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Today in Tabs: Wee, Sleekit, Cow'rin Tabbsie

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The most striking thing about iPhone 6 release day is how the failure states of communism and capitalism look identical:


via the Daily Mail (left) and Meredith Frost (right)

Also Today in Lines:

Today in Nae: Yesterday Scotlandvoted that there can continue to be only one. In a less well-covered referendum question, Scotland also voted that no, bloggers are not journalists. Farhaddidn't see what the big deal was, when there are really interesting things going on. David Cameron, although granted a temporary stay of execution by this outcome, is still a dick.

The Dot Biz: Obviously Apple's ok (though U2, not so much) but what's going on elsewhere in the dot biz? Larry Ellison is stepping down as Oracle CEO in order to spend more time pursuing his hobby, Evil. He leaves the company in the hands of co-CEOs named "Hurd" and "Catz" which has to be some kind of a parting U+1F595? If you want to get rich like Larry, perhaps Shark Tank is your ticket? Let Jia Tolentino disabuse you of that notion. Speaking of Jia, she's the new features editor at Jezebel (also now featuring 100% more Emma Carmichael) the announcement of which was greeted with delightful shade by Carmichael's former employer, real feminist blog The Hairpin. Yes I know that wasn't business news, but counterpoint: I don't care.

Today in Kevin: the gig economy screws its workers to no one's surprise. Here's a WordPress site made by some midwesterner that you can pay $9,000 to join if you have an extra $9,000 in your "being unbelievably basic" budget. A new startup is ruining email bounce messages, which I'm shocked to find even could be ruined. RIP Paul Ford, he died doing what he loved: "working." And David Brooksapparently discovered that human people have friends. "Come be my friend, fellow meat-person," said Brooks, spreading his mandibles in a show of congenial welcome, "Let us engage in sleepunders and create mutual physical and monetary benefit!"

I've hardly written anything today but it still feels like a lot of work, so let's see what the intern's got for us.

TODAY'S INTERN TAB, by BIJAN STEPHEN

I am the Drake of Tabs. I know this is true because a bot told me so.

Bots won't ever give you up, they'll never let you down, and they'll never rick roll you-unless, of course, they've been programmed to. To me, they represent strides toward a more perfect humanity.

Which, I guess, is why Botinder exists. It's Tinder, but with a crucial difference. You can set it to auto-like every single user. At speed. Makes this dude look like a chump, tbqf.

Anyway, Britton Green, random internet man, had this to say about Botinder: "Does what it says it does."

I, for one, welcome our bot overlords. Bring 'er home, Tab Daddy.

Thanks Bijan. This doesn't mean you get to stop manually liking everyone on my Tinder though. I would never replace you with a bot, even though I could. Easily.

Today's Headline Showdown: XOJane's "I Pooped Someone Else's Bed and Survived the Humiliation" vs. The Daily Californian's "'Cock' Doesn't Need To Go To Great Lengths To Please"

Today's Tumblr:Mies Van Der Rozay

Today's Song: The Thermals, "Back to the Sea"

~If you want a picture of the future, imagine a tab stamping on a human face - forever.~

Today in Tabs is brought to you by FastCoLabs and email newsletter which is the future of all media. If you'd like, you can follow me on Twitter @rustyk5 or the lower-volume @TodayinTabs. Have a weekend!


Glitch-Face Is The New Selfie

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The omnipresent "selfie" has some pretty particular, pretty annoying visual characteristics. We've grown accustomed to the unnatural 45-degree angle that thins the face and exaggerates the eyes (which are usually eerily deadpan, focused on maneuvering into the aforementioned thinning angle). Selfie aficionados know their most flattering and flattening Instagram filter. It's not just a self-portrait, it's an avatar, a self-made and self-modified icon, and it's not particularly realistic.

How do we deal with this? Well, we could grunt along to some generalizing thinkpiece about "millennials," or we could rejoice in another phenomena: The slew of user-friendly apps, programs, and websites which let you distort and glitch your selfie.

We've assembled a few of the best and the freshest for your perusal. These include browser-enabled webcams created by artists, apps for hiding from facial recognition software, and basic tools. These could have multiple uses for digital imaging, but let's not kid ourselves--you're going to take a picture of your face with them all. But that's okay. It's fun to observe certain aesthetic trends of digital art being so readily translated for mass consumption. So go on and pixel-drift, collage your face, and dissolve your features into a myriad of RGB shadows. It's pretty easy and it's a lot more fun to look at.

How Sephora Discovered That Lurkers Are Also Its "Superfans"

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Brand-sponsored online communities are a big part of the Internet these days. Organizations as varied as gaming companies, soft drink makers, and nonprofits invest millions of dollars into getting their customers off Facebook and onto standalone websites and apps. And they're following in the steps of an unlikely pioneer: Cosmetics firm Sephora. Years ago, Sephora discovered that building online communities for customers had unexpected benefits.

In 2010, Sephora opened an online community called Beauty Talk in collaboration with a marketing firm called Lithium. The new site did more than just give Sephora customers a place to trade beauty tips and network. Users' accounts are linked to their social media presences and Sephora loyalty cards, giving the beauty company all sorts of access to deep user metrics Facebook and Twitter can't offer. Although Sephora would not give exact metrics as of publishing time, Lithium confirmed over 1 million monthly page views for the site as of September 2014.

Michael Wu, Lithium's chief scientist, told Co.Labs in a telephone conversation that Lithium's platform has over 400 metrics it tracks user engagement with--which includes everything from content users view and post to aggregate benchmarks of how users behave on community sites. This means that clients such as Sephora, HP, Lenovo, Lego, Virgin Atlantic, and others can learn about customers' social relationships and shopping preferences with much greater detail than they would on Facebook or Twitter.

In Lithium's case, these detailed metrics led to finding unexpected insights about user behavior. For one thing, one of the best indicators of long-term engagement on a site is a user modifying their profile. Modifying a profile, it seems, signals engagement in sticking around a community site.

After looking through metrics, Sephora's team found that users of the bulletin board spent 2.5 times more on the company's products than the average customer. Not only that, but they discovered the site's heaviest users spent an average of 36.5 hours on Beauty Talk weekly.

These "superfans" also spent more than 10 times at Sephora than the average customer. Because they loved the brand so much, they naturally gravitated toward the company's board--and gave Sephora a brand new way to conduct outreach to their biggest customers.

One thing that surprised Wu was the discovery that Sephora and other brands can predict who a superfan is before they begin responding to every message and every thread. This came through a counterintuitive discovery.

Wu and his team thought that the easiest way to predict superfans is to look for people who signed up for an account on Beauty Talk or another client's site, and then immediately started heavily posting. But it turned out that wasn't the case--these users tended to have an immediate problem that needed resolving, and they then moved on from the site once it was solved.

Instead, it turns out that superfans can be predicted based on their lurking. The more a user logs into a site day after day, week after week, month after month, the more likely they are to become an active superfan. Posting activity had relatively little to do with it.

While Lithium is one of the largest companies in the business of making message boards for companies--they make their profits through a combination of platform fees and usage/page views--they're not the only ones. Competitors like Jive Software and Buddy Media offer similar services designed to help companies identify their biggest online influencers and deliver more detailed customer information than Facebook or Twitter offer alone.

Wu told me that in the case of his company, the message boards they create broadly fall into three categories: Sales and marketing (Beauty Talk), peer support (Microsoft's Skype Community), and innovation (Verizon crowdsourcing new functionality). User behavior changes broadly across all three of them.

Boards in the sales and marketing vertical tend to have long message threads with relatively short message length that stretch out over time. Peer support boards instead have initially long, detailed messages and threads that end as soon as a problem is resolved. Innovation communities tend to have a lot of upvoting and downvoting, and, as Wu puts it, a lot of "voting and validation." Because users leave extensive trails of digital breadcrumbs as they lead digital lives that cover everything from their geographic locations to their shopping habits, it produces valuable insights when figuring out everything from targeted advertising to what to stock in which stores.

In the meantime, for ordinary Internet users, that online forum you're using for tech support or product tips? There's a marketing team behind it.

Why VCs Use Crowdfunding To Make Sure Their Hardware Startups Pay Out

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Last year, the hardware startup Canary set up an Indiegogo campaign for its wireless home security system. Expecting to raise $100,000, it ended up raising nearly $2 million, approaching 2,000% percent of its funding goal.

What you may not have realized unless you read the fine print is that Canary already had a solid sum of money on hand before the campaign ever started. The company had raised $1.2 million in seed money from Two Sigma and Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. This Indiegogo funding round seemed like icing on the cake. Or was it?

It turns out that hardware investors have a soft spot for startups that opt for crowdfunding. In Canary's case, its seed investors were ecstatic that its Indiegogo campaign went so well, making their investment in the company that much sweeter. To whit: Khosla Ventures led a $10 million Series A investment round after the Indiegogo campaign.

It turns out that running a successful crowd funding campaign costs money. In fact, Canary raised the seed money to ensure the its Indiegogo campaign went smoothly. The funding helped bring on developers and solidify its product's design in time for the campaign's presentation.

"Once we did [rapid prototyping] it was easier to then take all that work and plug it into a site like Indiegogo, where we could tell a great story, figure out our product-market fit, make sure that there was a big enough market for them, and then fund the first round of actual product," says Andrew Kippen, head of marketing at Canary.

Canary's wireless home security device.

The crowdfunding campaign gave Canary a straight path from presenting the initial product to selling it in the marketplace. This may or may not have been possible with seed money alone--depending on the amount, it might not even fund a company long enough to manufacture the first set of prototypes.

It just doesn't happen all the time, says Colin Beirne, partner at Two Sigma Ventures, one of the investors in Canary's seed round. Usually, guaranteeing funding for manufacturing requires more capital, which is invested later in a startup's life. So that's where crowdfunding comes in handy.

"The way we see it is that crowdfunding funds the product, and then VC funding funds the company," Kippen says.

The seed round typically does the job of growing the company and giving it the resources to get the right market feedback and solidify the product's design. Manufacturing is just a glimmer in the eye of the investors at that point. "As an investor you have a sense of the amount of seed capital required to build the team and move toward manufacturing, which is independent of any money that might be raised during a crowdfunding campaign," says Beirne.

Crowdfunding campaigns give an advantage to a startup because they speed up this market feedback process. And crowdfunding sites make it simple to put the product's technical specs up for users to peruse and have a video at the ready.

The other huge benefit of the crowdfunding round is it takes the guesswork out of how much product to manufacture and at what cost. Without crowdfunding, a VC-backed company might drag its feet on deciding price points and initial product volumes when conducting research through traditional means.

In essence, Canary's Indiegogo campaign was a plug-and-play storefront. With its seed funders' resources in hand, the Canary team could attract its first real customers, while unlocking even more funds from lay citizens.

"It's not really crowdfunding. It's a presale, actually," says Charlie O'Donnell, partner at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Canary's other seed funder.

According to O'Donnell, crowdfunding is tantamount to a marketing channel with very friendly financial terms. It gives the startup a way to gauge how much to charge for its hardware product. And the capital is just a side benefit of the massive market feedback the company gathers from its backers. It takes the pressure off of both the seed investors and the company to figure out how to fund the manufacturing stage.

"We don't have to put out $1 million to make $2 million worth of product because our customers are willing to front that for us," says O'Donnell.

Indiegogo has helped several VC-backed hardware companies, like Canary, run successful crowdfunding campaigns.The wearables startup Misfit came into its Indiegogo campaign with seed funding. Afterwards, it attracted $15 million for its next round of funding. The company Muse also started its campaign after receiving seed money for its brain-sensing headband. Both Misfit and Muse have led some of Indiegogo's more successful hardware campaigns.

In just this past year, Indiegogo's tech category has grown by 1,000%. It's a category that mainly consists of hardware products, ranging from connected devices and wearables to robotics and drones.

"For them, oftentimes what they use Indiegogo for is to demonstrate market traction to get user feedback, to create evangelists. It helps investors. It helps to de-risk those investments," says Kate Drane, the design, technology, and hardware lead of Indiegogo.

Drane increasingly sees more seed investors urging their fledgling hardware startups to seek crowdfunding after they dole out the first check. After the crowdfunding round, these companies have little problem attracting their next round of funding.

In Drane's view, there are three types of campaigners. First, there's the hobbyist, who develops a product in his or her free time and wants to mainly finish it out for personal reasons. Second, there's the person who is already developing a product at a company and wants to refine it. Finally, there's a company that wants to launch a product and uses a site like Indiegogo to get to market.

It's this third type of campaigner that has really made products more visible in the hardware space. Crowdfunding is a way for these startups to gain market traction, demonstrate user interest, and get user feedback. It also reduces the risk companies take in moving into manufacturing.

"We really started seeing growth in this category in October 2012," says Drane.

At the time, Muse was running its campaign. Since then, companies like Misfit, Jibo, and Solar Roadways have led successful campaigns, hitting the $2 million mark. Skully, a smart motorcycle helmet, is currently live on Indiegogo and is close to joining this two-million-dollar club.

An investor told Drane that he appreciates it when startups do Indiegogo campaigns because the company could report detailed consumer feedback to him. One company could tell him what the open rates were whenever it sent out an email. The high engagement rates and analytics he saw from the campaign impressed him.

"It's not only the money, it's not only the amount of funders, it's not only the coverage that you get. That is part of it. It's those data points as well," says Drane.

The data can help a company put down a solid strategy to move forward with manufacturing. One way to do it is by surveying backers after a campaign. The 1:Face Watch startup did just this. It leveraged its engagement channel to figure out how to scale its manufacturing plan for mass production.

"By the way that people were contributing to those campaigns, they were able to make relatively smart decisions about the different scales," says Drane. For 1:Face Watch, if they sold five blue, 15 red, and 85 black watches, they were eventually able to turn those initial sales into percentages to estimate mass production categories.

Now that Canary is preparing for mass production this fall, its Indiegogo campaign is proving its worth. The concrete sales numbers have made life easy.

"For a hardware company, you don't have the luxury of putting out an initial version of the product and then iterating quickly, and continuing every month, shipping out a different version when the market gives you feedback on what they did like or don't like," says Beirne. "The hardware innovation cycles are longer."

Since its crowdfunding round, the Canary team has been finishing up its internal and external testing on its product's final design. Indiegogo's campaigning structure let Canary condense its market research and initial sales efforts into the course of one month. So the team spent its time on the thing that matters the most--turning out a high-quality product.

But neither Beirne's nor O'Donnell's seed investments in Canary depended on the outcome of its crowdfunding campaign. They simply saw the company as a good investment.

Beirne recognizes crowdfunding's perks that market research and production estimates get fast-tracked. Nonetheless, when deciding to invest in Canary, he was confident that the company would have been able to demonstrate its market value well, with or without crowdfunding. O'Donnell agrees.

"For me, actually, the thing that Indiegogo proved was that, for a former Israeli army security defense guy, and a hardware geek, they were actually pretty good at marketing!" O'Donnell says.

Can Longform Become A Netflix For Journalism?

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If you consider yourself a reader, you've probably heard the web is destroying your ability to focus and financially crippling the people that write for you. But Aaron Lammer, cofounder and editor of Longform, thinks it doesn't have to be that way.

"This is a golden age for writing on the web," says Lammer. "There are more publishers than there ever were, more people writing, more great stuff than there's ever been."

The problem, he says, is the awful UX of reading on the web today--which in turn creates a cascading effect of broken feedback loops and ill-adapted business models. Lammer and his cofounder Max Linsky hope to change all that, starting with their new Longform for iOS app, released last week to coincide with iOS 8.

What's fascinating about Longform isn't its success--people have always loved to read--but how it went from a fairly simple website to an ambitious world-changing platform by nothing more than user feedback. No abstract theories about "the way we read" or big-name partnerships or new devices. Just the simple power of going iteratively from MVP to a product people want, a concept that seems particularly difficult to grasp for the rest of the top-down world of editorial publishing.

"We know people want to read this stuff, but many of them gravitate to books on the Kindle, since it's so simple," he says. "The idea of having a rich media diet drawn from the web is just too hard for many people."

This was the observation that launched Longform in 2010, as a web-based curation service. Lammer and his cofounders would post three or four high-quality, in-depth articles from around the web that day. "The first year was: How does one operate a professional website?" says Lammer. Meanwhile, they were getting flooded with emails from enthusiastic daily users with all sorts of product suggestions. More gaming content! More international writers!

"Knowing these people were committed, it gave us a blank check: What else can we do for the user? What else would they like?"

They decided to prototype their next step with two new products: The first was a "rinky-dink" iPad app which, at $5 a pop and 60,000 downloads, helped them raise enough cash to stave off a big seed round. Secondly, they began conducting their own interviews with writers whose stories got popular on Longform, and turning those interviews into podcasts. Today, after 110 episodes, the podcast averages over 40,000 downloads per installment.

"The podcast worked because people get attached to writers," says Lammer, "but there wasn't a good way to get behind the scenes and see how they work." Years of user feedback began to crystallize. "We saw how much people identified with the writers, and we thought the writer was the most common through-line."

Hence the big innovation in the new Longform app: It allows you to follow individual writers' work, no matter which site it's published on. And without all the noise you'd get following that person on Twitter or Facebook.

"If you love an article, the most consistent thing you'll like next is whatever that writer publishes," says Lammer. "If you build up enough, say 20 writers that you really like, you've basically just built your dream publication, in the sense than an editor would think of it," he says. "And that's what we see people doing."

With 150,000 articles on the platform, you'd think Longform might shift to algorithmic curation, like many of the services that obliquely compete with it--but Lammer says that's the wrong approach.

"We're sitting on a lot of reader data, but we're careful about how much we expose that in the app," he says. "If you put a smoking fireball with a '340 Likes' next to an article, that affects what you want to read. We're saying: Listen to the team of editors, not the smoking fireball."

If Lammer and Linsky succeed at building a platform for all English-language articles, the way Netflix or Spotify did for their respective media, it could put writers in the same position of creative control as their counterparts in music, film, or TV. Even writers not associated with a major magazine or newspaper could find traction on a platform like Longform. But Lammer won't start building those features until he sees proof.

"If we're so popular that we're skewing publishing like that, then I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it," he says. "But I think the lesson for publishers would be: Put your best foot forward. Publish less bullshit."

Smart Sensors Let You Monitor Your Home Any Way You Want

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Lots of smart home products are Internet-powered replacements for appliances you already have in your home: lights and air conditioners you can control from your smartphone or cooking appliances that know when you want dinner.

But instead of making replacements for existing appliances, Notion is developing sensor pods that work alongside what you already have in your home, monitoring their orientation and acceleration, along with ambient light, sound, and moisture.

That lets them trigger a notification when a door or window opens, a room gets hot or cold, a propane tank gets low or a smoke detector sounds, without having to replace lock, thermostat, fuel, or alarm infrastructure. Or, says Notion, the sensor pods, each of which is equipped with the full set of sensing ability, can be applied in as many other ways as customers can think of.

The company's founders initially set out about two years ago to make a smart smoke detector, says CEO Brett Jurgens, after his cofounder Ryan Margoles came home from work to find his dog startled by a low-battery alarm.

"The battery was low, and there was that beep every 30 seconds," he says. "His dog was freaking out--destroyed some of the house."

Margoles, who has a background in engineering and is now Notion's CTO, lived in walking distance from his workplace and could have easily saved his furniture and his dog's peace of mind if the alarm could have texted or emailed him when its battery was running low.

"We actually set off close to two years ago to make the world's best smoke alarm," says Jurgens. But, though he acknowledges Nest later had success with its Protect alarms, they quickly came to think it would be hard to enter the smoke detector market at a higher price than homeowners are used to paying, especially since most people wouldn't even think to upgrade a working alarm.

"Making people replace their smoke alarm isn't something they're accustomed to doing," he says.

So, the two set out to make a more versatile piece of equipment. The current design, which has raised more than $100,000 in an ongoing Kickstarter campaign, consists of a power-adaptor-size hub and a set of sensors shaped roughly like hockey pucks.

The battery-powered sensors can be placed around a house or apartment to detect light, sound, water leaks, and other changes in the home, and the hub plugs in and communicates with Notion's cloud servers via Wi-Fi or cell signal.

Cell connectivity--which will allow the hubs to send brief updates via SMS--helps differentiate Notion's systems from other home sensor products and is especially valuable to backers who want to monitor for leaks and other problems in vacation homes that sit idle during the off season, since wired Internet connections are often disabled when the houses aren't occupied, he says.

Users would have to pay a monthly fee for the cell connection on a carrier to be determined, but Jurgens says the cost should be relatively low, since the devices will only need to send and receive text messages, not voice calls or cell data.

Notion plans to ship the first hubs and sensors to beta testers in April, then ship production models to backers in July.

"People are really understanding the value behind a really small sensor that you can place pretty much anywhere you can think of," says Jurgens, who previously worked in product development at UrgentRx, a startup making pocket-size packets of over-the-counter medication.

The sensors can send notifications to users through smartphone apps or trigger other actions through an open API. The company's been accepted into Apple's HomeKit smart home program, so for users who do have other smart appliances, the sensors should also be able to send them signals, Jurgens says.

For example, Jurgens says, some users have expressed interest in essentially using the sensors as second thermostats, placing them in rooms that get especially hot or cold.

And other potential customers have proposed uses the founders never would have thought of, he says.

"Somebody had horses, and they wanted to know if they could put sensors out in the barn to detect certain high-pitched noises to know that a horse is going into labor," he says. "That's not something I'd thought about before."

Today in Tabs: Monkey Business

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Good afternoon! Let's take a look at some bad journalism, shall we? On Friday, NY Times TV columnist Alessandra Stanley called Shonda Rhimesan Angry Black Woman. I'm not sure what else that column says because I'm just scanning it like "angry black woman... angry black woman... not classically beautiful... ok lol." The internet wasnotkeen, nor was Rhimes herself. But great news! Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan says that we are "correct to protest this story"! I don't know about you, but I was certainly concerned that everyone protesting the story may not, in actual fact, have been correct to do so. But no! Sullivan can confirm that the story "delivered [its] message in a condescending way that was - at best - astonishingly tone-deaf and out of touch," which is clearly a rarity for the paper of record. Sullivan gets to the bottom of things though, and finds that, according to Stanley, the fault lies with "the Twitter culture... with a reference to 140 characters." Good 2 know thx.

Weekend Twitter somehow got a hold of this old book review by Jonathan Franzen and mauled it like a starving sled dog that just found an ancient crate of pemmican beneath the receding snowpack. The Times also ran this editorial about VIP party culture which concludes that it's viciously exploitative but also ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Meanwhile an increasingly desperate Maureen Dowd (for what) lies on the floor keening "please love me pleeeeease I'm so cool this is all so cool..." Erstwhile Al Jazeera English columnist Sarah Kendziorquit on Saturday alleging that she was discouraged from doing research and told that all her editors want is "hot takes." Al Jazeerareleased a statement addressing some alternate-universe version of her complaints. Meanwhile left-wing media Twitter got real mad, as they always do when Kendzior appears.

When you follow the tabs, you can't help but become something of an Elizabeth Wurtzel connoisseur. At her worst, she can crank out the very best of tabs. So it's hard not to be disappointed by her Sunday Times tab this weekend about her upcoming marriage, which was clearly edited by someone with a functional grasp of the English language. Yes, it is still self-absorbed and tedious, but it lacks that layer of genuinely insane disregard for basic communication that characterizes Wurtzel's finest tabbing. I give it a C-.

But this is all just prelude to today's worst journalist, Charlo Greene, former reporter for KTVA News in Anchorage Alaska. Greene quit on-air, after revealing that she secretly owned the Alaska Cannabis Club, an organization that she reportedly used as a source in some of her on-air reports about marijuana legalization. So a terrible journalist commits numerous ethical breaches and then very publicly screws over all of her co-workers, walking out on them in the middle of a live broadcast. What's next? An Indiegogo fundraiser, of course! This tab has been brought to you by Indiegogo:When you absolutely, positively must give money to someone terrible.

But Good Journalism Too Tho: Sorry this is all just "Rusty reads the Sunday Times with you" today, I don't know how that happened, but the best weekend tab by far is Kevin Spacey's House of Cards co-star Matt Baion what happened to Gary Hart in 1987. Turns out that for an actor, this Bai fellow can really write! Caity Weaver goes deep on #buttghazi. The Home Depot data breach makes the Target hack look like... well, a smaller but still really bad hack. Leah Reich on how to detoxify the web is good, and part of a great (and now blissfully Milo-free!) issue of Kernel about building a better internet. Also don't miss the Mallory Ortberg interview because she's amazing.

Eater relaunched and, let's see, how about I just show you this one random story from it for no special reason at all. Netflix's spoilers site is good but I won't tell you how it ends. And Mitch McConnellis an Otherkin turtle.

I'm clearly scraping the bottom of my barrel here, fortunately we have the three-breasted Florida woman of interns here at Tabs. Bijan what do you have for us?

TODAY'S INTERN TAB, by BIJAN STEPHEN

My favorite thing about Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" is its origin: The poem's 111 words-quoted everywhere, by everyone-were initially composed in a sonnet-writing competition with Shelley's friend, Horace Smith. Apparently sonnet-writing competitions weren't rare in those days; and now, all that's left of Smith's poetic reputation are his two losing stanzas, which now go by "On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below".

All of this is to say: Nothing lasts. Your reputation could rest on a meaningless pissing contest you once had with a talented friend. Or worse.

And so here's today's tab, courtesy of Etsy: Black Chocolate Co. will make you a life-sized, 1.5kg, anatomically correct chocolate skull for a cool £68.00. Apparently they stay edible for up to 6 months (!) when kept in a cool, dry area-longer, probably, than it took Horace Smith to establish his lasting legacy.


nom skulls

Memento mori, ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, tantus labor non sit cassus. Tabs will live forever, though. And we will too. Right, Rusty?

Sure kid, sure. Look upon my tabs ye mighty, and despair.

Late Breaking:The Wire is being spun back in to the Atlantic. More on this tomorrow, probably.

Today's Song: Trent Reznor released a preview of the "Gone Girl Soundtrack" and I want to listen to a lot more of it. [via Lindsey Weber]

~Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the tab will be closed for you.~

Today in Tabs is brought to you by Fast Company Labs and/or email newsletter, for your convenience. Follow me @rustyk5 if you think you've got the guts in your blood.

Test-Rifting The Oculus Crescent Bay VR Headset

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I look over a gothic cityscape from atop a tall building, a bridge and a billboard are behind me and cars go by a dizzying distance below. Then I'm an explorer on an alien world, trying to communicate with a wide-eyed alien that has two thumbs per hand. But it's standing in a museum and seeing a towering T-rex coming toward me when I really feel it--the creators of Oculus Rift call this sense of being lost in the experience "presence."

Oculus Rift's new Crescent Bay headset prototype, unveiled this weekend at the company's Oculus Connect conference, shows that mainstream virtual experiences are almost a reality.

"The most important moment of my life in VR was when I saw this kind of quality experience. It was the time where I knew VR was finally going to work. Not just for me, but for everybody," says Brendan Iribe, CEO of Oculus. "That switch flipped in the back of my head that said you really are there in this virtual space."

The Oculus Crescent Bay headset prototype

Crescent Bay is one iteration above the tens of thousands of Developer Kit 2 versions the Oculus Rift has been sending out since July. The changes are incremental, but add up. Oculus wouldn't share any specs about the screen that is being used, which is made by Samsung. But Epic Games, which made the last part of the demo, confirmed it was running at 90 frames per second. That is triple the number of images per second that television shows are filmed in.

Three-dimensional audio has been integrated into the headset, adding directionality to the sound effects. And despite the addition of over-the-ear headphones, the head mount is lighter and has a more comfortable shape.

The camera capturing my movement sees a larger volume, which means the imaginary boundary where the camera stops working is much bigger than before. This allows me to move around the virtual space, walking for several feet in any direction, as well as stretching low to the ground. This freedom of movement inside the digital world seen through the headset makes it feel like a real place.

"The quality of the experience is good enough that it could ship as a product and we wouldn't be ashamed of it, but there is still a lot of last-minute tweaking that needs to go on," Oculus founder Palmer Luckey tells Fast Company. "The optics are not final, the ergonomics still have some issues, but overall it is getting very close."

Oculus created a variety of scenes to show what the headset is capable of--you stand inside a submarine, watch a velociraptor, examine an insect at a microscopic level, go camping with some animals in a field, look down at a futuristic map UI, examine a papercraft town up close, float through a Tron-esque cyber-world, and ending with a walk through a destructive firefight between a SWAT team and a towering robot in slow motion. There are moments during the demos when you forget it is a digital creation that is static.

The author of this post, Kevin Ohannessian, tries on the Crescent Bay prototype.

You want to interact with the environment, but can't. I wanted to travel through the world and not just circle around the space that the camera allows. What is over the hill on that alien world? What other creatures can be found in that museum? This would require a game controller, which the demo didn't use. And I was tempted to grab bannisters, turn doorknobs to open doors, or move the paper model pieces. But Oculus is not showing any sort of motion controller yet, though Luckey has stated in the past that Oculus R&D is making an input device. But getting the headset right is the first step toward building a VR ecosystem.

Palmer Luckey on stage at the 2014 Oculus Connect event

As great as these demos were, Crescent Bay is only a prototype. Most consumers will never use it and only a handful of AAA developers will get to use it to make games. The rabid fans and indie game makers will have to stick with their now obsolete DK2 headsets. CES is around the corner, and who knows what Oculus will reveal then.

"When people look at the history of VR, at decades of not working, to suddenly Oculus launching on Kickstarter in 2012, then showing something like Crescent Bay which delivers presence and largely eliminates motion sickness two years later," says Iribe, "to shipping a product some short amount of time after that, it's going to feel like VR came out of nowhere and took off."


A Visual Guide To North Korea's Totalitarian Operating System

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Last month a paper run by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) reported that the Chinese Academy of Engineering is set to unveil a new operating system in October that will replace the use of Windows on all government computers in the country--with the aim of seeing the new OS on most consumer PCs within a few years as well. The official spin is that the country is pushing devices that run software that enables them to use less energy, but many reports suggest the real reasons are twofold. First, that China would have an easier time monitoring their citizens if they controlled the development of their desktop OS, and second, that the NSA scandal has made the country extremely nervous about the perceived ease with which the U.S. government can compromise existing computer systems.

While it's a bit isolationist for a country to have its own proprietary OS, there is a precedent. To find it, one need look no further than Beijing's neighbor to the east, North Korea. The secretive country has used its own proprietary desktop OS, called Red Star, since 2003. Although owning a personal computer is rare outside of an elite class of politically connected citizens in Pyongyang, a growing number of students have access to PCs via heavily monitored university computer clubs. There's also a number of citizens who work in government agencies or in the state run media industry that have access to PCs during their workday.

I spoke with two experts on North Korean technology scene to find out what the OS is like and whether a similar system would work in China or other countries.

How Red Star Leaked

Few in the outside world have a complete picture of what it's like to live in North Korea. Most of what we do know about the state is pieced together from a combination of reports gleaned from returning foreign visitors, North Korean citizens who have managed to defect, and, increasingly, a small but growing number of internal leaks thanks to technological advances that allow information to more easily escape the country.

It is widely believed development on Red Star began back in 2002, with version 1.0 launching the following year. But besides a few anecdotal reports about the OS, the Western world didn't have a good idea of the exact technology behind it until a Russian man known only as Mikhail, who was living in North Korea as an international student at the time, bought a copy of version 2.0 in Pyongyang and uploaded images of it and, later, the entire OS to the web upon his return.

Screen capture of Red Star 2.0 showing desktop and included games.

It was then discovered that Red Star was not an OS written from scratch but a version of Red Hat Linux that uses a KDE 3 desktop that mimicked the look of Windows 7. That leaked copy was then followed earlier this year with information about its successor, version 3.0, which was obtained by American computer scientist and visiting lecturer at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, Will Scott. Although both versions of the OS only supported one language, Korean, it was easy enough for people with a moderate understanding of Linux to navigate. To the amusement of many, version 3.0 had ditched the Windows look in favor of Apple's OS X.

"It's basically something that would work fine on your typical netbook," says Dan Bowerman, a Canadian IT consultant and editor of the Opening Up North Korea blog, who also notes that it would be unheard of for anyone in North Korea to actually own a netbook. But Red Star possesses some fairly low minimum system requirements nonetheless: an 800MHz Pentium III processor with 256MB of RAM and 3GB of hard disk space.

These low system requirements are helpful in a country that doesn't have the manufacturing capabilities to make their own hardware and are blocked from importing more powerful hardware from any number of countries due to international embargoes. The computer equipment North Korea does manage to import is generally of the lower-end, generic white box PCs from China or Russia.

Screen capture of Red Star 3.0. Note the Windows-inspired UI has been replaced with a Mac OS X look.

As for apps, the versions of Red Star that have made it out of the country shipped with OpenOffice and some other light applications, including games, an engineering calculator, and an anti-virus, as well as with an installation of Wine, which allows Windows software to be run under Linux. There's also a modified version of the Firefox web browser that's been renamed "Naenara," or "my country" in Korean.

"They like to rebrand applications to stick with their whole mythology narrative," says Bowerman.

The Orwellian Desktop

Not-so-subtle signs of state propaganda appear throughout the OS. Every date is displayed in the Juche Calendar, which was first introduced in 1997 and states that the first recorded day in history is April 15, 1912--the birth of Kim Il-sung.

Then there's the desktop wallpapers.

"In the desktop wallpapers folder you have pictures of the North Korean countryside, but with artillery cannons peppered across the hillsides. And the cannons all looked the same. They've clearly been Photoshopped in," says Bowerman. "Then there's one with a shot of a beautiful Pyongyang lit up at night with soft lights on snowy-perfect streets. But in reality this is a scene you would almost certainly never see."

Desktop background featuring an idealized version of Pyongyang.

Indeed, it's widely known Pyongyang suffers from power outages and the government institutes a policy of rolling blackouts that leave some parts of the city with electricity for only an hour a night.

"You'll also see wallpapers of agriculture and farms with running tractors. But tractors are almost non-existent in North Korea, and for the few farmers who have them--and most farmers are lucky to just own an ox--it's very difficult for them to procure gasoline to make them work."

But while the badly Photoshopped desktop wallpapers may look comical to outsiders, it's just more of the status quo for North Koreans who are either numb to, or believe the propaganda they are fed in every corner of their lives. Propaganda that inundates everything North Koreans see or hear, whether it's films, operas, billboards, music...or your desktop operating system.

Another wallpaper showing off North Korea's military might.

However, another medium for propaganda isn't the only use the North Korean government has for its proprietary OS. Its biggest benefit, of course, is the ability to spy on and monitor the computer activity of its citizens.

"With a Linux-based operating system they can build directly from the source, they can inspect every line of code," says Bowerman. "They know what's going in it and, more importantly, they can control what's in it as well."

Bowerman's statements are supported by the findings of researchers at South Korea's Science and Technology Policy Institute (STEPI). As the Korea Times reported, STEPI did a thorough analysis of the leaked version 2.0 of Red Star and found that the software was "mainly designed to monitor the web behavior of its citizens and control information made available to them."

That's also probably why it's not surprising to discover that Red Star isn't just the ordinary version of Linux, either. It's actually a Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), which implements mandatory access controls that enable the government's programmers to limit the modifications users could make to the system. Because of this, it's very likely that it would be near impossible for a user to disable any of the monitoring technology built into Red Star or for users to hack their way out onto the open Internet.

The Future Of Geopolitical Operating Systems

If North Korea is that concerned about their citizens getting access to the open Internet, it begs the questions: Why even create a proprietary OS?

"No one knows why it was built," says Martyn Williams, a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and the editor of the North Korea Tech blog. It may have been a reflection of the time in which it was built. "Everyone was coming up with their own distributions at the time. The Chinese had one called Red Flag and there were several in Japan and in the West and things like that. Part of the thing at the time was that Linux was meant to be overtaking Windows, which of course it never really did on the desktop for most people. I think Red Star is just the product of the era."

The only clue to any kind of vague reason for its origin amounts to a line of text found in Red Star's readme file that orders, "You must create a system based on the Linux kernel in our [Korean] style."

A cynical (or, perhaps, cautious) person could argue that the escalating focus on computer technology in North Korean society is being undertaken solely to ramp up the efforts of the country's cyber-terrorism and cyber-espionage units. But North Korea's cyber security forces are mostly based in China and using different technology altogether.

The file system in Red Star 3.0.

That's why there's a mounting consensus in the global community that North Korean leaders may have finally come to the conclusion that the country will have to begin opening up its heavily secluded society if it wants to have any hopes of surviving in a 21st century world where information is a global currency and a country's economic health depends on how well it adapts to and embraces technological change.

"It's a difficult balance for them," Williams, who has been studying the country for decades. "I think they want to realize the efficiencies of modern technology, but modern technology is all about making it efficient and easy to share and move information--and information is the biggest enemy of the North Korean regime."

"The thing is the North Koreans have been lying to their people for so long that if you really do open things up, then all of the lies are going to come out, which makes it very difficult for them," he says. "So they're kind of playing the skeleton dance with technology."

But Williams notes that increasing digital freedoms isn't something North Korea would need to embrace in an all-or-nothing manner (because if it's "all" it's not happening). One increasingly likely option the North Korean government could now be considering is copying a move from China's playbook.

"One of the things that has been put out there in recent years is that maybe North Korea is hoping to kind of follow more of the Chinese model where there is relatively free access to information, but still quite strict government control at times when it's needed."

If this is a model that North Korea is indeed moving to, it's something which would be helped along greatly by its Red Star OS. The country could then not only set up a Great Firewall like China has, but might feel more secure in knowing they'd have deep control over the underlying code of the operating system running on their citizens' desktops.

If North Korea does takes its lead from China it would, of course, now be ironic when you consider that China, spurred mainly by the NSA revelations, seems to be following in the footsteps of North Korea by launching a proprietary OS next month.

Could this set a precedent for other controlling countries--or even democratic countries who are now, rightly, concerned about the NSA's oversight powers--to begin launching OSes that are limited to geographic or political boundaries?

"I think that operating system is less important than it used to be," says Williams. "I think the real question in terms of security and control for these countries is where is your data sitting? That's going to be much more important."

"But," he adds, "if people really start to fear about where their data is, then you do at some stage start to get an opportunity for people to start using more local services. The Chinese with their firewall--they pretty much keep a close eye on what people are doing. But who's to say who has more visibility into what the Chinese are doing--the NSA or the Chinese government themselves?"

And if that's no longer an easy question to answer, we may soon live in a world where other countries begin seeing the appeal of an operating system like North Korea's Red Star OS.

This was Part 1 of a two-part series looking at the state of technology in North Korea and its implications for its citizens and the world. Stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow.

Today in Tabs: Tech vs. Art

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Who wants some really good news? Tough! Because I don't have any. Instead I have the news that ebola could soon become endemic in West Africa. By January, we can flip a coin and call it heads or 70% fatal hemorrhagic tails. Who knows! Who also knows what the Earth's climatic future is like? There could be standing water in London by 2100, Alaskacould be the new hipster mecca, but at least someone finally put a stop to that whiny polar bear. "Waah the ice is melting, boo hoo I can't hunt seals..." Yeah sure buddy, get in the van. The way things are headed, Lonesome George is probably glad he checked out before the Galápagos's Finest could arrest him too. If you'd like to salvage something from the day you couldn't get anywhere in lower Manhattan, check out Hallie Bateman's live-sketches from the Climate March.

But enough bad news! Did you know we're... oh, I guess we're also bombing Syria. It's surprising that after three and a half years of sitting out the Syrian civil war we seem to have entered it with massive airstrikes against Assad's most powerful enemies. That was... unexpected! Just the kind of "switch it up" surprise policymaking that Obama has also shown in his approach to "closing" Guantanamo Bay and "eliminating" nuclear weapons.

This Pitchfork review accuses #buzz band Alt-Jof being clickbait somehow, so good to know that's spreading. The creepy world of Instagram stolen-baby-photo role-play is still with us despite having been comprehensively doxed by Daily Dotlast November. Crushing Bort and Blippo Blappogot an Esquire byline in their apparently still fruitless effort to make anyone hold human Xerox machine Fareed Zakaria accountable for his plagiarism. Alessandra Stanleydefended herself in Margaret Sullivan's column by saying "I didn't think Times readers would take the opening sentence literally because I so often write arch, provocative ledes that are then undercut or mitigated by the paragraphs that follow." Her defense is she never thought anyone would believe the actual words she wrote. To be fair, this was a perfectly reasonable assumption given the past believability of words she has written. If only we could all be Paul Ford's "Perfect Writer," but alas only I can be that.

Emily Gould used the Alaska weed reporter story as a jumping-off point to remind us about the time she dramatically quit her job and speculate about why that may not have gone so well. If you are not Emily but still want to quit your job, this how-to guide may be slightly more useful.

Of course the three-boob girl isn't real. Everything is a hoax!

Tech Vs. Art: The amazing Jenn Schiffer just launched the vart.institute to explore the intersection of tech and art. Or tech via art. Or art via tech? I'm not sure but it's awesome. She started by building a Mondrian generator in javascript. Cuddlr is a 100% real app for creepy manbabies and the hopelessly twee to hook up and have awkward simulated intimacy. Art history is full of womenwho just want to be left alone. Apple's design is a boring wasteland of aluminum and glass now. Did you know that throughout history, our most iconic photography has been almost completely devoid of John Malkovich? Well now you can!

The most surprising thing in this Jon Mooallem story about Larry Ellison buying the Hawaiian island of Lanai is that the island has almost always been owned by someone.

Today in Conflict of Interest:Kate Losse's book The Boy Kings is the featured selection on Oyster this week! It's a good review and a great book and you should read it. [Disclosures: Kate Losse is a friend. The Oyster editor who wrote the review, Kevin Nguyen is also a friend. I will probably get a free Oyster membership, although not for including this tab. I want my friends to succeed so I probably promote them in here more than would be strictly objective. I am a well-off straight white male American and therefore bad for both the human and natural worlds. I use more than my share of everything. These words are displacing the words of someone more deserving but less well connected. I frequently have uncharitable thoughts about people who are just trying their best.]

Speaking of people who are trying their best:

TODAY'S INTERN TAB, by BIJAN STEPHEN

I recently finished reading Archipelago Books'new translation of Frankétienne's 1968 novel Ready To Burst. It's a frenetic, aching look at life in Haiti under François Duvalier's regime, one that manages to disorient and entrance in its documentation of everyday brutalities.

The book has almost nothing to do with today's tab, which is about the continuation of the Clinton dynasty via Chelsea. "What Should Chelsea Clinton Name Her Baby?" Adam Lerner asks, going on to suggest-humorously? I hope?-that the Clintons should give their newly-hatched spawn a name that polls well in Iowa or New Hampshire. He doesn't, unfortunately, address my question: Why should Chelsea Clinton name her baby? It'd be metal as heck if she didn't. Metal enough to make me vote for them.

Anyway, Rusty, sorry this is long. Actually I'm not, but it seems like the right thing to say?

"I wash myself in tears. I quarantine my sorrow. And then I attempt to laugh from the margins of myself."- Frankétienne, Ready To Burst

Wow, Bijan you have outdone yourself in pretentiousness today, which is saying a lot since yesterday you finished by writing in actual Latin. Semper ubi sububi.

Today's Song:Prince, "Funkenroll". Meh, tbh.

Today's Other Song: New Kendrick Lamar! It's called "i". It is :fire_emoji:

~I tab myself~

Today in Tabs is late so let me just say: Fast Company / Subscribe / @rustyk5

Meet Councilman Ben Kallos, The Agile Politician

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The first time I walked into New York City Council Member Ben Kallos's District Office, I immediately recognized the layout: A pair of long tables occupied by laptop-facing 20-year-olds wearing jeans and hoodies.

To be fair, there were also several people not in their 20s wearing Oxford shirts and slacks. And on three sides of those tables--front, back, and left--are a handful of proper individual desks, the people behind them all wearing business attire. In the back of the room is a single corner office, comprised of quick-install floor-to-ceiling glass walls and a glass door.

"How do you like our startup office?" Kallos asked me, as he welcomed me into his glass-enclosed office with a smile.

Kallos is one of New York City's newest members of the city council. He is a former lawyer and business owner who represents part of Manhattan's Upper East Side as well as Roosevelt Island. But his experience as a coder--he's worked with MySQL and PHP--is shaping his time on city council as much as any of his other credentials. Thus far, he's proposed a host of open government bills and used technology to make his own work more open and accessible.

"We operate using Agile. We use Trello for task management. We do standing check-ins," says Kallos. "So we're using all the best practices of the world's most nimble startups to run our government offices."

It's exciting to hear a politician using tech buzzwords. Less clear is whether Kallos is just a savvy-self marketer wearing the cloak of geek chic. Are his unorthodox methods showing results?

In his term so far, Kallos has put forward numerous proposals in city council that make government more open. Including that New York City record government-issued public notices and certain public information be posted online (with an API), the creation of , and adding an interactive map to the city's open data portal. The City Record online portal bill was recently signed into law by Mayor de Blasio.

"He's definitely not someone with a career politician pedigree, who was brought up and trained to run for office," says Thom Neale, a programmer who worked alongside Kallos when they were both staffers in the state legislature. "He's really just an open data, open government, open source enthusiast, who just also happens to be politically ambitious and confident navigating in that world. Now he's up there doing exactly what he said he'd do the whole time I knew him when we were younger. These are the exact sorts of legislative initiatives he said he'd work on."

Here are six ideas from the startup world that Kallos is applying to his work in government.

1. Agile Politics

Kallos has adapted the "Agile" software development philosophy to his work, and even worked with CivicActions to train his staff in the practice.

Agile has been utilized by development shops big and small that need to prototype rapidly and respond to change seamlessly. In practice, running a local government office on Agile means learning from mistakes and being willing to pivot and alter even the most entrenched practices.

"The best part of the startup mentality is not being afraid to fail," says Kallos. "For startups, failure is part of the business model. Because if you're not failing you're not getting the opportunity to iterate."

The iterative process is a cornerstone of Agile. Rather than plan out every step of a workplan and then enact it, Agile emphasizes altering your model as you go as you respond to new information. And it's a methodology that Kallos puts to work on nuts and bolts aspects of the business of government.

2. Better Customer Service

"The number one job I have is constituent service." Constituent service is, essentially, what you think of when you think of local government: You come to a politician with a problem, they lodge your complaint, and either they do something about it or they don't. Through iterating how he handles those interactions, Kallos says he has been able to reduce the number of complaints he receives within his district fourfold.

Photo by William Alatriste

At first, when someone approached him on the street with a problem, Kallos would hand them his card and say to call his office.

"I've realized that was not customer service," says Kallos. "So I've changed what I do."

Kalllos soon picked up on the fact that people felt like they were being blown off when handed a card and, basically, told to go away. His next iteration was that as soon as someone starting lodging an issue with him, he'd pull out his phone and start taking notes on what he was being told.

"With that second iteration, I realized that people were upset because I wasn't looking at them. They thought I wasn't paying attention."

Finally, he settled upon listening first, looking a constituent in the eye, and asking them for permission to take out his phone and take notes on their issue, Kallos tells me, mimicking the process at his desk.

"Now I'm doing one hundred percent intake. What's started happening is I will stand at an event and someone will tell me their problem, I'll take notes on their issue, and then other people will start to queue up. It's a very different level of customer service that somebody is getting when I'm literally helping them right then and there."

Constituent service is a mundane, even boring, part of a politician's job. But if the numbers don't lie, Kallos has found a way to make it better through iteration.

3. Beta Testing

On top of his duties to his district in Manhattan, Kallos has introduced a number of bills and resolutions to the city council. And many of them have one surprising feature in common: a built-in beta testing period.

Photo via Facebook

"Something I learned at the very beginning of the Internet is you don't wait for the finished product to go online," says Kallos. "As soon as you have a minimum viable product you get out there with it and you honor the fact that it is a beta. Whether you're talking about software users or constituents, they'd rather see a solution to a problem now that might not be fully complete and have the opportunity to improve it."

Testing laws to see if they produce their intended effects before they become permanent makes logical sense. But in practice it would be complex--how long is the test period, and who evaluates whether or not the enforcement was effective?

For now, Kallos is focusing on the smaller but just as sensible goal of trying to build beta periods into city contracts for products and services. One example is NYC's plan to transform defunct pay phones into Wi-Fi and information hubs. Kallos hopes the department in charge of that program will include a period of beta testing for the new system before deploying it on a wide scale.

"Both legislation and software benefit from a healthy pre-launch or beta period where you're doing user testing," he notes.

4. Version Control For Legislation

Kallos' most innovative initiative is to literally treat legislation like a piece of software. "Legislation and software are both code," says Kallos. So naturally, he decided on a home for his legislation that many programmers have chosen for their code: GitHub. On the popular software version control site, programmers can share and collaboratively edit their projects. Now Kallos is applying that same system to his legislation.

"They can literally pull my legislation just like software code," he says. "They can edit my legislation and they can push it back into my GitHub repository."

It takes a particular type of politician to put their ego aside and voluntarily post their legislation online for their constituents to ruthlessly edit. Displaying a trait shared by successful CEOs, Kallos recognizes that his job is not to come up with all the brilliant ideas, but to be a conduit for them.

"I wish I could say I'm the smartest person in the council or in the district," says Kallos. "But I'm lucky enough to be surrounded by a lot of smart people. The open source ethos says let's tap into that and let's crowdsource our legislative process and our democracy."

For Kallos, crowdsourcing legislation means using technophile tools like GitHub and looking to what other politicians have done around the country and even the world. But often it also means taking an old-fashioned, low-tech approach.

"We actually have a policy night where people from my district are coming in and coming up with legislation," he adds. It's still crowdsourcing, just with a different pipeline for people's opinions.

5. Net Neutrality As A Local Issue

"I'm really focused on trying to bring a different argument to the net neutrality debate," says Kallos. Indeed, his perspective on net neutrality steers clear of the common technorati tropes and centers the importance of net neutrality to city denizens, especially the city's immigrant population.

That population, which comprises 37% of New Yorkers and 44% of the city's workforce (as of 2011) holds a particular stake in net neutrality, according to Kallos.

"The immigrant community cannot survive in a world without net neutrality," he says. "Whether someone is from Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, Russia, or where have you, the only way they can find out what's going on in the world today and communicate with their relatives is over the Internet. Restricted content or fast lanes would limit the ability of these people to connect. We live in a new age and people need to be able to communicate whether it's over Skype or Google Hangout or voice-over-IP."

6. Open Data

In 1996, Kallos worked on a website called Jumbo.com, which was one of the biggest shareware sites on the web at the time. He was written up in The New York Times as one of a handful of teenage pioneers in the new "after-school job" of web design and programming.

Photo courtesy of @CitizensUnion

Kallos left programming behind to pursue law school, but was drawn back into the field while working as an attorney on election law. He was concerned that New York State seemed to have lost 2 million voter records overnight, going from 12 million registered voters to 10 million.

Kallos's solution was to create votersearch.org. Any one can search the barebones site entering their basic information to check if they are successfully registered to vote. In order to create a tool that can parse 12 million records, Kallos had to learn MySQL. From there he taught himself PHP and got votersearch.org up and running in a matter of hours.

Later, Kallos and his friend Neale, who were both working as a staffers in the state legislature, collaborated on similar open government initiatives.

"I think it's so cool that Ben is a member of city council," says Neale. "A couple years ago we were just a couple of buddies who were interested in open source software and opening government data. We would write software and hack together."

They used the state's Freedom of Information Law to amass what Neale refers to as "data piles" and then write software to parse that information and make it accessible to the public.

Beyond Technology

Kallos isn't only about technology and open government. He has also spearheaded two resolutions with important political resonance. One resolution calls on the U.S. Senate and the President to take steps toward creating a National Women's History Museum. That resolution was adopted by the city council earlier this month.

"Any woman growing up is used to seeing so many men presented in the history books," says Kallos, who is the only man on the women's committee of city council. "So to have a national museum where women can come and see women's history is really important."

Kallos, who is Jewish, is also sponsoring a resolution calling on the New York State legislature to pass a law that would prohibit companies that profited from the Holocaust and have not yet paid reparations from being awarded government contracts.

"My family survived the Holocaust and I have relatives who passed in concentration camps and during Kristallnacht," says Kallos. "So through the lens of accountability, I want to make sure that companies like SNCF have repaid their debt to society before we engage in contracts with them."

For his first nine months in office, Kallos's track record so far is certainly ambitious. Clearly, he wants to make the most of the current political climate in New York.

"I think we have an amazing opportunity here," he says. "We have a progressive mayor. We have a progressive speaker. We see a lot of progressive change happening in New York City at this moment. Now is the time for people to take back their government, take back their democracy. It's our job to build the tools that allow people to interact with government in any way they wish."

Warning: Big Pharma May Be A Highly Addictive And Ethically Challenging Indie Game

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How would you like to manage your own pharmaceutical company and go from "knocking out cheap generic treatments for minor ailments" to producing cutting-edge medicine that reaps billions of dollars in profits? With Big Pharma, a new game from British developer Twice Circled, you can.

And hopefully you'll feel very bad about it.

As you manage your staff's production, improve the engineering of your machinery, tweak your formulas and build up your pharmaceutical empire, the only thing that seems to matter is profit. Every business starts at the production line, after all. And then you learn that "some remedies are more profitable than others and illness is good for business." Cha-ching!

First featured on Kill Screen, Big Pharma is "part business sim, part logistics puzzle." It follows the trend of games like Sweatshop, where you "run" an unethical manufacturing operation, and Papers, Please, the indie hit about immigrations processing, which presents you with horrible bureaucratic choices.

"Side effects may vary: 1 in 10 players may become empathically challenged," warns the game's user manual. "1 in 100 may see disease and suffering solely as a business opportunity. 1 in 1000 players may become megalomaniacal. 1 in 10,000 may become seriously addicted. (So few? Don't believe everything you read on the label)."

Sounds addictive. See the game at EGX in London September 25th through 28th, and look for it to be distributed more widely in the summer of 2015.

5 Ways Rent The Runway's CTO Turns Data Into Beauty

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Customers use Rent the Runway to pick out designer dresses and have them delivered in time for a special event. Then they send the dresses back to be dry-cleaned and sent to the next customer in line. The company tells customers to think of its service as a best friend with a well-stocked closet.

Behind the scenes, custom software and precision logistics make matching customers with outfits and getting them delivered in time as much a science as an art, says Rent the Runway CTO Camille Fournier.

"We are very much a data-driven company," she says. "We measure everything here."

Building risk management and other software tools for Goldman Sachs helped prepare her for this role, which has included building inventory software to minimize the time expensive dresses spend sitting in its warehouses while leaving enough margins to make sure customers get the outfits they want, when they want them.

"Our goal is to create a brain inside of our warehouse that really understands our current inventory status [and] our future demand," she says.

Here are five ways Rent The Runways is using data to make business decisions.

1. Managing Inventory To Fit Customers Just Right

Custom shipping software decides when there's time to save money by having a customer send a dress back via ground delivery versus when it needs to travel by next-day air. "We want to be aggressive--we just don't want to be too aggressive with how we model our inventory," says Fournier. "We need to know lots of information about how many we have, how many reservations we have for when and we also want to maximize the return on investment we get from our inventory."

Customers in New York and Las Vegas can also visit physical showrooms to try on and pick up dresses, and Manhattanites can receive their dresses on their own schedules delivered by courier.

2. Planning For Demand

And as soon as a dress returns to the company's 40,000-square-foot warehouse--soon to be upgraded to 160,000 square feet--that virtual brain knows how quickly it needs to be inspected, cleaned, and sent back into the world. "The minute that your package is scanned into customer receiving, that station knows what's in the package and knows whether it's needed for shipping out today or tomorrow or if it's not that urgent," says Fournier.

3. Recommendations

Rent the Runway strives to show its website visitors the dresses they'll like as quickly as possible. "We want to be able to keep you from getting fatigue at seeing so many styles and so many different options," she says. "We believe that if you order it's because you found something that you love."

When customers visit Rent the Runway, the company's recommendation engine presents them with dresses selected based on their browsing and rental history, age bracket, and other factors.

Customers can get more hands-on advice from a Rent the Runway stylist at the company's brick-and-mortar locations or through email.

4. A Review System That Puts Selfies To Work

Customers are encouraged to submit reviews of the dresses they rent, complete with photos, which help improve recommendations and let others with similar measurements see how they might look.

"We have a process that does analysis on all of our reviews that have been submitted," she says. "Obviously you don't have to upload a photo, but we have tens of thousands of photos of people on our site."

All orders include two sizes of the desired dress, and if neither fits, that information's used to improve future recommendations, says Fournier.

"If you have the experience where you rent something and neither dress fits, you can return it and get a full credit on your order," she says.

5. Spotting Trends On The Runway And Online

The company's buyers use a mix of industry experience and expertise to spot fashion trends early on. They keep a close eye on trends at Fashion Week and "read Vogue all the time," says Fournier--but they're also looking at customer data to decide what new dresses to order.

"We just learn a lot based on general browsing patterns of our audience," she says. "We really have an advantage in our business in that we can see a lot of information."

What It's Like To Use North Korea's Internet

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It is commonly accepted that the people of North Korea are cut off from all forms of technology--in stark contrast to their heavily wired counterparts to the south. Yet technology has slowly crept its way into certain, extremely limited, areas of North Korean life.

Yesterday we investigated what little is known about the country's totalitarian Red Star operating system. But what do North Korea's citizens see when they do gain access to a computer or mobile phone and get online?

"For the average North Korean, the Internet doesn't exist," Martyn Williams tells Co.Labs. He's spent decades studying the country, and is now a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and the editor of the North Korea Tech blog.

Instead of access to the Internet, Williams tells me, the country has an intranet--an internal collection of networked servers and computers that is only accessible from inside North Korea's borders. The name of this intranet is Kwangmyong, which roughly translates into "Bright" in English.

A "Bright" Intranet

As with most things about North Korea, what little is known about Kwangmyong has only been gleaned from North Korean defectors. Even foreign visitors to the country are not allowed to access it.

Kwangmyong is a free service to the country's inhabitants--even though less than 10% of the population is believed to have ever accessed it. Computer use outside of the capital of Pyongyang is virtually unheard of, and even most of those inside the city are unlikely to have a computer in their home.

Estimates for the number of websites on Kwangmyong range between 1,000 to 5,000 and their content is mainly dedicated to news propaganda, educational and reference materials, and scanned archives. Besides its limited state-hosted websites, Kwangmyong also has a search engine, news groups functionality, and even a messaging system similar to email.

One of the few North Korean websites available on the global Internet. It's believed this is taken directly from Kwangmyong.

"Their intranet connects things like universities and schools and libraries," says Williams, "but of course it is centrally run and you can't just put your own work server up and put your own website up there no matter what it does. It's all very strictly controlled."

The government dictates usage rules for even the tiniest minutiae of Kwangmyong, including the underlying HTML code used on every website. One such coding mandate dictates that every time Kim Jong Il's, Kim Il Sung's, or Kim Jong Un's names appear on a website their font will be 20% larger than the rest of the text on the page.

Note the larger font for the names of North Korea's leaders (Image from Martyn William's website).

What is more surprising considering the country's level of control over its intranet is that the North Korean government has, within the last six or seven years, been allowing a very select group of individuals to access the outside Internet that we all use.

Connection to the real Internet is limited to a few dozen "elites" as they're known. These are people in families in Pyongyang who have high-level connections in the government or military. The government has also allowed access to the broader Internet to select scientists and university students. In such cases Internet access is granted because it allows scientists and students to gather resources and learn from experts abroad, which helps advance the aims of the state in such areas as engineering, technological innovation, economics, and agriculture.

Why would the most controlling society on the planet chance give scientists and students--people who by their very nature desire to seek the truth--access to the outside world?

The government believes fear will keep them in line. "In almost all cases, all of the people that have Internet access are usually in a room and in a little room next door to the room where all the Internet computers are someone's sitting in there basically in real time, monitoring what everybody is looking at," Williams says. "They realize if they're on the Internet, that going and looking at Korean-language websites and free news is a very stupid thing to do because they could get caught very quickly."

The Koryolink 3G Network

Considering the measures the North Korean government goes through to limit the information that makes it into its citizens' hands, it's almost inconceivable to believe the country allows its citizens to have mobile phones. After all, mobile phones are an increasingly important tool used to promote democratic ideals--it was an instrumental tool in the Arab Spring.

Yet North Korea does have a rapidly growing 3G network called Koryolink. Introduced in 2008, the network was a joint venture between the state-owned Korea Post and Telecommunications Corporation (KPTC) and an Egyptian company called Global Telecom Holding. In the six years since its inception Koryolink's subscriber base has grown from 5,000 members to over 2 million (out of a total population of around 25 million). Its network now covers between six and 100 cities in the country.

But just as with its PCs, the mobile phones available to Koryolink subscribers are cut off from the real Internet. Users can make calls to other users inside the country, and they can access the intranet, but any access to numbers outside of North Korea or the global Internet is not possible. And as can be expected, members of the Koryolink network receive daily propaganda text messages espousing the virtues and greatness of their country's leaders.

Due to its lack of an advanced manufacturing industry, North Korea's phones are almost certainly not made in the country. Instead they're likely to be lower-end handsets imported from China. While no Koryolink-connected handset is known to have made it outside of the country, it's widely believed the phones are a mixed bag of flip phones and some smartphones. Higher-end handsets like iPhones and Samsung smartphones have been illegally imported, yet their use seems limited.

Most smartphones are assumed to be running a version of Android. This is supported by the fact that the country has also shown off an Android-based tablet computer called the Samjiyon, which it says is made by the domestic Chosun Computer company. Yet since North Korea lacks advanced manufacturing facilities many believe the tablet is actually a Chinese import as well.

An Assassin's Weapon

Though the North Korean government can ensure that no one on the Koryolink 3G network can contact the outside world, one wonders whether it sees the threat in allowing citizens to communicate with each other in a semi-anonymous medium. After all, it's hard to believe even the Orwellian North Korean government would have the technology or manpower to monitor the daily communications of 2 million subscribers.

But as Dan Bowerman, an IT consultant and editor of the Opening Up North Korea blog, points out, though the country might actively monitor the cellular communications of those in the media or military--in other words, those whose dissent could cause immediate damage to the regime--the country doesn't need to actively monitor every single citizen because an existing culture of fear and paranoia keeps people in line.

"These things are pervasive throughout their culture," says Bowerman. "They have a very big snitch model type of system, where you never know who is looking at you. Your best friend might be tapped by the secret service one day to keep an eye on you or to report what you're doing. These kinds of things are reported by defectors to happen all the time."

Bowerman says that even if North Korea's citizens began trusting their safety with each other more and began to communicate more openly behind closed doors on their mobile phones, the government may have no problem simply taking all their phones away. After all, they've done it before.

"There were cell phones back in 2003 in North Korea, and they were getting quite popular," says Bowerman. "They were gaining traction. That was going well for a while; all the senior cadres in Pyongyang had cellphones. They were a hit, and then, all of a sudden, there was a big ban on them. The government completely locked down and took everybody's cell phones away."

The reason why the government confiscated the country's cell phones was because of a suspected assassination attempt on Kim Jong-Il's life in 2004.

"Nothing has ever been said by the State about this, but several records of this exist," says Bowerman. "They were going to use a cell phone to detonate a bomb to kill Kim Jong-Il. This was the suspicion at the time. So cell phones went away for a few years, simply because there was a suspicion that the bomb that went off that was supposed to knock over Kim Jong-Il's train--and it went off an hour after he'd already passed through--had used a cell phone as the trigger device. This is why there was the lockdown."

A Pyongyang Spring?

Taking away the mobile phones of 2 million people in 2014 may be harder than it was a decade ago. The government seems to realize North Koreans see how advanced the rest of the world is. Some of them will travel to China. Others will watch dramas and movies smuggled from South Korea, or read websites like Wikipedia that are saved to a USB stick and literally floated into the country by a helium balloon released over the border. In the north by the Chinese border some North Koreans will risk connecting to open Wi-Fi or 3G Chinese networks on smuggled smartphones to access the outside Internet. Now, more than ever, North Koreans are waking up to what life is really like outside their borders.

The official website of North Korea. One of the few sites hosted inside North Korea's borders that are available to the outside world
.

But it's not just an awareness of the outside world's technological advancement that would make the North Korean regime pause for a moment before taking away the country's mobile phones now.

"Technological advancement in the country is needed more and more as North Korea gets increasingly desperate for foreigner money, which, frankly, they need to survive," says Bowerman."They have to welcome imports from China; they have to welcome imports from Russia; from the tourists that comes through. They have to make things more accessible for outsiders--and some of those things will trickle down, slowly, to the country's citizens."

If this technology and the information it brings continues to trickle down, could it possibly lead to a Pyongyang Spring along the lines of the Arab Spring we saw in the Middle East?

"Oh, I think there's definitely a potential in North Korea for things, very quickly actually, to reach a tipping point, and then suddenly there's a lot of people turning against the government," says Martyn Williams. But he notes that a potential problem arises in North Korea that those in the Middle East didn't have--at least not to the same degree.

"In other countries people have been able to self-organize, which in North Korea is difficult because even domestic communication is monitored. But also, in these other countries the eyes of the world have been on them. If you remember back to things like Tiananmen Square, while the students were in the square and while the Chinese were trying to figure out what to do, the world's TV cameras were broadcasting live from there. It was a difficult thing for the Chinese. But in Pyongyang, even if you manage to get 10,000 people in the middle of the city protesting against the government, I think the military could roll in and shoot all of them dead and we'd only find out about it through rumors like three weeks later or something. That all makes it a lot easier for the government there to keep things under control."

Still, with the increase in the people's awareness of technology, and the regime's acknowledgement that embracing more technology is necessary if it hopes to turn its fragile economy around, many believe the information that has been denied to the North Korean people for so long will only continue to increase. And with that information will come an ever-increasing desire to promote change in one of the most oppressive societies on the planet.

"I think it will happen," says Williams. "The question is will it happen this year or will it happen 20 years from now? What it requires, if you're in that type of society where fear rules...the only time you're going to be persuaded is if you're with such a mass of people that there's this unstoppable momentum that allows you to rise up in relative safety. That's going to take a while, I think. But whenever it does actually happen--as it did in Eastern Europe in 1989 when all of these countries very quickly fell--I think it could all end quite fast."

This was the second of a two-part series looking at the state of technology in North Korea and its implications for its citizens and the world. Read Part 1 here.

How Pandora Helps Musicians Plan Tours

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When touring acts come through San Francisco, they often drop by Pandora for in-office concerts. It's a nice perk for employees, but the acts walk away with something too: As part of their appearance agreement, the Internet radio company offers them extensive listener info.

Eric Bieschke, Pandora's chief scientist and VP of playlists, says that touring acts and their management are given a "presentation of all their big data on Pandora," which is based around a heat map showing the act's listenership, zip code by zip code, across the United States. While the artists don't have access to listener Facebook info or email addresses--which many artists request in order to alert listeners to upcoming shows--it does give extensive regional information. They also receive a detailed breakdown of how their music is received by different demographics, "different slices and views of things they can take advantage of," and what their next single should be based on Pandora play charts. He says that the company offers hundreds of these demonstrations for artists each year.

For most people, Pandora is synonymous with Internet radio. But it's also an amazing storehouse of data. The Oakland-based company keeps tabs on what kind of device a user uses to listen (smartphone? office computer?) and uses that to help determine playlists. The type of music a user listens to gives demographic and purchasing insights--a listener of Latin music, for instance, is far more likely to be served with ads for Latin American vacation destinations. And, for artists, Pandora keeps metrics on listenership that mash up old-fashioned radio ratings with contemporary data science.

The main tool used to sort through the massive amounts of data the service produces is Tableau, a popular data visualization platform that is commonly used to measure media consumption and audience metrics. Due to the nature of Pandora's freemium business model, the company depends on advertising revenue to keep stakeholders happy. And for artist stakeholders, who are still adapting to the strange world of streaming content royalties, Pandora wants to make sure they're on their good side. For musicians, that means access to all sorts of listener metrics.

Artists and management use the info from Pandora, along with conventional music stats and analytics from services like YouTube and iTunes, to plan tours. Co.Labs was given a detailed look into how this happens through the world of country music. Average Joes Entertainment is a Nashville-based country label best known for acts Montgomery Gentry and Bubba Sparxxx.

Nathan Thompson, director of digital business development at Average Joes, says that Pandora's play metrics (which are shown to recipients on heat maps) are crucial in finding out where people are listening to his label's acts. In the case of one musician, Lenny Cooper, Pandora's metrics indicated many plays in Indiana and Michigan--states which previously registered low sales for Cooper. The high play amount made Average Joes realize there was an opportunity to build an audience there. Based primarily on Pandora's metrics, Average Joes made the decision to strike a regional deal with Walmart for sales and a upper Midwest tour.

In the case of a second Average Joes act, the country-rap Moonshine Bandits, Pandora's metrics were used in tandem with iTunes analytics to boost regional sales. The central California-based Bandits tour extensively on the West Coast and built up a strong regional fan base, but their label wanted to break them in other markets. They were intentionally paired with a Southern act, The Lacs, and sent together on a package tour that visited each other's most popular cities for fans. Average Joes then followed Pandora metrics for both bands in each other's markets following the tour dates, and used that to influence song selection for an upcoming EP.

Tony Morreale, Average Joes vice president of promotion and marketing, added that "Pandora gives us a quicker national picture and allows us to act accordingly." By combining Pandora's analytics with Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, and other services, labels have access to something resembling real-time listener analytics for the first time in pop music's history. But, as Thompson puts it, the chief challenge is turning all those Pandora plays into paying customers.

Soon, Pandora's analytics will be available for just about any musical act, management, or label. Industry site Digital Music News reports Pandora is working on a listener data analytics dashboard for artists. Although Pandora would offer us no further information for this article, it's believed that some sort of fan interaction capability will be included. Although third-party vendors such as Next Big Sound offer Pandora analytics, there's no official Pandora analytics dashboard available on a mass basis at this time.

The rise of digital music effectively ended business patterns that existed in the pop world since the 1960s, and regional markets have become more important for musical acts as a result. But they are hard to find and define. Reaching out to fans via Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or any other platform of choice is crucial for any act hoping to make a living from live music and digital music streaming or sales. As every song we listen to is turned into discrete data points, the hope is that analytics--Pandora included--will turn into a dependable secret weapon for artists and management.


Myontec's Smart Shorts Will Measure Your Athletic Performance From Below The Belt

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Sports wearables already take the form of wristbands, leg bands, headbands, and shirts. Now the Finnish company Myontec is bringing performance measurement and injury prevention technology directly into your gym shorts.

The machine-washable shorts contain sensors to measure electrical activity in leg muscles and monitor athletes' heart rates, muscle load balance, and other critical factors. A phone-sized clip-on device logs sensor readings and sends them to a smartphone app via Bluetooth for real-time audio coaching during workouts.

The Mbody shorts are based on technology the company already offers to pro athletes and training centers, but the Mbody Coach app is a new product. Through a Kickstarter campaign launched this week, Myontec hopes to bring its smart shorts and an accompanying real-time audio coaching smartphone app to the running and cycling public.

"Muscle load readings and common bio signals are transmitted from the smart wear to your mobile device wirelessly and from your mobile device to your ears as a friendly, yet firm coach voice," according to Myontec's Kickstarter page. "With the Mbody voice feature you'll be able to train under professional-style coaching in real-time and in any training conditions."

The app will also provide visual alerts that athletes will be able to see at a glance during their workouts.

"If you keep the mobile application and the mobile phone in your bike, you can see in real time what is the ratio between your quads and hams," says Myontec sales and marketing lead Janne Pylväs. "You can see the balance between your left and right side with a very easy and friendly user interface."

Athletes who don't want to run or bike with their phones will be able to upload the data from their shorts after their workouts, seeing graphs of stats like heart rate and muscle load, as well as maps of the routes they traveled.

"You can record it without any mobile device, and then download and activate it afterwards," says Pylväs.

Myontec currently provides pro athletes with tailor-made clothing for other muscle groups, and hopes to expand its mass market offerings beyond shorts, assuming the Kickstarter campaign is successful.

"One of our stretch goals is, if we reach a certain level, we will provide a T-shirt monitoring heart rate," Pylväs says.

The company plans to deliver the first full version of the technology to backers by March 2015 for a $159 pre-order price. They hope to make the product available for retail sale soon after that for $499.

"It's [for] quite normal people, but of course they are quite active: the jogging life, three or four or five times per week," Pylväs says.

4 Oculus Rift Developers Who Are Going To Blow Your Mind

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Flying a spaceship, exploring a dungeon as a knight, and exploring the ocean's depths were among the dozens of virtual reality demos at the Oculus Connect conference this weekend. These prototypes--some of which used the latest Crescent Bay headset--show the promise of what's to come.

Samsung Gear VR Demo

"This is a prototype, a lot of one-off hardware. Everything in the consumer product is going to be the same as this or better in many cases," says Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR. "But this is the first time that you can deliver a pretty powerful sense of presence reliably across a wide variety of content."

Here are four of the Oculus Rift developers I encountered that achieve "presence" and are taking an innovative approach to virtual game design.

Playful Corp.

While most studios and indie developers are making first-person experiences for Oculus Rift, Playful Corp. decided to go third-person. Your view in Lucky's Tale is looking down at a colorful world as you move a cartoon fox below. Paul Bettner, the co-creator of the well-known game Words With Friends, founded Playful and is working on a full release of the platforming game. He sees Crescent Bay as Oculus taking that first real step toward a new era in tech.

"In technology , we have different inflection points. When you are on one side of it, it feels like we will never get to the other side of it. But once you get over that hurdle, you never look back. This is just how it's going to be now," Bettner tells Co.Labs. "Since the very first DK1, they had gotten over some hurdles, it still had a ton of compromises and issues , but it was able to invoke a sense of presence. And now with Crescent Bay, they have just nailed that."

There are a few moments in Lucky's Tale where you feel like you couldn't have experienced it, except using VR. "There's this part where Lucky holds up a bomb and you just look where you want it to go and he throws it right there," says Bettner. "The feedback was that those were the best parts. We have taken that to heart and been building a lot more of those things."

Cloudhead Games

Cloudhead Games is one of the first indie developers to announce, and then Kickstart, a game for Oculus Rift. The developer's founder is Denny Unger who, along with over a decade of experience working on role-playing and strategy games (both physical and digital), has strong views about the potential for VR to accidentally cause a death. His title The Gallery: Six Elements is an exploration puzzle game in the vein of the famous Myst.

"When they originally came out with DK2, and this has been the party line of Oculus, one of the constraints was seated experiences only. Don't make people stand up. Don't take that risk," says Unger. "With Crescent Bay, the fact that they put tracking components on the back of the headset, it feels like a validation of where things should ultimately be going and it allows us to open up again those gameplay mechanics that we locked down."

He's right: The eight-minute demo that Oculus created to showcase the capabilities of the Crescent Bay prototype was about a dozen short experiences, all done while standing up in a small room. That opens another dimension to the kinds of puzzles that can be used in a game like The Gallery, thanks to the improved camera of Crescent Bay that tracks the user's position in a room.

It creates a, "volumetric experience where you actually walk around and experience objects with full depth and experience them from all angles--that's when you experience presence, when you are untethered and you can walk around this small volume," says Unger. "That's the future of VR."

CCP Games

The company behind the hit sci-fi game Eve Online latched onto the promise of VR early and has been working on a spaceship dogfighting game, Eve Valkyrie, since April 2013. The game, which has been used to illustrate Oculus's technology at conferences and trade shows, brings to mind the dogfighting scenes in the Star Wars films--except you are there in the cockpit. You can look around the control panel of your ship, out the glass and into the vastness of space, and find the enemy fighters shooting at you. This is only possible with the accurate head tracking of the headset and the positional tracking of the camera.

"With every revision we've seen, the comfort level improves," says Richard Smith, the technical director of Eve Valkyrie. "That's a combination of the hardware getting better and software developers finding better ways to create VR experiences for people. It's also just understanding what the boundaries are for what we can do and what we can put the player through, without them having problems. There is a climatization curve that players go through when playing VR."

Most dogfighting games cheat around the lack of peripheral vision by, say, sending a beep to your heads-up display warning that an opponent is chasing you, says Smith. "Now I can look behind me and I can actually see the guy."

Epic Games

Oculus VR's Crescent Bay demo ended with a scene called Showdown, which was created by Epic Games and ran on its Unreal Engine 4 software. Players are dropped into a street where a firefight is taking place between a robot and a squad of SWAT officers. You move around in slow motion, dodging bullets, debris, and explosions.

"There' s a scene operating around you, in actual 3-D," says Nick Donaldson, a senior designer at Epic. "It's kind of a hybrid of cinema and interactive experiences. You get to choose the way that you view the experience. It's much more like a play. You are not necessarily interacting with the actors in the same way and it seems like a new thing."

Epic Games is in a unique position to discuss the Crescent Bay prototype headset. Epic and its Unreal Engine, which many companies here have licensed to make their games, has supported Oculus since the beginning. The developer has made demos for every iteration of Oculus's VR headsets. The man at Epic Games behind virtual reality integration is Nick Whiting, the company's lead programmer of VR and Visual Scripting.

"A lot of people who put on the first Development Kit could not see what's beyond the front of their face," says Whiting. "You put someone in the Crescent Bay prototype, you don't have to have a leap of imagination. It's on your face. You can see the quality. You can feel the presence in a good demo. That's the religious moment that everybody has. They put on really good VR for the first time and they are like, 'I get it now.'"

The biggest takeaway from Oculus Connect is that virtual reality will not be lacking for worthwhile content, even if some of it is only for novelty. You'll be able to fly through mountains and outer space, explore a garden or an alien space station, or enjoy a virtual meal. The sense of presence, a term used to describe the way quality VR makes you forget you are having a digital experience, becomes easier to obtain. You are having a dogfight in space. You are exploring a forest with a fox.

"Despite the fact that we've been working on Lucky's Tale for a while," Bettner says, "when I playtest one of the levels and then I go home and sit down to play a game on my PlayStation 4 and it's like, 'Meh.' I just wish I could experience all my games in VR."

Today in Tabs: No Its Becky

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Taylor Swift has been marketing her upcoming album brilliantly just by being Taylor Swift and doing Taylor Swiftish things like carrying her cat around, wearing clothes, and literally being a beautiful mutant human-heron hybrid. But real questions have been raised, such as what happened to Meredith? Why is Eric Holder resigning? How bendable is the iPhone 6+ really? And did De Blasiomurder a groundhog, and if so will it be winter forever? As our foremost modern stork-woman, we look to Swift for answers to these and literally all other questions, and until she provides them she will have to remain banished to the cutie.zone.

"It's the ultimate first world problem," begins NYTFirst-World Problems correspondentNick Bilton, in his ongoing quest to prove there is no issue too picayune for him to explore at excruciating length and with grim, relentless cuteseyness. The first-world problem this time is... you know what, who even cares? There will just be another one next week.


lemurs love lollipops

The headline "Five 'No. 2s' at The New York Times" somehow manages not to refer to either opinion columnists or actual poop. Fox News still your #1 platform for terrible human garbage. Businessweek does some fine (satirical?) data journalism with the Waka Flocka Flame blunt-roller story. "Julia Allison writes about things that are like Burning Man but are not Burning Man" is a sentence that is both true and composed entirely of things that are bad. Justin Ellis wrote about what happened to The Wire in Nieman Lab. Spoiler: according to Atlantic editor James Bennet, The Wire's traffic was "substantial," but only compared to sites that are very, very small. "How novel it would be to read Lena Dunham's thoughts on the idea of failure... What if she had to settle for anonymity?" is the bizarre conclusion to this Washington Post review of her memoir. Sorry Lena, but apparently in writing your memoir about your actual life, you're somehow doing that wrong too. The government of India's Maharashtra state made a vending machine that gives out cupcakes in exchange for likes on Facebook. Today in Tabs has obtained a secret diagram of how the machine actually works:


TABS EXCLUSIVE MUST CREDIT

FeminismUncool. Goth teensfake. Beloved AuthorNot So Jolly. PastaIntrusive. StoryCovered Exhaustively.

Bijan is sick today, so I don't know how this is gonna go, but here he is:

TODAY'S INTERN TAB, by BIJAN STEPHEN

I didn't wear headphones on my commute to work today, out of some misguided urge to be present, to fully experience the day. I left my apartment to the smell of fall's first rain; I thought about how it recalled the "frisson between the person I was then-in high school, as a freshman, on my way to a 7am soccer practice-and who I am now, someone who still enjoys the smell of rain in the morning, but someone for whom things have irrecoverably changed." Which is what I wrote on my iPhone's note-taking app, this morning on the 2.

And then I got to work and fired up Tweetdeck.

"4chan's latest, terrible 'prank': Convincing West Africans that Ebola doctors actually worship the disease", the headline went. 4chan does things like this for 'lulz,' which is something I used to believe in, as a 14-year-old freshman entering high school, as someone who was too consumed with his own pain to notice hurting anyone else.

The rain hasn't changed, really, and neither has 4chan. I'm wearing headphones home.

That was scrawled in some sort of very dark crimson ink (??) on what appears to be a tear-stained page torn from a Moleskine notebook so I hope I transcribed it right. Feel better soon little buddy!

Today's Album: The whole Gone Girl Soundtrack is up at NPR. That was quick! It's moody!

Today's Song: B. Dolan dropped "Natural Born Trouble," the first track from his upcoming House of Bees vol 3 mix tape.



~"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their tabs or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together...~

Hey today is the one year anniversary of Today in Tabs! On September 25th, 2013, I tweeted:

and then Caitlin tweeted:

and then I wrote 140,000-something words in 188 installments over the next year and here we are! I can't believe it's been a whole year, it only feels like twenty! Here's to another ye... mon... here's to getting through the rest of this week!

As always we're on FastCoLabs and in your email, and you might want to follow @TodayinTabs. Or you might not!

This Film Is Made From 3,000 Animated GIFs

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Twohundredfiftysixcolors is a silent, 97-minute film comprised entirely of animated GIFs. It features looping images of Beyoncé, Slavoj Žižek, Pizza Dog, 9-11, Eadweard Muybridge's pre-cinema animations, ASCII, dinosaurs on treadmills, meme-bits, early Internet artifacts, and artist-submitted works.

Let's start with some loading graphics.

For two years, Chicago-based artists and directors Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus, along with curatorial assistant Theodore Darst, collected and organized thousands of GIFs, dug out of the fringes and the heart of the Internet.

"We structured the film in a way that creates a sort-of 'narrative arc,'" Fleischauer explains. It traces the evolution of the GIF through its common themes and uses, tying it to the history of cinema and powering through aesthetics and pop culture. "Mainly, we were harnessing the power of montage to make connections and collisions between different GIFs to generate new meanings or ideas about the GIF from all these individual files. In some ways, the effect is orchestral, where all these individual parts are working in concert with each other to generate a dynamic portrait of the file format."

Along with archival digging, the directors invited submission of original or found GIFs and made a restriction-free open call to artists and non-artists alike. As a result, the film's credits include a slew of well-known digital artists, including Cory Arcangel, Bunny Rogers, Eva and Franco Mattes, Petra Cortright, jodi.org, and many more.

"In a lot of ways the artist-made GIFs were pretty stale compared to all the weird stuff Jason and Eric found," Twohundredfiftysixcolors curatorial assistant Darst says. And they found some very, very strange things. Darst's favorite? "There was a GIF of security cam footage of a guy getting robbed and then peeing on himself that was so funny and scary at the same time. I don't know if it made the final cut, but I really liked that one."

To Fleischauer, this demonstrated both the accessibility of the medium by a "deskilling of production" and the creativity of individual artists' approach to the format. "It also gives those outside the 'Art World' a platform to join the conversations digital artists are engaging in online."

Twohundredfiftysixcolors makes its way to New York on October 5th at the UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art in Brooklyn.

The Tiny Wireless Earbuds Of The Future Are Made Possible By Software

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My obsession with the movie Her isn't about the complex plot depicting a man's relationship with his gadget, it's directed at the small wireless earbud Joaquin Phoenix used in the film. It was tiny and spectacular, unencumbered by technical realities.

That's probably why I was enthralled when the company Earin launched its Kickstarter for a pair of impossibly small earbuds. Instead of only one playing in mono like in the movie, however, there are two--wirelessly connected--that can play in stereo.

Earin isn't the only manufacturer making tiny earbuds. There's also Bragi making The Dash, Ownphones, and Motorola, each creating some small wireless earbuds that tuck fashionably inside your ear.

The simultaneous timing of these product releases and announcements got me curious about what was behind these advancements. Turns out, these devices are using technology that is three years old.

"The hardware enabling these tiny new devices is the CSR8670, our leading-edge flash based audio system-on-chip platform," says CSR senior manager of audio marketing Kevin Carey. "It integrates advanced wireless connectivity with embedded flash memory and many other capabilities that enable manufacturers to design leading-edge wireless headsets and speakers."

The CSR8670 hardware was released in September of 2011. So why the delay in getting this type of earbud to market? The release of a new ADK (accessory development kit) with the updated "True Wireless Audio" application looks like it may have been the turning point. The software allows manufacturers to design headsets and speakers that don't need wires to connect the left and right speakers or earbuds together.

"We designed the application to ensure audio is so tightly synchronized it delivers the same user experience as a wired headset or speaker, and in conjunction with our aptX audio codec delivers CD-quality audio with no wires to be seen," Carey says. "This capability seems to have fired the imagination of a number of companies who are using it in some exciting new products."

CSR isn't the only company innovating in the system on a chip space, there's also ISSC and Broadcom. Earin, however, lists CSR as the hardware powering its earbuds--specifically the CSR8670.

Bragi also confirmed that it's using CSR technology, but didn't give specifics about which model. And they seem to have the most ambitious offering, stuffing as many components and features into people's ears with The Dash as possible. In addition to just making the small wireless earbuds, the product also has 4 GB of on-board storage, a fitness tracker, heart rate monitor, and is waterproof.

"Last year, after some amazing design work, a framework for the UI, and a realistic plan for sourcing the miniaturized components, there was a certain moment when we realized that Bragi's own software architecture was the key to bringing The Dash to life," says Bragi's Americas president Jim Ninesling. "Integrating all of the components so they spoke to one another required an operating system designed by us."

The company has been documenting its endeavor through the product's Kickstarter page, detailing exactly how much work is involved in making such tiny earbuds. It shows that just because all the pieces are available doesn't mean these amazing new products won't still be a challenge to build.

"The 5th of September was a hugely important day," says Ninesling in an update. "It was the day when the first miniaturized electronics for The left Dash was delivered to us." In nine hours the team managed to get the parts communicating, a process that usually takes weeks. "Specialists had told us many times it wouldn't work. Investors were sceptic (sic). We had taken a huge step forward."

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