Jeff Bezos Defends the Fire Phone’s Flop and Amazon’s Dismal Earnings

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos watches a video presentation from the wings during the launch of the new Amazon Fire Phone, Wednesday, June 18, 2014. Ted S. Warren/AP

Jeff Bezos is accustomed to praise. A never-ending stream of news stories, magazine features, books, and TV profiles celebrate the Amazon founder and CEO as one of the brightest minds in tech. But at Business Insider’s annual Ignition conference on Tuesday, Bezos found himself in the hot seat, as Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget grilled him about Amazon’s year to date.

“Henry, you’re exhausting me,” Bezos joked on stage, and with good reason. Though Bezos is an investor in Business Insider, a popular news website, Blodget pulled no punches, and it’s been a rather rocky year for Amazon.

Just recently, Amazon reported major losses for the third quarter of its financial year, a tough blow, even for an operation that has traditionally chosen reinvestment in new ideas over turning a profit. Then there’s the Fire Phone, Amazon’s first entry into the smartphone market, which has been largely considered a flop, and is now being sold for 99 cents on a two-year contract, after debuting at $199 each.

‘Henry, you’re exhausting me,’ Bezos joked, and with good reason.

Meanwhile, the company has spent much of this year waging war with Hachette over e-book pricing, which has turned some long-time Amazon customers against the company, believing that Amazon undervalues the very people who built the company in the first place: authors. And oh yeah, what about that whole drone delivery thing, which the press chastised as little more than a publicity stunt?

Bezos had lots of explaining to do, and he did so primarily by emphasizing that Amazon is a company that has always embraced failure—sometimes lots of it—in order to achieve major success. “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally,” he said.

“None of those things are fun, but also they don’t matter. What matters is companies that don’t continue to experiment or embrace failure eventually get in the position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets.”

‘It’s a Volatile Stock’

Bezos dismissed Amazon’s dismal third quarter earnings as a blip on the radar, saying he believes Amazon’s future will be so long that even what many investors consider to be a substantial fluctuation is tiny in the long run. He added that managing a company explicitly to meet quarterly expectations “would be a mistake.”

“If you look at our stock price over a year, five years, ten years, it all looks pretty great,” he said. “It’s a volatile stock. It always has been. It probably will be. We’re a large company, but in many ways because of all our emerging businesses, we’re still a startup, and there’s a lot of volatility with startups.”

The Fire Phone? ‘Stay Tuned’

That was also his argument as to why Amazon is still unprofitable, despite having what Bezos says are “very significant, very profitable” lines of business. “It’s like we built this lemonade stand 20 years ago,” he explained. “It’s become very profitable, but we decided to use our skills for a hamburger stand and a hotdog stand and so on.”

And those bets, Bezos said, take longer than a few months to succeed or fail. Case in point: the Fire Phone. Bezos stopped short of admitting that Amazon’s smartphone has been a complete failure, but he didn’t blindly herald it as a success either. “I think it takes more time to analyze something like that,” he said, urging the audience to “stay tuned.”

‘Books Are Overpriced’

Bezos was much less ambivalent about the recent dispute with Hachette, however, which ended recently with the publisher winning the right to set its own prices. Despite the resolution, Bezos maintained his argument that books are overpriced, and that authors and publishers would all be better off if they cost less.

“If we want a healthy culture of reading book-length things, we’ve got to make books more accessible and part of that is making them less expensive,” Bezos said. “If you make it more affordable, it’s not going to make authors less money. It’s going to make authors more money.”

Drones, Drones, and More Drones

The conversation also drifted toward Amazon’s interest in drone deliveries, which Bezos announced last winter. Bezos said the so-called Prime Air team is still hard at work on a new iteration of its drone, even though he predicted that the United States will likely fall behind other countries in its adoption of commercial drone technology.

Bezos explained that he feels justified in pursuing these wacky ideas because that is what he set out to do all along. “You have to be super clear about what kind of company you’re trying to build,” he said. “We said we were going to take big bets. We said we were going to fail.”

The Successor

He seems to believe that because Amazon is still trying new things, and sometimes failing, it’s as alive and vibrant as ever. But trusting that instinct may be Bezos’s riskiest bet yet. He admitted, however, that one big reason Amazon is able to take this approach is because he is still its CEO.

“I can do some things at Amazon that would be hard for other people to do, only because of my history with the company,” Bezos explained. That said, he also confessed that he does have a successor picked out should he have to hand over the reigns someday. Who has he chosen? It’s a “secret.”

Jeff Bezos Defends the Fire Phone’s Flop and Amazon’s Dismal Earnings

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos watches a video presentation from the wings during the launch of the new Amazon Fire Phone, Wednesday, June 18, 2014. Ted S. Warren/AP

Jeff Bezos is accustomed to praise. A never-ending stream of news stories, magazine features, books, and TV profiles celebrate the Amazon founder and CEO as one of the brightest minds in tech. But at Business Insider’s annual Ignition conference on Tuesday, Bezos found himself in the hot seat, as Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget grilled him about Amazon’s year to date.

“Henry, you’re exhausting me,” Bezos joked on stage, and with good reason. Though Bezos is an investor in Business Insider, a popular news website, Blodget pulled no punches, and it’s been a rather rocky year for Amazon.

Just recently, Amazon reported major losses for the third quarter of its financial year, a tough blow, even for an operation that has traditionally chosen reinvestment in new ideas over turning a profit. Then there’s the Fire Phone, Amazon’s first entry into the smartphone market, which has been largely considered a flop, and is now being sold for 99 cents on a two-year contract, after debuting at $199 each.

‘Henry, you’re exhausting me,” Bezos joked, and with good reason.

Meanwhile, the company has spent much of this year waging war with Hachette over e-book pricing, which has turned some long time Amazon customers against the company, believing that Amazon undervalues the very people who built the company in the first place: authors. And oh yeah, what about that whole drone delivery thing, which the press chastised as little more than a publicity stunt?

Bezos had lots of explaining to do, and he did so primarily by emphasizing that Amazon is a company that has always embraced failure—sometimes lots of it—in order to achieve major success. “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally,” he said.

“None of those things are fun, but also they don’t matter. What matters is companies that don’t continue to experiment or embrace failure eventually get in the position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets.”

‘It’s a Volatile Stock’

Bezos dismissed Amazon’s dismal third quarter earnings as a blip on the radar, saying he believes Amazon’s future will be so long that even what many investors consider to be a substantial fluctuation is tiny in the long run. He added that managing a company explicitly to meet quarterly expectations “would be a mistake.”

“If you look at our stock price over a year, five years, ten years, it all looks pretty great,” he said. “It’s a volatile stock. It always has been. It probably will be. We’re a large company, but in many ways because of all our emerging businesses, we’re still a startup, and there’s a lot of volatility with startups.”

The Fire Phone? ‘Stay Tuned’

That was also his argument as to why Amazon is still unprofitable, despite having what Bezos says are “very significant, very profitable” lines of business. “It’s like we built this lemonade stand 20 years ago,” he explained. “It’s become very profitable, but we decided to use our skills for a hamburger stand and a hotdog stand and so on.”

And those bets, Bezos said, take longer than a few months to succeed or fail. Case in point: the Fire Phone. Bezos stopped short of admitting that Amazon’s smartphone has been a complete failure, but he didn’t blindly herald it as a success either. “I think it takes more time to analyze something like that,” he said, urging the audience to “stay tuned.”

‘Books Are Overpriced’

Bezos was much less ambivalent about the recent dispute with Hachette, however, which ended recently with the publisher winning the right to set its own prices. Despite the resolution, Bezos maintained his argument that books are overpriced, and that authors and publishers would all be better off if they cost less.

“If we want a healthy culture of reading book-length things, we’ve got to make books more accessible and part of that is making them less expensive,” Bezos said. “If you make it more affordable, it’s not going to make authors less money. It’s going to make authors more money.”

Drones, Drones, and More Drones

The conversation also drifted toward Amazon’s interest in drone deliveries, which Bezos announced last winter. Bezos said the so-called Prime Air team is still hard at work on a new iteration of its drone, even though he predicted that the United States will likely fall behind other countries in its adoption of commercial drone technology.

Bezos explained that he feels justified in pursuing these wacky ideas because that is what he set out to do all along. “You have to be super clear about what kind of company you’re trying to build,” he said. “We said we were going to take big bets. We said we were going to fail.”

The Successor

He seems to believe that because Amazon is still trying new things, and sometimes failing, it’s as alive and vibrant as ever. But trusting that instinct may be Bezos’s riskiest bet yet. He admitted, however, that one big reason Amazon is able to take this approach is because he is still its CEO.

“I can do some things at Amazon that would be hard for other people to do, only because of my history with the company,” Bezos explained. That said, he also confessed that he does have a successor picked out should he have to hand over the reigns someday. Who has he chosen? It’s a “secret.”

Revealed: How bacteria drill into our cells and kill them

A team of scientists has revealed how certain harmful bacteria drill into our cells to kill them. Their study shows how bacterial 'nanodrills' assemble themselves on the outer surfaces of our cells, and includes the first movie of how they then punch holes in the cells' outer membranes. The research, published in the journal eLife, supports the development of new drugs that target this mechanism, which is implicated in serious diseases. The team brings together researchers from UCL, Birkbeck, University of London, the University of Leicester, and Monash University (Melbourne).

Unlike drills from a DIY kit, which twist and grind their way through a surface, bacterial nanodrills do not contain rotating parts. Rather, they are ring-like structures (similar to an eyelet) built out of self-assembling toxin molecules. Once assembled, the toxins deploy a blade around the ring's inside edge that slices down into the cell membrane, forming a hole.

To determine how these rings are built, team member Natalya Dudkina made several thousand images of artificial cell membranes coated with toxins, using an electron microscope. Dudkina is a member of Helen Saibil's group at Birkbeck, University of London, which specialises in mapping biological structures using electron microscopy.

"Each ring was formed of around 37 copies of the toxin molecule. But aside from complete rings, we also observed arc-shaped, incomplete rings," Dudkina said. "One problem we had, though, was that our method can only record snapshots of the membrane perforation process frozen at different intermediate stages."

The solution to this was to produce a 'movie' of what happens when the toxins are placed on a cell membrane. This was carried out with atomic force microscopy (AFM) at Bart Hoogenboom's lab at the London Centre for Nanotechnology at UCL. AFM uses an ultrafine needle to feel, rather than see, a surface. This needle repeatedly scans the surface to produce a moving image that refreshes fast enough to show how the toxins move over the membrane and then cut holes in the membrane as they sink in.

"It was quite spectacular to look at," said Carl Leung, a member of Hoogenboom's lab at UCL. "After the initial assembly of the toxins into arcs and rings, they kept skating over the membrane surface. Then they stopped, sank into the membrane, and started spitting out the material they had drilled through, like sawdust when you drill holes in wood."

A big surprise for the team was that complete rings aren't needed to pierce the cell membrane: even relatively short fragments are still able to cut holes, albeit smaller ones, and hold them open, allowing bacteria to feed on the cell's contents.

Together, these findings give a detailed view of how these bacterial toxins drill holes in cell membranes. The snapshots from the electron microscopy show how the rings are structured at the start and the end of the drilling process, and the moving images from the AFM show the process as it unfolds.

The discovery supports the development of new drugs that can target bacterial nanodrills and help treat the diseases in which they are implicated. These include pneumonia, meningitis and septicaemia. Extensive research into such drugs that is ongoing at the University of Leicester, which also provided a genetically modified form of the toxin to help identify the different steps in the hole-drilling process.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University College London - UCL . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Researchers control adhesion of E. coli bacteria

A research team from Kiel University (CAU) and Goethe University Frankfurt have jointly created a synthetic surface on which the adhesion of E. coli bacteria can be controlled. The layer, which is only approximately four nanometres thick, imitates the saccharide coating (glycocalyx) of cells onto which the bacteria adhere such as during an infection. This docking process can be switched on and off using light. This means that the scientists have now made an important step towards understanding the relationship between sugar (carbohydrates) and bacterial infections. Their research results embellish the front page of the latest issue of the journal Angewandte Chemie (Applied Chemistry).

The bond between either cells and other cells or cells and surfaces is vital to organisms, for example in the development of internal organs and tissue. However, these mechanisms are also involved in illness and infections. The E. coli bacteria used in the experiment can cause urinary tract infections, meningitis, sepsis and other severe illnesses. In order to understand and treat these illnesses, researchers need to decipher the molecular processes which allow the bacteria cells to dock onto the healthy host cells.

This often happens by way of proteins, which interact with carbohydrate structures on the surface of the host cell by means of a complex fit principle (simplified: lock-and-key principle). The Kiel/Frankfurt study demonstrates for the first time that the spatial orientation of the carbohydrate structures is crucial to this process. However, in natural glycocalyx, a mere nanometre thick polysaccharide layer covering all cells, the relationships are still too complex to uncover how proteins and carbohydrates identify each other.

In Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 677 'Function by Switching', Professor Thisbe K. Lindhorst, chemist at Kiel University, and her team construct molecules which, when irradiated by light at different wavelengths, operate as biological switches. Together with the working group around the surfaces specialist Professor Andreas Terfort (Frankfurt University), the Lindhorst group has now produced a system with which the orientation of the saccharide docking points, and thus the bonding of E. coli bacteria, can be controlled. To do this, the scientists covered an extremely thin gold surface with a precisely defined saccharide covering, coupled to azobenzene. This is a hydrocarbon containing a nitrogen bridge and operating as a hinge controlled by light. The bonding properties of the saccharide coating can now be switched using this method: if the researchers irradiate their system with light with a wavelength of 365 nanometres, considerably fewer pathogenic bacteria cells can adhere to the synthetic surface. The saccharide molecules turn away from the bacteria, in a sense, and can no longer be recognised. When switched on by 450 nanometre wavelength light waves, on the other hand, the structures reorientate such that the bacteria cells can dock on once again. In this way, E. coli adhesion can be controlled.

'By employing a layer system on a solid surface, in combination with a photo-hinge, the complex dynamics of a real glycocalyx can be reduced to the principal processes and thus be better understood', explains Terfort. 'It should be possible to transfer this novel approach to other biological boundary layer systems.'

'Based on our model system, glycocalyx recognition and bonding effects can be precisely defined and investigated from a completely new angle', says Lindhorst. 'If we can learn how to influence glycocalyx in the context of the relationship between health and healing, it will lead to a revolution in medicinal chemistry.'

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Christian-Albrechts-Universitaet zu Kiel . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Sweet smell of success: Researchers boost methyl ketone production in e. coli

Two years ago, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) engineered Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to convert glucose into significant quantities of methyl ketones, a class of chemical compounds primarily used for fragrances and flavors, but highly promising as clean, green and renewable blending agents for diesel fuel. Now, after further genetic modifications, they have managed to dramatically boost the E.coli's methyl ketone production 160-fold.

"We're encouraged that we could make such a large improvement in methyl ketone production with a relatively small number of genetic modifications," says Harry Beller, a JBEI microbiologist who led this study. "We believe we can further improve production using the knowledge gained from in vitro studies of our novel metabolic pathway."

Beller, who directs the Biofuels Pathways department for JBEI's Fuels Synthesis Division, and is also a senior scientist with Berkeley Lab's Earth Sciences Division, is the corresponding author of a paper describing this work in the journal Metabolic Engineering. The paper is titled "Substantial improvements in methyl ketone production in E. coli and insights on the pathway from in vitro studies." Co-authors are Ee-Been Goh, Edward Baidoo, Helcio Burd, Taek Soon Lee and Jay Keasling.

Methyl ketones are naturally occurring compounds discovered more than a century ago in the aromatic evergreen plant known as rue. Since then they've been found to be common in tomatoes and other plants, as well as insects and microorganisms. Today they are used to provide scents in essential oils and flavoring in cheese and other dairy products. Although native E. coli make virtually undetectable quantities of methyl ketones, Beller, co-author Goh and their colleagues have been able to overcome this deficiency using the tools of synthetic biology.

"In our original effort, for methyl ketone production we made two major modifications to E. coli," Beller says. "First we modified specific steps in beta-oxidation, the metabolic pathway that E. coli uses to break down fatty acids, and then we increased the expression of a native E. coli enzyme called FadM. These two modifications combined to greatly enhance the production of methyl ketones."

In their latest effort, Beller, Goh and their colleagues made further modifications that included balancing the overexpression of two other E. coli enzymes, fadR and fadD, to increase fatty acid flux into the pathway; consolidating two plasmid pathways into one; optimizing codon usage for pathway genes not native to E. coli; and knocking out key acetate production pathways. The results led to a methyl ketone titer of 3.4 grams/liter after approximately 45 hours of fed-batch fermentation with glucose. This is about 40-percent of the maximum theoretical yield for methyl ketones.

"Although the improved production is still not at a commercial level in the biofuel market, it is near a commercial level for use in flavor and fragrances, where certain methyl ketones are much more highly valued than they would be in the biofuel market," Beller says. "It may be possible for a company to sell a small percentage of methyl ketones in the flavor and fragrance market and use the profits to enhance the economic viability of the production of methyl ketones as biofuels."

The in vitro studies carried out by Beller and Goh provided insights into the pathway, some of which point to even further production gains. One key finding was the confirmation that a decarboxylase enzyme is not required for this methyl ketone pathway.

"Several different metabolic pathways have been developed in the past couple of years for methyl ketone production in E. coli, a couple of which use decarboxylase enzymes to catalyze the last step of the pathway," Beller says. "Our methyl ketone pathway is performing quite a bit better than these other pathways, but it does not include a native or added decarboxylase."

The in vitro studies also addressed concerns about the FadM enzyme being somewhat "promiscuous" in its hydrolyzing (thioesterase) activities. Beller and Goh found that FadM can act on intermediates in the methyl ketone pathway and effectively reduce the flux of carbon to the final methyl ketone products. However, they say that with some informed metabolic engineering, this need not be a problem and knowledge of the phenomenon could even be used to enhance production.

"In all likelihood, there is a sweet spot in the level of expression of the FadM enzyme that will allow for maximal production of methyl ketones without siphoning away metabolic intermediates," Beller says.

This research was supported by JBEI through the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Angry Nerd: You Need to Stop Hating on Animated Holiday Specials

It’s that time of the year again. No one can escape it. ‘Tis the season when networks air sickly sweet holiday cartoons whether you like it or not. When it comes to animated specials Angry Nerd typically loathes them, but will things change when he gets a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Specials Past?

Serious Games Go Offline: Bringing the Board Game to the Board Room

Workz

In a digital age where everybody worships technology, a growing number of companies are going in the opposite direction. Instead of e-learning, apps or social media, they use physical simulations inspired by board games to accelerate the organization’s ability to learn and adapt to change.

This trend is especially accelerating in Scandinavia, where business leaders within sectors including pharmaceuticals, service, shipping and biotech are using this approach to gain an advantage on their competitors. Inspired by the old Prussian tradition of Kriegsspiel (war games) the companies use the simulations as a training ground, where leadership skills, business understanding and key strategies can be tested and fine-tuned before implementation in real life.

Change is hard, and most scholars within change management agree with John Kotter’s estimate from 1995 (in his bestselling book Leading Change) that only around 30% of major change initiatives succeed. Why are the odds so bad?

One key explanation could be lack of adequate preparations. How do you prepare to deliver your best when it really counts? In sports the professional approach is to fine-tune team performance and collaboration on the training court before playing the real match. You try to leave behind the worst mistakes and misunderstandings.

What do we do to prepare ourselves when it really matters in big organizations? How often do we gather the team for a training or warm-up session before launching a new strategy or implementing a strategic change project? In most organizations it rarely or never happens. There are no test matches or training sessions before the game starts. And therefore we make too many unnecessary rookie mistakes when it really counts.

Lack of team preparation and change management training is one of the reasons why most companies struggle when it comes to organizational change. Board game based leadership simulations offer a highly efficient way to facilitate a “training environment” where team alignment and performance can be improved. The physical tools are tangible “talking pieces” that allow the participants to share concerns and experiences face-to-face in a trustful environment where mistakes are paid in monopoly money, and game pieces instead of real dollars, customers, or colleagues. It is about elevating the organizational change capability with a focus on “just in time training” instead of the traditional “just in case” approach to leadership development.

Last month, the Danish Innovation Center in Palo Alto hosted an open seminar on the Scandinavian approach to change management and game-based training. A number of American corporations participated in the event to get new insights and inspiration from Scandinavian business leaders, and it will be interesting to follow how the trend of taking serious games offline will be received in the States.

Ask Agger is CEO of the Copenhagen-based change agency Workz.

The Wu-Tang Clan Mingles With Little Boots on This Week’s Playlist

On Repeat

The week after Thanksgiving is never a huge time for music. Fourth-quarter albums are all waiting for that perfect pre-holiday spot, and artists are usually in enough of a post-turkey stupor that dropping new tracks isn’t a high priority. That being said, we should be doubly thankful that we’ve got so many great new tunes this week, from Little Boots’ new EP to a stunning—if completely raw and low-quality—snippet of whatever Frank Ocean has been up to since Channel Orange. Mixed in there are a track from She & Him’s new album of covers, along with a standout from A$AP Ferg’s brand-new tape, and now we’re going to stop because we just mentioned Ferg and She & Him in the same sentence and all is right with the universe.

As usual, we’ve added the tracks to our ongoing Spotify playlist of great new music, and created a standalone playlist (below). Keep the recommendations coming.

The tracks:

She & Him, “Time After Time”

Fredwave, “Home”

Donnie Trumpet and The Social Experiment, “Sunday Candy”

Deer Tick, “White Havoc”

Little Boots, “Pretty Tough”

De La Soul feat. Chuck D, “The People”

Wu-Tang Clan, “A Better Tomorrow”

A$AP Ferg feat. MIA and Crystal Caine, “Reloaded Let it Go 2″

Frank Ocean, “Memrise”

Twitter Beefs Up Its Anti-Troll Tools

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Twitter announced a couple of changes to the way it lets its users deal with harassment today. The company is making it easier for people to report harassment, even when it’s aimed at someone else, and it’s giving the block feature more power.

The reporting tools for harassment, which have been redesigned for mobile, will now be more streamlined and conversational. It will ask who is being affected (you or someone else) and what the nature of the harassment is—for example if violent threats are being made. If you are reporting harassment yourself, there’s an option to fill in more details. Tick off those steps, and the company will review the complaint and—it says—act on them much faster than it has in the past.

Block has gotten better too. Previously, while blocking a person kept them from following you, they could still head over to your profile page and see all your tweets. Now, if you block someone, as long as they are logged in, they won’t be able to view anything on your profile page. However, opening that page in another, logged-out browser will still let anyone see your public tweets. But Twitter’s A/B testing has apparently shown that when people have to go to another browser (or log out) to see a profile that has blocked them, they are far less likely to continue trying to interact with it.

And because it’s making block a little block-ier, Twitter is also adding a page where you can see everyone you’ve blocked in the past. That will let you make sure you’ve got your troll collection up to date, and also let you move people over to mute, or restore them completely if they’re no longer bothering you.

It’s all pretty good stuff, if a little overdue. Twitter has been dealing with harassment issues since its earliest days, and has come under a lot of fire, especially in the last two years, for not doing more to protect its users. These are small steps, but they’re moving in the right direction at least.

Angry Nerd: You Need to Stop Hating on Animated Holiday Specials

It’s that time of the year again. No one can escape it. ‘Tis the season when networks air sickly sweet holiday cartoons whether you like it or not. When it comes to animated specials Angry Nerd typically loathes them, but will things change when he gets a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Specials Past?

Serious Games Go Offline: Bringing the Board Game to the Board Room

Workz

In a digital age where everybody worships technology, a growing number of companies are going in the opposite direction. Instead of e-learning, apps or social media, they use physical simulations inspired by board games to accelerate the organization’s ability to learn and adapt to change.

This trend is especially accelerating in Scandinavia, where business leaders within sectors including pharmaceuticals, service, shipping and biotech are using this approach to gain an advantage on their competitors. Inspired by the old Prussian tradition of Kriegsspiel (war games) the companies use the simulations as a training ground, where leadership skills, business understanding and key strategies can be tested and fine-tuned before implementation in real life.

Change is hard, and most scholars within change management agree with John Kotter’s estimate from 1995 (in his bestselling book Leading Change) that only around 30% of major change initiatives succeed. Why are the odds so bad?

One key explanation could be lack of adequate preparations. How do you prepare to deliver your best when it really counts? In sports the professional approach is to fine-tune team performance and collaboration on the training court before playing the real match. You try to leave behind the worst mistakes and misunderstandings.

What do we do to prepare ourselves when it really matters in big organizations? How often do we gather the team for a training or warm-up session before launching a new strategy or implementing a strategic change project? In most organizations it rarely or never happens. There are no test matches or training sessions before the game starts. And therefore we make too many unnecessary rookie mistakes when it really counts.

Lack of team preparation and change management training is one of the reasons why most companies struggle when it comes to organizational change. Board game based leadership simulations offer a highly efficient way to facilitate a “training environment” where team alignment and performance can be improved. The physical tools are tangible “talking pieces” that allow the participants to share concerns and experiences face-to-face in a trustful environment where mistakes are paid in monopoly money, and game pieces instead of real dollars, customers, or colleagues. It is about elevating the organizational change capability with a focus on “just in time training” instead of the traditional “just in case” approach to leadership development.

Last month, the Danish Innovation Center in Palo Alto hosted an open seminar on the Scandinavian approach to change management and game-based training. A number of American corporations participated in the event to get new insights and inspiration from Scandinavian business leaders, and it will be interesting to follow how the trend of taking serious games offline will be received in the States.

Ask Agger is CEO of the Copenhagen-based change agency Workz.

The Wu-Tang Clan Mingles With Little Boots on This Week’s Playlist

On Repeat

The week after Thanksgiving is never a huge time for music. Fourth-quarter albums are all waiting for that perfect pre-holiday spot, and artists are usually in enough of a post-turkey stupor that dropping new tracks isn’t a high priority. That being said, we should be doubly thankful that we’ve got so many great new tunes this week, from Little Boots’ new EP to a stunning—if completely raw and low-quality—snippet of whatever Frank Ocean has been up to since Channel Orange. Mixed in there are a track from She & Him’s new album of covers, along with a standout from A$AP Ferg’s brand-new tape, and now we’re going to stop because we just mentioned Ferg and She & Him in the same sentence and all is right with the universe.

As usual, we’ve added the tracks to our ongoing Spotify playlist of great new music, and created a standalone playlist (below). Keep the recommendations coming.

The tracks:

She & Him, “Time After Time”

Fredwave, “Home”

Donnie Trumpet and The Social Experiment, “Sunday Candy”

Deer Tick, “White Havoc”

Little Boots, “Pretty Tough”

De La Soul feat. Chuck D, “The People”

Wu-Tang Clan, “A Better Tomorrow”

A$AP Ferg feat. MIA and Crystal Caine, “Reloaded Let it Go 2″

Frank Ocean, “Memrise”

Twitter Beefs Up Its Anti-Troll Tools

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Twitter announced a couple of changes to the way it lets its users deal with harassment today. The company is making it easier for people to report harassment, even when it’s aimed at someone else, and it’s giving the block feature more power.

The reporting tools for harassment, which have been redesigned for mobile, will now be more streamlined and conversational. It will ask who is being affected (you or someone else) and what the nature of the harassment is—for example if violent threats are being made. If you are reporting harassment yourself, there’s an option to fill in more details. Tick off those steps, and the company will review the complaint and—it says—act on them much faster than it has in the past.

Block has gotten better too. Previously, while blocking a person kept them from following you, they could still head over to your profile page and see all your tweets. Now, if you block someone, as long as they are logged in, they won’t be able to view anything on your profile page. However, opening that page in another, logged-out browser will still let anyone see your public tweets. But Twitter’s A/B testing has apparently shown that when people have to go to another browser (or log out) to see a profile that has blocked them, they are far less likely to continue trying to interact with it.

And because it’s making block a little block-ier, Twitter is also adding a page where you can see everyone you’ve blocked in the past. That will let you make sure you’ve got your troll collection up to date, and also let you move people over to mute, or restore them completely if they’re no longer bothering you.

It’s all pretty good stuff, if a little overdue. Twitter has been dealing with harassment issues since its earliest days, and has come under a lot of fire, especially in the last two years, for not doing more to protect its users. These are small steps, but they’re moving in the right direction at least.

Could Tauriel Shoot an Orc Arrow Out of the Air?

Screen capture from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

SPOILER ALERT. In the movie The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, Legolas fights some orcs. Yes, Legolas isn’t supposed to be in this movie, but he is. At one point, Legolas takes a breather from fighting and some orc thinks this would be a perfect time to take him out with an arrow. The orc’s arrow flies towards Legolas, but BOOM. The arrow is shot out of it’s trajectory as it is hit from another arrow fired from the wood elf Tauriel.

That’s your plot. Now for the physics.

How Fast is Tauriel’s Arrow?

Looking at the video, there are only a few details I can get. First, it takes about 0.1 seconds for the arrow to go from the orc almost all the way to Legolas (but not all the way). If I know how fast an arrow is fired from a bow, I can use this to get the distance from the orc to Legolas. It seems a decent arrow speed (shot from a modern bow) would be about 100 m/s. Of course the question is – are orc bows as good as a modern bow? Let’s say no. Let me put the arrow speed at 60 m/s. That would put the orc-Legolas distance at just 6 meters.

What about Tauriel? I’m just going to estimate the position of the wood elf. Here’s a diagram showing the locations. Note: this is just an estimate.

With this estimate, Tauriel is just 5 meters from the orc and about 9 meters from Legolas. In order to hit the arrow fired from the orc, I would estimate that Tauriel would have to fire AFTER the orc fired. Suppose she has lightning fast reaction time and can aim and fire in just 0.05 seconds. This would mean that her arrow has to travel 9 meters in just 0.05 seconds giving it a speed of 180 m/s. Yes, that’s fast. Right now, real humans are trying to break the 400 fps arrow speed (121 m/s). Ok, but she’s an elf. I guess she’s better than modern humans.

How difficult would it be to hit that orc arrow?

I will assume the orc arrow is traveling in a horizontal motion. Tauriel has to aim two ways. First, she has to aim vertically in order to hit the arrow. Let me assume the orc arrow has a diameter of 1 cm (and so does the elf arrow). In order to obtain an arrow-arrow hit, the elf arrow has to be in a certain position.

From this, the elf arrow has to be in a 1 cm vertical range to get a clean hit. If the arrow is 9 meters away, this is an angular size of just 0.06 degrees. Is that a small target? Let’s say you wanted to hit a 10 cm apple. In order to have the same angular size of the target, you would have to be 90 meters away. So, that seems like a tough (but maybe not impossible) target.

What about the timing of the shot? If you shoot the arrow too early, it will pass in front of the orc arrow. Too late, and it goes behind it. If I take one point in space (the point where the arrows might meet), I can find the time difference between the front of the orc arrow passing until the back of the arrow passes. Using an arrow speed of 60 m/s and a length of 0.6 meters, this give a passing time of 0.01 seconds. Tauriel must release her arrow in this small time window in order to hit the orc arrow. But wait! It’s even more difficult than this. I assumed that the orc arrow and the elf arrow ere perpendicular to each other – they are not. Tauriel shot from behind the orc making the target appear even smaller.

Needles to say, this is a tough shot.

What Was Tauriel Thinking?

We have missed the obvious question. Why didn’t Tauriel just shoot the orc? The orc is closer than the arrow, the orc is bigger than the arrow. Shooting the orc would be way easier than shooting the arrow. Oh sure, you could say she just arrived on the scene and didn’t have time to shoot the orc. However, there was only a 0.1 second window after the orc shot the arrow.

If I asked Tauriel what she was thinking, she might say this.

“Could I have just killed the orc right away? Sure. That would be simple. I mean, have you seen the other stuff I have done? Killing one orc is just too easy. It’s good to challenge yourself. Do that which is difficult, not that which is easy.”

“Ok, that’s not the real answer. The real answer is that I was tired of Legolas and his father. They think I am this lowly wood elf and they are all uppity high elves. I’m not good for anything important am I? Well, what if I show you how awesome I am with a bow? Maybe then you will notice. Yes, Legolas, you could have died if it weren’t for me. If I would have just shot that orc, you wouldn’t have even noticed that I saved your life.”

“Try to ignore me again. Let’s see what happens. Oh, don’t worry. I’m not attracted to you, I just want respect. Anyway, you aren’t my type. I like tall dwarves.”

See. This scene says something about Tauriel. You just have to think about it a little bit.

Data-Driven Parenting App Gives Personalized Tips for Every Kid

Learner Mosaic helps parents come up with activities based on what their kids are learning. Kidaptive

In 2012, P.J. Gunsagar and Dylan Arena founded Kidaptive and released their first iPad app, Leo’s Pad. It stars Leo, a young inventor with a treehouse laboratory, and combines segments of animated story with a variety of mini-games. It’s been downloaded over 800,000 times, with an App Store rating hovering near five stars. Kids love it.

But there is science hiding behind the fun: A tool, built on cutting-edge research in developmental psychology, that closely tracks the cognitive progress of its young users and adjusts the app’s difficulty accordingly. It’s a toy, but it’s one that gathers a tremendous amount of data on how it’s being used.

Now, Gunsagar and Arena want to put that data to use to help parents. Kidaptive’s new free app, Learner Mosaic, serves up ideas for backseat games and dinner table discussion topics that reinforce the skills being learned in the Leo’s Pad app. It takes the latest understanding of what kids ages five and younger should be learning, dices it into activities that are manageable for overworked parents, and surfaces those activities at just the right time in a kid’s development. The vision, as Gunsagar puts it, is to put a really smart preschool teacher in every parent’s pocket.

A New Type of Kids App

When they met in 2011, Gunsagar and Arena were both working with children, albeit in much different ways. Gunsagar owned a production company that worked on movies like Planes and Tinkerbell. Arena was at Stanford, pursuing a PhD related to games and their effect on learning. Gunsagar started spending time at Stanford, learning about Arena’s work and immersing himself in the latest research in developmental psychology. He quickly had a realization: No one was using the stuff.

Leo and friends. Kidaptive

Gunsagar was teaching his own young kids the ABCs and the 123s. At Stanford, however, he was hearing about the importance of skills like impulse control and cognitive flexibility. Here were entire dimensions of his youngsters’ development that he’d previously been oblivious to.

Leo’s Pad was created to engage all these different types of skills. It teaches kids about colors and counting, sure, but also has games specifically designed around skills like categorization, symbolic representation, and turn-taking. At the heart of the game is an “adaptive learning engine” that evaluates kids’ performance in these skills and adjusts subsequent games accordingly. If your kid’s mastered counting, for instance, the game might introduce more advanced concepts, like grouping and cardinality. The adaptive approach helps the app “ask the right questions at the right time,” Gunsagar says.

P.J. Gunsagar and Dylan Arena Kidaptive

A Lightweight Tool for Parents

The idea with the new app is to give parents additional activities to bolster what the kids are already learning. It was designed with the help of design consultancy Frog, which invested in Kidaptive as part of the firm’s incubator program, Frog Ventures. In discussions with parents, Frog’s designers zeroed-in on a tricky balance of demands: “The overwhelming message from parents was, ‘we absolutely want to be engaged,’ but the corollary message was, ‘we absolutely don’t have time,'” says Ethan Imboden, Frog’s head of venture design.

The app thus supplies lightweight activities directly linked to their kid’s progress through Leo’s Pad. These could be games, activities, or simply topics for discussions—many of which derive from findings in peer-reviewed studies and have been molded by masters-level preschool teachers. Say your daughter Jessica finishes a Leo’s Pad game that exercises impulse control. Mosaic Learner might suggest a “watery adventure” activity that explores the same skill. In this case, you put a blanket on the floor and tell Jessica it’s a river. You tell her to jump in the river, then you have her jump out. In, out. In, out. Then, you switch up the order of the instructions and see if Jessica will follow. The aim is to get her to delay gratification by listening to the instructions, even when their pattern in changed—kind of like Simon Says.

A Learner Mosaic card. Kidaptive

The idea is to reinforce the skill learned in the game with an activity outside it. “Connecting learning across context is a way to reinforce transfer, and transfer is the fundamental problem of education,” Arena, who serves as Kidaptive’s chief learning scientist, explains. “You teach a kid a thing, but you don’t want them to just reproduce that thing in that context. You want them to take it out into the world.” The more situations in which a kid exercises impulse control, the better chance they have at internalizing it.

Building a Platform for Learning

Gunsagar and Arena hope Mosaic Learner could eventually become a platform that takes in data from all sorts of other activities, as well as third-party apps. Someday, there could be a whole section of games in the App Store that automatically feed information to the app when your kids play with them.

Eventually, Gunsagar says, these learning profiles could be powerful tools for an entirely different type of evaluation. By cross referencing a kid’s performance on certain skills in Leo’s Pad with those same skills as put to work in a new app, Kidaptive’s platform could help sort which other learning apps are effective and which are bunk.

“Just think about the problem that solves for the apps ecosystem,” Gunsagar says. “They’re struggling with app discovery. Parents are buying the hardware, schools are buying the hardware, but they don’t know which apps work. We can start to speak to, with real empirical evidence, which apps work and which apps don’t.” It’s a vision in which Kidaptive becomes an algorithimic gatekeeper for learning apps, crunching the numbers on which new titles are worth your time and growing its own data sets all the while. But now that’s all adult stuff, isn’t it?

Fancy Water Bottle Filters Your H2O and Infuses It With Fruitiness

Liana Bandziulis/WIRED

Water bottles can help ensure proper daily hydration. But they can also be a huge pain to clean, especially if you’re transporting anything other than pure H2O. Last year, Clean Bottle sought to fix that problem with its clever Square Bottle, a stainless steel water vessel with a bottom that unscrews for easy cleaning.

This year, the company gave its signature square-shaped bottle a few updates. First, it’s larger, which means it holds 25 ounces of liquid instead of 20. The body is made of BPA-free plastic and measures 2.5-inches wide by 10.5 inches tall. That’s small enough that its square-shaped base still fits inside standard cup holders, which is good news for commuters. It’s also dishwasher-safe.

Second, when you’re stuck sipping less-than-savory tap water, you can use the included filter system that attaches to the inside bottom of the bottle. Just fill the container upside down, then remove the filter and screw the bottom cap back on. The filter removes chlorine, herbicides and pesticides, disinfection by-products, and other flavor contaminants. And speaking of flavor, the bottle also comes with a fruit infusing chamber, so you can drink pleasantly fruity spa water with easy cleanup afterwards. This plugs into the base cap the same way the water filter does.

The Square bottle, which comes in five colors including blue, green, and red, should be shipping by March 2015 with pre-orders starting at $15.

15 Futuristic Gifts for the Super-Early Adopter

3D Robotics Iris+ Early adopters are hard to keep up with, but the Iris+ quadcopter is on it. The drone comes with a "Follow Me" mode and an optional GoPro/mount configuration, so it can tag along behind people while shooting floaty and fascinating video selfies. The base hardware goes for $750, but you can get a configuration with a GoPro Hero 3+ and a gyroscopic stabilization gimbal mount for $1,260. 3D Robotics

3D Robotics Iris+ Early adopters are hard to keep up with, but the Iris+ quadcopter is on it. The drone comes with a "Follow Me" mode and an optional GoPro/mount configuration, so it can tag along behind people while shooting floaty and fascinating video selfies. The base hardware goes for $750, but you can get a configuration with a GoPro Hero 3+ and a gyroscopic stabilization gimbal mount for $1,260.

3D Robotics

Cirrus Vision SF50 This gets props because it doesn't have any. Cirrus' V-tail private jet is essentially a flying car. It's designed to be flown without a copilot and has a range of about 1000 miles. In case of calamity, a parachute system brings the entire plane softly back to terra firma. You can buy the $2-million SF50 and get one in 2015. Cirrus Aircraft

Cirrus Vision SF50 This gets props because it doesn't have any. Cirrus' V-tail private jet is essentially a flying car. It's designed to be flown without a copilot and has a range of about 1000 miles. In case of calamity, a parachute system brings the entire plane softly back to terra firma. You can buy the $2-million SF50 and get one in 2015.

Cirrus Aircraft

Samsung Gear VR and Samsung Galaxy Note 4 While everyone else waits for the official Oculus Rift facetainment system to roll out, you can spend $500 to get a slice of the future. Samsung's hardware ($200 for the Gear VR facemask and $300 for the Galaxy Note 4 inside it) has an Oculus store on the system that lets you download content directly to your face. Samsung

Samsung Gear VR and Samsung Galaxy Note 4 While everyone else waits for the official Oculus Rift facetainment system to roll out, you can spend $500 to get a slice of the future. Samsung's hardware ($200 for the Gear VR facemask and $300 for the Galaxy Note 4 inside it) has an Oculus store on the system that lets you download content directly to your face.

Samsung

Jaunt VR Camera Why not bring your own movies to the VR revolution? The Jaunt VR is built for capturing footage to view on an Oculus Rift. It packs 28 cameras—20 around its perimeter, four on the top, and four on the bottom—capturing 3.5 gigapixels per second. A four-capsule microphone rig captures a sphere of sound. You have to "know somebody" to get one (pricing and availability aren't final) but it does exist. Work that Rolodex. Jaunt

Jaunt VR Camera Why not bring your own movies to the VR revolution? The Jaunt VR is built for capturing footage to view on an Oculus Rift. It packs 28 cameras—20 around its perimeter, four on the top, and four on the bottom—capturing 3.5 gigapixels per second. A four-capsule microphone rig captures a sphere of sound. You have to "know somebody" to get one (pricing and availability aren't final) but it does exist. Work that Rolodex.

Jaunt

Alienware Area-51 The latest Alienware desktop gaming PC looks like it was designed by Johnny Five, not Jony Ive. It can be spec'd up to an eight-core 4GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, three AMD Radeon R9 290X graphics cards with 12GB RAM, and a 4TB hard drive/512GB SSD storage combo. That full-tilt config costs just under $6,000. If you just like its funky box, get the most modest selection of components for $1,700. Alienware

Alienware Area-51 The latest Alienware desktop gaming PC looks like it was designed by Johnny Five, not Jony Ive. It can be spec'd up to an eight-core 4GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, three AMD Radeon R9 290X graphics cards with 12GB RAM, and a 4TB hard drive/512GB SSD storage combo. That full-tilt config costs just under $6,000. If you just like its funky box, get the most modest selection of components for $1,700.

Alienware

Choc Creator V2 Consider the sand mandala. A team of Tibetan monks painstakingly create a delicate work of art over the course of weeks. Then, as soon as it's complete, they ritualistically destroy it. This $6,200 chocolate-squirting 3D printer is sort of like that. You spend weeks designing the perfect work of edible art on your computer, a few minutes printing it out, and then immediately shove the creation into your piehole. Choc Edge

Choc Creator V2 Consider the sand mandala. A team of Tibetan monks painstakingly create a delicate work of art over the course of weeks. Then, as soon as it's complete, they ritualistically destroy it. This $6,200 chocolate-squirting 3D printer is sort of like that. You spend weeks designing the perfect work of edible art on your computer, a few minutes printing it out, and then immediately shove the creation into your piehole.

Choc Edge

LG 77-Inch 4K Curved OLED Mr. Loudmouth down the block keeps boasting about his 4K TV, and Johnny Bragalot at work won't shut up about his OLED. Trump them both by buying a combination of the two. This curvy 77-incher combines the flawless contrast and fast response of an OLED panel with the razor-sharp resolution of Ultra HD. Translation: It's the best TV ever. It'll only set you back $25 grand. LG

LG 77-Inch 4K Curved OLED Mr. Loudmouth down the block keeps boasting about his 4K TV, and Johnny Bragalot at work won't shut up about his OLED. Trump them both by buying a combination of the two. This curvy 77-incher combines the flawless contrast and fast response of an OLED panel with the razor-sharp resolution of Ultra HD. Translation: It's the best TV ever. It'll only set you back $25 grand.

LG

Wonder Workshop Dash & Dot Robots The Dash & Dot ($228 as a two-pack) are little cyclops robots that grow along with a child's brain. Younger kids can control them with an app or just watch them zip around on the floor, avoiding objects with their built-in sensors. Older kids can control them with "Blockly," a puzzle-like programming interface. Kids who know Java and Objective-C can code complex commands. Wonder Workshop

Wonder Workshop Dash & Dot Robots The Dash & Dot ($228 as a two-pack) are little cyclops robots that grow along with a child's brain. Younger kids can control them with an app or just watch them zip around on the floor, avoiding objects with their built-in sensors. Older kids can control them with "Blockly," a puzzle-like programming interface. Kids who know Java and Objective-C can code complex commands.

Wonder Workshop

Sharp Wireless High-Resolution Audio Player Using a phone to play music over Bluetooth is fine, but you'll need something special to pipe uncompressed audio wirelessly to your surround-sound system. This $4,000 wireless player takes 24-bit/96kHz FLACs, WAVs, DSDs, Blu-rays, and SACDs and cranks out pristine audio to WiSA-compliant speakers on the uncluttered 5.2-5.8 GHz band. Sharp USA

Sharp Wireless High-Resolution Audio Player Using a phone to play music over Bluetooth is fine, but you'll need something special to pipe uncompressed audio wirelessly to your surround-sound system. This $4,000 wireless player takes 24-bit/96kHz FLACs, WAVs, DSDs, Blu-rays, and SACDs and cranks out pristine audio to WiSA-compliant speakers on the uncluttered 5.2-5.8 GHz band.

Sharp USA

Sen.se Mother You could buy a basic fitness tracker, a sleep tracker, plus door and window sensors. Or you could just buy Sen.se's Mother, which tracks all those things. This odd little $300 matryoshka doll plugs into a router via an Ethernet cable, analyzes data from its user-configurable "Cookie" sensors, and tracks all the lifestyle stats in your home. You can reprogram each Cookie to do a different task, making it super versatile. Sen.se

Sen.se Mother You could buy a basic fitness tracker, a sleep tracker, plus door and window sensors. Or you could just buy Sen.se's Mother, which tracks all those things. This odd little $300 matryoshka doll plugs into a router via an Ethernet cable, analyzes data from its user-configurable "Cookie" sensors, and tracks all the lifestyle stats in your home. You can reprogram each Cookie to do a different task, making it super versatile.

Sen.se

Sony 4K Ultra Short Throw Projector $50,000 isn't that much money. But if you've got the cash to drop on your loved one, opt for this short-throw 4K projector from Sony. It casts 4096 x 2160-pixel images that look tack-sharp at sizes up to 150 inches. Toss a 4K Media Player ($700) into the lucky recipient's stocking so they have something to watch. Sony

Sony 4K Ultra Short Throw Projector $50,000 isn't that much money. But if you've got the cash to drop on your loved one, opt for this short-throw 4K projector from Sony. It casts 4096 x 2160-pixel images that look tack-sharp at sizes up to 150 inches. Toss a 4K Media Player ($700) into the lucky recipient's stocking so they have something to watch.

Sony

Forza 100+ MP CAM A display that can natively show the Forza 100+ MP Cam's 200-megapixel, 60-fps video output doesn't yet exist. You're also going to need a zettabyte of storage to handle its massive video files. But those are minor grievances, as is the $35,000 ballpark price. After all, this camera can make those pipe dreams of solving capers by yelling "enhance" at your computer a reality. Forza Silicon

Forza 100+ MP CAM A display that can natively show the Forza 100+ MP Cam's 200-megapixel, 60-fps video output doesn't yet exist. You're also going to need a zettabyte of storage to handle its massive video files. But those are minor grievances, as is the $35,000 ballpark price. After all, this camera can make those pipe dreams of solving capers by yelling "enhance" at your computer a reality.

Forza Silicon

HI-MACS Kitchen Pod Replace your giftee's aging kitchen with an amorphous blob. This conceptual piece by Belgian designer Xavier Bonte has a remote-control pop-top that lifts to reveal a sink and an induction stovetop. Drawers for cutlery and flatware are built in. Unfortunately, there's no oven, fridge, or dishwasher, but at least the lid can be closed to hide away that pile of dirty dishes in the sink. HI-MACS

HI-MACS Kitchen Pod Replace your giftee's aging kitchen with an amorphous blob. This conceptual piece by Belgian designer Xavier Bonte has a remote-control pop-top that lifts to reveal a sink and an induction stovetop. Drawers for cutlery and flatware are built in. Unfortunately, there's no oven, fridge, or dishwasher, but at least the lid can be closed to hide away that pile of dirty dishes in the sink.

HI-MACS

HP Sprout The space in front of a computer is normally used for a keyboard. HP has a better idea. The $1,900 Sprout comes with a 20-inch-diagonal touch mat and a downward-facing projector/scanner/camera. It lets you get hands-on with any images beamed upon it. 3D scanning and modeling software for the system arrives in mid-2015. The touchscreen PC also comes with a keyboard and mouse if you want to kick it old-school. HP

HP Sprout The space in front of a computer is normally used for a keyboard. HP has a better idea. The $1,900 Sprout comes with a 20-inch-diagonal touch mat and a downward-facing projector/scanner/camera. It lets you get hands-on with any images beamed upon it. 3D scanning and modeling software for the system arrives in mid-2015. The touchscreen PC also comes with a keyboard and mouse if you want to kick it old-school.

HP

Panasonic DMP-BD70V VHS/Blu-ray/Streamer Combo Even the most forward-thinking person has a closet full of VHS tapes, so it's no wonder this magical VHS/Blu-ray/CD/DVD/MP3 player, SD-card/USB reader, and (very limited) set-top streamer is going for between $1,000 and $2,000 on Amazon. The DMP-BD70V even up-converts VHS video to... slightly-better-than-VHS video. Finally, a way to deliver VHS tapes via HDMI to a 4K OLED. Panasonic

Panasonic DMP-BD70V VHS/Blu-ray/Streamer Combo Even the most forward-thinking person has a closet full of VHS tapes, so it's no wonder this magical VHS/Blu-ray/CD/DVD/MP3 player, SD-card/USB reader, and (very limited) set-top streamer is going for between $1,000 and $2,000 on Amazon. The DMP-BD70V even up-converts VHS video to... slightly-better-than-VHS video. Finally, a way to deliver VHS tapes via HDMI to a 4K OLED.

Panasonic