Curt Long

Curt Long

This teen, who attempted suicide seven times, builds apps that saved her life and others

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On average, there are 123 suicides per day in the United States. If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK. USA TODAY

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Sitting alone in a lifeguard tower watching the sun sink below the horizon, Amanda Southworth had a decision to make.

This Los Angeles teen, gripped by depression and anxiety, could continue on as she had, not eating, addicted to painkillers and attempting repeatedly to kill herself, or she could grab a lifeline and use her love of coding to save her own life and others.

On that chilly summer evening in 2015, she hatched the idea for AnxietyHelper, a mobile app that offers the resources she herself needed and embarked on a journey of healing and recovery that has led to a career in the tech world.

“I can honestly say that technology has saved my life,” Southworth said. She says she hasn’t harmed herself or attempted suicide since. “When I found something greater than myself, I realized that I am not just a person with a life. I am a person who has something to contribute.”

Now 16, she has dropped out of high school and last month started her own company — but not the way most young technology entrepreneurs do. Astra Labs is a software nonprofit funded by donors and a $25,000 grant from the TOMS Social Entrepreneurship Fund. She spoke to USA TODAY from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California, on Friday.

Southworth’s commitment to creating mobile apps and other software that help others was reinforced this week. The deaths of designer Kate Spade and chef and television host Anthony Bourdain were grim reminders of the toll of suicide, the 10th-leading cause of death in the United States and one of three that is increasing, particularly for teens.

The suicide rate for white children and teens ages 10 to 17 rose 70 percent between 2006 and 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although black children and teens kill themselves less often than white youth do, the rate of increase was higher, 77 percent.

Southworth estimates she has been mentally ill for more than half her life. She says she attempted suicide at least seven times.

The bottom fell out when, as a nerdy kid, she moved to a new town for middle school, where she had no friends and felt like an outsider. Southworth used to send her future self emails that reflected her feelings of isolation and worthlessness: “I hope you’re not alive to get this email.” She daydreamed at school about killing herself. She’d wake up in the morning and cry that she was still alive.

More: Anthony Bourdain highlights the rising suicide rate among middle-aged adults

More: Suicide warning signs: Here’s what to look for when someone needs help

More: ‘We’re so extremely busy:’ More calling suicide prevention hotlines since celebrity deaths

More: A friend’s Facebook, Instagram post may be a suicide warning sign. Here’s what to do next

What saved her: a sixth-grade robotics club in 2011, which introduced her to the possibilities of technology and inspired her to soak up knowledge about web development and artificial intelligence from the internet and textbooks.

Her first app, AnxietyHelper, a mental health resource guide, debuted in the app store in September 2015 duringherninth-grade Latin class. Her excited classmates downloaded it, and she finished the day with 18 users. Even that small achievement gave her belief in her own power and a sense of purpose, Southworth says.

“I was always very destructive toward myself. Coding is the opposite. It’s about creating. It’s about taking different characters on a keyboard and transforming them into something bigger than you,” she said.

In May 2017, she launched a mobile app called Verena for the LGBTQ community after friends were bullied in the tense political climate around the presidential election. Verena, which means protector in German, locates hospitals, shelters and police stations and users can create a list of contacts to be alerted in an emergency.

“Everything in my life has shown me that both good and bad things in this world will continue to happen and that’s out of our control. But it’s what we do with the things that happen to us that can make all of the difference,” she said in a TedX talk last November in Pasadena, California. “My name is Amanda Southworth, I’m 15 years old, a junior in high school and I’m still alive.”

Building apps relieves stress and helps her cope and problem solve, she says. And helping others has helped her heal herself.

“The more I work, the more I do what I love, the better I feel,” she said.

Until she started Astra Labs, Southworth bootstrapped her apps, working random tech jobs. The apps are free, and she runs no ads and does not collect user data. “My core philosophy is that people should not have to pay for something if their life would be ended without it,” she said.

Three more apps are in the works: one to help turn handwritten class notes into study guides and practice tests, another to help people follow political and social issues they care about and a third that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help those with schizophrenia determine when they are experiencing hallucinations.

People come up to Southworth and say: Your app stopped me from killing myself. One user told her the app helped her after a rape. A facilitator at a tech summit confided that if her friend had had the Verena app, that person might still be alive.

Stories of suicide, like that of Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington, whose music helped Southworth through dark passages in her life, still haunt her.

“Maybe if I worked a little harder on this,” she said. “I could have gotten help to him or to someone else thinking about suicide.”

Follow USA TODAY senior technology writer Jessica Guynn on Twitter @jguynn

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Motorola Moto G6 Review: Affordable Excellence

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In my time writing about tech, I’ve spent untold hours using expensive smartphones. You know, the really nice ones that can sometimes cost upwards of a grand these days. For your money, you’ll get metal and glass components that feel and look great, eye-popping cameras, brilliant screens…the works.

But, after spending a weekend in Nashville with the $250 Motorola Moto G6, I began to wonder why anyone would pay more than that for a phone. That’s not to say that I haven’t felt the effects of Motorola’s penny pinching—I have. But are those momentary bouts of frustration balanced out by the low, low price? That’s a good question and, well, it depends.

A Blast of Glass

I don’t remember an edict coming out that all phones must come covered in fragile glass, but since the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy phones began coating themselves in the latest Gorilla Glass, every phone maker has followed them into the shimmer of Shatter City. And so the Moto G6 has a similar polished metal frame and glass back (curved up on the sides) that’s currently en vogue.

The G6 is comfortable to hold and doesn’t slip out of your hand (or slide off the table) too badly, but all the negative qualities of glass are here. Motorola is using Gorilla Glass 3, which is a few years older than version 5 that you’ll find on high-end phones, which means it’s not as durable if it takes a tumble. It does a decent job repelling fingerprints, but if you’re like me, you’ll notice them anyway. Bottom line, you’ll want to invest in a good case for this phone.

On the front is another 2018 design trend. Motorola (owned by Lenovo) kept the G6’s dimensions about the same, but stretched the screen real estate vertically to make it taller—cramming the fingerprint sensor below and crowding the selfie camera and sensors up top. There’s no unneeded notch cutout on the screen, but the net result is more screen space. The 5.7-inch LCD is HD (2,160 x 1,080 pixels), which is more than adequate, and hardly distinguishable from premium, expensive phone screens.

There are a few other perks, too. Moto has added USB-C quick charging, which complements the 3,000mAh battery that’ll probably last you a little more than a day per charge, depending on your use. It also packs in a 3.5mm headphone jack and a MicroSD slot for more file storage (MicroSD cards have gotten quite affordable). The MicroSD slot lets Moto get away with equipping it with only 32 GB of storage, which isn’t much these days. The G6 even has some protection against water, touting a “nano-coating” that’s supposed to keep the phone dry. It’s not up to the IP67 standard of pricier devices, but it’s better than nothing.

Rounding out the internals are 3 GB of RAM and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 processor, which delivers consistent enough performance for most apps, but isn’t the best choice for intensive 3D gaming. It’s a few years behind the performance of top-notch 2018 phones in our benchmark tests.

Plan Your Shots

My Moto G6 hasn’t had any major slow spells. Like the Moto X4, it’s always a tick slower than the most expensive phones on the market. Not a tick tock—just a tick, and its consistency makes the difference. Unless you’re taking photos.

The 12-megapixel rear camera on the G6 has an f/1.8 aperture, and even included a second 5-megapixel rear camera for “Portrait mode” and a few other features that blur the background and mess with depth-of-field effects. Like a lot of Android phones, none of these extra features work particularly well, but the main camera and 8-megapixel selfie cam do take decent photos in auto mode—just be sure to stand still and give the camera a little extra time.

Nashville, I learned, is known as the “Athens of the South” and is so proud of that Greek connection that it has a complete replica of the Parthenon, which looks amazing on a sunny day. Below are some shots I took around town.

The camera app was a full second behind my shutter button presses, at times. The lag meant I missed shots of many crazy people doing weird things on the streets of Nashville (seriously—this place is nuts!). It was particularly hard to nail a good, sharp shot in a moving car, and as the sun went down and the Honky Tonk bars lit up, I did wish I had a slightly better camera that could capture the lights or streets without blowing out one or the other. I did manage to take some beautiful outdoor photos during the day. My indoor shots were far more hit or miss, especially in more dimly lit bars and concert halls.

These problems aren’t, by any means, unique to the Moto G6. Many affordable phones have slower cameras that just can’t handle tricky lighting conditions very well, but the shutter lag is something Motorola needs to work on.

Some (not all) fancier phones would have delivered crisper photos, faster and more reliably. But they wouldn’t have been leagues better. At the end of the trip, I still have a camera roll full of fantastic memories.

Gotta Love These Gestures

Despite such a cheap price, Motorola has packed Google’s new Android Oreo (8.0) operating system into the G6. My unit was still running the March 2018 monthly security patch in June and hadn’t gotten the 8.1 update. Hopefully Motorola will keep up with updates as the year proceeds.

The G6 interface mostly looks like Google’s standard Android OS, but the Moto Actions app is still present. It has a bunch of gestures and other small, harmless little add-ons that you can enable if you like. I love Moto’s one-handed gestures for turning on the flashlight (move the phone up and down like you’re using an axe) and camera (twist the phone a few times). The one-handed, screenless Android navigation is fun, too. It lets you swipe left on the fingerprint sensor for Back and swipe right on it for the Recent Apps menu. It saves a hair of screen space by hiding the on-screen button bar so why not give it a try?

Fly Like a G6

The Moto G6 camera leaves much to be desired, and it’s not the speediest phone around, but it does behave consistently, which is important. For $250 this is, as most Moto Gs are, an excellent, affordable phone—in fact, probably the best Android phone you can buy in its price bracket. The Moto G6 won’t survive a swim, but it can handle an accidental dunk, and it has a headphone jack, which is more than I can say about many Android phones that cost hundreds more. Plus, it’s compatible with your current carrier or, if you want to make the leap to Google Fi, it can do that too.

Seriously, this phone is right in the sweet spot. It’s hard for me to recommend a cheaper, weaker device than this in good conscience. If you want to splurge on a killer deal, the OnePlus 6 is a $530 option that’s as powerful as anything on the market.

The Moto G6 isn’t flashy because it’s kind of above all that nonsense. It’s for the smart, frugal tech buyer that values their experience as much as their dollars.

Meater Wireless Meat Thermometer Review: A Recipe for Mediocrity

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On paper, it’s pretty slick, but I had some reservations. Most notably, there are no physical controls or a base station with temperature readouts à la the Smoke or iGrill 2. While some people don’t mind that connected kitchen devices pass things like controls and readouts entirely to the app, I can’t stand it. App connectivity and embellishments should be a perk, not a requirement for a thermometer’s basic functions; If I’m out back grilling, I want to concentrate on what I’m cooking and/or have a beer with friends, not fiddle around with, or be distracted by, my phone.

That said, I started testing the Meater and it worked pretty well! I made thick pork chops and they came off the grill with that perfect pinkness in the center. The estimated time remaining displayed on the app was pretty helpful, and the app can guide you to pull the meat off just a bit earlier than you might otherwise, allowing the built-up heat in the cut to bring the internal temperature to the finish line, aka “carryover cooking.” My brother-in-law Ben was impressed by those features and as someone who’s used to temperature probes at the end of cables, I liked how maneuverable the meat was without them. Like the iGrill 2 and the Smoke Gateway, the time-temperature charts Meater’s app created were helpful in understanding what was happening as I cooked.

While my ThermoWorks probe can withstand temperatures from -58 to 572 degrees Fahrenheit, the Meater is much more fragile.

Things went a little sideways, though, when I tried to make brisket. I didn’t have all day—a time commitment many briskets require—but I found a lovely-sounding recipe that called for a wet roast in the style of Michael Ruhlman’s fantastic Thanksgiving turkey. Here, the Meater was of limited use. It was able to monitor only the internal temperature as this brisket cooks under a foil wrap, meaning the temperature under the foil wasn’t representative of the oven temperature. I just ignored the ambient sensor reading.

Cooking this recipe brought up two issues. First, I got a warning message at 209 degrees Fahrenheit saying that the internal temperature of the brisket was “above safe level” and that I should “remove from heat immediately to avoid damaging the product.”

Wait…”safe level” for the meat or for the Meater? Which “product?” Brisket in this style is a long, slow cook that can get hotter than 200 degrees Fahrenheit, perhaps not ideally, but it’s not out of the question, particularly if you’re waiting for the tougher sections of the brisket to become fork tender.

While my ThermoWorks probe can withstand temperatures from -58 to 572 degrees Fahrenheit, the Meater is much more fragile.

I double-checked with a company rep, asking if the internal probe might break if exposed to temperatures over 212 degrees for more than 10 minutes.

“Correct,” came the response.

Yikes. That’s horribly restricting over the life of a thermometer. At some point, you’re going to mess up, and 212 degrees is an awfully low bar.

Making this meal also showed how restrictive it is to have the ambient probe attached to (and right next to) the internal probe. At first glance, it seemed exceedingly clever—two probes in one!—but in practice the arrangement requires a lot of workarounds.

The Meater team has apparently run into a version of this problem too, referring in its FAQs to the “cool air bubble” around larger pieces of meat in an oven or on the grill. In short, the meat you’re cooking is cooler than the oven it’s cooking in, creating a “bubble” of cool air around it. With a separate probe, this isn’t a problem, but for the Meater—especially for larger cuts with more thermal mass—you’ve gotta figure out probe placement that gets to the core of the meat, but keeps the ambient temperature sensor the recommended two inches from the food.

Plus, if I’m going to use a probe of some sort to tell me the temperature inside my oven or grill, I want to know that information before I put my meat in it; Meater doesn’t offer that possibility.

Fuss! Fuss! Fuss! Undaunted, I cooked a boneless leg of lamb on my grill. I used the low-and-slow method, cooking it over indirect heat until the internal temperature came up to a little past rare, then pulled it off the heat, cranked the grill, let the grates get screaming hot, then seared the meat’s exterior. The process worked pretty well as long as I didn’t stray too far—12 feet and a wall were too far for Meater’s Bluetooth, but the ThermoWorks Smoke’s radio remote had no trouble with this. The lamb was fantastic.

Since we’re here, let’s keep talking about the connection. To connect the app to the probe, you use Bluetooth—which is pretty slick considering how tiny the setup is. If you want a little more range and bought a single probe model (its only product currently on the market), Meater suggests connecting through the cloud by using a second smart device, which you would then leave near your grill or oven. Good grief! Or you could wait for the release of the $269 Meater Block with its four probes and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth options. (Considering the Meater’s delay-laden production history, though, you may wish to hold off until the Block is officially on the market.)

Did you keep up with all that connection stuff? It’s a lot to hold in your head. Still sure wireless-ness is that important?

4 Weekend Tech Deals for Father’s Day Gifts

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Father’s Day is coming up soon! While we’ve handpicked eighteen great gifts for the dad-ly figure in your life, we’ve also worked with our friends at TechBargains to find great deals on other gift-worthy gadgets that we adore. Does your traveling dad need a compact iPad? We’ve got you covered! Or does he want the best robot vacuum that can be had for love or money? We’ve got you there, too. Happy shopping!

$200 Off The Best Robot Vacuum Ever

The iRobot Roomba 980 is our favorite robot vacuum. It’s fast and effective; it has iRobot’s Dirt Detect system, and a rubber roller that doesn’t collect fuzz nuggets. It’s also unbelievably expensive, and never on sale, except now.

Snap up the iRobot Roomba 980 for a mere $699 (was $899).

Three Other Great Tech Deals

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.

At Festival of the Impossible, Artists Augment Reality to Tell Fresh Stories

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Walking into the new art exhibit centered around augmented reality and virtual reality storytelling, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the alternate dimensions that had been built.

The exhibit, Festival of the Impossible, is showing at Minnesota Street Project galleries in San Francisco, California, through this weekend. The show features new works by artists breaking boundaries in these relatively new digital mediums.

Learning that the artists were given these VR and AR platforms to stage their concepts made me believe the creations were meant to show off the hardware and software innovations, and to demonstrate the potential of the new tech. After experiencing each artists’ work, however, I realized the creations were not just technology demos, but that they gave the artists a chance to express their own ingenuity with technology in a way that’s never been this easy, nor this real.

Step Inside

Each artist in the exhibit gets their own open space where the audience can wander into their imagination. Some artists told stories on iPads using augmented reality, with the screen showing the view through the camera transformed, in one case, to show the room on fire or drenched in rain.

In another artist’s space, I pointed the iPad’s camera at small, 3-D printed beds. The view in AR showed Sims-like figures sleeping with their realistic dreams playing out above them. Some dreamed of giant spiders; others, the nightmare of a computer that won’t stop buffering.

Some of the artists made their work more personal. Judit Navratil used AR to revisit her childhood home through a video that incorporated her deepest memories, including talks with her grandmother. With just about every installation, it would have been easy (and fascinating) to spend way too much time exploring every detail.

New World, New Tools

Every time a new technological medium comes along, the art world asks: How can we use this for storytelling? The art world will adapt to these new mediums, but someone has to test the waters first.

That’s where Adobe comes in. Just this week, Adobe, in partnership with Apple and Pixar, launched the augmented reality authoring tool Project Aero. This new piece of multi-platform software is intended to let designers and developers create AR experiences in a simple, standardized environment. Project Aero integrates with tools with which creators are already familiar, such as Adobe Photoshop CC and the 3-D design tool Adobe Dimension CC. Project Aero aims to give people of different backgrounds and disciplines the freedoms to bring others into their worlds through AR, telling stories and presenting ideas in a fresh way.

Adobe is a sponsor of Festival of the Impossible, and the event coincides with the launch of the new software and with Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which happened this week in San Jose, California.

This box sucks pure water out of dry desert air

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For many of us, clean, drinkable water comes right out of the tap. But for billions it’s not that simple, and all over the world researchers are looking into ways to fix that. Today brings work from Berkeley, where a team is working on a water-harvesting apparatus that requires no power and can produce water even in the dry air of the desert. Hey, if a cactus can do it, why can’t we?

While there are numerous methods for collecting water from the air, many require power or parts that need to be replaced; what professor Omar Yaghi has developed needs neither.

The secret isn’t some clever solar concentrator or low-friction fan — it’s all about the materials. Yaghi is a chemist, and has created what’s called a metal-organic framework, or MOF, that’s eager both to absorb and release water.

It’s essentially a powder made of tiny crystals in which water molecules get caught as the temperature decreases. Then, when the temperature increases again, the water is released into the air again.

Yaghi demonstrated the process on a small scale last year, but now he and his team have published the results of a larger field test producing real-world amounts of water.

They put together a box about two feet per side with a layer of MOF on top that sits exposed to the air. Every night the temperature drops and the humidity rises, and water is trapped inside the MOF; in the morning, the sun’s heat drives the water from the powder, and it condenses on the box’s sides, kept cool by a sort of hat. The result of a night’s work: 3 ounces of water per pound of MOF used.

That’s not much more than a few sips, but improvements are already on the way. Currently the MOF uses zicronium, but an aluminum-based MOF, already being tested in the lab, will cost 99 percent less and produce twice as much water.

With the new powder and a handful of boxes, a person’s drinking needs are met without using any power or consumable material. Add a mechanism that harvests and stores the water and you’ve got yourself an off-grid potable water solution.

“There is nothing like this,” Yaghi explained in a Berkeley news release. “It operates at ambient temperature with ambient sunlight, and with no additional energy input you can collect water in the desert. The aluminum MOF is making this practical for water production, because it is cheap.”

He says there are already commercial products in development. More tests, with mechanical improvements and including the new MOF, are planned for the hottest months of the summer.

Gadget Lab Podcast: Apple’s WWDC Was About Using iPhone Less, and Also More

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Apple’s annual developers conference was this week, so naturally, our podcast conversation this week had to be about Tim Cook’s new Memoji.

Not really: We talked about all the things we can expect to see when iOS 12 comes to iPhones this fall, why Apple decided to launch “digital wellness” features, how walkie-talkie on the Apple Watch could make it more useful, and what iOS apps on Mac mean. Will Apple ever make a touchscreen laptop? Right now, the company says no…but it has a history of saying “no” before it goes and makes that exact thing.

Podcast

Some notes: You can read all about the top news announcements out of WWDC here. Also, Arielle (who is on vacation the next two weeks) wrote about the paradox of Apple’s “screen time” efforts, while Lauren had the exclusive interview with Apple software chief Craig Federighi about how iOS apps will port to the Mac. Also mentioned in this podcast was the new Sonos Beam; check out our deep dive into the product’s development.

Recommendations this week: We didn’t have time to talk about smart speakers nearly as much as we wanted to this week, but we still had music on the brain: Mike’s recommendation this week is LIVE Quadrophonic, a 180-gram vinyl pressing of Suzanne Ciani’s 30-minute live electronic music performance. (Mike warns that it’s both abstract, and totally worth it.) Lauren thanks you in advance for indulging her in her shamelessly promotional recommendation of her brother Gerald’s new album, Rocket Ship.

Send the Gadget Lab hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds. Lauren Goode is @laurengoode, and Michael Calore is @snackfight, and Arielle Pardes is @pardesoteric. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. Our theme song is by Solar Keys.

How to Listen

You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.

If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Play Music app just by tapping here. You can also download an app like Pocket Casts or Radio Public, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.

We’re also on Soundcloud, and every episode gets posted to wired.com as soon as it’s released. If you still can’t figure it out, or there’s another platform you use that we’re not on, let us know.

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Behind the Scenes With the Stanford Laptop Orchestra

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The Stanford Laptop Orchestra meets to rehearse every Wednesday night in the spring from 7:30 to 10:30 pm (The late hours are a remnant of Wang’s night-owl habits as a graduate student.) It’s a for-credit course at Stanford—Music 128, cross-listed in the computer science department as CS 170—but getting in isn’t easy. The group of 15 students includes those with computer science credentials, and those with more traditional music backgrounds, but neither is enough to become a great laptop orchestra player. The most important thing is curiosity. “We’re unified by this interest to make music together with computers,” says Wang, “and to figure out what that means.”

Wang likes to call SLOrk a kitchen of sound. “We can go to a restaurant, order delicious food, and enjoy that,” he says. “But there’s a special joy in going back into the kitchen with raw ingredients and being able to concoct your own dish. The process of making—and eating—your own creation carries with it its own satisfaction.”

Every orchestra member gets a MacBook, propped up on an Ikea breakfast tray, with a meditation pillow beside it.

In the ten years that SLOrk has existed, it’s composed over 200 original works and created almost as many new instruments. Most of these works have little in common, but they all start with the same set-up: Every orchestra member gets a MacBook, propped up on an Ikea breakfast tray, with a meditation pillow beside it. The laptop connects to a homespun hemispherical speaker, made by adding car speaker drivers and high-efficiency amplifiers to Ikea salad bowls. (From far away, they look a bit like Minions.) Wang created the speakers during the first year of SLOrk, with an aim to add an acoustic element to an otherwise machine-heavy ensemble. “We want the computer instruments to seem more like acoustic instruments where the sound isn’t coming from a PA system around you but from the artifact itself,” he says. While the MacBooks and cables have been replaced a few times, the hemispherical speakers are the same ones SLOrk used ten years ago.

Every station also includes a GameTrak, a game controller with a retractable cable. GameTraks were originally used in golf simulation video games, where they could turn someone’s virtual golf swing into data points. It was a commercial flop, but computer music researchers immediately saw the appeal. “We bought no less than 100 of them at massively discounted prices,” says Wang.

The Stanford Laptop Orchestra uses a range of noise-makers, from game controllers and physical instruments to, yes, laptops.

Ge Wang

Kimberly Juarez-Rico gets tuneful.

Ge Wang

The device maps movement in three-dimensional space. For a laptop orchestra, that means turning fluid movement into sound value. “It opens up the infinite space of human music, and the dancelike qualities of musical performance,” says Matt Wright, a longtime SLOrkian and one of the orchestra’s instructors. “You can put one in someone’s hands and say, ‘Here. Make an instrument out of this.'”

In past performances the ensemble has used GameTraks to operate video-games that translate into melodic compositions, or finger-plucked the cable like a traditional string instrument. One composition in SLOrk’s upcoming show introduces a new instrument, created by hanging GameTraks upside down on a beam and weighting them with various wooden blocks. Performers push them like swings on a playground to create the song. The performance is wildly playful, like watching kids on a playground discover the delightful sounds of their own laughter for the first time.

One student used a face-tracking program called FaceOSC to turn facial movements into sound.

During the SLOrk term, each student creates their own instruments, composes their own scores, and performs them with the class. There are virtually no rules, other than the limits of imagination and programmability. One student, Kunwoo Kim, used a face-tracking program called FaceOSC to turn facial movements into sound. He and fellow SLOrk member Avery Bick stared into their laptop web cams while opening their eyes wide, or raising their eyebrows, or stretching their mouth to scream, to control the pitch and tempo of the face-tracking instrument.

“Using a face as a controller was a very interesting concept for us,” he says. “We wanted to deliver a human message that uses human parameters.”

Kim came to Stanford after earning a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and a master’s in electrical engineering. He joined CCRMA because he wanted an interdisciplinary program that would let him continue engineering while also studying music; when he heard about SLOrk, he figured he’d give it a shot.

“I had no idea what was going on,” he says about his first day in the orchestra.

Soon, though, things started to click—and Kim found something in SLOrk that he’d never found before in his engineering coursework. The point of SLOrk isn’t to have a direction. It’s to find a direction.

“The engineering that I have been doing was about solving problems,” says Kim. “But in SLOrk, there’s no problem to solve. We try to cover more of the sentimental side of human beings. And I think that’s very interesting. You’re actually trying to say something about humanity through the computers.”

How to Watch the 2018 FIFA World Cup

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The FIFA World Cup is the biggest event for the most popular sport in the entire world. According to FIFA and Kantar Media, almost half of all people who are alive tuned in at home to watch at least a minute of one match of 2014’s World Cup in Brazil. Over one billion people watched the final game.

The 2018 World Cup will take place in Russia, and many of the matches will be easy to watch in the United States (if you live on the east coast, at least). Here’s our guide to catching as many of the beautiful games as possible.

What Is It, Anyway?

The World Cup is a soccer tournament where national teams compete for the world title. Each country that qualifies to participate is organized into different groups, which ascend through brackets by winning matches. This starts on June 14 and goes for a month, with the final on Sunday, July 15. This year, the United States failed to qualify, as did Italy, the Netherlands, and Chile.

But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of drama. For example, the tiny nation of Iceland is making its World Cup debut—and against none other than the team led by superstar Lionel Messi, playing for his final chance to bring the Copa del Mundo back home to Argentina. Suspense!

When Does the World Cup Start?

The first match is between Russia and Saudi Arabia on Thursday, June 14 and takes place in Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium. Kickoff is at 11 am EST (8 am PST).

Russia is an enormous country, and matches will take place in far-flung stadiums in Sochi, St. Petersburg, and Ekaterinburg, among others. If you want to watch a particular team, look up their group schedule. Find the match schedule, which channels are streaming which match, and input calendar reminders here, or find scores on FIFA’s website.

During the group stage, matches will be taking place between 6 am EST (3 am PST) and 3 pm EST (noon PST). Some of the early match-ups that you might want to make room for on your schedule include:

  • Iceland’s debut against Argentina on Saturday, June 16 at 9 am EST (6 am EST)
  • Germany, the returning champs, facing off against Mexico on Sunday, June 17 at 11 am EST (8 am PST)
  • England’s fearless and unbelievably young striker Marcus Rashford in the first game against Tunisia on Monday, June 18 at 2 pm EST (11 am EST).

If you live on the west coast, you’d better have a DVR. Or you may have to resign yourself to watching a few game highlights after the fact, since only deranged people will drag themselves out of bed to watch France vs Australia at 3 am PST.

What Streaming Service Do I Use?

For English speakers in the United States, Fox Sports has exclusive broadcasting rights and will be showing every game. If your soccer-viewing would feel incomplete without an announcer yelling “GOOOOOOOL!”, Telemundo and NBC Universo have your back.

First, you need a streaming service that shows these channels. DirecTV Now might be the easiest and cheapest one. The “Live a Little” bundle includes both FS1 and Telemundo, and right now the company is offering a free 7-day trial period, or $25 off for the first three months. (It will go up to $35 after that). DirecTV Now also offers an app for iOS and Android devices, and you can stream the games online at DirecTVNow.com.

If you’re not interested in the Spanish-language games, SlingTV carries Fox Sports and FS1 in the Sling Blue package. Sling is also currently offering a free 7-day trial period. If you think you might want to stick with a streaming service after the World Cup, Sling Blue offers 45+ channels and is cheaper than DirecTV at $25 per month. Sling also makes apps for iOS and Android devices.

You might also want to consider FuboTV. Its base package offers 85 channels for $45 month and includes FS1 and Universo. There are iOS and Android apps too. More services to consider: YouTubeTV carries Fox Sports, FS1, and Universo for $40 per month; Hulu Live TV, which carries the Fox channels for $40 per month; and Playstation Vue, which carries FS1 for $40 per month.

If you really don’t want to pay anyone any money, you can wait until July to use one of the 7-day free trials to stream the final game for free.

What Device Do I Use?

After you subscribe to one of these services, log in to the Fox Sports app on your streaming device. We love the Roku Ultra, but Amazon’s Fire TV and Apple TV also support these services. If you don’t immediately see the game you were looking for, don’t panic. Check the schedule, since some games will be streaming on a different Fox channel. All of the games should be available on FoxSports.com and the Fox Sports GO app.

If you decide to stream from your phone, it will be easier to watch on your television with a $35 Google Chromecast. True cheapskates—and I salute you—will avoid paying for any service whatsoever with a digital antenna, like this one, which will let you watch Fox games over the air.

You also don’t have to watch all the games to enjoy the experience of the World Cup. There will be endless articles, recaps, and analysis. Our personal recommendation for podcasts is Al Jazeera’s Game of Our Lives, which examines soccer through the various lenses of politics, economics, and cinema, with guests like Werner Herzog.

Finally, I have one last suggestion: Check to see if your local bars, restaurants, or movie theaters are planning on playing games during business hours. If there’s anything more fun than watching soccer, it’s watching soccer with fifty of your new best friends, while drinking beer at 11 am. Just a thought.

Update 10:00 am June 8, 2018: Fox Sports will also be partnering with LiveLike to offer a streaming VR experience through their Fox Sports VR app (available for iOS and Android devices). Watch the games in a virtual in-stadium suite, and switch on social VR to “sit” with either your Facebook friends or viewing partners picked at random (you can also switch this feature off). Users will also have access to pre-produced 360-degree features and watch previously-recorded tournament moments.

Father’s Day Gifts: 18 Awesome Gift Ideas for the Dad in Your Life

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New Chips From AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm Make PCs Exciting Again

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Personal computers have not elicited many thrills of late. They’ve gotten cheaper, sure, and a little faster. But despite some wild promises the gap between the actual and the possible has remained expansive. This week, it narrowed significantly.

PCs that work on smartphone parts. Devices that run all day, but for real this time. A 32-core hellbeast processor. The first GPU shrunk down to a 7nm process. Always-connected 5G laptops. And while not a PC, the ASUS ROG put vapor cooling in gaming-focused smartphone. (Vapor cooling. In a smartphone.) This was the bounty of Computex, the Taiwan trade show that serves as the cradle of innovation for what goes inside your gear.

Not all of these innovations will wind up in consumer-facing devices, at least not for a while. Not all of them are strictly necessary for the majority of the computer-using masses. But if you’ve grown tired of waiting for the future to become the present, this week, the industry pressed the fast-forward button.

Souped Up

Let’s start with the near-term, and work outward from there. Qualcomm, for years the king of (non-iPhone) mobile processors, set up shop in Windows PCs last December, pushing the convergence Google has already pushed heavily in its Chromebook line. The premise: all the productivity of a laptop, with the battery life and connectivity of a smartphone.

That first effort used a Snapdragon 835 chip, the same you’ll find top-tier smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S8. Its successor, the Snapdragon 850, is strictly for laptops. You still won’t want to edit video on a so-called Always Connected PC, and it’s not going to do you any favors playing PUBG. But it’s a new enough platform that the gains between each generation are potentially transformative, rather than iterative. The Snapdragon 850 promises a 30 percent systemwide performance jump over the 835, triple the AI performance, and up to 25 hours of continuous-use battery life.

Keep your grains of salt handy, especially over battery life claims, which are notoriously juiced industry-wide. But by optimizing for Windows 10 specifically, the 850 potentially gives PC makers the key to a viable everything machine, feather-light laptops that work anywhere, any time, for as long as you need it to. And they’re coming this year.

“It’s a big deal. The future of all notebooks is going to be like this,” says Patrick Moorhead, CEO of Moor Insights & Strategy. “They’re always going to be connected, and you’re truly going to be able to use them the entire day, regardless of what you’re doing, without having to bring a power cord with you.”

If connectivity and efficiency don’t rev your engine, fear not: AMD has you covered. Its Threadripper CPU line may sound like it was named after a dainty Victorian serial killer, but its next-generation release includes a variant that packs in 32 cores and 64 threads. For the uninitiated: That is very, very many cores and threads. Contextually, Intel made a huge splash last May—with a chipset that had half as many.

“Particularly in workloads like video editing, doubling the amount of cores is almost linear. What would have taken you a half an hour to edit or recode a 4K or 8K video now takes 15 minutes,” says Moorhead. “Workstations, creative-type applications. Any type of rendering is where you’ll see the real-world benefits. Wherever you see the hourglass today.”

In fact, think of Threadripper 2 the way you might a tricked-out auto-show reveal, there more to demonstrate what’s possible than for you to actually buy. (To be clear, you can buy it, sometime in the next few months, for a yet-unspecified price.) But it’s got plenty of appeal, even on possibility alone.

“In the past, I’ve built my own PCs from various components. I would seek out the best processor, the best GPU I could get. A 32-core PC processor sounds like really cool stuff to me,” says Shane Rau, who leads semiconductor research at IDC. Rau cautions that his enthusiasm isn’t an endorsement, especially given that Threadripper 2’s actual performance remains to be seen.

Still, it’s progress! Real, near-term progress. And that’s before you even get to what’s coming a little further out on the horizon.

Far and Away

The most directly impactful development out of Computex this year may ultimately come from Intel. It had chip announcements both whimsical—the limited edition Core i7-8086K is Intel’s fastest yet, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the x86 chip architecture that redefined personal computing—and aggressive, teasing a CPU with 28 cores. But look, instead, at Intel’s purported display breakthrough, which claims to halve the amount of battery used by a laptop screen.

“Being able to tackle what is one of the big power consumption aspects on your average laptop or mobile device, the technology pieces that Intel’s put into doing some very dramatic power reduction in display is I think going to have the biggest near-term impact,” says Eric Hanselman, chief analyst at 451 Research.

Intel Low Power Display Technology is classic trade show sizzle, promise of performance without much detail to back it up. It comes in the form of a 1-watt display, manufactured in partnership with Sharp and Innolux, and Intel pegs the overall battery life gains at up to eight hours. That’s about as much information as you’ll get for now; an Intel spokesperson described it as more of a prototype than a ready product. But let that temper your expectations, not deplete them. Your screen is a battery-sucking vampire. How wonderful that someone’s even attempting to fashion such a sharp stake.

(Let it be noted here that Intel also showed off a dual-display, clamshell computer this week, in case you’re into that sort of thing. It gets demoted to a parenthetical because of how many manufacturers have tried and spectacularly failed to make that work over the last five or six years. But godspeed!)

And then there’s arguably the real star of the show, an AMD prototype of the first-ever GPU built on a 7nm process. Unlike some of the other blockbuster announcements out of Taipei this week, this one won’t make its way to your computer any time soon. It’ll find a home in data centers, helping AI and machine learning compute at blistering speeds, using a lot less energy to do so.

That means the gains won’t be as flashy or as visible as those from other corners. It’s still a big honking deal. “The jump from 12nm to 7nm is going to be significant,” says Hanselman. “7nm means that they ought to be able to save on significant power savings in terms of compute capacity. It’s a big potential step.”

It’s big, too, that AMD is the the company that took it. After years of lagging behind, it’s now throwing down some gauntlets of its own.

“We’re back to this familiar sense of competition,” says IDC’s Rau. “These companies are producing better and faster, more cost-competitive products that I think bode well for the PC.”

And perhaps more importantly, for those who buy them, whether they need an all-day, always connected device or a hair-singeing powerhouse. It’s too early to know what they next generation of PCs will look like, or how they’ll incorporate all these new toys. But at least on the inside, they’re already brimming with potential.

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Blue bins overflow with Amazon and Walmart boxes. But we're actually recycling less

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The convenience of e-commerce is great, but the environmental effects could be devastating. USA TODAY

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SAN FRANCISCO – Walk down the street on garbage day in many towns, and evidence of our love affair with online shopping is plain to see. Recycling bins overflow with boxes from Amazon, eBay, Walmart and others.

All those folded and flattened corrugated cardboard boxes are a testament to Americans’ diligent recycling efforts — to a degree.

A USA TODAY analysis of several industry studies on cardboard use and recycling paint a different picture.Americans are sending more corrugated cardboard to the landfill than to recycling plants compared to past years.

Online sales have surged in the past five years, and cardboard use jumped 8% in the same period, according to the American Forest & Paper Association. Yet cardboard recycling has dropped.

Last year, 300,000 fewer tons of corrugated containers were recycled in the USA than in the year before, even as domestic consumption increased 3.5%, according to the AF&PA.

Without enough cardboard sent to recycling centers to be used to create new boxes, manufacturers may need more timber. Recycled content and timber each make up about half of what’s in a corrugated box.

“We need those boxes to come back. The alternative is trees,” said Bill Moore of Moore & Associates, a paper recycling industry consultant in Atlanta.

From the box-store baler to your curb

For all our efforts to flatten, pile and stuff boxes into recycling bins, consumers aren’t that good at recycling cardboard. For years, they didn’t have to be.

Many of the cardboard shipping boxes used to go to retail stores. Workers at your local Kmart, Sears or Target would load the flattened boxes into a machine that bound them into bales that the stores could resell for $74 or more a ton. Groceries and big-box stores recycled 90% to 100% of their cardboard, Moore estimated.

“Grocery and retail stores have been fantastic partners for us,” said Rachel Kenyon, vice president of the Fibre Box Association.

Consumers aren’t as efficient at it. About 40% of Americans either don’t have access to or don’t sign up for curbside recycling, said Betsy Dorn, director of RSE USA, a sustainable-packaging consulting firm in Orlando.

Of those who do, few actually recycle all their cardboard, mostly because it’s a hassle. The city of Charlotte asks residents to tear or cut cardboard into small pieces that fit loosely into recycling carts and tells people not to fold it.

Nationally, consumers send back 25% of their cardboard for reuse, Dorn estimated. “If you have to cut your cardboard up because it’s too big, who’s going to do that?” she said.

China — a big buyer of U.S. corrugated boxes — is becoming pickier about what it buys. It will no longer accept bales of cardboard that are contaminated, say a pizza box with a piece of pizza in it.

“China has stopped buying, and the recyclers in the United States can’t find enough buyers, so some of that goes to landfill. And that’s not eco-friendly at all,” said Hannah Zhao, a senior economist who follows global recovered-paper markets for RISI, a forestry and paper products consulting firm based in Bedford, Mass.

Garbage companies are just beginning to react.

In San Francisco, the waste management company Recology is giving customers new 64-gallon bins to replace the 32-gallon containers because of the increased volume of cardboard. Regular garbage cans shrank by half, to 16 gallons.

Last year, the company raised rates 14%, in part to deal with the rapid shift in what residents lug to the curb. Counties in Oregon and Michigan, along with El Paso, Largo, Fla., and Attleboro, Mass., have considered rate increases.

Even in the new, bigger bins, the cardboard doesn’t always fit, a common discouragement to household recycling.

Children’s book author Emma Bland Smith said she tries to keep mail and online orders at a minimum to keep down waste. Even so, she sometimes has to store paper for a week to wait for space in her recycling bin.

Her block has worked out an informal space-sharing arrangement. “We have an understanding with neighbors that you can use someone else’s bin if theirs is not full,” she said.

Online shopping’s ripple effect

Cardboard box recycling took a turn for the worse during the holiday shopping season in 2016. Usually, waste paper collection centers are flooded with cardboard after Christmas. In January 2017, they didn’t get more. They got less.

That period was a turning point for retail America, when the explosion in online shopping spurred by Amazon’s free two-day shipping for Prime members and aggressive strategies by rivals such as Walmart and Target set off wave after wave of retail store closures. Shuttered J.C. Penneys, Sears and Kmarts meant those stores stopped recycling cardboard boxes, which were in the hands of households.

Online retailers are dealing with the problem. Ten years ago, Amazon introduced 100% recyclable packing, so products can ship in their original packaging and don’t need to be put in a second box for shipping. That reduced the number of boxes by 500 million over the decade.

Walmart increased its number of box sizes from 11 to 27, to use the least amount of cardboard to get something to the customer.

Those moves haven’t help improve recycling rates. The problem is expected to become more urgent. E-commerce will make up 25% of all retail sales by 2025, according to ABI Research, suggesting even more boxes could go from doorstep to trash.

In the short term, recycling industry experts said, manufacturers could change the production process, for example, by going to dedicated production lines that supply e-tailers only in the Amazon ready-to-ship mode. This reduces the double-boxing problem.

“It’s just a question of how long does it take to correct and for the markets to adjust to the new reality that e-commerce is here to stay,” said Kenneth Waghorne, a packaging analyst with RISI.

Bridget O’Neill of San Francisco said she tries to forgo the recycling bin entirely when possible, in part because Amazon uses paper packing tape to seal its boxes. That allows her to put that cardboard to the greenest of uses.

“I can flatten those boxes and put them in with my compost,” she said.

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Amazon Fire TV Cube: Details, Price, Release Date

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Amazon first started shipping video streaming devices four years ago. Since then, the company has updated its Fire TV products to match the larger trends of consumer gadgetry. The flat Fire TV boxes were shrunk down to HDMI sticks and dongles that weren’t much larger than a thumb drive; to this day, the cheap streaming sticks from Amazon and Roku are best-sellers for both companies. Then Amazon’s TV devices started working with voice control, a trend that Amazon itself is largely responsible for, considering the popularity of Alexa.

Whereas earlier Fire TV devices required you to summon Alexa through the remote, the Fire TV Cube has Alexa built in.

Now Amazon is launching what it thinks is the next obvious thing in home entertainment. The just-announced 4K Fire TV Cube is part Fire TV, part Amazon Echo, and part TV control center for the other boxes and gadgets you have crowded around your TV. Whereas earlier Fire TV devices required you to summon Alexa through the remote, the Fire TV Cube has Alexa built in. In fact, Amazon says the whole user experience of the Cube was designed with a “voice first” philosophy.

“The goal for the Fire TV Cube is to really enable voice experience in a way that makes sense and actually highlights the use of voice,” says Sandeep Gupta, vice president of product development for Amazon Fire TV. “It’s not about just making some stuff that’s voice enabled.” What Gupta didn’t say, because he didn’t need to, is that putting Alexa in every possible space in your home is part of Amazon’s larger strategy of getting you to use Amazon’s services, and getting you to buy even more stuff from Amazon.

Eight microphones on the top provide access to Alexa. There’s also a dedicated button for switching them off.

Amazon

At $119, the new 4K Fire TV Cube is the most expensive Fire TV device to date. It’s also easily one of the nicest-looking TV products Amazon has ever made, compared with the flat-sandwich design of its Fire TV boxes and the uninspiring Fire TV Stick. This is for good reason—since it has Alexa built in, it’s meant to live out in the open, and not hide inside a home theater console. But even with the Fire TV Cube being sold at a reduced price ($90) for the first couple of days, it veers away from Amazon’s strictly utilitarian approach to making and selling inexpensive hardware.

The Amazon Fire TV Cube has eight far-field microphones built in, an array that was designed to accommodate the shape of the cube. It has the same beam-forming, noise-reducing, and echo-cancelling tech found in other Echo products. In his initial demo of the Cube at Amazon’s Silicon Valley labs last week, Gupta staged a scenario where he had just gotten home from work: “Alexa, I’m home,” he said to the Cube, and the Samsung TV, Sony soundbar, and Philips Hue smart lights in the room all turned on.

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The Alexa features work pretty much as you’d expect; you can ask the Cube for the weather, or for jokes, or access any number of skills, Amazon’s term for voice-powered apps. It’s that connection to the TV or soundbar that’s new. The Cube connects to the TV via HDMI and supports both multi-directional IR and CEC, a feature that allows users to control multiple HDMI-connected devices with just one remote. (Sonos supports CEC in just-announced, Alexa-equipped Beam soundbar as well.) This all means that you can use Alexa to control a whole host of TV interactions, from toggling the power to searching for shows to controlling the volume. You can even use it to switch inputs between TV boxes and consoles, arguably one of the most useful parts of the setup.

Cube owners with set-top boxes for cable TV or over-the-air TV can connect Amazon’s box to those devices and access them using Alexa. These commands have to be super specific—”Alexa, switch to channel 31,” for example. You can’t just search for a program or movie by name and expect Amazon to surface the cable TV option for you. (Roku, one of Amazon’s biggest competitors in this space, now shows over-the-air TV search results in its “smart guide.”)

Still, voice commands provide a new way to switch between internet streaming video and old-school cable. And, like Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV products support single sign-on via certain apps, which means you can sign in to your cable TV provider’s app and be automatically signed in to any other supporting apps.

One HDMI port is on the back, along with a USB port. There’s also a plug for an IR extender if you want to hide the Cube in a cabinet.

Amazon

The most interesting part about the new Fire TV Cube is almost certainly its interface. While the Cube runs on FireOS, Amazon’s Android-based operating system for tablets and TV streaming devices, it has the UX of the Echo Show. Gupta says Amazon used the Echo Show, its odd display-centric gadget, as drafting practice for the Fire TV Cube. “The reason why we’ve tried to leverage Echo Show is because voice interaction is different from TV remote interaction,” he says. “So, the results and the catalog are the same as any Fire TV, but it’s presented in a way that can be navigated through voice.”

This includes a grid-like format, with clearly numbered content options presented. It prompts you to say things like, “Alexa, show more,” or “Alexa, select option four”—much cleaner than trying to burrow through thousands of video options with your voice. Once you pick up the Fire TV Cube remote and press a button, the interface immediately switches back to the “old” Fire TV format. The Fire TV Cube remote, by the way, also has Alexa built in, in case you’d like to turn the Cube’s microphones off but still want to use Alexa from time to time.

Amazon, not surprisingly, is pitching the Fire TV Cube as the perfect Frankengadget for your TV, something that not only gives you full Echo features but is supposed to drastically simplify your TV experience. But as with any hardware product from a company that has some services skin in the game, the Fire TV Cube is not a perfectly agnostic streaming platform.

Like every other FireOS device, the Fire TV Cube doesn’t play content purchased through iTunes. Apple TV, on the other hand, now streams Amazon Prime Video, so Apple has the distinct advantage there. More important is FireOS’s lack of a native YouTube app. Thanks to a spat that Google and Amazon can’t seem to resolve, your only option for watching YouTube videos on an Amazon device right now is to use a browser.

Also, don’t expect the Fire TV Cube to replace your soundbar. According to Amazon executives, the Cube’s audio output is comparable to what you get with an Echo Dot—so, not great. There’s also the question of whether the Cube will coexist nicely with other Echos in a small household; like if you have another Amazon product in your kitchen and that happens to be within spitting distance of your TV. Amazon says its Alexa devices are smart enough to discern which one you’re speaking to when two are nearby, but that isn’t always the case in the real world. For now, your best solution is probably to use different wake words.

First world problems aside (too many voice-controlled speakers!), Amazon’s new Fire TV Cube shows the company is serious about taking over your living room–or at the very least, becoming a very important part of it.

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Yuba Electric Boda Boda Review: An E-Bike for Parents

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Coincidentally, the day that I brought home the electric Yuba Boda Boda bike was the day that the city of Portland decided to start a major construction project on the thoroughfare that goes by my house.

For a week, car commuters have been wandering around in a daze, finding their way through a maze of detours. “It’s like they’re a bunch of ants and their home has been destroyed,” our babysitter mused. I’ve bypassed all the confusion by e-biking to the construction site and walking my daughter and myself through the crosswalk.

Contrary to what my colleagues think (I love you guys!), I don’t believe that the bike revolution will happen when infrastructure improves. You see, I live in Portland, one of the most famously bike-friendly cities in the country. I’m (relatively) young, I don’t have a disability, and almost all of my destinations are less than a mile from my house, reachable through quiet residential roads.

Even armed with the best intentions, ideal circumstances, and gear, there are still some days when it’s just faster to pop my screaming toddler into a carseat than to get on my bike and do a SoulCycle-esque uphill sprint to her daycare. I don’t think people will take to biking en masse until it’s faster and easier to bike than it is to drive a car.

For the first time since I’ve become a mom, the electric Yuba Boda Boda has made that possible. It’s faster and easier to wheel the Boda Boda out of my garage, strap my toddler on the back, and e-bike, than it is to get in my car. The sound of my toddler shrieking, “This is so fun!” from the bike’s seat behind me is just a bonus.

Unlike the Yuba Supermarche, the electric Boda Boda is really easy to ride. It has a more compact aluminum frame with an extended rear rack, and comes in either a step-through or a step-over option. It has a 1.5-inch Chromoly fork, hydraulic disc brakes, and big, fat, 26-inch Cruz commuter tires. The tester model was in a wonderful bright teal color, and it was easy to adjust the seat and handlebars to fit my 5 foot, 2 inch height.

Yuba informed me that they don’t do home delivery, so I would have to pick up the bike myself at the retailer. I don’t own a vehicle big enough to fit the bike inside, and it wouldn’t fit on my roof rack. No matter, I said. I’d just ride it fifteen miles home.

Small Steps

The electric Boda Boda is kitted out with the e6000 Shimano Steps motor, which is an intelligent, weatherproof electric system with an integrated computer that assists you when you’re walking or riding the bike. It made the ride from the bike shop back to my house a total breeze.

The Steps system provides up to 50 newton meters of torque while pedaling. It automatically downshifts to a lower gear for an easier start, and even while stopping and starting on steep hills (curse you, stoplights!), I never felt like I had a hard time getting going.

Because the system provides power only when you need it, the motor has a colossal range of up to 93 miles, or around six hours, on one charge. That initial 15-mile bike ride on high assistance ate up only 24 percent of the battery life, even when I was hauling ass uphill at around 20 mph. If you ever want to surprise dedicated bike commuters, I suggest putting a Shimano Steps motor on the mom-liest bike of all time and waving as you pass them, hunched over in their racing crouches. I felt the way Paul Newman must have when he dropped a V8 engine in his tiny VW Bug.

The bike’s display is mounted between the handlebars, and you can turn your lights on and off, check your speed, range, gear, and battery life, and select between three levels of assistance (you can also turn off assistance entirely) from one convenient spot.

On a week of trucking my daughter and myself around our neighborhood (at much more moderate speeds), I only charged it once. It took a little over an hour to charge it after it had gone down to 40 percent.

E-assisted biking makes a huge difference, especially when you consider how heavy the whole apparatus is. The Boda Boda weighs 60 pounds without accessories, and can accommodate up to 220. I didn’t quite get there, but I came close. After you start piling on bags, bike seats, and kids, it is a lot of weight for a small woman to keep balanced. When it comes to hills, forget about it.

That’s why I normally hook a big, awkward bike trailer on my own bike, rather than put my kid in a bike seat. It’s a pain to wrestle my trailer out of my house and to strap my kids in it, but it does significantly lessen the possibility that I will keel over and crush everyone I love.

But, it’s much easier to maneuver a bike around obstacles when you don’t have a trailer fouling up your every move. My toddler far and away prefers riding in the open air, at a height where she can talk to me and enjoy the scenery. Instead of struggling to get her in the car, she now can’t wait to climb on. With electric assistance, I’m no longer afraid that I’ll let the bike topple over while she’s riding.

Big Boda Bucks

The electric Boda Boda is not light, or cheap. I wouldn’t be able to haul it up a flight of stairs if I lived in a walk-up, and the base model costs $3,400. A Kryptonite U-lock and cable seems sufficient protection for my ancient Surly, but I was terrified of letting the Boda Boda out of my sight. That might be a consideration if many of your bike trips are to public places like the farmer’s market or the corner store. You can also detach the battery from the motor and take it with you.

The base model comes with a double stand, chain guard, wheel skirt, fenders, and front and back LED lights, along with a two-year warranty on the frame and a one-year warranty on the motor. Thanks to Portland’s Clever Cycles, my step-through tester model was tricked out with a bike bell, padded seat, roll bars around the rear rack, and the Yepp Maxi child’s bicycle seat, which would have added about $500 to the cost.

Like I said, it costs a lot of money. But when you consider how much cars cost, and how much time and money it takes to maintain them, four grand starts to seem like a drop in the bucket.

According to a 2009 survey by the National Household Travel Survey, car trips of under a mile in the United States add up to ten billion miles per year. There have been more times than I’d like to admit when I’ve jumped in the car and driven a half-mile and back to get more milk. I’m constantly crunched for time and energy, and sometimes driving is just easier, until it’s not.

The electric Boda Boda turns driving into a relative hassle. While it might not be financially or physically possible for every family, it’s made a huge difference in how many times I use my car—just in a week! If it does turn out to be possible to buy our way out of climate change, then getting an e-bike might be a great start.

Sonos Beam Soundbar: Price, Details, Release Date

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The Sonos Beam is a new $399 soundbar, but to Sonos, it’s a heck of a lot more than just a speaker that sits under your television. It’s a fabric-wrapped representation of how Sonos sees the future—one in which all the voice assistants from Apple and Google and Amazon can live next to one another. In this future, hip, urban millennial parents will use Beam not just for Netflixing and HBOing, but queuing up the soundtracks to their hip, urban lives and for controlling their hip, urban smart home. And they’ll do it all with spoken commands instead of an app or a remote.

Development on the Beam has been going on for more than two years (during which time the speaker was referred to internally as El Rey, Spanish for The King). And it’s being released at a critical time for Sonos: It’s been reported that the 16-year-old audio company will soon file to go public. Sonos has also just laid off almost 100 employees, or around 6 percent of its workforce. Patrick Spence, the company’s relatively new CEO, inherited a perception of the company—one rooted in reality—that it was slow to react to the Amazon Echo and slow to release new products in general. Sonos products are pricey, and the company has been feeling pressure from the low end of the smart speaker market.

The microphones on top are for talking to your preferred voice assistant.

Beth Holzer for Wired

But that’s not the end of the speaker market Sonos wants to play in, even if this new Beam costs significantly less than Sonos’ two previous soundbars and also works with Alexa. Spence sees things like the Amazon Echo Dot as “stepping stones” to higher-quality speakers. Sonos believes firmly that audio quality is its killer feature and that if you experience the sound of a Sonos speaker, you’ll be more inclined to buy into a whole multiroom Sonos system. Employees at the company talk about sound as though it’s as essential as air or as vital as basic nutrients, and they emphasize simplicity as a feature in a way that rivals only Apple.

“We think of sound as a material that you can actually interact with,” says Tad Toulis, Sonos’ VP of design, who called in on a videoconferencing system while I was visiting the company’s offices in Santa Barbara, California, last week. “We have this life force running through the system called sound, and that can be either music or television or podcasts and so forth.”

The challenge for Sonos now is to convince potential new customers that a soundbar like the Beam—a soundbar for TV, for music, for chatting with an AI—is the speaker they need as the sound centerpiece in their living rooms. And they need to convince these buyers to pick a $399 Beam instead of an inexpensive Echo, an Apple HomePod, or a Google Home.

High Bar

There’s no mistaking the Beam for anything other than a soundbar, but it’s much smaller than Sonos’ last two television-adjacent speakers, 2013’s Playbar and last year’s Playbase. The Sonos Beam measures 26 inches across, around 30 percent shorter than the Playbar. It’s also 60 percent smaller by volume and weighs just 6 pounds. If the Playbase and Playbar were speakers you probably only moved when you were dusting, the Beam is something you could transport to your friend’s party and it wouldn’t be a total nuisance to do so.

Aki Laine, industrial design manager for Sonos Beam, took me through a product demo in a room at Sonos’ office that shared the same aesthetic as one of Breather’s rent-a-spaces: not quite a living room, but striving for it. I sat on a comfortable couch; a surf print hung on the wall. Perched in front of a Sony television was a brand-new white Sonos Beam on an entertainment console. (The Beam also comes in black.)

It’s 2.7 inches tall, which from my vantage point on the couch meant that the soundbar creeped just above the Sony logo on the TV. Laine says the designers carefully considered the sizes and dimensions of all of the top-selling TV sets on the market to ensure the product would fit well into most setups. In this case, it doesn’t align perfectly with the bottom of the TV, but the Beam is still remarkably unobtrusive. Plenty of people mount their TVs on a wall anyway, and Beam can be stuck to a wall too.

Another sign of Sonos’ design obsessiveness can be found in the fabric that wraps around the speaker’s body. It starts out as a circular tube of knitted polyester, like a sock. Then it’s cut to an exact length, stretched over the grille, and bonded to the inside edges of the speaker. Look at a Beam and you won’t see a single seam.

Sonos also custom-designed the Beam’s drivers, which are shaped like ovals. “The most cost-effective way to do transducers is to make them round,” Laine said. “But because we didn’t want to block any of the TV, we’re limited by height. So in order to move more air and get more sound out of the product, we designed elliptical transducers.”

There’s also a newly designed microphone array in the Sonos Beam. The $199 Sonos One speaker also has a microphone array and works with Alexa, but the two speakers have distinctly different shapes, which means the microphones used for voice recognition and noise cancellation required a different approach.

Cross Talk

At the start of the demo, Laine summoned Amazon’s Alexa through the Sonos Beam and asked it to turn on the television. These TV-control capabilities from the Sonos Beam are new, since Sonos replaced the optical audio cable that was in the Playbar and Playbase with support for HDMI ARC, a newish home theater standard that allows components to work together more smoothly, send each other commands, and more easily shuttle digital surround-sound signals between connected components. That also means that Beam supports CEC, one of the features of the HDMI standard that lets you use just one remote control for all of the devices in your home theater—even if it’s your voice, like in the demo I got.

The main upside of switching to HDMI ARC and CEC, according to Sonos, is that it facilitates support for more standards and codecs and that it makes things simpler overall. For example, the Beam can now automatically recognize whatever remote you’re using. Not all TV sets support HDMI ARC, so Sonos will throw an HDMI-to-optical adapter into the box so you can still send digital sound to the Beam. Like many new standards these days, simplicity comes with dongles attached.

Heavy Presence

To get a sense of how the soundbar performs, Laine cycled through a few music tracks from Jordan Rakei, Radiohead, and Beck before eventually landing on a short clip from the film Arrival. It’s hard to make an in-depth judgment after just a few minutes of listening, but to the average ear, I think the Sonos Beam will sound fantastic. Audiophiles may pick up on the diminutive speaker’s subtle lack of bass, despite it having four full-range woofers and three passive radiators. But it sounds great despite the small size. The clip from Arrival, which included loud, ominous tones and whispery dialog, benefited the most from the soundbar—specifically from its center tweeter, which was designed to amplify dialog.

Later that same day, I briefly visited Sonos’ anechoic chamber, a giant concrete box of a room with a mesh suspension floor and foamy soundproofing wedges lining the walls. The Beam speaker sat in the center of the room, on a surface carved to be the exact same size as the bottom of the speaker. A thin metal arm covered in microphones arced above the Beam. It looked like the speaker was about to be interrogated. In fact, this chamber is where all of Sonos’ products are interrogated. Because of the lack of any audible reverberation or resonance, every word spoken inside an anechoic chamber sounds serious, almost profound. Someone made a joke about turning the lights off, and I’m glad they didn’t. One form of sensory deprivation was enough.

Motorola Moto Z3 Play: Price, Specs, Release Date, Mods

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Motorola is in no mood to rock the boat. Motos are moving off shelves at a respectable pace in North America where phone buyers (especially those buying unlocked phones), are starting to recognize the company’s affordable, but very usable Android phones. The sixth Moto G was shown off earlier this spring, and now its time for the main attraction: the Moto Z3 Play.

The Z3 Play has a few new notable features, but it’s mostly the exact kind of upgrade you’d expect from last year’s Z2 Play. For you spec hounds, it has a Snapdragon 636 processor that Motorola says is about 30 percent faster than the Z2’s 626, an extra gigabyte of RAM (giving it a grand total of 4 GB), and the new Android Oreo (8.1). Battery life should remain around a day and file storage is still 32GB, though you can still upgrade it with a MicroSD card.

Can You Spot the Differences?

Spotting the design in phones is sometimes like examining a Where’s Waldo book, but there are some visible differences between the Z2 and Z3 Play. Motorola has added more microphones, two of which you’ll notice on the bottom of the phone’s face. They’ll let you talk to Google Assistant and Alexa from far away, and help cancel noise out when you’re talking on the phone. The rear of the phone is also covered in Gorilla Glass, though aluminum still adorns the edges.

It also did away with its front-facing fingerprint sensor in favor of new positioning on the right side. I haven’t held the phone yet, but this side positioning worked decently well on older Sony Xperia phones that used it.

The Power Pack battery Mod will come bundled with the Moto Z3 Play.
Motorola

The reason that fingerprint sensor had to move is simple: Motorola wanted more screen space, but didn’t want to make its phone bigger. The display now stretches 6 full inches diagonal, with slightly more pixels than before (2,160 x 1,080). Competing phones pack more pixels these days, but the HD AMOLED screen on last year’s Z2 looked plenty beautiful and clear. It’s a good bet that the Z3 Play will, too.

To appease fans of its handy fingerprint sensor gestures on previous Z phones, Moto has crafted an on-screen gesture slider on the bottom of the screen that will let pro users save some real estate. There’s also an odd feature that lets you animate parts of your photos and save them as .gif files for maximum meme-ability. In the demo we saw, the feature wasn’t enthralling, but we’re hoping it will work better in the real world. Regardless, the 12-megapixel rear camera does have some minor upgrades from last year and the selfie cam has gotten a boost from 5 to 8 megapixels. Google Lens also replaces some of Moto’s similar image-recognition features in the camera app.

There’s still no headphone jack on the Z3, though Motorola will include an adapter in the box. It’s also not waterproof, just splashproof, but Moto reps assured me it should be able to handle an accidental toilet drop, if that’s your chief worry.

A Mod Monopoly

Motorola isn’t giving up on its Moto Mods. The useful modular magnetic snap-on accessories that previous Z phones have built their names around are still supported and may be pushed harder than ever with new bundles. You can browse the Moto Mods here, but to give you an idea, there are Mods that add a zoom camera, a projector, let you talk to Alexa, or even print pictures. Most helpful of all are the extra battery packs, which can boost your battery capacity when you slap them on.

The Moto Z3 Play will start with a $500 price tag and come with a Moto Power Pack Mod included. It’ll be available unlocked, ready to work on any of the four major U.S. wireless carriers when it ships later in the summer.

12 Killer Deals on Google Devices, Amazon Echo, and Headphones We Love

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Most of the best Memorial Day tech sales have slowly trickled to an end, but with summer in full swing and new products coming out all the time, there are a surprising number of killer deals this week, including a rare sale on some excellent Google gadgets. With the help of our friends at TechBargains, below are some of our favorite deals going on this week.

Google Device Deals

Google discounts some of its products now and then, but this week four of them have had their prices slashed. The Google Pixelbook is the most powerful Chromebook you can buy, by a longshot, and ChromeOS has improved considerably since we reviewed it late last year.

Amazon Echo Deals

With the Google Home Mini on sale, rival Amazon has put its competing Echo Dots on discount, along with the Echo Show, which is an Echo with a screen, perfect for your kitchen.

Other Fantastic Deals

Be sure to check out some of the other killer audio deals this week, including the BackBeat Pro 2, Sony noise cancelling headphones, and UE Megaboom. We’ve also included a TV and laptop that we like.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.

WWDC 2018: Tech Addiction and the Paradox of Apple’s ‘Screen Time’ Tools

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Steve Jobs changed the world with the iPhone, the glossy slab of aluminum and glass that redefined the category of “phone” the day it went on sale in 2007. But it wasn’t until a year later, when Jobs introduced the App Store, that Apple would make its most lasting contribution.

The App Store invented a new world, where chauffeurs, dates, and deliverymen could be summoned with a few taps; but also where our attention could be shattered, our democracy shaken, and our anxiety spiked. Ten years later, as we increasingly grapple with technology’s dominance over our minds, it’s hard not to imagine Steve Jobs as a young Dr. Frankenstein; the App Store, his monstrous creation.

“iPhone and iPad are some of the most powerful tools ever created,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of software engineering, while speaking at Apple’s annual developer conference this week. But our apps “beg us to use our phone when we really should be occupying ourselves with something else. They send us flurries of notifications trying to draw us in for fear of missing out. We may not even recognize how distracted we’ve become.”

Now, Apple—like much of Silicon Valley—wants to cure the disease it’s caused. The next version of iOS will be armed with a “comprehensive set of built-in features” to limit distractions and recalibrate priorities on the iPhone. There’s a more expansive Do Not Disturb mode, which flips on during bedtime and hides notifications from the homescreen until you’re fully awake and ready to face them. Do Not Disturb can also be switched on during certain times of day, switching off when you leave a particular location or when an event ends on your calendar. A new feature for “tuning” notifications lets you adjust how you receive the pop-ups from certain apps, and for the first time, Apple will support grouped notifications to make them easier to parse and manage.

There’s also a dashboard for usage insights, called Screen Time, which sends a weekly breakdown of how you spend your time on the iPhone. A built-in App Timer can set limits on certain apps, reminding you to move on after 30 minutes or an hour. Those features also update Parental Controls, which first came to the iPhone in 2008, by letting parents to monitor their kids’ activity and set limits on how they’re spending their time. Throughout many of these features, Siri is there to help, like a secretary that holds your calls during important meetings and knows exactly how you take your coffee.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to the iPhone

The new features earned Apple generous applause on Monday, a sign that the WWDC crowd appreciated the company taking responsibility for the iPhone’s absorbent qualities. But just moments later, Apple executives demonstrated Memoji, a new personalized emoji feature that involves staring at the screen and animating a digital character with your facial features. Another demo featured Julz Arney, who works on Apple’s fitness technologies, biking while breathlessly scrolling through productivity apps on her Apple Watch, changing dinner reservations, texting friends, browsing the web, checking notifications about her infant baby, and struggling to close the fitness rings on the watch’s face.

The cognitive dissonance was striking. Apple says it wants you to have a healthier relationship with your phone, and it’ll even give you the tools to do it. But for every feature it showed to wrangle notifications or curb app use, it added more to keep you staring at your screen. The Screen Time dashboard and Do Not Disturb mode might make it easier to ignore certain apps, or shame you into spending less time thumbing through Instagram. But the rest of the keynote showed that Apple isn’t ready for you to put your iPhone down just yet.

Time Well Spent

The rise of “digital wellness” has been coursing through Silicon Valley for years, but it reached its fever pitch earlier this year when Tristan Harris, the father of the “time well spent” movement, formed the Center for Humane Technology. The group evangelizes a more human approach to personal tech, calling for better tools from the big tech companies, regulation from government, and a greater awareness of how much of our lives we waste staring at screens. Facebook name-checked “time well spent”—Harris’s famous credo—when it rejiggered its News Feed algorithm in January. Google riffed on the idea last month, when it introduced new Android features to promote “JOMO,” or the joy of missing out. It was Apple’s turn to go next.

In many ways, Apple was already primed to join the “digital wellness” movement. The company stands for minimalism; a distraction-free interface fits well with the Apple ethos. It makes most of its money from hardware, not software—meaning as long as long as you buy the iPhone, it shouldn’t matter how much time you spend staring into the black hole of its screen. Apple even introduced the Apple Watch with this idea in mind: it was pitched as a device to free you from the tyranny of the phone.

“We’re in a very unique position because we have never been about maximizing the number of times you pick it up, the number of hours that you use it,” Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said today in an interview with NPR. (Apple declined to give an on-the-record interview for this story.) “The user is our focus. And so our question is always, what is in their best interest?”

And yet, Apple’s native apps seem to be creeping in the opposite direction. Memoji was just one of the new immersive features demoed Monday. The native Photo app in iOS will get more social, popping up suggestions to share photos with friends; iMessage and FaceTime will get a suite of camera effects that look more like Snapchat. The problems with smartphone obsession have nothing to do with hardware, and everything to do with apps—ones like Instagram, and Facebook, and Snapchat. Apple seems to want you to spend more time interacting with your iPhone, with native experiences that look more like those apps. It’s hard to claim that any of these updates constitute “time well spent.”

In Apple’s view, users should make their own choices about how they use their phones. If you want to stare at your Apple Watch throughout your workout, or spend the next hour animating the poop emoji with your face, so be it. Apple’s “digital wellness” features are less paternalistic than Google’s, designed to empower you to make the choices you think are healthy without much interference. The limits on the App Timer can be easily extended; Do Not Disturb switched off with a tap. Screen Time simply shows you how you’re spending time on your iPhone, so that “you can make decisions about how much time you want to spend with your device each day,” as Federighi explained it on stage at WWDC.

“The fact Apple thinks three product changes alone can solve a complex social problem speaks to how simplistically they are treating the issue,” says Andrew Dunn, the CEO of Siempo, an Android app that replaces the standard homescreen with a simpler interface to minimize distraction. He and other developers have created their own solutions to smartphone obsession, ranging from apps that lock you out of your phone during certain times of day to ones that block all notifications. Dunn says that if Apple really wanted to give iPhone users a better “digital wellness” experience, the company should’ve turned to the community of developers who had already been building these tools for years. But yesterday, there was no mention of easing the current restrictions and allowing developers to build on the new screen time features.

“This is certainly a start in providing options to stem tech addiction and obsession, but nothing on your phone is going to change that behavior until you change the psychology behind it,” says Larry Rosen, the co-author of The Distracted Mind and a research psychologist who studies the impact of technology. Giving users the tools to monitor their own behavior is great, but showing people how much time they’re wasting on Facebook doesn’t make Facebook any less addictive. Hiding someone’s notifications can’t cure FOMO, and adding interactive Memojis doesn’t encourage people to spend any less time staring at their iPhones.

Apple’s new features represent a useful acknowledgement of the problems with technology. The screen time tools go a long way to giving users more control, and many iPhone users will be thrilled to finally find the features they’ve been wanting for years. But new features can only be as successful as the apps they regulate—and in Apple’s case, just like Frankenstein’s monster, it might already be too late.

More WWDC 2018 Coverage

THE DOYLE REPORT: CLOUD MATURITY REACHES IMPORTANT MILESTONE

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A new CompTIA study examines cloud’s now ubiquitous reach, and the implications thereof.

T.C. Doyle | May 24, 2018

Internet Life. NetGuide. And CyberSurfer.

Industry veterans will recall a time when these once popular publications heralded the new “world wide web” as the technology of the moment. Alas, they were gone in the relative blink of an eye once the internet went mainstream — casualties of technology ubiquity.

Related: How to Move to a Cloud Subscription Model

The latest tech trend of the moment, “cloud computing,” has reached a similar maturity, says a new report published this week by CompTIA. The report, “2018 Trends in Cloud Computing,” chronicles just how mainstream cloud computing has gone, says report author Seth Robinson, senior director for technology analysis at CompTIA.

“Our report finds that cloud has transitioned from an emerging technology that people are trying to figure out to an established one that is now a staple of computing infrastructure, applications and more,” Robinson says.

Related: What’s the State of Cloud Adoption in North America?

From a practical standpoint, the maturity means that basic migrations are done. Ditto for simple cost-benefit analyses and SaaS experimentations. Practically everyone’s mail is now in the cloud, their data storage, backup and recovery, too. With experiments behind them, end customers are trying figure out how best to deploy, leverage and secure their hybrid architectures that increasingly have cloud technology underpinning them.

Seth Robinson

“In the early stages of cloud, we were really doing the same old IT on a new model. What the later stages of cloud are about is doing a new form of IT. It’s that simple,” Robinson says.

Consider the study findings that leads Robinson to this conclusion:

  • Ninety-one percent of firms are using cloud computing in some form.
  • Six in 10 companies have more than 40 percent of their IT architecture in the cloud.
  • Three-quarters of businesses have between one and five years of experience with cloud solutions.

The findings are in line with similar study results from various parts of the world. Take Scandinavia, where a 2017 report conducted by Radar on behalf of Tieto and VMware found that more than 80 percent of all organizations in Finland, Norway and Sweden are using cloud services to some degree. “The Benefits of Cloud Maturity” report concludes that “organizations displaying the highest levels of cloud maturity are better prepared for the impact of future change.”

Robinson concurs. His study finds that cloud computing has become a critical part of IT operations. It also chronicles how cloud has become the key driver in decision making and infrastructure planning, and why its difficulties or challenges are more than outweighed by the business benefits that the technology provides. Take emerging technology, for example.

According to the CompTIA study, 81 percent of respondents say that cloud has “greatly enhanced or moderately enhanced their efforts around automation.” It literally has become the surest path for embracing new technology such as AI, virtual reality, blockchain, IoT and more.

The potential upside for IT solution providers? They could be more valuable to customers, says Robinson.

“Think about the complexity now that exists in technology. You have some things on-prem. You have some apps in the cloud. There are private and public capabilities. Channel companies have to juggle more variables and complexity than ever before. Customers simply cannot do it, so by default their trusted services providers become more valuable if they can demonstrate all the many ways they are helping.”

The latter point is an important distinction. CompTIA says a significant percentage of end customers have a direct-first mentality when it comes to the cloud. What this means is simple: When interested in a new technology, end customers tend to go directly to a vendor’s website to give it a try. While many eventually turn over the management and securitization of cloud technologies to a third-party business partner, the “try-it-first yourself” mentality represents a major shift in technology delivery and decision making.

As a consequence, channel companies, be they tech influencers, digital marketers, managed service providers, IT consultants or VARs, must zero in on the distinct value they provide, Robinson says.

“This isn’t so much about integrating an application, reselling it or even providing managed services on top of it,” he says. “It’s more about embracing a future state in which multicloud environments are pervasive, and end customers are more focused on optimizing their technology and using it more strategically. This is a very different form of value than in the previous generation in which distribution, reselling and managed services carried more value than they do today.”