Pao Testifies to Withering Bias at Kleiner

Ellen Pao walks to San Francisco Superior Court in San Francisco, California, March 3, 2015. Ellen Pao walks to San Francisco Superior Court in San Francisco, California, March 3, 2015. Robert Galbraith/Landov



Ellen Pao says that in 2005, she initially turned down a job at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, deciding that the role was ultimately “too junior” for her. Testifying for the first time in her lawsuit against the storied venture capital firm, Pao said Kleiner Perkins told her they would change the description from a job focused on operations to one focused on investing.


“I was told there would be an opportunity for me to invest in companies,” she testified in San Francisco Superior Court today.


But the chances for advancement she expected never materialized, Pao alleges. From the witness stand, Pao sought to portray herself as an employee whose career stagnated not because she lacked the qualifications but because of gender discrimination at the hands of a workplace culture biased toward men.


Pao’s long-awaited appearance on the witness stand represents a pivotal moment in the trial, now in its third week. The suit is being watched by much of the tech world as a potentially landmark case that could change how Silicon Valley views and deals with the thorny issues of gender politics over which it has stumbled for years.


In tech, women are a still distinct minority. The numbers are even worse in venture capital—especially in firms’ upper echelonsfirms. According to one report, only 4 percent of senior venture capitalists are women.


On the Stand


Pao, who left Kleiner Perkins as a junior partner in 2012, has sued her former employer because she believes she deserved one of these senior positions. She alleges that the firm’s managing partners unfairly passed her over for a promotion and penalized her for complaining about the male-dominated culture at the firm. Pao also claims she was pressured into an affair with a more senior colleague during her tenure at Kleiner, and that he retaliated against her when she broke things off.


With her testimony, Pao and her lawyers are not only seeking to present her argument to the jury but also Pao herself. The Kleiner defense team has sought during the trial to paint Pao as a colleague who had “sharp elbows,” was “dismissive of peers,” and who “did not come close” to being qualified for a promotion at the firm.


On the stand, Pao, wearing black-rimmed glasses and dressed in a structured purple blazer, appeared composed, speaking in a firm, even tone and gesturing with her hands while answering questions from her attorney, Therese Lawless. She sounded confident, if not a little rehearsed. In her line of questioning, Lawless sought to establish that Pao was a capable, qualified, and empathetic worker who was subjected to the firm’s objectionable culture.


Pao’s qualifications were a strong match with Kleiner Perkins’ requirements, right down to whether the candidate spoke Mandarin, she testified. But she was hesitant, she said, because didn’t want a job that would groom her for an operational role So Pao said she was told she would have the opportunity to work directly as an investor.


“This coming year, I’d like to help you with one of your goals to find a company for you to incubate at KPCB,” managing partner John Doerr, the firm’s most famous investor, wrote in a performance review for Pao during her first year.


Cut Out


Pao said she joined a team that ranged from five to fifteen people who supported Doerr, a cohort insiders at KPCB called “Team JD.” Though others on the team performed similar duties, Pao said she was given a lesser title. She also claimed that a male partner for whom she advocated to join the team was promoted over her despite having insufficient experience.


Pao also delved into her accusations against former partner Ajit Nazre, who she says coerced her into having an affair. Pao decided to bring her suit against Kleiner in 2012, she testified, in part because of partner Trae Vassallo’s claim of sexual harassment against Nazre, who left the firm in 2012 and is not named as a defendant in Pao’s case. She also suspected him in incidents of sexual harassment involving three administrative assistants and testified that Juliet de Baubigny, the firm’s head of human resources, told her she thought Nazre “was a sex addict.”


Nazre began pursuing her around February 2006, but she told him he wasn’t interested and that he should seek counseling if he was having problems in his marriage, Pao said. But Nazre continued to pursue Pao, she said. “He was relentless. Eventually, he told me his wife had left him,” she said on the witness stand.


After an on-and-off relationship that lasted for about six months, she found out that he had lied to her about leaving his wife. “I ended it, permanently,” she testified. “I was furious. I felt manipulated and deceived.”


After she ended the relationship, she said, Nazre began cutting her out of email threads and not inviting her to meetings. Pao and Nazre both worked on Kleiner Perkins’ team focused on investing in so-called “green tech.” Despite the conflict, Pao believed that she and Nazre could move forward and have a good working relationship. After Doerr caught wind of their relationship and breakup, he wanted to punish Nazre by firing him, she testified. But Pao fought for Nazre to stay, believing that he was a more productive employee than other partners.


Even then, by 2007, Pao testified she was ready to leave the firm because she was unhappy with the company culture, especially in its dealings with entrepreneurs. She brought up her concerns in a company memo in which she suggested that the firm change its ways: “Don’t be an asshole,” she wrote.


A Better Place


But Pao ultimately decided to stay at Kleiner Perkins, largely because she was convinced Doerr would address her complaints regarding the company’s problematic culture. “I thought John was being genuine about my concerns, and that he would be able to move us forward,” she testified. “I thought the firm would be a better place.”


In 2009, Pao testified that she wrote a self-review that mentioned her problems with Ajit Nazre once more. “I continued to bring up the issues and Kleiner Perkins continued to do nothing,” she said. Eventually, Doerr asked her to revise this review because he thought it was, in Pao’s words, “too self-promotional.”


Pao never heard that the partners were dissatisfied with her work performance up until the first half of 2011, she testified. But by 2012, the year she filed a written complaint, her relationships with all the managing partners—including her mentor, Doerr—had soured.



The Apple Watch Is About to Make Apps an Afterthought


It’s hard out there for an app. I mean, don’t make me pay for it — I don’t even know if I’ll like it! And stop pestering me with in-app purchases. Also, your banner ads are ridiculous. Not that I’d ever find your app in the first place.


The app economy can be an unfriendly place for developers these days. Now along comes the Apple Watch—in stores next month—to undermine the concept of an app altogether.


Yes, the Apple Watch has “apps.” But the Watch is not a platform for software that you use for an extended period of time. You won’t open on a Watch app and then spend minutes tapping around. Or at least you shouldn’t. Otherwise you might as well get out your phone.


Apps move into the background to support the actions they enable on screens further up the stack—the phone's lock screen, for example. Or a Watch.


The point of the Watch is actions, not apps. No, it’s not that hard to pull your phone out of your pocket. But once you do, a sea of choices and distractions opens before you. The Watch usefully limits those choices to what makes sense to do in the moment. It’s your phone’s notification screen ported to your wrist.


And as on the phone itself, those interactive notifications are making apps as we traditionally think of them a less prominent part of the user experience—a trend likely to march forward whether smartwatches take off or not. Apps move into the background to support the actions they enable on screens further up the stack—the phone’s lock screen, for example. Or a Watch.


Where We Are


In a mobile world that favors actions over apps, the greatest value comes in compressing the most steps into one gesture. Yesterday, I used Yo (yes, that Yo) to help me remember where I parked my car—tap twice to set the location, once to retrieve it. The execution wasn’t perfect, but it helped me to understand when I screen on my wrist might actually be useful. Instead of dithering with an app on my phone while I’m standing on a street corner, I could mash one button to make a complicated thing happen out in the world.


The point of the Watch is actions, not apps.


Some developers are already hard at work on compressing complex actions into single taps, and for good reason. While PC software is for doing things on PCs, software on mobile devices is for doing things in the world. The usefulness of mobile devices depends on context; what we do with them depends on where we are. The more efficient the interaction between that software and our environment, the more useful the device.


(Consider Uber’s “push a button, get a ride” slogan. One way of looking at the company’s massive valuation is that Uber figured out one of the most useful things you can do with a smartphone and shoved it all into one tap.)


Compared to smartphones, a watch is even more integrated to “where we are.” It’s the original, pre-digital notification screen, with one application: what time is it? The more instant interactions that can be built into the watch paradigm, the better for Apple. With each new action the Apple Watch enables, the better an experience it is to buy into.


But that same utility is not so useful for app developers. If monetizing apps is hard, monetizing actions is even harder. If ads are tough on small smartphone screens, they’re even tougher on smaller smartwatch screens. And that’s to say nothing of the 10-second time limit Apple suggests for any Watch-based interaction—not enough time to sell anything. In the meantime, the Watch creates one more reason not to engage directly with apps on the phone at all.


The great thing for users is that the Watch will impose a new rigor on developers seeking to justify their apps’ existence. They’ll need to distill their usefulness to a greater percentage of purity. Like Uber, the interactions they build may have to be magic enough to make us pay. Otherwise, in a world of actions, the app is an afterthought.



For Disney, the Future of VR Goes Beyond a Headset

At experiences like Goofy's Paint ’n Play at Disney Tokyo, immersion goes beyond the usual VR headsets. At experiences like Goofy's Paint ’n Play at Disney Tokyo, immersion goes beyond the usual VR headsets. Tokyo Disney Resort



SAN FRANCISCO, CA—This year’s Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco was full of buzz about head-mounted virtual reality displays. Valve unveiled the HTC Vive headset running Steam VR, Sony gave us a closer look at its Project Morpheus, and John Carmack confirmed that Samsung and Oculus will turn the “Innovator Edition” of its Samsung Gear VR unit into a full consumer-grade HMD later this year. Everywhere you turned, you saw attendees strapping on the future-goggles to check out VR game demos. (I was particularly taken with Minority Media’s Time Machine .) But in a fascinating panel presentation, Disney’s Bei Yang encouraged game developers to think outside of the headset.


“When people talk about virtual reality these days, they’re generally talking about head-mounted displays,” Yang told me before his presentation. “But we need to think in a broader context. VR is really about the human body as an input/output mechanism. It’s about spoofing inputs into the human perceptual system to create desired effects.”


Yang is a chief technology executive with Disney Imagineering, the team that designs immersive experiences for rides, hotels, and cruise lines. Imagineers have always been adept at spoofing human perceptual inputs—like the stretching room and the ghosts in the 1969 attraction Haunted Mansion–and they’ve been implementing VR into rides for over 15 years. There’s Disney World’s Toy Story Midway Mania, which lets riders fire virtual darts at Disney characters. There’s Disneyland’s flight simulator Soarin’ Over California, which dispenses blasts of wind as well as citrus and pine smells as riders zoom through orange fields and forests. And there’s Tokyo Disney’s Goofy’s Paint ‘n Play House, which lets kids launch blobs of color onto the walls of a room, thanks to an elaborate projection system.


“Practical Virtual Reality in Disney Theme Parks,” Yang’s talk last week, broke down exactly how VR can spoof our perceptions, and pointed out some ways in which HMDs will never be able to match the immersiveness of a ride. Visual input is important for a VR experience, but so is proprioception, the sense of where our bodies are positioned in relation to other things. And three-dimensional audio that shifts around you as your head turns can create an enveloping experience, but Yang reminded attendees that the tiny hairs on the cochleas in your ears don’t just perceive sound—they are also internal accelerometers that let you know your pitch and yaw and the direction of your movement.


Some of Yang’s advice was counterintuitive. VR headset makers have been killing themselves trying to cut down on latency—the lag between when your head turns and when the display registers that your head is turning—but Yang insisted that amount of latency is less important that the consistency of the latency. “Your brain is really good at adapting things, and it can handle a fair amount of latency,” he said. “It’s variability of latency that causes motion sickness. Motion sickness feels a lot like being drunk because it is like being drunk. In both cases, you’re experiencing an input mismatch, and we’ve evolved to think that this input mismatch means that we have been poisoned. The nausea is just your body saying, ‘Oh no, I’ve been poisoned, please eject everything.'”


According to Yang, VR was as integral to the building of Disney attractions as it is in the attractions themselves. Imagineers use tools like Digital Immersive Showroom to wander around a prototype version of an attraction before they begin any actual construction. “Building a theme park attraction is really expensive,” Yang told me me. “If you’re going to mess up, it’s better to do it with bits instead of concrete.” He discussed a VR system Disney uses to build life-sized environments on the fly with a pair of Wiimote-like mobile devices in each hand, and showed video of Imagineers walking around and inspect their handiwork as they build. He also pointed out that Minority Report-style interfaces are not a good idea—it may look cool, but no one would actually want to go to work and wave their arms in the air for eight hours.


Yang did have some advice for game designers working with HMDs. He believes that they’ll be particularly good for horror experiences. “When you see a scary movie in the theater, your friends are sitting right there next to you,” he said. “But that headset is so isolating that it really makes you feel cut off and alone.” He’s also keen to see VR real-time strategy games, where players can survey a virtual battlefield like a god looking down from on high. He talks about the surprising immersiveness of the decidedly old-school Disneyland experience Storybook Land Canal, even though it’s just a slow boat ride past miniature versions of classic Disney settings. “When you make something very small, it makes people feel powerful,” he says. “You don’t have to use pixels to make immersive environments.”



Today’s Apple Event: Everything You Need to Know


Today’s Apple Watch event brought us a few more details about the company’s first wristable, sure. But there were also plenty of non-watch announcements made today that were just as impressive. Here’s what happened, and why it mattered.


Apple Watch


We can start with the headliner. It turns out that Apple had already shared most of what it had to say about its wearable at its first introduction last September. The most important new info is the price, which varies—a lot—based on what model you opt for. Here’s a quick breakdown (price ranges depend on accompanying band).


Apple Watch Sport Edition: $349 (38mm); $499 (42mm)


Apple Watch: $549-$1049 (38mm); $599-$1099 (42mm)


Apple Watch Edition: $10,000 and up (and up, and up)


Preorders start on April 10th, with availability slated for April 24th. And while that Apple Watch Edition price might seem crazy, there’s a perfectly good explanation.


Otherwise, this is the same Apple Watch you’ve seen before. It offers some clever messaging and communication tools, like letting you share a drawing on your display with a fellow Apple Watch wearer in real time. It includes health monitoring tools, like an an accelerometer and heart rate monitor, and will help keep track of your fitness goals and nag you when you’re not meeting them. It plays nice with Siri and Apple Pay. You can use it for phone calls, even though if you have any common decency you probably shouldn’t. All pretty familiar!


We did, though, get a little more insight into what apps will work with it from launch, and how. Favorites like Twitter and MLB at Bat will bring with them fairly obvious notification use-cases (here is a tweet! here is a score!) while apps like Instagram will be present despite not making a strong case for why (here is beautiful photograph that you can barely see at this size!). The most useful apps will likely be those that save you time with your real-life interactions, like an American Airlines Passbook integration that lets you wave your wrist at TSA rather than digging out either your physical boarding pass or the one on your phone. Similarly, a W Hotels app will let you unlock your hotel room door with a single tap, rather than having to keep track of a keycard.


So far, most developers don’t seem to have done much beyond offloading features from your smartphone to your wrist. That’s enough to shave a few seconds off of a few interactions every day, probably, but hopefully over time they’ll be able to zero in on use cases that feel truly unique.


MacBook


The real star of the show—other than potential sticker shock for Apple Watch Edition hopefuls—was Apple’s 12-inch, two-pound, whisper-thin, totally redesigned, Retina display MacBook. An addition to Apple’s laptop lineup, rather than a MacBook Air replacement, the new Macbook features a few innovations might take a little getting used to.


To achieve its 13.1 millimeter thinness—that’s nearly a quarter less bulk than the current MacBook Air—this new MacBook ditches nearly all ports save for one USB Type-C (used for file transfers, video output, and charging) and a headphone jack. Its internals are also thoroughly redesigned; a tiny logic board, a Core M processor that lacks serious horsepower but allows for fanless operation, and acres of battery for up to 10 hours between charges.


Apple also gave the super-slight MacBook a new type of keyboard, trading traditional scissor switches for a “butterfly” movement that the company says improves accuracy but that we found a bit awkward in actual use. Similarly, a new “Force Touch” trackpad, which senses different levels of pressure applied, takes some getting used to.


The existing MacBook Air, meanwhile, got a processor bump but not a much-needed Retina display upgrade, leaving some question as to what sort of future Apple intends for its original ultralight laptop.


The new MacBook will start at $1,299 for a configuration with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. They’ll be available in silver, space grey, and gold, and will start shipping April 10th.


Cheaper Apple TV and HBO Now


Apple TV hardware didn’t get a spec upgrade today—although we hope to see one at some point this year; it’s been a while—but it did get a price cut, from $99 down to $69. That’s probably an overdue drop, given the prevalence of cheap streaming dongles like the Amazon Fire Stick and Chromecast. It also staves off competition from full-feature boxes like the Amazon Fire TV, Roku 3, and Nexus Player both of which still retail at $99.


Of even more importance, especially for those who already have an Apple TV entrenched in their living room, was the news that Apple will be the exclusive launch partner for HBO Now, the cable network’s standalone streaming service. When HBO Now launches in April, you’ll only be able to access it on Apple TV or through an iOS app. It’ll cost you $15 per month, which is totally worth the thrill of leaving your cable subscription behind.


ResearchKit


It’s not as flashy as watch or as gorgeous as a Q-tip-thin MacBook, but one of Apple’s most important announcements today was ResearchKit, a new open-source framework that hopes to draw on data from Apple’s millions of users to further medical studies. Essentially, it enables apps to turn your iPhone into a medical diagnostic device, sending your data to labs around the world.


ResearchKit will work with five apps as of today, including downloads that will attempt to do everything from tracking the effects of Parkinson’s disease, to aiding breast cancer patients. Any data collection will be strictly opt-in, and Apple itself won’t see any of your vitals along the way. While the idea of handing that much health data over to anyone can be off-putting, the potential benefits of research scientists having access to such a large sample size—and a constant flow of readings—are enormous.



Khaleesi Stops Playing Around in New Game of Thrones Teaser


“This is the time. And I will risk everything.”


Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane) issues that edict, but it could have been delivered by any power player in Westeros or Essos in this brand new trailer for Game of Thrones.


Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) is on the lam with Varys (Conleth Hill). Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) is finally ready, with legions of unsullied and three grown dragons, to “break the wheel” of power that has been spinning on and on in the Seven Kingdoms since the Targaryens were booted from the Iron Throne.* Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer) is in bed, literally and figuratively, with young Tommen Baratheon (Callum Wharry), which means Cersei (Lena Headey) is watching another son drift away into the femme fatale’s embrace. Jon Snow (Kit Harington) is speaking truth to power about the necessity of aligning with the Wildlings to confront the Army of the Dead, while Melisandre (Carice van Houten) remains the real power behind “King” Stannis in the North.


In other words, the chaos we were building towards all last season is about to be unleashed in grand fashion, and no banner will be spared bloodshed.


We’ve also got some exciting new faces, too, like three of the Sand Snakes, Oberyn Martell’s really scary and really angry daughters. Here we see Nymeria, Obara, and Tyene Sand accompanied by Ellaria (not their mom, but equally pissed about the savage end met by The Red Viper), training with whips, a severed head, and preparing to kill some people in the name of vengeance. And then there’s Jonathan Pryce, entering in as the High Sparrow. The gods are often invoked throughout Game of Thrones, but with the addition of Sparrow, the High Septon of the Faith of the Seven, it looks like we’ll finally get to meet an envoy to the New Gods.


This is the best look we’ve had so far at Season 5 of GoT, and as our hearts beat in time with the tick tick ticking of a clock in the background music, we know a bomb is about to blow.


*Thank the old gods and the new that we don’t have to watch her walk through the damn desert anymore.



Here’s What It’s Like to Use the Apple Watch


In September Apple showed us its wearable, the Apple Watch, but now we’ve actually gotten a chance to use it firsthand.


At today’s press event in San Francisco, I was able to poke, prod, and swipe an Apple Watch in a staging area the company set up next to the hall where the presentation took place. Overall, I found the touch and software experience of Apple’s Watch certainly as good as, if not better than, any other smartwatch on the market today. The hardware quality is superb, the screen is sharp, and the software experience is surprisingly robust—perhaps overwhelmingly so.


I tried on an Apple Watch with a brown leather band with a modern buckle. The watch was simple to take on and off. With this band, you simply press both sides of the buckle at the same time to release it once it’s on your wrist. The watch face itself sits comfortably on your wrist—the back is very smooth, and the rounded edges prevent any unwanted pinching. I tried the 38mm version, as I have a lady-sized wrist, and unlike other smartwatches, I didn’t feel like I had a small TV screen strapped to my arm.


The touch experience on the screen is exceedingly swift and responsive. You can tap or scroll on the screen using a fingertip, or use the digital crown on the side to scroll or zoom. Being accustomed to using an iPhone, using the crown for navigation feels kind of awkward and foreign for now, but I could see myself getting used to it in the future. For zooming into apps on the home screen, I had trouble spinning the crown to the exact zoom level I wanted (again, something that probably comes with practice). However, even without optimal zoom levels, I was usually able to tap the exact app I wanted to open. Apple’s circular icon-filled home screen is markedly different from other smart watches. I’m interested to see whether it is in fact easier and more convenient to use than swiping through a couple of pages to reach your app of choice, like on Android Wear.


Apple’s primary fitness app, which logs your exercise, standing time, and general movement, is very easy to use. You get an overview of all three metrics in graph compose of concentric circles, and by swiping from the right, you can get more details on each of those areas. With a swipe downwards, another graph shows exactly when in the day you were active.


AplWatch-3Up-Features-PR-PRINT Apple

When you use the exercise tracking app, you can select one of a number of different activities from a menu. Then you can set different goals for that activity, like distance or calories burned, for a run or walk. Once you hit start, you get a 3-2-1 countdown before the app starts tracking your activity. I’m used to waiting for a Garmin to sync with its satellites before pressing record for an activity, but not used to waiting once you actually hit start, so this was slightly off-putting. However, it does ensure that if you need to stash one last thing in your pocket before you start your workout, you’ve got a few seconds to do so.


Dialing It In


While you can control a number of the Watch’s settings from its companion iOS app, the Apple Watch also has a settings app on the watch itself. There, you can adjust the brightness of the screen, the size (and boldness) of the text, whether you want “Hey Siri” activated, or whether you want the screen to automatically wake when you lift up your wrist. The settings are minimal, and usually take two to three taps to complete. For controlling more detailed things like what app notifications you get on the watch, you’ll use its companion app.


For the most part, as we expected, app experiences are stripped down to the bare minimum, in terms of looks and functionality. One thing I didn’t like: the calendar app. I certainly think third party developers will be able to make something better. Apple didn’t have very many third party apps available for the demo at this point, but we will surely see a flood of new options once the watch app store actually goes up. But, calendar notifications and alerts are something better suited to viewing in a Glance, which you access with a downward swipe from the home screen. (And it was convenient and easy to tap the digital crown to return back to the home screen after you’ve completed an activity on the watch’s face.)


I’m cautiously optimistic to give the Watch a longer go, whenever review units become available. It does seem, for now, that it accomplishes a number of traditional smarwatch tasks in a more simple, and certainly more beautiful way. But needing to charge every day, with its 18-hour battery life, is still a bummer, and I wonder about how slowly third party apps will update over Bluetooth and Wi-fi. These are things we’ll look out for once we’re able to do a full review.



Full Apple Watch Details: Price, Availability, Apps, and More

The Apple Watch goes on sale April 24. Pre-orders and in-store demos begin April 10. The Apple Watch goes on sale April 24. Pre-orders and in-store demos begin April 10. Apple



Apple gave us a good look at the Apple Watch back in September, but also left us with a whole lot of questions. Now, things are a whole lot less mysterious: We know the on-sale date and price, plus more about how apps will work.


The Apple Watch will be available for pre-order on April 10. You’ll also be able to go into Apple Stores on April 10 and demo the watches in person. Retail sales begin two weeks later, on April 24. That’s also when the pre-orders should arrive in buyers’ hands.


Pricing starts at $349 for the entry-level, aluminum Apple Watch Sport (which we knew already), and goes up from there. The gold Apple Watch Edition starts at $10,000, which may seem like a whopping amount, but is actually a decent price within the gold jewelry world.


A breakdown of the pricing model is below. The actual price varies depending on which band you choose. There will be options from rubber to leather to finely-crafted steel links and mesh, all costing different amounts.


Apple Watch Sport

(aluminum version)

$349 38mm

$399 42mm


Apple Watch

(steel version)

$549-$1,049 38mm

$599-$1,099 42mm


Apple Watch Edition

(gold version)

$10,000 and up


How the Watch Works


As Apple detailed at its Apple Watch reveal last September, the wearable’s operation is heavily tied to an iPhone. It will work with the iPhone 5 or later, not just the more recent iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.


Apple says the battery should last 18 hours—the company claims this is “all-day battery,” and should get most of us through an entire day of use. You will have to charge the watch every night while you sleep, though, using the magnetic charger that attaches to the back of the watch body.


The Apple Watch lies dormant until you lift your wrist, at which point it wakes up to a bubbly-looking homescreen of circular app icons. While you can operate apps with touches and taps (including long taps, as the display can sense force), you can also navigate through menus using the Watch’s “digital crown.” With a twist, you can zoom through screens and menus, or with a press, go back to the watch’s home screen. You can also use the crown to customize the color of the watch’s face. Below the crown is a button you can tap to access contacts you’ve chatted with recently. This “digital touch” communicator lets you send them Snapchat-like pictures and sketches with just a few taps.


On the watch’s underside is an LED-based heart rate tracker, as well as a wireless inductive charging port that attaches magnetically to its charging cradle. Inside you’ll find a vibrating motor that offers haptic feedback for notifications and onscreen taps. It also includes a mic, so you can dictate queries to Siri, like asking what movie is playing this evening.


Apple has a number of built-in apps and features for the Apple Watch that were previously announced. Besides Siri, there’s a photo app, which offers a Photostream-like grid of photos you can browse through using the digital crown or a finger swipe. In its Maps app, you can pan around the screen using your finger or the crown, navigate to favorite locations, or search for specific places using voice commands.


Third Party Apps


Apple opened up WatchKit to developers late last year, so they’ve had plenty of time to get their offerings in order before the end of April. Apple will push out an update to iOS (version 8.2) that will enable watch interactions, and let you download Watch apps onto your phone and pair them with your wearable via Bluetooth.


For starters, you’ll definitely have Facebook and Instagram, with the ability to reply to incoming tweets or messages right from the watch’s notification screen. Pinterest also has an app, and you can navigate to places you’ve pinned in the watch app. Uber has an app—hail a car and watch it arrive on the little screen. American Airlines has also partnered with Apple so you can check into flights from your wrist, and so you can display your boarding pass on the watch’s screen. Hotel chains like the W will also let you unlock your room from your watch.


One of the coolest integrations we saw on stage at today’s event was all the smart home stuff you can control through Alarm.com using the watch. Security cameras, lights, locks, doors. Just a few taps and you can keep tabs on your house from anywhere.



This Is The Unbelievably Thin, Beautiful, Strange New MacBook


MacBook_PSL_AllColors_PR-PRINT

Apple’s latest MacBook isn’t a spec update. It’s not an incremental upgrade. It’s a totally different machine, for a different kind of person. It’s kind of ridiculous.


First of all, it is incredibly, impossibly thin. I’ve been using a MacBook Air for years, and this 13.1-millimeter, 2-pound device feels like something completely other. It’s amazingly sturdy for being so thin, too. The screen, the 2304 x 1400 display that I wish desperately would have also come to the Air, is lovely. It’s the biggest upgrade this device offers, honestly: once you start using a Retina display it’s hard to go back.


In every way, this is a thing of beauty; it’s no wonder Apple spent so much time talking about the engineering behind it. Everything about the MacBook is about beauty, whether it’s the single USB-C port on the left side that is the only port on the entire device save for a headphone jack on the right, or the new colors—Gold, Space Gray, and Silver. The Gold is actually much more handsome than gaudy, but the Space Gray is my favorite of the options. It’s dark and sleek, and so, so very thin.


MacBook_PF_OP30_Svr-PRINT


But then you use it, and the feeling changes a bit. For all the talk about the new butterfly keys, the new, better keyboard, I immediately hated the feeling of the keys. There’s basically no travel, no movement—it’s not that different from tapping on a touchscreen. I initially felt the same way about the new Force Touch trackpad, which is in most ways the same as ever, except for the new ability to sense different levels of pressure placed on it. For a minute, it was hard to get just right. I kept pressing too hard, or not hard enough, trying to select a word and get it to pop up a Wikipedia page for Kelly Slater, or to show all the Numbers documents I had open by mashing on the app icon. But after a minute, I figured it out, and quickly fast-forwarding through a video or looking something up on Wikipedia is actually quite easy. The keyboard may well be the same thing, but it doesn’t give a great first impression.


It runs quite well, actually, for a device powered by a Core M processor and with no fan inside. Based on a few minutes of web browsing, typing my name over and over in a Pages document, and poking through Numbers, it seems like this device is up to the tasks for which it is clearly meant. It’s not for gaming, it’s probably not for editing video, but it does the basics really well.


It’s hard to say for sure without using the laptop more, which we’ll do as soon as possible, but for the moment the new MacBook feels a bit like the Apple Watch: it’s beautiful, a status symbol I’d be desperate to show to everyone I know and kind of already want to frame. But it’s expensive, it’s a little underpowered for such an expensive laptop, and it feels a little like it might be a device without a market beyond the curious and the early adopter. But good lord is it beautiful.



Obama Has a $100M Plan to Fill the Tech Talent Shortage


Businesses in the US are on a hiring spree, but jobs that require tech skills sit open—500,000 in all.


It’s that gap that the Obama administration hopes to close with its new $100 million TechHire Initiative, announced by the president today. At its core, TechHire aims to convince local governments, businesses, and individuals that a four-year degree is no longer the only way to gain valuable tech skills.


This doesn't just apply to San Francisco. This doesn't just apply to Boston. It applies across the board in every part of the country. President Obama


“It turns out it doesn’t matter where you learned code, it just matters how good you are at writing code,” Obama said. “If you can do the job, you should get the job.”


That’s an idea that training startups like Codecademy and General Assembly, as well as online course companies like Coursera, have been pushing for years. Now, the White House is urging businesses and local governments to embrace that concept, as well.


In Silicon Valley, the idea of non-traditional training as a viable alternative to college is a familiar concept. In the rest of corporate America, not so much. And yet, non-tech industries like financial services and healthcare, are where two-thirds of the country’s tech jobs exist. So, to make this idea more palatable to non-tech employers, TechHire is working to develop some standards for alternative education.


“When companies have job openings they cannot fill, it costs them money,” he said, speaking to thousands of local leaders at the National League of Cities’ annual conference. “If these jobs go unfilled, it’s a missed opportunity for the workers, but also your city, your country, your state, and our nation.”


Setting the Standards


To create these standards, the Obama administration is working with the business advisory firm CEB to develop a guide for employers on how to recruit tech workers from less traditional places. It’s also working with a company called Knack to make a standard tech aptitude test free to employers and training organizations. The goal is to make it easy for employers to assess the quality of a job candidate, who doesn’t have a computer science degree on his resume.


There are financial incentives, too. In his speech, Obama announced that the Department of Labor would run a $100 million grant competition to fund programs that have a proven track record of helping underrepresented groups, like women, minorities, veterans, and people with disabilities, land tech jobs. Through TechHire, the group #YesWeCode also committed to donating $10 million in scholarships, which will fund 2,000 coding bootcamp scholarships for minorities.


So far, over 20 cities and local communities have agreed to share their expertise with one another and help create more training opportunities for tech workers. Several other companies, including Microsoft, Flatiron School, and Dev Bootcamp, have agreed to expand their free and low-cost training courses, and about 300 employers have signed up to recruit and place graduates of these new training programs.


In his speech, the President urged other local leaders to join the fray. “This doesn’t just apply to San Francisco. This doesn’t just apply to Boston,” he said. “It applies across the board in every part of the country.”



Yes, There’s a Market For That $10,000 Apple Watch

Apple Watch Edition $10 grand for an Apple Watch Edition? That's a lot compared to other wearables, but it's actually cheap for an 18k gold watch with sapphire glass. Apple



There’s no difference between the base-level $350 Apple Watch Sport and the $10,000 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition in terms of what they can actually do. But there’s certainly a difference in the what they’re made of, and you may have noticed a difference in price.


Just a slight $9,650 difference in price.


It’s reasonable to assume that $10,000 qualifies as “a lot of money” to most people—maybe not for a car or a house, but certainly for a watch that needs charging every night. (There are, of course, exceptions.) But in the world of high-end goods, $10 grand is not at all unreasonable for a 42mm 18-karat gold watch with sapphire crystal glass. Within that context, it’s actually sort of a bargain. However, there’s a clash between what the Apple Watch is and does, and the fundamental reasons why people spend thousands—or tens of thousands—of dollars on a timepiece.


Material World


Let’s talk about gold. 24-karat gold is pure gold, and it costs around $1,200 per ounce. It’s also too soft to use for watches and jewelry. 18-karat gold, which is more common but still costly, is usually 75 percent pure gold mixed with other metals. There are reports that Apple’s special blend of 18-karat gold is different, using ceramic instead of other metals to make the watch harder and less scratch-prone, thanks to an innovative, recently patented manufacturing approach. It may contain less gold by volume than normal 18-karat gold, due to the fact that the ceramic has a lower density than metal.


Depending on what the gold is mixed with, 18-karat gold has a different color. Yellow gold is usually 75 percent gold mixed with some combination of silver, copper, and zinc. Rose gold is usually 75 percent gold mixed with a greater amount of copper and a smaller amount of silver. With the Apple Watch, the rose and yellow coloration likely comes from ceramic rather than alloys. In any event, while the Apple Watch comes in yellow- and rose-gold varieties, both should contain the same amount of gold.


Also important to note: These are true-blue gold watches, not gold-plated watches. A gold-plated watch just has a spray tan; the plated stuff will chip away and may turn your wrist green. Solid gold doesn’t do that. Not all of the Apple Watch Edition’s components are made of gold, of course, but everything that looks gold is the real deal.


Compared to similarly sized (38mm and 42mm diameter) high-end watches made with 18-karat gold, the sky-high price of the Apple Watch Edition is right in line. But while the Apple Watch certainly does more than your average high-end Swiss watch, it’s also a different animal. Those other watches are hand-crafted timepieces from specialists in Switzerland that know a thing or two about tourbillons and rattrapantes. They have hand-crafted complications that jack up the price.


The difference between an 18-karat gold watch that costs a few thousand dollars and one that costs tens of thousands of dollars comes down to the movements inside them: The really expensive ones have handmade movements, while “cheaper” ones have those parts outsourced. So when you pay $20,000 for a watch, much of that is for rarity and skilled labor, not just the materials.


Here’s how the Apple Watch pricing compares to some of those other luxury wristwatches, as well as an 18-karat Tissot watch with an outsourced ETA movement and a gold-plated cheapie.


Within this context of this list, the Apple Watch Edition has a fair price, but it’s still a black sheep. It has big things going for it: It’ll be more versatile than the Piagets and the Vacheron Constantins of the world, thanks to an app ecosystem, a proximity-based payment system, and fitness-tracking features. There’s also the small fact that it’s built to interact with an iPhone, which happens to be the best-selling smartphone in the world.


So in the dream scenario for Apple, the Watch will be the iPhone of its category: A device that transforms the industry it enters, becoming the blueprint for How To Do It. But even in the best-case scenario, don’t expect an iPhone-like cash cow. People buy new iPhones every couple of years, in sync with their carrier contracts. The Apple Watch may be more like an iPad in terms of sales cycles, and it’s less of a necessity than a smartphone. If people buy one, especially the $10,000-and-up Edition, they’ll want to use it for more than a couple years.


Digital Native


And of course, it’s a digital watch. That may be enough to keep serious watch collectors away, despite its extra functionality. It’s an interesting juxtaposition within the watch world: Apple is creating a high-end, mass-market wrist-computer for an audience that values tradition, mechanics, and individuality.


Perhaps most daunting for those considering spending thousands on an 18k Apple Watch? It will certainly be an investment, but not in the same way an artisanal 18-karat gold Swiss watch might be. Technology is ever-evolving and fickle, and the Apple Watch may quickly become obsolete. It needs to be charged every day, and in a few years its battery will stop working altogether. This is not an heirloom.


There’s still a market in the watch-collector crowd—it just means that collectors will buy it for reasons other than being a watch. And they very well might, because they’ll experience less sticker shock than your average person. Imagine this scenario. You have a ton of money, you like high-end watches, and you own an iPhone. The Apple Watch seems interesting to you, either as a collector piece or a new way to interact with your iPhone. So which one do you get? You certainly wouldn’t befoul your wrist with one of the lower-end models. You have the cash, you go for gold.


It’s important also not to forget that Apple has made a big marketing push in China, which is the world’s biggest smartphone market, the world’s second-largest collection of millionaires, a world power that’s expected to double its number of super-wealthy households by 2018, and has an appreciation for gold as status symbol.


Apple is focusing marketing efforts in China, and it’s already experiencing sales momentum there with its other products. The iPhone is gaining serious ground on Xiaomi, China’s market-leading smartphone manufacturer, especially in urban areas. At today’s Apple event, the show started with a montage of shoppers in China’s newest Apple Store. And after it was announced, one of the Apple Watch’s first public appearances was on the cover of Vogue China last November. Of course, the one on the cover was that pricey rose-gold version.


As for the anodized aluminum Apple Watch Sport and stainless-steel Apple Watch? Those are meant to steamroll the Moto 360s, Samsung Gears, and LG G Watches of the world. The Apple Watch Edition may be essentially the same thing, but it’s hoping to conquer an entirely different market.



Everything You Need to Know About Apple’s New MacBook


If your eyeballs are aching from the horrid blocky pixels in your MacBook Air’s non-HD screen, rejoice. After much speculation and anticipation, a brand new, super-skinny MacBook with a Retina display has finally arrived.


This isn’t a “MacBook Air,” it’s simply called the new MacBook. But it looks more like a MacBook Air than any of the previous MacBooks.


The new MacBook starts at $1,300, weighs just two pounds and has a body made entirely of metal. But it’s only 13.1 millimeters thick—a full 24 percent thinner than the last MacBook. That’s so thin, Apple has had to redesign the entire thing. It has a new logic board, a new keyboard, a new touchpad, and the design is fanless.


The keys forego the scissor switches traditionally found in laptop keyboards for a new switch designed by Apple. The company says it provides better stability and more accurate typing when you’re banging away at your keys. Apple calls this new invention a “Butterfly switch.”


The trackpad has also been re-engineered. It not only senses touch, but also pressure and force, so it knows when you’re just gently tapping and navigating, and when you’re clicking with greater force and urgency. It provides haptic feedback (vibrations) through the trackpad as you tap (or as you grind your finger into it). This should open the door to some new gestures.


There’s a 12-inch Retina display that runs at 2,304 x 1,440 resolution. The panel itself is just 0.88 millimeters thick. Inside, the new laptop has a dual-core Intel Core M that’s configurable up to 1.3 GHz (the base model is 1.1Ghz) with an Intel HD graphics 5300 chip. Bluetooth 4.0 is on-board, as is 802.11ac networking.


The base model with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD will cost $1,299. A 512GB SSD option will cost $1,599. These new computers ship April 10. They’ll be available in silver, space gray, or gold. (The gold one actually looks really nice.)


At the product announcement in San Francisco, Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller joked, “It’s filled with batteries!” The new laptop has 35 percent more battery life than previous MacBooks (Schiller didn’t say exactly which model he was comparing it to, but the message is that battery life has been improved). The company claims nine hours of wireless web browsing and ten hours of watching movies. It consumes only five watts—that’s incredibly power efficient for a laptop.


As rumored, Apple has done away with traditional USB ports. In terms of I/O, the new MacBook features only one, reversible USB Type C port. This one port handles charging, video output, and data transport. Curiously, this means Apple is taking a step back from the MagSafe-style adaptors it moved to years ago.


The new USB-C port is reversible, and it handles power, HDMI, and data transport. The new USB-C port is reversible, and it handles power, HDMI, and data transport. Apple

Apple’s New ResearchKit, An App Framework For Medical Research



Apple’s ResearchKit, A New Framework For Medical-Research Apps

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Jeff Williams, senior vice president of operations at Apple, introduces ResearchKit at an event in San Francisco. Jeff Williams, senior vice president of operations at Apple, introduces ResearchKit at an event in San Francisco. Screenshot: WIRED




Cyberespionage Is a Top Priority for CIA’s New Directorate

CIA Director John Brennan during a news conference at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., Dec. 11, 2014. CIA Director John Brennan during a news conference at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., Dec. 11, 2014. Pablo Martinez/AP



In the CIA’s mission of global influence and espionage, its hackers have just been elevated to a powerful new role.


On Friday afternoon, CIA director John Brennan publicly issued a memo to the agency’s staff calling for a massive re-organization of its hierarchy and priorities. And center stage in the CIA’s new plans is a new Cyber Directorate that will treat “cyber”—in federal-speak, hackers and hacking—as a major new focus for both offense and defense.


“Digital technology holds great promise for mission excellence, while posing serious threats to the security of our operations and information, as well as to U.S. interests more broadly,” Brennan’s memo reads. “We must place our activities and operations in the digital domain at the very center of all our mission endeavors. To that end, we will establish a senior leadership position to oversee the acceleration of digital and cyber integration across all of our mission areas.”


The CIA’s interest in hacking isn’t new: After all, it’s known to have actively participated in the mission to disable Iranian nuclear facilities using the Stuxnet malware, in partnership with the NSA and Israeli intelligence. But more than ever, those sorts of digital elements are being integrated into the CIA’s human intelligence operations, says Jim Lewis, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has had conversations with intelligence and military officials over the last year about the plans for the CIA’s digital overhaul. Those “humint” operations, as the intelligence community calls them, typically involve real spies on the ground, unlike the NSA’s remote cyberespionage or the cyberwarfare activities of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command. “This kind of cyber activity has become increasingly important to them,” says Lewis. “It’s not NSA’s [signals intelligence] mission; it’s not Cyber Command’s war fighting mission. It’s traditional espionage using cyber techniques,” says Lewis. That combination of humint and digital operations could mean a spy infiltrating an organization to plant spyware by hand, for instance, or a digital investigation to check the bona fides of a source or agent. “If you think of NSA as a vacuum cleaner and Cyber Command as a hammer, this is a little more precise, and it’s about supporting human operations.”


The CIA’s announcement represents yet another sign that cyber-offense is gaining importance for practically every intelligence and military agency. The FBI late last year asked for new rules of criminal procedure that would vastly expand its power to hack into the computers of criminal suspects. And we know from Snowden leaks that the NSA has built the world’s most powerful hacking organization, pulling off high-resource operations that have rarely been seen elsewhere in the cybersecurity world. The NSA’s most recent operations reportedly include hacking SIM card manufacturer Gemalto and planting insidious malware in the firmware of hard drives.


But Lewis argues that the CIA announcement is also intended to help the CIA shift from its paramilitary role during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into more of a peacetime espionage role, where digital spying will be doubly important. “They’ve been involved in armed conflict and operating drones,” says Lewis. “Now they have to go back to old-school spying, recruiting agents, getting people to tell you secrets in a peaceful environment.”


Brennan’s announcement is also intended largely as a personnel move, says Alan Paller, research director for the SANS Institute, which educates and evaluates the cybersecurity skills of many government staffers. “His reorg is at least 80 percent about…giving the cybersecurity mission more of a front and center position and equal authority, rather than a technical support role at the beck and call of intelligence analysts,” Paller says.


That new level of prestige and opportunity for the CIA’s hackers, says Paller, will be crucial to recruiting in an age where human minds, not stockpiles of weapons, can decide foreign conflicts. “Only extraordinarily skilled cyber defenders and cyber operators can enable a unit or a business or a nation to survive,” Paller says. “You cannot train your way to supremacy. You have to recruit people with the right brain wiring and invest heavily in constantly building their skills. Those correctly wired people are rare.”



The CIA’s New Directorate Makes Cyberespionage A Top Priority

CIA Director John Brennan during a news conference at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., Dec. 11, 2014. CIA Director John Brennan during a news conference at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., Dec. 11, 2014. Pablo Martinez/AP



In the CIA’s mission of global influence and espionage, its hackers have just been elevated to a powerful new role.


On Friday afternoon, CIA director John Brennan publicly issued a memo to the agency’s staff calling for a massive re-organization of its hierarchy and priorities. And center stage in the CIA’s new plans is a new Cyber Directorate that will treat “cyber”—in federal-speak, hackers and hacking—as a major new focus for both offense and defense.


“Digital technology holds great promise for mission excellence, while posing serious threats to the security of our operations and information, as well as to U.S. interests more broadly,” Brennan’s memo reads. “We must place our activities and operations in the digital domain at the very center of all our mission endeavors. To that end, we will establish a senior leadership position to oversee the acceleration of digital and cyber integration across all of our mission areas.”


The CIA’s interest in hacking isn’t new: After all, it’s known to have actively participated in the mission to disable Iranian nuclear facilities using the Stuxnet malware, in partnership with the NSA and Israeli intelligence. But more than ever, those sorts of digital elements are being integrated into the CIA’s human intelligence operations, says Jim Lewis, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has had conversations with intelligence and military officials over the last year about the plans for the CIA’s digital overhaul. Those “humint” operations, as the intelligence community calls them, typically involve real spies on the ground, unlike the NSA’s remote cyberespionage or the cyberwarfare activities of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command. “This kind of cyber activity has become increasingly important to them,” says Lewis. “It’s not NSA’s [signals intelligence] mission; it’s not Cyber Command’s war fighting mission. It’s traditional espionage using cyber techniques,” says Lewis. That combination of humint and digital operations could mean a spy infiltrating an organization to plant spyware by hand, for instance, or a digital investigation to check the bona fides of a source or agent. “If you think of NSA as a vacuum cleaner and Cyber Command as a hammer, this is a little more precise, and it’s about supporting human operations.”


The CIA’s announcement represents yet another sign that cyber-offense is gaining importance for practically every intelligence and military agency. The FBI late last year asked for new rules of criminal procedure that would vastly expand its power to hack into the computers of criminal suspects. And we know from Snowden leaks that the NSA has built the world’s most powerful hacking organization, pulling off high-resource operations that have rarely been seen elsewhere in the cybersecurity world. The NSA’s most recent operations reportedly include hacking SIM card manufacturer Gemalto and planting insidious malware in the firmware of hard drives.


But Lewis argues that the CIA announcement is also intended to help the CIA shift from its paramilitary role during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into more of a peacetime espionage role, where digital spying will be doubly important. “They’ve been involved in armed conflict and operating drones,” says Lewis. “Now they have to go back to old-school spying, recruiting agents, getting people to tell you secrets in a peaceful environment.”


Brennan’s announcement is also intended largely as a personnel move, says Alan Paller, research director for the SANS Institute, which educates and evaluates the cybersecurity skills of many government staffers. “His reorg is at least 80 percent about…giving the cybersecurity mission more of a front and center position and equal authority, rather than a technical support role at the beck and call of intelligence analysts,” Paller says.


That new level of prestige and opportunity for the CIA’s hackers, says Paller, will be crucial to recruiting in an age where human minds, not stockpiles of weapons, can decide foreign conflicts. “Only extraordinarily skilled cyber defenders and cyber operators can enable a unit or a business or a nation to survive,” Paller says. “You cannot train your way to supremacy. You have to recruit people with the right brain wiring and invest heavily in constantly building their skills. Those correctly wired people are rare.”



This Week in Trailers: Nerds and Avengers Rule the World


Wow, you guys. It was a big week on the Internet for WIRED ones. Not only did we get another Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer, but we got a show called Nerd Court, robots, clones, artificial intelligence, Sherlock Holmes, and Community. When the Geek Gods give, they do indeed give with both hands. And for some garnish, we’ve also got a couple murder mysteries featuring Charlize Theron and model-turned actress Cara Delevingne, aka your future biggest crush in the movie Suicide Squad. Get yourselves some tall glasses of water, nerds. We don’t want you passing out while you take in this week’s best trailers.


The One Everyone is Talking About: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Above)


Now with more Vision!

Pause at: 1:01 for dangerous love. Stop at 1:09 for ass kicking. We’re assuming they aren’t here for brunch at 1:18. Looks like Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are finally declaring sides at 1:39 and 1:40. Annnnd Vision at 2:03!

Essential Quote: “People would look to the sky and see hope. I’ll take that from them first.”—Ultron (James Spader)


The One You Wish Everyone Would Talk About: Ex Machina


We first

posted about Ex Machina last November under the very same heading. And guess what? It’s still the movie we wish everyone would talk about! Since that time we’ve also had a chance to see the movie and it is really, really good. Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac, and Domhnall Gleeson are each outstanding in this sci-fi psychological thriller filled with creeping dread. This trailer plays up the more action-oriented elements of Ex Machina, but the movie as a whole is an excellent balance of curiosity, quiet fear, and even some mildly twisted ambient horror. April is coming up quick, everyone, and you don’t want to miss Ex Machina in theaters.

Pause at: 0:54, 1:22, 1:53, and 2:23 for Ava in full effect.

Essential Quote: “It’s strange to have made something that hates you.”—Ava (Vikander) to Nathan (Isaac), her creator


The Based-On-A-True-Story One: The Face of An Angel


The trial of Amanda “Foxy Knoxy” Knox was built for cinematic adaptation: A young, pretty American co-ed studying abroad in Italy first convicted then acquitted for the murder of her roommate—and then convicted again after Italy’s highest court of appeal overturned the acquittal. Though Knoxy is back in America and likely won’t serve any of her 28.5 year sentence, her story is still a playground for filmmakers looking to traffic in the salacious. And no, we aren’t just talking about the lifetime movie Amanda Knox: Murder On Trial in Italy. Director Michael Winterbottom (A Mighty Heart) helms this loose adaptation of Barbie Latza Nadeau’s book Angel Face: Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox and has turned it into a movie about a fictional murder of a college student—murdered by her roommate—in Siena, Italy. Kate Beckinsale plays a writer, Daniel Brühl plays a filmmaker, and they’re one of many trying to cash in on the tragic crime and subsequent media frenzy. And hey, Cara Delevingne is on hand to play tour guide for Brühl’s character, Thomas. This looks fun enough, but most exciting is perhaps the involvement of Delevingne, who was recently given the Breakthrough Actress honor at Elle magazine’s style awards. Before you guffaw at the accolade, consider that she’s slated to appear in Paper Towns, Pan, and Suicide Squad over the next few years. We’ll be seeing more and more of the model/actress in the future and Angel will give us a glimpse of what’s in store.

Pause at: 0:33—hey, Cara. Stop at 0:46 for some next level Kate Beckinsale bitchface.

Essential Quote: “Do you think you are the only one allowed to make money from this story?”—Edoardo (Valerio Mastandrea, asking the really humane questions)


The Suspenseful One: Dark Places


Just one year after her smash hit novel Gone Girl burned up the box office and nabbed a few Oscar nominations, Gillian Flynn’s second novel, Dark Places, is coming to theaters. This one doesn’t have the David Fincher bonus attached to it, but director Gilles Paquet-Brenner has assembled an interesting cast to tell the story of Libby, a woman who survived the massacre of her family 25 years ago, and who agrees—for a price—to revisit the murders and help unearth previously hidden truths. Charlize Theron stars as Libby, and is supported by Nicholas Hoult, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christina Hendricks, Corey Stoll, Tye Sheridan, and Drea de Matteo. Not bad, right? This likely won’t reach Gone Girl levels of populist appeal and critical praise, but if Theron and company can deliver a tight, satisfying little genre number we’re always in for a good murder mystery.

Pause at: 0:11 for the seeds of trauma. Pretty interested in what’s going on at 0:40.

Essential Quote: “You’re just as imprisoned as I am.”—Ben (Stoll) to his sister, Libby (Theron)


The Sherlock One: Mr. Holmes


Ian McKellen as a late-in-life Sherlock Holmes trying to solve one last unsolved case before his mental faculties are fully diminished by age?! Yes, please, and pass the tissues! Two things we are always up for are Sir Ian and Mr. Holmes, add in Bill Condon as a director and Laura Linney as a co-star and we’re locked in for this summer release.

Pause at: 0:31 for heartbreak.

Essential Quote: “His name is Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” Yeah it is!


The Sci-Fi One: Self/Less


Anyone else loving this “Everyone gets a science fiction movie!” trend? Cause we sure are! Ben Kingsley is a dying man. Correction: A dying very rich man, which means he can afford to put his mind in a new, sexy body. And who’s sexier than Ryan Reynolds? But since this movie can’t just be a 15 minute medical procedure and then Sir Ben goes home happy because he inherited Mr. Reynolds’ body, a lot of bad business is about to go down. And perhaps best of all, we get to see Matthew Goode put his sinister hat on as the doctor who heads up this Trading Places-style procedure. Goode is phenomenal at switching back and forth between dreamy boy next door and dripping evil power monger, and for our money, he’s more fun as the dark mastermind.

Pause at: 0:32 to meet the possible new you! Why they always gotta make consciousness transplants so scary, like at 0:46? There could be worse things than coming back as this guy at 1:06.

Essential Quote: “Immortality has some side effects.”—Albright (Goode)


The Alterna-Screen One: Nerd Court


You guys, it’s called Nerd Court. That pretty much covers all the bases.

Pause at: 0:03, 0:22, 0:24, 0:45 for, well, nerds.

Essential Quote: “I don’t need to see the penis of Sonic the Hedgehog like this.”


The Small Screen Standout: Orphan Black Season 3


Major spoilers here if you haven’t seen Season 2 yet, but as much as things change, they stay the same: clones on clones on clones!

Pause at: Any moment for something ominous and cloney.

Essential Quote: “Recognize me?”—Sarah (Tatiana Maslany), asking a very unfair question


The Other Alterna-Screen Standout: Community Season 6


Stopping at Season 5 probably would have been a good idea for Community, but hell, here we go!

Pause at: 0:38 for … Shirley?

Essential Quote: “I have a brain the size of Jupiter. I’m nobody’s fourth Ghostbuster.”—Elroy Patashnik (well played, Keith David)


The Small Screen Super Standout: Veep Season 4


Everything. This show is everything. Also, Hugh Laurie!

Pause at: 0:38 and 0:40 for Amy faces!

Essential Quote: “I’m your calendar. I’m your Google. I’m your Wilson the volleyball!”—Gary (Tony Hale)



How a Circular Smartphone Could Help Us Rethink Tech

Runcible is more of a provocation than a product, but it's an interesting provocation. Runcible is more of a provocation than a product, but it's an interesting provocation. Monohm



Screens are rectangles. Even the 3-year-old playing with your iPad could tell you that. But what would the digital world look like through a different sort of frame? Say… a circular one?


Monohm, a startup based in Berkeley, California, was founded around this very idea. For the last year, the three-person team has been working a circular, palm-sized device dubbed Runcible. They cheekily refer to it as the “anti-smartphone,” a description that goes for both its form factor and its value system. The round device is meant to be the antidote to our feed-obsessed, notification-saturated digital existence. It’s a challenge to the rectangular status quo and everything it represents. That’s a quixotic dream, but an interesting one.


Different Rectangles, Different Effects


Display technologies have a long and rectangular history. Before smartphones there were movie screens, TVs, and computers, not to mention paintings and pages of print. And then of course there are windows—in some ways the original glass rectangles. In each case, the rectangle’s prominence can be attributed in large part to practicality. Whether you’re talking about film or glass or stone, rectangles are easy to make. They don’t leave much wasted material.


As frames for shaping the world, however, different types of rectangles can produce vastly different effects. In her book The Virtual Window, which traces the rectangular frame from Renaissance painting up through Microsoft Windows, media theorist Anne Friedberg offers an example from the history of architecture, centering on a public feud between French builder August Perret and the preeminent modernist architect Le Corbusier. Perret was a strong advocate of the traditional French casement window, which was oriented vertically. Its main function, he said, was to let light into a room. Le Corbusier, making use of new manufacturing techniques, designed his buildings around long, horizontal windows, which were as much about framing the outside world as illuminating the space within. The disagreement influenced architecture for decades to come. The simple act of turning a rectangle on its side gave us entirely new ways to think about space.


Rectangles are still subtly dictating our behavior today. Movie screens, chased by TVs, have gotten bigger and wider, encouraging us to sit back and lose ourselves in the spectacle. (In 1930, Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein lamented how the cinema’s “passive horizontalism.” He wanted the screen to be square.) Smartphones, with their slender, touch-controlled displays, have become a distinctly more active rectangle. Paired with the never-ending vertical feeds that fill apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, they’ve become an irresistible, inexhaustible diversion.


The point is this: Frames matter. They suggest certain things about how we should approach them. They shape the type of stuff that’s made for them. And if just turning a rectangle on its side can make such a big difference, imagine all the interesting things that might happen if you left the rectangle behind altogether.


The Contained, Constrained Circle


Runcible isn’t meant to be a smartphone replacement so much as an alternative. “I think we’ve become really, really good at getting interrupted and creating conduits for interruption,” says Monohm CEO Aubrey Anderson, who met his co-founders during a stint at Apple. “It’s time now to use technology to get a little quieter.” If miniaturizing the computer is what got us the smartphone, Runcible asks what a gizmo might look like if you started by souping up a pocket watch. And the shape of the device is central to that thinking. A circular frame, after all, is no good for browsing a Twitter feed.


A concept sketch. A concept sketch. Runcible

So what is it good for? That’s the question. At this point, Runcible as much a provocation as an actual product. The three-person team, which has been working with the San Francisco design studio Box Clever on the concept for nearly a year, has some prototype hardware and a crude sketch of an operating system, but they’ve still got a long way to go. They’ve got a few vague ideas for applications. One is a sort of dashboard that gives you an overview of activity on your social media accounts. Another is a compass-style mapping system that encourages wandering instead of pure A-to-B efficiency. But they’re more enthusiastic about the philosophy behind it all: They want to see applications that distill information and streamline interaction, software that constrains the smartphone experience as it exists today.


All this is easier said than done, of course. Throwing out centuries of rectangular thinking and starting from scratch ain’t easy. Plus, it’s not clear that people really want constraint to begin with. Smartphones are distracting, sure, but they’re also incredibly useful and immensely entertaining and maybe a little distraction is a fair price to pay for all the good stuff.


Still, even as a hint of a possible device, Runcible is compelling. For one thing, the company’s hardware model feels great in the hand (The team’s hardware guy, George Arriola, came from Sony, where he helped design the PlayStation 4.) The model’s curved back brings to mind the very first iPhone—and makes you consider how each successive generation has become a little bit harder to hold. And though unformed, the vision for the software is interesting too. If today’s interactive rectangles and infinite feeds signal that there’s always more stuff just outside the frame, circles could offer something more self-contained, more complete. Maybe even something actively inefficient. Rectangles are beautiful and functional. Circles are zen.


The Apple Watch homescreen is ditching the static grid. The Apple Watch homescreen is ditching the static grid.

A circular device would sever the link to the printed page, the TV and the computer, and invite developers to look elsewhere for metaphor and inspiration. Pocket watches and compasses. Microscopes and telescopes. Peep holes, port holes, and wormholes. Dials, buttons, and other circular controls. If nothing else, the concept could be valuable simply for helping us identify some of the assumptions and habits that underlie our existing devices. Maybe thinking about circles could help us make our rectangles better.


Starting to Think Outside the Frame


Runcible is just one scrappy, literal attempt to abandon the rectangle. But similar thinking is happening elsewhere. Android Wear, Google’s smartwatch operating system, reconsiders what apps should look like on a tiny circular display. Apple Watch is in some ways another rectangle, but its real estate is limited enough that it will also encourage new, less rectangular thinking. (Note how its home screen ditches iPhone’s grid of icons for a blob of circular ones. Also note the recent rise of circular avatars over the traditional square ones in apps and interfaces of all kinds).


We’ve seen how sensors can be harnessed to choreograph experiences that happen outside of the frame entirely, as with Disney’s Magic Bands, which usher you through the company’s parks. And then of course there are technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality, where your nose is effectively pressed so close to the glass that the frame disappears entirely. Here, the screen is less of a window, more of a lens. The only frame is your field of vision.


Rectangles will endure. They’re easy, they’re efficient. But as new components and manufacturing techniques make it easier to experiment with other forms, we’ll likely find people exploring the unique effects they can produce. Just recently, in fact, we saw an instance of a tech industry giant leaving the glass rectangle behind in a very big way. In a 10 minute video, Google proposed a new headquarters that would leaves boxy buildings behind in favor of tent-like structures draped in glass. These buildings don’t have vertical windows or horizontal windows. They’re nothing but windows, or maybe they’re so radical that the concept of “window” doesn’t even really apply. Whatever the case, there’s nothing rectangular about them, and Google’s convinced they’re the future.



How to Build a Smart Home With Your Own Dumb Stuff


If you’re skeptical about the smart home as popularly envisioned, you’re not alone, and you’re not wrong. Replacing your current appliances with connected alternatives is an expensive proposition, without a convincing payoff. Fortunately, that’s also not your only option.


Emerging along with the headline-grabbing, complicated, and relatively pricey Nests and Winks of the world are another breed of smart home product entirely. These are devices that don’t require marathon installation sessions or advanced engineering degrees. In fact, they require hardly any know-how at all. And best of all? They work with the products you already own.


The idea of making an existing “dumb” gadget smart rather than replacing it entirely isn’t new; any television with an HDMI port has been just a Roku away from streaming Netflix for years now. The push towards a more fully connected home, however, has inspired a range of affordable add-ons that give even the most unassuming devices in your house internet brains, without many of the drawbacks that come with more well-known attempts.


A Simple Plan


The most exciting smart home product of the year so far isn’t a connected refrigerator, or a light bulb that can tweet. It’s a simple 9V battery, just like the one currently residing in your smoke detector, with one important difference. It’s connected to the internet.


This is Roost, a Wi-Fi enabled 9V battery—and accompanying app—that turns your existing smoke detector, however old or plain, into cutting-edge connected equipment. It sends you a notification in the event of the alarm being triggered, in case you’re away from home, and lets you know when it’s running out of juice, so that you can replace it well before that late-night “low battery” chirping drives you insane.


It does all of this for $40, which might sound expensive for a battery, but is less than half the cost of a similarly smart Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarm. The Protect has a few more tricks, but as Roost CEO Roel Peeters is quick to point out, it and other out-of-the-box smart home solutions also require time-consuming installation.


“People focus on the cost point of the device, but the installation cost is often times overlooked. It’s the actual cost of installation, but there’s also the risk factor: Am I going to be able to get this to work?”


The wired version of the Nest Protect, for instance, requires fussing with fuses and exposed wires, making it a project many customers might not be comfortable undertaking themselves. Installing a Roost, meanwhile, is as simple as swapping out batteries and downloading an app.


The push towards a more fully connected home has inspired a range of affordable add-ons that give even the most unassuming devices in your house internet brains.


And while you might not be beholden to your current smoke alarm’s looks, the fact remains that at least Roost gives you a range of aesthetic choices. If for some reason you want the Nest Protect’s functionality but don’t love its design (although you should, it’s lovely!), you’re out of luck. The flexibility to choose what your smart gadget looks like becomes even more pressing you’re dealing with items that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, or that take up a large part of your kitchen.


The best solution to that problem so far, it turns out, is also the simplest: Just buy the things you like, and make them smart yourself.


A LittleBits More Effort


The Roost will launch later this year, but there’s a more hands-on smart home strategy that you can buy right now. LittleBits, a company focused demystifying the world of DIY electronics, introduced its $249 Smart Home Kit last November.


The Smart Home Kit contains 14 LittleBits “modules”—including a temperature sensor, MP3 player, infrared transmitter, and more—along with accessories that help those units communicate with each other and the outside world. As you might have gathered, whereas Roost offers a vision of clever, simple, single-solution upgrades, the Smart Home Kit proposes something a little more involved. But with that elbow grease comes a lot more freedom, at less expense.

SHK-wBits_LR Little Bits

“Let’s say you have a perfectly good refrigerator in your kitchen and you just want to update it so that it can be smart and let you know if it’s overheating,” explained Krystal Persaud, Director or Product Design for LittleBits. “Instead of having to buy this whole new fridge that would cost you thousands of dollars just to add the internet, we’re modular. You can literally add the internet to anything, and connect anything to a smart device.”


In other words, LittleBits can make whatever’s already in your home as smart as your imagination allows. The company recommends several projects to get you started, including configurations that let you use your phone to control a creaky AC window unit, or to turn your lamp on or off.


There are also dozens of projects recommended by the active LittleBits community, ranging from productive (a smart thermostat) to slightly silly (an alert that plays the AOL “You’ve Got Mail” sound every time you receive an email from specified contacts).


While LittleBits still needs to convince people outside of the maker community that it’s intuitive enough to take on, it’s currently the easiest way to retrofit your entire dumb home into a smart one. And playing around with a few circuits is arguably less daunting than dropping hundreds of dollars on a single smart garage door opener. It also lets you keep maintain your individual style; as Persaud points out, “decorating and controlling your home is a very personal thing… We were seeing this plethora of shiny white boxes that you install on a wall that become part of your phone. Why does it have to be like that?” Retrofitting your existing home lets you think outside those boxes.


Your Home, But Smarter


With powerhouses like Google and Apple committed to participating in the smart home, it’s clear that whole-house solutions will continue to assert themselves. But companies like Roost and LittleBits are showing that it’s not the only way. A smart home doesn’t have to be expensive, or require a gut renovation. It just needs to make your life easier.


“It’s about what problem are you solving,” says Roost’s Peeters. “Are you solving a real problem for a consumer, or is [the smart home] just a Silicon Valley pipe dream where we think we can improve people’s lives marginally and on the edges, and people are going to pay money for it.”


That’s the question every smart home hopeful, from Nest to Wink to Roost to LittleBits and beyond, will have to keep asking themselves over the next few years. So far, it looks like the little guys are closest to the right answer.



Opinion: Bitcoin May Be What Gets Us Real Net Neutrality


The recent Net neutrality victory at the FCC is not a silver bullet. We can expect costly court challenges, complicated enforcement, and the risks that come with entrusting a large government bureaucracy to manage a technological problem. More competition would be a better solution—and that’s where Bitcoin could help.


As Marc Andreessen recently told The Washington Post, “The ultimate answer would be if you had three or four or five broadband providers to every house.” In such a world, Andreessen explained, “net neutrality is a much less central issue, because if you’ve got competition, if one of your providers started to screw with you, you’d just switch to another one of your providers.”


But how do you get more last-mile competitors?



Peter Van Valkenburgh


About


Peter Van Valkenburgh is Director of Research at Coin Center, a non-profit research and advocacy center focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency technologies. He is a graduate of NYU Law. On Twitter: @valkenburgh.




“I think you actually have the potential for that depending on how things play out from here,” Andreessen said. “You can imagine a world in which there are five competitors to every home for broadband: telcos, cable, Google Fiber, mobile carriers and unlicensed spectrum.”


That last one—using unlicensed spectrum—has been a tough nut to crack. This is actually rather strange given that we are awash in internet connectivity over unlicensed spectrum bands. I’m talking about the Wi-Fi routers in every home, apartment, coffee shop, and office across the country that surround us at all times. The problem, of course, is that all of these network on-ramps are locked.


You, your neighbors, and everyone else password-protects otherwise open wireless connections to the internet. Why? The tragedy of the commons and privacy.


A homeowner who pays for broadband doesn’t want her freeloading, torrent-hungry neighbor spoiling a comfy evening with Netflix and boxed wine, especially if she’s got no way to make them share the costs. And a neighbor piggy-backing on the homeowner’s Wi-Fi, freeloading or not, doesn’t want others to see what she’s reading, watching, or Skyping.


Last-mile bandwidth sits largely unused because people perceive only two possibilities: opening the connection to everyone but losing privacy and getting stuck with the check, or locking down the last mile so that only they can use it.


Micropayments and encryption could provide a way out from this trade-off. Efficient micropayments, however, have not been possible before the invention of Bitcoin.


There are three steps to enable this last-mile infrastructure over unlicensed spectrum: First, encrypt the network traffic so that sharing your connection doesn’t mean seeing your neighbor’s activities. Second, charge those who would send traffic through your devices for the privilege using micropayments. Third, program these open routers to seek the fastest connection to the larger internet not only through their own wired hook-up, but through their nearby peers. Knitting all of these consumer devices together gives us a mesh network.


Such a shared infrastructure protects privacy through encryption. Individuals are paid to maintain and even improve their links in the mesh with the micropayments. And software can intelligently direct traffic through intermediate nodes that offer the best connection to an outside resource for the price.


Mesh participants with particularly strong connections to desirable internet destinations will earn more in micropayments as their peers seek connection through their routers. These favored participants can use some of that revenue to pay for larger data plans or even faster access.


Say, for example, you’re the one apartment in the neighborhood with a super-fast connection to Netflix’s servers. Maybe you have a premium subscription from a telecom that hasn’t throttled Netflix, or—even better—maybe you’ve negotiated a wholesale fiber hookup to a Tier 1 network for your business. As the fastest connection to a desired server, you’ll earn more in micropayments from your neighbors.


The money you earn is your revenue for being a valuable part of the mesh. You are free to pocket some bitcoins, and use others to pay for the connection to the wider internet or to invest in an even faster connection and better routing hardware. Eventually, if you’re dealing with a wholesale provider or a particularly progressive telecom, payment for your uplink could also be metered and denominated in bitcoins, and traffic traveling through you from the mesh network could directly pay your provider through an intelligent, Bitcoin-accepting modem.


This scheme writ large is far better than a few neighbors sharing Wi-Fi. It could become a mesh network of hundreds or even thousands in a given area. The mesh network, taken as a whole, reduces granularity in hook-ups: it’s a neighborhood that seeks connections not a bunch of individual customers. This means that an outside infrastructure provider need only bring a pipe to the town square, rather than everyone’s home. Without the costly need to duplicate another provider’s efforts stringing connections to individual homes, we can expect more competitors offering connections to any given mesh. That means more competition and fewer opportunities for discrimination.


Telecoms may balk at this plan; it’s potentially disruptive, moving their revenue model from high-margin consumer entertainment services to low-margin utility provisioning for a neighborhood. Should those companies refuse to connect to mesh networks, however, wholesale Internet providers, previously available only to large enterprise clients, may enthusiastically fill the void. Even for data, it can pay to buy in bulk, and mesh networks combined with micropayments can bring those benefits of scale to each individual peer.


Bitcoin and the low-transaction-costs that automated micropayments can provide are the keys to building these better markets, which will ultimately unlock net neutrality itself.