Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, February 17

• Virtual Reality Companies Look to Science Fiction for Their Next Play: Tech companies have spent years developing better, cheaper devices to immerse people in digital worlds. Yet they are still figuring out how to make virtual reality the kind of technology that people cannot live without. So for inspiration, they are turning to science fiction. At Oculus, a leading virtual reality company, a copy of the popular sci-fi novel “Ready Player One” is handed out to new hires. Magic Leap, a secretive augmented reality start-up, has hired science fiction and fantasy writers. The name of Microsoft’s HoloLens headset is a salute to the holodeck, a simulation room from “Star Trek.” “Like many other people working in the tech space, I’m not a creative person,” said Palmer Luckey, 23, a co-founder of Oculus, which was bought by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. “It’s nice that science fiction exists because these are really creative people figuring out what the ultimate use of any technology might be. They come up with a lot of incredible ideas.” Those ideas are especially relevant now, as some of the biggest technology companies are nearing a major push of a new generation of virtual reality products. In the next few months, virtual reality headsets from Oculus, Sony and HTC go on sale. Venture capital money is pouring into the industry. But how people will interact with the imaginary worlds remains largely unknown territory. And that is where science fiction comes in. Science fiction is shaping the language companies are using to market the technology, influencing the types of experiences made for the headsets and even defining long-term goals for developers. “Science fiction, in simplest terms, sets you free,” said Ralph Osterhout, chief executive of the Osterhout Design Group, which builds augmented reality glasses. Techies do not need any encouragement from their employers to read or watch science fiction, long a pillar of geek culture. The genre has influenced many corners of technology, from smartphones to robotics to space exploration. But there is something unique about the interplay between science fiction and virtual reality, a technology that is essentially an instrument for fooling people into believing they are someplace — and often someone — they are not. Virtual reality is a medium, like television or video games, that can borrow liberally from the virtual worlds experienced by fictional characters. Magic Leap, based in Dania Beach, Fla., and which counts Google as one of its big investors, has gone even further than most companies by hiring three science fiction and fantasy writers on staff. Its most famous sci-fi recruit is Neal Stephenson, who depicted the virtual world of the Metaverse in his seminal 1992 novel “Snow Crash.” In an interview, Mr. Stephenson — whose title is chief futurist — declined to say what he was working on at Magic Leap, describing it as one of several “content projects” underway at the company.

• How to write emails if you want people to actually respond:  Having trouble getting replies to your emails? Apparently, one of the best ways to get a reply is to write as if you're 9 years old. That's according to the makers of the Boomerang mail plug-in, who found that writing at a third-grade reading level seems to be the right level of complexity for the average message, after mining their user data for information on what kind of writing actually gets replies. Here's a full list of the tips from the makers of Boomerang: Use shorter sentences with simpler words. A 3rd grade reading level works best. Include 1-3 questions in your email. Make sure you include a subject line! Aim for 3-4 words. Use a slightly positive or slightly negative tone. Both outperform a completely neutral tone. Take a stand! Opinionated messages see higher response rates than objective ones. Write enough, but not too much. Try to keep messages between 50-125 words.

• Twitter not reliable predictor of election outcomes: study: In politics, it is said that all press is good press. But that does not necessarily apply to tweets, according to a study released this week. In fact, it is difficult to predict the outcome of an election based on the amount of Twitter buzz a candidate gets, according to the study from the Social Science Computer Review. The study, whose relevance to this year's U.S. election was sharply disputed by Twitter, focused on the 2013 German federal election and found that Twitter data was a more accurate measure of the level of interest in candidates rather than the level of support they will receive. The daily volume of Twitter messages referring to candidates or parties fluctuates heavily depending on the events of the day - such as televised leaders’ debates, high-profile interviews with candidates - or the coverage of political controversies and scandals," the study said. The data also showed that Twitter users did not necessarily reflect the demographics of the population as a whole. In the United States, social media platforms like Twitter and Yik Yak are often more popular among millennial voters. A Twitter spokesman argued the study was not relevant to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. "I'd advise passing the next time someone sends along German Twitter data from three years ago in the context of the 2016 U.S. election," said Nick Pacilio, a spokesman for the social media site's government and news department. Pacilio cited a Time magazine website report that showed Twitter chatter favored the winning candidates, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, in the Iowa caucuses this month.

• After Zenefits, Will VCs Rein in Their Unicorns? The $4.5 billion benefits startup moved fast and broke things—maybe even the law: In a Feb. 1 meeting at its blandly luxurious Sand Hill Road offices, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz urged the chief executive officer of one of its most prized and promising companies to resign. Zenefits makes software designed to simplify and automate such HR tasks as health insurance signups. At three years old, it’s valued at $4.5 billion and is one of the fastest-growing business software companies ever. Under founding CEO Parker Conrad, it also made software that allowed its employees to skirt state regulatory requirements, the company now admits. Days after Chief Operating Officer David Sacks gave that information to Lars Dalgaard, an Andreessen partner who sits on Zenefits’ board, Conrad was out, say three people familiar with the matter. At Conrad’s suggestion, they replaced him with Sacks, a Silicon Valley fixture who’s worked at Microsoft and co-founded Yammer, the business chat company. In Zenefits’ early days, the people say, Conrad created a deceptive program called “the Macro,” which made it look like employees were watching legally mandated online training when they weren’t. Workers who claimed to have completed the training may have been well short of the required 52 hours. Conrad used it himself, the people say. California regulators are investigating Zenefits’ use of the Macro, as well as whether its employees had licenses when they started selling insurance. On Feb. 8, Sacks announced Conrad’s resignation in an internal e-mail. “For us, compliance is like oxygen. Without it, we die,” Sacks wrote. “Many of our internal processes, controls, and actions around compliance have been inadequate, and some decisions have just been plain wrong. As a result, Parker has resigned.” Conrad declined to comment. Zenefits’ financial issues were discussed during the Feb. 1 board meeting. Andreessen co-founder Ben Horowitz, who isn’t a Zenefits director, attended. But two people close to the post-Conrad Zenefits say the Macro, not sales misses, was responsible for the CEO’s resignation. At the meeting, Conrad tentatively agreed to resign, relinquish his board seat, and make Sacks CEO, say three people close to the company. People close to Conrad now say he’s agitated by how Sacks’s very public letters to employees have characterized his departure and blamed him for Zenefits’ compliance problems. The accusations that unlicensed Zenefits brokers were selling insurance became public on Nov. 25 when BuzzFeed reporter Will Alden began publishing articles on the matter. California and Washington state are investigating Zenefits’ sales. The company says it’s cooperating with those probes and conducting its own, and it’s hired PricewaterhouseCoopers for a third-party assessment. Sacks declined to comment. Two people close to Sacks say he first began to worry about the Macro’s possible criminal implications in late January, after receiving new information from the internal investigation. To verify that an insurance sales applicant has completed the 52 hours of training, California requires a signature that carries a perjury charge if violated.

• After Nearly Going Pop, Google’s Project Loon Heads Into Carrier Testing This Year:  Google’s “moonshot” to deliver Internet to remote parts of the world using high-flying balloons has survived a brutal development phase, and will enter testing with carriers in Indonesia and elsewhere this year. But Project Loon almost didn’t make it. Google struggled to find a balloon design that could be inexpensive and durable enough to not only float but navigate to predictably travel through the stratosphere. “We busted a lot of balloons,” said Astro Teller, head of Alphabet’s X unit (formerly Google X), showing off some of the designs to the crowd at the annual TED conference, which kicked off Monday in Vancouver. There were shiny balloons and round balloons and balloons that looked like giant pillows. But eventually the company found a design that could be made cheaply and still navigate precisely. That balloon, Teller said, last year travelled around the world 19 times over 187 days. “So we are going to keep going,” Teller said, noting that what was once a slow connection has advanced enough to deliver about 15 megabits-per-second Internet access, which he pointed out is enough to deliver video — such as a live broadcast of his TED talk. The next step will be seeing how it works delivering real Internet service to consumers. In addition to Indonesia, Alphabet has reached a deal with the Sri Lankan government to exchange access to needed radio frequency spectrum for a stake in the project. Alphabet is in talks with carriers around the world, Teller said, adding that the prospect is very real and that a further five billion people will have Internet access within five to 10 years. On the TED stage, Teller also talked about two moonshots that Google abandoned. The first, he said, was vertical farming, which would have used one-tenth the water and one one-hundreth of the land demanded by traditional agriculture. But although Google grew some lettuce, it never managed to grow staple crops like grain or rice. Another effort would have allowed landlocked countries to ship goods far more cheaply using a rocket-like air cargo ship that could land without a runway. The idea itself might have worked, Teller said, but just building the first unit would have cost $200 million. Even for a company with Google’s riches, that proved too much to gamble. “If there is an Achilles’ heel in one of our projects, we want to know it right now,” Teller said.