Smartphone users have gotten used to speaking to virtual assistants like Apple's Siri and Google Now, and a new set of startups are guessing users will be excited about talking with devices from thermostats to smartwatches.
"There is a very big fascination about man talking to machines," says Alex Lebrun, founder of Wit.ai, which provides speech recognition services for Internet of Things devices. "There is a kind of cultural fascination with that, starting with 2001: A Space Odyssey."
And even once the novelty wears off, makers of voice recognition tools are betting they'll be won over by the convenience of simply speaking to their appliances instead of hunting for remote controls or tablets and smartphones with control apps.
"Our long-term goal is to give users complete autonomy over their homes and smart products,"Insteon CEO Joe Dada said this summer in announcing the home automation company would be integrating Microsoft's virtual assistant Cortana into the Windows Phone app that controls its lights, thermostats, and other networked devices. "Adding a voice-driven, personal assistant into the mix is just another way that we can make people's lives easier."
And vendors say they're working to make sure 2001's vision of out of control computers doesn't turn out too prophetic, by integrating passwords and user voice recognition features to make sure users can control just who can order their appliances around.
"It's what we call speaker authentication, or speaker ID," says Lebrun. "This is exactly the kind of thing we'll add in the next months to the API."
The possibility of appliances responding to unauthorized commands was a joke on 30 Rock in 2011, with a voice-controlled TV reacting to on-screen dialogue, and, earlier this year, some Xbox owners claimed a Breaking Bad commercial showing characters playing a voice-controlled Xbox actually activated their video game systems.
Lebrun says Wit.ai, which translates spoken commands into structured data appliances can parse, will soon be able to give different level of access to homeowners and their guests, or parents and their children. The company's also adding emotion-detection capabilities, so a device can react differently to an angry or frustrated user versus a calm one, he says.
Even before many voice recognition platforms have such features, users can add some security by customizing the messages they use to control devices like garage doors, effectively integrating passwords so an outsider won't be able to unlock a home simply by guessing command phrases, says Leor Grebler, cofounder of Ubi, which makes a standalone home voice recognition system that can communicate with other devices and apps like IFTTT.
And, it turns out, users aren't just using new voice recognition systems to boss their appliances around, they're also using them to talk to each other. Grebler says that during Ubi's Kickstarter campaign, he was surprised to see users buying multiple devices to use as intercoms and started building in more human-to-human communication features.
"I can now actually have preconfigured triggered messages," he says of the devices, which are now on sale to the public for $299. "You can have Ubi be the bad guy in the family like 'Okay kids, brush your teeth.'"
And some users have Ubi announce when a family member arrives home or a pet with a proximity sensor on its collar makes an unexpected getaway.
"If the dog runs out, and the proximity tag changes to not in proximity, it'll announce, 'the dog just ran out the front door,'" says Grebler.
And Wit.ai's emotion detection will be useful in automatically adding emoticons to dictated texts and instant messages, a common use case, Lebrun says. Lebrun says he was surprised to find Wit.ai's systems being used for human-to-human communication, but it makes sense, since software can parse out elements of messages like meeting times and places and save users the trouble of dropping in calendar invites and map links, he says.
"You can use with it with voice, but it will also analyze what you say, and provide context," he says. "So if you say, let's meet this place at 6, it will show you a map and a calendar event."
If you want to improve productivity on any piece of frequently used software there's a simple solution: ditch the mouse and use keyboard shortcuts instead.
Plenty of you already know to hit control-c and control-v to copy and paste, or control-t to open a new browser tab. But a relatively small but dedicated group of people have embraced an alternate set of even more efficient keyboard shortcuts dating back to a decades-old, open source text editing program called Vim.
Vim's fans say its keyboard commands, which let you edit and scroll through documents while barely moving your hands from the keyboard's central home row, save time and help stave off carpal tunnel syndrome.
"Reaching for the mouse is slow and when done repetitively can lead to physical pain for a lot of people," developer Eric Van Dewoestine wrote in an email. "Although most programs have many key bindings that eliminate the need for the mouse, they rely heavily on meta keys (ctrl, alt, etc.) which requires a lot of awkward hand movements using your weakest fingers."
The Vim editor is especially popular among developers, and as such many people have built and released add-ons to let them control other software, from web browsers to programming tools. Van Dewoestine built one called Eclim that allows Vim to access features from iTunes and Twitter as well as the Eclipse development environment, all using Vim's arcane but beloved interface.
"Vim's editing commands are not easy to master," wrote Daniel Choi, creator of tools to control iTunes, Gmail, Twitter and other common programs from Vim, in an email. "You have [to] learn the command grammar and train your muscle memory over time. But by the same token, Vim raises manual text editing from a mundane chore into an art that rewards study and practice, like playing guitar, swimming, or jujitsu."
Vim got its start in 1988, when Dutch programmer Bram Moolenaar began work on a version of the popular Unix editor vi for the Amiga platform. Vi itself dates back to the 1970s, and Vim was initially billed as a "vi imitation." But after Moolenaar made some enhancements and ported the software back to Unix in the early 1990s, the name began to officially stand for "vi improved," according to his website.
Unlike most recent software, where keyboard commands are distinguished one by one from regular input by using keys like control, alternate, or command, Vim ships with several "modes." In Vim's insert mode, the keyboard works in a similar way to most software: hit a letter or number key, and that character is added to the current document. But toggle to command mode, usually by hitting the escape key, and the keys take on new meanings: h, j, k and l substitute for the arrow keys and navigate up and down; d cuts and deletes text; y "yanks," or copies, and p pastes.
Combinations of keys have meanings frequent users come to know as well as Windows users know control-alternate-delete or old school gamers know the Konami code: dd deletes a line of text, for instance, and dw deletes a word. Numbers generally repeat the following command a certain number of times, so 5dd cuts five lines, and 3p pastes three copies of whatever's in Vim's clipboard-style memory.
And that's just the beginning. There are Wikis, tutorials, and tip sheets to help beginners master all the possible commands, and power users say being able to switch modes and reuse the most easily reachable keys to enter commands saves an incredible amount of time and wrist strain. For them, using control-key-based shortcuts on other software is like trying to type an all-uppercase document on a computer with no caps lock key.
"Vim's editing mode feels so natural and elegant to me at this point that I feel like I've lost a limb when I'm using a non-Vim interface to write and edit text, like Apple's TextEdit or Gmail, or even just scan and navigate textual information, like iTunes," Choi wrote.
His software actually harnesses APIs in other programs and Vim's built-in scripting language to navigate Gmail mailboxes and iTunes playlists and send tweets directly from the editor.
Other developers have built tools to add Vim's interface to other pieces of software, as well. Developer Anton Khodakivskiy created the plugin VimFx to add Vim-style shortcuts to Mozilla Firefox. Hit "shift-alt-v" with VimFx installed, and the browser slides into command mode, where h, j, k, and l scroll, f follows a link, and o opens a new address.
"It's just real simple," he says. "It takes me a fraction of a section to follow a link using one of these plugins, versus just moving my hands and mouse."
And VimFx is just one of several alternatives for those looking to surf the web, Vim-style: it's based on a Chrome plugin called Vimium, Khodakivskiy says, and alternatives for Firefox, like the Pentadactyl project, offer different takes on the interface.
Another project, called Vimprobable, offers a complete browser designed to be controlled from the keyboard, with a Vim-style command mode for most interaction and an insert mode for inputting text. Based on the WebKit engine, it shares a common lineage with Chrome and Safari, though creator Hannes Schueller says it's designed to be lightweight, making it easy to disable features like JavaScript, browser plugins, and even automatic image loading with a few keystrokes.
"I see the main advantage in providing direct access to functions and features," Schueller wrote in an email. "If I want to switch proxies in Vimprobable, I can do so in a matter of seconds by simply triggering the appropriate command whereas most other browsers force me to move my hand to a mouse and then send me through five unintuitive sub-menus. Modal operation of Vim enables me to avoid using wrist-straining key combinations."
Developers acknowledge the learning curve can be steep for casual users. The creators of Vim interface tools acknowledge that their base is mostly programmers who are using the editors to write code. Even other developers don't always build programming tools with textual controls in mind.
"In the case of Eclipse, the major hurdle is that some features are closely tied to the graphical interface, wrote Van Dewoestine, the Eclim creator. "The [Java development toolkit] in eclipse did a great job of keeping the core functionality decoupled from the GUI, but other plugins for other languages have core features which rely on passing around GUI objects, or objects which have dependencies on parts of the GUI. To get around this I've had to create dummy mock objects to trick some of the code to think it is working in a graphical interface."
When GamerGate supporters on /v/, 4chan's video game forum, decided to sponsor The Fine Young Capitalists Game Jam, a crowd-funded project to develop video game ideas from women new to the industry, many saw the donations as a cynical attempt to rehabilitate GamerGate's image.
Even the initial 4chan posts conceiving the donation drive acknowledged the potential benefits of such a contest.
"Can you imagine? 4chan attacks the cancer and simultaneously sponsors the chemo AT THE SAME TIME," said one post archived in a history of the character. "We'd be PR-untouchable."
But those following the GamerGate saga have seemed surprised to learn that a crowdsourced mascot and logo created during the donation drive included a color scheme linked to a cartoon rape meme, which has only given critics more ammunition.
"The purple/green colors of #GamerGate and their mascot is a reference to a 4chan rape joke," media producer and critic Jonathan McIntosh wrote in a widely circulated tweet. "That's all you need to know about these creeps."
The GamerGate movement began with arguments video game critics and journalists covering the industry are corrupt and unethical, alleging that they accept what essentially amounts to bribes and favors from game developers in exchange for coverage. But the movement has since expanded to less well-defined claims about how women developers and perceived journalistic bias toward games about politically correct topics will transform the stereotypically male-dominated gamer culture.
Since its inception, when an ex-boyfriend of game developer Zoe Quinn claimed Quinn slept with a journalist covering her work to secure favorable coverage, GamerGate has been dogged by allegations it's little more than a misogynistic hate group. Self-proclaimed GamerGate affiliates have reportedly sent graphic threats of violence to Quinn and other women in the gaming world, driving some to cancel events, flee their homes, or seek police protection.
The GamerGate supporters raised enough money to create a mascot for their campaign, under the rules of the Fine Young Capitalists'Indiegogo campaign, collectively designing a female gamer character who came to be called Vivian James-a pun on "video games."
"Within like a day, there were at least a 150 different versions of her," says the Fine Young Capitalists' Matthew Rappard. "It's not uncommon for advertisers to slightly change an image multiple times, but this one is really on a community level, and it's really that they were excited about being given the opportunity and then they kind of all did it."
As forum members suggested aspects of Vivian James's appearance and personality and posted draft sketches, she took on aspects of a typical /v/ member and became a kind of mascot for the every-gamer.
"She has long auburn or red hair, green eyes, and freckles, with her eyes often depicted as having bags underneath them due to her inconsistent sleep schedule,"according to the quasi-official GamerGate Wiki. "Her skin is a pale white due to the large amount of time she spends indoors, and she is typically depicted as being slightly overweight due to a poor diet and lack of exercise."
She also has a headband adorned with a four-leaf clover, 4chan's logo, and a hoodie in purple and green stripes. The purple and green alludes to an animated GIF called "Piccolo Dick" which shows the Dragon Ball anime character Piccolo sodomizing Vegeta, another character from the series.
The image first appeared on 4chan in the 2000s and was frequently reposted by forum trolls, who spoke of giving a "daily dose" of the graphic to forum members, who'd then reply with the catchphrase "Thanks, doc,"according to the meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme. Soon, the image was banned, and users began to post other purple-and-green images understood to be a reference to the forbidden GIF.
The colors purple and green, taken together, came to be associated with the image on 4chan and other forums and used to troll users similarly to the once-popular links to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video or to more disturbing shock sites.
Driving home the subconscious nature of the meme, another forum post included "seeing green and purple together produces uncontrollable laughter" on a list of "ways 4chan has ruined your life."
But GamerGate supporters have denied any connection between Vivian James's image and the Piccolo meme. The Fine Young Capitalists, in particular, mocked the suggestion in a blog post, highlighting other unrelated images with similar colors.
"It doesn't seem like a popular enough meme that 4chan actually knew it," says Rappard, who acknowledges that some anonymous posts on the forum did contain deliberately obscene versions of the character but says the final consensus image was designed to be inoffensive.
Yet, in the initial forum discussion that led to the Vivian James design, a draft of the Vivian character with her distinctive color palette got plenty of "thanks, doc"replies, as did an anonymous illustrator who a few days later posted a first draft of the now standard GamerGate logo, showing a stylized video game controller with purple and green G's.
"Yes the colors are based off of Vivian," according to that post. One user replied with a censored clip of the Piccolo image.
Others have also argued that green and purple are simply colors associated with 4chan and the /v/ forum, not allusions to the meme.
"Why would you use a rape joke that's more than 6 years old?" the creator of dontjudgemeimscared.tumblr.com, who is a GamerGate supporter, asked in all caps. "Hell, it's been explicitly stated that Viv is just a normal girl, and intentionally so."
The anonymous creator of the dontjudgemeimscared Tumblr, when reached via Skype, insists that meme has been distanced from the rape scene once that GIF was banned by forum moderators.
"This cause people to edit it heavily and post it anyway," he says. "It's more about stubborn annoyance than actual sexual imagery, since there is a porn board on 4chan."
But if it's just stubborn annoyance, why associate it with-of all things-GamerGate? Regardless of the meme's evolution these visual branding elements are aimed "gamers," who clearly can identify the significance of the colors. If nothing else, it taps into gaming's male-dominated worldview, and certainly has not distanced GamerGate from the misogynist undertones associated with the movement. What may have been a trollish joke on GamerGate critics has only started to undermine the group's stated goal of creating a deliberately non-sexualized, gamer-girl-next-door mascot.
"Certainly if I were a designer and people were saying you should make it these colors, it certainly wouldn't occur to me that those colors were going to be shorthand for, basically, a rape joke," says David Futrelle, who writes frequently about online misogyny and has critiqued GamerGate and the Vivian James image on his blog. "Then again, that's something the designer should sort of investigate a little bit."
Keeping track of passwords is a challenge at every organization. But it's especially challenging in schools, where teachers can find themselves spending valuable computer lab time helping young students reset their passwords for various learning apps.
Clever, a startup focusing on account management for students and teachers, says market research has shown teachers spending up to a quarter of their computer lab time just getting logged in.
"The problem is exacerbated when you're working with a really young student population," says Clever CEO Tyler Bosmeny. "You have third-graders who are just learning to type who are being expected to remember 10 different usernames and passwords."
Clever's system lets them remember just one set of credentials which automatically logs them into a wide range of compatible educational apps. If schools already have students logging into a system like Microsoft's Active Directory or Google Apps for Education, Clever's APIs can translate those existing logins to accounts on other apps, he says.
And Clever can integrate with a number of popular student information management systems to keep track of things like when students move from one school or class to another and need accounts on new apps, he says. Those kinds of changes may seem rare, but they're common enough in large school districts to present administrative challenges, he says.
Similar technologies do exist in the enterprise space, but Clever addresses challenges that are particular to the K-12 world. As difficult as remembering passwords can be for office workers and online shoppers, it's even worse for kindergartners who are still learning their letters and numbers.
"The reason I see this [growing] faster in education than anywhere else is just because the need is so much higher," says Bosmeny. "The problem is exacerbated when you're working with a really young student population."
And as school administrators and parents have become more conscious of the need for student privacy, school systems are anxious to move away from ad hoc solutions that involve writing down passwords or passing around spreadsheets of login information.
Since Clever's focused purely on account management, and not part of a larger company selling other educational software, it is quickly expanding its network of supported software. Earlier this week, GlassLab announced that Clever's instant login would become available for its SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge game this year.
"There's an incredible network effect when more and more developers support the common way of doing things.," says Bosmeny, who credits much of the company's growth to the work its coders have done facilitating integration with schools and software vendors.
"You've got to make it easy," he says he'd advise other entrepreneurs building identity systems for other markets.
Indie games are often noted for their simplistic graphics, but Plotkin's game goes one step further: It has no graphical interface at all. Players explore a crashed starship, solve puzzles, and guide their characters through complex magical rituals using an interface based solely around the written word.
Hadean Lands is one of the latest examples of a nearly 40-year-old style of video game known as "interactive fiction," where players read novel-like descriptions of in-game action and either type their characters' actions or choose them from a written menu.
Until recently, interactive fiction seemed as though it had peaked in the 1980s, with new titles mostly made and played by a small but loyal group of fans. But in the last few years, new distribution channels and incredibly user-friendly development tools have not only revived the medium but brought in new players and developers who've pushed the genre far beyond its swords-and-sorcery roots.
"There's a greater variety of not just types of game content, although there's that too, but there's a greater diversity in terms of creators," says Jason McIntosh, a longtime player and creator of interactive fiction and the 2014 organizer of the annual Interactive Fiction Competition, now in its 20th year.
"When we're talking about IF, we're talking about games that are built entirely from text," says McIntosh, using a common acronym for interactive fiction. "Text—more so than making 3-D models and figuring out pathfinding and collision detection and particle effects and such—text itself is the one of the most accessible ways that anybody can create."
Fans trace the history of interactive fiction back to Colossal Cave Adventure, a game created in the 1970s by programmer, spelunker, and divorced dad William Crowther, partly as a way to bond with his young daughters. Crowther shared the game with friends and colleagues, and various clones and derivatives soon spread across the fledgling computer networks of the time.
Some of the MIT-based creators of Zork, one of the more polished games inspired by Crowther's classic adventure, went on in the late '70s to found a software company called Infocom, making interactive fiction games for early home computers.
By its mid-'80s heyday, Infocom's titles ranged from an adaptation of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, co-created by the book's author Douglas Adams, to The Witness, a 1930s Los Angeles noir-inspired detective game, to A Mind Forever Voyaging, a dystopian time-travel adventure.
"For the first time, you're more than a passive reader," said marketing materials for A Mind Forever Voyaging. "You can talk to the story, typing in full English sentences. And the story talks right back, communicating entirely in vividly descriptive prose."
Selling cross-platform games in the era before Microsoft cornered the market on consumer operating systems, Infocom built its games to run on a virtual machine whose code could be interpreted on a variety of computers, just as Java would later enable programmers to write applications that ran on Windows, Mac, and Unix systems.
But by the end of the '80s, Infocom and other interactive fiction publishers struggled to compete with increasingly sophisticated graphical video games. Adventure games featuring puzzles and exploration stayed popular—players snapped up installments from Sierra On-Line's King's Quest franchise, LucasArts' madcap adventures like Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, and CD-ROM-powered, graphically rich offerings like Myst, the best-selling PC game of the 1990s—but those games largely replaced text with animation, and typing full English sentences with pointing and clicking the mouse.
Still, fans remained committed to text adventures, and in 1993, developer Graham Nelson released Inform, an open source programming language designed for crafting interactive fiction and, crucially, capable of generating code that could run on Infocom's virtual machine.
"Infocom game story files are as near to a universal format as we have for interactive fiction games, but until now it has been very difficult to construct them, and I am not aware that anyone has previously created them outside of Infocom itself," he wrote in a post to Usenet, the premier pre-web network of Internet forums, announcing Inform.
And in 1995, members of the Usenet interactive fiction community launched what would become the annual Interactive Fiction Competition. They wanted both new games to play and a way for hobbyist developers to swap examples of quality code in Inform and a similar-purpose language called TADS.
"I LOVE IF and am glad there are people just like me!" said one post in response to the contest proposal. "Thank you, everyone, for keeping an underappreciated hobby alive!"
Plotkin, who'd launch Hadean Lands nearly 20 years later, won his division, and he, Nelson, and other developers continued work on better tools to power more sophisticated interactive fiction.
"Basically, the current movement has its roots in the mid-'90s with both the [competition] and Graham Nelson," says McIntosh.
The genre continued to draw in players and creators who grew up playing Infocom's games in the '80s, then younger audiences who grew up on LucasArts graphical adventures and open source interactive fiction, he says. But game authoring systems still required authors know some programming, and the games' commands parsers, usually expecting directives in a distinctively terse dialect of English, could be a barrier for new players.
"The reason the parser works the way it does is it came out of 1970s computer culture where, how did you interact with a computer? You typed things into the command line," he says. "Unless you're like a system administrator [nowadays], you're not used to typing in commands on a command line."
But in 2009, developer Chris Klimas released a tool called Twine, which made it possible for non-programmers to create interactive fiction by drawing flowcharts showing game scenes and the player choices that propel the game in different possible directions.
"It only started blowing up just in the last two years," says McIntosh. "Twine is definitely the [area] where there is the most community attention, and there is the most innovation happening right now."
Twine compiles its flowcharts to HTML, with transitions represented as ordinary web links, meaning IF newbies no longer had to worry about downloading virtual machines and compilers. Twine games are simply web pages, able to be uploaded to any old hosting site, or Twine-specific repositories, and played in an ordinary browser.
More sophisticated Twine games can be made with custom HTML and JavaScript, but it's certainly not necessary, and the tool attracted new creators and players often interested in shorter, more personal games of just a few scenes, often capturing creators' thoughts and emotions.
"This isn't just about about different game *interfaces*," Plotkin said in an email. "These are different communities, different audiences, different artistic conventions."
One game listed on the Twine site, called You Are Invited, sympathetically portrays a character's struggles with anxiety. Another, called Violet, drew critical acclaim for its story of a 30-year-old graduate student struggling to finish his dissertation. The story's narrated in the second person by the student's exasperated girlfriend, determined to leave him if he can't get his act together.
"[Twine] games tend to be intensely personal and direct," wrote Plotkin. "Not *all* of them — but the 'archetypical' Twine game is short, expressive, meant to convey one experience directly from the author to the player."
The tool has let people who would have never previously thought to make video games, or even to search for video games with characters they can relate to, enter the field and express themselves, says game developer and writer Anna Anthropy.
"I've played hundreds of Twine games by people who never made games before, maybe didn't play games before," says Anthropy. Her book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, discusses how Twine and other new authoring tools let would-be game creators without programming training or a traditional game-developer background create games, just as zine culture created an outlet for lo-fi, homemade print publications.
"There are a lot of people who I would like to see making games, like a lot of marginalized people who I think would use the form and are using the form in amazing ways," says Anthropy. "I think that games, or interactive work in general, lends really well to telling stories that are about systems or struggling with or engaging with those systems."
Anthropy's own games range from Star Court, a piece of Choose Your Own Adventure-type interactive fiction with a style of humor reminiscent of Douglas Adams, to Dys4ia, based on Anthropy's own experiences as a trans woman, to Encyclopedia Fuckme and the Case of the Missing Entree.
In the latter game, the player guides a female character, loosely inspired by Donald Sobol's classic boy detective Encyclopedia Brown, as she tries to escape from her lover, who she discovers is a cannibalistic serial killer. Using text lets Anthropy explore the character's complex and changing blend of attraction and fear as she uses a mixture of seduction, deception, and brute force to make her escape.
Another of Anthropy's interactive fiction games, Queers in Love at the End of the World, portrays a character with just 10 seconds to say goodbye to a beloved partner. It deliberately bombards players with an overwhelming array of choices, thoughts, and sensations as a timer ticks away Earth's last seconds—a sensation she says it would be hard to express through another medium.
"You have exactly 10 seconds and an enormous swath of different options—of all branching, different options, that are completely unnavigable in 10 seconds," she says. "I don't know how, that sense of urgency, how I would be able to create that in a more static form."
Some of Anthropy's games are available online for free, which is something she says is made economically viable by her supporters on the crowdfunding site Patreon.
"Patreon has been a big help to me," she says of the site, which emphasizes letting backers make steady contributions to artists regularly producing work they enjoy. "At this point, Patreon basically pays my rent."
Others are sold through indie game markets like Itch.io, where she says some fans are willing to pay more than the base price to support game makers they like.
Online markets, from indie sites to the big mobile app stores, are a boon to independent developers, as are more flexible crowdfunding models like Patreon's, says Plotkin.
"In 2010, Apple's App Store was an incredible deal — a way for a solo developer to offer a game worldwide, no contract negotiation, all payments and distribution taken care of," he wrote in an email. "Today I can do the same on desktop OSes using the Humble and Itch.IO platforms."
Plotkin's built open source tools to turn traditional virtual-machine IF games into iOS apps, and, he says, the mobile versions of Hadean Lands include features like a tappable directory of frequently used commands, to minimize typing, and a built-in virtual scratch pad.
And just as tools evolve to take advantage of new technologies, games will continue to evolve as long as their creators continue to be willing to experiment, says game developer Mark Musante.
"There's still plenty of things to try, even though we've been at this for around 40 years," he wrote in an email. "Compared to, say, writing books, this style of storytelling is still in its infancy."
If you've ever had to merge two Excel spreadsheets then you know how challenging it can be to work with data from multiple sources. At LinkedIn, where tables with hundreds of millions of records are far from unheard of, simply merging those giant datasets for routine queries began to take up massive amounts of time and resources.
"It slowed down the queries and even made them infeasible to execute in our Hadoop environment," says LinkedIn engineer Srinivas Vemuri, who worked on the number-crunching pipeline for XLNT, LinkedIn's A/B testing platform. "The size of the intermediate output of the join was explosive."
That led engineers working on XLNT to carefully craft a suite of Java code that pulls necessary data in from across the company, according to a blog post by engineers Vemuri and fellow engineer Maneesh Varshney.
"Written completely in Java and built using several novel primitives, the new system proved effective in handling joins and aggregations on hefty datasets which allowed us to successfully launch [the framework called] XLNT," the engineers wrote earlier this month.
The code divides data into manageably sized blocks of rows from the different tables, where rows from different tables referring to the same user are guaranteed to be found in corresponding blocks. That let a lot of interesting statistics, like tallies and averages, be computed block-by-block, without ever having to store the whole merged dataset in memory and made it possible to generate A/B test results in a reasonable amount of time.
"However, we soon became victims of our own success," wrote the engineers. "We were faced with extended requirements as well as new use cases from other domains of data analytics. Adding to the challenge was maintaining the Java code and in some cases, rewriting large portions to accommodate various applications."
The company decided to build a general-purpose tool built on that block-by-block principle, creating an open-source framework they called Cubert. Varshney, Vemuri, and some of their colleagues described the principles in detail in a conference paper published in September by Varshney, Vemuri, and other LinkedIn staff.
"We started off with the A/B testing analytics problem, and we went ambitious and decided to generalize these primitives," says Vemuri. "We were very surprised by the diverse nature of the use cases."
With the data broken into the right blocks, Cubert—which takes its name partially as a tribute to the classic block-sliding Rubik's Cube puzzle—makes it efficient to compute statistics broken down by a variety of variables, such as tracking user clicks by factors like day of week, time of day, or demographic factors, the engineers say.
Those kinds of statistical breakdowns are traditionally represented by an OLAP cube—a multidimensional plot where each dimension represents one of the factors in the breakdown. Different points within the cube correspond to the different possible sets of values those variables could take on.
Cubert's programmable through a custom scripting language not too dissimilar from SQL, so analytics experts don't have to write their own custom Java code to take advantage of its speed. A "blockgen" statement, for instance, breaks data down into blocks based on specified factors; a "cube" statement constructs an OLAP cube along specified dimensions.
"It should have the flexibility and the control to go and describe exactly how my algorithm should be run, and it should be simple enough as a scripting language to be written quickly and easy to discuss with somebody," says Varshney.
They also discovered the framework is surprisingly well suited to many network graph problems common at LinkedIn, like finding possible connections between friends of friends.
"Graph processing is technically a very interesting subject area for us," says Vemuri. "What we found is these same sort of primitives, with some twists and some extensions, can perform graph processing very efficiently."
The engineers say they hope making Cubert open source will enable engineers from different companies to work together on solving the kinds of problems it's suited to, rather than continuing to develop their own one-off solutions.
The app HotelTonight is built around last-minute hotel booking. Users depend on the app to quickly deliver room rates and vacancies, especially when they have a spotty cell connection and it's a busy holiday weekend.
"We can have customers that are standing outside a hotel and booking a room and walking in and expecting to be able to check in," says HotelTonight cofounder and chief architect Chris Bailey.
The app's backend needs to be able to quickly sync reservations and vacancy information with a range of hotel reservation systems and users' phones and tablets, so it doesn't fail to display a convenient deal or, worse, book someone a room that's already taken, says Bailey. The app's Black Friday traffic peaked at eight times normal load levels, with a $7 room special selling out in under seven minutes.
"Historically in the industry, people aren't booking so much last minute, but that's really shifted," he says, thanks to mobile devices. "They can be in the back of a cab; they can be at a bar; maybe they're at a party and decide, 'Hey, I don't want to drive home tonight.'"
To keep data updated in real time even under heavy load, the company uses the speedy Redis, an open source data structure server that is currently sponsored by Pivotal. Bailey says it also helps engineers quickly add and tweak new features and record new stats without painstakingly building traditional database tables.
"We didn't initially start with Redis, but we pretty quickly figured out a need for it there," he says, explaining the company still uses MySQL for some of its infrastructure. "All these things that you thought well, shoot, I don't really want to write that to MySQL—it just seems like a lot of overhead, I have to create a table and manage a schema and there's a lot of overhead—now I just write it to Redis."
The database system also helps with a common issue for HotelTonight: handling network timeouts and other errors in communicating with customers' devices and third-party services like booking APIs, says Bailey.
Redis includes atomic counters—that is, variables that can be incremented in a single operation so they report and store consistent values even when accessed by multiple processes—which help keep track of how often an API call or other operation has failed.
Partially to avoid focusing too much on the uptime and scaling of Redis and other core services itself, HotelTonight relies on cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and hosting from Redis Labs, he says.
"It allows us to not have to have as much expertise in house and rely on true experts in those technologies for things like Redis or some of the other services that we use," he says.
That, and the flexibility of the kind of data that can be stored in Redis, make it easy build custom logic to track and handle failures of different types of operations, from rapidly scheduling retries to failing over to alternative providers, says Bailey.
"What's really nice about that is from the customer perspective we avoid giving them an error message," he says. "There's no error for the customer; they get what they're after."
Using Redis also makes database changes more painless, as engineers can effectively tweak what's stored in the database without rebuilding formally specified SQL tables, which used to require downtime, he says.
"Don't get me wrong—you will have a schema, so to speak, at some point," he says. "It's more about how officially defined is it."
Even in the age of blockbuster digital hits like World of Warcraft and Civilization: Beyond Earth, there are still plenty of gamers who like playing role-playing and strategy games the old-fashioned way: gathered around the table with friends, food, and drink.
Still, friends move away, and gamers can find themselves living far from anyone who shares their hobby for Dungeons & Dragons or Settlers of Catan, says Nolan T. Jones, one of the creators of Roll20, an app that lets gamers play their favorite tabletop games remotely by video chatting, moving game tokens, and rolling virtual dice through their web browsers. Since it launched in 2012, it's signed up more than 700,000 players.
"I think a large part of our success was this was a program made for necessity—it wasn't a business," Jones says.
Jones and his two cofounders started building the in-browser app in 2012 to play with each other and with friends who were living in different cities, then decided to raise funds on Kickstarter and develop it into a commercial product. Visitors can play dozens of different games, with various editions of Dungeons and Dragons and the related game Pathfinder among the most popular. Most play for free, it relies on donations and some paid subscriptions, allow users extra features and additional storage space. There's a bustling community forum and even scripting functions, which, coupled with an API, allows players to track games and program their next moves.
Next, the Kansas-based company plans to reemphasize the analog gaming experience, with a tablet app for iOS and Android that will bring some of the advantages of its online platform back to gamers who are playing in person. The app, expected in early 2015, will help players by handling the mechanics of tracking character stats and running numbers while they enjoy the social experience of sitting around a table with friends face-to-face.
Some players are already loading the web-based app on tablets to do just that, Jones says.
"Currently it's the web application being used on the tablet," he says. "It works, and I've definitely used it myself in that way, but why not make it better with as many people as are starting to use us in this way?"
The existing app initially focused just on replacing the table in a traditional gaming session, letting game masters design tiled maps for their friends to explore and providing video and chat interfaces to replace yelling across the room or whispering in an allied player's ear. When it launched, the site was a clean, streamlined, accessible update on the virtual tabletop software that a number of websites have offered over the years, some of which started in the early days of the web.
Roll20's creators planned to keep things simple, leaving most of the game mechanics to traditional pen-and-paper calculations. They wanted to create an easy, simple way to play tabletop games remotely, not a video game engine, says Jones.
"Character sheets were actually something for a long time that we said we weren't going to do," Jones says, referring to the sometimes pages-long tables of statistics that define role-playing characters' strengths, weaknesses, and magical abilities. "A character sheet isn't part of the actual table experience."
But as the program evolved, its creators realized it would be useful to offload some of that complex accounting to the computer. In role-playing games where figuring out the results of combat or other activities often comes down to keeping track of scores or a long series of dice rolls, automating those tasks can improve the gameplay experience.
"It runs a little smoother when you have the speedy tabulation of a computer behind it," Jones says.
Some common visual effects can work better with a computer's help, too, they've found: With traditional tabletop gaming, players walking their characters through a dimly lit dungeon might hear the game master announce what fearsome thing they stumble upon in the dark. With Roll20, game masters can effectively preprogram those kinds of lighting effects, having tokens for monsters automatically pop up on the shared map as players draw near.
"It's a really simple interface to do that sort of shadows or lighting," Jones says. "With all the things that we lose from not having the tactile in-person experience, here's something we can gain."
And, he says, players gaming online don't have to worry about swapping out paper maps, keeping spoilers hidden as players navigate from area to area, or storing maps and tokens between gaming sessions.
"If I'm playing a game at a table, I've got to pick up the table and walk away, or throw a tablecloth over it so nobody wrecks where we were," Jones says.
"We have 85 different creators that are providing elements for sale that we're distributing," he says.
Players can choose from a number of paid subscription plans that unlock access to additional features, or stick with free ad-supported access to the app. Jones says the company aims to keep the free plans powerful enough to be useful and make sure that paid subscribers and free users can participate in the same games, similar to how tabletop role-playing groups historically would have only needed to buy one copy of a rule book or set of miniatures.
And for those not sure they want to hand over their dice, Roll20 offers a compromise: Its uses a server-side quantum mechanical random number generator, and players can track a bar graph of dice rolls that it's generated over time to verify that the system is fair. Or, if they prefer, they can close the stats page and watch a set of virtual dice roll to a stop onscreen.
"Of course, you can also roll your own physical dice in person," according to the Roll20 blog. "It's whatever works best for your group."
Sharing economy services have made headlines by seamlessly connecting buyers and sellers of services from transportation and lodging to dogwalking and housecleaning. The peer-to-peer rental market alone was estimated last year to be worth upwards of $26 billion.
But, security experts say, the new breed of online services have also made it easier than ever for scammers armed with stolen credit card numbers to extract funds from those accounts.
Credit card fraudsters have long used e-commerce sites to spend other people's money, says John Canfield, the vice president of risk at WePay, a payment processing platform in the vein of PayPal and Stripe. At least since the early 2000s, credit card thieves have used stolen cards, or account info they've acquired after one security breach or another, to buy resellable items on e-commerce sites like Amazon, eBay, and their smaller competitors, he says.
Those scam artists then had to deal with the logistics of receiving the ill-gotten goods and re-listing them on another website or otherwise converting them into cash, says Canfield, who spent nearly a decade on eBay's Trust & Safety team.
But sharing economy apps, and other online services like crowdfunding sites are changing the equation. In peer-to-peer markets, designed to allow users to both make and receive payments easily, fraudsters can take both sides of a transaction, effectively buying from themselves with someone else's credit card and, if they're lucky, disappear with the money before anyone's the wiser.
"With these platforms, there's opportunity, because they make it easy for people to get started—yes, I'm going to be a doggie babysitter, or yes i'm going to do this crowdfunding," Canfield says. "There is an opportunity for the fraudster to act like the recipient of credit card payments."
To commit fraud in the sharing economy, thieves may hijack valid accounts and associated credit card information—digital security firm ThreatMetrix estimates about 1 in 20 login attempts are fraud attempts on e-commerce sites it works with—or set up new accounts with the credit card numbers that circulate on shady corners of the web after payment system security breaches.
Criminals then pay a seller account also under their control for services that never take place—walking nonexistent dogs, backing fictitious crowdfunded projects, or whatever the victim site allows—and extract the funds to a prepaid debit card or even an online bank account created with more stolen credentials, says Canfield.
"They will work to create a false identity that will get by whatever screening that platform has—obviously the less screening they have the better," he says. "What we found is that most fraudsters are able to come in with perfect identity information—social security information, birth dates, mailing address for the identity they're trying to be."
Ultimately, the marketplace site can be left holding the bag, hit with credit card chargeback fees when account holders or banks detect the fraudulent transactions, unless site operators manage to block them before they happen. Canfield says it's difficult to estimate the exact amount of fraud that already passes through such sites, but he suspects the problem will grow as new sharing and marketplace sites come online.
"The interesting thing with these platforms, the marketplaces, the business tools is, are they in a position to protect themselves?" Canfield asks.
The trick, says Canfield, is recognizing unusual transactions as they happen.
An article by Andreas Baumhof, the CTO of ThreatMetrix, cites suspicious signs like one device registering a series of accounts, or new accounts being created by a known-compromised device or a proxy.
"It would be unusual if I'm signing up to be a seller on your marketplace, but I'm doing so hidden behind a proxy," says Alisdair Faulkner, ThreatMetrix's chief products officer. "There are straightforward things that businesses can do to automate this type of detection."
Use of international cards or orders with international shipping addresses
Many smaller transactions made with similar or the same card numbers, especially over a short duration
Use of obviously or likely-fake information in the transaction (such as fake phone numbers or gibberish email addresses like asdkf12495@freemailexample.com)
Big sharing economy platforms like Airbnb or Uber, or clients of payment providers like WePay, have the advantage of big data, Canfield notes, giving them more examples of normal and shady, anomalous behavior.
In general, there are steps any site can take to reduce fraud, ideally without making it too much harder for typical users to sign up. One option is analyzing social media profiles of new users: Anyone can set up a Facebook account, but it's hard to fake years of activity.
And to reduce account hijacking, sites can boost the use of multifactor authentication, and techniques like throttling users who are clearly trying multiple usernames or passwords.
"One of the things that we do that's very, very effective is we can see, is the device used by the seller the same that's used by a buyer?" says Faulkner. "That's clearly a dead giveaway."
Criminals can take more complicated steps to hide their tracks, like using multiple computers in multiple locations, or logging in through proxy servers, but with enough data, those tricks will still either stand out from ordinary transactions or require so much time and resources that fraudsters will get discouraged, he says.
"It does become expensive to continually change your devices, change your connections—and if you do a good enough job on a marketplace, fraud goes elsewhere," Faulkner says.
But fraud prevention is often a cat-and-mouse game, as criminals adjust their habits to evade detection or see how much they can get away with.
"It's like a scientist—they're doing experiments all the time: trying this, trying that, trying this, trying that," Canfield says. When companies do detect fraud, it's critical to act quickly. "You really have to drop everything and get your engineering department to quickly make adjustments yourself and as quickly as possible find a fraud vendor or a partner who can help protect you," he says.
Startups may tend to focus more on building their products and services than preventing fraud, Canfield says. But thieves are always on the lookout for new targets, he says, along with new platforms where they can ply their trade.
"There are these groups and individuals just searching, searching, searching for any place that has vulnerabilities," he says.
Facebook engineers say the auto-enhance feature newly added to the service's iOS app wouldn't have been possible even a few years ago, when phones just didn't have the necessary processing power like they do today.
But the actual goal of the tool—cleaning up images so they look more like what the photographer sees and wants to capture and share—is the same challenge that last century's masters of film photography would have faced in the darkroom, says Facebook Engineering director Brian Cabral.
"Certainly we were inspired by the masters of imaging," he says. "They confronted sort of the same problems every photographer did—they're trying to artistically express emotions or memories, whether it's in a grand way like Ansel Adams did at Yosemite, or in a more personal way with your friends and family."
Ultimately, the challenge is that cameras just don't see the way people do. Our visual systems automatically adjust for different levels of brightness and shadow, along with relative colors, across a real-life, three-dimensional scene. If you're looking at a group of people standing in the light in front of a darker background in real life, for instance, you'll be able to see and remember the whole scene.
"Your eye paints a picture," says Cabral. "Your eye actually adapts to the relative brightness and compensates for it."
But a piece of film or a digital sensor doesn't have that level of smarts by itself.
"Digital sensors, in particular, are very linear: A certain amount of photos come in, and they fire off a certain number of electrons," says Cabral. "You have a nice linear range, but that's not how you remember it; that's not how the brain accumulated that image."
Cabral and his colleagues want Facebook users to be able to share images that look more like their memories, and the techniques the app uses—leveling out highlights and shadows and selectively smoothing out noise while sharpening edges—are comparable to what Adams and other giants of film did manually by controlling exposure in the developing process, he says.
"When you look at the physical process you say, 'Oh, they're doing something really different,' but the techniques are really analogous," Cabral says.
For instance, while film photographers used physical filters to vary the light exposure, and thus the level of light or darkness, of different sections of a print, a digital tool like Facebook's app can create the same effect mathematically.
In the past hundred years or so, there have been formal scientific studies of human vision and color perception, but artists have developed and shared their intuitive understandings for hundreds of years, going back at least as far as Leonardo da Vinci, Cabral says. And, he says, members of the Facebook team working on the photo app have read both scientific papers and artists' writings.
"We've all read The Camera and The Negative," he says, referring to two Ansel Adams books considered classics of the field.
But translating even well-understood analog techniques to digital photography is by no means trivial, since the possibilities depend on the particulars of the hardware available, including camera sensors, processors, and screens or printers, and how they're being used, says Cabral.
"We're not only overcoming the input device—we're overcoming the output device too, because the output device has limited dynamic range," he says.
And they're relying on chips powerful enough to scan through images not just pixel-by-pixel but regionally and globally, putting together areas of the picture to make sure adjustments and noise corrections really make sense in context. Facebook's also reacting to increased demand, as phone photography has gone from a novelty to a part of everyday life, with users snapping and sharing more photos every day.
"Five years ago I think it would have been hard to do this—not because we learned that much more about the masters in the last five years, it's just that you have to have the right computers," he says. "You have to have the right confluence of technology and need."
Parse.ly doesn't sound like a typical name for a defense contractor.
But the New York-based web analytics startup has been awarded more than $1 million through a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program called Memex, focused on developing the next generation of web search.
"It's trying to explore all of the myriad use cases that search and webcrawling can do for you that aren't just commercial web search," says Parse.ly cofounder and CTO Andrew Montalenti.
One early anticipated application, for instance: tracking and shutting down online transactions related to human trafficking and modern-day slavery.
Eliminating human trafficking is a "key [Defense Department] mission,"according to DARPA, and the new search tools can help detect human trafficking activity online, identifying groups engaged in trafficking and discovering ties to other nefarious activities, according to a White House report that cites the Memex project .
"The use of forums, chats, advertisements, job postings, hidden services, etc., continues to enable a growing industry of modern slavery," DARPA said in a statement announcing the program earlier this year. "An index curated for the counter-trafficking domain, along with configurable interfaces for search and analysis, would enable new opportunities to uncover and defeat trafficking enterprises."
IST Research, a lead contractor on the project that's also worked on efforts to use SMS to gather and disseminate information in low-connectivity areas, also pointed to potential applications to epidemiology and tracking the sale of counterfeit goods.
In its ordinary business, Parse.ly provides media companies with tools to analyze who's visiting websites, how long they're spending on different pages, what they're sharing on social media and so forth. And to answer some of those questions, the company has developed tools to crawl customer websites, finding new content and automatically extracting author, section, tag and other information.
That work, some of which Parse.ly has made open source, drew DARPA's attention last year, says Montalenti. Parse.ly probably won't be working on specific applications, like anti-trafficking, but will be continuing to develop general-purpose tools for crawling sites and analyzing content in real time.
When DARPA approved funding for Parse.ly, says Montalenti, the agency offered a suggestion: "The way you use the research dollars is you basically work on research projects with your team and basically work on open source projects like you're already doing." DARPA, which famously funded the 1970s-era Internet predecessor known as ARPANET, increasingly backs projects designed to produce peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific results or publicly available open source code, according to Montalenti.
And since Parse.ly's technically a subcontractor on the project, most of the bureaucratic overhead of government contracting—which Montalenti freely admits is outside Parse.ly's expertise—is handled by the lead contractor on the project, leaving Parse.ly free to focus on the science and engineering.
"They basically said to us, [an option] for you is you can team up with a more established government contractor," Montalenti says. "They can take care of all the red tape for you; you can focus on the more fundamental research."
One goal is to essentially build a open source, distributed webcrawling API, which would make it possible for anyone to launch high-performance crawlers using technologies such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, similar to proprietary tools which search engines like Google and Bing have in-house.
"We're coming up with a way to scale out nodes to crawl a specific part of the web and do whatever you want with the results," says Montalenti. "You could take a list of news domains that you want to monitor, and you could spin up a bunch of Amazon EC2 instances and have web crawlers running there that are crawling that specific area of the web on a more frequent basis, and give you real-time results when new stuff shows up in that area of the web."
The company already works with a number of open source projects to build its crawlers, including the Python scraping framework Scrapy, the distributed real-time processing engine called Apache Storm, and the distributed message-passing and logging framework known as Apache Kafka.
Kafka manages streams of data like URLs, page content, and metadata for scraping and analysis projects, and Storm makes it possible to run analyses of massive sets of documents—"a great technology to use if you need to do large-scale document processing," says Montalenti.
Since Parse.ly normally works in the Python programming language, some of its open source contributions have involved building interfaces from that language—with its powerful natural language processing and scientific computing libraries—to Storm and Kafka, which are more typically used with Java and other languages that run on the same virtual machine platform.
In addition to funding work that Parse.ly can use in its usual line of business, the Memex program has also connected the company's developers with others working in similar areas, including in the academic world.
That's helped the company stay on the cutting edge of crawling and data-crunching technology, Montalenti says.
At DARPA, "they have full-team meetings and get-togethers where all the researchers from different organizations get together and present what they've been doing," he says. "It's really awesome and humbling."
On December 16, Facebook announced the release of open-source code the company says significantly sped up its internal artificial intelligence and machine learning projects.
Its release is part of an open-source push that's seen Facebook share hundreds of projects on code repository GitHub, from database software like the Presto big data SQL system to programming language tools such as HHVM, for speedily running PHP code, to web front-end tools like the React JavaScript library.
"The reasons are numerous—some of them are sort of ideological—we obviously built Facebook from the start on other people's open-source software," says James Pearce, the company's open-source lead. "So on some level we have an obligation to share back."
But sharing software isn't just an altruistic move, he readily acknowledges.
Publishing useful and impressive code helps boost the company's reputation in the developer community, making it easier to recruit and retain talented engineers—something that's no doubt critical in Facebook's ongoing battle with rivals like Google, Apple, and Microsoft to build the platforms that will engage web and mobile users for a generation.
"It turns out that large percentages of our engineers will have known about our open-source projects before they will have joined and they will say that it contributed positively to their decision to join the company," Pearce says. "It's a great window, I think, into the world of the sorts of problems that we solve, and of course we're hoping there are world-class engineers around the world who would relish those kinds of opportunities and when they see the problems we're solving will feel the urge to take a look."
While there's no one standard way to measure the magnitude of a company's open-source contributions, Adobe VP and industry commentator Matt Asay has argued in a series of articles that Facebook has outstripped other open-source-friendly Internet giants like Google, Twitter, and Netflix and even software distributors like Red Hat to become the biggest industry contributor to open source.
In 2014 alone, Facebook launched 107 open-source projects, Pearce wrote in a year-end blog post.
The December 16 code release provides efficiency boosts and other enhancements for several features of Torch, a number-crunching and machine-learning library commonly used in industry and academic research for tasks like training computers to classify images and analyze written and spoken language. A blog post by Facebook researcher and engineer Soumith Chintala announcing the release went into far more technical detail than any press release, quickly delving into areas of mathematics that even many developers wouldn't have worked with outside of an upper-level college class.
"The sequence of operations involves taking an FFT of the input and kernel, multiplying them point-wise, and then taking an inverse Fourier transform," reads one section of Chintala's post.
Yet despite, or perhaps because of, all its technical detail, the post quickly rose to the top of Hacker News, the Reddit-style industry forum hosted by the renowned startup incubator Y Combinator, where readers discussed everything from the code's features to the benefits of open source for hiring programmers.
"I see no issue with open-sourcing tools to recruit developers," wrote one commenter. "Honestly, that's one of the best methods I can think of."
That echoes a 2011 blog post by GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner, entitled "Open Source (Almost) Everything," which argued making software public helps attract talented programmers and keeps them satisfied as they build a public portfolio they can take pride in.
It also helps create better software, since developers take extra care in making their code well organized and reusable when they know it's going to be used outside their workplace, Preston-Werner wrote.
That's been the experience at Facebook too, where many projects are now designed from the start to be open source and promoted through blog posts, news releases, and the company's GitHub page, says Pearce.
"The projects that we open source, or the ones that we know we're going to open source in the future, we write better code," he says.
Late last year, Facebook announced the release of osquery, a cross-platform, open-source tool that presents operating system data as standardized SQL database tables.
"One of the things I wanted to solve was making it really easy for everyone to do these kind of operating systems analytics regardless of their technical know-how," says Facebook engineer Mike Arpaia. "It's supposed to feel as if you have a database on your system that has this wealth of information, and you're just gaining access to it like a normal database."
The company built the tool to be open source and easily extensible, letting users inside and outside Facebook easily add their own code to generate additional tables of system data. Since its release, Facebook engineers have been active on osquery's GitHub page, merging contributions from third-party programmers and soliciting comments on future additions to the tool.
"The public reception of osquery is better than I could have ever imagined," Arpaia says. "We've gotten a lot of amazing open-source contributions so far, and a lot of them are very complex."
Developers generally make better decisions simply knowing that others outside the company will be looking to understand—and judge—how their code is laid out line by line and section by section, Pearce says. Building projects like osquery or Presto with a public release in mind leads to more flexible, modular code, since programmers know outsiders will be looking to swap in plug-ins based on their own needs.
"If [Presto] had been developed as an internal project, it probably would have had all sorts of implicit dependencies on parts of our infrastructure," he says. "I think that's a canonical example almost, where doing it as an open-source project means it's a much, much better piece of software."
In the case of osquery, engineers working on the tool quickly saw the number of built-in data tables first double in a Facebook internal hackathon, then double again after the tool was publicly released, says Arpaia.
"We didn't want to create a divide between public developers and internal developers," he says. "We go through it with the exact same rigor and make sure that all code that gets into master is of a similar level of quality."
In general, more than 1,000 outside developers contributed code to Facebook's open-source projects in 2014, accounting for 17% of the source code commits to the various projects, according to Pearce's year-end blog post.
With HHVM, Facebook's open-source virtual machine for running PHP code, the company's made a point of pursuing compatibility with major PHP frameworks and codebases deployed outside the company, hoping to spur innovation in the PHP language community at large, says Pearce.
"We just wouldn't be able to do that if we had fragmented support for PHP in the first place," he says.
A Nov. 19 blog post by an engineer at Box said the cloud storage company began migrating to HHVM from the slower standard PHP interpreter after seeing Facebook's efforts at improving its compatibility with existing code, something that had previously been a deterrent to making the switch.
"But just under a year ago, the HHVM team's growing focus on parity with the standard PHP runtime caught our attention," wrote Joseph Marrama, the Box engineer. "We decided to seriously re-evaluate HHVM, and, after a couple months spent working through GitHub issues and runtime differences, often with Facebook's HHVM team directly, it was clear that we were on to something big."
Facebook's also a founding member of the Todo Group, an industry consortium formed in 2014 to help companies learning to share their code also share their methods for running open-source efforts.
"We felt we had to reinvent that wheel, and it turns out other companies had to reinvent that wheel, too," says Pearce. "We have a calendar laid out of the topics that we're going to be addressing and over the coming weeks we're going to be sharing our thoughts on each of those and engaging the community more actively."
But while YouTube and other websites make how-to videos for almost every conceivable task available on demand, the actual process of learning from those recordings hasn't changed much from when do-it-yourselfers fast-forwarded and rewound through VHS tapes of Julia Child and Bob Vila. Other than scrolling and clicking through, there's no good way to find a particular place in a video, making it hard to skip over the steps you know or reexamine the tricky parts of, say, a new dance step or dog trick. A team at MIT is working on using crowdsourced navigational information to build better interfaces for online how-to videos.
"Video interfaces like YouTube are not really not designed for learning," MIT PhD student Juho Kim says. "All of these common tasks while people try to learn seem to be not well supported by existing video interfaces, so that's sort of how the idea came up."
Kim and his colleagues built a how-to video player called ToolScape that highlights each step in an instructional video with short descriptions and before-and-after thumbnails. That makes it possible to quickly check whether a video teaches what you want to learn and to focus on the parts of the process that are new or challenging while skipping over the easy steps and tedious introductory remarks.
When they first tested the new system, they found ToolScape users studying a Photoshop tutorial had more confidence in their abilities and did better in an image manipulation task judged by outside experts than users studying the same tutorial through a traditional online video player, according to a research paper.
"I find that fascinating, because it's the same video content that you're interacting with," says Kim. "[It] results in better learning, even when you're using the same video content as the original material."
The MIT team isn't the first to look into building a better how-to interface, Kim says. There has been plenty of university research into building better instructional videos, especially as distance learning and online open courses have grown more popular, he says. At the same time, software companies have realized many of their customers learn to better use their products by studying online tutorials and have looked into ways of improving them, he says. "Companies like Adobe or Autodesk, companies that make complex software, really want people to learn better," says Kim, who previously interned at Adobe.
Researchers from Adobe and the University of California at Berkeley published a paper in 2012, showing a system for neatly integrating screen capture videos into step-by-step Photoshop tutorials, and Adobe has released a tutorial builder tool that lets users automatically record their actions in the program for other users to watch or even run themselves in their own copies of the program. Similar research by Autodesk focuses on letting users share and annotate step-by-step processes in the company's computer-aided design tools.
But those tools and others being researched require integration with specific software or heavy participation from the makers of the tutorial videos. That doesn't help viewers who want to master skills that don't involve software, and it doesn't help viewers of the innumerable instructional videos already online, Kim says.
"We can always ask authors to create these labels, but we have thousands, maybe millions, of those videos on the web, and we cannot possibly expect everyone to add those annotations when they create those videos," he says. "That's why we thought crowdsourcing would be a reliable approach."
Here's how Kim and his team built ToolScape, in four steps:
1. Experiment with Mechanical Turk.
Kim and his colleagues first experimented with using Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform to pay Internet viewers to pick out the discrete steps from existing how-to videos on subjects from cooking to makeup to Photoshop; they found the Mechanical Turk users performed comparably to experts in the various fields, he says. "That is great—these are untrained people, not necessarily experts in this domain, but they were still able to produce good enough labels," he says. But even at Mechanical Turk's low per-task rates, the cost of annotating those thousands, if not millions, of existing videos would still be quite hefty, he says.
2. Crowdsource.
Kim and colleagues decided to work on a tool called Crowdy that would let viewers annotate videos as they watch them by answering questions designed to generate and refine labels for individual steps.
3. Solicit feedback. "What we do is we occasionally pause the video and ask people to summarize the part that they just watched, and we combine notes from different people," he says. "We ask another set of people to verify what other people have done to describe that process."
4. Vet the results.
Kim and his colleagues found user-generated annotations were again comparable to those compiled by experts and observed users found their own learning experience improved from the note taking and editing process, they wrote in a paper scheduled for presentation at a March conference.
The team is continuing to add videos for crowdsourced annotation, and while Kim says he has no plans to turn the system into a commercial product, he intends to see it continue to grow as an academic project and as a service to the web community.
"We are trying to get more videos annotated that way, but I'm not particularly interested in starting a company with this," he says. "But, of course, having thousands of videos annotated this way would be really cool, and it would open up a lot of opportunity."
Ultimately, once the system is more complete and enough videos are properly annotated, Kim envisions users even being able to quickly jump from one video to another to see similar steps taught by different instructors. Someone confused about how to poach an egg as part of a larger recipe could easily skip around to egg-poaching steps in other cooking videos, then return and finish learning how to make the complete original dish, he says.
"What I'm trying to push forward is for people to be more actively engaged in the video and also contribute to the knowledge of the community," he says. "In the process of trying to learn better, what you generate can serve a bigger cause."
Makers of 3-D printers often promote the devices as ideal for rapid prototyping, saying they let users quickly and inexpensively turn sketches into physical models without complicated hardware and software.
But recently, creators of new 3-D pens have said for many applications they've gotten printers beat, using a similar technology to extrude plastic and let users actually draw three-dimensional models from the tabletop up.
"We say there's about a 20-minute learning curve, and after that 20 minutes, it's just a matter of practice," says Daniel Cowen, a cofounder of WobbleWorks, the Boston-area company behind the 3Doodler pen.
When WobbleWorks launched the initial version of its pen in 2013, after raising more than $2.3 million through a Kickstarter campaign, it was the only 3-D pen on the market. Since then, the company says it's sold more than 130,000 pens.
"We've just seen amazing growth," says Cowen. "What we struck on was this latent need to create things in 3-D, but there was no easy way to do it."
The company recently raised more than $1.5 million in a second Kickstarter campaign to fund the next version of the pen, and it's recently been joined by a number of rivals racing to create smaller, more efficient and easier-to-use 3-D pens.
"We're essentially trying to be the first cool ink [pen] and the safest 3-D pen to market," says Steve Cho, marketing manager of Future Make, which says its forthcoming Polyes pens will use photosensitive polymers that can be extruded using low-temperature blue LEDs instead of ultraviolet lamps, designed to make them safer for young users.
Cho says the company—which so far has raised more than $128,000 in an ongoing Kickstarter campaign of its own—plans to start manufacturing and shipping its first pens next month. The Polyes pens are designed to be precise enough for adult makers and safe, easy, and fun for kids, who'll be able to experiment with plastic "inks" that glow in the dark, inks that change colors at different temperatures, and even scented inks, says Cho.
"Kids are inherently creative," he says. "All the testing we did with kids. They were able to create all these really really intricate and creative structures that we wouldn't even think of."
Even for adults, Cho says 3-D pens make the prototyping process less intimidating, since it's possible to create a model simply by drawing, without having to master computer-aided design software.
"Anyone who wants to conceptualize something in their head—what they used to do is draw on paper, but now they can draw free-axis, free-X-Y-Z, free form in space," he says.
The Polyes pens likely won't be the only cool-ink pens on the market for long, Cho acknowledges—the Singapore-based company CreoPop raised more than $200,000 in an Indiegogo campaign last year and additional venture funding in early 2015, and has said its own cool-ink pens should ship in April.
The new 3Doodler pens are also scheduled to ship this spring and are planned to be a quarter of the size and half the weight of the original models. The new pens will also feature a new drive system that extrudes more smoothly and quietly than the existing model and uses 50% less power, says Cowen.
They'll also have a cruise-control style feature that lets them continually extrude without the user needing to hold down a button—an option Cowen says the company added after being surprised how long some users operate the pens in one drafting session.
"We have artists that are using it for five, six, seven hours straight," he says. "We never thought that people would use the pen for hours on end."
The company also plans to work with educators using the pens in the classroom, helping them share ideas and lesson plans with one another. Teachers are already using the 3Doodler to teach subjects including art, math, and science, with students modeling shapes, bridges, and even the chambers of the human heart, says Cowen.
That may lead to some competition with the kid-friendly Polyes, but Future Make's Cho says he believes there's plenty of room in the marketplace for multiple 3-D pens.
"It seems like there's enough pieces of pie for everyone," he says. "This is just a really dynamic and exciting space, and I just really want to see where it goes."
When OrderSnapp, a company that helps restaurants take orders online, works with its clients, it lets them choose how they want to be notified about incoming orders. Some prefer email, and some would rather get push notifications through their phones, says company president Ron Resnick. But a substantial number of OrderSnapp's clients—somewhere between 30 and 40 percent, Resnick estimates—prefer to have their customers' web and app orders delivered through a technology that has been rumored to be extinct: the fax machine.
"A lot of the smaller, family-owned or individually owned restaurants, there's a lot of them that still don't have Internet access," says Resnick. "They're not very Internet savvy, or they don't have an iPad or a mobile device in the store that they can receive the orders on."
Like many businesses in older industries, from law firms to medical labs, fax machines aren't seen as some '80s anachronism but as an efficient, reliable, and mostly secure way to communicate—the same way their own customers see their laptops and smartphones.
"Faxing has been there for so long, and they're so used to it," says Resnick. "It doesn't cost them anything extra. It's still a very good success rate with it, as far as them going through."
To bridge the gap between the two eras of messaging technology, OrderSnapp, based in Rochester, N.Y., uses a service called Phaxio. Calling itself "faxing for developers," it's one of several cloud-based faxing providers whose APIs make it possible to send and receive faxes without ever worrying about loading paper and toner into a traditional fax machine.
"It's something that we work very hard to keep almost [invisible] for our clients," says Phaxio cofounder Howard Avner. That is, Phaxio lets its customers build faxing into their apps and websites with the same kind of APIs they'd use to integrate 21st-century services like posting tweets or sending email confirmations, without needing to think about the phone lines and screeching modems that make it all happen.
Josh Nankin and Howard Avner, the founders of Phaxio
Some of Phaxio's customers are established companies looking to phase out their physical fax machines, and some are startups like OrderSnapp looking to work with clients in fax-dominated industries, says Avner. Either way, Phaxio's customers don't want to worry about the gory details of busy signals, line noise, and quirky old fax machines so they can focus on their core businesses. The company advertises simple pricing—7 cents per minute for faxing to and from the U.S. and Canada, 10 cents for other countries—and volume discounts for users with more than 50,000 faxes sent and received per day.
"We'll work with companies from Y Combinator—it's not a matter of crusty companies that are trying to use fax," Avner says, citing startups building apps for industries from health care to trucking. "We sit in the background and solve a really complicated problem for them."
Phaxio's one of several companies bridging the gap between the modern Internet and the legacy web of fax. Y Combinator-backed HelloFax is like the HelloSign virtual signature service it begat, but it also offers the ability to send and receive faxes through the web, via email or from cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive. Another service, Free Fax, lets users use a webform to upload and fax a limited number of documents per day, sent for free with a Free Fax cover sheet; customers can also pay to send more faxes and remove that Free Fax logo.
And EC Data Systems' service Faxage, which lets users send and receive faxes by email, through its website or using its API, says it processes more than 11 million minutes of fax transmissions every month. Faxage measures and bills usage in minutes to make price comparisons with traditional phone plans simpler, says EC Data Systems' president Christian Watts.
Relying on external services and software to abstract away the quirks of an underlying technology certainly isn't unique to fax: Developers routinely use libraries like jQuery to handle the details of browser intercompatibility or tools like PhoneGap to build cross-platform mobile applications. OrderSnapp uses Amazon Web Services to send mobile push notifications and uses the cloud-based voice service Twilio to place automated calls to verify orders, so it's natural the company would also work with a cloud-based fax provider as long as its customers keep wanting to receive faxes.
The sound of a fax, from "What Sound Looks Like," by Khara Cloutier, 2013.
Skeptics have argued for years that fax has already long overstayed its welcome—that its continued prevalence is just the result of typical enterprise conservatism and older generations' enthusiasm for the printed word and signatures inked on the proverbial dotted line.
But those in the digital fax industry point out that even businesses that have largely migrated records away from paper and aren't otherwise tech-averse still find value in fax. Companies don't just keep sending and receiving all those faxes out of pure inertia, says Faxage's Watts.
Faxage's clients include high-tech medical testing companies that need to send confidential results to doctors' offices, and law firms and other businesses that need a secure and legally vetted way to transmit documents to clients and colleagues. Besides medicine, mortgage banking, insurance agencies, and other highly regulated industries rely on faxes because faxed contracts are generally considered to be as legally binding as a signed-in-person version.
Physicians' internal records may have moved away from paper, but there's no online data transfer platform anywhere near as widely deployed as fax that offers the same privacy and reliability, Watts says. So companies looking to ditch their paper fax machines switch to cloud-based fax providers, where they can securely upload and download documents and know that the rest of the transmission goes through the medium they've trusted for decades.
"Medical is huge, and that's because email is not considered to be a secure medium, but fax is, in terms of sending people's medical information around. So that's a really really large growth area, especially with the push towards electronic medical records, and folks wanting to have it in that format," Watts says.
What the modern fax experience looks like on Phaxio.
To some, faxes might seem safer than digital communications. Phone lines are vulnerable to surveillance, but cyber-threats tend to draw more attention and thus seem more likely. After the hack at Sony, employees reportedly resorted to using phone calls and fax machines again in order to avoid hackers.
Companies know encrypted and verified email services and other secure document transfer systems exist, but they also know that many of the companies they do business with won't have the necessary software installed, says Watts.
A medical lab, for instance, can't insist doctors' offices install any particular data-transfer software, but it can reliably assume they have fax machines. Or a law firm needs a way to send someone a signed copy of a contract, and while it could potentially use some sort of digital signature, decades of legal precedent have made it clear that a faxed copy is every bit as good as a mailed document.
At restaurants that deliver to businesses—even restaurants that now use apps like Seamless—customers continue to fax in their orders. For restaurant employees used to snatching printouts from a fax machine, there's little desire to do away with a trusted technology in their kitchen workflow.
"It's the fact that the underlying business process, whatever it is, is fax-based," says Watts. "And in order for that underlying business practice to change, all the participants in that underlying process would have to agree that they want to change."
Faxes also remain an essential tool for requesting documents from many government agencies. MuckRock, a journalism startup that files and publishes FOIA requests, sends an average of about a dozen faxes a day using an email-to-fax service called Faxaway. (This works provided that government agencies have working fax machines.) "Within the last five years, the only way I've used a fax is through this email-to-fax application, which is the most poetic thing imaginable," MuckRock projects editor Shawn Musgrave told Motherboard. "It's bridging the generations of technology until the fax just finally goes away."
Fax is a little like Microsoft Office, Watts says, in that now that it's so universally deployed, it's hard for any competitor to steal too much market share without convincing an entire industry to shift gears.
"In some ways, it's a good thing, because promoting standards means people know what to expect," he says. "In a lot of areas, the trade-off of it not being quite as fast or quite as sexy is easily paid for by the fact that it's well understood and it's glitch free."
The concept of a cat cafe seems easy enough to explain: it's a place where people can have a snack or a cup of coffee while they play with cats.
And that's a pretty good definition—for a human.
But from a cat's point of view, a cat cafe is not only a place to eat and drink and play with people and cats, it's also a place to sleep and climb and hide and sit by yourself and look out the window.
As cat cafes are sprouting up across the U.S., their owners are working to make sure that the shops are designed to suit their feline residents—usually shelter cats who are eligible for adoption by cafe visitors—as much as they are their human customers. Cafe owners naturally want to see their cats happy, and they also want them in the right mood to make a good impression on customers looking to adopt a pet.
"The end goal is to help more cats find forever homes, and to get more people to fall in love with cats," says Christina Ha, of Manhattan's newly opened Meow Parlour. Here's how to design a great cat cafe.
Places To Hide "I learned quickly, the first couple of weeks, I need more hiding-hole places—places for the cats to go and chill," says Ericka Basile, the founder of Planet Tails in Naples, Fla., which opened in December. "I have to keep the quality of life good for them."
Basile previously worked as a pet product scout for ABC's Good Morning America and as a pet product buyer for Fab.com, so she says it was easy for her to know what products would help put her cats at ease.
She has installed plenty of spaces for shy cats to hide—even cat houses made from classic, see-through iMac cases. Floor-to-ceiling windows let the cats look out to the street or into the pet supply store Planet Tails, which operates in a separate room.
"They are coming from shelters—they're in a tiny little cage, and now they're in this room with a party happening," Basile says. "You don't want to party all the time. You want to go home."
At Meow Parlour, which opened in December on Manhattan's Lower East Side, an area in the back of the store offers cats a place to sleep and use the litter box in peace. "There's a tiny door just for the cats to walk in and out of," says coufounder Christina Ha. "There's a sign that says employees, cats and Taylor Swift only."
Places To Climb
Rhonda Lieberman, the creator of the Cats-in-Residence traveling art installation, gives her cat performers plenty of places to climb and explore, including sculptures, networks of boxes, pipes, and apparatuses inspired by modern art.
"They're entertaining when they climb, so that's kind of a performance aspect to it, too," says Lieberman. "You're wondering when they're gonna come out, or who's gonna climb the various climbing elements."
And cats at Planet Tails have climbing shelves with window views, though they often enjoy scaling the human furniture just as much, Basile says. "The cats like height, so they'll go up inevitably on the couches and on the cafe tables," she says.
The More Comfortable The Cats, The More Likely They'll Get Adopted
The comfortable environment lets some rescue cats thrive that don't do as well in tiny cages in noisy shelters, Ha says.
"There are a lot of cats who are wonderful cats, but they need to interact with people on their own terms in the beginning," Ha says. "We give a lot of control and power to the cats in that way—so they are meeting people, and people are seeing the best side of them." When cats are comfortable, cafe owners say the odds that they'll bond with people—and ultimately get adopted—increase.
Humans Need To Be Comfortable, Too
Making humans comfortable matters, too. The happier the visitors, the more likely they are to adopt a cat, or so the reasoning goes. But what constitutes a comfortable environment in one part of the world might feel downright awkward somewhere else.
Ha says her cofounder Emilie Legrand had visited cat cafes overseas, and found that in Japanese cat cafes, customers generally took off their shoes and sat on the ground level with the animals in accordance with Asian dining customs, while in a French cat cafe, they sat at traditional European-style tables.
"They were having a very difficult time enjoying their meal because they had to keep looking at the ground to see where the cats were," Ha says.
The founders sought a compromise, knowing American visitors to Meow Parlour wouldn't all want to sit on the floor.
"Some people prefer to actually sit at a table and eat, and we weren't going to force everyone to be like the Japanese and sit on the floor and eat," she says. "It was a very, very conscious decision to have really high seating and really low seating and to have neutral bench seating."
But ultimately, everything comes back to the cats, and what makes them happy. Those benches also double as storage—and have cat-sized holes to allow animals that need a break a place to go and hide.
The Hardest Part of Running a Well-Designed Cat Cafe? Saying Goodbye
The more cat-friendly the design, the happier the cats will be, and the happier they are, the more likely they are to find new, permanent homes. But for cafe staff, seeing the animals go is always going to be a bit bittersweet.
Still, Ha says, the ultimate goal is to see as many cats get adopted as can be—no matter how much she and the rest of her staff are going miss them.
"Our friendliest cat is named Liza," Ha says. "If we were going to stop people from adopting Liza because she's so friendly, she's never going to have a single person she falls in love with, she's never going to get to crawl in the bed with someone, no one's ever gonna wake up with Liza passed out on their face. And who's going to take care of Liza when she's old?""
While many still associate audio tours with bulky headsets rented from museum ticket counters, commercial startups, artists and storytellers are developing new smartphone-based urban audio walks they say can be as immersive as popular podcasts like Serial and This American Life.
Audio tours have the potential to change how tourists and locals alike experience cities, introducing listeners to landmarks and local stories they wouldn't otherwise stumble upon. But keeping listeners engaged as they stroll through busy city streets, smartphone in hand—and turning them into repeat customers, important since the startups make money on a pay-per-tour or subscription model—poses a significant design challenge: Producers must work to craft intriguing routes and make sure listeners don't have to rush or linger too long to stay in sync with the audio content.
Some of these walking tours rely on the smartphone simply as a portable audio player, guiding listeners on a fixed path through the sites and sounds of a particular neighborhood. Others, like those from Detour, an audio walk startup cofounded by former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason that had its public launch earlier this month, take advantage of more of the phone's capabilities, checking the phone's GPS coordinates to know when to play and pause, or using Bluetooth to let friends listen to the same tour at the same time. Another app, called yapQ, even integrates computer-spoken descriptions from untold numbers of geocoded Wikipedia pages so it can offer auto-generated audio tours around the world.
"We just bet our company on the TTS technology—it's called text-to-speech," says YapQ cofounder Yossi Neiman. "You can download a whole city like London with 50,000 [points of interest], and it just works."
YapQ's iPhone and Android apps offer downloadable tours of cities around the world for $1 each, with machine-curated content about each city's sights available in multiple languages. While the audio is still noticeably machine-read, Neiman says the company is betting that within a couple of years, technology will make that much less noticeable, giving the company the edge over other audio tour creators who can only write and record descriptions of so many places.
"The advantage is huge," he says. "The other companies that do audio can squeeze in 40, maybe 50, points of interest."
Detour, on the other hand, offers only a handful of what might be called artisanal audio tours, currently each available for $4.99 or as part of an all-you-can-listen subscription for $19.99 per year. Mason says he's had the idea for the company for the better part of a decade but smartphone geolocation capabilities have only recently gotten good enough to avoid annoying glitches. "When we try using Detour on phones that are pre-iPhone 4, the GPS is so unreliable that it just results in a very buggy experience," he says. "When you add on top of that things like iBeacon and the sensors built into the iPhone, it gives us the kind of raw material that we need in order to really precisely locate people and create the experience that it feels like there's someone there with you."
For high- and low-tech approaches alike, creators say the modern audio walk is a unique medium that combines the elements of radio storytelling with techniques more commonly used by people building websites and mobile apps. "It's not really just radio production that you need the skills to make a sound walk—it's really interactive design," says Shannon Carroll, project director for southside Stories, an audio tour of the historically Latino but rapidly changing Southside of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Audio walk creators have to think carefully about the paths they want their listeners to take and make sure stops at points of interest aren't so long that listeners get restless, Carroll says. They have to record and edit interviews with neighborhood residents or other experts to correspond to what listeners are seeing, and mix in ambient sounds in a way that keeps them engaged in the story, not distracted or unnerved by sounds like honking horns, she says. Here are the key ingredients for designing a great audio tour:
Southside Stories
Interview Subjects In Their Native Environment "When someone's interviewing someone about a story, I think doing it more in a This American Life style of interviewing is interesting—where you try to get the interviewee to show the story, not just tell it," she says. "Interview them on the street where the story is taking place, and have them point out and call out specific references."
Detour
Talk To The Locals
Getting knowledgeable locals to speak is important, especially when tours take listeners outside of traditional tourist areas, Mason says. His company has released a number of tours of San Francisco, including some that look at places and stories often not seen in tourist-frequented areas like Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf, and some going slightly more off the beaten path, like a tour of the Tenderloin narrated by Electronic Frontier Foundation founder and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. "When we can find someone who's part of the community, we find them telling stories is more compelling than a reporter," Mason says. "If we're going to Chinatown or we're going to do the Haight, or something like that, it feels like those places should be narrated by people who are parts of those communities."
Timing Is Everything
Snippets of audio have to be timed to routes to avoid silence as listeners move from one location to the next location. You also don't want them to have to stop and stand in one place for too long. "So [if] it takes three minutes to walk down this block, that means that this story that I want to tell can only be three minutes," says Pejk Malinovski, who created Passing Stranger: The East Village Poetry Walk, a downloadable tour narrated by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch.
With a GPS-based system like Detour, that gets a little easier, since the app can insert or remove extra content to match the listener's steps, or provide extra directional guidance.
"If they're moving too fast, we cut can intelligently cut the narrator short," Mason wrote on the company blog. "If they get off track, we can insert a navigation sentence in the middle of the story. We also play subtle navigation cues—like the sound of footsteps—to give the user confidence that they're doing the right thing."
Keep Features To A Minimum
Audio tours should be as seamless as possible. You want users listening to your tour, and learning about a city in new ways, not fumbling through endless phone menus. "We want to make our product similar to the experience you have with a real person," says YapQ's Neiman. "He doesn't give you something to read—he talks to you, and you listen."
YapQ includes text, along with photos to help listeners identify attractions, but the Israel-based company aims to keep the interface as simple and immersive as possible, Neiman says: "When you start creating and using different UIs and buttons to press, you just get challenged." Mason concurs. "We think with interacting with the phone as a garnish on the experience is something that can be really cool from time to time," he says. "But we think for the most part it's better when the phone is in your pocket, the technology melts away and it's just you in the world getting the lightly guided experience from the audio stream, and you're not thinking about your phone."
As Detour expands beyond its home base in San Francisco—Mason says tours in Austin, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago are likely to be seen soon—it also plans to release authoring tools letting users build and share their own tours. They could time audio segments to walking paths and trim audio by editing a linked written transcript in a tool the company has under development. "We're trying to reduce the learning curve and make it as simple as writing a blog post," he says. "I think the world's going to be a lot more interesting when it's not just us creating Detours but Detour as a platform for creativity."
Southside Stories
The exact business model is yet to be determined, including questions of quality control, but ultimately Mason hopes to build Detour into something like an iTunes for audio tours. "At the highest level, we want to make it possible for anyone to create and sell their own Detours, and get kind of a thriving ecosystem going," he says.
New gadgets are arriving that are designed to show you in real time just what you're breathing in, with Internet-enabled indoor and outdoor air-quality sensors.
But one of these devices' biggest challenges, their makers say, is keeping customers engaged by making sure they understand what the readings mean and how to act on them.
"What we think is really important with this kind of product and services, is that we really need to connect on the human level," says Ronald Ro, cofounder of Bitfinder.
Having participated in the most recent round of the Internet of Things-focused R/GA Accelerator, Ro's company plans to release its Awair indoor air-quality monitor this summer. The speaker-sized units will share the market with existing smart indoor-outdoor weather stations from French firm Netatmo, and ultimately with wearable environmental trackers from Vancouver-based TZOA, also slated for release later this year.
The Awair will monitor air temperature and humidity, along with levels of dust particles, carbon dioxide, and a class of chemicals called volatile organic compounds, which includes solvents like acetone and benzene and a range of various other substances of varying toxicity.
Bitfinder's Awair air-quality monitor
Ro says the device will help businesses know when to ventilate a conference room stuffed with carbon dioxide and hot air from a morning's worth of meetings, or make sure they're adequately dealing with chemicals released into the air from overnight renovations. For home users, it'll warn them if their bedrooms are getting uncomfortably dry overnight, or suggest they turn on their stovetop fans if their kitchens fill up with cooking exhaust.
Since most users won't have the same intuitive understanding of CO2 levels and dust particle concentrations that they do of degrees Fahrenheit, the sensors' accompanying smartphone app will offer five color-coded alert levels and text notifications emphasizing descriptions and suggestions, not numbers, Ro says.
"Our first notification will be something like, 'Hey, your environment is better suited for cactus than for humans,'" says Ro, coupled with recommendations for how to improve the situation. Users will be able to give feedback on whether the recommendations were actually practical so the app can improve its suggestions over time, he says.
For its part, Netatmo, which has sold smart weather stations tracking air pressure, humidity, temperature, and air quality since 2012, says its customers remain regularly engaged with the product. On average, users check the corresponding smartphone app about twice a day, the company says.
"Of course, we can't monitor if people act accordingly when they receive an alert (e.g., open the windows when the CO2 level is over 1000)," wrote Raphaëlle Raymond, Netatmo's vice president of marketing, in an email. "However, we have received a lot of testimonials from our customers who are happy to know when to open their windows and have a cleaner environment, especially for their kids."
Since the initial weather stations launched, Netatmo's added an optional rain gauge and recently announced plans for a wind-monitoring add-on. The weather stations also feed outdoor meteorological readings into a live weather map and, as of late last year, are shared with the Weather Channel-affiliated service Weather Underground.
TZOA's wearable environmental trackers
And when TZOA releases its lens-cap-shaped trackers later this year, the company plans to build a similar real-time map of outdoor air quality, letting cyclists and pedestrians clip the devices onto their clothes or bags to monitor what's in the air they're riding or strolling through. The company says its sensors will track temperature, humidity, ultraviolet light exposure, and levels of both larger particles, like dust and pollen, and smaller particles, like some found in car exhaust and smoke, that can cause longer-term health problems.
"That data gets pushed out to your smartphone [via Bluetooth], and you can see the number rising and falling, minute-by-minute in real time," says TZOA founder Kevin Hart.
Other users will be able to track those accumulated readings to plan their own trips and see how their neighborhoods stack up to others, Hart says. The app will offer color-coded warnings and tips and an air-quality index number, similar to metrics used by the EPA—the company's been speaking to researchers and regulators about using the data the devices will collect for scientific purposes, Hart says.
And for users who don't always want to wear the sensor, the TZOA devices will also be able to monitor indoor air quality, including when it's sitting at home, docked in its charging station.
"It's very flexible—I know with the Fitbit a lot of people are turned off by the fact that they always have to wear it, so it eventually sits in the drawer," says Hart. "In the future, we're looking at integrating with connected objects, so for example this might tell if the air quality's bad in your house and it needs to turn on an air-quality purifier."
With Internet connections orders of magnitude faster than are available in many larger American cities, Chattanooga's public fiber optic broadband network has been the subject of press coverage and an object of envy around the world.
But as the city's Electric Power Board, which operates the network, has sought to expand broadband coverage across its region of Tennessee, it's run into opposition from a surprising source: state lawmakers, who, under pressure from large private Internet providers, have barred local governments and public utilities from offering broadband outside the areas where they have traditionally sold electricity.
But on Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 along party lines to override the state law, in order to level the competitive playing field between the city's municipal network and those of incumbent providers like Comcast and Verizon. The decision could lead to similar challenges in the roughly 19 states that limit local governments looking to set up broadband networks.
"The bottom line of these matters is that some states have created thickets of red tape designed to limit competition," FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said, explaining his support for the ruling. "When local leaders have their hands tied by bureaucratic state red tape, local businesses and residents are the ones who suffer the consequences."
The FCC was ruling on petitions filed by officials in Chatanooga and Wilson, North Carolina, which operates a similar network. The commissioners voted on the ruling before a separate, landmark 3-2 vote, in which it ruled in favor of "net neutrality"— that Internet service providers would be treated as carriers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, which regulates services as public utilities. (Verizon responded to what it called "badly antiquated regulations" with a press release that appeared to be written on a typewriter.)
The move is expected to set a precedent that would give customers more choice in an industry that is often criticized for lack of choice and poor service. More than half of Americans have only a single choice of Internet provider at speeds of 25 megabits per second, the basic threshold for high-speed Internet under a new FCC-approved definition.
While there is no "silver bullet for net neutrality," April Glaser and Corinne McSherry of the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a recent essay, municipal broadband "can help promote competition by doing one essential thing: offering people real alternatives."
Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told Fast Company that the ruling over broadband could prove at least as important to promoting competition as the net neutrality decision.
"Preventing big Internet Service Providers from unfairly discriminating against content online is a victory, but allowing communities to be the owners and stewards of their own broadband networks is a watershed moment that will serve as a check against the worst abuses of the cable monopoly for decades to come," Mitchell wrote in an email.
Though the FCC said its decision is in line with a congressional mandate to "remove barriers to broadband investment and competition," the ruling could still face a challenge in federal court from state governments and telecom companies who've previously said such a ruling would exceed the commission's authority. States and telecom companies have promised to respond to the FCC's rulings today with litigation.
Municipal and local broadband networks around the U.S., where 19 states, including Tennessee and North Carolina, have limited local governments from establishing competitive internet service.Courtesy of Institute for Local Self Reliance
The ruling by the FCC's Democratic majority in favor of the power board and the city government of Wilson, N.C., which also says its plans to expand municipal broadband coverage have been curtailed by state law, comes after the White House formally came out against such laws last month, echoing widespread charges that the laws were passed largely at the behest of big cable and phone companies.
"Laws in 19 states—some specifically written by special interests trying to stifle new competitors—have held back broadband access and, with it, economic opportunity," says a January White House report that joined the cause to the Obama administration's push for net neutrality.
While Chattanooga's power board—along with the city government —argued Congress gave the FCC the authority to preempt the state law, telecommunications companies and state officials have said the states have the right to protect the broadband market from unfair competition by taxpayer-funded utilities and have ultimate authority, under the Constitution, to limit the powers of municipal governments.
"I want my state to compete in a 21st Century economy, and to do that, we need 21st Century infrastructure and technology—what we do not need is federal administrative intrusion into our state's business practices," wrote Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, which also places limits on public broadband networks, in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. "As a matter of policy, South Carolinians believe that the private sector can provide higher quality, more sustainable broadband services with lower risk to the taxpayer than local governments."
In Chattanooga, the city-owned utility initially planned its digital network as part its migration to "smart grid" technology, designed to let engineers track the status of the power network in real time. It ultimately used the same infrastructure to offer gigabit-per-second broadband to businesses and homes across the city, which it says helped the former industrial town perhaps still most closely associated with a 1940s Glenn Miller tune—"Chattanooga? As in, the Choo Choo?"asks a website touting the high-speed network—to attract new high-tech businesses and jobs.
But while Chattanooga and a few surrounding areas served by the city-owned utility have access to some of the fastest Internet speeds in the hemisphere, many surrounding communities are "in a digital desert" with little or no access to broadband service, according to a study cited by the Electric Power Board. The utility has said there's little it can do to help, as it was barred by state law from offering Internet access outside its electric coverage area.
Similarly, the Wilson, N.C., city government offers speedy fiber optic connections to residents of the onetime tobacco-trading hub but says a 2011 state law makes it effectively impossible for it to extend coverage to neighboring communities. Among other provisions, the law requires public broadband networks to prove that a high percentage of residents don't have access to other high-speed connections and charge no less than it would cost a private company to provide the service.
"Comments filed regarding Wilson's petition suggest that the law was largely sponsored and lobbied for by incumbent providers and competitors to Wilson," according to an FCC statement released after the commission voted to preempt the law.
Telecom companies have said such laws make it impossible for them to afford to offer broadband services, particularly in less lucrative markets: the Tennessee Telecommunications Association, a group of small telecom companies in the state, expressed its concern last year when legislators drafted proposals to ease the state's restrictions on municipal broadband expansion.
"These bills would allow municipalities to expand beyond their current footprint and offer broadband in our service areas," said Levoy Knowles, the group's executive director, in a statement. "If this were to happen, municipalities could cherry-pick our more populated areas, leaving the more remote, rural consumers to bear the high cost of delivering broadband to these less populated regions."
Mitchell, of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, says he expects to see a federal appeals court challenge to the ruling filed in the near future.
"It may be telecom companies, it may be the National Conference of State Legislators, or it could be a collection of state attorneys general," he says.
The ruling may also spur an effort in Congress to curtail the FCC's authority, with Republican U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, having previously pushed federal legislation to limit the commission's jurisdiction over state-regulated municipal broadband projects.
"We don't need unelected bureaucrats in Washington telling our states what they can and can't do with respect to protecting their limited taxpayer dollars and private enterprises," Blackburn said in a June statement.
Among the few telecom companies to back municipal networks in a letter to the FCC was Utah-based Internet service provider XMission.
"Allow municipalities to dictate their own data futures by allowing them to build open municipal data infrastructures," wrote Pete Ashdown, the company's president. "Open data infrastructures held by a government or regulated entity is the only way to ensure robust data competition without unfair competitive practices."
XMission provides service through a multi-city public fiber network called UTOPIA. Unlike in Chattanooga and other cities where a public utility operates the physical fiber lines and provides service, the multi-city agency provides the physical network and leases access to multiple ISPs, which Ashdown says ensures consumers see the benefit of competition.
"There are over a dozen other Internet service providers on that network that any of our customers could switch to tomorrow," he says.
How faster broadband tends to mean fewer competitors. Image via FCC
Municipal Internet proponents, including the Obama administration, say evidence shows increased competition in the broadband market often results in lower prices and faster downloads for Internet consumers.
"When Google announced that Google Fiber was coming to Kansas, speeds on existing networks surged 97 percent—the largest year-over-year jump in bandwidth observed in any state, ever," according to the White House report. "Likewise, when Google indicated that it would begin offering extremely fast connection speeds in Austin, TX, AT&T responded by announcing its own gigabit network."
Earlier this month, the president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the lobbyist for telecom companies, said it was "highly likely" that it would fight the FCC's rulings in court, alongside legislators in North Carolina and Tennessee.
While he was a university student in the Netherlands in 2009, Pieter Levels started an electronic music channel on YouTube that he says became popular enough to pay the bills even after he graduated. Still, something wasn't quite right.
"Most of my classmates became management consultants, investment bankers, and meanwhile, I had my music channel, and I really liked that," says Levels, who is now 28. "Life was really good, but it got a little boring, to be honest, because everybody was so busy working."
After a stop home briefly last year, Levels returned to Asia and launched a new project: A series of web services geared to helping "digital nomads" like him. Digital nomads are people who launch startups or do remote freelance work while seeing the world, in places like Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, or Latin America, where they can pay less to live better than they could at home. Many of these itinerant expats, says Levels, are writers, bloggers, and other workers in the digital economy—"mostly developers, designers—think front-end design, back-end development, software stuff."
Nomad List offers a real-time ranking of cities for remote workers.
Levels says the top tip he can offer aspiring nomads is simply not to be scared of trying the lifestyle.
"Most of the world is very safe and is waiting with open arms to make you feel at home," he wrote in an email. "And just get over it and do it. Waiting isn't going to make it easier."
Would-be itinerant workers should find a job that lets them work remotely—and Levels naturally runs a remote job-listing aggregator called Remote | OK, which mostly features tech jobs—and then plan a trip, he says.
Another startup aimed at movable workers, Teleport, offers a similar service to Nomad List, though it's currently focused on the Bay Area, where it helps new arrivals weigh the pros and cons of living in various neighborhoods in the city, from commute times to nightlife options to housing costs.
Teleport App.
The company plans to expand its services with an app to help explore the pros and cons of various startup-friendly environments around the world, says CEO Sten Tamkivi, who was previously an early employee and remote worker at Skype. Ultimately, he says, Teleport wants to offer other information services for digital nomads and frequent international business travelers.
"Living the sort of life that technology allows us to live is actually not as easy in the world that's set up today," says Tamkivi.
While it's easy for connected workers to work from anywhere with an Internet connection, and book international flights, accommodations, and taxis from their smartphones, it can be much harder for remote workers to know how to handle things like international visa and tax issues.
Many digital nomads working for companies back home simply travel on tourist visas, especially if they're not working for employees or clients in the countries they're visiting, and do "visa runs" to neighboring countries when their passport stamps are about to expire. But the legality of working in a foreign country without explicit authorization can be unclear.
In December, law enforcement officials in Chiang Mai, Thailand, reportedly raided a coworking space,though officers reportedly released them a few hours later after verifying their immigration papers. The raid appeared at odds with a statement in Chiang Mai City News made by immigration officials in August that said visitors running businesses "on the Internet" could do so on a tourist visa, though according to some reports, officials mistakenly believed the coworking space tenants were undocumented employees of the space's owners.
The formula Levels uses to rank cities for nomads.
Levels has said that he'd like to eventually see a simple tax regime for digital nomads. In the meantime, tax requirements vary depending on which countries travelers are visiting and where they have citizenship and legal residency.
Nomads from the U.S., in particular, are still required to file federal and sometimes even state tax returns, and to document assets held abroad above a certain threshold, though there are tax breaks for Americans with permanent homes abroad or who scarcely set foot on U.S. soil.
Some U.S. tax preparers specialize in helping digital nomads and other expatriates stay in compliance with IRS rules and avoid coming back to an unexpected tax bill. Tax-prep chain H&R Block offers remote tax prep for U.S. expats, as well as some offices in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
While it's unclear how many itinerant high-tech workers there are in the world, Levels says the #nomads Slack chat community he started last year has close to 2,500 members. That includes about 1,000 regularly active users, with a few hundred new subscribers paying the onetime $30 sign-up fee every month. Another free online nomad community, Reddit's /r/digitalnomad, has about 8,000 subscribers. The organizers of the DNX Global Digital Nomad Conference said they saw more than 700 visitors at its two events last year.
"People feel lonely on the road," says Levels, who's scheduled to speak at a DNX Global conference this summer in Berlin. "You're doing something weird, and to make it feel less lonely and weird, you need some kind of chat group."
Other startups are looking to provide digital nomads with a sense of belonging and comfort in a physical space.
One, called Nomad House, aims to build a network of short-term live-work spaces around the world, starting with one outside Ubud, a town on the Indonesian island of Bali, that began taking bookings last month.
"That's why I'm here, actually—I'm taking care of the first customer," says founder Arthur Itey, a 24-year-old Parisian who had previously been working in Montreal, then Bangkok, as a freelance web developer.
Itey's announced plans to open more Nomad Houses in Berlin, London, Bangkok, and Chiang Mai, and says he plans to keep prices below the cost of equivalent accommodations on Airbnb.
A listing on Nomad House | Click to expand
Beyond price, he says the houses will provide working travelers with like-minded housemates and cut out the guesswork of choosing accommodation in an unfamiliar city and the challenges of finding a reliable Internet connection and cozy work environment.
"When you book through Nomad House, you don't need to care about the area that you're going to be, because it's going to be the best one for your lifestyle," he says.
Ubud is perhaps best known as one of the locations visited by Elizabeth Gilbert in her best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, and it's home to a number of spas, yoga centers, and spiritually focused offerings.
"You imagine a nightclub downtown, like Studio 54, something like that: The Yoga Barn is like the place here in Ubud," says Ben Keene, founder of the sustainable-travel company Tribewanted. The town has lately also become "a bit of a Mecca for the startup scene" in the region, he says.
"Once it began to be put on the map, it's attracted a lot of other people," Keene says. "Now people are coming because of projects here, as opposed to Bali in the first place."
Tribewanted is best known for offering travelers what it calls environmentally sustainable, "off-grid" experiences in places like Mozambique, Fiji, and Umbria, Italy. But Keene says it's also in the midst of an experimental session that brings together startup founders looking to share ideas as they work side-by-side at local coworking space Hubud.
Ubud is also one of the planned launch sites for Caravanserai, a firm that looks to provide higher-end accommodation for nomadic customers there, and, starting next year, in Lisbon and Mexico City.
Residents will pay a monthly $1,600 fee and be able to book month-by-month slots in private suites in any of the facilities, which will also include built-in coworking spaces with reserved desks, shared kitchens, and, likely, locally operated coffee shops, bars, and restaurants along with daycare for travelers with children. "Sign a single lease, and you can roam among magical properties across 3 continents," reads the company's website.
"The most important feature in an abstract way is just to give them total piece of mind," says Bruno Haid, 37, Caravanserai's founder. "You know you can pack your bag in New York and show up at one of those locations and everything will be taken care of."
The company would provide visitors with electrical outlets compatible with their home countries' devices, for instance, and is considering offering a box for personal items that would be automatically shipped from house to house as residents traveled, he says.
Caravanserai plans to host pop-up events in existing spaces this year, to determine exactly what customers want in terms of support, both professionally and beyond. After all, Haid says, being a digital nomad isn't just about working in an exotic—and cheaper—city.
"When you're going to Bali, you're not only sitting in Bali. You can also learn how to drive a manual-shift motorcycle and go spearfishing."
