This is very interesting. I’m a bit sad that WebSockets are winning (for a number of reasons I won’t go into), but channels are going to be very useful for a number of things.

Reply to this post

Money talks, robots walk.

• It looks like Alphabet has put its robotics venture, Boston Dynamics, up for sale because there is no immediate path to earning a return on the money invested for Alphabet.
• Boston Dynamics is a robotics company that specialises in robots that are autonomous as far as navigating and adjusting to their immediate environment.
• This means that they can move around with relative ease but how these robots could generate value for Alphabet shareholders is completely unclear.
• At the end of the day Alphabet is a data and analytics company whose objective is to categorise and understand every piece of digital information about users and to sell those insights to marketers.
• Every other piece of hardware that Alphabet makes from thermostats to internet balloons, have the capacity to collect huge amounts of data and thereby generate value to the core business.
• The robots of Boston Dynamics do not collect data about users.
• Instead they replace them making a business case around data extremely difficult.
• Consequently, it seems likely that Boston Dynamics will be more valuable to an owner with a different business model such as Amazon, DHL, UPS, Cainiao (Alibaba logistics) or even the military.
• Consequently, I suspect that there will be plenty of interest in purchasing this company but I doubt that Alphabet will book a huge return on the sale.
• This is an encouraging sign of greater fiscal discipline at Alphabet which I think has been lacking for many years.
• The arrival of Ruth Porat (CFO) from Morgan Stanley has triggered improvements but there is still one big nut to crack.
• This is the general and administrative expense which is still between 7 to 8% of sales, some 200-300bp above where it should be.
• I think that a large tech company should be spending a maximum of 5% of sales on GNA and in 2016E, RFM forecasts that Alphabet will waste around $2bn on excessive spending.
• This is a small improvement compared to the last 2 years but more still needs to be done.
• With the decision to sell Boston Dynamics being based on the economics of this company rather than blue sky, I have greater hope for progress on fiscal discipline.
• The immediate outlook for Alphabet looks good as my concerns around its ability to earn a return from Android (see here) are unlikely to impact Alphabet before 2017.
• Hence I can see Alphabet outperforming Apple in the immediate term, although I would also be considering Microsoft and Samsung as places to look for value.

“No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time, it’s just that others are behind the times.”
—Martha Graham http://pic.twitter.com/Y4YZweMFRs

— Alf Rehn (@alfrehn) March 18, 2016

warrenellis:

Rare 1960s 2001 promotional documentary Retro ROCKET

Retro.futurism at its best. Kubrick’s advisors for 2001.

(PS I’ve decided to start using ‘.’ instead of hyphens in compound words.)

- Maria Sarungi Tsehai, via Twitter

Fewer boxes. More loops.

There are two important lessons I have learned as a PM that made me start thinking in loops and stop thinking in boxes:

1. No user touchpoint occurs in an isolated box.
   It is easy to get tunnel vision, focusing on one feature or KPI you are trying to drive this month. Asking “How can I get the user to use new feature X?” without understanding what they experienced before and after that point, or their expectations coming in. One of the best ways to zoom out and really improve the entirety of your user’s experience – including customer support interactions – is to develop a complete, multi-touchpoint customer feedback loop.
2. Product development should never be a black box.
   “If you build it, they will come” might be a nice Hollywood movie line, but it can be dangerous in a product development setting. A “Build-Measure-Learn” loop involving real conversations with users as you iterate is essential to improving everything from the tiniest feature to the whole customer experience.

“The fundamental activity of a [product team] is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful [team] processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.”
– Eric Ries, Author of ‘The Lean Startup’

This “loop beats box” mentality can really drive both how you think about collecting customer feedback in your organization, as well as how you make product decisions. If you set up a genuine, multi-touch closed feedback loop with your customers, your team can break out of silos and improve your product and user experience at a quicker and more productive pace.

This is all good in theory, but to have an automated, manageable, and thorough Closed-Loop Customer Feedback System requires some planning.

So, how do we do this?

Here is what we will cover:

1. First, we will look at what makes up a Closed Customer Feedback Loop.
2. Then, we will look at some less obvious benefits of closing the loop.
3. Last, we will look at some tools and techniques you can use as a Product Manager and throughout your organization to ensure customers are brought to the forefront.

1. What Is a Closed Customer Feedback Loop?

“If you’re not talking to customers a couple times [a day] at work, you are not doing a good job. I think that is true as a Product Manager.”
– Nickey Skarstad, Group Product Manager at Etsy

Typically, customer feedback is a one-way street. Get feedback. Make decisions. Rinse. Repeat. Feedback is collected in a survey, series of interviews, or maybe customer service tickets. It is then aggregated, analyzed, and reported. That is equivalent to taking all of your customers’ responses, putting them into a nice little box with a ribbon, then presenting them to your team.

Think about it. In what real world setting would that pass for real conversation? We saw in the 2014 UserVoice State of Product Management Survey that Sales and Executive teams dominate influence over product strategy. This happens despite Product Managers ranking actual users and Customer Support as far more valuable sources of product feedback. The best way to combat this imbalance is through closing the customer feedback loop.

A Closed Customer Feedback Loop, is a process of continued collection, reflection, and real conversation with users at multiple touchpoints in the customer lifecycle.

To close the feedback loop, you have to:

1. Listen to what your customers have to say
2. Address customer concerns promptly and properly
3. Talk with customers regularly
4. Track customers’ actual behavior
5. Understand where customers are coming from
6. Create new lines of communication
7. Solve underlying customer needs
8. Involve all teams in the conversation

On that last point, Nickey Skarstad, Group Product Manager at Etsy, shared a great tip during her talk at UserConf on using customer feedback to build better products:

“I actually encourage my team – everyone from product designers that I work with to the data analysts that are working on my team, as well as the engineers – to actually get into the prototype [feedback forum] and talk to people. My team has found it really rewarding because they are able to have real conversations with people.”

This level of conversation not only lets you (and your team) build better products for users, it can even affect how your users themselves behave with your product. Let us talk about how we can get there.

Make It Personal

Imagine you were in a long-term relationship. Every once in a while, your significant other gives you little bites of unsolicited feedback on your behavior here and there, maybe more and more frequently. A perceptive partner might pick up on this pattern and ask “Is something wrong?”, hear them out, then go back and think about that feedback moving forward.

Done. Finished. Everything is peachy. Right?

Not quite. Life is not so simple. Some issues can and should be addressed in real-time, and there are almost certainly nuances to their reactions. This does not mean picking apart every little detail about each other, but having ongoing conversations and open communication rather than just the occasional one-way feedback collection is more likely to build empathy and growth. You need to “get” your partner – and your users.

2. What Do We Get Out of Closing the Loop?

Better products. Better users. Fewer headaches. Stronger teams.

Let’s take a couple of case studies: Etsy, the creative seller marketplace,and Atlassian’s Confluence, an enterprise team management tool.

Etsy has a compelling method of collecting feedback before launching new features. They have a prototype section where their sellers can go in and actually toggle-on nearly-complete features to test them out and offer feedback in forum threads in that same section.

Even after features are being rolled out, Etsy users have a period in which  they can toggle the feature on or off when they like. Etsy’s team members not only engage and respond to users in the prototype feedback area, but they also look at the first few actions users take after they toggle off a new feature to look for patterns.

Confluence, on the other hand, uses a lighter version of prototyping in Keynote in addition to their fuller prototypes. They  have also used a live dashboard of users with photo avatars in their office that tracks individual metrics for that day. This way, they can start seeing patterns and really try to “get” their users. This can help put faces to personas, adding empathy to product conversations.

So, what are the rewards of all of this effort?

Better Products

“With great power comes great responsibility.” Or so say French Revolutionaries (and Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben).

When you make product changes, you can just as easily hurt your users as help them. Closing the feedback loop can ensure you are helping.

Etsy’s mix of prototyping, feedback conversations, and tracking actual user behavior ensures that they can address actual user needs. A tool might be  useful in theory for their sellers, but they will quickly validate this, either explicitly through feedback or implicitly by observing users who toggle the new feature off.

Etsy saw sellers disabling their new listing management feature before posting a listing, which was the opposite of what they were looking for. Fortunately, since they set up a channel for conversation they identified the reasons behind the behavior and could talk directly to the users who were exhibiting this behavior.

Sherif Mansour, Principal Product Manager at Atlassian responsible for Confluence, described how his team added a “Provide Feedback” button right in the Confluence app next to the new feature. This provided the most relevant feedback quickly, with over 900 submissions. Reducing friction for user feedback by avoiding forcing users to navigate to other pages or logins improved the amount and representation of feedback they received, as well. This led to better features, iterated quicker with less wasted development time. (Stop by this article on best practices for in-app feedback to learn more about how to do this well.)

Better Users

People do not like change. Users can often react in shock to major product changes or new features, even if they will be successful in the end. By allowing users to opt-in and toggle new features on or off, Etsy was able to avoid the “shock reactions” that typically drown out genuine user feedback. Not only does this provide much higher quality and actionable feedback, it primes the user base for changes and makes them happier and more invested members of the product community.

In the short-term, customers who are at risk of churning to competitors, downgrading, or lowering engagement can be turned around by a single positive real-time customer feedback or support experience.

In the long-term, every positive or negative interaction your customers have, whether it be with support, your product team, or the app experience itself, adds up over time. Improving the quality and frequency of these positive interactions and investments will only increase your customer’s engagement and reduce churn to competitors.

Fewer Headaches

Having closer feedback and communication with your users will avoid big headaches (like product change blow-ups), but will also avoid the build up of small bugs and poor experiences that users have over time.

Stronger Teams

Having everyone from support to sales to engineering to product all interacting and addressing users needs will provide everyone with context on the value they provide. This perspective will ensure each team member will make better decisions since they will be able to empathize with the customer on each part of the journey.

3. Tools and Techniques to Close the Customer Feedback Loop

There is a large toolkit out there right now for companies of all sizes.

Everyone from enterprises to startups can leverage scalable plug-and-play solutions that handle customer feedback collection, support, and product prioritization. Still, traditional market research is still useful in certain contexts. A good Product Manager should understand the full set of tools available and decide what they should prioritize.

Here is a list of some of the best traditional tools for closing the feedback loop:

1. Alert Systems
   From bug-ticketing tracking to in-app customer support ticketing, these systems can send automated alerts to staff and even auto-triage and route alerts to the appropriate managers. Using Alert Systems for aggregate analysis in addition to ad-hoc customer support will provide the most value.
2. Intelligent Knowledge-Bases
   The majority of top-class products now have automated knowledge bases that can answer user queries from a database of answers. There are tools out there to help. Having a feedback and follow-up system integrated in this knowledge base is the only way to ensure it is continuously improving. Be warned: Users will appreciate instant automated answers, but can quickly become annoyed if they get lost with no way to contact a human.
3. Case Management
   Assigning customer support cases to managers and ensuring that they are addressed with high quality support quickly is important. If you have an engaged customer community, as Airbnb has, this can be enhanced and scaled by engaging the community. Airbnb has queries first routed to incentivized community members – including fellow hosts & guests – to answer and even take action on tickets. If the ticket becomes complicated, the issue is escalated to a support manager. This both engages the community and helps scale quick responses across geographies and cultures.
4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
   Calculated through a survey of customers after they have been served, the NPS is the % of satisfied customers minus the % of unsatisfied customers. Almost every company should track this metric as a general signal of health, but this should not be used as a substitute for more in-depth customer support and feedback analysis.
5. Surveys
   Customer surveys are important. Whether it be simple sentiment questions using emoticons, or in-depth open-ended surveys to collect action-oriented user concerns, a survey is a great way to understand your landscape of customers and their concerns. Surveys tend to be one-way, however, and high-quality respondents should always be engaged. Reach out to these respondents, ask follow-up questions, or invite them in for user interviews. Most importantly, always thank your users and make them know their voices were heard. (Airbnb, for example, often frames new product releases as being “highly requested by the community.”)
6. Community Forums
   Similar to the above, a community forum with quality community moderators can be a great tool to have continual engagement with users. Although forums, along with many collection tools, will be a self-selected group of users, they can provide quality feedback on-demand. Consider having a manageable, invite-only forum for your power users or users that fill a specific variety of customer profiles.
7. In-app Feedback Tools
   Collect feedback where it is most relevant. There are plug-and-play tools that make collecting customer feedback – and even responding to feedback right in-app – very easy, but even a simple button for “tell us what you think” next to a new feature can be valuable. Reduce friction for feedback: If a thumbs up or thumbs down is all you need, then just add those.

…and here are some more inventive feedback tools and techniques:

1. Beta/Prototype Feedback Collection
   Etsy’s Prototype Feedback “Lab” and “Google Labs” are good examples of full beta versions of features that can be tested out by users with a feedback system built-in. There are plug-and-play beta feedback collection tools, of course, and you should always supplement with actual user testing, interviews, customer support feedback, and tracking actual user behavior.
2. Tracking In-App Behavior
   Using funnel analytics tools like Amplitude or Localytics, heatmaps or videos of user click habits with plugins like Inspectlet, and even simple Google Analytics tracking can help you understand exactly what your users are doing – not just what they are telling you. After you start to see patterns, talk to your users to validate your hypotheses on why they are taking those actions.
3. User Testing
   Testing new products or features with users has been made pretty simple. You can now take a simple mockup, an interactive prototype, or a fully built feature and go to a site like UserTesting to get screen-capture videos of users that fit your customer profile using your site and answering questions.
4. User & Usability Interviews
   Nothing will substitute for talking directly to your customers. If it is a new product, find customers in your employee or friend network who fit the profile or hustle and find them through online searches, Craigslist, or databases and services. Let your users ramble, follow-up on questions, and if you are doing a usability test, let them react before asking them questions or stating what you are trying to build. Consider building a customer panel that you can go back to and rotate through when you need to test new concepts and features.
5. Shared-Team Customer Support
   The best way to get everybody on board is to have a program where everybody in the organization (or at least key people in each team), has to do customer support for a day. Some organizations even have all employees do customer support for one day at least once every month or two. Either way, this will give everyone perspective and empower them to make more empathetic decisions without having to learn about the user through the same product or support manager.

In Sum

In the end, give your customers more opportunities to provide feedback that will actually be answered. Be  active in speaking with customers daily. And finally, empower your teams to support your users at scale. This will all greatly improve your chances of building and growing a winning product, plain and simple.

The post How to Close the Customer Feedback Loop appeared first on UserVoice Blog.

Waterfall. Agile. Scrum. In all product teams, people will debate the best format or usefulness of Product Requirements Documents (known as PRDs). As a Product Manager in agile scrum and continuous deployment environments, I have seen the essence of PRDs in different forms and names, but the basic end goal of them has stayed the same:

PRDs are used to communicate to engineers, designers, and ourselves what is going to be built, but not exactly how it should be built.

“Bad Product Managers…want light and ask for a candle when their engineers could have built a light bulb.”
-Ben Horowitz, Good Product Manager. Bad Product Manager.

Traditionally, the how is written up after the PRD as a technical/functional specification document, but in many teams, it is just worked out informally by the engineers, often with some back-and-forth with the PM (Remember: Software is a team sport. Avoid unnecessarily stepping on engineers’ toes as a Product Manager).

Size Doesn’t Matter: Customer Value Does

Whether you end up writing a full-on traditional 60-page PRD or a product spec ticket that looks more like a 140-character tweet, you still run the risk of scope creep and a bloated process. Short does not mean lean. Long documents might lead you to think “Might as well throw in just one more feature”, but short specs might make you say “let’s build whatever is quickest” instead of building what is most valuable to the user.

There are 3 things you need to understand to combat bloat and build a customer-driven PRD:

1. You cannot start writing an effective PRD until you validate the value to users with customer feedback methods.
2. You cannot maintain a living PRD that is useful to the team unless each feature decision is prioritized and backed up with customer data, experimentation, or testable reasoning.
3. You cannot test the completeness of PRD-driven development without customer feedback and analytics thought through from the beginning of the process.

You can find concise PRDs these days, even in lean startups, but they are always customer-driven. Take a look at Product Hunt’s stripped-down PRD. Only 7 pages of notes for their entire product. While it may not be a “formal” PRD, it does the trick – which is exactly what you need.

The Product Hunt team begins with a clear goal for the user, describes who it’s for, gives customer validation data to back it up, and provides UX mockups for design direction. We will dig into PH’s their informal PRD a bit more, but it is clear they did a lot of work before they began writing it.

Before You Begin Writing the Product Requirements Document

Customer feedback is not a one-and-done process. There are several stages of collecting feedback, like laying brick for a house. After each row of bricks, you need to add the binding and check the level.

Let’s look at 3 feedback methods to use before you begin writing a PRD:

1. Talk to your users

As a Product Manager, if you are not talking to users, you are not doing a good job. You can talk on customer forums, directly in your product, or (preferably) in person. Of course, the anecdotes of 4 or 5 users are not a statistically significant sample, but you will see patterns and can quickly highlight some obvious flaws. What this does is provide you with a list of hypotheses (testable assumptions about the value of your product), not a list of features.

2. Determine if you need each feature by measuring potential Revenue, Customer Satisfaction, ROI, & Customer Impact

Before writing a PRD or building anything, prioritize your features and validate your ideas against user-generated ideas (from forums, focus groups, etc.) in order to build a business case beyond your assumptions or simple user votes. (Hint hint – here’s one product management tool that can help you prioritize customer feedback).

3. Show customers your prototype

The best way to determine what to build without wasting engineering resources or accumulating technical debt is to test a prototype of your product features with your customers. The support costs of adding new features you don’t need are dwarfed by the costs of removing that feature later on (People don’t like change). Remember, prototyping is one of the 5 key technical skills of a product manager.

Make your prototypes to the minimum testable version that gets the customer’s job done. That way, you can identify what it is about the product that would or wouldn’t work.

Customer Feedback In Each Part of the PRD

In his article “How to Write A Good PRD”, ex-Ebay and Netscape VP of Product Marty Cagan broke the PRD down into 4 very broad sections. We will look at how Customer Feedback can be incorporated into each section:

1. Product Purpose

Who is this for? Why are we building it?

In this section, you will define the user needs, the user tasks to fill those needs, and the business case.

Provide Context Using Customer Feedback

Feedback is no more important than when communicating the case for building a product. Identify all of the feedback you collected before writing the PRD and add it here. If there are gaps in your business case, you need to go back and collect support quickly. Atlassian even recommends a PRD 1-page dashboard to keep up-to-date for all teams. For the Product Purpose, they recommend linking the user need to User Stories and actual Customer Interview notes. There is an opportunity to add snippets from user testing videos and other customer feedback or user behavior reports. If you are lucky, you have already implemented a customer feedback tool to provide this support. This will help your designers and engineers make implementation decisions with more user context. This will also help marketing, sales and customer success teams understand and explain to customers the reasoning for feature decisions later on, if they need to dig in.

Product Hunt gets right to the point in their informal PRD’s purpose section:

The PH team outlines:

1. What the product will be
2. What the product will NOT be
3. Which early tests validate customer value
4. Who the product is for
5. and Why they should build it

2. Features

What is being built to help users accomplish tasks and meet their needs?

Mockups and Prototypes are the best fidelity versions to put in here. If this is pre-design, it will be a living part of the document that you can continue testing. In this section, you will define the user needs, the user tasks to fill those needs, and the business case. Prioritizing features and discovering edge cases to communicate to design and engineering will require user feedback data.

Only Build What Is Valuable Using Customer Feedback

You will want your design and engineering teams to spend the most effort on the most valuable features and use cases of the product. If an engineer spends 4 hours optimizing load time on a page, but does not know that the most important factor is a sleek design and highly-customized experience, they may sacrifice what matters most to the user. The best way to communicate this is through prioritizing features.

Hopefully, you have already collected customer feedback data before writing your PRD, but new features will always creep in during the Product Requirements process. In his article on PRDs, Marty Cagan writes, “Remember that the PRD is a living document, and you should track all features in the PRD through product launch.” This means that you will need to use the same forums, customer interviews, user behavior analytics, and prototype usability tests to identify the priority and scope of each new feature.

Remember, you can also get drowned out with a flood of anecdotes and feature requests from customers, sales, and customer support, so you need to supplement feedback with behavior data, usability testing, and metrics that show how much a feature might move the needle.

3. Release Criteria

User testing, user stories, and usability tests can be included with acceptance tests to ensure each feature is ready for release. A good product manager will provide the engineers with the direction needed to ensure they have built something the user values and can actually use in practice.
To determine what functionality is required and what additional testing you will need, Jerry Cao at UXPin outlines several criteria question areas to consider in his article on PRDs:

• Functionality: “What are the absolute mandatory functions and features that need to be met? Does the customer require a specific set of legacy features that have to be maintained? Is there a security component that is mandatory?”
• Usability: “Does the feature meet the user’s expectations aesthetically and is it intuitive to use? What forms of user tests, interviews, and “dogfooding” are required to ensure this is met? How fast should a user take to complete a task or user story? You need to ensure the team is thinking about usability when they are developing.”
• Reliability: “What’s the maximum acceptable failure rate? Are these failures predictable? Can the system recover from these failures?”
• Performance: “How fast must it be? What is the maximum response time, throughput, and memory consumption?”
• Supportability: “Is it testable, serviceable, installable, and configurable?”

You can only find the answer to these questions through customer feedback.

If you want to avoid a flood of customer support tickets for missed functionality or – even worse – insufficient security features, you should focus on this section and ensure your customer has what they want.

If you discover new functionality as you talk to customers, add it to your PRD. If you realize some functionality is not needed after all, then remove it. Just be sure to communicate to your team what and why it is being changed.

4. Schedule

A reasoning for a timeframe. Reasoning is better than just specific dates.

Understanding the user or customer’s needs for timing of release, the strategy of coordinating different feature releases and retirements, as well as estimation with engineering will improve this section. It should be readdressed often to ensure it is either tracking or should be changed.

Timing is strategically important, and can be a key to your product’s success or failure.

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese’s Brilliant Release Schedule – Anticipate User Feedback

For a non-tech example, Kraft made a change to the recipe formula for their core Kraft Mac & Cheese product. They knew that if they announced the change before the launch that there would be a huge backlash. They would not be able to tell the quality customer feedback from actual issues with the product.

Instead, Kraft quietly tested the changes and released the new formula without telling any consumers or changing the packaging (except the ingredients list). Part of the launch strategy was to monitor Social Media and Customer Support channels for customer complaints. Nothing happened. They then used the lack of response in funny campaign ads.

Using customer feedback also means understanding and anticipating the behavior of your customers. You can learn from your customers’ previous responses to product changes, the failure of other product launches (such as Facebook’s News Feed’s backlash), and the simple needs of your users/customers. Do those enterprise clients need these reporting features by Q3? Do your users have a chance to use your e-commerce integration before the Holiday Season? Listen to your customers and find out. Timing matters.

Putting It All Together

In the end, customer feedback can transform your PRD creation into a lean process of building, measuring, and learning. At each step in the planning, writing, updating, and release stages of your PRD process, collecting and leveraging customer feedback will turn an uncertain bet into a smooth launch. You avoid wasting time writing specs that are not tested or used, and avoid building waste in products that put you in a hole that is costly to maintain and worse to dig out of. In the end, you have a better product for your users and an empowered team in any development setting.

The post Writing a Customer Feedback-Fueled Product Requirements Document appeared first on UserVoice Blog.

yes, i am an introvert.

no, i am not shy.

Krugman rebuts Williamson’s Father-Führer and the contempt of deep conservatives for the poor whites behind Trump https://t.co/AXQg8DleTw

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) March 18, 2016

Catching up with The Night Manager a couple of days ago, I was slightly creeped out (maybe because I thought he was going to be discovered!) by a scene where the eponymous lead has an iris scan taken via a phone app as part of a biometric authentication protocol.

A later scene uses the scan via an app on someone else’s phone to authorise a transaction:

I wasn’t convinced such idents would be possibly using a phone, but it seems such apps have been around for a couple of years, as for example the IriTech ForYourIrisOnly app:

So – fingerprint idents on phones, and now iris scans. How about DNA? Well, if you have £1000 to hand and can do a bit of wet stuff extracting a DNA sample, it seems that portable DNA profilers are available, such as Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ MinION, “a portable device for molecular analyses that is driven by nanopore technology. It is adaptable for the analysis of DNA, RNA, proteins or small molecules”.

And finally, it seems that Google is experimenting with voice recognition triggered authentication for a new mobile payment scheme: Hands Free Payments.

The Hands Free app uses Bluetooth low energy, WiFi, location services, and other sensors on your phone to detect whether you are near a participating store. This enables you to pay hands-free, without fumbling with your phone or opening the Hands Free app.

When you are ready to pay at a store, simply tell the cashier “I’ll pay with Google”. The cashier confirms your identity, using your initials and the photo you added to your Hands Free profile.

So this presumably combines location based geofencing and proximity sensing to locate you and enable the payment option, and voice recognition to trigger the payment? (It also suggests there is a visual check by the cashier, who is presumably presented with your photo that is raised by some combination of the personal device/voice recognition events?)

By the by, it’s worth noting that voice recognition is becoming a commodity component in consumer facing authentication schemes – Barclays has been using it with wealthy customers for years and now it seems to be hitting the High Street retail banks: HSBC rolls out voice and touch ID security for bank customers.

Brooks has been blindsided by Trump, so much that he says, 

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

You and all the thousands of pundits that expected him to fizzle, or worse, that now are showing contempt for those supporting him, like Kevin Williamson. 

Brooks mentions recent work by Politico that shows we should despise Trump for his prevarication:

Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes.

“His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources,” they wrote.

Yikes.

I like the new Linkis adblocker that replaces ads with Twitter stream.

During our French Canadian Feast on March 15th, chef Marc-Andre Choquette (aka MAC) delighted guests with a traditional Quebecois dish – split pea soup! Although the version he served was topped with a foie gras croquette, he shared a simple recipe with us that you can easily make at home. You;ll definitely want to add this one to your list of go-to comfort foods!

INGREDIENTS:

• 550 gr yellow split peas
• 2.5 lt water
• 250 gr onion diced
• 170 gr smoked bacon diced
• 170 gr carrot diced
• 170 gr celery diced
• 8 gr garlic finely chopped
• 2 bay leaves
• Salt and pepper

DIRECTIONS:

1. Rinse the split peas under cold running water under the tap. In a large pot, combine the peas & 2.5 liters of water, and bring to a boil. Add salt until nicely seasoned. Turn down to a simmer.
2. In a skillet over medium high heat, slowly cook the bacon until nicely caramelized, stirring consistenly.
3. Add the onions and keep cooking until translucent. Add the carrots and cook slowly, followed by tossing in the garlic & bay leaves. Finally, add the celery and cook until tender.
4. Once all the vegetables are cooked, transfer them into the tall pot with the peas & water. Keep cooking until the peas are nice & tender.
5. Season to taste with salt & pepper

The soup will taste better the next day when the flavours have had time to marry. Serve with your favourite bread on the side!

Bon appetit!

The post RECIPE: French Canadian Split Pea Soup appeared first on Edible Canada.

The illustration, above, is from a Courier article by Mike Howell yesterday on the Arbutus Corridor. I posted earlier in the week about potential conflicting visions of the corridor’s use. Howell’s story reflected the same concern:

In the wake of the NDP monster rally about housing affordability, reported below, provincial Housing Minister Rich Coleman rose in the legislature to say that Vancouver “has to learn from Burnaby” how to do density properly. I can’t find a story on-line to link to, but perhaps a diligent reader can. Brent Toderian, the former director of planning for Vancouver, said on his regular “On The Coast” gig on the CBC yesterday that he “picked his jaw up off the floor” when he heard Coleman’s statement.

This, and Brentwood, is the kind of development Coleman is apparently referring to:

Full story here from Vancitybuzz.com.

I could be back at UBC in 1970, taking pre-architecture courses, with the professors getting us to read Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture Moderne and study the Radiant City, while we all wanted to read Jane Jacobs!

It’s an interesting contrast with this quote from a Barbara Yaffe column in the Sun at the beginning of the month:

Local politicians for years have tried valiantly to convince Lower Mainlanders the only real solution to unaffordable housing is densification.

But if results of a new survey on preferred development are to be believed, there is a big problem with their strategy: The public is not buying it.

Incredibly, 44 per cent of those surveyed last July said, “All or most future development should be single, detached homes” — a category of shelter considered something of a relic in a region with a shortage of land and housing stock.

This is the dreamscape (hallucinatory!) at work, but it speaks to a deep desire people have for their own little plot of land, somehow, somewhere, that is theirs and theirs alone. A corollary is the suspicion many people have of strata-title, of strata councils, of all the potential mess of collectively managing a huge asset. The demand for fee-simple housing, which is far outrunning the supply of it in Vancouver and elsewhere, explains its skyrocketing price.

Could Vancouver provide more opportunities for fee-simple, ground-oriented housing on small lots (say, 30 x 66 feet, like some of the end-block houses in old neighbourhoods like Mount Pleasant and Grandview)? The townhouse-building community hasn’t responded, to my knowledge, with fee-simple rowhousing. Could the RS-1 McMansionland on the west side of the city be carved up into smaller lots, densifying along the way, while retaining the opportunity for fee-simple ownership?

I’ve been writing for tech mags for as long as the Raspberry Pi has existed, and one of the most popular Pi tutorials I’ve seen in the last four years or so is the classic Raspberry Pi fileserver. It’s a no-brainer really, due to the Pi’s size and power requirements; the only thing you need to add is a USB hard drive. On Pi Day Western Digital, popular purveyors of hard drives, released PiDrive, a Raspberry Pi-optimised USB hard drive that you may want to consider for the job.

You might want to get an enclosure for it

You see, while the Raspberry Pi may be low power, hard drives are basically a chunk of metal spinning at several thousand RPM; this, as you might expect, needs a little more juice. While in the grand scheme of things a Pi fileserver is still a relatively low-power solution, it does make you wonder. The PiDrive, on the other hand, is designed around the Raspberry Pi. It draws all the power it needs straight from the separately available USB power cable [this article originally implied that the cable was included – we’re sorry for the inaccuracy] which then also fits into the Raspberry Pi. With this and optimisations to the way data is transferred, the power draw of the entire system ends up being lower than the usual methods.

As it was released on Pi Day, WD have gone all-in with the Pi references. It has 314 GB of storage and currently costs $31.42 (£22), which is 31.4% off its RRP of $45.81 (£32).

It comes in a lovely box that reminds you what it’s good for

At that size it’s probably most useful for your day-to-day Pi use, offering more storage than your standard 8GB SD card. However, there are four USB ports on a Raspberry Pi and you can connect a drive to each of them if you want to go down the fileserver/NAS route – WD reckons PiDrive will work just fine for that kind of purpose.

The PiDrive is on sale now. Give it a look!

The post Meet the 314GB PiDrive appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

A screenshot from yesterday’s airbnb site, featuring two complete units for short-term “holiday” rental (probably taking them out of the city’s rental supply semi-permanently) and one share room (a mortgage or rent helper for the long-term tenant or owner, maybe?).

Allen Garr in The Courier has written two long columns on airbnb, last week and this week, both negative about its impact on the city. One bite from yesterday’s:

While the city of Vancouver continues, as it has for years now, to do nothing more than ponder the problems of short-term rentals, the likes of Airbnb continue to encourage illegal activities that significantly reduce the availability of affordable rental properties and drive up the cost of real estate.

The activities are illegal because they violate a city zoning restriction that prohibits rentals of less than 30 days without a license for a hotel or a bed and breakfast operation. According to the city’s chief housing officer Mukhtar Latif, this is the case in virtually all Airbnb listing in Vancouver, which, as I noted last week, number 4,728 — of which 67 per cent, or 3,179, are either complete homes or apartments.

Simon Fraser University graduate student Karen Sawatzky has been drilling away at this issue for almost three years now as she puts together her Urban Studies master’s thesis on the impact Airbnb has been having on affordable rental housing in our city.

She notes several city policies that are in conflict with the growing impact of Airbnb aside from the zoning bylaw on short-term rentals. There is also the great amount of noise the city makes about being a green city with affordable housing. Yet because of Airbnb, more people are forced out of the core of the city where they could either walk to work or cycle and instead are required to commute.

Aside from impact on the environment, a city study pointed out that by adding the cost of commuting to the cost of rent for those forced out of the city’s core, the cost of living is less affordable than simply renting in Kits or the West End.

Downturn For What?

Rookie Fast: A Q&A with Send It Courier

Photos and interview by Claire McFarlane

You probably didn't think about hiring a bike courier when you had to move your fridge from one end of the city to the other. And if you did, you'd probably expect some kind of Joseph Gordon-Levitt character to be delivering it to you. Send It is one of Toronto's leading courier companies and they will deliver pretty much anything you need by bike. They'll even get your house keys back from your one-night-stand.

dandyhorse sat down with Kiki, a Send It dispatcher who used to be a courier for the company before an injury led her to take a break from her bike. Eric, a fellow rider and dispatcher who was working at the time, also sat in on the conversation.

The following conversation has been edited down from it's original length. 

D: Tell me a bit about Send It.

K: Send It is a courier cooperative that started in 2012. They were a bunch of couriers that just kind of wanted to work together for their own reasons. It’s a really awesome company, especially if you’re working for yourself with your friends, it’s a little more family oriented that way, we take care of each other in that respect.

D: You do food as well as other packages?

K: Yup. So we do food and lots of different things. There is a huge range. For instance we deliver wine as part of a monthly subscription program, we do lots of retail stuff and we’ll do anything, really.

E: I’ve literally delivered everything. I’ve delivered a washing machine, a stove, a fridge and wine every month. We get about 250 cases of wine that show up and we deliver throughout the week.

K: Mostly catering too, like during the week we’ll do catering rushes. So we have these big platters that we deliver. I’m sure you’ve seen our big cargo bikes in and around the city; those are awesome tools we use in order to accommodate this kind of business.

E: We get a lot of mail, like kind of classic courier stuff. But we also do a lot of funny one-off stuff like people who need to send one thing, one time of their lives. So I’ve delivered like keys from a one-night stand. I’ve delivered a cell phone to a kid in high school who forgot it at home and he desperately needed it so his mom paid a lot of money for us to bring it to him at school. I brought it to him in his class.

K: I think the weirdest thing I’ve delivered is blood, like, on ice. I guess to a doctor’s office?

D: Was it like: ‘Someone’s dying and they need this blood’ kind of thing?

K: No no, I think it was just blood to be analyzed or something like that but it was pretty weird, I kept thinking ‘I have blood on my back.’

I think Eric has taken cat feces like, to a vet before.

E: Oh yeah. It was for analysis but it was like wrapped up in a bag kind of like a little cigar and it was definitely still kinda warm. It was pretty weird.

Kiki on one of Send It's cargo bikes

D: What makes Send It different from other courier companies?

K: I guess what makes it differently is that we are courier owned and courier operated so we’re all really invested in what we put out and what our customers see. Generally we all really care about what we’re doing. We go above and beyond for our clients to serve them what they’re putting money into. Whether it’s just going up to the door directly and handing them their mail instead of just going to the concierge like a lot of other couriers do, it’s just a little bit more friendly.

D: What do you guys think of the rise of food deliveries by bike?

K: Personally, I think it’s great. They have their own business model that they’re going for. I just think that if you’re going to have food delivered, you should really pay for the service and you should really care about it. It just brings things like buying locally and supporting your local businesses into the equation. Thinking about all that when you’re purchasing something can really make a difference for the smaller people like us.

Casper the dog plays an important role around the office

D: Do you think there’s a kind of bro culture associated with bike couriers?

K: Oh yeah! Especially being a woman in the community, it’s interesting to see the differences in personality. I’ve met some really amazing people that I consider like my family but then I’ve also met some real meanies but, that’s the culture. You really have to put in time and the effort to come across as someone who is worth staying around. A lot of people don’t take this job seriously so they’ll leave and that sucks; having someone that isn’t dedicated to what they’re doing. But you find a lot of dedicated people in this industry. You find a lot of people that want to do it and really believe in it, which is cool.

D: Do you feel that as a woman you have to try harder to stand out and be extra dedicated?

K: Uhhhh, sometimes. There’s this term called ‘rookie fast’ and when I first started I would just go [bike] as fast as I possibly could, just to kind of show off to show people that I could do the work even though you don’t have to go that fast to complete a same-day, you can take like all day.

E: It’s better to be smart than fast.

K: See, I learned that later on.

D: What’s you’re favorite part of the job?

K: I love the whole teamwork aspect, I love coming into work and seeing these dudes hustling as hard as they can and it’s really rewarding in that sense.

D: Your least favorite part?

K: I guess it would be getting that customer that doesn’t want to tip when it’s snowing a lot outside. And you know, that’s fine, you don’t have to tip, it’s just a general thing.

E: It’s more so just people who are unimpressed by the fact that you just trekked across the city. Sometimes people are like: “I need it now.” And you have like 30 minutes to deliver an envelope across the city, then, when you get there they’re like: “Oh how’s the whether out there?” And then you’re like: “It just snowed like eight inches today like, don’t ask me.” Sometimes they’ll then just throw the envelope on a desk even though you just killed yourself to get it there.

The Send It lair, which looks a lot like the clubhouse you wish you would have had growing up 

D: What would it mean for you guys if we established a minimum grid of bike lanes in the city?

K: Bike lanes are cool but couriers don’t often utilize them just because we have to go in and out of buildings really quickly so we’re crossing a lot of lanes.

E: The Richmond-Adelaide track is really good because you can get in and out of them really quickly. On other lanes, where there’s a curb, it can be a lot harder to pass slower riders, especially if there’s a car there or there’s snow in the way, it kind of just turns it into a single-lane track.

D: What’s the biggest misconception about bike couriers?

K: That we all smell bad. Some of us smell really nice, OK?

People assume that we all have bad attitudes and that we’re all just a bunch of tattooed freaks that don’t want to conform. Really, we’re all just softies looking for a job.

E: People think that we’re like degenerates or like, the scum of society. Some people just like to ride their bikes all day.

Related on the dandyBLOG:

Behind the scenes with Dylan Leeder shooting bike couriers in winter

Toronto couriers prepare for strike with benefit concert

Faster Food: Bicycle delivery by Hurrier

Toronto International Bike Show 2016 Recap

Real estate is one of this era’s few high-yield investments. Vancouver and Toronto lead the way in Canada, with heated bubble-like markets.

But there may be bad actors at the markets’ edges, with sinister motives. This according to the Financial Transactions and Reports Centre (FinTRAC), a federal agency that monitors compliance and enforces federal money laundering legislation.  (Their chief purpose is to provide financial intelligence to law enforcement and national security agencies.)

In this piece in the Globe and Mail, Kathy Tomlinson reviews recent activity by FinTRAC. We do not get any sense from this about the size of the real estate problem and its effect on prices.

The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre (FinTRAC), which enforces the legislation, says it found “significant” or “very significant” deficiencies within some five dozen B.C. brokerages in the past year. It decided to step up scrutiny over worries that money primarily from China is being laundered through Vancouver real estate.

“There were concerns being raised that those in the real estate sector were not fulfilling the obligations under the act, as well as other concerns expressed about the movement of money,” said spokesperson Darren Gibb. “The real estate sector is highly vulnerable to money laundering.”

FinTRAC’s 2015 annual report surprised me with the breadth of its abilities and its worldwide connections. Clearly, their focus is not on real estate prices.  However, their effectiveness at combatting money laundering begins with reporting from businesses such as those in the real estate sector, where big dollars change hands.

Through our compliance program, we ensure that businesses on the front lines of Canada’s legitimate economy meet their legal obligations. Our robust guidance, assessment, enforcement and feedback activities are focused on ensuring that businesses provide us with the information that we need to support our partners’ money laundering and terrorism financing investigations.

Given the importance of suspicious transaction reporting to our analysis and financial intelligence, we reached out to businesses last year to enhance their awareness of their obligations in this regard and, more importantly, to strengthen their understanding of what constitutes a useful suspicious transaction report. We also refined the methodology that we use to assess compliance related to suspicious transaction reporting and communicated it broadly to businesses across the country. As a result of these efforts, and an increased commitment from businesses, suspicious transaction reporting increased by 11 percent in 2014–15, and the quality of the reports that we are receiving has improved markedly. This has had a real impact on the financial intelligence that we are able to generate and disclose to our partners.

As Tomlinson reports, the real estate sector has concerns over training and extra work for its agents around money laundering and the federal legislation. Others also have concerns, but in a different sense, calling for more training.

Money-laundering expert Christine Duhaime says the federal agency deserves credit for increasing enforcement, but it should do more.

“I do think it’s good that FinTRAC is increasing its compliance. I just wish they’d do 800 [examinations] instead of 80,” said the Vancouver lawyer, who adds that she talks to many agents who are uninformed.

“Most don’t even understand the laws or what they are supposed to do,” she said. “[Brokerage firms] have to hire consultants and experts, and then you have to hire somebody to be a compliance officer – or appoint someone – so it’s really expensive.”

Somehow, I recently came across a link to Stay on the Bus, an excerpt from a commencement speech Arno Rafael Minkkinen gave at the New England School of Photography in June 2004. It is also titled "The Helsinki Bus Station Theory: Finding Your Own Vision in Photography". I almost always enjoy reading the thoughts of an artist on his or her own art, and this was no exception. I also usually hear echoes of what I feel about my own arts and avocations. Here are three.

What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera.

This is one of the great things about any art. What happens inside your mind can happen in a piano, on a canvas, or in a poem. When people find the art that channels their mind best, beautiful things -- and lives -- can happen.

One of the things I like about programming is that is really a meta-art. Whatever happens in your mind can happen inside a camera, inside a piano, on a canvas, or in a poem. Yet whatever happens inside a camera, inside a piano, or on a canvas can happen inside a computer, in the form of a program. Computing is a new medium for experimenting, simulating, and creating.

Teachers who say, "Oh, it's just student work," should maybe think twice about teaching.

Amen. There is no such thing as student work. It's the work our students are ready to make at a particular moment in time. My students are thinking interesting thoughts and doing their best to make something that reflects those thoughts. Each program, each course in their study is a step along a path.

All work is student work. It's just that some of us students are at a different point along our paths.

Georges Braque has said that out of limited means, new forms emerge. I say, we find out what we will do by knowing what we will not do.

This made me think of an entry I wrote many years ago, Patterns as a Source of Freedom. Artists understand better than programmers sometimes that subordinating to a form does not limit creativity; it unleashes it. I love Minkkinen's way of saying this: we find out what we will do by knowing what we will not do. In programming as in art, it is important to ask oneself, "What will I not do?" This is how we discover we will do, what we can do, and even what we must do.

Those are a few of the ideas that stood out to me as I read Minkkinen's address. The Helsinki Bus Station Theory is a useful story, too.

In the UK, the government are bringing in an apprenticeship levy, the details of which are still a bit sketchy, which prompted me to capture these details in a quick sketch at the excellent “Making Apprenticeships Work” event hosted by City & Guilds.

I’m all about apprenticeships. Proper apprenticeships. Not sausage-factory apprenticeships (unless it is actually in a sausage factory – which would probably be awful, but with obvious benefits…)

The post The “L” word appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

Oooh. Was that a buzz from the phone in my pocket? It’s probably someone tweeting me. Probably someone sharing an illustration of mine to their followers. They’ve probably got a bijillion followers… let me just check.

Nope – must of just been a tingle in my leg – back to reading with the kids…

(This is why I don’t have social media on my phone anymore…)

The post Offline appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

This Will Richardson talk really resonated with me. He quotes Dewey. You should really watch it. And in my curiosity, I thought I would record the process of creating an image – and you can check the results here.

The post A school’s mission appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

Yay! Top of the league!

What… for rote learning?
<heart sinks>

Here’s Jim Knight talking OECD: ‘England is bottom of the league when it comes to deep learning. And top for drill and practice. It’s no coincidence’

The post Top of the league! appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

Jason Snell:

People who aren't journalists may not realize the neat trick Jobs pulled. Product announcements are basically press releases: They're publicity. They're arguably news, but they're boring news — and a cynical writer could view them as free PR for the company putting out the press release. Rewriting a press release is one of the lower forms of journalism.

Covering an Apple event didn't feel like that, and it still doesn't. It feels like an event, and when you're reporting on it, you're not rewriting a press release — you're covering something as it happens live, just as if you were in the White House briefing room during a presidential press conference. In the end, these Apple events are just product announcements — the brilliance is that the stagecraft makes them much more interesting to journalists and fans alike.

I've only ever been to one Apple event (coincidentally, where I also met Jason), and I couldn't agree more. It was a product announcement, but it felt like a surreal movie premiere full of nerds. I loved it.

In less than a week, Apple will hold a media presentation at its corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California on March 21, where the company is expected to reveal a number of new products, including a new 4-inch iPhone.

Similar to past Apple events, rumours about what the tech giant will reveal have been swirling for the past number of weeks, many of them sourced from the almost always reliable Mark Gurman of 9to5Mac. Below is everything we know about Apple’s March 21st event so far.

Odds are we will see a 4-inch iPhone 5se

The main reveal at Apple’s event will reportedly be a new 4-inch iPhone designed to replace the iPhone 5s. The phone is expected to be called the iPhone 5se or possible iPhone SE.

According to Gurman, the device will feature many of the same components found in the company’s iPhone 6s, including its 12 megapixel camera, A9/M9 chips and NFC chip for Apple Pay. Should the iPhone 5se include a NFC chip and Apple makes a corresponding move to discontinue the iPhone 5s, then Apple’s entire smartphone lineup will feature Apple Pay functionality for the first time.

Unlike the iPhone 6s, however, sources indicate the SE won’t come equipped the front-facing LED flash featured in Apple’s latest flagship smartphone. It’s also rumoured the front camera won’t feature the same 5 megapixel front shooter as the 6s, though it could utilize the same 12 megapixel rear-facing camera.

Schematics sourced by OnLeaks, another notable Apple leaker, indicate the smartphone’s body will adopt a similar design to the current iPhone 6s, with curved edges and a minimal camera bump (or possibly no camera bump at all).

It’s time for an iPad Air refresh

While it’s still unclear if the often-rumoured upcoming 9.7-inch iPad refresh will be called the iPad Air 3 or a new variation of the iPad Pro, it’s expected whatever tablet Apple reveals will be the successor to the iPad Air 2, which first launched back in 2014.

The new iPad will repotedly feature the same internal components as Apple’s 12.9-inch iPad Pro: a more powerful A9X processor, and the positively received Smart Connector magnetic port, allowing it to connect with various accessories, including a new version of Apple’s iPad Pro keyboard. Support for the Apple Pencil is also expected to be part of the new iPad Air’s feature set.

Similar to the iPhone 6s, the new iPad Air will utilize a 12 megapixel camera, which means it will have a superior camera to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, as well as the ability to shoot 4K video.

Finally, it’s rumoured the launch of this refreshed iPad Air will result in older iPad models like the iPad mini 2 and original iPad Air being discontinued.

No Apple Watch 2, but we’ll get new watch bands

The Apple Watch 2 is reportedly still months away from being revealed, but as a way to tide fans of the wearable over, speculation indicates Apple plans to reveal new watch bands and colours at the company’s March 21 event.

One of these notable bands is the black Milanese Loop, which leaked on Apple’s own website in early January. It’s likely a number of other Apple Watch Bands will be revealed as well. Other reveals could include new tvOS and watchOS features, though most of the rumours surrounding new operating system features seem to be based solely on speculation right now, as opposed to definitive evidence.

Sorry, no new MacBook Air or MacBook Pro

Those who have been eagerly anticipating the release of a refreshed MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, one that features many of the innovations included in the 2015 MacBook, will be disappointed to learn Apple’s long overdue laptop refresh likely won’t be revealed on the 21st.

Apple’s refreshed MacBook Air and MacBook Pro line will is reported to feature Intel’s latest Skylake generation processors, which boost CPU speeds by up to 20 percent, a new, significantly sleeker form factor and the impressive keyboard featured in the 2015 MacBook.

We’ll be on the ground at Apple’s March 21st event, bringing you all the news straight from the show floor. So if both the iPhone 5se and refreshed iPad Air are revealed, you’ll find out here first.

Last week, a Richmond, British Columbia women in her 40s was pulled over for distracted driving. It was her 12th such offense.

Cpl. Dennis Hwang, the police officer who fined the woman after she almost hit his car, said at the time, “I have never encountered anyone with that many convictions for distracted driving, ever. Might be a good candidate for having their driving license reviewed.”

Well, that same woman has again been caught using her mobile device while driving — and just once, but twice.

On Wednesday, the Vancouver Police Department said on Twitter, “ticket #14 for this distracted driver courtesy of #VPD. Officer has requested driver be prohibited from driving.” In the span of 10 days, the woman has been fined three times for distracted driving.

Police have asked that she have her license revoked, though no timeline has been set for when that may happen.

For the time being, one very distracted driver remains loose on the road.

After a lengthy beta period, ProtonMail, the easy-to-use encrypted mail service that launched on Indiegogo back in 2014, is now available to the general public via an open registration process.

Developed in Geneva, Switzerland, ProtonMail’s claim to fame is that it allows its users to send encrypted emails without the use of private or public encryption keys. Everything related to the end-to-end encryption of an email is handled by ProtonMail’s client.

Using ProtonMail, you also don’t need to worry about the other person not having the proper software. When it comes to emailing someone with a client that doesn’t support end-to-end encryption, say an Outlook or Gmail, the person on the receiving end will get a link to a password protected message that contains the content of the original email you sent. The company also announced the launch of its mobile app, available on Android and iOS.

While free to use, ProtonMail is preparing to launch paid and premium tiers that grant users access to additional features. Previously, the company depended on a donation model.

“Do people want to pay for privacy? We’ll know in a month or two what the outcome of that is,” said Andy Yen, the co-founder and CEO of ProtonMail, in an interview with Motherboard.

According to a recent report published by Google, a significant portion of the Internet traffic in Canada, including a large swath of popular websites like Aliexpress, is not secured with end-to-end encryption.