Belle Haven & Friendly Acres Over 13s Youth Club Newsletter

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Hey KIDS!

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Exciting News!

First up: Exciting news! We’re going to be migrating the Club Newsletter to a new format from next month that will be delivered in person! In virtual reality! This means you’ll be able to feel like I’m sitting right next to you saying this stuff right in your face instead of just passively reading it off a screen and maybe getting distracted by other less important stuff. Myself and your Totally Lost Boys (TLB) Club Committee are so excited that we can bring you this amazing experience before any other Youth Club in the world! #awesome

Here’s a taster from a VR trip I took recently to check out the totally awful devastation in Puerto Rico:

Now you’re probably asking how can we bring this exciting new technology to your friendly neighborhood Youth Club, right?! I’m pleased to say that the 2,500% increase in Newsletter Sponsor Messages over the past ~two months has really helped bulk up the Club Money Pool. Rest assured, we’re ploughing all these revenues into product development to continue to make BH&FA YC the most innovative Youth Club on Planet Earth!

Of course we don’t want the Club to fall behind Lindenwood or Farm Hills YC either, which — as we’ve told you in recent Newsletters — have been busy developing ‘innovative’ newsletter solutions of their own. (I say ‘innovative’ but we all know the YC of MZ Yours Truly is the real innovator around these hills!!) But — and it’s a BIG ONE kids! — if the Club Committee were to allow another club to get ahead of BH&FA (brisket forbid!!!), say by offering better Member facilities, then we’d risk Membership declining — instead of benefiting from the continued year-on-year growth that _we_all_enjoy_. It would also mean less money for the Club Treasurer to spend on buying up neighborhood housing to knock down in order to expand the size of the Clubhouse and keep you all entertained right here on campus! And you really don’t want to be bored do you?! (NB: The date for opening the infinity pool waterpark is still tbc. We found a leak on several floors and given there’s a risk of electrical fire death if we get this wrong it’s taking a little longer than hoped.)

Of course the impending mandatory migration to VR Newsletters also means we’ll be able to bring you more immersive Newsletter Sponsor Messages in future! YAY! Which will be great for the Club Money Pool too. So double YAY!

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Of course we know that not everyone in Our Community has had a chance to purchase our great Oculus Rift VR headset yet :( Only 0.3% of you have done so! :((( Even though we’ve made sure to tell you all about how great it is for, like, the past several years. (You’ll remember we also ran VR Summer Club Camp last year in Black Chasm Cave. However attendance averaged <1% — and there was that unfortunate incident with the toxic frog — so your Club Committee knows it has a lot more work to do!). So, after a long talk at our last #awesome TLB Brisket Cook-Out^MZ I’m really excited to announce an amazing Discount for Club Members that have shown the most dedication to Our Community over the years! This means all of you will very soon enjoy the benefits of Oculus VR! Zero excuses!

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(NB: If you’re wondering how exactly we’ll be calculating personalized Oculus discounts we can tell you it involves a proprietary formula that Your Club Committee developed based on your lifelong Participation & Attendance Metrics (PAM). We can’t say too much, in case the formula were to be maliciously leaked to Lindenwood — or even, brisket forbid! Staumbaugh Heller!!! — (NBNB: For a reminder about penalties for leaking proprietary Club Information see the base of this newsletter; but, tl;dr, don’t do it!!! Remember the Club Motto: ‘Speak Don’t leak!’).

What we CAN tell you is we’ve been busy number-crunching PAM for the past several years, and those Club Members who have shown not just a consistent commitment to Our Community (which is mandatory) but who have shared their increasing enthusiasm for the Club Program (which Your TLB obviously works 24/7 to bring you!) will be given the biggest discounts — of up to 6.8%! Everyone else will get a smaller discount (based on your unique PAM-based relationship with the Club Program). So basically you only have yourselves to blame if you get offered a discount of sub-0.5%. (And don’t forget we’ll be sharing PAM scores with parents/guardians at the upcoming mandatory BH&FA Club Regulations Awareness Program.)

As you know, Membership of the Club is dependent upon reading Our Newsletter — which includes all Our Sponsor Messages. (Our Sponsors wouldn’t pay us if you didn’t read their messages now would they!?!) So unfortunately Your Club Committee is prepared to say goodbye to any Members who aren’t able to access the Newsletter in future. (NB: Saying you don’t have a VR headset will absolutely not be an acceptable excuse!!! We are, however, open to suggestions for expanding cross-platform support if Members have already bought other VR headsets. (Although we might question your loyalty to BH&FA YC if you do that!!! ;)))

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Your Awesome TLB Club Committee Update!

So what’s on the boys’ discussion agenda this week Mark!?!

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Mmmmmm! Just getting ready for some more crispy brisket!

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Okay, time for the customary run down of Important Issues Your TLB is really busy managing around the BBQ while you guys kick back and do wtf you like on campus… Mmm brisket! #Brisket #CookOut #Meat #Mmmm

• Participation & Engagement Metrics — as you should really know by now Your Committee’s ‘prime directive’ is 100% attendance & program engagement at all times! PAM! PAM! So frankly you guys are always a total disappointment :( BUT! — this week Boztank said he’s going to bring some of his special Ideas Envelopes for us to push around while we’re BBQing brisket — so consider yourselves totally warned!!!! PAM! PAM!
• Takeover of Woodside Heights YC — yes we are still finalizing our takeover of Woodside Heights. But we now expect members to be migrated to BH&FA by 06:00 on Saturday 4 at the very latest. Issues we have encountered with the migration include some outgoing Woodside members objecting to the razing of their Clubhouse and the mandatory requirement to travel to BH&FA’s campus because it’s so much further away from where they live and their moms and pops are at work so can’t always taxi them over. However we have pointed out that the facilities we offer here are by far superior. Sheryl has been working super hard (including on Saturdays) to get the message to Woodside parents that their kids will absolutely have the best development opportunities at BH&FA. To ease the transition we have also decided to offer Uber coupons (valid: Tuesday afternoons, for two weeks of August) and some pretty substantial Oculus discounts — although both are provisional on the new recruits completing a Club Reorientation Attendance Probation period of no less than 180 months (achieving weekly PAM average of 95.8%). (So if you hear them say ‘Oh CRAP’ you’ll know why.) We’ll be discussing ideas for hazing the newbs in a forthcoming Newsletter. So stay tuned! And get ready to burn all that Woodside Heights smoke out of em!!!
• Parental Concern — unfortunately we have been informed that a few responsible adults have been expressing concern over what Members might have been exposed to via the Club Program. We are investigating to determine whether there are any identifiable issues of concern, and so far have compiled a list of about ~2,500,000 items for possible follow-up — including reports of screenings of human beheadings in the cinema; animal torture in the yard; misogynistic graffiti all over the place; human trafficking; and even bomb-making classes and/or fascist memorabilia being distributed by a small number of members (!!!). While some of this stuff does sound kind of alarming, in truth we’re generally pretty stoked about the rich diversity of expression that’s evidently thriving within Our Community. Although we are still investigating to determine whether there are any specific issues we need to follow up on — like, in case we need to add an additional rule to our strict ‘Zero Nudity (no, not even fine art or war reportage nudes you sick f—)’ Club Policy. We’ll keep you posted if we decide to amend the Charter. But for now we just ask that you carry on being your richly expressive selves. (As we like to say on the Committee: ‘If you feel it, f—ing say it!!!!’)
• Member Behavior — it has also come to our attention that a small number of Members have been getting increasingly loud and disruptive on campus. However, in the BH&FA YC Founding Charter, we do make it very clear that any attempts to curtail or moderate freedom of expression will _not_be _at_all_ tolerated_. We therefore want to reassure all Club Members that when you are here, under our watchful care, you can say anything at all you want to anyone you fancy — no matter how horribly wrong or hurtful it might be. (As the TLB like to say at the start of a Cook-Out when we’re fighting over whose turn it is to poke the fire: ‘Sticks & stones will break your bones but names can never hurt you!’). That said, we have noticed an uptick in some very nasty name calling; blatantly false and/or ridiculous rumors (no, my parents were not lizards!!!); and people trying to start *actual* fights and/or fires during Club Events. One particularly unruly member — who shall remain nameless (but rest assured We Know Who You Are!!! NB: We discuss this person’s behavior in more detail below, in our Newsletter ‘Hard Issue of The Day’ — and who, let it be known, we also know has a record of threatening behavior outside the Club (because Sheryl read about it in the Menlo Park Tribune)), has been passing off some very ‘creative fictions’ on campus — we suspect as a sort of post-modern art project. But still, we’re keeping an eye out. For example, Adam says he’s seen instances of this person telling others in Our Community that Members’ dead relations didn’t really exist at all, and, furthermore, that corpses laid out in the morgue were just so-called ‘crisis actors’ paid by kids’ parents to pretend to like them. While we’re admittedly impressed with the avant-garde creativity of this particular Member, we recognize that they have also been saying a lot of other absolute tosh — like that flu shots give you cancer or make you gay or turn you into a toxic frog. And that President Trump is the literal lovechild of a Republican Senator (who we’re not naming for libel reasons) and the Angel Gabriel. Like, frankly speaking, we’ve lost track of the amount of garbage this particular Member has been spouting but that’s 100% okay because keeping track of how Members freely expressing themselves is totally not our job at all. We’re just here to make sure the BH&FA campus is massive enough to house all the billions of Members that now make up our richly diverse Community — which also means making sure Our Club Charter enshrines an absolute right to be an utter f— to anyone you please. Kids, we really can’t start cherry picking or where would it end?! The bottom line is that here at BH&FA YC, Your Committee is proud to preside over a marketplace of brainfarts of every possible flavor, toxic or otherwise. So we would like to take this opportunity to remind Members about our very firm *non-discrimination policy* — of welcoming absolutely anyone as a Member, no matter how disgusting your personal views. (And, sheesh, you kids really do have some pretty icky stuff on your mind sometimes!!!) Your Committee would also like to suggest all Members reread Boztank’s 2009 addendum to the Club Charter (entitled: ‘Why you kids need to learn to suck it up’). The TLBs never let anything as non-formulaic as emotional distress get in the way of the campus expansion roadmap. After all, we’ve got a mission to bring the benefits of BH&FA to every person (*13 years or older*) ON THE PLANET! (Shoot for 100% or kill everyone trying!!! — as we like to joke around the BBQ! Or as Boztank’s knuckle tattoo actually reads: ‘We grow PAM, period.’ So, as ever, eyes on the bigger prize, kids.)
• Brisket cook out! — yes! It’s back by popular demand! This time I will personally be bringing a small herd of live Dexter cows on campus and everyone will watch while I tear them apart with my bare hands. Chunks of brisket will be distributed according to the standard Club Formula and each Member will be responsible for cooking their own chunk (or not!). But please no squabbling over the meat!!! And definitely no pushing! You can shout insults at each other in the hopes of being able to distract another Member and grab yourself a tastier chunk but do please keep acts of physical aggression *off campus*. It’s a waste of energy anyways as everyone will definitely get some brisket, even if not everyone can get the delicious deep pectoral I will personally be chowing down on. (It is, however, inevitable that some members will have to wait longer than others to get some meat. But given Our Community is now 2.5BN Members strong & counting! — suck that up Staumbaugh Heller!!! >:-) — we absolutely must have a formula to manage the distribution of the Club Program, fair or otherwise. NB: Having a formula is the important bit, kids. As your parents should tell you, that’s called ‘Leadership’.)
• Proposal to livestream the urinals — as part of our ‘Next-Gen YC 2.0 Moving Fwd Brainfart Sessions 2018 Summer Season Sponsored by Y Combinator’ Boztank suggested the (IMO) pretty wild idea of putting a livestreaming unit in the urinals (!) — pointing down at the pee stream. He thinks it could be a good idea to collect yet another data-point on top of the ~hundreds of thousands we already record per Member for some interesting new engagement metric that we haven’t bothered to think of yet. We’ll let you know at least a day in advance if we decide to move forward with this plan. (NB: We’re still discussing whether it’s a good idea to livestream the girls’ toilets. Or we might just unilaterally replace all Club loos with unisex urinals. tbc). tbh the urinal idea was a lot better than Boz’s other suggestion which was a livestreamed ‘loudest fart’ competition. We might revisit that next fall, for our next Camp Cook-Out
• Committee ‘Diversity’ — we are aware that some Members are continuing to complain about the lack of so-called ‘diversity’ on the TLB Committee. However we would point out we are a truly open-minded bunch of — yes, okay, sure, whatevs — entirely white guys but who are nonetheless willing to entertain the wild and crazy notion that there’s no box at all to think inside of. So, frankly, we don’t understand what your problem is. Also we’re not *all* guys — that’s what Sheryl’s here for
• ‘Leadership elections’ — it has also come to our attention that a very small number of Club Members have been spreading some very malicious, gossipy and totally fake rumors claiming the Club Charter is going to be rewritten to create fixed leadership terms and allow for future Leader Elections. I personally want to make it very, VERY clear that this is 100% FAKE NEWS. Your Committee will not be discussing any changes to the Committee’s structure at all. At any point. Ever. Period.
• Under-13s YC — a brief update on the amazing traction we’re seeing for our ‘Horizon Newborn’ under-13s YC which continues to deliver major wins for BH&FA by onboarding all your siblings from the moment of birth to get them prepped & primed for life in the excitingly breakneck ‘fast-lane’ here on the 13+ campus (NB: Under-13 Memberships are automatically migrated to a full BH&FA YC Membership on your siblings’ thirteenth birthday; but remember, it’s your responsibility to let them know that if they want to collect any cuddly toys or other mementos they’ve accidentally left at the under-13s campus they will have to come here and sign the Membership form to release them from our Cryogenic Cold Storage Unit — where you should warn them they will otherwise languish for all eternity.) The committee is currently discussing whether to turn some of the old Woodside Heights YC campus into an Under-13s soft play foam-axe room. Alternatively we might turn it into a child-friendly sand & gravel mine. tbc
• ‘Odd’ sponsor message content — just a quick note on this last line item but we are aware of a few Members — and in fact the heads of some other Youth Clubs — raising concerns about things they’ve seen in our Sponsor Messages. We’re really not at sure what the issue/s of concern might be but we’re 100% sure that the notion of there being any problem at all with any of the stuff Our Sponsors are paying us to tell you is, like, a _totally_crazy_idea_. So, respectfully, we suggest you drop it. (NB: Also if you want to be able to keep swimming in the Club Money Pool you need to stop asking awkward stuff or we might have to close the pool to non-Committee Members.)

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Hard Issue of the day :/

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Trouble With A Member

Sheryl making her really scary face (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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I know we’re almost out of time for this week’s newsletter but — following on from the note about ‘Member Behavior’ — I wanted to take a short moment to remind all Members of the Club’s foundational commitment to freedom of expression at all costs.

Kids, if your reading level is strong enough you will understand that “at all costs” means there is actually a cost (but don’t worry, we’re not going to start charging you Membership fees!!! it’s not that kind of really bad cost) to the freedoms we enjoy here on campus. And, well, sometimes that cost means being forced to be bullied in public by an angry mob or having to know that some Members are going around campus telling others that your cherished siblings were in fact just a figment of your imagination and the tragic death they suffered at the hands of a gun-touting maniac is just your totally delusional fancy. Yep, life really can be that shitty sometimes! We’re not gonna lie to you!

Regretfully, this ‘cost’ also means that members of Our Community who are Jewish may well also hear some pretty random and totally untrue stuff being spread about their community on campus. Like that time one of our Member Societies put on an ‘alternative’ WWII fictional reconstruction in the theatre. Now Your Committee doesn’t for a moment believe that anyone on campus could have viewed this work as anything other than the piece of avant garde theatre it very obviously was (IMHO). (I mean, maybe a few Members thought it was an historically accurate reconstruction but really it’s the job of the rest of you kids to make fun of anyone crazy enough to believe such stupid stuff!!!) We sure don’t believe that kind of absolute crap. But, nonetheless, we’re 100% comfortable with our decision to operate an entirely open-door Membership Policy because Your TLB is entirely incapable of discriminating. I mean, if we did, where on Earth would it end?!? So even if a Member of Our Community happens to be a renowned fantasist with a record of shouting FIRE in theaters, or even a paid up member of a neo-nazi group which routinely denies historically verified episodes of ethnic cleansing, that’s totally not our problem — it’s theirs! We just provide the world’s over-13s with a soapbox to express their unvarnished selves, globally. What Members choose to do with the tools we provide to help them get their message out there is obviously none of our business!! (Although it is literally BH&FA YC’s business but how else would we fund the platform in the first place?!)

In any case, fact-checking is for qualified professionals who probably work for newspapers. And we are totally not that at all!!! [Edit note from Adam: Are there any newspapers left? Didn’t the Tribune close when you made the Newsletter a daily?] (Supplementary note from Boztank: Remember kids, Mark himself is Jewish. So if he can suck up Holocaust denial, so can you! As my grandpops used to say: ‘If a piece of baloney hasn’t blown your face off you’re winning because you’re not dead yet so stop whining ya cream-faced loon!’)

Last word from Mark: As Boztank has been saying for, like, almost before some of you were born, speech that is “distasteful and ignorant” is nothing to be worried about so long as you kids are totally prepared to just laugh it off (NB: We might use laughing gas for this too — see the Newsletter endnote for more on what we’re cooking up in the Innovation Labs). And, well, frankly speaking, a lot more people really need to grow up and learn that maniacs spouting total rubbish are just an unfortunate distraction from great Sponsor Message content. In any case, fact-checking is expensive — far too expensive for the Club Treasurer’s tastes!!

So, to wrap up, Your Committee wants to make it totally plain we’re 110% here to entertain your behavior — unruly, unreasonable or just plain stupid! Whatever the f— you like! (Just plank safely, eh! There have been a number of deaths related to selfie challenges lately and we’d really prefer you enjoy rather than kill yourselves!!!) And while we may not always be 100% comfortable about the views you’re espousing on campus, or via Club equipment (NB: We have another shipment of 200M Wi-Fi enabled megaphones arriving Wednesday so get gargling!!), we want all Members to know we’re fully behind you being a totally offensive f—. Period.

(Actually, if you or your parents bothered to read the small print that’s literally what our Founding Charter says. In any case, like Sheryl says, there’s no way Our Community would keep growing like the weed it has if we hadn’t let in any shitty idea that wants to crawl in off the street and set up a stink, crawl in off the street and set up a stink. She also says that BH&FA YC is like a compost heap: All shits are 100% welcome here. And: If it stinks, the Club Treasurer winks!!)

All we ask is that you kids play nice together. Because, regretfully, the bill for Clubhouse security staff has been rising alarmingly over the past several months — as more bouncers have been needed around campus to break up several pretty serious brawls. And, well, we have already stuffed the Newsletter to bursting with Sponsor Messages. So we do have some concerns about the depth of the Club Money Pool, going forward. We’ll be bringing you a more fulsome update on Club Finances in a future Newsletter (tbc — Wehner).

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One more thing!

Exciting Announcement… of a beta test to a Clubhouse Rule change!

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FIRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes! Shouting fire in the cinema is now provisionally acceptable!!!

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We wanted to end the Newsletter with a bit of good news, so the TLB has decided to beta test letting Members yell “fire” or even “bomb” during screenings in the cinema. Or actually anything you fancy (why not get creative — like, by yelling ‘argh! alien facehugger squirting acid on my eyeballs!!!’).

Why? Because the TLB has decided that having a space where Members’ speech is constrained — even as a narrow health & safety precaution — was just FAR too risky for Community cohesion. So we’re removing it and saying ya-boo-sucks to the consequences!

But don’t worry! We’re putting Community Safety first by taking precautions to keep all Members safe. (For example, we’ve covered all sharp edges in the cinema with foam padding to prevent anyone from being impaled during any panic-induced stampedes for the exit. But please remember there’s only one exit — so play safe kids! Definitely try not to crush each other to death!!! (NB: The Committee would like to take this opportunity to remind all Members that an ‘in the event of my death and/or horrific personal injury’ legal waiver was signed by all of you when you joined the Club so anyone with litigious parents should warn them not to get any ideas. (Yes, we know Colin is leaving but that’s not until after Thanksgiving.))

The Committee is also considering installing facial recognition technology in the cinema Wi-Fi-connected to laughing gas canisters which would be triggered in the event of anyone getting overly emotional in there. Our idea is that the gas could be automatically dispensed if any Members became hysterical, or, well, overly sad — thereby distracting people and preventing risky stampedes. (NB: This exciting Club innovation is still a work in progress but we’ll be sure to keep you updated on progress in future Newsletters. See our quasi-regular: ‘What’s Mark Cooking In The Lab’ section)

And that’s about all for today kids! Feel free to unstrap from your Oculus for now (for those of you special early adopters out there!) — and it’s adios amigos until tomorrow, when we’ll be right back in your face with more exciting BH&FA YC news!!!!

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Warning: Anyone caught leaking Club policies or information WILL HAVE THEIR MEMBERSHIP REVOKED AND BE BANNED FOR LIFE. Members contravening this rule will also be physically removed from campus (should they be here at the time) with zero opportunity to collect any personal belongings or say goodbye to any friends. Personal items will be piled in the yard and used as fuel for the next Club Cook-Out which will kick off with a competition to see which member can shout ‘Speak don’t leak!’ the loudest. One winner will be selected by Mark and given a bite of his prime brisket. Appeals are impossible.  

Photo: paylessimages/iStock

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Still here?!?!?!?!!!!!!!!

Additional really important information from the committee: Uhhhh, Alex just told me that the Committee room where we keep the PAM records, going back to ~2005, was left unlocked for, like, the past decade(ish). A quick review of our CCTV records appears to show a small army of unknown persons coming and going pretty steadily over the years. It looks like these complete strangers were systematically helping themselves to PAM stored in the Club register. Some of these non-members appeared to have used the same Clubhouse parking lot as our ~3,000 regular campus data partners — arriving in vans painted with names like ‘N.Y. Data uLike UnLtd’ and ‘Other Peoples’ info 4 you Inc.’ — perhaps seeking to blend in beside the totally reputable businesses we’ve been sharing all your information with for, like, ever, in order to undertake their totally nefarious theft of your PAM. So we’re really sorry about that! Sheesh! If it helps Sheryl was super mad with us and didn’t speak to us for, like, a week after she found out :o( Anyway it’s totally fine now because we have put an actual lock on the door. Phew! (NB: Anyone wondering if they can claim competition for the Committee’s total failure to protect your privacy should refer to the Compensation Claims Waiver Clause in the Club Charter which everyone signed by default when they joined (by clicking a button saying ‘yes I want to collect my free Brisket hamburger! & register for Club Membership! & I’m super happy to let Mark be totally responsible for all my data’). Feel free to ring Colin for a cry if you like. Thanks! – Your MZ) 

© BH&FA YC
MZ: Winners don’t leak — they speak!

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1 week until the deadline for Disrupt SF 2018’s Hackathon + new sponsor prizes

Are you a hacking speed demon of incomparable skill? Then we want you to submit your best hack to the Virtual Hackathon going down at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. But you need to chug Red Bull like never before, because this is the last week you can submit your hack. The deadline is August 2, so no matter where you are in the world, get coding and submit your hack right here. C’mon, show us your mad skills.

Here’s how the Virtual Hackathon works. We’ve recruited some awesome judges — including a few from Pinterest and Slack — and they’ll scrutinize and score all submitted hacks. Based on the quality of the idea, technical implementation of the idea and the product’s potential impact, the judges will score each hack on a scale of 1-5.

The 100 top-scoring teams win up to five Innovator Passes to Disrupt SF 2018 for the members of their team. The top 30 teams move forward to the semi-finals and demo their hacks at Disrupt SF 2018. The top 10 semi-finalists will step onto The Next Stage to demo their product to the world. The “Best in Show” team will win a grand prize of $10,000 and be crowned TC Disrupt Virtual Hackathon’s first champion.

Of course, our Hackathon is famous for interesting hack contests from our sponsors, and the Virtual Hackathon has many additional thousands of dollars in cash and prizes on the line. Not to mention some wicked cool challenges from Sony Pictures and United Airlines, BYTON, TomTom, Viond, Visa, HERE Mobility and Amazon. Check them out and jump on in!

You have no time to waste if you want to participate in our first Virtual Hackathon and have a shot at free passes to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7 — and a whole lot more. The deadline for submitting your hack is August 2. That’s just one week away, so sign up today.

Now we’re thrilled to tell you about this contest sponsored by Novartis.

Novartis

The challenge: Help us empower heart failure patients and save lives!

Heart failure is a chronic debilitating and potentially life-threatening disease affecting 26 million people worldwide. It is one of the most difficult and chronic heart diseases to manage and the biggest cause of hospital admissions in adults aged over 65 in the Western world (Source: Heart Failure). As a result, treatment costs, including hospitalizations, are estimated at $108 billion a year worldwide. About 25 percent of patients die within a year of diagnosis and 50 percent within five years (Source: CDC and WHO).

What Novartis is looking for is a digital solution to help better monitor, manage and even predict worsening symptoms of heart failure. After a patient is diagnosed with heart failure, there are very few resources available to easily and unobtrusively monitor their heart health over time. Adherence to therapy and lack of health interventions are major reasons why patients’ health often deteriorates rapidly after a diagnosis. This solution should therefore drastically reduce the number of hospital re-admissions and deaths following an initial diagnosis.

Our challenge to you

Help us reimagine medicine by using your creativity and tech skills to develop a tool that easily captures important cardiovascular vitals and monitors symptom progression, empowering patients to detect potential problems earlier and seek treatment sooner. Novartis is looking for accessible, affordable and easy to use technologies that can seamlessly integrate into the life of a patient who has recently been diagnosed with heart failure. Use of personal digital devices (smartphones, smartwatches, etc.), telemedicine and innovative patient engagement are encouraged.

Novartis is not looking for diagnostic devices that (a) is not a standard consumer device (e.g. a non-commercial wearable) and (b) increases the burden and involvement of a patient in monitoring their disease.

What to submit?

• An elevator pitch (50 words or less)
• An awesome pitch deck (max 10 Slides)

Consider including the following:

• Vision and value proposition
• Problem being solved
• Description of solution
• The product (description of the technology)
• Business model
• Traction to date and roadmap to scale
• The team
• How will winning the Novartis TechCrunch Hackathon help you?
• Link to your website (optional)
• Additional information (optional)
• Demo of product
• Logo and other marketing materials

Things to think about:

• Passive data collection
• Ease of use; noninvasive
• Software/tool that integrates with diffusive devices
• Measuring health status and change-over-time, specifically health deterioration
• Capturing shortness of breath (dyspnea) and respiratory rate
• Capturing body fluid retention (edema)
• Capturing physical activity, changes in energy and fatigue
• Capturing heart vitals (bpm, arrhythmia, EKG)
• Affordable for the general population
• Not a diagnostic tool

Have you been working on something truly innovative, but started before the hackathon began? We still want to see what you’ve been cooking up. Submit your project to Devpost regardless of when you started working on it. We’ll be awarding up to $30,000 in prizes, including TWO first prizes – one for the hackathon challenge and another for our “Extended Innovation Challenge” (for teams that have worked on their solution before the hackathon started on June 5, 2018). Three more prizes will be awarded to the runner-up teams.

The top five teams will be invited to a pitch competition, live at the Novartis booth during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018. They will be judged by a panel of esteemed healthcare industry veterans and there will be a single Grand Prize (detailed below) awarded to the overall best team, which will be announced and awarded on the main TechCrunch stage.

Prizes:

First Prize – Novartis Hackathon Challenge: $12,000

First Prize – Novartis Extended Innovation Challenge: $12,000

Second Prize: $3,000

Third Prize: $2,000

Fourth Prize: $1,000

Grand Prize:

A validation study (where appropriate), dedicated Novartis mentors, access to Novartis data lakes, free space and use of fabrication equipment, frequent encounters with industry leaders and investors through events, office hours, and networking opportunities.

To contact our challenge administrators at HITLAB send an email to: challengeadmin@hitlab.org.

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Why unskippable Stories ads could revive Facebook

Prepare for the invasion of the unskippables. If the Stories social media slideshow format is the future of mobile TV, it’s going to end up with commercials. Users won’t love them. And done wrong they could pester people away from spending so much time watching what friends do day-to-day. But there’s no way Facebook and its family of apps will keep letting us fast-forward past Stories ads just a split-second after they appear on our screens.

We’re on the cusp of the shift to Stories. Facebook estimates that across social media apps, sharing to Stories will surpass sharing through feeds some time in 2019. One big reason is they don’t take a ton of thought to create. Hold up your phone, shoot a photo or short video, and you’ve instantly got immersive, eye-catching, full-screen content. And you never had to think.

Facebook CPO Chris Cox at F8 2018 charts the rise of Stories that will see the format surpass feed sharing in 2019

Unlike text, which requires pre-meditated reflection that can be daunting to some, Stories are point and shoot. They don’t even require a caption. Sure, if you’re witty or artistic you can embellish them with all sorts of commentary and creativity. They can be a way to project your inner monologue over the outside world. But the base level of effort necessary to make a Story is arguably less than sharing a status update. That’s helped Stories rocket to over 1.3 billion daily users across Facebook’s apps and Snapchat.

The problem, at least for Facebook, is that monetizing the News Feed with status-style ads was a lot more straightforward. Those ada, which have fueled Facebook’s ascent to earning $13 billion in revenue and $5 billion in profit per quarter, were ostensibly old-school banners. Text, tiny photo, and a link. Advertisers have grown accustomed to them over 20 years of practice. Even small businesses on a tight budget could make these ads. And it at least took users a second to scroll past them — just long enough to make them occasionally effective at implanting a brand or tempting a click.

Stories, and Story ads, are fundamentally different. They require big, tantalizing photos at a minimum, or preferably stylish video that lasts five to fifteen seconds. That’s a huge upward creative leap for advertisers to make, particularly small business who’ll have trouble shooting that polished content themselves. Rather than displaying a splayed out preview of a link, users typically have to swipe up or tap a smaller section of a Story ad to click through.

And Stories are inherently skippable. Users have learned to rapidly tap to progress slide by slide through friends’ Stories, especially when racing through those with too many posts or that come from more distant acquaintances. People are quick with the trigger finger the moment they’re bored, especially if it’s with an ad.

A new type of ad blindness has emerged. Instead of our eyes glazing over as we scroll past, we stare intensely searching for the slightest hint that something isn’t worth our time and should be skipped. A brand name, “Sponsored” label, stilted product shot, or anything that looks asocial leads us to instantly tap past.

This is why Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg scared the hell out of investors on the brutal earnings call when she admitted about Stories that “The question is, will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed? And we honestly don’t know.” It’s a radically new format advertisers will need time to adopt and perfect. Facebook had spent the past year warning that revenue growth would decelerate as it ran out of News Feed ad inventory, but it’d never stressed the danger as what is was: Stories. That contributed to its record-breaking $120 billion share price drop.

Facebook loses $120 billion in market cap after awful Q2 earnings

The shift from News Feed ads to Stories ads will be a bigger transition than desktop ads to mobile ads for Facebook. Feed ads looked and worked identically, it was just the screen around them changing. Stories ads are an entirely new beast.

Stories Ads Are A Bigger Shift Than Web To Mobile

There is one familiar format Stories ads are reminiscent of: television commercials. Before the age of TiVo and DVRs, you had to sit through the commercials to get your next hit of content. I believe the same will eventually be true for Stories, to the tune of billions in revenue for Facebook.

Snapchat is cornered by Facebook’s competition and desperate to avoid missing revenue estimates again. So this week, it rolled out unskippable vertical video ads it actually calls “Commercials” to 100 more advertisers, and they’ll soon be self-serve for buyers. Snap first debuted them in May, though the six-second promos are still only inserted into its longer-form multi-minute premium Shows, not user generated Stories. A Snap spokesperson said they couldn’t comment on future plans. But I’d expect its stance will inevitably change. Friends’ Stories are interesting enough to compel people to watch through entire ads, so the platforms could make us.

Snapchat is desperate, and that’s why it’s already working on unskippable ads. If Facebook’s apps like Instagram and WhatsApp were locked in heated battle with Snapchat, I think we’d see more brinkmanship here. Each would hope the other would show unskippable ads first so it could try to steal their pissed off users.

But Facebook has largely vanquished Snapchat, which has seen user growth sink significantly. Snapchat has 191 million daily users, but Facebook Stories has 150 million, Messenger Stories has 70 million, Instagram Stories has 400 million, and WhatsApp Stories (called Status) leads with 450 million. Most people’s friends around the world aren’t posting to Snapchat Stories, so Facebook doesn’t risk pushing users there with overly aggressive ads except perhaps amongst US teens.

Instagram’s three-slide Stories carousel ads

That’s why I expect we’ll quickly see Facebook start to test unskippable Stories ads. They’ll likely be heavily capped at first, to maybe one to three per day per user. Facebook took a similar approach to slowly rolling out auto-play video News Feed ads back in 2014. And Facebook’s apps will probably only show them after a friend’s story before your next pal’s, in between rather than as dreaded pre-rolls. Instagram already offers carousel Stories ads with up to three slides instead of one, so users have to tap three times to blow past them.

An Instagram spokesperson told me they had “no plans to share right now” about unskippable ads, and a Facebook spokesperson said “We don’t have any plans to test unskippable stories ads on Facebook or Instagram.” But plans can change. A Snap spokesperson noted that unlike a full thirty-second TV spot, Snapchat’s Commercials are up to six seconds, which matches an emerging industry trend for mobile video ads. Budweiser recently made some six second online ads that it also ran on TV, showing the format’s reuseability that could speed up adoption. For brand advertisers not seeking an on-the-spot purchase, they need time to leave an impression.

By making some Stories ads unskippable, Facebook’s apps could charge more while making them more impactful for advertisers. It would also reduce the creative pressure on businesses because they won’t be forced to make that first split-second so flashy so people don’t fast-forward.

If Facebook makes the Stories ad format work, it has a bright future that contrasts with the doomsday vibes conjured by its share price plummet. Facebook has over 5X more (duplicated) Stories users across its apps than its nearest competitor Snapchat. The social giant sees libraries full of Stories created each day waiting to be monetized.

Stories are about to surpass feed sharing. Now what?

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Brat raises $30 million to reboot scripted television for the Gen Z crowd

We are in the era of peak TV. Hundreds of expensive, scripted television shows are splayed across streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Netflix itself is now expected to spend $13 billion on original content this year. And yet, these networks can struggle to reach viewers outside of the core adult market.

That’s where Brat hopes to make its mark. The LA-based production studio and media company makes scripted dramas such as Chicken Girls on platforms like YouTube targeting a purely teen audience. And unlike Netflix, Brat is built from the ground up to keep production costs low: Rob Fishman, co-founder of Brat, says that “We are spending in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for every season” for their shows, instead of what can be seven figures an episode in the Netflix world.

Wide distribution to a young audience and that cost-effectiveness has proven to be a compelling elixir for investors, who handed the company $30 million in capital. The fundraise was led by Anchorage Capital, and comes just a few months after the company’s previous $10 million fundraise last year.

For Fishman and his co-founder Darren Lachtman, this is familiar terrain. They previously founded Niche, an influencer marketing platform that matched social media stars to brands, which sold to Twitter for a rumored $50 million. Now they want to empower those very same influencers to build their own brands.

Fishman says the key question for Brat is “How do we become a youth culture brand.” The teens today are increasingly getting their content from vloggers on YouTube, the most popular of which can have millions of subscribers. Those videos are authentic, real and cheap, but this talent has no outlet to push the quality of their content up a rung. “Besides Netflix, no one is making TV for the internet,” Fishman explained.

Brat wants to create a middle ground for video content, a space where teens can watch some of their favorite vloggers, but with production values and creativity that is more attuned to a classic Hollywood production studio rather than a bedroom. With Chicken Girls, the studio started with four-minute scripted shows, but has steadily increased its length over the first season, ending with a season finale of 22 minutes. Season two is now underway. Fishman says that the show received “10 million views over a half an hour.”

The challenge is to push quality higher while keeping expenses low. “When you watch us film, it’s 20-person crews … this looks like a set, but we are doing it for 1/100th the cost,” Fishman explained. Even with a laser-focus on efficiency though, Brat has to differentiate through superior content. “The minute we make something that could be seen on one of these Vlogger channels, what is special for us? What’s distinctive?” Fishman noted. “That is the question that motivates us across everything we do – what are we doing that no one else is doing?”

The studio also takes its inspiration from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As it pulls in talent from the vlogging world with each unique show, it places them all in the same “high school universe” so that viewers can start with familiarity with the launch of each show. The model also helps to organically circulate viewership across its shows.

Ultimately, the company is targeting this Gen Z demographic for its spending power. Fishman says the Gen Z crowd has spending power in the tens of billions, but advertisers struggle to reach them. Cable advertising is still tens of billions itself, and he believes there is an opportunity to migrate some of that spend to online video with the right level of quality and targeted demo.

It’s an ambitious play, and now with an ambitious production budget, the race is on to become the defining brand for a rising group of Gen Zers.

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A new hope: AI for news media

Jarno M. Koponen Contributor

Jarno M. Koponen is working on intelligent systems and human-centered personalization. He currently is product lead at Yle, one of the leading media houses in the Nordics.

More posts by this contributor

• AI on your lock screen
• The next AI is no AI

To put it mildly, news media has been on the sidelines in AI development. As a consequence, in the age of AI-powered personalized interfaces, the news organizations don’t anymore get to define what’s real news, or, even more importantly, what’s truthful or trustworthy. Today, social media platforms, search engines and content aggregators control user flows to the media content and affect directly what kind of news content is created. As a result, the future of news media isn’t anymore in its own hands. Case closed?

The (Death) Valley of news digitalization

There’s a history: News media hasn’t been quick or innovative enough to become a change maker in the digital world. Historically, news used to be the signal that attracted and guided people (and advertisers) in its own right. The internet and the exponential explosion of available information online changed that for good.

In the early internet, the portals channeled people to the content in which they were interested. Remember Yahoo? As the amount of information increased, the search engine(s) took over, changing the way people found relevant information and news content online. As the mobile technologies and interfaces started to get more prominent, social media with News Feed and tweets took over, changing again the way people discovered media content, now emphasizing the role of our social networks.

Significantly, news media didn’t play an active role in any of these key developments. Quite the opposite, it was late in utilizing the rise of the internet, search engines, content aggregators, mobile experience, social media and other new digital solutions to its own benefit.

The ad business followed suit. First news organizations let Google handle searches on their websites and the upcoming search champion got a unique chance to index media content. With the rise of social media, news organizations, especially in the U.S., turned to Facebook and Twitter to break the news rather than focusing on their own breaking news features. As a consequence, news media lost its core business to the rising giants of the new digital economy.

To put it very strongly, news media hasn’t ever been fully digital in its approach to user experience, business logic or content creation. Think paywalls and e-newspapers for the iPad! The internet and digitalization forced the news media to change, but the change was reactive, not proactive. The old, partly obsolete, paradigms of content creation, audience understanding, user experience and content distribution still actively affect the way news content is created and distributed today (and to be 110 percent clear — this is not about the storytelling and the unbelievable creativity and hard work done by ingenious journalists all around the globe).

Due to these developments, today’s algorithmic gatekeepers like Google and Facebook dominate the information flows and the ad business previously dominated by the news media. Significantly, personalization and the ad-driven business logic of today’s internet behemoths isn’t designed to let the news media flourish on its own terms ever again.

From observers to change makers

News media have been reporting the rise of the new algorithmic world order as an outside observer. And the reporting has been thorough, veracious and enlightening — the stories told by the news media have had a concrete effect on how people perceive our continuously evolving digital realities.

However, as the information flows have moved into the algorithmic black boxes controlled by the internet giants, it has become obvious that it’s very difficult or close to impossible for an outside observer to understand the dynamics that affect how or why a certain piece of information becomes newsworthy and widely spread. For the mainstream news media, Trump’s rise to the presidency came as a “surprise,” and this is but one example of the new dynamics of today’s digital reality.

And here’s a paradox. As the information moves closer to us, to the mobile lock screen and other surfaces that are available and accessible for us all the time, its origins and background motives become more ambiguous than ever.

The current course won’t be changed by commenting on or criticizing the actions of the ruling algorithmic platforms.

The social media combined with self-realizing feedback loops utilizing the latest machine learning methods, simultaneously being vulnerable for malicious or unintended gaming, has led us to the world of “alternative facts” and fake news. In this era of automated troll-hordes and algorithmic manipulation, the ideals of news media sound vitally important and relevant: Distribution of truthful and relevant information; nurturing the freedom of speech; giving the voice to the unheard; widening and enriching people’s worldview; supporting democracy.

But, the driving values of news media won’t ever be fully realized in the algorithmic reality if the news media itself isn’t actively developing solutions that shape the algorithmic reality.

The current course won’t be changed by commenting on or criticizing the actions of the ruling algorithmic platforms. #ChangeFacebook is not on the table for news media. New AI-powered Google News is controlled and developed by Google, based on its company culture and values, and thus can’t be directly affected by the news organizations.

After the rise of the internet and today’s algorithmic rule, we are again on the verge of a significant paradigm shift. Machine learning-powered AI solutions will have an increasingly significant impact on our digital and physical realities. This is again a time to affect the power balance, to affect the direction of digital development and to change the way we think when we think about news — a time for news media to transform from an outside observer into a change maker.

AI solutions for news media

If the news media wants to affect how news content is created, developed, presented and delivered to us in the future, they need to take an active role in AI development. If news organizations want to understand the way data and information are constantly affected and manipulated in digital environments, they need to start embracing the possibilities of machine learning.

But how can news media ever compete with today’s AI leaders?

News organisations have one thing that Google, Facebook and other big internet players don’t yet have: news organizations own the content creation process and thus have a deep and detailed content understanding. By focusing on appropriate AI solutions, they can combine the data related to the content creation and content consumption in a unique and powerful way.

News organizations need to use AI to augment you and me. And they need to augment journalists and the newsroom. What does this mean?

Augment the user-citizen

Personalization has been around for a while, but has it ever been designed and developed in the terms of news media itself? The goal for news media is to combine great content and personalized user experience to build a seamless and meaningful news experience that is in line with journalistic principles and values.

For news, the upcoming real-time machine learning methods, such as online learning, offer new possibilities to understand the user’s preferences in their real-life context. These technologies provide new tools to break news and tell stories directly on your lock screen.

An intelligent notification system sending personalized news notifications could be used to optimize content and content distribution on the fly by understanding the impact of news content in real time on the lock screens of people’s mobile devices. The system could personalize the way the content is presented, whether serving voice, video, photos, augmented reality material or visualizations, based on users’ preferences and context.

Significantly, machine learning can be utilized to create new forms of interaction between people, journalists and the newsroom. Automatically moderated commenting is just one example already in use today. Think if it would be possible to build interactions directly on the lock screen that let the journalists better understand the way content is consumed, simultaneously capturing in real time the emotions conveyed by the story.

By opening up the algorithms and data usage through data visualizations and in-depth articles, the news media could create a new, truly human-centered form of personalization that lets the user know how personalization is done and how it’s used to affect the news experience.

And let’s stop blaming algorithms when it comes to filter bubbles. Algorithms can be used to diversify your news experience. By understanding what you see, it’s also possible to understand what you haven’t seen before. By turning some of the personalization logic upside down, news organizations could create a machine learning-powered recommendation engine that amplifies diversity.

Augment the journalist

In the domain of abstracting and contextualizing new information and unpredictable (news) events, human intelligence is still invincible.

The deep content understanding of journalists can be used to teach an AI-powered news assistant system that would become better over time by learning directly from the journalists using it, simultaneously taking into account the data that flows from the content consumption.

A smart news assistant could point out what kinds of content are connected implicitly and explicitly, for example based on their topic, tone of voice or other meta-data such as author or location. Such an intelligent news assistant could help the journalist understand their content even better by showing which previous content is related to the now-trending topic or breaking news. The stories could be anchored into a meaningful context faster and more accurately.

Innovation and digitalization doesn’t change the culture of news media if it’s not brought into the very core of the news business.

AI solutions could be used to help journalists gather and understand data and information faster and more thoroughly. An intelligent news assistant can remind the journalist if there’s something important that should be covered next week or coming holiday season, for example by recognizing trends in social media or search queries or highlighting patterns in historic coverage. Simultaneously, AI solutions will become increasingly essential for fact-checking and in detecting content manipulation, e.g. recognizing faked images and videos.

An automated content production system can create and annotate content automatically or semi-automatically, for example by creating draft versions based on an audio interview, that are then finished by human journalists. Such a system could be developed further to create news compilations from different content pieces and formats (text, audio, video, image, visualization, AR experiences and external annotations) or to create hyper-personalized atomized news content such as personalized notifications.

The news assistant also could recommend which article should be published next using an editorial push notification, simultaneously suggesting the best time for sending the push notification to the end users. And as a reminder, even though Google’s Duplex is quite a feat, natural language processing (NLP) is far from solved. Human and machine intelligence can be brought together in the very core of the content production and language understanding process. Augmenting the linguistic superpowers of journalists with AI solutions would empower NLP research and development in new ways.

Augment the newsroom

Innovation and digitalization doesn’t change the culture of news media if it’s not brought into the very core of the news business concretely in the daily practices of the newsroom and business development, such as audience understanding.

One could start thinking of the news organization as a system and platform that provides different personalized mini-products to different people and segments of people. Newsrooms could get deeper into relevant niche topics by utilizing automated or semi-automated content production. And the more topics covered and the deeper the reporting, the better the newsroom can produce personalized mini-products, such as personalized notifications or content compilations, to different people and segments.

In a world where it’s increasingly hard to distinguish a real thing from fake, building trust through self-reflection and transparency becomes more important than ever. AI solutions can be used to create tools and practices that enable the news organization and newsroom to understand its own activities and their effects more precisely than ever. At the same time, the same tools can be used to build trust by opening the newsroom and its activities to a wider audience.

Concretely, AI solutions could detect and analyze possible hidden biases in the reporting and storytelling. For example, are some groups of people over-presented in certain topics or materials? What has been the tone of voice or the angle related to challenging multi-faceted topics or widely covered news? Are most of the photos depicting people with a certain ethnic background? Are there important topics or voices that are not presented in the reporting at all? AI solutions also can be used to analyze and understand what kind of content works now and what has worked before, thus giving context-specific insights to create better content in the future.

AI solutions would help reflect the reporting and storytelling and their effects more thoroughly, also giving new tools for decision-making, e.g. to determine what should be covered and why.

Also, such data and information could be visualized to make the impact of reporting and content creation more tangible and accessible for the whole newsroom. Thus, the entire editorial and journalistic decision-making process can become more open and transparent, affecting the principles of news organizations from the daily routines to the wider strategical thinking and management.

Tomorrow’s news organizations will be part human and part machine. This transformation, augmenting human intelligence with machines, will be crucial for the future of news media. To maintain their integrity and trustworthiness, news organizations themselves need to able to define how their AI solutions are built and used. And the only way to fully realize this is for the news organizations to start building their own AI solutions. The sooner, the better — for us all.

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Facebook was never ephemeral, and now its Stories won’t have to be

Before Snapchat made social media about just today, Facebook made it about forever. The 2011 “Timeline” redesign of the profile and keyword search unlocked your past, encouraging you to curate colorful posts about your life’s top moments. That was actually an inspiration for Snapchat, as its CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in its IPO announcement that “We learned that creativity can be suppressed by the fear of permanence.”

Now Facebook is finding a middle ground by optionally unlocking the history of your Stories that otherwise disappear after 24 hours. Facebook will soon begin testing Stories Highlights, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Similar to Instagram Stories Highlights, it will let you pick your favorite expired photos and videos, compile them into themed collections with titles and cover images and display them on your profile.

The change further differentiates Facebook Stories from the Snapchat Stories feature it copied. It’s smart for Facebook, because highly compelling content was disintegrating each day, dragging potential ad views to the grave with it. And for its 150 million daily users, it could make the time we spend obsessing over social media Stories a wiser investment. If you’re going to interrupt special moments to capture them with your phone, the best ones should still pay dividends of self-expression and community connection beyond a day later.

Facebook Stories Highlights was first spotted by frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong, who specializes in generating screenshots of unreleased features out of the APK files of Android apps. TechCrunch inquired about the feature, and a Facebook spokesperson provided this statement: “People have told us they want a way to highlight and save the Stories that matter most to them. We’ll soon start testing highlights on Facebook – a way to choose Stories to stay on your profile, making it easier to express who you are through memories.”

These Highlights will appear on a horizontal scroll bar on your profile, and you’ll be able to see how many people viewed them just like with your Stories. They’ll default to being viewable by all your friends, but you can also restrict Highlights to certain people or make them public. The latter could be useful for public figures trying to build an audience, or anyone who thinks their identity is better revealed through their commentary on the world that Stories’ creative tools offer, opposed to some canned selfies and profile pics.

Facebook paved the way for Highlights by launching the Stories Archive in May. This automatically backs up your Stories privately to your profile so you don’t have to keep the saved versions on your phone, wasting storage space. That Archive is the basis for being able to choose dead Stories to show off in your Highlights. Together, they’ll encourage users to shoot silly, off-the-cuff content without that “fear of permanence,” but instead with the opportunity. If you want to spend a half hour decorating a Facebook Story with stickers and drawing and captions and augmented reality, you know it won’t be in vain.

Facebook Stories constantly adds new features, like this Blur effect I spotted today

While many relentlessly criticize Facebook for stealing the Stories from Snapchat, its rapid iteration and innovation on the format means the two companies’ versions are sharply diverging. Snapchat still lacks a Highlights-esque feature despite launching its Archive-style Memories back in July 2016. Instead of enhancing the core Stories product that made the app a teen phenomenon, it’s concentrated on Maps, gaming, Search, professional Discover content, and a disastrously needless redesign.

Facebook’s family of apps seized on the stagnation of Snapchat Stories and its neglect of the international market. It copied whatever was working while developing new features like Instagram’s Superzoom and Focus portrait mode, the ability to reshare public feed posts as quote tweet-style Stories and the addition of licensed music soundtracks. While writing this article, I even discovered a new Facebook Stories option called Blur that lets you shroud a moving subject with a dream-like haze, as demonstrated with my dumb face here.

The relentless drive to add new options and smooth out performance has paid off. Now Instagram has 400 million daily Stories users, WhatsApp has 450 million and Facebook has 150 million, while Snapchat’s whole app has just 191 million. As Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom admitted about Snapchat, “They deserve all the credit.” Still, it hasn’t had a megahit since Stories and AR puppy masks. The company’s zeal for inventing new ways to socialize is admirable, though not always a sound business strategy.

At first, the Stories war was a race, to copy functionality and invade new markets. Instagram and now Facebook making ephemerality optional for their Stories signals a second phase of the war. The core idea of broadcasting content that disappears after a day has become commoditized and institutionalized. Now the winner will be declared not as who invented Stories, but who perfected them.

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