Making the process of building websites less complicated is a growth industry. Just look at the success of WordPress and Squarespace. Yet with all the templates and customization available from these platforms, it still leaves humans to do most of the decision-making--should you put that checkout button in the middle or top right? You'll need another app if you want to A/B test it and find the answer.
What if instead your website used machine learning to build itself, and then rebuilt as necessary, based on data it was gathering about how it was being used? That's what The Grid is aiming to do. After you add content such as pictures, text, and videos--the stuff everyone enjoys interacting with--your obligation to design anything ends.
"We want to make the experience more fun," says The Grid founder and CEO Dan Tocchini. "I think the key to that is focusing on the content. It's what all the people [users] do, just focus on the content."
The Grid advertises itself as "AI websites that design themselves." But what that really means is that through a lot of complicated technical work, Tocchini is trying to completely alleviate fundamental issues with web design for someone like your mom or dad.
When you create a website with The Grid it asks you to define a purpose for the content, whether that's gaining followers, getting clicks, video views, crowdfunding, or a handful of other options. The layout will adapt and change based on those goals. You can go from something personal to commercial by adding something to sell--the commerce elements will appear and disappear as needed.
Colors are picked out of the images that you upload, algorithmically ordered, and matched together. Shapes are added around certain types of content and images are cropped perfectly. You'll notice nobody's face goes missing on the pages. That's one of the hallmark features that Tocchini is visibly excited about, The Grid's ability to detect faces and, no matter how the image is resized, keep them visible.
GSS is an open source project which has been getting a good amount of traffic and recognition on its own recently. The description from the product page explains further that, "GSS is a CSS preprocessor & JS runtime that harnesses Cassowary.js, the JS port of the same constraint solving algorithm Apple uses in Cocoa Autolayout for iOS & OS X."
The idea is based on constraint programming, which lets developers say what they want to do, and then rely on a mathematical solver to figure out how to actually do it. It's this underlying technology that's enabling The Grid to perform a lot of the design tasks seemingly autonomously--it's also where the name comes from.
The machine age of self-designing websites isn't perfect (yet). Sometimes it places content and images in ways that don't make sense or look good in context. There's still a lot of tweaking of code going on as The Grid gets closer to public use--and it's not intended for people who already know how to design websites on their own.
When colors aren't flattering or the layouts go weird, The Grid's creative director, Leigh Taylor, steps in to correct the issues. Taylor was previously at Ev Williams' Obvious Corporation and designed Medium's iconic post editor. "The designers are in-the-loop with the AI," says Taylor. "They interact with it, guide it, influence it to shape a framework of design that facilitates multiple user cases beyond what is feasible with just two hands."
"I see design as problem solving, a guide, a blueprint for interaction and experience. A framework for presentation and brand," Taylor explains. "The Grid doesn't remove that, there is still a role in providing all that. All while providing tools to reduce the trivial, iterative production chores that we have become accustomed to today."
The Grid's own website is the best example of what will be possible in the coming months as it fully launches to the public with the help of its crowdfunding campaign. The site is full of eye-catching elements that have a subtle rhythm as it scrolls. To accomplish this, the team just threw Markdown files [text] and images at it, and the site picked its own layout.
Every day this month, for three minutes before midnight, some of the giant electronic billboards in Times Square flicker violently in rectangular sequences of black and white. This is not a glitch. It's test pattern [times square], an electronic piece by Paris-based Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, reworked for 47 screens across five blocks of one of the most iconic and irritating places in the world.
Ikeda is best known for his work with sound art and minimal, overwhelming, synched audio-visual experiences that source raw data and push the boundaries of human perception. It's among the more abstract picks for "Midnight Moment," a monthly outdoor digital pop-up by the Times Square Advertising Coalition (TSAC) and Times Square Arts. Past installments featured moving images by political artists, avant-garde pop stars, YBAs, experimental theater directors, and trendy photographers. This is the first time that the program featured a sound artist and included sound--albeit only for one night on October 16th, with the help of 400 rented headphones. The rest of the month, the piece is presented in silence.
I showed up around 11:30 and spent most of the time shuffling inside a roped off pen at Duffy Square, rebuffing passersby who wanted to know if they could get some "free headphones" too. It was a very different experience than the version of the piece at the Park Avenue Armory in 2011. There, inside a massive cavern of a building where the the flickering bars rose up the giant screen splitting the hall in half, I was submerged in darkness, washed in pulses of light and their ticking, clicking, beeping noisetrack. In Times Square, the immersion element isn't just lost; it's an intense opposite: Stuffed in loud and crowded cracks between buildings perpetually searing with ads that for some reason continue to enchant generations of tourists.
It began and ended quickly. The headphones clicked on at 11:57. The few Clear Channel billboards that allow this takeover started blinking and shuddering and the track pulsed. People looked up, gleaming, gawking, furrowing their brows, smiling.
The piece felt scaled down in scope, then artificially blown up and stretched to cover ground. It's a small resized part of a great audio-visual project, surprising when packed into the pomp and business of a public attraction. It was successfully site-specific in context. The piece, after all, is about a particular sort of data. It references barcodes, instant processing of information usually related to commerce and money--quite appropriate for this storied mall "at the crossroads of the world."
It wasn't some grand subversion of the advertising industry, as they are willing participants, but there was something softly ironic about it. By the character and intensity of its abstractions alone, it's the most uncharacteristic takeover for the space. It's funny that without the sound, without warnings, test pattern [times square] can be mistaken for a few mystically, meaningfully broken displays. It takes a little effort to feel here, but it is very Ikeda, an incarnation of that raw data that already flows through everything, flowing above and over it all.
Sam Biddle, despite dressing exclusively in Tryhard for Men, has been on a pretty good streak lately. He did a job on Blake Lively's rose-tinted view of slavery: "Think of how great it would be if we could treat history like a buffet and just pick out nice parts? The chic tailoring of SS uniforms, the athleticism of Roman bloodsport, the loyalty of feudalism." Then he managed to troll both gamergate and Joel Johnson with one tweet advocating the return of bullying. Well done. And now that we're being forced (why? I don't know!?) to contemplate whatever "gamergate" is supposed to be, Sam is also pointing out that it's been co-opted by a bunch of reactionary nobodies who don't care about gaming and never did. And Sam isn't the only one pointing out that "gamergate" is a new brand for the same old gang of misogynists, MRAs, and right-wing douchebags. Amanda Marcotte pointed out that even the "acceptable" face of gamer gate-"it's about ethics in journalism"-is utter nonsense. I ignored gamergate for a long time because it is literally nothing but the same old gang of jackholes using a new hashtag, and therefore not worth noticing. Now let's all go back to not noticing it.
Egg for Beginners: It seems that even some long-time Tabs readers were not aware that I call Marc Andreesen "Egg" because he is actually a living egg IRL:
Humpty Dumpty sat on the board of numerous startups
It began as a joke, but at this point I have to struggle to remember his real name. Kevin Roosetalked to him for NYMag, not, apparently, for any particular reason other than Egg likes to hear himself talk. He does the expected-promotes Lean In, describes Silicon Valley's blatant cronyism as an "interesting" critique of "the meritocratic ideal," then later criticizes the cronyism of taxi regulations when they interfere with Uber. He's less wrong and oblivious when he gets into what democracy is good for and what happened to the middle class, but you would still be better off spending your time reading virtually anyone else's opinions, and Kevin Roose would be better off talking to people who don't already have a several hundred million dollar megaphone.
The other day a friend and I went to a Manhattan bookstore that's currently disguised as an apartment. It was my first time; it managed to be exactly what I expected. There were a few other people there, mostly young, drunk, and well dressed-they'd speak in low tones about their mutual friends, fingers running absentmindedly along some book's spine. Michael Seidenberg presided regally over the whole thing, puffing on a pipe and sipping Wild Turkey while fiddling with the playlist.
People walk so slowly here. It's like they're not even thinking about the future of publishing.
Anyway, as I made my way to the subway-full of whiskey and wine, feeling like I'd witnessed a moment-I noticed I'd managed to accidentally buy a book on my way out the door.
"The other day I was at a bar with my Millennial friends. We drank many cocktails, and I said I wish I knew what would become of us. They laughed and I touched my soft, warm cardigan. Later I read a book." -Literally Bijan like every day.
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. We've updated it since last month with some suggestions via email and comments. Who have we missed that should be on the list? Drop a line and let us know.
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.
URL: http://www.gotenna.com
Address: 102 S. 6th St. Brooklyn, NY 11249
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, cofounders Daniela and Jorge Perdomo found themselves without cell service, making their startup a product of necessity. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
URL: http://adheretech.com
Address: 11 Broadway, Suite 518, New York, NY 10004
Ever pick up your medicine from the pharmacy and then realize you'd need a secretary to remind you when to take it? Coming to the rescue, AdhereTech has come up with smart pill bottles that can send you a text, call you, or even alert you right on the bottle when you miss a dose. This company, who has pharm companies knocking on its door to try out its product, graduated from three NYC-based accelerators and received $1.75 million in Series A funding earlier this year for a bottle redesign.
URL: https://brightboxcharge.com
Address: 250 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10001
After Hurricane Sandy hit, Brightbox set up its cell phone charging stations in the Flatiron district for New Yorkers to re-juice their phones free of charge. Although this convenience is a paying service for the rest of us-outside of natural disasters-these kiosks let you securely leave your phone at the station while you browse the Internet on its touch screen. Last year, these do-gooders got $1 million in seed funding.
URL: http://rgaaccelerator.com/connecteddevices
Address: 350 W 39th Street, New York, NY 10018
Although technically not a startup, this tech accelerator started giving makeovers to ten worthy startups in the connected devices and IoT space last year and is getting started with its second class this month. With R/GA's marketing know-how and Techstars' funding force, these temporary NYC-transplants take advantage of business advice from local business leaders and a $120,000 check in seed funding to prepare for VC pitches. Last year's inaugural class attracted millions of dollars in outside funding by the end of the three-month program.
Despite all the apps crowding the category, planning a trip is still a pain. Sure, the booking process is more efficient, and you can find the cheapest flight and the highest rated restaurants more easily than before the Internet upended the travel industry. But the process still requires multiple interfaces, different apps, and in the end you're still entering the final details into a spreadsheet or note. It's a tedious project all its own.
But it's nothing a little cognitive computing can't fix.
WayBlazer is a new startup from Kayak and Travelocity veteran Terry Jones that's aiming to solve the travel problem. One of the first companies to team up with IBM for the launch of its new Watson artificial intelligence APIs, WayBlazer is in the early stages of making intelligent machines that act as our travel agents and tour guides.
"People forget that travel is the largest e-commerce marketplace," say Jones. Online travel booking in the U.S. reached $103 billion in 2012, according to Comscore. "I thought maybe there's a space a little farther up the value chain, up into the inspiration and dreaming and early planning phase."
Watson's unique brand of cognitive computing is especially well-suited to helping people think ahead, Jones says, because "its real strength is structuring unstructured data." This, combined with things like natural language processing and user behavior modeling, could dramatically streamline the process of planning a trip--or even coming up with the idea to go in the first place.
Unlike Jones's previous endeavors, WayBlazer is not a consumer-facing portal for planning trips, but rather will start out as a B2B company. Its first client is the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau, for which WayBlazer will power a web-based cognitive search tool designed to help convince people to travel to Austin.
When it launches publicly, the ACVB search tool will let users type in natural language queries--"I'm in the mood for some live jazz in Austin tonight"--and get a set of recommendations powered by various editorial and social data sources aggregated by WayBlazer with Watson's help.
This is WayBlazer in its most rudimentary form. That's no accident. "Watson is not so much programmed as trained," says Jones. "You have to get the data in and train it how to read that data and deal with that data. We wanted to start with a bounded problem. Austin is a bounded problem."
Indeed, Jones's vision for machine-assisted travel planning is much, much bigger. The idea is to build out intelligence about Austin and then stake out new locales to map. Many data points will carry over into new cities, while other details will need to be taught. Over time, some of the learning will become automatic.
"Data is the next big natural resource, but it isn't worth much until it's refined, kind of like oil," says Jones.
Just think of all the data that exists about a city: Everything from restaurant reviews, weather, traffic, and venue check-ins to more nuanced things like how people feel about certain places and events. What's the overall sentiment of tweets and check-ins coming from the zoo? Where's the best spot for a trio of 30-year-old women to go on a Friday night?
"What you want to do with your family is not what you do when you're by yourself, is not what you do with your kids," says Jones, who began his career as a travel agent back in 1971.
Then there's the other side of the equation: You. Early implementations like the ACVB site aren't personalizing results, but it is absolutely Jones's intention to do so. Once a user logs into a system powered by WayBlazer, they will be giving the system--consensually, of course--their identity, the most important data point of all.
This, in theory, will let WayBlazer tap into a trove of actionable information, from Facebook likes and the sentiment of your tweets to travel and commerce data that's already being collected by hotels and airlines.
"My favorite airline knows that I always sit in seat 4E, but they don't do anything with that data," says Jones. "The hotel knows what kind of room I want, but they don't do anything with it unless I explicitly tell them."
Whether we like it or not, there's a ton of information about our behavior sitting in various databases in various formats, never being linked together. With our permission, Jones would like to start piecing it together and making use of it in a way that only Watson's machine intelligence can.
"It's all dark data," says Jones. "We'd like to shine a light on that dark data and actually help people use it and take this digital exhaust and refine it."
For a metric that determines where billions of dollars flow, the page view sure is dumb.
Together with traditional measurements like clicks, unique visits, and time-on-site, the page view has defined how well-trafficked (and in so many cases, lucrative) websites are. Yet they tell us very little about what visitors actually do. One analytics company is trying to change that.
Chartbeat, the real-time web traffic monitoring platform that's keeping track of you as you read this article (and many others across the web), has been at the forefront of proposing new ideas for how to measure audiences. Specifically, the company thinks that metrics like engagement time and the visibility of ads are far more useful to publishers and advertisers in determining the value of a visitor and the pages they visit.
Chartbeat recently had the Media Rating Council accredit 21 new engagement-focused metrics, including ones called Viewability (for ads) and Active Engaged Time (for pages in general). And since asking the entire web to rethink the way traffic gets measured is a tall order, Chartbeat just pulled back the curtain on exactly how these new metrics are calculated.
To figure out how engaged site visitors are, Chartbeat's JavaScript snippet listens for what they call "acts of engagement." This includes things like the loading of the page, scrolling, resizing the window, mousing down, pressing the down arrow key and the like. Essentially, anything that signifies that you are in fact an actual human being with eyeballs paying any attention whatsoever to the page.
These checks indicate when a user is actively engaged on the page and, based on a study conducted by Chartbeat, will likely remain so for five additional seconds. This is a rolling window so engaged seconds are not summed (an additional five seconds for every action) but rather every additional act means the user is considered "engaged" for the next five seconds pending another event (which will extend the clock).
The script listens for seven different actions, dividing them up between "initial" engagement (such as loading a page) and "ongoing" engagement (like scrolling down).
The Description of Methodology, which is well worth a read, breaks down each metric and describes how it's measured.
Like most things in Internet life, these measurements have potential technical limitations. Anyone with JavaScript or cookies turned off can't be accurately tracked (although this is true for nearly all metrics). There are also fundamental differences in how mobile browsers render pages, which requires Chartbeat's script to ignore certain signals.
The goal is to give publishers and site owners a more precise idea of what visitors are actually doing while on a specific page. And more crucially for the business of web publishing, it says more about whether or not a person saw an ad and for how long, rather than simply registering an "impression" and assuming that means anything at all.
When it comes to helping listeners pick music, algorithms still desperately need our help. That's why Pandora's Music Genome Project is seeded with the smarts of real live human music experts and The Echo Nest's machine listening is aided by editorial input. It's also why Google, the famously data-driven giant, bought the music curation startup Songza this summer.
Today, we see the fruits of that acquisition. When Google Play Music subscribers launch the app, they will now see the option to generate playlists based on a mood, time of day, or activity such as cooking, driving, or pumping iron.
The new feature draws from Songza's thousands of playlists, each of which is hand-curated by actual people. As users of the service know, Songza lets you choose music playlists based on moods, genres, time periods, and activities as specific as "coding" and "lounging in a cool hotel." By acquiring Songza, Google beefs up the human side of the machine/human music intelligence machine that powers its Play Music subscription service.
"All of the stations that we direct users toward with the new music concierge feature are expert-curated," says Google Play Music product manager Brandon Bilinski. "However, we still use machine learning to understand what genres you like in order to get you to the appropriate stations."
Google launched the awkwardly named Play Music All Access last May as a competitor to Spotify, Rdio, and the other on-demand music subscription services that seem to crop up every 15 minutes. It also has a Pandora-style radio station feature built in, much like Apple's iTunes Radio.
For now, Songza will remain a stand-alone music service. Its underlying smarts are just being tacked on to Google Play Music, which already uses its own blend of machine listening and editorial curation. The Songza-powered playlists are "complementary" to all of that, Bilinski says.
There's still no word on Google's other long-rumored music service--this one a very logical extension of YouTube--but presumably acquisitions like this will go a long way toward bolstering Google's role in digital music as it tries to formally carve it out.
With this update, the Google Play Music app for iOS and Android also adopts the new "material design" interface style that Google has been rolling out since it was announced at Google I/O in June.
Yesterday I linked briefly to YA writer Kathleen Hale's Guardian tab. I didn't really dig into it much but there was SO! MUCH! MORE! It turns out, Hale has kind of a history of making her own regrettable choices into fodder for her #personalbrand, including the time 14-year-old Hale poured hydrogen peroxide on a girl who had accused her mother of molestation two years earlier, and the time she tattooed a soon-to-be-ex friend's name on her head. In response, the bookternet tapped into the National Strategic Dudgeon Reserve for blog posts and open letters featuring words only used by vaudevillians and angry book bloggers, such as "scurrilous" and "quell."
love the commute from my laptop to my phone every night. so relaxing. 'me' time
Of course, the Takes were Hot. In The Bustle, Caitlin White suggests a sort of Camp David summit for book bloggers: "Perhaps we need a safe, regulated online space where authors and bloggers can speak without feeling threatened, supported by a neutral mediator." We'll get Jimmy Carter right on that, as soon as we decide on the shape of the table. Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan sympathizes with Hale but not quite enough. Michelle Deansituates Hale in the pantheon of other bratty authors, like Hemingway and Richard Ford. And Miles Klee joins Team Nobody, ultimately pointing out that "Whatever the damage, both emerge better-known-more liable to be heard, as Hale describes their mutual desire-with a new posse of fans in their corner." Haley Mlotek weighs in on Kathleen Hale's side, in defense of everyone's right to tell their own story, even when it is unsavory or makes them look bad. Even when it legitimately is bad.
My Take: if Hale had been a man with a camera crew when she went to the reviewer's house, instead of a woman alone, she'd have gotten a TV show. And if her actions made the internet feel a little less safe for anonymous assholes, I'm pretty ok with that too.
Please do not pass up this opportunity to let Darius Kazemitell you how he won the lottery, and how you can too! All it takes is some hard work, and a supportive community of fellow Makers. Don't suffer another dark winter of ebola poverty.
Today's Song: The Act of Estimating as Worthless, "Bones"
~Tabs keep on Takin' Takin' Takin', into the future~
Today in Tabs is off tomorrow, probably. When we're on, we're on FastCoLabs. When we go in, we go in your email. I'm out here @rustyk5 and all around @TodayinTabs. Yeah that's right, I got prepositional up in this footer. I'm not even sorry.
Google Maps is so comprehensive that you can use it to plan a New York City subway trip down to the minute. But in the parts of West Africa affected by the Ebola epidemic, Google barely has the roads mapped out. More often than not, the names of villages are missing--and sometimes the village altogether.
"Google's business model is selling advertising, so it's simply the business case," says Andrew Buck, a volunteer coordinator with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). "Starbucks isn't paying for Google to advertise over there so there's very little incentive for Google to improve its maps."
Organizations working in the three hardest-hit countries, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, need doctors and medical equipment. But they also need something more basic: maps to help aid workers get around the country and do the difficult job of checking village by village for victims of the disease.
That's why organizations like the UN, Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders have turned to OpenStreetMaps (OSM) for their map data. Commonly referred to as the "Wikipedia for maps," OSM is a crowdsourced mapping project that brings together mappers on the ground using GPS devices with map editors working remotely.
A subset of the OSM community, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has taken on creating more robust maps of the affected countries in West Africa. HOT is a specialized team that responds to international humanitarian crises by corralling OSM volunteers to gear their efforts to impacted areas.
Using free and open source software designed by them specifically for this purpose, HOT has been able to produce detailed, freely available maps.
Gueckedou, Guinea as seen in OpenStreetMaps (left) and Google Maps (right).
Gueckedou, Guinea is a large border city where it is believed the current Ebola epidemic originated. OSM's map includes a much higher level of detail than Google's, including names of neighborhoods, landmarks, and terrain detail. Google Maps does not even include the two rivers that meet in Gueckedou.
OSM's maps of the region were not always this good. In fact, prior to the epidemic, the OSM map of Gueckedou looked very similar to Google's--if not worse.
Gueckedou, Guinea as seen in OpenStreetMap before the current effort.
The detailed mapping of areas impacted by Ebola are thanks to the efforts of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, which traces its roots to the Haitian earthquake in 2010.
OpenStreetMaps had first been used during a response to a typhoon in the Philippines the year before, but In Haiti HOT coordinated directly with disaster response teams, learning what was most mission-critical for them and in turn training them on how to get the most out of OSM.
"During the earthquake in Haiti there was an overwhelming response from OpenStreetMap contributors," says Chapman.
With the knowledge that HOT was able to meet the challenges of real-world disasters, relief organizations started approaching them directly. Since then Buck and Pierre Béland have coordinated several HOT efforts, called "activations." During the 2012 coup in Mali, they worked with the United Nations to map the country. And during Typhoon Haiyan, which hit the Philippines last year, which was the first time that the group worked closely with the Red Cross.
When Doctors Without Borders began working in West Africa on the Ebola epidemic in March, its aid workers were sorely lacking maps of the area. So they requested that HOT map three major towns in Guinea. Buck and Béland were quick to respond.
HOT works by getting satellite imagery of the areas they want to map. Volunteers sitting behind their monitors around the world then do the tedious work of translating those images into map data. Some satellite imagery is publicly available, some is purchased by organizations supporting OSM's work, while other imagery is provided through special agreements with companies like Bing.
According to an internal Doctors Without Borders , HOT mapped the three priority cities (Guéckédou, Macenta, and Kissidougou) in less than three days. "Within five days, 244 volunteers had mapped more than 90,000 buildings," according to the report.
An excerpt from the Doctors Without Borders report.
"If we get a high-priority request we can map that area pretty quickly and thoroughly--often in under 24 hours," says Buck.
Since March the team working on West Africa has mapped a staggering 8,000,000 objects, which in this context means individual buildings, roads, rivers, fields, landmarks, and more.
A visualization of the progress in OSM's map of West Africa from March to the present.
Since Ebola is spread by touch, the main method of containing the outbreak is contact tracing: Following the steps of an infected person to see with whom else they might have come into contact. Without adequate maps, that job is near impossible.
According to Doctors Without Borders, "one the biggest challenges the team faced was that the names of many villages were unknown." There are also many villages with similar or identical names. For example, the village name Bendou exists 14 times within the prefecture.
Many villages also have multiple names. The village of Rosos in Sierra Leone is also known as Sos, for example. If a sick patient tells a doctor they come from "Sos" and a map only knows that village as Rosos, it can lead to delays, and unnecessary trips to the wrong locations can expose staff to additional risks in a country where the doctors are not always welcome.
HOT overcomes this problem by integrating their maps with publicly available databases of place names like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's Names Server. As you can see in the screenshot below, Rosos has a custom alternate name value of "Sos" and it's flagged that the source of the data is the GNS database. Now if a user searches for "Sos, Sierra Leone" in OSM Rosos will pop up as a search result.
The village of Rosos in Sierra Leone is also known as Sos.
Road mapping is another key area in which HOT helps aid workers. "You're more likely to find sick cases in a town connected by a road," says Buck. "So Doctors Without Borders will know where to concentrate efforts for follow-up visits and education."
Having roads on their maps of course also serves a more basic purpose for relief workers: helping them get around. "They use our maps just for the roads to route trucks and personnel," says Buck. OSM also has special features that designate road quality--is it dirt or paved? potholed or muddy?--which might be factored into logistics considerations.
That level of detail can't always be recognized from satellite scans. So volunteers on the ground will feed information back upstream to HOT volunteers and ask them to integrate it into the maps.
Aid workers on the ground also feed information back to HOT to name specific neighborhoods within Gueckedou. Those names help doctors pinpoint where exactly someone is from in a large city. But those informal community names aren't on any official maps and can't be learned from satellites.
"All the neighborhood names in Gueckedou come from Doctors Without Borders when they surveyed people on the ground in March," says Buck.
All of this is possible because of HOT's intense volunteer coordination combined with OSM's software, which is built from the ground up to meet the organization's needs.
Humanitarian organizations send mapping requests to HOT, which manages the volunteers responding to the request. This reduces the workload for the requesting organization.
HOT's online task manager facilitates crowdsourcing the mapping work. Tasks are tagged by priority and show whether they were requested by a specific organization or are for general crisis response. According to Buck, tasks that are requested specifically by organizations like Doctors Without Borders, the World Health Organization, and the World Food Program, tend to be completed the most quickly.
"People feel like they are having a direct impact when they see that a group like Doctors Without Borders needs their work," he says.
The most basic "task" that needs to be filled is tracing over satellite imagery to create basemaps. That work is accomplished mainly with the Java OpenStreetMap editor (JOSM), an open source tool created by and for OSM volunteers.
JOSM allows mappers to do the digital equivalent of putting trace paper over an atlas to create a map. With an interface that feels like Paintbrush or MS Paint, volunteers can draw maps with specialized tools for buildings, roads, and water features. Tasks get divided up into "tiles" on the map grid that volunteers click on to begin working. A completed tile is reviewed by veteran OSM editors to verify that everything has been mapped and tagged accurately.
Buck gave me a personal tutorial of JOSM by sharing his screen over Skype. With less than a half hour's training, I felt confident tracing buildings and rivers for OSM. So it really is something anyone can do.
Data analysis is a runaway growth field these days--which is all fine and good when the data's digital to begin with. But what about when it's in paper form?
The Veteran's Administration has something over 600,000 outstanding cases, for instance. Those cases must be processed into data for qualified personnel to make decisions about patients, and a lot of the delays in processing are logistical--like different descriptions of medical issues that have to be reconciled.
Captricity has built a service to convert that mountain of paperwork into digital data that is ripe for analysis. The company ingests the paperwork using a combination of algorithm-powered image engines and crowdsourced manual image processing via Mechanical Turk, a cheap Internet-sourced labor service owned by Amazon.
Mechanical Turks manually process form fields, then feed that data into Captricity's algorithmic engines. Every subsequent round requires fewer Mechanical Turks as the algorithms process forms with increasing accuracy, training the algorithms to recognize all allowable answers in a field, from binary Yes/No to a specific village of origin within the nation of Malawi.
Kuang Chen was inspired to start Captricity after doing his PhD work in African medical clinics. The nurses would lay a baby on a cot and check their vaccine records on a paper form, because paper doesn't run out of batteries. But without the tools or resources to process that paper data, the medical personnel could only slowly track a village's rate of malarial infection.
Bolstered by an FDA contract and $10 million investment boost last July, the San Francisco company has since attracted contracts from the insurance industry. That is being used to help fund Captricity's benevolent arm, Captricity.org, and follow through with the idealistic plan that first sparked founder Chen's interest: providing data processing at cost for NGOs and civil-serving institutions.
"It's like that William Gibson quote: 'The future is here, it just isn't equally distributed yet,'" Chen says.
Not everyone is comfortable with machines processing their forms, and Captricity honors client requests that every form be checked by human eyes in a secure way. Captricity automatically chops forms up into anonymized batches of fields and sends them off without any identifying data to the humans working for Mechanical Turk.
There are multiple failsafes as well. If one algorithm is uncertain about the content in a form, they give it to another algorithm. If the second can't read a form, they transfer it to two Mechanical Turks; if they disagree, the form is sent to a third to evaluate both prior human answers. After five Turks deem the form illegible, the form is sent back. That's a lot of steps to pick apart sloppy handwriting, but sometimes the answer isn't even in a language.
"They'll mark things as impossible if they're written in crayon, but they'll also mark things as impossible if something like a snowman is drawn in the form. That's actually happened," Chen says.
While Mechanical Turk's policy won't explicitly name how many Turks are in use, Chen says, the 26 Captricity employees are responsible for wrangling a Mechanical Turk image processing army "in the low tens of thousands," Chen says.
"The computer vision was very hard, but getting the Turks to behave was equally hard," Chen says. The accuracy of a workforce like the Mechanical Turk isn't standardized, so how can Chen trust them?
"The thing is, we don't trust them," Chen says. "We verify all the time and so far it's worked very well."
Many large-scale employers of Mechanical Turks pre-vet them and retain a trusted pool. But people can change, Chen says, and so repeated quality testing is necessary to make sure the data you're processing is accurate. Especially with the sensitive and health-associated data that Captricity is processing. Hidden within every collection of form snippets sent to the Turks are planted questions that Captricity matches against known answers. Get enough wrong and Captricity will dismiss the Turk.
Imagine Captricity as a pipeline where the algorithms filter out answers at each stage. Stage one: Is the field blank? Stage two: Is it a binary solution? With 30 stages, they can account for solutions at 98% accuracy, Chen says. Before greenlighting the contract, the FDA required Captricity to undergo an accuracy test. Captricity processed 99.98% of form data accurately, better than human manual processing.
Though in the fortunate position of having to prioritize for their influx of insurance clients such that they doubled their workforce since July, Chen is excited to parlay this experience into helping more civil organizations.
Interested organizations must meet certain criteria, including a clear inability to afford Captricity's services and a follow-up report about what was done with the data. But it's a step toward fulfilling a social responsibility that Chen sold his employees on. Captricity has been in development since 2011 and his team signed on to solve this massive legacy problem for civil organizations.
"They're the true believers," Chen says of his team. "The way I was able to recruit them wasn't with startup sweets--it was to really help." When Captricity was contracted to help the FDA last summer, they ended up processing a backlog of adverse event forms. And when the FDA has a backlog, the nation isn't getting up-to-date information on drug effects. All because the data only exists on paper.
For nine years, Pandora has been amassing a stockpile of data--and 45 billion "thumb" button clicks later, the Internet radio company knows so much about how people listen to music that the insights have become its chief competitive advantage. Not even Apple has succeeded in shaking Pandora from dominance.
But what about the people that make all those songs in the first place?
Today, Pandora stops hogging all the big data glory for itself and opens up the Pandora Artist Marketing Platform (AMP). Through it, artists can see basic analytics like how many times their tracks get played, how many stations are built from their songs, how many thumbs up or down they're getting, and a breakdown of geographic and demographic data.
For artists who have a presence on Pandora, the insight could be incredibly useful. Are listeners in Baltimore suddenly taking a liking to your '90s throwback alt-rock band? Pandora AMP's interactive heat map will show you. Did everyone in Miami thumbs-down your new single? Maybe you could save the gas money on tour next time.
This is type of insight that Pandora has been sharing on a one-off basis with artists who stop by its Oakland headquarters for some time. With the launch of AMP, the company makes it available to everyone whose music is included on the service (provided they've formally claimed their artist profile).
Pandora AMP is part of the company's broader efforts to better cater to artists, some of whom have criticized the company for its low royalty payouts. The issue came to a head in 2012 when Pandora sponsored a bill to lower royalty rates for Internet radio. The company said it was an effort to level the playing field between terrestrial and Internet radio, though as it so happened, the change would have reduced Pandora's massive operating costs as well.
That bill failed last year, but it left a lasting dent in the relationship between artists and Pandora. Cracker frontman David Lowery--always the loudest, crankiest voice in any debate about the new digital music economy--was joined by prominent artists like Brian Wilson and Rihanna in opposing the bill.
Pandora and its Internet radio brethren continue to pursue their quest for a more sustainable business model, but realize they can't do so without handing some kind of olive branch to artists, lest they be labeled anti-musician boogeymen who don't care about the livelihood of hardworking artists. Data sharing is an obvious way to do that: It makes Pandora more useful to artists, and costs Pandora almost nothing to do.
Pandora isn't a pioneer here: Spotify already gives artists access to their data via a partnership with Next Big Sound. But Spotify's streaming model and Pandora's Internet radio model are different, and their users may be different too. Artists no doubt would prefer more money from both models, but perhaps the artists who learn to harness this data will at least find ways to turn it into cash.
Scan your fingerprint. Enter your mother's maiden name. Provide your phone number. Internet security is a pain in the ass, and after every credit card breach or celebrity selfie hack it gets more annoying and invasive. How many times can Gmail ask for your phone number before it's robo-sexual harassment?
We know security is important. We know we should care. But improving it is the corporations' job, right? And besides, each new security measure just makes our apps less convenient. As far as social advocacy goes, Internet security isn't about to get its own ice bucket challenge.
But that's because we're not seeing what's really possible with a trustworthy Internet: more intimate apps, more convenient services, and billions of dollars in commerce. That the only obstacle to all this money and awesomeness is our own indifference.
"In a world where everyone has a public key, you can trust documents, sign things, authenticate yourself, transfer money safely, keep conversations private, even let someone in your front door--all without sharing a password or trusting cloud services," says OkCupid founder Chris Coyne.
He's picturing a world without passwords, security questions, codes, or pins to memorize. "It could be amazing," he says. It could be. That is, if we all knew what a "public key" was.
"There are all kinds of amazing things that can be built if you take as a premise that everyone has a public key," he says. "But almost no one has one, for a variety of reasons." Reason number one on his list: "They're confusing."
You see, for a public key to work--saving our private data and unlocking billions in e-commerce--we all have to participate. Getting a public key is like creating any other Internet password: Nobody can do it for you. But since this key is your last line of defense, verifying you are actually the person you claim to be requires more than just a confirmation email, which puts it outside the reach of most casual Internet users.
Traditionally, cryptographers used a byzantine and technical verification process to validate public keys, but Coyne and his OkCupid cofounder Max Krohn think they have a better solution to the "identity problem" that might work for the masses. It's an experimental project called Keybase, and it makes generating a public key as simple as hooking up all your social accounts. If you can figure out About.Me or IFTTT, you can figure out Keybase.
"Everyone from my wife to Obama has a Twitter handle, a personal website, a Facebook name, et cetera," says Coyne, "so we're building software that lets you provably connect a public key to the sum of all your known identities." As long as someone doesn't hack into every single account you own, your identity can't be stolen from you.
Even if someone does hack into one (or more) of your social accounts, it's a public hack, so you'll notice right away. Here's the tweet that was auto-generated from my Twitter account when I verified my Keybase identity via Twitter.
It someone ever hacked my Keybase identity, I'd see another verification tweet like this in my own tweet stream, issued by the interloper trying to re-assign my account to him or herself. So as long as I'm paying attention to my own feeds, I have a chance to jump into my other accounts and change the passwords. The most pernicious thing about most hacks is that the victim is unaware they've been hacked, allowing careful exploits to go on for month after damaging month.
The core technology of Keybase is already built and working--you can join the public beta here--even though Coyne and Krohn haven't even raised money or hired employees yet.
The larger challenge here is storytelling, not technology (although Coyne admits they haven't worked out how the code will work on mobile devices yet).
Explaining Keybase is hard not just because people are disinterested, but because we think we already know how the tale ends. Safer selfies, right--that's what we're talking about here?
For a project like this to succeed, its creators will have to find a way to show what's actually at stake: a new and supercharged economic engine for the Internet that could enrich all of us, socially and otherwise. They need to show people why they should care. And that their solution is the best. And that they themselves are trustworthy.
In the programming world, few engineers need convincing. But outside of the technology world, noise, misinformation, and special interests make it hard for consumers to know who to believe. In a recent editorial, The Washington Post confusingly advocated a "golden key" solution for cryptography, which Coyne says would be tantamount to a government and corporate backdoor. In a top-ranking blog post on Hacker News this month, Coyne shot back with his own vision of a backdoor future:
You'd pick your own password for when you needed your data, but the companies would also get one, of their choosing. With it, they could open any of your docs: your photos, your messages, your diary, whatever. The Post assumes that a "secure key" means hackers, foreign governments, and curious employees could never break into this system. They also assume it would be immune to bugs. They envision a magic tool that only the righteous may wield. Does this sound familiar?
As familiar as every other utopian dream, yes. Now the onus is on Coyne and Krohn to prove Keybase isn't just that.
But it's our responsibility too. The next time you're entering a password, see that text box for what it really is--a bit of UI friction, an impediment to your free-flowing money and information. Fixing Internet security is about removing tolls from the thing we used to call the "information superhighway." It's about sharing more. Buying more. Working faster. Measuring everything. It is not simply about your naked selfies.
On paper the steps to fighting an Ebola epidemic look simple: Identify, isolate, and eradicate. Working backwards, the last of the steps, eradication, is usually handled by medical therapies, the body's natural immune defenses, or, tragically in over 50% of ebola cases, death of the host. Before one can arrive at the eradication of the disease, those infected must be isolated so they don't continue the disease's spread by infecting others. But in order to isolate those infected, the governments, NGOs, and public health services battling the epidemic must have the data to identify where the disease is at present but also the tools to predict where it's likely to spread and allocate resources there.
It's this identification and resource allocation stage that is the reason the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL), part of the Virginia Bio-Informatics Institute at Virginia Tech, decided to hold a 10-day Computing for Ebola Challenge earlier this month. The goal of the hackathon? None other than the creation of an app that helps fight one of the world's deadliest diseases.
"We have been involved in modeling the Ebola outbreak for the Department of Defense since early July," says Caitlin Rivers, a PhD student in computational epidemiology at NDSSL and one of the organizers of the hackathon. "Even so, we felt like we wanted to do more."
You might scoff, and even dismiss a hackathon to fight Ebola as Silicon Valley hubris. But what the NDSSL's hackathon showed is that there are a lot of smart hackers, scientists, and public health experts who are concerned about the epidemic. And if you can bring those groups together to share data and build better systems to analyze it, an app could make a life-saving difference in the world of deadly biological diseases.
"Programming and epidemiology-biology are totally different skill sets, and there aren't many people fluent in both," says Rivers. "There are so many problems that could use skills in that intersection, and I think that's what we were really aiming for with this hackathon."
The result was a gathering of 80 cross-disciplinary experts in fields such as computer science, epidemiology, web development, and physics taking part in the hackathon. "We were looking for individuals who were interested in contributing their time to this important societal problem," says NDSSL director Madhav Marathe. "We felt that the range of problems was such that individuals with basic skills could contribute meaningfully to this challenge."
By the end of the 10-day Computing for Ebola Challenge hackathon dozens of projects had been explored with several student hackers planning to release a finished product in the next few weeks. Given that an Ebola outbreak is a massive public health issue--the key word being public--another theme of the Computing for Ebola Challenge was to not strictly limit the hackathon to creating tools only big data experts or brainy scientists could understand. With the right software, the teams at NDSSL believe, everyone could be given the tools to help fight Ebola in some small way.
"It is impossible to imagine in today's connected world how one would be an effective epidemiologist without using innovative computer-based tools," says Marathe. "From simple problems that takes data in paper or other non-electronic form and converting it into machine readable form, to other sophisticated tasks such as developing data management tools, user interfaces, and web-apps for collecting and delivering information to analysts, and analytical tools for inferring patterns in data collected serve as examples of tasks computational scientists can undertake."
One project matches donors with reputable organizations in need, for example an NGO that provides protective equipment to health care workers in Sierra Leone. The website also matches volunteers with skills needed in different areas. "So as an epidemiologist I can find an organization recruiting people with my skills," says Rivers.
The NDSSL has also created an Ebola resource page that contains details on their work as well as all the data sets that they have released. That way, Marathe says, anyone who wants to try their hand at creating apps to help fight the epidemic can get involved.
But as Rivers stresses, "The people on the ground in West Africa working to stop the epidemic at its source are the real heroes. We're just trying to do what we can to support them."
Twitter's introduction of the "Audio Card" last week makes it easy to forget that Twitter #Music was at one time a separate app, and the company's cornerstone attempt to harness one of its most consistently popular topics of conversation: music.
The #Music app was iced last April. But the app was part of a broader strategy that included a website which was never publicly released.
These internal prototypes, provided to Co.Labs by people involved in their creation, offer a peek at what could have been.
The idea was to pull in all types of content relating to artists, including tweets, Vines, audio, and videos. Users visiting the site would have initially seen streams of general trending music data. They also would have been been able to select popular genres or search for specific artists.
The website also featured artist profiles which would have collected relevant music data around the artist that fans were sharing.
Stephen Phillips, the former head of Twitter Music, worked with design studio Twofold to build the prototypes and pitch them to Twitter executives.
In an early description of the project, Twofold said: "Our concept centered around using large, bold imagery to further personalize the artist page while presenting the content in an organic, yet structured layout that flowed like a stream as the user scrolls."
Twofold was then contracted to design the Twitter #music mobile app. The website version would have functioned in a similar fashion to the music discovery site We Are Hunted, a company that Phillips co-founded which was acquired by Twitter to bolster its skunkworks music project.
This website idea was abandoned in late 2013 to focus on music and audio inside the Twitter stream rather than a separate app and website.
After the Twitter #Music app failed to gain traction, the music efforts within Twitter split into two directions. The first was to make deals with other companies around the music data it was collecting and seeing. Lyor Cohen's music company 300 Entertainment was the first to make an exclusive deal to use Twitter's music data. Cohen's goal was to break new artists based on patterns it was seeing in the data. But to date, 300 has not signed any artists from Twitter and uses it mainly as a utility.
The second direction is the Audio Card, which brings music directly into the stream--and should allow it to flourish the same way Vine has expanded mobile video for Twitter. The Audio Card project is the brainchild of Bob Moczydlowsky, the current head of music at Twitter, who fleshed out some of these ideas with Phillips early in 2014. Richard Slatter, another cofounder of We Are Hunted, was the project manager for Audio Card and was described to me as critical in getting the current music partnerships in place.
Phillips left Twitter this past summer to scratch his own discovery itch by founding Wonder.fm. The service scrapes SoundCloud data to highlight things like the most played or popular songs.
"My goal is to identify the best new emerging artists before they make it big," says Phillips. "Both Hunted and Wonder are based on SoundCloud, because that's where a lot of really new artists are playing today. But whereas Hunted used blogs as a proxy to measure popularity, Wonder uses SoundCloud like and play metrics directly. So Wonder is finding music days before Hunted ever saw it."
In other words, Twitter #Music might be dead, but there's still plenty of success to be found for the company that figures out how to mine Twitter for music. The latest to make an attempt is Jawbone. The company best known for its fitness wearable just launched a new product called Drop, a Twitter-fueled audio player for iOS that creates playlists from tweets.
On any normal day, Matt Yglesiascalling for Amazon to crush the publishing industry would be one hell of a tab. The Last Apathybender wants lifelike humanoid Jeff Bezos to absorb the four publishing monopoly horsemen in the name of (maybe??) lower e-book prices? Slam dunk lead tab. But if not that, then how about Politico running an article titled "No, BP Didn't Ruin the Gulf" which was literally written by BP's senior US press flak Geoff Morrell, on the same day that BP sponsored influence-retailer Mike Allen's newsletter? Bo no, not today. Because yesterday was the day Gawker apologized to gamergate.
As I mentioned Monday, Gawker's chief dance criticSam Biddle upset the tens of emotionally stunted shut-ins who, instead of getting jobs or showering, congregate around the #gamergate hashtag. Biddle suggested that we should bring back bullying to keep their frothing misogyny in check, and in response, the "slopebrowed weaseldicks" of gamergate organized what might be the most successful totally inept campaign of non-advertiser harassment ever, targeting Adobe, which is not even a Gawker sponsor, with complaints about Biddle's bullying joke. Adobe, apparently confused into action like a lumbering wooly mammoth being driven off a cliff, demanded that Gawker "remove its logo" from, I don't know, somewhere? This resulted in Gawker editorial director and diap-lifestyle enthusiastJoel Johnson first issuing an instantly-leaked internal memo and then finally, yesterday, posting a public apology and clarifying that Gawker media does not endorse bullying (which is transparently untrue? But you know what, I don't even care at this point).
The New York Review of Books published its inaugural issue in 1963, during a printer's strike that forced most other papers of the time (including the New York Times) to suspend publication. Since then, they've continued to publish the unconsciously erudite, thoughtful pieces that have earned them a certain stuffy reputation.
In spite of this, the NYRB has done some out-of-character stuff (or maybe this is really what they're like?). I mean, they once partnered with spiritual leftist successor n+1 to trade personal ads, presumably to foster exchange of ideas between generations. These days, it looks like they're necking with Vice.
Like hope, love apparently springs eternal between the young and old. In Tabs, too. Right, Rusty?
Let's not say "love." Let's say… "reluctant tolerance." Reluctant tolerance springs eternal. BTW nice job including a self-tab but still not making it about you. You might have a future in this game yet.
~In spite of everything I still believe that tabs are really good at heart.~
Today in Tabs is on FastCoLabs and in your email. Hey if you enjoy this thing, tell a friend or tweet about it or whatever. You telling someone else is the only way I get more readers, which, honestly, I don't know why you would care about? But let's pretend I made some kind of compelling case for that, and skip right to the part where you do it. Thanks!
Are we starting to miss something, as technology becomes virtually keyboard-less and button-free? Florian Born, a Berlin-based designer, thinks so.
"One particular thing of multi-touch devices is in need of improvement," he writes. "It is the lack of haptic feedback, which makes it difficult to set parameters precisely. "
With Born's Modulares Interface B.A., a typical multi-touch screen like the iPad can be transformed into a tactile, accurate, programmable, and responsive controller.
The device is comprised of a variety of physical knobs, which can be arranged on the screen inside a framing case, and snapped together with built-in magnets. Because they are made of conductive aluminum, the knobs pass an electrical discharge between the user's skin and the screen, initiating haptic feedback. The individual functions and responses of the dials and nodules can be set on screen, with an app programmed in Cinder/C++. The screen then interprets the controls and relates the parameter data via OSC to corresponding applications on a computer.
Or, you know, just keep smearing your finger around a screen.
A few years ago we may have had to choose between great tech and spending money on our pets. Thankfully those dark days are over; here in 2014 there are some incredibly smart pet-related tech gadgets that are set to transform our dog- and cat-owning lives.
No, it's not a derivative of PayPal that lets you remotely send Frodo money for squeaky toys. Instead PetPal is an intriguing Indiegogo project from Ken Powers, an electrical engineer who previously worked on test systems for the F16, along with designing launch software for spacecrafts. Resembling R2-D2, the friendly droid from Star Wars, PetPal is a durable automatic Wi-Fi pet feeder for the digital age--equipped with a built-in night vision camera, microphone, speaker, computer, and patented feeding mechanism.
"My idea was to let you connect with your pet from anywhere in the world over your wireless device," says Powers. "Using your smartphone or tablet you can look at your pet, listen to it, talk to it--and of course feed it."
The impetus for the project came when Powers began feeding some stray cats which came to his garden. When he had to go overseas, he decided to create a device that would allow him to continue carrying out his food-providing duties--even though he was not physically in the country at the time.
Jump forward several prototypes and Powers' homemade pet feeder is now an Indiegogo project seeking $20,000 for a device that will ship in January next year.
"I've been watching the smart-pet space for a while now, and it's definitely an exciting one," Powers says. "I think people are just starting to realize the possibilities that are out there."
Creating a smart pet product isn't necessarily the first thing you think of when consider jobs for cognitive science and neuroscience PhDs. Try telling that to the founders of CleverPet, who have created a $279 games console for dogs designed to keep pets mentally engaged when their owners are out and about. Featuring three sensitive touch pads--each of which can light up interactively when touched with a nose or paw--the device asks pets to hit the pads in a certain order, at which point it releases food.
Using learning algorithms it's even possible for the games to be made harder or easier depending on the responses it receives.
"I've been working on training animals using computers for around 12 years now," says cofounder Dan Knudsen. "I've been studying how animals learn and interact with technology. This was a great opportunity to put some of that research into action."
As Knudsen points out, interacting with animals in an intelligent way is something we have been doing for the best part of one century, dating back to the classical conditioning of the Pavlov's dogs experiment--in which the pairing of stimuli (the sound of a bell and some food) can create conditioned responses.
"We're taking that idea one step further," Knudsen says. "Instead of classical conditioning, we're looking at operant conditioning, in which the animal has to do something to get the reward. Owners shouldn't just be concerned with the physical health of their pets--there's mental health to consider also."
Boasting a built-in laser, sound system, and wireless wide angle camera setup, Petcube's description makes it sound more like an advanced security system, or the the sinister creation of a James Bond villain, than a connected petcessory. However, that didn't stop it from smashing its Kickstarter fundraising goal late last year; earning $251,225 against a goal of $100K.
Like PetPal, Petcube allows owners to keep visual tabs on their dog or cat wherever they are in the world, although it also adopts the CleverPet concept of keeping your pet entertained while you are away. For Petcube, this means a laser pointer that you can use to send your animal careening around the living room.
"On your video screen, you can see exactly what is happening at home, or wherever you have the camera set up," creator Yaroslav Azhnyuk says. "You then swipe your finger over the screen and the laser follows wherever you point. It's a great way of keeping your pet engaged."
Petcube starts shipping to backers on Monday, and will be available to purchase starting in November.
There are, of course, times when being able to keep tabs on your pet is about far more than just giving them a handy midday feed, or remotely playing with them while you're on your lunch break. There are relatively few gadgets out there which could conceivably save lives but the Tagg Pet Tracker is certainly one of them.
A smart GPS attachment for your pet's collar, the device will send you text messages, push notifications, or emails if your dog (or other pet) journeys beyond your designated boundaries. You can then view your animal's location on an interactive map that you can access using either your smartphone, tablet, or computer--with the device leading you directly to your pet's location.
The device itself costs $99.95, but for anyone who's ever spent hours trudging in the rain unsure of whether or not they're going to see poor old Fido or Rover again, it's a way of making a purely reactive situation into a proactive one.
If that wasn't enough, the Tagg Pet Tracker additionally functions like a canine Jawbone UP or Fitbit by tracking your pet's movement using a built-in accelerometer. As a result, you can see how many steps your dog has taken, how far it's walked, and the overall intensity and duration of activities. The results are not only interesting from a "quantified self" perspective, but may also have life-saving capabilities--allowing you to spot changes or trends in your pet's activity that you can then discuss with a vet.
PAWSE isn't a "smart" technology in the Wi-Fi-enabled way that others on this list are, but it's certainly a smart piece of hardware in the classic sense. Essentially its a short leash stored in a tiny clip-on device on your dog's collar.
"It's not invented to replace the dog leash entirely, but rather to give you a mid-ground between having your dog on and off leash," says creator Matt Libby, who is currently in the middle of a Kickstarter drive for the device. "If you're walking with your dog on a trail and you see a rattlesnake or some other reason you'd need to have your dog on a leash, you simply extend the device attached to its collar."
Its compactness and lightweight nature make it an appealing option, but PAWSE has also solved a number of engineering issues--from how to make a retractor that can be repeatedly extended fully without breaking, to being a thin leash that is still strong enough to pull a car (or so is demonstrated in the Kickstarter video).
"I've been blown away by just how exciting the pet space is," Libby says. "Whether you're a consumer, an entrepreneur, or just an animal lover, I don't think there's been a better time to work in this field."
Paul Budnitz's buzzy invite-only social network Ello is a hot ticket in Silicon Valley right now. But Budnitz is not your typical tech entrepreneur, having last run a bicycle shop in Burlington, Vermont, far from the shadow of the California tech scene. Ello, a still-in-beta experiment that has attracted $5.5 million in venture backing, is his side project. And it's unlikely to have a measurable impact on existing social networks anytime soon.
But Budnitz's position as an outsider technologist and cultural tastemaker gives him the power to transform the way we think about the Internet's neighborhoods.
"In Ello we're certainly not trying to be for everyone in the entire world," Budnitz tells me recently. "I think Facebook once said that they want to sign up everyone on Earth. You know? We're not doing that."
Ello is not the anti-Facebook--although that's what many people think. Budnitz considers Facebook an advertising platform, while his space is a true social network. You can find out what exactly that means by reading the manifest on the Ello homepage, at the bottom of which there are two buttons. "One says 'I Agree' and the other says 'I Disagree,'" Budnitz says. "If you agree then you can request an invite to Ello, and if you disagree, we just send you to Facebook."
There's something about Budnitz's voice--a hushed didacticism packed with the charisma of a cult leader--that is reminiscent of the asymmetric knowledge transfer that happens at an indie book or record store between workers and patrons. Only Budnitz's style is more inclusionary, as he ends most sentences with an upward inflection ("you know?"). He chooses his words carefully, but not in the way a marketing or sales person might. No, his work is clearly based on a philosophy and his cadence and description are there to make sure he's accurate for the cause.
It's about this point in our conversation that I blurt out: "Did you go to art school?"
"I did, I studied art at Yale," he says. "Photography, sculpture, and I shot some movies in the '90s." This explains something about Ello that many people who are caught up in the VC-funding-to-exit strategy cycle of tech-sploitation don't immediately understand: It's as much an art project as a social network.
"People think, 'oh, you know you make something that's a little more artistic or beautiful it's not going to reach very many people," he says. "But you know my experience has been that if people are given an alternative, they'll choose something beautiful if they can, you know?"
A lot of Ello users are using it as a standard social network, and they're using real names and posting about their lives. Others are using it in an entirely different way. Greg Foley, the creative director for Visionaire magazine and a children's book author, has been posting hundreds of color fields to his profile. Just colors. "It looks like this beautiful sort of '70s or '80s modern painting," says Budnitz. "It just kind of goes on and on."
Ello might be the first gentrification story of the Internet. About a year and a half ago Budnitz was hanging out with designer friends when they realized the social networking platforms had decayed. "They're not fun anymore." Budnitz wanted to create a place where his friends, mostly designers and coders, could get together. "It would be a little bit like one of those ghettos where all the artists move in first and then kind of make it really nice," he says. "Eventually all the other people come and set up really nice coffee shops and restaurants and everyone wants to be there."
From a user perspective, Ello is simultaneously familiar and foreign. Its black and white, minimalist design fades to the background to give the stream of content, complete with emojis and full-width images, the center stage. There are moments when you can't help feeling that you're staring at a piece in a museum wondering, "Am I allowed to touch that?" There's a similar joy in discovering that yes, you can touch, and it does what you thought it should. One such discovery was the "Friend" and "Noise" modalities.
Noise is a compressed view, so that you can look at lots of stuff really fast. Friends is much more--everything is full screen. If you use Ello for a while, you'll follow about 60 people more or less. And at that point you realize that you want to put some people over in noise. And it's very natural.
"I know that Google Plus tried something like this a little bit with their circles thing," says Budnitz. "It wasn't binary. So you had to drag all these things to different places and then you were kind of lost looking at them and the interface was very confusing."
It's the paradox of choice. And Budnitz learned about it firsthand at his luxury bicycle shop, when they began selling different colored bikes. When the shop began offering more than six colors, customers would simply ask what the salespeople liked best. So they narrowed the choices to the six they like best. "And it's the same for Ello," he says.
Budnitz has found success largely because he manufactures the products he wants to see in the world. His bicycle shop was started because he didn't own a car and couldn't find a bicycle that was beautiful or sturdy enough for his tastes. He founded Kidrobot, a limited-edition toy company, because he wanted to see his artist friends making collectibles.
"It's kind of like extreme freelance," he says. "Freelance, but you actually have to make the job that hires you."
It should come as little surprise, then, that Budnitz does plan to make money from Ello. It won't be from advertising, but rather a model more akin to the app store. The basic features of the social network will be free, but if you want to add something extra it will cost money. For example, they are thinking of offering a way to create more than one profile on the service--Budnitz says thousands of people are requesting this feature-with the ability to control multiple log-ins from one place costing about $2.
Eventually the API will be opened to outside developers so that they can design new features and make money as well. Outsiders have already reverse-engineered Ello to create an Android app, and an enhanced search function. And technically the network is still in beta; the branding isn't even final yet.
The beta was released about eight weeks ago, with 90 people testing. Now Budnitz says the site is seeing as much as 45,000 new signups per hour.
Once you've been invited, you can invite your friends. But the number of invitations you are allowed fluctuates based on how much Ello's servers can handle at any given moment.
"We thought we had six months to scale," says Budnitz. "It happened in six days, so it was kinda intense."
Smartphone users have gotten used to speaking to virtual assistants like Apple's Siri and Google Now, and a new set of startups are guessing users will be excited about talking with devices from thermostats to smartwatches.
"There is a very big fascination about man talking to machines," says Alex Lebrun, founder of Wit.ai, which provides speech recognition services for Internet of Things devices. "There is a kind of cultural fascination with that, starting with 2001: A Space Odyssey."
And even once the novelty wears off, makers of voice recognition tools are betting they'll be won over by the convenience of simply speaking to their appliances instead of hunting for remote controls or tablets and smartphones with control apps.
"Our long-term goal is to give users complete autonomy over their homes and smart products," Insteon CEO Joe Dada said this summer in announcing the home automation company would be integrating Microsoft's virtual assistant Cortana into the Windows Phone app that controls its lights, thermostats, and other networked devices. "Adding a voice-driven, personal assistant into the mix is just another way that we can make people's lives easier."
And vendors say they're working to make sure 2001's vision of out of control computers doesn't turn out too prophetic, by integrating passwords and user voice recognition features to make sure users can control just who can order their appliances around.
"It's what we call speaker authentication, or speaker ID," says Lebrun. "This is exactly the kind of thing we'll add in the next months to the API."
The possibility of appliances responding to unauthorized commands was a joke on 30 Rock in 2011, with a voice-controlled TV reacting to on-screen dialogue, and, earlier this year, some Xbox owners claimed a Breaking Bad commercial showing characters playing a voice-controlled Xbox actually activated their video game systems.
Lebrun says Wit.ai, which translates spoken commands into structured data appliances can parse, will soon be able to give different level of access to homeowners and their guests, or parents and their children. The company's also adding emotion-detection capabilities, so a device can react differently to an angry or frustrated user versus a calm one, he says.
Even before many voice recognition platforms have such features, users can add some security by customizing the messages they use to control devices like garage doors, effectively integrating passwords so an outsider won't be able to unlock a home simply by guessing command phrases, says Leor Grebler, cofounder of Ubi, which makes a standalone home voice recognition system that can communicate with other devices and apps like IFTTT.
And, it turns out, users aren't just using new voice recognition systems to boss their appliances around, they're also using them to talk to each other. Grebler says that during Ubi's Kickstarter campaign, he was surprised to see users buying multiple devices to use as intercoms and started building in more human-to-human communication features.
"I can now actually have preconfigured triggered messages," he says of the devices, which are now on sale to the public for $299. "You can have Ubi be the bad guy in the family like 'Okay kids, brush your teeth.'"
And some users have Ubi announce when a family member arrives home or a pet with a proximity sensor on its collar makes an unexpected getaway.
"If the dog runs out, and the proximity tag changes to not in proximity, it'll announce, 'the dog just ran out the front door,'" says Grebler.
And Wit.ai's emotion detection will be useful in automatically adding emoticons to dictated texts and instant messages, a common use case, Lebrun says. Lebrun says he was surprised to find Wit.ai's systems being used for human-to-human communication, but it makes sense, since software can parse out elements of messages like meeting times and places and save users the trouble of dropping in calendar invites and map links, he says.
"You can use with it with voice, but it will also analyze what you say, and provide context," he says. "So if you say, let's meet this place at 6, it will show you a map and a calendar event."
We made it through another work week, maybe successfully, maybe not, but if you're reading this then at least you're alive and I was alive when I wrote it, for whatever that's worth. I'm tired. How about we take it easy today?
We're just trying to figure out how to be people. Nobody has the hang of it, and if they say they do, they're just pretending: there is always someone who has done worse, and better, than you. It's easy to deliver a hot take when someone puts themselves out there like that, a vulnerable chicken carcass that falls apart at the joints. Your argument is strong; you are right, the behavior was unflattering, maybe disgusting. It's harder to say, "Hello, I am the disgusting person."
Lynch gets at my interest in that whole mess, which is not really in taking sides but in recognizing that people are messy and broken and require empathy.
Does it make me a bad feminist to say "hey, I liked your old face. I wish you kept it?" If it does, then oh well. If feminism means we cannot challenge the choices other women make, then I pretty much suck at it (because I judge everyone equally. You're welcome, world!). My form of feminism is the belief that woman can live on their own terms but I don't think it means we're above critique. Just as I don't think Renee getting a new face makes her any less of a feminist, neither do I think people questioning her makes THEM traitors to the Love Pocket Land.
This is via Mallory, and I don't know why I have literally never encountered Awesomely Luvvie before but she's good.
Poor teeth, I knew, beget not just shame but more poorness: people with bad teeth have a harder time getting jobs and other opportunities. People without jobs are poor. Poor people can't access dentistry - and so goes the cycle.
That's a lot of good reading for you! Why not just stop here? Go ahead, it's Friday. Skip out right now. I won't tell anyone.
Still here? Ok, but don't say I didn't warn you. How about future community-service sentencee Casey Nocket? She's been traveling around our beautiful American wild spaces and painting garbage on them.
Chris Cillizza is bad at, among other things, tweeting.
Today in Music: It's a big day for music! Last night El-P and Killer Mike released their second collaboration album Run the Jewels 2 a few days early. Grab it for free here! It is [six fire emoji] ice-cold. And in less up-front releases, the new Taylor Swift album, 1989, leaked a few days ahead of its Monday release. My "friend" listened to it, and he says it's really good, much better than John Caramanica's lukewarm review would lead you to believe. And I trust my "friend" because his taste in music is exactly identical to mine. Exactly identical.
This is the last day this week that Bijan's prohibited from making it about.me! Until next week! I think he's grown a lot.
This is a terrible paragraph about a thing that's maybe not okay, but pretty predictable:
One would think such a bizarre proposal would prompt some level of debate, a modicum of sane opposition! After all, we're talking about mere teenagers eerily striking poses with weapons in their adolescent hands. Alas, the idea was met with a unanimous yes by all members of the Broken Bow school board.
Please ignore the story it's attached to. Those rural Nebraskans mostly did nothing wrong.
That was a solid Friday exercise in empathy for our damaged country-dwelling brothers and sisters, Bij. Now where's my coffee?
Today in About.Me:
@AnnaHolmes I have often thought that if a few things went differently, I'd be a nurse.
Today in Tabs wishes you the very best possible pre-Halloween-week weekend. Find us at FastCoLabs and in your email four days a week. Find me on Twitter basically 24/7. Find me huddled in my celebratory Friday afternoon fetal position in 5… 4… 3… 2…
