But the story of the year and half-old venture capital-backed Misfit isn’t just a tale about a startup building a coveted Apple-inspired gadget. Though it certainly is that — the company was founded on the day that Steve Jobs died, “Misfit” is a tribute to Jobs and Apple’s ads to think differently, and one of the company’s co-founders is Apple’s former CEO John Sculley (who was instrumental in pushing out Jobs in the 80′s).

Misfit has emerged at the intersection of a few key trends in 2013 that are shaping wearable computing, data, and design. These trends include the emergence of next-generation wearables that have more mainstream appeal, the development of the lean hardware movement that is using crowd funding to experiment, the collection of data that uses narrative and emotion to create an impact, and, most importantly, the introduction of a new type of user interface, which Misfit CEO Sonny Vu has coined as “the glanceable UI.”

Next-gen wearables

Accelerometers and sensors have been around for years. One of the pioneers of the space, Fitbit (see disclosure), is already a five-year-old company. Back in 2008, it was novel to just have a device that could track your movements, count your steps and calories, and sync with your laptop or smart phone.

But in 2013 the hardware for wearable devices has become a commodity, and the success of companies creating wearable computing will depend on the design of the device, the functionality of the software, and how the software and the gadget work together to provide value to the user’s life.

Misfit is part of this second wave of design-centric wearable computing. “We’re very focused on the packaging,” Vu told me with a smile during an interview last week at Misfit’s modest office in Daly City, California. Misfit was founded by Vu, Sculley, and Sridhar Iyengar, who was a co-founder with Vu at his former company AgaMatrix. AgaMatrix created the first FDA-approved glucose meter to work with the iPhone, giving Vu and Iyengar years of rare experience building wearable devices.

While crowd-funding helped fund Misfit’s first run of the Shine, Misfit is actually backed by some of the most well-known investors in the Valley, including Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. Along with its team in Daly City, it has a group of software developers in Vietnam, and makes its gadget in Japan and South Korea.

Think differently

For Misfit, design innovation has been fundamental to creating its hardware. The company doesn’t use words like sensors, or accelerometers on its website, and is trying to look far beyond the niche, early-adopter “quantified self” community.

The first aspect of its design innovation is in the materials. While most wearables on the market are made of rubber or plastic, Misfit’s Shine is almost completely made out of metal — a first in the industry. The metal is part of what makes the device so beautiful and also gives the feeling of value to the user. The metal also makes it very durable; the Shine is fully water proof.

There are reasons why competitors haven’t used metal for pint-sized wearables. The Shine might look awesome, but it takes four different factories just to make the various pieces of the shell and the metal also has created some usability restrictions. The Shine has to be placed directly onto (actually touching) the face of the mobile phone to sync it; the wireless signals wouldn’t escape the metal casing without that.

“The next time I think of doing an entirely metal product, someone shoot me,” laughed Vu.

Steve Jobs also famously went to great lengths for hardware design, like the iPhone’s unscratchable glass screen, and the handle on top of the original iMac.

Another unusual design element that Misfit deemed necessary is that the Shine isn’t chargeable. It’s got a coin battery, which lasts 4 to 6 months before it needs to be replaced. Pretty much every other wearable on the market is chargeable and requires weekly, or even daily, charging. “We had an almost religious belief that wearables should not be charged. You don’t charge the buttons on your jacket, or the backpack on your back,” Vu said.

The decision to forgo charging also created usability restrictions, namely power management. The Shine needed bright LED lights on its display, the LEDs needed to shine through the metal casing, and the battery had to run the processor and keep time for up to 6 months. Pairing it with a wireless charging dock would have been far easier and would have enabled far more functionality.

A third counterintuitive design choice is that the Shine is a circle, but uses an inverted edge to connect with various accessories — there’s a sports and leather wristband accessory, a magnet clip for clothing, and a necklace that hangs it from your neck. Vu said that quintessential form choice will make the Shine more accessible for people’s various needs.

For example, many women won’t put anything on their wrist, which means wrist-only devices like the FuelBand or Jawbone’s UP are neglecting a good portion of potential users. From a business perspective, accessories can also add substantially to margins, which, for Misfit, could be tight given the Shine is a higher-end device made completely of metal that is trying to hit the price point of the Fitbit.

These types of design decisions have created a device that is substantially different from Misfit’s larger and older competitors. Vu said before founding the company and designing the Shine, the team read every single negative review of the Fitbit, the Nike Fuelband, and the Jawbone products.

Glanceable UI

Beyond the hardware, Misfit is also innovating around the UI and how the user experiences feedback from the Shine. The design team made the decision to remove a digital screen interface entirely and replace it with a halo of tiny LED lights. They also removed an on/off button. Part of the reason they made these changes was because of the power management issue — there’s no way the device could power a brightly-lit screen and not be a chargeable device.

But the move was also a decision to head in the direction of what Vu called a “glanceable UI.” Designers have for years been focused on UIs for the laptop and cell phone screens, but are more recently just beginning to create interfaces for the very quick glance that is needed for a wearable device.

The Shine takes what the Nike Fuelband started with its colored-LED display and basically pares it down. Shine users can check to see how complete the circle of lights is around the gizmo to determine if they’re meeting their daily fitness goal. By briefly touching the center of the Shine, the lights can quickly configure into a clock to tell the time, meaning the Shine is also a smart watch, too.

If you hear wearable designers and developers talk about user experience, they’ll commonly talk about truncating content. Google’s Glass advocate Timothy Jordan explained recently at SXSW that an app built for Glass, like the New York Times app, has to show enough of a snippet of information to be conveyed in just a look. The New York Times Glass app shows headlines and images, but not full articles.

Likewise, health and body information on a wearable device like the Shine should be able to be conveyed in a second or two. The cell phone app that syncs with the Shine houses the rest of the functionality.

A glanceable UI is about creating a second’s worth of meaning out of important and impactful data. Whether that’s a moment to convey how well you’re doing toward your daily fitness goal or a single blinking light to encourage more movement. As Om wrote recently, as data becomes the world’s currency, data without emotion, empathy or narrative is meaningless. Wearable gadgets can track as much data as they want, but if the user isn’t exposed to the data in a way that impacts their lives, and in a time frame that they can work with, then the device has failed.

Getting to market

Some of Misfit’s design decisions were controversial even within the company, which is why Misfit decided to test out to see if customers would be interested in a metal, non-rechargeable, no-screen, wearable gadget. Turns out, at least on Indiegogo, they are. The company raised over $800,000 from almost 8,000 funders who wanted to buy the Shine early.

Crowd-funding was a way for Misfit to experiment. It’s actually gotten millions from traditional Valley investors to launch its products more commercially. But crowd-funding is becoming a common way for the so-called lean hardware movement to operate. Hardware innovation was front and center at SXSW this year.

Misfit is shipping its first 5,000 Shines to customers in early June and another 7,000 or 8,000 in the second half of June. Shortly after that the Shine will go on sale at retail outlets for around the same price point as the Fitbit, which is around $99.

The Shine is only Misfit’s first product, which Vu calls Product Zero. They’re also working on a device called Mars, or Project One, which will be launched early next year. On the topic of Mars, Vu would only say that it would be a wearable but one that has a longer battery, makes more use of data, and has a different material and different shape.

While Misfit is just a young company, and has yet to deliver its gadgets to its first customers, it’s operating at that the intersection of some of the Valley’s most interesting trends, including the power of design, the next-generation of more mainstream wearables, the importance of impactful data, and a coming era that will feature the glanceable UI.

I look forward to hearing about the first Shine users’ experiences this Summer. In November we’ll be talking more about these issues of design, connectedness and experience at our third annual RoadMap event in San Francisco. Tickets will go on sale this summer, but you can sign up to be one of the first to access tickets.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

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That’s when neuroscientists at UC San Diego started the research that would lead to discoveries about how the brain is impacted by Alzheimer’s and possible methods of early detection.  Over the years, that research led to multi-million-dollar grants and longitudinal studies and, ultimately, the recognition that it could become much more.

“They realized the impact outside the ivory tower and they brought me in,” Kaplan said.  Last spring, the company incorporated and, after a summer at health tech accelerator Rock Health’s Boston program, it launched in October.

Building on work from neuroscientists Stuart Zola, Elizabeth Buffalo, Eugene Agichtein and Cecelia Manzanares (now at Emory University) and  theories regarding short-term memory and recognition memory, Neurotrack says it can identify patients at risk for developing Alzheimer’s potentially 6 years before the onset of the condition.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, about 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s – and that number is expected to rise to 16 million by 2050. But, Kaplan said, most are diagnosed at a late stage.

“It’s the same thing as what happened with breast cancer before they had the mammogram,” she said. “They’re diagnosing at the equivalent of stage 4, when there’s already irreparable damage.”

Through a computer-based program connected to an eye-tracking device, patients are monitored as they view pairs of images, some of which are novel and some of which are familiar.  The program evaluates patients’ eye movement and the time spent looking at the familiar and novel images and then generates a score.  Kaplan said that of those who have scored below 50 percent on the test, 100 percent have gone on to receive an Alzheimer’s diagnosis within six years, while none of those scoring above 67 have converted Alzheimer’s.

Down the line, the company could sell to physicians (after receiving FDA approval), but Kaplan said the immediate plan is to sell to pharmaceutical companies, who can use the test to identify people for clinical trials and develop more effective treatment.

“One of the biggest issues with Alzheimer’s is that pharmaceutical companies haven’t been able to develop drugs because they can’t diagnose the condition early enough,” she said.

The company, which is based in Atlanta, has not yet raised funding from venture capitalists but is currently raising an insitutional round. Other interesting health startups that competed in the SXSW accelerator include Docphin, a Rock Health and Startup Health-backed site for healthcare professionals to access and share medical research, TechStars-backed Careport Health, which helps hospitals find appropriate after-care for patients and Care at Hand, another Rock Health company, a mobile system that helps non-clinical home care workers monitor and communicate the health of elderly patients.

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Google thinks so and claims that its hush-hush ideas lab known as Google X is designed to do just this. Speaking at Austin’s SXSW festival Tuesday, Google’s Astro Teller, the man who holds the title “Captain of Moonshots” shared some details about how the lab thinks and works.

According to Teller, who is the grandson of H-bomb inventor Edward Teller, Google X believes that the process for solving huge and difficult problems is unlike that for solving incremental ones. “Moonshot thinking,” he said, requires overcoming society’s prescriptions for caution and embracing both audacious ideas and failures.

“You have to have a group of people dedicated to throwing almost everything away,” Teller said.

To this end, Google X generates hundreds of ideas a year and even develops many of them into prototypes or white papers. Ultimately, though, the lab selects only one or a two a year to turn into a reality — Google’s driverless cars and computer glasses are among those that have been selected. Another recent product is the blue dot on Google Maps that reveals where you are inside a building.

Google X’s culture of creativity is about exploring any ideas but also getting the successful ideas out of the lab before they’re done. Teller said this ensures that commercialization doesn’t undercut the “Peter Panishness” of the place.

So what’s next from Google X? Teller said the lab expected to announce another discovery in the coming month but refuted reports that Google is building some type of space elevator.

Overall, Teller’s talk was an inspiring testament to the power of thinking big and what can happen when people explore without fear of failure. But it also had some of the drive-by ephemera of a TED talk — profound for a second and then forgotten the next day.

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Thursday, March 7th

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One of the most in-demand services in Austin? Phone charging.

But now, less than 24 hours into my first SXSW experience, I’m sitting on the floor of the Austin Hilton charging all my dead iDevices, telling someone that, no, they can’t take my picture for a Tumblr of people charging things and wondering if naps on the plush carpeting are acceptable. My hair is looking sort of frizzy from the humidity and I’ve been offered more free drinks in place of food than I thought possible. (Please let me know if you see vegetables anywhere. To the lady who told me that “Bloody Marys are the same as breakfast,” no, that’s just not true.)

I’m texting people and complaining about various aspects of SXSW. And thank goodness, they’re reminding me to shut up.

Despite the warnings that SXSW isn’t what it used to be, and despite the frizzy hair and excess drinks, I’ve still had a blast in the 24 hours I’ve been here. I’ve found plenty of geeks, heard live music three different times, seen people I’ve only read about speak in person, and have bookmarked the idols I still want to meet.

So if someone tries to tell you it’s not as cool as it used to be or that it’s just over-hyped marketing next year, you should ignore them. And do SXSW your own way. (Even if part of the conference is moving to Las Vegas next year.)

Here’s what I’ve learned in my 24 hours here so far:

1. Planes from San Francisco to Austin on the Friday before the conference should be re-labeled SXSW shuttles. They should be properly labeled as such, at least for other passengers who don’t enjoy the sight of startup sweatshirts, discussions of the Soundcloud party, or questions like, “Hey bro, is that a Pebble watch?”
2. When someone asks if your name is “on the list,” you should always say yes. Similarly, if they ask if you’re with “event PR,” you should say yes, because it’s possible they said “NPR” and you just misheard them and it will be an awesome party. Similarly, when you hear “Facebook jazz party” it could actually be “basement jazz party.” These are all good calls.
3. Pedi-cabs are apparently normal in Austin, and the drivers wear absurd costumes to stand out. I don’t know who thinks it’s a good idea to ride one. But people do. And they look like fools.
4. Introduce yourself to everyone. Say hello. People are fascinating. I took a Sidecar ride (which was free) and my driver told me about his job tutoring inmates in an Austin prison. I took an Uber car (also free) and my driver had worked at a mortician’s office. A completely random person and I bonded over trying to sneak into a line for free sandwiches before getting kicked out of said line. Seriously, this is like extrovert central; embrace it.
5. You’ll feel like you’re always missing out on something cooler happening somewhere else. I think that’s an inherent part of the experience. But I’ve decided I’m just going to roll with it, and enjoy whatever I’m doing whenever I’m doing it. My best time so far was sitting in the basement (not Facebook) jazz bar drinking gin and tonics with basically complete strangers. And there wasn’t a tacky Interactive badge in sight.

Think I’m an idiot for missing out on some crucial Austin tip or experience? I’m here till March 12 — tweet at me at @elizakern and let me know.

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But, last year, Bryan Sivak, the CTO and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department of Health and Human Services, was tapped to bring more Silicon Valley spirit to the massive department. (Prior to working in government, he founded a company that was acquired by Oracle). And it looks like his touch is starting to move the agency further along a startup-inspired track.

At the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin on Saturday, Sivak said he’s tried to promote a definition of innovation that gives people the “freedom to experiment.”

“I can teach you how to experiment. I can teach you how to develop a hypothesis. I can teach you how to define some tests that generate some metrics. I can teach you how to analyze those metrics to determine whether or not your test was successful and I can give you the freedom to execute some of these things,” he said. “This is something that’s critical for an entity like the federal government, which is very bureaucratic and structured and all the things we wish it wasn’t in a lot of cases.”

Sivak isn’t the first to bring lean startup theory to HHS. Sivak’s predecessor Todd Park, co-founder of health tech giants Athenahealth and Castlight and current CTO of the United States, drew on his tech chops to start opening up health data and transforming health care. But here a few of the more recent Silicon Valley-style programs at HHS.

Yammer-powered social networking

Getting 90,000 government employees to collaborate is obviously no easy task. But using Yammer, HHS employees across the department now have the opportunity to share ideas and reach out to people up and down the bureaucratic hierarchy through HHSConnect.  Since launching a few months ago, 10,000 of the department’s employees have used the platform with many using it actively, said Sivak.

Open coworking spaces

Like many startup CEOs, Sivak said he believes in the “serendipitous collisions” that happen between coworkers who work in open spaces. But in government cubicles, he said, “the only thing you’re going to collide with is air.”  To up the chances of serendipitous in-person collaboration, the department is creating “HHSLabs” – an open, modular, technologically-tricked out work space open to anyone in the agency.  It’s also opening its doors to health startup CEOs and other private sector visitors to DC who want a temporary place to work.

Internal crowdfunding for resources

To support entrepreneurial-minded people at HHS who come up with interesting ideas but need people with other skills or resources to get their projects off the ground, Sivak said they’ve created an internal crowdfunding-like site where people can solicit support. Called “HHSFairtrade,” people can post descriptions of their ideas and others across the department can commit needed resources or support. Like Kickstarter, the project only activates once it receives all of the commitments it needs to launch.

Seed funding for internal innovators

If it’s a little bit of cash that internal innovators need to test their ideas, Sivak said they can turn to “HHSIgnite.” The program gives department employees small amounts of money to try out new approaches. If the project can show returns in three to six months, he said, it can become a stronger candidate for allocated funds.

Opening the door to outside entrepreneurs

More technologists like Park and Sivak are bringing a startup mindset to the public sector, but Sivak knows that many of the country’s most innovative thinkers don’t live inside the Beltway. To tap into their ideas, he said, the department created “HHS Entrepreneurs,”a new program based on the HHS Innovation Fellows program launched last year. One track invites HHS employees to apply to be “internal entrepreneurs” who will work on special team and get extra networking, mentoring and professional development opportunities. But the other track is open to entrepreneurs around the country who would come to HHS to work with internal entrepreneurs for 6 to 12 months on “high risk, high reward” problems, Sivak said.

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During a wide-ranging interview with former Wired Editor Chris Anderson at the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin on Saturday afternoon, Musk talked about hair-raising attempts to troubleshoot a spaceship, showed off a video of a test landing of a reusable rocket, discussed his one regret from the Tesla incident with the New York Times, and talked about how he once considered buying missiles from Russia.

On his one regret from the New York Times review incident:

Musk said that the only thing he regrets from the interaction with the New York Times over the publication’s negative review of Tesla’s Model S, was that he never posted his own rebuttal of the New York Times’ rebuttal. Musk says he wrote a response to the New York Times’ journalist, which noted that he thought that the writer had committed a “low-grade ethics violation” and sent it to the New York Times’ editor, but he never published it himself.

Musk said he wanted to make it clear that he thought the writer had not “acted in good faith.” He also said he still might publish the response.

On spaceship anxieties:

Last Sunday SpaceX’s spaceship Dragon was able to connect with the International Space Station and delivered cargo to the astronauts on board. But before that connection happened, the spaceship suffered from a problem which Musk gave details of during the interview.

Basically three of the spaceship’s four thrusters stopped working, leaving the spaceship essentially floating in space, and the team couldn’t figure out why. Eventually the team used a pressure system to jolt the Spaceship and give it “the equivalent of the heimlich maneuver,” said Musk. That finally worked and all three thrusters started working again. Musk called the experience “extremely nerve wracking,” and said “that was hard core. I never want to go through that again.”

On testing reusable and landing rockets

Musk showed off a video, which he says was shown to the world for the first time at SXSW, of SpaceX testing a rocket that can launch and land in the desert. The video showed, to the tune of the Johnny Cash song Ring of Fire, a 10-story high rocket launch and then shortly after land back in place still in the launch position. The rocket had a tiny Johnny Cash cowboy on the side.

Traditional rockets launch but don’t land. And Musk says that to make interplanetary travel financially feasible rockets need to be built to land successfully. All other vehicles are reusable and can start and stop without having to be replaced, said Musk, adding, imagine if you were watching Star Trek and the Enterprise was replaced every time.

On his biggest mistake:

In response to a question about what his biggest mistake in life has been, Musk said that he has routinely made the mistake that talent always trumps personality when it comes to people he works with. He said he’s put too much weight on it being just about the brain, when having a good heart is very important. It’s a mistake he said he has made many times.

On trying to buy intercontinental ballistic missiles from Russia:

Musk says that back in 2001 and 2002, when he was just starting to get into the idea of building tech for space travel, he traveled to Russia three times trying to figure out how he could buy Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles to aid his idea. He says when he got back from his third trip he started to realize that his original premise to use that technology, and work outside of the U.S., was wrong. “The U.S. is a nation of explorers,” says Musk.

Musk also says he originally wanted to launch a spaceship to Mars that could crash into the planet and germinate a kind of greenhouse, and that he wanted to do such a stunt to help NASA increase their budget to travel to Mars. He said he had looked onto the NASA website and saw no section for Mars travel, and at first he thought maybe it was hidden somewhere.

On what he is most concerned about:

Musk says he will be very disappointed if humanity doesn’t land on Mars in his lifetime. “That’s the thing I’m most concerned about.”

On managing to have a family at the same time as his crazy life:

Musk says he does email on his phone while he spends time with his five kids, and says that’s how he’s able to spend time with them and run two companies. In response to that, interviewer Anderson said that he wasn’t able to do such a thing as it’s negative for both the email and the kids.

Other fun stuff:

• “Its fun to gamble as long as you are the house,” said Musk.
• People Musk admires: Founding father Benjamen Franklin, Google co-founder Larry Page, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
• “My buddies from PayPal saved my butt,” said Musk, in reference to when Peter Thiel and the Founders Fund backed SpaceX in a crucial time before its successes.
• “Don’t compete with China on a commodity product,” said Musk referring to the failure of solar companies like Solyndra.
• “I would like to die on Mars, just not die on impact on Mars.”

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“All the stuff that’s done really well on mobile has been incredibly short form and easily scannable,” Mullenweg told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. “I think there’s a space … to sit down and read something longer than a couple of seconds. Rather than the coffee line experience, what’s the sitting-down-in-the-back experience? We’re going to keep experimenting.”

Mullenweg said that the average post on WordPress is 280 words long, and that’s remained “relatively constant” over the past few years. “Certain ideas need to be expressed and they just need more than 140 characters,” he said.

WordPress is taking steps to surface more of its users’ content. “We’ve been working a lot on wordpress.com to create an interesting reading experience,” he said. The site’s “Freshly Pressed” feed surfaces content from across users’ blogs. “You’ll see a lot more longform content and a lot more galleries [on the feed],” Mullenweg said, and traffic to that feed has grown by double digits in the past couple of months.

When Swisher noted that WordPress doesn’t link its users’ blogs together — suggesting what else to read if you liked a certain post, say — Mullenweg answered that “we’re really excited about starting to do that.”

And while Mullenweg criticized many forms of digital advertising — “print ads are still infinitely better” — he suggested that WordPress might look at offering more native advertising options. WordPress would consider a partnership with a company offering native ad units, he said, if it’s “something really compelling that doesn’t make readers block it…Native advertising is the most interesting thing I’ve seen. At the point where advertising becomes as good as the content that surrounds it, I will applaud it.”

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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At a SXSW Interactive panel Friday on how health tech companies can design products that encourage users to change their behavior, Mayfield Fund managing director Tim Chang said:

“The way I evaluate a lot of companies now is I look at the design framework. I look at the design framework of the seven deadly sins,” he said. “If an app or service does not tap into one or more of the seven deadly sins, either directly or indirectly, it will not be addicting…I always look along those dimensions.. and see what do those trigger.”

(If you’re particularly virtuous, or just haven’t though about those sins in a while, they’re lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride.)

The conversation, which also included Stanford behavioral health expert Stephanie Habif, Basis Science CEO Jeff Holove, and Wired writer Michael Copeland, is clearly relevant these days. Health tracking devices — whether worn on the wrist, clipped to your belt or attached to the body in another way — are flooding the market. But many of these devices, while purchased with the best intentions, end up getting left behind on the dresser (or lost in the wash) after just a couple of weeks because while they generate a lot of data about how far you walked or how well you slept, they don’t necessarily lead to healthier actions.

Public health has historically followed the logic that if you increase someone’s knowledge and persuade their attitude, you’ll get the behavior change you’re looking for, Habif said, but added “but that very rarely works.”

“Knowledge is not enough. Health does not happen in a silo. In terms of what I’ve learned over the years, in terms of health behavior theories we’re trying to operationalize for health behavior change, social is very important. Emotion is very important,” she said. “It’s not just enough to infect the brain and implant the knowledge, you have to stir up the desire engine. You have to tap into emotion.”

Devices and device-compatible health programs hold a lot of promise but, at this point, we don’t know if data tracking actually changes behavior, just that it leads to adherence to the devices, Habif said. But several companies are reporting positive results with programs that use both technology and human interaction (either from expert coaches or peers).

Chang mentioned Chicago-based Retrofit, which provides a subscription-based weight-loss plan that relies on tracking devices and remote communication with behavior coaches and nutritionists. Diabetes-busting Omada Health is also beginning to find success with a model that pairs digital tools with a social support program in which users communicate with a cohort of people who share health indicators and other factors.

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First off, it’s launching a new iOS software developer’s kit (SDK), which allows app makers to code PayPal’s payment processing tools directly into their apps, instead of opening up a PayPal authorization and payments page. PayPal devs can also embed credit card scanning software from Card.io, which PayPal bought last summer. While it’s starting with iOS, PayPal said it would expand to other mobile platforms “soon.”

For quick integration, PayPal has developed Javascript buttons that can be embedded into a desktop or mobile website by adding five lines of codes. The payment feature can also be programmed into a QR code, allowing retailers to trigger transactions from outside of the device. Finally, PayPal is also retooling its application programming interfaces (APIs) around more modern and open frameworks such as REST, OAuth and JSON.

Previously, PayPal’s development platform ran over parent company eBay’s X.commerce, but PayPal is taking its developer efforts independent, launching a new development website that houses its sandbox, tools, documentation and other resources in a single location.

“This is just the beginning,” PayPal CTO James Barrese wrote on the company’s blog. “We will be releasing new APIs and capabilities throughout 2013, while continuing to support our existing developer tools through this evolution. We will continue to listen to the developer community and rapidly respond to their feedback.”

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