I was browsing the blogsphere and came across http://www.BlueDot.us. It is a social bookmarking site with a lot of AJAX and the ability to have links, representative thumbnails from the bookmarked page and ofcourse – tagging.
When I hit the site, it was a bit slow, but that is understandable given that they really were not ready for the kind of attention (they mentioned on their blog.) Good luck to them, hope they find what they are looking to achieve with the site.
Reminds me of 1999-2000, the entrepreneurial sprit never fails.
I have been following Riya – a photo sharing and searching web app for quite some time. It is interesting to see that someone is trying facial recognition at this scale. Facial recognition is a really hard problem to solve. In a nut shell think of a complex graph formed by common facial features like – distance between eyes, width of the nose etc to form a faceprint. Then these nodal points are compared to a reference set of images in a database.
Easier said than done of course!
When one talks about photo sharing sites, Flickr cannot be left out of the conversation. I was thinking about how fundamentally the two approaches differ. What it boils down to is – the former using computing power and the later using the social computing power of the web to make images searchable.
So I wonder which is more accurate and what kind of results would one produce versus another?
One thing is for sure; computers can recognize but not interpret.
Microsoft is always taking a beating for not being original and not being innovators. They copied the UI from Xerox, they were the last to get on to SAAS etc. However Google and to some extent Yahoo! are perceived to be very inventive and creative.
I personally think that none of them come up with original ideas, they just have the resources to perfect them over time. Microsoft with their OS has made it, one of the easiest to use. Google with their search have vastly improved it, since its inception.
So are they not innovators? Innovation to me is doing something very well, iterative, consistent, incremental improvements based on feedback from end users. Google is not original with its “new” calendaring services, or the just announced social bookmarking and vertical search. But rest assured they will improve it and refine it over time to make it such that it is a cut above the rest. So is true with Toyota and Honda – how many iteration have we seen of the Camry and Accord? Pure incremental refinement till they almost seem disruptive inventions.
Keen observation, good analysis and the ablity to translate them to actionable things are great tools that lead to innovation.
By no means am I the person qualified to answer this question. But I can still ask it and I can make some observations. I was reading about Prepme.com. A very entrepreneurial team started it to offer a way to prepare for your SAT. Well if I were to take an outsiders view, I would think with heavyweights like Kaplan and Princeton Review, why would one want to get into this market?
But that did not stop Karan Goel and Avichal Garg from making a business plan out of it and to top that will the Edward L. Kaplan New Venture Challenge award. Now that being said four key observation I could make quickly were:
- They were very close to the problem and understood the pain. This understanding of the problem, most likely (only guessing), made them passionate about solving it.
- They had a very focus problem to solve. Not trying everything to save the world, but just one problem which they seemed to have addressed very well.
- Technology that enabled them to leap frog into the already established market. Luck for them they did not have to create the market.
- Market timing – The number of people taking SAT and other exams like these is growing at a significant rate. More people, different needs and there is never a one size fit all.
Technology applied in a clever way to solve everyday problem and at the same time make good business sense is essential my aphrodisiac.
Best of luck to www.Prepme.com
I enjoy music. But there are other who seem very passionate about it. When I stumbled across this news, it made me wonder – Yahoo is really good at finding good talent. Flicker and now this.
At first it(WebJay) is like ok no big deal, it is a webbased playlist editor – convenient at the most. But that ends there. I love the simplicity and the focus on solving “one problem” as I had mentioned earlier. I may not be the target audience, but I can see how I could create my playlists and share them with friends, not to mention REST base open API.
Best of luck to you Lucas.
Video on demand was an old term but without the bandwidth and the storage technologies to enable it was just that – “a neat idea”. But its time has come. First with Apple (there were a few before, but they made it popular) and now with Google VideoStore. I have been visiting video.google.com com and as always like their simplicity of design. Design is best when you cannot take away anymore… (as some wise guy whose name I conveniently forgot).
So is Google that innovative? When it come to originality they really are not. Their main source of revenue come from Ads, that was Overture’s idea. But when it comes to doing something well, they are focused and inventive, like the Japanese car makers. They take something that is ordinary and perfect it till it stands out to be the best way to do things. I think some of it has to do with the organizational structure. Smaller groups and smaller project are easier to execute them some grandiose ERP solution.
So how do all these video download services make money. They pry on our insatiable appetite for entertainment, which I feel is some desperate attempt to fill some spiritual void with materialistic band aids.