Even as we buy more stuff online, clothing remains a holdout for brick-and-mortar retailers. Why? The fitting room.

"I'm not sure people would buy garments without trying them on in reality," says fashion designer Amber Bessey--especially the more expensive ones. But as the line between "reality" and "virtual" begins to fade, even the most traditional designers are beginning to crave the massive distribution power of the web.

A company called CLO Virtual Fashion Inc. is hoping to change the minds of designers like Bessey. The company's software, CLO3D, is a virtual sewing machine, simulating physical properties of materials and streamlining the design process.

Virtual Fitting Room

While retailers have been dabbling in virtual fashion for a while, none have attacked the design process from first stitch.

CEO of CLO USA Simon Kim says designers could use a device called the C-Mirror to make a more interactive experience.

The C-Mirror is a virtual fitting room--it's a real-life mirror that displays CLO3D-made garments over the person's reflection--allowing them to try on clothing virtually.

"Something like haute couture, that normal consumers would never be able to wear--you'd be surprised with how many people would get into that," Kim says.

High-end U.K designers are already using 3-D software, since they have to create their garments in-house and in a more competitive fashion market, unlike the U.S., which outsources most of its apparel.

One of CLO's European clients grew a single clothing line from 300 garments to 1,000. "U.K. designers don't want to increase the capacity by dismantling the traditional culture and philosophy, but they can reduce their lead time through technologies like 3-D," Kim says. "But, I do think we could have those kinds of things in the U.S."

Department stores like Macy's and Bloomingdale's have used virtual fitting rooms and body scanners like Me-ality and TrueFit. Sportswear designer Henri Lloyd reduced return rates by 70% with virtual fitting rooms and online retailers like ASOS--which recently teamed up with software program Virtusize--have been measuring fit. But, today's consumers want more than just proper fit. And, with the prices they are paying, they deserve to get it with software like CLO's.

It's All About The Output

The visual quality of CLO3D-made apparel surpasses competing 3-D garments like Fits.me and Bodymetrics--whose virtual apparel is created by scanning items, digitizers, or photographs and lack realist effects. Thanks to the software's output, CLO3D offers 23 different, realistic fabrics options and even allows designers to customize their own fabrics. You've probably seen CLO's technology before as it is responsible for the realistic garments in movies like The Hobbit and The Adventures of Tintin as well as games like FIFA and Call of Duty.

CLO's output also aids in the software's ability to nail the "draping" effect--the way the clothes naturally hang on a person. Unlike competitors' technology that relies mostly on a slower analog process, CLO3D's simulation engine is so fast that it can create fabrics' most extensive details. "We researched a lot about the sewing techniques and the fabrics and in essence, it's more based on the avatars and how the fabric connects with them," Kim says "And then, how it simulates--it's all about the draping."

The program's collision detection--an effect used in realistic 3-D video games--allows designers to create a garment's layering effect--the biggest component missing from virtual garments. "That's how designers can create puffs, pleats, and padding that they would consider in real life," Kim says. "You can see the draping and get more creative by drawing another pocket and different kinds of details that's completely impossible to do in other programs right now."

Adding Value To Fashion Week

Having reported from the fashion week front lines, I can say that the quality of CLO's virtual fashion show--from the lighting to the model's movement--is visually spot-on. There's an option to change a garment's colors on the avatar while it is walking down the runway--which, if I'm a designer, gives me a million ideas of creative things I could do with that alone.

Kim and the CLO team have been attending Milan Fashion Week to figure out how to get involved in future fashion weeks as soon as next year. And, while he doesn't want to narrow down the market just yet, he does have some ideas of possible uses. "With C-Mirror, I think it would be a good device to show the samples that are not inside the runway that you've already created," he says. "You can actually give more value by showing that you have more designs."

And with more designs, come more designers and more revenue options. Organizations like Mercedes Benz Fashion Week and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) could use the virtual fashion show to feature talented designers they aren't able to accommodate in the physical show, creating potential revenue streams and a more inclusive event.

There's also big value in having garment demand data before spending time and money on getting it produced and reducing the risk of not selling. U.K. luxury brand Burberry has been at the forefront of leveraging this kind of big data, reeling in annual sales in excess of $3 billion. It's no wonder Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts was recently picked up by Apple's management.

SAP Marketing Director David Trites says brands that can extract the most wisdom from the crowd and react to it fastest will win both on and off the runway. "A lot of designers--especially high-profile ones--reject the idea of data influencing their art or their ability to set new trends, " he says. "But, at the end of the day, big data is about gaining knowledge to help make better decisions, so some designers will leverage the insight for their designs--they just won't tell anyone."

Now imagine having that sort of wisdom already inside of the software you use to design an object--yet another potential benefit from CLO's technology.

Scaling The Line Between Tradition And Technology

A former Korean venture capitalist, Simon Kim understands the work it takes to disrupt this business and has been treading lightly. "Fashion is a very traditional industry--unlike other industries," he says. "We started to get in that market but we needed technology advancements to get there, which took more than two years."

To keep a competitive edge, early adopters of the product are keeping their affiliation with the product confidential, as 10 of its 100 clients are high-profile brands. "3-D adoption is somewhat of a bigger strategic business decision for many," says CLO's vice president of Business Development, Deborah Park. "This technology is not the future--it's actually now," Kim adds. "If you have the technology ready, the actual success of business really depends on how to communicate with people and catching the trends."

But not all tradition needs preserving--especially not the currently chaotic manufacturing system which involves a lot of time, money, and guesswork. The typical production process requires designers to attach 2-D drawings to an assortment of attachments and glued fabrics, followed by multiple shipping rounds to China. And, for the majority of U.S. apparel brands that are outsourcing, communication between factories is often difficult, delayed, and problematic.

CLO3D enables instant creation, edit options, and accurate measurement directly inside the program, making the average garment creation time a mere 35 minutes and an average lead time of 72 hours for a physical sample. One of CLO's clients saved $68.5k on a single clothing line, cutting the average time and cost in half.

Fashion designer Amber Bessey says CLO3D's concept is a serious development in the design process. "As a designer that does sketches completely on the computer, it would be very helpful," she says. "It seems like a natural but exciting technology which can help the designer visualize concepts before ever making a pattern."

Iowa State University professor Fatma Baytar says this kind of technology is needed in the design process. "It's better to have a more sustainable system where we don't have to create a bunch of garments, but customize fewer, quality garments for the consumer."

It's the company's patience with the fashion industry that will make it more of a success over competitors in the long run. But, Kim says the process will continue to need physical skills like pattern making. "We don't go to the client and say, 'We want to replace everything in 3-D'. We are trying to contribute to their processes so it can be easily adaptive, so they can benefit from it and so that it slowly gets the culture going," he says. "In fashion, you have to be very careful to get the right cultural fit as well."

New Roots To Dress The World

After researching several locations, the company decided to lay new global grounds in New York last month, where Kim believes is the perfect spot for overlooking European and South American markets--especially China. "The sheer amount of garments made in China--it's just too much," he says. "We need to be there."

In order to become the go-to fashion platform the founders envision, Kim says the company is using 2014 to nail down a sustainable model that can cope with the varying design processes around the world. "Every single retailer and designer has their own process--a designer in Brazil will have a different process than the U.S. or the Italians," he says. "We want to continue talking with them and advance the technology so it can cooperate with them all."

Though CLO is in a predominately B2B position right now, the company doesn't plan to stay there. Founders have ideas for the consumer side including a virtual shopping mall and virtual fitting rooms within mobile devices and wearables.

But Kim says it will have to wait for hardware efficient enough to hold CLO3D's considerable computer power. "It's a matter of the hardware which is not there yet," Kim says. "You could imagine that with the Google Glass you can actually have some suits or dresses worn by people walking around you."

The Stitchfest hackathon at UPenn didn't know what was coming when Andrew Quitmeyer and Firaz Peer built an Arduino-powered genital shocker for their DIY hacking contest. This was no stunt: Quitmeyer intends for the DIY sex toy to be one of an open source suite when he opens Comingle next August--what he hopes will be the "Adafruit of sex toys."

The "Electric Eel" prototype uses multiple conductors to zap the wearer's shaft with low-voltage electricity--which is physically stimulating and definitely won't burn, Quitmeyer insists, who bravely donned the prototype in front of hackathon judges. Though none of them would try out the prototype, says Peer, one licked an equivalent electrode-lined sheet of fabric...and found it pleasurably shocking.

Any other "new sex toy" innovation might stop there, but Quitmeyer and Peer built the Electric Eel with an Arduino microcontroller. Instead of writing bland programs to alternate the Eel's zapping frequency, Quitmeyer wants to include biometric sensors that'll allow a range of inputs to the sex toy's code. Below is Quitmeyer's (SFW) demonstration of a crude biosensor hooked to the Eel that zaps with each intake of breath.

But by opening the Comingle repository with fellow PhD candidate Paul Clifton, Quitmeyer doesn't just want to create the next generation of sex toys--he wants to inspire folks to create and iterate their own.

And it gets weirder still, when you learn this innovation story began with ants in a Panama jungle.

Robots In The Jungle

Quitmeyer began delving into robotics four years ago while taking classes for a Digital Media Master's at Georgia Tech. A self-described polymath, Quitmeyer holds undergrad degrees in film and industrial engineering. In a sense, his Master's experiments disrupted societal assumptions, often by grossing out or messing with folks on the street. His first piece, Ducks Feeding people, had an Arduino-powered giant duck head spew candy rewards to people feeding regular ducks in the park.

Quitmeyer got another request: A group of scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute needed a dynamic computer program to help them track ants in the jungles of Panama. He flew down to view their working conditions.

The scientists were using lab-developed procedures inadequate for the field, where ants crawl up 3-D structures and blend in with their surroundings. Quitmeyer built a light sensor sensitive enough to tell when the ants' shiny bodies reflected less light than the flat bark.

Quitmeyer started following the scientists around as they studied animals in their habitats. Inspired by their tasks and inadequate tools, Quitmeyer started building his own--a small fleet of specialized robots. One example, a simulated woodpecker, increasingly freaked out ant colonies as the robopecker pecked at different biologically accurate rhythms. Another was a stereo-smelling device that mimicked insects' dual antennas that allow them to smell directionally.

Quitmeyer was simulating nature with cheap robo parts from a remote workbench. As he began holding workshops to teach the scientists how to build their own animal-interacting bots, he fell in love with the roaming experimental nature of these scientists' lives. He upped to a PhD in Digital Naturalism at Georgia Tech and started scrounging personal money to fly back to Panama to continue his animal and robotic studies. Meanwhile, he was having a ton of fun using his computer science background to teach scientists how to create dynamic versions of static experiments with bots they could make themselves.

And then, during one of his impromptu robot workshops last year, someone asked Quitmeyer if he could use his robot know-how to build a vibrator.

The Robot Sex Game

It's no surprise that Quitmeyer jumped at the challenge. His Digital Media studies focused on playful subversion of societal expectations--like his "pee to check in" primitivist revival critique of Foursquare, "Mark Your Territory."

"The vibrator was a really interesting design aspect, especially because I was in this really limited environment, trying to MacGyver a dildo like this," says Quitmeyer. "Using a simple workshop under unusual workshop conditions revealed to me not only the demand but also how easy it would be for someone to create and modify their own sex toys."

After returning to Georgia Tech, Quitmeyer sat down with his program peer Clifton to think seriously about an idea they'd thrown around. In August 2013, they wrote the charter and mission statement for Comingle. Clifton began looking around sex toy review blogs and local shops--and found that sex toys haven't innovated in decades. You're lucky to get a remote. The high-end toys look more like industrial art pieces, says Clifton, so they decided to push back from the tech side instead.

But it was the playful scientific experiments with his fleet of bots that Quitmeyer credits with thinking digitally for new, dynamic, hackable sex toys. Quitmeyer found that some scientists' experiments were being focused around their older, inflexible tech. With Quitmeyer's bots, they broke the cycle of technological determinism.

"There was cross fertilization with my animal research," says Quitmeyer. "They're both about interacting with senses of animals that we usually ignore in most interaction design. We weren't looking at screens or mice or keyboards 'cause animals can't use those standard, very visual approaches to interacting with computers."

The fruits of that labor: biometrics. Like the primitive breath-controlled mechanic in the Electric Eel prototype, Quitmeyer and Clifton see incredible opportunities by linking sex toys to pulse, light, or motion sensors to stimulating servos or electrodes.

A Sex Toy-Friendly Future

The Electric Eel may not have impressed the judges, but passersby were certainly entertained--and incentivizing condom use is a novel approach to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's condom challenge to make condom use more enjoyable. While Firaz, Quitmeyer, and Clifton haven't discussed where the Eel will fit in the Comingle family of devices, it shows the radical thinking that these design and interface junkies are bringing to an industry desperate to be brought into the age of the Internet of Things.

Quitmeyer and Clifton plan to unleash Comingle in August 2014 at the earliest with a suite of three to four blueprints. Because of the taboo surrounding sex toys, the pair have have done their testing in private, but that won't be the biggest shock to their social circles.

"What will surprise people more will be me coming out as a businessman instead of a tech weirdo," says Quitmeyer.

He'll still be a bit of a tech weirdo--after all, most businesses don't give away their device blueprints for free. Quitmeyer and Clifton want Comingle to be a nexus for sharing iterations and improvements with others a la Adafruit's microcontroller enthusiast community. They figure to make money directly selling device components that are difficult to find elsewhere.

By hosting this conversation and community, Quitmeyer hopes to loosen up society. Tupperware party-style sex toy exchanges are already commonplace on college campuses--Quitmeyer hopes to raise the bar with sex toy hackathons. But at its core, the pair want the DIY aspect to empower users.

"It's important that we be supportive of people who want to build these things themselves--especially regarding sexuality," says Clifton. "If we take sex toys from a women's perspective, and if sex toys are a way for women to take control of their bodies, then the next step is creating their own devices instead of just going out and purchasing them."

Sex tech has already broadsided the tech world with the annual Arse Elektronika, which Quitmeyer and Clifton caught in San Francisco last October. A few attendees who made their own sex toys sparked the Comingle boys' imaginations. Likewise, they were inspired by venerable device hacker Micah Elizabeth Scott's work making a Wi-Fi-enabled feedback vibrator in Nov 2012. Sex toys and sexuality get people interested in tech who wouldn't otherwise be intrigued by Make magazine or RC copters, says Clifton. They're hoping Comingle can reach out to and engage this lost flock who might just need a little zap to get them into the tech fold.

Comingle still has kinks to work out before unleashing the first open source sex toy haven in late summer 2014. When it comes to such sensitive applications, perfecting the installation of gizmos in silicone and getting the molds to look just right will require the utmost care. But inspired acolytes can take the first step toward the future of sex toys by following Comingle on Twitter and signing up for their mailing list.

For now, Comingle is a plan and a placeholder site--but inspired donators can take the first step toward the future of sex toys by endorsing the Electric Eel on Indiegogo.

When it comes to editing, few writers are evoked as much as Ernest Hemingway. The author's spare and economical style is often seen as the gold standard for prose. Now, the patron saint of clarity in writing has a web app named after him.

Hemingway is a lightweight web app that will quickly analyze your work for clarity. It will point out every sentence that is too long, and shame you for every adverb you use. It will guide you to simplicity, and perhaps, to Truth.

At least, that's what the real Hemingway would say. Maybe.

So for kicks, we thought it would be fun to use the Hemingway app to critique both the real Hemingway and his imitators. We took four winners from the now-defunct International Imitation Hemingway writing contest--which ran from 1977 to 2005 and asked writers to emulate the author's style in a funny short story--to see if they were up to snuff.

The earliest winner that we found was from 1986, Mark Silber's "The Snooze of Kilimanjaro." And it's off to a pretty great start, with only one adverb and one instance of passive voice. As far as the app is concerned, Hemingway himself wrote the thing.

Jump forward a year for 1987's winner, "In Another Contra." The results on the scorecard are pretty good:

But it also has this paragraph, which would have caused the real Hemingway to finish his whiskey and then say something disparaging about the author's integrity.

The winner for the year 2000, "Across the Suburbs and Into the Express Lane," is probably the most grievous of the lot, with this doozy of a paragraph.

If you know what that means, please tell us in the comments.

The scorecard is pretty grim, too. Eight out of 48 sentences are hard to read. That's one-sixth of the entire story. A travesty. Hemingway is the guy who people attribute to having written an entire short story in just six words. You know, "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn." The man could have rewritten the Constitution in eight sentences had we asked him to.

The last person to win this contest was cardiologist Gary Davis, with his 2005 story "Da Moveable Code." The web-based Hemingway had problems with it instantly.

The real Hemingway probably wouldn't have read it at all, choosing instead to shoot a bear and make love to a woman immediately after. That's the sort of thing Hemingway was into. He was kind of a rock star.

All things considered, Mr. Davis isn't that far off the mark, although the Hemingway app says precious little about bear hunting.

At this point, you're probably wondering what App Hemingway thinks of Meatspace Hemingway. So are we.

That's from Hemingway's "The Old Man at the Bridge." Clearly, the guy was a hack. Five adverbs in a 762-word story, and this long-as-hell sentence:

Amateur stuff, man.

But let's not get too haughty. We should all be willing to subject our work to the scrutiny we apply to others. It's The Golden Rule, you know.

Here's (Right) what this piece looks like, according to the Hemingway app.

That's what you get for using em-dashes, I suppose.

Can people really live forever? A children's book author has joined the growing chorus of transhumanist voices insisting that we soon may. That's right kids, you too could be immortal.

Gennady Stolyarov, author of Death Is Wrong wants children to learn that death won't be a given in the technological age. As a boy growing up in Minsk, the prospect of death confused him and it's plagued him ever since. Why does a good, productive, happy person have to die?

Stolyarov, a property and casualty actuary, launched an Indiegogo campaign last week called "Help Teach 1000 Kids Death Is Wrong," aimed at giving out free 1,000 free copies of the book to kids. The book, which was illustrated by his wife Wendy, was first published in November 2013.

Over the last decade, researchers like Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil have helped popularize the notion that technology will extend the human lifespan--possibly forever. According to Kurzweil, we will achieve indefinite longevity by 2030. Meanwhile, recent biomedical advances--like nerve-connected bionic arms and nanobots operating inside living cells--have made the concept sound less crazy.

Stolyarov's book interweaves his own life and his mental grapple with death, the history of long-living plants and animals--like the Methuselah Tree that has lived for thousands of years and the functionally immortal turritopsis nutricula jellyfish--and the techno-philosophical developments combating senescence today.

The language is just saccharine enough for children to dig into, but the portentous themes will strike deep, philosophical chords in adults. The overall message is positive: The way technology is headed, we should be able to continue discovering and doing the things we love indefinitely. The response, especially in transhumanist circles, has been positive. Stolyarov's most ruthless criticism is a two-star Amazon review for "an alleged insufficiency of narrative."

Not everyone can think in prescient terms about the future to consider what technology can accomplish down the road to live forever. We talked to Stolyarov about his fixation on death and immortality.

Are you afraid to die?

I don't see any shame in saying that I am. For me as a person who relies on reason and understanding and anticipation of the future, this is the only condition that's truly unknowable. If you cease existing, what's that really like? The answer is to say that it's like anything is a misuse of language because there's nothing that remains. Is fear the predominant motive for why I wrote this book? And there, the answer is no.

How has growing up in Belarus culturally affected the way you think about death?

I was born at the very tail end of the existence of the Soviet Union. I think most people there are more fatalistic than people in the U.S. They might think life extension is a good thing, but it's never going to happen because life is so bad right now, and they don't see it getting better. Here, life is better and the technologies are being worked on and developed, but some people have philosophical or religious objections, or they just have status quo bias. They can only see a little bit ahead, only in incremental elements.

Is it frustrating to you that people use something like religion as a crutch to cope with death?

It's absolutely frustrating, and I can understand where that mentality comes from because for millennia prior to our time, there was really no feasible escape from human mortality. It's a tradition, and a lot of people will hang onto it just because that's what they're familiar with. But now that we've reached this critical point that, with enough of a push, our technology can actually get us to the point where we repair the damage to our bodies. Where our generation doesn't have to be the last generation to die.

With such a heavy title, Death is Wrong, and cover of a man shaming the Grim Reaper, do you worry you might dissuade children from wanting to read your book?

With children, their parents are gatekeepers, and sometimes that might be an issue because their parents pretty much have to support this message. But I think a lot of adults think that kids are more lighthearted than they actually are. You don't have to sugarcoat it for them; it has to be accessible. In fact, what I had learned about World War II and the atrocities that the Nazis committed when they invaded Russia, if I had read this book, it would have given me some hope.

Why did you choose to use the word "senescence," which appears several times throughout, instead of addressing it as "aging"?

I made that decision to try to get the concept of biological age and numerical age detached in the minds of children. If you just call it "aging," there's an implicit connotation that the more years you accumulate, the frailer you become, the more prone to disease and death you become. One has to essentially achieve biological youthfulness, a reversal of senescence, in order to age in such a way as not to increase one's probability of death over time.

In the book, you talk about cell rejuvenation as a solution to senescence, but there are many biomedical advancements taking us to a future based in physical, tangible technologies.

I think the two are intertwined...that there really is no fundamental disconnect between electronic technology and an organic body. Some organs will wear out and we would have the ability to replace them with artificial versions. We'll have the ability to go into a particular cell using a nanobot and fix something that was wrong with it. One of the fundamental positions that I have about the future is that when you have a lot of innovative, hardworking people who are devoted to a particular goal, they can achieve wonders. And those wonders are going to trickle down into our lives and enable us to live better.

The book is one big allusion to the possibility of the singularity, but I don't remember ever reading that specific word.

I wanted it to be a bit more grounded in I think what children are familiar with. I hint at what they could do if they had that timeframe. Rather than providing any single speculative vision, which a lot of people have done, what I want to do is to get kids thinking along those parameters, thinking about the future dramatically different than the past, thinking about what they could do in the future. I think as they grow up, as they seek out more of this material, they'll come to conversations about the singularity on their own.

Could there be a human limit of indefinite longevity?

The way I like to consider it is to look at what one would want to do tomorrow. If one's life is generally pretty good...would one want to keep living, considering that one's life might change a little bit tomorrow? For me, the answer is a resounding yes. The technologies, I think, will affect people's thinking. Ultimately, there is an evolutionary dynamic in there. The people who choose not to terminate their own lives...are the ones who are going to determine the course of our culture, our philosophy, everyone else's attitudes.

What if instead of a singularity, we reach a solfalarity--which is described in a New Yorker column by Tim Wu as the "evolution toward an absence of discomforts," resulting in better technology, but a worse-off society?

Technology is advancing more rapidly than culture is. The norms and traditions acquired over generations ceased to be relevant in a world of this kind of accelerating change. Some people adapt to it pretty well. I think I'm immensely and immeasurably better off due to the electronic age. [Today] if we want to be fit and philosophically inclined and productive, we can do all those things with the resources we have at our disposal. We just have to be deliberate about it. I think that's going to be true in every era.

How did you become a transhumanist?

The philosophy of transhumanism, as the name implies, is about transcending the limitations of the human condition. Ever since I was a child, I wanted to get more in my life to experience more, to create more, to do great things, and I never want that to stop. That's what motivates me as a transhumanist, and I'm very thrilled to be living in a time...with the information revolution, the biotechnology revolution, hopefully in the next 10 years, the nanotechnology revolution, that will enable us to repair the damage to our bodies that accumulates over time.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything last Wednesday, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich opened the floor for questions, but notably ignored the most popular one in the thread: in light of recent NSA revelations, what will the company do to assure that its chips don't contain a backdoor for the NSA?

While Kzarnich never answered any of the security-related questions--Intel PR says this is because the questions came late and Kzarnich either missed them entirely or couldn't reply in time--one Redditor, Bardfinn, responded at length on the issue of encryption and security.

Bardfinn's real name is Steve Akins, and in an email correspondence he describes his interest in cryptography and Internet security as personal and societal/political. But he's quite literate on the subject.

"It's an immense problem for the layman," Akins says. "Cryptography is difficult to use, touches many parts of our lives, and has not become significantly less difficult in the past 30 years… In our tablets and smartphones, and the networks they connect to, cryptography is handled for us by the manufacturers. We never see it, never interact with it, and in many cases *cannot* interact with it." We're placing an immense amount of trust in the cryptography of manufacturers, Akins argues, and therefore we're effectively "trusting them not to peek."

Of course, everyone can't be a skilled cryptographer, and since absolute security isn't really possible, there will always have to be some element of trust involved between manufacturers and everyday people--but Akins believes that trust needs to be verifiable, mitigated, and distributed:

The problem isn't that we have to trust a black box in our personal devices. The problem is that we have to trust that one black box, and many black boxes on the Internet (or cellular network) which may or may not be as secure as the black box in our devices, and the ones in our computers and the ones in the networks interoperate at the lowest common denominator, and they all probably have back doors (which makes it really hard to actually trust them), and the ones on the Internet are highly targetable by the bored kids, criminals, etc: Bad Actors.

To understand the root cause of this concern, and what can be done about it, it helps to have some understanding of how your computer goes about encrypting things to ensure that prying eyes don't see what you don't want them to see. For your computer to lock your data up tight and send it on its way, it relies on something that computers are in reality quite bad at: randomness.

Random numbers are a necessity for building secure systems, as they're the only way to make sure your encryption key stays secure. However, generating random numbers can be extraordinarily difficult, especially with software. Programs and computers are run by logic and if-then conditionals--asking them to pull numbers out of thin air without a prescribed formula is the sort of simple thing human minds can do that trip up computers. We call that predictability entropy. The higher your entropy, the harder it is to crack your encryption.

Since it's so hard to come up with a software solution that adequately generates random numbers with high entropy for encryption, it's become possible to mitigate that by turning to your computer's processor. Which is where Intel comes in.

Ever since the company launched its Ivy Bridge line of processors in May of 2012, it's included what it calls Secure Key technology for the purpose of random number generation. It is, essentially, a black box--an opaque system built for a specific purpose (random number generation) but with little to no insight as to how it actually accomplishes it.

This became problematic last fall, in light of further information about how the NSA and GCHQ surveillance programs cracked Internet encryption protocols leaked by Edward Snowden was made public. While neither Intel nor any of its competitors were ever mentioned in the report, details about the NSA decryption program code-named BULLRUN stated that the agency had "inserted secret vulnerabilities -- known as backdoors or trapdoors -- into commercial encryption software" in order to get past the most common web security protocols like HTTPS and SSL.

As such, the security community entered into a state of heightened concern and paranoia, as each discovered exploit could now be interpreted as intentional government surveillance, or at least an invitation for it. As a result, the developers of secure open-source OS FreeBSD stated that they could not solely trust chip-based cryptography from Intel or its competitor Via without running their output through additional random number generation software. What's more, Linux developer Theodore Ts'o claimed Intel engineers tried to pressure him into relying solely on their processor for cryptography--which he resisted for this very reason.

Internet security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier has also expressed concern that such a backdoor could easily exist on Intel processors, functioning as a virtually undetectable means by which the entropy of the chip-based cryptography could be dramatically lowered and compromised. In an editorial for Wired, Schneier elaborates further on the the backdoor problem:

In general, what we need is assurance: methodologies for ensuring that a piece of software does what it's supposed to do and nothing more. Unfortunately, we're terrible at this. Even worse, there's not a lot of practical research in this area -- and it's hurting us badly right now.

When contacted about these security concerns, Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said that "there has never been any association between Intel and the NSA. That's not something we do. We've taken a firm position--we don't do anything to compromise the security of our technology."

As far as assurance goes, well, they're working on it. "You can rest assured that we're working on addressing this. It's clearly an important issue, clearly something we've been following," Mulloy said.

For now, though, we're just going to have to take Intel's word for it.

Are you trying to create more diverse software teams by hiring more women? Here are six things NOT to do during the recruiting and interviewing process.

Open Source

Don't do this: Did you know that only about 10% of open source developers are women? The landscape can be harsh--a lack of role models, competing personal and family priorities, a combative hacker ethic, "flame wars," and the difficulty females face when receiving adequate recognition for contributions. Many women choose not to participate. By requiring candidates to have a strong track record of open source contributions, you limit your recruiting pipeline.

Do this instead: Unless open source experience is a strict requirement for the position, don't mention it in your job description.

Job Description

Don't do this: Use masculine wording in your job description. You'd be surprised how many companies make this mistake. Here are some real examples, taken from "Tech Companies That Only Hire Men," a blog that compiles such job descriptions:

• "If you are an IT guy looking to get in on a promising start-up, then this is the start-up for you..."
• "The Streaming Server team seeks a Senior Software Craftsman to join us in our bold efforts to…"
• "If you are the kind of person who builds a search engine over a weekend or manages his music collection on a Hadoop cluster we want to hear from you..."
• "A lead tech person that is looking to put some developers under his belt.
• We need 5 guys for a project..."
• "Looking for a sharp young up and coming guy who can be his right hand man..."

Do this instead: Don't make it hard for a woman to know she's welcome to apply. Edit your job descriptions to be gender neutral.

Company Photos

Don't do this: Show only the bro's. What do the photos on your website or Twitter feed say about your company? I've seen "Careers" pages for tech companies that show only men at team-building events. Or those with a token woman in a photo, but she doesn't look like she's having a good time.

Do this instead: Show the images on your site to women and ask if they can imagine themselves thriving at your company. Based on their feedback, decide what changes to make.

Referrals

Don't do this: Rely only on employee referrals. Employees will often refer people like themselves who have a similar background and are the same gender. Don't get me wrong--referrals are a proven way to find great candidates. However, to reduce the homogeneity that comes with referrals, be sure to utilize and value additional approaches to filling your pipeline.

Do this instead: Advertise your open positions in a variety of ways, including websites for women in the tech industry and your company's social media channels. Recruit at the Grace Hopper Celebration and other conferences geared to women in technology. Sponsor meetups for women in tech groups and tell them about your open positions.

Interviews

Don't do this: Create male-only interview teams. During an interview, candidates want to see people like themselves to help them imagine being successful in that environment. Don't make it hard for female candidates to see themselves thriving at your company.

Do this instead: Make sure every female candidate meets at least one female employee, ideally in a similar job function.

Sacrifice Quality

Don't do this: Lower the bar for female candidates. I once interviewed for a software engineering job on the same day that my husband interviewed with the same team for the same kind of role. When we compared notes afterwards, I was shocked at how hard his interview was. Mine was superficial and skirted any tough technical questions. We both got job offers, but I declined. I didn't want to join a team that didn't think I had the same technical chops as a man.

Do this instead: Design your interviews to be just as tough for women as for men.

While there are fewer women in tech than men, the candidates are out there. Don't shoot yourself in the foot and make it harder to recruit them than it has to be.

References

I wrote this article based on my firsthand experience combined with research published by the Anita Borg Institute and the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). I'm grateful for the work these organizations do to improve gender diversity.

Karen Catlin develops powerful women leaders in the tech industry with leadership coaching and advising companies on how to attract and retain female talent. She has an extensive background in Silicon Valley. Formerly, Karen was a vice president at Adobe Systems, and most recently, the CEO of Athentica, an early-stage startup. Follow her on Twitter @kecatlin.

Chaotic Moon is a creative technology agency based in Austin, Texas.

Getting everything online has become second nature for just about everything but medical treatment and clothes shopping. But Virginia Beach-based 7 Cups of Tea, founded by a clinical psychologist named Glen Moriarty, is attempting to offer that most personal of procedures--therapy--for free over a 24/7 counseling web app.

Except that 7 Cups doesn't just use licensed therapists--the person at the other end of the line could be anyone. That's right--it's the Mechanical Turk of therapy. Will this actually work?

The Doctor Is Inbox

"In therapy, you usually have to drive to the therapist, and when you get there, you're worried about being judged," Moriarty says. "But on 7 Cups, callers get right to the heart of the issue. It's incredibly healing. We're a global, social safety net."

Launched originally as a Y Combinator startup, six-month-old 7 Cups has thousands of people seeking counseling through the site per week. Some of the ailments that bring users to 7 Cups of Tea include anxiety, depression, eating disorders, panic attacks, surviving breakups, emotion management, traumatic experiences, or work-related stress. The site gets its name from a Chinese poem. In the poem, each of the seven cups of tea provides a different level of healing.

"[Therapy] has remained pretty unchanged since the time of Freud," says Moriarty. If it were invented in 2014 instead, it likely would've ended up being web-based and not geography-based.

How It Works

Say you're depressed: Your wife doesn't love you anymore. Your boyfriend's taking advantage of you. Work sucks. You log onto 7 Cups of Tea, plug in your phone number, and the site bridges you and your "Listener," which is this app's handle for counselor, in a secure phone call. If you prefer real-time text chat, that's an option, too.

Your Listener--who could be a mental health professional, a student, a part-time mom--offer advice and a proverbial shoulder to cry on, all in total anonymity. Your conversations are deleted afterwards. It's the Alcoholics Anonymous model: Many Listeners were onetime users of 7 Cups. When you're in "the rooms," as AA members say, it makes sense to connect to someone on purely a human level--not just because they're trained or certified. But over the web? Can people really get comfortable with that?

Apparently they can. Listeners might have been known to drop "thinking of you" notes, says Moriarty, after their conversations are done, and users can schedule follow-ups with the same person if they're feeling it. Some Listeners are recruited through the site's partners, which include a variety of mental health organizations, like the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the International Bipolar Foundation, or groups that focus on LGBT or motherhood-related issues.

All About "Listeners"

Granted, Listeners aren't supposed to dole out specific medical or psychological advice. But they provide unconditional support to people in dire straits. Hence the name "listener." "We helped over 5,000 people last week alone," Moriarty says.

The Listeners, who undergo a background check and a training program, hail from over 80 nations and speak dozens of languages. Users can request Listeners by country, language, or specialized topic, like health and wellness, work and school, family and friends.

There's even a gamification element for Listeners: They earn badges if they really connect with the caller. Listeners get points for extra-long conversations with users, for example, or if a user felt a real connection to the Listener and requests to speak to him or her a second time. In addition to the live Listeners, the site offers research-backed help guides that serve as a launching point to users as they begin navigating their problems and the healing process. There are videos, background information, self-inventories, and suggested exercises and activities.

Unchartered Psychological Territory

One of the biggest challenges the site is facing is recruiting enough Listeners to meet demand, as the number of daily users has reached into the thousands. And while skeptics may say that talking to random people online can't match the experience of seeing a medical professional, Moriarty says that it's not even the site's goal to replace the pros. In fact, the more ways people can seek counseling, the better.

"Therapists shouldn't worry," he says. "We have millions upon millions in this world who need help. We're not even coming close to solving the problem." A similar service, Breakthrough.com, works with users' insurance companies to pair them with psychiatrists for online sessions.

Moriarty thinks the secret weapon is blending technology with psychology, and that kind of experimentation is something we'll likely see more of as more startups and mental health organizations harness the power of on-demand services. Whether you're wrestling with a crippling existential crisis or just had a bad day, Listeners on his site are standing by.

"That's a big interest of mine," he says. "Leveraging technology to help people."

For much of the 20th century the automobile was American's sweetheart lifestyle product. In the last 10 years though, driving rates--especially among teens--have been on the decline. One of the main factors in that decline, according to a recent report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, is that driving isn't the cool, fun, hip pastime it once was. It's become drudgery.

Smartphones have replaced cars as the object of our collective identities. But now GM thinks cars can regain the "cool" mantle--or at least share it--by getting into the software business.

If You Can't Beat The Smartphone, Join It

GM wants its cars to be part of a platform. So last month it announced it's launching an API and app store which it believes will be home to a whole new segment of the 21st century software business.

I asked GM's Greg Ross if it bothered him that cars can't fall back on the cool factor anymore. Ross is the director of product strategy and infotainment for General Motors' Global Connected Consumer group, and one of the people at GM driving the push to bring the car into the 21st century.

"Sure, it bugs me in that any time you're working on a product you want to make sure it's as appealing as it can be to as many people as it can be," Ross says, "and youth more so than anybody because that's the future. I think we need to take it seriously to say, 'What do we need to do to make car and car ownership more appealing?'"

Appealing is the right world. Apple and other smartphone manufacturers have "appealing" down to a science, which has helped fuel the boom in the mobile economy of the last seven years. Virtually every quarter there are smartphones with better screens, faster processors, thinner designs, and more addictive apps.

Contrast that with automobiles, which evolve only by degrees each decade, even as they get more expensive, and you can see why phones are more fun.

Of course, car manufactures are slow to "revolutionize" automobiles every year, unlike technology companies can with smartphones, because they're obligated to adhere to more legal and safety regulations than a smartphone maker ever would be," Ross says.

"We're not on a cell phone development cycle, which make things, inherently, a little bit slower. But the car is on a long development cycle versus a smartphone and for good reasons. You've got several thousand pounds of steel going down the road, you have a lot of testing and development that needs to go into making sure everything works the way it's supposed to."

Developing For Machines That Travel At 70 MPH

This summer most of GM's 2015 model year vehicles are going to have an AppShop application in their in-dash computers, GM's equivalent to the iTunes Store or Google Play. GM first introduced its API at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2013 and within the first year they've had a few thousand developers sign up, eager to work on an entirely new software platform.

However, while Ross and his team have seen many great app ideas from developers, they quickly found that it was important to work with developers to change the way they thought about how users interact with their apps.

"The developers we've run into have a lot of experience developing for phones and so we have to introduce them to the nuances and the unique requirements of developing for a car and to make sure that they're aware of things like driver distraction requirements and are aware of how we test our software," Ross says, and notes that because of safety and usability requirements the GM AppShop will only open with around 10 apps at launch.

While it's unlikely anyone can point to an instance when operating an app has killed an iPhone user--and as alien as that possibility may seem--for developers who are going to delve into the new world of the car as a software platform, it's actually something they need to think about.

"We test apps using the same standards we would use to test any in-vehicle executions," Ross says. "So we're driving around our proving grounds, testing for how long you need the clients away from the driving task while you interact with an individual app; to what extent does it interfere with the driving task, and applying the same standards we would to our own stuff. That's been a learning experience between us and developers."

Matter of fact, the very notion that you don't want a user to be distracted by your app probably seems antithetical to most developers, which is why GM has lengthy guidelines on meeting distracted driving requirements for an app if it wants to be approved.

"Frankly, it's new to most developers and so we're having to do a lot of testing, a lot of validation, and a lot of education about what's doable," Ross says.

"We want to be on the right side of this. We're not introducing apps in order to create a distraction, we're trying to introduce applications, if anything, that are less distracting and more usable and formatted for car use than the alternative, which, unfortunately, right now is often customers looking down at their smartphones. We think designing an app framework that's explicitly formatted for use by the driver in the car is a way to do that and, frankly, that also makes us have to reject some applications because we can't come up with a way to do it in an appropriate manner in a car. That's been some of the lessons learned we're going through."

For The "Car As Software Platform" Developers Are Key

If there's such a huge learning curve and GM has only approved about 10 of the submitted apps so far, I ask Ross why the company doesn't just forgo the API and SDK and instead make its own apps.

Ross says the answer comes down to creativity. The iPhone, after all, was an amazing device when it was released in 2007, yet its full potential wasn't realized until Apple opened it up to developers with the App Store a year later. GM believes the same great potential for the car as a software platform can only be realized with a vibrant developer community.

"There's a lot of creativity out there that we don't have a unique monopoly on," Ross says, and notes that developers will pick up on a driver's needs just as good or better than GM might since each driver is unique. "There's other parties that have interest in developing applications unique to their own interest and values, so they're more willing to develop a niche application for their use than we might be."

"Take an example like, say, a particular home security company who wants to make the car able to interact with their whole home security system. General Motors isn't likely to make an app to work with a particular home security company, but if we have an application environment that allows something like that we can add value to our cars and rely on the motivating party to make the application that works in that environment. That satisfies the customer, satisfies that partner, and makes our cars a little more valuable, so I think that's just an example of what will allow us to have a greater diversity of content, tap into additional creativity, and really write off all the lessons learned that have been established in other industries."

We're Looking For A Few Good, Relevant Apps

Speaking of other industries, Ross says GM is under no delusion that it is competing against app stores like Apple's or Google's for download numbers or the number of apps available.

"I wouldn't draw out a number but I don't see us having millions of apps," Ross says. "I don't think this is an iPhone platform. We want to get applications that have a meaningful value to your car ownership experience."

In other words, GM isn't trying to make your car into the next great casual gaming device, so developers interested in making the next Flappy Bird probably need not apply.

"The initial discussion about apps in the car all focused on how to repeat popular smartphone apps in the car," Ross says. "There's certainly a place for that to the extent you can take a popular smartphone app and format it better and more appropriate for car use--and I think that's a good thing. But, what we most want to do is: We're in the car business, we want to make better cars so we're looking for apps that make your car a better car."

Porting a streaming music service to the car? Sure, it makes a car more entertaining, but GM wants developers to look at the whole spectrum of vehicle ownership and operation and ask themselves how they can use the new API and SDK, combined with GM's rollout of 4G in the car later this year, to make the entire automotive experience better.

What kind of apps? With a platform, Ross says, "I think I can make maintenance more convenient; I think I can reduce your insurance cost; I think I can reduce your fuel cost by giving you guidance on how to drive more efficiently along a more efficient route; and so on and so forth. Everything from shopping for the car, to initially getting oriented, to using the car, to maintaining the car, to insuring the car, to fueling the car, to using the car to do your day-to-day tasks. That's what we think would enhance the usefulness of the car and those are the kinds of apps that we're most in pursuit of."

The Road To The Future

Will GM's API initiative change the auto industry in the same ways the iPhone changed the mobile phone industry? After speaking to Ross it's clear that the company is betting it will. But that doesn't mean it won't take a while.

"This is a new model for our industry and so there's a lot of challenges just doing anything new like it. Everything is currently built around this notion of the car is designed to a set of specifications, tested to those specifications, and then released to those specifications." Breaking that 100-year-old mold, Ross says, is "a pretty significant shift for us as a company and for us as an industry."

However, thanks to GM's lead in trying to make the car the next big software platform, it's an industry that might now be on the upswing--and just may be enough to make cars "cool" again for the next generation of teenagers.

If you binge-watched the second season of House of Cards, along with a reported 15% of Netflix's 44 million subscribers, you may be newly interested in the Deep Web. Slate has done a good job of describing what the Deep Web is and isn't, but they don't tell you how to get there.

How To Access The Deep Web

First: the hot sheets. Subreddit forums for DeepWeb, onions, and Tor are the way to go in terms of gathering a backgrounder for entry points into DarkNet. Unsurprisingly though, much of the information currently on the surface Internet about the actual underbelly of the web is outdated. Ever since Silk Road's takedown last year, the Under-web has been changing.

To get into the Deep Web these days, you first have to download the Tor add-on for Firefox. By downloading the Tor Browser Bundle from the Tor Project you are securing your anonymity to browse, which is the main draw for using Tor. Once you have downloaded the browser bundle, Tor builds a circuit of encrypted connections through a randomized relay. In layman's terms that means that your online activity is covered as Tor randomly pings your IP address from one place to the other, making whatever you do less traceable.

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Multiple Redditors urged reading the Tor Project's warning page, where they discourage Torrent file sharing and downloading while using Tor. The idea is to follow protocol maintaining your anonymity while browsing, chatting, or navigating. This obviously includes giving away your personal information like email addresses, phone numbers, names, time zones, or home addresses in any context.

Other precautions include placing duct tape on your webcam, enabling your computer's firewall, and turning off cookies and JavaScript. Again, here is where you want to be completely free of an identity, so treading cautiously is key. The NSA and other government outlets peruse the Dark Web and onion sites frequently using cross-reference tools, malware, and remote administration tools to de-anonymize users engaging in illegal activity.

While the Deep Web houses the retail of weapons, drugs, and illicit erotica, there are also useful tools for journalists, researchers, or thrill seekers. It's also worth noting that mere access through Tor is not illegal but can arouse suspicion with the law. Illegal transactions usually begin on the Deep Web but those transactions quite often head elsewhere for retail, private dialoguing, or in-person meetups; that's how most people get caught by law enforcement officials.

Where To Go Once You're On The Inside

After reading up on the material, downloading Tor, and logging out of every other application, you can finally open Tor's Browser Bundle to begin secure navigation. Network navigation is slow once you are inside because of the running relay, so expect pages to load at a snail's pace.

The most common suggestion on Reddit is to start at the "Hidden Wiki." The Hidden Wiki has a similar interface as Wikipedia and lists by category different sites to access depending on your interest. Categories include: Introduction Points, News/History, Commercial Services, Forums/Boards/Chans, and H/P/A/W/V/C (Hack, Phreak, Anarchy, Warez, Virus, Crack) just to name a few. Under each of these headings are multiple sites with an onion address and a brief description of what you will find there.

Many of the listed sites on the Hidden Wiki though have been taken down. Deep Web Tor, Tor Jump, Tor Answers, and Tor.info were all busts. When the feds took down Silk Road, many other sites also fell victim and/or are currently down for maintenance. Still, gun, drug, and child porn marketplaces operate even though they are on much smaller scales and with a fraction of the reach than that of Silk Road or Atlantis, another drug-peddling site.

Some pages are less nefarious, but arouse your curiosity nonetheless. StaTors.Net is the Twitter for Tor users and Hell Online is the antisocial network with 369 members and 15 different groups. Torchan resembles Reddit, though you need to enter the username and password torchan2 for access, and is still up and running. But recent activity except in Request and Random rooms has all but stopped.

In the Random room a user asked for a new link to Silk Road and the responses were limited. Another user posting an image of a child fully clothed featuring bare feet pleading for a site featuring underage bare feet. An Anonymous user responded: "Someone please give this guy a link, this poor guy has been looking/asking for over a month now."

Galaxy is a great forum for networking with fellow users by joining groups but activity there seems to be on the decline. The Ultimate Tor Library is still up, but an enormous red warning on the page reads: WEBSITE SEIZED BY HOMELAND SECURITY AND THE OTHER LE THUGS." I clicked on "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison but a warning popped up advising against downloading the PDF followed by a second warning, so I chose to opt out before attracting some sort of vulnerability.

The DeepWeb Link Directory in the site OnionDir had some promising hyperlinks and some not-so-promising ones like the now defunct Deep Web Radio and a blog claiming to be a Deep Web blog but was actually just stories dedicated to spanking.

The New Yorker Strongbox is a secure transmission for writers and editors where I was given the code name: riddle yeah abreacts murgeoning. Through a given codename you can submit a message and/or file to the New Yorker's editorial staff. Mike Tigas, a news application developer for ProPublica, has a functioning blog in the Deep Web but has not posted anything new for some time, which was true for many other blogs as well.

New Sites To Explore

Reddit user NekroTor is on a quest to reboot many of the Freedom Hosting sites that were taken down. On February 16th of this year, on his onion-routed blog, Nekrotown, he wrote, "2 days ago the BlackMarket Reloaded forum got seized. On the same day, the long-awaited Utopia Market was seized, which just goes to show that all the markets fucking suck these days except for Agora and TMP, and that you should just wait until BlackMarket Reloaded opens up again... eventually ...5 years later, no BMR."

NekroTor is correct in writing that most of the content right now on the Dark Web is not that great. On top of the fact that there used to be a wealth of sites for illegal black market interactions, there also used to be radio, books, blogs, political conversations, and even an Encyclopedia Dramatica that was a satirical culture-based wiki and is now laden with porn and pop-ups.

NekroTor created a new version of Hidden Wiki that has some functional links to audio and video streaming as well as some up-to-date forums for socializing and buying and selling. There are still a few image boards left, but the popular Onii-chan has the words "Well be back later" typed over spinning dildos.

Redditors Who Are Reaching Out For Deep Web Direction

After watching House of Cards, user TrelianScar turned to Reddit for guidance on how to navigate the Dark Web. TrelianScar is not alone. The Deep Web is making appearances in the media, in dinner conversations, and of course on Internet forums. One user jokingly writes to TrelianScar saying, "Wait till we send you an iPad. Then talk to the Dutch oil painting. Then await instructions," referencing HOC's unrealistic depiction of Deep Web interactions.

On a more serious note though, user Serbia_Strong writes, "What are you looking for first of all? Drugs? Guns? Assassins? Credit cards or counterfeit cash? I'd start your journey at the Hidden Wiki and then narrow in on your interests. I pretty much save every site I come across (you can't exactly just google them). Start at The Hidden Wiki and if you need any links just ask. Enjoy your descent into madness :)"

Another user, Dexter-Del-Rey explained a similar conundrum last week--he too is new to the Deep Web and wants some functional starter links. Redditor Ampernand writes back saying, "On the topic of torchan... here's a good piece on how it fell authored by the previous host. Currently torchan is hosted by someone that allows cp, gore etc, censors critics and doesn't give a flying fuck about the community. Effectively torchan has become exactly what it was trying to not be. Also, nntpchan is better." Ampernand links to NNTP-chan, which is a new forum replacing the image board Onii-chan.

New channels are popping up daily in the Deep Web. Currently, marketplace alternatives to Silk Road, Agora and Pandora are the most frequented. Nonetheless, both TrelianScar and Dexter-Del-Rey were each respectively warned in their threads that the Dark Web is chock-full of scammers and is quite unlike its Hollywood depiction.

It would have taken Dann Petty a lot to quit freelancing. And it did. When the 30-year-old designer got a direct Twitter message from Ev Williams, it was a foregone conclusion that Petty would go to work for Obvious Corporation--the company behind Medium and Jelly--and set out to design one of the web's most gawked-at content sites.

"Going to Medium, the team didn't know what it was going to be but we knew whatever we created, it had to be different, and a step forward," recalls Petty.

Though the site's writing interface has been lauded since then, it was still a new kind of design pattern at the time, and new things on the web are too often excoriated.

"I think all of us designers have created bold designs like this for our clients at some point, but it's a risky type of interface," because of its newness, says Petty. "We always get push back on those type of things. It was great to see Medium embrace it."

Petty left Medium in late 2012 to work on his own project called Hum, pictured above, a messaging app looking to redefine the inbox. The app is nearing release--there's a waitlist available now--so we figured this was a good time to ask Petty to look back on his days with Ev (and before) and tell us what he learned.

What You Learn Designing Medium

"I went into the job at Medium thinking Ev knew everything due to his background, but I was super humbled by how many times he says 'I don't know, but let's figure it out,'" says Petty. "In design, I use to think I had all the answers because of my quick upbringing, but after working with Ev I quickly realized I was doing it wrong."

Petty says the trick is to treat each design challenge as a potential exception to the rule. "The major thing I learned working with Ev is that there is no secret formula to all of this. You read articles everywhere online about strict formulas you should follow about coming up with ideas or proper launches. What I learned is that there's no one secret answer other than plain old hard work and focus."

The trouble with plain old hard work? It takes a lot of motivation.

"I remember Ev walking into the office one morning at Medium and putting up a 200-hour shot clock, out of nowhere, for launch. That's not something you read online or in the 'startup' rule book. That shot clock helped motivate us to be more focused on the puzzle pieces we could actually build quickly and launch with," says Petty. "We worked on some crazy things, building some cool stuff really fast, but ultimately we decided to cut some of it short and just launch."

I asked Petty what else learned at Medium, and at his prior jobs--as a junior designer at Fluid in San Francisco, and then the advertising agency BSSP in Sausalito--where he did work for clients like The North Face, Mini Cooper, Priceline, EA Sports, LucasArts, and Converse.

Do What Is Right, And You'll Learn To Care About Every Project

If you freelance online at all, you'll see vicious arguments over whether or not you should work for free. It's a dividing issue which has valid points on both sides, but Petty clearly comes down on the side of working as much as you can, whether that's for free or pay.

Part of that, Petty says, comes from his time working at BSSP in advertising and learning the value of pitch work. He details one story wherein he was only supposed to make minor changes to a website, and ended up re-doing the entire thing out of pure ambition to do good work.

"I use to get in trouble for putting in extra hours to make the work better," he says. "One time I was tasked with making some 'small' changes in about four hours to a website we were creating for Mini Cooper. The site was terrible, though, and I was not motivated one bit to work on it, even if it was Mini Cooper. I didn't care. But what I did care about was making awesome stuff, so I completely redesigned not only the entire site, but the entire site concept on my free time after I made the small changes. The next Monday I presented it to Mini and blew their minds. It went from a decent project to an award-winning site over the weekend."

That's kind of Petty's philosophy when it comes to design, do what's right. It's also usually how he arrives at the finished project in the quickest way. Talking about his workflow and preparing for jobs, he says it isn't about planning for him, but about just starting.

"Planning takes time, I look at design as wanting to get to the solution as fast as possible."

Petty isn't against sketching out an idea, wire framing, and planning, but that type of stuff isn't what he subscribes to. He's very much in favor of getting into Photoshop as quick as possible and making, what he calls, "Happy mistakes."

Make Happy Mistakes

Anyone creating content is constantly looking for that "aha!" moment--when the project comes alive and makes sense. For Petty, that doesn't come from gathering screen shots of other people's work or making everything work on paper. It comes from trying things that might not work, mistake after mistake until the mistakes line up and everything fits.

"I'm a believer that almost every single successful project or new innovation was made because of a 'Happy mistake,'" says Petty. "That's the beauty of designing on a computer, it's so easy to tweak and tweak and tweak until you accidentally paste something or turn off a layer style, and Eureka!"

Sites like Dribbble, Behance, and others might be fine for some designers, but Petty's advice of looking within for your own ideas is much simpler. That's why if inspiration is lacking for Petty, he'll go surfing or head to Tahoe for snowboarding, usually just something outside. "Design inspiration comes from life, not a desk," he says.

Spot The Designers Of Tomorrow

Asked who Petty sees as a great up and coming designer, he says: Jared Erondu.

"Erondu's like 19 and just ripping it. He's awesome because he's starting out in a super trendy design world, but already has his own style which he's focusing on. You see these other guys starting out who are just trying to catch up to the latest trends since it's 'hot' but once those fade, they'll fade off with it."

After working in his industry for the past 12 years, Petty says he pays attention to entrepreneur mentality--what prompts people to redesign a site for free over the weekend just for the sake of improving it. Those are the types of people you want on your team, and that's what something Petty sees in Erondu: a passionate designer rather than a paycheck designer.

Often jobs at Twitter, Facebook, and Google are thought of as the end destination, the goal young designers and developers are trying to reach. The companies which started as small startups pushing the boundaries, however, themselves often can be graveyards for creativity and bold work now.

"I think it's important for all designers to freelance, even if it's on the side of a full-time job, just to get more exposure to different ways of thinking and design styles," he says.

Los Angeles will never be Silicon Valley. Too often when they're compared, L.A. gets the short end of the stick.

As a native Angeleno I get upset when people bash my city's tech scene from thousands of miles away. I've watched it my whole life up close. The city of angels is very much a startup town. Biotech, aerospace, renewable energy, transportation, manufacturing, the defense industry, video games, e-commerce. They're all just as much L.A. as Hollywood is. But in a strange twist, these are all facts the outside world largely doesn't know about--and that's because the city has an image and marketing problem.

We made a major marketing mistake: We Southern Californians spent so much time and money exporting the Hollywood brand that we've convinced everyone that this is a one-industry town. Call it cool-washing, but we've hidden all the brains here under piles of beach sand. Like we're all Botox-injected, palm-tree-dreaming car addicts shuttling between our luxury cars to lounge by swimming pools and tan. There are plenty of brilliant, pale, intellectual people here. Concealing that fact is a Keyser Söze move which--you have to admit--takes a pretty brilliant, creative culture to pull off.

First: An Innovation Inventory

Top-tier engineering programs at CalTech, USC, UCLA, and Harvey Mudd make Southern California a veritable farm system for startups: AdWords and AdSense were born here. And so was the Internet. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearby Pasadena builds some of the most innovative devices sent into space--and even hosts an accelerator with the State Department and USAID. Out in the desert, the much-maligned solar industry is quietly gaining traction with companies like SolarCity, Caelux Corp., and Greenbotics.

Down in the South Bay, Elon Musks' moonshots SpaceX and Tesla Motors are ramping up, and so are once-little-known startups turned future blue chips like messaging apps Tinder, Whisper, and Snapchat, which just hired Google's former engineering director, Peter Magnusson.

The clock is ticking for an IPO from these companies--or a major exit. Despite press that may tell you otherwise, the city has had history in that department.

Riot Games was acquired by Tencent Holdings for $400 million in 2011. That same year, Salesforce competitor Cornerstone OnDemand went public--it now has a market cap over $1 billion. Last month the ad network Rubicon Project filed for a $100 million IPO.

Los Angeles county saw $871 million in venture funding in 2012, and a new startup born every 40 hours, according to research from Built in LA. Forty-three companies were acquired in that period.

Last year, numbers were even higher. Over $1 billion was raised in 2013, with over 100 companies collecting at least $1 million in capital. The e-commerce site JustFab raised two rounds totalling $55 million. Content provider Edgecast Networks raised $54 million before being gobbled up by Verizon for $350 million. And let's not forget new media darling Snapchat. The company raised $123 million before 23-year-old cofounder Evan Spiegel turned up his nose to a $3 billion offer from Facebook.

So...why doesn't the city get any respect? Why is everyone still treating Tinseltown like the tech equivalent of Rodney Dangerfield? The answer could be as simple as the soil the city was built on.

Is L.A.'s Geography Problem Really Its Hidden Strength?

"A lot of people try to defame us," says Howard Marks, the cofounder of video game giant Activision, and the chair of the StartEngine accelerator. Marks, who moved Activision to L.A. in 1991, says a big exit would help change the image of what he calls "L.A. discount syndrome," lower salaries, valuations, and sales for companies and entrepreneurs than they would receive in Silicon Valley. He estimates valuations are about 30% less in Southern California, with high-level personnel like engineers receiving a 10-15% cut.

"The only reason is because of geography," he says. "A lot of people will tell you that's not the truth. It is."

The trade-off, he says, is culture and lifestyle, and more importantly, employee loyalty. Because there are so many companies tightly clustered together up north, high-level talent is often poached and competition is much worse.

"A big exit would help, though I'm not a fan," Marks says. "If you sell a company, most likely to companies not based in L.A., what happens is the talent eventually leaves and the company is no longer what it was. What we want is a company to grow."

Growth is why a company like Snapchat is on the right course, Marks says. "It takes strong personalities to walk away from a big deal. If the whole sole goal is to reach exit level, we'll never reach the level of success we want."

"There are many benefits to being here that are non-financial," explains serial entrepreneur and Pasadena native Alex Benzer, who recently launched the anonymous video service Viddme after selling the custom social networking platform SocialEngine in December. "People are less afraid to sell, they're more experimental." Plus there's an "advantage to being outside of the echo chamber of Silicon Valley," or even Santa Monica. "We can really focus on building stuff. Downside is it's isolatory."

That's true, but isolation has created niche pockets of specialized sectors. Santa Monica is known for e-commerce, the South Bay and Playa Vista for video game companies, YouTube, and accessory giant Belkin. Hollywood is home to digital agencies like theAudience and WhoSay (helping traditional media reach new audiences through social). Out in Valencia, famous for being the home of Six Flags Magic Mountain, big-time 3-D printing and manufacturing is starting to take root.

Regional Power

With the piggyback moniker Silicon Beach, Santa Monica may be grabbing the headlines, but the real players are inland. In 1996, Caltech graduate Bill Gross founded the Southland's first accelerator: Idealab. Almost 30 miles away from the beach. In Pasadena.

Gross has been developing, growing, and selling companies for decades, creating and running more than 125 startups with 40 IPOs and acquisitions. In 2003 he sold the pay-per-click-focused Goto.com to Yahoo for $1.6 billion.

The mix of top local education and the evolution of startups citywide has Gross optimistic. One of his new ventures with Idealab, UberMedia, is working on inference advertising, providing location targeted mobile adverts, based on where you are and your interests.

"There are now so many companies, and so many successes, and now quite a few IPO's, and so many great colleges, that we're really starting to have some critical mass," Gross wrote in an email. "After the Rubicon IPO, and someday maybe the Snapchat IPO and then a few more, we'll really have a lot of experienced teams that can continue to ramp new homegrown L.A. startups."

Is L.A.'s Past A Window Into Its Future?

"This is a story of tribes formed five to seven years ago, and now they're starting to return," says Mike Jones, the former CEO of Myspace turned head of Science, a hybrid accelerator that's more corporation than incubator.

Jones and other high-level alums of the "Myspace mafia" didn't turn L.A. into a social media capital--but they did pave the way for the web's commercialization.

"It (Myspace) should have been Facebook, but it didn't become that," notes entrepreneur turned investor Mark Suster. Because Angelenos weren't able to get as much startup capital as their Northern cousins, it forced them to turn a profit faster.

"The monetization of the Internet started in this town," Suster says emphatically.

Richard Rosenblatt founded Demand Media (before recently stepping down). Chris DeWolfe created Social Gaming Network. Amit Kapur, Jim Benedetto, and Steve Pearman built the interest graph site Gravity. Josh Berman teamed with Diego Berdakin to launch the celeb-driven e-commerce site BeachMint. Ross Levinsohn became an interim CEO of Yahoo before taking the reins of the Guggenheim Media Group, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and Adweek. Adam Bain is now the president of global revenue at Twitter.

Then there are lesser known successes like the six-year-old Swagbucks, a fully bootstrapped El Segundo coupon site that awarded members $55 million in rewards. CEO Josef Gorowitz attributes his company's staying power to pure hustle. Since they didn't have VC money, it was succeed or die, an environment Gorowitz calls "ideal for growth."

Jones, whose own venture at Science has grown a stable of commerce-focused lifestyle companies, links the greater success of the city to the peers he cut his teeth with, calling the now veteran entrepreneurs masters of "chain startups," who aren't in it for the quick buck.

Lots of companies are now "worth a few hundred million," Jones says. The question now is whether "we can build some companies that are worth billions."

Friends In High Places

Mayor Eric Garcetti wants to make sure that happens. The self-proclaimed geek is working to continue to make the region attractive to entrepreneurs. His open data initiative is collecting traffic, crime, and medical care data, allowing people to see how every dollar is spent by the city. There's also a push to create a citywide broadband network that would rival Google Fiber. To help him further these goals, last month Garcetti hired Peter Marx, a former Qualcomm exec, to serve as L.A.'s first chief innovation technology officer.

Garcetti says Marx will promote tech's economic development and integrate people with changing city services. That means rethinking modes of public transportation, car and bike shares, pedestrian paths, and the above-ground Expo Line.

"The external benchmark is keep the startup culture and grow into the expansion culture for this explosion of tech firms," he says. "People have such low bars of expectations for government. Well, imagine if we did meet their expectations?"

Government help includes startup incentives allowing new tech firms to pay the lowest rates for the city's business tax, state tax breaks for manufacturing, and a workforce investment program wherein the city pays new employee salaries during training periods.

When you hear Garcetti speak about his plans, he sounds genuine in his desire to make the city the tech hub it could--or, according to him, should be.

"We have so many raw ingredients here but we've never put the narrative together," Garcetti says. "L.A. is where the best storytellers and story makers have always come from, or come to. So that's in some ways our competitive advantage. And that's why I think for a lot of tech companies that are established, they're finding they can't afford not to be here. This is the kind of town where you can have green tech, digital tech, bio tech, new media, all intersect together--with analog industries like fashion or music."

Undoing The Cinderella Complex

Angelenos need to stop worrying about comparing themselves with Silicon Valley, says Suster. Which means focusing on what they have--not what they don't.

"We can build amazing businesses but this is not Silicon Valley," he says. "This is a town built on entrepreneurship. It's a town built on creativity. So we don't have any reason to try and pretend to be someplace else."

Suster says the growing synergy between Hollywood companies and startups will further commercialize the web and push the city out of its Cinderella role.

"What does it take to build great companies," he asks. "You need the combination of things that don't exist anywhere else in this country. Storytellers, sound, writers, actors, costume, makeup artists, and people who can then package that and sell brand integration and advertising. L.A. is the dominant place. That's why the studios haven't been able to build this stuff themselves. It's really the cross between digital media skills, and traditional content creation that doesn't exist anywhere else in America than Los Angeles."

Last year Android was installed on 78.6% of the smartphones shipped globally. Rich Miner cofounded Android with Andy Rubin in 2004, sold it to Google in 2005, and is now a partner at Google Ventures.

"Andy started looking at how to build an OS for cameras," says Miner. "When I joined he was already thinking that maybe it's about mobile phones and that's one of the reasons he talked to me." At the time Miner was a partner at Orange Ventures, to whom he had sold his first company, Wildfire. One of his investments was Andy's startup Danger, which was acquired by Microsoft.

"I'm proudest of the fact that within Google we were able to deliver on this vision of an open platform," says Miner. "That was a very audacious goal for a platform itself and a very audacious goal for a company. I'm also excited to see it make its way into lots of other devices--wearables, cars."

Miner has been pursuing audacious goals for a long time. In college in the mid-1980s, he was programming graphics and writing control software for teams of robots. "I've always enjoyed doing things which are very responsive, where you can get sort of immediate feedback," he says.

"Rendering graphics, you hit the return button and see your fractal mountain get built or what have you. Programming a robot if you did it wrong it's going to crash into something. Putting a phone in somebody's hand where they touch and feel and interact. So that kind of immediate feedback I've always sort of enjoyed. I'm still delighted by that."

In his first company, Wildfire, Miner built a voice-based personal secretary with the sort of interface that he had seen on Star Trek 20 years earlier. "Naivete can be a good thing," says Miner. "That was the case when we did Wildfire. We just blindly said 'let's start using speech' way before others. Luckily one of the cofounders understood how to build a personality with voice. When we first built her in 1994, everybody looked underneath the table and thought we were hiding something, like some kind of Mechanical Turk-ian chess game, that we were faking it. We broke barriers because we didn't know what wasn't possible."

Starting Android 10 years later was a very different story. "We launched the first Windows mobile phone with Orange. I saw the challenges of the fact that these phones were becoming computers. To make that transition they needed to have platforms that were developer-friendly and open. So that was much more of a thesis born out of working with the carriers, working with the handset OEMs, seeing that there needed to be more open software. That was more informed."

I asked Miner which of the current generation of young entrepreneurs he predicts will go on to do great things. He picked Seth Priebatsch, the CEO of one of his portfolio companies, Scvngr. "He's just 24 at the moment and unbelievably senior beyond his age, trying to disrupt mobile payments where the likes of Google haven't managed to figure it out. He's incredibly bright but also has a huge amount of common sense. It's a little bit of geek bright but he balances that with understanding people and dynamics in business."

Miner doesn't take all the credit for his own stellar career. "A lot of my career feels like lucky mistakes," he says. "You've got to be doing the right stuff but then no matter whether you do the right stuff or not being at the right place at the right time. I'm pretty content with the decisions that I've made. With hindsight one could have made better decisions at any one point in time but I don't know that the arc would have been any more interesting or better."

MIT professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland studies how ideas flow through groups and the effect that flow has on productivity, something he calls "Social Physics."

Social physics can predict the creativity and productivity of a team based on their communication patterns alone, determine which apps you will download or which business plans executives will choose. By tracking idea flow within a particular team or company, you can radically improve its performance.

Pentland says his approach is an outgrowth of sociology, with the addition of data. "The name comes from the fellow who created sociology," says Pentland. "He had this theory about how it was ideas that drove society but of course he had no data and no math." Pentland's team has studied communication data from day traders and call centers, German banks, and communities of young parents. The rules which govern how new ideas band together to become innovations and spread through society turned out to be similar in all those groups. Here's how it works.

How Ideas Flow

The first question is what is an idea anyway? "People use information and ideas interchangeably and I'm trying to tease them apart," says Pentland. "Information is just facts or possible facts. Ideas are actually like little strategies. In this situation if you do this you will get that result. Ideas are actionable. Idea flow is if I am exposed to ideas, I see people saying things, how likely is it that I am going to pick up that as a habit. So it's really the flow of habits through a community."

Your habits are often things you do and acquire almost unconsciously, what economist Daniel Kahneman calls "fast thinking." Habits are also hard to break so people tend to be conservative about adopting new ones. The collective habits of a particular company add up to what is often called its culture.

"What changes behavior is seeing people experimenting with the same behavior," says Pentland. "I mean really physically seeing it. It's a sort of cooperative group behavior where people explore new ways of doing things without even being aware that it's cooperative. It's what the community is thinking about as a collective and that's very different from the newest topic of conversation. Those sometimes turn into behaviors but very rarely."

In Pentland's view only rich channels of communication like face-to-face and to a lesser extent video conferencing and telephone lead to changes in behavior and therefore in culture. Email and text are particularly ineffective when it comes to the adoption of ideas. So effectively electronic channels can help maintain culture but they rarely create it.

Building Productive Teams

One of the most important mathematical measures Pentland's team has found to predict productivity in teams is engagement: the frequency and type of interaction between team members. The team often uses badges which measure not only a person's location but also use accelerometers to determine whether he is sitting, standing, or walking and to detect big body gestures. A built-in microphone samples volume and pitch in conversations rather than the content itself.

"Are you screeching at someone? Are you being distracted?" says Pentland. "In people who are negotiating a salary, it turns out that you can predict the negotiation pretty accurately from body language and the tone of voice. In speed dating, you can tell if the people are going to trade information or not by essentially how engaged they get."

Groups where everyone talks to everyone else, in other words engagement is high, tend to be highly productive no matter what kind of work they are doing. "And it's not official meetings. It's stuff around the coffee pot or at lunch or or just in the hall." Pentland persuaded the manager of a Bank of America call center to schedule coffee breaks for team members simultaneously (usually only one person has a break at a time). Productivity in the worst-performing teams jumped by 20%. More generally, Pentland has found that social time can account for up to 50% of improvements in communication

"A typical mistake which big companies make is to put a teleconference unit down the hall that you have to sign up for. That's very formal. It has to be more casual. What I like about, for instance Skype, is that you just say 'I've got to talk to X' and go bang, bang, bang, bang and there he is. It's just like popping around the corner and sticking your head into somebody's office. Those kind of spontaneous, dynamic, peer-to-peer tools are really important together with opportunities to work together physically."

One software company tried without success to improve engagement by organizing events like beer nights, but simply making lunch tables longer so that people who didn't know each other interacted more, increased productivity by 5%. The number of opportunities a workplace provides for social learning via engagement is often the largest single factor in its productivity.

Contrarians And Creativity

While engagement is a good predictor of productivity, creative teams exhibit a behavior Pentland calls exploration. "Creative groups are distinguished by communication outside of their group," says Pentland, "They talk to lots and lots of different people and usually this is something that their boss would consider a waste of time or not in their job description."

It's hard for a team to maintain high levels of both engagement and exploration since the time that its members can spend on communication is limited. So creative teams often oscillate between periods of high exploration and high engagement. Team members bring back new ideas from their wider network and then integrate and act on them during the high-engagement phase.

Not all external sources of ideas are equally useful, however. "In a lot of the tech world we are just embedded in echo chambers," says Pentland. "One of the very best things you can do is find contrarians," says Pentland. "You look for people who ought to think one way based on who they spend time with but actually they have a different opinion. What that tells you is they have some other information, strategy, other community that they touch that is different than the ones that you see."

At a certain point people become so interconnected that the flow of ideas is dominated by feedback loops. Groups of people whose opinions are very regularly correlated, which can be the case in highly engaged teams, may be operating in an echo chamber, which is bad for business. "The heuristic is does everybody think the same thing all the time? Or do you find yourself going to the same sources all the time? That's an indication that you are not diverse enough."

Pentland's group studied day traders on the trading website eToro. Traders can follow other traders, copy an individual trade or an entire trading history, operate independently, or combine several strategies. "What you find is that if you plot the amount of this exploration," he says, "how diverse are the set of people that they are talking to, that predicts how much money they'll make almost perfectly." Traders who had a balance of diversity and social learning earned 30% more than those at either extreme.

Reward the Social Fabric

Within companies, managers often use economic incentives to try and change behavior. "What I've been able to show with this rich data is the reason that economic incentives don't work the way they should is that everybody also has a set of valuable exchanges of ideas and favors and so forth with their peers," says Pentland, "Economic incentives that apply to the individual ignore the social fabric and the social fabric often wins in that struggle. What you can also do is reward the social fabric."

Pentland performed an experiment where half of a test group got an economic reward if they lost weight and the other half were assigned a weight-loss buddie within the group and were rewarded if their buddie lost weight. The second group were much more successful.

"We have been able to set up rewards like that to get enormous changes in behavior," says Pentland. "That sort of thing where it's essentially a social incentive or sometimes it looks like a group incentive seems to work much better in many situations than individual incentives. The mathematics of it says that it will be at least twice as efficient, in other words twice the bang for a given budget as economic incentives. What we find in real experiments is that we often get factors like four times more efficient or eight times more efficient."

Siri held lots of promise when Apple introduced it in iOS 6. However, in the two years since Siri's release, the virtual assistant has improved little--offering clever ways to do simple tasks via voice command, but no more. That's because Siri, and other virtual assistants like it, have built-in problems that doom it to be a simple system forever. But one Cambridge researcher thinks there's a better way to make virtual assistants become the companions we all want--and, soon, will need.

What's The Matter With Siri?

That's the question many of my friends have asked me. It's one I, and anyone who has ever used Siri, have asked as well. That's because, despite the promise of all that Siri and, more recently, Google Now, have to offer, the fact is neither virtual assistant is that good at handling more than your very basic requests.

The way Siri and Google Now currently work is a user asks a question--essentially a verbal command that is translated into a binary command--and then Siri or Google Now uses a rules-based approach to finding the most relevant answer.

The rules-based approach relies on Siri's back-end (aka, servers in North Carolina) interpreting what you said and comparing it with known variables that are tagged and labeled and then following a flow chart from one variable to the next to get you your answer.

This is great for simple questions like "What's the weather in my area?" or "What movies has Scarlett Johansson been in?" It's also to Apple's credit that Siri has been able to answer more of these types of questions in new categories (sports, restaurants, politics) each year.

But in order to expand its ability to answer questions, myriad new labels and new paths on the flowchart need to be added and created, making it more convoluted and crowded. And if Siri takes a user down the wrong path even once on a single branch of the flowchart it will always lead to the wrong answer or, almost just as bad, result in the entire query being rejected with a "Would you like to search the web for that?" Then the only option the user has is to start his query over from scratch.

"Siri is a combination of a pretty decent front-end recognizer, pretty decent back-end, and a whole load of rules which have evolved over time as more and more people have worked on the system," explains Steve Young, professor of Information Engineering in the Information Engineering Division at Cambridge University and an expert with more than three decades of experience in speech research and, more recently, spoken language systems. "This is, I think, the major problem and the major limitation."

"When Siri goes wrong, it goes badly wrong, and it doesn't have any graceful way of recovering from it. You more or less abandon what things you're trying to do and start again," explains Young. "I know some of the guys who work on Siri and also on Google Now, and they will sort of admit that the rule-based systems are slightly getting somewhat out of hand. They're getting to classic positions where no one quite knows what all the rules do anymore, and worse than that, the rules are starting to interact."

"It's because they're using rules to try to basically map words into concepts and, of course, language is very ambiguous, so it's very easy to get completely the wrong idea of what it is the user's talking about. My personal view is they're just heading into a dead end. You cannot build rule-based systems. The cost is enormous, and sooner or later you run out of steam, and clearly humans don't communicate like this anyway," Young says.

But Professor Young stresses that Apple and Google and other technology companies who are working on virtual assistants aren't just wasting their time. He believes that in the near future being able to speak to your computer won't just be a cool alternative to traditional human/computer interactions via keyboard, mouse, or touch screen--it will be a necessity.

Young argues that as storing, analyzing, and quantifying big data, along with the continued exponential growth of the Internet and all other kinds of devices that will read and record the world around us, will result in so much information that there will come a point where using computers via traditional input methods could become so cumbersome there will eventually be no way we'll be able to get to the most relevant information we are searching for. There will be just too much data to sift through via current means.

The way to solve that, Young says, is through a truly functional virtual assistant on the level of Samantha in Her or JARVIS in Iron Man.

"The whole point of a personal assistant is one that you can interact with and in a sort of a collaborative dialogue you can explore and get information and perform the goals that you want to perform. The only really natural and easy way to do that is with speech. It may be augmented by gestures and multi-modal things, maybe pointing at things occasionally on a screen, but basically it's natural speech that this depends on."

Who Needs Flowcharts?

The solution to Siri and Google Now's cumbersome and ever-growing flow chart system is something almost anathema to all classical computer programmers: a system with no rules.

And that's exactly what Professor Young and a team of European researchers have been working on for the last seven years with a program called PARLANCE that is reaching an end this year. What they created will be rolled out as VocalIQ, a cutting-edge statistical spoken dialogue system.

The VocalIQ statistical spoken dialogue system (or VIQ for short) unlike Siri and Google Now, which work on flowchart systems, works by leveraging a small knowledge graph to begin with and then learns organically through conversation with the user about the world around it.

"VIQ essentially builds large classifiers that takes the words you speak and it doesn't try to do any rule-based grammatical analysis," Young says. "It takes the words you speak, but more than that, it takes all of the things it thinks you might have said--not just the most likely thing, but all of the alternatives--and uses that as a set of features to go into a classifier. The classifier is trained to essentially identify the relevant node in the knowledge graph."

If the relevant node in the knowledge graph is identified, great--the correct answer is returned. But if it's not, VIQ doesn't just give up like Siri and redirect you to a web search. Instead, it begins a conversation with the user so it can answer the question in the future.

For example, let's say a clean slate version of VIQ doesn't know what a pizza is. The conversation might go something like this:

User: "Find me a restaurant. I really fancy a pizza."

VIQ: "I don't understand. What kind of food would you like to eat?"

User: "Pizza. It's usually found at Italian restaurants."

At this point VIQ has learned many things (Pizza is a food. The user likes pizza. It is found at Italian restaurants.) and will remember them in the user's future queries.

The user can then carry on their conversation:

User: "I also like falafels, which are found at Greek restaurants, but I'm not a fan of foods with noodles in them. Those are usually found at Chinese restaurants."

Now VIQ has also learned what types of Greek food the user likes and what types of Chinese food the user dislikes. With Siri this information would be irrelevant, but VIQ will remember it for all future queries. The next time the user says "I'm hungry. What's around me that I'd find good?" VIQ will know exactly what to search for based on your likes. Matter of fact, the system is so smart it doesn't need your implicit confirmation that you like a certain type of food. Simply saying "Give me directions to" or "Book a table at" the pizza place tells VIQ you're happy with the decision and it then adds a probability rating onto similar restaurants and types of food that make future conversations and suggestions more accurate.

In other words, VIQ operates virtually how a child does: At first it knows nothing, then it begins building a "belief state" about the user and the world around the user, which it learns from conversation. It's able to remember things, change its probability ratings for any one thing on its knowledge graph based on future conversations, and return more relevant results each time.

" VIQ is learning across whole dialogues," Young says. "What the system's trying to do is to get a reward from the user. The system's reward is to satisfy the user's need. It might take a long conversation before the user gets what they want, but as long as the system ends up with a positive reward for that interaction, it propagates the reward back amongst everything it's done over the dialogue."

In the above example, if the user asks for a pizza and VIQ doesn't know what it is, but then eventually though conversation gets to the fact it's food at an Italian restaurant, VIQ gets a positive reward because it knows the user is obviously happy with this. It then reviews all the decisions it took and reinforces its belief state based on those decisions.

"We call this reinforcement learning, and it does this every conversation," Young says. "If I wasn't happy at the end of the dialogue, it would review what it did and think, 'Well, I did some bad things there,' and it'll do things to adjust things and next time it'll try something different."

"That's what I mean when I say there are no rules. It really is this completely data-driven system."

Through this process, the users themselves are labeling the data via their feedback to VIQ. While at first this is slower than the rules-based and labeling methods of Siri and Google Now, over time VIQ learns more, more accurately, increasing its knowledge and belief state, enabling it to answer far more while also putting a user's queries into historical and personal context--something that Siri with its flowcharts could never dream of.

Whoever Owns The Agent Owns The Future

Those that have seen Her or Iron Man may feel like the virtual assistants in those movies are something for the next century, but Young says we can expect them within 10 years.

"We really are on the cusp," Young says. "Everything's coming together. The Internet is real now in a way it's never been real before. We really can move video and audio--anything we like--around the planet almost anywhere with zero latency. Computers are getting to be sufficiently powerful, and storage really isn't a barrier anymore."

"We've learned a huge amount about machine learning over the last few years, and big players like Google and Apple are in place who have sufficient reach and they're embracing users with a whole load of things that users want like content, access to purchasing and so on. Everything's coming together so that this idea of big data, learning on the fly during real interactions--this is about to take off. Once it does take off, we'll see progress much more rapidly than we were expecting."

But in order for an individual to sift through all that data progress will bring, we'll need a much simpler human/computer interaction method than type, touch, or click.

"It's a cliché, but speech is the natural way of communication of human beings," Young says. And he says the big technology companies know that truly conversational virtual assistants are the next market that will be bigger than the smartphone.

"When I go home and I walk in the door, I'm going to say, 'Turn the lights on.' 'I fancy a pizza tonight.' 'Switch the oven on.' When I go to the television set, I'm not going to want to reach for my controller or my smartphone or anything else. I'll just say, 'Turn the television on.' 'What's on the news?' 'Find me a movie.'"

"You'll want to be talking to the same agent, whether you're at home or you're at work, or you're traveling because that agent knows what you like, what you want. It doesn't have to ask you a whole load of dumb questions that you've answered before. This is really why Apple and Google are pumping money into this kind of technology and why companies like Amazon and Facebook are hiring speech people like there's no tomorrow."

"They want to own you. They want to be the supplier of your agent. Because if they own your agent, they're earning money from you. That's the end game here."

Thor Fridriksson watched his app fail and his young company Plain Vanilla go into bankruptcy in 2011. Instead of cursing his naiveté, he channeled it into a string of faith-leaps that has led to enormous success for his most recent app and a development contract for a major Hollywood client.

It would be easy to peg success on luck and timing, which Fridriksson humbly admits always plays a part. But the man's knack for turning a trip to the unknown into a wild partnership or funding success is uncanny, and betrays his real secret.

He trusts everyone. Implicitly.

Is Trust The Same As Naiveté?

It's fitting that Fridriksson takes cues from his literary hero, Candide. Though Fridriksson hasn't taken the lumps that Voltaire's plucky hero suffers throughout the 18th-century novella, he admires Candide's willingness to trust, well, everyone.

"I'm the guy who leaves the door open at his house," Fridriksson says, though he admits that It's not that remarkable to do in Iceland, a country with so little crime that it recently mourned its first ever death by police shooting. Still, his earnest trust extends to negotiations, where he won't compel partners to do anything in hidden contract clauses.

"You have to trust that their intentions align with yours. I write very open-ended contracts because I want [the negotiating company] to have their own incentives," says Fridriksson. "In the end, it's the trust between parties that's dictating the response."

That relaxed pose is anathema to the startup and tech landscapes, where patent trolling and name-protecting litigation are accepted poisons. But thus far, Fridriksson hasn't had his trust betrayed, nor has he fallen prey to the American shark businessmen his Icelandic peers warned him about. Again, Fridriksson credits his mantra: Trust the people you're dealing with and that will pay off. For Plain Vanilla, it surely has.

Trusting In The Next Level

After the bankruptcy, Fridriksson's first leap of faith was to hire two app devs and buy them one-way tickets to San Francisco, where he knew nobody. It was there that he pitched a game idea he dreamed up on a sheet of paper: QuizUp, a mobile trivia game that would become a blockbuster within three months.

That isn't to say that Fridriksson doesn't have regrets. Plain Vanilla's inaugural game, The Moogies, landed in the app store in Dec 2011. It promptly flopped. An entire year of Plain Vanilla development time was lost to the noise of the Apple app store. Why didn't I market it differently or add this or that, Fridriksson anguished. He forwent his own salary for a few months as he frantically weighed the options for a studio whose only product had sunk.

He hit his lowest point. His friends told him, "Stop trying to conquer the world with an app," and he applied for regular 9 to 5s. But he couldn't abandon his naive trust in incremental progress.

"In the end the first app was just a stepping stone into something else. Things just have this way of turning out fine," Fridriksson said. "I didn't understand why at that point in time, but everything helps you get to the next level."

His trust in "the next level" has been a long time coming. His first big startup success was Hive, a broadband ISP in Iceland that got bought by Vodafone in 2007. Fridriksson bounced around working as a television news reporter and other odd jobs before pursuing an MBA at Oxford to see more of the world. At Oxford, Fridriksson reveled in his culturally diverse peers and became determined to build a global company.

Global Trust

Fridriksson had three months of visa time in the U.S. when he landed in San Francisco. When he cold-called VC groups, the few that returned his calls said they could make an appointment ...in three months. Frantic, Fridriksson changed tactics and studied his VC marks to see when he could "happen" to bump into them at lunch. In retrospect, he says, it was borderline stalking. But it got the job done: Plain Vanilla got $1.2 million in seed funding.

If there's anyone Fridriksson trusts most, it's himself. How else could he keep trusting his gut to fly into the unknown? With the $1.2 million, Fridriksson began building the studio in Iceland but knew his team needed a stepping stone challenge. Trusting his gut, Fridriksson bought a ticket to Hollywood looking for a studio that could use a branded trivia app. Once again, he flew halfway around the world to a city where he knew nobody.

Lions Gate Entertainment took Fridriksson up on his offer. One Twilight Saga trivia app later, Plain Vanilla had a hit and a million users to study use behavior. With a legion of happy Twihards as clout, Plain Vanilla went back to the funding blackboard. It only took two weeks to scare up $2.5 million in funding. The train was rolling toward QuizUp.

Can We All Be Naive?

If there's a lesson to take from Fridriksson, it's that indulging in naive trust works when you go for it one hundred percent. Keep honest in your business dealings, he says, and you earn trust and show others trust. Like what happened with his hero Candide, the lumps will come--but abandon honesty and you lose a reputation for earnest cooperation.

Plain Vanilla's unofficial slogan is "Why Not?" Fridriksson was absolutely sure that he'd land in San Francisco and people would throw money at his app idea. He hadn't even lined up a place to stay.

"I went to SF with little more than a pitch: 'I've got this idea for a quiz app!' It's not really the strongest idea for a pitch. In retrospect, it's kind of stupid," says Fridriksson. "In retrospect, if I had done a lot of research, I probably never would have gone."

Five months doesn't sound like a long time to be driving for Lyft, but it's a lot longer than many of the drivers I talk to. I have driven my Toyota Camry for Lyft since October, but I'm a two-timer: I've also been driving for Uber since December. This article is my attempt to document what they are like, from the inside out, in the hopes of helping new drivers like myself decide which company fits them best.

Why Drive?

I didn't usually have a daily routine for these jobs. One day I might drive in the morning, while working a different project in the evening. Other days I might work somewhere in both the morning and afternoon and slip in an hour of Lyft or Uber somewhere in the middle. Other days, I might work late at night, from 8 p.m. to 2.a.m.

In my experience talking to other drivers, everyone drives for their own reason. For job-hopping freelancers like me, making my own hours with Uber and Lyft is perfect. For other drivers, it's about getting a piece of a new market. Still others are trying to escape from a traditional taxi shift.

How It All Starts: The Pavlovian Email

The week starts in earnest when I get the "Weekend Ahead" UberX email each Friday. This email is surprisingly motivating. In addition to "pro tips" about how to maximize our driving experience, the company gives us weather reports for the next few days and tells us the big events that we'll want to drive near if we want quick and lucrative pickups. It's a tacit reminder that I have at my fingertips the ability to make several hundred dollars over the weekend, on my own time, in my own whip. Without a deadline. Without a boss. Without meetings. Without performance reviews. The feeling of freedom is empowering. That email makes it feel like I don't truly answer to anyone but me.

The feeling isn't uncommon. "The only thing that really kept me from going out on my own earlier was the fact that no health care company would give me insurance," said Diana, a Lyft driver for more than six months. "Now that Obamacare provides that, I have the freedom to find my own jobs and just do the medical care myself. Now I rent out a second bedroom to people on Airbnb. I support myself." She, like everyone else I talked to, preferred not to give her full name for this story.

George and Ian are UberX drivers and, like many others, are refugees from the taxi world. George says he doesn't miss the difficulty in scheduling himself to drive someone else's cab. He also had problems with dispatchers. He says he was often sent to passengers who had already been picked up.

Ian has been driving UberX for more than a year now and has time to do some freelance graphic design work on the side.

"It's been wonderful," he says. "Five to six hours a day is terrific. If I'm busy in the mornings I drive in the evenings. I drove a cab before. What made me switch was many things. A cleaner car. I don't have to pay the gates."

Then there's the gas. Traditional taxi drivers often have to pay for their own gas at the end of their shifts, which would eat into their profits.

"Before you would get out from the yard, literally I'm in the hole with like $140," Ian says. "And then, after $140 that's where I made my money. So if I didn't make more than that then I ended up owing money. Uber is much better. I don't have to carry cash and I get paid every Thursday. My dream was to have my own taxi but Uber answered my dream by coming up with UberX."

Uber started its "ridesharing option" UberX about a year ago, invading a segment of the market already inhabited by Sidecar and Lyft. From a functionality standpoint, there's not too much that's different about these three offerings. They involve an app that provides a way for folks who have a car to give rides to folks who need to get someplace, without money physically changing hands. There are however differences in driver/rider expectations, pay, and some other details.

Lyft's Pink Mustache Problem

Love it or hate it, one of the most well-known images associated with Lyft is its neon pink mustache. We're talking about a plush, furry, three-foot-long tube of stuffing which must be visible to the passenger you are picking up. It's supposed to be the company's calling card, but drivers tend to hate it.
Rumor has it, one should never let the mustache sit on the driver side--or even the middle--of your dashboard. That would qualify it as an obstruction, earning you a moving violation. When I first started, fellow drivers told me that police had stopped Lyft drivers for that. If you dropped someone off at the airport, I had been told you should take it down from your dashboard then as well. You wouldn't want the police to see you picking someone up there when Lyft didn't have an official agreement with the airport.

Lyft technically wants drivers to put the mustache on the grill in front of your car, not the dashboard. I just didn't feel right doing that, considering tales of how it falls off when you go too fast or starts to heat up because of proximity to the engine. "Wouldn't it just be easier to have a pink light on the dash or something?" I thought to myself.

"They don't force you to (put it on the grill) to be honest," a driver named Johnny said when I discussed this with him. "It's preferred outside but because of the safety issues, the cleanliness of it, the safety of yourself and your passengers, I actually refuse to put it outside. I keep it inside. As long as you can see it and people know that I am the vehicle, then it's totally fine."

Then of course there's the way that the pink mustache makes you stick out like a sore thumb. The taxi and Uber ruffians saw me every time. I had been cut off, yelled at, or honked at many times in my first two months and still sometimes to this day.

"My first week in working for Lyft I was in the Castro and a yellow cab had honked at me and yelled at me for being in the area," Johnny said. "I had no idea what that was about because I was following the traffic and waiting patiently for a light. When the mustache is visible is when the anger starts to come through. Once I had an incident where three Uber drivers were around me and I was cut short. I was tailgated and closed off from (making) a light. That's when I knew it probably wasn't safe to keep it on the outside."

Despite all that, my main reason for leaving Lyft was my own personal preference. Both Lyft and competitor Sidecar are vying to be an Etsy-like alternative to Uber's Amazon. They are both in several cities, but aren't the globe-straddling Goliath that Uber is. Uber seemed to be a bit more organized and established.

Lyft is known for its emphasis on community, and that works for some. "We make friends with each other," said Johnny, who is still happily driving for Lyft. "I make about 2-5 friends a week with Lyft. I keep a notebook. I tell people about my lifestyle, dietary changes, workouts, and I've never been happy or healthier in years."

The community thing sounds great, and I liked it at first, but it began to wear on me personally. As more of an introvert, I needed more distance than what I felt able to achieve at Lyft. If I had already worked in the morning at a different project, I had a tough time being extroverted for passengers in the afternoon or evening. I had been told by friends working for Uber that passengers there often didn't feel like speaking with the driver, so I wouldn't feel as obligated to be social at all times.

Getting Paid

Then of course there was the money. UberX offered "surge pricing," which Lyft and Sidecar didn't have at that point. By switching over to Uber, I could take advantage of busy Friday and Saturday nights as well as morning and evening commute hours in order to double or even triple what I might get paid at Lyft. I made the switch. New Year's came around and I made a killing. As a Lyft driver who made the transition, I was awarded $500 after I completed my 20th ride for UberX.

Later on I heard that Sidecar was offering new drivers cash awards for switching over too. One driver told me Sidecar is currently offering $25 after your first 25 rides, $50 after your first 50, and a $250 cash bonus after your first 100 rides.

"The way I see it, you really don't know exactly what all these companies will look like a few months from now much less a year from now," says Diana the Lyft driver, who recently started driving for Uber as well.

"They're trying to keep up with each other with new features," she says. "It's only been like a month since Lyft started giving drivers big tips during peak hours, so I actually try to use both programs on the same nights. It sounds crazy but I switch back and forth. Why not? Whatever makes me the most money. People think Uber gives the biggest tips because 'surge pricing' is such a famous idea, but now Lyft is throwing (it back) at them. So I'm taking advantage of it."

As for myself, I'm sticking with Uber for now, at least most of the time. Will I hang up my pink mustache anytime soon? Not likely. I'll always be trying to keep up with the latest news about each company to see how drivers are paid. The rideshare war has only just begun.

Chaotic Moon is a creative technology studio based in Austin, Texas.

Some people take karaoke very seriously. In sweaty venues across the country, singers are racking up points in team karaoke leagues, renting live backup bands, or hoping passerby producers sign them on the spot. But now, many of these people aren't clamoring to bars or lounges for a chance in the spotlight. They're going to their smartphones.

Mobile games like Just Sing It, Karaoke Anywhere, and StarMaker have turned the Internet into a virtual karaoke bar, allowing users to move their underground passion to the digital mainstream. And these apps are hitting the money notes: StarMaker says its users have logged 2 billion minutes of singing time since launching in 2010. Yes, "billion"--with a "b." That's around 23,000 hours per day.

StarMaker has amassed nearly half a million likes on Facebook, and Just Sing It CEO Alec Andronikov reports that users sing an average of seven songs or more in one session of his app, "reflecting the addictive nature of karaoke."

"Voice is the last frontier of untapped mobile entertainment for smartphone users," says Andronikov. Just as Instagram and Vine turn your photos and videos into mini-artworks to share with friends, these singing apps are turning your voice into a viral commodity you can broadcast to your friends--whether they like it or not.

Wannabe crooners, divas, and rockers simply choose a song from the apps' catalogs, and sing into the mic on their mobile device. On StarMaker, your score goes up if you sing well and in tune. Karaoke Anywhere lets you mix and edit your stirring rendition of that Journey power ballad. And on Just Sing It (which Lindsay Lohan apparently uses), filters morph your voice into caricatures, like a singing hamster. All of them allow you to share your performance with friends (and strangers) via Facebook and Twitter.

"Until now, karaoke has stayed in the shadows, with low-quality MIDI recordings, not as much access to current hits, and no ability to be heard beyond the room," says Nathan Sedlander, president of StarMaker Interactive. "StarMaker brings singing out of the shadowy lounges. It offers all the latest hits, and tools that can make anyone sound like a star," like the app's auto-tune feature.

But it's pretty unclear if these games, though popular in app stores, are actually good for the wider karaoke industry, which has taken a nose-dive in the United States. Despite the hobby's feverish fandom (there's even a U.S. Karaoke Alliance that protects the rights of karaoke disc jockeys, or "KJs"), it's not enough to rake in the big bucks.

According to business intelligence firm IBISWorld, "The karaoke bars industry has experienced significant declines in revenue, which has been caused by a decrease in per capita alcohol consumption and lower disposable income." Just two years ago, it was reported that the karaoke bar industry sees a 5% drop in revenue yearly in the U.S. Those numbers might go up, however, as the economy continues to approve.

Either way, these apps are designed to spark interest in karaoke among users, and it gives the diehards a cheaper outlet to get their groove on.

But ironically, the apps could be poisonous to the broader industry: IBISWorld points to video games and smartphones as the biggest competition. The firm says there's been a continued migration of fans from karaoke bars to the safety of their own homes, "where there is an array of video game and Internet-based substitutes." Console games like Rock Band have replicated karaoke's performance-driven experience in American living rooms, and these newer mobile games accelerate the industry shift.

And these apps are far from a swan song. Last December, StarMaker pulled in $4 million in funding. "It's validation that the market sees the potential of our platform," says StarMaker's Sedlander. The company says it hopes to expand its international reach with the cash. Last April, Just Sing It nabbed a million bucks of its own in venture-round funding.

While it's clear these apps disrupt the traditional model of drunkenly wailing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in a bar full of strangers, they've also filled a void in mobile that's largely been unexplored.

"Most applications fail to provide an entertaining social experience for people that are hanging out together in person," says Jonathan Apostoles, CEO of JoltSoft, which makes Karaoke Anywhere. "Now, karaoke parties can be thrown together in seconds, and users tell us how our app took over their evening." That's the sweet spot that these developers have tapped into: They revamped a sputtering industry for the digital age.

The makers of these singing apps also say that their products go beyond the karaoke aspect. In today's world of Justin Biebers and Rebecca Blacks, technology makes it easy for netizens to upload videos of themselves singing or performing, which could potentially lead to a big break in Hollywood.

Sedlander says StarMaker's funding will help the app "change the face of talent discovery," and that the market "recognizes the power of crowdsourcing talent as a new paradigm for the entertainment industry."

Alec Andronikov says that his app was not just created to let users sing into their mobile device. He also wants to give users the chance to be discovered, which is another way to help monetize the karaoke experience.

"When you give a teenage girl sitting in her basement in South Dakota the ability to not only become famous on the Internet, but also make revenue by singing into her phone instead of having to travel to an audition, it becomes a very powerful phenomenon," says Andronikov.

Don't hold your breath if you're expecting to be plucked from digital obscurity to become America's next pop superstar, though, because like the offline world, the online sphere is just as crowded with rookie performers. On Just Sing It, for example, 500,000 songs were sung within its first month of launch, and 86% of users made their songs public. Ninety-four percent of users are American.

"We're getting people who might never sing in public to show their voice to the world, and that's exciting," says Jonathan Apostoles. Granted, these games can add modifications or mixing to make users' voices more palatable, just like Instagram can filter the crappiest selfie into profile-picture worthiness.

Singing apps have the popularity to become a powerhouse force in mobile. But despite all their tweaks that reinvent the amateur singing experience--auto-tune capability, on-screen visuals to help you stay on pitch, tweetable recordings--karaoke's core appeal remains intact.

At the end of the day, it's still all about throwing dignity to the wind and channeling Aretha Franklin for three minutes of pure catharsis. Members in the cult of karaoke will always have inner rock stars to unleash--either at bars, or on their phones.

It's been five years, and Josh Reich still won't call himself a banker. Back then, the CEO of Simple--the startup that's been called "banking 2.0" and praised for its design and customer-focused approach to personal finance--could have easily been called foolish or naive for his decision to jump into business with cofounder Shamir Karkal. He didn't really know a thing about banking except that it annoyed the hell out of him.

Five years later, Simple has become successful enough to attract the attention of the sort of institution it was looking to replace. Last Thursday, the company announced that it was being purchased by Spanish bank BBVA. In light of the news, I spoke to Reich about the benefits of entering a field you know nothing about, Simple's philosophy of "naive optimism," and how the company culture will fare under its acquisition.

"I think if I knew more about banking I probably wouldn't have done it. Because, who the hell does this?" Reich says, commenting on the massive amounts of skepticism he met when he started Simple in 2009. "I think everyone who I told throughout the first six months of this was like, 'that's kind of a stupid idea.' The assumption being that it's just impossible for someone to do it by themselves. Luckily, I had a business partner who knew something about banking but he was by no means a banker either."

Reich viewed their inexperience in the field as an asset, something that drove Karkal and himself to plow ahead despite the fact that they weren't bankers.

"The fact that we didn't know what we were doing wasn't a problem because we each had to hold up our own end of the bargain to each other." Echoing the beginnings of many startups, Reich and Karkal had quit their jobs and were committed to a venture they had no business being in.

"It probably gave us some arrogance," Reich says of the way Simple's contrarian approach to the way modern banks interact with customers and technology. "Arrogance and confidence is a really fine line. It was so easy to talk to bankers who were so blinded to what tech actually meant to people."

He cites Citigroup as an example of tone-deaf bankers who spend enormous amounts of money on upgrades that could prove to be irrelevant--choosing old, proven tech that completely ignores the ways consumers do banking now.

"So here you have a bank that's a massive, massive institution, the fourth or fifth largest bank in America right now, and they're investing billions of dollars in technology but they're not taking a modern approach… they think that the rules of technology don't apply to them because they're so massive, and they have their own arrogance."

To Reich and his team, it felt obvious that their modern approach would succeed, and afforded them the leverage to build a business around the core philosophies that distinguish Simple from traditional banking options. As a relative stranger to the financial world, the company found itself not balking at trying new things, less set in its ways, and more willing to convince regulators to allow them to launch new features.

"Innovation in banking is typically a dirty word," Reich says. "Innovation in banking is typically finding a new way to screw customers over. I think we've had a lot of success making a very clear statement to the public that we never want to profit from customer confusion."

Now that Simple has been around a while, Reich believes that it's becoming clear to other banks that Simple isn't taking this approach "to be hippies," but because it's a better way to do business. What's more, being green has saved them an immense amount of money--a hallmark of Simple is that there are no physical branches, which Reich calls "really expensive marketing channels."

But now, Simple is being acquired by a bank, which has proved worrisome to its supporters, and in direct opposition to the company's ethos. Reich however, believes that the purchase by Spanish bank BBVA was the one financing option that would most enable them to maintain the values and philosophy the company had built up as a banking newcomer. The deal will allow Simple to continue as an independent entity, with Reich keeping his team and his title, but now flush with cash and opportunities to expand internationally.

Reich speaks highly of his new employers, citing an op-ed by BBVA CEO Francisco González in which the executive, like Reich, argues that banks need to act more like tech companies in order to compete.

So while some remain skeptical, Reich believes that the purchase won't change a thing. "We have faith that we believe in the same things…they didn't pay for us for our customers, they didn't pay for us for our technology, they paid for us for the culture that we have, a culture of continuous innovation."

To hear Reich tell it, that culture wouldn't be there without the thread of naive optimism running through Simple's five-year history. It's a thread, he says, that's vital to both him and anyone else starting a business today.

"I think anyone who's working on something, anyone who's gone out on a limb starting a business has to have naivete, has to have optimism, because the odds are just so stacked up against any new business… And whether you succeed or fail depends on a million and one things but you can't succeed at all, you can't even be there, if you're not optimistic."