Loren Brichter

Tweetie wasn’t the first iOS Twitter app, but it did connect with users in a way the others didn't. Clean, simple, and intuitive, the app was so compelling Twitter acquired it, rebranded, and turned it into their official mobile offering. It’s natural to reach your thumb to the top of your phone’s screen and pull down to refresh the page, even now part of Apple’s core apps. It was Brichter, though, that designed that feature, implementing it in one of Tweetie’s updates. Even just a few years later, the pull-to-refresh gesture took on a life of its own and became bigger than any single app, but Brichter himself moved on to a different type of app. Following Tweetie, and working at Twitter, Brichter decided to head back to work for himself producing award-winning game Letterpress. Proving his thoughtful touch on each app developed, Letterpress takes on new UI challenges and makes the most of minimal elements. There's a flurry around any new apps Loren Brichter releases for good reason, he understands mobile design and constraints, giving people something very interesting.

Marco Arment

First with Instapaper, then with The Magazine, Marco Arment is now known for trailblazing and pushing different categories of apps into public awareness. Instapaper was, surprisingly, a unique idea at the time of introduction that is now copied by dozens, including Apple in their Safari web browser. From a technical standpoint, Arment’s follow-up app, The Magazine, took aim at big publishers with their unruly download sizes and inefficient magazine mechanics. The Magazine was truly an app built for a mobile device, specifically iPhone or iPad. Not only that, but Arment was also looking to leverage one of Apple’s newer features, Newsstand, which was a dedicated storefront for digital reading content. Success with both apps led to Arment selling both, at different times to different entities, in search of his stated passion, programming. His third app is set to debut sometime later in 2013.

Steve Demeter

In July of 2008, the App Store was an untested novelty. The demand and appeal were in place, but it wasn’t until Steve Demeter went public with his app’s success, stating he had made $250,000 in two months, as a solo developer did the potential become fully realized. Demeter was the man behind the puzzle game Trism. iPhone users around at the inception of the App Store will remember the triangle shapes which played off a Bejeweled style gameplay. Initially offered as a free download for the jailbreak community before any official SDK was available, Demeter’s Trism was the app every independent developer dreamed of making. Trism 2 looks to have a 2013 release with the developer regaining an appreciation for what made his initial game such a hit.

Gentry Underwood

Unlike some of the other mobile developers, Gentry Underwood’s first app, Orchestra, didn’t take off in the way he might have wanted. His initial app was a collaborative to-do app failing to grow beyond the weeds of the crowded space. Pivoting the whole company, Underwood took on email with the now famous mobile client, Mailbox. Mailbox’s appeal comes from a design built from the phone up, rather than from the desktop down. Underwood focused his development process on the “why.” Why would someone want or need a new email client, answering the “why” with genre-bending concepts that turned emails into to-do items. Not only did Underwood create an app that managed to convince consumers, he managed to join a small club of developers that have been acquired by a company capable of taking the popular app to the next, mainstream, level. The thing that Underwood makes mention to in regards to Mailbox’s design and success is the extreme focus on user experience. A trait that can never be underestimated.

Silvio Rizzi

Swiss developer Silvio Rizzi was the first to capture what a mobile RSS reading experience should, or could, be on the iPhone. Despite the original back end--Google Reader--shutting down, Reeder has continued to push people in one RSS direction or another in order to keep using the fluid app. Incorporating natural gestures, Reeder’s standout features were speed and a cohesive design sense. Demand eventually pushed Rizzi into taking Reeder to both the iPad and the Mac. A little foreign at first, taking Reeder to the Mac put Rizzi ahead of the Apple’s curve of bring iOS elements "back to the Mac." It’s this insight that has kept each major version of Reeder ahead of the curve in some way, continually bringing Rizzi's dedicated fan base along as well.

Mike Matas

Mike Matas has been a staple in development and design long before the iPhone and mobile revolution. Most recently the founder of Push Pop Press, Matas was on the verge of doing some radical things in independent publishing before Facebook acquired the company. To be fair, those radical things may still be coming, just under a new name. Push Pop Press’s first and only mobile app was a book for Al Gore, explaining his solution for climate change. Before Push Pop, Matas was the man behind Delicious Library on the Mac and the learning thermostat, Nest. Matas also worked at Apple contributing to the user interface of the iPhone and iPad. It doesn’t matter the pitch, if Mike Matas has touched a project, it should be something you’re interested in finding out more about, simple as that.

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger

Photo sharing before Instagram? It happened, but even just a few years in, it’s hard to remember a time before filtering snapshots. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger not only convinced other developers that their photo feed was a good idea, but they scared the largest social network on the planet--Facebook--with a real threat on mobile. Even as the app grew quickly in popularity Systrom famously kept the team behind the project small. A risky move in order to keep up with the workload that ended up paying off as the app was always stable and responsive. Was it the filters, design, or just the network effect that propelled Instagram to become the game-changing app most people consider irreplaceable? In addition to the right time and place, it’s probably a little of each.

Phill Ryu

Phill Ryu doesn’t just have one or two apps to his name, but a list of some of the top App Store apps over the years. First with the reading app Classics, then joining the development house Taptaptap, which produced Camera+ and The Heist, to name a few. Ryu also had a hand in making Clear, the bold to-do app that left a trail of imitation apps in its path. All the apps Ryu has been a part of have pushed the boundaries, ventured into territory others hadn’t been. Ryu has started his own development studio, Impending, and is currently working on its first title. There’s little doubt Impending and Ryu will keep pushing the limits of app development and figuring out what makes a mobile app sticky and viral.

Why do we have companies? I get why you have a business, and I get that having a business is about making money. I drive a Tesla, I get it! I’m not trying to live an ascetic lifestyle, but I think the fundamental thing that has been lost on this journey of capitalism that we’ve been on for quite some time, is…humanity, and what it means to be a person. And what it means to be a successful person.

I believe a company is a vehicle that’s like a social contract, it’s something we all agree to do, play this game called “come to the company.” The whole point of this thing is to make our lives better. We don’t serve the company. The company serves us. Right? Yes, I’m the owner of the company, I make money from it. But fundamentally, the reason why people stay here, one of the reasons why, is because the company is serving them. This idea is deeply foundational to the way this company is structured.

For example, I don’t set a title and look for a person. I think that’s completely stupid. I think that’s completely the wrong way of looking at it. I look for people, and craft titles around the people. To be certain, there are times where there’s very specific needs to be filled. But often, good people walk in the door, and I want to find a way to keep them, I want them to stay on the team. If you try to fit a round peg on a square hole, and that hole is Director of something something, and that person doesn’t really want to do that ultimately? They’re gone. Either they're checked out mentally, emotionally, whatever, or otherwise phoning it in, or literally they’re out the door.

Instead, I want to know, what do you want to do with your life? What drives you? What are you passionate about? That could be anything!

I read a really interesting thing about a hotel, that when they look for maids, they are dead focused on finding people who are crazy about cleaning. Love it. It feeds them. You know that kind of person, right? Me? I would be miserable, I would slit my wrists doing that kind of thing. That person, on the other hand, is in nirvana, because they get to do what they’re passionate about every day. That’s what I’m trying do here: My new Design Director, for example, is a rare, rare find that took years to locate.

We didn’t even have an Information Architecture department until Andrea came along. She initially started with Project Management. We talked about what she wanted, and it became clear Information Architecture moved her. So we created that role, and now have a whole division for that. It’s proved tremendously beneficial to us as a company as well.

Kayla, who’s our Office Coordinator…you could be a jerkoff capitalist dick and see someone like her as a low-level player. But to us, she’s super important to the team, she helps everything run at optimum here. She’s smart and capable, and I know that she’s going to move on if I don’t find a way to keep her engaged. I want the company to be helping her, which is not a usual way to think as a businessman. By putting people first, ahead of everything else, I feel like we have a really special environment.

Yeah, we’re focused on delivering great customer experiences, all that, but I really feel like something is missing here. How is it that I can be in an incredibly competitive environment, and still hold on to my team? It’s because I truly want to make sure that they’re happy, whereas another company down the road, they’re a revolving door. They don’t care. You see this reflected all across the board. Corporate level, small mom and pop operations…why aren’t we as a whole more mindful about this?

If owners of companies were village elders, or perhaps more fitting, captains of pirate ships, they’d be thrown overboard. Because they’re awful. Simply because they’re not caring enough about their team. Or better, getting out of the way of their team.

I don’t know if this is meaningful enough to do something about, but I feel it’s a fundamental problem we have in America. One of the reasons why I left Los Angeles was because I didn’t see anybody who gave a rat's ass about this. I looked around, keeping an eye out for people who cared about such things. Portland. People care about being human in Portland.

Brian Jamison is CEO of Portland-based web developer OpenSourcery. He created Disney and Sony Playstation's first websites, produced biodiesel, and has been a "ballonpreneur."

[Image: Flickr user John Williams]

Many early-stage entrepreneurs who come to me for advice love to brag about how fast their companies are growing. To the consumer-focused entrepreneur that usually means tons of traffic, and to the enterprise-focused entrepreneur, that’s likely to mean a bunch of trials.

I understand why they want to brag. Growth is sexy. It’s easy to understand, and everyone relates to the excitement. My response is: So what?

When you first start out the only thing that matters is finding a cohort of customers who truly value what you offer. Growth alone means next to nothing. Growth without value to the customer is likely to lead nowhere--or worse, to a big flameout.

Determine Your Value Hypothesis Then Your Growth Hypothesis

In their seminal books on entrepreneurship, Steve Blank and Eric Ries explained how this works: You must first develop and test a value hypothesis and then move on to your growth hypothesis. A value hypothesis is an attempt to articulate the key assumption that underlies why a customer is likely to use your product. A growth hypothesis represents your best thinking about how you can scale the number of customers attracted to your product or service.

Identifying a compelling value hypothesis is what I call finding product/market fit. A value hypothesis addresses both the features and business model required to entice a customer to buy your product. Companies often go through many iterations before they find product/market fit, if they ever do.

Steve and Eric recommend that entrepreneurs first nail their value hypothesis before tackling their growth hypothesis. After all, if the dogs don’t want to eat the dog food then what good is attracting a lot of dogs? You can waste a lot of money if you don’t follow their prescribed order, because you’ll spend more money on growth than determining value.

It might be easier to pursue your growth hypothesis first, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. I have seen many entrepreneurs spend a lot of money on attracting traffic to their site or app only to see low conversion rates. Hope springs eternal, and many in this situation believe they have found product/market fit because they have traffic. But traffic without conversion doesn’t mean much. In fact, growth may seduce the entrepreneurs into believing they have achieved their value proposition when they actually haven’t.

A classic example is Viddy. It rode the Facebook platform to attract tens of millions of users. Unfortunately, once downloaded, users found very little value in the product and stopped using it. As a result no real company value was created.

Which brings me to network effects businesses. Some of you may be wondering if network effects businesses are an exception because they benefit from a winner-take-all effect. It’s my experience over my 25-year venture capital career and specifically from my association with many successful network effects businesses at Benchmark (eBay, Equinix, oDesk, OpenTable, Snapchat, Uber, etc.) that you can’t catalyze the network effect if you don’t provide greater value up front than is required in a non-network-effects business. In other words you can’t get growth without exceptional value. Therefore network effects businesses are probably the greatest example of Steve and Eric’s advice.

Enterprise companies are no different from consumer companies when it comes to the timing of investing in value vs. growth. Instead of traffic, enterprise companies seek trials, and their equivalent of a conversion ratio is the percentage of trials that convert into paying customers. Adding trials that don’t convert is of no value. In my experience the best enterprise entrepreneurs pull trials after 30 days to determine if customers really need their product. If the customers do, they will pay despite numerous protests. The customers that don’t convert after 30 days seldom convert after 90 days. If you can’t convert, don’t add trials. Instead try a new value proposition or different type of customer.

Typical VCs Are Part Of The Problem

A lot of venture capitalists are as mistaken as the entrepreneurs. I have had scores of entrepreneurs voice their frustration with venture capitalists’ desire to have an answer to the growth hypothesis prior to the value hypothesis. Many VCs are riveted on how you’re going to get big to the exclusion of everything else. Data tells us the ultimate size of market addressed is the single greatest determinant of outcome, but a large potential market is worthless unless it gets realized. Google provides a great lesson. If traffic were all that mattered, Google would dominate every market it enters. That has clearly not been the case. Unfortunately, a lot of venture capitalists have not gotten the memo.

One of the key things that separates the premier venture capital firms from the rest of the industry is their understanding of this issue. In contrast to the majority of VCs, the best are riveted on product/market fit and want to invest before the growth hypothesis has been resolved.

They’re willing to take this risk because they know in most cases companies that find a compelling value proposition later figure out a way to grow. Waiting until companies resolve both their value and growth hypotheses leads to much higher valuations and therefore, for the VCs, much lower returns.

The next time a VC ignores your success converting potential clients and only wants to discuss how you plan to drive traffic then I suggest you find another VC.

Step On The Gas After You Find Product/Market Fit

The most successful technology companies first get their product/market fit right before stepping on the accelerator. Facebook cut its teeth in the Ivy League without spending a nickel on marketing (or growth as they call it) before making its product more broadly available. Once the company had incredible traction, it broadened its reach. The same can be said for just about every franchise technology company we know (for example: Adobe, Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Oracle, Salesforce, and Twitter).

The classic counter-example is Groupon. It ramped up the hiring of salespeople well in advance of determining if it offered customers (merchants) a compelling value proposition. In their case VCs threw money at the company because of its growth, but the growth never led to profits. The founders were fortunate; they sold a bunch of stock at huge prices before the company went public, but the VCs were left holding the bag because, post IPO, the market realized Groupon didn’t have a value hypothesis. In other words, Groupon was able to succeed for a while without a proven value hypothesis, but sooner or later the truth catches up with everyone.

Customer Delight Makes Your Product Viral

At my company, Wealthfront, we didn’t even hire the people who could address the growth hypothesis until we were confident we had achieved product/market fit.

You know you have fit if your product grows exponentially with no marketing. That is only possible if you have huge word of mouth. Word of mouth is only possible if you have delighted your customer. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a great tool to measure the magnitude of your product’s or service’s word of mouth. It should come as no surprise that the most successful companies generally have the highest NPS's.

The beauty of generating significant word of mouth is it helps you recruit better people than you could have attracted otherwise. Had it not been for our delighted clients, we never could have attracted three senior execs from LinkedIn. Their prior experience driving LinkedIn’s growth has allowed us to create a compelling growth hypothesis in much shorter time than we otherwise could have done.

The Best Companies Grow Out Of Value

It might take you a long time and many iterations to find your value proposition. You won’t have the vanity metrics, as Eric Ries calls them, to show your classmates, peers, or VCs. You don’t want the kinds of VCs who care about vanity metrics, and people who pay attention to flashes in the pan are of little value.

Once you do find your value proposition, driving growth is a heck of a lot easier … and more profitable. Entrepreneurs who focus on growth too early get addicted to it, and probably will always pay too much for it. Those with the discipline to find their value proposition first build the best companies.

Andy Rachleff is CEO of the startup Wealthfront, and cofounder and general partner of Benchmark Capital. He can be reached on Twitter @arachleff.

[Image: Flickr user Adam Selwood]

I have a lot of friends who work in Hollywood, and a fair number who work in advertising. When I talk about television with any of them they all tell me the same universal fact: People love television but hate commercials. Nothing frustrates a viewer more when than when they’re really into the story of the latest episode of their favorite TV show and then the channel cuts away for a regularly scheduled break.

But television commercials are just a fact of life. Without them 99% of television programming would not exist. Commercials are how the networks make the money to make the shows that you love to watch for “free.”

And since the birth of television in the early 20th century, there was little a viewer could do to get around a commercial. Then came the 21st century and Tivos and DVRs. And though these new digital devices that allowed viewers to record their favorite shows and skip the commercials were a godsend to consumers, it pissed advertisers off to no end. You just can’t imagine.

And since then DVRs and similar technology have been a double-edged sword for everyone involved. Networks liked the devices because suddenly time slots didn’t matter as much as they used to. If a big game was on one channel, those that liked a TV show airing on another channel at the same time would still get to see it...eventually. This helped networks and shows retain a regular audience. On the other hand, the network’s best buddies--the advertisers--hated this because they knew most people weren’t going to sit through their brilliant commercials they were paying big bucks to run if viewers could just fast-forward through them.

Likewise, though the ability to skip past commercials might seem like a total win for viewers, eventually if people stop watching commercials, why should advertisers keep paying for them? And once that happens the networks suddenly don’t have the cash to pay the costs it takes to produce a show, which means television programming dries up, leaving the viewer with a TV, but nothing to watch.

Apple Is Working On Breaching The Impasse Between Consumers, Networks, Advertisers, And Tech Companies--But It Won’t Work

Television needs advertising to function. But the problem is, it’s very hard to change consumer behavior. And in the last decade consumers now expect instant gratification as part of the deal. When we want a book, movie, app, or TV show, we want it now (or, as fast as our Internet connection will allow us to download it). This “now” attitude in consumer behavior also means that the ability to skip commercials to get back to the story is just something that is expected. Technology companies know this, so they’d be stupid to leave out commercial-skipping tech from their products (read: smart TVs), or else consumers won’t think those products are full-featured.

Talk to anybody in the industry and they’ll tell you that things appear to be at an impasse. What consumers expect is what technology companies want to give them, which is what advertisers fear, which means networks and content owners have to walk a careful tightrope between the needs of their advertisers and the expectations of their consumers in an increasingly digital age.

So what to do? When smart TVs go mainstream, if they don’t offer a DVR/commercial-skipping function (a technology which is over a decade old), people are going to feel ripped off. But if an Apple patent is any indication, the Cupertino company is working on the problem. As Jessica Lessin writes on her blog:

Apple has a new trick up its sleeve as it tries to launch a long-awaited television service: technology that allows viewers to skip commercials and that pays media companies for the skipped views...In recent discussions, Apple told media executives it wants to offer a “premium” version of the service that would allow users to skip ads and would compensate television networks for the lost revenue, according to people briefed on the conversations.

It is a risky idea. Ad-skipping would disrupt the entrenched system of television ratings—the basis for buying TV ads. In fact, television broadcasters sued Dish Network when it introduced similar technology last year.

On the surface, this seems like a nice idea. Apple sells smart TVs to consumers who skip commercials that advertisers are then reimbursed for. But the problem is that paying off an advertiser for each person that skips their ads really doesn't help the advertiser in the long run. The advertiser’s goal is not to make money off someone viewing the commercial, it’s to generate brand awareness and future sales from viewers watching that commercial.

Ultimately, Apple’s patent means the advertiser is essentially collecting bribe money from Apple and not getting what it really wants--brand awareness from the viewer. In the end, why wouldn’t the advertiser just leave TV and spend its valuable advertising dollars in other mediums?

A Better Way To Keep Everyone Happy: Merge Old Advertising Tricks With New Technology

In film school I first learned about “aspirational programming.” That’s a term coined by Hollywood and marketing people in the second half of the 20th century. Aspirational programs are television shows that dangle a carrot in front of the audience. They are programs that show us things we aspire to have one day: beautiful friends, lots of money, nice cars, exciting jobs, exotic trips.

Think: Gossip Girl.

Think: Sex in the City.

Think: any stupid reality show about rich, beautiful people who are famous for doing nothing.

Though aspirational programming is vastly unrealistic (on Friends, how could Rachel, a waitress, and Monica, a chef, afford what is clearly a million-dollar-plus apartment in New York City?), the reason the shows are so popular is because viewers want to believe that they too will one day live lives just as exciting, sexy, loving, or rich as the characters on their television screens. It’s just how we’re wired: the desire that overrides reason.

And ask anyone in advertising and they’ll tell you that that desire that overrides reason is exactly what they want. If you’ve ever really examined a commercial you’ll notice that it’s not actually selling a product; it’s selling an experience that happens to you when you use that product (“Oh! If I use Colgate toothpaste to brush my teeth, that 22-year-old supermodel who works in my office as a secretary will take notice of me.”). The fact that advertisers know people are so susceptible to aspirational programming is why they love product placements so much.

And it’s here in the decades-old practice of aspirational programming and product placement that the future of television advertising can thrive in a world of smart TVs, thanks to MTEVideo, a brilliant software advertising platform from a small company called Cinematique. As David Castillo writes for ProductPlacementNews:

In videos by Cinematique, prompts appear on selected products. If a product is clicked, the video will display basic information about it. And after viewing the video, consumers can click the Cinematique icon to see a summary of the information from all the products they selected.

Experts say that the new platform has tremendous e-commerce potential. Similar to tagging pictures, tagging items on video can be a good marketing tool. While the features do not force immediate purchases, it can give marketers detailed information about people that are interested in their products.

As of now, the MTEVideo platform is only available on the desktop, but if this technology is built into the OS of every smart TV, it could fundamentally change television advertising forever. All parties win: No more commercial breaks for viewers, increased hyper-targeted ads for advertisers, and continued revenue streams for networks.

Like that dress your favorite character is wearing? If your smart TV has Leap Motion-like hand gesture control, just swipe you finger in the air to add it to your want list. Does that car the bad guy is driving appeal to you? Tap in the air to learn more about it.

This type of advertising would also mean product placement wouldn’t even be limited to the big companies anymore. Smart TV advertising could get truly local. Does that steak dinner the TV stay-at-home-mom-by-day/crime-fighter-by-night is cooking for her family look good? Tap it in the air to see local deals on steak dinners in your area. Even reruns of old shows could become more profitable. Like that top Buffy is wearing as she’s slaying all those vampires? Tap it to see it was from American Eagle--and here are some up-to-date fashions like it.

Any new technology scares old media--and then old media’s advertisers. But if those two institutions embrace new tech to give viewers ads worthy of the 21st century, then smart TVs in every living room will be something they will be able to welcome, not fear.

[Image: Flickr user Mcfarlandmo]

True time travel may be a dream confined to Hollywood film scripts and Hermione Granger, but a group of grad students at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles have harnessed the ability to fix the past when it comes to 3-D printing. Traditional 3-D printers create objects by incrementally printing thousands of 2-D layers, which makes going back to fix things impossible. That’s why Brian Harms, the lead designer of the Suspended Dispositions project, and his team created a freeform printer that injects ultraviolet-curable liquid resin into a tank of gel using a needle-thin print head mounted on a robotic arm. The resin stays in liquid form until it comes into contact with UV light, which means designers can retrace missteps, manually or robotically, and fix potential design flaws. It’s essentially like pressing an “undo” button.

“You could go in with something like a syringe or metal needle and suck out the liquid resin that you injected, so you’re basically reversing the direction of the pump and retracing the tool path that you already traveled along,” says Harms. It’s even possible to “manually control where the robot is traveling so you could create an object that's only partially predesigned.”

The ability to “go back in print time” or control the printer manually is something traditional 3-D printers, which generate rigid structures to prevent objects from collapsing during the printing process, are unable to do. Instead of relying on solid supports, the gel substrate in the freeform printer acts as a “passive but omnidirectional support material,” according to Harms.

“The gel traps the resin in place and then once you've hardened the resin you can just pull your part out and leave the tank of gel there to be reused,” he explains.

Printing in a gel tank also means the robotic arm isn't restricted to working in skinny 2-D slices like traditional 3-D printers. This freedom of movement allows the printer to create more complex objects than normal printers because it can draw vector paths instead of traditional, layer-based contours.

“We have the ability to navigate around other objects inside of the gel,” Harms says. “We’ve 3-D printed a small ring in the gel and then had the robot print an interlocking ring around that existing object.”

The freeform printer isn’t just more flexible than its precise counterparts, it’s much faster as well. Harms and his team investigated by comparing how long it took their technology to create a wireframe cube compared to a traditional printer. Armed with the ability to print in vectors, Harm’s robot drew 12 lines suspended in the gel in 30 seconds, followed by a two-minute-long UV-curing process. A traditional printer would take around an hour to create the same product, although with superior resolution.

Harms and his team haven’t created any “real world” products with their printer yet, but he believes the technology has the ability to build more creativity into the 3-D printer production process.

“We’re interested in asking questions like, ‘What happens when you send a design to the printer and then step in and modify it on the fly, or remove parts you don’t like, or change the color of the resin?’” he says. The ability to create multiple connected objects within the same gel-space is another potential use of the technology, according to Harms.

“If you filled an entire room and had these robots submerged in the gelatin you could create much larger structures that could be architectural components.”

The emphasis of Harms and his team’s printer is focused on the rapid prototyping of structures, not product design or fabrication. But the team says the potential is much wider. Mataerial, a company currently experimenting with 3-D printing in space, is operating with the same design dream as Harms and his team: gravityless printing.

“It’s the idea we can do things without being constrained by support,” says Harms. “It can be more real time, immediate, and a direct output as opposed to a product that's been translated into machine code.”

Harms’ teammates include: Haejun Jung, Vince Huang, and Yuying Chen.

Spam may be the bane of our cyber-existence, but there are geographic considerations that go into producing it. One way security companies guard clients against junk mail and other attacks is by blocking IP addresses where spam has been known to originate. When too many IP addresses get blocked in one place, spammers pack up and move to a neighboring country and keep going.

By looking at IP blacklist data, we can see one such dance taking place in eastern Europe earlier this year. In January, only about 5% of IP addresses in Belarus were being blocked, a number that rose to almost 30% in May. The same study, produced by international message security company Cloudmark, points out that Romania currently has the most blocked IP addresses of any country. Spammers probably switched to using IP addresses in nearby Belarus and Russia to get around the problem, causing the spike in blocked Belarusian addresses. But then hosting companies in those countries wised up, implemented tighter restrictions, and forced them back to Romania’s more permissive hosts, which caused Belarusian IP blocks to drop back to normal levels in May.

It’s difficult to assess spam output because there are multiple ways to measure it: You can look at it in terms of how many spam messages are produced, how many IP addresses are blocked, or the percentage of blocked addresses in a given country, to control for population. Many sources cite the three countries with the largest populations, China, India and the U.S., as the origins for the majority of spam. This makes some amount of sense, but it doesn’t tell the full story unless you adjust the data for population and number of allocated IP addresses.

The security industry has operated using these measurements since email became a popular target for scammers, but the dynamics of spam are about to change. Now that all available IPv4 addresses have been allocated, security companies are beginning to turn their attention to what the spam environment will be like in IPv6. Once email providers moves to IPv6, some fear that spammers will have an advantage because they will be able to take over huge numbers of IP addresses without having to worry about the geographic constraints of a given country. But others point out that for this very reason an IP address’s “reputation” will no longer be a good indicator of its credibility at all when there are so many addresses, and that this will motivate the industry to discard IP blocking as a security strategy and adopt better methods.

Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise writes:

I don't expect IP reputation to become a complete non-issue. I think it's still valuable data for ISPs and filters to evaluate as part of the delivery decision process. That being said, IP reputation is so much less a guiding factor in good email delivery than it was 3 or 4 years ago. Just having an IP with a great reputation is not sufficient for inbox delivery. You have to have a good IP reputation and good content and good URLs.

As IPv6 rolls out among email providers and in general, the physical game of cat and mouse that spammers have been playing all over the world may morph into something different. It’s unclear whether this change will meaningfully affect how much spam we get every day, so until we know, keep those filters running.

Why We’re Tracking The Bad Internet

People’s lives and decisions are complicated. And the more they live them online the more ambiguity they introduce. But we’re not here to judge. This Bad Internet tracking story looks at offbeat or fringe Internet practices and people who are just trying to do a thing online. It explores the black hat spectrum, everything from scraping to vulnerability exploitation, and highlights utilities that could have both legitimate and dastardly functions.

[Image: Flickr user Pat Ferro]

Previous Updates

Lots Of People Can Read Your Private Chats--Not Just The NSA

July 12, 2013

The PRISM frenzy has added significantly to a discussion that was already simmering about the level of security protection on messaging apps like Apple’s iMessage. These services are so easy to use that most consumers don’t think about who might have access to their data. But usually at minimum, the company providing the service can parse messages and conversations, and often advertisers or investors have some access as well. But a desire to take advantage of now-basic digital communication should not preclude users from privacy, right? And probably anyone planning a bank heist knows about these security holes.

Peter Sunde’s new messaging app, Hemlis, promises to emulate the ease-of-use that makes messaging apps so popular, while also offering total anonymity from a data perspective. The company is saying that it won’t sell ads or user data and the plan is to fund Hemlis through donations and paid premium features.

All communications on today’s networks are being monitored by government agencies and private companies . . . That’s why we decided to build a messaging platform where no one can spy on you, not even us.

But the question is, what security strategies will Hemlis use? Because the extent of its security features will, at least in part, dictate who uses it. And how much shady business can be conducted over it. A lot of companies claim that messages sent via their apps live in encrypted fortresses. Even services with lousy track records, like iMessage, are touted as secure.

Conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data.

But just by taking a moment to think about how iMessage works, it’s clear that Apple is full of it. Messages must be somehow accessible if conversation histories are saved in iCloud for easy restoration on new devices, and if users have continuous, uninterrupted access to those histories even after they change their handset or iCloud password. These concerns were clearly outlined in a blog post by Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green a few weeks ago. He wrote:

That's the problem with iMessage: Users don't suffer enough. The service is almost magically easy to use, which means Apple has made tradeoffs--or more accurately, they've chosen a particular balance between usability and security. And while there's nothing wrong with trade-offs, the particulars of their choices make a big difference when it comes to your privacy.

These trade-offs are the crucial dictator for how a messaging service can be used for sensitive communication. If message histories are saved, even locally, the messages themselves are not secure. They can only function as such if their abstract meaning is transient and will not be useful to a later reader. A messaging system that works like SnapChat may sound like a better alternative, but it would run into similar issues between utilities that autosave received communications and the ubiquity of devices capable of taking screencaps.

No matter how sweeping a company’s privacy statements, they always seem to turn out bogus. For example, in 2008 Skype claimed that it could not tap users’ calls no matter what entity (private, government, etc.) requested data. Jennifer Caukin, Skype's then-director of corporate communications said, “Because of Skype's peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques, Skype would not be able to comply with such a request.” But it turns out that this was never true, or at least wasn’t true by 2010 when a pre-Microsoft Skype signed on to provide the audio from calls for PRISM.

If Hemlis can deliver on its lofty privacy goals there will be no reason to use any other messaging app on principle. But it seems like the only way for a service like Hemlis to be trusted for intensely private communication is for its backend to be totally open to scrutiny and evaluation. Without complete transparency, it will just be another black box into which people subtly allude to tax fraud, unwisely share their bank PIN, or correspond with their pot dealer.

Telepresence is the coming thing, so we've heard and said pretty often by now, because though Marissa Mayer prefers her Yahoo developers developing code at the office instead of at home, telecommuting really does offer many advantages. There's one big barrier in the way of this revolution, however. It's the price of telepresence robots...which even at the low end can cost thousands of dollars. Unless, that is, you're an engineer at AppNeta. Then all you need is an iPad and a few tens of dollars' worth of maker hardware.

The robotic chap in the video below is the result of AppNeta's ingenuity. He's called Petbot:

The parts list for building Petbot starts expensively, with an iPad, but after you've included a Raspberry Pi computer and a simple radio controlled car, then the list is basically bits of wood and screws for mounting.

Despite its simple construction, the Petbot is almost as sophisticated as professional machines. The iPad is used for two-way teleconferencing via a traditional app, and the robot's movements around the office are controlled by the telecommuting employee via a web interface.

This is where the clever bit comes in, from a developer point of view. The Raspberry Pi was programmed to run a local node.js client server and commands are served up over the net via socket.io and a remote node.js server hosted at the telecommuter's end and controlled via a plain web interface. The simplicity of the setup and fact the robot is connected over fast Wi-fi, with its hardware listening as a client to user inputs, means there's very little latency. If you're so inclined then the project's shared over at GitHub.

As the video shows, the entire affair, while a little basic, certainly works. It's no iRobot or Anybot machine, and it lacks extras like environmental sensors to stop it from bumping into things. But the engineering team at AppNeta is already working on improvements.

And what's the lesson here? It's a good one: Don't overlook the opportunity to be creative on a shoestring. The results of some hardware tinkering and clever programming may surprise you, and even lead to some unexpectedly productive teamwork--perhaps even highly motivated because of the constraints of having such limited hardware to work with. As the AppNeta team notes on its webpage about the robot, "Our team has already started contributing code as well as some great suggestions. With a team of engineers to help perfect it, PETBOT will be thinking for itself in no time."

[Image: Flickr user John Karakatsanis]

Photographers have created many iconic images, but Biostatistics professor Roger Peng recently asked “What are the iconic data graphs of the past 10 years?” FastCoLabs called in Andy Kirk of Visualising Data, Robert Kosara of Eager Eyes, and Matt Stiles, the data editor of NPR, to help answer that question. You can see their selections in the slideshow above.

The first three data graphics--WindMap, GapMinder, and the Ebb and Flow Streamgraph--were selected by multiple members of our panel. Reflecting the controversial nature of such a list, each of the remaining graphics were chosen as iconic by a single panelist.

Wind Map

Wind Map is an art project created by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. It makes the invisible visible using near-term wind speed forecast data from the National Digital Forecast database, which is updated hourly.

“A wonderfully elegant and transfixing portrayal of wind,” says Kirk. “Aside from being widely celebrated across the field, it also became the go-to tool during the severe wind events that struck the U.S. during 2012, elevating it beyond just being a beautiful design into an actual utility that people turned to, learned from, and discussed.”

You can zoom in on particular regions of the country, find the wind velocity at at a precise latitude and longitude, and browse wind patterns from the past such as when Hurricane Sandy made landfall. Gazing at Wind Map has a similar mesmerizing effect to looking into the flickering flames of an open fire.

GapMinder

Swedish physician/statistician Hans Rosling's famous 2006 TED talk debunked myths about the so-called “developing world” and has been viewed by millions. The talk was accompanied by animated graphics created using the Gapminder Foundation's Trendalyzer software.

“In a way, Gapminder was nothing new,“ says Kosara. “Animated scatterplots had been done before. But the way Hans Rosling used them to show data and make it interesting was a huge eye-opener for the visualization community. Who knew that you could use visualization not just to analyze data, but to present it, and make it interesting? This wouldn't have worked without Rosling's performance, but that only worked because he had impressive charts to work with.”

Rosling transformed dry statistics about serious global issues into an illuminating form of entertainment, earning him a spot on Time magazine's 2012 100 most influential people list.

The Ebb and Flow Streamgraph

The New York Times published Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986-2008, an interactive stream graph in 2008, which won the Peter Sullivan Best Graphic prize at the prestigious Malofiej awards the following year. Ebb and Flow presents time series data where the vertical axis of the area representing a particular movie shows its domestic gross box office takings while the horizontal axis portrays its longevity in the box office. Darker colors mean higher takings.

“A genuinely divisive piece when published, and still being debated today," says Kirk.”It offers so much potential for analysis and discourse about the value and impact of visualization. Its enigmatic and (certainly back then) novel form, enchanted as many as it repelled.”

Streamgraphs are controversial since the varying baseline can make them hard to read or even misleading. Graphic designer Gert Gielsen explained some of these problems in a post on how Ebb and Flow was Too Sexy for its own good.

“The StreamGraph has a lot of issues that are common in stacked area charts,” says Kosara. ”In particular, the baselines for virtually all the areas are some odd shape, rather than straight, making it hard to read exact numbers. That's not the point of this chart though, and it works fine for the particular data here: short, initial spikes that slowly decrease.”

Paths to the White House

Shan Carter, the New York Times’ interactive graphics editor, said that when designing a new electoral vote calculator for the 2012 presidential election, he decided two things: “It shouldn’t include electoral votes or calculations.” The obvious choice was an electoral map, but such maps are misleading in that a large state with a small population looks more significant than one with more electoral votes. The result was Paths to the White House, which represented all 512 possible paths available to the two candidates on their way to the White House in a single decision tree chart.

“During the last week or so before the 2012 U.S. presidential elections, there were a lot of arguments about Nate Silver's forecasts and whether the race was still close or not,” says Kosara. “This visualization showed how overwhelming things were in Obama's favor, and made a lot of people realize that Silver was right. The chart's unusual shape and clever interactivity make it iconic.”

Paths to the White House gives a succinct visual summary of the data without losing any of the micro-level information. Mike Bostock of the New York Times explains how the interactive tree was designed and built in this blog post.

Death and Taxes

“One of the most famous infographics of recent years,” says Kirk, “the designer Jess Bachman takes time every year to research and update this visual account of how U.S. tax dollars are spent.”

Death and Taxes is designed to be printed as a six-foot-square poster rather than displayed online, but an iOS app to browse it is apparently in development. The 2012 version showed significant reductions in the military budget. It also adds some non-governmental items like the the video game industry and Bill Gate’s net worth in the poster to give a better idea of the scale of government spending.

Gay Rights, State By State

The Guardian's Gay Rights, State by State won the data-driven storytelling prize for big media at this year's Data Journalism awards. This radial chart gives a breakdown of all gay rights, not just gay marriage, from hospital visitation rights to hate crimes. The states are organized by region, making it easy to see where different areas of the country stand.

“I don't normally like radial-style graphics,” says Stiles, “but this is an exception. I enjoy the normalized version that accounts for population. The regional differences really pop off the screen.”

The graphic is supplemented by a clever Facebook application which displays the rights available in the states in which your friends live.

Bikini Chart

The Bikini Chart (which I'm pretty sure is not the official title), was published by the Obama administration in 2012 to show job losses during the last year of the Bush administration and the first year after Obama took office, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It shows that the monthly job loss trend started to reverse itself during Obama's first year.

“This chart is iconic for its shape, which is what gave it its name,” says Kosara. “It's also remarkable because it is one of the few examples of political messaging (or propaganda) that's purely based on numbers. Some clever choices, like the bars pointing down and the symmetry, make this easily readable and quite effective.” Usually bars pointing down are used for negative numbers, and job loss statistics are not negative.

Kosara also points out on his blog that although the colors used are the traditional colors of the Republican and Democratic parties, “the dark color, especially towards the lower end, makes the red bars appear heavier than the blue ones. Since they are also pointing down, the additional weight might make them appear longer, or at least cause people to remember them as longer.”

A Peek Into Netflix Queues

A Peek Into Netflix Queues is another New York Times production from 2010, showing Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities.

“An amazing data set, perhaps more interesting than anything released by the U.S. Census Bureau, “ says Stiles. “And I also enjoy the interaction of tabbing through movies in my city and hypothesizing what's driving the rental patterns.”

The queue data was accessed through the Netflix API and zip code boundaries from the U.S. Census. In many cases, a rental most popular in one zip code was not among the top 50 titles of a neighboring one. Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for example, was popular all over Manhattan and in Westchester, but did not appear in the top 50 rentals in most of the South Bronx and Brooklyn.

Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller?

Why Is Her PayCheck Smaller? shows the stark salary gap between people doing the same job, who happen to be of different genders.

“This chart is not as well-known as it should be, but it deserves a lot more attention, “ says Kosara. ”Scatterplots are quite unusual in the news, because people often have a hard time reading them. Not only is this a scatterplot that presents quite a bit of data, but it also adds an incredibly smart aid to reading it in the form of a few simple lines.”

The data came from the current Population Survey for 2007 and includes occupations for which there were at least 50,000 responses for each gender. You can filter by occupation. Female physicians and surgeons, for example, make 40% less than their male counterparts.

How Common is Your Birthday?

How Common is Your Birthday? is a simple heat map on everyone's favorite subject--themselves--showing the most popular birthdays in the U.S.

“Full disclosure: This one is mine,” says Stiles. “It has its flaws, but it's the most popular thing ever on my blog with 250,000 page views. It's been published in dozens if not hundreds of other places, including Reader's Digest, and it's set to be published in Best American Infographics this fall. People love their birthdays, I guess.”

The data is how many babies were born in the United States on each date between 1973 and 1999. Colors were shaded by birthday rank, from 1 to 366, in popularity rather than by numbers of actual births. September 16 was the most common birthday, Feb. 29 the least common for obvious reasons.

[Image: Flickr user Ricardo Lago]

Why I'm On A Mission To Teach The World Encryption

I'm not a terrorist. Or out to break the law. But I am a little creeped out by the idea of the government reading my chats, texts, and emails. So, one of my friends and I started talking about how to hide our day-to-day digital chatter from curious eyes at the NSA.

We're, well, nerds, so our first thought was to set up our own encryption system to hide our online lives--from chat and email to web browsing, to search, and to transferring files.

Encryption takes simple data--any kind of information stored on a computer--and uses a special password (called a “key”) to transform it into an unreadable garble. This garble can be sent safely over the Internet, because even if a stranger snoops on the data, they won’t know what it says. Once the data gets where it belongs, anyone who has the special key can use it to translate encrypted ishkabibble back into its original form.

Rolling your own encryption system is a little bit tricky, so my friend and I began with some ready-made tools for encrypting what we send back and forth on the Internet. Once we had the easy stuff sorted out, we started getting into more complex encryption methods. We’ll update this article as we discover more tools to help hide your online life.

Selective Vs. Global Privacy

There's never been a question that you can achieve privacy, it’s just a matter of how painful it is to get there. Before we get started, I should make a distinction between selective privacy (hiding occasional emails about particularly sensitive issues) and global privacy (hiding everything).

Setting up selective privacy isn’t very difficult: My friend and I did it very quickly. All of the programs we found are extremely easy to use. The problem: You have to add a bunch of extra steps to every quick IM or email that you send. That’s tolerable if you have a single message that absolutely needs to be encrypted, but it’s not practical if you want to be totally hidden online. One of the questions we’re out to answer is whether you can achieve global encryption without making your life a living hell.

Chat

Cryptocat is a free, open-source program that makes setting up an encrypted chat room almost as easy as sending a message using Gchat or Facebook.

The program comes as a browser add-on for Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. You just download a copy and create a chat room. Then, you pass along the name of the chat room to your buddy (or buddies) and, voila--all of your dumb jokes (or revolutionary scheming) passes through the Internet as gobbledygook until it’s decrypted on the other side.

Cryptocat has a few downsides: All the encryption and decryption adds a little bit of lag time to your messages (it feels slower than Gchat). Plus, you have to go through the hassle of creating the chat room and passing out its name. (Sending out the name has its own risks: If somebody intercepts the name of your chat room then they can use Cryptocat to join your chat room and snoop on your chat.)

But otherwise, everything is really simple: My friend and I were able to move our GChats to Cryptocat in a couple of minutes.

Email

Big webmail systems like Yahoo Mail and Gmail save every single thing you write. So if you ever want to pass a private message through a webmail system, you’ll need to encrypt what you say.

A free tool called Mailvelope makes this process fairly simple. You start off by just downloading the Mailvelope extension for Chrome or Firefox. This part is easy enough--but from here, things get (just a little bit) technical.

Remember that encrypting and decrypting messages requires a pair of keys: one key to encrypt your data, and another key to decrypt your data once it gets where it belongs. Unfortunately, you’ll need to generate your own encrypting and decrypting keys with Mailvelope. Once you generate the keys, you have to send them to your friends, who then have to import them into their own copies of the program.

It’s all a (minor) headache, but Mailvelope makes the process fairly easy, and there is some good documentation to guide you through. Plus, once you’ve gone through the trouble of setting up a Mailvelope exchange, encrypting and decrypting emails is a snap.

My friend and I are both pretty tech-savvy, so it took us about 10 minutes to set up Mailvelope and send an encrypted exchange.

[Image: Flickr user Wayne Wilkinson]

Optical character recognition and image recognition have spawned all sorts of amazing mobile apps. They can help users identify trees in the forest, identify business cards, and even measure heart rate. Now one new iPhone product, MedSnap ID, could change the way pharmacies are run by allowing for the instant identification of pills via phone camera.

The Data Strategy Behind Mobile Medical Apps

Patrick Hymel, MedSnap's CEO, told Co.Labs that his company's product can help reduce the tens of thousands of patient deaths from accidental drug interactions annually, and save pharmacies and health care providers a ton by cutting down on wasted manpower from slower traditional medication history management tools. Users place a set of pills on a special tray or a clear imaging service, take a picture with MedSnap, and the product's algorithms identify the pills from over 60 images taken in quick succession.

Pills are identified through a combination of imprint recognition (the characters or logo on the pill) and visual characteristics (size, color, density, etc.). Apart from the Alabama-based company's current database--which is primarily centered on drugs available in the United States--users can add to what the company calls the Pill Mapping Project, an effort to “index the world's prescription drug supply so that it can be ready by a technology using a smart phone in a healthcare, patient, or caregiver environment.”

Hymel said that the app's time-saving aspects also come from integration with Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Using the MedSnap ID app, clinicians can identify and screen a patient's entire pill regime in seconds, and then export data to the patient's EHR. Another selling point for hospitals is that if they purchase the app, they hypothetically will be able to cut down on costly and health-endangering complications from drug interactions.

Importantly, MedSnap ID does not need to photograph one pill at a time. Multiple pills can be screened simultaneously, and the app reports to users the pills' names, strength, and potential drug-drug or drug-disease interactions. In a good UX move, the developers set the app up to work entirely off a user's iPhone with no data pulling through 3G, 4G, or Wi-Fi. Besides saving bandwidth, this also allows the app to work in hospitals or retail pharmacies in older buildings with poor reception.

Selling One App To Patient And Provider

Although MedSnap is marketing to retail pharmacies, they do not comprise the entirety of their target market. The app, which is distributed through the App Store and requires the use of the special trays (which are mailed to customers), is being sold to clinicians, health systems, hospitals, clinics, and home health providers as well. As far as professional-grade health apps go, MedSnap ID is relatively cheap: Introductory pricing for an individual license is $70 per year per phone, along with a choice of $30 or $20 imaging surfaces. The company offers a enterprise edition as well, which allows health care professions to associate patients' electronic medical records with each pill picture via barcode scan, and to import data from MedSnap into individual electronic health records.

Identifying pills in medical settings is important, if only for the fact that an overworked, inattentive, or distracted medical professional can endanger lives by handing the wrong medication to the wrong person. Medical institutions currently use a host of proprietary products to identify pills, many of which require trips back and forth to a computer terminal. Apart from wasting time and money for the health care provider, this also ironically increases chances of a pharmacist being distracted.

[Images: MedSnap]

Dear FastCo.Labs Reader,

All day long, we talk to you, monitoring your tweets and comments for reactions. Now we’re asking for you a straight shot of feedback. That’s right--a survey. So what do you get in exchange for five precious, irreplaceable minutes of your time?

• Early access to Fast Company events
• Special offers and discounts
• Chance to win prizes
• Feelings of magnanimity

Prizes? Discounts? Offers? Magna-something? It’s all quite vague, we know--but you’ll have to sign up to find out exactly what’s in store. Here’s the survey link:

fastcompany.com/connect

But wait! There’s more. (There always is.) A survey is a great way to get standardized responses, but we don’t want just standardized responses. In fact, we want specific suggestions: What kinds of stories do you want to see? What’s boring you? What’s under-covered? What story formats work? Is anyone listening to the audio tracks on our feature stories?

This is an open call for all sorts of feedback. (Disclaimer: We may print what you write, with or without attribution. So if you’re going for backhanded compliments, go get a coffee and some Post-it notes and write a few drafts first.)

If you email cdannen@fastcompany.com with subject “Labs Rats,” along with your ideas about how to make FastCo.Labs better, I’ll reply to you personally and we can hash out your ideas. If your ideas are bad, I’ll let you know. If they’re great, we’ll use them--and give you full credit. We may be frighteningly high up in a Manhattan office building, but this ain’t no ivory tower. So please: Reach out and let us know if we’re doing things well or really really well. If you're not familiar with our mission, watch our launch video below.

We appreciate your honesty and we value your time--that’s why we spend our mornings deleting every superfluous word from our stories and making sure they come across loud and clear. Thanks for reading, and we’ll keep working hard for your eyeballs--whether you drop us a line or not.

Chris Dannen
Senior Editor, FastCo.Labs

Gabe Stein
Technical Editor, FastCo.Labs

[Image: Shutterstock]

Fragments of code hidden in the latest beta release of Apple's iOS 7 contain several lines of text that have the tech world up in arms. The strings make specific mention to an built-in fingerprint scanner in the iPhone, located on or near the Home button. Seemingly, and confirming months of speculation, the next flagship Apple smartphone will be able to read your fingerprints. And that's actually grounds for excitement.

Firstly, the idea Apple would add biometric ID sensing to its phone shouldn't really come as a surprise. Back in October 2012 Apple won a patent for a fingerprint-based biometric unlock. It's a simple design that's incorporated into Apple's signature "slide to unlock" touchscreen unlock system, and in one of the mechanisms Apple talks about it seems pretty seamless: After you've slid your finger over the screen the phone prompts you to put your finger on a window next to the home button. The phone IDs you and then proceeds to the homescreen, having positively identified the operator as the genuine owner and user of the phone.

Separately Apple bought fingerprint tech firm AuthenTec for about $350 million last summer, and was said even then to be considering using fingerprint tech in the iPhone 5, released in the fall of 2012. So the company has been researching this technology for a while, and has spent at least a third of a billion dollars in M&A activities to support securing the iPhone (and presumably iPad, and possibly Macs) for a while.

The interesting bit of this equation, of course, is why Apple would be interested in popping a fingerprint system into the iPhone. The example mentioned above and in the patent is the most obvious one--it's a super-secure way to confirm the identity of the particular user of the phone. A fingerprint system that's hard-wired into the circuitry and the firmware of the phone is far harder to defeat than a PIN code, password, and even Android gesture-based unlock...particularly important news when it's possible to use a cheap robot to physically crack a phone's password by dabbing at the screen enough times.

Considering that the iPhone has been blamed for driving up muggings by none other than the mayor of New York, perhaps the idea of securing the login to an iPhone may be a deterrent to theft: If the phone is going to bricked or completely immobilized by Apple's "Find My iPhone" service, and there's no way around the phone's security other than to use the pre-approved fingerprint, discerning thieves may be dissuaded.

Casual thieves won't, though. Because fingerprint IDs on an iPhone could be much more important. It's plausible that Apple would parcel off special user data behind a security system that requires another swipe of the user's fingertips--meaning that passwords, specially flagged photos (*ahem*), and banking details, would be doubly protected. Smartphone fingerprint accessory firm CrucialTec demonstrated exactly this sort of function for Android phones at this year's Mobile World Congress event. The idea of a fingerprint system on an iPhone is thus a matter of data security as well as hardware security.

Developer's ears will prick up at this point, because presumably there will be an official Apple API that hooks up to the fingerprint IDs and thus allows third parties to secure data inside apps. One can immediately imagine Dropbox liking the idea. Perhaps there's even scope for innovative uses of fingerprint hardware in the iPhone, in ways that Apple can't imagine right now--implementations as esoteric as gaming or TV apps.

But it's the mention of banking data that really makes fingerprint ID on an iPhone very powerful. Alongside other rumors that the next iPhone will finally have NFC technology, this means the iPhone could become a powerful tool for mobile payments. Apple's might married to payment technology in the globally popular iPhone with an extra-secure fingerprint system would potentially please the credit card and banking industry.

It's unlikely that third-party developers will get a look-in on this part of the process, but a mobile payments service could lead to all sorts of ancillary systems on an iPhone including gathering metadata or promoting adverts at the point of sale. And this is the point that third-party app developers may be able to make a killing on. Adverts, coupons, games, promotional stunts...just think about it, and keep your fingers crossed that fingerprint ID really is coming to iPhone.

[Image: Flickr user Graham Richardson]

Screensiz.es

Screensiz.es is a site that makes it easy to find the physical size, aspect ratio, and pixel dimensions of smartphones, tablets, and monitors. The resource is a quick and easy way to get basic information about the most popular devices with sortable and customizable columns that fill the site. Over a dozen different Android phones are listed and an equally sizable amount of tablets including BlackBerry's Playbook, Microsoft's Surface Pro, and Barnes & Noble's Nook line. For the devices that are less popular, screensiz.es makes locating valuable data dead simple. The site also incorporates a popularity rating which the makers say is based off monthly Google queries and fuzzy math, a feature they say is better than nothing.

Subtle Patterns

Subtle Patterns isn't a secret by any means, but the site houses some of the best images to use for project backgrounds available. The beauty and appeal for the patterns is represented in the most basic need, an unobtrusive texture beyond just plain white. One of the best features the site offers is the ability to instantly preview any pattern as the site's background. Subtle Patterns also has a new Photoshop plugin that will be available soon, allowing the same functionality of the site, but in an always up-to-date program plugin. The best feature? The patterns are free to use.

Lost Type

"Homestead" is a font that once you've seen it, you begin to see it everywhere. It's just one of the fonts available on the co-op site, Lost Type. The site uses a co-op model, bringing in different designers who all allow their fonts to be downloaded for "pay what you want." Those users seeing the tremendous value and offering to pay do see 100% of their payment going to the font's designer. Clicking "Ribbon," another distinct font offered, takes you to its own details page complete with real-world examples and other tidbits of relevant info. Lost Type has quickly become a resource every designer should know about, or already does. There are few other places online offering the quality they do in the same generous manner.

Red Pen

Red Pen fills a complicated, necessary, task and does so with a simplicity that few sites, services, or apps have been able to accomplish before. Red Pen allows a designer to drag an image onto the site, then after it uploads, have it sent to someone who can then just click on the picture to leave notes in specific places. Once the image is commented on, the uploader is notified that feedback has been given. Instead of emailing and trying to describe what area of the design you do or don't like, Red Pen allows anyone, regardless of skill level, the ability to send or comment on an image. Oh, and it gives you a short URL to the uploaded picture as well.

Pattern Tap

Pattern Tap is not a tool or utility in the traditional sense, but a resource that every designer will probably need at some point. The point of Pattern Tap is to give you ideas about different aspects of a web page. For example, the site lists categories such as 404 pages, about pages, audio players, button types, breadcrumb styles, and many more. When you're stuck in an inspiration rut, seeing different ways of implementing an item can often help. Having all the different ideas in a single place rather than having to endlessly search the web for them is probably one of the biggest features, though. Pattern Tap also allows searching based on colors, and styles, in addition to the elements.

Blokk Font

Blokk Font is self-explanatory. The problem is that you want your wireframe design to look full of content, but deciding what content to fill it with is unneeded and extra work. Blokk Font takes the gibberish (hsafjasdhgfjhdagf) and turns it into something beautiful and self-aware. Instead of Latin, or nonsense sentences, you get patterned lines which mimic the written word.

The Icon Set from Brankic1979

Described as pixel perfect icons, the set of 350 icons is freely available for apps, websites, or any other project you may have. Ranging from numbers to gears to microphones, the set of icons probably has something that will work for your needs. Even though the times when you might legitimately need a Batman logo icon are few, knowing it’s available and within reach may prompt some unique design choices just to make it work. Not just for personal use, the free icons are also available to be used in commercial works, but you just aren’t allowed to resell them, obviously.

Color By Hailpixel

There’s no shortage of color-picking tools. It’s one of the first things a designer needs to have ready to go, but Color by Hailpixel is definitely one of the more interesting ones. Visiting the site, you’re presented with a blank screen with only the reference to black (#000000). Moving your mouse changes the color on the entire screen and also gives you the hex code as well. Once you’ve found a color you like, you click on the screen and it freezes, dividing up the remainder of the screen, flashing colors again as you move your mouse. Left and right direction changes the hue, up and down changes the lightness, and scrolling changes the saturation. A tool you have to try to fully appreciate.

[Image: Flickr user John Mayer]

In exchange for effortless portability, MacBook Air users accept that their sliver-thin machines will never be able to play graphical powerhouses like Borderlands 2 or Crysis...unless they stitch together a litany of video cards and transfer cables like Larry Gadea did:

As he mentions in the video, Gadea plays on maximum settings and still achieves 90 frames per second, a feat of 3x performance benchmark improvement he repeats in other games (including Witcher 2 and Bioshock Infinite) in his original post on the TechInferno forums.

Gadea, a former software engineer at Google and infrastructure engineer at Twitter, constructed his rig out of a video card--specifically, the nVidia GTX 570 GPU, which retails for about $250--and $250 of electronics store parts.

As Gadea mentions, due to Intel’s shutting down of a MacBook-friendly Thunderbolt-to-PCI Express Bplus adapter ($180), the rig requires a slightly pricier double-jump from Thunderbolt-to-ExpressCard adapter ($134) and ExpressCard-to-PCI Express adapter ($70), but as you can see in the above video, it doesn’t affect performance. Gadea Bootcamps Windows simply out of game and GPU compatibility, but using the Thunderbolt cable and accompanying software means his setup can theoretically work on any MacBook with the appropriate PCI.BAT file.

As GearBurn asks, why spend the dough on this setup ($1,200 MacBook Air, plus $350-$500 video card rig) when you could buy a MacBook Pro with Retina Display? Despite the mess of cables and clunky shoebox-size setup, Gadea’s rig performs better--after all, the MacBook Pro still suffers from the internal Intel HD Graphics 4000, which barely breaks 10 frames per second when running Bioshock Infinite. More than that, though, is the simple liberation from Apple laptop purgatory that gamers have yearned for since the MacBook hit shelves. Bravo, dude.

[Image: Frankenstein]

There are two ways to make money on the web. You can buy and sell stuff--also known as "e-commerce," a la Amazon or eBay. Or you can sell ads--the chosen profit engine for Facebook, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Spotify, YouTube, BuzzFeed, Yelp, OKCupid, HowAboutWe, Tumblr, Yahoo, Netflix, and Hulu. For an individual person just trying to make some scratch, both these options are high-overhead with an exceptionally steep learning curve.

But there's something unfair here, according to entrepreneur Claudio Gandelman: The users who create and share much of the content that the latter sites advertise against--that is, the people that provide all the data for the targeted ads that make these sites so profitable--never make a dime. The Internet is the great disintermediator, says Gandelman, who formerly served as CEO of Match.com Latin America. And the next logical step is for the people to get paid.

A Penny For Your Thoughts--But Payable To Who?

Selling your personal, demographic, and activity data to marketers (and other third parties) has been commonplace on the web since the early 1990s. Gendelman's startup Teckler, which launched in May, works differently. On the surface it's a social media site for sharing and discovering text, audio, photos, or video (coming soon), much like any other Facebook clone. But unlike a normal social network, which sells ads and data and keeps the cash, Teckler splits all its data-derived revenue 70-30 with users, much like Apple's App Store vigorish.

"I think it’s pretty fair that if people create content they should receive something, even if they're not big," says Gandelman. "They are the proprietors, so it’s fair that they should receive something for what they create."

As a busy CEO, Gandelman says, he didn't have time to write and market a book or even to maintain a blog regularly, but he still had thoughts to share occasionally--and why shouldn't he be paid for them? If he posted on Twitter or Facebook, he'd never see a dime. And to earn a share of ad revenue through a network like BlogHer or a platform like YoTtube, you must be a power user with a certain established audience already--an audience that requires you to keep up a demanding schedule of content creation. Teckler is a way for the amateur to still get a cut of the proceeds from his or her own brain, but without all the individual overhead of a monetizable social site like Pheed.

Users Should Own Their Own Peep Shows

Teckler and Pheed aren't the only startups with variations on this model; in fact, the established personal data site Reputation.com has a more controversial idea. Founded as a way for people and businesses to scrub their online reputations, they've announced a new feature that will let users share selected tidbits of personal information-your income, or the make and model of your car--in exchange for perks, like discount offers or loyalty memberships. This kind of permission-based marketing has the potential to raise a lot of awareness about the data harvesting that companies are already doing, by asking them to pay for the peeking.

How A Personal-Data Industry Should Look

The emergence of these kinds of marketplaces was recently called for by no less a pundit than Jaron Lanier. His most recent book, Who Owns the Future?, laments the way that the information economy has destroyed the livelihoods of musicians, authors, and (through globalization and automation) essentially the whole middle class.

Lanier proposes a system of universal micropayments, something like what the Swedish company Flattr has been doing, allowing people to be rewarded for providing useful information either through self-expression or just in the course of daily interactions. As the jacket copy puts it, "It is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they do and share on the web." That is, if users ever realize the true value of the assets they've sunk into Facebook and Twitter.

[Image: Flickr user Dwayne Bent]

In the beginning of 2010, when daily deals site Groupon was really hitting its stride and copycat businesses were popping up left and right, a small startup called Yipit was just getting off the ground. Yipit was involved in daily deals, too, but rather than creating the deals itself, Yipit simply aggregated the deals offered by the other companies to offer a nice tidy list in a daily email.

Like any startup, the Yipit team planned PR and marketing around their launch and hoped that the buzz would yield a nice base of users, who in turn would share with friends and create steady word-of-mouth growth. They managed to secure the spotlight from a major tech publication and then rode the wave. “After months of toiling away in obscurity, you feel like you’ve finally made it,” wrote Vinicius Vacanti, Yipit’s CEO, on his blog. “People know what you’re working on now. People all over the world are now using your product.”

But all of that attention was, in reality, for naught. The end result was an unimpressive 200 active users, much lower than Vacanti expected given the size of the audience that read about the launch. For one exciting day, it seemed like the whole world knew about Yipit--until the following morning, when Vacanti and his team discovered the unfortunate truth about the spotlight: That is, it’s always brighter when you’re in it.

The Psychology of the App Spotlight

Many companies have had experiences like Yipit’s. In fact, it’s easy to dismiss this story altogether, chalking it up to the woes of a fledgling, unproven startup without any traction. But Yipit’s lofty expectations and subsequent disappointment weren’t just a coincidence; they were the result of the powerful and potentially detrimental psychological effect of valuing media feedback and artificial “buzz” over the only kind of feedback that actually matters: The kind that comes from users. If a startup isn’t aware of it, the spotlight effect can occur repeatedly over time--every feature release, every redesign, ever hire--until it gradually drains the company’s employees of their optimism. Time and again, artificial buzz will belie the cricket sounds coming from the user base, making everyone feel like they’re a little too drunk on their own Kool-Aid. The only option at that point is to back off your devotion to the product to avoid utter disappointment--a process we colloquially know as giving up.

But positive press is supposed to buttress entrepreneurs and spread the word, right? So what is behind this effect, exactly?

How Our Brains Short-Circuit When We Get Attention

In the late 1990s, Dr. Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues recruited a large group of Cornell University undergrads for a simple psychological experiment. In one room, five students sat patiently at a table. In another room, one student met with researchers and was asked to put on a new T-shirt. The student could choose between three T-shirts, each with the face of a different iconic figure: Bob Marley, Jerry Seinfeld, or Martin Luther King Jr. With the new T-shirt on, the student was taken to join the rest of the group.

However, after just a few moments of being in the room--before the student could even sit down--a researcher quickly mumbled an excuse about being “too far behind to join this group...” and took the shirt-choice student back to the other room. Then the remaining students at the table completed a brief questionnaire while the student with the T-shirt answered a few questions separately. What Gilovich wanted to know: Would the student, pleased to wear a new, trendy T-shirt in front of the group, overestimate how many people noticed it?

The definitive answer: Yes. In reality, Gilovich and his team found that an average of only two of the five students in the group noticed the T-shirt that the subject had chosen. On the other hand, the students who had been segregated from the group and asked to choose a T-shirt estimated on average that at least four people remembered it. In other words, they overestimated their peers' attention levels by double.

In conclusion of the study, Gilovich and his colleagues wrote:

People tend to believe that more people take note of their actions and appearance than is actually the case. We dub this putative phenomenon the spotlight effect: People tend to believe that the social spotlight shines more brightly on them than it really does.

The Underlying Enemy Of Your Launch Is Self-Consciousness

The problem with over-estimating the attention others pay you--what can be called the “spotlight effect”--is that it causes us to behave in ways that are not consistent with the reality of our circumstances. Simply put, our self-consciousness derails our decision-making.

We’ve all experienced this: You spill food on your shirt at lunch. Assuming that everyone will notice the stain, you spend the rest of the day avoiding social encounters to save yourself the embarrassment. In truth, it’s unlikely that anyone would notice the stain at all. Instead, they just notice you behaving awkwardly.

A startup that is affected by the spotlight effect might overthink their marketing goals, underestimate the cost of acquiring customers, unintentionally craft an inauthentic brand, or set unrealistic expectations--all things that result in an emotionally frustrated team. Of course, it’s possible for a company to overcome these or other missteps, as Yipit did, but that’s missing the point: Time, money, and optimism are at a premium for a startup, so each small miscalculation is a step toward an undesirable fate. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts, as a company repeatedly behaves in a way that is not consistent with the reality of their situation.

As Venture Capitalist Brad Feld wrote in his book Burning Entrepreneur:

The great entrepreneurs just keep building their companies. They focus relentlessly on their products, their customers, and their people. [...] They just keep at it and the very best ones shut out and ignore all the noise.

How To Keeping the Spotlight in Check

Is there any way to mitigate the spotlight effect? Even when we’re aware that it’s occurring, it’s incredibly difficult to prevent ourselves from overestimating the amount of attention we’re receiving. To find out whether it’s possible to mitigate the effect of the spotlight, I spoke with Dr. Gilovich himself. He offered three suggestions, specific to companies, that he thought would help startups maintain appropriate focus:

1. Consider the opposite: Gilovich explained that when we anticipate more attention than usual (in the form of PR or a big marketing event) we expect that the audience will be massive. We concentrate on the best possible scenario. To bring ourselves back down to earth, we should consider the opposite outcome. If your startup had a large amount of negative press, how bad would it really hurt you? In most cases, it would wear off after a week or so and you’d continue business as usual. And when you receive positive attention, you can expect a similar effect.
2. Whittle down to the truth: Dr. Gilovich described a strategy in which you envision a big circle that represents everyone in the target audience for your product. Then imagine a smaller concentric circle, which represents everyone that will read the publication your company appeared in. Then a smaller circle for the people that will actually read the whole article. And a smaller circle for the number of people that will click through to your site. And smaller. And smaller. Eventually you’ve narrowed down to a tiny circle that represents the microcosm that might try your product and like it. A nice, humbling way to take on the spotlight effect.
3. Seek a variety of perspectives: Rather than focusing on one data point, such as the total number of people that will hear about your product at its press launch, focus on other variables like whether or not these people are even in your target audience. Dr. Gilovich acknowledged that one of the best ways to take in different perspectives is to receive constant feedback from a variety of people who are outsiders to your company and your industry.

For a startup, capturing the spotlight from the press can be a huge advantage--it always feels good to have free publicity and third-party validation. But if all the hype inhibits your judgment and leads to poor, unfounded decisions, the spotlight will be the slow death of your company. In the words of Brad Feld, work to “shut out and ignore the noise” and you’ll find it easier to avoid the negative effects of the spotlight.

Max Ogles is a writer and entrepreneur based in Utah. He does product marketing and content strategy for mobile health startup Coach Alba. Connect with him on Twitter @maxogles.

[Spotlight: SERGEI PRIMAKOV via Shutterstock]

When I spoke with Tim Pool on the phone, the Vice reporter and media innovator (first to pioneer the use of drones for reporting on demonstrations, for instance) was having a typically busy week. Just after coming back from working in the United Kingdom, Pool was now in Las Vegas getting ready to visit Def Con and Black Hat--the world's two best known cybersecurity conferences, which both take place within days of each other in Las Vegas's searing summer heat. Pool was interested in the reactions from Las Vegas tourists, many of whom likely had no idea that thousands of computer hackers and eccentric tech geniuses were about to disrupt their vacation.

He was, however, more interested in sharing his findings from using Google Glass as a journalist. Using Glass, Pool shoots livestreaming footage for Vice.com and takes pictures from the midst of volatile demonstrations and other newsworthy events. It also helps him see his producers from thousands of miles away, speak to locals who don't understand English, and even allows him to instantly access his home computer in the middle of a revolution.

The Biggest Thing To Happen To Journalism Since The iPhone

In our conversation, Pool said Glass was the biggest change to his reporting toolkit since the iPhone. After being accepted as a member of the Google Glass Explorer program, he began tinkering with Glass in order to add functionality useful for him as a journalist. Using Launchy, an Android app launcher program for Glass OS, Pool quickly added livestreaming, voice translation, and remote access capabilities to his headset. Using a Bluetooth mini-keyboard, Pool is able to access his desktop from volatile points in the field, see his files displayed in his field of vision, and bring up any file he might need to consult on background.

While Pool notes that Glass currently has technical obstacles--it can be constrained by bandwidth, the battery life is relatively poor, and, as he notes on his Google+ page, it is surprisingly susceptible to tear gas, he considers it a huge asset to his reporting. Most important, it seems, is the safety and non-distraction factor. While it might be ironic given all the talk of Google Glass bans, he swears that wearing the headset saves him from distraction during demonstrations where there's risk of harm. To give one example, Pool says wearing Glass helped him keep his cool during a volatile demonstration in New York City over the Trayvon Martin verdict. Pool was able to film protesters being detained while focusing on avoiding arrest or injury, thanks to Glass. Using his headset, he shot the below footage.

Pool's Crisis Reporting Toolkit

Pool, who joined Vice in early 2013, is best known as the co-creator of Occupy Wall Street's iconic livestream. His organization, The Other 99, used everyday technology such as Samsung mobile phones and a modded Parrot AR.Drone quadrocopter to feed 24/7 footage from Zuccotti Park to tens of thousands of viewers and major media organizations worldwide. Because Pool works with small organizations with limited layers of bureaucracy, the journalist has been able to experiment with tools and feature sets that the entire industry, in my opinion, is bound to adopt.

What Glass Needs To Be A Complete Storytelling System

During our conversation, Pool was quick to note that Glass isn't an all-in-one tool. Instead, the headset is part of his toolkit alongside an HD camera. He says that the headset takes decent quality footage whenever there's a volatile situation where using a standard camera would be imprudent. “I shoot photos and video with Glass, and b-roll shows up immediately,” Pool said. “When I film, one of my phones livestreams footage, and another camera films in HD. GoPro can be inconvenient when I have to be on the ground for 13 hours; Glass streamlines things.”

“Glass allows me to keep my focus--When I'm running, having my hands free is particularly important. When things get intense with plastic bullets, I don't want to stare at a camera, I just hit record. It puts me more in the moment when I have a POV shot.”

Since joining Vice, Pool has used Glass to cover demonstrations in Istanbul, Brazil, and New York, as well as Cairo in the days leading up to the Egyptian Army's coup in early July.

The Surprising Potential Of Google Glass GIFs

Pool has been quietly experimenting with turning his Glass video feed into GIFs on his Google+ page. The self-professed "media hacker" stumbled upon one of Glass's most intriguing uses: Quick GIFs of breaking news events and interesting things a Glass wearer sees... all assembled on the fly. One sample is below, and we've scattered others throughout the story.

In the below clip, Pool filmed himself doing a little parkour at New York's Union Square subway stop.

How To Tweet From A Riot

One ingenious hack Pool made to his Glass was setting up Twitter integration through IFTTT. Using an IFTTT formula and a dummy email account, Pool can instantly tweet photos or text from his Glass with no hands required.

Glass Auto-Translation--And Other Technical Tricks

In Istanbul and Cairo, Pool found that his modded headset's translation functions came particularly in handy. Using a voice translation app, Pool was able to have words and simple phrases in Turkish and Arabic fed to him. This could be as simple as sussing out how to say “Where is the bathroom?” in Arabic or, alternately, to know the right word to ask a store owner when you're trying to get a receipt for your brand-new gas mask. (Pro tip: Pool says the word in Turkish for a receipt is “makbuz.”)

However, Pool noted that this functionality was crippled somewhat in Brazil due to bandwidth issues.

Using Glass To Remote-Work With Editors And Producers

Pool is particular enamored with Glass's integration with two existing Google products--Hangouts and Google+.

Using Hangouts, any journalist wearing Glass in the field can see and hear their producer or editor in a heads-up display. As long as bandwidth is cooperative, the two-way conversation between producer and content producer lets them collaborate to cover breaking news or event-specific events in a way that's unimaginable with mobile phones. The way Pool describes it, it's almost science fictionish--his producer's webcam shows up on his horizon as the two discuss story angles during Turkish riots where vans are being set alight.

More important for Pool, any pictures taken via Glass are instantly ported to Google+. This deep integration with Glass appears to be part of Google's secret sauce for the well-designed-but-relatively-devoid-of-users social network. Any time Pool snaps a public picture with Glass, it's instantly posted to his Google+ account--making assembling articles for the Vice team much easier. It's the equivalent of a news agency getting a live feed of every single picture taken with a reporter's camera.

The heads-up display also works marvelously in other cases, such as when Pool decided to take footage of Cairo via Glass on a rooftop.

The Future Of Glass-Based Reporting

Although Pool is part of the Explorer program, his Glass use is relatively unsupervised. He has been in touch with sympathetic engineers at Google, but his efforts to push Glass's boundaries for journalism and newsgathering have been done largely on his own.

For Vice, the results are a coup de grace: Glass livestreaming alone, especially with the GIF integration shown above, gives a flexibility for covering breaking news that Skype, Vine, Instagram, and Twitter can't match. As for the other uses... once Glass opens up to the general public, I'm sure we're going to hear a lot more about them.

[Slideshow Images: Vice & Tim Pool]

Correction: An earlier version of this article mistakenly said Glass does not shoot HD video. According to Pool, Glass does shoot 720p HD.

Few people expect 3D printing--particularly in the home--to be as much of a revolution as it actually could be. Whether it's Foxconn's boss or industry journalists, people seem to think this is some kind of hobby phenomenon. Kind of the way homebrew computers were in the 1970s, before they changed absolutely everything.

But the household economics of 3D printing, when considered more academically, suggest that relatively low-tech 3-D printers in the home of the average user can equate to incredible high cash savings for a family's bottom line.

Researchers from Michigan Technical University set out to approach the idea of a home 3-D printer from a satisfyingly tangential perspective. Instead of starting with the commonly expressed position "I can't imagine what one would need a 3-D printer at home for" they instead found 20 items that could be useful for the home that are already listed on the Thingiverse 3-D objects database--objects like a chess piece, a fruit juicer, and shower curtain clips. They printed these objects on a simple FDM-type home 3-D printer and then calculated the effective cost of producing the objects in this way in terms of print time, energy use, and consumption of plastic filament. They then compared the totals to the typical cost bracket a consumer could expect to pay for the same 20 items in stores.

The results may surprise you. 3-D printing the 20 chosen objects cost only about $20 and took around 25 hours. In a store, depending on the quality of the products chosen, the same items would cost between $300 and about $2,000. Assuming the average family would only print about 20 objects of similar practical utility in a year, a printer like a RepRap would pay for itself in savings in just about four years.

That's impressive enough, but the team points out that there's not much of a question of wear and tear on a printer at such low output levels, and even if there is a cost associated with wear, in a design like RepRap replacement parts that do wear out can be printed on the printer itself. It's also worth remembering that 3-D printing is a two-part process, with the hardware being driven by a suite of algorithms that determine the printing process. These algorithms are constantly being tweaked and thus it's possible that the efficiency and quality of output of 3-D printers can even go up as time passes.

Think about what 20 simple items you have recently bought, and consider the implications of this research. Just this weekend I found myself longing for a 3-D printer because I wanted a simple plastic lid to stop cat food from smelling in the refrigerator. No local shops stocked one, and though I also did other shopping it took a considerable time to find one in a distant supermarket--with the product costing me €1.50. If I had a 3-D printer I could've quickly created a 3-D model, or found one online, and printed it out for a tiny fraction of that cost.

Meanwhile 3-D scanning, the counterpart tech of 3-D printing in terms of home usefulness, is becoming easier all the time thanks to innovations like the Fuel3D 3-D scanner Kickstarter project. This is a "point and shoot" 3-D scanner that should cost less than $1,000 to buy and which indicates that in the near future consumer-ready 3-D scanners should be available. Developments of this type mean that 3-D printing at home, where one either creates an object to print, finds a version online, or scans a pre-existing object that you perhaps intend to replace, is already an economically sensible proposition. Then take this idea and imagine what it would mean if your local corner store had a printer, even if your home didn't?

The practical upshot of these innovations from an industry point of view is significant. If your product is in some way applicable to 3-D modeling, 3-D scanning, or 3-D printing--even if you're simply planning to make objects like simple toys, tchotchkes, or novelty items like a 3-D printed business card--then don't hold back. With 3-D printers costing less than $300 hitting the market, there's going to be space for developers to sell software, improve algorithms, try out nefarious things, and even invent whole new classes of product. That is, if you have faith in the 3-D printing revolution.

[Image: Flickr user Mirko Tobias Schaefer]

Let's be honest: FM radio is not what it used to be. Of all the music, news, commentary, and other audio content available in the world, the FM dial only captures a tiny--and bland--percentage of it. If this wasn't obvious before, it's been made clear by the advent of podcasting and the explosion of smart, personalized audio apps available on computers, phones, and tablets. Why tune in to a commercial-packed parade of the same top 40 hits when you can listen to music based on your own tastes? Why bother with whoever happens to be rambling on talk radio right this very moment, when your favorite host is a tap away? The Internet is far better at delivering audio to people than radio waves are.

So why does FM radio persist? For one, it still makes money. It's also built into just about every car on the road. And as magical as the Internet is, FM radio waves are still more ubiquitous and reliable (you never hear about the radio going down).

But web-based music technology is improving quickly and everyone knows it’s giving FM a run for its money. We have 4G mobile devices and new cars with audio apps built into the dashboard. A simple Bluetooth connection can paste your playback UI of choice from the tiny screen to the dashboard or the controls on the steering wheel.

Since cars are such a mainstay of FM radio, bridging the user experience gap between phones and automobiles is going to be a crucial part of overhauling what we today know as "radio." It'll be a while before FM is rendered unrecognizable, but a handful of today's most innovative players seem especially well-positioned to help forge that future. Here they are.

Stitcher Radio

What most makes Stitcher Radio feel like a viable replacement for the FM dial isn't the app's personalized radio stations. Nor is it the smart discovery features built in throughout the interface. Those things are great, but what makes it feel like radio is something far simpler: The audio is infinite.

Once you load Stitcher with the podcasts and non-commercial FM streams of your choice, it starts to learn what you love. You can build out "stations" of programs (I have stations for tech, world news, and music commentary, for instance). As you listen and tap the Pandora-style thumbs up/down buttons, it gets even smarter. Using this knowledge, it builds out a customized station of recommended programs, fueling the discovery of new audio shows.

Most crucially of all, listening to Stitcher is a "lean back" experience. When one program or segment is finished, it jumps to the next one automatically. This simple feature (along with the FM streams) is what sets it apart from other podcasting apps. It's also what saves you from careening to your tragic and untimely demise while you're listening in the car. It even has a "Car Mode" to simplify the controls should you need to access them.

Swell

One of the biggest obstacles apps face in their quest to replace FM radio is their own interfaces. In order to compete with radio, apps need to be pleasant and safe to use while driving. In the car, more so than any other context, simplicity is key.

Swell takes this mantra to an extreme, stripping out much of the functionality one expects to see in a mobile audio app and giving the user very little opportunity to stare down at a screen and make decisions. Billing itself as a sort of "Pandora for news," Swell lets users select broad topic areas like "technology" or "music" and then auto-generates a playlist of public radio and podcast audio content that cycles through itself without user intervention. The only audio controls the user has are to listen, pause, swipe to skip, or jump 30 seconds forward or backward. Over time, Swell learns what you like and hones its playlists accordingly. Think Stitcher, but more serendipitous.

NPR

You don't have to be a VC-funded tech startup to master mobile digital radio. The folks at NPR have long been forward-thinking about new platforms and technologies, and the smartphone revolution did not catch them off guard. The organization's mobile apps sport the perfect blend between live public radio streams and on-demand NPR shows. This combo single-handedly eliminates the need to touch the FM dial to hear what's on now, while simultaneously serving up an archive of your favorite shows on demand. The app's playlist builder encourages hands-free, lean-back playback wherever the user may be.

It's not just about phones and tablets, though. NPR's digital team has been very proactive about ensuring the organization's content is available on as many platforms as possible. That, of course, means offering a variety of apps for iOS, Android, and other prominent mobile platforms. But it also means integrations with smart TV platforms and, most importantly, teaming up with car manufacturers. Old media, my eye.

Pandora

The notion that Pandora could disrupt terrestrial radio isn't exactly a new one. On the surface, it's almost too obvious to mention. But Pandora's position at the forefront of Internet radio should not be taken for granted. The company faces fierce competition from huge players like Google and Apple and its struggle to reduce onerous music licensing costs has won it more bad press than progress.

Still, Pandora has two huge advantages. For one, its music recommendation and playlist generation technology--fueled both by machines and the human expertise of trained musicians--is still superior to that of its competitors. Some are gaining ground, but there's still something to be said for hiring real-life musicians to feed the algorithms (and eight solid years of data generated by millions of listeners doesn't hurt either). Pandora's other key asset is its strategic focus on cross-platform availability. The company is partnering with more and more car manufacturers to ensure that its smart music discovery engine is effortlessly available where most people do their radio listening.

Spotify

The obvious one: Spotify. At its core, it’s not an Internet radio service. But the preeminent all-you-can-stream music subscription service has bolted on its own Pandora-like radio product of its own and its new "Discover" tab is very, very good at surfacing music you either already love or are bound to enjoy. Crucially, both features are available on Spotify's mobile apps, which makes them a Bluetooth connection or audio cable away from supplanting whatever top 40 fluff is blaring through the fuzz of FM.

By combining on-demand music with Pandora-style Internet radio, Spotify offers the best of both worlds. You can curate your own listening experience like an iPod with unlimited capacity or you can let the algorithms pick songs for you. In this case, that automated curation is powered by the Echo Nest, a music intelligence engine that deserves a nod of its own. The service also fuels Rdio’s radio feature, iHeartRadio, and a long list of Internet radio apps out there.

What gives Spotify the radio crown is its combination of personalized stations, top-notch curated discovery, and on-demand streaming of albums and songs galore. Spotify’s radio and playlists make for a more hands-free, and thus safer experience for drivers. With the liberty to browse your favorite subset of Spotify's 20 million songs (not to mention your own library, which you can sync with Spotify's mobile apps), there's even less of a reason to tune in to the commercially motivated whims of some deejay.

SoundCloud

One doesn't usually associate SoundCloud with Internet radio. Unlike the likes of Spotify, iTunes, and Google Play, SoundCloud doesn't even have a feature with "radio" in its name. They're not trying to compete with Pandora. But in its quest to become the YouTube of audio, the growing social audio service is unwittingly building out an experience that could soon rival radio.

SoundCloud started as a repository for bedroom demos, fan-made remixes, and tracks from independent artists. It has since blossomed into something utilized by labels big and small and that established artists use to float new material. The amount of music available on SoundCloud (much of which is absent from Spotify and other streaming services) is staggering. To top it all off, the Berlin-headquartered company has been actively courting podcasters, public radio outlets, and known radio personalities, encouraging them to use SoundCloud as a supplementary publishing platform. The result is a hyper-varied selection of audio content that makes terrestrial stations feel staler than ever.

Shuffler.fm

It doesn't get anywhere near as much attention as these other apps, but Shuffler.fm deserves a nod for its crack at music curation. Rather than relying on algorithms or even its own team of music experts, the service turns prominent music bloggers collectively into deejays. The service mines some of the hottest music blogs, crawls them for audio and video and aggregates it all by genre, effectively creating crowd-curated radio stations and turning the modern variety of music tastemakers--bloggers, that is--into something more analogous to disc jockeys of yesteryear. But there’s a twist: Instead of playlists generated by the traditional methods of radio programming, with a crowdsourced, blogosphere-fueled twist.

Touting itself as a “Flipboard for music,” the iOS app and its browser-based counterpart do an excellent job of digging up the gems making the rounds on more under-the-radar music blogs. And the genres go beyond the broad and expected. If terms like “shoegaze,” “chillwave,” and “future garage” mean anything to you, you’ll appreciate what Shuffler.fm is doing.

iHeartRadio

For all the wonder of algorithms and APIs, there’s still something to be said for the old-fashioned way of curating music, if it’s done right. If the future features a hybrid of the old and new, then Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio will undoubtedly play a central role in forging it.

On the surface, iHeartRadio feels more like a defensive reaction than a bold act of innovation. But by merging terrestrial FM streams with Echo Nest-powered, personalized Internet radio stations, the delightfully cross-platform app stakes out the middle ground between what was and what’s next. You’ve got to give Clear Channel credit. This is more forward-thinking than anything the newspaper industry tried when it was poised to be gutted by technological change. Sometimes, rather than waiting around, it makes more sense to try and disrupt yourself.

[Image: Flickr user Tobias Abel]

The dream of a connected home, where smart devices communicate like technologically advanced Toy Story characters, still feels far off to most of us. In a fragmented market cluttered with devices chatting in over a dozen different communication protocols, “smart” has become a fraught concept. Imagine you’re living in the very near future: Your coffee pot refuses to make friends with the television, and your iPhone alarm won’t tolerate the allegedly intelligent bedroom mood lighting. It’s enough to inspire an “Internet of things” crisis meeting, and this reality isn’t even here yet.

The problem, according to the creators of a new device called WigWag, is that smart devices need a common language. The WigWag device attempts to ameliorate the problem with a piece of hardware similar to a Twine sensor with an app-based operating system. The goal of the platform is to make protocol-specific, smart-object jargon simple enough for normal human beings to dictate through simple “if this, then that” rules--like IFTTT for smart appliances.

Built on an open source language called DeviceJS, the WigWag platform allows developers to use JavaScript to build automated home environments. For non-coders, WigWag also offers a graphical “When Then” smartphone UI so that anyone can design rules and engineer their smart home.

What’s Inside This Smart Device

The most basic WigWag package consists of the Relay and Sensor Block and can connect an entire house. The Relay connects WigWag and smart devices to the product’s cloud service, which pulls Internet functionality like email, Dropbox, and Twitter into the network. Eight different plugins mean WigWag’s Sensor Block can detect light, motion, sound, temperature, humidity, movement, and contact closure, and can also set up infrared tripwires.

How The WigWag Ecosystem Operates

IPhone users can incorporate new smart devices into their WigWag network by scanning a QR code while Android phones automatically detect devices. “It’s as simple as choosing a sense, like motion, or temperature and then choosing a device to help,” says cofounder Ed Hemphill, an ex-military signals officer who named WigWag after a flag-waving protocol the army used to signal artillery and infantry across a battlefield.

More sophisticated users can build more complex rules or use JavaScript to write their own rules, and DeviceJS affords users and developers wiggle-room for swapping smart devices in and out of their smart networks.

“When you build a rule, you’re talking about a light. You’re not talking about a brand of light,” says Hemphill. “You can swap bulbs out and, as far as the rules are concerned, the lights continue to work.”

So what does a conditional rule look like? WigWag has many Kickstarter backers fitting out entire houses with sensor blocks, usually one per room. We asked Hemphill, his design team, and their merry band of Kickstarters to share how they’re hypothetically plotting to WigWag their home.

How WigWag Can Help You Assemble The Smart Home Of Your Nerd Dreams

Here are some use-cases to help ignite your home-automation brainstorms:

Safety

Kickstarter backers are building custom alarm & alert system so devices can “send” their owner texts and emails.

One backer is interested in monitoring their 92-year-old mother-in-law who lives on her own. They’re looking to receive messages or changing light colors based on her movement.

Another backer helps a quadriplegic disabled person on a daily basis. WigWag will automatically turn their lighting and home components on and off.

Convenience

A dog-loving backer wants to keep their pets off the sofa when they aren’t home. The combination of the Presence Tag and Sensor Block will let them know if the dog sneaks onto a "no-no" spot.

Hemphill’s cofounder's wife wants to use the Presence Tag to warn her if she leaves her bag at home while driving away.

And some from the design team:

"I would make an alarm clock--a rule that turns on my speakers and presses play using the IR blaster at a certain time. I would enhance the alarm clock by making another rule that blasts the volume if it detects that I'm not up and about during the few minutes after it rings. This would be my first reliable alarm clock."
- Ben Lozano, WigWag Lead Mobile Developer

"When I wake up, I get the news or the TV comes on, the lights come on, coffee starts to brew. As I walk through the house things come on."
- Patrick, WigWag’s social media intern

"When you’re driving home from work the WigWag app knows your location and sends a message to the cloud commanding that your oven, A/C, and lights turn on. When you arrive, you can eat, your house is chill, and you do not need to find a light switch."
- Diego, WigWag’s Android developer

Monitoring

One backer told Hemphill’s team about a problem in Hyderabad, India with water levels and pumps. The backer’s envisioning a way for the city to save large amounts of power by enabling individual pumps to only run exactly when required based on WigWag sensors in each house.

How To Get Your Hands On WigWag

WigWag’s raised $237, 008--nearly five times their project goal--since its Kickstarter launch on June 19. Over 1,100 people backed the project. All WigWag circuit boards are manufactured in China, with final product testing and assembly in Austin, Texas. Hemphill’s looking to use funds to refine how the product looks in the lead up to November--WigWag’s target shipping date.

From taming dogs, to monitoring old ladies, Hemphill thinks WigWag’s got the power to pull the thread linking the expanding, but fragmented, Internet of things together. “When a pie’s growing its not so much about fighting with other companies. Its really about helping the pie grows and getting a slice of it,” he says. “The main issue is the 99% of people that don't know anything about any of this.”

[Image: Flickr user Derek Gavey]