Apparently we should all learn to code. Men. Women. Children. CEOs. Everyone. Even President Obama is imploring his constituents to learn computer science already. But what if learning to code isn't the right mantra after all?

A 50-person Brooklyn-based dev shop called Happy Fun Corp thinks the pressure to program should be replaced by something else. Don't just learn to code, HFC says--learn to make products.

With their upcoming HFC Academy, the digital engineering firm is using its experience to lay out a course that teaches product management. It's no longer enough to learn some coding and call it a day. Thriving in tomorrow's tech world needs training in taking your digital product from vision to uploaded, accessible reality.

HFC should know: They've spent a lot of time training new recruits. In a way, their HFC Academy is self-serving, teaching students to code, design, develop, and iterate a product through a project timeline just like they've taught their recruits.

"Selifshly, our ability to grow is based on getting smart people," says HFC cofounder Ben Schippers.

University degrees have been the gold standard for decades, and their graduates often scoff at bootcamp graduates. Many academically trained programmers praise their computer-science education for expanding their problem-solving skillset. But Schippers sees a great disconnect between those programs and practical preparation for getting programming jobs.

"For people graduating now, what these expensive colleges are saying is, 'You are now prepared for graduate school,'" says Schippers. "They're not preparing you for the tech workplace. By the time they get to us, it takes just as long to teach four-year graduates as to teach a layman who's really hungry to learn."

Computer-science education teaches the abstracts of computer workings, but not the critical thinking to evaluate public-facing products, says Schippers. Liberal arts colleges teach more of the soft skills Schippers values, like communication and critical thinking. But as HFC Academy starts teaching interested students the practical project management and programming skills that Schippers says tech titans like Google and Facebook have been teaching for years, the hope isn't just to sneak ahead of the competition--it's to guide students into jobs they wouldn't have gotten with yesterday's code classes.

Coding in the Ivory Tower

Schippers isn't going into the Tech Academy blind; he's already taught a version of the course to college students. Schippers' alma mater, Bates College in Maine, chose Schippers and HFC cofounder Will Schenk as part of its first wave of "Practitioner Taught" short courses. Bates is using the inter-term courses to bring business-savvy alumni back to explore the post-graduation world that's nebulous to academia.

While HFC's Technology Academy and The Flatiron School have similarly simple goals--educate professionals to find jobs in tech--Bates doesn't view the Practitioner Taught courses as purely pragmatic or vocational. They complement Bates' ambition for its students to find "purposeful work."

"Purposeful work is a notion of discovering through coursework what really matters to you," says Dean of Faculty Matthew Auer. "There's no sense in getting a job with no way to grow personally and professionally."

Like many Liberal Arts colleges, Bates stacks its faculty with long-term tenured professors instead of filling out the faculty with many higher-turnover associate professors and adjunct lecturers. While it's a win for faculty, it means the expertise pool is limited to whoever Bates hires long-term. Since Bates has no computer-science department, any programming education is part of patchwork courses taught by faculty who happen to have related theoretical experience for courses on number theory, artificial intelligence, or robotics design.

The Practitioner Taught courses address that experience gap, as much about exposing students to new concepts as keeping their critical faculties honed. Schippers' and Schenk's course doesn't just instruct how to build, but prompts students to ask if the world really needs this new product.

And as much as Bates shies away from the "pragmatic" label, Schippers' and Schenk's course had very work-practical elements--like mock interviews. According to the extensive student evaluations Bates collected, students raved about the workplace preparation that's largely absent from academic coursework.

"This is what students really want. Let's not pretend that they don't know what they want," says Schippers.

No matter how eager, Schippers felt the three days per week, five-week program was too short--hence why HFC Academy has been stretched to five days per week for seven weeks. On the whole, Schippers had to adjust his expectations of tech fluency. This is partially a generational issue: students grown on the app interface of iPads and iPhones were clueless about file system locations, for example. These are kids who may have never seen a DOS prompt. Schippers has separately taught Baby Boomers who missed the computer train and struggle to get on Facebook. These refinements don't just help certain demographics--they refine the educational process of programming education as a whole.

For Bates, the five-week length was a great testing ground for integrating programming in future courses. The faculty have talked about applying Big Data analysis to microeconomics and health courses, or even Dean Auer's own bioinformatics courses. And while those talks have a long way to go before implementation, Bates is seeing an uncommonly high number of faculty on the verge of retirement. Now is the time to plan for integrating programming in courses for the next 20 to 30 years, says Dean Auer.

Even Learning To Code Can Benefit

Of course, there are brick-and-mortar Learn To Code schools that see just as much opportunity--and prove their worth by getting their graduates employed. For The Flatiron School's offshoot Brooklyn campus, that number stands at a staggering 100 percent of job-seeking graduates getting placed at programming jobs in New York City within three months.

Flatiron doesn't venture into the product management that HFC Academy is exploring, but its focus on employment-centric skills sets it apart from online and theoretical coding courses. While it doesn't pioneer project-management skills, the Brooklyn campus exists to innovate a different aspect of America's next generation of coding classes: educating the less-skilled and unemployed.

Through a deal with the city, Flatiron's Brooklyn campus holds tuition-free classes exclusively for students who are unemployed or make less than $50,000 per year. In addition, the school goes out of its way to enroll women, veterans, and minorities. The Brooklyn campus runs a 22-week course including a four-week job-placement externship that extends the course past Flatiron Manhattan's 16-week standard, but the instruction is otherwise identical. The Brooklyn students are held to the same standards, says the Brooklyn campus instruction lead Blake Johnson.

Flatiron Brooklyn has graduated one class and are in the middle of their second. Despite drawing an experience range from computer-science dabblers to students who didn't know what a URL was, the school found employment for all. It's a testament to the concept that literally anyone can walk into the right bootcamp's doors and walk out ready for programming work--even those with extensive obstacles. Poverty increases stress levels, Johnson says and decades of studies have supported, and there are very unfortunate moments where students can't afford a ride to class on public transportation.

And yet, Flatiron found them jobs--including getting one student a programming gig at Etsy.

The Argument For A Classroom

Flatiron's job guarantee is a great carrot in a still-challenging economy, but the benefits of a brick-and-mortar classroom have always been teacher facetime and peer support. Students aren't just building a peer network in the classroom--they're training for tomorrow's group-oriented programming culture.

"That cliche of the cowboy coder in his parents basement--it doesn't happen anymore," says Johnson.

Those cowboy coders have always been the determined few who can learn on their own with minimal support. The classroom provides the space and authority for everyone else to learn. This includes the teacher facetime and the confidence of following structured learning.

"The most important thing you can give people is a map," says Johnson. "You say, 'Trust me. Do this now and do that tomorrow.'"

Obviously, having a structured timeline stretched over weeks is reassuring, but Johnson finds himself coaching his students through the difficult process of gearing up to learn again as much as he's actually teaching skills. Acting like a combination psychiatrist, priest, and parent on top of teaching means Johnson's troubleshooting his students as much as he's troubleshooting their code.

"One of the biggest obstacles is that programming makes you feel stupid. It's really crippling. The emotional aspect is the hardest thing," says Johnson.

It's especially hard to admit difficulty in tech--one doesn't want to look weak and unable to keep up with technology's progression. But that obstructs learning and builds poor communication habits. Part of Flatiron Brooklyn's program is Feelings Friday, a circle-up confessional period. Students vent--and nobody gets to respond. It's not just cathartic for the confessor. Chances are, others around the circle are relieved to discover that they aren't the only ones having trouble. That's the safe space and personal exchange that builds strong networks among the students themselves--something difficult to grow in online courses.

For their part, HFC Academy wants to keep their students in contact after graduation by launching a concurrent Academy Network. LinkedIn comparisons aside, HFC is setting up the Academy Network to be both an alumni hub and a job board stocked with listings by companies that trust the HFC name.

That's in addition to the business personnel HFC has lined up for facetime with students--connections HFC has made through years in the NYC tech scene. In a digital age, the future of programming education is in the human connections to learn, collaborate, and improve.

Cryptocat is one of the most popular and easiest to use encrypted chat programs in existence today. Whether as a simple browser plug-in or as an iPhone app, Cryptocat has drawn praise (and criticism) for its focus on ease of use rather than power-user tools.

With over 200,000 regular users, Cryptocat has achieved exactly what passes for mass adoption in the world of super-secure apps. But for Nadim Kobeissi, the original developer and current project lead of Cryptocat, there is still much to be done. I spoke with Kobeissi about why he builds privacy apps for ordinary users and his commitment to "fighting against the Ivory Tower" of cryptography.

For those who don't know, what is Cryptocat?

Cryptocat is a free software project that attempts to make encrypted end-to-end chat accessible to everyone. If you know how to use Facebook chat, then you already know how to use Cryptocat. You can just install it for your browser or your mobile phone and have truly private conversations with your friends. You can have group conversations. You can also send files over it. And also recent versions of Cryptocat can connect to your Facebook account and load your Facebook contacts and if you have other friends using Cryptocat you can have an encrypted conversation that way as well.

How did the idea for Cryptocat originally come about?

Well, that story is actually not that exciting. I was taking a shower a few years ago and I realized during my shower that I think web technologies have come to a point where you can have really good encryption schemes that are built into the browser. I remembered reading a few articles about advancements in HTML5 and also in JavaScript in the browser. And I wanted to take advantage of new advancements in browser technology to make advancements in cryptography accessible to the general public.

Why the focus on the general public?

Cryptography is my main research interest and I've always had the opinion that you have to focus on practical, applied cryptography. I see a lot of research being done on really theoretical cryptography. But I don't like that approach because it's a very Ivory Tower, academic approach. I really want to focus on the kind of cryptography that has practical benefits to regular individuals in the world. Everything I've done related to cryptography has I think embodied the belief that if you want to do cryptography research it's much more valuable to do stuff that's related to practical or applied cryptography.

I'm actually releasing a brand new cryptography tool next week at the Hope Conference. It's a common theme in my work to combine advances in cryptography technologies with advances in usability technologies. I want to fight back against the Ivory Tower of purely academic theoretical cryptography practice. I want to bring cryptography in a direction that makes sense for the average person. Because to me the most valuable research when it comes to cryptography is to focus on what this can bring to the regular individual.

One of the things I appreciate about Cryptocat is that it's a great privacy tool but you also intersperse fun, like displaying random facts about cats while security keys are being generated.

It's really just a way of tying together my interest in practical cryptography with more usable technologies. It's all toward the goal of making products that people find useful and that they're not intimidated by. That's the point.

How has the landscape changed since you first started building Cryptocat?

When Cryptocat started working on encryption in the browser it was still a brand-new field. And it actually lacked a lot of credibility as a field. Now three years later after Cryptocat was at the forefront of that battle, you see Google releasing its own JavaScript browser cryptography project. Microsoft now has a research group on browser cryptography and JavaScript cryptography. Cryptocat was ahead of the curve on this for three years. People are starting to catch up and realize that if you want to advance cryptography, you should focus on making it usable to the general public.

So you have a Kickstarter campaign for Cryptocat currently going on. What exactly are you raising money for?

We're fundraising for three big, sweeping things. The first is to have an Android app because it's very high in demand for our users. The second is to have encrypted audio and video chat. If we have that, then Cryptocat can be a drop-in replacement for Skype. The third goal is just to raise funds to be able to pay for server costs and quality assurance costs. Right now Cryptocat's server usage is not cheap and it's only going to get more expensive if we offer encrypted audio to everyone for free.

Encrypted audio and video inside the browser seems like quite a challenge. How are you planning to implement that?

We're investigating using WebRTC, which is a technology that allows us to do this. From looking at it so far, I think we can add some improvements to it to bolster its security. WebRTC is already a technology that comes with end-to-end encryption, so we just need to figure out how to reliably implement it in a way that keeps up with the security expectations of Cryptocat and also integrate it into our existing user interface.

For you personally, what's the most exciting use of Cryptocat that you've heard of?

I think the most exciting thing to hear about was that Glenn Greenwald used it in Hong Kong to talk to another journalist when he was meeting Snowden for the first time. The most interesting thing about that story is that Greenwald used Cryptocat in Hong Kong because his other encryption software had failed. But Cryptocat succeeded because of its usability in the browser. I really think that this single story really epitomizes what Cyrptocat is about. But I could tell you a million other stories.

Such as?

Well I know Cryptocat is being used in lawyers' offices, medical offices, sex clinics, and activist groups. A lot of people use Cryptocat to have cybersex, from what I keep hearing.

Well, there are a lots of reasons that people need private communication and that's certainly one of them.

The take-away I think is that if you make it accessible, people from really different places in the world and really different situations will find it useful.

Why is it important for you that Cryptocat is free and open source software?

First this is an argument that I believe in at the engineering and programming level. I think that encryption software can't afford to not be open source. I think that in order to evaluate the research and security of any cryptographic software, you need to adhere to , which has been a staple for cryptography for many decades. The principle is simply that you cannot obtain security via obscuring your practices. You have to obtain your security via assuming that the adversary already knows all aspects of the system and nevertheless the system is still secure.

So how does that principle play out with Cryptocat?

The way I enforce this is not only by making Cryptocat open source software, but by making it free software under a permissive license. We document the software and the cryptographic specification and we open up our development process. We hire auditors to do biannual audits and release those audits for the public to examine. It's a very transparent approach to doing cryptography research. Unfortunately it's resulted in the misconception that Cryptocat is more broken than other tools because we keep talking about how many different bugs we find and fix. But the real reason for that is because no other software has this level of transparency.

When you think about household appliances that it would be nice to control from your smartphone, lightbulbs might not immediately rise to the top on the list. After all, home lighting generally comes down to a couple of basic rules: Turn the lights on when you enter a room and remember to turn them off when you leave.

But smart-bulb maker Ilumi hopes to change that, with Bluetooth-enabled LED lights that let you turn them on and off and configure brightness and even color from an iOS or Android device.

"I think it's a really good time for this type of technology," says Ilumi cofounder Corey Egan. "By throwing in some intelligence and really using the mobile device as a platform, we can make ordinary things extraordinary."

The bulbs plug into ordinary lightbulb sockets, and multiple Ilumi bulbs in a room can form their own mesh network, so as long as any device is within a phone's range, it's possible to control them all. Since the bulbs are equipped with their own flash memory, they can remember settings even if a wall switch gets turned off or a lamp unplugged.

And letting customers use their phones to configure the bulb instead of a custom control panel makes adoption that much easier, Egan says.

"It's actually done through a device the user already has," he says. "They're already used to interacting with it."

The company has received more than $200,000 in funding from crowdsourcing campaigns on Indiegogo and Kickstarter and began shipping bulbs in May, Egan says.

The bulbs can be set to automatically turn on at a certain time and even made to pulse and change color in time to music. And once the lights in a room are all set to the right color, that configuration can be saved and recalled later, Egan says.

And as far as more complex possibilities, Ilumi's providing a software development kit to let programmers build their own apps, he says.

"We've seen a lot of unique things," he says, including researchers looking to use the bulbs for scientific purposes.

"One researcher is doing research in how light can affect folks with autism," Egan says.

And, the company says, users will soon be able to have Ilumi bulbs automatically turn on and off as they move through their homes, meaning energy-conscious Ilumi customers may no longer even have to remember to turn off the lights when they leave the room.

It's tempting to think of iOS 8 as a more polished version of iOS 7; when you first install the update, there's no visual cue that anything is different. But iOS 8 packs a long list of new features, some of which we're still digging up weeks later. But what else is really new and worthwhile here? After thoroughly testing out the new OS, there were four such features that really stuck out.

1) Audio Messaging

I'm not fond of dictating my texts, yet I find the new quick audio feature in Messages to be addictive.

Activated by holding down the microphone icon, the feature immediately starts recording an audio message, which is then sent by sliding your finger up on the screen. If you misspoke (or are having second thoughts about drunk voice-texting your ex) you can use the familiar leftward swipe gesture to delete it before it sends. I suspect that once people try it, the tap, hold, and flick-to-send routine will become familiar.

Sending audio text messages isn't for every situation--it's still awkward to dictate messages while standing in line at Chipotle--but there are a lot of lazy situations in which it's perfect. I found using it around the house, audio being a lot more convenient when doing chores. And because it doesn't transcribe the note into text like Siri, there's no need to correct spelling, which is especially nice when you're behind the wheel.

2) Predictive Texting

Making texting even easier is the predictive text capabilities of the new keyboard. It's one of the most noticeable new additions, thanks to the hard-to-miss row of words it appends right above the keyboard.

The QuickType feature--which lets you a few letters and tapping a word, typing a few more letters and selecting another--is a toss-up. Some might like it, while others might ignore it in favor of the way they've always typed on iOS. The place really comes in handy, however, is when replying to incoming messages.

For example, my wife sent me a few questions from the store and instead of having to type the answers, the choices were pre-populated. For the times messages are utilitarian in nature, the predictive text will be your best friend. Answering questions will be a delight, plus the predictive element learns how you speak to different contacts and tailors the responses accordingly. In this regard, messaging with iOS 7 will feel like a huge chore once you've used iOS 8.

3) Better App Store

After six years the App Store has seen its fair share of criticism. It's also pretty clear the App Store is too big too do a good job and make everyone happy. The updates made to it in iOS 8, however, are pretty nice.

Visually, icons are bigger and items are spaced a little better, but overall it remains similar. The biggest complaint--which Apple is trying to address--is discoverability. Third-party apps make the iPhone experience. In iOS 8, surfacing new apps in the App Store feels a lot easier.

Google's Play store has a similar problem: Once you highlight dozens of apps in different ways, the results can be overwhelming for users. One way the iOS 8 App Store tries to change this is by making it easier to drill down into specific interests.

There's a new "explore" button now which combines previous efforts into one area. Front and center under explore is apps "Popular Near Me," while the categories underneath help to separate the sub-division out more. Tapping "Music," for example, produced a long list including "Apps For Learning Music," "Lyrics," and "Radio." All very different types of apps that still fall under the broad music category.

Another subtle, but helpful addition is under the search button. Without typing anything, the first thing you see is a list of trending searches. This has already proved useful, not to mention interesting. Revision: Once you search for something, the store displays a list of items related to your query, further improving app discovery.

The tweaks might seem small, but they could be enough to help people find apps they might not have otherwise.

4) Spotlight

Spotlight finally feels like it's reached the level of maturity it was destined for since its introduction. Integrating things like App Store searches, iTunes music, nearby places, and news rounds out the search box nicely.

In practice, it's the first time I feel like I have a go-to place on iOS to quickly type things and at least get close enough to what I'm looking for. I was concerned Safari had too many desktop metaphors to be a useful mobile browser, but in combination with Spotlight's new capabilities, the two work well together.

Spotlight in iOS 7 often came up short, focusing mostly on local search. Now in iOS 8, if I search for an app I need, it doesn't matter if it's on the phone or not because Spotlight will find it on the app store if it's not local. Same for music, it doesn't matter if a song is in my library or not because searching will still find it in iTunes.

The important improvement in Spotlight is that I don't have to think about whether I need to search online or locally on my phone because the two are much more intertwined now.

I'd still love to see more refinement and work on Spotlight going forward, but in practice it's much more useful than it's ever been before.

A lot of wearable fitness trackers can help you keep track of how many steps you've taken or how many hours you've slept. The creators of the Stonecrysus aim to go further, using data about how particular sleep or exercise patterns or dietary choices affected your body in the past to offer recommendations to help meet your fitness goals.

"Stonecrysus then learns how specific foods, activities, and sleep affect each user's physiology uniquely," says Stonecrysus CEO Matt Landers. "It collects over 35 data points and analyzes those data points to make those recommendations."

Daily measurements help the device, which can be worn on a lanyard or wristband or carried in a pocket, and a connected smartphone app continually improve their estimates of how different exercises and sleep habits affect individual users, he says.

"Stonecrysus doesn't define a mile run as 125 calories burned," the company wrote on the page for its ongoing Kickstarter fundraiser. "It looks at how running a mile has affected you in the past to determine how it will affect you today, based on your current health and fitness."

Then, the app can make predictions and recommendations for changes based on specific goals, like weight loss or muscle gain and continually refine its estimates over time, he says.

"If your weight is even slightly different, it's going to relearn about how an apple and three miles [ran] affect you and what your metabolism is," he says. "Even if it corrects only slightly, it's still gonna correct."

The wearable component can distinguish between different motions related to different exercises, and the app includes a wide range of graphical menu options to let users specify down to the slice exactly what foods their meals included, not just nutrition label calorie counts, Landers says.

Users will also have the option to share their information with fitness advisors, such as doctors or personal trainers, through a secure cloud system.

"We created this online dashboard where all this data gets uploaded, and the user can give access to their health professional to access this data," says Landers, who worked with his cardiologist father to develop the product.

Landers says Stonecrysus lawyers say the app doesn't have to comply with strict HIPAA health privacy requirements, but the company plans to do so anyway.

"We've done an extensive amount of research into how to best protect this data, and to whether we need to meet certain regulations," he says. "The data privacy is of the utmost importance to us."

The company will also let users optionally submit their data for anonymous research into how certain foods and sleep and exercise patterns affect different demographics, he says.

"We're going to look at how lifestyle habits affect specific health events," from weight loss to various illnesses, he says.

Pete Warden's startup, Jetpac, isn't your typical company dealing in the hoary world of Instagram content. Jetpac builds travel guides based around visual analysis of Instagram pictures. The service parses Instagram with an image-recognition platform to tag and categorize pictures of hipsters, dog owners, surfers, local residents, and a million other subcategories.

Now Warden's tackling a new challenge: teaching smartphones (and cameras in general) how to recognize objects.

Back in April, Warden released a software development kit called DeepBeliefSDK on GitHub. Designed for developers to integrate machine vision into smartphone apps, DeepBelief is currently available for Android, iOS, Linux, and Raspberry Pi. While DeepBelief is just one in a number of early entrants into the somewhat creepy world of deep learning for mobile devices, it has one advantage over competitors. It's blazing fast--Warden says Deep Belief can identify objects in under 300 milliseconds on an iPhone 5S, while using less than 20 megabytes of memory. Jetpac recently released an iPhone app Spotter, which uses Deep Belief to instantly recognize any object you point an iPhone at.

And like any good techie, Warden tested Deep Belief on cute cats fighting evil raccoons (video below). The video starts slowly, but gets fun as you watch. We promise.

Jetpac's work is also part of a movement called "deep learning" which offers Google, Facebook, and government intelligence agencies a holy grail of search--being able to search the visuals of images just like we search text and metadata today.

Geoffrey Hinton, who pioneered a revolutionary convolutional neural network approach, now works for Google. Facebook, in turn, hired Yann LeCunn, a NYU computer scientist considered to be one of the world's top experts in deep learning, for a secretive artificial intelligence project. Warden and Jetpac offer a third approach for deep learning--one where the masses, not just huge search companies, get early cracks at cutting edge image search techniques. It's also a nifty advertisement for his organization's capabilities.

"Normally, computer vision starts off by saying you need to find edges, corners, and parts of the image that have a particular texture or color to incorporate that as an algorithm," Warden told Co.Labs. "The deep learning approach instead focuses on giving the neural network, as it learns, millions of examples of the different thing you want it to recognize. It figures out how to look for smaller properties in an image, to find things that look like fur and noses which you would see in pictures of cats. What you end up with is a neural network looking for patches of images that resemble eyes or ears or cat noses, to see what arrangement they're in. If they resemble what they saw in example images of cats, it's likely a cat."

There are challenges, however. While Deep Belief is great at recognizing some objects, its image recognition component is not perfect. The SDK's developers found that it mistook sidewalks for crossword puzzles, the binding of spiral notebooks for oboes, and large black trash bags for black swans.

For now, Deep Belief is an exciting novelty. However, Warden is fascinated by the SDK's future uses. One example he gave was training wildlife cameras in the woods to automatically go off if a certain type of animal wanders by. But more importantly, he pointed to a project called the Catalyst Frame Microscope--one of a number of devices which turn the iPhone into a portable microscope. Using the SDK, Catalyst Frame's software can be trained to automatically identify different kinds of cells.

While deep learning might be in its infancy today, the future ramifications for fields as diverse as health care, advertising, scientific research, and law enforcement could be huge.

Can jingles help you learn how to code?

At least 27,000 people think yes. That's the number of actively engaged users on Code School, an Orlando-based startup using songs and interactive learning to teach coding.

"You might consider us the HBO of online education," explains Gregg Pollack, an actor turned programmer, and Code School's founder. "We want to create the most engaging way you can learn, which is learning by doing."

With course names like Rails for Zombies 2, this is gamification brought to the extreme. "The experience you get when you play a course is less like reading a textbook, and more like playing a video game," says Pollack, who writes most of the songs, then commissions voice-over artists and musicians. Students range from beginners to intermediate and advanced developers.

Pollack claims "anybody who has a knack for patterns and problem solving" can succeed in his program. Code School's team of 30 staffers produce four to eight hours of courses every month. About a third of the content is free; a monthly fee of $29 unlocks everything.

Pollack knows firsthand the value of merging the arts and science. Raised by a father who worked as an engineer at Intel, he's been coding since elementary school. As an undergrad at Santa Clara University, he majored in computer engineering. But that's where he also realized his other passion: acting. The budding thespian ended up minoring in theater, a tech-art pairing not many developers can claim. Even more unique is the acting chops he honed as a co-ed: moonlighting as a lead in The Rocky Horror Picture Show where he performed with high heels and fishnets as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, week in and week out, for four years.

"I would not have made it through college without The Rocky Horror Picture Show," he remembers.

Although the part was very much risque, it gave the young Pollack an understanding of what audiences respond to--and how to get their attention. When he graduated, he began scripting educational code, blogging, and consulting. He started mixing his penchant for problem solving with his love of performance and design, artistic sensibilities he'd incorporate into the catchy jingles that would become Code School's trademark. Although unorthodox, today the approach seems to be working.

A few weeks ago at Google I/O, the Mountain View mega-firm announced it's partnering with Code School to give away free accounts to women and minorities. Opening the door to coding is an issue long part of the tech discussion, but few companies have actually done anything to further this agenda. This collaboration encourages real professional development, and the companies are giving away 1,000 passes for three free months of lessons. Google has previously partnered with the company on half a dozen courses, including Exploring Google Maps for iOS, Discover Drive, and Discover DevTools.

Teaming with Google is huge, but it isn't an ed-tech carte blanche. Huge questions remain: Can unconventional teaching methods actually lead to more efficient learning, and entice young, overlooked demographics to become the developers of tomorrow? And are jingles a real way to learn, or is this a catchy fluke?

Transforming Coding For The Masses

With potential for huge paydays and payouts, no one is arguing the validity of coding and software development as top-tier employment skills. The popularity of the web, and in particular mobile apps, has created a gold rush with coders cast as new-age '49ers. But deftness behind a keyboard isn't something most can claim overnight. And the road to that efficiency isn't something the masses are being exposed to. That's why Code School's play could be so valuable--if they get it right.

So will it work? Howard Marks, the chair of the Los Angeles accelerator StartEngine, told me he thinks it definitely could; but in order to make an impact, Code School will have to try especially hard to reach traditionally marginalized groups like minorities, women, and youth.

Some of those wheels, while difficult to grease, are already in motion. In April, Marks' StartEngine piloted a coding program with the Youth Business Alliance, hosting high school kids from charter schools in South Central Los Angeles. Other nonprofit initiatives, like UrbanTxT, a 501(c)3 founded by Watts native Oscar Menjivar, are aggressively targeting the raw untapped talent of these youths, an unorthodox approach Menjivar compares to Code School. Whether it's hands on or behind a screen, "good learning is all about relationship building," he says. This month, Menjivar's startup received a grant to build a hackerspace in the tech desert of the inner-city.

There's a whole generation of kids, especially those from poorer socio-economic backgrounds, that are not getting exposure.

"If we push underrepresented people toward coding skills and entrepreneurship, we can only imagine what could happen," Marks says, pointing domestically and abroad at booming startup scenes in developing nations like Argentina, Brazil, and Nigeria.

Games, or musical learning, could be a new avenue to that end. In his own accelerator, Marks says most applicants are Asian or white, yet the city of Los Angeles, where he's based, is more than 50% latino. Tech isn't about DNA; one ethnic group isn't more predisposed to code over another. It's a matter of familiarity and contact. And while underprivileged kids are now being targeted, the next mission is to incorporate more women, who are just as adept at learning as men are.

Pollack, who has a daughter and a son, says he's very conscious of the "boys' club" stigma in the industry, and the need to keep his material balanced.

"There's not enough female coders," he admits. "It's very male centric, and we definitely have become more sensitive to that. Even the characters that we use in our animation are a little more gender-balanced."

Getting Girls Coding

Pollack often uses his own children as test subjects. If he can hook a 6- and 7-year-old, he's confident he can hook anyone.

"I remember very distinctly last year my wife saying to my daughter: 'Hey Ilana, do you want to watch some TV,' and she said 'no thanks, I'm programming,'" Pollack says. "That's a little victory. Yes, I'm making programmers!"

The question "Why code?" is rhetorical, according to Pollack; he says no matter what work you do, just a little bit of programing knowledge can help speed-up flow, streamline efficiency, and problem solve.

"You can and you should learn to code from scratch, because it's making the Internet right now," says Kim Bui, a digital journalism professor at USC's Annenberg School. She agrees that that troubleshooting ability is what keeps the web innovative.

Her co-eds aren't all stereotypical web savants, but she's helped teach student athletes and undergrads who aspire to be traveler bloggers. No matter the students or their goals, Bui says the key is keeping the material fun and engaging, which is why she thinks Code School could be a winner.

Pollack's service isn't the only on the market. Many offer free training. There's General Assembly and Codecademy, and Lego's WeDo, which teaches real-life problem solving. But none of them provide the kitschy songs that stick in your head, like Code School. That niche is what keeps it unique, and students coming back.

Pollack says he's surprised there aren't more companies trying to copy the same formula.

"I think what it comes down to, why they haven't, why our recipe is so unique, is that it combines so many different disciplines," he notes. "That's usually where innovation happens. We combine good branding, good design, good user interface, good background development, and we're from the arts."

As convenient as it may be, shopping for clothes online has one major pitfall: finding the right size. Retailers know it: E-return rates can reach as high as 40% as consumers take guesses on the correct size and toss items in their virtual shopping cart. That's if they even bother to click "buy" amidst the uncertainty. It's a sticking point for retailers that one startup hopes to fix.

True Fit, a retail software startup that just raised $10.6 million in equity funding, uses data analytics to take the guesswork out of online shopping. Well-known department stores and brands, like Macy's, Nordstrom, and Guess, use True Fit's algorithms on their e-commerce sites to help boost sales conversion rates and reduce customer returns. And in a quest to reduce retailers' online return rates and boost sellers' sales conversion numbers, the software company gets a lot of help from the field of data science.

How It Works

"There's no real easy way to figure out what size you should pick across brands and different styles, and especially when you don't have the benefit of a dressing room," says True Fit cofounder Jessica Murphy, who was a buyer for a large department store before starting True Fit.

To get a global perspective on how clothing sizes from different brands compare with one another, True Fit gets proprietary fit data from its more than 1,000 brand partners. So, if True Fit needed to understand how Levi's intended a pair of jeans to fit a customer, it could just look through its database for the specific fit information that Levi's provided.

"It's not just a technology solution; It has to also be a relationship solution, as well as a product solution," says Jeff Putz, True Fit's vice president of engineering. The more brands and retailers the company partners with, the wider variety of recommendations True Fit can make to its clients' online consumers.

When a user is ready to select a clothing size on a product page, he can choose to access or set up his True Fit profile. Setting up a profile requires him to know his height and weight, as well as the size and brand of his favorite piece of clothing. In less than a minute, True Fit's algorithms spit out a size suggestion, with a rating that indicates how happy the user would be with the item. But what makes True Fit so easy to use is the last piece of data that the user provides about himself--his favorite item of clothing.

"The preference data is really the key to getting it right," Murphy says. It is even more important than getting his exact measurements. With this one piece of data, True Fit's algorithms can keep learning more about the user over time, all the while tracking the user's sales and returns data. Murphy likens True Fit to the music-discovery app Pandora.

"It's less about getting people into the right size, which is obviously very important, but it's more important to get them into the styles that they're going to keep," Murphy says. The more users use their True Fit profiles with different brands and items, the better of a picture True Fit gets of what types of styles the user is likely to keep or return.

On average, True Fit has helped its clients reduce their online return rates by 10% to 15%, depending on the category. Lord & Taylor improved its sales conversion rate three times over after implementing True Fit.

The Data Part

To crunch all the numbers from both consumers and retailers, True Fit's engineering and data science teams work together. Engineers participate in the data exploration with the data scientists, and the data scientists take part in the construction and delivery of the coded algorithms. Putz describes this collaboration the best way to innovate.

Both teams use the usual suspects of data science tools to sift through all of the data points that it gets. Among them are Hadoop, to process datasets in parallel, and R, to visualize and analyze them. The teams store all their data in the cloud, terabytes of it on secured, third-party servers.

"We've found that we can get the best results by using a variety of techniques in really clever ways," says Zhidong Lu, lead scientist at True Fit. How it mixes and matches its algorithms is what makes True Fit's approach to analyzing such large datasets unique. Some of the calculating techniques it uses are generalized linear regression, collaborative filtering, and quadratic programming, all of which are common tools among data scientists.

Exactly how True Fit's number crunchers make their mix of calculations so "clever" is information that does not travel far outside of the company. But there is no question that how True Fit leverages its massive database and assortment of algorithms is improving retailers' bottom lines.

"So much of what we do is what we've learned from using those tools and really making them fly in the real world," says Putz.

Jake Levine, the founder of a startup called Electric Objects, wanted to create a new kind of computer when he conceived of his digital arts display, a computer that is solely devoted to displaying digital art on the wall. According to its Kickstarter, the EO1, as it's called, has succeeded.

"What if we tried to make a different kind of computer, one that didn't demand your attention, that didn't try to absorb you in interaction, that merely displayed beautiful things from the Internet?" asks Levine. An awesomer evolution of the digital picture frame, Electric Objects' EO1 campaign reached its funding goal within a half hour of launching on Kickstarter earlier this month.

This isn't just a novelty; it's a true problem solver. Increasingly, museums are showing new and archived works which are digital, or in the case of newer art, only exist digitally. The EO1's hardware and software is specially equipped to handle and present these Internet-native pieces of art. And with Electric Objects opening up its SDK to developers within the next few months, the possibility to support and display still more types of media is within reach.

The device essentially runs a custom web browser that connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi. Users can voluntarily put a new image up using Electric Object's website or app, both of which will directly send the image to the EO1. The EO1's predecessor, the EO0 prototype, has already reached 100 users worldwide this year, bolstered by an early round of venture capital funding. Positive reviews from the tech world have kept the momentum going. Fast Company featured Levine in its Most Creative People series earlier this year.

This thing looks simple, but its design belies what's under the hood. The EO1 has advanced hardware and processing power to support the kind of complex digital art that is emerging on the web, not just static images and GIFs. The EO1's browser uses Gecko, the layout engine that quickly loads web pages in Mozilla's Firefox. There are 2-D and 3-D graphics accelerators to handle artists' renderings. And the 1GB of RAM can support these new types of moving multimedia.

"Some of the most interesting work that developers and artists are doing on the web is in JavaScript," says Levine. He cites a type of art called "generative art" that typically uses an external data stream to shape the visual. It can take into account, for example, interaction from users visiting the piece online. The team is betting on more artists creating coded work, putting in place EO1's advanced hardware in anticipation.

The team has put in a lot of work to go from supporting standard images and GIFs to supporting JavaScript. The EO1's browser is compatible with WebGL, the API that lets developers create graphics in the JavaScript language, directly within the browser. And it will support most of the major JavaScript frameworks.

Electric Objects is also currently working with the artist Casey Reas on implementing support for the Processing programming language in the EO1's browser. Ultimately, the browser will support Processing.js and overall data processing.

Because Electric Objects is designing everything up from its software and down to its hardware, it has the flexibility to implement any type of development platform it wants. The idea for the JavaScript and Processing language support came directly from the company's relationships with digital artists. With options to choose from, third-party developers will be able to specify what kind of backend their custom apps will use once Electric Objects opens up its SDK.

Using Kickstarter as its base, Electric Objects plans to ship the EO1 to beta-tester funders in January and the rest of the funders in May 2015. The company will settle on a price point and open up general sales after that.

In the end, the EO1 is a way for artists to explore another medium. And as the Kickstarter project runs its course, the experience is a way for Electric Objects to explore the market's readiness for its product. Finding the sweet spot between the art and hacker worlds will be an ongoing exercise for Levine.

"I don't want to disrupt painting, you know?" he says, and laughs.

Nicola Villa, one of Cisco's top consultants on big data and analytics, believes the "Internet of food" will soon be as real as the Internet of things.

The IT giant, which is heavily involved in the world of connected devices, forecasts a future where sensors and analytic systems will guarantee food stays safe, fresh, and affordable in the supply chain. Villa is helping representatives from British supermarket giant Tesco and others to work on proof-of-concept projects for sensors in the food supply chain at Thnk, an Amsterdam-based incubator/thinktank. At a presentation day in September, Tesco and Cisco will integrate feasible ideas from the class into their business plans.

Some of the test concepts from the sensors-and-food brainstorming project make perfect sense. Ayana Johnson, a marine biologist, is working on infrastructure to allow end consumers to track the sourcing of their food down to the individual farm it was grown or raised on. Other participants envision a start-to-finish supply chain tracking system similar to the one FedEx uses to ship packages, or technology to prevent food counterfeiting such as mislabeled seafood.

"We wanted to see if we could hack an entire value chain, starting with food, to see how people, processes, data, and things come together to transform whole markets," Villa told Co.Labs. "We selected food as one major issue because we believe there is a safety crisis in food supply. Tesco, through their Tesco Labs division, is also cooperating in the challenge. They bring expertise from a retail management perspective, customer insights, and propositions."

The idea of placing sensors in every pallet and analytics dashboards in every warehouse isn't a new one for agriculture, hospitality, or retail. According to a report published earlier this year by the Kaufman Foundation, one of the biggest changes for the world of agriculture is the rise of "integrated farming systems" that combine sensors, smart machinery, genetics, and physical labor to track plants and animals in real time. And Tesco purchased analytics firm Dunnhumby last year, which is one of the world's best known consumer data analysis firms.

Although the process of building sensors and analytic backends into the world's food supply chain will take a long time, it's already underway--and is largely an outgrowth of the point-of-sale, inventory management, and record-keeping methods huge corporations have used for years. Huge chains and corporations are finding it increasingly affordable to use sensors and RIFD technology at the pallet and even SKU level. Agricultural users are finding novel uses for data-driven tech like monitoring vineyards using analytics dashboards and even--in Michigan--mandatory ear tags for cattle that track each cow's location to prevent disease infestation.

For companies like Cisco, Tesco, and PepsiCo, the industrial Internet is a massive goldmine--and a way of sharply enhancing customer and vendor satisfaction. Being able to cut waste out of the supply chain and preventing subpar products from hitting store shelves benefits all sides. Cisco and other large vendors like Microsoft and General Electric will benefit nicely from the change, but there are also significant benefits to customers. In the meantime, though, expect to see more and more food producers adopting sensors and connected devices of all sorts.

Phone calls, text messages, Facebook comments, Snapchats: Notifications bombard us constantly, forcing us to check our phones. It sucks. Electronerds, a Ukranian team of designers, are developing an elegant solution for notification overload with a device called LEDmeKnow, a "Smart Lightbox" that glows to alert you of notifications from your phone. Their Kickstarter campaign has reached about a quarter of its goal and all of the entry-level devices are already claimed.

But devices like this raise a tricky issue: Does one more device going "ding" actually reduce your techno-anxiety?

LEDmeKnow has nine square LEDs on its face resembling one side of a Rubik's cube. Pair your phone to the box via Bluetooth and use the connected app to assign different LEDs with various services or contacts. A blue square will light up whenever you receive a Facebook notification, and a yellow square for emails and texts from Mom.

Electronerds promises that LEDmeKnow will be compatible with any app that sends a notification to your phone. You can combine apps and contacts, so you will be silently notified if anyone from a work group sends an update on a project through Google Hangouts or WhatsApp. Additionally, your phone can pair with multiple devices, so you can keep one in the office, and a few at home.

A square will pulse while your phone is ringing and goes steady after the call is missed. All of the squares stay lit until you dismiss the notification on your phone.

The idea that we need to become liberated from our smartphones has been gaining traction for some time now. With smart watches and other products like smart rings and smart dashboards, when do these secondary devices become just as intrusive and distracting as the smartphones we seek to unchain ourselves from?

The LEDmeKnow has a better shot than most competing products like the L8 SmartLight. That device generates notifications that disappear shortly after. With LEDmeKnow, alerts are persistent, ensuring that you'll address them before going back to another six episodes of Orange is the New Black.

**With just a few days to go and a large chunk of the project still unfunded, the fate of LEDmeKnow may be a little cloudy. "We'll bring this to life," says Svetlana Lozovaya, marketing manager at Electronerds, explaining that the team will seek out alternative funding if their Kickstarter campaign doesn't meet its goals.

One or two games in MLB is often the difference between advancing to the post-season or staying home, and an entire season can be determined by a couple of good or bad pitches. There is a huge competitive advantage to knowing the opponent's next step. That's one reason sport analytics is a booming field. And it explains why data scientists, both fan and professional, are figuring out how to do more accurate modeling than ever before.

One notable example is Ray Hensberger, baseball technologist and head of the Strategic Innovation Group at Booz Allen Hamilton.

At workshop during the GigaOm Structure conference, Hensberger shared his next-level data crunching and the academic paper his team prepared for the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. His team modeled MLB data to show with 74.5% accuracy what a pitcher is going to throw--and when.

Hensberger's calculations are more accurate than anything else published to date. But as Hensberger knows, getting the numbers right isn't easy. The problem: How to build machine-learning build models that understand baseball decision-making? And how to make them solid enough to actually work with new data in real-time game situations?

"We started with 900 pitchers," says Hensberg. "By excluding players having thrown less than 1,000 pitches total over the three seasons considered, we drew an experimental sample of about 400," he says. "We looked at things like the number of people on base, a right-handed batter versus a left-handed batter, current at-bat situation."

They also looked at the current at-bat (pitch type and zone history, ball-strike count); the game situation (inning, number of outs, and number and location of men on base); and pitcher/batter handedness; as well as other features from observations on pitchers that vary across ball games, such as curveball release point, fastball velocity, general pitch selection, and slider movement.

The final result? A set of pitcher-customized models and a report about what those pitchers would throw in a real game situation.

"We took the data, looked at the most common pitches they threw, then built a model that said 'In this situation, this pitcher will throw this type of pitch--be that a slider, curveball, split-finger. We took the top four top favorite pitches of that pitcher, and we built models for each one of those pitches for each one of those pitchers," Hensberger said.

Methods he and his team outline in a book published by his team called The Field Guide To Data Science. "Most of [the data]," he says, "was PITCHf/x data from MLB. There's a ton of data out there."

Cross Validation Is Key

"Each pitcher-specific model was trained and tested by five-fold cross-validation testing," Hensberger says. Cross-validation is an important part of training and testing machine learning models. It's purpose, in English: to ensure that the models aren't biased by the data they're triangulated by.

"The cross-validation piece, the goal of it, you're defining a data set you can test the model with," says Hensberger." You've got to have a way of testing the model out when you're training it, and to provide insight on how the model will generalize to an unknown data set. In this case, that would be real-time pitches."

"You don't want to just base your model on purely 100% on what was done historically. If we just put out this model without doing that cross-validation piece, people would probably say your model is overfit for the data that you have."

Once the models were solid, Hensberger and his team used a machine-learning strategy known as "one-versus-rest" to run experiments to predict the type of the next pitch for each pitcher. It is based on an algorithm that allowed them to establish an "index of predictability" for a given pitcher. Then they looked at the data in three different ways:

1. Predictability by pitch count, looking at pitcher predictability: When the batter is ahead (more balls than strikes), when the batter is behind (more strikes than balls), and when the pitch count is even.
2. Predictability by "platooning" which looks at how well a right-handed batter will fare against a left-handed pitcher, and vice versa.
3. Out-of-sample test, a test to verify the predictions by running trained models with new data to make sure they work. "We performed out-of-sample predictions by running trained classifier models using previously unseen examples from the 2013 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals."

"Overall our rate was about 74.5% predictability across all pitchers, which actually beats the previous published result at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference. That that was 70%," says Hensberger. The report published by his team was also able to predict exact pitch type better than before. "The other study only said if a fastball or not a fastball that's going to come out of a pitcher's hand," says Hensberger. "The models we built were for the top four pitches, so [they show] what the actually pitches were going to be."

Hensberger's team also made some other interesting discoveries.

"Some pitchers, just given the situation, were more predictable than others," he says. "There is no correlation between predictability and ERA. With less predictable pitchers, you would expect them to be more effective. But that's not true. We also found that eight of the 15 most predictable pitchers came from two teams: the Cardinals and the Reds."

This may be a result of the catchers calling the game, influencing the pitchers and their decisions. But it also may be attributed to pitching coaches telling pitchers what to do in certain situations. "Either way," Hensberger says, "it's interesting to consider."

His findings around platoon advantage are worth thinking about as well. Statistically in baseball, platoon advantage means that the batter usually has the advantage: They have better stats when they face the opposite-handed pitcher.

"What we found [in that situation] is the predictability of pitchers was around 76%. If you look at the disadvantage, the overall predictability was about 73%," Hensberger says. "So, pitchers are a little more predictable, we found, when the batter's at the advantage. That could play into why the stats kind of favor them."

This work was done over the corpus of data, but Hensberger says that you run the models real-time during a game, using the time interval between pitches to compute new stats and make predictions according to the current game situation.

According to Jessica Gelman, cofounder and co-chair of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, that type of real-time, granular data crunching is where sports analytics is headed. The field is changing fast. And Gelman proves it. Below, her overview on how dramatically it has evolved from where it was just a couple of years ago.

How Sports Data Science Has Evolved

"If you've read Moneyball or watched the movie, at that point in time it was no different than what bankers do in looking for an undervalued asset. Now, finding those undervalued assets is much harder. There's new stats that are being created all the time. It's so much more advanced," Gelman says.

Though it may surprise data geeks, Gelman says that formalized sport analytics still isn't yet mainstream--not every sport or team uses data. The NHL is still lagging in analytics, with the most notable exception of the Boston Bruins. The NFL is slow to adopt as well, though more teams like the Buffalo Bills are investing in the space.

However, most other leagues are with the program. And that is accelerating. In a big way. In Major League Soccer, formal analytics are now happening. Data analysis is now standard in English Premier League football, augmented by global football by fan sites. And almost every baseball and basketball team has an analytics team.

"Some sports have been quicker to accept it than others," says Gelman. "But it's widely accepted at this point in time that there's significant value to having analytics to support decision making."

So how are analytics used in sports? Gelman says there's work happening on both the team side and on the business side.

"On the team side, some leagues do a lot with, for example, managing salaries and using analytics for that. Other leagues use it for evaluating the players on the field and making decisions about who's going to play or who to trade. Some do both," says Gelman.

On the business side, data science increasingly influences a number of front office decisions. "That's ticketing, pricing, and inventory management. It's also customer marketing, enhancing engagement and loyalty, fandom, and the game-day experience," Gelman explains. A lot of data science work looks at how people react to what in the stadium and how you keep them coming to back--versus watching at home on TV. "And then," Gelman says, "the most recent realm of analytics is wearable technology," which means more data will soon be available to players and coaches.

Hensberger sees this as a good thing. Ultimately, he says, the biggest winners will be the fans.

"Data science is about modeling and predicting. When this gets in the hands of everyone across the leagues, the viewing experience will get better for everybody," he says. "You want to see competition. You don't want to see a blowout, you want to see close games. Excitement and heart-pounding experience. That's what brings us back to the sport."

The dating app Tinder not only impacted how people meet, but also how easy apps should be to use. There's been research and plenty of think pieces on why the app mechanics work, but ultimately the simple swipe right or left actions to approve or reject someone is a sticky gesture. That's why it's quickly moved on from the dating scene and made its way into lots of other apps.

Jobr is one of the latest to try and fit job hunting into the swiping paradigm. After logging in with your LinkedIn account, you can see job "cards" the app thinks may fit your search profile, then lets you anonymously like or pass on the job. Companies like Lyft, Uber, and Twitter are already using the service, which has raised $2 million in funding.

Tinder copycats abound. There's BarkBuddy, the app lets you look for dogs available for adoption in your area. Swiping through the different pups allows BarkBuddy to learn more about your preferences and should give better recommendations over time.

Social media app Buffer also recently released a "Tinder for news" app. Daily is a mobile front end for Buffer's backend which serves up different news stories and allows you to save or pass on the story.

SoSho is most likely testing the limits of what the "Tinder for" analogy can be applied to. The app allows users to match with... shoes. When users like a pair of shoes, they are moved onto a wish list, where the user can see see more information such as price and availability. The Finnish company might be onto something, but they aren't the only "Tinder for shoes" out there--there's also Stylect.

If you're looking for more Tinder style apps you can always open Jelly and ask your friends for recommendations. Just hope people don't swipe your question away--Jelly also relies on the swipe-left-or-right interface for its Q&A service.

When we think about virtual reality, the most obvious use case is gaming. But what about film? What if instead of watching documentaries on a screen, we could don a headset that takes us to the bottom of the ocean or into a different culture? Spoiler alert: This will all be possible soon.

Atlantic Productions, a U.K.-based TV production company, recently launched Alchemy VR, a branch of its business dedicated to producing virtual reality material for Sony's Project Morpheus and Facebook's Oculus VR. In doing so, the Emmy and BAFTA-award winning Atlantic hopes to break ground in virtual reality.

To achieve this, it has roped in the help of its Emmy-winning visual effects and animation studio ZOO, and teamed up with renowned natural history filmmaker Sir David Attenborough, the man (and, perhaps most recognizably for many viewers, the voice) behind such nature documentary masterpieces as Frozen Planet and Planet Earth.

The first of Alchemy's projects--set to debut later this year--will plunge users into the depths of the Cambrian ocean, circa 550 million years ago. In doing so it will trace key moment of early life on planet Earth-- narrated by Sir Attenborough, naturally.

"Virtual reality is the next great technological advance," says Sir Attenborough. "You don't have a television set there at all, you actually really are there--inside a rainforest, diving in the ocean or exploring a pyramid, wherever you want to go."

But can VR really change the face of documentary film as we know it, or is this a novelty like IMAX?

The VR Revolution

"At Atlantic we've been aware of the possibilities of virtual reality for about 15 years," says Anthony Geffen, CEO of Atlantic and Alchemy VR. In the late 1990s, Geffen worked alongside VR pioneer Michael Deering at Sun Microsystems to build a prototype virtual reality experience.

"It was a virtual chariot ride," he says. "You would go round the Circus Maximus in ancient Rome, with five of you in real time. It blew us away!"

As exciting as the technology was, however, Geffen realized that there was a major hitch: What he had worked on had been a one-off, and there was absolutely no way to translate the experience to a mass audience. "We realized was that while it was on the way, there were still a whole lot of technical problems with bringing it to users," he continues. "It was only recently when we started finally seeing the potential for headgear that could provide seamless VR in the way we had envisioned."

Most readers will be well aware of the VR revolution that's currently underway. In 2012, the Oculus Rift project arrived on Kickstarter. Its founder, Palmer Luckey, hoped to raise $250,000. Instead the pledges added up to almost ten times this--eventually coming in at $2.4 million. In March this year, Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook for a sum of $2 billion. Not long after, Sony revealed its own prototype VR headset--called Project Morpheus--at a session on the "future of innovation at Sony Computer Entertainment."

There has also been interest in VR from other companies, such as Samsung--and even Google's intriguing Google Cardboard project.

Building Virtual Worlds

While Alchemy is currently focused predominantly on Oculus and Project Morpheus its team is exploring all available avenues.

"What we're doing at this stage is just to try everything," says Geffen. "The only consistent demand we have is that it needs to be at the high end. Like the early days of 3-D, it's important that whatever we do blows people away. Our documentaries have been right at the top end of what's possible in the medium, so we want to translate that same idea to VR."

One thing working in Alchemy's favor when it comes to the speed that it's able to jump on the VR bandwagon is the fact that, as Alchemy and ZOO studio head James Prosser points out, it's not necessarily as big a departure as it may seem.

"With the kind of 3-D graphics we do on a regular basis we're constantly building virtual worlds of sorts," he says.

For one previous series, the team used advanced laser scanning technology to render astonishing structures, such as the pyramids in Egypt and the ancient desert city of Petra in Jordan. Using this data they were able to create what is known as a "point cloud," made up of billions of measurements which would allow them to re-create the objects in a 3-D environment. Adding the VR component that lets a user explore these models for themselves, Prosser says, is just the next logical step in the process.

Everything's Impossible (Until It's Not)

There are, of course, challenges in taking a medium like documentary which has played out on two-dimensional screens since its inception, and moving it into immersive three-dimensional VR. For example, while Alchemy's current projects revolve around entirely artificial CGI worlds, how about the possibility of virtual reality versions of real-life filmed documentaries like the groundbreaking David Attenborough series Planet Earth and Frozen Planet? Re-creating an accurate version of St. Paul's Cathedral in London may be one thing, but how about an environment like the Antarctic or the African plains?

While the technology is not quite there yet, Prosser is convinced it's not far off. "That would require 360-degree filming," he says. "360 2-D cameras have been around for a number of years, and it's absolutely achievable to film using that method and then to stitch the images together afterwards. The challenge everyone is trying to crack at the moment, however, is 360 degree 3-D material. We've seen some excellent systems prototyped, which suggest that this will be possible. They still have a few limitations in terms of how much you can move the camera around, but they're moving forward at an incredible pace. The question is how you use it to tell the stories you want to."

This sums up the attitude of the Atlantic team, which focuses less on working within the boundaries of what is now considered possible, and more on working out what is needed to tell a particular story--and then reverse-engineering the technology to achieve it. The reason? Good stories remain good stories, while technology is constantly in transition.

"When we originally started shooting in 3-D we were told that pretty much everything was impossible," says Geffen. "Five years later we're flying camera drones shooting 3-D in 4K resolution. If there's a demand for something it will be pulled off eventually."

A bigger challenge is thinking about what a documentary will look like in a virtual reality world. Many of our preconceptions are firmly in the 2-D age, and re-imagining the medium is a bit like the conceptual leap that came with the advent of the graphical user interface. As with the birth of cinema, what is needed is a whole new cinematic language that will dictate what a documentary can look like in a world where the user is in an immersive 3-D experience.

"You see great examples of VR in action where it's a person standing on the corner of a road in Tokyo," says Prosser. "That's all well and good--but it won't keep people around for long. Gaming is a bit different, but when it comes to edutainment we've really got to think hard to come up with stories that people will want to come back to."

"There are a lot of great demos out there, but where VR often falls down is extending that into a story," says Geffen. "We're focused on that: creating great journeys, rather than just moments in time."

The Future of Documentary

For their debut into virtual reality documentaries, Alchemy is sticking to an on-rails model that will guide the user through an environment, while giving them space to look around and interact with certain elements. (Imagine a safari truck being driven by a tour guide.)

"This on-rails approach allows us to produce the images that will match up to TV and film photo-real quality," says Geffen. "Don't get me wrong, though: We're also working to create experiences where you can go everywhere and anywhere. This medium is so new that we're still working out the best way to make the technology as effective as it can be. This is something that will evolve over time."

Interestingly, both men say that 88-year-old David Attenborough was key in making them test the limits of virtual reality.

"David is very interested in technology," Geffen says. "When we've worked with him we've always pushed whatever medium we're working in as far as we can--whether that's time-lapse photography, macro photography, aerial photography, or now virtual reality."

One example of this, Geffen says, is what happened the first time Sir Attenborough imagined how he would record his narration for the project. "One of the first things he realized was that the traditional idea of television narration needed to evolve," he says. "When David put on the headset and started doing a trial recording, he pointed this out to us. As a result, the finished product will feature branching commentary depending on which routes you choose to explore."

The biggest question, of course, is what this all means for documentary in its present form. If virtual reality docs like Alchemy's turn out to be successful, does this signal the end for the great wildlife documentaries we've seen on television and movie screens?

"For quite a long time I think that virtual reality and TV documentaries can happen in parallel," Geffen says. "VR gives a very different experience, and in some ways fills a completely different role for those who are using them. Over time, who knows? But I think that they're going to exist as complementary things for the foreseeable future. Television still has a long way to go in its current iteration--with 3-D and 4K both coming into their own."

"There's absolutely something about virtual reality, which makes it uniquely exciting."

It seems odd that a speech translation company would build a smartwatch that mainly lets you answer your phone hands-free. But this wearable device, the Bluetooth Wristwatch Band, can also sync up with the company's smartphone and tablet translation app via its recently released proprietary API, making it half phone, half foreign communicator.

The wristband launched with little fanfare in March, also tells the time, lets you listen to music and access the contacts from your phone or tablet. It even alerts you when you've stepped too far away from your phone, a reminder not to forget it. But it's the translation app that draws users to this wearable device.

The Bluetooth Wristwatch Band uses SpeechTrans's new API to make its translation and dictation tech work. But it's not the only device that uses the API. Large customers, like HP and Cisco, are currently using the SpeechTrans API to improve the way they do business internationally as well as provide apps for their consumer devices. But the wristband brings the API's speech capabilities to everyday consumers in a unique way.

The app translates to and from 44 different languages using speech recognition for voice and chat. It's also a tool to simply dictate and record your speech. SpeechTrans's API links the app's capabilities to the wristband. At the moment, however, the wristband's other features trump its translation capabilities.

Professionals that are constantly on their feet, like doctors, have been using SpeechTrans's translation app on their mobile devices when they need to translate urgent information to and from the people they are serving. But these users mainly use the wristband as a hands-free Bluetooth device for calls and stick to the mobile app for translation.

"The translation isn't perfect yet, and it takes patient cooperation. But it has saved me from forgetting my phone," says Joe D'Alonzo, a resident at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. He usually tells patients to speak slowly and directly into the microphone when he does use the translation feature.

D'Alonzo only just started using the wristband, but the stand-alone mobile translation app has helped him before. During D'Alonzo's medical training, he had a patient who needed an emergency C-section. The problem was, she only spoke French, and D'Alonzo only spoke Spanish. He used the app to explain that she would be prepped for surgery because her baby's heart rate was crashing.

The wristband-plus-app somewhat resembles a real-time translator on your wrist. Essentially, the wristband hardware acts as a hands-free microphone and speaker for your cell phone or tablet. If the translation app is installed on the secondary device, and you connect the wristband to it, the app transcribes what you say onto the smartphone's or tablet's screen.

At that point, you need to touch a button on the smartphone's screen to validate the text. Then, a computerized voice reads out the translated text in the second language. The translating function isn't completely hands-free if you use the wristband, naturally pushing users back to just using the smartphone app.

In some ways, however, the wristband does win over a smartphone. The microphone is omni-directional, so it will pick up anyone who is talking nearby. If you were just translating with your smartphone, you would have to position the phone in front of your conversation partner.

"One of the situations that we've found ourselves in is when we're over in a different country where we're trying to speak to a complete stranger, who doesn't understand us at all, holding a phone up to their face is a little obscure and, at some point, somewhat offensive," says Yan Auerbach, SpeechTrans's cofounder and COO.

So it's no wonder that SpeechTrans is spanning the wearable tech space. The company aims to enable speech recognition-enabled translation across any device, conforming to any situation. And SpeechTrans's new API provides the basis for integrating its translation technology into even more devices.

"We try to make technology integrate into people's daily lives as seamlessly as possible, rather than obstruct their communications," says Auerbach. This smartwatch is moving in a direction that could make machine translation less awkward than holding a cell phone up to someone's face.

Everyone's seen automatic lawn sprinklers watering the lawn on a rainy day. It's funny, as long as you're not the one paying the water bill.

The trouble is that most sprinkler systems just run basic timers, so unless someone's home to override the default settings, they'll happily pump out water in the middle of a storm. And even for homeowners who keep a careful eye on the weather report, sprinkler controllers can be difficult to configure, and it's often hard to calculate exactly how much water a section of lawn needs on a given day, says Skydrop cofounder Clark Endrizzi.

Skydrop makes Wi-Fi-enabled smart sprinkler controllers that automatically pull in online weather report data to help them decide when to turn on and when to stay off, conserving water.

"My frustration just originated with my own experience with my own sprinkler controller," says Endrizzi. "I pay for my water like a lot of people, and so it's an expensive thing that I have to pay monthly for, and I went and talked to three different contractors wondering how should I be watering my lawn and how can I do it most efficiently, and I got three different answers."

Skydrop's configuration panels, which the company says will begin shipping in mid-August, couple live, zip code-level data about precipitation and temperature with user-provided information about sprinklers and soil to keep grass properly watered and not over-saturated, he says.

"Where the real savings come through is on that day-by-day, season-by-season basis," he says. "Utah, where we are based, is a very dry state. In May, we just happened to have this crazy spell of rain, so my Skydrop didn't have to water for three weeks."

And if users want to override Skydrop's recommendations for any reason, they can set custom schedules either directly on the control panel or configure their sprinklers remotely through a mobile or desktop browser, he says.

"We give our users as much or as little control as they want," he says. "If you happen to be seeding or something like that, it needs to be watered four or five times a day, that's where you might set up a custom schedule or something like that."

Unlike some Internet-based smart sprinkler systems like those from Droplet, Skydrop's systems are designed as drop-in replacements for existing sprinkler controllers. And, since the controllers pull weather information from Skydrop's cloud servers, not from clouds in the sky, there's no need to install weather monitoring equipment, according to the company website.

Endrizzi says it's an exciting time for garden automation in general, with more digital tools coming on the market to tell homeowners when to put down seeds and when to fertilize their plants.

"This is a huge area where it's ripe for innovation," he says. "You look at places like California where it's like 95% dry. There's some major things that can be solved in this space in terms of water use and water conservation."

In the last year, many people have reached the conclusion that privacy in our digital lives might, you know, be important. Ephemeral apps like Snapchat have sprung up in the wake, but they're not usually too ambitious. Now a new app launching on iOS next week called DSTRUX aims to give users complete control over every file they share from their iPhone.

Erasing Permanence

"The Internet is written in ink" is a line I've frequently heard my friends tell their young children as a warning that careless, spur-of-the-moment digital sharing can come back to haunt them long after they've forgotten about it. Indeed I know any parent I've heard use this line is speaking from experience. That's why it's easy to see why apps like Snapchat (and others such as Glimpse) have such wide appeal: These simple apps give us control over a small part of our digital footprint by turning the Internet's digital ink into pencil.

Yet many of us need to share more than just photos. We have spreadsheets full of sensitive financial information, documents of medical data, or top secret NDAs that are easy to share with just a click. But once we do decide to share our files and send them out into the ether of the Internet, there's no way for us to control what the recipient does with them or--thanks to the Snowden revelations--know who has intercepted them along the way.

That's something that didn't sit well with Nathan Hecht, founder and CEO of DSTRUX, a startup that's launching an app this week which aims to give users total control over virtually every file they share from their iPhone. "It is our inherent right of privacy to protect the things that belong to us," he says. "[That's why] I came up with the idea for DSTRUX about a year ago, but the initial motivation came from recognizing over the years how everything shared through the web was essentially permanent. I felt that there was a compelling proposition and saw an opportunity to give people the option to control their information; controlling who sees it and for how long."

The Birth Of Destruction

DSTRUX actually launched earlier this year as a cloud-based web-only service, but Hecht and his team knew that a mobile solution was a priority as our smartphones are the devices we use a majority of the time and their convenience means we are more willing to share files with a tap of a button without fully thinking through the consequences of what would happen if that file ended up in the wrong hands.

"If you lose control of the information you've shared online then you have to be willing to risk the consequences," says Hecht. "We constantly upload to various forms of social media and not all of your information and images are things you want certain people to see--yet we've been readily relinquishing control for years. These consequences can range anywhere between government interference to someone using your privately shared, online information in a way that you didn't intend for it to be shared."

After using DSTRUX for only a few days I wish it was something embedded directly into iOS itself. With the app users can access virtually any file--supported files types are jpg, png, doc, docx, ppt, pptx, psd, ai, svg, pdf, jpeg, eps, bmp, gif, xls and xlsx--stored in their Dropbox or any photo in their iOS camera roll via DSTRUX's built-in browser (Google Drive integration is coming soon). Once the user selects a file to share they're asked to set a self-destruct timer for it. This can be anything from a matter of seconds to days. The user then selects a recipient from their contacts, enters an optional message and sends the file on its way. The recipient doesn't need to be using DSTRUX to view the file. They'll receive a link and can view the document in the time allotted on any device they own. However, even when viewing the file in the time allotted the recipient cannot alter, copy, download, screen capture, or print it--and, if the sender chooses, he can self-destruct the file at will should he decided he no longer wants the person he sent it to to have access to it.

Though comparisons to Snapchat are obvious, the beauty of DSTRUX lies in more than the simple fact that it handles all kinds of file types. If a recipient tries to forward the document DSTRUX will notify the sender and ask for permission before it's sent. The app also applies proprietary end-to-end encryption for every file sent and the file never resides unencrypted on the company's servers.

"I cannot divulge too much detail here, but our team is comprised of programmers highly experienced in encryption and security that are applying methods normally used in military and intelligence to a consumer app," says Lior Giller, DSTRUX's senior architect and a former officer of technology operations in the Israel Defense Forces' elite Unit, when I ask about the encryption technology they've built. However, she does reveal that "about 80% [of the encryption tech] is handled on the back end and about 20% is handled on the front end through unique methods of implementing security on iOS." The company also notes that the moment the file's self-destruct timer runs out the file is securely deleted--i.e., not only erased, but written over with 1's and 0s--from DSTRUX's servers.

This level of encryption, granular control, and destruction is clearly something that has wide appeal to enterprise, yet Hecht stresses the app isn't just for business people or high-level executives looking to send private documents. "It is for everyone," he says, "from the ordinary person wanting to gain more control in their life to those who want to share personal information without the risk of it ending up all over the Internet."

Indeed, the broad-based appeal is obvious through the social integration built into DSTRUX. Not only can users send files to those in their Contacts app, but DSTRUX integrates with Facebook and allows them to send links directly through Facebook Messenger, and soon the company will be adding support for WhatsApp as well.

The Future Of Privacy

It has been said that the world of social media we live in will bring about a self-induced end of privacy, and from what we know about what corporations like Facebook and Google collect about us--not to mention what the NSA has the capability to collect--it seems like that end of privacy is indeed nigh.

But Hecht doesn't agree.

"I think that there can be and that there should be [privacy]," he says. "The potential for privacy is definitely there, but we need to make people more aware of how important it actually is." Instead of destroying it, Hecht believes social media has only temporarily changed how we viewed privacy. "We forgot about it for a few years and it's time to remind everyone of the need for it."

"I honestly believe that DSTRUX is the future of communication on the web," he says. "More and more people will become aware that all of their information is owned by big corporations and that they are vulnerable to these corporations. Once they realize this, they will be motivated to have more control. At least that is what we are hoping will happen. When people realize how much big corporations control our lives in this aspect, they will start to feel uncomfortable and lean toward maintaining better privacy. We think this is the future."

A long time ago, a guy flew a kite in a storm. When lightning struck it, the current traveled down the string of the kite to a key, giving the victim a jolt of electricity. Who was that famous scientist?

Jacques de Romas.

Wait, that's not right. Wasn't it Benjamin Franklin?

Well, not according to historians. The Bordeaux Academy and The French Academy both credit de Romas for successfully being the first to complete The Kite Experiment. Even Mythbusters believe they've busted Franklin's claim--the shock from the reported key would have easily killed him.

So what's the point? Franklin didn't do the experiment--in fact, he didn't even discover electricity. A guy named Thomas-François Dalibard had proven a month prior to Franklin that lightning was electricity through an experiment similar to The Kite Experiment (but he used a lightning rod, which probably explains why he lived to describe the experiment).

So why aren't grade school kids taught about Thomas-François Dalibard's discovery. Why isn't de Romas flying the kite in that painting? Why is Franklin so famous for something he probably didn't even do?

I enjoy helping entrepreneurs figure out how to start and grow businesses. And I've had a chance to work with some new entrepreneurs at Starter School here in Chicago. At a recent talk I gave, one question stuck in my mind. The young entrepreneur asked, "Now that I've built a product, how do I get it to spread?" This entrepreneur recognizes that having a good idea and building a great product isn't enough.

In a paper studying how we can predict success, researchers found that given a market where people are trying to pick things that are of good quality (e.g., movies, music), as soon as you give consumers extra social information (e.g., number of downloads, likes, stars, votes), the success of good products becomes unpredictable.

We can't predict successful things just based on how good they are. Our social influence over each other messes up our ability to choose. So how do we get our products to spread if it's not enough to rely on making something great?

I believe we can find some answers if we explore why Benjamin Franklin is so famous for his mythical kite.

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, and already at 12 years old he was learning how to build an audience.

He became an apprentice to his brother, James, who taught him the printing business. And when Franklin was 15, James founded a newspaper, The New-England Courant. Franklin wanted to write for the newspaper, but James wouldn't allow it. So the rebellious teenager just wrote under a pseudonym, Mrs. Silence Dogood.

He was hooked. He kept on writing, and working in the printing and newspaper businesses.

Let's look at this quote from Mythbusters about how The Kite Experiment myth began:

The American legend likely sprang from an article Franklin wrote for the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1752 describing a theoretical kite-lightning experiment.

There's Franklin writing an article for the Pennsylvania Gazette. But Franklin wasn't just an occasional writer there. He owned the Pennsylvania Gazette! And the Pennsylvania Gazette was the most read newspaper of the American colonies.

Franklin knew the power of writing and owning ways to distribute his messages. So he spent significant time writing for newspapers, publishing books, even running a newspaper--in other words, building an audience before he even had much to spread.

So when Franklin was writing about theoretical experiments, it was his name that traveled far and wide because of the audience he had spent years cultivating.

You've likely heard of a recent startup called Product Hunt, a popular site listing new product launches. Its founder, Ryan Hoover, is frequently appearing in technology news and popular blogs, and getting some nice TV coverage.

Most people see the "overnight success." But if you peek just a little bit further back, you'll see Ryan doing something similar to Benjamin Franklin.

He was writing.

Ryan was a product manager at a company called PlayHaven. And during his time there, he knew he wanted to create a business, he just didn't know what it would be. But instead of squandering his time dreaming about starting a business, he built an audience.

He put a ton of effort into his blog, Twitter, and getting articles in popular online magazines like PandoDaily and Fast Company, writing about other people's products and what made them successful.

And his audience grew.

When the time finally came to tell people about a product he built, he didn't have to go looking for a way to spread it, he already had it.

Look at one of the first articles talking about Product Hunt on Fast Company. Who wrote it? Ryan Hoover. And editors at other magazines were happy to spread Ryan's news... because he had already been helping them.

Benjamin Franklin also had another genius idea to help spread his work--he created a hub of smart people interested in helping each other out, the Junto.

Look at some of the questions Franklin created to guide a Junto meeting:

• In what manner can the Junto, or any of them, assist you in any of your honourable designs?
• Hath any body attacked your reputation lately? and what can the Junto do towards securing it?
• Is there any man whose friendship you want, and which the Junto, or any of them, can procure for you?

The Junto was created to help spread the ideas of Franklin and his fellow members.
Before Product Hunt was created, Ryan was creating his own group, Startup Edition. He asked a group of like-minded bloggers, including myself, to blog about the same topic each week. We joined because of our interests, but also because of a slightly selfish reason--the extra value the group brought to each other: shared traffic. If someone like Adii Pienaar wrote a great post, then the rest of us enjoyed benefiting from his blog traffic as he linked back to the group.

And when Ryan had built a product of his own, the folks in Startup Edition were some of the first people to spread the word.

If you're dreaming about your own business, but reading this while working for someone else, or maybe you've already started something, but it's far from being ready or good, don't squander this time. Don't wait. Start writing, teaching, and publishing today. Form groups of like-minded people and friends. So when you do have something of your own to spread, you'll already have an audience happy to help.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. --Benjamin Franklin

And Franklin did both.

Nate Kontny is the creator of Draft, a collaborative platform to help make you a better writer. You should follow him on Twitter.

No one expected a no-name Android phone manufacturer to be a buzz brand in 2014, not even OnePlus itself. But after releasing its first and only product earlier this year called One, the company is beginning to see itself in a different light.

Demand for the One, which retails starting at $299 off contract, was so large the company had to implement an invitation system slowly letting people purchase the phone. It wasn't a marketing stunt--it was about making sure OnePlus could keep up with orders and not piss off customers.

"Our biggest fear was that no one would care about us, but this fear has completely evaporated over the past few months," says director of OnePlus global Carl Pei. "The biggest issue we're tackling at this moment is scaling. There are no shortcuts here. We're putting in the hours, thinking hard, and finding thorough solutions and processes that gives us a foundation for growth."

There are lots of device manufacturers around the world, so what makes OnePlus any different? For one, it's the combination of price and build quality. Google's own off-contract Nexus 5 starts at a higher price and hasn't been as widely praised in reviews as the One.

But how did this phone manage to blow away the competition with so little resources behind it? For one, it does things differently on the software side. Instead of using a carrier modified version of Android like most OEMs, or even stock Android OS, the company is using Cyanogenmod. This aftermarket firmware gives the user nearly complete control over every aspect of the operating system and also provides additional enhancements not found in the stock version of Android.

The motto at OnePlus is "Never settle." Pei explains that this means never settle on your quest to satisfy customers' idea of a great phone. Through forums and social media, the company adopted new ideas and got feedback on the current specs. The box that the One ships in even says, "Designed together with our fans" as a nod to the input the company has received and implemented.

It's still hard not to be jaded by a startup's optimism, however, when it says it'll "never settle." As soon as sales reach a certain level priorities usually change for companies. Mostly because once there's something to lose, it becomes hard to sacrifice a known quantity for experimentation.

"Internally, we've discussed how this could manifest once we're a billion-dollar company," says Pei. "If we one day become a big company, apart from just chasing profits, we'll also inspire the world to be better. We have some wild ideas for this, and our plan has already been put into place."

Without giving away any actual details, Pei further explains, "It's boring to create just any other company. We want to change things, not only in the smartphone industry, but also in the concept of what a company is."

It's early, but so far it's working. Taking direct feedback from its fans and rethinking what it means to be a modern-day global company seems to be working for OnePlus. The company has yet to share any numbers, but it tells Co.Labs it sells every unit it makes, almost instantly. Pei also adds, "We're confident that we'll at least make a small dent in the market this year."

And the takeaway for such a young company as it gears up to try and change the world?

Pei says focus on quality: "It's really hard to not have a great product spread itself via word of mouth."

As an avid weightlighter, Dr. Eric Hensen knows how annoying earbuds can be at the gym. Hensen, who is also an ear, nose, and throat doctor, watched as the tiny headphones slipped out of sweaty ears and got tangled in machines. For athletes and gym buffs, traditional earbuds just aren't cutting it. So Hensen decided to reinvent them.

"There's a guy who I work out with--he does bent-over rows, and he always puts the wire in his mouth while he lifts," says Dr. Hensen, who is the founder and chief medical officer of wireless earphone maker FreeWavz. "Inevitably, he'll bite through the wires once a week."

Hensen says he wanted to design a safer and more comfortable earphone for athletes that would fit snugly and comfortably in the ear and work without tangling wires. He took a look at current listening device design and ultimately came up with a prototype for the FreeWavz headphones, which connect to an audio source via Bluetooth and are designed to stay in the ear even through rigorous exercise.

"I took a set of these really old hearing aids, and I kind of retrofitted them to our idea," he says. "From there we actually drilled [them] out, made our own housing, put all the components that we wanted in it."

Cutting The Fat: How The Product Evolved

In an early iteration, the earphones included a built-in MP3 player, but FreeWavz soon heard from potential customers that they'd prefer to listen to music they already stored or streamed of their phones. FreeWavz can pick up audio signals from a phone up to about 33 feet away through Bluetooth networking, he says.

Bluetooth technology's being integrated into a number of wireless headphone designs lately, from the tiny Earin earbuds to other exercise-focused tools like the Dash earbuds. Dr. Hensen says FreeWavz, in particular, were developed to include all the exercise-centric features the company could pack into its ear-fitting form.

"The MP3 player got dropped because none of our customers wanted it," he says. "That allowed us to incorporate even more stuff that we wanted."

Taking out the MP3 player and storage left room to add more fitness-oriented components to the earphones, including an accelerometer to track motion and a pulse oximeter to track heart rate.

Smart Earbuds For The Self-Tracking Generation

Through a connected smartphone app, users can program the earphones to automatically announce stats like distance and heart rate throughout their workout or when they cross certain thresholds.

"There's a lot of power in getting information and having it fed to you audibly without any visual distractions or safety issues," says FreeWavz president Harry Ericson. A software development kit will ultimately let other developers deliver audible notifications through the headphones, too.

The earphones also include support for hands-free phone interaction and calling, and each earpiece can be configured independently to blend outside noise with audio content in a particular ratio.

"There are two microphones--one you talk into and one that's on the earbud that allows you to pick up sound in front of you, behind you, or to the side of you, depending on how you program it," Ericson says.

That's of particular importance to cyclists, who want to make sure they hear traffic sounds while listening to music, says Dr. Hensen.

"When you're going with traffic, you can program the left side to pick up as much road sound as you want," he says.

Users can also independently configure volume and equalizer settings on each earphone, which Dr. Hensen says will be useful to anyone with different hearing levels in different ears. And, they can save multiple profiles for different exercises, so they can tune out outside noise and skip updates on distance traveled while lifting weights but still hear traffic sounds and mileage numbers while riding a bike.

FreeWavz is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign and hopes to ship the first earphones by October, says Ericson.

"We've got the core functionality done and it's really now moving toward production," he says.