The e-retailer has confirmed it will mail its first printed toy catalog to millions of customers this month, reports CNBC. The catalog, titled “A Holiday of Play,” is a throwback to the old Toys R Us and department store catalogs that were a staple of holiday marketing in the past.

The 70-page catalog, which you can see a PDF version of here, features a retro look that will probably have as many adults browsing through its pages as children. Many of the toys in the catalog will have a QR code next to them, which readers can scan to be taken to the product on Amazon’s website. Readers can also use Amazon’s mobile app to scan product images to get more information about them and to add them to their Amazon shopping cart.

Besides being mailed to customers, the catalogs will also be available at all Amazon Bookstores and Amazon 4-star retail outlets.

Even if you’ve never heard of MZ or played its games, there’s a good chance you’ve seen some of the company’s work.

Originally called Addmired, then Machine Zone, and eventually just MZ, the studio has poured tens of millions of dollars into TV commercials for Game of War: Fire Age and Mobile Strike, including Super Bowl ads with Kate Upton in 2015 and Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2017. Outside of TV, Game of War’sscreaming soldier mascot has become a digital advertising staple, and an advertisement about a supposedly legendary Game of War player took on a life of its own last year as an internet meme.

But for much of the last two years, MZ has seemed more interested in technology than games, announcing forays into the Internet of Things business and blockchain technology. Meanwhile, the company has pulled back its marketing for Game of War: Fire Age and Mobile Strike, instead putting its promotional energy into Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire, which launched in mid-2017. While that game has done well on iOS and Android, the metrics firm Sensor Tower says it hasn’t reached the heights of its predecessors, and its revenues may have already peaked.

All of this led to a leadership change in June, when MZ’s board of directors replaced CEO Gabriel Leydon with Kristen Dumont, who had been COO. Although Leydon had insisted for years that MZ was really a technology company, Dumont says that obsession eventually caused the company to lose its way. She says that her job is to refocus MZ on its gaming roots and win back the confidence of players, investors, and employees.

“The company image and culture became a mirror of Gabe,” Dumont told me in her first interview as MZ’s CEO. “When anybody talked about Machine Zone, it was intertwined with Gabe’s opinions, and Gabe’s personality quirks, rather than the company being about our people, our products, and our players. That’s what should define [MZ].”

Mobile multiplayer without the spam

Before becoming Machine Zone’s COO in 2015, Dumont had spent roughly two decades as an attorney, providing legal advice to technology companies. Machine Zone was one of her clients, and over time, her conversations with Leydon shifted from legal matters to business strategy. He eventually convinced her to join the company.

“I wanted to actually invest in Machine Zone, and he wouldn’t let me,” Dumont says. “He kept saying, ‘I’m not going to let you invest. You just have to come join Machine Zone and put all these good ideas to work.'”

Dumont says she was impressed with Leydon’s vision for the mobile games business outgrowing console and PC gaming–still an edgy idea in 2013, when Dumont started working with the company–and with the social elements of MZ’s games in particular. Unlike, say, Zynga’s FarmVille, which rewards players for bringing their Facebook friends into the game, Game of War is more like a traditional massive multiplayer game: Players form alliances with strangers and coordinate attacks on other groups. Machine Zone’s chat system even uses real-time translation so that players around the world can band together.

“There’s nothing that you do in the game that doesn’t upset, impact, or interact with another player,” Dumont says. “That was taking social to the next level a long time ago, and it wasn’t just spamming your friends.”

Dumont joined the company at a time of peak excitement. In 2014, a Wall Street Journal story claimed that MZ was seeking additional venture funding for a $3 billion valuation, and a 2015 Bloomberg story framed the rivalry between MZ and Clash of Clans maker Supercell as a high-stakes battle between potential gaming giants.

“I think I was drawn to Machine Zone’s very bold vision, and very bold claim that, yes, mobile is going to be the future,” Dumont says. “It’s going to be incredible growth, and I think Gabe’s original bet on the growth of mobile was the right one.”

Beyond games, then back again

For Dumont, things started to get off track in early 2017, when MZ launched a new venture called Satori. Although Leydon had been hinting for years that MZ was a technology company at heart, this was supposed to be his big move, with MZ’s in-game chat technology morphing into a platform for all kinds of public data. He envisioned having other organizations tap into that data for smart cities or other Internet of Things applications.

“The idea at the time was that the games had been an excellent alpha product for this real-time messaging platform, and that tech could expand into different verticals,” Dumont says.

While Dumont believes that finding broader uses for MZ’s technology was a smart idea in theory, the problem was in the execution. Leydon clearly had a grand vision for Satori, but the venture never had a clear category beyond gaming to break into. This lack of a clear strategy, combined with Leydon’s zeal for the cause, started to affect employee morale. (While reporting this story, I came across a parody Twitter account for Leydon, calling him a “con man” with a “sociopathic narcissistic personality.” The account looks like the work of a disgruntled insider, but MZ would not comment on it.)

“I would say the culture was extremely hard-charged, and people started to feel confused, and maybe a little bit resentful about where they were spending their time because they no longer understood what they were marching towards,” Dumont says.

The final straw broke as MZ began moving into blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, including a partnership with Hedera Hashgraph Council on a blockchain alternative that was announced in March. Three months later, Leydon stepped down, ostensibly to run Satori as a standalone business. Dumont says the board’s decision was emotional and difficult, but ultimately amicable.

“I think crypto may be a very compelling space. I think there’s a lot of potential promise, “she says. “But it is a new and murky frontier, and to pivot the company very aggressively into crypto was a bridge too far for me.”

As for Satori, its fate seems uncertain. Leydon did not respond to a message on LinkedIn for this story, and two of Satori’s Twitter accounts did not answer requests for comment. Satori’s website provides no contact information except for a Telegram account that is no longer active, and MZ’s public relations representatives said they didn’t have Leydon’s contact information.

More games, faster

Dumont says MZ is now focused on its core mission of connecting people around the world through games. To that end, the company plans to start releasing new ones at a much faster rate.

MZ will soon launch its first new game since 2017’s Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire. The studio is also planning two more games for 2019–one in the same vein as MZ’s current strategy games, and one that Dumont says will “surprise people”–and aims to release a new game every six months thereafter. That’s a significant change for a company that’s only released three games since 2012.

Mobile games are a cutthroat business, but Dumont believes MZ has an edge in its social features, along with its ability to analyze millions of players’ needs and habits in real time. This can be useful for grouping players into alliances with similar players, and offering them the right in-app purchases at the right times.

“Because we have spent so much time building out our infrastructure, our gaming engine, we are now able to develop games exponentially faster than we could in the past, and so that poises Machine Zone for very healthy growth for the future,” Dumont says.

Just don’t count on Super Bowl ads to be part of the new strategy. Dumont says she’d rather focus on marketing with more measurable results.

“TV’s kind of a rip-off, to be honest,” she says.

In just five years, sock brand Bombas has sold 10 million pairs of socks, and thanks to the brand’s mission of donating a pair of socks to the homeless for every pair sold, this means that 10 million homeless people around the country now have warm, clean socks. Cofounders David Heath and Randy Goldberg came up with the idea for their company when they discovered the remarkable statistic that socks are the number-one most requested item in homeless shelters. They now donate brand-new socks through a network of 1,200 partners and shelters across the United States.

In order to make Bombas successful, the founders needed to engineer socks that customers would be willing to choose over the many sock competitors on the market. This strategy has clearly worked, because Bombas socks, which cost about $12 a pop, have now achieved cult-like status among people who really care about their socks. Last year, the brand generated $47.2 million in revenue.

But the socks Bombas make for the homeless are different from those sold on the website. Those for the homeless are black, thicker, and feature reinforced seams, to make them more durable. They are also antimicrobial to deter odor and fungus and make them last longer between washes, since many homeless people don’t have easy access to a washing machine. To celebrate this milestone, Bombas is launching a campaign called The Best Sock Never Sold, since the donation socks aren’t available to the public.

Joe Ariel was a New York kid who ended up in the South, attending Vanderbilt University studying economics. The esteemed college’s meal plan was downright inedible. So he did what any irresponsible young foodie would do: He explored the cuisine of Nashville on his credit card.

Mouth-numbing Hot Chicken from Prince’s. Those crispy, pillowy biscuits with homemade jam from Loveless Cafe. Ariel fell in love with the food of the South, only to end up back in New York as a young professional, and find himself pining for those old flavors. So he did what any entrepreneur would do: He improvised.

“I would call some of these guys, and say, ‘Put it into a box, I’ll pay for FedEx overnight.’ Some of these restaurants sent me stuff,” says Ariel. “Reheating the food, I learned chefs knew how to get it so it tastes just like it does in the shop. That didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was the moment when I’d open the box, smell those smells, see the grease-stained menus, and I’d be transported to a different time.”

Food delivery has been one of the big user experience feats of the past decade. Uber Eats and Grubhub will get you just about any local meal delivered in an hour. Goldbelly’s goal is to take it to the next level, to connect mom-and-pop shops to eaters across the whole United States. “We’re not trying to get you the fast stuff, or the fanciest stuff, or the cheapest stuff,” says Ariel. “We’re trying to capture the best portion of the market.” But Goldbelly has to do so in an economically feasible fashion, while ensuring that a lobster roll mailed from 3,000 miles away shows up delectable–and without a tire mark down the middle. It’s a tremendous design challenge. But if Goldbelly can get it right, the company will give foodies yet another reason to never leave their couch.

Mastering shipping logistics to give users a predictable experience

Shipping is a vexing problem for nearly any startup that sells goods. How do you ship things quickly and, more to the point, predictably, to ensure you meet customers’ expectations every time? Goldbelly has a proprietary algorithm that scans USPS, Fedex, and UPS to find the fastest, cheapest shipping option for every product. It accommodates for price fluctuations and weather, and handles rerouting as necessary. So once a customer places an order on Goldbelly, all the restaurant has to do is pack a box, and put on a shipping label; Goldbelly handles the rest. Depending on the product, shipping may be free or cost extra. In some cases, Goldbelly eats differences in shipping price fluctuations so that it presents customers with a more predictable, repeatable ordering experience.

Packaging food so customers come back for more

Goldbelly’s other big experiential design challenge is around the food itself. Every food is different, and must be treated as such, to make it through the mail with as much integrity as possible.

“When we started, there were certain things I thought may be impossible for us to ship. But now, I think we can ship any item in the country,” says Ariel. “Ice cream seems like one that would be impossible. It’s not at all. You use dry ice. It has to be in a cooler. You order a six-pack. It can be mailed two- or three-day. It’s actually not hard to do!”

French fries were another tricky one to ship. Grubhub told me once, during a panel, that french fries are one of the biggest challenges in food delivery, because they steam in a bag on the way to your door and become soggy. Working with restaurants themselves, test shipment after test shipment, Goldbelly learned that the best method was to par cook them–basically cook the fries largely, but not entirely, through–and let the customer brown them in an oven.

What about fried chicken? “As you think through it, in the South, cold fried chicken is a delicacy. That was our starting point,” Ariel says. “Then testing, we tried [hot chicken] with the sauce on the side, with the sauce on. Now we ship it fully cooked, wrapped right after it cools down, with sauce on it. You put it in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes, and it crisps up because there’s so much oil on it.”

A playbook of best practices

Over time, Goldbelly has developed a playbook of best practices, based on the company’s own testing. All foods are divided into three categories–depending on whether it belongs in a pantry (like baked goods), the fridge (steaks and seafood), or the freezer (ice cream and pizza). This determines if something needs to be kept cold, and how cold to keep it. Stone crab and fresh tuna need to be cold, for instance–but if they freeze in transit, that affects the integrity of the fresh seafood, too. Indeed, fridge items are the most challenging for Goldbelly to ship because the temperature needs to hover around 40 degrees.

For pantry cakes and pies, temperature isn’t so much a concern, but they have to be stabilized in transit, lest they become a pile of goop and frosting. Goldbelly has developed proprietary packaging dubbed the “pie shipper,” that keeps these round desserts upright, insulating them while and stopping them from hitting the walls of the box.

Another strategy for keeping shipped food presentable is to ship items deconstructed rather than in ready-to-eat mode. Such is the case for sandwiches like Philly cheesesteaks and Maine lobster rolls. If a sandwich is sent whole, it gets soggy. And reheating it would just turn the mush into a hot mess.

When I ask Ariel what’s the hardest item to ship, he answers without hesitation: the Primanti Bros. sandwich. It’s a Great Depression-era meal out of Pittsburgh, with thick-cut Italian bread that’s piled high with meat, cheese, coleslaw, tomatoes, and fries. “That was one where it was like, ‘Are we going to be able to do this?'” Ariel recounts. “We got on the ground. We do test shipments. What we did was, we decomposed it and turned it into a kit.”

The case for $90 sandwiches

A week after our interview, a Primanti Bros. box arrives at my door. It’s a cardboard container with a giant sandwich outline drawn on the box. Opening it, I’m greeted with a notecard all about the sandwich itself, complete with its history and assembly instructions. I remove an inner styrofoam lid, and I find that the meat and cheese have been vacuum-packed. I’ll need to heat the meat on the stove, divide it into four portions, and top it with cheese right before serving. A large loaf of Italian bread is in a normal bakery bag and unsliced. The tomatoes are mine to cut, too–four slices apiece. The fries will need 30 minutes in the oven at 450 degrees F.

I read the instructions, which go so far as to explain the order each ingredient is layered on the bread. Jeez, I’ve got work to do–a surprising amount of work for a sandwich!

“The restaurant sets it up so much . . . and then it’s up to the user,” says Ariel. “Part of the fun is doing it how you like it.” I do enjoy the ritual, as it makes me anticipate this giant gut bomb I’m about to consume. But then again, I like to cook. At one point in the process, I do wonder if I should have just ordered a Milk Bar pie I could eat with a fork right out of the box.

As for how the sandwich tasted: It’s a good sandwich. The pastrami is paper thin and loaded with flavor. The bread is a marshmallow that melts in my mouth. (And just an hour later, the spare slices had grown stale on the counter–no wonder the loaf comes whole.) The fries? Look, they still taste like oven fries for whatever reason, but they’re crispy enough to crack between my teeth. The red devil hot sauce on top complemented the pastrami in a way I’d never expect. And that sweet and sour vinegar coleslaw? Phenomenal.

I enjoyed the indulgence! Was it worth $90 for four sandwiches (compliments of Goldbelly)? Not to me or my fellow testers who wanted to know why I didn’t order a fancier lobster roll. But if this were a sandwich I grew up eating and had been jonesing for, I imagine it would have been a borderline spiritual experience. Because I’d estimate the flavors were replicated with 85% fidelity–plenty for your brain to fill in the gaps.

Goldbelly has been profitable in the past, according to Ariel, though the company’s $15 million in new funding suggests a more immediate focus on user and partner growth, instead of revenue. At a time when Grubhub, Uber Eats, and Amazon are all duking it out for the local delivery market, Goldbelly has discovered a promising niche–by slowly mastering the art of delivering a taste of your past to your door.

In 2009, Miranda Kerr, the supermodel-turned-mogul, turned her love of certified organic and nontoxic beauty products into a business–a very successful one at that. With Kora Organics, Kerr quickly established herself–and her company–as a competitive player in the $13.2 billion dollar organic and natural beauty industry. As her company grows, the first Australian to wear Victoria’s Secret angel wings and self-described “multitasking mumma” is building her skincare brand into a natural beauty behemoth.

View this post on Instagram

✨✨✨GLOW from head to toe all year long with our certified organic Gradual Self-Tanning Lotion.✨✨✨ It’s a dual action, ultra-hydrating body lotion that builds a natural, sun-kissed glow. The DHA (Dihydroxyacetone) ingredient used in our Gradual Self-Tanning Lotion is naturally derived from organic sugar and the molecules in the sugar turn brown, delivering a safe and non-toxic tan. #NoniGlow #MindBodySkin #EndlessSummer @mirandakerr

A post shared by KORA Organics (@koraorganics) on Oct 9, 2018 at 5:15pm PDT

Here, Kerr reveals her tips and tools for getting the most out of every day:

What’s your Off Switch?

When I arrive home I leave my work—and phone—at the door. I like to switch off from business mode and into family mode. It’s so important to have that time and be present.

What’s your On Switch?

A cold shower! I like to do an all over body brush, then jump in the shower and do a cold blast for the last 30 seconds (or longer). I turn off the hot water and let the cold water invigorate my body. It’s the best wake-up call!

What product are you currently in love with?

I’m obsessed with exfoliating and also face masks.

What high-price-tag product have you recently splurged on?

Chanel ballet flats. They’re classic and comfortable, and I’m too busy running around for heels right now.

What do you do when you have . . . 

A free five minutes: meditate.

A free hour: deep tissue body and scalp massage.

A whole free day: a day by the ocean with my boys or a pool party and BBQ with friends and family.

An Australian icon: Vegemite! I travel with it everywhere. Nothing beats Vegemite on toast.

The country already has an Orwellian social credit system and over 170 million CCTV cameras keeping an eye on its citizens night and day. Virtually all of those cameras can be used with facial recognition software to identify citizens in a snap. But now China is rolling out new gait recognition software that can identify someone even if their face is covered–just by analyzing how they walk,reports the AP.

Huang Yongzhen, the CEO of Watrix, one of the companies who make gait recognition software used by China, says their product can identify people from up to 50 meters (165 feet) away–even if their backs are turned to the camera. Speaking to the AP, Huang said:

“You don’t need people’s cooperation for us to be able to recognize their identity. Gait analysis can’t be fooled by simply limping, walking with splayed feet or hunching over, because we’re analyzing all the features of an entire body.”

But the system does have some drawbacks, including requiring much more powerful computers to analyze footage. That’s because gait recognition requires a sequence of images whereas facial recognition tech just requires AI to analyze a single image. Still, the increased computational requirements are probably of little concern to a government that wants to achieve complete and total surveillance over its citizens.

With support from celebrity billionaire Marc Benioff, plus real celebrities Chris Rock and Jewel, San Francisco’s proposed $300 million business tax to fund housing and homeless programs became a national cause célèbre. Winning by a healthy 60%, Proposition C was by far the biggest, but not the only, successful effort to make big tech pay more to even out the growing income divide in American cities–a trend that may continue.

Just south of San Francisco, voters in tony Google hometown Mountain View and lower-income East Palo Alto passed their own smaller tax measures on local tech companies. Three very different communities all opting to claw back money from the tech titans may mark a turning point in the relationship between cities and the companies that bring them both rising prosperity and widening inequality.

“The way I see it is, they’re afraid that it will spread to other cities–the concept of taxing concentrations of wealth as represented by the corporate tech sector. And I think it very well might,” says Mountain View mayor Lenny Siegel about opponents of the city’s new business license tax.

Nearly all the money–90%–goes to transportation projects, such as upgrading the city’s transit center and expanding bike paths. One of the top priorities Siegel listed in taking office in January was to expand transit to keep up with economic growth that brings tens of thousands of workers into town each day. The bike-riding mayor has emphasized multimodal transit, with bikes, shuttles, and trains, as well as cars.

Google and parent company Alphabet have already been funding transit programs–such as free downtown shuttles and a bike trail between two of their campuses–which benefit both employees and the general public. “They recognize that their ability to continue doing business here depends upon us solving the transportation problems,” says Siegel.

Related: The dirty political fight to get tech’s richest companies to give less than 1% to the homeless

The relationship between business and government is more contentious in East Palo Alto, says city council member Carlos Romero. Developers balked at Measure HH, a parcel tax on landlords of $2.50 per square foot per year on commercial properties over 25,000 square feet, he says. “When we proposed this tax, the business community, they essentially were up in arms saying, ‘Why should we pay for any of this?'” says Romero. But voters approved the measure overwhelmingly, giving it 70% of the vote.

Unlike Mountain View, tech companies are new to East Palo Alto. Only recently have they branched out of richer cities, like posh neighboring Palo Alto, to this lower-income, predominantly Latinx community. (Amazon, for instance, leased a more than 200,000-square-foot space in 2017.)

But the new companies haven’t brought economic opportunities with them, as they mostly hire people from outside the community, says Romero. “The community said . . . if you approve these projects, you need to figure out a way to create pathways for us–moderate income, low-income residents, our children–to get a foothold into that ever-growing industry that actually pays far better than the other service sector or even middle-management work that people might be able to get in East Palo Alto,” says Romero.

With rents skyrocketing, and residents moving into RVs, Measure HH will provide loans and subsidies for building new housing, such as rental units connected to adjacent homes. It will also fund science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in the hopes that residents cannot only survive the tech influx but take advantage of it.

Depending how much development grows, Measure HH could raise from about $1.7 million to $7.5 million–significant in a city of about 30,000 people, with an annual budget around $40 million. (Mountain View’s is about $328 million, and San Francisco’s is around $11 billion.)

And the idea could spread. “There are other elected officials locally interested in this ability to tax these companies on the real estate side because the rents are so significantly high,” says Romero. He says he’s had conversations with a few, but declines to name them.

The path is far from clear, though. Under pressure from its local tech behemoth, Apple, the South Bay town of Cupertino shelved (at least until the 2020 election) a per-employee tax similar to Mountain View’s. Last June, the Seattle City Council was pressured by business titans, especially Amazon, to reverse its vote for a $275-per-employee tax on businesses making more than $20 million a year. It would have raised about $47 million per year for housing and homeless programs.

But the victory in San Francisco–in the face of opposition not only from many tech companies, but also the mayor and other prominent politicians–shows new power for communities to take on big tech. It also forced tech companies like Salesforce, Square, Stripe, and Lyft into the spotlight on these issues, much more than Google or Apple were down south.

Related: Marc Benioff just Twitter-shamed Jack Dorsey over San Francisco’s homeless tax plan

As the one major tech company to actively support Prop C, Salesforce won a great deal of attention and good will–for a modest cost of about $10 million in extra taxes, per its own estimate. The company even contributed about $5 million to the Yes on C campaign, but that’s a small outlay for a company that aspires to be a first corporate citizen in San Francisco–as Google does in Mountain View. (Co-CEO Benioff contributed about $2 million from his pocket.)

If the tide of public opinion continues to turn against big tech, at least some companies seem ready to set a new course rather than ride against it.

That means the Singapore-based ride sharer has brought in $2.7 billion in investment to date, reports CNBC. Hyundai and Grab said that, together with Kia, they will also set up a partnership to pilot electrical vehicle (EV) programs throughout the Southeast Asia region. The goal is to increase EV usage throughout the region and to “maximize cost efficiencies for Grab’s driver-partners.”

Grab was founded in 2012 and for much of its life was a major competitor to Uber in Southeast Asia. However, in March of this year, Grab announced that it had acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia operations. The deal saw Uber leaving the region and the company taking a 25.7% stake in Grab.

Grab’s latest deal with Hyundai and Kia will further help cement the ride sharers dominance in the region. Asia already accounts for 70% of the 16 billion ride-sharing trips made last year. By 2026 the ride-sharing market is expected to exceed $28 billion annually.

I’ve just got a minute—might as well scroll through Instagram.

No time to get anything real done—what’s in my e-mail inbox?

The default setting for most individual’s brains when they have 20 minutes or less is to waste it on activities that give them no greater sense of accomplishment at the end of the day than if they had skipped them.

As a time management coach, I’ve seen that most people can easily reclaim one to two hours of productivity in their workday by changing their default settings. That means getting more stuff done and less working late. Happier boss and happier you. Here are five ways to get more done by reclaiming small pockets of time.

Keep a quick task list

Consider making a “quick task list” for items that will take 10 minutes or less. These could include printing off a document, doing a follow-up call, scheduling an appointment, or other little things that need to get done but don’t take much time. When you have a small opening of time, challenge yourself to knock items off that list. Not only will this help you get more done in the time, but it can also help you beat procrastination on pesky little tasks.

Get real stuff done on your phone

You don’t have my permission to scroll mindlessly, but a small pocket of time can provide the perfect opportunity to get communication done that you really need to do. For example, catch up on text messages, return a voicemail, or reply to LinkedIn messages. By doing these activities during a small window of time, you’re reducing their intrusion into larger blocks of time better used for focused work.

Catch up with a coworker

If you only have a small bit of time between meetings, you may find it an ideal time for an informal catchup with a coworker who either is attending one of the same meetings or who has a desk nearby the meeting space. A 10-minute conversation when you’re already up and “in the neighborhood” can help you effectively use the time away from your desk.

Make some small progress on a project

A common procrastination mind-set is, “I don’t want to start until I have enough time to finish this project.” Since the most frequent scenario is not having enough time to finish a project in one setting, you never get started. A way to reduce procrastination, after-hours work, and deadline stress is to do what you can to move the project forward in a small pocket of time. To best utilize this strategy, start out by breaking down a project into steps such as, “Read A, B, and C documents,” “Draft outline,” “Write intro,” etc. Then, when you have 20 minutes, get something done. Maybe you just get one article read, but you’ve still made progress.

Take a refreshing break

Sometimes the best thing to do in a small pocket of time is to not do anything work-related. Take five to 10 minutes to go on a quick walk, journal, pray, clear your mind, or stretch. There’s no need to deprive yourself of small doses of unplugged time that can lower stress and recharge your mind and body for the rest of the day.

It’s time to stop throwing away the extra minutes in your day because you see them as too little to matter. By intentionally investing small pockets of time in meaningful work, you can get more done and feel more satisfied.

Elizabeth Grace Saunders is the author of Divine Time Management and How to Invest Your Time Like Money, and she is a time management coach. Find out more at www.RealLifeE.com

It’s late afternoon, and your coworkers are being loud again. You have work to do, so you pop in your earbuds to drown out their voices–but it doesn’t work, because you can still see someone showing off their new juggling skills. If only I had a cubicle! you think.

In a professional world dominated by open-plan offices, some people find themselves longing for the cubicles of yore. They might have been beige, but at least they were easier for getting your work done. So how would you design a cubicle for the 21st century?

That’s the question that Fast Company posed to the design studio Rapt as part of our series Provocation. The workplace-design experts concocted two futuristic concepts in response, both of which give people private space for focused work and meeting space for collaborative work–in completely radical ways.

A robot for every cubicle

Rapt’s designers envisioned a concept in which everyone gets a private space to work when they want it. But there’s a catch: Each private cubicle sits on short legs, enabling small warehouse robots to scuttle around underneath them. Then, the robots can pick up the cubes and move them around the office based on what each person and team needs for the day. For instance, if you have a day of heads-down work, you’d get assigned a private cubicle so you can focus. If you have a day full of meetings, and you don’t need private space, your cube combines with other cubes to create a larger space in which to work with your colleagues. The robots shift the office in real time to make this happen.

That’s where the robots come in. They’re powered by machine-learning technology that continually learns from workers’ requests  and optimizes it to increase everyone’s productivity.

“Spatial privacy voids” for all

Rapt’s second concept is another ingenious (if totally bananas) answer to the challenge of workers needing a mix of private and collaborative space at work. “Say in the future we invented this non-toxic fog that could be a barrier that would allow for individual acoustic and visual privacy,” Galullo says. He and his team envision this fog carpeting the entire workspace. Each person would have a movable fan or some kind of device to repel the fog wherever they stood, which would create a bubble within the fog where they could work undistracted. Galullo calls it a “spatial privacy void.”

The concept is a bit nuts, but Rapt’s designers were clearly being provocative to push traditional thinking about office design out the window. After all, for people who hate open plans, the fog might just be more appealing than overhearing your colleagues’ personal phone calls for the umpteenth time.

We’re used to thinking of the cubicle as a boring, beige box, but these two ideas imagine something radically different. Practical? Probably not. But the larger point is to underscore the degree to which workers need both private space and social spaces. To Galullo, that’s the key to the future of office design: “There are so many ways to interact that people are kind of hungry for . . . more meaningful interaction and more meaningful private time,” he says.

This story is part of Co.Design’s conceptual design series Provocation. Previously I’ve written about a mobile lactation pod for the office. Check out the rest of the series as it’s published here.

In the last few years, vehicle-aided terrorism has become a horrible reality for many cities. To protect pedestrians, cities have expanded efforts to install street bollards, peppering the urban landscape with these three-foot-high metal barriers. After New York was hit by a truck-borne terrorist in 2017, the government decided to spend $50 million on bollards, dramatically increasing the footprint of this defensive architecture on the streets.

Could these increasingly common devices serve a second purpose–and bring strangers together on city streets? That’s the idea behind three prototypes by the Peruvian designer and architect Beatriz Pero Giannini. The three chairs–called the rocker, the slider, and the wobbler–sit atop bollards and function like seesaws. If one person sits down they’ll probably be uncomfortable, but if two people sit together it brings each design into balance. By encouraging people to sit down together, Giannini hopes to bolster a sense of community among strangers.

“This tension that is created by the interaction was very appealing to me: the softness of this intimate moment and interaction, with the sharpness of placing it in public,” she says.

Giannini created the three prototypes during her first year as a student at the Piet Zwart Institute in the Netherlands, and was originally inspired by the bollards that dot the landscape of Amsterdam. There are so many in the Dutch city, they even have a special name–amsterdammertjes, which date back to the 1800s–and they’re mostly used to separate the sidewalk from the street. “I wanted to take the pre-existing element (the amsterdammertjes) that’s intrinsic to the identity here and try to generate a positive encounter that would encourage a sense of community between people,” Giannini says. “I wanted to achieve that through the balance and cooperation two people need to achieve to use the design.”

The design, which Giannini created in collaboration with the street furniture company HR Groep, was on display at Dutch Design Week this fall. At the fair, she tested out her ideas with passersby–and found that they worked exactly as envisioned. Even people who were initially skeptical came away smiling. She credits the chairs’ intuitive nature: You don’t need any explanation to understand how to use them, or that it’s an experience better shared. (She’s now in talks with HR Groep to bring the designs to life in cities.)

Ultimately, the rocker, the slider, and the wobbler are about sparking small, joyful moments in a pedestrian’s day, which can help them feel more connected to the place they live–and the people who live around them. “These kind of positive interactions are essential to the fabric of what urban life is and what the essence of what living in a city means,” Giannini says.

Few activities in the business world eat up as much time as meetings. Professionals spend 37% of their time in meetings, and it’s worse for executives, who by some estimates devote 85% of their days to meetings.

But if you look around during a typical meeting, you’ll see people texting, or treating the event with indifference. Too often, these gatherings are regarded as a painful obligation.

Imagine if you approached meetings with an entirely different mind-set–as a place where you can sell your ideas and demonstrate your leadership. With that mind-set, you will help your organization, and not incidentally, your own career.

The following five steps will enable you to sell your ideas, and make your meetings more productive and engaging.

1. Figure out what you want to sell

The starting point is having a sales mind-set. Most people enter meeting rooms with a knowledge of the topics, and some background on them. But rarely do participants come in with a desire to pitch their thinking. Yet if you are invited to a meeting, it’s because others think you have something to say. You need to come prepared to make that point or make your position clear.

For example, let’s say you’re in a meeting focused on a new marketing plan. You’ve been invited because you’re versed in the product being marketed. Decide what point of view you want to get across. Do you support the plan, have reservations about it, or downright dislike it? Knowing what you’re selling will give you a sense of purpose. It will energize you from the moment you walk into that meeting.

2. Listen for your “in”

Once the discussion starts, listen carefully to the exchanges and find the right moment to present your ideas.

There are various times when you can take control. One is when other voices in the room are moving toward the position you want to present. In that case, speak up and say, “I agree with George’s view on this. In fact, I’d like to build upon it.” That collaborative tone will win you listeners.

Another situation in which you can best introduce your views is when the discussion is moving away from what you’d like to say. This is a ripe opportunity to sway the thinking of the room. But be discreet—don’t begin with “on the contrary,” or “I don’t agree.” Those phrases will distance you from the previous speaker and position you as a negative presence. Instead, begin, “Leah and Jamal have argued that . . . and while I see how they arrived at their conclusion, there is another point of view we should consider.”

In both instances, the art of the pitch begins with listening, and showing that you are sensitive to the views in the room and you are building upon them or recognizing them.

3. Cut to the chase with one single point

Pitching your ideas requires getting to your point as soon as possible–or you’ll lose listeners and they won’t be there for you when you do get to your message.

This message should be a one-sentence statement that distills your thinking and defines the essence of your pitch. It can be a message about how to move forward (“As I see it, we need to first get our business partners on side”) or it can be a message about staffing (“Marketing needs to take the lead on this”) or it can be a message about serving a client (“This is too good an opportunity to lose by charging them more than they are willing to pay”).

The point is to have a point—one, simple, clear, compelling idea that reaches the room.

4. Elaborate with clear points

You have your audience listening to your idea. Don’t ramble or wander, or introduce an information dump. Instead, choose two to four points that successfully develop your idea.

Your might briefly elaborate your points, but if you want your audience to stay with you, count them out–use “first,” “second,” “third,” to earmark the points.

5. End with a call to action

You’ll want closure on your idea, so specify what you want the others in the room to do, or what will you do for them. Every sale ends with an “ask,” and every time you sell an idea, you need to ask your audience to act upon what you’ve said. Otherwise, there is no sale, no closure, and no impact.

A call to action can be a gentle suggestion of next steps (“I suggest we move to appoint a team to lead this initiative”) or it can be a more decisive rallying cry (“Given that we all want this program to move forward, let’s set out a timetable; appoint a team; and have a report on progress at our next meeting”) At times your call to action can also be a self-delegated act (“I’ll take the lead on this”).

These five steps will enable you to play a leadership role in every gathering. Your ideas will benefit the organization, and you’ll help make meetings more exciting for everyone.

Over the past year, scooters have become a political minefield in some cities where the devices’ ubiquity on sidewalks are blocking access to pedestrians, baby strollers, and people with disabilities. Bad parking jobs and misuse has made these vehicles the object of rage in cities like San Francisco. A geolocation company called Fantasmo is proposing a novel solution to this particular problem: Augmented reality.

The idea stems from the current problems with scooter parking. If scooter startups like Lime, Scoot, or Bird knew exactly where their users were leaving scooters on city streets, they could accurately enforce parking rules and keep sidewalks clear–for instance, by forcing a rider to move their scooter to the correct parking spot before the system ends their ride. The problem is that scooters’ built-in GPS isn’t accurate enough to pinpoint locations that precisely–so scooter companies can’t enforce parking policies effectively.

Instead of using GPS, Fantasmo is using something called “Camera Positioning Standard.” CPS, which the company is developing as an open standard that it views as the successor to GPS for far more than scooter parking, uses a digital camera and artificial intelligence to discover the world around it, akin to the way self-driving cars or augmented reality games “see.” Using this tech, Fantasmo can match the surroundings of the scooter with the company’s 3D map databases, triangulating its precise position on the street using the visual cues around it. You can see how accurate this tracking is in this demonstration video:

“Our CPS solution provides the ability to find the position of a scooter accurately enough to know if a scooter is being ridden legally on the street or illegally on a sidewalk,” cofounder Jameson Detweiler writes on Medium. “This creates a better experience for everyone. Cities will have a wider variety of more sustainable mobility options. They will also have better intelligence about what is happening in the city. Riders and chargers will be able to find their scooters much faster. Scooter companies will have a better understanding of the location of their fleets, reduce losses, and, most importantly, provide the optimal scooter experience for riders, non-riders, and cities alike.”

Scooter companies must find a way to force riders to abide by parking and sidewalk laws if they want to continue operating in many cities; some cities like Beverly Hills, are already moving to ban the devices, and in cities like New York, scooters are preemptively illegal. In Los Angeles, the city has moved to limit them, just like San Francisco after months of debate. In European cities like Madrid, where these vehicle companies disembarked last summer to operate without regulation, they have been strictly limited (even though the police aren’t really enforcing these limitations or punishing violators). And unfortunately, parking is just one of many design problems these companies must tackle–in addition to accidents, data privacy issues, and pedestrian rights.

“Yay, it’s time for my annual performance review!” said no worker ever.

While the yearly assessment handed down from manager to staffer has become something for both parties to dread (and prompted some companies to abolish it entirely) the approach to appraise workers’ progress has a long history that’s ranged from practical to problematic.

There is no definitive source that points to the very first performance review. Some suggest that the Industrial Revolution’s focus on worker productivity may have contributed to formalizing a standard for judging how well people did their jobs based on their output alongside machines like the cotton gin and the spinning jenny. If so, that’s a dark part of the annual review’s history, as it can’t be separated from slave and child labor and the unsafe working conditions that plagued factory workers before unions were organized to protect them.

Flash-forward to WWI and WWII, when the military started using metrics, first to identify and dismiss poor performers and then to rank enlisted soldiers based on their potential to ascend to leadership.

In between the wars, in 1927, Elton Mayo, an Australian-born psychologist, implemented a socioeconomic experiment that studied the female employees of the Hawthorne Works factory of the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois. Their productivity was measured by changes in their hours, wages, rest periods, lighting conditions, organization, and degree of supervision and consultation to see what would affect the way they did their jobs. They found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that performance wasn’t tied to money, but to the fact that someone was paying attention to their conditions.

But that finding was short-lived, at least according to Peter Capelli and Anna Tavis. They reported in Harvard Business Review:

By the 1940s, about 60% of U.S. companies were using appraisals to document workers’ performance and allocate rewards. By the 1960s, it was closer to 90%. Though seniority rules determined pay increases and promotions for unionized workers, strong merit scores meant good advancement prospects for managers.

Theory X and Y

At first, they observed, giving feedback that focused on improving performance was an afterthought. But along came social psychologist Douglas McGregor, whose Theory X and Theory Y would change the approach to assessments. While Theory X suggested that no one really wants to work and therefore they need strict supervision, Theory Y holds that employees should be trusted and empowered. It was a radical departure of viewing workers and leadership. As such, managers and their staff were seen in a collaborative way and performance could be positively influenced by encouraging development. “The limits on human collaboration in the organizational setting are not limits of human nature but of management’s ingenuity in discovering how to realize the potential represented by its human resources,” McGregor concluded.

The rise of middle managers

By the 1960s, General Electric and other companies embraced this approach to the performance review and began implementing developmental feedback. However, when companies started to feel the crunch of inflation in the 1970s, they resumed appraising people in order to scale back merit raises. And under Jack Welch’s leadership, GE started ranking employees to promote top performers and pink-slip those who were just coasting.

As the decades passed, with more middle management having more direct reports at larger companies, the investment in individual performance reviews started to get out of hand. For example, by 2015 a report from the Harvard Business Review revealed that at Deloitte it took 1.8 million hours across the firm. And at CEB, managers reported 210 hours for appraisals (that translates to 5 weeks per year). Adobe scrapped the practice after calculating that 2,000 managers were in for some 80,000 hours when dealing with performance reviews. Talk about a counterproductive way to spend the workday.

But it wasn’t just the hours that put the performance review on deathwatch. As Capelli and Tavis noted, research proved that workers “would rather be told they were ‘average’ than given a 3 on a 5-point scale.”

Researchers at Kansas State University, Eastern Kentucky University, and Texas A&M also looked at how negative feedback during annual performance reviews affected employees and (shocker) it didn’t help them improve. But surprisingly, even positive feedback got misconstrued and failed to motivate.

As for the future of the performance review, the bad news is that it’s not totally going away. But as Capelli and Tavis point out, there is a better way. “Ideally, conversations between managers and employees occur when projects finish, milestones are reached, challenges pop up, and so forth–allowing people to solve problems in current performance while also developing skills for the future,” they write. “At most companies, managers take the lead in setting near-term goals, and employees drive career conversations throughout the year.” Sounds like a much more productive and empowering way for everyone to spend their time.

The only way to make people angrier than promising something and not delivering it is to offer something for free and then take it away. It’s true for babies. And it’s true for the users of internet services, too.

On November 1, Flickr’s new owner, SmugMug, announced changes to the photo-sharing service, which it acquired from Yahoo in April after years of neglect. Flickr Pro users, currently paying $50 a year, will receive a number of new features and upgrades, some immediately–like unlimited storage–and some coming between November and early 2019. (SmugMug raised the Flickr Pro subscription price shortly after acquisition; existing Pro subscribers pay the higher rate only on renewal.)

But the company also said users who don’t pay will lose the 1TB of storage that Yahoo ill-advisedly put in place in 2013. “At the time I’m sure they looked like fantastic decisions at Yahoo,” says SmugMug’s CEO, Don MacAskill, referencing the free 1TB and other changes Yahoo rolled out at the same time.

Starting in January, SmugMug will allow new free Flickr members to store up to 1,000 photos at up to 200MB each. Existing users with more than 1,000 pictures (or videos, which Flickr supports, though poorly) will have until February 5, 2019, to download them via a recently added tool that includes all comments and Flickr-specific data added to photos. After that, Flickr will start deleting photos from oldest to newest until just 1,000 remain in the account.

Some Flickr users who view the service as essentially a giant free hard drive in the sky may be unhappy with these changes, but MacAskill is okay with that. “I view Flickr as a community, not as a cloud-backup solution,” he says.

When news of the revamp broke, a minor hue and cry arose. But strikingly, it seemed mostly on behalf of other people. On social networks, photo forums, and Flickr’s community boards, the complaints largely focused on other users losing access to old photos if they weren’t aware the change was coming. Friends and relatives might even still be viewing images originally posted by people who have since passed on.

Many people also worried about what would happen to Creative Commons licensed photos that were taken by users who exceed the threshold and don’t pay for service. They’re a valuable source of imagery on every imaginable topic and are widely used (including here on FastCompany.com).

In the past, Flickr and other services have retained data even when a subscriber dropped out of a paid tier. Slack, for instance, offers a remarkable come-on: If you’re using its free tier, which provides access to only the most recent 10,000 messages, the company retains all the rest. That gives teams an incentive to convert from free to paid and regain all their old messages.

But a similar approach isn’t viable here. Yahoo tried to grab marketshare by offering an unsustainably large amount of storage to free users and making it up by displaying ads, and it didn’t work. (In 2013, a free terabyte seemed almost implausible; even today, it’s a head-snapper.) That was in line with the company’s history of never quite knowing what to do with Flickr, starting soon after it bought the photo-sharing phenom in 2005.

SmugMug’s goal is to move Flickr into the future, and as a small, self-funded company that states it doesn’t want to mine the habits, photos, or personal data of Flickr users to serve up contextual ads, it has a primary source of revenue: subscription fees from Pro users.

Free as in “free tier”

The internet’s freemium business model is supposed to work this way: A company has a valuable service offering that it wants people to pay for. Instead of creating a preview version with severely hobbled features or a time-limited trial period, it offers a free tier for indefinite use that’s often nearly as good as the deluxe flavor. However, it omits certain power features that serious, professional, and corporate users would gladly pay for.

A free tier may be useful enough for many people, and users at that level may even vastly outnumber paid recurring subscribers or people who pay a onetime fee. It’s a training ground for customers, who may decide to upgrade, and a tool to attract younger people–especially those still in school–who could make a personal or company decision later for paid adoption.

But a free tier has to be carefully calibrated. It can’t routinely irritate its revenue-free users so much that they just abandon it, it must require relatively few resources to deliver, and most importantly, it shouldn’t cannibalize paid offerings.

In 2013, Yahoo broke all the rules–and not in a good way–when it updated free and paid options, providing 1TB to free users. This 1TB decision leveled all users, removing any advantage to paying for a Pro account, while also attracting new members who had little interest in community–or ever paying. At that level, you could store 200,000 images at a reasonable photo file size of the day (about 5MB on average), or even 5,000 at the maximum supported (200MB). The company did offer an additional terabyte for $499 a year, and eventually restored a Pro tier for about $25 a year with minor benefits.

SmugMug’s own photo-sharing service, by contrast, has never offered a free tier since its founding in 2002–which made some veteran Flickr users a little nervous when the acquisition was announced in April. Would the company shut down free users? MacAskill didn’t know at the time exactly what the final plan would be. But he has consistently said that the community at Flickr is his focus, and users who don’t pay for a subscription are part of it.

SmugMug didn’t make its Flickr account changes on gut feeling feeling alone. MacAskill says that the SmugMug crunched numbers to come up with a threshold. He said that the 1,000 images shook out from the data: 97% of free-tier Flickr users have fewer than 1,000 images, while the vast majority of paid users have more than 1,000. There wasn’t a better sweet spot to pick.

MacAskill also pointed out that because modern smartphones and cameras can generate images that run into the tens of megabytes, 1,000 images and videos could represent tens of gigabytes of storage. That’s a lot to give away by industry standards, though Google Photos offers unlimited storage if you’re willing to let the service compress your images.

I asked MacAskill if he wasn’t at risk of excluding people who couldn’t pay $50 a year for a Pro account, and whether the benefit they received from and gave to Flickr’s community should be a factor. He had some data for this, too: Nearly everyone with more than 1,000 images, free and paid accounts alike, are shooting on pricey high-end smartphones–or mirrorless and DSLR cameras that start at $2,000 to $3,000. Such members should be able to pony up 50 bucks if they see value in Flickr.

But MacAskill is aware that for some people–especially in certain countries–the price of a Pro account may still be a hardship and might remove voices. He’s open to further tweaks to the new plan to accommodate such members of the community.

Images for the public good

MacAskill also expresses a commitment to work out Flickr’s role as a source of public domain and Creative Commons images. Nothing will change with the Commons, a collection of public-domain imagery from the Library of Congress and other institutions, started in 2008. MacAskill calls it a “national treasure.”

But he’s still exploring the broader questions relating to Flickr images licensed under various Creative Commons terms. These licenses allow individuals to choose terms for published items, such as allowing only non-commercial, unmodified use or permitting something close to free-rein public domain use.

Creative Commons images have been an important part of Flickr from the early days. The service hosts 400 million images marked with a CC license, but MacAskill didn’t provide a count of how many are in free accounts and at risk once the 1,000-photo limit kicks in. Because Flickr added web-based photo embedding a few years ago, photo deletion could have ripples across the internet.

“We’re very passionate about Creative Commons and the good that it has done for the world,” said MacAskill. In a recent post, Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley said the group was working closely with SmugMug to sort this issue out and has high hopes it can be resolved. Depending on the license, a third party could copy all CC-licensed images that would otherwise be deleted, and maintain them in a Pro account or, with SmugMug’s support, within the Commons.

When an issue came up on Nov. 1 about the state of the Internet Archive’s Flickr account, which isn’t marked as institutional, but holds 5.2 million images extracted from public-domain and other freely available titles, MacAskill moved to resolve it quickly. While he said it should be included in its general exemption for institutions for public good, he also donated $5,000–the cost of 100 years of Flickr Pro–directly to the Archive. (He also confirmed later that it was already in the exempt category.)

“We’re not trying to delete millions of photos,” said MacAskill, who has replied on forums and Twitter to people concerned on their own behalf and on that of others. The last thing he wants is people’s photos to disappear.

But, as he tweeted to Cory Doctorow, an editor at Boing Boing and a fierce defender of freely available work, “Given an unsustainable model or a sustainable model, which would you choose?”

“My mom always told me, if I don’t study well, I’ll end up as a scavenger. All they do is pick up garbage. They rely on garbage. It’s the only livelihood they know.”

It’s an insight that a young Filipino woman makes when realizing that her own job in technology is very much the same thing. Her position: Content moderator, one of perhaps thousands of human beings who scan, assess, and delete media of everything from beheadings to child pornography uploaded to services like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter each day. Her quota? 25,000 photos a day. Her rules? Dictated by corporations–but often vague at best.

This scene comes from The Cleaners, a documentary by German filmmakers Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block, who spent the last several years gaining access to Manila’s clandestine world of content moderation. The city has become Silicon Valley’s cleanup capital. As the Facebooks and Googles of the world outsource much of their content moderation to third-party companies, those companies hire these contractors abroad to actually do the work.

“It’s a really secretive industry,” says Block. “When someone is working for Facebook, they have to say they work for ‘The Honey Badger Project.’ They use codewords so no one knows they work for the clients.”

When the filmmakers began shooting the documentary in 2015, they spent the first eight months traveling back and forth between Berlin and Manila, just trying to track down the companies performing this labor, and then forge relationships with their employees to go on camera and talk about the work.

“They have private security firms to make sure no one talks to journalists. They took photos of our team with a warning and said, ‘If you talk to those guys you will be immediately fired,” Block recounts.

“We had to decide [how to film.] They have airport scanners in their offices, so it wasn’t at all possible to bring a hidden camera in. Even if we could, we wouldn’t have liked to do that,” says Riesewieck. “It wasn’t worth harming the workers, and it doesn’t make sense visually.” At best, The Cleaners would have been a GoPro documentary filmed in a backpack.

Instead, The Cleaners takes some creative liberties to tell the story, which turns Manila into an important character in the process. I’d estimate 90% of the film and its interviews are shot at night, with the shadowy city as its backdrop. This gives Manila a dystopian Gotham or Blade Runner look, the directors tell me, but it also highlights an important point about the job: When the sun is up in the U.S., that’s when Americans are posting the most on social media. So as a result, content moderators work the night shift.

The moderators themselves–all of whom are unnamed, some of whom are shot to carefully to mask their identity–do appear to be working in the film, inside a dark, empty office building. The film never reveals that this is not their real place of employment, but it is a suitable set piece all the same.

“We coincidently found a hidden, abandoned office where this work had been done, with all the workstations still set up. It was just left behind because the company changed the site,” says Riesewieck. “We rented it, and we could invite employees into this office without risking too much harm.”

Here, we see the workers make quick decisions over heinous images, filtering their own rationale through regulations that have been handed down to them. Hitting a green or red button determines whether an image sticks around or is deleted. Even this content moderator interface–while technically a re-creation for the film–is faithful to its source material.

“We precisely rebuilt the original moderation software according to data we got from several different insiders,” the directors explain. “So the content moderators in our film actually moderate in exactly the same way they do it during their shifts.”

The only difference is that the moderators speak aloud for our benefit, giving us a stream of consciousness that reveals the decision-making process. “This is Donald Trump in nude,” one worker narrates, while accessing the now famous painting by Illma Gore imagining his micropenis. “He’s not a strong enough leader to handle [sic]. That’s why his penis is somehow small. He’s not that manly enough to handle the huge task as a President of America. It’s delete. Why? It degrades Donald Trump’s personality so it must be deleted.”

In the view of this moderator, and perhaps the platform’s own protocols (neither the specific company nor its rules are revealed), Trump was being cyberbullied.

Through the course of the film, Riesewieck and Block don’t try to answer any big questions or offer a satisfying conclusion to their viewers, but they do very convincingly demonstrate how deep the problems of content moderation go. There is the immense personal toll and psychological trauma these workers face–each person has a story to tell about that one image they just can’t scrub from their mind.

“It seemed like it was a joke. We didn’t know if it was real. He was attempting to kill himself using a rope. It was live, not uploaded,” one moderator recounts. “Maybe thousands of viewers. There were comments like: ‘Don’t do it, don’t commit suicide!’ Others were joking: ‘Do it! Do it!’ As long as he hasn’t actually committed suicide, we’re not allowed to stop his stream. Because if we stop it, we’re the ones who get in trouble….When he started to get up on the chair, and he put the rope around his neck, that’s when we got nervous that he was going to go ahead with it. Then he killed himself.”

Even though the live stream is never shown, the film forces you to relive these memories right alongside the moderators in what turns out to be an exhausting hour and a half. The Cleaners also highlights the greater societal toll. Silicon Vally has handed powerful tools of censorship to a relative few people. Their guidelines are provided by profit-driven social media companies. And ultimately, no single person can ever have the immense, globe-spanning social and political context necessary to determine, say, whether that image is war journalism or ISIS propaganda. Is that video too terrible to see? Or should we all have to see some of this bad stuff, lest we allow Silicon Valley’s veneer of optimism to taint our terrible reality?

Riesewieck and Block assure me that they didn’t want this film to be one-sided–and indeed, some of the best perspective of the film is offered in an interview with Nicole Wong, a former policy maker Google and Twitter, who walks through complicated decisions like leaving the hanging of Saddam Hussein on YouTube.

But Facebook, Google, and Twitter are ultimately protected from face-to-face scrutiny throughout the film, because they all refused to take part in it. The closest we ever get to knowing what the Valley really thinks is through the mouthpieces of its lawyers, when summoned to a congressional hearing on content moderation. As you might expect, those lawyers don’t say much.

“The main approach of our film from the beginning, was to include [these companies], to have an open dialog on the topic. We didn’t want to bash companies. We wanted to think openly, what’s the problem of an open network?” says Block. “No one responded to our interview requests. That was very frustrating to us. Whenever we hear about Facebook, they present themselves very openly, to give everyone a voice. We experienced the opposite…there’s something like a cone of silence in Silicon Valley.”

The Cleaners is touring in select cities in the U.S. now. You can also see it on PBS’s Independent Lens on November 12, or on PBS.org starting November 13.

If you work for a large, established corporation–or even in a department that has historically been resistant to change–the notion of thinking or acting like a startup founder feels like a non sequitur. But the concept of intrapreneurship, the act of applying a startup-like mind-set and behaviors within an established corporate environment, can become a powerful tool in accelerating career mobility and shifting company culture.

While the defining characteristics of an entrepreneur–grit, passion, creativity, a will of steel, and the unwavering motivation to always shoot for the stars–may not come naturally to most of us, anyone looking to innovate and succeed can apply entrepreneurial attitudes and skills to achieve short- and long-term career goals.

As the director of talent at IAC, parent to both large technology companies and emerging players, I see firsthand the qualities of executives who rise to the top, and there are some consistent traits that map to those key ingredients of entrepreneurialism that cut across gender, race, religion, or academic background. These traits are what I look for as I’m hunting to fill that next big leadership role at one of our portfolio companies.

1. Look for challenges and run headfirst into them

The hallmark of an entrepreneur is a willingness to embrace risk. So, get comfortable being uncomfortable. Do what you fear most. Then do it again. And again. Hate public speaking? Start asking questions at your regular Town Hall. Think you’re bad with numbers? Volunteer to start helping with the budgeting process for your department. Get social anxiety at networking events? Grab a buddy and start making the rounds. As you start taking on meatier and business-focused obstacles, take note of how you rose to these, what the results were, and illuminate those results. Even if you didn’t overcome the challenge completely, you will come away with new skills and a reputation as having the ability and courage to do more.

2. Always act like the underdog

Being the incumbent has its advantages, but so does being forced to constantly punch above your weight. At larger companies, it’s important to be hyper-aware of competitive threats and quickly changing trends with a healthy dose of founder paranoia. Being an intrapreneur also means tapping in to that creativity to get things done quickly with very little resources. Though you may have the luxury of an adequate budget, spending money like it’s your own will help you be extra judicious in making sure your company gets the biggest bang for its buck. And document any cost savings for future discussion with decision makers.

3. Conflict is your friend

Founders fight for what they believe in. While you shouldn’t go looking for battles for the sake of a good argument, don’t shy away from tough, intellectually honest debate. This is often where the magic happens. Watch and learn from those who argue their point of view effectively, with passion, conviction, and kindness. Research, prepare, and practice your point of view, especially if you have to sell it. Always remain empathetic and self-aware (this includes knowing when to cut bait), but lean into opportunities where your knowledge, expertise, or access gives you a unique edge, and you can fight for something you believe in.

4. Be willing to unlearn what you thought you knew

Both entrepreneurs and corporate leaders can fall victim to hanging onto ideas they have an emotional attachment to, or processes they are comfortable with. Whether it’s allowing the passion for your product vision cloud reality or automatically falling in line with, “Well, this is the way we’ve always done things,” it can be difficult to let go of ideas or beliefs that you hold dear. We all collect handed wisdom throughout our careers, but highly effective leaders are constantly questioning both those assumptions and the status quo. Don’t be afraid to deprogram yourself or abruptly shift course. Don’t be afraid to contradict yourself if the circumstances and data call for it. Having a startup mentality means being able to accept change at a fast pace, and your ability to succeed relies on the fact that nothing can be sacred.

5. Embrace a non-linear path

There are countless examples of leaders whose career paths are anything but ordinary or expected. Meaningful progress isn’t always a straight line, and your path getting where you want to go might take you somewhere else entirely. When practicing a startup mentality, the willingness to put aside or revisit what you thought you wanted might very well open a diverse array of opportunities. Be focused in your approach and establish goals, but with a degree of balance, as rooting yourself to narrow or specific goals may close you off to potential opportunity.

Sharfi Farhana is director of talent at IAC.

Xinhua, China’s state-run press agency, has created two virtual “composite anchors” that use artificial intelligence to read the news, the South China Morning Post reports. The two virtual anchors, one for the Chinese language and one for the English language, combine the images and voices of real human anchors with artificial intelligence.

Xinhua is boasting that their new artificial intelligence news anchor is a world’s first and that “he” is now considered a regular member of the reporting team and, even better, never needs a break. Since the AI anchor can work 24 hours a day, Xinhua says that means production costs associated with human anchors can be reduced and efficiency improved.

Xinhua also says that the virtual anchor can self-learn from watching live broadcasting videos and “can read texts as naturally as a professional news anchor.” But we’re not so sure about that last part. Take a look at the video below and you’ll see his voice sounds highly synthesized.

Still, the achievement is fascinating, creepy, and horrifying at the same time. In a country where the press is heavily censored, one wonders if China has more ambitious plans to roll out more virtual news anchors, replacing human ones who might not always toe the party line.

The country’s second-largest automaker has announced it is buying the San Francisco-based electric scooter rental startup, reports Reuters. Spin is only two years old, yet Ford will spend $200 million to acquire the company. Though some cities have found scooter startups to be more trouble then they are worth, the micro-mobility sector is only expected to grow as urbanites look for new alternatives to get them from one place to the next.

But spending $200 million to acquire Spin doesn’t look like that much when you consider the fact that scooter companies Lime and Bird have already received $450 million and $400 million in funding, respectively. As for the vision Ford has for Spin, Sundeep Madra, head of the car company’s Ford X startup incubator, said that Ford plans on expanding Spin over the next 18 months, rolling out from 32 markets to more than 100 in the U.S. alone. Marcy Klevorn, president of Ford’s mobility unit, also notes that the acquisition of Spin “fills a gap in our mobility portfolio” by providing “accessible and affordable transportation” in both cities and on college campuses.

Over the past few years, multiple startups have tried to take the hassle out of scheduling meetings. Calendar tools like Meetingbird and Calendly let users create meeting slots for attendees to choose from, while virtual assistants like X.ai can schedule entire meetings on the user’s behalf.

Now former Facebook executives Timothy Campos and Burc Arpat have launched a new startup called Woven to take another crack at the problem.

“If you look at Calendly or X.ai or some of the other applications that are trying to help people solve the scheduling problem, they’re not calendars,” says Campos, who was Facebook’s CIO from 2010 to late 2016. “Really, this is the only product that I’m aware of that puts [calendars and scheduling features] together.”

To schedule an event through Woven’s app or desktop website, you can either create one from scratch or pick from a list of “Suggested” events, which uses natural language processing to scan your email inbox for meeting requests. You can then ask Woven to suggest some times that work with your schedule.

Woven then sends an email to the other attendees, asking them to pick one of your suggested times. They can also open a link to Woven’s website and suggest alternative times, which Woven will check against your own calendar. (If all attendees are using Woven, the app will suggest mutually available times from the start.)

“Because we’ve integrated the scheduling experience and the calendar experience, we have much more of the context of what the user is trying to do,” Campos says.

Still, Campos says scheduling is just the beginning of what Woven hopes to offer. Users can already apply tags and private notes to their events, and the plan is to support attachments and third-party app integration in the future. Woven is also planning to offer analytics tools to users and organizations, turning users’ schedules into insights on whether they’re making good use of meeting times.

“We don’t see ourselves just as a scheduling tool,” Campos says.