That's proven by the finalists from our 2014 Innovation by Design competition, chosen from 1,587 boundary-pushing entries. All are listed here, and category winners will be announced at our conference in New York on October 15. Learn more at fastcodesign.com/ibd.
Swipe left. Swipe right. It's such a small gesture that packs such a big punch.
After Tinder launched about two years ago, its dead-simple user interface helped propel the app--and its interface--into the realm of pop culture artifact. The swipe-yes-or-no design has been adopted by apps offering everything from employment to puppies to threesomes, rapidly becoming as familiar a part of the mobile ecosystem as the checkbox is to the web.
But while Tinder's widespread media attention and viral growth helped make swiping mainstream, being a "Tinder for X" does not necessarily mean instant success. The swipe design's close ties to the app can make other swiping products seem less than serious. (After all, Tinder's interface initially drew for making romantic interactions feel shallow). As startups look to become more than just novelty Tinder clones, they're working to turn swipes into meaningful recommendations and adopt other features that set them apart from an increasingly swipe-covered field.
This begs the question: What is the meaning, exactly, of the swipe?
"I really see the Tinder swipe as a UI pattern, more than anything else," says Chris Calmeyn, a cofounder of professional social networking firm Caliber. "It's just a great way to process information quickly."
Founded in 2013, Caliber uses the swipe UI to bring together people interested in building business connections. Calmeyn says the Tinder-style mechanism was originally proposed jokingly after Tinder's soaring popularity at the time, but it turned out that, as on Tinder, only pairing users who both expressed interest in each other made users more comfortable looking to connect with relative strangers.
"That's just as valuable in a new professional relationship as it is in dating," he says.
But unlike Tinder, Caliber aims to emphasize users' professional connections and achievements, not their looks.
"Tinder can be so visceral--it's really just about attraction," something not appropriate to a business app, says Calmeyn. "It's really more about what the person has done--what they care about and who they want to meet."
Still, the relative informality of the swipe approach can make the app more appealing than alternatives such as LinkedIn. "It can be sporadic--be something that you go back to, but we really want it to be lightweight," he says.
That view is echoed by TJ Nahigian, the CEO of Jobr, which lets users swipe their way through potential job opportunities. If a potential candidate swipes yes to a posting, and a recruiter or hiring manager swipes yes to him or her, they're paired for a chat.
Nahigian says the casual feel of the swipe UI helps attract potential employees who might not have filled out a complete formal application. "When you have a few minutes to kill, it's sort of an easy and enjoyable way to explore your career opportunities," he says. "Chatting is also important in that regard as well--you can have a casual conversation with the recruiter wherever you are."
Ironically, the informality of the app interface actually led Jobr's recruiter clients to request an old-fashioned web version, so their employers didn't watch them spending their work days swiping at their phones, he says. Either way, as users swipe or click through postings, they can be better matched with jobs or candidates they'll be interested in, says Nahigian. "There's a pretty important algorithm that we use in order to show candidates the right job opportunities, and recruiters or hiring managers the right candidates for roles," he says.
Similar algorithms can help in other apps when users are swiping to pick products that can't swipe back, says Jeremy Callahan, the founder of Shoe Swipe, which lets users swipe yea or nay to shoes. "It knows the difference between a high heel and a wedge or a flat, and it knows color as well," Callahan says of his app. "I'd say about 9% of the shoes we're showing people right now are added to their favorites."
Callahan says users generally seem to immediately understand the interface, which lets them swipe or tap yes or no to a given pair of shoes.
"I haven't gotten any support type of emails--I think it's pretty self-explanatory," he says.
Still, he says, later versions of the app will likely add features beyond the simple swipe to keep users coming back, such as notifications letting bargain seekers know when a bookmarked pair of shoes goes on sale, he says.
Generally, using a swipe interface lets app developers very rapidly determine what their customers are interested in without making them fill out dull and discouraging web forms, says Henrik Werdelin, the cofounder of Bark & Co.
Bark & Co is probably best known for BarkBox, a subscription service delivering a monthly package of canine-centric products, but the company also operates BarkBuddy, which matches would-be dog owners with adoptable animals.
"I think as a product designer one of our challenges is how can we make sure that people get into the product as quickly as possible," he says. "We thought that it is an incredibly useful method for looking at a number of different dogs, but really what it also allowed us to do is create an algorithm on the backend to present more dogs that you like."
That's faster than making users fill out forms to see the kinds of dogs they're interested in, he says, a process that can be daunting, especially since many rescue dogs don't fit cleanly into one breed.
"One of the challenges we've seen in the dog rescue community is that it can be a little complicated to use the sites that are available," he says. "There's a lot of people who actually get really into the idea of adopting a dog, but they either don't know how to or they think it's too difficult."
Simplicity was also a big motivation for Dimo Trifonov, the founder of 3nder, which matches individuals or couples with others looking for ménages à trois. Prior to 3nder, couples had to post profiles that didn't fit cleanly into conventional dating sites, or turn to personals sections on Craigslist or sleazier sites, he says.
"I don't know how many of those are real, how many are serial killers," he says. "We give this elegant interface and elegant way to communicate with people without disturbing them." That's something 3nder's privacy- and safety-conscious clients appreciate about the interface requiring both sides to swipe yes, he says.
With a design background, Trifonov's worked to make the app seem elegant and classy, he says, even when it means breaking traditional design patterns. Notifications show up as a glowing menu bar inspired by the movie Her--not as an alert icon or flashing number as on other messaging apps--and the messaging interface is full-screen, not a Tinder-style narrow text box at the bottom of the screen, he says.
"When you send a message you have this full screen where you can type your message, and people were really confused because you have this big type," he says. "It's a small thing, but I think it's creating meaningful conversations."
The simplicity of the underlying swipe interface and the volume of user data it generates make it easy to iterate on other features, developers say.
CoffeeMe, a business-networking swipe app, got its start at a bachelor party hackathon, says cofounder Hsu Ken Ooi.
"When I first built it, I wasn't sure how often people were going to say yes," he says. "If people say yes [to connecting with other users] 1% of the time, there's probably not a product here."
But the app, which is currently limited to approved users in the Bay Area startup world, saw a much higher rate of users approving one another and of actually making contact, he says.
"That's how I track the health of the product," he says. "I wouldn't want to build a product where we're making a lot of introductions, but nobody actually talks to each other on there." The swipe, it seems, can only take you so far.
The Mayo Clinic is testing out whether Watson, IBM's cognitive computing platform, can be used to streamline cancer medication trials. On Monday, IBM and the Mayo Clinic announced a roadmap to use Watson to match patients with oncology trials beginning in early 2015. By having Watson automatically scan through thousands of patient records and medical histories, both organizations hope the platforms will match patients with experimental and potentially lifesaving treatments. The announcement was made at the Mayo Clinic's annual Transform symposium, which focuses on how tech innovation and design can be applied to health care.
Sean Hogan, vice president at IBM Healthcare, told Fast Company that the new Watson program is designed to increase access to clinical trials for cancer patients. "I have had family members and friends who have all had cancer," he added. "Cancer is a race against time and you want to get on a plan as quickly as possible because of how aggressive the disease is." IBM has made oncology one of the areas where they're seeking new customers for Watson and the Mayo Clinic entered into a partnership with Apple earlier this year as well.
After the recent leak of celebrity iCloud photos, 35% of Americans responded by stepping up their own online security. The most common action taken was creating stronger passwords, according to a YouGov/Tresorit survey reported by 9to5Mac.
The survey of 1,000 Americans found that 20% of those who took steps to upgrade their security did so by creating stronger passwords, while 11% plan to change their passwords regularly. Another 13% created different passwords for each online account, but only 6% started using a two-step verification process.
Two-step verification is the new buzzword in online security, as it requires both a password and a random code sent by text to a user's phone, making hacking more difficult. Apple's Tim Cook has promised to make two-step verification easier to enable on Apple products.
The recent iCloud leak was the most high-profile internet security breach since Heartbleed. With more and more talk of online security concerns, Americans may finally be taking notice.
With last week's launch of Samsung's Oculus-powered Gear VR headset, we know two things about our weird future: Number one, virtual reality is indeed a thing. Tech companies will soon be falling over each other to try and sell immersive face computers to the masses. Second, our phones are getting capable enough to power the experience. For developers, this means exciting things. But it also guarantees headaches, especially when Android is involved.
Okay, there's the normal hell of moving to a new platform--and I gotta say, Android was more hell to move to than most consoles I've adopted. Just because of the way Google has to position things across a diverse hardware spectrum, and because Google still doesn't really endorse native code development--they'd still rather everyone worked in Java. And that's a defensible position, but it's certainly not what you want to be doing on a resource-constrained VR system.
So brace yourself: Android setup and development really does suck. It's no fun at all.
For Carmack, adapting the Oculus operating system to work on Samsung's new hardware was the first time the seasoned developer (remember Commander Keen?) has worked in the Android ecosystem. So to some extent, the growing pains are natural. But Carmack's complaints echo not-uncommon gripes about Android development in general, particularly device fragmentation. Photo:Barone Firenze via Shutterstock]
In the resource-intensive world of virtual reality computing, Android and other mobile platforms present unique limitations of their own, as Carmack and his colleagues quickly discovered. Power management, for example, is much more challenging on a phone than it is on the PCs for which Carmack has been building games for years.
The power issue is going to be a big battle, and it's going to be interesting to see because we don't know yet how many people will like smaller nuggets of entertainment experiences instead of longer-form things. We're hoping developers make a lot of short, bite-sized nuggets of entertainment because they work well on mobile--they don't tax the thermal and power so much, and they also have another benefit: Since we don't have positional tracking on mobile, we know we're going to cause problems for more sensitive people.
It's not all bad news for game developers itching to give mobile virtual reality a try. For one thing, testing virtual games on a smartphone that slides into a VR headset is much easier (and more portable) than prototyping games on much bulkier systems.
As Oculus mobile VP Max Cohen spells out in the same interview, features developed for mobile are easily ported over to less restrictive platforms:
One of the great things about the mobile development process is that asynchronous timewarp, for instance, has been implemented on mobile, and that's going to make its way to the PC SDK as well. So designing within constraints and making a highly optimized VR experience is something that's useful, even if you have the most high-end PC in the world. What we've learned from the mobile development process will pay dividends for developers everywhere.
All things considered, it's pretty remarkable that our pocket-sized devices are capable of such complex computing tasks, even if the limitations are still painful for developers. But this is just the beginning for VR, which isn't even being aggressively marketed to consumers yet. We'll start to get a glimpse at what's to come at this month's Oculus Connect conference, which Co.Labs will be covering when it kicks off in Los Angeles on September 19th. As VR inches toward mainstream status, expect the growing pains to continue.
Even if you aren't digging through job boards for your next gig, there's always that gnawing feeling there might be something better out there. And now there's an app for those of you who are never satisfied with your current job: Poacht, an app and service which algorithmically tries to match a currently employed candidate's LinkedIn profile with employers looking for the best talent.
Instead of using industry-standard keyword search, the company is trying to drastically improve how people look for jobs--or rather, wait for jobs to find them. "The algorithm looks at your skills, education, previous work history, employment level, location, and what we call a 'predictive success' value which uses a collaborative filtering model to weigh your chances of getting hired," says Poacht cofounder and CTO Isaac Rothenbaum. "The outcome of this is a single value (with meta data) that highlights your strengths and weaknesses as they compare to the needs of a position."
There are two main challenges the Poacht team has come across while crafting this service.
First, the skills people have listed don't always line up with the job descriptions employers are looking for. Humans, with trade knowledge, understand that having Photoshop listed as a skill could fulfill a job description's field for Adobe Creative Suite--computers don't. It's difficult to translate those types of discrepancies automatically.
To address the problem of translating skill between resume and job description, Poacht is actually doing it manually. The company hasn't found a reliable way to automate the task yet, so until then it's relied on the interns to help do it by hand.
Second, developing an algorithm for use with primarily static data isn't easy. The discovery engine for a service like Spotify or Pandora, for example, gets plenty of data to use from song choices, skips, and constant user interaction. The problem for Poacht is that once a user has filled out their LinkedIn profile nothing much happens.
The company is now looking into algorithms for handling sparse data. It's also working with a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins who's researching applying machine learning techniques to big data in health care to address the problem. But in the end, there may just need to be more interaction created with users.
"We do have some ideas in mind, maybe tying in gamification elements to encourage user buy-in, but they are all very early stage," Rothenbaum says.
Poacht has already updated its algorithm since going live about a week ago. And version three of the app is already coming into focus.
Bootcamps have sprung up all over offering to train anybody to code in just a few short months. But there's a big difference between learning to write software and building an actual product--which is something people often confuse. After profiling the Brooklyn-based dev shopHappyFunCorp just before the inaugural class of its HFC Academy, a bootcamp teaching how to build websites and apps, they invited me to take the course and report back.
Over the next six weeks, I'll explore whether HFC Academy lives up to its promise. This first entry will cover the basic course outlines and what kind of person it's designed to teach.
HFC Academy covers six weeks of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily instruction. Students can expect to learn everything they need to build websites and apps on their own, specifically studying HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, Ruby, and RubyOnRails, among others. In addition to the tutelage of Will Schenk, cofounder of HappyFunCorp and one of the Academy's two full-time teachers, instruction includes discussions from HFC employees and industry professionals. That's the basic stuff--240 hours of guided learning.
Like many coding bootcamps, HFC Academy is designed with the complete neophyte in mind. Aside from middle-school HTML class, I have zero coding experience. Fellow coding illiterates, fear not: This course moves at your pace. As such, there's a bit of assigned pre-work to get your coding feet wet before the course starts--HTML and JavaScript basics from HTMLDog and, yes, the introductory tracks for CSS, JavaScript, and Ruby on CodeCademy.
But HFC Academy distinguishes itself from the bootcamp crowd with its focus on creating products. As HappyFunCorp cofounder Ben Schippers told me back in July, they're training students like they'd train new employees--to have a product-minded skillset, not just a toolbox of coding languages with little idea how to apply them.
Which means the course isn't for folks wanting to immediately delve into the heavy-lifting, granular languages like C or into back-end or database management. It's for folks who want to get a job building the sites you've got open in your other tabs and apps just beneath your phone's lock screen--the things you see and use every day.
The first class of HFC Academy is held in a plush (and mercifully air-conditioned) conference room in HFC's DUMBO office in Brooklyn. The walk through Brooklyn's darling startup-trendy neighborhood seems like the first lesson: Here are folks with jobs in all manner of trendy startups. Odds are good that half of them are on a first-name basis with HFC Academy's instructors, Schenk and engineer Aaron Brocken.
That conversational style flows into the wee conference room, where my fellow First Class guinea pigs and I are greeted with a little slideshow and a lot of TLC as we set up our "local environments." Woe to the Windows user (me) who walks into a front-end coding and product course! Turns out that Ruby (our chosen language workhorse) was forked long ago down a Mac and Linux path, while the rogue Windows users gnaw on the occasional port and helpful command line patch. I didn't find those bones the developer community threw my way--my instructors hunted down the Windows patches without knowing beforehand. Lesson two: Programmer problem-solving requires stretching the brain and, as the cliche goes, thinking different.
One point before I go further: HFC cofounders Schenk and Schippers were careful about who they chose for the first HFC Academy. Obviously, it behooved Schenk and Schippers to select ambitious candidates who applied on the HFC Academy site--those who would profit best from the short, intense bootcamp. But their selection doesn't resemble the tech scene's WASPy dominance: Half the class is female and half the class is nonwhite. I won't speak again of my classmates out of respect for their privacy, but this intention to diversify the tech scene is powerful and important. Deliberate choices here and now will open up tech to critical new voices that will break the paradigm of white male Silicon Valley's dominance of the scene.
Our first task: Learn HTML. HTML is an imperative language, which means there's a lot of behind-the-scenes unpacking of the simple commands you type. In that sense, it's probably the easiest language to learn--and some erudite programmers may debate the semantics of calling it a "language." But it's the basic version of every site you see and the introduction to the essential programmer quality of anal-retentive grammar. It's arduous (and heartbreaking) to hunt for that one misplaced quote breaking your page.
The biggest revelation comes when the neophyte links their crude HTML to a CSS stylesheet for the first time. Like routing electricity and plumbing into a building for the first time, the home transforms, and new features beg to be plugged in. Of course, those wires can get plenty tangled when you keep layering them. Lesson three: Keep your code clean and those page-breaking mistakes are easier to find.
Then you discover that CSS (along with JavaScript and other stylesheets) can automate appearance and functionality, saving hundreds of lines of HTML code. This is the primal lesson, the thing that fuels programming debates high and low: Elegant code is best. Elegant code is efficient. Think elegantly and your problems decrease; slap code on to patch each individual problem and your code becomes a labyrinthine beast. It's not just harder for you to catch--it's harder for anyone coming after you.
It's as I stop styling code for each graf and start styling for the whole page and nesting code only where necessary that my perspective starts to slide out. I see the interconnectedness of stylesheets and pages across my crude practice site like tin can lines across a neighborhood. And as my perspective expands, so does my vision, and I see the carpet of my HFC classroom has been carefully tiled into a giant Space Invader.
Let's cut right to the showcase material--the product-focused instruction embedded in the course. In the first week, we students received our first two long-term projects. Both were designed by Milos Roganovic, seasoned product designer at HFC. An experienced programmer in his own right, Roganovic built our sample projects to resemble products they make for clients every day. Why work on anything but what you'd be expected to build in the real world?
The first project, a "Fitocracy meets Github" named "Gitocracy," is a humorous jab at the startup trend to mash services together into a VC-friendly pitch line--e.g., "It's [Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr] meets [Yelp/Amazon/Tinder]."
Boom. From the second day of class, I've been building products--and learning from the programmers and designers who do this every day. The words "best practice" float around the classroom, but so do "what the client REALLY means is…" and even "never let the engineers talk to the clients."
Laughs aside, the lesson is clear: What's best or easiest for a software engineer is rarely best for the client. Engineers spend so many hours enmeshed in codebase guts that they often get tunnel vision--and become very attached to their code. If a client looks at mockups and doesn't like a feature, a wave of their hand can wipe away weeks of programming.
Thus the importance of the Project Manager--the gap-bridger, the intention-translater, the motivation machine. While the PM's duties rarely involve rolling up sleeves for sustained codework, coding fluency is critical to managing deadlines and maintaining project perspective. Especially when the client changes their mind.
A client may say, "I want a simple search...like Google." The engineer hears "simple" and thinks "Oh sure, I'll just put in a keyword search. Easy!" and he's done in a couple hours. But the PM knows what the client actually means--a search that is simple for users--and how to break to their engineers gently that the client changed the layout design...for the 6th time.
The last time Apple jumped into a brand-new product category was in April 2010. For context, Peyton Manning had just lost the Super Bowl as a Colt, and Conan O'Brien had just been yanked by NBC as host of the Tonight Show. And the iPad, at least when it was first introduced, became the target of countless jokes comparing the tablet to a certain kind of sanitary napkin.
Now the jokes have long subsided, and Apple has sold 225 million-plus iPads--a category-redefining product that helped Apple become the most valuable company on the planet.
But over those four years, Wall Street and investors have been bullish on Apple to release something--anything--in hopes of taking over a new product category like the iPad and iPod before it, whether that be a television set or, well, something else.
Today, that "something else" is turned out to be a smartwatch. It's called... Apple Watch.
"Because you wear it, we invented new intimate ways to connect and communicate directly from your wrist and it works seamlessly with iCloud, and it's also a comprehensive health and fitness device," Apple CEO Tim Cook said of the new Watch.
The Apple Watch's form factor is, to the dismay of some Apple fans, similar to the design found on Samsung's Gear smartwatches, and not, say, a svelte Nike FuelBand. Its tiny screen is made out of sapphire, an ultra-durable material that's resistant to cracks. You can read all about sapphire here.
One of Apple Watch's notable features is something the company calls the "Digital Crown," a small toggle on the right side of the device. The Digital Crown allows wearers to zoom in and out of apps, the thinking being that pinch-to-zoom on a tiny screen isn't a convenient way to navigate. (For what it's worth, I think Apple is right here.) Here's what the home screen looks like:
The software built into Watch comes with multiple faces. It seems Apple is big on pushing personalization options, which are all shown off on a small Retina-quality screen.
Inside Apple Watch is an S1 chip, a gyroscope, and accelerometer. In order to use GPS, Apple Watch has to tether to your iPhone. Instead of plugging the device in to re-juice it, you can charge the battery using inductive charging, which snaps together with your watch-using magnets.
What can you actually do with this thing? In order to feed wearer's contextual information, Apple Watch utilizes a feature it calls "Glances," which is similar to the notices in Motorola's smartwatch, the Moto 360. Glances can show you your next calendar event, your location, the weather outside, stock market information, world time, and music playing on connected devices--whether it's stored locally on your watch, or on your Mac or iPhone.
You can also send messages using Siri, or, if you're so inclined, with a simple emoji, which takes up your whole screen.
One of the more interesting features is that the watch uses haptic feedback (think: tiny vibrations) to send users smart alerts. For example: If you're going the right way using Apple Maps (I know, I know), you will feel a small but benign tingle against your wrist.
Of course, fitness is one of the key focuses behind the device, and that's why Apple is pushing Watch hard to the Nike-wearing athlete crowd. Apple Watch can even read your heartbeat. It includes an official "Workout" app that can monitor calories burned or miles ran, and an "Activity" app that monitors the same metrics--but over the course of your day, including how often you're sitting versus standing.
"Apple Watch required some deep innovation. It's a precise timepiece with an incredible ability to customize. It's a new, innovative, intimate way to communicate directly from your wrist. And it's a comprehensive health and fitness device, and it is so much more," said Cook.
While the (Apple) Watch can do a lot of things--we didn't mention that it can control your Apple TV or act as a shutter on your iPhone camera--the question remains: Does its value proposition appeal to anyone outside of the hardest-core tech dweebs?
There are other big questions too, especially about battery life, which Apple didn't mention anything about, and which I argued is any smart device's most important feature.
Apple Watch will be available in 2015. Pricing starts at $350. It will come in two bezel colors: silver and gold, with a range of different leather and sport bands.
The Apple Watch won't ship until early next year, but based on what we know so far, here's how it compares to some of the other smartwatches it will compete against:
Apple Watch: Heart rate sensor (will also help detect calorie intake) and accelerometer.
Moto 360: Accelerometer, Pedometer, and optical heart-rate monitor.
Apple Watch: Apple's watch is heavily focused on fashion, with lots of physical customization options. The watch will also be curated into three different collections featuring different materials and different watch bands. It's not currently known whether accessory makers will be able to offer their own products for the Apple Watch.
Moto 360: The Moto 360 recently released to a bunch of fanfare for its stylish round display and sold out on the first day it was available to purchase.
Pebble Steel: Pebble was the first widely adopted smartwatch, complete with third-party apps and watch faces. Pebble has sold more than 400,000 units and now offers the original version in several different colors.
LG G: The G watch was one of the first Android Wear watches to be teased and released. LG has already announced and shown off its second Android Wear watch, Watch R, which has a round display like the Moto 360.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, tech companies moved in droves from using expensive servers from companies like Sun Microsystems to using commodity hardware and open source software, like Linux-based operating systems and the Apache web server.
Since then, developers have come up with powerful, open source tools to quickly and reliably deploy code and data to the collections of servers that deliver web and app content without having to interact with the individual machines. But networking switches--the computers that route packets data to and from individual servers in a data center--have largely continued to rely on proprietary software running on specialized machines made by vendors like Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks.
And configuring these machines, with vendor-specific interfaces, can be hard to automate and reliant on the talent and knowledge of specialized network engineers, says Najam Ahmad, the director of technical operations at Facebook. But the social networking giant is at the forefront of an industry effort to move networking equipment to machines built on open source designs and running Linux-based systems.
"As the web companies are scaling and have to build new infrastructure, networking becomes a bottleneck," says Ahmad.
Moving to open source designs and software would ultimately let companies like Facebook buy intercompatible switches from a variety of vendors, just as they can now do with other computing hardware, instead of choosing between proprietary models from the current vendors, each with their own idiosyncratic interfaces.
"We are working together, in the open, to design and build smarter, more scalable, more efficient data center technologies--but we're still connecting them to the outside world using black-box switches that haven't been designed for deployment at scale and don't allow consumers to modify or replace the software that runs on them," wrote Frank Frankovsky, the head of the Open Compute Project, in a May blog post.
The Open Compute Project was initially created by Facebook to share efficient, nonproprietary data center hardware designs and software, and Facebook's Ahmad is leading the group's effort to develop and promote open source switch designs.
Facebook's testing a switch design called Wedge that uses commercially available hardware and runs a Linux distribution called FBOSS based on software the company already uses to drive its servers, he says. When Wedge and FBOSS have proven themselves internally, Facebook plans to make the designs and codes open source through the Open Compute Project.
"The demand is definitely there," says Ahmad, who argues a move to open source will let tech companies configure their network switches as readily as they now configure other computers.
"If you look at web companies like ourselves, we manage hundreds of thousands of servers which have a whole development environment, they have configuration tools," he says. "We want to be able to leverage the same engineering resources [for networking equipment]."
In the long term, major switch vendors will likely migrate to open source technology to stay competitive, or at least make their proprietary systems more intercompatible, says James Kelleher, a senior analyst at Argus Research who covers the telecom equipment sector.
Already, Juniper is offering more programmable switches, but in more established markets the transition will likely be gradual, Kelleher predicts.
"Cisco is so well entrenched in the enterprise," he says. "It's gonna to be kind of hard to dislodge them or to switch quickly."
In the meantime, Facebook's new Wedge-based switches use commercially available and well-documented chips from vendors such as Broadcom to handle the actual processing of networking data, and FBOSS is effectively the operating system Facebook uses for its servers augmented with additional code to talk to the networking chips, Ahmad says.
"You still have to write some code to be able to talk to the chip, to be able to program the chip," he says. "Linux provides a development environment where you can do that."
Networking vendors such as Cumulus Networks are willing to provide buyers support for the switches, he says, and being able to more efficiently configure the devices provides a big efficiency gain.
A main challenge for many organizations may be bridging gaps that now exist between server and network engineers, says Ahmad, though he predicts those barriers may erode as both teams come to use more similar hardware and software.
"The most interesting thing in most companies is organizational issues," he says. "The server side and network side are very separate teams, and you can't stand on each others toes, as it may be."
When Jon Hundley's computer was compromised by hackers, he ended up having to reinstall practically everything. Hundley, a developer, looked around for a piece of software that would allow him to keep tabs on what his computer was connecting to behind the scenes, but couldn't find anything that worked.
"I spent ages trying to find a product that did what I was looking for and there was just nothing out there," he says. "So I decided to build one."
The result is GlassWire, a beautiful and free Windows application, which lets users visualize network activity in an easy-to-understand, real-time graph. With the repercussions of the recent iCloud hacking incident reminding everyone of the importance of online security, GlassWire does the impossible: It makes web monitoring interesting.
"I think many people may not realize what is happening on their computers and don't understand traffic flows and traffic volume consumption," says cofounder Anton Bondar. "With GlassWire you will see what applications use your Internet bandwidth, where they go, and how heavy the traffic exchange is. This helps user understand what is going on and brings attention to suspicious Internet activities."
Since Hundley and Bondar had worked together in the past--they cofounded and then sold webcam startup ManyCam last year--getting GlassWire started was straightforward. The challenge was designing it to be the most elegant solution possible.
"I'd downloaded a number of different firewalls that ask you to approve certain permissions, but after a while I found that I'd just click 'OK' to get them to go away," Hundley says. "I think a lot of people do that--you just get lazy. It was a difficult problem to get around."
The solution the pair settled on centered around one simple thing: context. In software designed to put the user back in control of their bandwidth it was vital that users were in a position to make the most informed choice possible.
"If you have a graph you can look at, it's not like an alert that interrupts you by appearing on-screen," Hundley continues. "You can actually look to see what's having an impact on your computer and how."
GlassWire isn't the first piece of software to help you monitor web usage, but it might be the most attractive. Instead of throwing the user in at the deep end with complex charts of figures--or TCP and UDP splits--GlassWire's data visualizations fill the user in on what's happening with no more than a simple glance required. In doing so it achieves the impossible: making web monitoring sexy.
"Everyone's talking about and trying to create beautiful mobile apps these days, but there are still 1.5 billion Windows desktop users," Hundley says. "With all the focus on mobile, there's a real opportunity for developers to create something that's exciting for desktops--particularly when it does a useful job, too."
This design was about more than simple aesthetics, though. For example, when choosing whether to visualize the peaks and troughs of Internet use on a graph, Hundley and Bondar decided to use curved lines rather than spikes. Although spikes in bandwidth use are more true to life, by incorporating curved lines the user has a better idea of trends in data use.
Context was also the reasoning behind arguably the software's niftiest feature, the ability to monitor Internet usage going back in time.
"It was really important to us that you'd be able to go back in time and see what happened in the past, because it puts everything in perspective," Hundley says. "For instance, I can see that yesterday I had a big spike in bandwidth. By mousing over the graph I can then click that spike and see exactly what applications were doing at that time, in terms of who they were talking to."
The software gives the user the ability to dive more deeply into data, but rather than doing this upfront, explorations feel more organic. If users don't regularly visit visit African, Asian, or South America websites, for example, they may be interested to look into why there could be repeated activity related to these locations, as this could suggest malicious activities or spyware. An Alerts tab lets users view any new programs which have connected to the web recently, while a Usage bar lets them filter data analytically by host, app, or other categories.
Don't like what you see? A simple firewall display lets you break any connection with a single click.
Although GlassWire's not yet a sufficient firewall to act without support, going forward Hundley says this is something he is looking at.
"There's a lot we want to still do," he says. "From providing you with more detailed information about ports to letting you go even further back in your data. At the moment, we let you track back 30 days. We want that to be a year. From all our installs we've had a lot of feedback, and we're working on as much as we can. There are many, many ideas we're really excited about."
Every New York City winter brings stories of residents shivering in their apartments, despite strict laws requiring landlords keep their properties adequately warm.
The city receives hundreds of thousands of heat-related complaints every season, and angry New Yorkers can be left waiting for inspectors to verify the complaints or compiling pen-and-paper temperature logs to bring to housing court in an effort to force property owners to take action.
This year, a project launched from the Flatiron School, a Manhattan professional programming academy, aims to make this process easier, especially for some of the city's underprivileged residents who are often taken advantage of by penny-pinching landlords. The Heat Seek NYC project designed wireless temperature sensors it plans to distribute across the city with the help of tenant advocacy groups. Those sensors let tenants and those helping them navigate the city's housing bureaucracy by automatically tracking when their apartments get illegally and dangerously frigid, say the project's leaders.
Housing temperature problems aren't unique to New York City, but "this project definitely would not have happened anywhere else," says Heat Seek backend developer and cofounder William Jeffries.
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Jeffries says the idea evolved last winter, when he was a student at the Flatiron School brainstorming ideas for class projects using the Twine Wi-Fi-enabled sensor kit. Temperature monitoring was one idea he considered, and classmate and Heat Seek cofounder Tristan Siegel's mother is a social worker whose clients often have issues with inadequately heated apartments, and the two began to think seriously about the idea.
"Pretty soon we had a team of, like, nine people," says Jeffries.
The Flatiron School provided the fledgling project with prototyping tools, supplies, and work space. "The curriculum is sort of like fundamentals of programming and general tools and instruction on how to think about problems and learn new tools," he says. "There wasn't a lot of direction in terms of what projects you should work on, or what kind of ideas you should have." The school also helped arrange for the team to present its project at New York Tech Meetup, where budding inventors present "hacks of the week" to industry luminaries.
"When we presented at New York Tech Meetup, everyone loved it--it's partially how we met our designer Andrea [Acevedo] and our other frontend person Ethan [Ozelius]," Siegel says.
Since then, the group has received more than $10,000 in pledges in an ongoing Kickstarter campaign that's set to bring the sensors to project backers and New Yorkers in need. And, Heat Seek is working with advocacy groups Community Action for Safe Apartments and the Urban Justice Center to help determine where to place the devices and make sure advocates and attorneys are on hand to help track temperature violations.
"These organizations all have high-priority lists of tenants, and they renew these relationships every winter," says Jarryd Hammel, the project's business development lead. "We're really good at hardware development, software development; it's not a good use of resources for us to be building up lists of the thousands and thousands of tenants who need these resources."
The sensors come in two flavors: a more powerful hub unit that takes temperature readings and transmits them to Heat Seek's cloud servers via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and simpler and less expensive cell units that transmit their readings via a nearby hub. Sending the data to the cloud means tenants no longer have to worry about compiling their own heat logs and that advocates can be automatically notified when violations are detected.
"One of the principal pieces of feedback that we received since we first tested our sensors is that the tenants themselves want the technology in their apartment and working, but they don't really want to interact with the data," says Hammel.
Ideally, just having reliable data easily available could help landlords and tenants find fixes without protracted legal battles, says Daniel Kronovet, an industrial designer on the project.
The project is also compiling a real-time interactive map of heat complaints to show city officials and plans to add real-time data from its own sensors. Heat Seek's also a finalist in the NYC BigApps competition, which provides guidance and funding to projects using city data.
"New York as a city has been making a lot of effort to promote this kind of thing," says Jeffries. "New York City has over 1,100 regularly updated databases with city data that is all public."
After deploying its sensors to needy tenants in New York, the group sees the potential to expand into other cities and markets, including some that might bring a profit. Some building management companies and energy efficiency consultancies have expressed interest in using the same or similar sensors to track heat loss, says Hammel.
"One of the issues that all of these consultancy groups have is all that all of the sensors available to them take temperatures at the boiler," he says.
And in other areas of the country, the sensors could be valuable for tracking when apartments get dangerously hot in the summer, he says.
"It's the same problem, just manifested in a very different way," he says, though he adds that New York's strong tenant protection laws can make it easier to translate data into concrete fixes there than in other cities.
"It'll definitely be useful for providing information at the very least to landlords, tenants, and municipalities around the country," he says. "It's the powerful regulations that are here in New York that allow us to implement this as an aid to the justice system."
We've spoken to Apple regarding the confusion surrounding Apple's new TestFlight Beta Testing program after the company sent emails to developers about its progress after the Apple special event yesterday.
In the email Apple told developers, "You can now distribute your prerelease builds to up to 25 trusted internal users before you make your app available on the App Store."
This surprised many as when the TestFlight Beta Testing program was first announced at this year's WWDC Apple stated that it would allow developers to beta test their iOS 8 apps with up to 1,000 users. After being contacted by quite a few developers confused about the "25" user reference in the email we reached out to Apple and a company spokesperson confirmed that the 1,000-user limit is still on its way.
The confusion the email generated stemmed from those developers who didn't realize TestFlight will have two beta-sharing channels: internal and external.
The internal channel is limited to 25 beta slots and are for companies who want to distribute builds for testing and internal review quickly and easily. These 25 slots can only be given to members of an organization that have a Technical or Admin role in the developer's iTunes Connect account. On the flip side of that is the external TestFlight channel. With this channel, developers can beta test their apps with those outside of their organization--be they professional testers or just fans of an app. The example the Apple spokesperson gave me in reference to the external TestFlight channel was a game development studio that might want to test a new version of their RPG with a small slice of its most avid players.
The Apple spokesperson confirmed that the external TestFlight channel will still support 1,000 beta users per app and also stated that Apple knows how excited developers are about the 1,000 external beta slots TestFlight will offer. And though an exact date has not yet been chosen as to when TestFlight's external channel support will launch, the company spokesperson said it will be "coming soon after the public launch of iOS 8," which is on September 17th.
For those not familiar with the history of Apple's TestFlight, it's a technology that wasn't actually created by Apple. A company called Burstly invented the TestFlight SDK, which made it relatively simpler for iOS and Android developers to offer betas of their apps to users and other members of their teams for testing. But while TestFlight under Burstly was welcome by most developers--not to mention widely-used--the service still required some cumbersome information gathering (mostly in the form of UDIDs) from potential testers in order for them to load beta apps on their devices.
When Apple bought Burstly in February it shut down the Android portion of the service and radically simplified the information needed from beta testers and the steps needed to install beta software on their devices.
Using Apple's implementation of TestFlight developers can send betas to users by requiring nothing more from them than their email address. The user will then get a notification they are a beta tester and they'll then be directed to the App Store where they can download the dedicated TestFlight app. Once installed on their device the dedicated app works as a gateway that allows beta testers to install an app's beta without needing to provide their device's UDID or install provisioning profiles.
Twitter announced yesterday that it will hold its first mobile developer conference; it's called Flight. Taking place in San Francisco on October 22nd, the whole thing is still fairly mysterious. We don't know too much yet, except the obvious, like a keynote by CEO Dick Costolo.
Twitter isn't known for being particularly developer friendly. In fact, it's been downright hostile in the past. Is this conference some kind of turning over of a new leaf? More likely, it's a way to get developers onboard with Twitter's vision for the future of its mobile platform.
And that future will be focused around two revenue-generating areas: Advertising and the new buy button.
Twitter will talk commerce at the conference. The company just announced its "buy" button which developers and companies will be able to integrate into tweets. The social network has been playing around with commerce for the last few years--though only in an unofficial nature until now.
Starbucks dabbled in sales on Twitter, allowing users to send $5 gift cards to people with the @tweetacoffee handle. No official numbers have ever been released, but Starbucks has said it's happy with the engagement rate of the test program.
Chirpify was initially built around the idea of selling goods over Twitter, but has since added more disciplines, including converting passive viewers into active ones and measuring the social media return on investment.
In the blog post Twitter calls out Fancy, Gumroad, Musictoday, and Stripe as initial partners, but says more will be announced. This would be the place to highlight other partners.
A major part of Flight is undoubtedly ads--maybe specifically mobile ads. Twitter bought MoPub back in 2013, but has been fairly quiet about the company or mobile advertising since that acquisition. This is from the announcement almost exactly one year ago:
We also plan to use MoPub's technology to build real-time bidding into the Twitter ads platform so our advertisers can more easily automate and scale their buys. We'll maintain the same high quality standards that define our platform today. Our approach is to show an ad when we think it will be useful or interesting to a user, and that isn't changing.
If MoPub is the future of Twitter's mobile advertising, it seems a developer's conference focused on mobile would include an update on MoPub's real-time bidding platform.
In May of this year, Crashlytics--acquired by Twitter in 2013--released it's beta toolset for iOS and Android. The team also released Answers in July. A blog post announcing Answers hints at why this is a big deal for Twitter and its third-party developers.
Answers by Crashlytics features what we call an "opinionated" user experience. Instead of forcing developers to pore over a pile of data, it presents focused dashboards that answer the most important questions. We've been secretly using Answers at scale over the past few months in both Twitter for iOS and Android, and it's been an invaluable resource for our product managers and engineers.
Let us know in the comments what you hope to see announced, if anything, at the one-day conference.
The on-demand music streaming service battle is officially under way. Listeners in the U.S. already have access to Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, and Beats Music, and starting September 15th, Deezer Elite will officially be available stateside.
Deezer is one of the most popular European streaming services, and the company is switching up its formula for the U.S. launch. Instead of the standard $9.99 price all other services charge per month, Deezer Elite will be $19.99 each month.
The extra cost is because the Elite service will stream music in 16-bit FLAC audio (or 1411kbps). The lossless, high-resolution, audio content contains a lot more sound information than both Rdio or Spotify's 320kbps streaming music.
The other catch is that Deezer Elite will only be available through Sonos speakers. On launch, those interested can try the service for 30 days free.
Even though high-resolution audio has been around for a long time, it's only recently surged in popularity. Neil Young first successfully crowdfunded his portable audio player earlier this year, called Pono, which focuses on sound quality. And more recently he also blew past his goal for crowdfunding equity in the music player company.
Geek Wave is another portable audio player--capable of playing high-quality music that iPods and other devices just can't--which raised over $1 million. Its main draw was that it could play nearly any music format, and literally play the highest-quality formats, all while being portable.
Deezer's strategy of launching to audiophiles in the U.S. is a bit unorthodox. But the high-end might just be where all the money in the music industry is hiding.
Every morning at 7 a.m., Matt Mullenweg wakes up in Houston, Texas, and reads a book. After a chapter or so, he scrambles some eggs, grabs a couple bottles of Hint water, and wanders over to his office--a desk a few feet away. This is the executive suite from which Mullenweg runs his three companies, a venture-backed startup, a nonprofit foundation, and one of the world's largest open source projects.
He logs into the internal project room where team members post discussions about what they're doing. It's buzzing with hundreds of updates from employees working from their homes in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the East Coast. Most of them only see each other once or twice a year.
Mullenweg turns on some jazz and starts reading. There will be no formal meetings today, or on any day this month. And only rarely does anyone communicate using email. He keeps his Skype connection open in case anyone wants to chat one-on-one while he trolls the discussions--which continue to update in almost real time.
In one of the posts, Mullenweg notices something out of sync and starts typing. Twenty seconds and 30 words later, he punches the "Post it" button. The pattern continues for the next several hours. A programmer is not thinking holistically about a particular feature. A team is getting off track from the broader product vision. On the side, he chats with a dozen people about how they're feeling, and touches base with a few key employees. Course corrected.
Then he closes his web browser and goes to dinner.
And that is how Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, founder of Automattic, and chairman of The WordPress Foundation, runs 22% of the Internet.
Every second, somewhere in the world four babies and two WordPress blogs are born. When those babies are old enough to blog, Facebook might not be the dominant social network anymore. But WordPress, the 11-year-old open source blog software, might just be their publishing platform.
One-fifth of all websites currently use WordPress. Facebook, by comparison, consumes the lives of about a third of Internet users. But while Facebook has 6,818 employees, WordPress is run by just 230 people. Facebook is valued at around $150 billion. Mullenweg this year closed a $160 million investment round for his WordPress hosting company, Automattic. He plans on using the money to increase the size of his staff, to 2,000 people.
Every day, Automattic's nine data centers push an astronomical 450 terabytes of data around the globe. (The much-anticipated WordPress Version 4.0 just launched on Friday, with millions of downloads already.) However, "I think we can do four times what we are now," Matt Mullenweg, recently told Fast Company. "Seventy or eighty percent of the web."
Yet even at that scale, Mullenweg is committed to continue running the WordPress ecosystem as a bizarre blend of non- and for-profit, meritocracy, and dictatorship. At the helm sits Mullenweg, playing "jazz director" and preaching open source, while carefully puppeteering every detail of his organization.
When management guru Scott Berkun "showed up to work" at Automattic in 2010, he worried that what made him good at other jobs wouldn't transfer to the chaotic, impersonal coworking dynamic for which Automattic was famous. "My best leadership tricks depended on being in the same room with people," he wrote. He wanted to know how such a successful enterprise had grown without emails or meetings or managers, and if it could continue to grow that way.
"At times I felt like a capitalist in a socialist country," said Berkun, who spent an ethnographic 18 months inside of WordPress and wrote a book about the company's unique culture, called The Year Without Pants, which was released last September.
By the time he arrived, WordPress had become the web's dominant blogging and content management platform. At around 60 employees, the company finally added some structure: The company split into a dozen small teams to work on individual projects together. Berkun joined the "social media" product team.
He quickly discovered that the famous Automattic chaos was actually quite organized. People had confused cultural freedom with disorganization, but to the contrary, Mullenweg had created a highly efficient process. Hours on the clock, employee location, managers--Mullenweg's philosophy was that these kinds of things were moot if the work itself got done, and that most companies engaged in a lot of unnecessary "metawork" because of these. He believed that if you removed those things, along with efficiency-destroying interruptions like email and phone calls and meetings, work could proceed more quickly and with less pain.
And though it sounds crazy, he replaced all of those things with one simple thing: blog posts.
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Automattic's secret sauce is a WordPress theme called P2 that every employee publishes posts on all day long. At the top of a P2 blog post is a blank box. When you enter something and hit submit, your update appears in a list below, essentially forming a big, group comment thread. Each P2 post gets its own URL, which can be referenced in other posts. Every project, question, idea, complaint, and conversation gets its own P2, and anyone who wants to can participate.
There are no private P2s. Everyone, from intern to CEO, can weigh in on anything. Most people aren't interested in most posts, of course, but if ever someone at Automattic needs to know about something--in any project and from any point in history--a P2 record is there.
Each Automattic employee checks the P2s all day long. Instead of email, which decays over time and empowers the sender, P2s are permanent and empower the group.
The radically transparent P2 method virtually eliminates politics. It keeps remote employees in the loop on everything in the company--it's their fault if you don't know about something, because that means you haven't read. The P2 system encourages healthy debate (which happens often), and reinforces the idea of meritocracy. Automattic also tracks employees' actual work (support tickets closed, code written and deleted) and puts it on a public scoreboard, so everyone knows how everyone else is doing. This creates internal pressure to achieve results and avoid that dreaded metawork.
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Though the system does have downsides (some conversations need to be real-time and involve fewer people, threads can be hijacked by tangents, and blog posts lack visual data like tone and body language), Berkun came to believe that the P2 method rendered Automattic's product development process and remote organization rather shatterproof. "It's very resilient, just not in the same predictable way that classical management or engineering would define resilience," Berkun explains. "It seems completely insane. But if you have smart people that you're working with it's actually liberating."
When forced to publicly document everything, the disparate team members became that jazz ensemble, each player improvising his or her own notes, but making music without skipping beats. (Automattic embraces the analogy by naming its product releases after jazz musicians.)
The great irony in this, of course, is Mullenweg himself. In the jazz ensemble, Mullenweg's notes overrode everything. "I'm married to WordPress," he told me. All the high-stakes decisions for all three organizations were made by him--and often low-stakes ones as well. Employees jokingly referred to the following common occurrence as "Matt bombing," writes Berkun:
"This was when a team was working on something in a P2, heading in one direction. Then late in the thread, often at a point where some people felt there was already rough consensus, Matt would drop in, leave a comment advocating a different direction, and then disappear."
On the P2 boards, the personally charismatic founder who friends variously describe to me as "calm," "wise," and a "gentleman," recalls Berkun, "earned a reputation for being terse, occasionally cryptic, and, to some, quite intimidating online."
Yet it worked. WordPress kept growing. And Automattic employees were happy.
As product visionary, Mullenweg was able to use P2s to scale himself beyond the effectiveness of a typical manager.
"If I were just dropping into a meeting like a regular manager, I would only have a few minutes of context," Mullenweg explains. "With the P2 structure, I can read [about] everything leading up to it and get a deep context." Instead of delegation, he simply had to be good at reading.
Mullenweg thinks his unconventional management system should be adopted by businesses everywhere. Still, with 190 employees by the time Berkun's book was published, it was a wonder Mullenweg had been able to keep micromanaging the Automattic team while running the open source project and the WordPress Foundation.
In truth he did have some help. Toni Schneider, an executive who early Automattic investors brought in as CEO eight years ago, managed business and revenue affairs while Mullenweg did his jazz-product thing.
That is, until January when Schneider stepped down.
Back in 2005, it became clear that WordPress couldn't be supported at scale through the generosity of starving programmers alone. Security and infrastructure would become increasingly disaster-prone as more people used it. Mullenweg believed fanatically that software should be free, and he created a for-profit side to WordPress to solve that problem. "Nonprofits can do amazing things but their reach is often limited; for-profits often do amazing things, but often their vision is limited," he says. "I thought if we could take the best of both, a complementary for-profit and nonprofit and create a wider ecosystem, we could create something bigger than them both."
So, he established Automattic, a corporation that provided web hosting and premium services to WordPress users who wanted the free software but were willing to pay someone else to run it for them. Mullenweg raised $1.1 million in venture capital and brought on Schneider, an experienced CEO who'd sold his webmail service, Oddpost, to Yahoo in 2004 (Oddpost became Yahoo Mail), to take care of business while Mullenweg focused on the product and community. Automattic would use some of its profits to ensure the continued development of the free WordPress code--especially unsexy components like security and infrastructure.
A fuzzy line separated the corporation (wordpress.com, which Automattic claimed) and the open source project (wordpress.org). "There were some people who were involved in the community who wanted to get jobs at Automattic but who were not offered jobs," said Siobhan McKeown, a WordPress historian who works for Mullenweg's personal investment company. Plus, she says, "Whenever there's a media story, they say 'Automattic, the makers of WordPress,' and people get frustrated with that."
Rich Bowen, an early WordPress.org contributor, and several others led a group in 2006 which split off from WordPress's codebase to form a rival blog tool, Habari--having grievances with Mullenweg's top-down decisions. "The perception was that people would work hard on patches, and he would accept or reject them in a somewhat capricious manner," Bowen says.
As if to make things more confusing, Mullenweg also created a 501(c)(3) called the WordPress Foundation, with the mission of democratizing publishing through open source software. Its charge was to protect the WordPress trademark and educate the public about the benefits of open source.
Mullenweg himself made it all work. "Subsequent history has shown that he must have been doing something right," Bowen admits. Through sheer charisma and micro-management, Mullenweg calmed the community and orchestrated the coders and volunteer educators within boundaries he set. He came to describe himself as a "benevolent dictator," helming the nonprofit, the open source project, and the commercial product offerings himself. Meanwhile, Habari and other splinter projects floundered, with little resources and direction.
As Automattic's revenue grew, he recruited work-from-home programmers from various corners of the world with the promise of freedom and flexibility, so long as they followed his process of no meetings and no email, and no hierarchy but "Matt."
The most important difference between Mullenweg and, say, Mark Zuckerberg is one of philosophy. Mullenweg keeps WordPress open source, because he believes it keeps him honest and shows that his intentions are pure--and that keeps the community building his software for free, despite what some outsiders see as a conflict of interest. "People could pick up [the code] and start their own WordPress," Mullenweg says. "That's sort of how it started in the first place." Despite the dictatorial nature of his management, it's Mullenweg's genuineness and vision that keeps WordPress's contributors contributing, Automattic's employees from churning.
On the other hand, Facebook's founder has put business before users enough times to make "we promise not to screw you for 2 years" the big reveal at his recent F8 summit. So if we had to entrust one of the two men with three-fourths of the web, I think a lot of people would pick Mullenweg.
Yet, if Zuckerberg dies, Facebook users won't notice. If Mullenweg moves on, WordPress won't immediately crumble, but its spiritual fire may die. No remote work, open-source-based organization in history has grown as big as Automattic intends. But as Berkun points out, "The oldest, largest companies today all began much like Automattic, with ambitious youth, big ideas, and high thresholds for change." And Mullenweg adds, "I get excited when people say things can't be done."
Having been coached by Schneider, Mullenweg may no longer need adult supervision to run his three-headed organization. But despite his remarkable ability to influence and manage unwieldy programmers, Automattic is at a turning point. Mullenweg says he's ready to be CEO of a big company, and he doesn't want the distributed team or open source nature of the firm to change. But he admits that he's going to need good lieutenants and to shift his management style--P2s or no--if he's to get to 2,000 employees.
Last September, I asked him, "What if I offered you, personally, a billion dollars right now to sell me WordPress?" He laughed. "I would say I'm very flattered, but we have a lot of work left to do."
Toogether was a good enough idea. But the Dutch ridesharing and carpooling startup announced today that it's shutting its doors. There are a number of reasons why: an imperfect business model, stiff competition, and the uphill battle of getting users to change their behavior. But there's also the issue of funding. Toogether's failure to raise cash should serve as a reminder to those with access to U.S. venture capital: You're damn lucky.
Toogether's funding came from a combination of various Dutch foundations and a tax credit available to startups based in the Netherlands. Despite watching a French competitor nab a $100 million investment, Toogether couldn't secure VC money of its own. In an unusually candid blog post about the company's failure, its founders explain why:
It has become clear to us, that Dutch investors have a completely different view on investments then the praised VCs from the US. One investor even said to me: in the Netherlands, Blablacar would not have received funding. In some cases it was us not [being] interested pursuing a deal, as quite often the conditions were horrible. One investor even asked us if he could join as director, and pay him an hourly fee. In the end, we are happy not to have a VC deal. We have no debts, nor VCs that need to explain to their informal investors or funds that the investment sucked.
The issue isn't unique to the Netherlands. As active as Europe's tech scene is, the investment going on there is nowhere near as big as in the United States. According to the Wall Street Journal, the gap is enormous:
Firstly the sheer size of U.S. investment is staggering. Just taking the second quarter of 2013, U.S. tech investments totaled $4,674 million. That is more than the entire amount invested in Europe in 2012 ($3,905 million). U.S. VCs completed 563 deals compared to 229 in Europe (which together were worth $999 million).
Of the VC investments that do happen in Europe, they are much more heavily directly at later-stage companies than startups looking for their first or second round of funding. Seed investments are the tiniest pie slice of all. By comparison, American investors are not only more generous, but more willing to take risks on companies in their earliest stages.
An idea like Toogether, as firmly rooted as it is in the "sharing economy" ethos now taking the tech industry by storm, has its share of pitfalls. As the founders point out in their post, the Netherlands already has pretty solid transportation options and erecting "multi-sided marketplaces" is a huge challenge. And then there's the very core of the product itself:
Carpooling requires behavioral change from both the driver and the passenger. A carpool ride to a festival is a whole lot different from having a frequent ride together. The benefits (such as cost reduction) simply do not outweigh the fear of being dependent on someone else. Furthermore, it is not on people's radar; we don't rely for our commutes on other people. Rather, we prefer, as human beings, to be in control or to be dependent on a public transport company with a clear schedule.
Factors like these can make a startup a tough sell to any investor. But it doesn't help when there's much less cash flowing through the marketplace. If it seems like companies in the Silicon Valley are able to drum up cash for just about any inane idea, it's probably because comparatively speaking, they totally can.
Music's shift to an all-you-can-stream model is convenient for listeners, tough for many artists, and potentially lucrative for the tech companies involved. It also has a hidden perk that could benefit all of them: Data. Lots of it.
As more and more people listen to music on digital platforms, our collective understanding of music and the culture that surrounds it is exploding. Spotify, the streaming music market leader, was already sitting on an incredible amount of data before it acquired music intelligence firm The Echo Nest in March. Now the company is armed with a trove of insights about music and listener behavior. To help corral it all, the company just launched a data storytelling blog called Spotify Insights.
"We've kind of been doing this already," says Eliot Van Buskirk, Spotify's in-house Data Storyteller. "We just didn't have a place to put it all."
If his name sounds familiar, it's because Van Buskirk has been writing about digital music since the late '90s for CNet, Wired, and most recently for The Echo Nest's Evolver.fm music tech blog. Since Spotify acquired his employer, Van Buskirk has transitioned into this new role.
"What excites me about this is that I have access to data that I wouldn't be able to see if I were still at Wired or CNet," says Van Buskirk. "I can work with software engineers to be like, 'What is going on with music in Australia right now? Why are so many of my favorite bands coming out of Melbourne?'"
This kind of geographic music data is exactly the kind of thing that The Echo Nest is great at digging up. Since its founding in 2005, the company has mastered the art of combining machine listening with cultural insights scraped from the Internet and mashing it all into one complex algorithm that learns how and why music is consumed around the world. Spotify, which is available in over 60 countries, has meanwhile been amassing listening data from its millions of users, which packs its own insights, geographic, and otherwise.
In fact, before it acquired the Echo Nest, Spotify's internal music data was starting to get so good that the company opted to build its own recommendation technology into the "Discover" tab, rather than rely on its longtime partner The Echo Nest, which powers the Pandora-eqsue "Radio" feature.
To kick things off, the Insights blog launched with a post examining how different genres of music have migrated from their countries of origin to other places around the world. Fascinating material for music geeks and data visualization nerds alike, but it's just the beginning.
The marriage of big data and music is expected to have a major impact on the industry as a whole, a process you can already see beginning to unfold. The rise of Lorde, for instance, was fueled in large part by Spotify, whose data team noticed the pop star was trending on the service long before she became an international star. Internally, the company has a team of people dedicated to spotting these types of trends and cultivating the artists behind them. They're also working with traditional radio stations to help spot regional surges in popularity previously invisible to deejays.
The problem is simple: Emoji don't work the same way everywhere. Trying to send the images between mobile and web services doesn't mix well and usually leaves a (literal) gap in the experience.
I encountered this problem trying to write about the rise in emoji-only social networks. Even though the emoji showed up on my Mac just fine, the picture sentences didn't play well in the final post--which is why it's just a picture of emojis. Even if the emoji had worked fine on this end, it would have been a complete crapshoot as to whether those characters showed up for everyone else in their browsers.
EmojiOne is a free, open source, set of emoji which could possibly end the madness of guessing whether your pictogram stays intact as it travels over the web and is viewed by countless browser and device configurations.
"The biggest technical challenge throughout this project was sourcing the correct information needed to actually map out all of the current emoji Unicode characters," says EmojiOne senior programmer Kevin Paterson. "The Unicode charset is supposed to be a 'standard,' but it has been modified to make room for special symbols, such as flags, which combine two Unicode glyphs to create one image."
To get around the discrepancies, the team did a lot of testing with different devices and customized their scripts to account for the quirks. "If we simply followed the Unicode standard, many devices wouldn't be able to have their Unicode emoji converted," Paterson explains.
Even if emoji show up on different sites or services, the differences in appearance are a problem. Each app, company, or device has a slightly different take on how a wink or smiley face looks--that can get a little confusing. And everyone is creating their own because there hasn't been a good, freely available, option until now.
The EmojiOne icons are available as 842 PNG images with a 64 x 64 resolution, or SVG vector format. The project is available for commercial or non-commercial use as part of the Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Here's something you probably didn't even think to wish for, because the concept is so insane: A way to surf the web using SMS text messages. That's the idea behind Cosmos Browser, a project posted to GitHub a few days ago. But if it comes to fruition, this idea could have far-reaching implications.
If the experience is functional enough, you could imagine this workaround being used to access the Internet in parts of the world where Wi-Fi and 4G mobile broadband aren't readily available.
Even if it doesn't make a dent in the digital divide, you have to admit: This is a pretty impressive feat.
The Cosmos Browser is an Android web browser that uses SMS text messages to retrieve web content and then display it to the user in a stripped-down layout. On the backend, Cosmos will use Node.js to compress and re-encode the page's content into a format than can be transferred over SMS.
"We want this to be a way for people to get information when they're in dire need of it," says Rohith Varanasi, a developer who contributed much of the backend code for Cosmos.
After a person inputs a url, our app texts our Twilio number which forwards the URL as a POST request to our Node.JS backend. The backend takes the url, gets the HTML source of the website, minifies it, gets rid of the css, Javascript, and images, GZIP compresses it, encodes it in Base64, and sends the data as a series of SMS's. The phone receives this stream at a rate of 3 messages per second, orders them, decompresses them, and displays the content.
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In other words, the browser is requesting URLs, grabbing and simplifying the source code, and then unpacking the results and displaying them, all via SMS (with a little help from Twilio and Node.js). It's not going to be as fast or as beautifully rendered as web pages on Safari or Chrome--picture your desktop browser running with the CSS and JavaScript turned off--but it will allow people to look up information without a proper connection.
Right now, pages on Cosmos will essentially be text-only documents with some light formatting, but Varanasi says they're working on including images.
Cosmos is expected to launch before the end of the September.
