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 money by building something similar themselves, especially with easy access to their audience.

The purchase is also a sign that facebook is taking the mobile web very seriously.

The extraordinary statistic that ’10% of pictures ever taken were taken last year’ can undoubtedly be partly attributed to the rise of Facebook, so in that sense the acquisition is a good match. It also displays that there is room for growth in the digital photos market.

Facebook would have also been concerned with instagram’s incredible speed of growth, and nipping that in the bud has strengthened facebook’s castle.

The question of how shrewd the acquisition was will boil down to whether or not instagram, as part of Facebook, can grow to be worth more than $1 billion. The answer is ‘probably’. And the extraordinary figure of ‘$1 billion’ did gain the story a fair few dollars worth of extra press.

The acquisition was also interesting from a tech start up point of view in that it has given a bench mark for acquisitions of startups, of which there hadn’t been for a while.

It’s also bound to turbo charge the motivation of app developers around the world, which can’t be a bad thing.

This is especially true in the over-crowded modern market place. To be regular is to be ignored. Even if you are noticed, you probably won’t be talked about.

I recently heard about a new gym that has opened – it charges it’s members if they don’t turn up to use the equipment.

A gym that cares so much about your health that it doesn’t mind making less money when it’s clients are fitter?

Maybe. More likely is that it’s (smart) marketing department know that this extraordinary idea will spread, resulting in more members. And not all of them will be able to make it in every day.

Gyms don’t tend to be very profitable (if at all) in a recession. This gym is doing very well.

For an idea to spread, it helps if it’s unexpected. I doubt the person who told me about the gym would have bothered to if the gym charged a flat monthly fee.

IP (intellectual property)

Let’s bring up IP again, with a slightly counter-intuitive slant.

Common practice involves coming up with a new product and immediately looking at every conceivable way that you could stop others from replicating it.

For a brand new product or concept, is this necessarily the best idea?

You’re trying to open up a new market category, and presumably you’ll have to acquire your customers from older, more established categories.

If your category had more than one operator within it, it would be larger. You’d create more buzz around it, and earn it far more credibility.

So how about opening a new category and letting others join it? Of course, putting your effort into maintaining your position as it’s leader? You wouldn’t have the whole category to yourself, but you’d have the largest chunk of a larger pie.

If Apple had been able to stop anyone else from making anything that resembled a tablet pc, would they have sold as many iPads as they have today?

I don’t think the masses would have accepted this new product idea in the same way had only one company produced them.

It’s counter-intuitive, but in many situations counter-intuition works.

Jon

Oolone

And the answer is relatively simple. The Kindle is a great device! It is slick, slim and portable, it has a practical length of battery life, and of course most importantly it has a revolutionary e-ink screen that set it apart from other devices at the time it came out.

And if you think about it, it is very visual. It is my belief that it is successful despite the dominance of text within its frame, not because of it. Relative to backlit screens it is a pleasure to read from. Combine this with Amazon’s monopoly on the book and e-book industry and you have a winner.

So what is the likely future of books? Although some are hesitant to convert to e-readers, the positive reviews and conversion stories keep pouring in. But as information has become instantly available, our attention span as a whole has waned. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. As many prominent authors and publishing agents point out, there is now more competition for readers’ attention than ever before. And it is only because of this competition that we quickly switch between sources.

Sidney J. Levy, the Coca-Cola Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the University of Arizona, rightly states that as readers, “…before we can experience the content within we have to have our attention engaged”. If anything it may mean we are more efficient than ever at determining good sources and gleaning relevant information.

Of course there have been attempts at simplifying the summary process as well – take Summly, an app which summarises based using verb stemming and various associated algorithms – but it appears the very sources we use are having to be pithier and more succinct. And let’s face it, nobody likes a waffler.

So read your kindle. But not for too long. My bet is you’ll be back to your video-playing tablet/laptop before long anyway.

Chris

Oolone

We’ve now got a mobile version of our visual search engine at m.oolone.com

We’d love to hear what you think on feedback@oolone.com, especially how it looks on different devices..

Thanks

Oolone.com

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, humans communicate on a subconscious level with ‘microrhythms’. His studies showed that if you slow down footage of people who are familiar with one another talking amongst themselves, you start to see a rhythmic interaction between the participants of the conversation.

On the speaker you can detect tiny movements of eyebrows, lips, fingers and eyebrows that all emphasize her words. At the same time, the listeners are moving to the same rhythm, starting and stopping their movements in perfect harmony.

When two people get comfortable with one another they also equalize the length of silence between each other’s input. The differences between their volumes and pitches balance out.

This conversational rhythm is not a conscious decision by the participants, just a natural harmony we fall into.

Some people can match your rhythm instantly, sealing a subconscious rapport. It is thought that this rapport goes a long way in helping a persons ‘charisma’ or assisting in one person’s decision over whether they like another person not.

It’s interesting just what we pick up that we are not aware of, and how it affects our decisions.

Relevance to search

What makes a search result a good result? What makes us trust a website?

Consciously, many obvious things. A decent logo and a professional layout of relevant information spring to mind.

But how about subconsciously? The ratio of ads to content? The font? Presence of an obvious ‘template’ design? A majority of these will be drawn on past interactions of previous websites and your experiences with them. The rest will be made from your intuition. Both will overlap.

A large internet retailer recently ran a split test on the wording of their shopping basket. They changed a button’s wording from ‘create your account’ to ‘continue’. The result was a 50% decrease in abandonment.

If you had asked buyers why they didn’t buy, I doubt many would have said “because it said ‘create account’ not ‘continue’”. But subconsciously, they objected to going through the registering process (even though they’d have to register either way).

That’s quite an advanced thought process to be having without even knowing it. Imagine the complexity of the process going on when you’re evaluating a whole website, whether to interact with or extract information from it.

Text Results

Trying to come to a conclusion about how useful a site is based on 20 words is like trying to build a rapport with someone blindfolded, in silence, with a 20 word description about the person.

That’s why, with our visual search engine, we let you evaluate a site before you visit it. This way, you won’t waste your time clicking ‘back’.

We display results as the page title, URL and an image of the website.

Take your blindfold off and start browsing.

Jon

Oolone

Some technology-based ideas are clearly catching the collective student eye already; whether it be through video, (teachertube.com, khanacademy.com), games (alleyoop.com), or simply interconnection in general (mashable.com/2010/11/22/technology-in-education/)

But what if it went deeper than that? What if students could be fully immersed in their topics just as the keenest bookworm becomes immersed in his or her book? What if all of our students could be the proverbial bookworm by default? We all know that learning should not be difficult or uncomfortable, and it is a travesty that we sometimes make it so. It seems like the best way to alienate students is to create contrast with their every day lives, a gap between the vibrant games and interfaces of home and the glum texts and blackboards of school. This is a gap that should not exist.

Of course one means of closing the gap is the tablet revolution. While some still think it is a fad, and that an iPad or Android tablet is ‘not really a computer’, when you look at the statistics it seems like this may not be true:

Source: ABI Research

Of course this could be due to more disposable income and frivolity (just look at MiniDisc sales back in the early 00’s), but when you think about the advantages of a tablet it is clear that they are changing the way we interact with computers. Wherever we are with them, we are able to use and re-use a touch screen method that we have already become familiar with on smartphones. We can move, create and work on these devices without the requirements of a level surface.

And this makes them one more thing for new generations to become faster and more precise with than their parents; the next level of interface that young plastic brains are adapting to.

And hopefully because students are enjoying their interaction with tablets more than their parents ever enjoyed interacting with large black and white textbooks, they will be far more efficient and involved with their learning. At Oolone we believe we can help with this, through not only the intrinsic visual nature of our engine, but also through the provision of timely and progressive lesson plans and resources. Let’s keep adapting the classroom for the better. 

Here is just one of the fundamental feedback systems in one part of his brain:

Cohen MX, Frank MJ. Behav Brain Res. 2009 Apr 12;199(1):141-56

But the functionality of such processes is what really matters. The reason things get easier as we do them more – the reason practice makes perfect – is the presence of an automatic response tendency which we carefully control. Reward – in our case finding what you want – reinforces the correct action.

What’s more, we anticipate what is coming. We second-guess life, hence the utility of experience. Of course, this has been known for some time, but now there is direct evidence for it’s precise anatomy from modern imaging studies:

I. Momennejad, J.-D. Haynes / NeuroImage 2012

Gilbert S. J Neurosci 2011

For correct anticipation, we have specific brain areas such as the prefrontal motor cortex to control it. Otherwise a forehand smash might be prepared for a ball falling far too low.

Research shows that overlap with irrelevant reward associations (ie. when blue ink is used to spell the word ‘red’) influence the automaticity.

Red
Blue

If we blindfolded Federer and randomly informed him that his shot was ‘in’ or ‘out’, regardless of the truth, it would severely affect his automatic ‘knowing’ of whether he has hit a winner.

Why is this relevant to searching the web? The major languages are said to have several hundred thousand words each, depending of course on how you count them. And if we cross over enough websites with limited numbers of keywords, we have some inevitable irrelevant reward association in our searching.

A picture has no such limitations. No such overlap. No such irrelevant reward when ‘catalytic converter’ brings up ‘how one works’ as well as ‘how to replace it’.

What about more correct keywords, you may say. Certainly – this will help. But given the growing gap between available information and available words, we need more differentiators.

While Federer may be interested in the percentage backhands Nadal plays in a match, and how far he can run in 30 seconds, chances are he would prefer to visualise his returns against Rafa’s low, powerfully angled shots as his form of practice. To emulate how the ball will look when it comes to him at that speed and that angle. And not overfeed himself with information that may or may not still be true by the end of his match against Nadal. After all, imagery and perception have a surprising amount in common, and Nadal will be doing the same visualisation:

Goebel R et al, Eur J Neurosci 10:1563–1573

So whether it’s tennis or web searching, we have a natural tendency to visualise and anticipate. And whether the reward is a good shot, a great site, or a bar of chocolate, reinforcement is key.

Chris
Oolone

We just changed the results page on our visual search engine to use 6 previews per page rather than 4.

Hopefully this will make it easier to find what you’re looking for. As normal, each preview can be enlarged for a better view.

Love to hear what you think – feedback@oolone.com

Thanks!

They are intangible, and un-protectable. You cannot patent an idea.

The value in an idea is in its execution. No execution = no value, regardless of how good an idea is. You can patent the execution of an idea.

If your idea is incredibly good (very rare) it will, at most, make the execution easier.

The number of people who say, “I wish I’d had that idea” or “I just need a killer, big idea” is astonishing. Ideas and what they entail are wildly misconceived.

Saying such things imply that ‘having the idea’ was the hardest part of a product or service, and completely devalues the work done to execute it.

An initial idea is worth 1% of making a successful product. 99% is execution. And the 99% itself contains hundreds of smaller ideas to make the product get noticed, grow and evolve.

An idea isn’t a golden ticket.

Ideas evolve. Groupon started as a wordpress blog offering cheap pizzas for locals.

I recently read that 30% of the start ups in a year’s accelerator group had completely changed their products by the end of the program.

All ideas evolve to varying degrees, depending on people’s reactions to different aspects of the product on offer.

Think of Google – you could pin their success on Larry’s ‘idea’ of the pagerank system. Now, relative to the numerous other methods of ranking, they barely use it.

The Good, the Bad and the Big Ideas

Alex Osbourne came up with the notion that ‘there’s no such thing as a bad idea’ – a now common sound bite designed to ensure the free flow of ideas in a group situation. The concept being that no idea will be judged, so people won’t be reluctant to share ideas that they don’t rate that highly themselves (in the hope that the group might find a golden nugget in a single member’s ‘lesser’ ideas).

One problem of this of course is that there’s no filtering system, prompting a spewing of worthless concepts.
Some argue that judgment will induce ideas of substance, and that criticism is the driving force of idea evolution.

David Ogilvy, the advertising guru, had his own definition of a big idea: one that could be used over many years without it losing its efficacy.
Of course, all of his ‘big ideas’ required great execution from himself and his team of executives. It made it easier to squeeze value from the idea because the initial ‘big’ idea was timeless – people could still understand and connect with it over decades.

The fact remains; having a good idea won’t mean it’ll be successful. Good execution will.

You can make a success of average ideas, and unoriginal ideas. You can make a failure out of an incredibly good idea.

So don’t get hung up on having a good idea. Just get on and make something. This will make you better at the execution, and when a good idea pops into your head you’ll be better equipped to exploit it.

Jon
Oolone

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 forum with the car maker’s logo or name in the upper right hand corner. This image comes from my presumption that there will be an owners club on the internet, with members who might be having the same trouble as I am.

We now use the Internet so much that we’re getting more efficient at using it, and most people know what they want before they find it.

I read a comment recently that said “If I have a coding problem and the first search result isn’t stackoverflow, I start to panic”.

We are now so ‘in tune’ with the internet, we can second guess it.

The interesting part is that we do it real-time, adapting our visualizations according to what we find.

We can make instant decisions on whether a particular site is going to be useful to us, for example, by recognizing a similar layout to a site which has been useful to us in the past.

We know what we want to see before we see it.

We go through a process of visualization to discovery. If we find that the result has slightly deviated from our visualization, we automatically adjust our perceptions for next time.

This means that as the web evolves, our perceptions and predictions do too. (we don’t just do it online)

The problem with Google is that it interrupts our flow by throwing a block of words at us, hoping that we can fit them into our minds eye.

With our search engine we provide results in a visual format. This way, you can match your projection with the images on the screen.

If your looking for a brands official site, it’ll be easy to identify their logo and page layout.

Conversely, if you see an abundance of advertisements on a page, you can opt not to visit the site.

We hope that you find this alternative approach to web discovery useful.

Jon
Oolone