Pretty packaging, tissue, ribbon, and a brand logo is the e-commerce equivalent of an eye-catching storefront.

There was a time when a cardboard box was just a simple brown vessel in which to mail packages. These days, as we purchase more products online than we do in brick-and-mortar stores, brands are using attractive packaging to create a delightful unwrapping experience that allows them to stand out from the crowd. As our doorsteps are piling up with an increasingly diverse array of boxes, bubble mailers, and envelopes, a colorful, beautifully designed box is the modern-day equivalent to having an eye-catching storefront.

While big e-commerce companies like Amazon, Zappo's, Target, Macy's, and Walmart still send products in generic, utilitarian packaging, startups have been leading the charge to make boxes and envelopes more exciting. It's a relatively inexpensive way for them to engage with their customers. "Brick-and-mortar stores inherently have endless opportunities for customers to have sensory experiences," says MeUndies's creative director, Andrew Teague. "These experiences leave an immediate impression on customers and are interpreted, consciously or not, as a reflection of your values as a business. As an online-only brand, we have very few tactile moments with our customers, so when we get that opportunity, we need to make it count."

Many Birchbox customers, for instance, say they feel like they are receiving a present when they get their box in the mail every month. (Of course, packaging alone can't keep a company afloat; Birchbox is currently going through major financial setbacks and has fired dozens of employees.)

Until recently, it wasn't so easy to design and create your own branded packaging.

This is something Jesse Genet discovered during her career as an entrepreneur. In 2014, she'd been on Shark Tank and then subsequently spent time at Y-Combinator working on a company that would allow people to print graphics on surfaces like a T-shirt or a wall with a dye that would be activated by natural sunlight. One of the things she discovered in this process is that small businesses struggle with the process of buying branded mailing supplies.

"We were delightfully surprised by how easy technology was making some parts of our business," Genet says. "Platforms like Shopify and Stripe were invaluable to us," she explains, "but when it came to the packaging side of things, everything was really old school: We were dealing with a whole bunch of vendors asking us to scribble down notes on PDF printouts."

As she dug through the supply chain, she began to learn about why it was so hard. Small- to mid-sized e-commerce businesses would go to packaging distributors like Uline. But if they wanted to customize their packages, they would need to go to a broker who would likely have contacts at larger manufacturing companies who would be able to do the job. "The typical process involved combing through Alibaba and interacting with people who can barely speak English," she says. "You would be wiring money to people and hope for the best. It was a very weird world."

So a year ago, Genet and her business partner Stephan Ango decided to come up with a platform that would solve the problem. She founded Lumi, a platform that allows brands to upload logos and designs, then create their own customized tape, boxes, mailers, stamps, and bags.

The founders invested heavily to develop a dashboard for their users that allows them to play around with colors and fonts to achieve the look they want. "Our website acts as a layer that replaces the brokers and the middlemen," she explains. "Underneath that layer, we have selected the company that we think is the best-in-class manufacturer for each product we sell," such as padded mailers or embossed stamps, Genet says.

So when an order comes through, Lumi places an order with one of these other manufacturers. This means it does not need to have a warehouse full of blank boxes waiting to be customized. Lumi can also negotiate high-volume rates, since it is placing such large orders annually, then pass the savings on to the small businesses that they work with. These are rates that startups would never be able to get on their own. T-shirt brand Cotton Bureau reports lowering packaging costs by 34%. Underwear brand MeUndies, for instance, says it managed to save $100,000 a year by switching to Lumi while maintaining the same quality.

Genet also points out that the right packaging can lower shipping costs. For instance, apparel brands might think about using expandable envelopes rather than boxes, since they are useful for shipping bulky soft goods but don't cost as much to ship.

Lumi is now working with a wide range of growing startups including brands like Primary, Threadless, and the Cotton Bureau, whose packaging has become well-known in their industries. "These are brands that take it for granted that packaging is a central part of the customer experience," she says. Little touches like customized drawstring bags for small products might seem like an unnecessary expense, but many customers keep these bags to store things in, which allows brands to make a lasting impression.

MeUndies recently released a special edition underwear that featured Keith Haring's art and wanted to create a richer experience for customers. Rather than using their standard mailers, they created a special package covered in Haring's art. "Showing how much we valued the collaboration ensured our customers would do the same," says Teague. "It also extended the amount of time they were engaged with us—from the moment they caught a glimpse of Haring's art in their mailbox to the moment they put on the undies—precious seconds e-com brands don't easily get." They're working on a similar experience this year.

Many moments like this live on in social media. Lots of customers take pictures of really special unboxing experiences and share them on Instagram, which serves as free advertising. "This is the only time—apart from the product—that they are physically interacting with the customer," says Genet. "It's a key differentiator between them and everyone else that is shipping stuff to that person."

A new AI platform hopes to inject more human interaction into the dreaded yet vital manager-to-employee feedback loop.

Though it's an integral part of a properly functioning managerial relationship, feedback remains a sticky subject for many whose jobs require them to provide it.

Some fear the backlash that may result, others worry that it may jeopardize their career, and still others fret that their feedback is getting completely ignored.

In fact, a recent study by VitalSmarts found that 83% of employees have witnessed a colleague say something that has had a negative impact on their careers, something the study's authors referred to as "suicide by feedback."

On the other hand, regular feedback is vital for employee engagement, which can lead to profitability and productivity increases of more than 20%, according to a 2014 Gallup Poll.

So how can managers get over their fear of the repercussions while keeping their employees engaged? One company thinks they've found a solution by supplementing the very human process of managerial relationships with artificial intelligence tools.

"In today's fast-paced work environment, managers seldom focus their energies on coaching employees continuously, yet feedback and recognition are most effective when they're given instantly with appropriate context and specificity," Kris Duggan, the CEO of BetterWorks, tells Fast Company.

The enterprise software company builds employee work profiles, known as "Work Graphs," based on data from integrations with Google Apps, email, and Office 365, as well as Salesforce, JIRA, and Slack. The machine-learning algorithm specifically tracks each employee's goal progress, goal alignment, comments, cheers, nudges, cross-functional collaboration, recognition hashtags, and more, according to Duggan.

"BetterWorks then uses the Work Graph to prompt feedback and recognition from the relevant people, whether it's managers or peers," he says. "We want to bring feedback and recognition into the weekly workflow of managers, making it more natural and ingrained in their relationships with their reports," adds Duggan.

Duggan explains that a major contribution to a top company goal may warrant recognition from the leadership team, while reaching a team goal will prompt a peer to deliver feedback and recognition. The AI platform has also been designed to recognize each users' preferred method of interaction, such as whether they want to receive continuous feedback in real time, or in batches at specific moments during the day.

"As this data surfaces, so does the ability to apply machine learning to compare trends across departments, workers, or organizations as a whole," says Duggan. The AI feature will be available at no additional cost to users of BetterWorks' Goal and Performance Development software, which starts at $20 per user per month.

Injecting the feedback process with AI capabilities is in part a reaction to the demands of the millennial generation, 85% of whom feel more confident when they receive regular feedback from managers. Duggan adds that the tool was designed with those that grew up on social media in mind.

"With Facebook likes, recipients receive immediate feedback, often a feel-good signal that represents their friend's sentiment on the content," he says. "Applied in the workplace setting, this type of instant feedback and recognition is a quick solution to the constant need to give and receive feedback."

Currently, companies such as TINYpulse and 15Five offer more continuous feedback loops through software that produces short surveys that are collected weekly.

Recent research, however, suggests that millennials and gen Z still crave in-person communication in the workplace, which Duggan says the BetterWorks AI platform strives to foster, not replace.

"No matter what, peers and managers still have to take the action of recognizing employees, and our new features make it easy for them to do so," he says. "Since our platform is positioned to understand when an employee makes a contribution to the organization, we can surface this to the most relevant users. In this way, feedback and recognition becomes significantly more meaningful."

In other words, Duggan argues that applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to the employee feedback process will foster more human interaction, not less.

Companies that have sweetened their paid leave policies in recent years have been rewarded beyond good feelings.

When it comes to maternity leave, not all companies see the costs and benefits in the same way.

All of the companies on Working Mother magazine's 100 Best Companies list—released today—offer at least a few weeks of fully paid leave (an average of nine weeks, up from eight last year). Companies in the top 10 offer an average of 11 weeks. Contrast this with the U.S. private sector as a whole, where, according to Working Mother's numbers, only 26% of employers offer coverage beyond short-term disability leave. Only three states and six cities have enacted paid parental leave programs for their workers this year.

That's quite a gap. It raises the question of how these organizations perceive the economics of leave. While a better-than-average policy may land a company on a magazine's list, is there any business benefit to be gained beyond that?

Conversations with a few companies that have increased paid leave over time suggest that sweetening leave packages is not just about warm, fuzzy feelings. To be sure, companies often change many benefits at once, meaning it's difficult to attribute outcomes to any one change. But paid leave, they report, can generate returns in two areas.

Helping With Retention

Replacing people is expensive. This is especially true for specialized, skilled work. "The number that tends to get thrown around is 150% of an individual's salary," says Barbara Wankoff, executive director for diversity and inclusion at KPMG. If a company has gone to the trouble of hiring and training someone, avoiding voluntary turnover boosts the bottom line.

Some new mothers are 100% sure they want to stay home with their babies. Some are eager to get back to work. But many have mixed feelings. If the transition back to work after giving birth is too difficult, a mother might decide it's not worth it. Companies with longer paid leaves recognize that there is a huge difference between an 8-week-old baby, who may be waking up multiple times per night to eat and who might not have good head control yet, and a 16- to 18-week-old baby, who has a good chance of sleeping through the night, may be starting solid foods (reducing the pressure on mom for breastfeeding), and can smile and interact with other caregivers.

Accenture, the consulting company, doubled its paid maternity leave last year, to 16 weeks. According to Stacey Jones in Accenture's media relations department, the firm subsequently saw a nearly 40% reduction in the number of moms leaving their jobs after the birth or adoption of a child.

KPMG likewise increased its leave in 2014 from roughly eight to 10 weeks to up to 18 weeks (representing a combination of disability leave and paid parental leave). From employee surveys, Wankoff says, they knew that "if we could get people through their first year after the birth of a child, we had a much higher success rate of retaining them for the long term."

The policy is new, but in terms of retention rates, "we have seen some slight movement in the first year," she says. New parents also get access to transition counseling to help them figure out how to juggle work and life. "Our leaders and our partners really do see this as a short-term investment for long-term gain," says Wankoff. Paying an additional 10 weeks of salary, plus the cost of coaching, is much cheaper than paying the equivalent of 78 weeks in replacement costs (that's the 150% of salary figure).

Boosting Recruiting

IBM increased its paid parental leave policy recently, with new moms now getting around 14 weeks. "The ROI comes in the form of attracting the best talent in the industry, and in having an engaged workforce," says Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, IBM's chief diversity officer.

Companies that do (or want to) hire young women find that paid weeks off is an easy number for potential hires to compare between companies. Young men increasingly care about paternity leave policies too. As McIntyre points out, "There is a lot of activity in the marketplaces around formal leave policies." If a competitor makes a move, an organization needs to be at least close to avoid awkward recruiting conversations.

Sometimes increasing leave is about changing who everyone sees as the competition. Nancy Dunn, GE's diversity program leader, reports that the company increased paid leave to roughly 16-18 weeks in 2015 (representing a combination of disability, paid leave, and GE's "permissive" time-off policy, which does not strictly limit vacation or sick days). This move made GE "more aligned with progressive startups in terms of what we offer," says Dunn. It is one aspect of allowing the organization to hire people away from tech companies with good leave policies (e.g. Google). "Our recruiters are really on fire," Dunn says of the change. "It's gotten them traction with experienced hires and university hires as well."

Looking At The Bigger Picture

To be sure, the number of weeks of paid maternity leave a company offers is not the whole picture of its attitude toward women. In some companies, people can take quite long unpaid leaves, and still have a job to come back to. Many new parents might accept shorter leaves if coupled with reduced schedules later on, or flexibility and the ability to work from home. There is more to raising children than getting through the baby stage.

Also, as with unlimited vacation policies, there can be a difference between policy, and what managers will accept. With leave, "if it isn't role-modeled by people in positions of influence, it won't be used," says IBM's McIntyre. In some cases, people taking long leaves may find themselves penalized in promotion and compensation decisions for doing so.

There are ways to guard against that. At KPMG, Wankoff reports, any leave time is taken out of the denominator when figuring out people's utilization rates (which influence promotions and bonuses). Likewise, people's relative bonus levels are protected when they take leaves.

And then there's just showing that having kids is compatible with advancement. McIntyre recently had three children in three years, gaining new responsibilities every time she came back. Says McIntyre: "I had the greatest career velocity of my IBM tenure over the course of having my children."

Some debate viewers had a hard time following some of Trump's responses, from "the cyber" to hackers who weigh "400 pounds."

Two of the most common criticisms of the presidential candidates after their first debate tonight was that Donald Trump was sometimes incoherent and Hillary Clinton was "over-prepared."

Viewers especially had a hard time following Trump's responses on claims that he underpaid his workers, nuclear security in East Asia, and "the cyber." Even a GOP strategist told Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald that "Trump was somewhere between incoherent and babble." And Politico's Capitol bureau chief John Bresnahan tweeted: "That is the most amazingly incoherent display by a major party candidate in TV history. Truly breathtaking display by Trump."

After the debate, in the media spin room, Trump sought to explain some of his incoherent answers by claiming that his debate microphone was "defective" and wondering if it was "on purpose."

So, as a public service, here are some of the relevant parts of the debate transcript, via Vox and the Washington Post.

What About Bankruptcies And "Stiffing" Workers?

Now, if you want to change the laws, you've been there a long time, change the laws. But I take advantage of the laws of the nation because I'm running a company. My obligation right now is to do well for myself, my family, my employees, for my companies. And that's what I do.

But what she doesn't say is that tens of thousands of people that are unbelievably happy and that love me. I'll give you an example. We're just opening up on Pennsylvania Avenue right next to the White House, so if I don't get there one way, I'm going to get to Pennsylvania Avenue another.

Do You Support Changing U.S. Policy On First Use of Nuclear Weapons?

I have to say, what Secretary Clinton was saying about nuclear aggression. Russia has been expanding there, they have a much newer capability than we do. We have not been updating from the new standpoint. I looked the other night, I was seeing B-52s that your father, your grandfather could be flying them. We are not keeping up with other countries. I'd like everybody to end it, just get rid of it, but I would certainly not do first strike. I think once the nuclear alternative happens, it's over. At the same time, we have to be prepared. I can't take anything off the table. Because you look at some of these countries. You look at North Korea, we're doing nothing there. China should solve that problem for us. China should go into North Korea. China is totally powerful as it relates to North Korea.

And by the way, another one powerful is the worst deal I think I've ever seen negotiated that you started as the Iran deal. Iran is one of their biggest trading partners. Iran has power over North Korea. And when they made that horrible deal with Iran, they ought to have included the fact that they do something with respect to North Korea and Yemen and all these other places, and when asked to Secretary Kerry, why didn't you do that? One of the great giveaways of all time, including $400 million in cash. Nobody's ever seen that before, that turned out to be wrong, it was actually $1.7 billion in cash. Obviously, I guess for the hostages, it certainly looks that way. Why didn't they make the right deal? This is one of the worst deals ever made by any country in history. The deal with Iran will lead to nuclear problems, all they have to do is sit back 10 years, and they don't have to do much. I met with Bibi Netanyahu. He's not a happy camper.

How Would You Defend U.S. Against Cyber Attacks?

Look at the mess that we're in. Look at the mess that we're in.

As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said, we should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we're not. I don't know if we know it was Russia who broke into the DNC. She's saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. It could also be China, it could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds. You don't know who broke into DNC, but what did we learn? We learn that Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of by your people. By Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Look what happened to her. But Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of. Now, whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don't know, because the truth is, under President Obama, we've lost control of things that we used to have control over. We came in with an internet, we came up with the internet.

And I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what ISIS is doing with the internet, they're beating us at our own game. ISIS. So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is a, it is a huge problem. I have a son.

He's 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it's unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it's hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing, but that's true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester and certainly cyber is one of them.

With time-saving AI, companies may advertise that candidates can speak with an actual human when applying for jobs in the future.

Artificial intelligence is taking over some parts of the recruiting process that used to be reserved for humans.

Take for example, HireVue's software that analyzes facial expressions and word choice in video interviews. Koru's does the same with written tests, while Fama and TalentBin scour social media to profile candidates. RoundPegg uses automation to determine a candidate's potential cultural fit with a company. There is even an AI chatbot named Mya that can help candidates better navigate the automated first phase of resume sorting.

Artificial intelligence tools such as the ones used on HiringSolved's recruiting platform are also being employed more regularly to help reduce bias in recruiting. The company recently announced a new proof of concept tool called RAI (pronounced "ray") that can help predict candidates' gender and ethnic backgrounds to help companies reach diversity targets.

Shon Burton, the CEO of HiringSolved, explains that RAI takes a layered approach to candidate searches. Instead of applying filters that screen for viable candidates, the platform uses hundreds of data points to identify diverse candidates. It does this through a prediction engine that's based on a proprietary statistical model the HiringSolved team developed in house. It allows users to "boost" search relevance by using the platform's ethnic and/or gender diversity models. Those who meet certain criteria get pushed to the top of search rankings.

"We call it a diversity boost, because it's not a filter, it's actually changing the relevance algorithm," he says. "The number of candidates doesn't change," adds Burton, "the relevant candidates will still be there, but I can turn on a boost for females so they bubble up to the top of the search."

While these tools can help recruiters narrow down the millions of potential candidates into more manageable pools of more likely contenders, Burton suggests some may be taking it too far.

"There's a flood of AI applications coming out, and a lot of them are going to be demoralizing to people," he says. Burton chalks this latest development up to a pattern inherent in the way technology advances. "We gain the ability to do something, we do it, then we find out later that it wasn't a great application of it," he says.

Like restaurants that advertise "never-frozen" meat and produce, or telecommunications companies that advertise your ability to speak directly with a customer service representative, Burton believes there will soon come a time when resisting the conveniences of available technologies—many of which come at the expense of the end user—will become a major selling point.

"In 10 years it will be a brand differentiator," he predicts. "I bet you'll see companies saying, 'You don't have to talk to a machine to get hired here, because we believe in humans.'"

Burton adds that the real benefit of AI-based recruiting technologies lies in the initial screening phase, rather than during testing and interviewing phases. He describes HiringSolved as the Google for recruiters. With a price tag that starts at $5,000 per year, it allows them to search for positions in various industries by qualifications, experience, and location, as well as a variety of other filters, and then send an initial email to qualified candidates.

"Searching, refining the search, exporting the list, putting it into a campaign, creating a message and sending it, that's up to three hours or more of work," he said. "Our goal is to reduce the amount of time, give [the recruiters] back a few hours of their day, so they can focus on the human conversation."

RAI is currently being piloted by some of the largest recruiting firms in the U.S., says Burton, and while most are eager to automate many aspects of the recruiting process, he hopes the human interaction element remains the same as it did before the invention of AI.

"Technology applied to recruiting is technology applied to one of the purest forms of human interaction," he says. "Think about how horrifying it would be to talk to a machine about a pre-existing medical condition with someone in your family," Burton observes.

While these technologies can help eliminate much of what Burton refers to as the 'busy work' of recruiting, he believes facial recognition, language analysis, and mood prediction tools take automation in recruiting a step too far.

"Where artificial intelligence is today in every industry, we've finally achieved the tipping point in just being able to do it, to build it, to make it useful," he says. "The question now that everyone has to answer is, 'Should we?'"

Just eight days after GoPro unveiled its long-awaited Karma, DJI is unleashing its similarly priced Mavic Pro.

The drone wars between industry leader DJI and rival GoPro are not only heating up, they're folding in on themselves.

Just eight days after GoPro finally pulled back the wraps on Karma, its foldable drone, DJI unveiled a foldable drone of its own, the Mavic Pro.

At first glimpse, these seem like very similar products, each capable of being folded into a small package that's meant for easy transport. The two drones also have similar price tags. Although Karma's base price is only $799, that doesn't include a camera. A bundle including a new Hero5 Black runs $1,099, and with a new Hero5 Session, it's $999.

The Mavic Pro, which comes with a built-in camera that's on par with what DJI offers in its higher-end Phantom drones, also costs $999. It weighs 1.65 pounds, has a battery life of about 27 minutes, a top speed of about 40 miles an hour, and a software-based video downlink technology called OcuSync. While it comes with a small controller that offers tactile feedback warning of impending obstacles, it can also be flown with just a smartphone.

The Karma goes on sale October 23. The Mavic Pro will start shipping in mid-October.

DJI is positioning the Mavic Pro as a selfie-taking powerhouse. It features a "gesture mode" that lets someone on the ground wave at the drone, which then centers that person in a frame and then, after a short countdown, takes a photo. It can also take 4K video at 30 frames per second, and full 1080p HD video at 96 frames per second.

The Mavic Pro includes the obstacle avoidance system DJI unveiled with its Phantom 4, and also offers ActiveTrack, a technology meant to recognize people, animals, bikes, vehicles, and more—and then fly with those objects, either behind, ahead, alongside, or circling around them. It also has a feature that can track someone as they go uphill while maintaining a constant height above the terrain.

High-Flying Rivalry

China's DJI and California's GoPro have a long history together. In DJI's early years, many customers mounted GoPro cameras on DJI drones. Eventually, though, the company decided it wanted control of the whole platform and began selling its hugely popular Phantom drones with built-in cameras. Rumors that began circulating in 2014 suggesting GoPro was planning on selling its own drone set off a new rivalry, one that was expected to peak when GoPro finally released that product.

In the interim, however, consumer drone industry dynamics shifted dramatically. While GoPro had to delay the release of the Karma for a year, DJI took off, becoming the unquestioned leader in the field. Observers were still very interested in what GoPro would release, but few believed it could knock the Chinese company from its throne.

The Karma is unlikely to do that, especially in light of the fact that the Mavic Pro provides much of the same functionality for about the same price.

GoPro is marketing the Karma as more than a drone. At its launch event last week it argued forcefully that the device is really just one piece in GoPro's larger camera and and content ecosystem, and for heavy GoPro users, that's a compelling argument.

For casual drone consumers, however, access to that ecosystem could mean less than the perception that DJI is the world's drone leader and likely knows how to deliver maximum value for consumers' dollars.

GoPro declined to comment for this story.

While DJI currently sells six different Phantom models, from the $339 Phantom 2—which doesn't have a built-in camera—to the $1,199 Phantom 4, the Mavic Pro is evidence that the company saw a hole in its consumer drone line.

"It isn't always about price," said Adam Najberg, DJI's global director of communications. "It's safety and form factor."

The foldable Mavic Pro, Najberg opined, has a less intimidating form factor than the fixed-arm Phantom, and because it can be flown quickly and easily, he said it may one day become a standard tool for journalists.

Whether that's true or not, the new drone is definitely easier to pack up for a quick trip on foot because it doesn't require a special case. That could be a big win for people interested in bringing a drone with them just in case they find a place they want to take aerial pictures or video.

That, of course, is the same use case for GoPro's Karma, which fits in most backpacks. The Karma comes with a free backback, while DJI is offering a Mavic Pro package that includes the drone, two extra batteries, replacement propellers, a charging hub, a car charger, and a shoulder bag for $1,299.

It's too early to tell whether there are enough consumers to make both the Mavic Pro and the Karma successes. Both companies clearly have tremendous marketing muscle and will no doubt be all-in on promoting their new drones this holiday season.

For those looking to buy a high-quality, easy-to-use, feature-heavy drone without spending a fortune, it's a very good time to be a consumer.

EB Originals updates six items from the archive in a tip of the hat to the company's innovative, wilderness-loving founder.

Unlike Tommy Bahama or Betty Crocker who were figments of marketers' imaginations, Eddie Bauer was a real person. He was was born in 1899 in Orcas Island, Washington, and before he became famous for his sporting goods brand, he was known as an outdoorsman who spent many months of the year up in the mountains, enjoying the dramatic landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. He started to make clothing because he couldn't find any products on the market that were rugged enough for his adventures in the wilderness.

Many people who buy products from Eddie Bauer aren't fully aware of the brand's storied history, but today, the company is launching a new collection called EB Originals that re-creates six pieces that Bauer himself developed in the 1920s. This is part of a broader effort to pay homage to the founder (who died in 1986) and explore the roots of the brand in the lead up to its centennial anniversary, in 2020.

Colin Berg, the company's official historian, has spent the last few years digging into the Eddie Bauer archives of designs and advertisements to help create this collection. Today, the apparel industry is obsessed with creating performance fabrics; Bauer was among the first textile innovators in the U.S. After nearly dying of hypothermia on a winter fishing trip, he decided to create a new kind of outerwear that would insulate him in extreme conditions. "It would need to be warm, lightweight, but also breathable so that you could wear it while doing strenuous activity," Berg says.

In 1936, he created the Skyliner, the first down jacket patented in this country. When he debuted it in Seattle, it became a hit among skiers, hunters, and fishermen, and was sold continuously for more than 50 years. (Bauer is wearing the coat in the image above.) Today, the company is releasing a version of that jacket that looks identical to the original one, but is updated with newer synthetic technical fabrics. It comes in colors that were popular at the time, including hunter green, burgundy, and taupe. "The Skyliner jacket was an early invention that gave him all the advantages of being first to market," Berg says.

In the 1950s, he had another breakthrough. After World War II was over, there was a great deal of interest in scaling the Himalayas, and Bauer saw an opportunity to create gear that was up to that challenge. "All the geopolitics after World War II had changed, and the borders of Nepal and Tibet became open for travel," Berg says. "Western mountaineers began to try climbing these big Himalayan mountains that had never been climbed before."

In 1953, an expedition of eight Americans set out to climb a mountain range on the China-Pakistan border. Three of the climbers were from Seattle and were familiar with Bauer's products. They asked him to develop a jacket for them. He created the Kara Koram Parka, which became the best-in-class expedition coat for the next three decades, used by most Americans who went to the Himalayas, Antarctica, or the poles. Today, Eddie Bauer is releasing a new version of the Kara Koram.

Like the Skyliner, the Kara Koram and all the other pieces in the new collection are aesthetically similar to the original versions, but have been updated with new materials. When Bauer was designing, he primarily used high thread count cotton because it was harder to find synthetic fibers that make garments stronger and help with temperature regulation. As Berg says, "The Eddie Bauer Original collection is incorporating both new developments and technologies that the company has been working on, with the original design principles of the individual pieces."

The famed Chicago author and radio host left behind boxes of tapes after he died in 2008. Now, they've been digitized.

"Going through these tapes was like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls," Joe Richman, the founder and executive producer of the podcast Radio Diaries, says about the interviews Studs Terkel recorded while writing his influential oral history, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.

In the early 1970s, Terkel traveled the country and taped interviews with more than 130 everyday people about their jobs. When he died in 2008, at the age of 96, he left behind boxes of those tapes in his office. The Library of Congress and the Chicago History Museum began an effort to digitally preserve and catalog the interviews in 2010, and Radio Diaries, which along with Project & gained exclusive access to the tapes, began producing audio portraits about two years ago. This week, NPR will broadcast the results.

"Now everyone can publish their own stories," says Richman, whose nonprofit gives people tape recorders to record stories about their own lives. Terkel's Working, when it was published in 1973, provided a rare look at the mundane lives of everyday people. "For me personally, this idea of celebrating the uncelebrated and taking what we think of everyday people and the most mundane part of their lives, their work, and elevating it to something we should pay attention to—to me, at that time, that felt like almost a revolutionary act."

Producers at Radio Diaries, when possible, contacted the interview subjects in the 40-plus-year-old tapes. The juxtaposition of their then-and-now interviews speaks to how much times have changed, and how much they haven't.

In the 1970s, one woman who worked as a switchboard operator at Illinois Bell told Terkel, "You get to feel just like a machine." Even then, she agreed that a machine could do her job, but added, "It would have to be some machine, though. Because if people knew how funnily they talked, how badly they enunciate, how hard it is to understand some people, [they would see that] a machine would have a hard time."

Obviously, that job no longer exists, though the fear of being replaced by a machine still does. The woman notes in her follow-up interview with Radio Diaries, "We've all been in that situation when all you want do is talk to somebody, and all you have is a list of menu options. I tell my kids to push zero."

One Chicago police officer, Renault Robinson, told Terkel in the 1970s that about 60% of police-citizen contact started around traffic situations:

"Certain units have really developed a science around stopping an automobile. In other words, in their minds, if they stop 100 cars in the black community, the likelihood of them finding one or two or three violations of some sort is highly possible. Now of course, after you've stopped 1,000, you have 900 people who are very pissed off. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, or just average working people who haven't broken any laws and are irritated or aggravated about being stopped by the police. Black folks or minority tolerance of police brutality has grown very short. They won't accept that treatment—they won't accept that dehumanizing, degrading treatment. That's why more young kids are being killed by the police than ever before."

Today, Robinson says, "Fifty years later, whether it's Chicago or Baltimore or Detroit, the same thing is happening in all of these cities. It just feels like déjà vu."

The "Working Then and Now" series will air across NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, and Weekend All Things Considered, and in upcoming episodes of the Radio Diaries podcast.

When Hillary Clinton theorized that Trump hasn't paid federal taxes, he quipped, "That makes me smart."

Donald Trump raised plenty of questions during tonight's presidential debate by seeming to admit that he hasn't paid any taxes in some years—and then later denying it in interviews with the media. The Republican nominee has refused to release his tax returns, and that refusal has become a major campaign issue, with 60% of Fox News voters saying they believe Trump is hiding something in his returns.

During a discussion of Trump's refusal to release his tax returns, Clinton chimed in with a strong claim, stating that his reason for not taking that step is because, "Maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes because the only years that anybody has ever seen were a couple of years when had he to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax."

In response, Trump didn't contradict her assertion, but quipped: "That makes me smart."

Later, Clinton repeated the claim: "He paid zero. That means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health. And I think probably he's not all that enthusiastic about having the rest of our country see what the real reasons are, because it must be something really important, even terrible, that he's trying to hide. And maybe it's because you haven't paid any federal income tax for a lot of years."

To which Trump again didn't contradict her but replied, "It would be squandered, too, believe me."

But later, in post-debate interviews with CNN's Dana Bash and Jim Acosta, Trump insisted that he has paid federal taxes. When Bash asked him about it, he denied implying he hadn't paying taxes, adding "If they said I didn't, it doesn't matter." Later, he told Acosta, "I've paid federal taxes," without explaining whether there have been years that he's avoided paying taxes.

Later, the Clinton campaign tweeted a video of that exchange, stating: "Paying zero in taxes doesn't make you 'smart.' It makes you a tax evader."

This company wants to make it as easy for kids (and the rest of us) to build and program gadgets as it is to use them.

From Hackaball to the Mover Kit to Apple's Swift Playgrounds, a cottage industry has lately sprung up of gadgets and apps dedicated to helping kids learn how to code. Kano, which launched in 2013 as a Kickstarter project, was one of the earlier efforts. And the concept—it's a Linux-powered computer that budding programmers build themselves, hooked into an online code-sharing community—remains unique.

In the years since its Kickstarter debut, Kano has found investors (including Salesforce's Marc Benioff), secured retail deals with Toys "R" Us and Barnes & Noble, and sold 100,000 units. Now it's heading back to Kickstarter to raise more funds for three new programmable do-it-yourself kits—all of which can work with the Kano Computer, but don't require it. (The company has brought its software environment to the web in a browser-based version of its Kano Code platform.)

The new kits include:

• Pixel Kit. A smart display, in the form of a 128-pixel array of color LEDs
• Camera Kit. A 5MP camera that can be used to snap pictures or to monitor the surrounding environment
• Speaker Kit. A device for recording and playing back music and sound effects

Kano aims to raise at least $500,000 in its new crowdfunding campaign; it plans to ship the Pixel Kit in January 2017, followed by the Camera Kit in May and the Speaker Kit in July. They'll retail for $130 apiece.

All of the kits can react to the world around them via bundled and optional sensors: The Pixel display, for instance, comes with a sensor that lets it tell if it's being tilted. "This stuff really comes to life when it responds to its environment," explained Kano founder and CEO Alex Klein during a visit to Fast Company's San Francisco office, as he quickly assembled the Pixel Kit, plugged it into his MacBook, and then taught it to flash different colors in response to loud noises. (The devices will also have wireless connectivity and the ability to respond to data spawned outside their immediate environs, such as sports scores or weather information.)

Kano was able to bring its original kid-oriented PC to market by building it around Raspberry Pi, the dirt-cheap, dead-simple, open-source mini-PC. Now that the company is more experienced, better funded, and sees the cloud as its software platform, it's handled more of the engineering of the new kits itself. "I kind of figured that the Raspberry Pi was a sort of first lily pad for us," says Klein.

Age-wise, Kano's sweet spot is kids from 8 to 14. But it also has plenty of appeal for adults, a phenomenon that Klein expects to continue with the new kits. And that's okay, because the company's vision is bigger than STEM education for kids. "We want to make it as simple for anyone in the world to make, hack, create, manipulate, and warp technology as it is to use it today," he explains.

And Klein adds that the company plans to release plenty of kits beyond the ones in its current Kickstarter campaign, especially as it becomes possible to leverage new technologies in an affordable way: "I think in five years, it would be unlikely that you wouldn't see a virtual reality kit from Kano, or a 3D printer kit from Kano."

Daily Mix is a new personalized playlist that blends songs you love with new, undiscovered gems that fit right in.

Matthew Ogle wants Spotify to stop feeling so much like a music app. That might sound counterintuitive, since Spotify is pretty much synonymous with streaming music these days, but his quest is simpler than it sounds: More and more, he wants the all-you-can-stream music service to feel like an old friend.

When Ogle, a senior product lead at Spotify, oversaw the development of Discover Weekly last year, it was this synthesized feeling of years-long camaraderie that inspired the feature and its mix tape-esque vibe. Since the unexpectedly explosive success of Discover Weekly, the company has shifted to new personalized music features. First, there was Release Radar, an auto-updated weekly playlist of brand-new music based on your listening habits. Today, Spotify listeners are getting something new: Daily Mix, a fresh stab at music personalization that Ogle and his team hope will keep listeners even more addicted.

Daily Mix is an infinite, always-updating playlist (or set of playlists—each user can have up to six of them, depending on how broad their tastes are) that consists of two things: Primarily, it's a shuffling list of songs Spotify already knows you like (because you listen to them a lot), but with new, Discover Weekly-style recommendations woven throughout. Think of it like the "shuffle" button on artificially intelligent steroids.

"For every user, we create a picture of their taste, which just looks at all the artists they play and the similarity distance between those artists and try to find some natural groupings," says Ogle. "The idea with Daily Mix is that it takes all the zones of your listening and tries to make a bottomless playlist out of each one."

Using Spotify's taste analysis data science—one of the key technologies developed by the Echo Nest before Spotify bought them in 2014—Daily Mix first lumps your frequently played music into stylistically cohesive clusters. These are not quite genres, Ogle is quick to point out, since such human-concocted categorizations of music can be vague, overly broad, or imprecise. In fact, internal user studies showed that naming these lists after genres ("My Daily Hip-Hop Mix," for instance) altered people's expectations and complicated the experience. Instead, successive lists are named as simply as possible: Your Daily Mix 1, Your Daily Mix 2, and so forth.

Throughout the playlists, Spotify introduces less familiar (or often, completely new) songs using logic similar to its Discover Weekly algorithm. These songs are, according to the data, likely to scratch a similar itch as the one that their more familiar-sounding counterparts already do. For example, if you've been binging on Paul McCartney's early solo stuff, your Daily Mix might throw in a lesser-known Beach Boys song that has a similar feel. Or if you've been listening to Rihanna's latest album and recently went back to Janet Jackson's Control to relive the album's 30th anniversary, don't be surprised to see an unfamiliar track by Nicki Minaj or an early Whitney Houston song show up next, even if you haven't listened to her music in years.

"Our hope is that Daily Mix can help you fill in the gaps and explore around the music you already love," says Ogle. Most Daily Mix playlists should be about 75% music you like and 25% new discoveries, although the ratio will vary depending on your listening habits and how deeply you've already dug into a cluster of related genres.

For those who aren't familiar, Discover Weekly is a personalized playlist that analyzes your listening history and compares that to the behavior of a subset of active playlist creators. Scanning millions of playlists, the system finds tracks that are commonly listed alongside music with which a user is already familiar, and then groups those tracks together into a new, personalized list of songs. It essentially takes the classic "people who like that, also like this" logic of collaborative filtering, tapping into Spotify's elaborate web of genres, artists, and musical tastes and crunching that data to create a digital mixtape for each user.

The feature was an immediate hit: In less than a year, Discover Weekly reached 40 million listeners (more than all Apple Music and Tidal subscribers combined) and generated 5 billion streams on Spotify.

With Daily Mix, Spotify is hoping to keep racking up impressive numbers like these, this time by blending discovery with familiarity. The effort comes at a pivotal time: Apple Music has quickly ballooned into Spotify's biggest competitor over the course of the year, thanks to a blend of exclusive releases from big-name artists (a game that Spotify refuses to play) and superior, human-driven music curation in the form of Beats 1 radio and hand-curated playlists. The human-focused curation strategy has done well for Apple Music, which recently hit 17 million paying subscribers (compared to Spotify's 40 million), but Spotify's experiments in discovery appear to just be getting started.

How the software giant aims to tie everything from Cortana to Office to HoloLens to Azure servers into one AI experience.

"Microsoft was born to do a certain set of things. We're about empowering people in organizations all over the world to achieve more. In today's world, we want to use AI to achieve that."

That's Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, crisply explaining the company's artificial-intelligence vision to me this afternoon shortly after he hosted a keynote at Microsoft's Ignite conference for IT pros in Atlanta. But even if Microsoft only pursues AI opportunities that it considers to be core to its mission, it has a remarkably broad tapestry to work with. And the examples that were part of the keynote made that clear.

They included, but were not limited to:

• Using health insights to help the Cortana assistant notice that a user tends to binge on junk food when traveling and might miss a gym appointment while on the road
• Working with Volvo to make cars less dangerous by analyzing motorists' faces to ensure that they're alert, undistracted, and in a mood conducive to safe driving
• Bringing football/baseball legend Deion Sanders onstage to try an in-the-works NFL fantasy football bot, which Microsoft hopes to have ready for next season
• Verifying the identity of Uber drivers by having them snap a selfie and analyzing it using Microsoft facial recognition technology
• Calling on HoloLens augmented reality to preview a kitchen remodel project at a Lowe's store, with recommendations based on a shopper's Pinterest pins
• Translating "War and Peace" in a fraction of a jiffy using Azure's cloud computing service and leveraging Microsoft-designed Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips

Though most of these instances have a gee-whiz aspect to them, Nadella was quick to stress to me that they weren't only about where Microsoft AI is going, but where it is already. "This is not all future," he said. "Volvo is using it today. Uber is using it today. Lowe's is using it today."

Which is not to say that the company isn't also dedicated to using AI to tackle long-term projects, including some that most people wouldn't automatically assume to be in its purview, such as using "biological computing" techniques to better understand how to fight cancer. Nadella says that the company has actually been involved in such research for years, and that it can now utilize its Azure platform to collaborate more efficiently with outside concerns such as pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, its partner in its cancer research.

In general, he adds, things are moving so fast these days that the line between research and product is increasingly blurry. "Sometimes I get confused myself," he admits. For instance, Doug Burger, who demoed the Azure/FPGA advances during the Ignite keynote, works for Microsoft Research, but the stuff he showed off is already out there helping Microsoft cloud-computing customers.

"This is not academic work at all," says Nadella. "He got me to write some big checks and got FPGAs deployed across all the compute nodes in Azure."

When I ask Nadella how Microsoft is sheparding its resources to create the artificial intelligence it needs, he says that it's partly about remixing resources that already exist. "It's this constant renewal," he says. "We have talent coming in from different angles." Facial recongition technology that originated in the Xbox's Kinect sensor, for example, is now deployed as part of Microsoft's cognitive services suite, used by companies such as Uber; image search technology initially built for Bing has come in handy for HoloLens.

In some cases, the company is preparing for the future through acquisitions—none bigger than the $26 billion deal to buy LinkedIn. Asked about that, Nadella begins with an obligatory reminder that the transaction is not yet final. But "we're very, very enthusiastic," he says. "The central thesis is that we already have great momentum with the professional cloud, with products like Office 365 and Dynamics 365. My goal was to say, what's the social network that goes with that? It's the professional social network, and there's only one: LinkedIn."

Melding together Microsoft productivity tools with LinkedIn's data about people and their work could make all the services involved richer, he says. One example: Microsoft's Dynamics 365 CRM would be a far more potent prospecting tool if it was hooked directly into a salesperson's LinkedIn network.

AI Everywhere

Though the scenarios Microsoft presented at Ignite were new, the big-picture AI story is one that the company has been telling for a while now, including at its Build conference last spring, where agents and bots and their ability to transform venerable products such as Office was a primary theme. It's also consistent with Microsoft's recent emphasis on trying to be everywhere that people get stuff done—an era that I think of as having kicked off when Nadella presided over the unveiling of Office for the iPad a few weeks after being named as Microsoft CEO in February 2014.

Nadella says that his vision was never about writing apps for other companies' operating systems per se: "The way I thought about it was not talking about iOS or Android or Windows. It was a mobile-first, cloud-first worldview."

"In the long arc of time, I learned from our own history that you can't assume any high-volume device will be at the center of all activities for all time to come," he adds, implying that just as Windows didn't rule the world indefinitely, it's not a given that iOS and Android will reign forever.

In the time since Nadella began making cloud-first, mobile-first into a mantra, it's become clear that it involves a lot more than just making sure that Microsoft's best-known apps are available in capable versions for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.

Earlier this year, for instance, the company acquired SwiftKey, a third-party keyboard for Android and iOS that, in its Android incarnation, now utilizes neural network technology to power its guesses about what you're really trying to type. "We've proved that the keyboard is not associated with the device, it's associated with you," says Nadella. "That's a fundamental shift in computing."

Nothing is more core to Microsoft's AI vision than the way it treats Cortana as an agent that—with your consent—can know quite a bit about you, and then share it with specialized bots on a need-to-know basis. (The service currently has 133 million active users across Windows iOS, and Android.) As Nadella explains it, "it's your data, as opposed to something that's going to be used for advertising or conflated with other data or transferred over to other apps without your consent."

That philosophy fits in with Microsoft's overall emphasis on productivity, but it also helps neatly frame the competition with the other tech giants who are applying AI to vast amounts of data. "Today, we look at people who have the capability we do," Nadella told me. "There's one or two—there's a Google, there's a Facebook. Some we compete with, some we partner with. Each of these companies has AI, but what do they do with it? Even if we make the same choices about categories, our approaches will be different."

AppZen, which offers automated auditing services, just added computer vision and AI to help spot sketchy charges in expense reports.

These days, a lot of workers are worried about robots taking their jobs, but now robots are taking jobs that literally no one else was doing—like poring through every inch of people's dense expense reports.

AppZen, a startup that provides automated auditing services, has just expanded its software, which can now not only read basic items on attached receipts, but also scan entire documents to look for clues about invalid charges. Anant Kale, the company's CEO, tells Fast Company that the new offering, called ReceiptIQ, can audit 100% of the expense reports that employees submit, spotting them for "accidental fraud . . . or intentional fraud."

The upgrade required moving beyond optical character recognition to computer vision that can understand the entire receipt, such as recognizing company logos. Many hotels put their logos on receipts rather than spelling out their name, says Kale.

ReceiptIQ analysis goes deeper by looking for context, such as whether car rental bills include a fuel service charge—a penalty for not returning the car with a full gas tank. Companies often won't reimburse such penalty charges. On cell phone bills, the software can now determine if the employee has a family plan and is trying to get reimbursed for the kids or spouse. Machine learning helps the service better understand what to look for in all those PDFs, emails, and other attachments appended to reports.

Alcohol is another item often exempted from reimbursement. ReceiptIQ reads the names of beverages on receipts and looks them up on a bunch of websites that feature names and recipes of drinks and brand names for types of alcohol. AppZen often pings the web for information, such as checking sites like Yelp or Trip Advisor to verify that the restaurant named is a real place and that the amount on the bill seems in line with what other people spend there. It even checks news and government sites to ensure that the employee hasn't treated a foreign government official to a prohibited freebie (aka a bribe).

AppZen debuted in spring 2015 and picked up $2.9 million of new funding in June 2016. The company has been testing ReceiptIQ, running 1,700 randomly selected expense reports from clients, totaling over $3.6 million, through its new system. Kale reports that the new tech found twice as many bogus charges as the company's current software, and 10 times what spot checks by humans would have caught.

Expense report auditing is far from the sexiest aspect of running a business, and that's exactly the appeal of AppZen. The service promises to not only save humans from drudgery, but it can also read far more than humans, and it can flag only the really suspicious stuff. "When we classify something as high risk, which is typically about 6% to 10% of all expenses, we give the formation back to the company," says Kale. "And [we] say, 'You need to look at that.'"

From there, it's up to the client to figure out how to proceed. AppZen flags a bigger chunk of reports as medium risk and tracks the employee over time to see if sketchy patterns continue that need to be investigated. The majority of reports come out as low risk, says Kale, and AppZen recommends clients just pay them.

Although AppZen advises how a company should proceed with tackling fraud, it doesn't take responsibility for making mistakes that could get a company in trouble with the IRS.

"We're not guaranteeing that there is no fraud," says Kale. "Even if you are in noncompliance, as long as you have the right controls at the company and have put in the right processes, that's what matters." The main point, he says, is that clients can audit a lot more paperwork than before. But clients have to decide their "appetite for risk" in setting thresholds for what requires review by a human.

AppZen, which emerged from the 500 Startups accelerator in 2015, has picked up some brand-name clients, including Bandai Namco, Cantor Fitzgerald, Comcast, and Equinox. In August, it became an approved app for Concur, the big expense report and invoice-paying software service. It also works with accounting systems by NetSuite and Oracle.

Most to-do lists confront us with only the least motivating parts of our jobs.

You may not like planning things, but your brain does. There's evidence, for example, that the experience of planning your vacation helps you to enjoy it more when it actually happens. And as I wrote recently for Fast Company, even writing to-do lists that go uncompleted can give you a productivity boost.

But while that exercise has its upsides, to-do lists themselves remain something of a double-edged sword. Many of them still leave us feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, and less productive than we could be. They don't have to, though. Here's how to tweak your next to-do list so it helps you feel happier at work.

Why Your To-Do List Is Making You Miserable

Most of the to-do lists we draw up are litanies of tedious tasks. If you fill up your calendar with reminders for daily action items, you run the risk of spending all of your time focused on specific things you have to accomplish. That may not sound so bad—isn't that the point of a to-do list, after all?

Well, sort of. Like it or not, some of the things we need to get done at work are tedious, annoying, or boring. But if you confront yourself each day with reminders of only the least enjoyable parts of your job, it'll probably wind up sapping your motivation to come to work.

It doesn't help that the most mundane of your duties tend to be the most urgent, making them dominate most to-do lists. So while your agenda may be an accurate reflection of what you need to do, it can quickly become one of the least motivating tools for actually doing them.

Using Your To-Do List To Make You Happier

That doesn't mean that you can or should avoid writing to-do lists altogether. In fact, you should probably keep planning your workday and plotting out your goals—but you might want to consider doing it differently.

In fact, planning is a crucial way to help you enjoy your career more. Research on happiness suggests that people who see their jobs as a calling enjoy their work more than those who just see their jobs as a collection of things to do. In other words, a sense of purpose matters, and a well-written to-do list can help impart it. A big part of seeing your job as a calling is recognizing the significant contributions you make over the days, weeks, and months that make up your career. So your to-do list should ideally make that easier to see, not harder.

For that to happen, you need to make sure your weekly calendar includes time to work on tasks that take you closer to making the contributions you want to make at work—for doing the things you find meaningful. When you sit down to write a to-do list, you're actually planning, even if you think you're just throwing a jumble of unfinished items onto a notepad. So take that time to include big-picture tasks on your agenda, not just urgent ones.

This takes effort and diligence. Most of us don't move toward our most significant goals automatically; if anything, we fall short of them because we're too consumed with immediate task execution. And by comparison, we frame our most important goals abstractly. So while you might really want to get promoted, finish a big project, or improve the lives of customers, these broad objectives rarely make it onto your to-do list because it isn't always clear what specific actions are required to make them happen.

Luckily, though, writing a to-do list helps you break those goals down into achievable steps—as long as you stop to consider them. The next time you write a to-do list, make a conscious effort to figure out where over the next workweek you'll be able to add those tasks to your schedule. Yes, this may involve making some tradeoffs, but that's the point. Because it already itemizes your most urgent (and often dullest) tasks, you have a built-in opportunity to see which of the most angst-inducing responsibilities may be able to get the nudge, even if temporarily.

Once you identify the recurring tasks that are getting in the way of making progress on the parts of your job that actually create enjoyment, you can gradually begin building in time for those (and, hopefully, learning which items you may be able to delegate). Researchers have found that people who are good at anticipating obstacles tend to be better at surmounting them.

As you get better at actually planning the type of work that makes you happy, you may begin to feel better about all the tasks on your to-do list, even if it still includes plenty of tedious stuff. When you look at the list, you'll recognize several items each week that relate to your core goals, which can help put the more boring tasks into perspective. That gives you a daily reminder that your job is more than just a sequence of small, boring, urgent duties to execute—because you've planned it to be.

The popular enterprise messaging platform will be able to pull in Salesforce record data, and sync with its Chatter messaging feature.

The popular enterprise messaging app Slack said today that it's partnering with Salesforce to let companies that use both platforms more easily unify and harmonize sales lead information and conversations.

Slack users will soon be able to type in the "/salesforce" command to search for sales prospects, customers, contacts, or lead records in Salesforce. The search, Slack says, will return three results, any one of which can expand to display full sales record information.

For companies using both Slack and Salesforce, conversations about sales prospects can sometimes happen in two places at once, which creates a risk of duplicated efforts or worse. A new integration will link Slack and Salesforce's Chatter messaging app in a way that unites the conversations. Chatter users can enter the "/slack" slash command to send updates from Chatter into Slack. Slack users can enter the "/chatter" command to send massage data into Chatter.

In another integration designed to centralize conversations, Slack channels can be linked to Salesforce customer records. A new section will appear in the record to show the number of unread Slack messages about the account.

The new integrations, Slack says, will be available to companies using both Slack and Salesforce in October. A Slack representative told Fast Company that there's no charge for these first integrations, and that more and deeper integrations between the two platforms are in the works.

In a Bluetooth speaker? In a messaging app? In a desktop OS? No. Your personal assistant should be in your ear. Here's why.

In the heat of the controversy about removing the analog headphone jack on the iPhone, Apple released a line of wireless headphones called AirPods. They seemed to represent Apple's vision for the way we'll listen to mobile music in the future.

But the new AirPods are clearly meant to be far more than an audio device. With a powerful W1 chip inside and at least one microphone for listening, calling the AirPods a pair of headphones is like calling Amazon's Echo a Bluetooth speaker.

You don't get too far into Apple's spiel on the AirPods without hearing about Siri's role. "Talking to your favorite personal assistant is a cinch," Apple says at the AirPods product page. "Just double-tap either AirPod to activate Siri, without taking your iPhone out of your pocket."

AirPods—in their current form and in future revs—seemed aimed at putting Siri's gentle voice, and her growing personal assistant capabilities, in your ear. And your ear canal may be the very best part of the body to put such a thing.

Veteran Apple engineer Bill Atkinson—known for being a key designer of early Apple UIs and the inventor of MacPaint, QuickDraw, and HyperCard—saw this coming a long time ago. He gave a presentation at MacWorld Expo back in 2011 in which he explains exactly why the ear is the best place for Siri.

After Glassholes

Atkinson gave his presentation just before the arrival of Google Glass, which represented the first big effort to put assistive technology in a wearable consumer device. The vision was for the device to be always watching and listening, always ready to assist with some digital task, or to instantly recall some vital piece of information.

Well, we all know how that turned out. In my neighborhood people who wore Glass were labeled "Glassholes" or pitied for being hopelessly geeked.

There were other, more functional, problems. "Google Glass is in your way for one thing, and it's ugly," Atkinson told me. "It's always going to be between you and the person you're talking to."

Google Glass and other augmented reality devices superimpose bits of helpful information over the world as viewed through a small camera lens. "I don't think people want Post-it notes pasted all over their field of vision," Atkinson says. "The world is cluttered up enough as it is!"

Since Glass showed up, the personal digital assistant (PDI) has, of course, become even more important to us and has emerged in more compelling form factors than eyewear. PDIs exist as free-standing apps like Google Now, in a variety of messaging apps, inside freestanding home speaker devices like Amazon Echo, in desktop OSs like Windows 10 and macOS, and of course as a key part of mobile OSs like iOS.

The device on which we arguably use personal assistants most often, the smartphone, is far from ideal. "We're used to using touch screens, but when you're in a car, that's not what you want to do, and you certainly don't want to be looking at a display," Atkinson reasons.

Foreshadowing

The ear-based personal assistant isn't a completely new idea. "Apple's AirPod device ... is a significant step forward toward a new interface paradigm that has long been anticipated in science fiction," says Ari Popper, founder of the futurist consulting and product design firm SciFutures. "The movie Her is an interesting articulation of this."

The sentient assistant OS in Her is perhaps the best developed imagining of the in-ear assistant, but the concept goes back far further than that.

Bill Atkinson points to Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series from the 1980s, in which an artificial sentience called "Jane" lives in a crystal planted in the ear of the main character, Ender. Jane can do millions of computations per second and is aware and responsive on millions of levels. She's hesitant to make herself known to humans because she's painfully aware of the dangerous feelings of inferiority she may awaken in them. Pretty brilliant stuff.

Siri is headed for something like Jane, eventually, Atkinson says. "I think of this as Jane 0.1," Atkinson says. "Within a few years it's going to be able to do lots of things: It will hear everything you hear, it's going to be able to whisper in your ear."

The user can double-tap and quietly request some fact or figure, or some stranger's name, or their birthday, or their children's names. Reading email or texts in the car, or getting driving directions, would be easier and safer.

Atkinson says that as Siri gets more intelligent, it may be able to recognize certain important sounds in the environment. For example, if a user hears a siren while driving, the AirPods might immediately mute any messages or other audio.

In the ear, Siri is more discreet and polite as a notifications device. Sensors in the device will know if you are in conversation, and will break in only with the most important verbal notifications. "John, if you don't leave now you will miss your meeting with IBM." That's far more discreet than getting buzzed on one's wrist as a cue to look down at some update.

Siri Is No Jane, Yet

In fact, it's Siri's abilities that will hold back AirPods as an ear-based personal assistant. "Siri is a bit of a joke now; it doesn't really understand the meaning of conversations," Atkinson says. "That's going to improve."

For Siri to begin acting like Orson Scott Card's Jane, her AI will have to advance far beyond what it is now. She will need a larger knowledge base, and the ability to understand the meaning and flow of conversation, not just store and regurgitate it.

"Your personal digital assistant needs to understand what you're saying, and be able to piece together concepts even from your quiet mumblings," Atkinson says. "It will understand the difference between a sequitur and a non sequitur; a simple transcribing technology wouldn't understand that."

The assistant needs to understand when the user is talking about taboo subjects, or saying something that's politically incorrect," Atkinson says. "I think we will slowly get there."

Those are challenges all AI must deal with in the coming years, not just Siri, and not just Apple's.

Adding The Camera

And, of course, the AirPods (at least for now) contain no camera. An effective personal assistant needs to see. The addition of a camera would open up the whole science of computer vision. Siri could recognize people, things, places, and motions, then connect them with data to give them meaning. It could pair a face with a name in one's contacts list, in one simple use case.

Atkinson says the addition of a camera to AirPods may have to wait, for the same reasons people resented the camera on Google Glass. "A microphone is invasive also, but constant video is more threatening," he said. "Adding a camera to the device might come 10 years later, when people realize that there really is no privacy."

When Siri can see (and is smarter), she might start acting a lot more like Orson Scott Card's Jane. "She'll know everything about you," Atkinson says. "We don't have immediate recall, but Jane (Siri) will hear everything you hear and see everything you see."

Change Agent

A device like that, of course, could radically reshape our personal computing universe. If the only thing our personal assistant device can't do is show us images, we may not want a smartphone to fill that gap; we may want something larger. By then, our two "can't-leave-home-without" devices might be our AI ear piece and a large transparent display that we keep folded up in our pocket.

And where the thing could go after that is something we're only now envisioning.

"In the near future, as cloud computing, voice recognition, and AI algorithms improve, we envision ubiquitous human machine interactions initially expressed as voice and then as sub vocalization (currently deployed by the military) and finally as seamless mind machine interactions," SciFutures's Popper says. "The AirPod seems to be an early evolution of persistent AI assistants."

Colonization of Mars is still 40 to 100 years in the future, but Musk and SpaceX have captured the public's imagination today in Mexico.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk is delivering the keynote on stage at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico to present his plan for human exploration of Mars.

This is the video released just prior to his presentation.

There was a bit of a stampede to get the best seats.

There's been some kind of launch delay: 20 minutes late already.

SpaceX's competitors are responding to the hype.

And we have takeoff, Musk is on stage.

He kicks it off with a question: "First of all, why go anywhere?"

"History is going to bifurcate…," he continued. "One path is we stay on Earth forever, and eventually there is going to be some doomsday event…The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and multiplanetary species, which I hope you'll agree is the right way to go."

Early Mars is a lot like Earth. Certainly more so than Venus or even the moons of Jupiter.

The challenge: Getting to Mars is incredibly expensive.

You can't create a self-sustaining civilization if the cost is too high. He thinks the price needs to come down to $200,000 to make it accessible to the average person (not that the average person would even want to go right away, he admits).

That's why you have to build a reusable system, a rocket ship that can refuel in orbit. That would drive the cost per trip down.

You'll also need to produce propellant on Mars. He thinks there's one choice that's better than the others.

Methane is the clear winner. "We think methane is better almost across the board," he said. "We started off thinking hydrogen might make sense."

Now he cuts to the video released just before his keynote. Which is, to be fair, all CGI magic—a movie trailer for a mission to Mars. But more than what NASA has come up with at this point.

"What you saw there is actually quite close to what we actually will build," he says. The animations are created from CAD drawings, for example.

"The ship goes to Mars, gets replenished, and then returns to Earth," he says. There would be maybe a thousand ships in orbit at once. "Kind of like Battlestar Galactica," he says.

To give you a sense of the size.

"This will be relatively small compared to the Mars interplanetary ships of the future," says Musk.

Estimating a million people on Mars to establish civilization, and people can only go every two years, with at least 100 people per trip... that's why you need a thousand ships.

"From the point at which the first ship goes to Mars it's probably between 20 and 50 Mars rendezvous, and maybe 40 to 100 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilization on Mars," says Musk.

The Mars vehicle is larger than a Saturn V, making it the largest rocket ever made. He says through massive design performances the "performance bar will exceed the physical size of the rocket."

The rocket booster is a scaled up version of SpaceX's Falcon 9.

It's all designed so that you could lose one or multiple engines and still lift off and land safely, he says.

Everything will be flat-packed inside the cone. The trickiest part is the oxygen tank. Cargo of up to 450 tons, and goal is 100 passengers per ship, although he'd like to see that climb to 200 or more.

Now, how long will the trip take? Depending on which Earth-Mars you're aiming for, "can be as low as 80 days," says Musk. And Mars transit time of less than 30 days in the near-distant future.

What's it like to be in the space craft? In order to make more people want to go it's got to feel exciting and not feel cramped. You can float around, watch movies. There will be a restaurant. "It'll be, like, really fun to go. You'll have a great time," says Musk.

All yours for less than $200,000, based on his estimates. And he thinks it can drop below $100,000.

He jokes that funding could come from Kickstarter. But really it will come from launching satellites, working with NASA, and private sector funding.

"Ultimately this is going to be a huge public-private partnership," says Musk.

As we show this is possible, and can be made real, the support will snowball over time, he says. "I really don't have any other motivation for personally accumulating assets other than to make the biggest contribution I can to making life multiplanetary."

Timeline: in 2002 when SpaceX was launched he thought there was a 10% chance of doing anything. "But I came to the conclusion that if there wasn't some new entrance into the space arena without some ideological motivation," Musk says, then we wouldn't get to Mars.

If everything goes "super-well" then it could be as little as 10 years until the mission starts. And for every current trip to Mars they will be sending payloads to drop off, with 2 or 3 tons of useful payloads on the surface.

The test of the Raptor engine, which Musk showed off on September 26, was his hardware proof of concept for this announcement.

And they also built this carbon fiber tank and tested it with cryogenic propellant.

This Interplanetary System should work throughout the solar system. "This system gives you the freedom you want to go anywhere in the Solar System," Musk says. "Provided you have filling stations along the way." Interstellar travel is another story however.

The first question that came up during the Q&A session was about where SpaceX would be able to build such an enormous rocket. Musk says that it would have to be built in multiple sites along the world, including parts of the Middle East. It would eventually get assembled in the final site.

Another question had to do with the very first people who would go to Mars. They would have to risk dying. But Musk points out that there are two ways to think about the journey to Mars. One is defensive: preparing for the possible extinction of humanity. But the more encouraging one is the excitement of wanting to explore the universe. It will be a great adventure, and something worth waking up for every day.

How would people survive on Mars? Musk says that a wide variety of people to get to the new colony so that there will be everything, "from iron forgeries to pizza joints." It's not just about making the trip there safe, it's about creating a balanced network once we get there.

Why doesn't SpaceX hire internationally? Musk explains that this is a government regulation. Working on space-related technology is considered advanced weapons technology and the government restricts the number of people who can do this.

Will people be able to return from Mars? Musk believes that it is very important for people to be able to come back, even if they don't actually decide to do so.

Musk says that the entertainment industry could play a role in this mission. Getting people excited about the possibility of going to Mars and building popular support is important for what SpaceX is trying to do. It's about sparking people's imagination.

He also believes that the more companies that are working on space-related endeavors the better. His reason for coming to this conference was to get more people involved in this project. They might compete with SpaceX or collaborate.

Letting your team members meet with job candidates and debriefing afterward can help you make better hires and develop the talent you have.

The goal of any hiring process is to hire the best talent. That much is obvious. But the way you hire can also help you develop—and, ultimately, hang onto—the team members you already have.

In fact, if your hiring process doesn't actually make your team better before it leads to a single hire, you might be missing out. Here's one key step your hiring process needs to include in order to do that.

The Art Of The Interview Debrief

Too often, hiring decisions are made exclusively by hiring managers who don't involve their existing team members. That's a mistake. Anytime you're filling a position on your team, you need to devote at least part of the interview process to a short meeting with the other staff that the new hire will be working with. Not only can their points of view help make a good choice, but it's also a professional development opportunity for them, too.

Some of the most memorable moments of my early career took place after our team had interviewed someone and we were comparing notes on the candidate. I remember once offering my take about how smart and qualified someone was (or wasn't), only to have my reasoning crumble when the CEO said, "I know this person is really smart, but how do you see him making us a more successful company? What do you expect him to do?"

I'd fumble through an answer I should've already had in mind, but much more important was the chance to hear everyone else weigh that question, including the CEO. When a team is searching for a new hire, it forces the current members to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the team today. They have to recognize strengths and weaknesses and understand the current and future needs of the business.

All this comes to the fore in a debriefing session after an interview. The discussion forces everyone to clarify their expectations and understanding of the present state of things. In fact, it's one of the best ways to find out about the hidden problems in your organization, because new hires are often evaluated by whether they can help solve one of them.

Ideally, effective teams share a vision on these fundamental issues. Keeping everyone aligned isn't always easy, especially if you're short-staffed and looking to fill a role. But making the post-interview debrief a mainstay of the hiring process can help keep everyone aligned.

Three Guidelines For Debriefs That Work

For starters, giving all your team members a chance to meet with job candidates is the first hurdle, and it's usually the biggest one. Sure, scheduling issues can make this difficult, but your existing staff doesn't need to sit in on every single interview, just the relatively small handful of final-round candidates. In order to make the logistics easier, you can even have those candidates come in for a group interview at the same time slot as your weekly team meeting.

Then you need to make this opportunity count, and that's where a debrief comes in. It isn't rocket science; half the battle is simply making the commitment to actually do it. That said, there are a few simple do's and don'ts that will get you started on the right foot.

1. Don't let people email in their feedback about a candidate. Writing up copious notes is great, but it doesn't let you off the hook. This conversation must happen verbally and preferably in-person so everyone hears each other's points of view.
2. Don't collect feedback from people individually. The purpose of the debrief is for everyone to benefit from each other's perspectives and experience. Without that, people aren't learning from each other.
3. Everyone must answer the "Should we hire this person?" question and explain their reasoning. If the answer is "I don't know," then the person must explain why they can't make a determination and what they'd need in order to do so.

There are no exceptions to these rules, no matter how senior or junior the position you're looking to fill. Each debrief should follow this format consistently and involve your current staff to the same extent.

Personally, I've learned more about business and leadership from these sessions than from any other single activity in my career. I've also witnessed over and over again the personal growth in others that resulted from these discussions. Do it enough and you'll start to see people thinking and communicating about the business more thoughtfully than ever.

It can be tempting to find quicker ways for people to offer their feedback on a candidate. As a manager, it's probably most efficient just to cut them out of the decision-making process altogether and just interview and hire on your own. But hiring properly and managing well aren't strictly about efficiency. It's up to you to include your team members in the process and hold a proper candidate debrief afterward. You, your team, and your company can't afford not to do it right.

Christian Bonilla designs analytics software at Resonate, despite having no formal engineering training. You can follow his business ramblings at SmartLikeHow.com or on Twitter at @smartlikehow.

Standing out at a busy conference can be challenging, but these tips from a professional public speaker will give you an edge.

You landed a speaking role at an upcoming conference. Great! Now what? Well, if you're lucky, a decent crowd will show up for your talk, nod politely while you speak, and amble out afterward. That doesn't mean it was a failure—after all, this is how most presentations at formal events like conferences tend to go. They help you share a few ideas, raise your professional profile, and maybe lead to an exchanged business card or two.

But there are a few ways to turn your speaking engagements into much more powerful networking opportunities than just this. Here are five.

1. Provide A Handout

You may worry that conference-goers already have heaps of materials to cart around with them—and they probably do. But even if they toss it away afterward, a simple hard copy of your talk's key ideas can help them follow along better while you're delivering it and remember its details better afterward.

You don't have to go overboard. Just distill your main takeaways into a visually compelling one-page handout. Include a headshot, a quick biography, and contact information at the bottom or on the reverse. Many speakers print out copies of all their slides, but this can be costly (to your wallet and the environment), and it isn't all that effective. In most cases, listeners are more likely to review and hang onto a one-page distillation of your message, especially if it's got action items that relate directly to them. It may even be worth hiring a designer to help you polish up the look of your one-pager as well as your slides.

When it comes time for your talk, make sure you have handouts at place settings or on chairs before attendees arrive. This will prevent the distraction of waiting for handouts to make their way through the room as you start speaking.

2. Record Your Presentation So You Can Share It Later

When you work hard on a big presentation, you should share it beyond the live audience (assuming you have the okay of event organizers). Some conferences will record your program for you. If not, consider hiring a professional videographer who can record high-quality footage of your speech. Look for one who uses more than one HD camera and captures sound with an independent microphone system—not just the one the conference uses to amplify sound in the auditorium. This way you can leave with a high-quality recording, even if one camera or device fails.

Then make sure you share it. Conference organizers may be willing to include it on their website, but you should post it on your own site, your LinkedIn profile, YouTube channel, the other social media accounts that you use professionally, too. Think of this as a powerful piece of content for making connections and starting new conversations. In this sense, the video of your talk is out there in the world, networking for you virtually.

3. Wear Something That Stands Out

No, you shouldn't wear something totally outlandish, but it helps to dress in a way that makes you easy to recognize after your talk wraps up. After all, you want people to come find you and strike up a conversation. So you might wear a brightly colored blouse or tie, or perhaps a blazer with an interesting print (just make sure ahead of time that the pattern won't jump on camera).

Then make sure you continue to wear the same clothes the rest of the day of your talk so attendees can identify you even hours later. If conference events in the late afternoon or evening call for less formal clothing, consider wearing a casual shirt in the same bright color, or pair your unique blazer with jeans and an open-collared shirt.

4. Collect Business Cards

This tried-and-true step isn't one you can ignore. When people have a meaningful interaction with you at the event, ask for their business card and offer yours in return. But this basic networking rule is worth reiterating with a caveat: Don't be the annoying speaker who shoves business cards at every passerby. That's the quickest way to squander the platform you've been given.

Instead, try to jot down a note about each of your conversations on the back of the cards you're handed; this way you'll be able to follow up with those you'd like to connect with. A brief, personalized note via LinkedIn or email can go a long way. If an audience member approached you with a specific question after your talk, your message should contain a few links articles, videos, books, or other resources that the person might find useful.

5. Stay For The Entire Conference

To make the most of your conference presentation, attend sessions before and/or after your own speech. If you speak early in the program, you can relax after your talk, network with fellow attendees, and learn from other speakers—both about the content of their talk and about different presentation styles you might want to try out yourself next time.

If you speak late in the conference, participating in earlier sessions helps you learn more about your audience and creates a chance to mention of other sessions and attendees during your talk. Plus, any new friends you make before it's your turn to speak can even serve as encouraging audience members.

Giving a great presentation at a conference takes a significant investment of time, if not money. But if you do it right, it can pay dividends long afterward, broadening your network and contributing to your business. Conferences are often packed with content in a way that sometimes makes it tough to stand out. But follow these five steps and you're likely to leave an impression on some of the key people who attended—and, hopefully, plenty of others who didn't.

Christine Clapp is the author of Presenting at Work: A Guide to Public Speaking in Professional Contexts and the president of Spoken with Authority. Follow her on Twitter at @christineclapp.

The new $100 Wink hub connects with more devices, touts tighter security, and has the support of Walmart.

Among all the companies competing for smart-home supremacy, it's easy to forget about Wink.

Wink's platform doesn't have the backing of a tech industry titan, like Samsung's SmartThings or Alphabet's Nest, nor does it have the hype of Apple's HomeKit or Google's Brillo. And when its former parent company Quirky filed for bankruptcy last year, Wink's future looked murky.

Now, Wink has reemerged with its first new hardware product in two years, a second-generation hub that ties together all kinds of smart light bulbs, door locks, thermostats, garage door openers, and other home appliances. Perhaps as importantly, the company is teaming up with Walmart, which plans to promote and sell the new $100 hub, along with a slew of Wink-enabled devices, in its retail stores. Nathan Smith, Wink's founder and CTO, hopes these developments will help put the company on the map for the average user.

"What we're really trying to do here is make the first hub that appeals to mainstream consumers, that you don't have to be a hobbyist or enthusiast to get going with," Smith says.

What's A Hub For?

When Wink launched its first smart-home hub in 2014, the company saw it as a short-term solution for working with smart-home protocols such as ZigBee and Z-Wave, which can't talk directly to phones and tablets. Over time, the company hoped Bluetooth and Wi-Fi products would become more prevalent, so that users could control them straight from Wink's smartphone app without a hub. "We would love not to be in the hub business," Brett Worthington, a former Wink vice president, said at the time.

Since then, new smart-home protocols have emerged, and existing ones aren't going away. So instead of picking winners and losers, Wink is still trying to support them all. The Wink Hub V2 works with devices that use Wi-Fi (both 2.4 GHz and 5 Ghz), Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Thread, Kidde, and Lutron Quick Connect.

It may be hard to get people excited about what is essentially a box full of radios, but Wink is trying. The new hub is handsomer than most, with a tapered design that stands upright. It also has some new features, such as a faster processor and eight times the memory. This in turn enables more offline processing capabilities, so the system can run schedules and automate tasks even when the internet or Wink servers are down.

"We've made it a lot more complicated for ourselves, but it makes it a lot easier for consumers. They never have to think about what's happening locally, and what's happening remote," Smith says. (There are still exceptions, as some of the smart-home devices that the new hub works with still rely on their own servers for certain tasks.)

Wink has also beefed up security with a dedicated cryptographic chip, which verifies the integrity of the software to prevent against tampering. That's not to say Wink is hack-proof—a nearby attacker could still exploit a vulnerability in communication protocols such as ZigBee or Z-Wave—but it does help avoid total compromises of the system.

Smith says the new security features are a direct benefit from Wink's new corporate owners, Flex. The huge supply chain company, formerly known as Flextronics, has its own design team that worked with Wink's engineers and developers to create the necessary hardware and firmware.

"It's a space where people talk about security, but it's actually a lot easier to break into someone's house with a brick than to hack one of these devices, especially when we're operating with security practices that are the same that are used in industrial-sized hardware," Smith says.

Beyond The Box Of Radios

Wink still doesn't see itself as being in the hub business forever, but the company's goal of supporting as many devices as possible means it's unlikely to abandon hubs anytime soon.

Over time, Smith imagines that we'll see hub-like features built into other products. Wi-Fi routers from Google and Almond already include other radios for connecting to smart-home devices. Wink hasn't gone that route yet because it's still to hard to include everything. Google's OnHub, for instance, doesn't support Z-Wave devices, and the Almond 3 requires a separate Z-Wave dongle.

"We're still committed to providing consumers with a ton of choice in that respect, so fitting that into an OnHub or an Echo is just not a reality right now," Smith says. "You can maybe do one or two, but getting the full power of what we're providing people with everything else going on in there is just an overcomplication."

Smith does think that smart-home standards will consolidate eventually, likely around Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Either that, or the radios for other protocols will get smaller and cheaper, at which point we'll see a lot more routers, streaming boxes, and thermostats with hub capabilities inside. "It'll be sort of a footrace," he says.

For now, though, Wink is hoping to extoll the benefits of hub ownership to the average consumer, which is where the Walmart partnership comes in. Starting in late October, Wink's hub will be on display along with compatible smart-home products, and clear explanations of why people should care.

"We're really not focusing on the protocols so much, but focusing on what you can do," Smith says. "Have your lights come on to make it seem like you're home. Never come home to a dark house. Never come home to a cold house. We think in this way we'll be continuing to make this technology accessible to normal consumers."

Wink has a long way to go, though. As of now, the company has 1.7 million devices connected to its back end. That's up from 1.3 million in April, when Wink last shared usage figures with The Verge. And with the Consumer Technology Association reporting 7.36 million smart-home device sales last year, the category as a whole is small compared to smartphones (1.4 billion sold in 2015), tablets (206 million), and connected TV devices (42 million).

But Smith believes people's attitudes are changing as smart-home devices get easier to use, as prices fall, and as the use cases become clearer.

"People are jumping into this because of those use cases that I've described," he says. "For a low cost, you can now get a much better level of service and quality of interface than used to be possible with even extremely expensive installed systems."