In the quest for the perfect selfie, some folks seem to have decided that no photo-editing app to is good enough to smooth out the wrinkles: nothing less than old-school plastic surgery will do.
An annual study released earlier this year by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery showed that one in three surveyed doctors have seen an increase in requests for surgery due to patients’ dissatisfaction with their image on social media. As a result, the report says, American surgeons saw a 10% increase in rhinoplasty from 2012 to 2013, a 7% rise in hair transplants, and 6% in eyelid surgery.
Doctors say patients come to them with selfies they took to show where they think they need improvement. Some surgeons point out that with the selfie’s characteristically distorted angle, it does not provide an accurate representation of one’s face. “I refuse a significant proportion of patients with selfies because I believe it is not a real image of what they actually look like in person,” Dr. Sam Rizk, a Manhattan-based plastic surgeon told Reuters.
Many of the requests come from a generation increasingly defined by social media. Over half of the surgeons surveyed saw a rise in procedures performed on patients under 30, a sign of the impact of platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat on the falling self-esteem of the young.
A fresh face for your selfie isn’t the only reason the Instagram-obsessed visit the plastic surgeon. Elle reported earlier this year that with the now-obligatory social media engagement announcement, women are getting hand lifts—yes, hand lifts—to “appropriately” show off their wedding bling. Dr. Ariel Ostad, a New York dermatologist told the magazine that he has seen a 40% increase in the procedure, which smoothes out the skin on the fingers, since the advent of social media.
Another fix for the Internet generation? Patients with constant computer-face come in to get their “tech necks” done—getting rid of the wrinkles on the neck caused by leaning into their screens 24/7.
For your future selfie endeavors, some words of caution. The perfect selfie may come with a hefty price-tag from the plastic surgeon, but if you are striving for that extra arm’s length with a “selfie stick,” it could also land you in jail.
On Nov. 28, protesters across America boycotted Black Friday retailers to draw attention to police brutality in wake of the death of Michael Brown and the failure to indict the policeman who shot him. Noting that black Americans contribute over a trillion dollars to the US economy yet routinely have their civil rights violated, organizations asked shoppers to stay home so that corporations, and the politicians they often fund, will feel the economic impact. Protesters marched and chanted in shopping malls, staging “die-ins” in which they lay prone in imitation of victims of police shootings.
In the St. Louis metropolitan region, three malls were temporarily closed. The first, the Galleria, is in the commercial suburb of Richmond Heights and is popular with black middle-class St. Louisans. (On a map of St. Louis that went viral in April, this area was referred to as “where black people go to shop.”) The second, West County Center, is in the wealthy town of Des Peres in St. Louis’s affluent West County, and primarily serves white middle-to-upper class shoppers. The third, Chesterfield Mall, is the largest in the state of Missouri. A thriving commercial megaplex, it is even further out in West County, in an area populated primarily by wealthy white conservatives.
There were no mall boycotts near Ferguson, because there are almost no malls left to boycott.
The Black Friday boycott was called to bring attention to how little black lives are valued in America. One look around majority black North County, the area surrounding Ferguson, and this becomes clear. The malls of North County stand vacant, stores shuttered, weeds sprouting in the parking lot. “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” cried the protesters (referring to an indictment), but in North County, commerce was shut down long ago, leaving an impoverished majority black population without resources or job opportunities. This is the landscape of abandonment, where things crumble quietly and communities scramble to survive.
It was not always this way. North County was once home to several thriving shopping centers that opened in the 1960s and 1970s. One of America’s first shopping malls was the River Roads Mall in the city of Jennings, which borders Ferguson. In the 1980s and 1990s, when poor black families fled crime-ridden St. Louis City in search of a better life in North County, white families began to flee North County for the majority white exurbs. River Roads Mall, having no viable consumer base, closed in 1995—and the community lost the jobs and tax revenue that came with it. Today, Jennings makes the news for closing school in advance of the Ferguson grand jury decision, because it cannot afford a school bus to transport students through the area of Ferguson which ultimately burned.
The remains of The Crossings at Northwest mall in St. Ann, blocked off to the public.(Sarah Kendzior)
In St. Ann, a small suburb near Ferguson where police have been locking up protesters since August, Northwest Plaza—later renamed The Crossings at Northwest—lies in ruins. Once the largest enclosed mall in Missouri, Northwest Plaza closed in 2010 after being acquired by the Australian corporation Westfield Group in 1997. As the demography of St. Louis shifted, with whites abandoning North County, stores began to pull out of Northwest Plaza, and Westfield shifted its investment to the malls in wealthy, white West County. Damaged infrastructure in Northwest Plaza was ignored for years, and in 2013, much of the complex was demolished. Today, impoverished St. Ann builds its revenue from traffic citations of a mostly black and Hispanic population. In 2013, St. Ann Municipal Court brought in $3.42 million dollars from fines, the most of any town in St. Louis County. A town stripped of its commercial base now profits off, and increases, the poverty of its own citizens.
What’s left of the Jamestown mall in Florissant.(Sarah Kendzior)
In Florissant, another city bordering Ferguson, the Jamestown Mall stands empty, a giant gold “Cash Paid for Anything of Value” sign looming over where an entrance once was. Jamestown is St. Louis’s most recently closed mall, having shuttered in July 2014, a casualty of the recession that never ended. By 2013, the mall was so poor the owners could not pay to heat it on Black Friday. By January 2014, Macy’s, the last remaining store in the mall, had closed, laying off 88 employees. They are among the thousands in St. Louis who have lost their jobs in the past decade as mall after mall collapsed.
A military vehicle watching over the St. Louis Galleria mall on Nov. 29.(Sarah Kenzior)
The consequences of North County’s mall closures are far-reaching. In early 2014, I interviewed black North County fast food workers, most of whom took public transportation to their service jobs in wealthier St. Louis areas. North County residents who once had jobs nearby now spend hours on the bus, working for wages that do not even cover the cost of public transit. Displaced North County consumers face their own problems. When black shoppers of North County, now without a central destination, began going to the Galleria, their arrival was protested by parts of white St. Louis, some of whom sought to close the Metrolink transit station near the mall that opened in 2006. Concerns about Galleria “gang activity” prompted a panic that, by 2014, has proven wildly overblown.
Mall protests in St. Louis are not new. For years, Reverend Larry Rice, a champion of the homeless in St. Louis, has brought residents of his New Life Evangelistic Center shelter to malls in order to demonstrate the chasm between St. Louis’s rich and poor. In 2012, he proposed the Galleria be used as a shelter to protect the homeless in the scorching summer heat. St. Louis’s problems of poverty and racism long pre-date the events that drew attention to the region in 2014. But they remain, in spite of national attention, unaddressed.
In the region surrounding Ferguson, the real problem is that there is little left to boycott. Much of North County suffers quietly, commuting to wealthier suburbs as their own region is left to rot, their tax base erodes, and their officials derive revenue through racially-biased exploitation schemes. Opportunity, here, has long been in foreclosure. Apathy to the suffering of poor and black citizens has shut down more than any protest ever could.
On Sunday, Switzerland is voting on whether to cap the number of immigrants to just 0.2% of its total population of 8 million, which would restrict the number of people coming in to about 16,000 people a year. Whether it succeeds or fails, this latest plebiscite—named after the 40-year-old Ecopop movement that seeks to link protecting the environment with slowing population growth—is just latest Swiss effort to keep the outside world at bay.
In February, the far-right Swiss People’s Party mustered enough signatures to get a national referendum on introducing immigration quotas—and won by a slim margin, throwing relations with the European Union into flux. Switzerland, famously neutral, is not a member of the EU but has several agreements allowing citizens from the 28 EU nations to live and work in Switzerland and vice versa, as well as travel passport-free.
The referendum result violated those agreements, and the government has no idea what to do. The result of the February vote has yet to be implemented.
Switzerland is at the center of Europe geographically, and outside of it politically. But the worst attacks on the principle of free movement are coming from a country on the geographic edge and political heart of Europe. Earlier this week, British prime minister David Cameron announced plans to force migrants to wait four years to claim certain benefits. For this plan to work, the other EU leaders will have to agree with it—and this much-retweeted Czech reaction, harking back to WWII, shows it isn’t going to be easy:
Any changes to the basic right of free movement within the EU must be endorsed by the rest of its members. Cameron had floated plans for a Swiss-style migrant cap, but these were a non-starter, perhaps because of a German intervention. Now, with nothing more up his sleeve, Cameron said he would “rule nothing out” if the UK didn’t win backing for his new, more limited proposals—implying that he would campaign to leave the EU in a future referendum.
And the UK’s shrinking mainstream parties aren’t the only ones in Europe facing threats from the left and right. In France, the Front National’s leader, Marine Le Pen, is being hailed by the Austrian and Dutch far-right as the future president of France at this weekend’s annual party conference. In Greece, voters rewarded the anti-EU leftist Syriza coalition in May and sent the neo-nazi Golden Dawn, already in parliament (paywall), to Brussels.
Almost 25 years after the European Union was first created and free movement was enshrined as a right of all its people, immigration is becoming the most important issue to voters across a region with high unemployment and a perpetually weak economy. But how much can they pull at the fabric of the EU before the whole thing falls apart?
Here’s our newest round-up of the featured startups on our site this week. If you have startup tips or story suggestions, feel free to email us or tell us about your startup on this form. Any juicy tech news tips go here. Enjoy this week’s list!
Pembantu is similar to an online marketplace where it brings together information from third-party agencies into one place – in this case for people to find domestic helpers for cleaning, babysitting, or as a live-in nanny.
PocketMath is a self-serve mobile advertising platform from Singapore which announced earlier this week the raising of a US$10 million series A funding round from Rakuten Ventures.
Founded in 2012, IzumoBase specializes in a next-gen software-defined storage (SDS) that the founder developed over eight years of research and development. The startup attracted about US$1.35 million worth of funding from Global Brain.
Shelfy, a Japanese startup that matches business owners with interior design companies, received an investment from East Ventures. Through the platform, business owners can browse example designs by category. If the user comes across an example that matches their desired aesthetic, they simply provide details about their place and request an estimate. Users can also select multiple examples to compare quotes and select the most affordable option.
Vmoney’s founder aims to improve access to public transportation by making payments frictionless for passengers. The company developed TAPnPASS, which is a stored-value card that makes use of near field communication (NFC) technology. Users can also transfer funds to it by tapping it on your mobile phone using the VMoney app.
Four Eyes sells affordable prescriptive eyewear online. All frames are designed by the company and delivery is free. There’s a home try-on service where users can pick three frames, try them at home, and then send them back to the company. Users can get their money back if they dislike all of them. This could win over consumers who are hesitant to buy without trying a physical pair. There’s also a fun virtual try-on feature. Users upload a personal photo, and the site fits the frame over the face.
Japan’s Yesterscape is a self-described photographic time machine. People are already constantly taking photos to preserve their memories. This app takes that tendency a step further by affixing photos to GPS locations so users can revisit the location weeks or years later and relive the moment.
Qiandaibao, a mobile point-of-sales startup similar to Loop and Square, makes a series of mobile POS solutions, including a smartphone fob that plugs into the headphone jack and can read magnetic strip cards. The startup was one of the first companies in China to obtain a license to operate a third-party payment business in the country.
Qiandaibao is aimed at lower-tier cities with poor payment infrastructure, especially among small businesses. It currently supports bank cards, WeChat payment, Alipay, and some bank apps. It is also revealed to have raised “hundreds of millions of RMB” from IDG Capital, Banyan Fund, Haitong Securities, and Jiangxi Copper.
Carousell, a Singapore startup that has developed a mobile app for consumers to buy and sell things, has raised a series A round led by prominent venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. Existing investors Rakuten Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, 500 Startups, and serial entrepreneur Darius Cheung also joined.
Online restaurant booking platform Qraved offers regular discounts for reservations made on its online platform. It currently lets users place bookings for more than 1,500 restaurants in Jakarta, and will roll out partnerships with another 1,000 restaurants in Bali next month. Qraved also provides back-end technology for restaurant partners to manage bookings and build guest profiles online.
The startup announced this week a follow-up investment of US$1.3 million, jointly led by Convergence Accel and M&Y Growth Partners.
Taiwan’s QLL, a mobile app startup that makes language learning apps for children under six years old, revealed it closed a US$450,000 round led by B Dash Ventures, with participation from Taiwan’s Pinehurst Advisors, Singapore’s Coent Venture Partners, and Viling and Incubate Fund from Japan.
Seoul-based restaurant delivery app Baedal Minjeok is similar to GrubHub in the US (which Goldman Sachs also owns a stake in) and FoodPanda in Singapore. Almost all of its transactions take place via mobile device.
Users simply browse a list of local restaurant menus and pick out what they want on the app, then the Baedal Minjeok team will order, pick it up, and deliver it to their doorstep. The startup has 145,000 registered restaurants in its database, for which it received about four million orders last month and is the most popular food delivery app in Korea right now.
Arki is a new wearable created by Korean hardware startup Zikto. Its mission is to coach the average person to walk with good posture, thereby exuding confidence. The Arki coaches you by gently vibrating whenever it detects that you are adopting a poor walking posture – but this is subject to your own needs. The device also comes with a companion app that will track your progress, giving you points according to the amount of “Sound Walking” you have done.
Scrollback, a Singapore and India-based startup that’s building a real-time chat widget for online communities, has raised US$500,000 in seed funding. The service consists of rooms that can be embedded on websites and apps. It connects to other channels like IRC and Twitter, creating conversations that span across platforms.
Aromajoin, just might be the future of movie theaters, interactive advertisements – and maybe even home entertainment. The startup aims to integrate visuals with smells. The company’s Aroma Player software is simple and straightforward – it almost resembles music mixing software a la Garageband. Just upload a video and drag-and-drop scents (or mixtures of scents) at specific times.
A recent piece in Quartz argued that the the Roma, a group of people who migrated from India to Europe over 1,000 years ago, could save Europe’s flailing economy. But this young and able-bodied population is woefully unemployed and underpaid. Governments must decide that it is important to educate and enfranchise Roma children and their families together.
I learned this firsthand in 14 years of working with Roma families.
I have observed that they carefully maintain their ancestral skills and their Sanskrit language while being an oral culture. With them, education is not through being formally taught in alienating schools in rows at desks but through direct observation and practice within their families.
Though I have taught at all levels, particularly at pre-school and university, my own practice with Roma families is the opposite of the above. I believe it is best to have schooling for the entire family, for it to be carried out in Romanì, their language, in a library setting with books, where parents, grandparents, children and grandchildren come together and write out their names, the alphabet and, with Romanian Roma who are Christian as well as European Citizens, the Lord’s Prayer, as children were taught literacy for centuries. Seven participants in our Alphabet School in Florence, young mothers and a widow with children, were next given library schools to be in their homes in Buzau, Ramnicu Sarat and Constantsa in Romania, receiving a stipend of €100 ($125) a month for a year, plus money for firewood, so they could stay with their children rather than begging in Florence for their families’ survival leaving the children with grandmothers in Romania as they formerly had to do. This family schooling strategy does not create a gulf between illiterate parents and their literate children but a shared culture added to their Romany base, enriching rather than depriving these families. Early learning is the most intense. It should not be at the cost of the centuries of skills which are lost when children are taken away from their homes at the best age to absorb these in the family. This project thus enables early home schooling as the base for later formal schooling and literacy to which these children will have already been exposed together with their mothers and fathers.
It is also important for schools, particularly the teachers, to learn from Roma of their migration from India, the Sanskrit language, and of the centuries of discrimination and slavery, gulags and lagers, they have experienced. It would be helpful to teach how our alphabet is one family, spreading from outside Europe, originating in the Near East amongst Semitic peoples, then becoming adopted almost globally today. Likewise we can learn that Roma with their Sanskrit/Romanì language, and we, are from one Indo-European linguistic family, though distant relatives.
I have taught university students at Berkeley, Princeton. and Boulder. I prefer teaching illiterate Roma, all ages, and learning from them the richness of their culture, the excellence of their skills, and the strength of their families. We reciprocate, giving each what the other lacks, with dignity, in this pilot project.
Fernando, 12, Esmeralda, 10, with New York University students, and Brunetto Latino text on Justice in medieval Italian Esmeralda can read.(Photo/Julia Bolton Holloway)
For residents of Newtown, Connecticut, the small town devastated by a deadly school shooting nearly two years ago, replacing Sandy Hook Elementary School was going to require more than a tear-down and a simple redesign.
Working with the theme “We Choose Love,” the architecture firm Svigals + Partners met with 50 parents, school employees, and townspeople to design a new school that not only would be outfitted with tighter security measures but would be restorative to the town—to feel not like a fortress but a place of education and communal gathering. (Architects who rebuilt the library at Columbine High School in Colorado, the site of a 1999 school shooting, similarly found that for locals, the rebuilding process was a therapeutic part of relieving their grief.)
If all goes according to plan, the new Sandy Hook Elementary, a $50 million project funded by the state, will open to students in the fall of 2016. Here are some elements of the new design.
Segregated entryways and parking lots
Shaped like an “E” to maximize evacuation routes, the school will have only three entrances: one main entrance, plus one for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students and one leading to public areas like the cafeteria and auditorium. The doorways will be reached by crossing bridges that are connected to the parking lots and bus drop-off areas. Though the bridges alone wouldn’t prevent an attacker from entering the school, they offer a good way for staff to monitor the traffic flow and notice if anybody looks out of place.
Staff and visitors will use different parking lots. Only cleared staff can gain entry into the staff parking lot. They will enter by key fob, freeing up security guards to focus more on visitors.
A bird’s eye view of the plan.(Courtesy of Svigals + Partners)
Maximizing mother nature
Rain runoff will be collected and used for gardens, that in addition to serving an educational purpose for students will, according to the designers, provide the comfort of a natural environment; they’ll also act as an additional barrier to the school.
The building will be tucked into the surrounding woods. Parts of the school will be elevated; this will allow teachers and staff members to have a better view not only of the trees but of what’s happening outside.
A view of the driveway leading into the school(Courtesy of Svigals + Partners)
Internal restructuring
One thing the community wanted to keep from the old school’s design was its courtyard, so the designers incorporated three into the plan. But the interior will otherwise be very different. Administrative offices and communal spaces like the cafeteria, library, and music room will move to the front, where more adults could keep an eye on the entryways; classrooms, meanwhile, will be moved to the back, where trees (and fences lining the courtyards) provide a natural barricade.
The school also will feature doors that automatically lock from the inside and not just the outside, and high-impact glass windows (they’re not bullet-proof, though, because that can make it difficult for security officers to enter the building during emergencies). These kinds of “invisible security measure” are meant to offer protection while helping students, parents, and staff keep the focus on education.
The little town of Ferguson, Missouri, became a global story again this week, after a grand jury declined to indict police officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown.
In the US, there’s a sense of missing leadership. Brown’s death forced everyone to notice the broader problem: that black Americans are far likelier to die at the hands of police than white ones (or seem to be; part of the problem also is that the data are notoriously incomplete). Yet despite the protests that roiled the country, despite reams of analysis in the media and online, despite a speech by the president, nobody is proposing a comprehensive approach to the problem.
To be sure, that’s in part because America is the problem—racial discrimination is a structural feature that will take generations more to eliminate. Yet it felt distinctly uninspiring that the best Barack Obama could offer was to send his attorney general on a trip around the country to “help build better relations between communities and law enforcement.”
Yet there’s something to temper the rest of the world’s noticeable Schadenfreude. In Mexico, it’s taken a grisly mass-murder by cops in cahoots with criminals to start a protest movement. In Brazil, if the data are to be believed, police have killed about as many people in four years as American cops have in two decades. In Egypt, where a law passed this week defines any disruption to public order as “terrorism,” it’s hard to imagine president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi making a sympathetic speech about police victims.
In short, America is fortunate to be a country where one man’s death can still get people angry. All the more pity, then, that nobody has worked out how to turn the anger into action.—Gideon Lichfield
Five things on Quartz we especially liked
The world’s OPEC opportunity. As oil prices collapse, the cartel has realized that cutting output would bring it only temporary relief. With OPEC neutered, Steve LeVine, argues, Western countries have a once-in-decades opportunity to push for their own strategic goals.
How Ferguson divides America. Emma Pierson, a statistician, created a map of the Twittersphere around the Ferguson grand jury decision. It shows what you might expect: There are large groups of people who not only disagree, they’re not even seeing the things the other side says.
The restaurant with 20 different waters. They cost an average $12.64 per liter, and come described in a 44-page tasting guide. David Yanofsky interviews the manager, Martin Riese, who calls himself “America’s only water sommelier.”
How a female US army colonel got her way in Egypt. She was seconded to an Egyptian general. He refused to deal with her. In a nice case study on negotiating cultural differences, Lt. Colonel Jill Morgenthaler relates how she got him to change without compromising either her authority or his.
Why international development keeps failing. Its history is littered with brilliant ideas that attracted publicity, won over donors, and inspired TED talks, but turned out to be duds. In the New Republic, Michael Hobbes, a veteran of the field, offers a searing critique of much of what is wrong with development aid—but concludes that ultimately, its biggest problem is our outsized hopes about what it can achieve.
The scourge of the gamers. Anita Sarkeesian never thought that her dense, scholarly feminist critiques of video games were going to go viral. But, as Sheelah Kolhatkar relates in Businessweek, she has become a linchpin of a movement against sexist game violence and the target of a vicious backlash from male gamers.
The running man. The journalist Jose Antonio Vargas is the poster boy of the “DREAMers,” people brought to the US illegally as children who are now campaigning for the right to stay. But the years of keeping secrets have taken a big emotional toll, as Marc Fisher writes in this sensitive profile in the Washington Post.
ISIL’s modern history. Though its methods invoke metaphors like “medieval,” the Islamic Statement movement is pretty modern, explains Karen Armstrong in the New Statesman—not just in its use of social media and corporate organizational strategies, but as the product of a complex interplay of religious and political factors that begin in the (relatively recent) 18th century.
The Hillary show. She charges $300,000 to give a speech—and that’s the discount rate. Her backstage demands are as detailed as a rock star’s. Rosalind Helderman and Philip Rucker at the Washington Post, who dug up details of one of Hillary Clinton’s speaking contracts, ask: Is this a credible presidential candidate to voters still struggling to climb out of the recession?
Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, development ideas, and excessive speaker fees to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day.
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In 2012, Spain’s ruling party raised taxes on theater and movie tickets to 21%. The tax rate on magazines, including pornographic ones, is only 4%.
So, according to the Guardian, a theater group called Primas de Riesgo has made the decision to start selling back issues of the pornographic magazine Gente Libre; a free ticket to the company’s current show comes with. The magazines are sourced from a collector and sell for about $20.
It’s part economically rational act, and part public protest meant to highlight a law that seems pretty absurd. The disparity in the tax doesn’t make much sense, and seems pretty easily circumvented—making it not just a culturally troublesome tax, but a poorly designed one at that.
The theater group’s name translates to risk premium, referring generally to the extra yield demanded by investors in Spanish bonds as compensation for the country’s shortcomings as a worthy creditor. The bond market has improved since 2012, when the group was started, and the country is in a much less precarious financial position. It hasn’t quite caught up to Germany, but it’s far closer:
Maybe the government doesn’t exactly want to encourage theater goers with subsidies. But its current strategy is more likely to raise ridicule than substantial revenue.
Last June I snapped the above photo on Fifth Avenue during New York City’s LGBT pride parade. I was surrounded by Russian-speakers, many of them newly arrived from somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Most, if they had been to a pride parade at all, had been to a tiny, illegal gathering where the police arrested them while onlookers hurled insults. Here in America, there were thousands of police protecting them, and hundreds of thousands of onlookers cheering themselves hoarse.
Yesterday evening I spent Thanksgiving with some of those same people. About 50 of us crowded into a warm, welcoming brownstone in New York City. All the usual Thanksgiving elements were there—a table groaning with food, turkey (three of them), a little speech. Kids played on the floor while adults weaved around them ever more unsteadily as the evening wore on.
And again and again one heard the question: “Have you got your papers?”
Just as it was once a haven for Jews leaving the Soviet Union, the US is now home to a small but gradually growing community of gay and transgender refugees from Russia and other former Soviet states. They have a formal organization, RUSA LGBT, and an informal network that helps newcomers find work, housing and contacts. One of its leaders is Masha Gessen, a journalist who moved from Moscow to New York last year with her family after Russian lawmakers began discussing a law that would allow the state to take kids away from same-sex couples. The Thanksgiving dinner was at her home.
Among the people I spoke to were a sociologist who had come under scrutiny from the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency, because his course on gender identity breached the law Russia passed last year that bans “homosexual propaganda.” There was a gay couple, both journalists, who were arrested (paywall) after publishing stories exposing corruption in Sochi, the site of the Winter Olympics. There was a model from Moscow for whom the stress of concealing his sexuality from clients and employers became so great that he started developing cataracts. There was a smattering of people from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine, and even a young Iraqi.
Of course, they’re the lucky ones. To get asylum in the US people have to be able to prove that being gay, bisexual or transgender has put them in actual harm’s way. Typically—unless their plight is so extreme that they can apply for refugee status from their home country—they have to come to the US first, and wait six months to apply for asylum. It can be months more before they get a work permit. Until then, they must either live off any savings they have, make money under the table, or find an employer willing to make a convenient “mistake” in their paperwork that can later be corrected. (One person I spoke to is working and paying taxes under someone else’s social security number.) Not surprisingly, Gessen’s Thanksgiving guests were overwhelmingly middle-class. Millions of LGBT people without the money or connections to come to the US in the first place are condemned to staying where they are, living in fear and trying not to attract attention.
Still, for the people who can make it, America truly is a haven. Before we started eating, one of the Americans present, with Gessen translating, explained the origins of the Thanksgiving tradition in the harvest festival that the first colonists celebrated along with a group of Native American guests. “Since then, people have just kept coming to North America,” they said, to laughter. “And now you’ve all come to North America. And we’re very, very thankful that you’re all here, and that we’re here, and we can all live the way we want to live. So let’s eat!”
The air in many China’s cities is bad. Really bad. And while there’s probably no way to fix an entire city’s air supply with a consumer tech product, smart air filters are an increasingly popular option for homes and apartments. Shut the windows, start the filter, and you’ll have cleaner, more breathable air indoors.
One such smart air filter is the Baomi, a smartphone-controlled filter from Beijing app company Cheetah Mobile. If the Baomi name reminds you of Xiaomi, that’s not the only similarity: Cheetah also takes a very similar approach to Baomi sales, selling only via its website and offering batches of its product in limited quantities to drive up demand and hype. On Friday, the first round of Baomi filters went on sale. They reportedly sold out in one second.
That may not be quite as impressive as it sounds, as Cheetah Mobile hasn’t made it clear exactly how many units were available in the first place. A significant part of the one-second sale also appears to have been preorders, meaning that many of the customers weren’t actually on Baomi’s website that second, that’s just when their orders were processed. But even so, it’s obvious there’s quite a lot of interest in the smartphone-controlled air filter.
Baomi product representatives told Techweb that they plan to gather feedback from this first round of customers to improve the filter further before it goes on sale again. That means if you didn’t get one already, you may have to wait a while for the next sale to come around.
With the now-fledging wearables market set to explode thanks to Apple’s upcoming smartwatch, many hardware startups are looking for creative ways own wristband real estate. Taiwan’s JoyRay is hedging its bets youngsters with Jumpy, a smartwatch for kids that’s currently raising funds on Kickstarter.
Jumpy is a palm-sized cube that fits inside a wearable rubber wristband. It comes with several basic features like bluetooth proximity tracking, a step counter, an activity counter, and notifications, along with several educational games. Chang demoed some these features for Tech in Asia at JoyRay’s office space in Taipei, and it checks our box for “Working Prototype Completed.”
Founder Jerry Chang tells Tech in Asia that he hopes to build an open platform around Jumpy, through which developers can create and submit their own apps. In his opinion, developing a strong ecosystem will help maintain high user retention.
“In our side, we’ll try to make usage limitless. We will keep developing applications by ourselves and by our partners,” says Chang. We also don’t want this watch to only be used by kids. We want to have kids interacting with kids, and parents interacting with kids.”
Keeping both children and parents happy is a core part of Chang’s vision for Jumpy. For one thing, parents are the ones with the wallet, Chang believes be more likely to purchase a product for kids that doesn’t come stocked with time-waster games. But if the app doesn’t engage the children who wear it, it could end up in the junk heap alongside last year’s Christmas toys.
“When I studied the market, I realized there were three types of smart wristbands for children,” says Chang. “The first type was like Jawbone but for kids. I don’t think kids really want to calculate the number of steps they take each day. The next type I saw was a tracking device. But if you’re a kid who’s out playing video games when he should be at basketball practice, you won’t wear the watch. The third type is more focused on entertainment – but we want to do entertainment plus education.”
Jumpy’s app suite is sparse at the moment, but impressive when one considers that product has been in development for just eight months. Chang envisions his software team’s “explore the human body” app, in which users place Jumpy on top of a tablet to peek at pictures of hearts and lungs, as the type of apps he hopes to fill the platform with.
Like many of Taiwan’s hardware entrepreneurs, Chang has a good decade (and then some) of industry experience on his resume. He spent the first part of his career building software Alcatel in Taiwan, where he helped create the island’s first ringback tone server (that’s what plays back elevator music or Lady Gaga when you call someone). Sensing he’d hit a glass ceiling at a foreign company, Chang moved over to Foxconn, where he spent time at Mobinnova, the company’s division for in-house branded products. After several shifts between departments, he left in late 2013 to found JoyRay. Chang says he exited the island’s biggest contract manufacturer for the independence.
“Although we’re encouraged to run our own internal startups at Foxconn, if we face competition for resources, then those resources will be given to products [considered more urgent]. We did a smartwatch before at Foxconn, but we didn’t get to mass product it because the project was killed,” says Chang. “I want to do this [on my own volition], without interference from others – that ‘others’ includes clients and upper management.
Even as Chang severed formal ties with Foxconn, his connection to the company remains strong. As is the case for many Taiwanese hardware startups, sourcing components for JoyRay has been a breeze. In addition, Chang says his connections at the company have helped him source talent for completing Jumpy. “You can easily imagine it’s not easy to design this,” Chang says. “You need mechanical engineers, software engineers, testing engineers, and other types of engineers.” The JoyRay team currently consists of four full-timers including Chang, and a small group of contract workers.
Chang is currently he’s looking to raise US$1-2 million in venture capital for JoyRay and Jumpy. In order to familiarize himself with the ins-and-outs of startuphood, he joined the most recent accelerator batch of AppWorks, Taiwan’s homegrown answer to Y Combinator.
“I’m already 43. I thought, if I can join AppWorks… these people are ten or fifteen years younger than me. I can learn from their passion and their mindset,” says Chang. “I’m also looking to hire them,” he jokes.
