The Internets are abuzz today with news that an enterprising hacker has crafted an exploit worthy of science fiction: By merely showing a special QR code in front of a Google Glass headset they could take control of Glass and reconfigure it to whatever purpose--including malicious ones--they desired.

The hack exploited the fact that Glass' software constantly samples the view through the camera to look for "interesting" targets in the scene in front of it--a critical trick for the future of AR devices like this. QR codes fall under the "interesting" category, of course, because they can contain encoded rich data that may be a contact, or a URL, or a text message. The malicious QR hack simply subverts this process and takes Glass's software to a site that compromises its systems.

QR hacks aren't new, of course, and there have been a handful demonstrated for devices like smartphones before. But in the case of Glass it's a particularly wicked trick because unlike deliberately pointing a phone at a QR code, the headset is always on the lookout for data like this, and thus the wearer could unwittingly and perhaps even unknowingly expose the device at any moment. It's even possible to "hijack" an existing QR code with a new coded sticker that links to the hack.

The team behind the hack at security outfit Lookout Mobile have long since alerted Google to the flaw and Google has quickly closed the loophole that enabled this particular exploit. That's a tribute to Google, and a signal of how seriously it's taking the user privacy and safety issues that Google Glass may present.

But the news does raise an interesting, and perhaps nerve-wracking problem. This is most definitely not going to be the last Glass hack. The brute-force hack demonstrated here could do all sorts of things such as steal user data, passwords, and similar information from a Glass. But future hacks--achieved through other means, perhaps using loopholes in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connections or even malicious apps on the owner's companion smartphone--could be more subtle. Imagine an app that subverts Glass's navigation alerts, sending users the wrong way for fun, or even for criminal gain. Or how about an exploit that captures images the wearer would rather not be made public?

Hacks on the brain-damaging levels from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash aren't possible with Glass, of course, because these were set in a virtual world that mystically affected the user's brain. There is a chilling similarity of simply glancing at a code to activate the exploit, though. But with wearables certain to expand far beyond Glass's limited powers in the near future, get ready for some pretty upsetting headlines.

[Image: Flickr user Kema Keur]

Dating these days is like shopping on Amazon. You go online and check out profiles on OKCupid, Grindr, Blendr, or Tinder, you look at pictures, you read a description and click a button. If the persona on the other end reciprocates, you meet in real life and take it from there. Romantic? Perhaps not. But it sure is efficient.

Then there’s the other online sex market: The one you pay for. Sites like The Erotic Review may look like dating sites, but they’re designed for a seedier kind of online flirt. Eighty percent of prostitution today starts online, and their systems are hauntingly similar to “unpaid” dating sites: Listing preferences and interests, the Review lets clients rate escorts on 50 attributes, from breast size to number of tattoos to, ahem, technique.

These services make it more convenient than ever for men to buy sex, but they leave the women in as much danger as before--if not more, because malicious johns are harder to track online. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

All The Online Risks, None Of The Benefits

If adapted to sex work, dating technologies could make prostitution healthier for everyone involved. And it works both ways: Privacy safeguards developed for the prostitution business could protect online daters as well. The problem: No one wants to tacitly endorse the world’s oldest (and perhaps most taboo) profession.

“The law has been fucking [over] prostitutes for a long time,” says Scott Peppet, a law professor at the University of Colorado. He’s working on a plan to expand dating safety technologies to prostitution. “We arrest them, we let them go. We never arrest the johns, almost ever... The public has known for decades that prostitutes are in danger and that the law isn't helping them at all."

In this legal vacuum, women are dying. Lots of them. As you read this, the Long Island serial killer, murderer of 14 sex workers and the subject of New York Magazine writer Robert Kolker’s new book Lost Girls, remains at large. For almost as long as sites like Craigslist and BackPage have posted erotic listings, some johns, like Boston University medical student Phillip Markoff, have used them to kill.

“We know that the women live in this horrible black market where they can't avail themselves of the police, they can't enforce contracts, they can't go after the johns. We've known that forever--society basically says, 'So what? These are prostitutes, what do we care?'"

The great power of the Internet is democratization and empowerment, and these murder victims are among society's most vulnerable and voiceless. Many are born into poverty and broken homes. Many were abused as children. Few graduated high school. Others were addicts, and plenty were single mothers, as Kolker’s reporting has shown. The Internet has made it easier than ever to turn to prostitution, and it’s made the process of selling sex more efficient: No need for a pimp or a brothel, just an Internet connection and a sex worker can be in business. But because these women go it alone online, often without a community or enforcer, it can also make the process more dangerous.

In the world of dating, this kind of disintermediation has also made dating safer. The QPid app lets sex partners share their latest STD test records, and social network searches (plus public criminal databases) allow for some light background checking before dates. None of those benefits carry over to prostitution.

Prudish Lawmakers Need To Think Different

Our laws aren’t ready for this discussion. The U.S. has taken a tact that is different from social democracies in Europe in terms of its sex work policies. Prostitution is legal in the Netherlands, and decriminalized in many Western countries, including Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, and France. These laws make paying for sex in these countries legal, while keeping pimping, advertising, solicitation, and procuring criminal. Where sex work is legal, the theory goes, it can be regulated just like drugs.

Where it’s regulated, prostitution has proven to be safer for the women who put their lives at risk to feed men’s lust. (That said--anyone who’s walked around the red light district in Amsterdam or Antwerp will tell you that it’s no more uplifting than street corners in downtown Brooklyn.)

The "retrograde nature” of today’s prostitution markets perpetuates the stigma and discrimination against women, Peppet writes in his paper on the subject. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Innovation in tech and legal reform for sex work could help wear down stigma and make the business of sex more legitimate and humane. Peppet calls it Prostitution 3.0. But what would it look like if tech companies were allowed to innovate in the sex market? Do we actually want to find out?

How Safe Online Sex Markets Would Work

In the case of both online dating and online prostitution, one of the most difficult problems in need of solving is how to balance protecting privacy online with being able to verify identity offline. Peppet says that there are four main verification challenges:

1. The sexual health status of both the customer and the escort.
2. The criminal history of both parties.
3. Reviews of the customer and the escort (“reputation”).
4. The legal status of the prostitute--proof that she hasn’t been trafficked by anyone else.

The first tool a legalized prostitution industry needs is a biometric identifier, like an iris scanner, to vouch for identities on-site. Next, it needs third-party companies to aggregate health data, criminal records, blacklists of violent clients, escort/client ratings, and police records of known human-trafficking victims. The firms would confirm this information for an individual on his or her cellphone, while protecting anonymity. Laws would need to make exceptions in the case of abuse, disease, or fraud, so that anyone who cheats could be exposed. Peppet says laws should grant these firms immunity from court subpoena, while binding them not to sell their clients' data.

Once established, such "personal data aggregation" firms could provide similar services to people outside the sex industry by protecting personal health and legal information for easy disclosure on a cellphone. If you were pulled over by a cop you could show him a clean criminal record on your phone. And police could access centralized databases of known human trafficking victims on mobile devices.

Buying sex outside of the legal market in Peppet’s system would be outlawed. The Prostitution 3.0 system would crack down, in particular, on customers who buy sex on the black market, and on pimps who sell women illegally, rather than trying to prosecute the prostitutes themselves. The law should punish the predatory men, Peppet and others argue, not the female victims who have historically taken abuse from men at all levels, from pimps to police.

A Grindr-Like App For Google Glass

The truth is that most of the pieces of this system are available to consumers today. They’re just not used by the sex industry, because of laws and stigma. But they could be, which would make dating and prostitution safer, and maybe even more fun.

Imagine "Grindr for Google Glass." That’s how Peppet describes the technology he envisions for dating and prostitution. Google has said that it will not enable face recognition for its wearable device, citing privacy and security concerns. But as Peppet points out, there may be cases where users want this capability: For example, when two people meet in real life for the first time, they could use to verify each other's identities and pull up criminal background checks and sexual health reports.

"That's going to happen," Peppet insists. "You're going to walk into a room and your glasses, plus your phone (providing the CPU power) are going to say: That guy over there wants to have sex with you. Google isn't going to want its glasses to be used for prostitution. But if you could employ the power of something like Google Glass for prostitutes, it would make them safer, it would make them healthier."

Qpid, the STD test-sharing app mentioned earlier, could also be adapted by prostitutes and clients, Peppet argues, as could mobile dating apps like Grindr. Imagine if an escort could broadcast her whereabouts in public via her phone, without needing to "streetwalk" in the conspicuous traditional sense. The phone, rather than the street, would become the center of commerce for Prostitution 3.0.

We Have A Choice To Make

Market forces will probably create a sex trade regardless of our laws. So according to Peppet, we have a choice: Either accept sex work, but make it regulated, safer and healthier, or hold fast to denial, and condemn sex workers to work in danger. The moral choice is easy, but in America, sex innovation faces steep political walls.

The hypocrisy of U.S. sex-trade laws frustrates Peppet. "We've basically let this [online prostitution] stuff happen because 'gee, it's not too bad for the guys,'" he says. "But when somebody says, 'Hey, let's build this other, fancier [technology] that takes a bit more effort, so we can actually protect the women’? Well, we haven't been able to pull any of that off yet.”

[Image: Flickr user Lachlan Hardy]

Predicting the future is big business. But while think tanks, corporations, and intelligence agencies have traditionally relied on hiring academics or analysts to write contingency plans, the rise of cloud computing and cheap processor time are changing things. One company, Massachusetts-based Recorded Future, is part of a growing number of predictive analytics firms--but they're one of only a few partially funded by America's intelligence agencies. In an interview with Co.Labs, founder Christopher Ahlberg said “The world actually knows a fair amount about the future. Little tidbits of information here and there about different behaviors. One company makes a corporate filing. Another person tweets something. We wondered.... what if we could get our hands on every single fact that humanity knows about the future, and actually put them together for analysis? That was the idea behind Recorded Future.”

Since Recorded Future was initially founded in 2010 with funding of less than $10 million each from Google Ventures and CIA/NSA venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, the company has sold their products to a variety of buyers. Recorded Future's products, which scour the Internet to predict upcoming news events and forecast risk, are used by intelligence agencies, Fortune 1000 companies, foreign governments, hedge funds, and energy companies. Most of them rely on open source intelligence, which--despite the name--has nothing to do with open source software. Open source intelligence is the publicly accessible content available from the Internet and newsstands; newspaper articles, television broadcasts, and publicly accessible social media posts all fall into the open source intelligence sphere. According to Ahlberg, the company only uses free and non-pay source materials for their database.

It also helps, apparently, to figure out where the next riot will be. In press materials, Recorded Future calls themselves “the world's first temporal analytics engine.” Ahlberg is Swedish and the company also maintains offices in Goteborg, Sweden; their last major funding round was $12 million from Balderton and Google Ventures in 2012.

How Recorded Future Works

Recorded Future's main product is a software package that claims to predict the future. The by-subscription online dashboard allows users to run queries and visualizations for upcoming events that are keyed to specific time periods. Recorded Future's spiders, which take in content from multiple languages and display original foreign-language source materials, use algorithms to parse language and correlate specific dates and times to specific events.

The web product, which licenses for $149 monthly or $1,599 per user, takes inputs from over 250,000 publicly available news and data sources and correlates them. Users can create visualizations from the data and custom maps, alongside network diagrams and event feeds. In order to attract potential users, Recorded Future also offers a free version that, while useful for dissertation or small business data forecasting work, lacks the full functionality of the $1,599 version. This web product is similar to offerings from competitors such as (also In-Q-Tel funded) Palantir, except aimed directly at predicting real-world events rather than larger detection of connections between individual data points.

Recorded Future also offers two more products. One is an API which allows Recorded Future's open source data interpretations to be ported into other apps; Ahlberg said most of their API-centric users are in the financial sector. The other is a for-government product called Foresite which applies Recorded Future's predictive algorithms to what the company calls “internal documents, third-party content, or sensitive data sources.”

So What Are Temporal Analytics, Anyway?

Co.Labs' demo of Recorded Future's dashboard took place several days before the Egyptian coup. Ahlberg showed how Recorded Future's algorithms parsed data from different sources to make forecasts about the likelihood of disorder in several Egyptian cities. The bulk of the company's algorithms tie word choice and word frequency to the mention of specific times and dates; this data is extrapolated and visualized to help understand what different events are likely to happen. In a second demo, Co.Labs was shown how Recorded Future's dashboard could help information assurance teams in government or at large corporations analyze chatter about hacker attacks on the Internet for future threat analysis. Ahlberg noted that many of his clients look for particular combinations of events that precede another event happening--for instance, corporate resignations or large DDoS attacks.

As far as DDoS attacks and other cyberattacks, Ahlberg says, "Pretty much all cyber defense today is focused on what has already happened, inside or at the perimeter of a company. Virus scanning, firewalls, and things like that. We realized that you can find a lot of signal for upcoming attacks in social media, chat rooms, and foreign open sources by applying our temporal analytics. So instead of waiting for attacks to happen we can find early signals and try to prevent them in the first place."

Recorded Future In Action

Several visualizations created through Recorded Future, which show--among others--potential fracking sites all over the world, likely Egyptian protests during Ramadan, and which companies are likely to debut electric cars, are all shown above.

Here are a few other predictive exercises made using Recorded Future's platform:

Monitoring Protests And Unrest

Competitive Intelligence On Business Competitors

Predicting Cyberattacks Against Agencies Or Corporations

Nostradamus's Toolkit

For all the gee-whiz futurism of Recorded Future's predictive analytics engine, the inclusion of only text for corporate and government users is a major hindrance. Because Recorded Future and their competitors rely only on text--with video, maps, audio files, and so much else pushed to the side--their event forecasts are only as good as their textual samples. Underground radio shows from Iran? YouTube samizdat from Russia? SoundClouds by the next angry young person with a gun in America? Those are missing from the equation.

This means that Recorded Future's target market--the militaries, intelligence agencies, corporations, and investment funds with a pressing need to predict the future--have to turn their products into just one part of a future predicting toolkit. For organizations which live and die by creating accurate forecasts of what will happen when, good mapping and data-extracting products are just as much part of operations as Recorded Future's software.

But where the company excels is in taking massive amounts of data and making them accessible to ordinary analysts and end users. Recorded Future's software doesn't use any amazing sci-fi magic to predict the future; it uses the same big data toolkit as hundreds of other companies. But by scouring the web's news sources and letting users quickly perform analyses on thousands of newspaper articles or message board articles at a time, they make life much easier for a lot of organizations.

[Images: Recorded Future]

Meditation and yoga can combat stress and deepen relaxation, but what if you want to calm down without unplugging from your iPhone? Irish startup Galvanic may have a solution. The company is about to conclude a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to make the PIP, a galvanic skin response sensor that’s also a game controller.

Stress causes the sweat glands to activate, changing the conductivity of your skin in a reaction known as a galvanic skin response (GSR). The PIP, held between finger and thumb, measures that response and transmits it to an Android or Apple device. Galvanic has also developed several games, including a racing game called Relax and Race, which use the PIP as a controller. Galvanic’s CTO Daragh McDonnell calls it “competitive relaxation.”

“What the PIP and its games give you is feedback,” says McDonnell. “It tells you when you are succeeding. A lot of people don't necessarily know how stressed they are or when they are de-stressing, what's working for them. With the PIP there's an element of practice and training. If you play the game often enough, you can see which strategies work so over a period of time you can develop a personal strategy for real-world situations.”

McDonnell has been working on biometric games for over 10 years. He was a member of the MindGames group at Media Lab Europe in Dublin and before the age of the smartphone ran a startup which aimed to develop such games for the consumer market. Galvanic has not only prototyped the PIP but also developed an algorithm for identifying anxiety based on skin response. “What galvanic skin response correlates with is arousal,” McDonnell explains. “Arousal could be stress, it could be excitement or various kinds of stimuli in your environment. We ask people to focus on relaxing so there is a correlation between what you are doing and actual skin conductance.”

Some skin conductance changes are more significant than others when it comes to identifying stress. Galvanic’s algorithm looks for trends and assigns significance to them. “If a lion jumped out in front of you now, you would get quite a steep skin response. If the lion went elsewhere it would come down pretty quickly. It's a pulse. If you are relaxing the trend is a slow decline over a much longer period of time. The skin conductance baseline also varies a lot from one individual to another, depending on your ethnicity, your age, and your gender. The algorithm is baseline independent. It's looking at deltas all the time,” says McDonnell.

Galvanic’s games include the aforementioned Relax and Race and a one-player game called Loom. Loom uses calming visuals and music to bring you into a relaxed state. The music starts with a single instrument and as you relax more instruments are added. By the end of the game you have a full symphony and the visuals have changed from winter to summer.

Galvanic’s Kickstarter campaign has received a lot of interest from health care professionals who work with children who are autistic or suffer from PTSD. “I think Carl Jung was the first person to use skin measurement as part of a course of treatment. There is a general body of work on its relationship with anxiety,” says McDonnell. He cites a recent Irish study using the PIP and Loom, in which they were shown to reduce stress. Tetris, incidentally, was found to increase it.

The PIP could even be used to tackle chronic pain and addiction. “People who have chronic pain experience anxiety and stress as a result of it and there is a feedback loop; If you can reduce the anxiety, that helps to reduce the pain. There is also a large element of stress in addiction. If you are craving that fix you get really stressed until you get it. The PIP isn't the solution but it can form part of an overall course of therapy,” says McDonnell.

Galvanic isn’t the only mind-altering game in town. Two EEG headbands, Muse and Melon, raised funds on Indiegogo and Kickstarter respectively last year, and they also come with exercises which promise to help you achieve focus or calm. An EEG measures electrical activity in the brain via contacts on the scalp. As a medical instrument it has long been used to diagnose conditions like epilepsy and dementia as well as determining whether a patient in a coma is brain dead.

Brainwaves within particular ranges of frequencies are known as “alpha” or “beta” waves. Beta waves are emitted when people are alert, agitated, tense, or afraid and have frequencies ranging from 13 to 60 pulses per second in the Hertz scale. When we are relaxed, the frequency slows down to 7-13 pulses per second, the alpha wave range. The alpha rhythm is ideal for learning and performing complex tasks. Decreasing the brain rhythm to alpha also results in significant increases in the levels of beta-endorphins and dopamine.

The Muse EEG headband measures full brainwave spectrum data from four points on the scalp: the temples and behind the ears. Muse’s Brain Health system runs you through a series of mindfulness-based exercises such as deep breathing suitable for your current brainwave state.

I talked to Ariel Garten, the CEO of Interaxon, which makes Muse, during their fundraising campaign. “This is another tool to build body awareness. It's a new sense,” says Garten. “This is still first stage technology so what we can detect is quite limited, but the very fact that we can detect it is pretty damn exciting. The predominant thing we can detect is alpha waves and beta waves. With 4-sensor technology you can't yet read emotions. We can read arousal. With a lot more sensors you can begin to (read emotion).”

Muse can also be used as a controller. “We can do really basic controls--one dimension--based on alpha waves and beta waves. When you focus on something it will happen. If there’s a glowing ball in your game and you focus on it (to go into a beta state), it can get bigger,” says Garten.

McDonnell, who worked with EEGs during his Media Lab days, is more skeptical about measuring EEG “in the wild.” “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack at the other side of the universe. It's such a tiny electrical signal. Normally when you measure it you have an EEG cap on with 20 or 24 electrodes and you are in a shielded room. Interference from mains or mobile phones or even muscular movement tends to drown out the signal. If you blink you get a massive spike of EMG which would drown out the EEG measurement. As a caveat, these products may have proprietary technology, some cool magic, that is filtering out all that noise,” he says.

Muse raised almost twice its fundraising target of $150,000. PIP is still $20,000 shy of its $100,000 goal. Either way electronic mind monitoring devices may be here to stay.

The Co.Labs and Target Retail Accelerator challenged entrants to design and build an app that would extend the Target customer experience into new areas, leveraging mobile software--native or web-based--to produce new and pro-social effects in their community, family, school, or social network.

This week, we’re interviewing the winners: Team Pilot, which created an app called Divvy. This interview is with the team’s strategist, Juuso Myllyrinne.

What was your role in working in Divvy?

I was Divvy's product strategist. So I tried to find out as much as I could about Target and about the patterns in the retail space right now. It was a lot of secondary research and then kind of pulling out interesting things that would be inspire us. I think I pulled out like four or five different topics, kind of ideas for the kind of thing we could do. I think they were all really good ideas to begin with. But it was really just a starting point early on in the creative process. It was answering question like “how can we us subscriptions within physical retail?” It was a very wide array of things we were looking at.

What for you decides what's a good idea and what's not?

Well, we just thought about what are the important things for Target and also what ideas our competition was likely to have. But it all comes down to trying to create as many shopping occasions as possible. Divvy pretty naturally came out of that revelation. So the idea is that when you walk into a store, you're not walking in alone but with your whole social network of possible shoppers with you. And that creates a ton more purchase opportunities. When we realized the power of that concept we really gravitated towards that idea.

In working as a strategist for Divvy, what did you find personally challenging?

I haven't done that much retail work myself. So it was an interesting challenge to kind of dive into that. I've been working in digital my whole career so it was actually kind of an interesting change to see the physical retail side of things and learn what's hot there.

So what's your past work experience in the digital space like?

I've been at TBWA Pilot for almost four years now. Before that I headed up a global digital team at Nokia. I was the head of planning for the N-series range which is kind of their--in very big quotes--“iPhone killer.” So I did a lot of planning work and building relationships.

How did your experience in mobile at Nokia inform your thought process on Divvy?

I've been working on mobile my whole career. I think the most interesting part of that world is that a mobile application is not a whole website squeezed into a smaller screen. It's actually a tool that lets you talk to your friends. That's the origin of the mobile phone. It makes it easier for you to make social decisions. So we're not trying to squeeze a service into the mobile phone, but apps like this are an extension of what the phone was originally designed to do.

More generally then what's your own philosophy on what makes a good mobile product?

Well, the most important thing is something that's actually feasible and practical. The starting point for Divvy was making sure it can work as its own, stand-alone app. But we also wanted to complement the existing Target ecosystem. So we came up with something that could kind of be an add-on that fits fluidly into the flow of things. I think Chris Reardon did a great job with the UX because it really does seem like a continuation of the world of Target, which is very much what we waned to do. We didn't want to have a real jagged edge that's jarring from the rest of the Target experience.

What are the kinds of things you do for fun outside work?

I try to go jogging quite a lot. But it's been too hot in New York to do that for some time now. I've started to dabble into code myself. I'm looking at jQuery and Node.js just as a hobby. It's fun to kind of dabble and learn how to code that way. Even the past three to five years there are so many more things online that you can use to learn to code. It's much closer to assembling Legos into whatever order you want than building everything from scratch like it used to be. And there are so many people out there who are willing to help newbies like myself. I think it's the new Latin--everybody has to learn a little bit of code to know how the world works.

How are you learning to code?

There are a bunch of cool courses. There's actually one open Stanford course I'm in that I think has over 100,000 participants. So it's clearly blowing up.

[Image: Flickr user James Blunt]

Ten years ago, if two companies wanted to work together, they would need to get their technical teams in the same room and figure out how to mate their two technologies. Then came the API.

API stands for Application Programming Interface and is a specification of how some software components should interact with each other in order to marry two technologies. Once a company builds an API, other companies are able to plug in their technology (whether it be for maps, SMS, or something else).

Why You Need An API

There are typically two use cases for APIs. The first is building a developer community to extend the ability of your platform--these are usually free to use. The second is building a service that other people can use and pay you for; sometimes APIs as a service are free and monetized by other means. Both use cases make it much easier for a company to get functionality they need and/or partner with another company without the heavy lifting of custom integrations for each partnership.

I’ve worked for two companies in a business development role emphasizing the API platform: first at Aviary, a photo editing API platform for web and mobile, and now at Dwolla, a payment network, helping companies plug in a cheap and secure way to send and receive money. The two companies have different offerings in their API and I have learned a great deal about how to successfully manage these relationships to further each startup and build the business side of building your API platform.

At Aviary, we made it easy for any developer to plug in photo editing to their website or mobile app. They now power the editing and filters ability for a slew of apps, including Walgreens, Twitter, Flickr, Squarespace, Box, Edmodo, MailChimp, and more. When I left the company in April 2012, they had around 6M MAU; in May they announced 50M MAU. They have one of the best scalable APIs, and helping to work on the infrastructure for its growth taught me a lot. We are still in the infancy of the API at Dwolla, but there are some big things in the works and the rest of the year should be very exciting.

Below are a few things I have learned about building the business side of an API and dealing with getting companies to use your API.

Got An API? You Need A Dev Portal

One of the first things a company must think about when developing an API is a website dedicated to the use of that product; most people call it a developer portal. A big misconception about developer portals is that they are only for developers. This is not always the case! More often than not, it is a business or non-technical founder who stumbles upon the API section of the website, looking to see if that company might have specific functionality and be the right fit for their company. If all that exists are documentation, sample code, and helper libraries, you will probably lose this type of lead. You need to cater to both technical and non-technical people alike.

At Dwolla, we thought of it as a decision tree. When you get to the developer portal you are asked if you can or cannot code. If you code, you go directly to the documentation. If not, you head over to the side of the portal that tells you why you should use Dwolla, how you can use Dwolla, who else is using it, and FAQs. We have had a lot of success with this.

One of my favorite API-focused companies is Twilio. Twilio lets you build voice, VoIP, and SMS applications. They fall into the second bucket of use cases (API as a service). They’ve built a great website that is very simple and clear to find exactly what you need, whether you are a business/product person or developer looking to build SMS, voice, or VoIP into your application.

Your API’s Rocket Fuel: Hackathons

I am often asked about sponsoring and participating in hackathons in relation to a company’s API. I’ve been involved, organized, and attended more hackathons then I can count on two hands. I’ve been on all sides of the table and seen it all.

From the outset I should say that hackathons are useful for jump-starting platforms. Coming from the business standpoint, I’ve had the most success when organizing the event. When you and your company are the center of attention, it is very easy to get all your targets in the same room for 24 hours so you can build a meaningful relationship with each one. I think if you are looking to make a name for yourself in a specific vertical, organizing a hackathon is a great way to do it.

Another thing to mention is that it is very rare to see a return on investment for a sponsorship at a hackathon. If you’re hoping that whatever developers build that weekend will end up going the distance, think again. For me, the most beneficial thing that comes out of a hackathon, as a sponsor, is meeting the other companies who are sponsoring. I have met many eventual partners for the first time at a hackathon.

If you are not organizing, my advice is to participate at the lowest sponsorship level and offer a slick prize for people to use your API. This usually has the best results in terms of engagement with developers. On top of that, hackathons are a great opportunity to talk to developers about your offering and get honest feedback to make it better. A lot of companies use hackathons to release early versions of their API or features in their API so they can get this key developer input.

Validate Your Endpoints With Partners Before Designing An API

When building out an API platform, one of the first things to do (even before building the API offering or a specific feature set) is to talk to prospective partners about different functionalities they might use from a hypothetical API.

Talking to prospective clients/users seems obvious, but until you actually figure out their problems and needs, you may be building something that nobody wants or cares about. For example, when I was at Aviary, Avi Muchnick, the cofounder, would always have the business team liaise with potential API integrators before he would pull the trigger on building a new product. Every time we launched something, we had already garnered interest and attention from several companies who were ready to use the product from day 1.

Getting a lay of the land not only helps figure out what to build, it also helps launch the API with partners who will publicize.

Work With Your Partners To Launch Killer Integrations

Hopefully you’ve built something other companies really want. The best way to get usage of your API is to initially launch it in conjunction with a few other companies as partners.

In my experience, if you deliver the right product and have a few great use cases to point to, there is typically a compounding effect that takes place. At Aviary, we launched our web API around Thanksgiving 2010 with 12 companies, and then a mobile SDK in September 2011 with 30 companies. You can see on the Aviary homepage that they now have 4,500 integrations.

I’ve also seen scenarios where you follow this formula and the opposite occurs. It’s usually when the product doesn’t match what people actually want or there is a scaling problem (i.e., the product is meant for a niche group but you want it to work for everyone). A surefire way to fail with your API (as a service) is to go build it without ever talking to any prospective integrators.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, but if you don’t talk to anyone, have no pipeline of companies waiting to use it, your expectations should be zero. The harsh reality is that by the time you get the API ready to use, you will have internal expectations that will be nearly impossible to hit unless you get insanely lucky. That’s no way to run a business and should be a cautionary tale for anyone looking to build a business around an API as a service.

Plan For Your API’s Next Horizon

Everything in this article will put you on the right direction when thinking about the business side of your API platform. While every piece is important, just remember to listen to what companies really want. If you listen and come back with a product that solves the issues for them, you will be in a great position to build and scale the business side of your API.

The final thing you should consider when opening up an API to the outside world is how well those endpoints will serve your business as it grows. Many companies only open up API access to functionality or data that is not core to the platform, and which doesn’t dilute the brand. The danger, of course, is that you don’t want third parties competing with you on your own platform. Closing down API access can create developer backlash, so think carefully before you build, and keep your dev community happy.

[Image: Flickr user Archibald2002]

Spotify is taking punches from Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke because bands need a way to make money. Here are a few music monetization services that you and your bandmates may not have heard of.

Distro Kid

TuneCore is currently the most popular way for small and independent artists to get their music into digital music stores like iTunes and Amazon, as well as streaming services like Spotify and Rdio. Distro Kid is a recent spin-off of Fandalism that may save artists some money and time with the service’s mostly automated processes. Distro Kid allows unlimited music uploads for only $19/year, with the artist keeping 100% of the royalties. As an added bonus, the service promises quick turnaround with your music hitting stores the same day (2-4 hours).

The Music Bed

Music licensing isn’t usually an artist’s first thought, but maybe it should be. The idea of letting your music make money while potentially showing up in a mainstream movie, commercial, or some other high-profile work is an attractive one. There are a few bigger places that provide this service, but smaller, more specialized ones like The Music Bed or Jingle Punks will usually be a better place to start. Most of the smaller services do vet submissions, so there’s a chance of not making the cut, but if accepted, there’s a better chance of your music being used and actually making some money.

Teespring

Teespring isn’t specific to music, but should be used by all independent artists. The T-shirt-selling site works like Kickstarter, but much easier and quicker. The user goes through a few easy decisions like what type of shirt, what color, and how much the total cost will be. Followed by either typing text on the shirt or uploading an image. Teespring lets you set a minimum number of buyers before anyone gets a shirt, and allows you to set any price and see your cut right then. Perfect for artists will little or no capital to put up for shirts they don’t know will sell.

NoiseTrade

Ironically, the basis for NoiseTrade is a place for an artist to give their music away for free. The site does employ a tip jar for fans or generous listeners to give the artist anywhere from a $1 to $1,000. An older music album might actually make more from people donating after downloading than off of sales in a digital store. The hope is also that artists will gain more fans to buy a new album or come to a show.

There are plenty of ways to still make money as a musician, but the key is being creative about it. Keep an eye on the music tech space as there’s always new sites and services looking to be a savior for the small and independent bands.

[Image: Flickr user Adam Ososki]

Like a lot of crazy ideas, the world’s first tweeting e-cigarette was conceived of in a bar. This particular bar is called Tir Na Nog, and it’s the unofficial satellite office of creative agency R/GA’s New York branch where--according to Michael “Pickles” Piccuirro--“a lot of what happens at this agency takes place.”

Piccuirro is prototype studio product and technology director at R/GA, by all accounts a smart guy. So why is he spending his time linking e-cigarettes to Twitter? As this connected egg carton proves, you shouldn’t connect something to the Internet just because you can. But Piccuirro and his group of cohorts believe the world’s first connected e-cigarette might actually help people quit smoking.

“We work with a guy who's a Q/A engineer,” explains Piccuirro. “His name is Will Creedle, he’s been a smoker for a long time and he's tried lots of stuff trying to quit. He picked up e-cigarettes. Since it's an e-cigarette that uses water vapor, you can smoke inside.”

Because the members of the prototype studio spend so much time at the bar, eventually R/GA CTO John Mayo-Smith saw Creedle taking drags from the device and asked him about it. A few weeks later, Mayo-Smith read about the growing popularity of these devices in the New York Times and instructed his prototype studio to connect one to the Internet.

A few years ago, this would have been a daunting task, requiring hardware engineers, a fabrication shop, and expensive proprietary sensors. Thanks to the rise of open-source, cheap, and easy-to-program reusable microcontrollers like the Arduino, however, you can now connect just about anything to the Internet with very little overhead. Agencies are increasingly taking advantage of this new capability by setting up labs of people who can do much more than just conceptualize ideas for their clients.

“Everybody here is a maker, so at the end of the day we're producing something,” says group director Marc Maleh, who oversees the prototype studio. That mentality lead to a functional connected e-cigarette prototype and companion iPhone app in just four days of work.

“The way we integrated it is kind of low-tech,” says Piccuirro. “We have this thing called conductive tape. The conductive tape was put over the button of the e-cigarette, and we created this cigarette box that would house an Arduino with a Bluetooth shield powered by a nine-volt battery.” When you press the button, the conductive tape completes the circuit and sends a signal to the Arduino, which connects with an iPhone app over Bluetooth. The app displays statistics and sends tweets to the device’s Twitter account, TweetingCiggy.

E-cigarettes use a battery and small coil to heat flavored liquid nicotine and water, providing smokers with an inhalable vapor that feels like smoking a cigarette, without the harmful chemicals and tobacco of the real thing. They’re primarily sold as a device to help smokers quit, but because they don’t use tobacco, they aren’t subject to FDA or state smoking regulations, and can be advertised on television. This fact has led big tobacco companies to start investing in e-cigarettes, which has some anti-smoking groups worried that they may start to use them as gateways to the real thing.

Connecting the e-cigarette to Twitter, where it could potentially go viral and reach millions of people, seems like it would be a dream come true for big tobacco companies. But the people at R/GA say they view the tool as more of a tracking device along the lines of the Jawbone wristband, and the tweets the device sends focus, however glibly, on the benefits of quitting, not the novelty of the device itself.

“I think of using those analytics as a cessation tool for people, rather than promoting smoking,” says senior communications associate Martin Maisonpierre. “It's really understanding what your smoking habits are. You see, like, 'Oh my god, every Thursday after a meeting I consume three cigarettes. Wow, that's a stress point in my life.' Being able to understand and track those things can be a benefit.”

There’s no doubt that adding a data layer to smoking habit could be an enormously beneficial quitting tool. As anyone who’s quit smoking knows, a key part of ending the addiction is discovering the daily events that trigger the desire to smoke and eliminating or finding different ways of coping with them.

Maleh says the next step for the prototype would be partnering with an e-cigarette company to build connectivity into the device itself. But would a company want to build a connected device that helps their customers limit consumption of the product? Maleh admits he doesn’t know. For now, he’s just enjoying helping his friend stay away from the real thing.

What on earth makes a “smart” TV? It’s worth asking that question this week, on the heels of the deprecation of WebTV. Known as “MSN TV” after Microsoft bought it in 1997, the platform--which basically allowed you to surf the web on your television--will be shutting down come September 30th. Apparently, a browser does not make a TV “smart,” or at least, not smart enough.

So what does? Ask someone who isn’t a techie to define “smart TV” and they’ll probably say something like, “Oh, it’s like a TV and an iPhone. You can watch shows and surf the web at the same time... Right?” But ask someone who is in the tech industry what a smart TV is and they’ll probably give you the exact same answer (although they may add, “It runs apps too”). Rarely are Luddites and turbo-nerds on the same page about this sort of thing, but in the realm of television, the future is so undefined that it’s anybody’s guess.

And that’s why the current crop of “smart televisions” haven’t caught on yet--and perhaps also why Apple, the company most believe will be able to take the product mainstream, has yet to get into the market. A product needs to be clearly defined before it can be engineered--and marketed--effectively.

But what is a “smart TV” really? Is it a TV with a media streaming box like an Apple TV or a Roku built in? Is it a TV with an app store? Is it the central control room of your house that lets you video conference with people and control the lighting and temperature and oven in your kitchen? Is it all of these things? Or maybe the browser is the key--and the problem is a dearth of new, usable interfaces for it?

The causes of WebTV’s death are myriad, as Brad Hill, WebTV’s first official evangelist, writes for Engadget:

Assessing the demise of WebTV is probably unnecessary -- every proposed reason for Microsoft's decision has some truth. Computers have become household appliances. (Though still not easy or desirable for many people.) The long-sought internet / TV convergence is happening in new ways, most of them specialized to deliver TV-like content (not email). Mobile devices -- that's the real hammer to WebTV, I think. When the iPad was introduced, and was voraciously adopted by seniors, the tablet paradigm provided a new on-ramp to an internet experience. Touching an app icon is a vertical action, not unlike changing channels on a TV.

Brad Hill’s list of causes of WebTV’s death should be a cautionary tale to Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, and others who market current “smart” televisions. Many of these are little more than standard TVs with slick UIs, a web browser, and a very limited app store.

But as the death of WebTV shows, in order for the smart television to invade the living room, its sum must be better than the whole of the features our other devices can give us. And right now the Internet is much easier to browse on a tablet or laptop than on a smart TV. There are more apps for the dying BlackBerry platform than even the best smart television. Even video content offerings--something a smart TV should excel at--are just as good on tablets via all the streaming apps and video stores available to consumers. And don’t even get me started on remotes. No television can be considered smart if the remote has more than five buttons you need to press to easily navigate all of its offerings.

WebTV died because our other devices allowed us to access the same features more easily and comfortably. This should be a warning to all current “smart TV” makers. Your product won’t reach the critical tipping point of mass adoption until the smart television allows us to take advantage of the features our other devices offer, in an easier to use and more attractive package. That includes content accessibility, killer UIs, remote interfaces, and unique features that can only be done through a television. And for that to happen, what a “smart television” is and does needs to be clearly defined.

Previous Updates

Could Apple’s “Magic Wand” Be The Next Universal Remote?

July 10, 2013

Many of us probably take for granted that we can pick up an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook and begin using it right away. But for millions of people around the globe computers and other technology have always presented use limitations due to personal handicaps such as those with vision and hearing issues, or physical and learning disabilities. As computers and, indeed, now smartphones, move from luxuries to necessities, those that have conditions that don’t allow them to operate the devices as easily as others can find themselves at a disadvantage.

Thankfully Apple, the number one consumer technology company in the world, has a deep history of providing cutting-edge assistive technology features built into its hardware and software.

But assistive technology is a lot easier to enable once and forget about on personal devices like laptops and smartphones, which typically only have one user. After all, a person who is hard of sight can simply set an iPhone (or have someone set it for them) to the desired accessibility settings once and get on with using it. But communal devices like televisions often have multiple users, and each one might have a different assistive technology need, which means accessibility settings may have to be changed multiple times a day depending on who is using the television--and that may be hard for a user to do depending on their situation.

That’s where Apple’s patent for a “magic wand” remote control come in. From the patent filing:

In response to detecting a thumbprint or fingerprint, wand or the electronic device may compare the detected print with a library of known prints to authenticate or log-in the user associated with the print.

In response to identifying the user, the electronic device may load content specific to the identified user (e.g., a user profile, or access to the user’s recordings), or provide the user with access to restricted content (e.g., content restricted by parental control options).

As I’ve written about in the past, one of the biggest problems with smart TVs is that many “smart” televisions on the market still cling to an outdate, 20th century method of input: the 60+ button remote controls. The remote control for television is an area ripe for innovation--and needs to be revolutionized if any TV can truly be called “smart.” The immediate advantages of a “magic wand” remote described in the patent are myriad, some obvious. As Christian Zibreg writes for iDownloadBlog:

If Apple could authenticate users who simply hold a magic wand or an iPhone 5S (rumored to integrate a fingerprint sensor underneath the Home button) in their hand, the solution could make parental and media permission controls effortless and secure while allowing for multi-user scenarios.

But what perhaps is not so obvious a use of this “magic wand” remote is that it would make accessibility on communal television so much easier for those that need it.

Such a device would be able to instantly recognize the accessibility settings any user needed simply by touch. A person hard of sight could pick up the remote and immediately see the text size and contrast increased in their on-screen channel guide. A person hard of hearing could pick up the remote and see subtitles immediately activated. Even a person with motor control difficulties, such as those who have lost dexterity in their fingers, could pick up the remote and the smart TV would know to increase the size of gesture zones when the wand is waved. In this situation, a user could swing the remote left or right to move forward or backwards through the channels. The wide swing zones automatically activated based on this user’s need would free them from having to make specific, narrow-area presses or taps a traditional remote control, or even a touch screen remote (like an iPhone), requires.

Of course, the “magic wand” patent is just that--a patent. It doesn’t mean it will ever be an actual product. But if it comes to fruition, it would be a kick in the pants the traditional remote control needs and--more importantly--allow for much easier accessibility option activations that communal devices like televisions desperately require.

[Developers interested in making their apps accessible for all should check out Apple’s Accessibility in iOS guidelines.]

The TV Channel Guide Is Broken. Can Netflix Max Fix It?

July 8, 2013

As a child of the early '80s, it wasn’t too hard navigating what to watch on TV. We had five channels and you turned the dial to switch between them. By the end of the '80s we had cable, with a whopping 30 channels and you keyed in digits on the cable box’s numeric keypad to flip through channels to see what was on. By the mid-'90s the first on-screen channel guides appeared. This was handy because it let me see what was playing on my 90+ channels; all the programs were displayed on a linear grid. The early 2000’s brought TiVo and the first guides you could enter search queries into. Amazing. And since then, well, things haven’t changed much.

And for smart TV’s that’s going to be a huge problem.

Because in 10 to 15 years live TV and scheduled programming will exist for two things only: news and sports. Everything else will be on-demand. The new episode of the latest hit sitcom will no longer “air” every Thursday at 8 p.m. Instead it will be made available at a certain time and viewers can then choose whenever to watch it.

Not only will this on-demand programing for new episodes mean a traditional linear program guide is no longer needed, but when you combine all the on-demand currently running TV seasons (that is, “new releases”) with all the other on-demand content smart TVs will offer (100 years' worth of movies and TV shows) trying to navigate what’s available to watch via a traditional programming guide, or even more modern UI like you find on the Apple TV or Roku, could quickly get pointless. There’s just too much content to browse. You could flip through an alphabetized list of television shows or images of movie posters for weeks and not even skim 1% of all the content that will be available.

So how will content be found and searched on future smart TVs? It has to be in a better way than is done now because, just as search is the most important function for user interaction on the web, discovery will become the most critical aspect of user interaction on a smart TV.

That’s where I think Netflix has an interesting thing going for it with Netflix Max. Currently only on the PS3, but rolling out to other Netflix platforms soon, Netflix Max is a new interactive discovery tool in the guise of mini-games viewers play that helps them find what to watch next based on their answers to the game and also their Netflix analytics history, such as past viewing habits and ratings given to content watched. As Yahoo’s Jason Gilbert explains:

When you click in to play Max, you’ll be served a random game which will terminate in a recommendation from Netflix’s famous learning software. At the E3 Gaming conference in Los Angeles earlier this month, I got a chance to play around with Max for about 30 minutes, sampling three of the initial games that will ship with Max. There was Mood Ring, asks you which celebrity, or genre, or oddly specific Netflix category you prefer, generally offering you two disparate choices to find out what you are in the mood for; the Rating Game, which lets you rate a number of movies between one and five stars, and then spits out a title it thinks you will like based on those ratings; and an option that was like the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button in Google, which auto-plays a title based on your rating and viewing history.

For my taste, Netflix Max is a little annoying. I like the discovery aspect, but the games and Max’s voice are a bit too cutesie-wootsie. However, Netflix is to be commended because it shows that the company knows discovery will be the future of smart TVs and that they are aware that current programming guides--and even their own tiled UIs--are coming to the end of their useful shelf lives. Are mini-games the future of content discovery on smart TVs? Probably not. But creative and easy ways to put new content in front of users definitely are.

How Smart Remotes Could Keep TVs Dumb

June 24, 2013

Ask people what device they use most often with their TV, and the answer will likely be “my remote control.” Indeed, remotes have been synonymous with home televisions since the 1980s. However, they also seem to be the one device that could be holding back engineers tasked with creating the television of the 21st century from finding the best ways to interact with TVs of the future.

Engineers and design experts working on creating the first true smart TV need to get the notion of the remote control out of their mind. The remote control is a multi-buttoned monster of a relic that has had its day. It’s clunky, confusing, and 90% of the buttons on it are never pressed.

The remote control was good for its time, but trying to build a “remote control of the future” based on conceptions of a 30-year-old device won’t lead anywhere. Think of it this way: In late 2006 when the rumors were pretty strong that Apple was set to unveil an iPhone, many people thought the device might resemble an iPod but also have the functionality built into the scroll wheel to make phone calls. Pundits shouted that the rotary would once again rise up and take back the crown from the T9 pad. Other people imagined an advance Palm Pilot type of device with a stylus.

But neither of those things happened. What happened was Apple started from scratch--as if they had never seen a phone before--and invented their own. And it ended up changing the computing world.

That’s what the handheld device (indeed, if there even is one) is going to have to be like in order to call a smart TV “smart.”

Writing for 9to5Mac, Dan DeSilva recently praised Logitech for its newest Harmony Ultimate Hub “appcessory” that turns any smartphone into an ultimate remote:

“For years, harmony has been one of the most respected brands in remote technology. It seems like the Ultimate Hub is a move in the right direction making this technology affordable for everyone. The Ultimate Hub will be available in the U.S. and Europe in August 2013.”

While he’s right that Logitech makes nice products and that it’s always a good thing when technology becomes cheaper because it speeds adoption, let’s stop praising companies for merely adapting old technology to fit slightly new standards, because a total rethinking is needed for the way a user will interact with a smart TV--and it’s not the remote in any traditional sense.

So what’s the answer? Voice seems obvious. But as Tom Morgan writes for ExpertReviews:

“In theory, voice and motion control are ideal ways to interact with technology, but not in their current forms. Currently, voice-controlled TVs have a pre-programmed list of commands that must be uttered exactly in order to register a match. If the company hasn’t programmed an alternative phrasing, you’re limited to a single statement to perform simple actions that takes a mere button press on a traditional remote control. The limited degree of recognition accuracy also means that unless you speak with a BBC-trained English accent, there’s a good chance your command won’t get recognized even if you get the wording correct.”

Could voice control be the “remote” of the 21st century? Sure. But as Morgan points out, the tech isn’t there . . . yet (but if I had to place my bets, Google will get there before Apple).

So what about gestures? My problem with gestures is that you run into the gorilla-arm syndrome. “Gorilla-arm syndrome” describes why touch screens don’t work well on vertical interfaces (like an iMac). Though the tech might be there, human anatomy still overpowers technological innovation. The fact is, we get tired holding our arms out in front of us (especially while sitting) and waving them around. It’s why we use our iPads in our laps and our iPhones held in our hands and don’t hang them on a wall like a painting.

But let’s say we could get around gorilla-arm syndrome. Current gesture tech still has many flaws to overcome. As David Katzmaier writes in his review of Samsung’s Smart Interaction control box for televisions:

“The problem was, despite excellent lighting, my attempts to activate gesture control were often ignored and I ended up waving foolishly at the TV. When it did work, navigation was inexact and frustrating--think of a coarse version of a Wii-mote--and after a minute or so of it, my arm became tired. I guess that means gesture control is a good workout.

My fist-to-click didn't register as often as it should have and I ended up flapping my hand open and closed repeatedly in an attempt to "click" an item on the screen. At this point, I seriously considered using my fist to do something else to the TV screen.”

So, what’s the answer to the best way to interface with the smart TV of the future? I don’t know, which is why I’m tracking this story. If you’ve seen or are working on something that might revolutionize the way we interact with our TVs in the future, please tweet me @michaelgrothaus. Because the world’s first true smart TV could have all the content deals it wants and have the slickest UI ever designed, but if it doesn’t have a novel, intuitive, and easy way to navigate it, it could very well be more of a pain to use than today’s TVs with their average of 60-plus buttons per remote.

Apple TV Gets Smarter (By Borrowing Popular iOS Apps)

June 20, 2013

Apple doesn’t like rushing products out the door before they’re ready. However, that doesn’t mean the company is resting on its laurels. Indeed, today the company quietly rolled out the Apple TV 5.3 software update that brings more features to Apple’s set top box.

Significantly, today’s update shows that Apple thinks the road to a true smart television might be paved with features borrowed from iOS--most notably, some of its most popular apps. Now when Apple TV owners turn on their TV, they’ll be presented with new “channels” that are essentially ports of the iOS apps WatchESPN and HBO GO. Depending on what country the user is in, they may also see new channels from Sky News, Crunchyroll, and Qello.

Is third-party content important on a smart television? Of course. But not just any third-party content. To suck users into a world where smart TVs dominate, you need to lay a trail of bread crumbs made of the best content out there, something Apple’s Eddy Cue seems to recognize; he said this in a press release announcing the new channels:

“HBO GO and WatchESPN are some of the most popular iOS apps and are sure to be huge hits on Apple TV. We continue to offer Apple TV users great new programming options, combined with access to all of the incredible content they can purchase from the iTunes Store.”

However, the thing about these new Apple TV channels is that all but one (Sky News) requires an additional subscription to access (or you must already be a paying subscriber to that channel through your home cable plan). For people who want to truly cut the cord, it doesn’t seem to make much financial sense to get rid of the $50 a month traditional cable plan that offers hundreds of (okay, mostly unwatched) channels if every à la carte channel on a smart TV is going to cost between $4.99 and $11.99 a month.

But as Wilson Rothman writes for NBC News, that doesn’t matter--for now:

“Regardless of the limitations, the news is welcome, not just to "Game of Thrones" fans eager to relive the crushing emotional blows of the Red Wedding, but to anybody wondering about the future of Apple TV. The more content deals Apple can ink up, the better the prospects for that elusive "iTV." If Apple can't do it up big--and that means getting contracts from most or all of Hollywood's biggest content stores--it will fall short. HBO is certainly a must-have these days, at least for premium-content bragging rights.”

Still, the day a truly smart TV takes living rooms by storm, I don’t see it being one where I need to spend $60 a month to get access to 10 or fewer channels. Content is king, but for the most part, we live in a 99-cent economy as our app and song downloads clearly show, which means that, for now, the Apple TV needs to improve its learning curve before it can be called “smart.”

Why We’re Tracking The Evolution of The Smart TV

My ideal version of a perfect “smart TV” is this beautiful millimeter-thin pane of crystal clear glass that is invisible until it’s turned on. And once it is, it has access to every film, television show, and sporting event ever recorded--all through the cloud. It’s got apps and content galore. Further, its a two-way communication screen that allows me to talk to any of my friends and colleagues, no matter what device they are behind at the time. This perfect smart TV lets me navigate it by voice and hand gestures in the air. It’s my home assistant that can access any of my computer files--from emails to pictures to video games--from any device I own. And because this perfect smart TV contains every kind of media I could ever want access to, it has only a single cable that plugs it into an outlet. No other ports are on it because they’re no longer needed. External Blu-ray players, video game counsels, and DVRs are so early-21st-century.

But all this is just a fantasy in my head, of course. A true “smart television” doesn’t exist yet--no matter what the marketing material for existing offerings may say. Apple’s kinda sorta doing it with its Apple TV; Google did their version with the Nexus Q, which quickly went nowhere; and companies like Roku, Microsoft, and Sony think they’re on their way, too.

But no one’s there yet, because no firm definition exists of what makes a smart TV, well, “smart.” Is my vision of the ideal TV “smart?” Perhaps. Then again, I’m sure I’m leaving a lot out. And that’s what this tracker is for. Here, we’ll look at the latest advances in television OS’s, cloud services, and UI’s suited to the living room.

Don’t be mistaken: Smart TVs are coming. It’s just that we may have to go through many equivalents of the Palm Pilot until we reach something as refined as the iPhone 5.

If you’re interested in the evolution of the smart TV, be sure to follow this tracker. Here, we’ll explore the latest hardware and software advances that will one day get the television of the 21st century right. And if you’re a developer involved in trying to get us there, get in touch with the author @michaelgrothaus to let him know what you’re up to.

[Image: Flickr user Andy Price]

According to the Wall Street Journal, "Smartphone Upgrades Slow as 'Wow' Factor Fades." The statistics behind this headline come from UBS, which has reported that while in 2008 around 20% more U.S. smartphone owners with major carriers were planning an upgrade than in 2007, in 2013 this trend has reversed: About 2% fewer people plan on upgrading this year versus the figure for 2012. The Wall Street Journal all but insinuates that this is terrible, terrible news, and that the future for smartphones is gloomy. No "wow" factor, eh? Awful.

Except this is absolute nonsense, and probably a misunderstanding of the market. Sure, the smartphone revolution has--in its current paradigm--grown past the explosive, exciting stages of its youth. Smartphones are no longer new, and your gran may even have one because they've penetrated so far and so quickly through the different sectors of society.

But to say this is a lack of "wow" ignores the fact that the market has changed. Phones have gotten better and companies like Apple and Samsung are now releasing software more frequently that adds radical new functions to existing phones. With the upcoming release of iOS7 for example, phones from 2011's iPhone 4 upward will be compatible and may even gain new features. Why, many consumers will argue, do I need to buy new hardware if my recent, expensive purchase still works?

The smartphone market is also about much more than the plain hardware: Smartphone app markets are a global billion-dollar phenomenon, and are growing and adapting all the time. Recent data from Flurry shows that these markets are also maturing--90% of iOS apps are free, up from about 80-84% during 2010 to 2012. That's actually not much of a shift, and it may reflect that the iPhone is appealing to lower-income markets as well as its traditional higher-end ones (paralleling the Android app store's long-standing bias toward free apps). And old apps tend to hang around on the app stores, often free versus their original paid-for status, to drive a tiny dribble of income via embedded ads and perhaps to extend app branding a little. Why not leave them there, as it doesn't cost developers anything to do so? And I don't think anyone would suggest that apps per se have gotten dumber, or less powerful or less exciting today than yesterday.

I'd argue that the "wow" factor for smartphones hasn't gone anywhere. It's just matured a little and shifted. The excitement really isn't about the hardware so much now (the current paradigm has all phones as black, glossy slabs anyway), although there's always going to be the frisson of owning something cutting edge.

Instead the excitement in smartphones is more about what you can do with them. Look at the rise of companion wearable devices, which give amazing new power to phones. Look at the arrival of personal assistant apps like Siri. Look at the dramatic explosion of social photography, which relies not on cutting edge photo gear, but instead has many users digitally corrupting their photos to look like they were taken in 1974 on wet film.

As a developer you should be excited by the news that the smartphone market has matured, not made to feel nervous. It means your audience understands the app world better, and is actively looking for the next app that adds a new "wow" factor to their much-loved device. Something new. Something unexpected, clever. That's actually a great challenge.

[Image: Flickr user Sara Thompson]

While I was doing reporting for this big story about GitHub, a side discussion came up with Scott Chacon, one of GitHub’s founders and the tsar of their new office, known to GitHubbers as Office 3.0. As we talked about the architecture of the new space, a “blank slate” industrial building where GitHub will move next month, it became easy to draw an analogical connection to the architecture of good software.

Pattern Languages In Architecture And Software

This anecdote stuck out: One GitHubber suggested Chacon read a book called A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings And Construction to help vet ideas for the space. Of course, the title will sound familiar to any front-end designers out there: Design “patterns” are commonly discussed in software as well as architecture.

Since everything at GitHub is done in the open, there were a lot of ideas to vet. Chacon has been managing feedback about Office 3.0 in--where else--a GitHub repo. Since most of GitHub’s staffers are remote--about 70% of its employees are not located in San Francisco--the use cases for the office vary somewhat dramatically.

“I opened up a repository and emailed everybody saying: If you want to see something built, if you try to think about your daily life. Try to think about the time that you spend in the office--which is different whether you live in San Francisco and you use this for work, or whether you don't, and use it to visit,” says Chacon. “Identify the problem-set [you face] when you’re in the office and let me know what works well, and what doesn’t work well.”

But in the back of my mind, that book gnawed. Without much training in architecture, I was curious how town and city “pattern languages” could teach me more about interface design, something I think about constantly for Writebot, the collaborative platform I’m building with two friends (and which we use here at Fast Company internally.) I bought A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings And Construction on Amazon for about $23 used and pored over it for useful advice for software architects. Here’s what I found.

Think About Your App’s “Circulation Realms”

Chapter 98 of this tome covers “circulation realms,” which I’ll loosely define as the ease with which people can navigate a huge campus of buildings--or in a web analogy, how easy it is for users to find their way around your site. The chapter opens with a pertinent warning on page 481:

In many modern building complexes the problem of disorientation is acute. People have no idea where they are, and they experience considerable mental stress as a result.

Anyone who has tried to adjust settings in Facebook will know this feeling well; having a non-obvious structure or organization to a space makes navigating feel like cognitive molasses. The real problem, according to the authors, is lack of adequate language to describe where you are. Imagine a first-time visitor to your building (or app, or website) the book says:

From your point of view, the building is easy to grasp if someone can explain the position of this address to you, in a way you can remember easily, and carry in your head while you are looking for it.

Imagine your mom asks you how you might change her preferences in a certain app. In a user-friendly space--let’s use Mac OS as an example--it’s easy. Navigate to the Apple menu, then select System Preferences. Now imagine explaining how to change privacy settings in Facebook. You’d have to write three paragraphs. The book continues on p.482:

To put this in its most pungent form: a person must be able to explain any given address within the building, to any other person, who does not know his way around, in one sentence.

This is not just crucial for new users, the book says, but for anyone who has to carry around a mental map of a space. The more complex and nuanced the map required, the more cognitive load the person experiences--even if he’s been in the space for years.

If he spends a great deal of time looking out for landmarks, thinking about where to go next, then his time is entirely occupied, and leaves him little time for the process of reflection, tranquil contemplation, and thought.

What Are Your App’s “Main Buildings?”

Here the book gives some advice that might sound familiar to anyone who has designed iOS apps, or other applications where extreme simplicity and parsimony are crucial to usability. The book is talking about “main buildings” in a complex of buildings--say, the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, my alma mater--the brain, the locus of activity for the community of users. But it could easily be talking about an app’s “main task.” From p.487:

For any collection of buildings, decide which building in the group houses the most essential function--which building is the soul of the group, as a human institution... [B]uild the marin part of it higher and more prominent than the rest, so that they eye goes immediately to the part which is most important.

Apps or sites which have flat, uniform navigation inevitably leave people wondering what they’re supposed to be doing there. Apps that clearly call out the main task--for example, Instagram’s front-and-center camera button--are much easier for people to gain expertise in. Once they know what the main task is, everything else can be explored in the context of ancillary features.

Public Spaces And “Pedestrian Streets” In Software Design

This section could easily be titled “why people prefer to do things in public.” It’s why countless closed, proprietary networks have lost out to the robust public-ness of Twitter. From p.489:

The simple social intercourse created when people rub shoulders in public is one of the most essential kinds of social “glue” in society.

Software spaces, like physical buildings, often have centralized “corridors” or gathering spaces where people rub shoulders. This can be a feed or group chat; another example is people commenting around a piece of comment. Too much privacy, the book argues, can make these spaces feel awkwardly intimate:

... It is therefore unpleasant, even unnerving, to move through them; people in them are in no state to generate, or benefit from, social intercourse.

The book suggests allowing people to move between private spaces via outdoor areas that re-create pedestrian streets, where all sorts of activity is permissible and visible. This should make software architects think twice about what appears on their “home” or “dashboard” screens--whatever the user considers to be the app’s resting place. This is the place to house your most open social environment; closed feeds, groups, and person-to-person communications can branch off the central agora, but what people really want is a public space.

Coder Caves: GitHub’s Homebrewed Architectural Pattern

GitHubbers also used the book for inspiration, says Chacon, coming up with ideas that ranged from “super academic discussions” to “we want to have dark, smaller spaces with sound dampening, so it's easy to concentrate.”

Those dark, small spaces earned the nickname “coder caves.” As Chacon describes the design: “It's this maze-like structure where there are all very smaller rooms, they're dark and there are small walls” to break up the space. “People can go in there and escape and have a quiet small space for themselves.”

Chacon shopped the idea around with other GitHubbers. “I was going back and forth with design and sketches with different people in the company, would it look cool like this, or like this? Should it we use it for design? Should we lay them out? Should we be able to see each other?” After some consensus-building, the caves were framed out by the contractor. “They’re built now--we can actually go through and walk through them,” says Chacon.

Design patterns also helped Chacon figure out which ideas to reject. One that seemed particularly dangerous was any design that encouraged GitHubbers to spend too much time in the office.

“Beds--that was something that I specifically pushed back on,” says Chacon. “We said, ‘We're not a company that wants you to spend 18 hours at the office. We want you to go home. We don't want you to plan to sleep in the office. We want to make sure that you have a life outside of GitHub.”

[Image: Flickr user Jon Olav Eikenes]

On Monday GitHub launched a site called ChooseALicense.com for anyone whose legal knowledge about software licensing is a little rusty. Or, you know, nonexistent.

It’s meant to be a resource for coders when they start a new repository and go to select a license, partly so users can understand their options and classify their work appropriately. But partly because so many GitHub users aren’t choosing a license for their work at all.

The overall culture on GitHub is one of openness. Post what you want to post, fork what you want to fork, and find new opportunities for collaboration. It sounds downright utopian. But reality always creeps in somewhere, and the fact that 77% of GitHub projects carry no license is not necessarily a move toward sharing and the free flow of ideas. As GitHub’s new site explains, if a project doesn’t have a license it may actually have more legal protection under federal copyright laws than code that has been designated with specific terms of use.

You're under no obligation to choose a license and it's your right not to include one with your code or project . . . But generally speaking, the absence of a license means that default copyright laws apply. This means that you retain all rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work. This might not be what you intend.

As part of an investigation into licensing, Black Duck Software surveyed one million projects across a number of code sharing sites, and found that overall 40% of them are unlicensed. On average this shows better licensing implementation than on GitHub, but the bottom line is that if you want your code to be open for use you need to choose a license that frees it up in the right ways. And this could save a lot of people a lot of money.

On GitHub the three main types of software licenses are:

The MIT License, which is meant to be extremely straightforward and open. It permits users to do anything with a given project as long as they credit the developer and don’t hold him or her liable for the project’s use.

The Apache License, which is similar to the MIT License, but also explicitly grants patent rights to users.

The GPL License, which is older, more limiting, and less popular than the other two. It is a copyleft license that requires users to track their changes if they modify and then distribute a project. Different versions of this license also restrict the use of modified code in various classes of hardware.

But other options include:

Affero GPL
Artistic License 2.0
BSD 3-Clause License
BSD 2-Clause license
Eclipse Public License v1.0
GPL v3
LGPL v2.1
LGPL v3
Mozilla Public License Version 2.0
Public Domain (Unlicense)

Unlicensed code is concerning in itself, but companies looking to utilize open source software may be shying away because of a related problem: embedded licenses. An open source project may build on code from a number of sources. And this code may or may not have been licensed. Unless a developer investigates and declares the license restrictions of all her source code, a company looking to save money on open source software is opening itself to legal issues by using the project. As a blanket protection, many companies won’t use unlicensed software at all to try and avoid accidental rights infringements. Black Duck found that 42% of the million projects they surveyed had embedded licenses that were different than or conflicted with the projects’ own license status. Resolving these issues could lead to major industry savings, Black Duck estimates $59 billion.

ChooseALicense.com is motivating entrepreneurs and developers to be more vocal about licensing concerns. On Wednesday, developer John Mertic tweeted, “Yes @github users, you need to pick a license for your code. Especially if you expect others to use it seriously...” And tech writer Marco Tabini added yesterday that, “Instead of a license chooser, maybe GitHub should put out a license conflict detector.” Honestly, it would be a smart next step.

Tumblr, thanks to its open doors policy, is a place where you can find porn and adult content on the Internet. That's not much of a surprise, given that many sites and apps serve up exactly the same sort of material (lots of which is sampled and re-shared via Tumblogs, of course). But perhaps we need to rewrite that initial sentence. Tumblr is a place where you used to be able to find porn on the Internet. The site has made some porn-related maneuvers, and they're surprisingly technical.

Let's not get into sticky questions about pornography itself. Frankly the debate is tired, and YMMV. Yahoo, with its slightly family-friendly paternal/maternal/big brotherish stance, may have finally decided Tumblr's long-standing pink pixel content is incompatible with its values, and that's possibly a serious PR misstep given that there was a post-acquisition promise Tumblr would continue business uninterrupted. We don't know. What's interesting about the current news is exactly how Tumblr is dealing with the content.

Tumblr is not deleting pornographic content. It's simply making it unfindable.

Tumblogs that fall into adult categories are from now on invisible in Tumblr's internal search engine, because adult-related tags are blocked from the algorithm. Tumblr's also adjusted its robots.txt file to bar search engine indexing robots from discovering Tumblogs that are marked as "adult." The "adult" label can apparently be slapped onto a blog without the owner's input, and as of now that automatically means it won't show up in Google or Bing or any other online site no matter what a particular blog entry is about--even something innocent.

Similarly, Tumblr's new iOS app removes search queries that match tags #gay, #lesbian, and #bisexual, though it's being reported that #bi, #lgbt, and others are still searchable.

But this doesn't stop users from running adult-tagged Tumblogs, nor from visitors navigating to them directly via their browser's URL bar. Effectively Tumblr's taken a high-tech code-based approach to pornographic content. It's not deleting it or blocking it. It's deadstocking it. That's still a form of censorship that flies in the face of founder David Karp's previously staunch defense of freedom of speech, but only sort of. Sure, kids who navigate the web via their parents' PC, with a default browser landing on Yahoo's home page, may now not accidentally stumble onto porn hosted on Yahoo's network via Tumblr... but the content is still there. It's not excised from the Net, it's just much, much harder to find. Presumably the company can hold its hands in the air in a well-known gesture that says "we aren't doing anything wrong"...and in fact in a posting about the new move it argues that it's all for the public good:

Tumblr welcomes and encourages all forms of expression. However, we have to be sensitive to the millions of readers and bloggers from different locations, cultures, and backgrounds with different points of view concerning mature or adult-oriented content.

Tumblr users who log in to the site and specifically turn off adult filtering can still see adult content, and followers of adult Tumblogs can still access their favourite content via the mobile apps. So Tumblr really isn't making it impossible to see adult content on the site. But it's using every code-based trick it can to shutter it away in a very high-walled garden, and block some critical Net navigation methods from getting inside. In a search-engine dominated world this is effectively a sentence of solitary confinement for this sort of content.

Tumblr's not the first, and won't be the last, big Net entity to wrestle with the slippery issue of pornographic content. But the the upshot for Tumblr is still unknown. What may, of course, happen is that Tumblrers who use the service for adult content will simply go elsewhere... and considering that this may be about 10% of Tumblr's userbase, this could be bad news for the site and good news for its rivals.

You may find it admirable or even clever that Tumblr's taking a digitally smart stance on the matter of porn, or other adult content. But for content creators and developers of all types this should be a harsh reminder that what the Net giveth the Net also taketh away. Relying on one particular vehicle for accessing and promoting your content is really risky because at any time the access can be locked off, potentially putting your entire business model at risk.

[Image: Flickr user Nuraishah Bazilah Affandi]

Augmented Reality really hasn’t caught on beyond the gimmicky location-based app or two because it causes people to do totally unnatural things to make it work--like holding their smartphones out in front of them as they’re walking down the street. It’s a nice idea--having an overlay of information atop a real-world canvas. But even the much-vaunted Google Glass, with its voice commands and awkward head nodding, has yet to discover its real reason for for being, at least beyond celebrity POV videos.

[Credit: Lynne d Johnson]

Enter MindPirate, an augmented reality gaming company, that recently received an infusion of $2.5 million from Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) and Signia Venture Partners (SVP) in hopes of finding a conceivable reason. Built on the premise that “your world is the game board,” the company plans to create a game development platform, the Callisto Engine, for game developers to take advantage of the sensing abilities of smartphones and tablets--things like GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes, compasses, image sensors, and proximity sensors--as well as emerging devices like Google Glass.

[Credit: MindPirate]

“It’s designed to make as easy as possible the transition of game design from a touch-centric experience to one that embraces the unique dynamics of wearble tech, and the sensing capabilities of modern mobile design,” MindPirate CEO Shawn Hardin recently told Gamasutra. “There can be value in dynamics that don’t disrupt, but complement what you’re already doing,” he added.

MindPirate’s future is closely tied to wearable tech’s growth. Juniper Research estimates the market will reach $5.2 billion by 2017, up from $82 million in 2012.

"We have a strongly held point of view that as the form factor, device capability, lightweight design of these devices move through very quick and iterative cycles, we think they're going to become broadly appealing and deliver value in many use cases. We think the entertainment and game area is likely to be the first major breakout space," Hardin told GameIndustry International in another interview. We’re already seeing different form factors, such as Glass Up, that look more like a regular pair of glasses and place the line of sight in a more natural eye path.

As more developers and technology companies create reasons for Google Glass’ existence with a focus on utility and usability for the user, so too will we see an increase in Augmented Reality’s adoption. Until then, both are nothing more than a geek’s playthings.

Lynne d Johnson is a Content + Community Consultant, helping brands learn how to put the customer first, who has been closely watching the AR for the last three years and speaking about its marketing potential at conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo, AdTech, and SXSW.

[Image: Flickr user Mike Baird]

Some of today’s greatest tech companies, young and old, were started by college students: Apple, Dell, Facebook, Snapchat. In each case, their founders (Jobs, Dell, Zuckerberg, and Spiegel) started working on their companies while in school, and then dropped out to pursue their ventures full-time. So is school a good place to start a business?

Starting Up In College: The Pros

The advent of cheap hosting and other outsourced infrastructure has brought the costs of starting a software company down dramatically. Now more than ever, students are building companies from their dorm rooms. This was especially salient for my cofounders and me at Stanford, where, in the last 18 months, we experienced much of the optimism and many of the resources that the university has become well-known for. Here are other things that student founders have going for them.

Finding A Cofounder Is Easier

“How do I find a cofounder?” is the single most common question asked of Paul Graham, and yet the hardest question for him to answer. PG’s answer is that he can’t find you your cofounder, because the best candidates are folks you already know. My cofounders, Mike and Alden, entered my life at Stanford. I met Mike through our shared interest in organizing founder meetups around campus. Mike and Alden met through Stanford’s CS classes. It’s cliche but in my opinion very true: Cofounders need to be respected and trusted peers first, and colleagues second. College is a fantastic mixing ground because it’s a place where people have natural flexibility, shared interest, and an objective of getting to know each other.

You Can Use Class Time To Incubate Ideas

Starting a company while at Stanford, we were able to iterate our concept quickly in classes designed to “test the entrepreneurial waters.” In the d.school’s “Launchpad,” we were asked to create a working prototype in one week, have a paying customer after two, and constantly iterate our product according to user feedback. Over at the Graduate School of Business, Professors Barnett and Rachleff taught us how to find “product-market fit.” In both cases, the school environment helped stimulate us to think about our ideas in ways that are hard to reproduce outside of school. Outside of Stanford, many startups now adopt the “Lean Startup” Methodology championed by Eric Ries and taught at many forward-thinking universities around the world.

You’re In A Low-Risk Environment

Mike, Alden, and I focused many class projects and presentations on our own startup, garnering help and feedback from smart classmates while enabling us to refine our business plan and pitch in a low-risk environment. In school you can pick up a project, work on it with a group of people, talk to potential customers, fail, and do it all over again, without the risks that would come later in life; having to leave your job to try something new, supporting a big family, etc.

You Can Call Anyone For Help

People will almost always extend a helping hand to students--even when they might not have helped that person outside the context of school. It’s much easier to learn from and get to know future partners, colleagues, or competitors while you’re still in school and they feel an intrinsic desire to help you.

Starting Up In College: The Cons

So with all those benefits and resources, shouldn’t every entrepreneurially minded student be starting a business in school? Notwithstanding all the benefits of starting a company in school, there are challenges and risks that I came across the hard way when founding LifeSwap (the predecessor to my current startup--here’s our pivot story). Consider these disadvantages:

Hunting For Ideas Is Harder

Some of the startups founded in school arise through class projects where a group of students proactively seek to uncover and develop a business opportunity. This goes against the belief that true innovation stems from authentic and unique insight into a problem. When students come up with business ideas that are inauthentic to their own experience, or lack deep insight into a pain point, there’s a risk that the idea is more of a vitamin than a painkiller, and thus less likely to be a necessary solution.

You’re In An Echo Chamber

Less-than-great ideas, rather than dying quickly, stay alive due to falsely positive feedback from others. Affirmative feedback from surveying classmates is too often taken as confirmation of a use case, when it is a result of people’s inclination to be supportive. We learned this lesson with LifeSwap: People loved the idea of experiencing another job for a few hours! But our classmates weren’t our target market... so make sure you get “out of the building” to test your product with your real customers.

False Positives Are More Likely

Amidst that echo chamber of excitement about your startup, and positive reactions from those around you, many student founders experience an escalation of commitment. Before I knew it, I was working on LifeSwap in lieu of a summer internship, and being asked if I was planning to “drop out” before graduation. I considered it, as did a number of classmates of mine. With hindsight, I’m relieved that I decided to stay in school. My chances to start a business didn’t dissipate, while the experience of attending graduate school and building a valuable network would have been hard to replicate later on. One question to ask is whether deferral is an option.

After graduating in June and joining Mike and Alden to work on our startup full-time, it’s become abundantly clear to me that perhaps the biggest disadvantage of working on a startup in school is that it’s really hard to meet your full potential while also pouring time into school. Being a part-time team member increased our team’s email volume and delayed our product decisions, because I wasn’t there to have the quick debates and make the fast decisions that a startup needs to build, iterate, and be successful.

The Takeaway: Start Up Anyway!

Having said all that, I’m finding the relationships built and insights garnered through my startup experience while in school to be invaluable in my current day-to-day startup rollercoaster. School is often the best place to meet cofounders, build working relationships with them, and get excellent feedback from smart people. I’d encourage other startup-hungry students to make the most of the resources around them while inflicting a healthy dose of skepticism on themselves and making sure not to mistake approval within the classroom for product-market fit!

Bastiaan Janmaat (@bastiaanjanmaat), Mike Dorsey (@mikedorsey) and Alden Timme are cofounders of DataFox, a private company analytics tool that allows users to discover and track high growth companies, based at StartX in Palo Alto. Check out their other FastCoLabs posts here, visit their blog, or follow them on Twitter at @datafoxco.

[Image: Flickr user Cuboulderalumni]

The option to share Instagram photos on Facebook and Twitter is both a blessing and a curse. When I want to share a photo that’s particularly special with my Facebook friends who aren’t on Instagram (i.e., my grandma), I can do so. When I want to share a photo that’s particularly witty on Twitter, I can do so. But when I see the same linked photos on Facebook and Twitter, and then again on Instagram, it drives me nuts. Especially if said photos are of my friend’s cat... and I like cats. In short: cross-platform integration has gone overboard and it’s led social giants to become one massive lump of blah.

Giant Social Networks: Where Intellect Goes to Die

On the big social sites, a person’s network is often so big that there’s no real sense of community. Chances are, in real life you consider yourself a member of many different communities within society: An animal lover, a UX designer, and a parent, for instance. Your online life should mirror your real life, which is not to say that everything must be kept separate, but you should feel connected to the people you’re surrounded by.

When your feeds are drenched in a constant stream of mixed messages, it’s overwhelming. Because of the sheer number of posts, those that actually have any substance or meaning are lost in the undertow. As a marketer, Facebook and Twitter have become necessary components of my job, and they’re still effective. But as a human, I want something that’s a little more human. I crave the interaction and engagement that the Internet was built to foster. It’s no secret that the web gives us the infinite power to connect, so why are we wasting it updating each other about the minute details of our day?

The most frustrating part of the whole social giant oversaturation thing is that young people are typifying the generalized negative qualities of our generation. It’s said that we share every detail of our lives merely because we have the technology at our fingertips; but much like the boy who cried wolf, any time an action is constantly repeated, it becomes meaningless. Maybe I’m just “friends” with dull people, but reading my feed provides no insight because it’s so routine and predictable. In a social sense, I’m not learning or growing as an online being anymore.

But I think there’s an antidote. Niche social networks, that were built for specific, narrowed-down purposes allow for focus, community, and meaning to be restored to the online world. Sites and apps like Quora, Quibb, Path, Potluck, and even Medium present themselves as forums for like-minded individuals to connect with each other, to form new communities, and to bring meaning and argument (the non-troll kind) back to digital spaces. With a powerful zap of what feels like magic, new niche sites are bringing intelligence back to the social network. They’re a breath of fresh air in an online world that’s cluttered with social smog.

How Niche Networks are Bringing Community (and Meaning and Insight) Back

When Quora went public in 2010, it set the stage for hyper-focused social networking by implementing a single purpose: Q&As. The smart person’s Yahoo Answers, Quora quickly grew to over 500,000 users in its first year. With the site’s extensive division of categories, Quora is an easy place to tap into a specific, but vast community. In my work life, Quora has proven to be an invaluable source of inspiration and discovery. There are countless articles about social media, marketing, best practices, and digital culture. Quora is a magical combination of curiosity, indulgence (you can talk about yourself with a specific purpose), and intelligence. It allows you to add value to a larger conversation with people who are interested in the same topics as you. Win win.

Similarly, Quibb and Potluck offer a sense of community through their simple purposes of link sharing. While Quibb is a selective environment for work-related news and Potluck is more an “everyone’s invited” type platform, both sites are excellent resources for finding content that will be relevant to you, as you choose who to follow and what conversations to join. Not unlike Quora’s capabilities, Quibb and Potluck let you jump into a digital community and draw insights from what others have to say. These sites keep you up on relevant industry and cultural debates and they’ll actually engage you as they do so.

Path is another new social network of note. Despite its initial prompt that asks you integrate your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram accounts (sigh), the difference here, the money-maker if you will, is that Path limits the number of friends you can add. Ultimately, Path creates a space for much more personal connections and interactions. It prompts you to invite your family and close friends, but not that random person you met years ago. Essentially a microcosm of social networks, Path does its job of connecting you (and even lets you overshare), but only a small circle of people you care about will be able to see your updates.

Finally, there’s the Evan Williams-spawned Medium: A beacon of light in the Internet of nothingness. Medium has no “follow” or “friend” functions; as a reader, the only actionable buttons are for commenting on and recommending posts. Though there isn’t too much interaction happening on Medium, the experience of using it takes my mind far past any place it could go by skimming my newsfeed. The site is well-organized and places value on curiosity and discovery. It connects you to a large web of opinionated, thought-provoking writers who you can engage with and whose words may inspire you.

Can Smaller Networks Keep Up?

The question now is whether or not these networks can survive among the giant networks, but still avoid becoming part of the oversaturation themselves. Better yet, do they even want to “keep up” and try to compete with traditional social networks?

Despite the fatigue that’s felt at the hands of social media giants, there are certain elements of the fluid web we can and should use to our advantage. For starters, Medium is linked to Twitter (and Quibb uses a Twitter integration to log in), so when you want to share something, the default prompt is to share on Twitter. Sure, it’s another fleeting tweet, but at least there’s substance to it. I’d much rather be prompted to read an interesting story than see a complaint about the weather. That said, I think the Medium + Twitter relationship may be the one exception to the “keep traditional networks and niche networks separate” rule.

If you’re a business owner or entrepreneur and you’re worried your presence on niche networks won’t reach a large audience: don’t. That’s not what these networks are geared toward. Why share niche-specific information with your entire social following if the grand majority of them won’t care? That defeats the purpose of these networks existing. Directing your audience toward your presence on these sites will get them to see you as a thought leader in your industry. Maybe you’ll inspire the brightest ones to join the conversation.

Rishon is the marketing manager at Spinnakr, a new kind of analytics that takes action for you. She’d love to connect with you on Twitter.

[Image: Flickr user Thomas Leth-Olsen]

The levees have broken for 3-D printing, and the resulting deluge of printing-concepts-on-the-cheap is flowing faster than we can gather. The best of these rise to the surface for their innovating predictions of a faster/safer/healthier future.

A Robotic Hand That Doesn’t Cost An Arm And A Leg

Teen engineer Easton LaChappelle created his first robotic hand out of Legos, fishing wire, and surgical tubing--a feat that earned him 3rd place at the Colorado Science Fair. More importantly, it introduced him to a young girl who was born without an arm and needs new prostheses as she grows, which cost a hefty $80,000 per arm. Sensing an opportunity, LaChappelle taught himself 3-D printing and created a dextrous arm controlled by an Arduino chip. Cutting-edge commercial tech requires spinal surgery to hook prosthetics up to the body’s neural network, but LaChappelle’s version keeps costs and complications down by using an EEG headset to channel brainwaves through Bluetooth signals to the arm.

Speaking at TEDxMileHigh last month, LaChappelle presented the arm, which features as much motion and almost as much strength as a human arm and costs just $400. He credits 3-D printing for driving down the price, and he’s already working on stronger, better models that can go from blueprint to model in just a few days.

[Image credit: TEDxMileHigh]

Kowabunga, Customized

MADE boards, based in Chicago, is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new production process for custom, 3-D-printed “SmartBoards.” Before you buy one of their boards, MADE wants you to drop your phone in a waterproof case, strap it to your existing board, and take it along for a ride. The app then collects data about how you surf and allows MADE to print a board that exactly matches your riding style.

[Image credit: MADE, LLC]

Prosthetics As Fashionable As They Are Durable

[Image credit: Bespoke Innovations]

San Francisco-based Bespoke Innovations is the lovechild of an orthopedic surgeon and an industrial designer, and it shows: chrome plating, ballistic nylon, leather, and tattoo patterns combine to make prosthetics a personable fashion statement. The wares are customizable, durable, and, thanks to the polymer Bespoke uses to 3-D print the prosthetics, extremely lightweight. They’ve even been used by athletes and Survivor finalists, you know they can stand up to anything.

Sugar That’s Sweet For The Eyes, Too

[Image credit: The Sugar Lab]

Liz and Kyle von Hasseln, architects-cum-confectionary entrepreneurs of The Sugar Lab in Echo Park, Los Angeles, have ditched the trendy cupcake for the 3-D-printed sugar sculpture. Using a mixture of water and alcohol to harden a sugar substrate into exotic forms, their latest project is an elegant toothache-waiting-to-happen, printed layer-by-layer by a 3-D printer. What’s next? Collaborating with “some seriously talented cake artists” at a well-known bakery in Hollywood, according to TechCrunch.

Drone Everything

Dutch designer Jasper van Loenen designed this 3-D-printable Drone It Yourself (DIY) kit. Once constructed, the drone can be clipped to just about anything for impromptu aerial exploration. Though the four motors with propellers, control box, and batteries need to be picked up from a local hobby store, the DIY kit provides printable clasps, extenders, and bolts to transform the mundane into the airborne. The genius of the kit isn’t the included pieces, which are functionally minimal, but the DIY mentality that those assorted clasps and extenders give rise to. If this bike wheel/history textbook/terrarium can go for a spin, then if I just print out longer extenders and add a couple more engines...I have no idea where my sister went, mom, I swear!

[Image credit: Jasper van Loenen]

Back From The Dead (Sort Of)

[Image credit: University of Dundee]

Nothing says honor thy (great-great-grand) father like creating a 3-D bust of your forebears. Or, you know, ancient royalty. Using a 3-D scanner on the recently unearthed remains of Richard III, researchers at the University of Dundee were able to print a likeness of the infamous king’s face. Now is the winter of--Oh, hey, he doesn’t look so hunched and ugly. What gives, Shakespeare?

3-D That Takes 2-D

[Image credit: Leo Marius]

Yes, it’s an analog camera, which means you’d have to drum up some actual 35mm film and schlep the used roll to a drugstore for processing. But building an SLR out of $30 in scrap parts is a feat, and analog means this baby won’t run out of batteries. Its designer, Leo Marius, made sure to keep the camera modular so your lenses will fit on a custom lens mount. Eventually, the 3-D-printed digital SLR will rise to be the photography hacker’s darling, but for now, this is an ingenious little memory-catcher that’s truly one-of-a-kind. Find instructions to print this bad boy out here.

Let Me Slip Into Something A Bit More...Printable

[Image credit: Shapeways]

Because why not, N12 and Continuum Fashion have collaborated on the first 3-D-printed bra-and-panty combo. The underwear was designed with an algorithmic “circle packing” equation to maximize curvature (smaller circles for curvier areas, larger circles for flat areas) that will be applied to other clothing pieces in the future. For now, that flexibility requires each piece to be bought separately for a whopping $275 total, available for purchase on Shapeways. A bit steep? Perhaps. But that’s the price you pay for futuristic underoos.

Earlier this year, I began work on a project requiring real-time communication with Node.js and Socket.IO. The existing solutions I was aware of try to tie as much as possible of the frond-end to the back-end using JavaScript. I prefer to keep these functions more clearly differentiated, and that by integrating only where necessary, it's easier for one person, or single small team, to maintain both.

The idea is to build a solution that lets you implement your specific use case, and then add features and expand for scale from this platform. All too often, teams feel the need to throw everything out and start over when the use case changes, as it inevitably will.

Why JavaScript Is Taking Over Web Development

JavaScript works on all devices and in all browsers, pretty much guaranteeing that your HTML page will always render. It can be used for everything, and new JavaScript tools and frameworks seem to be everywhere.

There are front-end development frameworks, such as Ember.js, AngularJS, and Backbone.js. Template engines, such as Jadejs. Back-end frameworks, such as the Web Application Framework, Express for Node, and real-time app framework, engine.io for transporting real-time information using different methods. Testing frameworks using JS libraries, such as Mocha or Should.js. Task automation using GRUNT The JavaScript Task Runner, and the list goes on and on and on. It seems that every other day there is a new project .js or .io out there.

Much of that is contributed by the open source community (through GitHub) and increases the popularity and health of JavaScript. And the NPM Registry for Node Packaged Modules is the official package manager for Node.js, making it easier for developers to share their projects and code together, not to mention bower, which helps distribute re-usable components.

Many MVC libraries and template engines have been created giving JavaScript an awareness of the design patterns we all know from Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). And as more web developers embrace HTML5, they're finding JavaScript frameworks to support many of the new, interactive media and real-time features.

Cutting-Edge Developers Are Building On Node.js

Node.js is a server-side engine (just like PHP, ASP, and .NET) designed for writing scalable Internet applications, specifically web servers. It could have been written using any programming language, but it ended up in JavaScript.

In 2009, Node.js creator, Ryan Lienhart Dahl, set out to build websites with push capabilities similar to what he saw in Google's Gmail application. Interestingly, he chose to work in JavaScript not for what it had, but for what it lacked--an I/O API. This left him room to define a "convention of non-blocking, event-driven I/O" that became Node.js.

Most JavaScript programs execute in a web browser, but Node.js executes on the server-side. This has the distinct advantage of allowing one developer, or a single small team, to work on both front-end and back-end at the same time!

Framework Agnosticism in a Fragmented Mobile World

Obviously, the web has been a fragmented place ever since the old browser wars, and each time we appear to be approaching greater unity, a new technology comes along and sends us all scurrying to pick up the new paradigm. Even so, there are standards maintained and much of the turmoil is the inevitable fallout of the rapidly changing mobile world.

It's easy to feel hesitant about committing to yet another new development paradigm, which has become one of the major reasons so many of us are returning to JavaScript or even discovering its capabilities for the first time. It may not seem fashionable, but it certainly is reliable, more so than ever.

This JavaScript resurgence has had the effect of encouraging more work on JavaScript, itself. We're seeing remarkable new tools that make it possible to do all of our work, front-end and back-end, in a single language, which is a new paradigm we've discovered almost by accident.

We'll discuss these tools and ways to use them to make web development easier, faster, and definitely more fun. Most importantly, we'll also show you how to design and build better, brighter, easier-to-maintain websites. Too good to be true? Stay tuned.

[Image: Flickr user Brad Perkins]

Our dev team here at Webkite is incredibly over-educated. Between us, there are graduate- and doctorate-level degrees in philosophy, political science, mathematics, geology, and electrical engineering. No, we’re not an education startup, and we don’t have an especially big budget to make lavish hires.

We’re simply located in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh is home to a number of great universities, but doesn’t exactly offer a huge pool of programmers like some bigger cities. What Pittsburgh does have is a lot of highly educated candidates who have strong academic backgrounds and are eager to learn and build. I work at a startup company called WebKite there, which is a data filtration platform that allows anyone to create decision engines built on top of their data. It’s a complex problem that requires a lot of abstract thinking--the kind that graduate-level students are used to.

“We’re building out an app that can be so many things to so many people,” our founder, Eric Silver, told me when we discussed the topic of this guest post. “How do you go about finding a developer who is excited to work on some of the smaller features?” His solution has been to apprentice PhDs and turn them into programmers--and we’ve had incredible success with it.

“With an apprenticeship program, you find extremely talented, interested folks and teach them how to solve these smaller problems as you teach them a craft,” says Silver. Eric Silver taught himself how to code too so he could build the earliest prototype of the WebKite platform to share with investors. This gave him the idea to institute an apprenticeship program into the structure of the company, which became the “Non-Traditional Programming Internship,” as we call it. Soon, WebKite began to bring on PhD graduates, teach them the Ruby on Rail programming language, and integrate them into WebKite’s development team with fellow developers acting as mentors.

From PhD to Programming

WebKite currently has two software developers who are going through the Non-Traditional Programming Internship and one who has completed the program. Between the three of them they have PhDs in Philosophy, Mathematics, and Computer Engineering.

Greg Gates, one of our early graduates of the program, found the switch from a PhD program to the Non-Traditional Programming Internship to be exciting. Gates told me, “It's been a really great challenge, mostly. Coding is a great skill in that it doesn't take long before you can write code that works, but it does take a lot of practice to develop the skills to solve hard problems and to write code that's readable and runs fast. Looking back on code I wrote two months ago always makes me want to cringe a little bit, but it's still up there powering our application.”

It’s not always easy, but the novice programmers persevere and solve challenges as they materialize. Ying Liu, who has been with the team for over six months, recalled the friction of learning to code. “I can still remember the first two days I was struggling with setting up my work environment on my computer, while at the same time having no idea what I was installing. Not to mention having to write code in a programming language I never used before. But when I start to learn how to code and solve problems one by one, I feel real excitement.”

PhD students have turned out to be stellar junior developers. They are intellectually curious, disciplined, learn quickly, love to solve problems, and innovative when they suspect there’s a better way.

Merve Kovan-Bakan, a more recent addition to our program, spent six years in academia, but the switch to coding hasn’t been too much of a jolt. “How you'd structure your proofs for a theorem is very similar to how you'd go about writing a meaningful code,” she explains. “When you are proving theorems, you have to think about all the cases that might arise, maybe write a long and unnecessarily detailed explanation of why the theorem is true at first, and then try to make it more readable, in small beautiful chunks at the end.”

How PhD Candidacy Feels Like CS 101

Why are folks with PhDs such great candidates? PhD programs teach students how to take a research question, set up a research program around it, and then implement a process to answer that question. If you have a PhD, you know how to complete this process. Coincidentally, these same processes are highly valued in a startup environment.

They also know how to fail. “During the PhD program, these students, at some point during their program, faced mind-numbing failure,” says Peter Meulbroek, WebKite’s CTO. “They’ve been catastrophically wrong with one underlying assumptions, and had to adapt a process to that realization. These are incredibly useful skills to the developer: To be able to design a research program and to be able to face failure and recover, and to pick up the skills necessary to solve a problem.”

“From being in academia, I’ve been responsible for setting, then meeting, deadlines and creating a structure to reach my goals,” Kovan-Bakan said of the program. “Also, I spent a lot of time thinking about questions and jumping from problem to problem--all things needed in a startup environment.”

Since many of these PhD graduates are lifelong learners, they’re willing to learn new computing skills, which is important as skills quickly become obsolete as trends in software tools evolve. Having the ability to learn systems is vital to surf these waves, and today's skills aren't as important as being able to learn tomorrow's skills.

How To Implement A Non-Traditional Programmer Internship

While we’re always refining the process of the Non-Traditional Programming Internship, here are some of the things we’ve learned along the way:

1. Know the local educational environment from which you are hiring. WebKite has found success in understanding the PhD programs from which we are recruiting. This really helps in knowing which candidates will thrive in the program and benefit from what is has to offer.
2. Create an environment where failure, support, and experimentation is encouraged. Ying Liu says, “I learned a lot through the help of my mentor. He has reviewed my code very carefully and gave me very good suggestions, including coding styles and performances. In addition, the other senior developers in WebKite are very nice and are always ready to help.” Most of the time, those who graduate from the class become mentors to the next group. They bring their knowledge and know-how to avoid many of the pitfalls that plagued their experience.
3. Encourage a work culture that values all contributions and growth from team members. Gates says, “I think one of the reasons for this program's success at WebKite is that we have a lot of people here who understand the value of cultivating individual development, and we also have a lot of people who are happy to fill a part-time mentorship role. Plus, a small startup is a great environment for someone who's a "junior" member of the team to own important parts of the project, rather than just getting other people's grunt work, which is a great incentive to learn fast.”

Innovation from Within

Startup companies are always eager to bring innovation and disruption to the marketplace. By innovating how we hire and train new developers, WebKite has been able to stay on the cutting edge, while maintaining our rapid development pace. If you’re curious about the program or have some questions, send me an email at Dan@WebKite.com or leave a comment. We’re always excited to talk more about the Non-Traditional Programming Internship.

Dan Tallarico currently works at WebKite, a startup in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he helps spread the word about WebKite, handles communications, and generally gets people hyped up about the product. Prior to entering the startup arena, he spent time writing about video game industry at PikiGeek.com and handling the social media for Printing Industries of America. When he’s not talking about WebKite, he’s pioneering the world of pizza journalism at PizzaWalkWithMe.com or tweeting @Woozle. You can email him at dan@webkite.com.

[Image: Flickr user Orin Zebest]

Jason Calacanis has been a perennial voice in the technology community for over a decade, to the ire of some and the entertainment of others. He started out publishing a paper newsletter called Silicon Alley Reporter in New York during the dotcom boom, which eventually grew into a magazine on both coasts. He sold his company Weblogs, Inc. to AOL in 2005, and moved on to be product manager at Netscape. Now he’s working on a new venture called Inside.com that will roll out this fall. (I can’t tell you how it works--that was off the record--but I can tell you it sounds ingenious.)

Calacanis sat down with me in New York to talk about the startup landscape in New York--an issue near and dear to my heart as we continue to test Writebot here in the Fast Company office. Here are the highlights from our discussion.

NYC Startups Are Original

I always knew New York was going to play a critical role in the Internet, that’s why I started the magazine and did it for a good number of years. The reason was advertising is here, Wall Street is here, media is here, and it’s the best city to live in in the world. The art scene here is better than almost anywhere in the world, and it’s clearly the best city in the world where young, creative people are going to want to be. Not playing a role is impossible for New York.

Sequoia Capital invested in Tumblr. [Partner] Roelof Botha decided he’s going to take a cross-country flight every eight weeks to go to that board meeting. That’s when you know something’s up in New York--when you see the VCs in the Valley take a cross-country flight. The ideas coming out of here--Foursquare, Tumblr, Gilt--are original and bold. Whereas in I think Los Angeles you don’t see that same boldness. Boston sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t.

No Country For First-Timers

For a first-time entrepreneur, there’s nothing better than being in Silicon Valley because there is so much going on, and there’s such a large number of inventors, that even a B level idea or a C level idea could be nurtured and be given venture capital there. Here in New York, maybe the B level could be nurtured and get angel investing, but the C level idea probably wouldn’t fly. Because there’s not enough investors here.

Your Advantage? New York Is Just Cooler

The stuff coming out of Silicon Valley is dorky. Like it’s not very sexy. So New York, I think, has a branding advantage, a design advantage, and a media advantage. Like, I mean the New York Times is here--you guys are here. A lot of times the Silicon Valley folks come here to do their press tour to try to get you guys to write about them. So if you’re in New York you just have this inherent press advantage. It’s very important as a startup to get early press, because although it may not be a large number of people, having a Fast Company story--some of those people that read it are going to be your next employees and hires, your next investors. Others will be advertisers and maybe a thousand of them are potential customers who will try the product. That could be very material. It may be small numbers compared to like a hundred million YouTube views or something, but those readers could be huge catalysts and amplifiers.

Get Publicity By Blogging Authentically

When you’re younger and you’re starting your career, write about something you really know well--even if it’s very narrow. If you know about ad platforms, write something definitive and be honest and authentic; people are drawn to the person who is real. The problem most people make with their media presence is they’re trying to craft a media presence as opposed to just consistently publishing who they are. For better or worse, I’ve consistently published who I am for 20 years, and it means I have a really big audience: Over 30,000 emails, 150,000 people on Twitter, and a couple hundred thousand on the other social networks. That doesn’t mean they’re going to agree. But those people will give me a chance at least.

Be Yourself And Readers Will Follow

To get readers, I think you have to be authentic and be a good writer. Writing is just clarity of thought. I think early in my career as a writer my writing sometimes was passionate, but maybe not as good as it is now because I didn’t have as much clarity of thought. Now when I write, I can write a 2,000-word piece in one sitting and it just flows--just “boom.” I’ve seen enough in the world, I’ve experienced enough, that I have clarity of thought. I don’t think anybody under the age of 30 should be expected to write [like that]. You know, like I’ve been offered two or three book deals, and I said I’m just going to wait until I’m 50. I’m 42 now. Let me get one more startup out of myself and then I’ll write a book.

Write About What You Know

I’ve never stopped writing about what I’m building. I started writing about why I’m building it. Right? So in the next couple of months you’re going to see me write a lot about media. And it’s going to be because I’m launching a new project, Inside.com, in October that has to do with the media. But I’m not going to lead with "here’s my project and the 17 new features," because nobody cares. They might care someday when they use it, but they’ll care when they load it and they use it and they love it. My writing is not going to convince them to love any product. What my writing might do is convince them of why I built it or why it’s important, right?

Tell People Why--Not What--You Built

Step back for a second and say, Here’s why I built what I built. When I angel invest, I ask people that. Why did you build this? Sometimes they’ll say like because it’s a big market and I think we could make a lot of money. Or they’ll say well, because Pinterest sucks, and they don’t have these three features. Those are terrible reasons to build something. But to say “I built it because I’m passionate about this space and I was frustrated by these five or six things,” or, “I saw an opportunity to make something that made people’s lives easier,” that makes people say: Okay, now let’s really talk about your idea. Always try to couch it in something bigger.

Be Honest About What You Know

If you’re a young entrepreneur and you want to get into blogging, you want to write your ideas, write about something much bigger than yourself. And it’s okay not to have all the answers. It’s okay to say that. It’s okay to say: I’ve been thinking a lot about the issue of RSS going away and Google Reader going away and why didn’t Google want to support this product anymore? I don’t know, but here are some theories I have.

Say Something That Will Snowball

Dave Winer--who doesn’t get a lot of credit--a lot of times when he writes, it’s not about him trying to wrap everything up in a bow. I perceive him as like a snowball roller. He just likes to roll snowballs down the hill. And sometimes those snowballs, they get big and they turn into avalanches where everybody is talking about what he’s saying. Actually, if you look at my writing, you can tell I always studied the way he was able to capture a lot of attention for his ideas. I think I’m a snowball roller, too. Be a snowball roller.

[Image: Flickr user Bruce Thomson]