Co.Create Creativity in the converging worlds of advertising, entertainment, and technology. // Copyright 2013, Mansueto Ventures en-us Sat, 15 Mar 2014 13:08 +0000 (Teressa Iezzi) Sat, 15 Mar 2014 13:08 +0000 (Fast Company) TXJP (0.0.1) creativity culture commerce advertising marketing brand campaigns commercial ad agency // Co.Create // Creativity in the converging worlds of advertising, entertainment, and technology. 48 48 TabTale's Strategy For Creating Best-Selling Apps <p>So let's say you've made an iPhone app. You're a brilliant coder, you've nailed the user experience, the gameplay, the design. So that means you're about to strike it rich, right?</p> <p>Wrong. But several years ago, that's more or less what Sagi Schliesser, cofounder and CEO of the Israeli app startup <a href="" target="_blank">TabTale</a>, thought. TabTale initially sold richly interactive book experiences for iOS users. Since these books took a lot of work to make, Schliesser thought it natural enough to charge for them. But the product simply wasn't moving; people weren't downloading. And that's when Schliesser began to realize that to make it as an app designer, it wasn't enough to be an expert at designing apps. You also had to become an expert in so many other things: pricing, marketing, consumer psychology.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Sagi Schliesser</figcaption> </figure> <p>TabTale adopted a freemium model and shifted its focus to games for kids. And it started cranking out numerous products, instead of putting all its efforts behind the book app. Today, the company has grown successful enough--it recently hit <a href="" target="_blank">300 million downloads</a> and exceeded $15 million in revenue last year--to hire a total of 150 employees. It now puts out an app every few days. Some hit, some don't, and each time, TabTale learns.</p> <p>Though TabTale produces the bulk of its content in house, app publishing is also part of its business. It works with with third-party programmers who have developed great apps but don't necessarily know how to sell them.</p> <p>"A lot of developers have an app with good gameplay, but good gameplay is only part of it," explains Schliesser. TabTale can help with a suite of questions: how to market the app, what's the best icon or text to use in the app store. More importantly, TabTale can help you figure out pricing. "We offer advice and infrastructure on monetization, how to manage the game map, and ways to open gates, like a star system."<br /> <br /> If you're not much of a gamer, that lingo may go over your head. But the insight Schliesser is offering is this: that today's casual gaming economy is simply too complex for you to throw up an app, slap a price on it, and sell it like a Nintendo cartridge of old. There's a very precise strategy that is likely to maximize your revenue, and it may involve giving parts of your content away for free, tucking others behind a paywall, and being clever about the way gamers get to pay to unlock it. Those coins that Mario collected are less and less metaphorical, and the economy that exists in your game bears an increasingly direct relation to the real-world economy that puts coins in a developer's pocket.</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p>At the same time--particularly since TabTale has historically focused on children's gaming--TabTale pays attention to the ethics of pricing. You may or may not remember <a href="" target="_self">Smurfberrygate</a>, but suffice it to say that Schliesser is uncomfortable with a scenario in which an eight-year-old can accidentally spend $1,400 within an app to buy something frivolous. "We don't do consumables," says Schliesser, meaning he'll never publish a game in which you can spend an infinite amount of money. "The maximum price in a TabTale game to unlock everything is $4.99 at most."</p> <p>While this might reduce revenue in the short term, it's an illustration of what TabTale feels is a fundamental business principle: an ethical business will lead to a stronger brand, which in turn will lead to a longer tail of revenue. Few consumers probably explicitly think to themselves, "I want to buy the next Rovio game." Rather, they think, "I can't wait for the next Angry Birds." Nevertheless, Schliesser says he's confident that at least some consumers recognize the TabTale brand, which may guide some of their download and purchase decisions. He has shown up at conferences wearing a T-shirt with the brand logo, but with none of his game's iconic characters--and parents have still approached him to thank him for his products.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p>"The best advice I can provide is that we've consistently taken the more patient approach, and not gone after the low-hanging fruit. We wanted to build a brand, a community, and be fair, and we saw that it resonates and gets us more active users."</p> <p>As TabTale grows, Schliesser begins to think of it more generally as a media and entertainment company. He cites Disney as a major model. The company has launched a YouTube channel featuring game teasers and some singalongs with game characters. And TabTale is looking beyond its core audience of youngsters: last week, TabTale launched a sub-brand, Crazy Labs, devoted to content targeting kids 13 and up. An air hockey game called Disky rapidly shot to the top of free section of the App Store.</p> <p>So if TabTale's the next Disney, with Schliesser as its own Israeli Walt, does the company yet have its Mickey Mouse? He laughs, admitting it's a long struggle to get an iconic character like <a href="" target="_self">Cut the Rope's Om Nom, which can become something like a household name</a>. "It's hard to create IP that can go out from the gaming world to the TV and merchandising world. We haven't gotten our Mickey Mouse--yet."</p> David Zax Tue, 11 Mar 2014 10:06 +0000 apps sagi schliesser tabtale People Most Creative People The Black List, Fox's WIGS Team Up To Produce New Drama By Unknown Writer <p>Two Hollywood startups announce a partnership today designed to bring new voices to entertainment. <a href="" target="_blank">The Black List</a>, a community of unrepresented screenwriters, is partnering with <a href="" target="_blank">WIGS</a>, the Fox-affiliated digital studio, which has committed to producing a drama pilot by a yet-to-be-chosen Black List writer.</p> <p>For as long as Hollywood has been Hollywood, it's been dominated by a clubby atmosphere that sometimes seems designed to frustrate the dreams of new writers. The Black List, founded by Franklin Leonard (one of <em>Fast Company's</em> <a href="" target="_self">Most Creative People in Business 1000</a>), began as a list of high-quality unproduced feature film scripts. Since 2012, though, <a href="" target="_self">Leonard has grown</a> the brand into a website for the hosting and evaluation of unproduced screenplays and teleplays, with some users of the site going on to receive professional representation and optioning of their work.</p> <p><a href="" target="_blank">WIGS</a>, meanwhile, is a twist on the idea of a traditional TV network. Its foundational question: Rather than cobbling together the tens of millions of dollars it takes to launch a traditional cable channel, why not launch the equivalent directly on YouTube? WIGS launched in May of 2012, cofounded by entertainment veterans Jon Avnet (<em>Black Swan</em>, <em>Risky Business</em>) and Rodrigo Garcia (<em>In Treatment</em>), who bring A-list talent to what might have been dismissed as mere "webisodes." Its most popular drama is <em><a href="" target="_blank">Blue</a></em>, which features Julia Stiles as a single mother who makes ends meet as an escort. Since launching, WIGS has entered into partnerships with Fox (which airs prime-time ads promoting WIGS) and Hulu. The <em>Blue</em> pilot garnered 12 million views on YouTube; today WIGS has about 1.6 million subscribers across a few different platforms (like Hulu, YouTube, and its <a href="" target="_blank">own online player</a>).</p> <figure class="inline-video inline"><iframe src=";autoplay=0" width="560" height="340" frameborder="0"></iframe></figure> <p>Leonard and Jake Avnet (Jon's son and the COO of WIGS) had known each other socially, and when The Black List opened its doors to teleplays, the two got in touch about making a possible deal. "It was the equivalent of a first date where both people are excited about the deal," recalls Leonard. "I was hoping Jake would be interested in something like this." And he was. His company's brand already revolved around online communities and fan bases, so despite the fact that WIGS was already turning down pitches from established content, Avnet decided that a partnership with The Black List made sense.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Jake Avnet</figcaption> </figure> <p>There was also a shared mission around amplifying lesser-heard voices in Hollywood. Though mostly named as a cheeky nod to the McCarthyist witchhunts that ruined Hollywood careers, The Black List has also carved out a niche as a source for talented writers of color. And WIGS, for its part, has decided to focus its content all around female protagonists. Other actors on the channel include Grace Gummer and Anna Paquin, and over half of its directors have been women, whereas in the broader film industry, only 6% of directing work went to women last year. (Nevertheless, for the Black List partnership, WIGS has not committed to choosing a woman or person of color to develop its pilot.)</p> <p>For both, it was a match that made sense. Avnet and Leonard alike see technology as a means both to shake up that clubby Hollywood atmosphere and to simply solve the manpower problem of sifting through mountains of quality, unproduced work. "There are literally tens of thousands of pieces of material registered to the Writers Guild of America each year," says Leonard (and he's struck up partnerships with the Guild, too). "It's impossible for one person or team to sort through this stuff, so people default to the path of least resistance." In other words: the already-represented, in both senses of the word--those with agents, and the white males who have traditionally been unduly prominent in the industry.</p> <p>"Technology has the power to make this all more efficient, and better," says Avnet. Then, perhaps remembering the Black List scripts he needs to sift through--and perhaps <a href="" target="_self">mindful of the fear that a data-driven era could hollow out the soul of entertainment</a>--he adds: "That said, I don't think technology's the only answer. It's a mix of technology and human input that create the magic of good content."</p> David Zax Thu, 06 Mar 2014 13:15 +0000 Franklin Leonard Jon Avnet Rodrigo Garcia The Black List wigs People Most Creative People Waiting Room And OR Tech Aimed At Reducing Patient Frustrations, Surgical Error <p>Where would you rather work: a sexy company like Apple--or in healthcare IT?</p> <p>Pranam Ben, an Orlando-based entrepreneur, wants to erode the distinction. Ben is the founder of <a href="" target="_blank">The Garage</a>, named for the birthplace of many a Silicon Valley company, has the look of a groovy Bay Area accelerator (Ben calls it a "hub for innovation"). And yet at The Garage, Ben and his small team are working on what might at first blush seem like decidedly unsexy problems: IT headaches in hospitals and doctor's offices.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Pranam Ben</figcaption> </figure> <p>The Garage's first product, Engage, was recently <a href="" target="_blank">acquired</a> by a large Texas healthcare company, Anthelio. Engage is meant to channel the frustration many patients (and practitioners) feel in that limbo-like space, the doctor's waiting room. It's an app that patients can download on their mobile devices; that app then contains about 15 sub-apps offering interactive content, healthcare videos, health-related games, and--crucially--the ability to fill out survey forms and sign consent forms digitally.</p> <p>If widely adopted, it could save patients the tedium of repeatedly filling out the same information again and again. And it could serve as a valuable pre-examination means of communication between doctor and patient, since the doctor's office can send personalized messages through the device. Ben got the idea when he traveled through New York's JFK airport and saw the wild popularity of the roughly 130 installed iPads there, which offer travelers the opportunity to browse the web, check their flight status, and order food.</p> <p>The next product The Garage developed, <a href="" target="_blank">Air</a>, is a Microsoft Kinect-based platform for patient safety in operating rooms. Ben says that to this day in America, roughly 50 times per week something embarrassingly avoidable goes wrong in surgeries: doctors operate on the wrong body part, on the wrong site of the body, or they accidentally sew up the patient leaving something behind, like an instrument or bit of sponge. Settlements follow; the victims are compensated--but the errors shouldn't happen to begin with, says Ben.</p> <p>Air works simply; a Kinect goes in the corner of the OR and the doctor can talk or gesture to interface with it and call up "real-time patient and surgical information" on any display she likes. To ensure operation on the correct body part, a human avatar will pop up with the appropriate site highlighted. Forward-thinking surgeons and surgical nurses already advocate for what's called a "time-out" pre-surgery--a brief meeting in which the patient's identity and procedure is confirmed: "basically a medical audit," says Ben. But why not extend the time-out through the procedure itself, with that information continually beamed to a screen that all in the OR can see? Air offers a continuous "visual time-out," says Ben.</p> <p>Air also enables the surgeon to dictate notes immediately following the surgery, and to store medical information in the cloud. The product, which launched 7 months ago on a small scale in two medical centers in Florida, is now more widely available, with hospital systems in California and Tennessee now coming on board. Ben says he believes Air will be shown to greatly reduce "wrong-side" and "wrong-site" surgeries, but acknowledges that he's about a year away from having the data he needs to approach a body like the Centers for Medicare &amp; Medicaid Services or the Joint Commission: Accreditation, Health Care, Certification--each of whose approval could represent a ticket to the medical big leagues.</p> <p>The third major product The Garage is working on is called Mamba; it would be something like a medical app store for Google Glass, <a href="" target="_self">the wearable device Google has said is already gaining favor with some surgeons</a>. Ben says his team has hopes to develop 40 apps or more, but has zeroed in on three ideas for now: "Ask Mamba" would be a search engine for healthcare information; "My Messages" would allow communication between Glass users, and "Patient Lookup" would enable doctors to access patient data on the device. With Mamba, The Garage aims to be something like a Rovio for healthcare. (Instead of Angry Birds, you'd have happy doctors).</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Code Name: Mamba</figcaption> </figure> <p>Though much coverage of healthcare in America is lately focused on controlling ballooning costs, Ben says his innovations play a role in that: "I think every product we're developing has a direct impact on cost-savings," he says. A bold claim, but it stands to reason that fewer lawsuits and smoother workflow would achieve just that, even if it involved new software and hardware costs.</p> <p>And why has Ben ended up in Orlando, a land better known for its affiliation with Mickey Mouse than Steve Jobs? Ben landed there in 2005 on a job assignment, and likes the climate. And with retirement communities ringing the city, there's no shortage of demand for healthcare--and healthcare innovation. Apple and Google <a href="" target="_blank">recently acquired</a> startups from the region, and perhaps someday central Florida will become known as a hub of innovation that Ben would like it to be, with The Garage one of its important spokes. "For me, the future of The Garage is to be a global brand for healthcare IT," says Ben.</p> David Zax Wed, 05 Mar 2014 11:06 +0000 air Engage google glass pranam ben surgery surgical error the garage People Innovation Agents #BLACKandSTEM: The Hashtag As Community <p><a href="" target="_blank">Stephani Page</a> didn't mean to become Twitter-famous. The Ph.D. candidate biologist at UNC Chapel Hill simply wanted to get something off her chest. Page, 32, is a black woman working in academic science, a field (like so many) that still has disproportionately few people like her. And though she's done her part to try to change that--by pursuing a career in science herself, and by weighing in on topics like race and mentoring in science--she still found herself craving a sense of community now. So she took to Twitter.</p> <p>A little over two weeks ago, she devised a hashtag, <a href=";src=hash" target="_blank">#BLACKandSTEM</a>. ("STEM" means involved in science, tech, engineering, or math. "BLACK" means, well, black.) People use hashtags in a variety of ways, be it to categorize a post or to offer ironic commentary on the content of a tweet. But Page's faint, wild hope was that her hashtag might just become something of a community.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Stephani Page</figcaption> </figure> <p>On February 13 at 12:33 p.m., Page tweeted: "'Role' call. #BLACKandSTEM what do you do?" She had few followers--even today, she has under 1,000--and the tweet received one retweet.</p> <p>Yet that was enough to start a small Twitter movement. People began piping up. "Phd Human and Statistical Genetics #blackandstem," tweeted @shelinasr. "PhD in CE/EngE #blackandSTEM," chimed in @GodsNaturalDiva. "#BLACKandSTEM Electrical Engineering degrees (BS,MS), former EE adjunct prof, now a Systems Engineer at Cisco," added @AkilahRakel. A dentist chimed in, then a NASA employee, then an expert on African indigenous astronomy. It was the simplest of gestures: tweeting who you were. "It was just like, 'I'm here,'" says Page. But it was suddenly enough to make her--and many others--feel a lot less alone as an African American in science.</p> <p>"When you give people a chance to say, 'Here I am, and here's what I do'--it might be someone in that situation 500 miles away in Canada or Seattle or Detroit or Florida--you break down all of that distance," she recalls. Critical mass could be made visible--online. It felt electric.</p> <p>Page has tweeted out a #BLACKandSTEM question each subsequent Thursday. On the 20th, it was, "#BLACKandSTEM list your UG and grad institutions. What influenced your choice in schools and majors?" A week later, she asked, "Was there ever a specific occurrence of STEMEd being made inaccessible to you or someone you knew? #BLACKandSTEM." The responses snowballed. And soon, even a <a href=";original_referer=" target="_blank">White House-affiliated handle</a> tweeted using the hashtag. "When I initially saw it, I closed my Twitter app, went off and did something, and then it hit me and I came back and looked at it again." To date, about 1,400 tweets with the hashtag have been sent.</p> <p>Page is still trying to figure out what exactly the virality of her hashtag might mean, or how it might be leveraged in the long term. Already, though, she says it's a resource for journalists and science educators who have been looking for ways to connect with African Americans in STEM career paths. "So maybe there's an educator in Nashville who wants to bring more black and Hispanic scientists who are women into the classroom to talk to the kids. #BLACKandSTEM can make them see, 'Oh wow, there's this person at Vanderbilt. I can reach out.'" Page says she's seen people meet and interact as a result of the hashtag, and that a few mentorship relationships have already been born of it.</p> <p>"Twitter has a way of taking a small idea and amplifying the transmission of it," says Page, who is still getting used to her newfound role as moderator of a discussion on blacks in science and tech. "I'm a real behind-the-scenes kind of person," she says, conforming to at least one stereotype of the shy scientist. But she's glad to be taking on this new role of convening a virtual space, and encouraging people to not be digital wallflowers. "What I'm seeing with #BLACKandSTEM is that it's already a community. We already want it to be a community."</p> David Zax Tue, 04 Mar 2014 14:30 +0000 blackandstem stephani page women and minorities People Most Creative People Uncomfortable Lessons In Business--And Race--From Showtime's "House Of Lies" <p>You may or may not watch <em>House of Lies</em>, Showtime's twisted comedy about the world of management consulting, whose first season received mixed reviews but whose recent episodes have been hitting a stride. The series stars Don Cheadle as Marty Kaan, an ethically challenged consultant with various romantic, familial, and professional entanglements. Cheadle, twice nominated for Best Actor at both the Emmys and Golden Globes for his work on the series, nabbed the latter in 2012. Showtime just announced it would be producing a fourth season.</p> <p>We prevailed upon showrunner Matthew Carnahan for the difficult task of drawing business advice from a show that satirizes business advice. Ultimately, our conversation ranged a little wider, as Carnahan weighed in on the pitfalls of the typical workplace and what he feels is our "entertainment apartheid system."</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p><strong>Fast Company: Cheadle's Marty Kaan is cunning, but not the most moral guy. What are methods of his that you avoid, and what are methods of his that you use, in running your own writers' room?</strong></p> <p>Matthew Carnahan: I avoid lying. But I would say that the intersection of truth and flattery is something that's kind of worth exploring. In order to get the best work out of my writers, I find it doesn't help to berate them or make them feel small. It actually helps to lean in to the positive aspects of what they're doing. Even if they might've ultimately failed with a given piece of work, there's always something in there worth salvaging.</p> <p><strong>How do you deal with the puzzle of making an audience connect to a character who's often loathsome?</strong></p> <p>I can't write characters unless I fall in love with them a little bit. With Marty, I'm starting with a pretty ruined guy--pretty much morally bankrupt, unrepentant, unexamined, careless... kind of an all-around douchebag. And what I've been interested in is beginning to deconstruct him as an antihero. We begin to unravel this guy, to take him apart piece by piece and see if by the end of the series, there can be this person who emerges a little more examined and able to live with some version of integrity.</p> <p><strong>A lot of people probably don't feel like they're their best selves in the workplace.</strong></p> <p>The workplace sucks. The workplace sucks ass. I've had so many jobs. I've counted 77 jobs I had while trying to eke out a living as a writer. I was copy editing for a soap opera magazine. I have so many vivid hellish memories of taking this soap opera magazine to print down in Hackensack. Of being a bike messenger. Of being a barback and cleaning up the most nasty, filthy dregs of the drunk life. So the workplace I think for most of us is pretty fucking awful, and my takeaway on the workplace is that I think what saves you is the human element--finding some respite from the horror of the banality of it in your coworkers, in people.</p> <p><strong>Not all workplace interactions on the show are kind. There's a scene in a recent episode where Jeannie, played by Kristen Bell, chews out a female underling for reading books during her downtime rather than studying arcane management terms. Work/life balance is hard to come by in this world.</strong></p> <p>That scene is important. I probably do feel more for Jeannie's coworker than I do for Jeannie at that moment. But it's just one of the moments for me that highlights how alone Jeannie is, that she doesn't have literature in her life, she doesn't have people in her life. She has her work, and she's desperately trying to suppress her desire to have a relationship because it worked out so badly the last time she tried. That's just one of those moments when I go, "Wow, these characters are stuck in this environment where it's really hard, and so often you have to put away the best part of yourself, suck it up, and suit up."</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p><strong>You've just been renewed for a fourth season. But two years ago, June Thomas in Slate asked why the show wasn't a hit?</strong></p> <p>The show is a hit. It trounces <em>Girls</em> every week, and gets over three million viewers. Where it isn't is in the white zeitgeist--the "whitegeist." This show in the African-American community is absolutely buzzed about and talked about, but because we live in the entertainment apartheid system that we live in, it doesn't get perceived as the kind of hit that I is. That to me speaks of much bigger things--that after all this time, a show that at its heart is about three generations of African-American men is only going to get the traction it's going to get in the black community, and that in the predominantly white media, it doesn't get the same kind of traction that it should.</p> <p>Until I made the show, I wasn't necessarily awake to what's quietly going on. As an example: there's a director of photography I wanted to work with on the show. He's African American, and I had done several projects with him. I never thought about, "What's Gary off doing when I'm on various writing jobs?" I said Gary, I need to get your reel to make sure you get hired (which ultimately he did), and I looked at this reel and I think the reel had one white face in the whole thing. I thought, "Oh! There really are two worlds here." We basically have a dual system. It really shocked me. We don't talk about it, but it's there.</p> <p><strong>So what can we do to integrate entertainment?</strong></p> <p>You just have to begin. One has to begin making steps unilaterally. For me it's about having a really diverse writers' room, office, and crew. That's what I can do today. And much as people might find fault with what I'm saying right now, I'm actually just trying to further the conversation. I don't know what else can be one, other than sit in the discomfort, and talk about it.</p> <p><em>This conversation has been condensed and edited.</em></p> David Zax Wed, 26 Feb 2014 14:30 +0000 house of lies Showtime People How London Cabbies Use Facebook To Share "The Knowledge" <p>Patric McGuinness is the first to admit that his past is checkered. His childhood was marred by an abusive father. He got involved with gangs, with drugs. He spent 15 years in prison. He hurt a lot of people. But a little over a decade ago, McGuinness decided to turn his life around, getting sober and helping others to begin to do so. And last year, he told a friend he was thinking of trying to become a London taxi driver--which is when his friend recommended that McGuinness join a 1,000-member Facebook Group called "<a href="" target="_blank">The Taxi Knowledge of London</a>."</p> <p>Facebook Groups are one of the social network's oldest features, predating even News Feed or photo albums. Yet early users tended to use Facebook Groups more as "bumper stickers," in the words of Facebook Groups Project Manager Jimmy Chen. They'd start groups with wacky names like "I Enjoy Stepping On Crunchy Leaves" or "It Blew My Mind The First Time I Learned The Disney Logo Was A D"--the sorts of little aperçus that would later find a more fitting home on Twitter. In 2010, though, Facebook revamped Groups substantially, making them a "more practical space for communication."</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Patric McGuinness</figcaption> </figure> <p>In McGuinness's case, "The Taxi Knowledge of London" became a community that ushered him into the daunting world of London black-cab apprenticeship. Would-be cab drivers in London must spend three years learning "The Knowledge"--essentially becoming a living GPS system of everything within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross Station. You need to know the best way to get from any one point to any other; you have to know the major landmarks; you need to be able to out-Google-Maps Google Maps. It's a spatial memorization undertaking so mammoth that it's known to <a href="" target="_blank">substantially change black cab drivers' brains</a>.</p> <p>If that weren't daunting enough, McGuinness wasn't even sure if he'd be allowed to apply, due to that checkered past. So before McGuinness was even pre-certified to begin studying The Knowledge, the Facebook community served as a welcome mat and sounding board for his anxieties.</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p>After a period of a few months, McGuinness was officially able to begin studying to become a taxi driver--and that was when the group <em>really</em> began to be useful. He was soon was confronted with all kinds of questions. What was a good kind of motorbike to get, in order to learn The Knowledge? When would the landmark Savoy Hotel reopen? "Can you do The Knowledge in a car, and how much money do you earn, and can I lease one, or do I buy it, and is there insurance? There's a whole heap of questions," he says. And the Group always had an answer--sometimes, 30 of them, one piled on top of another.</p> <p>Once the newbie to the group, McGuinness is now able to share knowledge of his own. Since he shares his story as a youthful criminal offender openly on the page, others have approached him asking how the application process has been for him. "I've got messages: 'How did you get past this? What would you advise?' They would never have had access to firsthand information had they not been on this Facebook page with me."</p> <p>The group is also helpful for licensed drivers, who collectively pool their smarts to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated mapping software from the likes of Google. McGuinness cites a London street that Google still has marked as one-way, even though it changed recently to a two-way street. The Facebook Group helps those thousand connected cabbies disseminate that knowledge more quickly.</p> <figure class="inline-video inline"><iframe src="" width="604" height="340" frameborder="0"></iframe></figure> <p>Facebook's Chen points to The Knowledge Group one of a wide array of use cases that Facebook users increasingly avail themselves of. He points to other surprising groups, including one where Australian four-wheel-drive off-roading enthusiasts share tips (and real-time pleas for help when they get stuck in the mud). Recently, Facebook Groups helped reunite participants in the 1975 evacuation of Vietnam War orphans known as "<a href="" target="_blank">Operation Babylift</a>." Chen says that users should expect to see the Facebook Groups experience improve and become more intuitive on mobile devices--which is how people increasingly use Facebook all over the world.</p> <p>That will surely help McGuinness as he continues to learn The Knowledge on the streets of London over the next few years. And he's looking forward to what he hopes will be an endpoint that combines his interests and helps him turn over a new leaf. Most recently a counselor for at-risk youth, McGuinness (who still volunteers with substance abusers), says he'd like for his cab to someday be something like a psychotherapy office on wheels for his fares. "I like people," he says. "I just want to have the ability to deliver advice and guidance on the journey while they're in my cab."</p> David Zax Fri, 21 Feb 2014 11:06 +0000 facebook jimmy chen patric mcguinness The Knowledge People Innovation Agents SupportPay Aims To Take Headaches Out Of Child Support And Family Finances <p>Divorce is the easy part.</p> <p>That, at least, is the conclusion that Sheri Atwood, who created the child-support payment app <a href="" target="_blank">SupportPay</a>, came to. A child of an acrimonious divorce herself, Atwood was committed to not making the same mistakes when she divorced her husband some years ago. "It was so amicable, it cost three hundred bucks," she says. They were wealthy Silicon Valley types: cars, houses, a boat, the whole lot. But they divvied it up fairly and without bitterness.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Sheri Atwood</figcaption> </figure> <p>Then came the hard part. Because when you have a kid--as Atwood and her ex-husband did--there's no such thing as a clean break. You're tied to your ex, financially, forever. And while divorce agreements also include at least general provisions about child support, the devil is in the details. It's rarely so simple as A pays B a lump sum per month. It's a constant back and forth: you owe me for the shoes, but I owe you for the violin lessons, and did you pay me for the haircut, and was that doctor you chose really reasonably priced, and... you get the idea. "It's constant debits and credits," says Atwood...a headache for all but the most seasoned and even-tempered bean counter.</p> <p>One day, Atwood was filing expense reports to her boss during a flight back from Singapore, while also chasing reminding her ex about a bill. She began to wonder: what if families brought the best practices of business to this process? Specifically: what if there were software to help them manage? She hit the books, and found that while there's lots of chatter about so-called "deadbeat parents" who skimp on child support, much less ink has been spilled--and much less attention paid--when it came to the majority who <em>were</em> paying, but found it a logistical challenge.</p> <p>The app Atwood launched, SupportPay--<a href="" target="_blank">new on iOS</a>, also available on <a href="" target="_blank">Android</a>--solves a few problems, she says. By enabling parents to immediately scan and store receipts, it addresses the paranoia many a divorced parent faces: "I have no problem paying," they often say, "but I just want to make sure the money is going to my child." The app also integrates a pre-approval system, where expenses over a certain amount trigger review from one's ex. (This solves the problem of a lawyer friend of Atwood's who pays 100% of child support, and whose ex stuck it to him by deliberately taking the child exclusively to out-of-network doctors.) SupportPay, like other forms of accounting software, often comes handy each April, since alimony is tax deductible, but record-keeping and consistency are essential to avoid an audit.</p> <p>In its first iteration, SupportPay is a subscription-based service for headache-prone, math-averse divorcees. But Atwood claims that "the vision of the company is to become a family financial-management platform"--even for that increasingly contracting market: the family that sticks together. Indeed, she thinks, software like hers could help that market grow by stripping away some of the most perilous family conversations. "When it comes to family and money, it's a very tense situation," she says.</p> <p>Consider, for example, two siblings taking care of aging parents: one pays the mortgage, the other pays the phone bill, and accounts need to be reconciled periodically. "How do you manage finances in families," asks Atwood, "when the money doesn't fit in one household?" She notes that a lot of her company's IP centers on solving tricky problems. For instance: how do you share <em>exactly</em> the amount of financial information you want to share with a family member or ex--and no more?</p> <p>Families are bound up by a lot of forces--love, blood, shared experience. But a realistic appraisal shows that there's another force, prosaic but strong: money. Homes--broken or not--can be run like businesses, suggests Atwood. She'd like to be the one to help you manage the bill.</p> David Zax Tue, 18 Feb 2014 11:06 +0000 supportpay People Innovation Agents Forget Five-Blade Razors: Bevel Is A Better Shave For Black Men <p>Tristan Walker, who grew up fatherless in Queens, N.Y., came of age at a boarding school in Connecticut. When it came time to deal with his increasingly intractable peach fuzz, he got his hands on some mass-market shaving products and went for it. He went to sleep mostly satisfied--only to wake up the following morning "completely broken out."</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p>And there begins the origin story of Walker's latest venture, <a href="" target="_blank">Walker and Company</a>, which has aspirations of becoming the Johnson &amp; Johnson for people of color. Its first product? Bevel, a shaving system with black men in mind.</p> <p>Because as he was to learn with increasing frustration over the next few years, mass market shaving products simply weren't made for someone with coarse, curly hair like his. "The multi-blade razor cuts hair beneath your skin," he explains. "But if you have curly hair, then it grows back <em>into</em> your skin." (He mocks four-and five-blade razors: "the fourth to make your bed in the morning, the fifth to do something else completely unnecessary"). Walker, the former business development director at Foursquare, experimented with electric clippers but found them "harsh on the face," and finally settled into a 15-year-long routine of using depilatory cream, not realizing, he says, he was putting "hazardous chemicals on my face." Finally, last year, during a stint as <a href="" target="_self">entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz</a>, Walker put his foot down.</p> <p>He was going to remake health and beauty products for people of color in America.</p> <aside class="pullquote"><q>For the first time in the nation's history, the majority of Americans are non-white. And all those babies are going to want to pluck, rinse, groom, and shave in the not-too-distant future.</q></aside> <p>It's no small goal, but when he was lured to Andreessen Horowitz from Foursquare, he was encouraged to be ambitious. Would he found a new kind of bank? Tackle the childhood obesity epidemic? Fix the inefficiencies in freight trucking? He considered all three. Finally, though, he realized that if he was going to spend the next decade or more of his life doing something ambitious, it also had to be authentic, rooted in who he was. And who he was, at that moment, was a black man in America pissed that he couldn't get a decent shave.</p> <p>He began to research. He interviewed an "old retired executive from a large shaving company" who counseled him to look at old photographs from the days before King Gillette began patenting novel forms of razors. Walker turned to Flickr and clicked through photos of men 100, 150 years ago. "None had any razor bumps on their faces," he recalls of black and white men alike--and this, in the supposedly primitive era of the single-blade razor! Finally, Walker set about designing what he calls "the first and only end-to-end shaving system designed for men and women with coarse or curly hair." It's a six-product system called <a href="" target="_blank">Bevel</a> (razor, blade, brush, and several liquid products), and the product has just become available on Bevel's website. A starter kit is $60, or there's a $30-per-month subscription option.</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p>Walker knows his product will be welcomed with open arms by some--he describes the indignity of walking to the "ethnic aisle, which is really a shelf" at the average drugstore--while others may be more hesitant. Bevel sells direct-to-consumer. Might it in any way threaten the sense of community that many black Americans feel around their barbershops? "It's not an institution we want to get rid of," insists Walker. "The way we think about Bevel is, 'Hey, go to the barbershop every Saturday. Then let us take care of you from Sunday to Friday.'"</p> <p>Noting that almost <a href="" target="_blank">three quarters of African American babies are born to unwed mothers</a>, Walker--who also founded CODE2040, a mentorship program for black and Latino STEM students--welcomes the opportunity a black-oriented shaving product provides for a conversation about fatherlessness in America. A related website, <a href="" target="_blank">BevelCode</a>, already collects stories about the ways young men of color have forged grooming habits unique to their situations. One story recounts the peculiar challenge a black fraternity at Stanford faced: "How does it feel not to have a barbershop within 15 miles of campus? These guys got super creative," he says, "and figured out a way to invite barbers to the campus to cut the kind of hair they had."</p> <p>Bevel is not intended solely for African Americans. Razor burn and bumps resulting from shaving course or curly hair affects about 80% of the black community, and 30% of the rest of men, says Walker, who sure won't turn away customers on account of their skin color. "It has to start with a problem," Walker says of his product-designing philosophy--and he does hope to someday reach a cadence of one to two new brands per year. "We'll never make a shampoo just to make a shampoo." Future products will tackle problems that may present more commonly among Latinos or Asian Americans, he says.</p> <p>Though driven by a personal frustration, and possessed with a sense of mission, Walker is the first to admit that designing products for people of color simply makes good business sense. Just look at the census, he says: for the first time in the nation's history, the majority of Americans <a href="" target="_blank">are non-white</a>. And all those babies are going to want to pluck, rinse, groom, and shave in the not-too-distant future. "I am dedicating my life to this demographic shift that's happening," says Walker. "Why are folks missing the boat?"</p> David Zax Fri, 14 Feb 2014 11:06 +0000 bevel Tristan Walker walker and company People Most Creative People Amazon Makes A Play For New Customers--Your Kids--With Original Children's Programming <p>Though Netflix has <a href="" target="_self">garnered the lion's share</a> of attention given to a tech company venturing into original programming, Amazon is nipping at its heels.</p> <p>You may or may not be a regular watcher of <em>Alpha House</em> or <em>Betas</em>, the two original "prime time" (i.e., adult) series that have full seasons up on Amazon Instant Video. But even if you're a fan of those, you might have missed the fact that Amazon Studios, as its production arm is called, has made a special commitment to children's programming. Six kids' series pilots were produced last year, with three picked up for full-season runs (those series have yet to launch, partly due to the long lead time required by animation). And this past Thursday, Amazon put out a second wave of pilots for kids' shows--five new ones in all, the most popular of which will go to series.</p> <figure class="inline-video inline"><iframe src=";autoplay=0" width="560" height="340" frameborder="0"></iframe></figure> <p>We caught up with Tara Sorensen, who heads up the kids' content division at Amazon Studios, to learn more about playground gossip, that lucrative lower-school demographic, and the first success story of Amazon's unusual open-door script submission policy.</p> <p><strong>FAST COMPANY: Why is Amazon so interested in children's content?</strong></p> <p>TARA SORENSEN: Families are a big part of Amazon's customer database, so we wanted to make sure we were providing great content within the Prime universe that they loved. We work with an educational consultant to develop innovative curriculum. We know that mom needs to feel good about what she's putting in front of the kids, but that also the kids need to fall in love with the characters. In this second round, we've expanded into the 6-to-11 demo.</p> <p><strong>You've been in kids' TV for almost 20 years. How is working for Amazon different?<br /> </strong><br /> In many ways, the Amazon experience hasn't been so different. Though there's definitely a startup mentality--producing 52 half-hours right out of the gate!</p> <p><strong>Amazon as a brand is still <a href="" target="_self">mostly known for retail</a>. Do you have trouble explaining at cocktail parties that you don't spend your days shipping books?<br /> </strong><br /> I definitely have conversations where friends think immediately I work on the retail side. They tell me how much they love Amazon. One went as far as to say, "It's like a really great boyfriend because it's always there when it says it's gonna be. It really delivers, I can always count on it."</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p><strong>How do your kids watch TV?<br /> </strong><br /> I have two children aged 7 and 8, and I was seeing the way tablets really change the way they watch TV. Kids don't have the allegiance today to networks that you and I used to. They're getting a lot of information from friends, word of mouth. They're not sitting in front of a linear broadcast anymore.</p> <p><strong>How do kids learn what they want to watch these days? What's the playground equivalent of the water cooler?<br /> </strong><br /> I can tell you that kids are definitely influenced by older siblings. Even programs they maybe haven't watched, they're aware of. As kids get older, they're not in social media yet, but there are definitely forms of that, with cliques in school. I often ask my kids, "How did you find out about that program?" They usually say, "Oh, so and so was talking about it."</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p><strong>Most networks insist that pilot scripts come in through agents or representatives, but Amazon Studios has an open-door policy, and I understand that yielded a success with this wave of pilots?<br /> </strong><br /> <a href="" target="_blank">David Anaxagoras</a> had an MFA in screenwriting, but he'd given up on it, and has been a preschool teacher the last 15 or 20 years. He decided to give screenwriting one last shot, wrote a script, and uploaded it. It's called <a href="" target="_blank"><em>Gortimer Gibbon's Life on Normal Street</em></a>. We were able to secure an Oscar-winning director to direct it. David took off a week of work to be on set, and it was really a treat to see him through the process. At the end of the shoot we asked him what he thought of the process, and he got really emotional. For him it was a dream come true, and he's still pinching himself now as he waits a decision as to whether or not we'll push the series into production for a full order.</p> <p><em>This interview has been condensed and edited.</em></p> David Zax Tue, 11 Feb 2014 11:06 +0000 Amazon amazon studios children's television david anaxagoras tara sorenson People Most Creative People How A Nascar Champion Rebooted The Bobsled To Help Americans Win Olympic Gold <p>Geoff Bodine was watching the winter Olympics on TV in 1992 when the sportscaster said something that would change Bodine's life. The event was bobsledding, and the American team was not faring well. Noting that bobsledding was an event where equipment was exceedingly important, the sportscaster wondered aloud if one reason the Americans were faring poorly is that they had bought their bobsleds from the very countries they were competing against. Bodine, a Daytona 500-winning Nascar driver who also sold cars on the side, felt what the sportscaster said was the truth: "I sold cars to the competition," he recalls. "But I sold 'em the ones I didn't want."</p> <p>Soon as he could, Bodine headed out to the bobsled track in Lake Placid, N.Y., where he climbed in his first bobsled. He figured bobsledding would be more or less like racing a car. And indeed, "the first time down, I did quite well," he recalls. "I got a big head, and I said, 'Let's do this again.'" But then on the second run, "I realized the first time down was just luck," he says. He slammed into a wall and mangled the rear of the sled. "It scared the life out of me."</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Group with Geoff Bodine</figcaption> </figure> <p>At that point Bodine realized two things: that he wasn't cut out to be a bobsled racer, and that if the U.S. was to bring home a gold in this event, the team needed someone to build it a better bobsled. Despite the fact that was 43, a Nascar driver, and had never set foot in a bobsled before that day, Bodine decided that person would be him.</p> <p>Twenty-two years later, Bodine and his design team have built 18 bobsleds for Olympic teams that have gone on to win a number of gold medals: Women brought home the gold in Salt Lake City in 2002, and the four-man USA-1 team also won gold in Vancouver in 2010. It was the first time an American four-man team placed first since 1948, and it makes them defending champions at Sochi.</p> <figure class="inline-video inline"> <iframe height="360" width="640" src="" id="videoEmbedTwistage1" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe> </figure> <p>You might think that the way to design a winning bobsled is simply to build the thing to go as fast as possible (or as fast as regulations allow). And indeed, for certain uncomplicated tracks, that's the best strategy. In Vancouver, for instance, aerodynamic, drafting-optimized design was key.</p> <p>But the Sochi track is different, says Bodine. "It's a very technical track," he says. "All the corners are difficult." In particular, there is a section of the track where a series of corners lead to a stretch of track that goes uphill. All of which makes it especially important to build a bobsled that is highly navigable, since to come off those corners with any lost momentum can impair the team's ability to plow through that uphill stretch. "That's where they can lose those thousandths of a second," says Bodine.</p> <p>The design process required more flexibility, more trial and error, and so Bodine's team turned to <a href="" target="_blank">Solidworks</a>, 3-D design software from Dassault Systèmes (a French design firm whose <a href="" target="_self">3-D simulation of a transatlantic iceberg odyssey</a> we wrote about earlier) to map out how to approach Sochi's unique track. Bodine's partner Bob Cuneo experimented with design after design, moving this lever, altering that steering mechanism, until finally he felt confident he had optimized the design. And because USA-1's driver, Steve Holcomb, has a history of vision impairment that leads him to steer the bobsled as much by feel as by sight, the team also took care to build a sled that could continually be modified until the steering responded just how Holcomb liked it.</p> <figure class="inline-video inline"> <iframe height="360" width="640" src="" id="videoEmbedTwistage2" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe> </figure> <p>The resulting vessel is called the Bo-Dyn Night Train 2, and it will be the last of the American bobsleds to race at Sochi in late February. He can't know yet, of course, who will bring home the gold, but whatever happens, Bodine feels it's preordained. "The Lord blessed me," says Bodine. "He just put it in my soul to watch the Olympics in '92 and gave me the feeling of, "Man, someone needs to help these kids.'"</p> David Zax Tue, 11 Feb 2014 11:06 +0000 bob cuneo bobsledding bobsleds bodyworks dassault systemes Design geoff bodine Olympics sochi Innovation Most Creative People How Shoptiques Is Helping Independent Boutiques Tackle E-Commerce <p>Before the financial meltdown, Olga Vidisheva worked in finance ("I wanted to make a difference, as surprising as that might sound") and found the job draining. When she was traveling overseas for work, though, she would take a breather, walk around an unfamiliar city, and do one of her favorite things--stop in a boutique. When she'd return to the states and friends would fawn over her purchases, Vidisheva was startled to learn that most of the boutiques she'd shopped at had no web presences to speak of. "Am I missing something?" she thought. The gears began to turn--and continued to do so through her time at Harvard Business School.</p> <p>Recently, Vidisheva's startup, <a href="" target="_blank">Shoptiques</a> (tagline: "Shop the world's best boutiques"), entered a new and more serious phase, unrolling sales software that will enable the company to scale. Shoptiques--which enables users to buy clothes at boutiques from all over the world--provides inventory management tools for retailers, and offers web-based tools to drive sales (an ability to search for an item across all of a neighborhood's boutiques, say). Videsheva endeavors to have 1,000 boutiques in its system this year. There's certainly demand: "We reject over 80% of stores that apply to be featured," she says.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Olga Vidisheva</figcaption> </figure> <p>Before Vidisheva launched Shoptiques in 2012, she spent hours interviewing hundreds of boutique owners. What she found was that many simply had no interest in forming a web presence, even if they knew it would be good for their brand or bottom line. "These people just had no clue how to do this," says Vidisheva. "They're brilliant in merchandising and supply chains, but they had no interest in e-commerce. We provide services that they just don't know how to do, or don't want to do."</p> <p>As an example, she asks me to Google "Pinkyotto," a hip brand with a strong New York presence. Pinkyotto's own website comes up, and I click through, but as soon as I try to shop through the site, I'm redirected to Shoptiques' own Pinkyotto-dedicated page. Pinkyotto has essentially outsourced all their e-commerce to Shoptiques' infrastructure, and Shoptiques takes a cut of the revenue.</p> <p>If that seems like something anyone could do, think again (and consider that Y Combinator, for one, believed in Vidisheva, providing seed funding and making her their first non-technical, non-partnered cadet in the famed accelerator, she says). Vidisheva points to the example of OpenTable as another startup that would seem replaceable, yet has been extremely savvy about insinuating itself into restaurants' businesses in a non-replaceable way--by integrating with their in-house table management systems, for instance. "The brilliance of OpenTable is that it went deep into the infrastructure of restaurants," she says. "That's why no one's been able to replace them."</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Bash &amp; Bow</figcaption> </figure> <p>Vidisheva wants to achieve something similar with her software, which is why Shoptiques has become something more than a mere payments infrastructure. By using point-of-sale software called LightSpeed, Vidisheva is able to link her own business to that of her clients' in deeper and deeper ways. For instance, whereas formerly boutiques would have to manually enter updates to their inventory for those changes to register on Shoptiques, the LightSpeed integration does this automatically--making a store's Shoptiques page a neat mirror of what goes on in the brick-and-mortar location. "We're fully integrating into the lifecycle" of partner boutiques, says Vidisheva. "So if any competitor comes in, boutiques will say, 'What are you talking about? We're already fully integrated with Shoptiques.'"</p> <p>Shoptiques has wound up being something like the IT guru for each and every boutique, in a sense. Take, for instance, the case of what Vidisheva calls #<a href="" target="_blank">shopstagram</a>. Many boutiques have gotten into the habit of posting Instagram photos of their wares for publicity. But there was no infrastructure available to allow followers to know how many of this item were available, or to point them in the right direction to buy online. Using a bit of back-end wizardry, Vidisheva trained her boutiques to include a bit of metadata with each Instagram posting, which Shoptiques algorithms would then process directly into its own systems. Now a boutique can post an Instagram photo, simultaneously stimulating demand for a product, letting Shoptiques know just how much of the product is available, and driving users to the relevant Shoptiques page to make a purchase.</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Rachel Dress</figcaption> </figure> <p>The new LightSpeed integration goes a step beyond this clever Instagram hack, making Shoptiques constantly up to date on all inventory. It also allows novel shopping behavior: the shopper who eyes a dress in full stock on Friday, then sees its numbers dwindle online over Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, can confidently snap up the last dress online on Tuesday. And as Shoptiques acquires more and more data on behavior like this, it will be in a position to provide analytics back to the boutique owners. She aims to be far more than the pipes processing payment for fancy dresses: "I want to get to the point where if you're a new owner starting a store, you say, 'Shoptiques--that's all I really need.'"</p> <p>In a recessionary era--and one in which <a href="" target="_blank">one particular e-commerce site</a> is <a href="" target="_blank">squeezing retailers everywhere</a>--Vidisheva claims that her site can be the difference between life and death for some stores. She points to the example of one Arizona boutique, <a href="" target="_blank">Clothes Minded</a>, that recently saw a dreadful lull in foot traffic over a particularly sweltering summer. The owner wrote Vidisheva to say that but for online sales that season, the business was likely to have gone under. "They understand that we eliminate the cyclicality and seasonality of the business," says Vidisheva.</p> <p>After all, she says, even if your New York boutique has leftover bikinis come winter, "you can send to Hawaii year-round."</p> David Zax Fri, 07 Feb 2014 11:06 +0000 olga vidisheva shoptiques People Most Creative People Google Glass's Unexpected Lessons In Product Launching <p>Given the level of hype around Google Glass--which recently announced a <a href="" target="_self">fashion-forward redesign</a>--it seems nearly every angle of this piece of technology has been explored. And yet, there's been less focus on the variety of people actually <em>using</em> the technology and insight into what they do with it. <a href="" target="_self">Leila Takayama</a>, one of <em>Fast Company's</em> newly announced <a href="" target="_self">MCP 1000</a> honorees, last year joined Google[x], the Googly research arm, where she is now a senior user experience researcher who has recently been focused on the development of Google Glass.</p> <p><em>Fast Company</em> recently spoke with Takayama about what she's learned from watching Glass users in the wild--and lessons may apply equally to any technology aimed at a diverse and general audience.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Leila Takayama<span class="credit">Image: Flickr user <a href="" target="_blank">Pop Tech</a></span></figcaption> </figure> <p><strong>YOUR USERS AREN'T ALL LIKE YOU</strong></p> <p>The Google Glass team takes its products for a spin in various parts of the country, to see how people react to it in real life. "The first surprise was who walked in the door," says Takayama. "We were expecting the people to be extremely tech savvy--to kind of look like us Googlers. But what we actually saw were people who were much more diverse. They were people who were just sort of curious: 'Hey, here's a line outside a building--let's check out what's going on in there.'" It's important, says Takayama, not to "develop in a conference room."</p> <p><strong>THE CREATIVE WAYS PEOPLE USE YOUR PRODUCT MIGHT SURPRISE YOU</strong></p> <p>As soon as Glass got out into the world, Takayama and her colleagues were surprised to see its manifold uses. Glass had been viewed mainly as a utility for the busy and on-the-go, a kind of on-face extension of the smartphone. But many uses were more casual: "The camera was often used for capturing moments that otherwise it would be hard to capture, like when toddler needs help to walk," says Takayama. A whole new genre of pet video spawned--ones where the user had both hands free to play with and prompt their cat, dog, or hamster. Glass had more of a future in the domestic setting than many had initially imagined.</p> <p><strong>UNEXPECTED NICHE USERS OFFER NEW INSIGHTS</strong></p> <p>Too, Takayama and co. were surprised to find that markets that were already served by analogous products were nonetheless taking an interest in Glass. Take surgeons, for instance, who often operate with a camera trained on the site of incision--even <em>they</em> were finding uses for the device. Particularly when it came to education. "When you can see an operation from the surgeon's point of view, it's different from having a camera mounted at the site of the incision. Just being able to share the world in the way that you see it--Glass is really good for that." The bounciness of the video becomes the <em>point</em>--because the experience of actually operating on someone does, in fact, involve swiftly changing points of view.</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p><strong>DON'T PRE-DEFINE YOUR MARKET</strong></p> <p>Likewise, Google would have thought that fans of on-helmet cameras--there's a cottage industry of them, for extreme sports types who like to broadcast their adventures--would have no use for Glass. That market, Google figured, was already served. These cameras are often "super waterproof, super robust," says Takayama--surely a specialized market that Google couldn't crack. "You'd figure that niche industries that needed a heads-up display would already have it," is the way Takayama puts it--and the extreme sports community seemed like a case in point. "Yet many are adopting it for some reason," says Takayama, much to her surprise.</p> <p><strong>REACTIONS MATTER</strong></p> <p>In a sense, Google Glass's "users" include those <em>around</em> the person wearing them. Their reactions matter. This was a lesson Takayama learned early, when studying telepresence robots: she learned that "if you make a telepresence robot taller, more people are persuaded by you" (something Takayama, who counts herself as short, found particularly useful). As with a rolling avatar of yourself, so with the funny camera-looking thing affixed to your glasses: "With any of these computing technologies, where they're sort of mediating your experience in the world, it's going to change our interactions with each other," she notes.</p> <p><strong>LEARN TO THINK LIKE THE FASHIONABLE--EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT</strong></p> <p>Okay, <em>Vogue</em> editor Anna Wintour may not be trading in her famed shades and bob for a pair of Google's eyewear just yet. But in August, her magazine <a href="" target="_blank">did indeed feature</a> a photo spread on Google Glass and a "futuristic vision of fashion." Here, Takayama admits to being a little out of her depth, but as computers become wearable--and subject to all the trends and forces that "wearability" implies--the pages of fashion magazines become newly relevant to the field of "human-computer interaction." Takayama says she's not a fashionista herself, "but we do work with people who are, for sure. When I'm sitting in meetings with them, I feel like I can't compete." If you thought iPhones came out with infuriating regularity, just think of the whims of the stylish. "They know what colors are coming up next season, and I have no clue!" says Takayama. That's one thing she didn't learn when getting her Ph.D. at Stanford.</p> David Zax Mon, 03 Feb 2014 11:06 +0000 google google glass leila takayama Design Most Creative People Is This Story An Ad? <p>A few months ago, the Atlantic caught a drubbing. The media company, with its distinguished brand anchored by a 157-year-old magazine, made the mistake of running a piece of "sponsored content" with a headline about Scientology's "Milestone Year." Though a yellow rectangle above the post labeled it as "sponsor content," the post otherwise appeared like any other article on the website. Gawker <a href="" target="_blank">jumped on the story</a>; others followed; and the Atlantic soon <a href="" target="_blank">apologized</a>. It added, however, "We remain committed to and enthusiastic about innovation in digital advertising"--which is indeed a necessity for most media brands that want to stay afloat in this age.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Keya Dannenbaum</figcaption> </figure> <p>Keya Dannenbaum of <a href="" target="_blank">Versa</a> thinks she has the solution. Versa is a new platform that enables sponsored content to appear on websites in a way that she feels will satisfy editors, publishers, advertisers, and readers. After some months in beta with a select few partners, Versa announces $2 million in seed funding today, plus its intention to serve media brands and advertisers across the country.</p> <p>Versa works simply enough. Versa has publishers add a snippet of code to their site, which creates a space right below an article. When a publisher puts out a piece on a certain topic, Versa's alerts a network of organizations that may want to publish their take on the news, in a little box beneath the article. Placement and various design elements make it abundantly clear that the response is paid for. Versa calls it "the op-ed for the digital age."</p> <p>It's worth looking at one example up close. Take, for instance, this Oct. 18 RealClearPolitics article about Obamacare's software woes, by Michael Barone.</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>RealClearPolitics article about Obamacare's software woes, by Michael Barone.</figcaption> </figure> <p>Barone wrote the content with full journalistic integrity, and without any consideration of how the publishing side of things might try to monetize the content. Then Versa made a match: It knew that <a href="" target="_blank">Maxwell Health</a>, a company billing itself as an "operating system for employee benefits," wanted to establish itself as a "thought leader" in matters pertaining to health care, technology, and the like. Versa sold placement as a "Featured Perspective," took a cut, and gave RealClearPolitics the rest.</p> <p>The match could be made manually since Versa's current list of clients and partners is short; as that list grows, though, Versa will rely on proprietary technology that scours the web for content, prompting matches with organizations and allowing them to act quickly on getting a (paid) word in edgewise.</p> <p>Also worth noting is the "+Respect" button next to the Twitter link at the bottom of the ad. Dannenbaum says that that choice of wording emerges from findings from UT Austin's "Engaging News Project," to the effect that using words like "respect" helps moderate comments sections and enables "more cross-partisan appreciation for different points of view," in Dannenbaum's words. "It helps readers engage: 'Even if I disagree with this, I respect the argument.'"</p> <p>Versa represents an intriguing pivot from Dannenbaum's previous effort, a startup called ElectNext that helped users determine which political candidates best fit their own views (<a href="" target="_self">we called it an "OKCupid for Politics" in an earlier post</a>). Dannenbaum found that few users were visiting ElectNext as a standalone sight; however, ElectNext's embeddable widgets became popular on RealClearPolitics and other political news sites. As monetization became a more pressing issue, Dannenbaum and her team shifted their focus from the health of politics to the health of media, bringing to bear the expertise they'd gained in the world of widgetry and opinion.</p> <p>"Sponsored commentary is just one step in what I hope will be a company that produces multiple products," says Dannenbaum. "There's no question that making this move for Versa is a move in the direction of making the press stronger."</p> David Zax Thu, 30 Jan 2014 15:00 +0000 advertorial electnext keya dannenbaum most creative people publishing sponsored content versa Advertising Innovation Agents BBC Radio 1's "Head Of Visualization" On How To Get To A Million YouTube Followers <p>"You'd be hard-pressed to find a young person who asks for an analog radio for Christmas," admits Joe Harland, with wry British understatement. Harland works for <a href="" target="_blank">BBC Radio 1</a> as its "head of visualization." If that sounds like something of an oxymoron for a radio station, well, that's sort of the point.</p> <p>Though BBC Radio 1--a station launched in 1967 in response to the rock and roll pirate radio stations that sprung up--still has an audience of 11 million, "listening hours are going down," Harland acknowledges. And as radio faces the contraction--and distraction--of its traditional audience, it's Harland's job to find novel ways to engage listeners and attract new ones. In part, he does that by thinking of listeners as <em>viewers</em>.</p> <aside class="pullquote"><q>It's Harland's job to find novel ways to engage listeners and attract new ones</q></aside> <p>Because increasingly, as Harland's example shows, radio is something you <em>watch</em>.</p> <p>Last March, BBC Radio 1 had around 100,000 subscribers to <a href="" target="_blank"> its YouTube channel</a>. Harland made it known around the office that he would grow a kind of protest beard until the YouTube channel earned its millionth user. Over the months, his beard grew to Biblical proportions. "It will tickle and assault you in the night," he says to anyone thinking of growing out their own facial hair unrestrainedly. "You'll have to go shopping for particular types of beard wax, and drink through a straw."</p> <p>But last Sunday, the torture ended--the YouTube channel earned its millionth viewer, and BBC Radio 1's future in a digital age was fortified.</p> <p>How did he do it? And what--beyond questionable grooming strategies--should you bear in mind when trying to build a YouTube presence of your own? We caught up with Harland for a few dos and don'ts.</p> <figure class="inline-video inline"><iframe src=";autoplay=0" width="560" height="340" frameborder="0"></iframe></figure> <h4><a name="iDonti_Try_To_Create_A_Viral_Hit"><em>Don't</em> Try To Create A Viral Hit</a></h4> <p>"I've never met anybody who said, 'I'm gonna create a viral hit!'--and then did," muses Harland. "If people try to make a viral hit, it's hard to stop that from smelling like marketing, and the moment an audience smells marketing on a video, you'll struggle."</p> <aside class="pullquote"><q>I've never met anybody who said, 'I'm gonna create a viral hit!'--and then did</q></aside> <p>And yet, there are exceptions to every rule, he says. "When Miley Cyrus's '<a href="" target="_blank">Wrecking Ball</a>' came out, the team gave itself 24 hours to create a good spoof. It became a viral hit, and indeed got 4.5 million views."</p> <p>It turned out that there was only one wrecking ball in London. "The builder's yard we used were deluged with phone calls, but we had got there first."</p> <h4><a name="iDonti_Engage_In_Random_Acts_Of_Digital"><em>Don't</em> Engage In "Random Acts Of Digital"</a></h4> <p>"In the past we've made some mistakes where a presenter may think, 'I have an idea for a thing! I'll just film myself trying on hats! Isn't that funny? And I'll post it online.'" But this is an old media mindset: Online is not merely a dumping ground for the miscellaneous secretions of your whimsy.</p> <aside class="pullquote"><q>If what I'm watching is an afterthought, where the camera was just left running--then that's what I'd deem a random act of digital</q></aside> <p>"If you haven't carefully considered your visual content, how you're going to surface it, how shareable it will be, and how the audience will engage with it--if what I'm watching is an afterthought, where the camera was just left running--then that's what I'd deem a random act of digital." And it just won't work.</p> <h4><a name="iDoi_Remain_True_To_Your_Brand"><em>Do</em> Remain True To Your Brand</a></h4> <p>"We work very hard not to post clickbait or to try to jump on a meme, because that isn't true to our values," says Harland. At the same time, you've got to "nail the art of compromise," he adds. After all, radio is an auditory medium, first and foremost--but sometimes it's beneficial to do something on air that affords a good visual for YouTube rebroadcasting. "You might have to compromise that little bit to get a good visual," he says.</p> <p>Interviews, too, are changed by the presence of a video camera--and not always for the better. "If there are no cameras, you are much more likely to get beneath the skin [of your interview subject]." Still, if Kanye or Jay-Z is coming into the studio, you'd be a fool not to roll cameras on them.</p> <h4><a name="iDoi_Play_The_Game"><em>Do</em> Play The Game</a></h4> <p>BBC Radio 1 hired several personalities who already had a YouTube following and brought them into the BBC Radio 1 fold.</p> <p>While it's important to stay true to your brand's voice, it's also important to pay close attention to nuances between your audiences on different platforms. For example: While the radio audience might prefer recorded hip-hop music, Harland has found that his YouTube audience especially digs hip-hop <em>freestyling</em>. Go figure.</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Joe Harland</figcaption> </figure> <h4><a name="biDoi_Cut_Your_Beard_On_The_Air_When_Youve_Achieved_Victoryb"><strong><em>Do</em> Cut Your Beard On The Air When You've Achieved Victory</strong></a></h4> <p>Okay, this one may be particular to the experience of Harland himself, who wound up "looking like a druid" by the end of his stunt.</p> <p>A couple of YouTube stars that BBC Radio 1 had brought within the fold--a pair of baby-faced fellows who go by the handles "<a href="" target="_blank">Amazing Phil</a>" and "<a href="" target="_blank">Dan Is Not on Fire</a>"--had the honor of shaving Harland's face, live. "They took it in turns," says Harland, who found the experience somewhat harrowing. "I don't trust those guys with razors. They've never shaved in their lives."</p> David Zax Mon, 27 Jan 2014 14:00 +0000 bbc radio 1 joe harland youtube Technology Most Creative People One Therapist's Diagnosis--And Prescription--For The Overworked Masses Of Silicon Valley <p>What is it like to be a therapist in Silicon Valley?</p> <p>For Dr. Stephanie Brown, it's been a lot like being a therapist much anywhere else: you're surrounded by patients ravaged by addiction. Yet Brown, who has a specialty in counseling substance abusers, thinks she has identified a new form of addiction, one endemic to Silicon Valley and other stress-filled corners of the country. It's an addiction to "speed"--not methamphetamines, but to an overall rushed rhythm of life that is spiraling out of control.</p> <p>Her book is <em><a href="" target="_blank">Speed: Facing Our Addiction to Fast and Faster--and Overcoming Our Fear of Slowing Down</a></em>. <em>Fast Company</em> caught up with Brown to talk about addiction, overwork, and the ways our society behaves like a bunch of impulse-driven toddlers.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Stephanie Brown<span class="credit">Photo by Layla Mandella</span></figcaption> </figure> <p><strong>FAST COMPANY: So your book, <em>Speed</em>, is not a novelization of the Keanu Reeves movie.</strong></p> <p>STEPHANIE BROWN: It's about the fast pace of life that has spread through America and is spreading through the world. It was born in Silicon Valley, where I live. In the last 20 years, there's been a revolution, a radical shift in the pace of life. What I see is the ravages of an addiction that has encompassed our culture with this sense of the need to go faster and faster.</p> <p><strong>I think many readers may balk at the notion that we're really "addicted" to speed--not the drug, but simply the pace of life. Some people begin to feel we're experiencing a kind of addiction inflation. And yet you're not someone to use this terminology lightly, are you?</strong></p> <p>I identify as a recovering alcoholic, and I am a researcher of AA and of people in AA. What I describe in the book is an in-depth theory about why I think this is an addiction, why I think society has gotten out of control--and that's what an addiction is. Society now readily operates at the level of three- and four-year-olds: the idea that you should operate on impulse, not stop and think, that you should keep moving or you'll fall behind. The dynamics of it become an addiction. People are no longer pausing to say, "Wait a minute. What am I doing here? What happens if I wait 15 minutes and don't respond to this right away?"</p> <p><strong>Is there a test for whether one is "addicted" to speed or not?</strong></p> <p>No. But people will be able to diagnose themselves. The book has been out a week, and people area already saying, "Holy cow, this is me. Oh my gosh. I don't listen to my children anymore." This is why I think the addiction framework is very valuable. This is not just a minor tweaking we need to take on here.</p> <p><strong>You link the addiction to speed with workaholism in your book. But surely hard work is valuable, no?</strong></p> <p>I don't contest the value of high achievement or of work. But we've gotten caught up in our preference for outcome, and we don't understand the value of process. We think in terms of, "The team won or the team lost." Everyone is looking for the next hit. As a culture we've come to value this kind of dichotomous thinking, but that kind of thinking is characteristic really of a younger developmental level--eight-, nine-, ten-year-olds. I think we need to redefine success.</p> <p><strong>Your book chronicles the story of "Jack" and "Maureen," a married couple who seem successful--at least on paper.</strong></p> <p>They come out to the West Coast. One takes a job in the startup world, another in a stable company. Together they forge a life in the fast lane. But then they begin to have trouble with their pace of living. They're always on "go," up early, up late, pushing, pushing, pushing, fancier cars, a bigger house. But they're not stopping to think. They're not reflecting very much. Jack eventually has trouble in the workplace. He makes too many mistakes, and the boss and team say, "You need to take time off." Only through this forced slowing down--which at first he thinks is terrible--is he able to think, "Hold on a minute. What am I missing?"</p> <p><strong>Jack winds up getting advice from a friend, "Raj," who has faced substance addiction. Do you believe the <a href="" target="_blank">DSM-V</a>, say, will include your notion of "speed addiction" in the way that earlier editions of the DSM include specifications for drug addiction?</strong></p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p>I don't know. I think there's a huge problem with the DSM anyway. I think we're not at a point now where we should be reducing it, trying to define it. What I try to do in the book is to describe it, so the reader would say, "That's me," but not necessarily sign themselves into a treatment center. We should not start reducing it. We're just beginning to identify it.</p> <p><strong>You've treated all sorts of Silicon Valley types over the years. So who's crazier: hackers or venture capitalists?</strong></p> <p>We're all in this together. At the beginning of the book I talk about recovering alcoholics who look at people who can drink without trouble as "normies." But we don't have any "normies" left--not the tech people, not the VC people. It's the entire culture. The whole culture lives out of control now. And we need to have a conversation about it.</p> <p><em>This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.</em></p> <p><strong>Related: "'<a href="" target="_self">Alone Together': An MIT Professor's Book Urges Us To Unplug</a>"</strong></p> David Zax Fri, 17 Jan 2014 11:06 +0000 stephanie brown work life balance Work/Life Most Creative People With YesGraph, Finding Tech Talent Is As Easy As Using Tinder <p>They go by different names. Some companies call them "searchlight meetings." Others call them "total recall sessions." Ivan Kirigin first got to know these meetings when he worked at Facebook a few years ago. A hiring manager would bring in Facebook employees, tell them they were looking to hire an engineer or designer, and would ask everyone present to write down the names and contact information for the best job candidates they could think of.</p> <p>It was important work--referral recruiting is a tried and true way to scale a business--but tedious. "Sluggish meetings with people sitting around and looking at their laptops," is how Kirigin describes them. Some companies, says Kirigin, have taken measures to liven up such meetings. One startup used beer and fondue to add a party atmosphere. He's heard that Twitter once raffled off free iPads to make such meetings more appetizing.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Ivan Kirigin</figcaption> </figure> <p>But Kirigin thinks there's a better way, which is why he and his team created <a href="" target="_blank">YesGraph</a>, which digitizes the "searchlight meeting" and makes it easier to manage. YesGraph announces a $1.3 million funding round today.</p> <p>The web application is fairly simple. A recruiter sends out an invite to people on his or her staff, asking for referrals. Those employees then can connect simply through Facebook and LinkedIn, and YesGraph automatically culls the most apt connections (people who've listed engineering as their professions for an engineering job, for instance). YesGraph pulls up these people one by one, and your employee can very quickly say "Yes"--this person's a good one--or pass.</p> <p>"We're joking about building a mobile app that would be 'Tinder for referrals,'" says Kirigin. But it's not far off. Like the famous dating app, the wheat-from-chaff separation is practically as easy as swiping left or right. "The feed is almost gamified," says Kirigin.</p> <p>In an age where competitors use algorithms to crawl LinkedIn for words like "engineer" and "Ruby on Rails," YesGraph aims to find a happy medium between the technological and the human. "There are a lot of tools whose hubris makes them ignore the human element of this," says Kirigin. "The software you write probably is not as smart as actual humans. We make it really easy to get that human involved."</p> <p>Referral recruiting is still a favored method of human resources. According to <a href="" target="_blank">HR pros and surveys</a>, a referral is less costly to hire and is more likely to stick around in a job. "At the very least, your employees are a good talent filter," says Kirigin. "If you ask people you trust and have already hired, 'Who do you know who's really good?'" then you're bound to get results, he says. And on the side of the candidate, a referral creates a warmer introduction that's more likely lure that talented candidate from what may be a position she's already quite happy with.</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>YesGraph Feed</figcaption> </figure> <p>Talk to Kirigin long enough, and soon he has you visualizing the social network that is the workplace entirely differently. New hires, for instance, are in some ways the most valuable when it comes to seeking out further candidates, since their networks are "freshest" (in a few years, their professional contacts will mostly be from within your own organization).</p> <p>And although employees often stop making referrals after a few years, Kirigin says that's not simply because their networks are "tapped out." Rather, it's because a lack of transparency in the hiring process may have led to an awkward conversation with a friend who was recommended, but never hired. ("Hey, Bill, whatever happened with ... Oh, I'm sorry, no, they didn't tell me ...") Kirigin hopes to develop a tracking system within YesGraph, so an employee can follow the fate of a referral and cue the appropriate social graces should that person not be hired.</p> <p>"I've built a lot of social products over the years," says Kirigin, who also led growth at Dropbox, "and most recruiters don't think about social graphs intelligently yet." One of Kirigin's visions may be most frightening to those who believe a pure meritocracy should trump clubby college networks. Eventually, he thinks recruiters will begin to consider the network that a candidate would bring along with him, if hired. "Facebook was very strong at Harvard and Stanford, but weak at CMU [Carnegie Mellon]," when it comes to recruiting, he says. "Whereas Dropbox was good at MIT, but needed to grow CMU and Stanford."</p> <p>The vision takes "It's not what you know, it's who you know," to a whole new level. Wouldn't that be not unlike JPMorgan Chase's slimy "<a href="" target="_blank">Sons and Daughters</a>" program in China, I ask? "I think it's a bit of a sensitive topic, and I'm not suggesting companies do 100% of their hiring from referrals," says Kirigin. "You have to think of the DNA of a company, to find the right balance. I'd say most companies don't do a good enough job scaling referrals right now."</p> <p><strong>Related: <a href="" target="_self">"What If You Could 'Date' Companies?"</a></strong></p> David Zax Wed, 15 Jan 2014 17:00 +0000 hiring ivan kirigin yesgraph Careers Most Creative People How Facebook Makes Inroads In The Developing World <p>Chris Daniels will never forget the day he had to buy a car in Zambia.</p> <p>It was 1993, and Daniels was high-school age. Though Daniels grew up in Vienna, Virginia, he spent part of that year working for his mother, who ran a World Bank-sponsored entrepreneurship-development project in the East African country. And on this day, Daniels--now the VP of business development at Facebook--was sent to buy a car in Lusaka, the capital.</p> <p>In Zambia back then, the highest bank note you could get was for 500 Zambian kwacha--a sum worth around 70 cents at the time. And you could only buy a car in cash. "To buy a car in Zambia, you'd go to the bank in the morning, fill duffels full of cash, go across town to the car dealership, and purchase the car with the duffels of cash," Daniels recalls. The process took a day, because all the money had to be counted. "I remember the monotony of putting every single bundle of 500 kwacha bills through the machine, hearing them flip through, then doing it over and over." It was a day wasted--"for me, for the dealership, and for the bank," says Daniels. He couldn't help but think, If there were better banking here, and technology to support it, "people could be more productive and live better lives."</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Chris Daniels</figcaption> </figure> <p>Now, at Facebook, Daniels feels he's doing just that--bringing the technology to help people live better lives around the world. A central pillar of Daniels's job is to work together with cellular carriers around the world, to help the next few billions of people to come online. "1.19 billion monthly active users, that's a lot of people," says Daniels, citing Facebook's current numbers. "But when you consider there are another 8 or 9 billion out there, there's a lot of work left to do."</p> <p>Over the past few months, Facebook has announced new partnerships with two carriers, Globe in the Philippines and Tigo in Paraguay, partly the fruits of Daniels's travels and negotiations. He's been to the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, South Africa, and to Europe just in the past few months.</p> <p>Depending on where a country is in its evolution towards connectivity, the needs of the market may be vastly different, he says. In the Philippines, for instance, 80% of the country still uses feature phones. Since many in the country live from paycheck to paycheck, they'll buy chunks of data throughout the month rather than pay a monthly fee for broader access. Yet even as they earn more money, these consumers' behaviors are often entrenched. A carrier like Globe, then, is asking itself questions like, "How do we get people to become habitual data users?" and "How do we get people to update to Android from their current phones?" says Daniels.</p> <p>So Globe and Facebook struck up a partnership that the two deem mutually beneficial, as well as good for consumers. In many parts of the world, says Daniels, more people claim to want "Facebook" than "the Internet." The latter is sometimes a fuzzy concept to them, but they are familiar with the Facebook brand and intuitively understand the idea of socializing online. Capitalizing on this brand recognition, some international carriers offer free use of Facebook over their networks, meaning a Filipino consumer can browse the social network freely without eating up data. When they click on a link to explore the Internet at large, Facebook delivers a message explaining that they're free to do so--<em>if</em> they buy a data plan from the carrier.</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/> </figure> <p>For people in the developing world, "Facebook is an on-ramp to the Internet," says Daniels.</p> <p>This component of Daniels's job goes hand in hand with a relatively new initiative spun out of Facebook. <a href="" target="_blank"></a> is a collaboration between Facebook and other corporate partners to help <a href="" target="_self">drive digital penetration</a> for the next 5 billion people--making access to data more affordable and finding business models that allow connectivity to surge across the digital divide. "A lot of the work that myself and my team do is in the spirit of and contributes to," explains Daniels.</p> <p>Zuckerberg and Daniels claim an altruistic motive behind and Facebook's international exploits, saying the company's mission is to make the world more open and connected. There's inevitably a business case, too, to make sure that Facebook is a beneficiary of that connectivity. Though Facebook's global social-networking reign seems all but unstoppable, it's worth remembering that new markets, where local tastes and first-mover advantages can be influential, are idiosyncratic. For instance, in Peru, Inca Kola remains a stronghold against Coca-Cola's global conquest. Daniels points to Russia's <a href="" target="_blank"></a> as a viable competitor to Facebook in some parts of the world.</p> <p>But his global travels can't help but reassure Daniels of Facebook's prominence. In Indonesia, Daniels saw the Facebook logo posted on storefronts just about as often as he'd seen the Coke logo in Zambia 20 years ago. Many stores don't have web presences apart from their Facebook page.</p> <p>It all serves to remind him of how far emerging markets have come since the time he spent in Zambia. In a rural corner of the Philippines, he recently tested out how difficult it would be to buy a phone and data plan and to get Facebook up and running. He feared a laborious process, along the lines of his Zambian car purchase all those years ago.</p> <p>He needn't have feared. He was up and running in a matter of minutes. "Outside of Manila, in a relatively rural village, it's actually really easy to buy a phone and get Facebook up and running," he muses. "That's <em>awesome</em>."</p> David Zax Tue, 14 Jan 2014 11:06 +0000 chris daniels facebook Responsible Business Most Creative People The Subscription Economy's Secret Weapon <p>Movies used to be something you paid for in one of three ways. You went to the theater, you bought a DVD, or you rented one at the local Blockbuster. Today, though, hardly anyone thinks of paying for movies that way. When most people are budgeting for their monthly movie expenses, they might factor in a theater visit or two, but mostly they're thinking in terms of a monthly subscription to Netflix for $8 (and maybe a comparable amount pitched in for Hulu Plus, for TV junkies).</p> <p>In the sharing economy, people's identities as consumers are shifting--and not just for movies. As the Internet enables new ways of distributing things--and new ways of connecting services to physical objects--the identity of "subscriber" may soon occupy the majority part of your brain you use to pay the bills.</p> <p>This is the insight at the heart of <a href="" target="_blank">Zuora</a>, a subscription commerce company founded in 2007 by Tien Tzuo, who was employee #11 at Salesforce. While Netflix itself isn't a Zuora customer, other heavyweights like Dell, Box, News Corp., and Dollar Shave Club are. Each of them leans on Zuora to help manage their subscription billing services.</p> <p>It's a task more complex than you might think. Managing subscriptions could be a real headache without Zuora, claims Tzuo. How exactly should you price your product? How do you build a payment infrastructure to allow for price changes? How do you process payments internationally? How do you manage the legal issues that surround storing credit cards? Though other payment companies--<a href="" target="_self">Braintree, for instance</a>--tackle some of these problems, Zuora professes to tackle all of them, in a way tailored for the subscription economy.</p> <p>Can't companies just handle all this themselves, I ask? "Sure, you can tell your developers to build anything," says Tzuo. "But then you realize that 10%, 20%, or more of your engineering capacity is spent doing this stuff, versus working on innovations, improving your service."</p> <p>Venture capital, at any rate, sees big business here, having poured <a href="" target="_blank">$128 million</a> into the company to date (most recently, in September, a $50 million round). That might seem a ludicrous amount of money, but Zuora's value proposition has become all the more convincing with the rise of cloud computing, in which just about <em>everything</em> could be subscribed to, in one way or another.</p> <p>Even the most unlikely businesses are shifting their identities, as they move away from selling <em>stuff</em> and toward selling services related to that stuff. One of Tzuo's clients, for instance, once sold a medical scanner to hospitals for $200,000. A few years back, it was necessary to house a lot of high-tech equipment directly on the device. But now, most of the image-processing can be done in the cloud, using <a href="" target="_self">services like Amazon</a>. The company now sells the device for $50,000, and charges a monthly service fee for data processing.</p> <p>A vast array of devices are similarly becoming connected--you may have heard of the so-called "<a href="" target="_self">Internet of things</a>"--which opens up a subscription pricing model for each of them. Tzuo lists other clients: a company that once merely sold car-mounted cameras, but now can offer monthly data and analysis about what those cameras capture. A copier that figures out how much paper you use, and orders replacements automatically. Even an ankle bracelet company (of the variety used on felons, not tweens) uses Zuora, charging a buck a day or so for GPS and other services. It's something like "given 'em the razor, sell 'em the blades" for the cloud-computing generation.</p> <p>As an end user, this raises questions. When my toaster is Internet-enabled, will I really want to pay a nickel per use? Tzuo quickly counters, and his mind soon spins to places mine never would have gone. First he wonders if a freemium model might work--most people don't pay anything, but "high-value toasters" (restaurants, perhaps?) do. Then he hits it: "Or maybe someone comes along and says, it doesn't make sense to pay five cents a toast, but we're a home automation company, and if you pay us $20 a month, we take care of all your appliances and you don't have to think about it anymore."</p> <p>It all comes back to the idea of identity--whether consumers are ready to shift their identities from "owners" to "subscribers." When a company makes their lives easier, the answer is invariably yes.</p> David Zax Fri, 10 Jan 2014 11:06 +0000 internet of things netflix pricing Subscriptions tien tzuo zuora Technology Innovation Agents A Plan To Tackle Florida's Python Problem, One Luxury Handbag At A Time <p>When Camille Zarsky was growing up in Houston, she used to spend weekends working on her family's ranch outside the city. "I used to find snake skins on the property," she says. "I had this infatuation with snakes. I loved the beauty of the skin." So when Zarsky, now 28 and a designer in New York, launched a <a href="" target="_blank">luxury handbag brand</a> a few years ago, she decided to make about a fifth of her collection out of python skins, and the rest out of leather. When she found that only the python pieces sold out, she pivoted the brand to focus entirely on python.</p> <p>Business boomed. She called up her father to tell him of her success with the handbags. He said, "If you're going to go the route of pythons, you should consider Florida."</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Camille Zarsky</figcaption> </figure> <p>Currently, Zarsky sources her pythons from Europe, where there is a centuries-old tradition of tanning and dyeing the skins, which it sources from Asia. What Zarsky <em>père</em> was getting at was the fact that if his daughter could shift her python sourcing to Florida, her business would also be helping to solve a major ecological problem there.</p> <p>In the past decades, the Everglades, where the invasive species now thrives without a predator, have developed a serious python problem. Theories about the problem's origin vary; one is that illegal, exotic pets may have escaped, then multiplied. The python problem has become so great that Florida recently sponsored a "<a href="" target="_blank">Python Challenge</a>," to encourage amateur hunters to go after the beasts.</p> <p>At first, Zarsky didn't make too much of her father's suggestion. But coincidentally, her bags soon became especially popular in Florida, and Zarsky found herself down at a Palm Beach boutique called Style So Chic promoting her bags. A woman at the sale told Zarsky a story about a friend's dog who was "almost eaten" by a python, right in her friend's backyard. The problem suddenly became more vivid to Zarsky, who decided to start looking into sourcing python from Florida in earnest. "I love the idea of eliminating a problem and creating beautiful works of art," she says.</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Camille Zarsky Line of Bags</figcaption> </figure> <p>But as much as Zarsky would love to have a product that is 100% made in the U.S. and solves a problem to boot, her actual path forward remains as murky as Florida swamp.</p> <p>She began as you'd imagine--by Googling "python hunter." Soon, she and several of her employees, elegant young women who more typically found themselves on the phone with luxury retailers, were setting up Skype dates with a suite of Crocodile Dundee types who make a hobby or career out of hunting snakes.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Ruben Ramirez</figcaption> </figure> <p>Zarsky struck up a bond with a licensed python hunter named Ruben Ramirez. "I get texts from him that literally say, 'Hey Camille, how about this one, do you like it? I caught it last night.' And it's a photo of him standing in a swamp with a python in his arms," says Zarsky. "He's in rubber boots and a wife beater and jeans, and you can see there's a knife in his pocket, like something out of a movie."</p> <p>While Ramirez and others have produced skins to her liking, she has yet to find a tannery that can tan and dye the skins to her specifications. "Tanning hides is an art form, and to do it properly you need millions of dollars worth of equipment," she explains. She could export the skins to Europe and import them back again, but the taxes she'd have to pay would double the price of her bags, which already retail, on average, for $1,200 (a large tote using three python skins runs $5,500).</p> <figure class="inline-video inline"> <iframe height="360" width="640" src="" id="videoEmbedTwistage1" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe><figcaption>Ruben Ramirez captures a Python<span class="credit">Video courtesy of Ruben Ramirez</span></figcaption> </figure> <p>Zarsky's story of an innovative idea stymied reveals some of the real-life challenges for a well-meaning entrepreneur who'd like to source locally and leverage business to solve an environmental problem. But while the goal remains elusive, she says she's up to the challenge--she'd particularly like to find a high-quality tanner in Florida, if she can, and plans to dedicate more time this year to the pursuit. She even hopes to accompany Ramirez on a hunt herself, soon.</p> <p>"I'm not scared," Zarsky says. Her dad prepared her for this, too. At the ranch, colonies of water moccasins would slither out of the lakes and sun themselves on a little piece of land they called Snake Island. She and her dad went out there summers with a shotgun. "I had a unique childhood," she says.</p> David Zax Tue, 07 Jan 2014 11:06 +0000 camille zarsky fashion handbags pythons Brands Most Creative People DeliverLean, The Startup Automating Willpower For Lazy Dieters And Productivity Chasers <p>Some years back, Scott Harris was running a call center, and he was trying to figure out how to make his employees more productive. What he found was that the lunch hour was the real slump--not so much the lunch hour itself, he recalls, but the half-hour spent beforehand figuring out where to go, and the hour spent readjusting once his workers had returned. So Harris decided to do something that might seem like a luxury: he brought in a chef to make food for the workers, and to feed them small, healthy, more frequent portions. Productivity soared, and a business idea was born.</p> <p><a href="" target="_blank">DeliverLean</a> is now spreading something like his call-center solution to companies in a 150-mile radius of Boca Raton, Florida. It's not alone in the land grab for hungry workers--<a href="" target="_self">Blue Apron</a>, <a href="" target="_self">Fooda</a>, <a href="" target="_self">Munchery</a>, and <a href="" target="_self">Spoonrocket</a>, among many others, all cater to time-pressed professionals who want to eat better. But it is growing quickly--in just two and a half years, DeliverLean has gone from 5,000 meals a month at launch to more than 100,000 meals a month today.</p> <figure class="inline-small inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Scott Harris</figcaption> </figure> <p>Most DeliverLean meals are based on a four-ounce serving of a lean protein source, plus a complex carbohydrate and a vegetable. (All manner of modifications are available, for the vegetarians, vegans, gluten-avoidant, and so forth.) "Each meal is calorically balanced and weighed, which eliminates the guesswork," explains Harris. The service is something of a hybrid of a diet plan and <a href="" target="_self">restaurant delivery scheme</a>--and yet it's neither. "It's sold more as a lifestyle," says Harris, a notion evident from the company's promotional videos.</p> <p>"We have three different real sources of business," says Harris. The first is direct-to-consumer. The second is businesses like Harris's old call center, who view the meal plan as a form of corporate wellness (<a href="" target="_self">similar to something like built-in exercise breaks</a>), and may foot all or part of the bill for their employees. And the third, surprisingly, is the medical community, which Harris says makes up almost a third of its business. Doctors often prescribe diets, of course--but many people lack the time, competence, or discipline to stick to one.</p> <p>All of which makes January, the season of dietary and health resolutions, payday for a company like DeliverLean. "Most people who go on diets tend not to stick to them," says Harris. "But this is lifestyle, and it could be something you're on for a very long time."</p> <figure class="inline-large inline"> <img src="//" alt=""/><figcaption>Meal Plans</figcaption> </figure> <aside class="pullquote"><q>DeliverLean all but automates willpower.</q></aside> <p>Convenience is obviously a factor in the company's success. Meals are delivered every two days in a insulated cooler bag in the wee hours, like a newspaper of old. The number of meals in your bag will be determined by your plan, of course--if you've signed up for four meals a day, you'll find eight. Call it a "frictionless resolution"; DeliverLean all but automates willpower. It needn't break the bank, either (depending, of course, on the size of your bank): the four-meal-a-day plan, for instance, prices a meal at eight bucks.</p> <p>Harris's New Year's resolution, it would seem--like a lot of entrepreneurs--is expansion. He says the company has just found space in New York from which to launch the company's next phase. "Ideally we'd like to be a national presence," he says, adding he also has his eyes trained on the health-happy West Coast.</p> <p>He hopes to find more influence, too, within that medical community that already offers so many referrals. The biggest hope is to "break into health insurance," he says, marketing his company as something like a gym membership, which in some cases can reduce premiums. "Most illness stems from food-related issues" in Harris's opinion, citing grim <a href="" target="_blank">statistics on obesity and diabetes</a>. "We're not eating food. We're eating food-like substances."</p> David Zax Fri, 03 Jan 2014 11:06 +0000 deliverlean food food delivery food startups scott harris Technology Innovation Agents