Earlier this month one of Hollywood's biggest stars, Jennifer Lawrence, along with many other actresses, experienced the nightmare that we all dread: Her personal photos were stolen and shared with all the world. The breach was accomplished using a brute force phishing method where iCloud user names and passwords were repeatedly guessed until the hackers came upon the right combination, and it was just the latest example of how vulnerable our photos are in the age of mobile phones and cloud storage.

Add to that the recent revelations that the NSA has ways to remotely enable the cameras and mics on our smartphones and it's easier than ever to feel like not only our personal pictures, but our entire lives could be compromised at any time.

Apple has vowed to improve its security measures. But if you're looking for something more sturdy, a San Antonio, Texas company called Vysk has developed an iPhone case and companion app that is likely the best consumer-grade protection against camera and photo hacking ever developed.

"Smartphones are a window into our lives. It wakes up with us in the morning, goes to work or school with us, goes out with friends, goes on dates, goes on vacations, and records all the special moments of our lives, but it's like living in a glass house with no curtains," says Victor Cochia, a U.S. Army veteran who cofounded Vysk along with cryptographic expert Dr. Michael Fiske. "Although we don't have anything to hide when we are in our homes, it doesn't mean we want someone looking in on us at all times. We have a certain level of privacy that we desire and deserve."

With the Vysk smartphone case--available for the iPhone 5, 5s, and Samsung Galaxy 4--Cochia said he and his team set out to create the "curtain you need on your phone."

The Vysk Everyday Privacy Case (EP1) takes a two-pronged approach to securing your smartphone's cameras and ensuring your photos and videos can't be hacked. The first prong is mechanical. The EP1 case features a simple shutter that completely seals the front and rear cameras inside the case. When the shutter is enabled, which the user does by simply sliding a switch, it is not possible for either camera to see or record anything. This means if someone--whether the NSA or a hacker--compromised your phone's cameras all they would see is darkness.

But Vysk knows that while a compromised camera is a potentially greater security threat since the intruder can monitor you and your surroundings in real time, the way most people will have their privacy violated on their mobile phones is by a hacker or thief gaining access to the photos and videos you've already shot.

That's where the second, software-focused, prong of the Vysk security case comes in. Users who have the EP1 get access to the Vysk Private Gallery app. The Private Gallery is an encrypted, password-protected app designed to be a secure repository for photos and videos. Users can store photos and videos in two separate inner galleries, effectively separating, say, life and work. Each inner gallery uses a unique PIN code for entry. The Private Gallery app encrypts the photos and videos before they are stored on the device. Even if a user backs up their phone's data to iCloud, the files are still stored as encrypted data and cannot be deciphered.

"The iCloud hacking case demonstrates that we all need to pay closer attention to the way that we use computing devices and the way we store our data," says Cochia, who also notes that it's not just celebrities that need to be worried about photo hacking. "It's become a common tactic for stalkers and cyber bullying."

The EP1 case, which also features a built-in battery, retails for $119 and comes in red, blue, gold, and black.

But Vysk isn't stopping with this case. They're currently working on next generation case called the QS1. The company says it will solve the problem of eavesdropping and hacking "by creating a secure environment within the case that is separate from the phone's vulnerable operating system."

In addition to the camera shutter and security app, the QS1 will include an external processor embedded in the case to encrypt calls, a microphone jammer to disrupt the device's internal microphones, and an independent microphone that will allow users to encrypt their calls before the audio enters the device.

It's a bit sad--and frightening--that Vysk's cases seem like a reasonable tool for people to have nowadays. Back when point-and-shoot cameras were our main tools for photography we didn't have to worry about privacy too much. Our smartphones have made our lives easier, but they have made them less secure too--even with all the existing security measures built in.

"The celebrity photo leak scandal is an example of hackers exploiting social engineering to work their way around the system," says Cochia. "We're living in a world of diminishing privacy where any of the common security answers needed for password retrieval can be found with more and more ease. When almost every detail of a person's life can be found on the Internet and used to exploit security weaknesses, it's time to change gears and adopt more sophisticated technology."

Note: this is the third in a six-part series covering the six-week coding and product bootcamp, HFC Academy. Read the first and second entries too.

The delicate balance of product and coding lessons at HFC Academy sits on the fulcrum of difficulty--and the Ruby On Rails language hit my barely-code-literate brain like a ton of bricks. The product lessons are great parables in the importance of communication, but mostly abstract preparation for when the programming side of the business kicks in.

It's the third week of HappyFunCorp's hybrid product and coding bootcamp, and I've hit the hard wall of language abstraction. In comparison, the first two weeks of the course learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript tricks were gravy. Breaking visual elements rarely broke the entire page--just fix that misplaced bracket and everything will line up as you intended. Rails is far more opaque: You're toying with the strings connecting different pages and if they aren't formatted just so, your page is broken. Poof.

"Rails is just a series of horrible tricks. It's upsetting until you figure out what it wants you to do, and then you can do cool things," says Ricky Reusser, instructor at HFC Academy. 'It makes a lot of assumptions for you. Once you figure out what those tricks are, you can save yourself a lot of typing. You have to figure out where the magic is happening."

Or where the magic isn't happening, and breaking your code. Which means it's time to learn how to debug code and properly QA what's gone wrong. Sharp eyes are still important, but now it's become relentless hunting. Like hacking down brush to find the source of the fire, Reusser suggests chopping 100 lines out of your code. If your code still works, replace and chop out 90--all the way down until you zero in on the problem. This is where coding becomes a zen exercise in dogged resilience.

But never to the point of perfection. Expect perfect code and you'll never release it. In a break from the slog up the Rails learning curve, CEO and cofounder of PercolateNoah Brier briefed us on Percolate's small-team method to solve workflow madness.

Ship Small, Early, and Often

Percolate is a software engineering firm that builds suites of tools--a self-proclaimed "system of record"--for digital marketers. Up until three months ago, Percolate was a structural monolith, Brier says, but then they sliced the 50-person Product staff into five teams. It worked so well that they can't remember how it operated before, Brier says.

Each 7-8 person team is split between engineers, designers, and product managers--which means multiple disciplines have their eyes on a product as it grows. This means more eyes are acting as proxies for the user, pointing out potential problems from an early stage. Small teams are lean teams.

"One of the most scalable operations in history was the Roman army," Brier says, quoting former Engineering SVP of Twitter Chris Fry.

Percolate maintains their product teams at the vaunted two-pizza level, which means they can work on more features at once. The problem with the Waterfall workflow method, Brier says, is that you end up comparing apples to oranges: Do I want this new user feature or to refine that old one? Small teams let you compare apples to apples.

They also keep things simple. Simple doesn't happen when you merge teams for large endeavors. "As soon as you merge in, you gotta merge everyone in, who might be in 16 different places," Brier says.

But most importantly, staying small and lean fits with Percolate's mantra: Ship small, early, and often.

Small teams avoid scope creep. Percolate's small teams figure out the smallest thing they can build, built it, then refactor. Smaller projects move more quickly up the workflow pipeline and are easier to QA. Feedback comes that much quicker and products evolve more fluidly.

Brier, a former journalist and self-taught programmer, hand-coded the first iterations of Percolate back in its January 2011 beginnings. He's since handed most of the company's coding off to the regiment of software engineers he oversees as head of Product.

"I love working with engineers because they see every problem as a solvable thing," Brier says. "One of our core concepts that we took from Etsy is to always assume things are systemic problems. If somebody does something stupid, instead of blaming them, blame the system that let them do something massively stupid."

Satisfying Your Market

That's all internal, but Percolate has to make the companies buying its software understand that, too. The marketing agencies in turn have to answer to their own clients, who make numerous requests for changes.

Back in January 2011 when Brier started Percolate, the challenge was that brands saw the marketing potential of digital as more channels and more targeting options. But the production and cost model was staying linear. Brands wanted three times more stuff for three-quarters of the budget. The answer was to find efficiencies in tech--which Brier and his Percolate cofounder set out to do.

"From a product point of view, selling to someone with a budget is always easier," says HFC instructor Will Schenk. Instead, business-to-business has its own slew of challenges. "It's always a big question: What's the value of a tweet? What's the value of a Facebook share? Lots of people will consume on one channel and act on another. A lot of marketers are trying to make those connections because they don't have any sense of what's moving the needle."

Many of those efficiencies came down to homing in on what Percolate's marketing agency client base needed--not what they said they wanted.

"You're supposed to ask 'why' five times to figure out what's going on. Somebody will say we should build it because your marketers' clients asked for it--but why did those clients ask?" Briers says. "You realize people have not gone below the second layer. Instead of an idea, you should bring the actual challenge they're trying to solve."

Ello, ello, ello, ello White America, you've got a new social network to groan at the prospect of joining or being left out of or ostentatiously refusing to join, depending on how you handle these things. But what is Ello? It's been around since at least April, when BetaBeat's Jack Smith Fourtook a steely-eyed, critical look at the "supergroup of artists, programmers, and designers" organized by "mad genius" Paul Budnitz. Mr. Four concluded at the time that although "Ello.co is just a landing page," nevertheless "success is by no means guaranteed!" Hmm, tough, but fair. But after six weeks in invite-only beta, yesterday was Ello's breakthrough day in tabs.

Beta invites were reportedly selling on eBay for $500. Mr. Four updated breathlessly throughout the day, first breaking the vital news that Ello welcomed porn, and later updating about the site's server status as though he were reporting from behind German lines in the Ardennes. The sheer gathering force of the tabs drew halfhearted blog posts out of Gizmodo's Les Horn and Valleywag's Nitasha Tiku like a waterspout sucking resigned fish up to their airborne deaths. "There have been a few versions of this virtuous social network before-from Diaspora (forgotten), App.net (oof), and even Path (oy)," summed up Tiku, wisely leaving the interjection "(lol)" for future articles where this list also includes Ello.

Of course if you're a man, you can hardly launch your new social network without a manifesto. The foremost concern for Ello's -ifestoing men seems to be not having ads. Nevertheless, and please try to contain your shock here, #brands were among the first to sign up, including Sonos and, most hilariously, Ello's anti-advertising founder's own bicycle brand, Budnitz bicycles. We know why the brands are there, but why were people so keen to get in? Taylor Hatmakerthinks it might be Facebook's new emphasis on real names, and many of the early and vocal Ello migrants seem to have been LGBTQ users who felt excluded by the Zuckerborg. What's strange about this is that so far, Ello provides no privacy controls or means of blocking anyone from following or interacting with you, which are fundamental tools for the internet's most frequently victimized groups.

Most interesting have been the Takes from people who are not required by contract to produce Takes. Quinn Nortonwrote about the place of social networks in our brains and the "devil's bargain" of venture capital w/r/t Ello's no-ads stance. It turned out, though, that Ello has so far been funded by a $435,000 seed round from FreshTracks Capital, as Andy Baio posted on Ello itself. He's expecting a big Series A round soon, and with growth numbers like this you can be sure Mr. Budnitz is getting offers. Quinn Nortonsuggested a differential pricing model where users pay, and people in richer countries are charged more. But they've already got seed funders, so that's just not going to happen.

One thing is certain, however, and that is Death. Whatever its prospects for short-term success are, Ruby J Murray takes the sure bet in the Guardian and predicts that Ello won't last forever. In fact one fellow manifesto writer has already jumped ship over concern about Ello's ideological purity. And while it is certain that Ello will let everyone down, I look forward to finding out whether it's by selling out or failing to bootstrap. If you'd like, you can friend my imposter on Ello, right here.

Random Digressions:

• Ello is already home to some of the hottest #content on the 'net.
• A rumor went around yesterday that Ello was banning #gamergate posts. "Not true!" Mr. Four leaped in to explain.
• Before he got into crappy social network design, Paul Budnitz started a bike company that was similarly thick with earnest, anti-corporate manifestos. Bike people were not charmed, calling his bikes "overpriced... singlespeed hybrid-style bicycles for douchebags" that are "marketed by a designer toymaker instead of somebody with any real knowledge of bicycles." Bike maker Black Sheep also alleged that Budnitz stole its designs for his bikes.

I've got some tabs about #groundghazi here but the hell with it. Let's just turn it over to Bijan.

Thanks for the encouragement, Millennial Giles Corey. I'm sure you'll be calling for more weight if capitalism ever elects to settle the crushing millstone of a real job upon you.

Today's Actually Good Thing: Read this Casey Cep essay about the most pointless ferry in Maryland

Today's Song: Radiohead's Thom Yorke just dropped a whole album on Bittorrent. You can listen to the first track on the site, the album's $6.00 to buy.

~Who in that? Oh shit, it's just tabs on tabs on tabs~

Today in Tabs is a useful and intriguing daily digest of the most important stories online, is what someone who is totally lying to you would say in this space. Read it on FastCoLabs or get it in your email but rest assured I will never attempt to be useful or intriguing.

Your company's social media guru may craft the most enviably hilarious tweets imaginable, but even they know the sobering truth: When it comes to the social web, most people prefer the stuff that comes from actual human beings over whatever some brand has to say. It seems like pretty intuitive, self-evident thing, but now there's data to back it up.

In a recent study [PDF], the folks at Chartbeat demonstrated that content tweeted by third parties grabbed people's attention for longer than content tweeted out by the original publishers themselves. On average, pages tweeted from third-party users (aka regular people) reeled people in for 42 to 45 seconds. By comparison, pages tweeted by the brands averaged between 37 and 39 seconds of engagement.

In other words, if you tweet out this article to your followers right now, it's more likely to grab people's attention longer than when @FastCoLabs or @FastCompany pushes it out.

The difference might not seem dramatic, but as the authors of Chartbeat's white paper point out, a mini-gulf like this "can lead to practical differences in engagement from a few seconds to nearly a 40% difference in Engaged Time."

It only makes sense that people would become more immersed in a blog post or news article shared by somebody they know (or otherwise respect) than by a brand for whom the act of sharing is a necessary and reflexive part of doing business. Fast Company will share this article because we have to. If you share it, it's probably because you find it informative, counterintuitive, or just plain outrageous (Thanks, BTW!).

What's interesting is that the human factor didn't just lead to more clicks (at least, that's not what's being measured here) as you might expect, but rather to more time spent consuming the content itself. That says something not just about connection between non-brand humanoids on Twitter, but about the perceived quality of what's being shared.

While they were at it, the data team at Chartbeat looked at the long-term loyalty of social traffic, again broken down by third-party and first-party tweets. The conclusions there were a little less predictable. While third-party tweets led to more engagement per visit, the percentage of people who actually returned to the site was higher for first-party tweets. That makes sense: Of course you're likely to return a site if you follow the publisher on Twitter. Interestingly, once social visitors returned to a site, the number of times they returned was slightly higher for those who arrived via tweets from third parties.

Chartbeat is in a unique position to measure this kind of thing, given how many editors are glued to its real-time analytics dashboard every day of the week. The company is sitting on a gold mine of valuable data about how people interact with web content, samples of which are used to conduct studies like this one.

Why does engagement matter? In the very same white paper, Chartbeat's data is used to illustrate a correlation between engaged time and how viewable advertisements are. As it turns out, the more time people spend reading a page, the more likely they are to see all of the ads on that page. Whether or not they take any sort of action is another story, but the connection between engagement and ad impressions is bound to be of interest to publishers who rely on advertising to stay afloat. It also further bolsters the notion that publishing highly sharable content can lead to directly to real-world financial payoff.

Okay, maybe you're onto something, Upworthy.

Just imagine putting on a headset and seeing a computer game not as a flat screen but a three-dimensional image right there in front of you. And when you move your head, you can look around this imaginary world just how you would in real life.

You don't have to dream this up. It's real. A company called eMagin released the Z800 3DVisor in 2005 for $1,000. And there were others before the Z800, like Virtuality and VPL. These companies had expensive, not quite effective virtual reality equipment.

It is easy to forget when using Oculus Rift prototypes that this is not the first attempt at creating VR for the masses. Oculus is working to build a high-quality product, to create an ecosystem of games, and to make a VR industry that will survive this time. But it may all fall apart once again. Let's take a look at how that could happen.

1. VR Doesn't Move Beyond Games

While gaming may be a huge industry, reaping over $15 billion last year in the U.S. alone according to the NPD Group, it's going to take more than that to turn VR into the world-changing technology many believe it will be. The content must go beyond games. If VR does not find uses in other industries, it will remain an enthusiast's gaming rig.

"The most interesting industry for widespread adoption is film," says Oculus VP of product, Nate Mitchell. "What is a VR trailer? What does a Pixar short look like in VR? That's something we've been investigating. And it's something that we are seeing a lot of people in the film industry get excited about."

At the Oculus Connect conference, one panel featured Maleficent director Robert Stromberg, Saschka Unseld from Pixar, and John Gaeta of Lucasfilm discussing Hollywood's interest in VR. And in demos for the latest Oculus prototype VR headset, there was a moment that could have been ripped out of Jurassic Park, with the player in a museum and a gigantic T-rex coming toward them.

"There's a reason we picked the demos we did, part of that is to show people where we think this is going," Mitchell tells Co.Labs. "It's not all going to be games. It's going to be film and storytelling, and health and education and travel. You have to show people and open their eyes for them to really get it."

2. VR Stays Expensive

While Oculus has said that the consumer headset will only cost between $200 and $400 when it is released, using it will require a computer with some serious horsepower, which would likely cost over $1,000. But by partnering with Samsung to create the Gear VR, a more affordable unit that uses the Galaxy Note 4 cell phone for the screen and processing power, the company has fixed this problem already.

"Most of the Gear VR system is the phone, and you have to buy this anyway. And once you have this, the VR is a minor expense on top of it. As opposed to having to buy a high-end PC," says Max Cohen, VP of Mobile at Oculus VR.

For people getting the phone already, to spend the extra $200 or so for the headset shell with its additional tracking sensors is not a ridiculous proposition. And a mobile VR unit would be easy to share, to show friends what virtual reality is like, although the graphics will be simpler. But the cell-phone market is considerably larger than that of gaming PCs.

Cohen says, "I wouldn't say one is better than the other, they are just very different products. The overall market size will most likely be larger for mobile than PC, just based on history."

3. People Don't Want Flashy, Yet Empty Technology

Despite selling millions of Kinect cameras for the Xbox 360, and including an updated Kinect with its new console Xbox One at launch, Microsoft later released an Xbox One without the Kinect. This was to lower the price of the console by $100 to $399 to match Sony's PlayStation 4, which had been outselling Xbox One about 2:1. But it was also likely because few developers were making games for the Kinect because these motion-control games do not seem to be selling--Microsoft's recent Kinect Sports Rivals has only sold about 200,000 copies, according to VGChartz. Despite the futurism of the technology, it failed to grab the attention of players or the content makers that would provide such experiences for said audience.

The same could happen to VR. People may find the technology just a flashy, shortened version of 3-D films or television shows.

"I'm a third of the way around the world away from my family. And every night I am having a Skype call with my wife and my 18-month-old son. But with VR, we have the potential to create that experience where we feel like we are genuinely in the same place at the same time," says Richard Smith, the technical director at CCP Games. "Everyone these days has friends or relatives that don't live in the same city as them and would benefit from being able to have a conversation no matter where we are. I like the idea of being able to play board games with friends that aren't able to be in the same room and get that sense that we are all together."

CCP Games created the online multiplayer game Eve Online, as well as the VR game Eve: Valkyrie. Smith sees VR extending even further. "Messages could be more meaningful for people. How do you make that work so it doesn't feel intrusive to people? This could be one of the last trips to a conference I have to make. No more jet lag, no more expensive airfare. We could enjoy these conferences from the comfort of our own desks at home, and yet feel like we are having that shared experience."

4. Distrust From Past VR

Virtual reality of decades past was expensive, and did not work particularly well either. Screens were blurry, movement was erratic, and some people would get nauseous. People who remember those days may be turned off by the whole idea of VR coming back. But the enthusiasm of early adopters who may persuade them to try the Oculus Rift could win them over. Execs at Oculus promise they will not release a product that makes people uncomfortable.

"If you try something, even for a few minutes, and you came out feeling horrible, you are not going to want to do it again, you are not going to be excited to run to a store and buy it," says Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. "I am the most sensitive at the company. I don't want to be shipping something I can't use."

Even the less advanced experience of the Gear VR feels better than the choppy games of the older VR units you could buy for the home or that were found in various arcades and amusement parks.

5. People Fear The Effects Of VR

What if the problem extended beyond just comfort? What if it was a health issue? All those who attended the Oculus Connect conference had to sign liability forms and declare there was no health risk. Can VR be a danger to your body?

VR is so powerful because it tricks your brain into thinking it is in an actual place. If you move too quickly, you do get a bit of motion sickness. If you stand at a virtual ledge, you can feel a degree of vertigo. And if something suddenly lunges at you, your heart races.

"People want escapism, but they don't necessarily want to be scared. I am very anti-jump scare in VR," says Denny Unger, founder of Cloudhead Games and creator of VR game The Gallery: Six Elements."VR has such an amazing influence on our physiology; we are very close to our first death in VR. Someone is going to push it too far and someone who has some kind of physical issue is going to die. It's going to happen."

It does seems inevitable that a health scare or an actual death will happen and it will spread through the media like wildfire. Such bad exposure could turn the public away from virtual reality. Oculus currently curates the section of its website where developers share the VR demos and games they are working on, not giving official exposure to software with inappropriate content. And it would not be a stretch to see Oculus include longer descriptions, like ESRB ratings, to let people know what they are getting into--labels for things like "high speed that may induce nausea" or "jump scares that may shock people."

"If no one is doing it officially, you should just take that on yourself. Give people some kind of warning about what they are going to experience," says Unger. "There should be some kind of rating system. I don't think it should stymie development and I don't think it should limit how game developers create their games, but there should be transparency."

6. Competitors Fragment The Market

There is always the possibility that Oculus Rift doesn't take off because another company's product does. Sony is working on its Project Morpheus virtual reality headset for PlayStation 4. And they probably aren't the only company working on a competing VR headset given the buzz that Oculus is receiving. Could these splinter the market to such a point that no one succeeds?

Many games are being made to target multiple platforms. Cloudhead Games is making The Gallery for Oculus Rift and Morpheus. Likewise, CCP is designing Valkyrie for both. Epic Games, early fans of Oculus and supplier of several Rift demos, is also looking at multiple VR platforms for its Unreal Engine 4 technology.

"As long as all the VR headsets are high-quality experiences, I think it is a great thing. Because you have more avenues to get VR. Some people who don't have a high-end PC will have a PlayStation to try the Morpheus or some people will be willing to try Gear VR," says Nick Whiting, lead programmer of VR at Epic.

A competitor that comes out of nowhere could be a problem if they get wide exposure, and deliver a bad experience. "The worry is that someone is going to come out with a really bad VR setup and they are going to beat everyone else to market. So people start trying it and you poison the well," says Whiting.

But he also admits this scenario is unlikely. "There is enough high-quality stuff out there now that it's really hard to try a bad one without trying a good one. Oculus has shipped over a hundred thousand development kits. That's a pretty good population," says Whiting. "So hopefully when people see the other ones they will be like, 'This isn't good. I've tried better. I am going to put this one down and still stick with VR.'"

Just as HD-DVDs lost to Blu-rays, new technologies which improve existing markets can still fail (just look at 3-D television sets). But with Facebook backing up Oculus's move to make virtual reality more than a niche, perhaps next year VR gets real--1990s or 2000s be damned.

Update: Denny Unger, president of Cloudhead Games, has contacted Fast Company with additional thoughts on the subject of a possible death occurring because of virtual reality. "To design better games in VR, developers should be aware of the positive and negative potential physiological and psychological health consequences," says Unger. "You can induce profoundly positive experiences as well as negative ones. A pre-existing condition could make VR dangerous for some people."

Plenty of companies use data to turn leads into sales, or turn one-time clients into repeat buyers through targeted marketing. But when some of those sales inevitably turn into past-due accounts, those same companies often drop the statistical analysis and move to a more primitive--and less effective--one-size-fits-all approach to bill collecting.

"I realized how lacking debt collection was in comparison to other parts of the business in terms of technology," says Ohad Samet, the cofounder and CEO of TrueAccord, a data-driven debt collection agency, who previously worked in risk management at an e-commerce company. "It should be a more pleasant experience that doesn't ruin the relationship between the company owed money and the person who owes money."

TrueAccord's machine learning platform, which launched September 16 with funding from Khosla Ventures and Max Levchin among others, lets the company crunch numbers on a scale not available to small businesses and freelancers with only a few late-paying clients each. And that is already leading to insights--for instance, it's found that debt collection emails sent on Thursdays and Fridays are the most effective.

TrueAccord shared these tips for businesses looking to optimize the effectiveness of their own billing.

Get Their Side Of The Story

Part of the inspiration for TrueAccord came when Samet accidentally forgot to pay a credit card bill on time. He didn't dispute the charges and was willing to pay, so he didn't appreciate being hounded by an aggressive, largely automated collection system.

"I didn't enjoy that," he says. "I started thinking about all these people who cannot pay and what they must be going through."

First off, says Samet, it's important to understand where a delinquent customer's coming from. Is the payment delayed because they're unsatisfied with the service they received, because they don't have the money, or simply because of an honest mistake?

"A large part is getting them to actually tell us what happened," he says. "Predominantly when someone doesn't pay, it's not that they want to hurt you, it's for other reasons."

Make It Easy For Customers To Respond

TrueAccord generally reaches out to customers via email and invites them to log in to see the outstanding bill in question, file a dispute, or set up a payment plan.

"The digital generation prefers email, text message, IM more than just making a phone call," Samet says, adding that about 30% of the service's web traffic comes from mobile devices. "If someone really wants to talk, they can call in, or they can ask to be called."

A blog post recounting his credit card experience mentions how bill collectors often robodial from unfamiliar numbers at inconvenient times, then play automated and generic messages asking customers to hold for an actual operator.

"Online communication responds to people," says Samet. "It works with people's preferences."

Some modes of communication, such as SMS, aren't ideal for initial communication, since it's hard to insert all the legally required information into a text, but they're still useful for following up, he says.

Tailor The Message

TrueAccord uses a variety of data points to target different styles of collection messages to different customers, says Nadav Samet, the company's cofounder and CTO (who is not related to Ohad Samet). For instance, the company's message to a young debtor might focus on the importance of proving responsibility, he says.

"Maybe that wouldn't be the same language you would use to speak to a 40-year-old mom," he says.

One example email targeted at a younger audience is written from the perspective of an unpaid bill. "I've been sitting here listening to breakup songs and eating ice cream because I feel like you've been avoiding me," reads the bill. "Maybe life just got busy and you meant to pay me but got distracted?"

TrueAccord tries to write the letter in a voice that customer can relate to, says Ohad. "A very young, fun person is not going to get a great response from an older professional."

Be Specific About What You Want

TrueAccord recommends companies be clear about what's owed, how the charges originated, and what the customer should do next, says Ohad.

"We strongly recommend that you have a reiteration of the breakdown of the charges and what caused the charges," he says.

It's also important to convey what the company calls a "sense of urgency" to motivate customers to act quickly.

"We recommend that you give an actual deadline with an explanation of what's going to happen after the deadline," says Ohad.

And, when possible, giving the customer a variety of payment options, from check to wire transfer to online form, makes it more likely that a bill will get paid.

We have kind of a garb-bag of Tabs today, and that is not a typo. The big weekend tab was the return of Professor Dumpster, last seen blaming his wife for his completely vanilla midlife crisis and smelling terrible across Eastern Europe. The date is now in development as a book and movie, and the Prof. D and his girlfriend seem to be settling in to stunt-living as a full time thing. Today in Tabs sent our Human Garb Bureau ChiefAlison Headley to the dumpster itself this morning and she sent back the following (basically) LIVE picture:

No toilet but I guess he's got radar?

Speaking of human garbage, Ed Champion went on another vicious harassment spree last week, and finally got his Twitter account suspended. He followed it with the usual suicide threats, and some have speculated that this Brooklyn Paper article is about Champion. The only thing that's clear at this point is that wherever Champion is, he won't be missed, and he should never come back or write anything ever again.

The Daily Show mentioned One Directionand #teen Twitter completely lost it. I could have told them it was a bad idea to engage the 1D Fandom. Quartz published a tab explaining that the Hong Kong protesters are not referring to Ferguson when they hold their hands up, and titled it "'Hands up, don't shoot" comes to Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement." Vox's version admits "It's impossible to say the degree to which protesters are using the gesture as a deliberate nod to Ferguson," which might be true except for the fact that literally no one in either tab had ever heard of Ferguson. Chelsea Clintonhad her baby and the media was gross about it.

LeBron's hairline appears to be tidal (teach the #LeBrontroversy)! Egg warns us about the tech bubble he created. There's gonna be a whole Franzen biography to hate-read next year! Future divorcée confuses the words "code-switching" and "lying." Noted individuality fanatic Peter Thiel's cryogenically preserved brain in a jar recommends that "everyone at your company should be different in the same way." Life will be so much simpler when we have one appfor each word we might want to send someone. "Yahoo focuses on core products by shutting down Yahoo" is somehow not a joke but a real thing that just happened. This three-breasted woman Halloween costume is both horrifying and, one feels, only what we deserve. Benedict Cumberbatchcan't say "penguins." [via Digg].

Late Ello coverage continues to trickle in: Jess Zimmermanpoints out that while Ello is not a real threat to them, this would be a good time for the existing social networks to think about why we hate them so much. As if anyone could ever figure that out!

Well Bijan, as John Lennon once said: "you don't have to put on the red light." Good google-using, btw, that Vice tab took me at least 45 seconds to find. I will now go back to pretending to be essential, and leave you with:

Today's Notable Title: The Register, "Super Cali so litigious, Uber is the focus. Even German judges say it's something quite atrocious"

Today's Song: Lorde, "Yellow Flicker Beat" from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 soundtrack

~Every vow you break, every tab you take, I'll be watching you~

Today in Tabs would like to be known as DJ Pyroclastic Flow when we're up in the club. Read us on FastCoLabs or by email. Corrections and Tabs news @TodayinTabs. Dad jokes @rustyk5.

New York City is no Shenzhen when it comes to electronics manufacturing. But the city has seen a number of impressive hardware startups take root and grow. And it's a diverse set of companies, from MakerBot and Adafruit Industries, which exist to help other makers realize their own hardware dreams, or organizations like the New York Hardware Start-up Meetup and the R/GA Accelerator, that are like support groups for tinkerers. But why here?

"They're starting their companies here because of the ancillary connections with some of the areas that New York has been very strong in, whether that's commerce, advertising, fashion, et cetera," says Jenny Fielding, managing director of Techstars.

This is our map of some of the most notable hardware startups in New York City. Our aim is to update it over time as the scene changes. Who have we missed that should be on the list? Leave a note in the comments.

1. LittleBits

   URL: http://littlebits.cc/
   Address: 601 West 26th St, #410 New York, NY 10001
   LittleBits, led by MIT Media Labber Ayah Bdier, is Legos for electronics. Their kits turn gadget prototyping into easy-to understand modules that snap together magnetically, with blocks that dole out power, let you connect an input, and spit out actions. The company has over $15 million in funding, the bulk of which came from a Series B round last November that included O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Nicholas Negroponte, Khosla Ventures, and Lerer Ventures.
   

2. Shapeways

   URL: http://www.shapeways.com/
   Address: Shapeways HQ 419 Park Ave South Suite 900, Floor 9 New York, NY 10016
   Although it was founded in the Netherlands, Shapeways now occupies a 25,000-square-foot factory in Long Island City that produces thousands of 3-D-printed objects every day. Any designer can upload their digital creation onto the site and have the Shapeways team 3-D print the object using their industrial printers. Once prototyped, they can use Shapeways' online marketplace to sell the physical wares to the public. Investors including Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz have pumped more than $48 million into Shapeways so far.
   

3. BotFactory

   URL: https://www.botfactory.co/
   Address: 20 Jay St #312 Brooklyn, NY 11201
   The founders of BotFactory, two NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering grad students and one of their professors, found a way for makers to design and print their own circuit boards faster and cheaper than had been possible before. Makers can even watch their boards being printed from home, via BotFactory's web interface. After raising a little over $100,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, the company is gearing up to begin selling its Squink printers for around $2,500 apiece.
   

4. Adafruit Industries

   URL: http://www.adafruit.com/
   Address: 150 Varick Street New York, NY 10013
   Adafruit Industries connects makers with open-source hardware, like the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino controller, to use in their own creations. The company keeps adding new electronics to their roster, while cultivating a community of DIY hardware enthusiasts. With over $22 million in revenue for 2013, Inc. recently named it one of the fastest growing private companies in manufacturing.
   

5. Canary

   URL: http://canary.is/
   Address: 96 Spring St 7th Floor New York, NY 10012
   This plug-and-play device alerts you on your mobile device when there are changes in movement, temperature, air quality--you name it--in a room. Canary is working on a smoke detector that measures overall air quality as well as a $199 home security device that raised $2 million on Indiegogo. The company recently received $10 million in Series A funding from Khosla Ventures as well as Dropbox investor Bobby Yazdani.
   

6. MakerBot

   URL: http://www.makerbot.com/
   Address: 87 3rd Ave Brooklyn, NY 11217
   MakerBot brought 3-D printing to the masses. The company was acquired by Stratasys in a $403 million transaction last year, and it's not yet clear whether the headquarters will remain in the city. Meanwhile, founder Bre Pettis stepped down from his role as CEO just last week and announced his new project Bold Machines, which is headquartered in a Brooklyn and will use Stratasys, MakerBot, and Solidscape 3-D printers to create, among other things, a feature film that will offer fans the ability to 3-D print every character.
   

7. SOLS

   URL: http://www.sols.co/
   Address: 1201 Broadway Suite 301 New York, NY 10001
   SOLS draws on NYC's fashion tradition to make their 3-D-printed insoles appealing to wearers. The company, founded by the former director of operations and industrial engineering at Shapeways, attracted $6.4 million in Series A funding this year led by Lux Capital.
   

8. EyeLock

   URL: http://www.eyelock.com/
   Address: 355 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10017
   Myris, this company's flagship product, is a device that scans your iris to access your online accounts and data. VOXX International gave EyeLock $3 million this year to further the company's password-free world view.
   

9. Enertiv

   URL: http://www.enertiv.com/
   Address: 333 W 39th Street, Floor 2, New York, NY 10018
   Enertiv has raised over $2 million to fuel its vision for a clean energy-monitoring system. Having taken part in NYC's R/GA Accelerator, the Enertiv team is staying put in the city and setting its sights on upgrading energy systems inside some of the city's prime real estate.
   

10. GoTenna

    URL: http://www.gotenna.com/
    Address: 102 S. 6th St. Brooklyn, NY 11249
    GoTenna lets you text off the grid when your phone doesn't have service. Your mobile device transmits your text to the goTenna device via Bluetooth, which then sends it to a receiving goTenna device over radio waves. It has raised $1.8 million in seed funding.
    

11. Ringly

    URL: https://ringly.com/
    Address: 200 Park Avenue, Suite 1501, New York, NY 10166
    Ringly knows that wearables have big potential for female consumers. So it's little wonder that its presale for its first product, a ring that lights up and vibrates to alerts you to phone calls, text messages, and emails from your mobile device, reached its first-day goal in under eight hours (and that was after raising over $100,000 on Kickstarter). The Ringly team, which fetched $1 million in seed funding from First Round Capital and Andreessen Horowitz among others, is set to deliver its $195 electronic jewelry this fall.
    

12. Keen Home

    URL: http://www.keenhome.io/
    Address: 137 Varick St, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10013
    Keen Home's founders supplanted their non-techie backgrounds with every resource that the NYC hardware scene has to offer. They took part in NYU's $200K Entrepreneurs Challenge, the NYC-based R/GA Accelerator, and attended New York Hardware Start-up Meetups in order to bring their $60 smart home ventilation system to life. The two-year-old company has only $120,000 in seed funding thus far, along with the $40,000 raised from Indiegogo and a $20,000 NYU grant which is being put toward a dorm-room pilot project.
    

Developers could learn a lot from Charles Lloyd. As legend has it, the jazz saxophonist was known to rotate the musicians in his band during concerts in the 1960s. When the group returned to the stage for an encore, the drummer would would sit down at the piano, Lloyd sat behind the drum kit, and pianist Keith Jarrett would pick up the saxophone that made his bandleader famous. The stunt not only wowed crowds, but it made each individual player that much more versatile--and the group as a whole much stronger.

It's a fitting, albeit completely coincidental, analogy for the professional life of Sean Kenny. Nearly a year into his stint at Spotify, the developer recently shifted gears from web development to working on the company's Android app. It may sound like a dramatic change--and from a technical standpoint, it was--but it was the right move. Kenny's never been happier.

"It's very rare that you'd hear someone say, 'I was toiling away on some project that I was totally disinterested in, and then I had this amazing breakthrough,'" says Charlie Hellman, director of product development at Spotify. Instead, he says, people tend to thrive when they're working on something they're interested in, which is why the music streaming startup encourages its employees to stake out new roles within the company.

"We really felt like the more people at Spotify that could feel like they're working at their dream job, the more people we would have doing amazing work," says Hellman.

This professional shape-shifting isn't just an old-fashioned promotion. In most cases, Hellman says, the change is lateral and isn't accompanied by an increase in pay. It may improve long-term prospects for the employees that choose this route, but in the short-term, it's more about keeping the ladder steady than it is about climbing it.

While the practice of letting employees switch hats like this isn't widespread, it's becoming a perk for developers--and thus a competitive advantage for the companies willing to experiment with the model. Stack Exchange and Viacom, two very different companies in size and ambition, have been eyeing Spotify's strategy and encouraging their developers to try it out.

Spotify: Institutionalized Role-Switching

At Spotify, the process is pretty informal. An employee catches wind of a new project or simply gets tired of what they've been doing for the last year or two. They ask their manager about switching and if there's room on the new team--or "squad" as Spotify calls them--the gears will start moving and the shift will be underway as soon as it's logistically feasible.

This is roughly how things went down after Kenny got his first taste of Android development. Originally hired as a full-stack web developer, Kenny was accustomed to building web apps with PHP, querying MySQL databases and crafting user interfaces with JavaScript and HTML. These were the technologies with which Kenny had grown the most proficient, and he was perfectly happy building for the web in his new gig.

Then Spotify started ramping up to launch in Brazil. As you might imagine, milestones like this have a way of impacting the work performed in various roles across a still-growing startup like Spotify. In this case, the service's prelaunch invite system required some mobile integrations that put Kenny much closer to the Android ecosystem than he'd ever been before. Despite not having coded in Java since college, he suddenly found himself dabbling in Android development.

"Through the course of that project I helped contribute to how some of the little finer details would work on the Android side," says Kenny. "I found that it was really quite enjoyable. I liked the development practices that were happening on the Android team."

His curiosity piqued, Kenny asked his manager about the possibility of switching--to keep things from getting awkward, Spotify's squad system is structured such that one's manager will never be the person leading their project squad. Kenny was in luck: The company was looking to build out its internal mobile development resources, a crucial area of expertise for a company whose freemium subscription business model leans so heavily on mobile to convince users to pay up.

Although he had dealt with Android on the Brazil launch project, he was by no means a full-fledged Java developer. Indeed, the last time he had dealt with Java at length was when he was still in school. Like most technologies, the language had evolved over time.

"I considered myself a noob when I started using it again," Kenny says. "So it was a pretty steep learning curve."

When it comes time for somebody to switch gears at Spotify--a process Hellman estimates is undertaken by "a couple of people per month"--there isn't much in the way of formal training. Occasionally companies like Big Nerd Ranch will run intensive coding bootcamps onsite at one of the company's offices. But in general, these transitions are lubricated by an internal culture of mentorship that seems to arise naturally when a company is stocked with enough well-rounded developers.

A big part of the education process comes in the form of code reviews. "When I'm contributing code to the Android platform, that doesn't just go in willy-nilly," Kenny says.

As is common practice at technology companies these days, Spotify ensures each every line of code that's pushed to production is seen by more than one pair of eyeballs. This policy is especially useful for developers getting their hands dirty with new technologies for the first time.

Some of the internal education is even more direct and hands-on.

As Kenny started shifting his attention to Android, he struck up a working relationship with Brian Christensen, one of the company's most experienced Android programmers.

"I spent a lot of time picking Brian's brain and coming to him for advice on a design pattern to use or maybe a library that's already built to do such-and-such a task," says Kenny. "Being able to have access to somebody who's more or less a guru is a big perk."

Christiansen himself is no stranger to switching gears. When he joined the company about a year and a half ago, he was focused on building social features for Spotify's Android client. This includes the app's support for Twitter-style following of other users, as well as experimenting with other social features that might translate well to a phone or tablet-based listening experience.

The experimental nature of the social squad was fun and all, but Christensen had a nagging desire to work on something more crucial to the company's future. Then he saw that the ads team was hiring.

"It sounded really interesting," says Christensen. "They're solving some pretty cool technical challenges over here so I was excited to do it."

In his new role, Christensen would focus on the various ways in which advertisements can be integrated into a mobile music service. As any non-paying Spotify user knows, the primary method is through radio-style audio ads. It's a decidedly old-school way of doing things and the company knows it, so perfecting its audio ad functionality and experimenting with new formats is a growing priority.

"Ads can come in at any point in the experience so it gives me a chance to work across features that go deeper into the app," says Christensen. "I'm not just working on the user interface. I'm involved in the timing of playing an audio ad, for example. And it relies on deeper components within the app. The core layers of the app."

Since he's dealing with audio playback, Christensen gets to muck around with a feature that is at the very heart of what Spotify does: the player. As a Spotify user you'd never know it, but there's a fair bit of complex, proprietary technology that goes into something as simple as the play button.

"We use the same player internally across iOS and Android and desktop," Christensen explains. "It's written in C++ and there's a layer that relays messages to and from it. There's work that needs to be done in that C++ layer to decide which type of ad to play and to manage playback with what they were already listening to. Simply by being part of the playback stream, it exposes me to a couple of additional deeper layers of the app with the core shared C++ library and the layer that passes messages through it."

It's clear from his geeky enthusiasm that Christensen genuinely relishes in cracking open newfound technical challenges like this. But it's not the only benefit of switching squads. In this case, it lets Christensen work on problems that deal directly with one of the biggest and most existential challenges of any company: making money.

"A lot of times people are interested in going to high-profile projects where they can have a big impact on the company," says Hellman, citing the ads team as the most common example. It's one thing to include the words "Android developer" on your LinkedIn profile. It's quite another to tell prospective employers that you help the leader in streaming music figure out how to make enough money to stay in business in the long run.

For Christensen, Kenny, and other developers who have switched roles, the practice is as much about furthering their own careers as it is about staving off the inevitable boredom of work.

Meanwhile, the company reaps a benefit or two of its own. In talking to several developers at Spotify, it becomes clear that the freedom to essentially get a new job without leaving the company is viewed as a huge perk. This not only works as a recruiting tool, but would help just about any company hang onto the talent it manages to bring on board.

"Tenures at technology companies tend to be relatively short," says Hellman. "I think the reality is that people who are working in technology and software want to keep learning. They want to keep progressing. They're curious people by nature."

It's a bit early to measure the success of the practice at retaining talent, but Hellman seems emboldened by the number of requests he's seen to date. "I would be surprised if a lot of companies at our size wouldn't move to this model," he says.

Viacom: Department Hopping

It's not just scrappy startups that are letting employees jump around. Viacom has employed a similar practice for years, often encouraging employees to switch roles as a way of "rebooting" their career. Unlike Spotify, Viacom does this to enable upward advancement more than anything else. But the trajectory up the ladder there is anything but traditional.

To keep its talent well-rounded and loyal, Viacom encourages leaps across departments, says senior vice president of engineering John Pavley. It's not uncommon, for instance, for engineers to shift over to the business side and become product managers.

"This transition allows Viacom to bring 'engineering thinking' to business problems," says Pavley. "Engineers who become product managers think about solving business problem by building tools, processing data, and creating repeatable processes."

The company is also working to infuse technical know-how across departments. Later this month, several VH1 producers are going to be taking an intensive course in JavaScript programming. Even if those producers don't wind up writing code day to day, exposure to the principles of object-oriented programming and learning how web apps work at their core can go a long way.

For Viacom, teaching creatives to code is also about cross-pollenating technical know-how across previously impenetrable silos. "We find that the thinking from one domain applied to the problems of another domain often results in unexpected connections and insights," Pavley says.

Like the cross-department job leaps, the coding bootcamps have a dual purpose: Keeping employees well-rounded helps the company retain them by keeping them happy. It also makes the ladder easier to climb.

"I love those stories about executives who started in the mail room along their way up the ladder," says Pavley. "Today the mail room is full of servers and our future leaders are still starting out there."

Stack Exchange: Competitive Learning

At Stack Exchange, the higher-ups have begun to notice the value of having a fresh pair of eyes on a problem.

Between the company's popular Q&A forums for programmers and its dev job listings site, Stack Exchange has a pretty good sense of what developers and employers are looking for. And demand for this type of professional flexibility is on the rise.

"We definitely think that Spotify might be onto something here," says Will Cole, a product manager at Stack Exchange.

At Stack, they will accommodate developers who request to switch to new product teams, but it is by no means a formal policy. Cole says the company is "inching toward" adopting the practice more officially, given the high praise it tends to get from developers who have experienced it.

It would be a fairly natural extension of Stack's current approach, which is to keep its developers as well-rounded and versatile as possible. Coders are actively encouraged to dabble in new technologies on a regular basis, even if they don't wind up using them on the job.

If, for example, a technology like Node.js suddenly becomes very fashionable, Stack will encourage developers to use their time in the office to play with it, learn how it works, and actually use it to solve real-world technical problems. Curious about data science? Go ahead, take some time out of your day to brush up on it. iOS development? Same deal.

"We have problems that arise that need solutions with things that are outside of our normal tech stack," explains Cole. "So if we start doing some machine learning, we're very happy that we have a policy in place that we gave people time on their work time to dig into the machine learning Coursera course and play with our data and try to solve problems. Now all of the sudden we want to do stuff in production and we have a few people that are already capable of doing it."

For Stack, this means not having to go out and hire new people to keep up with ever-evolving trends in programming. It also helps with recruiting.

"You're in a competitive market where developers are a premium," says Cole. "Developers are hard to get. What are you actually doing to make your development environment stand out? How are you winning developers over?"

For developers, much like the more formalized role-switching at other companies, Stack's approach keeps things interesting. As an added perk, the company pays its employees based on their broader skill set, even if they're not utilizing their most lucrative skills at the moment. So if you're writing CSS stylesheets but your iOS development chops are really strong, your paycheck will reflect that.

"It's also really important for the developers and their long-term career path," says Cole. "I don't think anyone wants to be locked in as just a .Net person."

Across the board, the developers we talked to who had the chance to leapfrog to a new role reported being more satisfied, some of them even turning down recruiters from big-name tech companies.

"I actually take the train two hours each way just to get to work because I love working here," says Kenny. For him, the freedom to switch jobs not only keeps him happy day to day but also makes him more employable. "It's better to be diverse and flexible. It makes you as a person overall more resilient to any change in the industry or at Spotify or whatever. It's preparing me to be a better software engineer as a whole."

The freedom that allowed Kenny to give himself a new, more enjoyable job isn't necessarily always easily implemented within a given company. For starters, the flexibility and free flow of knowledge require a certain type of culture in order to germinate. It also has a lot to do with the types of people the company is hiring in the first place. Anyone can take a Coursera course, but it takes an exceptional developer to pick up brand-new and unfamiliar tools and start building with them.

"It's almost like a good musician," Kenny says. "They could probably pick up and play another instrument to a pretty good degree just because they know music. They know how the notes work. They know scales."

LinkedIn enjoys one big advantage against competitors Facebook and Twitter: It's the social network people can use at work. By positioning it as a service for professional development, LinkedIn has embedded itself into offices worldwide. And in the process, found a holy grail of corporate data: The social hierarchy of people inside an organization… even if the people themselves don't know it.

LinkedIn's affable head of search quality, Daniel Tunkelang, spoke with Co.Labs earlier this year. Tunkelang is the person responsible for making sure LinkedIn's searches connect people to the contacts they're actually looking for. This means learning a lot about how people know each other, and how people interact with each other, in the process.

One thing LinkedIn's users don't always realize is that the search process works differently depending on whether you're using a desktop or laptop computer, a smartphone, or a tablet. Tunkelang says typing is harder on mobile devices, which leads his team to see a higher incidence of shorter queries from users.

"In mobile, we really emphasize the autocompletion experience because the environment in which people use a laptop versus a phone is quite different." People also use the search function differently on mobile devices too. Tunkelang told me that his company sees a lot of what he calls "meeting intelligence" being conducted on smartphones--LinkedIn users inside meetings encountering someone at a real-life event, taking out a phone, and looking up the person's profile.

Because Tunkelang and LinkedIn's other data scientists are able to see how users search on the service and how they use it in different circumstances, this means they get deep insights into how recruiters search for candidates, how sales teams evaluate potential leads, and how different departments of organizations relate to each other.

One of the most fascinating parts of his job, he says, is finding unexpected results when finding data to prove or disprove different hypotheses. Tunkelang's team discovered the way people's social networks related to each other, and found that changed the search experience. Specifically, the way people search for names on LinkedIn and the way people search for titles on LinkedIn have little to do with each other at all.

When LinkedIn users search for someone by name, it's primarily for someone relatively closely connected to their social network (to be exact, one population away from them). But when searches are conducted for job titles, users are primarily contacting individuals two populations away from them in their social network--further away than searches by name. Although the discovery wasn't counterintuitive, it wasn't what they were looking for… and Tunkelang says the trend came "shining through the results" when they analyzed the data.

Other LinkedIn data projects require more user input to glean insights. Take for example that endorsement box that sometimes pops up asking you to vouch for someone's skills? There's actually a sophisticated project going on there.

These requests might seem like LinkedIn's way of increasing engagement on the site, but it's also part of a sophisticated mapping mechanism that lets data scientists figure out what job titles at organizations actually mean. Endorsements help LinkedIn figure out what skill sets and talent requirements align to which jobs.

LinkedIn engineer Sam Shah and data scientist Pete Skomoroch explained how the endorsements feature worked at the 2013 edition of data science conference Strata. Endorsements are used to build a "Skills Dictionary" for the social networking site. Defined as a taxonomy of work skills, the skills dictionary is primarily based on mining data from the site's millions of profiles and then augmenting them through other sources like endorsements. A big part of Skomoroch and Shah's work is cleaning the data--over 250 different phrases map to "Microsoft Office" alone.

In one case study of mapping skills to the correct occupation, they showed which phrases map to "Angels" (as in alternative medicine) and "Angels" (as in venture capital). It's easy to figure out where psychic readings, clairvoyancy, and early-stage investing map. This information is then used to infer what skills someone with a specific title actually has.

LinkedIn then uses skills endorsements to see both which particular contacts users feel have these skills… and who they choose to endorse. The results in aggregate are used to both build social maps and to understand the difference in responsibilities between jobs with identical titles at different companies.

Facebook has its own social graph, of course. But those connections have been mapped to personal histories rather than job skills. And that results in an entirely different kind of network effect than the one LinkedIn is trying to capitalize on.

I'm standing in front of a wall with 180 of Sonos's Play:1 speakers that have been gutted and outfitted with a 12-pixel LED ring for control over RGB color and light intensity. Those are surrounded by another 120 speakers playing music, sound effects, and voice-overs. The entire wall, which represents a map of New York City, is motion controlled using an Xbox Kinect, so that when I wave my hand over one of the five boroughs it sonically comes to life with music and voice-over effects. Moving my hand ever so slightly around the lighted map causes individual speakers to protrude and change color as they're activated.

The 300 speakers here are an art installation, a collaboration between the speaker company Sonos, technology company Perfect Fools, and the musical group Big Noble--featuring Daniel Kessler of the band Interpol and soundscape artist Joseph Fraioli.

Driving all of this are 24 Arduino micro controllers connected to the 180 custom-built stepper motors and 180 12-pixel LED rings.

"Our research stages included consulting motor specialists in Sweden and in the U.S. to see what motor best fit our needs for a lightweight, easily controllable, reliable, and affordable motor," says project producer from Perfect Fools, Amit Raab. "We also tried testing different ways we could use light with the Play:1, seeing whether an aura of LED behind the speaker would give an interesting effect, but finally choosing to use a 12-pixel LED ring in the inside center of a Play:1 shell, giving the feeling that each Play:1 is glowing."

One of the biggest challenges for the installation, technically speaking, was to get everything wired, ventilated, and connected in such close proximity. Raab estimates the team used nearly a mile of wiring to pull the whole thing off--all in a space of roughly 7.5-feet by 12-feet.

Another challenge, as expected, was planning the project remotely and then constructing it stateside. Perfect Fools built a smaller 30-speaker version of the installation in its Stockholm office and then scaled up as the team spent the last month building the entire project in New York.

Contributing the music to the art piece, Big Noble had the similar experience of not fully knowing what to expect from the final product being played back on a system that didn't exist before now.

"While composing, you don't entirely know how its going to play back once installed because it can be near impossible to re-create this environment in the studio," says sound designer and artist Fraioli. "Its really a perfect scenario for us as we hope listeners take in their environment a bit while listening to our music and invite any environment to be part of the listening experience."

Big Noble was already been in the process of making an album which included street sounds from New York, so their contributions were a natural fit. The music also lent itself to the location aspect of the project as well.

"Perfect Fools took my coordinates for the locations of these recordings and represented them visually on the Sonos speakers," Fraioli says. "Additionally, we created another piece that is sort of the opposite in composition to Big Noble's album work where field recordings of locations take precedence and there is tonal ambiance mixed in to these recordings to present a particular feel for these spaces that will hopefully help change the perspective of these locations for the listener."

Sounds of NYC will run September 30th through October 5th at the NeueHouse in New York City.

The tides of ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛebb and flow, and I can only collect whatever detritus is left behind. On... the beach. Which is Twitter? I guess? Let me just kick this metaphor behind the couch and zip up my tab suit and we'll get started. A bunch of good things washed up today, and lots of them are in Matter. The internet's Chief Doge CorrespondentKyle Chayka returns with the doge update I didn't even realize we needed until I read it. Also today in memes, David Rothexplores "Marine Todd" and internet folk literature. Taffy Brodesser-Akner published her own report of that infamous Paula Deen cruise, previously covered by Caity Weaverin Gawker. More seriously, this listicle-style report on the Ebola outbreak in Liberia is a good example of the listicle form done well (which it can be because every form can be done well and used for good).

BUT WAIT that's all fine, and go ahead and read those things in a minute but first: The Toast just somehow hired Roxane Gay to run its forthcoming Roxane Gay vertical which will be called The Butter! Here's Jess Zimmerman's extremely well-timed column about Gay's book Bad Feminist. Setting aside a lot of obligatory we're not worthy-ing from the Toast team, I'd like to point out that literally no other site is more worthy, and internet publishers of all kinds would do well to pair up this event and the Awl's recent ginger simul-poaching and draw some lessons about the relative merits of focusing on metrics vs focusing on quality and voice and letting good people get on with their dang work.

What else is good? There are still a few more things! The first Gone Girl movie reviews are in and Richard Lawson and David Edelstein both agree that it's really good. Open source software might be doomed, and us along with it, but "How I Explained Heartbleed to my Therapist" is a good explanation why at least. The New Yorker's new animated cover is on point. They're making a Black Mirror Christmas Special with Jon Hamm! Mapbox broke the emoji barrier! And... and...

And, I'm afraid, that's it for the good news.

The Bad:Time's Ideas vertical is going hard after Thought Catalog's worst of the 'net status lately. Recent steaming-hot takes include a Reason editor actually-ing Emma Watson and Camille Paglia being the worst kind of cranky Old. Dylan Byersthrowing shade at Nate Silver is pretty delicious. Jeffrey Rosen gets a sit-down with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and asks her what the Canadian Air Force exercises are because he's an idiot. Uber celebrated teachers being forced to scrounge for extra cash by driving for the would-be transport monopolist as a triumph of the "gig economy." This is, as Matt Buchanan pointed out, sickening. Here's Evgeny Morozov on the gig economy as a symptom of economic disaster in general. It might be time to just invade Ferguson. "Thug Kitchen" is food-blogging in blackface. Giant phonecomes with smaller phone you can actually use.

Well that was a downer. What's good Bijan?

I didn't understand a goddamn word of that.

Today's New Advice Columnist: is T-Pain, "the Heather Havrilesky of autotune." --Kevin

Today's Song: T-Pain, "Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin')" because of course

~Talk to me, I talk back, let's talk money, I'll talk tabs~

If you're having any trouble getting your Today in Tabs delivered by email, make sure you add "kuro5hin.rusty@gmail.com" to your contacts. It'll help. Of course you could just read us on FastCoLabs where videos are embedded and C's look like O's! It's up to you. We're off tomorrow so you're on your own till Thursday! I just want to tell you, good luck, we're all counting on you.

What happens if you take parts of the code from the Blaster Worm, which ripped through 400,000 Microsoft systems in 2003, and insert it into audio and visual files? As in any glitch-based work, that depends on how you handle the corrupted material.

For his newest, virus-themed electronic album Blaster on the Berlin-based label PAN Records, New York-based artist James Hoff used bits of the infected code to make electronic beats. Artist Nic Hamilton added a pulsing and prismatic video for its title track.

"This video exactingly deconstructs a previous video work and repurposes it into a new composition using velocity pass render elements with each colour representing degrees of movement in an X,Y,Z space," Hamilton explains.

Hoff's particular repurposing of the noise produced by code-corrupted media is rabid and wonderful, scratching and screening in tight, concentrated loops. Rhizome called it "a fungal aural mass." In his visual practice, Hoff also uses "bad code" to create new works.

The beats, together with the abstract patterns of the video, form a multi-medium connection to painting. "I borrow from the historical vernacular of abstraction to render the work as abstract paintings," Hoff said in a interview with BOMB magazine. "It allows me to talk about viruses using the language of painting rather than the technical jargon of computer programming or the hyperbole of mass media. In this way, abstraction functions as a lens, an interface."

Hoff seems to be discouraging technical discussions--which makes us skeptical about the degree to which Blaster Worm or any virus can be deployed to create sound or imagery. The vintage computer artifact may only be a conceptual ingredient, but it makes for some pretty sweet beats.

Enterprise software is massive and clunky for a reason. It's made to handle massive troves of data and complex workflow chains that likely jump between corporate offices on different continents. Today's enterprise software is largely similar to the stuff that came out 20 years ago, in part because it's too costly to transition to an entirely new system.

But as employees see consumer tech getting easier to use, the questions about why their company's internal software is such a terrible user experience can begin to have a real impact on morale and ultimately retention. BMC Software, which has made IT assistance and server automation software for decades, felt it was time to respond: The company introduced an enterprise suite redesigned with consumer expectations in mind.

"Virtually all enterprise software sucks from a user standpoint," says BMC area vice president of user experience George Kaempf, who spearheads the project. "That's a fixable problem these days."

BMC should know. Founded in the '80s, the Houston-based company spent decades acquiring companies small and large such that their current offices and subsidiaries cover North America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. With over 6,000 employees worldwide, BMC has dozens of software offerings in IT service, server management, and cloud access. That requires a lot of communication and streamlined workflows.

SmartIT, introduced last Wednesday, is BMC's revamped version of its Remedy software aimed at service desk employees. It's mostly aimed at employees of call centers who handle diverse service requests and who may be contracted to multiple companies at once. This means data access is crucial, not just to look up solutions for the call center client's problems, but to access different types of client operating system and software.

The key is being able to understand what the call center agent needs in a given point of time and how much workload SmartIT can handle. Combine this with a better front-end user experience for the call center agent and everything runs that much more quickly.

"Pick the world's largest company and think about the number of employees they have," Kaempf says. "To deliver better service to employees--that's a real win for them."

In Kaempf's opinion, enterprise has been too focused on solving technical problems--not user problems. Massive data companies build better databases instead of fixating on how users can better access them.

"The real trick is how to use that tech to solve a problem," Kaempf says. "For us, we ask 'how do we resolve this caller's problem in 60 seconds?' If you focus on it that way, you become much more efficient and have better performance."

BMC's first pass at reinventing its software suite, MyIT, was a collaboration with tech consulting firm Artefact and came out back in March. "Since the end of March, we've had over 100 customers with over a million seats," Kaempf says--"seats" being enterprise lingo for individual software licenses. While many of those customers had previously used BMC software, Kaempf says, MyIT is such a different approach that BMC doesn't consider it a replacement or new iteration--it's an entirely new system.

MyIT is aimed not at the agents, but employees inside the company that BMC services--that could be a salesperson, an administrator, or coder. By automating much of the software, employees don't need to put in a help desk call every time they need to translate the byzantine workings of their enterprise software. MyIT replaces the need to have a specialist in IT to fulfill every request.

"I don't need to know anything. I don't need a specialized skill set. I can open up MyIT and find a printer without calling someone," Kaempf says.

This comes in handy for Kaempf himself when he roams between BMC campuses and needs to find a conference room. MyIT tells him where it is via GPS and even whether the room's services are compatible with his computer setup and, critically, whether the room's services are working. And it's not just for visitors: Field technicians, the guys fixing everything from printers to electrical wiring to lighting, use the MyIT maps to navigate and locate appliances and circuit breakers.

Part of BMC's journey has been learning and applying new workflow concepts within their own operations.

"It's really about transforming whole product teams to see what users see," Kaempf says. "Part of it is transforming the way the teams think about things and integrating agile development, because good designing goes hand in hand with agile development."

Odds are good you've seen your doctors using computers a lot more in the past three years. During appointments or while at the hospital, they've stopped at a desktop computer or taken a tablet out of their pocket. It's not because technology lets them provide better care, it's because federal legislation is changing the way health care providers and insurers use computers.

After the 2008 economic crash, a piece of legislation called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was signed. Although the name doesn't have much to do with health care, the provisions strongly encouraged providers and insurers to adopt electronic health records by 2013--organizations which adopted them received significant government incentives in return. This, coupled with technology requirements inside 2010's Affordable Care Act, has inevitably led many doctors offices' and hospitals to take the next step… and adopt cloud services.

IT giant Cerner is one of the world's best known vendors of electronic health records. The company is in the middle of the $1.3 billion purchase of Siemens Health Services, and dominates the American cloud health care market alongside rival Epic (Epic declined to speak with Fast Company for this story). I recently connected with Cerner vice president and chief medical officer Bharat Sutraiya to get a better idea of why doctors, hospitals, and insurers are migrating to cloud services instead of the locally based programs they have been using for decades.

Sutraiya, a busy emergency physician by training who still does some ER shifts in addition to his corporate job, says health care providers are going through cultural changes, process changes, and tech stack changes all at the same time. The cloud has become a way to simplify the process and make current technology investment a little bit more future-proof.

Cerner's main cloud products are Skybox (a mobile infrastructure for health care providers that guarantees privacy and information security) and a host of cloud hosting solutions. Because the health care industry is restricted by a set of privacy regulations called HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), it is one of the hardest industries--along with finance--to provide cloud storage services for.

For software companies that can work within those constraints, there's a massive opportunity to crunch "data across a broad continuum of care," says Sutraiya. Health records now include patient medical and financial data, along with satisfaction metrics for insurers and providers. And soon personal health information fed from quantified-self systems like Apple Health. But the applications tackling everything from analyzing the quality of provider networks to chronic disease management have yet to be built.

One example of how patient data could lead to improvements for everyone comes from Microsoft Research. In 2013, a team there wrote a paper on what they called web-scale pharmacovigilance. The paper explained how Internet search queries could be data mined to find previously unknown adverse drug interactions.

Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research's managing director and a prominent health care and technology researcher, spoke with Fast Company about where this could lead last year. He explained that, for health care analytics specifically, discovery of extremely rare events in data sets could be very fruitful because they give insights that would otherwise be very difficult to find. By leveraging services such as Bing and Google, the paper argues, researchers could find out about previously unknown drug interactions. Search engine records are much easier to use in bulk than anonymized electronic medical records.

In the meantime, there's Iodine. Officially launched last week, the website combines clinical data with user feedback to better understand the side effects of medications as well as the ways they potentially interact. Its founders come from Google and Wired, and as a result the site feels more consumer-friendly than most health-care-provider-backed solutions.

Companies who come from outside of the traditional health care technology space are increasingly entering into the medical space and looking to attract long-term partnerships to share knowledge and risk. One example comes from a recent agreement between Philips Healthcare and Salesforce. In July, the two companies entered into a strategic partnership to build a cloud-based health care platform. The two initial products built on the platform, eCareCompanion and eCareCoordinator, are aimed at chronic disease management and are built on top of Salesforce's software development kit.

Anthony Jones, chief marketing officer for patient care and clinical informatics at Philips Healthcare, says that a major benefit of the Salesforce partnership will be to make it easier for doctors to enjoy greater interoperability among systems. The health care tech ecosystem today is full of competing standards which are often incompatible. Jones argues that switching to cloud infrastructure makes it easier to share data across these different systems--thus improving patient care and saving money.

"A lot of things that happened with cloud computing in health care can be traced back to tablet computing," Jones told me. "The emergence of iPads and and tablet computing in general moved technology forward in the whole idea of mobility, which really took off with health care providers. It meant we could do things we couldn't do on smartphones like EEG tracing and looking at radiology imaging--things where the screen was normally too small. The tablet really hit that sweet spot in the middle between a workstation and phone."

Health care tech is big, big business. Cerner had $2.9 billion in revenue in 2013, and Epic made $1.7 billion in 2013. And more and more health care companies are adopting cloud technologies--a recent survey by HIMSS Analytics found 83% of health care organizations are currently using cloud-based apps. New health care products could save lives and save money… and make tech companies a lot of money in the process.

From Nest to the Misfit Wearables, hardware is back in a big way. And along with the lower barrier to entry thanks to cheaper components, crowdfunding, rapid prototyping courtesy of 3-D printing and Arduino, there is more competition than ever before.

As a result, a number of VC-led hardware accelerators and incubators--driven into a field that is (currently) less crowded than the jam-packed software space--have entered the fray. Led by names like Lemnos Labs, Highway1, and HAXLR8R, these hardware accelerators are helping hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs try to hit the big time, with everything from connected consumer electronics devices to full-blown robots.

Acceptance into one of these programs brings much needed cash flow to a budding hardware startup. This can vary from $40,000 up to $150,000 (normally somewhere in the middle), and it's usually in return for an equity stake.

With five or even six-figure amounts being little more than pennies on the dollar for larger VC firms, it's not unheard of for them to adopt what is called a "spray and pray" model--money is given out to a large number of startups, with the expectation that only one or two will ever amount to much. In these cases, the "superstar" winners are enough to offset the cost of betting on losers.

That might be okay if all you're looking for is funding. But the real value of any accelerator or incubator is in the features that make them more than just a long-term bank loan.

"I've always viewed the best accelerators as schools," says HAXLR8R founder Cyril Ebersweiler. "Forget the money and the resources--although those are important too--what you learn though the experience is something that will benefit you over the course of your career."

Access To The Smartest People In The Room

Like a school, would-be hardware entrepreneurs looking to be taken under the wing of an accelerator should consider both the "teaching" and the facilities of any accelerator they plan on joining. Lemnos Labs, for example, boasts some prime real estate in the form of a large warehouse located in San Francisco. Startups get to spend between 6-15 months in a dedicated facility with plenty of workshop space and prototyping tools. Lemnos takes a broad view of what hardware means ("anything that involves moving atoms or electrons," their website claims), which means that there are tools to meet the requirements of people working on everything from robotics and satellites to consumer electronics.

"Right now we have eight startups, with about 50 people in all," says Jeremy Conrad, Lemnos's founding partner. "They work together every day, and that cross-pollination can be really useful. Although it might not sound like satellites and consumer electronics have anything to do with each other, the reality is that they all use electronics, they're all made of plastic or metal, and they all have to test out their early prototypes. There's a huge amount of commonality across different sectors, and sometimes that exchange of ideas can yield really interesting results."

The "teaching" side of accelerators is the other side of the coin. Not only does being part of an accelerator mean access to a deep Rolodex of designers, suppliers, and contract manufacturers, but also 24/7 access to key mentors and the company's founding partners. At Lemnos, the likes of Conrad take weekly meetings with all of their startups, helping them with everything from engineering problems to questions about scaling businesses.

"There's so much that can go wrong in the hardware space," Conrad continues. "Terrifyingly most of those wrong decisions you'll make in the first 6-12 months: whether it's design or business model. That's where we focus our time. We want to get involved with the founders as early as possible to put them on the path to success."

Location, Location, Location

But while that covers the "who," "how," and "why" questions, an equally big conundrum when looking for your ideal accelerato is "where." While the Internet (and tools like Dropbox) now mean that it's more than possible for individuals to work with colleagues across borders without ever having to meet in person, in fact the geographical location of an accelerator is as vital as ever.

"One of the main things people need to ask themselves is where do they want to be based?" says Brady Forrest, vice president at Highway1, the incubator program run by PCH. "We're in Silicon Valley, which is of course where a lot of the big tech investors are based. If people want to make connections and meet mentors, there's no better place."

What Forrest says is absolutely true--although that doesn't mean that entrepreneurs should automatically head West like prospectors heading for gold. Being in a place where you have access to the best tech mentors in the country, or even the world, is key, but there are other aspects of the hardware business to consider.

HAXLR8R is a venture fund and hardware accelerator, with over 50 companies launched during the past two years. Unlike many other accelerators and incubators, HAXLR8R focuses the majority of its time on startups working in Shenzhen, where they are in close proximity to China's massive supply chain and factory ecosystem.

"You shouldn't view the people manufacturing your products as your suppliers, so much as your partners," says Cyril Ebersweiler. "Without them there's no product coming out of the door--simple as that. Being in a place where you can build those relationships is essential."

In addition to the usual work space and mentor-driven learning, HAXLR8R therefore features plenty of factory visits and the like during the 14 weeks (out of 16) that participants spend in Shenzhen. In addition to seeing where products are made, startups also get a firsthand look at the reality of shipping, along with crucial meetings with figures like factory managers.

"Just like anything in business, being face-to-face helps," Ebersweiler continues. "It's impossible for a factory to know exactly how you want whatever it is that you're building. If you're doing your job right as an entrepreneur your product is the first time something of that type has been built. You need to be able to communicate that vision."

Ebersweiler says that working in close proximity with the supply chain is no different than keeping up to date with the latest 3-D printing technologies or programming languages: It's all about empowering entrepreneurs to know their tools.

"It can also help you to build better products, or to better innovate, in the future," he says. "A company like Apple is very famous for its innovation at the point of manufacturing. It enables them to create new processes that might never have been thought of otherwise. If you're serious about what you want to do, you want to spend as much time as possible understanding it. And there's no better place for that than Shenzhen."

How To Get In

Different hardware accelerators and incubators have their own rules about the stage at which they want to get involved with startups. Approach them too early and, even if you're accepted, the experience can be frustrating for all involved. Leave it too late and the value isn't there for either party--as strategies are well underway and key decisions have already been made.

"We need to see a functioning prototype," Highway1's Brady Forrest says, describing his own preference for the ideal candidate.Preferably they've already moved off of Arduino, and have started to think about moving beyond 3-D printing or plastic paper. The best time to meet is when they've got one or two more prototypes left to do."

Although it might be tempting to try and create a buzz for yourself with a crowdfunding campaign, Forrest says that he's never yet taken on a company with outstanding orders to be fulfilled from an incomplete Kickstarter project. Raising $50,000 might sound an impressive way to leap to the top of an incubator's "must have" pile, but compared to some of the bigger crowdfunding campaigns it also shows that your product doesn't market very well--or, even worse, that you're not the one to market it.

"The number one thing we look for is team," Forrest says. "We want to know you have the skills and the drive. Just as important is that you all get along--because founder disputes are the number one cause of startups collapsing. I also look for a product that's interesting, that's different from the competition, and that's going to make the world better."

Apparel is a multibillion-dollar industry, but its manufacturing and supply chains still haven't been disrupted by technology. And it's not because they work well.

"I think global supply chain for apparel is an area that is so complex that until this point nobody even wanted touch it," says Bob Bland, founder and CEO of ManufactureNY, a fashion incubator in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Bland and her team are relocating to an enormous factory space in New York City's next hot neighborhood, Sunset Park, with the hopes of changing all that. If they succeed, it will mean a flood of new independent fashion companies and wearable device manufacturers for the city. By experimenting with small-batch, on-demand manufacturing, ManufactureNY could also produce innovations that ripple out to every company that creates and ships physical goods just about anywhere. It's an incubator that could just as easily produce an Oracle-killer as the next vertically integrated fashion label.

Biofabrics And Open Source Manufacturing

ManufactureNY will have space for companies and individuals building apps, hardware, new textiles, fashion labels, and manufacturing processes. Bio-fabrics and bio-leathers, grown in the facility's wet lab, will be led by the director of the building's tech annex, MIT PhD in tangible media Dr. Amanda Parkes, who just won a Business of Fashion award for her role at ManufactureNY. There will also be open sourcing industrial knitting machines, digital printing, and other tech that most hackers would never normally be able to get their hands on.

And that makes fashion a lucrative place to be hacking right now. "When some people say 'fashion' they mean marketing and retail, but where the money really is," says Bland, "is process innovation." If you can map supply chains throughout the world, then you can figure out more efficient ways to source materials, make and finally ship goods. "That's where huge companies who have tons of money need these solutions and don't have them," says Bland.

Applications for the incubator space, which is being designed by Ole Sondresen, the architect behind Kickstarter's converted pencil factory and Etsy "Breathing Rooms" here in New York, will begin in early 2015.

"This is a new typology for an office," says Sondresen. "There aren't many manufacturing spaces that are designed, they're mostly built and engineered, so it won't be a typical manufacturing space either; it has the components of incubator space, labs, and offices."

The diagram below is a sketch of the floorpan as it might develop. "We're phasing the buildout to accommodate people from all specialities," says Bland.

One of the space's flagship machines is a vertically integrated system for mass customization. Fifteen years in the making and created by a company called AM4U, this "system" is actually a group of machines and processes that allow people to custom design, order, and manufacture all sorts of unique garments--on demand, in batches as small as one.

"We'll be using 12,000 square feet to pilot this mini-factory where you can be online anywhere in the world, design a piece, order, and have this automated process produce a pair of leggings in 30 minutes," says Bland.

For companies in residence, spaces will scale from small coworking offices all the way up to for co-located manufacturing floors from 2,000 to 30,000 square feet. The owner of Liberty View Industrial Park, which encompasses ManufactureNY and a total of 1.2 million square feet of total commercial space, is hoping ManufactureNY will help the area become the destination for young designers and creatives now that other industrial centers, like Greenpoint Design and Manufacturing Center, and the spaces at Brooklyn Navy Yards and Army Terminals, are at 98-100% capacity.

Chaotic Incubators Aren't Fashionable

The secret to taking these experiments to market is inclusivity, says Bland. "This can't be done over the heads of the industry, because the real commodity in fashion is ultimately relationships with suppliers and manufacturers," says Bland, who created her own label, Brooklyn Royalty, before founding ManufactureNY. "I've seen startups try to do it without cooperating with traditional fashion and manufacturing, but so far they aren't successful."

That's why the Sunset Park space has such an emphasis on so many disciplines. But when working with big fashion companies, that reckless up-all-night feeling that pervades some incubators would send the wrong message.

"Some of these users are manufacturers, some are them are tenants," says Sondresen, "and we're gonna be moving heavy machinery, moving goods in and out. You want to expose all users to a shared experience," he says, "but the challenge is to make that safe, interesting, practical, and efficient."

Funding will also be done cooperatively, through a public-private partnership and an SBA Growth Accelerator Fund grant which Bland says is the "beginning of an ongoing financial relationship" with the SBA.

"There's a huge amount of innovation and money waiting for the technologist who comes in and works with the fashion community and takes a fresh look at the supply chain solutions," Bland says. And that money will get funneled into middle class jobs that she says will integrate traditional, artisanal fabrication techniques with technology and embedded sustainability practices.

"The question is not whether it can work," says Sondresen, "It's what does it look like when it's working?"

I am obliged to examine the Tabs that are, rather than the Tabs I would like there to be. So we must once again recognize Ed Champion's regrettably continued existence, first with a Salon two-fer: this finger-waggy thing by Laura Miller which basically says "don't feed the trolls," a shopworn piece of 'net-dot-wisdom that has never been useful and post-#gamergate (or really mid-#gamergate) is entirely laughable. And second, in a fascinating display of editorial schizophrenia, Salon also published the rebuttal to Miller's tab, where Andi Zeisler argues that the criticism female authors get is particularly gendered and is not the same as the net's ambient level of trolling. Both of which I could have ignored were it not for Elon Green's worthwhile Toastreview of all the theories about why Champion even still exists as, like, a thing. And now let's fervently hope that Elon's is the last word and we are done with Ed Champion forever.

But even if we are, don't worry about running out of tabs! In the past few days, the ALT LIT rock has been flipped over, exposing many nasty wriggling things to the light. TRIGGER WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS SUPER DISTURBING IF YOU HAVE HUMAN FEELINGS. Last week, Canadian writer Sophia Katzposted an account on Medium of a visit to NYC where she was repeatedly coerced into having sex with her host, who she refers to as "Stan" but who was quickly unmasked as Stephen Tully Dierks, editor of #crayolacore 'zine POP SERIAL and what passes for a valid notable personage in this minuscule lit scene. Dierks quit public lief, explaining that the patriarchy is to blame, of course: "being a straight white male who clearly has taken in the toxicity of our society's patriarchal structure has led me, to an incident I deeply regret..." But the king of alt-lit has always been Tao Lin, and anyone who has ever read a word Lin wrote could have predicted what came next. The then-16 year old subject of Lin's second novel Richard Yatesdescribed his relationship with Lin in a disturbing series of tweets. In response, Lin explained that having sex with a 16 year old was legal in Pennsylvania when he did it, at age 22. Charming. Here's Allie Jones in Gawker and Erin Gloria Ryan in Jezebel rounding up the Tao Lin situation. Perhaps the second best-known alt-litster is Steve Roggenbuck, who hasn't been accused of anything that I know of and dear god please let him not be a rapist too? Roggenbuck posted a blog entry about the idea of "enthusiastic consent" also calling attention to similar accusations made last month against another alt-lit scenester named either Janey Smith or Steven Trull, it's not entirely clear.

So that was awful and laborious, I'm sorry, but here's the thing to take away. In the last couple months, we've seen men acting egregiously terrible in gaming, publishing, and now this tiny sub-sub-literary culture of alt lit, which has a reputation of being super #posi and liberal. My conclusion is not: "gosh these three disconnected and entirely random subcultures sure are beset by awful dudes!" but "gosh every part of our culture is beset by awful dudes who act like this openly, all the time and all that's necessary to find them is for someone to look. Whatever subcultures you're part of: look for these dudes, and speak out when (not if) you find them. It helps? I hope?

Knock knock. Who's there? Ebola!

Yes ebola has come to the US, the real uncontrolled kind. Should you panic? Vox says no. But more than 80 people had contact with the Dallas ebola patient when he was contagious. The Guardiansays we still shouldn't panic. But the ebola patient was literally spraying ebola-vomit all over his apartment complex bushes before the ambulance finally got him! Luke Russert says... uh, "who broke the ebola story embargo?" is actually what Luke Russert says, because he is a half-witted legacy news-potato. I'm gonna go against the grain here and say that a reasonable amount of panic is a good and healthy option at this point, and I for one will be engaging in it.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere:Can we trust Uber? Um, lol no? Another word added to our app-cabulary. Pathpivots. The New York Times gets a little hollower. How did Papple forget about women? Rookie's female PUA Guide is hilarious. Crossfitfor preschoolers :-/. Air Canada pilots "flying high on porn." Mirrorfor sale.

Today in D:Ben Affleck. Elon Musk.

Nw here's Bijan with a crisp, cool Fall Tab for us.

We are obliged to examine the Tabs that are, rather than the Tabs we would like there to be, Bijan. I make no promises.

Today's Oracle:Net Tarot is amazing

Today's Song: Jaden Smith, "Blue Ocean"

~Do not spoil the ship for a ha'pworth of tab~

Today in Tabs is brought to you today with the help of 29th St Publishing, and is always found on FastCoLabs and your email. Follow @TodayinTabs and @rustyk5 stop asking questions just do it.

In 2004 a small website appeared that contained a browser-based game called Notpron, which has since been hailed as "the hardest riddle on the Internet." It consists of a series of 140 puzzles and riddles that get progressively more complex. Completing the game requires knowledge in a diverse range of fields including HTML programming, sound and graphics editing, music apprehension, research skills, and even remote viewing.

Out of the 17 million players that have attempted the game in the last decade only 31 have completed it. That's just one in every 550,000 players--or, to put it another way, the chances you'll be hit by lightning once in your lifetime are 41 times greater than they are for you solving Notpron.

To celebrate the game's 10th anniversary I asked David Münnich, Notpron's creator, to go down the rabbit hole of how and why it was created--and what it all means.

"From a game design standpoint the main idea behind Notpron is that it's doing one thing totally different from all other games," Münnich says from his home in Saarbrücken, Germany. "Usually you start a game and the game tells you what to do, and you have to act inside that system. Notpron, however, expects you to work around the system, without even telling you to do so."

This "working around the system" could easily be the unofficial theme of Notpron. The game begins simply enough on level 1 with a rather creepy image of the front door of a house. To pass level 1 you must get inside the house, which you can do easily enough by clicking on the door. Level 2 then features an image of an interior door, but you'll never make it past this level if you think think inside the borders of the web page that the game is presented on. Instead, you need to look to the browser's address bar and manually change the URL to progress to level 3.

"You have to do things that would be considered totally user unfriendly in a normal case," Münnich says of the game, which on the surface looks like it's just made up of 140 stills of pictures and text, sometimes accompanied by music or sound effects. If you only concentrate on what you see, read, or hear you'll never crack the riddle. "You have to change the address in your browser, you have to read the source code of the website, you have to download a picture and edit it so important information becomes visible. You have to understand what the riddle is made of [at its most technical level], which is files in folders, basically. And you need to understand how there are different file formats and what they mean. So if you don't know anything about how a computer works, you will be totally lost."

But don't think technical prowess are the only muscles the game asks you to flex. True to the "working around the system" theme, players at one point even need to step away from their computer to advance to the next level.

"Level 72 [is] my favorite level, because we force the player to leave the monitor and actually handcraft something, which is necessary in order to progress," says Münnich.

If you don't know anything about how a computer works, you will be totally lost.

It's this blending of the digital and real worlds that remind me of another mysterious Internet puzzle I've written about, Cicada 3301. There are many similarities between the two: riddles that require deep technical knowledge, intensive research, and interacting with the real world. Cicada 3301 debuted eight years after Notpron, though no one knows who's behind it. I ask Münnich if he's ever tried solving Cicada.

But Münnich says he's never heard of it, then adds, "To your surprise, I am not a big riddle solver."

Münnich is right, I'm shocked the guy who created one of the greatest Internet riddles of all time isn't a riddle solver. You'd think the creator of Notpron would be sitting around working on crossword puzzles and reading all the Agatha Christie and Symphosius he could. But Münnich is a now 32-year-old game developer who has always been fascinated with traditional gaming.

"I had a passion for making games since I was a little kid," he says. "Of course I couldn't really make any for technical reasons, so I was painting Super Mario levels on paper."

Through his teenage years Münnich progressed from drawing levels to becoming a level designer for German firms. Then in 2004, at the age of 22, Münnich one night had an epiphany after being inspired by another website.

"My inspiration for Notpron was a riddle kind of website that was called 'This Is Not Porn'," which doesn't exist any longer, says Münnich. He decided to quickly make up a few riddles of his own--the first five levels of Notpron. "To make my game I just temporarily called the folder 'notpron' that I put in all the stuff. 'Pron' was just an Internet way of misspelling 'porn' on purpose. So obviously not much thought went into that."

But almost overnight thousands of people began showing up at Notpron to try the riddles.

"And when there have been tens of thousands of people on the page, it was too late to change it," Münnich says. "But for this kind of game it's kinda cool to have a name that makes people wonder what it actually means, so that's fine."

As traffic grew and potential riddle solvers kept coming, Münnich began adding more levels. After the first five, he added another dozen. Notpron then grew from around 20 riddles to 50, then 70, then over 100, to, finally, 140 levels.

"I started to turn everything I looked at into a riddle," says Münnich when I ask him how he created so many. "Like I saw a Twix bar in a supermarket, and I remembered that it was called 'Raider' in Germany earlier. So there is the foundation for another riddle."

But Münnich doesn't claim the credit for all of Notpron's 140 riddles. As the game grew players would begin to send Münnich their riddle ideas. Most he rejected, but quite a few made it into the game. Münnich credits one player, Christine, in particular.

"She was a Notpron player and contributed one riddle at first," he says. "And then we got to know each other better and she made like 30 in the end."

As for what it takes to make a good riddle?

"When you get down to it, most riddles are very simple in their essence. Just finding out what to do makes it appear so complicated. People really overestimate the process of making a riddle. They keep thinking I must be some kind of superbrain. In reality those who solve the riddles are masterminds."

Yet only 31 have successfully completed all 140 levels--that's a success rate of only 0.00018%. That low figure is all the more extraordinary considering the whole cottage industry of forums and sites that have sprung up offering advice and how-to's to beat the game.

"I don't think anyone beat the game all alone, because you need to possess so many different skills, that it's nearly impossible for a single person," Münnich says. "Usually it's little groups of friends who beat it step by step [with] everyone's strengths being put to use."

When I ask him if any of his friends have ever beat the game, Münnich says, "No, they all get frustrated after six levels and leave it. But some of those that beat it became friends."

Münnich doesn't track stats for the shortest amount of time anyone has ever beat the game in, so he says he can only rely on what people have told him. Three months is the stated record. But given the challenging nature of Notpron, it's understandable that many will give up along the way.

"In the site stats you can see an exponential curve. Almost all reach level 2, but then it's going down rapidly. So most leave in level 2, another big bunch in level 3. If someone reaches level 9, he or she is most likely going to stick to it and stay," he says. "It's something that people are going on a long journey with, and when they are through they are looking back at it in a very nostalgic way."

Those that complete the game are given a certificate that reads: "He/she persisted with a broad range of complex ways of thinking, while maintaining focus and dedication over a long period. His/her detective skills have been tested to the limits, yet the smallest hint proved sufficient to solve the most complicated tasks."

No certificates have been issued in 2014.

Throughout history riddles have been used to test us, to show that we are worthy, to reveal something about the human condition. A modern-day riddle that attracts 17 million sleuths surely must have a deep philosophical message--a grand payoff along the lines of The Riddle of the Sphynx, right?

"You overestimate 10-year-ago-David," Münnich says. "I just had a quick idea and quickly made up five little riddles [then] I just kept adding riddles as long as I had ideas and fun with it" adding that Notpron was just "designed to be mysterious without any essence."

"It's a shame really," he says. "Nowadays I would have a real background that would be mysteriously revealed step by step with the big twist in the end... or so. I'm sorry to spoil it, but Notpron however is just a series of riddles. If you beat one, you get to the next one."

But then Münnich reveals there is one caveat to what he's just told me. In the years since he first created the game--as he slowly added more levels--his interests also expanded to areas outside mainstream technology and science.

He created a four-hour documentary on the controversial Five Biological Laws of Nature by the German physician Ryke Geerd Hamer. "[His] discovery shows how any organic and psychological changes in the body happen and it contradicts all mainstream views very very much," says Münnich. The documentary is currently the second most-watched German documentary on YouTube with over 2.4 million views (it's subtitled in English for those interested).

Münnich's increasing interest in the experimental, fringe, and metaphysical prompted him to add a special reward for those that beat level 140 of Notpron. He wouldn't tell me what it was--only 31 people besides himself knows--but he did reveal it has something to do with remote viewing.

"I made sure the last one is really special, and if you beat it, you experience something that might change your whole idea of how the universe works. Doesn't that sound mysterious and provoking? But I actually mean it."

But the reason most people will play Notpron isn't for some metaphysical awakening, according to Münnich. "Our society makes people try to prove how smart they are, so this attracts them."

As for Münnich his payoff in making the game seems to be taking joy from the community that has sprung up around it and the friends he has made from it--and even from the sites that have copied Notpron.

"There are over 100 clones; we had an alphabetic list of them on the Notpron forums. It's cool to see that it inspired so many people," he says. And after 10 years he's still amazed at how popular the game is. "That's pretty cool. You're proud when a person you met for a different reason goes 'YOU made that?'"

Still, that doesn't seem to stop the person who used to draw Super Mario levels as a child from having doubts today.

"On the other hand," Münnich says. "I think that it's been done pretty amateurish and I could do it a lot better today."

What do you think? Start here.

VICE is a trash fire of faux-"street" branding and youth exploitation conspicuously failing to hide the fact that it has a profit spreadsheet for a heart. So when former VICE associate editor Charles Davisprovided Gawker with emails where he is told to "run up the flagpole" any stories that mention brands that VICE has or even might ever have a sponsor relationship with, the preëmptive self-censorship is revolting but not exactly surprising. What's really fun, though, is this response from The New Republic's COO, Sloan Eddleston:

This is just how it works out here in Garbage Town fellas. If you wanna be in the garb game you gotta expect to eat a certain amount of shit for the #brands. Just Do It.™

It appears that the Secret Service's secret is that it provides no actual service. Politicotook the opportunity to be awful. And Jonathan Chait decided that defending this hideously racist Boston Herald cartoon was a great use of his platform. No really, it could have been any random flavor! Fried chicken, purple drank, just anything! I don't see why anyone would think that "watermelon" was racist.

Remember yesterday's conclusion about subcultures and sex abuse? YouTube has them too. Undeniably smart dude John Herrmandraws a line between internet fandom-fame and abuse. Emily Gould responded to the advice that people should "just ignore" trolls and harassment, which I called "finger-waggy" yesterday, with a much longer explanation of exactly why it is finger-waggy. And here's the brilliant Ann Friedman on Etsy and tech sexism and why we still stillstill have to keep talking about tech sexism. Matter is really showing how great a web site can be when it can afford to pay writers a lot and literally doesn't have to do anything to make money, by the way, so enjoy it in these, the golden years.

Eventually we will all have ebola if Texas has any say in it. Amateur porn rings flourish on Snapchat. Tony Hsieh quit his big Las Vegas Downtown project, possibly because it was always crazy and impossible. Aeon Magazine has a #longread about why Elon Musk thinks we need to colonize Mars which is very good but put it on a Kindle or something. This American Life-er Sarah Koenig just launched a new podcast called Serial, which is like a one-story, season-long mega-TAL. Looks good. Podcasts sure are exciting these days. Big area. Podcasts. Watch for it. Apparently spooked by Ello, Facebook reverses its anti-drag-names policy. "Facebook says a single user had flagged hundreds of drag-queen profiles, but this anomalous behavior wasn't caught amid all the identity flaggings it receives." LL cool beans, Facebook. Here, this is what Selfie is about, so you don't have to watch it.

Bijan what are the youth of America thinking about on a sunny Friday?

Bijan I did the math and I only need one gnarled, liver-spotted, arthritic hand to count how many years old you were in 1995.

Closing Tabs?Not Even Once.

Today's Music: I've been sleeping on this for a few days but Kutiman, who created 2009's YouTube video mashup album ThruYou is back with ThruYou Too, and it's so, so good.

~We can live beside the ocean, leave the tabs behind, swim out past the breakers, watch the world die~

Today in Tabs feels like this week was just long as hell. Dumpster Boyfriend was Monday y'all. What even is time? FastCoLabs puts us on the world wide web, and Tinyletter puts us in your email. Watch for a brand new email sponsor next week! And email me if you might be interested in sponsoring us.