Unexpected Opportunities and Creating Value
It often seems that hte most successful businesses rely on just the right combination of good technology, cost, and adaptability to user’s habits, and, of course, fantastic marketing. Take Apple’s iconic iPod for example. Before the iPod launched, there had been numerous portable music players (see, for example, i2Go EGO and the Creative Nomad Jukebox). Yet, these previous portable music players were too big, too expensive, or too cumbersome for the typical user (converting music files to mp3 format was not always so easy!). The iPod hit the sweet spot: sleeker than its competitors, still expensive, intuitive volume and track control wheel, and killing software to load music to the iPod (iTunes, of course). Therefore, creating significant value corresponds to finding that sweet spot of technology, cost, and adaptability to user’s habit (or we can think of it as usability). We can then hire awesome marketers and still pray that our product succeeds.
Fortunately, in the world of apps at least our investment is limited. We don’t have to sink millions of dollars into R&D before we launch a mobile app. Additionally, it may be easier to convince people to spend smaller amounts of money on an application or a subscription than shelling out several hundred for a specific product. Below are my ideas for creating value through mobile apps.
- In one of my previous posts, I suggested that there could be an application that guides an elderly person back home after he/she has wandered due to, for example, dementia or Alzheimer’s. I believe that the adequate implementation of such an application would create significant value. The application would determine the walking habits of the elderly person (e.g., determine where and how far the senior citizen normally travels), and when the senior citizen strays from the norm, the application would begin interaction with the senior citizen to alert them they are going somewhere new. As the senior citizen goes farther, the application can begin talking to them to determine both the severity of the situation (e.g., does the senior citizen remember his name, his relatives, his address, etc) and to guide the senior citizen back home. The hardest part of this application becomes how to convince the senior citizen to follow the voice in his pocket. Using friendly and familiar voices, I think, will be best way to go forward. This application would provide significant value to those caring for senior citizens suffering from dementia.
- My second idea to create significant value is to significantly improve our ability to search the internet through images. I’m sure you’ve heard of Google Goggles. When I downloaded it, I was excited to finally have the ability to take a picture, and in return, receive relevant information about whatever I had just imaged. Needless to say, I was disappointed at Google’s inability to identify what I was looking for. Google Goggles is great at recognizing branding on products, popular photos, and landmarks. Here’s an example, when I take a picture of a few buildings downtown, Google recognizes I’m in downtown Milwaukee, but when I take a picture of an unmarked (e.g., unbranded) pen, Google is dumbfounded. Another application, CamFind, seems to do a better job of object recognition to provide relevant information. CamFind, for example, recognizes that my pictured pen is a “black and silver click pen.” Interestingly, though, if I feed a different view of my pen to the app, the app classifies it as a “red black gray pen” (apparently missing that it’s a click pen this time). Sadly, CamFind still cannot be used to tell me more about interesting things (like plants, or weird bugs). When I feed the image below to CamFind, I get: “green leaf.”
Yes, I know it technically is a green leaf, but I was hoping it would tell me which green leaf it is. I was especially disappointed because this is a very common indoor plant called “philondendron.”
My idea therefore is centered around making object recognition better in applications. Specifically, in environmental settings — think bugs, birds, animals, plants, trees. It would make for such a considerably richer experience when spending time outside, it would be useful for science teachers looking to incorporate technology, and it would be useful for scholars studying these plants, animals, and the like. The internet is already loaded with millions of images, we can look into classifying these images into specific types of plants (for example) and using these images as a training set. There are also plenty of books that go in-depth into the types of plants and animals — we need access to that information digitally. Additionally, to continue growing its knowledge, this application would ask for feedback from the user. Based on my pen example above, the app might ask me to click on the descriptions that seem correct: a. click-pen b. red c. black and silver. Even more awesome, it would be if, specifically for plants, it would contact people knowledgeable in the area (e.g., someone who works in a landscaping design company or a botanist) and gather information from them. A one-time charge to download a powerful image searching app seems like a small price to pay.
