Recently is was announced that facebook would acquire instagram for $1 billion. It raised a few eyebrows, not least because instagram seemed to have no real revenue. One point made was that at that time instagram had 13 employees, while facebook had 4000 employees. It was wondered if facebook could have saved a lot of
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No Comments » One question we have been asked a few times since the launch of Oolone is how we explain the huge success of Amazon’s Kindle, given our penchant for all things visual and non-text based. And the answer is relatively simple. The Kindle is a great device! It is slick, slim and portable, it has a
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Occasionally you’ll come across a person who has an ability to build a rapport with, and be liked by, almost everyone. What makes these people likable? What makes peoples’ personalities infectious? The easy answer is charisma and charm. But there is also a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ about some people. According to William Condon,
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Imagine you’re sitting down, on the internet, and you search to find out which year a famous actor was born. What does the resulting website look like? It probably looks something like wikipedia or imdb. How about if you’re looking to solve a small, idiosyncratic problem with your car? I am visualizing some sort of
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Google are set to release head up display ‘augmented reality’ sunglasses. Some are calling them Google goggles. They will cost the same as current smart phones (around $300), and look similar to Oakley thumps. Rather than a conventional browser, they will use a heads up display overlay. Interaction with the glasses will be made with
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Search me inc. was a visual search engine, similar to ours (Oolone.com) that launched in 2008. After spending millions of dollars (it launched with $25m backing from Sequoia Capital), the engine went offline in 2009. In fact, over 3 months in 2009 the engine lost 1.2 million visitors. As far as I can see, there
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Pinterest recently, in a single week, received more visits than the population of Portugal. This is a 40x increase on the same period the year before. Pinterest is a social network that allows users to share things of interest on their virtual ‘pinboards’. By all accounts, Pinterest’s growth hasn’t always been as explosive, with relatively
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Death of the television There are multiple cool technologies on the horizon, multiple ways that visual technology could go. But whether devices are on our laps, hands, or windows, the interaction has already changed from that of sitting round the family TV set. To paraphrase Joey from Friends, if we don’t have a TV, what
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A few people have asked for our opinion on ‘Search cube’, a search engine, like ours, that displays search results in a visual manner. We were aware of services such as ‘Search cube’ and the now defunct ‘Search Me’ before building Oolone, and while we enjoy their services, we felt that they don’t utilize the
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