From Apple's HomeKit to Google's Nest Labs, smart homes are one of the biggest tech crazes of the year. But once your house is rigged up with sensors and Internet-connected gadgets galore, how will you clean the carpets? With a smart vacuum, of course.

The AirRAM is a cordless, bag-less smart vacuum which charges via USB, and can even track the calories burned as users vacuum. At a mere 3.5kg, it's one of the lightest vacuum cleaners on the market, and uses just 100 watts of electricity to do a job most conventional vacuums would require 2,000 watts to carry out.

In other words, it's as lightweight as handheld devices, while being as powerful as corded units--its power coming from the same kind of lithium-ion battery used in high-end consumer gadgets and electric cars.

Question The Vacuum

"Vacuum cleaners have stayed almost completely unchanged for years," says AirRAM inventor Nick Grey. "They have a head which is about a foot wide, and they suck dirt into a tube. Although people have changed superficial things about the design in about 100 years they've not really drastically rethought the concept. We have."

Grey's work as a designer started out at the bottom of the ladder sweeping the floors in the design lab at Hoover. Having found school and college tough--since he constantly butted heads with teachers who only had one way of looking at a problem--Grey discovered that his constant questioning fitted perfectly into a design studio environment.

"I've always had a passion for doing things differently, and I found that that idea was embraced in the job of designer," he says.

For the next 12 years, Grey worked his way up from the lowest position in the department to running it: an achievement he says he is very proud of.

When he finally struck out on his own, he decided to turn his attention to solving the cordless vacuum problem. "Cordless vacuum cleaners have generally been limited to being less powerful, miniaturized versions of main vacuum cleaners," he says. "From a design perspective what this means is that they have a fundamental weakness: The ducts and airways can get clogged up very rapidly. They don't run for too long."

Grey wanted to create a cordless vacuum that would be both battery powered and as effective as a mains vacuum cleaner. He had some neat ideas, like using a revolutionary brush approach and compressing the dirt into small bales, rather than sucking them into a bag. Initial tests were positive, but it wasn't until the first model was built that Grey realized quite how well his design worked.

"There was a defining moment when we tested the very first prototype, it actually picked up more dirt than a mains-powered product," says Paul Pickford, AirRAM's technical director. "To confirm this we rushed out and purchased two of the latest vacuum cleaners from the two leading U.K. brands, and tested the prototype against these using the International standard for testing vacuum cleaner performance. Again we outperformed both--we really did have a cordless vacuum cleaner that performed as well as a corded [one]."

Users get about 40 minutes per charge from the AirRAM's battery, which is enough time to clean the majority of houses. (Most handhelds get a fraction of this.) An LED display on the side of the vacuum shows the status of its charging process--with four green lights indicating how much charge is remaining.

"Altogether, it's a very neat solution," Grey says.

A Vacuum For The Jawbone UP Generation

The AirRAM sports a surprisingly agile design featuring an aluminum pivoting part in the base. It compares favorably to larger vacuum cleaners in terms of power and the device features a world first in the form of an onboard computer, which lets you quantify your cleaning experience.

This onboard computer can be accessed via a USB port, and allows users to measure calories burned, as well as how much energy they've saved using the device. "While energy costs in America vary depending on locale, third-party tests in Great Britain have proven that the cost of operating an AirRAM vacuum is 95% less than what it costs to operate a 2,000-watt vacuum," Grey says.

It's also possible to switch the AirRAM to a mode that increases runtime at the expense of performance.

"At first it's a bit of fun," Grey says of his decision to include the device's smart features. While there's no doubt that these tools could be expanded upon in future iterations of the device, it's a neat look at what could wind up being the first step toward becoming the world's first Internet of Things-connected vacuum cleaners.

"I think in time if you can plug in and get to our support desk, and they are able to see the data on your machine to help troubleshoot, verify the guarantee or spare parts then it could be useful," he says.

What They Learned Reinventing A Common Device

While Grey--like many designers--is forward-looking, the general is not always on the same page. As consumers we assume that the buying public represents the ultimate beta test, and that our buying habits automatically bring to the forefront the best products, while marginalizing those which don't do the job as well. Of course, history has shown that this isn't always the case. While the best ideas may persist over time, in their first iterations they may be so radically different that people are afraid to embrace them.

"That's absolutely right," Grey says. "If you take a radically different, innovative product and you stick it on the shelf next to a product that people recognize, nine times out of 10 the radically different product will just end up getting dusty. That's what happened with us at first."

The story of how AirRAM managed to turn initial bemusement into a viable business is a lesson worth learning for would-be entrepreneurs. For Grey and his team, the key was in finding which corner of the market to target. For designers, products may be problem-solving tools, but as well as knowing what the problem is that you're solving, it's vital to know whose problem this is.

"Rather than taking a broad approach, it's best to target one segment of the market and set out to own it," Grey says. "In our case, we started by aiming our product at older customers. They like cordless products, because they often aren't able to move around heavy vacuum cleaners. We had a limited ad budget, so we decided to focus our whole campaign on these customers: hitting the TV shows they watched, the magazines and newspapers they read, and the radio they listened to. The aim was to make sure people would hear about this product from two or three different channels."

"There are numerous opportunities in all 'above the line' media to test on a smaller scale, before betting the farm on big budget national rollouts," says Jon Collings, AirRAM's marketing director. In all, adopting this approach allowed AirRAM to upscale their ad campaigns from $170,000 to $5.1 million without ever having the need for capital injection.

"We've been thrilled by the response," Grey says. The AirRAM and Gtech has picked up numerous awards since the product's launch, including a recent Award for Excellence in Innovation.

"The first thing I'd tell any designer is that you need to learn to be very hard on yourself," says Grey. "Even if you've got a great new product, with some radically new ways of solving a particular problem, if it's got any drawbacks you've got to ruthlessly push to eliminate these or else to turn them into positives. Many designers fall into the trap of thinking that one great feature will offset the trade-offs, and they end up taking one step forward and one step back."

In the case of Grey and the AirRAM, the vacuum seems to be an unequivocal step forward. Using the device gives you the same sense that accompanies all genuine breakthroughs: that it is difficult to imagine that all products in this category won't one day work like this.

After all, as our homes and wearables get smarter, why should our vacuum cleaners get left behind?

Hardware projects aren't just capital intensive--they take manufacturing experience. Unfortunately for most Kickstarter or Indiegogo projects, crowdfunding campaigns generate plenty of cash, but little in the way of expertise.

That's where Dragon Innovation comes in: a kind of Quirky without the manufacturing. They help inventors hook up with Chinese factories, make reasonable product roadmaps, and help QA the design.

But oddly, its founders don't see Dragon Innovation as a Kickstarter competitor. In fact, the company collaborates with Kickstarter and is just as happy selling service packages as they are hosting campaigns. "We always joke that you can't google 'manufacturing'," says Dragon Innovation cofounder and CEO Scott N. Miller. But actually, you can. Which begs the question: Is "crowdfunding advisory" a new kind of cottage industry, or can competent people actually figure this process out themselves?

A Crowdfunding Platform?

A year ago, Hammerhead signed up with Dragon Innovation to be a guinea pig as one of the company's first crowdfunded endeavors. Their campaign for the bike-mounted Hammerhead Navigator was fully funded by late October. It achieved 130% funding despite asking for $145,000, a risky goal considering only 7% of Kickstarter campaigns asking for more than $100,000 are successfully funded. The platform has completed a total 14 campaigns to date.

Dragon Innovation was a great fit for the slick cycling device, but there was still concern about using a far smaller and newer crowdfunding platform than Kickstarter or Indiegogo. The rate to convert browsers to backers is 1%, says Dragon Innovation's Miller, so a bigger the crowdfunding community will likely equal more funding from habitual backers who are browsing the site. This is critical, since a full third of funding should come from the crowdfunding platform itself, Miller reckons.

By sheer numbers, Kickstarter or Indiegogo would be the smarter choice. But the Hammerhead team knew they would need production advice. Hammerhead cofounder Piet Morgan researched the space--and found only Dragon Innovation advising and helping crowdfunding campaigns.

Morgan started talking to Dragon Innovation's VP of Engineering Bill Drislane, a cyclist himself. The product made sense to Drislane. With his experience in manufacturing, he explained the challenges of the device to the Hammerhead team.

"When I first got in touch, I was just a guy with an idea," Morgan says. "Something like Kickstarter is so big that there's not a tremendous amount of dialogue. Dragon Innovation was a much more active partner."

Like many startups, the Hammerhead team had almost zero production experience. Dragon Innovation filled that gap. Once the Hammerhead team got onboard, Dragon Innovation set up a realistic production timeline, assured quality control, and secured a contract with the ideal factory to roll out the Hammerhead Navigator.

One of the Hammerhead team's bigger problems was naively believing the Hammerhead Navigator would market itself. Like the proverbial tree in a firestorm, Morgan says, they hoped that the Hammerhead Navigator would grow and get funded by organic brilliance. After a fully funded campaign, they're much more aware of the need to spread the word.

Now that they've run the crowdfunding gauntlet, the Hammerhead team might choose Kickstarter or Indiegogo for their next project. But that doesn't mean their relationship with Dragon Innovation is over. While Dragon Innovation has offered production and manufacturing advisory services for years, they've refined their pre-campaign design review and cost estimates into a stylized badge that campaigns can display on other crowdfunding page: the Dragon Certification. That way, more experienced companies like Hammerhead can still get the personal advice and access to pick the Dragon Innovation team's brains for lower cost--$5,000, a drop in the bucket for larger hardware campaigns. Given the quirky problems that spring up during every production, having that experience onboard is a helpful investment.

"I wasn't aware of the degree to which shipping to different countries needed different certifications--it helped make sense to me the need for certification logos," Morgan says. But it wasn't just a smattering of incidents that Dragon Innovation's expertise aided the young team. "We have benefitted tremendously from off-the cuff help. We received tremendous value just from our relationship with them."

How Crowdfunding Campaigns Dig Their Own Graves

Since the probability of successfully funding a campaign falls as the price increases, crowdfunding campaigns often intentionally lowball their funding requirements, hoping to hit their actual goal with excessive funding. Sometimes campaigns unintentionally lowball due to poor estimation. In his experience, Miller sees lowballing happen in over 70% of campaigns for either reason. At the end of the day, market forces pressure campaigns into setting their goal low.

The sobering reality is that crowdfunding campaigns only get one shot at wowing their backers, Dragon Innovation cofounder Miller says. If they fail at quality control, the brand is tainted. Since it takes about 12 weeks to get product runs back from factories, poor design or preparation that forces product re-evaluation and new production runs can decimate deadlines.

This is where inexperience hits crowdfunding campaigns hardest--the "unknown unknowns," as Miller puts it, that creep up and cripple the naive. Dragon Innovation's Chinese cell knows and has relationships with trusted factories; without that trust, campaigns don't know if the factory they've been directed to gave kickbacks for their recommendation.

Dragon Certifications Raising The Tide

With all that expertise, it's easy to point to Dragon Innovation's 55% campaign success rate as a triumph over Kickstarter's 41% campaign success rate. But that's apples and oranges: Kickstarter has launched 160,000 projects over five years, while Dragon Innovation has only run 22 in its first year. The assistance and attention is what makes the difference.

And while they'll continue to hold crowdfunding campaigns, Dragon Innovation is focusing on its Dragon Certification program to assist more companies and entrench its position as a hardware crowdfunding consultant. Dragon Innovation is working on about 30 Dragon Certifications right now.

There's probably not enough data to definitively say that partnering with Dragon Innovation will increase odds of successfully funding a project. But Dragon Innovation's wealth of production experience means that a Dragon Certification badge should inspire a backer with confidence that after it's funded, a certified campaign will reliably ship the product on schedule.

And their experience is substantial. Cofounder Miller, a mechanical engineer by training, spent years as a Walt Disney Imagineer and an engineer for Hasbro. Then he jumped to iRobot's Chinese division as they started production of their new project: the Roomba. Without really knowing how to scale, Miller grew production to 40,000 units a month and transitioned from VP of iRobot's Asia Pacific region to R&D for iRobot's next generation of robots. After 10 years at iRobot, Miller left to start Dragon Innovation--and brought many acquaintances from his Hasbro and iRobot days with him for Dragon Innovation's U.S. and Chinese teams.

Since then, Dragon Innovation has worked with around 150 companies. Their first great partnership, the Pebble e-paper watch, scored almost 69,000 backers and raised over $10 million, the most financially successful crowdfunding campaign in history. With that crowdfunding clout, Dragon Innovation hopes to use its Dragon Certification as a new standard to raise industry expectations for the reliability and efficiency of crowdfunding campaigns.

Ideally, a company comes to Dragon Innovation 2-3 months before starting a crowdfunding campaign. To earn their Dragon Certification, the company learns about machine design and manufacturing until they gain a real understanding of how to bring products to life. In addition to the $5,000 fee, Dragon Innovation collects 2% of whatever the campaign raises beyond its goal threshold--a clear incentive for Dragon Innovation to train its certified teams for success.

On the other side of the campaign, after it's been funded, Dragon Innovation's Manufacturing Services is a separate advisory package. Got a production plan? Got a factory lined up? Can you trust that factory?

"For the equivalent to the cost of hiring a VP of engineering, you get 10 people with a range of experience," says Miller of Dragon Innovation's China team.

Logically, the Dragon Certification process should pay for itself as more and more campaigns exit the crowdfunding process prepared for production and to hit their deadlines. Far from encroaching on territory, Dragon Innovation has a good relationship with Kickstarter: Everyone's aware of the manufacturing inexperience that has casts public doubt on crowdfunding. The Dragon Certification could be the pioneer of a line of third-party agencies that support the crowdfunding dream.

Since time immemorial, dot-com has been the only top-level domain, or TLD, that's ever mattered. But now a domain registrar named Donuts has put $58 million into registering new dot-whatever Internet names, making it into the largest domain registrar in the world--overnight. Google is number two with 101 generic top-level domains, or gTLDs in Internet-speak.

But can all that money actually topple our cultural attachment to dot-com?

What's In A Name?

"You don't want to be in dot-com because it doesn't mean anything." Daniel Schindler, cofounder of Donuts. "If dot-com was released now with all these other TLDs it wouldn't have any success at all. It only had its success because it had a near monopoly for 25 years," says Schindler. This isn't the world we live in, though. The web consists of about a trillion pages and only around 1.6 million new gTLDs. The most visited sites everyone knows and loves all end in dot-com.

If Schindler sounds convinced, it's because he's put a lot of capital behind this hypothesis. At $185,000 each, applying for domain names isn't exactly a cheap investment. Donuts applied for 307 domains, which is how they got to that $58 million figure.

So, how do you pick winners in the domain game? Schindler was reluctant to share Donuts' methods, but told me there are 20-25 parameters that determine which domains will be successful. In the past, new gTLDs like dot-co or dot-us have performed with mixed results. Donuts points to .guru, which they suspected would be popular; in fact it has turned out to be a runaway success with 64,000 .guru domains registered in just a few months.

Domain names categorizing a specific field are strongest contenders, Schindler says. He points to .photography as an example. "We debated long and hard whether a world that was used to seeing two- and three-letter TLDs would actually welcome a TLD that had whatever photography's got," a comparatively long 11 letters. "Forty-thousand people have signed up for [that] one because of its specificity."

Specificity isn't always strong enough to sell domains, though. The .vision domain has been available for about a month and has just over 1,000 registrations.

How Domains Are Made

You might be wondering where all these new domain names came from in the first place. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the worldwide governing body for these things, and they voted recently to lift the restrictions that have been in place on new domains. New gTLDs have been trickling out ever since.

Last week saw the launch of dot-services, a new gTLD that Donuts expects to perform well. "We're moving from a manufacturing-run world to a service-run world. Home cleaning services, car cleaning services, legal services, local gardening services, everyone's in the service industry one way or another," Schindler told me. Apparently macroeconomics is part of the domain-guessing formula.

The dot-services domain went live shortly before I spoke with Schindler on the phone and had already sold over 3,000 registrations before the end of our call.

There is evidence that obtaining a site with an appropriate domain may be more important than seeking out dot-com. Crops of sites registered under new TLDs have no dot-com equal. Consultinghouse.ventures is a registered site but consultinghouseventures.com is not. The information hub for Yakima, Washington is yakima.info but yakimainfo.com is a blank page. We may see even more websites forgo dot-com in the future.

How To Get One

You'll need to follow a set of ground rules to register a website under a new gTLD. The Sunrise Period is a 60-day window of time before the actual public sale. This is a mandate set by ICANN so companies that hold trademarks can protect their brand. Schindler says this helps avoid the "cyber squatting" that occurred during the dot-com boom. The Sunrise Period is when a company like Microsoft would be able to buy the domain dot-windows.

After the Sunrise Period, there's an early access program that lasts for seven days. During this time domains sell on a first-come, first-served basis where the price starts out high and drops every day. During the EAP, a company like Verizon may want to register cell.phone since they don't have a trademark for "phone." Verizon would pay a little more for that domain, but "we want to see organizations like that get cell.phone because they're going to market it. They're going to use it and they're going to help build out the dot-phone TLD brand," says Schindler.

Lately, we've seen a lot of diversity stats in the news, with Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and other tech companies recently going public about how many women they employ. But we rarely see the story behind the numbers, especially when it comes to how many women are hired into tech roles at those companies. Are all tech employees developers and engineers? What do they do, and how do they fit into their companies? We asked three female tech leads at Shopify to open up to us about what they really do at work.

Lynsey Thornton, Director of UX Research

Women make up 13.4% of the tech workforce at the e-commerce backend provider Shopify. For Lynsey Thornton, becoming the director of user experience research at Shopify was just a matter of accepting the title. She was the one who introduced real UX thinking to the company. Now leading the team, she define's Shopify's UX research as bridging the gap between customer feedback and the company's product strategy.

Before coming to Shopify, Thornton designed video games, focusing on interaction design. The gaming company she worked for also hadn't done UX research before. She created her first UX team there and has been building UX research teams since then, for the past five years.

"Quite frankly, I didn't know anything about the needs and motivations of the players I was designing for, and neither did anyone else on our team. It was frustrating, and I didn't feel proud of my design work," says Thornton of her time at the gaming company.

In general, Shopify puts customer feedback at the top of its design priorities, and Thornton's UX team has a unique sway in the matter. Because Shopify's designers are also the front-end developers in the company, Thornton's UX team has a large say within the organization on how to implement new features. The designers focus their attention on design and coding, while UX focuses on understanding what the customer wants. The design collaboration is conflict-free.

"Working with ego-heavy designers who 'know better' than the end user and don't want feedback is something we steer clear of! It really does result in an inferior product offering," says Thornton. With Shopify's designers leaving the customer-focused design decisions to the UX team, Thornton runs a smooth operation.

She says UX research spans business and tech roles, but in general, UX teams are known to fight with marketing people. At Shopify, Thornton makes sure that marketing makes users' needs first priority. This can be difficult when a company uses an advertising model. At Shopify, the advertising model works for both the company and the customer.

"Marketing wants to 'Sell now!' and UX understand the customer doesn't want banner ads in their face at every turn," says Thornton. So Shopify's marketing team only pushes ads that are relevant to the user.

Thornton says that a successful UX researcher must have an almost obsessive interest in human behavior, but having a tech background isn't absolutely imperative. It is good, however, to know how to program or do data analytics, but understanding the design principles of user interaction or business development fundamentals works, too.

Considering the variety of backgrounds that a UX designer can have, Shopify seems to have covered most of the bases. Thornton's UX team has researchers who started their careers in accounting, customer service, political writing, and industrial design. A tech degree isn't compulsory.

Monika Piotrowicz, Front End Development Lead

Last year, Shopify acquired the UX design firm Jet Cooper, where Monica Piotrowicz did front end development. Very quickly thereafter, she became the front-end development lead at Shopify. And like Thornton, Piotrowicz started working in a new department when she arrived at Shopify. Front-end development was starting to professionalize at Shopify when Piotrowicz arrived.

Before leading the team, she spent six years working on pure production work. But leadership was always something she strove for.

"It's definitely not for everyone, as I have a lot less time now to dedicate to active front-end development, so there is a trade-off," she says. Moving into a managerial role inherently meant that she would spend less time directly creating a product and more time executing processes.

Piotrowicz's team works closely with Thornton's UX research team, taking up the design and coding of products that comply with UX requirements. She creates shared standards for the team, facilitates weekly discussions, and brings people together to work on problems.

But her years of technical experience with pure front-end development have made her successful in her new leadership role.

"Being able to point to specific successes and learning from project mistakes is a big part of moving on to leadership," says Piotrowicz. "Without that technical foundation and understanding, it would be impossible to guide a team."

She hopes she doesn't move too far away from web development as her leadership role evolves. Piotrowicz first became a developer because she liked to find creative ways to solve problems. As the lead on the front-end development team, she won't be too far away, but she will spend a lot of her time directing other people's work.

Vanessa Sabino, Data Analysis Team Lead

Vanessa Sabino, Shopify's data analysis team lead, has a solid background in computer science and applied math. She has done development since 2000 and has always been in the IT industry. In recent years, she has shifted her career into data analytics, mainly for marketing departments.

Now at Shopify, she is putting in place new computer programs that will help the marketing department better leverage their big data sets. Lately, she has been spending her days programming to devise tools that extract, transform, and load data correctly.

"Marketing deals with high volumes of unstructured data, therefore technical skills are very important to understand how to use them and extract meaningful patterns," Sabino says. Still, the balance between her technical and marketing responsibilities varies over the course of the year.

Women's Roles In The Tech World

All three of these women have technical degrees, ranging from multimedia technology to computer science. With the conversation continuing over how to attract and retain women in the STEM workforce, their stories can help us understand just how women's careers pan out in the industry after obtaining a technical degree.

In relation to the big tech companies, Shopify's female tech workforce is comparatively small, but the company is hiring to fill more technical roles. It seems like Shopify could welcome a few more women into the tech workforce. The recruiting site advertises its Hack Days, where developers spend a couple of days intensely working on specific projects. A male voice mainly narrates for the duration of the four-and-a-half minute promotional video, and only one or two women might have passed as developers in a couple of fleeting scenes.

The role of women in the tech world has become a hot topic of discussion. On the one hand, nonprofits want to push more women into the tech industry, both through early education initiatives and working with human resource departments in the tech industry. On the other hand, the female techies who already work in the industry feel excluded and unwelcome.

A group of female developers started the site "AboutFeminism.me," where they talk about how male tech colleagues regularly question their technical abilities. "We're constantly asked 'if you write any code' when speaking about technical topics and giving technical presentations, despite just having given a talk on writing code," the site says. The tech world has a tendency to mentally disconnect women from technical tasks.

The women that have taken on technical leadership roles at Shopify all possess technical skills, applying them with varying degrees in their day-to-day work. The variability arises from two factors. First, working in leadership takes away from the pure development work that traditional engineers and software developers carry out. And second, succeeding in leadership ultimately means that you also have some business acumen ready to go when your boss asks for your opinion.

In the tech world, women make up 9% of management roles and 14% of senior management roles at startups. It might be better to classify some of the tech positions at Shopify as management positions, but when we're trying to increase female presence in both categories, who's counting?

Almost a year ago, the UPS Store in San Diego was the first to launch retail 3-D printing, available to anyone. The experiment was targeted at small businesses and startups giving them access to a 3-D designer and printer in part to assist in building their products. But how did it work out?

The good news is that putting a 3-D printer in a retail store, right next to the regular one-dimensional copy machines, actually works. As such, the company will be announcing expansion plans in the fall to put more 3-D printers in stores across the country. Its expectation that the technology wasn't just a fad is proving true, but it's also learned a few lessons over the last year.

1) 3-D Printing Didn't Cannibalize Other Parts Of The Business

For a store that makes money mainly by shipping physical goods from one place to another, it could be shortsighted to bring in machines that help alleviate that need. But it turns out that offering the new service had no affect on existing services.

"The 3-D print sector increased by 21% between 2012 and 2013," says the UPS Store's Small Business Technology leader Daniel Remba. "The growth in our stores's sales of 3-D print services has been in line with that trend, and continues to increase as more consumers become aware of our 3-D print offering." In fact, it has actually acted as a gateway to offering small businesses other existing printing and mailbox services.

2) Users Are Frequent Repeat Customers

The initial assumption at the UPS Store was that small businesses and startups would create onetime 3-D projects--otherwise why wouldn't they buy their own machine? But the reality has been different. "We've seen people from all types of different industries with the common denominator being people making prototypes of new products," Remba says. And like most people who make things, they iterate. A ton. So many customers are frequent repeats, printing a design, taking it home, and coming back again to refine it.

Interestingly, the company has also seen some people who already have access to 3-D printers at their office, but the wait to use it is too long. These people especially are ones who benefit from having the professional 3-D printer available outside their office in a retail environment.

3) There Is Latent Demand (And How They Know)

"I can say we certainly learned we have some sophisticated customers," says Remba. "We thought we'd have more customers needing design services, and [demand for] that's been lower than we expected." Apparently, there are many more 3-D-printing-savvy consumers in Southern California than the company thought. The UPS Store will continue to offer design services anyway.

4) The Printer Matters. A Lot.

There are a lot of different 3-D printer choices available. Picking the right one that balances price and capabilities can be challenging. The UPS Store uses the Stratasys uPrint SE Plus--a ~$20,000 unit which looks at home alongside their other professional printing gear.

Remba says they also get lots of inquiries about home printers from customers that come into the store.

"There's a big difference between home printers and professional printers and it's up to us to explain to our customers those differences," Remba says. "How there's a lot of maintenance that has to be done and that quality of the prints [on a home printer] aren't always what you're expecting." The company doesn't have any plans to switch manufacturers and says it has been happy with the results the current printers have provided.

For those of us old enough to remember MiniDisc players, Qblinks will sound awfully familiar. Like the inline MiniDisc remotes of yore, QBlinks attempts to solve the phone-in-pocket-or-purse problem by giving you a way to interact with your phone from a distance. But unlike the many other digital rings, watches, or home accessories, QBlinks has a powerful secret.

First, the basics: This thing is a one-button remote that can wirelessly control your phone's music, camera, or Siri. It also uses LED lights to give you feedback about incoming messages. Randomly, it also tells temperature.

But buried in the guts of Qblinks is the ability to automate communication in a way that phones and computers presently can't do. Your iPhone talks to the Qblinks remote, which talks to the Qblinks cloud, which can then talk to social media accounts or other cloud-based services. If this sounds abstract, think of IFTTT or Zapier. The Qblinks Kickstarter page, which has 38 days to go and hasn't yet met its goal, explains the functionality like this:

Each formula is an event-action combination. An event is a condition from a channel which you select. For example, you can set Gmail as a channel, and when Gmail receives an email, this is an event. An action is whatever designated activity you set to happen when the event is triggered. For example, when the email event happens, you can set the flashing blue notification on your Qblinks.

Of course, that means that to get the full power of the device, you'll need to spend some time thinking of (and setting up, and testing) various notification and action formulae. We're guessing that will limit the audience of the device to tinkerers and other miscellaneous nerds, but that's how IFTTT started out too--and it's achieved something like mainstream success despite the setup overhead.

Qblinks uses Bluetooth Low Energy (aka Bluetooth Smart) to communicate with its connected smartphone. This allows Qblinks to communicate in efficient intervals, allowing it to work off of two watch batteries for several months to a year under normal circumstances, obviating the need for yet another recharging cord. There are some compromises: BLE has a short 40m range that is hindered by metal and other dense components in walls, but 120 feet should be plenty for most people.

Why is it iOS only? Constantly communicating signal formats like Wi-Fi would probably have drained Qblinks' tiny batteries in a single day, Samson Chen, Qblinks's CEO, estimates, and an Android-compatible device would have forced them to use Wi-Fi connectivity. Some Android devices support protocols like Z-Wave and ZigBee, but the iPhone 5 (in iOS 5 and above) natively supports BLE, which is a far better option. Only Android 4.3 and later support BLE, or about 20% of the Android phones in the wild today. (The team plans to release an Android-compatible device in about six months.)

"It's not a technical problem, and it's not even a release problem--we're just waiting on the customer to understand that not every Android phone supports it," says Chen.

The Qblinks team is releasing their API for cloud-to-cloud interaction so interested teams won't even have to touch their app--they can just have their cloud talk to Qblinks' cloud, and then Qblinks can fire a notification to your phone. That way, they can keep updating their "cloud back-end" without needing app or device updates for new partners.

On the other end of the API spectrum, Qblinks wants to release an API for the Bluetooth GATE protocol. This will allow third parties to use their devices to talk to smartphones through Qblinks, eliminating the laborious need to build apps themselves. They could also talk to the Qblinks device directly, which has a temperature sensor built in with pins on Qblinks' small PCB board for enterprising hobbyists to attach new sensors.

While Qblinks is interested in releasing these devices open source, the compiler they used costs a hefty $3,000--a license outside most hobbyist programmers' budgets. Burning in a hobbyist's custom firmware is cheaper, likely costing about $49 according to Chen--but then why not just pocket a standard Qblinks for $35?

A small Chinese startup is working on an idea that's straight out of the movies: Cheap, easy-to-use telepresence robots. PadBot, which is currently running an Indiegogo campaign, wants to put $450 robots in homes and hospitals which allow people to communicate with remote friends, family members, and colleagues.

Ghangzhou-based manufacturers Inbot tech thinks its formula, which takes advantage of Bluetooth, iOS, and Android, will appeal to children who live far away from grandparents and companies seeking to loop remote employees into conferences. Their vaguely humanoid telepresence robots follow the same format as similar robots by industry giants like iRobot, but are far cheaper. iRobot's more fully featured Ava 500, for instance, is reported by Slashgear to lease for a staggering $2,500 a month.

One big challenge for the PadBot, at least initially, is that they're, well… short. Communicating at eye level for most adult users of the PadBot requires sitting down. While the low height of the robot keeps them affordable and, importantly, cute rather than creepy, it also influences use cases. Ava 500 and its ilk are simply more usable for office meetings, while PadBot seems destined for home and institutional use. Since PadBot has not made it onto the market yet, it's hard to say just how sturdy and functional the robots themselves are. However, demos of the company's UI indicate an intuitive interface for both parties in the conversation.

Justin Van of PadBot told Co.Labs by email that he and cofounder Blue Tan currently have five employees; with that team, they estimate they can have robots shipping by the end of the year. The PadBot, which is a little less than three feet tall, uses a cloud backend and iOS/Android apps that let users transfer video, voice, and robot movements. The robots themselves are connected to users' tablets and smartphones via a low-energy Bluetooth connection, and can perform such nifty robotic tricks as running around a room and tilting or waving its head.

As of press time, PadBot has raised approximately $27,000 of the $30,000 they plan to raise on Indiegogo by August 31. But there's one big catch for early users: PadBot requires at least two tablets or smartphones on each side to work. One device serves as the robot's "head" (through an articulated, adjustable phone/tablet holder) and the other device is held by the user as they converse and helps to control the robot on the other end. Part of the reason the company is able to market its robots at such a low price is that it is essentially piggybacking on a lot of the brainpower of the user's smartphones and tablets.

While Inbot and PadBot are good examples of inventors outside of the United States and Europe bringing genius products to market through crowdfunding, they're also entering a competitive field. Various players have tried to make low-cost telepresence robots happen with varying degrees of success; the super-low cost Telemba, the midrange Double Robots with an approximately $2,500 retail price and telepresence-ish tools such as Kubi and Helios all participate in the space. The first company who can crack the code of a low-price, intuitive interface, and a sturdy physical product stands to gain a lot from the telepresence robot market.

It's no secret that cars are trying to replicate the smartphone experience. Touchscreen interfaces are common in today's cars, dashboard designers take UI tips from iPhones, and automakers want to build apps for cars. And starting this year, large automakers like General Motors are taking the next obvious step and integrating 4G LTE service into their cars. Drivers pay a monthly service fee for in-car 4G that's separate from their smartphones, and use it for an array of services from movies for kids in the backseat to sophisticated GPS-on-steroids solutions. It's a win-win for automakers, the dealers who sell the 4G add-ons, and carriers like AT&T. But is it a win for consumers?

Audi, the first major automaker to introduce 4G connectivity, debuted the option in their 2015 A3 car. GM is adding 4G capability to nearly all of their 2015 Buick models, and 4G is also rolling out to Chevrolet and Dodge within the year. While some luxury cars have come with built in 3G in the past, there are two major game changers here: Both GM and Audi are aggressively targeting middle-market consumers, and 4G viewers tend to consume a whole lot of bandwidth-intensive video content which generates expensive data fees.

Phil Abram, GM's chief infotainment officer (a job title which does actually exist) is the man responsible for rolling out interactive content and delivery systems for Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac, and other brands. When Co.Labs held a video chat with Abram earlier this month, he said that the 2015 Buick LeSabre, the first GM model with 4G, debuted in June and the company will add 4G to 30 more models by the end of the year. New car buyers would be given a 3 gigabyte trial and data plans would be set up by AT&T. The cheapest $5 plan offers 250 megabytes usable in a 24-hour period; monthly plans range from $5 for 200 megabytes to $50 for 5 gigabytes a month. These fees piggyback on top of existing OnStar telematics packages, which start at $20 a month.

"We looked closely at other device pricing plans," Abram added. "The use case of cars is different than phones."

In promotional materials, Audi and GM both emphasize 4G LTE service as a mechanism for users to get in-car entertainment, rather than for navigation or safety monitoring. Buick boasts they can "Keep everyone happy with streamed movies, music, and games," while Audi emphasizes "faster downloads and high-definition video streaming for up to eight devices used by passengers over the in-vehicle Wi-Fi hotspot."

Smartphone and car convergence has been happening for quite some time, and in-car 4G allows automakers to solve the vexing customer issue of answering demand to integrate smartphones without sacrificing safety or usability, while simultaneously pushing a lucrative car option to market. Audi is offering drivers their a new and data-intensive navigation system, which feeds the dashboard with information on nearby gas stations, restaurants, and all sorts of Google Earth overlays. GM, meanwhile, is revamping their previously 2G Onstar system to take advantage of the new data possibilities.

And then, naturally, there are the auto dealerships. In-car 4G hotspots are potentially lucrative business--especially when there's a $50 monthly fee attached. It's a safe bet to assume dealers will give the hard sell to families with young children in the backseat or businesspeople who constantly travel by car. Beyond the obvious use cases of Netflix and data-heavy navigation systems, 4G LTE service also means drivers can send SMS text messages by voice dictation, can have their seatmates shop on Amazon while they drive, and take advantage of a whole set of use cases. While drivers and passengers might not necessarily need high-speed Internet in their cars, it's arrived on the market… and it's a safe bet to say we'll see it in most new cars sooner rather than later.

In a conflict as grisly as Syria's civil war, getting humanitarian aid to those who need it can be a life-threatening affair. Fortunately for those hoping to help, data from sources like Twitter, YouTube, and a range of others lets researchers turn war into a giant data science project, helping understand the tension between groups, how armed they are, and where they're headed next.

One year ago, Palantir Technologies donated their data organization software to nonprofit the Carter Center. "We wanted to see who the biggest fish amongst the opposition are, everyone relates to one another, and who's funding who," says Christopher McNaboe, who works on the Syria Conflict Mapping project. Now that the the U.N. has granted unauthorized border crossing into Syria to provide relief, that data can finally be put into action.

Finding Relationships From Formation Videos

In the past year, McNaboe found that a big part of understanding the conflict was understanding the overall structure of opposition groups--and the place to go was YouTube. Formation group videos now account for 90% of his overall data, at one point showing 600 YouTube videos per day proving to be an enormous resource, McNaboe says. "Each video is two and a bit minutes long. That's more minutes of video than of conflict," he says. "When I started watching these videos it was just individuals. Then it became armed groups and they started making very flashy formation videos for propaganda purposes." Since then he says the groups have formalized. "Now they release statements, videos of government abuse, and much more."

By aggregating data from armed groups and mining conflict events from social media, activist blogs, news sites, and humanitarian organizations, the Carter Center has documented over 11,000 events and tracked almost 6,000 armed groups and 100,000 fighters. They used Palantir's Gotham platform to do visual analysis of events including a hierarchal view of opposition groups' relationships to each other, which McNaboe uses to see who the main actors are.

So what's the impact? Tracking 14,000 defectors by the summer of 2012, McNaboe was able to reverse-engineer the defection videos where he found a lot of information related to the structure of Syrian military itself. He points to a web of color-coded groups in what resembles a complicated spider web.

"These are the armed troops that have formed in one governate of Syria," McNaboe says. "We can very easily see who is central to this network or we can find out who has tanks. The blue groups have tanks, or who was formed with religious reasons in their statement of purpose, this clusters."

Such visual data allows McNaboe to call bluffs on leaders who give out misinformation--an impossible feat with previous data methods.

"I met with somebody from the Supreme Military Council of the armed opposition in Syria and he said that he was in control of 70% of the armed groups in Syria, which is complete and total bullshit," he says. "You can look at these networks and see that not even 70% of the groups are connected to one another in a logical way."

Making Sense Of A Complex Web Of Data

It can get a pretty hairy trying to connect pieces of a 6,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and differentiate formation groups like the "Military Council of Damascus and its Countryside" and the "Revolutionary Military Council of Damascus and its Countryside" McNaboe says.

"There are local names, there are Arabic names, there are Kurdish names, and then various English transliterations of all of those and oftentimes we'll come across a place that we've never heard of before, that doesn't show up in Google Maps or on Google," he says.

Sorting through tons of video material, McNaboe and other analysts vigilantly coded 70 different attributes for each formation video they came across. "We look at how many people are in it, if there is a leader who gets his name, the name of the leader or leaders, the name of affiliated organizations, and others."

Not only does each node have 70 different attributes to import, but they have these attributes for a fixed periods of time, McNaboe says. "It's 70 different attributes for 6,000 different groups for 1,000 different days and the file size and ability for a computer to handle this amount of computation becomes really difficult."

Prior to Palantir's software, McNaboe and data scientist Russell Shepherd had to limit the number of attributes to 25 in order to preserve the temporal aspect of the visualization they needed.

Geo Locating For Passage Planning

Using tagged geo location data, McNaboe can see the conflict history of any given location, oftentimes down to the exact neighborhood.

"If organizations get satellite imagery of aerial bombs being loaded into a plane, that's great, but we've got the historic information on where all these aerial bombs have been used and the changing areas of control."

They can see if each attack is comprised of shelling, clashes, aerial bombardments, IEDs, suicide bombs, or sniper fire--and they can even tell which groups use what. A heat map displays visual data, showing where ISIS--one of the most powerful rebel groups--has been operating in more than 900 events since last November.

"December, a lot of activity in the south," McNaboe says, pointing to the map. "In January, when trading took off between the opposition and ISIS in western Aleppo, they were very, very active."

Green-coded patches show where the most aerial bombardments took place. "That's likely where the fighting has been very intense and how these bombs have progressed over time, where the first ones were, how they coincide with fighting."

With history data, humanitarian aid organizations can better plan how they'll engage with the opposition groups to ensure safe passage for humanitarian aid in a given location.

"You have a history of cease-fires they may have agreed to in the past and therefore information on what they're willing to compromise on or what they're not willing to compromise on."

Geo tags from tweets help a lot too, McNaboe says. "A map of geo-tagged tweets come only from areas of government control. They very rarely overlap with where there has been conflict."

But censorship by both the government and by citizens make it a constant game of cat and mouse especially in the case of Damascus and Aleppo, he says.

"It could be destruction of utilities in opposition-controlled areas, simply the government switches the area off, making it difficult for people to tweet," McNaboe says. "The uniformity of it suggests something like that is going on."

An Open Platform

When video content--like sophisticated weaponry--is blurry or unidentifiable, McNaboe outsources the findings to experts like Brown Moses, who return and input the data themselves. "We've structured the data by providing subsets of information to those experts for feedback, which is really easy. We've been doing that a lot lately," he says.

McNaboe says the success of this project has largely been due to partnerships and collaboration such as the ones with Palantir, Brown Moses, and the citizens themselves.

Both Palantir and the Carter Center are working to make the data more accessible and user-friendly so humanitarian organizations can import their own data collections directly into the platform. "We can overlay areas of internally displaced person camps with information on the conflict events, who controls what, and so on," McNaboe says.

And while McNaboe uses YouTube as a resource, the opposition groups use it as their own platform, forming more than 100 armed groups in the first two months of 2012.

So why are these groups so active on social media, knowing they can be seen by the whole world? To build their organization and connect with international funders, McNaboe says.

"They've done a cost-benefit analysis and have determined that the public relations that is now so readily available to them through Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter is far more beneficial for their sustainability as an organization than a lack thereof. Some use YouTube as a way to tell their funders 'thank you' and some have even named their organization, the battalion of whatever, after the funders themselves."

Based on the YouTube data, McNaboe's personal theory is that the openness of the Internet has helped facilitate the increase of more opposition groups.

"It's a slow-moving but very serious movement because of their ability to connect with funders and supporters where now they don't have to go through this long process of building an organizational philosophy and a sustainable model," he says.

Nintey-nine Percent Perspiration

Up to this point, the northern border cities have controlled the border, making it near impossible for the U.N. to bring in relief to citizens while McNaboe watched in real time.

"There were about 40,000 people in need right across the border," he says. "The convoy drove almost within sight of them without being able to deliver it."

It's the hope for safe passage that fuels McNaboe and team's sometimes painstaking data input as they try to fill in as many blanks as they can. For the first nationwide report, McNaboe stayed up all but three hours every day for about a month going through the source file database that converted visual files, the network maps, and then the geographic maps of conflict distribution.

"It's one of those 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration type of things where the success of it is not based upon some flashy click of a button tech innovation--though it helps--but rather a lot of sweat, hard work, data structuring and data collection," he says.

Gotham's collaboration tools have enabled more contribution from outside experts, other organizations, and most importantly, the citizens themselves. No other conflict in history has ever been this carefully documented just by its citizens, McNaboe says.

With a new resolution in place, the U.N. will rely on McNaboe, his team of data scientists, and Palantir's engineers to know where to make their next move.

Despite knowing how closely their online activity is being monitored, citizens are still determined to get information out to the rest of the world, while McNaboe tries to make sense of it all.

"There are a couple of compilation videos which show people literally looking down the barrels of tanks that are firing at buildings around them and staying there, narrating what they're seeing and what's happening," McNaboe says. "A tank is shooting or pointing straight at the camera, and they're still there."

McNaboe says they are just now looping in more analysts of outside organizations--including the U.N.--so they're able to directly view Syria data in the next few weeks. By combining the databases that are normally siloed within the Palantir platform, analysts can better evaluate the conflict and people's needs by picturing it, literally.

"What they [citizens] are doing is beneficial," McNaboe says. "They really want the world to see what is happening and we're listening--or trying to."

Stark white and minimally designed, the new NPR One app looks like a paradigm of technology. But surprisingly, the app isn't powered by algorithms, filters, or other pseudo-intelligence--it's still good old human editor curation on the backend.

"For us, the algorithm that programs the app is very importantly focused on the human curation part of it," says NPR VP of digital media Zach Brand. "A lot of people tend to think of it in terms of machine learning--which is a portion as well--but we have dedicated staff making sure that the most important stories are populated from the outset that represent the best experience right at the first moment. As we get to know the listener, it then tailors even more to them."

For Brand's team, using human curation as a backstop ensures the app doesn't screw up the most vital interaction: the first-time user experience. Usually, algorithmically personalized apps struggle to meet a user's expectations until the app has enough behavioral data to make inferences about what the user likes. In the NPR app, the first time a new user opens the app all the stories they see (or hear) were picked by human editors. From there the app begins to take cues based on some of the indicators and transitions to more machine learning.

"We absolutely can use and do use machine learning in here, but [we] are very true to the experience of public radio," says Brand. NPR didn't want the app to be a filter bubble for listeners. It didn't want to artificially narrow the scope of stories people were hearing because they were selecting topics and categories. Another thing it didn't want was to only be a destination for the most popular stories. There's a mix of local and national stories along with popular and obscure ones.

Building A Radio App

The actual app is simple looking and was built as a minimal viable product (MVP). Front and center is a play/pause button, 15-second-rewind button, and a skip button. Swiping left in the main area shows the upcoming story segments while swiping right shows a history of what you've already listened to. There's a share button, an "interesting" button, and search, but there's not much else--not even settings.

"One of the interesting things we saw [while beta testing] was that people didn't want to like or dislike news stories, because it's pretty hard to thumbs-up a genocide story," says senior director of digital products at NPR Joel Sucherman. "We've seen the 'mark interesting' as the most powerful indicator to reliably know someone's interest."

Another on-demand audio app, Swell, was just bought by Apple a little more than a day before NPR One launched. Swell collects different parts of podcasts and audio content and ties them together, also with a swiping gesture. The app swings heavily in the opposite direction of NPR's app--it's fully automated to learn based on user preferences and skipping signals.

The Tribune Company also released its Newsbeat app earlier this year, which works a little bit differently. The talk radio app takes text articles from websites and with a text-to-speech process, turns the writing into audio. Newsbeat also employs human talent in a studio to constantly read and record the most popular stories.

Businesses can gather more and more real-time data on everything from sales to web traffic to social media buzz, but actually accessing those stats often requires individually logging in to lots of different analytics sites.

That's something a lot of busy company leaders just don't have time for, especially when they're traveling and only have Internet access on a smartphone, says Davorin Gabrovec, CEO of Databox.

"They have Salesforce, they have other apps, but they don't have those apps installed on mobile," he says.

To make real-time data from providers like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Zendesk actually useful in real time, Databox aggregates selected company stats from across the web and creates simple, customizable charts and dashboards all within one mobile app.

"Imagine it like the first app you will open in the morning, and you will see what's really going on with the business," says Gabrovec.

While doing market research, Databox found that many executives only received an emailed spreadsheet of company data once or twice a day, while the live numbers were effectively only available to analytics staff able to devote a desktop browser tab to each analytics provider.

"Email was still the only way they accessed their business data," he says. "We started to see there is a huge need for the whole enterprise for people who spent huge amounts of time outside the office to bring them key insights and metrics in a way more appropriate than opening Excel files."

For common data sources, users can provide their login credentials to the app and select from some of the most commonly accessed metrics, Gabrovec says.

"We asked, first, for example in MailChimp, what are the top 10 metrics that we care about as a MailChimp user," says Gabrovec. "A user can change those metrics and personalize based on his or her needs."

Different types of users naturally pull from different data feeds, says Gabrovec: Developers often look at info from GitHub and Trello, while sales and marketing staff look at data from sites like Salesforce and Oracle's Eloqua, he says.

Users can also set up a daily scorecard that displays a morning summary of the data they're most interested in, says Gabrovec.

"You will receive a push notification before you even started your breakfast saying these are five things that happened yesterday that deserve your attention," he says.

And push notifications can also be set up to automatically notify users when certain stats cross designated thresholds, he says.

An SDK also lets users add custom data sources, and display customized charts and scorecards, Gabrovec says.

"When we expose that part, real users feel the whole potential of really plugging in different data sources presented in a way they would like to see," he says.

The company's in the midst of rolling out an Android app, which should be available in the next few weeks, and tweaking the layout options for that and the existing iPhone app, he says, in the hopes of making company data simple to use and analyze.

"Everyone is talking about big data, but data itself is not the problem--we have huge amounts of data already," he says. "But how to deliver that data to someone who needs to make big decisions, that is what we call the last mile in data work."

With the arrival of iOS 8, developers will be able to offer custom keyboards. If Android is anything to go by, these third-party keyboards could become as lucrative as best-selling apps. But developing a keyboard for iOS is a lot different than developing an app, so we talked to four of the biggest keyboard makers to get their advice on what you need to know.

1. Onboard Slowly

"The keyboard is arguably the most utilized UI component of a smartphone," says Ioannis Verdelis, founder and COO of Fleksy, the third-party Android keyboard known for its powerful prediction and auto-correction technology. "It's really hard to think of another app, or part of the OS, that sees this type of engagement."

Verdelis tells me that the average Fleksy user sees the keyboard 180 times a day, and the average time a user spends using the keyboard on a smartphone is one hour and 30 minutes.

With that kind of engagement, and considering the iOS keyboard has stayed mostly the same for the last seven years, Verdelis says it's important to onboard your new users slowly--and to do so in innovative ways.

"Since typing is such a fundamental interaction, we try to strike the perfect balance between bringing something new to the table, while making sure we don't alienate new users," he says. "At its core idea, Fleksy has zero learning curve--we use the standard QWERTY layout; the standard way to type, tap typing. [But] we also offer a complementary gesture system which is very popular with users who want to benefit from even faster, more accurate typing," he says.

To gently guide new users into the more advanced gesture features of Fleksy, the company created a rewards system that makes the onboarding process fun.

"Most users actually discover these using our innovative 'badges' system. Basically, we reward users who adopt our advanced features by unlocking badges, free themes, and other premium features. This way, we avoid having to put new users through a tedious onboarding experience--something nobody should need for a keyboard," he says.

Draven Zhou, senior lead product manager at TouchPal, another Android keyboard set to make its way to iOS 8, agrees that gradually onboarding new users to the more advanced features of third-party keyboards is the way to go. But instead of gamifying the more advanced features with badges, Zhou and his team wanted to display more traditional instructions--yet ones which wouldn't bore the user or make them feel there was too much to learn up front.

"It's not a traditional step-by-step tutorial," Zhou says of TouchPal, which claims to need 90% fewer keystrokes than normal software keyboards. "We hope users can 'discover' these interesting features when they want it. For example, users can swipe left on the backspace key to delete the whole word before the cursor. We will not tell the user about this feature in advance. Only when a user taps backspace repeatedly will a hint come up to show the user how this feature works."

2. This Isn't Android

All the custom keyboard developers I spoke with are porting their keyboards from Android--an OS that has been open to third-party keyboards for years now. But while all the developers raved about Apple's implementation of custom keyboards, they all cautioned that it's important to understand that Apple handles custom keyboards differently than Android does--and Apple places more limitations on keyboard developers than Android.

"Android is easier--at least at the moment," says Naveen Durga, lead product manager at KeyPoint Technologies, maker of the Adaptxt keyboard. "Android has supported third-party keyboards ever since its inception, and this means it is quite mature and robust in this respect. However, this is the first time Apple has opened up to third-party keyboards, and we strongly believe that they will gradually scale up their support for developers in this area."

Durga says the biggest challenge the company faced in bringing Adaptxt to iOS 8 was in accommodating their keyboard solution within the confines of the iOS app extension framework.

"We have developed keyboards for many other platforms and in almost all of them, the keyboard was perceived as a service component," Durga says. "This means the keyboard application's life cycle starts when the user selects our keyboard as the primary one and ends when the user switches to another keyboard. On iOS the keyboard's life cycle is determined by the host application in which the keyboard is used. This was a major challenge as we had to optimize our prediction engine and its life cycle according to the life cycle of the keyboard and--by doing this--we also had to make sure that there was no impact on performance."

Developers must also keep a baseline level of keyboard consistency, meaning a keyboard must autocorrect, auto-capitalize, quick dot (double-tapping the spacebar to enter a period), and react to the type of field a user is typing into (a keypad for number fields, for example).

And then there are the security restrictions. Unlike on Android, third-party iOS keyboards are unable to directly exchange information with the app in which the keyboard appears. In other words, an app won't know which keyboard the user is typing with. Another security feature is that Apple will not allow any third-party keyboard to work with password or credit card fields. Instead, iOS's default keyboard will appear.

But all the developers I spoke with say Apple's strict custom keyboard guidelines are reasonable.

"The reason [for the security features] is easy to understand,' says TouchPal's Zhou. "Apple treats users' privacy very seriously. So they would rather offer fewer APIs and methods to developers than offering everything developers want. Because keyboard apps are so close to users' privacy information, it would be very dangerous if there's no critical policy to restrict developers from what they should do and what they shouldn't."

3. Offer Something New

In 2008 when Apple opened iOS to third-party apps there was a mad rush by many developers to quickly throw together an app hoping it would catch on. The problem with those early apps, however, were many of them offered nothing new that the apps that came before them already didn't offer. The result was these "me too" apps mostly languished unnoticed, tried for only a few seconds before being deleted from a user's iPhone.

The same goes for custom keyboards on iOS.

"Having grown Fleksy on Android from zero to one of the top players in just six months, my advice to developers is to look hard at their idea/product and be sure that they are offering something new," Verdelis says.

"There are currently so many keyboards that offer next word predictions; so many that offer some form of gesture typing; so many that offer some kind of emojis. Apple's own keyboard--and Android's too--already offer many of these features, which is why many of the third-party products have not gained huge traction."

4. Know The Device

If Apple only made smartphones developers would only have to worry about one screen size when designing their keyboards for iOS 8. But to date Apple has sold over 225 million iPads--whose users are clamoring for custom keyboards as well. And while Apple has made it relatively easy to code one universal keyboard for both devices, Fleksy's Verdelis says developers need to keep one very important thing in mind when developing universal keyboards.

"People type differently on a tablet than a phone," he says. "On a tablet you have to deal with the fact people type using multiple fingers, or sometimes they hold the tablet with one hand and type with the other. These are subtle differences, but they make a world of difference in the typing experience. It's not just blowing up the keyboard to be bigger and you are done."

Developers should also be aware that one of the most popular features of the iPad's keyboard--the ability to split it into two parts for easy thumb typing--isn't an API that has been made available to custom keyboard developers. All third-party keyboards must remain whole for now.

5. Beta Test Creatively

Finally, remember that your custom keyboard will be targeting a market of users who aren't accustomed to having keyboard options at all. If a user isn't used to having options--or hasn't played with other third-party keyboards before--it could be hard for them to give accurate feedback because they might not actually know what it is they are looking for in a keyboard--or know how to explain with enough proficiency how they found themselves using it.

That's why developers might be served best by taking some more creative measures in its user beta tests.

As VP of global communications at SwiftKey's Ruth Barnett reveals, "We hold face-to-face, recorded user tests so we can watch users explore our product and check what's clear and what isn't. If in doubt, test, test, test."

A lot of us have old school Game Boys lying around, but even if they still work, they require hard-to-find game cartridges. Good news: The Internet is awash in projects that let you use a $40 Raspberry Pi and a game emulator to breathe new life into otherwise dust-covered gadgets of yesteryear. Here we outline three of them.

Fair warning: These types of DIY hardware projects aren't for the technically faint of heart--they frequently involve soldering, rewiring, and modifying the original plastic enclosures to accommodate new guts. But if that last sentence didn't freak you out, these mods can make for some weekend tinkering that will take care of the whole boredom thing a lot more constructively than Candy Crush ever could.

Bringing Your Old-School Game Boy Back To Life

If you keep an eye on Hacker News, you likely saw this gem bubble up the ranks last week. The Super Pi Boy project uses a Model B Raspberry Pi, broken Game Boy, printed circuit board (PCB) for controls, some new buttons, a 3.5-inch LCD screen, and a tiny audio amplifier.

With only a slight modification to the original Game Boy enclosure, it turns out the Raspberry Pi model B fits perfectly inside. To get the full sensory experience, the game audio comes through the amplifier, which is hooked up to the Pi and lives inside the Game Boy enclosure. Installing a backlit LED screen requires a little soldering and the controller board needs to be trimmed slightly, but it all fits. The whole thing is wired together and then powered by an external USB battery pack.

Like most video game hacks of this nature, the Super Bi Boy uses a video game emulator called RetroPi to run whatever games you want to play. In this particular mod, two additional buttons are added to the back of the Game Boy, so you're not strictly limited to the two-button gameplay of old school Game Boy games.

For detailed instructions and schematics, check out the Super Pi Boy website.

If you happen to have one of Nintendo's later, slimmer Game Boy Pocket handhelds lying around, don't worry: There's a Raspberry Pi mod for that, too. Despite the Game Boy Pocket's smaller size, the so-called Pi-Pocket mod manages to fit a Raspberry Pi Model B, lithium ion battery (to eliminate the need for AAA batteries), audio amplifier, and color LCD screen inside the device without any dramatic modifications to the original enclosure. Unlike the Super Pi Boy, this mod uses a Teensy 2.0 USB dev board to make the buttons work with the Raspberry Pi.

Since the Pi has more interfaces than are needed for this project, the mod involves removing a few ports from the device to save space. This, along with installing the new display, replacing the original Game Boy speaker and adding a more modern power source, involves a fair amount of soldering, hot gluing, wiring, and patience.

If you can't get your hands on an original Game Boy system of any kind, you can always just 3-D print your own enclosure. The maker learning hub Adafruit has a project detailing just such an endeavor. This particular project calls for a spare Super Nintendo controller, which is taken apart and used for its buttons.

Beyond that, the mod is comparable to the Super Pi Boy and Pi-Pocket projects in terms of its approach and complexity. If you have access to a 3-D printer and want to be able to say "I 3-D printed my own Game Boy" to people, check out the detailed instructions here.

If you're not a Nintendo devotee but still want in on the retro game-hacking glory, it's possible to pull off the same thing using a Sega Game Gear.

Tech companies want to see computer science students learning the tools and techniques necessary to contribute to large-scale programming projects, as well as the algorithms and theory traditionally taught. So to make that happen, Facebook launched a program last year called Open Academy, letting CS students from around the world earn course credit by contributing to major open source projects. A year later, we checked in to see how it's going.

Why Free Isn't Good Enough

The idea of making education free online isn't new, but Open Academy does the concept one better by giving students real-world projects to work on.

"I think the opportunity to have a superior learning experience while contributing something to society is just a natural win," says Open Academy founder Jay Borenstein, a lecturer at Stanford who also holds the title "education modernizer" at Stanford. "I think it's not lost on the students that in large part they're using freely available frameworks or libraries of some kind that are pretty critical components of whatever they're building."

GitHub worked with Facebook at the launch of the program, and is also a staunch open source supporter. The company offered free accounts and training to students and schools looking to use its code repositories in the classroom--something that GitHub cofounder Scott Chacon says grew out of his collaboration with Borenstein.

Open Academy kicks off each session with a weekend hackathon to get teams on the same page, works with participating universities to make sure students can get credit and fit the program into their academic schedules, and assigns student teams industry mentors to keep them on track. And just as in industry, it's critical to get student developers motivated and feeling capable from the moment they dive into a new codebase, Borenstein says.

"There's a ramp-up process where the students start off orienting themselves with the codebase," he says. "Part of the subtlety of being a good mentor is first introducing bite-size issues: things that the students can bite off in the early going," but are still part of a larger project that has real impact.

In one successful project, students helped make the Facebook-created, open source HipHop Virtual Machine compatible some of the web's top PHP codebases, Borenstein says.

"HipHop is a technology where you can compile PHP to bytecode and it performs a lot faster, and the students have made it compatible with the 20 most popular PHP frameworks that are out there," he says. "The mentor did a good job of compartmentalizing different aspects of the syntax compatibility that need to be worked on, giving them things that were achievable in the early going and then broadening that toward the end."

That's training that will help the students jump into new projects throughout their careers, he says.

"There's a skill to that--just dropping yourself in there," says Borenstein. "I think you get better at that over time."

Getting Kids On Git

For GitHub's education program, too, the challenges go beyond simply finding the server space for the 100,000 free accounts GitHub is granting students, says Chacon. In the beginning, it was possible to manually activate student and class accounts on a case-by-case basis, but that quickly grew impractical as the program grew.

"I would go in and flip a switch for Jay or whatever, and that very quickly was not scalable," Chacon says. "Scaling the giving away free accounts was actually a technical challenge."

Now, the process is heavily automated, with workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk helping to validate students' eligibility, he says. And once students and teachers are signed up, the company helps make sure they know how to use GitHub and the underlying Git source code version control software effectively.

"We hired an education liaison, and he goes around to multiple universities and teaches them how to use GitHub effectively and how to use open source effectively in the classroom," Chacon says.

Not surprisingly, not all teachers and schools are eager to have their students' homework assignments open source or even stored on private sections of GitHub's cloud, he says.

"Just being able to get people to use GitHub successfully has been a little bit more involved than in the corporate world sometimes," he says, explaining some privacy and intellectual property-conscious universities prefer to store student work and other materials behind their own firewalls.

But students increasingly come to class understanding the importance of mastering tools like Git, say both Chacon and Borenstein. And both agree the relationship between open source, software engineering, and academia is rapidly evolving.

"There are challenges, but those are definitely outweighed by the benefits," says Borenstein, explaining Facebook hopes to develop a template for Open Academy-style projects that other organizations can use.

Since 2008, OS X has felt like the middle child: perennially ignored and particularly unimpressive. Many Apple fans assumed the company would do away with its desktop OS altogether. But in a pretty incredible reversal of priorities, the forthcoming OS X 10.10 Yosemite is full of the most radical changes since OS 9 became OS X. Here's what Mac app-makers are excited about.

ICloud Finally "Just Works"

The promise of the cloud as the one-stop, easy-access source for all our files has been bandied about for years now, but no one company has been able to pull it off perfectly--especially Apple. Since iCloud was introduced it's been the number one source of complaints from both developers and users. The document-sharing-and-syncing service worked well for simple (e.g., non-packaged) files, but anything more complex always presented headaches for everyone involved. Users complained that their documents were sequestered and hard to navigate since there was no universal file system they could access on all devices, and developers bore the brunt of the blame when Apple's iCloud sync issues didn't work or even corrupted data.

But with the introduction of the CloudKit API in OS X Yosemite, Apple seems to have finally gotten cloud storage right. The new API eliminates the need for OS X (and iOS) devs to write server-side application logic. It also provides developers with authentication, private and public databases, and structured and asset storage services with massive data allowances at no cost. This new back end enables seamless syncing of the new iCloud Drive front end, which users will be able to access in Yosemite.

"Apple have improved iCloud with every release, but this release is pretty special," says Dan Counsell, founder of Realmac Software, makers of RapidWeaver, among other popular apps. "iCloud Drive is going to be a huge deal and something that is being overlooked by a lot of people right now."

The importance of CloudKit to developers and iCloud Drive to users is something Scrivener's Keith Blount agrees with.

"For simple apps, iCloud support has always been incredibly simple to implement," says Blount. "In the past, it has been much more difficult when it comes to implementing it for apps that don't have 'typical' data structures."

iCloud Drive means that users will now be able to store any sort of document in iCloud just as they can in Dropbox, regardless of the intricacies of the file format.

"That's great for both users and developers," says Blount. "We're currently working on our iOS version, and until the announcement of Yosemite, it looked as though the only way our users would be able to sync data between our desktop and iOS versions would be via the Dropbox APIs, because of the previous iCloud limitations. With a combination of iCloud Drive and CloudKit, however, I'm optimistic that we'll now be able to provide users with a syncing solution that is available on their Mac out of the box, without requiring a third-party service."

Just how big of a deal is Apple's finally-fixed iCloud in OS X?

"I honestly believe that iCloud Drive has a massive chance to usurp Dropbox as the go-to cloud drive solution," says Counsell. "Dropbox will have a hard time competing with something that's built right into the system. Apple can offer really tight integration on both iOS and OS X that Dropbox will never be able to replicate. In my opinion Dropbox should have taken the offer from Apple when they had the chance."

OS X's Vibrant Refresh Is A Much-Needed Shot In The Arm

It's hard to believe, but OS X first shipped to the public over 13 years ago and in that time not much has changed from a design perspective. OS X 10.9 Mavericks is just as glossy and slick today as OS X 10.0 was in 2001.

But with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apple's desktop OS is getting a much-needed iOS 7-inspired facelift which has reenergized many of the developers I spoke with and made them look at their app design in new and fresh ways.

"Everything feels much cleaner: Windows seem more spacious, UI elements have more room to breath and are given more space," says Till Schadde, CEO of equinux, makers of popular apps such as Mail Designer 2 and VPN Tracker 8. "Overall everything is less boxed in--much like we saw in iOS 7. Icons now have fewer details and gradients, which gives them more structure and clarity. We experimented with the new icon style in Mail Designer 2 and it looks great in the dock next to Apple's Yosemite-style icons."

But more space and refined UI elements aren't the only thing in OS X Yosemite developers are taking inspiration from. Another key change in the OS is additions to various frameworks that support Vibrancy.

"Vibrancy is Apple's name for the various translucent aspects of Yosemite's interface," says Scrivener's Blount. "Way back with the release of Tiger, Apple introduced floating HUD panels into OS X--those black translucent panels that are often used for tools--and from there, it became quite common to have controls set against a dark background in programs where it was important that the UI didn't distract from content, such as the editing tools in iPhoto. Yet despite this becoming more common in OS X UI design for the past several years, until now, Apple has never provided a unified set of tools for building a UI against a dark background. Any developer wanting to do so has had to create his or her own set of lighter UI elements to place on top of that background, which leads to a less unified appearance across different applications."

But that's all changed now with Vibrancy, says Blount. "Apple has introduced a lot of of cool background stuff that can update the appearance of various UI elements so that they adapt to look good against any background. This means a lot less code, and it means that UI elements are likely to adapt much more easily to future changes in the look of the OS."

Yet while Vibrancy and other Yosemite frameworks can mean less coding for some--particularly those whose apps are written in Cocoa or those that don't have a lot of custom UI elements--non-Cocoa apps and apps with heavy UI customization could have their work cut out for them. And that work is something you shouldn't put off, according to Ralf Pfleghar, director of development at equinux.

"If developers haven't started yet, they need to get moving," Pfleghar says. "It is much more important to your UI for Yosemite than it was for previous OS X versions. Apps that don't adapt to the new UI regime are going to look really old. I'd compare it to old Aqua-style apps, or even OS 9 apps in terms of how old they feel."

Pfleghar also notes that the UI changes in Yosemite can also present an opportunity for underdog apps to shine.

"Yosemite levels the playing field just like iOS 7 did," he says. "With iOS 7, a few 'established' developers missed the boat and new apps took their place by offering a more compelling UI for the new OS. The same could happen again with Yosemite."

iOS and OS X Now Live Together Harmoniously--Which Could Bring More Users To Desktop Apps

A big new feature in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite is called Handoff. It allows users to begin a task on one device--like an iPhone--and pick it up immediately on another device--like a Mac. At WWDC Apple only demoed the feature working with its apps, such as Mail, but any developer can take advantage of it.

"We're really excited about Handoff," says equinux's Schadde. "Hopefully it'll put an end to the days of emailing results from your phone to your Mac." Schadde says Handoff is great for developers because it does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to devices finding each other and pushing document states between devices, "but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter if the features makes developers' lives easier as long as it makes customers' lives easier."

And ultimately that ease of use of working on document states instantly across devices could spur a large majority of a developer's iOS app users to shell out money for the iOS app's desktop counterpart. As one major OS X developer I spoke with, who asked not to be named because his company's plans haven't been made public yet, said, "Handoff is the holy grail of cross-promotion, if you will, for many OS X developers. It's something we're all terribly excited about because not only does it allow us to serve our users better, but we believe it will make our desktop apps much more enticing to our much larger iOS user base."

The Future Of OS X Looks Strong In Our Post-PC World

Despite all the hype about being in a Post-PC world--and all the fear from developers that OS X was going to be left to languish--I haven't seen Mac developers this excited in a long time.

"It is definitely the best OS X yet," says Pixelmator's cofounder and UI designer, Saulius Dailide, when I ask him how he feels about the state of OS X after having played with the Yosemite beta for the last few months. "And it is easy to tell why. First, it looks and feels like an OS of today and even like the OS of the future. New icons, translucency, streamlined toolbars, and so on."

"Second, it comes with exactly those types of features that we would like to have--like more iOS friendship via Phone and SMS features, Handoff, new Spotlight, iCloud Drive--all these in a single OS update are just the exact thing one would expect from Apple," he says. "Fortunately, this time, I am so excited about the OS X update that I could not think about any features or improvements that could make the OS better. Yosemite is fantastic and I am very happy Apple brought back so many things from the iOS world."

But perhaps Scrivener's Keith Blount sums it up best. "Yosemite is an exciting release for Mac users and developers alike. The UI feels fresh while remaining familiar, but mostly, after several years of promising to get 'back to the Mac,' it finally feels as though Apple has. The Mac has felt more and more like a second-class citizen to iOS, but Yosemite shows that OS X is still close to the heart of Apple, and that it has a lot left to give."

Making child support payments online is not new, but existing sites, contracted through state governments, only processed the base payments. None had ever helped parents split and track the child's other necessary expenses, like dentist bills and extracurricular activity fees. And there has never been a good way to ensure each parent that the money was actually going to the child. A site called SupportPay, which raised $1.1 million in funding this past May, is changing that.

Like Mint.com, SupportPay is an accounting tool that exists completely online. Couples can use the detailed accounting records in a legal proceeding if they can't settle a specific financial dispute themselves. Or they can use the records for filling in their taxes.

But it's also a bill pay tool. You can pay the child support payments to the ex-partner with PayPal, cash, check, or credit card. Through desktop and mobile platforms it lets parents upload receipts and maintain proofs of payment as well as upload other types of documents, like report cards and pictures related to the child's activities. Each parent can determine which documents he or she wants to share or keep private.

If the parents can't decide on how to divvy up specific expenses, the disputed documents get filed away for future reference for when and if the parents decide to seek a mediator.

"The [dads] say, 'I have no problem paying. I just want to know the money is going to my child,'" says Sheri Atwood, the founder of SupportPay and a Fast Company Innovation Agent. "The person typically paying these expenses, typically the mom, says, 'He has no idea how expensive these kids really are.'"

The site's detailed accounts keep both parents on the same page, making the situation as clear as possible in one, centralized location and minimizing conflicts that would require legal action.

How Child Support Works

The setup process for child support differs for each family. When divorced parents determine who pays what for their children, they can first come to an agreement on their own terms or, in the case of non-agreement, get a mediator, lawyer, or judge involved to reach an agreement.

The first part of the agreement covers base support, the single monthly amount that one person pays to the other parent. The monthly payment is a calculation that is based on each parent's income and the amount of time the child spends with each parent. It's supposed to cover things like rent, electricity, and groceries.

People most often associate base support with child support, but it only covers 60% of the child's total expenses. The other 40% consists of medical, educational, and other special needs, like extracurricular activities, orthodontics, and college tuition. These costs fluctuate over time and are harder to keep track of than a recurring, monthly payment.

No official authority keeps track of either payment. It's not as though parents receive a bill from the government to remind them to make these payments. It's just something they need to remember to do.

So, Atwood's site helps divorced parents manage both the base support and extraordinary expenses for the child, while avoiding frustrating legal quibbles. Payment reminders and confirmations, as well as detailed documentation storage on the site, keep both parties in the know.

Unlikely Beginnings

Child support payments have been largely untapped by the tech world. The stereotypical startup founder is a single male in his 20s, but most people don't confront divorce until later in life. And it's typically the women in the relationship who run into financial stress when caring for the children. SupportPay came from an unlikely founder, a divorced woman in her 40s.

Atwood, a former VP at Symantec, was filling in an expense report at work when she got the idea for SupportPay. Her husband had forgotten to pay for his week of the daycare payments, but all he needed was a simple reminder. She couldn't find a system anywhere online that would help manage the accounting and payments of her daughter's child support, so she built her own.

"If I can't learn to code and build this, it will never happen because I can't afford to hire a team of developers to do it," recalls Atwood.

Atwood taught herself how to code HTML/CSS and JQuery for the front end. For the database back end, she uses the Salesforce.com platform. She built the prototype herself, and up until a few weeks ago, she did all of the content development.

Other co-parenting platforms exist, but they don't manage payment processes. They mainly help keep track of scheduling and communication, like the site Our Family Wizard does. And a Xerox company called Affiliated Computer Services, Inc., processes online payments for 14 states, but it only focuses on the base payments and goes through the government.

Simplified Online Communication

What SupportPay does is leaves the government out of the financial lives of the couple, leaving them free to sort out whatever payments need to be made among themselves. Atwood says only around 30% rely on the legal authorities to come to a child support agreement. The other 70% of separated parents don't go through the government system to settle on child support. These types of couples want to make splitting the costs of raising the child as painless as possible, and they are typically SupportPay users.

Atwood and her ex-husband exemplify this type of cooperation, post-divorce. Atwood administered the proceedings of the divorce herself. It only cost her $350 in total. Before founding SupportPay, she and her ex-husband attacked her daughter's expenses on their own. Child care, gymnastics, and yearbook activity fees would turn into a running bill of I.O.U.s--$50 here, $100 there.

"It quickly became this sort of administrative, financial nightmare, where I had two spreadsheets, and we were--I don't want to say arguing--having intense conversations about expenses in front of our daughter," says Atwood.

A SupportPay user, Lola Serrano, also used an Excel spreadsheet with her ex-husband before signing up for the site.

"I kept having to explain everything, and if he didn't like something on there, he could just delete it off," says Serrano.

For the last eight months since she started using SupportPay, Serrano hasn't had to explain any of the expenses to her husband. The site's centralized database lets her keep communication over finances with him to a minimum.

"You don't have to argue about who did this or who paid this. Everything is done online," says Charles Teater, another SupportPay user.

Teater says he doesn't speak to his ex-wife in person or on the phone, so the online aspect is important to him. He was happy to have received a simple invitation from his ex-wife to use the site. For them, the strictly online communication has been conflict-free for the past six months.

Everything from communication and paying for things has become so easy on the web. Making a transaction is quick and is mainly a solitary activity, requiring little effort. Sending an email or an instant message doesn't require waiting for the person on the other side to respond right away; it's indirect. SupportPay capitalizes on all of this.

"The Internet has caused people to stop talking, right? Stop communicating in person. But the one, actual set of people who really don't want to talk to each other, that is where the Internet hits its ideal," says Atwood.

The National Football League (NFL) announced in-game player tracking technology today for 17 stadiums for the 2014 season. And, while limited to a little more than half the buildings in the league, the NFL is doing things differently than other leagues.

RFID tracking chips will be placed on every player at some point this season--two of them--to allow the NFL to measure something the NBA and NASCAR don't: player orientation. Is this a way to improve the fan experience, or is it just creating data for data's sake?

What Fans Want From Big Data

The league calls this initiative "Next Generation Statistics," and they plan to pipe the insights primarily into stadiums hosting NFL's Thursday Night Football on the league's own television network, the NFL Network.

"From those 17 stadiums, specifically," explains Vishal Shah, NFL vice president of media strategy, "we'll be capturing position- and location-based data. Really, the focus and the genesis of this project was the ability to capture proprietary new statistics in real time. Then secondarily, create fan experiences which have applications. Probably the most visual one is within the broadcast itself."

The tech driving the analytical push--MotionWorks--is the same technology installed this year for NASCAR's Michael Waltrip Racing practices, but it's actually not new. MotionWorks is a legacy business initially developed for industrial manufacturing. Zebra, the maker of MotionWorks, developed the technology to measure distance within motion-based systems and improve safety and efficiency on factory floors about 10 years ago. Their technology was deployed all over the globe even before they began selling to pro sports leagues.

At launch, MotionWorks will be used to augment television broadcasts and provide fans with statistics previously unavailable even to teams and coaches. Missed blocks and turnovers (like butt-fumbles) will not simply be understood "missed assignments," but be broken down by way of spatially oriented statistics that show fans who screwed up and where.

And so will their coaches.

Inside The Tracking Playbook

Zebra's real-time location system (RTLS) receives transmission from two RFID chips from each player--one in each shoulder pad--and will provide precise positioning data, as well as velocity, acceleration, distance run, and impact measurements in real time--while the game is still in play. The data itself is put together in a database and can be output into a variety of graphics and tables depending on use case.

So how does MotionWorks know the difference between subjects?

"We've got a component-sized event module where you just change the rules of the game," says Jill Stelfox, vice president & general manager, location solutions at Zebra Technologies. "There's rules for football. There's rules for pit crews in NASCAR. There's rules for soccer. There's rules for hockey. You just change the rules. The data collection mechanics are the same. The broadcast integration is the same."

So, by introducing velocity to the equation, Zebra hopes to usher in a whole new era of analytics to America's favorite game.

MotionWorks can discern every player from the others--even in a scrum--and provide data quickly enough that the graphics can be layed on top of the broadcast within the same two-second delay employed since Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl.

"The clever part about that by the way is it's pretty hard to pull off from a movement happening on the field to being able to do an enhancement on a video live," says Stelfox. "All of that mechanics happen in less than seconds, right? There's a one or two-second delay to the total game itself and we've got to fit in to all of that including the producer being able to understand or not understand but choose what to look at. It all happens very, very quickly, which is pretty cool."

The Missing Metric

Like other leagues, the NFL is tracking people. But why not track the ball?

"The ball has its own set of unique characteristics that we look to go ahead and solve for from a tracking [perspective]," explains Shah, which means the technology--at this point--is strictly of entertainment value for fans, and of supplemental use for coaches and players until these new metrics are defined."

In the future, the stats that fans obsess over could be metrics that didn't even exist before RFID tracking.

The Story

The NFL spent the last several years parsing through the available technologies--Bluetooth, GPS, infrared--before settling on MotionWorks.

"A lot of these statistics may have been available on a post-production basis for a very huge set of players," explains Shah, "but given some of the challenges that the NFL has around its sport when it comes to these types of technologies including the number of people on the field, occlusion, and people being on top of one another, the real technological sort of challenge was finding the right technology [for our game]."

By teaming with Zebra, the NFL thinks it has the best chance of capturing XYZ positional data of the players officials on X-Y-Z axes. Statistics like speed, total distance run, acceleration, and distance between players were soon to follow.

"It's these statistics that we think from X, Y, and Z, you could create a lot of derived statistics," Shah predicts. "I think we have a fairly good understanding what fans want. We see some of the statistics being visualized on-screen, but really, we're going to be able to just create a much deeper, broader, set of statistics from the XYZ and positional data itself."

Forth And Long

The league is uncertain at this time as to what MotionWorks might someday supplement, but the possibilities are self-evident. With measurements accurate to the millimeter, MotionWorks might someday augment officiating by way of ball position, line judgement, and maybe even really friggin' high field goals.

Or... concussions.

"We're leaving that medical data under the purview of the experts," says Shah. "That's not under the purview of this particular project, but we'll certainly look at and consult with all the club officials and medical professionals around what is the right approach with data capture in the first place."

A behavioral scientist, artificial intelligence professor, and Stanford PhD candidate in machine learning walk into an office. The result, strangely enough, is yet a to-do and calendar app. But it's no joke.

These three smart, uniquely qualified people--noted economist Dan Ariely, professor Yoav Shoham, and CEO Jacob Bank--aren't in love with to-do apps. But with their app Timeful, they're trying to solve an acutely modern human problem using the types of tools people are already used to.

"We built many things that looked very different from a calendar and a to-do list, but what we found over and over again is that it's hard to affect behavior change if you're not in the environment," says CEO Jacob Bank. "It's very hard to get people to go to another place that adds functionality on top of a set of tools that they're already accustomed to--like the calendar and to-do list. We eventually realized that to have an impact we had to leverage some of the familiarities of the current tools."

Timeful uses what the teams calls the "Intention Genome" and "Intention Rank" to algorithmically assist in scheduling a person's day. The names were inspired by Pandora's Music Genome and Google's Page Rank, respectively. The Intention Genome breaks down user behavior to better categorize it and the Intention Rank helps to determine the best place to schedule items throughout the day.

The Timeful app is essentially just a backdrop for the company's algorithmic magic. Sure, it looks like a smart to-do list and calendar, but that's the sleight of hand. Its real trick is trying to make people more mindful of their time and form better habits.

"We needed a single starting point to demonstrate how algorithms and behavioral science can help people manage their time, and that's really around scheduling flexible things and getting them onto your calendar," explains Bank. "Everything about the current app is about inputting the flexible things you need to do and we'll help you get them on your schedule. Everything that doesn't directly feed into that goal was cut from the app."

In addition to normal meetings and appointments users are encouraged to add things like drink water, walk, study, or a host of other positive tasks. These are all things that vie for a person's valuable time, but usually aren't scheduled for specific times. The learning algorithm looks at the person's day and will suggest a time accordingly and let the user confirm or deny the suggestion as well as move it to a different time.

The app will learn from all the different interactions a user makes and decide when they are most productive. It makes sense to do the important and critical tasks when a person is at their most productive and scheduling mindless tasks for other times. As part of the settings there's a slider which allows the user to control how often scheduling suggestions are made.

Smart calendar apps aren't new. Tempo and Mynd for example have been around for a while. Tempo includes clever features to connect with contacts, displaying drive times, and other social interactions. Mynd is a fairly similar to Timeful in the sense that both are trying to actively learn about the user. But Mynd includes a few more surface level features that go beyond scheduling a person's day.

Talking to Co.Labs, Bank and Shoham hammered the point that their visually simple app is about seeing time differently. They don't want to improve the calendar, they want to improve people's time management and the app happens to use a calendar. In which case, all, or most, productivity apps out there right now just aren't doing what Timeful is aiming to do.

Looking forward, the app will evolve over time in natural ways. For one, it will likely grow to other platforms, but more importantly it will continue to be the playground for more machine learning and behavioral science. As you might expect from a data-driven company, usage and stats will heavily play into which directions are pursued the most. This is just the beginning for the Timeful team as they attempt to give people their time back.

While the Internet's made it easier to browse and search real estate options, anyone who's shopped for a house or apartment knows many brokerages haven't changed their practices much since the days of paper listings--finding the perfect place hasn't gotten much easier.

Urban Compass, a New York-based brokerage poised to expand to other markets after announcing a $40 million round of funding earlier this month, plans to use that fact to its advantage, using a mixture of data science and old-fashioned broker know-how to match clients to brokers, neighborhoods, and homes.

"We're not looking to replace real estate agents," says Alex Stern, the company's head of product. "We're looking to empower them."

The brokerage says its website contains up-to-date listings that match actual inventory, along with online neighborhood guides that combine hard figures on rents and commute times with photos and frank descriptions.

And once customers decide they're ready to look at a particular property or enlist the help of an Urban Compass agent, an ever-evolving algorithm pairs them with a broker based on their interests, desired price range, and other factors.

"We try to turn around the way that traditional real estate companies allocate leads," Stern says, explaining that since listings aren't the exclusive domain of particular agents, clients don't have to wait for the right person to become available to see the property they're interested in.

"What happens if that agent is on the phone or showing another client a property?" he asks. "That client never gets to see the property, because there's sort of a one-to-one relationship between the listing and the listing agent."

Urban Compass doesn't steer clients to particular agents based on income or other suspect criteria, he emphasizes, but aims to pair clients with agents who know the neighborhoods and amenities they're interested in.

"We look at the behavior of not only our agents over time--deals that they're closing and people that they're able to help," he says.

Once a client's working with an agent, the company relies on a mixture of automated search and matching tools and the broker's own knowledge and experience to help find the right properties, says Stern.

"Agents always have that je ne sais quoi--that ability to see almost nonlogical links between neighborhoods or building styles or stuff like that," he says.

And to reach out to prospective customers and pick listings to highlight on a first web visit, the company uses a variety of criteria to try to predict what house hunters want.

"We like to do it a little smarter than the traditional postcard in the mail," he says. "The brains-over-brawn approach, we like to call it."

Urban Compass can use browsers' geographical locations to make an educated guess at what properties might interest them and can notify contacts when an interesting listing sees a price drop, says Stern.

"Certain listing attract international buyers, for example," he says. "Certain listings that provide more luxury amenities or more integrated amenities are more interesting to people that are relocating from elsewhere in the states."

Visitors from college campuses are often interested in certain cities, he says: Students from engineering schools might be more interested in properties in Austin or San Francisco, while schools with more business majors might send more new grads to New York and Chicago, though he says an actual matching formula would be involve more complicated factors.

Stern says he's optimistic the company's mix of tech and talent will serve them well as they expand into new markets.

"The search experience that we provide is infinitely scalable -- you just have to fill it with different geographies and different listings," he says. "I think the value proposition has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with the home search, which is pretty ubiquitous around the world."

Remember when the iPad was going to save magazines? Nearly five years later, tablets haven't replaced print so much as offered a supplement that seems to present as many challenges as it does opportunities. It begs a central question: Should publishers become app developers? One digital magazine pioneer says no.

The Magazine, a biweekly iOS publication originally built by Instapaper creator Marco Arment, is switching gears. After a notably successful launch in 2012, the digital mag is ditching its custom codebase and relaunching on the third-party publishing service TypeEngine. For The Magazine, the old "build vs. buy" question became a no-brainer.

"The honest truth is that without a quite high level of subscribers on a consistent basis, it doesn't make sense to fund an app," says Glenn Fleishman, who bought the business from Arment in May 2013. "The amount of work required to keep pace with what Apple is doing is just not sustainable."

See Also: One Year Later, The iPad's Most Promising Magazine Looks Back (And Forward)

The new version of The Magazine bears a strong resemblance to its predecessor: a minimal design with the same typographical style and a lack of visual flourishes beyond the occasional photograph. Its content--typically long-form, narrative-style journalism--is packaged in issues organized by date, tucked away in a slide-out menu the appears along the left-hand side when beckoned.

Avid readers will notice a few slight differences: simpler navigation, improved sharing options, and a simplified login process between devices. But the crux of what's changed here is on the backend: The Magazine now runs on somebody else's servers and, crucially, its maintenance and feature updates are somebody else's responsibility.

Why Buy Rather Than Build?

"Earlier this year I was working heavily with developers who were terrific," says Fleishman. "We made a bunch of progress but then we sort of hit some roadblocks where it was like, 'Well, we need to do this stuff. Is the money there? Does it make sense to continue developing the platform?'"

The answer wasn't clear until Fleishman had breakfast with some of the guys from TypeEngine. The white-label publishing platform launched in 2013, sporting a design and functionality that Arment himself noticed was strikingly similar to that of The Magazine. Indeed, much to Fleishman's delight, the publishing tools TypeEngine had built matched The Magazine's needs almost perfectly, minimizing the technical acrobatics needed to get things migrated.

"They've been focusing on solving the same problems that I've been concerned about," says Fleishman. "And it turns out that that same discussions I'd had with developers and other people were the same discussions they've had internally."

This wasn't the first time Fleishman considered partnering with a third party. Last year, he looked at platforms like 29th Street Publishing, The Atavist, and even TypeEngine, but didn't think any of them met the needs that were then fulfilled by his admittedly costly custom development effort. So he stuck with the codebase he had, paid programmers to keep it fresh, and kept trucking along.

iOS Is Moving Faster Than Publishers--And That's A Problem

But with each major upgrade to iOS, the cost of keeping an app like this up-to-date would only grow more onerous. With outside help, he managed to get the app into iOS 7-friendly shape, but began to wince at the ways in which The Magazine still didn't take full advantage of the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system. And then before he knew it, iOS 8 was unveiled.

"I'm absolutely not prepared as a single app platform developer to be able to afford the cost to actually take advantage of iOS 8," says Fleishman. Features like actionable notifications, for example, could open up new possibilities for publishers, but the payoff is impossible to ascertain before pouring dollars into development.

"That would be a huge problem in just a few months," Fleishman says. "If we can't take advantage of the new features that iOS 8 has, then I think we're even less relevant to readers."

By teaming up with TypeEngine, The Magazine essentially offloads these concerns onto a company with the time and resources to focus on them. For Fleishman, that means more energy to focus on the tricky endeavor of marketing the app and finding new ways to reel in subscribers long after the publication's post-launch hype has faded.

For The Magazine, the payoff of switching to a third party will be immediate.

"They have things like single issue sales, which I've wanted to implement forever," says Fleishman. "But it probably would've cost me on the order of tens of thousands of dollars to implement."

Tinkering With The Business Model

In addition to going with a new platform, The Magazine will tinker with its subscription model. Instead of only offering an all-access pass for a monthly (or yearly) fee, the publication will allow readers to purchase single issues for $1.99 with no commitment. To help rope people in, Fleishman is also opening up The Magazine's archives for free for 30 days.

All these changes represent the most dramatic shift yet for the first independent tablet-native publication to reach profitability (It did so within one week of going live) and thus will tempt observers to raise further questions about the economic viability of tablet magazines. Last year, the lack of any overwhelming success stories in tablet publishing led some to declare that the model had failed and even died altogether.

The Magazine, it should be noted, was born of a unique set of circumstances. Its creator was a prominent developer with an established following. And, as Fleishman notes, Arment's proficiency in iOS development and building out a backend system allowed him to keep his early expenses low.

Upon its launch, The Magazine not only reached nearly instant profitability, but it became the poster child of what Craig Mod calls "subcompact publishing," which eschews the skeuomorphic approach of most legacy publishers' tablet offerings in favor of something simpler: Compact issue sizes, smaller downloads, proportional prices, HTML text, and a general web-friendliness. Scrolling intend of pagination. Design navigations that don't require explanatory diagrams. Essentially, in Mod's view, everything the tablet-based afterthoughts of traditional publishers were not.

But while it's been widely praised and mimicked, The Magazine's long-term success was, of course, never guaranteed. Since its launch, the publication has lost a number of subscribers and struggled to market itself to new ones.

"We have thousands of yearly subscribers," Fleishman says. "We've seen a big decline in monthly subscribers. We are just trying to figure out how to reach those readers who would enjoy what we have, even if they subscribe for a few months."

The Magazine's Future (Hint: It's Not Limited To Tablets)

Over time, Fleishman has realized that a publication isn't likely to thrive existing solely on tablets and smartphones. The Magazine's content has thus found its way onto sites like BoingBoing and Medium via content partnerships. Last year, The Magazine printed its first yearly anthology, a premium-quality hardcover book collecting some of the most notable work published in the pixel-based rag to date. While it made only a thin profit, the Kickstarter-supported run was successful enough to convince Fleishman that print has a place in The Magazine's future. Plans are underway to print the second edition later this year, albeit with some modifications to the cost structure.

"Because of the high perceived value, people will simply pay more for a permanent object that they can own, loan, show, and give to others," Fleishman says. "It's totemic where digital isn't."

Moving forward, The Magazine's approach is very much a multi-pronged one. An annual print edition, content partnerships, and a revised biweekly subscription model are all pieces of a larger strategic puzzle. And with the app running on a somebody else's platform, previously unthinkable things like launching an Android version may be coming down the pike, depending on Type Engine's product plans.

"Getting the technology shit off the plate and not having to worry about the app does conceptually free me up to work more strongly on the marketing front," Fleishman says. "I know I've got a solid app."

See Also: Six iPad Magazines That Are Changing The Publishing Business