Project Rethink

As I am sure we all know, a wiki is a type of website that allows visitors to add, remove, and sometimes edit available content; the word Wiki is derived from the Hawaiian word for quick. Some very successful applications have developed around the “wiki” concept, Wikipedia, PBwiki, Wiktionary, just to name a few.  This idea was revolutionary at the time, but now a wiki is generally accepted and expected.

The next step in wiki technology is found in a company called Kaltura. Kaltura is a great idea; bring wiki technology to video. But it’s not the idea that I want to write about.  Instead, I want to try and illustrate why I feel this idea is actually innovative. 

Why is Kaltura Innovative?

I’ve said countless times that our “boxes” prevent us from creating truly innovative solutions.  At some point in history the idea of a wiki was innovative.  Creating a wiki page that allowed users add video content might also seem innovative at first–but it’s not.  In this sense, our perception of a “wiki” has become the box.  Even though at some point that box was innovative, we can’t stay there; we have to move on.  

We see this problem a lot when we create a new piece of technology; let’s take wikis for example. Later down the road we take something else innovative like streaming video and try to create a mash-up of the two, somehow expecting that innovation + innovation = new innovation.  It seems like a breakthrough, but it’s not; it is just another iteration of wiki technology.  Innovation is not iterative.

It is important to realize what aspects made wiki technology innovative.  A wiki allowed a community of users to collaborate on one document. The purpose was collaborating on articles–collaboration towards a complete form of media.  Adding video to articles is not innovative because you are still producing the same result; only now the article contains video. But taking that concept of collaboration and adding it to the video itself; that is our next innovative leap.

We often get caught up in the idea of something and forget what its true purpose was.  The purpose of a wiki was to produce collaborative articles–not to allow users to add the newest form of media to a webpage.  That is where Kaltura sets themselves apart.

Kaltura allows a community of users to easily: remix videos and images, upload and import videos, add  soundtracks, add transitions, trim video clips, add effects, and more… Kaltura is about editing the actual media as a community, not just identifying various media sources and combining them on a single web page.  The same way a community of users produces an article on a wiki, Kaltura allows a community of users to produce video.

Kaltura is actively developing new tools for MediaWiki software, and earlier this year formed partnerships with Wikipedia.  It is very likely you will be seeing these tools more prominently in the apps we all know and love.

Innovation starts with a blank, not a box.  When we get distracted with pre-existing frameworks, we often side-step true innovation.  Below is a presentation hosted on SlideShare.net.  

This slideshow was entered in the SlideShare.net World’s Best Presentation contest.  Be sure to cast your vote for Project Rethink!

Yesterday, Adobe’s plans were revealed by Adobe VP Jim Guerard at a Beet.tv conference. In this interview, Guerard hinted towards Adobe’s plan of including automated voice-to-text metadata in flash video files to aid web-crawling software.

It’s not about the media

We live in a world where bringing new multimedia to the web is not enough.  At this point, multimedia is expected.   What’s important is that media becomes discoverable. More often than not, people are so focused on getting their rich media platforms to the web that they forget about making it discoverable.  Imagine a world where a google search returns results of an instructor’s lecture series in iTunes University, or an instructor’s YouTube Channel.  Adobe’s efforts to include automated transcripts for videos is the first step in this process.  It is important that your media remains easy to access.  With the abundance of media out there, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle.

Innovation is about the consumer. The important thing to remember is that the consumer decides the success or failure of your product. Interestingly though, you can’t always ask the consumer what they want and expect innovation. When asked about this subject, Henry Ford (of Ford Motors) said:

“If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”

So what do we do?  It is important that you know your audience.  Notice I didn’t say, “know about” your audience.  If you only know about your audience, you will only be able to give them what they are asking for.  But if you truly know your audience, you will be able to give them something they don’t know they want.

Lessons About Knowing Your Audience

Here we have 2 clips; the first is from a few years back.  This first clip is from The Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.  Here Triumph is interviewing people waiting in line for Star Wars Episode II.  It is approached with obvious humor, and seen as comedy.  The Conan O’Brien Show knows their audience and the people they are interviewing.

This next clip comes from recent television coverage of the iPhone 3G release. Here the reporter tried the same tactic as Triumph, but failed miserably. Maybe it’s easier to take insults from a toy puppet? Or maybe Apple fans have less of a sense of humor than Star Wars fans. The bottom line is, this guy did not know his audience.  (The hyphenated “i-Phone Mania” in the lower third of the news clip is only more evidence to that fact)

Another important lesson…Don’t try to insult your audience on Live TV.  Late night was smart enough to pre-record their bit.

In a recent entry on beet.tv, RJ Pittman talks about what google is doing with image search.  Pittman references what essentially amounts to an image recognition A.I. that analyzes images and pre-populates them with tags.  This is to be used concurrently with systems already in place (geotagging, etc…)

The Cloud

This actually falls very much inline with a recent entry by Seth Godin.  In this entry, The Clowd, Godin describes a system that handles much of what we do now.  Pictures are uploaded to a “cloud”. The cloud is able to analyze the picture and automatically know: who is in it, where it was taken, and how it can group with it other photos.  

This is the heart of innovation.  New systems need to make things easier on the people using them.  A new feature on the website that lets you zoom in with Ajax, or change color correction is nice–but is that the purpose of your web based photo service?  Social networking is no longer an “extra”; it has become expected.  For some it is too much of a hassle to try and network with people, the next step?  Create a system the is smart enough to handle the legwork of social networking, without compromising privacy.

Of course, if this system is created, we would need to create a new buzzword.  Geomicrophotoblogging is too long.