive project is by [M.M.] Dimitrijevic. It is Mesh Glove Electrical Simulation. This is for patients who have 50 degrees of flexibility in their elbows. You wear this up-to-the-elbow metal glove. It stimulates the muscles. You can't feel it. The brain releases more and more neurons in response to the stimulation and flexibility increases to 100 degrees, which is really quite astonishing."

While that's a great example of passive haptic rehab, the technology could be applied in all sorts of ways to help healthy muscles learn new skills.

"Can you do it for dancing? Can you record the sequence of muscles required for throwing a baseball? Can you do something for sign language, which has very complex hand motions? You could certainly imagine it for any type of typing," says Starner. "I think there are a lot of things where you might not be able to teach the whole system, but you can definitely speed up learning."

"We spend a lot of time working on this crazy technology," says Starner. "And sometimes it just pays off."

While the Braille studies have not yet been broadly released, they will be presented in Seattle this September at the academic-focused International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC).

Not every new and innovative thing in the tech scene comes in a package as attractive as a slick smartphone. Some things are a harder sell. Like iBeacons.

One year after Apple's tracking and proximity tech launched with iOS 7, a clear, game-changing use case has yet to emerge. That may change with additions to Core Motion in iOS 8 and the increasing importance of the M7 coprocessor inside most iPhones and iPads.

But for now, the best way to figure out the utility of iBeacons may be to experiment on interns. Chaotic Moon, a dev shop in Austin, Texas, did just that--they built an intern-tracking system. (Yeah, these are the same guys that tased an intern from a drone during SXSW this year. How they keep getting interns we don't know.)

Chaotic Moon employs interns of two stripes: engineering interns who help with development, and general purpose gophers.

"Those people, they're not as well trained as my engineering staff, but they're not always on their computers and they're not always available, we can't always reach them via Hipchat," says Chaotic Moon's VP of Technology, C.K. Sample, describing a scenario where the studio might need a particular intern. "And it's hard to track him down because he's on a couch in a corner somewhere hiding."

To that end, Chaotic Moon built Gopher Tracker: a network of iBeacons set up in strategic areas throughout the office. When synced with interns' smartphones, Gopher Tracker would let management know exactly where the interns were and allow them to send the misplaced intern a message.

"Typically when we do projects like this, they're just internal, for fun," says Sample. "But sometimes we'll repurpose it for something that we pitch to a client. For example, this, given that it's all about locating where people are in an office space and around town, I think it has many applications in retail--it's one of the heavy places where iBeacon has been used in order to locate things in a store. But with this you can use it to monitor your staff working in a retail place."

Sample is right in implying that iBeacon's most prominent use case has been among retailers: From Apple's own stores to grocery stores and Macy's, there hasn't been a remarkable variety of applications for the tracking technology. As we've noted before, this might be a problem: The more superfluously implemented iBeacons are, the less of a chance they have to catch on and be put toward any truly useful ends. But Sample isn't worried: He just thinks that people haven't started to think big enough yet.

"People tend to--when they hear something like [iBeacons] they think 'oh, so it's more precise than GPS inside a building.' And they don't really get what that means," says Sample. "Because most people are really familiar with GPS at this point and they think it's really accurate… GPS is kind of--it's the general area, but it's not as precise as iBeacons. It could enhance all kinds of mapping, all kinds of directions, all kinds of experiences where you need to find exactly where something is."

Sample cites a number of areas that could be improved using iBeacons: anything that involves mapping or tracking, timecards for hourly employees, mesh networks, and general workplace management. The developers of the world just need to start playing with it more--this is, after all, coming from the same people who, after getting Google Glass, promptly strapped it to a rocket.

"The more that clients like ours start to think about ways to leverage iBeacons and actually build them into their applications and build functionality that makes people's lives easier into what they're doing, then consumers will adopt it," he says.

Big data can be a nightmare. Sure, it's powerful stuff, but as anyone who's worked with large sets of raw data knows, they can be an epic bitch to wrangle. Cleaning things up into a consistent, usable format winds up burning an extraordinary amount of time--precious hours that could be going into something far more productive. But that may be about to change.

The issue is known among data scientists and statisticians as data transformation. And by Jeff Heer's estimate, it can eat up anywhere between 50% and 80% of a data wrangler's time. The University of Washington professor and longtime data visualization specialist is now the cofounder of a startup called Trifacta, which offers a web-based platform for easily transforming data sets.

"We've been trying to address this by changing the coding exercise into a sort of visual exploration," says Heer about Trifacta, which runs in the browser and uses behind-the-scenes algorithms to smartly reshape data without needing to code.

If Heer's name sounds familiar, it may be because he's one of the creators of D3.js, the JavaScript library for data visualization that won a journalism award last year. Between this and his 15 years of academic work in the field, Heer's data viz cred could hardly be more rock-solid. But while the tools for visualizing data have become faster and easier to use, massaging that data into a usable format--for visualizations or any other purpose--is still a massive time-suck.

"As I looked back on what I was doing, I realized I was spending the majority of my time on data preparation," says Heer. "Everything from finding the data sets that are relevant to different questions, seeing if they're even responsive to that question, seeing what the quality is like, and transforming the format of the data."

Heer knew he wasn't alone. Before building Trifacta, he and cofounders Joe Hellerstein and Sean Kandel interviewed data gurus at dozens of companies and found that, indeed, data transformation is a huge pain in the ass for just about everyone.

How Data Transformation Works Now

"This is the elephant in the room of data science," Heer says. "I feel like we can make this process much more efficient and accessible."

Currently, most data transformation is done by hand inside software like Excel. As you might imagine, it's tedious work.

Just ask Enzo Yaksic, who has been collecting data about serial killers for 13 years. As the founder of the Serial Homicide Expertise and Information Sharing Collaborative (SHEISC), Yaksic has taken data sets from a variety of sources and built a centralized database of serial killers that has been used for academic and journalistic purposes.

With data coming from various law enforcement agencies and independent researchers, the results were anything but consistent. Each individual spreadsheet contained its own set of columns and even the columns that matched often had data points spelled out in different ways from spreadsheet to spreadsheet.

"The setup of each file was different," says Yaksic. "Some files were messy while others were pristine. Misspellings caused several duplicate records that had to be removed."

Merging the data, scrubbing it clean, and zapping duplicate records was all a manual process for Yaksic, who painstakingly pored through each cell in Excel, all in the name of good data.

Not only is this process every bit as tedious as it sounds, but it has a bigger problem: It doesn't scale. For smaller academic or marketing-oriented data projects, manual data transformation is possible, even if it's not fun. But once the data reaches a certain size, this type of cell-by-cell tweaking proves impossible.

To modify large data sets, typically some kind of custom script is employed. This approach is more efficient than doing things manually, but it's not without issues of its own.

"Writing this code is extremely time-consuming," says Heer. "Somebody writes the code, they run it on the data, and it takes a long time to run in many cases. And then you're looking at raw outputs to try and assess if the code did the right thing. If not, they have to go back, fix their code, debug it, and then run it again."

It's also technically prohibitive for many. "People who may have interesting analysis questions and not necessarily deep programming skills are sort of left out of the process altogether," explains Heer.

A Problem That Spans Industries

In short, neither manual editing nor semi-automated scripting have nailed the data transformation problem, in Heer's view. And he's not alone in thinking so.

The problem isn't limited to a single profession or industry. In the era of big data that is now well underway, companies of all sizes are generating ever-growing mountains of data. Rarely does it get spit out of their systems in a format that's easy to analyze, visualize, and learn from.

Take health care, for example. As the U.S. transitions to electronic health records, data about patients and their treatment holds huge potential just waiting to be unlocked. But the information generated by one health care provider's office may look wildly different from what comes out of another. Then factor in insurance companies and you've got a huge mess. Meanwhile, patients are starting to generate streams of their own personal data, a trend that will likely accelerate once Apple jumps in on the wearable gadget game and puts their new Health app on every iOS 8 home screen.

Tying all of this health-related data together in any meaningful way will only get more challenging as the breadth of the data grows. Heer knows what kinds of data headaches the health care industry experiences. One of Trifacta's first clients is a subdivision of Lockheed Martin that processes all Medicare and Medicaid claims on behalf of the U.S. government.

How Trifacta Works

Trifacta lets users ingest a sample of their data, which is then viewable both as a spreadsheet and via built-in visualizations. Once the data is loaded in, users can make selections of the parts that need some tweaking. This is where things get interesting.

"Based on that selection, we have algorithms that actually search over a space of possible transformations," says Heer. "One way to think about this is as sort of an intelligent autocomplete." For instance, you might select a given chunk of cells and Trifacta will suggest replacing missing values or getting rid of unnecessary columns. To accomplish this, Heer and his team designed a proprietary programming language.

"Behind the scenes, our software is searching over possible statements in that language," says Heer. "But the flip side that's also pretty exciting is that we can take that programming language and then compile it to run in a variety of environments. So you might be working with a small subset of data directly in the browser but the results of that is not just the transformation of that sample, but it's actually a script that we can then take and run at scale across your cluster."

In other words, those scripts that you were hand-coding for one-off data transformations before? Trifacta writes the code for you and then spits it out in whatever format you need.

"Not only are we trying to make data transformation much more visual and interactive, but we're doing so in a way that can actually scale to large data volumes," says Heer.

The result? A tenfold increase in efficiency, the company boasts. Having just raised $25 million in its recent Series C round of funding, Trifacta has its sights set on streamlining the process even further.

Before long, it won't be enough for music services to play songs you might enjoy. Instead, the music platforms of the future will know exactly what you want to hear based on your mood. But how?

The latest foray into mood-powered music comes from Rok Mobile. When the music-focused mobile carrier launches in a few weeks, it will be powered by Gracenote's Rhythm platform. This will give users of the Rok music service the ability to use a mood grid to play songs based on how they're feeling. The company's Rhythm platform has been categorizing song moods for a while, but this is the first time it's being used publicly.

Rok Mobile isn't the first company to tackle mood-based music curation. Beats famously introduced its Sentence feature, which lets you dictate a playlist by playing a Mad Libs-like fill-in-the-blank. Songza also built its service on playing music depending on what you're doing right now. Moodagent is one of the more visual music apps, using sliders to adjust the amount of "angry" or "happy."

Rok Mobile will also be visual in its approach. Users of the mobile service's app will see different squares defined by extremes on the top, bottom, left, and right. The X axis is defined by intensity ranging from calm to energetic, while the Y axis is emotion ranging from dark to positive.

"Music evokes memories and emotions, it helps define how you are feeling at this very moment," says Ty Roberts, chief strategy officer and cofounder of Gracenote. "By assigning specific moods to every song, Gracenote is finding commonalities that cross artists, genres, and eras. This allows us to bring together songs that share similarities to match what you want to listen to right now."

Initially Categorizing Music

When Gracenote gets new music, there's a few different ways that it initially breaks it down and gets it into its system. If it's a new song from a new artist then the human editorial team--or "musicologists" as they're called--listens and assigns a basic artist profile.

A new artist with new music: First, a new artist with a new song gets tagged with a genre profile. If a song spans more than one genre, it's weighted, such as 80% contemporary R&B and 20% hip-hop. Next, a song is tagged with its origin. For example, The Killers are from--and associated with--Las Vegas.

An era is then assigned. Because we're talking about new artists with new songs, this is typically the current era (i.e., early 2010's). Then there's artist-type information, which includes gender and/or composition of the group.

Existing artist with new music: If an existing artist produces a new song, there should already be an artist profile and it's typically carried over to the new song.

Complex artists: For the few artists that truly do change from one release to the next, a new song is listened to and assigned another genre from the broader artist profile. If the genre isn't already in the artist's profile it's given a new genre outside that profile.

How Music Is Matched To Mood

Once songs are initially categorized based on the process described above, they are then ready to be dissected for insights about their mood.

Gracenote's feature-extraction system analyzes the sound waves of an audio recording for features that mathematically describe qualities like harmony, rhythm, timbre, and melody. The system then takes those audio features and puts them into its sonic mood classifier algorithm, which looks for patterns that can help the system classify tracks by mood.

A song is weighted against a mood vector containing 101 different moods. Based on the weighting, each song is then assigned a spot on the mood grid.

Those 101 public-facing moods are getting distilled further into 25 different moods, in the case of Rok Mobile. Examples of the different types of moods include defining "peaceful" as pastoral/serene, delicate/tranquil, reverent/healing, and quiet/introspective.

Having 300 different moods internally used moods helps to train the algorithm and improve accuracy. By having so many different options, the goal is consistency.

It doesn't really matter if someone gets the 100% exact mood they're looking for, as long as it's close. The real issue is having all the songs that play being closely aligned. The more categories there are, the more likely that similar songs get grouped together rather than forcing a wider range of songs into few groups.

The multimeter is about to grow up. Long a mainstay in the toolkits of tinkerers, the electricity measuring tool is so clunky and complex that it can be more of a distraction than an aid. That's why two engineers from Denmark set out to reinvent the wheel--err, nob--through a product called Voltset.

Instead of awkward nobs and confusing symbols, the Kickstarter-funded Voltset relies on a small hardware component the size of large key chain, which holds two probes and connects to a smartphone. Once it starts shipping, the Voltset promises to bring an age-old tool to today's growing class of makers in an all-too-familiar form factor.

Mobile Maker Hardware

Voltset founders Michael Bruun-Larsen and Tom Wang said they had to ask themselves how they would design a maker's tool for the 21st century when beginning their project two years ago.

"We thought, 'Well, it's obviously more helpful to base it on the smartphone that everybody brings and just make it an extension of what you already use,'" says Bruun-Larsen.

Designing features like the USB port, they thought of worst-case scenarios like a dead computer battery.

"The two sockets on the top are for the regular banana sockets, so you can extend into the stuff that you are already doing," cofounder Wang says. "Voltset doesn't have a battery, so if you have a phone you'll always have these mini probes that can save the day."

It also includes multiple sensor compatibility with extensions, which the team has been utilizing in its collaboration with solar technology educators KidWind.

"We are using ambient light sensors in Arduinos with a Bluetooth configuration, to measure relationships between solar energy output and the sun," says Bruun-Larsen. "The idea is that you buy Voltset once and you will have it for the rest of your life so that when new technology comes along, you just upgrade the extension."

Going to Kickstarter with an early prototype instead of a finished project has helped Voltset get more feedback to shape the product. "We wanted to make this into a hub but we didn't know we'd receive such a variety of requests," Wang says. "It's kind of overwhelming and it's all very specific and high-end."

For those high-end requests, corporations are already finding uses for internal solutions to the likes of on-call technicians.

"The technician would take the readings while out in the field through LTE, Internet, or something else, then share it instantly to the headquarters where they have the really experienced technicians look at readings and guide them."

Bruun-Larsen says one man requested a Voltset to create automated notifications when his car has problems. "He wants to customize Voltset and put it in his car so when his car batteries drops below x amount of voltage, the car will call him personally."

An Open-Ended Hub

As for the Voltset app, Bruun-Larsen says they wanted its software to be customizable for users. "We came up with the fact that we really needed to design it in a way in which it's really open-ended so that people can take it in whatever direction," Bruun-Larsen says.

After spending excessive time manually measuring, writing, and then calculating numbers at their previous jobs like Intel and Agilent, Voltset engineers wanted built-in Excel--something he says helps in checking power levels for Rasberry Pi and Arduino.

"By automatically recording measurements, the Excel has built-in equations. You wait five seconds per measurement, go to the next point and measure another five seconds, and then you can tap a 'generate report' option or even share with other users."

The team is working on a free SDK for all to hack and tinker with, so an API and relevant development tools are available, says Bruun-Larsen.

"If you're a newbie and have to learn things from scratch, you can customize the application to suit that kind of user," he says. "If you're an advanced user you just code it and pre-program it for whatever use case you need."

Other software capabilities allow for educational means that go beyond measuring and recording.

Simplified icons--such as a graphic of a lamp--will instruct users how to accomplish specific tasks that are useful for everyday household issues. "The idea is that tips for that task can be shared with the Voltset community on ideas of how to best fix a lamp," Wang says.

The founders have been approached by classroom teachers who want to use Voltset as a learning game for young makers. Bruun-Larsen says the app would show kids where to find the battery in any given product, then allow them to try matching the correct probes.

Voltset has also been in talks with maker-space chain TechShop for similar educational projects for its customers, which Wang says will roll out in about a year.

Even though they've already doubled their campaign goal, the Voltset team hopes for more funding to include features like current clamps, automated voice commands, and more mobile casing.

"The Kickstarter goal is the bare minimum for this new playground we're building," Brunn-Larson says. "The more units we can build, and the more users on the platform, the better an experience it will become for all involved."

Child baseball injuries are skyrocketing. Just ask Dr. James Andrews. In 1994, the American Sports Medicine Institute founder didn't perform any Tommy John surgeries (ulnar collateral ligament, or UCL, reconstructions) on youth baseball players. By 2008, more than a third of his UCL operations were on kids. The problem, he believes, is increased specialization that has kids playing the same sports year-round. But he thinks he might know the solution too.

Today, Dr. Andrews and his lead physical therapist Kevin Wilk are launching Throw Like A Pro, a mobile app that allows parents and coaches to access medical and training resources like never before. The app, built in conjunction with Abracadabra Health, takes aim at irresponsible player development practices in hopes that it can preserve pitchers' arms with practice regimens, stretching exercises, and rehabilitation programs--previously reserved for patients of ASMI--for just $9.99.

"We're seeing Tommy John injuries occurring at a younger and younger age in the professional life," warns Andrews. "It used to be they would be 28, 29, 30 years old, maybe older. Their ligament would finally have a problem. Now we are seeing it in relatively young professional pitchers, in the first few years of their professional career."

"We ask parents all the time," says Wilk, Dr. Andrews' longtime leading physical therapist at the American Sports Medicine Institute, "'Why doesn't he just take off the two or three months in the winter?' and they say, 'Well, we think if he takes off he'll lose the edge.' He's 12. What kind of edge does he have?"

The Injury Epidemic

Both Wilk and Andrews believe the problem stems directly from sport specialization at a young age. In 2014, adolescents are often encouraged to choose one sport to pursue, as opposed to the multi-sport programs of previous generations' athletes. Studies conducted by the institute suggest this narrow, year-round approach is a leading contributor to UCL tears in pitchers. Andrews, a member of Major League Baseball's research committee, has been preaching the dangers of what he calls "professionalism"--a practice whereby youngsters and their coaches attack their training in the same way as the pros--for years.

"Baseball, as you well know, has always been America's sport," Andrews explains. "The type of injuries we're seeing have become so common and particularly when they start getting hurt when they're 13, 14, 15 years old. They drop out of sports. They drop out of school. They don't get a scholarship. They end up on the street, and from there it's a downhill spiral for a lot of people. It's become a socio-economic problem in the United States. Even when they get operated on, there's not a high percentage of return in that age group. They lose their ability to participate in the sport."

According to Andrews, 34 major league pitchers had Tommy John surgery in 2012. In 2013, just 12 pitchers elected for the procedure. Under three months into the 2014 season, more than 20 hurlers have gone under the knife. But Andrews doesn't think the pro game is to blame--at least not entirely.

"The epidemic of these injuries really began, even with some of these major league baseball pitchers, when they were in youth baseball," says Andrews. "Twenty-five percent of the major league pitchers right now out playing major league baseball have had Tommy John surgery. That's really unbelievable."

The institute estimates that some 17 million males play baseball in the United States. During a study of 9-to-14-year-olds during their youth baseball seasons, the institute surveyed players and asked how many of them experienced shoulder or elbow pain and continued playing through it.

"Over 50% said that they had elbow or shoulder pain," says Wilk. "That's kind of a staggering number. The other staggering number is just the number of surgeries. In the clinic today I had a young man come in. He's 12 years old, but he's had two elbow surgeries already, which is scary."

To Andrews, the instinct to perform surgery on such patients isn't always the best solution.

"At some point you have to say, 'Okay, is there something wrong with the system?'" says Andrews. "Because if he's lying on the table, he's got elbow pain, and he wants to play. You know what? He probably shouldn't play right now. Somebody needs to tell him, "You're not ready to play. You're hurting on the table. You certainly cannot go out there and play. You're not doing any good for anybody. Another surgery is not what's going to fix you."

During a recent study at the Major League level, the Institute polled all 30 teams in an effort to determine how prevalent the procedure is today. Twenty-five percent of all Major Leage pitchers reported having had Tommy John surgery. Roughly 17% of minor leaguers have elected surgery. The institute is adamant that surgeries like Tommy John have a directly proportional, negative affect on the longevity of professional careers.

"I think the mindset is with some of these people is, 'Well, if I blow my elbow out I'll just have surgery. I'll be okay,'" confides Wilk. "Because 9 times out of 10 it's successful. That's not really the right approach. You want to prevent surgery at all cost, and prevention is really the key. We know that when you pitch, you're 36 times more likely to become injured if you pitch when you're tired, when you're fatigued."

And arm fatigue is precisely what Throw Like A Pro hopes to curb. The app provides recommendations for players of all ages, talent levels, and physical state not just to the individual, but to coaches and families so that they might better understand the strain on kids' joints.

"They come out and they don't know how to change speeds," explains Wilk. "Every pitch is 100% intensity and that appears to be a big mistake. Some recent data was just put forth. When it looked at Major League baseball players with elbow surgeries, what they found was pitchers that didn't have a big range in velocity were the highest percentage to have elbow surgery. The ones that had a larger range, you know their fastball is maybe 92, but their change-up is 79, had more elbow problems. Physically your body may not be able to withstand what your mind can put forth. You're saying in your mind, "Do more, more." But your body is breaking down."

Dr. Andrews asserts that kids today mature faster than when he was first coming up himself and that tendons and ligaments aren't keeping pace. When arms get stronger, the bones get bigger, the muscles get bigger.

"The ligaments get thicker as you throw, through all of the stages of development all the way up to the professional ranks," says Andrews. "These young kids in high school that are high-velocity throwers are overtaxing their ligament and it won't withstand it. It goes beyond what we call its 'redline,' like the RPM on your car and they tear it in high school now because their bodies are more mature than the ligament is."

In other words, the ligament is not ready to take that high a velocity. Andrews' staff found out in its research that the redline for a kid's UCL ligament ligament in junior high and high school is about 80 miles per hour.

"When you get beyond that, it's suspect to be torn on every pitch," Andrews says. "So If a kid is throwing 90, 95 miles per hour, which they're all trying to do in high school because that's how they get drafted and get scholarships, they're all suspect to tearing their ligaments. So our best pitchers are also the ones that get used more often in more innings, extended seasons, and playoffs, get called upon by coach to pitch the next day to pitch a complete game and so they're the ones that are getting hurt. Our best pitchers are the most susceptible to injury, unfortunately."

How The App Was Born

In 2000, Dr. Andrews began seeing high school and junior high school patients with "adult-type injuries" to their lower shoulder and elbow. "That was unusual," Andrews confessed. "I started tracking what was happening to our young baseball players, particularly baseball players, but this has been out all over the board with all youth sports. Baseball has been the one that's really caught my attention."

Since then, the American Sports Medicine Institute has gathered sevenfold the statistics relative to youth injuries in baseball to the shoulder and elbow. The information gathered, and subsequent preventative strategies has always been available to the Institute's patients, but has been limited until now.

"We would send the booklet out, but it was just word of mouth," says Wilk. "One day in the clinic, I think I was talking to Dewar Gaines, our business partner. Dewar was rehabbing an ankle problem and we started talking about how to maybe treat and educate people. We kind of bounced ideas off of one another."

As the discussion evolved, the inevitable became clear: This should be an app.

"Then I called Dr. Andrews up and I said, 'You know, I got an idea for you. I've talking to this guy and we're thinking about doing an App on sports medicine injuries.' The idea was, let's provide the information we've given to patients, but now let's make it available to empower the parents and empower the coaches as far as what they need to know to help reduce injury rates."

Reducing Fatigue--And Pre-empting Lawsuits

In the short term, Throw Like A Pro has identified pitchers and the Tommy John epidemic as its primary concern.

"It's important to all of us to do the proper research and to educate parents and grandparents, kids, coaches, and the public alike about this problem so we can try to control it," says Andrews. "We're pretty much discovering what the problem really is. The big problem in any sport, but particularly baseball, is fatigue."

"We found in our research at ASMI that if you pitch with fatigue--event fatigue, too many pitches in a game; seasonal fatigue, too many innings in a season, or year-round fatigue--there was a 36:1 times that they could injure their throwing shoulder or elbow," says Andrews. "There's a 3,600% increase if they pitch with fatigue."

With young players growing faster, bigger, and stronger than ever, however, ASMI and Throw Like A Pro have identified ethical complications that Wilk believes are of greatest concern moving forward. Citing an incident just last month in which high school senior Dylan Fosnacht threw 194 pitches over 14 innings, Wilk thinks legal liability for coaches is just around the corner.

"Now that the information is out there," says Wilk. "A lawsuit is probably right around the corner."

Earlier this year Facebook created DeepFace, a facial recognition system almost as accurate as the human brain. In a standardized test involving pairs of photographs, a human being would get the answer correct 97.53% of the time; Facebook's technology scored an impressive 97.25%. Most people thought that was as far as facial recognition breakthroughs would go in 2014. They were wrong.

A few months after Facebook's breakthrough, the Multimedia Laboratory at the Chinese University of Hong Kong claims to have smashed Facebook's record by building a recognition system that achieves a massive 99.15% accuracy rate--based on some truly innovative deep learning models.

"This is strong evidence that deep learning is making artificial intelligence possible," says the university's Xiaoou Tang, former head of Microsoft Asia's Visual Computing group of Microsoft Asia. "As a breakthrough, it's very exciting for us."

By surpassing human levels of recognition for the first time, Tang's triumph demonstrates just how how far facial recognition technology has come in recent years--and where it might be going next.

Smaller Datasets, Better Models

"I first became interested in facial recognition when I was working on object recognition at MIT in 1990," Tang says. "It was when people were starting to consider the implications and possibilities of this technology for the first time. I was fascinated."

After obtaining his PhD from MIT, Tang moved back to Hong Kong and established what has become China's premier facial recognition lab, the CUHK Multimedia Laboratory. With its recent facial recognition breakthrough--named DeepID--the lab has achieved its biggest success to date.

Not only does DeepID break Facebook's previous record in terms of accuracy, but even more impressively it has done this with just a fraction of the training data. While DeepFace required 7.4 million images for training its system, Tang's work uses just 200,000 training images--a mere 3% of the dataset available to Facebook.

"Facebook relied heavily on their vast amount of data," Tang says. "DeepFace uses one deep learning network to do the training. What we did was to train about 200 networks, each focusing on a different point of the face at a different scale. Then we selected the most productive group of networks from all the trained networks, and combined them in an efficient way to achieve a much better result."

Tang's group also used a better classifier--something called the Joint Bayesian model--to compare DeepID features extracted from different face images for face verification. The end result was a neural network (essentially a vast artificial brain) that achieved far better results--with around a 70% reduction in errors.

"When you get to the endgame it becomes much more difficult in terms of error rate reduction," Tang says. "When you've got only 2% of error left to correct, a one-percentage-point improvement means a 50% error rate reduction. If you've only got two mistakes to correct, then managing to successfully correct just one is very significant."

Facial Recognition Is About To Become Huge

What makes Xiaoou Tang's lab's work of added importance--rather than it being limited to academic interest only--is that it focuses on images taken "in the wild," rather than those taken under laboratory conditions. In other words, this is something that can (and will) have real-world applications.

There's little doubt that facial recognition is one of several big waves currently breaking in tech. Last week, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced the Fire Phone, which among other features will lock onto user's faces to carry out a wide range of features--such as scrolling through news articles, or maneuvering through apps.

Although Amazon hasn't yet opened up details of its new phone, its facial detection software (named Dynamic Perspective) was reportedly trained by studying a dataset of millions of images of people's faces. "We got really good at tracking faces, finding heads," said Bezos.

"At first glance, I thought the Dynamic Perspective and other features were just cute gimmicks and a way for Amazon to get attention in the mobile space," says Hoyt David Morgan, the cofounder of NITO, an iOS app which uses markerless facial recognition and tracking technology for creating 3-D animated avatars. "But after careful observation, I now see a huge potential in the gaming and entertainment industry. Dynamic Perspective gives users a greater user experience by allowing users to see other aspects of an app without having to swipe or press a button. This is a major step forward for the mobile phone's interface design."

Much like Apple was able to redefine mobile interfaces with multitouch, so too will tools like face tracking and other interface elements that can smartly respond to the face help create the next wave of revolutionary UI design.

As something of a guinea pig, Amazon is taking a big chance with its Fire Phone. However, it's far from the only big tech company thinking along similar lines. Apple and Google are clearly looking at facial recognition for mobile security. Last November, Apple acquired PrimeSense--the company behind the XBox Kinect. In March this year, Apple was granted a patent related to various forms of biometric passwords, meaning that users may soon have the opportunity to add extra levels of protection to secure files by safeguarding it not just with fingerprint authentication via Touch ID, but also facial confirmation. Google has long implemented a similar feature as part of Android, with a selfie password system called Face Unlock that uses facial recognition technology to safeguard your smartphone.

"We're seeing a lot of big companies entering this space," says Xiaoou Tang. "It's interesting to see the approach each company takes based on its own business model. Everyone is trying to corner their particular market."

Amazon, for instance, is interested in opening up the user interface with face tracking--although its main focus would logically be toward building on the kind of object recognition that can help identify potential products in the real world, and link users to the relevant Amazon page. A future area of interest could even be analyzing user sentiment to predict certain products at certain times.

On the other end of the spectrum, Tang points to the Chinese-market Meitu 2 smartphone--targeted at female users--which utilizes a 13MP front-facing camera, designed for taking selfies, which can then "intelligently" remove blemishes within pictures by identifying specific parts of the face. In the future the company has talked about using facial recognition for photo management.

Tang plans to get involved, too, by making his new groundbreaking facial recognition technology available for free to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone developers in the form of a FreeFace-SDK. In addition to opening up his groundbreaking work to practitioners in every field from advertising to medicine (smartphones can be great at diagnosing diseases!), he also wants to take advantage of user feedback to further improve the accuracy of his algorithm.

"The SDK will provide state-of-the-art capability for face detection, face alignment, and face recognition," he says. "People can use it to design face-related games, face verification based login function, photo management functions, face photo labeling and search apps, and other applications. The algorithm can only improve if more people use it, which is why we want it freely available to everyone," he says.

What's Causing All This?

Facial recognition has long since split into various different disciplines--from face and eye tracking on the one hand, to facial recognition and even emotional analysis on the other. So why are all of these advances coming together so neatly here in 2014?

"Part of it is about the advancement of hardware," says Yitzi Kempinksi, the creator of Umoove, an iOS face tracking app which launched with an impressive tech demo earlier this year. "This has always been a very processor-heavy area to work in, so as hardware has gotten better, rolling out these technologies has become more possible. Where previously you may have needed a supercomputer for this work, increasingly it is now possible on our home computers and mobile devices."

This brings about the second major paradigm shift we've seen over the past few years: the prevalence of portable, built-in cameras. Even as recently as the iPhone 3--launched back in 2009--leading smartphones didn't have front-facing cameras. A few years before that, the majority of PCs didn't come with webcams as built-in standards. While surveillance cameras have been in full effect for decades (in the CCTV-heavy U.K., the average citizen is caught on security camera 300 times per day), it is only as mass market cameras became a ubiquitous part of our devices that the consumer sector has really opened up.

"We take a lot more pictures now as a culture," Kempinksi continues. "From being just one thing that we share online, pictures have became something that drives online sharing--which you can see through the rise of services like Snapchat. Increasingly the face is the main data point. We've known how to analyze text for years; analyzing faces is something we're just starting to understand."

There are, of course, a number of ethical questions that will need to be worked through as this trend continues. Phones that can detect our faces--or even pick up on registered emotions and make intelligent decisions based on this data--have the opportunity to raise a number of concerns around topics like privacy.

"What information is being provided about people that are identified?" says Kelly Gates, professor in communication and science studies at UC San Diego, and author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. "Their name, phone number, home address, employment history, police records, Match.com preferences, Amazon purchases? Will it provide a range of possible facial matches, or just one? There's a lot of questions we want to ask about the design of these kinds of apps up front, before they become commercially available. They disperse identification and tracking capabilities into infinitely more spaces than current systems."

After years of false starts, the implementation of real-world facial recognition systems are finally here--and in some cases passing human levels of recognition in the process.

It's where we go from here that really matters.

There comes a time in the life of a mobile app when a hard, honest look in the mirror becomes unavoidable. Is my feature set bloated? Are people even using these bells and whistles? Where can I cut the fat?

For the folks at SoundCloud, that moment of truth arrives today. The popular audio streaming platform is launching a radically overhauled version of its iPhone app. The new SoundCloud iPhone app sports an immersive, more minimal design that focuses on consuming audio rather than discovering or creating it. Indeed, quite a bit of fat has been cut here.

"It's a complete interaction overhaul," says SoundCloud director of Product Design Brian Yeung. "The way that you experience the player, the way that you experience music. We rethought everything from the ground up."

A Minimal, Immersive Listening Experience

With this new app, SoundCloud is moving away from the standard iTunes-esque interface typically employed by music services. It's less about albums and collections and more about social feeds, follows, and favorites. In terms of its user experience, SoundCloud now feels more like Twitter than Spotify.

The new app is big on imagery and animation: The main feed is peppered with wide, screen-spanning thumbnails, and scrolling through them produces the sort of 3-D "parallax" effect so popular in interactive design these days.

Perhaps the most dramatic visual difference is the audio player interface. In a shift that defies convention in an almost jarring way, the player doesn't even have a play button when you first launch it. Instead, the visual focus is on the track's imagery--the thumbnail that gets uploaded with the audio--and the iconic SoundCloud waveform, which glides to the left as the track plays. It's only when you tap that orange waveform to pause the audio (yes, that's how you pause the audio) that the player controls reveal themselves. This may be a little disorienting for some at first glance, but it's also refreshing to see somebody rethink how audio playback should function on mobile devices.

Cutting The Fat: Which Features Got The Axe?

"If you think about what the experience is like on a mobile device, most people are on the go," says Yeung. "They're not looking at their phone directly." In other words, most users are interested in listening, rather than creating or interacting. And as Yeung explains, "If you want to focus on the listening experience you've got to pare everything down and simplify."

And simplify they did. Indeed, what many hardcore users will notice more than the sleek new UI is what's missing. Several features from the existing SoundCloud apps have been removed, most notably those centered around interaction and creation.

Features like playlist creation and SoundCloud's famous timed comments--which let users leave comments at specific timestamps on the audio--are not included in this version of the app, although Yeung says they're looking at how to best adapt features like those for a mobile context.

One notable feature that's not likely to find its way back into the SoundCloud app anytime soon is audio recording. For years, Android and iOS users have been able to record, edit, and publish audio files from inside the SoundCloud app. The feature lent itself to publishing rudimentary field recordings and interviews, but nobody's going to produce an NPR-quality radio show or a song worth listening to without more sophisticated audio editing tools.

"Generally speaking, if you have an application that focuses on one thing, you can have a much cleaner experience," says Yeung. "We looked at other people who were focusing just on the recording functionality and we looked at our high-level priorities. We wanted to focus on keeping the app really simple, so we decided to take the recording functionality out."

Focus On One Thing And Let Third Parties Do The Rest

After experimenting with mobile audio production, SoundCloud is now content to leave that functionality to third parties in favor of its own simplicity. Plenty of audio and music creation apps for desktops and mobile devices can publish directly to SoundCloud, and the company will rely on partnerships like that for the audio creation side of things. To replace its outgoing audio recording feature, SoundCloud is officially endorsing an app called AudioCopy, which provides pretty much the same functionality to which some (but obviously not a majority) users had grown accustomed.

"A lot of the things that we had done in the previous version of the application were about enabling a user, be it a creator or listener, to do anything they wanted," says Yeung. "There's a lot of controls available. We said, 'Look, there's a lot of things that we could do, but it's not really clear what we should do.'"

As with any dramatic overhaul--especially one in which features get the axe--this update is sure to ruffle a few feathers. But while the recording feature may be dead, other missing features will find their way back into SoundCloud's iPhone app once its designers find the most elegant way to include them. Playlist creation, comments, and offline caching are reportedly toward the top of that list.

Luckily for SoundCloud's engineers, these types additions should be easier to make than they were before.

"The codebase has been completely re-architected and our software development processes have changed so that we can iterate and continue to push out features at a faster rate," explains Yeung. "The codebase has been designed to be quite modular and isolated into layers of responsibilities. We've put a lot of effort into our build pipelines and development and testing tools to ensure that we get fast feedback as to when problems exist in our app."

Like any overhaul worth the time and money expended on it, this redesign is as much about future-proofing the app as it is about wowing the user. Don't be surprised to see another update before too long.

When Matt Parrill decided to launch his company's line of sports cases for iPhones, he didn't have a traditional manufacturing background. For the past 14 years, Parrill ran a Washington, DC-area IT company that worked in bits and bytes, not in plastic molds or additive manufacturing. Nonetheless, changes in manufacturing--and especially the easy availability of 3-D printers--meant that Parill's company could make chest and body mounts for the iPhone 5 that turn an ordinary smartphone into a GoPro-like sports camera.

Parrill's company, iXtreme, sells a line of mounts and accessories for iPhones. His original product prototypes were 3-D printed, giving his small startup a chance to fabricate initial accessories on a small budget. For Parrill, who originally funded his company through Kickstarter, this is a boon. It's also part of a much larger trend of decreasing fabrication costs, letting outsiders market their own genius ideas which, for whatever reason, were never marketed by larger companies.

"Im a huge fan of GoPro, and think it's awesome, but my friends and I were never able to justify the expense of a purpose-built sports product," Parill told Co.Labs. "We were on a ski trip in Colorado and everyone was zooming around with little boxes on top of their helmets, and that's where this thing got started. I tried to build an immersive action video with my iPhone 4, and on the second attempt dropped it into 18 inches of powder. Poof, it disappeared."

With the help of an industrial designer client Parrill had from his IT business, he set out to build a case and harness combo that would allow users to wear their iPhones on their bodies for sports photography. Seven years later, iXtreme is gearing up to release their product line to the public this fall.

"Not having had a product development background, it's fairly daunting to make physical things. If I knew then what I knew now, I may not have even started the process… It's far more complicated than I ever thought it would be," Parrill added. "But as time progressed, the greater accessibility of CAD software, and having more tools for home-based printing and design meant a real shift for product development. Everything we've done for past few years, with a few exceptions, has been 3-D printed. When you switch to building physical products, you have to think about small nuances about industrial design. Things like ergonomics and what goes into making a product successful. None of it is whim, there's a lot of hard work and engineering that goes into these things."

IXtreme says their cases are waterproof and shockproof, and that users can also use the mounts with GoPro-brand accessories. One of the unexpected issues as a startup making physical products, Parrill told me, was having to quickly react to changes in Apple's product. When the physical design of the iPhone changed between the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5, he quickly had to play catch-up with his company's cases and mounts--which turned out to be a daunting process. This required a specific skill set. Or, as he put it, "My advice to people intending to develop a product is unless you are an industrial designer or engineer, you need to get people with those skills on board early. You need a skilled eye and skilled hand to commit ink to paper and untap a product's additional potential."

The company's core product, a $120 iPhone case-and-lens combo with several accessories, will be available for sale later this year.

The food industry and the tech world are getting friendlier. Food entrepreneurs are digging into technology, and food service companies are beginning to pitch and raise money like the startups they service. So it's only natural that an upcoming hackathon called Hack//Dining will bring an open forum for food technologists in New York City this weekend, starting June 27.

The hackathon will focus primarily on creating hardware and software solutions to enhance the dining and food-service experience for customers and restaurants. Developers, designers, and food execs from Chipotle, the Google Food Team, and the Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group as well as notable people like Wylie Dufresne, chef and owner of wd-50 and Adler, and Naveen Selvadurai, cofounder of Foursquare, will participate, among others. So what will they build?

The Tech Drive In Food

Emerging software and hardware trends are helping create new services in the food industry: mobile apps for dietary preferences that tie into calorie counting and fitness tracking. And restaurants are starting to use technology like Dash to run their businesses more efficiently. The Hack//Dining hackathon aims to bring all of these ideas together and forge some new ones.

"I saw tech working in other industries and figured it would work in the food world, too," says Danielle Gould, CEO of the four-year-old event. Her posts ranged from market analyses to stories about business models and investment trends. Now, the site regularly publishes stories about innovators at the cross section of food and technology.

Hack//Dining is one of a series of hackathons the online publication Food+Tech Connect hosts to encourage crossover in the food and tech industries. An earlier hackathon in the series, Hack//Meat, took place in Silicon Valley last summer.

Hacking Food Tech APIs

A typical issue in the food world is accessing nutritional information for common food products. The companies that have the most comprehensive databases usually charge users expensive fees to license the data or have rigid data structures, putting off many food startups. In response, a new crop of nutritional databases has sprung up, places like Klappo, FatSecret, Ingredient1, and Food Essentials.

Ingredient1 just launched in New York with its homespun database of nutritional info for around 18,000 unique ingredients. The founders, Taryn Fixel and Eris Stassi, had looked into purchasing data from established institutional databases but realized that those didn't contain the type of data their customers needed. So over the course of a year, Fixel and Stassi forged direct relationships with producers to fabricate a custom database that categorizes products and ingredients by allergy information and dietary information, among other factors. Users of Ingredient1's app can freely search this database to better inform their grocery lists.

"Being able to really build up the database first has given us a wider view on what the entire industry can really do to improve food transparency," says Stassi.

Several of these food-tech companies offer APIs that third parties can hack to create new products. Developers might use FatSecret's API to create a diet tracking application or enhance their sites' search capabilities. Food Essentials' LabelAPI parses food label info into an accessible and searchable format, which you can test in its demo app. And as we have previously reported, DuckDuckGo uses Yummly's recipe search API. Both Klappo's and Ingredient1's APIs are especially targeted toward users that follow special diets. Think paleo, gluten-free, and vegan.

"What's so exciting about an API like this is that when you finally release all of this information and make it easily and affordably accessible, so many things can be built on top of it," says Fixel.

The company Ordr.in created an API that lets restaurants and developers create better applications for ordering food for delivery. The API was designed to provide a technical backbone for everything from getting restaurants on board to operational issues to payment processing so that the designer could concentrate her focus on her business and not get stuck in the technology. For developers that don't need the whole API, Ordr.in has stand-alone modules available, among which are the Mustard and Tomato modules.

"We think that by putting e-commerce restaurants into an API, we can inspire a lot of the innovation that comes from other parts of tech into local commerce, especially restaurants," says Ordr.in founder and CEO David Bloom.

Hardware In The Food Industry

Web apps aren't the only new technologies in the food world. Emerging sensor technology is making new products available that provide unique services to consumers. One business, The Orange Chef Co., created a personal device called the Prep Pad to educate its users on what exactly is in their food.

The Orange Chef Co.'s Prep Pad is mostly reminiscent of a digital scale except that it prints out nutritional information and meal suggestions on a nearby iPad. The user places a food item on the pad and indicates to the system what it is, either by typing it or speaking it out loud.

The Orange Chef Co. does not plan on stopping with the Prep Pad. "We're also coming up with a solution to kind of make regular things smart," says Santiago Merea, CEO of The Orange Chef Co. "We're very excited to kind of, like, bridge the gap between the physical world and the, you know, the software that will allow you to make better decisions while you're cooking."

A food-tech product that won't even deliver until next year, Vessyl, has already started to gather media attention. Co.Design reported on it earlier this month. Vessyl is a beautiful, hi-tech beverage container that helps users keep track of their fluid intake. It automatically syncs how much you drink on a daily basis with data from wearable pedometers into a mobile app.

A sensor in the container automatically understands what you have poured in, whether it's beer, wine, water, or anything else. Then, the system prints out nutritional data on the side of the container. The user gets info in real time and can also check in with the dedicated app. The tech behind Vessyl started in a college biomedical computing lab.

"In my later years in college, different people were putting computers into glasses; some people were putting computers into wristbands," says Justin Lee, founder and CEO of Mark One, the company that created Vessyl. "I wanted to put a computer into one of the most ubiquitous objects to begin with the human race, you know, which is the beverage vessel."

Pushing Tech Through Startups

Food+Tech Connect's trajectory from a bare bones website to a business mirrors much of what is going on in the food world. "There's been a huge explosion of startups in this space in the past few years," Gould says.

In a departure from the business of traditional eateries, food tech companies are now following the same incubation process as startups in other industries. Venture capital plays a big role in their development. Caviar, a direct competitor to the food delivery app GrubHub, raised $2 million in seed funding and just secured $13 million in Series A round funding a couple of months ago.

"In the early days, we were doing everything ourselves," says Jason Wang, CEO of Caviar. "Fast-forward to three months after we launched, in September of 2012, we became profitable. There was just five of us at the time and [we] quickly realized that this could become a really big business." The company grew from 15 to 70 people this year and will be in 15 markets by this fall.

Still, these new apps and gadgets aren't yet mainstream in the restaurant world. For example, many restaurants still rely on legacy point-of-sale software but would benefit from upgrades.

"Adoption has been fairly slow," says Gould. "People are nervous."

Food+Tech Connect wants to pave the way for restaurants to make technology a bigger part of their operations. One part of its strategy to better prime the industry is its online classes. In July, Food+Tech Connect will offer an online class called "Building Your Restaurant Technology Strategy."

Among other companies, Klappo, Ingredient1, Ordr.in, and the Orange Chef Co. will be at Hack//Dining, educating participants about their hackable APIs and SDKs. Ordr.in's David Bloom says that keeping these APIs open could lead to so much more development in the food-tech space.

Looking back over the first year of Apple's iBeacon, most use cases have been for advertising and retail: Using the low-power Bluetooth protocol, it's easy to offer deals to customers based on their location. But shopping isn't the only experience ripe to be enhanced by this technology. Next up: the workplace.

Why would you use iBeacons in the office? Well, you could keep track of your interns, for one thing. Or if your office space is large and tricky to navigate, iBeacon devices can help guide people around. Digital advertising company Huge is doing exactly that: taking the technology and using its ultra specific location guidance to make navigating its office more efficient. Being able to guide an employee or guest to a specific conference room could cut out a lot of wasted time.

Here's a look and how the company did it and how you can get started as well.

1) Get iBeacon devices.

Be sure to consider what type of hardware you purchase. Michael Welles, principal architect at Huge, says there's smaller keychain-type hardware running on watch batteries made for lower power and less frequent update intervals, or larger, hockey puck-sized units.

"To save money when we were prototyping, we purchased a mess of the keychains which are not the best quality for our purposes, and caused us no end of pain when trying to fine-tune the location approximation algorithm," says Welles. "Much of the work was making the algorithm smart enough to deal with inaccuracy and making the best approximation from very noisy data. To do this well, it needed to be able to determine which signals it receives are more trustworthy than others and give them preference. "

2) Get floor plans for the space you're using

"In Apple's iBeacon protocol, each detected iBeacon contains an accuracy reading and is measured in meters, which while specifically stated by Apple 'Do not use it to identify a precise location for the iBeacon,' instead is supposed to represent your distance to an iBeacon," says senior software engineer Micah Acinapura. "However, we found this to fluctuate more than we expected. The limitation here is just in the nature of the Bluetooth technology used, which is easily interfered with."

Taking a project from the screen into real-world environments can cause discrepancies if the finer details aren't kept in mind. Everything from the shape of the office to units of measurement should be considered.

"The important point that people often forget when applying mathematical algorithms in their code, is that the real-world data may not be as perfect as the math suggests, and you often have to 'massage the data' or 'assist the math," Acinapura says. "Apple also uses this approach when locating an iPhone, which users may notice when their iPhone alerts them 'Turning on Wi-Fi will improve location accuracy.'"

3) Configure the identifiers.

This part will likely take a lot of patience and attention to detail, Acinapura says. The major and minor identifiers can be changed, which will matter depending on how many beacons you use and how you want them to interact with each other.

4) Mount the beacons around the office.

For bigger offices, it's key to keep in mind that mounting beacons will take planning. While you personally might not mind having these devices around, others might. There's a good chance people spent good money and time to design the office as it currently looks. The beacons will likely need to be hidden and kept out of sight.

5) Input the data.

The beacons and their physical locations will need to be stored in a database so that an application can access that information somehow.

An off-the-self solution like Proximity Kit might work for smaller projects or people not wanting to build something themselves. Proximity Kit stores beacon locations, acting as a backend to your app. The service is free for users with five beacons and under.

7) Find a method for detecting beacons.

You'll need some way for detecting the beacons around the office. Huge built its own iBeacon scanning utility for OS X, which they've made available to everyone.

BeaconScanner, as they call it, will detect and display each beacon along with its major and minor identifier. There's a whole blog post detailing more about the utility, how to install it, and all its capabilities.

8) Build end user apps.

Here's where you have to figure out how employees or office guests will actually use the iBeacon technology you've installed.

In the case of Huge, they're in the process of finishing their iOS app, which will be available to all employees internally. For guests, the idea is to have a few iPod Touch's with the app preloaded available as they come to the front desk. iOS will be the first platform supported and it will expand to Android in the future.

Other Use Cases For iBeacons In The Office

If using iBeacons to guide people to different conference rooms doesn't fulfill your needs, there's still other reasons to consider iBeacons for the office.

For Huge, once it started building and implementing the beacon system, the team realized that it could be used for tracking all different kinds of office supplies. Huge hasn't jumped on the people-tracking train yet, though Acinapura says there is a different kind of value in knowing where people are in the office.

"While we are still working out the privacy and ethical concerns, we would like to use the location data that could be gathered by our application to leverage other aspects of a smart office," he explains. "For example, if we gather the location data of all our employees, we can identify high and low traffic areas. That data could then be used to inform climate/lighting controls for specific areas, resulting in a more 'green' office."

Having actual data on traffic areas around the office could also lead to improvements in furniture and desk layouts. It's an extensible list of small tweaks and design decisions that could be made based on where people actually move around at work.

Kickstarter and Indiegogo are home to some awesome new products, and many more strange ones. After taking a deep dive into this month's crowdfunding campaigns, we were left incredulous at the sight of some of these projects--for reasons good and bad. Some of these are incredibly well executed by really smart people; others are scams that would make Bernie Madoff blush. The main qualifier: a certain amount of head-scratching perplexity. Let us know what you think of these on Twitter.

THE GOOD

These are the campaigns that struck us as strangely ambitious--and technically impressive.

Carpool DeVille

Funding: $1,948 of $10,000 raised with 22 days left

For 15 years, the guys behind Carpool DeVille have been prototyping a 1969 Cadillac with a hot tub in the trunk. Now they've actually built it--but they're not done. They want to race it, and getting it race-ready is going to cost money. That's where Kickstarter comes in.

"The goal [is] a land speed record at Bonneville for the World's Fastest Hot Tub," says Duncan Forster, film writer and Carpool DeVille "coconspirator." Forster says the project began serendipitously, when someone left an '82 Caprice outside their engineering house in college. Forster and his friends recall a "beer-induced idea of turning the car into a hot tub."

That was 10 years ago; now Forster and co-creator Phil Weicker are living in L.A. and, equipped with full-time jobs, can actually afford to build the Carpool Deville they dreamed up in college. "You won't believe what you can find on Craigslist," Duncan says.

[Carpool DeVille campaign link]

Chugometer

Funding: $242.25 USD of $46,577.49 USD raised with 30 days left

Quantified self for frat boys, the Chugometer is a liquid flowmeter that attaches to the end of a beer bong to track how much you've chugged and how fast you've chugged. It allows you to compare these stats with "your fellow Chugonaughts."

Shockingly, all of the cofounders on this project have Master's degrees. "We all do have degrees in what many consider to be 'rocket science,'" says co-creator Brian Petz, "but that also means that between the three of us, we've spent two decades in university... that's a lot of partying."

The idea for the Chugometer came to Petz when he considered the competitive potential in putting a flowmeter on a drinking device. (What could go wrong?) He and the other founders searched for things like this already on the market but were astounded to find nothing.

"We saw that any flowmeter you buy ready-to-use out of the box is crazy expensive, industrial type stuff and anything else requires you to affix your own electronics and readouts," Petz says. "This means there's also a market niche out there for the Chugometer, re-branded as a standard plug-and-play flowmeter." Petz says this project is a trial run for his team. "We chose the Chugometer as our first endeavor because it's a fun, manageable-sized project that really did test the technical skill we've got, and also taught us new things about encoding, electronics, fluid mechanics, additive manufacturing methods, and entrepreneurship,"

The team 3-D-printed their prototypes to keep prices low, and the Chugometer actually involves a lot of complex engineering. Things like "impeller based flow" and "ultrasonic and ionic flow measurement" fly right over my head. Then again, I don't think I'm their intended audience.

[Chugometer campaign link]

THE BAD

You don't run across a Carpool Deville every day. In fact, there are far more strange projects that aren't so technically impressive, and we found dozens of them. Who would buy these?

The Capsule: Aquarium For The World's First Wireless Powered Electronic Fish

Funding: $568 of $100,000 raised with 32 days left.

The Capsule is waterless, fishless aquarium for those of you who would like a low-maintenance pet, where "low-maintenance" means "not actually alive."

Surely you have questions. What is a LumiPUFF fish? According to the creators, the actual pets are wireless electronic robotic fish that glow indefinitely and require no maintenance or batteries. The Capsule and LumiPUFF actually involve some pretty complex components to imitate living sea creatures, like Bluetooth, infrared communication, luminosity, and vibration sensors.

Unfortunately, neither the fish nor the tank are compatible with actual living pets. "The Capsule is not meant to sustain life for living creatures," says the campaign verbiage without a hint of irony.

[The Capsule campaign link]

URME Surveillance

Funding: $2,565 of $1,000 raised

This resin prosthetic face mask is designed to hide you from Big Brother-like facial detection surveillance by replacing your visage with a "life like" (not really) generic one. As the creator astutely points out on Indiegogo, the future is going to require you to more closely consider your surveillance-avoidance needs:

You can either hide your face by wearing something like a ski mask, which looks very suspicious, or you can destroy private or public property vis-a-vis security cameras.

But now, a much more viable third option! Spring for the $400 hard resin prosthetic face or the more budget-friendly cutout mask. But let me clarify: These are all masks of the creator's face, not your own.

When you wear these devices the cameras will track me instead of you and your actions in public space will be attributed as mine because it will be me the cameras see...What would happen if security cameras could no longer identify a public but instead could only detect hundreds of me walking down the street?

[URME Mask campaign link]

Spy Cam Peek-I

Funding: $5491 of $1,000 with 30 days left

Peek-I is essentially a periscope-like device that attaches to your smartphone camera magnetically that reflects the image at a 90˚ angle, letting you take pictures discreetly around corners.

This item comes out of Moldova (that little country landlocked between Ukraine and Romania that you can never remember) and this is the team's second campaign--the first one was so successful that the creators made a second campaign by popular demand.

But before you get excited thinking about the Snapchat story potential, just think how much easier this guy's job just got.

[Peek-I Campaign link]

Emoji-U

Funding: $30 of $5,000 goal with 26 days left

In theory, Emoji-U--which lets you make custom emoji out of your pictures--could be a cool addition to your international keyboard: Maybe some cityscapes, your dog, who knows? But the developer of this app has chosen to advertise perhaps the most unsettling possible use--turning your own face into an emoji. Unflattering? Probably. Creepy? Definitely.

Surprisingly, creator (and daytime personal trainer) Victor Adam started the project to make money. Having realized that emoticon apps tend to be the most popular apps in the app stores, he founded Axiom Apps as a vehicle company for Emoji-U. If he gets to $1 million, he's promised throw a "huge party in the city," but which city he doesn't specify.

[Emoji-U Campaign Link]

Kimbi Educational Robot

Funding: $150 of $1,000 raised with 25 days to go

The Kimbi is an educational knockoff of the gone-but-not-forgotten Furby. Based out of Boise, ID, the team behind Kimbi Ed wants to make it easier for kids to learn interactively, using games programmed into the robot. Ideally, this would create a more "social" learning experience than simply handing your kid an iPad. But in a truly remarkable instance of irony, Urban Dictionary reveals that to be "kimbi'ed" means "to be ditched by one's friends."

Aside from the obvious question (how will $1,000 manufacture a full-fledged robot toy and app?) the Kimbi toys are also nightmarishly ugly. We do not suggest giving this to your children. Unless you really want to mess with them.

[Kimbi Campaign link]

THE FRAUDULENT

This group of campaigns needs disclaimer: They're bullshit. Hilarious at first glance, these little scams get more and more egregious as you read the descriptions. But we don't suggest you do that--neither do we suggest you give them money. Here are two of the boldest examples.

Panacea Connect Silicone Bracelet

Funding: $0 of $68,378 with 20 days left

The idea here is a Livestrong-type bracelet emblazoned with the word "Connect." There's no Bluetooth sensor in this bracelet; no RFID; no data collection. It's just a rubber bracelet that says you're open to making friends. With literally anyone. You know, for when "hello" just doesn't cut it.

The cherry atop this crap-heap campaign is the goal amount of $68,378. Another infamous Kickstarter scam, Kobe beef jerky, only had the gumption to ask for $2,374.

[Panacea Campaign link]

Racing Through Deversity [sic]

Funding: $0 of $25,000 with 23 days to go

If you thought the bracelet scam above was daring, this one makes it seem downright discreet. Rob Dees of Kent, WA has launched a thinly veiled attempt to recruit local (unpaid) "youth" to build him his new race car. For free. Because he wants one.

"My project is to get some troubled teens to take there [sic] negative energy and turn into a positive and build a race car."

Even the name can't disguise his expediency. As for plans, schematics, parts, worker training, and the rest of the milieu, Dees is scant on details.

This is what were [sic] building, a car like this"

[Racing Through Deversity Campaign link]

Making hardware is hard when you're starting from scratch. Selling it is tough too, especially when you're not sure how polished your product needs to be or who will ultimately be your audience. Emile Petrone, CEO of Tindie, knows this well. Two years ago, he started building out an indie hardware marketplace that has become a go-to spot for things like robots that do mobile app testing and cheap hardware parts from Shenzhen.

"Because we're the first hardware marketplace out there, we've basically tried to learn on the fly," says Petrone. "When you have niche, specialized things that people have never thought of, you're basically introducing to them for the first time. That's not easy."

Twelve thousand orders and 2,500 product later he's learned a few things. "We get orders from hobbyists. And also from Google, Intel, NASA, the U.S. Navy, Lockheed Martin, MIT, Harvard. It's kind of the secret of the site," says Petrone.

So how do you get a hardware product (or marketplace) off the ground? Here's his advice.

Find Your People First. Focus on Community--Even Before You Have A Product.

"If there isn't a group that's going to rally around it, then it's going to launch and it's going to flop," says Petrone.

The first step, he says, is to align with other sites and influencers who can give advice, credibility, and spread the word. "We had to focus on supply for the first year. Hack spaces in London and New York were sharing it with people," Petrone adds." And I think being on Reddit was the huge jump-start for us."

But having friends isn't all you need. You also need to manage supply and get customers, which can be chicken-and-egg for any product startup. Which comes first when you really need both? How can you get both at the same time? Petrone has a couple of tricks. And he started using them way before he even had a product to launch.

"When I launched the site, it was two months of work. Me doing it on the weekends and nights and I got something out the door that worked. The first thing I threw up was the homepage that said 'reserve your username,' says Petrone. "In reality, they were signing up, but I just put it as 'reserve your username.' So they were already putting a password, email, and a username--done."

While this was happening, Petrone was building out the backend--quickly creating the as-yet-unmade product people were signing up for. "A couple weeks later once I had minimum MVP of the product layer, the backend. They would see the page 'We're stocking the shelves--submit products that you want to sell or projects,'" he says. "People were already uploading title, description, photos before there was even anything to do. On that first day, we already had 20 sellers and orders. On Day 1, there was a community and product."

While this might be slightly different for a marketplace than a product, the same basic approach applies. Get something out there. Start enlisting support early, and build interest. Petrone tells the story of one of his soon-to-be sellers who did just that. He validated his market the not-so-old fashioned way. With 100,000 hits on YouTube.

"Arduboy is a Game Boy the size of a credit card or your business card. Basically it's a super thin, super lightweight gaming platform. It's $50. No cartridges. You just throw games on this thing. Right now, it's a bare PCB but a plastic case around it and all of a sudden it's the best thing since sliced bread," says Petrone.

The product has ridiculous potential. But how did the guy who made it go about getting support? Originally, Petrone says, he just slapped together a prototype and posted it on YouTube. "It got like 100,000 views when he went 'This is what I made!' explains Petrone. "So now he's decided to make it and sell it. It's in manufacturing now."

Be International From Day One. U.S. First Is An Old Model.

One of the things Petrone did to accelerate growth was broaden his view of how large his marketplace could be--a lesson any hardware manufacturer can take to heart. "The staggered approach which Yelp took, for example, where you start in the U.S. then you roll out to the next country and the next country is an old mindset," Petrone says. "You have to start with everyone in mind because otherwise you're going to miss out on potential customers. And chances are they will teach you things that you didn't know."

Tindie made a part of being market agnostic and international from day one. Petrone says that's only way to go. "If we had said orders are only from the U.S., we wouldn't have sellers from the U.K. who are some of our top sellers. We have tons of people from London like an ex-Google engineer who's now making his own hardware."

In a surprise comment, Petrone points out that international growth is actually on par with that of the U.S. "We're now in 81 or 82 countries. Growth internationally is on par with the U.S.--Europe and U.S. traffic right now are basically even." He also gives an indication of where hardware is hottest right now, a stat worth noting whether you're a maker or a seller. "New York, London, and SF are all tied," he says. "They flop back and forth for the number one city."

Put Interesting Projects On The Market (Even...Or Especially If They're Still Raw)

People look at the slick, well-produced products on Kickstarter and forget what it took to get from the raw idea to that polished product. The commonly held idea is that perfection is required for success. That's a misconception says Petrone. "'If we polish it, we will be successful is the logic,' whereas the reality is far from it," he explains. "GoPro is a great example. It took years and years and years to create and it actually started out with 35MM film. There's a photo of the early GoPro--it was just like a bare PCB and a lens and you throw in the film."

His advice to any maker: Get out there early. Get feedback. And get product out in raw form that people "can at least say what you're doing is interesting." That's what some of Tindie's top sellers have done. They're not who you might expect--and they're selling like crazy.

"Tapster is our number one or two best seller right now. It's a robot that does mobile app testing. It used to be this big hulking robot that was originally built to play Angry Birds. Now every iteration gets more and more polished and the people that are buying it are the biggest companies in the world. We shipped one to Beijing to Nokia. We shipped one to Intel in Austria or somewhere," says Petrone. "The biggest companies in the world are buying this robot for 500 bucks that does this specialized thing. Most people see it as 'That's an interesting little toy.' The reality is, it's doing a very specific job and it's the best thing that's out there.'"

Another example, he gives is a Raspberry Pi weather station called AirPi. It launched in the fall and was made by the most unlikely hardware manufacturers--two 17-year-olds who built it for a science fair. "That product was not meant to be commercialized, but they won the science fair and threw it up on Tindie. They made $30,000 in two weeks with a bare PCB that you slap onto a Raspberry Pi," he says. "They just rolled out v 1.4 and schools are buying it for classrooms around the world. The product sold out and a middle school in the U.K. has been emailing me ferociously. 'We want to buy 30 of these things, can we get them?'"

Tindie got into the hardware marketplace business at at a good time. Hardware marketplaces are heating up. Alibaba is coming to the U.S soon. They just filed for their IPO. Amazon isn't publicizing it broadly, but they're quietly trying to do the same with AmazonSupply--a resource, among other things, for supplies like washers, capacitors, or LEDs in mass quantity.

However, even Petrone is banking on the fact that hardware makers and enthusiasts will continue to come to Tindie. That's why he has flipped his attention to improving the user experience beginning with a huge shift in site organization that happened just yesterday.

"People don't know how to categorize products, the syntax, and the taxonomy. And it's very reactive because we don't know what people are going to post. It doesn't make sense for us to have 50 categories with only three products in them. So we're giving control over the categories to the community," he explains. "As of [yesterday], we basically let that community take over, allowing for these little niche communities to start to emerge."

Bringing things full circle, it's a very Reddit approach. It is also one that lends itself to geographically based communities popping up. Good news for anyone who wants to check out components from China--without hopping on an airplane. "We discovered that we have tons of sellers in Shenhzen selling on Tindie because it's easier for them to get directly to the Western market," Petrone says. "So now we have a Shenzhen market. People in Shenzhen can come together themselves, or you can buy directly from them. If you're looking for cheap, mass quantity consumer components, you can basically gobble them up for pennies each."

Gmail has always had a slightly different take on email ever since its inception. Instead of traditional folders, Google imagined a new way of leveraging its search product for the communication medium. But with that different take came a lot of work-arounds needed to fit non-traditional uses into the IMAP standard.

With the release of the new Gmail API at this year's developers conference, Google is taking steps to give more and better access to its email platform.There will still be the basic things like being able to send and receive email, but also better control over labels and better search.

It doesn't appear, however, that the new Gmail API is aiming to replace IMAP just yet. Listed on the API page is a note that it shouldn't be used for full-fledged email client access.

From Google's announcement of the API is a little deeper explanation.

In contrast to IMAP, which requires access to all of a user's messages for all operations, the new API gives fine-grained control to a user's mailbox. For example, if your app only needs to send mail on behalf of a user and does not need to read mail, you can limit your permission request to send-only.

To keep in sync, the API allows you to query the inbox change history, thereby avoiding the need to do "archaeology" to figure out what changed.

There are already a lot of apps that use Gmail in non-traditional ways, but many are pushing Gmail beyond its current limits, resulting in a buggy experience. Popular add-ons like Boomerang are hugely useful, allowing you to schedule messages to send in the future, but are a little wonky to operate in practice.

Another top extension for Gmail is Play My Inbox. The app turns a user's inbox into a jukebox by scanning messages to find threads containing songs. It then displays the songs in new visual manner. With the new Gmail API, the clever use cases should only increase from here on out.

The basic idea behind Bountysource seems easy enough to explain--it's a crowdfunding site for open source software. But when the site first launched about a decade ago, those were still fairly esoteric concepts for potential users and investors. Even the founders, then fresh out of college, had never heard the term "crowdfounding," says cofounder and COO David Rappo. The project died fast.

"It ran for a few months before we realized this wasn't gonna pay our bills, and we needed to move on and get real jobs," says Rappo. But about a year and a half ago, Rappo and CEO Warren Konkel decided it was time to focus full time on Bountysource once again.

"Nowadays, we can say it's a crowdfunding platform for open source software, and people are like, we get it," Rappo says. "The time is right: people not only understand crowdfunding, but they love it."

The company's recently hosted successful and well-publicized funding campaigns for Neovim, a modern update to the venerable Vi used by generations of Unix hackers, and for RVM 2, an enhanced tool for Ruby developers managing libraries of third-party code.

Bountysource helped the RVM 2 team plan and distribute the rewards it offered backers and often helps software developers organize and even write copy for their funding campaigns, says Rappo.

But the other advantage of raising money for software projects with Bountysource, as opposed to a general purpose crowdfunding site like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, is that open source projects can publicly offer "bounties" payable to any developer willing to contribute certain features or quash particular bugs.

"When you come to Bountysource and raise money, you can keep the money in the system, start paying it out to different developers for different versions of things," Konkel says.

Even outside of a major funding campaign, anyone can post a bounty offering to pay for improvements to a favorite open source tool, and other users are able to pledge their own funds until the bounty's high enough that a programmer is willing to take on the task. Then, once the requested feature is implemented to the backers' satisfaction, the developer gets paid by check, PayPal, or Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's proven especially popular with programmers overseas in countries where paying by check or PayPal can be difficult, says Rappo.

"It's absolutely the preferred method of payment for a lot of developers these days, especially international developers," he says.

Projects with successful bounties range from the Linux-based operating system Elementary, which has used Bountysource to commission a variety of interface enhancements, to the D programming language, related to C and C++. And backers range from individuals looking to improve favorite software tools to organizations like Mozilla and the cloud provider DigitalOcean.

Letting backers fund iterative improvements to software projects instead of simply raising large sums of money up front aligns better with how open source projects run, says Konkel.

"Kickstarter and Indiegogo are very much around raising one lump sum of money," he says. "With software development, there's really a long life cycle of software."

When it comes to data science, a lot of companies talk the talk. But a lot of this "science" comes down to interesting--but not particularly actionable--correlations. Warby Parker has a different approach. For the eyewear retailer, data are essential feedback that change the way they run their business. But how does a company implement data science in a way that actually drives growth?

"It's kind of unusual to have a data science team that's our size very early on in the company growth," says Carl Anderson, Warby Parker's director of Data Science. Anderson was hired by the company a little over a year ago--just three years into the company's existence. He has spent much of the past year revamping the company's data strategy. This is where he started.

Buckets Full Of Data

Anderson's approach to data science is a holistic one. In a business, it's not always clear what use a given dataset might have when one gets down to the brass tacks of actually making business decisions. As such, an effective data science team is one that's involved on every level and works to make sure that findings are easily found and interpreted for everyone in an organization.

Like a lot of things involving math and statistics, that's really easy to summarize in a paragraph and difficult to discuss in detail. Anderson does it by breaking down what he and his team does into four discrete "buckets."

1. Data Engineering

This is the rough stuff, the trailblazing. According to Anderson, data engineering means "getting the data from our different internal systems or from our different vendors, into databases in a form that people can actually use it." That means normalizing the information and joining together datasets that are otherwise separate.

"All the data was pretty much siloed, and it wasn't in a form that people could join," says Anderson of Warby Parker's earliest data efforts. It's a common scenario for that see exponential growth. "Everyone was working with Excel spreadsheets, which are great, to some extent--but they don't scale."

2. Enabling Your Analysts

Anderson describes the second part of his team's role as becoming "an enabler" for the analysts. That means doing things like developing business intelligence tools and automating processes that don't warrant any manpower. It's cleaning up and anonymizing data, training employees in statistics and SQL databases, and helping them learn how to make useful queries.

If the team's first role is to make sense of the data, its second is to make sure it's accessible and not a time-consuming drag to sort through. It's that necessary middle step toward turning your data into a resource that can be used toward real business decisions.

"That's one of the things that drives me as a data scientist," says Anderson. "These insights that start as abstract math, and then you build a tool that answers business questions, and make the world a lot different. "

3. Get Everyone Thinking About Performance Metrics

A big part of Anderson's strategy is to get the whole organization--that includes employees outside the data team--to start noticing what metrics matter. Once those heuristics are established, the data science team can start to build reports and analysis that help shed light where it's needed.

"Carl [Anderson] has often come in and asked a question... Are these the right metrics? Are they tightly coupled to the work? Are we measuring them correctly? What's going on?" says Lon Binder, VP of Technology for Warby Parker. "What's happened over the last nine months is that we've really seen that become a part of the Warby Parker culture across the board, so more and more people are asking those questions, even when Carl's not in the room."

4. Actually Do The Data Science

Finally, the last bucket is the sort of highly specialized work that you'd imagine data scientists would do.

"We complement what the data analysts do, and then further it," says Anderson, "moving on to advanced predictive modeling with classifiers and natural language processing and recommendations engines. Things you might call 'data products.' It gives you a sense of [what happens] when data itself becomes an asset in its own right."

Over the past year, Anderson and his team have equipped Warby Parker with the proper tools to interact with its data. Now, he says, they can have fun "building things that learn from data and build insights."

Because ultimately, to Anderson data science isn't just another tool for a company to make use of--it's an entirely different perspective that a business can operate from.

"It's making them understand that there's this whole world out here," says Anderson of his approach at Warby Parker. "[You can] ask questions of data that answer back in rapid succession. You really talk to the data… [remedying] a lack of tools that were keeping the analysts from reaching full potential, from reaching the best use for the data."

Startup lore demands that founders stay hungry, stay foolish. Stay friendly? Not so much.

But Travefy, an early-stage group travel startup based in the heart of Silicon Prairie--aka Nebraska--has been playing nice with its competitors and reaping the rewards. Travefy cofounder and CEO David Chait tells Co.Labs that his team recently took the unusual step of acquiring challenger Tripeese, after months of informally swapping notes.

"Many startups when they think about growth and scale, don't necessarily think about partnerships or M&A," says Chait. In this case, however, "it's actually a cheaper source of growth."

Under the terms of the acquisition, Tripeese's users and partners will migrate to Travefy's platform. Tripeese cofounders Matheus Riolfi and Rodrigo Boscolo, who previously raised a $65,000 seed round from friends and family, will serve as advisors, but will not play a day-to-day role in the rolled-up entity.

"When you build a company, you want to solve a problem and create value for your customers," says Riolfi. "It doesn't mean that you shouldn't fight, but there are times where it's better to join forces. We decided they were better positioned than us to tackle this market."

Chait founded Travefy in 2012 and set up shop in Lincoln, Neb., after meeting his technical cofounder, a Nebraska native. They raised a $320,000 seed round and launched a beta version of the product in mid-2013, giving the site a narrow head start on Tripeese. Both companies promised to eliminate the hassles of group travel booking and payments--a market worth $120 billion--and both were founded by business school students exploring entrepreneurial paths. (If my Facebook feed is any indication, coordinating jaunts to the world's party capitals is indeed the primary hardship facing MBAs; challenges related to learning or career development appear to be secondary concerns.)

On its own, Travefy has grown to serve 15,000 active users, who have planned over 1,000 trips. Chait says the site monetizes roughly 10% of trips, through commissions.

Convincing someone to sign up, he says, is all about "the emotional heartstrings, not the features. It's about making them feel that pain that we've all felt--when that friend stiffs them on the money they owe for the bachelorette party, for example." Other popular use cases include sports tournaments, school trips, and family reunions.

Looking ahead, Chait and his team are focused on growth. He says that 4% of users have already completed a second trip, and hopes to see that number rise along with the size of his user base. In addition, a patent is pending for Travefy's expense management software; payment transfer fees also contribute to the company's bottom line.

As for Travefy's unusual growth hack, Chait declines to disclose the price he paid for Tripeese, but the self-professed "data nut" contends that the acquisition makes perfect sense. "We're keenly aware of our cost structures, and part of our strategy is to think about every distribution channel that we can," he says. "If you think about the competitive landscape, the one value that your peers have is that they've tapped into [a customer base of] like-minded individuals."

Tripeese cofounder Boscolo concurs. "The more we moved into our product development, the more we learned the needs of our customers, we felt like we were moving in the same direction they were already in," he says. "We realized, these guys are building the kind of product we want to build. Being humble, I think they were ahead."

With startups easier than ever to launch but harder than ever to grow and scale, that kind of attitude could go a long way toward introducing some efficiencies at the cluttered early stages. Startup culture has managed to destigmatize failure, but incentivizing humility might be too much to ask.