YouTube Is Purposely Making Shows with Stars You Don’t Know

Netflix did it. Amazon did it. Now YouTube is getting into the original content game. But there’s one big difference: the names on the online marquee.

The world’s largest online video site announced plans today to partner with some of its biggest stars—Fine Brothers’, Prank vs. Prank, Joey Graceffa, and Smosh—to launch four new original series. Over the next two years, the video-streaming behemoth will also release several feature films in a partnership with AwesomenessTV, a company that helps develop popular YouTube content. The films, as the company touts proudly, will be “driven by YouTube Stars.” But, unless you’re 15, it’s pretty safe to say you probably haven’t heard of them.

Because, with its announcement today, YouTube isn’t coming for you (or your eyeballs). It isn’t pitting itself in direct competition with other online original content creators like Amazon and Netflix. YouTube has decided to zag. It’s launching originals for an audience it knows it already has with stars it helped create: YouTube stars—who have a real, highly coveted audience: teens. Joey Graceffa may be no Adam Sandler, who recently signed a four-movie deal with Netflix. But for teens, Joey Graceffa is better.

Already Famous

For a company that has made its name as a video platform where users create, upload, and share their own content, YouTube’s move towards originals may seem at odds with its mission. And, in a world where HBO gets Matthew McConaughey, Netflix gets Kevin Spacey, and Amazon gets Jeffrey Tambor, YouTube trumpeting a new series where Prank vs. Prank’s “Jesse and Jeana pull off their most ambitious pranks yet” seems like a hard sell.

But YouTube stars really are stars. Millions of fans watch them put on makeup, make jokes, or recount their days. Tens of thousands of fans go to their concerts and meet-ups. And in a survey last summer, Variety found that YouTube Stars were the most influential figures for American teens, even more so than Jennifer Lawrence, Paul Walker, or Katy Perry. (The most influential? Smosh and The Fine Bros., both of whom will have their own original shows as part of YouTube’s partnership.)

So as silly as it sounds to anyone over a certain age, an original series where Smosh’s “Ian and Anthony work at a theme restaurant where out-of-control kids and crazy parents are all in a day’s work” will likely be huge. Smosh’s channel, for example, has 35 million subscribers now, and their comedy sketches have generated more than 7 billion views. Just like Spacey will draw viewers to Netflix with House of Cards, Ian will bring millions of viewers, old and new, to YouTube.

Right at Home

While YouTube’s streaming competitors, like Netflix and Amazon (not to mention video newcomers BuzzFeed and Vice), have gone all-in on originals, YouTube has been slow to produce its own shows. And now it risks getting left behind by the same talent that has used its platform as a springboard to fame.

That’s because that talent now has choices. Online video is booming: YouTube’s video creators have more options than ever as Facebook, Vine, and Vessel all become viable alternatives to sharing homemade clips. That means YouTube’s content creators may have fewer reasons to stay with the platform, especially as it launches its ad-free subscription service which could affect their income. To help keep its stars from fleeing to richer pastures (or Hollywood), YouTube is giving these very, real stars the opportunity to be even more popular right at home.

YouTube’s investment in its very own stars is also smart in the long term as it seeks to hold onto the teen audience so many other sites covet. Teens are a highly desired demographic for advertisers—and no one online (or IRL) has them totally figured out. But by trying to hold onto stars those younger viewers love, YouTube is hoping it can hold their attention long enough to stick around as they grow up. To beat out the competition, YouTube’s best bet may be sticking with its roots.

Nostalgia Alert: Hasbro’s ’80s Cartoons Are Now Streaming

Skip to story
Nostalgia Alert: Hasbro’s ’80s Cartoons Are Now Streaming

Skip to story

Twitter’s Stock Tanks After Its Earnings Leak…on Twitter

Turns out Twitter is its own worst enemy.

The social media company, which is already struggling against investor doubts about its meager growth, saw its share price plunge today after its latest earnings results leaked in a tweet.

Selerity, a data science company that hunts for the online addresses of earnings releases based on past URLs, posted Twitter’s first quarter earnings results to Twitter well ahead of the company’s planned release of the figures. The less-than-stellar results sent Twitter’s stock down more than 18 percent by the market’s close.

Regardless of when the results came out, they weren’t great. Twitter posted a big miss on revenue in spite of the company’s launch of new products and features meant to attract more users. In the first quarter, Twitter’s revenue rose 74 percent to $436 million, but missed analysts’ expectations for $456.5 million. The company averaged 241.6 mobile monthly active users—a key metric—missing an expected 243 million.

“Revenue growth fell slightly short of our expectations due to lower-than-expected contribution from some of our newer direct response products,” Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO, said in the company’s news release.

Now a little over a year after the company began publicly trading its stock, Twitter has faced intense pressure from investors to have its revenues çatch up with its perceived cultural value and compete with other social networks. Recently, the company has rolled out new tools to make its service more accessible to new users, including giving strangers the ability to direct-message each other; adding options like an auto-filling Instant Timeline for Android users; and surfacing the most popular tweets that a user may have missed from their feeds.

In some ways, the tactics have worked: the number of Twitter’s total monthly active users rose to 302 million for the first quarter, up 18% from the same period a year ago. Last quarter, Twitter reported adding just 4 million new users, the smallest jump in quarter-over-quarter growth for the company so far. Costolo promised investors the company would rebound in this past quarter, which it did accomplish—amounting to a small win for Twitter. Twitter’s first quarter adjusted earnings also came in at 7 cents per share, beating analyst estimates of 4 cents per share.

But for a company that’s been doing everything it can do to meet investor expectations, and has been struggling on the way, this disclosure is anything but fortuitous—and didn’t even appear to require much effort on the part of the data science company that ultimately revealed the earnings. Twitter tweeted that it had asked the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading on its shares while it sought the source of the leak. But Selerity said (on Twitter) that it hadn’t done anything wrong: “Today’s $TWTR earnings release was sourced from Twitter’s Investor Relations website http://ift.tt/1ivKWSP . No leak. No hack.”

Holograms Could Bring Videogame-Like Navigation to Your Car

Skip to story virreal_drivingA rendering of what the Navion could display on windshields soon. WayRay

There are plenty of ways to get directions in the car, but most have one big shortcoming. Whether you’re using a standalone GPS, in-car navi system, smartphone, the Apple Watch, or even a paper map, you have to look away from the road (you know, that thing you’re supposed to be paying attention to when driving) in order to see where you’re supposed to be going.

So how to keep your eyes on the road and not get lost? One option is the heads-up display. Increasingly common on high-end cars, these devices project things like navigation directions and current speed onto the windshield, so the driver has important information right in their field of vision. It’s a technology that’s fast spreading beyond this incarnation, though: We’ve seen screens showing ghost cars for racers, and another that uses lasers to “paint” the edge of a road on the windshield in inclement weather. Then there are these wacky augmented reality concept goggles from Mini.

One of the latest gadgets to enter the fray is something called the Navion, from Swiss firm WayRay.

forzanavThe videogame version of a heads-up display, from the Xbox One’s Forza Horizon 2. Forza Horizon 2

The Navion, which is still a prototype for the time being, promises to project holographic imagery onto the windshield from a small device sitting on the dashboard, so you don’t have to buy a new car equipped with the tech to reap the benefits. It throws navigation information and safety notifications right where you can see them. The navi directions look just like the arrows projected on the road in videogames like Forza Horizon 2.

It all sounds swell, except for the part where the company says the device responds to hand gestures for control. While some automakers have talked about this kind of feature, there’s little evidence it’s ready for the market, and a recent J.D. Power study showed consumers have close to no interest in waving their hands to control their vehicles. I need to use the Team America secret signal to get driving directions? No thanks.

Minus that bit, if the Navion works (and ever hits the market), it could be fantastically useful. WayRay asks interested customers to sign up for its mailing list ahead of pre-orders opening later this year.

One Doctor’s Quest to Save the World With Data

103265210 Phil Ashley/Getty Images

In Rwanda, people have to deal with all kinds of threats to their health: malaria, HIV/AIDS, severe diarrhea. But in late 2012, Agnes Binagwaho, Rwanda’s Minister of Health, realized her country’s key health enemy was something far more innocuous. The thing causing the most harm to her people, the leading risk factor for premature death and disability, was inside their own homes: Dirty indoor air, from cooking food over burning dung and vegetation in poorly ventilated huts. Within weeks, Binagwaho announced a program to distribute one million clean cookstoves to the poorest households in the young, mostly rural country.

Binagwaho was able to improve millions of lives thanks to a new kind of medical record-keeping, only possible in this era of big data. Just as Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics, used sabermetrics to maximize wins, epidemiologists can crunch data to determine the so-called global burden of disease—information that can be used to optimize the health of a neighborhood, nation, or the entire globe. Call it Moneyball for public health.

You might think that policymakers and health czars would jump at the chance to save the maximum number of lives with a minimum of investment. But it hasn’t always been easy going for Christopher Murray, the godfather of the approach, who today directs the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. In Epic Measures, published earlier this month, health journalist Jeremy Smith recounts Murray’s struggle to index the global burden of disease—and the political obstacles he encountered in publishing and distributing his findings.

A Precocious Pharmacist

The roots of the global burden of disease stretch back to Murray’s childhood. At 10 years old, his family traveled to Niger to help run a rural hospital. After traveling more than a month through the Saharan desert to get there, they found no power, no water, no medical supplies and no other staff. At 10 years old, Murray was promoted to role of hospital pharmacist. In his role, he saw children sick with malaria and suffering from malnourishment, along with a fair share of donkey bite victims.

Those experiences shaped the rest of his life: “It gave me my primary question, which I continue to try to get the answer to,” Murray says. “What are people’s main problems and what can you do to fix them in a way that transcends individual clinical practice?”

More than 20 years later, as a leader at the World Health Organization (the United Nation’s health arm), Murray noticed that official reports and analyses of those main problems didn’t quite reflect medical reality. In fact, the numbers—many of which came from advocacy groups, seeking money and attention for specific causes—didn’t make sense. “If you added things up,” he says, “people were dying three times over.”

So Murray took a different approach. He and his collaborators—not advocacy groups—calculated disease impacts, double checking to ensure they matched the total number of people who had died. And he revised a strategy he and medical demographer Alan Lopez had pioneered in the early 1990s at the Harvard School of Public Health, where they created a new metric for quality of life and health loss (disability-adjusted life years, or DALYs). Using DALYs as a quality of life measure makes it possible to compare one disease to another, giving a complete view of the global burden of disease.

“It’s a study of everything wrong with everyone everywhere, in all countries for all time,” says Smith. “I mean everything that makes people sick, everything that kills people, everything that causes pain and suffering and the risk factors for those things.” That can include anything from whether you live with an abusive partner to how much lunch meat you consume.

Explosive Results

In 2002 Murray’s team released a new version of the global burden of disease data, analyzing world health between 1990 and 2000 and adding new insights. Rankings of national health systems performance were among those additions—including the famous statistic that the United States has the 37th best health system, despite spending the most per capita.

Controversy erupted. “That generated much greater reaction than anything else,” Murray says. “When you start talking about performance of health systems, you get very close to the job description of the minister of health in a country.”

Some politicians and ministers felt the ranking was a direct threat, an evaluation of how well they did their jobs. (Murray says the clever ones used the results to push for more money.) José Serra was the health minister of Brazil at the time, running a presidential election campaign. “He really went after us at the WHO at the time,” says Murray, “saying that this was not appropriate for the UN to do this. I think the WHO still shows the scars.” Since the conflict, Murray says, the WHO has been enormously reluctant to venture near health care system performance.

A Third Life for GBD

But Murray’s quest still lives. The study’s current iteration, housed at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, analyzes global health data up to 2013. A super-computing cluster is busily whirring away at the University of Washington—supported by more than $100 million in funding from the Gates Foundation—crunching information from sources like hospital and police records to output more than a billion data points.

That data and the approach it drives will go on to accomplish grand things, Murray hopes. Already it’s racking up success stories. Australia used the data to re-map their health systems: In 1970 the life expectancy of the average Australian man was about the same as a man in the United States (about 71). Now, Australia is neck and neck with Japan (80 years).

The same approach worked in Colombia, where Rodrigo Guerrero, mayor of Cali, analyzed data to understand patterns of violence. Deaths were concentrated on weekends, he found, particularly near paydays. Drugs and gangs weren’t the sole cause of gun violence and murders—the devil, in this case, was the dangerous combination of young men, alcohol, and an already violent culture. Guerrero changed where and when booze could be sold and instituted gun bans, cutting shootings and murders nearly by half.

The information Murray and his more than 500 collaborators have gathered is designed to help you lead a better life, too. One of best health interventions for Americans, turns out, is simply to eat more fruit, helping to prevent heart disease and stroke. That’s the beauty of the DALY: It works to identify the root cause of the greatest health threats, whether it’s a dung-filled fire, alcohol-fueled violence, or in the case of American men in their late 30s, processed meat. Sorry, guys: The data doesn’t lie.

Google Now Expands Its Reach, Integrates 70 More Services

Skip to story When Google Now opens its API to all developers, get ready to access many services through cards rather than apps. It could pave the way to a post-app mobile experience.When Google Now opens its API to all developers, get ready to access many services through cards rather than apps. It could pave the way to a post-app mobile experience. Google

Google Now lives life a quarter-second at a time. The feature, which comes standard on every Android phone, surfaces information to you based on the time of day and your current location. It always shows you a simple dashboard of cards, each filled with timely notifications, reminders, and real-time data.

With a newly open API, Google is working with its partners to present even more of that information on your mobile screen. And today, Google has announced more than 70 new integrations for Now. You can find new music to listen to, control your smart home, and even track the whereabouts of your food delivery from the restaurant to your door, all within the confines of Google Now. When you say “OK Google” into your watch or phone to activate Google Now, you’re not just searching for stuff—you’re doing stuff.

The services of the future have to do the heavy lifting for you.

The Now platform is essentially the entire interface for Android Wear devices, and it’s becoming more and more important on Android phones as well. (There’s also a great Google app for iOS, if you didn’t know, which is basically just Now and a search box.) Its primary purpose, product manager Aparna Chennapragada said in a phone interview, is to show you everything you need to see every time you look at your device.

“You’re on the go, you have maybe thirty seconds to look at your phone,” she says. “How can we get that information to you before you have to ask?” The perfect mix is a cocktail of reminders, news, and actionable info. And the more you learn to trust Google to deliver the right mix—the things you need right now, the things you’ll need in an hour, and the score to the game you missed that last that you desperately want to know—the more powerful Now becomes. For Google, that process is all about collecting more data. “The services of the future have to do the heavy lifting for you,” Chennapragada says. “It’s almost unsexy, because, like, we need to do more work.”

These integrations are only half the job, though. Google also wants Now to be the place you start on your phone, the first place you go to do everything. Why should you have to remember which streaming service has which movie, or whether that restaurant is on Seamless or Eat24? The future of Now is about giving you more access to the apps and services that power your life—that’s surely part of Google’s plans for its new partners. “If there’s a single tap to say, ‘Hey, I’m at the airport, call a Lyft,’ I’ll go do it,” Chennapragada says. “You’re compressing a whole bunch of steps.”

But right now, Google Now is about push. It’s a new, smarter spin on notifications. It’s about showing you what you need to know, and speeding up the process of finding what you want to know. You need it, and you need it now.

SurveyMonkey Has Quizzed Us Since 1999. Now It Has Answers

When Dave Goldberg stepped into the role of CEO at SurveyMonkey in 2009, he saw an opportunity to transform the company. Back then, the company behind the world’s leading online survey platform was made up of just 14 people. It was profitable and successful, Goldberg remembers, with lots of happy customers. But Goldberg believed SurveyMonkey could do more than ask questions. It also has a lot of answers.

Goldberg is under no illusions that when people hear the name SurveyMonkey, they could be tempted to dismiss the company out of hand as unserious. But there’s a good chance you’ve taken one of SurveyMonkey’s surveys since the company was founded during the height of the first dotcom boom. SurveyMonkey says that these days its servers handle 3 million survey responses every day—about 100 MB per minute, or almost 150 GB per day.

That pipeline is precisely what Goldberg realized he could leverage. In April, the company introduced SurveyMonkey Benchmarks, a product it bills as a way to unlock its vast database of answers. Today customers include 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies, along with organizations ranging from academic institutions to neighborhood soccer leagues. With such a wide spread, SurveyMonkey believes it can offer an incredibly accurate picture of how you stack up against everyone else.

Points of Comparison

In 2011, SurveyMonkey released a product called Question Bank, a collection of pre-written questions SurveyMonkey says it’s methodologically inspected to remove biases and help survey makers get the best quality answers from respondents. The answers feeding into these standardized questions became the starting point for the company’s Benchmarks product.

After several years of cleaning up and ordering the data (one employee described the process as “building a plane while it’s flying and accelerating”), Benchmarks is launching with four categories: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, net promoter scores (a metric that looks at whether or not customers are recommending a product or service to others), and website feedback. For users who want to run those same sets of questions by their own customers, employees, or the public, the idea is that they’ll now have a rich context to which they can compare their results.

To explain how it works, SurveyMonkey shared its own internal employee engagement data with WIRED, comparing results with SurveyMonkey benchmarks. In the category of how employees evaluated the work atmosphere at SurveyMonkey, for example, 75 percent of employees surveyed said they agreed SurveyMonkey is dedicated to diversity. Though getting two-thirds of the respondents to respond to the survey question positively seems like a clear majority, the context changes when you know the base percentage of all those who had ever agreed when asked the same diversity question: 63 percent. In other words, SurveyMonkey still does better than average, but depending on the gap in percentage points between the baseline response and what the internal survey returns, a company may choose to make adjustments to its policy accordingly.

Democratizing Context

Benchmarking products have existed before, but they’ve typically been offered by entrenched research firms that focus on a specific vertical—Towers Perrin for the HR industry, for instance—and the data can run hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other players in the space include management consulting firm Bain & Co., which created the Net Promoter Score also included in Benchmarks, and enterprise feedback outfits like Allegiance Software, Qualtrics, and CustomerGauge.

SurveyMonkey believes it can offer insights of comparable quality at a much lower price thanks to its reach. The benchmarks are refreshed every quarter, and SurveyMonkey gives the average benchmark—average across all industries, that is—for free. If customers want to cut the data further, for instance, looking only at responses one industry vertical, or if they want to compare themselves to the top 25 percent companies in a certain industry, or a firm of a certain size in a certain industry that looks more like them, SurveyMonkey charges a fee for the product, starting from about $800.

SurveyMonkey also claims its model allows it to offer specificity in domains where establishing benchmarks wouldn’t typically be worth the cost, such as in the education and nonprofit sectors.

“We’ve been able to give people democratized access to making decisions based on data,” Goldberg says. “Now we want to democratize the context of that data.”

The LG G4 Has A Leather Jacket and a Great Camera

LG’s flagship smartphone line has always boasted high-end specs and components, but it’s also consistently suffered from a serious case of “buuut…”

The G2 and G3 packed high-end Qualcomm chips, beautiful big displays, plenty of battery life, and solid cameras. Buuut… with each phone, LG veered away from stock Android and incorporated its own software features. Some were good, like the resizeable keyboard and “knock to wake.” Others didn’t really help. The build quality was always a bit plasticky, and you had to get used to the power and volume buttons being on the back of the phone. None of those features were deal-breakers, but they made the otherwise excellent hardware a little frustrating.

LG’s brand-new G4, announced today, appears to have cracked the code. At first pick-up, the new phone reduces the “buuuts” dramatically. It still differentiates itself from the herd with its back-facing buttons and slightly curved display, but LG Corporation President and CEO Juno Cho says that’s sort of the point.

“Now every phone looks the same,” Cho explained at the LG G4 launch event in New York City today. “How can we give a smartphone some character? What actual value would this provide to consumers… (beyond) a hunk of metal and glass?”

As with previous G phones, strong components lurk within that hunk of metal and glass. The company’s new flagship phone runs Android 5.1 and is built around a six-core 1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 system-on-a-chip with 3GB RAM. It should be plenty zippy.

LG is touting the phone’s display, with a 5.5-inch 2560×1440 IPS screen and a robust 538ppi pixel density, as one of the best in the game. The company says it has reengineered the IPS LCD panel on the phone to produce better brightness and contrast than competing technologies like AMOLED and quantum dot. The G4 has 32GB storage on board, with the ability to expand it via the phone’s MicroSD slot. There’s also a swappable 3000mAh battery, which LG claims can last more than a day on a charge.

LG-phone-inline2 LG

Perhaps the biggest upgrade lurks within the main camera, which will put it among the upper echelon of smartphone shooters. The rear-facing 16-megapixel camera has a bigger sensor than most smartphone cameras on the market, matching the Samsung Galaxy S5 (and many point-and-shoots) with a 1/2.6-inch-type imager. It backs that big sensor up with a wide F1.8 aperture, optical image stabilization, a manual focus slider, RAW+JPEG capture, 4K video capture, and manual controls over ISO, white balance, and shutter speed. The result of all that, Cho says, is “the closest (a smartphone has) come to emulating what we see with our naked eye.”

The camera is quick to boot, too, thanks to the ability to double-tap on the down-volume key and have the camera launch, focus, and capture a shot within a second. That’s just a great, well-rounded set of controls and specs for a smartphone camera. The screen-side second camera is also no slouch, with an 8-megapixel sensor and an F2.0 aperture, so your selfies should look hype.

LG is certainly trying to take the G4 into “premium phone” territory with its build materials, which also get a boost. There are two design variations of the G4: One with a leather-swathed back, available in six colors, with a nice raised seam running down the middle. Finally, you can get a full-grain leather phone without forking over six figures for a Vertu Signature Touch. There’s another variation with a patterned, ceramic-like backing on the phone. It certainly feels better than the light-and-plasticky builds of previous G-series handsets.

Buuut… well, there aren’t many buts this time around. The buttons are still around the back, and the G4’s screen is slightly curved. The company claims this makes the phone less prone to damage when it’s dropped face-down. And while LG still is building its own hit-or-miss software into the G4’s UI, a few of them seem genuinely useful this time around. You can drag-and-drop items from your email and other applications into the phone’s calendar, get alerts to kill zombie apps that run in the background and drain your battery, and organize photos in several ways on the phone without having to upload them to the cloud. Just for buying the phone, LG says you’ll also get a free 100GB on Google Drive for two years.

The prices aren’t out yet. The LG G4 is slated to be available on all major carriers in early June, and it’s surely LG’s most polished phone yet. It certainly won’t be enough to dethrone the iPhones and Galaxys of the world, but the camera on this thing looks like a winner.

The LG G4 Has A Leather Jacket and a Great Camera

LG’s flagship G line of smartphones has always boasted high-end specs and components, but it’s also consistently suffered from a serious case of “buuut…” The G2 and G3 packed high-end Qualcomm chips, beautiful big displays, plenty of battery life, and solid cameras.

Buuut… with each phone, LG veered away from stock Android with its own software features. Some were good, like the resizeable keyboard and “knock to wake.”. Others didn’t really help. The build quality was always a bit plasticky, and you had to get used to the power and volume buttons being on the back of the phone. None of those features were deal-breakers, but they made the otherwise excellent hardware a little frustrating.

Has LG cracked the code with the brand-new G4? At first pick-up, the new phone reduces the “buuuts” dramatically. It still does things a bit differently with its back-facing buttons and slightly curved display, but LG Corporation President and CEO Juno Cho says that’s sort of the point.

“Now every phone looks the same,” Cho explained at the LG G4 launch event in New York City today. “How can we give a smartphone some character? What actual value would this provide to consumers… (beyond) a hunk of metal and glass?”

As with previous G phones, strong components lurk within that hunk of metal and glass. The company’s new flagship phone runs Android 5.1 and is built around a six-core 1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 system-on-a-chip with 3GB RAM. It should be plenty zippy.

LG is touting the phone’s display, with a 5.5-inch 2560×1440 IPS screen and a robust 538ppi pixel density, as one of the best in the game. The company says it has reengineered the IPS LCD panel on the phone to produce better brightness and contrast than competing technologies like AMOLED and quantum dot. The G4 has 32GB storage on board, with the ability to expand it via the phone’s MicroSD slot. There’s also a swappable 3000mAh battery, which LG claims can last more than a day on a charge.

Perhaps the biggest upgrade lurks within the main camera, which will put it among the upper echelon of smartphone shooters. The rear-facing 16-megapixel camera has a bigger sensor than most smartphone cameras on the market, matching the Samsung Galaxy S5 (and many point-and-shoots) with a 1/2.6-inch-type imager. It backs that big sensor up with a wide F1.8 aperture, optical image stabilization, a manual focus slider, RAW+JPEG capture, 4K video capture, and manual controls over ISO, white balance, and shutter speed. The result of all that, Cho says, is “the closest (a smartphone has) come to emulating what we see with our naked eye.”

The camera is quick to boot, too, thanks to the ability to double-tap on the down-volume key and have the camera launch, focus, and capture a shot within a second. That’s just a great, well-rounded set of controls and specs for a smartphone camera. The screen-side second camera is also no slouch, with an 8-megapixel sensor and an F2.0 aperture, so your selfies should look hype.

LG is certainly trying to take the G4 into “premium phone” territory with its build materials, which also get a boost. There are two design variations of the G4: One with a leather-swathed back, available in six colors, with a nice raised seam running down the middle. Finally, you can get a full-grain leather phone without forking over six figures for a Vertu Signature Touch. There’s another variation with a patterned, ceramic-like backing on the phone. It certainly feels better than the light-and-plasticky builds of previous G-series handsets.

Buuut… well, there aren’t many buts this time around. The buttons are still around the back, and the G4’s screen is slightly curved. The company claims this makes the phone less prone to damage when it’s dropped face-down. And while LG still is building its own hit-or-miss software into the G4’s UI, a few of them seem genuinely useful this time around. You can drag-and-drop items from your email and other applications into the phone’s calendar, get alerts to kill zombie apps that run in the background and drain your battery, and organize photos in several ways on the phone without having to upload them to the cloud. Just for buying the phone, LG says you’ll also get a free 100GB on Google Drive for two years.

The prices aren’t out yet. The LG G4 is slated to be available on all major carriers in early June, and it’s surely LG’s most polished phone yet. It certainly won’t be enough to dethrone the iPhones and Galaxys of the world, but the camera on this thing looks like a winner.

Lockheed’s New Drone Will Help Rescuers Find Missing People

Thanks to a newly developed UAV from Lockheed Martin, finding people who have gone missing is set to become easier, quicker, and less expensive.

The defense contractor is teaming up with nonprofit Project Lifesaver to create a version of its quadcopter Indago UAV that will help locate people with cognitive disabilities or diseases that make them prone to wandering.

Project Lifesaver was established in 1999 to equip people with with autism, Alzheimer’s, Down’s syndrome, and other mental issues, with a personal transmitter worn on the ankle or wrist. If the person goes missing, emergency services can track the signal, using equipment and training provided by the nonprofit. This setup has helped find nearly 3,000 people, with an average time of 30 minutes per recovery.

The nonprofit’s main shortcoming is that you have to be within a mile and a half of the signal to pick it up. That’s where the Indago comes in: Packing a specialized antenna produced by Canadian firm Loen Engineering, it acts as an airborne relay and expands that range to seven miles. Since most “wanderers” are found within a few miles from wherever they left, that makes a big difference.

“Project Lifesaver, for a number of years, has been desiring and wishing and dreaming about having this type of capability,” founder and CEO Gene Saunders says.

The UAV is remote controlled and can be operated from up to three miles away. It can stay aloft for about 50 minutes, and while it usually flies at around 400 feet, it can reach as high as 18,000 feet, helpful in mountainous terrain. It weighs just five pounds, fits in a small backpack when folded, and can be deployed in about two minutes.

It’s already being used in commercial and military applications, and can carry a camera to help locate people (who aren’t wearing tracking devices) in natural disaster relief efforts. It’s being tested to help locate wildfire, which can then be battled with Lockheed’s autonomous K-Max helicopter. “It provides an eye in the sky,” says Lockheed General Manager Dave Pringle.

Since partnering with Project Lifesaver in October 2014, Lockheed has finished integrating the special antenna into the quadcopter. It’s aiming to have this version of the Indago ready by mid-summer, then get FAA approval and start sales by the end by Q3. It hasn’t decided on pricing for this setup yet, but says it plans to offer the unit to the nonprofit at a reduced rate.

Once it’s ready, the folks at the defense contractor will train Project Lifesaver on how to use the UAV, who will in turn train their clients, including first responders around the country. And if all goes according to plan, by the end of 2015 finding missing loved ones will be a way easier process.

Racing Towards A Self-Driving Future

Forget the motor and the drivetrain. The main engine of the self-driving car of the future will be an AI-powered supercomputer. That future could be approaching faster than you think: Next month Nvidia will release a self-driving car computer, one of the first to hit the market. Called Drive PX, it has 2.3 teraflops of processing horsepower, 12 camera inputs, and computer vision algorithms—essentially it’s an automotive OS that automakers and developers can use to help “teach” cars how to drive.

Making smart decisions quickly is one of the big promises of artificial intelligence. This is why many see automated driving systems as the future of transportation. Of course, it’s a leap of faith to turn control over to robots, yet most airplanes cover the majority of their routes on autopilot, so it isn’t without precedent. (And the recent Lufthansa tragedy may open the door to pilotless air travel sooner than we think.)

Today, many cars already pump the brakes when sensing danger or stay in-lane if a driver takes his or her hands off the wheel. Lexus has had a self-parking car since 2007. Tesla Motors’ Model S “autopilot” will soon feature push-button lane changes. And legacy brands like BMW and Mercedes are pushing these changes, too. But as in the case of longtime game and entertainment-tech maker Nvidia, next-gen innovation is coming from a variety of technology ventures, big and small—not Detroit. Here are a few worth a second look:

• Automatic— Its diagnostic module plugs into your car’s computer to analyze driver habits, trip costs, fuel efficiency, and other hidden performance metrics.

• Google X—The search giant’s well-known innovation lab has been training cars to drive on their own by learning roads, signals, signs, and how to detect danger.

• Seeing Machines—In-vehicle cameras that monitor a driver’s eye movements to alert them when they’re distracted, drowsy, or drunk.

• IBM—Big Blue has been using its other-worldly powers to test traffic optimization in big cities around the globe.

• Navdy—Head-Up Display (HUD) that projects map displays as transparent images floating outside a car’s windshield, letting drivers keep their eyes on the road.

To be sure, companies and legislators will have to answer some tough questions before humans hand over the keys. Who’s at fault if two self-driving cars collide, for instance? How can we prevent car hacking so that cars don’t route us toward danger? What if people actually want to drive? Elon Musk suggested recently that lawmakers may eventually “outlaw [human-] driven cars because they’re too dangerous.” One thing is for certain: As the technology advances, so too, will our definition of what it means to take the wheel.

Awesome Projection Art You Can Play Like Brick Breaker

Remember Brick Breaker? The Breakout clone that was once the go-to mobile time waster—the Snake of the Blackberry era? The game is long gone, but could be due for an interactive comeback—if Aakash Nihalani gets his hands on it.

Brooklyn-based Nihalani describes himself as an installation artist. He’s known for creating geometric illusions on city sidewalks and brick walls with colorful tape. For his latest latest series, Projections, Nihalani went digital. The artist projected geometric patterns onto a white wall, like pixels blown up to Godzilla scale. A Kinect is hooked up to the projector and Nihalani’s computer, so when a viewer waves his hand across the projected image, the sensors pick up the motion. The 2-D bricks respond by twitching and floating around, like fish in a pond, swimming away from a submerged human hand.

The point of any kind of visual work is to be seen, but Nihalani’s pieces pay special attention to the viewer. Thanks to Nihalani’s code, each “sculpture” can be reconfigured to interact with the viewer in unique ways. The exchange between the viewer and the artwork is necessary to “illuminate the underlying personality and sculptural quality of the work,” Nihalani says.

Because they act a little like toy blocks, and because of Nihalani’s neon color palette, it’s easy to imagine a version of these projections at an arcade even at kids parties (interactive Pin the Tail on the Donkey, anyone?). For now, however, Projections will be a traveling exhibit, shown alongside Nihalani’s paintings and Outdoor tape series.

Dropbox Makes File-Sharing More Social with Comments

Dropbox wants you to read the comments.

In a new feature unveiled today, you can now leave comments on Dropbox files much in the same way that you can comment on news articles like this one. Except instead of trolling, Dropbox is hoping you’ll use these comments to get something done.

Dropbox’s premium Dropbox for Business service has long featured collaboration tools such as access permissions and an activity log. But this is the first time that Dropbox has enabled users to actually comment on shared files, pitching the option as a way to get work done without needing to open or download a file at all. And while commenting will probably be most useful for businesses, the feature will be available to all users.

Dropbox says the comments will appear in a new comments pane when previewing files online. To help you keep up with discussions, Dropbox will send you an email notification for each comment left on one of your files unless, of course, you opt out, and you can invite anyone to comment on a file you share, even if they’re not Dropbox users. The company is also adding a Twitter-style “@ mentions.” When you “@ mention” someone in a Dropbox comment, they’ll get an email notification.

And if you don’t want to deal with comments at all, you can disable the feature on particular files.

Dropbox has long been one of the easiest ways to store files in the cloud and synchronize them across multiple devices. But competitors like Amazon and Google have slashed prices and increased storage limits in recent years, forcing Dropbox to do the same. With an IPO likely imminent, Dropbox has been buffing up its collaboration features in an attempt to show that it’s more than a one-feature pony in a race to undersell some of the world’s biggest tech companies.

For example, last year the company forged a partnership with Microsoft to integrate the service directly into Office. And last January, Dropbox acquired a mobile document creation and editing company called CloudOn. And now it’s testing its own text editor for users to collaborate on Dropbox-linked documents.

In every case, the idea is to show that Dropbox is about more than just extra gigabytes in the cloud. Beyond just storing and syncing files, Dropbox wants to show it can help you do useful stuff with them.

Cree Wants to Make Your Office Lighting Less Ugly

No matter how much headway LED lighting makes in your home, you’re still likely stuck with unsightly fluorescents at work—or pretty much anywhere else you spend most of your indoor waking hours. A product from LED specialist Cree hopes to change that, using a new kind of optical technology to save you from the washed-out grossness that plagues cubicles everywhere.

Cree’s new LN series suspended LED tubes are similar to the fluorescent counterparts you’re accustomed to, at least until you turn them on. That’s when they trade the familiar jaundiced glow for the softer, more palatable hues that have made LEDs a legitimate alternative to incandescents bulbs, to say nothing of more garish corporate fluorescents.

The aesthetic benefits aren’t limited to the lights themselves; the LN light fixture simply look better than the buzzing overhead blocks that fluorescents call home. “You can see those panels that come out to the side and go up at an angle,” points out Cree vice president of product strategy Gary Trott. “Those are about a quarter inch thin, whereas a fluorescent fixture might be 3-4 inches deep. It makes a far cleaner, more elegant look.” They serve a practical purpose as well, directing light upward and diffusing it across the ceiling, rather than shining it directly down into your eyeballs. While so-called suspended ambient lighting of this sort is already popular among those companies that can afford it, a cost-competitive LED version is a welcome, energy-efficient alternative.

That’s not to say the LN series is the first suspended LED lighting solution destined for offices; Phillips offers a handful similar options as well, as does GE. But Cree vice president of product strategy Gary Trott points to his product’s efficiency of 110 lumens per watt, compared to the 70-90 lumens per watt you might find in a comparable fluorescent tube. Perhaps more importantly, the LN series incorporates what Cree is calling WaveMax, a new technology that purports to allow for more customizability without sacrificing efficiency.

“WaveMax allows you to have the trifecta of benefits that hasn’t been possible before: control, efficiency, and comfort,” says Trott. It does so by taking a more fine-tuned approach to light extraction, giving more granular levels of control over the final effect.

cree-inline2 Cree

That granularity is matched by simplicity; the new Cree LN series also works with the company’s SmartCast technology, a plug and play smart lighting controller. First released a little over a year ago, SmartCast coordinates large groups of lights—allowing them to dim automatically based on daylight conditions, or to power off if there’s no movement detected in a given space—with minimal input from a user beyond the initial set-up.

More than anything, the Cree LN series represents more competition in a space that sorely needs it. There’s no question that LED lighting will eventually replace the unfortunate fluorescent aesthetic with something more palatable. But the rate of that adoption has been slow, thanks to both limited options and a high start-up cost for those that do exist. If you’re an office manager, there simply hasn’t been much incentive to switch out your entire lighting plan until absolutely necessary.

That’s starting to change. As LED costs continue to decline and the ease of use of money-saving smart systems continues to increase, our least palatable, most pervasive lighting will eventually give way to something brighter, softer, and, over a long enough time horizon, cheaper.

While WaveMax specifically isn’t likely to trickle down to a bulb that fits in your nightstand lamp, smarter LED solutions in the office in general will hopefully translate to broader LED adoption at home. Many of the misgivings over LED—they’re too expensive, they’d oddly shaped, they cast a cold glow—are rooted in products that have long since been replaced by models that look and feel like the incandescents you grew up with. Being exposed to LED lights that manage to not just match but beat their fluorescent predecessors in aesthetics both physical and luminary could entice the next generation of converts.

In the meantime, LED luminaires like the LN series may not make you actively enjoy going to work, but they should make the time you spend there that much more bearable.

David Chang’s Startup Is a Restaurant Without a Restaurant

While he was in business school, Caleb Merkl got to thinking about opening a restaurant. Everyone told him he was nuts, because restaurants are crazy expensive to run and mostly doomed to fail. Merkl knew they were right, of course. But now, he’s gone and done it anyway. Well, sort of.

Technically, Maple, which launched in downtown Manhattan today, is an app. But in almost every other way, it operates more like a restaurant. It’s got a kitchen staff of 22 who cook up a rotating daily menu of fresh meals, curated by co-founder and chief culinary officer David Chang of Momofuku fame, as well as executive chef Soa Davies, formerly of the Michelin starred restaurant Le Bernardin. On any given day, the team is whipping up dishes like arctic char with dill on a bed of olive relish or green chile enchiladas with locally sourced tortillas and home-made green sauce.

Maple is going after something altogether different. It’s the answer to the question: What would a restaurant be like, if you couldn't actually go to the restaurant?

The difference is, you can’t actually go to a Maple restaurant. In fact, they don’t even exist. Instead, the only way to enjoy Maple’s food is to order it through the app. Maple is using technology to eliminate one of the trickiest—and most costly—parts of running a restaurant, which is, well, running a restaurant.

This approach distinguishes Maple from the dozens of startups trying to eke out a space in the food industry without actually having to get their hands dirty making and serving the food. There are restaurant delivery services like Seamless and Delivery.com that simply connect you with existing restaurants, and companies like Blue Apron and Plated that send you all the pre-portioned ingredients you need to cook your own meal at home. There are messenger apps like Postmates that let you order delivery from restaurants that don’t offer it themselves. There’s even Uber’s new food delivery service.
Maple App Screen Shot 1 Maple
Maple is going after something altogether different. It’s the answer to the question: What would a restaurant be like, if you couldn’t actually go to the restaurant? For Maple’s founders, coming up with that answer means thinking as thoroughly about what makes for a good delivery experience as traditional restaurateurs think about furniture, plating, location, and decor.

“Restaurants aren’t set up to do delivery well. They don’t have the budget or time to think about packaging or putting technology together to route the orders intelligently,” Merkl says. “For us, everything we do is about how to make some part of delivery better.”

Restaurant, Redesigned

It all starts in the kitchen. On any given day, Maple offers just three options for lunch, which costs $12 with tip and delivery included, and three options for dinner, which costs $15 all-in. Limiting variety allows the kitchen staff to focus on quality and speed, says Maple co-founder and chief operating officer, Ashkay Navle. Maple plans to open a kitchen in every neighborhood it serves, which Merkl says minimizes the time it takes to go from Maple’s oven to your door. For now, Maple runs just one kitchen, which exclusively serves Manhattan’s densely populated Financial District, but that will change with time. “It’s about building as much density as we can, which is why our delivery zones are so tight,” Navle says.

But while limiting Maple’s geographic footprint helps, what really makes its model work is the technology that runs it. That’s also what helped Maple raise $22 million from tech investors like Thrive Capital and Greenoaks Capital Management. The team has redesigned virtually every piece of technology that runs a traditional restaurant from scratch. As orders come in through the Maple app, the kitchen staff doesn’t simply cook them on a first come-first served basis, and send them out in that order. Instead, the technology prioritizes the orders based on what other orders are coming in to ensure its delivery team is traveling the most efficient route.

While limiting Maple’s geographic footprint helps, what really makes its model work is the technology that runs it.

When the delivery team is actually on the road, Maple’s delivery app tracks them all the way, measuring their velocity to determine how much time they spend on the bike, how long it takes them to walk to the person’s door, which streets have the most traffic, and which buildings take longer to deliver to than others. The app processes all of this information and uses it to inform future routes. “The system gets better at making these decisions over time,” Navle says.

It’s this technology that Will Gaybrick, who is both a Maple co-founder and a partner at Thrive Capital, says makes Maple a smart investment. “In general, food service is really not leveraging technology to scale,” he says. “But it’s technology that lets us serve better food, faster, fresher, and at a better price.”

The Complete Package

There’s a sophisticated science to Maple’s method, but of course, there’s an art to it as well. Not satisfied with tossing your meticulously delivered meal at you in a grease stained brown bag, Maple’s founders also went to great lengths to ensure the packaging itself is optimized for delivery. That means they tested nearly every off the shelf package to find the one that can withstand heat and condensation the best and minimize the amount of space the food has to shift around. They also hired one of the Museum of Modern Art’s former assistant creative directors to design their subtle yet sophisticated branding.
24_Spiced-Shrimp-Biryani_IMG_4160-Edit-(1) Maple
“Restaurants have that asset, but it rarely travels with delivery,” Merkl says. “We think it’s especially important to recreate some emotion around food, when we don’t have a physical space.”

What’s more critical to Maple’s success than any of this, though, is the fact that the food is actually incredibly good. With Chang as a co-founder, Maple has access to one of the world’s most celebrated chefs. That’s an asset no amount of technology could replace. According to Merkl, who was introduced to the Momofuku founder through a connection at Thrive Capital, Chang was receptive to the idea of Maple from the start. “He’s already playing at the highest level, and now he’s more interested in where food is going than he is in how much farther he can push fine dining,” Merkl says.

‘Not a Technology Company’

But while there are obvious advantages to forgoing a physical restaurant, including minimizing overhead and making it much easier to scale, there are also substantial obstacles to delivering on the promise of perfect delivery. For starters, Maple’s business model still requires a huge staff, only instead of waiters and waitresses, it’s a delivery team. Right now, the company has 32 delivery people, and that’s just for one neighborhood. Navle expects it will grow with time.

Then there’s the fact that in order for Maple’s technology to be worthwhile, Maple needs densely packed routes. That means that Maple may never be a practical solution outside of big cities, and even in those cities it will need a large volume of orders in any given area to make the delivery-only model economically efficient. That’s why Maple is only going to expand geographically once it has built a substantial user base in the Financial District.

But while Maple may not scale as quickly as the average tech company, Merkl says it will scale much more quickly and efficiently than the average food company. And that, he says, is what Maple is, first and foremost. “I know it’d be super in vogue to say, ‘We’re building a platform that will deliver you anything,’ but we’re actually just trying to build a food company,” he says. “We’re not a technology company or a logistics company or a growth for growth sake’s company. We’re a food company, and we’re by nature going to grow more slowly, because it’s about building trust over time.”

You Can Now Experience Lip Sync Battle in Virtual Reality

Skip to story The Lip Sync Battle VR experience is meant to give viewers the sense of being in the crowd when the show is taped. The Lip Sync Battle VR experience is meant to give viewers the sense of being in the crowd when the show is taped. courtesy Matador

Virtual reality hasn’t had a viral hit yet. The technology is too new, and in too few hands, to hit Star Wars Kid levels of “Have you seen this?!” But if a VR could go viral, the new Lip Sync Battle experience would be the one most likely to hit big numbers.

Today, Lip Sync Battle, which airs Thursdays on the Spike network, is releasing a virtual version of its show on the Milk VR app for the Samsung Gear VR headset. The show, which is exactly what it sounds like with the added bonus of celebrities, has been a viral hit machine with clips featuring the likes of Anna Kendrick, Emily Blunt, and Anne Hathaway racking up millions of views on YouTube.

“We chose this show based on its share-ability,” says Casey Patterson, the head of talent development and production at Spike’s parent Viacom. “The most important thing is connecting with your audiences in new and different ways. So, VR is so fresh and yet another way for someone to experience your [shows].”

Ten episodes were filmed for VR. The experiences being released today are highlights of shows on which John Legend battled Common and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson faced Jimmy Fallon. More experiences will roll out as future episodes air, says Jay Peterson, the founder and CEO of Matador, which produced the VR segments.

It might seem excessive to have a 360-degree version of a show that can gets most of its best gags across even in YouTube clips, but Peterson says Lip Sync Battle in VR provides immersion and makes viewers feel like they were at a show very few people made it into. “It’s the ultimate experience that you can’t get any other way,” he says. “It’s exactly what I think virtual reality was supposed to provide.”

That’s true even for the stars on the show, apparently. The crew had a Samsung Gear VR kit on the set so contestants could see the show from inside a headset. Most had no idea what Gear VR was, Peterson says, but “they universally loved it.”

Will consumers? Probably. (OK, we’re biased. We watch a fair amount of Lip Sync Battle around here.) But that may not matter. Finding applications for VR beyond gaming (the most obvious use) remains something like the wild west, so it’s hard to know what’s going to click and what isn’t. Now is the time to experiment—and working with something that has a bit of celebrity panache never hurts.

“The celebrity factor was a big thing. VR is still such a small environment and a small ecosystem, despite all of the interest in it,” says Matt Apfel, Samsung’s head of content for Milk VR. “We want to make a lot of efforts to try things because who are we to know whether people want to watch concerts or football games or animals sitting in the Serengeti?”

To that end, both Viacom and Samsung will be watching the response to Lip Sync Battle’s VR experience closely to see how fans respond. It may not go viral, but as Apfel notes, the data he’s seen so far shows “people like everything” that comes out on Milk VR.

And this is only Season 1. Lip Sync Battle just got picked up for a second season so there will be opportunities to do more things, and different things, with VR. And, ultimately, whether Battle’s VR experience is a raging success isn’t so important as simply giving it a shot.

“It’s the future,” says Patterson. “It’s just incredibly exciting as a concept, so whether we have the perfect iteration of it on this first season of this one show, that doesn’t matter as much as the idea of experimenting with it does.”

Netflix, Stop Spamming Us With Crappy New Shows

When Netflix first moved into original programming in earnest, it cultivated a mystique around the massive quantities of data it appeared capable of mining from subscribers—allowing the company to predict what viewers wanted better than viewers could themselves. The press surrounding House of Cards frequently ascribed to the development team “the ability to see into the future,” a description that appeared borne out by the success of that show and its successor, Orange is the New Black. But increasingly, Netflix’s development process appears to be less precision strike and more carpet bombing.

Beyond its wholly original series, Netflix fields revivals of canceled shows (season four of Arrested Development), films and stand-up specials, and international shows that it has secured for exclusive U.S. distribution (The Fall, Derek). This adds up: Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos has claimed the company would expand to the point of premiering a new series, on average, every two weeks. These numbers aren’t staggering for broadcast networks with long-running pipelines, but certainly are a lot for a relatively new player, and become more impressive in contrast to direct competitors like Amazon and Hulu. With that much content, there’s bound to be some failure of quality control, a problem embodied by the latest Original: a British comedy that is actually, seriously, titled Scrotal Recall.

To be fair, a terrible name doesn’t necessarily indicate a series will be bad (Terriers, we hardly knew ye). But while it displays flashes of inspiration, Scrotal Recall is mostly the result of years of rom-com cliches being run through a supercollider. The silly pun only provides the inciting incident of the show, when hopeless romantic Dylan (Johnny Flynn) is forced to call his exes in alphabetical order to inform them he’s been diagnosed with chlamydia—How I Met Your Mother meets Broken Flowers, without the snap of the former or the emotional resonance of the latter. By the end of the series, characters have only begun to hint at more depth than the archetypes of horndog best friend, milquetoast husband, or domineering wife would suggest. Encapsulating the whole problem, Flynn calls the show “Woody Allen for the Girls generation.”

TV development readily jumps on trends—when something hits, other networks rush to copy what they think made it work. Consider the legion of shows attempting to mimic the success of Lost‘s bonkers plotting (The Event, FlashForward) or the slick, 20th-century period dramas hopping on the back of Mad Men (The Playboy Club, Pan Am). For all Netflix’s supposed ability to predict newer things audiences will enjoy, its Originals slate has engaged in this at a blistering rate. The bloated, critically ignored Marco Polo is an obvious attempt at leaping on the Game of Thrones bandwagon. Bloodline, which has as its tagline “We’re not bad people, but we did a bad thing,” recycles elements of every other prestige drama, ever.

And Netflix has been ahead of the curve (or, in a sense, helped create the curve) with a more recent trend—reviving dead properties. Canceled shows it has brought back range from the zombification of long-gestating cult favorites (Arrested Development) to additional episodes of shows no one seemed to be watching or caring about (The Killing, Longmire). And it’s not even including the upcoming Bob & David, a Mr. Show revival in all but name. New seasons of Trailer Park Boys, a show with its own devoted following, appear to have passed by without much notice.

Given the age of the platform’s audience, it’s unsurprising that several upcoming Netflix shows and movies are extensions of old kids’ shows like Pee Wee’s Playhouse, The Magic School Bus, and Care Bears. (Let no one speak the name of the upcoming series that may or may not feature Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.) A few weeks ago, the company premiered an inexplicable reboot of Richie Rich starring an alternate-universe Justin Bieber. These development choices have started resembling the business model of The Asylum, the production company that has split its time between ripping off established properties (Transmorphers) and the Sharknado trilogy. Describing its approach to content a few years back, Asylum partner Paul Bales told WIRED the company was in the “pretty-box business.” Netflix, it seems, has gotten into the same business.

Take its recent bulk deals for films from Adam Sandler and the Duplass brothers, who, regardless of whether you like the work, are formalized enough to be considered brands. (Something that becomes a bit more explicit considering one of Netflix’s other big areas of investment—stand-up specials, which rely primarily on recognition of the comic to drive viewers.) Netflix’s tone-deaf response to Native American actors walking off the set of an Adam Sandler film suggests the streaming service’s attempt to dethrone appointment viewing may not be ready for prime time.

The best example of the upside of Netflix’s future development is Daredevil, which proves a strong entry into superhero TV behind The CW while also explicitly combining other genres in slightly original and interesting ways, with a couple of good performances. There’s no way it will ever be great, but it’s content to be “very good.” Then again, these days, it’s very good to be content. As Vulture‘s Margaret Lyons puts it, it’s representative of the Netflix brand: “competently assembled but ultimately sort of hollow.” The decision to one-click consume a brand has never been easier—and that’s all Netflix really needs.

We Try a New Exoskeleton for Construction Workers

Russ Angold, the co-founder and CTO at exoskeleton maker Ekso Bionics, says he can tell how old someone is by which pop-culture reference they make when he tells them what he does for a living. Kids talk about the suit Tom Cruise wears in Edge of Tomorrow. Millenials name-check Iron Man. Gen-Xers go classic: Sigourney Weaver in Aliens. Nobody ever mentions Starship Troopers.

But building a power-enhancing exosuit isn’t easy. And nobody knows that better than Ekso. Angold has his own high standards to live up to; when he was a kid, his brother decided to become a Navy SEAL—and Angold promised to become an engineer to build cool gear for him. “The spec that the users want for all exoskeletons is very clear,” says Angold. “It can’t suck.”

Ekso started out trying to build Iron Man suits for the military, then spread into the world of physical therapy, with powered walking suits that help people learn to walk again after strokes or accidents. Over 4,000 people have used those. Now Ekso is trying to break into a new market: construction. The Ekso Works Industrial Exoskeleton is an unpowered frame that lets a person heft heavy powertools as if they weighed nothing at all.

exolabs-inline Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

The key to typical exoskeletons is power. That was the genius of the first Iron Man movie—the macguffin, nerds will recall, was the “arc reactor,” a fantastically small source of huge amounts of power. The lack of any such magical technology in the real world has held exosuit development back for a decade, especially for the military. A human being uses about 10 watts just standing around, and 1 kilowatt working, according to Ekso. No battery can keep a suit going all day long with that output.

The industrial exoskeleton doesn’t care about that, though. It’s unpowered, relying instead on counterweights and a standard, sprung arm used on image-stabilizing steadicams. The trick is the carbon fiber harness and metal-tube frame running down a user’s legs. It translates the weight of whatever’s on the end of the arm down through the suit and into the ground.

The effect is unsettling. When I strapped into the suit, a grinder that I’d previously had trouble holding above my head for more than a few minutes felt utterly weightless…until I tried to move it away from my body. Then the counterweights kicked in and moved me around in the harness.

Angold had warned me about this, I realized. “The suit can take the weight of the tool, but you’ll still feel the inertial effects,” he said. The weight of the tool was getting shunted mechanically through the suit’s Vibram-soled footplates, but the mass was still banging me around. And walking was awkward, but just a little practice improved my gait almost immediately.

So by and large the suit works as advertised. Now the question is one of marketing and uptake. The construction business—which is what Ekso is targeting—is perhaps a bit more conservative than the military. Also, Ekso wouldn’t discuss the price of the suit, saying instead that the company would prefer to “focus on value.”

One other bit of weirdness: Last year Lockheed Martin sold unpowered, steadicam-arm-armed exoskeletons to the US Navy. The suit is called the Fortis, and if you look at the images, you can see that it looks a lot like the Ekso Works Industrial Exoskeleton. I asked Heidi Darling, Ekso’s director of marketing communications, about the similarity, and she emailed: “LM Fortis is Ekso Bionics technology (Ekso Bionics Inside) and it has been designed primarily for Navy ship maintenance applications.”

But John Kent, senior manager for media relations at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said: “I can tell you Lockheed Martin has not purchased any exoskeletons from Ekso Bionics. Fortis was independently developed by Lockheed Martin with support from Robrady Design.” Robrady Design is a “design and development studio” in Sarasota, Florida, according to a company website that does indeed tout work on the Fortis.

Each spokesperson denied the truth of the other’s statement.

Meanwhile, Ekso’s eventual marketing plan is to sell suits with arms adapted to specific tools. Wearing the exoskeleton it’s easy to imagine one with arms built to specifically carry Milwaukee or DeWalt—maybe even with batteries for power tools instead of dead metal as the counterweight. It won’t be Ripley fighting an alien queen in a loader, but maybe it’s a start.

Earthquakes Don’t Kill People, Buildings Do

Skip to story Nepalese residents carry belongings from their destroyed homes as they walk through debris of Saturday's earthquake, in Bhaktapur on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal, on Monday, April 27, 2015. Nepalese residents carry belongings from their destroyed homes as they walk through debris of Saturday's earthquake, in Bhaktapur on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal, on Monday, April 27, 2015. Niranjan Shrestha/AP

When the shaking from the Himalayan earthquake reached Kathmandu just before noon on April 25, the Nepalese capital was filled with buildings—hastily constructed, poorly built—that were filled with people.

Saturday’s earthquake may have caught Nepal by off guard, but that doesn’t mean it came as a surprise. “You have a massive plate boundary system going under the country of Nepal,” says Janise Rodgers, a structural engineer with Geohazards International, a Palo Alto nonprofit that helps developing countries earthquake-proof their infrastructure. Experts like Rodgers expected the quake because Nepal sits astride a massive continental subduction zone.

And the resulting devastation came as no surprise, either, because Kathmandu is filled with buildings not made to stand up to a quake. “Seeing modern, vulnerable construction go up without engineering input, building codes, or thought to earthquake design made a lot of people very worried,” Rodgers says. The details of earthquake mitigation vary from building to building, but the general principles are:

1. Build on bedrock (not sloppy sediment).
2. Tie buildings together so they won’t be easily knocked over.
3. Use steel, or something similarly strong, to reinforce concrete buildings.

Proximity to a fault line puts cities in danger of earthquakes. Other accidents of geography can exacerbate a trembler1, but you can predict a city’s real risk using a much simpler metric: net worth. “In Nepal, you have a rapidly growing population that is very poor, and has basic shelter that is unsafe rather than shelter that is earthquake safe that they can’t afford,” says Simon Klemperer, a seismologist at Stanford University.

The scary part? Kathmandu isn’t unique. It’s impossible to predict an earthquake with reliability, of course, but when I asked seismologists what places they worried about the most, these three were among the the most compelling examples of places at the intersection of geology and economics.

Mexico City, Mexico

Even though the Mexican capital is hundreds of miles from any fault lines, it is one of the most seismically threatened cities on the globe. If a quake strikes the coast, people living above the dense bedrock between the Pacific and the capital might only feel a slight tremble. But the capital sits atop an infilled lake, which traps and amplifies seismic waves. And before 1957, the city did not require buildings to be earthquake compliant. Since then, semi-regular tremblers have knocked down a lot of dangerous dwellings (some of which were rebuilt with quake reinforcement), but in the same period the city’s perimeter has expanded with shantytowns.

On the plus side, Mexico City has a pretty nice early warning system. It 2012, when a 7.4 quake hit the coast 200 miles away, the alarm gave many Capitalinos precious seconds to find their way to safety.

Istanbul, Turkey

Like Kathmandu and Mexico City, this ancient city connecting Europe and Asia is filled with poor people living in poorly built structures. Unlike those other places, Istanbul is right on top of a dangerous fault zone. “The North Anatolian fault is a similar type—strike-slip—to California’s San Andreas fault,” says Rodgers. And as with its North American twin, experts have been predicting a minimum 7.0 magnitude quake on the North Anatolian for years. But Istanbul does not have anything near California’s stringent earthquake codes. The last quake to hit the city—a 7.4 magnitude—killed more than 17,000 people. In the Golden State, the Loma Prieta quake—of comparable strength—shook up the Bay Area, but only killed 63.

New Madras region, USA

On the surface, the middle parts of America do not seem like candidates for seismic disaster. But 200 years ago a small town in southeastern Missouri was the epicenter of several huge earthquakes, some of which reached up to 8.0 magnitude. The strongest of these quakes altered the course of the Mississippi River. But because the region has been so quiet in the past century or so, building codes were never brought up to snuff. In 2008, FEMA issued a warning that a modern earthquake of the same magnitude (the odds are around 7 to 10 percent in the next 50 years) would cause, “the highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States.”

Bringing buildings up to code—at home or abroad—is costly, but economics is just the language we use to measure the true cost of disaster. “When you’re talking about earthquake mitigation, you’re talking about lives you’re saving,” says Rodgers. “That’s where the real value is: You’re protecting lives.” In other words, we should start picking up buildings before they fall down.

1. Kathmandu was built in a huge, bowl-like basin atop young, sedimentary rocks. When the quake struck, the basin focused the seismic waves onto the city, which propagated through the soft sediments at amplified levels.

Review: Jawbone Up3

4/10

Wired

Wrist-worn wearable reads your heart rate, counts your steps, and tracks your sleep. Buzzes gently to awaken you at the optimal point in your sleep cycle. Nice slim design fits comfortably next to your wristwatch. It's OK to wear it in the shower. Battery lasts a week between charges.

Tired

For all the data it collects, the software doesn't offer enough suggestions to improve your habits. Accuracy is often lacking. $180 cost is too high -- the $100 Up2 does almost all of the same stuff, and the features exclusive to the Up3 are the ones you don't need.

How We Rate

1/10A complete failure in every way

2/10Barely functional; don’t buy it

3/10Serious flaws; proceed with caution

4/10Downsides outweigh upsides

5/10Recommended with reservations

6/10A solid product with some issues

7/10Very good, but not quite great

8/10Excellent, with room to kvetch

9/10Nearly flawless, buy it now

10/10Metaphysical product perfection

I’m going to tell a long story in a second, but here’s the TL;DR version: The $180 Up3, Jawbone’s latest wrist-worn fitness tracker, is very few of the things it promises to be. It’s wildly ambitious, and spectacularly flawed. Even after Jawbone took six extra months to improve and perfect it—thanks to production delays, because waterproofing is hard—it didn’t get it right. You shouldn’t buy it. You should buy the $100 Up2 instead, which tracks your steps and sleep just as well. Or buy a Fitbit, or any of a thousand other basic fitness trackers. Everything else about the Up3 is snake oil.

OK, moving on: Let’s talk about your heart. The ol’ ticker. This may shock you, but it’s important. And it’s a new focus for a lot of fitness trackers, from the Fitbit Charge HR to the Microsoft Band to even the Apple Watch. Your resting heart rate is a particularly useful number—it’s the point where your heart pumps the least blood, usually right after you wake up. It’s a really good indicator of your overall fitness level, particularly as it changes over time. Among other things, there’s even some evidence that if your resting heart rate suddenly spikes, you’re about to get sick.

The inside of the Up3’s band has five square metal contacts, which use tiny currents against your skin to get heart-rate readings. But for all that tech, the band doesn’t care for anything but your resting heart rate, and I don’t know why it measures even that. The first night I wore an Up3, my RHR was 55 beats per minute. That seemed good! A few nights later, it was 74 bpm. Clearly something was wrong that night, but what? Answering that question is supposed to be Jawbone’s big plan, the thing it says it can do now that you have all these sensors strapped to your wrist. It can measure everything from steps and sleep to ambient temperature and respiration rate.

Not that it does much good. The Up3 hardly shows me any of that data, and it doesn’t do much with it. Half the time, it’s not even any good: my Up3 seems to think that my 20-minute train ride every morning constitutes vigorous exercise. This thing is connected to my phone; why can’t it check my GPS, or my calendar, or figure out what I’m actually doing? All this data is supposed to make the Up3 predictive and proactive, telling me things I need to know before I’m even aware of them. I already know I’m supposed to eat better, sleep more, and hit my step goal, and I even like having a device that reminds me. Yet you use the Up3 for a week or so, and you realize: this thing’s still just a step and sleep tracker. A good one, sure, but I’m not cheering for a good step tracker. And you don’t need to spend $180 to get it.

jawbone-inline2 Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

The Up3’s heart rate readings are relatively accurate, or at least consistent with competitive devices, but that doesn’t matter until Jawbone figures out what to do with the information. For metrics like steps and sleep, there’s at least some benefit in simply tracking them. It took all of one day before I started going way out of my way to hit my step goal, and feel the Up3’s joyful buzzing on my wrist. As soon as I figured out that I don’t get enough deep sleep at night—the one actually useful result of the Up3’s new sensors—all I had to do was Google to find out how to fix that. (Turns out stretching is a good thing.) And I am hopelessly in love with the Up3’s Smart Alarm feature, which vibrates to wake you at the perfect moment in your sleep cycle. When I use it, I wake like a Disney princess, smiling and stretching joyfully into the sunshine while birds flutter sing-songily around my room and select my outfit for the day.

Jawbone’s app is perfect for those simple things. It doesn’t overload you with data, but makes it easy to see how you’re doing against your goals. Jawbone constantly has ideas for how to sleep better, too, or a challenge to get in bed a little earlier tonight. It’s like a super-earnest wellness blog in push-notification form. The app is available for most platforms, and hooks into a huge number of devices; Jawbone’s as much a software company as a manufacturer, and it’s a great hub for your fitness data.

Unless, of course, you’re the type who wants more and better data—you know, the kind of person who would drop this kind of coin on a fitness tracker. Then, the app becomes infuriating: it takes four taps and two confirmations to log a glass of water, and you’re not going to learn anything about your sleep beyond not-that-accurate readings of deep, light, and REM sleep. OK, Jawbone, I woke up twice last night: tell me what I’m supposed to do about it. Oh, and those 43 minutes you say I was awake? I was showering, because it’s the morning, and you should know that because you are my alarm clock.

Every single thing Jawbone does well is also inside the Up2. For all its bells and whistles, the Up3 does nothing else. Other than “exercise more,” I don’t know what to do about my resting heart rate—and I don’t need to spend another $180 to know that. My unused gym membership is reminder enough.

In fact, the only real improvement over the much older Up24 is the design. Jawbone’s old devices, like basically every other fitness tracker, were big, rigid, clunky bangles that scream, “Technology!” The Up3 and Up2 aren’t exactly high-end jewelry, but they’re about the most wearable wearables I’ve ever seen. Jawbone worked hard on making it smaller: it wants you to wear the Up next to your smartwatch, not instead of it. And that looks crazy, but only a little bit. For one thing, they’re finally small enough that I don’t have to take my Up off when I sit down at my computer. They’re incredibly simple—and identical, except the Up3 is a little larger—with a rigid part that goes on top of your wrist, and a super-flexible rubber band. It’s super durable and water-resistant, but not waterproof—a concession made in production, and the cause of the product’s delays. It comes in black and silver, but trust me on this: get the black.

jawbone-inline5 Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

It’s a “one size fits most” device, with an adjustable hook-and-eye sort of clasp. It’s awkward to put on, especially because you’re supposed to make it tight enough on your wrist that the sensors press against your skin. Once you get it on, though, it holds tightly—or at least the second model Jawbone lent me did. The first one came off a dozen times in a day, including while I slept. I missed my alarm by 90 minutes after I got the Up3, because there was nothing on my wrist to buzz me awake. Normally I wouldn’t mention a hardware defect like this, because there’s always a few that don’t work right. But Jawbone has such an ugly history with imperfect hardware, and the issues with the Up3’s buckle were so frustratingly expected, that I can’t just write it off.

That’s what’s so frustrating about Jawbone: It has all the right ideas, and just never quite nails the execution. I love the idea of a fitness tracker that collects and collates more data, that can tell me more specific and actionable things over time. On paper, the Up3 is exactly the thing I want, more so than any of its competitors. But even ignoring the fact that it doesn’t turn more data into better data, the experience of using it is a mess. I never figured out the double-tap-then-long-press method of switching between Active and Sleep modes, because most of the time it doesn’t work. I also can’t figure out why it doesn’t switch automatically. I can’t stand that some days, for some unknown reason, it just doesn’t track my sleep. I like that the battery lasts a week, but not that it doesn’t really warn you before it dies, or that it has to sit just-so on the awkward induction USB charger or else it won’t charge at all. This is easy stuff, or at least it should be.

I want Jawbone to succeed, because I want the device the Up3 was supposed to be. Instead of a revolutionary fitness tracker, though, I’ve been wearing something that feels like a Kickstarter prototype that they swear will be better before it ships. So I waited six extra months for it to ship, and it’s still not as cool as advertised.

Maybe the Up3 isn’t possible yet. Maybe you can’t build something that powerful, in that small a package, for $180. Maybe no one can. But I know this: six months ago, Jawbone promised the world. Then it built a step tracker.

Uber Says It Can Deliver Food in NYC in 10 Minutes

Uber will already ferry you just about anywhere you want to go, hook you up with a carpool, help you move, and deliver packages for you. Now, depending on where you live, Uber drivers will also bring you a freshly cooked meal.

Today, the transportation giant announced it is rolling out UberEATS, its food delivery service, in New York City and Chicago, following successful tests in Barcelona and Los Angeles. For this new feature, Uber partners with local restaurants, which offer one menu item per day to Uber customers—like a slimmed down version of Seamless. The big difference from other app-based food delivery services is how quickly Uber says it will get you your grub: the company promises to use its mighty network of drivers to deliver your order in 10 minutes or less.

For anyone who’s ever tried to get anywhere in New York City in 10 minutes or less, that seems like an impossible promise to keep. But according to Jason Droege, who heads up all of Uber’s so-called Uber Everything experiments, it’s the fact that Uber can deliver on that promise that convinced the company to go after this market.

“We thought, ‘What can Uber bring to this field that’s special and magical?” Droege says, “and our delivery time is pretty magical.”

The trick is, rather than waiting for customers to place an order, waiting for the restaurant to make the order, and then battling traffic to deliver the order—a process that can easily take 45 minutes—Uber drivers pick up batches of orders from participating restaurants in temperature controlled bags. Then they drive around as they always do, waiting to make a delivery to the nearest willing customer.

Push A Button, Get Banh Mi

For users, ordering from UberEATS is similar to ordering a ride. You open the app as you usually would, open the UberEATS tab, select an item from the menu, and place the order. When the driver pulls up, you come out to meet him, only instead of getting in the car, you get a banh mi sandwich.

Droege says UberEATS is an easy way for drivers to earn a little extra pocket change (drivers collect the $3 delivery fee). And for customers, Droege says, it not only cuts down on delivery wait times, but it also means being able to order from any restaurant Uber partners with, not just the ones that are nearby. Plus, you could be standing on the beach or in a park, and Uber would still know where to find you. “Anywhere you can drop a pin you can get food now,” he says. “That’s not something other delivery services can offer.”

Anywhere you can drop a pin you can get food now. That's not something other delivery services can offer. Jason Droege, Uber

And yes, there are a lot of other delivery services, from Seamless and Grubhub to Postmates and Instacart. But Uber is convinced there’s still room in this industry, Droege says, largely because its pilot programs in Los Angeles and Barcelona were so successful.

The bigger question, though, is why would a company like Uber want to be in this industry in the first place, particularly when so many other competitors exist? The answer, Droege says, is that this is yet another way that Uber is flexing its muscles not just as a transportation powerhouse, but as a full-scale logistics company. “We’re trying to build products at the intersection of where your lifestyle meets logistics,” Droege says. And food, of course, is a significant part of people’s lifestyle.

Still, it may not be as easy for Uber to overtake existing food delivery companies the way it did the taxi industry. Because UberEATS only offers a few menu items a day, Droege admits that it will primarily appeal to a subset of customers who “choose speed over selection.” But for a company that’s so dominant in one industry already, that may be enough.