1. You are the conductor. Your one and only job is to lead your team to make something people love.
2. If anyone on your team does not have what they need to do their very best work, consider it your fault and fix it.
3. What you do after each small failure will determine your course and destination. Treat everything as an experiment.
4. Your process is itself a product. Build this process iteratively, test it, refine it, and find product-market fit.
5. Each product and team is unique and calls for a specific, unique process.
6. Ideate. Prioritize. Articulate. Coordinate. Inspire. Your five tools.
7. Fear of failure is at the root of almost every unhelpful behavior. It can also be among the most powerful sources of ambition, openness, drive, and creativity. Managing morale is, at the root, managing fear of failure.
8. Confusion is a dire enemy for most, but for some it is a combustion engine.
9. Tell a story that leads from a future people can expect to a future that is truly wondrous. That is: manage both expectations and hope.
10. Top-down and bottom-up are sisters, not enemies. Everyone, rightfully, wants to be heard and respected. A few, bold people want to make choices for which they are actually accountable. Be neither stupidly democratic nor stupidly autocratic.
11. At least four times each week, exercise until you can't think about anything but your body. (Then, for fun, try to quietly witness your body from slightly above and behind your head.)
12. Cherishing sleep is cherishing your brain.
13. Fear meetings. Ten thousand hours of soul-depleting boredom and disarray have been saved by the great facilitator.
14. Roadmap > design > build > deploy > analyze > kill or refine. These happen in order, with breathing room for thought. Improper planning leads to overlap which leads to a cart mired in the mud of blame.
15. If you hear about a problem you aren't already solving, you probably haven't been paying close enough attention.
16. Humor is a great balm and motivator. If you're not hearing and making jokes, this is a sign that you need to relax. Relaxation and slacking are strangely close to opposites.
17. Perceive what is most wonderful and precious about each person. Make sure they are using this beloved quality to move the needle for everyone. This is what people mean when they say they love their work.
18. Creation is the activity of Consciousness.
This list is based in part on a 15,000-word series about how to build top-notch product development processes. Check it out here.
Need to clear your head and get away for a few minutes? Slip on a pair of headphones and visit Washington Square Park in New York City without paying subway fare--or getting on a train. It's not just spots around New York, either. The Sound City Project documents locations around the world including Oslo, Florence, Bergen, Stockholm, and San Francisco.
Yet project co-creator David Vale isn't just pulling out his phone and using the voice recorder, he's trekking around with a 3-D printed device that looks like a drone with four human ears. It captures realistic noise for a 360-degree stereoscopic experience. Here's what it looks like.
The audio is directional, and accompanied by a beautifully designed websites. When you move through the site's imagery, the sound changes as well. You hear the same sounds, but the perspective changes as if you were really there. In other words, nothing about the sound you're hearing is simulated, it's true-to-life accurate from every angle.
To do this, Caco Teixeira, a sound designer with Sonoplastico, helped take Vale's idea put it into practice with four microphones and create a custom model. This concept went through several phases starting with styrofoam and ending with the sleek and scary four-eared "soundhead."
"We made sure to build the prototype according the anatomy of a human head," says Vale. "That meant respecting the distance between the ears to make the head related transfer function (HRTF) possible. It's not a perfect model because it still lacks some details like the ear canal, but that would create the need of extra post-production of the sound files."
Once sound was captured, it then had to be mixed, matched to the panoramic picture, and added to the site--the last of which presented the biggest challenge working with multiple-channel audio.
Using WebAudio allowed for a lot of freedom and the ability to handle lots of audio files, but it also meant building everything from scratch including the basics like play, pause, and scrubbing.
"Usually when I use audio in a web project I use Howler.js," says co-creator Rick Van Mook. "But once we figured out we wanted to use four-channel audio files we had to go for something custom. The usual audio libraries only deal with loading and playing audio, which makes sense, of course. We needed a way to download multiple files, merge them together, and manipulate the individual channel data."
The technically impressive audio is coupled with monochrome imagery that subtly highlights each location's charm, while the overall navigation of the site makes "traveling" to the different spots immersive.
Vale and Mook work for the Firstborn digital agency. Part of the company's mission is "creating progressive ideas and translating them into engaging, intelligent, and innovative user experiences."
Sound City is an ongoing project so if you were hoping for things like a mobile app, new locations, or even a live version to continually check in with, don't fret because those are all on the to-do list.
Internet tough guy and self-confessed couchfuckerChris Jones, riding high off his recent string of magazine award losses, just published an Esquirecover story on "sexiest woman alive" Penelope Cruz that takes literally until the tenth paragraph to mention Cruz's name or existence. It's clear that she didn't say anything to him at all over their awkward dinner, but I'd hate to see Jones have another tantrum when his fifth-grade Hemingway pastiche isn't recognized, so I commissioned him a special National Magazine Award:
For Good Writering
There's a new, authorized biography of Bill Cosby, which of course doesn't mention the 13 women who have accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them. Michael Wolffasks himself if that's ok to simply disregard, and answers that yes, it's "a nice reminder" of "the old rules and assumptions from a time when journalism and especially news magazines promoted nothing so much as ambition and achievement." So, Michael Wolff is totally cool with not mentioning your rapes, that's good 2 know.
It's Columbus Day, so let's all re-read chapter one of The People's History. Columbus would have appreciated these Dropbox bros' struggle to claim a soccer field from a horde of savage native children. "It would be glib to call Malala [Yousafzai]'s very real fight for justice and Harry Potter's fictional quest a case of life imitating art..." says Charlotte Alter in Time, near the beginning of a 1000 word tab doing exactly that. "If the Taliban had read Harry Potter, they might recognize that in trying to kill Malala, they created a powerful threat..." If the Taliban had read Harry Potter. If the. Taliban. Had read. Harry.
Wild clowns have been reported encroaching on human settlements in both Bakersfield and Wasco, CA. Sadly, with the effects of climate change and habitat loss, instances of uncontrolled clown-human interactions are only going to increase. Just remember, the clown is more afraid of you than you are of it.
A truly startling incident occurred at a Greenwich Village restaurant this evening: A man apparently emerged from a sidewalk subway grate to throw a smoke bomb into Bar Pitti-and then went back down the grate.
This raises more questions that it answers. Here is a video. I do not know why this happened, only that it did. In New York, there are approximately 39,000 subway grates scattered across the city. I am trying to remain calm, because everything is fine. Why did he go back down the grate. Where was he going.
Peace be upon you,
bijan
The question isn't "why did he go back down the grate" but "why aren't we all huddling in the subway tunnels all the time?"
Today's Song: David Bowie's new single "Sue (or in a season of crime)" sounds like Frank Sintra, a jazz track, and a drum 'n bass song all playing at the same time
~They do not have Takes, and do not know them, for I showed them a tab, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance.~
Did you know I literally write this footer by hand every day? For a while, early on, I had one standard footer that I copied and pasted in, but I found that no one read it, and they'd be like "Rusty how do we follow you on twitter?" so what was the point? Now I write every word of this thing by hand and post it on FastCoLabs and send it via TinyLetter my own self. That's service. Standing offer for artichoke hearts.
Despite recent advances in gestural interfaces, we're nowhere near the Minority Report-style future we were promised. Sure, technologies like Kinect and Leap Motion make for some impressive, sci-fi-seeming projects, but when was the last time you saw somebody waving their hands in front of a computer or smartphone in the wild?
That day may come sooner than you think.
SideSwipe is a clever new approach to 3-D gesture control from researchers at the University of Washington. It uses the device's own wireless signal transmissions to detect nearby hand gestures, effectively turning the 3-D space around your phone into an interface. It even works when your phone is in your pocket.
"Today's smartphones already include multiple antennas for spatial diversity and to support multiple wireless standards," says Matt Reynolds, a UW computer science and engineering professor who helped lead the research. "We expect that the simple broadband receivers that we have developed could be integrated with existing antennas, and the detection of reflected power could be built-in to the phone's chipset by the chipset manufacturer."
Since SideSwipe doesn't rely on processor-hogging resources like the phone's camera or internal sensors, it lets the device effectively "listen" for its owner's gestural commands at all times without sapping the battery. In doing so, SideSwipe removes the biggest obstacle phone manufacturers face when it comes to including persistent gestural control in mobile devices: preserving battery life. For most people, gee-whiz functionality like this just isn't important enough to justify the power it would normally consume.
Admittedly, the use cases will be limited. Multitouch and voice will endure as the primary input methods for handheld devices, perhaps coupled with biometric sensors and, who knows, maybe even brainwaves. But in certain scenarios, the ability to activate or control a device without touching it could come in... handy.
Forgot to silence your phone at the movie theater? You can train it to understand that a double swipe above your pants pocket means to stop ringing. Need to skip a track on Spotify from a few feet away? No problem. Want to surreptitiously record a conversation? That's pretty weird. But with this technology, it will be easier than ever.
In a blog post, the UW team behind the research describes how it works:
When a person makes a call or an app exchanges data with the Internet, a phone transmits radio signals on a 2G, 3G or 4G cellular network to communicate with a cellular base station. When a user's hand moves through space near the phone, the user's body reflects some of the transmitted signal back toward the phone.
The new system uses multiple small antennas to capture the changes in the reflected signal and classify the changes to detect the type of gesture performed.
In the initial research, SideSwipe was successfully trained to respond to 14 different swiping, tapping, and hovering gestures and it recognized those gestures 87% of the time.
"The fact that SideSwipe does not produce an image is an important distinction from a privacy perspective," says Reynolds. "SideSwipe is inherently privacy preserving, compared to an imaging sensor. Recent news describes plenty of examples of what can go wrong with smartphone photographs and videos!"
Watching complex, strategy-based games is difficult unless you understand the play mechanics. And it's even less entertaining when the action isn't at 60 frames per second but instead on the seconds hand of a chess clock.
Now a team from MIT is trying to make 1,500 year old game into an e-sport, starting with the Millionaire Chess Open championship in Las Vegas. Throughout this week's tournament, they've been testing a system called DeepView (a play on Deep Blue, the IBM super computer that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1990s). It combines algorithms, leaderboards, and real-time game visualizations to turn chess into a smart spectator sport.
"In the run-up to the tournament I gathered data on the top 25 players," says lead MIT researcher and data scientist Greg Borenstein. "All these statistics are being used as part of the on-screen graphics."
Announcers called the game while it was being played, and instead of the traditional method of tracking positions on the board--'rook to queen bishop 4'--they gave odds on who was most likely to win based on the current board positions.
Borenstein basically created a scoring system for chess. It took more than stats know-how: He had to learn the game. "I'm not a chess expert. Maurice Ashley, a grandmaster, is my collaborator on this project," he says. "Before this, I knew no more about chess than the average person."
One thing he discovered is that there aren't many tools that describe different types of players, or how likely they are to win a chess match based on the moves they're making. So Borenstein did what any data scientist would, he analyzed 750,000 chess games.
"I used a chess engine to evaluate how strong a position that is," he says. "And then I built up a statistical model of how likely each position is to result in victory for that side."
Different chess players value different aspects of the game. Some aim for mobility, others focus on space, threats, pass/pawns, or king safety. There are aggressive early game players who attack immediately to shake the other player up. And there are more structural players who build toward a later game. Borenstein's team analyzed them all.
"I can characterize them as players," says Borenstein. "I can also look at how they'll match up head-to-head and detect weaknesses and eccentricities in their game, when it will pay off and they'll win and when it won't."
Game length statistics for Varhuzan Akobian. This grandmaster tends to lose longer games more often than shorter ones, implying that he plays an aggressive early game strategy, which leaves him in trouble when it doesn't pay off. So he will have more control over this game, with stronger stats in king safety, threats, and mobility. But opponent Alejandro Ramirez is stronger in space and passed pawns--if the game extends into a drawn-out endgame, he might have the edge.
While live-casting chess matches won't replace baseball anytime soon, DeepView does create a more accessible experience for anyone who wants to watch masters play (and learn from them).
It also represents a human-focused application of data science. Instead of building an artificial intelligence engine--using computers to win games and replace people--it's about using the data to tell the story of each game.
"There is a change in how computer science uses data, a move from trying to replace people to understand them," Borenstein says. "It's the Google and Facebook way. Except that this uses those techniques to not sell things, but to make games more exciting to more people."
Even if you're more into Defense of the Ancients than watching play-by-play chess, this is worth checking out. The reason: DeepView's open source software was built with a larger long-term goal of modeling how other games can become spectator sports. Including video games.
Multiplayer championship sports like League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients are extremely complicated. "They make chess look much simpler," says Borenstein. "Tens of millions of people watch The World Championships of DotA, but if you're a novice viewer trying to watch you have a very hard time making sense of it."
Saints preserve.us from Blake Lively, Contessa of Cwestionable Copy and Superintendent of Solecism. Preserve's Fall issue is called Allure of Antebellum, referring specifically to "the Antebellum period (prior to the Civil War)" in case you didn't know what "antebellum" meant. "The prowess of artful layering -the southern way- lies in inadvertent combinations," says Lively's characteristically arbitrary introductory copy. Gawker's Allie Jones noted that the "Southern Belles" of Lively's inspiration were in fact slave owners, and also called back to Lively's slave plantation wedding last year. Max Read posted a takedown letter from Lively's lawyers, who assert that Gawker "paints Ms. Lively and Preserve in a false light," which is not, presumably, the honest and authentic kerosene-fired lamplight of the slave cabins of yesteryear. Stay tuned, and ~shop the controversy~
Last night I met a friend at a bar before a reading headlined by some emo white dude. We were talking about our Southern upbringings-small towns suck, y'all, try not to romanticize them-when she told me that she'd lived in New York for 10 years now, but still wasn't comfortable calling it home.
Another friend showed up later. He said he'd been in the same Brooklyn apartment for the last 15 years, and was afraid that he'd become "one of those people"-which I took to mean someone who'd been around long enough to see their neighborhood drastically change, long enough for it to feel familial.
Anyway, people live in Brooklyn. This is a fact, I've learned, that's more true for some segments of the New York population than others. Emo white dudes at readings, for example. It's a very good brand, the The Atlantic noted. But a brand isn't a home. At least, not yet.
"People live in Brooklyn" is probably most true for the segment of the New York population that, you know, lives in Brooklyn.
Today in Tabs would like to remind you that we are not out of the woods. Read us on FastCoLabs or in email for the decreasing percentage of you that ever see the emails arrive (we're working on it). Follow @rustyk5 and/or @TodayinTabs on Twitter if you like Tabs but wish it were a lot shorter.
When it comes to taking a good photograph, the human eye is still the best sensor. What happens to the image after that is probably something a machine can do just as well or better, especially given the massive number of images piling up in our photo albums today. And that's why the breakthroughs in the next era of imagery are going to be done by computers. Apps are already arriving that help us explore the possibilities, ranging from retouching tools to software that addresses the enormous availability of images in the digital age.
Here are five photo apps that are changing the way you think about pictures.
We are taking more photos than at any other time in history. Billions of images are being uploaded, many never to be looked at again. And they might just include something that you don't want the rest of the world to see. But who has time to scour a photo archive looking for the stray bong or worse?
The idea that we need to focus on limiting--rather than creating--images is one way in which our ideas about photos are changing in 2014.
A service that neatly explores this concept is Social Sweepster. It's a tool that scans your online social presence (currently Facebook and Twitter, but soon expanding to Tumblr and Instagram) and flags questionable images that you may not want in the public domain.
"Our primary user would be someone who has recently graduated from college and is looking to clean up their photos ready for job applications," says founder Tom McGrath. Recruiters regularly look at Facebook and Instagram accounts as part of their employee screening process. One recent study even demonstrated that it's possible to predict job performance based on the pictures on a person's Facebook profile. That hilarious picture of you passed out at your end-of-year college party? Maybe not so funny now.
As with many next-gen smart photo tools, Social Sweepster doesn't just look at the image itself to gather data. In addition to computer vision, the software also uses text recognition algorithms to sift through keywords associated with images. It's even possible to examine the context of images, since metadata can regularly reveal where a photo was taken.
"We're really trying to tackle one of the hardest computer vision problems out there, which is recognizing images in the wild," McGrath continues. "Recognizing a single beer can in a photo that's small, low-resolution, and badly lit is a real challenge. Being able to do that--and do it accurately--is very, very tough."
Whether it's removing a photo-bombing stranger from that lovely shot of you and your family, or taking out an ugly hotel from an otherwise stunning landscape scene, one popular request for photo apps is the ability to touch up existing photos. Unlike other methods of removing unwanted detritus from pictures, TouchRetouch intelligently carries this work out on your behalf, rather than requiring time-consuming manual work. Just select the image component you wish to remove, and leave it to the software to do the rest. Once an element has been selected, the app smartly analyzes what is going to be required to fill a certain area, and then sets about filling it using image components cloned from other parts of the photo.
The end result is impressive--and developer Kostyantyn Svarychevskyy credits it with the new processing power of smart devices, which can now carry out the kind of intensive graphical work that previously would have required a much larger graphics-oriented machine.
"Increase of computational power of smartphones provides the possibility of using new technology or advanced algorithms and user experience," he says. "In newer versions we [also plan to] try to improve this technique on more complex backgrounds, such as buildings."
The idea that the massive quantity of images we gather today opens up new possibilities for photographers is ithe dea behind Vhoto. "We talk about camera ubiquity a lot as a team," says creator Noah Heller. "What does it mean when everyone carries devices with multiple cameras built into them? And what happens when those cameras are on all the time? You have to ask yourself what you're going to do with this amazing amount of content."
Vhoto uses computer vision technology to scan your videos to find and extract the best photographic moments. "The concept that you have to press a button to take a single picture is a really old idea that goes back to chemical cameras," Heller continues. "That no longer has to be the case. If you want a record of a great moment in your life, why not just let the camera go and then let technology sift out and sort the best end images. Our mantra is that users should think of photography as fishing with a net, not with a hook."
Some of the metrics Vhoto examines are fairly straightforward: sharpness, clarity, color, and the presence or absence of a face or smile. But the model also takes into account more abstract features like novelty, context, and composition. Rather than the photographer having to be consciously aware of all these elements, the app learns preferences based on the past behavior of individual users so it gets better at predicting what photographic elements you're likely to be interested in. Whatever pictures you end up sharing, saving, or otherwise interacting with will be analyzed so that future similar images can be elevated within the model.
"It's not our job to force people to like photos a professional critic might say is better composed, it's our job to help people get the photos that they want," Heller says. "If our users turn out to like photos with a certain color composition or facial expression, that's what our machine learning model needs to deliver."
The rise of Instagram has made filters increasingly popular, but some tools take the concept of post-processing pictures further than others. Color Thief is an example of a great color correction app that should be on every budding smartphone photographer's device.
"Color Thief takes the colors from one of your photos and transfers them to another," says creator Aaron Barsky. Blurring the line between functional image modification and something entirely new, Barsky likens the app to challenging a painter to repaint your photo, using only the color palette from another photo of your choosing.
"We count how often a color is used in both photos," Barsky continues, explaining how the app functions. "We then transfer the most frequently used color from the source to the most frequently used color in the target, and similarly down to the least frequently used color." The challenge, he says, is in grouping colors together. "A photo could have hundreds of subtle shades that a human would identify as light blue--but the computer sees as completely different colors. We use 'mathemagic' to make sure the color transfer happens with smooth gradients of color."
Although Color Thief is a post-processing step for images, rather than a camera app in itself, it still benefits from the improved quality of smartphone cameras. "Color Thief works best on photos that have a sharp in-focus foreground with a blurred background," Barsky says. "As our users can take better and better photos with the built-in camera, the more fun they'll have remixing those photos with our tool."
It started as a computer vision research project at the University of British Columbia, and now AutoStitch is a panoramic photo app that leaves it rivals in the dust. It has two major benefits over other similar apps, as well as the built-in panoramic functionality found in an increasing range of smartphones.
It's a versatile tool that doesn't require taking a single sweep shot. As long as the images overlap in some way, the photographer is free to experiment with images in any order or arrangement--including horizontal, vertical, or a mixture of both. It's even possible to stitch together photos taken with different camera apps, as well as those imported from other devices.
The quality of the finished images is also vastly superior to other panorama apps. Inputs are composed of full resolution images, which allows for each photo to be composed individually. The overlapping regions of these high-def photos are then automatically blended to ensure seamless transitions between images. The end result is an impressively professional panoramic photograph.
"By using the other sensors on board, and with the sheer processing power available, the door is open to create tools that will take smartphone cameras beyond what is possible with traditional cameras in many ways," says developer Geoff Clark, speaking about the future of smart camera apps in general. "Augmented reality shooting guides that analyze the images in real time, or light-field capture that allows for re-focus of images, are a couple of examples."
So go ahead and snap all the photos you like. Just put them somewhere accessible to the algorithm that's going to make them worth looking at again.
When you visit a website on the modern web, you're not really just visiting one website. If you dive into the source code, you'll see that a page more likely than not pulls libraries and scripts from all across the Internet. These chunks of code provide advanced features that users have come to expect from interactive websites.
But third-party code also poses a security risk. By integrating such code into their sites, web developers may unintentionally expose their site visitors to bugs or malicious backdoors. With the way the web works now, a script integrated into a website could compromise user privacy and access sensitive data on that site or even in other browser tabs. Web developers are caught between the competing aims of creating a website that supports strong privacy versus providing the flexibility and features that users desire.
Now researchers from University College London and Stanford have unveiled what they are calling a solution to this dilemma.
The system is called COWL--"Confinement With Origin Web Labels"--and is purported to safely allow building web applications with third-party code but without leaking sensitive data.
Brad Karp, co-author of the COWL specification, explains how it works: "If a JavaScript program embedded within one web site reads information provided by another web site--legitimately or otherwise--COWL permits the data to be shared, but thereafter restricts the application receiving the information from communicating it to unauthorized parties. As a result, the site that shares data maintains control over it, even after sharing the information within the browser."
COWL is available for web developers to freely download starting today.
Kicking off Fast Company's Innovation By Design 2014 Conference, Fast Company Executive Editor Noah Robischon hosted an intimate chat with Nest CEO Tony Fadell. The designer behind the original iPod, Fadell founded Nest in 2010 as a way to make our homes smarter. In front of a packed audience, Fadell talked about the future of the connected home, Google's $3.2 billion buyout of Nest, the importance of getting design details right, and whether or not Fadell might be Google's big Android boss someday. Here, four insights from the CEO who wants to change how we live:
When most people envision the connected home of the future, they imagine a big glowing button on their wall, connected to some HAL-like artificial intelligence that can do everything: raise your blinds, make your coffee, turn on your TV, and so on.
"That's not the right way to think about it," Fadell says. "People don't buy platforms. They buy one product at a time that somehow differentiates itself from every other product in their life. And then they move onto the next one. And the next one. You need to make standalone, great products, and if they can eventually all talk to each other 10 or 20 years down the line, then great. "
That's why Fadell thinks a Jetsons-like vision of the future of the connected home is bonkers. "The people who are pitching those kinds of products, it amazes me," Fadell says. "They just don't work."
Many people assume that search giant Google bought Nest as a way to gather information on people in their own homes as well as online, but Fadell says that there's actually no data overlap between Nest's data and Google's.
"All the data we've gathered are kept on Nest's own servers, it doesn't mingle with Google's at all," Fadell says. "That was well-understood by Google well before we signed the deal."
Nor was it about a $3.2 billion paycheck.
"We didn't even talk about price until all the other details of how we'd work together were worked out," Fadell said. "But after 25 years working in Silicon Valley, what it takes to build a world-changing platform, it's a huge mission. Eventually, the big boys are going to get involved."
What the Nest deal was really about, Fadell says, was synergy. "Talking about the Nest roadmap, we were completing each other's sentences," Fadell says. "Google and Nest are just birds of a feather: We all understand on a fundamental level what we need to do to take Nest to the next level. It's not a marriage of convenience; it's a marriage of mission."
Asked why Nest went to the curious length of designing its own screwdriver to ship alongside the Nest, Fadell said that it was because a product's smallest details matter.
"If you think about why we've all got these yellow gray boxes on our walls, it's because thermostats were designed for electricians, not consumers," Fadell says. "But the Nest is a consumer product, we developed it for consumers, and because a thermostat needs to be installed, we needed to make sure consumers were comfortable installing it. So that little screwdriver is our way of signaling to customers that there's nothing to worry about: we've thought of everything."
Another example: Fadell shared with the audience how his company settled on an appropriate voice for the Nest Protect, the company's intelligent smoke and CO2 detector.
"For the Nest Protect, the last thing we wanted was some LED blinking out Morse code," Fadell says. "We wanted it to have a humanizing effect. In particular, we wanted the Nest Protect to have a motherly voice, because studies have shown that kids are more likely to wake up to the sound of their mother's voice when there's danger, where as they'd just sleep through a beeping smoke alarm."
From there, Nest did a talent search in the United States, Canada, and Europe, reading through lines of over 100 different voice actors. At the end of the day, the Nest Protect needed a culturally appropriate mother's voice for each language and territory it shipped in. Another company might not have bothered, but according to Fadell, "it's those sort of details we feel we have to go to the nth degree on."
Asked if the buy-out of Nest was just a way of bringing Fadell in as Google's go-to product guy, Fadell sent mixed messages. While stressing Google's current teams were doing fantastic work, he seemed open to it, but doubted it was practical.
"I mean, if someone asked me to take over everything? Yes. But no one's asked," said Fadell. "And really, I just don't have the time."
A software platform originally developed with funding from the Defense Department and America's intelligence agencies is now being used for a novel purpose: Diagnosing traumatic brain injuries. Ayasdi, one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies for big data, is collaborating with the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, GE, and the National Football League to develop novel ways of visualizing neurotrauma. If it works, doctors will have a new way of visualizing what happens when brain injuries occur.
Devi Ramanan, a program director at Ayasdi who is working on traumatic brain injury research, explained to Co.Labs that the company's main product, a topological data platform which generates 3-D models of extremely complicated data sets, is being used to find more granular diagnoses of injuries. Ayasdi and their partners hope to identify specific kinds of traumatic brain injury that can eventually be pegged to different treatment options. Essentially, their hope is that software platforms will find small differences that a human researcher couldn't.
There's precedent for this, and it comes from the world of pro sports. Muthdu Alagappan, a former intern at Ayasdi, used the company's software to claim there are really 13 different basketball positions, rather than five. Alagappan's analysis won first prize at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference and earned him consultant contracts with the Miami Heat and the Portland Trail Blazers. Although basketball is far different from neurotrauma, both generate extensive sets of data points which can then be leveraged by software.
Another pro sports league, the NFL, is helping to fund ongoing neurotrauma research at UCSF using Ayasdi's software. The joint Ayasdi-UCSF team received a $300,000 research grant from GE and the NFL earlier this year as part of the football league's "Head Health Challenge." UCSF's Adam Ferguson and Esther Yuh are using the big data platform to sort through results gained from a new type of brain imaging technology called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). DTI is useful for medical professionals in detecting mild injuries that wouldn't necessarily show up in a MRI. Ayasdi's visualization software is then used to create geometric-like analyses of the results, where anomalies show up as changes in the shapes generated on the screen.
Part of the challenge, said Ramanan and Ayasdi cofounder Gunnar Carlsson, is the massive amount of data generated by DTI. The imaging technology captures the way water diffuses in the brain in 3-D, which creates a large amount of data to parse and analyze. Because the data sets created by the images include more than 100,000 voxels (3-D pixels) mapping the white matter in the brain alone, analyzing them causes logistical challenges for medical researchers. Using Ayasdi, or a similar platform, simplifies what Ramanan calls the "needle in a haystack game" for UCSF's team. Research at UCSF using Ayasdi's platform is still ongoing.
But across the country in New York, another study is taking place using the same software as UCSF. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (which also made our Most Innovative Companies in big data list) is using Ayasdi to create visual analysis of combined MRI and imaging data from brain diseases. Although Ayasdi would not go into specifics due to the fact that research is ongoing and still has not been published, the Icahn-Ayasdi partnership is centered on linking brain imaging data to a data set supplied by the University of Pennsylvania, which will then be used for research into schizophrenia and related conditions. The medical school and software company already work together to create precision medicine protocols for Type 2 diabetes.
Sick of filling out computer questionnaires? Want a matchmaker more like Patty Stanger, aka the Millionaire Matchmaker, who will personally size up potential candidates (if her reality show is to be believed, often in humiliating terms)? Well, look no further than that the workhorse of the online dating world, eHarmony.
On Tuesday, Dr. Neil Clark Warren, eHarmony's founder, announced EH+--its first product that uses human intervention for the more "complex cases" of the lovelorn. In a revelatory admission, the founder acknowledged that while many couples have found wedded bliss after meeting on eHarmony (approximately 600,000 couples at last count), some 70% of its users say they are not satisfied with the online matchmaking site.
"This means we still have far to go," said the founder, who has been married for 55 years.
True love definitely doesn't come for free, though. The service will cost $5,000 per year. "Many people don't find that amount too much to pay to find the love of their life," said Warren.
During this week's DreamForce conference for Salesforce.com, Clark and his team announced that eH+ offers personalized service to customers who may not have the time or energy to wade through potential matches on their own. These customers are also willing to spend the annual subscription fee to have a human matchmaker with a background in psychology help them make meaningful connections, and ultimately meet their soul mates.
The Santa Ana, Calif. company quietly launched a soft rollout of the service in January, but did not make a nationwide press announcement, noted sales executive Jane Riley. The business would not release exact figures but did say that several hundred customers have signed up for the new service.
Photo: Jonathan Vickburg, courtesy of eHarmony
When a person emails the company during business hours, a sales rep will return with a phone call within two minutes. If you call outside the stated times, someone will call the next day to explain what eH+ entails. And if you agree to the terms, you get your own dating coach who will examine your profile to match you up with a potential suitor, call you with the findings, and set up the date. "It's all very personalized," said Riley. "People will text their matchmaker after the date, explain what happened, and ask advice on what to do next." Some clients use Skype to talk to their coaches, others can request a face-to-face meeting if they live nearby.
According to Riley, the sales reps and all the matchmakers are staff employees and do not work remotely or overseas.
When clients sign up, they fill out the same questionnaire as the regular eHarmony users. Matches are made within this dating pool in addition to those who are on eH+. Since the company has a proven compatibility matching system, it only makes sense to use it with the premium service, according to Riley.
Plans for the near future include opening the phone lines so sales reps can respond to email requests seven days a week instead of five. Since eHarmony has never hired a sales team before, it has had a learning curve of its own. Partnering with Velocify, a vendor of online sales tools, eHarmony has had to train sales reps regarding how to gently work with potential clients who are probably sensitive about the whole issue.
So even with optimal scientific processes and mathematical formulas associated with online dating, it is clear that the human touch is still needed. Said the white-haired grandfatherly founder, "To find that perfect mate is not easy. It seems like you are looking for an invisible needle in a haystack." With eH+, Warren is attempting to make the invisible visible.
Is one of the most popular anonymous secrets apps around keeping a secret of its own… and collecting intelligence on their users? In a story published earlier today, U.K. newspaper The Guardian accused Whisper of tracking the location of users who have opted out of geolocation services, of specifically targeting users who appear to work at Disney Hill, Yahoo, and on Capitol Hill, and of sharing information left anonymously with partners including the FBI, the Department of Defense, and British intelligence agency MI5.
The Guardian alleges to have found out about Whisper's practices during a trip to the company's Los Angeles headquarters to explore a possible business relationship (which, obviously, will not be happening anytime soon). The newspaper reports that "at no stage during the visit were the [visiting] journalists told they could not report on the information shared with them," and did not give any additional context around their decision to abandon the potential partnership and instead go public with the alleged full extent of the app's tracking of users. During the Guardian's visit, they claim they were showed how the app could be used to follow high-value users such as Israeli troops serving on the front line in Gaza and an alleged "sex-obsessed lobbyist in Washington DC." In a screenshot, a geotagged message appears to show a White House employee saying "I'm so glad this app is anonymous. The press would have a field day if they knew some of the stuff I post on here."
In a series of tweets, Whisper editor-in-chief Neetzan Zimmerman strongly disputed the allegations and made vague threats toward the newspaper. Here's a transcript of what he said:
First response: The Guardian's piece is lousy with falsehoods, and we will be debunking them all. Much more to come.
Second response: The Guardian made a mistake posting that story and they will regret it.
1/This cannot be overemphasized: @Whisper has never nor will ever collect nor store ANY personally identifiable information from its users.
2/Users must OPT IN to location, not OPT OUT. If a user does not OPT IN, their location information is NEVER collected nor stored, period.
3/Users who OPT IN - meaning elect to make their location public - have their location HEAVILY FUZZED by @Whisper to 500 meters away.
4/No exact location data is EVER stored or is accessible by @Whisper or its employees. The Guardian's suggestion to the contrary is FALSE.
5/Again, users who have OPTED IN to making their location PUBLIC have their location proactively fuzzed to 500 meters by @Whisper.
6/As there is no personally identifiable information (name, phone, email, address) collected or stored, fuzzed location data is meaningless.
7/Users who do not opt in to location send NO GPS information. It is a technical impossibility for us to determine their location.
8/To sum: Users must OPT IN to location; location is ALWAYS fuzzed to 500 meters; Users who don't opt in provide NO GPS data.
Whisper later released a statement with a point-by-point attack on the supposed inaccuracies in The Guardian's piece.
Regardless of the newspaper's allegations, remember: If you don't want someone tracking and monetizing information you volunteer for free, it's best not to put it online.
Today in The D: I am surprised to find myself with a whole section's worth of peen-ralated tabs, but here we are. The gameshow Family Feud probably caused one when this contestant revealed that her husband's dick is the worst. Katie Notopoulous investigated the elusive micropenis and clearly wants to conclude that size doesn't matter, but I couldn't help noticing that zero of her correspondents' stories ended with "...and we're still happily together today!" And to complete our dialectical movement from bad dicks to small dicks to no dicks: Gawker's Simon Davis brings us this interview with a "nullo."
Trash novelist and hillbilly dick John Grisham unexpectedly came out as an advocate for the harmlessness of child porn, at least when enjoyed by "60 year old white guys," "guys like [him]," or his "good buddy from law school" who "had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons," in case you were in any way unclear about who exactly should not be punished for seeking out and downloading clearly labeled sexual pictures of children. Grisham later posted a statement saying the exact opposite of what he clearly says in the Telegraph video, but more briefly and much less convincingly. And finally, Eron Gjoni, the dick to whom we owe #gamergate, says that if he could go back in time, he would still post the gross misogynist rant against his ex-girlfriend Zoe Quinn that started it all, even though he had to quit his job because fighting an online war against women is so exhausting. Poor fella. Lay down your burden, son, and just sleep. Shhh. Sleep now.
Last week, my sister came up from college to get lunch with my brother and I. She, of course, brought along four friends. I don't remember any of their names. But anyway, we sat down for our meal, and, not five minutes into it, the #teens called me #old.
I was a little offended, until I remembered how old everyone seemed when I was my sister's age and younger. Today, my friends Leah and PJ put out a TLDR episode about Leah's time as a sex/advice columnist to teenage boys at IGN. She told them that their dicks were normal, yes, but she also helped them consider what it means to care about people. PJ, of course, was one of those lost boys.
It's pretty powerful, I think, and a nice reminder that what you do online really does follow you. I guess the challenge is to make things you're proud of-things that matter, that are as reliable as your shadow.
I swear that Bijan and I did not collude on the dick-related content in today's intern tab. It must be the autumn Full Willy Moon or something.
Also: I guess Apple had an event today.
Today's Local News Moment: Listen to the response when Alexis Coe says "castrated" at 1:40 of this video.
~Tabs and glitter cover the floor, we're pretty and sick, we're young and we're bored~
Today in Tabs is sorry that this thing is at least 50% about dicks. Ok, strictly speaking, I'm not at all sorry. Read us on FastCoLabs or get us by email. Also I'm like 90% sure I used the quote above already but I couldn't help it.
The simple wooden frame hangs nondescriptly on the wall, until its motion sensors spot a passerby. That initiates the "face to face" alignment, powered by a magnetic "puppeteer" arm behind the wall. The hidden pinhole camera transmits the live video footage to the software, which uses emotional recognition algorithms to analyze face expressions. The ferrofluid "eyes" in the frame, controlled by four servo/magnets, begin to react, producing abstract, drippy, floating forms.
"Eye Catcher" is an interactive project from Lin Zhang and Ran Xie, combining receptive software and analog mechanics. It reads your facial expression and expresses itself accordingly, in the form of two morphing black liquid blobs. They're quite expressive… for blobs.
"There are many digital interfaces that have the appearance of advanced technologies and compete for our attention," Lin Zhang tells We Make Money Not Art. "But I think it is better to develop interfaces that rather than standing out, can sit within our normal daily lives and then come to life at the right moment whether for functional or playful purposes." That's sneaky, and pretty great.
See it October 16th through the 19th at Kinetica Art Fair in London.
Pasha Khordorkovskiy wanted to get his hardware business off the ground a few years ago, but the timing was wrong. The financial downturn made hardware unattractive to investors, the path to market unreachable. Fast-forward to four years later, and he and his cofounder have found themselves embraced by a vibrant hardware startup community, ready to launch their product.
"Hardware is sexy again." Khordorkovskiy says.
Khordorkovskiy's startup, Enertiv, was part of the first class of the New York-based R/GA Accelerator this past year, along with nine other hardware startups. All of the companies that presented at the accelerator's demo days at SXSW this spring met or exceeded their funding goals. One participant, Grove Labs, secured $2 million and the first versions of its hydroponic grove are already operating in users' homes.
The projects in R/GA's first class all centered on connected devices, from Grove Labs' indoor hydroponic grove to Enertiv's energy-efficiency monitoring system. They gained access to technical and product mentors, as well as the accelerator's machine shop thanks to a partnership with MakerBot. In many cases the founders already had enough technical know-how to move their idea into a product, but R/GA's branding and commercial resources pushed them from dorm-room startups to funded business.
Now the R/GA Accelerator is getting ready to welcome the second group of startups to its accelerator on Monday, and this time around software and data will be getting more attention.
The R/GA Accelerator's space
The R/GA Accelerator is the product of the New York-based interactive agency R/GA and the global seed-stage investment program Techstars. The accelerator's affiliation with Techstars created a lot of inbound interest for the first class of participants, and R/GA's reputation in the connected devices world as a powerful branding force has given the accelerator its commercial edge--R/GA counts the Nike+ FuelBand and the Beats Music services among its prized projects.
"We think that our point of differentiation is really with the go-to-market strategy, whereas other programs focus a lot on building products," says Jenny Fielding, the accelerator's new managing director. "It's nice to have products, but if you can't get the products into the hands of consumers, that's half the battle there."
R/GA's first class at its New York Demo Day
Knowing that the marketing pitch is they key to attracting investors, the first thing R/GA did was sit down with Khordorkovskiy and the Enertiv team to help them analyze their market presence and potential. Since Khordorkovskiy and his cofounder already had live versions of their energy-efficiency system in place with a few customers, R/GA helped refine their story for these existing markets as well as identify new types of target clients for future growth.
"They're experts at a few things and not all the things that are necessary to bring a brand to market," says Daniel Diez, global chief marketing officer of R/GA. But with R/GA's full scope of capabilities on the table, the accelerator's startups could build both the brand and the business.
Enertiv's energy-monitoring hardware
In the end, Khordorkovskiy says the program completely turned Enertiv's business model upside down, for the better. In its early years, Enertiv charged the customer high initial fees for its energy-monitoring hardware. But after lowering its upfront costs, on R/GA's suggestion, the company saw its sales pick up. And along with targeting new customer types, Enertiv upped its revenue by implementing a payment scheme for access to its hardware's acquired data.
"The value that you deliver is the data. It's in the recommendations. It's in real-time dashboards that people have in their facilities, and for that, they pay on a monthly basis," says Khordorkovskiy.
The software dashboard, showing Enertiv's data stream
Now, Enertiv's brand of managing home energy efficiency leverages the Internet of Things in a way that older and established companies in the same space do not. The company has an API that can interface with existing hardware in its customers' buildings, as well as provide data streams to other companies, like real estate firms. Enertiv's software transformed its product from solely a consumer solution to one that also caters to other businesses.
Keen Home, another startup in the R/GA Accelerator's first class, came into the program with a working prototype of its smart vent that opened and closed depending on the conditions of the room it was installed in. Ryan Fant, its cofounder and co-CEO, says R/GA really understood his vision that Keen Home was more than just a vent company. He was interested in intelligent automation but didn't know where to grow his business from that idea.
"When we came in, we knew we were more than a smart vent company, but we didn't know how to say that; we didn't know how to portray that. And I don't think we fully believed we could be more than that," says Fant.
Keen Home's smart vent, complete with sensors and a wireless connection
With R/GA's help, Keen Home developed an identity that it could easily pitch to investors. Its product is a complement to other smart devices in the home. Rather than being the central nervous system of an HVAC system, like Nest is, it's the respiratory system, leveraging information from other datasets in the home. Now, the home improvement store Lowe's is embedding Keen Home's app into its smart home platform.
Marketing tactics aside, working with the other startups on their products in the lab turned into a good give-and-take for Keen Home. One of Keen Home's cofounders was even known as the 3-D printing guru among the class members, known for helping the other teams refine their designs for a couple of hours at a time. In return, one of the other teams' standout software developers helped Keen Home finish out its app.
The Keen Home app
"We have different challenges than traditional software platforms or app companies do. And if there's anything we can do to help each other get over that hump, there's a real willingness to do that," says Fant.
Focusing the second batch of accelerator startups more clearly on software and data is a recognition of just how quickly the connected devices world is evolving.
"In the future, we'll be able to link multiple devices on a platform," says Fielding. New hardware solutions, she says, will need to demonstrate how they connect to other solutions and devices. Software does that.
And with prototyping costs going down and the open-source hardware movement catching on, Fielding and Diez realize that the key to differentiation is in services. The market is bound to see copycats of smart security and energy-monitoring systems that new hardware startups tend to turn out because hardware products are getting increasingly easy to build.
"At some point, we're going to reach a critical mass of devices," says Diez. "And I think the thing that's really going to differentiate a lot of them is going to be the service layer that people start to create in addition to having the device."
So when sifting through this year's applications to its accelerator, R/GA looked for companies that had potential in its software and data products, while the hardware component took a backseat. The accelerator will announce the new class members this coming Monday, October 20th.
As our fifth week of HappyFunCorp's HFC Academy waned, the class slowly realized that these websites we were building...worked. But the end of our six-week course looms large. Soon we'll have to put all these product and coding lessons to task.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating: If not for the instructors poking over my shoulder to correct my code, I'd have quit weeks ago. As the course wears on, I ask less for them to find my missing semicolon and much more "I want to link this to this. Where do I need to insert code to do that?" The basic instruction has moved into conceptual frameworks--plug this page into that page with this controller while this model tells these pages how they feel about each other.
The instructors take pains to emphasize how many ways we can link and style these pages. Partially this is to stretch our brains into accepting solutions as conceptual, not procedural--some solutions are lengthier while simpler solutions may take longer to figure out and code. We begin to see where adherence to Don't Repeat Yourself programming can be ignored here and there to just get things built.
For example, one of our class project designs called for a footer to stick to the bottom of the page. HFC instructor Ricky Reusser walked us through the extensive but correct styling to perfectly replicate the spec designs...and then told us why we shouldn't always do that. You have to ask yourself how much value your effort is creating.
"There's absolute value to learning how to do that correctly, but there's a lot of value to be lost dumping time into engineering solutions that are not worthwhile. I made a lot of mistakes there in the past," Reusser says. "This is a corner case...if I engineer a corner case here, only two people will see that. So by saying "Yeah I can do that" that's actually damaging because I'm adding a lot of code for a weird corner case and the actual payoff is...not much."
The instructors have dropped our final tool in our laps: AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. AJAX allows you to update particular parts of a page without having to go through a full request-response cycle and reload the entire page--the asynchronous request works to ping the server to update data in the background. This is mostly useful for form data, like posting comments. It uses fewer resources, relieving stress on the server and reducing the chance that screwy server returns will leave your page in limbo. Plus, a fully refreshed page loses everything carried over from the last page, like params or URL add-ons. But more importantly, it allows the page to update data without force-refreshing the page, a major win for user-pleasing UX. AJAX streamlines your product.
"Normally, when you update a page, there's a flash when the page reloads--and if just one element has been updated, the user will think the whole website is slow," says HFC instructor Aaron Brocken. "Before, the page is static, but with AJAX the page is more alive. There's a whole crazy user psychology you have to think about. People try to keep their apps from feeling "heavy." They want it nimble, lightweight."
Throughout the course, the instructors have hammered home the importance of responsive design. If your users change their browser window size, your page should adapt to preserve the aesthetic. Adapting to browser window size--or for mobile view--keeps your product clutter-free and, again, preserves the lightweight aesthetic.
Sometimes your assets themselves get in the way of that aesthetic. One of our projects required a directory page using an image logo that was sized smaller than adjacent images for profile photos. It came to a judgment call: We could either a) code around the image size disparity, b) ask our designer to fix the logo, or c) fix the logo size ourselves.
Choice "a" would be the elegant answer, but how much time would be spent exactly spacing out our page columns--funny spacing which may introduce problems of their own down the road? Choice "b" would be the easiest fix, offloading it to the designer, but the designer may have too much on their plate--or they're the type that doesn't take kindly to tiny problems that distract them from important work. Is it worth diplomatically maneuvering for this tiny fix?
Sometimes a cadet programmer just has to muscle up and go with "c"--but there are plenty of free tools out there to fix image assets. GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an old standby, but other free solutions exist: Pixlr, for one, is an in-browser photo manipulation program that has several Photoshop-esque features.
The point isn't that we've filled our toolbox. Like every step of the Learn 2 Code process, we're being taught how to solve problems. Fidelity to solutions, not methods, will keep us flexible enough to grasp the usefulness of new tools that streamline coding so we can save energy for the big conceptual problems.
Our class is at the first stages of the coding learning curve, Reusser says: First you learn to make things, then you learn to make things well, then make things work, and finally you write elegant code, which for some becomes an end unto itself. This is a tricky pitfall when building products. It's easy to miss the forest for the trees.
"Unless somebody's paying attention, it's easy to get lost writing great code. But that's not the goal. The goal is to get the product out there," Reusser says. "Put that in your heads right from the start."
Ideally, this is where the project manager works their magic--figuring out tickets, find the value, and assign work accordingly. As an engineer, Reusser says, it's your job to figure out what's happening, because there's not always enough oversight to keep you from getting lost. And the project manager needs to know an engineer well and adjust instructions in order for the engineer to deliver the right output.
"Some engineers will not do enough because they'll only meet the letter of what was asked, and some will do too much. Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium," Reusser says. "It's not the engineer's job to think about it, to plan and prioritize project or product management, but the engineer is the one that needs to make it happen."
Which means us cadet coders need to get in the habit of managing our attention. Time management, Reusser admits, will always be a struggle. As an engineer, he needs to be aware of how long tasks will take for him to complete.
"It's the last 20% of building stuff that takes 80% of your time," Reusser says.
You, the engineer, need to communicate that to your project manager, who communicates an appropriate timeline to the client. It's a tricky balance of team management and setting appropriate client expectations that takes learning from the 80-20 programming rule and properly respecting --that things will always take longer than you think.
"If it's going to take half a day, you never tell the client that. You tell them it will take three days and then deliver it a day early," Brocken says.
If you want to find news articles worth reading, you could do a lot worse than to simply check out what your friends share on Twitter and Facebook. That isn't exactly a revelation. It's closer to a self-evident statement of fact.
Trouble is, finding those recommendations can be surprisingly tough. They're there in your social feeds, but submerged in a surging sea of selfies, jokes, personal reflections, viral lists, cat videos, and various other things which have nothing to do with current events. Blink, and something worthwhile may pass you by.
Clever use of technology, of course, might be able to help people discover articles on their social networks which are likely to pique their interest. It could be that a proprietary algorithm or a machine-learning breakthrough is called for--or at least a uniquely elegant user interface.
Or maybe the solution is obvious: Just get rid of everything else that isn't a recommendation of an article by a friend, and then put the most popular links at the top.
The app from a startup of the same name, created by veteran entrepreneur Jonathan Abrams, isn't yet a breakout hit, even among web-savvy types. But its approach is resonating with some pretty influential people, such as GigaOm founder, venture capitalist, and Fast Company columnist Om Malik, who recently rhapsodized that Nuzzel "has made my life just better."
If Nuzzel has a secret sauce, it's that it has no secret sauce. All it does is show articles shared by your friends, sorted by popularity. The interface is utilitarian at best. But as it turns out, it's a powerful way to put worthwhile reading material right in front of you, where you can't miss it. The experience feels both personalized and serendipitous, and distinctly different from those of the bevy of mobile news apps which bring more technology and resources to the challenge, such as Circa, Inside, and Yahoo News Digest.
Nuzzel's iPhone app
By filtering the din of Facebook and Twitter down to a manageable list of articles which people cared enough about to share, Nuzzel appeals to folks for whom the sheer volume of material on social networks is intimidating. But it also caters to digitally intrepid types who fret that they might fall behind no matter how voracious their consumption of social feeds.
"For years I have wanted a DVR for Twitter for when I am away," says venture capitalist Chris Sacca, who was a Nuzzel addict before he became an investor in it, via his firm Lowercase Capital. "What did I miss? What's the news today? What are the people I care about all talking about? No one does real-time better than Twitter. But, if I am offline for a few hours and then log back in, I am always curious what I missed."
Nuzzel is that DVR. And despite the fact that it hasn't even arrived on Android phones yet--it's currently an iPhone app and a website--it can be consumed in a variety of ways, making it an unexpectedly rich experience.
"There are people who primarily use Nuzzel on the web," explains Abrams. "There are some people who primarily think of it as an email digest they get every morning. There are some people who use it primarily as an iPhone app that they click on, that's on their home screen. And there are some people who primarily think of us as something that sends them push notifications on their device."
Abrams isn't disclosing how many users Nuzzel has signed up since it left private beta in March and launched its iPhone app in May, except to acknowledge that the number remains "small." The company is is concentrating on ramping up its membership base rather than figuring out how to make money. Once it's ready to cash in, it's not hard to envision marketers paying to target Nuzzel users with sponsored content inserted in their feeds, much as companies already do on Facebook and Twitter.
What Nuzzel has accomplished so far, it's done without needing huge sums of cash: The company, like the app, is stripped-down and simple. Though it has well-known backers such as Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and 500 Startups, it's raised a modest $3.4 million to date, in two rounds of seed funding. It only recently hired its fifth team member, and is run out of Founders Den, a coworking space which Abrams cofounded around the corner from the San Francisco Giants' home at AT&T Park, in the startup-dense SOMA neighborhood.
Nuzzel's low profile and willingness to grow at a measured pace makes for a striking contrast with Abrams's best known past entrepreneurial effort, Friendster, which he started in 2002. That site got famous fast and helped popularize the concept of social networking. But what it's best known for is fizzling out, as MySpace, and then Facebook, took off. (Its current incarnation, a Malaysian-owned gaming portal, shares little with the original Friendster except the name.)
Abrams "is a fellow who, like me, launched a social media company at slightly the wrong time," says Jay Adelson, the cofounder of Digg--the pioneering sharing community which, like Friendster, created a splash and then failed to live up to expectations. However, thinking of Abrams only as someone who didn't turn out to be Mark Zuckerberg is a pretty shallow assessment of the man.
"Some entrepreneurs want to become rich or famous," says Adelson, who runs his office out of Founders Den and is an advisor to Nuzzel. Abrams, however, "isn't one of those guys. He gets impatient waiting for something, and so he finally creates it himself."
In the case of Nuzzel, Abrams has been pondering the problem of social sharing for a long time--since the late 1990s, when he founded a startup called HotLinks, after spending time as an engineer at browser pioneer Netscape.
HotLinks was among the last search sites built before it was clear that Google and its PageRank algorithm would dominate web search. It let its members bookmark their favorite sites, and then collected those bookmarks into a Yahoo-like directory of the entire web. It bore some resemblance to the later and better-known service Del.icio.us. And like Nuzzel, it leveraged the wisdom of crowds to identify worthwhile content.
"The vision of HotLinks was that people should share cool links with other people," Abrams says. "That you're looking for stuff, I'm looking for stuff. That if we found cool stuff on the web, we could somehow share it."
Back in 1999, however, turning that vision into reality was far harder than it is in 2014. Nuzzel sits atop social networks built by others and leverages their existing features and vast membership bases. HotLinks would only have had a shot at success if it had been able to build and sustain all that on its own. Instead, it was one of countless startups which got washed away when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. "We were obviously way too early," says Abrams.
Like Nuzzel, Abrams's Web 1.0 startup HotLinks was about sharing cool links
Flash forward more than a decade--past Friendster and past Socializr, the latter being an event planning service which Abrams founded and then sold to a rival called Punchbowl.
A few years ago, he found that he was getting more and more of his news from links his friends shared on Twitter and Facebook. But he also felt increasingly daunted by the sheer quantity of items, and worried that he might fail to see something good if he didn't monitor his feeds obsessively. In short, he craved a less noisy approach to news.
"It seemed like a very obvious idea," Abrams says. "I actually thought, okay, this is going to be built. I thought Digg was going to do it, and there was a company called Summify that Twitter bought, and there was other stuff out there...So initially, I had the idea but didn't actually work on it."
Eventually, he took matters into his own hands by putting together a prototype and sharing it some of the entrepreneurs at Founders Den, He wasn't startled when they said nice things about it--"Everybody will check out their friend's product once"--but a couple of weeks later, they were still using it. That seemed like a promising sign.
What Abrams had prototyped was the first rough draft of Nuzzel. He says that the name he chose for his creation has no deep meaning other than being a variation on the word "Nuzzle." Even if the similarity to the words "news" and "nozzle" is coincidental, it's evocative. Nuzzel is a nozzle for news--a far more efficient alternative to gulping information directly from the firehoses that are Facebook and Twitter.
Unlike Yahoo News Digest--an app which delivers tidy packages of news twice a day--Nuzzel doesn't artificially constrain the material it gives you. If you want, you can gorge on your friends' content, and then move on to read stories recommended by friends of friends. But it does help busy people get get in, get informed, and then get out.
"If 17 of my friends share something, something big has happened," says Nuzzel COO Kent Lindstrom, who is, like Abrams, a Friendster alumnus. "If five people shared it, that's cool. Once something gets down to the twos or the ones, I've seen the most important news of the day."
"It just sounds too simple to work. Sorting the news by what your friends share most--that doesn't sound like a big deal. It turns out it works profoundly well."
If you tire of reading your friends' links on Nuzzel, you can read ones from friends of friends
Which brings up an unavoidable question: If the idea that makes Nuzzel work is so straightforward, does it run the risk of being rendered superfluous by something comparable from a major social network?
After all, if Twitter and Facebook chose to mimic the concept, they could roll it out immediately to hundreds of millions of people. And there's plenty of evidence that both companies are intensely interested in the news and their role in spreading it.
When the World Cup was going on, for instance, Twitter even reworked its homepage around it, and turned country codes into custom "hashflags." Facebook, meanwhile, sticks "Trending" links to news stories in prime real estate in the upper right-hand corner of your homepage. It also launched Paper, an iPhone app which is--among other things--a sort of news magazine reimagined for the smartphone era.
Abrams, not surprisingly, maintains that Nuzzel wouldn't be a cakewalk to clone. "There's a million boring little details underneath that make Nuzzel work properly," he says, "The kind of boring details that browsers and search engines have, that users should be completely oblivious to."
Facebook's "Trending" news links bear superficial resemblance to Nuzzel
Facebook's "Trending" links may prove his point. Though superficially similar to Nuzzel, they appear to be based on what teeming masses of Facebook users are discussing, not what your friends are sharing, so they feel like impersonal information overload. And the news sources in the Paper app--based on content deals with major media brands such as NBC News, the New York Times, and MarketWatch--have none of the serendipity that comes from mining your friends' feeds for recommendations the way Nuzzel does.
Twitter and Facebook could still implement more Nuzzel-esque features. But in the end, news will never be the only thing that's important to the major social networks, or even the most important thing. That's an advantage for a specialist such as Abrams's app.
"The challenge for Twitter and Facebook is that they need to serve many masters and thus they need to be more generic in nature," says Om Malik. "More importantly, the two companies won't likely work with each other, so there is a room for [an] independent."
Assuming that Nuzzel is around for the long haul, there are some obvious ways that Abrams and his team can expand on the concept in ways that will keep current users engaged and make it alluring to a bigger audience than its current small-but-dedicated fan base of early adopters.
Yves Béhar's Nuzzel feed
For one thing, it doesn't have to be solely about your friends' news recommendations. Browsing the links shared by another person's friends is also an effective organizing principle for news. "Being able to look at someone else's Nuzzel is actually a pretty big idea," says COO Lindstrom.
That's already how I use the app. My friends' feeds are often full of articles I've already found on my own--which makes sense, since an awful lot of them are tech journalists, Silicon Valley folk, or people with backgrounds otherwise similar to mine. But Nuzzel also lets me browse the feeds of people who I don't know, such as design god Yves Béhar, one of the app's "Featured Feeds." (Others include entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, TechCrunch coeditor Alexia Tsotsis, and Parts Unknown CNN host Anthony Bourdain, among others.)
It's important to note that it doesn't matter whether Béhar is sharing stuff himself, or whether he actively uses Nuzzel. As long as he has a critical mass of friends who share items on his social networks, he'll have an interesting Nuzzel feed. And he does.
Perhaps more intriguingly, the company is also experimenting with curating themed lists of links shared by groups of people with something in common. In June, for instance, VentureBeat's Tom Cheredar reported on a feed which Nuzzel had created based on articles shared by the top 1,000 investors on angel funding site AngelList. If you're interested in tech startups, it makes for good, insider-y reading.
There's no reason why the company couldn't do something similar with a thousand athletes, or a thousand scientists, or a thousand people in the TV industry, or all of the above--all based on what those people are sharing on Facebook and Twitter, regardless of whether they joined Nuzzel themselves. Topic-based recommendations would make Nuzzel feel even more like a modernized version of what Abrams had tried to build with HotLinks, and would give you something which the big social networks do not.
Nuzzel's mascot, a hedgehog, was chosen in a contest held to find a symbol akin to Twitter's birdie
Abrams didn't lay out Nuzzel's exact strategy for me, but did tell me that aggregation of this general sort will be part of its future. "The possibilities," he says, "are probably endless."
As Nuzzel does get more ambitious, preserving the attributes which make it inviting in the first place will be essential. "You don't want to take it in too many directions," says Jay Adelson. "You want to tweak the user interface, make it nicer over time, add the ability to find and share those filters or lenses or whatever you want to call them. There's a lot of temptation to go crazy. But I think they'll grow their user base without having to do that."
Abrams is keenly aware that it would be possible to screw up his brainchild by overcomplicating it with new features. "It's about editing," he says. "A lot of it is what you take out. A big part of Nuzzel is what Nuzzel doesn't do, doesn't have, doesn't try to be." Which means that for this company--even more than the average promising startup--the key to long-term success will lie in doing more without overdoing it.
Andy Baiopoints out a few enjoyable links where #gamergaters watch their heroes call them garbage. Here's an interview with the guy whose site is booming thanks to the howling mob of misogynist hate-weasels. The world's worst ex-boyfriendposted his own transcript of his Buzzfeed interview, apparently thinking it makes him look... better? Or at least not worse? It does neither. And elsewhere, Radley Balko says "...not all child porn!"
We're Offering $10,000 For Unretouched Photos of a Male Gamergate Participant We Would Actually Fuck
This is really late because I was busy today, and apparently so was the intern because I threw a cup of coffee at his head (like I do every day) and all he managed to produce was this:
Wherever there is hardware, software and streams of data are following close behind. NYC's R/GA knows this better than most companies, given their key role in the creation of the Nike+ FuelBand and the Beats Music service. Today, the R/GA Accelerator announces its second class of 10 startups, who will begin working with the program's mentors this month.
Last year, the Manhattan-based interactive brand agency R/GA and the global startup mentorship program Techstars teamed up to transform 10 fledgling connected devices companies into surefire VC investments with their three-month-long R/GA Accelerator. The program's $120,000 in seed funding helped pair each company's hardware product with colorful digital marketing campaigns and attractive apps. And it worked: The startups attracted millions of dollars in outside funding and are now preparing their products for market.
This year, the R/GA Accelerator is letting software and data take center stage as the connected devices themselves take a step back. All hail the Internet of Things.
Here's a look at R/GA's newest class of startups:
1MM - New York, NY
1MM connects the workplace to make it safer. Its hardware solution tracks the activities of employees who are most at risk of workplace injury and uses data to improve their conditions. Think warehouses and factories. http://www.onemillionmetrics.com
Astro - New York, NY
Astro's product has the form factor of a light bulb but functionality to do much more than light up a room. It automates a home's entire suite of appliances, requiring no new wireless networks. http://www.astro.ai
Bitfinder - Seoul, SK / San Francisco, CA
Bitfinder helps individuals suffering from autoimmune conditions, such as asthma and eczema, with its portable device that helps detect airborne and environmental irritants. http://www.bitfinder.co
Chargifi - London, UK
Chargifi provides wireless and location-based charging stations that double as platforms for advertising and interactive content. http://chargifi.com
Diagenetix, Inc - Honolulu, HI
Diagenetix, also known as Smart Dart, uses sensor-detection and data streams to screen the food processing chain for pathogen risk on a large, industrial scale. The low-cost, portable diagnostics tool covers all stakeholders from food producers and processors, to buyers. http://www.diagenetix.com
Freedom Audio - Orlando, FL
Freedom Audio is creating an all-terrain wireless, waterproof stereo that will be fully connected to music services via a touch-screen interface. It's just one more product in its existing line of durable audio products. http://freedomaud.io
Latch - Washington, DC
Latch is rethinking the keyless entry security platform for residents and building managers. They're looking at beacons and other ways of implementing the keyless entry system. http://www.getlatch.com
LISNR - Columbus, OH
LISNR is a second-screen-experience company whose technology uses audio to activate another device's screen. It's already raised a fair amount of funding, making it one of the more mature companies in R/GA's second class. http://www.lisnr.com
Pinoccio - Reno, NV
Pinoccio has an Arduino-type maker kit that allows users to build wireless projects that are mesh-networked and open source. https://pinocc.io
SkySpecs - Ann Arbor, MI
SkySpecs brings drones onto R/GA's roster. Its Air Bumper technology helps drones avoid collisions, making them more accessible for industrial and consumer applications. The FAA recently grounded a stunt that SkySpecs planned at an Ann Arbor football stadium. http://www.skyspecs.com
"We don't think of ourselves as a hardware accelerator," says Stephen Plumlee, R/GA's chief operating officer.
Although all of these startups have hardware in their product lines, he says, their offerings can evolve within the Internet of everything scope. The software or data component might become more valuable than the hardware by the end of the program. And this differentiates R/GA from the run-of-the-mill hardware accelerator.
"We're thinking about the broader ecosystem of what IoT means. And it's way bigger, of course, than just gadgets and wearables and portable devices," Plumlee says.
You've seen Google Glass headsets, smartwatches, earpieces, and even smart shoes. Now Nokia (yes, still in business) has come up with a new concept its creators are convinced represents an exciting alternative: A smart spyglass.
Named after the small magnification device commonly used by jewelers, Loupe is a near-eye virtual display that compresses Google Glass-style functionality into a tiny handheld device resembling a miniature telescope.
"We were interested in creating a device that would have some of the positives of a device like Google Glass, but wouldn't have all of the same trade-offs in terms of costs versus benefits for the user," says Kent Lyons, formerly principal researcher at the Nokia Research Center, now working at Yahoo Labs.
Sized at just 3cm x 8cm, Loupe is the polar opposite of Google's "always-on" model. Instead of being an omnipresent recording device, it is designed for viewing only, and is put away when not in use--either worn around the neck like a pendant, or placed in a shirt pocket for easy access.
The research team behind Loupe started work on the project last year, experimenting with different form factors. They were particularly inspired by a spyglass-style portable picture viewer Nokia released in 2004, called the Nokia Kaleidoscope.
Arriving at a time when other companies were trying to figure out the digital picture frame, the $300 Kaleidoscope was a 75g device that allowed people to privately view their photos while on the move. The concept failed to take off, but the team at Nokia was intrigued.
"What it lacked was the kind of rich interaction made possible using today's technology," says David Nguyen, another researcher at the company who worked on Loupe.
The project was hacked together from various pieces of existing hardware. The micro-display was taken from a pair of Epson Moverio BT-100 smart glasses: an Android-powered binocular device which projects a big-screen image the equivalent of a 320-inch display viewed from a distance of 65 feet. The team took the glasses to pieces, threw out the optics and housing, and then extracted the electronics, one of the LCDs, and the LED backlight.
For the magnification, the team used a jeweler's loupe with a diameter of 13mm and a nominal magnification of 20x2. The Loupe's multitude of sensors were all from existing models including accelerometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes, and an infrared proximity sensor to establish when the device was being placed in front of the user's eye.
Outwardly a spyglass doesn't seem like it should feature a whole lot of possible input methods--particularly since the user has to be able to operate them without looking. However, as Lyons explains, there are more control methods than you might think.
"For our prototype we put capacitive touch points around the outside of the device," he says. "Just like having a touch screen on a tablet or smartphone, users can interact with Loupe by way of an outside touch surface. This means a variety of different swipes, finger placements, or other gestures could be recognized."
The plethora of smart sensors open up possibilities for controlling Loupe by tilting the device, or else spinning it on its axis. "Imagine it like spinning a pen in your fingers," Lyons continues. "That rotated between the different applications that we mocked up. Then aim the device down and that moves into an extended view, where you can flip between different pieces of content."
The user interface itself is both newly designed with the device in mind, but also somewhat familiar. Because the electronics were kept from the Epson smart glasses, the device runs a version of Android OS. The interface presents the information users would wish to access--be it web pages, calendar entries, or photos--on what looks like a stack of Polaroid pictures, which recede off into the distance. Around this celestial filing cabinet is a colored ring, on which different apps are dotted like the numbers on a clockface. Currently these apps, which include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others, are just mock-ups, but the team says the interface works surprisingly well.
"We decided to focus on digital media that favored a 'snacking' approach," says Nguyen. "That's the kind of short-term task you might carry out while waiting in line at a bank, or sitting in the waiting room to see a doctor. It could be checking your Facebook feed for news, for instance, or looking at photos you've been tagged in."
So what are the chances that Loupe will become an actual product with a shipping date? As you would expect from a prototype, there are plenty of hurdles. The jeweler's loupe used for magnification isn't ideal, for one thing, since it creates visible aberrations in the displayed image. However, these problems could be easily solved, and the OS could be finished.
"From a technology perspective it is very plausible," Lyons says. "It's the same kind of technology that's already been used in Google Glass, so there's not a big gap that would need to be overcome for moving this beyond the prototype stage. Will it ship? I don't know--I'm no longer working at Nokia. But I'd like to see it."
The bigger question, of course, concerns whether Loupe is the kind of wearable device that could find its way in the mass market. Following the old adage about trees falling in the woods, if nobody asks for a spyglass-shaped wearable does it still represent a breakthrough?
One barrier to entry is the current cost of wearable tech. While component prices are coming down all the time, smartwatches and head-up displays are still costly enough that most users will only buy one (if any).
"That's going to change as we move forward," he says. "It may be that a personalization can occur whereby you'll own multiple wearables, and pick the one that suits you best in a given situation." In the same way that currently we put on a T-shirt if it's sunny, and a waterproof jacket when it rains, so would cheaper devices mean that we could choose to wear a smartwatch on occasions, and carry a Loupe-style device on others.
It also depends on what the use case for wearables turns out to be, and we don't really know that yet. New technology only makes total sense once customers start dictating how they want to use it.
"As an industry, we owe it to ourselves and to consumers to try and find that one killer experience that is going to persuade people to put down money for wearables," Nguyen says. "As far as I can tell, we haven't got there yet--but we're all trying our best. And I hope that Loupe is a step in the right direction."
