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Fusion Radar: January 29, 2014

January 28th, 2014 - by marissa - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.

“The Ostrich Problem” and The Danger of Not Tracking Your Progress

This 99U article describes a problem we’ve all dealt with: undermining our own goals by fearing and avoiding feedback. (“The Ostrich Problem” is the name psychologists gave to this phenomenon.) The article linked below explores a bit of the psychology behind this habit and gives some suggestions on how you can overcome it.

The Ostrich Problem

Phabricator

Phabricator is a collection of open-source web applications that can help you build better software. These applications include Differential, which can simplify code review; Maniphest, which keeps track of bugs; Herald, which notifies you when important changes are made by other members of your team; and many others.

Phabricator

StickNFind

StickNFind Stickers are coin-sized devices that you place on items you tend to lose; you can then recover these items by using Bluetooth 4.0 to track the stickers. Although there are similar products out there (StickR TrackR and Tile come to mind), StickNFind is already available for purchase and use, and sends notifications to your phone when the stickers are out of its range.

StickNFind

Smart Thermostats

Nest, which we’ve covered before, was recently acquired by Google. In light of some of the privacy concerns that have cropped up since then, a few companies have stepped forward with potential open-source alternatives. For example, Spark (which currently sells the Spark Core, a tiny Wi-Fi development board) wrote a post detailing their own attempts at making a  basic “smart” thermostat — a feat which they claim took them a single day and just $70.

Smart Thermostats

MotaWord

MotaWord is a cloud-based collaborative translation service that uses human translators (as opposed to something like Google Translate) to produce translations that are cheap, fast, and accurate. It also allows clients to monitor project progress and quality in real time, a unique feature in the translation industry.

MotaWord

2013: The Year in Kickstarter

We’ve talked about Kickstarter projects a few dozen times in the past year alone, so their year in review didn’t hold many surprises for us. However, even if you aren’t very familiar with Kickstarter, this review is still fascinating and inspiring.

2013: The Year in Kickstarter

Velocity

Velocity is an iOS app that allows users to speed read by showing them just one word at a time. You can speed up or slow down the words flashing past on the screen, and the app allows you to read articles from Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability, plus any text or word documents.

Velocity

Eyes on the Road

Eyes on the Road is an app designed to cut down on distracted driving. It does this by turning off your notifications once it senses you’re driving 12mph or more and automatically sending “Away” messages to anyone who texts you. It also gamifies safe driving by allowing you to earn points for the miles you travel while the app is turned on.

Eyes on the Road

Hacking OKCupid

Chris McKinlay is a PhD student and mathematician who wasn’t having much luck finding love online. Nine months of actively looking for love interests on OKCupid had yielded just 6 dates; so, he decided to try applying mathematics to the problem. He used Python scripts to riffle through about 20,000 OKCupid female profiles, sorted them into different clusters, and optimized his profile for the cluster he was most interested in. Just a year later, he and one of his matches are engaged.

Hacking OKCupid

Fixed

Fixed is an iOS app that claims to help users fight parking tickets. Users just take and upload a photo of their ticket, and then the team at Fixed takes over. They help you contest the ticket and if you win, they charge 25% of the original parking fine for their efforts. If you lose, you pay nothing (except the parking ticket, of course).

Fixed

Fusion Radar: January 22, 2014

January 22nd, 2014 - by Objective - Salt Lake City, Utah

A Brief Primer on Public-Key Cryptography

Security and encryption are getting a lot of press-time lately, thanks to some high-profile data breaches and some less-than-comforting revelations about how the NSA is accessing Americans’ data. So, at Agency Fusion’s team meeting this week it seemed pertinent to do a quick review of public-key cryptography, one of the core technologies underlying secure online communications.

Archaic, simple methods of encrypting messages (such as a decoder ring) use the exact same formula to encrypt every message. For example, shifting all letters of the alphabet by one (a=b, b=c, etc) will always require than an “a” in the original message is represented as a “b” in the encrypted message. Once the encryption method is discovered, all messages can be decrypted. The code has been cracked and is no longer secure.

Advanced encryption approaches, on the other hand, rely on the use of a secret “key” in addition to the encryption method. Keys are usually very-long, randomly-generated numbers which ensure that a message is scrambled in a unique, unpredictable way. Knowing the encryption method alone doesn’t mean you can decrypt the message because the key made sure the resulting message was encrypted in an unpredictable manner (unpredictable without knowing the key).

Public-key cryptography involves two keys: a public key and a private key. These keys are used in combination to encrypt and decrypt messages, respectively. A public key is truly public as its name implies. Anyone can know this key and it isn’t important who has the public key. The private key, on the other hand, is very secret and must never be shared.

Let’s use an example: Assume I want to send you a secret message. To do this, I would use your public key to encrypt a message which I would then send to you. Because I encrypted the message with your public key, only your corresponding private key (which you’re keeping very secure) can decrypt my secret message. You’re the only one who can decrypt and read my secret message. Others may also know your public key, but your public key cannot be used to decrypt my secret message, so our communication is still secure. When one key is used to encrypt, the other key must be used to decrypt. Since I used your public key to encrypt, your public key won’t work for decryption.

If you want to reply to my message securely, you’ll follow the same steps and encrypt a message using my public key which then ensures that only I can decrypt the message using my private key.

Would I ever want to encrypt a message using my own private key? Yes. This can be useful in a scenario where I want to send a public message that can be verified to be truly from me and not from some impostor. I would encrypt the message, send or publish the message, and then anyone who wished to verify the authenticity of the message could use my public key (which is publicly available, remember?) to decrypt the message and be assured I am the sender. In this scenario I’m not trying to keep the message a secret, I’m using the keys for the purpose of assuring identity.

This last scenario illustrates, in part, the importance of SSL certificates for websites. A full explanation is beyond the scope of this brief post, but public-key cryptography allows you to be confident that the website you’re about to purchase from really is Amazon.com and not some impostor. Amazon pays a third-party to verify that Amazon really is Amazon and then this third-party (called a Certificate Authority) issues Amazon a pair of keys for secure communication. When you type https://www.amazon.com in your browser, you’re able to communicate with confidence because your browser knows that the Certificate Authority is trustworthy and has issued the keys to Amazon and only Amazon.

So, how easy is it to decrypt a message without having access to the appropriate key?

Public-key cryptography uses key-lengths (the keys are random numbers, remember?) that are usually 1024 or 2048 bits long; in other words, it’s an enormous 307- or 617-digit number. For the sake of comparison, the number of water molecules in the Atlantic Ocean has just 41 digits. Attempting to correctly guess a key in order to decrypt a message with this level of encryption could take about six quadrillion (6,000,000,000,000,000) years.

Fusion Radar: January 15, 2014

January 14th, 2014 - by marissa - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.

Clever

Clever is an API designed to assist schools with integrating their software and all the online tools they use into one simple system. Companies with a focus on online education – including programs like online grading tools, web-based classes and tutoring, digital textbook delivery, and teacher training programs – partner with Clever; so when schools integrate Clever into their systems, they also get dozens of online educational tools at their fingertips.

Clever

Pizza Pie Charts

Pizza is an easy-to-use plugin that helps you build clean, responsive pie charts. Because its main goal was to be super simple, Pizza skips over using JavaScript objects in favor of easy integration via HTML markup and CSS. However, users can still pass JavaScript objects to Pizza if they want to use that option.

Pizza Pie Charts

Trigger.io

Trigger.io is a development framework designed to enable users to create native mobile apps for multiple platforms from a single codebase. It seems reasonably priced, and has valuable features like cross-platform portability, multi-OS app gallery distribution, and the ability to engage native power and UI. We’ve not yet been impressed with tools like this so hopefully Trigger delivers better on the promise of creating cross-platform native apps.

Trigger.io

Storyful Newswire

There were a handful of stories in 2013 about “internet hoaxes.” And a lot of those hoaxes fooled not just the public, but reputable news outlets as well. This is the problem Storyful’s Newswire tool is designed to fix. Media organizations hire Storyful to research and provide them with source information and solid facts behind popular online content. They can then use this information to find and interview sources and further explore the validity of the content.

Storyful Newswire

ColorHexa

ColorHexa is an online tool that provides you with all the information you’d ever want to know about any given HEX color. For example, clicking on a random green color produced information like the hex (#47e53a), RGB and CMYK values, along with a color description (Bright lime green), and swatches of complementary, triadic, analogous, and tetradic colors. And all that is just part of the information ColorHexa provides in a simple, clean format for hundreds of HEX colors.

ColorHexa

The Dialect Map Quiz

A few months ago, we talked about Joshua Katz’ dialect map of the USA. It looks like a few editors from the New York Times drew inspiration from his studies, because this interesting – and often quite accurate – Dialect Quiz based on Katz’ work has been gaining popularity online lately.

The Dialect Map Quiz

UI Names & Faces

Here are two great resources for web designers. Instead of pulling random images off of Facebook, or coming up blank while you’re making up test user names, you can go to UI Faces and UI Names, which offer you those things for free. UI Faces in particular offers a wide variety of social network icon photos in a variety of sizes and shapes (square vs. circle).

UI Names and UI Faces

Find photos and graphics

This SiteBuilderReport article has a handful of other resources graphic designers can use in their work. It includes sites where you can find things like copyright-free photos, thousands of consistently-designed icons, and even free or inexpensive designs, textures, and patterns.

Find photos and graphics

Too Many Social Networks

The real title of this ReadWrite article is, “Are There Too Many Social Networks?” And judging by the article’s main points and the majority of the comments below the article, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Selena Larson, the article’s author, first discusses the booming growth of social networks. There are new social networks popping up all over the place, like Jelly, the Forbes social network (called Stream), and so many others. Larson also examines the possible causes of this social network explosion (the saturation of mobile is a likely culprit) and what we can do to consolidate.

Too Many Social Networks

Intel’s Make It Wearable

Intel recently introduced what they call the Intel Edison development board. It has some nice specs, including an Intel Quark processor with two cores and integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth all encapsulated in an SD card-sized board. However, it seems that the minds at Intel aren’t quite sure what to do with it, which could be why they’re having a Make It Wearable contest. Intel wants to see what innovators and engineers can do with small, powerful technology and the motivation of recognition and a few thousand dollars.

Intel’s Make It Wearable

The Question You Aren’t Asking (But Should Be)

January 9th, 2014 - by Brett Derricott - Salt Lake City, Utah

It’s not uncommon for prospective clients to tell us they’re looking for a new agency because the last one let them down. The reasons vary, but not by much:

  • The agency didn’t hit deadlines
  • The client wasn’t happy with the creative
  • The cost far exceeded the promised price
  • The technology developed didn’t meet the client’s needs

Each of these could be (and at some point may be) the topic of its own article, but collectively these reasons all boil down to missed expectations. At Agency Fusion we’ve learned to avoid missed expectations by following a principle. I wish I could say we understood this principle beginning day one (2003) but in truth it’s a principle we’ve learned through experience. The (somewhat wordy) principle is this: The degree to which success is clearly defined at the outset of a project determines the degree to which success can be expected at completion.

Most agencies are experienced enough to spend some time in discovery or planning at the beginning of a project. They’ll ask the client questions to try to make sure the scope of work is clear and that the specific deliverables are defined. The client happily answers these questions and tries to communicate their need clearly. There is an abundance of communication at this stage which feels very productive and reassuring. This is when it’s fun to say, “Great! Let’s get to work!” But the most important thing, success itself, is rarely well-defined.

Deliverables get defined but deliverables don’t guarantee success. Schedules are created but schedules, even when met, don’t guarantee success. Plans and strategies and scopes, although critical, don’t guarantee success either. Success is influenced by planning, scopes, and schedules but success should not be assumed to be the automatic outcome of even the best planning. Success is its own thing, independent of the rest.

At the beginning of the project the client usually communicates in terms of deliverables: I need a website. I want a logo. I’d like a mobile app. The agency responds with great questions to clarify that deliverable, such “What will the app do?” or “Which mobile platforms will your app need to support?” All of these many questions are critical on the path to having a shared understanding of the scope of the project. They must be asked. But there is one final question that rarely gets asked: How will we both know if this project is a success? Or a variation: When this project is complete, we want you to be happy. What do we need to do to make sure that happens?

Whether it’s been articulated or not, the client has some kind of “success measuring stick” in mind. They’re envisioning some outcome or expecting some result and the agency takes an enormous risk to begin the project without knowing how that client will define success. Asking this one additional question will go a long way toward making sure every project ends with a happy client who is eager to refer others. And from the agency’s perspective…that’s the ultimate success.