Amanda Hocking and the 99-Cent Kindle Millionaires

As Amanda Hocking said herself, "I don't understand why the internet suddenly picked up on me this past week, but it definitely did."

And how.

The writing world is abuzz about Amanda Hocking, the 26-year-old self-published author who sold over 450,000 copies of her e-books in January alone, mostly priced between 99 cents and $2.99. She's now a millionaire. The writing world has been abuzz for a while about J.A. Konrath, who has very publicly blogged about the significant amount of money he has made selling inexpensive e-books.

Many people in the last week have sent me links about these authors, wondering...

What exactly is going on here? How in the heck are these self-published authors making so much money? Is this the future? And does this mean the end of the publishing industry as we know it?

The News That's Fit to Print

Before we delve into what this means for the world of books, I feel like it's important to take a deep breath and splash some cold water on our faces.

The reality: This is still a print world and probably will be for at least the next several years. Even as some publishers report e-book sales jumping to between 25% and 35% in January, the significant majority of sales are still in print. As I wrote in my recent post about record stores, over a decade after the rise of the mp3 the majority of revenue in music is still in CDs.

So let's not get out of hand (yet) about the scale of this e-book self-publishing revolution, if it is indeed one. Yes, this is real money we're talking about. Yes, these authors deserve all the credit in the world. And yes, these authors are also making money in print as well.

But we're still a ways away from self-published Kindle bestsellers making Dan Brown, James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer, J.K. Rowling kind of money, the old-fashioned way, through paper books in bookstores. It's not as exciting a story to remember that traditionally published franchise James Patterson made $70 million between June '09 and June '10, but it's still worth keeping in perspective.

Let's also not forget that Hocking, Konrath and a couple of others are the tip of a very large iceberg of self-published authors, the overwhelming majority of whom are selling the merest handful of copies. As Hocking herself writes:

I guess what I'm saying is that just because I sell a million books self-publishing, it doesn't mean everybody will. In fact, more people will sell less than 100 copies of their books self-publishing than will sell 10,000 books. I don't mean that to be mean, and just because a book doesn't sell well doesn't mean it's a bad book. It's just the nature of the business.

Yes, it's new, it's a big deal, it's seriously awesome for Hocking, who seems like a super nice and humble person. But let's not also lose our perspective about the scale of the shift taking place. The book world is changing in a big way, but it still ain't done changed just yet.

by Nathan Bransford |  Read more:

Zhao Ji (Emperor Huizong, 1082 - 1135): Auspicious Cranes
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Those Summers, These Days

On a warm afternoon in August, almost all of the fifty or so members of my extended family gather at my grandma’s farm to celebrate Grandma Fugman’s 80th birthday, and concurrently, my son Elvis’s second birthday. Picnic tables and chairs dot the front lawn, burgers and hot dogs roast on a grill, a slight breeze rustles the century-old trees bordering the street. It is warm but not sweltering, cool enough to sit comfortably in the shade. Two of my cousins recline on a blanket with their six-month-old babies beneath the lane of maple trees along the south side of the yard. My dad and his brother sit at the picnic table, each with a Miller Lite in his hand. Some uncles and nephews kick a soccer ball around. While it’s a special occasion that we’re gathered for on this Sunday in August, one could expect to see a half dozen or so kids in the yard at Grandma’s house on any given day. All of the family members on my dad’s side live within 30 minutes of each other in Northeast Ohio, except for me, my husband, and my kids. Elvis and my daughter, Lydia, with my cousins and cousins’ kids, push tractors and bull dozers in the same sand pile that my brothers and I played in twenty years ago, and my dad and his siblings twenty plus years before that. If they dig deep enough, they will probably unearth a Matchbox car from 1970. Beneath the shade of a maple tree, the cousins and second cousins and first cousins twice removed, or whatever they might be, get the same grit of the family farm beneath their fingernails.

I spent my childhood romping around the farm with my cousins, begged my dad to take me with him in the mornings to traverse the cool, wet terrain of the cornfield, dew heavy before the sun rose over the tree line. My cousins and I were taught the way to pull an ear of corn away from the stalk with a swift twist in order to make a clean break. After we filled the bushel baskets lining the dirt lane, Dad, or Frank or June or Connie or Rich or Pat or one of the other aunts and uncles, would lift the baskets over the edge of the pickup. We challenged each other to see who could launch themselves up into the truck bed the fastest. Our bony legs dangled over the tailgate, prune-y feet in wet shoes swinging back and forth as we bounced through the field to the house.

When we weren’t trying to help pick corn or vegetables in the field, my older cousins and I would play a dozen different versions of tag, hide and seek, SPUD, ghost in the graveyard, and baseball, employing “ghost runners” when there weren’t enough of us to run the bases, pitch, catch, and field. We jumped from the wooden bench swing into a mountain of maple leaves each fall. The swing’s rope rubbed our palms until they stung as we spun each other around. We barrel rolled each other down the slope from the house to the trees, the whole world spinning. We picked red raspberries and black raspberries and didn’t notice until much later the scratches on our legs from the bushes.

When we tired of playing in the yard, we walked through the corn and hay, down the hill, and into the woods. The trails wound randomly, looped around an ancient tree and backed up to a creek, but it was more fun to ignore the trail and plot out our own way, stepping on branches and startling at the sudden rustle of leaves nearby. The woods were never quiet, even when we would shush each other into silence and freeze, our breathing heavy as we eyed the forest for deer or fiercer wildlife we imagined into existence. The birds would chirrup, frogs ribbit, bees hum, chipmunks and squirrels rummage, leaves crackle. Cars could be heard coming down Stafford Road, spraying up limestone and tar as they sped along. When it was hot, we navigated skunk cabbage and may apples to the creek, waded in the cold, knee-high waters hunting for crawfish and minnows, challenged each other to walk through the culvert pipe underneath the road. As the pond my dad dug in the woods filled with rain water and run-off from the fields, I imagined all of us in speed boats, hanging out on a sandy beach, fishing and picnicking by the lake. It didn’t matter that you could skip a rock from one end of the pond to another or that the mud bottom and snapping turtles prevented anyone except our black lab from swimming in it. We roamed around the pond hunting for tadpoles, wary of the higher weeds, afraid there might be snakes.

Our parents were elsewhere—working at a job, sitting in the living room with Grandma, weeding in the garden. We came back for lunch and for dinner, but no one scolded us for being gone so long, at least not that I remember. We were free to wander.

It is hard for me to imagine a childhood without the farm or a definition of home without the farm in it. The summer I turned ten, my parents bought the century home across the street from the farm and next door to my other set of grandparents. Home extended beyond the four walls of my parents’ house and was defined by natural boundaries; it stretched through the field and woods all the way to the creek and then south to the lane, across the road and down to another creek, then back up through the rows of field corn to my mom’s parents’ yard, bordered by towering blue spruce trees. My brothers and I were more at home outdoors than in. No matter the day or season, someone was always around to play with, all I needed to do was cross the street, hop the ditch, and walk down the field. If there weren’t cousins there yet, they’d be there soon, I was sure of it.

by Sarah Wells, Ascent |  Read more:

FiveBooks Interviews > Renata Salecl on Modern Misery

The Slovenian philosophy professor decries the tyranny of choice and says we now expect long life, a beautiful body, sexual and job satisfaction. But the idea that we can perfect ourselves dooms us to failure and misery

Why misery? 

I wanted to go against the presumption that happiness is the theme of today’s life. This ideology of happiness has actually produced more unhappiness than needed, since we’ve constantly been measuring our lives with regard to success, or self-fulfilment, or enjoyment. From a psychoanalytic point of view it’s been known for a long time that total satisfaction is completely impossible to attain.

The books I chose describe the most prevalent forms of unhappiness linked to the expectations that we have in today’s post-industrial capitalism. Those expectations are: long life, beautiful body, a sexually satisfied life, creatively satisfied life, an ideal of self-making. The idea is that we have the power to create this ideal life – and exactly these books reverse this presumption.

Tell me about The New Black.

Darian Leader is a British psychoanalyst who in a great way undermines today’s ideas about depression. He starts with the premise that we live in a society of hyped optimism, where depression appears as a danger that goes against optimism – it’s something for people who gave up the fight for success or whatever. Today we use the terms depression and stress too much – they dominate psychiatric and self-help discourse.

They’re debased terms; you might be ‘depressed’ if you miss the bus.

Absolutely. Or just the common boredom of children can be described as depression. But what Darian does is to return to the difference between melancholy and mourning, and he makes a great distinction between them. It’s very good to return to these different roots of depression, and to stay with them – not as traumatic things, but as something pretty normal which has been forgotten.

So we should re-codify depression?

Not perceive it as a unified term, but to see it as various different things, which is why he is using the old terms of melancholy, mourning and loss.

Darian is also critical of the pharmaceutical industry: depression appears as something universal that can be quickly dealt with using pretty much universal types of drugs. But, as he points out, this denies the fact that the symptom is connected to some cause beyond the depression. He shows that in depression everyone has a different logic and a different individual story, which can be linked to loss – of another human being, of identity, of a job, of health or love. It can also be linked to being stuck in circulating around some lack.

He particularly shows that what we cannot deal with easily today is mourning. Not only mourning people we have lost, where it is quite easy to see why someone is sad; but whenever we lose someone we mourn not only that person, but also who we were for that person – and that’s much more difficult to overcome. Our society has a hard time dealing with that: previous societies (he uses a lot of anthropology) had long rituals related to mourning for the beloved and so on.

Contemporary society has a problem with death altogether.

Absolutely. There’s a denial of death, almost a prohibition of thinking about it, and an attempt to prolong life unrealistically. We try to stay away from a person who is mourning. And he shows that mourning and loss can be very much helped with various social rituals, as it was in the past. For example, children today are almost not allowed to attend funerals. But funerals have a huge symbolic role, especially for small children if their grandparent dies, to be part of saying goodbye and be part of the ritual.

He also deals with the important difference between lack and loss. He points out the problem that we have with loss as such: sometimes we lose something and can pinpoint what we have lost. But sometimes actually we are stuck in a particular deadly enjoyment of circulating around a lack in our life, and that can be a completely different melancholic state from a mourning state. In the conclusion he sees a way of overcoming this stuckness via artistic production. Some artists, for example, have been very good at circulating around the pain of lack, and have created great works of art. So not only has melancholy been the cornerstone of a lot of cultural production in the past and today, but it can even be its engine.

If you were to read this looking for some prescription for your own life, wouldn’t that set up unrealistic expectations? Not everybody has a creative spark.

That’s a great point. Unfortunately life is perceived as a work of art; everyone is supposed to work on life as a special project or a business plan. I would think that he’s not planning to push everyone into creation; what he is doing is basically unpacking and destigmatising depression and showing that it’s a really dangerous term to use universally. That’s where I think he helps everyone.

Interview of Renata Saleci by Tom Dannet, The Browser |  Read more:

Fairfield Porter, Wheat, 1960
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The Problem With High Frequency Trading

One of the many consequences of global warming is that it’s now, for the first time, possible to drill under the sea bed of the Arctic ocean. The oil companies are all there, of course, running geological tests and bickering with each other about the potential environmental consequences of an oil spill. But they’re not the only people drilling. Because there’s something even more valuable than oil just waiting to be found under the Arctic.

What is worth so much money that three different consortiums would spend billions of pounds to retrofit icebreakers and send them into some of the coldest and most dangerous waters in the world? The answer, of course, is information.

A couple of days ago, I called a friend in Tokyo, and we had a lovely chat. If he puts something up on Twitter, I can see it immediately. And on the web there are thousands of webcams showing me what’s going on in Japan this very second. It doesn’t look like there’s any great information bottleneck there: anything important which happens in Japan can be, and is, transmitted to the rest of the world in a fraction of a second.

But if you’re a City trader, a fraction of a second is a veritable eternity. Let’s say you want to know the price of a stock on the Tokyo Stock exchange, or the exact number of yen being traded for one dollar. Just like the light from the sun is eight minutes old by the time it reaches us, all that financial information is about 188 milliseconds old by the time it reaches London. That’s zero point one eight eight seconds. And it takes that much time because it has to travel on fiber-optic cables which take a long and circuitous route: they either have to cross the Atlantic, and then the US, and then the Pacific, or else they have to go across Europe, through the Middle East, across the Indian Ocean, and then up through the South China Sea between China and the Philippines.

But! If you can lay an undersea cable across the Arctic, you can save yourself about 5,000 miles, not to mention the risk of routing your information past a lot of political flash points. And when you’re sitting in your office in London and you get that dollar/yen exchange rate from Tokyo, it’s fresh from the oven, comparatively speaking: only 0.168 seconds old. If everybody else is using the old cables and you’re using the new ones, then you have somewhere between 20 milliseconds and 60 milliseconds when you know something they don’t.

Those are periods of time so short that humans can barely notice them. This essay, for instance, is about 900,000 milliseconds long, and it takes me hundreds milliseconds just to say the word “cable”. Which is a word with more than one meaning. To you, it probably means some kind of wire. But to City traders, it means 1.6254, or something very close to that number. Because in the City, “cable” means the pound/dollar exchange rate. And it’s named that after a transatlantic cable which was used to telegraph the exchange-rate information from London to New York as far back as 1858.

So what we’re talking about here is nothing new, in terms of kind. Nathan Rothschild built a significant chunk of his fortune by using a system of couriers who told him the result of the Battle of Waterloo a full day before anybody else in London knew it. And my own employer, the Reuters news agency, was founded on sending financial information between Brussels and Aachen using carrier pigeons.

What’s new is that billions of pounds can be made by having access to information not a day in advance, or an hour, or even a second, but even just a millisecond or two. Stock exchanges aren’t physical places where human beings bargain with each other any more: they’re racks of computers in places like Mahwah, New Jersey, where the cables are carefully measured to be exactly the same length so that no one has an infinitesimal advantage thanks to the amount of time it takes information to travel an extra few millimeters down a wire.  (...)

Most of the trading on US stock exchanges is done by something called algobots, these days. These are algorithms: they’re computers which are programmed to put in orders, take out orders, trade in big size, trade in small size – all according to very sophisticated rules, called algorithms. And one of the ironies about the flash crash is that it was actually caused in large part by algobots not trading. The US has over a dozen different stock exchanges, places where stocks are bought and sold. Most of us have only ever heard of the listing exchanges, the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. But there are many more you probably haven’t heard of, with names like Arca and BATS, as well as sinister-sounding things called Dark Pools. What happened in the flash crash is that when the trading got completely crazy, the algobots just switched themselves off. This was something they weren’t used to, they didn’t know how to react, and so they just went away. And there was suddenly no liquidity in the market. No one was offering to trade. And with no one offering to trade, the prices just plunged, all the way down to one cent. Because there were no bids in the market any more.

The algobots can be very useful, on a day-to-day basis. If a normal person like me buys a few shares in some company or other, that trade doesn’t even happen on any stock exchange at all. It just happens directly with a broker, an algobot, who’s happy to take the other side of my trade because small individual investors like me are normally pretty stupid, and tend to buy high and sell low.

In any case, if any given stock exchange is an incredibly complicated thing, the fragmentation of the stock exchanges has created a much more complex system yet. Most big banks and stockbrokers — and the algobots they control — have access to all of the different exchanges, and they trade wherever they think they can get the best prices. Since the best prices tend to be found wherever the most traders are trading, you end up with something a bit like six-year-olds playing football: everybody’s running towards the ball at the same time. And the result is these huge waves of activity, where traders move en masse, from one stock exchange to the next, in very unpredictable ways. If you layer that unpredictability on top of the complexity inherent in any system of multiple stock exchanges, you end up with something which will almost certainly break in a pretty catastrophic manner at some point. We don’t know how, and we don’t know when, but there’s an ironclad rule of any system: the more complex it is, the less predictable it is, and the more likely it is to fail catastrophically in some unforeseeable manner.

by Felix Salmon, Reuters |  Read more:
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Can Marissa Mayer Really Have It All?

There comes a moment in every very ambitious person’s life when she sees with perfect clarity that the path before her is blocked. For Marissa Mayer, Google employee No. 20 and Silicon Valley’s reigning “geek queen,” this moment occurred last year, when her former boyfriend, Google co-founder Larry Page, kicked her off the company’s elite operating committee, to which she had been appointed the previous year.

Page had taken over the running of Google’s day-to-day operations from Eric Schmidt, the company’s longtime CEO, in April 2011, and immediately launched a major renovation of the company’s structure and priorities. Mayer was bruised in that reshuffling. For about a dozen years she had presided over “search”—which is to say everything the user saw, felt, and experienced when navigating Google—but now she was shunted away from that core business and put in charge of “local”—maps, restaurant recommendations, and the like. This was arguably a demotion and at best a lateral move. And when Page overhauled the operating committee, or “OC,” Mayer’s reduced status was made both explicit and public. The committee was renamed “the L-Team,” after the boss, and he pushed Mayer off in order to make room for a handful of others, including Android and YouTube masterminds Andy Rubin and Salar Kamangar. “She was not included,” says her friend Dylan Casey, who left Google last year. The L-Team is Google’s Sanhedrin, a group of insiders that decides strategy and vets acquisitions. If you’re on it, you have a hand in shaping Google’s future—and, therefore, the future of global technology. If you’re not—well then, you have Google on your résumé and a net worth estimated at $300 million.

Mayer was not happy, according to people who know her. “Marissa is very, very, very driven,” says Brian Singerman, a former Googler who is now a partner at Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm. But at the office, she kept her cool. “She was a trooper,” is how someone familiar with the situation described her. “She worked through it.”

Google loyalists said the move was part of the reorg, plain and simple. “That was what Larry thought was best for the company,” says Casey. Others said it was political, a punishment for Mayer’s inability to play nicely with other VIP Googlers, and bloggers began to wring their hands anew over the larger question of sexism in tech. Two other people removed from the L-Team were also women; one of them, Shona Brown, who ran business operations, “is a freaking Rhodes scholar,” says a former Googler, “another one of these rock stars.”

Then there was the delicate matter of Mayer’s public but never widely reported relationship with Page. (“Most local journalists know the gossip, relish it,” vented Nick Denton on Gawker in 2006, but “wouldn’t dream of working it into an article,” so anxious are they to protect their access to Google’s top tier.) Although some of Mayer’s former colleagues insist the affair had no bearing on their friend’s corporate profile, others disagree, pointing to the hard facts: Under Schmidt, Mayer was on the committee; under Page, she was booted off. “It’s got to have some impact,” says Dave McClure, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who knows Mayer slightly. “It gave her access to strategy and thinking at the highest levels. And it probably made it more difficult for her to advance. I don’t know too many other senior female executives who went out with the CEO who were still there after they stopped going out.” Page got married in 2007. Two years later, Mayer married the investor and lawyer Zachary Bogue.

She may have been stymied at Google, but Mayer, at 37, was already one of the most visible tech personalities in Silicon Valley. “She is, for all intents and purposes, famous,” says Casey. She was popular with the press for her accessibility in an industry notorious for its reclusive, or stammering, geniuses. She threw parties at her penthouse atop The Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco, to which everyone yearned to be invited. And throughout Silicon Valley and among the groupies drawn to its idiosyncratic nerd glamour, she was as well known for her hobbies—notably a taste for high-end fashion and a large collection of Dale Chihuly handblown glass—as she was for her tech cred. In a world still struggling to leave behind that age-old bias—girls can’t do math—Mayer was everyone’s favorite exception, fully girl and fully geek, a former ballet dancer who stayed up all night writing code. And one who seemed driven to make her own path when the men around her wouldn’t oblige. Frustrated at Google, she did what any strategically savvy executive in her place would do. She publicly shored up her brand while privately contemplating her next move. She tweeted her whereabouts from Davos and Vail as she kept things going at work (notably, overseeing the acquisition of Zagat listings). She got herself a seat on the board at Walmart. And she checked a big item off her Life List, one that might have been a professional obstacle for another kind of woman: She got pregnant.

Now, less than a year after news of her being sidelined at Google, Mayer arrives at two auspicious milestones virtually at once. Twelve weeks ago, she was named president and chief executive officer of Yahoo Inc., making her one of twenty female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and the only one to take the job while pregnant. At Yahoo, Mayer has her work cut out for her. Yahoo is a foundering brand suffering from a dramatic talent drain and years of chaos on its board and in its upper ranks. Its second-quarter results were grim, with U.S. search queries down 17 percent from a year ago and time spent on its content pages down 10 percent. The Yahoo stock price has been bumping along all year between $14 and $17 a share, about half of what it was five years ago. Mayer has to turn this around—and fast.

And last week, on September 30 at 10:22 p.m., her first child was born, a boy, weighing nearly nine pounds. “Name TBD,” she wrote in an e-mail she sent to a large circle of friends. “Suggestions welcome!” The e-mail was signed, “With love and happiness, Marissa & Zack.” It is, perhaps, a blessing that she doesn’t think much, she has said, of the high-achieving mother’s mantra, “balance.”

In celebration of the new arrival, Mayer’s friend Craig Silverstein, Google employee No. 1, who also left the company this year, is thinking about building Mayer a homemade diaper cake: three tiers of diapers in three different sizes, stacked around an empty cardboard tube and decorated all over with toys, onesies, and burp clothes. Mayer has made them for many of her friends’ babies and once showed him how, Silverstein says. “She had a whole recipe. She helped me make one. We went to five different places to get the right toys. You spend all night putting it together.” At the tippy top, Mayer likes to put a plush toy octopus. Silverstein calls the diaper cake “the perfect Marissa baby present”: “It has usability at its core.”

by Lisa Miller, The Cut, NY Magazine |  Read more:

The Young Man's Guide to Geezer Style

[ed. Ahh...sweet vindication. It was only a matter of time.]

Right now, the cool kids aren't taking their style inspiration from icons like the Clash or the Stones or the Kanyes. Nope, they're adopting the suited nonchalance of old grandpas, from their fusty ties to their sneakered feet. Here, we break down everything you need to know about the biggest suiting trend of the moment: old-fogey fashion

At GQ, we picked up on the suiting trend we call geezer style because it's right under our noses. Both guys on this page are on the GQ staff: 24-year-old editorial assistant Mark Anthony Green and 27-year-old fashion editor Justin Doss. It's counterintuitive, but these young guns and their stylish friends are all obsessed with old-school suits, mostly Italian. They know the minutiae of fit, fabric, and construction. And when they're raving in the hallways about someone with sick style, it's not, like, Ryan Gosling. It's some old dude they saw on the subway eating a tuna sandwich and wearing a threadbare suit from 1964 with a pair of New Balance 574s.

As we'll see, there are lots of ways to get your geezer on, but this look starts with the suit. The jacket's shoulders should be natural, meaning almost no padding. And when it comes to style and fabric, let it rip: Go double-breasted or with a Caddyshack plaid. The only real tweak is in the fit—the young guys keep it super slim. To learn how to fast-forward your own style, read on.

by Will Welch, GQ | Read more (if you dare):

Photo: Taghi Naderzad

Dailies, by Missouri Bend Studio
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No Filter: Inside Hipstamatic’s Lost Year

If Lucas Buick's company Hipstamatic is on the verge of bankruptcy, you couldn't tell by the dinner spread. It's mid-September and we're at the Isola restaurant in the Mondrian Soho, an expensive hotel-cum-lounge where you're never quite sure you're wearing the right style of Warby Parkers. Under the airy space's glass ceiling and sparkling chandeliers, Buick and "director of fun" Mario Estrada knock back espresso martinis and old-fashioneds, while digging into tuna and pine nut crudos and fennel sausage pizza with herbed ricotta--delicious fare just begging to be photographed, filtered, and shared with friends.

"This is it. We're clearly falling apart," says Buick, laughing. "If this is the last supper, then I wish we had a bigger table."

Despite a rough couple of weeks, the Hipstamatic cofounder and CEO is in good spirits. In late July, over lobsters and bottles of Prosecco, Buick told me he wanted Hipstamatic, a $1.99 photo app that takes analog-style photographs on your iPhone, to become the "Kodak for the digital era." He envisioned a time when his company could be the industry leader for selling digital lenses, films, and flashes, as well as providing third-party camera and printing services.

But then just 16 days later, Buick laid off five of his employees, roughly half the company’s workforce, including its entire developer team and social media and office managers. The decision sparked a swath of bad press and ex-employee backlash, and led many to question the San Francisco-based startup's viability. "Suddenly I was getting calls from friends asking, 'Do you still have a job?'" Estrada recalls. "We're going bankrupt? When did all this happen?"

“It got a little ugly,” admits Buick, who turns 30 this week. With a doughy face and ginger scruff, the former graphic designer carries a soft, seemingly happy-go-lucky demeanor, which juxtaposes his otherwise serious look: black G-Star jacket, black shirt, and black-framed glasses. "I didn't even like coming to work,” he says. “When you're the guy who built the company and you don't even want to work there yourself, something just isn't right."

Hipstamatic's journey over the past year has been tumultuous, to say the least. As Fast Company has learned from speaking to more than a dozen players involved, Hipstamatic has wrestled with ever-growing social competition, internal tensions, and a lack of product vision--not to mention juggling acquisition interest and worsening term sheets in a post-Facebook IPO world.

But what the startup has most struggled with is remaining relevant in an unforgiving app market dominated by one of the hottest spaces in tech: photos. Photos are considered the killer app of any platform, web or mobile. They're the driving force behind Facebook's social success, and the reason for its blockbuster acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram, which recently surpassed Twitter in U.S. smartphone engagement. They're why Marissa Mayer is said to be rethinking Flickr as she takes up the reins at Yahoo; why Google recently bought Snapseed; and why a slew of hot Internet startups from Tumblr to Pinterest to Camera+ have gained popularity. Even Apple introduced photo-stream sharing capabilities in its latest version of iOS.

Hipstamatic was one of the first startups to crack the photo formula in the mobile space--then it watched similar services gain ground and eventually blaze by. The company’s experience proves that no startup can rest on its laurels in the age of the iPhone, when the time between innovation and disruption is ever shortening, and when IPOs and fast exits are valued over establishing long-term viable businesses. And perhaps most significantly, Hipstamatic proves that no modern startup can ignore the siren call of social, even if at its own peril.

by Austin Carr, Fast Company |  Read more:

Photo: Shutterstock

Agustin Castillo
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Daredevil Sets Sight on a 22-Mile Fall

Whatever the leap means for mankind, it should definitely be one giant step for a man.

Felix Baumgartner, a professional daredevil, plans to step off a balloon-borne capsule 22 miles above Earth on Tuesday morning and plummet for five and a half minutes until opening his parachute a mile above the New Mexico desert. If all goes as planned, he will do a series of barrel rolls in the near-vacuum of the stratosphere and then plunge headfirst at more than 700 miles per hour, becoming the first sky diver to break the sound barrier.

Mr. Baumgartner, 43, a former Austrian paratrooper who became known as Fearless Felix by leaping off buildings, landmarks and once into a 600-foot cave, said that this was his toughest challenge, because of the complexity involved and because of an unexpected fear he had to overcome: claustrophobia. During five years of training, he started suffering panic attacks when he had to spend hours locked inside the stiff pressurized suit and helmet necessary for survival at the edge of space.

But he persevered with the help of psychological conditioning and a mentor, Joe Kittinger, a retired Air Force colonel who has held the altitude and speed records since 1960, when he jumped 19 miles from a balloon during a research project (after nearly dying in a practice jump). Mr. Kittinger, now 84, will be the only voice on the radio guiding Mr. Baumgartner during the two-hour ascent to the stratosphere.

“Felix trusts me because I know what he’s going through — and I’m the only one who knows what he’s going through,” Mr. Kittinger said on Sunday at the mission-control center here.

And just why would anyone want to go through this? Both men like to stress the science to be learned, but there are, of course, other motives.

“All of my life I have been looking for unique goals, things no one has accomplished,” Mr. Baumgartner said.

Mr. Kittinger knew just what he meant. “From the beginning of mankind, the boys want to go higher, faster, lower,” he said. “It’s a fascinating part of human nature. We’re never satisfied with the status quo.”

Previous attempts to break Mr. Kittinger’s records have cost a Frenchman nearly $20 million and claimed the life of an American, Nick Piantanida, a New Jersey truck driver who died from brain injuries after his suit depressurized in 1966. Mr. Kittinger said he joined this project, called Red Bull Stratos, after the energy drink, because he considered it the first with the resources to do the job properly, thanks to the scores of aerospace veterans hired by Red Bull.

For Mr. Baumgartner, the dangers will start as soon as his pressurized capsule lifts off. To reach such thin air requires an enormous yet lightweight balloon, 55 stories high, built of a polyethylene plastic that is one-tenth the thickness of a sandwich bag.

If the fragile plastic ruptures below 4,000 feet — the Dead Zone, as the project’s engineers call it — there will not be enough time for a parachute to deploy, forcing Mr. Baumgartner to make a crash landing.

Mr. Kittinger used a much smaller balloon to rise 102,800 feet in 1960. “It’s a phenomenal view,” he recalled. “The sky is black, and you see the curvature of the Earth, and the colors are beautiful. But you’re also aware that if anything happens to your pressure suit, you’re dead.”

The Red Bull helium balloon is supposed to climb more than 120,000 feet. There, Mr. Baumgartner will perform an exquisitely rehearsed bunny hop designed to keep his body from spinning out of control.

“In a regular sky-dive, you use your hands against the air to stop from tumbling, but there’s no air to use up there,” he said. “If you start to tumble over, you carry that tumble all the way down.”

The worst-case outcome is the kind of spinning that nearly killed Mr. Kittinger during a training jump in 1959. He went into a flat spin, blacking out as his body whirled at 120 revolutions per minute. He regained consciousness only after his emergency parachute opened automatically.

After the bunny hop, Mr. Baumgartner hopes his body will slowly rotate so that he descends headfirst and breaks the 614-m.p.h. speed record held by Mr. Kittinger. After 34 seconds, engineers calculate, he will have fallen to 102,000 feet and accelerated beyond the speed of sound, which at that altitude is close to 690 m.p.h. (the exact figure depends on the temperature).

“I expect him to reach 720 miles per hour, about Mach 1.1,” said Art Thompson, the technical director of Red Bull Stratos and a former designer of the Stealth bomber. Mr. Baumgartner should remain supersonic for 20 seconds, until he reaches an altitude of 92,000 feet. Then the thickening atmosphere should slow him to subsonic speed, and eventually to a terminal velocity of 120 miles per hour.

Engineers and physicians are not sure what will happen if Mr. Baumgartner goes through the sound barrier. They realize he could be battered as parts of his body go supersonic or subsonic at different times, but the impact is expected to be manageable because of the thin air at that altitude — or so the engineers and Mr. Baumgartner hope.

by John Tierney, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Jay Nemeth/Red Bull, via Associated Press

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Stéphanie Deveaux
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Secret Golfing Life of Barack Obama

It is the first Sunday morning in May 2011, and the president of the United States tees off on the East Course at Andrews air base. It is Barack Obama's 66th round of golf as president, and as usual, the media and the public aren't invited. Like nearly all of Obama's previous outings, the only witnesses are his playing partners -- a trio of White House staffers -- and a platoon of Secret Service agents.

Obama's favorite game is basketball, a love affair that began at age 10 when the father he barely knew gave him a ball. But by his third year in office, golf has become his most cherished escape. The press corps is forbidden from following the president from hole to hole or even taking his photograph on the course. For a man who laments that he "misses being anonymous," the golf course has become the one place he can disappear.

On this morning, Obama calls it quits after nine holes, a curious turn for a golfer who typically insists on 18 holes during rounds that last as long as six hours. No explanation is offered to the media. The lone pool reporter is forced to guess at the reason, blaming the somewhat "chilly weather and rain."

Back at the White House, Obama, still clad in a white golf shirt, khaki pants and a navy blue windbreaker, doesn't return to the residence, as he usually does after a round. Instead, he strides to the Oval Office, swaps his black-and-white cleats for dress shoes, hustles downstairs and takes a seat inside the Situation Room. Here the president, still dressed for a Sunday round, watches a monitor as Navy SEAL Team Six storms a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and kills Osama bin Laden.

***

For more than a century, golf has ranked as the favorite pastime of American presidents. Fifteen of the past 18 chief executives have played the game -- most joyously (Eisenhower, Ford, Clinton), a few grudgingly (Coolidge, LBJ, Nixon) and nearly all dangerously risking duck-hooking a drive into a gallery. The presidential golf tradition began ignominiously when William Howard Taft -- all 320 pounds of him -- ignored the counsel of his political mentor, Teddy Roosevelt, who had once declared "Golf is fatal" to any political man. Despite that warning and newspaper cartoons lampooning his buffoonish swing, Taft kept right on playing the gilded game, all but admitting that he preferred golfing to governing. Taft was a one-term president.

But in the century since Taft, no president has been more vilified for his love of golf than Obama. And perhaps not surprisingly, no president has done more to keep his game a secret. During the 104 rounds Obama has played as president, photographers have been permitted only five times, according to White House pool reports. Even then, they've had to use telephoto lenses from 40 or 50 yards and only for a few moments. Reporters accompanying Obama are usually banished far from the first tee; at Andrews, they are quarantined inside the base's food court. The last golfing president to ban photographers was John F. Kennedy. In the half century since, many presidents have held impromptu news conferences on the first tee. George W. Bush infamously told reporters in 2002, "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive."

by Don Van Natta, Jr., ESPN  |  Read more:

Photo: Pete Souza

Villa Moderne, oil on canvas, 150 cm x 150 cm, 2008
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The Patent, Used as a Sword

When Apple announced last year that all iPhones would come with a voice-activated assistant named Siri, capable of answering spoken questions, Michael Phillips’s heart sank.

For three decades, Mr. Phillips had focused on writing software to allow computers to understand human speech. In 2006, he had co-founded a voice recognition company, and eventually executives at Apple, Google and elsewhere proposed partnerships. Mr. Phillips’s technology was even integrated into Siri itself before the digital assistant was absorbed into the iPhone.

But in 2008, Mr. Phillips’s company, Vlingo, had been contacted by a much larger voice recognition firm called Nuance. “I have patents that can prevent you from practicing in this market,” Nuance’s chief executive, Paul Ricci, told Mr. Phillips, according to executives involved in that conversation.

Mr. Ricci issued an ultimatum: Mr. Phillips could sell his firm to Mr. Ricci or be sued for patent infringements. When Mr. Phillips refused to sell, Mr. Ricci’s company filed the first of six lawsuits.

Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Mr. Phillips to Mr. Ricci’s firm. And the millions of dollars Mr. Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees.

When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Mr. Phillips won. In the companies’ only courtroom face-off, a jury ruled that Mr. Phillips had not infringed on a broad voice recognition patent owned by Mr. Ricci’s company.

But it was too late. The suit had cost $3 million, and the financial damage was done. In December, Mr. Phillips agreed to sell his company to Mr. Ricci. “We were on the brink of changing the world before we got stuck in this legal muck,” Mr. Phillips said.

Mr. Phillips and Vlingo are among the thousands of executives and companies caught in a software patent system that federal judges, economists, policy makers and technology executives say is so flawed that it often stymies innovation.

Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons.

Vlingo was a tiny upstart on this battlefield, but as recent litigation involving Apple and Samsung shows, technology giants have also waged wars among themselves.

In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.

Patents are vitally important to protecting intellectual property. Plenty of creativity occurs within the technology industry, and without patents, executives say they could never justify spending fortunes on new products. And academics say that some aspects of the patent system, like protections for pharmaceuticals, often function smoothly.

However, many people argue that the nation’s patent rules, intended for a mechanical world, are inadequate in today’s digital marketplace. Unlike patents for new drug formulas, patents on software often effectively grant ownership of concepts, rather than tangible creations. Today, the patent office routinely approves patents that describe vague algorithms or business methods, like a software system for calculating online prices, without patent examiners demanding specifics about how those calculations occur or how the software operates.

As a result, some patents are so broad that they allow patent holders to claim sweeping ownership of seemingly unrelated products built by others. Often, companies are sued for violating patents they never knew existed or never dreamed might apply to their creations, at a cost shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer choices.

“There’s a real chaos,” said Richard A. Posner, a federal appellate judge who has helped shape patent law, in an interview. “The standards for granting patents are too loose.”

Almost every major technology company is involved in ongoing patent battles, but the most significant player is Apple, industry executives say, because of its influence and the size of its claims: in August in California, the company won a $1 billion patent infringement judgment against Samsung. Former Apple employees say senior executives made a deliberate decision over the last decade, after Apple was a victim of patent attacks, to use patents as leverage against competitors to the iPhone, the company’s biggest source of profits.

Apple has filed multiple suits against three companies — HTC, Samsung and Motorola Mobility, now part of Google — that today are responsible for more than half of all smartphone sales in the United States. If Apple’s claims — which include ownership of minor elements like rounded square icons and of more fundamental smartphone technologies — prevail, it will most likely force competitors to overhaul how they design phones, industry experts say.

HTC, Samsung, Motorola and others have filed numerous suits of their own, also trying to claim ownership of market-changing technologies.

While Apple and other major companies have sometimes benefited from this war, so have smaller partners. In 2010, Apple acquired Siri Inc., the company behind the software of the same name. The stock price of Mr. Ricci’s company, Nuance, which had by then become Siri’s partner, rose by more than 70 percent as iPhone sales skyrocketed. Some former executives at Vlingo, Nuance’s old rival, remain bitter.

“We had spent $3 million to win one patent trial, and had five more to go,” said a former Vlingo executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he had signed confidentiality agreements. “We had the better product, but it didn’t matter, because this system is so completely broken.”  (...)

At a technology conference this year, Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, said patent battles had not slowed innovation at the company, but acknowledged that some aspects of the battles had “kind of gotten crazy.”

“There’s some of this that is maddening,” he said. “It’s a waste; it’s a time suck.”

The evolution of Apple into one of the industry’s patent warriors gained momentum, like many things within the company, with a terse order from its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs.

by Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr, NY Times |  Read more:

How to Die

One morning last month, Anthony Gilbey awakened from anesthesia in a hospital in the east of England. At his bedside were his daughter and an attending physician.

The surgery had been unsuccessful, the doctor informed him. There was nothing more that could be done.

“So I’m dying?” the patient asked.

The doctor hesitated. “Yes,” he said.

“You’re dying, Dad,” his daughter affirmed.

“So,” the patient mused, “no more whoop-de-doo.”

“On the other side, there’ll be loads,” his daughter — my wife — promised.

The patient laughed. “Yes,” he said. He was dead six days later, a few months shy of his 80th birthday.

When they told my father-in-law the hospital had done all it could, that was not, in the strictest sense, true. There was nothing the doctors could do about the large, inoperable tumor colonizing his insides. But they could have maintained his failing kidneys by putting him on dialysis. They could have continued pumping insulin to control his diabetes. He wore a pacemaker that kept his heart beating regardless of what else was happening to him, so with aggressive treatment they could — and many hospitals would — have sustained a kind of life for a while.

But the hospital that treated him offers a protocol called the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient, which was conceived in the 90s at a Liverpool cancer facility as a more humane alternative to the frantic end-of-life assault of desperate measures. “The Hippocratic oath just drives clinicians toward constantly treating the patient, right until the moment they die,” said Sir Thomas Hughes-Hallett, who was until recently the chief executive of the center where the protocol was designed. English doctors, he said, tell a joke about this imperative: “Why in Ireland do they put screws in coffins? To keep the doctors out.”

The Liverpool Pathway brings many of the practices of hospice care into a hospital setting, where it can reach many more patients approaching death. “It’s not about hastening death,” Sir Thomas told me. “It’s about recognizing that someone is dying, and giving them choices. Do you want an oxygen mask over your face? Or would you like to kiss your wife?”

Anthony Gilbey’s doctors concluded that it was pointless to prolong a life that was very near the end, and that had been increasingly consumed by pain, immobility, incontinence, depression and creeping dementia. The patient and his family concurred.

And so the hospital unplugged his insulin and antibiotics, disconnected his intravenous nourishment and hydration, leaving only a drip to keep pain and nausea at bay. The earlier bustle of oxygen masks and thermometers and blood-pressure sleeves and pulse-taking ceased. Nurses wheeled him away from the wheezing, beeping machinery of intensive care to a quiet room to await his move to “the other side.”

Here in the United States, nothing bedevils our discussion of health care like the question of when and how to withhold it. The Liverpool Pathway or variations of it are now standard in most British hospitals and in several other countries — but not ours. When I asked one American end-of-life specialist what chance he saw that something of the kind could be replicated here, the answer was immediate: “Zero.” There is an obvious reason for that, and a less obvious reason.

The obvious reason, of course, is that advocates of such programs have been demonized. They have been criticized by the Catholic Church in the name of “life,” and vilified by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann in the pursuit of cheap political gain. “Anything that looks like an official protocol, or guideline — you’re going to get death-paneled,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the bioethicist and expert on end-of-life care who has been a target of the rabble-rousers. (He is also a contributing opinion writer for The Times.) Humane end-of-life practices have quietly found their way into cancer treatment, but other specialties lag behind.

The British advocates of the Liverpool approach have endured similar attacks, mainly from “pro-life” lobbyists who portray it as a back-door form of euthanasia. (They also get it from euthanasia advocates who say it isn’t euthanasia-like enough.) Surveys of families that use this protocol report overwhelming satisfaction, but inevitably in a field that touches families at their most emotionally raw, and that requires trained coordination of several medical disciplines, nursing and family counseling, the end is not always as smooth as my father-in-law’s.

The less obvious problem, I suspect, is that those who favor such programs in this country often frame it as a cost issue. Their starting point is the arresting fact that a quarter or more of Medicare costs are incurred in the last year of life, which suggests that we are squandering a fortune to buy a few weeks or months of a life spent hooked to machinery and consumed by fear and discomfort. That last year of life offers a tempting target if we want to contain costs and assure that Medicare and Medicaid exist for future generations.

No doubt, we have a crying need to contain health care costs. We pay more than many other developed countries for comparable or inferior health care, and the total bill consumes a growing share of our national wealth. The Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — makes a start by establishing a board to identify savings in Medicare, by emphasizing preventive care, and by financing pilot programs to pay doctors for achieving outcomes rather than performing procedures. But it is barely a start. Common sense suggests that if officials were not afraid of being “death-paneled,” we could save some money by withholding care when, rather than saving a life, it serves only to prolong misery for a little while.

But I’m beginning to think that is both questionable economics and bad politics.

by Bill Keller, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Nicholas Blechman

Mural (by Kaptain Kobold)
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