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What Happens When 3-D Printing Outgrows Plastics?

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For anyone that's ever considered 3-D printing superfluous, let me suggest a counterpoint: Candy.

Yes, computer-created desserts are about to become a reality thanks to 3D Systems's new ChefJet printer, which is able to print whole confections.

3-D printed candy

"The ChefJet printers operate using a process that's a lot like making frosting in your kitchen at home," says creative director of food products at 3D Systems Liz Von Hasseln. "The ChefJet builds up a confection by adding the wet ingredients of a given recipe to the dry ingredients, only very very precisely, on a layer-by-layer basis."

Using a 3-D printer in the kitchen gives chefs a completely new way to express their artistic talents. Printing desserts is also a natural fit for the technology, says Von Hasseln, "There's already a cultural expectation of a dessert as a designed object--it's a space that values embellishment and experimentation and customization."

Printing food has long been a popular idea. Even MakerBot originally tried to print using frosting, but the efforts ultimately failed. It turned to plastics instead. This is why the material science side of 3-D printing is so important; without advances there we'd be stuck printing the same objects. Structur3D is approaching the industry from the materials side rather than the mechanical engineering side.

"At the end of the day, being able to move into these new materials gives more options for flexibility, edibility, aesthetics, and how something feels to the touch," says Structur3D CTO Andrew Finkle. "All these new properties beyond plastic allow printing endless applications now."

The ChefJet comes in two models: one that prints foods in color and one that only prints them in black and white.

Custom insole printed using silicon

Food service isn't the only industry that 3-D printing will disrupt. One example Finkle gives is the possibility of being able to print custom orthotics with $3-$4 silicon found at Home Depot. If someone wanted to print an object out of Play-Doh, for example, they could find other projects people had done, challenges they faced, and techniques used--like speed or mixture levels--to overcome the difficulties.

Shapeways has been building its 3-D printing community around shopping and designing custom printed objects. Searching through its store, you begin to see that nearly everything can be 3-D printed in some fashion.

"We are able to directly 3-D print with stainless steel, then the parts are strengthened by infusing them with bronze," says Shapeways VP of supply chain Justine Trubey. "We also have a family of metals like brass, bronze, silver, gold, and platinum that are printed in wax and cast using traditional lost-wax casting--like most traditional jewelry. 3-D printing with gold is possible--and there are some 3-D printers that can do that--but it's much more expensive to do so and the quality currently isn't as good as when it is done through lost-wax casting."

The material side of 3-D printing is rapidly expanding, but it has by no means been cracked yet. The feeling is that it's more of a matter of time at this point, rather than having hit a wall. As Structur3D's Finkle puts it, "Right now there's not the capability to print whatever, but I believe where there's a will there's a way."


How This Brilliant Idea Earned $11 Million On Kickstarter

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In 2012 the Pebble smartwatch became the most backed product in Kickstarter history, gaining $10.3 million during its fundraising period.

That record stood until yesterday, when another product smashed Pebble's pledges--earning an astonishing $11,045,769 (and counting) for a Kickstarter project that still has around 24 hours on the clock.

The project? The Coolest Cooler: a $299 USB-enabled, Buetooth speaker-pumping, illuminated, partitioned, accessory-holding cooler featuring an onboard blender. It is, to put it simply, the most incredible story in crowdfunding history--and made all the more amazing by the fact that Portland-based creator Ryan Grepper only set out to raise $50,000.

So how did a glorified drinks holder become a Kickstarter record breaker?

If At First You Don't Succeed...

"I'm so overjoyed and overwhelmingly grateful to everyone who rallied behind the Coolest Cooler and believed in what we can do," Grepper says.

Ryan Grepper

Like many of the best innovations, the Coolest Cooler started out as a passion project.

"Just in my daily life I'm always looking at products with an eye to whether they are created as efficiently as possible," he says. "That's not to say that I've always done something with these ideas, but it's sort of the framework that dictates how I view products."

Working in product development, several years back Grepper whipped up a blender he could take to the beach by modifying an old weedwacker. To accompany it, he then modified a cooler so that it could play music. "These were just things I created to entertain myself and my friends," he continues.

It was in 2013 when Grepper first considered that this might be an idea with mass-market potential. He observed the rise of companies like YETI coolers, which put out durable, high-end ice boxes capable of surviving more than one season. When he began running the numbers, he became even more convinced.

"Around 40-50 million coolers are sold every year," he says. "Most of these serve just one function which is just to keep things cool. That's perfectly adequate, but I saw it as a bigger opportunity than that. I knew that wherever the cooler is, the party also is. I wanted to create a premium cooler that could really contribute to the gathering."

After creating some designs he put together a Kickstarter campaign hoping to hit it big. He didn't. When the campaign ended last November he had raised just $102,188 against a goal of a $125,000 goal. Disappointed, Grepper went back to the drawing board to rethink his idea. Among the things learned he knew that he needed a better design. He also knew that people didn't want to think about keeping cool in the height of winter.

"But we connected with enough backers who believed in what we were doing, that it gave me the confidence to relaunch and learn from our mistakes," he says.

With marked improvements, Grepper came back with the Coolest Cooler. And things went crazy from there.

A Floor Wax And A Dessert Topping

"I always believed that this [product] category was fundamentally exciting," he says. "At its core the Coolest is about having fun and creating memories with family and friends. We live in a world where we often lack in real experiences. Compare the number of friends you have on Facebook, to the number you see in daily life. It's easy to feel that you're keeping up to date with what's happening, but it's much more valuable to create memories by making the time to see people in person. That's what we're about."

Making the Cooler into a social experience was a masterstroke. Keeping your drinks cold may be all well and good (although unnecessary in the middle of November) but selling it as something more made the product into a crowdfunding superstar.

This led to one of the many design challenges of the project which was, of course, how you avoid overloading a concept like this? All of us could sit down and compose a list of features for a cooler (fitness tracking anyone?) but simply making the Coolest into a Swiss Army Knife isn't necessarily the best way to ensure quality.

Chevy Chase once starred in a memorable skit for Saturday Night Live about Shimmer Floor Wax, the dual-purpose product that was both a floor wax and a dessert topping. Often that joke is used in tech companies, where startups will take a scattershot approach to innovation by creating products that try to do a lot of things, but manage none of them perfectly. How did Grepper avoid falling into this trap?

"One of the challenges was definitely making sure that every component was of top quality," he says. "For example, rather than this being a blender that you can use outside, I wanted it to be a top-quality blender that can make a fantastic margarita, and can produce enough of them to satisfy your event."

User Feedback

In a way, this was where crowdfunding both helped and hindered his vision. Crowdfunded projects are great in terms of providing their creators with constant user feedback. Rather than creating a product in isolation and then unleashing it on the world (the way that Apple, for example, created the iPhone), with a Kickstarter project contributors are kept abreast of how customers are reacting, and this can often have a major impact in shaping the finished product.

"We've had a tremendous amount of input and suggestions from our backers regarding what it is that they would like to see," Grepper says. "They range from solar panels to motorized wheels you can ride on. It's great to read them, but at the end of the day as a designer it comes down to staying true to your vision and original design intent. There may be a lot of features in the Coolest Cooler, but all of them solve a problem that anyone who uses a cooler will regularly experience. I want the end user to come away questioning why coolers were not always designed this way."

For instance, coolers will often accompany food, so it makes perfect sense to have plates storable in the lid, and for these plates to be plastic rather than paper to cut down on waste. The same is true with the combination of music player and cooler, since people will naturally circle around the cooler at a party or gathering.

"I feel proud of the way that we balanced the features that made it into the Coolest, and I'm confident that we will execute well on each and every one of them," he continues. "Customers are going to say, 'This feature belongs in here,' rather than, 'Look at what other gimmick the designers threw on this.'"

Dealing With Unexpected Success

Another issue to grapple with has been the impact of the tremendous (and unexpected) success of the project. No crowdfunding entrepreneur ever sits down and worries about what will happen if their project is too successful. Grepper was no different. He imagined a business that required just $50,000 to get it started. Now he's in the position of having to manufacture and deliver more than 49,000 coolers--and to do this all by February.

As he points out, however, it presents him with a massive opportunity.

"When you launch a Kickstarter you're looking to bring it to market for early adopters, and also at a growth strategy down the road," he says. "The speed, success, and public nature of our campaign means that we've been forced to make a lot of that happen much more quickly than would often be the case."

The scale of the project has opened up new options concerning manufacturing costs (linked to volume), which means that the Coolest can now be a better product at a more reasonable price.

"At the same time, a lot has certainly had to happen very quickly in terms of building up and scaling our team at a rapid rate," he continues. "It was a real challenge, but as it's come together, it's something I'm extremely proud of. Everyone on the team has been working like a maniac to make this product the best it can be."

When the Coolest Cooler Kickstarter campaign ends tomorrow it will be the biggest success in Internet crowdfunding history. More than anything, though, it shows how this digital-age method of fundraising can take truly original ideas and find an audience for them.

"This isn't a solution that would have come about through the traditional incremental innovation process of an existing industry like the cooler business," Grepper says. "I think crowdfunding is going to let us see some amazing concepts and innovations, as different industries get shaken up. I can't wait to see what they are."

60-Year-Old Rock Mystery Solved With GPS Tracking

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Massive boulders in Death Valley California have been known to move as much as several hundred feet on their own. Despite decades of study, no one knew how. That is until Scripps geoscience professor Richard Norris drilled GPS trackers into the rocks and pointed video cameras at them as part of his "Slithering Stones Research Initiative" in 2011.

Here's what his team discovered:

"The largest observed rock movement involved >60 rocks on December 20, 2013 and some instrumented rocks moved up to 224 m between December 2013 and January 2014 in multiple move events. In contrast with previous hypotheses of powerful winds or thick ice floating rocks off the playa surface, the process of rock movement that we have observed occurs when the thin, 3 to 6 mm, 'windowpane' ice sheet covering the playa pool begins to melt in late morning sun and breaks up under light winds of ~4-5 m/s. Floating ice panels 10 s of meters in size push multiple rocks at low speeds of 2-5 m/min. along trajectories determined by the direction and velocity of the wind as well as that of the water flowing under the ice."

The GPS units were placed inside the rocks along with a battery back. A magnet set nearby triggered a switch that would log the boulder's position once movement was detected.

The findings were released this week in the journal Plos One.

Related: Meet The Man Who Solved The Mysterious Cicada 3301 Puzzle

How Do Those Police Body Cameras Work Anyway?

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Calls for police officers to wear body cameras at all times have skyrocketed after Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson under contested circumstances.

Given that encounters with the police can sometimes be lethal affairs--particularly for blacks and Latinos--body cameras seem like a no-brainer solution to remove uncertainty from those incidents. Yesterday we looked at some of the potential privacy concerns around police body cameras. Today we're going to take you through the actual hardware and software of these wearable gadgets.

The Case For Body Cameras

Two of the largest companies selling these cameras in the U.S. are Vievu and Taser International--the latter is the maker of the eponymous Taser stun gun. Vievu president Steve Lovell, a former marine and police officer, says that their product can "take a jury into the crime scene, when otherwise they would only read a police report."

Rick Smith, the founder and CEO of Taser, says that his company's "100-year vision is to make obsolete the idea of shooting someone with a bullet" and that Taser got into making cameras to provide transparency into violent confrontations "so that everyone can know what happened."

A widely cited study of body cameras used by police in Rialto, California shows a drop in both complaints against officers and police use of force. While that's a net good in and of itself, cities around the country are now also seeing this as a way to save money in the long term. Both camera manufacturers and civil liberties group advocating for body camera adoption believe that the cost savings from investigating fewer complaints of police misconduct will make the cameras pay for themselves in short order.

As a result, both Vievu and Taser have seen interest in their products shoot up rapidly. Police chiefs have been keeping their phones ringing off the hook these past couple weeks.

The Camera Models

Taser's AXON body camera and Vievu's LE3 camera systems are fairly similar, with some notable differences. Taser also offers a model called AXON Flex, which can be mounted on an officer's sunglasses, collar, or hat. Vievu's cameras are manufactured overseas, while Taser has parts sourced globally but assembles its devices in the U.S.

As police generate recordings throughout the day, videos are stored locally on the devices until the officers return to headquarters and download the files into their department's database. At the end of a shift with a Vievu LE3 camera, an officer removes her camera and connects it to a computer with a USB cable. Using Vievu's accompanying proprietary software, the officer then transfers the videos into their department's system and write up notes on events from the day.

With the AXON models, the process is a little more seamless. Using Taser's accompanying smartphone app, officers can tag and categorize their incidents back in the squad car immediately after they happen. When her shift ends, an officer just drops the camera into a cradle that acts as charger and automatic sync system.

How Is That Sensitive Data Stored?

Both camera systems are integrated with software services for storing and managing the video. Vievu's offering is called Veripatrol, while Taser's is Evidence.com. Both provide fine-grained permissions so that certain files can be restricted and any time a user accesses a file is tracked. Both encrypt the videos in such a way that even Vievu and Taser cannot access them, unless invited to do so by a department. Most importantly, both provide simple, scalable solutions that take the burden off of managing big data for police departments.

"Your average police department in the United States is a city agency with less than 50 people," says Smith. "Most police departments do not have a full-time information security officer."

Evidence.com is offered on a software as a service model, where departments pay a monthly subscription fee to use the cloud storage service, a la Dropbox. Veripatrol on the other hand is bundled for free with the Vievu cameras and police departments can run the software locally on servers in their own department. If a department prefers cloud functionality, Vievu offers Veripatrol as a managed service hosted on Amazon Web Services. In that case the department would only pay for its actual hosting costs on Amazon's cloud.

As Evidence.com is also hosted on Amazon Web Services, both Smith and Lovell are quick to point out that the CIA recently announced a deal for Amazon to manage data for intelligence community.

"When we started in this space five years ago and talked about putting law enforcement data in the cloud, there was a very skeptical response," says Smith. Lovell says that Vievu encountered a similar hesitance at first, saying that "law enforcement wanted the evidence in their basement."

"But we've seen that absolutely turn on its head with the CIA choosing Amazon to build them a data center," says Smith. "It was a seismic shift. When police ask about security and we point out the CIA's data center, it's basically the end of the conversation."

How Long Should Videos Be Kept?

In either instance, one potential concern is vendor lock-in. Smith himself even makes the comparison to the Apple ecosystem of iPods and iTunes, which, while convenient, has historically been criticized for using non-standard components and being hard to break free of once bought into. The ease of changing camera providers and software systems is something cities need to be wary of when contracting with a camera vendor.

But as ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley points out, "the risk of vendor lock-in depends on how much need a department has for past video." And Stanley's position is that video should not be kept any longer than it absolutely needs to.

"We've called for recordings to be disposed of in a reasonable period of time unless for some reason they are flagged," he says. "They could be flagged either because there's been a formal or informal complaint of abuse against an officer or because police believe it to contain evidence of a crime. In the absence of one of those flags, video should never see the light of day. We consider a reasonable period of time to be months or weeks, not years."

Can The Cameras Be Too Good For Their Own Good?

One key difference between the Taser and Vievu models is in how much and how well they film. The AXON body camera boasts a wide-angle 130 degree field of view compared to the LE3's 68 degrees. However, Vievu's cameras record in 1280x720 HD while Taser's captures in 640x480.

"We have worked with video forensic experts to try to create a very flat image so if forensic enhancement is required we don't want any distortion from the camera's video segment," says Lovell.

At first blush, a wider angle may be preferable, but Lovell argues that image resolution and fidelity to what is an officer's immediate vision is more important.

Although Vievu's cameras record in higher resolution, they do not offer any special features for recording at night. Taser's AXON body camera, in contrast, offers low light enhancement. Smith points out that many police incidents that would be of public interest tend to occur at night, making this a vital feature.

Lovell has a different take and argues that enhancing beyond a police officer's natural eyesight with the light available at the scene is effectively introducing new evidence into an encounter.

"We don't want the camera to see more than what the officer could have seen," says Lovell. "Nor do we want the camera to see better at night. So we don't do any infrared or image stabliization. If we did then we'd be enhancing the image and that has implications for chain of custody and evidence standards. We'd be going beyond what the human eye can see and recording in formats that aren't original."

Stanley says that low light image enhancement "would give additional evidence of what took place, but could confuse the issue of intention and knowledge on the part of officers," which could then leave a jury with making the tough deliberation of whether an officer was actually able to see something that his camera recorded.

"The point is to capture what was seen by the people who were there," says Stanley. "But on the other hand you can imagine scenarios in which a police officer could commit abuse in the dark." He concludes that this is a new area of technology and policy and that these sorts of issues will have to be worked out in the years to come.

That Pesky On-Off Switch

Perhaps the most contentious issue is what does and does not get recorded. Both models require officers manually to turn their cameras on and off as they respond to a call. (The oversized switch on Vievu's model looks to be slightly easier to manipulate, which could be useful when officers need to turn on a camera in a high-intensity situation.)

"A crucial and central point is that technology and policy needs to be designed so that police can't turn the video on and off at will," says Stanley. "It should be remembered that even having video does not always constitute an objective record of events. It depends on when the video was turned on and when it was turned off."

It's not hard to imagination a situation in which a police officer might intentionally shut off his camera and then later blame a supposed technical malfunction. Smith says that AXON cameras maintain logs on the device of when the cameras are manually turned on and off, which allows them to determine whether a shutoff was intentional or accidental.

Stanley says that one policy that has been suggested to deal with this problem "is to put the burden of proof on the police officer if there has been an accusation of abuse when the interaction should have been recorded but was not."

These Cleaning Bots Work for Less Than Minimum Wage

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The founders of Avidbots, graduates of Ontario's University of Waterloo, initially planned to build robots for a task familiar to residents of the north: snow removal.

"While we were doing that, while we doing customer discovery, we realized it was going to be very hard for us to penetrate that market," says cofounder Faizan Sheikh.

Driveway snow removal is a distinct market from parking lot snow removal, which is a distinct market from street snow removal, Sheikh says. And all of those small markets are, naturally, geographically and seasonally limited, and demand can vary drastically from year to year, Sheikh says.

So, the company decided to focus on a more universal problem: keeping the floors of shops and offices clean.

"Cleaning has to be done every night--it has to be done irrespective of whether it's winter," Sheikh says.

Avidbots has developed prototype autonomous robots that can sweep and scrub floors, using laser mapping technology similar to Google's self-driving cars to build a floor map of a business. Since the robots are Wi-FI enabled, they can communicate with each other to share map data, plan their attack, and share their progress with each other through the network.

Refining the mechanics and navigation algorithms is an iterative process, involving simulation and in-office testing, Sheikh says.

"In robotics, a lot of things are very important: You have to have the mechanics down very well, the electrical design, and you have to have the artificial intelligence," says Sheikh.

The robots should work on a variety of hard surfaces, and Avidbots plans to make them available to buy or rent by the hour. The company plans to charge $6 per hour for scrubbing and $4 for sweeping--less than the U.S. human minimum wage--though Sheikh says he anticipates many companies will reallocate human janitors to more difficult tasks like cleaning bathrooms, not let them go.

"I see this as freeing up human beings to do higher-quality tasks," he says. "If you have robots cleaning floors, then the cleaning guy can do other higher-value tasks like cleaning washrooms, cleaning windows, other complicated things that robots cannot do at the moment."

Of course, as the robots grow more sophisticated, the range of tasks they're qualified for will only grow.

"The future is very exciting," says Sheikh. "It's sort of what keeps up at night."

Are 3-D Video Capsules The New Family Photo Albums?

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Before photography became widespread, the average person had no way of knowing what their ancestors from just a few generations past looked like, say the founders of Yourbot.

Yourbot aims to help users record not just their pictures but their personalities, using a mix of video and sound recording and profile questions to create digital archives users can share with their families now and after their passing, says founder Ekim Kaya.

"You can think of this as a digital time capsule," he says, pointing to a prototype Android-powered device that will let Yourbot customers access recordings of their loved ones. A projector and mirror inside the handheld device help create a three-dimensional image, Kaya says.

"We didn't want to use an LED screen," he says. "We decided to go with a projector that makes it look a little bit from the past."

Users will be able to answer questions about their personal histories--their childhood neighborhoods, their lifelong relationships toward money and career, their thoughts on the keys to happiness--and about current events, says Kaya.

"Let's say there is a conflict going in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine--we'll send them a question about the solution to this debate," he says. "We will be curating up-to-date questions so that we will extract more information."

Yourbot started as a project of Kaya's company Botego, which builds automated conversation agents for automated customer service, he says. And the tool will let users record their answers as video, or as audio, or as plain text; should they choose audio or text, Botego's technology will create an animated video for them to share, he says.

The same technology will also let them create representations of historical figures based on their writings and public statements, he says.

"This would be amazing for children, or visitors in a museum," he says.

Users will be able to store their recordings in Kaya's cloud and choose between making their responses public or private, he says.

"We will be using encryption to keep all data private on the cloud," he says. "If you choose to share your persona publicly, I'm sure many interesting things would happen."

The company plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign in September to fund mass production of the devices, which the company plans to ship by the middle of 2015, and aims to set up a foundation that will pledge to help users and their families preserve their recordings for the next 200 years, Kaya says.

"Once the Kickstarter project ends, we will be able to offer user accounts to our backers, and they will be able to start building their personas," he says.

The company's already had positive feedback from users who want to preserve their memories, or those of their loved ones, he says.

"There is a lady who says, 'My mother is losing her memory,'" he says. "This is so important to her. I want her to be one of the testers."

Hack Your Bike With These Smart Upgrades

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Earlier this week we covered a bicycle that can't be stolen because the lock is part of the frame. But what if you want to hack the bike you already have?

In the spirit of technology upgraders everywhere, we've whipped up a list of ways to enhance your ride with products and concepts that are available now or currently raising money via crowdfunding.

Helios Smart Handlebar

The Helios is a handlebar replacement that comes in Straight, Bullhorn, or Drop Bar style flavors. Equipped with front- and rear-facing LEDs that serve as forward illumination and rear turn signals. The handlebars are equipped with Bluetooth and GPS that enable you to track your position, distance traveled, and more with the accompanying app.

Hammerhead Navigation

The Hammerhead is named for its appearance: it's a small T-shaped accessory that locks on to your existing handlebars and helps you navigate. LEDs on the face of the Hammerhead give you turn-by-turn directions that correspond with a route you've chosen or created using the paired iOS or Android app. Hammerhead also syncs data with popular cycling app Strava, so you can send routes to friends and compete for bragging rights.

Skylock

Bike theft is clearly a serious concern for cyclists. Skylock protects the bike you already own and features cool upgrades like "keyless entry" and bike sharing via smartphone app. An accelerometer notifies you when someone is manhandling your bike and knows if you've taken a spill, offering to call for help. Power comes from a solar panel on the side of the unit, so you don't have to worry about getting locked out because of a dead battery. Its price is as hefty as its protection, though; this Indiegogo-backed product will retail for $249 when it goes into mass production.

Double O Bike Light

This circular light serves multiple purposes. A front- and rear-facing light ensures maximum visibility in low light situations. The LEDs are spaced farther apart than on traditional lights so you don't blind oncoming traffic, whether pedestrian or vehicular. It can be fixed to various positions on the bike itself as well as to your body or bag and the circular design allows you to leave it dangling on your U-lock when you want to leave it behind.

Patchnride Flat Tire Repair

Preventing bike theft and staying visible at night have been covered. What about getting a ride-ruining flat? The patchnride is a small handheld device that can be inserted into a tube tire of any kind to permanently patch the hole. All you need is a handheld pump to refill the air and you're back on the road in no time. The Indiegogo project has blown its goal fund out of the water with almost 1000% funded with plenty of time to go.

Klamp Camera Mount

For more adventurous cyclists, this high-grade mount allows you to capture your ride in ways not possible before. The patented design lets you strap your preferred recording device to various sections of your bike for epic angles. The mount also supports Wi-Fi and GPS devices and includes a high-quality light for nighttime action riding.

LifeBEAM Helmet

Smart bike upgrades can enhance your ride but you still need to take precaution against accidents. This smart helmet protects your noggin while tracking heart rate, distance, and calories without requiring you to wear an uncomfortable chest strap or other restrictive device. It pairs with most fitness apps to sync data effortlessly to your smartphone, sport watch, or cycling computer.

Five Ways Body Motion Will Change Virtual Reality

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Thanks to Facebook's billion-dollar acquisition of gaming firm Oculus, virtual reality has become a cash cow. Facebook/Oculus and rivals like Sony's Project Morpheus feel that the future of gaming will consist of immersive, 360-degree environments--and that virtual reality games don't quite fit in with the video game controllers and Kinect-like motion tools of today. The next frontier for gaming is using the human body as a video game controller--and being able to control avatars with your hands, fingers, and feet.

Being inside the game is amazing. It's also an amazingly complicated technical challenge. Using the human body as an input device requires constructing an array of sensors, endlessly tinkering with software libraries, and dealing with thousands and thousands of variables. People who are 6'4" and 300 lbs. and who are 5'1" and 110 lbs. will both be using your company's platform. Interfaces have to be intuitive enough for casual gamers but full-capacity enough for hardcore gamers. Then you have to account for everything from sweating too much on a hot day to making sure calibration won't go out of sync when, say, a fly buzzes by.

Fast Company recently reported on Survios, a Los Angeles-based startup which users positional trackers and Sixense controllers to control virtual reality avatars with body movements. Another southern California company called Control VR is going even further--and creating sensor-filled gloves which replicate virtual reality motions down to the individual finger. They are part of an ecosystem that includes Microsoft's Kinect and other small startups like PrioVR.

Control VR's product, which recently raised over $400,000 on Kickstarter, is a glove and SDK platform the company claims "is a next-generation wearable technology that turns your hands into the ultimate intuitive controller for PCs, tablets, virtual reality and robotics." In a demonstration at the company's loft offices on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, I tried out the company's product in a demonstration. While there were slight sync problems, my astronaut avatar in the mini-game i was playing made the exact same finger motions as me. The precision, down to the fingers, was fascinating. Even if the technology isn't ready for prime time, it was still amazing to try out.

Once the glove, which is filled with sensors and vaguely resembles a cybernetic prosthesis from a science fiction movie, is put on, and the user undergoes a quick initialization process, the hand itself is turned into the controller for the virtual reality simulation. Much like Survios' product or the Kinect, it was fascinating--the player themselves are turned into the controller.

But for Control VR, even though they might talk about gaming, the real money is likely to come from the enterprise sector. Although my conversation with CEO Alex Sarnoff centered around the device's gaming uses, the technology they use comes from an industrial background. Control VR's CTO Ali Kord is the founder and CEO of Synertial, which has sold their motion capture technology to the company and already licensed their technology to NASA, Samsung, Ford, Ubisoft, and defense giant Raytheon.

Sarnoff claims Control VR offers a similar experience for the gamer at an under $300 price point to Synertial's motion capture equipment systems, which he says sell for $30,000-$150,000. As Oculus Rift makes its way toward commercial reality, the enterprise is going to find out that virtual reality is a game changer for everything from worker education to operating robots to product testing.


Your Very Own Indoor, Hydroponic Grove

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If you live in a city, eating locally grown, organic fruits and vegetables mostly requires you to seek out specific grocery stores, or parse through the produce section of a mainstream one, or wake up early on a Saturday and trek to the farmer's market. And you might feel bad for craving zucchini in November, since it's usually only available locally as a summer vegetable.

Buying organic is not completely convenient, and it's hard not to stray away from it every now and then. But let's say that eating all kinds of organic produce year-round was as easy as opening the fridge in your kitchen. A company called Grove Labs has been developing something along those lines ever since graduating from this spring's inaugural class of the R/GA Accelerator--which is incidentally in the process of choosing its second class--and finishing college. Grove Labs, a team of freshly minted MIT and RISD grads, now has early iterations of the produce-growing units operating in users' homes.

The grove, which sits alongside your kitchen's other appliances.

Designed to fit alongside the appliances in and blend into the décor of your kitchen, Grove Labs' device lets you grow fruits and vegetables hydroponically, without leaving your house. The whole setup includes the hydroponic chamber, which you can monitor through the transparent encasement, as well as a mobile app to keep track of growing conditions and link up to vendors to replenish your materials. The Grove Labs team calls the contraption a grove, not to be confused with a greenhouse.

"I don't object to people calling it an indoor greenhouse, but I wouldn't. It is a grove, which is a product or an area in someone's home that grows food," says Gabe Blanchet, cofounder and CEO of Grove Labs.

Grove Labs' founders, Jamie Byron (left) and Gabe Blanchet (right).

Blanchet and his cofounder, Jamie Byron, were still finishing up their undergraduate coursework in mechanical and aerospace engineering at MIT, last year, when they started actively seeking out ways to turn their grove idea into a business. As rising seniors, they took part in the MIT Global Founders' Skills Accelerator and raised seed money from friends and family. Last fall, R/GA accepted them into its accelerator among 10 hardware startups, where Blanchet and Byron started to build out the grove concept with $120,000 in financial resources, while refining their brand.

Immediately after presenting at R/GA's demo day at SXSW this year, Grove Labs attracted $2 million in funding from a couple of venture capital firms, two seed-stage funders, and angel investors. Having advertised on AngelList, it eventually caught the attention of Tim Ferriss, the "four-hour" guru and now investor. Ferriss eventually used AngelList to get his network on board with Grove Labs, boosting the company's funding. Ferriss is now an official advisor to Grove Labs.

Since raising the $2 million, Grove Labs set up its office outside of Boston and invested in capital equipment to fill its new machine shop. There, the team plans to build up manufacturing knowledge in-house and fill small orders. At the moment, the team is still in the product development phase, waiting on user feedback from the people who are currently testing the groves in their homes. From there, they will solidify the design and continue product iterations.

"I think for a seed-stage startup in hardware, you're usually taught to stay lean and don't buy any tools and just outsource everything. But we've done the opposite," says Blanchet. With these resources, the team is learning a lot about how to design for manufacturing and also perfecting the grove's features in-house.

Getting to invent and build something as a job right after college is valuable to Blanchet. He understands that while many of his engineering classmates had their pick of positions in investment banking, consulting, or software development after graduation, Grove Labs is the next logical step in his development; he's always been building things.

"Jamie and I both come from an engineering background, and I don't think we were ever tempted to just go to a larger company and work for somebody," he says. "It wasn't like we were training to be engineers to go write software for someone--or go to Wall Street and don't build anything."

How The Super-Rich Use Data Science To Get Even Richer

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A little-known analytics company in Silicon Valley with ties to one of the NSA's favorite tech tools is using big data for an unlikely end: managing the personal finances of the world's super-wealthy.

Addepar is a wealth management platform whose engineer base comes largely from companies Google and Facebook, and is headed by Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale and early-stage engineer Eric Poirier. The company's selling point is simple--they feel the rich can become even richer by harnessing real-time analytics, and they can help.

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Co.Labs spoke with Poirier, Lonsdale (the company's executive chairman), and COO Karen White earlier this year. In the conversation, Lonsdale claimed that Addepar's products would "transform" the way wealth portfolios are handled. Essentially, the company's core product--a wealth management platform that is able to work in real time with wildly different sorts of data and detect relationships between them in real time--is designed to act as a dashboard and a sort of consultant to personal wealth advisors.

Palantir, where both Lonsdale and Poirier play key roles, is a data analysis firm that produces relational software that's used by the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, and others to examine huge data sets and track relationships between individuals and groups. Alongside Palantir's intelligence- and law-enforcement uses, its tools are commonly used by the finance sector for purposes like tracking relationships between exotic financial instruments and predicting the returns of complicated investment packages. On Quora, Lonsdale said that Addepar's platform is instead designed to create an integrated dashboard for wealth managers.

The company's leadership all comes from the murky intersection of finance and big data. Before joining Palantir, Lonsdale was one of PayPal's early employees and reportedly played a key role in building the company's financial arm while still a student at Stanford. Poirier is a former Lehman Brothers quant who started a coding business at 14, and White held executive roles at database giant Oracle and hedge fund Pequot Capital.

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During our conversation, White noted the evolution of databases and their capabilities over the past several years. As cloud computing and distributed systems have gotten more prevalent, it's become easier and easier for individuals to be able to harness huge data sets for their own purposes. Poirier also emphasized that most wealth managers in the demographic Addepar is aiming for use a suite of software tools on the job instead of one integrated platform, and that the constant switching both compromised productivity and held users back.

In a sense, Addepar and their competitors are following in the steps of consumer cloud tools such as Mint, which leverage huge data sets to automate financial record-keeping and generate insights. Personal wealth managers for the ultra-wealthy operate in a famously closed world filled with non-disclosure agreements, clubby relationships between managers, and--as the New Yorker has noted--a deliberately esoteric work culture. Addepar, with their intelligence agency data wonk backgrounds and GitHub repository, stand poised to offer a product with the enviable selling point of making its users more money… and making Addepar tons of cash in the process.

And there is a ton of cash to be made. The New York Times reports that Addepar can charge anywhere from $50,000 to over $1 million per customer. Competitors like Advent's Black Diamond and Envestnet Tamarac also reportedly work with similar sums. However, Addepar has a strong suit: Name recognition and strong roots in a Silicon Valley flush with suddenly rich tech stars with more money than they know what to do with. Addepar and their competitors are applying the same machine learning and predictive analytics techniques found in nearly every other vertical to wealth management--except here, they can make much more money from it.

Why Icontrol Is Crowd-powering Its New Smart Home Product Suite

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Crowdfunding is all the rage for Internet of Things devices, but campaigns often fail as a result of team inexperience and lack of business savvy. To better shepherd the next generation of connected communication gadgets, Indiegogo is partnering with Icontrol to bootcamp promising new startups.

Icontrol isn't well known to consumers--instead, it's grown to become a dominant purveyor of connected devices in enterprises. "Icontrol is the biggest IoT platform that nobody's ever heard of," says Jason Domangue, VP of ecosystem development. The company has 22.5 million devices in use across North America.

Of course, enterprise products are traditionally more pragmatic than sexy. Take the keypad entry security systems of yesteryear--effective but not attractive for consumers expecting slick and intuitive design. Today's edgiest design concepts increasingly come out of small teams running crowdfunding campaigns. That's why Icontrol turned to Indiegogo to promote its next-generation smart home integration project, OpenHomeLabs. Instead of targeting large companies, Icontrol is working with Indiegogo to chaperone young startups under one interoperability umbrella that will allow it to reach mass consumers.

Both Icontrol and Indiegogo hope OpenHomeLabs becomes a model for larger companies to lend logistics and fundraising guidance in a way that helps the whole startup ecosystem. This professional advisory role couldn't come at a better time as as large and established companies begin launching their own crowdfunding campaigns.

"It's a growing up of the crowdfunding ecosystem," says Kate Drane, hardware lead at Indiegogo. And there are requirements that reflect its maturity: The device has to be scalable from the start, and should be a domestic gadget. But by growing these startups to work in Icontrol's OpenHome environment, each new startup's IOT device offers new interactivity with devices already in the OpenHome family.

OpenHomeLabs is launching the project with three smart home device companies:

BTTN

BTTN is, well, a single button--but a smart one. Living up to its Scandinavian roots, BTTN combines ultra-simplistic design from lauded Finnish industrial designer Harri Koskinen and efficient engineering. "It's the ultimate smart home toggle" says BTTN founder and CEO Harri Rautio. You can set up any coordinated device-linked effect with a press of the BTTN, from turning on the house lights to alternating precise setups of security, lighting, temperature, smart locks, etc. Rather than suffer feature bloat, the BTTN team kept the device simple--but simple doesn't mean limited.

As part of Icontrol's setup, BTTN connects directly to the OpenHome server--meaning functionality improvements are just a server-side update away. This includes any other smart device that wants to link up to OpenHome and use BTTN's open API. A press can connect to the servers via SMS, mobile phone data, or Wi-Fi and the BTTN lights up green, yellow, or red for appropriate feedback on how that signal went.

Reemo

Simple is also the name of the game for Playtabase's' Reemo, a wristband that uses gestures to connect with the smart home. "It's a wearable mouse for the Internet of Things," says Playtabase COO and cofounder Al Baker. Mouse indeed: Many gesture devices have been tried through the years, but Reemo's is far more natural--and intuitive enough for Playtabase CEO cofounder Muhammad Abdurrahman's 100-year-old grandfather to use. Abdurrahman dreamed up Reemo after a series of strokes limited his grandfather's mobility, but Abdurrahman thinks that everyone would want to expand their home control from afar. "I think people will want those Jedi superpowers," Baker says.

Microsoft believes so, too--which is why Playtabase is in the inaugural round of Microsoft Ventures Accelerator. As Playtabase's Reemo Indiegogo campaign opens today for funding, they'll join nine other startups on Microsoft's campus this Fall to get even more mentoring and resources on top of their OpenHomeLabs partnership with Indiegogo.

Reemo not only tracks data but can, once again, upload it to OpenHome's servers--which lets Abdurrahman know if his grandfather made it to the medicine cabinet on time to take his medication. And if grandpa hasn't moved all morning, it might be time to head over and check in on him. But Abdurrahman maintains that this increases his grandfather's independence now that his visits aren't veiled check-ins to make sure grandpa's still up and at 'em.

There's an even greater dimension to Reemo's potential: discussions with drug companies to explore how the Reemo band could measure minute body movements. Parkinsons patients, for example, could be monitored from afar, and it would be simple to automate an alarm triggered by erratic movement straight through OpenHome's servers.

Zen Thermostat

The Zen Thermostat has already raised over $32,000 of its $50,000 goal after only a couple days on Indiegogo. Zen is more than a squared-off Nest...or rather, less. After a half-year of design refinement, the Australia-based Zen aims to be as hands-off as possible. Plus, without any knobs or whistles to finagle with on the device itself, it looks sleek on a wall.

The Zen team connects with smart home devices via Zigbee or Wi-Fi. It can also be controlled with taps on the lit casing, but you'll mostly be twiddling with the temperature through the connected smartphone app. Zen isn't ignoring Nest's 800-pound gorilla in the room--Google's purchase validates the smart thermostat concept, says Zen founder Michael Joffe. But the Google-bought gold thermostat standard hasn't really made inroads to the Australian market. This gives Zen room to grow, but also to develop its integration possibilities with the greater OpenHomeLabs suite. Plus, as a simpler machine, you can snag a Zen for $150 Indiegogo price--easily $100 cheaper than Nest.

But Zen's greatest advantage over Nest lies in the OpenHomeLabs partnership: Icontrol has the global B2B experience to help Zen scale into new markets. Unlike many other smart home devices, thermostats aren't plug n' play--they need to be engineering to work with the local utility grid. Thermostats differ from region to region, and international business experience is invaluable when working with foreign bodies.

With the slew of devices in OpenHomeLabs' suite, Joffe is betting that Zen's simplicity puts it ahead of the Nest, which requires far more monitoring to attain optimal energy use. "I put one in my parents' home," founder Joffe said. "They didn't touch it except for once or twice a month. They used their phone to change the temperature. The Zen minimizes time spent messing with the device."

The Algorithm That Lets James Murphy Turn Tennis Matches Into Music

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The drama of a tennis match can be heard in the rhythmic sound it produces. The ball pops and whooshes, a player grunts, then come cheers--in its own way, it's almost musical. But what if you could turn the players' movements into actual, listenable songs? With a combination of data, algorithmic smarts, and human creativity, you can--at least if you're James Murphy.

Murphy, the electronic musician best known as the founder of LCD Soundsystem, teamed up with IBM, Ogilvy & Mather New York and Tool of North America creative director Patrick Gunderson to take tennis matches from this week's U.S. Open tournament and turn them into over 400 hours of music. The finished product is a browser-based environment that lets you hear the game-generated songs and create your own by selecting different players and courts from the U.S. Open.

The songs probably aren't something you'd leave on in the background at your desk. "I'm not writing music," Murphy says in one of the promotional videos released by IBM. "I'm generating probabilities for music."

For more digestible tunes, you'll want to keep an eye out for the 14 remixes Murphy will be producing based on the sounds generated by the U.S. Open matches.

Gunderson and his team of developers built an algorithm that maps each player's movement to audio samples and automatically composes electronic soundscapes. IBM is using these sonic matches to market its Cloud Orchestrator suite of tools, which ingests data about everything from serve speed to the number of volleys.

"Each match we're scoring actually has people with little handhelds inputting all kinds of data for every point," says Gunderson. "Data like: number of shots and serve speed. Was there a net approach? Was there an unforced error? Where was the player when they hit the shot?"

That data is then passed through a custom-built music sequencer that turns the data points into musical tones.

"It doesn't work like a standard sequencer," Gunderson explains. "Instead of going in and setting where beats are I devised a system that uses composite periodic functions to determine when notes are played."

To illustrate the concept, Gunderson cites the example of the moon and Earth traveling around the sun in a "spirograph" pattern. Imagine that when the moon and sun are at their farthest apart, a musical note is triggered. That's essentially what's happening with the more complex, less constant tennis match data. "Throw in a few more levels of cycle and things begin to become predictably and controllably random, while remaining based on a linear, repeatable function," Gunderson says.



In addition to wrangling code--the project was built almost entirely in JavaScript--Gunderson's team built an interface for Murphy to use to tweak sounds using knobs and sliders, much like the traditional synthesizers that fill Murphy's studio. For inspiration, Gunderson spent time looking at Murphy's synthesizers and familiarizing themselves with his creative process. The end result is a semi-skeuomorphic take on physical instruments, but with a fresh take on how the buttons manipulate sound.

From now until the end of the U.S. Open on September 8, you can tune in to a live electronic soundtrack to each match. After that, the sounds will be archived online and the remixes will be made available on iTunes, Spotify, and Soundcloud when Murphy is finished producing them.

Is Heart Bot Making Your Pulse Into Art Or Just Turning Data Into Ink?

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The art world is fascinated with data. Information has been turned into everything from flowing fabric sculptures to intimate street-view soundscapes. And this week The New Museum in New York City opened Heart Bot, a robot that produces drawings based on the collective pulse rates of the people in the room.

Heart Bot's drawing mechanism is made up of two stepper motors spaced 12 feet apart and connected by a long belt. That's connected to a pair of robotic arms holding the pens that do the actual drawing. As each user steps up to the podium and places their finger on the pulse sensor, the arms move across the wall in strokes dictated by each person's heartbeat. The pulse data is sent from the sensor to a piece of software that then relays that information--combined with choreographed actions--to the motors and arms. The end result, while not a mind-blowing composition, is nonetheless notable for being drawn by the collective pulses of a room full of people.

The project, which was designed by interactive agency Tool of North America in collaboration with the branding firm Sid Lee NYC, has a built-in novelty. "The idea was to create a collaborative piece of art throughout the night by inviting all of the guests to spend 30 seconds with their finger on a heart rate sensor while the machine would draw on the wall in real time," says Tool of North America interactive director Aramique. "By the end of the night they would create a piece of art together."

But like many wired art projects, the system is often more creative than whatever traditional form of art it produces. And its functionality challenges what art is at its core: a creative expressive derived from the human mind.

The drawing by Heart Bot (left). J 138 1965/1991 by Tadasuke Kuwayama (right).

Tool of North America has become known for its creative forays into technology's bleeding edge. In April, the agency unveiled a similarly biometrically fueled art project at the Moogfest music and technology festival called Conductar, a brainwave-controlled music and virtually reality experience. More recently, the production company lent some technical talent to the collaboration between James Murphy and the U.S. Open that let the electronic music producer turn data from tennis matches into songs.

This project is influenced by HEKTOR, the motor-controlled spray-painting machine developed by engineer Uli Franke for Jürg Lehni in the early 2000s. And it's reminiscent of the "Senseless Drawing Bot" by Japanese designers So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi that uses a double pendulum mounted on a modified electric skateboard to create an ingenious spray-painting machine. And Harvey Moon's Drawing Machine used a similar mechanism and a little help from Processing to turn photographs into intricate wall art. You can even get a tiny, Arduino-powered drawing robot of your own (presuming the Piccolo ever starts shipping) for less than $70.

Tool takes some inspiration from these concepts and expands on them to work with biometric signals rather than have the machine take its commands directly from a computer.

"After dozens of people have used it, the result is a collective representation of the emotional state of all of the contributors," says Tool technical director Jeff Crouse.

That may be true, but the Heart Bot's drawings resemble EKG readings more than fine art. And as a result the creation is less inspiring than the idea behind it.

The Robot Gunning For Your Job Just Got A Software Update

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When a company purchases a robot like Baxter, part of its long-term value is invisible. That's because the $25,000 manufacturing bot is more than just hardware: Like your smartphone, its operating system will be updated over time, adding new features and capabilities. Therein lies the real value of today's worker robots: They learn and get more efficient over time.

Baxter, a semi-autonomous, humanoid factory robot made by Rethink Robotics, just got some major improvements from the mothership in Boston, Mass. Intera 3 is the latest version of Baxter's underlying software and it promises to speed up Baxter's movements, make them more precise, and generally turn Baxter into a better worker.

For companies who have purchased Baxter--such as the Rodon Group in Hatfield, Pennsylvania--this is where that $25,000 investment really starts to pay off. Consider this: A few weeks ago, Baxter may have been packing plastic parts on the floor of the Rodon Group's factory and moving along to the next box. Now, it can fill those boxes much more quickly and with fewer errors.

There has been much consternation about the fact that robots like Baxter appear to be gunning for our jobs. Indeed, why bother with a human being when a robot can work longer hours without complaining or stopping for lunch? And unlike Baxter, even the highest-performing human worker can't double his or her efficiency overnight.

Yes, Baxter is better at certain repetitive tasks than we are. But fear not, say the factory owners: Robots are just taking over the boring, potentially dangerous jobs and freeing the masses up to take on more rewarding tasks.

The underlying platform that powers Baxter controls two things: Baxter's physical capabilities and its interface. In this case, "interface" means much more than a glass screen and a few buttons. Baxter is designed to work alongside non-technical factory workers and be easily programmed by his human colleagues. As items move down the conveyor belt, Baxter learns its surroundings and responds to people appropriately, right down to the cartoon-like facial expressions it makes.

This particular update to Intera focuses on making Baxter faster, smoother, and more precise. But who knows? Maybe the next upgrade will teach him to seal up the box of widgets and hand it off to somebody else.

Chartist Is An Elegant Solution To Responsive Infographics

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On Tuesday, the editor-in-chief of The Vergetweeted that he deleted his site's iPhone app (which won't be updated any longer) in favor of using the new responsive website. Beyond the surprise that such a recently built website wasn't responsive in the first place, it proved once again that all news organizations must build websites that scale to different device sizes.

Part of having a responsive site, however, is making sure all the items on the site are responsive as well. Just scaling down the size of pictures and charts, which is what most sites do now, doesn't solve the problem. Take a look at the chart in this Wonkblog article about wages, for example. Resize your browser window smaller and most of the page adjusts to fit and still be readable--but the chart resizes in a way that makes it practically unreadable.

An open source solution to this problem emerged recently. It's called Chartist (the developer chose the name both because it sounded good and refers to the working class election reform movement of the 1830s). Chartist is noteworthy because it doesn't just make existing charts smaller or bigger, it changes the the way the data is displayed so that it makes sense on whichever size screen it's being viewed on.

A chart showing each of the 12 months along its x axis when displayed in a full-width browser window, for example, will change to show only six months along that axis when the window is reduced in size. The chart is smaller, and the labels are collapsed, but it is no less clear than the larger version in communicating the results.

Chartist's re-rendering solution is not wholly new, there are other libraries that can do the same thing with various amounts of effort. Chart.js is one option, and D3 can also be made to create responsive axes (here's a good example of how that works). And Highcharts, from the Norwegian firm Highsoft AS, appears to be the Cadillac of chart-building tools (with pricing to match).

Part of Chartist's appeal is that it does one thing, and one thing well--draws simple charts. There is missing functionality, notably hover effects, but that can be added with CSS and JavaScript by the developer in the context of the specific chart.

"Most libraries just miss the point that they are libraries (and not applications) and should try to focus on a specific problem rather than trying to solve everything on their own," says Chartist developer Gion Kunz. "Libraries get used by developers and developers produce applications."

Kunz recently gave a Lightning Talk at the Frontend Conference in Zurich in which he quickly--a timed five-minute talk--details the basics of Chartist and shows off some powerful functionally in the simple package.

Chartist is Kunz's first large open source project, and he felt that it was right to open it up to the community to help give it life (you can find the GitHub repo here). Since Chartist is brand new it still has the opinionated feel of one developer.

"I hope this changes soon as I have a few people now who like to contribute and get into the source code of Chartist to enhance it with requests from the community," Kunz says. He's also eager to address problems that arise from situations he hasn't encountered yet.


With Look, You'll Never Lose Your Glasses Again

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When many of us think of "smart glasses" we envision technology like Google Glass--fully outfitted specs with a heads-up display and a constant Internet connection. But if you're like me--a lifelong eyeglass wearer--you'll know the smartest thing your glasses could do is tell you where they are when you've lost them. It happens more than I'd like to admit, and I'm not alone. Recent research suggests that, along with keys, glasses are among the most commonly lost items in the home and we spend more than 10 minutes each time trying to track them down when we should be heading out the door for work.

Constantly losing glasses was a problem for Dafna Ariely, a former social scientist, too, which is why she decided to create the Look, a wearable tracking device that fits onto virtually any frames.

The Look wearable tracker.

"The idea came to me when I was having trouble finding my glasses," says Ariely. "I spent hours looking for them, and my whole family had to come together to help me. When I finally found them between my couch cushions, I decided that I need to get something that will save me and my family from hours of frustrating searches."

The Look is a small wearable device with a Bluetooth Low Energy chip inside. Users can attach it to virtually any type of frame and then pair their glasses with their iOS or Android device. If you misplace your glasses with the Look attached, simply open the Look app on your smartphone and tap "Find Glasses." The Look wearable will send out an audible beep alerting you to your glasses' general location. As you move toward them the Look app will act as a visual rangefinder, confirming you're headed in the right direction.

The Look's Bluetooth tracker is one of the smallest ever made.

Ariely and her team opted for range-finding software instead of an app that showed a map because oftentimes glasses are misplaced within a 20-foot radius in a home or office--not forgotten across town. Since homes and most offices don't have detailed indoor maps in either Apple's or Google's mapping solutions--and since most lost glasses are left in very niche areas such as a shelf or in between couch cushions--range-finding software was the optimal solution. The custom BLE chip inside the Look has a 50-foot range.

Tracking devices are nothing new for larger items like luggage tags and fobs linked to key rings, but making one for eye frames presented a unique set of challenges. The Look needed to be small enough to fit on the arm of standard glasses and also be stylish enough so people would want to wear it on their frames (style is something Google overlooked with its Glass eyewear).

Original patent application image showing a more artistic model.

"The biggest challenge was creating a small and elegant device, which would be both lightweight and aesthetic," says Ariely. "I just wanted it to be as small as technologically possible. What I love about Look is that it doesn't require any adapting. It doesn't affect the weight of your glasses and it's pretty, so it doesn't take away from the design of your glasses in any way."

At launch the Look will come in four different designs and multiple colors to fit the myriad styles of prescription, reading, and sunglasses on the market. The device itself measures 35mm long x 10 mm wide, which when placed on the glass's arm where it meets the frames, should be enough to obscure it from sight on most eyewear--particularly sunglasses or any wider frames (hipsters, take note). But because the Look was designed with style in mind, users can also choose to wear it on the outside of the arm if they want to show off how smart their glasses have become.

The Look is currently seeking to raise $50,000 in funding on Indiegogo. Its campaign runs until November 2nd and, if successful, the Look will ship shortly after.

Can AliveCor's Heart Monitor Predict Your Stroke Before It Strikes?

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With Apple days away from potentially unveiling its health-tracking iWatch, all eyes are on the mobile health field. One medical device company that's been working in the space for years is AliveCor; they introduced a smartphone case that doubles as an electrocardiogram, or EKG, back in 2012.

Their mobile EKG could save the day for someone suffering from heart disease or if they are using a pacemaker. But it's still a reactive solution--alerts arrive only after a problem begins. Now, a team at AliveCor has found a way predict whether you're likely to suffer a stroke or even a heart attack.

Up until now, the company relied on human doctors to analyze the various EKG readings that are gathered from users of the device. Soon, however, AliveCor plans to turn much of this analysis work over to algorithms, a process for which the FDA recently granted approval.

"Having achieved clearance, we will work to incorporate the algorithm in our app and plan to make this available to customers during September," says Euan Thomson, an operating partner at Khosla Ventures who has been serving as the CEO of the company since last summer.

AliveCor's heart monitor works by sensing the series of electrical signals that keep your heart beating. Because the human body is essentially an electrical conducting system, it's possible to pick up the heart's electrical pattern at certain points in the body. One of these areas is the fingertips. When a user rests their fingers on the AliveCor heart monitor, the electrical impulses are turned into ultrasound signals transmitted to the attached smartphone's microphone.

Courtesy of AliveCor

Historically the only EKGs that were recorded came from patients sitting in a doctor's clinic, with electrodes stuck on their chest. This meant the measurements were only taken in a select few locations, under certain conditions. Since irregular heartbeats may be infrequent, it also meant that patients were not necessarily suffering from symptoms when they came in to see their doctor for a scheduled appointment, making atrial fibrillation diagnosis a challenge.

"The way we had to treat it was to tell patients that if they suffer an arrhythmia they better run to the doctor's office so we can capture and document the episode," says Dr. Richard Wong, a cardiologist with Cardiology Consultants Medical Group of the Valley near Los Angeles, who has been using the monitor with patients for more than six months. "That seems so archaic now, but the reality is that there are just certain arrhythmia that only recur once every two or three months."

Last February, the company launched a so-called "interpretation service" which uploads the EKGs of users so they can be analyzed by qualified teams of doctors. But right from the start the challenges of scaling the product were enormous.

"Currently we have well over one million EKGs in our database," says Euan Thomson. "At the moment they're coming in at a rate that is a little bit shy of 100,000 EKGs each month, from thousands of users who use this device on a regular basis."

What was needed was an algorithm to do the job of analysis, and this is where AliveCor believes its data-driven approach will make a major impact. Algorithms have been used by cardiologists in hospitals for many years, but the one developed by AliveCor is capable of distinguishing between between normal and abnormal EKGs without the need for human intervention. Not only does their proprietary algorithm mean that AliveCor can serve more users faster, but their data can help make it even more effective.

Courtesy of AliveCor

To Thomson, what separates his device from dozens of other health-tracking apps and products available on the market is one thing: context.

"A lot of people confuse mobile health with the wellness apps that are around today," he says. "These really don't give any health insights. The counting of steps, for example, is all well and good--but nobody can tell you definitively whether 10,000 steps per day is going to stop you from getting sick, or will make you live longer. It's not related to actual health care. These wellness products are really potential health care products without an outcome. As mobile health companies, we need to think about outcomes."

What gives AliveCor's heart monitor context, or makes it actionable in terms of patient outcomes, is the way it can be used to help doctors fine-tune patients' treatment. In short, mobile health devices like this will make health care more personal. As it currently is, advice given by GPs and cardiologists around arrhythmia can be be incredibly broad-based: suggestions like cutting down on stress, getting a good night's sleep, or avoiding coffee. All of these are good suggestions (like walking 10,000 steps each day) but none of them allow for any difference between patients, or aim to discover specific triggers for atrial fibrillation.

"One of my challenges as a cardiologist is to correlate heart rhythm with symptoms, and that can only happen when I'm able to look at what's going on with a patient at a time when they're symptomatic," says Dr. Kevin R. Campbell, a cardiologist with North Carolina Heart and Vascular, at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Medicine. "Once you've done that it is then possible to modify these inciting factors to ensure that their impact is reduced."

There's a lucrative data science opportunity in determining those inciting factors. "For the first time, because of the presence of lifestyle trackers embedded into mobile devices--combined with electronic medical records and genetic analysis--we will be able to figure this out. It's not even an 'if' so much as a 'when,'" says Thomson. "The reality is that some combination of things are causing people to go into A-Fib. It's an unknown currently only because we don't have enough data."

Mobile health devices will soon offer scientists and doctors the ability to tap into contextual information on patients. It's not just about being able to take an EKG reading at any time of the day, but being able to marry this information with knowledge of what that person was doing at that exact time. Data from apps like Jawbone's UP Coffee, for instance, would allow AliveCor to analyze how caffeine affects user heart rates: perhaps ruling out coffee as a risk for some patients, and alerting others of its significance. Similar developments are possible with the geo-location tracking made possible by today's smartphones, to find out how specific locations or movement correlate to A-Fib. Or to use natural language processing to analyze Twitter feeds and cross-reference heart rate with stress (indicated through the use of "stressful" words used on social media channels).

"As someone who works with arrhythmia disorders this is really the future of medicine," says Dr. Leslie Saxon, founder of the Center for Body Computing and chief cardiologist at USC's Keck School of Medicine. "As a physician I want to be able to build and draw on large databases, and see artificial intelligence and sophisticated analytics applied to data in a way that's really going to help people live longer, live safer, perform better, and stay safer. That's going to be better for both the patient and the physician; it's absolutely the future."

What Apple Must Fix To Make An iWatch That Works

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I've been using several different smartwatches over the past year. And what I've learned is that they are all great--at first. But after using them for an extended period of time, the simple frustrations that often get overlooked by early adopters become a plague of problems.

I keep pretending the current smartwatch market is fine because it is progressing somewhat. But now I'm a little scared. Because Apple just might announce a smartwatch at its September 9th event. And if the company that made the modern smartphone appeal to the mass market can't get wearables right, it may stall the entire sector for years to come.

Here are the problems with the existing crop of smart watches which I'm looking to see if Apple can address, either directly or indirectly, when they take the wraps off their iWearable.

Connecting A Watch To A Phone

After receiving a review version of the Pebble when it was first released, I ended up buying my own. It was new and different, sparking interest from most people who noticed it, but recently I've stopped wearing it because keeping it connected to my iPhone is so frustrating.

The basics like incoming calls and music controls usually work consistently, but all other notifications are heavily unreliable--even with the latest updates installed. After the Pebble asking to re-pair too many times, and being constantly unsure whether I've received notifications, I'm to the point of giving up on it.

Apple's iWatch needs to be 100% rock-solid making and keeping a connection. If you can't depend on it every time then it becomes useless.

Notifications

Both Pebble and Android Wear have an annoyance problem. I want glance-able notifications on my wrist, especially when driving or when my phone's across the room, but I don't want to have to manually manage them.

Google Now's predictive notifications are an intriguing start, but they're wildly sporadic and will likely remain so for a while. Also, has your Pebble ever disconnected and then reconnected? Then you know what it's like to get battered with wrist-numbing buzzing.

Notifications on a smartwatch are both its destiny and its curse. Apple's smartwatch apps will likely be related to iOS 8's new notification center widgets. Meaning, developers will have to rework existing apps slightly, but not completely.

Setup

The LG G watch I received was stuck in demo mode when it came out of its box. It took a few hours to get it fully charged and finally figure out how to get it reset. It was extremely frustrating for something I wanted to use. This wouldn't fly for someone on the fence about the device.

On several occasions I've had to restore and re-set up my Pebble watch. It doesn't take too long, but every time it happens it constitutes a severe look at whether the device is worth the work.

The setup for wearables should be instantaneous. Apple's setup is rumored to include NFC so that you touch the watch to the phone and it's connected in a matter of seconds.

Buttons/UI

Touch isn't good with Android Wear watches, but Pebble's four protruding physical buttons aren't great either.

Using the Pebble to control music playback shows the limitation of physical buttons on a watch. By default the top and bottom buttons on the right-hand side control skipping forward and back. The middle one is play/pause.

You couldn't control the volume out of the box until a recent software update. But now to change the volume you have to press and hold the middle button until the top and bottom buttons change to volume indicators. It's unintuitive, likely undiscovered for most.

The user interface of future watches needs to make sense on a small screen. Something powerful, but incredibly simple. Apple's new wearable will be the next-generation iPod--especially replacing the iPod Nano. It is probably square with rounded edges and about the thickness of two quarters stacked on top of each other.

Wrist Straps

None of the wrist straps on the current smart watches are very comfortable. Presumably companies are focusing on the actual electronics, which means the look and comfort of the wrist strap is a second thought.

It is nice that some like Pebble and LG allow the straps to be swapped out with other standard watch straps, but it'd be nice if they put the same level of attention to the the non-electronic elements in the first place.

Third-party customization is great, but the shipping wrist strap needs to be good too. It would be ideal if Apple's token-like device will be wearable anywhere--wrist, around the neck, on your waist, et cetera. Third-parties could also capitalize on accessories such as necklaces, watch bands, clips, and more. Think GoPro and all its different clips to expand its uses.

Battery Life

Anything measured in hours is too short. Here's a list of the current advertised battery life for several wearables.

  • LG G watch: "All day"
  • Samsung Gear Live: "All day"
  • Nike Fuel Band: 4 days
  • Fitbit Flex: 5 days
  • Pebble: 5-7 days
  • Jawbone UP24: 7 days
  • Jawbone UP: 10 days

Prediction: Apple's offering will measure battery life in days, possibly weeks.

Charging

The obvious option for being able to charge a smartwatch would be to use the same cable your phone uses. But that probably makes the device bulkier than it needs to be.

Nike's Fuel band integrates the charging cable into the wristband in a useful way, except it limits the customization of switching out different wrist straps.

After misplacing Pebble's propriety cable one too many times, wireless charging seems like the best bet. But again, you still have to have multiple charging stations or keep track of one.

The way Apple decides to have the device charge will be one of the most telling items for where they placed its priorities for version one. If the device is fashion first, expect the method of charging to be extremely clever. If the device is all function, expect charging to just be as clean looking as possible.

Health Monitoring

Counting steps is over-rated. Raw data isn't cool enough for kids, and it won't sell devices at iPod levels.

The integrated heart rate monitor is one of the only technical specs that differentiates Samsung's Gear Live from LG's G watch. I don't think it's enough to sway buyers over the look and feel aspect.

HealthKit seems like a slow-burn feature. Apple's device ought to track steps initially and eventually transform that into useable data such as recommendations for future activities.

It's Apple's Turn

I think Apple realized with the square Nano a few years back that they were onto something. Instead of developing it in the public eye, however, the company completely changed the design the next year.

As sales of dedicated music players continue to decline it makes sense that the iPod line would transition into this new wearable category. Hey, Apple may even call it, "the new iPod."

By all accounts it seems that we'll see Apple's wearable device, but the big question becomes: When can we finally use it?

Uber Can Now Predict Where You're Going Before You Get In The Car

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It's no secret that Uber is powered by data. The ridesharing service is built on analytics and famously encourages passengers and drivers to rate each other. But data scientists at the company aren't just focused on the service's core functionality. They often delve into some pretty nitty-gritty details of how passengers use the service--and they can dig up some unexpected insights in the process.

Using Bayesian statistics, Uber's data team showed how it's been able to accurately predict the destination of its users three out of four times. To do this, they built an algorithm designed to figure out specific destinations--not just the intersection or another rough approximation, but exact addresses--and then tested it against the actual behavior of 3,000 anonymous Uber riders.

In an exceptionally wonky, math-laden post, Uber's Ren Lu breaks down the specifics of how their formula works:

We took the riding patterns of over 3000 unique riders in San Francisco earlier in 2014 (anonymizing the data to protect privacy.) Each of these trips had been "tagged" by the rider: when requesting an Uber, the rider had filled in the destination field. We assumed that this represented the true destination the rider wanted to go, creating a gold standard against which we can compare the predictions of our model.

Uber's formula looks at three key factors: the history of the user, the behavior of other users, and the general popularity of specific places. It mathematically blends all of these "priors" (in statistical parlance) and factors in other bits of logic to determine whether a user is going to a particular nightclub or the coffee shop down the street. This is no easy feat in densely populated cities like New York City or San Francisco, which is why the traditional method of reverse-geocoding the drop-off coordinates or pinging a publicly available location database wouldn't cut it.

Map via blog.uber.com

Where has this person gone in the past? Do they frequent a certain bar? Where do other Uber users go? What businesses are popular generally? These are the basic questions the algorithm asks. On top of that, it smartly considers factors like time of day (people don't typically go to night clubs at 11 a.m.), distance (people aren't likely to get dropped off too far from their actual destination) and even the Zip code of each destination (Sketchy neighborhood? They probably didn't want to walk far, so the destination is likely near the drop-off point).

Why does this matter? Like any modern company, Uber has a lot to gain by better understanding its users. "Our rider destination model is one way the #UberData Team is working on improving the Uber ride experience," writes Lu. "Extensions of this project involve building more complex priors and likelihoods."

In other words, it's not just your final destination that Uber wants to be able to predict. Thanks to experiments like this and the models they use, Uber's ability to see into your future will only get more refined with time. Presumably, so will your ride.

A Ping-Pong Table Hack Worthy Of The Olympic Games

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Table tennis originated in England in the 1880s, was trademarked as "ping pong" in the 1900s, became an Olympic sport in 1988, and a conspicuous tech startup office perk in 1990s. Yet throughout the decades this analog sport has seen relatively few digital upgrades. Sure, there's the classic Pong. And the company that makes Grand Theft Auto tried their hand at the game in 2006. A decent commercial upgrade for office table tennis called Ping Pong Ninja came out from Campaign Monitor a few years ago too.

But now the web agency Si Digital puts a digital-physical spin on the game.

They started with automatic player recognition. Si Digital added RFID tags to the paddles by drilling the small parts into the handles. Then they built a an RFID reader, complete with color-changing lights, which automatically adds a player to the game board-- a flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall--when scanned.

The second part is keeping score. For this, the team implemented capacitive touch sensors on each side of the table connected to a Spark Core microcontroller. Each time someone scores, they tap the sensor mounted under the edge of the table. This sends a point to the scoreboard and gives an audio cue. The sound serves a few purposes, including keeping players honest so they don't try to sneak in a few extra points.

On the live scoreboard, each player's picture is displayed above their score. To accomplish this they used Node.js and Socket.io.

If all this talk of hacking the office ping-pong table is creating a competitive itch then you're in luck, Si Digital open sourced everything, including the hardware info, on its GitHub repo. It's your serve.

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