Website lets visitors sit at Elizabeth Holmes’ desk
Extend engineer Bo Lau has built a site simulating the workspace of the Theranos chief executive, using documents made public in her trial. The project also promotes his company and a watch party for Nathan Fielder’s upcoming documentary.
Extend engineer Bo Lau has created an interactive website that puts users in the position of Elizabeth Holmes, the former Theranos chief executive. It draws on more than a thousand emails, slides, texts and other documents made public during the United States v. Elizabeth Holmes trial.
What it looks like
The environment recreates 2016: the iPhone has a home button and must be unlocked by sliding a finger across the screen, and the MacBook Air runs OS X El Capitan. Users can click around, browse the published documents on Holmes’ phone and laptop screens, and even run the Theranos Edison machine, the company’s ill-fated device meant to extract large amounts of health data from a single drop of blood.
According to the creator, the texts, emails, slides, documents and machine records are genuine and come from exhibits in the criminal trial.
Practical value and purpose
The project appears to have been made mostly for fun, but it is also a convenient way to look through materials from one of the best-known court cases in tech history. It is far easier than tracking down thousands of PDFs on court websites.
There is a promotional side as well. Lau is advertising a watch party that her company is hosting for Nathan Fielder’s upcoming documentary about Holmes, “You Can See Everything.” The site also promotes Extend itself, which says it can parse, extract and split difficult documents with high accuracy.
