WE had all the ingredients for a campfire. We had the wood, the kindling, the newspaper. We had the graham crackers, the marshmallows and the chocolate bars. We had the songbook. We even had T-shirts my mother-in-law had made with the nickname we voted on for the campfire nook behind her house on Cape Cod, “Snug Harbor Hollow.”

But one thing was missing. So when my time came to occupy the “story rock,” I stood in front of a circle of 13 people and pulled out my secret ingredient: my wife’s iPad.

I didn’t set out to spend my summer vacation online. A few things conspired to give me the idea. The first was the insistent finger wagging one now encounters that the only way to spend quality time with one’s children is to disengage from technology.

Get off the grid! Take a screen vacation! As one well-meaning theologian put it in an e-mail someone forwarded me this June, “Fathers, put down your phones!” Go to any playground, play date or sporting event, he wrote, and dads are glued to their devices. “Am I moralizing,” he asked, “if I say that I think we are lingering longer on these devices than we realize or admit?”

The same day, my brother sent along a link for a new app (leafsnap) that allows users to identify trees by submitting photos of leaves. What a smart way to juice that nature walk, I thought. The next day I saw a Twitter message from Pierre Omidyar (@pierre), the eBay founder, in which he attached a photo and asked, “What is the name of this purple and white flower bush?” Seconds later he had his answer: lilac.

Then my sister wrote to ask how she could identify the bird building a nest on her deck. “Take a picture and put it on Facebook,” I said. “You’ll have an answer within the hour.” She bet me it wouldn’t work, but within 19 minutes two friends had confirmed it was a Carolina wren.

I concocted a scheme. During weekends this summer, I would pursue the opposite of an unplugged vacation: I would check screens whenever I could. Not in the service of work, but in the service of play. I would crowd-source new ideas for car games and YouTube my picnic recipes. I would test the prevailing wisdom that the Internet spoils all the fun. With back-to-school fast approaching, here’s my report.

For starters, the Web supplied an endless font of trivia and historical tidbits to enliven our days. I learned that a great debate still rages over who was the “Benedict” in eggs Benedict; that ancient mythologists believed fish were so afraid of the ospreys that they turned up their bellies in surrender; and that care packages like the one we sent my nephew at camp had their origins feeding starving Europeans in World War II and initially contained liver loaf and steak and kidneys.

Online videos are another boon to summer. When my 6-year-old daughters were upset that we didn’t awaken them at midnight to watch a brief light show on the Eiffel Tower, a quick trip to YouTube did the trick. My brother-in-law watched online videos to learn how to make the perfect crosshatch pattern on grilled fish. And my father used seaturtle.org to teach my girls how sea turtles emerge from the Atlantic near our home on Tybee Island, Ga., and lay eggs. Injured turtles are implanted with G.P.S. devices, allowing them to be tracked online.

One surprising way that being plugged in improved our vacations was using newfangled resources to solve oldfangled problems. Bugs, for one. I used the Internet to find a home remedy for the slugs eating my begonias (broken eggshells). My sister-in-law snapped a photo of the alarming bug bite on her 10-month-old and sent it along to our other sister who’s a pediatrician. (No Lyme disease!) Others did the same thing with burns and poison ivy.

The Web proved particularly helpful when we broke the disposal at my in-laws’ weekend house. No problem. I typed the problem into Google and within seconds was looking at the exposed rear end of a Joe the Plumber look-alike who made an extremely helpful video guide to being a weekend D.I.Y.-er.

The Web also helped give us the feeling that we saw people more than we did. While it’s fashionable to complain that we’re overly connected, I still found an occasional, virtual interaction with a friend or family member to be as pleasant as running into them on the beach. I texted with my 12-year-old nephew about geocaching when we get together. My kids Skyped with my parents about learning to swim.

Bruce Feiler’s most recent book, “Generation Freedom: The Middle East Uprisings and the Remaking of the Modern World,” was just published. “This Life” appears monthly.

 

One of the major fights in the debt ceiling battle is how much top earners should contribute to efforts to close deficits. Australian economist John Quiggin makes an eloquent case as to why they need to pony up:

My analysis is quite simple and follows the apocryphal statement attributed to Willie Sutton. The wealth that has accrued to those in the top 1 per cent of the US income distribution is so massive that any serious policy program must begin by clawing it back.

If their 25 per cent, or the great bulk of it, is off-limits, then it’s impossible to see any good resolution of the current US crisis. It’s unsurprising that lots of voters are unwilling to pay higher taxes, even to prevent the complete collapse of public sector services. Median household income has been static or declining for the past decade, household wealth has fallen by something like 50 per cent (at least for ordinary households whose wealth, if they have any, is dominated by home equity) and the easy credit that made the whole process tolerable for decades has disappeared. In these circumstances, welshing on obligations to retired teachers, police officers and firefighters looks only fair.

In both policy and political terms, nothing can be achieved under these circumstances, except at the expense of the top 1 per cent. This is a contingent, but inescapable fact about massively unequal, and economically stagnant, societies like the US in 2010. By contrast, in a society like that of the 1950s and 1960s, where most people could plausibly regard themselves as middle class and where middle class incomes were steadily rising, the big questions could be put in terms of the mix of public goods and private income that was best for the representative middle class citizen. The question of how much (more) to tax the very rich was secondary – their share of national income was already at an all time low.

 

And the fares of the have versus the have-nots continue to diverge. A new survey found that 64% of the public doesn't have enough funds on hand to cope with a $1000 emergency. Wages are falling for 90% of the population. And disabuse yourself of the idea that the rich might decide to bestow their largesse on the rest of us. Various studies have found that upper class individuals are less empathetic and altruistic than lower status individuals.

This outcome is not accidental. Taxes on top earners are the lowest in three generations. Yet their complaints about the prospect of an increase to a level that is still awfully low by recent historical standards is remarkable.

Given that this rise in wealth has been accompanied by an increase in the power of those at the top, is there any hope for achieving a more just society? Bizarrely, the self interest of the upper crust argues in favor of it. Profoundly unequal societies are bad for everyone, including the rich.

First, numerous studies have ascertained that more money does not make people happier beyond a threshold level that is not all that high. Once people have enough to pay for a reasonable level of expenses and build up a safety buffer, more money does not produce more happiness.

But even more important is that high levels of income inequality exert a toll on all, particularly on health. Would you trade a shorter lifespan for a much higher level of wealth? Most people would say no, yet that is precisely the effect that the redesigning of economic arrangements to serve the needs at the very top is producing. Highly unequal societies are unhealthy for their members, even members of the highest strata. Not only do these societies score worse on all sorts of indicators of social well-being, but they exert a toll even on the rich. Not only do the plutocrats have less fun, but a number of studies have found that income inequality lowers the life expectancy even of the rich. As Micheal Prowse explained in the Financial Times:

 

Those who would deny a link between health and inequality must first grapple with the following paradox. There is a strong relationship between income and health within countries. In any nation you will find that people on high incomes tend to live longer and have fewer chronic illnesses than people on low incomes.

Yet, if you look for differences between countries, the relationship between income and health largely disintegrates. Rich Americans, for instance, are healthier on average than poor Americans, as measured by life expectancy. But, although the US is a much richer country than, say, Greece, Americans on average have a lower life expectancy than Greeks. More income, it seems, gives you a health advantage with respect to your fellow citizens, but not with respect to people living in other countries….

Once a floor standard of living is attained, people tend to be healthier when three conditions hold: they are valued and respected by others; they feel ‘in control’ in their work and home lives; and they enjoy a dense network of social contacts. Economically unequal societies tend to do poorly in all three respects: they tend to be characterised by big status differences, by big differences in people’s sense of control and by low levels of civic participation….

Unequal societies, in other words, will remain unhealthy societies – and also unhappy societies – no matter how wealthy they become. Their advocates – those who see no reason whatever to curb ever-widening income differentials – have a lot of explaining to do.

 

It's easy to see how "big status differences" alone have an impact. The wider income differentials are, the less people mix across income lines, and the more opportunties there are for stratification within income groups. Thus a decline in income can easily put one in the position of suddenly not being able to participate fully or at all in one's former social cohort (what do you give up, the country club membership? the kids' private schools? the charities on which you give enough to be on special committees?). And lose enough of these activities that have a steep cost of entry but are part of your social life, and you lose a lot of your supposed friends. Making new friends over the age of 35 is not easy.

So a perceived threat to one's income is much more serious business to the well-off than it might seem to those on the other side of the looking glass. Loss of social position is a fraught business indeed.

Robert Frank has also pointed out that the issue is relative status. Changes that hit all members of a particular cohort more or less the same way does not disrupt the existing social order:

 

As psychologists have long known, individuals typically find belt-tightening painful. But recent psychological research suggests that if all in that group spent less in unison, their perceptions of their standard of living would remain essentially unchanged....

With less after-tax income, top earners also wouldn’t be able to spend as much on cars or their children’s weddings and coming-of-age parties. But why did they feel compelled to spend so much in the first place? In most cases, they simply wanted a car that felt spirited, or a celebration that seemed special. But concepts like “spirited” and “special” are inescapably relative: when others in your circle spend a lot, you must spend accordingly or else live with the disappointment that results from unmet expectations.

 

And the costs of living in more unequal societies extend beyond health, although that impact is particularly dramatic. If you look at broader indicators of social well being, you see the same finding: greater income inequality is associated with worse outcomes. From a presentation by Kate Pickett, Senior lecturer at the University of York and author of The Spirit Level, at the INET conference in 2010:

You might argue: Why do these results matter to rich people, who can live in gated compounds? If you've visited some rich areas in Latin America, particularly when times generally are bad, marksmen on the roofs of houses are a norm. Living in fear of your physical safety is not a pretty existence.

Japan, which made a conscious decision to impose the costs of its post bubble hangover on all members of society to preserve stability, has gotten through its lost two decades with remarkable grace. The US seems to be implementing the polar opposite playbook, and there are good reasons to think the outcome of this experiment will be ugly indeed.

Carr — “wellness warrior,” best-selling author, prominent green-juice lover, emerging force on the motivational circuit, a woman Oprah has called a “crazy sexy teacher”— said it’s easier here in Woodstock, where she lives. She said that sitting here, in the Garden Café on the Green, with Bob Dylan warbling through the speakers, she was sure that nobody cared who she was. She was being humble. In truth, Kris Carr could be no more famous anywhere else on the planet than in the orbit of Woodstock vegan cafes. This is changing quickly, however, as the self-described “healing junkie” looks to ascend to the rarefied air where health and pop culture and marketing all intersect, a realm where names like Dr. Oz and Andrew Weil currently reign.

Such an ascent might not be all that unusual if Carr were simply a sparkling and attractive 39-year-old, who looks as fresh as a blade of grass and who signs her e-mails “love & glitter & unicorns!” and “peace ’n’ veggies!” while also sharing stages with top Harvard doctors and Deepak Chopra. But in the case of Carr, the idea that everyone seems to want a little bit of what she has is frankly fascinating, because the thing she is most famous for having is cancer. She was given the diagnosis in 2003 and rose to prominence with a 2007 documentary called “Crazy Sexy Cancer.” She subsequently wrote two successful books — “Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips” and “Crazy Sexy Cancer Survivor” — about her peppy, pop-spiritual approach to her disease, and she soon became what she sometimes describes as a “cancerlebrity” or, at other times, a “cancer cowgirl.”

Now she has a blossoming business. At the cafe, she laid it all out while sipping a coconut-vanilla chai with soy. Her blog postings are being syndicated, she has pending sponsorship contracts, her weekend workshops are thriving and she has provided one-on-one coaching sessions on Skype ($250 for 90 minutes). She also just bought a farm — 16 acres complete with two houses, a barn, a meadow and a forest to get lost in.

Her next move, however, is her most audacious, as she looks to make the leap from “cancer person” to “total wellness” guru. Her third book, “Crazy Sexy Diet,” which came out in January, became her first New York Times best seller, and for the first time for Carr, the word “cancer” isn’t on the cover. She is also in the process of consolidating a couple of her various Web sites, including crazysexycancer.com, into one megasite under the name crazysexylife.

She regards all this as a natural progression. “I mean, what is health?” she asked me, her lashes fluttering over her chai. “Or sickness?” She sees her tumors as beauty marks and illness and health as two sides of the same coin. “And anyway, would you listen to some plain Jane who’s never been in the trenches tell you why you need to eat more kale? I don’t think you would.” She unraveled her ponytail. Her hot pink lock, what she calls her freak flag, fell over her collarbone. “That’s just not the world we are living in,” she said.

It’s safe to say that Kris Carr’s journey could not have existed at any other moment in history. Even 10 years ago, her cancer might well have been the end of her story, not the beginning. Carr was 31 when doctors diagnosed Stage 4 epithelioid hemangioendothelioma, a vascular sarcoma that had dotted her liver and lungs with tumors. This sarcoma is so rare that only 40 to 80 new cases are diagnosed in the United States each year. And it is only since the mid-’90s that American researchers have understood that this cancer generally presents in two ways: very aggressive, when an EHE patient can learn they have dozens of lesions after a visit to the doctor’s and be dead of rampaging tumors six weeks after the discovery, or extremely passive, when the growths, even vast constellations of them, can remain more or less dormant for long stretches. Carr’s turned out to be the latter sort.

Had her cancer been diagnosed only a handful of years earlier, says Dr. George Demetri, her oncologist at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a world leader in the study and treatment of rare sarcomas, chances are she would have been subjected to aggressive chemotherapy, probably to no benefit. Instead Carr received what at the time may have still seemed an experimental strategy for treatment: no treatment at all. They decided to keep it under medical surveillance, but otherwise, “it was, ‘Let’s let cancer make the first move,’ ” Carr says. “It was, ‘Go out and live your life.’ ” And she has since made that her message, one that’s suited to these times: not life in spite of cancer, but because of it.

Payment startup Jumio revealed a new technology Tuesday that turns a standard webcam into a secure credit card reader.

The technology, called Netswipe, uses secure video streaming to recognize and verify credit card information. Hold a credit card up to the camera, wait for it to initialize and then enter the 3-digit CVN number.

We think Jumio’s ideas are interesting, and for businesses that have a hard time with traditional payment processors or for consumers who are iffy about typing their credit card details into a form, this might be a solution.

 

SEE ALSO: How Mobile Payment Systems Are Redefining Commerce

 

We have to wonder though how much traction this idea will really have. Credit card readers were once built into computer keyboards and that trend never took off, partly because convincing businesses to adopt alternate payment technologies is difficult.

Still, for online purchases, this could be a better, potentially faster and safer way to make payments.

Photo by Douglas Lyle Thompson

On a sticky summer day in New York, I walk east on 29th Street. My destination: the Ace Hotel. As I pass the expansive windows of the John Dory--the mod oyster bar that's part of Ace's ecosystem--I notice Norah Jones at a window table, having lunch. This is the place. The bellboy on duty, who looks exactly like Keanu Reeves (circa Point Break), opens the hotel's weighty double doors, and I enter the cavernous but intimate lobby and find a seat. To my left, several well-coiffed thirty-somethings, speaking Italian, assemble camera equipment. To my right, at the long wood table outfitted with vintage library-carrel lamps, sit an array of people, earbuds in place, eyes glued to laptop screens. An intense young guy with the veiny hands of a strongman appears to be playing Japanese video games. Another dude logs on to the North Carolina Medical Board's website. At the dining table across the way, a gaggle of boisterous young women in sweater sets make calls and assemble mysterious packets from boxes of photocopies. Who are all these people and what are they doing here all day?

Turns out, they're at work. For a class of designers, academics, stylists, advertising execs, writers, and entrepreneurs, the Ace Hotel lobby is their collective workspace. By way of an obvious but unprecedented blend of haute hipster style (the lobby staircase features a Michael Anderson mural made of graffiti stickers, as well as a tribute to folk anthologist Harry Smith) and functionality (free Internet, unobtrusive staff ), the Ace is a model of the modern workplace in a borderless world. "It was a very natural evolution," says Ace cofounder Alex Calderwood of the hotel lobby's office-away-from-the-office vibe. "Ace is meant to have the feel of visiting with friends, so the experience you find here just depends on what you're into."

The city's other communal spots tend to be all work (chains like Starbucks) or all play (hip downtown cafes); the Ace is both. "People are getting a lot of work done here," says Shawndra (who prefers her last name not be used), one of several women working at the table on the eastern side of the lobby, from which they run NYC Clean Team, a luxury cleaning service. Back at the main communal table, an androgynous girl with the delicate complexion of someone who rarely sees the sun gets up to leave. "I'm a biomedical informatics professor," she says. "I come here to do research and get away from the students." As she packs up her stuff, a foxy mom in cropped acid-washed jeans and hoof like red-suede wedges strides through the lobby holding hands with her sundress-clad daughter. They are on their way to the in-house gift shop/boutique, run by the people behind fashion mecca Opening Ceremony and a travel specialty shop called No. 8a, where you can buy, among other things, Marvis toothpaste and the Criterion Collection edition of Tout Va Bien.

It's hard to say who came to the Ace first, the beautiful people or the creative cool kids. The New York outpost, the first East Coast location for the Portland, Oregon-based brand, nailed the proper tone immediately. The hotel had the right low-lit, casually arty look; the right vibe of easy exclusivity (no velvet rope required because no one unworthy would dare to enter); the right food (the Breslin, run by Spotted Pig gastro stars April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman, was the first eatery in the hotel); and the right scene. For a while, every after-party, celebrity-DJ gig, or fashion event seemed to be held here. This has all contributed to Ace achieving its signature balance between practicality and stylishness.

A few days later, after changing outfits three times in search of the perfect I'm-just-here-to-work look, I arrive in time for lunch. For the two girls across the table from me, this consists of Champagne and fries. I get to work. Sentences that seemed dull and uninspired this morning suddenly read raw but promising amid the Ace atmosphere. That's part of what's for sale here: the idea that just by showing up, whatever you are working on becomes more interesting. "The environment here is more or less a spontaneous organism striving for homeostasis," says Calderwood. "Our collaborators provide the good coffee, food, and cocktails that keep it moving. Other than that, it develops off of its own instincts." (He's right about the coffee: Portland-based farm-to-cup emporium Stumptown seems to caffeinate the air.)

Back at the communal table, I attempt to return to my writing, but, like every single guy here and most of the women, I'm distracted by the arrival of a pair of willowy girls who look like Urban Outfitters models dressed in platform clogs and silky rompers. One goes to get food from No. 7 Sub, the hotel's sandwich spot. The other sits alone, a fluffy white dog in her lap. There's a collective tension in the room: We're here to work, but, seriously, are all of these nerd boys too chicken to talk to her?

Library-style communal tables in the Ace Hotel lobby inspire both work and a bit of a brainy meat market during the day. | Photo by Douglas Lyle Thompson

The question goes unanswered, thanks to the appearance of an even more compelling guest, a tall, serene man with a long gray beard, wearing a white turban and caftan, who sits directly across from me. He methodically consumes a chocolate doughnut followed by a chocolate croissant, then proceeds to clip coupons. "I'm an appellate lawyer," he says, handing me his card, which lists his name as Hari Nam Singh Khalsa. "But I also travel around the world as a spiritual healer." I ask him about the coupons. "I get these Costco things," he says with a shrug.

Behind him, in the lounge area, a couple leaves their suitcases with the bellgirl (an Alexa Chung doppelganger), claims a pair of arm-chairs, and orders margaritas. In addition to drinking tequila in the middle of the day, Terri Hinton and Will Rogers also run businesses. Hinton founded Evolutionary Connections, a brand management and development company, and Rogers runs Visual Sapien, a design firm. Based in San Francisco, they're in town in part to attend a party for Gerard Senehi, who calls himself "the Experimentalist," one of the world's preeminent mind readers. "I was talking to this futurist last night who really freaked me out," Rogers says, telling me about these neuroscientists he met who are doing research on free will. Their basic conclusion? "It doesn't exist," he reports.

After downing their cocktails, the couple heads to the airport but leaves me with homework: investigate Moore's law and the singularity. When they're next in New York, we'll rendezvous--at the Ace, of course--and get started changing the world.

A version of this article appears in the September 2011 issue of Fast Company.

via fastcompany.com

Quick Pitch: Browse, order and pay for local goods and services from your smartphone.

Genius Idea: Letting mobile users skip in-store lines.

Just-launched startup Pago presents you with a convenient alternative to waiting in line at your favorite coffee joints and restaurants — skip the line and order via mobile app instead.

Pago launched Tuesday with apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry, and more than 50 venue partners in Mountain View. The Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas is also a venue partner.

“Pago is a lifestyle approach to commerce, inspired by the inefficiencies in daily transactions for both consumers and businesses,” says Leo Rocco, Founder and CEO of Pago. “From buying a morning coffee to picking up dry cleaning, we knew that commerce could be easier and more personalized.”

App users can locate participating coffee shops, salons, flower shops, dry cleaners and restaurants accepting Pago mobile orders, and then place and pay via the apps. They can also leave reviews, share recommendations through Facebook and Twitter, and send gifts to friends.

On the flip side, merchants in the Pago network can tap into their existing point of sale systems, get transaction data and store customer information. Participating businesses can also use Pago to push out deals and discounts, as well as reward customers for loyalty.

Mountain View’s Chamber of Commerce has bought into the startup’s mobile and local approach to commerce and will back Pago with its full support. The city says it’s shooting to have 75% of all of its merchants accepting payments via Pago by the end of the year.

Pago, a San Francisco-based startup, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding.

 

 

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Americans work too much. Herman Miller’s new Envelop Desk doesn’t pretend otherwise and is designed to make it comfortable to park in front of a computer for hours on end.

Americans work longer hours than people in most other developed countries. More than 10 million employees log 60-hour workweeks. Thirty-four percent of the workforce doesn’t take vacations. Barring dramatic shifts in the cultural and political landscape, Americans will continue to work themselves into the ground. So Herman Miller has unveiled a desk that -- while no month-long holiday in the French Riviera -- promises to make life a touch more tolerable for workaholics everywhere.

 

 

Envelop Desk has a flexible table top ergonomically designed to make it comfortable for people to park in front of a computer for hours on end (or as comfortable as that can be). Typically, when workers sit at a computer, they contort their bodies to ensure that their eyes stay focused on the monitor. Cricks, ungodly back pains, and the like inevitably result.

Envelop is meant to help your body adjust naturally with your eyes. The soft, molded urethane surface slides toward and away from you with a simple tug or push and tilts 7 degrees so that your laptop or computer always rests comfortably in your sightline. “When people slouch over their laptop, we call this the ‘turtle’ position and it’s very bad for your back,” says Herman Miller’s Wayne Baxter. “You want to get that laptop in a semi-reclined position so your reach and eyesight are the right distance from it, regardless of whether you're sitting or in a forward recline.”

In short, Envelop lets you move around in your chair, as you’re wont to do in the course of a grueling work day, without having to twist yourself into all kinds of awkward positions to keep your eyeballs on the screen.

Sounds great, but we worry about our papers (yes, we still have papers) slipping off the desk. Tables are parallel to the floor for a reason. “It's a slight 7 degree downward slope, so you can maintain a cup of coffee and papers on it as long as you're cautious,” Baxter assures. “Works fine with a wireless mouse. There is also a flat surface [behind the slope] to keep things horizontal.”

 

 

Envelop was conceived of to complement Herman Miller’s Embody Chair (Bill Stumpf and Jeff Weber designed the two together), though you can buy the desk as a standalone item for $960 here.

Yale economist Dean Karlan may be best known for starting Stickk.com, a site that aims to help you achieve personal goals by forming "commitment contracts" in which a liberal Democrat might be forced to forfeit $1,000 to the Tea Party, let's say, if he or she falls off the wagon. But Karlan has amassed weightier accomplishments as the protegee of pioneering development economist Esther Duflo, who I write about in this month's Life in Beta column. Like Duflo's Poverty Action Lab at MIT, Karlan's Innovations for Poverty Action is dedicated to evaluating various poverty interventions using randomized controlled trials: the rigorous, scientific gold standard, like a doctor conducting trials of a new drug. His new book More Than Good Intentions--written with Jacob Appel--is full of surprising insights on what really works to fight global poverty. It's also full of funny, human stories about the people that Appel and Karlan have met around the world in the course of this research.

FAST COMPANY: Your book and Esther Duflo's book Poor Economics came out at almost exactly the same time and have often been reviewed together. How are the books different?

DEAN KARLAN: I think their book is more academic--aimed at the Guns, Germs and Steel audience. Our book is much more for the retail donor, who wants to know how I can make a difference with my $50 or $100. 

Your studies often get at some surprising relationships, like the fact that deworming schoolchildren has a better impact on school attendance than providing uniforms or paying teachers more, for example. (On IPA's site, you can donate to the Proven Impact Fund, supporting the deworming program and others that have been shown to make a real difference.)

The real thing we’re hoping to do with the data is create better actions, so we don’t just act on compassion.

That's why we called the book, More Than Good Intentions.

It's interesting that you talk about compassion. In many instances, you're exposing seeming irrationalities: the fact that farmers can't be convinced to buy drought insurance, or that they run out of money to buy fertilizer even though the return would be huge. Won't reading about these self-destructive behaviors among the poor actually make the average donor lose his or her patience?

Sure, if one wanted to be a hardass you could look at someone in moneylender debt, for example, and say they obviously chose this at some point. But the minute you understand that in your own life you’re not perfect, you have a little more sympathy for how people get stuck in bad decisions. So we then look at how do can guide them into better decisions--in household finances, for example, we're looking at creating incentives to save more.

Get Satisfaction was born out of Valleyschwag, a lark of an idea for distributing grab bags of leftover promotional goodies.

While initially designed to be a fun and frivolous side project, a surprising number of people signed up for the service, and the proprietors found themselves awash in thousands of customer-service requests. To their amazement, they weren't able to find a suitable, inexpensive, online tool to host their community of customers. So they built one.

The friendly online environment they created encouraged people to answer each others' questions, pitch in to help solve problems, and share all kinds of new ideas about how to improve their product and processes.

via getsatisfaction.com

New technology lets smartphones unlock hotel, office and house doors and open garages and even car doors.  

It’s a not-too-distant cousin of the technology that allows key fobs to remotely unlock automobiles or key cards to be waved beside electronic pads at office entrances. What’s new is that it is on the device more people are using as the Swiss Army knife of electronics — in equal parts phone, memo pad, stereo, map, GPS unit, camera and game machine.

The phone simply sends a signal through the Internet and a converter box to a deadbolt or door knob. Other systems use internal company networks, like General Motors’ OnStar system, to unlock car doors.

Because nearly everyone has a cellphone, a number of start-ups, lock companies and carmakers are betting on broad acceptance of the technology. 

Schlage, a major lock maker, markets a system that lets homeowners use their mobile phones to unlock their doors from miles away, and manage their home heating and air-conditioning, lights and security cameras. Customers buy locks that are controlled by wireless radio signals sent from an Internet-connected box in their home.

Recently, Dwight Gibson, vice president for connected home solutions at Ingersoll Rand, Schlage’s parent, said that he used the system to let a friend into his house while he was sitting at his desk at work. “She thought it was magic,” he said.

Daimler-Benz now has it on its Mercedes.  Zipcar, the car sharing service, has a mobile phone app that allows customers to unlock their car doors by pressing a button on their phone screen that looks like a lock. They have used it 250,000 times since it was introduced two years ago. 

In October, General Motors introduced an app that lets owners of most 2011 G.M. models lock and unlock the doors and start the engine remotely. It allows car owners to warm up the engine on a frigid day or fire up the air-conditioning on a hot one from the comfort of their office cubicle, said Timothy Nixon, who oversees “infotainment” products for the automaker. “In the winter, when my wife and I went to dinner and the check came, I pulled out my phone and started the car,” he said. “By the time we got to it, it was toasty and warm.”

Other times, Mr. Nixon has landed after a flight and used his phone to double-check that he had locked his car door at his departure airport.

But having a phone double for entry or ignition does not yet feel fail-safe. “You don’t want a dead phone battery and discover you can’t go anywhere,” Mr. Nixon said.

It’s unlikely you’d hide a spare phone under a rock or in the bushes. (Though a homeowner may want to stash a physical house key outside in case the home Internet connection goes down.)

Another sticking point is that the technology remains fairly cumbersome by requiring users to push buttons on their phone to establish a connection with a system in the car or house.

Mobile phone industry analysts say that process will get easier with the emergence of a technology called near field communications, or N.F.C. It allows a phone to be waved like a magnetic card near a device that can capture the signal and click open a door.

N.F.C is now in only a handful of phones, but manufacturers should ship around 550 million N.F.C. phones in 2015, according to IHS iSuppli, a technology consulting firm. Rajeev Chand, head of research for Rutberg & Company, a boutique investment bank that focuses on emerging companies and technology in the mobile phone industry, said keys might seem like outdated technology in a few years. “Keys are not going away, but they will become an arcane thing.” 

In an eight-month trial that ended last month using N.F.C technology, visitors to the Clarion Hotel in Stockholm were invited to use their phones to gain access to their rooms.  

Front pockets and purses are slowly being emptied of one of civilization’s most basic and enduring tools: the key. It’s being swallowed by the cellphone.

Minneapolis was named the country's number one city for biking last year by Bicycling magazine, but the city's bike community isn't resting on its laurels. Looking to make Minneapolis even more welcoming to cyclists, local entrepreneurs recently opened the city's first self-service bicycle repair kiosk, to serve the flat tubes and busted gears of the thousands of cyclists who travel Minneapolis's bike paths each week.

The kiosk, called Bike Fixtation, offers basic bike tools, a repair stand, and a vending machine full of useful goodies, including tubes, lights, patch kits, and snacks. For their first station, founders Alex Anderson and Chad Debaker chose a location along the city's bicycle superhighway, the Midtown Greenway. The crowning achievement of the city's pro-biking initiative, the Greenway is a cyclist's dream with 5.5 miles of bike-only trails reclaimed from an outmoded railroad corridor. The repair center will be open 18 hours a day, 365 days a year, and a second location is already in the works. 

Projects like Bike Fixtation drive home the point that for bike culture to truly blossom on a large scale, city dwellers need more than just the occasional bike shop, they need a true commitment to biking infrastructure. Bike lanes and greenways are an important first step in making cities more bikeable. But just like car-culture has fostered a urban landscape of ubiquitous gas stations and service stations, bike culture will need more projects like Bike Fixtation to truly flourish.

Story via Treehugger

Today in win-win situations: Not only has the bicycle industry recovered from the recession—bikes sales were up 15 percent in 2010 from the previous year—but it creates new jobs as well! A new University of Massachusetts study shows that bicycle lanes create 46 percent more jobs than car-only road projects. The study examined 58 infrastructure projects in 11 states, and found out that cycling projects create a total of 11.4 local jobs for each $1 million spent, while road-only projects generate just 7.8 jobs per $1 million.

Congress is having trouble ponying up any funding for projects that create jobs, but Bicycle Times points out that there's already about $225 million in federal funding under the banners of "Transportation Enhancements," "Safe Routes To School" and "Recreational Trails Program." That's more than 2,500 jobs. All we have to do is maintain the same amount of funding in order for jobs to be created at this rate, although there are proposals on the table to double this funding.

It's always a breath of fresh air, so to speak, to see sustainability and money line up. Now let's do what we can to advocate for some extra bike cash from our elected officials.

via good.is

A top Secret Service official ended up spilling details about federal anti-hacker strategy at a relatively obscure federal hearing in Alabama. In testimony given to the House Committee on Financial Services, assistant director Alvin T. Smith revealed just how involved the Secret Service is in federal investigations into cybercrime ... and told some extremely cool stories in the process.

Smith was a witness at a field hearing called, simply, “Hacked Off: Helping Law Enforcement Protect Private Financial Information.”

At the naughtily named hearing, Smith detailed how the Secret Service has infiltrated underground websites (including both hacker and cyberfraud sites) and bulletin boards. A 2008 investigation into criminals who stole credit and debit card numbers from Dave & Buster's, OfficeMax, Sports Authority, and Barnes & Noble customers was largely accomplished thanks to accounts by undercover feds on illegal websites.

Undercover Secret Service agents then, with the assistance of Turkish and other international investigators, traced the sale of stolen American credit card numbers to Russia and Eastern Europe.

While The Guardian has previously revealed that the Secret Service has infiltrated hacker websites, this is one of the first times a federal official has spoken on the record about the extent of law enforcement penetration.

But pride of place in the presentation went to the elaborate methods that the Secret Service used to nab alleged credit card data thief “BadB,” aka Russian national Vladislav Horohorin. “BadB” was arrested in France in 2009 on charges related to the CarderPlanet website, which sold more than $9 million worth of stolen credit card numbers to criminals around the world.

Smith referred to Horohorin not by name, but as “one of the world's most notorious traffickers of stolen financial information.” His testimony also unveils how the Secret Service simultaneously embeds itself with cyberfraud investigators across the federal spectrum and works with international law enforcement:

The suspect is alleged to have created the first fully automated online store for selling stolen credit card data. Working with our international law enforcement partners, the suspect was identified and apprehended as he was boarding an international flight to Russia. Both the Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section and the Office of International Affairs of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice played critical roles in this apprehension. This type of cooperation is crucial if law enforcement is to be successful in disrupting and dismantling criminal organizations involved in cybercrime.

In testimony, Smith also detailed how the Secret Service teamed up with Dutch law enforcement services to track a series of cyberattacks in 2010. This cyberattacks included everything from brute force attacks to sophisticated spearphishing attacks aimed at specific users.

Most importantly, the Secret Service has been embedding agents and staff at almost all levels of the federal government. The Secret Service has thoroughly melded handling of what they call “cyber” investigations with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other government agencies. Secret Service agents are assigned on detail to (among others) the DHS' National Cyber Security and Office of Infrastructure Protection Divisions, DHS' Science and Technology Directorate, every individual FBI joint terrorism task force, the FBI's National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, the Treasury Department's Terrorist Finance and Financial Crime and Financial Crime Enforcement Network sections, the DEA's Special Operations Division, the Department of Justice's International Organized Crime division, the CIA, EUROPOL and INTERPOL.

The hearing was held at the Secret Service's National Computer Forensics Institute in Hoover, AL, which offers courses on everything from mobile device data recovery to intelligence/evidence gathering via social media to local law enforcement nationwide.[Image: Flickr user mdfriendofhillary]

For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Email Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, here.

Correction: An earlier version of this story erroneously reported the nature of the 2010 cyberattacks mentioned in the hearing. Fast Company regrets the error.

In an industry littered with excess packaging, it sounds like an impossible goal: in.gredients, a startup out of Austin, Texas, wants to create the first zero-waste, packaging-free grocery store in the U.S.. Can this ever work?

When it launches later this year, in.gredients won't be in competition with your local Safeway; it won't even offer the same selection. You'll be able to find produce, grains, baking supplies, oils, dairy, meat, beer, wine, and household cleaners--but no Twinkies, Doritos, or other unhealthy snack foods that could also be found at your local corner store. In.gredients claims that it will carry "all the basic ingredients you need for life (and most recipes)."

"Most will perceive our competition as supermarkets, since we're literally revising what grocery shopping looks like. But really, our competition is hyper-consumerism, which is just not sustainable long-term," explains Brian Nunnery of in.gredients in an email to Fast Company. "If we were competing with supermarkets, we'd be setting up shop across the street from one. Instead, we're targeting areas where folks don't have easy access to good food--and are forced to buy unhealthy food out of convenience.".

But here's the thing: it's often the eco-conscious consumers who live in areas with plentiful fresh food that bring their own bags to the grocery store. How is in.gredients going to convince its customers to do the same? The company will offer compostable packaging inside the store, but customers in food deserts may at first still be uncomfortable with the idea of bulk foods, which can be intimidating to the uninitiated (just try scooping and tagging those grains as fast as you can while impatient customers wait behind you).

The company also admits that it's not entirely free of packaging--items that require minimal protection for food safety reasons will get recyclable, compostable, or reusable packaging. "We want to make good food accessible to our community," says Nunnery.

In any case, in.gredients may not actually the first packaging-free grocery store when it launches; Simply Bulk Market in Colorado already offers a packaging-free selection of bulk items. But in.gredients is open to franchising opportunities (and to food deserts), which means it could come to a city near you if it succeeds in Austin.

Diet soda is not, it turns out, a panacea for overeating. But it's not just because ordering a burger, fries, and a diet soda means you're still consuming too many calories; it's because diet soda itself may increase your waistline.

The news comes from a University of Texas study that examined data from 474 participants in the San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Aging, a continuing study of elderly Mexican and European Americans. The result: Diet soda drinkers saw a 70% increase in waist circumference compared with non-drinkers over the course of a decade. People who drank more than two diet sodas a day saw a staggering 500% greater waist circumference compared to non-drinkers.

Part of the problem may be traced back to aspartame, the artificial sweetener used in many diet sodas. According to a study from other researchers at the university, heavy exposure to aspartame may directly increase blood glucose levels, leading to an increase in diabetes risk. "Artificial sweeteners could have the effect of triggering appetite but unlike regular sugars they don't deliver something that will squelch the appetite," explained Sharon Fowler, an obesity researcher who co-authored both studies, in an interview with the Daily Mail. (If this sounds familiar, here's why.)

So what's the solution? Cut down on your soda intake--both diet and regular. And while you're at it, stop driving so much and exercise more at your job. Or get your employer to join Keas, where you'll get rewards, instead of just being scolded.

Related: Your Mom Is Why You're Fat

Also Related: Gilded Grub: Burger Shoppe's $175 Burger

HBO Connect directs viewers back to the network -- and away from Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter profiles are, to a degree, reflections of who you are -- from the friends you choose to the topics you follow. Likewise, what you watch on TV represents personal choices: Are you a Dexter fanatic? Maybe more of a cerebral The Wire person? Regardless of the show that defines you, there’s usually a gap between your level of passion about a show or character and your ability to express that passion through social media habits. Currently, the best you can do is talk your partner’s ear off or “like” a show. Enter HBO Connect.

HBO and many of its premium-content rivals know what they’ve got: great content. Just ask Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who’s been dangling verbal carrots to get HBO shows on Netflix on Demand. HBO’s programming naturally generates conversations about plot, characters, actors, and so on. HBO could have taken the conventional route of placing a Facebook feed on its main site, showing viewers which of their friends “like” a show. It could have depended entirely on their audiences’ HBO-generated conversations outside of HBO.com -- not a bad approach per se. Instead, it opted to take its audiences’ passions for content and characters and aggregate them in one useful place.

 

 

[The word cloud at the bottom of the page shows clickable subjects, which brings up Twitter conversations around it]

HBO Connect is a solid attempt to direct interaction and conversation to HBO’s site -- and away from independent social networks -- without losing the benefits of content affinity and personal connection. HBO didn’t alienate social media audiences; it worked on their terms. Taken further, audiences can interact with actors on HBO Connect and have those exchanges published to external communities at the same time for others to see.

The site's true potential reveals itself in Feeds and Conversations.

The true potential of HBO Connect reveals itself in the Feeds and Conversations features of the site. The Feeds area is designed around one’s favorite show (in my case, TrueBlood) but provides a simple layout of the social land by pulling pertinent content from Twitter (real-time), YouTube, and Facebook without being obnoxious about it. HBO designed the Live feed simply and elegantly, but the aggregation of live feed data has been done before (even newspapers experimented with the idea during elections). It’s the Conversations area that really starts to show the power of audience development on the audiences’ terms.

I’m a huge Wendell Pierce fan. From his work on Sleepers (yes, I liked Sleepers) to The Wire, I’ve always enjoyed his acting. Do I like him enough to connect to with him on a social network? Maybe not. Yet HBO is providing me an exclusive capability to participate in a live chat with him. Again, live chats have been around a long time. But by combining the social network strengths in the Feeds section of the site with HBO’s ability to have me crave more content (the Conversations area of the site), I might revisit Connect to read the aggregated comments. I’ll do that knowing that HBO filtered the conversation for me in a clean design, rather than using social-network searches and filters.

From HBO’s perspective. it can’t hurt that I’ve “liked” Wendell Pierce and participated in the live chat (or even visited HBO Connect to read it) as a result of one of my friends doing the same thing. And if I choose to read via Twitter or Facebook, who cares! HBO is doing what it does best -- generating conversations around its content regardless of where those conversations take place. Connect is one more tool to generate some talk and guide it. There’s more development to be done, but this is certainly an interesting start!

[Top image: A still from Game of Thrones, of the first shows which HBO used to promote HBO Go, via exclusive preview episodes]