Now available for $29.99, the open-world, standalone version of DayZ– based on the popular ARMA 2 mod with the same name – has sold over 172,000 in its first day of sales through both the official site and Steam.

The game still tops the best-sellers list on Steam in fact, beating out popular, less expensive games and big-name franchises that have been offered with massive discounts in the previous weeks.

I’ve been playing the game with some friends and it’s an interesting beast. DayZ is now at version 0.3 or so, and is clearly unfinished. In some ways it’s barely working: Your axe will often make gunshot noises, zombies can clip through the floor, and the game can feel unresponsive and hard to play. It’s not a welcoming experience. I was addicted within hours.

The success of DayZ mirrors the success of Minecraft in many ways, although the games may not seem similar at first blush. Minecraft has spawned a small army of imitators, some of which are quite good, but no other game exemplifies the true lessons of Minecraft as well as DayZ.

There’s not much land to be tilled by trying to directly duplicate DayZ, and we’ve already seen the trainwreck that was WarZ’s cash grab, so let’s take a step back and look at the broader lessons of the game, and see what others can do to try to grab a piece of the pie. This is fertile ground for innovation and other developers are likely to move in, but it’s important to understand why DayZ is so important and popular instead of trying to cop the game’s feel and setting without knowing why players have responded so strongly.

Imitators will see an open-world zombie game, and think that's the take away.

Unfinished games are now a valid business strategy

This is a controversial one, but you need only look at popular games such as Starbound, Don’t Starve, Planetary Annihilation, DayZ, Nuclear Throne, Rust and Kerbal Space Program to see how many people are taking advantage of the ability to sell a game before it’s "done," and making their community part of the development effort.

Minecraft may have helped popularize the idea of continuing to add features to a game after its "release," but the Steam early access program provided structure and a home for games that were ready for players, but not ready to be considered finished, polished products.

You take your gaming time in your hands by playing early access games, as many features are missing or don’t work, crashes can be common, and each patch brings the game closer to a "finished" state, but the process often feels like listening to the demos of your favorite bands as they’re in the studio recording.

It's not for everyone, but games and developers with a strong track record are more than comfortable using sales of works in progress to help fund the rest of the game. It’s important that customers understand what they’re getting when they purchase an early access game, pay for a beta, or otherwise interact with these works in progress, but it’s no longer necessary for your game to be 100 percent finished to begin selling it to a waiting and hungry public.

The feedback from these players, taken from the game’s data or the community forums on Steam, can even help guide development itself. With care on the side of developers, and a little research on the part of players before they buy, this system is a win for everyone involved.

And if you’re not interested in playing a game before it’s finished? You don’t have to. Just wait for the official release and enjoy a more polished product. The rest of us will be having fun with the messy, but oftentimes exhilarating, early versions of some very enjoyable games.

It’s okay to remove the training wheels

Modern games usually feature tedious tutorial levels where we’re taught which button makes the character crouch, or worse talking heads that jump into the experience every five minutes to explain what’s going on and what has to happen next. Your hand isn’t held, it’s crushed, and then you’re shoved in the right direction.

Even open-world games such as the Grand Theft Auto series are simply story missions surrounded by optional objectives in a large environment. You have the choice of which order to tackle the content, or what you can safely ignore, but you’re never "free." You’re kept in place by the game's systems, and your interactions are pre-determined by the game’s designers.

DayZ, on the other hand, does almost nothing to teach you how the game is played, much less "won." You can join a server only to be lost in the dead of night, to be quickly killed by zombies. Or you can spend an hour scavenging for supplies only to have a well-placed bullet from an unseen adversary end your character's life. There is nothing fair about it.

If you encounter a group of survivors that is better equipped, you are likely to die. The game is not interested in evening the odds. It simply presents the landscape, and sets you free. DayZ is refreshingly indifferent to your existence.

There is no right or wrong way to play. Do you want to collect as much gear as you can and see how long you can survive? That’s fine. Do you kill other players and steal their gear? That’s perfectly valid. None of this is explained in the game, and you don’t even decide where to spawn when you first play a character.

Figuring out where you are by reading signs and looking for landmarks while looking at an external map on your laptop or tablet is part of the fun, and then trying to survive long enough to bring the players together … these are all distinct challenges.

You have to learn how to survive in this world, and the world does not give a single shit about trying to teach you how to do so. Each player picks up the same set of skills, but they feel earned, not given. That’s a powerful thing to present to each player.

Life is not fair

There are strategies for the metagame, including the act of spawning into a low-population server, collecting as much gear as you can relatively unmolested, finding your friends, and then moving into a higher population server to terrorize the players who are just looking for a canteen. It’s not fair, but then again, life is not fair. Might makes right.

Someone asked me if they had fixed the "trolling and ganking" in the standalone version of the game. I had to explain that the game consists of trolling and ganking. Players have very little reason to trust each other, and many reasons to kill each other. It’s very hard to be the "good guy," which is a scary thing to take away from a simulation of the apocalypse.

EVE Online is another game that has benefited from the act of sitting back while the players learn how lucrative it can be to lie, cheat and steal. There is limited law in EVE Online, but overall the person who has the most friends and the most powerful ships gets to decide how the world operates. It’s not a game to play if you want things to be fair, it’s a game to play if you want to use every tool at your disposal to move the odds to your favor.

I’ve been chased down by groups of three people only to be beaten to death for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve helped my friend flush someone out of a house only to put a round in his head because we wanted to keep an unlooted area for ourselves. There is power in numbers, and a gun may mean nothing if it doesn’t have any bullets.

When someone points a firearm in your direction, and you’re scared of losing your loot if you die, it may just come down to how lucky you’re feeling. Your response to the threat, and their decision to make it, are not based on any of the game’s ideas of fairness or balance. It’s just people trying to survive. No achievements, no points and no levels, nothing to gain or lose in the greater game.

It may not be fair, but it’s certainly freeing.

So what did we learn?

I could go on and on about the clever design decisions of DayZ, including the local chat that allows everyone you meet to communicate, threaten, or coerce everyone else as long as they’re within visual range. If you’re hiding from someone, it’s important to actually shut up if you want them to think you’ve left.

Or you could unplug your microphone, but what fun is that?

The game can also be deeply boring. You have to be into role-playing as a survivor, and it can often feel like a walking simulator. You can go hours between seeing another human being, and at that point your time is spent going through barren houses looking for a better backpack or more ammunition. The minute to minute action can be boring, and often frustrating.

An open door usually means a building has been looted, so you can troll other players by closing the doors as you leave. This will cause them to waste their time looking for items in empty buildings. Does this sound fun? It can be, but it’s hard to describe if you haven’t played the game. You have to make your own fun, and that’s often at the expense of the other players, or perhaps due to their actions towards you. It’s a playground for the perverse.

So if you strip the game to the bone and compare it to Minecraft, the other giant indie success story of the past few years, the trends are certainly there to be explored. Sell a game before it’s done, invite players into an unfinished world and then build it around them, as they play and learn.

It’s a playground for the perverse.

Allow them to uncover the rules and play of your world on their own terms, and keep the guidance minimal, if it’s there at all. Don’t be worried about making the game fair as much as you should make the world feel dynamic and reactive. Remove the training wheels, and let your players tell you what the game is, and what it should be. Not the other way around.

If more developers built a playground instead of shooting a movie, we’d have many more of these success stories, and likely at least a few more brilliant games that share the success of DayZ and Minecraft. Focus on the core lessons, not the superficial trappings. I can’t wait to play the results.

After his son was arrested for downloading files at MIT, Bob Swartz did everything in his power to save him. He couldn’t. Now he wants the institute to own up to its part in Aaron’s death.

Bob Swartz walks past MIT’s Building 16, where Aaron was caught downloading files from an academic archive in 2011. (Photograph by Mark Fleming)

There was a point, during the two years of legal proceedings that would overtake, and then shatter, both of their lives, when Bob Swartz and his son Aaron found themselves with a bit of free time. They had arrived at the Federal Reserve building, in Boston, to meet Aaron’s lawyer—one of dozens of meetings Bob would arrange in hopes of fending off the 13 felony counts against his son. But they were early, so they took a walk.

Aaron was Bob’s first child, the oldest of three boys, and he was a fragile, thoughtful kid from the very beginning. Growing up, Aaron and his brothers, Noah and Ben, had unfettered access to the nascent Internet, creating and coding projects of their own design. Evenings were spent building robots with Legos, playing Myst or Magic: The Gathering. Dinner-table conversations might concern the merits of a particular font, or Edward Tufte’s theories of information. “It was a house of ideas,” Bob says.

Aaron taught himself to read at age three, and became bored with school shortly thereafter. By ninth grade he became an anti-school activist, arguing that rote drills and homework assignments couldn’t teach kids how to think. Instead, he chose to be “unschooled,” documenting his progress on a blog he called Schoolyard Subversion. “He lived more of his life online than he did with his friends,” Bob says. “There was a degree of alienation that occurred, especially as he got older. He was working on the Internet and that was sort of terra incognita.” But Aaron found a network of friends online—many far older than he—who shared his interest in the future of the Web. Bob understood his dark-eyed, curious son’s enthusiasms. They spent time together in their Highland Park home, bonding over books as Aaron mowed through the family’s canon. One summer, they cataloged several thousand of their books according to the Library of Congress classification system. One night a fight erupted over standards. Aaron won.

Another time, Bob took Aaron to the Crerar Library at the University of Chicago, just as his own father had once taken him. Bob led Aaron through the stacks, pulled a book off the shelf, and cradled it in his hands. It was from the 1800s, a marvel. He told his son libraries were portals into the knowledge of the world.

Whenever Aaron needed advice, his father would share an insight from life or literature. “You always answer things in stories,” Aaron would say. That afternoon, as Bob and Aaron circled the block, they discussed the events of the past few months—Aaron’s arrest, when he was forced to the pavement; his strip search and solitary confinement upon arraignment; the increasingly circuitous route the U.S. Attorney’s Office was taking in negotiating the charges; their legal fees, which would soon clear $1 million; the looming felony conviction that Aaron feared. Aaron said he felt as though he’d been living in a version of The Trial, Kafka’s classic novel, which follows the incoherent prosecution of a defendant named Josef K.

Aaron had read the story in 2011, shortly after his arrest, and called it “deep and magnificent” on his blog. “I’d not really read much Kafka before and had grown up led to believe that it was a paranoid and hyperbolic work,” he wrote. Instead, he’d found it “precisely accurate—every single detail perfectly mirrored my own experience. This isn’t fiction, but documentary.”

Bob had admired Kafka, but didn’t remember the plot of The Trial. He asked Aaron to remind him how the story ended.

Aaron just stared at him.

“They killed K., Dad,” Aaron told him. “They killed him.”

Just a few months later, on January 11, 2013, nearly two years from the date when he was first arrested by a Secret Service agent in Central Square, Aaron Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26 years old.

MIT may be the world’s most prestigious engineering school, with touchscreen maps installed in its building lobbies, but it remains a remarkably difficult place to navigate. To find room 485 in the Media Lab building, you pass through a series of silver double doors, then skirt a workshop where a garden of mechanical flowers gleam purple and silver under iridescent lights. There are no bumper stickers or flyers taped to the hall window of room 485; the blinds are closed. The only sign it’s occupied at all is the magnetic poetry on the door. Most of the tiles are a random scramble, but nine have been arranged to form the lines: Construct the future to be better for your children.

Bob Swartz is inside.

Bob has kind brown eyes and a brow crowned with gray fuzz. He wears a striped button-down shirt, khakis, a brown belt, a Tag Heuer watch with a simple brown leather strap, and sensible shoes. He swivels in his chair with one leg tucked underneath him. The room is small, only about 10 by 14 feet, but there are seven office chairs. “This is where the chairs hang out,” he jokes. There is weariness in his voice. “I feel bad putting them out in the hall.”

Bob lives in Highland Park, Illinois. For more than a decade, he has traveled to the MIT campus each month to consult on intellectual-property aspects of Media Lab creations. After Aaron’s arrest, these trips took on a new urgency: He had to file motions, meet with attorneys, plead with MIT administrators. Now, in the wake of his son’s death, coming here has become an exercise in grief.

“I see Aaron on every corner,” he says. “I pass by the building. I see MIT police. I remember, I remember him…” he sighs. “We spent a lot of time here. There are all sorts of painful aspects of what happened. They come back.”

I’m fast! I’m as fast as 100 ideas-per-hour. I have always had this talent of coming up with good ideas, sometimes great ideas. People say its not about the idea, its about the execution. Well I would say its actually about validation but lets leave that for a blog post on ‘lean-startup‘.

Hello 2014. One goal I will be fulfilling is launching a validated startup. I spent the latter part of 2013 validating this idea and I am glad to say its an exciting place to be when you have a good idea that’s validated!

“But Scott wait! What about me?” I hear you say “I don’t even have an idea, let a lone a good one!” Fear not friend, I am here and have 100 golden business ideas for 2014 just for you!

NOTES: These range from futuristic ideas to new angles on old and existing ventures. Yes there will be companies already offering a service like my idea but don’t let that stop you! Attack the problem NOT the competition. There is something here for everyone. Every idea here is an idea I have had during 2013 and they are ideas of have seriously considered bringing to life. I want to share these with the world and would love for someone somewhere to pick one and say “hell yeah, I’m gonna launch this“. If you do – let me know.

Can I also encourage you to SHARE this post by ClickHere2Tweet and also get involved in the comments, even if you hate me and my ideas – let me know you hate them! What’s your favorite idea – leave a comment and win a trip to space (if Rich Branson emails me back).

In no particular order:

Bamboo Eyewear: Sustainable eye wear is awesome. I  had this idea two summers ago and bought several bamboo sunglasses from Alibaba.com but never got round to launching. I even bought the domain Vayders.com as a bad-ass brand name. WearPanda are doing a good job here but plenty of room for healthy competition. I know nobody is really killing this in the UK as I have given all of my samples away and the buzz those seven pairs generated was exciting. Start now and you will be ready for a big launch this summer!

Rock Your CV: I was once a manager and also hired someone to work for me when i ran my own business. The rubbish that was CV’s representing people is ripe for disruption! If people really wanted to earn $100k a year then they should be investing upfront in themselves. One option would be to offer a service where you re-design peoples CV’s like the hundreds of templates available on GraphicRiver or find a designer to build you 5 templates. Charge $49 per CV. Can’t design? Then find an offshore designer via oDesk. People should even be going as far as this to stand out from the job competition!

GradFolio:I love this idea and believe this will be a real winner if done right. Imagine a website launches called GradFolio (domain name available to purchase). A student is just entering his first year at University but signs up onto the site and starts putting his interests and also features projects on there. He likes to build drones and already Amazon’s HR team see this and start a dialogue with him. Over the years of his study they let him know what other skills and technologies they would like to be using in the next 3-5 years so he can also study towards these and land a dream job. The students can tailor and change their study here and there to work towards a specific company and project and can better his/her chances of landing the job. The companies can pay you a fortune for this access as they can start influencing their graduates who will be more than ready for their firm.

50 Ways: I was speaking to three restaurant owners this week. Two were independent and one was a manager of a local restaurant which makes up a larger corporate chain. I pretended to tell the manager that i had just finished writing a book with online references and case studies of “50 Ways for a Restaurant To Get More Customers”  and all three said they would be very interested in getting a copy. I then said that it would sell exclusively to one chain that they can then send to their location managers. If you went even further you could create an online log-in training area to compliment the book. Plus you can go and get a sale without even typing a word! If you have $0 or even worse -$0 then this is what I would be doing to pull in a few thousand dollars. Start here and here to give a few ideas away for free!

Virtual Data Room:For some reason I know a lot of legal people. I read an article in some business magazine while on a lads holiday back in 2012 about virtual data rooms used securely for legal conclusions, signing documents, exchanging contracts, deeds etc. Historically it was done in a lawyers office but now technology is allowing a secure way of doing this remotely. Each law firm would pay a monthly fee to hire their room or rooms out. Two of my network now use this as a solution. I’m not the only cat who thinks this is a sexy business idea – see here, here and here!

Gmaids: I remember watching a Mixergy interview about two immigrants in the US who were cleaners. Then they transformed their lives into owning a successful cleaning company. It was such a simple business concept and done in a step by step way that anyone could follow this. I then learnt of other people doing this and following an online guide that a cleaning entrepreneur had made for people. Again if i had nothing – i would start here: From An Idea To Replacing My Full-time Salary in 4 Months

WordPress Theme Review: As a WordPress developer I was stunned to see how much a WordPress Review website went for in a Flippa auction. Sold by a friend of mine he was making a killing reviewing WordPress themes and making an affiliate commission. He built it up over 3 years and did spend a few hours each day on it but still – it made my ears stand-up, especially when I seen his bank statement as proof! Start here.

English Teaching Website for Chinese Students:I watched a BBC documentary on millionaire teachers in China and thought there had to be an alternative now using technology for Chinese students. Why not connect them one-to-one with UK or US students? There is an opportunity here.

Entrepreneur Course for Kids:  During Summer I had setup a small cake stand at a local charity event and my 3 year old daughter manned the till and I was showing her a few entrepreneur and sales techniques and a few parents commented on this about there should be a class for this type of thing. As a parent if my school or local center ran a business class for kids and made it fun – I would pay. There you go – one validated parent! You could design an online course for parents and their children or create fun games or animations that teach an important basic business lesson. Check out Cameron Herold on TED discussing teaching kids to be entrepreneurs.

Technology Course for Kids: Moving on from my last point. I am teaching my daughter typing at the moment as she has been brought up on swipe screens on the iPad and iPhone. I will then go onto teaching her how to setup a basic WordPress website and basic coding skills. The foundations. If today you told parents if a kid learns to code they could be another Zuckerberg I bet you would have a queue. This could be done online or offline.

Couples Curated Breaks: Me and my wife love to get away once a quarter just the two of us. Recently we have discovered spa weekends, now as a meditator I like anywhere peaceful so yeah spas rock! My problem is there are too many all-female groups at the spas drinking and generally making too much noise! So a couples curated spa break would be perfect and I know there are sites out there but they are just too expensive. Team up with 30 spas, ask them that one weekend each month they put on a couples event where they minimize hen parties and you’re good to go!

Sales Training MOOC: There seems to be an explosion of MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Course) over the past 18 months and there still is the question on how they make money but I think a niche MOOC such as in sales training could work – charge sales people to use the site, have them enter there sales goals for the year so they can personalize the site and keep them coming back. Here is a list of current MOOC’s and start building your content from here.

Beer Feedback Service: Craft beer is exploding in the US and UK. While out one night with friends sipping craft ales i mentioned a club where up to 1000 people join and micro-breweries pay to distribute samples of the beers to gain live feedback from the experts. They can “lean test” their beers before they have even completed a massive batch. This saves money and generates a buzz of a new beer being launched, something that craft breweries struggle with right now. You could get this started right now – find the biggest voices in social media on craft beer and hit them up with a free beer!

Food Lessons by Local Restaurants: My wife’s favorite of my ideas she would use this herself. So you signup some of the countries biggest chains and independently owned restaurants and consumers can signup to a cooking class in one of their kitchens with a real chef. They can cook their own meals. Great as a gift, group gift and more and awesome marketing for restaurants. Businesses catering (excuse the pun) are exploding everywhere right now.

Corporate Lunch: I work in an office where we usually order a corporate lunch in 3 times per week for clients who are visiting us. Its typical buffet food wherever you order it from. Same old bacon, lettuce and tomato triangle sandwiches, sausage rolls and crisps. Disrupt the market – one brand, one website with a really simple menu that has been developed by a good chef. Recruit nationwide caterers that could replicate the menu and use them to deliver the last-leg. I would use it! Also as a vegan some good vegan dishes! Most companies say “vegetarian” when i say “vegan”. Check out the vegans here discussing this very issue.

Press Release Service:I have had some good results from using a number of free press release services. It has often led me to get some coverage that has either generated leads, sales or contacts. But using free press release websites sucks. Why not setup a press release writing service that also sends them out to hundreds of free press release websites. I have used a guy I found on oDesk who could mass submit them saving me time and you could use him as your supplier.

Security Analytics: This is going to be a growing area in 2014 as we see more and more hacking stories in the press. Most organisations have the data but how do they visualize it into meaningful results? Maybe a start would be to offer a data analysis service using offshore experts, after this start figuring out what a core product would be that these companies want. Here’s a good post on the current situation of companies not knowing where to start.

Online Shoes: You can’t go wrong with online shoes! But one area I have seen my wife moving into is using services where she designs her own shoes using a company such as Shoes of Prey (which is such a bad name). She had an idea where you subscribe, get a monthly email with a unique shoe design and it is limited to say 300 or 500 shoes. People then pay for it and once you have the money you then go and get the shoes manufactured. A lean shoe business! My wife would love wearing shoes that there are only a few made. here is a good article on why shoes have dominated the online eCommerce market.

Kids Charm Bead: I loved reading the success story of the Rainbow Loom. The founder took a simple idea, a little bit of savings and turned this into a multi-million pound business. My daughter makes her own toy right now and me and my wife always talk about turning this into a kids toy. She has a hair braid that she attaches into her hair, then she makes little charms out of cardboard that she then puts onto this braid. You could easily turn these into colorful charms and shapes or characters and each one represents a letter so you can make secret messages that only your friends can translate. But these offline ideas are still like gold. I think revisiting all of the past 80′s and 90′s toys and gadgets and seeing how you can improve them or make them a little different. But I know kids are BIG into personalizing stuff – so if you could have a whatever, hair braid with charms if you can make secret messages in that only their friends can understand – bingo!

Website Security Check: I met a guy who asked me if I wanted a free WordPress website security health check – sure i said! Then he came back with a list of vulnerabilities. Now I knew enough about WordPress to know he was genuine and not just inventing threats. I could easily fix around 90% of them but the others I happily paid him to correct. I experimented with this idea and within 4 hours I found 3 offshore security experts with qualifications recognized in the UK to perform remote website security health checks. I went on to charge 4 people £99/$163 each to do this check and fix the threats. You could start tonight and get your first 5 clients by offering free security checks.

Estate Agent Intelligence: I’m not sure if this would work elsewhere around the world outside of the UK but there is a company called VizziHome who are leading market intelligence in the estate agent industry. In fact they are the only provider that I am aware of and they were just acquired!

Crowdsourced Fitness: Another of my wife’s favorite – you setup a website that connects local people who currently have a fitness regime e.g. they run locally every morning at 0600am or a yoga practitioner who does her workout in her garden at 0700am every other day. They register and then you can sign up to joining them on their workout and they train, coach you. Its on a micro-level but that’s what is appealing to my wife. I know there are online coaches using webcam and Skype and that could be an option too.

Get Me This Job: I am working on a what I consider a big project that will involve jobs which I am launching in March 2014. I am fascinated about jobs, the recruitment process and also how people portray who they are. How do you stand out from the crowd to land your dream job? I think this requires an expert to help and guide people, even professionals. Think about it – you want a job paying $100k per year yet you refuse to spend say 1% of that in investing in yourself. So the idea here is that you work with a candidate towards a specific job. This could be coaching via Skype, designed CV like my idea number 2, maybe even an animation like here. Fix fee $1,000 per client.

Lesson Recorded: My wife is a teaching assistant and even she wishes she could go to some place and pull up a recorded video of the class she sat through so she can go over the lesson with her students with learning difficulties. Why aren’t lessons recorded so students can go back later that day or week to learn more? A teacher could also send out a week ahead schedule that also includes links to Wikipedia links and other blog articles so even before the lesson the student has had the chance to read up and be grounded on a particular subject. The idea is being discussed by geeks as I type!

Extra Lessons: So instead of a just starting yet another websites offering tutors for extra tuition on your standard subjects you could launch a website where people can put up adverts that request an expert in whatever subject or field they are struggling with and then the experts or students can come along and put forward a proposal on how they will teach you this. So a salesman needs to go and pitch for some business in a sector he is not that conversed with – he could pay for an hour of someones time to get educated in the core basics, sector, competition, suppliers, challenges blah blah blah.

Thank you Cupcakes: Whenever have won a significant amount of business, once I had successfully delivered it I would say thank you by sending cup cakes from a local deli in town. Even if a client lived in the US or Australia I would Google a local cafe to them and get it sent. There is ROI from saying thank you. Saying thank you is a great way to stand out from all the other salesmen calling your clients. So I was pleased to see a company called MailLift who are doing this with hand written letters. They have even integrated with SalesForce API which is genius! So i still think a global ThankyouCupcakes.com (I own that by the way) where you team up with cupcakes makers all over the world that could hand deliver them next day would be awesome plus if you integrate it into SalesForce.com. So every time you complete business – cupcake request gets sent automatically.

Cloud Storage Re-seller: Come on! It’s the cloud! What I love about cloud now is its a no-brainer. I mean even my mum gets it and wants to “digitize” everything to go on the cloud so when she is in her nursing home in years to come she can sit and watch hours and hours of memories all safely backed up in real-time. So if I take a picture of my daughter almost immediately it gets added to my mums photo cloud account. If you have no money – get a cheap WordPress website and starting re-selling Cloud services.

Cloud Storage For Kids: Again my wife thinks a very secure cloud storage service for parents where they can store everything that their child produces digitally is a good offering. My wife takes images of every drawing my daughter does and uploads them to a private cloud. A service dedicated to this and marketed towards parents is a great idea. Another one you can call on us for custom!

Airbnb for Corporate Accommodation: I never knew the secret world of corporate rented accommodation before until I visited a friend of mine who was staying in Birmingham. His swish high-rise apartment overlooked the city and I was very impressed when he said that his company rents this place out and they also have several other apartments over the UK that he uses. Looking into this I thought a marketplace for this secret world would be a hit as it would bring more accommodation into the marketplace and also encourage better pricing and community feedback. Take a look at StayBay for example.

Customer Experience Expert: Most companies don’t have a clue about their own customer experience. That is what a customer of their’s see’s, feels and experiences as they go through the buying process. An easy way into this area would be to become an expert in customer experience. You could setup a website of the top 100 retailers in your country and then take a look at their customer experience. Visit their shop, ask their staff questions, go on their website, find information. Maybe build a 10 point checklist and mark each area out of ten. One area UK retailers are falling over is in Click & Collect. It’s meant to be a smooth process but it actually is a painful one. Send your findings to the retailers and then offer them a consultancy fee to come in and inform them where they are going wrong and how they can improve it. 

RFID Limited Edition Toys: There are literally thousands of toy collectors around the world. Why not design and develop your own limited edition collectors set? You could release only a small amount over time e.g. 5,000 units per quarter. Go a step further a put in a RFID chip in each toy so it can be verified as an original and not a fake. This would also give an old toy a modern appeal and generate buzz among collectors. Again find a designer on oDesk and then get a supplier to build them.

Sell Your Business: Selling your business is tough. Where do you even begin? Well I have sold three businesses for people and also I have sold more than 10 projects (micro businesses/websites etc). There is a right way and wrong way to do it and most people opt for the latter out of experience. Some of the worst people to sell a business are the owners as they are too personally attached. So if you could come up with a good way, a easy app to guide business owners through this process or even just become a sales agent and sell it for them – I think you will do well. Again this is what I did when I had no money. I sold a furniture store in Birmingham for an elderly gentleman and made a neat commission of $6,000. Research how to get started. The best people to sell a business to are competitors as they can grow overnight.

Problem Shared:I work in a small business, 7 off us and over the past year we have gotten into a very healthy habit of working with each other on our own problems. Sharing an issue before we react means we can use 7 of us to resolve it. We do this even down to checking an important email or response document. So far we have been using a shared drive or email chain but this is getting out of hand. I think a web app or piece of software that allows you to share problems that crop up throughout the day will make the workforce a lot more efficient. After writing this I have seen Deezco offering a solution to this.

SEO Outsourced:Flippa is a great resource to see who is making money – how much and how. OK there are some clear cowboys on there selling nothing but a dead horse but one winner I always see are people who have built up an SEO service and they also totally outsource it. There a hundreds of thousands of tiny small businesses out there that struggle to get new clients – its one, if not there biggest issue. Solve it – and make some money. Find a good SEO’er on oDesk.

Problem Solved: I love problems. I really do. I pride my cool, calm and collective approach to coming up with as many ideas to solve the problem as possible. I also accept not all problems can be solved, and a lot of problems aren’t actually problems! How about a service, web app or mobile app where a person for say a few dollars can submit a problem for you to resolve, maybe for a fixed fee they can have 5 problems worked through. If you can solve problems – you can make a lot of money.

Nursing Home Review: It’s a really tough decision to make to place a loved one into a nursing home. One opportunity in the UK is for a good service to provide a fair review of each nursing home. You could easily make money for advertising or listing of each nursing home. A sort of TripAdvisor for nursing homes!

Research Business: Its never been easier now to access some fabulous minds. There are scientific, legal and medical students based offshore who can help you provide a robust research service. I have used students found on the likes of Elance and oDesk to do this for two companies based in the UK. One was to research the Europe market for Click & Collect in grocery stores and the other was to write a whitepaper on a manufactured replacement for Coltan – circa $4,000 in profit.

Showrooming Whitepaper: Showrooming is the process of going into a shop, looking at an item, maybe trying it on and then using your phone or going on the internet to find it cheaper and buy it there. Showrooming is a big issue for some retailers and there are some things retailers can do to turn this into an opportunity. I could give you 3 ideas right now! Why not create a landing page for a whitepaper on this offering and see how many orders you can get from retailers – once you have $2,000 in orders – outsource it to a smart student offshore.

Content Marketing:Another marketing technique that can be onerous and time-heavy for a small business owner. Why not find a team offshore that has the experience, case studies and ability to provide an ongoing service. You could even look at the top ten industries – get a good keyword domain, start loading it with content and then sell it to a company in this sector, as well as find 10 companies a month to give you recurring revenue and for you to manage their content marketing.

Reboot Reload: I have recently undergone a hugelife-hack. Its taken about 18 months since I begun. I got out of debt, I got in shape and lost a lot of weight. I gave up being a Christian and became a Buddhist! I opened a savings account (my first ever) and filled it with $10,000. I became a minimalist and now I am still improving day by day. I wish looking back that I could have undertook a course that shaped this journey as it was tough and at times I didn’t know what I was doing. If it could give me the results that my own life-hack has given me I would have paid $10,000 per year easily. I have friends now asking me how I did it. There a re a lot of people who are not happy and they need a guided process or program to get them started and through until they can wake up with a burning desire for the day. Maybe you can just choose one area and offer to help people achieve this.

Complaint Hero: I am the best at resolving beef with any commercial company. As I write this I hold a cheque for $400 from a local bus company that slightly burnt my daughters leg by not having the bus heater covered correctly. My wife has a huge bunch of flowers on her kitchen table after she received an annoying sales call from a UK energy company. I get results. Then there are people who do not know how to handle these vicious corporate bullies. I have helped my wife’s two friends settle disputes and they even said they would have paid me to do this on their behalf. Maybe there is an opportunity to manage these disputes for a fee.

Pimp My Printer: I love 3d printing and think we haven’t even scratched the service yet in terms of really using this technology. I have three friends that have all purchased their own 3d printers. I am yet to get one! There are now companies starting up to collectively represent printer owners so they can take on local or large scale work. PimpMyPrinter.com is still available as a domain and would make a great brand name for this!

Positivity Training: I was working inside a large UK retailer in December and for two days they had a huge conference going on. When I inquired they said that they had “positivity training” going on and that they have this every 3 months! There were hundreds of people attending and this plays a large part of this companies structure. Get training now in positivity and start a consultancy in positivity!

Idea Management Software: I had this idea years ago being an idea mad man! The beauty and skill of an idea is writing it down and then developing with experience, more ideas, positivity, validation  and realism. Now I see a UK company is leading the way with a solution. You could even launch sector specific software or couple it with idea brainstorming workshops.

Droplet Soap: OK this is a little wild but maybe you make soap at home or maybe you partner does but offer a handmade soap the shape of a droplet and the size of a small tomato so you only use enough for one wash. This means the soap saving and waste saving  every hotel in the world will make!

Night time Delivery Service: Again an idea I have had since eBay became mainstream and people were ordering a lot of stuff to be delivered at home but they weren’t in. The solution is you launch a niche delivery courier service in your town where consumers can have their parcels delivered to the depot in the day and then when the consumer is at home in the evening they are in for the delivery. I recently seen a San Francisco company start this.

Contract App: Freelancers like me need a better way to remain professional and protected and a contract app that can also do other things such as generate invoices and NDA’s would be a great service. I like what ProperApp has done.

Man Catcher: Attacks in schools all over the world are more common and the threat will only increase as radical groups continue to commit all sorts of atrocities. A solution for schools to better protect themselves and deal with this threat is urgently required. I see a consultancy setting up to offer training, risk management and also some practical solutions such as door locks that teachers can apply quickly and intruders cannot disable. So if a man or student is walking into classroom after classroom to shoot students, each classroom can be locked down. Also how do you disable a man with a knife? How about resurrecting an old Medieval device such as this? Develop this device and sell it with training to every school in the US and Europe.

Hotel Reputation: Me and my wife stop in a lot of hotels and bed and breakfasts around Europe. Some are just awful and deserve a good rant in TripAdvisor! But what about the good hotels who get something wrong once in a while? What if there was a solution where you could work with the hotel on that issue and get rewarded for putting it right and not just going charging into leaving a damaging TripAdvisor report. So work with hotels on a service that limits damage and manages the risk. You could put flyers in the rooms, with a website where they visit to report their gripe. You deal with on behalf of the hotel and then reward them with a gift. You could set up a recurring revenue package for this. This is a company in the US that has just received funding for something similar for shops but i cant remember the name.

Crowdsourced Care: This is an idea my mother had. So this would be an alternative to going into full-time care. You could go onto a website and browse older retired peoples profiles in your area and then match them with a hobby or interest with your elderly loved one. So for example my mother one day will be very elderly and once a week I can hire a local lady who will take my mum to the garden center, buy flowers and then help her in the garden plant them. Maybe care is the wrong word here but you could have two levels, CrowdFriend and CrowdCare. Care could be retired nurses who still want to do a few hours per week. They would also put their hourly charge in their profiles.

Kids Depression Tools: Its sad that kids get depressed but at least there is a way to help kids out. A UK company is leading the way in providing tools such as books and MP3′s. Most sales will come from schools, doctors, counselors and parents.

Boutique: My wife would love a niche service where once a month boutique designers could send sketches and design boards where my wife could offer her feedback and then buy that dress. It would take a lot of work to get a good base of boutique designers but you could command a high price for the end product.

Music Tour List: So there maybe is something out there already in a form of an app but I am thinking a simple app where I put in my favorite bands and I can receive notification when they are in my town or country on tour.

My Cause: So MyCause would be an About.me type page but for peoples personal efforts in activism for good causes. So it would be a proud way of saying “I fed 300 schoolchildren this month” or “I saved a little girl in Somalia“. These would be a clear achievements in good. Why? Because people are proud and if this means everyone can now have an activism page which they fight for causes they believe in then great. You would make money by charging charities to get involved.

Funeral Videos: OK a bit dark and deep but how about a service where you can signup for a monthly fee and record a personal video say once a month. Over the years the video footage can be reviewed and each year a video of your best bits of what you would want playing at your funeral and a gift to everyone that came. So each year you build more of the video and continue to edit it. You can also upload photos and other video footage. At your death with a permission of a certified nominee you can have your video edited for the final time and released. NCH even advertise in Google for their software for this very thing.

Intropop:There are somany music apps out there. I love music and I am still not happy with any app for discovering new music until now. I have in my head the perfect app. So it would be a really minimalist design. You would put in your likes and music genre. Then in one minute you would hear a 1 minute mix of 6 x 10 second samples from the middle of each new song. If you like the sample you hit like while playing that specific sample and it would add the full track in to your daily curated list for you to listen to later. Awesome! You could make money from ads or royalties for selling songs.

Minimal Political Website: So this might not sound like a business idea but politics is bigger than ever. Everyone even the youth follow politics. The big issue still remains that politicians and political parties are not very good at communicating their messages to the youth. This would be a simple webpage and app with the top 5 things the party wants to get across about why you should support them. Also you can select a topic such as healthcare to compare the parties. You then get the political parties to advertise on it.

Recycled Jewelry: Me and my wife finally went (going) vegan after being ignorant to where our meat came from for so long and we are so glad that we did. More of the world and especially our youth are being brought up now aware of the environment and so recycled jewelry I think will be a leader here. If you could bring about a range with a great brand name, get some famous person to wear it like Lady Ga Ga and then you can continue to look for more rubbish to recycle! Again there are plenty of offshore suppliers that can help you here.

BookSnips: So this would ideally be a service for publishers to promote their new releases. A reader would download BookSnips app or sign up for the email service, select what types of book genres they are interested in and once a week they would receive a snip of a chapter from a new book. If they liked what they read they could then order the book. You would make your money by charging publishers a fee to enter snips of their books.

3D Art: I love 3D printing and so one idea i thought of would be to print 3D art for blind people to enjoy.

One Page Biz Plan App: I am against the myth of writing pointless business plans that take years to write and nobody reads! With the “lean startup” movement taking hold everyone now hopefully knows that it isn’t about the size of your business plan, but the validation of your idea that counts. I think an app that would allow you to take that idea (or any of the 100 here) and work it through would be very beneficial. I often have a leaner version of “lean” which I blog about here

Blog Writing App: How do you know what to blog about? What if your company blog needs to be focusing on whats current and trending? How about an app that emails you once a day with the current trending topics in your sector for that day. Charge a monthly subscription service to pull all of this together, package and sell it.

MyDish:This would be a mobile app or website where users can put up their own recipes and invented dishes. You could charge for advertising.

Failure Training:I see a lot of noble blog posts about failure. I don’t like the “failure-worship” I also see but that’s another article. But I really do think there is a need for failure training. Getting people to be comfortable with failing BUT also teaching them how to learn from a failure. How to do afailure postmortem. This could be done via talks, training, online courses, books, podcasts, challenges, app, consultancy etc

WordPress For Schools: Oli Barrett tweeted a good question some time back about what do you wish you had learnt at school. I replied “learn how to setup a WordPress site”. Imagine if every kid coming out of school could get online with their own website? WordPress makes it so easy to do this so I think offering a service where you go into schools and teach courses in WordPress would be well received. If I was asked to pay extra so my girl could learn how to build a website – hell yeah I would pay! (But she will be so ahead of this when she hits first school!)

AnalyticsYOU:I would love to wake-up in the morning and look at all the analytics that it has to do with ME. So I log in, see how much money I have in all of my accounts, get a quick traffic report on my websites, see how much weight I have lost in the past 30 days, how much electricity I have saved etc especially with the rise in quantified self.

CEO Dashboard: I have an idea for a web app or mobile app or both where a CEO can login and quickly see everything he needs to know without calling ten different people for updates. So he/she see’s current money in the bank, profit for this month, outstanding money owed, debt, leads, sales for the month etc. So it could be an app where you can add in streams of data, API to fetch all the info required. A bit like this.

Niche App Review:It’s app mad and apps are still growing and making loads of money. But I think one area that need a little help is some expert somewhere in a certain niche telling people like me on a weekly basis which apps I should be trying and why! For example, there could be an app reviewer focusing on sports apps, music apps, productivity apps, entrepreneur apps, marketing apps the list goes on. Start off by reviewing peoples apps and then become an expert in that niche so that any new apps will want you to review it. You can then charge a review fee, build up a newsletter list and take on sponsorship.

Spin Dinner:Sticking with the app theme here is a great app I would love to see. So you turn up in San Francisco after a long trip into town and you are a little peckish but not sure what or where to go to eat. You open up SpinDinner (SpinDinner.com available) app and literally hit “SPIN” it then will use your location to find a random dish out of the local restaurants. So you could get each restaurant to submit their top 10 dishes and these come up as opposed to just a “Chinese restaurant”. The user can also setup what they like e.g. vegan etc. You could charge each restaurant per dish.

ThisIsHowIWouldDoIt: So the idea here is a web app or mobile app where for a small fee people could submit challenges they are having and either one person or a network could resolve by saying “this is how I would do it”. Sort of a paid Quora but more in depth answers.

Blog App:So I read a lot of blogs. One blog I really like is the Buffer App blog. Imagine if Buffer had an app (this is my idea here) where at the end of the post a little popup comes up and says “What articles do you want to see on the buffer blog?” and also it will have the top 3 article ideas with how many votes each has. Then Buffer can start writing blog posts that people want to see. You could sell this as a plugin or as a service.

Twitter Stream Review: This is so needed! So many people are writing crap on their twitter feed. I’m a little guilty here also but it is my personal account and not a business account. So I think a good idea would be for a twitter review service. For $10 we review a company’s twitter feed. We take 1 months tweets and review and rate each one for value, relevancy, information, etc. We then score the account and provide guidelines for a better feed. To get this going you could pick 10 competitors in a certain space and rate their feeds and publish it on your blog.

Police Translation Service: In the UK the amount of money spent by police forces alone in translation service is unbelievable. I was working with a local Police force on an RFID project and so also knew from a personal level the challenges they have. Currently they have to call up a live translator and get charged a huge amount per call per minute or have to buy a bulk contract. If there was a way for a software application between two terminals that could negate this cost then there is money to be made. I was only too aware of this when I read about a company called ChatLingual who have a fantastic piece of software. In fact I was so hyped about their product I spoke to my contact in the Police force and said if I had x would you at least trial it and he said “hell yeah!”. So i reached out to ChatLingual hoping to form some commission-only arrangement and get their product into a huge Police force – but they never got back to me. If you could find out how ChatLingual do what they do – repackage it for the Police and ca-ching.

Curated Courses:So this is an idea using free information that is out there on the internet. So for example I want to learn about starting a blog. I would come to Curated Courses website – enter my subject, pay a fee say $12 and then they get back a hand curated course in their subject that includes the top blog posts on this subject, then a link to a how to YouTube video and a list of apps and services you can use to start your blog. The pain at the moment is there are so many pieces of information and advice out there but how do you package this into a learning module.

Followgen/TargetPattern: I am just going to come and be bold and say will someone please build whatthese two are doing and do a better job than they are and you will make a lot of dollar. So these companies for a fee will take your top 5 interests and then match these to people on twitter who are talking about these things. It will then from your account ‘favorite’ these tweets in the hope that these people respond by following you. You gain a lot of followers all in your niche areas. I have tried both and it works. It absolutely works. They are both making a lot of money doing it but so far they are both always down due to demand. Do it and I will sign-up.

Browser Check:How many help desks out there ask you what browser are you using? I don’t know! They should have a tool that tells them everything about your browser so they can fix your fault quick-time! So i had this idea years back and so far I have only found one guy doing this here. But I don’t think he’s pushing it so do it!

How To Be Awesome Course: The word awesome is probably one of the most marketed word used in 2013. A course in how to be awesome would be cool. It could teach you how to be cool, relax, be minimalist with monthly challenges. How to send emails properly, how to send marketing emails correctly etc How to be a better manager, better co-worker, better person! Life coaches could definitely do this instead of “life coaching” which is very off-putting and 1990′s.

Get Started:So I won some business last year for large accounting firm who wanted me to write an online “Get Started” manual for social media and anything that the older employees needed to know about the online and social world. So I asked them for subjects and then I typed a “How to Get Started” list and actions which went down really well. I think a website with say 100 topics to start with and then a how to get started list. Here is a good example from Anthony Feint.

3 Friends:Another app idea. It involves you and two other close friends and how you much you really know about each other. So you download the app – connect with three friends who also download it (viral effect) and it then sets up a set of questions about one of the friends and then the two other compete against it by getting the answers right. It then feeds back the score. You then play this game two more times alternating the friend in question. Its incredibly viral as you keep asking more and more friends to beat your score. My wife loves this one so if you do decide to do it – let me know!

GIF Tutorials: This comes from an idea Timothy E. Johansson had as day 2 of his 100 Day Growth Hacking experiment. Using GIF images to show users how something works. You could offer this service using an offshore partner and offer it to every technical company in you can speak too. Cheap but hugely effective and we now use this at our RFID business showing customers how to setup the device and it has had raving reviews.

Santa Has Been: This Christmas was special in the fact my daughter was old enough to understand and be excited by Santa turning up at our house. I used a cardboard cutout of a boot and sprinkled talc powder around them all over the house to represent magical Santa footprints. We even put fake reindeer hair by the front door. I wish there was a “Santa has been” kit that I could order each year that had all of these little tricks and more to make my little girl experience the fact Santa has truly been. If you could do this – I would buy it!

Competitor Watch:This would be a paid monthly service where I can request competitor reports on a company. You send me a report detailing all of their activities in that month via social media, news etc You could even include marketing information e.g. where are they advertising, what deals and pricing are they offering. I know there are social media listening services that offer this but this could be a little more.

Drone Service:I don’t know what yet but I have been watching the Bloomberg reports about drones being used in all sorts of sectors and I can’t help but believe this will one day be a big industry. Start something in this space, drone parts, service for Drones, their already is a lawyer setting up shop to deal with drone legal issues – what else can you think about to setup for the drone invasion?

Solar Panel Cleaning:There are loads of these solar panels up everywhere – even in dull and dark England. If the cells aren’t clean then the performance of these can be seriously reduced so keeping them clean is important. But also cleaning them you really need to know what you are doing. In the UK one guy has setup a website offering to advertise window cleaners who are currently now offering this service. He then went onto make a fortune on training and qualifying people to safely clean solar panels. There are more ways to make money than just selling and installing solar panels.

Vegan Education:Me and my wife have been ignorant for so long at the suffering of animals and so have embarked this year on a road to going vegan. Its hard and were about 90% there but boy do we feel we know nothing about food. We really do have to question everything and we wish there was a better way of going vegan. We haven’t found any decent iPhone apps, there is nothing online yet that we have found useful – just thousands of pages of info. We need a hand-held course to show us what to eat, where to get it from, how to swap this with that, the biggest challenges you will face etc

1 Goal/1 Mentor:So this is where experienced people can either give a bit of their time back for free or earn extra income mentoring young people of tomorrow. So for example a student sets up a business with a revolutionary new technology but needs guidance in how to protect it, market it etc. They can put an advert up for a mentor to see and apply. You could build a high-level platform and have FTSE 100 companies and try and invite them to join and then charge a premium for access for people looking for mentoring.  But they key would be on the fact that there is a goal and also an expert in that field as a mentor.

MySpace 2: This sounds silly but if you look at the way Facebook is now being left behind by the new younger generation who are now using sites and apps such as WhatsApp and WeHeartIt you can see they are using personalized pages and images of their favorite things. What if you offered a combined website and told them that everything they share can have an affiliate link so if some purchases something on their page they can make money.

LoveLanguage: Learning a new language by discussing stuff you love so you could have combined cooking classes with a Spanish teacher, fishing with a French teacher and yoga with a Mandarin teacher! Or combine videos or lessons about subjects or topics that people enjoy and they can learn that way by doing something they enjoy and are passionate about. This would also work really well with kids. A bit like Messy Church phenomenon but with learning a new language.

Curated Corporate Training: Companies drop huge amounts of money on training courses for their staff. One issue we have noticed here in our 7 person small company is that the larger frequently run courses do not offer us enough tailored training and so we never attend these. If there was a provider who could curate us a course that tackled our needs then this would be very appealing for example, we have started social media but we do not do it very well and we know this. We also have a blog that needs a better strategy. Maybe a one day course curated to cover all of these issues we would go for. You could go out and talk to companies, ask them what their biggest challenges are and then go and find experts in this area to deliver this and you take a commission.

Habit Homepage:An app-homepage that you can bookmark where you make your daily habit change or goal for the day or week. So you see it throughout the day and even make it your background image on your PC.

Dart: Imagine a web app where you can view items online and be notified when they become cheaper? So you might look at some shoes online but they be a little out of your budget – you can let the company know you like them but you won’t part with you hard earned until they lower the price. The retailer will have a firm list of people who will buy them at a lower rate so when sales drop off the retailer can act and still shift the stock.

Blog CV: Ryan Hoover writes some modern wisdom – check him out. One recent article he wrote was about your blog being the new CV. In fact when we recruit people we ask them for a blog link. Its a great way for you to demonstrate you, your knowledge and skill-set and give an employer a really good insight into who you are. Many people have been headhunted because of there blog. So what about people who can’t or don’t write blogs? Offer them this service!

Best Mans Speech App: So this would be an app where you survey all of your grooms friends for stories and photos for the ultimate best man’s speech. This would help you truly give a 360 about him with stories he would have never thought you would know!

CartRecover:I always imagine a great service would be one that could solve the issue around people who abandon a purchase on a website. Imagine a service that could ping an email to those people who gave up on your shopping cart before giving you money to say hey please come back and complete your purchase here’s $5 off if you do it today!

JournaLIST: This idea came from an article that I can now longer find where a journalist mentioned sending her Press Release articles does her head in! She recommended sending her an article that she could use – so all the research done, interviews, quotes and even images! So this idea is for a service that you research the top 10 journalists for your product and service and helps you prepare a piece to submit to them.

LastPillow:This would be an app where owners of small guest houses and BnB’s and even hotel could put on last minute rooms that they have. So for example I might be in London and open the app up at say 1500pm to see what accommodation is available. The hotel might have a cancellation and so now can make money on the room if they release it last minute at a discounted price.

Christmas Party Booker: Every corporate Christmas party is a nightmare to book. Why not have one destination like we do for everything else where venues can advertise and you then connect with companies.

3D Job Tests:Taking recruitment that one step further by testing potential applicants before you hire them. So in the UK there is a company who has a mock office setup and they hire actors to form a fake workplace scenario and a potential employee will spend they day going through different scenarios and being assessed. Why not take this online. Use 3D animation scenarios and a number of questions that potential candidates must go through before a company wastes times and resources interviewing lots of people.

Self-Publisher Reviews:The high number of self-publishers calls for marketing companies to offer ways to promote their work. More people means more competition. Like an app review service you could review a new publisher and their work by reading three chapters. Build up a bit of a back date in work and you will soon start getting publishers asking for your reviews. Build up an email newsletter list where you can also make revenue advertising. Even break off into niches e.g. sci-fi, poetry, self-help etc

Sell My Car:I am serious about this one – this is still a huge problem that has not been resolved. I hate selling my car. You have to deal with time-wasters and weird people kicking your tyres and looking for a cheap steal! I would happily pay £100 here in the UK for someone to sell my car on my behalf. So I don’t think this is a major international web app but more of a local service with a local agent that sells peoples cars. If you could solve the pain here – there’s money to be made.

There you are! If you need any help drop me an email.

Please share this by simply clicking here

Don’t forget to leave a comment below – what was your favorite idea? What would you use as a consumer?

Have an awesome 2014 and be prosperous!

Jan2

Posted on behalf of Daniel Hastings

I had heard about mesh networking before I arrived in Somaliland, but had never been in the position to actually build a mesh network. When I accepted the position as ICT instructor atAbaarso School of Science and Technology in Abaarso, Somaliland, I figured this may be my chance. I knew that the Open Technology Institute (OTI) had been developing a mesh firmware called Commotion, suitable for remote locations. Upon arriving in Somaliland I decided that building a mesh network using Commotion would be one of my top priorities.

It seemed like building a mesh network could be a difficult process. I experimented in the past with other firmware on a variety of routers, but found the configuration to be too time-consuming and difficult to set up.

I knew Commotion ran on Ubiquti hardware, designed for rough outdoor environments like Somaliland. Unfortunately, finding Ubiquiti routers in Somaliland -- for that matter, getting anything into Somaliland -- is no easy task.

Somaliland is an independent autonomous region of Somalia, and is an area that is safe compared to the southern regions of Somalia. While not internationally recognized as a country, Somaliland has its own currency, government, and military.

The analogy I like to use when it comes to traveling to Somaliland is no different than that of getting to Hogwarts. Instead of running head first into an imaginary platform at the train station, you have to land in Dubai, catch a flight that leaves only once a week and then travel across a desert on one of the worst-built roads you can imagine.

While back in the US this past summer I contacted OTI and found that they would be able to provide me with the proper equipment to run and set up a mesh network using Commotion. I was so excited about the possibility of actually getting all of the equipment into Somaliland that I carefully packed everything into my carry-on.

Before I go any further, I should explain my level of experience with building networks. My only experience with networking had been taking a class at a community college in San Francisco and spending the last year troubleshooting our Internet problems at school. However, Commotion is built in such a way that little if any advanced configuration is necessary to set up a mesh network.

I first began building my network by identifying where I wanted access points on campus and mapping out distances between each spot. Having a good line of sight between each node was extremely important. Luckily we have a lot of high guard and water towers on campus so placing nodes was not an issue.

One minor problem with placing nodes in towers was that I had to ensure a reliable power source was within range of the node. If all my nodes were solar-powered, I would not have had to worry about running any cable at all!

I next had to “flash” each router, which means loading the Commotion firmware on to each Ubiquti device. I had experience flashing firmware onto routers before but had never “meshed” wireless nodes together. To help with this I referred to the configuration examples on Commotion’s website, which I found extremely helpful. Open source software has been known to be tricky to configure and maintain but it certainly does not have to be. Commotion has proved this to be more than true.

While building the network, I made sure to include students as much as I could. I assembled together a computer club of my top ICT students to discuss and teach the basics of mesh networking, how to flash firmware onto routers, and how to add a node to the network. Together we ran cable and climbed water towers to place the nodes in their proper places. We also had to place some nodes in the guard towers which often times, the guards would unplug accidentally. Students trained the guards on the difference between the LAN and PoE ports as well as the importance of keeping the PoE cable plugged in at all times. A few weeks after school we put up the last two nodes for the girls’ dorms and the boys’ dorms.

Local Applications and Limited Bandwidth
Somaliland is currently the only country in Africa that lacks fiber optic access -- cables are laid but access is not predicted to be available until 2014. Somaliland receives its Internet connection via microwaves across the desert from Djibouti. All of the IP address ranges in Somaliland will tell you that you are in Djibouti. The distant gateway connectivity, not to mention unreliable ISPs, equates to some seriously slow Internet.

http://www.ubuntunet.net/sites/ubuntunet.net/files/Intra-Africa_Fibre_Map_v6.pdf© UbuntuNet Alliance; Creative Commons 3.0

A lack of consistent access to the Internet is an ICT instructor’s nightmare. Not being able to teach the most current technologies can be frustrating, and it also hampers sharing files with students.

Mesh networking is described as a “peer to peer network:” I wanted to use the full sense of the term and make file sharing among my students easy and manageable. In order to solve this communication problem I decided to rely less on the outside Internet and rely more on local applications installed on our servers.

I found the solution to our inconsistent and slow Internet by installingOwnCloud, an open source alternative to Dropbox, on our local server. Now students could share homework assignments with me and other teachers without having to rely on the Internet at all.

Creating a Self-Sufficient Network
As well as the network worked and as much fun as setting it up was, I cannot call this project successful until I can come back to Somaliland a year from now and see the same nodes in place running the same network.

I used a few methods to make sure this would be the case. I was careful to document every aspect of the project and create detailed guides for teachers and future network administrators on everything from how to find your IP address on the network to how to ping a node, which is important for isolating a potential problem on the network. Even though mesh networks are “self-healing”, they are not perfect and still have their quirks.

Having all of the knowledge centered in one place with one staff member will only set an organization up for failure, so I've made sure to give a series of small trainings to the entire staff.

The more transparent you are about how the network works, the more likely the technology will last.

I repeatedly told my students that some of the greatest makers and technologists of our time were self-taught. The excellent support community centered around open source software makes projects such as Commotion sustainable. There is a good chance that if a problem arises, someone else already had that issue or someone in another community across the globe is working on a solution to that problem.

I would like to give my sincere gratitude to the Commotion Wireless Project for the support they gave me along with providing me with necessary tools to build this network. Not only did the students at Abaarso School get extremely enthused about mesh networking and learn the meaning of community technology, but now another small part of a country that, technically, does not even exist is more connected to the rest of the world.

The official website for the widely used OpenSSL code library was compromised four days ago in an incident that is stoking concerns among some security professionals.

Code repositories remained untouched in the December 29 hack, and the only outward sign of a breach was a defacement left on the OpenSSL.org home page. The compromise is nonetheless rattling some nerves. In a brief advisory last updated on New Year's Day, officials said "the attack was made via hypervisor through the hosting provider and not via any vulnerability in the OS configuration." The lack of additional details raised the question of whether the same weakness may have been exploited to target other sites that use the same service. After all, saying a compromise was achieved through a hypervisor vulnerability in the Web host of one of the Internet's most important sites isn't necessarily comforting news if the service or hypervisor platform is widely used by others.

Update: Shortly after this brief was published, VMWare posted an advisory saying that there's no evidence any of its products were involved in the compromise.

"The VMware Security Response Center has actively investigated this incident with both the OpenSSL Foundation and their Hosting Provider in order to understand whether VMware products are implicated and whether VMware needs to take any action to ensure customer safety," VMWare Senior Software Security Leader Iain Mulholland wrote. "We have no reason to believe that the OpenSSL website defacement is a result of a security vulnerability in any VMware products and that the defacement is a result of an operational security error."

It wouldn't be surprising to learn that the authors of the OpenSSL post were using the term "hypervisor" when they meant something closer to the host on which OpenSSL's virtual private server guest was located. Based on data returned from trace route commands, several observers have speculated that OpenSSL's provider is IndIT Hosting. The company's website indicates it uses both ESXi and KVM virtualization platforms.

Fortunately, the attackers didn't, or weren't able to, use their access to slip backdoor code into the OpenSSL software, which websites around the world use to provide HTTPS encryption for the pages they serve. That assurance is possible because the code is maintained and distributed through Git, a source-code management system that allows developers and users to maintain independent copies all over the Internet. Since the cryptographic hashes found on OpenSSL matched those elsewhere, there is a high degree of confidence the code hasn't been altered.

Still, it wasn't that long ago that OpenSSL used a source code management system that didn't provide as much anti-tampering assurance. Hackers who were able to access OpenSSL servers during that time may have had more room to do something considerably more malicious and stealthy than a simple homepage defacement. OpenSSL has pledged to provide more details in the future. Users should demand a thorough autopsy. And while they're at it, they should demand that the official maintainers of both the PHP Web scripting language and the Linux operating system kernel make good on promises to provide autopsies of serious compromises on their own servers.

By Steven Rich and Barton Gellman,

In room-size metal boxes ­secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.

According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” — a machine exponentially faster than classical computers — is part of a $79.7 million research program titled “Penetrating Hard Targets.” Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at a laboratory in College Park, Md.

[Read an annotated description of the Penetrating Hard Targets project]

The development of a quantum computer has long been a goal of many in the scientific community, with revolutionary implications for fields such as medicine as well as for the NSA’s code-breaking mission. With such technology, all current forms of public key encryption would be broken, including those used on many secure Web sites as well as the type used to protect state secrets.

Physicists and computer scientists have long speculated about whether the NSA’s efforts are more advanced than those of the best civilian labs. Although the full extent of the agency’s research remains unknown, the documents provided by Snowden suggest that the NSA is no closer to success than others in the scientific community.

“It seems improbable that the NSA could be that far ahead of the open world without anybody knowing it,” said Scott Aaronson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The NSA appears to regard itself as running neck and neck with quantum computing labs sponsored by the European Union and the Swiss government, with steady progress but little prospect of an immediate breakthrough.

“The geographic scope has narrowed from a global effort to a discrete focus on the European Union and Switzerland,” one NSA document states.

Seth Lloyd, an MIT professor of quantum mechanical engineering, said the NSA’s focus is not misplaced. “The E.U. and Switzerland have made significant advances over the last decade and have caught up to the U.S. in quantum computing technology,” he said.

The NSA declined to comment for this article.

The documents, however, indicate that the agency carries out some of its research in large, shielded rooms known as Faraday cages, which are designed to prevent electromagnetic energy from coming in or out. Those, according to one brief description, are required “to keep delicate quantum computing experiments running.”

[Read a document describing classification levels related to quantum computing efforts]

The basic principle underlying quantum computing is known as “quantum superposition,” the idea that an object simultaneously exists in all states. A classical computer uses binary bits, which are either zeroes or ones. A quantum computer uses quantum bits, or qubits, which are simultaneously zero and one.

This seeming impossibility is part of the mystery that lies at the heart of quantum theory, which even theoretical physicists say no one completely understands.

“If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics,” said the late Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who is widely regarded as the pioneer in quantum computing.

Here’s how it works, in theory: While a classical computer, however fast, must do one calculation at a time, a quantum computer can sometimes avoid having to make calculations that are unnecessary to solving a problem. That allows it to home in on the correct answer much more quickly and efficiently.

Quantum computing is difficult to attain because of the fragile nature of such computers. In theory, the building blocks of such a computer might include individual atoms, photons or electrons. To maintain the quantum nature of the computer, these particles would need to be carefully isolated from their external environments.

“Quantum computers are extremely delicate, so if you don’t protect them from their environment, then the computation will be useless,” said Daniel Lidar, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of the Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology at the University of Southern California.

A working quantum computer would open the door to easily breaking the strongest encryption tools in use today, including a standard known as RSA, named for the initials of its creators. RSA scrambles communications, making them unreadable to anyone but the intended recipient, without requiring the use of a shared password. It is commonly used in Web browsers to secure financial transactions and in encrypted ­e-mails. RSA is used because of the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers. Breaking the encryption involves finding those two numbers. This cannot be done in a reasonable amount of time on a classical computer.

In 2009, computer scientists using classical methods were able to discover the primes within a 768-bit number, but it took almost two years and hundreds of computers to factor it. The scientists estimated that it would take 1,000 times longer to break a 1,024-bit encryption key, which is commonly used for online transactions.

A large-scale quantum computer, however, could theoretically break a 1,024-bit encryption much faster. Some leading Internet companies are moving to 2,048-bit keys, but even those are thought to be vulnerable to rapid decryption with a quantum computer.

Quantum computers have many applications for today’s scientific community, including the creation of artificial intelligence. But the NSA fears the implications for national security.

“The application of quantum technologies to encryption algorithms threatens to dramatically impact the US government’s ability to both protect its communications and eavesdrop on the communications of foreign governments,” according to an internal document provided by Snowden.

Experts are not sure how soon a quantum computer would be feasible. A decade ago, some experts said that developing a large quantum computer was likely 10 to 100 years in the future. Five years ago, Lloyd said the goal was at least 10 years away.

Last year, Jeff Forshaw, a professor at the University of Manchester, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “It is probably too soon to speculate on when the first full-scale quantum computer will be built but recent progress indicates that there is every reason to be optimistic.”

“I don’t think we’re likely to have the type of quantum computer the NSA wants within at least five years, in the absence of a significant breakthrough maybe much longer,” Lloyd told The Washington Post in a recent interview.

Some companies, however, claim to already be producing small quantum computers. A Canadian firm, D-Wave Systems, says it has been making quantum computers since 2009. In 2012, it sold a $10 million version to Google, NASA and the Universities Space Research Association, according to news reports.

That quantum computer, however, would never be useful for breaking public key encryption like RSA.

“Even if everything they’re claiming is correct, that computer, by its design, cannot run Shor’s algorithm,” said Matthew Green, a research professor at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, referring to the algorithm that could be used to break encryption like RSA.

Experts think that one of the largest hurdles to breaking encryption with a quantum computer is building a computer with enough qubits, which is difficult given the very fragile state of quantum computers. By the end of September, the NSA expected to be able to have some building blocks, which it described in a document as “dynamical decoupling and complete quantum ­control on two semiconductor qubits.”

“That’s a great step, but it’s a pretty small step on the road to building a large-scale quantum computer,” Lloyd said.

A quantum computer capable of breaking cryptography would need hundreds or thousands more qubits than that.

The budget for the National Intelligence Program, commonly referred to as the “black budget,” details the “Penetrating Hard Targets” project and noted that this step “will enable initial scaling towards large systems in related and follow-on efforts.”

Another project, called “Owning the Net,” is using quantum research to support the creation of quantum-based attacks on encryptions like RSA, documents show.

“The irony of quantum computing is that if you can imagine someone building a quantum computer that can break encryption a few decades into the future, then you need to be worried right now,” Lidar said.

We all understand the absurdity of that old adage “sleep is for the weak”. That attitude has been put to rest by a bevy of studies empirically showing that sleep in fact makes you smarter, stronger, and more creative. But when it comes to extended rest and relaxation, there still exists a sort of taboo.

I recently got back from a five day holiday vacation to the Puerto Rican island of Culebra, planned last minute because I felt dangerously close to burning out. Every time I talked to anyone about the trip, I included the disclaimer “it’s only my third break since Amicus was founded”. Every time. It was only once I was lying on a beach that I realized what I was doing: I was making excuses for taking a break because I felt guilty. To my teammates, to my friends, to fellow entrepreneurs. I might as well have been saying “vacations are for the weak”.

Professional runners take long breaks between marathons. They make no excuses for this, and no one judges them for it, because everyone knows that rest and recuperation is an essential part of being a pro athlete. The same is true for entrepreneurs (and everyone, really). Preventing burnout is part of your job. Staying well rested is part of your job. Sleep and exercise help, but occasional extended breaks are essential too, and their benefits on creativity, productivity, and happiness are well documented.

It’s time we stopped making excuses for rest and relaxation. Doing so is not only bad for you, but sends the wrong message to the rest of your team. So next time you’re planning a vacation, announce it with pride.

Introduction

I wanted a text that would bring together the ideas behind many of the more recent distributed systems - systems such as Amazon's Dynamo, Google's BigTable and MapReduce, Apache's Hadoop and so on.

In this text I've tried to provide a more accessible introduction to distributed systems. To me, that means two things: introducing the key concepts that you will need in order to have a good time reading more serious texts, and providing a narrative that covers things in enough detail that you get a gist of what's going on without getting stuck on details. It's 2013, you've got the Internet, and you can selectively read more about the topics you find most interesting.

In my view, much of distributed programming is about dealing with the implications of two consequences of distribution:

• that information travels at the speed of light
• that independent things fail independently*

In other words, that the core of distributed programming is dealing with distance (duh!) and having more than one thing (duh!). These constraints define a space of possible system designs, and my hope is that after reading this you'll have a better sense of how distance, time and consistency models interact.

This text is focused on distributed programming and systems concepts you'll need to understand commercial systems in the data center. It would be madness to attempt to cover everything. You'll learn many key protocols and algorithms (covering, for example, many of the most cited papers in the discipline), including some new exciting ways to look at eventual consistency that haven't still made it into college textbooks - such as CRDTs and the CALM theorem.

I hope you like it! If you want to say thanks, follow me on Github (or Twitter). And if you spot an error, file a pull request on Github.

The first chapter covers distributed systems at a high level by introducing a number of important terms and concepts. It covers high level goals, such as scalability, availability, performance, latency and fault tolerance; how those are hard to achieve, and how abstractions and models as well as partitioning and replication come into play.

The second chapter dives deeper into abstractions and impossibility results. It starts with a Nietzsche quote, and then introduces system models and the many assumptions that are made in a typical system model. It then discusses the CAP theorem and summarizes the FLP impossibility result. It then turns to the implications of the CAP theorem, one of which is that one ought to explore other consistency models. A number of consistency models are then discussed.

A big part of understanding distributed systems is about understanding time and order. To the extent that we fail to understand and model time, our systems will fail. The third chapter discusses time and order, and clocks as well as the various uses of time, order and clocks (such as vector clocks and failure detectors).

The fourth chapter introduces the replication problem, and the two basic ways in which it can be performed. It turns out that most of the relevant characteristics can be discussed with just this simple characterization. Then, replication methods for maintaining single-copy consistency are discussed from the least fault tolerant (2PC) to Paxos.

The fifth chapter discussed replication with weak consistency guarantees. It introduces a basic reconciliation scenario, where partitioned replicas attempt to reach agreement. It then discusses Amazon's Dynamo as an example of a system design with weak consistency guarantees. Finally, two perspectives on disorderly programming are discussed: CRDTs and the CALM theorem.

The appendix covers recommendations for further reading.

Gate Tower Building(ゲートタワービル,gēto tawā biru?) is a 16-story office building in Fukushima-ku, Osaka, Japan. It is notable for the highway that passes through the building. It has been nicknamed "beehive" referencing its appearance as a "bustling place".

Overview[edit]

The building has a double core construction, with a circular cross section. The Umeda Exit of the Ikeda Route of the Hanshin Expressway system (when exiting the highway from the direction of Ikeda) passes between the fifth and seventh floors of this building. The highway is the tenant of those floors. The elevator passes through the floors without stopping: floor 4 being followed by floor 8. The floors through which the highway passes consist of elevators, stairways and machinery. The highway does not make contact with the building. It passes through as a bridge, held up by supports next to the building. The highway is surrounded by a structure to protect the building from noise and vibration. The roof has a helipad.

History[edit]

A wood and charcoal business held the property rights for this plot of land since the early Meiji period, but the gradual move to other sources of fuel resulted in the deterioration of those company buildings. In 1983, redevelopment of the area was approved, but building permits were refused because the highway was already being planned. The property rights' holders refused to give up, and negotiated with the Hanshin Expressway corporation for approximately five years to reach the current solution.

Although normally highway corporations purchase the land they build a highway on or over, it is not guaranteed to succeed and therefore issues like this can arise.

For that reason, the highway laws, city planning laws, city redevelopment laws and building codes were partly revised in 1989 to permit a so-called Multi-Level Road System(立体道路制度,rittai dōro seido?) that allows the unified development of highways and buildings in the same space. This system was originally designed to facilitate the construction of the second Ring Road in the vicinity of Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo, but in the end was not applied there. Instead, the system was put into effect in the construction of the Gate Tower Building, becoming Japan's first building to have a highway pass through it. Normally, highways are still built underground in these cases, and passing through a building is an extremely rare occurrence.

Profile[edit]

• Address: 5-4-21 Fukushima, Fukushima-ku, Osaka
• Completed: 1992
• Site area: 2,353 m2
• Construction area: 760 m2
• Total floor area: 7,956 m2
• Structure: Reinforced concrete and partly steel frame
• Height: 71.9 m
• Floors: 16 floors above ground, 2 floors underground and 1 floor counted as the mechanical penthouse[clarification needed]
• Purpose: Office building
• Client: Suezawa Sangyo Co. Ltd.
• Designer: Azusa Sekkei and Yamamoto-Nishihara Kenchiku Sekkei Jimusho
• Builder: Sato Kogyo Co. Ltd.

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

A Harvard economist finds there are psychological connections between the bad financial planning of many poor people and the poor time management of busy professionals. In both cases, he finds the experience of scarcity causes biases in the mind that exacerbate problems.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Let's hear now about a new book that explores a major source of stress. The book is called "Scarcity" and it's a look at what happens to us when we're pressured with too little time or too little money. The authors say "Scarcity" actually changes how we think. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam explains.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Each September the state of Massachusetts asks one thing from "Scarcity" author and Harvard economist, Sendhil Mullainathan, to renew his car inspection sticker and each year this recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award does the same thing. He's really busy, so on each day leading up to the expiration of the sticker, he tells himself he'll attend to it the next day.

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN: One more day of delay, I mean, what's the big deal?

VEDANTAM: Pretty soon, Mullainathan finds himself driving around Boston with an expired sticker.

MULLAINATHAN: The sticker is three months expired and now you're doing all sorts of stuff, like you're driving down the street, oh, look, there's a cop. I better make a right turn so he doesn't see my expired sticker.

VEDANTAM: Turning the wrong way makes Mullainathan late for a meeting or late for class. Now, he has to spend time fixing the mistake, rescheduling meetings with students, playing catch-up. His next day gets even busier. Now, he definitely doesn't have time to fix that sticker.

MULLAINATHAN: I do this constantly. Right now, I've got a meeting to get to. I don't have the time to replace the sticker. Whereas, the truth is, the enormous amount of distortions I've now made for the last three months because of the stupid sticker add up to five times as much time as I would've spent just going and having it fixed.

VEDANTAM: Mullainathan recently decided to think about his behavior like a researcher would. Was he just a busy absentminded professor or was there something else going on? He thought about research in his own field. He studies the economics of poverty. Lots of studies show poor people tend to make bad financial decisions, the kind that land them in ever deeper cycles of debt.

Mullainathan realized there was an unexpected connection between his behavior and the behavior of the people he studied.

MULLAINATHAN: Just as the poor mismanage their money, isn't it astonishing how badly I mismanage my time?

VEDANTAM: Not having enough money and not having enough time, might not seem like similar things, but psychologically, they are similar. You're running low on something you desperately need, you feel the pinch of scarcity. Mullainathan turned to a colleague of Princeton, the psychologist Eldar Shafir. That conversation lead to the book, "Scarcity," which they wrote together.

Just as Mullainathan was asking why he mismanaged his own time, Shafir said he was asking why the poor make bad financial decisions.

ELDAR SHAFIR: Perhaps it's the context of poverty itself, being in that context, that brings about a very special psychology, a psychology that's particular to not having enough. And in that psychology brings out problematic outcomes.

VEDANTAM: After lots of research Mullainathan and Shafir have concluded that when you don't have something you desperately need, the feeling of scarcity works like a trap. In a study looking at poor farmers in India, for example, the researchers found that farmers tended to be better planners and thinkers when they were flush with cash. But right before harvest, when they were strapped for cash, Mullainathan says their brains focused only on short term goals.

MULLAINATHAN: When you have scarcity and it creates a scarcity mindset, it leads you to take certain behaviors which in the short term help you manage scarcity, but in the long term only make matters worse.

VEDANTAM: Poor farmers, for example, tend to weed their fields less often than wealthy farmers. It's the same with being super busy. The busier Mullainathan got, the harder it became for him to make time to get his car sticker. In fact, there was a short term reward for not getting the sticker. On each day he didn't get the sticker renewed, he saved a little time to devote to other pressing demands.

But each delay made things worse the next day. Scarcity, whether of time or money, tends to focus the mind on immediate challenges. You stretch your budget to make ends meet. People in the grip of scarcity are tightly focused on meeting their urgent needs, but that focus comes at a price. Important things on the periphery get ignored.

MULLAINATHAN: That's at the heart of the scarcity trap. You're so focused on the urgent that the important gets waylaid. But because the important gets waylaid, you're experiencing even more scarcity tomorrow.

VEDANTAM: Mullainathan and Shafir think we ought to change how we think about poverty and how we think about time. When poor people and busy people run short of money or time, we tend to blame them.

MULLAINATHAN: There's this presumption in our entire social policies here that mistakes happen because of willful negligence and I think just understanding that, yes, we need incentives to prevent willful negligence, but we also need a way to recognize that no matter how hard somebody tries, there will be mistakes.

VEDANTAM: It might be possible to reduce the impact of mistakes caused by scarcity. The poor farmer in India might need repeated reminders about weeding. One might not be enough. The minimum wage worker in America might need a couple of extra days to pay her bills instead of being slapped with a fine one day after payment is due.

For busy people, Shafir says a respite from scarcity might mean penciling in a block of time in their calendar so long term things have a chance to bubble up.

SHAFIR: One of the few things I've learned from the book which I try to adhere to now is throughout my day, when I have a day that's, you know, scheduled moment by moment throughout the day, fully packed, I try to arrange a couple of half hour chunks, half hour slots that are unplanned.

VEDANTAM: If you try to make an appointment with Shafir at that time, he'll tell you he has a meeting. What he doesn't tell you is that the meeting is with himself. Shankar Vedantam, NPR News.

Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to NPR. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

We’ve been informed from JollaSuomi that Jolla outsold the two best selling iPhones (5S and 5C) in Finnish market, provided by DNA.

On DNA’s list, we have 5 phones ahead of Jolla which are:

It is indeed some good news. Many might say that Samsung is on top and Nokia outsold Jolla with their Lumia 520 (Which is a surprisingly great phone compared to it’s €119 price!) but you see, Galaxy Trend is €99 , Galaxy Y is only €39 and as mentioned Lumia 520 is just €119 while we have Jolla for €399 available to the market and it came 5th in on the list.

The only high-end / pricey phone among the first 4 is the Samsung Galaxy S III 4G which we can compare, price-wise to Jolla phone. And meanwhile we can say Jolla became second in the pricey phone market.

Jolla is a phone with a ready and solid hardware and a beta software/ecosystem which is okay by me because it’s still very awesome even in beta, but not okay for many as they want everything native in their phone. But how can we get out of beta? By supporting Jolla, it is possible to make it faster and we can free ourselves from the name, “Beta” + having a completely functional operating system.

Click on the photo to order yours now! Let’s make it happen!

Before she became ill, Ms. Jorgensen took out $43,000 in student loans. As her payments piled up along with medical bills, she took the unusual step of filing for bankruptcy, requiring legal proof of “undue hardship.”

The agency charged with monitoring such bankruptcy declarations, a nonprofit with an exclusive government agreement, argued that Ms. Jorgensen did not qualify and should pay in full, dismissing her concerns about the cancer’s return.

“The mere possibility of recurrence is not enough,” a lawyer representing the agency said. “Survival rates for younger patients tend to be higher,” another wrote, citing a study presented in court.

There is $1 trillion in federal student debt today, and the possibility of default on those taxpayer-backed loans poses an acute risk to the economy’s recovery. Congress, faced with troubling default rates in the past, has made it especially hard for borrowers to get bankruptcy relief for student loans, and so only some hundreds try every year. And while there has been attention to aggressive student debt collectors hired by the federal government, the organization pursuing Ms. Jorgensen does something else: it brings legal challenges to those few who are desperate enough to seek bankruptcy relief.

That organization is the Educational Credit Management Corporation, which, since its founding in Minnesota nearly two decades ago, has been the main private entity hired by the Department of Education to fight student debtors who file for bankruptcy on federal loans.

Founded in 1994, just after the largest agency backstopping federal student loans collapsed, Educational Credit is now facing concerns that its tactics have grown ruthless. A review of hundreds of pages of court documents as well as interviews with consumer advocates, experts and bankruptcy lawyers suggest that Educational Credit’s pursuit of student borrowers has veered more than occasionally into dubious terrain. A law professor and critic of Educational Credit, Rafael Pardo of Emory University, estimates that the agency oversteps in dozens of cases per year.

Others have also been highly critical.

A panel of bankruptcy appeal judges in 2012 denounced what it called Educational Credit’s “waste of judicial resources,” and said that the agency’s collection activities “constituted an abuse of the bankruptcy process and defiance of the court’s authority.”

Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat who has introduced a bill to limit predatory tactics, said, “The government should hold its agents to the highest standards, and I don’t know that we’ve been doing that.”

He added that the government has a special responsibility to use “a standard that’s reasonable.”

The case that caused the bankruptcy judges to accuse the agency of abuse concerned Barbara Hann, who took a particularly drawn-out beating from Educational Credit. In 2004, when Ms. Hann filed for bankruptcy, Educational Credit claimed that she owed over $50,000 in outstanding debt. In a hearing that Educational Credit did not attend, Ms. Hann provided ample evidence that she had, in fact, already repaid her student loans in full.

But when her bankruptcy case ended in 2010, Educational Credit began hounding Ms. Hann anew, and, on behalf of the government, garnished her Social Security — all to repay a loan that she had long since paid off.

When Ms. Hann took the issue to a New Hampshire court, the judge sanctioned Educational Credit, citing the lawyers’ “violation of the Bankruptcy Code’s discharge injunction.”

Educational Credit went on to appeal the sanctions twice, earning a reprimand from Judge Norman H. Stahl of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, who agreed with the bankruptcy judges that the agency “had abused the bankruptcy process.”

Asked for comment, Educational Credit responded that the case was not related to undue hardship and that it was based on “complicated issues of legal procedure.”

Another case dating from 2012 involved Karen Lynn Schaffer, 54, who took out a loan for her son to attend college. Her husband, Ronney, had a steady job at the time.

But Mr. Schaffer’s hepatitis C began to flare up, and he was found to have diabetes and liver cancer. He became bedridden and could no longer work.

Other resources to help you get a new job:
Hire Art: Find startup jobs (marketing, sales, customer service & operations, biz dev) and learn more about the startups who are hiring.

The Muse: Learn about job opportunities and career paths, get career advice from experts and read profiles of the most interesting places to work.

Codecademy: An easy, interactive way to learn to code.

CodeCombat: Learn to code by playing a game.

Hacker School: A free, 3-month school in New York for becoming a better programmer.

On learning to become a better programmer:

Vayable: A travel experience marketplace powered by locals.

Other resources to help you plan your travels:

Airbnb: Vacation rentals, apartments and rooms for rent from people in over 34,000 cities and 192 countries.

Hipmunk: Online travel search designed to take the agony out of travel planning.

ReadyforZero: Online tools that will help you manage and pay off credit cards, mortgages, student loans and other loans.

FutureAdvisor: An online investment advisor that automatically manages your investments to help you do better with your money.

Watsi: Directly fund low-cost, high-impact medical care for people in need.  

Microryza: Discover, fund and experience new scientific discoveries.

I’m a HUGE fan of todo lists. They help me stay organized, prioritize my day and add structure to an otherwise chaotic day. 

I recently discovered what appears to be the best yet simplest way to keep a todo list: a GitHub Gist.

Edit: As mentioned in the comments on HackerNews, this is the best to-do list for me based on my workflow (I use this on a daily basis at Thinkful). Depending on your workflow, other to-do lists might make more sense (here are some recommendations from HN and some from LifeHacker).

Allow me to elaborate: GitHub has this thing called “GitHub Flavored Markdown” which allows you to write task lists.

Go to gist.github.com, create a new Markdown file (ending your filename with .md will auto-set it to Markdown). Enter some Markdown and create a Secret Gist (secret ‘cause you don’t want others peeking on your todos).

Notice how the above example includes task lists which, when saved, transforms into checkboxes.

The notation is:

• - [ ] for an empty checkbox
• - [x] for a checked checkbox
• Note: As mentioned by Ben in the comments “you need a space between the dash and open bracket and, for unchecked items, a space between the open and closing brackets.”

It’s like magic, but real.

Whenever you complete a task simply check it off (all changes are automatically saved):

At the end of my workday I click “Edit” to delete all tasks completed and move tomorrow’s tasks up:

Save the file (shortcut: cmd + enter) and voila!

Wait, but what if I want to know when I completed something? Easy, this is GitHub! Simply go to the revisions tab, your entire file change history is available there:

Find the sample todo list here. Let me know if you found this useful and happy holidays! :)

P.S.: I often tweet about Marketing, Engineering and Startups. You should follow me here.

If you use Netflix, you've probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it's absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s?

If Netflix can show such tiny slices of cinema to any given user, and they have 40 million users, how vast did their set of "personalized genres" need to be to describe the entire Hollywood universe?

This idle wonder turned to rabid fascination when I realized that I could capture each and every microgenre that Netflix's algorithm has ever created. 

Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies.

There are so many that just loading, copying, and pasting all of them took the little script I wrote more than 20 hours. 

We've now spent several weeks understanding, analyzing, and reverse-engineering how Netflix's vocabulary and grammar work. We've broken down its most popular descriptions, and counted its most popular actors and directors. 

To my (and Netflix's) knowledge, no one outside the company has ever assembled this data before.

What emerged from the work is this conclusion: Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented. The genres that I scraped and that we caricature above are just the surface manifestation of this deeper database.

Netflix cooperated with my quest to understand what they internally call "altgenres," and made VP of product innovation Todd Yellin, the man who conceived of the system, available for an in-depth interview. Georgia Tech professor and Atlantic contributing editor, Ian Bogost, worked closely with me recreating the Netflix grammar, and he programmed the magical genre generator above. 

If we reverse engineered Yellin's system, it was Yellin himself who imagined a much more ambitious reverse-engineering process. Using large teams of people specially trained to watch movies, Netflix deconstructed Hollywood. They paid people to watch films and tag them with all kinds of metadata. This process is so sophisticated and precise that taggers receive a 36-page training document that teaches them how to rate movies on their sexually suggestive content, goriness, romance levels, and even narrative elements like plot conclusiveness.

They capture dozens of different movie attributes. They even rate the moral status of characters. When these tags are combined with millions of users viewing habits, they become Netflix's competitive advantage. The company's main goal as a business is to gain and retain subscribers. And the genres that it displays to people are a key part of that strategy. "Members connect with these [genre] rows so well that we measure an increase in member retention by placing the most tailored rows higher on the page instead of lower," the company revealed in a 2012 blog post. The better Netflix shows that it knows you, the likelier you are to stick around.

And now, they have a terrific advantage in their efforts to produce their own content: Netflix has created a database of American cinematic predilections. The data can't tell them how to make a TV show, but it can tell them what they should be making. When they create a show like House of Cards, they aren't guessing at what people want. 

Operation Scrape All the Data

This journey began when I decided I wanted a comprehensive list of Netflix microgenres. It seemed like a fun story, though one that would require some fresh thinking, as manyotherpeoplehaddoneversions of it. 

I started on Twitter, asking my followers to submit the categories that showed up for them on Netflix to a shared document. "To my knowledge, no such list exists, but obviously one should," I wrote. "And then we can see what Netflix is really doing to us."

That call for help yielded about 150 genres, which seemed like a lot, relative to your average Blockbuster (RIP). But it was at that point that Sarah Pavis, a writer and engineer, pointed out to me that Netflix's genre URLs were sequentially numbered. One could pull up more and more genres by simply changing the number at the end of the web address. 

That is to say, http://movies.netflix.com/WiAltGenre?agid=1 linked to "African-American Crime Documentaries" and then http://movies.netflix.com/WiAltGenre?agid=2 linked to" Scary Cult Movies from the 1980s." And so on. 

After walking through a few dozen URLs, I began to try out what seemed like arbitrarily high numbers. 1000: Movies directed by Otto Preminger. 3000: Dramas Starring Sylvester Stallone. 5000! Critically-Acclaimed Crime Movies from the 1940s. 20000! Mother-Son Movies from the 1970s. There were a lot of blanks in the data, but the entries extended into the 90,000s. 

This database probing told me three things: 1) Netflix had an absurdly large number of genres, an order of magnitude or two more than I had thought, 2) it was organized in a way that I didn't understand, and 3) there was no way I could go through all those genres by hand. 

But I also realized there was a way to scrape all this data. I'd been playing with an expensive piece of software called UBot Studio that lets you easily write scripts for automating things on the web. Mostly, it seems to be deployed by low-level spammers and scammers, but I decided to use it to incrementally go through each of the Netflix genres and copy them to a file. 

After some troubleshooting and help from Bogost, the bot got up and running and simply copied and pasted from URL after URL, essentially replicating a human doing the work. It took nearly a day of constantly running a little Asus laptop in the corner of our kitchen to grab it all.

As the software ran, I began to familiarize myself with the data. I randomly selected a snippet, so you can see what the raw genre data looks like:

The first thing that I noticed was that not every genre had streaming movies attached to it. The reason for that is the streaming catalog rotates and the genres that I was looking at represented the total possible universe of different genres, not just the ones that people were being shown on that particular day in this particular geography (the United States). So, right now, category 91,300, "Feel-good Romantic Spanish-Language TV Shows" doesn't show me anything I can stream. But category 91,307, "Visually Striking Latin American Comedies" has two movies and category 6,307, "Visually Striking Romantic Dramas" has 20. 

So this is the main caveat to keep in mind as we go through this data: The existence of a genre in the database doesn't precisely correspond to the number of movies that Netflix has in its vaults. All the genre's existence means is that, based on an algorithm we'll get into later, there are some movies out there that fit the description.

As the thousands of genres flicked by on my little netbook, I began to see other patterns in the data: Netflix had a defined vocabulary. The same adjectives appeared over and over. Countries of origin also showed up, as did a larger-than-expected number of noun descriptions like Westerns and Slashers. There were ways of saying where the idea for the movie came from ("Based on Real Life" "Based on Classic Literature") and where the movies were set ("Set in Edwardian Era"). Of course, there were the various time periods, as well—from the 1980s, and so on—and references to children ("For Ages 8 to 10"). 

Most intriguingly, there were the subjects, a complete list of which form a window unto the American soul: 

As the hours ticked by, the Netflix grammar—how it pieced together the words to form comprehensible genres—began to become apparent as well.

If a movie was both romantic and Oscar-winning, Oscar-winning always went to the left: Oscar-winning Romantic Dramas. Time periods always went at the end of the genre: Oscar-winning Romantic Dramas from the 1950s.

The single-word adjectives (such as romantic) could basically just pile up, though, at least to a point: Oscar-winning Romantic Forbidden-Love Movies. 

And the content-area categories were generally tacked onto the end: Oscar-winning Romantic Movies about Marriage. 

In fact, there was a hierarchy for each category of descriptor. Generally speaking, a genre would be formed out of a subset of these components:

There were a few wildcards, too, like everyone's favorite, "With a Strong Female Lead" and "For Hopeless Romantics."

And, of course, there were all the genres that are for movies or TV shows starring or directed by certain individuals. 

But that was it. All 76,897 genres that my bot eventually returned, were formed from these basic components. While I couldn't understand that mass of genres, the atoms and logic that were used to create them were comprehensible. I could fully wrap my head around the Netflix system. 

I should note that the success of my bot had made me giddy by this point. A few Netflix categories put together are funny and intriguing. What could we do with 76,897 of them?!

And it was then that Ian Bogost, my colleague, suggested that we build the generator you see at the top of this article. 

Decoding Netflix's Grammar 

To build a generator, however, our understanding of the grammar needed to get precise. I turned to another piece of software called AntConc, a freeware program maintained by a professor in Japan. It's generally used by linguists, digital humanities scholars, and librarians for dealing with corpuses, large amounts of text. If you've ever played with Google's Ngram tool, then you've seen at least one of the capabilities of AntConc. 

What AntConc can do, essentially, is turn a bunch of text into data that can be manipulated. It can count the number of times each word appears in the mass of text that forms Netflix's database, for example.

So, it becomes trivial to create a list of the top 10 ways that Netflix likes to describe movies in their personalized genres. 

Or you can have it count the appearance of all 3-word phrases that begin with "from" and that would output the top decades in Netflix genres, with the 1980s rightfully and expectedly on top. When you're looking for an '80s movie, nothing else will do, you know? 

By searching for phrases beginning with "Set in" I found all the locations mentioned in genres: 

By searching for phrases beginning with "For," I created a list of the age-specific genre descriptions. Netflix has content "for kids" generally, as well as for ages 0 to 2, 0 to 4, 2 to 4, 5 to 7, 8 to 10, 8 to 12, and 11 to 12.  

I took all of this data about Netflix's vocabulary and I created one large spreadsheet. Separately, I calculated the top actors, directors, and creators, and stashed those in a separate file. 

Ian then took these spreadsheets and created several different grammars. The first and easiest method just lets lots of adjectives pile up and throws all the different descriptors into the mix very often. That's the GONZO setting in the generator. It outputs amazing stuff that you immediately want to copy and paste to your friends like:

• Deep Sea Father-and-Son Period Pieces Based on Real Life Set in the Middle East For Kids
• Assassination Bounty-Hunter Secret Society Dramas Based on Books Set in Europe About Fame For Ages 8 to 10
• Post-Apocalyptic Comedies About Friendship

Gosh, those are good, no? The second you read one, don't you just want that movie to exist? Can't you just imagine it? All that to say, Gonzo, for me, is films that should exist but won't. Or at least pitches that should exist and might soon.

Then, we scaled back the fun stuff, allowing only a few adjectives into the titles. Suddenly, we found ourselves staring at the extant movie-production logic of the Hollywood studios. Basically: endless recombination of the same few themes.

• Classic Action Movies
• Family-Friendly Westerns
• Buddy Period Pieces

That's the Hollywood button. (And that's Hollywood.)

Finally, we played and played around with different grammatical structures until we started to see Netflix's trademark level of specificity. 

• Raunchy Absurd Slashers
• Fight-the-System Political Love Triangle Mysteries
• Chilling Action Movies About Royalty

As we worked on the generator, I could tell someone had gone down this road before. A single human brain had had to make the decisions that we had. How many adjectives? How long should they be? And even more basic: what should the adjectives be? Why cerebral and not brainy? Why differentiate between gory and violent? 

As a writer, I kept asking myself: why are the adjectives just right? Mind-bending and sandal-and-sword (you know, Conan!) and Twisty Tale and Rogue-Cop and Mad Scientist and Underdog and Feel-Good and Understated. 

The words themselves were carefully chosen. By whom?

There were questions we still had, too. From a Los Angeles Times article, we knew the basics of tagging. But how did the tags relate to Netflix's "personalized genres"? What algorithm converted this mass of tags into precisely 76,897 genres?

If most people attempting to understand Netflix's genres were like the classic blind man trying to comprehend an elephant, I felt like I could see the front half of the beast, perhaps, but not the whole thing. I needed someone to explain the back end.

So, after I'd secured my data, I called up Netflix's PR liaison, a Dutch guy named Joris Evers who keeps a miniature windmill on his desk. I told him we had to talk. 

After I filled him in on what we'd done, I waited to hear his reaction, wondering if I was about to have my Netflix account permanently canceled. Instead, he said, "And now you want to come in and talk to Todd Yellin, I guess?"

Yellin is Netflix's VP of Product and the man responsible for the creation of Netflix's system. Tagging all the movies was his idea. How to tag them began with a 24-page document he wrote himself. He tagged the early movies and guided the creation of all the systems.

Yes, of course I wanted to meet Yellin. He had become my Wizard of Oz, the man who made the machine, the human whose intelligence and sensibility I'd been tracking through the data.

At our interview, Yellin turned to me and said, "I've been waiting for someone to bubble up like this for years."

* * *

On the day I visited Netflix in Los Gatos, California, a lesser-known Silicon Valley town, there was a recycling center fire spewing toxins all across the Bay Area. The sky turned strange colors and the smell of burning plastic crept into one's nostrils. 

Netflix is housed in a huge Italianate building that looks like a converted spa: yellow stucco, fountains, sky bridges. People live in apartments directly behind their headquarters, and the residents there share a gym with the Netflix folks. 

It feels oddly like a movie set, except everybody is doing the wrong thing, like if you showed up at a Universal Studios backlot and it turned out to be a branch office of Charles Schwab. They should be lounging by a pool, eating olives and drinking rose, but instead they're typing in vast and admirably adult rows of cubicles.  

Yellin had some of the misplaced Hollywood feel, too. Intelligent, quick, and energetic, he feels like a producer, which makes sense as he's been, by his own accounting, "on all sides of the movie industry." Physically, he bears a remarkable resemblance to the actor Michael Kelly, who plays Doug Stamper, chief of staff to Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) in Netflix's original series House of Cards. 

He seems like a guy who can make things work. 

As we sit down in a conference room, I pull out my computer and begin to show off the genre generator we built. I walk him through my spreadsheets and show him all the text analysis we've done. 

Though he seems impressed at our nerdiness, he patiently explains that we've merely skimmed one end-product of the entire Netflix data infrastructure. There is so much more data and a whole lot more intelligence baked into the system than we've captured. 

Here's how he told me all the pieces fit together. 

"My first goal was: tear apart content!" he said.

How do you systematically dismember thousands of movies using a bunch of different people who all need to have the same understanding of what a given microtag means? In 2006, Yellin holed up with a couple of engineers and spent months developing a document called "Netflix Quantum Theory," which Yellin now derides as "our pretentious name." The name refers to what Yellin used to call "quanta," the little "packets of energy" that compose each movie. He now prefers the term "microtag."

The Netflix Quantum Theory doc spelled out ways of tagging movie endings, the "social acceptability" of lead characters, and dozens of other facets of a movie. Many values are "scalar," that is to say, they go from 1 to 5. So, every movie gets a romance rating, not just the ones labeled "romantic" in the personalized genres. Every movie's ending is rated from happy to sad, passing through ambiguous. Every plot is tagged. Lead characters' jobs are tagged. Movie locations are tagged. Everything. Everyone. 

That's the data at the base of the pyramid. It is the basis for creating all the altgenres that I scraped. Netflix's engineers took the microtags and created a syntax for the genres, much of which we were able to reproduce in our generator. 

To me, that's the key step: It's where the human intelligence of the taggers gets combined with the machine intelligence of the algorithms. There's something in the Netflix personalized genres that I think we can tell is not fully human, but is revealing in a way that humans alone might not be. 

For example, the adjective "feel good" gets attached to movies that have a certain set of features, most importantly a happy ending. It's not a direct tag that people attach so much as a computed movie category based on an underlying set of tags. 

The only semi-similar project that I could think of is Pandora's once-lauded Music Genome Project, but what's amazing about Netflix is that its descriptions of movies are foregrounded. It's not just that Netflix can show you things you might like, but that it can tell you what kinds of things those are. It is, in its own weird way, a tool for introspection.

That distinguishes it from Netflix's old way of recommending movies to you, too. The company used to trumpet the fact that it could kind of predict how many stars you might give a movie. And so, the company encouraged its users to rate movie after movie, so that it could take those numeric values and develop a taste profile for you. 

They even offered a $1 million prize to the team that could design an algorithm that would improve the company's ability to predict how many stars users would give movies. It took years to improve the algorithm by a mere 10 percent.

The prize was awarded in 2009, but Netflix never actually incorporated the new models. That's in part because of the work required, but also because Netflix had decided to "go beyond the 5 stars," which is where the personalized genres come in.  

The human language of the genres helps people identify with the recommendations. "Predicting something is 3.2 stars is kind of fun if you have an engineering sensibility, but it would be more useful to talk about dysfunctional families and viral plagues. We wanted to put in more language," Yellin said. "We wanted to highlight our personalization because we pride ourselves on putting the right title in front of the right person at the right time."

And nothing highlights their personalization like throwing you a very, very specific altgenre. 

So why aren't they ultraspecific, which is to say, super long, like the gonzo genres that our play generator can create? 

Yellin said that the genres were limited by three main factors: 1) they only want to display 50 characters for various UI reasons, which eliminates most long genres; 2) there had to be a "critical mass" of content that fit the description of the genre, at least in Netflix's extended DVD catalog; and 3) they only wanted genres that made syntactic sense. 

We ignore all of these constraints and that's precisely why our generator is hilarious. In Netflix's real world, there are no genres that have more than five descriptors. Four descriptors are rare, but they do show up for users: Scary Cult Mad-Scientist Movies from the 1970s. Three descriptors are more common: Feel-good Foreign Comedies for Hopeless Romantics. Two are widely used: Steamy Mind Game Movies. And, of course, there are many ones: Quirky Movies.

A fascinating thing I learned from Yellin is that the underlying tagging data isn't just used to create genres, but also to increase the level of personalization in all the movies a user is shown. So, if Netflix knows you love Action Adventure movies with high romantic ratings (on their 1-5 scale), it might show you that kind of movie, without ever saying, "Romantic Action Adventure Movies." 

"We're gonna tag how much romance is in a movie. We're not gonna tell you how much romance is in it, but we're gonna recommend it," Yellin said. "You're gonna get an action row and it may have more or less romance in it based on what we know about you."

As Yellin talked, it occurred to me that Netflix has built a system that really only has one analog in the tech world: Facebook's NewsFeed. But instead of serving you up the pieces of web content that the algorithm thinks you'll like, Netflix is serving you up filmed entertainment.

Which makes its hybrid human and machine intelligence approach that much more impressive. They could have purely used computation. For example, looking at people with similar viewing habits and recommending movies based on what they watched. (And Netflix does use this kind of data, too.) But they went beyond that approach to look at the content itself.

"It's a real combination: machine-learned, algorithms, algorithmic syntax," Yellin said, "and also a bunch of geeks who love this stuff going deep."

As a thought experiment: Imagine if Facebook broke down individual websites according to a 36-page tagging document that let the company truly understand what it was people liked about Atlantic or Popular Science or 4chan or ViralNova? 

It might be impossible with web content. But if Netflix's system didn't already exist, most people would probably say that it couldn't exist either. 

The Perry Mason Mystery

As our interview concluded, I pulled my computer back out and showed Yellin this one last chart. Take a good look at it. Something should stand out.

Sitting atop the list of mostly expected Hollywood stars is Raymond Burr, who starred in the 1950s television series Perry Mason. Then, at number seven, we find Barbara Hale, who starred opposite Burr in the show. 

How can Hale and Burr outrank Meryl Streep and Doris Day, not to mention Samuel L. Jackson, Nicholas Cage, Fred Astaire, Sean Connery, and all these other actors in the top few dozen? 

It's not that the list is nonsensical. That would be easy. We'd simply say: Netflix's actor-based genre-creation doesn't make much sense. But that's not the case at all. The rest of the actors at the top of the list make a lot of sense, even if it does not precisely reflect the top box-office earners. 

Take a look at this list of the top 15 directors, too. Since you probably don't recognize his name, Christian I. Nyby II directed several Perry Mason made-for-TV movies in the 1980s. (His father, Christian I. Nyby, directed episodes of the original series, too!)

Christian I. Nyby II
Manny Rodriguez
Takashi Miike
Woody Allen
Ernst Lubitsch
Jim Wynorski
John Woo
Joseph Kane
Norman Taurog
Peter Jackson
Akira Kurosawa
Ingmar Bergman
R.G. Springsteen
Ridley Scott
Roger Corman 

No, the strange thing is that these lists seem pretty spot-on, except for this weird Perry Mason thing. 

Granted, the existence of all these Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale altgenres doesn't mean that Netflix users are having these movies pop up all the time. They are much more likely to get Action Movies Starring Bruce Willis. 

But, then, why have all these genres?

What was the deal? I asked Yellin. 

Actually, I had a theory, which I told him. "In the DVD days, Perry Mason fans ordered a ton of Perry Mason, one after the other after the other," I said. "It created sufficient demand that you guys thought there should be categories."

That is not an accurate theory, Yellin told me. That's just not how it worked.

On the other hand, no one — not even Yellin — is quite sure why there are so many altgenres that feature Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale. It's inexplicable with human logic. It's just something that happened.

I tried on a bunch of different names for the Perry Mason thing: ghost, gremlin, not-quite-a-bug. What do you call the something-in-the-code-and-data which led to the existence of these microgenres?

The vexing, remarkable conclusion is that when companies combine human intelligence and machine intelligence, some things happen that we cannot understand. 

"Let me get philosophical for a minute. In a human world, life is made interesting by serendipity," Yellin told me. "The more complexity you add to a machine world, you're adding serendipity that you couldn't imagine. Perry Mason is going to happen. These ghosts in the machine are always going to be a by-product of the complexity. And sometimes we call it a bug and sometimes we call it a feature."

Perry Mason episodes were famous for the reveal, the pivotal moment in a trial when Mason would reveal the crucial piece of evidence that makes it all makes sense and wins the day. 

Now, reality gets coded into data for the machines, and then decoded back into descriptions for humans. Along the way, humans ability to understand what's happening gets thinned out. When we go looking for answers and causes, we rarely find that aha! evidence or have the Perry Mason moment. Because it all doesn't actually make sense. 

Netflix may have solved the mystery of what to watch next, but that generated its own smaller mysteries. 

And sometimes we call that a bug and sometimes we call it a feature.

The National Security Agency’s sophisticated hacking operations go way beyond using software vulnerabilities to gain access to targeted systems. The agency has a catalog of tools available that would make James Bond’s Q jealous, providing NSA analysts access to just about every potential source of data about a target.

In some cases, the NSA has modified the firmware of computers and network hardware—including systems shipped by Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, and Juniper Networks—to give its operators both eyes and ears inside the offices the agency has targeted. In others, the NSA has crafted custom BIOS exploits that can survive even the reinstallation of operating systems. And in still others, the NSA has built and deployed its own USB cables at target locations—complete with spy hardware and radio transceiver packed inside.

Documents obtained by Der Spiegel reveal a fantastical collection of surveillance tools dating back to 2007 and 2008 that gave the NSA the power to collect all sorts of data over long periods of time without detection. The tools, ranging from back doors installed in computer network firmware and software to passively powered bugs installed within equipment, give the NSA a persistent ability to monitor some targets with little risk of detection. While the systems targeted by some of the “products” listed in the documents are over five years old and are likely to have been replaced in some cases, the methods and technologies used by all the exploit products could easily still be in use in some form in ongoing NSA surveillance operations.

Special delivery

There’s no indication from the documents that the manufacturers played any role in the development or delivery of the backdoors (something that manufacturers are now loudly telling their customers, too). The documents, which appear to be pages from a catalog of capabilities provided by the NSA's ANT division for the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division, show that many of the tools on offer are ordinary Windows exploits designed to use parts of the operating system to “phone home” to the NSA with data; like most malware, these packages can be dropped in place remotely and are probably the least interesting of the new revelations.

Hardware- and firmware-based backdoors, by contrast, require laying hands on the actual target systems. In some cases, the NSA’s operators install backdoor hardware and firmware directly onto the systems by “interdiction”—the systems are diverted during shipping to “load stations” where the surveillance components are installed. (This interception may have been accomplished with the cooperation of shipping companies or other government agencies; details of the process remain murky.) In other cases, the NSA uses an insider with a USB device or remote access tools deployed by other means to gain access to computer systems, allowing the NSA to “reflash” their low-level BIOS firmware.

Either way, the altering of systems’ firmware or hardware gives the NSA the ability to install backdoors that can survive a total operating system wipe and re-installation. One BIOS attack, called SWAP, was developed by the NSA to attack a number of types of computers and operating systems by loading surveillance and control software at boot-up. SWAP uses the Host Protected Area on a computer’s hard drive to store the payload and installs it before the operating system boots.

More specialized BIOS attacks were developed to take advantage of motherboard-based System Management Mode (SMM) capabilities on Dell and Hewlett-Packard servers. Dell PowerEdge servers were targeted with an implant called DEITYBOUNCE, while HP Proliant 360DL G5 servers were targeted with one called IRONCHEF. Both allowed NSA operators to gain remote control of systems in SMM mode—giving the agency firmware-level control over infected servers and the ability to do things like run “rootkits” on the server operating system.

Network hardware is also a target for the NSA’s BIOS attacks. For example, one collection of BIOS hacks called the “MONTANA” family  (SCHOOLMONTANA, SIERRAMONTANA, and STUCCOMONTANA), was designed to target Juniper Networks routers using the JUNOS operating system—a FreeBSD derivative. Once installed, the hacked BIOS actually modifies the operating system kernel in memory when the router is booted, giving an NSA remote operations center full command and control over the router and allowing for selected network traffic to be sent back to the operations center over an external network connection. Even physically replacing the CompactFlash memory card the router boots from wouldn't get rid of this back door.

Juniper routers weren’t the only targets of these sorts of BIOS “implants,” either—firewalls and routers from Cisco and Huawei were also on the 2007 menu for firmware and software exploits. Such router exploits didn’t even require interception of the hardware but could in many cases be remotely installed by way of another hack.

For systems where a BIOS hack is impractical, the NSA has other tools to install a persistent backdoor. One, called GINSU, uses a PCI bus device installed on the computer. An implant called BULLDOZER creates a stealth wireless bridge, providing radio-based remote control of the backdoor to TAO operators. If the rootkit on the system (called KONGUR) is removed by a system re-installation, the GINSU backdoor can re-install the software on the next boot-up.

Reach out and touch someone

An implanted wireless device is the NSA’s go-to approach for dealing with “air-gapped” networks—networks that don’t have an Internet connection for security reasons. There are a number of other implanted devices that the NSA has in its TAO arsenal, including USB and Ethernet implants that can transmit short-range radio signals and more robust implanted hardware for longer-range transmissions. These radio links create a shadow Internet that allows the NSA to move data out of an adversary’s network and into its TURMOIL and X-KEYSCORE collection system.

For networks that the NSA can't get to physically, there's NIGHTSTAND, a self-contained Wi-Fi hacking system that can break into networks up to eight miles away, in optimum conditions. NIGHTSTAND hijacks the target network and uses packet injection attacks to install exploits on the target network's computers. Combined with a Windows exploit called SOMBERKNAVE, which uses a computer's Wi-Fi adapter to "phone home" with data, it could be used to collect data from target computers even when they're not intentionally connected to a network.

But why stop at network data? The NSA also uses some fairly exotic tools to grab computer video, keyboard strokes, and even audio from inside more difficult-to-reach places by using passive electronic devices that are actually powered by radar. These devices, charged by a specially tuned continuous wave radio signal sent from a portable radar unit (operating at as little as 2W up to as much as 1kW of power in the 1-2GHz range), send back a data stream as a reflected signal, allowing the NSA’s operators to tune in and view what’s happening on a computer screen or even listen to what’s being said in the room as they paint the target with radio frequency energy—as well as giving a relative rough location of devices within a building for the purposes of tracking or targeting.

Hacking smartphones

The 2007 NSA wish book for analysts also includes a number of software tools that allow data to be stolen from a variety of smartphones and dumb cell phones. One software hack, called DROPOUTJEEP, is a software implant for Apple iOS devices that allows the NSA to remotely control and monitor nearly all the features of an iPhone, including geolocation, text messages, and the microphone and camera. (Researcher and developer Jake Appelbaum, who helped write the Spiegel article revealing the documents, said separately this week that the NSA claims DROPOUTJEEP installations are always successful.) Another package, called TOTEGHOSTLY, does the same for phones based on the Windows Mobile embedded operating system.

Both the DROPOUTJEEP and TOTEGHOSTLY releases mentioned in the 2007 product listing required “close access methods” for installation—in other words, a human being getting up close and personal with the phone to install it. “A remote installation capacity will be pursued for a future release,” the document states. But another tool, called MONKEYCALENDAR, allowed the NSA to remotely install location-tracking software onto any GSM phone by way of a software implant for SIM cards.

But these aren't the only way the NSA can get to cell phone data. Also in the bag of tricks are a number of wireless monitoring devices, as well as “networks in a box” and other gear that can pose as cell towers and networks—intercepting devices as they enter an area and grabbing up their voice, data, and SMS traffic. A "tripwire" program called CANDYGRAM can send out alerts whenever a cell phone hits a specified cell tower.

Old tricks, new tricks

It’s important to note that the exploits in the documents are largely over five years old, so they don’t necessarily give a complete picture of what the NSA is capable of today. That doesn’t mean that these techniques are no longer in circulation—given the stubbornness of Windows XP, many of the exploits developed for older Windows platforms may have years left in them, and some of the adversaries the NSA is trying to monitor don’t have Fortune 500 hardware refresh rates.

A frequent defense of what the NSA does with its bag of tricks is that in many ways it is no different from what other countries (including China, Russia, and France) try to do to the United States and other countries via their intelligence organizations. These documents show the key way the NSA is different—its vast technical resources and ability to essentially put itself into the supply chain for technology flowing to the rest of the world. US officials have long suspected China of doing the same thing with hardware from companies such as Huawei and ZTE, but these documents essentially spell out that "interdiction" is part of the US intelligence strategy, too.

The exposure of the techniques and capabilities of the NSA creates another problem for the agency, in that it provides those hard-to-get-at organizations the TAO was created to go after with an idea of how the NSA has targeted and will target them. It also creates a problem for companies like Cisco and Juniper, who now face the same sort of scrutiny the US and others put Huawei under for its connections to the Chinese military. Even if Dell, HP, Cisco, and Juniper had no hand in creating the backdoors for their products, the documents will undoubtedly be used against them the next time they try to sell hardware to a foreign government.