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.

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."

Most advertising is all about statistics. But when it comes to getting press, most companies still use traditional "PR," personal relationships with journalists, cold calls, and email press releases.

The founders of Spokepoint set out to move beyond that, building a PR firm and public relations platform that brings the same kind of numbers-based insight that companies cultivate about their contacts with customers to their contacts with the media. Spokepoint's focused on catering to other startups, even offering packages for crowdfunding campaigns where Spokepoint takes a percentage of funds raised instead of a flat fee.

"We've done that with a bunch of customers, and it's always worked out super well," says Spokepoint cofounder Dan Siegel. "It aligns incentives really well."

Siegel and cofounder Paul Lam got the idea after successfully publicizing a previous invention of their own: the popular "Super Pac App," which applied Shazam-style sound recognition to political ads during the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The app let TV viewers turn to their smartphones to find out who was sponsoring commercials backing and bashing different candidates.

"The app hit number one in the App Store," says Siegel, and friends and acquaintances began to call for advice on publicizing their own companies and Kickstarter campaigns.

"We sat down with people, and we laid down the process, and it was stupidly simple," he says. "Track everything, was really the answer."

Many company founders who might have no qualms about poring over programming language specs or negotiating hardware specs with suppliers weren't sure how to go about reaching out to the press, he says.

"They get right up to the point of actually sending messages out, and then they get a little too scared to do it," he says. "The thing I say there is don't fear the journalist; fear the silence."

That is, startup founders should be more worried about their inventions not being publicized at all than they should fear a snarky interviewer, he says.

"It's very empowering to realize it's well within your power to vocalize and get press," Siegel says.

Spokepoint started out providing standard PR services using their own tools behind the scenes to find journalists who'd be likely to take an interest in their clients and A/B test the effectiveness of different pitches, and, as of this month, launched a platform to let clients do as much or as little of the writing and pitching as they wish.

Siegel says he advises clients to think about their concrete desires for a media campaign, just as a financial advisor would advise clients to think about earning goals and risk aversion. Some clients might prefer to pitch a few big-circulation outlets, and others might do better pitching to a wide circle of smaller publications, he says.

The most important metric to measure about a pitch, the company's found, is simply whether an initial pitch gets a positive reply, Siegel says. Knowing that, clients can target journalists interested in particular topics and try different variations on a pitch to see what gets the most interest, he says.

"You can really have an impact on the positive reply rate based on the message you're sending," he says.

From tracking results from previous clients and crawling the web for journalists' new stories and up-to-date contact information, the data that provides Spokepoint's predictive power is always getting more complete, and the company's working on pulling in other information like reporters' social media posts and LinkedIn profiles, says Siegel.

Some reporters are initially skeptical of the idea, he says, but most ultimately warm to the idea of a tool that means they get more story ideas that are actually relevant to them and their audience, he says.

"Okay, if this works, it means i'm actually going to get more targeted pitches," he says reporters think.

"Our north star is conversion," he added. "It's helping people get a positive reply from a journalist, and the way you get that is by sending journalists something they actually care about, rather than by spamming them."

Segment.io builds tools to help companies more easily connect their websites to analytics and advertising platforms like Google Analytics, Omniture, and Chartbeat. And after making much of their work open source, the company says those tools have improved faster than they otherwise would--thanks to talent and customers who come across the company through venues like GitHub.

"It makes a lot of our tools more productive," says cofounder Calvin French-Owen. "It encourages us to make Readmes for each one, and then just test the individual functionality of that module."

The company's founders started focusing seriously on open sourcing their product a few years ago after noticing that an early version they released was racking up stars on GitHub. That signals users were bookmarking the code and interested in working with it, says cofounder Ian Storm Taylor.

"It started to gain some stars and we thought, this is a potentially cool idea, and maybe we should investigate and see if there's something there," he says.

Since then, the company's continued to make as much of the product as possible open source, and often receives code contributions from users and analytics providers who want to see the product better integrated with their favorite analytics tools.

"It's probably split between the partners and the people who are just interested in using the services," says French-Owen.

The Segment.io platform captures data from web and mobile users and sends it to any of more than 100 analytics services, making it possible to turn on and off different analytics services from a web dashboard without having to deploy new web code or wait for a new mobile app version to publish.

To manage all of those different product integrations, Segment.io uses a traditional, Unix-style development philosophy, chaining together short, simple, open-source modules that do one thing well, say the company's founders.

Providers generally want to be integrated into Segment.io so that it's easier for existing Segment.io users to add their services, French-Owen says.

"In general, companies like us because it sort of speeds up the sales cycle," he says. "They can say, oh, you're already using Segment.io? Just turn us on and try us out."

And the company's added more than 100 repositories to GitHub, ranging from software error-logging tools to web stylesheet processors.

"They range in size from a random tiny utility that we needed one day to projects that we've been working on internally and decided to release to a bigger public," says Taylor.

Even the company's press kit, giving reporters basic info about Segment.io, is stored as a GitHub repository, and the founders say GitHub's used internally to manage wikis, trouble tickets, and other internal data.

Contributing to the open source community has also helped bring the Segment.io new customers, says marketing director Diana Smith--one project, called Metalsmith, which makes it easier for non-developers to build and edit simple websites, is in the top 10 sources of referrals leading to new customer signups, she says.

And, it turns out, being involved in open source helps bring in the kinds of employees Segment.io wants to hire, says French-Owen.

"The interesting thing: When we started, we just started open-sourcing things because we wanted to, more than because we wanted to attract a certain type of developer," he says.

But since then, he's seen that developers who fit well with Segment.io's coding style and sharing culture are likely to be open source contributors and users themselves.

And the traditional open source ideal of building small, interoperable modules proved ideal for melding multiple analytics tools, like combining Optimizely's A/B testing platform with other metrics, he says.

Sous vide cooking, where food is cooked in airtight bags immersed in a water or steam bath at a precise temperature, has long been one of the trade secrets of high-end restaurants. But now that the technology is democratizing, they're becoming a favorite tool of home kitchen-hackers, too.

Lisa Fetterman, the CEO and cofounder of Nomiku, says she and her husband Abe enjoyed cooking for each other, and envied TV chefs with sophisticated immersion circulators that let them raise sous vide pots to precise temperatures throughout. Abe, a plasma physicist by training, suggested they create their own, and the homemade sous vide machine evolved into Nomiku's flagship product: a clip-on immersion circulator that attaches to a pot you already own.

"All our friends were like, 'can you make me one?'" Fetterman says.

The couple started working with food-savvy hackers at makerspaces, first developing a kit to let DIY chefs assemble the machines. Then, in 2012, raised almost $600,000 through a Kickstarter campaign to create a mass-produced version.

"To date, we've shipped over 5,000 of that model," Fetterman says.

Their company has just launched a second Kickstarter campaign and raised more than $500,000 to date for a second-generation Nomiku, which comes equipped with a Wi-Fi connection. A smartphone app will let users configure and monitor the cooker remotely as well as share and download recipes which can be automatically used to configure the cooker.

"What's great about Wi-Fi connectivity is we literally connect to people," says Fetterman. "Your sous vide machine is not talking to your refrigerator. With our app, we can actually be inside your kitchen by proxy to help you sous vide."

Users can input their own recipes into the app, which will offer cook time and temperature recommendations, she says.

"You can create your own recipes and it's heavily templated, and then we give you the time and temperatures for everything," she says. "Any recipe that you want to translate into sous vide we can help you do that."

And they'll be able to upload their successful recipes for others to try and download recipes from friends and celebrity chefs. Fetterman says she hopes the device's simplicity will inspire users to experiment with more complicated, and more delicious, recipes.

"I want them to try out really ambitious things, like short ribs," she says. "Short ribs are usually like a two- to three-day cook, and I want them to have the confidence to try that."

The founders of Avidbots, graduates of Ontario's University of Waterloo, initially planned to build robots for a task familiar to residents of the north: snow removal.

"While we were doing that, while we doing customer discovery, we realized it was going to be very hard for us to penetrate that market," says cofounder Faizan Sheikh.

Driveway snow removal is a distinct market from parking lot snow removal, which is a distinct market from street snow removal, Sheikh says. And all of those small markets are, naturally, geographically and seasonally limited, and demand can vary drastically from year to year, Sheikh says.

So, the company decided to focus on a more universal problem: keeping the floors of shops and offices clean.

"Cleaning has to be done every night--it has to be done irrespective of whether it's winter," Sheikh says.

Avidbots has developed prototype autonomous robots that can sweep and scrub floors, using laser mapping technology similar to Google's self-driving cars to build a floor map of a business. Since the robots are Wi-FI enabled, they can communicate with each other to share map data, plan their attack, and share their progress with each other through the network.

Refining the mechanics and navigation algorithms is an iterative process, involving simulation and in-office testing, Sheikh says.

"In robotics, a lot of things are very important: You have to have the mechanics down very well, the electrical design, and you have to have the artificial intelligence," says Sheikh.

The robots should work on a variety of hard surfaces, and Avidbots plans to make them available to buy or rent by the hour. The company plans to charge $6 per hour for scrubbing and $4 for sweeping--less than the U.S. human minimum wage--though Sheikh says he anticipates many companies will reallocate human janitors to more difficult tasks like cleaning bathrooms, not let them go.

"I see this as freeing up human beings to do higher-quality tasks," he says. "If you have robots cleaning floors, then the cleaning guy can do other higher-value tasks like cleaning washrooms, cleaning windows, other complicated things that robots cannot do at the moment."

Of course, as the robots grow more sophisticated, the range of tasks they're qualified for will only grow.

"The future is very exciting," says Sheikh. "It's sort of what keeps up at night."

Before photography became widespread, the average person had no way of knowing what their ancestors from just a few generations past looked like, say the founders of Yourbot.

Yourbot aims to help users record not just their pictures but their personalities, using a mix of video and sound recording and profile questions to create digital archives users can share with their families now and after their passing, says founder Ekim Kaya.

"You can think of this as a digital time capsule," he says, pointing to a prototype Android-powered device that will let Yourbot customers access recordings of their loved ones. A projector and mirror inside the handheld device help create a three-dimensional image, Kaya says.

"We didn't want to use an LED screen," he says. "We decided to go with a projector that makes it look a little bit from the past."

Users will be able to answer questions about their personal histories--their childhood neighborhoods, their lifelong relationships toward money and career, their thoughts on the keys to happiness--and about current events, says Kaya.

"Let's say there is a conflict going in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine--we'll send them a question about the solution to this debate," he says. "We will be curating up-to-date questions so that we will extract more information."

Yourbot started as a project of Kaya's company Botego, which builds automated conversation agents for automated customer service, he says. And the tool will let users record their answers as video, or as audio, or as plain text; should they choose audio or text, Botego's technology will create an animated video for them to share, he says.

The same technology will also let them create representations of historical figures based on their writings and public statements, he says.

"This would be amazing for children, or visitors in a museum," he says.

Users will be able to store their recordings in Kaya's cloud and choose between making their responses public or private, he says.

"We will be using encryption to keep all data private on the cloud," he says. "If you choose to share your persona publicly, I'm sure many interesting things would happen."

The company plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign in September to fund mass production of the devices, which the company plans to ship by the middle of 2015, and aims to set up a foundation that will pledge to help users and their families preserve their recordings for the next 200 years, Kaya says.

"Once the Kickstarter project ends, we will be able to offer user accounts to our backers, and they will be able to start building their personas," he says.

The company's already had positive feedback from users who want to preserve their memories, or those of their loved ones, he says.

"There is a lady who says, 'My mother is losing her memory,'" he says. "This is so important to her. I want her to be one of the testers."

Swipe left. Swipe right. It's such a small gesture that packs such a big punch.

After Tinder launched about two years ago, its dead-simple user interface helped propel the app--and its interface--into the realm of pop culture artifact. The swipe-yes-or-no design has been adopted by apps offering everything from employment to puppies to threesomes, rapidly becoming as familiar a part of the mobile ecosystem as the checkbox is to the web.

But while Tinder's widespread media attention and viral growth helped make swiping mainstream, being a "Tinder for X" does not necessarily mean instant success. The swipe design's close ties to the app can make other swiping products seem less than serious. (After all, Tinder's interface initially drew for making romantic interactions feel shallow). As startups look to become more than just novelty Tinder clones, they're working to turn swipes into meaningful recommendations and adopt other features that set them apart from an increasingly swipe-covered field.

This begs the question: What is the meaning, exactly, of the swipe?

"I really see the Tinder swipe as a UI pattern, more than anything else," says Chris Calmeyn, a cofounder of professional social networking firm Caliber. "It's just a great way to process information quickly."

Founded in 2013, Caliber uses the swipe UI to bring together people interested in building business connections. Calmeyn says the Tinder-style mechanism was originally proposed jokingly after Tinder's soaring popularity at the time, but it turned out that, as on Tinder, only pairing users who both expressed interest in each other made users more comfortable looking to connect with relative strangers.

"That's just as valuable in a new professional relationship as it is in dating," he says.

But unlike Tinder, Caliber aims to emphasize users' professional connections and achievements, not their looks.

"Tinder can be so visceral--it's really just about attraction," something not appropriate to a business app, says Calmeyn. "It's really more about what the person has done--what they care about and who they want to meet."

Still, the relative informality of the swipe approach can make the app more appealing than alternatives such as LinkedIn. "It can be sporadic--be something that you go back to, but we really want it to be lightweight," he says.

That view is echoed by TJ Nahigian, the CEO of Jobr, which lets users swipe their way through potential job opportunities. If a potential candidate swipes yes to a posting, and a recruiter or hiring manager swipes yes to him or her, they're paired for a chat.

Nahigian says the casual feel of the swipe UI helps attract potential employees who might not have filled out a complete formal application. "When you have a few minutes to kill, it's sort of an easy and enjoyable way to explore your career opportunities," he says. "Chatting is also important in that regard as well--you can have a casual conversation with the recruiter wherever you are."

Ironically, the informality of the app interface actually led Jobr's recruiter clients to request an old-fashioned web version, so their employers didn't watch them spending their work days swiping at their phones, he says. Either way, as users swipe or click through postings, they can be better matched with jobs or candidates they'll be interested in, says Nahigian. "There's a pretty important algorithm that we use in order to show candidates the right job opportunities, and recruiters or hiring managers the right candidates for roles," he says.

Similar algorithms can help in other apps when users are swiping to pick products that can't swipe back, says Jeremy Callahan, the founder of Shoe Swipe, which lets users swipe yea or nay to shoes. "It knows the difference between a high heel and a wedge or a flat, and it knows color as well," Callahan says of his app. "I'd say about 9% of the shoes we're showing people right now are added to their favorites."

Callahan says users generally seem to immediately understand the interface, which lets them swipe or tap yes or no to a given pair of shoes.

"I haven't gotten any support type of emails--I think it's pretty self-explanatory," he says.

Still, he says, later versions of the app will likely add features beyond the simple swipe to keep users coming back, such as notifications letting bargain seekers know when a bookmarked pair of shoes goes on sale, he says.

Generally, using a swipe interface lets app developers very rapidly determine what their customers are interested in without making them fill out dull and discouraging web forms, says Henrik Werdelin, the cofounder of Bark & Co.

Bark & Co is probably best known for BarkBox, a subscription service delivering a monthly package of canine-centric products, but the company also operates BarkBuddy, which matches would-be dog owners with adoptable animals.

"I think as a product designer one of our challenges is how can we make sure that people get into the product as quickly as possible," he says. "We thought that it is an incredibly useful method for looking at a number of different dogs, but really what it also allowed us to do is create an algorithm on the backend to present more dogs that you like."

That's faster than making users fill out forms to see the kinds of dogs they're interested in, he says, a process that can be daunting, especially since many rescue dogs don't fit cleanly into one breed.

"One of the challenges we've seen in the dog rescue community is that it can be a little complicated to use the sites that are available," he says. "There's a lot of people who actually get really into the idea of adopting a dog, but they either don't know how to or they think it's too difficult."

Simplicity was also a big motivation for Dimo Trifonov, the founder of 3nder, which matches individuals or couples with others looking for ménages à trois. Prior to 3nder, couples had to post profiles that didn't fit cleanly into conventional dating sites, or turn to personals sections on Craigslist or sleazier sites, he says.

"I don't know how many of those are real, how many are serial killers," he says. "We give this elegant interface and elegant way to communicate with people without disturbing them." That's something 3nder's privacy- and safety-conscious clients appreciate about the interface requiring both sides to swipe yes, he says.

With a design background, Trifonov's worked to make the app seem elegant and classy, he says, even when it means breaking traditional design patterns. Notifications show up as a glowing menu bar inspired by the movie Her--not as an alert icon or flashing number as on other messaging apps--and the messaging interface is full-screen, not a Tinder-style narrow text box at the bottom of the screen, he says.

"When you send a message you have this full screen where you can type your message, and people were really confused because you have this big type," he says. "It's a small thing, but I think it's creating meaningful conversations."

The simplicity of the underlying swipe interface and the volume of user data it generates make it easy to iterate on other features, developers say.

CoffeeMe, a business-networking swipe app, got its start at a bachelor party hackathon, says cofounder Hsu Ken Ooi.

"When I first built it, I wasn't sure how often people were going to say yes," he says. "If people say yes [to connecting with other users] 1% of the time, there's probably not a product here."

But the app, which is currently limited to approved users in the Bay Area startup world, saw a much higher rate of users approving one another and of actually making contact, he says.

"That's how I track the health of the product," he says. "I wouldn't want to build a product where we're making a lot of introductions, but nobody actually talks to each other on there." The swipe, it seems, can only take you so far.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, tech companies moved in droves from using expensive servers from companies like Sun Microsystems to using commodity hardware and open source software, like Linux-based operating systems and the Apache web server.

Since then, developers have come up with powerful, open source tools to quickly and reliably deploy code and data to the collections of servers that deliver web and app content without having to interact with the individual machines. But networking switches--the computers that route packets data to and from individual servers in a data center--have largely continued to rely on proprietary software running on specialized machines made by vendors like Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks.

And configuring these machines, with vendor-specific interfaces, can be hard to automate and reliant on the talent and knowledge of specialized network engineers, says Najam Ahmad, the director of technical operations at Facebook. But the social networking giant is at the forefront of an industry effort to move networking equipment to machines built on open source designs and running Linux-based systems.

"As the web companies are scaling and have to build new infrastructure, networking becomes a bottleneck," says Ahmad.

Moving to open source designs and software would ultimately let companies like Facebook buy intercompatible switches from a variety of vendors, just as they can now do with other computing hardware, instead of choosing between proprietary models from the current vendors, each with their own idiosyncratic interfaces.

"We are working together, in the open, to design and build smarter, more scalable, more efficient data center technologies--but we're still connecting them to the outside world using black-box switches that haven't been designed for deployment at scale and don't allow consumers to modify or replace the software that runs on them," wrote Frank Frankovsky, the head of the Open Compute Project, in a May blog post.

The Open Compute Project was initially created by Facebook to share efficient, nonproprietary data center hardware designs and software, and Facebook's Ahmad is leading the group's effort to develop and promote open source switch designs.

Facebook's testing a switch design called Wedge that uses commercially available hardware and runs a Linux distribution called FBOSS based on software the company already uses to drive its servers, he says. When Wedge and FBOSS have proven themselves internally, Facebook plans to make the designs and codes open source through the Open Compute Project.

"The demand is definitely there," says Ahmad, who argues a move to open source will let tech companies configure their network switches as readily as they now configure other computers.

"If you look at web companies like ourselves, we manage hundreds of thousands of servers which have a whole development environment, they have configuration tools," he says. "We want to be able to leverage the same engineering resources [for networking equipment]."

In the long term, major switch vendors will likely migrate to open source technology to stay competitive, or at least make their proprietary systems more intercompatible, says James Kelleher, a senior analyst at Argus Research who covers the telecom equipment sector.

Already, Juniper is offering more programmable switches, but in more established markets the transition will likely be gradual, Kelleher predicts.

"Cisco is so well entrenched in the enterprise," he says. "It's gonna to be kind of hard to dislodge them or to switch quickly."

In the meantime, Facebook's new Wedge-based switches use commercially available and well-documented chips from vendors such as Broadcom to handle the actual processing of networking data, and FBOSS is effectively the operating system Facebook uses for its servers augmented with additional code to talk to the networking chips, Ahmad says.

"You still have to write some code to be able to talk to the chip, to be able to program the chip," he says. "Linux provides a development environment where you can do that."

Networking vendors such as Cumulus Networks are willing to provide buyers support for the switches, he says, and being able to more efficiently configure the devices provides a big efficiency gain.

A main challenge for many organizations may be bridging gaps that now exist between server and network engineers, says Ahmad, though he predicts those barriers may erode as both teams come to use more similar hardware and software.

"The most interesting thing in most companies is organizational issues," he says. "The server side and network side are very separate teams, and you can't stand on each others toes, as it may be."

Every New York City winter brings stories of residents shivering in their apartments, despite strict laws requiring landlords keep their properties adequately warm.

The city receives hundreds of thousands of heat-related complaints every season, and angry New Yorkers can be left waiting for inspectors to verify the complaints or compiling pen-and-paper temperature logs to bring to housing court in an effort to force property owners to take action.

This year, a project launched from the Flatiron School, a Manhattan professional programming academy, aims to make this process easier, especially for some of the city's underprivileged residents who are often taken advantage of by penny-pinching landlords. The Heat Seek NYC project designed wireless temperature sensors it plans to distribute across the city with the help of tenant advocacy groups. Those sensors let tenants and those helping them navigate the city's housing bureaucracy by automatically tracking when their apartments get illegally and dangerously frigid, say the project's leaders.

Housing temperature problems aren't unique to New York City, but "this project definitely would not have happened anywhere else," says Heat Seek backend developer and cofounder William Jeffries.

Jeffries says the idea evolved last winter, when he was a student at the Flatiron School brainstorming ideas for class projects using the Twine Wi-Fi-enabled sensor kit. Temperature monitoring was one idea he considered, and classmate and Heat Seek cofounder Tristan Siegel's mother is a social worker whose clients often have issues with inadequately heated apartments, and the two began to think seriously about the idea.

"Pretty soon we had a team of, like, nine people," says Jeffries.

The Flatiron School provided the fledgling project with prototyping tools, supplies, and work space. "The curriculum is sort of like fundamentals of programming and general tools and instruction on how to think about problems and learn new tools," he says. "There wasn't a lot of direction in terms of what projects you should work on, or what kind of ideas you should have." The school also helped arrange for the team to present its project at New York Tech Meetup, where budding inventors present "hacks of the week" to industry luminaries.

"When we presented at New York Tech Meetup, everyone loved it--it's partially how we met our designer Andrea [Acevedo] and our other frontend person Ethan [Ozelius]," Siegel says.

Since then, the group has received more than $10,000 in pledges in an ongoing Kickstarter campaign that's set to bring the sensors to project backers and New Yorkers in need. And, Heat Seek is working with advocacy groups Community Action for Safe Apartments and the Urban Justice Center to help determine where to place the devices and make sure advocates and attorneys are on hand to help track temperature violations.

"These organizations all have high-priority lists of tenants, and they renew these relationships every winter," says Jarryd Hammel, the project's business development lead. "We're really good at hardware development, software development; it's not a good use of resources for us to be building up lists of the thousands and thousands of tenants who need these resources."

The sensors come in two flavors: a more powerful hub unit that takes temperature readings and transmits them to Heat Seek's cloud servers via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and simpler and less expensive cell units that transmit their readings via a nearby hub. Sending the data to the cloud means tenants no longer have to worry about compiling their own heat logs and that advocates can be automatically notified when violations are detected.

"One of the principal pieces of feedback that we received since we first tested our sensors is that the tenants themselves want the technology in their apartment and working, but they don't really want to interact with the data," says Hammel.

Ideally, just having reliable data easily available could help landlords and tenants find fixes without protracted legal battles, says Daniel Kronovet, an industrial designer on the project.

The project is also compiling a real-time interactive map of heat complaints to show city officials and plans to add real-time data from its own sensors. Heat Seek's also a finalist in the NYC BigApps competition, which provides guidance and funding to projects using city data.

"New York as a city has been making a lot of effort to promote this kind of thing," says Jeffries. "New York City has over 1,100 regularly updated databases with city data that is all public."

After deploying its sensors to needy tenants in New York, the group sees the potential to expand into other cities and markets, including some that might bring a profit. Some building management companies and energy efficiency consultancies have expressed interest in using the same or similar sensors to track heat loss, says Hammel.

"One of the issues that all of these consultancy groups have is all that all of the sensors available to them take temperatures at the boiler," he says.

And in other areas of the country, the sensors could be valuable for tracking when apartments get dangerously hot in the summer, he says.

"It's the same problem, just manifested in a very different way," he says, though he adds that New York's strong tenant protection laws can make it easier to translate data into concrete fixes there than in other cities.

"It'll definitely be useful for providing information at the very least to landlords, tenants, and municipalities around the country," he says. "It's the powerful regulations that are here in New York that allow us to implement this as an aid to the justice system."

With football-related concussions in the news--one-third of NFL players suffer from brain trauma--and a nation of runners eager to dodge injuries, a new breed of wearable fitness tools aims to not only track calories burned but also blows to the head and strain on the calves.

The challenge these devices' makers face, according to them and other experts, is providing reliable alerts to help keep athletes healthy without unnecessarily sounding the warning bells when they're playing safely.

"You can't just bring a person into a lab and slam stuff into their head and see what happens," says Benjamin Harvatine, the cofounder and CEO of Jolt, which is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to fund a clip-on head impact monitoring device.

The idea for the Jolt sensor came to Harvatine after he sustained a serious concussion himself in college wrestling practice but, attributing his dizziness to hunger or dehydration, continued to wrestle, sustaining more blows to the head throughout the session.

"When I went to stand up, I couldn't really stand up right," he says. The most severe symptoms persisted for about five months. "It was a situation where I felt like I would have really benefitted from something that would really quantify, was I dizzy because of head impact, or not?"

Jolt's sensor, which is designed to be mounted on a helmet, headband, or other athletic headgear, tracks the level of head impact athletes sustain and relays those measurements in real time to a companion smartphone app, so coaches or parents of younger athletes can see what's happening to players' heads.

The app also includes a concussion symptom checklist and cognitive assessment test coaches can give players to see if their thinking is clouded after impact. Jolt will encourage coaches to give the players the tests regularly, even when they haven't taken any serious blows to the head, to help establish a baseline and potentially detect any cumulative effects of smaller injuries.

"Every day after practice, or once a week, they can take this test in the app," Harvatine says. "We can start to watch this data, and see if we pick up on any trends medical folks haven't picked up on yet."

Similarly, a helmet insert from Reebok, called the Checklight, uses green, yellow, and red lights to quickly signal when a player has taken a moderate, heavy, or no impact to the brain. When the light glows yellow or red, Reebok recommends the player get checked out, says Paul Litchfield, head of Reebok Advanced Concepts.

"Go through a screening process that is appropriate to whatever environment you're in," he advises athletes, explaining the device uses a formula based on linear and rotational forces applied to the head and other factors.

And other devices can measure potentially harmful forces applied to the rest of the body. GestureLogic's LEO LegBand, which successfully raised more than $140,000 in an Indiegogo effort concluded last month, can warn runners and cyclists to reduce the level of impact on their legs, or to stop and take a drink when they become dehydrated. Since the leg band uploads user data to GestureLogic's cloud, the company says it should grow better at warning of injuries over time.

Shoe inserts from companies such as Boogio and Scribe Labs also promise to be able to measure and offer correcting advice on runners' gaits.

Boogio cofounder Jose Torres says the company's devices, currently available for preorder, should be able to establish a baseline of healthy movements for individual athletes and warn them when they step out of that safe zone.

"You can see this is too much weight, or you're tired, or your posture is incorrect," he says.

And Scribe Labs' runScribe inserts track technique, distance, and speed over time and even help runners figure out which shoes are healthiest for them, says CEO Tim Clark.

"I actually managed to find what shoes I should be in, and they were completely not the shoes that the guys in the running shoe stores were trying to put me in," he says.

Of course, all of these device makers emphasize their products aren't medical-grade equipment; they're not meant to diagnose particular injuries, or substitute for the advice of a doctor, trainer, or physical therapist. With head injuries, in particular, that's inevitable, since there are no hard and fast rules for diagnosing a concussion.

"The medical community does not have the exact definition of what thresholds would cause injury and what thresholds would not cause injury," says Reebok's Litchfield.

Studies have shown athletes avoiding apparent concussions after impacts hundreds of times the force of gravity, while others were concussed after milder impacts, says Thomas Talavage, a Purdue University engineering professor and medical imaging expert who's studied head injuries and techniques for detecting them.

"The truth is is that there is no definable threshold beyond which you're certain or even necessarily likely to get a concussion," he says, arguing that sensors would get more accurate results monitoring the full range of impact sustained by an athlete over time.

"You almost certainly require some level of modeling of what have been the most recent exposures for a given athlete," he says.

That's a goal to which most of these device makers aspire, with many of them eager to collect user data to help scientists develop new and better models of what causes injury.

"For us, we see the data we're storing, capturing, and analyzing as something that's very valuable," says Jolt's Harvatine.

Jolt and other sensor makers also plan to update their devices and apps with code and thresholds based on ongoing medical research, he says.

"With any device that has any sort of connectivity like for ours, we can push over-the-air updates," he says. "All of these devices will be continually monitoring the latest medical research in the area."

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg once suggested that Franz Aliquo might be in need of "psychiatric help," and it wasn't because of his Satanic-themed food truck, 666 Burger. It's because he created Street Wars, a multinational series of live action tournaments that challenge players to hunt down and "assassinate" perfect strangers with squirt guns while trying to avoid their own would-be shooters. Successful assassins are assigned new targets, until the last person standing is tasked with taking down Aliquo himself while evading his team of watergun-packing bodyguards.

Bloomberg and other officials worried the game could prove dangerous or trigger an unnecessary police response in the years after the September 11 attacks. Aliquo says nothing like that has actually come to pass in the ten year history of the tournaments, which returned to New York this week. And, he says, Street Wars and other artistic activities, such as costumed road trips dubbed Rental Car Rallies and a a $666 hamburger topped with caviar and served in gold leaf, have taught him lessons about localization, marketing and trusting the audience that have helped in his day job promoting brands looking to interact with consumers in ways beyond traditional advertising.

"What I do with Rental Car Rally and Street Wars is really try to create situations that will bring coincidences to people," he says. "Being able to understand what types of situations cause what types of reactions makes it a lot easier to then create the types of advertising experiences that are really going to resonate with the consumer, which is really what brands are after right now."

With Street Wars, for instance, Aliquo found that players in different countries use very different strategies.

"When we do street wars in London, a lot of times the kills that happen in the game happen because of people tricking each other-because of social engineering," he says. Londoners Google their targets and lure them out of their homes with fake business opportunities or job offers, he says, while New Yorkers rely more on brute force.

"People just literally hang out in someone's room for 18 hours or hang out in a garbage can or literally chase them through the streets," he says. "There's less James Bond trickery and more Jason Bourne action."

Either strategy is perfectly within the rules, which give wide latitude to players, he says.

That's something he's tried to do in his advertising work as well, he says, pointing to a Pepsi pilot program called "Bronx flavor," tested in that borough of New York.

"Part of that really was one of the billboards that we had made was on the street," he says. "It just read, 'Bronx flavor is,' and there was a blank space."

Pepsi and Aliquo's firm provided chalk and a list of suggestions but generally trusted residents to fill in the blank as they saw fit without a problem, he says.

Still, Aliquo acknowledges Street Wars has had to add policies preventing players from doing things like breaking into each other's homes.

"The thing that's changed [the game] is really seeing how people interact in the real world and having to constantly update rules in order to account for things that I've never thought of," he says.

But generally, participants play fair--since there are often no witnesses, players often have to come to a consensus about whether or not an assassination attempt was successful, for instance-and Aliquo, who takes inspiration from the Situationist movement of the '50s and '60s in tearing down walls between performer and audience, generally prefers to match wits with players rather than kick them out for finding loopholes in the rules.

"One time I got killed because the way we had players recording their kills wasn't 100 percent secure," he says, explaining a player was able to falsely record his own disqualification, making him eligible to join Aliquo's bodyguard squad in the final round.

"He worked with us for two-and-a-half days working his ass off to protect my life, and then decided to shoot me in the back of the head while I was in a car," he says. "That's kind of the fun of this."

And when players test the security of the servers used to assign targets and record kills, Aliquo hardens his firewalls but doesn't kick offenders out of the game.

"It would be very easy to be like, if you hack the website, you're gonna get kicked out of the game, but I find these experiences are most powerful and most effective when they really mimic the real world as much as possible," he says.

Of course, Aliquo's side projects have also helped him learn to grab the attention of the media. News coverage of his food truck's $666 burger helped bring customers for its infinitely more popular $6.66 burger, served without gold leaf.

"More than anything, the $666 burger was an advertising-marketing thing for the truck itself," he says. "The cost of it is completely arbitrary, so it's super easy to make the world's most expensive burger-you just make a burger, and say it's the most expensive burger."

Only a few of the expensive burgers sold, all to wealthy diners who were in on the joke, he says. Although a few media outlets reported a first sale to a wealthy buffoon named Lance Brody, who was pictured enthusiastically biting down on the sandwich, Brody was actually a costumed Aliquo, he says.

"It's very easy to get press coverage, is what I learned," he says.

The real challenge for many companies, though, is learning to trust fans to take some control of advertising campaigns--something many brand managers still struggle with, especially when a Twitter or Instagram hashtag takes an unexpected turn.

"You have to be okay with people messing with your stuff a bit," says Aliquo. "It is difficult to get brands to assimilate that information, but here and there, they're getting a little bit smarter. They're realizing that the rules are very porous, and they have to play with them and not make them."

Lots of smart home products are Internet-powered replacements for appliances you already have in your home: lights and air conditioners you can control from your smartphone or cooking appliances that know when you want dinner.

But instead of making replacements for existing appliances, Notion is developing sensor pods that work alongside what you already have in your home, monitoring their orientation and acceleration, along with ambient light, sound, and moisture.

That lets them trigger a notification when a door or window opens, a room gets hot or cold, a propane tank gets low or a smoke detector sounds, without having to replace lock, thermostat, fuel, or alarm infrastructure. Or, says Notion, the sensor pods, each of which is equipped with the full set of sensing ability, can be applied in as many other ways as customers can think of.

The company's founders initially set out about two years ago to make a smart smoke detector, says CEO Brett Jurgens, after his cofounder Ryan Margoles came home from work to find his dog startled by a low-battery alarm.

"The battery was low, and there was that beep every 30 seconds," he says. "His dog was freaking out--destroyed some of the house."

Margoles, who has a background in engineering and is now Notion's CTO, lived in walking distance from his workplace and could have easily saved his furniture and his dog's peace of mind if the alarm could have texted or emailed him when its battery was running low.

"We actually set off close to two years ago to make the world's best smoke alarm," says Jurgens. But, though he acknowledges Nest later had success with its Protect alarms, they quickly came to think it would be hard to enter the smoke detector market at a higher price than homeowners are used to paying, especially since most people wouldn't even think to upgrade a working alarm.

"Making people replace their smoke alarm isn't something they're accustomed to doing," he says.

So, the two set out to make a more versatile piece of equipment. The current design, which has raised more than $100,000 in an ongoing Kickstarter campaign, consists of a power-adaptor-size hub and a set of sensors shaped roughly like hockey pucks.

The battery-powered sensors can be placed around a house or apartment to detect light, sound, water leaks, and other changes in the home, and the hub plugs in and communicates with Notion's cloud servers via Wi-Fi or cell signal.

Cell connectivity--which will allow the hubs to send brief updates via SMS--helps differentiate Notion's systems from other home sensor products and is especially valuable to backers who want to monitor for leaks and other problems in vacation homes that sit idle during the off season, since wired Internet connections are often disabled when the houses aren't occupied, he says.

Users would have to pay a monthly fee for the cell connection on a carrier to be determined, but Jurgens says the cost should be relatively low, since the devices will only need to send and receive text messages, not voice calls or cell data.

Notion plans to ship the first hubs and sensors to beta testers in April, then ship production models to backers in July.

"People are really understanding the value behind a really small sensor that you can place pretty much anywhere you can think of," says Jurgens, who previously worked in product development at UrgentRx, a startup making pocket-size packets of over-the-counter medication.

The sensors can send notifications to users through smartphone apps or trigger other actions through an open API. The company's been accepted into Apple's HomeKit smart home program, so for users who do have other smart appliances, the sensors should also be able to send them signals, Jurgens says.

For example, Jurgens says, some users have expressed interest in essentially using the sensors as second thermostats, placing them in rooms that get especially hot or cold.

And other potential customers have proposed uses the founders never would have thought of, he says.

"Somebody had horses, and they wanted to know if they could put sensors out in the barn to detect certain high-pitched noises to know that a horse is going into labor," he says. "That's not something I'd thought about before."

Customers use Rent the Runway to pick out designer dresses and have them delivered in time for a special event. Then they send the dresses back to be dry-cleaned and sent to the next customer in line. The company tells customers to think of its service as a best friend with a well-stocked closet.

Behind the scenes, custom software and precision logistics make matching customers with outfits and getting them delivered in time as much a science as an art, says Rent the Runway CTO Camille Fournier.

"We are very much a data-driven company," she says. "We measure everything here."

Building risk management and other software tools for Goldman Sachs helped prepare her for this role, which has included building inventory software to minimize the time expensive dresses spend sitting in its warehouses while leaving enough margins to make sure customers get the outfits they want, when they want them.

"Our goal is to create a brain inside of our warehouse that really understands our current inventory status [and] our future demand," she says.

Here are five ways Rent The Runways is using data to make business decisions.

1. Managing Inventory To Fit Customers Just Right

Custom shipping software decides when there's time to save money by having a customer send a dress back via ground delivery versus when it needs to travel by next-day air. "We want to be aggressive--we just don't want to be too aggressive with how we model our inventory," says Fournier. "We need to know lots of information about how many we have, how many reservations we have for when and we also want to maximize the return on investment we get from our inventory."

Customers in New York and Las Vegas can also visit physical showrooms to try on and pick up dresses, and Manhattanites can receive their dresses on their own schedules delivered by courier.

2. Planning For Demand

And as soon as a dress returns to the company's 40,000-square-foot warehouse--soon to be upgraded to 160,000 square feet--that virtual brain knows how quickly it needs to be inspected, cleaned, and sent back into the world. "The minute that your package is scanned into customer receiving, that station knows what's in the package and knows whether it's needed for shipping out today or tomorrow or if it's not that urgent," says Fournier.

3. Recommendations

Rent the Runway strives to show its website visitors the dresses they'll like as quickly as possible. "We want to be able to keep you from getting fatigue at seeing so many styles and so many different options," she says. "We believe that if you order it's because you found something that you love."

When customers visit Rent the Runway, the company's recommendation engine presents them with dresses selected based on their browsing and rental history, age bracket, and other factors.

Customers can get more hands-on advice from a Rent the Runway stylist at the company's brick-and-mortar locations or through email.

4. A Review System That Puts Selfies To Work

Customers are encouraged to submit reviews of the dresses they rent, complete with photos, which help improve recommendations and let others with similar measurements see how they might look.

"We have a process that does analysis on all of our reviews that have been submitted," she says. "Obviously you don't have to upload a photo, but we have tens of thousands of photos of people on our site."

All orders include two sizes of the desired dress, and if neither fits, that information's used to improve future recommendations, says Fournier.

"If you have the experience where you rent something and neither dress fits, you can return it and get a full credit on your order," she says.

5. Spotting Trends On The Runway And Online

The company's buyers use a mix of industry experience and expertise to spot fashion trends early on. They keep a close eye on trends at Fashion Week and "read Vogue all the time," says Fournier--but they're also looking at customer data to decide what new dresses to order.

"We just learn a lot based on general browsing patterns of our audience," she says. "We really have an advantage in our business in that we can see a lot of information."

Sports wearables already take the form of wristbands, leg bands, headbands, and shirts. Now the Finnish company Myontec is bringing performance measurement and injury prevention technology directly into your gym shorts.

The machine-washable shorts contain sensors to measure electrical activity in leg muscles and monitor athletes' heart rates, muscle load balance, and other critical factors. A phone-sized clip-on device logs sensor readings and sends them to a smartphone app via Bluetooth for real-time audio coaching during workouts.

The Mbody shorts are based on technology the company already offers to pro athletes and training centers, but the Mbody Coach app is a new product. Through a Kickstarter campaign launched this week, Myontec hopes to bring its smart shorts and an accompanying real-time audio coaching smartphone app to the running and cycling public.

"Muscle load readings and common bio signals are transmitted from the smart wear to your mobile device wirelessly and from your mobile device to your ears as a friendly, yet firm coach voice," according to Myontec's Kickstarter page. "With the Mbody voice feature you'll be able to train under professional-style coaching in real-time and in any training conditions."

The app will also provide visual alerts that athletes will be able to see at a glance during their workouts.

"If you keep the mobile application and the mobile phone in your bike, you can see in real time what is the ratio between your quads and hams," says Myontec sales and marketing lead Janne Pylväs. "You can see the balance between your left and right side with a very easy and friendly user interface."

Athletes who don't want to run or bike with their phones will be able to upload the data from their shorts after their workouts, seeing graphs of stats like heart rate and muscle load, as well as maps of the routes they traveled.

"You can record it without any mobile device, and then download and activate it afterwards," says Pylväs.

Myontec currently provides pro athletes with tailor-made clothing for other muscle groups, and hopes to expand its mass market offerings beyond shorts, assuming the Kickstarter campaign is successful.

"One of our stretch goals is, if we reach a certain level, we will provide a T-shirt monitoring heart rate," Pylväs says.

The company plans to deliver the first full version of the technology to backers by March 2015 for a $159 pre-order price. They hope to make the product available for retail sale soon after that for $499.

"It's [for] quite normal people, but of course they are quite active: the jogging life, three or four or five times per week," Pylväs says.

Plenty of companies use data to turn leads into sales, or turn one-time clients into repeat buyers through targeted marketing. But when some of those sales inevitably turn into past-due accounts, those same companies often drop the statistical analysis and move to a more primitive--and less effective--one-size-fits-all approach to bill collecting.

"I realized how lacking debt collection was in comparison to other parts of the business in terms of technology," says Ohad Samet, the cofounder and CEO of TrueAccord, a data-driven debt collection agency, who previously worked in risk management at an e-commerce company. "It should be a more pleasant experience that doesn't ruin the relationship between the company owed money and the person who owes money."

TrueAccord's machine learning platform, which launched September 16 with funding from Khosla Ventures and Max Levchin among others, lets the company crunch numbers on a scale not available to small businesses and freelancers with only a few late-paying clients each. And that is already leading to insights--for instance, it's found that debt collection emails sent on Thursdays and Fridays are the most effective.

TrueAccord shared these tips for businesses looking to optimize the effectiveness of their own billing.

Get Their Side Of The Story

Part of the inspiration for TrueAccord came when Samet accidentally forgot to pay a credit card bill on time. He didn't dispute the charges and was willing to pay, so he didn't appreciate being hounded by an aggressive, largely automated collection system.

"I didn't enjoy that," he says. "I started thinking about all these people who cannot pay and what they must be going through."

First off, says Samet, it's important to understand where a delinquent customer's coming from. Is the payment delayed because they're unsatisfied with the service they received, because they don't have the money, or simply because of an honest mistake?

"A large part is getting them to actually tell us what happened," he says. "Predominantly when someone doesn't pay, it's not that they want to hurt you, it's for other reasons."

Make It Easy For Customers To Respond

TrueAccord generally reaches out to customers via email and invites them to log in to see the outstanding bill in question, file a dispute, or set up a payment plan.

"The digital generation prefers email, text message, IM more than just making a phone call," Samet says, adding that about 30% of the service's web traffic comes from mobile devices. "If someone really wants to talk, they can call in, or they can ask to be called."

A blog post recounting his credit card experience mentions how bill collectors often robodial from unfamiliar numbers at inconvenient times, then play automated and generic messages asking customers to hold for an actual operator.

"Online communication responds to people," says Samet. "It works with people's preferences."

Some modes of communication, such as SMS, aren't ideal for initial communication, since it's hard to insert all the legally required information into a text, but they're still useful for following up, he says.

Tailor The Message

TrueAccord uses a variety of data points to target different styles of collection messages to different customers, says Nadav Samet, the company's cofounder and CTO (who is not related to Ohad Samet). For instance, the company's message to a young debtor might focus on the importance of proving responsibility, he says.

"Maybe that wouldn't be the same language you would use to speak to a 40-year-old mom," he says.

One example email targeted at a younger audience is written from the perspective of an unpaid bill. "I've been sitting here listening to breakup songs and eating ice cream because I feel like you've been avoiding me," reads the bill. "Maybe life just got busy and you meant to pay me but got distracted?"

TrueAccord tries to write the letter in a voice that customer can relate to, says Ohad. "A very young, fun person is not going to get a great response from an older professional."

Be Specific About What You Want

TrueAccord recommends companies be clear about what's owed, how the charges originated, and what the customer should do next, says Ohad.

"We strongly recommend that you have a reiteration of the breakdown of the charges and what caused the charges," he says.

It's also important to convey what the company calls a "sense of urgency" to motivate customers to act quickly.

"We recommend that you give an actual deadline with an explanation of what's going to happen after the deadline," says Ohad.

And, when possible, giving the customer a variety of payment options, from check to wire transfer to online form, makes it more likely that a bill will get paid.

Picture computer programmers, and you probably think of workers at individual workstations, each working on their own sections of code. Naturally, the truth is more complicated than that: Developers routinely test, patch, and review each other's code, and swap notes to make sure different sections of programs operate together.

And some programmers even take things a step further, working in pairs. They sit side-by-side at one monitor, or sharing a screen from across the Internet. Advocates of pair programming say that while the practice might seem to boost costs, with two programmers instead of one writing each line of code, the benefits to code accuracy and knowledge sharing far outweigh the price in labor.

"You might be doing it one way, and having somebody there to kind of question you, or sometimes you might be kind of stuck and they might give you some ideas," says Joanne Daudier, the cofounder of CoderMatch, one of several services that connect programmers interested in collaborating.

The critical trait for would-be pair programmers is patience, says Daudier, who says she learned a great deal as a novice programmer from pairing up with more experienced developers.

"I'm sure advanced coders would probably think the same way--if they have someone more advanced than them," she says.

That's also the idea behind Hackerbuddy, a service that connects coders with people who have different skills. David Peiris, its creator, says when he was building Recon.io, a site that tracks Twitter brand mentions, he was able to use Hackerbuddy to connect with a Rails optimization expert with questions about specific sections of code that were running slow.

He didn't pair-program the entire site, just the section requiring specialized knowledge he didn't have.

"So in short, I think pair programming works extremely well when you have people who specialize in one main thing (like performance-tuning), as it helps you learn creative and interesting techniques that you otherwise wouldn't pick up on your own," Peiris wrote in an email.

And while that kind of pairing might seem to help the programmer in Peiris's shoes more than his counterpart, Daudier says there's generally benefit on both sides.

"In general, if you're explaining something to someone, it helps you learn," she says.

And even more experienced coders can often learn something from their newly minted counterparts, says Joseph Moore, a developer and pair-programming advocate who blogs about the practice.

"There's certainly an aspect that anybody can learn from anybody," says Moore. Recent computer science graduates sometimes have experience with newer software or academic research that their more experienced counterparts lack, for example. "The more I know, the more I'm aware of the things I don't know, and the more value I get out of working with people of all experience levels."

Pair programming's grown in popularity since Moore entered the field in the 1990s, he says, partially due to improved remote collaboration tools like the screen-sharing utility Screenhero as well as pairing platforms and social media. There's even a Twitter hashtag for the practice, #PairWithMe.

Within a company, pair programming is often used to get new coders up to speed on a project, says Moore, though senior programmers should make sure they're prepared to learn from junior colleagues.

"It might be harder for them depending on the personality to switch back and forth between the teaching role and, say, the learning role," he says.

Would-be pair programmers should also be prepared to put their egos aside, he says, since each section of code is inherently the work of more developers, whether coders remain in permanent pairs or switch off from day-to-day and task-to-task.

"There's certainly an aspect of ownership that many people miss if they're doing only pair programming," he says. "You're always attributing all your work to a group of people."

On the other hand, the code is sure to be understood and approved by the entire group.

"When you combine with, say, having a group of four people who rotate pairs every day," he says, "then you're producing code that's not only stronger or more well understood by just two people, you're producing code that four people agree is really well produced."

Working together also has another advantage: keeping programmer minds from drifting during the workday, its advocates say.

"When you have somebody next to you it's really hard to slack off when they're just watching you," says Daudier. "It's also very draining because you're completely focused during that time, and it can be very intense."

Every year, more than 100,000 Mexican migrant workers are recruited to travel to the United States on temporary employment visas (and many more arrive unofficially). They find themselves with little ability to research whether promised wages and working conditions will actually be delivered. In some cases, fake job recruiters even collect application fees from prospective workers, only to disappear without a trace.

"These prospective migrant workers have a great necessity to get work in the U.S.," says Sarah Farr, a project coordinator with Centro de los Derechos del Migrante or CDM. "There's really no information available to them that allows them to verify if this is a real job offer or not."

To help level the playing field, CDM created Contratados, a platform launched last week to let migrant workers share Yelp-style ratings and reviews of their experiences with different recruiters and employers.

The idea evolved out of a Facebook page run by a fraudulent recruitment agency. The agency had been routed out, but scam victims reappropriated the comments section to share information about their experiences with other employers and recruiting agencies.

"This Facebook page had since been abandoned by whoever had been administrating it and had since been used as a community bulletin board where workers were sharing information," says Farr.

CDM, a non-profit advocacy group based in Mexico City, found that while prospective migrant workers often don't have computer-based Internet access at home, many do have at least rudimentary web connections through cellphones or at Internet cafes.

"What we found was that most people, especially the younger generation, had access to basic Internet via either a pretty basic feature phone--often times it wasn't a smartphone--or via Internet cafes," says Farr.

Along with adding reviews through the web, workers can share their experience by leaving a voice message, sending a text, or passing along a photo. To enable this, CDM used Vojo, a voice and SMS storytelling tool built by developers from MIT's Center for Civic Media.

"It allows you to submit stories via text messages, and you can tag them and geocode them," says Farr. "Also users can submit information, say [if they're facing] recruitment fraud, or want to take a picture of a recruitment agency and say something about what they know."

CDM hopes to add the ability to access reviews and ratings via voice or text, as well.

There are only a few submissions on the site right now, and the group is using more traditional methods of outreach to promote the service. They've been contacting lawyers who assist migrant workers in the U.S. and broadcasting on cross-border radio stations popular with the target audience, as well as producing comic books and other educational material to teach workers about their rights.

The U.S. Department of Labor has expressed interest in using the reviews to target inspections and enforcement efforts, Farr says, and CDM is hopeful that the reviews will also be useful in motivating employers using recruiters that charge workers exorbitant fees to put pressure on them to change, she says.

"You can't use that argument of, 'I didn't know,'" she says.

There are lots of home monitoring devices on the market with built-in cameras, motion sensors, smoke detectors, and microphones to pick up unusual sounds, along with Wi-Fi or cell connectivity to transmit video footage or alerts in real time.

To Kallidil Kalidasan, the CEO and cofounder of MindHelix, that set of features sounded awfully familiar.

"From an engineer's point of view, these devices are built from the same stuff smartphones are built from," he says. "That's when it struck me that you could actually repurpose used smartphones into home security devices."

MindHelix is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to fund its Rico line of home monitoring systems, which are designed to be connected to a used Apple or Android phone, which many people already have at home.

The smartphone provides audio and video capabilities, along with network connectivity, and the Rico units provide additional sensors for smoke, heat, humidity, and carbon monoxide. "Everything that's not there in the smartphone, we put into Rico," says Kalidasan.

In addition to monitoring for these dangers, the devices will provide live or cloud-recorded video streams and integrate with Rico-branded "smart sockets" that sit between ordinary outlets and appliances to add remote power control.

Because most of the functionality for the system is provided by the equipment customers already have sitting idle, Rico systems will sell for $99. That's $50 less than Dropcam or Simplicam, neither of which offer temperature, carbon monoxide, and smoke detection.

The company says the Rico units should be able to work even with cellphones that have broken screens, a problem faced by as much as a quarter of all iPhone owners according to one insurance company. And given Apple's annual release cycle, it's not uncommon for people to have an older model to sell or recycle--Horace Dediu analyzed the market in 2011 and estimated that half of people buying a new iPhone were also discarding an old one.

MindHelix will provide Android and iOS apps to integrate the phones with the Rico units, says Kalidasan, a serial entrepreneur who initially founded the company as part of the Startup Village incubator based in Kerala, India.

The company has since relocated to the Bay Area and participated in the Alchemist Accelerator program, which is backed by Cisco, Salesforce, and other companies focused on enterprise and Internet of Things startups.

MindHelix plans to begin shipping Rico units to backers in Fall 2015.

The screech of dialup modems. Brightly colored, blinking text scrolling across a flickering screen. Web rings and under-construction GIFs and tinny Pearl Jam MIDIs.

For years, the 1990s Web has mostly been a set of punchlines for those who were online early enough to remember it, the virtual equivalent of JNCO jeans, Pogs and the Macarena.

But lately, a growing number of developers have sought to bring back its early aesthetic and, more importantly, the spirit of innovation and community they say prevailed on the Internet of the day. And that movement has spread to include programmers and designers who are too young to remember the '90s but still admire the spirit of the early, less commercial web.

Earlier this month, author and developer Paul Ford launched the experimental and deliberately retro hosting provider Tilde.club on a whim, after having a few drinks and reminiscing about what he called"the early personal web."

According to Ford's widely circulated Medium post announcing the service, thousands of users applied for an account. And those users quickly logged in, swapping ASCII art images and building websites from hand-coded HTML, according to Ford's post.

"A lot of the pages were purposefully retro and '90s-looking; others were meditations on the meaning of tilde.club," he wrote in the post.

Tilde.club, which takes its name from the Unix tradition of preceding a user's home directory with a ~ mark, has received donations of money and technical help, according to Ford, and a screenshot he posted of an Amazon Web Services statement suggests the hosting expenses are relatively minimal as, he implies, are any expected financial returns.

"There is no hurry to join," Ford wrote. "There is no business model, no relevance for brands and nothing to optimize. The site does not compete with anything--for it is just a single computer like millions of others."

Though Ford playfully presents himself as a crusty old system administrator of the type mocked in old Dilbert cartoons--"Like any system administrator, I will be slow to respond, will get everything wrong, and will act imperiously while never acknowledging wrongdoing," he wrote in an email to new users--he promises a level of inclusiveness that's been far from universally present in the tech world, either now or in decades past.

"This thing is a de-facto whitey sausagefest so everyone be actively, aggressively cool and sweet and remember that the only binary that's real is the one that we use on our microchips," he continued in the email.

But it goes beyond Tilde.club. Designers and developers across all corners of the internet are embracing this aesthetic.

"Certainly there is a desire for those more earnest days of the Internet," says Ben Brown, cofounder and CEO of the software design and development house XOXCO. "Those days of the quiet, nerdy, artistic web are very appealing."

Brown's firm created Make Pixel Art, a deliberately lo-fi app with an interface reminiscent of early versions of Microsoft Paint. For Brown, the medium hearkens back to a time when those Internet communities felt like their own places, separate from the physical world. Back then digital media had a distinctive pixellated look simply because of the limitations of computers and displays.

"It was clearly an Internet thing or a computer thing, not some sort of hybrid media experience," Brown continues. "Everything is now so high-res and so glossy that the sort of raw digital natures of things are lost."

And quick glance of platforms like Tumblr reveal that pixel-heavy style still appeals to a wide swath of Internet users, including digital natives too young to remember the early days of CompuServe and AOL.

"There's a cross-generation community of pixel art," he says, from teens to nostalgic early adopters now in their forties and beyond. He believes the early sense of community has been somewhat lost as technology's improved and become more a part of everyday life.

"Being able to be online on a Unix box or on The Well or one of those early community tools really did give you a sense of being in a physical place with people," he says. "A lot of us got online in the early days to create a community of people that we couldn't create in our physical lives for whatever reason."

Kyle Drake, the creator of the web host Neocities, says he was motivated less by nostalgic for the look-and-feel of '90s free hosting provider GeoCities than by the desire to create a new platform with the same spirit of experimentation.

Filling out a Facebook profile or even populating a site on a blogging platform doesn't promote the same level of experimentation as crafting a personal page in old-school HTML, he says.

"I don't miss the tables; I don't miss the crappy layout; I don't miss the embedded MIDI files," says Drake. "I miss web surfing. I miss the creativity, the spontaneity and uniqueness."

Drake misses the old, weird Internet, where it was easier to surf from a pre-IMDb movie fan site to a crafter's page of photos to something even more esoteric.

"What I'm trying to do with Neocities is re-enable that creativity, and show people that it isn't just a nostalgia thing any more," he says, adding that the site now hosts about 26,000 sites and has proven financially self-sustaining. "This is something you can really do."

And while it's certainly possible to build unique and creative sites through services like Tumblr, there's something refreshing about working with raw HTML and not having to worry about the staying power of more elaborate platforms' databases and templating systems, he says.

Even developers who've since moved on from the pre-CSS Internet to building sophisticated, database-backed web apps say there's something pleasantly refreshing about coding sites simple enough to put together with a basic text editor.

"I thought it would be fun to just wing it, and start editing right there on the server," says Mike English, a system administrator and developer with an old-school homepage on Tilde.club, though he's since started storing past versions in Git.

English said his site isn't quite representative of any actual historical Internet era--friends have teased him about anachronisms in his HTML--but is largely modeled off of a type of academic and professional homepages he's always appreciated, which pay more attention to substance than beauty.

"I had always wanted to have a page like academic profile pages--these old pages where the style is just not there, but the content is great," he says. "I thought, okay, this is my chance, I can finally make one of those pages."

Many of the architects of the retro web lament a time when the medium wasn't as dominated by advertising and branding and commerce. Drake emphasizes that Neocities is purely community-supported and plans to revise the site's terms of service to guarantee he won't sell user data to advertisers, and Ford's Medium post reads like the opposite of a typical product launch.

Drake, too, says his site's hosting expenses are likely orders of magnitude less than hosting providers faced in its namesake's heyday.

The hardest resource to come by nowadays is often not computing power but manpower, says Michael Townsend, whose Doublespeak Games is known for its critically acclaimed "minimalist text adventure" game A Dark Room.

"You've got limited time, limited skill, limited money--it's much easier to go with the old-school aesthetic."

But old-school graphics don't mean old-school gameplay, he argues, recalling that 20 years ago, even being able to save progress in a console game was a relatively new concept.

"You approach the stuff that you loved from back then but through a lens that is shaped by all the experiences that have come between then and now," he says. "You can revisit those kinds of aesthetics with a lot more tools and a lot more ideas."

Townsend says the success of Minecraft among younger players shows simple graphics don't automatically repel users raised on high-definition video, which is good news for independent developers and studios who can't afford to build games with cinematic video.

Aided by the rise of smartphones and Internet distribution, game developers have also embraced a lo-fi, retro approach, allowing smaller, bootstrapped developers to focus more on imaginative storytelling and innovative game design.

Nostalgic players have recently helped bring about a sequel to the 1980s post-apocalyptic game Wasteland that competes on story, if not on graphics, with the Wasteland-inspired Fallout series and funded a new game in the Shadowrun role-playing universe, with similar mechanics and graphics to '90s Shadowrun games for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.

And other indie developers have created games that wouldn't seem out of place on game systems of years gone by, from Final Fantasy-style role-playing games to addictive puzzles.

"The retro aesthetic is really great," Townsend says. "Anything that lowers the barrier to entry and gets more people making things on the Internet is good in my books."